Anybody ever read Ender's Game? Thinking about violent RTS' just makes me think about that... I mean, preparing kids for war with computer games...
Now it would be REALLY freaky if the military made a network-based RTS under some other name... Run simulation for everybody down from the top-10... And then... Well...
Just a sorta half-paranoid thought... Ah, in this day-and-age, who knows, somebody will probably try it.
Actually, there are a few Linux distributions that build all apps when you install it. None of the really major ones, mind you, but there are a few. There are some very valid technical reasons for it as well. Usually, things tend to run better on the system they were compiled on. Even if this makes absolutely no logical sense, it is still true.
First, the compiler optimizes the programs for the CPU that you're compiling on (well, not necessarily, but you can anyways). Second, all library dependancies, et al are set right by recompiling everything.
Not to mention that a total rebuild is quite a good test of your system.
And it's even easier to create dynamic pages in Python with CGI. Really. Being a programmer, but being totally new to CGI (and having never used Perl...), I tried out CGI in Python. This is the first time I ever made a CGI program, mind you, but it holds up really well. And IMX Python seems to be (maybe?) lighter-weight than Perl in many cases.
The point is that, for the bulk of us who consider web-pages to be just a neat way to waste an afternoon, you absolutely cannot beat Linux/Apache. In about an hour of trying, I had a half-dozen decent CGI's done in Python, including a server-push page (I know it's a netscape extension, but these are personal-LAN pages, and I use netscape).
I once messed around with "Personal Web Server".... I turned it off after 2 days. I really tried to make CGI's... Wasted hours... But windows and its strange API's... Ah well... It probably works better if you *PAY* to get IIS or somesuch, but it never mattered that much to me.
Hey, how come the comment above was rated "2 (Insightful)" and this guy is still at 0. Must be because he's an AC and nobody listens to AC's. Seriously, could we maybe get a moderator over here?
Erm, stop me if I'm wrong, but he's talking about He-3, not He-4. As I recall, Helium-3 is actually a byproduct of excess light-hydrogen in the reaction (H + D -> He-3), not necessarily an input. It's been ages since I've looked at the fusion reactions, but this is what I remember.
Is anybody looking at non-hydrogen fusion? Doesn't most of the actual power of the sun come from the "Sodium cycle"? (I could be wrong about the element, but I know it's around there somewhere). I know the threshold is much higher, but so is the yield. It should be a lot easier to do...
Sorry, this doesn't cut the mustard. Nanobots are the same as regular robots, just smaller. By your reasoning, putting a fuel-rod in your blender would cause it to become a kill-bot.
I just love these lines of reasoning. Nanorobots and genetically-engineered bacteria are two very different things. Get this straight.
There IS a consequence of irradiating nanobots. They crumble into silicon powder. Nothing more. No scary "mutation". Seriously, has the alpha-decay in the RAM in your computer caused your computer to gain evil sentience yet?
Oh, and mutation requires reproduction. Nanobots, in general, are NOT designed to reproduce. (self-replicating nanobots is a fairly stupid idea actually...) You will find that no matter how much radiation you throw at a single organism, the only thing you're really going to do to it is kill it. The offspring are generally where mutations happen. (this is not ENTIRELY true for bacteria though...)
Regardless, nanobots are just small robots. Jeeze.
Actually, this is not the case. There is a marked difference between removing a nag-screen and piracy. Namely, here in Canada, the first is legal, as it is only modification of a binary for personal use, which does not infringe on any licence agreements and is considered "fair use". (IANAL, but this was the case last time I actually checked.)
Oh, it was a nag-screen, not a limitation. Removing a limitation is a bird of a slightly different color. Just the same, since the program had NO EULA...
Maybe it has something to do with the screwed-up laws in the USA. Makes me glad to be up North.
Oh, nevermind, you're calling me a "priate [sic]". Nevermind, forget I mentioned it!
News flash: EMACS is huge, and has HUNDREDS of strange, obfusciated commands. I've used it, but honestly I almost wish I hadn't. Then again, I've never used original vi... It's sort of an anachronism today. Vim kicks very serious ass, I do _ALL_ my coding (that's quite a stack of code too!) in Vim. There's only about a dozen commands you need to know to properly use Vim. I still don't know a TENTH of the full command-set, and I already find it the fastest editor I've ever used. (mind you, if you're forced to use a screwy keyboard layout, productivity goes down the tubes until you do some remapping... Fortunately it works out-of-the-box in RedHat, so its not usually a problem... Now if only I could get it to behave properly on Solaris... (on real Sun machines)) Oh, in case you're wondering, Vim is the smallest complete IDE you'll ever find. Syntax coloring for dozens of different languages, plus the ability to define your own. Etc. And Vim supports block-select, unlike original Vi, thank god.
