And let's take a closer look at some of the "exotic" concepts too. Like the Polywell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell. The US Navy is already funding that one, but the sums are tiny compared to what goes into Tokamak research (ITER). Maybe some extra funds for building an additional, larger test apparatus would be well invested, as the output of a Polywell device is said to go up rapidly with increasing size. As in, double the size and see if that part of the theory holds true.
Managed to hide from war for 22 years, got violently drawn into WWII.
Only half true. The USA already provided significant material help to the allies. That started before Pearl Harbour. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease as the most obvious example. So they were not exactly neutral anymore.
If we don't want to play World Policeman I'm sure China would be happy to step in.
There are a few cases where the USA might do itself a favor if it lets someone else shovel the shit. Like Iraq, which was not really a threat. Unless the whole operation was really (as I strongly suspect) to gain better access to Iraqi oil;-)
Sounds like an interesting alternative to EVE Online. Where EVE is big, this could be bigger and casually grow with the number of players. Where adding new star systems is an obvious change in EVE, adding new motherships would seem more natural.
If you define "originality" as having original IP in an established genre (and possibly with the same game mechanics 20 other MMORPGs had before) then there is no shortage of it. Any MMO developer who puts together some generic fantasy background story instead of buying the license for an existing one qualifies.
Personally, I think a MMORPG needs at least one major feature that is not already established in similar form to be called original. That feature can either be the setting or a major part of the game mechanics. With that premise, the list of original MMORPGS becomes much shorter. Those I can list offhand, partly based on Wikipedia because I did not play them myself: -Ultima Online: The founder of the genre. You can't be more original than that:-) -Everquest: Brought 3D to MMORPGs. I guess that counts as "major part of the game mechanics". But most fantasy MMORPGS that came after that are just Everquest clones. -DAOC: Realm versus Realm as major focus. -Star Wars Galaxies: SciFi as setting, also may be the first MMORPG that had a deep and complex player economy (going from reports here, never played it myself). -Jumpgate: The first MMORPG that actually had players flying spaceships, and player skill based on top of that. -Eve Online: Space MMO with huge game world and strong strategic elements. Allows players to gain sovereignty of unpoliced space ("0.0 space"), with room for many factions. -Neocron, for the post-apocalyptic, somewhat Mad Max-like setting. -Auto Assault, again for the setting (and defunct by now). -Pirates of the Burning Sea: At least, the setting is new. Plus some of the game mechanics seem original too.
So that is nine original ones I can come up with on short notice. Compared to the huge number of existing MMORPGs, a rather poor yield:-(
Congratulations, Microsoft. You have just blocked one of the most popular topics on the internet, forcing people to use an other search engine. Google will love this decision;-)
3) Someone else invades them. The U.S. government does not care. Rationale: because they insisted on leaving the USA and NOT paying their taxes, they are not entitled to protection either.
The standard desktop is better than Google desktop. Yes, everybody says, to put Google in a good light: "standard compliant" browsers, but that means nonstandard compliant mail, nonstandard everything else. We won't own software, we'll be always customers, dumb terminals, served from huge company's "clouds". Free software will be over, irrelevant. We won't be able to improve and modify our environment, we can't improve Gmail ourselves, there's no alternative/better/innnovative client for Gmail.
(emphasis mine)
The points in boldface are a reason to side with the Open Source community. Neither Google nor Microsoft is any help on these aspects. And IMHO Ubuntu and similar systems are already quite usable for most purposes.
Even Unix won't save you if the attacker gets physical access to the machine. I learned how to "crack" SCO Unix 10 years ago in an administration course by booting from floppy and resetting the password file. If you can prevent that, it should be possible to secure Windows with a firewall that blocks all ports except the one your ATM application uses. This said, Linux may actually be easier/cheaper to secure. But I don't consider a Windows based ATM an automatic security risk if the developer does his homework.
Depending on how easy it is to pull and replace the wires (are they in sufficiently wide ductwork?), you could install Ethernet instead of plain telephone cable. With Ethernet ports in each room instead of the telephone jacks and a central switch.
