Although Ben Bova's _Welcome_to_Moonbase_ is approaching its 15th birthday, it remains a provocative look at commercial and scientific exploitation of the moon's resources.
Commercially, the moon is a cheap source of materials needed for large-scale construction in space. Oxygen and aluminum are readily-available propellants. Aluminum is a good structural material, particularly in the moon's weaker gravity. Solar panels and reflectors can provide cheap heat and electricity. Metals can be refinend and oxygen extracted by melting lunar soil, capturing the escaping gases, and allowing the result to separate as it cools. The moon's atmosphere is almost nonexistent, providing a free vacuum several orders of magnitude better than the best commercial installations, and the thin atmosphere is very clean, virtually free of dust above one to two meters above the surface.
The ability to cheaply manufacture and launch satellites, probes, and other vehicles means direct observation of planets, asteroids, and comets could be conducted many times more frequently. The moon, while it lacks the earth's large shock-absorbing core, is a geologically quiet base upon which to build a massive telescope or array, with the entire mass of the moon insulating it from the sun's radiation, and virtually no atmosphere to distort the image. Even the mere fact of having scientists in long-term direct contact with another solar body will enormously expand our knowledge of the universe. Studying the earth, we can only hope other places are similar, but studying the moon as well means we can make generalizations with much more confidence.
I don't think any one company is rich enough to set up the infrastructure needed to be sustainable and commercially successful, and no government can dump that much money into a project with no short-term returns. We can only hope that several companies can cooperate either on one project or will develop complementary projects. If several groups are planning on trying to setup installations on the moon, it might be profitable for another organization to setup an installation whose sole purpose is to provide materials the others will need. A small automated facility which extracts oxygen from the soil could save a dozen other installations the expense of setting up their own oxygen plant. Another installation could extract only aluminum and sell that for construction of its neighbors, perhaps paying for its oxygen consumption in aluminum used to expand the oxygen extraction facility.
I'll be the first to admit this sort of closed economy cannot sustain itself and must eventually reap some financial reward for the companies on earth, but cooperation between enterprises makes everyone's barrier to entry that much lower. As soon as the infrastructure is setup to mine and use materials from the moon, construction there should be immediately financially rewarding and should create a scientific and manufacturing boom. Once we reach that point, it's all downhill from there. The problem is the financial risk involved in getting to that point. Hopefully the lure of potentially vast riches will bring in the necessary funding.
Half (at least) of the problem is the complete lack of credible information. We know some broad figures (number of CDs sold, total profits (of some sort), and the like). What we don't know is how much it costs to make a CD (pressing costs, transportation, amortized recording costs, etc.) How much money do artists make (popular ones, and not-so-popular ones) from CD sales v. concerts v. merchandising and advertising. Do we know how much it costs up-front to make a well-produced CD and press a small run or a large one? Does anyone know how much it would cost an artist to put their work on their website for public download? Do any P2P clients keep statistics on bandwidth usage?
If we had facts instead of tidbits and wild speculation, there might be a middle ground. Unfortunately, the vast majority of information available to each side is the product of willful hyperbole. Can anyone credible help fix this?
"And no, Linux on IBM/390 WILL NOT help them because it is just an emulation, and disk arrays of this one huge computer will get swamped by the billions of read requests (the same way they will get swamped on Starfire or the same S390 under OS390)"
Exactly. Even at ~1M/s per IDE drive (lots of random reads), that's 1M/s * 8000 machines * 2 drives/machine (yeah, some have 4, but the article doesn't say how many) = 16GB/sec. It would take a hell of a SCSI setup to equal that bandwidth, let alone the massive numbers of IOs.
Further, even if the boxen only have 2G memory each, that's 16TB of memory, which you could put in one big server, but no single memory system is going to provide the throughput that 8000 SDRAM channels will.
First, you can add wire for whatever you expect to need, like phone, cat5, coax for video, cat3 for an intercom, wires for home automation, etc. and hope it's enough.
Or, you can install conduit with what you expect to need in it, and leave it for other stuff. If you're reasonably mechanically inclined (a good test here would be whether you have a fish tape or not), pulling wires around isn't terribly difficult. You will want conduit for main runs though, such as from the first to second floor, or from both floors to the basement, etc.
