Some of your complaints about Revolutionary, Civil and WW I scernerios are some of my complaints about a lot of the FPS gaming scenerios -- not enough group combat situations. It's usually you vs. a zillion (sometimes limitless) enemies. I'd like to be able to participate in combat situations involving many vs. many.
I also think you're overstating the civil war and the revolutionary war a little. A fair amount of both wars were more than formation rifle fire.
Also, I think there's a great opportunity for someone to implement mounted cavalry battles.
I'd also like to see battles involving Roman scenerios, especially Julius' Gaul campaign.
Rotary multibarrel cannon? Sure, but let's see it loaded with depleted uranium rounds or high explosive/incindiery at least. And nothing smaller than the 30mm variant.
RPG? Don't use the shitty Soviet RPG, use the Javelin. MUCH better boom -- it'll blow a T72 tank totally to pieces.
Plain machine gun? Not some lame.30 cal, let's see Arnie hold and fire a.50 cal or even the 25mm Bushmaster.
There's quite a few rotary multibarrel cannon in various calibers, some of which fire explosive ammunition (like the 30mm) and some that just fire lead (7.62mm).
It was around 2000/384k. In Minneapolis we have ATTBI/Comcast at 1800/256 for 42.95 (it's going up though).
Some small inaccuracies:
Burnsville ne Minneapolis. Minneapolis, and most of the adjacent south and western suburbs have AOL/TW as the cable provider, not ATTBI/Comcast. They're primarily a St. Paul provider.
In Minneapolis (I cannot get it [DSL] here in Burnsville) it's 640k w/a lot of download limits and it depends on ISP but around $55+/mo.
Your pricing and download speeds are about accurate for Qwest DSL, but the ISP that I and everyone else I know use, Visi.Com, doesn't have any caps that I'm aware of on downloads or download speed. You probably can't get it in Burnsville for one of two reasons -- your development in Burnsville is fed by fiber, not copper or you're a Front-to-Rear, er, Frontier phone customer, not a Qwest customer.
The five people at work (all who live in different regions of the metro) I've set up with computers and VPN access all have different providers, one DSL and the others cable. The cable people complain loudly about huge variances in reliability -- some times its fast, often its unreliable enough to cause the VPN connection to drop. The DSL user has ZERO complaints about this.
There are probably some "good" cable providers --those that will do everything Visi DSL does for me -- static IPs, setting reverse DNS on those IPs for you, consistant & uncapped throughput, great news/mail servers, shell access w/gcc -- but I've never heard of them. I've only ever heard of cable providers that occasionally have stunning throughput but otherwise are unreliable, bad servers, dynamic IPs, bandwidth caps, no-servers-allowed rules, and so on.
I tell people that want to save bucks and do basic web browsing to use cable, because I know its cheaper and "good enough." People who want more than that or might want more than that in the future I tell to go DSL because it's more like a "real" internet service, and not just the http channel.
A good example is UK where the Customs and Excise department staged ambushes on roads in Wales last year to stop cars that do not smell of abnoxious gasoline fumes and require them to immediately present a document that proves that their fuel has paid fuel duty.
In the US the Highway Patrol routinely test large diesel truck fuel when doing traffic stops or at weigh stations. Over-the-road diesel fuel has dye in it, heating oil and farm/marine diesel does not, and anyone caught with undyed fuel faces a big fine and possibly other penalties.
A friend of my dad's had a diesel pickup with a 100 gallon tank mounted in the bed. He also had a business removing old home heating oil tanks from houses that had/were converting to natural gas. The stuff that hadn't gone bad got dumped into his tank, he claimed to have not paid a fuel tax in years.
Dad lives in a Grehound-type bus that uses the main diesel tank as its heater fuel source. During long parks in cold weather he will get the tank filled with heating oil instead of driving to a station and filling with taxed over the road fuel. It's usually a wash, since he tries not to get more fuel than he'll need for heating and fills up with OTR fuel as soon as he intends on travelling again.
Haha, nobody expects it for free, but at the same time why do we have to pay for all these marginal upgrades to the OS? AFAIC 10.0->10.2 should have been free upgrades since much of what they did was fix functionality that was supposed to have worked right in 10.0.
And no, I am not impressed with all the new "free" iApplication upgrades along the way. I want a working, non-broken OS not a bunch of iApps. Make those that want the iApps buy them as a bundle, subscribe or something. But don't use OS upgrades to finance them.
