The retail shops are fighting a losing battle: they will all have disappeared in just a few years, along with non-specialist music stores (i.e. stores selling things like vinyl that customers generally want to look at first) and anything else that can easily be delivered over the internet. They can no longer stop the ultimate disappearance of the 'high street game store' market than King Canute could hold back the sea.
Boycotting Steam games will just hasten their disappearance, since customers won't be able to find the games they want in the stores, and will naturally go for downloads instead.
And building a kernel really isn't mysterious to begin with. I have a custom ramdisk based very small Linux based disk imager for our specific requirements when rolling out specialist workstations. We have new workstations which has hardware not supported by our current kernel, and it really was no bother to build a new one. Just "make gconfig", go over the options and make sure what should be included was, and run make, and copy the new bzimage to the tftpboot directory.
It's a useful skill to have; once you can roll your own netbootable environment it can be tremendously useful and a big timesaver.
Perhaps it is for 1vs1, but in over 80% of my 3vs3 games, the other team always has "advantage" or "slight advantage". It is very rare that the teams are equal or we have the advantage.
I've been using OpenBSD since 3.3, and I don't think I've ever specified anything in cylinders when setting up. The BSD disk label tool accepts arguments in size, example 20M, 20G, 20T etc.
The Microsoft definition of multiplatform is "runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, plus Windows Server 2003 and 2008". It runs on five platforms!
You wouldn't need one. A car spends most of its time stationary, the only time you ever need a quick charge is when you need to "refuel" on a long journey, or when doing a great deal of driving during a day. The charging-at-home use case is likely to be an overnight charge. There is no need for a 6 minute charge time when all you're doing is watching TV or sleeping, an at home charge can feasibly be allowed to take 12 hours.
"Quick charge" stations would of course need some serious infrastructure, possibly in the form of a big local battery pack so they don't have huge instantaneous draws off the grid, and a fairly hefty supply. However, the build up of electric cars will likely be slow enough that you don't have to triple electrical generating capacity overnight.
They called it Windows, therefore people will have the (unrealistic) expectation that it runs Windows apps. When it doesn't, they will be disappointed and tell their friends, or get the impression that Windows mobile is somehow "a bastardised Windows".
Apple's marketing idea was much better. While iOS might share roots with OSX, they don't call the iPhone/iPad operating system 'OSX'. They call it iOS. There is then no expectation that an iOS device will run Mac apps in the mind of the user.
No, because the data rates get too high. If you had a 450-odd DPI display, 20in x 11.7in, you'd need a data rate of about 65 gigabits per second at 60 Hz refresh rate going to the raw panel. This is more than ten times the data rate of DisplayPort. A completely new standard for connecting monitors would be needed and there would be significant challenges to overcome to make it work.
Let's imagine 458dpi on a relatively "modest" screen that's 20in by 11.7in. That makes a display resolution of 9160 by 5358.
To update that screen at 60 frames per second would require a data rate of 6.9 *terabits* per second to the actual panel. Now you can say, "compress the data before sending it to the screen", but that would just increase the processing power needed, and at the end of the day, something still has to feed the raw panel the data at 6.9 terabits per second.
Big screens aren't getting higher DPI because (a) it's not needed (generally, you're looking at a big screen from a few feet away, and 100 dpi is more than enough) and (b) it would be fantastically expensive to do it and (c) no one has developed a standard to shift data from the computer to the display at the kinds of data rates that would be required to drive such a display.
They *do* sell it SIM unlocked, it's right there in the Apple store website (certainly the Apple Store UK website). It is rather expensive when not subsidised by your phone carrier though.
It won't knock or detonate, it uses direct fuel injection, so on the compression stroke all that's being compressed is air. Different technology to most cars (older, carburettors, newer, indirect fuel injection).
Which suggests they haven't really fundamentally advanced compared to the chat bot a friend wrote for the BBC Micro in 1989 or so - except in having a wider vocabulary.
Go into your preferences and turn Discussion 2 off. There is a bug in Slash that means (or at least a week ago, meant) that the settings don't always save first time so you may have to try a couple of times.
I agree, Discussion 2 sucks (it uses masses of CPU time and any discussion with more than a couple of hundred comments requires an 8 core system to merely run at a snails pace). I wasn't all that pleased they turned it on for me when I've had it switched off, I've got rid of it now.
