... which have been steadily disappearing as well. So much for gender equity in the gaming world...
I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom using the joystick until the true 3D shooters made it pretty much impractical compared to lining up shots with the mouse. It was very satisfying to have that trigger finger... much better than devolving the FPS into a "point-n-click" frenzy.
Oh well, I suppose with advances in controls, everything will be replaced by a mouse eventually... You'll have a little tiptronic rock pad instead of a stickshift in a car, you'll aim and shoot guns with a touchscreen and stylus, and you'll land an airplane by clicking your mouse on the end of the runway, Starcraft-style.
Maybe they're hoping if the satellite finds out we're planning on shooting it, it'll get scared and start replying to their commands to activate. This kinda worries me about the state of the art in artificial intelligence that they're installing on these orbital platforms... Hopefully the satellite doesn't take this action the wrong way and organizes an orbital strike on us with some of its pals...
Or even worse, maybe someone successfully hacked the satellite and/is/ bringing it down in a controlled manner. In which case shooting it down would be the appropriate response. Wouldn't be surprised if this is the mindset:P
I was inconvenienced enough when I had to switch from Hotmail to Yahoo mail. Yahoo has been my primary spam account (meaning I used to to register an email for all the websites I visited, but I still occasionally scan through emails there) for years now...
It was really convenient with fetchyahoo.pl... Yahoo's spam filters (which were pretty good compared to most of the other services I've tried) would have a first pass at it before my computer ran an additional pass. I'm guessing that functionality won't last too long once Microsoft takes over, much like Hotmail went way downhill after their acquisition, not just because they switched their servers from FreeBSD to Windows server, but the spam filtering got really weak and they added plenty of their own spam.
Anyway, not looking forward to resetting my email address for dozens of websites I don't even remember.
Rock on, bro. I have to admit I actually care very little about music... I mean I like to listen to it, but don't really go out of my way to look for stuff and learn about bands. So the streaming radio stations like http://somafm.com/ and http://di.fm/ have fit me very well - it's more about the DJ chosing a good selection of things in a particular genre, and I just tune into the stream that suits my mood. I really can't be bothered to manage my own playlists myself.
That said, I have picked up an affinity for some artists in exactly the way you describe from listening to some of the ambient / electronica streams, such as Jon Hopkins, Nathan Fake, and Zero 7. Haven't been able to find much of them in record stores, I guess that means I've managed to pick up an obscure taste in music? Anyway, I'm very happy that there's still some good diversity in the types of streaming radio available on the internet. I really can't stand to listen to any of the popular radio stations in most US metropolitan areas anymore, and even get bored with what I've heard from the somewhat broader selection on satellite radio pretty quickly.
Speaking of Digitally-Imported, remember to check with your foreign friends overseas to see what's interesting. I'm deep into a Ukrainian group ( http://fleurmusic.com/ ) right now, but most of their albums are virtually unobtainable in the US. I'd characterize them as something like a mix of Tori Amos doing Celtic stuff, except (insert "in Soviet Russia" joke here) you need a whole bunch of very talented women to make a successful band (would TaTu be big anywhere if they were independent artists? Well, the whole lesbian act aside).
Finally just want to point out http://sleepbot.com/ as a source of very quirky ambient / background... sound (most stuff playing there doesn't really qualify as music).
Yes, the David H. Levy of the Shoemaker-Levy comet fame.
I picked up _Skywatching_ in the bargain bin for a few bucks. It's a bit dated (it has pictures of "microcomputers") but is an excellent introduction. The star charts are perfect for the beginner, he provides a few highlights in each constellation.
As far as software goes, I really like Celestia (which actually lets you travel to the planets and stars in the star catalog in 3D), NASA WorldWind, and more recently Google Earth 4.2 now does good zoomable star browsing.
I haven't even been able to google a good EVE vs. Vendetta article. Most of the Vendetta players I've talked too say it's better than EVE, but none of the EVE players I've talked to have even heard of Vendetta:P
I've played through the trials of both somewhat recently, so here's my quick synopsis:
EVE has nicer graphics and a good business & economy simulation. I'm a bit disappointed with lack of realism. There's no collision damage (in fact you can fly right through most objects such as ships and stations). Mostly you just approach objects such as stations and warpgates and "interact" with them without having to align with a flight path to dock or anything. To my knowledge you can't even just grab the controls and "fly". The interface is strictly point-and-click on objects, send a command, and wait. A lot of people play EVE while doing other things. Combat is mostly based on "dice rolls", though you still have to be there to select targets and activate weapons.
Vendetta actually lets you pilot aircraft, so there's a lot more actual player skill (not "stats") involved. I'm a bit annoyed that they introduced "licensing" to follow EVE's "skill points" thing. But at least the licensing is based on completing tasks and not on simply selecting a skill to "train" and waiting a bunch of real life time.
So EVE probably appeals more to the RTS player, and Vendetta would appeal more to the FPS player. Neither has very realistic physics... haven't seen much improvement in that in video games since Wing Commander.
Anyone know of space games with more realistic physics? Vegastrike (http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/) is a little better, but doesn't quite seem to be multiplayer just yet. And of course there are the outright simulators like Orbiter (http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/) which are neat to tinker with.
No, seriously... especially since this is what Linux is best known for.
Specifically, I'd like to see more mainstreaming of some of the features from mosix / openmosix. I played with mosix clusters (deployed from a master NFS server using debian's diskless-image package) quite a few years back, and I've been yearning to set up more.
Some of the features currently possible (or that I'd like to see):
transparent process migration
CPU-intensive processes automatically run on nodes with free CPU cycles
load balancing / optimization
Network or disk I/O intensive processes run on the node nearest to where the data is stored
high availability & fault tolerance
your cluster can still be usable through individual node failures or even during upgrades(!)
scalability
Simply add compute / storage / graphics nodes to the system... as you and your friends pool resources into the system, it just gets more powerful
So if you had a computer, you could just plug in to the network and netboot to get the current kernel and mount an NFS-root partition and join the cluster. You could set up any authentication necessary for CPU sharing and offer up any local disk partitions that could be automatically allocated to the network RAID. You might have mobile nodes (Laptops or maybe even PDA thin clients) that would run apps off the cluster, and then cleanly migrate its processes and hoard its files back to itself before cleanly detaching and continuing to run on its own.
