Now, can we get on with life? And if you want to make a serious dent in MS Windows, let's develop a better OS targeted directly for the desktop user.
There's no one such entity as a "desktop user" in the first place. The term covers everything from the home machine which is constantly having things installed and uninstalled on it to the corporate machine which runs only one application operated by people who would be looking for another job if they even though about changing any settings.
The problem is, I have yet to see an interface for *nix that does as good as job as windows does of 'packing everything under the hood' and making an operating system that (as a friend of mine, the chief sysadmin for Connectiv would say) "protects users from their own stupidity".
Thing is that "protecting users from their own stupidity" is about the last thing Windows does. Not only are there a myriad of applications which require to be run as "administrator" even a supposedly unprivileged user in Windows still has the ability to seriously mess things up.
Since this is primarily a freedom of speech issue, I should note that freedom of speech is not there to defend speech you want to hear, it's there to defend the speech you _don't_ want to hear.
Actually it's to protect speach with is politically incorrect which isn't always the same thing.
There are limits, encouraging violence or criminal activity is not protected. Slandering or libeling someone is not protected.
Actually all of these may be protected, depending on who the target is. Laws and law enforcement tends to follow the principle of whatever is politically correct at the time.
That's high altitude, low pressure. NOT a vacuum. I don't think a magazine is going to help much in space.
A pressurised aircraft is somthing like 8 PSI preassure difference in flight. The most a pressurised spacecraft is going to experience is around 14 PSI. Assuming it is preassurised to sea level.
I think the point of slugthrowers in a ship is that we know they work, and aside from B5's PPGs, every single space show out there had ray guns of some type.
Even B5 used "slugthrowers".
Avoiding cliches is a point of good writing, and slug throwers are cheap, they carry their own energy
They also carry their own energy in a way which is reasonably safe to the operator A ST Phaser contains enough energy to make a very effective bomb. Not the sort of thing you want to carry on your person
And this whole "explosive" decompression thing. Too many explosions in current entertainment has got people thinking a little hole in the wall will make the ship blow up.
Maybe a few people need to be forced to watch the episode of "Mythbusters" where this is put to the test. All a bullet will do is make a small hole you could plug by putting your in flight magazine over.
The most annoying thing for me was that no matter what horrible thing was happening to the crew, it would always be fixed at the end of the episode (TNG had a few of these, but it was a noticeable, regular event in Voyager).
This is most likely an effect of the way US broadcasters like to show series. With a "reset button" it's rather less obvious when episodes are shown in random order.
This became more obvious with other Sci-Fi series that changed the rules a big (DS9, B5 both come to mind) with longer story arcs and more long term consequences for actions taken in an episode.
Some of the consequences included being cancelled.
Yes, they are used on commercial flights almost as much as pilot guided landings. The first aircraft that could autoland, including descent onto runway and flair, was the BAC Trident 1C in June 1965 at Heathrow, London, UK. This system is fitted as standard on most modern aircraft.
IIRC it took a long time before US manufactured airliners had such a system. Things like overstressing one part of the runway might also have been less of an issue with a relativly small plane too.
When will a station finally pick the show up in the United States???
The TV execs are probably looking for a way in which they can "remake" it for a US audience.
It's showing in Australia, the UK, Canada, and Italy to record ratings. Someone needs to wake up the execs that be and get this show on the air before we look like complete morons.
You'd probably need to borrow The Doctor's TARDIS to do that.
I'd compare it to top-fuel dragsters and funny cars. They can hit 300+ mph while traveling in a straight line. If the driver doesn't keep the vehicle pointed in the right direction, things get very ugly, very quickly.
These cars are specifically designed so that if something goes wrong most of the energy goes into breaking the car rather than the driver.
Rockets have the same problem. They are designed to travel along the roll axis of the vehicle. It only takes a small amount of pitch or yaw error to generate aerodynamic forces that will produce "rapid unplanned disassembly" of the rocket.
This appears to be a bigger problem with s "spaceplane" bolted to the side of a rocket than with a capsule stuck of top. In addition the latter is typically fitted with a solid fuel motor to get the capsule away from the rest of the rocket if things go wrong.