I found myself in the same situation. To do anything in windows, you have to lay down big bucks. When I was a kid, of course this meant, not having the bucks, that I'd use other means (occasionally) or, more frequently, rewrite the program from scratch. (You don't want to know how many times I had to do THIS...)
Now I use Linux. I don't have ANY pirate software here, although I did disable a nagware message on a program or two. The only program I'd even CONSIDER buying [a registration key to] is "blender" anyways. (and IMNSHO it's WELL worth the price. Even though it would be really simple for me to crack, I refuse to do so on ethical grounds, it's just TOO GOOD.)
Sorry, just had to say. Laughed my ass off at that one. Too bad you posted AC and I don't have any moderator points left today... This is really, really funny. But at the same time, insightful...
Why do I get the feeling that this post is going to get labeled "offtopic" or something? I seem to attract mean and pissed-off moderators like a lightning rod or something.... Ah well, such is life.
Exactly. Most of these warez channels are just kids with no money passing on applications and games that otherwise they would not have the money to acquire. It gives me shivers to think about the people getting busted.
A few years ago, I personally knew a mess of operators on some newnet warez channels. Now, to think that they're probably facing stiff legal fees and enourmous fines.. Makes me sad.
Personally, I think it's the software companies' faults. "Free for personal use" and "Free for evaluation purposes" programs are great. Imagine if every big program had these types of things? (And I don't mean disable save and print either).
I'm not just imagining this either, the company I work for will be releasing it's upcoming software line (all at once, mostly system libraries) under a license similar to the QPL. (Don't flame because it's QPL unless you plan to pay our development bills. Pay our bills and we'll GPL it for you;) This lets us charge the corporations, without hurting the free-software developers who should not be expected to pay for this code. We're also thinking about something similar for our non-library code, but nothing has yet been finalized.
Re:For the Future (was Re: Cool)
on
Linux on Palm
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· Score: 1
What? Are you serious?
I've gone through crappy digital organizer after crappy digital organizer (this was not too recent btw) and I have to say, all I really want is something portable with a bit of power that I can hack. The palm cost enough that I wouldn't THINK about buying one if I couldn't run Linux on it.
In fact, to date, the only PDA that looks reasonably useful to me is the Sony Viaio (or however you spell it;) The little pentium-powered handheld sublaptop. So you say, "but it's not a PDA". WHO CARES? It's what I want. A little system that can do some processing on the road, that I can uplink to my main computers.
Unfortunately, I think you're right. When I was a kid (in a rather small town), Radio Shack was the only place to get parts. Granted they had some problems, but it was still OK. Recently, they have been dropping their prices and increasing their selection.
And now THIS. It really IS too bad.
Oh, and I know this is offtopic, but slashdot is actually usable in Lynx!! WOW! Cool! Keep up the good work people, never break that top-line compatibility! (I'm watching a movie on one computer and using lynx on the web-server next to it... Which has practically no graphics capability (monitor is VGA and missing mouse, despite a Banshee in it;))
Yes, the nice people at Precision Insights are working on getting DRI to allow you to run 3D in-a-window on Banshee/V3 hardware (the two cards are almost identical, except for the extra TMU and raw speed).
This all hits when XFree86 4.0 comes out. Plus a bunch of other neat stuff.
I _have_ seen such a monster once. It looked really bizzarre, it had the 386 socket and some REALLY old PCI slots. I think it may have had a few EISA slots on it too, in addition to the ISA... It had like 6 72-pin simm slots! I didn't know what to say, it was really REALLY strange. But such things existed, even if they were not well spread.
That being said, I think this was one of the professional-grade machines that hardly saw the light of day in common use.
Unless I'm mistaking an old alpha board for a 386 or somesuch;) But I should know better than that...
People pirate my stuff all the time (whatever I don't outright release as opensource freeware anyways). Do I mind? Officially, yes. It is annoying, but it's a fact of life. Most of the really popular PC games got that way through piracy. You think that DOOM would be anywhere near as popular without rampant piracy?