*NIX and Linux in particular already has a lot of good projects that handle the individual pieces you'd need to assemble a system that would work almost completely over the network like this (booting, parallel global network filesystems, even good 3D OpenGL over the network), it's just a matter of assembling, integrating, and filling whatever remaining holes to make this seamless.
Actually, it'd be interesting to see where current PS2 sales fall in with all of this. My understanding is that it's still selling pretty well, and already has a large library of top games that maximize its still respectable computing power.
Hell, I just bought a used PS2 two weeks ago (my first console since my Famicom - the Japanese version of the original Nintendo). The complete setup was 1/10th the price of updating my PC gaming rig, and since I've virtually been living under a rock for the past few decades of console gaming I can enjoy several titles from the bargain bin. I paid a bit extra for the component cable so I can do 480p on games that support it... I guess the only thing I really miss is anti-aliasing.
Anyway, I've been playing Burnout 3 (I'm from Thailand, so I'm pretty tickled by the reasonably authentic models of Bangkok and the beach towns), and am even considering getting a few more PS2s just to run an immersive multi-screen Gran Turismo 4 setup. Also hope to check out some of the unique titles like Colossus and that K.... Damacy ball-rolling game that I've read some interesting reviews on.
So life's actually pretty good far behind the bleeding edge:P
It usually takes a second-generation solar system to create a planetary disk with enough heavy elements to form rocky earth-like planets with iron cores (thus generating a magnetic field that can shield the planet's biosphere from solar radiation). Heavy elements form through atomic fusion deep inside the the core of decent-sized main-sequence stars, and are probably only released through supernova-scale events.
The known universe is only 15 billion years old. Our sun is only halfway through its (at least second, maybe more) 10 billion year lifecycle. So chances are we're still fairly early to the party.
Once conditions were right on Earth, it took life only about 2 million years to develop to where we are now. We've only been pumping out radio signals for about a century. We're 8500 light years from the center of the Milky Way, so news of our existence hasn't even reached most of our own galaxy yet.
From the bits I've read about what we know about physics, quantum tunneling and wormholes are the only prospects we have for faster-than-light communication and/or travel. And both of them pretty much rely on having the entangled particles or artificial wormhole endpoints moved to separate locations at sub-light speeds. So I think the prospects are dim for finding ways to survey a significant part of our galaxy and the rest of the universe for our contemporaries. We'll just have to hunker down and try to survive for the long haul, and try not to destroy ourselves or our planet or fail to colonize other planets before this one goes out on its own. Eventually we'll find something out there, and hopefully they'll have the decency not to thwack us:P
In an ideal world, with no friction, it would take no energy to get from point A to point B, assuming they were at the same gravitational potential (height).
In this frictionless scenario, the ordinary old 'dumb' car spends all of its energy accelerating, and burns off all of its kinetic energy as heat while braking.
The hybrid car recoups as much kinetic energy as it can through regenerative braking... if it was 100% efficient it would get all of its energy back for the next acceleration cycle.
This "intelligent" car spends its energy accelerating, and relies on regular friction without braking to decelerate as much as possible... obviously it wouldn't be much better than the 'dumb' car in this scenario.
Add friction, and basically the only thing that separates the dumb car and the intelligent car is that the intelligent car tries to avoid braking, mostly by avoiding coming to a full stop at traffic lights, but also probably by spending a lot longer coasting to full stops when required. Slower = less air resistance.
The hybrid car can still start and stop relatively fast, and depending upon how efficient its regenerative braking is, won't be at a loss.
Ostensibly they're trying to save money on things like textbooks or language labs with tape decks. If that's the case, they should just stop refreshing textbooks for a while until they save enough money to buy an iPod and load it with educational content.
Oh wait, schools hardly refresh textbooks as it is, that wouldn't raise enough money very fast:P
Even then, they often forget that putting an iPod / PDA / laptop in a kids' hands is useless without any specialized content to throw on it, and the support structure to load and maintain that content.
I'd question their decision to use an iPod rather than a more general-purpose PDA, which are cheaper, can run more programs, and still play back music and movies like an iPod, except for the larger screen that PDAs have.;P
Well, everyone has to deal with personalities, but if it's a matter of trying to argue and figure out what features get implemented and how, there are plenty of systems engineering practices that can help create a streamlined, even automated process for collaboratively plotting out what gets added to the project plan.
Start with establishing a gate review process for evaluating and accepting change requests to any of your roadmaps and requirements. If someone can't get their feature through the peer review, they haven't done enough homework and must go back and twiddle with their proof of concepts or gather more convincing benchmark figures or background research to back up their proposal.
Have a set of policies, coding conventions and guidelines, etc. established in advance, and allow the gate review to reject change/merge requests that fail to meet these.
These layers of bureaucracy is somewhat antithetical to the idea of open source, but someone has to be the guardian of the trunk of the svn repository. Properly implemented and streamlined, they won't encumber the development process too much, while allowing many people to take part in approving changes while preventing a few dissenters from causing too much damage.
The overall software architecture should be constrained to a relatively small team, but they should be flexible enough to modularize a contentious component in such a way as to allow people to explore a few competing branches. That way, if someone insists on doing something their own way, you can somewhat pigeonhole them into their own little corner or "development branch" while you take the rest of the functional team and run circles around the rest of the components, including ones that supercede the poor fellow's sandbox. But they still get to feel proud that they contributed something that can break your program in awesome ways with a simple flick of a compile-time switch.
Anyway, it's really difficult to try to recommend a solution not knowing the specifics of your challenges, but there are several technical measures you can take to help mediate your trolls and wayward egos. Welcome to management. Just remember to try to stack your cards in such a way that keeps people happy and feeling productive, even the trolls and spoilsports.
