We cannot make another saturn V because some of the paperwork has been lost.
This is incorrect. The Saturn V blueprints are safe and completely intact on microfilm at MSFC, where they have been since the 1960s. Nothing at all has been lost. From the link:
"The Federal Archives in East Point, Georgia, also has 2,900 cubic feet of Saturn documents," he said. "Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F 1 and J 2 engine production to assist in any future restart."
This oughta give the elves a good chance to try out his w1r3l355 sk177z! All they gotta do is hook up that wireless adapter up to bigred.santa.org, set it to promiscuous mode and fire up with Ethereal. They'll be through the WEP in no time, and then the way will be cleared for them to download as much hot elf-on-reindeer action as they can handle!
Looks like, at least in parts, the imagery is from an older dataset than what's on the Keyhole service. I live in a large neighborhood that's been under construction for 3 years across the various sections, and there are more houses in the Keyhole dataset than on the Google Maps satellite images.
No idea how much older, but it can't be more than a year or so.
I better run into the datacenter and unplug all the Linux-powered EMC control stations and NAS heads we just bought! And they told us that they take security seriously! LIARS!
I disagree with the idea that without manned spaceflight, the entire space program is doomed....The Mars rovers, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens have all been huge successes....We could be littering the entire solar system with probes if we'd stop spending people up to film themselves drinking spheres of Tang or working hard raising spiders in microgravity in the experiment submitted by Mrs. Wachowski's third-grade class in Salina, KS. Bang for buck.
"The conquest of space is worth the risk of life....Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because, in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men." -Gus Grissom
Grissom was talking about the moon, but it's true about any location. We go because that's what we do. Exploration salves the spirit.
Robot probes have their place, and it is a vital one, but you underestimate the power and importance of having a person there, whether there is the moon, Mars, or wherever else you're going--because until we're there, we'll not have been there.
They're not planning for it to fly until 2010, which is two years after the completion of CEV's first spiral.
Ugh, I have misspoken. 2008 is not the completion date for Spiral 1; 2008 is the fly-off date for the competing prototypes. Still, it is the first launch date, so my point is the same.
You'll note the capsule is a pathetic little thing nearly identical to the one Apollo had 40 years ago. In fact the whole lunar plan is just a regurgitation of Apollo, excepting they are missing one key component the Saturn V
A capsule is an extraordinarily efficient way to design anything that you're going to be de-orbiting through earth's atmosphere. Heat spreads evenly over the heat shield, and it's self-righting. By comparison, the shuttle is a monstrously inefficient, draggy beast. For lofting crew and eventually returning through the atmosphere, capsules are where it's at.
They're re-using the design because it works, and because it's a thousand times easier than designing a wasteful space-plane.
I'll go ahead and out myself here--I work for, um, one of the companies we've been talking about, directly on the current shuttle and station contracts. If you don't see anything substantive in the pretty-pictures public web site, it's because the public web site is a sales pitch.
And multiple launches for multiple components is indeed the order of the day. Delta IV Heavy's launch in December cleared the way for it to be the Boeing team's prime mover, at least during Spiral One, but I wouldn't be suprised if something bigger comes to the table eventually. Nobody said we had to loft the whole freaking assembly in one go.
Believe it or not you want to get the habitat to the surface and leave it there so making it inflatible and like a LEM is not a great idea.
Baby steps, man. Baby steps. First we gotta go there, then we get out and walk around and come back, and then we gotta stay there. Besides, those habitat mods link up, like LEGO, or like those multi-robot Transformer uber-robots, except minus all the destruction and ch-ch-ch-ch-ch noises.
If you see elements of Apollo recycled in the new Moon/Mars plans, it's because those things worked. LOR works, and it works well. So, LOR is the way to go. By extension, MOR ought to work well, too. The LM design worked--you need four legs to support the weight of the craft when it lands, because three isn't enough and five is too many. That's why you've got a lander with a descent stage that looks like the LM.
If Kliper flies, great. I'm all for it--I'm all for anything that continues space exploration, even if it's not my employer doing it, because we must go. But right now, all Kliper's got are some engineering plans and a mock-up, and the mock-up isn't done yet. They're not planning for it to fly until 2010, which is two years after the completion of CEV's first spiral.
