I personally really love Steam. It works great, and unlike other DRM schemes it actually gives advantages to you in return for not allowing you to sell your games. All other DRM schemes just restrict you without giving anything back. Tbh, the one single feature that I love the most is the fact that I never ever have to worry about losing my CDs or CD-keys or patch my games up or backups: they're always up-to-date and can be installed anywhere where there's Internet connection.
If the two were split apart (e.g. you could buy & download Steam powered games through Amazon, Play, etc. etc.) I doubt anyone would care so much if it allowed proper competition.
Actually, you can often buy games from elsewhere and just supply the CD-key to Steam and from there on it'll work as if you had bought it from there. It seems to work mostly for the bigger games that are also available on Steam Store, the games that aren't available there obviously won't work, and I ran into one re-print of Mass Effect 1 that didn't work that way.
Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE's and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this - no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.
I personally use 'nano' as my primary programming tool:)
fourth is obvious, a the magnetic rod in the middle would deflect plasma (and it would have to be magnetic to keep form getting eaten by the plasma). Even you solved your objection after that.
It wouldn't deflect the projectile as if it were a solid object; it would instead partially get caught inside the same magnetic field that holds the saber's own plasma and the rest of the projectile would just disperse around the saber.
"The collapsible rod extends out of the handle of the lightsaber when activated, much like a high-tech version of a toy lightsaber with a flickable blade. The plasma and magnetic field are energized immediately when powered up"
For the rod to be able to fit inside the handle it would firstly have to be of very, very thin material, otherwise it would simply not fit in there. Secondly, there's not that many ways of making something that could expand and retract in such a limit space without making it very fragile. Combine that with the aforementioned fragile material and these things wouldn't be able to even sustain their own weight; fighting with those would be completely out of the question.
Now, about the magnetic fields: to be able to contain plasma without it leaking these things would have to sport very, very powerful magnetic fields. Even assuming they had the tech to generate powerful enough magnetic field in such a small space how would they limit its range? They would somehow have to be able to generate two magnetic fields in order to protect the rod from the plasma, and to prevent the plasma from espacing, and they'd have to be able to also limit how wide the fields are at the same time. That's again out of the question.
But then again, none of it is real anyways so arguing about it is as pointless as two anonymous people yelling death threats to eachothers on the Internets.
Because it is not a journalised FS, it's a COW FS, it does not need to go offline to be repaired. It can repair itself online or allow you to mount the last working/clean version of the FS.
Well, superblocks et al can still get corrupted, and at the moment the only way of repairing issues seems to be full rebalancing of the whole filesystem. That is VERY time consuming, not to mention that it causes loads of unnecessary I/O. An fsck utility could just instead rebalance the parts that need it resulting in much less overhead and time spent.
My mistake, I meant raid0, ie. with striping. The odd thing is that the tools report it as raid1. And yes, I have way more stuff there than the smallest drive, so it can't be raid1.
For some reason I'm getting really low performance on btrfs, both on a single disk and on raid1 configurations. I have tried with -nodatacow and with and without -compress, but it seems it doesn't have any effect. Also, I have 90 gigabytes of free space on Storage1 but I get drive full error when I try to write there. Rebalancing it didn't fix the issue. The btrfs command-line tool is, well, rather incomplete and somewhat buggy, like e.g. when I query 'btrfs fi df/media/Storage2' -- with Storage2 being the raid1 pool -- it reports the size and usage of the smallest disk on it, not the whole thing. I don't understand why. I also have had some filesystem corruption which caused me to lose quite a bit of data, and again the only way to fix it was rebalancing the whole thing which takes the whole damn day.
I do understand that it's a filesystem that's still under development, but the tools atleast need a lot more work. They're just too incomplete at the moment. I'm not really sure pushing it as the default filesystem for end-users is a good idea yet.
a very rich user experience over the web that was cross platform
I've got nothing to comment on the rest of your comment, but this part irks me: you should have known already back then that Microsoft would drop support for other platforms when they've gained enough developers and Silverlight products. You see, once there are products out there there's no way for the developers to pull them back, and if they've invested heavily on Silverlight-related tools and knowledge they more-or-less have no choice but to continue.
You were naive to expect Silverlight to remain cross-platform.
With newer reactor designs, it could be even better. We still need to come up with a good solution for the waste, though. Nobody has any idea how much it will cost to deal with as we're currently just putting it aside.
