Faster back and forward means better performance...
Nice. Too bad its taken over 11 years for someone to optimize this in a relevant browser.
I'm not a browser developer so I've always wondered why browsers do not simply re-render what has already been cached when 'back' is used. I hit 'back' and I observe network activity even when the page is entirely 100% cacheable content. The browser is probably playing with If-Modified-Since... I'd rather it just render what's cached especially when, between the time the page was first rendered and the time I hit 'back' the network flakes out and, rather than simply rendering what is already faithfully stored on my local disk, the browser hangs!
It's not just inconvenient. It's wrong in principle; 'back' should be 'back to precisely what I received previously', not 'attempt to re-get whatever now appears at the previous URL.' If I want the page refreshed, I will use the provided 'refresh' button, mkay? Thanks.
There's probably some profoundly crucial and subtle reason for all this and I've foolishly revealed my ignorance. Apply the necessary flames, but only if you have credible answers.
Canceled my EVE Online accounts this weekend. Both accounts represent hundreds of hours of... something. Not sure if its work or play, but its a hell of a lot of time. Past MMOG engagements include DAOC and PlanetSide. Both equally large time sinks, PlanetSide being the most fun until they ruined it.
I'm done with MMOG. I appear to have the ability to quit these things cold-turkey after sufficient suffering. I know others can't.
Downloaded Wolfenstein, Enemy Territory. The bugs apparent in the 1.x releases are gone. There are plenty of very active servers. No exp bar to watch; you're uber the instant you start playing. Log off and you're done. Only way it becomes a time sink is when you attempt to develop content.
There you go; living proof MMOGs won't ruin the non-MMOG market.
This is why string theory is a joke. Whenever they run into a problem, they throw in more dimensions or some other kludge, like gravitons leaking out of the universe.
The meme "string theory" means something because a few brilliant people continue to believe the math involved is actually applicable to modeling reality. It may yet be dismissed as luminiferous aether. In the meantime it serves as a possibility that can be studied. Does this status justify ridicule? Certainly not from me.
Further more, the dike enhancements the COE were planning (well, hoping for some money to spend on), would not even have involved the areas where the dikes failed
I've been wondering about this. Can you or your connection provide any specifics? From what I can see the Feds are mostly responsible for the river. The municipal government was responsible for the Lake Ponch sea wall, which is the part that failed. What I'd really like is details about the plan that the money was supposed to fund before the Feds cut it. I suspect it was money earmarked for the Mississippi River levees after the floods in the late 90s, and probably would have had nothing to do with preventing the failures that we have seen in New Orleans.
Ultimately the point is academic; had a Category 5 hit the city square, there wouldn't be anyone on rooftops with signs. There would be a lake with thousands of bodys and a lot of rubble piled up on one shore or the other. No amount of money can eliminate the danger inherent in a place as precarious as New Orleans. The fact is the fate of New Orleans was sealed before GWB or his father were even born.
why isn't that same energy storage technology being used in my damn car so I don't have to pay $3 a gallon to fill up the tank?
Your car uses the same energy storage technology. Hydrocarbons are good for a lot of things. You can use a spinning turbine (aircraft typically use an APU.) to convert the energy stored in jet fuel into electricity!
As for 15kW; that's not really a lot of power. That is equivalent to the continuous load of about 8 contemporary suburban homes. If you charge an array of capacitors for a bit and discharge it all in a couple microseconds you get a very powerful weapon, no fission required.
I know a Novell admin who did basically the same thing. Some system he had to cope with generated a large volume of log output. He wrote a DOS batch script to clean the directory once per day. This ran without a problem for several years.
One day the system was upgraded and the old directory structure changed. Naturally this meant the 'cd' command in that now old and forgotten daily batch job failed, yet the recursive 'del' command functioned perfectly. Goodbye volume contents, hello backup tapes.
Can you count the number of gross and avoidable administration mistakes, boys and girls?
Most serious failures occur shortly after the administrator finishes his first cup of coffee.
It was determined that one of the guys was driving recklessly, hit someone and killed 'em, and he got 5 years.
How long ago was this? One day you'll meet someone just like him. You'll shake his hand and respect him based on what little you know. I lack the arrogance necessary to attempt an evaluation of this.
Your premise is that people won't be going to orbit and that, lacking a Shuttle, they won't have the facilities. They will go to orbit and they can have better facilities when they arrive.