There are also mixed installations: at my last workplace the Ethernet cabling could be used for telephone instead. I don't know offhand where to buy that stuff, but that might be a possibility for going back to telephone if you ever need it.
The cheapest netbooks I can find on Amazon are around $250, with specs that are sufficient for Windows XP. The OLPC laptop reportedly costs around $200 these days (difficult to compare because it is not in the usual sales channels).
I wonder how much you could squeeze the price with a cheaper processor (ARM?), less memory and a minimalistic Linux setup.
Only SP2? Then I hope you have a very good firewall. And an IT support that took the time to install all the security-critical patches since SP2 for the XP2 image.
Madison et al did this by creating a governmental structure that would increase the number of factions in the political districts by enlarging the political districts.
I call bullshit, because the majority vote system in the US has lead to only two parties having real power in Congress. Third parties (like the Libertarians and the Greens) might get lucky and score a few seats, but they are far from playing a big role. In fact, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress#Party_summary there are currently only two independent senators and one non-voting independent member in Congress. The rest are either Democrats or Republicans.
Re:Engine damage due to cars that are not prepared
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
·
· Score: 1
As others have pointed out after my original post, cars in Brazil run on mixtures with much more ethanol. Obviously, the car industry can do it once they have to. I'm sure the aircraft industry could adapt as well if they had to.
Engine damage due to cars that are not prepared
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
According to TFA, in many cases fuel lines or fuel pumps have been destroyed by fuel with increased ethanol content.
This seems credible because similar problems are known with biodiesel (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel#Material_compatibility). But there are materials that can handle the ethanol, they just need to be used in new cars and eventually most cars in existence will have them.
The real question is how large the net energy gain from using ethanol actually is. If TFA's assertion that it is a net energy loser are correct, that would be a far bigger problem.
[quote]15 watts for the CPU is huge compared to what some of the ARM chips are doing while also doing HD video.[/quote] And it should be doable to make a reasonably fast X86 CPU with 15 watts of power consumption. Actually I like the idea of the hardware vendors going for a fast but still affordable 15 watt CPU. Because someone might release a mini-ATX board for it that works with passive cooling in a small tower case, as a reasonable all round PC for everything except the latest games.
My data point: With gentle driving, I get about 38 mpg from my 1992 Audi 80 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_80, scroll down to the B4 model). The engine is the 2.0 - 66 kW (89 hp), in-line four-cylinder carburetor engine.
Improving the efficiency by 10% should be possible, considering the improvements in engine technology since 1992 (and the carburetor version was arguably not the most advanced back then).
390,000 are too many even if they could keep the secret. Because it is almost certain that in such a large group there are some people the information should be secret from.
First, a bad application would frequently crash the entire system. While Win9x was supposed to be able to terminate bad 32bit applications without crashing itself (according to MCSE class), in practice that did often not work. The Windows NT line was much better at that. Second, memory management was limited to 512 MB. Run multiple applications and you might exceed that. Of course, that only became an issue a few years down the road when 1 GB and more was affordable.
This is an ongoing question. I was forced to explain the reason for going to XP (migration done this year!) from 2000. Since migrating, I think we have only had one or two BSOD's - and a quick BIOS upgrade fixed that (we are an HP shop, BTW). Sure I mean there was no real technical reason to upgrade, as most of our users use apps and not the OS features anyways. But I am convinced that but not upgrading, you end up like we did - an old OS trying to run on modern hardware, which was becoming a support nightmare trying to explain why their PC would BSOD three or four times a day.
So I'm not the only one who noticed problems with Windows 2000 on new hardware. My current PC (built from components in 2007) was never quite stable under Windows 2000. I suspect that the hardware vendors had stopped caring at that point and did no real QA on the Windows 2000 drivers anymore. For the MSI graphics card (a NVidia 8600 GT), only an obsolete Windows 2000 driver version was offered at all. A switch to XP fixed the problems.
On the other hand, my older Pentium IV is quite stable under Windows 2000.
