I know this sounds like flamebait material but Microsoft's idea about digitally signing all applications does sound like the best way to avoid these potential problems.
Hmm, depends on how you look at it. I don't install any rpms that aren't digitally signed from Mandrake. All other software I install from source. In any case, digitally signing software packages has been in use long before Microsoft thought about it.
Now, signing the executable and only allowing "trusted" executables to run, that's a different problem entirely. I think Microsoft is going to hit the point of diminishing returns with this scheme, especially if all that's needed to sign an executable is a chunk of change. We'll see digitally signed and trusted viruses, worms, and trojans. Many of the criminal elements that fund virus development won't even think twice about it, it's just another cost of doing business.
What they really need is a way to check the signatures on software before installing it, and CRC checks. Some standard method of doing that will put us right up to the point where anything we do after that will be diminishing returns, i.e. a lot of work for little gain.
Do yourself a favour, and use webmail instead of your own pop client. Let M$/Yahoo pay Norton and keep their virus clients up to date. I have never felt the need to use Outlook, Outlook Express. At home, I've never needed to store many e-mails, plus Yahoo has 6MB, and Hotmail has 2.
I've got 10MB on my ISP's mail server, and if I don't delete messages off the server I run out of room in two weeks. I get very little spam. I also don't delete any email from my mail client. Never know when I'll need to grep for something sent in an email. So those webmail services aren't for me.
I've just upgraded from Win98 to XP Prof. Now also using ZoneAlarm in conjunction with XP's built-in firewall, and also the multiple users feature which *nix users have been able to use forever(i.e. browsing the web from an account which has 'limited' access and not Admin. And that means that for the last 10 yrs at least, I've been totally virus free...
I found ZoneAlarm to be quite a hit on my machine's performance. I also didn't like having to deal with 10 prompts everytime I opened a net-using program. Not to mention that it seems like you're jumping through quite a few hoops just to make sure you don't get anything.
See, I run behind a NAT router and that stops 90% of all net-based attacks. The only reason it doesn't stop more is because I have a few ports open. After that, Linux does the rest for me. Just by not being compatible with the viruses themselves, I stop 99% of the attacks that get through NAT. What about the other 1%? Well, haven't been infected yet. Last virus I got infected by was the old SCA virus on the Amiga...
What's a good solution for you isn't a good solution for everybody. I get lots of email with valuable information in it, and I can't even begin to count the hours saved by being able to grep my email for information stored in it. My mail folders currently take up 100MB of my home directory and store about 3 years worth of email, incoming and outgoing. It's probably less than 1% spam and other commercial emails that I *did* ask for. I use browsers that aren't normally targetted by any viruses, and the ones that do target Mozilla from time to time still don't affect Linux boxes. So I'm pretty safe, in general. If I feel the need to implement a firewall, well I've got machines laying around doing nothing that could run a great firewall for me, just stick it between the NAT router and the cable box. Nothing to it. Virus scanning? When viruses on Linux can't be dealt with just by running as a normal user and keeping permissions under control, then I'll think about it. Until then, no reason to waste a moment thinking about it...
Looking at my own electric bill, it divides almost perfectly in half, with 50% going to electric "supply", and 50% going to "distribution". So, even if they paid me the same rate they charge me, it would seem that, no matter how much I produce, I could at best break even (since presumeably I would make the money on supply, but still have to pay almost the same rate for distribution).
I remember reading somewhere, although I don't remember where (fuzzy memory, this), that they're required to credit you 1 kwH for each 1kwH you generate, and buy any surplus you generate. So, you get a straight 1:1 credit for your use, and then the surplus is free money at whatever rate it is. Recall that the purpose of the law is to provide a way for people to provide their own electricity without letting the power companies (notoriously anti-competitive) screw you out of doing so. Promoting a distributed power infrastructure is good.;)
On a side note, I am so sick and fucking tired of electronic "music." I don't know about you, but I want my music to be played by a fucking MUSICIAN, wielding an instrument like an extension of his body and putting all the feel and soul into it that ONLY a human can. THAT is music, not a bunch of wav files you strung together in Acid and called a song. Some guy sitting at a keyboard is not a musician, okay?
