To be fair, theres a world of difference between a rocket that launches crew and one that doesn't.
No there isn't, unless you insist on using a massive SRB. I believe the proposed 'man-rating' costs for launching Onion on Atlas and Delta were on the order of a few tens of millions of dollars.
Crew-rating costs are out now, which saves a ton of money.
Two orbital launches is a nice start. How many did Ares have again, in the same time period of development?
And didn't SpaceX build two different launchers and their engines from scratch and launch them into space for about the same amount as NASA spent to launch a dummy upper stage on an existing SRB? Or have I got my numbers wrong?
holding my hands up in the air and wildly waving my arms around. That would be a huge improvement.
Yeah, but just think of the benefits: if you walked down the street wildly waving your arms around ten years ago people thought you were a lunatic, if you do it ten years from now people will think you're a poser with the latest Apple iThing.
Even if they are not successful, I know that LG has just climbed to the top of my list next time I need to look for a piece of tech.
My LG Blu-Ray player stopped working after six months and has been in for warranty repairs for about nine months (about six months ago they said they couldn't fix it and would get me a replacement); so you might want to reconsider that.
According to the statistics: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey 73% of steam users' video cards support dx10 and 12% - dx11. It's not a small number.
My laptop supports DX10. But if I enable DX10 in the only game I own that has a DX10 mode, then the frame-rate drops from 30fps to 10-15fps. So they might as well not have bothered.
The REALLY sad part is that halo was originally going to be a PC game before Microsoft (ironically a PC Operating System developer) decided to make it "console playable".
Funny, isn't it? Microsoft make most of their money from Windows and Windows apps, the only reason for the average PC owner to upgrade is for games, but they push games off of the PC onto consoles, where they lose money.
Not only did buying a PS3 not make my PS2 stop working, my Playstation 1 still plays all the games I have for it!
On the other hand, I've seen a number of console gamers complaining that they can no longer play old games on their old console becuase they require online services which have since been shut down.
You can be sure that in future console manufacturers are going to do everything they can to tie you to online activation schemes that they can shut down a year or two after the new console is out.
Save slots is a nuisance, but there are plenty of reasons not to permit someone to save everywhere at anytime.
No there aren't.
Why should I be forced to replay parts of a game that I don't want to replay just because you decided that I should have to? Ah, because you only have three hours of actual content in the game and if you don't make me play through it fifteen times before I get to the end then I'll complain that three hours of content is not worth the $5 I paid for it.
Used to be that I could just buy a PC game and know what I was getting. Then I had to start checking whether it had intrusive DRM so I could avoid buying any that did. Then I had to check that it was actually playable and not crippled by a console interface. Now I have to check that it's also not crippled by a consolised save system.
I don't see this as a console related thing. There's nothing about console hardware that prevents arbitrary saves -- modern consoles have plenty of storage.
But consoles have traditionally had crippled save systems to force you to replay content because there's so little of it, while PCs have had save anywhere; very few PC games lacked a save anywhere feature a few years back but as PC gaming has been replaced by crappy console ports it's become common.
For example, being able to save immediately before a difficult jump in a platformer would ruin the challenge, and result in a boring game of { save; jump; while(!success) { load; jump; } }
If save anywhere would make your game boring, you've made a boring game. What exactly is supposed to be fun about having to press a key at exactly the right millisecond to make a stupid jump and have to repeat it three thousand times until you get it right? That's the kind of boring, repetitive crap that's been typical of the console market and the consolised PC market.
Personally, by far the most interesting games I've played in the last couple of years are from indies who do develop for the PC instead of consoles; most of the mass-market games are crippled by being developed for consoles and ported over. I really hope the big publishers completely abandon the PC market and let people who want to make PC games take over.
The risk of death for open heart surgery is approximately 1/50. And you don't even get a refund!
Perhaps, but they're presumably going to die without it so they're better off with a 2% chance of death. I doubt anyone is going to die any time soon because they couldn't go on a space tourism trip (absent aliens promising to cure cancer or whatever).
