Question: Is there any reason you need to actually open up the monitor for these modifications? From the description, it sounds like you could simply hack together an MGA connector which takes in (see what pinouts your monitor requires here) and you're done. Solder a couple of pots at the V and H lines on the connector and put a project box around it and you've got a portable visualizer. Yes?
I'm sure someone has pitched this before, but how would you feel about someone doing a 3rd person action game based on Army of Darkness, with your likeness and voice talent as the main character?
From what I've read, it's had very very little to do with any chemicals we were using, but the unusual amount of volcanic eruptions in the 70's and 80's, contributed almost entirely to the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere and causing the hole.
It's quite likely this hole phenomenon has happened countless times in the past, and there just weren't any reactionary humans around to make a big fuss over it.
The only two cool things about the PCI card in the article is host-IP connectivity (which essentially is a dual ethernet card then, perfect for firewalls and such), and 10W power draw straight from the host's power supply.
However, Powerleap, ubiquitous for upgrades and socket adapters, also has a card which touts some similar attributes called the Renaissance/370S based on a Socket 370 or FC-PGA chip. It cranks with Celeron, Celeron II, and P3 chips. Quite rockin'.
The main cool thing about this device is it does NOT use the motherboard slot it sits in. It just uses it as a place to mount. That's right, you can put one in an ISA slot and still run the motherboard it sits in and they won't know a thing about each other, because no pins are connected between them. The price is also a lot better (~$250 for a low end model), you can swap out the CPU and it has two DIMM slots, with a max ram per slot of 512mb (1GB combined). The specs are much better and the price is much lower. It's just marketed as an upgrade option rather than a performance enhancement to an existing machine.
I've been looking into this as a solution for my cluster, but haven't gotten up the nerve to buy them yet. From what I can find on the web, they're the best cluster card option, especially if you are handy with soldering. To really maximize the power per box, I'd probably buy a dead 486 motherboard (ISA slots all the way across the board, which this card requires), slam four Renaissance cards in it, link two power supplies in parallel, rig extra power and reset switches for each card separate from the power supply, and there's your mini-cluster. Probably 4 machines per 4U case, which notably isn't a huge space savings over 4 1U pizza boxes, but it costs less than a single 1U server would.
So their options are either (a) work 20 hour shifts, or (b) die. I'm glad to hear they have a choice in the matter.
The alternative is the corporation leaves the area, and they have their original choice back: die.
That's not very realistic. There are ways to survive in locations before the sweatshops came to town; they just have a better chance to survive, better, even if the working conditions are hazardous. If the risk vs. reward were not worth taking, people wouldn't.
Tell me how France and Sweden and the USA have exploited Afghanistan and become rich because of it. If anything, some 3rd world nations have become rich beyond their means by providing various corporations with labor. Now they are educated enough and skilled enough to start their own companies and compete globally. See Taiwan.
Dunderheads like you want to equate poor, wretched masses in other countries with exploited globalist nation states. You're welcome to do so, but it doesn't mean you're anywhere near reality. See sig.
And many political scientists equate Afghanistan's poverty, political extremism and instability to the fact that globalization hasn't yet reached the country.
I don't understand is why people think that government doing a mediocre job at current scope will perform equally or better at a worldwide scope. There are places in the Appalachian mountains where running water is uncommon. Why should Afghanistan or any other region be given special treatment? Capitalist, Christian, Islamic, etc ideologies all teach that you reap what you sow. They've sown war from their country's birth, and have nothing to show for it. America and Europe have a great deal because we've all worked for it. Globalism and socialism and communism are nothing more than mechanisms to redistribute wealth from people who have built it to people who do not deserve it.
I'm sorry if you don't agree, but fuck everyone who thinks that's a good idea. I'm keeping my car and my house and my computer.
I haven't figured out this fascination with expensive, lower power, quieter components.