The B-52 fleet has many airframes older than the parents of the people flying them for instance.
By the time they retire it's possible that they will be older than the grandparents, even the great-grandparents of their pilots. Interestingly NASA's B52 is the oldest in terms of when it was built, but has the least flying hours on it.
The Air Force flys Bombers designed in the 40s and built in the 50s. Fighters that where designed in the 60s and built in the 70s. Even the Boeing 747 was first built in the 60s as was the 737.
Even older Boeing's first jet airliner, the 707. Which is still being flown as the KC-135, RC-135 and E3. With there being not many civilian 707s still flying. (Even when they don't decide to go for a swim in Lake Victoria.) Similarly the military varient of the DeHaviland Comet is still flying, as the Nimrod MR2
STS was originally conceived in the 60s, implemented in the 70s, and was launched in the 80s.
Age isn't all there is to the equation. The B52 bomber was designed in 1948 (IIRC). Still considered, by the USAF, to have plenty of life left in it.
I turned 24 today. The space shuttle first took off when I was six days old.
It was a few days late...
From a technology standpoint, I don't use the same computers that were out in 1981. I don't drive a car that was made or designed in 1981. I don't even talk on a phone whose carrier techology was around in 1981.
You'd probably be suprised how much old technology you are using. The likes of power steering and automatic transmission have been around a long time. SPC digital telephone switching dates from the 1970's. With some telephone cabling being decades old.
So why, WHY are we launching people into space with a program older than I am?
Soyuz is even older than the shuttle. As well as being considerably safer.
The governments represented by the EU cannot pass any law they like; they must respect the treaties they've signed, including those on copyrights and patents.
Actually they can. With some governments, e.g. the US, being notorious for ignoring treaties when they feel like it.
These treaties do not permit confiscation of the copyrights or patents of a US-based company, and the U.S. could pursue trade sanctions if the EU attempted this.
Would such sanctions be more harmful to the EU or the US though?
One of the problems for NZ (and to a lesser extent Oz) is that there are only a few high bandwidth feeds into the country from the rest of the world. The country is well wired internally, but there is a chokepoint.
With Torrents and the like, much of the international traffic is replicated and repeated, leading to inefficient use of the available international bandwidth.
It depends if the protocol has an algorithm for picking "local" peers over "non local". As well as how good said algorithm is of working out how local each peer is.
The most recent Doctor Who aired 7:00 pm Saturday night, UK time. By Sunday morning, Australian time, there were enough torrent seeds to have it a high quality 350MB DivX on my hard drive in less than an hour.
Since the BBC broadcast had no commercials in no editing would have been needed. Simply a capture and render.
SF television programs have never been treated seriously by the television stations here in Australia.
Or in many other parts of the world.
When I was a kid, it took several summer holidays to *never* see the entire television adaptation of "The Tripods" because the station would just pull the series when regular programming returned.
Problem is that the adaption of the third books was never made. So things just sort of stop on a cliff hanger.
In the US, your show pretty much always gets booted by any live show that comes on before it, like the Grammys or any football / baseball / etc game. See also Futurama. While it may be at 10PM on Wednesday this week, it will probably jump around to 11PM on Friday next week and 3:30 PM on Monday the week after. And television studios have been known to do really dumb things like show serials out of order intentionally. See also Firefly.
This kind of non serial scheduling is also likely to affect how the programmes are made in the first place. If a series is mostly standalone episodes, with little or no character development, it will suffer a lot less by being shown out of order than one which has a lot of continuity. Which is possibly why the new Battlestar Galactica was first shown outside of the US.
Well exactly - if the networks insist on treating their customers badly, eventually their customers will look for alternatives.
With commercial television the customers aren't the viewers. Their customers are the advertising agencies. The only reason they bother showing programmes is to get viewers for their advertising slots.
The big question is - why oh why doesn't the dickhead australian voiceover bloke use Meters and Kilograms instead of feet and flamin' pounds?
