chances of a 30m rock hitting your satellite in geosynchronous orbit?
About 30 in 1.15E+16 (one chance on the way in, one chance on the way out)
(If asteroids like that arrive every 280 years, you might expect one to hit the satellite during the first 2E+17 years, if the satellite is still there after so long)
"Who the hell uses proprietary Flash(tm) technology to display simple friggin' graphs! What the heck is the purpose of that? PNG, JPEG or GIF isn't good enough?!?"
Even Toms Hardware uses images instead of text/stretched-single-pixel graphs to display their results for anything. Means you can't use the browser's search facilities to find items in any of their mega-something-roundup reviews.
I presume Anananandtech is just trying to make people turn off their Flash-blockers so they can display more adverts, but the net result is, as you say, "leave and don't return" to most people.
"But in order for it to work, the file formats need to be completely open"
"Open" might not be enough: "open and supported" would give you enough choice to have a proper competition. Like being able to share documents between KOffice and OpenOffice and AbiWord without having to use the.DOC format, for example.
"In the case of Hebrew, they declared there would never be Hebrew language versions of their software even though the Israeli government offered to pay for the development and ultimately even to supply the developers if that is what it took. Microsoft said NO."
In some of the better software products, you can just take the messages file and translate it yourself, without any need to request that the vendor enables that feature for you.
"Free Software", I think they call it. Hey, you even get freedom of language thrown in...
"It's not nice to joke about the size of someone's exchange rate. If you're not careful, some British guy will show up and starting making fun of you."
If you want to be environmentally-friendly about it, you can take your fashionable mug with you to the cafe at university...
and find out they only serve it in styrofoam cups (of a known size), so you have to buy coffee in the foam cup, pour it into your mug, and throw the foam away unused. Congratulations to Nottingham university on their environmental policy.
Because if you had a linux computer, you could run the game just by typing "/mnt/cdrom/myth4". Only if you had an unsupported operating system such as Windows would you need to use the bootable CD and use it as a linux gaming console
"For Linux to truly become the gaming OS of choice it will need a killer app that can't run in Windows, forcing users to switch over.
Problem is, no developer will be willing to develop said killer app until Linux becomes the gaming OS of choice."
Solution is, linux games can come on a bootable CD.
"Fed up with copying 1200Mb of game onto your Windows computer, and still having to insert the CD each time? Try this!
"Just put it in your computer and reboot to run the game, it will detect your hardware, setup graphics, audio, and input devices, and start your game automatically, just like a console.
"Keep a 3.5'' disk in the drive if you want to be able to save your game, or your settings, just like a console.
"All the convenience of a console gaming platform on your PC, with none of the hassles of installing it under Windows.
"You know, silly stuff like reliable, robust video and sound drivers... |... It's funny, but Linux is in much better shape for video drivers than audio ones."
While we're at it, it would be nice for Windows to have reliable robust soundcard drivers, rather than the turtle-beach bluescreening on dual-processor machines, and the Terratec bluescreening on DirectX 9.0 or earlier...
That seems to indicate it's a difficult problem to solve, if the soundcard manufacturers can't even do it for Windows.
What's odd about this? Someone who uses photoshop to resize pictures, someone who writes HTML with the ?microsoft quotes? left in, yet is a linux expert...
"Dans Data / will say something sucks when it does."
Just had to buy some speakers for work, and there was only one site which ignored the manufacturers' claims of power rating, and talked instead about the wattage available from the power supply, the likely efficiency, and the ratings printed on the back of each driver. Most other sites seem to take specifications at face-value.
In fact, Dans Data has been known to:
(-) Tell you a speaker gives 20W output even when it's described as "250W total system power"
(-) Actually test CPU heatsinks with a resistive heater
(-) Relentlessly mock manufacturers who describe 10^9 bytes as a gigabyte
(-) Take everything apart
(-) Know enough about overclocking to laugh at people who do it badly
(-) Pick-up digital camera manufacturers for lying in their "megapixel" ratings (I think some of them count each colour in a pixel as a separate pixel?)