There are several plans for secondary reactors designed to re-use the waste. These secondary reactors offer some extra power, though obviously not as much as the primary ones, but they reduce the half-time of the waste products by quite a bit. I don't remember exactly how much, you can Google that if you're interested, but as far as I remember it reduced 10 000 years to about 1200 years for the worst elements, and to mere decades for the less dangerous ones. So such reactors could serve as great temporary solutions, giving us some more time to come up with better solutions or with a completely new reactor which doesn't involve fission reaction at all.
That is indeed something me and my friend -- both somewhat environmentally friendly and aware -- have been wondering about: from all the CURRENT power plant technologies nuclear is the most efficient one with the least downsides to it, ie. it's still the best choice for now. Sure, once something better comes along nuclear power should be dropped like a hot potato, but for example coal is dozens of times worse than nuclear. With modern tech fission reactors produce less byproducts -- ie. nuclear waste -- than before, and coupled with secondary reactor the half-life of those byproducts is also short enough that you don't have to worry about them for tens of thousands of years.
I'd much rather we'd stop using coal reactors, they pollute our air constantly by several orders of magnitude more than any nuclear reactor while still taking up as much space and offering lower power output.
This is actually pretty darn clever. Maybe I don't know of the prior art everyone and their brother knows, but colored me impressed by a company I no longer expected this from. Not just in realizing this could be done, but in the executives allowing it to reach market.
There's something Sony didn't mention out loud: the display shows different pictures to the two different players, but it'll apparently be 2D, not 3D. 3D just for one person requires twice the bandwidth as compared to regular 2D, and 3D for two requires four times that, so there's simply not enough bandwidth to do it.
Three buttons, humidity, temperature and motion sensors plus several LEDs all controllable separately and this would garner a whole lot more interest; you'd actually be able to do some neat tricks with it then.
Neither of them had more than a 6th-grade education (common for that generation) and were hardly upper middle class. They wrote significantly better than the college students whose essays I have graded at fairly elite institutions. They also both had very legible handwriting, which would today be expected of only calligraphers.
That's indeed something I've been wondering about, too, at times. It seems that for some reason the value we in modern societies place on grammar skills and functional writing has declined sharpy, even though we still need those skills. In past times phones were not as widespread and available to everyone, yet alone cell phones which provide you communication capabilities on-the-go, and more importantly you had to make certain that when the other party receives your message they'll understand it, every word, since it wasn't possible to just ask what you meant without atleast a week's delay; ie. you had to make every word count, both individually and as complete, coherent sentences. Today we seemingly trade quality of information/communication with excess amounts of it, and sadly schools seem to be picking up on the same trend. It is just saddening to see how high you can score nowadays on tests and exams even with papers full of errors, incoherent sentence structures and just plain-old lack of vocabulary.
I suppose one of the reasons that contributes to this trend is that texting and calling in case of misunderstandings is simply perceived as more efficient than putting down the time to write something as clearly as possible in the beginning, and similarly it contributes to our feeling of being in touch with other people, ie. it caters to our need to feel social.
Too bad for you then that in this case all the compared e-mails seem to be from business-related discussions with acquaintances, not friends. And even then, people are more likely to write more casually with people they're close with, but in this case Zuckerberg would've written casually with a person whom he was not a friend with. That goes against basic human nature.
The emails are not fabricated and Zuckerberg used a different linguistic style by accident. (E.g., personal style can shift depending on audience [do you cuss in front of your parents?] or technology [do you use shorthand when texting?].)
Interesting dilemma, yes, but atleast the quoted part seems highly unlikely. After all, they are comparing e-mails to e-mails, and even those are all between business partners. If Zuckerberg had struck a deal that he is claimed to have struck that would also make it business-related discussion. There is no reason for Zuckerberg to try to shorten his messages or leave out commas in this case; after all, all the e-mails were most likely written on a full desktop computer with a complete keyboard. I also got the impression that all these acquaintances of his are on a similar footing in their relationship with Zuckerberg, ie. they're more-or-less just business partners and acquaintances, not friends.
Thus there is really no explanation for why his style would change so radically when in touch with this one, single person, even so much as to affect his use of ellipsis. I mean, e.g how you type ellipsis -- ie. with or without spaces -- is so deeply hidden in your subconscious that it's almost a reflex; you just don't suddenly start using spaces when you're always doing it without.
I will admit, in general, it shouldn't change with all those points in just a few years
The whole point is that the linguistics experts compared the alleged fake emails to proven-real emails _from the same time_, not to his current ones.
Atleast I find it very much unlikely that Zuckerberg would've somehow unlearned how to use apostrophes, capitalization and ellipsis correctly every time he contacted the other person, but again picked up on the correct grammar every time he was communicating with other people.
