Anything that can be done to help those online gamers deal with crappy, untested game clients that crash their computers should help Electronic Art's, Sony's and other MMORPG game companies profit margins. I can see the recession turning around already, especially with gamers able to reboot so quickly.
I've never had the problem of it using 70% of the CPU. I get the normal spikes I'd get with any other program, but no steady use over 5% from Mozilla, even with 7-8 windows open. The only web-page that hasn't worked correctly for me is the MSNBC front page, but all the news article pages on it work fine. I haven't had any problems with any other webpages with 0.9.2. Flash works fine, I can even get the embedded video working good, and Java of course works good. This is a fine browser as is as far as I can tell. I'd love to see more innovation in the interface, but since Microsoft isn't really innovating in that area (*cough*no competition*cough*cough*), why complain?
I don't use newsgroups, but I have been using the Mozilla e-mail program as my primary e-mail proggie at home, and it's been doing a decent job. The interface stinks, and it's rather inflexible in folder creation, but I haven't lost any e-mail, and it doesn't crash on me.
It's nearly ready now. I haven't logged into bugtraq very often lately, but I haven't had a bug to report in over a month. 0.9.2 has been very stable and usable. It's a little slow on the load, and the e-mail proggie it comes with could be a lot easier to use, but those are truly the only complaints I'd have with it.
Sure, XP is stable, it's one-code, it's got instant messaging and other apps embedded in it...
And that's it. Does that make me want to upgrade? No way in hell. Do you think most consumers seeing a possibly deep recession welling are going to want to upgrade to basically the same thing? I don't think so. Even new PC sales are seriously slumping this year, some estimates saying they are down 21% the first two quarters alone.
I think we're only looking at the beginning of Microsoft's hard times.
I can view MSNBC webpages well in Linux Mozilla
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Linux Win In Schools
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Mozilla for Linux is a very capable browser. I've managed to get Realplayer, Java, and even flash working well(and I did it rather easily). What more do you need for good browsing? Sure there are some sites who only offer Windows Media player, but even in some of those situations, XMMS can be used.
What's even better, is Mozilla has a great gui e-mail proggie. It's very basic when stacked up to Outlook of course, in fact right now it barely keeps pace with Outlook express, but it will do the job adequately.
It would seem to me that any company using custom software that doesn't ask for the source code is letting themselves get ripped off. If you have the source code, and it's in C, then porting should be vastly cheaper than replacing the software.
As for the semi-custom, well you have a point there.
Congress just recently put back $400 million into NASA's budget so NASA could complete work on the X-38 CRV (crew return vehicle). So now, with the Italians looking like they'll be building the new Habitation module (so it can sleep 7 people), and the money back in for the CRV, a full-complement of 7 people looks like a reality.
Also, keep in mind that this is currently only the SECOND crew on the ISS, and they're basically still in the "shakedown" phase where they hash out bugs/problems in preparation for real science.
Granted, I'd rather see NASA focus on Mars as a goal (much as Zubrin calls for) and I dislike all absurd bureacracy in the agency, but Pulling together 16 nations (two of which used to be bitter rivals) to build a huge earth-orbiting outpost IS a worthwhile goal. I dont like the idea of LEO space stations for research, as I see them as a waste of time. But I do love to see the entire world work towards a single goal, simply because it's unprecedented in the history of mankind, I watch to see the ISS fly over to make me feel like the future isn't some apocalyptic end where we nuke ourselves into oblivion due to political differences.
There have been over 100 shuttle flights, including 51L. This is the 79th flight since the Challenger exploded. NASA engineers currently rate the chances of a catastrophic failure resulting in the loss of the craft and all hands to currently be around 1 in 300.(because of improvements to engine design/computer systems)
At the time, everyone at NASA was an engineer. Engineers don't putz around when they're trying to solve a problem, they get the job done. These days Dan Goldin complains that like 70% of his engineering force is set to retire in 10 years. Who knows, maybe someday the engineers will all be civil servants... that'd be funny. Then we'd see space-shuttles fueled with red-tape.
NASA has become a big pot-belly space program. Sure, they field great missions to the planets, the scientific community would demand no less. But their Human Exploration, propulsion, and new-craft research efforts are horrible. HEDS is always over-budget, unfocused, and over-managed. NASA hardly does much in researching new propulsion or crafts these days, and when someone DOES come up with a new craft, NASA gets in the way, rather than jumping on board.
