By releasing the single player game so long after the multiplayer-only binaries, I suspect that Id has ensured the existance of lots of players like me, who bought the game for a fun multiplayer experience without the hassle of frequent reboots, but who weren't somehow "morally" above rebooting to Windows for a couple days to play through the single player game a month ago. Also, the RTCW single player game, although it's the best such that I've seen from Id, just doesn't cut it compared to Deus Ex or even Halflife. I could easily imagine busy people buying this for the (most fun shooter I've ever seen) multiplayer experience and ignoring the single player game altogether.
It takes a whole lot (Deus Ex is the only example I can give you right now) to get me to buy a game without a Linux port at this point. Linux is enough of an improvement over Windows for most of the productive things I do on a computer that my desktop spends most of it's time there; why would I want to have to spend minutes rebooting every time I want to take a break and goof off?
A great thing about using steel as a construction material is that not much eats it.
By "not much", are you perhaps to the 20% of our atmosphere which undergoes exothermic reactions with iron? Steel bridges (to use your example) have a whole lot of thought put into "how can we plant this in the middle of salt water spray and expect it to still be here in ten years?"
I'll grant you, the difference between someone making $60K and someone making $600K is often an accident of birth... but the difference between $16K and $60K is rarely more than motivation. The "peasants" won't revolt against their economic leaders for the same reason they won't revolt against their political leaders: because democracy and capitalism allow those people who are dissatisfied with their place in the system to change it peacefully. During what other "toppled regime" has that been true?
There was a bad period where the Soundblaster Live driver (particularly mixer settings) was broken. That lasted through at least three kernel releases. There was a worse period where the VM had fits, and where performance degraded way too rapidly if the system had to swap. That lasted at least six kernel releases. There were at least one or two releases where I discovered that Alan Cox's (usually more bleeding edge) tree was being better behaved.
Of course, whenever I'm playing around with this stuff I don't delete my "last known good" kernel, so if after a couple hours or a couple days I noticed a problem, I just booted back to what worked. The default (albeit heavily patched) Red Hat kernels were good, so "last known good" always existed for me.
To summarize: this hasn't been a source of inconvenience for me, but it has been one of vicarious embarrassment. I've only been using Linux since 2.0.somehighnumber, but this is the worst mess I've seen the "stable" kernel tree go through in that time. Don't get me wrong, I've experienced system-crashing bugs (a tulip driver that freaked at some tulip chipset clones, some really bad OOM behavior a couple years ago) before, and pragmatically I guess that's worse... but those problems were always fixed fast enough that the patches predated my bug reports. Watching even the top kernel developers seem to flounder for months over bugs in a core part of the OS like the virtual memory system just sucked.
You realize you're just jumping excitedly into the stereotypical Slashdot user mold, right?
"Well, gee, there must be some reason I'm not scoring with all the chicks the way the heroes of my favorite science fiction TV shows do. I know, I just need more technological gadgets!"
How many non-odd operating systems does it run on??
Have you turned on a computer lately? We've got desk lamp appearing things that have buttons that look like they should be licked instead of clicked. We've got most beige boxes being upgraded to Fisher Price's My First GUI. We've got most of the remainder running a GUI which answers "how many widget sets can you fit into a phone booth". And we've got operating systems designed by the occasional upstart company who thinks they can suddenly "break in" to a saturated market dominated by network effects and owned by organizations who all agree that giving your product away for free is at least better than letting the competition make money.
My bad; I was so busy nitpicking the "ablative surfaces generate heat" error that I happily replicated the "Shuttle has an ablative surface" error. Anyway, even after the comedy of errors, I think my "bacteria wouldn't survive reentry" point probably stands.
And if he believes in karma, then Rob will spend the rest of his days being the coworker who has to be continually "consulted" by shouldn't-have-graduated CS cheaters who can't write anything themselves.
The large ablative surface area is to help dissipate the reentry heat, not a cause of it. It's been a while since I looked at this, but I seem to recall that the stagnation temperature for air at the leading edge of a reentry vehicle was inversely proportional to the radius of that edge. That's why the Shuttle has a nice round nosecone: they don't dare look like the Concorde or a fighter jet, because the tips of those nice sharp noses would simply melt off.