One one thing (other than pretty miserable performance on my 350Mhz G3) that keeps me from using OS X is the pretty awful user interface. I still boot to OS9 most of the time because it's a great user interface. It just works, and has worked for a long time. All the eye candy of X may appeal to people who spend a lot of time theming, but I want to work, not fight the UI.
Well I think that no matter what job you look at, you will have to deal with some amount of Windows boxes. While Linux or Unix might be arguably better for a server, Windows is still the king of the desktop and workstation.
I think this is true, although I'd take it a step further, and presume that there's probably a number of places that are running hybrid operations -- Win2k systems where the desktop integrates to the server room, and UNIX variants where there's little or no direct linkage to the desktop.
You can probably split the difference on applications. MS developers are less expensive, but the cost is made up in licensing and infrastructure. UNIX developers are more expensive, but you make up that difference in licensing and infrastructure, especially if you are using an x86 Free UNIX.
Any amount of drag created would outweigh the power generated.
I realize that, but IIRC the original poster said that they wanted to have wireless sensors and actuators but the limitation was piping power to the places they needed to have them. My suggestion was a way to power (recharge) a wireless sensor without having to run power to it.
Say a building needs N horsepower to drive its ventilation system. The drag from a bunch of windmill-powered sensors requires 5 more HP from the system. If, over the next 20 years, it costs less money to buy and operate an N+5 HP motor than it does to buy and operate the N HP motor and pipe the power to all the sensors, then the drag is worth it.
I would even bet that you could get away in many cases without having to increase the power since the drag would be so distributed it wouldn't be measurable.
Sure, it's not free power, it just using a more efficient central power source.
I had no idea VFP had such a following. So what is it about VFP that inspires so much devotion among its users?
I think the unflattering answer is there's a shitpile of small business applications written in Fox Pro by enterprising consultants that work well enough for the business owners who don't want to spend any more on them than they have to. They get sold periodic "updates" so they work with their new PCs sporting new OSs, but that's it.
I think the reason they never get ported to anything else is that nobody else can untangle the code in a timeframe that would make them any money, plus if they want periodic updates like new forms or something, FP is pretty easy to design them with where a web app or something would be a PITA.
I've been talking about augmenting our backup system (five LTO Ultrium drives, need to add about two more if we up storage on another system) with a couple of systems stuffed with ATA RAID-5.
And then management decided they wanted the tapes used once and kept forever, so I'm stuck doing shit on tape for the rest of my life...
There is no degree, no regimen of training, which enables any one person to claim a better ability to rule over others than the average Joe. A college education certainly doesn't qualify one as a superior human being when it comes to making decisions for others.
If that's the case, then you'd be perfectly happy with illiterates?
That's a great idea, and its probably something that could be easily integrated into a RAID controller so you could stuff a 12-disk cabinet with 8 high capacity disks and 4 high speed disks and let the controller sort it out.
Although I still like the idea of integrating some kind of ultacapacity tape medium into the mix as well at the far end of the storage cycle for maximum storage. I think in a lot of storage situations, 10-30% of files are just not accessed all that often.
I've always thought it'd be great to have a hybrid storage device, coupling RAM, hard disk and tape or optical into a single cartridge. The device would then manage the migration of data between the three mediums transparently based upon access.
Rather than being filesystem dependent, I'd have the device not know or care about filesystem, just logical disk sectors. Those that were accessed frequently would stay on the higher speed medium and those that weren't, the less frequent. Large files that were only partially read wouldn't penalize the computer for being on tape or penalize the high speed storage for unaccessed chunks taking their space.
Unfortunately its probably too complex to actually implement, and disk storage capacities have grown so fast to quickly that it seems like disk is the way to go, its applying disk to the servers that need it intelligently that's the bigger challenge (iscsi, fiber channel, EMC, etc).
...the European cell network is great because of this kind of crap?
I don't care how cool your GSM network tech is or how easy it is to roam from Spain to Syria, if you have to put up with this kind of BS billing game it's not worth it...
We've gone through two area code splits here in Minneapolis -- 612/651 first, and then 768/612/952 later.
Would cell number portability slow this kind of thing down? I can't help but think that each cell provider switch ties up two numbers for at least a month or so as one number gradually expires and gets put back into the re-use bin.