Separate the people from the cargo:
1.) Launch your 100+ ton satellite garage(s) into orbit on large, risky, unmanned launchers. If it blows up it might make the news.
2.) Maneuver the garage into position. Simple orbital mechanics performed from terra firma by hundreds of people every day.
3.) Launch a crew on a small, reliable, inexpensive rocket. Rutan may eventually do this for millions, as opposed to hundreds of millions.
4.) Link up your capsule with your garage and go fix your satellite. We've been docking things with other things is space for decades and no one has yet been killed doing it.
5.) Undock your capsule and use your undamaged, expendable, ablative heat shield to glide back to a runway. Leave the garage in orbit because we'll need it again soon.
Any auto mechanic could have devised this. I've yet to meet one that hauled his tools between home and shop every night. How is the Orbiter better than this?
There are people walking around who have killed families with their driving. They aren't in prison, or destitute or threatened by anyone. At some point, they were indifferent to their responsibilities and wiped out members of our species.
A question; why is this tolerated? It is tolerated, no question. I'm not indifferent to it, yet I participate in spectating.
My answer is that this is my expectation. At some point, the fact that good answers aren't easy for anyone, including myself, became crystal clear. We individuals are often fools.
Bodies in the road. Automation could make this rare. That's the plain truth.
Why NASA is using a shuttle that is 20 years old is beyond me.
It may well be beyond you, but 20 year old equipment is commonplace for most aerospace equipment. 20 years is mid-life for passenger airliners. Airlines are routinely launched with no aircraft newer than 15 years. Military aircraft see 30+ years and more.
The fact that the orbiter is 20 years old is not relevant. The design intended that the vehicle last through many flights; that was the whole point. Unfortunately, the design ignored basic physics and presumed that some magic propulsion system would exist to get the plane into orbit without 90% of the launch weight being fuel. When the engineer's magic wand failed to create such an engine, they bolted on boosters and fuel tanks and left us with the present costly, low capacity and inefficient launcher.
NASA is on the road to fixing this. Griffin has a clear vision for the future launch platform; separate the cargo from the crew, put the payloads on top, reuse the high quality and well understood booster and shuttle main engine designs for propulsion, de-orbit the crew in a lifting body capsule, and do it quickly so we don't have to keep flying these space planes. It should be cheap, reliable and flexible.
Doubt it. More like they saw the "mysterious future" post themselves and the subscribers hitting their machine before the post appeared before all./. Some admin with enough wit to handle the situation frobbed the server and saved himself a tough Friday afternoon.
Maybe people that ill should be in a hospital, not walking around in the streets?
The presumption being the patient is being denied sufficient attention? As someone with actual experience with real patients I can tell you that the reality is the patients would rather not spend years of their lives living out of a hospital due to some chronic condition. We have no end of drugs and therapy that enable people to continue living with serious conditions that would have killed them in the recent past. They live among you, one pill to the next, occasionally calling in EMTs to handle the more dramatic moments, and they want to spend no more time in a hospital than you.
OSX would never survive as an OS if it went open to the x86 platform at large.
This is just guesswork, but based on my own behavior, I think you're wrong. I know this; if x86 OS-X becomes available for whatever off-the-shelf hardware for $200 (approx. retail price of XP,) I will buy it. No question.
Windows has too much market share, and o one cares enough to relearn things.
I would put it in front of my wife and extended family based on reputation alone, if only to assure they can't make a hash of it like they do Microsoft products. In my experience, getting people to "relearn" enough to use OS-X is trivial. The kind of user that can't be bothered to learn new stuff is also the kind of user that could not give a damn which company created the GUI they use to read email.
Apple makes boatloads off of their hardware
It is entirely possible to make "boatloads" selling software. The fact is you and I don't really know why Apple is moving to Intel CPUs. You speculate that they got jacked in the ass by IBM. I suppose that means they got a new vendor because they were unhappy with the old one. That's really going out on a limb!. Consider the possibility that Apple agrees with me; moving to x86 is the first step toward an "open" OS-X.
Also, hardware support is a major issue. Everything would cease 'just working', which is a very nice benefit of osx.
