"As long as WINE has to reverse engineer Windoze there's going to be a demand for porting various games to Linux to run them natively."
On the other hand, I just installed a Windows game from 1998 on my Linux laptop and it ran fine -- heck, it even let me select the correct widescreen video mode -- whereas I doubt you'll find many Linux binaries from that era that will still run on an up to date distro.
Actually, looks like I was wrong: it crashed if I tried to install over NFS from my server, but after I copied the setup.exe file to the local machine it did install and run.
I just tried installing a couple of games from gog.com in Wine and the setup program crashed. So I guess that if you could manage to install them they might work, but installing doesn't seem to!
So the EU is broke with several nations teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, but it's going to find 400,000,000,000 Euros to throw into another 'green energy' scam?
I would find it extremely hard to believe that not a single one of them is secretly cooperating with government agencies, law enforcement, or anyone with a large enough check book.
To prove that you just need to provide a single example of a fake certificate used by a government. Which no-one has so far; the only examples I know of were stupid CAs who'd sign any old crap rather than crooked CAs.
The simple fix, as others have pointed out before, is that any web browser should warn the user if the site certificate changes. Then you're at least safe at any site you've visited before.
The PC isn't innovating because it doesn't need to - it's already perceived as "good enough" by its users. Advances in computing power generally get asorbed by the ever-increasing needs of the OS and office applications.
I bought a laptop for $1000 in 2007. I just replaced it with a 2010 model $1000 laptop... the CPU is 5x faster, the GPU is immensely faster, and it plays all my games at medium to high quality settings with no problems when the old one had problems playing anything more sophisticated than Pacman.
So while I'm not sure that providing vastly greater power for the same price counts as 'innovation', I'd hardly say that the PC market is stagnant. I'd agree though, that if you don't play games or edit video or some other performance-intensive task then even the cheapest PC is generally 'good enough'.... probably much of the real 'innovation' in the PC market over the last few years has been getting usable performance at lower and lower power consumption (e.g. my Ion system takes 30W to play HD video that my 300W Pentium-4 system can't play at all).
There are two rockets in the Ares program, the Ares I man rated version, which is designed to get astronauts into orbit and the Ares V heavy lift vehicle, which is designed to carry the rest of the equipment that the voyage will need.
The funny part is that astronauts are easier to replace than the 'rest of the equipment' required to get to the Moon; so in any rational world the 'Ares V' should have been designed to be _safer_ than the 'Ares I'. If you lose an 'Ares I' but the translunar stage gets into orbit then you can have another crew up there in a few days... lose the translunar stage and you'll be waiting months to replace it.
Aren't Uwe Boll's films financed by the public in the first place?
Last I read German law was changed so that he could no longer use German taxpayers' money to fund bad movies, which is why his budgets have dropped dramatically. Though I haven't really been keeping up on what he's been doing in the last couple of years.
I'm sure those "top scientists" have given a lot of thought to the size of ITER and its budget -- as they plan their retirements around it.
Indeed: some of these people are going to retire having spent their entire careers not building working fusion reactors. So I'd rather trust the thoughts of some random Slashdot poster than a 'top scientist' who's achieved nothing of substance after spending decades and billions of dollars in research.
with a keyboard, captive touchscreen, trackball, 3/4G and Wi-Fi, and a fast CPU, there is very little you can't do with the phone.
That's rather my point: if you do all that then it's no longer a phone, it's a best a small laptop which can make the occasional phone call... and small keyboards are useless for the average user for anything more sophisticated than sending the occasional email. Even my netbook keyboard is painful to use for word processing for long.
So the only way that phones are going to replace laptops in the near future is by becoming small laptops with poor ergonomics.
So we're going to be carrying around phones the size of laptops? Personally I'd rather carry a phone that's just a phone, and a laptop when I need one... it's bad enough that you can barely find a phone without a camera anymore, for those who aren't allowed cameras where they work.
Obviously one day human/computer interfaces are going to reach the point where they're more efficient than a keyboard, a decently-sized LCD display and mouse, but I can't see that happening for a long time yet.
The only problem is that the default browser on most (all?) 64 bit GNU/Linux distributions is 64 bit.
And that you need to install a load of 32-bit libraries just to run a 32-bit web browser when the rest of the OS is 64-bit. I'd rather dump Flash (which I only ever use to watch Youtube videos anyway) than have huge amounts of cruft in my OS just so that it can run.
But 64-bit Flash has been working fine in 10.0; they've only dropped it now they've switched to 10.1, implying that they've actively broken something that used to work.
