I don't know if the Chinese are capable of doing this (if they are, more power to them), but I realy hope this re-ignites the space race. Good competition is something NASA really needs to get the Federal dollar, and with the soviet program no longer in contention, we've seen the funds cut drastically.
If this puts space back into the public eye, then it's a Good Thing (tm) through and through.
Oh sweet irony
on
Tron 2.0 Game
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think it's kind of ironic that when the movie was made, they specifically limited the environments inside the computer to a few basic colors - greys, blues and reds - and to simple geometric stuctures (mostly), to make it a "believable" computer interior. And now with the game coming out trying to mimic the movie, the designers will have to stick to that style, even though it is well within the capability of todays games to present a much richer and more detailed world. So it's like an old, perceived, limitation of the computers that is coming back to haunt them.
I mean I understand that the graphics market right now is hotter than the 1980s arms race, with companies trying to one-up each other constantly... But can somebody tell me if there are products currently on the market that take full advantage of the *current* crop of video cards?
When Geforce3 came out it didn't have much of a clock speed increase, but boasted features that if taken advantage of by the developers would make the games look *MUCH* better. And yet, the only trend in the gaming industry that I've spotted is cranking up the poly counts.
Oh, I am not saying that they (Walmart) didn't think of the side benefit of selling a Windows-less PC to the geeks who hate Microsoft. I am just saying that the chances that that was what drove them to strip the system of the OS initially are slim to none. (As is evident by their decision to ship witha winmodem.)
I was merely responding to the person who asked how they could commit the folly of having a Linux-targeted system with a modem that requires windows. And my answer was that the system was not Linux targeted. Just cut-rate.
Somehow, I doubt that the decision to drop windows from the bundle was motivated by the highter purpose of giving users a choice. The idea was to cut corners where possible. Since when looking at the spec sheet, the absence of an OS isn't what strikes you right away, they probably thought this was one of the corners they could cut more or less unnoticed.
Now given that it was never their intent to promote the use of alternative OS, I think their decision to use a (cheaper) winmodem, makes all the sense in the world. Its disappointing to the/.ers because we just go and assume that anyone who unbundles windows from a system is a Good Guy (tm). But really, sometimes people are just greedy.
OK, so maybe they can build it so that the bandwidth will be high with this method of broadcast, but what about latency?
Will this be any better than sattelite? If this technology cannot offer low latency in addition to high throughput, it will be effictively unviable in large sectors (such as any realtime financial application, or online gaming).
Also, they don't seem to mention anything about end user equipment, though I imagine the ISPs would give that with the service.
One cool application of this is roaming wireless ethernet (ala Ricochet) for laptops. Imagine if you could get a PCMCIA card that would keep you online anywhere in your city for $40/month!
I think that they have a chance here to be different than cdrom.com... As long as they avoid becoming the dumping ground for all sorts of projects, pick the cream of the crop, and, most importantly, work on packaging.
An initiative that focuses on slicker installation procedures for OSS (which they would have to do if they want to be taken seriously by less than geeky types) will benefit the entire field of OSS development.
For a big number of OSS projects, various GUI config and setup tools are already available, but have never been packaged together with the software itself. Bringing all these components on a coherent easy to use CD, would further the movement greatly.
Ummm, and since then are the domain extensions that you mentioned owned by the US? The US doesn't make any money off of those, simply because it does not own them.
The.us domains are another matter, but I don't think anyone's buying those, as they have to be geographically specific.
Yeah, but that's nothing new, Yahoo's been running ads like that for a while.
It was my understanging that the story was concerning an ad that masqueraded as a news story (i.e. was in one of the news categories), that was spotted by the submitter, but judging by the comments on this story is yet to be seen by anyone else.
Might this have been a simple mistake that Yahoo expediently corrected?
It would be much trickier of them of course to have the ad links appear randomly, so that they're difficult to duplicate. That would be a pretty difficult thing to prove...