I think you exaggerate; making the transition isn't that difficult and nothing will just cease. You "certify" the third parties and slowly accumulate compatibility. That's how IBM lost its PC business to the rest of the world. Apple is a credible vendor for whom the better hardware vendors already work to port their products. Moving to x86 dramatically lowers the bar for all vendors.
Microsoft owns the PC market. They have only one way to go, and that's down. OS-X is just the kind of product that could make it happen.
For years I have listened to slash-snotters speak with towering authority about Apple's commitment to PowerPC's superiority. Today, with apparently equal credibility, the locals claim a hardware independent OS-X is a metaphysical impossibility. We'll see.
How about getting CSS 2.1 recommended sometime this decade? It's only been three years. At least Microsoft wouldn't be able to use the document status as a cop-out for not attempting to implement it. I'd rather you stick to promoting interoperability instead of social engineering; people won't turn out the way you want anyhow.
VmWare is going to continue in the proprietary vein. The F/OSS community has several projects going for it though: QEMU, Bochs, CoLinux, Xen and some others.
I'm really happy with CoLinux. I just take it for granted that I can run Linux under Windows with native performance. At the moment I'm using it to run MySQL, Squid, Apache, Ruby and Samba. It's much better than Cygwin or SFU. Eventually there will be a framebuffer driver for CoLinux and it will be near perfect. For me, however, the Linux stuff I need does not require an X server.
Housing prices in high population areas in the US are headed for a crash. There have been many regional real-estate bubbles, and many popped bubbles, in the US. Some people will benefit; those who buy after the crash. Others will get stuck with property for which they overpaid. The last will not include me.
One of the listed dot coms mentioned is MVP.com. John Elway is noted as an investor. He runs a large auto dealership outfit in Colorado. Sort of a an "Unpainted Arizona" in these parts.
This will clearly disappoint some idealists (at least those who haven't been exhausted trying defeat the vandals.) Our species never hesitates beating up idealists.
All one must do to understand why this is happening is watch the Wikipedia updates live here. It's very rapid and a high percentage of edits are simple vandalism. There are diligent Wikipedians watching these changes closely. There is even custom software designed to isolate suspects.
Wikipedia can either degenerate into whatever malicious anonymous masses twist it into, or it can continue to be an excellent product of emergent contribution. Wikipedia has done due diligence. The bar must now be raised.
An inevitable side effect of this is that MediaWiki's edit controls will become more robust. This will make the system more appealing to other potential users.
I have to agree with this. Children have to be taught that there's a debate going on, that some people believe in intelligent design. If no mention is made of ID in schools, then kids will be at the mercy of people who will teach it to them as religious ideology and they won't have the tools to evaluate it properly.
Contemporary educators, if forced to introduce ID into the curriculum, will subtly use it as an opportunity to demonstraight tenets of the scientific method. The students (at least those paying attention) will emerge with a clear understanding of the debate, and be better equipped to distinguish science from non-science. Those who fail to pay attention will do what they have always done; subsist and have little or no significance.
I am not naive; the proponents of ID-like agendas believe they are "winning" when they advance their cause by forcing tacit acknowledgement from some cornered politician. I, however, have my own "faith." I have faith in the innate ability of rational individuals to recognize fraud. I have faith that our civilization will continue to discount hucksters, however well dressed. I do not fear fraudulent agendas. The creationists might well force a limited policy change that leads to their own exposure; be careful what you wish for.
In the West, institutional religion has been sliding into irrelevance for hundreds of years. The trend isn't going to stop or reverse itself. Contemporary politicians must still pander to the legacy of religion because cultures are slow change; you can not peacefully reboot society to clear a fault. Clinton made sure the cameras were rolling every single time he left his church. Bush may well be a real fundy, and its seems to me that he knows better than to let it show with more than about annual frequency. We have this well in hand.
I prefer to patiently permit the relentless decent of religion to continue. Excessive ridicule is not helpful; it creates a "loser" that will engender sympathy. I keep my expectations low and celebrate when they are exceeded. This is my preference because the only alternative I see involves firearms and, as most of us recognize, the topic has proven rather adept at claiming lives. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams; Don't Panic.
We went from sails to steam-driven paddleboats (which worked poorly) to propeller-driven steamships (which worked really well). The shuttle program is equivalent to saying "These paddleboats just have no future. Let's go back to sails."
Inventing a jet that operates at 27,400 km/h and survives re-entry is an exercise left to the reader.
