Iwould agree that it is much easier to support if all schools are running the same, but if they have to neglect other software concerns such as security, they should consider switching
But by switching they neglect great deals like a free porche bundled with purchase of a million licenses. As long as OSS can't give out free porches as bonus to government-funded purchases, we're on a lost position.
they pay if they have the money. Or, if they don't, they grab as much as they can and flee to Argentina, Somalia, Cuba or such, leaving the subsidiary company falling apart at rapid pace.
Of course this is not a likely scenario, but veeeery interesting:)
"$1.4 billion, *yawn*. Do you take visa or should I pay with cash?" "Cargo ship loaded with cash would be nice." "That will fit in four ISO size containers, we can send it by air freight." "I think no more than $1.5 milliard fits in a container. You need a ship to send $1.4 billion dollars." "milliard? What the fuck is that?" "I think you call these 'billions' back in the US. A billion here is a thousand milliards or a million millions." "*cough* *choke*"
This is the designers and planners and builders and maintainers who put together a complex set of systems.
And then there's the managers who greenlighted the launch even though said designers and engineers noticed a fault and wanted it corrected instead. Now the designers and engineers can just say Godspeed and hope for the best. Only luck matters now.
but there are several options to choose between when you're putting anything other than people into orbit.
Yep. Russia, Japan, ESA or the shuttle. Sure theoretically the US options in this manner are wider but practically no competitive unmanned flight offer exists. Most are reserved for the military.
....also, if EU was Really Really Mean, they'd say "Sorry, you didn't pay 1.4 billion, you paid only 1.4 milliard, that's 0.1% of what you should pay." and Microsoft would be deep under:)
Add three zeros to a million and you get a thousand million.
It's called milliard. At least in most of Europe.
num - US - UK
10^3 - thousand - thousand 10^6 - million - million 10^9 - billion - milliard 10^12 - trillion - billion 10^15 - quadrillion - trillion 10^18 - quintyllion - quadrillion
You need to specify Europe or US when speaking bignum, or you may end up 3 orders of magnitude away from desired goal. In Poland we say "Microsoft placi 1.4 miliarda dolarow" and nobody mentions billions of dollars that easily.
Will Microsoft cough up and pay, or will the EU have to raid their european headquarters, confiscate property and put it all on sale. All these computers with Windows sources on their harddrives on public auction, that would be an interesting turn of events.
Still, it's the corporation you're employed in. You work for it, you get certain benefits, and if you play foul, you get punished, or fired (=jailed) for a certain period of time. It's bad if your corporation is getting ripped off by other corporations.
You're confusing "real-time" and "fast". They aren't similar. They aren't even orthogonal. They go in pretty much opposite directions.
"Real-time" allows for getting things done within fixed latency. It requires some very tricky programming techniques and creates so much overhead that you need really good hardware to keep it running without failure. Of course it has all kinds of safeguards to make the failure recoverable, but all it really does is granting that the real-time process won't be waiting for its share of time to access the hardware longer than specified time. Then it must return control to the kernel in specified time or get killed. This isn't how you get things done fast. This is how you get things done without breaks. Monitoring, driving, streaming - not much CPU power needed but no pauses allowed. That's how RTOSes work.
"Fast" is giving the program a big chunk of resources and not disturbing. The whole machine stops reacting to any controls for 5 minutes, then presents you with a result, instead of crunching the data for a hour but making you able to play Solitaire in the meantime. The priority task takes over all the required system resources and any overhead is minimized, latency of any OS operations skyrocketing. Real-time reactions go bye-bye, scheduled for after the program returns control to the OS and it's up to the program to decide if any interrupts are worth bothering or when (how late) to service them. This is where OS like FreeDOS comes in handy - launch and get forgotten.
Yep, except without windows. Usablity of task switching without bloat, restrictions and requirements of GUI. Comfortable way to run multiple applications without forcing them to be written and designed in some highly specific way.
Troll - probably not. Maybe just misguided. HL2 was the sign of the coming crisis in the games world and it shares a small deal of problems with nowadays games, but it was about the last good game.
