If Congress was going to fund a new shuttle fleet, I doubt they'd use the existing design. It'd probably be a ground-up redesign, as we know a lot more now than we did 30 years ago when the shuttles were originally designed. Still, considering what they do, the shuttles have a remarkably low failure rate. I've heard landing the shuttle is like trying to land an engineless flying brick blind.
That said, the space program is too important to the nation's image to abandon. Building a new fleet of space vehicles will take at least 5, probably closer to 10 years. We've spent too much money on the ISS to abandon it.
Yeah, except ebay is really good about finding and shutting down illegal auctions. Ever tried selling pirated software (or even grey area software, like student copies) on ebay? Your auction will be down within a few hours.
Actually there are a bunch of rather large pieces throughout northeast Texas. Apparently most of them are pieces of the engines, some of them several meters wide. The debris field is pretty large (seeing as it was at about 200,000 ft when it broke up) so we'll probably be finding pieces of this thing for months. Northeast Texas isn't the most populated place out there; there's a lot of small towns but not much of anything else there.
I thought that the neutron bomb was never ACTUALLY developed; only theorized. IIRC, the military never actually built one because they weren't really possible until near the end of the cold war, when nuclear ("nucular") dearmament was a popular idea. But who knows, there could be a secret stockpile of these things laying around somewhere, though a large hydrogen bomb is probably just as effective 99% of the time.
I rather enjoyed the virtual boy. Granted, I paid $30 for the system and all 12 games (new, I might add) but there were still a few good games.. Teleroboxer and Red Alarm come to mind.. Mario Tennis was also kinda fun. But, in the end, it wasn't worth $130 or whatever Nintendo charged for it. I would never have touch the thing if it hadn't been on super-clearance.
Force quitting XDarwin doesn't work? You should be able to kill -9 the processes accessing it and it'll die gracefully (if not, force quit it.) True, it's not terribly graceful, but it can only get better.
This is what I actually meant.:) IIRC X11 was working on Darwin around the time commercial OS X 10.0 was released. Soon thereafter, the rootless server came out, and soon after that, OroborOSX (which is, IMO, the killer app for X11 on OS X.) The only problem is that X11 on OS X is painfully slow (though I am running it on a G3.) Needless to say, the point remains the same: X11 on OS X is very real, very practical, and very usable.
X has been available on OS X for about a year. With XDarwin and OroborOSX it's about as perfectly integrated as it can get. Most X programs will compile just fine (and the ones that don't more often than not the problem is with the configure scripts.. rewrite the makefile and it works) I use gvim as my text editor and other X programs with relative frequency. OS X really is the best of both worlds IMO.
I don't think anyone claims OpenBSD is not an innovator. But it really isn't that hard to secure a *nix box from most security breaches. The biggest part is keeping current on patches and staying away from software such as BIND and sendmail. I can still exploit root on an OpenBSD machine with a crappy CGI. If you need to hack the data on a machine, there are low level exploits (though if you have data someone would want to hack, you should be encrypting your filesystems.)
I do admire OpenBSD's approach to software development; it can be called responsible if nothing else. It's just that for volunteers who basically code other *nix OSes, code auditing is not nearly as much fun as porting your OS to a Nintendo.:)
I should hope OpenBSD is the most secure OS out there. That is the main goal of the project. It's definately not the fastest or most feature-rich OS out there. But, that's what they do, and if you need ironclad security, OpenBSD is the way to go.
I'm surprised there aren't more pirate radio stations than there are. I'm personally tempted to start one myself, but I live in an apartment (nowhere to place a modest transmitter) and don't have the knowledge of radio equipment. Christ, there are enough bands out there without record contracts that would be more than happy to let such a station play their shit for free.
Just a note about Radiohead, they were becoming quite the pop-radio darlings for about 3 albums before they said "fuck everyone" with Kid A. Radiohead is actually one of the most popular bands out there (try getting concert tickets when they come to America,) but their newer songs don't play well on the radio. My theory is that they made enough money with OK Computer (4 million copies, Pablo Honey and The Bends were million sellers too) that they just did whatever they wanted. So basically, they did a bunch of radio-frendly stuff (Pablo Honey was a straight-up radio rock album) then some weird stuff.
So this is assuming that the only reason people leave college is because they failed out. I don't have solid numbers, but a lot of people drop out because of reasons like money, marriage, having kids, good job offer, military service, etc. Also, people transfer schools a lot; this is especially true if your alma mater was not a "top tier" school.