While I agree in spirit, I can't disagree more in implementation. I've recently adopted midi sequencing as part of my personal repertoire. Why would I do a silly thing like that? Well, go check out my music on my website. Notice any missing sounds from the mix? Like, perhaps, a bass that I don't own? Also, I'm moving away from thrash metal and into more melodic stuff, and as such I'm wanting some good harmonies and texturing noises (violins and synths, mostly), upon which I'll be building compositions, rather than just songs. So I figure there's still a human element, and there's still the base muse being involved here.
To keep it with real humans playing every single instrument, I'd have to know a hundred musicians all with the ability to play a variety of instruments. I'd need a big, good acoustical room for them to play in, and hundreds of high-dollar microphones to record them. Then I'd need to compose a score and distribute it to all the musicians, wherever they are, and it would really suck if the day came to record and I discovered I had an entire harmony line written out half a step too low. Oops. Without having all these "friends" I'd have to hire them. So you're looking at a thousand-dollar proposition for me to make the music that I want to make.
Or, instead I can delegate the less-important parts to the computer, play the important parts myself, take my time, and do it all with existing facilities/utilities. In the end, what's going to be the noticeable difference between the two recordings (assuming all technical factors of recording being equal)?
Not a whole lot. I could probably get a little more collective emotion into the recording by having humans play it. Instead I'm depending on the listener providing that extra emotion. And it's not like the computer is writing the music, just performing. In the long run, I can get a midi pickup and literally play every part, just not all at once.;)
So it's not as simple as just "electronic music sucks". There is good and bad electronic music. I particularly enjoy Yello. I also enjoy some of the sampling that Anthrax has been doing lately (as in the last ten years). On the other hand, I don't enjoy the music you hear in a standard techno dance club. That stuff doesn't appeal to me, it's all loud, throbbing bass drum and more or less random samples thrown on to "sound cool" and "have a dance beat". Of course, in that case they're not trying to make music, they're trying to make dance, which is a different muse entirely, I think. Or should be, anyway.
Well, I can't point you to a specific distribution, but I would suggest mirroring MandrakeMove and building it from source for a little while. Why?
WEll, it's easy to get, and it's a CD-bootable distribution, so you can *experiment*.
I'd start with a 2.6 kernel, seriously. RAM being the biggest problem, what kind of video cards are we looking at? Make sure you can get the exact right drivers for those, and then you want to tone back the resolution and a few other things anyway. So go hack into your XF86Config file and make sure you're set to a lower resolution (800x600 at the most) and fewer colors (more than 256, but somewhere around 16bpp, or less). That'll get you a decent-looking desktop and cut down dramatically on your RAM requirements.
Now google for "video card RAM linux swap" and learn how to configure your system to use your video card RAM for swap space. That should improve performance quite a bit since your computer won't have to swap to hard drive every time, it can swap across the PCI bus which is a lot faster.
I can't think of any other easy way to bring down total memory usage. You do, of course, have to take a completely different approach to system services than you otherwise might take. You have to decide "which ones do I need to run and which ones can I live without/start on demand?". Every distribution, as far as I know, starts a bunch of services at boot time, and then they usually get swapped to hard disk until they're needed. Problem is, put your computer on a network and a number of those services will be constantly swapped in and out just from being polled on the network. SO eliminate every service you don't need.
Now, the reason you mirrored the MandrakeMove source tree is so you could make the modifications there, build the distribution, test it, and so forth, and ultimately post a patch or something so that other people can use your low-RAM MandrakeMove.;)
I would much rather see regulation that required all software to clearly declare its intentions, and to get explicit and verified permission to install.
Forget intentions, and forget trying to define "spyware". Just use a little ET icon to show that the software phones home, let the marketers say why, and let the user decide. I mean, come one, the user needs to carry some of this burden. Let's not fill software up with idiot labels, shall we?
So, I say if they stick labels, they should define them by function rather than buzzword. If the software uses any networking code for *any* reason, then it should have an icon. If it only uses loopback interface, then it gets a "local machine only". And so on and so forth.
Hi mom. You want to install a program? Ok, what's it called?
Great! Now open a terminal window. It's a command line interface and it's much more powerful than a gui. Got it open? Great. Now you have to become the superuser, so type 'su' and then put in the password.
You don't know your root password? Ask dad.
Ok, great, so now you're root. Now type "urpmi", a space, and the name of the program you wish to install.
It's asking for the CD that contains the program. Put that CD in and follow the directions.