No, private companies are only selling tickets to LEO. There is a big difference between running circles around the world we have been on since pre-history and actually exploring another one.
I believe one of them was offering a trip around the Moon by Soyuz for a couple of hundred million dollars a while back. But that's about as far as current cheap Russian rockets can get.
Those who fail to understand X11 are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Sadly, many people using Unix today fail to understand the benefits of a client-server architecture which doesn't care whether it's rendering in the same computer or a completely different architecture and operating system on the other side of the planet.
Why would you put Ubuntu on a server? I only have an Ubuntu server because I run xbmc on Ubuntu as MythTV frontends so using Ubuntu for the backend is the easy way to ensure that everything stays consistent between the different boxes; it's about the last distro I'd pick for a general purpose server.
And while I agree that UNR is a kludge, it works pretty well for what it's designed to do (e.g. web browsing). If I boot Windows on the same netbook and run Windows Update, IE can only display about three lines of text between the menu bars and the border.
BIOS does not support booting from hard drives larger than 2TB while UEFI does.
Don't you just need GPT support for that? My BIOS boots from a GPT partition table though switching from GRUB1 to GRUB2 seems to have screwed that up somehow.
It's never good to make assumptions -- you have to work with what you know. The moment you step away from that, you're in the land of conspiracy theories and what-if logic.
True. I'm sure that secret software mandated by a communist government to be installed at their ISP is entirely in the best interests of their population.
Google is an incubator of technologies -- they try a hundred different things to find one that works.
So where's Google's 'WD40'?
Perhaps I've missed something, but Google do advertising, web search, advertising, online email, online word processing, advertising, online maps, online photo storage, advertising and a few other odds and ends that are either old hat or just online versions of things people have done on PCs for years. If they're such a great technology incubator I'd be interested to know what great new technologies they've incubated; Google Earth is about the most innovative I can think of.
If you knew anything about Bernanke you would recognize that he is extremely anti-inflation and has been well before he took his current roll.
This is the same Bernanke who said that if all else failed he would thrown money out of helicopters?
Given that US money supply has tripled over the last couple of years, if he's anti-inflation then he's been a dismal failure. US policy appears to be based on throwing new money into the economy then removing it at precisely the right time during a recovery to prevent an hyperinflationary spiral without causing another depression, and if the government was smart enough to do that then we wouldn't be in the current mess.
Actually, as oil prices increase, it'll eventually be cheaper to manufacture low margin goods here than to do it overseas and pay for shipping.
Shipping is extremely cheap compared to other forms of transport: this is why coastal cities have been the biggest economic centers for most of human history. With oil at $500 a barrel you'd easily be better off bringing products to a coastal city from China on a container ship than driving them from a factory half-way across America by truck; at a minimum you'd probably need to build a vast network of electric rail for transport inside America to be competitive.
For example, when I emigrated across the Atlantic half of the cost of shipping my stuff over paid for taking it thousands of miles from Europe through the Panama Canal to the West coast and the other half on the remaining few hundred miles by truck from the port to my house.
You are shooting off the hip and apperantly you haven't flown with El Al or have been flying out of Israel on another airline.
I've done both, which is exactly why I know that anyone who seriously suggests that Western airlines should adopt Israeli practices has no clue. Even if they worked, they would never be accepted in a politically correct Western nation.
They screen EVERYONE. Not everyone's name sounds jewish.
Do you seriously think they're as likely to search a Jewish Israeli passenger as they are a Palestinian or an Iranian Muslim? We're talking about a country which has real terrorist threats to deal with on a regular basis, not a politically correct Western nation which believes it has to strip-search a Christian grandmother as counterbalance every time they search a young Muslim man.
and you know this how?
Because they wouldn't treat passengers they way they do otherwise. The last time I flew out of Israel the 'security' at the next row over had a blonde German girl literally in tears; do you really think she's ever going back there?
I should add that I couldn't care less what Israeli security do as I never intend to go there again and it's there country so what they do at their airports is their choice; but if such measures were imposed in America and Europe I'd take a boat next time I had to cross the Atlantic.
Slashdot Mirror
"As long as WINE has to reverse engineer Windoze there's going to be a demand for porting various games to Linux to run them natively."
On the other hand, I just installed a Windows game from 1998 on my Linux laptop and it ran fine -- heck, it even let me select the correct widescreen video mode -- whereas I doubt you'll find many Linux binaries from that era that will still run on an up to date distro.
Actually, looks like I was wrong: it crashed if I tried to install over NFS from my server, but after I copied the setup.exe file to the local machine it did install and run.
