I'm surprised. I used to have a dual 2800 MP, and it could play 1080p divx & mpeg2 content without much trouble. 1080i had to be deinterlaced/transcoded to progressive before it was viewable, though. mpeg2 was by far the "easiest" to play, thanks to XvMC-assisted codecs for it. This was under linux, fwiw. One thing to note, though - if you have an older graphics card, it might not be able to handle a full 1080p-size video overlay, and will fall back to regular framebuffer. This will slow things down horrendously.
"Binary blobs" are only a problem in kernel space. Userspace binary blobs are acceptable. Fence them in with chroot and/or SElinux policies if you're feeling paranoid, and if you find them doing anything suspicious, just strace/ltrace/gdb the bastards. There are plenty of ways to "get an idea what it's doing".
> Section 9 (Desktop Effects) Looks like its just AIGLX, not Xgl (in fact there's no mention of Xgl).
Fully-implemented AIGLX pretty much makes Xgl obsolete. Compiz runs on top of AIGLX now, and compiz is shipping with Fedora. That means all the "bling" normally associated with "Xgl" is available.
> Section 17 (Virtualization) FC6 uses Xen 3.0.2
Xen 3.0.3 was released on the 17th, in time to get included. The release-schedule slippage had a silver lining.
I think the main advantage over XFS is that the codebase won't make kernel developers vomit.
From a user POV, XFS is my favorite FS, and I've had no bad experiences with it whatsoever. However, from what I've heard about the code, I can fully understand why it's not "popular" among kernel devs, and why none of the enterprise distros favor it (because doing so would inevitably force _their_ kernel hackers to try to debug XFS-related errors). I'm hoping now that SGI is officially "retiring" IRIX, XFS will be cleaned up and properly ported to Linux, rather than be essentially a non-native module with a "portability layer" around it, which from what I hear is the main reason the code is so ugly to work with.
>...Pluto is only about 2300 km across while our own moon is about 3500 km across. Are we in a double-planet system, or > is there some logical reason you can think of for making a smaller object than our moon a planet while our moon is > undeserving of the status?
Firstly, both Ganymede and Titan are larger than Mercury. Should we "demote" mercury from planetary status on the basis of this fact?
Secondly, yes, there are good logical reason, that have nothing to do with the absolute comparative sizes; the preliminary definition of "planet" (a definition that I consider to have been concise, logical, and scientificially _useful_, unlike the current botch-job) that would have given us an initial 12 planets, laid those reasons out quite well. It should be added that the Earth/Moon system does fall _very close_ to being a "double planet" system, but does not quite fulfill the criteria.
I see you're sensibly predicting the first game to use this rendering technology will be "Doom 4", which still won't provide ducttape for the flashlight.
That SCO is not this SCO, even though they've attempted to create that illusion with their name change. The "SCO" involved in this lawsuit is the company formerly known as Caldera - once, a major Linux distributor.
I've always considered this to be a borderline bug, since this also happens in wildcard expansion. If you do a "command *" in a directory where there are files beginning with a -, the wildcard will expand in a way that makes the command take the filename of file beginning with - as an option/argument. I've never found any "evil" way to exploit this, but it's always bothered me a bit.
IF you buy a Xeon cpu on a add-on card you can set up the machine to RUN WINDOWS.
That's right. Run windows with a fucking x86 cpu on a PCI CARD.. Sharing the same memory and harddrives as Linux running on POWER5. On the same machine. At the same time. With NO slowdown.
Wow. IBM re-invented the bridgeboard? I remember the Amiga 2000 having those in the 80's. Not really "virtualization", though.
