One is that there are many positive expectation video poker games out there. The casino's know about them, it's not like it's a secret. But you will only find a positive-expectation game ont the cheap machines (nickel, maybe quarter). The trick is that working a machine like that, playing perfectly, and very quickly, you can only make in the vicinity of minimumm wage. Casino's seem to think that it's worth paying you so that people can see someone winning.
Two is that, expecting to win may be silly, but expecting to have a reasonable chance of winning isn't really that silly. Casino games may be negative expectation, but the variances are so high that in the short term, a player has a fairly good chance of coming out ahead. It takes thousands of games to approach the house edge with any degree of precision. So an individual player may play 100 hands and have the outcome be fairly up in the air. But the casino plays millions of hands in that time, and can gbe damn sure it's going to win.
No it isn't, at least not under Fedora Core 2 Test 3. All the applications are set by default to ALSA. I had exactly the same problem as the gradparent (close xmms, and get a full minute of gaim sounds), and had to manually set all my programs to use ESD.
Highly directive and electronically steerable digital data transmission via solid-state semi conductor based plasma generators? Is that all? Heck, I've got, like, four or five solid-state semi conductor based plasma generators providing highly directive and electronically steerable digital data transmission in my car. Highly directive and electronically steerable digital data transmission via solid-state semi conductor based plasma generators aren't that big of a deal.
From the summary: "AOL's e-mail service, long accessible only via AOL's proprietary, monolithic app." However, AOL's mail has been avilable form the web for a long time (albeit using a Java app, as I recall.) http://webmail.aol.com
Most good radio DJs make an effort to kleep at least some continuity between songs. We try to keep a certain flow going. A good DJ will never play a hard rock song after a mopey indie song, for example. I rely on a good knowledge of the station library to make sure listening to the radio is not a jarring experience for the user, but is rather like a well done hours-long mixtape. Winamp does not have the ability to know which songs flow well into the other. (Perhaps they could, user aucoustic watermarking? Interesting...)
Sadly, this is giving away to (badly) set playlists and clear channel stations. But at the college radio station where I DJ, at least, I try to keep a flow going for the user.
Changing topic, for everyone complaining that albums no longer have any kind of flow and that the concept album is dead, you're listening to the wrong music. There is a huge indie rock movement in America (fueled largely, I believe, by the internet, and the ability for small record labels to attract listeners over the web), where the concept albums as a coherant piece of art is still alive, and concept albums are made routinely. Step out of your boundaries, do a little digging, and you'll see that good music is alive and well, it's just moved a bit more underground.
> Like take the Asus offerings. The A7NX's rocked, but the nforce eqivalent..
There's is no motherboard that I'm aware of called the A7NX. Asus does make the A7N8X, which is generally considered one of the better motherboards available, supports 3 gigs of ram, and is based on the NForce2 chipset.
The N in the product number reveals that it uses an NVidia chipset. If it was a Via board, it would have a V instead of the N.
(I personally own an A7N8X and love it. I haven't had much luck with Linux on it, but that's my failing, not the board's.)
> Then there's the people who can afford healthcare but choose not to. I know this is a minority of people without healthcare, but it is significant.
Very signifigant. The statistic I saw in Atlantic was something like 1/3 of uninsured people make more that $50,000 a year. So it is a minority, but it's uncomfortably close to a majority.
FUD. There's no reason that the Mozilla foundation can't simply explicitely allow these vendors to use their trademark, rather than threaten lawsuits. I do not disagree with Mozilla's tactics, but this is not really a trademark issue.
You're right, early prototypes of this product will be flawed. In fact, early prototypes of any new invention will undoubtably have flaws. Nothing new should be invented. Ever. Faced with the fact that nothing will be perfect the first try, we should never innovate or try anything new.
The rovers were extensively tested before launch. For example, NASA took about 100000 pictures with the test panoramic cameras under varying conditions to see how they would react.... This limitation of the filesystem was known about ahead of time. If you had read the article, you'd have known that.
From Article: "It was recognized just after [the June 2003] launch that there were some serious shortcomings in the code that had been put into the launch load of software." So they didn't realize that too many files would be a problem until after launch.
Also in the article "The data management team's calculations had not made any provision for leftover directories from a previous load still sitting in the flash file system."
So it's clear that their on-the-ground testing didn't catch the first bug, despite the rigorous testing you described. Which makes one wonder if they really did such rigorous testing. The grandparent is right.
They forgot to delete old files when updating the programs in the flash memory (which is mounted like a filesystem, or hard disk), and the OS was failing because it wanted to use that space.
