Well, to be fair, if the driver already exists then whoever ends up working on it is going to have to coordinate with that driver's author or maintainer, otherwise they'll end up stepping on each others toes and all sorts of hilarity will ensue. Easier if the original requester initiates that - who knows, there may already be an update for the driver.
It's different, of course, if the driver is orphaned.
I'd say it's fair game that if, after trying to contact the driver's author and not getting a satisfactory response, throw it over to the Linux Driver Project explaining all that, there may well be somebody interested in taking it on.
Don't use the ATI drivers with the 9200, the open source drivers are better. My 9250 card (same radeon driver) works just fine. That's the last card that ATI actually released specs for up until the recent announcement by AMD/ATI.
Don't know about the joystick - I just have a relatively cheap Saitek ST290pro (USB) that works fine.
I got both of the above for use with FlightGear's Flight Simulator, the card gives me a decent 30 fps or so with all the effects turned on; glxgears runs at 1555 fps.
Exactly. Furthermore, lead salts (some of them, anyway) taste sweet, which is why kids are inclined to chew (leaded) paint flakes in the first place. (Toys, of course, are always chewed on.)
Yes, blatantly ripped off (like much of Star Trek) from classic science fiction, in this case Asimov's Robot stories of the 1950s. (His robots had "positronic brains" mostly because it sounded cooler than "electronic" (by his own admission), although he later threw in some buzzwords to justify it.)
Yeah, and with a research reactor, it's not like they should have even close to a critical mass worth of uranium
It's probably not going to work real well if they don't.
Mind, if the U-235 is mixed with U-238, not to mention the various other elements mixed in to make the fuel assembly, it's not exactly going to be weapons grade. The other thing is that some designs (eg SLOWPOKE) make heavy use of beryllium reflectors to reduce the mass needed for criticality. (Since SLOWPOKE uses about 93% enriched uranium, this is a good thing. Even though that uranium is alloyed with aluminum in the fuel assembly, separating aluminum and uranium is trivial compared to enriching uranium.)
But yeah, uranium and radiation in general is a lot less scarey than most people think. No doubt a legacy from all those 50's sci-fi movies (which makes one wonder how much Hollywood really was being subtly influenced by the Soviets in those days).
Currently, there are approximately 25 universities across the United States with active nuclear reactors on campus
You know, when you've read as many science fiction books as I have, this shit is a liiiitle creepy.
I'm surprised that you're surprised. Heck, I didn't know the number but I knew various universities had nukes even in the sixties when I was in grade school -- I even got to visit the University of Toronto's reactor (well, parts of it) during an open house.
We're talking research reactors of a few kilowatts (or so) here, not multi-hundred-megawatt power reactors. (Although NC State has a one megawatt "swimming pool" type (see the "Dr. No" movie) reactor, and McMaster U in Hamilton (half way between Toronto and Buffalo if you're driving around the lake) has a 5 MW reactor (also pool type) which has a full containment building.)
The very first nuclear reactor was constructed in a racquet court at University of Chicago, for Pete's sake. I don't know what kind of "science fiction" you're reading, but you might want to look for something with a little more science.
The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying, however, is about equal.
Even assuming this to be true (which, not having looked at the analysis, I reserve judgement on), if I'm planning a trip from A to B that are, say, 20 hours driving time or 2 hours flying time apart, flying is going to be 10 times safer for me than driving.
As in "Ground Effect Machine". At a seven foot altitude, this thing is well within its own ground effect. In other words, it's a hovercraft that looks like a helicopter.
Mind, I'll give the guy props for effort and ingenuity, and if he gets the 15 foot altitude version working that would be kind of fun to skim around in over open enough terrain. But an actual helicopter that can fly out of ground effect is a bit more of a challenge. (Me, I've lusted after Rotorway's homebuilt kits since their original Scorpion days.)
No, I think "jump drive" is an SF term for some kind of hyperspace engine that gets your ship from A to B without messing around with the space in between.
Even if the fire button was completely manual things could still go wrong.
Absolutely. I was on the range once when the guy a couple of spots over had the mechanism fail (never did find out if it was dirt or breakage) on his FN and it started firing full auto without his hand anywhere near the trigger. Fortunately he (and/or the sergeant that was on him almost immediately) had the presence of mind to keep it pointed downrange until it emptied.
people rarely, if ever, joke about something anything that affects and hurts them
Two or three days after my dad died (I was 23) I started quoting Monty Python's parrot sketch to a friend on the phone who was having trouble grasping what I was talking about. Mind, the day of, I wouldn't have appreciated that at all.