The more signal wires you use to get the signal across, the better the video quality you'll get from your cable:
Component (3 signal pairs for YUV) > SVideo (2 signal pairs for luminance / chrominance) > Composite (1 signal pair for everything!)
It's easy cheap to find SVideo capture cards, the Osprey brand is well respected and has good linux support, but so does most of the things from Hauppage. You'll have to search a bit harder for a professional VHS / S-VHS deck and capture card that supports Component I/O, but it may not even help you much since the VHS tapes are encoded at closer to SVideo quality anyway.
For more money (>$1k), you can find VHS (usually from JVC) and/or capture card equipment that supports DV or SDI, then you won't lose anything at all over the cabling (arguably overkill, but sounds like that's what you're going for). Plus, your DVgrab software can then often control the playback and rewind so you'd need less manual coordination. This way all of your sampling is done in the VHS hardware and your PC just worries about storing and processing raw digital data, which is what it's good at. There's much more OSS support for DV than SDI at the moment.
Anyway, test a few pipelines, compare some samples of the quality (especially with scenes with high motion so you can see how well your deinterlacing works), and get a farm of the final solution so you can get back to us on what setup worked the best;>
Rather than bother with the patch, we simply took this opportunity as a sign that we ought to change our system clocks to GMT. Many benefits:
* Systems that dual-boot windows and linux no longer make oopses with DST transitions
* our company does more and more projects across different timezones across the country and internationally, and it gets real confusing real fast to have everything in Eastern, Pacific, Arizona (they don't observe DST), Melbourne, and the UK.
* we're an aviation company, so most of us are already used to it
* most of our computers are on closed networks anyway
So Congress is really doing us a favor by driving us towards a global economy with a common accessible timebase already established for maritime and aviation uses. Even if that's not what they intended:P But Congress works in mysteerious ways... (we have to try to assume, because admitting they're dumb just sucks for everyone:P )
We need better designed cities, not better designed cars.
Cars are certainly the most flexible way to get around. But we should not have to use them for our daily commute through rush hour traffic or even for running most common errands or to go out and play or dine out.
The problem really is with the way we (esp. the US) design cities. Instead of spending money on public transit-oriented communities, it's much, much cheaper for the municipalities to just pave a stretch of concrete and let individual citizens pay for the cost, maintenance, and operation of personally-owned vehicles. On top of that, condo construction here is pretty lousy, whereas if single family home construction is lousy at least your immediate neighbors are farther away from the noise.
Unfortunately, we don't really have a simple way to measure how much energy people can save in cities with alternative transit as opposed to people who live in cities where they have to drive even to the nearest postal mailbox.
Progress in these areas of urban development will get us closer to constructing sustainable colonies in space than any improvement in individually run cars.
Fascinating article, but while searching through aptitude for some of those alternative init engines, I came across bootsplash instead and I couldn't resist!
Uh, yeah, I guess I could make good use of bootchart from the article too... mmm... more eye candy.... and you can keep looking at / admiring your stats / comparing with you friends' stats long after after you've booted up anyway!
I work in the defense-industrial complex, and I'm seeing a lot of expensive UNIX systems being replaced with high-end PCs running NVidia cards. OpenGL simulations and applications that used to run on large SGIs, HPUX, and Solaris boxes that cost $100s of thousands have been ported to $5000 Linux boxes.
This market is especially lucrative because oftentimes the company usually wants to spend at least $5k on each computer so it counts as a capital investment instead of an expense for the bean counters. So they do everything they can to load up a base PC with extra hard drives and premium GPUs (the NVidia Quadro line is milking this pretty well with CAD/CAM workstation GPUs that cost 10x as much as the equivalent consumer-grade Geforce chips they're based on) just to drag their basic $2k PC up into capital territory. And it's getting harder all of the time since the base PC components keep dropping in price so fast. But these people can afford it and even say they're saving so much money because it's still orders of magnitude cheaper than their old big iron platforms.
Sheesh, imagine having a $5k budget to build a PC.
Anyway, making a decent (and fun, for me at least) living compiling binary modules and hand-tuning nVidia xorg.conf files for various multi-screen sim visualization configurations, among other things.
Don't mix up science with politics. Whether it is happening or not has been established by scientists. Whether it was anyone's fault (and more importantly, whether we're going to do anything about it) is a political issue.
First of all, you can start by calling it "Climate Change" instead of "Global Warming". If we just focus our efforts on the slow increase of merely one factor of the complex global climate system -- average temperature -- we're not going to convince anyone that there's been a significant man-made difference. However, if we could start focusing on how the climate of individual regions has changed drastically, it becomes much simpler to see and establish causality on how man-made activity has beat back glaciers, leveled mountains, polluted ecosystems, etc.
Anyway, now that we're playing politics, anything goes, including Hollywood sensationalizing. Just remember to draw clear lines between scientifically-proved fact and political slander;P .
It sucks that science is getting attacked by political groups lately. But in the end, this will hopefully be helpful for science. People will fund "scientific" studies such as "Industrial activity has No Correlation with Climate Change" and "Creationism Explains the Origin of Species" and science will be bolstered when the data disproves these null hypotheses, which is after all how scientific method works in the first place:>
* Pager Thumbnails I really miss the virtual desktop pager from Gnome 1.4. It had window thumbnailing that would update the screen contents of the thumbnailed views of all of the windows you had open, and you could use that little pager to move the real windows around your current desktop in addition to dragging them onto other virtual desktops. I really wish they hadn't removed all of that from Gnome 2 onwards. Seems like Enlightenment.16 and maybe KDE are the only other WM/environments that still retain this kind of functionality. I'm currently running Beryl now, and I kind of wonder why they haven't implemented a visual thumbnailing pager, since it seems they have the only compositing framework that could do that kind of live thumbnailing right.
* Quicklaunch clustering Another feature I miss from the Gnome 1.4 panel are multiple rows/columns of quicklaunch icons. Right now if you have a wide panel but small icons, it just wastes a lot of space. I've resorted to hiding them in a drawer, but I get annoyed needing two clicks to launch a common app instead of one:P .
