Because you say so? There are plenty of good reasons that a piece of software would want a write lock on a file so that someone else can't replace the file.
There are plenty of retarded reasons but I can't think of any good ones; if it's something like a database, then you should only be allowing one process to access it, not allowing multiple programs to randomly write stuff in there.
All I've ever seen file locking achieve is annoying users and fscking up the system when it fails so you have to reboot to clear the stuck locks.
Which is to say, don't unmanned Progress mission failures tell you something important about the likelihood of manned Soyuz disasters?
Had it been manned, the escape system would have fired and brought the crew back down. As far as I remember that's already happened once on a Soyuz flight and the biggest problem was that the crew had to hide from hungry wolves after the landing.
One of the benefits of capsules is that you don't die just because the wings fell off and you need them to come back down.
The point is, it's kind of dick to not include the lost Apollo mission on account of it "never having actually launched"... when in truth, but for the fire, it would have launched.
But I believe it was being tested in a configuration that would never have flown; if I remember correctly, the cabin atmosphere changed from normal air to low-pressure (6psi?) pure O2 during launch, whereas the test was about 16psi pure O2.
That said, there were enough flaws with the Block I Apollo capsules that the odds of killing a crew at some point without the Block II redesign were pretty high.
Why the heck would anything running in a web-browser be able to write to the MBR?!?
Well, if you're running on XP you're probably an administrator so a browser exploit can write to anything. And if you're a typical user running Windows 7 then you'll click 'Yes' when UAC asks 'Do you want to allow Internet Exploder to: do some shit you don't understand?'
OK, so let's trot out the old chestnut of pharmaceutical patents. Let's say I invest $100 million to do the research needed to create a new drug, I create it, and the doses cost only $1 to make.
Why does a drug cost $100,000,000 to develop?
And, in any case, drinking magic water because the witch doctor tells you it will cure you is going the way of the dodo as genetic engineering takes over and produces real targeted cures.
Which would be really cool. That way we'd have lots more rockets with which to launch... uhm... what, exactly?
Whatever you want.
If SpaceX can build Falcon 9 for about a tenth of what NASA estimated it to cost, they could probably knock out a couple of JWSTs for a billion or less.
My understanding was that the entire constellation program has been canned. Obviously no more shuttle flights, they're being shipped off to museums.
The problem is that Congressthings keep trying to push Constellation back in through the back door. Hence the current plan for NASA to develop a heavy-lift launcher for which there are no missions.
So I guess we're back to the question, "what manned spaceflight program?"
The one where you buy launches from private companies so you don't have to waste money building your own rockets that cost ten times as much per pound to orbit and can therefore spend it on doing useful stuff in space instead?
But that won't happen while space cadets keep demanding that NASA must build and fly its own rockets and the rockets used by the rest of the world to launch billion-dollar satellites just won't do. I mean, NASA is OK with launching a $6.5 billion dollar satellite on a commercial launcher, but we're supposed to believe it's too risky for astronauts?
But with the tax money saved from these wasteful government programs, every American will be building rockets and satellites in their own back yard!
JWST is expected to cost $6,500,000,000 if it doesn't go even further over budget. That's more than twenty times as much as SpaceX say they spent to develop Falcon 9.
So yes, if those billions were given to people building rockets then there'd be a heck of a lot of them.
As I understand it, JWST is ten years behind schedule and billions over budget. It's clearly a strong candidate for cancellation unless they can show that it will actually get finished and launched within the current predicted budget.
While that would be nice, by far the worst thing about Gimp is the UI. It may be OK on a desktop with a big screen but I was trying to edit an image on my laptop recently and with all the windows splattered everywhere, most of them forcing themselves to the front all the time because, my God, the font window is so much more important than the image I'm trying to edit, I ended up with about a quarter of the screen available for editing.
Sounds like they've been attempting to destroy software patents, without as much real success as we might like.
