It would be possible to have a MMOG that didn't focus on character advancement, or one with relatively little benefit to playing a lot during a short amount of real time, or one where there was a substantial game-wide cooperative component. Of course, MMOGs generally try to make people obsessed, because that lets them charge a lot per player and still get people. But different game balances are possible which would lead to different audiences.
For example, they could do a MMO version of GTA in which you could get cool new vehicles either by playing enough to unlock them or by just getting in when someone else gets out. You can get special items either by unlocking them, or by hanging around when obsessive people crash into buildings. They could arrange areas to only be available a certain amount of real-world time after you start playing, or gradually change things globally to keep it interesting. And they could have different gangs get bigger and smaller, and have different stuff available, based on the actions of all the players who play on a particular server combined.
"In hindsight," says Lutz, "we shouldn't have tried to cut over to a new infrastructure at the same time we were deploying a new software application. It was too much at once."
They found that their Linux servers couldn't support the new application they had deployed at the same time. That doesn't mean it's less capable than the mainframes they replaced: they didn't even try running the higher-load application against the mainframes.
They should have first ported their servers to Linux on the mainframes, then switched them to Linux on clusters, then sent out new software that they could force back to the old behavior, then supported the new software in general.
That way, they'd have been able to isolate the problems more easily (which really turned out to be that the new application generated extreme peak loads, and nothing to do with Linux per se, aside from that they managed to improve the Linux performance to deal with it) and keep things stable while they fixed the issues.
People get a reasonable idea of what various justices think about various topics, and figure out how they might be expected to vote. They can't tell about the justices' actual discussion, but they do read the decisions and dissents, and look at what the authors say, how they write them, and who writes what decision, as well as how each justice voted on a particular case.
X11 came out before the GPL, so it could hardly have used it; the license was set even further back (they didn't start with version 11). Of course, they could have switched at some point, but trying to change the license is what killed quite a number of the organizations which have maintained X over the years, and excluding non-GPL versions would cause fragmentation, due to the various commercial versions.
Integrating RSS into the OS is a bad idea, but not nearly as bad an idea as integrating a web browser, which has all the same issues and more. RSS doesn't fundamentally do anything more than a web browser, aside from automating revisiting a site. It doesn't deal with local files, so there's no trusted files going through it to complicate authentication issues. It's also much more limited in the expected control of the user experience, so there's less chance to spoof things.
Knowing that, why wouldn't you just give up all the passwords at once? This would put you in exactly the position you'd be in if there was only one password; you don't have anything further to give them, and there's more randomness on the disk.
Actually, the smart thing would be to have a hard drive full of boring documents, and have a hidden directory full of porn, with all the important stuff steganographically added, encrypted, to the porn. That way your captors will have a reasonable explanation of every bit on the disk from the start, and you can just say that you don't take secret documents out of the office.
I still like the old "fixed", which is just carefully done. The 'x' is square, the accented characters aren't generally squashed, it doesn't need to be anti-aliased (which looks blury on small fonts), the O and 0 and the 1, I, and l look different, and line weights are consistent. Also, the iso10646 version has quite impressive coverage.
For that, you have to live in east Cambridge. I'm fairly certain that they've changed the intro sequence now that the Big Dig has completely changed the route from 93S to Storrow Drive. Although it does make me want to shout out "Cue Leonard Zakim!"
In fact, X.org's latest release notes have a substantial section on driver improvements for ATI cards which, as far as I can tell, didn't make it into XFree86's more recent release.
A couple of pages full of updated drivers, for one. One of the problems with XFree86 was that releases took forever and were very conservative, such that video hardware rarely survived long enough for the drivers to actually get into a release. This left lots of people stuck with the generic, non-accelerated drivers, with limited video modes and slow graphics.
Sorry Bill, we'd sure like to help you out, but the US military has to wax some cat in the middle east that evening. Or, rather, the politicians MS has bought in DC aren't the ones who can borrow the army.
The article makes it sound more creepy than it really is. It's not like they can reanimate just any dead dog. It's effectively a lot like anaestesia, but more stuff shuts down. The electrical shock to restart the heart is more prime-time drama than 50s sci-fi at this point. It's the whole shouting "clear" thing.
