Minnesota Department of Agriculture has a comparison of energy costs to produce different types of fuel. Treat this as a starting point for information.
People seem to forget that we don't pump oil out of the ground and into our gas tanks, it requires some serious refining. I've also heard that ethanol processing essentially removes the sugars from the corn, leaving a high-protein slurry that can be used as animal feed. Since it's high in protein and low in carbohydrates it's a more efficient feed and causes lower emissions from the cows. Heh.
I got a Vex starter kit before the official launch, and have built my first robot with it. The kit itself is much better than I expected. It comes with wheels, gears, metal body pieces and lots and lots of screws and nuts. You also get a number of motors and a servomotor as well as limit switch sensors and bumper triggers.
There is a very nice radio control unit that comes in the kit that allows for different controlling modes and has all kinds of adjustments for sensitivity and calibration. You can also change the crystals on the RC control and receiver to switch to different frequencies.
The best part is the microcontroller. It is similar in many ways to the LEGO Mindstorms RCX, with connection points for the motors and sensors. There is support for two simultaneous radio receivers so you can have dual control of the robot if you'd like. What makes this better than a RC model is that the microcontroller is actually part of the system. The squarebot that is described in the manual will cause a 2-second shutdown of the motors if you hit something with the bumper, ignoring input from the RC controller. There is also an autonomous mode in the microcontroller firmware that allows for backing up and turning when an obstacle is hit.
What will make Vex really nice is the release the programming module later this year. Essentially the kit contains the brains of the Vex robot already and the programming module is not much more than a jump drive that attaches to the microcontroller through a serial port. It looks like you detach the programming module, plug it into your computer via USB and program it, then reattach to the robot for the code to be executed.
The components included in the Vex starter kit are or will be available as separate kits, so one can have as many motors or servos as needed or add chain drive. Even the RC controller and RC receiver are separate, so you can add that second controller if you'd like.
I've been playing SWG for over a year and am a fairly hardcore player. My main character is a Master Droid Engineer, Master Shipwright and Pistoleer. My primary role is a crafter but I've been fairly decent in combat with pistols and have gone with groups through the Death Watch Bunker (one of the toughest theme parks) a few times. I've also been in 2-4 person hunting parties that have taken out Krayt Dragons. I'm a decent fighter but by no means elite.
The CU (Combat Upgrade) is one of many major upgrades I've lived through. Whenever a major revamp happens, there are invariable a lot of complaints as things change and some of peoples' favorite moves get nerfed:
Bounty Hunters had their combat skills nerfed for game balance.
Commandos also had their skills nerfed for game balance.
Creature Handlers had who could use high-level pets taken away from them, then mounts added, then vehicles reduced the demand for mounts.
Droid Engineers had combat probots made useless and then a droid revamp that broadened the spectrum of droid functionality.
Entertainers and Chefs benefited from major changes that made their professions more relevant to the game.
Every major change in the game has caused a lot of complaining from the affected professions (except the droid revamp and the entertainer/chef changes). In some cases, like the CH and DE changes, the game play was radically altered. Combat Upgrade is having the same impact with the difference being it goes beyond a single profession.
My impression after playing CU for a couple of days is that it's a different mindset from the previous combat system, and that's what's causing a lot of the hard feelings.
In the previous system, you would choose a combat profession and your skills would be defined by that profession. So Pistoleer had special pistol moves, Rifleman had special rifle moves, etc. The weapons you were certified to use were also dependent on your profession and level. As a pistoleer I could not use any rifles without huge penalties, because I had no certification in rifles. Same was true of melee skills.
The CU has disassociated the combat professions from the weapons and skills one can use. Pistoleer now is essentially just a grouping of a certain type of combat skills. I can use any ranged weapon I'm certified for with those skills, be it a pistol or rifle or carbine. Weapon certification is now based on combat level, with only a few weapons reserved for master level skills. Fan shot used to be a pistol-only skill. I can now use fan shot with any ranged weapon. I've jokingly thought of getting sniper from the rifleman profession so I can do sniper shots with a pistol. I'd be limited by the pistol range but would have the special attack of higher accuracy and higher damage.
What this means is that my character is no longer a Pistoleer per se, just that I've chosen to learn the Pistoleer profession skills to use when I'm fighting. I can mix and match from multiple ranged weapon professions and create hybrid capabilities to apply when fighting.
The other big impact of the CU is that players can no longer act invincible, able to solo some of the biggest creatures like Krayt Dragons. This is a bitter pill to swallow for some of the "arcade" players who want to run around blasting everything. The CU now requires tactical awareness and decisions when fighting, not just queueing up your most powerful shot and keeping an eye on your health. Combat now takes active involvement from the player, and encounters aren't over in a minute or two like they used to be.