This is one of the reasons why, despite the Earth being continually pelted by thousands of tons a day of asteroidal material, it's rare that anything makes it to the ground: the small stuff just vaporizes first.
Obviously the temperature can't go to infinity, so there has to be some reason (continuum hypothesis failing at small enough distances?) why it doesn't... but even for centimeter radii leading edges we've only recently discovered ceramics that we think can survive the resulting reentry temperatures. What would let bacterial micrometer radii survive?
I think your #1 is off, too. At the very least, a bacterium reaching the Earth from another planet would have to be moving at Earth's escape velocity (because that's the velocity Earth's gravity would impart to it as it approaches), and that is 40% faster than the Shuttle's reentry velocity.
I clicked on their "Download 300 dpi image" link, and it gave me a 533 pixel wide picture of the "microchain" drive. That means that gear must be over an inch and a half wide!
It could also be considered slander if someone sends you an e-mail from something like animalsex@microsoft.com.
You know, I'm usually on the "public horsewhipping" side of this argument, but I'm almost tempted to become a spammer just so I can use that address...
You need to define "large" and "barely missing", to even understand what those assumptions are saying.
First, we're doing pretty well at tracking the really large earth-grazing asteroids now - for rocks at least a kilometer in diameter (picture the "little guy" that hit at the end of Deep Impact) we're tracking an estimated ~90% instead of 10% of them now, and the big improvement has come in the last five years or so.
For the stuff smaller than a kilometer (which don't threaten civilization, but can still be large enough to make much of New York City a memory), I don't know that we're doing much tracking at all. So what's your definition of "large"? Thanks to the heavy ocean cover and relatively sparse city covering of the land, odds are we'll get hit in a nice relatively non-fatal location before a city-buster earns its name. And we'll get hundreds or thousands of near misses before then. What's your definition of "barely missing"? I've heard it to refer to anything passing inside the moon's orbit, which is a target with 3,600 times the cross section of Earth. That's a near miss on a cosmic scale, not on a human one.
It's hard to set odds on something like this, but the most informed I've seen would give us about even odds of having a populated area smashed up (damage as much as a trillion dollars) sometime in the next millenium. Not such bad odds that we want to start putting up an "asteroid defense shield", but bad enough that some other valuable activities (pointing more telescopes at the sky, cataloguing asteroids, improving launch vehicle technology) become more valuable for this secondary reason.
And even taking into account the big burn needed to reach the asteroid's velocity, the math works anyway. I don't know about geosynchronous orbit, but there are a number of near earth asteroids that take less delta V to match orbits with than the moon does. The good launch windows are far less frequent, of course, but that's an obstacle to "flag and footprint" missions, not robot surveys or long-term human mining operations.
For instance, if you've written a custom server with a set of commands, and you run it on a single computer somewhere on some random port, chances are it's not going to be hacked unless somebody smart and dedicated specifically targets you.
Or unless somebody scripting and kiddieish specifically downloaded a port scanner. Are you absolutely sure that said kiddie isn't going to learn anything useful (or do any accidental damage) to your custom server just by sending and observing responses to random data? Maybe he'll find it hard to get a root shell without his own copy of the software to play with, but I'd be worried about denial of service attacks too. When I see "secret custom server" I read "software whose hundreds of system-crashing bugs in response to unexpected inputs still haven't been discovered".
I'm supposed to be researching microfluidics before I get back to meet my advisor after vacation. I wonder how one would reference Slashdot in a footnote...;-)
...is get dressed up, compliment my wonderful, gorgeous girlfriend on the fact that her low cut blue satin dress can turn my brain to butter, then go dancing into 2002.
Yeah, I know, I've probably pissed off about a thousand lonely TV-watching nerds with that sentence. But cut me some slack: I'm a slashdotter too; do you really think this sort of thing happens to me often enough that I can afford not to brag when it does?
It tries to look credibly scientific, yet it does not use any units, it tries to quantify non-constant values, it's simplistic, it's presented without any justification, and it has several glaring errors.
There have been a number of remote exploits in Win9x filesharing, first of all. I don't know of anything affecting an "out of the box" installation, but if you had a Win95 box that had any writeable shares, even password protected ones, even deeply nested in the filesystem ones, your computer could have been remotely compromised.
