I recently read an industry report that thanks to deregulation, the United States is in an over-capacity situation now, and will remain so until about 2005.
Market forces at work: Once the generation was split from the load serving entities, they realized how much money was in gen, so everyone and their neighbor started building cheap units. Result: Over-supply. That drove down the average price of electricity, which is hurting the gen owners in 2003, because they cannot recoup the 2002 investment costs (because the average price of electricity is too low for their margins).
California is just screwed up. Look at the east coast: you have NEISO, NYISO, PJM... all successful cases of deregulation, because of a diverse fuel type & willingness to invest. Now look at CALISO's f-up: they didn't build generation, relied on northern hydropower, then one hot dry summer wiped it out. Their PUCs locked the consumer rates lower than the economic cost of the gen they had to run, and the LSEs ran out of money. Then the state gets in the mix, and locks in long term rates; two years later, they're trying to get the courts to negate the contracts, because now the spot market price is low... well damn! what the heck is a price-protection contract for then?
The rest of the country is trying to increase their distributed gen & load management programs, and California is taking two steps back. Kind of dampens that whole myth about how "progressive" they are out there...
My father worked for AT&T in a computer component repair department (AT&T used to have in-house repair for printers, PCs, & modems). When they acquired NCR in 1991, they dumped (sorry, laid off) his whole group in favor of NCR's repair group. Then, to top it off, the union (CWA) let them get away with it with no arguments (for ~25 years experience w/ Bell/AT&T, not to mention dues paid to the union), flapping in the wind.
I recall reading that flowers attract insects not because of their markings in the (human) visible spectrum, but because of additional ultraviolet markings along the petals, which act like "landing lights" for flying insects.
"Insects see a spectrum of colors that is shifted toward the shorter wavelengths of light. Their three kinds of cone cells respond to green, blue, and ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet light, like infrared at the other end of the spectrum, is invisible to us. Many insect-pollinated flowers display patterns that are visible only in the ultraviolet range. Flowers that look uniformly white, yellow, or blue to us often show striking patterns--like bull's eyes and road maps--that seem to guide insects to their nectar or pollen reward. (In other flowers, these patterns are visible to us.) Most insects do not see red, so a red flower would blend into the background for an insect. Red flowers are thus likely to be pollinated by birds, which have color vision more like our own."
"How do AC generators control vars, voltage, and power?
Although the controls of a generator do interact, the following generalities are true.
* Power output of a generator is controlled by its prime mover.
* Voltage and/or var contribution of a generator are controlled by the exciter current level.
For example, let's assume that an additional load is connected to the output of a generator. The added current flow will increase the strength of the armature's magnetic field and cause the generator to slow down. In order to maintain frequency, the generator's governor will increase the power input to the prime mover. Thus, the additional power required of the generator is controlled by the prime mover input."
And vice versa. Too much generation increases the frequency.
"As a final example, let's assume that we have two or more generators running in parallel and feeding a load. Generator 1 (G1) is carrying all the load (real and reactive) while Generator 2 (G2) is running at zero watts and zero vars. If the operator for G2 opens the prime mover throttle, G2 starts to feed watts to the system. Since the connected load hasn't changed, both generators will speed up unless G1 throttles back.
As G2 picks up an additional share of the load, it requires an increased field flux. If the G2 operator does not increase the G2 field, G2 will draw its additional excitation from G1, requiring G1 to increase its excitation level. If neither G1 nor G2 increase the excitation level, the overall system voltage will go down."
See also
http://www.ecmweb.com/ar/electric_prime_movers_v ol tage/
Humans create "reactive load" by running motors. Motors draw current, increase in current lowers voltage amplitude across a transmission line, plus larger power flow causes increase in reactive loss on a power line. Reactive loss lowers the voltage at both the supply end and the delivery end. Lower voltages reduces the torque in the motor shaft, not to mention reactive demand reduces the real output of the generator. This tends to slow down the motor, and the rotor speed is proportional to the frequency, so the overall frequency drops.
The only difference is that there is no cat. Err, I mean, the whole concept of "reactive" energy is just a mathematical construct representing amplitudes and phase angles. Its the old A<Phi vs R+jX conversions. But they're messy.
That's nice in theory, but totally inpractical. Basically, you'd have to sync both ends of the data transmission with frequency, except that the grid frequency is not a constant, and unpredictable...
The 60Hz frequency standard in the US is a "desired" point... everything, from turning on a blender at home, to firing up your local steam generator for the morning ramp, has an effect on the grid, from a minute twitch to a big swing. If there is more demand than generation, the frequency slows down as energy is sucked out of the grid; likewise, overproduction of electricity causes the frequency to speed up. Now, it takes many many MWatts to make a change, because so many loads & generators are wired in parallel, but it's still possible.
