60 degrees Fahrenheit? That's below room temperature, which seems a little excessive for a PC. 60 degrees Celsius would make sense however. My Mobo will automatically shut itself off if the temperature exceeds a certain threshold (I use 40 degrees C) to avoid damaging the components, but I'm pretty sure the Bios is just polling every few seconds or so for that data, in the example in the article it wouldn't be fast enough.
I remember those kits. Especially the one that came with wordstar built in that was set up like Turbo-C. They were pretty shoddy IIRC, it was the quickest way to write a virus that all antivirus packages would immediatly detect (because the kits themselves tended to leave their signature on the virus). I do remember some of the more sophisticated kits claiming to make your virus automatically polymorphic, but I don't know if they actually worked. Most of those kits were riddled with bugs to boot (heck, most _viruses_ have bugs in them, have you ever read through those virus bestiaries?).
Besides, I never heard of any kits that helped you to write boot sector viruses, which were the only ones that ever seemed to spread anywhere, at least before Word Macro viruses and Outlook worms came along.
It's the old Chicken-and-Egg problem. Nobody feels particularly inclined to get their Bluetooth technology to market because there are no other devices to talk to.
I expect Bluetooth to be like USB. Pretty much useless for a couple of years except for the bleeding edge folks who don't mind buying technology before it's really ready. Have you seen the current bluetooth PCMCIA cards and their related software? Talk about a work in progress! I have one piece of software which will remain nameless where the Outlook like gui has widgets for all sorts of useful applications (LAN and Dial up access for instance) that don't actually work. If you dig aroudn on their site for awhile you discover that they don't work because they are implemented yet, the rest of the software crashes frequency and busywaits (I just love watching my OGR rate drop to 0 when the stupid BTEvents daemon starts up).
Still, until companies start biting the bullet and releasing these devices you won't reach critical mass and they will never come down in price. Fortunatly companies aren't doing this, they're going ahead and realeasing their devices now even if they are uselese so that in a couple of years you will be able to use your cell phone to sync your PDA and print out slides for a meeting. Just remember the old jokes about how USB used to be "Useless Serial Bus", and now people are looking at getting rid of PS/2.
Although I had never met the boy, I went to the memorial service to support my friend. It was a very informal event. His family, friends, teachers and therapists were all present. One by one they took the podium to say a few words about how Michael had enriched their lives with his joy, enthusiasm, and love. Not a single person in the room -- and certainly not his parents -- regretted having known him, or begrudged him their efforts on his behalf.
Yes, because you always badmouth the dead on their funeral day...
Honestly I think it's cruel to bring a child to the work with a debilitating dieseas that will kill him (if from the complications if nothing else) before his 20th birthday, especially if he will spend most of his youth half dead and in pain.
Somehow to me it seems less cruel to give your child a fighting chance at leading a full and happy life. To be able to play with the neighborhood kids in the backyard and to go to the regular school instead of the "special" school where half of the kids are truely retarded.
This also applies to crack babies of poor single urban drug addicted mothers, but in all cases I think it's the mother's decision and not mine.
But that's just my opinion, and I'm donning my asbestos underwear before hitting the submit button.
In other matters, I suspect the reliance on a computer program to diagnose risk factors is a consequence of the UK's wonderful national heath system. Yes, a living, breathing OB/GYN certainly would have known the risk factors for Down Syndrome and other diseases without the aid of a computer.
That's a huge assumption there. Human doctors are certainly not infallable, in fact I'd like to see the statistics on the number of misdiagnosed cases with a human OBGYN vs a Computer program. What's more, a computer program is more likely to notice very obscure diesease risk factors for dieseases that the human doctor hasn't seen since his medical school days. Personally I'd like to see a combination where a doctor checks what the program thinks, then gives his patient a once over to be sure it's sane before handing them the diagnosis.
Have you ever had a real dog (or cat?) They certainly aren't "operational" all day long unless the Aibo has a "sleep and ignore my master" mode.:)
This is doubly true for cats. In fact the AI for a robotic cat should be pretty easy to write:
while true
do
sleep
sleep
sleep
eat
sleep
sleep
sleep
random
done
That was the thinking during Vietnam time, unfortunatly it backfires when the enemy is very determined because if you only wound them they will keep on fighting anyway (most Americans stop to tread the wounded), even to the death. This can be nightmarish if you keep shooting someone with your "wounding" rifle and they keep coming at you with their "killing" rifle (like an AK-47).
