1) A lot of windows programs refuse to run as anything but Admin. This is caused by architechtural baggage in Windows, baggage in the programs themselves, and idiot programmers who continue to write bad code. Since some of these programs are essential if you use them (eg AutoCAD), you have to run as admin: Thank you idiot programmers.
2) It seems that even some MS internal programs won't work under LUA: The corporate left hand doesn't know what right hand is doing. What else is new...
3) There is an enormous amount of inertia behind doing things the insecure way with Windows. Thank you MS.
4) There are a couple of posts asking why they should care about security even though they know about it. These jackasses are why the 'september that never ended' never ended. I hope they all choke on olives.
5) There are some people who want to use their computer for nothing more than e-mail, surfing the 'Net, music and the occasional text document. Linux + Evolution + Firefox + XMMS + StarOffice (to gaurantee winword compatibility) = all they need.
Depends... If you've incorporated, you're owned by wall street investors who would most likely feed their own mothers to the ravenous bug blatter beast of Traal to make a buck... You think they'll balk at selling your company to the Evil Software Monopoly if it'll make a buck?
"So this is how liberty dies... to thunderous applause." We're just past the end of Episode II, and President Bush^W^WChancellor Palpatine has just been granted 'emergency powers' to crush the Terrorists^WSeperatists.
'Bout the only thing that isn't the same is that the current threat from terrorists is the result of about 20 years of incompetence by the US government rather than the orchestration of one individual. Meh, trifles...
As far as I understand, the actual energy density of batteries is or is nearly as high as it can get given the energy available from rearranging the electrons in them; The only way to get more power is to either engineer them to deliver electrons faster (but that only increases watts, not total joules available) or use a new chemistry, and we're running out of those too.
I fully support this. Because I can't wait until some virus is created that destroys the contents of ANY computer using DRMed CPUs or Motherboards. At which point the massive backlash of dumb users who got burnt will force it out of the market forever.
But the virus shouldn't just wipe out the user's computer. It should inform them first. Redirect all web connections to a page explaining what is wrong with their computer ("Because of corporate greed, anyone with some knowhow can do anything they want to your computer."). Then tell them they have 24 hours to backup anything they want to keep. Then wipe every writable media clean.
And when OOo looks / works exactly like MSOffice, the dumb users will complain that it's nothing but a ripoff clone and why should they use that?
I've had a couple problems with OOo, though not the same ones. First: WTF is with what it does to " characters by default? That was a real irritance for a long time.
I've also had problems with printing (Using old Panasonic KX-P2023 Dot-Matrix. Don't knock it - I've never had ink problems unlike the 7 inkjets that've gone through my family in as many years): OOo ends up with pages that are 8.5x11 on the screen taking up 14" vertically on the printer - no clue why; Export to pdf and 'lp $PDF_FILE' works perfectly.
And finally, why does it take so long to START! I mean, a 1.6Ghz Athlon ain't no speed demon, but 15 full seconds before I can type?!? You can do better than that. Indeed, start times seem to be a real problem for many open-source programs: Evolution, Firefox, and OOo all take far longer to start than Outlook, Internet Exploder, and Office respectively.
No, they don't need to read every single bill that comes through. But they should probably read bills that will seriously affect the course of the nation.
This reminds me of the Daily Show...
Jon Stewart: And after all, defense legislation hurriedly passed in the midst of a national panic never hurt anyone, right?
* Turns to face left side of screen *
* Picture of WWII Japanese detainment camp appears *
Oil is considerably more valuable than it would be otherwise because America imports so much of it (and middle east dictators know this, and take pleasure from sticking our collective balls in a vice, but that's another story). Since a large portion of oil we buy is destined for vehicle fuel, a logical way to make oil less valuable is to make vehicles that use 4 to 6 times less.
Moving on, how was Saddam dangerous? He had oil, but wasn't able to sell any real amount of it (only enough to enrich himself and certain corrupt individuals in the UN). That's what the sanctions were about. He couldn't even keep his country from experiencing nonstop rolling blackouts. His army imploded as quickly as Coalition forces were able to advance. He had no WMD: He said it, the inspectors found nothing, and the US had found nothing in more than two years.
Saddam was no military threat to anyone but his own people. Since the US government has proven repeatedly in the last 50 years that it cares nothing for the suffering of people in other nations, the argument would more accurately be "no threat to anyone that the US government cares about." If not a military threat, what else did he have that would warrant an attack?
