An accurate definition of "assault weapon" might read:
assault weaponn : a light rifle capable of firing more than one bullet in sequence with a single trigger-pull.
Or, there's the California definition:
Waah! It looks like one! WAH! WAAAUUGH!
For what it's worth, all full-auto weapons (capable of firing multiple bullets in sequence with a single trigger-pull) have been heavily regulated in America since the 1930s.
Clary, I guess this just means I'm agreeing with you...
For 100 simultaneous users, all of whom have no clue how to use the software, you figure you need about 5 trained sysadmins. Let's say you only run the lab 5 days a week for 10 hours, and pay your sysadmins $10/hour. In three years: 5*5*52*3*10*10=$390,000. Lets say using Windows software saves you only one of those sysadmins. 1*5*52*3*10*10=$78,000. I think we have a winner.
You failed to explain why Windows WOULD save a sysadmin vs. Linux. It's my experience that Windows would require just as many low-level computer lab operators, because they're there to be warm bodies, make sure nobody walks off with the computers, and answer the questions of the clueless, who know neither Linux nor Windows.
It's been my experience, though, that a Unix network infrastructure is considerably more robust than a M$ one, and requires fewer mid-to-high-level staff to keep things running.
Question: how much does it cost just to keep the macro viruses in check on a Windows network?
Lastly, with machines being used by clueless users, using Linux has the major advantage that you are more able to lock the low-level users out of the sensitive areas of their machines using permissions, preventing them from screwing up the system by "trying to fix it" or installing AOL. This saves you a lot of time reinstalling the operating system on machines. You can also remotely sysadmin the machines, which saves lots more time.
It's called an MPEG video server, and they've been around for years in professional broadcast circles. And they can not only record an MPEG bitstream while playing others back, they can play at least 8 if not dozens of different mpeg streams back at the same time, or the same stream starting at 8 different times, or any combination of the above.
For that matter there were professional systems built out of computer controlled VTR decks ans switchers that could do the same thing using VIDEOTAPE, though it was inelegant and complicated and expensive.
Tivo is an inexpensive video server with VCR-like record functions. It's apparently a nice product, and I wish them well, but this patent should not have been granted.
It's like with Tomb Raider: what was really special about the game was that Core had finally come up with a way of controlling a character in a 3D game that really worked. It was infinitely better than the "can't even walk through a doorway" control on previous games.
BUT, the lesson game companies seemed to learn was "boobs sell games."
So, probably these developers are looking at games like Tomb Raider, or even moreso the Dead or Alive series, and saying "sex sells." When, really, it's gameplay, replayability, multiplayer, etc.
Then they started trying to outdo each other, leading to the bordello atmosphere. Bleah. That kind of thing is why I STOPPED going to scifi cons.
I've never seen my playstation crash. There are places in the Tomb Raider games where your character can get stuck and have trouble getting unstuck, though, which can have the same effect. Even those are bizarre aberrations: you don't expect the console to crash, and it almost never does.
I've seen my Dreamcast crash once, on Skies of Arcadia. It never happened again, and I've never had another problem.
On the other hand, with Windows, it can be a matter of when will it crash TODAY, and major apps like Word and IE5 exhibit major bugs and crashes on a continuous basis. That's much worse than would be tolerated on a console.
Consoles are about cheap thrills, instant gratification and lack of hassles. If people buy X-boxen, and they get sidelined by crashes even once a week, MS is screwed, because they're not only going to lose $125 on the sale, they're going to lose $300 more when the XBox gets returned to the store.
It's fairly easy to use, everyone can read it, and it's not editable, which in many cases is a plus.
Plus, all the change tracking in Word goes away (I won't call it version control, because it's not).
Actually, there are some nasty bugs associated with change tracking (screws up automated numbering of figures), so it's another feature of Word I never use.
I've been in your shoes, and my opinion is that it's better to keep it simple, but organized.
I don't like using CVS with nontechnical people who haven't been trrained for it. They are as likely to accidentally overwrite the new version of the doc with the old as they are to save themselves any trouble. So, if you go with CVS, definitely factor in training for everyone.
But, if that won't fly, maybe you should just consider using a plain old network directory, with some careful setup.
Basically, use grouping and network access privileges to give each workgroup their own directory noone else can edit. Each software project has their own subdirectory, and each set of docs for a version of the software a deeper subdirectory. Keep the different versions of the docs totally separate (don't try to be clever and have a shared graphics directory), and archive the old docs in zip files so that nothing gets lost or written over.
