Know what's probably a more difficult problem than FTL travel? Getting people off the planet earth as fast (or faster) than population increase.
Pff. That's not so hard. In the US, there are about 2.4 million deaths per year, and 4 million births per year. If we wanted to actually empty the nation, we should shoot high at 4 million people off the planet per year. Now a modified Space Shuttle could launch about 60 passengers (plus crew, who we assume are returning) per flight. To get 4 million people off the planet, we'd need 66,667 flights per year. That's ~182 flights per day, or 7.6 flights per hour. Now if we build a fleet of say, a few dozen shuttles, all running round-the-clock operations, we could empty out the US in no time! To get the entire world, just expand the program to other major nations.;-)
Of course, it would make more sense just to build a bigger ship. A ship that could fly 300 people to a LEO rendezvous (Energia reusable?) could easily empty out four million people in a year with ~1.5 flights per hour!
I realize it may sound amusing at the moment, but consider one thing for a moment. US air travel easily exceeds these numbers. If space travel was expanded to air-travel proportions, flights would not only be cheap enough, but we'd be able to move WAY more people off-planet then we could ever possibly need.
Uh, yeah. Whatever you say. RiscOS was hardly single user, nor was BeOS. Most of the GUIs (GEM, NeWS, VisiOn, etc.) never even had a chance to compete in a multi-user, networked world. Most of them preceded Windows, but were crushed by Microsoft before they made any progress in the marketplace.
The Mac adapted to networking quite well, thank you. Before Windows, even. And OS X has shown that the NeXT interface (made in 1986, mind you) is far superior to your "adaptable" POS.
Really, if you're going to troll, at least try to make sense.
Anyone know how draconion the "not allowed to use a computer" laws are? Does it only apply to PC's, or would this guy not even be able to use the friar at McDonalds?
Putting aside the obvious joke about holy men in boiling oil, the McDonald's frier is not a "computer". It's a electronic device. In the case of Mitnick, he wasn't allowed any electronic devices (including a telephone!) due to his proven ability to misuse them. In this case, he probably can't use anything that we would reasonably consider a PC, Server, or other interactive computer. That may pose a problem for today's electronic cash registers, but the judge may make an exception for such devices.
Microsoft never had to work hard for the money. Everyone jumped on the Windows/Office bandwagon.
That's just simply not true. Microsoft has worked it ass off to convince the public it needs what its selling. That's been particularly difficult as Microsoft products have traditionally not been very innovative. So Microsoft has taken the tack of marketing the heck out of their product, and crushing the competition in the process.
Take the matter of the VisiOn GUI. Microsoft had nothing to compete. Zip, Zilch, Nada. So they see this VisiOn and realize that they'll soon be irrelevant. To counter this threat, Microsoft annouces that they will be releasing a product known as "Windows" Real Soon Now(TM). Everyone then puts off purchasing VisiOn while Microsoft goes and makes something up. Microsoft is late shipping (since they didn't actually have a product), and ends up bleeding Visi-Corp out of the market. Microsoft then delivers a steaming pile of software known as "Windows" which gains absolutely no foothold on the industry up until the point where it copies the Macintosh. Poorly.
Windows was then scheduled for demolition right up to the point where a couple of smart guys saved the company by getting Windows to run in 32 bit mode. Microsoft throws their marketing muscle behind this new version of "Windows", and the rest is history.
So in summary, Microsoft may be a lot of things. But lazy isn't one of them. Always give the devil his due, or you may get complacent.
By the way, why is Bill Gates still so involved? I thought he left Microsoft a long time ago.
You thought wrong. Bill Gates stepped down as CEO to "focus on being the Chief Engineer". Which is polito-speak for "there's too much attention/hated directed toward the CEO, so let's move him out of the way to give the company a new image". Gates pops out to give speeches whenever Microsoft wants to mislead the public. They probably figure that half the population listens to him because they hate him, and the other half listens because they think he's a genius.
Make no mistake, though. He's probably still the puppeteer running the show. We just don't see him at as many press conferences.
Really! See the big shiny thing! Yes, ignore those other things. They're new, small, and boring. The Gigantasaurous Rex over there is the REAL threat! What's that? It's not moving you say? That's because it's... um... conserving its energy. Yea, that's it! It's like a crocodile. The moment you get too close, SNAP!