Its completely delusional to think CEV will be usable at all for going to Mars.
Incorrect. I don't know about LockMart's proposed designs, but Boeing's Constellation project (briefly described near the bottom of this page) will do just that: Consisting of a crew exploration vehicle (CEV) and associated systems, CONSTELLATION will create capability for missions beyond Earth orbit.
I'm skeptical that they are going to land the whole CEV on the moon and blast if off from there. The Apollo strategy was the right one for a lot of reasons. To do the Moon right chances are a several vehicles will be required.
You said it. Again, I don't know a thing about LockMart's proposal, but Boeing & co. are developing a set of spacecraft. No one's sure yet whether or not they plan to use EOR or LOR (or MOR, I suppose it would be) to do the shuffling around of craft, but you're right.
If you've not read it, check Wikipedia's page on the CEV. In its current state, the page is quite informative and has a lot of good links.
By contrast NASA is wasting $500 billion on CEV this year alone and they wont get ANYTHING for it other than pretty computer generated images. Building CEV is going to cost at least 36 times as much as Kliper and is scheduled to be 4 years later for its first manned launch, 2010 versus 2014.
That's because CEV's intended role, as a platform that can be used for interplanetary expeditions, is much broader than Kliper's intended role as a bus to ferry people and cargo to LEO. The competing CEV design teams have a lot more complicated problems to solve, like, how do we keep the crew from being fried by radiation while they're hanging somewhere in the spaces between worlds, and how do we engineer a complex, multi-role vehicle that can launch, go to Mars, send down a lander component to deliver people and cargo, lift back off and rendezvous, and then return those people and cargo to earth?
You're not just comparing apples to oranges; you're comparing apples to 747s.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Report listed one permutation of a rescue mission that could have been launched to save Columbia, if anyone had realized the true severity of the damage to her wing. According to the report, a second shuttle (I believe it was Endeavour, but it's been a while since I read the report) could have been rolled out and launched in a matter of days, skipping the normal three-month pre-launch safety checklist.
The second shuttle could have rendezvoused with Columbia and brought to station-keeping directly below her, such that the two shuttles' cargo bays were facing each other (Columbia would have been orbiting upside-down and backward relative to the ground, as is standard). Columbia's crew could then have transferred to the rescue shuttle via tether.
All of this could have been done inside the week-long window before Columbia's consumables were exhausted; after the rescue, Columbia would have been de-orbited into the ocean.
One of the things that will be mandatory on all remaining shuttle launches will be for all shuttles to be able to rendezvous and dock with the ISS, in the event something like this happens again. This was not an option for Columbia, for a couple of reasons--she was unable to boost to the ISS's altitude, and she lacked the correct docking mechanism to couple with the ISS.
Re:Offline games require online reporting = BOGUS
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Steam Users Steamed
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· Score: 1
Many people have already pointed out that you only have to connect to Steam once to check authorization, and after that you can play single-player in offline mode all you want.
Very true. However, the procedure to play HL2 in offline mode is inconvenient as hell. Log onto Steam, make sure your game works, and then exit Steam without logging off. Then, unplug your computer from the Internet (or disable your NIC) and start Steam again. It will fallback into offline mode and you'll be able to play.
You must remember to disable your NIC or unplug your network cable every time you want to play the game. Just blocking ports isn't enough; Steam sees the active network connection and goes into on-line mode and then hangs at the "Looking for updates..." screen.
That's not a method. That's a hack. And a pretty messy one, at that.
I agree with the OP. I've lived in and around Clear Lake for as long as I've been breathing, and the near-daily sight of that Saturn V is as much a part of my life as blue sky and sunshine.
I'm glad they're taking efforts to keep it up--for a while it was in pretty bad shape, with visible mold and cracks running down the paint--but it should be on display, in the open. It's the first thing you notice as you drive past the Johnson Space Center, and it never fails to draw a gasp from any out-of-town guests I bring.
Hack into Valve's e-mail system. Then, tell them that you did it. They'll make you an awesome job offer--take it!! It worked out great for the last guy!
Balderdash. Balderdash is perhaps the greatest board game ever created. It's provided more hilarity and riot to my friends and I than anything else I've ever encountered.