There are many companies operating in parallel across the USA (abbreviated RTOs & ISOs) that work to balance the supply & demand of electricity every second... we track the frequency (graph here) in an attempt to balance the whole thing out, by calling on more generation when the frequency is low, and telling the to back off when it is high...
Now, as far as sending data by modulating the AC wave, the problem here is the "scrubbing" effects of Transformers. The premise behind high voltage transfer of electricity is to use transformers to step up the voltage & lowering the current. Lower current equates to less heat loss, so you can send the energy more miles for the same loss. Now, the problem is the magnetic core does not have a good frequency response when converting E to M to E again... they're designed for a low frequency after all. So, you end up with every transformer removing all of the high-freq. oscillations.
The way it's described in the article, you don't touch it up, you replace it. It's like a "dip" process to get the "paint" on, so maybe you sand it down and re-dip it... not enough information yet.
Last year, my Saturn and I were rear-ended during stopped traffic on the local highway. Basically, you have a polymer (fibreglass of some sort) panel underneath, with an enamel glaze on the exterior. The person doing the repairs explained to me at the time that the glaze is "baked" on, so it hardens & becomes shiny. When the panel is damaged, the glaze discolors along the scratch lines (and you end up with white streaks that cannot be removed), or in my case, the glaze peels back like a ripped plastic bag, down to the panel (which was a dark grey in my case). Once torn, the glaze cannot be relayered like paint can, so you have to have the part replaced, and they send the old part back to be re-processd, most likely junked.
"Saturn pioneered the use of thermoplastic systems in body panels with the introduction of the industry's first quality, high production thermoplastic door panel ten years ago." More info here.
Windows isn't exactly a piece of cake either. The reason I had to go to Windows XP is I blew out my VMM32.VDX file, in a moment of stupidity when I was trying to repair a set of USB drivers. I had put my sister's Windows98 SE disk in when it prompted for drivers, and overwote my First Edition DLLs... not a good thing, since the computer would fault every time I tried to get my digital camera to work.
So, my other drive's OS was f'ed, but I wanted all of the files, which is why I bought a new hard drive & made my impromptu upgrade.
If you're like me, you didn't bother to make a Win98 "safety disk", so I can understand the not booting from floppy. Under normal conditions, you would, because Win98 just drops the Dos(7) COMMAND.COM to the floppy, and it boots to a DOS prompt (which is about as far as I got with the terminal).
And I also ran into that same CD-ROM problem before. I don't understand: Why give CD-ROM drivers on a CD, because if you actually NEED the drivers, your CD is most likely not working? Makes you want to kill someone. ATAPI drives will auto-boot Windows CS for Windows98 and later, but there are many of us with non-ATAPI. I had to go to work to use the net, just to find a MSCDEX driver to get the CD to work...
Windows XP now gives you the option to boot from any partition, so running multiple (Windows) operating systems in parallel on different partitions is not an issue. You didn't actually want to run anything else, did you?:)
Besides, in the example you give, you can just tinker the boot order in your BIOS (this option has been pretty standard for 4+ years), and windows should boot off the secondary disk; so Yes, it does work automatically. Your primary partition on the second disk should still be marked Active from the last time you ran it, so that's the one that becomes C:
Come to think of it, I should have done the same thing, that would have cleared all that config crap right up. Ah well, hindsight etc etc
If your BIOS doesn't do that, then Windows has no recourse but to physically reorder the hard drives. You're hosed, time to find a screwdriver. Linux is MUCH better at ordering partitions by software, I suppose it just doesn't occur to Microsoft that there ARE other OSes.
Oh, and Windows *has* something to configure itself, once the kernel starts, Safe mode & Control panel. Every video card can hit SVGA 640x480x256, and windows just uses the video card's interrupts to send commands to the video bios, and it draws. I'm curious why XFree86 crapped out trying to do the same thing.
So yes, in either case of blowing out the OS, any "average" person would just throw it in a box and send it back to the factory. I mean really, that's why Dell & Gateway do as well as they do... service contracts.
Just last night, I needed to ressurect my RedHat 6.1 installation, so I could work on some C programming at home.
Over the course of 2 years, I had swapped hard drives, video cards, and internet providers. I had gone from Win98(1stEd) to Windows XP now... and boy, was I in for a treat.
First off, the COMMAND.COM eqiuvalents in Windows ME & later do not support the processor mode flags that allow programs like LOADLIN to swap in the kernel. I had to go on the web for a Dos6.0 floppy disk image (even though I had Dos6 on my hard drive, you can't SYS it because of version problems) and make myself a boot disk. Once I was in Dos6 again, I could boot...