I've got a server cabinet that's got six machines in it. Talk about noise. I'm going to buy a box of acoustic foam and mount it on the doors and sides, then on the walls of the room with whatever is left. For a box or two of foam, I can put any old hardware in the enclosure and ignore its noisy fans.
A suggestion: build an inexpensive box and line it with foam, cut out a circle or two on the lid and put some server extraction fans (114 CFM, 110v AC plug). Put a hinge on the front for cd and floppy access when necessary, bore a few holes in back for cables. You're there in under $150, and you get to use the same box for any upgraded computers you may buy in the future as well.
This is called IFF format. It was invented by Electronic Arts in 1985 and used by Amiga OS for audio files (AIFF). It was the first portable interchange format, predating XML by over a decade.
I've personally used IFF in years past to great advantage where XML was bulky or wasteful or didn't exist yet. That's one of the reasons I haven't gotten a stiffy over XML, because the problem was largely addressed prior, only it was missing standardized attributes retrieval and arbitrary length tag names. As a format for speedy reading, it's almost unbeatable (with a couple of logical conventions for data formats).
Programs are essentially mathematical descriptions of data manipulations. People make mathematical errors all the time, so it's not surprising that programs, given their size and complexity, have problems being correct at every stage. The issue is not so much that they do have problems, but how quickly they are fixed and put into a usable state.
The crux is OSS and commercial software differ in what 'usable' means. In OSS, a program can be dysfunctional on many levels and be considered usable. Because it's FREE. Once you start paying for it, the expectations must go up, because you've traded your money for assurances that the product works as advertised, every time. Of course, we know that this is wishful thinking, but the motivation is definitely more compelling when, as a software developer for a corporation, your paycheck depends on it.
Have to agree that seasoned engineers who understand exception handling begin with error recovery and reporting, then build apps on top of that foundation. I haven't seen a lot of good error handling code that could be improved upon by greater experience in engineering. The approaches are fundamentally different, where simple error handling requires diligence and exception handling requires only forethought.
I ran into a serious problem with ghostscript a while back where we couldn't determine if it was correctly interpreting the command line and job options we were sending it. The way they wrote it, it turns out you can pipe/dev/rand to its command line and it will happily do whatever it feels like and you'd never know. That's poor programming, not just error recovery. But that's the only serious OSS example I can name.
As a 'professional', my bent is to make my program so damn picky that any wrong parameter or character that is out of place will cause the utility to bomb and tell you why. Garbage In/Garbage Out. If you feel crap into a system, it's better that you don't get crap back out, but rather get nothing until you fix your data. Not too many people believe in that so strongly, so you have a lot of utilities where you don't know what it'll do when the data is bad.
I'm sure people out there need text to speech technology. I'm sure that VXML would be used by some niche that desperately needs it.
I'm also sure that it'll never take over the internet, because it's a different medium, and has the same drawbacks as other spoken media, both citizen band and broadcast. Audio is linear, the web is random access. If you are interested in a portion of a web page, you will skip to that portion immediately, am I right? Besides, audio is almost as intrusive as Flash and Shockwave, only with VXML, it'll be a patented standard. The last thing I like is web sites with noise on them. If I wanted a multimedia experience, I'd play a good game, not Joe Generic's lame attempt at an interactive web page. I surf for information, not for a memorable experience.
Hmmph. Seems to me W3C should be documenting emerging standards, not creating them.
When a measure meant to protect inventors becomes a way for two companies to hold silly legal dicksize contests, it's a sign the system is broken and needs fixing, or scrapping, or something.
Agreed. IANAPL (Patent Lawyer), but it seems to me that companies should not own patents. In the eyes of the law, a corporation is a person, but I think that's misleading. It never has to die, it never has to stop suing people because it runs out of money like an individual would, and so on and so forth.
I think only people should own patents, jointly or otherwise. I'd like to see those who produce gain ownership of the fruits of their labor; they may get paid by a company to do some work, but something so novel to be patented should be owned by those in development.
