He's actually quite correct. Tito's voyage came on an international station built for research to help the people of the world. Glenn's trip came on a shuttle funded by the US to give the millitary-industrial complex billions of dollars. Clearly, Tito is violating the sacred trust of an international commison whilst Glenn merely sought the American Dream and helped fund the people who help us fight our horribly important wars.
It's funny because it's true. The AARP leaders would be licking their lips right now if they weren't afraid of cutting their tounge on their dentures. Unfortunately, the leaders tend to be "age-impaired" as well and will thus be gone before their organization reaches the zenith of its power. But they will still lay the foundation for the glorious empire of the 2010 AARP!
Quick question though, with all these new seniors, won't Florida get a bit overrun? Sure, overflow is already spilling into Arizona, but will that really be enough? There is only so much desert you know. Perhaps the AARP should look into leveraging its future power to purchase a small island or the like (possibly Australia due to Senior-friendly climate) for providing overflow maintanence.
Is it just me, or would I think twice about buying from a small server company with an IT department. Especially considering there probably are only one or two marketoids to help out at this point in the company's development. I don't know, I just thought a company that solely produced massively redundant rack servers like this would be more, uh, self-sufficient?
Of course, the demand would go up when people are checking CNN.com to see if they will be the next to fall victim to rolling blackouts, so it would actually make more of a problem:)
Seriously though, I doubt you could convince any company to buy two sets of servers solely for power issues (unless they did some research and found that the power costs saved would offset the cost of the low-load server rack, which it probably wouldn't). Hell, you can't even convince the president of the United States to help fix the power problem. It should be noted that he has reasons similar to the aforementioned technology companies.
On a related noted, could it be possible to compile directly for the Crusoe processor in a native (and I guess therefor significantly faster) instruction set? Could one port, say, Linux to the native Crusoe architechture? Hell, Linus is working there - has he already done this? Like the other responses to this comment say, the Crusoe is great for the mobile market, and if Linux could run 20% faster than windows (presumably a windows port would be far behind given how long it's taken them to finish their 64-bit port) it would go a long way towards consumer acceptance.
Thanks for the "inside" insight there. I was basically just speculating. Your story is interesting, but I would think that many companies coding for the government would intentionally make their code poorly documented or use obscure methods so as to eliminate the potential for your example (competeing companies would have to place a higher bid to cover the cost of researching the coding methods before modifying it). Sure, this is somewhat unethical, but what in business/government isn't?
Are you saying the government buys a unique compiler for each program it contracts? That's kind of funny. I think Borland would be hurt by a gov switch to GNU more than Microsoft in that case.
That is a pretty weak argument. Money invested in domestic software would be split amont domestic and foreign dividends. When a free (beer) solution is used, the money saved goes directly to lessen the tax burden. Not to mention that any government effort put into the code benefits the populous. Of course, if you take Microsoft's argument that Open Source ends up costing more than a proprietary solution because of more expensive maintanence, this isn't the case. I think most of us can agree, however, that that is a bunch of FUD. Obviously taking the time/cash to develop a.gov *nix distro would save millions of dollars in taxpayer money (from all of the win liscenses). Not to mention that it could be ported to most any existing government system. The one problem would be porting proprietary windows programs written for gov use. Unfortunately I'd imagine most of the developers would charge an arm and a leg for porting it. With something like Wine though, this would be less of an issue.
They really should have known that sending one dollar to each of the countries on the list wouldn't make them a profit. Hell, there are only a few hundred countries, so how much could they have possibly made anyway?
Yeah, and put on a cell phone to upload live shots of the fly by. Better yet, use an iridium phone as long as the sattelites are still floating. Of course, Iridium phones weigh about 5 pounds (a big reason for their failure), so that might be a mistake. I doubt the cellular reception is very good in Area 51 though.
Aren't you the one posting that on Slashdot? Wait, aren't I replying to it? So much wasted energy! Must find something interesting and fun and challenging.
Birds fly over the open ocean. Birds weigh less than 11 pounds. Ever see a bird just sitting there in a gust of wind when it should be moving forward? Assuming good engineering, and given the altitude of the plane, it should be fine. Don't assume that it's weak just because it's balsa wood either. Five pounds of balsa wood (well, probably considerably less when you factor in surface materials and electronics) is plenty to build a craft to stand up to ocean winds.