I think the CU is a positive step forward for the game. It certainly isn't any worse than the previous combat system, just different. There will no doubt be some patches in the coming weeks to adjust the balance but that's to be expected with changes this big.
I'm sure some players will be put off permanently by the CU, but the rest of us will adapt to it. Finally, I think the release of Episode III and the Rage of the Wookiees upgrade will bring a lot of new players to the game who will never have known the old system and they will have no problem with how combat works.
Java 5 (Tiger) is not included in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). But Apple's got it under development and I'd suspect there'll be a Java update to Java 5 within a short period. Apple's been making test builds available to developers.
Dean Kaman is doing more things. He just launched his Vex Robotics. This is the robotics kit that is a step up from LEGO Mindstorms. Essentially based on Dean Kaman's FIRST competition, this is a commercialized manufactured robotics kit.
I've just about finished assembling my first robot with the kit, and the kit is what I've been waiting for since I could solder stuff together (no soldering required). It's real metal parts and real radio control and soon real programming. Radio Shack is the exclusive outlet for these, and they sell all of the sensors, gears and wheels, motors and other parts as individual components, so one can upgrade their robot as much as necessary.
I've already gotten my Vex Robotics starter kit from Radio Shack, and it's pretty impressive. This is a commercialized version of Kaman's FIRST competition kits. In fact, FIRST is now using the Vex kits.
What makes the Vex kits nice is the real microcontrollers and impressive transmitter. Very nice packaging of all of the robotic stuff. Unlike Lego Mindstorms, these use real screws and nuts and can be used as a foundation for real robotic projects.
While the starter kit is $300 (it gives you everything to make robots except batteries), I believe there's an educational discount of some sort. You can also buy the individual components at Radio Shack, so you can piece together whatever you need. I stopped buying components at Radio Shack years ago, but I have a feeling I'll be spending a lot of money on sensors and motors there.
I solved the problem by routing around the providers' poor DNS servers by pointing my home LAN to my own DNS server on my colo box. I run a DNS server in my house which then identifies my colo DNS server(s) with the forwarders option. Instead of relying on who-knows-what from the ISPs I use my own DNS server that I set up and am responsible for.
I know it's not a solution for everyone, but it does let me avoid stupidity. And having my own, reliable DNS server sure came in handy recently since Comcast has been having bad DNS problems the last couple of weeks.
I found tar to be a dated format that has no checksumming of individual files. I ran into a situation where a large tarball was made, and tar tf foo.tar done to verify it. A later attempt at extract failed due to corruption.
There are horrors that arise with tar. First, there are multiple tar record formats. The original tar only supported 14-character file names (original unix file system limitation). Along came a second tar format, but even that ended up with variants. Most people are using the GNU tar format these days, but the old stuff still crops up. Heck, early versions of Mac OS X had two separate commands (tar, gnutar) because of this.
The worst, however, is the streaming nature of tar. A tar file header contains the length of the file data. It is assumed the data immediately following that are another tar file header. If you have corruption you get "lost" in the data stream and very few tar implementations will find a resync point so you can recover files later in the stream.
I had the joy of needing to do just this to recover as much as I could from a corrupt tarball. It was kind of a fun java exercise, but after I was done I swore I'd never use tar again for archiving data. Zip is my choice now. It's supported everywhere (even Java's jar files are zip format) and is much more reliable than tar.
It's easy to look at technology that we use every day and know so intimately and disregard it as mundane. But think of the people who don't read/. for fun, the non-techies. What we take for granted they may marvel at.
The Apple II was revolutionary because it successfully moved home computing from kits to mass appeal. The Apple II flooded schools, giving a generation of children hands-on experience with computers. Apple did it first on a wide scale, if not best. The success of the Apple II also pushed IBM into the PC market.
The Macintosh was revolutionary because it brought the graphical user interface to everyday use. Predecessors tried and failed (including Apple's Lisa). But at the time the Macintosh hit the market, the command-line mentality was entrenched. I remember vividly reading monthly screeds railing against icons and the mouse by major voices in the computer industry. Where are we now? The GUI dominates everything, for good reason. It makes the computer a more accessible tool, even if far from perfect.
The other, less recognized, benefit of the Macintosh is the blossoming of desktop publishing and image editing. With Mac OS and laser printers people were able to create beautiful, expressive documents instead of just printouts. Coupled with the GUI it led to a much easier way to lay out all aspects of the page before printing. Photoshop provided similar ease of use for image manipulation on the Mac.