It's not even that they forgot to delete old files. Then program they sent to the old files failed to upload correctly, and they ran out of space before they could retransmit the delete program.
What surprises me is that they don't have a 'twin' of the rover's computer system set up on earth. When commands are run on the rover, the same commands could be run on the computer system on earth. Then, if the rover's software, fails (as it did), the software on earth would (theoretically) fail in a similar way, and be MUCH easier to debug. Of course, the systems wouldn't be identical (without building an entire duplicate and expensive rover), and the data gatehred wouldn't be identical, but if the twin was carefully planned and fed dummy data that aproximately mirrored that data the rover was gathering. For example, the twin could be fed dummy pictures about as often as the rover took a real picture.
From the article "[The] transmission that uploaded the utility was a partial failure: Only one of the utility program's two parts was received successfully. The second part was not received, and so in accordance with the communications protocol it was scheduled for retransmission on sol 19." NASA could have simulated a half failed transfer on the twin copmuter on earth, and then watched carefully using traditional debugging tools to make sure the failed transmission didn't cause a software failure (which it did).
Again, from the article "The data management team's calculations had not made any provision for leftover directories from a previous load still sitting in the flash file system." However, if they had a twin computer system to watch, they would have seen that the failure occur on earth as it did in space. Debugging a system you can hook a serial debugger to is bound to much easier than debugging a system a million miles away.
+4 insightful? More like bold face lies. Try looking toward the bottom of http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.0-0261.html. GPL'd drivers for the Nforce2 chipset, including audio and ethernet. And it's not like it was hard to find. Just three clicks off of Nvidia's front page.
And for what it's worth, the Asus A7N8X-Deluxe is the best motherboard I've ever owned. And if you take a look at oneline reviews, you'll see I'm not the only one who thinks so.
Keep in mind that this is an insightful article. Even if it is plagarized, the plagarizer is getting anything for it (since he's AC), and the original author is at +5, so it's not like people won't know who he is, so you might as well leave the article at +5, so people can read it.
Slashdot Mirror
Two small nit-picks.
One is that there are many positive expectation video poker games out there. The casino's know about them, it's not like it's a secret. But you will only find a positive-expectation game ont the cheap machines (nickel, maybe quarter). The trick is that working a machine like that, playing perfectly, and very quickly, you can only make in the vicinity of minimumm wage. Casino's seem to think that it's worth paying you so that people can see someone winning.
Two is that, expecting to win may be silly, but expecting to have a reasonable chance of winning isn't really that silly. Casino games may be negative expectation, but the variances are so high that in the short term, a player has a fairly good chance of coming out ahead. It takes thousands of games to approach the house edge with any degree of precision. So an individual player may play 100 hands and have the outcome be fairly up in the air. But the casino plays millions of hands in that time, and can gbe damn sure it's going to win.
> Errr, but esound is the default.
No it isn't, at least not under Fedora Core 2 Test 3. All the applications are set by default to ALSA. I had exactly the same problem as the gradparent (close xmms, and get a full minute of gaim sounds), and had to manually set all my programs to use ESD.
Highly directive and electronically steerable digital data transmission via solid-state semi conductor based plasma generators? Is that all? Heck, I've got, like, four or five solid-state semi conductor based plasma generators providing highly directive and electronically steerable digital data transmission in my car. Highly directive and electronically steerable digital data transmission via solid-state semi conductor based plasma generators aren't that big of a deal.
"...it's too late! The ailiens are already here! See?! They left this mark on me! I must do their bidding...
</sanity>"
Looks to me like you actually closed your sanity tag well before the start of you post...
From the summary: "AOL's e-mail service, long accessible only via AOL's proprietary, monolithic app." However, AOL's mail has been avilable form the web for a long time (albeit using a Java app, as I recall.) http://webmail.aol.com
There's a rediculously large range, so it really depends on what you like.
Most good radio DJs make an effort to kleep at least some continuity between songs. We try to keep a certain flow going. A good DJ will never play a hard rock song after a mopey indie song, for example. I rely on a good knowledge of the station library to make sure listening to the radio is not a jarring experience for the user, but is rather like a well done hours-long mixtape. Winamp does not have the ability to know which songs flow well into the other. (Perhaps they could, user aucoustic watermarking? Interesting...)
Sadly, this is giving away to (badly) set playlists and clear channel stations. But at the college radio station where I DJ, at least, I try to keep a flow going for the user.