Most likely because someone forgot to change the units before giving him the script. There's also be using pascals rather than PSI. Most ammusing was something on the National Geographic Channel where they overdubbed a oceanographer who was speaking in French. Changing not only the language but also the measuring units. Except that they appeared to be using an inch which was about 2.4mm too long:)
In the case of Mythbusters (shown on SBS), for some reason they've actually replaced the commentary with an Australian dub.
The comments are identical to the US version, which I had no trouble understanding. What's with that?
In addition to the redubbing there also appears to be some content juggling going on. e.g. the Discovery Europe version showing the train running over coins in the "Pissing on the 3rd Rail" episode rather than the "Mythbuster's Outtakes" episode.I suspect the Australian voiceover is probably the same script, except where a different term is in common usage in Australia. Maybe there's ever a version where Adam and Jamie are overdubbed:)
Many low budget movies that get big releases have the soundtrack redone from scratch with better equipment. If the studio was going to release it in America, it made sense to redo the soundtrack with voices that Americans could easily understand.
The US media industry appears to have this obsession with "redoing for a US audience". It isn't just confined to film. Even going to the extent of "remaking" TV series such as "The Office" and printing special US versions of the Harry Potter books. No one really knows if the US public would do fine with the originals, since most of them never get the chance...
Check out who owns the local stations and do a trade mark search on the Foxtel. The contracts for the Aussie market is just part of the standard contracts for much of the TV production and there is no major reason not to run most US tv shows within 24 hours in Australia.
This has been possible for over 20 years. Even airfreighted video tape or film would do the trick. There's no real reason that it would not be possible to have showings of a televsion programme worldwide within a 24 hour period. With appropriate local commercials. Instead of moaning about P2P maybe the TV companies need to realise that they are living in the 21st century and viewers are not prepared to wait. Especially when things get to the point that even downloading over dialup is likely to be the quick option.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, can we get on with life? And if you want to make a serious dent in MS Windows, let's develop a better OS targeted directly for the desktop user.
There's no one such entity as a "desktop user" in the first place. The term covers everything from the home machine which is constantly having things installed and uninstalled on it to the corporate machine which runs only one application operated by people who would be looking for another job if they even though about changing any settings.
The problem is, I have yet to see an interface for *nix that does as good as job as windows does of 'packing everything under the hood' and making an operating system that (as a friend of mine, the chief sysadmin for Connectiv would say) "protects users from their own stupidity".
Thing is that "protecting users from their own stupidity" is about the last thing Windows does. Not only are there a myriad of applications which require to be run as "administrator" even a supposedly unprivileged user in Windows still has the ability to seriously mess things up.
Since this is primarily a freedom of speech issue, I should note that freedom of speech is not there to defend speech you want to hear, it's there to defend the speech you _don't_ want to hear.
Actually it's to protect speach with is politically incorrect which isn't always the same thing.
There are limits, encouraging violence or criminal activity is not protected. Slandering or libeling someone is not protected.
Actually all of these may be protected, depending on who the target is. Laws and law enforcement tends to follow the principle of whatever is politically correct at the time.
That's high altitude, low pressure. NOT a vacuum. I don't think a magazine is going to help much in space.
A pressurised aircraft is somthing like 8 PSI preassure difference in flight. The most a pressurised spacecraft is going to experience is around 14 PSI. Assuming it is preassurised to sea level.
I think the point of slugthrowers in a ship is that we know they work, and aside from B5's PPGs, every single space show out there had ray guns of some type.
Even B5 used "slugthrowers".
Avoiding cliches is a point of good writing, and slug throwers are cheap, they carry their own energy
They also carry their own energy in a way which is reasonably safe to the operator
A ST Phaser contains enough energy to make a very effective bomb. Not the sort of thing you want to carry on your person
And this whole "explosive" decompression thing. Too many explosions in current entertainment has got people thinking a little hole in the wall will make the ship blow up.
Maybe a few people need to be forced to watch the episode of "Mythbusters" where this is put to the test. All a bullet will do is make a small hole you could plug by putting your in flight magazine over.
The most annoying thing for me was that no matter what horrible thing was happening to the crew, it would always be fixed at the end of the episode (TNG had a few of these, but it was a noticeable, regular event in Voyager).
