According to the TV news the other day here (UK), Beagle 2 was the first craft to actually use a parachute on a Mars descent (the idea was to slow it down for an impact on the surface at 40mph or so).
no link to back this up, but the guy with the beard who was running the project said on TV the other day that Beagle could function on its own for 20 days with no communication.
I think then it needed to be told to recharge its batteries (i.e. it wouldn't do that automatically and would then die from lack of juice)
Sorry but this is completely not true! I've been playing now since August and I haven't even touched a mining laser for at least 2 months.
My play revolves purely around....
- manufacturing and selling ammunition and missiles to support players who are fighting and having wars.
- trading ore and minerals for profit. Ok so people mine this stuff, but I just cart it about, refine it and sell it.
- pirating is fun too.
Oh, and yes you gain *skill points* even while not online - but you have to buy the *skills themselves* first, and they cost up to 10,000,000isk each (a lot!).
The motivation to play, for me at least, is cash - buying and selling stuff, trying to get the most profit, selling it where its needed (e.g. buying ore in places where people mine a lot, refining it, shipping it to where my refinery and labs are, manufacturing guns and ammunition, shipping that out in the wildlands where people are fighting and selling for huge profit).
You most likely don't need RAID, you say yourself you don't need the performance and you probably dont mind being offline for a couple of hours swapping out hardware if the worst happens.
All you need is a few extra hard drives lying around that you back up to; perhaps two in the machine; manually copy from one to the other (or use rsync), and one offline for a weekly/fortnightly backup
Its not an ideal solution (what is?) but drives get bigger and cheaper all the time; just upgrade a bit more often than you would, keep a couple in the computer and rotate the others as offline backup...
one or two may die, but they won't all die
It is still a beta - so I guess it's fair enough...
but what's worse is its support for IFRAMES; in that if you refresh a page with an IFRAME and the url for the IFRAME content changes, Safari doesn't recognise that..... and it also intermittently loses all the query info off the end of the url too (the ?foo=bar&foo2=bar2 bits)
- ebuilds arent perfect. some dont work, others have known problems. it isnt always perfect. things are usually fixed quickly though.
- version mismatches. although its kinda cunning and you can have multiple versions of things installed (Qt 2 in/usr/qt/2/, Qt 3 in/usr/qt/3/ etc...) this doesnt always work! Can end up with some painful instabilities needing things to be unmerged and then re-emerged again after
- other version mismatches. some apps like autoconf 2.13, others like 2.5. you can easily change your 'active' one (export WANT_AUTOCONF_2_5="1" for 2.5) - but the ebuilds don't 'know' which one they want. Again, broken builds and more problems. Easily fixable but still a pain.
- upgrading doesn't get rid of old versions. Sometimes you really need to unmerge an old version of a program before emerging the new one or dependent apps will get confused and pick up the wrong versions of shared libs. I know this isn't meant to happen but it occasionally does..
- other weird stuff. recently I somehow lost my TEMP environment setting and emerge unpacked a fresh glibc version into / (still haven't cleaned up the mess..)
- cant resume an aborted build. start building big package (openoffice!). quit for whatever reason. have to start again from the beginning...
Don't get me wrong - I love Gentoo dearly, its my primary desktop that I spend 16 hours a day on doing all my work and all my pleasure. But nothing's perfect...:)
(and the support on the lists is truly excellent, so you're never completely lost..)
(and admittedly many of the problems above are as likely to be caused by the apps themselves as Gentoo..)
dunno about the rest but the transparent integration of non-free stuff is as good as it can be....
emerge nvidia (downloads and installs nvidia's binary closed source drivers, kernel and glx)
emerge ut2003-demo (yup, you guessed it...)
things like RealPlayer are slightly more complex (you have to get the install file from real.com then stick it in a directory before emerge'ing it - presumably because of Real's licensing).
Wasnt the original reason for this that files that were especially important were capitalised (README, INSTALL, etc) specifically so they'd head up the list in ls.
Sounds like a good idea to me - but a real pain in the butt when dealing with files created on Windows.
that looks awful similar to an old game called Puzzle Bobble if I remember rightly - is it related?
Re:Somewhat somplistic, aren't you?
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 2
How about saying no to the EULA box and mailing Microsoft for clarification on what exactly the EULA means?
MS will not clarify any EULAs - I contacted them last week about the license for the ASF file format spec (yukky clauses about not using it on/with/for Free software).. Anyway, they won't clarify - they just suggest that you seek independent legal advice.
I think the reason why though is fairly clear; anything else they say about the EULA would constrain themselves in any future legal actions related to it - so the EULA already says everything they're prepared to commit themselves to...
Hmm, I don't know about your experiences but I've found Intel's to be more reliable.
Ok so the AMD's have more performance, but they run hotter and are more liable to blow up (yeah ok, no evidence to back this up), The Intel chips jut seem to be built to more conservative tolerances.
Just my 2 cents I guess...
Re:the benefits of accurate timekeeping
on
Do You Have The Time?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Since latency between machines is almost equal, everybody is out by the same amount.