Nitrogen tri-iodide is most certainly an explosive. If my memory from my days of making things go kaboom as a hobby, the measured power of NI3 was approximately three times that of common gunpowder, or half that of TNT, if you will. I don't remember what the name of the measurement scale was, but I remember some of the numbers: gunpowder: 37 Nitrogen Iodide: 110 TNT: 220 Nitroglycerin: 530. Someone whose knowledge is fresher can probably identify what "scale" that is. I nearly blew out my eardrums by setting of a single crystal of NI3 some 3x3x1mm "big". It was possibly the _sharpest_ bang I've ever heard in my life. Made a cool purple cloud of vaporized iodine too. After that, I was careful to create only the tiniest amounts of NI3 at a time. Your point sort of stands, though - I've never heard of anyone making a big enough batch of it to injure themselves. If you've actually seen it demonstrated and found out how insanely easy it goes off, once dry, you'd have to be exceedingly stupid to make more than a tiny bit at once. But then again, the Darwin Awards seem to have no shortage of people to nominate.
I hadn't heard of this before. Mach 10 in 5 seconds sound insane. A rough calculation gets me 68G for that, or, interestingly, 666m/s^2. Yes, I'm cheating with the rounding, just to be able to say "Hellishly fast accelleration.":)
> The electronic components of the Sprint were designed to withstand accelerations of 100 times > gravity
That, otoh, isn't all that impressive. The electronics in the two "penetrators" that were part of the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander were made to withstand 80000 G. They both failed to return any data, though, so they may not be the best example to compare to...
Well... you know, I wouldn't necessarily take that as hard evidence they weren't innocent at the time they were first caught. Being locked up for years without any kind of trial and accused of all sorts of shit when you knew you'd done nothing to deserve it just MIGHT incline you to get rather pissed off at your captors. Especially if you're surrounded by other prisoners whose arguments against the captor nation suddenly sound rather convincing. Any innocents locked up there would be pretty prime recruiting material for any genuine al queda folks they might be mixed in with.
You missed the part about her being 6'2", right? I don't think there's a hell of a lot of "little girl" clothes around for 6'2" women. I barely even know any adult women that height.
> Again, I'm not talking about what we can do NOW. How many times do I need to explain > this on Slashdot?
Then perhaps you shouldn't have given a link to a specific example of two "upcoming" drugs.
> Just imagine eating gourmet meals as much as you like and not having to exercise and > still having a body like Usher.
Contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, you don't have to eat miniscule portions of bland crap and spend hours upon hours on the treadmill to look good and maintain a healthy bodyfat percentage. Usher's body gives me no reason for envy, and the only days I don't eat tasty meals are when I'm too lazy too cook something. Pills probably appeal most to people who labor under the myth that they'd have to "sacrifice" good eating in order to stay slim.
Moreover, even assuming other types of drugs are eventually invented, they'll have to work by either making you burn more calories (DNP already does this by raising body heat - unpleasant, and potentially lethal in overdose) or make the calories not get absorbed at all, which would leave you crapping nutrients. Honestly, I find the idea of this just a little bit ethically perverse, given that there are still tons of people dying of starvation in this world. Pharmaceutical research time and money could be spent on more important products than something that renders real food into tastebud-masturbation. Moral/ethical arguments and sentences like "money could be better spent" tends to annoy me when I see them, though, so I won't blame anyone for bitchslapping me with a good counter-argument on that particular point.
That's what I'm trying to do. But apparently you think you countered rather than strengthened the point I was trying to make about the problems that arise when people on differing sides of a debate are operating on different definitions of the word describing the topic they are debating.
And please, do read that dictionary definition again. It may not spell out the words "the scientific method", but what, exactly do you think definition 1a, "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena." is describing? Moreover, if you're debating with someone who is on the "side" of science in this day and age, what do you think THEY mean when they use the word science?