The wounding weapons only make sense in "civilized" warfare, which many countries don't practice.
Since the US hasn't used leaded gasoline (petrol) for almost a decade now, I doubt we use in FAE weapons. Besides, lead increases the octane of gasoline, which is exactly what you don't want in a FAE type application (where you want as much of it to explode at the same time as possible).
What the heck are police doing with FAE bombs anyway?
Unless you're referring to Molotov Cocktails, but aren't those usually filled with Kerosene (because you want it to burn longer, not flash like gasoline)?
I think ICQ UINs work because for the most part we don't care about them. You only need a UIN when you're setting up a new ICQ instance on a computer somewhere, and you only have to remember your own. The rest can be found using the search features of ICQ fairly easily (assuming your friends don't change their information constantly). It's not like you say "Hmm, I want to contact person X, what was his 12 digit number again?"
There is something about an immortal race of beings that get converted to artefacts (amulets actually) when they die.
My impression is that the amulets are artifacts created to trap the immortals rather than an aspect of them dying.
That comment came from the fact that whenever one of your Kohan heros kicks the bucket on the field, you get his "amulet" back, and you have to pay to convert the amulet back into a usable hero.
It will be cool if you don't have to babysit special units like you do in other RTSes (usually the mission statement is something like: Do so and so, XXX must survive).
I got an email the night of the 27th saying the game shipped, so I'm expecting it to show up today or tomorrow.
I respectfully disagree with your accessment of Kohan.
Caveat: I've only played the demo.
Graphics: The graphics are beautifly drawn 2D sprites that move quite fluidly. The Backgrounds are quite varied although they game draws them a little weird (when you walk next to a large mountain the entire mountain draws, even the stuff that's well outside of your LOS). Personally I think pure 3D is a bad idea when you have lots of units on the field (it's hard to make out the differences between polygons when each unit is only half an inch tall) so I commend Kohan on it's choice here.
Friendly unit AI: The pathing in this game is acceptable, but not phonominal. The stuipid units (zombies for instance) seem to get stuck more often than the smart ones for some reason. Also, if a unit gets too far seperated from it's company it will be "lost in the wilderness" and you will have to wait in your supply zone to regnerate it. The battle AI is ok, but basically it just runs each company into each other and see who's left standing. The Morale bar is a very nice touch though. It is rather frustrating at times to see some stuipid unit just walk around your back lines instead of walking _around_ some obsticle to engage the enemy. This is very noticable in the only multiplayer map in the game, on the left side there is a town on the top of the map. At the beginning of the game when you attack the town all of it's milita will appear in the crevace behind the town and attack your only your front unit. The rest of your units will just sort of mill around and wait for the guy in front of them to be killed.
Enemy AI: Pathing and attacking are the same as friendly AI. The computer's strategy is generally to build up one or two companies and attack (at least in the demo). The computer is also very expansionist, building towns everywhere it can (which is very important to your economy). The computer will launch surprise attacks and will send companys down to attack some poorly defended towns you might have. Unfortunatly the demo AI doesn't have enough smarts to build armies big enough to combat a 3 or 4 army strong force for long. Once you get 6 armies (especially if you use beastmen/Grenadiers/Skeletons/Bone Reavers) all together you can pretty much just run over the rest of the computer's defenses. Fortunatly Kohan supports (at least in the Windows version) pluggable AIs, which promise to keep the game interesting. There's also multiplayer, but I havn't seen many people on the demo multiplayer servers yet.
Interface: The games interface does like to throw up lots of windows everywhere, but once you get the hang of the interface it's pretty fast. My only beef with the inteface is that it is fairly hard to manage a large number of towns (although there is a mechanism to make it easier--a town list---I havn't gotten the hang of using it yet).
Fun factor: Honestly I consider this the best RTS since StarCraft. It's one of the first ones in a long time to offer something different in terms of gameplay, and I rather like how you don't have to micromanage everything in the game, and in fact you CAN'T micromanage the battles (which means higher level players will be the ones with superior strategies instead of the fastest clickers).
Story: There is something about an immortal race of beings that get converted to artefacts (amulets actually) when they die. You are one of those beings and are trying to piece together your lost history (apparently sleeping for 100s of years makes you forget). Most RTS games aren't heavy on the story (although StarCraft did a pretty decent job here, I was ready to kill that bastard Arcturus when he let Kerrigan die), and the demo doesn't give a lot of indication one way or the other to how much the story means to the game.