It's only big and cheap in the short run. If you want to commute in SUVs that get single-digit MPG, there will be a tradeoff. The opportunity cost (borne in this case by society as a whole) is invading other countries to aquire their natural resources to support wasteful habits, gaining badwill world-wide in the process. And dealing with the environmental and medical problems caused by consuming so much fuel.
Look beyond now and the next quarter, and see the long-term implications of what America, as a society, chooses to do today.
Can't be entirely sure (as CNB changes with every playing), but that sounds suspiciously like one of the intro words flashed by Chocolate Niblet Beans. You may have to play it 20 or 30 times to get the really long word to come up...
Current budget for military: 500 billion USD / year
Interest payments on debt that's spiraling out of control: 200 billion USD / year
Cost of war against Afghanistan and Iraq: 100+ billion USD / year
Donations to political campaigns by individuals in 2004: ~500 million USD
Budget for Drug Enforcement Agency: 200 million USD / year
Cost of keeping Voyager program running until it's power supply dies: 4 million USD / year
Abandoning scientific opportunity it will take decades to replace right when it's gathering data that no other source can: PRICELESS
Conclusions: Destroying irreplacable scientific opportunity will save enough money each year to 1) fund the DEA for one week, 2) Wage war on Iraq for 20 minutes, 3) Forestall government bankrupcy due to inability to make debt payments for 10 minutes, 4) Account for rounding errors in the military budget, 5) Account for 6th decimal errors in federal government budget.
Conclusions 2: Voyager and Pioneer probes can be saved for the rest of their operational lifetimes if: 1) the DEA takes a break for 1 week around christmas each year, 2) America pulls out of Iraq 5 hours early, 3) the federal budget is increased by two ten-thousands of one percent, 4) President Bush is given glasses with quarter-inch-thick diamond lenses to correct his myopia.
The Voyager and Pioneer missions are some of the most important expeditions ever undertaken - the first craft to reach the end of the solar system. The first craft to detect an anomalous force acting on them, and the only ones that will be in a position to do so for a very long time.
It should be self-evident that this is a fight that can't be lost. And if NASA is proposing to kill something that costs so little, they must be desperate. Or some pure, undiluted fragment of stupid from the big bang of stupid has landed at Cape Canaveral, but let's be optimistic on that detail.
In short, get the word out! Contact your local newspapers, call the news stations, contact your senators and representative in dead tree format. Make a ruckus that those idiots who propose to do this can't ignore!
Most plants are horribly, morbidly inefficient at converting sunlight to growth - something like 1% of incident energy on average. Their huge advantage over solar cells (and all other human technology) is that they're self-maintaining.
And it's based on the 1998 game "Starfleet Academy." In short, follow the adventures of a group of cadets in the book as you play the 5-cd game. IIRC, 230-something pages. The game/book take place during the Star Trek VI era.
Liked the book, liked the game's storyline, the gameplay was so-so (Otherwise generic starship flight simulator w/ Star Trek name attached). Why can't Paramount seem to license a good non-FPS game based on Star Trek? S.F. Academy the gameplay was half-baked, New Worlds the interface was off, Klingon Academy was pretty good.
And that is the way their GUI system config program, drakconf, doesn't seem to interact with CLI tools properly. Something caused my network setup to go down the toilet; When I try to figure things out, drakconf says one thing and ifconfig/route/netstat/etc seem to say another. I say "drakconf, delete eth0", and ifconfig still shows it. In the end, I gave up and just canned all network settings and setup the network from scratch (not a big deal: 1 DSL modem, two 10/100 cards), but I shouldn't have had to. Other than that, I think that the keypad-like (as opposed to side bar) button layout of Drakconf in 10.0 sucked bigtime from the usability perspective - good thing that changed with 10.1.
Main things I like are that Mdk unifies the look and feel of KDE and Gnome. It's GUI tools are friendly enough for everyday tasks but you can still go back to the CLI any time you want the power. Oh yeah - did I mention that Konqueror starts in about 2 seconds, eats ~5MB of memory per instance, and has tabbed browsing?
#11 - the 'WOW' signal? Last I heard, the WOW signal was the first (accidental) detection of the RF beam that comes off a pulsar.