Until private space travel takes off (no pun intended) we won't have a good set of figures to find out which is relatively safer, private space travel or public
No legal business could survive for long if it killed one customer in fifty with their first purchase.
But Linux's legacy security model is so deeply embedded in the UNIX/Linux world that it's almost impossible to get beyond that.
That 'legacy security model' is there because anything more complex becomes insanely difficult to administer. Do you really think that a user who demands 'autopwn' for convenience is going to be setting up ACLs so that autopwn programs can't trash their data?
And any useful autopwn program is likely to require at least user permissions for whatever the user plans to do with it..
Are you in the habit of inserting media you don't intend to actually access?
Yes. The last time I remember this happening, I put a DVD in the drive because I was going to play it after I finished reading my email and the stupid operating system decided to start up the DVD player, getting in the way of what I was going at the time.
And I'm definitely, absolutely, certainly, 100% in the habit of inserting media where I don't want to open up a browser window which runs random buggy codecs in order to display thumbnails that I 100% don't give a damn about.
I insert a DVD into my player - and it just plays.
A DVD player has one intended use and only one intended use: playing DVDs.
I put film into my (now older camera) and it it loaded it up for me ready to use when I shut the back
A camera has one intended use and only one intended use: taking photos.
So why do you think the average consumer is *not* going to expect things happen automatically?
Computers are used for many things other than playing DVDs. Why should the operating system assume that just because I put a DVD in the drive, I want to play it?
Well thank god we have the bastions of intelligence and civility over at Fox News, Free Republic and Conservapedia to help usher in a new dawn of meaningful political discourse, right?
There's no such thing as 'meaningful political discourse', politics in its entirety is just apes throwing turds at each other.
The difference is that you won't see those sites being sold to AOL any time soon. The left just can't build a viable online community because they're always fighting over who gets to be Supreme Leader of the Glorious People's Website.
As with climate change, the few real scientists who are skeptical seem to be from fields which have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand.
Indeed. Most of the scientists working in 'climate science' seem to deny that the climate changes naturally and blame any change on humans.
But I've never met anyone who's skeptical about climate change; only people who deny that the climate changes naturally (e.g. the infamous 'hockey stick' where the temperature was supposedly flat for centuries until the industrial revolution) and people who believe it does... given that we have records of climate change going back millions of years I can't see how anyone could possibly be skeptical about it.
The fact is individual variance is far far larger than normative gender gaps.
Find an eight-year-old kid and try telling them that boys and girls think the same; they'll probably just laugh at you. Believing that men and women are the same takes a great deal of practice at ignoring reality.
There are certainly very 'masculine' women and very 'feminine' men, but the reality is that men tend to be at one end of the scale and women at the other, and the number who are at the opposite end of the psychological scale from their natural position is pretty small. And there's nothing wrong with that unless you hate women.
Actually, there are probably more stupid women since women out number men.
But from what I've read on the subject men seem to have greater IQ variance than women, so the percentage of really stupid men is larger than the percentage of really stupid women (but so is the percentage of really smart men).
Having to pay a license to lawyers to be authorized to sell your own invention is not really what the patent system is supposed to be.
That's exactly what the patent system is supposed to be: you invent something yourself, then discover that you can't use your own invention because someone invented it before you and has a piece of paper saying they own it.
There are few really unique and innovative inventions which someone else in the field couldn't come up with independently.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, theres a world of difference between a rocket that launches crew and one that doesn't.
No there isn't, unless you insist on using a massive SRB. I believe the proposed 'man-rating' costs for launching Onion on Atlas and Delta were on the order of a few tens of millions of dollars.
Crew-rating costs are out now, which saves a ton of money.
Only if you insist on using a massive SRB.
Two orbital launches is a nice start. How many did Ares have again, in the same time period of development?
