Right now 1824 but I've never made a real effort to become good or to only play when I'm in top shape to max my rating, I think well but I got no patience for reading up on openings, but I have beat both players and computers over 2000, particularly if they play gambits. I think my best was a draw against Chessmaster on a 2250 rating.
At least if you're doing C++/Qt, then nothing beats Qt Creator... I had hope for KDevelop 4 for a while, but it seems to take forever and meanwhile Qt Creator has fixed most of the things I missed. I haven't done any really big scale development but at least for cranking out smaller tools it's fast and easy with graphic drag & drop ui designer, autocompletion and such that I expect and Qt is near a complete platform with IO, network, databases, xml, whatever. I generally don't have any other deps except the C++ standard, and not much of those either. I pretty much suck at debugging though so can't tell you much about that, I try to put in as many error and sanity checks as I can and qDebug() (the fancier versions of printf() ) my way out of trouble.
I seem to remember a back door injection into the Linux codebase a few years back. But that was accomplished not by a contributor (newbie or no) but by exploiting a vulnerability in the hierarchical code repository system, which they changes afterward.
I remember that too, but then it's a different ballgame because whatever back door code is added has gone through no reviews, it's exactly the same as you could do with a closed source download server. It's probably easier with closed source in fact since they're often not signed, while Linux packages in general are so compromising a mirror won't help. Of course it won't help you if you are tricked into adding bad repositories, but that's a different threat.
...then you can really get chewed out by Linus because you should have known better. It's not just from the outside it's a tough crowd all the way, but you also have to remember these people write the most key component of any good server. There are many places where having a developer, even if he's not the world's greatest is better than having none at all. The kernel isn't one of those places, if you can't take the heat then get out of the fire.
Think of it more like chess, the rules are simple but the most effective implementation hard. Hell, I know a couple geeks who built their own OS, but I think the scheduling was just a round robin. Well a lot of bright people have thought quite a lot about it, and the kernel performs to some level. It's like a grandmaster chess player, he can't learn anything from a player ranked below 2000, it'll only be rehashing the same simple ideas and walking into the same traps that people have walked into before.
Of course there's also the asshats that think that just because they know how to write an operating core, they're god's gift to mankind. But, I've run into those in quite a few other areas too...
If it were more inclusive rather than exclusive, there would be MUCH risk in stability and security as I firmly believe that there would be attempts at installing exploitable code within the kernel. These types of problems have already occurred in F/OSS projects all over and we know that there are parties out there who are willing to to to GREAT lengths to accomplish their goals.
Please cite some examples of people exposed for becoming open source developers to install clever backdoors, since it's happening "all over". I smell FUD and imagine there's lot more hidden back doors in closed source projects, thank you. If someone's willing to go to great lengths, then it's not exactly a big obstacle to become a Microsoft (or whatever) employee.
If you literally sit in that chair for 7 hours, no meetings, no lunch break, no coffee breaks (with or without coffee), no toilet breaks then no it's not healthy. That's like those really long flights they also worry about, except every day. Just get up once every two hours minimum, take a minute to walk to the water cooler and back. It's not for the exercise, but it is good for the body anyway.
Why? I mean you have some competitions like 100m dash where you only measure one thing, but take a sport like soccer. You want 11 different people with different proficiency at dribbling, passing, scoring, tackling, interception and goalkeeping based on speed, strength and skill. Of course you won't find any poorly trained people, nor will you find teams that are all attack or all defense, but they don't end up as opposite blueprints in one min-maxed combination either. The nerfing and new gear is quite like what happens as some people gain skills, some age and lose skills, some retire, some rookies come in and you have to replan to get the most out of your team. Or for that matter, compare it to a troop of marines if you will. It's actually way more "real life" than playing a game that never changes.
Which is why I find this a strange project, it's like trying to develop a Linux exclusive game instead of a crossplatform one to share costs. The specs look extremely similar to existing nettops/netbooks, so why can't they? Scour the market for models, find one that has only Linux-compatible hardware already and ask the OEM "Hey, we would like to buy model XYZ from you in bulk, put Linux on them and sell and support that since you don't. We would like to be legally in the clear about it, could we come to a rebranding agreement or similar with your legal department?"
That sounds like the easiest and most competitive way, even if it comes on top of the bulk cost. Sure, everyone would know that it's someone else's PC with a new sticker but that could actually be positive. With that, they should be able to do installation + support + donation to KDE for less. Because I don't really mind supporting that, but here it seems you're more supporting a smalltime build-computer-by-parts project which happens to use Linux.
