"On the first lesson, we were told that we would be learning a language called CESIL. This wasn't any kind of a real language that anyone used to really do things with, from what I recall, but some synthetic language purely for the purposes of education (or perhaps places on real comp.sci courses were already getting oversubscribed, and CESIL was deployed to send lesser students running gibbering and screaming into the hills, vowing never to go near a drop of code ever again)."
lol. When I was at university I thought the same thing about PASCAL.
If micropayments ever become popular and easy to implement, I think we'll start seeing the old "salami slicing" hack again. When a lot of stuff you do online costs a nickel here, a penny there, a dime elsewhere... you can rack of some pretty serious numbers of transactions just browsing around. After all, if loading that New York Times article (free reg required) linked to from Slashdot is only 2 cents, who cares, right?
But perhaps some clever fraudster will see an opportunity here. Wouldn't it be easy to steal 1 cent a month from 1,000,000 people who use micropayments? After all, who's going to notice a line item titled "News article ----- $0.01"? So there's $10,000/month that nobody's really going to miss.
And for a single penny, would most people take the time to make a phone call or write an email to request clarification on where that charge originated? Even if all you make is a pitiful $3.60/hour, that one penny takes a mere 6 seconds to earn, far shorter than the time it would take to investigate. And is the micropayment company going to investigate your 1 cent dispute? Likely they would ignore you or even just automatically refund your penny without much thought.
Europe's Rosetta space mission, which aims to chase and then land on a comet, is standing by for blast-off on an Ariane-5 rocket at 0736 GMT, Thursday.
The probe will depart from Kourou in French Guiana on the first stage of its 7bn-kilometre, 10-year journey to reach the comet 69P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Once up in space, Rosetta will be placed in orbit around Earth before departing for the outer Solar System.
In 2014, Rosetta will reach the comet and deliver a lander to its surface.
The rocket consists of boosters, a core section, or stage, an upper stage and the probe itself. The probe and upper stage are known collectively as the stack.
Two minutes after lift off, the rocket jettisons its boosters leaving the rest of the rocket to ascend to a height of 4,000km.
Escape velocity
After about 10 minutes, the rocket begins to fall back towards Earth. As this happens, the core stage separates from the stack.
The core re-enters the atmosphere while the stack remains in orbit, using the Earth's gravity to build up velocity for Rosetta's "escape".
Rosetta will put a lander called Philae on the comet
After a further two hours, the upper stage separates from Rosetta, leaving the probe to begin its journey.
During the course of its 10-year journey, the probe will round the Sun four times before reaching 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The probe will perform three close fly-bys of the Earth and one of Mars in "slingshot" manoeuvres that will use the planets' gravity to help the probe build up speed.
Rosetta will need this extra velocity if it is to intercept the comet as it streaks past Jupiter towards the Sun.
Over half of the 3,000 kg spacecraft's mass is fuel, to enable it to complete its epic trip around the Solar System.
By May/June of 2014, Rosetta will enter orbit around the comet and begin edging towards its nucleus. The orbiter's cameras will then map the nucleus in detail to help scientists choose a suitable landing site.
After this has been chosen, Rosetta will despatch its lander Philae to the comet's surface. Approaching the nucleus at walking speed, Philae will fire two harpoons to anchor itself down.
During Rosetta's rendezvous with the comet, commands from Earth will take about 50 minutes to reach the spacecraft. So the probe has been designed with a degree of autonomy, allowing it to think for itself.
Rosetta will have to cope with temperatures that fall to -150 Celsius beyond the planet Jupiter. The mission is due to end in December 2015.
I remember playing my first EA games back in the 1980's on a C-64.
Games like M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Pinball Contstruction Set, Mail Order Monsters, etc. These games were fantastic. EA used to play up the fact that the games they published were created by 'artists', not just programmers.
But the table turned long ago. Profit became more important than creativity. EA now is afraid to publish innovative titles because they might negatively impact it's balance sheet.
It's a major pain in the ass to deal with the Indian tech support. There are accent issues, but that is only a minor point. The real issue is the training and scripting. Typical experience (of many) I had a little while back from when I had to replace a screen and hard drive on an Inspiron. Even though I had done extensive testing ahead of time, told the tech what I had done I still had to go through 2 hours of hell before they finally acknowledged that I in fact did have failed hardware.
The scripting is bad, the fact that they can't operate outside the script is abhorrant. But what really ticks me off is when they keep trying to trick people into stating something that would void their warranty. When I had to get the LCD for the laptop replaced I was asked no less than 10 times if I had dropped the notebook. The question was varied from "did you drop it even a little bit" to "now, you said you recently dropped it, right".