Some things to keep in mind: when you are running one type of cable, run others if there's a remote possibility you'll want them, since it's easier to cut holes in drywall once, pull cable once, mess with faceplates once, and the like. While you're pulling a mass of cable to the second floor, pull a few extras (at least two, and perhaps as many as one per room) and leave nice long runs so you can drop cable into any room on that floor. Do it yourself or make sure the electrician knows what he's doing. Getting a full 100Mbps requires careful installation, and an electrician used to yanking on 12AWG copper power lines will have to be reminded to be careful.
A small diamond bit is used as a seed for the crystal, and methane gas (at the appropriate temp and pressure) is passed over it. The carbon sticks to the growing diamond, and the hydrogen continues on its way. In theory, this can create arbitrarily large diamonds.
I hope industrial diamonds get more popular (not as jewelry) because they really are lovely material to work with. As has been mentioned, they conduct heat quite well, are quite strong for their weight, resist abrasion, etc. There's a good reason why lots of sci-fi uses diamond as a building material...
That's not entirely accurate, but it's close enough to get the point across. Another way is by observing the brightness of the star. A planet (of any size, though obviously this also works best with large planets) passing between the star and our telescope causes the star to dim. If this occurs periodically, and a few other things check out, it's very likely a planet.
I can't seem to find them. A friend challenged me to find a pair, as I've become known for being able to locate any piece of information, but as far as I can tell, they don't exist. Can anyone tell me if they really do fall in the nonexistent category, or whether they're just rather well hidden?
As a G400 user, I can say unequivocally that the 2D performance is unparallelled. I have a high-quality Viewsonic monitor (Pf795), and can run it at any resolution and refresh rate it can handle at 32bpp, with a crystal-clear image all the way from 640x480 up to 1800x1440 (the best the monitor will handle).
It's true the 3D performance really isn't there. The framerates I was getting with Q3 under Win2k were about 20% less than my brother running win98 with a GF256 (SDR). I think the 20% could be attributed to the poor win2k drivers (at that time - can't speek about current drivers for windows). For the money, you could've gotten about 50% greater FPS, but if your priorities are like mine (and it sounds like they are), dualhead, insane resolutions and refresh rates, and pure 2D gorgeousness are considerably more important.
I'm unfamiliar with the state of ATI's linux drivers, but if they're of good quality, and gaming is somewhat important and dualhead is not, I would recommend a radeon of some sort. Their 2D quality is in the same class as the G400's, and similarly feature-rich (it doesn't hurt that the design is rather newer, either).
Have you looked at a modern CPU lately? 400mm^2 is enormous: about 4x the size of current consumer-level chips. 400mm^2 is about the size of IBM's POWER4 CPU, and Sony won't have the margins IBM has to pay for it. They'd better hope the games sell like hotcakes!
I think you're 100% correct here. Even those people who do add and subtract by hand, because they had to, typically don't understand why or how these things work. To extend your 5% example, the vast majority of people I know try to figure out 5% by multiplying their $5.99 by.05 and then adding 5.99. I do such things by taking 10%, which is easy, and dividing by two, which is also easy. Furthermore, 5.99 = 6, so we're talking 6 *.1 =.6 *.5 =.3 + 5.99 is $6.29. If you live in a place where tax is (as it is in the county I live in) 5.5%, it's similarly easy. If 5% is $0.30, then 5.5% is $0.33, so we get $6.32 as the total.
Another example: 24 * 17. I just found another person who does this problem in their head intelligently instead of following the same method they would use on paper, which requires remembering too many numbers to perform accurately. Everyone else I know tries it the hard way, and most fail. The procedure is as follows: 24 is almost 25, so use 25 and remember that you cheated. 25 * 17 can be easily calculated because 25 * 4 is 100, so 25 * 16 is 400 so 25 * 17 is 425. Now, remember that we cheated, and added an extra 17 by going from 24 to 25. 425 - 17 is 408. Presto. Written down, the method seems complicated, but in practice it is very quick and efficient, because it only uses small numbers, unless the big numbers are easy (100, for example). Another way to do it is to recognize that 24 * 17 is the same as 12 * 34. 10 * 34 is 340, and add 2 * 34, which is 68. 340 + 68 is 408. Someone taught to think about the problems they're given rather than punch them into the calculator would recognize these shortcuts, rather than compute 24 * 7 [7 * 4 is 8, carry the two. (remember both those numbers) 7 * 2 is 4, carry the one, add the two that you had from before, and then get 168 (remember that)] and then add 24 * 10. [4 * 10 is 0, carry the four. 2 * 10 is zero, carry the two, add the four you remembered, and get 240, now add that other number. What was that again? Oh. 168. 168 + 240 = 408.] Which would you rather do in your head? I don't worry about people who can't remember phone numbers. That's what palm pilots are for (among other things). It's when people are bowled over by such simple problems (and math is just the easiest example) that I really get concerned.