That's a start. There is a whole lot more involved in doing this job right: you have to build standardized templates, get the users to enter information for each doc (this can be done easily using a macro that makes them fill out a form when the doc is created), collect that information and set up search tools and indexes.
It's a complicated subject, and that's the short version. If you want to read more, check out my my 16-page Guide to Standardizing and Organizing Documentation. It's not quite where I want it to be yet (second draft but not finished), but I think it might be helpful.
Your example only works if Red Hat wanted to be in the business of installing applications for users. I doubt that they do: you don't get enough money for the small stuff, and maintaining a support staff for drudgework only leads to high turnover in that department.
Red Hat probably wants to be IBM when they grow up, only they won't even have to do the hardware. They want to sell their expertise to big companies with big expense accounts.
It's a LICENCE, for crying out loud! It RUNS ON the concept of intellectual property! You cannot licence what you do not own!
What it IS "anti" is the concept of closed source licensing that locks its users out of the code so that they can't fix it and work with it. But that isn't being against the concept of intellectual property, it's against an abuse of that concept, in much the same way that anti-monopoly law is not anti-free-market.
The GPL was intended to correct a problem with the way software was being licenced, all while staying within the legal framework of software licencing.
Office is and will continue to be the office suite standard. Believe it or not, people (lots of people) love Office, with good reason.
Believe it or not, professionals like myself are DYING to get away from Windows to ESCAPE Microsoft Office, because it has become so screwed up that it is unusable for professional work. I've had to start going over my hardcopy printouts in Word on a page by page basis to make sure cross-references and numbered lists haven't become spontaneously corrupted. These are features that used to work dependably. I have little faith that they will ever be fixed properly, since there are still significant and well-known bugs from Word 2.0 left in the code (ex: the section break bug).
If Office were being introduced as a new set of apps, I'd have to say "nice features, but it's just not dependable enough to use."
As for IE5, it crashes just as much as Netscape, and I prefer the way new Netscape windows inherit the maximization of the parent window.
Every piece of software from Microsft seems to turn into "feature landfill."
Moreover, and getting back to the point you were trying to rebut, Office and IE were nothing new. Office was copying WordPerfect and Lotus 123 and Harvard Graphics, and IE was BOUGHT from another company! Office's major innovation was its interoperability among apps, and the fact that it was sold at a discount as a suite, and I'm not sure those were really innovations.
It's a Transmeta laptop with a CD-ROM and a fullsize screen, in the kind of nice aluminum casing that Panasonic has been using on their M1 laptop (and that Apple has more recently been copying with their titanium laptops). It has a 7 hour battery life, 9 if you replace the drive bay with an additional battery.
The problem with paper for me is that while it is easy to write that note on that piece of paper, the pieces of paper add up. This becomes especially bad once you fill up your first notebook: either you leave all that information at home, where you can't get at it, or you carry a ton of notes and paper around with you.
With the Palm Pilot, I have a notebook that works acceptably well for jotting things down, and never fills up (you would have a hard time filling up one of the old 500K Palms with just notes and phone numbers, and the new Palms have sixteen times as much memory). I alsways have the lists of books I was wanting to read, music I was wanting to listen to, DVDs I wanted to rent. I have a map of New York City. I have several calculators and a date and address book that doesn't need to be replaced at the end of the year. I can shuttle files around between work and home using FileBox. I even have goofy things like a solar compass and the "Tricorder" app. And, all this stuff gets backed up, so if I lose the PalmPilot, or a dog eats it or something, I still have all the data.
And, the amount of space this takes up is getting smaller.
Jon Acheson
It's like when cells grow large then divide...
on
DailyRadar.com Closes
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· Score: 2
There is a maximum size to any community, virtual or otherwise, beyond which it stops being a place where everybody knows everybody else, and starts being more like a small city, where you have your circle of friends but most of the people on the street are strangers to you. At which point you begin to form subcultures around common interests.
I think of it as being like living cells, which can only get so big before they either divide or die of bloat.
USENET was like that too, back in the day. There was a real online community there, and there were rules you had to learn or you'd be voted off the island (and they could make it stick!). It worked even though it was huge, because accounts were largely metered out by colleges and universities. So, every fall a new batch of students would arrive and go online, but by the end of September they would have been mostly civilized, and things would calm down again. This worked up until 1993, when AOL came online and there was a flood of newbies that never ended (Hence the term "The September that Never Ended"). The result was that large swaths of Usenet effectively died of overpopulation and spam, because the constant flood of newbies just couldn't be acclimitized before the next newbies showed up, and that culture was pretty much crippled. Fortunately, many smaller newsgroups that the masses just aren't interested in still survive (anything involving strenuous thought is generally safe).