If you'd thrown the word "science" into dictionary.com, which gives responses from several different dictionaries, you'd also have seen this among the results:
Main Entry: science Pronunciation: 'sI-&n(t)s Function: noun : knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through the scientific method and concerned with the physical world and its phenomena
Dictionaries will give you both common usage and specific usage definitions for words. If someone debating from a scientist's point of view uses the word "theory", which has a specific definition within science, and rather different defintion in common usage, both which a good dictionary will provide, which definition do you think will help you better understand what the other person was trying to say? It all depends on whether you actually want to understand what the "opposing" side is trying to say, or if your goal is to score "points" by deliberately misinterpreting the intended meaning of the communication for the purpose of "scoring points" by twisting their words around. I just don't see the latter approach as being particularly fruitful, and I actually find it worth spending my time on writing posts like this simply in the hope of lowering the ratio of miscommunication in a discussion.
but those "anti-obsesity" drugs work by causing people to eat less. They're either appetite suppressors, or "fat blockers" (which ultimately force people to eat less fat, since eating fat when you eat a fat blocking drug tends to cause nasty oily diarrhea). So in the end, the people on these drugs _are_ eating less. The drug just aids or enforces self control, just like gastric bypass operations. So these people do end up eating less, just like regular diet & excercise people do, except they end up also making pharmaceutical companies rich in the process, and suffers nasty side effects if they gobble certain foods while still taking the drugs.
When it comes to the shuttle, there are just WAY too many things you wonder what the hell NASA was thinking. Thank god a replacement is finally on the way. I rather like the proposed shuttle-derived launch stack for the CEV and HLLV.
No, it wasn't _science_, because science is a modern word _defined_ as application of the scientific method as formalized by Newton & friends. Before Newton and even up to the time of Newton, it was called "natural philosophy". Earlier ages and other languages had yet other words. Getting nitpicky has nothing to do with "intellectual snobbery", it has to do with the fact that some words actually have rather strict definitions as to what they mean, and no discussion or debate about topics concerning these words will ever be fruitful if some of the debaters don't even know the proper meaning of the words they're using. Invention, research and other progress of human knowledge - all things which for example the Aztecs, the ancient egyptians, the persians, the greeks etc did in spades - isn't the same as "science". Science is a specific and comparatively rather new _method_ to minimize the errors in the abovementioned progression of human knowledge, and that's an extremely important thing to keep in mind if you're going to debate the merits or limitations of "science". Language is the tool we use to communicate, and if different sides in a debate keep redefining the meaning of the words used to decribe the core concepts being debated, then the language becomes meaningless, and thus, the debate itself will become meaningless, and both sides will be reduced to packs of monkeys trying to out-OOK each other.
Your survival scenarios are complete fantasy, I'm sorry to say.
There would have been no _reason_ for the Challenger crew to emergency-evacuate while still on the pad. The O-ring leak didn't show until well into flight. Saner minds making the decisions should have held off on the launch, but then there'd have been no accident at all.
Skydiving at maximum altitude is also preposterous. The cabin reached 66000 feet. The crew could not have remained conscious long enough to get outside even to take their chances with a parachute-less skydive - they had no pressure suits.
Columbia is more iffy - there might possibly have been modifications to the descent profile that could have at least increased the chances of surviveability. Going in upside down most certainly isn't one of them, though - that'd only have torn the shuttle apart far sooner.
In-space rescue, which might seem like the most obvious "fix", was sadly not very realistic either. They were not equipped to dock, either with the ISS (which they couldn't reach) or any supply ships that might have been possible to send either from the ISS or from the ground. Nor were they carrying equipment for spacewalks. There really wasn't anything that could have been done within the timeframe, even if they'd found out the damage on day one in orbit. Of course, one could start thinking of _really_ unpleasant scenarios like sacrificing part of the crew to make their supplies last long enough to mount some kind of rushed rescue operation (current russian "lifeboat" descent modules, which would be the only thing even remotely imagineable to get launched in time, only hold 3 people anyway), but even so, it seems highly unlikely it could be done on time, OR that anyone would have been willing to make that harsh a decision. I'll leave it to any aeronautical engineers whether there _might_ have been a way to at least increase survival chances with a modified descent profile, though, but i seem to remember reading that there really weren't all that much that could be done, even with that.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised. I used to have a dual 2800 MP, and it could play 1080p divx & mpeg2 content without much trouble. 1080i had to be deinterlaced/transcoded to progressive before it was viewable, though. mpeg2 was by far the "easiest" to play, thanks to XvMC-assisted codecs for it. This was under linux, fwiw.