#13 - Superconductors were explained 40 years ago? Sorry - BCS only works on type-1 superconductors.
Besides that, I think that some of the wierd stuff we observe (Pioneer acceleration, tetraneutrons, flatness & accelerating expansion of the universe, etc) implies that there's something big that we're missing. Sort of like how the effect of time/mass dialation is almost undectable and Newtonian predictions highly accurate until you get to a measurable fraction of lightspeed, it's like our current theories are still mostly in the part where missing terms in the equation are near-zero... but we're starting to leave that part. Think of how Y = X^2 / (X - 1) looks like a flat line until you approach X = 1.
What's this talk of using an *api* to create a photo gallery? What's wrong with simply laying them out, 5 or 6 to a page? With having one box and Javascript snippets to change pictures? I dunno, I guess my fascination with retrocomputing has led me to value getting the most out of one's CPU cycles and storage. I'm probably the only guy left who refuses to do web site development using graphical tools...
When these probes were launched, I don't think anyone would have expected or imagined that they would continue to operate for more than a quarter century. Yet here we are, 28 years later, and we're planning to kill the longest-running space missions ever, which have been returning scientific data for longer than 1/3 of the world's population have been alive. I simply cannot fathom the reasoning (or lack thereof) that leads to such stupefying myopia.
For the love of God, 4.4 million dollars per year is a ROUNDING ERROR compared the the amount of money the US has spent in it's effort to stop terrorists by force (the futility of which is something one could write about for pages and pages and pages...). The American government will spend ten thousand times that amount this year to be ready to kill people (plus five thousand times as much spent actually killing people in Iraq + Afghanistan), yet THIS is, of all things, the program chosen to die?
Something is terribly wrong with America if this is happenning. Can the problem be fixed before the damage is irreversible?
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Neither does ignoring international law, which does minor things like outlaw torture...
1) A lot of windows programs refuse to run as anything but Admin. This is caused by architechtural baggage in Windows, baggage in the programs themselves, and idiot programmers who continue to write bad code. Since some of these programs are essential if you use them (eg AutoCAD), you have to run as admin: Thank you idiot programmers.
2) It seems that even some MS internal programs won't work under LUA: The corporate left hand doesn't know what right hand is doing. What else is new...
3) There is an enormous amount of inertia behind doing things the insecure way with Windows. Thank you MS.
4) There are a couple of posts asking why they should care about security even though they know about it. These jackasses are why the 'september that never ended' never ended. I hope they all choke on olives.
5) There are some people who want to use their computer for nothing more than e-mail, surfing the 'Net, music and the occasional text document. Linux + Evolution + Firefox + XMMS + StarOffice (to gaurantee winword compatibility) = all they need.
Depends... If you've incorporated, you're owned by wall street investors who would most likely feed their own mothers to the ravenous bug blatter beast of Traal to make a buck... You think they'll balk at selling your company to the Evil Software Monopoly if it'll make a buck?
85% better than the House, Senate, or White House can claim.
But seriously, scientists are human too, and feel the same desires to be right and for instant gratification as any of us do.
"So this is how liberty dies... to thunderous applause." We're just past the end of Episode II, and President Bush^W^WChancellor Palpatine has just been granted 'emergency powers' to crush the Terrorists^WSeperatists.
'Bout the only thing that isn't the same is that the current threat from terrorists is the result of about 20 years of incompetence by the US government rather than the orchestration of one individual. Meh, trifles...
America was/is not the first Democratic government in the world. Ancient Athens was both the originator of the concept and the first to implement it.
As far as I understand, the actual energy density of batteries is or is nearly as high as it can get given the energy available from rearranging the electrons in them; The only way to get more power is to either engineer them to deliver electrons faster (but that only increases watts, not total joules available) or use a new chemistry, and we're running out of those too.
I fully support this. Because I can't wait until some virus is created that destroys the contents of ANY computer using DRMed CPUs or Motherboards. At which point the massive backlash of dumb users who got burnt will force it out of the market forever.
But the virus shouldn't just wipe out the user's computer. It should inform them first. Redirect all web connections to a page explaining what is wrong with their computer ("Because of corporate greed, anyone with some knowhow can do anything they want to your computer."). Then tell them they have 24 hours to backup anything they want to keep. Then wipe every writable media clean.