Actually, that's not all that's there anymore. The guy's put in a special redirect that anyone from slashdot goes to MS' IE page without delay...unless you're not using javascript, which obviously wouldn't occur to anyone using IE in the first place.
Yep. I'm with you. In fact, even on the campus network here at school and with a fast machine, I'm fast enough to kill popups before they even render the background color. I'd also agree about the resizing thing. Damn annoying. Worse even than sites that insist on rendering their page as a 640-pixel-wide column down the middle of the browser. Unfortunately, other than routing around such bull, I don't have a good solution...
Remember what he said before Windows 2000 came out? It was 60000 bugs this and overdue schedule that, and now it's out without any problems at all.
60k bugs is either fact or not, and pretty much irrelevant anyway, so I won't comment. I don't know about the schedule, so I won't comment there either. What I do know about though is the 'without any problems' nonsense. I'll cheerfully acknowledge that win2k is by far the best windows yet, but if it ran without any problems, I'd get over 100 hours uptime on a regular basis, which I don't. Almost without fail, windows crashes (or becomes unusably tangled) between about 75 and 125 hours uptime. That's a damn sight better than the ~5 hours uptime I'd get with win95, but hardly problem-free.
Imagine if MS spokesmen spent their time with unfouded attacks on Linux. They don't - which is a sign of self confidens and maturity.
Do you live in a box? We have a german MS ad insinuating that the many flavors of linux are bad. Has anyone counted the number of versions of windows in the last 5 years (I seem to recall there are about 10 versions each of win95 and 98, not including the different language versions (which, by the way, have different sets of bugs in each), though winME and win2K are too new to have fragmented yet) and compared it with the number of linux distros?
How about the Naked PC page which insinuates that anyone who doesn't buy windows with their computer must be stealing it later.
For my third exhibit, I present The Linux Myths Page:
"Myth: Linux performs better than Windows NT." The fact is that linux does many things better than NT, but NT also does some things better than linux. They at least support their argument with 'independent' benchmarks.
"Myth: Linux is more reliable than Windows NT" - No comparisons, no statistics, no substance. The fact that more companies guarantee windows uptime than those that guarantee linux uptime has nothing to do with the reliability of either operating system, merely that windows is currently more popular.
"Myth: Linux is Free" - after which they cite a single comparison between UNIX and winNT, which links to a MS article comparing winNT and Solaris on Sparc, NOT linux. In my book, thats an unfounded attack: if they can't find proof, there's no foundation, and thus it's unfounded.
"Myth: Linux is more secure than Windows NT" - The first bulleted point under this header is as follows: "Linux only provides access controls for files and directories. In contrast, every object in Windows NT, from files to operating system data structures, has an access control list and its use can be regulated as appropriate." Right. What would an OS data structure be, if not a file? How about simple things like the floppy drive? That's a file under linux, and thus can be controlled by file permissions, as can ports, peripherals, etc. Next, we have MS's claim that a single source of security information for windows makes NT more secure than linux, with myriad sources of information. To my of thinking, just the opposite is true.
Lastly, "Myth: Linux can replace Windows on the desktop," supported by such false statements as "Linux does not support important ease-of-use technologies such as Plug and Play, USB, and Power Management" Which explains why adding a NIC to my RH installation caused the appropriate drivers to be installed at startup (after I gave the go-ahead, unlike Windows which randomly adds code to your installation whenever it gets confused). It also explains why my USB cordless Logitech trackball works marvelously (right out of the box, with no tweaking, might I add?), and why ACPI functions are supported out of the box.
I should stop now, as this is becomming a rant, but surely you see my point? If not, I'll summarize: You're wrong. If MS were self-confident, they'd ignore linux and continue to push windows on its own merits. Unfortunately, it has comparatively few, so they've got to try to make everyone else look bad to make themselves look good. Maturity?!?
If you don't agree with RMS' style, that's fine. In fact, you should say so. Claiming that RMS' faults somehow make his arguments invalid is not the way to go about it though.
While it looks like this will eventually be a good place to look for stuff, it's failed several tests so far, and jumbled all but one.