The EU's goal is to make the legislature a meaningless figurehead that just rubberstamps the output of the underlying bureaucracy; kind of like the Queen in the UK.
As some Scottish guy whose name I forget said a couple of centuries ago, democracy can only last until the voters realise they can vote to steal their neighbours' stuff.
However, dictatorship is hardly an improvement: sometimes you may get lucky and have an effective and relatively non-corrupt leader in charge, but most of the time it's another Stalin or Saddam Hussein.
Why can't this be handled by a package manager similiar to the one on my linux box?
Doesn't the package manager just run the install script as root?
I entirely agree, installers should only be allowed access to specific files and directories, but that's relatively hard to do. Especially in Windows, where those files and directories may be scattered across the system rather than being in well-known places.
Sure for the *really* important DLLs, but those are going to be on Windows by default for everyone.
No, for any DLL that's common between applications. For example, a few years back there was some important security hole in zlib, and I found about a dozen different installations of zlib.dll on my Windows PC; either I replaced them and hope the application still worked, or lived with a known security hole.
If there was one zlib.dll on the system with a sensible versioning methodology, then updating it once would have fixed them all and the versioning would ensure that they didn't break.
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You can copy files in Vista? I've never had the system stable long enough to try that.
You can, but it takes so long that no-one has ever managed to copy a complete file.
Because you say so? There are plenty of good reasons that a piece of software would want a write lock on a file so that someone else can't replace the file.
There are plenty of retarded reasons but I can't think of any good ones; if it's something like a database, then you should only be allowing one process to access it, not allowing multiple programs to randomly write stuff in there.
All I've ever seen file locking achieve is annoying users and fscking up the system when it fails so you have to reboot to clear the stuck locks.
Which is to say, don't unmanned Progress mission failures tell you something important about the likelihood of manned Soyuz disasters?
Had it been manned, the escape system would have fired and brought the crew back down. As far as I remember that's already happened once on a Soyuz flight and the biggest problem was that the crew had to hide from hungry wolves after the landing.
One of the benefits of capsules is that you don't die just because the wings fell off and you need them to come back down.
The point is, it's kind of dick to not include the lost Apollo mission on account of it "never having actually launched"... when in truth, but for the fire, it would have launched.
But I believe it was being tested in a configuration that would never have flown; if I remember correctly, the cabin atmosphere changed from normal air to low-pressure (6psi?) pure O2 during launch, whereas the test was about 16psi pure O2.
That said, there were enough flaws with the Block I Apollo capsules that the odds of killing a crew at some point without the Block II redesign were pretty high.
Note that Soyuz is on about its 7th or 8th generation of craft. The soyuz deaths occurred in some pretty ancient models.
And the Soyuz 11 problem wouldn't have affected the current crews since they wear suits.
BTW, weren't there a couple of close calls when the re-entry module didn't separate properly? AFAIR the crews survived but had an exciting ride.
Why the heck would anything running in a web-browser be able to write to the MBR?!?
Well, if you're running on XP you're probably an administrator so a browser exploit can write to anything. And if you're a typical user running Windows 7 then you'll click 'Yes' when UAC asks 'Do you want to allow Internet Exploder to: do some shit you don't understand?'
OK, so let's trot out the old chestnut of pharmaceutical patents. Let's say I invest $100 million to do the research needed to create a new drug, I create it, and the doses cost only $1 to make.
Why does a drug cost $100,000,000 to develop?
And, in any case, drinking magic water because the witch doctor tells you it will cure you is going the way of the dodo as genetic engineering takes over and produces real targeted cures.
Which would be really cool. That way we'd have lots more rockets with which to launch ... uhm ... what, exactly?
Whatever you want.
If SpaceX can build Falcon 9 for about a tenth of what NASA estimated it to cost, they could probably knock out a couple of JWSTs for a billion or less.
My understanding was that the entire constellation program has been canned. Obviously no more shuttle flights, they're being shipped off to museums.