As a more slashdot friendlier terms, do you really care how a pizza place makes your pizza? No. You only care about how good it tastes when you eat it.
But you seem to have missed the biggest reason why you try to run IT as a business in the first place, and that's to make the business side come up with something resembling specifications or business needs or some sort of picture on where they'll be going with this. I've been working for some time now with a public service who has split off their IT services and trying to professionalize their relationship, but I see plenty signs of how it has been.
To use a baker's analogy, the service side (equivalent of a business side) would start projects that weren't really evaluated or even estimated and planned, they were just started and ran because they were needed to deliver some service. And it was a bit like starting a baker off on making dough, but they haven't decided yet if they want a pizza, a bread or a pastry, or for how many exactly. But they're pretty sure it'll need dough. And ultimately it turns out half of it was just to throw out and will never be used for anything useful.
Don't get me wrong, if IT manages to be involved in the business as a strategic partner and not just service delivery that's great. But my impressions, and I have worked at quite a few allegedly competent private companies too, that it's difficult enough to make the business side agree on what they want internally. And that's also one of the big points about making it a customer/vendor-relationship, you can't have 50 ways of going to the IT department for something. There has to be a process, a pipeline where they as a customer agree with themselves before ordering with IT.
I won't name names, but I've met big companies where it turns out different departments were trying to do the same thing using different software for no other reason than that they didn't know about each other's projects. That ordering process is also a point of visibility, what are we really doing and does this really make sense to do this combination of things? Particularly if you're trying to set some enterprise-wide standards, you're bound to crash with some other project that might be smart in itself, but would make you dependent on something you're replacing.
Sure, you can do all this without that strict division, there's nothing that explicitly requires it. But those that try, struggle....
Just because Linux always survives doesn't mean that everything is sustainable. Clearly Google not renewing their agreement would be a huge setback for Firefox, likewise if Nokia decided to lay off everyone developing Qt which is the basis of KDE, Sun pulling out of OpenOffice and so on. For all of you remembering the dotcom days, lots of money was poured into open source then as well and went bust just like the rest of the economy. Personally I felt quality went considerably down when Red Hat stopped supporting Red Hat Linux and went enterprise only, for example. I also remember why I switched away from Debian and over to a "suger daddy" funded distro.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's going in the right direction. But I do see that without profitable companies it'll be getting there much slower, and profits can disappear as the market wills it.
So what? The point is that if tons of people carry encrypted business laptops over the border, there's no particular reason to check or flag or beat the password out of you with a wrench. There's too much presumption here that a government being nasty wouldn't target you just for using encryption and staying off the radar, and steganography also involves having lots of random data that seems very unrandom to have. The only good hiding place is to blend in with the masses, which is a lot easier if the masses use encryption too.
Try applying that to say, driving across the border where you're no more a hazard than anywhere else on the road. Right or wrong, countries have asserted the right to search anyone and anything on the border before letting them into the country.
Used to be same in Unreal Tournament, I have a friend who was MEAN using the sniper rifle, going for headshots every time. He could get himself vote-kicked off any server in less than five minutes, two on the touchy ones. So he was already being misidentified as an aimbot, and once the instant-aimbots were banned a new generation turned up who were more like an extremely fast and accurate player with luck. There's no real way to win that battle.
It tells us that the actual game as less "value" than the way it is marketed.
And is it really without results that go beyond the mere technical qualities of the game? Many games are fun because you do them with your friends or classmates or workmates. So why don't they end up playing some other FPS or whatever? Because you sell them on the idea that MW2 is the game to play.
Pound that marketing message into people's heads and eventually you will get it bouncing off each other "How about MW2?" "Yeah, heard about that - sounds cool" "Did you see that trailer?" "I've preordered already" and suddenly they all have a copy and then it really doesn't matter to you that there's some other FPS out there that is just as techincally good. You buy MW2 because that's what the people you know play, then the people you know buy MW2 for the same reason and the ball keeps rolling.
Think of it more like social media, what's the value of facebook or youtube or whatever? I can set up the same kind of site, but it's nearly worthless by itself. Games stand more on their own, but ignoring the social aspect and the network effects would be most foolish.