That alone would make companies considerably more indifferent to patenting. Focusing on putting out better products, cheaper, and faster, and competing directly with other companies should be their goal, not using anti-competitive practices like patents to gain market share with inferior products.
An interesting side effect of such an arrangement is that companies would then learn to take care of their scientists. Not only that, but a scientist would then have a value portfolio of patents that codifies their experience when job shopping.
Lincoln's justification of his abrogation of rights during the civil war is just another manifestation of the tired ends-justify-the-means-argument. [...] In breaking law to save the union, he ultimately set precedent to fundamentally change that which he sought to save.
While I can't disagree that the union was forever changed by the civil war, I don't specifically agree that your statement follows conclusively from his suspension of certain laws. IANALH (Legal Historian) at any rate, but it seems to me that it's been only in the past 30 years that people are unwilling or unable to think outside the box for even a short time. You know, if our rules and laws were enough to control all aspects of our population, then civil wars would not occur. During such times, those laws are being violated in such mass that no judicial solution could realistically be effective. There are other things on the minds of men than trivial matters, especially when lives are at stake. Civil rights are one of those "trivial matters" that are extremely important during peace time, but find a back seat to your livelihood in a pinch.
During a *real* war, not this Afghanistani conflict, civil rights might be suspended legitimately to some extent, and I wouldn't see that as an unlivable affront to the country. During wartime, all energy needs to be focused on protecting our men and women abroad, not on peacekeeping on our own soil. It's much more effective to round up people who are being disobedient and might disrupt the military machine where it hurts most--right here at home--than to be vigilant in two places at once.
I'm not projecting my approval onto such practices, just my understanding of the causes.
One of my office mates was an interesting fellow. He had a real problem making eye contact with people, loud noises, or physical contact. I wouldn't call him a guru, exactly, but competent I suppose. It's hard to call someone a guru when they largely remind you of a squirrel. For kicks, a coworker would sneak up behind him and scream AHHHH!! just to watch him go white and literally run out of the room.
Another guy was a neat freak. He knew exactly the precise angle of every object on his desk. A coworker would screw with him by rotating his stapler 180 degrees. Every morning the ritual was to watch him rearrange everything into precise order. He couldn't work unless everything was perfect.
And then there's the really freaky people that you only hear about in whispers... like the guy who would walk around in socks mumbling calculus to himself, drinking beer and eating reeses pieces at noon, and while drunk, getting naked in front of the security guard because he forgot his identification in his office and she wouldn't let him in... best that we don't think about that too much!
The maintenance factor is a problem as well, since most solar power systems require batteries for storage.
This is a little off the beaten path, but I was told by a friend who worked in Dallas of a company who was trying to reduce their energy costs. That company installed a very large tank of water on the top of their building, several stories high from the description, and used energy off the grid at night (non-primetime energy costs per KWH) to heat the water, then would reclaim it during the day back into electricity.
I don't know how efficient their reclamation scheme was, but I'm sure it didn't hurt to have the sun out 300 days a year to warm the tank while extracting energy from it. Seems that solar might benefit from a similar approach, using a natural battery of sorts. Obviously, this is only reasonable for large installations, but terrestrial solar doesn't seem to be feasible on an individual basis anyway.
Joel, an ex-Microsoft engineer, wrote something in an article last year that gives me hope on occasions such as this. To glibly paraphrase, programmers write bugs into their code. Just imagine how much less time it would take if they didn't put them in there, only to have to take them out again.
MS should be flogging their inept staff for putting so many critical ones in; then flog their QA for not finding the serious ones. Yes, they have some very complicated products, but there's a such thing as unit testing, and dammit, they haven't done any (or enough).
In other news, Microsoft has purchased a secret weapon of vast destruction, code named Blamethrower. It strikes out at random targets, displacing reality at near the speed of light.
After you dealt with the blatant security holes, your best and only weapons is obfuscated code.
