Renault has decided to take legal action in the form of a summary proceeding, without prejudice to other actions taken in compensation for any damage suffered by the company.
According to the radio station I listened to this morning, this means that Renault will ask a judge to have a counter-expertise made, by law-appointed independant experts. If nothing wrong is found (again), they might (try to) sue the driver for the damage he did to the company image.
One of the first times I drove on my own, some weeks after I got my driving license, I forgot to remove the parking brake. Let me tell you, I had no problem starting to drive (first gear, then second), but the car felt strange, like the engine was having trouble of some sort; then I understood, removed the brake, and felt very ashamed. Telling this story to several people in the following years, I discovered this is a common beginner's mistake. Lesson is: the parking brake is no match to your engine.
Some years before that, we were surprised, coming out of the Sunday mass, that our car was missing; cars were seldom stolen in the area we were (let's even say, never stolen). Well, we quickly found it, encased in a small (unhabited) building down the hill. Lesson is: when parking in a slope, do put some appropriate gear, the parking brake is not enough.
That said, if someone were to try to push your car, your engine would indeed be damaged, so do not put a gear when it is not needed.
* The driver has tried to use the brakes, but he says they quickly heated up and became ineffective.
* The driver has tried to remove the ignition "key" several times, initially without success.
* Out of ideas and quite afraid, he has called the police, and has soon been escorted by police motorcycles.
* The toll booth had been evacuated and left wide open by the police, all vehicles on the highway (around the toll booth) had been stopped and parked on the emergency lane. Even then, entering the booth at 120 mph would have been quite deadly.
* Fortunately, the driver has stopped the car 12 or 20 miles before the toll booth, by finally managing to remove the smart card that is used as an ignition key on these cars.
* Renault says there are three independant ways the cruise control system can be deactivated: using the brakes; pressing the appropriate button on the steering wheel; switching to neutral gear. The first two are electronic controls, the last one is mechanical.
* Renault says the three systems are fully independant, and it is unlikely they all should fail at the same time. Renault says the car will be brought back to its factories as soon as possible, for inspection.
* The driver was only planning to drive home, a few miles trip, but ended up more than one hundred miles from its planned destination.
In my opinion, he could have stopped the car much earlier, but was panicked. To those who say he should have had no problem removing the smart card, try doing that while controlling a car at 120 mph on a non-empty highway (at one point, he had to overtake a truck by driving on the emergency lane!).
As for the failure, there may be three independant systems, but ultimately, there's only one engine, which can go mechanically wrong.
As far as I know -- I've never had the pleasure of owning an Infocom game, or this compilation, but I have downloaded A Mind Forever Voyaging from some site -- all games ship with a.dat file somewhere. This.dat file is the Z-Code, you can open it directly with an interpreter, or rename it to.z3 or.z5 (or whatever) if you feel more comfortable with a more recognizable file extension.
However, the Mac collection might be different, maybe they have put the.dat file in the resource fork of the interpreters -- bleh. Ask on rec.games.int-fiction, someone is bound to have already solved that problem, or will help you solve it.
There are two main IF platforms (TADS 2/3 and Infocom/Inform/Z-Code/Glulx). As you can see in the list of IFComp entrants, most games are written using one of these two, and most discussion on r.a.i-f is about one of these two.
There are also several second-tier platforms (Hugo and Adrift for example), which attract less people, but have enough followers to survive. They are usually less discussed on r.a.i-f (except for the occasionnal whats-the-best-platform flamefests) but often have dedicated forums where fans gather. They attract a slightly different bunch of people than TADS/Inform/r.a.i-f, for example it looks like Adrift attracts people more in interested in quick-n-easy graphical development.
Then there are many other platforms, either older ones that have done their time, or platforms that never really took off. Alan was in this tier, but is right now going back to second tier, with a new major version in the works after several years without updates.
Overall, the reason there are so many platforms is that there is no commercial competition, and that several (if not many) people enjoy writing their own platforms (a not uncommon subject of discussion on r.a.i-f). A handful of fans is enough to have games produced for a platform and sometimes submitted to IFComp, so every year or so you are in the need to download an exotic interpreter of some sort.
That said, note that judges do not have to play all the games, especially those for which there's no interpreter on their OS. Playing five games is the minimum to become a judge, and as you can see, a TADS and a Z-Code interpreter are more than enough to cover that.