While "take" is generally used in contexts where coming to have something means that it stops being where it was, I believe it only actually means the former and not the latter. If you consider stuff that gets duplicated in transit, "take" seems to apply naturally: "take your work home with you", "take Algebra", "take a picture", "take an extra turn", and so forth.
That definition is also flawed; if I intend to return something, but don't actually return it, or if I do return it, but the owner didn't want to be deprived of it, it is still stealing (by my understanding, at least). I'd say (1) should be "to deprive the legitimate owner of something by taking it".
Actually, spammers started using SPF before anybody else, having guessed (correctly) that software would be more likely to deliver spam with SPF than without. SPF means that, when you get spam from some throwaway domain, it's really from that throwaway domain.
Actually, according to Reuters, the Russian officials only said that the spacecraft was not delivered to its planned orbit, and that they don't know if it is in some other orbit or has crashed. So Fox overstated the failure report, which only said that the craft is not in the planned orbit with a flaky transmitter, but is actually somewhere else, due to the launch vehicle failing. This is consistant with the report of a weak signal, and the search for it both in orbit and on the ground.
You might also consider that the measure they use to determine bias is how often each one cites a particular think-tank. They didn't take into account anything about how the citation was used (such as whether it was given in favorable terms or not), nor did they consider in any way content not attributed to outside sources. Your post, by this metric, would be based on Newsweek, UCLA, and ADA, plus, possibly, FOX News, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, and the other sources you refer to. For that matter, that article would show a substantial liberal bias (since it discusses a number of sources which, evidentally, have a liberal bias), despite the obvious fact that a paper on that topic with a liberal bias would have the opposite conclusion.
We have that in Massachusetts. It's nice for avoiding riders, but it has certain problems: they can't pass a bill to tax one thing (e.g., gas) to fund a different thing (e.g., public transit), and it's therefore possible for one bill to pass and the other not. If the funding bill is first, opponents will say there isn't money to fund it. If the taxation bill is first, opponents will come up with more popular things to spend the money on.
I think a better solution would be to have a quick process for undoing the effects of a rider. The day after passing a bill with a rider that wouldn't have passed as a bill by itself, anyone could propose repealing the rider, everyone would look at the rider and realize that it's something noteworthy that wasn't actually discussed at all, and they'd vote with no argument for keeping it (since no argument was initially raised for adding it). Chances are that such a bill would survive a presidental veto on general principle (or the threat of sneaking something nasty about the areas that fail to support it into the next popular bill).
Is it just me, or might MacAuthur have been disturbed by the section which discribed Nagasaki geography in terms of Manhatten, and been ill-disposed to the rest of the article because of it? That's just a bit too much identification with the enemy for comfort, plus they probably didn't want to give the citizens of NYC particular nightmares. And, even though the article reports that most of the stuff destroyed was factories of military contractors, it associates it with a residental and business area.
Hard science fiction, done well, is generally an exploration of the consequences of a universe which could be real but happens not to be (or isn't currently). Consider Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars series; it raises a huge number of issues that arise as consequences of technology which is not yet available, but probably will be. When the real world catches up, we will have to deal with these issues, and it's probably worth starting now. (E.g., if we find ways to cure everything at a high cost, which seems likely, how will we deal with rich people who live forever, which the poor die of old age and the young have reproductive urges to replenish populations that aren't dying?)
Soft science fiction, done well, is generally an exploration of aspects of how the universe really is, projected for expository purposes into a universe that is different in many ways. The original Star Trek, for example, was a discussion of 1960s American gender and race relations, with a veneer of unreality that made it acceptable to broadcast in explicit detail. Aliens and FTL travel were just props; the vision of the future was a black woman on the bridge and nobody finding it notable.
Re:One thing I'm a bit confused about...
on
Kernel 2.6.12 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The problem was that starting an unstable series was exactly the kind of fork that causes problems with development. There was a substantial period when the functionality needed to run a system with recent software and on recent hardware was only in the unstable one of the official series, and was backported to the nominally stable series by each distro individually separately and to different degrees. Furthermore, there was constant pressure to add new features to the officially stable series, rather than to the unstable series (or backported from the unstable series).
