Around the world, 24 private ventures are vying for the $10 million awaiting successful garage rocket scientists.
I've only read about 5 or 6 of the ventures, pretty much all of them American or European teams. Anyone know if any "real" contenders for the X-Prize are elsewhere in the world? Wouldn't it be neat if we're all surprised some day by some little known (in the West) team that takes the prize?
Do players need a purse or handbag to put their valuables in, or is there no way to cure the distracted real-life state of an avid gamer?
Well d'uh. If you're going to let thieves simply pick up your stuff from the PC beside you, you might as well provide a nice bag for them to put it all in.
It's going to be great watching the data come back from the 4 (I think) probes to Mars. There should be a lot of interesting video and photos over the next couple months. I hope all of the probes make the journey in one piece.
BTW. Anyone know how "spread out" these probes are supposed to land? I hope that at least one is aimed at one of the polar regions.
One more thing, to all people who say, "So what, Mars almost as close every 15 years." Well, how long do you expect to live? Every 15 years is somewhere between 3-5 chances in the average lifetime. So, go stare at Mars for a while, it isn't this "big" in the sky every day ya know.
Tape always comes in handy. What's the rlie? Duct tape to make things stop, WD-40 to make things go.
I generally keep the WD-40 away from the PC's, but tape has all sorts of uses. Such as:
taping up (network) cable ends so they don't snag or fray whlie pliling them through walls or other tight spaces
bunching up cables inside a PC to make things neater or have better air flow or stop jamming the CPU fan(!)
strategic placement to prevent or minimize rattles and other noises in the case. A little tape here and there can often prevent annoying resonating vibrations.
holding things in place temporarliy (or permanently). Especially handy if it's a real hassel to put things together with only two hands.
Great tips.
I'd like to emphasize on one point. Do NOT overcharge rechargeable batteries! It kills them very quickly. In fact, I'm wary of leaving batteries in any charger as a 'hot spare'.
I've had pretty good success recharing NiMH's using an old charger purchased when NiCD's were the only game in town for rechargables. It's one of the trickle charge type. It seems to work fine. BUT I use a cheap timer (the type often used for lamps) to turn the charger off after 8-12 hours depending on how long I intend to charge the batteries. If you want to get really fancy, you can set your timer so that it will keep batteries topped up by charging them for 10 minutes or so everyday.
I think overcharging created most of my dislike for NiCD's, though it was really an ID10T issue. =)
Certainly I'd agree that Apollo was a better run and much more successful project, but didn't the moon race consume something in the neighbourhood of 10% of the US GDP at the time?
To attempt to put that in perspective, if you think that the war on Iraq was/is expensive, try multiplying it by 10* to get an idea of how much Apollo cost.
What could people really expect? Once the moon race was over, there really was no place for NASA spending to go but down. Less money = Less resource = Less cool stuff that you can pull off.
* Being Canadian, I have excused myself from looking up completely accurate figures. My back of an envelope calculations actually give me closer to 1000 times more expensive (relative to GDP), but that seems rather high... Someone who knows better please feel free to correct me.
Yeah, I recently looked at phpNuke for the first time. It appears they are doing something along the lines of your concept #1. The "club" version is now 6.8 with presumably enhanced features, while the "public" version is 6.5. It seems to be a fair system to me - as long as security fixes get pushed out ASAP.
Any first hand experience in China?
on
SARS Contained
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Are there any Slashdotters out there with first hand perspectives on the current SARS situation in China? I've been wondering why outbreaks have only 'occured' in the big cities. Do smaller outbreaks in less well known cities not get picked up by Western media? With such densely populated cities, plus a few months of a head start in having SARS around, I find it rather remarkable that it was contained at all.
Heck, even Toronto had a second outbreak while everyone was still on alert. Mind you, that's not meant as an negative comment on my fellow Canadians, rather it's a statement of how hard it must be to contain this particular bug - there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of room for error.
You might wish to check out: http://www.webhostingtalk.com. There are several forums there where people go to ask questions about various web hosts, and also get quotes. It's a quite active forum and generally, a good site for this type of question, IMHO.
Remember that this "preview" probably violates one or more NDA's, and it is of a desktop x86-64 chip that is scheduled for September release. In the meantime, it's bigger brother, the Opteron, who has more memory bandwidth, (usually) more cache, and multiple processor support will be released in less than a week (Tuesday to be exact).
Now the reviews that out in 4 days time should be much more interesting reads. I expect to see someone do a solid x86-32 vs. x86-64 comparison using Linux, maybe other OS's too. And yes, probably even Quake frame rate results. =)
Why? Because millions of lines of VBA code already exist. Sure, embedding a 'nice' language - whatever that means to the Slashdot crowd - would be good. But the issue I want to see addressed is this: the vast majority of business currently use MS Office, and many of them use the VBA to some extent.