The Yahoo France accident report appears to be the correct one, but it is missing one line, the time of the accident: 30-09-2004 06:48, which is consistent with what is reported by Wichert. The time you see on Yahoo (13:50) is the time the road was cleared, and the traffic jam dissolved.
All other informations in the accident report (highway, location, direction, vehicles) is consistent with what has been reported here.
The fog condition is not unlikely early morning in that area, at this time of the year. Unfortunately, many others have died in similar crashes (sometimes dozens of cars crashing one after the other).
(Note: it appears that when Infotrafic is under heavy load, they redirect to a single summary page of traffic condition around Paris - try again later, then.)
Absolutely. The story is clear to me, and I believe it is true. We had pulse dial phones when I was a kid, so I know them quite well (I've used them for maybe ten years).
It is quite easy to not wait for the dial to return, especially if you're dialing a 9 or a 0, though of course very stupid to do so. I would not be surprised if you found occurences in the news of people who failed to dial some number because they were under some kind of emergency and the stress made them dial the number incorrectly.
I just saw Steamboy last wednesday : though not the greatest animé of all times, it entertained me a lot. (Sitting in the best seat of one of the finest theatres in Paris helped.)
If you like big machines that grow ever bigger, breathtaking action, technical excellence, and lively illustration of times past: this is your movie.
If you want blood, barely-dressed women, computers and ray guns, stay away.
You'll miss crushed buildings, bullets, bombs, weird mechanical war machines, and the cool effects highly-compressed steam can have upon release, though.
Every change was in Wikipedia for at least 20 hours, and the longest was in for five days.
and then (emphasis mine):
I was disappointed that all my changes in Wikipedia went unchallenged. Surely
a week was plenty of time, especially since fresh changes tend to get more scrutiny than old ones.
How is five days "a week"? How are twenty hours "a week"? It looks like this guy had a nice idea, but was so impatient to tell the world that he ruined the experiment.
Its simply the most remarkable anime I have seen in more then 5 years (and ive been doing this for more then a decade)
Have you seen Last Exile? It is the best anime in more than 5 years.
I've watched Escaflowne (very good), Stand Alone Complex (some excellent episodes, but uneven quality overall),.hack//SIGN (excellent, but a lot of chatter) in the same time period, but none of them reaches the quality of Last Exile.
Excellent, surprising, tight plot up to the very last minute (they had to remove the opening credits of the last episode and to redesign the closing credits to fit it all!). Excellent and constant design, graphics, and animation quality. Excellent music, not by Yoko Kanno or Yuki Kajiura for once, but by a group named Dolce Triade. Very original and memorable universe, as much as Cowboy Bebop.
If you enjoy top-quality work and great storytelling; if you enjoy planes, airships, wind and clouds; or if you want to pretend you know your stuff when it comes to anime, you just have to watch Last Exile, the best anime of 2003 (and maybe of a couple of years before and after that)!
So what's needed is careful set up in the robots.txt file and other HTML clues for the web crawlers to exclude anything but the most current version of a page (and to skip over the other 'action' pages, like edits, etc).
It has probably already been done in any wiki software worth its salt. Here's what MoinMoin does for example:
* It has a regexp of HTTP_USER_AGENTS which should receive a FORBIDDEN for anything except viewing a page. The default setting includes many known bots (including Google) and utilities such as wget.
* Most pages contain the appropriate robot meta tag, whith the relevant noindex and/or nofollow settings.
In addition to that, the webmaster can of course set up a robots.txt file, and actually should do so because there are tools out there which don't understand the robot meta tags (or they don't want to take a performance hit) and the user agent of which can easily be changed by the user... wget comes to mind.
Of course, it shouldn't be too hard to add regexps to prevent certain links from being done, or certain hostnames or IPs from altering the site (editing pages, reverting them, deleting them).
But webmasters may soon deluge these handy tools with links back to their site, not to get clicks, but to increase Google page rank.
The Arch Wiki has sufferred several times from such vandals in the past few months. I'm sure other wikis have, too. They create links over single spaces or dots, so that casual readers don't notice them. Attentively watching the RecentChanges page is the most effective way to find and fight them, but this is tiresome. I guess many wikis will require posters to be authenticated soon, which is a blow in the wiki ideal, but not such a major blow. Alternatively, maybe someone will develop heuristics to fight the most common abuses (e.g. external link over a single space).
