Windows 'works' largely because it comes pre-installed. Try taking any random PC, wiping the disk and installing Windows on it from an official Microsoft install CD and you'll find it at least as hard to get working as Linux.
Though personally the last few times I've installed Linux I just stuck the CD in the drive, selected a few install options and half an hour later I had a working system sitting at the logon prompt. Finding, downloading and installing all the correct updated drivers for a fresh Windows install would probably take longer than that.
I believe there's been at least one case in the UK of crooks spreading other people's DNA around in order to confuse the cops. I don't remember the details but I'm sure I read about it in the last year or so.
All you need to do is drop some skin flakes on the London underground and next you know you could be a suspect in a murder case.
Why? If you are arrested, they already have your fingerprints. If you are exonerated, they still keep your fingerprints on file.
And they should be deleted too.
You appear to be saying 'because the police do this bad thing, we should let them do other bad things too'. Taking DNA on arrest is now standard practice in the UK and even though the EU has told them they must delete it if the suspect turns out to be innocent, they've taken two years and a change of government to start to delete some. It's just another attempt to create a big police state database.
So you'd use it as somewhat leaky storage and a source of spares and raw materials.
There's little commonality between shuttle parts and ISS parts, no-one is going to be melting down the shuttle's aluminum for raw materials to build new space station parts, and you'd need to bring more supplies into space to keep the atmosphere from leaking out (plus more fuel to raise the orbit since you'd have another hundred tons of mass). It's simply a lose-lose proposition.
I tell anybody I hear thinking about buying NVIDIA to buy AMD instead. Sure, you might get a few more fps today, but tomorrow you may find your card unsupported by the manufacturer with no documentation available to end users on how to fix problems they may encounter in the future.
AMD no longer support my integrated ATI GPU; I had to manually patch the driver wrapper source to make it work after recent kernel changes and I'm guessing that before long it will be too rotted to work at all.
There is an open source driver but it doesn't work with my monitor resolution and performance is awful. So my solution before I discovered I could patch the source was going to be buying the cheapest Nvidia card I could fit into the computer.
i go way back to the Riva TNT2 and voodoo2 days. i bought a top of the line voodoo2 the day it came out back in 1998. cost me $299. these days a top of the line card is $500 or more and it sucks enough electricity to power a small town.
While I agree that power usage is insane on high-end GPUs, have you ever heard of inflation? $299 in 1998 money probably isn't far off of $500 in today's money.
He'll be remembered as the anti-Kennedy for shutting down the US manned space program.
The Columbia investigation committee decided that the shuttle should be recertified if NASA wanted it to fly past 2010. No-one thought that going through that process made any sense, so that was the end of the program. Bush just happened to be President at the time.
The shuttles were only 35% through their rated lifespan.
There are concerns about aging of a number of parts which were never designed to be replaced because the shuttles weren't supposed to fly for thirty years; you'd have to take the airframe apart to replace them and then you might as well build a new vehicle instead.
Obama didnt help much by shutting down its successor.
That's probably the best thing Obama has ever done. If NASA replaces expensive NASA-only launchers with launch services purchased on the open market, they can concentrate on developing new technologies and travel to places beyond Earth orbit which commercial organisations won't be doing any time soon.
It's an airtight space full of equipment and other useful things.
It's far from airtight and is only designed to operate in space for a couple of weeks (which is why they didn't go to a great deal of trouble to make it airtight). Cooling and power would be problematice and the interior space is small compared to a space station module.
A number of people have suggested this and there's no good reason to do it and lots of good reasons not to do it.
And it should be obvious that a dozen people can get the job done quicker and better than one.
Why?
I'd note that Indian rockets seem to have shown a remarkable tendency to explode since they switched away from Russian engines. It may be unrelated -- after all, American rockets explode too -- but it does seem a bit of a coincidence.