One thing to note, though - if you have an older graphics card, it might not be able to handle a full 1080p-size video overlay, and will fall back to regular framebuffer. This will slow things down horrendously.
"Binary blobs" are only a problem in kernel space. Userspace binary blobs are acceptable. Fence them in with chroot and/or SElinux policies if you're feeling paranoid, and if you find them doing anything suspicious, just strace/ltrace/gdb the bastards. There are plenty of ways to "get an idea what it's doing".
> Are other BIOS's not "production-quality"?
In my experience, that's unfortunately indeed all too often the case.
> Section 9 (Desktop Effects) Looks like its just AIGLX, not Xgl (in fact there's no mention of Xgl).
Fully-implemented AIGLX pretty much makes Xgl obsolete. Compiz runs on top of AIGLX now, and compiz is shipping with Fedora. That means all the "bling" normally associated with "Xgl" is available.
> Section 17 (Virtualization) FC6 uses Xen 3.0.2
Xen 3.0.3 was released on the 17th, in time to get included. The release-schedule slippage had a silver lining.
I think the main advantage over XFS is that the codebase won't make kernel developers vomit.
From a user POV, XFS is my favorite FS, and I've had no bad experiences with it whatsoever. However, from what I've heard about the code, I can fully understand why it's not "popular" among kernel devs, and why none of the enterprise distros favor it (because doing so would inevitably force _their_ kernel hackers to try to debug XFS-related errors).
I'm hoping now that SGI is officially "retiring" IRIX, XFS will be cleaned up and properly ported to Linux, rather than be essentially a non-native module with a "portability layer" around it, which from what I hear is the main reason the code is so ugly to work with.
"Someone set up us the cluster bomb."
Actually, it's not creating miniature black holes that get them, it's measuring the precise mass of the Higgs Boson.
> ...Pluto is only about 2300 km across while our own moon is about 3500 km across. Are we in a double-planet system, or > is there some logical reason you can think of for making a smaller object than our moon a planet while our moon is
> undeserving of the status?
Firstly, both Ganymede and Titan are larger than Mercury. Should we "demote" mercury from planetary status on the basis of this fact?
Secondly, yes, there are good logical reason, that have nothing to do with the absolute comparative sizes; the preliminary definition of "planet" (a definition that I consider to have been concise, logical, and scientificially _useful_, unlike the current botch-job) that would have given us an initial 12 planets, laid those reasons out quite well. It should be added that the Earth/Moon system does fall _very close_ to being a "double planet" system, but does not quite fulfill the criteria.
> And in the darkness bind them
I see you're sensibly predicting the first game to use this rendering technology will be "Doom 4",
which still won't provide ducttape for the flashlight.
That SCO is not this SCO, even though they've attempted to create that illusion with their name change. The "SCO" involved in this lawsuit is the company formerly known as Caldera - once, a major Linux distributor.
I've always considered this to be a borderline bug, since this also happens in wildcard expansion. If you do a "command *" in a directory where there are files beginning with a -, the wildcard will expand in a way that makes the command take the filename of file beginning with - as an option/argument. I've never found any "evil" way to exploit this, but it's always bothered me a bit.
Other than my somewhat sarcastic "wow" about the PC-on-a-card, I do agree with your rant - IBM are indeed the gods of virtualization.
Nitrogen tri-iodide is most certainly an explosive. If my memory from my days of making things go kaboom as a hobby, the measured power of NI3 was approximately three times that of common gunpowder, or half that of TNT, if you will. I don't remember what the name of the measurement scale was, but I remember some of the numbers: gunpowder: 37 Nitrogen Iodide: 110 TNT: 220 Nitroglycerin: 530. Someone whose knowledge is fresher can probably identify what "scale" that is.