By the time of the wake there were plenty of us cracking jokes. Dad would have appreciated it.
A while back when I was actively sending out resumes, many places were happy with PDF. For those that insisted on "Word format", I sent them an RTF. A few places insisted on RTF over DOC, to avoid Word virus problems.
A few years ago I discovered a "standard" XML schema (HR-XML) for resumes, etc (see e.g. here. Never found anywhere that actually used it, though, but that may have changed since.
In general, any document that's going to be distributed outside of my organization (a very large IT industry player) is done so as a PDF. Certainly anything formal is. A spreadsheet for e.g. a weekly status meeting with a customer may go out as is (.xls), but sending out a.doc is pretty rare. The latter would either be text in the body of an email or a PDF.
> Cross references, table of contents, footnotes. Plain text doesn't have it.
Of course it does. Anything from LaTeX, through to simple SGML-like markup through to reStructuredText.
To say nothing of [gnt]roff, {IBM,Waterloo} Script, Formal, and others using "dot" markup going back to the 1970s, at least. Most (all of the above, certainly) include macros, too.
And since they're text, you do version control with the same tools as for source code (eg SCCS, back in the day).
The signal becomes poor a lot faster with analog than with digital. Yes, a really bad digital signal will give you freeze-ups and mosaics, a really bad analog signal gives you snow, loss of sync, noisy sound, ghosting, tearing...
I plugged a cheap pair of rabbit ears that I had lying around into my new TV -- the digital channels come in consistently better than their analog counterparts (where such analog counterparts even exist - there are more digital channels).
(Mostly I don't watch any broadcast or cable TV - if there's a TV series that interests me I'll wait for it to come out on DVD. Over a typical season, that's four or five hours saved not watching commercials.)
This has to do with shell expansion and the argument list that gets passed to exec(). It's fixed in a recent Linux kernel version, it now allows argument lists limited only by available memory.
Even if OCR only has a 50% success rate, that means that it is 50% less work that someone is going to be doing.
While in general I agree with your point -- a thing doesn't have to be perfect to be useful -- OCR with only a 50% success rate is likely to mean more work for somebody who has to go through and correct it. At some point it's easier just to retype the whole thing manually than go through correcting all the OCR errors, and I think that point is a lot fewer errors than 50%. (Been there, done that.)
This has to be Microsoft's best shot, after the SCO "Unix copyrights" attack collapsed. They're clearly -- if indirectly -- targetting the Linux Desktop, which is what threatens Windows (and Office) revenue most.
But this lawsuit only relates to the desktop. RedHat, Novell, and the other distros are -- assuming worst case (best case for Microsoft) where the patent is upheld and the distro companies get slapped with an injunction -- still free to distribute Linux that doesn't include a desktop (or at least not one that appears to infringe). But most Linux server farms happily hum along in runlevel 3; no X Windows, no desktop, no Gnome or KDE. Even for those that want a graphical management console (although most sysadmins I know prefer to just ssh in and use the command line), things like webmin or HPs System Managment Homepage (for Proliants) don't need graphics running on the server.
So if this is Microsoft's best shot, they've lost the server room (not that they really ever had it).
Software patents don't exist or aren't enforceable in most of Europe. Or, for that matter, the rest of the world, but Microsoft has just lost major antitrust battles in Europe recently. European-based distros like Mandriva -- or even foreign subsidiaries of Novell and RedHat -- are free to continue distributing desktop Linux. It's quite possible that this action -- which while it may not be Microsoft filing the suit, it's pretty clearly Microsoft pulling the strings -- will fuel the already rising anti-Microsoft sentiment in Europe.
Again, if this is Microsoft's best shot, they're going to be losing the desktop in Europe. (Admittedly not overnight, but any exponential process starts slow. It'll follow a Gompertz curve, and it's just at the lower inflection point. (There will always be a few holdouts.)
If it isn't Microsoft's best shot -- as no doubt some would like to argue -- then what would be? And why aren't they taking it?
Both Novell and Redhat make GNU/Linux distributions, which they sell with hardware.
Excuse me? Where can I buy a RedHat or Novell branded computer? They sell software[*].
Ironically, in the recent Supreme Court AT&T vs Microsoft decision, the Supremes found in favor of Microsoft that software per se is not a component of an infringing device, but infringement only happens when the software is run on a computer. (There are detail differences in the cases, of course, part of it including what was being shipped overseas.)