That seems like a bizarre claim when there's probably more commercial interest in spaceflight today than ever before in the history of the human race. Dozens of groups are building suborbital rockets, SpaceX has built and flown two new orbital launchers with new engines for less than the cost of NASA putting a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB, and at least some of those groups will come up with innovative ways of reducing the cost of spaceflight as a result.
At least two, I believe. From what I remember they were launched on a shuttle but the upper stages didn't fire, so they were recovered on a later flight and then launched again by expendable rockets?
In a generation or two even low-end graphics cards will probably have the power to play 1080p games at full detail.
They do already, so long as you're playing games from 2003. The reason why you can play many modern games on max settings on mid-range cards is that those games have been crippled for the console market and simply cannot benefit from the power of a high-end card.
I went to a small book signing, greet & meet for two authors. Both had agents. Both had publishing deals. One of them even had two of his novels optioned by some big-name Hollywood producers. You'd think with this kind of track record they'd be marketed by their publishers. They both told me they have to do all of their own marketing.
Then they have crappy publishers. You don't pay someone a $50,000 advance for a book and then not try to sell it.
As to what publishers offer in the ebook era, the answer is packaging, marketing, and a sign that the book doesn't suck. I've read sample chapters of $0.99 ebooks and the reason why most of them are $0.99 is because they suck so bad that no-one would even consider paying more than $0.99 for them (heck, few people in their right mind would consider paying $0.99 for them). In this case the writer has made a name in traditional publishing, has an established web presence and apparently writes good books, so his experience is vastly different to that of Joe Writer who's putting up their first novel on Amazon.
The $0.99 price point will soon be full of the ebook equivalent of what you find on fanfiction.net; finding anything good is then going to down to word of mouth, reviews or a seal of approval from a publisher you've heard of.
No offense but Mass Effect 1's copy-and-paste worlds were one of the worst parts of the game, along with the Mako APC.
Yeah, that was the point where I finally gave up and uninstalled it. Bad driving physics on cookie-cutter worlds wihle randomly being killed by worms jumping out of the ground is really not my idea of a fun time.
Good voice acting in RPGs redefines the whole experience.
Voice acting in RPGs makes me want to yell 'shut up and let me get on with actually playing the game'. There's usually way too much dialog that's repetitve or dull, and I can read subtites twice as fast as they speak so I just keep pressing the 'get on with it' button... if there is one, isn't Mass Effect's dialog mostly unskippable?
I've basically given up on modern 'RPGs' because most of them seem to expect me to spend most of the 'game' watchng tedious cut-scenes that are like something out of a Sci-Fi channel movie without Bruce Campbell.
Im not at all impressed by graphics on PS3, a good PC or an Xbox. All the games look roughly the same regardless of game engine or developer.
That's because they're all being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator (i.e. the least powerful of the consoles). When my $1000 laptop can play just about any modern game on high settings, you know that those games aren't even beginning to stress a high-end PC.
Is there any reason that one of the largest software companies in the world can't make new software? I can't think of a reason why.
Management and internal politics; the people working on desktop Windows won't want to support anything that will harm their market.
Changing direction is extremely hard for any large company because there are so many people who have to be convinced to support that change or fired if they won't.
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Perhaps you haven't seen the breakdown of seats in the US Congress lately?
Hint: how long do you think this ACTA process has been going on for?
Yes, if they flip flop, like they did in the 1800s, switch sides. But RIGHT NOW Republican == BAD.
And there I was thinking that Democrats had run the US government for the last two years.
Windows 'works' largely because it comes pre-installed. Try taking any random PC, wiping the disk and installing Windows on it from an official Microsoft install CD and you'll find it at least as hard to get working as Linux.
Though personally the last few times I've installed Linux I just stuck the CD in the drive, selected a few install options and half an hour later I had a working system sitting at the logon prompt. Finding, downloading and installing all the correct updated drivers for a fresh Windows install would probably take longer than that.
He has every right to take EA to small claims court over the $60 game. I wish him the best.
And he would win, because EA don't want the 'you're only buying a license, na-na' excuse tested in court for the sake of $60.