If Modern Warfare 2 had been another Daikatana, no amount of hype would have saved it. Everybody would like to bitch about something, for example right now I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins. Ok, so there's a dude in camp hawking DLC who should have had a dollar sign instead of a quest sign over him, but it's on an inconvienience level less than pretty much any bug and I've found none of those. So the angle isn't freeform but I never felt it very limiting. I seem to remember a time when bugs were like really bad and could make your game unplayable or crash outright or whatever. These days I hardly ever find anything that'd go past 3 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Because it's a turing-complete programming language with font management and a rendering engine, that was ditched on almost all low and mid-level printers because it added cost. I'm talking about a mode where you pipe it all to Ghostscript on the computer and pipe the output as a series of raw pixels/dots right to the printer, no font management, no rendering, no instruction language beyond setting up the print area and most importantly, something that could hopefully be done on a 49$ printer without adding cost.
I work with a vendor that implemented a nice secure upload facility for their support services. I'm sure it's secure, but I haven't been able to use it at a single customer yet because of firewalls and plugin blockers and who knows what else. So instead of using the plain HTTP which they so kindly removed, I now email everything to them instead. Luckily they got an intelligent script that'll parse mail and file it to my case.
Considering the rumor is it'll pull 280W, almost as much as the 5970, my guess would be no. I settled for the 5850 though, plenty oomph for my gaming needs.
Actually, I hope the kernel will contain less. Let's take USB for example, do we really need all sorts of various connectors? Or would we rather just use USB, teach the kernel to do low level read/write to USB devices and then do keyboards and mice and printers and scanners and digicams and webcams and external hdds and whatnot over USB in userspace? In fact, much the same applies to drivers in general, there's no reason why so many printers are paperweights under Linux. Can't there at least be one universal idiot mode where we feed it uncompressed raster data and it prints? Seriously.
Kernels are best at being mediators, be it of CPU time, GPU time, IO bandwidth, network bandwidth, whatever. Something offers resources, something consumes resources and the OS is that gray glue in the middle. Whatever killer feature you want, you probably don't want it in the kernel. You want to write a desktop environment or an application or something, and the kernel will make sure it runs gracefully together with everything else. There's a quite a few more bits to the kernel, but they're just adoptees brought into the kernel for performance reasons.
|. Switch to nv driver 2. Upgrade kernel 3. Switch to nvidia driver
Not that I've ever done that, I use a distro that packages the kernel and binary driver for me. Maybe if you want a userfriendly solution you should get one instead of trying to do everything manually, then complain about having to do everything manually?
Nouveau will be much closer to nv than nvidia in pretty much everything. They got no specs, and even with specs writing a good open source 3D driver is tough, as AMD has shown us. So expect no 3D acceleration, no video acceleration, no nothing. The only thing you get is 2D modesetting in the kernel instead of xorg, big whoop. If you don't use KMS for anything else, the only thing it'll do it make your boot a little prettier.
And that something is producing 65 million units, and selling only a slight profit because it also sells game licenses, accessories and so on. I don't recall ever standing on a balance board at any doctor or hospital I've been to, and lots of people can probably use that one board, so I'm guessing the market is tiny.
P.S. It's not that solid. My pad has gotten to the point where the standing on one foot exercises will make the board black out. I use it as a weight with tracking these days, I was getting tired of the same old things anyway and it was well worth the money as long as it lasted.
Unfortunately, none of the astronauts would have survived the trip. Once you add in food, water, oxygen, radiation shielding, pressure suits, a landing mechanism that wouldn't kill them and so on and the not so minor rocket and fuel required to get them back off the planet and back home, then yeah. It's a bit like saying "yeah, we need to flip that switch, it's in the middle of a nuclear reactor but a human could do it much faster." Minus the hostil environment that'd kill them, of course.
I suspect you can build a set that looks like the inside of the shuttle for a lot less than the shuttle itself. And the exterior shots I figure you can do with archive footage for flying and bluescreen for boarding/leaving. Hell, it might even be cheaper with CGI, and it sounds like your movies will have plenty of it unless you want to take it into space again.
Reading prose is different from reading code. I'd think that whatever you gain wouldn't be enough to make up for the loss from lack of vertical alignment.
As long as space is a fixed width, then you should still have verical alignment... Imagine:
if ( foo ) {
bar(); } else {
otherbar(); }
vs
if ( foo ) {
bar(); } else {
otherbar(); }
In fact, I think fixed space characters can put unproductive attention to variable name lenghts over content to create "nicer" looking code.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now 1824 but I've never made a real effort to become good or to only play when I'm in top shape to max my rating, I think well but I got no patience for reading up on openings, but I have beat both players and computers over 2000, particularly if they play gambits. I think my best was a draw against Chessmaster on a 2250 rating.