You're absolutely right that Direct3d is harder to program for than OpenGL (which is why most students learn OpenGL before Direct3d). The thing is, Direct3d is part of DirectX, which, as a package, makes the whole game-development enterprise a bit simpler. Plus, as you said, features get added much quicker to Direct3d because of the more efficient feature-adding environment. What we need is someone with the efficiency of Microsoft (you really can't fault Direct3d too much as a product) to produce an open DirectX-type system. There are open source projects to this direction, but nothing that compares to DirectX yet.
Maybe the actual launch costs $10 million. You also have to take into account the six months or so of training Mr. Tito received in Russia - I imagine that had a sizable cost. Of course, if NASA flew him up it would cost more like $40 million or something. I'm sure there are many other things besides the physical launch and oxygen that you aren't taking into account - space suits, non-resusable parts for the capsule, supplies for the station, etc, etc, etc. I'm guessing Russia made a profit on it (or why would they do it other than to boost the space-tourism industry?), but not a $10 million one.
Assuming the X-Box has moderate success, developers will begin to move even further away from open graphics protocals. Like it or not, Direct3d is really easy to program for and has great compatibility with graphics cards in Windows. Look at the OpenGL drivers for ATI cards and you'll see what I'm talking about (apparently this has improved somewhat). Companies always care about the bottom line. Until Linux gets more market share, full on ports will only be done for the biggest games (and this even has yet to be reasonably profitable). I think companies would be willing to make cross-platform games if there were common libraries across the board - also, if there was something universal that was as easy to code for as Direct3d. Making a Direct3d wrapper like this (that can take direct 3d calls and render them with OpenGL or something) is a decent solution. Not perfect, but until someone makes something better than Direct3d companies aren't going to do anything. Now, if the open source community made a well documented, up-to-date, easy to code for, massively supported / cross platform API then we might get somewhere.
Linux won't get commercial games until it has more desktop market share - conversely it probably won't get a lot more desktop market share till it has games. Making it easy for developers to make cross-platform games is the solution.
Hmmm... someone already made that exact thing. In fact, there was a Slashdot article about it (or at least a quickie). I would go search, but for some reason I imagine it would be difficult to filter through all the results for "Napster."
Now it's coming to me... it was a pig-latin encryptor. It translated you're mp3 files into pig latin and then beamed them over some file sharing service. It even had the DMCA twist.
Assuming you have a ps2 mouse, there are "overclocking" programs that will increase the mouse refresh rate for you in win9x. Go look around (sorry no links, I use a usb mouse so I don't know where to find it).
Why not extend this and include the libraries and compilers needed to create a native ps2 application? Just compile it on the ps2 and zip it out the ethernet to your cd-burner. You'd probably be best suited to do the 3d modeling, animation, mapping, textures, etc on another machine, but this could be feasible.
There is already a dreamcast program that can play mp3s... or vcds for that matter. I think someone has a mame port going to... plus there's linux as reported here.
I had a little bit of trouble with my Mandrake 8 installed that would have repelled a first-time user - certianly not "windows easy" quite yet. First off, it didn't install the accelerated nvidia drivers (or say that they existed), so I had to go download them and follow Nvidia's instructions. I think they do include a commercial CD with their boxed release with closed drivers, commercial office apps (star, applix), and more non-free stuff. It also didn't have my monitor listed, so I had to go search for the monitor definitions on Google and manually edit the xf86 config file. Now it's up, but it would be a little confusing to a first time user to click tuxracer and have nothing happen:) - at the least they should have an error message pop up when a program doesn't start. The shear amount of configuration tools would also be fairly daunting. It took me awhile to find the right program to install new packages...
It would be far more than memorizing a single game of moves. You would have to know the correct move to every possible move of the opponent. Obviously the opponent's cache of likely moves would decrease as the game wore on, but you're still talking an incredibly large number of possible games that you'd have to memorize. There is no "perfect game" where you can make the same moves every time and win... chess isn't a rubiks cube.
I imagine a computer could probably determine a perfect checkers game (ie, unbeatable string of moves based on opponents reaction.) There just aren't as many possibilities as chess. Hell, there is probably a perfect chess game too - not that anyone knows it yet... or that any human could memorize it:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have to check Rudy Rucker out assuming I can find a book of his anywhere :)
Thanks.