Notice that the story is about a guy with a partisan interest in the outcome- he's a Thiokol engineer and they make the solid-fuel boosters for the current shuttle.
Thiokol ATK is the prime contractor of the SRB. In 226 flights one has failed. Whether that failure is attributable to Thiokol is a debate that will never be complete. The bottom line is that the failed SRB probably would not have failed if it flew under the conditions for which it was designed. In any case, Thiokol SRBs are reliable, and cheap, human rated boosters that will do the job soon. If you need to consult with someone about how to build SRBs, I recommend you consider inviting someone from Thiokol.
These boosters are the heart of the proposal, and my only question is, do we want solid fuel rockets as the primary lifter for human crews?
Risk analysis of SRB verses SSME shows the solid booster is less likely to fail catastrophically.
Don't they present special challenges and risks because they can't be shut down in case of problems? Just asking, IANA astronautical engineer.
In the event of a catastrophic failure, a solid rocket motor actually provides more reaction time and better survivability for a launch escape system to protect the crew. Most catastrophic failures of a solid rocket motor actually result in a phenomenon referred to as thrust augmentation, which is easily detected by an In-Vehicle Health Monitoring System (IVHM), which can be used to signal the Launch Escape System.
This has be demonstrated; a solid fuel Delta booster exploded on the pad and the payload got hurled downrange intact (until the ground inflicted a sudden deceleration...) This could be a survivable scenario with a good crew module. Solid boosters aren't the bombs they are perceived to be, and they are extremely reliable relative to liquid boosters.
I think this scheme is excellent. Separate crew and cargo; mighty groaning 100 ton heavy lift events can fail without a half dozen dead people. Reuse the best part of STS; propulsion of over 200 tons of LEO capacity. People go up in small, simple, reliable rockets with survival systems built in. No costly reinventing the wheel; the physics of the problem haven't changed in the 40 years this has been going on.
in manned space flight would never even consider that this shows the monstrous demerits and grotesque waste
Our species is trying to figure out how to do this. It's hard. It takes time and costs lives and great treasure. Fifty years from now some nameless mech will be strapped to the side of a cracked hull trying to patch a hole with a Shuttle derived glue gun.
Take the long view. It's easier on the blood pressure.
of manned flight versus unmanned.
There is no versus. Cassini is filling basements full of storage devices with Saturn and its moons. Deep Impact's primary objective was fulfilled only one month ago. In 2003, WMAP (and COBE before it) nailed the age of the universe to within a couple hundred million years. CLOVER and the Planck Surveyor will improve on this. Gravity Probe B is concluding its mission in August. NOAA-N launched in May. Spitzer (2003) and Chandra (1999) are both functioning well. Here is a page full of on-going unmanned missions you probably can't even identify.
GOES-N launches in 3 days. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is launching in 6 days. CALIPSO goes up next month. STEREO, ST5, GOES-O, AIM, THEMIS, Pluto New Horizons and Dawn are all launching in 2006. Phoenix launches in 2007.
There is no verses. We do BOTH. We have the means and we're using it, regardless of what fools like you think you know.
So... a person that really has a need for such a 'gaming router' is just gonna pick up bunch of parts and slap a freebsd box together.
Well, I did this half a decade ago. Setting up so-called "pipes" connected to packet queues in FreeBSD is really simple. Back when I first setup this "router" I had a 802.11a radio pointed at a mountain top seven miles away; one must rate limit such connections lest all the other users get really angry. Later, while using ISDL (128kbps ISDN repackaged) I used rate limits to not starve out games. Today, with a 1.5Mbps Motorola Canopy wireless uplink, I rate limit to avoid the ISP's rate limiter, which introduces noticeable delays causing lag in games.
The hardware is an AMD 486 133MHz. The OS kernel was built (by me) half a decade ago. Witness uname -a:
Slashdot Mirror
Faster back and forward means better performance...
Nice. Too bad its taken over 11 years for someone to optimize this in a relevant browser.
I'm not a browser developer so I've always wondered why browsers do not simply re-render what has already been cached when 'back' is used. I hit 'back' and I observe network activity even when the page is entirely 100% cacheable content. The browser is probably playing with If-Modified-Since... I'd rather it just render what's cached especially when, between the time the page was first rendered and the time I hit 'back' the network flakes out and, rather than simply rendering what is already faithfully stored on my local disk, the browser hangs!