Sorry, but as a game programmer who has worked with client/server code for several years, I can honestly tell you this is quite wrong. Obfuscation plays no part in it. In fact, for all you care, you could give out the server protocol and client source code, and let people write better clients. It doesn't matter a bit, if the server is written correctly. The best they can do is improve their aim a bit, perhaps visualize a little more map or character positions by making walls transparent or somesuch, but that's about the limit.
A proper server sends only enough information to render on the client's end for the next few frames, and decides exactly what does and does not happen per client. A server may think a client is full of shit and ignore anything it claims to have done.
A proper client does whatever the hell it feels like with that data... if it renders in text mode, fine. If it presents a Zork interface, fine. If it's holographic in real 3d, fine. None of those should have any real advantage over another, if the server is written right.
Doing anything authoritative on a client is beyond stupid, and no quality games do it anymore. We've learned that lesson well.
Peer to peer has some slight advantages that might look appealing, until you start actually writing the code and realize that resolution functions are required at every step to decide which machine is authoritative in each instance, because networking throws off all your calculations by delta-latency. All you can do to make it correct is to either 1) assume each client has correct data about the world and other players and delay world model updates by delta-latency, or 2) let a single authoritative server set arbitrate. In the former case, you have the frame period of the slowest ping between any two players. Think about it.
The only reason p2p is slightly interesting is the concept of roaming server code which locates the fastest connection among the players and stays there. But any given player may run a hacked server in that case. But, at least everyone gets the same symmetrically hacked experience, rather than an asymmetric peer to peer hack.
Uhm.. Right. Why don't you take your AC mask off and pretend to be constructive yourself? You don't need to make up excuses for Mandrake or the Linux community--just examine the software for yourself and form your own opinion.
I have a cluster of 7 workstations in a rack, thankyouverymuch, and run several different distributions of Linux on them, and have a Win2k (temporarily) machine as the gateway/bridge between two separate networks. What do you run?
I'm not clueless about networking, just relaying my experience with a broken UI and what should have been a very simple install process. Other than that, I've been pretty happy with Mandrake 8.1.
Should, yes, that's why it's broken. I set it for DHCP and it never connected. After setting those figures manually, then setting DHCP again, it worked fine. While the UI is friendly, it's still not entirely functional. But I'm sticking with it for now.
I looked up my representative, Lamar Smith, and sent him an email that contained my views, and urged him to reconsider. Being the chairman of some Crime subcommittee that introduced legislation restricting our rights to help track terrorists, I thought perhaps he would be more responsive than just Joe Representative, because he was involved directly in authoring the bill.
I got the form letter back in the mail, hand stamped by a staff member in congressional ink, woohoo! The letter described how aggressively he's fighting terrorism in the only way he can, and how my vote matters. Blahblahblah. They didn't even read my email, and if they did, they certainly didn't think to send me the consolation letter rather than the patriotic/unthinkingly aggressive letter.
I'll be sending my correspondence by handwritten mail from now on.
Maybe compared to the text install of Debian that I tried first, okay, I can accept that. I've been trying to jump the Windows bandwagon for a few weeks now on some test machines, and haven't been terribly lucky with everything going smoothly, not even with Mandrake 8.1.
For instance, if you try to set up an ethernet card using the Control Panel (or whatever it's called), you cannot set up a NIC correctly without using BOTH normal AND expert mode. Reason being, in expert mode, there's no way to set the Gateway and DNS (I think?) servers... you have to go to normal mode to do that, but only if you set up a static IP. If you set up bootp or dhcp, it won't show up those boxes. So once I set those correctly, I went through the expert install and finished off the process. This took some serious tinkering to figure out their severely broken UI, and several hours to sort out because they don't even show you what the settings are unless you get to those screens by pure luck.
If I were the typical clueless Windows user trying Linux for the first time, I'd probably have given up and installed Windows by now.