With this there'd be more slack in the system as providers wouldn't need as much of a supply of numbers for new customers, as some (high?) percentage could be expected to keep their numbers.
It's prima facie to me that someone with an advanced degree in X is more able to make a decision about X than people without that education.
If you had a choice between someone with an MD and a PhD in oncology and some kid from the ghetto treating your cancer, which would you choose?
There are always exceptions, people without an official certification or education who end up one-upping the experts, but in almost every case those people have given themselves an extensive unofficial education in some specific field.
But, what is it that actually differentiates the ruler from the subject? Is it knowledge? Education? Experience? Good will? None of the above: It's power and power alone.
I disagree with this, on factual rather than moral grounds. I think that there's a long history of the ruling elite being better more knowledgable and better educated, more experienced and in some cases posessing a broader moral vision than the ruled, by and large.
About what, 1/3 of the US population has a college education, while probably 1/3 of the Bush administration has at least a master's degree, several have PhDs or law degrees. They have individually decades of leadership experience, both practical and theoretical. I'm not trying to defend the Bush administration, but they have a lot of education and experience, moreso than the overwhelming majority of people they "rule" (which is a misleading term).
And this has been true in Western societies since at least the Roman empire. Only in pre-Roman tribal Europe did the leadership actually differ very little from the people they led.
Unfortunately, though, their claims to meritocracy have holes IMHO because of the way that access to education experience are limited to select groups. Sure, if I had a PhD in foreign policy I could make a claim to leadership but I can't because I'm prevented from joining a PhD program by all kinds of barriers, some of them legit and some less so.
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Some of your complaints about Revolutionary, Civil and WW I scernerios are some of my complaints about a lot of the FPS gaming scenerios -- not enough group combat situations. It's usually you vs. a zillion (sometimes limitless) enemies. I'd like to be able to participate in combat situations involving many vs. many.
I also think you're overstating the civil war and the revolutionary war a little. A fair amount of both wars were more than formation rifle fire.
Also, I think there's a great opportunity for someone to implement mounted cavalry battles.
I'd also like to see battles involving Roman scenerios, especially Julius' Gaul campaign.
Basically? You always are guaranteed to have that address? You get reverse DNS on it (eg, dig -x doesn't say some.cable.customer.comcast.com)?
If the answer is "no", it's not really a static IP.
Railgun, schmailgun.
.30 cal, let's see Arnie hold and fire a .50 cal or even the 25mm Bushmaster.
Contemporary military weapons are fine with me.
Rotary multibarrel cannon? Sure, but let's see it loaded with depleted uranium rounds or high explosive/incindiery at least. And nothing smaller than the 30mm variant.
RPG? Don't use the shitty Soviet RPG, use the Javelin. MUCH better boom -- it'll blow a T72 tank totally to pieces.
Plain machine gun? Not some lame
There's quite a few rotary multibarrel cannon in various calibers, some of which fire explosive ammunition (like the 30mm) and some that just fire lead (7.62mm).
It was around 2000/384k. In Minneapolis we have ATTBI/Comcast at 1800/256 for 42.95 (it's going up though).
Some small inaccuracies:
Burnsville ne Minneapolis. Minneapolis, and most of the adjacent south and western suburbs have AOL/TW as the cable provider, not ATTBI/Comcast. They're primarily a St. Paul provider.
In Minneapolis (I cannot get it [DSL] here in Burnsville) it's 640k w/a lot of download limits and it depends on ISP but around $55+/mo.
Your pricing and download speeds are about accurate for Qwest DSL, but the ISP that I and everyone else I know use, Visi.Com, doesn't have any caps that I'm aware of on downloads or download speed. You probably can't get it in Burnsville for one of two reasons -- your development in Burnsville is fed by fiber, not copper or you're a Front-to-Rear, er, Frontier phone customer, not a Qwest customer.
The five people at work (all who live in different regions of the metro) I've set up with computers and VPN access all have different providers, one DSL and the others cable. The cable people complain loudly about huge variances in reliability -- some times its fast, often its unreliable enough to cause the VPN connection to drop. The DSL user has ZERO complaints about this.