I believe there's been at least one case in the UK of crooks spreading other people's DNA around in order to confuse the cops. I don't remember the details but I'm sure I read about it in the last year or so.
All you need to do is drop some skin flakes on the London underground and next you know you could be a suspect in a murder case.
Why? If you are arrested, they already have your fingerprints. If you are exonerated, they still keep your fingerprints on file.
And they should be deleted too.
You appear to be saying 'because the police do this bad thing, we should let them do other bad things too'. Taking DNA on arrest is now standard practice in the UK and even though the EU has told them they must delete it if the suspect turns out to be innocent, they've taken two years and a change of government to start to delete some. It's just another attempt to create a big police state database.
For some bizarre reason they've hidden it: you need to select 'use custom settings for history' to be able to configure coookie use.
So you'd use it as somewhat leaky storage and a source of spares and raw materials.
There's little commonality between shuttle parts and ISS parts, no-one is going to be melting down the shuttle's aluminum for raw materials to build new space station parts, and you'd need to bring more supplies into space to keep the atmosphere from leaking out (plus more fuel to raise the orbit since you'd have another hundred tons of mass). It's simply a lose-lose proposition.
I tell anybody I hear thinking about buying NVIDIA to buy AMD instead. Sure, you might get a few more fps today, but tomorrow you may find your card unsupported by the manufacturer with no documentation available to end users on how to fix problems they may encounter in the future.
AMD no longer support my integrated ATI GPU; I had to manually patch the driver wrapper source to make it work after recent kernel changes and I'm guessing that before long it will be too rotted to work at all.
There is an open source driver but it doesn't work with my monitor resolution and performance is awful. So my solution before I discovered I could patch the source was going to be buying the cheapest Nvidia card I could fit into the computer.
i go way back to the Riva TNT2 and voodoo2 days. i bought a top of the line voodoo2 the day it came out back in 1998. cost me $299. these days a top of the line card is $500 or more and it sucks enough electricity to power a small town.
While I agree that power usage is insane on high-end GPUs, have you ever heard of inflation? $299 in 1998 money probably isn't far off of $500 in today's money.
I can spend £40 on a game for my PS3 that's, what, 3 years old? And it will be very, very close to what the PC version is like
Because the PC version is a port of the PS3 version which was pre-crippled to run on the PS3.
And the PC version will probably cost $5, not 40 pounds. I can't imagine paying that much money for a three year old game.
He'll be remembered as the anti-Kennedy for shutting down the US manned space program.
The Columbia investigation committee decided that the shuttle should be recertified if NASA wanted it to fly past 2010. No-one thought that going through that process made any sense, so that was the end of the program. Bush just happened to be President at the time.
The shuttles were only 35% through their rated lifespan.
There are concerns about aging of a number of parts which were never designed to be replaced because the shuttles weren't supposed to fly for thirty years; you'd have to take the airframe apart to replace them and then you might as well build a new vehicle instead.
Obama didnt help much by shutting down its successor.
That's probably the best thing Obama has ever done. If NASA replaces expensive NASA-only launchers with launch services purchased on the open market, they can concentrate on developing new technologies and travel to places beyond Earth orbit which commercial organisations won't be doing any time soon.
It's an airtight space full of equipment and other useful things.
It's far from airtight and is only designed to operate in space for a couple of weeks (which is why they didn't go to a great deal of trouble to make it airtight). Cooling and power would be problematice and the interior space is small compared to a space station module.
A number of people have suggested this and there's no good reason to do it and lots of good reasons not to do it.
And it should be obvious that a dozen people can get the job done quicker and better than one.
Why?
I'd note that Indian rockets seem to have shown a remarkable tendency to explode since they switched away from Russian engines. It may be unrelated -- after all, American rockets explode too -- but it does seem a bit of a coincidence.
We have lost our ambitions for spaceflight.