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Question: Is there any reason you need to actually open up the monitor for these modifications? From the description, it sounds like you could simply hack together an MGA connector which takes in (see what pinouts your monitor requires here) and you're done. Solder a couple of pots at the V and H lines on the connector and put a project box around it and you've got a portable visualizer. Yes?
I'm sure someone has pitched this before, but how would you feel about someone doing a 3rd person action game based on Army of Darkness, with your likeness and voice talent as the main character?
NOAA has an interesting page on the ozone hole, animated by days in 2001. Very cool to see the levels change and drop.
Jane, you ignorant slut.
From what I've read, it's had very very little to do with any chemicals we were using, but the unusual amount of volcanic eruptions in the 70's and 80's, contributed almost entirely to the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere and causing the hole.
It's quite likely this hole phenomenon has happened countless times in the past, and there just weren't any reactionary humans around to make a big fuss over it.
The only two cool things about the PCI card in the article is host-IP connectivity (which essentially is a dual ethernet card then, perfect for firewalls and such), and 10W power draw straight from the host's power supply.
However, Powerleap, ubiquitous for upgrades and socket adapters, also has a card which touts some similar attributes called the Renaissance/370S based on a Socket 370 or FC-PGA chip. It cranks with Celeron, Celeron II, and P3 chips. Quite rockin'.
The main cool thing about this device is it does NOT use the motherboard slot it sits in. It just uses it as a place to mount. That's right, you can put one in an ISA slot and still run the motherboard it sits in and they won't know a thing about each other, because no pins are connected between them. The price is also a lot better (~$250 for a low end model), you can swap out the CPU and it has two DIMM slots, with a max ram per slot of 512mb (1GB combined). The specs are much better and the price is much lower. It's just marketed as an upgrade option rather than a performance enhancement to an existing machine.
I've been looking into this as a solution for my cluster, but haven't gotten up the nerve to buy them yet. From what I can find on the web, they're the best cluster card option, especially if you are handy with soldering. To really maximize the power per box, I'd probably buy a dead 486 motherboard (ISA slots all the way across the board, which this card requires), slam four Renaissance cards in it, link two power supplies in parallel, rig extra power and reset switches for each card separate from the power supply, and there's your mini-cluster. Probably 4 machines per 4U case, which notably isn't a huge space savings over 4 1U pizza boxes, but it costs less than a single 1U server would.
So their options are either (a) work 20 hour shifts, or (b) die. I'm glad to hear they have a choice in the matter.
The alternative is the corporation leaves the area, and they have their original choice back: die. That's not very realistic. There are ways to survive in locations before the sweatshops came to town; they just have a better chance to survive, better, even if the working conditions are hazardous. If the risk vs. reward were not worth taking, people wouldn't.
Tell me how France and Sweden and the USA have exploited Afghanistan and become rich because of it. If anything, some 3rd world nations have become rich beyond their means by providing various corporations with labor. Now they are educated enough and skilled enough to start their own companies and compete globally. See Taiwan.
Dunderheads like you want to equate poor, wretched masses in other countries with exploited globalist nation states. You're welcome to do so, but it doesn't mean you're anywhere near reality. See sig.
And many political scientists equate Afghanistan's poverty, political extremism and instability to the fact that globalization hasn't yet reached the country.
I don't understand is why people think that government doing a mediocre job at current scope will perform equally or better at a worldwide scope. There are places in the Appalachian mountains where running water is uncommon. Why should Afghanistan or any other region be given special treatment? Capitalist, Christian, Islamic, etc ideologies all teach that you reap what you sow. They've sown war from their country's birth, and have nothing to show for it. America and Europe have a great deal because we've all worked for it. Globalism and socialism and communism are nothing more than mechanisms to redistribute wealth from people who have built it to people who do not deserve it.
I'm sorry if you don't agree, but fuck everyone who thinks that's a good idea. I'm keeping my car and my house and my computer.
I haven't figured out this fascination with expensive, lower power, quieter components.