Well, as far as being self serving, I doubt you would be seeing this move on the part of RedHat if the antagonist in question was a company not as prominent as Microsoft. Also I wonder if the fact that there is no chance in hell MS will go for the deal had any role in the offer.
In any case, this is a briliant PR/Marketing move on the part of RedHat, that will result in great publicity reguardless of Microsoft's answer.
Whoever came up witht this at RH is definitely earning their pay.
I actually think it's a great move on their part. Not of course as far as the users' benefit is concerned, but things like this are great killer-apps for software upgrades. I downloaded QT3 to see the starwars episode one trailer, QT4 to see the original LOTR teaser, and I've just installed QT5 today to get a glimpse of this latest offering. Too bad the servers turned out to be swamped.
In any case, this is a great partnership idea from Apple's standpoint. I'm not sure what their end of the bargain was for the exclusive QT5 release, but I sure hope it wasn't handling the distribution, because if that's the case, New Line got the short end of that stick.
I think it's possible a lot of major news sites have been lately hacked by script kiddies. How else do you account for the quality of writing on some of these sites?
This appeals to Maxim Titov, 26, who was five years old when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, beginning the chain of events that made it possible for him to work for Plesk today.
I'm generally not one to nitpick these things, but this quote struck me as being funny. If the guy was 5 then, and is 26 now, that's 21 years' difference. Making it 1980. Gorbachev wasn't "elected" until the mid 80s.
I don't see what this little dramatic sentence adds to the story that the reporter had to make up these numbers...
I don't think you'll ever be getting things that are nVidia comliant or ATI compliant (or any HardwareBrandX compliant). Instead we'll be seeing things that are OpenGL compliant or DirectX compliant or SoftwareApiZ compliant. Which would be cool, except it's really more like OpenGL subset AB comliant or DirectX subset CD compliant that we actually have. ("product x supports hardware transform, but not tri-trexel shading, so is incompatible with Doom X"). And even to get that level of support, you will need to port both the API and the hardware drivers to all the platforms.
Whatever happened to standards? Remember when things were "100% compatible"? IBM-PC compatible. SoundBlaster compatible. VESA compatible. Compatibility in harware was nice, because you could take it and your software would work on any OS with a piece of compatible hardware without needing special drivers.
Now the hardware industry has moved away from that, instead giving us free drivers for windows. Which not only are crappy in their first release, but are also useless on other platforms which the vendor decides not to support.
Bring hardware standards back, and MS will lose much of the power it's able to leverage through the high degreee of hardware support their system provides. I for one would sacrifice a little technological progress for the ability to have things work together as expected out of the box.
Europe has mandatory voting? So does Australia (as the person in a reply below informs me), and look at their state of speech protection. I really doubt that the policy differences in these regions are shaped by the voting laws. I believe that they are more impacted by the social and economic developments that took place in the countries over the last few decades.
You are also making the assumption that all the liberals who have not voted in the last election would if they were forced to vote, take the time to familiarize themselves with the candidates and their agendas. I doubt that this will be the case. I cannot say that everybody will just go and punch a random hole in the ballot on the election day, but can you really expect a lot of these people who have made a choice to not vote, to suddenly go and educate themselves as to the candidates beliefs and proposals? I consider that unlikely.
So you're saying if somebody is so dirt poor that they can't afford to leave their job for an hour (which i think there's a law that forces employers to allow for time off in this instance) they should be able to vote from their home Compaq which they happen to have gotten from the nearest salvation army center, by connecting to their AOL account that their wealthy aunt is paying for. Or should they just go to a nearest public terminal at a library or something? In which case why not go to the voting booth to begin with?
Face it, online voting would only simplify things for lazy middle class people, and possibly the handicapped. While the latter is quite important, I believe that there are already allowances made for them as it stands. As far as the those who don't really feel like getting to the physical voting center, I don't think they should be voting to begin with.