(-) Write reviews in valid HTML that are all on one page, and use the full width of your browser window without Flash animations
(-) Test PC power supplies under load, and compare it with manufacturer specifications
(-) Get out the multimeter for pretty much everything, from LED flashlights to power supplies and batteries
And of course, the famous:
(-) debunking a load of wacko free-energy products and "this'll make your toaster healthier" new-age power connectors.
"Something like 1 cent. If the recipient doesn't mind your message then they don't redeem your offer and it doesn't cost you a thing. However, if you're sending spam then the recipient cashes it in"
Problem: Enough people give money to spammers that it becomes possible to profit from abusing the system, tricking or defrauding people.
Solution: Put even more money into the email system, and hope that all of these new flows of cash don't end up in the hands of spammers and criminals.
"And truthfully, many companies I talked to who converted to it haven't been all that thrilled with the results so far."
Like dropping phone calls when the network gets busy? Too right it's not a good result. And try debugging phone problems when they're being caused by someone running a game on the network with intermittant IP traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
"When you're trying to steal someone else's copyrighted product via a P2P network... What exactly is your beef with this?"
The same beef that you'd have if someone shot you when you were speeding.
"if I write a "Hello World" program and call it UT2004.exe"
then it'd run really fast on nVidia graphics cards, but only display "hel____rld"...
"It'll be about two more days now till someone alters the code and delivers a REAL malicious payload through the damn program."
Labelling the malicious payload as "a program to automate sending trojans to P2P users" might help it reach the right target...
chances of a 30m rock hitting your satellite in geosynchronous orbit?
About 30 in 1.15E+16 (one chance on the way in, one chance on the way out)
(If asteroids like that arrive every 280 years, you might expect one to hit the satellite during the first 2E+17 years, if the satellite is still there after so long)
"Who the hell uses proprietary Flash(tm) technology to display simple friggin' graphs! What the heck is the purpose of that? PNG, JPEG or GIF isn't good enough?!?"
Even Toms Hardware uses images instead of text/stretched-single-pixel graphs to display their results for anything. Means you can't use the browser's search facilities to find items in any of their mega-something-roundup reviews.
I presume Anananandtech is just trying to make people turn off their Flash-blockers so they can display more adverts, but the net result is, as you say, "leave and don't return" to most people.
"But in order for it to work, the file formats need to be completely open"
.DOC format, for example.
"Open" might not be enough: "open and supported" would give you enough choice to have a proper competition. Like being able to share documents between KOffice and OpenOffice and AbiWord without having to use the
When will they get an elvish or klingon desktop? C'mon, we're lagging behind KDE here...
"I should make a camera with a resolution of 1x5000000 and call it a 5 megapixel camera just out of spite."
Why bother, just create a single pixel, use a high sample rate, and market it as "5 megapixels per second", just like optical-mouses
"In the case of Hebrew, they declared there would never be Hebrew language versions of their software even though the Israeli government offered to pay for the development and ultimately even to supply the developers if that is what it took. Microsoft said NO."
In some of the better software products, you can just take the messages file and translate it yourself, without any need to request that the vendor enables that feature for you.
"Free Software", I think they call it. Hey, you even get freedom of language thrown in...
"They should make unauthorized email address distribution fineable at $1000 per offense."
That's gonna increase the cost of running Outlook Express...
"It's not nice to joke about the size of someone's exchange rate. If you're not careful, some British guy will show up and starting making fun of you."
Sssshhhhh..... cheap CDs....
If you want to be environmentally-friendly about it, you can take your fashionable mug with you to the cafe at university...
and find out they only serve it in styrofoam cups (of a known size), so you have to buy coffee in the foam cup, pour it into your mug, and throw the foam away unused. Congratulations to Nottingham university on their environmental policy.
"Erm... then what would be the point of Linux?"
Because if you had a linux computer, you could run the game just by typing "/mnt/cdrom/myth4". Only if you had an unsupported operating system such as Windows would you need to use the bootable CD and use it as a linux gaming console
"For Linux to truly become the gaming OS of choice it will need a killer app that can't run in Windows, forcing users to switch over.
Problem is, no developer will be willing to develop said killer app until Linux becomes the gaming OS of choice."