Sony's Walkman, while not a spectacular device from a purely technical standpoint, was revolutionary because it gave everyone portable music. The iPod seems to be heading in the same direction for digital music, even though the iPod is far from the first mp3 player.
Revolutions are not founded just on brilliant technology but on the right mixture of technology with social acceptance, like Henry Ford who altered the course of society by mass-producing the automobile. Changing the way people conduct their lives should be the measure of what is and is not revolutionary, not whether or not the technology is something unique.
Starship Troopers is one of the worst adaptations of a movie I can think of. They eliminated the powered armor, a centerpiece of the setting for the book. While the movie managed to not be horrible, it certainly is not related to Heinlein's book in any significant way. The Doom movie sounds like it will be worse.
I got a Nikon Coolpix 3100 a couple years ago. I've been very happy with it as a 3MP point-and-shoot compact camera. It's small enough to carry around with much better image quality than a phonecam.
Since I want to pretend I can take decent photos, I couldn't resist the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20. While "only" a 5MP camera, it's the better controls that attracted me. It's got full manual capabilities such as control of shutter speed, aperture and manual focus. It also has the nice auto-focus capabilities and shooting modes like the compact cameras.
Since the FZ20 is only about $500 (street price), it's significantly cheaper than true DSLRs and gives me the flexibility of photography I've always wanted. It even has interchangeable lenses. Considering the cutting-edge pocket cameras are in the $500 price range it's a hell of a buy.
Portable cassette tape players (are they still around?) had no display. In the pre-digital age we'd have to put the tape in, press play for a few seconds, hit fast-forward, press play, etc. The luxury of finding "next song" didn't even exist. Sony managed to sell millions of those things.
I'll grant that we are living in a different technological age and people's expectations are higher. But I think it should be possible to come up with a usable no-display device that people won't mind, even if it's not as nice as a player with a display. There's a lot of mini FM radios on the market that have tuning without a display, which people seem to buy.
SWG is not the same game it was a year ago, and I like the organic nature. I actually appreciate that SOE is willing to invest in rethinking major parts of the game, mostly driven by user feedback. Any good software evolves over its life cycle. And in an MMOG it's impossible to know what the in-game dynamics are going to be until you have an active population.
I know a lot of people get frustrated when their chosen profession gets nerfed, but you should just roll with the punches and treat them as new challenges. Think of it as similar to adding a new quest. As a Droid Engineer I went through some major revamps of the way droids work, but the end result has been better for the game. And while I have sympathy for Creature Handlers who went from the most envied profession to insignificance, it is much more Star Wars-like to use droids and vehicles than it was when everyone had three pets.
The loot revamp serves to respond to how much players like loot, adding more dimension to the loot drop experience. Everyone loves getting low-use schematics to craft rare items and the revamp is expanding on that idea.
Combat on the ground is a big issue, being very much a turn-based experience. You queue up your actions and hope they beat out the sequence of actions your opponent (player or mob) queues up. The JTL expansion has FPS combat between ships, which is in sharp contrast to the ground combat system. A better system for combat is definitely desired.
The combat revamp was delayed by the JTL expansion. While JTL isn't perfect, they did manage to essentially add a second complete game to SWG, integrating it very well with those who don't have the expansion. The most interesting thing about JTL is how it has drastically altered the economy. Prior to JTL resources were selling for about 1 credit per unit, now the resources needed for making ships are going for as high as 10-15 credits per unit. This is happening on all servers and is confirmed by reading the shipwright profession forum.
JTL's ship combat is FPS like Tachyon or Starlancer or similar. It's pretty nice compared to the turn-based combat on the ground. What they've done for higher-level pilots are extra ship skills. There are also different levels of responsiveness for ships and ship components, altering things like energy regeneration and rate of fire. It doesn't change the FPS feel, but not everyone fights at the same level. It is now not just natural ability but also how good the gear is that you can put together for your ship.
..."Keep right except to pass" is only some sort of helpful tip.
In the state I live in it is, in fact, just that. We have no law requiring you to keep right. If you live in a populous metro area it is unreasonable to expect inner lanes to be clear. The lanes exist to hold traffic, not to provide clear lanes for speeding.
If I'm going at or above the speed limit and you feel a need to pass me, it becomes your problem to move around me. I'm holding a constant speed and choosing the lane that lets me experience the smoothest flow. Since entrance and exit ramps tend to be on the right side, I'm most likely to be in the left lane until I near my exit. And the speed limit is not "catch up to person in front of me".