A search for "sancho games" failed to bring up Sancho Games
A search for "White Wolf" (... productions,... games, white wolf by its self) failed to bring up White Wolf
A search for "Disney" brought up Disney-MGM (not quite their home page, but close) as the 677th result, but never actually turned up www.disney.com
Searching for "Slashdot" failed to turn up Slashdot, though it nabbed a bunch of knockoffs and generic linux info.
I could understand a search for microsoft not turning up anything, on the basis that Microsoft isn't family-friendly, but of 3096 hits, doesn't Microsoft (for any reason, good, bad, *or* ugly) deserve at very least to be in the top 25%?
Success!:
A search for "In Nomine" brought up Steve Jackson Games, as did a search for "Steve Jackson" but "sjgames" got me bupkis.
A search for "Milton Bradley" came up with AXIS & ALLIES - Games from Hasbro Interactive and Hasbro as the first hit. To be fair, the second search result that comes in when I search for "Hasbro" is a game by Milton Bradley. While equitable, I'm not sure this is what people are looking for...
While I commend you guys on the effort, and several years of dedicated work, it's got at least a few more years' worth of work to go before it starts getting usable for everyday searching.
>>Here's an article from Scientific American on the topic.
Which points out that the data density wasn't there, and that they were slow and expensive. Commercially available isn't what we're looking for: commercially viable is, and Honeywell's product clearly wasn't. Admittedly, it doesn't sound like IBM is going to be able to make them cheaply for quite some time either, but at least they have the access times down (or so it sounds--the article was a bit vague, as is ZDnet's want).
>>Do the people of Dune speak the Queen's English or Webster's English?
No. Herbert included a pronunciation guide just so there wouldn't be any confusion. I haven't seen the series (don't have cable) so I can't comment on the pronunciation in it, but I have read the books, and I don't really think pronunciation should be that big a deal. After all, as long as you can tell one word apart from another, all's well, right?
That's right. I only use word for the import filters when abiword won't handle something right, and I'm going to spite MS by waiting until that 50th application start to . . . uninstall and reinstall. I've estimated that at about 100hours uptime, assuming I start word once per reboot (amazing! It takes about 100 hours for w2k to become seriously fubared), I won't have to worry about it for another 6 months.
You don't have to be careful with ATA/33 cables. I cut them freehand with a razor blade, not being particularly careful. I mostly got them right, but sliced into two or three wires by mistake. I didn't sever them, of course, but you don't have to worry about stripping the insulation off a wee bit (as long as two such wires don't connect, of course.
Let me put it to you this way - unless you're doing graphic design with pictures, and that - is there any REAL advantage apart from typesetting between using WordPerfect for DOS and the latest newfangled "will do HTML, PDF output, with 35,000 useless features" WYSINNWYG MS Word, in terms of productivity when it comes to typing out text?
Nope, which is why I'm still using WP5.1 for DOS. In fact, that old WP works better for me than word does. I have macros (and no, they don't have viruses in them) that let me type in spanish conveniently (no 3 or 4-keystroke combinations for accents here!), add headers and footers, keep track of contacts (yep, I wrote a rolodex program in the WP macro language. Let's see you do that in 2k of word macros), and FORMAT MY DAMN TEXT. In word, to get 'By: <name>' left-justified on one side of a line and 'November 11, 2000' (yes, it's a date code--shows the date I print a document, not when it's created) right-justified on the other, you have to use a table. I'm sorry, a table is not a formatting element: it's a data-presentation element.
Anyway, the point of this rant is that, as you hinted at, adding features and such doesn't make a better program. I'd love to be able to buzz around in a 3D world to do my computing, but I won't touch it unless it can beat the programs I currently use for usability. Yes, that means making a word processor that can out-do WP5.1 (and I *do* make use of my ability to position individual characters within a thousandth of an inch in wordperfect), notetab (beefed-up Notepad, for HTML editing), the Gimp, etc.
And let's not forget the biggest 3D problem is feedback...