I agree. Don't have that much experience with C, but even so I can immediately name a few things that might have "interesting" results: -Messing up pointer arithmetics -Buffer overflows from miscalculating array indices (not so different from pointer arithmetics) -Introducing unwanted compiler directives through a careless #include. Oh, there was a #pragma in that included file and now you get weird side effects?;-)
Bottom line: If reliability is more important than maximum performance and flexibility, don't use C in the first place. Some people call it a "high level assembler" for a reason.
That's one part of Eve history I was not familiar with (only in game for 2 1/2 years). Unless you count a handful of systems for faction warfare, the only expansion since was wormhole space. One wonders if Jove space gets opened someday:-)
Even Eve is somewhat affected by this, in the form of overcrowded public research facilities. That is now, with (estimated) around 300k subscribers. In the beginning, the universe probably seemed pretty empty. But Eve handles these issues relatively well, because players can build their own structures for manufacture and research. Also, the market system scales very well (each station is in effect an auction house).
Both of these could be transferred to fantasy games, with the town building James Portnow suggested. Just make sure it includes things like forges, libraries and market halls. There is only one thing he was glossing over and that needs addressing: I think there needs to be some mechanism to encourage building actual towns instead of buildings that are wildly spread over the landscape. The latter is something SWG veterans complained about;-)
In terms of world size, think big but group some attractive resources around the starter areas. This way, people will only move into the hinterlands when resources are growing scarce near town (due to overcrowding and overuse). Another concept James Portnow got right.
Even for desktops, I'd like to see more of those. Lets say below 20 W, so a not-too-massive passive heat sink will do. I'm quite happy with the performance of my NVidia 6800 GT, and it needs about 50W at full usage. With the latest chip technology (40 nm anyone?), the same performance should be possible with much less power consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
And let's take a closer look at some of the "exotic" concepts too. Like the Polywell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell. The US Navy is already funding that one, but the sums are tiny compared to what goes into Tokamak research (ITER). Maybe some extra funds for building an additional, larger test apparatus would be well invested, as the output of a Polywell device is said to go up rapidly with increasing size. As in, double the size and see if that part of the theory holds true.
Managed to hide from war for 22 years, got violently drawn into WWII.
Only half true. The USA already provided significant material help to the allies. That started before Pearl Harbour. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease as the most obvious example. So they were not exactly neutral anymore.
If we don't want to play World Policeman I'm sure China would be happy to step in.
There are a few cases where the USA might do itself a favor if it lets someone else shovel the shit. Like Iraq, which was not really a threat. Unless the whole operation was really (as I strongly suspect) to gain better access to Iraqi oil ;-)
Sounds like an interesting alternative to EVE Online. Where EVE is big, this could be bigger and casually grow with the number of players. Where adding new star systems is an obvious change in EVE, adding new motherships would seem more natural.
If you define "originality" as having original IP in an established genre (and possibly with the same game mechanics 20 other MMORPGs had before) then there is no shortage of it. Any MMO developer who puts together some generic fantasy background story instead of buying the license for an existing one qualifies.
Personally, I think a MMORPG needs at least one major feature that is not already established in similar form to be called original. That feature can either be the setting or a major part of the game mechanics. With that premise, the list of original MMORPGS becomes much shorter. Those I can list offhand, partly based on Wikipedia because I did not play them myself: :-)
-Ultima Online: The founder of the genre. You can't be more original than that
-Everquest: Brought 3D to MMORPGs. I guess that counts as "major part of the game mechanics". But most fantasy MMORPGS that came after that are just Everquest clones.
-DAOC: Realm versus Realm as major focus.
-Star Wars Galaxies: SciFi as setting, also may be the first MMORPG that had a deep and complex player economy (going from reports here, never played it myself).
-Jumpgate: The first MMORPG that actually had players flying spaceships, and player skill based on top of that.
-Eve Online: Space MMO with huge game world and strong strategic elements. Allows players to gain sovereignty of unpoliced space ("0.0 space"), with room for many factions.