He's actually quite correct. Tito's voyage came on an international station built for research to help the people of the world. Glenn's trip came on a shuttle funded by the US to give the millitary-industrial complex billions of dollars. Clearly, Tito is violating the sacred trust of an international commison whilst Glenn merely sought the American Dream and helped fund the people who help us fight our horribly important wars.
It's funny because it's true. The AARP leaders would be licking their lips right now if they weren't afraid of cutting their tounge on their dentures. Unfortunately, the leaders tend to be "age-impaired" as well and will thus be gone before their organization reaches the zenith of its power. But they will still lay the foundation for the glorious empire of the 2010 AARP!
Quick question though, with all these new seniors, won't Florida get a bit overrun? Sure, overflow is already spilling into Arizona, but will that really be enough? There is only so much desert you know. Perhaps the AARP should look into leveraging its future power to purchase a small island or the like (possibly Australia due to Senior-friendly climate) for providing overflow maintanence.
I'm in IT--and you think that you're cynical.
Is it just me, or would I think twice about buying from a small server company with an IT department. Especially considering there probably are only one or two marketoids to help out at this point in the company's development. I don't know, I just thought a company that solely produced massively redundant rack servers like this would be more, uh, self-sufficient?
Of course, the demand would go up when people are checking CNN.com to see if they will be the next to fall victim to rolling blackouts, so it would actually make more of a problem :)
Seriously though, I doubt you could convince any company to buy two sets of servers solely for power issues (unless they did some research and found that the power costs saved would offset the cost of the low-load server rack, which it probably wouldn't). Hell, you can't even convince the president of the United States to help fix the power problem. It should be noted that he has reasons similar to the aforementioned technology companies.
On a related noted, could it be possible to compile directly for the Crusoe processor in a native (and I guess therefor significantly faster) instruction set? Could one port, say, Linux to the native Crusoe architechture? Hell, Linus is working there - has he already done this? Like the other responses to this comment say, the Crusoe is great for the mobile market, and if Linux could run 20% faster than windows (presumably a windows port would be far behind given how long it's taken them to finish their 64-bit port) it would go a long way towards consumer acceptance.
Thanks for the "inside" insight there. I was basically just speculating. Your story is interesting, but I would think that many companies coding for the government would intentionally make their code poorly documented or use obscure methods so as to eliminate the potential for your example (competeing companies would have to place a higher bid to cover the cost of researching the coding methods before modifying it). Sure, this is somewhat unethical, but what in business/government isn't?
Are you saying the government buys a unique compiler for each program it contracts? That's kind of funny. I think Borland would be hurt by a gov switch to GNU more than Microsoft in that case.
That is a pretty weak argument. Money invested in domestic software would be split amont domestic and foreign dividends. When a free (beer) solution is used, the money saved goes directly to lessen the tax burden. Not to mention that any government effort put into the code benefits the populous. Of course, if you take Microsoft's argument that Open Source ends up costing more than a proprietary solution because of more expensive maintanence, this isn't the case. I think most of us can agree, however, that that is a bunch of FUD. Obviously taking the time/cash to develop a .gov *nix distro would save millions of dollars in taxpayer money (from all of the win liscenses). Not to mention that it could be ported to most any existing government system. The one problem would be porting proprietary windows programs written for gov use. Unfortunately I'd imagine most of the developers would charge an arm and a leg for porting it. With something like Wine though, this would be less of an issue.
They really should have known that sending one dollar to each of the countries on the list wouldn't make them a profit. Hell, there are only a few hundred countries, so how much could they have possibly made anyway?
Yeah, and put on a cell phone to upload live shots of the fly by. Better yet, use an iridium phone as long as the sattelites are still floating. Of course, Iridium phones weigh about 5 pounds (a big reason for their failure), so that might be a mistake. I doubt the cellular reception is very good in Area 51 though.
Aren't you the one posting that on Slashdot? Wait, aren't I replying to it? So much wasted energy! Must find something interesting and fun and challenging.
I work in a secret government lab
Not any more...
Birds fly over the open ocean. Birds weigh less than 11 pounds. Ever see a bird just sitting there in a gust of wind when it should be moving forward? Assuming good engineering, and given the altitude of the plane, it should be fine. Don't assume that it's weak just because it's balsa wood either. Five pounds of balsa wood (well, probably considerably less when you factor in surface materials and electronics) is plenty to build a craft to stand up to ocean winds.
Hmmm... I just got Real Producer basic a few days ago and it had an option to encode for version 5.0+ instead of 8.