* Panel interference Is there any way to make the panel less annoying, in terms of the way it tries to stay on top of fullscreen windows, or prevent other windows from overlapping its space? I just want it to behave like a normal window.... maybe it can jump to the top if I hit the "Super/Win" key or something. I realize this is mostly due to its WM hinting as a "panel" type, just wondering if there was some way to disable this behavior at the source rather than from any/every ICCM-compliant window manager I try to run (e.g. such as the way gkrellm's configuration works). I really hate it when I can't move a window over a clear patch of space because of a stupid panel I have tucked away in another corner.
Other than those few peeves, I really like Gnome. Its relative simplicity and visual elegance has kept me from seriously trying to migrate over to KDE. KDE looks and works great in KNOPPIX, but every time I've tried to use it as my primary desktop, I kept running into progressively weirder quirks that I ran out of patience trying to resolve.
Looking forward to when Gnome-terminal supports compositing hints so Beryl can give it true transparency!
RFID really just needs a simple on/off switch that completes the circuit to its antenna. Is anyone doing this?
My Metro SmartTrip card essentially does this all by itself after sitting in my wallet for a while. The only way it registers to readers is if I flex the card a certain way.
It's only after a year or two when I have to replace the card that the authorities can track my ass once again.;P
It's the new global economy, we don't/have/ to employ people directly here in America. It makes more sense, since then workers will spend money on our local economy. But ostensibly the foreign workers send most of their money back home anyway (but who doesn't have an H1B buddy with an awesome home entertainment system and doesn't eat out all the time?). But our policymakers don't have a very good track record of making sense, so I'm not terribly worried about our economy, we'll managed to scrape by.
What does suck are the export controls imposed by the EAR (Dept. of Commerce) and ITAR (Dept. of Defense). It pretty much means that any transfer of engineering technical data / discussion must be approved. For US companies, they basically need to employ a full time "Export Compliance Officer" that serves as a proxy to either ensure all technical communication (which now needs to be done in paper) is utterly devoid of "sensitive" technical information, or that we apply for a specific license from the DOC and/or DOD to talk or send source code on things like encryption algorithms (which are showing up EVERYWHERE now that proper security and authentication are important).
Basically, we've had to pigeonhole all of our foreign workers (even H1Bs, permanent residents and US citizens are typically all right) into their own office spaces and file and network servers locked off from everyone else. If the project they're working on contains "sensitive data", they're pretty much only allowed to contribute code to it, but can't even really access the repository with their own code.
So anyway, if you're working developing on anything interesting, such as high performance computing or improving encryption devices or better phased-array antennas or vehicle guidance systems, AND you want to take advantage of the best/cheapest foreign scientists and engineers available from around the world, you're better off spinning out your R&D center onto foreign soil as a foreign entity. It seems much easier to have the few US citizens you have emigrate or become non-technical project managers, than to put up all the walls and proxies you need for your US scientists and non-US scientists to collaborate without incurring US gov't fines.
The way I see it, the effect of EAR and ITAR will be to provide job security for American engineers and scientists in the short run, but in the long run our engineering/scientific capability will either flounder here all on its own, or move entirely outside our borders where they can more easily collaborate in the global intellectual community (very much the opposite of the US technological superiority that the EAR and ITAR try to preserve).
So really, it's us American workers who should be worried about our government's policy screwing us over, not the H1B workers.
Step one is to pay teachers like we give a damn. There is no competition to become a teacher. Those that do simply care about the lives they touch (shut up Butthead) and are willing to put up with the county bureaucracies to get there.
Conversely, it is extremely hard for the county to get rid of poor-performing teachers. There was one, uh, mentally unstable person at my wife's school who didn't publish her floating classroom schedule for the first few weeks of the school year, so her students could never find her. She was still on chapter 1 of the basic math textbook halfway through the year, and pretty much made up grades since she never graded howework or tests. My wife would drop in and give and grade worksheets for the students every once in a while, so they would at least get somewhere while the county sent in at least 4 waves of administrative "observers" month after month to build a case for firing^H^H^H^H^H^Htransferring the poor teacher after squatting there for some 15-20 years.
Anyway, at least there's a small tax break for the school supplies (dry erase markers, printer paper) we buy to keep her classroom running.
I'm hoping that this pointless change just means DST is in its death throes. Corporations do more business online internationally now, and will soon find it more convenient to just use GMT rather than continue to do conversions for a meeting in 4 time zones. This is just another nail on the coffin of local US time zones.
And as everyone on Slashdot surely knows, setting you BIOS clock to GMT and your Windows timezone to GMT is the only way to prevent your system from doing something stupid when dual-booting Linux around DST-changing time.
Anyway, I'm waking up at 1300 GMT tomorrow, dammit.
Heat rises. That creates wind. The Earth isn't going to get appreciably hotter, it's just going to get windier. I don't think we're going to see much surface temperature change, but if we could look at the energy being stored and dissipated in the atmosphere, we'd see a dramatically different story. That's why any environmental alarmist worth their salt will talk about "climate change" and not "global warming".
Now, Earth and the ecosystem is a buffer system, and buffer systems tend to try to hold conditions steady. Of course, once they get pushed to the edge, they abruptly go way off. So things should get interesting.
On the bright side, hopefully when things get really really bad and people start dying en masse, we'll finally make some policy changes and the ecosystem will correct itself again relatively quickly. But I'm not holding my breath. In all previous environmental issues, we've had to wait for things to get really bad to take any action (industrial pollution vs. deaths due to London fog, the ozone hole, etc.). Just too bad we can't figure out a way to hold people accountable for not taking action sooner:P
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... which have been steadily disappearing as well. So much for gender equity in the gaming world...
I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom using the joystick until the true 3D shooters made it pretty much impractical compared to lining up shots with the mouse. It was very satisfying to have that trigger finger... much better than devolving the FPS into a "point-n-click" frenzy.