The reason they got so much hell from corporate customers is that they have dedicated IT professionals who've already done all the testing and can't afford two hours on the phone to get some replacement hardware sent out. The IT dept will simply switch to a new vendor if that kind of crap persists.
Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up? The Indian support centers also pretend to be located in America, practice American accents, have sports teams they pretend to watch, and otherwise try to fool you into thinking they are in the US. All of which to get around the issue of supporting local jobs. If we farm all of our jobs out to India, who will be left to buy anything?
Cheaper software makes it easier for small businesses to grow, and large businesses still need the support and tech's to impliment this software, so they hire, spend, develop, and contribute (via GPL). Anything that lowers the cost to start up and grow a business is good for jobs, good for the economy, good for consumers who now have more choice in the market place.
New star emerges from dust cocoon By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor
An amateur astronomer in the US has detected the emergence of a young star from the cocoon of gas and dust in which it was born.
Such an event has only rarely been recorded by astronomers.
"This is exciting for all astronomers, especially those interested in the birth of stars," University of Hawaii astronomer Bo Reipurth told the BBC.
"We tend to think of the sky as fixed and unchanging, so when we see something new it's important," he said.
The new object was first spotted on 23 January by amateur astronomer Jay McNeil from his observatory at Paducah in Kentucky.
"The entire discovery was quite serendipitous in nature," he told BBC News Online.
While looking at star formation regions in the constellation of Orion, he noticed a star not present in previous sky surveys.
"I have spent countless hours seeking out the darkest of skies and peering into the largest of telescopes at distant galaxies, so who would have known that I would take an image of a famous object with a small telescope from my back yard and find a sun-like star being born."
The new object had appeared alongside the well-known gas cloud known as Messier 78.
"The new object was just a faint smudge. I contacted Brian Skiff at the Lowell Observatory who also realised it was new," says McNeil.
Suspecting that it was a young star that had just broken out of its birth cloud of gas and dust, McNeil then contacted star formation expert Bo Reipurth.
Reipurth arranged for follow-up observations to be carried out using the University of Hawaii 2.2 metre telescope, and then using the giant 8-metre Gemini telescope, also in Hawaii.
McNeil was amazed at the train of events following his discovery, "The idea that this thing, first seen on my 3-inch telescope, which one can easily hold using one hand, would be observed, within 48 hours, by a telescope of 342 tons was absolutely staggering."
Following those observations Reipurth told BBC News Online: "The young star was embedded in its placental nebula. Now it has brightened, and like a lighthouse it is casting its light across the landscape of dust and gas around it."
"We know of many small nebula like this scattered throughout the sky but it is very rare to see an event like this. We know very little about these objects and do not know what to expect next."
An urgent appeal has gone out to astronomers to monitor the object which is now known as McNeil's nebula.
"We will lose it in about six weeks when Orion goes behind the Sun. We will then have to wait until the autumn for it to be observable again. I expect it will have changed by then," says Reipurth.
"I'm thrilled to have found it and to be a part of such a great effort," says McNeil.
It's just one more reason I'm becoming completely unmotivated to work in corporate I.T.
I've been an "I.T. guy" ever since my first job, and frankly, I banked on "PCs and DOS/Windows solutions" as the stuff one needed to keep up with to retain a decent job.
Somewhere along the way (I think roughly around the time Microsoft started pushing Active Directory integrated with Exchange 2000, but that's far from the ONLY factor), I started becoming disillusioned with the whole thing. I had always tinkered with Linux as a curiousity and fun "alternative OS" to use at home - but couldn't spark any interest in it where I worked.
I decided to "rock the boat" a little bit, building Linux-based thin clients PCs out of old, depreciated systems being taken out of service, and asking employees to try using them on a "trial" basis. I had few complaints, and got most of the ones I did have ironed out in short order. (Mostly, people whining about needing support for their scroll wheel mice, stuff like that.)
I think it threatened my co-workers though, who were die-hard "MS only!" people. My boss was "on the fence" about the whole project, basically not wanting to stop me from experimenting - yet uneasy about it disrupting his little "happy family" of I.T. employees.
Next thing I knew, I was let go. By this time, the job market was quickly drying up, and I spent a long time collecting unemployment checks, and trying to find another, similar job to no avail.