Misc: I really liked the ability to change your units defensive stance in order to increase it's movement rate. You can even go on "forced marches" when you need your units to be somewhere quick, but don't expect them to fight since they'll be too fatigued to move after running half way across the continent.
My verdict: 4.5 out of 5. If you like RTS games, but are tired of "he who clicks fastest wins" this is definatly the game for you. Strategy (but not RTS) fans will also want to try the demo, you might like it. FPS only players and "twitch gamers" should probably look elsewhere as well, unless you're ready to give up the speed drip. Benchmarking sites are going to ignore this game because it doesn't even come close to pushing the limits of my computer, but it should run on most any reasonably modern (
Personaly I hope this takes off. I'd like to see more people online to play against, and I do believe that it is an excellent game, and Loki did an excellent port.
Re:Lego has in fact abandoned what made it great
on
Why Can't LEGO Click?
·
· Score: 2
You know what though? You don't have to follow the directions if you don't want to. We used to get those Technic kits as well when I was a child, and it was always the same thing. First I build the kit according to the instructions, play with it for awhile, then get bored and build something else completely different out of it. I especially remember the pnumatic kits, even though they didn't work all that hot, they were unbelievably cool to me. I remember trying to make a walking biped with that once, but then I discovered that the lego motor wasn't powerful enough to pump the pnumatic system (the main piston had a big spring on it)
The problem with support on laptops in Solaris isn't the processor, it's all of the accessories. I tried to install Solaris x86 (we have a piece of software written for Solaris x86 exclusivly that we wanted in a mobile package). I tried no fewer than 6 different kinds of laptops (although 5 of those were just different kinds of Dell laptops--it's what we have aroudn the lab). Number of workable Solaris installs: 0.
On newer laptops Solaris doesn't initalize the keyboard properly, and the first time you have to enter a keystroke it pretty much b0rks the machine up. Not to mention that the video card was completely unsupported by Solaris's X (if you use a USB keyboard the laptop will run, but it's not exactly useful for a moble machine). We had two machines in that category.
In the older Dells the PCMCIA controller was completely unrecognised, and Solaris seems to think that every piece of hardware in the system conflicts with something (Duh! It's a laptop, laptops are always lacking for interrupts).
Finally, with the HP laptop (unsupported video again), we could at least try to fix some of the problems. One big stumbling block though was that none of our (dozen or so) PCMCIA ethernet cards worked at all. Even common ones like the 3Com 3C509 and the Netgear FA410s were unrecognised. Eventually we had to use parallel port ethernet to get the system semi-functional.
At least it isn't so bad on the desktop machines. I just wish the/boot dirctory would stop emptying itself out occasionally, and the demon processes would stop spin-locking, and that it wouldn't take 128MB of RAM for the OS alone (not to mention all of the Java based tools that come with it).
Oh, and the PPP daemon (aspppd) that comes with Solaris sucks, but not as much as the old daemon.
Not to mention all of the braindamage in the base system that forces you to tinker with just about every app you download to get it to compile. If it wasn't explicity ported to Solaris your chances of having it compile out of the box aren't very good, even with gcc.
Finally, I think I should add that Solaris x86 runs really slow on our (admittedly meager PII-300s) machines, but that's partially the result of massive amount of memory these things want that we don't have.
If noone can prove that it's unsafe to fly, we fly - - Pre-Challenger NASA mindset.
Doesn't seem to strange when you consider how unbelievably complicated and dangerous something like going into space is. If somone has proof (and a fix) to some deadly problem I can see them stopping, otherwise it's all just theoretical mumbo jumbo and we'd still debating launching our first rocket. Even now space shuttle launches are risky, it's only a matter of time before someone else dies in them.
Jet fighters won't help us win the war, let's move those R&D funds elsewhere - Adolf Hitler, 1942
Almost certainly true. One of Hitler's problems was his belief in superweapons. Germany spent countless R&D dollars on wasted projects during the war that would have (in the end) been better spent on making Panthers more reliable and simply producing more of them. Jet fighters wouldn't be viable for several years after 1942, even if Hitler decided to spend massive R&D dollars on them. By the way, Germany DID build jet powered planes near the end of the war, but their affect was minimal (the war was already pretty much lost by that point).
Mp3? What's that? - RIAA, 1996
Shouldn't that be: MP3? Our existing copyright laws should cover that nicely, but just to be sure, let's go and buy some Congressmen.