You even see the same thing happening in radio and TV. If your college has a single radio station, its programming is split up to try and cover every possible interest on the one channel. In a metropolitan area, though, there are lots of channels, and so the dominant formats each get their own stations, and the fringe formats get time in the late-night shifts. Sometimes a fringe format gets big enough to take over a station, like hip-hop or talk radio. But nobody listens to every channel at once.
I'm assuming someone has already postulated this as a law of sociology, but since I never studied sociology, I wouldn't know.
The one thing I always found interesting is how all the other team sports seem to end up having a fight with the other team at some point during the year. But not the rifle teams.
Not surprising. A rifle range is one of the few bastions of genuine politeness left.
"Hmm," you say to yourself, "everyone in this room has a real live gun and it's loaded with real live ammunition. In theory, this means that the only thing keeping me alive is the continued good will of my fellow man. I will, therefore, do all that is within my power to engender such good will!"
The big deal about using hydrogen peroxide as fuel is the simplicity of the engine design. All you have to do is run the peroxide (which is, btw, far, far more concentrated than what you buy at the drugstore) over a platinum mesh, and there is a catalyzed reaction and the stuff goes off.
Combine that with a simple, pressurized fuel tank instead of turbopumps, and you have a rocket engine with the minimum of moving parts. Perfect for a technology demonstrator that's more about the other parts of the system than the rocket itself.
The late, lamented Beal Aerospace was building a big booster rocket by scaling up this technology, and with a fair degree of success. (Then NASA stomped them flat by announcing a "civilian space launch initiative" that would have amounted to subsidizing Beal's competitors. Beal closed up shop.) Read the Space Access Society's pages to see what they think of NASA these days.
First of all, as far as distributing dangerous technology goes, the Soyuz isn't exactly The Bomb. They've been used since the seventies, at least, and like most things in the Russian space program, have received upgrades over their long service life, instead of trying to come out with some next-generation superwidget that used 12 unproven technologies and consequently never gets off the ground (*cough*-X-33-*cough*). Frankly, the F-18s the Chinese are flying probably contain a lot more sensitive stuff.
Secondly, this is just a cool idea, and it's one that would have been rejected flatly by the bureaucrats at NASA. The Russian space program is actually embracing capitalism and trying to make a go of it as a moneymaking venture. Three cheers for them: at least they have the courage to try!
My ideal convergence system has individual a/v components, each with a single data/control port in the back. These go into either a router or the back of the Borg Box. The analog sources all go into the components, not the Borg Box.
The borg box then becomes all about issuing commands and manipulating data streams, something that Linux should be well suited for, and not about tons of specialized hardware doing endless conversions between analog signals. It also lets me swap out and upgrade a/v components, and choose the ones that fit my needs and price range.
Then, only the Borg Box gets to talk to the screen, the keyboard, the mouse and the speaker amps.
I don't have a lot of hope for consumer-grade components with FireWire ports in them any time soon, though.
I know what you mean about the 15" screen. I got a Hollywood Plus card and a DVD drive, but I was still watching on an old 15" monitor that wouldn't die. As soon as we got DVD in the living room, I stopped using the drive on my PC upstairs. Then I bought a nice 19" monitor (Stealth Black IBM G96, Trinitron tube: buy one). DVD on the computer got a LOT better, to the point where it's my favorite way to watch a movie when I'm by myself. It's basically an HDTV picture, and if you're sitting in front of it it's plenty big.
I'm split on DVD on the laptop: it's nice, but it's too expensive, and the machines I want (older, cheap laptops) don't have it.
The Hidden Fortress was mainly the inspiration for the two droids and their bickering comedy-relief relationship. That's just about it.
The Hidden Fortress largely follows the misadventures of two camp followers, who are basically scavengers, scumbags, and comic relief. They encounter the hero, a lone samurai general (Toshiro Mifune) travelling incognito, and get pulled along with him out of greed as they try and find a stash of gold in a (dum-dum-dum!) hidden fortress, really a kind of hole-in-the-wall hideout located in a rugged wasteland. There is also a bunch of bad guys, and a princess. There are a lot of twists and turns and treachery, and some nice sword and spear fighting at the end.