Solution is, linux games can come on a bootable CD.
"Fed up with copying 1200Mb of game onto your Windows computer, and still having to insert the CD each time? Try this!
"Just put it in your computer and reboot to run the game, it will detect your hardware, setup graphics, audio, and input devices, and start your game automatically, just like a console.
"Keep a 3.5'' disk in the drive if you want to be able to save your game, or your settings, just like a console.
"All the convenience of a console gaming platform on your PC, with none of the hassles of installing it under Windows.
"You know, silly stuff like reliable, robust video and sound drivers... | ... It's funny, but Linux is in much better shape for video drivers than audio ones."
While we're at it, it would be nice for Windows to have reliable robust soundcard drivers, rather than the turtle-beach bluescreening on dual-processor machines, and the Terratec bluescreening on DirectX 9.0 or earlier...
That seems to indicate it's a difficult problem to solve, if the soundcard manufacturers can't even do it for Windows.
It's not "pay to send", it's "pay to send spam"
It's not "pay to send spam", it's "pay if the recipient wants you to"
What's odd about this? Someone who uses photoshop to resize pictures, someone who writes HTML with the ?microsoft quotes? left in, yet is a linux expert...
"I, for one, root for the asteroid."
Do you think the people on the asteroid are preparing their earth-defence systems, and making charts of the planets that're likely to hit them?
"Just a really big nookular bomb on one side of that planet ought to do it" one alien on that asteroid is saying to another...
"Dans Data / will say something sucks when it does."
Just had to buy some speakers for work, and there was only one site which ignored the manufacturers' claims of power rating, and talked instead about the wattage available from the power supply, the likely efficiency, and the ratings printed on the back of each driver. Most other sites seem to take specifications at face-value.
In fact, Dans Data has been known to:
(-) Tell you a speaker gives 20W output even when it's described as "250W total system power"
(-) Actually test CPU heatsinks with a resistive heater
(-) Relentlessly mock manufacturers who describe 10^9 bytes as a gigabyte
(-) Take everything apart
(-) Know enough about overclocking to laugh at people who do it badly
(-) Pick-up digital camera manufacturers for lying in their "megapixel" ratings (I think some of them count each colour in a pixel as a separate pixel?)
(-) Write reviews in valid HTML that are all on one page, and use the full width of your browser window without Flash animations
(-) Test PC power supplies under load, and compare it with manufacturer specifications
(-) Get out the multimeter for pretty much everything, from LED flashlights to power supplies and batteries
And of course, the famous:
(-) debunking a load of wacko free-energy products and "this'll make your toaster healthier" new-age power connectors.
As Dan would say, "reccommended."
"I wonder what is so important that NASA is going to wait until Monday. Maybe they will be unveiling something else at the same time?"
It's the monthly bug-report announcement. "A local root vulnerability has been found in the astrology community. NASA rates it as non-critical"
The documentation has sample outputs for each thing as it's being explained.
If you want to be pedantic about it, they do have a screenshot:If you want a screenshot of a GUI, you need to look at a program that has a GUI, such as this frontend to LilyPond.
"Something like 1 cent. If the recipient doesn't mind your message then they don't redeem your offer and it doesn't cost you a thing. However, if you're sending spam then the recipient cashes it in"
Problem: Enough people give money to spammers that it becomes possible to profit from abusing the system, tricking or defrauding people.
Solution: Put even more money into the email system, and hope that all of these new flows of cash don't end up in the hands of spammers and criminals.
"Anybody have a better idea? I didn't think so. :)"
Yeah, I have an idea. Howabout you handle distribution of the NANOG mailing list after your "pay-to-send" idea gets implemented.
"And truthfully, many companies I talked to who converted to it haven't been all that thrilled with the results so far."
Like dropping phone calls when the network gets busy? Too right it's not a good result. And try debugging phone problems when they're being caused by someone running a game on the network with intermittant IP traffic.
"This is America, you'd think by now we'd be fighting with robot armies and other new-age weaponry."
I. A robot shall not harm a human, or through inaction allow a human to be harmed.
(and yes, I work with people who develop UAVs)