In my commuting it's become clear to me that most humans shouldn't control vehicles. Too many of them drive erratically, creating traffic flow problems by changing speed and weaving between lanes.And there are the idiots who think there's only accelerate and brake. Few seem to understand coasting is a way to slow down without causing a compression wave from your brake lights. Commuting would be so nice if we all had mass transit or Johnny Cabs.
I don't think these electronic voting machine problems should be characterized as trivial "glitches". They are complete failures of the software, since the whole purpose of these machines is to accurately count votes. Would losing a few hundred database records at your company be considered a glitch?
By referring to these problems as glitches, the media are downplaying the severity of the problem. Regardless of the candidates, if voting can not be reliable and verifiable people lose trust in the process and the outcomes will always be questioned. We either want democracy in the United States or we do not. But using technology that fails in its basic function should not be acceptable.
This reminds me of BITNET, an alternate attempt at creating a network. While never using it directly, I remember BITNET protocols being funky, email being handled differently and BITNET mostly just not adapting to new protocols or the internet very well. What started out as an idea to be a new type of network ended up becoming brittle and outdated. Different does not mean better. Good luck, Government, on your defense contractor-driven project where nothing can be changed without a minimum of 18 months of project management and millions of dollars.
Well, that and how many mountain dews they can drink without having to go to the bathroom.
Hah! I read that and thought to myself, "Mountain dewbacks? Why do Jedi need to hunt those?" Augh, I'm playing too much.
With the JTL expansion traveling is much quicker since you can use your own ship and go directly to your destination without actually loading the "space" stuff. No more waiting for the shuttle to arrive, although the waiting is a realistic experience. Now every player will have their own personal shuttle. And if you use a multi-occupancy ship everyone in your group gets sucked along. One interesting thing, however, is that your ship must have light speed capabilities or you are unable to go to to another system.
Another note on traveling is your ship remains where you dock it. So if you use your ship to go to Mos Eisley, then take the public shuttle to Theed, you'll be unable to use your ship to travel because it's parked in Mos Eisley even though you still have the ship in your datapad as a posession. That's a very nice little detail.
Herman Miller's Mirra chair is the Aeron's downscaled sibling. It's much cheaper, yet offers most of the same features. Some reviews even say it's on par with the Aeron.
Yes, code to the standards. I test with a gecko-based browser and Safari (khtml/Web Kit). Those two renderers bring you as close to the standards as you can get. And by testing against both you have a decent comparison for those vague parts of the standards.
MSIE's rendering is out of date. Microsoft crushed Netscape and then stopped working on their browser. If people want to see my web content they can damned well get a modern browser. Screw MSIE, screw the users who insist on using it, and screw bad browsers.
I recently made master droid engineer. By choosing not to grind, but to progress "naturally" through doing business, I had a more enjoyable experience and a process that lasted a few months. It gave me a reason to play the game instead of racing through the content as quickly as possible.
The recently-added droid stuff really improved things. Droids are more complex and there is a greater variety. I was concerned that when I mastered the DE profession I'd lose interest, but I find myself making more droids than ever. Sales are good, people seem to find the droids useful finally.
As the analysis pointed out, most droid changes are for utility functions. This has been great, players find more use for droids than just fighting. There is a sizable population of players who aren't interested in running combat missions, and they are the ones who seem to add the most depth to the game (not to knock the fighters).
The analysis did get wrong, however, the point that droids can't be healed by players. Droid engineers can make repair kits that anyone can use, and droids can be equipped with an auto-repair module that actually repairs all droids (including itself) within a radius. This greatly improves the survivability of droids in combat. And with the changes to droid combat, more types of droids can fight, with different models doing different types of damage.
The Jedi effect isn't really noticeable if you don't engage in PvP. It will be interesting to see how things change after the Jedi update is finished. Apparently the next update will create a two-tier Jedi system, with a limited number of Jedi players being able to engage in PvP and the other Jedi players only going after mobs. And after that comes a reworking of the Galactic Civil War, which should help the Star Wars-iness.
Finally, the space expansion sounds like it will essentially be a second game on the server, which could be cool. The current combat system is turn-based but the space expansion is supposed to be FPS-style combat, which will appeal to many. And it is very cool that the players are the ones who will make and sell the spaceships.
Let's stop IE at the webserver. Someone needs to create mod_noie, which returns a page to download FireFox and/or Mozilla if it detects the user is using MSIE. Warn the user they have an insecure browser that's hurting the internet and they need to upgrade.
It worked for Microsoft to squelch DR-DOS, didn't it? Turnabout is fair play.
amazon can sell music cd's across europe, why can't apple sell music files across europe?
I suspect the difference is that Amazon.com just ships around pre-made physical goods, whereas iTunes Music Store offers digital downloading. It's essentially a completely new form of commerce.