You're done, now? Great! Now just click on your K menu and you should find it under "Applications". You don't have a K menu? You have a little paw. Ok, click the little paw, yes I know it's cute. Found it? Glad to help!
The man says you gotta be able to sing... what part of that do you not understand?
William Shatner did sing Rocket Man! The best he could, mind you. I didn't say it was any good.... I wonder if whoever gave me a +1, Funny saw the same tape I saw.;)
You didn't see that space documentary he made with...what was that guy's name? You know...the one who sung about the little fella in the Peter jackson movie...
Nope, didn't see it. But I did see a tape of William Shatner singing (or saying, rather) Rocket Man sometime in the '70s. Well, I saw it in the '90s, but the tape was made in the '70s.
Ok, I think you missed a few details. DD gave up his position when he needed more cash than he expected and had to take a loan from Dixon, using his insurance policies as collateral. He was a director of the power syndicate, and the power syndicate itself consisted of the "top" men in certain industries, and none of the directorates interlocked, at least not on paper. Harriman and Strong owned a big chunk of it, a controlling chunk, together. Strong followed Harriman on all his hairbrained schemes and constantly criticized DD for it.
In any case, the fate of the world was more or less decided by these men, these men who built the roadtowns, made semi-ballistic international travel. I think they built the Beanstalk, too, that gets bombed by terrorists in Friday. And yes, this story gets talked around in quite a few stories. Lazarus Long was the relief pilot, in fact.;)
But the trip to the moon also includes a fundamental shift in power from DD Harriman to Dixon, because of that last-minute soul-selling that had to be done to keep the operation on the ground, er, in the air, er, whatever. And the very next story (I forget what it's called) is about DD funding yet another hair-brained trip to the moon, makes it, and then dies. But he did finally get there.;)
One thing's for certain, if I were a tycoon funding a moonshot, after reading about Harriman, ain't a snowball's chance in hell I'm gonna let some suit talk me out of going and spending the rest of my days landlocked. No way.
Um, sorry to burst your bubble, but this has absolutely no comparison to DD Harriman and company. See, DD Harriman was the guy at the top of the power conglomerate, and as such had much more power than the government itself. Be thankful we don't have that kind of world--yet. He was also an idealist, so I have a real hard time believing he got to be where he was in the story in any fashion that resembles real life corporate politics.;)
Don't underestimate what a leap an efficiency the X-Prize represents.
Not that I disagree with you, just keep one foot in the part of reality that remembers that X-prize isn't going to LEO, and isn't even getting close to LEO. Unless you hit LEO, your reusable spacecraft is just a great ride.:)
Don't get me wrong, though. After they've hit the low target they've set with the reusable requirements they've got I expect the design to be pushed to LEO pretty quickly, pretty much as soon as it gets covered up with funding from both the X-prize itself and all the VCs and other investors that learn by virtue of the X-prize that you have a viable technology.
Why did they change the way 'make xconfig' worked with the 2.4 and earlier kernels? Why is the kernel config now bound up into a proprietary X Toolkit?
Have you been living in a cave for the last fucking five years? Qt on Linux is GPL.
Yeah, it was one of those C-names. Sorry.;) I knew it was a Democrat whose name started with a C, and I remember Clinton taking a lot of flack for something along those lines. Maybe it was debate about whether or not he would actually call up some conscript troops for some UN peacekeeping mission or other. (Oxymoron: UN Peacekeeping mission)
But yeah, so the GP post is still a little off when he says we don't have the draft anymore.
Hm, evidently this troll moderation comes from mods who don't know that one of Yakov's original soviet russia jokes was "car drives you". Oh well, I've got karma to burn.;)
Spoken like someone who hasn't been paying attention. Right now, they're testing the *big motors*. i.e. The one's that are going on the full sized craft. And they're testing them both bolted to the ground, and with captive tests of the craft. Once they get some of the engine kinks worked out and finally work out a control board they can rely on, they'll be ready to fly. Go check out the videos on their site. You can see the big armadillo craft in some of them.
Not to mention that they've been doing parallel development anyway, working on the small craft to build the software and building the large one at the same time. Theoretically anyway, they could find themselves with a large ship ready to go and the software being finalized at the same time and then they could launch the same day, or whatever.
I admit I haven't checked their site in a little while, though, so I don't know exactly where they're at today.
