I think sprint charges $4 a month just for the privileged to make overpriced international calls. And another fee to make international SMS. So yeah it's a pretty big deal for those who are studying abroad or have lots of international friends/business contacts.
Voicemail transcription is awesome. I've got it setup to replace my cell phone's voicemail completely. I liked having email on my cell phone, but getting voicemail in your computer's email is just damn cool.
I will admit, I've never tried running Firefox 3.0 or 3.5 on a supercomputer before. I wasn't aware you could download binaries for specific supercomputers. I bet loading slashdot on my computer screen in Firefox would still be limited by my home broadband connection and screen refresh rate, rather than my (super)computer's processing power.
Bit Torrent predates XP by more than 6 months! That's almost NINE YEARS this thing has been around. Honestly I'm surprised Win7 doesn't come prepackaged with a built in Bit Torrent client already. It comes with everything else. What are you doing? Admining a bunch of Win98/WinME computers at an elementary school in rural North Dakota? As a data service that chews through probably 50% of the global data capacity at any given moment, it's pretty hard to ignore bit torrent as a geek.
I would imagine it losslessly compresses the image. The result being that if the data is stored in the binary code of the file, PNGcrush probably destroys the data payload. If the data is stored in the image itself (like a barcode or datamatrix) then you're probably safe. I think that's how it works.
It's a shame the default size isn't 100x100 pixels or 125x125... a more common size, particularly for VBB avatars and whatnot. 32x* will be considerably easier to filter/block by hosts.
Some torrent sites already filter out HBO shows and American origin IP addresses. If TPB goes 100% legit then this becomes an easy way to distribute.torrents if you already have a twitter account and access to twitpic, just without the ability to browse by number of seeders/leechers. EZTV and a few others already post all their torrents to twitter for when the site goes down (their site is down currently).
Everyone knows carriage returns were supplanted by carrier returns with the advent of aircraft carriers. They're looking at revising the term as Shuttle Return when the Space Shuttle Program is finally Shuttered.
FF 3.0 is instantaneous and has never crashed on me. I'm running a vanilla install of XP SP3 though. In fact I use 3.0 at home and work and I've never had a crash or any "slowdown" which you speak of. Modern computers are just way too fast for software to be "slow" anymore.
I thought Steam still worked on ME, just not Orange Box games like HL, TF2 etc (they require W2K now). The fact that Valve supported Win98 (1998!) up until early 2008 is a goddamn miracle. One can only pray that 10 year support from major software houses becomes the norm. Quake still runs on Windows despite being a DOS game at heart, thanks to the Quake95.exe release and the subsequent backsupport of windows 95 in XP (is this broken in Win7's "xp compatibility mode"?). Of course it's open source now and more compatible versions work, but it's the oldest example I can think of.
I'm having trouble playing X-Wing Alliance because it supports Direct-X 5 but there's a compatibility issue between DX9 and DX5 and there was never a patch released since. Fortunately it has a software mode but I'm sure there's lots of "abandonware" games that only support DX4 or 5 (or 6? there was a major overhaul of D3D around that release) that don't have software mode, and unless you have an old 3DFx card running DX5 drivers, you may never be able to play those games again.
As a counterpoint, TF2 has DX8.0 (8.zero! that version released Nov 2000) support. Which is why the load times suck compared to L4D but you take what you can get. This is for a game released in fall of 2007 as DX10 was being announced.
I have IE6 on my computer at work. I COULD change it, but I have better things to do than upgrade my browser. I use firefox mostly, but a couple of the sites I have to use at work require IE to login (FF just sits there dumbly). So I have FF 3.0 and IE6. Until I can't login to my required sites using either of those, it's unlikely for me to need to upgrade (unless youtube starts blocking FF 3.0 in which case I might upgrade).
We're almost what, almost 3 years since PS3 US launch (nov 16 2006)? How many PS1 games were there 3 years after launch date? For the PS2? I'd guess that number is double what there is for the PS3 (quick google says 220 currently).
Smoother, maybe faster or slower. 30fps -> 24 (maybe even 18! depends on the camera)fps -> 30fps -> whatever fps youtube uses, is going to result in slowdown/speedup depending on what algorithms were used when it was converted.
What was the scan resolution of a TV in 1969? Wikipedia says 262.5 lines per field. 320 > 262.5.
It's like going from youtube quality to HQ YouTube for free! (and a 50 year wait). We should get 640x(480?) resolution video, interlaced as a result. Who knows what the framerate will be - perhaps 30fps? I'm pretty sure the 8mm video that's been distributed was originally 24fps, and then degraded further to 30fps again. The moon video's motion might look different from what we see now.
NASA is like FEMA in terms of frugality. The difference is, one shoots cool shit into the sky that you can tell your kids about, the other shoots holes in your wallet that you can grumble about to your wife.
I have no problem investing more money at NASA. I'm 25 and haven't seen anyone set foot on the moon - I expect that to happen in my lifetime too, dammit!