I know people are going to complain about this system not being an online voting system and therefore not a far enough step towards "openness" of the vote.
But as a person who was the only one of all my friends to vote in the last presidential elections, because noone else could be bothered to go and pull a bunch of levers, I think that restricting voting to offline only is a good idea.
It serves to give the control of the government to those people who care enough to get their ass out of a chair and walk to the voting center. I honestly don't think that I would like all the people who didn't vote out of lazyness to be able to do so online with a few mouse clicks, because they are probably just not interested enough to make an informed decision, and might just randomly click on the boxes that they're not sure what they mean.
Something so serious as selecting your government should require the small barrier of entry that getting to the physical voting booth represents.
My point about moving target simply meant to say that if you were to write an app today using Java 2D (intruduced in Jdk 1.2) it would not work with a huge installed base of MS JVMs, because they use 1.1, and while java has been (mostly) backwards compatible, you have to code to your target audience. So if MS continued shipping their Java 1.1 VM for the next 7 years as they could have, that's seven years you have to make a choice to go with the newest features/optimisations or go for the biggest audience.
Yes, but why do you have to do this through the web? I mean I can understand the advantage of having this app be available anywhere, i guess, but creating it as a Java application rather than an applet would have let you utilise a wider set of libraries without complicating the code any (you would still use java.net.Socket, right?).
Then you could package it as a.jar file and allow people easy access. Granted, not as simple as an applet to use, but not much functionality is lost, it's still platform-independant, and you get rid of a bunch of annoying limitations an applet imposes on you.
I think that there's this rush to put everyting on the web nowadays without stopping to think if it's really the appropriate medium for some of these applications.
Sun is about to release JDK 1.4 (if it hasn't already) which adds a lot of new things like fullscreen graphics support, etc (to promote game programming).
Also as far as I can recall, there is a javaw.exe file that you can call instead of java.exe to not have the console open up. Both have their uses.
Slashdot Mirror
If this puts space back into the public eye, then it's a Good Thing (tm) through and through.
I think it's kind of ironic that when the movie was made, they specifically limited the environments inside the computer to a few basic colors - greys, blues and reds - and to simple geometric stuctures (mostly), to make it a "believable" computer interior. And now with the game coming out trying to mimic the movie, the designers will have to stick to that style, even though it is well within the capability of todays games to present a much richer and more detailed world. So it's like an old, perceived, limitation of the computers that is coming back to haunt them.
When Geforce3 came out it didn't have much of a clock speed increase, but boasted features that if taken advantage of by the developers would make the games look *MUCH* better. And yet, the only trend in the gaming industry that I've spotted is cranking up the poly counts.
I was merely responding to the person who asked how they could commit the folly of having a Linux-targeted system with a modem that requires windows. And my answer was that the system was not Linux targeted. Just cut-rate.
Now given that it was never their intent to promote the use of alternative OS, I think their decision to use a (cheaper) winmodem, makes all the sense in the world. Its disappointing to the /.ers because we just go and assume that anyone who unbundles windows from a system is a Good Guy (tm). But really, sometimes people are just greedy.
Also, they don't seem to mention anything about end user equipment, though I imagine the ISPs would give that with the service.
One cool application of this is roaming wireless ethernet (ala Ricochet) for laptops. Imagine if you could get a PCMCIA card that would keep you online anywhere in your city for $40/month!
An initiative that focuses on slicker installation procedures for OSS (which they would have to do if they want to be taken seriously by less than geeky types) will benefit the entire field of OSS development.
For a big number of OSS projects, various GUI config and setup tools are already available, but have never been packaged together with the software itself. Bringing all these components on a coherent easy to use CD, would further the movement greatly.
(I may be wrong of course :)
The .us domains are another matter, but I don't think anyone's buying those, as they have to be geographically specific.
I hope this isn't what the poster meant.