The central problem was that series progressed from unstable to stable to obsolescent to non-functioning. The solution is to always have a place for unstable features (the -mm series) and a place for stable features (the mainline series), and features move into the stable series as they become stable, rather than requiring a major upheaval and years of fussing. Then there needs to be something that corresponds to the period where mistakes in a release are fixed in a release that doesn't include anything else, even new features which are extensively tested; this is only useful until there are no known regressions in the next version with added features.
The reason that the numbering changed is that, were the numbering maintained, the recent releases would now be 2.16.11, 2.18.0, and 2.19.0 (assuming that the new system was adopted at 2.6.6, the old numbering would make what was 2.6.7 into 2.8.0, and so forth, replacing one point release with two minors, which would just be silly). Also, it would be confusing if 2.17.x included stuff that wasn't in 2.18.0, was in 2.19.0, and was in 2.20.0; this is what happens to anything that's still in testing when a release is made and then stabilizes. Since there's always stuff in testing, no stable release could ever be made without having the existance of features be confusingly non-continguous.
In any case, 2.6.x.y is now about as stable as 2.4.x was during the period before distros started moving to 2.6.
It's good to see Linux making a comeback at uCenter. I remember seeing Linux CDs there back in the day (when "Linux CDs" were snapshots of tsx-11.mit.edu or other FTP sites). For a while, they were a lot less clueful about Linux, though, so I haven't actually gone there for anything higher-level than keyboards and cables in ages.
Linus only works on the kernel (and a couple of tools, but not equivalents of what Windows comes with), and the Windows kernel is not accessible to users. There aren't really any practices of Windows, best or otherwise, that he'd be able to carry over.
That's almost certainly the clock interrupt, which, at the time, was generally 100 Hz on Linux, and is now generally 1 kHz. In fact, the thing that's likely to seem quaint before too long is having a constant value, not expecting the value to be less than 10 kHz. This clock is related to system speed, in that it's basically the rate at which housekeeping tasks get done, and it's enough slower than the processor speed that a useful amount of work gets done between ticks, and fast enough that the delay isn't too noticeable when you have to wait for it to tick.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be possible to have a MMOG that didn't focus on character advancement, or one with relatively little benefit to playing a lot during a short amount of real time, or one where there was a substantial game-wide cooperative component. Of course, MMOGs generally try to make people obsessed, because that lets them charge a lot per player and still get people. But different game balances are possible which would lead to different audiences.
For example, they could do a MMO version of GTA in which you could get cool new vehicles either by playing enough to unlock them or by just getting in when someone else gets out. You can get special items either by unlocking them, or by hanging around when obsessive people crash into buildings. They could arrange areas to only be available a certain amount of real-world time after you start playing, or gradually change things globally to keep it interesting. And they could have different gangs get bigger and smaller, and have different stuff available, based on the actions of all the players who play on a particular server combined.
"In hindsight," says Lutz, "we shouldn't have tried to cut over to a new infrastructure at the same time we were deploying a new software application. It was too much at once."
They found that their Linux servers couldn't support the new application they had deployed at the same time. That doesn't mean it's less capable than the mainframes they replaced: they didn't even try running the higher-load application against the mainframes.
They should have first ported their servers to Linux on the mainframes, then switched them to Linux on clusters, then sent out new software that they could force back to the old behavior, then supported the new software in general.
That way, they'd have been able to isolate the problems more easily (which really turned out to be that the new application generated extreme peak loads, and nothing to do with Linux per se, aside from that they managed to improve the Linux performance to deal with it) and keep things stable while they fixed the issues.
People get a reasonable idea of what various justices think about various topics, and figure out how they might be expected to vote. They can't tell about the justices' actual discussion, but they do read the decisions and dissents, and look at what the authors say, how they write them, and who writes what decision, as well as how each justice voted on a particular case.
X11 came out before the GPL, so it could hardly have used it; the license was set even further back (they didn't start with version 11). Of course, they could have switched at some point, but trying to change the license is what killed quite a number of the organizations which have maintained X over the years, and excluding non-GPL versions would cause fragmentation, due to the various commercial versions.