Yeah I think other countries have contributed between 500 million and 30 Billion Dollars. $100 billion is definitely the minimum we've spent on the project just coming from the USA alone. Total amount is way over $130 billion dollars.
Considering that NASA lives or dies by the public interest (I'm aware they do a lot more than Space Exploration) but it's mostly Space Exploration that gets NASA more funding than say, the EPA. Bush knew it was a popular program with the public, and that its a fairly partisan-neutral program as far as most people are concerned, and a point of national pride. A rare bright point for the government.
So what, are you saying the ISS can't be refitted? Its cheaper to start building a new space station than refit the ISS? All possible space science has already been completed on the ISS? Its not possible to expand the ISS to meet future needs? It seems more feasible to leave it up there, whatever the cost, expand it and improve it rather than build a new one from scratch. That's the point I'm trying to make with the harvard analogy in case you missed it. I don't see why they can't add/replace instruments as they go along, which you didn't answer. Some are too big to fit through a hatch, but most will fit through dissassembled.
With the exception of the NASA experiments where they either failed before they got there (we smashed a probe into mars on accident I think, due to imperial/metric mixup) or the blew up a comet, I'm pretty sure 90%+ of NASA probes have/are currently operating beyond their original mission plan. How many years was MIR extended? 8? 15?
Well hey, while we're at it, let's burn harvard university to the ground. Because clearly we don't need them doing and teaching 400 year old science. Once its burnt down we can spend untold billions rebuilding the infrastructure and putting in new scientific instruments and professors. Seriously? Its not terribly difficult to add new instruments. Its unbeleivably costly to design, certify, then fly new ISS segments into space, connect them etc. If they're already up there just remodel! Burning it up in the atmosphere rather than just connecting it to a new spacestation in unbeleviably wasteful. I'd consider selling it to a private party long before burning it up.
How much did this cost? $100 billion dollars? I expect it to be up there till at least 2050, even if it is the ratty garage of a much larger space station by then. Of course Mir was up for what 15 years beyond its expected lifespan? $100 billion dollars is a lot of money just to burn it up in less than 20 years, even if you count the annual upkeep costs. That's like taking 6 months of the Iraq war funding and just burning it.
What about the pig farmer in Alberta, Canada who gave the flu to his pigs? This is not the punchline for a bad joke, it actually happened - Farmer was in the US, flew home to canada and accidentally infected most (all?) of his herd(?) of pigs.
Slashdot Mirror
I think sprint charges $4 a month just for the privileged to make overpriced international calls. And another fee to make international SMS. So yeah it's a pretty big deal for those who are studying abroad or have lots of international friends/business contacts.
Voicemail transcription is awesome. I've got it setup to replace my cell phone's voicemail completely. I liked having email on my cell phone, but getting voicemail in your computer's email is just damn cool.
I will admit, I've never tried running Firefox 3.0 or 3.5 on a supercomputer before. I wasn't aware you could download binaries for specific supercomputers. I bet loading slashdot on my computer screen in Firefox would still be limited by my home broadband connection and screen refresh rate, rather than my (super)computer's processing power.
The business/RC/RTM edition or the home edition?
Bit Torrent predates XP by more than 6 months! That's almost NINE YEARS this thing has been around. Honestly I'm surprised Win7 doesn't come prepackaged with a built in Bit Torrent client already. It comes with everything else. What are you doing? Admining a bunch of Win98/WinME computers at an elementary school in rural North Dakota? As a data service that chews through probably 50% of the global data capacity at any given moment, it's pretty hard to ignore bit torrent as a geek.
I would imagine it losslessly compresses the image. The result being that if the data is stored in the binary code of the file, PNGcrush probably destroys the data payload. If the data is stored in the image itself (like a barcode or datamatrix) then you're probably safe. I think that's how it works.
It's a shame the default size isn't 100x100 pixels or 125x125... a more common size, particularly for VBB avatars and whatnot. 32x* will be considerably easier to filter/block by hosts.
Are your images PNGcrush-able? What happens if you PNGcrush the image?
Some torrent sites already filter out HBO shows and American origin IP addresses. If TPB goes 100% legit then this becomes an easy way to distribute .torrents if you already have a twitter account and access to twitpic, just without the ability to browse by number of seeders/leechers. EZTV and a few others already post all their torrents to twitter for when the site goes down (their site is down currently).
Everyone knows carriage returns were supplanted by carrier returns with the advent of aircraft carriers. They're looking at revising the term as Shuttle Return when the Space Shuttle Program is finally Shuttered.
Someone broke your
Carrier Return
FF 3.0 is instantaneous and has never crashed on me. I'm running a vanilla install of XP SP3 though. In fact I use 3.0 at home and work and I've never had a crash or any "slowdown" which you speak of. Modern computers are just way too fast for software to be "slow" anymore.
