2) Save buttons: I can't think of the last time I actually clicked on a Save button. If I'm doing something that actually requires saving (editing and viewing a web page), I use Ctrl-S. For most work, saving is not something the user should have to worry about - the program should keep a frequently updated backup on disk, so the user shouldn't need to keep saving.
3) Multi button mouse: I hate multi-button mice. I had one of those MS 5 button ones for a while and it drove me mad - I kept accidentally clicking. You can't just grab the mouse and move it, as you have all these buttons on the side.
You do realise you have to lead the target a little, right? Putting the cursor on the target will only kill them if they are running straight at you or stationary.
The tank shell thing is annoying, though. At least you can stun them with it now.
Please please please would Slashdot stop giving this idiot so many page impressions. Time after time he writes this shit, all straw-man arguments and half truths, and Slashdot predictably links to it. He hasn't said anything insightful yet or made any useful predictions: why keep posting links to his drivel?
If we ignore him, he will go away. As it is, every time he posts one of these articles his employer gets a nice big boost to their advertising revenue.
BF1942's game browser had stupid bugs as well - before one of the recent patches, if you filtered on a map name with a space in it, it would ignore any text after the space. So filtering on "Battle of Britain" would match "Battle of the bulge" as well.
I don't know why we expected anything different from BF2, really. Does anyone remember the problems with BF1942 when it was first released? Random disconnections, broken game browser, hundreds of bugs and crashes.
EA did the usual thing of spouting crappy troubleshooting ideas like forwarding ports or changing MTUs until they could get a patch ready. IIRC, it was many months before it was actually stable - after about four patches.
This just seems to be par for the course in PC gaming: promise the world, feed the hype machine (notice that gamespot's review makes no mention of bugs at all), release a crappy beta version and then stall for time while your overworked, undertrained developers scrabble to make a patch or three so that the game actually works.
Hence the fact that I do almost all my gaming on my Gamecube, PS2 or Gameboy these days. BF2 could be a great game, but I'm not sure I can be bothered to put up with the bugs, crashes and troubleshooting required for PC gaming any more.
You're forgetting the input of solar energy which produces the plants in the first place. The energy to convert plants to ethanol is not related to the energy content of the ethanol itself.
Any truly renewable energy source, ethanol included, is at worst CO2 neutral. Growing crops absorb CO2, which is then emitted when you burn them as ethanol.
The problem here is that the production process for the ethanol is apparently inefficient, so the shortfall in energy is made up using non-renewable resources: it is overall non-renewable. If you could decrease the energy requirement for producing the ethanol so it was less than the energy content of the ethanol produced, the entire thing would be self-sufficient and you would produce no net CO2.
I'd settle for BF2 actually working. It's a great game, but bloody hell is it buggy. I've had regular crashes, flag captures not showing up on the map, TKs for driving near friendly infantry in a tank. The internet game browser is seriously broken and crap - I had to do a clean reinstall just to be able to join online games!
Just to throw in my thoughts on Groove, as a comparison:
We use Groove for coordinating a small development team in the US, UK and Germany. We bought Groove because we wanted a common communication, calendar and file store. It's generally quite nice, but:
The bad: - It's very slow. The task management (Gantt chart) tool becomes unusably slow with any reasonably sized project. - The chat tool is crap. We went back to xchat after a few days trying to use it. - The UI is annoying, with lots of unneccessary flashing and changes
The good: - Most of the tools are pretty good: meetings, web link repository etc all work nicely - File syncing seems to work pretty well
It's a very nice idea and it works pretty well, it's just not quite well polished enough yet. An OSS alternative virtual office would be very welcome: I would imagine a lot of it could be built using already complete projects: webdav, rsync etc.
Don't forget Samsung, Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital for allowing their storage. And CTX, iiyama, Dell for making monitors to watch pirated movies on.
I expect Tim Berners-Lee to be arrested any day now for enabling so much piracy. Along with pretty much every operator of a web proxy.
* Competing to see who could get the 3 1/2" drive on the school's RM Nimbus 186s to fire a disk the furthest. * Keeping a stock of rubber bands around for replacing the 3 1/2" drive band of my PCW 9512 when it wore out.
Are there any legal experts out there who can explain how the publishers can get an injunction preventing people with whom they have no contract from talking about a book? Do they just have to show that significant damage would be done to their business in order to get an injunction?
It seems very odd to me that this is possible - it's not like the books were stolen.
- Channel 4 is saying there might have been an incident at South Kensington: can anyone confirm that? - Anyone in Brighton know why they've closed the station there as well?