Without Balderdash, I never would have known that vagitis means "what my wife is going to do to me when I get home" and that a shittah is "a ghetto toilet".
It's a great set of tools--we own it at work and managed our own Win2k -> WinXP upgrade using the PC Transplant and Deployment Server tools, but can massively bone you if you don't do enough testing. PC Transplant, in particular, can hurt if you--that's the application that lifts your profile off of one PC and slaps it down on another, so that you don't have to re-configure your Exchange settings, Office personalizations, backup documents and application settings and bookmarks, and a whole mess of other things. When doing an OS migration, if you don't design your personality transplant template correctly, you can end up with all kinds of Win2k-specific settings stuffed into your WinXP profile, which can lead to all kinds of crazy-ass problems.
And why would ANYONE be unwilling to block it from authenticating?
I certainly don't want a foreign, network-aware agent with the ability to execute arbitrary code calling home and telling another entity info about my computer. At work, we call that "spyware", and I spend a goodly amount of my day cleaning it up.
Valve is already using Steam to track pseudo-demographic data on their players' computers--RAM, graphics cards, processors and speed, OS, and those manner of things. The average WinXP user logs on with an administrative account; when running Steam in that context, the potential exists for massive abuses.
It is likely that Steam is being used to sniff credit card numbers and other personal stuff like that? No, of course it isn't. Still, I'd trust a game publishing company about as far as I can throw their corporate office. Vivendi certainly hasn't done anything to endear itself to me personally--I'd rather keep our relationship on the level of, "I'll write you a cheque and you give me your game". Anything beyond that--like, "I'll write you a cheque and you give me your game and then your game will call home and you can decide when and where I get to play it" is wrong.
Crap like this is why the first thing I do after buying a game is download the crack. There's already a crack to make Steam unnecessary for playing CS:S--I'll be snagging a similar crack for HL2 as soon as one shows up.
It does seem rather unfair that even the single-player portion of the game needs to touch the Steam authentication servers in order to become active; there appears to be no concession made to those who have no Internet connection (or are unwilling to allow the program to touch the public network).
Even Microsoft, with WinXP's activation, has a do-it-yourself option via telephone.
It's disappointing that a content *delivery* system like Steam is instead being used as a content *regulation* and *denial* system.
This is easy. Download Sharepod. It's an executable and two DLL files. Stick those files on your iPod in the root directory.
Plug the iPod into anyone's computer, navigate to it via explorer, and double-click the SharePod executable. Voila. You now have a nice, GUI-driven way to copy one, some, or all of the songs off of the iPod onto that computer.
Easy. Portable. Takes up a megabyte or two on your iPod. Works on any PC into which you can plug your iPod.
Since the site appears to have been utterly destroyed and the locator is timing out, the customer service number for Verizon Fiber Solutions. is 888-553-1555. These guys can check your availability for you.
I'm in Houston, TX, and they say no Fios for the forseeable future here.
Sounds like the same problem we face--4k client PCs in five locations--and we don't have too good of a solution.
We're currently taking a two-pronged approach. First, for the big baddies like Gator or Bonzi, we use Altiris Notification Server to find them and block their execution. This works tolerably well, but it's a reactive process--for me to block a spyware app, I have to know about it, and it has to be something of which I can deny exeuction (so, no browser helper objects).
Second prong is a managed install of Spybot S&D--we're enterprise licensed and maintain our own update server. We stick Spybot S&D in our base loads and force it to run on a schedule, automatically updating itself and running non-interactively. This catches lots, but can sometimes interfere with the users' work.
There is also an ongoing user education effort, consisting of mandatory training and constant reminders about how spyware works and how one gets infected, but that's about as hopeless as bailing the ocean with a kid's toy bucket. I'm long past the point of hoping that the general user population can learn about how not to get infected with spyware; I'm resigned to spending the rest of my days hearing about how someone in Marketing was hitting the gambling sites at lunch and picked up yet another malware app.
I'm at work right now, and I have two Dell 2001FPs running dual-monitor. I was able to replicate *exactly* what's shown in the video--when dragging a window that spans both displays, the window moves faster on the primary display (on the left) than on the secondary display (on the right).
It's not the monitor. It's not CRT vs. LCD. It looks like that's the way Windows deals with multi-monitors.