There's not much to disagree with, here, so I won't waste our time doing so.:)
Instead, I direct you to US history, where the last serious war we fought in was WWII. Sure, the rest were "serious" in the sense that they involved killing and so forth. Viet Nam was fought with conscript troops, and conscripts are the worst troops you can have. I forget about Korea. Other than that, we've had small engagements, and UN-supported engagements, and very little else. The US doesn't have a long history of war. Our first war was a revolution, and we lost the next couple of wars in a row, pretty much. Let's see, there was 1812, some fight with Canada (the French-Indian Wars?). Of course we had our Civil War in which the official US military had numerous problems.
So we don't have a long military tradition, and our military tradition is strangely deficient in discipline. I'd say that 99% of all incidents involving US troops can be attributed to a lack of discipline, and our military's peace-time affairs (Tailhook, anyone?) certainly don't lend themselves to a display of discipline.
Yes, it's a problem. No, throwing more technology at the problem isn't making it better. And it's a problem that needs to be solved, since most of our volunteer servicemen really want to do good things but wind up doing bad things. Kinda like 5-year-olds.;) As far as maturity, I suppose you can probably liken the US military to, say, any military unit in Europe in the 17th century. Our standing military is very young as an organization, with several branched that didn't even appear until the latter part of the 20th century.
When you look at it like this, our military isn't that bad, and in a fight they're second to none, but that doesn't mean we can't use some improvement. Best thing you guys can do is show what a well-disciplined military is capable of accomplishing, set a solid example, and hope that we'll follow it somehow. But don't lose sight of the fact that the top officer of the military is an elected president, and those types of officers are notorious for a lack of discipline. So who else are they going to get their example from?
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I know this sounds like flamebait material but Microsoft's idea about digitally signing all applications does sound like the best way to avoid these potential problems.
Hmm, depends on how you look at it. I don't install any rpms that aren't digitally signed from Mandrake. All other software I install from source. In any case, digitally signing software packages has been in use long before Microsoft thought about it.
Now, signing the executable and only allowing "trusted" executables to run, that's a different problem entirely. I think Microsoft is going to hit the point of diminishing returns with this scheme, especially if all that's needed to sign an executable is a chunk of change. We'll see digitally signed and trusted viruses, worms, and trojans. Many of the criminal elements that fund virus development won't even think twice about it, it's just another cost of doing business.
What they really need is a way to check the signatures on software before installing it, and CRC checks. Some standard method of doing that will put us right up to the point where anything we do after that will be diminishing returns, i.e. a lot of work for little gain.
Do yourself a favour, and use webmail instead of your own pop client. Let M$/Yahoo pay Norton and keep their virus clients up to date. I have never felt the need to use Outlook, Outlook Express. At home, I've never needed to store many e-mails, plus Yahoo has 6MB, and Hotmail has 2.
I've got 10MB on my ISP's mail server, and if I don't delete messages off the server I run out of room in two weeks. I get very little spam. I also don't delete any email from my mail client. Never know when I'll need to grep for something sent in an email. So those webmail services aren't for me.
I've just upgraded from Win98 to XP Prof. Now also using ZoneAlarm in conjunction with XP's built-in firewall, and also the multiple users feature which *nix users have been able to use forever(i.e. browsing the web from an account which has 'limited' access and not Admin. And that means that for the last 10 yrs at least, I've been totally virus free...
I found ZoneAlarm to be quite a hit on my machine's performance. I also didn't like having to deal with 10 prompts everytime I opened a net-using program. Not to mention that it seems like you're jumping through quite a few hoops just to make sure you don't get anything.
See, I run behind a NAT router and that stops 90% of all net-based attacks. The only reason it doesn't stop more is because I have a few ports open. After that, Linux does the rest for me. Just by not being compatible with the viruses themselves, I stop 99% of the attacks that get through NAT. What about the other 1%? Well, haven't been infected yet. Last virus I got infected by was the old SCA virus on the Amiga...
What's a good solution for you isn't a good solution for everybody. I get lots of email with valuable information in it, and I can't even begin to count the hours saved by being able to grep my email for information stored in it. My mail folders currently take up 100MB of my home directory and store about 3 years worth of email, incoming and outgoing. It's probably less than 1% spam and other commercial emails that I *did* ask for. I use browsers that aren't normally targetted by any viruses, and the ones that do target Mozilla from time to time still don't affect Linux boxes. So I'm pretty safe, in general. If I feel the need to implement a firewall, well I've got machines laying around doing nothing that could run a great firewall for me, just stick it between the NAT router and the cable box. Nothing to it. Virus scanning? When viruses on Linux can't be dealt with just by running as a normal user and keeping permissions under control, then I'll think about it. Until then, no reason to waste a moment thinking about it...