This is most likely an effect of the way US broadcasters like to show series. With a "reset button" it's rather less obvious when episodes are shown in random order.
This became more obvious with other Sci-Fi series that changed the rules a big (DS9, B5 both come to mind) with longer story arcs and more long term consequences for actions taken in an episode.
Some of the consequences included being cancelled.
Yes, they are used on commercial flights almost as much as pilot guided landings. The first aircraft that could autoland, including descent onto runway and flair, was the BAC Trident 1C in June 1965 at Heathrow, London, UK. This system is fitted as standard on most modern aircraft.
IIRC it took a long time before US manufactured airliners had such a system.
Things like overstressing one part of the runway might also have been less of an issue with a relativly small plane too.
When will a station finally pick the show up in the United States???
The TV execs are probably looking for a way in which they can "remake" it for a US audience.
It's showing in Australia, the UK, Canada, and Italy to record ratings. Someone needs to wake up the execs that be and get this show on the air before we look like complete morons.
You'd probably need to borrow The Doctor's TARDIS to do that.
Probably because, unlike the American press, they really do reporting i.e. they don't just print off Press Releases & Talking Points.
Or even print fiction... It certainly dosn't help if the media concerned is more interested in producing entertainment.
I'd compare it to top-fuel dragsters and funny cars. They can hit 300+ mph while traveling in a straight line. If the driver doesn't keep the vehicle pointed in the right direction, things get very ugly, very quickly.
These cars are specifically designed so that if something goes wrong most of the energy goes into breaking the car rather than the driver.
Rockets have the same problem. They are designed to travel along the roll axis of the vehicle. It only takes a small amount of pitch or yaw error to generate aerodynamic forces that will produce "rapid unplanned disassembly" of the rocket.
This appears to be a bigger problem with s "spaceplane" bolted to the side of a rocket than with a capsule stuck of top. In addition the latter is typically fitted with a solid fuel motor to get the capsule away from the rest of the rocket if things go wrong.
Had the burn happened on the other side of the SRB the hot gas would have (safely) vented away from the LOX tank and no one would what noticed.
Rather it wouldn't have destroyed the vehicle. It would have been noticed since the autopilot would have reacted to thrust in the wrong place.
The B-52 fleet has many airframes older than the parents of the people flying them for instance.
By the time they retire it's possible that they will be older than the grandparents, even the great-grandparents of their pilots.
Interestingly NASA's B52 is the oldest in terms of when it was built, but has the least flying hours on it.
The Air Force flys Bombers designed in the 40s and built in the 50s. Fighters that where designed in the 60s and built in the 70s. Even the Boeing 747 was first built in the 60s as was the 737.
Even older Boeing's first jet airliner, the 707. Which is still being flown as the KC-135, RC-135 and E3. With there being not many civilian 707s still flying. (Even when they don't decide to go for a swim in Lake Victoria.)
Similarly the military varient of the DeHaviland Comet is still flying, as the Nimrod MR2
STS was originally conceived in the 60s, implemented in the 70s, and was launched in the 80s.
Age isn't all there is to the equation. The B52 bomber was designed in 1948 (IIRC). Still considered, by the USAF, to have plenty of life left in it.
I turned 24 today. The space shuttle first took off when I was six days old.
It was a few days late...
From a technology standpoint, I don't use the same computers that were out in 1981. I don't drive a car that was made or designed in 1981. I don't even talk on a phone whose carrier techology was around in 1981.
You'd probably be suprised how much old technology you are using. The likes of power steering and automatic transmission have been around a long time. SPC digital telephone switching dates from the 1970's. With some telephone cabling being decades old.
So why, WHY are we launching people into space with a program older than I am?
Soyuz is even older than the shuttle. As well as being considerably safer.
The governments represented by the EU cannot pass any law they like; they must respect the treaties they've signed, including those on copyrights and patents.
Actually they can. With some governments, e.g. the US, being notorious for ignoring treaties when they feel like it.
These treaties do not permit confiscation of the copyrights or patents of a US-based company, and the U.S. could pursue trade sanctions if the EU attempted this.
