What do we want a dumb little planet for? I would really hope by the time actually going there can be seriously considered, we'd be at a sufficiently posthuman state that we don't *need* somewhere like Earth to live; if you want to ensure the survival of humanity, better get cracking on better substrates to run ourselves on than squishy blobs of protein, and scanning technology to match so we can upload into something which just needs a power supply and which can be serialized to backup storage or other substrates, rad-hardened, upgraded, paused, forked, checkpointed, etc.
Handily that would make it much easier to go interstellar safely and economically, since you don't need to drag a whacky big unstable biosphere along with you.
"How about people actually TRY it and see that it works excellently"
I've bought plenty via Steam, but this is going a bit far; it works (mostly), but it's not exactly the most well written of applications. It takes ages to start up (~10s) and authenticate (another ~5-15s), it eats massive quantities of CPU for no apparant reason, bits of it break and remain broken for extended periods of time (all my third party Source mods just say "Sorry, this game is unavailable" unless I launch them from desktop shortcuts now), there's no opportunity to accept/reject patches or roll back when things go wrong...
Stardock Central is rather more friendly; it actually looks and feels like a real application, starts in a second or so, asks me nicely before installing patches (while giving me useful changelogs for them and letting me install betas without fiddling with obscure command line arguments and restarting), lets me roll back to previous versions, uses about 1/3rd the memory or less, doesn't occasionally dead/livelock, and doesn't leave daemons running as SYSTEM all the time even when you close it.
Won't the populace get a little suspicious when 180 million of them disappear at the exact same time McDonalds starts doing a "20 burgers for the price of 1" deal?
It seems par for the course that every sci-fi show ever will try to pull some mystical/magical/spiritual bs somewhere; scriptures and prophecies will turn out to be true, lights and visions will point the way, magical entities will join in to help out, someone will be The Chosen One with the power to bend plot to the path of least resistance, etc etc.
What I'd really like to see is some vaguely hard sf, preferably written by, *gasp* a real sf author, and which doesn't constantly get reduced to a soap opera wrapped with whatever the special effects dept and a few out-of-their-depth writers could be bothered to do. I really like BSG, but.. just once can't we have a view of a relativistic space ship with a nice compressed view of the universe, and just *deal with* the long travel times? How about a realistic portrayal of pervasive nano/biotech? How about sticking within our own solar system and never invoking aliens? Uploads? Intelligence amplification? Strong AI which doesn't pine to be a fucking human? Or here's an idea, if you want to do aliens.. make them alien, not humans with ridges and curiously homogenous emotional issues.
Personally, I expect I'll see these things for real before I see them on my TV;)
"Now they intend to do it, but with a backup shuttle in orbit in case the first one gets into trouble."
That would be retarded; the most dangerous phases of the mission are launch and reentry, with a significantly lower risk of something going wrong while in orbit; something likely to either be so terrible you can't do anything or managable enough that you have a good long while to worry about it (e.g one of the tiles gets damaged at launch and you can't reenter safely, ala Columbia).
So no, it won't be in orbit, the backup shuttle will simply be ready to launch if needed.
On my Cherry keyboards, you need to be holding down the "KeyMan" meta-key 90% of the way across the keyboard from the power button before it does anything. It also requires more pressure than normal to activate (as does Caps Lock and a few others).
What? No, you know it's normally polite to actually read the comment you're replying to, right?
"Spending twice as much for 2-3x the performance seems like a pretty good deal to me if you actually have use for the extra power"
"Still, just because I can easily afford it doesn't mean I'm going to spend it on something I'll barely notice."
The former was about the 8800 series in general; it's a good couple of times faster than my existing card. The latter is about the Ultra, which is similar to "getting a top-of-the-range CPU which costs 2x as much for a whole 10% extra performance."
I'm sorry you're poor. Maybe learning to read will help:P
"top-range of cards are *all* overpriced and more of a status symbol than a practical purchase."