I've got a server cabinet that's got six machines in it. Talk about noise. I'm going to buy a box of acoustic foam and mount it on the doors and sides, then on the walls of the room with whatever is left. For a box or two of foam, I can put any old hardware in the enclosure and ignore its noisy fans.
A suggestion: build an inexpensive box and line it with foam, cut out a circle or two on the lid and put some server extraction fans (114 CFM, 110v AC plug). Put a hinge on the front for cd and floppy access when necessary, bore a few holes in back for cables. You're there in under $150, and you get to use the same box for any upgraded computers you may buy in the future as well.
This is called IFF format. It was invented by Electronic Arts in 1985 and used by Amiga OS for audio files (AIFF). It was the first portable interchange format, predating XML by over a decade.
I've personally used IFF in years past to great advantage where XML was bulky or wasteful or didn't exist yet. That's one of the reasons I haven't gotten a stiffy over XML, because the problem was largely addressed prior, only it was missing standardized attributes retrieval and arbitrary length tag names. As a format for speedy reading, it's almost unbeatable (with a couple of logical conventions for data formats).
Programs are essentially mathematical descriptions of data manipulations. People make mathematical errors all the time, so it's not surprising that programs, given their size and complexity, have problems being correct at every stage. The issue is not so much that they do have problems, but how quickly they are fixed and put into a usable state.
The crux is OSS and commercial software differ in what 'usable' means. In OSS, a program can be dysfunctional on many levels and be considered usable. Because it's FREE. Once you start paying for it, the expectations must go up, because you've traded your money for assurances that the product works as advertised, every time. Of course, we know that this is wishful thinking, but the motivation is definitely more compelling when, as a software developer for a corporation, your paycheck depends on it.
Have to agree that seasoned engineers who understand exception handling begin with error recovery and reporting, then build apps on top of that foundation. I haven't seen a lot of good error handling code that could be improved upon by greater experience in engineering. The approaches are fundamentally different, where simple error handling requires diligence and exception handling requires only forethought.
/dev/rand to its command line and it will happily do whatever it feels like and you'd never know. That's poor programming, not just error recovery. But that's the only serious OSS example I can name.
I ran into a serious problem with ghostscript a while back where we couldn't determine if it was correctly interpreting the command line and job options we were sending it. The way they wrote it, it turns out you can pipe
As a 'professional', my bent is to make my program so damn picky that any wrong parameter or character that is out of place will cause the utility to bomb and tell you why. Garbage In/Garbage Out. If you feel crap into a system, it's better that you don't get crap back out, but rather get nothing until you fix your data. Not too many people believe in that so strongly, so you have a lot of utilities where you don't know what it'll do when the data is bad.
I'm sure people out there need text to speech technology. I'm sure that VXML would be used by some niche that desperately needs it.
I'm also sure that it'll never take over the internet, because it's a different medium, and has the same drawbacks as other spoken media, both citizen band and broadcast. Audio is linear, the web is random access. If you are interested in a portion of a web page, you will skip to that portion immediately, am I right? Besides, audio is almost as intrusive as Flash and Shockwave, only with VXML, it'll be a patented standard. The last thing I like is web sites with noise on them. If I wanted a multimedia experience, I'd play a good game, not Joe Generic's lame attempt at an interactive web page. I surf for information, not for a memorable experience.
Hmmph. Seems to me W3C should be documenting emerging standards, not creating them.
When a measure meant to protect inventors becomes a way for two companies to hold silly legal dicksize contests, it's a sign the system is broken and needs fixing, or scrapping, or something.
Agreed. IANAPL (Patent Lawyer), but it seems to me that companies should not own patents. In the eyes of the law, a corporation is a person, but I think that's misleading. It never has to die, it never has to stop suing people because it runs out of money like an individual would, and so on and so forth.
I think only people should own patents, jointly or otherwise. I'd like to see those who produce gain ownership of the fruits of their labor; they may get paid by a company to do some work, but something so novel to be patented should be owned by those in development.