It's not just inconvenient. It's wrong in principle; 'back' should be 'back to precisely what I received previously', not 'attempt to re-get whatever now appears at the previous URL.' If I want the page refreshed, I will use the provided 'refresh' button, mkay? Thanks.
There's probably some profoundly crucial and subtle reason for all this and I've foolishly revealed my ignorance. Apply the necessary flames, but only if you have credible answers.
Canceled my EVE Online accounts this weekend. Both accounts represent hundreds of hours of... something. Not sure if its work or play, but its a hell of a lot of time. Past MMOG engagements include DAOC and PlanetSide. Both equally large time sinks, PlanetSide being the most fun until they ruined it.
I'm done with MMOG. I appear to have the ability to quit these things cold-turkey after sufficient suffering. I know others can't.
Downloaded Wolfenstein, Enemy Territory. The bugs apparent in the 1.x releases are gone. There are plenty of very active servers. No exp bar to watch; you're uber the instant you start playing. Log off and you're done. Only way it becomes a time sink is when you attempt to develop content.
There you go; living proof MMOGs won't ruin the non-MMOG market.
No, you can't have my stuff.
This is why string theory is a joke. Whenever they run into a problem, they throw in more dimensions or some other kludge, like gravitons leaking out of the universe.
The meme "string theory" means something because a few brilliant people continue to believe the math involved is actually applicable to modeling reality. It may yet be dismissed as luminiferous aether. In the meantime it serves as a possibility that can be studied. Does this status justify ridicule? Certainly not from me.
Further more, the dike enhancements the COE were planning (well, hoping for some money to spend on), would not even have involved the areas where the dikes failed
I've been wondering about this. Can you or your connection provide any specifics? From what I can see the Feds are mostly responsible for the river. The municipal government was responsible for the Lake Ponch sea wall, which is the part that failed. What I'd really like is details about the plan that the money was supposed to fund before the Feds cut it. I suspect it was money earmarked for the Mississippi River levees after the floods in the late 90s, and probably would have had nothing to do with preventing the failures that we have seen in New Orleans.
Ultimately the point is academic; had a Category 5 hit the city square, there wouldn't be anyone on rooftops with signs. There would be a lake with thousands of bodys and a lot of rubble piled up on one shore or the other. No amount of money can eliminate the danger inherent in a place as precarious as New Orleans. The fact is the fate of New Orleans was sealed before GWB or his father were even born.
why isn't that same energy storage technology being used in my damn car so I don't have to pay $3 a gallon to fill up the tank?
Your car uses the same energy storage technology. Hydrocarbons are good for a lot of things. You can use a spinning turbine (aircraft typically use an APU.) to convert the energy stored in jet fuel into electricity!
As for 15kW; that's not really a lot of power. That is equivalent to the continuous load of about 8 contemporary suburban homes. If you charge an array of capacitors for a bit and discharge it all in a couple microseconds you get a very powerful weapon, no fission required.
I know a Novell admin who did basically the same thing. Some system he had to cope with generated a large volume of log output. He wrote a DOS batch script to clean the directory once per day. This ran without a problem for several years.
One day the system was upgraded and the old directory structure changed. Naturally this meant the 'cd' command in that now old and forgotten daily batch job failed, yet the recursive 'del' command functioned perfectly. Goodbye volume contents, hello backup tapes.
Can you count the number of gross and avoidable administration mistakes, boys and girls?
Most serious failures occur shortly after the administrator finishes his first cup of coffee.
It was determined that one of the guys was driving recklessly, hit someone and killed 'em, and he got 5 years.
How long ago was this? One day you'll meet someone just like him. You'll shake his hand and respect him based on what little you know. I lack the arrogance necessary to attempt an evaluation of this.
I believe you're wrong and here is why;
Your premise is that people won't be going to orbit and that, lacking a Shuttle, they won't have the facilities. They will go to orbit and they can have better facilities when they arrive.
Separate the people from the cargo:
1.) Launch your 100+ ton satellite garage(s) into orbit on large, risky, unmanned launchers. If it blows up it might make the news.
2.) Maneuver the garage into position. Simple orbital mechanics performed from terra firma by hundreds of people every day.