Changing topic, for everyone complaining that albums no longer have any kind of flow and that the concept album is dead, you're listening to the wrong music. There is a huge indie rock movement in America (fueled largely, I believe, by the internet, and the ability for small record labels to attract listeners over the web), where the concept albums as a coherant piece of art is still alive, and concept albums are made routinely. Step out of your boundaries, do a little digging, and you'll see that good music is alive and well, it's just moved a bit more underground.
> And seriously, do you really need macros for basic for loops?
You do if you're trying to make a raytracer in 2kb of code.
Say, wood's very flammable isn't it? Looks like the server is running (or rather, failing to run) with one of these cases...
> Like take the Asus offerings. The A7NX's rocked, but the nforce eqivalent..
There's is no motherboard that I'm aware of called the A7NX. Asus does make the A7N8X, which is generally considered one of the better motherboards available, supports 3 gigs of ram, and is based on the NForce2 chipset.
The N in the product number reveals that it uses an NVidia chipset. If it was a Via board, it would have a V instead of the N.
(I personally own an A7N8X and love it. I haven't had much luck with Linux on it, but that's my failing, not the board's.)
> Then there's the people who can afford healthcare but choose not to. I know this is a minority of people without healthcare, but it is significant.
Very signifigant. The statistic I saw in Atlantic was something like 1/3 of uninsured people make more that $50,000 a year. So it is a minority, but it's uncomfortably close to a majority.
Don't worry. I don't think anyone wants to know about that.
I feel dirty now.
> If you don't defend a trademark, you lose it.
FUD. There's no reason that the Mozilla foundation can't simply explicitely allow these vendors to use their trademark, rather than threaten lawsuits. I do not disagree with Mozilla's tactics, but this is not really a trademark issue.
He also deserves credit for the most annoying flash intro ever. It took forevfer to get to the navigation, even after spressing 'skip intro'
You're right, early prototypes of this product will be flawed. In fact, early prototypes of any new invention will undoubtably have flaws. Nothing new should be invented. Ever. Faced with the fact that nothing will be perfect the first try, we should never innovate or try anything new.
Thank you for showing us the light.
Score: -1, neither did you
From Article: "It was recognized just after [the June 2003] launch that there were some serious shortcomings in the code that had been put into the launch load of software." So they didn't realize that too many files would be a problem until after launch.
Also in the article "The data management team's calculations had not made any provision for leftover directories from a previous load still sitting in the flash file system."
So it's clear that their on-the-ground testing didn't catch the first bug, despite the rigorous testing you described. Which makes one wonder if they really did such rigorous testing. The grandparent is right.
It's not even that they forgot to delete old files. Then program they sent to the old files failed to upload correctly, and they ran out of space before they could retransmit the delete program.
What surprises me is that they don't have a 'twin' of the rover's computer system set up on earth. When commands are run on the rover, the same commands could be run on the computer system on earth. Then, if the rover's software, fails (as it did), the software on earth would (theoretically) fail in a similar way, and be MUCH easier to debug. Of course, the systems wouldn't be identical (without building an entire duplicate and expensive rover), and the data gatehred wouldn't be identical, but if the twin was carefully planned and fed dummy data that aproximately mirrored that data the rover was gathering. For example, the twin could be fed dummy pictures about as often as the rover took a real picture.
From the article "[The] transmission that uploaded the utility was a partial failure: Only one of the utility program's two parts was received successfully. The second part was not received, and so in accordance with the communications protocol it was scheduled for retransmission on sol 19." NASA could have simulated a half failed transfer on the twin copmuter on earth, and then watched carefully using traditional debugging tools to make sure the failed transmission didn't cause a software failure (which it did).
Again, from the article "The data management team's calculations had not made any provision for leftover directories from a previous load still sitting in the flash file system." However, if they had a twin computer system to watch, they would have seen that the failure occur on earth as it did in space. Debugging a system you can hook a serial debugger to is bound to much easier than debugging a system a million miles away.
Stereoscopic wall? What's that?
+4 insightful? More like bold face lies. Try looking toward the bottom of http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.0-0261 .html. GPL'd drivers for the Nforce2 chipset, including audio and ethernet. And it's not like it was hard to find. Just three clicks off of Nvidia's front page.
And for what it's worth, the Asus A7N8X-Deluxe is the best motherboard I've ever owned. And if you take a look at oneline reviews, you'll see I'm not the only one who thinks so.
You could always just mail it to me. I'll even pay postage.
To those modding the parent flamebait:
Keep in mind that this is an insightful article. Even if it is plagarized, the plagarizer is getting anything for it (since he's AC), and the original author is at +5, so it's not like people won't know who he is, so you might as well leave the article at +5, so people can read it.