So look over that way. And pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
(Sure Bill, we're all going to listen to you. *rolls eyes*)
It's amazing that SCO would even consider throwing away money on such a lost cause in the first place.
I suspect that SCO now realizes that it can't possibly win, and is merely trying to extend its lawsuit long enough for the public to forget they exist. If they can keep the case tied up in the courts for a few more years, they probably think that everyone will no longer care. I don't think they realize how long Slashdot holds a grudge.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to hack my CueCat.;-)
You're referring to the fourth section of the Constituion, right? From Wikipedia:
The United States is obligated by Section Four to ensure a "Republican Form of Government" in each state. What exactly constitutes a republican government, however, is not up to the courts. In effect, the clause is non-justiciable; in Luther v. Borden 48 U.S. 1 (1849), the Court held that "it rests with Congress to decide what government is the established one in a State... as well as its republican character."
So states can pretty much be anything they want as long as Congress agrees that they're "republican". Since the definition is so broad, the States are not required to hold elections for the state positions. This is something of a throwback to when the states were "owned" through a purchase or deeding from the King of England.
But yes, I was primarily referring to the Presidential Elections, which are decided by the state alone. The state may suffer an election at its own option.
Cars that were rigged to explode "The Wall Within" that wasn't The Killian documents
Those were just off the top of my head. Sure, they found a few scapegoats for those really big ones, but no one important got canned. Hell, Dan Rather got away with crappy journalism for decades before they finally cut him loose. (And even then there's still some question as to whether he didn't just retire.)
Like another poster said, I've been interviewed by reporters a couple times. It almost always leaves a bad taste as they just take a single soundbite out of a two hour conversation, then skew the article however they want it to go. Since their "journalism" is so wishy-washy, it's often hard to call them on being outright wrong. Sure, they're highly inaccurate, their facts are mixed up, blah, blah, blah. But no one cares enough to force the issue, partly because the buggers are so slippery.
Trust me. If you read it in the newspaper or watch it on television, take a very large grain of salt before buying into lock, stock, and barrel.
TRue. Some states didn't even have voting until a hundred or so years after the United States was founded. There is, in fact, no Constitutional requirement that any State of the Union provide voting to any person or persons. Each state gets its allotted number of electorial votes, then it's up to the state to figure out how to allocate them.
That being said, most states I've lived in require voter registration to prevent fraud. North Dakota probably doesn't because it doesn't need it as much. No offense to you guys, but it's not like there are that many people for each voting station to sort through. Even when I lived in Wisconsin (which *does* require registration), everyone knew everyone well enough to keep fraud out.:-)
Your system really isn't any different than the one in the US. In the US, you must first register to vote. This only needs to be done once, after which the voting place will expect you. As soon as you check in, your name is crossed out and you're given a ballot. That ballor has no identifying information, thus securing your right to a secret ballot. If a recount goes into effect, two things can happen:
1) The ballots themselves are recounted 2) The voters who showed up are verified to ensure that no one voted who shouldn't have. (e.g. Dead people.)
The system is tedious, but it works. The problem that has arisen, however, is that districts want to streamline voting by using electronic ballots. Since it can be difficult to *prove* that a counted vote wasn't changed after the fact, we have various stories like this one pointing out the many problems with E-Voting.
Remember that one of the key points in an election is anonymous ballots. The entire point is that someone can't hold a gun to your head (or hold your family hostage, blackmail you, or do millions of other nasty things) to force you to vote the way they want you to. The moment a ballot can be traced back to its owner is the day our entire system will collapse.
Which is to say, the LapBoard is as far as they've gotten on development, right? It helps when you have employees actually working on stuff.:-/
Seriously, doing a good job creating a game console is HARD. Compounding that difficulty is the fact that you need game producers all lined up with new games at launch time. This idea that they were going to take PC hardware and run PC games was never a very good one. Microsoft tried it (and failed), and they DID have game producers lined up! Now the latest generation of consoles are using hardware that's in excess of PC capabilities, and the Phantom is suddenly looking worse and worse by the day.