-Neocron, for the post-apocalyptic, somewhat Mad Max-like setting.
-Auto Assault, again for the setting (and defunct by now).
-Pirates of the Burning Sea: At least, the setting is new. Plus some of the game mechanics seem original too.
So that is nine original ones I can come up with on short notice. Compared to the huge number of existing MMORPGs, a rather poor yield :-(
Congratulations, Microsoft. You have just blocked one of the most popular topics on the internet, forcing people to use an other search engine. Google will love this decision ;-)
3) Someone else invades them. The U.S. government does not care.
Rationale: because they insisted on leaving the USA and NOT paying their taxes, they are not entitled to protection either.
The standard desktop is better than Google desktop. Yes, everybody says, to put Google in a good light: "standard compliant" browsers, but that means nonstandard compliant mail, nonstandard everything else. We won't own software, we'll be always customers, dumb terminals, served from huge company's "clouds". Free software will be over, irrelevant. We won't be able to improve and modify our environment, we can't improve Gmail ourselves, there's no alternative/better/innnovative client for Gmail.
(emphasis mine)
The points in boldface are a reason to side with the Open Source community. Neither Google nor Microsoft is any help on these aspects. And IMHO Ubuntu and similar systems are already quite usable for most purposes.
Even Unix won't save you if the attacker gets physical access to the machine. I learned how to "crack" SCO Unix 10 years ago in an administration course by booting from floppy and resetting the password file.
If you can prevent that, it should be possible to secure Windows with a firewall that blocks all ports except the one your ATM application uses.
This said, Linux may actually be easier/cheaper to secure. But I don't consider a Windows based ATM an automatic security risk if the developer does his homework.
Depending on how easy it is to pull and replace the wires (are they in sufficiently wide ductwork?), you could install Ethernet instead of plain telephone cable. With Ethernet ports in each room instead of the telephone jacks and a central switch.
There are also mixed installations: at my last workplace the Ethernet cabling could be used for telephone instead. I don't know offhand where to buy that stuff, but that might be a possibility for going back to telephone if you ever need it.
Is anyone really trying?
The cheapest netbooks I can find on Amazon are around $250, with specs that are sufficient for Windows XP. The OLPC laptop reportedly costs around $200 these days (difficult to compare because it is not in the usual sales channels).
I wonder how much you could squeeze the price with a cheaper processor (ARM?), less memory and a minimalistic Linux setup.
Only SP2?
Then I hope you have a very good firewall. And an IT support that took the time to install all the security-critical patches since SP2 for the XP2 image.
Some of us, for various reasons, are pretty much stuck with using IE6 for browsing /. and are faced with a pile of mis-rendered & incompatible pages
Browsing from work I guess, there cannot be many /. readers who don't have at least one alternative browser on their private machine ;-)
We appreciate having /. optimized for FireFox, but would also like such consideration for the more-used IE6 browser.
No longer more used. According to http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2, Firefox 3.0 overtook IE6 in February of this year.
Madison et al did this by creating a governmental structure that would increase the number of factions in the political districts by enlarging the political districts.
I call bullshit, because the majority vote system in the US has lead to only two parties having real power in Congress.
Third parties (like the Libertarians and the Greens) might get lucky and score a few seats, but they are far from playing a big role. In fact, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress#Party_summary there are currently only two independent senators and one non-voting independent member in Congress. The rest are either Democrats or Republicans.
As others have pointed out after my original post, cars in Brazil run on mixtures with much more ethanol. Obviously, the car industry can do it once they have to. I'm sure the aircraft industry could adapt as well if they had to.
According to TFA, in many cases fuel lines or fuel pumps have been destroyed by fuel with increased ethanol content.
This seems credible because similar problems are known with biodiesel (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel#Material_compatibility). But there are materials that can handle the ethanol, they just need to be used in new cars and eventually most cars in existence will have them.
The real question is how large the net energy gain from using ethanol actually is. If TFA's assertion that it is a net energy loser are correct, that would be a far bigger problem.