Sure the ending was a cliffhanger, "to be continued..." and because of that, sucked. But you point out WRONG weaknesses. The story was good. Last good story to date. The climate, the world with the resistance, the post-soviet cities and rural areas, the oppression. The storytelling was great, with some even if cliche, then still well executed twists. Ant lions, gravity gun, combine rifle secondary fire, turrets, these all required quite a bit of skill. Have you tried carrying the turrets in Nova Prospect? The prison fight gets really fun with 5 turrets for your defense, especially if you try to strategically place them in such a way that the whole fight would fight itself without your help:) And eight turrets in the teleporter battle is a pure madness.
Vehicles - oh, no, they didn't drive the same at all. The hovercraft would never land upside down, you could do some really mad stunts, and it was driving like a hovercraft, that is you turn, apply acceleration and as result modify vector of speed. No wheels to change direction and long sequences where you'd madly drive through radioactive sludge dodging or hitting the combine at high speed, rarely slowing down. The buggy OTOH required much more cautious driving and often it felt really redundant, because of lots of places where walking on foot was definitely preferred - get in, drive for a moment to next "event place", get out, wipe the house or solve the puzzle, continue driving to the next place.
Enemies - okay, not -much- development here. The combine elite sucked, the rest appeared quite early. The fighting technique had to be adopted to situation though, zombies in Ravenholm different than Anticitizen One.
The weaknesses were - linearity and restrictiveness, you couldn't take a stride and see behind the church, climb a mountain over the tunnel or go check the docks instead of getting into the buggy. The story was told, and simultaneously the game was played, but you couldn't change the development of the story, they didn't blend, they were separate and playing the game was like clicking "play" on video player, simply replaying prerecorded story. Enormous amount of work put in details resulted in the overall story being short. Game length aside, pieces that kept forcing you to spend time on tasks that weren't directly connected with the plot, obvious sequencing into "blocks" - a settlement with combine ambush, a road block in the tunnel, a series of tunnels for fast and rough ride, a physics puzzle location - little or no continuity between these, they felt each like a minigame with little impact on what happens later. The piece where you fight 4 dropships and a gunship, your buggy is taken away and the rebels demand your help has completely nothing in common, with no mention, no sign of continuity with Laszlo who lies wounded 100 meters away and must have passed through that base recently. They are separate pieces, separate minigames. Laszlo is part of physics puzzle plus jumping game of sandtraps, the lighthouse is a dropship battle. And neither has anything in common with the main story...
...if they released Corel Draw for Linux. Inkscape doesn't live up to the needs of the market. There is simply NO good vector drawing program for Linux. Meantime there's a great office package and lots of distributions. Corel can't hope to make much profit with such a competition, but pushing Corel Draw they would pretty much leave the others behind.
Will they enter Poland? Or other countries where Paypal does half-assed attempts to do enter, but doesn't really dare?
I mean, currently there's no way I could sell stuff from Poland to other countries. The item mailing fee is okay. But any payments from outside, no matter how small, are associated with money transfer fee like $40-60. Or $200 if you pay when you get the item. Nobody's gonna buy $10 item and pat $60 for sending the $10 to me. They could send it in envelope... almost assuring some bastard in the polish mail service stealing it. Or they could send me some gift I don't need instead.
Paypal is present in Poland, of course. But it works one-way. I can pay through Paypal, but I can't receive money. I really hope Google kicks in and I finally can sell stuff outside Poland.
The game was amazing. Great and revolutionary. But the industry didn't follow. FF sequels were more washed out and niche, and no other games of similar class followed. Final Fantasy was a hit that could have sparkled a revolution of great games, but it didn't. Not sure why. FF7 still stands out in that era and quite a few great games were created later, but none of them took from the greatness of FF7, and the games that did, were at best medicore.
Slashdot Mirror
But by switching they neglect great deals like a free porche bundled with purchase of a million licenses.
As long as OSS can't give out free porches as bonus to government-funded purchases, we're on a lost position.
they pay if they have the money. Or, if they don't, they grab as much as they can and flee to Argentina, Somalia, Cuba or such, leaving the subsidiary company falling apart at rapid pace.