I just downloaded the FC4 install ISOs, in fact. Maybe I'll give it a try. As it stands, Ubuntu's (and Debian's) attitude "of once it's released, no more non-RC bugfixes" is very annoying.
My point was that it scales better to push more of the packaging work onto the developers, as the number of packagers is fairly constant, but the number of developers is proportional to the number of packages. Something like Autopackage seems a step in the right direction to me: a simple common package format, so I don't have to wait for a packager, I just download the package fresh from the developer's build-script.
Try downloading the firefox installer from mozilla.org and using that version. The version in Ubuntu seems to have been screwed up somehow - I think it's the GNOME integration they added or something. The mozilla.org version is much faster on my system, and has much better font rendering.
The problem with having a central repository of software is that the user is stuck with the version of software that the packagers give them, assuming they even package it at all. It's just too much work to keep up with all the minor bugfixes for thousands of packages.
For example, on my system (Ubuntu Hoary), I have had to do custom installs of the kernel, Gnumeric, Abiword, Evince, Openoffice and Firefox to replace the Ubuntu packages to work around bugs. I've also had to install various packages from source because there's no.deb for them.
I don't think you need to look at such revolutionary changes as the author suggests to produce a great Linux desktop. The three areas we need to look at first, in order of importance, are:
1) Bugs 2) Usability 3) Performance
GNOME, for example, seems to be shifting its focus from 'revolution' to these points. The frameworks of several great desktop environments are there, they just need to be finished off,
But then Jeremy Clarkson is a twat who I hope gets run over one day by a speeding SUV with bull bars because the driver was too busy sticking two fingers up at a speed camera.
Seriously, that is the most ridiculously stupid quote I have ever read.
Slashdot Mirror
From a Linux (and forced Windows) user:
2) Save buttons: I can't think of the last time I actually clicked on a Save button. If I'm doing something that actually requires saving (editing and viewing a web page), I use Ctrl-S. For most work, saving is not something the user should have to worry about - the program should keep a frequently updated backup on disk, so the user shouldn't need to keep saving.
3) Multi button mouse: I hate multi-button mice. I had one of those MS 5 button ones for a while and it drove me mad - I kept accidentally clicking. You can't just grab the mouse and move it, as you have all these buttons on the side.
You do realise you have to lead the target a little, right? Putting the cursor on the target will only kill them if they are running straight at you or stationary.
The tank shell thing is annoying, though. At least you can stun them with it now.
Please please please would Slashdot stop giving this idiot so many page impressions. Time after time he writes this shit, all straw-man arguments and half truths, and Slashdot predictably links to it. He hasn't said anything insightful yet or made any useful predictions: why keep posting links to his drivel?
If we ignore him, he will go away. As it is, every time he posts one of these articles his employer gets a nice big boost to their advertising revenue.
BF1942's game browser had stupid bugs as well - before one of the recent patches, if you filtered on a map name with a space in it, it would ignore any text after the space. So filtering on "Battle of Britain" would match "Battle of the bulge" as well.
I don't know why we expected anything different from BF2, really. Does anyone remember the problems with BF1942 when it was first released? Random disconnections, broken game browser, hundreds of bugs and crashes.
EA did the usual thing of spouting crappy troubleshooting ideas like forwarding ports or changing MTUs until they could get a patch ready. IIRC, it was many months before it was actually stable - after about four patches.
This just seems to be par for the course in PC gaming: promise the world, feed the hype machine (notice that gamespot's review makes no mention of bugs at all), release a crappy beta version and then stall for time while your overworked, undertrained developers scrabble to make a patch or three so that the game actually works.
Hence the fact that I do almost all my gaming on my Gamecube, PS2 or Gameboy these days. BF2 could be a great game, but I'm not sure I can be bothered to put up with the bugs, crashes and troubleshooting required for PC gaming any more.
OK, I should use the preview:
Energy output is Energy3 - Energy2.
(1) In the corn: CO2 + Energy1 (Sunlight) + Chlorophyll -> Biomass (plants)
(2) In the fermenting: Biomass + Energy2 -> Ethanol
(3) In the car: Ethanol + O2 -> CO2 + H2O + Energy3
The best possible total useful energy output = Energy3 = Energy1 - Energy2
Energy1 is free - it's solar power. So if Energy2 is less than Energy2, you have overall net energy production.
You're forgetting the input of solar energy which produces the plants in the first place. The energy to convert plants to ethanol is not related to the energy content of the ethanol itself.