3.) Launch a crew on a small, reliable, inexpensive rocket. Rutan may eventually do this for millions, as opposed to hundreds of millions.
4.) Link up your capsule with your garage and go fix your satellite. We've been docking things with other things is space for decades and no one has yet been killed doing it.
5.) Undock your capsule and use your undamaged, expendable, ablative heat shield to glide back to a runway. Leave the garage in orbit because we'll need it again soon.
Any auto mechanic could have devised this. I've yet to meet one that hauled his tools between home and shop every night. How is the Orbiter better than this?
This is plain truth.
There are people walking around who have killed families with their driving. They aren't in prison, or destitute or threatened by anyone. At some point, they were indifferent to their responsibilities and wiped out members of our species.
A question; why is this tolerated? It is tolerated, no question. I'm not indifferent to it, yet I participate in spectating.
My answer is that this is my expectation. At some point, the fact that good answers aren't easy for anyone, including myself, became crystal clear. We individuals are often fools.
Bodies in the road. Automation could make this rare. That's the plain truth.
Why NASA is using a shuttle that is 20 years old is beyond me.
It may well be beyond you, but 20 year old equipment is commonplace for most aerospace equipment. 20 years is mid-life for passenger airliners. Airlines are routinely launched with no aircraft newer than 15 years. Military aircraft see 30+ years and more.
The fact that the orbiter is 20 years old is not relevant. The design intended that the vehicle last through many flights; that was the whole point. Unfortunately, the design ignored basic physics and presumed that some magic propulsion system would exist to get the plane into orbit without 90% of the launch weight being fuel. When the engineer's magic wand failed to create such an engine, they bolted on boosters and fuel tanks and left us with the present costly, low capacity and inefficient launcher.
NASA is on the road to fixing this. Griffin has a clear vision for the future launch platform; separate the cargo from the crew, put the payloads on top, reuse the high quality and well understood booster and shuttle main engine designs for propulsion, de-orbit the crew in a lifting body capsule, and do it quickly so we don't have to keep flying these space planes. It should be cheap, reliable and flexible.
We're working on the win32 api on monday!
/.
Win32? Big deal. Go implement X11 6.8.2 if you want to impress
Go ahead, I'll wait...
Slashdotted by the second comment.
./. Some admin with enough wit to handle the situation frobbed the server and saved himself a tough Friday afternoon.
Doubt it. More like they saw the "mysterious future" post themselves and the subscribers hitting their machine before the post appeared before all
it's coming out 2007 May 05
:)
To be announced May 07, 2007... May 6 is a Sunday, noob.
Maybe people that ill should be in a hospital, not walking around in the streets?
The presumption being the patient is being denied sufficient attention? As someone with actual experience with real patients I can tell you that the reality is the patients would rather not spend years of their lives living out of a hospital due to some chronic condition. We have no end of drugs and therapy that enable people to continue living with serious conditions that would have killed them in the recent past. They live among you, one pill to the next, occasionally calling in EMTs to handle the more dramatic moments, and they want to spend no more time in a hospital than you.
OSX would never survive as an OS if it went open to the x86 platform at large.
This is just guesswork, but based on my own behavior, I think you're wrong. I know this; if x86 OS-X becomes available for whatever off-the-shelf hardware for $200 (approx. retail price of XP,) I will buy it. No question.
Windows has too much market share, and o one cares enough to relearn things.
I would put it in front of my wife and extended family based on reputation alone, if only to assure they can't make a hash of it like they do Microsoft products. In my experience, getting people to "relearn" enough to use OS-X is trivial. The kind of user that can't be bothered to learn new stuff is also the kind of user that could not give a damn which company created the GUI they use to read email.
Apple makes boatloads off of their hardware
It is entirely possible to make "boatloads" selling software. The fact is you and I don't really know why Apple is moving to Intel CPUs. You speculate that they got jacked in the ass by IBM. I suppose that means they got a new vendor because they were unhappy with the old one. That's really going out on a limb!. Consider the possibility that Apple agrees with me; moving to x86 is the first step toward an "open" OS-X.
Also, hardware support is a major issue. Everything would cease 'just working', which is a very nice benefit of osx.
I think you exaggerate; making the transition isn't that difficult and nothing will just cease. You "certify" the third parties and slowly accumulate compatibility. That's how IBM lost its PC business to the rest of the world. Apple is a credible vendor for whom the better hardware vendors already work to port their products. Moving to x86 dramatically lowers the bar for all vendors.