Looking at my own electric bill, it divides almost perfectly in half, with 50% going to electric "supply", and 50% going to "distribution". So, even if they paid me the same rate they charge me, it would seem that, no matter how much I produce, I could at best break even (since presumeably I would make the money on supply, but still have to pay almost the same rate for distribution).
I remember reading somewhere, although I don't remember where (fuzzy memory, this), that they're required to credit you 1 kwH for each 1kwH you generate, and buy any surplus you generate. So, you get a straight 1:1 credit for your use, and then the surplus is free money at whatever rate it is. Recall that the purpose of the law is to provide a way for people to provide their own electricity without letting the power companies (notoriously anti-competitive) screw you out of doing so. Promoting a distributed power infrastructure is good. ;)
On a side note, I am so sick and fucking tired of electronic "music." I don't know about you, but I want my music to be played by a fucking MUSICIAN, wielding an instrument like an extension of his body and putting all the feel and soul into it that ONLY a human can. THAT is music, not a bunch of wav files you strung together in Acid and called a song. Some guy sitting at a keyboard is not a musician, okay?
While I agree in spirit, I can't disagree more in implementation. I've recently adopted midi sequencing as part of my personal repertoire. Why would I do a silly thing like that? Well, go check out my music on my website. Notice any missing sounds from the mix? Like, perhaps, a bass that I don't own? Also, I'm moving away from thrash metal and into more melodic stuff, and as such I'm wanting some good harmonies and texturing noises (violins and synths, mostly), upon which I'll be building compositions, rather than just songs. So I figure there's still a human element, and there's still the base muse being involved here.
To keep it with real humans playing every single instrument, I'd have to know a hundred musicians all with the ability to play a variety of instruments. I'd need a big, good acoustical room for them to play in, and hundreds of high-dollar microphones to record them. Then I'd need to compose a score and distribute it to all the musicians, wherever they are, and it would really suck if the day came to record and I discovered I had an entire harmony line written out half a step too low. Oops. Without having all these "friends" I'd have to hire them. So you're looking at a thousand-dollar proposition for me to make the music that I want to make.
Or, instead I can delegate the less-important parts to the computer, play the important parts myself, take my time, and do it all with existing facilities/utilities. In the end, what's going to be the noticeable difference between the two recordings (assuming all technical factors of recording being equal)?
Not a whole lot. I could probably get a little more collective emotion into the recording by having humans play it. Instead I'm depending on the listener providing that extra emotion. And it's not like the computer is writing the music, just performing. In the long run, I can get a midi pickup and literally play every part, just not all at once. ;)
So it's not as simple as just "electronic music sucks". There is good and bad electronic music. I particularly enjoy Yello. I also enjoy some of the sampling that Anthrax has been doing lately (as in the last ten years). On the other hand, I don't enjoy the music you hear in a standard techno dance club. That stuff doesn't appeal to me, it's all loud, throbbing bass drum and more or less random samples thrown on to "sound cool" and "have a dance beat". Of course, in that case they're not trying to make music, they're trying to make dance, which is a different muse entirely, I think. Or should be, anyway.
In the UK, every day is April Fool's Day.
Well, I can't point you to a specific distribution, but I would suggest mirroring MandrakeMove and building it from source for a little while. Why?
WEll, it's easy to get, and it's a CD-bootable distribution, so you can *experiment*.
I'd start with a 2.6 kernel, seriously. RAM being the biggest problem, what kind of video cards are we looking at? Make sure you can get the exact right drivers for those, and then you want to tone back the resolution and a few other things anyway. So go hack into your XF86Config file and make sure you're set to a lower resolution (800x600 at the most) and fewer colors (more than 256, but somewhere around 16bpp, or less). That'll get you a decent-looking desktop and cut down dramatically on your RAM requirements.
Now google for "video card RAM linux swap" and learn how to configure your system to use your video card RAM for swap space. That should improve performance quite a bit since your computer won't have to swap to hard drive every time, it can swap across the PCI bus which is a lot faster.