Except now I had swapped hard drives. The bootup scripts were expecting all of the partitions to be on/dev/hda, but now they were on/dev/hdb. After all that time, I couldn't even remember it was on/dev/hdb8... I had to DL a windows program to scan the partitions to find it. Once I included the ROOT=/dev/hdb8, the kernel panic'ed, and put me into a root shell. Except now, it had mounted the / partition as read only. I had to swap back to Dos, figure out the command line params to put it into RW, boot back, let it panic again, then trace through/etc for the configuration files. The culprit was/etc/fstab
But now, how does one edit a file on a computer without emacs, since up to this point everything went to X11 (and run xedit like a normal person)? VI. Yay. So, imagine trying to learn syntax after 8 years of non-use. *Obviously* the Edit mode command is (ESC)-A, from there I could remember:w:q. Reboot again.
So now everything starts up ok, and I get to the terminal. Log in, and it's time for X11. Of course the settings for my old Voodoo3 don't apply any more, I need to get it to work with an NVidia GForce3, and when you try to run X11, it craps out to a garbled video buffer, definitely not mode $80. Had to reboot just to get the text termal back.
So now I browse the web, and I find an XFree86 binary just for NVidias, so I'm happy. I copy it over, reboot to Linux, mount the drive, and try to run it... no go, it has GLIBC 2.1.3 & 2.2 dependancies. Back to Windows to scan the net for files, and finally found them in RPMs in the redhat 7 & 8 distributions... and that's where I left it, after 4 hours of tooling around. And I still have to look forward to eth0 working with DHCP before I can even get on the net..
Now explain to me how an "modern average" user is supposed to figure this all out? Linux needs SOMETHING to configure itself!
Last time i checked, police departments should not be broadcasting in the military spectrum.. second, houses don't tend to speed, so there's no reason why the police should beam their radar guns at your house. Third, even if they did, it wouldn't do anything.
Information on police radar guns: "The granddaddy of systems is X band radar... X band operates on the narrow channel from 10.500 to 10.550 gigahertz (GHz)... K band appeared in the seventies and quickly became popular in its deadliest form: a hand held gun featuring an instant on switch. K band operates on a higher-frequency channel from 24.050 to 24.250 GHz... In 1989, photo radar appeared on the scene, and it was bad news for motorists--it operated on a frequency that was undetectable by existing radar detectors. The FCC set up a channel for photo-radar from 34.200 to 34.400 GHz, which lies within the wide Ka band... Which brings us to the Stalker, the latest wrinkle in hand-held radar guns. It operates on the Ka band anywhere from 34.200 to 35.200 GHz."
Here is another informative article on how the Wi-Fi is colliding with the millitary radar, down at 5 GHz side of the spectrum, specifically 5.150-5.350 GHz.
Thus, police radar should never affect Wi-Fi, and vice versa.
Agreed. In my recent years at work, I have adopted the Microsoft Visual Basic language as my primary scripting language, for pretty much doing anything related to reporting database data. Once you've researched enough tricks, you begin to understand how powerful a tool you have...
Many people here at Slashdot like to bash on VB (as did I, until I played with Macromedia Director, and scripted myself a 10 minute interactive software demo)... and after learning how to poke the registry, read/write files, touch databases, probe the 'net, all sorts of stuff, all of which is scripted, and standardized.
I would think that the penultimate scripted virus should be one that, like the genetic variety, has the abilty to self-modify to avoid detection. Remember, virus scanner software is just a glorified pattern-match... this this file contain this segment of code that matches a segment in my database. So, if you could change your code on the fly, as only scripts can, then you could avoid the scanners blocking your code.
To explain, let's assume the virus is in file X. Within the code for the virus, it can generate a copy Y that is equally infecting. A script is basically variable names and values.. well what if you could randomly generate variable names, of arbitrary length, then at run-time, search-and-replace to generate copy Y with the new names. The document would have all of the functionality of the original X, but would have difference checksums, function names, variable names, with potentially different registry keys to spread... but the core program would produce the same output. The drawback is a virus checker could still detect the patterns in the system-call functions (which obviously cannot be renamed, or they would no longer link properly to the DLLs) and that could define the virus.
Or, maybe encase the code in a randomized ROT-# (which is easy for scripts to process)... Or use UUENCODE notation, and store everything as alphanumerics of its ASCII codes... but you would still have a stub of code that does the decoding, and you have to worry about that being tracked. Ah well.