Microsoft owns the PC market. They have only one way to go, and that's down. OS-X is just the kind of product that could make it happen.
For years I have listened to slash-snotters speak with towering authority about Apple's commitment to PowerPC's superiority. Today, with apparently equal credibility, the locals claim a hardware independent OS-X is a metaphysical impossibility. We'll see.
How about getting CSS 2.1 recommended sometime this decade? It's only been three years. At least Microsoft wouldn't be able to use the document status as a cop-out for not attempting to implement it. I'd rather you stick to promoting interoperability instead of social engineering; people won't turn out the way you want anyhow.
VmWare is going to continue in the proprietary vein. The F/OSS community has several projects going for it though: QEMU, Bochs, CoLinux, Xen and some others.
I'm really happy with CoLinux. I just take it for granted that I can run Linux under Windows with native performance. At the moment I'm using it to run MySQL, Squid, Apache, Ruby and Samba. It's much better than Cygwin or SFU. Eventually there will be a framebuffer driver for CoLinux and it will be near perfect. For me, however, the Linux stuff I need does not require an X server.
US might do the same.
Housing prices in high population areas in the US are headed for a crash. There have been many regional real-estate bubbles, and many popped bubbles, in the US. Some people will benefit; those who buy after the crash. Others will get stuck with property for which they overpaid. The last will not include me.
One of the listed dot coms mentioned is MVP.com. John Elway is noted as an investor. He runs a large auto dealership outfit in Colorado. Sort of a an "Unpainted Arizona" in these parts.
Yeah, fire from water, and ... 220V.
If your power comes from coal (as it does for a large fraction of all power consumers) this is nothing more than a fire delivery system...
burning coal->boiling water->generator->electrolysis of water->burning hydrogen
A profoundly inefficient way to ship fire.
was anyone not expecting this?
This will clearly disappoint some idealists (at least those who haven't been exhausted trying defeat the vandals.) Our species never hesitates beating up idealists.
All one must do to understand why this is happening is watch the Wikipedia updates live here. It's very rapid and a high percentage of edits are simple vandalism. There are diligent Wikipedians watching these changes closely. There is even custom software designed to isolate suspects.
Wikipedia can either degenerate into whatever malicious anonymous masses twist it into, or it can continue to be an excellent product of emergent contribution. Wikipedia has done due diligence. The bar must now be raised.
An inevitable side effect of this is that MediaWiki's edit controls will become more robust. This will make the system more appealing to other potential users.
I have to agree with this. Children have to be taught that there's a debate going on, that some people believe in intelligent design. If no mention is made of ID in schools, then kids will be at the mercy of people who will teach it to them as religious ideology and they won't have the tools to evaluate it properly.
Contemporary educators, if forced to introduce ID into the curriculum, will subtly use it as an opportunity to demonstraight tenets of the scientific method. The students (at least those paying attention) will emerge with a clear understanding of the debate, and be better equipped to distinguish science from non-science. Those who fail to pay attention will do what they have always done; subsist and have little or no significance.
I am not naive; the proponents of ID-like agendas believe they are "winning" when they advance their cause by forcing tacit acknowledgement from some cornered politician. I, however, have my own "faith." I have faith in the innate ability of rational individuals to recognize fraud. I have faith that our civilization will continue to discount hucksters, however well dressed. I do not fear fraudulent agendas. The creationists might well force a limited policy change that leads to their own exposure; be careful what you wish for.
In the West, institutional religion has been sliding into irrelevance for hundreds of years. The trend isn't going to stop or reverse itself. Contemporary politicians must still pander to the legacy of religion because cultures are slow change; you can not peacefully reboot society to clear a fault. Clinton made sure the cameras were rolling every single time he left his church. Bush may well be a real fundy, and its seems to me that he knows better than to let it show with more than about annual frequency. We have this well in hand.
I prefer to patiently permit the relentless decent of religion to continue. Excessive ridicule is not helpful; it creates a "loser" that will engender sympathy. I keep my expectations low and celebrate when they are exceeded. This is my preference because the only alternative I see involves firearms and, as most of us recognize, the topic has proven rather adept at claiming lives. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams; Don't Panic.