[*] Technically, they don't even sell software, but software support.
According to our website stats Windows Vista market now share is -- wait for it -- 11%
Yeah, but if you're running a support site for Vista you'd expect the stats to be skewed. It'd probably be even higher if most of the users didn't have to revert back to XP to be able to connect to your website at all.
(Joke, but it illustrates the value of such anecdotes.)
Let's put the receivers and transmitters right next to the gigawatt microwave antenna! That will surely fix all those problems!
Yep. Unless you're trying to watch satellite TV in the middle of a rectenna farm, of course -- although even there they'd likely have the transponders for that particular region mounted on a different satellite. It's not like everything on the powersat has to point in the same direction, you know, or operate at the same frequency.
This isn't limited to the US, I've seen it with eg Canadian companies too. But, it isn't universal practice either. Most of the companies I've worked for (Canada and US) don't put a specific limit on the number of "sick days" one takes.
Current policy where I work is (paraphrased) "take a sick day if you need it; if it's going to be several days, we may need an explanation; if it's going to be a couple of weeks, you should go on short-term disability leave". Obviously if somebody is taking a lot of random "sick" days, their manager may have a word with them.
Consulting companies (ie body shops) I've worked for often have a two-tier pay system: salaried, which is lower per-hour but includes paid sick days, vacation etc; or hourly, which is higher per-hour but there are no benefits, if you don't work you don't get paid. You make your choice when you sign on.
Beaming high amounts of energy at certain targets could cause serious damage.
Hitting said targets with a few hundred pounds of TNT could cause serious damage, too.
To use the example of a megawatt beam an earlier poster mentioned, hitting a target with a one megawatt beam for one second delivers about the same energy as a hand grenade (about a half-pound of TNT). Yeah, for some very few targets that kind of exotic delivery system might be of interest, but most of the time a Tomahawk or even an RPG fired from a drone is easier and cheaper.
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Well, to be fair, if the driver already exists then whoever ends up working on it is going to have to coordinate with that driver's author or maintainer, otherwise they'll end up stepping on each others toes and all sorts of hilarity will ensue. Easier if the original requester initiates that - who knows, there may already be an update for the driver.
It's different, of course, if the driver is orphaned.
I'd say it's fair game that if, after trying to contact the driver's author and not getting a satisfactory response, throw it over to the Linux Driver Project explaining all that, there may well be somebody interested in taking it on.
Don't use the ATI drivers with the 9200, the open source drivers are better. My 9250 card (same radeon driver) works just fine. That's the last card that ATI actually released specs for up until the recent announcement by AMD/ATI.
Don't know about the joystick - I just have a relatively cheap Saitek ST290pro (USB) that works fine.
I got both of the above for use with FlightGear's Flight Simulator, the card gives me a decent 30 fps or so with all the effects turned on; glxgears runs at 1555 fps.
Exactly. Furthermore, lead salts (some of them, anyway) taste sweet, which is why kids are inclined to chew (leaded) paint flakes in the first place. (Toys, of course, are always chewed on.)
Isn't Data's neural network positronic?
Yes, blatantly ripped off (like much of Star Trek) from classic science fiction, in this case Asimov's Robot stories of the 1950s. (His robots had "positronic brains" mostly because it sounded cooler than "electronic" (by his own admission), although he later threw in some buzzwords to justify it.)
Yeah, and with a research reactor, it's not like they should have even close to a critical mass worth of uranium
It's probably not going to work real well if they don't.
Mind, if the U-235 is mixed with U-238, not to mention the various other elements mixed in to make the fuel assembly, it's not exactly going to be weapons grade. The other thing is that some designs (eg SLOWPOKE) make heavy use of beryllium reflectors to reduce the mass needed for criticality. (Since SLOWPOKE uses about 93% enriched uranium, this is a good thing. Even though that uranium is alloyed with aluminum in the fuel assembly, separating aluminum and uranium is trivial compared to enriching uranium.)
But yeah, uranium and radiation in general is a lot less scarey than most people think. No doubt a legacy from all those 50's sci-fi movies (which makes one wonder how much Hollywood really was being subtly influenced by the Soviets in those days).
Currently, there are approximately 25 universities across the United States with active nuclear reactors on campus
You know, when you've read as many science fiction books as I have, this shit is a liiiitle creepy.