And when OOo looks / works exactly like MSOffice, the dumb users will complain that it's nothing but a ripoff clone and why should they use that?
I've had a couple problems with OOo, though not the same ones. First: WTF is with what it does to " characters by default? That was a real irritance for a long time.
I've also had problems with printing (Using old Panasonic KX-P2023 Dot-Matrix. Don't knock it - I've never had ink problems unlike the 7 inkjets that've gone through my family in as many years): OOo ends up with pages that are 8.5x11 on the screen taking up 14" vertically on the printer - no clue why; Export to pdf and 'lp $PDF_FILE' works perfectly.
And finally, why does it take so long to START! I mean, a 1.6Ghz Athlon ain't no speed demon, but 15 full seconds before I can type?!? You can do better than that. Indeed, start times seem to be a real problem for many open-source programs: Evolution, Firefox, and OOo all take far longer to start than Outlook, Internet Exploder, and Office respectively.
No, they don't need to read every single bill that comes through. But they should probably read bills that will seriously affect the course of the nation.
This reminds me of the Daily Show...
Jon Stewart: And after all, defense legislation hurriedly passed in the midst of a national panic never hurt anyone, right?
* Turns to face left side of screen *
* Picture of WWII Japanese detainment camp appears *
Oil is considerably more valuable than it would be otherwise because America imports so much of it (and middle east dictators know this, and take pleasure from sticking our collective balls in a vice, but that's another story). Since a large portion of oil we buy is destined for vehicle fuel, a logical way to make oil less valuable is to make vehicles that use 4 to 6 times less.
Moving on, how was Saddam dangerous? He had oil, but wasn't able to sell any real amount of it (only enough to enrich himself and certain corrupt individuals in the UN). That's what the sanctions were about. He couldn't even keep his country from experiencing nonstop rolling blackouts. His army imploded as quickly as Coalition forces were able to advance. He had no WMD: He said it, the inspectors found nothing, and the US had found nothing in more than two years.
Saddam was no military threat to anyone but his own people. Since the US government has proven repeatedly in the last 50 years that it cares nothing for the suffering of people in other nations, the argument would more accurately be "no threat to anyone that the US government cares about." If not a military threat, what else did he have that would warrant an attack?
It's only big and cheap in the short run. If you want to commute in SUVs that get single-digit MPG, there will be a tradeoff. The opportunity cost (borne in this case by society as a whole) is invading other countries to aquire their natural resources to support wasteful habits, gaining badwill world-wide in the process. And dealing with the environmental and medical problems caused by consuming so much fuel.
Look beyond now and the next quarter, and see the long-term implications of what America, as a society, chooses to do today.
I haven't used them much myself, but if you write C++ then try Qt3 Designer for the GUI and KDevelop for the code if you're using KDE for development.
If you want to write a 3-d graphics program without having to deal with X/glx/sdl for windowing, try GLUT.
This is going to be as bad as that time I let Numa Numa Iei play all night... Thank god this one doesn't loop...
Go Actuator Man!!!
Can't be entirely sure (as CNB changes with every playing), but that sounds suspiciously like one of the intro words flashed by Chocolate Niblet Beans. You may have to play it 20 or 30 times to get the really long word to come up...
Current budget for military: 500 billion USD / year
Interest payments on debt that's spiraling out of control: 200 billion USD / year
Cost of war against Afghanistan and Iraq: 100+ billion USD / year
Donations to political campaigns by individuals in 2004: ~500 million USD
Budget for Drug Enforcement Agency: 200 million USD / year
Cost of keeping Voyager program running until it's power supply dies: 4 million USD / year
Abandoning scientific opportunity it will take decades to replace right when it's gathering data that no other source can: PRICELESS
Conclusions: Destroying irreplacable scientific opportunity will save enough money each year to 1) fund the DEA for one week, 2) Wage war on Iraq for 20 minutes, 3) Forestall government bankrupcy due to inability to make debt payments for 10 minutes, 4) Account for rounding errors in the military budget, 5) Account for 6th decimal errors in federal government budget.
Conclusions 2: Voyager and Pioneer probes can be saved for the rest of their operational lifetimes if: 1) the DEA takes a break for 1 week around christmas each year, 2) America pulls out of Iraq 5 hours early, 3) the federal budget is increased by two ten-thousands of one percent, 4) President Bush is given glasses with quarter-inch-thick diamond lenses to correct his myopia.