Then I don't know what is. These guys are no longer playing with the stuff our universe is made of, they're now playing with what it's/not/ made of. That's quite amazing, if you ask me.
Uhh. The universe IS made of both matter and anti-matter, so...
Why even drink the milk from another animal? There are many alternatives that aren't full of growth-hormones such as soy and almond.
Those are indeed good alternatives. I personally like the taste of rice milk the best, it leaves the most pleasant aftertaste in your mouth.
But there's just one issue: these dairy milk alternatives are terribly expensive, atleast in here. When the alternatives cost 150%-300% of the price of dairy milk it's no wonder people rather choose the latter.
They don't like Sony so they fuck over the services that millions of paying customers are using and expose all their personal details? What a pack of pricks. That ain't cool, that's fucked up and selfish.
I wholeheartedly agree. I mean, it doesn't hurt SONY in the least bit, they can just play the sympathy card and get even more support from the general populace while at the same time they simply do not care if the customer data has been copied off of them. And well, the customers then? Was the hacker groups' intentions to hurt the customers or SONY? Publishing all their passwords and everything just hurts the customers, many of whom don't even understand what's going on!
This is willful, ignorant, and downright moronic from their part. They could have just posted a list of usernames and left everything else out, just to prove a point. I still wouldn't condone of their behaviour, but atleast they wouldn't have majorly screwed over entirely innocent people!
Why don't you just buy some hardware that hasn't been (or has minimally been) poisoned by Microsoft?
I wasn't talking about hardware, I was talking about software. Sure, I have had issues with hardware under Linux, too, but usually it's software that one way or another crashes or doesn't work and that's exactly what I got so fed up with.
And the fact that you switched back to Windows simply lends credence to the suspicion that you didn't know what you were doing and didn't bother to find out.
He used Linux for 15 years as his primary OS and happens to also develop his own software. It's quite likely he does indeed know what he's doing. And I am in a similar position myself too: I started using Linux as my primary OS somewhere in 1996 and dropped it last year. I simply got tired with something always breaking or not working correctly and I feel quite a bit more satisfied nowadays.
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I personally really love Steam. It works great, and unlike other DRM schemes it actually gives advantages to you in return for not allowing you to sell your games. All other DRM schemes just restrict you without giving anything back. Tbh, the one single feature that I love the most is the fact that I never ever have to worry about losing my CDs or CD-keys or patch my games up or backups: they're always up-to-date and can be installed anywhere where there's Internet connection.
If the two were split apart (e.g. you could buy & download Steam powered games through Amazon, Play, etc. etc.) I doubt anyone would care so much if it allowed proper competition.
Actually, you can often buy games from elsewhere and just supply the CD-key to Steam and from there on it'll work as if you had bought it from there. It seems to work mostly for the bigger games that are also available on Steam Store, the games that aren't available there obviously won't work, and I ran into one re-print of Mass Effect 1 that didn't work that way.
Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE's and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this - no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.
I personally use 'nano' as my primary programming tool :)
fourth is obvious, a the magnetic rod in the middle would deflect plasma (and it would have to be magnetic to keep form getting eaten by the plasma). Even you solved your objection after that.
It wouldn't deflect the projectile as if it were a solid object; it would instead partially get caught inside the same magnetic field that holds the saber's own plasma and the rest of the projectile would just disperse around the saber.
"The collapsible rod extends out of the handle of the lightsaber when activated, much like a high-tech version of a toy lightsaber with a flickable blade. The plasma and magnetic field are energized immediately when powered up"
For the rod to be able to fit inside the handle it would firstly have to be of very, very thin material, otherwise it would simply not fit in there. Secondly, there's not that many ways of making something that could expand and retract in such a limit space without making it very fragile. Combine that with the aforementioned fragile material and these things wouldn't be able to even sustain their own weight; fighting with those would be completely out of the question.
Now, about the magnetic fields: to be able to contain plasma without it leaking these things would have to sport very, very powerful magnetic fields. Even assuming they had the tech to generate powerful enough magnetic field in such a small space how would they limit its range? They would somehow have to be able to generate two magnetic fields in order to protect the rod from the plasma, and to prevent the plasma from espacing, and they'd have to be able to also limit how wide the fields are at the same time. That's again out of the question.
But then again, none of it is real anyways so arguing about it is as pointless as two anonymous people yelling death threats to eachothers on the Internets.
Because it is not a journalised FS, it's a COW FS, it does not need to go offline to be repaired. It can repair itself online or allow you to mount the last working/clean version of the FS.