Oh well, I suppose with advances in controls, everything will be replaced by a mouse eventually... You'll have a little tiptronic rock pad instead of a stickshift in a car, you'll aim and shoot guns with a touchscreen and stylus, and you'll land an airplane by clicking your mouse on the end of the runway, Starcraft-style.
Maybe they're hoping if the satellite finds out we're planning on shooting it, it'll get scared and start replying to their commands to activate. This kinda worries me about the state of the art in artificial intelligence that they're installing on these orbital platforms... Hopefully the satellite doesn't take this action the wrong way and organizes an orbital strike on us with some of its pals...
/is/ bringing it down in a controlled manner. In which case shooting it down would be the appropriate response. Wouldn't be surprised if this is the mindset :P
Or even worse, maybe someone successfully hacked the satellite and
Anyway, enough quack theories from me...
I was inconvenienced enough when I had to switch from Hotmail to Yahoo mail. Yahoo has been my primary spam account (meaning I used to to register an email for all the websites I visited, but I still occasionally scan through emails there) for years now...
... Yahoo's spam filters (which were pretty good compared to most of the other services I've tried) would have a first pass at it before my computer ran an additional pass. I'm guessing that functionality won't last too long once Microsoft takes over, much like Hotmail went way downhill after their acquisition, not just because they switched their servers from FreeBSD to Windows server, but the spam filtering got really weak and they added plenty of their own spam.
It was really convenient with fetchyahoo.pl
Anyway, not looking forward to resetting my email address for dozens of websites I don't even remember.
Rock on, bro. I have to admit I actually care very little about music... I mean I like to listen to it, but don't really go out of my way to look for stuff and learn about bands. So the streaming radio stations like http://somafm.com/ and http://di.fm/ have fit me very well - it's more about the DJ chosing a good selection of things in a particular genre, and I just tune into the stream that suits my mood. I really can't be bothered to manage my own playlists myself.
... sound (most stuff playing there doesn't really qualify as music).
That said, I have picked up an affinity for some artists in exactly the way you describe from listening to some of the ambient / electronica streams, such as Jon Hopkins, Nathan Fake, and Zero 7. Haven't been able to find much of them in record stores, I guess that means I've managed to pick up an obscure taste in music? Anyway, I'm very happy that there's still some good diversity in the types of streaming radio available on the internet. I really can't stand to listen to any of the popular radio stations in most US metropolitan areas anymore, and even get bored with what I've heard from the somewhat broader selection on satellite radio pretty quickly.
Speaking of Digitally-Imported, remember to check with your foreign friends overseas to see what's interesting. I'm deep into a Ukrainian group ( http://fleurmusic.com/ ) right now, but most of their albums are virtually unobtainable in the US. I'd characterize them as something like a mix of Tori Amos doing Celtic stuff, except (insert "in Soviet Russia" joke here) you need a whole bunch of very talented women to make a successful band (would TaTu be big anywhere if they were independent artists? Well, the whole lesbian act aside).
Finally just want to point out http://sleepbot.com/ as a source of very quirky ambient / background
Yes, the David H. Levy of the Shoemaker-Levy comet fame.
I picked up _Skywatching_ in the bargain bin for a few bucks. It's a bit dated (it has pictures of "microcomputers") but is an excellent introduction. The star charts are perfect for the beginner, he provides a few highlights in each constellation.
As far as software goes, I really like Celestia (which actually lets you travel to the planets and stars in the star catalog in 3D), NASA WorldWind, and more recently Google Earth 4.2 now does good zoomable star browsing.
Finally, people can do some pretty decent astrophotography on budget equipment using software compositing, check out these works done with halfway-decent webcams duct-taped to a telescope: http://www.my-spot.com/planets.htm http://homepage.mac.com/nmonks/astronomy/astro_photo.html
I haven't even been able to google a good EVE vs. Vendetta article. Most of the Vendetta players I've talked too say it's better than EVE, but none of the EVE players I've talked to have even heard of Vendetta :P
I've played through the trials of both somewhat recently, so here's my quick synopsis:
EVE has nicer graphics and a good business & economy simulation. I'm a bit disappointed with lack of realism. There's no collision damage (in fact you can fly right through most objects such as ships and stations). Mostly you just approach objects such as stations and warpgates and "interact" with them without having to align with a flight path to dock or anything. To my knowledge you can't even just grab the controls and "fly". The interface is strictly point-and-click on objects, send a command, and wait. A lot of people play EVE while doing other things. Combat is mostly based on "dice rolls", though you still have to be there to select targets and activate weapons.
Vendetta actually lets you pilot aircraft, so there's a lot more actual player skill (not "stats") involved. I'm a bit annoyed that they introduced "licensing" to follow EVE's "skill points" thing. But at least the licensing is based on completing tasks and not on simply selecting a skill to "train" and waiting a bunch of real life time.
So EVE probably appeals more to the RTS player, and Vendetta would appeal more to the FPS player. Neither has very realistic physics... haven't seen much improvement in that in video games since Wing Commander.
Anyone know of space games with more realistic physics? Vegastrike (http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/) is a little better, but doesn't quite seem to be multiplayer just yet. And of course there are the outright simulators like Orbiter (http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/) which are neat to tinker with.
Specifically, I'd like to see more mainstreaming of some of the features from mosix / openmosix. I played with mosix clusters (deployed from a master NFS server using debian's diskless-image package) quite a few years back, and I've been yearning to set up more.
Some of the features currently possible (or that I'd like to see):
transparent process migration CPU-intensive processes automatically run on nodes with free CPU cycles load balancing / optimization Network or disk I/O intensive processes run on the node nearest to where the data is stored high availability & fault tolerance your cluster can still be usable through individual node failures or even during upgrades(!) scalability Simply add compute / storage / graphics nodes to the system... as you and your friends pool resources into the system, it just gets more powerful So if you had a computer, you could just plug in to the network and netboot to get the current kernel and mount an NFS-root partition and join the cluster. You could set up any authentication necessary for CPU sharing and offer up any local disk partitions that could be automatically allocated to the network RAID. You might have mobile nodes (Laptops or maybe even PDA thin clients) that would run apps off the cluster, and then cleanly migrate its processes and hoard its files back to itself before cleanly detaching and continuing to run on its own. *NIX and Linux in particular already has a lot of good projects that handle the individual pieces you'd need to assemble a system that would work almost completely over the network like this (booting, parallel global network filesystems, even good 3D OpenGL over the network), it's just a matter of assembling, integrating, and filling whatever remaining holes to make this seamless.Actually, it'd be interesting to see where current PS2 sales fall in with all of this. My understanding is that it's still selling pretty well, and already has a large library of top games that maximize its still respectable computing power.