I nearly blew out my eardrums by setting of a single crystal of NI3 some 3x3x1mm "big". It was possibly the _sharpest_ bang I've ever heard in my life. Made a cool purple cloud of vaporized iodine too. After that, I was careful to create only the tiniest amounts of NI3 at a time.
Your point sort of stands, though - I've never heard of anyone making a big enough batch of it to injure themselves. If you've actually seen it demonstrated and found out how insanely easy it goes off, once dry, you'd have to be exceedingly stupid to make more than a tiny bit at once. But then again, the Darwin Awards seem to have no shortage of people to nominate.
The fact that it's moving is only tricking you to think it isn't dead. You'll find out different when it eats your brains.
Hilarious. I've been missing a source this kind of humor since adequacy.org went down. Thanks for that link, bookmarked instantly. :)
I hadn't heard of this before. Mach 10 in 5 seconds sound insane. A rough calculation gets me 68G for that, or, interestingly, 666m/s^2. Yes, I'm cheating with the rounding, just to be able to say "Hellishly fast accelleration." :)
> The electronic components of the Sprint were designed to withstand accelerations of 100 times
> gravity
That, otoh, isn't all that impressive. The electronics in the two "penetrators" that were part of the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander were made to withstand 80000 G. They both failed to return any data, though, so they may not be the best example to compare to...
Well... you know, I wouldn't necessarily take that as hard evidence they weren't innocent at the time they were first caught. Being locked up for years without any kind of trial and accused of all sorts of shit when you knew you'd done nothing to deserve it just MIGHT incline you to get rather pissed off at your captors. Especially if you're surrounded by other prisoners whose arguments against the captor nation suddenly sound rather convincing.
Any innocents locked up there would be pretty prime recruiting material for any genuine al queda folks they might be mixed in with.
You missed the part about her being 6'2", right? I don't think there's a hell of a lot of "little girl" clothes around for 6'2" women. I barely even know any adult women that height.
> Again, I'm not talking about what we can do NOW. How many times do I need to explain
> this on Slashdot?
Then perhaps you shouldn't have given a link to a specific example of two "upcoming" drugs.
> Just imagine eating gourmet meals as much as you like and not having to exercise and
> still having a body like Usher.
Contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, you don't have to eat miniscule portions of bland crap and spend hours upon hours on the treadmill to look good and maintain a healthy bodyfat percentage. Usher's body gives me no reason for envy, and the only days I don't eat tasty meals are when I'm too lazy too cook something. Pills probably appeal most to people who labor under the myth that they'd have to "sacrifice" good eating in order to stay slim.
Moreover, even assuming other types of drugs are eventually invented, they'll have to work by either making you burn more calories (DNP already does this by raising body heat - unpleasant, and potentially lethal in overdose) or make the calories not get absorbed at all, which would leave you crapping nutrients. Honestly, I find the idea of this just a little bit ethically perverse, given that there are still tons of people dying of starvation in this world. Pharmaceutical research time and money could be spent on more important products than something that renders real food into tastebud-masturbation. Moral/ethical arguments and sentences like "money could be better spent" tends to annoy me when I see them, though, so I won't blame anyone for bitchslapping me with a good counter-argument on that particular point.
> Indeed. You should probably work on that.
That's what I'm trying to do. But apparently you think you countered rather than strengthened the point I was trying to make about the problems that arise when people on differing sides of a debate are operating on different definitions of the word describing the topic they are debating.
And please, do read that dictionary definition again. It may not spell out the words "the scientific method", but what, exactly do you think definition 1a, "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena." is describing? Moreover, if you're debating with someone who is on the "side" of science in this day and age, what do you think THEY mean when they use the word science?
If you'd thrown the word "science" into dictionary.com, which gives responses from several different dictionaries, you'd also have seen this among the results:
Main Entry: science
Pronunciation: 'sI-&n(t)s
Function: noun
: knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through the scientific method and concerned with the physical world and its phenomena
Source: Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.