Would such sanctions be more harmful to the EU or the US though?
One of the problems for NZ (and to a lesser extent Oz) is that there are only a few high bandwidth feeds into the country from the rest of the world. The country is well wired internally, but there is a chokepoint. With Torrents and the like, much of the international traffic is replicated and repeated, leading to inefficient use of the available international bandwidth.
It depends if the protocol has an algorithm for picking "local" peers over "non local". As well as how good said algorithm is of working out how local each peer is.
The most recent Doctor Who aired 7:00 pm Saturday night, UK time. By Sunday morning, Australian time, there were enough torrent seeds to have it a high quality 350MB DivX on my hard drive in less than an hour.
Since the BBC broadcast had no commercials in no editing would have been needed. Simply a capture and render.
SF television programs have never been treated seriously by the television stations here in Australia.
Or in many other parts of the world.
When I was a kid, it took several summer holidays to *never* see the entire television adaptation of "The Tripods" because the station would just pull the series when regular programming returned.
Problem is that the adaption of the third books was never made. So things just sort of stop on a cliff hanger.
But who watches the adverts on TV anyway? At most I see two or three second snippets as I flick channels waiting for them to finish.
Assuming you don't have synchronised ad breaks.
In the US, your show pretty much always gets booted by any live show that comes on before it, like the Grammys or any football / baseball / etc game. See also Futurama. While it may be at 10PM on Wednesday this week, it will probably jump around to 11PM on Friday next week and 3:30 PM on Monday the week after. And television studios have been known to do really dumb things like show serials out of order intentionally. See also Firefly.
This kind of non serial scheduling is also likely to affect how the programmes are made in the first place. If a series is mostly standalone episodes, with little or no character development, it will suffer a lot less by being shown out of order than one which has a lot of continuity.
Which is possibly why the new Battlestar Galactica was first shown outside of the US.
Well exactly - if the networks insist on treating their customers badly, eventually their customers will look for alternatives.
With commercial television the customers aren't the viewers. Their customers are the advertising agencies. The only reason they bother showing programmes is to get viewers for their advertising slots.
The big question is - why oh why doesn't the dickhead australian voiceover bloke use Meters and Kilograms instead of feet and flamin' pounds?
:)
Most likely because someone forgot to change the units before giving him the script.
There's also be using pascals rather than PSI.
Most ammusing was something on the National Geographic Channel where they overdubbed a oceanographer who was speaking in French. Changing not only the language but also the measuring units. Except that they appeared to be using an inch which was about 2.4mm too long
In the case of Mythbusters (shown on SBS), for some reason they've actually replaced the commentary with an Australian dub. The comments are identical to the US version, which I had no trouble understanding. What's with that?
:)
In addition to the redubbing there also appears to be some content juggling going on. e.g. the Discovery Europe version showing the train running over coins in the "Pissing on the 3rd Rail" episode rather than the "Mythbuster's Outtakes" episode.I suspect the Australian voiceover is probably the same script, except where a different term is in common usage in Australia. Maybe there's ever a version where Adam and Jamie are overdubbed
Many low budget movies that get big releases have the soundtrack redone from scratch with better equipment. If the studio was going to release it in America, it made sense to redo the soundtrack with voices that Americans could easily understand.
The US media industry appears to have this obsession with "redoing for a US audience". It isn't just confined to film. Even going to the extent of "remaking" TV series such as "The Office" and printing special US versions of the Harry Potter books.
No one really knows if the US public would do fine with the originals, since most of them never get the chance...
Check out who owns the local stations and do a trade mark search on the Foxtel. The contracts for the Aussie market is just part of the standard contracts for much of the TV production and there is no major reason not to run most US tv shows within 24 hours in Australia.
This has been possible for over 20 years. Even airfreighted video tape or film would do the trick.
There's no real reason that it would not be possible to have showings of a televsion programme worldwide within a 24 hour period. With appropriate local commercials.
Instead of moaning about P2P maybe the TV companies need to realise that they are living in the 21st century and viewers are not prepared to wait. Especially when things get to the point that even downloading over dialup is likely to be the quick option.