I finally found work with Apple Mac systems. Wow, what a difference! Problem is, it's a small mom and pop place that's hanging on by a shoestring. My hours got cut back to part-time recently, because he couldn't make ends meet otherwise. It's really disappointing more folks haven't yet discovered the things Apple has done/is doing with OS X.
But anyway, here in the present, I see the I.T. job market SLOWLY starting to open back up, but when I read the job descriptions, my stomach churns. I don't even want to apply for most of them! It just seems like signing up to administer hundreds (or thosands?) of users on Exchange email while helping develop roll-outs of the latest MS technologies is like signing one's death warrant.
Obviously, there are still plenty of I.T. folks out there happy and willing to take on these jobs, risks and all. But maybe all my experience has made me too jaded? I'm about to throw in the towel. I don't have nearly enough "real world experience" using the OS's I see as superior solutions (Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc.) to get a decent paying job supporting/administering them. I spent too much time in the MS camp for that. I think I can handle the Mac OS X support quite well, but nobody's hiring for that. MS's current offerings give me the creeps....
Defender/Robotron/Stargate - how did you get those games to FEEL so right? Incredibly challenging, but not unplayable? - It's a process of successive refinement - like cooking a soup. You put a little pepper in, maybe add some salt, decide that's too much salt... The difference is, with programming, it's easy to pluck out an ingredient that doesn't work and try something else. Defender was my first videogame, and, like any crazy kid who wants to design a game, I started out with unbelievable ambition. I wanted it to be everything - the player can fly, he can drive, he can go underground... After a while, I thought: 'I'm never gonna finish this. It's too much'. You have to stop and ask yourself: 'What is really the meat of this thing?'
Was it almost a good thing that you were limited by the technology? - Designing videogames is all ABOUT limitation. It's not about doing everything that's possible, just because you can. It's about finding some small subset of something that's FUN and building on that. With fighting games like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter 2, you can go back and forth on this barely two-dimensional line, but you have all this richness of being able to execute a big variety of moves within that simple framework. The backbone of the game is simple - it's a small world, but the trick is how you work it to make it a rich and exciting world. You should be doing a few things very well, rather than a lot of things poorly.
At a time when videogames were quite static and samey, was Defender a bit of a reaction to that - something more brash and dynamic? - Oh, yeah. You have to think - what am I doing that's cool that no-one else has done before? Otherwise, what's the point? With Defender, I knew that I wanted to do a game where you fly around. My only option at the time was 2D, so I thought, okay - you fly around in 2D, but, because the screen is so small, you're gonna be bouncing off the walls and that isn't much fun. So I thought of the screen as just one window on this expansive universe, and, the scrolling came from wanting to get a sense of speed and motion. All the best videogames are about survival - it's our strongest instinct, stronger than food, sex, lust for money... You have to create a survival story - to tap into the raw energy and adrenaline and get people naturally excited. Sounds obvious, but that's why you need a LOT of very nasty bad guys trying to kill you.
Noisily. - Yeah! And in a really cool-looking way, too. People love special effects. They love to see things blow up, they love shiny, cool, sparkling stuff. At the time of Defender, we had a gifted nineteen-year-old programmer called Sam Dicker, and he was the particle effects genius - although at the time we didn't know what the hell they were. We just wanted to blow stuff up in an attractive way - and I wanted everything to respond accordingly to how fast you're flying, what you hit, how you hit it... Whenever I played Asteroids, I was always disappointed that, when you crash into a boulder, your ship just does this little rotate-and-collapse thing. That isn't very exciting. I wanted those moments to feel more interactive - like, if you get hit by a bigger rock, something bigger and more spectacular happens than if you're hit by a small one.
Your games are good at creating a sense of relentless hostility and danger - urging the player to go into battle against seemingly impossible odds. That's particularly true of Robotron... - Well, with Defender, you can fly around and, to some extent, find a little safety. But with Robotron, you're stuck in this confined little space. That confinement is the key element in what makes Robotron feel the way it does. The constant feeling of being cornered and having to fight your way out of that corner - fight or flight. There's no choice. You're ALWAYS making a last stand. A lot of people tell me that Robotron is the only game that makes them physically sweat. It's the same for me, too.
How long did it take you to be happy with Robotron? - It was
The WHOIS database provides contact information that is necessary for the proper operation of the world wide web. It is not only registrars that need access to this information, if you have a complaint about a domain, and the registrar for said domain is the same company, who do you go to for contact information.