The problem is that Congressthings keep trying to push Constellation back in through the back door. Hence the current plan for NASA to develop a heavy-lift launcher for which there are no missions.
So I guess we're back to the question, "what manned spaceflight program?"
The one where you buy launches from private companies so you don't have to waste money building your own rockets that cost ten times as much per pound to orbit and can therefore spend it on doing useful stuff in space instead?
But that won't happen while space cadets keep demanding that NASA must build and fly its own rockets and the rockets used by the rest of the world to launch billion-dollar satellites just won't do. I mean, NASA is OK with launching a $6.5 billion dollar satellite on a commercial launcher, but we're supposed to believe it's too risky for astronauts?
If JWST is cancelled, the next decade of Astrophysics research in the USA is dead in the water. Over. Finito.
How's that possible when JWST isn't supposed to launch until at least 2018?
But with the tax money saved from these wasteful government programs, every American will be building rockets and satellites in their own back yard!
JWST is expected to cost $6,500,000,000 if it doesn't go even further over budget. That's more than twenty times as much as SpaceX say they spent to develop Falcon 9.
So yes, if those billions were given to people building rockets then there'd be a heck of a lot of them.
As I understand it, JWST is ten years behind schedule and billions over budget. It's clearly a strong candidate for cancellation unless they can show that it will actually get finished and launched within the current predicted budget.
Maybe they can get the Chinese to build them a high speed rail line.
The libertarian/conservative philosophy is dying off. Everyone's going Big Government with Big Spending Projects these days.
Kind of hard when you don't have the Big Money to spend.
If you're planning a revolution on Facebook, you're doing it wrong.
I'm all for that; get rid of the adverts and charge me some small fee. I'll bet that gets rid of most of the trolls anyway.
It will also get rid of most of the users as they move to free sites or just stop wasting time on the Internet in the first place.
I set my cache to /tmp/mozilla-cache, so it automatically gets deleted every time I reboot. Same for Flash crap.
While that would be nice, by far the worst thing about Gimp is the UI. It may be OK on a desktop with a big screen but I was trying to edit an image on my laptop recently and with all the windows splattered everywhere, most of them forcing themselves to the front all the time because, my God, the font window is so much more important than the image I'm trying to edit, I ended up with about a quarter of the screen available for editing.
I'm really hoping that this is an improvement.
I think this is probably the most stupid thing the Tories have done so far.
It doesn't even come close to being visibile on the list of stupid things the current government have done so far.
Sounds like they've been attempting to destroy software patents, without as much real success as we might like.
The EU's goal is to make the legislature a meaningless figurehead that just rubberstamps the output of the underlying bureaucracy; kind of like the Queen in the UK.
As some Scottish guy whose name I forget said a couple of centuries ago, democracy can only last until the voters realise they can vote to steal their neighbours' stuff.
However, dictatorship is hardly an improvement: sometimes you may get lucky and have an effective and relatively non-corrupt leader in charge, but most of the time it's another Stalin or Saddam Hussein.
Do they still exist? I thought they went bust decades ago.
Why can't this be handled by a package manager similiar to the one on my linux box?
Doesn't the package manager just run the install script as root?
I entirely agree, installers should only be allowed access to specific files and directories, but that's relatively hard to do. Especially in Windows, where those files and directories may be scattered across the system rather than being in well-known places.
You don't need to click on the banners. Most sites are being paid by impressions, not clicks.
But advertisers will eventually smarten up and realise that paying for impressions is pointless.
Sure for the *really* important DLLs, but those are going to be on Windows by default for everyone.
No, for any DLL that's common between applications. For example, a few years back there was some important security hole in zlib, and I found about a dozen different installations of zlib.dll on my Windows PC; either I replaced them and hope the application still worked, or lived with a known security hole.
If there was one zlib.dll on the system with a sensible versioning methodology, then updating it once would have fixed them all and the versioning would ensure that they didn't break.