As for your issues with the physical gear (binocular headware, force-feedback gloves / whatever else, the problem of motion, etc.), I'd say not to worry about it. Currently, most of it is just a problem of economics, which will change when such a thing becomes popular / useful, rather than technology. There's a product which basically fubares your inner ear so it doesn't provide much in the way of orientation or acceleration information at all (sorry, I forget what it's called, or I'd put in a link), so you are forced to rely on visual cues instead, for example, and I don't see any major technological problems creeping in while we aren't looking. Having an environment that you can literally run around in could be created if someone wanted to spend the money. All you need is a lightweight I/O package (glasses, gloves, etc.), and a surface to move around on. Take a sphere, cover it with a fabric surface that can be moved around by a computer. Squish the sphere so it's flat on top to a radius of about 6 feet, and let people run on that. Whenever someone moves, the computer moves the fabric they're running on in the opposite direction so they stay more or less stationary. Just a thought, but it illustrates that it's not technology that's holding us back right now.
Slashdot Mirror
66 blocks? You poor man!
Although Ben Bova's _Welcome_to_Moonbase_ is approaching its 15th birthday, it remains a provocative look at commercial and scientific exploitation of the moon's resources.
Commercially, the moon is a cheap source of materials needed for large-scale construction in space. Oxygen and aluminum are readily-available propellants. Aluminum is a good structural material, particularly in the moon's weaker gravity. Solar panels and reflectors can provide cheap heat and electricity. Metals can be refinend and oxygen extracted by melting lunar soil, capturing the escaping gases, and allowing the result to separate as it cools. The moon's atmosphere is almost nonexistent, providing a free vacuum several orders of magnitude better than the best commercial installations, and the thin atmosphere is very clean, virtually free of dust above one to two meters above the surface.
The ability to cheaply manufacture and launch satellites, probes, and other vehicles means direct observation of planets, asteroids, and comets could be conducted many times more frequently. The moon, while it lacks the earth's large shock-absorbing core, is a geologically quiet base upon which to build a massive telescope or array, with the entire mass of the moon insulating it from the sun's radiation, and virtually no atmosphere to distort the image. Even the mere fact of having scientists in long-term direct contact with another solar body will enormously expand our knowledge of the universe. Studying the earth, we can only hope other places are similar, but studying the moon as well means we can make generalizations with much more confidence.
I don't think any one company is rich enough to set up the infrastructure needed to be sustainable and commercially successful, and no government can dump that much money into a project with no short-term returns. We can only hope that several companies can cooperate either on one project or will develop complementary projects. If several groups are planning on trying to setup installations on the moon, it might be profitable for another organization to setup an installation whose sole purpose is to provide materials the others will need. A small automated facility which extracts oxygen from the soil could save a dozen other installations the expense of setting up their own oxygen plant. Another installation could extract only aluminum and sell that for construction of its neighbors, perhaps paying for its oxygen consumption in aluminum used to expand the oxygen extraction facility.
I'll be the first to admit this sort of closed economy cannot sustain itself and must eventually reap some financial reward for the companies on earth, but cooperation between enterprises makes everyone's barrier to entry that much lower. As soon as the infrastructure is setup to mine and use materials from the moon, construction there should be immediately financially rewarding and should create a scientific and manufacturing boom. Once we reach that point, it's all downhill from there. The problem is the financial risk involved in getting to that point. Hopefully the lure of potentially vast riches will bring in the necessary funding.
Half (at least) of the problem is the complete lack of credible information. We know some broad figures (number of CDs sold, total profits (of some sort), and the like). What we don't know is how much it costs to make a CD (pressing costs, transportation, amortized recording costs, etc.) How much money do artists make (popular ones, and not-so-popular ones) from CD sales v. concerts v. merchandising and advertising. Do we know how much it costs up-front to make a well-produced CD and press a small run or a large one? Does anyone know how much it would cost an artist to put their work on their website for public download? Do any P2P clients keep statistics on bandwidth usage?
If we had facts instead of tidbits and wild speculation, there might be a middle ground. Unfortunately, the vast majority of information available to each side is the product of willful hyperbole. Can anyone credible help fix this?
The van contained no explosives, but the three people involved have been detained for questioning.
"And no, Linux on IBM/390 WILL NOT help them because it is just an emulation, and disk arrays of this one huge computer will get swamped by the billions of read requests (the same way they will get swamped on Starfire or the same S390 under OS390)"
Exactly. Even at ~1M/s per IDE drive (lots of random reads), that's 1M/s * 8000 machines * 2 drives/machine (yeah, some have 4, but the article doesn't say how many) = 16GB/sec. It would take a hell of a SCSI setup to equal that bandwidth, let alone the massive numbers of IOs.
Further, even if the boxen only have 2G memory each, that's 16TB of memory, which you could put in one big server, but no single memory system is going to provide the throughput that 8000 SDRAM channels will.