We went from sails to steam-driven paddleboats (which worked poorly) to propeller-driven steamships (which worked really well). The shuttle program is equivalent to saying "These paddleboats just have no future. Let's go back to sails."
Inventing a jet that operates at 27,400 km/h and survives re-entry is an exercise left to the reader.
Notice that the story is about a guy with a partisan interest in the outcome- he's a Thiokol engineer and they make the solid-fuel boosters for the current shuttle.
Thiokol ATK is the prime contractor of the SRB. In 226 flights one has failed. Whether that failure is attributable to Thiokol is a debate that will never be complete. The bottom line is that the failed SRB probably would not have failed if it flew under the conditions for which it was designed. In any case, Thiokol SRBs are reliable, and cheap, human rated boosters that will do the job soon. If you need to consult with someone about how to build SRBs, I recommend you consider inviting someone from Thiokol.
These boosters are the heart of the proposal, and my only question is, do we want solid fuel rockets as the primary lifter for human crews?
Risk analysis of SRB verses SSME shows the solid booster is less likely to fail catastrophically.
Don't they present special challenges and risks because they can't be shut down in case of problems? Just asking, IANA astronautical engineer.
Here's a quote from a site that explains this:
In the event of a catastrophic failure, a solid rocket motor actually provides more reaction time and better survivability for a launch escape system to protect the crew. Most catastrophic failures of a solid rocket motor actually result in a phenomenon referred to as thrust augmentation, which is easily detected by an In-Vehicle Health Monitoring System (IVHM), which can be used to signal the Launch Escape System.
This has be demonstrated; a solid fuel Delta booster exploded on the pad and the payload got hurled downrange intact (until the ground inflicted a sudden deceleration...) This could be a survivable scenario with a good crew module. Solid boosters aren't the bombs they are perceived to be, and they are extremely reliable relative to liquid boosters.
I think this scheme is excellent. Separate crew and cargo; mighty groaning 100 ton heavy lift events can fail without a half dozen dead people. Reuse the best part of STS; propulsion of over 200 tons of LEO capacity. People go up in small, simple, reliable rockets with survival systems built in. No costly reinventing the wheel; the physics of the problem haven't changed in the 40 years this has been going on.
Of course, the fanatical believers
Ad hominem
in manned space flight would never even consider that this shows the monstrous demerits and grotesque waste
Our species is trying to figure out how to do this. It's hard. It takes time and costs lives and great treasure. Fifty years from now some nameless mech will be strapped to the side of a cracked hull trying to patch a hole with a Shuttle derived glue gun.
Take the long view. It's easier on the blood pressure.
of manned flight versus unmanned.
There is no versus. Cassini is filling basements full of storage devices with Saturn and its moons. Deep Impact's primary objective was fulfilled only one month ago. In 2003, WMAP (and COBE before it) nailed the age of the universe to within a couple hundred million years. CLOVER and the Planck Surveyor will improve on this. Gravity Probe B is concluding its mission in August. NOAA-N launched in May. Spitzer (2003) and Chandra (1999) are both functioning well. Here is a page full of on-going unmanned missions you probably can't even identify.
GOES-N launches in 3 days. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is launching in 6 days. CALIPSO goes up next month. STEREO, ST5, GOES-O, AIM, THEMIS, Pluto New Horizons and Dawn are all launching in 2006. Phoenix launches in 2007.
There is no verses. We do BOTH. We have the means and we're using it, regardless of what fools like you think you know.
So... a person that really has a need for such a 'gaming router' is just gonna pick up bunch of parts and slap a freebsd box together.
Well, I did this half a decade ago. Setting up so-called "pipes" connected to packet queues in FreeBSD is really simple. Back when I first setup this "router" I had a 802.11a radio pointed at a mountain top seven miles away; one must rate limit such connections lest all the other users get really angry. Later, while using ISDL (128kbps ISDN repackaged) I used rate limits to not starve out games. Today, with a 1.5Mbps Motorola Canopy wireless uplink, I rate limit to avoid the ISP's rate limiter, which introduces noticeable delays causing lag in games.
The hardware is an AMD 486 133MHz. The OS kernel was built (by me) half a decade ago. Witness uname -a:
FreeBSD const. 4.0-STABLE FreeBSD 4.0-STABLE #0: Mon Sep 25 19:25:55 MDT 2000