It's a MUCH tougher sell to get someone to convert to another office suite if it requires rewriting code.
Really, it's the same reasoning that applies to MS Office file formats in general - compatibility counts whether we like it or not.
Yikes, I hate to reply to my own post, but that was a disgraceful subject line...
What I meant to write was: "I wonder if IBM will be working on MS Office Filters."
You can preview and edit a comment a hundred times but still look stupid if you don't check the subject line once! - LC
I suspect IBM will want to be able to import MS Office files into their system... perhaps they'll share some code with the OpenOffice gang.
The filters in OpenOffice are pretty good... but there's always going to be room for improvement. (plus, those MS file formats are a moving target...) It would be a nice bonus if IBM would open source their filters, or better yet, use the OpenOffice filters and contribute patches. I have no personal experience with recent Lotus packages, but I'm going to guess that OpenOffice filters are more advanced than the Lotus ones by now anyway.
Personally, I'd like to see some basic VBA compatibility... say what you want about VB, but I find it very handy for little custom functions in Excel -- and no, I don't want to rewrite them just to use oO.
Interesting co-opetition if this did happen. IBM working with a group largely supported by Sun, both trying to take a big bite out of MS.
Like some previous posters have said, you are pushing the limits of an Access MDB.
MS SQL-server is the obvious recommendation, mainly for "compatibility" reasons. In fact, I've counted several such recommendations already. It's a "real" database, and a reasonably easy upgrade path (depending on how the code was written...).
That said, it's cheaper (i.e. probably free for your purposes) for you to use MSDE - which is really a limited version of the SQL Server engine. I think the only major limits are that the maximum db size 2GB, and the management tools are not included (you'll have to live without, or get a license to them some other way, such as getting a copy of Office Developer).
Having said that, perhaps you really don't want to touch the code... there are many ways to optimize an Access MDB. I don't think anyone has suggested making sure Samba isn't causing a bottleneck -- I recall reading about updates or settings that dramatically affected filesystem databases like Access MDBs.
Let's also remember what PayPal provides to those who use it. No one else (that I know of) gives regular folks such an easy way to accept credit card payments. Heck, even for business use, it's a LOT easier and cheaper to setup with PayPal than most other credit card payments services (for low volumes anyway).
Would online auctions even exist if PayPal wasn't around? How about the various websites requesting donations through PayPal?
I tried the Bit Torrent download, it worked fairly well. But I decided to cancel the transfer because it was 3 ISO's in one transfer!
Personally, I'd prefer separate downloads for each ISO, especially since the latter disks are usually optional (or at least they used to be!).
Ah well. Maybe next time.
Some of the other responses have sort of alluded to my point, but... AMD plans to eventually replace the current Athlon with the Athlon64. Further, AMD claims that the overhead for adding 64 bit capability was somewhere in the ballpark of 10% additional transistors. So... whether MS releases an x86-64 bit OS or not, and assuming AMD keeps selling 10-20% of the market, there WILL BE millions of 64bit mainstream CPUs in a year or two. To reiterate, x86-64 is a nice and simple (relatively) enhancement... in some ways comparable to SSE or MMX. Opterons and Athlon64's will be built, and they will most definitely have a price/performance ratio better than Itaniums... and probably the Pentiums too.
Well, not directly answering your question, but... x86-64 (the 64 bit architecture that the Athlon64s and Opterons use) is more than just more bits. There are also a lot more registers which will help out code that is recompiled, because programs won't need to do do quite as much moving of values into and out of memory (or cache, I guess). There are other improvements too, but I think the register count is one of the most important ones - with respect to playing games at least. =)
True, there is a penalty to interpreted code, but a lot of this penalty can be mitigated (in PHP at least). The folks at Zend offer their PHP accelerator, and I use the ion cube (free as in beer) on my puny home server.
Both of these compile the scripts, and parse, and validate _once_ (per reboot). For every subsequent call to the script, the server just runs the cached copy of the compiled code. So, you get all of the benefits of the scripted language, i.e. speed of coding, and fewer of the downsides.
It's in the government's INTEREST to have people file electronically. I cringe when I imagine the number of people working in Ottawa (I'm Canadian) just doing DATA ENTRY, never mind auditing/reviewing of our returns. I have no idea how many people or how long it takes or how many tons of mail are involved, but I'm pretty sure it's better for _everyone_ (well, maybe not the aforementioned data entry people) to provide free electronic filing software.
Nothing like wasting tax money to unnecessarily process tax returns. =)
Seriously.
I, like many Slashdotter's, was not around when the Apollo missions took place. I can only imagine the the feeling of watching folks romp around off the planet.