The Voyager and Pioneer missions are some of the most important expeditions ever undertaken - the first craft to reach the end of the solar system. The first craft to detect an anomalous force acting on them, and the only ones that will be in a position to do so for a very long time.
It should be self-evident that this is a fight that can't be lost. And if NASA is proposing to kill something that costs so little, they must be desperate. Or some pure, undiluted fragment of stupid from the big bang of stupid has landed at Cape Canaveral, but let's be optimistic on that detail.
In short, get the word out! Contact your local newspapers, call the news stations, contact your senators and representative in dead tree format. Make a ruckus that those idiots who propose to do this can't ignore!
Most plants are horribly, morbidly inefficient at converting sunlight to growth - something like 1% of incident energy on average. Their huge advantage over solar cells (and all other human technology) is that they're self-maintaining.
That the little blurb at the bottom of /. should say "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."
This is why idiots shouldn't be let near computers...
And it's based on the 1998 game "Starfleet Academy." In short, follow the adventures of a group of cadets in the book as you play the 5-cd game. IIRC, 230-something pages. The game/book take place during the Star Trek VI era.
Liked the book, liked the game's storyline, the gameplay was so-so (Otherwise generic starship flight simulator w/ Star Trek name attached). Why can't Paramount seem to license a good non-FPS game based on Star Trek? S.F. Academy the gameplay was half-baked, New Worlds the interface was off, Klingon Academy was pretty good.
Hmm... I oughta try those games with WINE...
And that is the way their GUI system config program, drakconf, doesn't seem to interact with CLI tools properly. Something caused my network setup to go down the toilet; When I try to figure things out, drakconf says one thing and ifconfig/route/netstat/etc seem to say another. I say "drakconf, delete eth0", and ifconfig still shows it. In the end, I gave up and just canned all network settings and setup the network from scratch (not a big deal: 1 DSL modem, two 10/100 cards), but I shouldn't have had to. Other than that, I think that the keypad-like (as opposed to side bar) button layout of Drakconf in 10.0 sucked bigtime from the usability perspective - good thing that changed with 10.1.
Main things I like are that Mdk unifies the look and feel of KDE and Gnome. It's GUI tools are friendly enough for everyday tasks but you can still go back to the CLI any time you want the power. Oh yeah - did I mention that Konqueror starts in about 2 seconds, eats ~5MB of memory per instance, and has tabbed browsing?
#11 - the 'WOW' signal? Last I heard, the WOW signal was the first (accidental) detection of the RF beam that comes off a pulsar.
#13 - Superconductors were explained 40 years ago? Sorry - BCS only works on type-1 superconductors.
Besides that, I think that some of the wierd stuff we observe (Pioneer acceleration, tetraneutrons, flatness & accelerating expansion of the universe, etc) implies that there's something big that we're missing. Sort of like how the effect of time/mass dialation is almost undectable and Newtonian predictions highly accurate until you get to a measurable fraction of lightspeed, it's like our current theories are still mostly in the part where missing terms in the equation are near-zero... but we're starting to leave that part. Think of how Y = X^2 / (X - 1) looks like a flat line until you approach X = 1.
What's this talk of using an *api* to create a photo gallery? What's wrong with simply laying them out, 5 or 6 to a page? With having one box and Javascript snippets to change pictures? I dunno, I guess my fascination with retrocomputing has led me to value getting the most out of one's CPU cycles and storage. I'm probably the only guy left who refuses to do web site development using graphical tools...
When these probes were launched, I don't think anyone would have expected or imagined that they would continue to operate for more than a quarter century. Yet here we are, 28 years later, and we're planning to kill the longest-running space missions ever, which have been returning scientific data for longer than 1/3 of the world's population have been alive. I simply cannot fathom the reasoning (or lack thereof) that leads to such stupefying myopia.
For the love of God, 4.4 million dollars per year is a ROUNDING ERROR compared the the amount of money the US has spent in it's effort to stop terrorists by force (the futility of which is something one could write about for pages and pages and pages...). The American government will spend ten thousand times that amount this year to be ready to kill people (plus five thousand times as much spent actually killing people in Iraq + Afghanistan), yet THIS is, of all things, the program chosen to die?
Something is terribly wrong with America if this is happenning. Can the problem be fixed before the damage is irreversible?