* Pirates don't forget to copy the serial number when they copy the CD, so this page doesn't help them that much.
* Legitimate users often lose the paper page that contains the number, and when they have to reinstall the OS a couple of years (or months...) later, they are toasted, so this page helps them much.
Actually, reading his site, it seems he has been in "contact" with Microsoft lawyers several times already. They have repeatedly gotten his providers to cut access to his pages through legal threats. (The current site is the fifteenth relocation of the pages.)
However, he claims the numbers are not copyrighted nor trademarked, so the law does not forbid posting them. Since it seems he has published them for some time and still not directly been sued by Microsoft, this might actually be true.
Re:How would Google manage a 100K-node cluster?
on
Speculating About Gmail
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Google's cluster was 25K-node in summer 2002. I don't know where they are now, but I'd guess somewhere higher in the exponential growth curve of their cluster. Maybe 50K already?
I think they've probably already solved all the problems you mention.
Too bad CheckInstall has several bugs (and installwatch, the core of the magic, some serious ones, like improper handling of symlinks). Too bad CheckInstall has not been updated for a year or so.
I really enjoy the idea, I quite hate the implementation. Back to SlackBuild scripts.
Yeah, I noticed (and enjoyed) that. Man, I would have loved being there! I've done my share of WW2 bunkers exploring in France, but they were nowhere near this scale. Much less dangerous too, this one is quite extreme.
Slashdot Mirror
Renault has decided to take legal action in the form of a summary proceeding, without prejudice to other actions taken in compensation for any damage suffered by the company.
According to the radio station I listened to this morning, this means that Renault will ask a judge to have a counter-expertise made, by law-appointed independant experts. If nothing wrong is found (again), they might (try to) sue the driver for the damage he did to the company image.
Why are they playing chicken with mountains anyways?
Because they are given orders to do so?
No. He had set his cruise speed to 80 mph, the speed limit on the highway, and the speed most people drive at.
One of the first times I drove on my own, some weeks after I got my driving license, I forgot to remove the parking brake. Let me tell you, I had no problem starting to drive (first gear, then second), but the car felt strange, like the engine was having trouble of some sort; then I understood, removed the brake, and felt very ashamed. Telling this story to several people in the following years, I discovered this is a common beginner's mistake. Lesson is: the parking brake is no match to your engine.
Some years before that, we were surprised, coming out of the Sunday mass, that our car was missing; cars were seldom stolen in the area we were (let's even say, never stolen). Well, we quickly found it, encased in a small (unhabited) building down the hill. Lesson is: when parking in a slope, do put some appropriate gear, the parking brake is not enough.
That said, if someone were to try to push your car, your engine would indeed be damaged, so do not put a gear when it is not needed.
This article (in French) has much more information than what we've had until now: http://www.rtl.fr/rtlinfo/article.asp?dicid=225812
Key points translated from the article:
* The driver has tried to use the brakes, but he says they quickly heated up and became ineffective.
* The driver has tried to remove the ignition "key" several times, initially without success.
* Out of ideas and quite afraid, he has called the police, and has soon been escorted by police motorcycles.
* The toll booth had been evacuated and left wide open by the police, all vehicles on the highway (around the toll booth) had been stopped and parked on the emergency lane. Even then, entering the booth at 120 mph would have been quite deadly.
* Fortunately, the driver has stopped the car 12 or 20 miles before the toll booth, by finally managing to remove the smart card that is used as an ignition key on these cars.
* Renault says there are three independant ways the cruise control system can be deactivated: using the brakes; pressing the appropriate button on the steering wheel; switching to neutral gear. The first two are electronic controls, the last one is mechanical.
* Renault says the three systems are fully independant, and it is unlikely they all should fail at the same time. Renault says the car will be brought back to its factories as soon as possible, for inspection.
* The driver was only planning to drive home, a few miles trip, but ended up more than one hundred miles from its planned destination.
In my opinion, he could have stopped the car much earlier, but was panicked. To those who say he should have had no problem removing the smart card, try doing that while controlling a car at 120 mph on a non-empty highway (at one point, he had to overtake a truck by driving on the emergency lane!).