Oh, they mean well, and they're smart people. But they have one of the largest companies in the country (Boeing) and several other wealthy aerospace firms basically begging them for cheap funding so they can pad their bottoms. Sure, innovation goes on, but when money passes from the Government to the private sector, 90% is wasted because the government couldn't oversee a teakettle. That's just a fact of life.
NASA needs this gut-check, and more. I love what they do, but I hate what they don't do more.
Is that Microsoft could easily be successful by opening the source to their code. It would go like this:
1) They release their code, they GPL it.
2) No longer selling their software, they sell technical support. Since their software is currently bloated, buggy, and insecure, they make a fortune charging for tech support.
3) People slowly begin improving MS's GPL'd software
4) As the software is improved, they change their focus from supporting their software, to providing custom computing solutions for businesses. (*GASP* PROVIDING A SERVICE, who'da thought eh?) This is the business model that many of the original dos-based software companies were modeled on. It worked then, it can work again.
5) Christ returns to the earth and blesses Microsoft for seeing the error of it's ways, and repenting.
I thought that game developers brought the scantily clad women and the sex to their booths to help encourage their own employees to attend. It's not marketing at all! It's all an effort to get developers on the floor to talk to gamers!
There's a lot of "fringe science" that goes on that NASA typically rejects outright.
One of the most recent is a claim by a scientist that our Sun has a large failed-star as a neighbor, that our system is really a binary system. In theory, if some kind of brown dwarf existed, it could be affecting the probes. NASA, and most space scientists reject the very idea that our sun has a neighbor, simply because it's presence should be more obvious. I'd tend to agree (even though I'm nowhere close to being a space scientist). But it's a possibility, and maybe now that NASA has probes that are being affected by gravity in unknown ways, they should consider the idea.
Tito paid for his trip when, in 1997? Has NASA made any moves to give Tito the training he needs? No, they dragged their feet and waited until it's too late, and now they're putting up a stink about him being untrained.
As Government agencies worried about funding go, NASA has to be about the dumbest... they seem to shy away from any sort of publicity.
Richard Garriot was canned over a year ago by Electronic Arts. Origin Systems Inc is dead and buried, the Ultima property is basically the publicity concubine of EA these days.
As I understand it, the human eye has several times the number of photoreceptive cells lining the optic nerve that you actually use. I remember it being something like 3 times the number you actually use, so most people only use 1/3 the photoreceptors they have in their eyes. In fact, I'm told there are rehabilitative techniques for the human eye that allow people who have damaged portions of their optic nerve to re-train themselves to use the other photoreceptors that they were previously ignoring.
This would indicate to me, that providing you worked at it, you could probably make up for whatever aliasing there were by simply re-training to use your improved retinal image.
Scientific Creationism has no method laid out for HOW humans were assembled. Darwin essentially laid out the HOW. Creationism doesn't so much point to the HOW, as to the WHY. Good for Darwin, but it still doesn't mean that life on this planet happened by blind chance.
NASA has been open with the public, very open, for a while now. I don't want to see them suddenly become tight lipped. Those are my dollars flying up there, I want to know what happens with them.
You cannot judge movies that are made about games differently, or justify their horrific nature by saying that you "need to know the subject". Game reviewers don't justify bad games because they came from movies, it's ridiculous to do the opposite. It is an entirely illegitmate excuse to point to an obscure fiction. Games are one medium, movies are another. Yes the lines blur between them, but games are not projected in 72mm, and movies don't require joysticks or dice. When a movie stinks, it stinks. You cannot justify it's poor quality by pointing to an obscure subject matter and saying, "you don't know how it's supposed to be." I believe that is classified as The Microsoft Excuse (tm).
A movie is supposed to tell a story. If I wanted an hour and a half of CGI, I would stare at a computer screen for free. I don't pay $6.50 to $8 to see eye candy projected with THX sound (although some who purchased Ultima IX would argue that we paid $50-80 to see that).
... it has everything to do with just how much three people are being asked to accomplish, while at the same time dealing with all the glitches and bugs of a brand new space station. If they were three Americans, and the parts were all American, the first visitors would be under the same stress and would likely lose their temper just as easily as Alpha's crew is.
In fact, we should be thanking our lucky stars that Russia are the people training our astronauts for long duration spaceflight. They have a long history of space stations, and their training programs specifically focus on preparing a person for the intense pressure of living with other people in a can in orbit. Without that training, I'd wager things would be much worse than a little hissy fit about a carbon dioxide removal unit.