Apple needs to convince the labels that they want to offer their product through iTMS, hence the need to negotiate deals. Apple has also said the labels make the actual music files, not Apple. So again, Apple has to convince the labels to put effort into encoding their products for iTMS.
Anyone know of current radio plays? I heard some good stuff on an in-flight audio broadcast and would sure like to find modern stuff in the vein of Old Time Radio shows.
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Minnesota Department of Agriculture has a comparison of energy costs to produce different types of fuel. Treat this as a starting point for information.
People seem to forget that we don't pump oil out of the ground and into our gas tanks, it requires some serious refining. I've also heard that ethanol processing essentially removes the sugars from the corn, leaving a high-protein slurry that can be used as animal feed. Since it's high in protein and low in carbohydrates it's a more efficient feed and causes lower emissions from the cows. Heh.
I got a Vex starter kit before the official launch, and have built my first robot with it. The kit itself is much better than I expected. It comes with wheels, gears, metal body pieces and lots and lots of screws and nuts. You also get a number of motors and a servomotor as well as limit switch sensors and bumper triggers.
There is a very nice radio control unit that comes in the kit that allows for different controlling modes and has all kinds of adjustments for sensitivity and calibration. You can also change the crystals on the RC control and receiver to switch to different frequencies.
The best part is the microcontroller. It is similar in many ways to the LEGO Mindstorms RCX, with connection points for the motors and sensors. There is support for two simultaneous radio receivers so you can have dual control of the robot if you'd like. What makes this better than a RC model is that the microcontroller is actually part of the system. The squarebot that is described in the manual will cause a 2-second shutdown of the motors if you hit something with the bumper, ignoring input from the RC controller. There is also an autonomous mode in the microcontroller firmware that allows for backing up and turning when an obstacle is hit.
What will make Vex really nice is the release the programming module later this year. Essentially the kit contains the brains of the Vex robot already and the programming module is not much more than a jump drive that attaches to the microcontroller through a serial port. It looks like you detach the programming module, plug it into your computer via USB and program it, then reattach to the robot for the code to be executed.
The components included in the Vex starter kit are or will be available as separate kits, so one can have as many motors or servos as needed or add chain drive. Even the RC controller and RC receiver are separate, so you can add that second controller if you'd like.
The CU (Combat Upgrade) is one of many major upgrades I've lived through. Whenever a major revamp happens, there are invariable a lot of complaints as things change and some of peoples' favorite moves get nerfed:
Every major change in the game has caused a lot of complaining from the affected professions (except the droid revamp and the entertainer/chef changes). In some cases, like the CH and DE changes, the game play was radically altered. Combat Upgrade is having the same impact with the difference being it goes beyond a single profession.
My impression after playing CU for a couple of days is that it's a different mindset from the previous combat system, and that's what's causing a lot of the hard feelings.
In the previous system, you would choose a combat profession and your skills would be defined by that profession. So Pistoleer had special pistol moves, Rifleman had special rifle moves, etc. The weapons you were certified to use were also dependent on your profession and level. As a pistoleer I could not use any rifles without huge penalties, because I had no certification in rifles. Same was true of melee skills.
The CU has disassociated the combat professions from the weapons and skills one can use. Pistoleer now is essentially just a grouping of a certain type of combat skills. I can use any ranged weapon I'm certified for with those skills, be it a pistol or rifle or carbine. Weapon certification is now based on combat level, with only a few weapons reserved for master level skills. Fan shot used to be a pistol-only skill. I can now use fan shot with any ranged weapon. I've jokingly thought of getting sniper from the rifleman profession so I can do sniper shots with a pistol. I'd be limited by the pistol range but would have the special attack of higher accuracy and higher damage.
What this means is that my character is no longer a Pistoleer per se, just that I've chosen to learn the Pistoleer profession skills to use when I'm fighting. I can mix and match from multiple ranged weapon professions and create hybrid capabilities to apply when fighting.
The other big impact of the CU is that players can no longer act invincible, able to solo some of the biggest creatures like Krayt Dragons. This is a bitter pill to swallow for some of the "arcade" players who want to run around blasting everything. The CU now requires tactical awareness and decisions when fighting, not just queueing up your most powerful shot and keeping an eye on your health. Combat now takes active involvement from the player, and encounters aren't over in a minute or two like they used to be.
I think the CU is a positive step forward for the game. It certainly isn't any worse than the previous combat system, just different. There will no doubt be some patches in the coming weeks to adjust the balance but that's to be expected with changes this big.