As for the failure, there may be three independant systems, but ultimately, there's only one engine, which can go mechanically wrong.
Same thing in France. Runaway lanes in mountainous areas only.
As far as I know -- I've never had the pleasure of owning an Infocom game, or this compilation, but I have downloaded A Mind Forever Voyaging from some site -- all games ship with a .dat file somewhere. This .dat file is the Z-Code, you can open it directly with an interpreter, or rename it to .z3 or .z5 (or whatever) if you feel more comfortable with a more recognizable file extension.
.dat file in the resource fork of the interpreters -- bleh. Ask on rec.games.int-fiction, someone is bound to have already solved that problem, or will help you solve it.
However, the Mac collection might be different, maybe they have put the
There are two main IF platforms (TADS 2/3 and Infocom/Inform/Z-Code/Glulx). As you can see in the list of IFComp entrants, most games are written using one of these two, and most discussion on r.a.i-f is about one of these two.
There are also several second-tier platforms (Hugo and Adrift for example), which attract less people, but have enough followers to survive. They are usually less discussed on r.a.i-f (except for the occasionnal whats-the-best-platform flamefests) but often have dedicated forums where fans gather. They attract a slightly different bunch of people than TADS/Inform/r.a.i-f, for example it looks like Adrift attracts people more in interested in quick-n-easy graphical development.
Then there are many other platforms, either older ones that have done their time, or platforms that never really took off. Alan was in this tier, but is right now going back to second tier, with a new major version in the works after several years without updates.
Overall, the reason there are so many platforms is that there is no commercial competition, and that several (if not many) people enjoy writing their own platforms (a not uncommon subject of discussion on r.a.i-f). A handful of fans is enough to have games produced for a platform and sometimes submitted to IFComp, so every year or so you are in the need to download an exotic interpreter of some sort.
That said, note that judges do not have to play all the games, especially those for which there's no interpreter on their OS. Playing five games is the minimum to become a judge, and as you can see, a TADS and a Z-Code interpreter are more than enough to cover that.
Last year, there was a BitTorrent, but the competition didn't make it to Slashdot, so this was not useful.
This year, as luck would have it, there's no BitTorrent, and Slashdot...
What about attributing the increase to the massive quantity of sugars ingested by adults nowadays?
The Yahoo France accident report appears to be the correct one, but it is missing one line, the time of the accident: 30-09-2004 06:48, which is consistent with what is reported by Wichert. The time you see on Yahoo (13:50) is the time the road was cleared, and the traffic jam dissolved.
n =NORD&AC=1774966287.
All other informations in the accident report (highway, location, direction, vehicles) is consistent with what has been reported here.
The fog condition is not unlikely early morning in that area, at this time of the year. Unfortunately, many others have died in similar crashes (sometimes dozens of cars crashing one after the other).
Here's a more complete and hopefully stable URL to Infotrafic web-site: http://www.infotrafic.com/perturbations.php?Regio
(Note: it appears that when Infotrafic is under heavy load, they redirect to a single summary page of traffic condition around Paris - try again later, then.)
Absolutely. The story is clear to me, and I believe it is true. We had pulse dial phones when I was a kid, so I know them quite well (I've used them for maybe ten years).
It is quite easy to not wait for the dial to return, especially if you're dialing a 9 or a 0, though of course very stupid to do so. I would not be surprised if you found occurences in the news of people who failed to dial some number because they were under some kind of emergency and the stress made them dial the number incorrectly.
I just saw Steamboy last wednesday : though not the greatest animé of all times, it entertained me a lot. (Sitting in the best seat of one of the finest theatres in Paris helped.)
If you like big machines that grow ever bigger, breathtaking action, technical excellence, and lively illustration of times past: this is your movie.
If you want blood, barely-dressed women, computers and ray guns, stay away.
You'll miss crushed buildings, bullets, bombs, weird mechanical war machines, and the cool effects highly-compressed steam can have upon release, though.
Who modded this up?
I did, tricked by the two positive answers. And now I'm answering you, so that my moderation gets removed.
Well done, trolls.
and then (emphasis mine):
How is five days "a week"? How are twenty hours "a week"? It looks like this guy had a nice idea, but was so impatient to tell the world that he ruined the experiment.