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Anything that can be done to help those online gamers deal with crappy, untested game clients that crash their computers should help Electronic Art's, Sony's and other MMORPG game companies profit margins. I can see the recession turning around already, especially with gamers able to reboot so quickly.
I've never had the problem of it using 70% of the CPU. I get the normal spikes I'd get with any other program, but no steady use over 5% from Mozilla, even with 7-8 windows open. The only web-page that hasn't worked correctly for me is the MSNBC front page, but all the news article pages on it work fine. I haven't had any problems with any other webpages with 0.9.2. Flash works fine, I can even get the embedded video working good, and Java of course works good. This is a fine browser as is as far as I can tell. I'd love to see more innovation in the interface, but since Microsoft isn't really innovating in that area (*cough*no competition*cough*cough*), why complain?
I don't use newsgroups, but I have been using the Mozilla e-mail program as my primary e-mail proggie at home, and it's been doing a decent job. The interface stinks, and it's rather inflexible in folder creation, but I haven't lost any e-mail, and it doesn't crash on me.
It's nearly ready now. I haven't logged into bugtraq very often lately, but I haven't had a bug to report in over a month. 0.9.2 has been very stable and usable. It's a little slow on the load, and the e-mail proggie it comes with could be a lot easier to use, but those are truly the only complaints I'd have with it.
More monopolistic behavior, planned obsolescence. Frankly I don't know why the DOJ didn't add this kind of behavior to their case.
Sure, XP is stable, it's one-code, it's got instant messaging and other apps embedded in it...
And that's it. Does that make me want to upgrade? No way in hell. Do you think most consumers seeing a possibly deep recession welling are going to want to upgrade to basically the same thing? I don't think so. Even new PC sales are seriously slumping this year, some estimates saying they are down 21% the first two quarters alone.
I think we're only looking at the beginning of Microsoft's hard times.
Mozilla for Linux is a very capable browser. I've managed to get Realplayer, Java, and even flash working well(and I did it rather easily). What more do you need for good browsing? Sure there are some sites who only offer Windows Media player, but even in some of those situations, XMMS can be used.
What's even better, is Mozilla has a great gui e-mail proggie. It's very basic when stacked up to Outlook of course, in fact right now it barely keeps pace with Outlook express, but it will do the job adequately.
It would seem to me that any company using custom software that doesn't ask for the source code is letting themselves get ripped off. If you have the source code, and it's in C, then porting should be vastly cheaper than replacing the software. As for the semi-custom, well you have a point there.
Congress just recently put back $400 million into NASA's budget so NASA could complete work on the X-38 CRV (crew return vehicle). So now, with the Italians looking like they'll be building the new Habitation module (so it can sleep 7 people), and the money back in for the CRV, a full-complement of 7 people looks like a reality.
Also, keep in mind that this is currently only the SECOND crew on the ISS, and they're basically still in the "shakedown" phase where they hash out bugs/problems in preparation for real science.
Granted, I'd rather see NASA focus on Mars as a goal (much as Zubrin calls for) and I dislike all absurd bureacracy in the agency, but Pulling together 16 nations (two of which used to be bitter rivals) to build a huge earth-orbiting outpost IS a worthwhile goal. I dont like the idea of LEO space stations for research, as I see them as a waste of time. But I do love to see the entire world work towards a single goal, simply because it's unprecedented in the history of mankind, I watch to see the ISS fly over to make me feel like the future isn't some apocalyptic end where we nuke ourselves into oblivion due to political differences.
On an open-source software community bulletin board you are claiming that good engineering is expensive?
There have been over 100 shuttle flights, including 51L. This is the 79th flight since the Challenger exploded. NASA engineers currently rate the chances of a catastrophic failure resulting in the loss of the craft and all hands to currently be around 1 in 300.(because of improvements to engine design/computer systems)
At the time, everyone at NASA was an engineer. Engineers don't putz around when they're trying to solve a problem, they get the job done. These days Dan Goldin complains that like 70% of his engineering force is set to retire in 10 years. Who knows, maybe someday the engineers will all be civil servants... that'd be funny. Then we'd see space-shuttles fueled with red-tape.