I'm sure some players will be put off permanently by the CU, but the rest of us will adapt to it. Finally, I think the release of Episode III and the Rage of the Wookiees upgrade will bring a lot of new players to the game who will never have known the old system and they will have no problem with how combat works.
Java 5 (Tiger) is not included in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). But Apple's got it under development and I'd suspect there'll be a Java update to Java 5 within a short period. Apple's been making test builds available to developers.
Dean Kaman is doing more things. He just launched his Vex Robotics. This is the robotics kit that is a step up from LEGO Mindstorms. Essentially based on Dean Kaman's FIRST competition, this is a commercialized manufactured robotics kit.
I've just about finished assembling my first robot with the kit, and the kit is what I've been waiting for since I could solder stuff together (no soldering required). It's real metal parts and real radio control and soon real programming. Radio Shack is the exclusive outlet for these, and they sell all of the sensors, gears and wheels, motors and other parts as individual components, so one can upgrade their robot as much as necessary.
I've already gotten my Vex Robotics starter kit from Radio Shack, and it's pretty impressive. This is a commercialized version of Kaman's FIRST competition kits. In fact, FIRST is now using the Vex kits.
What makes the Vex kits nice is the real microcontrollers and impressive transmitter. Very nice packaging of all of the robotic stuff. Unlike Lego Mindstorms, these use real screws and nuts and can be used as a foundation for real robotic projects.
While the starter kit is $300 (it gives you everything to make robots except batteries), I believe there's an educational discount of some sort. You can also buy the individual components at Radio Shack, so you can piece together whatever you need. I stopped buying components at Radio Shack years ago, but I have a feeling I'll be spending a lot of money on sensors and motors there.
I solved the problem by routing around the providers' poor DNS servers by pointing my home LAN to my own DNS server on my colo box. I run a DNS server in my house which then identifies my colo DNS server(s) with the forwarders option. Instead of relying on who-knows-what from the ISPs I use my own DNS server that I set up and am responsible for.
I know it's not a solution for everyone, but it does let me avoid stupidity. And having my own, reliable DNS server sure came in handy recently since Comcast has been having bad DNS problems the last couple of weeks.
I found tar to be a dated format that has no checksumming of individual files. I ran into a situation where a large tarball was made, and tar tf foo.tar done to verify it. A later attempt at extract failed due to corruption.
There are horrors that arise with tar. First, there are multiple tar record formats. The original tar only supported 14-character file names (original unix file system limitation). Along came a second tar format, but even that ended up with variants. Most people are using the GNU tar format these days, but the old stuff still crops up. Heck, early versions of Mac OS X had two separate commands (tar, gnutar) because of this.
The worst, however, is the streaming nature of tar. A tar file header contains the length of the file data. It is assumed the data immediately following that are another tar file header. If you have corruption you get "lost" in the data stream and very few tar implementations will find a resync point so you can recover files later in the stream.
I had the joy of needing to do just this to recover as much as I could from a corrupt tarball. It was kind of a fun java exercise, but after I was done I swore I'd never use tar again for archiving data. Zip is my choice now. It's supported everywhere (even Java's jar files are zip format) and is much more reliable than tar.
It's easy to look at technology that we use every day and know so intimately and disregard it as mundane. But think of the people who don't read /. for fun, the non-techies. What we take for granted they may marvel at.
The Apple II was revolutionary because it successfully moved home computing from kits to mass appeal. The Apple II flooded schools, giving a generation of children hands-on experience with computers. Apple did it first on a wide scale, if not best. The success of the Apple II also pushed IBM into the PC market.
The Macintosh was revolutionary because it brought the graphical user interface to everyday use. Predecessors tried and failed (including Apple's Lisa). But at the time the Macintosh hit the market, the command-line mentality was entrenched. I remember vividly reading monthly screeds railing against icons and the mouse by major voices in the computer industry. Where are we now? The GUI dominates everything, for good reason. It makes the computer a more accessible tool, even if far from perfect.
The other, less recognized, benefit of the Macintosh is the blossoming of desktop publishing and image editing. With Mac OS and laser printers people were able to create beautiful, expressive documents instead of just printouts. Coupled with the GUI it led to a much easier way to lay out all aspects of the page before printing. Photoshop provided similar ease of use for image manipulation on the Mac.
Sony's Walkman, while not a spectacular device from a purely technical standpoint, was revolutionary because it gave everyone portable music. The iPod seems to be heading in the same direction for digital music, even though the iPod is far from the first mp3 player.
Revolutions are not founded just on brilliant technology but on the right mixture of technology with social acceptance, like Henry Ford who altered the course of society by mass-producing the automobile. Changing the way people conduct their lives should be the measure of what is and is not revolutionary, not whether or not the technology is something unique.