Sure it's been done before, but a long time ago, and with similarly old technology (and knowledge!). Why not send another mission out, maybe land on the dark side (correct me, if they already have), take some new high res. photos and videos, set up a long-term, unmanned monitoring station.
I'm sure with 20 years of research, there must be a LOT of new questions that need answering.
It would also make for a great warm up for something bigger (i.e. Mars).
But most of all, like I said earlier, it's all about capturing the imaginations of humanity. Rekindle the support that NASA had in the past.
LC
Slashdot Mirror
It's going to be great watching the data come back from the 4 (I think) probes to Mars. There should be a lot of interesting video and photos over the next couple months. I hope all of the probes make the journey in one piece.
BTW. Anyone know how "spread out" these probes are supposed to land? I hope that at least one is aimed at one of the polar regions.
One more thing, to all people who say, "So what, Mars almost as close every 15 years." Well, how long do you expect to live? Every 15 years is somewhere between 3-5 chances in the average lifetime. So, go stare at Mars for a while, it isn't this "big" in the sky every day ya know.
I generally keep the WD-40 away from the PC's, but tape has all sorts of uses. Such as:
Great tips.
I'd like to emphasize on one point. Do NOT overcharge rechargeable batteries! It kills them very quickly. In fact, I'm wary of leaving batteries in any charger as a 'hot spare'.
I've had pretty good success recharing NiMH's using an old charger purchased when NiCD's were the only game in town for rechargables. It's one of the trickle charge type. It seems to work fine. BUT I use a cheap timer (the type often used for lamps) to turn the charger off after 8-12 hours depending on how long I intend to charge the batteries. If you want to get really fancy, you can set your timer so that it will keep batteries topped up by charging them for 10 minutes or so everyday.
I think overcharging created most of my dislike for NiCD's, though it was really an ID10T issue. =)
Certainly I'd agree that Apollo was a better run and much more successful project, but didn't the moon race consume something in the neighbourhood of 10% of the US GDP at the time?
To attempt to put that in perspective, if you think that the war on Iraq was/is expensive, try multiplying it by 10* to get an idea of how much Apollo cost.
What could people really expect? Once the moon race was over, there really was no place for NASA spending to go but down. Less money = Less resource = Less cool stuff that you can pull off.
* Being Canadian, I have excused myself from looking up completely accurate figures. My back of an envelope calculations actually give me closer to 1000 times more expensive (relative to GDP), but that seems rather high... Someone who knows better please feel free to correct me.
Yeah, I recently looked at phpNuke for the first time. It appears they are doing something along the lines of your concept #1. The "club" version is now 6.8 with presumably enhanced features, while the "public" version is 6.5. It seems to be a fair system to me - as long as security fixes get pushed out ASAP.
Are there any Slashdotters out there with first hand perspectives on the current SARS situation in China? I've been wondering why outbreaks have only 'occured' in the big cities. Do smaller outbreaks in less well known cities not get picked up by Western media? With such densely populated cities, plus a few months of a head start in having SARS around, I find it rather remarkable that it was contained at all.
Heck, even Toronto had a second outbreak while everyone was still on alert. Mind you, that's not meant as an negative comment on my fellow Canadians, rather it's a statement of how hard it must be to contain this particular bug - there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of room for error.
You might wish to check out: http://www.webhostingtalk.com.
There are several forums there where people go to ask questions about various web hosts, and also get quotes. It's a quite active forum and generally, a good site for this type of question, IMHO.
Remember that this "preview" probably violates one or more NDA's, and it is of a desktop x86-64 chip that is scheduled for September release. In the meantime, it's bigger brother, the Opteron, who has more memory bandwidth, (usually) more cache, and multiple processor support will be released in less than a week (Tuesday to be exact).
Now the reviews that out in 4 days time should be much more interesting reads. I expect to see someone do a solid x86-32 vs. x86-64 comparison using Linux, maybe other OS's too. And yes, probably even Quake frame rate results. =)
Why? Because millions of lines of VBA code already exist. Sure, embedding a 'nice' language - whatever that means to the Slashdot crowd - would be good. But the issue I want to see addressed is this: the vast majority of business currently use MS Office, and many of them use the VBA to some extent.
It's a MUCH tougher sell to get someone to convert to another office suite if it requires rewriting code.
Really, it's the same reasoning that applies to MS Office file formats in general - compatibility counts whether we like it or not.
Yikes, I hate to reply to my own post, but that was a disgraceful subject line...
What I meant to write was: "I wonder if IBM will be working on MS Office Filters."
You can preview and edit a comment a hundred times but still look stupid if you don't check the subject line once! - LC
I suspect IBM will want to be able to import MS Office files into their system... perhaps they'll share some code with the OpenOffice gang.