:)
Of course this is not a likely scenario, but veeeery interesting
"$1.4 billion, *yawn*. Do you take visa or should I pay with cash?"
"Cargo ship loaded with cash would be nice."
"That will fit in four ISO size containers, we can send it by air freight."
"I think no more than $1.5 milliard fits in a container. You need a ship to send $1.4 billion dollars."
"milliard? What the fuck is that?"
"I think you call these 'billions' back in the US. A billion here is a thousand milliards or a million millions."
"*cough* *choke*"
This is the designers and planners and builders and maintainers who put together a complex set of systems.
And then there's the managers who greenlighted the launch even though said designers and engineers noticed a fault and wanted it corrected instead.
Now the designers and engineers can just say Godspeed and hope for the best. Only luck matters now.
but there are several options to choose between when you're putting anything other than people into orbit.
Yep. Russia, Japan, ESA or the shuttle.
Sure theoretically the US options in this manner are wider but practically no competitive unmanned flight offer exists. Most are reserved for the military.
Supposedly you have that "shield" system?
Look up Babilon - that's current Iraq. Look up the Ottoman empire. That's Turkey.
Back then oil was useless, but these countries were world powers.
Yep, the Enemies are a smaller problem.
It's the Friends that could start making money off it what really hurts the US.
....also, if EU was Really Really Mean, they'd say "Sorry, you didn't pay 1.4 billion, you paid only 1.4 milliard, that's 0.1% of what you should pay." and Microsoft would be deep under :)
It's called milliard. At least in most of Europe.
num - US - UK
10^3 - thousand - thousand
10^6 - million - million
10^9 - billion - milliard
10^12 - trillion - billion
10^15 - quadrillion - trillion
10^18 - quintyllion - quadrillion
You need to specify Europe or US when speaking bignum, or you may end up 3 orders of magnitude away from desired goal.
In Poland we say "Microsoft placi 1.4 miliarda dolarow" and nobody mentions billions of dollars that easily.
Will Microsoft cough up and pay, or will the EU have to raid their european headquarters, confiscate property and put it all on sale. All these computers with Windows sources on their harddrives on public auction, that would be an interesting turn of events.
Still, it's the corporation you're employed in. You work for it, you get certain benefits, and if you play foul, you get punished, or fired (=jailed) for a certain period of time. It's bad if your corporation is getting ripped off by other corporations.
NExT STeP in Control Panels for ISP? I know it has a nice GUI, but I think bit antiquated for controlling ISP software.
You're confusing "real-time" and "fast". They aren't similar. They aren't even orthogonal. They go in pretty much opposite directions.
"Real-time" allows for getting things done within fixed latency. It requires some very tricky programming techniques and creates so much overhead that you need really good hardware to keep it running without failure. Of course it has all kinds of safeguards to make the failure recoverable, but all it really does is granting that the real-time process won't be waiting for its share of time to access the hardware longer than specified time. Then it must return control to the kernel in specified time or get killed. This isn't how you get things done fast. This is how you get things done without breaks. Monitoring, driving, streaming - not much CPU power needed but no pauses allowed. That's how RTOSes work.
"Fast" is giving the program a big chunk of resources and not disturbing. The whole machine stops reacting to any controls for 5 minutes, then presents you with a result, instead of crunching the data for a hour but making you able to play Solitaire in the meantime. The priority task takes over all the required system resources and any overhead is minimized, latency of any OS operations skyrocketing. Real-time reactions go bye-bye, scheduled for after the program returns control to the OS and it's up to the program to decide if any interrupts are worth bothering or when (how late) to service them. This is where OS like FreeDOS comes in handy - launch and get forgotten.
Yep, except without windows. Usablity of task switching without bloat, restrictions and requirements of GUI. Comfortable way to run multiple applications without forcing them to be written and designed in some highly specific way.
Troll - probably not. Maybe just misguided. HL2 was the sign of the coming crisis in the games world and it shares a small deal of problems with nowadays games, but it was about the last good game.
:) And eight turrets in the teleporter battle is a pure madness.
Sure the ending was a cliffhanger, "to be continued..." and because of that, sucked. But you point out WRONG weaknesses.