And didn't SpaceX build two different launchers and their engines from scratch and launch them into space for about the same amount as NASA spent to launch a dummy upper stage on an existing SRB? Or have I got my numbers wrong?
holding my hands up in the air and wildly waving my arms around. That would be a huge improvement.
Yeah, but just think of the benefits: if you walked down the street wildly waving your arms around ten years ago people thought you were a lunatic, if you do it ten years from now people will think you're a poser with the latest Apple iThing.
For ages I've been wondering why processor power has increased many times over but input devices have hardly changed at all.
Because for general purpose computer use, a keyboard and mouse are hard to beat.
Windows 98 won't used RAM past 256M unless you hack the registry, it'll use the page file instead
Um, no.
Even if they are not successful, I know that LG has just climbed to the top of my list next time I need to look for a piece of tech.
My LG Blu-Ray player stopped working after six months and has been in for warranty repairs for about nine months (about six months ago they said they couldn't fix it and would get me a replacement); so you might want to reconsider that.
According to the statistics: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey 73% of steam users' video cards support dx10 and 12% - dx11. It's not a small number.
My laptop supports DX10. But if I enable DX10 in the only game I own that has a DX10 mode, then the frame-rate drops from 30fps to 10-15fps. So they might as well not have bothered.
The REALLY sad part is that halo was originally going to be a PC game before Microsoft (ironically a PC Operating System developer) decided to make it "console playable".
Funny, isn't it? Microsoft make most of their money from Windows and Windows apps, the only reason for the average PC owner to upgrade is for games, but they push games off of the PC onto consoles, where they lose money.
Not only did buying a PS3 not make my PS2 stop working, my Playstation 1 still plays all the games I have for it!
On the other hand, I've seen a number of console gamers complaining that they can no longer play old games on their old console becuase they require online services which have since been shut down.
You can be sure that in future console manufacturers are going to do everything they can to tie you to online activation schemes that they can shut down a year or two after the new console is out.
Save slots is a nuisance, but there are plenty of reasons not to permit someone to save everywhere at anytime.
No there aren't.
Why should I be forced to replay parts of a game that I don't want to replay just because you decided that I should have to? Ah, because you only have three hours of actual content in the game and if you don't make me play through it fifteen times before I get to the end then I'll complain that three hours of content is not worth the $5 I paid for it.
Used to be that I could just buy a PC game and know what I was getting. Then I had to start checking whether it had intrusive DRM so I could avoid buying any that did. Then I had to check that it was actually playable and not crippled by a console interface. Now I have to check that it's also not crippled by a consolised save system.
This is why PC gaming sucks ass right now.
I don't see this as a console related thing. There's nothing about console hardware that prevents arbitrary saves -- modern consoles have plenty of storage.
But consoles have traditionally had crippled save systems to force you to replay content because there's so little of it, while PCs have had save anywhere; very few PC games lacked a save anywhere feature a few years back but as PC gaming has been replaced by crappy console ports it's become common.
For example, being able to save immediately before a difficult jump in a platformer would ruin the challenge, and result in a boring game of { save; jump; while(!success) { load; jump; } }
If save anywhere would make your game boring, you've made a boring game. What exactly is supposed to be fun about having to press a key at exactly the right millisecond to make a stupid jump and have to repeat it three thousand times until you get it right? That's the kind of boring, repetitive crap that's been typical of the console market and the consolised PC market.
Personally, by far the most interesting games I've played in the last couple of years are from indies who do develop for the PC instead of consoles; most of the mass-market games are crippled by being developed for consoles and ported over. I really hope the big publishers completely abandon the PC market and let people who want to make PC games take over.
The risk of death for open heart surgery is approximately 1/50. And you don't even get a refund!
Perhaps, but they're presumably going to die without it so they're better off with a 2% chance of death. I doubt anyone is going to die any time soon because they couldn't go on a space tourism trip (absent aliens promising to cure cancer or whatever).
Until private space travel takes off (no pun intended) we won't have a good set of figures to find out which is relatively safer, private space travel or public
No legal business could survive for long if it killed one customer in fifty with their first purchase.