At least if you're doing C++/Qt, then nothing beats Qt Creator... I had hope for KDevelop 4 for a while, but it seems to take forever and meanwhile Qt Creator has fixed most of the things I missed. I haven't done any really big scale development but at least for cranking out smaller tools it's fast and easy with graphic drag & drop ui designer, autocompletion and such that I expect and Qt is near a complete platform with IO, network, databases, xml, whatever. I generally don't have any other deps except the C++ standard, and not much of those either. I pretty much suck at debugging though so can't tell you much about that, I try to put in as many error and sanity checks as I can and qDebug() (the fancier versions of printf() ) my way out of trouble.
I seem to remember a back door injection into the Linux codebase a few years back. But that was accomplished not by a contributor (newbie or no) but by exploiting a vulnerability in the hierarchical code repository system, which they changes afterward.
I remember that too, but then it's a different ballgame because whatever back door code is added has gone through no reviews, it's exactly the same as you could do with a closed source download server. It's probably easier with closed source in fact since they're often not signed, while Linux packages in general are so compromising a mirror won't help. Of course it won't help you if you are tricked into adding bad repositories, but that's a different threat.
...then you can really get chewed out by Linus because you should have known better. It's not just from the outside it's a tough crowd all the way, but you also have to remember these people write the most key component of any good server. There are many places where having a developer, even if he's not the world's greatest is better than having none at all. The kernel isn't one of those places, if you can't take the heat then get out of the fire.
Think of it more like chess, the rules are simple but the most effective implementation hard. Hell, I know a couple geeks who built their own OS, but I think the scheduling was just a round robin. Well a lot of bright people have thought quite a lot about it, and the kernel performs to some level. It's like a grandmaster chess player, he can't learn anything from a player ranked below 2000, it'll only be rehashing the same simple ideas and walking into the same traps that people have walked into before.
Of course there's also the asshats that think that just because they know how to write an operating core, they're god's gift to mankind. But, I've run into those in quite a few other areas too...
If it were more inclusive rather than exclusive, there would be MUCH risk in stability and security as I firmly believe that there would be attempts at installing exploitable code within the kernel. These types of problems have already occurred in F/OSS projects all over and we know that there are parties out there who are willing to to to GREAT lengths to accomplish their goals.
Please cite some examples of people exposed for becoming open source developers to install clever backdoors, since it's happening "all over". I smell FUD and imagine there's lot more hidden back doors in closed source projects, thank you. If someone's willing to go to great lengths, then it's not exactly a big obstacle to become a Microsoft (or whatever) employee.
If you literally sit in that chair for 7 hours, no meetings, no lunch break, no coffee breaks (with or without coffee), no toilet breaks then no it's not healthy. That's like those really long flights they also worry about, except every day. Just get up once every two hours minimum, take a minute to walk to the water cooler and back. It's not for the exercise, but it is good for the body anyway.
Why? I mean you have some competitions like 100m dash where you only measure one thing, but take a sport like soccer. You want 11 different people with different proficiency at dribbling, passing, scoring, tackling, interception and goalkeeping based on speed, strength and skill. Of course you won't find any poorly trained people, nor will you find teams that are all attack or all defense, but they don't end up as opposite blueprints in one min-maxed combination either. The nerfing and new gear is quite like what happens as some people gain skills, some age and lose skills, some retire, some rookies come in and you have to replan to get the most out of your team. Or for that matter, compare it to a troop of marines if you will. It's actually way more "real life" than playing a game that never changes.
Which is why I find this a strange project, it's like trying to develop a Linux exclusive game instead of a crossplatform one to share costs. The specs look extremely similar to existing nettops/netbooks, so why can't they? Scour the market for models, find one that has only Linux-compatible hardware already and ask the OEM "Hey, we would like to buy model XYZ from you in bulk, put Linux on them and sell and support that since you don't. We would like to be legally in the clear about it, could we come to a rebranding agreement or similar with your legal department?"
That sounds like the easiest and most competitive way, even if it comes on top of the bulk cost. Sure, everyone would know that it's someone else's PC with a new sticker but that could actually be positive. With that, they should be able to do installation + support + donation to KDE for less. Because I don't really mind supporting that, but here it seems you're more supporting a smalltime build-computer-by-parts project which happens to use Linux.