Actually the small footprint of IE is a lie. IE is actually fairly large but a lot of it's code is integrated into the OS (ever wonder why Explorer takes soo long to start up?). As far a rendering speed is concerned, current Mozillas and IE seem to be neck and neck in my experiance, although my machine is fast enough that the big bottleneck is my slow connection to the internet.
The last half of your post is just pure troll and I'm not going to bother responding to it past this point.
Basically that's an email virus...in the days before outlook. The person has to not only okay the download, but then run the application (and many people don't ever run anything other than the datebook, address book, memo pad, and maybe the calculator. Even non-savvy users have to work to start the spread of this little beauty. Worse, you have to walk right up to someone to spread it, so you can't get Melissa like rates of infection.
A time delay trojan is something else entirely. It's just a net virus that affects the palm. You still have the above mentioned problems if the virus tries to propagate through the IR port.
One final note: the IR port is slow if your virus is bigger than a few k, the people are going to think something's wrong and pull their Palm's back to investigate (IE if that busniess card that takes half a second to transfer normally is taking 30 seconds, then they might think something is broken and trade traditional business cards.
All this strikes me as theoretically possible but somewhat infeasable in practice.
The problem is spreading the Viruses. Once you get something executing on a Palm platform it can really take over, but it's fairly hard to spread malicous code around on the palm. Most people only beam business cards, not executable applications. The best bet seems to be to trojan the hotsync app, but even that is just a computer virus that happens to do something to the Palm, it's not like people share lots of cradles since every palm comes with one and it's not particularly easy for non-technical people to use the built in facilties for remote syncing.
Not if you don't have the source. It's not like MS is going to offer up any sort of utility that uninstalls Word. Some wiseass at a university might find a way to do so, but it will no doubt leave lots of little bits of the OS broken, just like IE.
Personally, I think Microsoft should try this strategy against Linux and integrate a real OS into Windows.
That's not true anymore, at least not in the US. In the US it is illegal to listen in on cell phone frequencies for instance.
Of course it's technicly feasable for anybody to do so, but it's not legal unless you are the FBI (or other law enforcement and you have the proper paperwork).
Er, I think there's more "solar power" available in the desert where you don't have trees, buildings, or _clouds_ blocking the sun. Also, many of these deserts are closer to the equator and tend to get a bit more direct sunlight than most of the US or Europe for example.
Also, Iridium phones do drain more power than your average cell phone, but it's not enough to be unmanageable with a small solar cell out in the desert.
If phys ed is going to be taught, it should be more "learning to to take care of yourself" and less "pointless running around". Also, I learned more about teamwork working in pairs in science class then I ever did playing softball, football, etc.
Amen to that. I remember my high school phys ed classes. Change close, stand in line for 5 minutes while the instructer verified that you indeed did change clothes and that they have been washed in the past week. Then it was 45 minutes of running around the lines painted on the floor in the gym, then change and leave. It was easily the most boring class I've ever taken. Apparently alot of the equiptment had been stolen/vanalized over the summer, and the coaches weren't much on thinking up new ideas (and they were all huge track weenies), so every day it was just running.
Basically it has some builtin optimizations that try to make your code run as fast as possible on the P4. In fact to get decent performance on a P4 you pretty much HAVE to use a P4 optimized compiler, or assemble it yourself (assuming you know the ins and outs of the P4).
Intel probably has a document somewhere that will at least enumerate exactly how you should write your code for the P4 (at the machine level), the Intel compiler just follows that standard.
Isn't that kind of like saying your new car has better acceleration than a diesal Rabbit? NTSC doesn't have particularly good color fidelity last time I checked. Besides, I'd try to avoid associating color performance with NTSC[1] as much as possible from a pure stigma point of view.
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60 degrees Fahrenheit? That's below room temperature, which seems a little excessive for a PC. 60 degrees Celsius would make sense however. My Mobo will automatically shut itself off if the temperature exceeds a certain threshold (I use 40 degrees C) to avoid damaging the components, but I'm pretty sure the Bios is just polling every few seconds or so for that data, in the example in the article it wouldn't be fast enough.
Did you just hear a whooshing sound? That's the joke flying right over your head.
I remember those kits. Especially the one that came with wordstar built in that was set up like Turbo-C. They were pretty shoddy IIRC, it was the quickest way to write a virus that all antivirus packages would immediatly detect (because the kits themselves tended to leave their signature on the virus). I do remember some of the more sophisticated kits claiming to make your virus automatically polymorphic, but I don't know if they actually worked. Most of those kits were riddled with bugs to boot (heck, most _viruses_ have bugs in them, have you ever read through those virus bestiaries?).