The mechanic doesn't own a fancy car because he knows how often said fancy car will break down. So he buys a Honda or Toyota and doesn't touch the damn thing (other than sched. maintenance) for 5 years.
Actually, less priveleged countries (I assume you're talking about dirt poor countries, but anyway) usually have enormous militaries because they've been fighting for so long. They spend ALL their money on the military and as such, have none to spend on anything else. Our freedom is not free, but we don't need to go around picking fights. We were considering not letting the weapons inspectors finish their jobs so we could attack.
You are right though, a lack of understanding and complacency probably will kill this country, but it will not be through military means.
Yeah, cept first year female college students usually try to rebel against their parents by dating 29 year old slackers. That's why first year males should hunt for older women.
With oroborosx, X windows are integrated into aqua and behave as if they were OS X windows. So really all you have are some OS X windows that happen to be running X programs. It's really not cluttered at all. In general, Mac users like the unclutteredness of their OS and thus shareware authors try to keep it that way. On windows, on the other hand, shit is already fucked up so nobody tries to fix it.
Aah, so true, so true. But the reason for this is music videos. MTV (unfortunately) defines much of American teen culture, so Britney waving her cooch into the camera sells records. But I agree, I'd rather have Britney (and the like) in my bed than in my CD player.
CDs fall under the category of "impulse buys." You see a CD you want, you buy it. Except that's not really how it works anymore. Record companies have effectively cut out the impulse market by pricing them so high. Ten $7 impulse purchases over a period of a month seem like a lot less to the pocketbook than two $20 impulse purchases. Shopping psychology figures heavily into things like this, and $10 is sort of a magic price point at which people will take a risk on something. If they don't like the CD, who gives a fuck, it was $8, but at $16, a CD becomes almost an investment.
Anyway, the point is that overall sales actually would likely double at that price point. A lot of my (non techie) friends pirate CDs because they're poor college students (note: a main target demographic of record companies) and aren't willing to spend part of their limited income on a grossly overpriced CD.
But you are right on one point.. this will never happen. No matter what the possible rewards, it's way too great a risk for the record companies to take. If it works, they're just moving more product and not making TOO much more money. If it fails, the industry goes under. More than likely something like this will happen over time, but it won't be overnight and consumers probably won't notice. Anyway, now that this post says many things and nothing at all, I'll stop.:)
So the RIAA is stupid. All that happens now is people just borrown their friends copy and burn a bit copy (and yes, this usually will work even with those stupid copy-protected CDs) and listen to them. That was always the main source of piracy anyway. Besides, IRC always has been a better means of getting whole albums anyway. Chan ops will nix bots serving bad files.
The entire idea of this contest is flawed. Like the article said, securing a box is trivial. Apply the newest patches and set up a simple firewall, bingo. But if everyone knew what was going to be open ahead of time, it'd just be a race to see who could run their exploit scripts first.
Truth is, hacking in general is not rocket science. Anyone can do it. Securing a box is not hard, however the reason so many machines get hacked is ignorance and/or apathy to the situation. Hell, the hardest part about hacking is finding a box with holes to exploit. If you already know the box has holes, you can run a script to find them. I went to the first Linux top gun and it was a total washout as well. This one sounds a bit more organized (at the first one, half the attendees were bums there for pizza) but the entire idea of this contest just sounds stupid. Anyone can be a l33t h4x0r, it takes intelligence not to want to.
This sounds right. I would use SMS a lot more if it were reasonably reliable. This probably has something to do with tower density in the US being a lot lower than the rest of the world (mostly because there's a heck of a lot more area to cover.) As it is, if I can't send an SMS message knowing it's going to go through, it's not worth using.
Actually, no they wouldn't. Why would a company sink millions (or billions) into R&D if they didn't have exclusive rights to sell it (and thus make their money back) If IBM blows $10 million developing some new fab process, and everyone on the market has it 3 months later and IBM hasn't made a dime off it, there's little incentive to improve things. Everyone else will just wait for someone else to do it.
Patents are reward for innovation, and generally a good idea. It's just that our current patent system is awful. The idea is good, but the implementation is horrible and antiquated.
Aah, but the PowerPCs in these devices are not made by Motorola. The embedded PowerPC (known as Gecko) is made by IBM. Essentially, there are two branches of the PowerPC, Motorola's and IBM's. IBM's are generally considered to be better, though Motorola's are cheaper and Mot is also more willing to play the desktop game.