Well, superblocks et al can still get corrupted, and at the moment the only way of repairing issues seems to be full rebalancing of the whole filesystem. That is VERY time consuming, not to mention that it causes loads of unnecessary I/O. An fsck utility could just instead rebalance the parts that need it resulting in much less overhead and time spent.
My mistake, I meant raid0, ie. with striping. The odd thing is that the tools report it as raid1. And yes, I have way more stuff there than the smallest drive, so it can't be raid1.
For some reason I'm getting really low performance on btrfs, both on a single disk and on raid1 configurations. I have tried with -nodatacow and with and without -compress, but it seems it doesn't have any effect. Also, I have 90 gigabytes of free space on Storage1 but I get drive full error when I try to write there. Rebalancing it didn't fix the issue. The btrfs command-line tool is, well, rather incomplete and somewhat buggy, like e.g. when I query 'btrfs fi df /media/Storage2' -- with Storage2 being the raid1 pool -- it reports the size and usage of the smallest disk on it, not the whole thing. I don't understand why. I also have had some filesystem corruption which caused me to lose quite a bit of data, and again the only way to fix it was rebalancing the whole thing which takes the whole damn day.
I do understand that it's a filesystem that's still under development, but the tools atleast need a lot more work. They're just too incomplete at the moment. I'm not really sure pushing it as the default filesystem for end-users is a good idea yet.
a very rich user experience over the web that was cross platform
I've got nothing to comment on the rest of your comment, but this part irks me: you should have known already back then that Microsoft would drop support for other platforms when they've gained enough developers and Silverlight products. You see, once there are products out there there's no way for the developers to pull them back, and if they've invested heavily on Silverlight-related tools and knowledge they more-or-less have no choice but to continue.
You were naive to expect Silverlight to remain cross-platform.
You probably mix them up with breeder designs that can fully burn all heavy isotopes.
Yeah, that's probably it. Thanks for clearing it up :)
I think I'll go and read up on breeder designs now then.
With newer reactor designs, it could be even better. We still need to come up with a good solution for the waste, though. Nobody has any idea how much it will cost to deal with as we're currently just putting it aside.
There are several plans for secondary reactors designed to re-use the waste. These secondary reactors offer some extra power, though obviously not as much as the primary ones, but they reduce the half-time of the waste products by quite a bit. I don't remember exactly how much, you can Google that if you're interested, but as far as I remember it reduced 10 000 years to about 1200 years for the worst elements, and to mere decades for the less dangerous ones. So such reactors could serve as great temporary solutions, giving us some more time to come up with better solutions or with a completely new reactor which doesn't involve fission reaction at all.
That is indeed something me and my friend -- both somewhat environmentally friendly and aware -- have been wondering about: from all the CURRENT power plant technologies nuclear is the most efficient one with the least downsides to it, ie. it's still the best choice for now. Sure, once something better comes along nuclear power should be dropped like a hot potato, but for example coal is dozens of times worse than nuclear. With modern tech fission reactors produce less byproducts -- ie. nuclear waste -- than before, and coupled with secondary reactor the half-life of those byproducts is also short enough that you don't have to worry about them for tens of thousands of years.
I'd much rather we'd stop using coal reactors, they pollute our air constantly by several orders of magnitude more than any nuclear reactor while still taking up as much space and offering lower power output.
This is actually pretty darn clever. Maybe I don't know of the prior art everyone and their brother knows, but colored me impressed by a company I no longer expected this from. Not just in realizing this could be done, but in the executives allowing it to reach market.
There's something Sony didn't mention out loud: the display shows different pictures to the two different players, but it'll apparently be 2D, not 3D. 3D just for one person requires twice the bandwidth as compared to regular 2D, and 3D for two requires four times that, so there's simply not enough bandwidth to do it.
If it had a bunch of sensors stuck to it
Three buttons, humidity, temperature and motion sensors plus several LEDs all controllable separately and this would garner a whole lot more interest; you'd actually be able to do some neat tricks with it then.
Neither of them had more than a 6th-grade education (common for that generation) and were hardly upper middle class. They wrote significantly better than the college students whose essays I have graded at fairly elite institutions. They also both had very legible handwriting, which would today be expected of only calligraphers.
That's indeed something I've been wondering about, too, at times. It seems that for some reason the value we in modern societies place on grammar skills and functional writing has declined sharpy, even though we still need those skills. In past times phones were not as widespread and available to everyone, yet alone cell phones which provide you communication capabilities on-the-go, and more importantly you had to make certain that when the other party receives your message they'll understand it, every word, since it wasn't possible to just ask what you meant without atleast a week's delay; ie. you had to make every word count, both individually and as complete, coherent sentences. Today we seemingly trade quality of information/communication with excess amounts of it, and sadly schools seem to be picking up on the same trend. It is just saddening to see how high you can score nowadays on tests and exams even with papers full of errors, incoherent sentence structures and just plain-old lack of vocabulary.