[quote]15 watts for the CPU is huge compared to what some of the ARM chips are doing while also doing HD video.[/quote]
And it should be doable to make a reasonably fast X86 CPU with 15 watts of power consumption. Actually I like the idea of the hardware vendors going for a fast but still affordable 15 watt CPU.
Because someone might release a mini-ATX board for it that works with passive cooling in a small tower case, as a reasonable all round PC for everything except the latest games.
My data point:
With gentle driving, I get about 38 mpg from my 1992 Audi 80 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_80, scroll down to the B4 model). The engine is the 2.0 - 66 kW (89 hp), in-line four-cylinder carburetor engine.
Improving the efficiency by 10% should be possible, considering the improvements in engine technology since 1992 (and the carburetor version was arguably not the most advanced back then).
390,000 are too many even if they could keep the secret. Because it is almost certain that in such a large group there are some people the information should be secret from.
First, a bad application would frequently crash the entire system. While Win9x was supposed to be able to terminate bad 32bit applications without crashing itself (according to MCSE class), in practice that did often not work. The Windows NT line was much better at that.
Second, memory management was limited to 512 MB. Run multiple applications and you might exceed that. Of course, that only became an issue a few years down the road when 1 GB and more was affordable.
This is an ongoing question. I was forced to explain the reason for going to XP (migration done this year!) from 2000. Since migrating, I think we have only had one or two BSOD's - and a quick BIOS upgrade fixed that (we are an HP shop, BTW). Sure I mean there was no real technical reason to upgrade, as most of our users use apps and not the OS features anyways. But I am convinced that but not upgrading, you end up like we did - an old OS trying to run on modern hardware, which was becoming a support nightmare trying to explain why their PC would BSOD three or four times a day.
So I'm not the only one who noticed problems with Windows 2000 on new hardware.
My current PC (built from components in 2007) was never quite stable under Windows 2000. I suspect that the hardware vendors had stopped caring at that point and did no real QA on the Windows 2000 drivers anymore. For the MSI graphics card (a NVidia 8600 GT), only an obsolete Windows 2000 driver version was offered at all. A switch to XP fixed the problems.
On the other hand, my older Pentium IV is quite stable under Windows 2000.
I agree. Don't have that much experience with C, but even so I can immediately name a few things that might have "interesting" results: ;-)
-Messing up pointer arithmetics
-Buffer overflows from miscalculating array indices (not so different from pointer arithmetics)
-Introducing unwanted compiler directives through a careless #include. Oh, there was a #pragma in that included file and now you get weird side effects?
Bottom line:
If reliability is more important than maximum performance and flexibility, don't use C in the first place. Some people call it a "high level assembler" for a reason.
That's one part of Eve history I was not familiar with (only in game for 2 1/2 years). Unless you count a handful of systems for faction warfare, the only expansion since was wormhole space. :-)
One wonders if Jove space gets opened someday
Even Eve is somewhat affected by this, in the form of overcrowded public research facilities. That is now, with (estimated) around 300k subscribers. In the beginning, the universe probably seemed pretty empty.
But Eve handles these issues relatively well, because players can build their own structures for manufacture and research. Also, the market system scales very well (each station is in effect an auction house).
Both of these could be transferred to fantasy games, with the town building James Portnow suggested. Just make sure it includes things like forges, libraries and market halls. There is only one thing he was glossing over and that needs addressing: ;-)
I think there needs to be some mechanism to encourage building actual towns instead of buildings that are wildly spread over the landscape. The latter is something SWG veterans complained about
In terms of world size, think big but group some attractive resources around the starter areas. This way, people will only move into the hinterlands when resources are growing scarce near town (due to overcrowding and overuse). Another concept James Portnow got right.
It's better now, and OK for a strategy-oriented game like Eve. But still too slow for a twitch-based game.
Even for desktops, I'd like to see more of those. Lets say below 20 W, so a not-too-massive passive heat sink will do.
I'm quite happy with the performance of my NVidia 6800 GT, and it needs about 50W at full usage. With the latest chip technology (40 nm anyone?), the same performance should be possible with much less power consumption.