That alone would make companies considerably more indifferent to patenting. Focusing on putting out better products, cheaper, and faster, and competing directly with other companies should be their goal, not using anti-competitive practices like patents to gain market share with inferior products.
An interesting side effect of such an arrangement is that companies would then learn to take care of their scientists. Not only that, but a scientist would then have a value portfolio of patents that codifies their experience when job shopping.
Lincoln's justification of his abrogation of rights during the civil war is just another manifestation of the tired ends-justify-the-means-argument. [...] In breaking law to save the union, he ultimately set precedent to fundamentally change that which he sought to save.
While I can't disagree that the union was forever changed by the civil war, I don't specifically agree that your statement follows conclusively from his suspension of certain laws. IANALH (Legal Historian) at any rate, but it seems to me that it's been only in the past 30 years that people are unwilling or unable to think outside the box for even a short time. You know, if our rules and laws were enough to control all aspects of our population, then civil wars would not occur. During such times, those laws are being violated in such mass that no judicial solution could realistically be effective. There are other things on the minds of men than trivial matters, especially when lives are at stake. Civil rights are one of those "trivial matters" that are extremely important during peace time, but find a back seat to your livelihood in a pinch.
During a *real* war, not this Afghanistani conflict, civil rights might be suspended legitimately to some extent, and I wouldn't see that as an unlivable affront to the country. During wartime, all energy needs to be focused on protecting our men and women abroad, not on peacekeeping on our own soil. It's much more effective to round up people who are being disobedient and might disrupt the military machine where it hurts most--right here at home--than to be vigilant in two places at once.
I'm not projecting my approval onto such practices, just my understanding of the causes.
One of my office mates was an interesting fellow. He had a real problem making eye contact with people, loud noises, or physical contact. I wouldn't call him a guru, exactly, but competent I suppose. It's hard to call someone a guru when they largely remind you of a squirrel. For kicks, a coworker would sneak up behind him and scream AHHHH!! just to watch him go white and literally run out of the room.
Another guy was a neat freak. He knew exactly the precise angle of every object on his desk. A coworker would screw with him by rotating his stapler 180 degrees. Every morning the ritual was to watch him rearrange everything into precise order. He couldn't work unless everything was perfect.
And then there's the really freaky people that you only hear about in whispers... like the guy who would walk around in socks mumbling calculus to himself, drinking beer and eating reeses pieces at noon, and while drunk, getting naked in front of the security guard because he forgot his identification in his office and she wouldn't let him in... best that we don't think about that too much!
They have probably never seen Highlander 2. Not that many people have.
I have, and I'm still in therapy.
The maintenance factor is a problem as well, since most solar power systems require batteries for storage.
This is a little off the beaten path, but I was told by a friend who worked in Dallas of a company who was trying to reduce their energy costs. That company installed a very large tank of water on the top of their building, several stories high from the description, and used energy off the grid at night (non-primetime energy costs per KWH) to heat the water, then would reclaim it during the day back into electricity.
I don't know how efficient their reclamation scheme was, but I'm sure it didn't hurt to have the sun out 300 days a year to warm the tank while extracting energy from it. Seems that solar might benefit from a similar approach, using a natural battery of sorts. Obviously, this is only reasonable for large installations, but terrestrial solar doesn't seem to be feasible on an individual basis anyway.
Joel, an ex-Microsoft engineer, wrote something in an article last year that gives me hope on occasions such as this. To glibly paraphrase, programmers write bugs into their code. Just imagine how much less time it would take if they didn't put them in there, only to have to take them out again.
MS should be flogging their inept staff for putting so many critical ones in; then flog their QA for not finding the serious ones. Yes, they have some very complicated products, but there's a such thing as unit testing, and dammit, they haven't done any (or enough).
In other news, Microsoft has purchased a secret weapon of vast destruction, code named Blamethrower. It strikes out at random targets, displacing reality at near the speed of light.
Zot!