Besides, I never heard of any kits that helped you to write boot sector viruses, which were the only ones that ever seemed to spread anywhere, at least before Word Macro viruses and Outlook worms came along.
It's the old Chicken-and-Egg problem. Nobody feels particularly inclined to get their Bluetooth technology to market because there are no other devices to talk to.
I expect Bluetooth to be like USB. Pretty much useless for a couple of years except for the bleeding edge folks who don't mind buying technology before it's really ready. Have you seen the current bluetooth PCMCIA cards and their related software? Talk about a work in progress! I have one piece of software which will remain nameless where the Outlook like gui has widgets for all sorts of useful applications (LAN and Dial up access for instance) that don't actually work. If you dig aroudn on their site for awhile you discover that they don't work because they are implemented yet, the rest of the software crashes frequency and busywaits (I just love watching my OGR rate drop to 0 when the stupid BTEvents daemon starts up).
Still, until companies start biting the bullet and releasing these devices you won't reach critical mass and they will never come down in price. Fortunatly companies aren't doing this, they're going ahead and realeasing their devices now even if they are uselese so that in a couple of years you will be able to use your cell phone to sync your PDA and print out slides for a meeting. Just remember the old jokes about how USB used to be "Useless Serial Bus", and now people are looking at getting rid of PS/2.
I can't imagine bash on a calculator.
But I got ZShell on my TI85.
Although I had never met the boy, I went to the memorial service to support my friend. It was a very informal event. His family, friends, teachers and therapists were all present. One by one they took the podium to say a few words about how Michael had enriched their lives with his joy, enthusiasm, and love. Not a single person in the room -- and certainly not his parents -- regretted having known him, or begrudged him their efforts on his behalf.
Yes, because you always badmouth the dead on their funeral day...
Honestly I think it's cruel to bring a child to the work with a debilitating dieseas that will kill him (if from the complications if nothing else) before his 20th birthday, especially if he will spend most of his youth half dead and in pain.
Somehow to me it seems less cruel to give your child a fighting chance at leading a full and happy life. To be able to play with the neighborhood kids in the backyard and to go to the regular school instead of the "special" school where half of the kids are truely retarded.
This also applies to crack babies of poor single urban drug addicted mothers, but in all cases I think it's the mother's decision and not mine.
But that's just my opinion, and I'm donning my asbestos underwear before hitting the submit button.
In other matters, I suspect the reliance on a computer program to diagnose risk factors is a consequence of the UK's wonderful national heath system. Yes, a living, breathing OB/GYN certainly would have known the risk factors for Down Syndrome and other diseases without the aid of a computer.
That's a huge assumption there. Human doctors are certainly not infallable, in fact I'd like to see the statistics on the number of misdiagnosed cases with a human OBGYN vs a Computer program. What's more, a computer program is more likely to notice very obscure diesease risk factors for dieseases that the human doctor hasn't seen since his medical school days. Personally I'd like to see a combination where a doctor checks what the program thinks, then gives his patient a once over to be sure it's sane before handing them the diagnosis.
Have you ever had a real dog (or cat?) They certainly aren't "operational" all day long unless the Aibo has a "sleep and ignore my master" mode. :)
This is doubly true for cats. In fact the AI for a robotic cat should be pretty easy to write:
while true
do
sleep
sleep
sleep
eat
sleep
sleep
sleep
random
done
That was the thinking during Vietnam time, unfortunatly it backfires when the enemy is very determined because if you only wound them they will keep on fighting anyway (most Americans stop to tread the wounded), even to the death. This can be nightmarish if you keep shooting someone with your "wounding" rifle and they keep coming at you with their "killing" rifle (like an AK-47).
The wounding weapons only make sense in "civilized" warfare, which many countries don't practice.
Do you have any sort of evidence on the cancer rates in Kosovo, or are you just making stuff up?
In contrast you may want to look at This site on the effects of DU in the Balkans.
Since the US hasn't used leaded gasoline (petrol) for almost a decade now, I doubt we use in FAE weapons. Besides, lead increases the octane of gasoline, which is exactly what you don't want in a FAE type application (where you want as much of it to explode at the same time as possible).
What the heck are police doing with FAE bombs anyway?