:P
Hell, I just bought a used PS2 two weeks ago (my first console since my Famicom - the Japanese version of the original Nintendo). The complete setup was 1/10th the price of updating my PC gaming rig, and since I've virtually been living under a rock for the past few decades of console gaming I can enjoy several titles from the bargain bin. I paid a bit extra for the component cable so I can do 480p on games that support it... I guess the only thing I really miss is anti-aliasing.
Anyway, I've been playing Burnout 3 (I'm from Thailand, so I'm pretty tickled by the reasonably authentic models of Bangkok and the beach towns), and am even considering getting a few more PS2s just to run an immersive multi-screen Gran Turismo 4 setup. Also hope to check out some of the unique titles like Colossus and that K.... Damacy ball-rolling game that I've read some interesting reviews on.
So life's actually pretty good far behind the bleeding edge
Well, there's the Multi Theft Auto mod:
http://mtavc.com/
Haven't tried it, though. All my friends are too busy leveling up in WoW and EVE to engage in any simple human skill-based game.
It usually takes a second-generation solar system to create a planetary disk with enough heavy elements to form rocky earth-like planets with iron cores (thus generating a magnetic field that can shield the planet's biosphere from solar radiation). Heavy elements form through atomic fusion deep inside the the core of decent-sized main-sequence stars, and are probably only released through supernova-scale events.
:P
The known universe is only 15 billion years old. Our sun is only halfway through its (at least second, maybe more) 10 billion year lifecycle. So chances are we're still fairly early to the party.
Once conditions were right on Earth, it took life only about 2 million years to develop to where we are now. We've only been pumping out radio signals for about a century. We're 8500 light years from the center of the Milky Way, so news of our existence hasn't even reached most of our own galaxy yet.
From the bits I've read about what we know about physics, quantum tunneling and wormholes are the only prospects we have for faster-than-light communication and/or travel. And both of them pretty much rely on having the entangled particles or artificial wormhole endpoints moved to separate locations at sub-light speeds. So I think the prospects are dim for finding ways to survey a significant part of our galaxy and the rest of the universe for our contemporaries. We'll just have to hunker down and try to survive for the long haul, and try not to destroy ourselves or our planet or fail to colonize other planets before this one goes out on its own. Eventually we'll find something out there, and hopefully they'll have the decency not to thwack us
In an ideal world, with no friction, it would take no energy to get from point A to point B, assuming they were at the same gravitational potential (height).
In this frictionless scenario, the ordinary old 'dumb' car spends all of its energy accelerating, and burns off all of its kinetic energy as heat while braking.
The hybrid car recoups as much kinetic energy as it can through regenerative braking... if it was 100% efficient it would get all of its energy back for the next acceleration cycle.
This "intelligent" car spends its energy accelerating, and relies on regular friction without braking to decelerate as much as possible... obviously it wouldn't be much better than the 'dumb' car in this scenario.
Add friction, and basically the only thing that separates the dumb car and the intelligent car is that the intelligent car tries to avoid braking, mostly by avoiding coming to a full stop at traffic lights, but also probably by spending a lot longer coasting to full stops when required. Slower = less air resistance.
The hybrid car can still start and stop relatively fast, and depending upon how efficient its regenerative braking is, won't be at a loss.
But obviously you want an intelligent hybrid.
Ostensibly they're trying to save money on things like textbooks or language labs with tape decks. If that's the case, they should just stop refreshing textbooks for a while until they save enough money to buy an iPod and load it with educational content.
:P
;P
Oh wait, schools hardly refresh textbooks as it is, that wouldn't raise enough money very fast
Even then, they often forget that putting an iPod / PDA / laptop in a kids' hands is useless without any specialized content to throw on it, and the support structure to load and maintain that content.
I'd question their decision to use an iPod rather than a more general-purpose PDA, which are cheaper, can run more programs, and still play back music and movies like an iPod, except for the larger screen that PDAs have.
Well, everyone has to deal with personalities, but if it's a matter of trying to argue and figure out what features get implemented and how, there are plenty of systems engineering practices that can help create a streamlined, even automated process for collaboratively plotting out what gets added to the project plan.
Start with establishing a gate review process for evaluating and accepting change requests to any of your roadmaps and requirements. If someone can't get their feature through the peer review, they haven't done enough homework and must go back and twiddle with their proof of concepts or gather more convincing benchmark figures or background research to back up their proposal.
Have a set of policies, coding conventions and guidelines, etc. established in advance, and allow the gate review to reject change/merge requests that fail to meet these.
These layers of bureaucracy is somewhat antithetical to the idea of open source, but someone has to be the guardian of the trunk of the svn repository. Properly implemented and streamlined, they won't encumber the development process too much, while allowing many people to take part in approving changes while preventing a few dissenters from causing too much damage.
The overall software architecture should be constrained to a relatively small team, but they should be flexible enough to modularize a contentious component in such a way as to allow people to explore a few competing branches. That way, if someone insists on doing something their own way, you can somewhat pigeonhole them into their own little corner or "development branch" while you take the rest of the functional team and run circles around the rest of the components, including ones that supercede the poor fellow's sandbox. But they still get to feel proud that they contributed something that can break your program in awesome ways with a simple flick of a compile-time switch.
Anyway, it's really difficult to try to recommend a solution not knowing the specifics of your challenges, but there are several technical measures you can take to help mediate your trolls and wayward egos. Welcome to management. Just remember to try to stack your cards in such a way that keeps people happy and feeling productive, even the trolls and spoilsports.