Any truly renewable energy source, ethanol included, is at worst CO2 neutral. Growing crops absorb CO2, which is then emitted when you burn them as ethanol.
The problem here is that the production process for the ethanol is apparently inefficient, so the shortfall in energy is made up using non-renewable resources: it is overall non-renewable. If you could decrease the energy requirement for producing the ethanol so it was less than the energy content of the ethanol produced, the entire thing would be self-sufficient and you would produce no net CO2.
I'd settle for BF2 actually working. It's a great game, but bloody hell is it buggy. I've had regular crashes, flag captures not showing up on the map, TKs for driving near friendly infantry in a tank. The internet game browser is seriously broken and crap - I had to do a clean reinstall just to be able to join online games!
Just to throw in my thoughts on Groove, as a comparison:
We use Groove for coordinating a small development team in the US, UK and Germany. We bought Groove because we wanted a common communication, calendar and file store. It's generally quite nice, but:
The bad:
- It's very slow. The task management (Gantt chart) tool becomes unusably slow with any reasonably sized project.
- The chat tool is crap. We went back to xchat after a few days trying to use it.
- The UI is annoying, with lots of unneccessary flashing and changes
The good:
- Most of the tools are pretty good: meetings, web link repository etc all work nicely
- File syncing seems to work pretty well
It's a very nice idea and it works pretty well, it's just not quite well polished enough yet. An OSS alternative virtual office would be very welcome: I would imagine a lot of it could be built using already complete projects: webdav, rsync etc.
Don't forget Samsung, Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital for allowing their storage. And CTX, iiyama, Dell for making monitors to watch pirated movies on.
I expect Tim Berners-Lee to be arrested any day now for enabling so much piracy. Along with pretty much every operator of a web proxy.
And all it took was four OS releases and an architecture change!
;-))
(I'm just kidding, before the flames start
* Competing to see who could get the 3 1/2" drive on the school's RM Nimbus 186s to fire a disk the furthest.
* Keeping a stock of rubber bands around for replacing the 3 1/2" drive band of my PCW 9512 when it wore out.
Are there any legal experts out there who can explain how the publishers can get an injunction preventing people with whom they have no contract from talking about a book? Do they just have to show that significant damage would be done to their business in order to get an injunction?
It seems very odd to me that this is possible - it's not like the books were stolen.
Baldur's Gate 2 (PC) is around 300 hours long (depending on how many side quests etc you do)
I guess they're probably a bit jumpy in Brighton about terrorist bombs on a normal day.
n g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombi
- Channel 4 is saying there might have been an incident at South Kensington: can anyone confirm that?
- Anyone in Brighton know why they've closed the station there as well?
I just downloaded the FC4 install ISOs, in fact. Maybe I'll give it a try. As it stands, Ubuntu's (and Debian's) attitude "of once it's released, no more non-RC bugfixes" is very annoying.
My point was that it scales better to push more of the packaging work onto the developers, as the number of packagers is fairly constant, but the number of developers is proportional to the number of packages. Something like Autopackage seems a step in the right direction to me: a simple common package format, so I don't have to wait for a packager, I just download the package fresh from the developer's build-script.
Try downloading the firefox installer from mozilla.org and using that version. The version in Ubuntu seems to have been screwed up somehow - I think it's the GNOME integration they added or something. The mozilla.org version is much faster on my system, and has much better font rendering.
The problem with having a central repository of software is that the user is stuck with the version of software that the packagers give them, assuming they even package it at all. It's just too much work to keep up with all the minor bugfixes for thousands of packages.
.deb for them.
For example, on my system (Ubuntu Hoary), I have had to do custom installs of the kernel, Gnumeric, Abiword, Evince, Openoffice and Firefox to replace the Ubuntu packages to work around bugs. I've also had to install various packages from source because there's no
I don't think you need to look at such revolutionary changes as the author suggests to produce a great Linux desktop. The three areas we need to look at first, in order of importance, are:
1) Bugs
2) Usability
3) Performance
GNOME, for example, seems to be shifting its focus from 'revolution' to these points. The frameworks of several great desktop environments are there, they just need to be finished off,
1 tonne of TNT = 4.184 x 10^9 joule = 4.184 Gigajoules/tonne
:-)
19/4.184 ~ 4.5 tonnes TNT
TNT has a lot of energy
But then Jeremy Clarkson is a twat who I hope gets run over one day by a speeding SUV with bull bars because the driver was too busy sticking two fingers up at a speed camera.
Seriously, that is the most ridiculously stupid quote I have ever read.
Skodas are just VWs with a different badge and a cheaper interior and body these days...