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If Congress was going to fund a new shuttle fleet, I doubt they'd use the existing design. It'd probably be a ground-up redesign, as we know a lot more now than we did 30 years ago when the shuttles were originally designed. Still, considering what they do, the shuttles have a remarkably low failure rate. I've heard landing the shuttle is like trying to land an engineless flying brick blind.
That said, the space program is too important to the nation's image to abandon. Building a new fleet of space vehicles will take at least 5, probably closer to 10 years. We've spent too much money on the ISS to abandon it.
Yeah, except ebay is really good about finding and shutting down illegal auctions. Ever tried selling pirated software (or even grey area software, like student copies) on ebay? Your auction will be down within a few hours.
Actually there are a bunch of rather large pieces throughout northeast Texas. Apparently most of them are pieces of the engines, some of them several meters wide. The debris field is pretty large (seeing as it was at about 200,000 ft when it broke up) so we'll probably be finding pieces of this thing for months. Northeast Texas isn't the most populated place out there; there's a lot of small towns but not much of anything else there.
I thought that the neutron bomb was never ACTUALLY developed; only theorized. IIRC, the military never actually built one because they weren't really possible until near the end of the cold war, when nuclear ("nucular") dearmament was a popular idea. But who knows, there could be a secret stockpile of these things laying around somewhere, though a large hydrogen bomb is probably just as effective 99% of the time.
I rather enjoyed the virtual boy. Granted, I paid $30 for the system and all 12 games (new, I might add) but there were still a few good games.. Teleroboxer and Red Alarm come to mind.. Mario Tennis was also kinda fun. But, in the end, it wasn't worth $130 or whatever Nintendo charged for it. I would never have touch the thing if it hadn't been on super-clearance.
Force quitting XDarwin doesn't work? You should be able to kill -9 the processes accessing it and it'll die gracefully (if not, force quit it.) True, it's not terribly graceful, but it can only get better.
This is what I actually meant. :) IIRC X11 was working on Darwin around the time commercial OS X 10.0 was released. Soon thereafter, the rootless server came out, and soon after that, OroborOSX (which is, IMO, the killer app for X11 on OS X.) The only problem is that X11 on OS X is painfully slow (though I am running it on a G3.) Needless to say, the point remains the same: X11 on OS X is very real, very practical, and very usable.
X has been available on OS X for about a year. With XDarwin and OroborOSX it's about as perfectly integrated as it can get. Most X programs will compile just fine (and the ones that don't more often than not the problem is with the configure scripts.. rewrite the makefile and it works) I use gvim as my text editor and other X programs with relative frequency. OS X really is the best of both worlds IMO.
I don't think anyone claims OpenBSD is not an innovator. But it really isn't that hard to secure a *nix box from most security breaches. The biggest part is keeping current on patches and staying away from software such as BIND and sendmail. I can still exploit root on an OpenBSD machine with a crappy CGI. If you need to hack the data on a machine, there are low level exploits (though if you have data someone would want to hack, you should be encrypting your filesystems.)
:)
I do admire OpenBSD's approach to software development; it can be called responsible if nothing else. It's just that for volunteers who basically code other *nix OSes, code auditing is not nearly as much fun as porting your OS to a Nintendo.
I should hope OpenBSD is the most secure OS out there. That is the main goal of the project. It's definately not the fastest or most feature-rich OS out there. But, that's what they do, and if you need ironclad security, OpenBSD is the way to go.
I'm surprised there aren't more pirate radio stations than there are. I'm personally tempted to start one myself, but I live in an apartment (nowhere to place a modest transmitter) and don't have the knowledge of radio equipment. Christ, there are enough bands out there without record contracts that would be more than happy to let such a station play their shit for free.
Just a note about Radiohead, they were becoming quite the pop-radio darlings for about 3 albums before they said "fuck everyone" with Kid A. Radiohead is actually one of the most popular bands out there (try getting concert tickets when they come to America,) but their newer songs don't play well on the radio. My theory is that they made enough money with OK Computer (4 million copies, Pablo Honey and The Bends were million sellers too) that they just did whatever they wanted. So basically, they did a bunch of radio-frendly stuff (Pablo Honey was a straight-up radio rock album) then some weird stuff.
So this is assuming that the only reason people leave college is because they failed out. I don't have solid numbers, but a lot of people drop out because of reasons like money, marriage, having kids, good job offer, military service, etc. Also, people transfer schools a lot; this is especially true if your alma mater was not a "top tier" school.
The mechanic doesn't own a fancy car because he knows how often said fancy car will break down. So he buys a Honda or Toyota and doesn't touch the damn thing (other than sched. maintenance) for 5 years.