Starship Troopers is one of the worst adaptations of a movie I can think of. They eliminated the powered armor, a centerpiece of the setting for the book. While the movie managed to not be horrible, it certainly is not related to Heinlein's book in any significant way. The Doom movie sounds like it will be worse.
I got a Nikon Coolpix 3100 a couple years ago. I've been very happy with it as a 3MP point-and-shoot compact camera. It's small enough to carry around with much better image quality than a phonecam.
Since I want to pretend I can take decent photos, I couldn't resist the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20. While "only" a 5MP camera, it's the better controls that attracted me. It's got full manual capabilities such as control of shutter speed, aperture and manual focus. It also has the nice auto-focus capabilities and shooting modes like the compact cameras.
Since the FZ20 is only about $500 (street price), it's significantly cheaper than true DSLRs and gives me the flexibility of photography I've always wanted. It even has interchangeable lenses. Considering the cutting-edge pocket cameras are in the $500 price range it's a hell of a buy.
Portable cassette tape players (are they still around?) had no display. In the pre-digital age we'd have to put the tape in, press play for a few seconds, hit fast-forward, press play, etc. The luxury of finding "next song" didn't even exist. Sony managed to sell millions of those things.
I'll grant that we are living in a different technological age and people's expectations are higher. But I think it should be possible to come up with a usable no-display device that people won't mind, even if it's not as nice as a player with a display. There's a lot of mini FM radios on the market that have tuning without a display, which people seem to buy.
SWG is not the same game it was a year ago, and I like the organic nature. I actually appreciate that SOE is willing to invest in rethinking major parts of the game, mostly driven by user feedback. Any good software evolves over its life cycle. And in an MMOG it's impossible to know what the in-game dynamics are going to be until you have an active population.
I know a lot of people get frustrated when their chosen profession gets nerfed, but you should just roll with the punches and treat them as new challenges. Think of it as similar to adding a new quest. As a Droid Engineer I went through some major revamps of the way droids work, but the end result has been better for the game. And while I have sympathy for Creature Handlers who went from the most envied profession to insignificance, it is much more Star Wars-like to use droids and vehicles than it was when everyone had three pets.
The loot revamp serves to respond to how much players like loot, adding more dimension to the loot drop experience. Everyone loves getting low-use schematics to craft rare items and the revamp is expanding on that idea.
Combat on the ground is a big issue, being very much a turn-based experience. You queue up your actions and hope they beat out the sequence of actions your opponent (player or mob) queues up. The JTL expansion has FPS combat between ships, which is in sharp contrast to the ground combat system. A better system for combat is definitely desired.
The combat revamp was delayed by the JTL expansion. While JTL isn't perfect, they did manage to essentially add a second complete game to SWG, integrating it very well with those who don't have the expansion. The most interesting thing about JTL is how it has drastically altered the economy. Prior to JTL resources were selling for about 1 credit per unit, now the resources needed for making ships are going for as high as 10-15 credits per unit. This is happening on all servers and is confirmed by reading the shipwright profession forum.
JTL's ship combat is FPS like Tachyon or Starlancer or similar. It's pretty nice compared to the turn-based combat on the ground. What they've done for higher-level pilots are extra ship skills. There are also different levels of responsiveness for ships and ship components, altering things like energy regeneration and rate of fire. It doesn't change the FPS feel, but not everyone fights at the same level. It is now not just natural ability but also how good the gear is that you can put together for your ship.
..."Keep right except to pass" is only some sort of helpful tip.
In the state I live in it is, in fact, just that. We have no law requiring you to keep right. If you live in a populous metro area it is unreasonable to expect inner lanes to be clear. The lanes exist to hold traffic, not to provide clear lanes for speeding.
If I'm going at or above the speed limit and you feel a need to pass me, it becomes your problem to move around me. I'm holding a constant speed and choosing the lane that lets me experience the smoothest flow. Since entrance and exit ramps tend to be on the right side, I'm most likely to be in the left lane until I near my exit. And the speed limit is not "catch up to person in front of me".
In my commuting it's become clear to me that most humans shouldn't control vehicles. Too many of them drive erratically, creating traffic flow problems by changing speed and weaving between lanes.And there are the idiots who think there's only accelerate and brake. Few seem to understand coasting is a way to slow down without causing a compression wave from your brake lights. Commuting would be so nice if we all had mass transit or Johnny Cabs.
I don't think these electronic voting machine problems should be characterized as trivial "glitches". They are complete failures of the software, since the whole purpose of these machines is to accurately count votes. Would losing a few hundred database records at your company be considered a glitch?