NASA has become a big pot-belly space program. Sure, they field great missions to the planets, the scientific community would demand no less. But their Human Exploration, propulsion, and new-craft research efforts are horrible. HEDS is always over-budget, unfocused, and over-managed. NASA hardly does much in researching new propulsion or crafts these days, and when someone DOES come up with a new craft, NASA gets in the way, rather than jumping on board.
Oh, they mean well, and they're smart people. But they have one of the largest companies in the country (Boeing) and several other wealthy aerospace firms basically begging them for cheap funding so they can pad their bottoms. Sure, innovation goes on, but when money passes from the Government to the private sector, 90% is wasted because the government couldn't oversee a teakettle. That's just a fact of life.
NASA needs this gut-check, and more. I love what they do, but I hate what they don't do more.
Is that Microsoft could easily be successful by opening the source to their code. It would go like this: 1) They release their code, they GPL it. 2) No longer selling their software, they sell technical support. Since their software is currently bloated, buggy, and insecure, they make a fortune charging for tech support. 3) People slowly begin improving MS's GPL'd software 4) As the software is improved, they change their focus from supporting their software, to providing custom computing solutions for businesses. (*GASP* PROVIDING A SERVICE, who'da thought eh?) This is the business model that many of the original dos-based software companies were modeled on. It worked then, it can work again. 5) Christ returns to the earth and blesses Microsoft for seeing the error of it's ways, and repenting.
I thought that game developers brought the scantily clad women and the sex to their booths to help encourage their own employees to attend. It's not marketing at all! It's all an effort to get developers on the floor to talk to gamers!
There's a lot of "fringe science" that goes on that NASA typically rejects outright.
One of the most recent is a claim by a scientist that our Sun has a large failed-star as a neighbor, that our system is really a binary system. In theory, if some kind of brown dwarf existed, it could be affecting the probes. NASA, and most space scientists reject the very idea that our sun has a neighbor, simply because it's presence should be more obvious. I'd tend to agree (even though I'm nowhere close to being a space scientist). But it's a possibility, and maybe now that NASA has probes that are being affected by gravity in unknown ways, they should consider the idea.
than the big media-conglomerates are pumping out these days.
They're the only "news" (quotes because they don't consider themselves journalists) source that blatantly points out lies.
I'm going to have to watch them tonight to see Jon's reaction.
Tito paid for his trip when, in 1997? Has NASA made any moves to give Tito the training he needs? No, they dragged their feet and waited until it's too late, and now they're putting up a stink about him being untrained. As Government agencies worried about funding go, NASA has to be about the dumbest... they seem to shy away from any sort of publicity.
Richard Garriot was canned over a year ago by Electronic Arts. Origin Systems Inc is dead and buried, the Ultima property is basically the publicity concubine of EA these days.
As I understand it, the human eye has several times the number of photoreceptive cells lining the optic nerve that you actually use. I remember it being something like 3 times the number you actually use, so most people only use 1/3 the photoreceptors they have in their eyes. In fact, I'm told there are rehabilitative techniques for the human eye that allow people who have damaged portions of their optic nerve to re-train themselves to use the other photoreceptors that they were previously ignoring. This would indicate to me, that providing you worked at it, you could probably make up for whatever aliasing there were by simply re-training to use your improved retinal image.
Scientific Creationism has no method laid out for HOW humans were assembled. Darwin essentially laid out the HOW. Creationism doesn't so much point to the HOW, as to the WHY. Good for Darwin, but it still doesn't mean that life on this planet happened by blind chance.
NASA has been open with the public, very open, for a while now. I don't want to see them suddenly become tight lipped. Those are my dollars flying up there, I want to know what happens with them.
A movie is supposed to tell a story. If I wanted an hour and a half of CGI, I would stare at a computer screen for free. I don't pay $6.50 to $8 to see eye candy projected with THX sound (although some who purchased Ultima IX would argue that we paid $50-80 to see that).
... it has everything to do with just how much three people are being asked to accomplish, while at the same time dealing with all the glitches and bugs of a brand new space station. If they were three Americans, and the parts were all American, the first visitors would be under the same stress and would likely lose their temper just as easily as Alpha's crew is. In fact, we should be thanking our lucky stars that Russia are the people training our astronauts for long duration spaceflight. They have a long history of space stations, and their training programs specifically focus on preparing a person for the intense pressure of living with other people in a can in orbit. Without that training, I'd wager things would be much worse than a little hissy fit about a carbon dioxide removal unit.
Kind of raises my confidence in this nation's academics when lawyers will walk out of this type of power play.