Not really; plenty of games struggle even on fairly beefy cards if you want to run them at native resolution on a decent TFT with details turned way up. I spent about £200 on a 512MB 7950GT and it likes to dip into the distracting world of jerkovision in plenty of games in at least some spots, even without full detail. Spending twice as much for 2-3x the performance seems like a pretty good deal to me if you actually have use for the extra power -- it's probably a smarter investment than getting a top-of-the-range CPU which costs 2x as much for a whole 10% extra performance.
Hell, I'm using over £800 worth of monitors, why should spending half that on a card which can do them justice bother me?
"Anyone buying 8800 today (ultra or not) apparently has money to waste, and if 10% more cost $200, so be it."
Well, yes, it's a high end part, and high end parts are generally bought by people with a bit of disposable income or a very pressing need. Still, just because I can easily afford it doesn't mean I'm going to spend it on something I'll barely notice.
Back in the days of the Amiga, I kept a hefty portion of my data on SFS. When you deleted a file, SFS moved it to a magic.recycler directory (or something like that), and only actually cleared the file when the blocks were reused. If you wanted the file back, you just copied it out of the recycler.
You could do something like this without going anywhere near the kernel -- just LD_PRELOAD or otherwise blat the function and replace it with your own. However, personally I think it's a shit solution -- half the data loss I've experienced hasn't had anything to do with unlink -- write() is just as capable of ruining your day, and without COW you're basically screwed without backups (which are never fine-grained and regular enough).
RAR has recovery records (settable percentage of each archive dedicated to ECC, default off) and recovery volumes (dedicated files with PAR-like recovery capabilities). "Keep broken files" can be used to extract from broken or truncated archives.
Xming seems pretty good; X.org + patches compiled with MinGW. I've not had any problems with it so far. Exceed I found rather clunky, but the last time I used it was several years ago.
fb2k is known for being very effecient, even in the face of crazily huge libraries. I dare say you'll hate the default interface/config, but it's not difficult tobendittoyourwill (though it's not exactly iTunes; more like vim/mutt for music).
Windows only unfortunately, though it is supposed to work well in Wine. Significant chunks of it are BSD licensed.
Do you have *any* idea how hard it is to find a parking space for that thing where some yob's not going to key it or deflate the tires or poke at it with a spectrograph?:(
I should have got the next model down, then I could have pretended it was just another moon, but nooooooo, I had to get the hexagonal UltraSUV because it was "different" and had more legroom.
Hm, wonder if that guy who owns Mimas would do a swap. His camo paint job looks *so* much less convincing after those stupid films.
Counting the number of files you're about to delete so it can provide you a progress indicator, most likely. In Directory Opus you can turn this off from Preferences -> File Operations -> Deleting (Count files in folders before deleting). I can't see a similar option in Explorer's Folder Preferences, but it *might* be an option buried in a registry setting somewhere.
Swap allows for more effecient use of memory, which isn't as ubiquitous as you seem to think (we're constantly finding the 16G limit on sensibly priced/available hardware somewhat annoying) -- if you're pushing the limits of physical memory, swap allows for least used pages to be written out to disk to leave expensive and scarce physical memory available for things that actually need it. Go ahead - allocate and dirty a whole bunch of memory for a bit and force your nearest *ix box to dip into swap. You'll probably still find hundreds of MB swapped out days later because it's just been sat there doing nothing.
On-disk binaries and other mmapped files also make use of the semantics of swap; when you run an app, the system basically uses the on-disk executable and libraries as read-only swap, and any pages not being used can be discarded because they're "swapped". Similarly userspace apps commonly mmap's data files into their address space, basically using them as app-specific swap files, with the VMM taking care of caching data and flushing dirty pages in a manner hopefully appropriate to the system memory load. Swap space is exactly the same thing; it just happens to use anonymous space on an OS-wide file for general purpose use. If it's not being used, it's not hurting, and if it is being used, wouldn't you rather a few unused pages get written to disk instead of your app just outright failing? If not, well, it's your system, feel free to turn it off.