Unless you're referring to Molotov Cocktails, but aren't those usually filled with Kerosene (because you want it to burn longer, not flash like gasoline)?
I think ICQ UINs work because for the most part we don't care about them. You only need a UIN when you're setting up a new ICQ instance on a computer somewhere, and you only have to remember your own. The rest can be found using the search features of ICQ fairly easily (assuming your friends don't change their information constantly). It's not like you say "Hmm, I want to contact person X, what was his 12 digit number again?"
There is something about an immortal race of beings that get converted to artefacts (amulets actually) when they die.
My impression is that the amulets are artifacts created to trap the immortals rather than an aspect of them dying.
That comment came from the fact that whenever one of your Kohan heros kicks the bucket on the field, you get his "amulet" back, and you have to pay to convert the amulet back into a usable hero.
It will be cool if you don't have to babysit special units like you do in other RTSes (usually the mission statement is something like: Do so and so, XXX must survive).
I got an email the night of the 27th saying the game shipped, so I'm expecting it to show up today or tomorrow.
Caveat: I've only played the demo.
My verdict: 4.5 out of 5. If you like RTS games, but are tired of "he who clicks fastest wins" this is definatly the game for you. Strategy (but not RTS) fans will also want to try the demo, you might like it. FPS only players and "twitch gamers" should probably look elsewhere as well, unless you're ready to give up the speed drip. Benchmarking sites are going to ignore this game because it doesn't even come close to pushing the limits of my computer, but it should run on most any reasonably modern ( Personaly I hope this takes off. I'd like to see more people online to play against, and I do believe that it is an excellent game, and Loki did an excellent port.
You know what though? You don't have to follow the directions if you don't want to. We used to get those Technic kits as well when I was a child, and it was always the same thing. First I build the kit according to the instructions, play with it for awhile, then get bored and build something else completely different out of it. I especially remember the pnumatic kits, even though they didn't work all that hot, they were unbelievably cool to me. I remember trying to make a walking biped with that once, but then I discovered that the lego motor wasn't powerful enough to pump the pnumatic system (the main piston had a big spring on it)
The problem with support on laptops in Solaris isn't the processor, it's all of the accessories. I tried to install Solaris x86 (we have a piece of software written for Solaris x86 exclusivly that we wanted in a mobile package). I tried no fewer than 6 different kinds of laptops (although 5 of those were just different kinds of Dell laptops--it's what we have aroudn the lab). Number of workable Solaris installs: 0.
/boot dirctory would stop emptying itself out occasionally, and the demon processes would stop spin-locking, and that it wouldn't take 128MB of RAM for the OS alone (not to mention all of the Java based tools that come with it).
On newer laptops Solaris doesn't initalize the keyboard properly, and the first time you have to enter a keystroke it pretty much b0rks the machine up. Not to mention that the video card was completely unsupported by Solaris's X (if you use a USB keyboard the laptop will run, but it's not exactly useful for a moble machine). We had two machines in that category.
In the older Dells the PCMCIA controller was completely unrecognised, and Solaris seems to think that every piece of hardware in the system conflicts with something (Duh! It's a laptop, laptops are always lacking for interrupts).
Finally, with the HP laptop (unsupported video again), we could at least try to fix some of the problems. One big stumbling block though was that none of our (dozen or so) PCMCIA ethernet cards worked at all. Even common ones like the 3Com 3C509 and the Netgear FA410s were unrecognised. Eventually we had to use parallel port ethernet to get the system semi-functional.
At least it isn't so bad on the desktop machines. I just wish the
Oh, and the PPP daemon (aspppd) that comes with Solaris sucks, but not as much as the old daemon.
Not to mention all of the braindamage in the base system that forces you to tinker with just about every app you download to get it to compile. If it wasn't explicity ported to Solaris your chances of having it compile out of the box aren't very good, even with gcc.
Finally, I think I should add that Solaris x86 runs really slow on our (admittedly meager PII-300s) machines, but that's partially the result of massive amount of memory these things want that we don't have.
If noone can prove that it's unsafe to fly, we fly - - Pre-Challenger NASA mindset.
Doesn't seem to strange when you consider how unbelievably complicated and dangerous something like going into space is. If somone has proof (and a fix) to some deadly problem I can see them stopping, otherwise it's all just theoretical mumbo jumbo and we'd still debating launching our first rocket. Even now space shuttle launches are risky, it's only a matter of time before someone else dies in them.