I'm surprised that you're surprised. Heck, I didn't know the number but I knew various universities had nukes even in the sixties when I was in grade school -- I even got to visit the University of Toronto's reactor (well, parts of it) during an open house.
We're talking research reactors of a few kilowatts (or so) here, not multi-hundred-megawatt power reactors. (Although NC State has a one megawatt "swimming pool" type (see the "Dr. No" movie) reactor, and McMaster U in Hamilton (half way between Toronto and Buffalo if you're driving around the lake) has a 5 MW reactor (also pool type) which has a full containment building.)
The very first nuclear reactor was constructed in a racquet court at University of Chicago, for Pete's sake. I don't know what kind of "science fiction" you're reading, but you might want to look for something with a little more science.
The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying, however, is about equal.
Even assuming this to be true (which, not having looked at the analysis, I reserve judgement on), if I'm planning a trip from A to B that are, say, 20 hours driving time or 2 hours flying time apart, flying is going to be 10 times safer for me than driving.
As in "Ground Effect Machine". At a seven foot altitude, this thing is well within its own ground effect. In other words, it's a hovercraft that looks like a helicopter.
Mind, I'll give the guy props for effort and ingenuity, and if he gets the 15 foot altitude version working that would be kind of fun to skim around in over open enough terrain. But an actual helicopter that can fly out of ground effect is a bit more of a challenge. (Me, I've lusted after Rotorway's homebuilt kits since their original Scorpion days.)
You forgot jump drive, key disk, and thumb drive.
No, I think "jump drive" is an SF term for some kind of hyperspace engine that gets your ship from A to B without messing around with the space in between.
It would be cool if you could buy those, though.
I use my giant robot cannon for hunting, you insensitive clod.
Bandersnatchi, no doubt.
Even if the fire button was completely manual things could still go wrong.
Absolutely. I was on the range once when the guy a couple of spots over had the mechanism fail (never did find out if it was dirt or breakage) on his FN and it started firing full auto without his hand anywhere near the trigger. Fortunately he (and/or the sergeant that was on him almost immediately) had the presence of mind to keep it pointed downrange until it emptied.
people rarely, if ever, joke about something anything that affects and hurts them
Two or three days after my dad died (I was 23) I started quoting Monty Python's parrot sketch to a friend on the phone who was having trouble grasping what I was talking about. Mind, the day of, I wouldn't have appreciated that at all.
By the time of the wake there were plenty of us cracking jokes. Dad would have appreciated it.
Shit happens. Deal and move on.
A while back when I was actively sending out resumes, many places were happy with PDF. For those that insisted on "Word format", I sent them an RTF. A few places insisted on RTF over DOC, to avoid Word virus problems.
A few years ago I discovered a "standard" XML schema (HR-XML) for resumes, etc (see e.g. here. Never found anywhere that actually used it, though, but that may have changed since.
In general, any document that's going to be distributed outside of my organization (a very large IT industry player) is done so as a PDF. Certainly anything formal is. A spreadsheet for e.g. a weekly status meeting with a customer may go out as is (.xls), but sending out a .doc is pretty rare. The latter would either be text in the body of an email or a PDF.
> Cross references, table of contents, footnotes. Plain text doesn't have it.
Of course it does. Anything from LaTeX, through to simple SGML-like markup through to reStructuredText.
To say nothing of [gnt]roff, {IBM,Waterloo} Script, Formal, and others using "dot" markup going back to the 1970s, at least. Most (all of the above, certainly) include macros, too.
And since they're text, you do version control with the same tools as for source code (eg SCCS, back in the day).
The signal becomes poor a lot faster with analog than with digital. Yes, a really bad digital signal will give you freeze-ups and mosaics, a really bad analog signal gives you snow, loss of sync, noisy sound, ghosting, tearing...
I plugged a cheap pair of rabbit ears that I had lying around into my new TV -- the digital channels come in consistently better than their analog counterparts (where such analog counterparts even exist - there are more digital channels).
(Mostly I don't watch any broadcast or cable TV - if there's a TV series that interests me I'll wait for it to come out on DVD. Over a typical season, that's four or five hours saved not watching commercials.)
This has to do with shell expansion and the argument list that gets passed to exec(). It's fixed in a recent Linux kernel version, it now allows argument lists limited only by available memory.
Of course there were always ways around it.
Even if OCR only has a 50% success rate, that means that it is 50% less work that someone is going to be doing.