The two movies just don't fit together as neatly as people seem to believe. Star Wars has a lot of plot threads going: saving the princess, saving the rebellion from the Death Star, Luke losing his old life and becoming a hero and proto-Jedi, Han Solo demonstrating that he's not just a mercenary, Obi-wan coming out of seclusion and moving towards his final confrontation with Vader. In contrast, The Hidden Fortress is just about Toshiro Mifune's character accomplishing his quest, and, to a much lesser extent, the two camp followers trying to reap a reward through treachery and survive the results of their own actions.
Lastly, the tone of the two movies is very different. Star Wars is a saturday matinee romp, whereas The Hidden Fortress was a straightforward samurai flick with two offbeat characters for comic relief.
In short, you can see the influences, but they're really two different movies.
Why lug around a 2 lb brick when you can carry around your iPAQ with wireless (or wired) Internet access, a full-sized keyboard, and the processor power and memory to make good use of both?
The Stowaway keyboards are neat, but honestly once you have that, plus the palmtop, plus the carrying cases, the total package is too big to just stick in a pocket, so that that you lose the carry-it-anywhere benefits of having a palmtop in the first place. YMMV, I suppose.
I know, and I could have, what, a gigabyte of secondary storage with a TRGPro and an IBM CompactFlash minidrive.
Onboard ram would be cooler than the secondary storage, though, because it would probably use less power, and because it would be real memory you could use without the hassle of accessing the storage media.
Slashdot Mirror
All I want is the Tom Baker years on DVD, and maybe a boxed set of Blake's 7.
And still the Beeb drags its feet on American releases.
Come on, BBC, get with the program and make yourself some money!
Jon Acheson
Or, there's the California definition:
For what it's worth, all full-auto weapons (capable of firing multiple bullets in sequence with a single trigger-pull) have been heavily regulated in America since the 1930s.
Clary, I guess this just means I'm agreeing with you...
Jon Acheson
You failed to explain why Windows WOULD save a sysadmin vs. Linux. It's my experience that Windows would require just as many low-level computer lab operators, because they're there to be warm bodies, make sure nobody walks off with the computers, and answer the questions of the clueless, who know neither Linux nor Windows.
It's been my experience, though, that a Unix network infrastructure is considerably more robust than a M$ one, and requires fewer mid-to-high-level staff to keep things running.
Question: how much does it cost just to keep the macro viruses in check on a Windows network?
Lastly, with machines being used by clueless users, using Linux has the major advantage that you are more able to lock the low-level users out of the sensitive areas of their machines using permissions, preventing them from screwing up the system by "trying to fix it" or installing AOL. This saves you a lot of time reinstalling the operating system on machines. You can also remotely sysadmin the machines, which saves lots more time.
Jon Acheson
It's called an MPEG video server, and they've been around for years in professional broadcast circles. And they can not only record an MPEG bitstream while playing others back, they can play at least 8 if not dozens of different mpeg streams back at the same time, or the same stream starting at 8 different times, or any combination of the above.
For that matter there were professional systems built out of computer controlled VTR decks ans switchers that could do the same thing using VIDEOTAPE, though it was inelegant and complicated and expensive.
Tivo is an inexpensive video server with VCR-like record functions. It's apparently a nice product, and I wish them well, but this patent should not have been granted.
Jon Acheson
It's like with Tomb Raider: what was really special about the game was that Core had finally come up with a way of controlling a character in a 3D game that really worked. It was infinitely better than the "can't even walk through a doorway" control on previous games.
BUT, the lesson game companies seemed to learn was "boobs sell games."
So, probably these developers are looking at games like Tomb Raider, or even moreso the Dead or Alive series, and saying "sex sells." When, really, it's gameplay, replayability, multiplayer, etc.
Then they started trying to outdo each other, leading to the bordello atmosphere. Bleah. That kind of thing is why I STOPPED going to scifi cons.
Jon Acheson
I've never seen my playstation crash. There are places in the Tomb Raider games where your character can get stuck and have trouble getting unstuck, though, which can have the same effect. Even those are bizarre aberrations: you don't expect the console to crash, and it almost never does.
I've seen my Dreamcast crash once, on Skies of Arcadia. It never happened again, and I've never had another problem.
On the other hand, with Windows, it can be a matter of when will it crash TODAY, and major apps like Word and IE5 exhibit major bugs and crashes on a continuous basis. That's much worse than would be tolerated on a console.
Consoles are about cheap thrills, instant gratification and lack of hassles. If people buy X-boxen, and they get sidelined by crashes even once a week, MS is screwed, because they're not only going to lose $125 on the sale, they're going to lose $300 more when the XBox gets returned to the store.