I humbly suggest that the article submitter swap his displays and use the LCD as primary, and see if the CRT then displays the lag. Bet you dollars to donuts that it will.
I love it. I can see it in my mind, and it is beautiful.
The musical opens with the soul-wrenching duet, "Elvira Can't See Her Soaps".
Alex plays Starfighter, humming the main leitmotif and singing about how he's been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.
Centauri shows up after Alex beats the Starfighter game and does a vaudeville-style dance routine, eventually convincing Alex to get into the Starcar.
In the main briefing room, the leitmotif is explored in full orchestral splendor, with all the assembled starfighters and the president of the STar League singing the words, and eventually culminating in a stirring "VICTORY OR DEATH!" finale, complete with crashing cymbols and tympani, before they're interrupted by You-Know-Who:
Xur's massive holographic visage appears and sings a taunting, stinging song of rebuke, "I've Caught Your Master Spy! I've Caught Your Master Spy!"
Alex, realizing what he's up against, wants to get the hell out of there and head back to earth. The Rylans aren't happy with Centauri!
Rylan: Return the money, Centauri! Centauri: Return the money? Return the money?! Do you know how long it takes to design the games, to build the things, to get them into the stores by Christmas? And he has THE GIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFT... (breaks into song)
Of course, the base is attacked and destroyed, but not before Alex and Grigg escape in the prototype Gunstar.
Xur, on the bridge of his Ko-Dan Command Ship, sits alone and soulfully sings a mournful dirge, titled "It Takes More Than a Scepter To Rule (Even On Rylos)". He is interrupted with the news that one of the starfighters escaped the destruction of the Star League base, and sends an assassin to earth:
Centauri: Meanwhile, down here, they'll be going after Beta. Beta Unit: Beta? Alex: Beta!! All: BETAAAAAAA!! (break into song)
Other highlights include Centauri, Beta, and Alex's "Smells Like Zan-Do-Zan", Maggie's tear-jerking "I Love You, Alex Rogan!", and Grigg's musical highlight, "A Mobile Cave That Never Went Anywhere".
Fun for the whole family!!
The customer is not *always* right
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Best Buy Sued By Ohio
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The customer is not *always* right. The business is not *always* right. No one is always right. That's why treating your customers with respect (which sometimes means saying "no" to the truly asinine requests) is the best way to be successful.
Having been a Best Buy employee for three very long months in 1999, I can tell you that respect for the customer is *far* from BBUY's focus--it's all about PSPs, PSPs, PSPs--that's Product Support Plan, or BBUY's in-house extended warranty. I was told to lie about service policies, suggest that the product would be broken and unusable in a year without the PSP, and even offer discounts off of an item's price up to the amount of the PSP (and I worked in PC & Home Office, so the PSP was $199)--ANYTHING to get the customer to buy the damn thing.
That place is as close to evil as any company that exists. Not honoring rebates is probably in one of their SOP manuals.
The tins of meat are bought at a Dutch importer, who in turn buys them from a Belgium importer who buys them in the former Sovjet Union.
Oh yeah, that's chuffing tasty. Because God knows I can't go get a tin of meat at the corner market. I'd rather eat formerly Soviet meat that's been imported through three countries.
I deal with a lot of spyware/adware at work, and one of the big problems is that the user usually has no idea why the advert windows are popping up, nor from where they're coming.
I'd love to see spyware makers be forced to provide a small link at the bottom of *each advert window* that says something like, "This advertisement is being shown to you by $NAME_OF_PROGRAM. Click here for more information." Then, you could click the link and be taken to a page with a brief description of what the program is and what it does, and how to remove it. If it was installed because you installed KaZaa or whatever, it should say so there, too.
Perhaps I should torture myself further by dreaming up more completely reasonable but totally impossible things...
Slashdot Mirror
We cannot make another saturn V because some of the paperwork has been lost.
This is incorrect. The Saturn V blueprints are safe and completely intact on microfilm at MSFC, where they have been since the 1960s. Nothing at all has been lost. From the link:
"The Federal Archives in East Point, Georgia, also has 2,900 cubic feet of Saturn documents," he said. "Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F 1 and J 2 engine production to assist in any future restart."