Secondly, does anyone remember a little thing called Outlook Express? Sure, most of the popular worms exploited the unpatchable "Stupid User" bug, but there have been at least two that left your computer remotely compromisable from just the Preview pane of the email (thanks to HTML buffer overflows) and one that would let your computer be compromised as email was downloaded (thanks to email header buffer overflows). Of course, the preview pane bugs were really Microsoft HTML component bugs, so could be triggered by Internet Explorer hitting a malicious page even if you didn't use Outlook.
And if there's one thing that Microsoft has taught us, it's that Internet Explorer is an essential part of the Windows(TM) Operating System eXPerience.
There are USB scanners with great Linux drivers, for instance... but they're not in the majority, because every damn scanner company has to solve the "tell the scanner to scan something and give me the image back" problem with their own half-assed protocol.
This isn't just a Linux thing, too - don't you love it when, running Windows, you can just have a piece of hardware start working without you futzing around with separate driver disks? The only way that happens is when the hardware significantly predates your version of Windows (i.e. not often) or when it follows some standard that Windows already knows how to support. It's so much more fun to install a new hard drive (even internally) than, say, a new video card.
Video cards, at least, are advancing by leaps and bounds and so have an excuse for rapidly changing hardware protocols. But scanners? Webcams?
The future of manned spaceflight depends on pan-national co-operation.
Have you seen the results of international cooperation? Everybody teaming up to try and put up a Low Earth Orbit space station, and finally getting hardware in orbit after 2 decades of redesigns, tens of billions of dollars of cost growth, United States delays that threatened European schedules, Russian delays that threatened American schedules... and the result just isn't that impressive, even for a space station.
What human spaceflight depends on, apparantly, is international competition. Russians orbiting the globe, "putting a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before this decade is out", you know, that sort of thing?
We don't need Chinese astronauts on ISS, we need China building it's own space station in half the time... because apparantly there's nothing that motivates the American space program so well as being laughed at.
Slashdot Mirror
By releasing the single player game so long after the multiplayer-only binaries, I suspect that Id has ensured the existance of lots of players like me, who bought the game for a fun multiplayer experience without the hassle of frequent reboots, but who weren't somehow "morally" above rebooting to Windows for a couple days to play through the single player game a month ago. Also, the RTCW single player game, although it's the best such that I've seen from Id, just doesn't cut it compared to Deus Ex or even Halflife. I could easily imagine busy people buying this for the (most fun shooter I've ever seen) multiplayer experience and ignoring the single player game altogether.
It takes a whole lot (Deus Ex is the only example I can give you right now) to get me to buy a game without a Linux port at this point. Linux is enough of an improvement over Windows for most of the productive things I do on a computer that my desktop spends most of it's time there; why would I want to have to spend minutes rebooting every time I want to take a break and goof off?
That should read "perhaps referring to", of course.
A great thing about using steel as a construction material is that not much eats it.
By "not much", are you perhaps to the 20% of our atmosphere which undergoes exothermic reactions with iron? Steel bridges (to use your example) have a whole lot of thought put into "how can we plant this in the middle of salt water spray and expect it to still be here in ten years?"
I'll grant you, the difference between someone making $60K and someone making $600K is often an accident of birth... but the difference between $16K and $60K is rarely more than motivation. The "peasants" won't revolt against their economic leaders for the same reason they won't revolt against their political leaders: because democracy and capitalism allow those people who are dissatisfied with their place in the system to change it peacefully. During what other "toppled regime" has that been true?
There was a bad period where the Soundblaster Live driver (particularly mixer settings) was broken. That lasted through at least three kernel releases. There was a worse period where the VM had fits, and where performance degraded way too rapidly if the system had to swap. That lasted at least six kernel releases. There were at least one or two releases where I discovered that Alan Cox's (usually more bleeding edge) tree was being better behaved.
Of course, whenever I'm playing around with this stuff I don't delete my "last known good" kernel, so if after a couple hours or a couple days I noticed a problem, I just booted back to what worked. The default (albeit heavily patched) Red Hat kernels were good, so "last known good" always existed for me.