There are probably some "good" cable providers --those that will do everything Visi DSL does for me -- static IPs, setting reverse DNS on those IPs for you, consistant & uncapped throughput, great news/mail servers, shell access w/gcc -- but I've never heard of them. I've only ever heard of cable providers that occasionally have stunning throughput but otherwise are unreliable, bad servers, dynamic IPs, bandwidth caps, no-servers-allowed rules, and so on.
I tell people that want to save bucks and do basic web browsing to use cable, because I know its cheaper and "good enough." People who want more than that or might want more than that in the future I tell to go DSL because it's more like a "real" internet service, and not just the http channel.
I knew I'd get that wrong. Oh well.
A good example is UK where the Customs and Excise department staged ambushes on roads in Wales last year to stop cars that do not smell of abnoxious gasoline fumes and require them to immediately present a document that proves that their fuel has paid fuel duty.
In the US the Highway Patrol routinely test large diesel truck fuel when doing traffic stops or at weigh stations. Over-the-road diesel fuel has dye in it, heating oil and farm/marine diesel does not, and anyone caught with undyed fuel faces a big fine and possibly other penalties.
A friend of my dad's had a diesel pickup with a 100 gallon tank mounted in the bed. He also had a business removing old home heating oil tanks from houses that had/were converting to natural gas. The stuff that hadn't gone bad got dumped into his tank, he claimed to have not paid a fuel tax in years.
Dad lives in a Grehound-type bus that uses the main diesel tank as its heater fuel source. During long parks in cold weather he will get the tank filled with heating oil instead of driving to a station and filling with taxed over the road fuel. It's usually a wash, since he tries not to get more fuel than he'll need for heating and fills up with OTR fuel as soon as he intends on travelling again.
Usually when it comes to that kind of national security spook stuff they arrange his silence on that topic and any others...permanently.
This is as good a reason as any to always provide your own edge equipment and edge equipment management.
Haha, nobody expects it for free, but at the same time why do we have to pay for all these marginal upgrades to the OS? AFAIC 10.0->10.2 should have been free upgrades since much of what they did was fix functionality that was supposed to have worked right in 10.0.
And no, I am not impressed with all the new "free" iApplication upgrades along the way. I want a working, non-broken OS not a bunch of iApps. Make those that want the iApps buy them as a bundle, subscribe or something. But don't use OS upgrades to finance them.
One one thing (other than pretty miserable performance on my 350Mhz G3) that keeps me from using OS X is the pretty awful user interface. I still boot to OS9 most of the time because it's a great user interface. It just works, and has worked for a long time. All the eye candy of X may appeal to people who spend a lot of time theming, but I want to work, not fight the UI.
Well I think that no matter what job you look at, you will have to deal with some amount of Windows boxes. While Linux or Unix might be arguably better for a server, Windows is still the king of the desktop and workstation.
I think this is true, although I'd take it a step further, and presume that there's probably a number of places that are running hybrid operations -- Win2k systems where the desktop integrates to the server room, and UNIX variants where there's little or no direct linkage to the desktop.
You can probably split the difference on applications. MS developers are less expensive, but the cost is made up in licensing and infrastructure. UNIX developers are more expensive, but you make up that difference in licensing and infrastructure, especially if you are using an x86 Free UNIX.
Any amount of drag created would outweigh the power generated.
I realize that, but IIRC the original poster said that they wanted to have wireless sensors and actuators but the limitation was piping power to the places they needed to have them. My suggestion was a way to power (recharge) a wireless sensor without having to run power to it.
Say a building needs N horsepower to drive its ventilation system. The drag from a bunch of windmill-powered sensors requires 5 more HP from the system. If, over the next 20 years, it costs less money to buy and operate an N+5 HP motor than it does to buy and operate the N HP motor and pipe the power to all the sensors, then the drag is worth it.
I would even bet that you could get away in many cases without having to increase the power since the drag would be so distributed it wouldn't be measurable.
Sure, it's not free power, it just using a more efficient central power source.
I had no idea VFP had such a following. So what is it about VFP that inspires so much devotion among its users?
I think the unflattering answer is there's a shitpile of small business applications written in Fox Pro by enterprising consultants that work well enough for the business owners who don't want to spend any more on them than they have to. They get sold periodic "updates" so they work with their new PCs sporting new OSs, but that's it.
I think the reason they never get ported to anything else is that nobody else can untangle the code in a timeframe that would make them any money, plus if they want periodic updates like new forms or something, FP is pretty easy to design them with where a web app or something would be a PITA.