I thought Steam still worked on ME, just not Orange Box games like HL, TF2 etc (they require W2K now). The fact that Valve supported Win98 (1998!) up until early 2008 is a goddamn miracle. One can only pray that 10 year support from major software houses becomes the norm. Quake still runs on Windows despite being a DOS game at heart, thanks to the Quake95.exe release and the subsequent backsupport of windows 95 in XP (is this broken in Win7's "xp compatibility mode"?). Of course it's open source now and more compatible versions work, but it's the oldest example I can think of.
I'm having trouble playing X-Wing Alliance because it supports Direct-X 5 but there's a compatibility issue between DX9 and DX5 and there was never a patch released since. Fortunately it has a software mode but I'm sure there's lots of "abandonware" games that only support DX4 or 5 (or 6? there was a major overhaul of D3D around that release) that don't have software mode, and unless you have an old 3DFx card running DX5 drivers, you may never be able to play those games again.
As a counterpoint, TF2 has DX8.0 (8.zero! that version released Nov 2000) support. Which is why the load times suck compared to L4D but you take what you can get. This is for a game released in fall of 2007 as DX10 was being announced.
I have IE6 on my computer at work. I COULD change it, but I have better things to do than upgrade my browser. I use firefox mostly, but a couple of the sites I have to use at work require IE to login (FF just sits there dumbly). So I have FF 3.0 and IE6. Until I can't login to my required sites using either of those, it's unlikely for me to need to upgrade (unless youtube starts blocking FF 3.0 in which case I might upgrade).
We're almost what, almost 3 years since PS3 US launch (nov 16 2006)? How many PS1 games were there 3 years after launch date? For the PS2? I'd guess that number is double what there is for the PS3 (quick google says 220 currently).
Smoother, maybe faster or slower. 30fps -> 24 (maybe even 18! depends on the camera)fps -> 30fps -> whatever fps youtube uses, is going to result in slowdown/speedup depending on what algorithms were used when it was converted.
What was the scan resolution of a TV in 1969? Wikipedia says 262.5 lines per field. 320 > 262.5.
It's like going from youtube quality to HQ YouTube for free! (and a 50 year wait). We should get 640x(480?) resolution video, interlaced as a result. Who knows what the framerate will be - perhaps 30fps? I'm pretty sure the 8mm video that's been distributed was originally 24fps, and then degraded further to 30fps again. The moon video's motion might look different from what we see now.
NASA is like FEMA in terms of frugality. The difference is, one shoots cool shit into the sky that you can tell your kids about, the other shoots holes in your wallet that you can grumble about to your wife.
I have no problem investing more money at NASA. I'm 25 and haven't seen anyone set foot on the moon - I expect that to happen in my lifetime too, dammit!
Yeah I think other countries have contributed between 500 million and 30 Billion Dollars. $100 billion is definitely the minimum we've spent on the project just coming from the USA alone. Total amount is way over $130 billion dollars.
I doubt if the public will get a say in it.
Considering that NASA lives or dies by the public interest (I'm aware they do a lot more than Space Exploration) but it's mostly Space Exploration that gets NASA more funding than say, the EPA. Bush knew it was a popular program with the public, and that its a fairly partisan-neutral program as far as most people are concerned, and a point of national pride. A rare bright point for the government.
So what, are you saying the ISS can't be refitted? Its cheaper to start building a new space station than refit the ISS? All possible space science has already been completed on the ISS? Its not possible to expand the ISS to meet future needs? It seems more feasible to leave it up there, whatever the cost, expand it and improve it rather than build a new one from scratch. That's the point I'm trying to make with the harvard analogy in case you missed it. I don't see why they can't add/replace instruments as they go along, which you didn't answer. Some are too big to fit through a hatch, but most will fit through dissassembled.
With the exception of the NASA experiments where they either failed before they got there (we smashed a probe into mars on accident I think, due to imperial/metric mixup) or the blew up a comet, I'm pretty sure 90%+ of NASA probes have/are currently operating beyond their original mission plan. How many years was MIR extended? 8? 15?
Well hey, while we're at it, let's burn harvard university to the ground. Because clearly we don't need them doing and teaching 400 year old science. Once its burnt down we can spend untold billions rebuilding the infrastructure and putting in new scientific instruments and professors. Seriously? Its not terribly difficult to add new instruments. Its unbeleivably costly to design, certify, then fly new ISS segments into space, connect them etc. If they're already up there just remodel! Burning it up in the atmosphere rather than just connecting it to a new spacestation in unbeleviably wasteful. I'd consider selling it to a private party long before burning it up.
How much did this cost? $100 billion dollars? I expect it to be up there till at least 2050, even if it is the ratty garage of a much larger space station by then. Of course Mir was up for what 15 years beyond its expected lifespan? $100 billion dollars is a lot of money just to burn it up in less than 20 years, even if you count the annual upkeep costs. That's like taking 6 months of the Iraq war funding and just burning it.
What about the pig farmer in Alberta, Canada who gave the flu to his pigs? This is not the punchline for a bad joke, it actually happened - Farmer was in the US, flew home to canada and accidentally infected most (all?) of his herd(?) of pigs.