While many people cite piracy as a "loss of revenue" situation, it very often ends up being free marketing.
Just wanted to point out that not all software developers terribly mind.
On the other hand, if a corporation decided to rip me off, THAT I would mind a LOT. But personal use hurts very few people. Mind you, maybe I'm just biased, working for a cool company that likes releasing stuff "free for personal use".
Don't think "system belonging to a script kiddie". Think instead "Linux box with a user of 'user' with a password of 'user'". Some really insecure system which could be used as a redirector for an attack. Back in the day (and even today to some extent) this was how most "real" hacker/cracker/whatever's worked, by bouncing through a long pipe of systems, so you would have a hell of a time tracking them. Tack a few ssh2 pipes in there, and you get the point.
Pulling the accounts of students with poorly secured systems? You absolutely SURE that your system is secure? Think about it.
What made me start using Linux? Well, lessee here. I got my start on a C128, awesome little machine, it had a really neat operating environment (although the microsoft copyright on bootup was annoying). Anyways, it was a real programming OS, which I liked greatly.
The first time I used DOS, I thought to myself "This is really a braindead operating system", so for a few years I went back to the commodore.
Eventually I was forced to switch to the PC. But the more I started using it and the more it "matured", the harder it became to program the darn thing. DOS was the braindead child of satan (if you've ever had to suffer through near/far pointers, you'll know what I mean), and win 3.1 was no better.
Win95 was no better, in fact, it no longer came with QBasic. MSVC was an abomination, and I was for a few years forced to use it.
Eventually I found something better. It was called DJGPP, and it let me write 32-bit DOS programs using UNIX-standards. I even had bash, the fileutils, basically the whole GNU system installed. (Oh, and I vote "DJ Delorie" for that award!)
I used that for a fair amount of time, and it was so transparent moving to Linux (all I really needed was a text editor that I was good with, and I ended up learning VIM and now swear by it.), that it was a foregone conclusion as soon as I saw it.
I don't know, I think a lot of the success of Linux is based on its pure technical merits. I would have been willing to pay $200 for a copy of any reasonable facimile of UNIX early on... Linux was a dream come true for a lot of us programmers.
I read a book called "The man who tamed lightning". I believe this is the same person you are referring to, but it's almost a decade since I read it...
Anyways, the one thing I _DO_ remember is how it worked (what does that say about me? I don't think I even want to think about that one...). Anyways, basically it was a huge conventional transformer and a mess of incredibly big capacitors.
When switched on, the transformers would charge the capacitors. When the capacitors reached full charge, the spark gap path would ionize, and the entire charge would flow through the air (a space of a foot or two if I recall correctly). The model town that he put in there for show was instantly vaporized.
I think that's what you meant. On those types of powers, the capacitor banks would take something like a 200-story building... Possible, but definately not practical.
That is just stupid. Anybody who knows the first thing about electricity knows NOT to connect a battery to AC, ESPECIALLY 220VAC. It's kids like you who made it hard for people like me to do cool stuff with high-voltage when I was a kid (and I was ALWAYS careful, and RESEARCHED what I was doing... What a concept...).
And, at the risk of getting this post moderated into oblivion, anybody who would smash an SGI monitor just to see the sparks deserves what he gets from such blatant stupidity. (Hell, anybody who would smash an SGI monitor for ANY reason...)
Re:Wasnt Tesla wrong about a lot of things
on
Lightning On Demand
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· Score: 1
Whether or not some of his theories were proven wrong, Tesla did much more than he is given credit for. AC power is not his only claim to fame. Here is a partial listing:
AC, high-voltage, radio communication, wireless power transmission, logic circuits, robotics, radio-controlled robotics, data encryption, satellite orbits, fluorescent lighting..... The list is actually MUCH longer than this, this is just all I remember.
And if you don't believe me, go check up on it yourself. His prototype radio-controlled submarine droid, built roundabout the turn of the century, was really really cool.
Oh, and Marconi was in violation of 17 (give or take) of Tesla's patents when he made his famous transmission.
Slashdot Mirror
Now it would be REALLY freaky if the military made a network-based RTS under some other name... Run simulation for everybody down from the top-10... And then... Well...
Just a sorta half-paranoid thought... Ah, in this day-and-age, who knows, somebody will probably try it.
First, the compiler optimizes the programs for the CPU that you're compiling on (well, not necessarily, but you can anyways). Second, all library dependancies, et al are set right by recompiling everything.