Of course if you're using Rockbox, you can just use ReplayGain, which is supported by pretty much any format imaginable. Nicer than either normalizing the raw data or constantly reaching for the volume control. Of course, Apple have something like this too, though as always they decided to forgo the whole "use an established standard" thing and do their own inferior version which only they support.
"MVIC is composed of 7 independent CCD arrays on a single substrate. It uses two of its large format (5024x32 pixel) CCD arrays, operated in time delay integration (TDI) mode, to provide panchromatic (400 to 975 nm) images. Four additional 5024x32 CCDs, combined with the appropriate filters and also operated in TDI mode, provide the capability of mapping in blue (400-550 nm), red (540-700 nm), near IR (780-975 nm) and narrow band methane (860-910 nm) channels."
You did know that cameras like this take colour shots by merging multiple exposures with different filters applied, right? They're probably using their limited bandwidth to retrieve single exposures from each shot to get a quicker overview of what they've got.
"Excluding attachments I think it would be practically impossible for anyone to use up Googles 2 gig of storage"
-% du -sh Mail
27G Mail
Only about 5 years worth, and I don't deal much with attachments. Or do you not class "I don't bother deleting email" as practical? Works well enough for me:)
Heh, not really; Opteron 185, 2GB. The pattern was a set of highly repetitive smaller CA's (not unlike this); hash based algorithms are *really* good at accelerating "big" CA's like this.
Using Golly and a perfectly reasonable desktop computer, I just loaded a ~128k-sq grid with a starting population of roughly 100 million and ran it for 700 million iterations inside about half a minute, so I'm going to bet: pretty big.
Slashdot Mirror
What do we want a dumb little planet for? I would really hope by the time actually going there can be seriously considered, we'd be at a sufficiently posthuman state that we don't *need* somewhere like Earth to live; if you want to ensure the survival of humanity, better get cracking on better substrates to run ourselves on than squishy blobs of protein, and scanning technology to match so we can upload into something which just needs a power supply and which can be serialized to backup storage or other substrates, rad-hardened, upgraded, paused, forked, checkpointed, etc.
Handily that would make it much easier to go interstellar safely and economically, since you don't need to drag a whacky big unstable biosphere along with you.
"How about people actually TRY it and see that it works excellently"
I've bought plenty via Steam, but this is going a bit far; it works (mostly), but it's not exactly the most well written of applications. It takes ages to start up (~10s) and authenticate (another ~5-15s), it eats massive quantities of CPU for no apparant reason, bits of it break and remain broken for extended periods of time (all my third party Source mods just say "Sorry, this game is unavailable" unless I launch them from desktop shortcuts now), there's no opportunity to accept/reject patches or roll back when things go wrong...
Stardock Central is rather more friendly; it actually looks and feels like a real application, starts in a second or so, asks me nicely before installing patches (while giving me useful changelogs for them and letting me install betas without fiddling with obscure command line arguments and restarting), lets me roll back to previous versions, uses about 1/3rd the memory or less, doesn't occasionally dead/livelock, and doesn't leave daemons running as SYSTEM all the time even when you close it.
"and yet this bill proposes to group these individuals with other violent people, since most people in jail are in jail for violent crimes"
I thought most people in the US were in jail for things like posessing or distributing an immoral type of plant.
XFX make a nice range of passively cooled 7950GT's too, though the heatsink design means they use two slots in the "wrong" direction.
Nice; thanks!
;)
Can't help but feel they're overdoing the insanity angle a bit, are all Japanese like that?
Won't the populace get a little suspicious when 180 million of them disappear at the exact same time McDonalds starts doing a "20 burgers for the price of 1" deal?
He had to do each wavelength seperately, hence why he's not done yet.