Sorry Infinium. You missed the boat. Better luck next time. Good luck on your peripheral business.
Actually, it's more like a REALLY light airplane. The craft itself is heavier than air, but only a bit heavier. It's buoyancy makes it easy to get it off the ground at low speeds, and easy to keep in the air. That's why it only needs the small "fins" you see for wings.
Of course, that's all what the brochure says. We'll have to wait to see how it performs in the real world.
I wonder if the story submitter realizes that Netscape has bundled AIM as a sidebar extension since the earliest release of Netscape 6 Beta? Might come as a serious shock to his system that this "killer" app is not so "new" or "killer" after all.;-)
One 4K version of tetris on that page uses almost 40 MB of RAM after a few minutes
Did you consider that the memory you're seeing may be JVM overhead combined with pre-allocation? In smaller devices (like Cell Phones), the JVM is built into the device. So there's no real overhead for Java. The pre-allocation is also smaller to compensate for the smaller device. Considering that many of these devices have barely 64K available (never mind 120K), I'd say that Java fits just fine.
and after playing for a while there's occasional, noticeable pauses for garbage collection (yes, I verified it was from garbage collection)
I find it interesting that you singled out such an example without looking at many of the more interesting examples like T4XI, Robotron 4096, and Hunters 4K. Also, you may find Tetris 4K to be a much better version than the first item on the list.
Java's great for some tasks, it's almost like a cross-platform VB. But the language, or more likely the way the language is most commonly used, isn't optimal for some things. Games happen to be one of those things.
At one point I could have pointed to the poor performance and massive memory usage of VegaStrike. Does that mean that C/C++ is a "bad" langauge? NO! It means that it was poorly coded and still needed lots of work done. The developers worked on improving their codebase, and low-and-behold, the game got better. Perhaps it wasn't the language after all?
Yeah, then roaming profiles are going to work great.
And roaming profiles are a *good* idea because... ???
The more meta-data you can link up to individual files, the better you can network those individual files. The problem is that Windows is an explosion of little files, with an explosion of configuration files, with an explosion of proprietary databases, with an explosion of special directories on top. It's a fracking mess, and roaming profiles is a band-aid.
No other PC GUI system came up with such a poor design. (Yeah, X-Windows was a mess too. But it was a controlled mess intended for *cough* "Professionals".) BeOS, Amiga, RiscOS, Mac, etc. all had way better solutions to the problem. The most important goal for Windows was to run a multi-user environment on top of a single-user Operating System that would perhaps be best be described as an "embedded OS". It worked at the time, but it wasn't a very effective way to handle things long-term. Plus, GUI designs have never been reevaluated in the face of modern hardware.
Read the article. I haven't covered everything (it's an article, not a book), but you may find that it's actually a good idea. BTW, the follow-up is here.
Having moved to the Mac a few years back, I haven't found many demos which run natively on my machine.
Try Robotron 4096. It was developed on a Mac, then tested on Windows.;-)
Is this a sign the demo scene may just kick off big time for J2SE?
This contest is currently running into its fourth year. It garnered quite a bit of attention the first year, but the quality of the entries was pretty low. The second year two competitors really tore up the contest with full graphics, sound support, and full screen applications. The third year gained attention from many professional game developers. taking the contest into 3D, real-time raytracing, and other areas that it had never been before.
The fourth year is shaping up to be even bigger and badder than ever before. Visit JavaGaming.org for more info.
It does have real use for Cell Phones and other J2ME devices. The types of tricks used in this contest are precisely the types of things you'd do for J2ME. The only difference is that J2ME further constrains you on total system memory, not just download size.
Slashdot Mirror
Know what's probably a more difficult problem than FTL travel? Getting people off the planet earth as fast (or faster) than population increase.
;-)
Pff. That's not so hard. In the US, there are about 2.4 million deaths per year, and 4 million births per year. If we wanted to actually empty the nation, we should shoot high at 4 million people off the planet per year. Now a modified Space Shuttle could launch about 60 passengers (plus crew, who we assume are returning) per flight. To get 4 million people off the planet, we'd need 66,667 flights per year. That's ~182 flights per day, or 7.6 flights per hour. Now if we build a fleet of say, a few dozen shuttles, all running round-the-clock operations, we could empty out the US in no time! To get the entire world, just expand the program to other major nations.