By referring to these problems as glitches, the media are downplaying the severity of the problem. Regardless of the candidates, if voting can not be reliable and verifiable people lose trust in the process and the outcomes will always be questioned. We either want democracy in the United States or we do not. But using technology that fails in its basic function should not be acceptable.
This reminds me of BITNET, an alternate attempt at creating a network. While never using it directly, I remember BITNET protocols being funky, email being handled differently and BITNET mostly just not adapting to new protocols or the internet very well. What started out as an idea to be a new type of network ended up becoming brittle and outdated. Different does not mean better. Good luck, Government, on your defense contractor-driven project where nothing can be changed without a minimum of 18 months of project management and millions of dollars.
Well, that and how many mountain dews they can drink without having to go to the bathroom.
Hah! I read that and thought to myself, "Mountain dewbacks? Why do Jedi need to hunt those?" Augh, I'm playing too much.
With the JTL expansion traveling is much quicker since you can use your own ship and go directly to your destination without actually loading the "space" stuff. No more waiting for the shuttle to arrive, although the waiting is a realistic experience. Now every player will have their own personal shuttle. And if you use a multi-occupancy ship everyone in your group gets sucked along. One interesting thing, however, is that your ship must have light speed capabilities or you are unable to go to to another system.
Another note on traveling is your ship remains where you dock it. So if you use your ship to go to Mos Eisley, then take the public shuttle to Theed, you'll be unable to use your ship to travel because it's parked in Mos Eisley even though you still have the ship in your datapad as a posession. That's a very nice little detail.
Herman Miller's Mirra chair is the Aeron's downscaled sibling. It's much cheaper, yet offers most of the same features. Some reviews even say it's on par with the Aeron.
Yes, code to the standards. I test with a gecko-based browser and Safari (khtml/Web Kit). Those two renderers bring you as close to the standards as you can get. And by testing against both you have a decent comparison for those vague parts of the standards.
MSIE's rendering is out of date. Microsoft crushed Netscape and then stopped working on their browser. If people want to see my web content they can damned well get a modern browser. Screw MSIE, screw the users who insist on using it, and screw bad browsers.
I recently made master droid engineer. By choosing not to grind, but to progress "naturally" through doing business, I had a more enjoyable experience and a process that lasted a few months. It gave me a reason to play the game instead of racing through the content as quickly as possible.
The recently-added droid stuff really improved things. Droids are more complex and there is a greater variety. I was concerned that when I mastered the DE profession I'd lose interest, but I find myself making more droids than ever. Sales are good, people seem to find the droids useful finally.
As the analysis pointed out, most droid changes are for utility functions. This has been great, players find more use for droids than just fighting. There is a sizable population of players who aren't interested in running combat missions, and they are the ones who seem to add the most depth to the game (not to knock the fighters).
The analysis did get wrong, however, the point that droids can't be healed by players. Droid engineers can make repair kits that anyone can use, and droids can be equipped with an auto-repair module that actually repairs all droids (including itself) within a radius. This greatly improves the survivability of droids in combat. And with the changes to droid combat, more types of droids can fight, with different models doing different types of damage.
The Jedi effect isn't really noticeable if you don't engage in PvP. It will be interesting to see how things change after the Jedi update is finished. Apparently the next update will create a two-tier Jedi system, with a limited number of Jedi players being able to engage in PvP and the other Jedi players only going after mobs. And after that comes a reworking of the Galactic Civil War, which should help the Star Wars-iness.
Finally, the space expansion sounds like it will essentially be a second game on the server, which could be cool. The current combat system is turn-based but the space expansion is supposed to be FPS-style combat, which will appeal to many. And it is very cool that the players are the ones who will make and sell the spaceships.
Let's stop IE at the webserver. Someone needs to create mod_noie, which returns a page to download FireFox and/or Mozilla if it detects the user is using MSIE. Warn the user they have an insecure browser that's hurting the internet and they need to upgrade.
It worked for Microsoft to squelch DR-DOS, didn't it? Turnabout is fair play.
amazon can sell music cd's across europe, why can't apple sell music files across europe?
I suspect the difference is that Amazon.com just ships around pre-made physical goods, whereas iTunes Music Store offers digital downloading. It's essentially a completely new form of commerce.
Apple needs to convince the labels that they want to offer their product through iTMS, hence the need to negotiate deals. Apple has also said the labels make the actual music files, not Apple. So again, Apple has to convince the labels to put effort into encoding their products for iTMS.
Anyone know of current radio plays? I heard some good stuff on an in-flight audio broadcast and would sure like to find modern stuff in the vein of Old Time Radio shows.