He's also wrong on many details. The one that's most jarring to me is:
"... Herman Hauser, who had started Acorn computer over in the U.K. out of Cambridge university. And Herman designed the ARM processor, and Apple and Olivetti funded it."
Herman Hauser was a VC. He was one of the people who set up Acorn, but he didn't design the ARM CPU. The ARM CPU was principally designed by Sophie Wilson (instruction set) and Steve Furber (hardware architecture). Herman Hauser bankrolled it, he didn't design it.
It's not about *quantity* of oil it's about *rate*. A lot of naysayers seem to think that shale and tar sands are just like Texas sweet crude, stick a straw in it and out it comes, but it's not. Shale is basically rock. It costs a lot of money and takes a lot of effort to get oil out of this shale, and when you do, you just can't extract it at a very high rate.
If you had infinite oil it wouldn't matter one bit if you could not extract it at a sufficient rate to feed the consumers of this oil.
To contrast the *rate* at which you can extract oil from tar sands and other euphemistically named "unconventional sources", consider this. The entirety of Canada's tar sands, with something like 1.7 trillion barrels of proven reserves, after decades of investment is producing at a rate less than Mexico's Cantarell field did at its peak. Cantarell field is just *0.1%* of the size. 1/1000th of the size.
Extracting from shales and tar sands is also highly polluting and energy intensive. For each barrel of oil energy you invest in, say, Saudi Arabia, you get about 30 barrels of oil back. For Canadian tar sands, one barrel of oil's worth of energy only yields 3 to 6 barrels of production. Shale is likely to be a lot lower if it can even make the break even point at all. If it can't break even there's no point even mining for it.
Radio will never die, I listen to considerably more radio than I do watch TV. Radio will outlive TV.
Why?
You can't watch TV while driving your car. You have to dedicate time to watching TV because it needs 100% of your attention to be watched. But you can listen to the radio while driving a car, while writing code, while fiddling with the engine of a motorcycle in the workshop, while working on a building etc.
You can't browse the web either while your hands are occupied with any of these tasks.
Bad news, his son James Murdoch is only in his 30s, is cast from the same mould, and is already a high ranking executive in his father's business. It's obvious he's being groomed to take over the empire. When Rupert dies, James will continue in much the same manner. Indeed, it was James Murdoch who is to blame for getting Rupert interested in the internet in the first place. News Corporation will probably get worse, not better, with respect to what they want to do with the net when Rupert carks it.
That Madrid is overly hazardous is news to me. I have several friends from Madrid, and not one of them thinks it's a hazardous place to live. Of course I've been to Madrid several times and it seems a much safer place to be than many other cities where enforcement is rather more vigourous.
It's unlikely they produce as much or more CO2 than a small car in city driving. The bikes you think produce more CO2 than a car only do so when being driven hard, which you cannot do in central London. In start-stop traffic, owing to not having to start and stop as frequently (bikes can filter between lanes) and owing to having about 1/5th of the mass of a small car, they are way more economical. Not to mention they used about a fifth of the resources to build in the first place.
IIRC, Elite for the Speccy - which came with a full user manual AND a novella - was about £12.99 when it first came out, in other words, about £30-£35 in today's money. That was by far the most expensive game at the time. £5 or £6 was considered "full price" in the mid 1980s.
It's probably because there seems to be a hard core of very *loud* Americans who yell (figuratively, online) at the top of their voices about how any renewable power is no good. They also yell loudly about how $INSERT_EFFICIENT_TECHNOLOGY is no good, too. It's almost as if they think being energy inefficient is something to be proud of.
Because a 16:9 screen can have more diagonal inches than a 4:3 display, while needing less actual surface area. The monitor makers LOVE this "HD" and "widescreen" stuff because they can make smaller panels but advertise them as being bigger (via their diagonal size). Now everyone's gone widescreen, it's difficult to go back because the diagonal inches of a 4:3 screen puts that display at a marketing disadvantage, although the 4:3 screen may have more surface area it doesn't have the headline number of more diagonal inches.
Anyway, get off my lawn. I'm still using a 21in Sun-badged Trinitron monitor (1600x1200) which I bought second hand in 2001...
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like the old sysadmin insult, "Go away - or I will replace you with a very short shell script" has actually happened to the sports writers...