False or missing information in whois records is already a problem that helps (for instance) spammers hide their contact information from people with legitimate reasons to contact them. If you get no response from the contact listed in the domain's SOA record, abuse, admin, webmaster, postmaster, etc, and there is no contact information posted on the site (or false contact information), what do you do? You check out the WHOIS record for the domain. If the info that's supposed to be there is present and accurate, you have a way to contact somebody, if it isn't, you have ammo for asking the registrar to suspend the domain registration, and if *they* won't, you have ammo to ask ICANN to suspend the registrar's activities.
Unfortunately, people don't realize the reason that WHOIS records exist, which is to provide contact information. That's the WHOLE reason. Removing that information makes the WHOIS database useless.
Of the practice of sneaking text based games in daemons. I think either classic adventure or mansion was on one of the mindspring DNS servers for a while. You could play with nslookup. It went along the lines of:
nslookup www.blah.com 207.69.188.186 forward
and you'd get your request back and at the bottom of it would be something like:
You enter a room and a loud clear voice says "ritnew is a charming word" or whatever your next move was. I'd love to find another one of these.
* It's incredibly easy to script and build new applications by tying together existing ones via pipes. The results are fast, reliable, and professional -- unlike AppleScript or VB-produced results. This is only relevant to tech users, but it's a big one.
* It's free. Okay, for a professional with a decent salary, the cost of Windows vs Linux itself -- the base package -- really isn't significant. A hundred or two hundred bucks is not a big deal. However, to purchase commercial equivalents of all the Linux apps I use would be extremely expensive. Compilers (think Visual Studio), editors (think Visual SlickEdit), mail clients (think Eudora), system monitors (think all manner of shareware apps), sound editors (think Cakewalk), image editors (think Photoshop), web servers (think IIS), code checkers (think Gimpel Lint), graphing programs (think Visio), math/statistics packages (think MATLAB), and all the rest, there is a *lot* of money involved. Sure, you can pirate it, but that's not an option at work, and pirating software is less and less trivial with the surging prevalance of phone-home features.
* It's secure. Traditionally UNIX (and its apps) have had tighter security design than Windows, especially WRT local security. A couple of Microsoft apps are phenomonally insecure (MSIE, Outlook), and most Windows apps don't have the same emphasis on avoiding attacks.
* It gives better performance. My workstation runs a large set of servers in the background. I don't notice. I have a friend that runs a Windows FTP server that he kills off when he wants to take all the CPU time on his system.
* I can fix bugs that piss me off. If I have an issue, I happen to be a coder, so I can run out and fix it without just complaining to a company's forums and hoping that something happens. I can add features that I want. Obviously, this benefit isn't nearly as good if you aren't a coder, but it's something to consider.
* I can actually see what's going on. Linux has a strong tradition of talking about and letting you see what's *actually* happening on your system. The startup system is just a bunch of scripts that are quite readable. In contrast, if you pick up a book designed for a Microsoft administrator, you'll get a bunch of Microsoft-invented terms ("Enable a service"...am I starting a process listening on a port or what? What the hell is happening?) This also makes troubleshooting much better.
* A richer toolkit. For at least coders, network admins, and security types, good tools exist that have no Windows equivalent. (The reverse tends to be true when it comes to office workers.)
* Choice. If I use Windows, I also must use Explorer, like it or not (and I don't). I can't use the kernel or Windows software without also using the expected file manager (yes, there have been a few hacks to try "replacing" Explorer, such as LiteStep, but they're flaky...more neat toys than pratical tools). On Linux, I have more window managers available than I have fingers. I have a whole collection of file managers. I have docks galore. I can choose my favorite from each category and use that.
* Better design. The fact that Linux uses better file-locking semantics, the fact that Linux uses symlinks instead of shortcuts, the fact that it's easier to write a reliable Linux driver than a reliable Windows driver, all have strong trickle-down effects to the user in the form of fewer reboots, more flexibility in file system layout and control, and a more reliable system.
Slashdot Mirror
from the article:
"On the first lesson, we were told that we would be learning a language called CESIL. This wasn't any kind of a real language that anyone used to really do things with, from what I recall, but some synthetic language purely for the purposes of education (or perhaps places on real comp.sci courses were already getting oversubscribed, and CESIL was deployed to send lesser students running gibbering and screaming into the hills, vowing never to go near a drop of code ever again)."
lol. When I was at university I thought the same thing about PASCAL.
If micropayments ever become popular and easy to implement, I think we'll start seeing the old "salami slicing" hack again. When a lot of stuff you do online costs a nickel here, a penny there, a dime elsewhere... you can rack of some pretty serious numbers of transactions just browsing around. After all, if loading that New York Times article (free reg required) linked to from Slashdot is only 2 cents, who cares, right?