Two broad classes of options are apparent here.
First, you can add wire for whatever you expect to need, like phone, cat5, coax for video, cat3 for an intercom, wires for home automation, etc. and hope it's enough.
Or, you can install conduit with what you expect to need in it, and leave it for other stuff. If you're reasonably mechanically inclined (a good test here would be whether you have a fish tape or not), pulling wires around isn't terribly difficult. You will want conduit for main runs though, such as from the first to second floor, or from both floors to the basement, etc.
Some things to keep in mind: when you are running one type of cable, run others if there's a remote possibility you'll want them, since it's easier to cut holes in drywall once, pull cable once, mess with faceplates once, and the like. While you're pulling a mass of cable to the second floor, pull a few extras (at least two, and perhaps as many as one per room) and leave nice long runs so you can drop cable into any room on that floor. Do it yourself or make sure the electrician knows what he's doing. Getting a full 100Mbps requires careful installation, and an electrician used to yanking on 12AWG copper power lines will have to be reminded to be careful.
Good luck!
A small diamond bit is used as a seed for the crystal, and methane gas (at the appropriate temp and pressure) is passed over it. The carbon sticks to the growing diamond, and the hydrogen continues on its way. In theory, this can create arbitrarily large diamonds.
I hope industrial diamonds get more popular (not as jewelry) because they really are lovely material to work with. As has been mentioned, they conduct heat quite well, are quite strong for their weight, resist abrasion, etc. There's a good reason why lots of sci-fi uses diamond as a building material...
That's not entirely accurate, but it's close enough to get the point across. Another way is by observing the brightness of the star. A planet (of any size, though obviously this also works best with large planets) passing between the star and our telescope causes the star to dim. If this occurs periodically, and a few other things check out, it's very likely a planet.
I can't seem to find them. A friend challenged me to find a pair, as I've become known for being able to locate any piece of information, but as far as I can tell, they don't exist. Can anyone tell me if they really do fall in the nonexistent category, or whether they're just rather well hidden?
Thanks!
Microsoft: The Biggest Web Bugger, eh?
Yeah, I think we can all agree that Microsoft has buggered the web...
http://www.octools.com/articles/submersion/submers ion.html
Cooling with Fluorinert and liquid nitrogen. If only the Fluorinert wouldn't gel up, it would be perfect:)
>> When Windows crashes, at least it lets you click OK first
And if you're lucky and careful, you can get an amazing amount of stuff done before you actually click that button.
As a G400 user, I can say unequivocally that the 2D performance is unparallelled. I have a high-quality Viewsonic monitor (Pf795), and can run it at any resolution and refresh rate it can handle at 32bpp, with a crystal-clear image all the way from 640x480 up to 1800x1440 (the best the monitor will handle).
It's true the 3D performance really isn't there. The framerates I was getting with Q3 under Win2k were about 20% less than my brother running win98 with a GF256 (SDR). I think the 20% could be attributed to the poor win2k drivers (at that time - can't speek about current drivers for windows). For the money, you could've gotten about 50% greater FPS, but if your priorities are like mine (and it sounds like they are), dualhead, insane resolutions and refresh rates, and pure 2D gorgeousness are considerably more important.
I'm unfamiliar with the state of ATI's linux drivers, but if they're of good quality, and gaming is somewhat important and dualhead is not, I would recommend a radeon of some sort. Their 2D quality is in the same class as the G400's, and similarly feature-rich (it doesn't hurt that the design is rather newer, either).
Have you looked at a modern CPU lately? 400mm^2 is enormous: about 4x the size of current consumer-level chips. 400mm^2 is about the size of IBM's POWER4 CPU, and Sony won't have the margins IBM has to pay for it. They'd better hope the games sell like hotcakes!
I think you're 100% correct here. Even those people who do add and subtract by hand, because they had to, typically don't understand why or how these things work. To extend your 5% example, the vast majority of people I know try to figure out 5% by multiplying their $5.99 by .05 and then adding 5.99. I do such things by taking 10%, which is easy, and dividing by two, which is also easy. Furthermore, 5.99 = 6, so we're talking 6 * .1 = .6 * .5 = .3 + 5.99 is $6.29. If you live in a place where tax is (as it is in the county I live in) 5.5%, it's similarly easy. If 5% is $0.30, then 5.5% is $0.33, so we get $6.32 as the total.