The retail shops are fighting a losing battle: they will all have disappeared in just a few years, along with non-specialist music stores (i.e. stores selling things like vinyl that customers generally want to look at first) and anything else that can easily be delivered over the internet. They can no longer stop the ultimate disappearance of the 'high street game store' market than King Canute could hold back the sea.
Boycotting Steam games will just hasten their disappearance, since customers won't be able to find the games they want in the stores, and will naturally go for downloads instead.
And building a kernel really isn't mysterious to begin with. I have a custom ramdisk based very small Linux based disk imager for our specific requirements when rolling out specialist workstations. We have new workstations which has hardware not supported by our current kernel, and it really was no bother to build a new one. Just "make gconfig", go over the options and make sure what should be included was, and run make, and copy the new bzimage to the tftpboot directory.
It's a useful skill to have; once you can roll your own netbootable environment it can be tremendously useful and a big timesaver.
Perhaps it is for 1vs1, but in over 80% of my 3vs3 games, the other team always has "advantage" or "slight advantage". It is very rare that the teams are equal or we have the advantage.
I've been using OpenBSD since 3.3, and I don't think I've ever specified anything in cylinders when setting up. The BSD disk label tool accepts arguments in size, example 20M, 20G, 20T etc.
The Microsoft definition of multiplatform is "runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, plus Windows Server 2003 and 2008". It runs on five platforms!
You wouldn't need one. A car spends most of its time stationary, the only time you ever need a quick charge is when you need to "refuel" on a long journey, or when doing a great deal of driving during a day. The charging-at-home use case is likely to be an overnight charge. There is no need for a 6 minute charge time when all you're doing is watching TV or sleeping, an at home charge can feasibly be allowed to take 12 hours.
"Quick charge" stations would of course need some serious infrastructure, possibly in the form of a big local battery pack so they don't have huge instantaneous draws off the grid, and a fairly hefty supply. However, the build up of electric cars will likely be slow enough that you don't have to triple electrical generating capacity overnight.
On the Sinclair Spectrum 128K (and +2, +3) the MIDI and serial port share the same physical port and circuitry.
They called it Windows, therefore people will have the (unrealistic) expectation that it runs Windows apps. When it doesn't, they will be disappointed and tell their friends, or get the impression that Windows mobile is somehow "a bastardised Windows".
Apple's marketing idea was much better. While iOS might share roots with OSX, they don't call the iPhone/iPad operating system 'OSX'. They call it iOS. There is then no expectation that an iOS device will run Mac apps in the mind of the user.
No, because the data rates get too high. If you had a 450-odd DPI display, 20in x 11.7in, you'd need a data rate of about 65 gigabits per second at 60 Hz refresh rate going to the raw panel. This is more than ten times the data rate of DisplayPort. A completely new standard for connecting monitors would be needed and there would be significant challenges to overcome to make it work.
It's the data rate that's a problem.
Let's imagine 458dpi on a relatively "modest" screen that's 20in by 11.7in. That makes a display resolution of 9160 by 5358.
To update that screen at 60 frames per second would require a data rate of 6.9 *terabits* per second to the actual panel. Now you can say, "compress the data before sending it to the screen", but that would just increase the processing power needed, and at the end of the day, something still has to feed the raw panel the data at 6.9 terabits per second.
Big screens aren't getting higher DPI because (a) it's not needed (generally, you're looking at a big screen from a few feet away, and 100 dpi is more than enough) and (b) it would be fantastically expensive to do it and (c) no one has developed a standard to shift data from the computer to the display at the kinds of data rates that would be required to drive such a display.
They *do* sell it SIM unlocked, it's right there in the Apple store website (certainly the Apple Store UK website). It is rather expensive when not subsidised by your phone carrier though.
It won't knock or detonate, it uses direct fuel injection, so on the compression stroke all that's being compressed is air. Different technology to most cars (older, carburettors, newer, indirect fuel injection).
Which suggests they haven't really fundamentally advanced compared to the chat bot a friend wrote for the BBC Micro in 1989 or so - except in having a wider vocabulary.
Go into your preferences and turn Discussion 2 off.
There is a bug in Slash that means (or at least a week ago, meant) that the settings don't always save first time so you may have to try a couple of times.
I agree, Discussion 2 sucks (it uses masses of CPU time and any discussion with more than a couple of hundred comments requires an 8 core system to merely run at a snails pace). I wasn't all that pleased they turned it on for me when I've had it switched off, I've got rid of it now.