As a more slashdot friendlier terms, do you really care how a pizza place makes your pizza? No. You only care about how good it tastes when you eat it.
But you seem to have missed the biggest reason why you try to run IT as a business in the first place, and that's to make the business side come up with something resembling specifications or business needs or some sort of picture on where they'll be going with this. I've been working for some time now with a public service who has split off their IT services and trying to professionalize their relationship, but I see plenty signs of how it has been.
To use a baker's analogy, the service side (equivalent of a business side) would start projects that weren't really evaluated or even estimated and planned, they were just started and ran because they were needed to deliver some service. And it was a bit like starting a baker off on making dough, but they haven't decided yet if they want a pizza, a bread or a pastry, or for how many exactly. But they're pretty sure it'll need dough. And ultimately it turns out half of it was just to throw out and will never be used for anything useful.
Don't get me wrong, if IT manages to be involved in the business as a strategic partner and not just service delivery that's great. But my impressions, and I have worked at quite a few allegedly competent private companies too, that it's difficult enough to make the business side agree on what they want internally. And that's also one of the big points about making it a customer/vendor-relationship, you can't have 50 ways of going to the IT department for something. There has to be a process, a pipeline where they as a customer agree with themselves before ordering with IT.
I won't name names, but I've met big companies where it turns out different departments were trying to do the same thing using different software for no other reason than that they didn't know about each other's projects. That ordering process is also a point of visibility, what are we really doing and does this really make sense to do this combination of things? Particularly if you're trying to set some enterprise-wide standards, you're bound to crash with some other project that might be smart in itself, but would make you dependent on something you're replacing.
Sure, you can do all this without that strict division, there's nothing that explicitly requires it. But those that try, struggle....
Just because Linux always survives doesn't mean that everything is sustainable. Clearly Google not renewing their agreement would be a huge setback for Firefox, likewise if Nokia decided to lay off everyone developing Qt which is the basis of KDE, Sun pulling out of OpenOffice and so on. For all of you remembering the dotcom days, lots of money was poured into open source then as well and went bust just like the rest of the economy. Personally I felt quality went considerably down when Red Hat stopped supporting Red Hat Linux and went enterprise only, for example. I also remember why I switched away from Debian and over to a "suger daddy" funded distro.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's going in the right direction. But I do see that without profitable companies it'll be getting there much slower, and profits can disappear as the market wills it.
So what? The point is that if tons of people carry encrypted business laptops over the border, there's no particular reason to check or flag or beat the password out of you with a wrench. There's too much presumption here that a government being nasty wouldn't target you just for using encryption and staying off the radar, and steganography also involves having lots of random data that seems very unrandom to have. The only good hiding place is to blend in with the masses, which is a lot easier if the masses use encryption too.
Try applying that to say, driving across the border where you're no more a hazard than anywhere else on the road. Right or wrong, countries have asserted the right to search anyone and anything on the border before letting them into the country.
Used to be same in Unreal Tournament, I have a friend who was MEAN using the sniper rifle, going for headshots every time. He could get himself vote-kicked off any server in less than five minutes, two on the touchy ones. So he was already being misidentified as an aimbot, and once the instant-aimbots were banned a new generation turned up who were more like an extremely fast and accurate player with luck. There's no real way to win that battle.
It tells us that the actual game as less "value" than the way it is marketed.
And is it really without results that go beyond the mere technical qualities of the game? Many games are fun because you do them with your friends or classmates or workmates. So why don't they end up playing some other FPS or whatever? Because you sell them on the idea that MW2 is the game to play.
Pound that marketing message into people's heads and eventually you will get it bouncing off each other "How about MW2?" "Yeah, heard about that - sounds cool" "Did you see that trailer?" "I've preordered already" and suddenly they all have a copy and then it really doesn't matter to you that there's some other FPS out there that is just as techincally good. You buy MW2 because that's what the people you know play, then the people you know buy MW2 for the same reason and the ball keeps rolling.
Think of it more like social media, what's the value of facebook or youtube or whatever? I can set up the same kind of site, but it's nearly worthless by itself. Games stand more on their own, but ignoring the social aspect and the network effects would be most foolish.