This oughta give the elves a good chance to try out his w1r3l355 sk177z! All they gotta do is hook up that wireless adapter up to bigred.santa.org, set it to promiscuous mode and fire up with Ethereal. They'll be through the WEP in no time, and then the way will be cleared for them to download as much hot elf-on-reindeer action as they can handle!
I bet Santa haX.
Looks like, at least in parts, the imagery is from an older dataset than what's on the Keyhole service. I live in a large neighborhood that's been under construction for 3 years across the various sections, and there are more houses in the Keyhole dataset than on the Google Maps satellite images.
No idea how much older, but it can't be more than a year or so.
I better run into the datacenter and unplug all the Linux-powered EMC control stations and NAS heads we just bought! And they told us that they take security seriously! LIARS!
I disagree with the idea that without manned spaceflight, the entire space program is doomed....The Mars rovers, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens have all been huge successes....We could be littering the entire solar system with probes if we'd stop spending people up to film themselves drinking spheres of Tang or working hard raising spiders in microgravity in the experiment submitted by Mrs. Wachowski's third-grade class in Salina, KS. Bang for buck.
"The conquest of space is worth the risk of life....Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because, in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men."
-Gus Grissom
Grissom was talking about the moon, but it's true about any location. We go because that's what we do. Exploration salves the spirit.
Robot probes have their place, and it is a vital one, but you underestimate the power and importance of having a person there, whether there is the moon, Mars, or wherever else you're going--because until we're there, we'll not have been there.
They're not planning for it to fly until 2010, which is two years after the completion of CEV's first spiral.
Ugh, I have misspoken. 2008 is not the completion date for Spiral 1; 2008 is the fly-off date for the competing prototypes. Still, it is the first launch date, so my point is the same.
You'll note the capsule is a pathetic little thing nearly identical to the one Apollo had 40 years ago. In fact the whole lunar plan is just a regurgitation of Apollo, excepting they are missing one key component the Saturn V
A capsule is an extraordinarily efficient way to design anything that you're going to be de-orbiting through earth's atmosphere. Heat spreads evenly over the heat shield, and it's self-righting. By comparison, the shuttle is a monstrously inefficient, draggy beast. For lofting crew and eventually returning through the atmosphere, capsules are where it's at.
They're re-using the design because it works, and because it's a thousand times easier than designing a wasteful space-plane.
I'll go ahead and out myself here--I work for, um, one of the companies we've been talking about, directly on the current shuttle and station contracts. If you don't see anything substantive in the pretty-pictures public web site, it's because the public web site is a sales pitch.
And multiple launches for multiple components is indeed the order of the day. Delta IV Heavy's launch in December cleared the way for it to be the Boeing team's prime mover, at least during Spiral One, but I wouldn't be suprised if something bigger comes to the table eventually. Nobody said we had to loft the whole freaking assembly in one go.
Believe it or not you want to get the habitat to the surface and leave it there so making it inflatible and like a LEM is not a great idea.
Baby steps, man. Baby steps. First we gotta go there, then we get out and walk around and come back, and then we gotta stay there. Besides, those habitat mods link up, like LEGO, or like those multi-robot Transformer uber-robots, except minus all the destruction and ch-ch-ch-ch-ch noises.
If you see elements of Apollo recycled in the new Moon/Mars plans, it's because those things worked. LOR works, and it works well. So, LOR is the way to go. By extension, MOR ought to work well, too. The LM design worked--you need four legs to support the weight of the craft when it lands, because three isn't enough and five is too many. That's why you've got a lander with a descent stage that looks like the LM.
If Kliper flies, great. I'm all for it--I'm all for anything that continues space exploration, even if it's not my employer doing it, because we must go. But right now, all Kliper's got are some engineering plans and a mock-up, and the mock-up isn't done yet. They're not planning for it to fly until 2010, which is two years after the completion of CEV's first spiral.
Whatever works, as long as it works.
Its completely delusional to think CEV will be usable at all for going to Mars.
Incorrect. I don't know about LockMart's proposed designs, but Boeing's Constellation project (briefly described near the bottom of this page) will do just that:
Consisting of a crew exploration vehicle (CEV) and associated systems, CONSTELLATION will create capability for missions beyond Earth orbit.