Integrating RSS into the OS is a bad idea, but not nearly as bad an idea as integrating a web browser, which has all the same issues and more. RSS doesn't fundamentally do anything more than a web browser, aside from automating revisiting a site. It doesn't deal with local files, so there's no trusted files going through it to complicate authentication issues. It's also much more limited in the expected control of the user experience, so there's less chance to spoof things.
Knowing that, why wouldn't you just give up all the passwords at once? This would put you in exactly the position you'd be in if there was only one password; you don't have anything further to give them, and there's more randomness on the disk.
Actually, the smart thing would be to have a hard drive full of boring documents, and have a hidden directory full of porn, with all the important stuff steganographically added, encrypted, to the porn. That way your captors will have a reasonable explanation of every bit on the disk from the start, and you can just say that you don't take secret documents out of the office.
I still like the old "fixed", which is just carefully done. The 'x' is square, the accented characters aren't generally squashed, it doesn't need to be anti-aliased (which looks blury on small fonts), the O and 0 and the 1, I, and l look different, and line weights are consistent. Also, the iso10646 version has quite impressive coverage.
For that, you have to live in east Cambridge. I'm fairly certain that they've changed the intro sequence now that the Big Dig has completely changed the route from 93S to Storrow Drive. Although it does make me want to shout out "Cue Leonard Zakim!"
In fact, X.org's latest release notes have a substantial section on driver improvements for ATI cards which, as far as I can tell, didn't make it into XFree86's more recent release.
A couple of pages full of updated drivers, for one. One of the problems with XFree86 was that releases took forever and were very conservative, such that video hardware rarely survived long enough for the drivers to actually get into a release. This left lots of people stuck with the generic, non-accelerated drivers, with limited video modes and slow graphics.
Sorry Bill, we'd sure like to help you out, but the US military has to wax some cat in the middle east that evening. Or, rather, the politicians MS has bought in DC aren't the ones who can borrow the army.
The article makes it sound more creepy than it really is. It's not like they can reanimate just any dead dog. It's effectively a lot like anaestesia, but more stuff shuts down. The electrical shock to restart the heart is more prime-time drama than 50s sci-fi at this point. It's the whole shouting "clear" thing.
While "take" is generally used in contexts where coming to have something means that it stops being where it was, I believe it only actually means the former and not the latter. If you consider stuff that gets duplicated in transit, "take" seems to apply naturally: "take your work home with you", "take Algebra", "take a picture", "take an extra turn", and so forth.
That definition is also flawed; if I intend to return something, but don't actually return it, or if I do return it, but the owner didn't want to be deprived of it, it is still stealing (by my understanding, at least). I'd say (1) should be "to deprive the legitimate owner of something by taking it".
Actually, spammers started using SPF before anybody else, having guessed (correctly) that software would be more likely to deliver spam with SPF than without. SPF means that, when you get spam from some throwaway domain, it's really from that throwaway domain.
Actually, according to Reuters, the Russian officials only said that the spacecraft was not delivered to its planned orbit, and that they don't know if it is in some other orbit or has crashed. So Fox overstated the failure report, which only said that the craft is not in the planned orbit with a flaky transmitter, but is actually somewhere else, due to the launch vehicle failing. This is consistant with the report of a weak signal, and the search for it both in orbit and on the ground.
You might also consider that the measure they use to determine bias is how often each one cites a particular think-tank. They didn't take into account anything about how the citation was used (such as whether it was given in favorable terms or not), nor did they consider in any way content not attributed to outside sources. Your post, by this metric, would be based on Newsweek, UCLA, and ADA, plus, possibly, FOX News, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, and the other sources you refer to. For that matter, that article would show a substantial liberal bias (since it discusses a number of sources which, evidentally, have a liberal bias), despite the obvious fact that a paper on that topic with a liberal bias would have the opposite conclusion.
We have that in Massachusetts. It's nice for avoiding riders, but it has certain problems: they can't pass a bill to tax one thing (e.g., gas) to fund a different thing (e.g., public transit), and it's therefore possible for one bill to pass and the other not. If the funding bill is first, opponents will say there isn't money to fund it. If the taxation bill is first, opponents will come up with more popular things to spend the money on.