Another example: 24 * 17. I just found another person who does this problem in their head intelligently instead of following the same method they would use on paper, which requires remembering too many numbers to perform accurately. Everyone else I know tries it the hard way, and most fail. The procedure is as follows: 24 is almost 25, so use 25 and remember that you cheated. 25 * 17 can be easily calculated because 25 * 4 is 100, so 25 * 16 is 400 so 25 * 17 is 425. Now, remember that we cheated, and added an extra 17 by going from 24 to 25. 425 - 17 is 408. Presto. Written down, the method seems complicated, but in practice it is very quick and efficient, because it only uses small numbers, unless the big numbers are easy (100, for example). Another way to do it is to recognize that 24 * 17 is the same as 12 * 34. 10 * 34 is 340, and add 2 * 34, which is 68. 340 + 68 is 408. Someone taught to think about the problems they're given rather than punch them into the calculator would recognize these shortcuts, rather than compute 24 * 7 [7 * 4 is 8, carry the two. (remember both those numbers) 7 * 2 is 4, carry the one, add the two that you had from before, and then get 168 (remember that)] and then add 24 * 10. [4 * 10 is 0, carry the four. 2 * 10 is zero, carry the two, add the four you remembered, and get 240, now add that other number. What was that again? Oh. 168. 168 + 240 = 408.] Which would you rather do in your head? I don't worry about people who can't remember phone numbers. That's what palm pilots are for (among other things). It's when people are bowled over by such simple problems (and math is just the easiest example) that I really get concerned.
Actually, that's not all that's there anymore. The guy's put in a special redirect that anyone from slashdot goes to MS' IE page without delay...unless you're not using javascript, which obviously wouldn't occur to anyone using IE in the first place.
Yep. I'm with you. In fact, even on the campus network here at school and with a fast machine, I'm fast enough to kill popups before they even render the background color. I'd also agree about the resizing thing. Damn annoying. Worse even than sites that insist on rendering their page as a 640-pixel-wide column down the middle of the browser. Unfortunately, other than routing around such bull, I don't have a good solution...
60k bugs is either fact or not, and pretty much irrelevant anyway, so I won't comment. I don't know about the schedule, so I won't comment there either. What I do know about though is the 'without any problems' nonsense. I'll cheerfully acknowledge that win2k is by far the best windows yet, but if it ran without any problems, I'd get over 100 hours uptime on a regular basis, which I don't. Almost without fail, windows crashes (or becomes unusably tangled) between about 75 and 125 hours uptime. That's a damn sight better than the ~5 hours uptime I'd get with win95, but hardly problem-free.
Imagine if MS spokesmen spent their time with unfouded attacks on Linux. They don't - which is a sign of self confidens and maturity.
Do you live in a box? We have a german MS ad insinuating that the many flavors of linux are bad. Has anyone counted the number of versions of windows in the last 5 years (I seem to recall there are about 10 versions each of win95 and 98, not including the different language versions (which, by the way, have different sets of bugs in each), though winME and win2K are too new to have fragmented yet) and compared it with the number of linux distros?
How about the Naked PC page which insinuates that anyone who doesn't buy windows with their computer must be stealing it later.
For my third exhibit, I present The Linux Myths Page:
I should stop now, as this is becomming a rant, but surely you see my point? If not, I'll summarize: You're wrong. If MS were self-confident, they'd ignore linux and continue to push windows on its own merits. Unfortunately, it has comparatively few, so they've got to try to make everyone else look bad to make themselves look good. Maturity?!?
If you don't agree with RMS' style, that's fine. In fact, you should say so. Claiming that RMS' faults somehow make his arguments invalid is not the way to go about it though.
While it looks like this will eventually be a good place to look for stuff, it's failed several tests so far, and jumbled all but one.
... games, white wolf by its self) failed to bring up White Wolf
A search for "sancho games" failed to bring up Sancho Games
A search for "White Wolf" (... productions,
A search for "Disney" brought up Disney-MGM (not quite their home page, but close) as the 677th result, but never actually turned up www.disney.com
Searching for "Slashdot" failed to turn up Slashdot, though it nabbed a bunch of knockoffs and generic linux info.
I could understand a search for microsoft not turning up anything, on the basis that Microsoft isn't family-friendly, but of 3096 hits, doesn't Microsoft (for any reason, good, bad, *or* ugly) deserve at very least to be in the top 25%?