Of course, it would make more sense just to build a bigger ship. A ship that could fly 300 people to a LEO rendezvous (Energia reusable?) could easily empty out four million people in a year with ~1.5 flights per hour!
I realize it may sound amusing at the moment, but consider one thing for a moment. US air travel easily exceeds these numbers. If space travel was expanded to air-travel proportions, flights would not only be cheap enough, but we'd be able to move WAY more people off-planet then we could ever possibly need.
Uh, yeah. Whatever you say. RiscOS was hardly single user, nor was BeOS. Most of the GUIs (GEM, NeWS, VisiOn, etc.) never even had a chance to compete in a multi-user, networked world. Most of them preceded Windows, but were crushed by Microsoft before they made any progress in the marketplace.
The Mac adapted to networking quite well, thank you. Before Windows, even. And OS X has shown that the NeXT interface (made in 1986, mind you) is far superior to your "adaptable" POS.
Really, if you're going to troll, at least try to make sense.
Anyone know how draconion the "not allowed to use a computer" laws are? Does it only apply to PC's, or would this guy not even be able to use the friar at McDonalds?
Putting aside the obvious joke about holy men in boiling oil, the McDonald's frier is not a "computer". It's a electronic device. In the case of Mitnick, he wasn't allowed any electronic devices (including a telephone!) due to his proven ability to misuse them. In this case, he probably can't use anything that we would reasonably consider a PC, Server, or other interactive computer. That may pose a problem for today's electronic cash registers, but the judge may make an exception for such devices.
I see there is still a learned individual or two on Slashdot.
Microsoft never had to work hard for the money. Everyone jumped on the Windows/Office bandwagon.
That's just simply not true. Microsoft has worked it ass off to convince the public it needs what its selling. That's been particularly difficult as Microsoft products have traditionally not been very innovative. So Microsoft has taken the tack of marketing the heck out of their product, and crushing the competition in the process.
Take the matter of the VisiOn GUI. Microsoft had nothing to compete. Zip, Zilch, Nada. So they see this VisiOn and realize that they'll soon be irrelevant. To counter this threat, Microsoft annouces that they will be releasing a product known as "Windows" Real Soon Now(TM). Everyone then puts off purchasing VisiOn while Microsoft goes and makes something up. Microsoft is late shipping (since they didn't actually have a product), and ends up bleeding Visi-Corp out of the market. Microsoft then delivers a steaming pile of software known as "Windows" which gains absolutely no foothold on the industry up until the point where it copies the Macintosh. Poorly.
Windows was then scheduled for demolition right up to the point where a couple of smart guys saved the company by getting Windows to run in 32 bit mode. Microsoft throws their marketing muscle behind this new version of "Windows", and the rest is history.
So in summary, Microsoft may be a lot of things. But lazy isn't one of them. Always give the devil his due, or you may get complacent.
By the way, why is Bill Gates still so involved? I thought he left Microsoft a long time ago.
You thought wrong. Bill Gates stepped down as CEO to "focus on being the Chief Engineer". Which is polito-speak for "there's too much attention/hated directed toward the CEO, so let's move him out of the way to give the company a new image". Gates pops out to give speeches whenever Microsoft wants to mislead the public. They probably figure that half the population listens to him because they hate him, and the other half listens because they think he's a genius.
Make no mistake, though. He's probably still the puppeteer running the show. We just don't see him at as many press conferences.
Really! See the big shiny thing! Yes, ignore those other things. They're new, small, and boring. The Gigantasaurous Rex over there is the REAL threat! What's that? It's not moving you say? That's because it's... um... conserving its energy. Yea, that's it! It's like a crocodile. The moment you get too close, SNAP!
So look over that way. And pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
(Sure Bill, we're all going to listen to you. *rolls eyes*)
It's amazing that SCO would even consider throwing away money on such a lost cause in the first place.
;-)
I suspect that SCO now realizes that it can't possibly win, and is merely trying to extend its lawsuit long enough for the public to forget they exist. If they can keep the case tied up in the courts for a few more years, they probably think that everyone will no longer care. I don't think they realize how long Slashdot holds a grudge.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to hack my CueCat.