"Where did my AJAX comment box go? For some reason slashdot started loading new pages whenever I click on comments? Ugh...!"
I was wondering whether it was just me having that problem, but I guess it's not :).
I just tried installing a couple of games from gog.com in Wine and the setup program crashed. So I guess that if you could manage to install them they might work, but installing doesn't seem to!
So the EU is broke with several nations teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, but it's going to find 400,000,000,000 Euros to throw into another 'green energy' scam?
I would find it extremely hard to believe that not a single one of them is secretly cooperating with government agencies, law enforcement, or anyone with a large enough check book.
To prove that you just need to provide a single example of a fake certificate used by a government. Which no-one has so far; the only examples I know of were stupid CAs who'd sign any old crap rather than crooked CAs.
The simple fix, as others have pointed out before, is that any web browser should warn the user if the site certificate changes. Then you're at least safe at any site you've visited before.
The PC isn't innovating because it doesn't need to - it's already perceived as "good enough" by its users. Advances in computing power generally get asorbed by the ever-increasing needs of the OS and office applications.
I bought a laptop for $1000 in 2007. I just replaced it with a 2010 model $1000 laptop... the CPU is 5x faster, the GPU is immensely faster, and it plays all my games at medium to high quality settings with no problems when the old one had problems playing anything more sophisticated than Pacman.
So while I'm not sure that providing vastly greater power for the same price counts as 'innovation', I'd hardly say that the PC market is stagnant. I'd agree though, that if you don't play games or edit video or some other performance-intensive task then even the cheapest PC is generally 'good enough'.... probably much of the real 'innovation' in the PC market over the last few years has been getting usable performance at lower and lower power consumption (e.g. my Ion system takes 30W to play HD video that my 300W Pentium-4 system can't play at all).
NASA fucked up a lot of things w/ the shuttle but safety was pretty damn good.
In which universe does killing the entire crew one time in fifty count as 'pretty damn good' safety?
If the Falcon merely has to kill the crew one time in fifty to be 'man-rated' then it's pretty much trivial.
There are two rockets in the Ares program, the Ares I man rated version, which is designed to get astronauts into orbit and the Ares V heavy lift vehicle, which is designed to carry the rest of the equipment that the voyage will need.
The funny part is that astronauts are easier to replace than the 'rest of the equipment' required to get to the Moon; so in any rational world the 'Ares V' should have been designed to be _safer_ than the 'Ares I'. If you lose an 'Ares I' but the translunar stage gets into orbit then you can have another crew up there in a few days... lose the translunar stage and you'll be waiting months to replace it.
Standby uses a lot less electricity then you seem to think it does. Like orders of magnitude less.
My Atom server takes 6W when it's 'powered off'. That's 15-20% of the power that it uses when it's powered on.
What the heck is it doing while 'powered off' that requires a fifth as much power as running under full load?
Aren't Uwe Boll's films financed by the public in the first place?
Last I read German law was changed so that he could no longer use German taxpayers' money to fund bad movies, which is why his budgets have dropped dramatically. Though I haven't really been keeping up on what he's been doing in the last couple of years.
I'm sure those "top scientists" have given a lot of thought to the size of ITER and its budget -- as they plan their retirements around it.
Indeed: some of these people are going to retire having spent their entire careers not building working fusion reactors. So I'd rather trust the thoughts of some random Slashdot poster than a 'top scientist' who's achieved nothing of substance after spending decades and billions of dollars in research.
with a keyboard, captive touchscreen, trackball, 3/4G and Wi-Fi, and a fast CPU, there is very little you can't do with the phone.
That's rather my point: if you do all that then it's no longer a phone, it's a best a small laptop which can make the occasional phone call... and small keyboards are useless for the average user for anything more sophisticated than sending the occasional email. Even my netbook keyboard is painful to use for word processing for long.
So the only way that phones are going to replace laptops in the near future is by becoming small laptops with poor ergonomics.
So we're going to be carrying around phones the size of laptops? Personally I'd rather carry a phone that's just a phone, and a laptop when I need one... it's bad enough that you can barely find a phone without a camera anymore, for those who aren't allowed cameras where they work.
Obviously one day human/computer interfaces are going to reach the point where they're more efficient than a keyboard, a decently-sized LCD display and mouse, but I can't see that happening for a long time yet.
The only problem is that the default browser on most (all?) 64 bit GNU/Linux distributions is 64 bit.