Dictionaries will give you both common usage and specific usage definitions for words. If someone debating from a scientist's point of view uses the word "theory", which has a specific definition within science, and rather different defintion in common usage, both which a good dictionary will provide, which definition do you think will help you better understand what the other person was trying to say?
It all depends on whether you actually want to understand what the "opposing" side is trying to say, or if your goal is to score "points" by deliberately misinterpreting the intended meaning of the communication for the purpose of "scoring points" by twisting their words around. I just don't see the latter approach as being particularly fruitful, and I actually find it worth spending my time on writing posts like this simply in the hope of lowering the ratio of miscommunication in a discussion.
but those "anti-obsesity" drugs work by causing people to eat less. They're either appetite suppressors, or "fat blockers" (which ultimately force people to eat less fat, since eating fat when you eat a fat blocking drug tends to cause nasty oily diarrhea). So in the end, the people on these drugs _are_ eating less. The drug just aids or enforces self control, just like gastric bypass operations. So these people do end up eating less, just like regular diet & excercise people do, except they end up also making pharmaceutical companies rich in the process, and suffers nasty side effects if they gobble certain foods while still taking the drugs.
When it comes to the shuttle, there are just WAY too many things you wonder what the hell NASA was thinking. Thank god a replacement is finally on the way. I rather like the proposed shuttle-derived launch stack for the CEV and HLLV.
No, it wasn't _science_, because science is a modern word _defined_ as application of the scientific method as formalized by Newton & friends. Before Newton and even up to the time of Newton, it was called "natural philosophy". Earlier ages and other languages had yet other words. Getting nitpicky has nothing to do with "intellectual snobbery", it has to do with the fact that some words actually have rather strict definitions as to what they mean, and no discussion or debate about topics concerning these words will ever be fruitful if some of the debaters don't even know the proper meaning of the words they're using.
Invention, research and other progress of human knowledge - all things which for example the Aztecs, the ancient egyptians, the persians, the greeks etc did in spades - isn't the same as "science". Science is a specific and comparatively rather new _method_ to minimize the errors in the abovementioned progression of human knowledge, and that's an extremely important thing to keep in mind if you're going to debate the merits or limitations of "science".
Language is the tool we use to communicate, and if different sides in a debate keep redefining the meaning of the words used to decribe the core concepts being debated, then the language becomes meaningless, and thus, the debate itself will become meaningless, and both sides will be reduced to packs of monkeys trying to out-OOK each other.
Your survival scenarios are complete fantasy, I'm sorry to say.
There would have been no _reason_ for the Challenger crew to emergency-evacuate while still on the pad. The O-ring leak didn't show until well into flight. Saner minds making the decisions should have held off on the launch, but then there'd have been no accident at all.
Skydiving at maximum altitude is also preposterous. The cabin reached 66000 feet. The crew could not have remained conscious long enough to get outside even to take their chances with a parachute-less skydive - they had no pressure suits.
Columbia is more iffy - there might possibly have been modifications to the descent profile that could have at least increased the chances of surviveability. Going in upside down most certainly isn't one of them, though - that'd only have torn the shuttle apart far sooner.
In-space rescue, which might seem like the most obvious "fix", was sadly not very realistic either. They were not equipped to dock, either with the ISS (which they couldn't reach) or any supply ships that might have been possible to send either from the ISS or from the ground. Nor were they carrying equipment for spacewalks. There really wasn't anything that could have been done within the timeframe, even if they'd found out the damage on day one in orbit. Of course, one could start thinking of _really_ unpleasant scenarios like sacrificing part of the crew to make their supplies last long enough to mount some kind of rushed rescue operation (current russian "lifeboat" descent modules, which would be the only thing even remotely imagineable to get launched in time, only hold 3 people anyway), but even so, it seems highly unlikely it could be done on time, OR that anyone would have been willing to make that harsh a decision.
I'll leave it to any aeronautical engineers whether there _might_ have been a way to at least increase survival chances with a modified descent profile, though, but i seem to remember reading that there really weren't all that much that could be done, even with that.