But perhaps some clever fraudster will see an opportunity here. Wouldn't it be easy to steal 1 cent a month from 1,000,000 people who use micropayments? After all, who's going to notice a line item titled "News article ----- $0.01"? So there's $10,000/month that nobody's really going to miss.
And for a single penny, would most people take the time to make a phone call or write an email to request clarification on where that charge originated? Even if all you make is a pitiful $3.60/hour, that one penny takes a mere 6 seconds to earn, far shorter than the time it would take to investigate. And is the micropayment company going to investigate your 1 cent dispute? Likely they would ignore you or even just automatically refund your penny without much thought.
Rosetta probe set for blast-off
Europe's Rosetta space mission, which aims to chase and then land on a comet, is standing by for blast-off on an Ariane-5 rocket at 0736 GMT, Thursday.
The probe will depart from Kourou in French Guiana on the first stage of its 7bn-kilometre, 10-year journey to reach the comet 69P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Once up in space, Rosetta will be placed in orbit around Earth before departing for the outer Solar System.
In 2014, Rosetta will reach the comet and deliver a lander to its surface.
The rocket consists of boosters, a core section, or stage, an upper stage and the probe itself. The probe and upper stage are known collectively as the stack.
Two minutes after lift off, the rocket jettisons its boosters leaving the rest of the rocket to ascend to a height of 4,000km.
Escape velocity
After about 10 minutes, the rocket begins to fall back towards Earth. As this happens, the core stage separates from the stack.
The core re-enters the atmosphere while the stack remains in orbit, using the Earth's gravity to build up velocity for Rosetta's "escape".
Rosetta will put a lander called Philae on the comet
After a further two hours, the upper stage separates from Rosetta, leaving the probe to begin its journey.
During the course of its 10-year journey, the probe will round the Sun four times before reaching 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The probe will perform three close fly-bys of the Earth and one of Mars in "slingshot" manoeuvres that will use the planets' gravity to help the probe build up speed.
Rosetta will need this extra velocity if it is to intercept the comet as it streaks past Jupiter towards the Sun.
Over half of the 3,000 kg spacecraft's mass is fuel, to enable it to complete its epic trip around the Solar System.
By May/June of 2014, Rosetta will enter orbit around the comet and begin edging towards its nucleus. The orbiter's cameras will then map the nucleus in detail to help scientists choose a suitable landing site.
After this has been chosen, Rosetta will despatch its lander Philae to the comet's surface. Approaching the nucleus at walking speed, Philae will fire two harpoons to anchor itself down.
During Rosetta's rendezvous with the comet, commands from Earth will take about 50 minutes to reach the spacecraft. So the probe has been designed with a degree of autonomy, allowing it to think for itself.
Rosetta will have to cope with temperatures that fall to -150 Celsius beyond the planet Jupiter. The mission is due to end in December 2015.
I remember playing my first EA games back in the 1980's on a C-64.
Games like M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Pinball Contstruction Set, Mail Order Monsters, etc. These games were fantastic. EA used to play up the fact that the games they published were created by 'artists', not just programmers.
But the table turned long ago. Profit became more important than creativity. EA now is afraid to publish innovative titles because they might negatively impact it's balance sheet.
It's a major pain in the ass to deal with the Indian tech support. There are accent issues, but that is only a minor point. The real issue is the training and scripting. Typical experience (of many) I had a little while back from when I had to replace a screen and hard drive on an Inspiron. Even though I had done extensive testing ahead of time, told the tech what I had done I still had to go through 2 hours of hell before they finally acknowledged that I in fact did have failed hardware.
The scripting is bad, the fact that they can't operate outside the script is abhorrant. But what really ticks me off is when they keep trying to trick people into stating something that would void their warranty. When I had to get the LCD for the laptop replaced I was asked no less than 10 times if I had dropped the notebook. The question was varied from "did you drop it even a little bit" to "now, you said you recently dropped it, right".
The reason they got so much hell from corporate customers is that they have dedicated IT professionals who've already done all the testing and can't afford two hours on the phone to get some replacement hardware sent out. The IT dept will simply switch to a new vendor if that kind of crap persists.
Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up? The Indian support centers also pretend to be located in America, practice American accents, have sports teams they pretend to watch, and otherwise try to fool you into thinking they are in the US. All of which to get around the issue of supporting local jobs. If we farm all of our jobs out to India, who will be left to buy anything?