That's ok, because I have degrees from an engineering college, and science and engineering students basically think liberal arts schools are community colleges, not real higher education.:)
Boy oh boy, Linux as a gaming platform... Linux was optimized to outperform in the areas of Software Design (for stability of the kernel) and Server Architectures. I have a partition kicking around whenever I need to do *real* work with C++, and I've used it since Slackware in 1995
But, as a gaming platform, Linux still isn't exactly jumping out at me... the UI/core apps now need about a half a decade of interface redesign to catch up. For one thing, a Control Panel type app would go a long way towards standardizing the configuration of these beasts. In all, completely giving up Windows for Linux is about as compelling as Switching to a Mac...
Recently, I've started to listen to Jim Cramer, a (egotistical but successful) financial analyst who also happened to be a stock analyst on CNBC in the late 1990s... up until the point when he gave a "bad" review of a certain tech company, and told the viewers to sell.
The company in question sued him for slander, went to his managers at the station, and pressured them to fire him... he was released from the show for trumped up reasons because of the pending lawsuit. After a big public farce, he was found innocent, but they ruined his public career for a good 2 years... up until the point when the company went bankrupt, because they really were a crappy company, and just didn't want anyone to look at what was going on behind the curtain. As we know now, there never was a "tech boom", no economic prosperity of the late 90s, because all of it was lies on paper, and all those startups were counting on the fact that noone was looking.
So in this case, we have an entity who is providing a review of a service, who in their opinion happens to be bad. Reviewee is now taking legal action against the reviewer to silence the opinion, with no regard to whether or not the review is factual or not. I can't help it if I get a feeling of deja vu... "Our service is great! No really, do you see any complaints?"
Back in December one of the review publishers screwed up (violating an NDA), and for about 1.5 hours they had posted what the Harvesters were. QS made them remove it, and they didn't get any more business from Infogrames..
But, if you were lucky to hit it at the right time... Harvesters are a "race" of nanomachines, that infect the existing populations of planets. Basically, your team is composed of a mix of other races, except like the Borg, they are super strong, great at research, spying (because you can't tell who's infected), and can live practically anywhere. The article indicated for drawbacks that either the population growth rate is either extremely low, or even zero... something about consuming their own population as food/upkeep, Soylent Green style...
Thanks Slashdot for killing the site:) But you can still get to the communities to hear from the dev's themselves...
Anyways, I saw an incredulous comment above that the system requirements are Pentium II @ 300 MHz... the game has been in development for so long, that the game engine is not based on modern 3D-accellerated engines. Instead, the engine is voxel-based, which has angered some in the past because the game's "smoothness" is software speed based, not add-on hardware or slickness of video card.
The game supports 8 human players, with up to a total of 16 (assuming the other 8 are computer AIs). Human players can drop connections and re-connect without reloading from a saved state (like Moo2 makes you do). Battles between players are executed in real-time, and multiple battles between two exclusive sets of players will happen simultaneously. Between turns, when battles are resolved, non-battling players are forced to wait.
I totally agree... Mother Nature is a sloppy programmer..
I look at it like evolution spends a lot of time adding minor "features" to the program (or "bugs" like cancers which kill it off)... over time, some of those features aren't needed anymore, so the main function just doesn't branch out to that subroutine (protein) anymore, but it's still there. Which I guess is a metaphor for these "knock-out" genes, it's not that they destroyed the code, they suppressed the ability for the DNA to make that chemical...
Chromasomes, nature's DLLs... what a scary thought.... Interchangeable at compile time, like forked code tinkered by thousands of programmers...
Funny, I look at it like Big Media decided they didn't like the results that reality gave them... so they decided that their VPN system must be wrong when Bush was predicted to win, so it needed an upgrade.
No, I learned to type by using a mechanical typewriter that my mom had from her college days, and it wasn't until ~1984 that my dad first got our family an AT&T electric typewriter.
Remember, the QWERTY keyboard layout was designed so the traveling salesman could type out "TYPEWRITER" by using only one row of the keyboard; that's about the extent of "efficiency" in its design. When the first mainframe computers (and accompanying terminals) were developed, it was only natural that they adopted the only common interface that the technologists were familiar with.
In this case, humans built a machine to fit their already-learned interface. The above poster is arguing that building the machine with an arbitrary interface, then forcing the users to learn it, is not the best approach in designing for customer acceptance... and I whole heartedly agree.
Slashdot Mirror
You're telling me, they were really baaaad.
I recently read an industry report that thanks to deregulation, the United States is in an over-capacity situation now, and will remain so until about 2005.
Market forces at work: Once the generation was split from the load serving entities, they realized how much money was in gen, so everyone and their neighbor started building cheap units. Result: Over-supply. That drove down the average price of electricity, which is hurting the gen owners in 2003, because they cannot recoup the 2002 investment costs (because the average price of electricity is too low for their margins).