It seems par for the course that every sci-fi show ever will try to pull some mystical/magical/spiritual bs somewhere; scriptures and prophecies will turn out to be true, lights and visions will point the way, magical entities will join in to help out, someone will be The Chosen One with the power to bend plot to the path of least resistance, etc etc.
;)
What I'd really like to see is some vaguely hard sf, preferably written by, *gasp* a real sf author, and which doesn't constantly get reduced to a soap opera wrapped with whatever the special effects dept and a few out-of-their-depth writers could be bothered to do. I really like BSG, but.. just once can't we have a view of a relativistic space ship with a nice compressed view of the universe, and just *deal with* the long travel times? How about a realistic portrayal of pervasive nano/biotech? How about sticking within our own solar system and never invoking aliens? Uploads? Intelligence amplification? Strong AI which doesn't pine to be a fucking human? Or here's an idea, if you want to do aliens.. make them alien, not humans with ridges and curiously homogenous emotional issues.
Personally, I expect I'll see these things for real before I see them on my TV
"Now they intend to do it, but with a backup shuttle in orbit in case the first one gets into trouble."
That would be retarded; the most dangerous phases of the mission are launch and reentry, with a significantly lower risk of something going wrong while in orbit; something likely to either be so terrible you can't do anything or managable enough that you have a good long while to worry about it (e.g one of the tiles gets damaged at launch and you can't reenter safely, ala Columbia).
So no, it won't be in orbit, the backup shuttle will simply be ready to launch if needed.
On my Cherry keyboards, you need to be holding down the "KeyMan" meta-key 90% of the way across the keyboard from the power button before it does anything. It also requires more pressure than normal to activate (as does Caps Lock and a few others).
What? No, you know it's normally polite to actually read the comment you're replying to, right?
:P
"Spending twice as much for 2-3x the performance seems like a pretty good deal to me if you actually have use for the extra power"
"Still, just because I can easily afford it doesn't mean I'm going to spend it on something I'll barely notice."
The former was about the 8800 series in general; it's a good couple of times faster than my existing card. The latter is about the Ultra, which is similar to "getting a top-of-the-range CPU which costs 2x as much for a whole 10% extra performance."
I'm sorry you're poor. Maybe learning to read will help
"top-range of cards are *all* overpriced and more of a status symbol than a practical purchase."
Not really; plenty of games struggle even on fairly beefy cards if you want to run them at native resolution on a decent TFT with details turned way up. I spent about £200 on a 512MB 7950GT and it likes to dip into the distracting world of jerkovision in plenty of games in at least some spots, even without full detail. Spending twice as much for 2-3x the performance seems like a pretty good deal to me if you actually have use for the extra power -- it's probably a smarter investment than getting a top-of-the-range CPU which costs 2x as much for a whole 10% extra performance.
Hell, I'm using over £800 worth of monitors, why should spending half that on a card which can do them justice bother me?
"Anyone buying 8800 today (ultra or not) apparently has money to waste, and if 10% more cost $200, so be it."
Well, yes, it's a high end part, and high end parts are generally bought by people with a bit of disposable income or a very pressing need. Still, just because I can easily afford it doesn't mean I'm going to spend it on something I'll barely notice.
Back in the days of the Amiga, I kept a hefty portion of my data on SFS. When you deleted a file, SFS moved it to a magic .recycler directory (or something like that), and only actually cleared the file when the blocks were reused. If you wanted the file back, you just copied it out of the recycler.
You could do something like this without going anywhere near the kernel -- just LD_PRELOAD or otherwise blat the function and replace it with your own. However, personally I think it's a shit solution -- half the data loss I've experienced hasn't had anything to do with unlink -- write() is just as capable of ruining your day, and without COW you're basically screwed without backups (which are never fine-grained and regular enough).
Everyone knows the Inhibitors occupy space we pass through every 62 million years.
Don't park near Resurgam next time. And stop trying to solve that puzzle!
RAR has recovery records (settable percentage of each archive dedicated to ECC, default off) and recovery volumes (dedicated files with PAR-like recovery capabilities). "Keep broken files" can be used to extract from broken or truncated archives.