Let's just mix and match:
How about:
"Any sufficently advanced violence is indistinguishable from magick."
or
"any sufficiently advanced technology is the last refuge of the incompetent"
Or my personal favorite:
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetent is indistinguishable from magick violence."
Nice try at trolling, btw.
Amiga University - Arexx
The number allocation scheme might not be maxed out yet, but the physical network that can carry those calls is getting close to it.
Heck, there are still times when I can't get a cell phone or a land line call to go thru because I get the dreaded 'all ciruits are busy' message.
I would really like a good Tempest clone. Too bad it's not in this compilation.
Damn! This means I can't download the movie Strange Brew along with Bryan Adams songs anymore!
Cheaper software makes it easier for small businesses to grow, and large businesses still need the support and tech's to impliment this software, so they hire, spend, develop, and contribute (via GPL). Anything that lowers the cost to start up and grow a business is good for jobs, good for the economy, good for consumers who now have more choice in the market place.
New star emerges from dust cocoon
By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor
An amateur astronomer in the US has detected the emergence of a young star from the cocoon of gas and dust in which it was born.
Such an event has only rarely been recorded by astronomers.
"This is exciting for all astronomers, especially those interested in the birth of stars," University of Hawaii astronomer Bo Reipurth told the BBC.
"We tend to think of the sky as fixed and unchanging, so when we see something new it's important," he said.
The new object was first spotted on 23 January by amateur astronomer Jay McNeil from his observatory at Paducah in Kentucky.
"The entire discovery was quite serendipitous in nature," he told BBC News Online.
While looking at star formation regions in the constellation of Orion, he noticed a star not present in previous sky surveys.
"I have spent countless hours seeking out the darkest of skies and peering into the largest of telescopes at distant galaxies, so who would have known that I would take an image of a famous object with a small telescope from my back yard and find a sun-like star being born."
The new object had appeared alongside the well-known gas cloud known as Messier 78.
"The new object was just a faint smudge. I contacted Brian Skiff at the Lowell Observatory who also realised it was new," says McNeil.
Suspecting that it was a young star that had just broken out of its birth cloud of gas and dust, McNeil then contacted star formation expert Bo Reipurth.
Reipurth arranged for follow-up observations to be carried out using the University of Hawaii 2.2 metre telescope, and then using the giant 8-metre Gemini telescope, also in Hawaii.
McNeil was amazed at the train of events following his discovery, "The idea that this thing, first seen on my 3-inch telescope, which one can easily hold using one hand, would be observed, within 48 hours, by a telescope of 342 tons was absolutely staggering."
Following those observations Reipurth told BBC News Online: "The young star was embedded in its placental nebula. Now it has brightened, and like a lighthouse it is casting its light across the landscape of dust and gas around it."
"We know of many small nebula like this scattered throughout the sky but it is very rare to see an event like this. We know very little about these objects and do not know what to expect next."
An urgent appeal has gone out to astronomers to monitor the object which is now known as McNeil's nebula.
"We will lose it in about six weeks when Orion goes behind the Sun. We will then have to wait until the autumn for it to be observable again. I expect it will have changed by then," says Reipurth.
"I'm thrilled to have found it and to be a part of such a great effort," says McNeil.
Why in the world does anybody still use AIM? It's a bloated, closed-source POS. Those using it should expect to get spammed.
Give me Trillian any day.....
Once you get the hang of it, get the Desert Combat mod. Updates the weapons, vehicles, and maps to present day.
It's just one more reason I'm becoming completely unmotivated to work in corporate I.T.
I've been an "I.T. guy" ever since my first job, and frankly, I banked on "PCs and DOS/Windows solutions" as the stuff one needed to keep up with to retain a decent job.
Somewhere along the way (I think roughly around the time Microsoft started pushing Active Directory integrated with Exchange 2000, but that's far from the ONLY factor), I started becoming disillusioned with the whole thing. I had always tinkered with Linux as a curiousity and fun "alternative OS" to use at home - but couldn't spark any interest in it where I worked.
I decided to "rock the boat" a little bit, building Linux-based thin clients PCs out of old, depreciated systems being taken out of service, and asking employees to try using them on a "trial" basis. I had few complaints, and got most of the ones I did have ironed out in short order. (Mostly, people whining about needing support for their scroll wheel mice, stuff like that.)
I think it threatened my co-workers though, who were die-hard "MS only!" people. My boss was "on the fence" about the whole project, basically not wanting to stop me from experimenting - yet uneasy about it disrupting his little "happy family" of I.T. employees.