I suppose one of the reasons that contributes to this trend is that texting and calling in case of misunderstandings is simply perceived as more efficient than putting down the time to write something as clearly as possible in the beginning, and similarly it contributes to our feeling of being in touch with other people, ie. it caters to our need to feel social.
i write differently based on my audience.
Too bad for you then that in this case all the compared e-mails seem to be from business-related discussions with acquaintances, not friends. And even then, people are more likely to write more casually with people they're close with, but in this case Zuckerberg would've written casually with a person whom he was not a friend with. That goes against basic human nature.
The emails are not fabricated and Zuckerberg used a different linguistic style by accident. (E.g., personal style can shift depending on audience [do you cuss in front of your parents?] or technology [do you use shorthand when texting?].)
Interesting dilemma, yes, but atleast the quoted part seems highly unlikely. After all, they are comparing e-mails to e-mails, and even those are all between business partners. If Zuckerberg had struck a deal that he is claimed to have struck that would also make it business-related discussion. There is no reason for Zuckerberg to try to shorten his messages or leave out commas in this case; after all, all the e-mails were most likely written on a full desktop computer with a complete keyboard. I also got the impression that all these acquaintances of his are on a similar footing in their relationship with Zuckerberg, ie. they're more-or-less just business partners and acquaintances, not friends.
Thus there is really no explanation for why his style would change so radically when in touch with this one, single person, even so much as to affect his use of ellipsis. I mean, e.g how you type ellipsis -- ie. with or without spaces -- is so deeply hidden in your subconscious that it's almost a reflex; you just don't suddenly start using spaces when you're always doing it without.
I will admit, in general, it shouldn't change with all those points in just a few years
The whole point is that the linguistics experts compared the alleged fake emails to proven-real emails _from the same time_, not to his current ones.
Atleast I find it very much unlikely that Zuckerberg would've somehow unlearned how to use apostrophes, capitalization and ellipsis correctly every time he contacted the other person, but again picked up on the correct grammar every time he was communicating with other people.
Then I don't know what is. These guys are no longer playing with the stuff our universe is made of, they're now playing with what it's /not/ made of. That's quite amazing, if you ask me.
Uhh. The universe IS made of both matter and anti-matter, so...
Why even drink the milk from another animal? There are many alternatives that aren't full of growth-hormones such as soy and almond.
Those are indeed good alternatives. I personally like the taste of rice milk the best, it leaves the most pleasant aftertaste in your mouth.
But there's just one issue: these dairy milk alternatives are terribly expensive, atleast in here. When the alternatives cost 150%-300% of the price of dairy milk it's no wonder people rather choose the latter.
stuff that matters
Atleast the quoted part is indeed true in this case.
Next up: Breathing air and eating food can cause cancer
Living for a period of time may cause death.
They don't like Sony so they fuck over the services that millions of paying customers are using and expose all their personal details? What a pack of pricks. That ain't cool, that's fucked up and selfish.
I wholeheartedly agree. I mean, it doesn't hurt SONY in the least bit, they can just play the sympathy card and get even more support from the general populace while at the same time they simply do not care if the customer data has been copied off of them. And well, the customers then? Was the hacker groups' intentions to hurt the customers or SONY? Publishing all their passwords and everything just hurts the customers, many of whom don't even understand what's going on!
This is willful, ignorant, and downright moronic from their part. They could have just posted a list of usernames and left everything else out, just to prove a point. I still wouldn't condone of their behaviour, but atleast they wouldn't have majorly screwed over entirely innocent people!
Why don't you just buy some hardware that hasn't been (or has minimally been) poisoned by Microsoft?
I wasn't talking about hardware, I was talking about software. Sure, I have had issues with hardware under Linux, too, but usually it's software that one way or another crashes or doesn't work and that's exactly what I got so fed up with.
And the fact that you switched back to Windows simply lends credence to the suspicion that you didn't know what you were doing and didn't bother to find out.
He used Linux for 15 years as his primary OS and happens to also develop his own software. It's quite likely he does indeed know what he's doing. And I am in a similar position myself too: I started using Linux as my primary OS somewhere in 1996 and dropped it last year. I simply got tired with something always breaking or not working correctly and I feel quite a bit more satisfied nowadays.