After you dealt with the blatant security holes, your best and only weapons is obfuscated code.
Sorry, but as a game programmer who has worked with client/server code for several years, I can honestly tell you this is quite wrong. Obfuscation plays no part in it. In fact, for all you care, you could give out the server protocol and client source code, and let people write better clients. It doesn't matter a bit, if the server is written correctly. The best they can do is improve their aim a bit, perhaps visualize a little more map or character positions by making walls transparent or somesuch, but that's about the limit.
A proper server sends only enough information to render on the client's end for the next few frames, and decides exactly what does and does not happen per client. A server may think a client is full of shit and ignore anything it claims to have done.
A proper client does whatever the hell it feels like with that data... if it renders in text mode, fine. If it presents a Zork interface, fine. If it's holographic in real 3d, fine. None of those should have any real advantage over another, if the server is written right.
Doing anything authoritative on a client is beyond stupid, and no quality games do it anymore. We've learned that lesson well.
Peer to peer has some slight advantages that might look appealing, until you start actually writing the code and realize that resolution functions are required at every step to decide which machine is authoritative in each instance, because networking throws off all your calculations by delta-latency. All you can do to make it correct is to either 1) assume each client has correct data about the world and other players and delay world model updates by delta-latency, or 2) let a single authoritative server set arbitrate. In the former case, you have the frame period of the slowest ping between any two players. Think about it.
The only reason p2p is slightly interesting is the concept of roaming server code which locates the fastest connection among the players and stays there. But any given player may run a hacked server in that case. But, at least everyone gets the same symmetrically hacked experience, rather than an asymmetric peer to peer hack.
Uhm.. Right. Why don't you take your AC mask off and pretend to be constructive yourself? You don't need to make up excuses for Mandrake or the Linux community--just examine the software for yourself and form your own opinion.
I have a cluster of 7 workstations in a rack, thankyouverymuch, and run several different distributions of Linux on them, and have a Win2k (temporarily) machine as the gateway/bridge between two separate networks. What do you run?
I'm not clueless about networking, just relaying my experience with a broken UI and what should have been a very simple install process. Other than that, I've been pretty happy with Mandrake 8.1.
Should, yes, that's why it's broken. I set it for DHCP and it never connected. After setting those figures manually, then setting DHCP again, it worked fine. While the UI is friendly, it's still not entirely functional. But I'm sticking with it for now.
I looked up my representative, Lamar Smith, and sent him an email that contained my views, and urged him to reconsider. Being the chairman of some Crime subcommittee that introduced legislation restricting our rights to help track terrorists, I thought perhaps he would be more responsive than just Joe Representative, because he was involved directly in authoring the bill.
I got the form letter back in the mail, hand stamped by a staff member in congressional ink, woohoo! The letter described how aggressively he's fighting terrorism in the only way he can, and how my vote matters. Blahblahblah. They didn't even read my email, and if they did, they certainly didn't think to send me the consolation letter rather than the patriotic/unthinkingly aggressive letter.
I'll be sending my correspondence by handwritten mail from now on.
My ass.
Maybe compared to the text install of Debian that I tried first, okay, I can accept that. I've been trying to jump the Windows bandwagon for a few weeks now on some test machines, and haven't been terribly lucky with everything going smoothly, not even with Mandrake 8.1.
For instance, if you try to set up an ethernet card using the Control Panel (or whatever it's called), you cannot set up a NIC correctly without using BOTH normal AND expert mode. Reason being, in expert mode, there's no way to set the Gateway and DNS (I think?) servers... you have to go to normal mode to do that, but only if you set up a static IP. If you set up bootp or dhcp, it won't show up those boxes. So once I set those correctly, I went through the expert install and finished off the process. This took some serious tinkering to figure out their severely broken UI, and several hours to sort out because they don't even show you what the settings are unless you get to those screens by pure luck.
If I were the typical clueless Windows user trying Linux for the first time, I'd probably have given up and installed Windows by now.