Next thing I knew, I was let go. By this time, the job market was quickly drying up, and I spent a long time collecting unemployment checks, and trying to find another, similar job to no avail.
I finally found work with Apple Mac systems. Wow, what a difference! Problem is, it's a small mom and pop place that's hanging on by a shoestring. My hours got cut back to part-time recently, because he couldn't make ends meet otherwise. It's really disappointing more folks haven't yet discovered the things Apple has done/is doing with OS X.
But anyway, here in the present, I see the I.T. job market SLOWLY starting to open back up, but when I read the job descriptions, my stomach churns. I don't even want to apply for most of them! It just seems like signing up to administer hundreds (or thosands?) of users on Exchange email while helping develop roll-outs of the latest MS technologies is like signing one's death warrant.
Obviously, there are still plenty of I.T. folks out there happy and willing to take on these jobs, risks and all. But maybe all my experience has made me too jaded? I'm about to throw in the towel. I don't have nearly enough "real world experience" using the OS's I see as superior solutions (Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc.) to get a decent paying job supporting/administering them. I spent too much time in the MS camp for that. I think I can handle the Mac OS X support quite well, but nobody's hiring for that. MS's current offerings give me the creeps....
Lawyer for SCO?
Defender/Robotron/Stargate - how did you get those games to FEEL so right? Incredibly challenging, but not unplayable?
- It's a process of successive refinement - like cooking a soup. You put a little pepper in, maybe add some salt, decide that's too much salt... The difference is, with programming, it's easy to pluck out an ingredient that doesn't work and try something else. Defender was my first videogame, and, like any crazy kid who wants to design a game, I started out with unbelievable ambition. I wanted it to be everything - the player can fly, he can drive, he can go underground... After a while, I thought: 'I'm never gonna finish this. It's too much'. You have to stop and ask yourself: 'What is really the meat of this thing?'
Was it almost a good thing that you were limited by the technology?
- Designing videogames is all ABOUT limitation. It's not about doing everything that's possible, just because you can. It's about finding some small subset of something that's FUN and building on that. With fighting games like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter 2, you can go back and forth on this barely two-dimensional line, but you have all this richness of being able to execute a big variety of moves within that simple framework. The backbone of the game is simple - it's a small world, but the trick is how you work it to make it a rich and exciting world. You should be doing a few things very well, rather than a lot of things poorly.
At a time when videogames were quite static and samey, was Defender a bit of a reaction to that - something more brash and dynamic?
- Oh, yeah. You have to think - what am I doing that's cool that no-one else has done before? Otherwise, what's the point? With Defender, I knew that I wanted to do a game where you fly around. My only option at the time was 2D, so I thought, okay - you fly around in 2D, but, because the screen is so small, you're gonna be bouncing off the walls and that isn't much fun. So I thought of the screen as just one window on this expansive universe, and, the scrolling came from wanting to get a sense of speed and motion. All the best videogames are about survival - it's our strongest instinct, stronger than food, sex, lust for money... You have to create a survival story - to tap into the raw energy and adrenaline and get people naturally excited. Sounds obvious, but that's why you need a LOT of very nasty bad guys trying to kill you.
Noisily.
- Yeah! And in a really cool-looking way, too. People love special effects. They love to see things blow up, they love shiny, cool, sparkling stuff. At the time of Defender, we had a gifted nineteen-year-old programmer called Sam Dicker, and he was the particle effects genius - although at the time we didn't know what the hell they were. We just wanted to blow stuff up in an attractive way - and I wanted everything to respond accordingly to how fast you're flying, what you hit, how you hit it... Whenever I played Asteroids, I was always disappointed that, when you crash into a boulder, your ship just does this little rotate-and-collapse thing. That isn't very exciting. I wanted those moments to feel more interactive - like, if you get hit by a bigger rock, something bigger and more spectacular happens than if you're hit by a small one.
Your games are good at creating a sense of relentless hostility and danger - urging the player to go into battle against seemingly impossible odds. That's particularly true of Robotron...
- Well, with Defender, you can fly around and, to some extent, find a little safety. But with Robotron, you're stuck in this confined little space. That confinement is the key element in what makes Robotron feel the way it does. The constant feeling of being cornered and having to fight your way out of that corner - fight or flight. There's no choice. You're ALWAYS making a last stand. A lot of people tell me that Robotron is the only game that makes them physically sweat. It's the same for me, too.
How long did it take you to be happy with Robotron?