I've been talking about augmenting our backup system (five LTO Ultrium drives, need to add about two more if we up storage on another system) with a couple of systems stuffed with ATA RAID-5.
And then management decided they wanted the tapes used once and kept forever, so I'm stuck doing shit on tape for the rest of my life...
There is no degree, no regimen of training, which enables any one person to claim a better ability to rule over others than the average Joe. A college education certainly doesn't qualify one as a superior human being when it comes to making decisions for others.
If that's the case, then you'd be perfectly happy with illiterates?
What about small windmills in the ducts?
Wouldn't generate much power, but it might be enough to keep a battery-powered sensor charged.
It'd create some drag in the duct, but a lot of ducts are large enough that it might not matter.
It's too bad that you couldn't electrically charge the duct and get power from the differential between the duct and ground.
That's a great idea, and its probably something that could be easily integrated into a RAID controller so you could stuff a 12-disk cabinet with 8 high capacity disks and 4 high speed disks and let the controller sort it out.
Although I still like the idea of integrating some kind of ultacapacity tape medium into the mix as well at the far end of the storage cycle for maximum storage. I think in a lot of storage situations, 10-30% of files are just not accessed all that often.
I've always thought it'd be great to have a hybrid storage device, coupling RAM, hard disk and tape or optical into a single cartridge. The device would then manage the migration of data between the three mediums transparently based upon access.
Rather than being filesystem dependent, I'd have the device not know or care about filesystem, just logical disk sectors. Those that were accessed frequently would stay on the higher speed medium and those that weren't, the less frequent. Large files that were only partially read wouldn't penalize the computer for being on tape or penalize the high speed storage for unaccessed chunks taking their space.
Unfortunately its probably too complex to actually implement, and disk storage capacities have grown so fast to quickly that it seems like disk is the way to go, its applying disk to the servers that need it intelligently that's the bigger challenge (iscsi, fiber channel, EMC, etc).
You now have a fixed phone number, for life.
/. about telecomms is starting to have at least one "...vonage..." message. Is it astroturfing?
No, you have a number as long as Vonage is in business and supports your use of their service.
It seems that every story on
...the European cell network is great because of this kind of crap?
I don't care how cool your GSM network tech is or how easy it is to roam from Spain to Syria, if you have to put up with this kind of BS billing game it's not worth it...
We've gone through two area code splits here in Minneapolis -- 612/651 first, and then 768/612/952 later.
Would cell number portability slow this kind of thing down? I can't help but think that each cell provider switch ties up two numbers for at least a month or so as one number gradually expires and gets put back into the re-use bin.
With this there'd be more slack in the system as providers wouldn't need as much of a supply of numbers for new customers, as some (high?) percentage could be expected to keep their numbers.
It's prima facie to me that someone with an advanced degree in X is more able to make a decision about X than people without that education.
If you had a choice between someone with an MD and a PhD in oncology and some kid from the ghetto treating your cancer, which would you choose?
There are always exceptions, people without an official certification or education who end up one-upping the experts, but in almost every case those people have given themselves an extensive unofficial education in some specific field.
What's wrong with Lucida Console? I think its a great face and highly visible at tiny point sizes.
I've tried vera and the intercharacter gap is too huge, and the lowercase L is kind of annoying looking.
But, what is it that actually differentiates the ruler from the subject? Is it knowledge? Education? Experience? Good will? None of the above: It's power and power alone.
I disagree with this, on factual rather than moral grounds. I think that there's a long history of the ruling elite being better more knowledgable and better educated, more experienced and in some cases posessing a broader moral vision than the ruled, by and large.
About what, 1/3 of the US population has a college education, while probably 1/3 of the Bush administration has at least a master's degree, several have PhDs or law degrees. They have individually decades of leadership experience, both practical and theoretical. I'm not trying to defend the Bush administration, but they have a lot of education and experience, moreso than the overwhelming majority of people they "rule" (which is a misleading term).
And this has been true in Western societies since at least the Roman empire. Only in pre-Roman tribal Europe did the leadership actually differ very little from the people they led.
Unfortunately, though, their claims to meritocracy have holes IMHO because of the way that access to education experience are limited to select groups. Sure, if I had a PhD in foreign policy I could make a claim to leadership but I can't because I'm prevented from joining a PhD program by all kinds of barriers, some of them legit and some less so.