To summarize: this hasn't been a source of inconvenience for me, but it has been one of vicarious embarrassment. I've only been using Linux since 2.0.somehighnumber, but this is the worst mess I've seen the "stable" kernel tree go through in that time. Don't get me wrong, I've experienced system-crashing bugs (a tulip driver that freaked at some tulip chipset clones, some really bad OOM behavior a couple years ago) before, and pragmatically I guess that's worse... but those problems were always fixed fast enough that the patches predated my bug reports. Watching even the top kernel developers seem to flounder for months over bugs in a core part of the OS like the virtual memory system just sucked.
You realize you're just jumping excitedly into the stereotypical Slashdot user mold, right?
"Well, gee, there must be some reason I'm not scoring with all the chicks the way the heroes of my favorite science fiction TV shows do. I know, I just need more technological gadgets!"
How many non-odd operating systems does it run on??
Have you turned on a computer lately? We've got desk lamp appearing things that have buttons that look like they should be licked instead of clicked. We've got most beige boxes being upgraded to Fisher Price's My First GUI. We've got most of the remainder running a GUI which answers "how many widget sets can you fit into a phone booth". And we've got operating systems designed by the occasional upstart company who thinks they can suddenly "break in" to a saturated market dominated by network effects and owned by organizations who all agree that giving your product away for free is at least better than letting the competition make money.
There are no non-odd operating systems.
My bad; I was so busy nitpicking the "ablative surfaces generate heat" error that I happily replicated the "Shuttle has an ablative surface" error. Anyway, even after the comedy of errors, I think my "bacteria wouldn't survive reentry" point probably stands.
And if he believes in karma, then Rob will spend the rest of his days being the coworker who has to be continually "consulted" by shouldn't-have-graduated CS cheaters who can't write anything themselves.
... is what you hear when a joke goes completely over your head.
Is it too late to make this load of bacteria a little more intelligent?
The large ablative surface area is to help dissipate the reentry heat, not a cause of it. It's been a while since I looked at this, but I seem to recall that the stagnation temperature for air at the leading edge of a reentry vehicle was inversely proportional to the radius of that edge. That's why the Shuttle has a nice round nosecone: they don't dare look like the Concorde or a fighter jet, because the tips of those nice sharp noses would simply melt off.
This is one of the reasons why, despite the Earth being continually pelted by thousands of tons a day of asteroidal material, it's rare that anything makes it to the ground: the small stuff just vaporizes first.
Obviously the temperature can't go to infinity, so there has to be some reason (continuum hypothesis failing at small enough distances?) why it doesn't... but even for centimeter radii leading edges we've only recently discovered ceramics that we think can survive the resulting reentry temperatures. What would let bacterial micrometer radii survive?
I think your #1 is off, too. At the very least, a bacterium reaching the Earth from another planet would have to be moving at Earth's escape velocity (because that's the velocity Earth's gravity would impart to it as it approaches), and that is 40% faster than the Shuttle's reentry velocity.
I clicked on their "Download 300 dpi image" link, and it gave me a 533 pixel wide picture of the "microchain" drive. That means that gear must be over an inch and a half wide!
If you're running for city council, stick to the top issues in municipal government: schools, taxes, crime, etc.
He just has to promise that he'll make better schools, lower taxes, and less crime! His opponent will never think of that!
Run any command or program off the hard disk
You know, once you get to this entry, it's really kind of redundant to continue with the rest of the list...
It could also be considered slander if someone sends you an e-mail from something like animalsex@microsoft.com.
You know, I'm usually on the "public horsewhipping" side of this argument, but I'm almost tempted to become a spammer just so I can use that address...
You need to define "large" and "barely missing", to even understand what those assumptions are saying.
First, we're doing pretty well at tracking the really large earth-grazing asteroids now - for rocks at least a kilometer in diameter (picture the "little guy" that hit at the end of Deep Impact) we're tracking an estimated ~90% instead of 10% of them now, and the big improvement has come in the last five years or so.
For the stuff smaller than a kilometer (which don't threaten civilization, but can still be large enough to make much of New York City a memory), I don't know that we're doing much tracking at all. So what's your definition of "large"? Thanks to the heavy ocean cover and relatively sparse city covering of the land, odds are we'll get hit in a nice relatively non-fatal location before a city-buster earns its name. And we'll get hundreds or thousands of near misses before then. What's your definition of "barely missing"? I've heard it to refer to anything passing inside the moon's orbit, which is a target with 3,600 times the cross section of Earth. That's a near miss on a cosmic scale, not on a human one.