Not to mention that a total rebuild is quite a good test of your system.
The point is that, for the bulk of us who consider web-pages to be just a neat way to waste an afternoon, you absolutely cannot beat Linux/Apache. In about an hour of trying, I had a half-dozen decent CGI's done in Python, including a server-push page (I know it's a netscape extension, but these are personal-LAN pages, and I use netscape).
I once messed around with "Personal Web Server".... I turned it off after 2 days. I really tried to make CGI's... Wasted hours... But windows and its strange API's... Ah well... It probably works better if you *PAY* to get IIS or somesuch, but it never mattered that much to me.
July _1993_
This patent is filed quite a ways after the initial Wine development started.
I mean, sure, back THEN, Wine really couldn't DO this, but they CERTAINLY knew that that's what they were GOING to do...
Looks like good-ol' Wine comes to the rescue. It translates windows calls to X calls, and allows remote-display to an X server.
Somebody from the Wine team should talk to the FSF about getting this patent fought. I hate software patents, especially stupid ones.
Hey, how come the comment above was rated "2 (Insightful)" and this guy is still at 0. Must be because he's an AC and nobody listens to AC's. Seriously, could we maybe get a moderator over here?
Is anybody looking at non-hydrogen fusion? Doesn't most of the actual power of the sun come from the "Sodium cycle"? (I could be wrong about the element, but I know it's around there somewhere). I know the threshold is much higher, but so is the yield. It should be a lot easier to do...
I just love these lines of reasoning. Nanorobots and genetically-engineered bacteria are two very different things. Get this straight.
There IS a consequence of irradiating nanobots. They crumble into silicon powder. Nothing more. No scary "mutation". Seriously, has the alpha-decay in the RAM in your computer caused your computer to gain evil sentience yet?
Oh, and mutation requires reproduction. Nanobots, in general, are NOT designed to reproduce. (self-replicating nanobots is a fairly stupid idea actually...) You will find that no matter how much radiation you throw at a single organism, the only thing you're really going to do to it is kill it. The offspring are generally where mutations happen. (this is not ENTIRELY true for bacteria though...)
Regardless, nanobots are just small robots. Jeeze.
Oh, it was a nag-screen, not a limitation. Removing a limitation is a bird of a slightly different color. Just the same, since the program had NO EULA...
Maybe it has something to do with the screwed-up laws in the USA. Makes me glad to be up North.
Oh, nevermind, you're calling me a "priate [sic]". Nevermind, forget I mentioned it!
News flash: EMACS is huge, and has HUNDREDS of strange, obfusciated commands. I've used it, but honestly I almost wish I hadn't. Then again, I've never used original vi... It's sort of an anachronism today. Vim kicks very serious ass, I do _ALL_ my coding (that's quite a stack of code too!) in Vim. There's only about a dozen commands you need to know to properly use Vim. I still don't know a TENTH of the full command-set, and I already find it the fastest editor I've ever used. (mind you, if you're forced to use a screwy keyboard layout, productivity goes down the tubes until you do some remapping... Fortunately it works out-of-the-box in RedHat, so its not usually a problem... Now if only I could get it to behave properly on Solaris... (on real Sun machines)) Oh, in case you're wondering, Vim is the smallest complete IDE you'll ever find. Syntax coloring for dozens of different languages, plus the ability to define your own. Etc. And Vim supports block-select, unlike original Vi, thank god.
Do you turn to stone?
Now I use Linux. I don't have ANY pirate software here, although I did disable a nagware message on a program or two. The only program I'd even CONSIDER buying [a registration key to] is "blender" anyways. (and IMNSHO it's WELL worth the price. Even though it would be really simple for me to crack, I refuse to do so on ethical grounds, it's just TOO GOOD.)
But then maybe I'm getting soft in my old age ;)
Why do I get the feeling that this post is going to get labeled "offtopic" or something? I seem to attract mean and pissed-off moderators like a lightning rod or something.... Ah well, such is life.
A few years ago, I personally knew a mess of operators on some newnet warez channels. Now, to think that they're probably facing stiff legal fees and enourmous fines.. Makes me sad.
Personally, I think it's the software companies' faults. "Free for personal use" and "Free for evaluation purposes" programs are great. Imagine if every big program had these types of things? (And I don't mean disable save and print either).