While in general I agree with your point -- a thing doesn't have to be perfect to be useful -- OCR with only a 50% success rate is likely to mean more work for somebody who has to go through and correct it. At some point it's easier just to retype the whole thing manually than go through correcting all the OCR errors, and I think that point is a lot fewer errors than 50%. (Been there, done that.)
This has to be Microsoft's best shot, after the SCO "Unix copyrights" attack collapsed. They're clearly -- if indirectly -- targetting the Linux Desktop, which is what threatens Windows (and Office) revenue most.
But this lawsuit only relates to the desktop. RedHat, Novell, and the other distros are -- assuming worst case (best case for Microsoft) where the patent is upheld and the distro companies get slapped with an injunction -- still free to distribute Linux that doesn't include a desktop (or at least not one that appears to infringe). But most Linux server farms happily hum along in runlevel 3; no X Windows, no desktop, no Gnome or KDE. Even for those that want a graphical management console (although most sysadmins I know prefer to just ssh in and use the command line), things like webmin or HPs System Managment Homepage (for Proliants) don't need graphics running on the server.
So if this is Microsoft's best shot, they've lost the server room (not that they really ever had it).
Software patents don't exist or aren't enforceable in most of Europe. Or, for that matter, the rest of the world, but Microsoft has just lost major antitrust battles in Europe recently. European-based distros like Mandriva -- or even foreign subsidiaries of Novell and RedHat -- are free to continue distributing desktop Linux. It's quite possible that this action -- which while it may not be Microsoft filing the suit, it's pretty clearly Microsoft pulling the strings -- will fuel the already rising anti-Microsoft sentiment in Europe.
Again, if this is Microsoft's best shot, they're going to be losing the desktop in Europe. (Admittedly not overnight, but any exponential process starts slow. It'll follow a Gompertz curve, and it's just at the lower inflection point. (There will always be a few holdouts.)
If it isn't Microsoft's best shot -- as no doubt some would like to argue -- then what would be? And why aren't they taking it?
Both Novell and Redhat make GNU/Linux distributions, which they sell with hardware.
Excuse me? Where can I buy a RedHat or Novell branded computer? They sell software[*].
Ironically, in the recent Supreme Court AT&T vs Microsoft decision, the Supremes found in favor of Microsoft that software per se is not a component of an infringing device, but infringement only happens when the software is run on a computer. (There are detail differences in the cases, of course, part of it including what was being shipped overseas.)
[*] Technically, they don't even sell software, but software support.
So it appears that this story is a fraud.
Oh, what a pity.
According to our website stats Windows Vista market now share is -- wait for it -- 11%
Yeah, but if you're running a support site for Vista you'd expect the stats to be skewed. It'd probably be even higher if most of the users didn't have to revert back to XP to be able to connect to your website at all.
(Joke, but it illustrates the value of such anecdotes.)
Brilliant idea!
Thank you, but it's not original.
Let's put the receivers and transmitters right next to the gigawatt microwave antenna! That will surely fix all those problems!
Yep. Unless you're trying to watch satellite TV in the middle of a rectenna farm, of course -- although even there they'd likely have the transponders for that particular region mounted on a different satellite. It's not like everything on the powersat has to point in the same direction, you know, or operate at the same frequency.
This isn't limited to the US, I've seen it with eg Canadian companies too. But, it isn't universal practice either. Most of the companies I've worked for (Canada and US) don't put a specific limit on the number of "sick days" one takes.
Current policy where I work is (paraphrased) "take a sick day if you need it; if it's going to be several days, we may need an explanation; if it's going to be a couple of weeks, you should go on short-term disability leave". Obviously if somebody is taking a lot of random "sick" days, their manager may have a word with them.
Consulting companies (ie body shops) I've worked for often have a two-tier pay system: salaried, which is lower per-hour but includes paid sick days, vacation etc; or hourly, which is higher per-hour but there are no benefits, if you don't work you don't get paid. You make your choice when you sign on.
Beaming high amounts of energy at certain targets could cause serious damage.
Hitting said targets with a few hundred pounds of TNT could cause serious damage, too.
To use the example of a megawatt beam an earlier poster mentioned, hitting a target with a one megawatt beam for one second delivers about the same energy as a hand grenade (about a half-pound of TNT). Yeah, for some very few targets that kind of exotic delivery system might be of interest, but most of the time a Tomahawk or even an RPG fired from a drone is easier and cheaper.