NTP uses a nifty little algorithm to compensate for network latency. I forget the details but it makes little difference whether you sync from a LAN box or from one on the other side of the planet.
First thing I do with a box is stick that in crontab. Run it once every day or two and job done. No real need for a local time server and LAN boxes synching from that; bandwidth usage is negligible and there are enough time servers for load not to be a problem.
I hate ASP as much as the next Linux guy here, but IIRC ASP isn't meant to be used much like that either (assuming use of VB in ASP that is). App logic should be done in COM objects and ASP/VB provides the glue between them and the HTML; just like what you said for JSP. Of course, with more capable languages under ASP thats probably not necessary.
There is quite a market for wireless cameras and video camera for hobbyists (R/C models and so forth). Have a look at this site for a starting point, and some googling will get a lot more...
The quality may not be so hot but they're small, lightweight and don't need a lot of battery power. The idea being you could have some sort of 'base station' a mile or so away that receives and records the images and/or video.
Thats what I was thinking but I wasnt sure enough to say - so, AMDs plans rest on us all going to 64bit; ok its a nice 64bit with good 32bit compatibility, but is anyone going to care...
I dont have any URLs to back this up - but the point of the P4 is specifically that it does less with each cycle (it doesn't even have a barrel shifter..) - but it's consciously and deliberately designed to be able to go to massive clock speeds as technology improves. Yes, it beats the Athlon clock-for-clock - but in 2 years time when the P4 is at 6Ghz or whereever, what is the Athlon going to do then?
IIRC the linux kit comes with an Ethernet adaptor, and in the interview they talked about mounting network shares - there should be no reason why playing over the network shouldn't work. They also say they are expecting some media players..
Slashdot Mirror
Ok you're probably trolling but I'll bite...
According to the TV news the other day here (UK), Beagle 2 was the first craft to actually use a parachute on a Mars descent (the idea was to slow it down for an impact on the surface at 40mph or so).
no link to back this up, but the guy with the beard who was running the project said on TV the other day that Beagle could function on its own for 20 days with no communication.
I think then it needed to be told to recharge its batteries (i.e. it wouldn't do that automatically and would then die from lack of juice)
Sorry but this is completely not true! I've been playing now since August and I haven't even touched a mining laser for at least 2 months.
My play revolves purely around....
- manufacturing and selling ammunition and missiles to support players who are fighting and having wars.
- trading ore and minerals for profit. Ok so people mine this stuff, but I just cart it about, refine it and sell it.
- pirating is fun too.
Oh, and yes you gain *skill points* even while not online - but you have to buy the *skills themselves* first, and they cost up to 10,000,000isk each (a lot!).
The motivation to play, for me at least, is cash - buying and selling stuff, trying to get the most profit, selling it where its needed (e.g. buying ore in places where people mine a lot, refining it, shipping it to where my refinery and labs are, manufacturing guns and ammunition, shipping that out in the wildlands where people are fighting and selling for huge profit).
Great fun!
ok I didn't explain myself all that well...
You most likely don't need RAID, you say yourself you don't need the performance and you probably dont mind being offline for a couple of hours swapping out hardware if the worst happens.
All you need is a few extra hard drives lying around that you back up to; perhaps two in the machine; manually copy from one to the other (or use rsync), and one offline for a weekly/fortnightly backup
Its not an ideal solution (what is?) but drives get bigger and cheaper all the time; just upgrade a bit more often than you would, keep a couple in the computer and rotate the others as offline backup... one or two may die, but they won't all die
Er, another good reason for FAT32 sucking balls is the 2Gb file size limit.
/home/ | gzip > /mnt/backup/filename.tar.gz) had to become a little more complex because of this...
My nice backup solution (tar --create
(ok so for anyone else in a similar boat, 'man split' should help)
It is still a beta - so I guess it's fair enough...
.. and it also intermittently loses all the query info off the end of the url too (the ?foo=bar&foo2=bar2 bits)
but what's worse is its support for IFRAMES; in that if you refresh a page with an IFRAME and the url for the IFRAME content changes, Safari doesn't recognise that...
Now what exactly would a MISD(multiple instructions single data) system be?! And, can anyone point to an example of such a system?
They don't exist - just a theoretical fourth type to complete the set. Always in computer science courses, but none ever built.
There are a few....
/usr/qt/2/, Qt 3 in /usr/qt/3/ etc...) this doesnt always work! Can end up with some painful instabilities needing things to be unmerged and then re-emerged again after
:)
- ebuilds arent perfect. some dont work, others have known problems. it isnt always perfect. things are usually fixed quickly though.
- version mismatches. although its kinda cunning and you can have multiple versions of things installed (Qt 2 in
- other version mismatches. some apps like autoconf 2.13, others like 2.5. you can easily change your 'active' one (export WANT_AUTOCONF_2_5="1" for 2.5) - but the ebuilds don't 'know' which one they want. Again, broken builds and more problems. Easily fixable but still a pain.