I'm not just imagining this either, the company I work for will be releasing it's upcoming software line (all at once, mostly system libraries) under a license similar to the QPL. (Don't flame because it's QPL unless you plan to pay our development bills. Pay our bills and we'll GPL it for you ;) This lets us charge the corporations, without hurting the free-software developers who should not be expected to pay for this code. We're also thinking about something similar for our non-library code, but nothing has yet been finalized.
I've gone through crappy digital organizer after crappy digital organizer (this was not too recent btw) and I have to say, all I really want is something portable with a bit of power that I can hack. The palm cost enough that I wouldn't THINK about buying one if I couldn't run Linux on it.
In fact, to date, the only PDA that looks reasonably useful to me is the Sony Viaio (or however you spell it ;) The little pentium-powered handheld sublaptop. So you say, "but it's not a PDA". WHO CARES? It's what I want. A little system that can do some processing on the road, that I can uplink to my main computers.
End of story
And now THIS. It really IS too bad.
Oh, and I know this is offtopic, but slashdot is actually usable in Lynx!! WOW! Cool! Keep up the good work people, never break that top-line compatibility! (I'm watching a movie on one computer and using lynx on the web-server next to it... Which has practically no graphics capability (monitor is VGA and missing mouse, despite a Banshee in it ;))
No, I know what MCA looks like and this was NOT MCA. It was PCI. Weird.
This message is powered by Vim. Just cause VIM rocks.
This all hits when XFree86 4.0 comes out. Plus a bunch of other neat stuff.
That being said, I think this was one of the professional-grade machines that hardly saw the light of day in common use.
Unless I'm mistaking an old alpha board for a 386 or somesuch ;) But I should know better than that...
While many people cite piracy as a "loss of revenue" situation, it very often ends up being free marketing.
Just wanted to point out that not all software developers terribly mind.
On the other hand, if a corporation decided to rip me off, THAT I would mind a LOT. But personal use hurts very few people. Mind you, maybe I'm just biased, working for a cool company that likes releasing stuff "free for personal use".
Pulling the accounts of students with poorly secured systems? You absolutely SURE that your system is secure? Think about it.
The first time I used DOS, I thought to myself "This is really a braindead operating system", so for a few years I went back to the commodore.
Eventually I was forced to switch to the PC. But the more I started using it and the more it "matured", the harder it became to program the darn thing. DOS was the braindead child of satan (if you've ever had to suffer through near/far pointers, you'll know what I mean), and win 3.1 was no better.
Win95 was no better, in fact, it no longer came with QBasic. MSVC was an abomination, and I was for a few years forced to use it.
Eventually I found something better. It was called DJGPP, and it let me write 32-bit DOS programs using UNIX-standards. I even had bash, the fileutils, basically the whole GNU system installed. (Oh, and I vote "DJ Delorie" for that award!)
I used that for a fair amount of time, and it was so transparent moving to Linux (all I really needed was a text editor that I was good with, and I ended up learning VIM and now swear by it.), that it was a foregone conclusion as soon as I saw it.
I don't know, I think a lot of the success of Linux is based on its pure technical merits. I would have been willing to pay $200 for a copy of any reasonable facimile of UNIX early on... Linux was a dream come true for a lot of us programmers.
Anyways, the one thing I _DO_ remember is how it worked (what does that say about me? I don't think I even want to think about that one...). Anyways, basically it was a huge conventional transformer and a mess of incredibly big capacitors.
When switched on, the transformers would charge the capacitors. When the capacitors reached full charge, the spark gap path would ionize, and the entire charge would flow through the air (a space of a foot or two if I recall correctly). The model town that he put in there for show was instantly vaporized.
I think that's what you meant. On those types of powers, the capacitor banks would take something like a 200-story building... Possible, but definately not practical.
And, at the risk of getting this post moderated into oblivion, anybody who would smash an SGI monitor just to see the sparks deserves what he gets from such blatant stupidity. (Hell, anybody who would smash an SGI monitor for ANY reason...)
AC, high-voltage, radio communication, wireless power transmission, logic circuits, robotics, radio-controlled robotics, data encryption, satellite orbits, fluorescent lighting..... The list is actually MUCH longer than this, this is just all I remember.
And if you don't believe me, go check up on it yourself. His prototype radio-controlled submarine droid, built roundabout the turn of the century, was really really cool.
Oh, and Marconi was in violation of 17 (give or take) of Tesla's patents when he made his famous transmission.