There are even pretty pictures.
I'm skeptical that they are going to land the whole CEV on the moon and blast if off from there. The Apollo strategy was the right one for a lot of reasons. To do the Moon right chances are a several vehicles will be required.
You said it. Again, I don't know a thing about LockMart's proposal, but Boeing & co. are developing a set of spacecraft. No one's sure yet whether or not they plan to use EOR or LOR (or MOR, I suppose it would be) to do the shuffling around of craft, but you're right.
If you've not read it, check Wikipedia's page on the CEV. In its current state, the page is quite informative and has a lot of good links.
By contrast NASA is wasting $500 billion on CEV this year alone and they wont get ANYTHING for it other than pretty computer generated images. Building CEV is going to cost at least 36 times as much as Kliper and is scheduled to be 4 years later for its first manned launch, 2010 versus 2014.
That's because CEV's intended role, as a platform that can be used for interplanetary expeditions, is much broader than Kliper's intended role as a bus to ferry people and cargo to LEO. The competing CEV design teams have a lot more complicated problems to solve, like, how do we keep the crew from being fried by radiation while they're hanging somewhere in the spaces between worlds, and how do we engineer a complex, multi-role vehicle that can launch, go to Mars, send down a lander component to deliver people and cargo, lift back off and rendezvous, and then return those people and cargo to earth?
You're not just comparing apples to oranges; you're comparing apples to 747s.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Report listed one permutation of a rescue mission that could have been launched to save Columbia, if anyone had realized the true severity of the damage to her wing. According to the report, a second shuttle (I believe it was Endeavour, but it's been a while since I read the report) could have been rolled out and launched in a matter of days, skipping the normal three-month pre-launch safety checklist.
The second shuttle could have rendezvoused with Columbia and brought to station-keeping directly below her, such that the two shuttles' cargo bays were facing each other (Columbia would have been orbiting upside-down and backward relative to the ground, as is standard). Columbia's crew could then have transferred to the rescue shuttle via tether.
All of this could have been done inside the week-long window before Columbia's consumables were exhausted; after the rescue, Columbia would have been de-orbited into the ocean.
One of the things that will be mandatory on all remaining shuttle launches will be for all shuttles to be able to rendezvous and dock with the ISS, in the event something like this happens again. This was not an option for Columbia, for a couple of reasons--she was unable to boost to the ISS's altitude, and she lacked the correct docking mechanism to couple with the ISS.
Many people have already pointed out that you only have to connect to Steam once to check authorization, and after that you can play single-player in offline mode all you want.
Very true. However, the procedure to play HL2 in offline mode is inconvenient as hell. Log onto Steam, make sure your game works, and then exit Steam without logging off. Then, unplug your computer from the Internet (or disable your NIC) and start Steam again. It will fallback into offline mode and you'll be able to play.
You must remember to disable your NIC or unplug your network cable every time you want to play the game. Just blocking ports isn't enough; Steam sees the active network connection and goes into on-line mode and then hangs at the "Looking for updates..." screen.
That's not a method. That's a hack. And a pretty messy one, at that.
I agree with the OP. I've lived in and around Clear Lake for as long as I've been breathing, and the near-daily sight of that Saturn V is as much a part of my life as blue sky and sunshine.
I'm glad they're taking efforts to keep it up--for a while it was in pretty bad shape, with visible mold and cracks running down the paint--but it should be on display, in the open. It's the first thing you notice as you drive past the Johnson Space Center, and it never fails to draw a gasp from any out-of-town guests I bring.
Hack into Valve's e-mail system. Then, tell them that you did it. They'll make you an awesome job offer--take it!! It worked out great for the last guy!
Balderdash. Balderdash is perhaps the greatest board game ever created. It's provided more hilarity and riot to my friends and I than anything else I've ever encountered.
Without Balderdash, I never would have known that vagitis means "what my wife is going to do to me when I get home" and that a shittah is "a ghetto toilet".
The BBC article mentions that EDS is responsible for the ugprade. They're partnered with Altiris, so I'd be willing to bet that the upgrade was carried out using the Altiris Client Management Suite.