Jet fighters won't help us win the war, let's move those R&D funds elsewhere - Adolf Hitler, 1942
Almost certainly true. One of Hitler's problems was his belief in superweapons. Germany spent countless R&D dollars on wasted projects during the war that would have (in the end) been better spent on making Panthers more reliable and simply producing more of them. Jet fighters wouldn't be viable for several years after 1942, even if Hitler decided to spend massive R&D dollars on them. By the way, Germany DID build jet powered planes near the end of the war, but their affect was minimal (the war was already pretty much lost by that point).
Mp3? What's that? - RIAA, 1996
Shouldn't that be: MP3? Our existing copyright laws should cover that nicely, but just to be sure, let's go and buy some Congressmen.
Actually the small footprint of IE is a lie. IE is actually fairly large but a lot of it's code is integrated into the OS (ever wonder why Explorer takes soo long to start up?). As far a rendering speed is concerned, current Mozillas and IE seem to be neck and neck in my experiance, although my machine is fast enough that the big bottleneck is my slow connection to the internet.
The last half of your post is just pure troll and I'm not going to bother responding to it past this point.
Basically that's an email virus...in the days before outlook. The person has to not only okay the download, but then run the application (and many people don't ever run anything other than the datebook, address book, memo pad, and maybe the calculator. Even non-savvy users have to work to start the spread of this little beauty. Worse, you have to walk right up to someone to spread it, so you can't get Melissa like rates of infection.
A time delay trojan is something else entirely. It's just a net virus that affects the palm. You still have the above mentioned problems if the virus tries to propagate through the IR port.
One final note: the IR port is slow if your virus is bigger than a few k, the people are going to think something's wrong and pull their Palm's back to investigate (IE if that busniess card that takes half a second to transfer normally is taking 30 seconds, then they might think something is broken and trade traditional business cards.
All this strikes me as theoretically possible but somewhat infeasable in practice.
The problem is spreading the Viruses. Once you get something executing on a Palm platform it can really take over, but it's fairly hard to spread malicous code around on the palm. Most people only beam business cards, not executable applications. The best bet seems to be to trojan the hotsync app, but even that is just a computer virus that happens to do something to the Palm, it's not like people share lots of cradles since every palm comes with one and it's not particularly easy for non-technical people to use the built in facilties for remote syncing.
Not if you don't have the source. It's not like MS is going to offer up any sort of utility that uninstalls Word. Some wiseass at a university might find a way to do so, but it will no doubt leave lots of little bits of the OS broken, just like IE.
Personally, I think Microsoft should try this strategy against Linux and integrate a real OS into Windows.
That's not true anymore, at least not in the US. In the US it is illegal to listen in on cell phone frequencies for instance.
Of course it's technicly feasable for anybody to do so, but it's not legal unless you are the FBI (or other law enforcement and you have the proper paperwork).
Er, I think there's more "solar power" available in the desert where you don't have trees, buildings, or _clouds_ blocking the sun. Also, many of these deserts are closer to the equator and tend to get a bit more direct sunlight than most of the US or Europe for example.
Also, Iridium phones do drain more power than your average cell phone, but it's not enough to be unmanageable with a small solar cell out in the desert.
If phys ed is going to be taught, it should be more "learning to to take care of yourself" and less "pointless running around". Also, I learned more about teamwork working in pairs in science class then I ever did playing softball, football, etc.
Amen to that. I remember my high school phys ed classes. Change close, stand in line for 5 minutes while the instructer verified that you indeed did change clothes and that they have been washed in the past week. Then it was 45 minutes of running around the lines painted on the floor in the gym, then change and leave. It was easily the most boring class I've ever taken. Apparently alot of the equiptment had been stolen/vanalized over the summer, and the coaches weren't much on thinking up new ideas (and they were all huge track weenies), so every day it was just running.
Basically it has some builtin optimizations that try to make your code run as fast as possible on the P4. In fact to get decent performance on a P4 you pretty much HAVE to use a P4 optimized compiler, or assemble it yourself (assuming you know the ins and outs of the P4).
Intel probably has a document somewhere that will at least enumerate exactly how you should write your code for the P4 (at the machine level), the Intel compiler just follows that standard.
Isn't that kind of like saying your new car has better acceleration than a diesal Rabbit? NTSC doesn't have particularly good color fidelity last time I checked. Besides, I'd try to avoid associating color performance with NTSC[1] as much as possible from a pure stigma point of view.
[1] Never The Same Color