- It was
Try this site: Adjusting Your Mirrors Correctly
The WHOIS database provides contact information that is necessary for the proper operation of the world wide web. It is not only registrars that need access to this information, if you have a complaint about a domain, and the registrar for said domain is the same company, who do you go to for contact information.
False or missing information in whois records is already a problem that helps (for instance) spammers hide their contact information from people with legitimate reasons to contact them. If you get no response from the contact listed in the domain's SOA record, abuse, admin, webmaster, postmaster, etc, and there is no contact information posted on the site (or false contact information), what do you do? You check out the WHOIS record for the domain. If the info that's supposed to be there is present and accurate, you have a way to contact somebody, if it isn't, you have ammo for asking the registrar to suspend the domain registration, and if *they* won't, you have ammo to ask ICANN to suspend the registrar's activities.
Unfortunately, people don't realize the reason that WHOIS records exist, which is to provide contact information. That's the WHOLE reason. Removing that information makes the WHOIS database useless.
Of the practice of sneaking text based games in
daemons. I think either classic adventure or mansion was on one of the mindspring DNS servers
for a while. You could play with nslookup. It went along the lines of:
nslookup www.blah.com 207.69.188.186 forward
and you'd get your request back and at the bottom of it would be something like:
You enter a room and a loud clear voice says "ritnew is a charming word" or whatever your next move was. I'd love to find another one of these.
Maybe Taco should petition Ann Arbor to do this so he can finall get off his crappy 56k modem.......
Oh nothing could be finer that to have a FP
on Troll Tuesday!
Props to anti-slash and clit!
When the US Govt makes Linux it's official OS, then I'll start believing in politicians again.
Other good reasons to use Linux:
* It's incredibly easy to script and build new applications by tying together existing ones via pipes. The results are fast, reliable, and professional -- unlike AppleScript or VB-produced results. This is only relevant to tech users, but it's a big one.
* It's free. Okay, for a professional with a decent salary, the cost of Windows vs Linux itself -- the base package -- really isn't significant. A hundred or two hundred bucks is not a big deal. However, to purchase commercial equivalents of all the Linux apps I use would be extremely expensive. Compilers (think Visual Studio), editors (think Visual SlickEdit), mail clients (think Eudora), system monitors (think all manner of shareware apps), sound editors (think Cakewalk), image editors (think Photoshop), web servers (think IIS), code checkers (think Gimpel Lint), graphing programs (think Visio), math/statistics packages (think MATLAB), and all the rest, there is a *lot* of money involved. Sure, you can pirate it, but that's not an option at work, and pirating software is less and less trivial with the surging prevalance of phone-home features.
* It's secure. Traditionally UNIX (and its apps) have had tighter security design than Windows, especially WRT local security. A couple of Microsoft apps are phenomonally insecure (MSIE, Outlook), and most Windows apps don't have the same emphasis on avoiding attacks.
* It gives better performance. My workstation runs a large set of servers in the background. I don't notice. I have a friend that runs a Windows FTP server that he kills off when he wants to take all the CPU time on his system.
* I can fix bugs that piss me off. If I have an issue, I happen to be a coder, so I can run out and fix it without just complaining to a company's forums and hoping that something happens. I can add features that I want. Obviously, this benefit isn't nearly as good if you aren't a coder, but it's something to consider.
* I can actually see what's going on. Linux has a strong tradition of talking about and letting you see what's *actually* happening on your system. The startup system is just a bunch of scripts that are quite readable. In contrast, if you pick up a book designed for a Microsoft administrator, you'll get a bunch of Microsoft-invented terms ("Enable a service"...am I starting a process listening on a port or what? What the hell is happening?) This also makes troubleshooting much better.
* A richer toolkit. For at least coders, network admins, and security types, good tools exist that have no Windows equivalent. (The reverse tends to be true when it comes to office workers.)
* Choice. If I use Windows, I also must use Explorer, like it or not (and I don't). I can't use the kernel or Windows software without also using the expected file manager (yes, there have been a few hacks to try "replacing" Explorer, such as LiteStep, but they're flaky...more neat toys than pratical tools). On Linux, I have more window managers available than I have fingers. I have a whole collection of file managers. I have docks galore. I can choose my favorite from each category and use that.
* Better design. The fact that Linux uses better file-locking semantics, the fact that Linux uses symlinks instead of shortcuts, the fact that it's easier to write a reliable Linux driver than a reliable Windows driver, all have strong trickle-down effects to the user in the form of fewer reboots, more flexibility in file system layout and control, and a more reliable system.
FP to the mostest!