The filters in OpenOffice are pretty good... but there's always going to be room for improvement. (plus, those MS file formats are a moving target...) It would be a nice bonus if IBM would open source their filters, or better yet, use the OpenOffice filters and contribute patches. I have no personal experience with recent Lotus packages, but I'm going to guess that OpenOffice filters are more advanced than the Lotus ones by now anyway.
Personally, I'd like to see some basic VBA compatibility... say what you want about VB, but I find it very handy for little custom functions in Excel -- and no, I don't want to rewrite them just to use oO.
Interesting co-opetition if this did happen. IBM working with a group largely supported by Sun, both trying to take a big bite out of MS.
Like some previous posters have said, you are pushing the limits of an Access MDB.
MS SQL-server is the obvious recommendation, mainly for "compatibility" reasons. In fact, I've counted several such recommendations already. It's a "real" database, and a reasonably easy upgrade path (depending on how the code was written...).
That said, it's cheaper (i.e. probably free for your purposes) for you to use MSDE - which is really a limited version of the SQL Server engine. I think the only major limits are that the maximum db size 2GB, and the management tools are not included (you'll have to live without, or get a license to them some other way, such as getting a copy of Office Developer).
Having said that, perhaps you really don't want to touch the code... there are many ways to optimize an Access MDB. I don't think anyone has suggested making sure Samba isn't causing a bottleneck -- I recall reading about updates or settings that dramatically affected filesystem databases like Access MDBs.
Let's also remember what PayPal provides to those who use it. No one else (that I know of) gives regular folks such an easy way to accept credit card payments. Heck, even for business use, it's a LOT easier and cheaper to setup with PayPal than most other credit card payments services (for low volumes anyway).
Would online auctions even exist if PayPal wasn't around? How about the various websites requesting donations through PayPal?
I tried the Bit Torrent download, it worked fairly well. But I decided to cancel the transfer because it was 3 ISO's in one transfer! Personally, I'd prefer separate downloads for each ISO, especially since the latter disks are usually optional (or at least they used to be!). Ah well. Maybe next time.
Some of the other responses have sort of alluded to my point, but...
AMD plans to eventually replace the current Athlon with the Athlon64. Further, AMD claims that the overhead for adding 64 bit capability was somewhere in the ballpark of 10% additional transistors. So... whether MS releases an x86-64 bit OS or not, and assuming AMD keeps selling 10-20% of the market, there WILL BE millions of 64bit mainstream CPUs in a year or two.
To reiterate, x86-64 is a nice and simple (relatively) enhancement... in some ways comparable to SSE or MMX. Opterons and Athlon64's will be built, and they will most definitely have a price/performance ratio better than Itaniums... and probably the Pentiums too.
... and all of a sudden, 1000 Overclockers wonder, "How do I get my Athlon to Centaurus?"
Well, not directly answering your question, but... x86-64 (the 64 bit architecture that the Athlon64s and Opterons use) is more than just more bits. There are also a lot more registers which will help out code that is recompiled, because programs won't need to do do quite as much moving of values into and out of memory (or cache, I guess). There are other improvements too, but I think the register count is one of the most important ones - with respect to playing games at least. =)
True, there is a penalty to interpreted code, but a lot of this penalty can be mitigated (in PHP at least). The folks at Zend offer their PHP accelerator, and I use the ion cube (free as in beer) on my puny home server.
Both of these compile the scripts, and parse, and validate _once_ (per reboot). For every subsequent call to the script, the server just runs the cached copy of the compiled code. So, you get all of the benefits of the scripted language, i.e. speed of coding, and fewer of the downsides.
This has bugged me for the last few years.
It's in the government's INTEREST to have people file electronically. I cringe when I imagine the number of people working in Ottawa (I'm Canadian) just doing DATA ENTRY, never mind auditing/reviewing of our returns. I have no idea how many people or how long it takes or how many tons of mail are involved, but I'm pretty sure it's better for _everyone_ (well, maybe not the aforementioned data entry people) to provide free electronic filing software.
Nothing like wasting tax money to unnecessarily process tax returns. =)
Seriously. I, like many Slashdotter's, was not around when the Apollo missions took place. I can only imagine the the feeling of watching folks romp around off the planet. Sure it's been done before, but a long time ago, and with similarly old technology (and knowledge!). Why not send another mission out, maybe land on the dark side (correct me, if they already have), take some new high res. photos and videos, set up a long-term, unmanned monitoring station. I'm sure with 20 years of research, there must be a LOT of new questions that need answering. It would also make for a great warm up for something bigger (i.e. Mars). But most of all, like I said earlier, it's all about capturing the imaginations of humanity. Rekindle the support that NASA had in the past. LC