But Linux's legacy security model is so deeply embedded in the UNIX/Linux world that it's almost impossible to get beyond that.
That 'legacy security model' is there because anything more complex becomes insanely difficult to administer. Do you really think that a user who demands 'autopwn' for convenience is going to be setting up ACLs so that autopwn programs can't trash their data?
And any useful autopwn program is likely to require at least user permissions for whatever the user plans to do with it..
Are you in the habit of inserting media you don't intend to actually access?
Yes. The last time I remember this happening, I put a DVD in the drive because I was going to play it after I finished reading my email and the stupid operating system decided to start up the DVD player, getting in the way of what I was going at the time.
And I'm definitely, absolutely, certainly, 100% in the habit of inserting media where I don't want to open up a browser window which runs random buggy codecs in order to display thumbnails that I 100% don't give a damn about.
You can't claim that Linux > Windows and then suggest it remove features Windows has had for years.
Linux has traditionally been better than Windows precisely because it didn't have features like 'autopwn' that Windows has had for years.
I insert a DVD into my player - and it just plays.
A DVD player has one intended use and only one intended use: playing DVDs.
I put film into my (now older camera) and it it loaded it up for me ready to use when I shut the back
A camera has one intended use and only one intended use: taking photos.
So why do you think the average consumer is *not* going to expect things happen automatically?
Computers are used for many things other than playing DVDs. Why should the operating system assume that just because I put a DVD in the drive, I want to play it?
When is this insanity going to end?
When developers stop listening to new users who say 'But I can do this in Windows, why can't I do it in Linux?'
Well thank god we have the bastions of intelligence and civility over at Fox News, Free Republic and Conservapedia to help usher in a new dawn of meaningful political discourse, right?
There's no such thing as 'meaningful political discourse', politics in its entirety is just apes throwing turds at each other.
The difference is that you won't see those sites being sold to AOL any time soon. The left just can't build a viable online community because they're always fighting over who gets to be Supreme Leader of the Glorious People's Website.
As with climate change, the few real scientists who are skeptical seem to be from fields which have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand.
Indeed. Most of the scientists working in 'climate science' seem to deny that the climate changes naturally and blame any change on humans.
But I've never met anyone who's skeptical about climate change; only people who deny that the climate changes naturally (e.g. the infamous 'hockey stick' where the temperature was supposedly flat for centuries until the industrial revolution) and people who believe it does... given that we have records of climate change going back millions of years I can't see how anyone could possibly be skeptical about it.
The fact is individual variance is far far larger than normative gender gaps.
Find an eight-year-old kid and try telling them that boys and girls think the same; they'll probably just laugh at you. Believing that men and women are the same takes a great deal of practice at ignoring reality.
There are certainly very 'masculine' women and very 'feminine' men, but the reality is that men tend to be at one end of the scale and women at the other, and the number who are at the opposite end of the psychological scale from their natural position is pretty small. And there's nothing wrong with that unless you hate women.
But surveys at the end of the term ALWAYS showed that both the boys and girls said they "got more out of" classes that had mixed gender participation.
But, uh, the only actual scientific studies I'm aware of show that both boys and girls do better in single-sex classes than mixed.
Actually, there are probably more stupid women since women out number men.
But from what I've read on the subject men seem to have greater IQ variance than women, so the percentage of really stupid men is larger than the percentage of really stupid women (but so is the percentage of really smart men).
Why not just set criteria for filing patents as to allow only patents that really are major inventions?
How would big companies keep small competitors out of the market if they could only patent major, really innovative inventions?
Having to pay a license to lawyers to be authorized to sell your own invention is not really what the patent system is supposed to be.
That's exactly what the patent system is supposed to be: you invent something yourself, then discover that you can't use your own invention because someone invented it before you and has a piece of paper saying they own it.
There are few really unique and innovative inventions which someone else in the field couldn't come up with independently.