Actually, less priveleged countries (I assume you're talking about dirt poor countries, but anyway) usually have enormous militaries because they've been fighting for so long. They spend ALL their money on the military and as such, have none to spend on anything else. Our freedom is not free, but we don't need to go around picking fights. We were considering not letting the weapons inspectors finish their jobs so we could attack.
You are right though, a lack of understanding and complacency probably will kill this country, but it will not be through military means.
Yeah, cept first year female college students usually try to rebel against their parents by dating 29 year old slackers. That's why first year males should hunt for older women.
With oroborosx, X windows are integrated into aqua and behave as if they were OS X windows. So really all you have are some OS X windows that happen to be running X programs. It's really not cluttered at all. In general, Mac users like the unclutteredness of their OS and thus shareware authors try to keep it that way. On windows, on the other hand, shit is already fucked up so nobody tries to fix it.
Ehh, not really. They claim it to be a violation of their copyright. IANAL but I really don't think they can violate their own copyright :)
Then you grew up and alas, your virginity is still in mint factory condition :(
Aah, so true, so true. But the reason for this is music videos. MTV (unfortunately) defines much of American teen culture, so Britney waving her cooch into the camera sells records. But I agree, I'd rather have Britney (and the like) in my bed than in my CD player.
CDs fall under the category of "impulse buys." You see a CD you want, you buy it. Except that's not really how it works anymore. Record companies have effectively cut out the impulse market by pricing them so high. Ten $7 impulse purchases over a period of a month seem like a lot less to the pocketbook than two $20 impulse purchases. Shopping psychology figures heavily into things like this, and $10 is sort of a magic price point at which people will take a risk on something. If they don't like the CD, who gives a fuck, it was $8, but at $16, a CD becomes almost an investment.
:)
Anyway, the point is that overall sales actually would likely double at that price point. A lot of my (non techie) friends pirate CDs because they're poor college students (note: a main target demographic of record companies) and aren't willing to spend part of their limited income on a grossly overpriced CD.
But you are right on one point.. this will never happen. No matter what the possible rewards, it's way too great a risk for the record companies to take. If it works, they're just moving more product and not making TOO much more money. If it fails, the industry goes under. More than likely something like this will happen over time, but it won't be overnight and consumers probably won't notice. Anyway, now that this post says many things and nothing at all, I'll stop.
So the RIAA is stupid. All that happens now is people just borrown their friends copy and burn a bit copy (and yes, this usually will work even with those stupid copy-protected CDs) and listen to them. That was always the main source of piracy anyway. Besides, IRC always has been a better means of getting whole albums anyway. Chan ops will nix bots serving bad files.
The entire idea of this contest is flawed. Like the article said, securing a box is trivial. Apply the newest patches and set up a simple firewall, bingo. But if everyone knew what was going to be open ahead of time, it'd just be a race to see who could run their exploit scripts first.
Truth is, hacking in general is not rocket science. Anyone can do it. Securing a box is not hard, however the reason so many machines get hacked is ignorance and/or apathy to the situation. Hell, the hardest part about hacking is finding a box with holes to exploit. If you already know the box has holes, you can run a script to find them. I went to the first Linux top gun and it was a total washout as well. This one sounds a bit more organized (at the first one, half the attendees were bums there for pizza) but the entire idea of this contest just sounds stupid. Anyone can be a l33t h4x0r, it takes intelligence not to want to.
This sounds right. I would use SMS a lot more if it were reasonably reliable. This probably has something to do with tower density in the US being a lot lower than the rest of the world (mostly because there's a heck of a lot more area to cover.) As it is, if I can't send an SMS message knowing it's going to go through, it's not worth using.
Actually, no they wouldn't. Why would a company sink millions (or billions) into R&D if they didn't have exclusive rights to sell it (and thus make their money back) If IBM blows $10 million developing some new fab process, and everyone on the market has it 3 months later and IBM hasn't made a dime off it, there's little incentive to improve things. Everyone else will just wait for someone else to do it.
Patents are reward for innovation, and generally a good idea. It's just that our current patent system is awful. The idea is good, but the implementation is horrible and antiquated.
Aah, but the PowerPCs in these devices are not made by Motorola. The embedded PowerPC (known as Gecko) is made by IBM. Essentially, there are two branches of the PowerPC, Motorola's and IBM's. IBM's are generally considered to be better, though Motorola's are cheaper and Mot is also more willing to play the desktop game.