If Modern Warfare 2 had been another Daikatana, no amount of hype would have saved it. Everybody would like to bitch about something, for example right now I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins. Ok, so there's a dude in camp hawking DLC who should have had a dollar sign instead of a quest sign over him, but it's on an inconvienience level less than pretty much any bug and I've found none of those. So the angle isn't freeform but I never felt it very limiting. I seem to remember a time when bugs were like really bad and could make your game unplayable or crash outright or whatever. These days I hardly ever find anything that'd go past 3 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Because it's a turing-complete programming language with font management and a rendering engine, that was ditched on almost all low and mid-level printers because it added cost. I'm talking about a mode where you pipe it all to Ghostscript on the computer and pipe the output as a series of raw pixels/dots right to the printer, no font management, no rendering, no instruction language beyond setting up the print area and most importantly, something that could hopefully be done on a 49$ printer without adding cost.
I work with a vendor that implemented a nice secure upload facility for their support services. I'm sure it's secure, but I haven't been able to use it at a single customer yet because of firewalls and plugin blockers and who knows what else. So instead of using the plain HTTP which they so kindly removed, I now email everything to them instead. Luckily they got an intelligent script that'll parse mail and file it to my case.
Can't there at least be one universal idiot mode where we feed it uncompressed raster data and it prints? Seriously.
It already exists, and it's called "postscript".
And you can also use Photoshop CS4 to crop screenshots, if "overkill" is not in your vocabulary.
Considering the rumor is it'll pull 280W, almost as much as the 5970, my guess would be no. I settled for the 5850 though, plenty oomph for my gaming needs.
Actually, I hope the kernel will contain less. Let's take USB for example, do we really need all sorts of various connectors? Or would we rather just use USB, teach the kernel to do low level read/write to USB devices and then do keyboards and mice and printers and scanners and digicams and webcams and external hdds and whatnot over USB in userspace? In fact, much the same applies to drivers in general, there's no reason why so many printers are paperweights under Linux. Can't there at least be one universal idiot mode where we feed it uncompressed raster data and it prints? Seriously.
Kernels are best at being mediators, be it of CPU time, GPU time, IO bandwidth, network bandwidth, whatever. Something offers resources, something consumes resources and the OS is that gray glue in the middle. Whatever killer feature you want, you probably don't want it in the kernel. You want to write a desktop environment or an application or something, and the kernel will make sure it runs gracefully together with everything else. There's a quite a few more bits to the kernel, but they're just adoptees brought into the kernel for performance reasons.
|. Switch to nv driver
2. Upgrade kernel
3. Switch to nvidia driver
Not that I've ever done that, I use a distro that packages the kernel and binary driver for me. Maybe if you want a userfriendly solution you should get one instead of trying to do everything manually, then complain about having to do everything manually?
Nouveau will be much closer to nv than nvidia in pretty much everything. They got no specs, and even with specs writing a good open source 3D driver is tough, as AMD has shown us. So expect no 3D acceleration, no video acceleration, no nothing. The only thing you get is 2D modesetting in the kernel instead of xorg, big whoop. If you don't use KMS for anything else, the only thing it'll do it make your boot a little prettier.
And that something is producing 65 million units, and selling only a slight profit because it also sells game licenses, accessories and so on. I don't recall ever standing on a balance board at any doctor or hospital I've been to, and lots of people can probably use that one board, so I'm guessing the market is tiny.
P.S. It's not that solid. My pad has gotten to the point where the standing on one foot exercises will make the board black out. I use it as a weight with tracking these days, I was getting tired of the same old things anyway and it was well worth the money as long as it lasted.
Unfortunately, none of the astronauts would have survived the trip. Once you add in food, water, oxygen, radiation shielding, pressure suits, a landing mechanism that wouldn't kill them and so on and the not so minor rocket and fuel required to get them back off the planet and back home, then yeah. It's a bit like saying "yeah, we need to flip that switch, it's in the middle of a nuclear reactor but a human could do it much faster." Minus the hostil environment that'd kill them, of course.
I suspect you can build a set that looks like the inside of the shuttle for a lot less than the shuttle itself. And the exterior shots I figure you can do with archive footage for flying and bluescreen for boarding/leaving. Hell, it might even be cheaper with CGI, and it sounds like your movies will have plenty of it unless you want to take it into space again.
Reading prose is different from reading code. I'd think that whatever you gain wouldn't be enough to make up for the loss from lack of vertical alignment.
As long as space is a fixed width, then you should still have verical alignment... Imagine:
if ( foo ) {
bar();
} else {
otherbar();
}
vs
In fact, I think fixed space characters can put unproductive attention to variable name lenghts over content to create "nicer" looking code.