You're referring to the fourth section of the Constituion, right? From Wikipedia:
... as well as its republican character."
The United States is obligated by Section Four to ensure a "Republican Form of Government" in each state. What exactly constitutes a republican government, however, is not up to the courts. In effect, the clause is non-justiciable; in Luther v. Borden 48 U.S. 1 (1849), the Court held that "it rests with Congress to decide what government is the established one in a State
So states can pretty much be anything they want as long as Congress agrees that they're "republican". Since the definition is so broad, the States are not required to hold elections for the state positions. This is something of a throwback to when the states were "owned" through a purchase or deeding from the King of England.
But yes, I was primarily referring to the Presidential Elections, which are decided by the state alone. The state may suffer an election at its own option.
Lemme see here:
Cars that were rigged to explode
"The Wall Within" that wasn't
The Killian documents
Those were just off the top of my head. Sure, they found a few scapegoats for those really big ones, but no one important got canned. Hell, Dan Rather got away with crappy journalism for decades before they finally cut him loose. (And even then there's still some question as to whether he didn't just retire.)
Like another poster said, I've been interviewed by reporters a couple times. It almost always leaves a bad taste as they just take a single soundbite out of a two hour conversation, then skew the article however they want it to go. Since their "journalism" is so wishy-washy, it's often hard to call them on being outright wrong. Sure, they're highly inaccurate, their facts are mixed up, blah, blah, blah. But no one cares enough to force the issue, partly because the buggers are so slippery.
Trust me. If you read it in the newspaper or watch it on television, take a very large grain of salt before buying into lock, stock, and barrel.
TRue. Some states didn't even have voting until a hundred or so years after the United States was founded. There is, in fact, no Constitutional requirement that any State of the Union provide voting to any person or persons. Each state gets its allotted number of electorial votes, then it's up to the state to figure out how to allocate them.
:-)
That being said, most states I've lived in require voter registration to prevent fraud. North Dakota probably doesn't because it doesn't need it as much. No offense to you guys, but it's not like there are that many people for each voting station to sort through. Even when I lived in Wisconsin (which *does* require registration), everyone knew everyone well enough to keep fraud out.
Your system really isn't any different than the one in the US. In the US, you must first register to vote. This only needs to be done once, after which the voting place will expect you. As soon as you check in, your name is crossed out and you're given a ballot. That ballor has no identifying information, thus securing your right to a secret ballot. If a recount goes into effect, two things can happen:
1) The ballots themselves are recounted
2) The voters who showed up are verified to ensure that no one voted who shouldn't have. (e.g. Dead people.)
The system is tedious, but it works. The problem that has arisen, however, is that districts want to streamline voting by using electronic ballots. Since it can be difficult to *prove* that a counted vote wasn't changed after the fact, we have various stories like this one pointing out the many problems with E-Voting.
Mod parent up:
100% Correct
100% American
100% Insightful
Remember that one of the key points in an election is anonymous ballots. The entire point is that someone can't hold a gun to your head (or hold your family hostage, blackmail you, or do millions of other nasty things) to force you to vote the way they want you to. The moment a ballot can be traced back to its owner is the day our entire system will collapse.
Correction: It would have been a cool mod if it didn't double as a boat anchor!
;-)
Miniaturization. Learn it, live it, love it.
Which is to say, the LapBoard is as far as they've gotten on development, right? It helps when you have employees actually working on stuff. :-/
Seriously, doing a good job creating a game console is HARD. Compounding that difficulty is the fact that you need game producers all lined up with new games at launch time. This idea that they were going to take PC hardware and run PC games was never a very good one. Microsoft tried it (and failed), and they DID have game producers lined up! Now the latest generation of consoles are using hardware that's in excess of PC capabilities, and the Phantom is suddenly looking worse and worse by the day.
Sorry Infinium. You missed the boat. Better luck next time. Good luck on your peripheral business.
Him: "I am over 6'2(185 cm)"
;-)
You: "Back to the Military thing, maybe you could get a Nuclear Sub to take you accross the ocean."