Good luck!
The more signal wires you use to get the signal across, the better the video quality you'll get from your cable:
;>
Component (3 signal pairs for YUV) > SVideo (2 signal pairs for luminance / chrominance) > Composite (1 signal pair for everything!)
It's easy cheap to find SVideo capture cards, the Osprey brand is well respected and has good linux support, but so does most of the things from Hauppage. You'll have to search a bit harder for a professional VHS / S-VHS deck and capture card that supports Component I/O, but it may not even help you much since the VHS tapes are encoded at closer to SVideo quality anyway.
For more money (>$1k), you can find VHS (usually from JVC) and/or capture card equipment that supports DV or SDI, then you won't lose anything at all over the cabling (arguably overkill, but sounds like that's what you're going for). Plus, your DVgrab software can then often control the playback and rewind so you'd need less manual coordination. This way all of your sampling is done in the VHS hardware and your PC just worries about storing and processing raw digital data, which is what it's good at. There's much more OSS support for DV than SDI at the moment.
Anyway, test a few pipelines, compare some samples of the quality (especially with scenes with high motion so you can see how well your deinterlacing works), and get a farm of the final solution so you can get back to us on what setup worked the best
Have fun!
Rather than bother with the patch, we simply took this opportunity as a sign that we ought to change our system clocks to GMT. Many benefits:
:P But Congress works in mysteerious ways... (we have to try to assume, because admitting they're dumb just sucks for everyone :P )
* Systems that dual-boot windows and linux no longer make oopses with DST transitions
* our company does more and more projects across different timezones across the country and internationally, and it gets real confusing real fast to have everything in Eastern, Pacific, Arizona (they don't observe DST), Melbourne, and the UK.
* we're an aviation company, so most of us are already used to it
* most of our computers are on closed networks anyway
So Congress is really doing us a favor by driving us towards a global economy with a common accessible timebase already established for maritime and aviation uses. Even if that's not what they intended
We need better designed cities, not better designed cars.
Cars are certainly the most flexible way to get around. But we should not have to use them for our daily commute through rush hour traffic or even for running most common errands or to go out and play or dine out.
The problem really is with the way we (esp. the US) design cities. Instead of spending money on public transit-oriented communities, it's much, much cheaper for the municipalities to just pave a stretch of concrete and let individual citizens pay for the cost, maintenance, and operation of personally-owned vehicles. On top of that, condo construction here is pretty lousy, whereas if single family home construction is lousy at least your immediate neighbors are farther away from the noise.
Unfortunately, we don't really have a simple way to measure how much energy people can save in cities with alternative transit as opposed to people who live in cities where they have to drive even to the nearest postal mailbox.
In the mean time, the exciting progress in the transportation field ought to be things like transit oriented design:
http://www.transitorienteddevelopment.org/
http://www.carfree.com/
Progress in these areas of urban development will get us closer to constructing sustainable colonies in space than any improvement in individually run cars.
Fascinating article, but while searching through aptitude for some of those alternative init engines, I came across bootsplash instead and I couldn't resist!
:P
http://www.bootsplash.org/
Uh, yeah, I guess I could make good use of bootchart from the article too... mmm... more eye candy.... and you can keep looking at / admiring your stats / comparing with you friends' stats long after after you've booted up anyway!
Seriously, real Linux servers don't reboot
(burned by playing with runit some time ago)
I work in the defense-industrial complex, and I'm seeing a lot of expensive UNIX systems being replaced with high-end PCs running NVidia cards. OpenGL simulations and applications that used to run on large SGIs, HPUX, and Solaris boxes that cost $100s of thousands have been ported to $5000 Linux boxes.
This market is especially lucrative because oftentimes the company usually wants to spend at least $5k on each computer so it counts as a capital investment instead of an expense for the bean counters. So they do everything they can to load up a base PC with extra hard drives and premium GPUs (the NVidia Quadro line is milking this pretty well with CAD/CAM workstation GPUs that cost 10x as much as the equivalent consumer-grade Geforce chips they're based on) just to drag their basic $2k PC up into capital territory. And it's getting harder all of the time since the base PC components keep dropping in price so fast. But these people can afford it and even say they're saving so much money because it's still orders of magnitude cheaper than their old big iron platforms.
Sheesh, imagine having a $5k budget to build a PC.
Anyway, making a decent (and fun, for me at least) living compiling binary modules and hand-tuning nVidia xorg.conf files for various multi-screen sim visualization configurations, among other things.
Don't mix up science with politics. Whether it is happening or not has been established by scientists. Whether it was anyone's fault (and more importantly, whether we're going to do anything about it) is a political issue.
;P .
:>
First of all, you can start by calling it "Climate Change" instead of "Global Warming". If we just focus our efforts on the slow increase of merely one factor of the complex global climate system -- average temperature -- we're not going to convince anyone that there's been a significant man-made difference. However, if we could start focusing on how the climate of individual regions has changed drastically, it becomes much simpler to see and establish causality on how man-made activity has beat back glaciers, leveled mountains, polluted ecosystems, etc.
Anyway, now that we're playing politics, anything goes, including Hollywood sensationalizing. Just remember to draw clear lines between scientifically-proved fact and political slander
It sucks that science is getting attacked by political groups lately. But in the end, this will hopefully be helpful for science. People will fund "scientific" studies such as "Industrial activity has No Correlation with Climate Change" and "Creationism Explains the Origin of Species" and science will be bolstered when the data disproves these null hypotheses, which is after all how scientific method works in the first place
* Pager Thumbnails .16 and maybe KDE are the only other WM/environments that still retain this kind of functionality. I'm currently running Beryl now, and I kind of wonder why they haven't implemented a visual thumbnailing pager, since it seems they have the only compositing framework that could do that kind of live thumbnailing right.
:P .