California is just screwed up. Look at the east coast: you have NEISO, NYISO, PJM... all successful cases of deregulation, because of a diverse fuel type & willingness to invest. Now look at CALISO's f-up: they didn't build generation, relied on northern hydropower, then one hot dry summer wiped it out. Their PUCs locked the consumer rates lower than the economic cost of the gen they had to run, and the LSEs ran out of money. Then the state gets in the mix, and locks in long term rates; two years later, they're trying to get the courts to negate the contracts, because now the spot market price is low... well damn! what the heck is a price-protection contract for then?
The rest of the country is trying to increase their distributed gen & load management programs, and California is taking two steps back. Kind of dampens that whole myth about how "progressive" they are out there...
My father worked for AT&T in a computer component repair department (AT&T used to have in-house repair for printers, PCs, & modems). When they acquired NCR in 1991, they dumped (sorry, laid off) his whole group in favor of NCR's repair group. Then, to top it off, the union (CWA) let them get away with it with no arguments (for ~25 years experience w/ Bell/AT&T, not to mention dues paid to the union), flapping in the wind.
I recall reading that flowers attract insects not because of their markings in the (human) visible spectrum, but because of additional ultraviolet markings along the petals, which act like "landing lights" for flying insects.
Ah, here we go...
"Insects see a spectrum of colors that is shifted toward the shorter wavelengths of light. Their three kinds of cone cells respond to green, blue, and ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet light, like infrared at the other end of the spectrum, is invisible to us. Many insect-pollinated flowers display patterns that are visible only in the ultraviolet range. Flowers that look uniformly white, yellow, or blue to us often show striking patterns--like bull's eyes and road maps--that seem to guide insects to their nectar or pollen reward. (In other flowers, these patterns are visible to us.) Most insects do not see red, so a red flower would blend into the background for an insect. Red flowers are thus likely to be pollinated by birds, which have color vision more like our own."
Yes.
e n_ common/
v ol tage/
http://www.ecmweb.com/ar/electric_answering_sev
"How do AC generators control vars, voltage, and power?
Although the controls of a generator do interact, the following generalities are true.
* Power output of a generator is controlled by its prime mover.
* Voltage and/or var contribution of a generator are controlled by the exciter current level.
For example, let's assume that an additional load is connected to the output of a generator. The added current flow will increase the strength of the armature's magnetic field and cause the generator to slow down. In order to maintain frequency, the generator's governor will increase the power input to the prime mover. Thus, the additional power required of the generator is controlled by the prime mover input."
And vice versa. Too much generation increases the frequency.
"As a final example, let's assume that we have two or more generators running in parallel and feeding a load. Generator 1 (G1) is carrying all the load (real and reactive) while Generator 2 (G2) is running at zero watts and zero vars. If the operator for G2 opens the prime mover throttle, G2 starts to feed watts to the system. Since the connected load hasn't changed, both generators will speed up unless G1 throttles back.
As G2 picks up an additional share of the load, it requires an increased field flux. If the G2 operator does not increase the G2 field, G2 will draw its additional excitation from G1, requiring G1 to increase its excitation level. If neither G1 nor G2 increase the excitation level, the overall system voltage will go down."
See also
http://www.ecmweb.com/ar/electric_prime_movers_
The current, voltage, motor speed (and torque), and AC frequency are all interrelated. Here is some good information on the web.
p lications-3.shtml
m l
/ s1.htm
http://www.valhallascientific.com/applications/ap
http://www.lehmanengineering.com/quiz/quiz6sol.ht
http://www.mech.uq.edu.au/courses/mech3760/chap34
Humans create "reactive load" by running motors. Motors draw current, increase in current lowers voltage amplitude across a transmission line, plus larger power flow causes increase in reactive loss on a power line. Reactive loss lowers the voltage at both the supply end and the delivery end. Lower voltages reduces the torque in the motor shaft, not to mention reactive demand reduces the real output of the generator. This tends to slow down the motor, and the rotor speed is proportional to the frequency, so the overall frequency drops.
The only difference is that there is no cat. Err, I mean, the whole concept of "reactive" energy is just a mathematical construct representing amplitudes and phase angles. Its the old A<Phi vs R+jX conversions. But they're messy.
That's nice in theory, but totally inpractical. Basically, you'd have to sync both ends of the data transmission with frequency, except that the grid frequency is not a constant, and unpredictable...
The 60Hz frequency standard in the US is a "desired" point... everything, from turning on a blender at home, to firing up your local steam generator for the morning ramp, has an effect on the grid, from a minute twitch to a big swing. If there is more demand than generation, the frequency slows down as energy is sucked out of the grid; likewise, overproduction of electricity causes the frequency to speed up. Now, it takes many many MWatts to make a change, because so many loads & generators are wired in parallel, but it's still possible.