And hurricanes often spawn a very large number of tornadoes. It would be a rare hurricane that didn't spawn some of them.
He's also wrong on many details. The one that's most jarring to me is:
"... Herman Hauser, who had started Acorn computer over in the U.K. out of Cambridge university. And Herman designed the ARM processor, and Apple and Olivetti funded it."
Herman Hauser was a VC. He was one of the people who set up Acorn, but he didn't design the ARM CPU. The ARM CPU was principally designed by Sophie Wilson (instruction set) and Steve Furber (hardware architecture). Herman Hauser bankrolled it, he didn't design it.
It's not about *quantity* of oil it's about *rate*. A lot of naysayers seem to think that shale and tar sands are just like Texas sweet crude, stick a straw in it and out it comes, but it's not. Shale is basically rock. It costs a lot of money and takes a lot of effort to get oil out of this shale, and when you do, you just can't extract it at a very high rate.
If you had infinite oil it wouldn't matter one bit if you could not extract it at a sufficient rate to feed the consumers of this oil.
To contrast the *rate* at which you can extract oil from tar sands and other euphemistically named "unconventional sources", consider this. The entirety of Canada's tar sands, with something like 1.7 trillion barrels of proven reserves, after decades of investment is producing at a rate less than Mexico's Cantarell field did at its peak. Cantarell field is just *0.1%* of the size. 1/1000th of the size.
Extracting from shales and tar sands is also highly polluting and energy intensive. For each barrel of oil energy you invest in, say, Saudi Arabia, you get about 30 barrels of oil back. For Canadian tar sands, one barrel of oil's worth of energy only yields 3 to 6 barrels of production. Shale is likely to be a lot lower if it can even make the break even point at all. If it can't break even there's no point even mining for it.
Radio will never die, I listen to considerably more radio than I do watch TV. Radio will outlive TV.
Why?
You can't watch TV while driving your car. You have to dedicate time to watching TV because it needs 100% of your attention to be watched. But you can listen to the radio while driving a car, while writing code, while fiddling with the engine of a motorcycle in the workshop, while working on a building etc.
You can't browse the web either while your hands are occupied with any of these tasks.
Bad news, his son James Murdoch is only in his 30s, is cast from the same mould, and is already a high ranking executive in his father's business. It's obvious he's being groomed to take over the empire. When Rupert dies, James will continue in much the same manner. Indeed, it was James Murdoch who is to blame for getting Rupert interested in the internet in the first place. News Corporation will probably get worse, not better, with respect to what they want to do with the net when Rupert carks it.
That Madrid is overly hazardous is news to me. I have several friends from Madrid, and not one of them thinks it's a hazardous place to live. Of course I've been to Madrid several times and it seems a much safer place to be than many other cities where enforcement is rather more vigourous.
It's unlikely they produce as much or more CO2 than a small car in city driving. The bikes you think produce more CO2 than a car only do so when being driven hard, which you cannot do in central London. In start-stop traffic, owing to not having to start and stop as frequently (bikes can filter between lanes) and owing to having about 1/5th of the mass of a small car, they are way more economical. Not to mention they used about a fifth of the resources to build in the first place.
IIRC, Elite for the Speccy - which came with a full user manual AND a novella - was about £12.99 when it first came out, in other words, about £30-£35 in today's money. That was by far the most expensive game at the time. £5 or £6 was considered "full price" in the mid 1980s.
It's probably because there seems to be a hard core of very *loud* Americans who yell (figuratively, online) at the top of their voices about how any renewable power is no good. They also yell loudly about how $INSERT_EFFICIENT_TECHNOLOGY is no good, too. It's almost as if they think being energy inefficient is something to be proud of.
And you know why?
Because a 16:9 screen can have more diagonal inches than a 4:3 display, while needing less actual surface area. The monitor makers LOVE this "HD" and "widescreen" stuff because they can make smaller panels but advertise them as being bigger (via their diagonal size). Now everyone's gone widescreen, it's difficult to go back because the diagonal inches of a 4:3 screen puts that display at a marketing disadvantage, although the 4:3 screen may have more surface area it doesn't have the headline number of more diagonal inches.
Anyway, get off my lawn. I'm still using a 21in Sun-badged Trinitron monitor (1600x1200) which I bought second hand in 2001...