It was my understanging that the story was concerning an ad that masqueraded as a news story (i.e. was in one of the news categories), that was spotted by the submitter, but judging by the comments on this story is yet to be seen by anyone else.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
It would be much trickier of them of course to have the ad links appear randomly, so that they're difficult to duplicate. That would be a pretty difficult thing to prove...
In any case, this is a briliant PR/Marketing move on the part of RedHat, that will result in great publicity reguardless of Microsoft's answer.
Whoever came up witht this at RH is definitely earning their pay.
What if one of the pipes bursts? Or evel leaks a little? Is such a risk worth the extra CPU cycles?
In any case, this is a great partnership idea from Apple's standpoint. I'm not sure what their end of the bargain was for the exclusive QT5 release, but I sure hope it wasn't handling the distribution, because if that's the case, New Line got the short end of that stick.
I think it's possible a lot of major news sites have been lately hacked by script kiddies. How else do you account for the quality of writing on some of these sites?
I don't see what this little dramatic sentence adds to the story that the reporter had to make up these numbers...
I don't think you'll ever be getting things that are nVidia comliant or ATI compliant (or any HardwareBrandX compliant). Instead we'll be seeing things that are OpenGL compliant or DirectX compliant or SoftwareApiZ compliant. Which would be cool, except it's really more like OpenGL subset AB comliant or DirectX subset CD compliant that we actually have. ("product x supports hardware transform, but not tri-trexel shading, so is incompatible with Doom X"). And even to get that level of support, you will need to port both the API and the hardware drivers to all the platforms.
Now the hardware industry has moved away from that, instead giving us free drivers for windows. Which not only are crappy in their first release, but are also useless on other platforms which the vendor decides not to support.
Bring hardware standards back, and MS will lose much of the power it's able to leverage through the high degreee of hardware support their system provides. I for one would sacrifice a little technological progress for the ability to have things work together as expected out of the box.
You are also making the assumption that all the liberals who have not voted in the last election would if they were forced to vote, take the time to familiarize themselves with the candidates and their agendas. I doubt that this will be the case. I cannot say that everybody will just go and punch a random hole in the ballot on the election day, but can you really expect a lot of these people who have made a choice to not vote, to suddenly go and educate themselves as to the candidates beliefs and proposals? I consider that unlikely.
Face it, online voting would only simplify things for lazy middle class people, and possibly the handicapped. While the latter is quite important, I believe that there are already allowances made for them as it stands. As far as the those who don't really feel like getting to the physical voting center, I don't think they should be voting to begin with.
He's probably a visible enough figure at this point that he can just walk into any russian embassy and be on the next flight out of the country.
But as a person who was the only one of all my friends to vote in the last presidential elections, because noone else could be bothered to go and pull a bunch of levers, I think that restricting voting to offline only is a good idea. It serves to give the control of the government to those people who care enough to get their ass out of a chair and walk to the voting center. I honestly don't think that I would like all the people who didn't vote out of lazyness to be able to do so online with a few mouse clicks, because they are probably just not interested enough to make an informed decision, and might just randomly click on the boxes that they're not sure what they mean.
Something so serious as selecting your government should require the small barrier of entry that getting to the physical voting booth represents.
My point about moving target simply meant to say that if you were to write an app today using Java 2D (intruduced in Jdk 1.2) it would not work with a huge installed base of MS JVMs, because they use 1.1, and while java has been (mostly) backwards compatible, you have to code to your target audience. So if MS continued shipping their Java 1.1 VM for the next 7 years as they could have, that's seven years you have to make a choice to go with the newest features/optimisations or go for the biggest audience.
Then you could package it as a .jar file and allow people easy access. Granted, not as simple as an applet to use, but not much functionality is lost, it's still platform-independant, and you get rid of a bunch of annoying limitations an applet imposes on you.
I think that there's this rush to put everyting on the web nowadays without stopping to think if it's really the appropriate medium for some of these applications.
Also as far as I can recall, there is a javaw.exe file that you can call instead of java.exe to not have the console open up. Both have their uses.