- upgrading doesn't get rid of old versions. Sometimes you really need to unmerge an old version of a program before emerging the new one or dependent apps will get confused and pick up the wrong versions of shared libs. I know this isn't meant to happen but it occasionally does..
- other weird stuff. recently I somehow lost my TEMP environment setting and emerge unpacked a fresh glibc version into / (still haven't cleaned up the mess..)
- cant resume an aborted build. start building big package (openoffice!). quit for whatever reason. have to start again from the beginning...
Don't get me wrong - I love Gentoo dearly, its my primary desktop that I spend 16 hours a day on doing all my work and all my pleasure. But nothing's perfect...
(and the support on the lists is truly excellent, so you're never completely lost..)
(and admittedly many of the problems above are as likely to be caused by the apps themselves as Gentoo..)
dunno about the rest but the transparent integration of non-free stuff is as good as it can be....
emerge nvidia (downloads and installs nvidia's binary closed source drivers, kernel and glx)
emerge ut2003-demo (yup, you guessed it...)
things like RealPlayer are slightly more complex (you have to get the install file from real.com then stick it in a directory before emerge'ing it - presumably because of Real's licensing).
Seriously, its good - even for non-free stuff..
The problem is that good quality fonts are extremely time consuming and hard to make; so no-one wants to give them away for free.
:(
There is the Luxi font set donated by Bigelow & Holmes which seems quite popular, but I can't say I like them much
XFree has Luxi fonts: http://www.xfree86.org/4.2.0/fonts3.html
Microsoft's free fonts are of excellent quality though, and they're still available at the link below (completely legally too!):
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/
Wasnt the original reason for this that files that were especially important were capitalised (README, INSTALL, etc) specifically so they'd head up the list in ls.
Sounds like a good idea to me - but a real pain in the butt when dealing with files created on Windows.
er no, there is an _option_ to use mozilla for rendering instead of khtml, but its not turned on by default.
that looks awful similar to an old game called Puzzle Bobble if I remember rightly - is it related?
How about saying no to the EULA box and mailing Microsoft for clarification on what exactly the EULA means?
MS will not clarify any EULAs - I contacted them last week about the license for the ASF file format spec (yukky clauses about not using it on/with/for Free software).. Anyway, they won't clarify - they just suggest that you seek independent legal advice.
I think the reason why though is fairly clear; anything else they say about the EULA would constrain themselves in any future legal actions related to it - so the EULA already says everything they're prepared to commit themselves to...
Hmm, I don't know about your experiences but I've found Intel's to be more reliable.
Ok so the AMD's have more performance, but they run hotter and are more liable to blow up (yeah ok, no evidence to back this up), The Intel chips jut seem to be built to more conservative tolerances.
Just my 2 cents I guess...
Since latency between machines is almost equal, everybody is out by the same amount.
NTP uses a nifty little algorithm to compensate for network latency. I forget the details but it makes little difference whether you sync from a LAN box or from one on the other side of the planet.
First thing I do with a box is stick that in crontab. Run it once every day or two and job done. No real need for a local time server and LAN boxes synching from that; bandwidth usage is negligible and there are enough time servers for load not to be a problem.
Why can't you just edit it and change the layout so the diagrams go down the page instead of across?
If you can't do HTML try one of the many WYSIWYG editors (Frontpage et al, bleurgh).
Otherwise, post links to the pages - it'd be pretty trivial to knock up a script to do it for you...
I know I'm going to get modded down for this but the link in the article is wrong.
http://freebsdfoundation.org/
I hate ASP as much as the next Linux guy here, but IIRC ASP isn't meant to be used much like that either (assuming use of VB in ASP that is). App logic should be done in COM objects and ASP/VB provides the glue between them and the HTML; just like what you said for JSP. Of course, with more capable languages under ASP thats probably not necessary.
Ah well, I'll stick to me PHP+Postgres any day.
There is quite a market for wireless cameras and video camera for hobbyists (R/C models and so forth). Have a look at this site for a starting point, and some googling will get a lot more...
h tm
http://www.wirelessvideocameras.com/hobbyequip.
The quality may not be so hot but they're small, lightweight and don't need a lot of battery power. The idea being you could have some sort of 'base station' a mile or so away that receives and records the images and/or video.
Thats what I was thinking but I wasnt sure enough to say - so, AMDs plans rest on us all going to 64bit; ok its a nice 64bit with good 32bit compatibility, but is anyone going to care...
I dont have any URLs to back this up - but the point of the P4 is specifically that it does less with each cycle (it doesn't even have a barrel shifter..) - but it's consciously and deliberately designed to be able to go to massive clock speeds as technology improves. Yes, it beats the Athlon clock-for-clock - but in 2 years time when the P4 is at 6Ghz or whereever, what is the Athlon going to do then?
IIRC the linux kit comes with an Ethernet adaptor, and in the interview they talked about mounting network shares - there should be no reason why playing over the network shouldn't work. They also say they are expecting some media players..
:))
All sounds good to me