It's hard to set odds on something like this, but the most informed I've seen would give us about even odds of having a populated area smashed up (damage as much as a trillion dollars) sometime in the next millenium. Not such bad odds that we want to start putting up an "asteroid defense shield", but bad enough that some other valuable activities (pointing more telescopes at the sky, cataloguing asteroids, improving launch vehicle technology) become more valuable for this secondary reason.
And even taking into account the big burn needed to reach the asteroid's velocity, the math works anyway. I don't know about geosynchronous orbit, but there are a number of near earth asteroids that take less delta V to match orbits with than the moon does. The good launch windows are far less frequent, of course, but that's an obstacle to "flag and footprint" missions, not robot surveys or long-term human mining operations.
For instance, if you've written a custom server with a set of commands, and you run it on a single computer somewhere on some random port, chances are it's not going to be hacked unless somebody smart and dedicated specifically targets you.
Or unless somebody scripting and kiddieish specifically downloaded a port scanner. Are you absolutely sure that said kiddie isn't going to learn anything useful (or do any accidental damage) to your custom server just by sending and observing responses to random data? Maybe he'll find it hard to get a root shell without his own copy of the software to play with, but I'd be worried about denial of service attacks too. When I see "secret custom server" I read "software whose hundreds of system-crashing bugs in response to unexpected inputs still haven't been discovered".
I'm supposed to be researching microfluidics before I get back to meet my advisor after vacation. I wonder how one would reference Slashdot in a footnote... ;-)
...is get dressed up, compliment my wonderful, gorgeous girlfriend on the fact that her low cut blue satin dress can turn my brain to butter, then go dancing into 2002.
Yeah, I know, I've probably pissed off about a thousand lonely TV-watching nerds with that sentence. But cut me some slack: I'm a slashdotter too; do you really think this sort of thing happens to me often enough that I can afford not to brag when it does?
It tries to look credibly scientific, yet it does not use any units, it tries to quantify non-constant values, it's simplistic, it's presented without any justification, and it has several glaring errors.
Have you considered a career as an economist?
There have been a number of remote exploits in Win9x filesharing, first of all. I don't know of anything affecting an "out of the box" installation, but if you had a Win95 box that had any writeable shares, even password protected ones, even deeply nested in the filesystem ones, your computer could have been remotely compromised.
Secondly, does anyone remember a little thing called Outlook Express? Sure, most of the popular worms exploited the unpatchable "Stupid User" bug, but there have been at least two that left your computer remotely compromisable from just the Preview pane of the email (thanks to HTML buffer overflows) and one that would let your computer be compromised as email was downloaded (thanks to email header buffer overflows). Of course, the preview pane bugs were really Microsoft HTML component bugs, so could be triggered by Internet Explorer hitting a malicious page even if you didn't use Outlook.
And if there's one thing that Microsoft has taught us, it's that Internet Explorer is an essential part of the Windows(TM) Operating System eXPerience.
There are USB scanners with great Linux drivers, for instance... but they're not in the majority, because every damn scanner company has to solve the "tell the scanner to scan something and give me the image back" problem with their own half-assed protocol.
This isn't just a Linux thing, too - don't you love it when, running Windows, you can just have a piece of hardware start working without you futzing around with separate driver disks? The only way that happens is when the hardware significantly predates your version of Windows (i.e. not often) or when it follows some standard that Windows already knows how to support. It's so much more fun to install a new hard drive (even internally) than, say, a new video card.
Video cards, at least, are advancing by leaps and bounds and so have an excuse for rapidly changing hardware protocols. But scanners? Webcams?
The future of manned spaceflight depends on pan-national co-operation.
Have you seen the results of international cooperation? Everybody teaming up to try and put up a Low Earth Orbit space station, and finally getting hardware in orbit after 2 decades of redesigns, tens of billions of dollars of cost growth, United States delays that threatened European schedules, Russian delays that threatened American schedules... and the result just isn't that impressive, even for a space station.
What human spaceflight depends on, apparantly, is international competition. Russians orbiting the globe, "putting a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before this decade is out", you know, that sort of thing?
We don't need Chinese astronauts on ISS, we need China building it's own space station in half the time... because apparantly there's nothing that motivates the American space program so well as being laughed at.