The story was good. Last good story to date. The climate, the world with the resistance, the post-soviet cities and rural areas, the oppression. The storytelling was great, with some even if cliche, then still well executed twists. Ant lions, gravity gun, combine rifle secondary fire, turrets, these all required quite a bit of skill. Have you tried carrying the turrets in Nova Prospect? The prison fight gets really fun with 5 turrets for your defense, especially if you try to strategically place them in such a way that the whole fight would fight itself without your help
Vehicles - oh, no, they didn't drive the same at all. The hovercraft would never land upside down, you could do some really mad stunts, and it was driving like a hovercraft, that is you turn, apply acceleration and as result modify vector of speed. No wheels to change direction and long sequences where you'd madly drive through radioactive sludge dodging or hitting the combine at high speed, rarely slowing down. The buggy OTOH required much more cautious driving and often it felt really redundant, because of lots of places where walking on foot was definitely preferred - get in, drive for a moment to next "event place", get out, wipe the house or solve the puzzle, continue driving to the next place.
Enemies - okay, not -much- development here. The combine elite sucked, the rest appeared quite early. The fighting technique had to be adopted to situation though, zombies in Ravenholm different than Anticitizen One.
The weaknesses were - linearity and restrictiveness, you couldn't take a stride and see behind the church, climb a mountain over the tunnel or go check the docks instead of getting into the buggy. The story was told, and simultaneously the game was played, but you couldn't change the development of the story, they didn't blend, they were separate and playing the game was like clicking "play" on video player, simply replaying prerecorded story. Enormous amount of work put in details resulted in the overall story being short. Game length aside, pieces that kept forcing you to spend time on tasks that weren't directly connected with the plot, obvious sequencing into "blocks" - a settlement with combine ambush, a road block in the tunnel, a series of tunnels for fast and rough ride, a physics puzzle location - little or no continuity between these, they felt each like a minigame with little impact on what happens later. The piece where you fight 4 dropships and a gunship, your buggy is taken away and the rebels demand your help has completely nothing in common, with no mention, no sign of continuity with Laszlo who lies wounded 100 meters away and must have passed through that base recently. They are separate pieces, separate minigames. Laszlo is part of physics puzzle plus jumping game of sandtraps, the lighthouse is a dropship battle. And neither has anything in common with the main story...
And don't forget the definite article teh. That's teh intarwebs, sir.
Obviously shining a pocket laser at the shuttle would be considered an act of terrorism, but what about aiming homemade fireworks at it?
Dragging a thin golden wire all the way back from NSA headquarters.
...if they released Corel Draw for Linux.
Inkscape doesn't live up to the needs of the market. There is simply NO good vector drawing program for Linux. Meantime there's a great office package and lots of distributions. Corel can't hope to make much profit with such a competition, but pushing Corel Draw they would pretty much leave the others behind.
In wider perspective, nutcase or not, genius or not, in this narrow perspective, this single quote comes from a genius.
The new regulations require Chuck Norris to enter an 8-digit PIN on his boot before he can do the roundhouse kick.
Do I have to enter an unique 8-digit pincode on the numpad everytime I want to shot too?
Will they enter Poland? Or other countries where Paypal does half-assed attempts to do enter, but doesn't really dare?
I mean, currently there's no way I could sell stuff from Poland to other countries. The item mailing fee is okay. But any payments from outside, no matter how small, are associated with money transfer fee like $40-60. Or $200 if you pay when you get the item. Nobody's gonna buy $10 item and pat $60 for sending the $10 to me. They could send it in envelope... almost assuring some bastard in the polish mail service stealing it. Or they could send me some gift I don't need instead.
Paypal is present in Poland, of course. But it works one-way. I can pay through Paypal, but I can't receive money. I really hope Google kicks in and I finally can sell stuff outside Poland.
The game was amazing. Great and revolutionary. But the industry didn't follow. FF sequels were more washed out and niche, and no other games of similar class followed. Final Fantasy was a hit that could have sparkled a revolution of great games, but it didn't. Not sure why. FF7 still stands out in that era and quite a few great games were created later, but none of them took from the greatness of FF7, and the games that did, were at best medicore.