I can't think of any other easy way to bring down total memory usage. You do, of course, have to take a completely different approach to system services than you otherwise might take. You have to decide "which ones do I need to run and which ones can I live without/start on demand?". Every distribution, as far as I know, starts a bunch of services at boot time, and then they usually get swapped to hard disk until they're needed. Problem is, put your computer on a network and a number of those services will be constantly swapped in and out just from being polled on the network. SO eliminate every service you don't need.
Now, the reason you mirrored the MandrakeMove source tree is so you could make the modifications there, build the distribution, test it, and so forth, and ultimately post a patch or something so that other people can use your low-RAM MandrakeMove. ;)
I would much rather see regulation that required all software to clearly declare its intentions, and to get explicit and verified permission to install.
Forget intentions, and forget trying to define "spyware". Just use a little ET icon to show that the software phones home, let the marketers say why, and let the user decide. I mean, come one, the user needs to carry some of this burden. Let's not fill software up with idiot labels, shall we?
So, I say if they stick labels, they should define them by function rather than buzzword. If the software uses any networking code for *any* reason, then it should have an icon. If it only uses loopback interface, then it gets a "local machine only". And so on and so forth.
to denote buggy code?
How about "Designed for Windows XP"? Better yet, let's require buggy code to come with a certificate of authenticity and a hologram!
Phone rings.
Hi mom. You want to install a program? Ok, what's it called?
Great! Now open a terminal window. It's a command line interface and it's much more powerful than a gui. Got it open? Great. Now you have to become the superuser, so type 'su' and then put in the password.
You don't know your root password? Ask dad.
Ok, great, so now you're root. Now type "urpmi", a space, and the name of the program you wish to install.
It's asking for the CD that contains the program. Put that CD in and follow the directions.
You're done, now? Great! Now just click on your K menu and you should find it under "Applications". You don't have a K menu? You have a little paw. Ok, click the little paw, yes I know it's cute. Found it? Glad to help!
The man says you gotta be able to sing... what part of that do you not understand?
William Shatner did sing Rocket Man! The best he could, mind you. I didn't say it was any good.... I wonder if whoever gave me a +1, Funny saw the same tape I saw. ;)
You didn't see that space documentary he made with...what was that guy's name? You know...the one who sung about the little fella in the Peter jackson movie...
Nope, didn't see it. But I did see a tape of William Shatner singing (or saying, rather) Rocket Man sometime in the '70s. Well, I saw it in the '90s, but the tape was made in the '70s.
Ok, I think you missed a few details. DD gave up his position when he needed more cash than he expected and had to take a loan from Dixon, using his insurance policies as collateral. He was a director of the power syndicate, and the power syndicate itself consisted of the "top" men in certain industries, and none of the directorates interlocked, at least not on paper. Harriman and Strong owned a big chunk of it, a controlling chunk, together. Strong followed Harriman on all his hairbrained schemes and constantly criticized DD for it.
In any case, the fate of the world was more or less decided by these men, these men who built the roadtowns, made semi-ballistic international travel. I think they built the Beanstalk, too, that gets bombed by terrorists in Friday. And yes, this story gets talked around in quite a few stories. Lazarus Long was the relief pilot, in fact. ;)
But the trip to the moon also includes a fundamental shift in power from DD Harriman to Dixon, because of that last-minute soul-selling that had to be done to keep the operation on the ground, er, in the air, er, whatever. And the very next story (I forget what it's called) is about DD funding yet another hair-brained trip to the moon, makes it, and then dies. But he did finally get there. ;)
One thing's for certain, if I were a tycoon funding a moonshot, after reading about Harriman, ain't a snowball's chance in hell I'm gonna let some suit talk me out of going and spending the rest of my days landlocked. No way.
Um, sorry to burst your bubble, but this has absolutely no comparison to DD Harriman and company. See, DD Harriman was the guy at the top of the power conglomerate, and as such had much more power than the government itself. Be thankful we don't have that kind of world--yet. He was also an idealist, so I have a real hard time believing he got to be where he was in the story in any fashion that resembles real life corporate politics. ;)
Don't underestimate what a leap an efficiency the X-Prize represents.
Not that I disagree with you, just keep one foot in the part of reality that remembers that X-prize isn't going to LEO, and isn't even getting close to LEO. Unless you hit LEO, your reusable spacecraft is just a great ride. :)
Don't get me wrong, though. After they've hit the low target they've set with the reusable requirements they've got I expect the design to be pushed to LEO pretty quickly, pretty much as soon as it gets covered up with funding from both the X-prize itself and all the VCs and other investors that learn by virtue of the X-prize that you have a viable technology.