I really miss the virtual desktop pager from Gnome 1.4. It had window thumbnailing that would update the screen contents of the thumbnailed views of all of the windows you had open, and you could use that little pager to move the real windows around your current desktop in addition to dragging them onto other virtual desktops. I really wish they hadn't removed all of that from Gnome 2 onwards. Seems like Enlightenment
* Quicklaunch clustering
Another feature I miss from the Gnome 1.4 panel are multiple rows/columns of quicklaunch icons. Right now if you have a wide panel but small icons, it just wastes a lot of space. I've resorted to hiding them in a drawer, but I get annoyed needing two clicks to launch a common app instead of one
* Panel interference
Is there any way to make the panel less annoying, in terms of the way it tries to stay on top of fullscreen windows, or prevent other windows from overlapping its space? I just want it to behave like a normal window.... maybe it can jump to the top if I hit the "Super/Win" key or something. I realize this is mostly due to its WM hinting as a "panel" type, just wondering if there was some way to disable this behavior at the source rather than from any/every ICCM-compliant window manager I try to run (e.g. such as the way gkrellm's configuration works). I really hate it when I can't move a window over a clear patch of space because of a stupid panel I have tucked away in another corner.
Other than those few peeves, I really like Gnome. Its relative simplicity and visual elegance has kept me from seriously trying to migrate over to KDE. KDE looks and works great in KNOPPIX, but every time I've tried to use it as my primary desktop, I kept running into progressively weirder quirks that I ran out of patience trying to resolve.
Looking forward to when Gnome-terminal supports compositing hints so Beryl can give it true transparency!
RFID really just needs a simple on/off switch that completes the circuit to its antenna. Is anyone doing this?
;P
My Metro SmartTrip card essentially does this all by itself after sitting in my wallet for a while. The only way it registers to readers is if I flex the card a certain way.
It's only after a year or two when I have to replace the card that the authorities can track my ass once again.
It's the new global economy, we don't /have/ to employ people directly here in America. It makes more sense, since then workers will spend money on our local economy. But ostensibly the foreign workers send most of their money back home anyway (but who doesn't have an H1B buddy with an awesome home entertainment system and doesn't eat out all the time?). But our policymakers don't have a very good track record of making sense, so I'm not terribly worried about our economy, we'll managed to scrape by.
/cheapest foreign scientists and engineers available from around the world, you're better off spinning out your R&D center onto foreign soil as a foreign entity. It seems much easier to have the few US citizens you have emigrate or become non-technical project managers, than to put up all the walls and proxies you need for your US scientists and non-US scientists to collaborate without incurring US gov't fines.
What does suck are the export controls imposed by the EAR (Dept. of Commerce) and ITAR (Dept. of Defense). It pretty much means that any transfer of engineering technical data / discussion must be approved. For US companies, they basically need to employ a full time "Export Compliance Officer" that serves as a proxy to either ensure all technical communication (which now needs to be done in paper) is utterly devoid of "sensitive" technical information, or that we apply for a specific license from the DOC and/or DOD to talk or send source code on things like encryption algorithms (which are showing up EVERYWHERE now that proper security and authentication are important).
Basically, we've had to pigeonhole all of our foreign workers (even H1Bs, permanent residents and US citizens are typically all right) into their own office spaces and file and network servers locked off from everyone else. If the project they're working on contains "sensitive data", they're pretty much only allowed to contribute code to it, but can't even really access the repository with their own code.
So anyway, if you're working developing on anything interesting, such as high performance computing or improving encryption devices or better phased-array antennas or vehicle guidance systems, AND you want to take advantage of the best
The way I see it, the effect of EAR and ITAR will be to provide job security for American engineers and scientists in the short run, but in the long run our engineering/scientific capability will either flounder here all on its own, or move entirely outside our borders where they can more easily collaborate in the global intellectual community (very much the opposite of the US technological superiority that the EAR and ITAR try to preserve).
So really, it's us American workers who should be worried about our government's policy screwing us over, not the H1B workers.
Step one is to pay teachers like we give a damn. There is no competition to become a teacher. Those that do simply care about the lives they touch (shut up Butthead) and are willing to put up with the county bureaucracies to get there.
Conversely, it is extremely hard for the county to get rid of poor-performing teachers. There was one, uh, mentally unstable person at my wife's school who didn't publish her floating classroom schedule for the first few weeks of the school year, so her students could never find her. She was still on chapter 1 of the basic math textbook halfway through the year, and pretty much made up grades since she never graded howework or tests. My wife would drop in and give and grade worksheets for the students every once in a while, so they would at least get somewhere while the county sent in at least 4 waves of administrative "observers" month after month to build a case for firing^H^H^H^H^H^Htransferring the poor teacher after squatting there for some 15-20 years.
Anyway, at least there's a small tax break for the school supplies (dry erase markers, printer paper) we buy to keep her classroom running.
I'm hoping that this pointless change just means DST is in its death throes. Corporations do more business online internationally now, and will soon find it more convenient to just use GMT rather than continue to do conversions for a meeting in 4 time zones. This is just another nail on the coffin of local US time zones.
And as everyone on Slashdot surely knows, setting you BIOS clock to GMT and your Windows timezone to GMT is the only way to prevent your system from doing something stupid when dual-booting Linux around DST-changing time.
Anyway, I'm waking up at 1300 GMT tomorrow, dammit.
Heat rises. That creates wind. The Earth isn't going to get appreciably hotter, it's just going to get windier. I don't think we're going to see much surface temperature change, but if we could look at the energy being stored and dissipated in the atmosphere, we'd see a dramatically different story. That's why any environmental alarmist worth their salt will talk about "climate change" and not "global warming".
:P
Now, Earth and the ecosystem is a buffer system, and buffer systems tend to try to hold conditions steady. Of course, once they get pushed to the edge, they abruptly go way off. So things should get interesting.
On the bright side, hopefully when things get really really bad and people start dying en masse, we'll finally make some policy changes and the ecosystem will correct itself again relatively quickly. But I'm not holding my breath. In all previous environmental issues, we've had to wait for things to get really bad to take any action (industrial pollution vs. deaths due to London fog, the ozone hole, etc.). Just too bad we can't figure out a way to hold people accountable for not taking action sooner