Xming seems pretty good; X.org + patches compiled with MinGW. I've not had any problems with it so far. Exceed I found rather clunky, but the last time I used it was several years ago.
fb2k is known for being very effecient, even in the face of crazily huge libraries. I dare say you'll hate the default interface/config, but it's not difficult to bend it to your will (though it's not exactly iTunes; more like vim/mutt for music).
Windows only unfortunately, though it is supposed to work well in Wine. Significant chunks of it are BSD licensed.
Do you have *any* idea how hard it is to find a parking space for that thing where some yob's not going to key it or deflate the tires or poke at it with a spectrograph? :(
I should have got the next model down, then I could have pretended it was just another moon, but nooooooo, I had to get the hexagonal UltraSUV because it was "different" and had more legroom.
Hm, wonder if that guy who owns Mimas would do a swap. His camo paint job looks *so* much less convincing after those stupid films.
Counting the number of files you're about to delete so it can provide you a progress indicator, most likely. In Directory Opus you can turn this off from Preferences -> File Operations -> Deleting (Count files in folders before deleting). I can't see a similar option in Explorer's Folder Preferences, but it *might* be an option buried in a registry setting somewhere.
"Why do we even have swap anymore at all?"
Swap allows for more effecient use of memory, which isn't as ubiquitous as you seem to think (we're constantly finding the 16G limit on sensibly priced/available hardware somewhat annoying) -- if you're pushing the limits of physical memory, swap allows for least used pages to be written out to disk to leave expensive and scarce physical memory available for things that actually need it. Go ahead - allocate and dirty a whole bunch of memory for a bit and force your nearest *ix box to dip into swap. You'll probably still find hundreds of MB swapped out days later because it's just been sat there doing nothing.
On-disk binaries and other mmapped files also make use of the semantics of swap; when you run an app, the system basically uses the on-disk executable and libraries as read-only swap, and any pages not being used can be discarded because they're "swapped". Similarly userspace apps commonly mmap's data files into their address space, basically using them as app-specific swap files, with the VMM taking care of caching data and flushing dirty pages in a manner hopefully appropriate to the system memory load. Swap space is exactly the same thing; it just happens to use anonymous space on an OS-wide file for general purpose use. If it's not being used, it's not hurting, and if it is being used, wouldn't you rather a few unused pages get written to disk instead of your app just outright failing? If not, well, it's your system, feel free to turn it off.
Of course if you're using Rockbox, you can just use ReplayGain, which is supported by pretty much any format imaginable. Nicer than either normalizing the raw data or constantly reaching for the volume control. Of course, Apple have something like this too, though as always they decided to forgo the whole "use an established standard" thing and do their own inferior version which only they support.
Ralph: A Visible/Infrared Imager for the New Horizons Pluto/Kuiper Belt Mission
"MVIC is composed of 7 independent CCD arrays on a single substrate. It uses two of its large format (5024x32 pixel)
CCD arrays, operated in time delay integration (TDI) mode, to provide panchromatic (400 to 975 nm) images. Four
additional 5024x32 CCDs, combined with the appropriate filters and also operated in TDI mode, provide the capability
of mapping in blue (400-550 nm), red (540-700 nm), near IR (780-975 nm) and narrow band methane (860-910 nm)
channels."
You did know that cameras like this take colour shots by merging multiple exposures with different filters applied, right? They're probably using their limited bandwidth to retrieve single exposures from each shot to get a quicker overview of what they've got.
Heh, not really; Opteron 185, 2GB. The pattern was a set of highly repetitive smaller CA's (not unlike this); hash based algorithms are *really* good at accelerating "big" CA's like this.
Using Golly and a perfectly reasonable desktop computer, I just loaded a ~128k-sq grid with a starting population of roughly 100 million and ran it for 700 million iterations inside about half a minute, so I'm going to bet: pretty big.