And that you need to install a load of 32-bit libraries just to run a 32-bit web browser when the rest of the OS is 64-bit. I'd rather dump Flash (which I only ever use to watch Youtube videos anyway) than have huge amounts of cruft in my OS just so that it can run.
A "size_t" is NOT the same as an "unsigned int".
If you think it is, you're ignorant.
But 64-bit Flash has been working fine in 10.0; they've only dropped it now they've switched to 10.1, implying that they've actively broken something that used to work.
No, private companies are only selling tickets to LEO. There is a big difference between running circles around the world we have been on since pre-history and actually exploring another one.
I believe one of them was offering a trip around the Moon by Soyuz for a couple of hundred million dollars a while back. But that's about as far as current cheap Russian rockets can get.
he said they'd still suck, like they always have
Those who fail to understand X11 are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Sadly, many people using Unix today fail to understand the benefits of a client-server architecture which doesn't care whether it's rendering in the same computer or a completely different architecture and operating system on the other side of the planet.
Why would you put Ubuntu on a server? I only have an Ubuntu server because I run xbmc on Ubuntu as MythTV frontends so using Ubuntu for the backend is the easy way to ensure that everything stays consistent between the different boxes; it's about the last distro I'd pick for a general purpose server.
And while I agree that UNR is a kludge, it works pretty well for what it's designed to do (e.g. web browsing). If I boot Windows on the same netbook and run Windows Update, IE can only display about three lines of text between the menu bars and the border.
BIOS does not support booting from hard drives larger than 2TB while UEFI does.
Don't you just need GPT support for that? My BIOS boots from a GPT partition table though switching from GRUB1 to GRUB2 seems to have screwed that up somehow.
It's never good to make assumptions -- you have to work with what you know. The moment you step away from that, you're in the land of conspiracy theories and what-if logic.
True. I'm sure that secret software mandated by a communist government to be installed at their ISP is entirely in the best interests of their population.
Google is an incubator of technologies -- they try a hundred different things to find one that works.
So where's Google's 'WD40'?
Perhaps I've missed something, but Google do advertising, web search, advertising, online email, online word processing, advertising, online maps, online photo storage, advertising and a few other odds and ends that are either old hat or just online versions of things people have done on PCs for years. If they're such a great technology incubator I'd be interested to know what great new technologies they've incubated; Google Earth is about the most innovative I can think of.
If you knew anything about Bernanke you would recognize that he is extremely anti-inflation and has been well before he took his current roll.
This is the same Bernanke who said that if all else failed he would thrown money out of helicopters?
Given that US money supply has tripled over the last couple of years, if he's anti-inflation then he's been a dismal failure. US policy appears to be based on throwing new money into the economy then removing it at precisely the right time during a recovery to prevent an hyperinflationary spiral without causing another depression, and if the government was smart enough to do that then we wouldn't be in the current mess.
Actually, as oil prices increase, it'll eventually be cheaper to manufacture low margin goods here than to do it overseas and pay for shipping.
Shipping is extremely cheap compared to other forms of transport: this is why coastal cities have been the biggest economic centers for most of human history. With oil at $500 a barrel you'd easily be better off bringing products to a coastal city from China on a container ship than driving them from a factory half-way across America by truck; at a minimum you'd probably need to build a vast network of electric rail for transport inside America to be competitive.
For example, when I emigrated across the Atlantic half of the cost of shipping my stuff over paid for taking it thousands of miles from Europe through the Panama Canal to the West coast and the other half on the remaining few hundred miles by truck from the port to my house.
You are shooting off the hip and apperantly you haven't flown with El Al or have been flying out of Israel on another airline.
I've done both, which is exactly why I know that anyone who seriously suggests that Western airlines should adopt Israeli practices has no clue. Even if they worked, they would never be accepted in a politically correct Western nation.
They screen EVERYONE. Not everyone's name sounds jewish.
Do you seriously think they're as likely to search a Jewish Israeli passenger as they are a Palestinian or an Iranian Muslim? We're talking about a country which has real terrorist threats to deal with on a regular basis, not a politically correct Western nation which believes it has to strip-search a Christian grandmother as counterbalance every time they search a young Muslim man.
and you know this how?
Because they wouldn't treat passengers they way they do otherwise. The last time I flew out of Israel the 'security' at the next row over had a blonde German girl literally in tears; do you really think she's ever going back there?
I should add that I couldn't care less what Israeli security do as I never intend to go there again and it's there country so what they do at their airports is their choice; but if such measures were imposed in America and Europe I'd take a boat next time I had to cross the Atlantic.