Him: "Owwww! My aching back! I wish I could stand up and stret... OWWWWW!!! MY HEAD!"
There's a reason why there's a size limit for submarine duty.
Actually, it's more like a REALLY light airplane. The craft itself is heavier than air, but only a bit heavier. It's buoyancy makes it easy to get it off the ground at low speeds, and easy to keep in the air. That's why it only needs the small "fins" you see for wings.
Of course, that's all what the brochure says. We'll have to wait to see how it performs in the real world.
I think I like the name more than I think I'll like the game.
:)
How sad. You might find you're missing a great little game. Not to mention many of the other good ones like T4XI and Hunters4K.
Well, at least you might get some amusement out of the manual:
http://java.dnsalias.com/4k/robotron/readme.txt
It contains an entire story about how Robotron ends up in 4096.
I don't think this is so much an IM app as a filesharing one...
So you're trying to say that AIM *doesn't* have file sharing capabilities?
I wonder if the story submitter realizes that Netscape has bundled AIM as a sidebar extension since the earliest release of Netscape 6 Beta? Might come as a serious shock to his system that this "killer" app is not so "new" or "killer" after all. ;-)
God, I love that name.
;-)
Yes, but what about the game?
One 4K version of tetris on that page uses almost 40 MB of RAM after a few minutes
Did you consider that the memory you're seeing may be JVM overhead combined with pre-allocation? In smaller devices (like Cell Phones), the JVM is built into the device. So there's no real overhead for Java. The pre-allocation is also smaller to compensate for the smaller device. Considering that many of these devices have barely 64K available (never mind 120K), I'd say that Java fits just fine.
and after playing for a while there's occasional, noticeable pauses for garbage collection (yes, I verified it was from garbage collection)
I find it interesting that you singled out such an example without looking at many of the more interesting examples like T4XI, Robotron 4096, and Hunters 4K. Also, you may find Tetris 4K to be a much better version than the first item on the list.
Java's great for some tasks, it's almost like a cross-platform VB. But the language, or more likely the way the language is most commonly used, isn't optimal for some things. Games happen to be one of those things.
You don't know what you're talking about.
At one point I could have pointed to the poor performance and massive memory usage of VegaStrike. Does that mean that C/C++ is a "bad" langauge? NO! It means that it was poorly coded and still needed lots of work done. The developers worked on improving their codebase, and low-and-behold, the game got better. Perhaps it wasn't the language after all?
Yeah, then roaming profiles are going to work great.
And roaming profiles are a *good* idea because... ???
The more meta-data you can link up to individual files, the better you can network those individual files. The problem is that Windows is an explosion of little files, with an explosion of configuration files, with an explosion of proprietary databases, with an explosion of special directories on top. It's a fracking mess, and roaming profiles is a band-aid.
No other PC GUI system came up with such a poor design. (Yeah, X-Windows was a mess too. But it was a controlled mess intended for *cough* "Professionals".) BeOS, Amiga, RiscOS, Mac, etc. all had way better solutions to the problem. The most important goal for Windows was to run a multi-user environment on top of a single-user Operating System that would perhaps be best be described as an "embedded OS". It worked at the time, but it wasn't a very effective way to handle things long-term. Plus, GUI designs have never been reevaluated in the face of modern hardware.
Read the article. I haven't covered everything (it's an article, not a book), but you may find that it's actually a good idea. BTW, the follow-up is here.
Having moved to the Mac a few years back, I haven't found many demos which run natively on my machine.
;-)
Try Robotron 4096. It was developed on a Mac, then tested on Windows.
Is this a sign the demo scene may just kick off big time for J2SE?
This contest is currently running into its fourth year. It garnered quite a bit of attention the first year, but the quality of the entries was pretty low. The second year two competitors really tore up the contest with full graphics, sound support, and full screen applications. The third year gained attention from many professional game developers. taking the contest into 3D, real-time raytracing, and other areas that it had never been before.
The fourth year is shaping up to be even bigger and badder than ever before. Visit JavaGaming.org for more info.
It does have real use for Cell Phones and other J2ME devices. The types of tricks used in this contest are precisely the types of things you'd do for J2ME. The only difference is that J2ME further constrains you on total system memory, not just download size.