It's a great set of tools--we own it at work and managed our own Win2k -> WinXP upgrade using the PC Transplant and Deployment Server tools, but can massively bone you if you don't do enough testing. PC Transplant, in particular, can hurt if you--that's the application that lifts your profile off of one PC and slaps it down on another, so that you don't have to re-configure your Exchange settings, Office personalizations, backup documents and application settings and bookmarks, and a whole mess of other things. When doing an OS migration, if you don't design your personality transplant template correctly, you can end up with all kinds of Win2k-specific settings stuffed into your WinXP profile, which can lead to all kinds of crazy-ass problems.
And why would ANYONE be unwilling to block it from authenticating?
I certainly don't want a foreign, network-aware agent with the ability to execute arbitrary code calling home and telling another entity info about my computer. At work, we call that "spyware", and I spend a goodly amount of my day cleaning it up.
Valve is already using Steam to track pseudo-demographic data on their players' computers--RAM, graphics cards, processors and speed, OS, and those manner of things. The average WinXP user logs on with an administrative account; when running Steam in that context, the potential exists for massive abuses.
It is likely that Steam is being used to sniff credit card numbers and other personal stuff like that? No, of course it isn't. Still, I'd trust a game publishing company about as far as I can throw their corporate office. Vivendi certainly hasn't done anything to endear itself to me personally--I'd rather keep our relationship on the level of, "I'll write you a cheque and you give me your game". Anything beyond that--like, "I'll write you a cheque and you give me your game and then your game will call home and you can decide when and where I get to play it" is wrong.
Crap like this is why the first thing I do after buying a game is download the crack. There's already a crack to make Steam unnecessary for playing CS:S--I'll be snagging a similar crack for HL2 as soon as one shows up.
It does seem rather unfair that even the single-player portion of the game needs to touch the Steam authentication servers in order to become active; there appears to be no concession made to those who have no Internet connection (or are unwilling to allow the program to touch the public network).
Even Microsoft, with WinXP's activation, has a do-it-yourself option via telephone.
It's disappointing that a content *delivery* system like Steam is instead being used as a content *regulation* and *denial* system.
This is easy. Download Sharepod. It's an executable and two DLL files. Stick those files on your iPod in the root directory.
Plug the iPod into anyone's computer, navigate to it via explorer, and double-click the SharePod executable. Voila. You now have a nice, GUI-driven way to copy one, some, or all of the songs off of the iPod onto that computer.
Easy. Portable. Takes up a megabyte or two on your iPod. Works on any PC into which you can plug your iPod.
Since the site appears to have been utterly destroyed and the locator is timing out, the customer service number for Verizon Fiber Solutions. is 888-553-1555. These guys can check your availability for you.
I'm in Houston, TX, and they say no Fios for the forseeable future here.
Sounds like the same problem we face--4k client PCs in five locations--and we don't have too good of a solution.
We're currently taking a two-pronged approach. First, for the big baddies like Gator or Bonzi, we use Altiris Notification Server to find them and block their execution. This works tolerably well, but it's a reactive process--for me to block a spyware app, I have to know about it, and it has to be something of which I can deny exeuction (so, no browser helper objects).
Second prong is a managed install of Spybot S&D--we're enterprise licensed and maintain our own update server. We stick Spybot S&D in our base loads and force it to run on a schedule, automatically updating itself and running non-interactively. This catches lots, but can sometimes interfere with the users' work.
There is also an ongoing user education effort, consisting of mandatory training and constant reminders about how spyware works and how one gets infected, but that's about as hopeless as bailing the ocean with a kid's toy bucket. I'm long past the point of hoping that the general user population can learn about how not to get infected with spyware; I'm resigned to spending the rest of my days hearing about how someone in Marketing was hitting the gambling sites at lunch and picked up yet another malware app.
I'm at work right now, and I have two Dell 2001FPs running dual-monitor. I was able to replicate *exactly* what's shown in the video--when dragging a window that spans both displays, the window moves faster on the primary display (on the left) than on the secondary display (on the right).
It's not the monitor. It's not CRT vs. LCD. It looks like that's the way Windows deals with multi-monitors.
I humbly suggest that the article submitter swap his displays and use the LCD as primary, and see if the CRT then displays the lag. Bet you dollars to donuts that it will.