There are many companies operating in parallel across the USA (abbreviated RTOs & ISOs) that work to balance the supply & demand of electricity every second... we track the frequency (graph here) in an attempt to balance the whole thing out, by calling on more generation when the frequency is low, and telling the to back off when it is high...
Now, as far as sending data by modulating the AC wave, the problem here is the "scrubbing" effects of Transformers. The premise behind high voltage transfer of electricity is to use transformers to step up the voltage & lowering the current. Lower current equates to less heat loss, so you can send the energy more miles for the same loss. Now, the problem is the magnetic core does not have a good frequency response when converting E to M to E again... they're designed for a low frequency after all. So, you end up with every transformer removing all of the high-freq. oscillations.
I knew there was a reason I kept all of those AOL floppies...
The way it's described in the article, you don't touch it up, you replace it. It's like a "dip" process to get the "paint" on, so maybe you sand it down and re-dip it... not enough information yet.
Last year, my Saturn and I were rear-ended during stopped traffic on the local highway. Basically, you have a polymer (fibreglass of some sort) panel underneath, with an enamel glaze on the exterior. The person doing the repairs explained to me at the time that the glaze is "baked" on, so it hardens & becomes shiny. When the panel is damaged, the glaze discolors along the scratch lines (and you end up with white streaks that cannot be removed), or in my case, the glaze peels back like a ripped plastic bag, down to the panel (which was a dark grey in my case). Once torn, the glaze cannot be relayered like paint can, so you have to have the part replaced, and they send the old part back to be re-processd, most likely junked.
"Saturn pioneered the use of thermoplastic systems in body panels with the introduction of the industry's first quality, high production thermoplastic door panel ten years ago." More info here.
Heh, touche
:)
Windows isn't exactly a piece of cake either. The reason I had to go to Windows XP is I blew out my VMM32.VDX file, in a moment of stupidity when I was trying to repair a set of USB drivers. I had put my sister's Windows98 SE disk in when it prompted for drivers, and overwote my First Edition DLLs... not a good thing, since the computer would fault every time I tried to get my digital camera to work.
So, my other drive's OS was f'ed, but I wanted all of the files, which is why I bought a new hard drive & made my impromptu upgrade.
If you're like me, you didn't bother to make a Win98 "safety disk", so I can understand the not booting from floppy. Under normal conditions, you would, because Win98 just drops the Dos(7) COMMAND.COM to the floppy, and it boots to a DOS prompt (which is about as far as I got with the terminal).
And I also ran into that same CD-ROM problem before. I don't understand: Why give CD-ROM drivers on a CD, because if you actually NEED the drivers, your CD is most likely not working? Makes you want to kill someone. ATAPI drives will auto-boot Windows CS for Windows98 and later, but there are many of us with non-ATAPI. I had to go to work to use the net, just to find a MSCDEX driver to get the CD to work...
Windows XP now gives you the option to boot from any partition, so running multiple (Windows) operating systems in parallel on different partitions is not an issue. You didn't actually want to run anything else, did you?
Besides, in the example you give, you can just tinker the boot order in your BIOS (this option has been pretty standard for 4+ years), and windows should boot off the secondary disk; so Yes, it does work automatically. Your primary partition on the second disk should still be marked Active from the last time you ran it, so that's the one that becomes C:
Come to think of it, I should have done the same thing, that would have cleared all that config crap right up. Ah well, hindsight etc etc
If your BIOS doesn't do that, then Windows has no recourse but to physically reorder the hard drives. You're hosed, time to find a screwdriver. Linux is MUCH better at ordering partitions by software, I suppose it just doesn't occur to Microsoft that there ARE other OSes.
Oh, and Windows *has* something to configure itself, once the kernel starts, Safe mode & Control panel. Every video card can hit SVGA 640x480x256, and windows just uses the video card's interrupts to send commands to the video bios, and it draws. I'm curious why XFree86 crapped out trying to do the same thing.
So yes, in either case of blowing out the OS, any "average" person would just throw it in a box and send it back to the factory. I mean really, that's why Dell & Gateway do as well as they do... service contracts.
Just last night, I needed to ressurect my RedHat 6.1 installation, so I could work on some C programming at home.
/dev/hda, but now they were on /dev/hdb. After all that time, I couldn't even remember it was on /dev/hdb8 ... I had to DL a windows program to scan the partitions to find it. Once I included the ROOT=/dev/hdb8, the kernel panic'ed, and put me into a root shell. Except now, it had mounted the / partition as read only. I had to swap back to Dos, figure out the command line params to put it into RW, boot back, let it panic again, then trace through /etc for the configuration files. The culprit was /etc/fstab
:w :q. Reboot again.