Its simply the most remarkable anime I have seen in more then 5 years (and ive been doing this for more then a decade)
.hack//SIGN (excellent, but a lot of chatter) in the same time period, but none of them reaches the quality of Last Exile.
h tm
Have you seen Last Exile? It is the best anime in more than 5 years.
I've watched Escaflowne (very good), Stand Alone Complex (some excellent episodes, but uneven quality overall),
Excellent, surprising, tight plot up to the very last minute (they had to remove the opening credits of the last episode and to redesign the closing credits to fit it all!). Excellent and constant design, graphics, and animation quality. Excellent music, not by Yoko Kanno or Yuki Kajiura for once, but by a group named Dolce Triade. Very original and memorable universe, as much as Cowboy Bebop.
If you enjoy top-quality work and great storytelling; if you enjoy planes, airships, wind and clouds; or if you want to pretend you know your stuff when it comes to anime, you just have to watch Last Exile, the best anime of 2003 (and maybe of a couple of years before and after that)!
Last Exile on DVD in the USA:
http://www.lastexiledvd.com/
Some pictures:
http://halo-productions.com/LastExile/multimedia.
(look at the ones marked "from Last EXILE website")
Final word of advice: try very hard not to learn anything about the plot or the universe! Just jump into the first episode, you'll be glad you did!
So what's needed is careful set up in the robots.txt file and other HTML clues for the web crawlers to exclude anything but the most current version of a page (and to skip over the other 'action' pages, like edits, etc).
It has probably already been done in any wiki software worth its salt. Here's what MoinMoin does for example:
* It has a regexp of HTTP_USER_AGENTS which should receive a FORBIDDEN for anything except viewing a page. The default setting includes many known bots (including Google) and utilities such as wget.
* Most pages contain the appropriate robot meta tag, whith the relevant noindex and/or nofollow settings.
In addition to that, the webmaster can of course set up a robots.txt file, and actually should do so because there are tools out there which don't understand the robot meta tags (or they don't want to take a performance hit) and the user agent of which can easily be changed by the user... wget comes to mind.
Of course, it shouldn't be too hard to add regexps to prevent certain links from being done, or certain hostnames or IPs from altering the site (editing pages, reverting them, deleting them).
But webmasters may soon deluge these handy tools with links back to their site, not to get clicks, but to increase Google page rank.
The Arch Wiki has sufferred several times from such vandals in the past few months. I'm sure other wikis have, too. They create links over single spaces or dots, so that casual readers don't notice them. Attentively watching the RecentChanges page is the most effective way to find and fight them, but this is tiresome. I guess many wikis will require posters to be authenticated soon, which is a blow in the wiki ideal, but not such a major blow. Alternatively, maybe someone will develop heuristics to fight the most common abuses (e.g. external link over a single space).
So, this is not new, but this is now news.
Here's a nickel, kid. Go buy yourself a real window manager and toolkit.
I went to Fry's and asked what window manager I could have for a nickel. Nobody was able to answer my question, but maybe it's just that nobody knows?
The author thinks so:
* Pirates don't forget to copy the serial number when they copy the CD, so this page doesn't help them that much.
* Legitimate users often lose the paper page that contains the number, and when they have to reinstall the OS a couple of years (or months...) later, they are toasted, so this page helps them much.
Actually, reading his site, it seems he has been in "contact" with Microsoft lawyers several times already. They have repeatedly gotten his providers to cut access to his pages through legal threats. (The current site is the fifteenth relocation of the pages.)
However, he claims the numbers are not copyrighted nor trademarked, so the law does not forbid posting them. Since it seems he has published them for some time and still not directly been sued by Microsoft, this might actually be true.
Google's cluster was 25K-node in summer 2002. I don't know where they are now, but I'd guess somewhere higher in the exponential growth curve of their cluster. Maybe 50K already?
I think they've probably already solved all the problems you mention.
Too bad CheckInstall has several bugs (and installwatch, the core of the magic, some serious ones, like improper handling of symlinks). Too bad CheckInstall has not been updated for a year or so.
I really enjoy the idea, I quite hate the implementation. Back to SlackBuild scripts.
It would be cool, but there might be a problem: echo.
Yeah, I noticed (and enjoyed) that. Man, I would have loved being there! I've done my share of WW2 bunkers exploring in France, but they were nowhere near this scale. Much less dangerous too, this one is quite extreme.