Success!: A search for "In Nomine" brought up Steve Jackson Games, as did a search for "Steve Jackson" but "sjgames" got me bupkis.
A search for "Milton Bradley" came up with AXIS & ALLIES - Games from Hasbro Interactive and Hasbro as the first hit. To be fair, the second search result that comes in when I search for "Hasbro" is a game by Milton Bradley. While equitable, I'm not sure this is what people are looking for...
While I commend you guys on the effort, and several years of dedicated work, it's got at least a few more years' worth of work to go before it starts getting usable for everyday searching.
>>Here's an article from Scientific American on the topic.
Which points out that the data density wasn't there, and that they were slow and expensive. Commercially available isn't what we're looking for: commercially viable is, and Honeywell's product clearly wasn't. Admittedly, it doesn't sound like IBM is going to be able to make them cheaply for quite some time either, but at least they have the access times down (or so it sounds--the article was a bit vague, as is ZDnet's want).
>>Do the people of Dune speak the Queen's English or Webster's English?
No. Herbert included a pronunciation guide just so there wouldn't be any confusion. I haven't seen the series (don't have cable) so I can't comment on the pronunciation in it, but I have read the books, and I don't really think pronunciation should be that big a deal. After all, as long as you can tell one word apart from another, all's well, right?
That's right. I only use word for the import filters when abiword won't handle something right, and I'm going to spite MS by waiting until that 50th application start to . . . uninstall and reinstall. I've estimated that at about 100hours uptime, assuming I start word once per reboot (amazing! It takes about 100 hours for w2k to become seriously fubared), I won't have to worry about it for another 6 months.
You don't have to be careful with ATA/33 cables. I cut them freehand with a razor blade, not being particularly careful. I mostly got them right, but sliced into two or three wires by mistake. I didn't sever them, of course, but you don't have to worry about stripping the insulation off a wee bit (as long as two such wires don't connect, of course.
I'd go for it, but VMWare won't run win2k, which is the only windows worth using if you're going to pay for it.
Let me put it to you this way - unless you're doing graphic design with pictures, and that - is there any REAL advantage apart from typesetting between using WordPerfect for DOS and the latest newfangled "will do HTML, PDF output, with 35,000 useless features" WYSINNWYG MS Word, in terms of productivity when it comes to typing out text?
Nope, which is why I'm still using WP5.1 for DOS. In fact, that old WP works better for me than word does. I have macros (and no, they don't have viruses in them) that let me type in spanish conveniently (no 3 or 4-keystroke combinations for accents here!), add headers and footers, keep track of contacts (yep, I wrote a rolodex program in the WP macro language. Let's see you do that in 2k of word macros), and FORMAT MY DAMN TEXT. In word, to get 'By: <name>' left-justified on one side of a line and 'November 11, 2000' (yes, it's a date code--shows the date I print a document, not when it's created) right-justified on the other, you have to use a table. I'm sorry, a table is not a formatting element: it's a data-presentation element.
Anyway, the point of this rant is that, as you hinted at, adding features and such doesn't make a better program. I'd love to be able to buzz around in a 3D world to do my computing, but I won't touch it unless it can beat the programs I currently use for usability. Yes, that means making a word processor that can out-do WP5.1 (and I *do* make use of my ability to position individual characters within a thousandth of an inch in wordperfect), notetab (beefed-up Notepad, for HTML editing), the Gimp, etc.
And let's not forget the biggest 3D problem is feedback...
As for your issues with the physical gear (binocular headware, force-feedback gloves / whatever else, the problem of motion, etc.), I'd say not to worry about it. Currently, most of it is just a problem of economics, which will change when such a thing becomes popular / useful, rather than technology. There's a product which basically fubares your inner ear so it doesn't provide much in the way of orientation or acceleration information at all (sorry, I forget what it's called, or I'd put in a link), so you are forced to rely on visual cues instead, for example, and I don't see any major technological problems creeping in while we aren't looking. Having an environment that you can literally run around in could be created if someone wanted to spend the money. All you need is a lightweight I/O package (glasses, gloves, etc.), and a surface to move around on. Take a sphere, cover it with a fabric surface that can be moved around by a computer. Squish the sphere so it's flat on top to a radius of about 6 feet, and let people run on that. Whenever someone moves, the computer moves the fabric they're running on in the opposite direction so they stay more or less stationary. Just a thought, but it illustrates that it's not technology that's holding us back right now.