That seems like a bizarre claim when there's probably more commercial interest in spaceflight today than ever before in the history of the human race. Dozens of groups are building suborbital rockets, SpaceX has built and flown two new orbital launchers with new engines for less than the cost of NASA putting a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB, and at least some of those groups will come up with innovative ways of reducing the cost of spaceflight as a result.
Did the shuttle, indeed, ever return a satellite?
At least two, I believe. From what I remember they were launched on a shuttle but the upper stages didn't fire, so they were recovered on a later flight and then launched again by expendable rockets?
In a generation or two even low-end graphics cards will probably have the power to play 1080p games at full detail.
They do already, so long as you're playing games from 2003. The reason why you can play many modern games on max settings on mid-range cards is that those games have been crippled for the console market and simply cannot benefit from the power of a high-end card.
Scandinavia?
Scandinavia has significant oil income and has seen growth decline as it's become more socialist. It also appears to be a demographic disaster zone.
I certainly don't see many Americans queueing up to move there.
1000 x ($3.00 x 0.35) = $1,050.00
20,000 x ($0.99 x 0.35) = $6,930.00
Even if your increased volume is not 20-fold, you still stand to make a lot more by selling as few as five times more copies:
Amazon's royalties increase to 70% at $2.99. So you need to sell six times as many at $.99 to make the same amount of money.
I went to a small book signing, greet & meet for two authors. Both had agents. Both had publishing deals. One of them even had two of his novels optioned by some big-name Hollywood producers. You'd think with this kind of track record they'd be marketed by their publishers. They both told me they have to do all of their own marketing.
Then they have crappy publishers. You don't pay someone a $50,000 advance for a book and then not try to sell it.
As to what publishers offer in the ebook era, the answer is packaging, marketing, and a sign that the book doesn't suck. I've read sample chapters of $0.99 ebooks and the reason why most of them are $0.99 is because they suck so bad that no-one would even consider paying more than $0.99 for them (heck, few people in their right mind would consider paying $0.99 for them). In this case the writer has made a name in traditional publishing, has an established web presence and apparently writes good books, so his experience is vastly different to that of Joe Writer who's putting up their first novel on Amazon.
The $0.99 price point will soon be full of the ebook equivalent of what you find on fanfiction.net; finding anything good is then going to down to word of mouth, reviews or a seal of approval from a publisher you've heard of.
No offense but Mass Effect 1's copy-and-paste worlds were one of the worst parts of the game, along with the Mako APC.
Yeah, that was the point where I finally gave up and uninstalled it. Bad driving physics on cookie-cutter worlds wihle randomly being killed by worms jumping out of the ground is really not my idea of a fun time.
Good voice acting in RPGs redefines the whole experience.
Voice acting in RPGs makes me want to yell 'shut up and let me get on with actually playing the game'. There's usually way too much dialog that's repetitve or dull, and I can read subtites twice as fast as they speak so I just keep pressing the 'get on with it' button... if there is one, isn't Mass Effect's dialog mostly unskippable?
I've basically given up on modern 'RPGs' because most of them seem to expect me to spend most of the 'game' watchng tedious cut-scenes that are like something out of a Sci-Fi channel movie without Bruce Campbell.
Im not at all impressed by graphics on PS3, a good PC or an Xbox. All the games look roughly the same regardless of game engine or developer.
That's because they're all being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator (i.e. the least powerful of the consoles). When my $1000 laptop can play just about any modern game on high settings, you know that those games aren't even beginning to stress a high-end PC.
they browbeat quintessential PC developers to bring out games later on the PC (Mass Effect)
I wish they'd managed to convince them not to bring out Mass Effect on the PC. Worst 'RPG' I've played in years, I'm glad I only paid $5 for it..
Is there any reason that one of the largest software companies in the world can't make new software? I can't think of a reason why.
Management and internal politics; the people working on desktop Windows won't want to support anything that will harm their market.
Changing direction is extremely hard for any large company because there are so many people who have to be convinced to support that change or fired if they won't.