Over the course of 2 years, I had swapped hard drives, video cards, and internet providers. I had gone from Win98(1stEd) to Windows XP now... and boy, was I in for a treat.
First off, the COMMAND.COM eqiuvalents in Windows ME & later do not support the processor mode flags that allow programs like LOADLIN to swap in the kernel. I had to go on the web for a Dos6.0 floppy disk image (even though I had Dos6 on my hard drive, you can't SYS it because of version problems) and make myself a boot disk. Once I was in Dos6 again, I could boot...
Except now I had swapped hard drives. The bootup scripts were expecting all of the partitions to be on
But now, how does one edit a file on a computer without emacs, since up to this point everything went to X11 (and run xedit like a normal person)? VI. Yay. So, imagine trying to learn syntax after 8 years of non-use. *Obviously* the Edit mode command is (ESC)-A, from there I could remember
So now everything starts up ok, and I get to the terminal. Log in, and it's time for X11. Of course the settings for my old Voodoo3 don't apply any more, I need to get it to work with an NVidia GForce3, and when you try to run X11, it craps out to a garbled video buffer, definitely not mode $80. Had to reboot just to get the text termal back.
So now I browse the web, and I find an XFree86 binary just for NVidias, so I'm happy. I copy it over, reboot to Linux, mount the drive, and try to run it... no go, it has GLIBC 2.1.3 & 2.2 dependancies. Back to Windows to scan the net for files, and finally found them in RPMs in the redhat 7 & 8 distributions... and that's where I left it, after 4 hours of tooling around. And I still have to look forward to eth0 working with DHCP before I can even get on the net..
Now explain to me how an "modern average" user is supposed to figure this all out? Linux needs SOMETHING to configure itself!
Last time i checked, police departments should not be broadcasting in the military spectrum.. second, houses don't tend to speed, so there's no reason why the police should beam their radar guns at your house. Third, even if they did, it wouldn't do anything.
Information on police radar guns: "The granddaddy of systems is X band radar... X band operates on the narrow channel from 10.500 to 10.550 gigahertz (GHz)... K band appeared in the seventies and quickly became popular in its deadliest form: a hand held gun featuring an instant on switch. K band operates on a higher-frequency channel from 24.050 to 24.250 GHz... In 1989, photo radar appeared on the scene, and it was bad news for motorists--it operated on a frequency that was undetectable by existing radar detectors. The FCC set up a channel for photo-radar from 34.200 to 34.400 GHz, which lies within the wide Ka band... Which brings us to the Stalker, the latest wrinkle in hand-held radar guns. It operates on the Ka band anywhere from 34.200 to 35.200 GHz."
Here is another informative article on how the Wi-Fi is colliding with the millitary radar, down at 5 GHz side of the spectrum, specifically 5.150-5.350 GHz.
Thus, police radar should never affect Wi-Fi, and vice versa.
Agreed. In my recent years at work, I have adopted the Microsoft Visual Basic language as my primary scripting language, for pretty much doing anything related to reporting database data. Once you've researched enough tricks, you begin to understand how powerful a tool you have...
Many people here at Slashdot like to bash on VB (as did I, until I played with Macromedia Director, and scripted myself a 10 minute interactive software demo)... and after learning how to poke the registry, read/write files, touch databases, probe the 'net, all sorts of stuff, all of which is scripted, and standardized.
I would think that the penultimate scripted virus should be one that, like the genetic variety, has the abilty to self-modify to avoid detection. Remember, virus scanner software is just a glorified pattern-match... this this file contain this segment of code that matches a segment in my database. So, if you could change your code on the fly, as only scripts can, then you could avoid the scanners blocking your code.
To explain, let's assume the virus is in file X. Within the code for the virus, it can generate a copy Y that is equally infecting. A script is basically variable names and values.. well what if you could randomly generate variable names, of arbitrary length, then at run-time, search-and-replace to generate copy Y with the new names. The document would have all of the functionality of the original X, but would have difference checksums, function names, variable names, with potentially different registry keys to spread... but the core program would produce the same output. The drawback is a virus checker could still detect the patterns in the system-call functions (which obviously cannot be renamed, or they would no longer link properly to the DLLs) and that could define the virus.
Or, maybe encase the code in a randomized ROT-# (which is easy for scripts to process)... Or use UUENCODE notation, and store everything as alphanumerics of its ASCII codes... but you would still have a stub of code that does the decoding, and you have to worry about that being tracked. Ah well.