I think a better solution would be to have a quick process for undoing the effects of a rider. The day after passing a bill with a rider that wouldn't have passed as a bill by itself, anyone could propose repealing the rider, everyone would look at the rider and realize that it's something noteworthy that wasn't actually discussed at all, and they'd vote with no argument for keeping it (since no argument was initially raised for adding it). Chances are that such a bill would survive a presidental veto on general principle (or the threat of sneaking something nasty about the areas that fail to support it into the next popular bill).
Is it just me, or might MacAuthur have been disturbed by the section which discribed Nagasaki geography in terms of Manhatten, and been ill-disposed to the rest of the article because of it? That's just a bit too much identification with the enemy for comfort, plus they probably didn't want to give the citizens of NYC particular nightmares. And, even though the article reports that most of the stuff destroyed was factories of military contractors, it associates it with a residental and business area.
And to get it back to Earth, they can just produce non-glazed, defect-free items, which can then be sent down in microwaves...
Hard science fiction, done well, is generally an exploration of the consequences of a universe which could be real but happens not to be (or isn't currently). Consider Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars series; it raises a huge number of issues that arise as consequences of technology which is not yet available, but probably will be. When the real world catches up, we will have to deal with these issues, and it's probably worth starting now. (E.g., if we find ways to cure everything at a high cost, which seems likely, how will we deal with rich people who live forever, which the poor die of old age and the young have reproductive urges to replenish populations that aren't dying?)
Soft science fiction, done well, is generally an exploration of aspects of how the universe really is, projected for expository purposes into a universe that is different in many ways. The original Star Trek, for example, was a discussion of 1960s American gender and race relations, with a veneer of unreality that made it acceptable to broadcast in explicit detail. Aliens and FTL travel were just props; the vision of the future was a black woman on the bridge and nobody finding it notable.
The problem was that starting an unstable series was exactly the kind of fork that causes problems with development. There was a substantial period when the functionality needed to run a system with recent software and on recent hardware was only in the unstable one of the official series, and was backported to the nominally stable series by each distro individually separately and to different degrees. Furthermore, there was constant pressure to add new features to the officially stable series, rather than to the unstable series (or backported from the unstable series).
The central problem was that series progressed from unstable to stable to obsolescent to non-functioning. The solution is to always have a place for unstable features (the -mm series) and a place for stable features (the mainline series), and features move into the stable series as they become stable, rather than requiring a major upheaval and years of fussing. Then there needs to be something that corresponds to the period where mistakes in a release are fixed in a release that doesn't include anything else, even new features which are extensively tested; this is only useful until there are no known regressions in the next version with added features.
The reason that the numbering changed is that, were the numbering maintained, the recent releases would now be 2.16.11, 2.18.0, and 2.19.0 (assuming that the new system was adopted at 2.6.6, the old numbering would make what was 2.6.7 into 2.8.0, and so forth, replacing one point release with two minors, which would just be silly). Also, it would be confusing if 2.17.x included stuff that wasn't in 2.18.0, was in 2.19.0, and was in 2.20.0; this is what happens to anything that's still in testing when a release is made and then stabilizes. Since there's always stuff in testing, no stable release could ever be made without having the existance of features be confusingly non-continguous.
In any case, 2.6.x.y is now about as stable as 2.4.x was during the period before distros started moving to 2.6.
It's good to see Linux making a comeback at uCenter. I remember seeing Linux CDs there back in the day (when "Linux CDs" were snapshots of tsx-11.mit.edu or other FTP sites). For a while, they were a lot less clueful about Linux, though, so I haven't actually gone there for anything higher-level than keyboards and cables in ages.
Linus only works on the kernel (and a couple of tools, but not equivalents of what Windows comes with), and the Windows kernel is not accessible to users. There aren't really any practices of Windows, best or otherwise, that he'd be able to carry over.
That's almost certainly the clock interrupt, which, at the time, was generally 100 Hz on Linux, and is now generally 1 kHz. In fact, the thing that's likely to seem quaint before too long is having a constant value, not expecting the value to be less than 10 kHz. This clock is related to system speed, in that it's basically the rate at which housekeeping tasks get done, and it's enough slower than the processor speed that a useful amount of work gets done between ticks, and fast enough that the delay isn't too noticeable when you have to wait for it to tick.
It will also produce citations to articles which it doesn't have a URL for at all, so that you can go to a library and find a dead-tree version.