I love it. I can see it in my mind, and it is beautiful.
The musical opens with the soul-wrenching duet, "Elvira Can't See Her Soaps".
Alex plays Starfighter, humming the main leitmotif and singing about how he's been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.
Centauri shows up after Alex beats the Starfighter game and does a vaudeville-style dance routine, eventually convincing Alex to get into the Starcar.
Once on Rylos, Alex receives his uniform:
Rylan: Geeta!
Alex: Geeta?
Rylan: Geeta! Geeta!
Alex: Yeah, right--geeta.
Both: Geeta! Geeta! Geeta, geeta, geetaaaaaaaaaaa!! (break into song)
In the main briefing room, the leitmotif is explored in full orchestral splendor, with all the assembled starfighters and the president of the STar League singing the words, and eventually culminating in a stirring "VICTORY OR DEATH!" finale, complete with crashing cymbols and tympani, before they're interrupted by You-Know-Who:
Grigg: Xur!
Centauri: Xur!
Alex: Xur?
All: It's Xuuuuuuuuuuur!!!!!!!!! (break into song)
Xur's massive holographic visage appears and sings a taunting, stinging song of rebuke, "I've Caught Your Master Spy! I've Caught Your Master Spy!"
Alex, realizing what he's up against, wants to get the hell out of there and head back to earth. The Rylans aren't happy with Centauri!
Rylan: Return the money, Centauri!
Centauri: Return the money? Return the money?! Do you know how long it takes to design the games, to build the things, to get them into the stores by Christmas? And he has THE GIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFT... (breaks into song)
Of course, the base is attacked and destroyed, but not before Alex and Grigg escape in the prototype Gunstar.
Grigg: Target lights, Alex.
Alex: Target lights?
Grigg: Taaaaaaaaaaarget Liiiiiiiiiiiiights!! (breaks into song)
Xur, on the bridge of his Ko-Dan Command Ship, sits alone and soulfully sings a mournful dirge, titled "It Takes More Than a Scepter To Rule (Even On Rylos)". He is interrupted with the news that one of the starfighters escaped the destruction of the Star League base, and sends an assassin to earth:
Centauri: Meanwhile, down here, they'll be going after Beta.
Beta Unit: Beta?
Alex: Beta!!
All: BETAAAAAAA!! (break into song)
Other highlights include Centauri, Beta, and Alex's "Smells Like Zan-Do-Zan", Maggie's tear-jerking "I Love You, Alex Rogan!", and Grigg's musical highlight, "A Mobile Cave That Never Went Anywhere".
Fun for the whole family!!
The customer is not *always* right. The business is not *always* right. No one is always right. That's why treating your customers with respect (which sometimes means saying "no" to the truly asinine requests) is the best way to be successful.
Having been a Best Buy employee for three very long months in 1999, I can tell you that respect for the customer is *far* from BBUY's focus--it's all about PSPs, PSPs, PSPs--that's Product Support Plan, or BBUY's in-house extended warranty. I was told to lie about service policies, suggest that the product would be broken and unusable in a year without the PSP, and even offer discounts off of an item's price up to the amount of the PSP (and I worked in PC & Home Office, so the PSP was $199)--ANYTHING to get the customer to buy the damn thing.
That place is as close to evil as any company that exists. Not honoring rebates is probably in one of their SOP manuals.
The tins of meat are bought at a Dutch importer, who in turn buys them from a Belgium importer who buys them in the former Sovjet Union.
Oh yeah, that's chuffing tasty. Because God knows I can't go get a tin of meat at the corner market. I'd rather eat formerly Soviet meat that's been imported through three countries.
Seriously, who in the HELL would buy this?
I deal with a lot of spyware/adware at work, and one of the big problems is that the user usually has no idea why the advert windows are popping up, nor from where they're coming.
I'd love to see spyware makers be forced to provide a small link at the bottom of *each advert window* that says something like, "This advertisement is being shown to you by $NAME_OF_PROGRAM. Click here for more information." Then, you could click the link and be taken to a page with a brief description of what the program is and what it does, and how to remove it. If it was installed because you installed KaZaa or whatever, it should say so there, too.
Perhaps I should torture myself further by dreaming up more completely reasonable but totally impossible things...