You have to be able to sing "Rocket Man" from memory.
So does William Shatner have such a license, then?
Did some KDE dandy infiltrate the kernel development group?
Last I heard, Linus himself wrote the new xconfig app. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall reading that...
Who cares if it's GPL? It's a big pile of crap that shouldn't be necessary to compile the Linux kernel.
What's so hard about that? If you're so dependant on point and click, wtf are you compiling a Kernel in the first place?
If this works, fun can be only a Perl script away...
Careful, dude. Get one character wrong and she might bite your dick off. Better use Python.
Why did they change the way 'make xconfig' worked with the 2.4 and earlier kernels? Why is the kernel config now bound up into a proprietary X Toolkit?
Have you been living in a cave for the last fucking five years? Qt on Linux is GPL.
Now, can we have a new mod? -1, Dead Badger
Yeah, it was one of those C-names. Sorry. ;) I knew it was a Democrat whose name started with a C, and I remember Clinton taking a lot of flack for something along those lines. Maybe it was debate about whether or not he would actually call up some conscript troops for some UN peacekeeping mission or other. (Oxymoron: UN Peacekeeping mission)
But yeah, so the GP post is still a little off when he says we don't have the draft anymore.
Hm, evidently this troll moderation comes from mods who don't know that one of Yakov's original soviet russia jokes was "car drives you". Oh well, I've got karma to burn. ;)
You're far enough ahead already to make it a formality, and all your attitude is going to do is provoke another arms race.
Alright, then let's do it. The last big arms race took us to the moon, where's the next one going to take us?
Spoken like someone who hasn't been paying attention. Right now, they're testing the *big motors*. i.e. The one's that are going on the full sized craft. And they're testing them both bolted to the ground, and with captive tests of the craft. Once they get some of the engine kinks worked out and finally work out a control board they can rely on, they'll be ready to fly. Go check out the videos on their site. You can see the big armadillo craft in some of them.
Not to mention that they've been doing parallel development anyway, working on the small craft to build the software and building the large one at the same time. Theoretically anyway, they could find themselves with a large ship ready to go and the software being finalized at the same time and then they could launch the same day, or whatever.
I admit I haven't checked their site in a little while, though, so I don't know exactly where they're at today.
Shit, the mods must be smoking something to give that guy an insightful. Can we meta-mod the mod itself yet? That gets a +1, Funny Mod, easily.
(hoping to get an insightful mod for nothing just like the parent poster)
There's not much to disagree with, here, so I won't waste our time doing so. :)
Instead, I direct you to US history, where the last serious war we fought in was WWII. Sure, the rest were "serious" in the sense that they involved killing and so forth. Viet Nam was fought with conscript troops, and conscripts are the worst troops you can have. I forget about Korea. Other than that, we've had small engagements, and UN-supported engagements, and very little else. The US doesn't have a long history of war. Our first war was a revolution, and we lost the next couple of wars in a row, pretty much. Let's see, there was 1812, some fight with Canada (the French-Indian Wars?). Of course we had our Civil War in which the official US military had numerous problems.
So we don't have a long military tradition, and our military tradition is strangely deficient in discipline. I'd say that 99% of all incidents involving US troops can be attributed to a lack of discipline, and our military's peace-time affairs (Tailhook, anyone?) certainly don't lend themselves to a display of discipline.
Yes, it's a problem. No, throwing more technology at the problem isn't making it better. And it's a problem that needs to be solved, since most of our volunteer servicemen really want to do good things but wind up doing bad things. Kinda like 5-year-olds. ;) As far as maturity, I suppose you can probably liken the US military to, say, any military unit in Europe in the 17th century. Our standing military is very young as an organization, with several branched that didn't even appear until the latter part of the 20th century.
When you look at it like this, our military isn't that bad, and in a fight they're second to none, but that doesn't mean we can't use some improvement. Best thing you guys can do is show what a well-disciplined military is capable of accomplishing, set a solid example, and hope that we'll follow it somehow. But don't lose sight of the fact that the top officer of the military is an elected president, and those types of officers are notorious for a lack of discipline. So who else are they going to get their example from?