Butt they promised if I Switched, everything would be ok!
That's ok, because I have degrees from an engineering college, and science and engineering students basically think liberal arts schools are community colleges, not real higher education. :)
Boy oh boy, Linux as a gaming platform... Linux was optimized to outperform in the areas of Software Design (for stability of the kernel) and Server Architectures. I have a partition kicking around whenever I need to do *real* work with C++, and I've used it since Slackware in 1995
... the UI/core apps now need about a half a decade of interface redesign to catch up. For one thing, a Control Panel type app would go a long way towards standardizing the configuration of these beasts. In all, completely giving up Windows for Linux is about as compelling as Switching to a Mac...
But, as a gaming platform, Linux still isn't exactly jumping out at me
The New York Times was a reputable news organization.
Oh, and info on the Incredible Hulk movie (who's preview also just aired) can be found here.
ObDup
Matrix Revisited just played on TV. I assume it will be appearing here soon...
Recently, I've started to listen to Jim Cramer, a (egotistical but successful) financial analyst who also happened to be a stock analyst on CNBC in the late 1990s... up until the point when he gave a "bad" review of a certain tech company, and told the viewers to sell.
The company in question sued him for slander, went to his managers at the station, and pressured them to fire him... he was released from the show for trumped up reasons because of the pending lawsuit. After a big public farce, he was found innocent, but they ruined his public career for a good 2 years... up until the point when the company went bankrupt, because they really were a crappy company, and just didn't want anyone to look at what was going on behind the curtain. As we know now, there never was a "tech boom", no economic prosperity of the late 90s, because all of it was lies on paper, and all those startups were counting on the fact that noone was looking.
So in this case, we have an entity who is providing a review of a service, who in their opinion happens to be bad. Reviewee is now taking legal action against the reviewer to silence the opinion, with no regard to whether or not the review is factual or not. I can't help it if I get a feeling of deja vu... "Our service is great! No really, do you see any complaints?"
Back in December one of the review publishers screwed up (violating an NDA), and for about 1.5 hours they had posted what the Harvesters were. QS made them remove it, and they didn't get any more business from Infogrames..
But, if you were lucky to hit it at the right time... Harvesters are a "race" of nanomachines, that infect the existing populations of planets. Basically, your team is composed of a mix of other races, except like the Borg, they are super strong, great at research, spying (because you can't tell who's infected), and can live practically anywhere. The article indicated for drawbacks that either the population growth rate is either extremely low, or even zero... something about consuming their own population as food/upkeep, Soylent Green style...
Thanks Slashdot for killing the site :) But you can still get to the communities to hear from the dev's themselves...
Anyways, I saw an incredulous comment above that the system requirements are Pentium II @ 300 MHz... the game has been in development for so long, that the game engine is not based on modern 3D-accellerated engines. Instead, the engine is voxel-based, which has angered some in the past because the game's "smoothness" is software speed based, not add-on hardware or slickness of video card.
The game supports 8 human players, with up to a total of 16 (assuming the other 8 are computer AIs). Human players can drop connections and re-connect without reloading from a saved state (like Moo2 makes you do). Battles between players are executed in real-time, and multiple battles between two exclusive sets of players will happen simultaneously. Between turns, when battles are resolved, non-battling players are forced to wait.
I totally agree... Mother Nature is a sloppy programmer..
... Interchangeable at compile time, like forked code tinkered by thousands of programmers...
I look at it like evolution spends a lot of time adding minor "features" to the program (or "bugs" like cancers which kill it off)... over time, some of those features aren't needed anymore, so the main function just doesn't branch out to that subroutine (protein) anymore, but it's still there. Which I guess is a metaphor for these "knock-out" genes, it's not that they destroyed the code, they suppressed the ability for the DNA to make that chemical...
Chromasomes, nature's DLLs... what a scary thought.
Funny, I look at it like Big Media decided they didn't like the results that reality gave them... so they decided that their VPN system must be wrong when Bush was predicted to win, so it needed an upgrade.
No, I learned to type by using a mechanical typewriter that my mom had from her college days, and it wasn't until ~1984 that my dad first got our family an AT&T electric typewriter.
Remember, the QWERTY keyboard layout was designed so the traveling salesman could type out "TYPEWRITER" by using only one row of the keyboard; that's about the extent of "efficiency" in its design. When the first mainframe computers (and accompanying terminals) were developed, it was only natural that they adopted the only common interface that the technologists were familiar with.
In this case, humans built a machine to fit their already-learned interface. The above poster is arguing that building the machine with an arbitrary interface, then forcing the users to learn it, is not the best approach in designing for customer acceptance... and I whole heartedly agree.