By the way, try freespeech.org for free real media streaming - for non-profit ORGANIZATIONS (ie, not you and your clanmates).
You're absolutely right that Direct3d is harder to program for than OpenGL (which is why most students learn OpenGL before Direct3d). The thing is, Direct3d is part of DirectX, which, as a package, makes the whole game-development enterprise a bit simpler. Plus, as you said, features get added much quicker to Direct3d because of the more efficient feature-adding environment. What we need is someone with the efficiency of Microsoft (you really can't fault Direct3d too much as a product) to produce an open DirectX-type system. There are open source projects to this direction, but nothing that compares to DirectX yet.
Maybe the actual launch costs $10 million. You also have to take into account the six months or so of training Mr. Tito received in Russia - I imagine that had a sizable cost. Of course, if NASA flew him up it would cost more like $40 million or something. I'm sure there are many other things besides the physical launch and oxygen that you aren't taking into account - space suits, non-resusable parts for the capsule, supplies for the station, etc, etc, etc. I'm guessing Russia made a profit on it (or why would they do it other than to boost the space-tourism industry?), but not a $10 million one.
Assuming the X-Box has moderate success, developers will begin to move even further away from open graphics protocals. Like it or not, Direct3d is really easy to program for and has great compatibility with graphics cards in Windows. Look at the OpenGL drivers for ATI cards and you'll see what I'm talking about (apparently this has improved somewhat). Companies always care about the bottom line. Until Linux gets more market share, full on ports will only be done for the biggest games (and this even has yet to be reasonably profitable). I think companies would be willing to make cross-platform games if there were common libraries across the board - also, if there was something universal that was as easy to code for as Direct3d. Making a Direct3d wrapper like this (that can take direct 3d calls and render them with OpenGL or something) is a decent solution. Not perfect, but until someone makes something better than Direct3d companies aren't going to do anything. Now, if the open source community made a well documented, up-to-date, easy to code for, massively supported / cross platform API then we might get somewhere.
Linux won't get commercial games until it has more desktop market share - conversely it probably won't get a lot more desktop market share till it has games. Making it easy for developers to make cross-platform games is the solution.
Hmmm... someone already made that exact thing. In fact, there was a Slashdot article about it (or at least a quickie). I would go search, but for some reason I imagine it would be difficult to filter through all the results for "Napster." Now it's coming to me... it was a pig-latin encryptor. It translated you're mp3 files into pig latin and then beamed them over some file sharing service. It even had the DMCA twist.
Assuming you have a ps2 mouse, there are "overclocking" programs that will increase the mouse refresh rate for you in win9x. Go look around (sorry no links, I use a usb mouse so I don't know where to find it).
Why not extend this and include the libraries and compilers needed to create a native ps2 application? Just compile it on the ps2 and zip it out the ethernet to your cd-burner. You'd probably be best suited to do the 3d modeling, animation, mapping, textures, etc on another machine, but this could be feasible.
There is already a dreamcast program that can play mp3s... or vcds for that matter. I think someone has a mame port going to... plus there's linux as reported here.
I had a little bit of trouble with my Mandrake 8 installed that would have repelled a first-time user - certianly not "windows easy" quite yet. First off, it didn't install the accelerated nvidia drivers (or say that they existed), so I had to go download them and follow Nvidia's instructions. I think they do include a commercial CD with their boxed release with closed drivers, commercial office apps (star, applix), and more non-free stuff. It also didn't have my monitor listed, so I had to go search for the monitor definitions on Google and manually edit the xf86 config file. Now it's up, but it would be a little confusing to a first time user to click tuxracer and have nothing happen :) - at the least they should have an error message pop up when a program doesn't start. The shear amount of configuration tools would also be fairly daunting. It took me awhile to find the right program to install new packages...
It would be far more than memorizing a single game of moves. You would have to know the correct move to every possible move of the opponent. Obviously the opponent's cache of likely moves would decrease as the game wore on, but you're still talking an incredibly large number of possible games that you'd have to memorize. There is no "perfect game" where you can make the same moves every time and win... chess isn't a rubiks cube.
I imagine a computer could probably determine a perfect checkers game (ie, unbeatable string of moves based on opponents reaction.) There just aren't as many possibilities as chess. Hell, there is probably a perfect chess game too - not that anyone knows it yet... or that any human could memorize it :)
Kansas City