Jon
It's fairly easy to use, everyone can read it, and it's not editable, which in many cases is a plus.
Plus, all the change tracking in Word goes away (I won't call it version control, because it's not).
Actually, there are some nasty bugs associated with change tracking (screws up automated numbering of figures), so it's another feature of Word I never use.
Jon Acheson
I've been in your shoes, and my opinion is that it's better to keep it simple, but organized.
I don't like using CVS with nontechnical people who haven't been trrained for it. They are as likely to accidentally overwrite the new version of the doc with the old as they are to save themselves any trouble. So, if you go with CVS, definitely factor in training for everyone.
But, if that won't fly, maybe you should just consider using a plain old network directory, with some careful setup.
Basically, use grouping and network access privileges to give each workgroup their own directory noone else can edit. Each software project has their own subdirectory, and each set of docs for a version of the software a deeper subdirectory. Keep the different versions of the docs totally separate (don't try to be clever and have a shared graphics directory), and archive the old docs in zip files so that nothing gets lost or written over.
That's a start. There is a whole lot more involved in doing this job right: you have to build standardized templates, get the users to enter information for each doc (this can be done easily using a macro that makes them fill out a form when the doc is created), collect that information and set up search tools and indexes.
It's a complicated subject, and that's the short version. If you want to read more, check out my my 16-page Guide to Standardizing and Organizing Documentation. It's not quite where I want it to be yet (second draft but not finished), but I think it might be helpful.
Jon Acheson
Your example only works if Red Hat wanted to be in the business of installing applications for users. I doubt that they do: you don't get enough money for the small stuff, and maintaining a support staff for drudgework only leads to high turnover in that department.
Red Hat probably wants to be IBM when they grow up, only they won't even have to do the hardware. They want to sell their expertise to big companies with big expense accounts.
Jon Acheson
It's a LICENCE, for crying out loud! It RUNS ON the concept of intellectual property! You cannot licence what you do not own!
What it IS "anti" is the concept of closed source licensing that locks its users out of the code so that they can't fix it and work with it. But that isn't being against the concept of intellectual property, it's against an abuse of that concept, in much the same way that anti-monopoly law is not anti-free-market.
The GPL was intended to correct a problem with the way software was being licenced, all while staying within the legal framework of software licencing.
Jon Acheson
Believe it or not, professionals like myself are DYING to get away from Windows to ESCAPE Microsoft Office, because it has become so screwed up that it is unusable for professional work. I've had to start going over my hardcopy printouts in Word on a page by page basis to make sure cross-references and numbered lists haven't become spontaneously corrupted. These are features that used to work dependably. I have little faith that they will ever be fixed properly, since there are still significant and well-known bugs from Word 2.0 left in the code (ex: the section break bug).
If Office were being introduced as a new set of apps, I'd have to say "nice features, but it's just not dependable enough to use."
As for IE5, it crashes just as much as Netscape, and I prefer the way new Netscape windows inherit the maximization of the parent window.
Every piece of software from Microsft seems to turn into "feature landfill."
Moreover, and getting back to the point you were trying to rebut, Office and IE were nothing new. Office was copying WordPerfect and Lotus 123 and Harvard Graphics, and IE was BOUGHT from another company! Office's major innovation was its interoperability among apps, and the fact that it was sold at a discount as a suite, and I'm not sure those were really innovations.
Jon Acheson
Either that or it's my employer's LOVELY internet connection again.
Jon Acheson
It's a Transmeta laptop with a CD-ROM and a fullsize screen, in the kind of nice aluminum casing that Panasonic has been using on their M1 laptop (and that Apple has more recently been copying with their titanium laptops). It has a 7 hour battery life, 9 if you replace the drive bay with an additional battery.
Check it out!
Jon
The problem with paper for me is that while it is easy to write that note on that piece of paper, the pieces of paper add up. This becomes especially bad once you fill up your first notebook: either you leave all that information at home, where you can't get at it, or you carry a ton of notes and paper around with you.
With the Palm Pilot, I have a notebook that works acceptably well for jotting things down, and never fills up (you would have a hard time filling up one of the old 500K Palms with just notes and phone numbers, and the new Palms have sixteen times as much memory). I alsways have the lists of books I was wanting to read, music I was wanting to listen to, DVDs I wanted to rent. I have a map of New York City. I have several calculators and a date and address book that doesn't need to be replaced at the end of the year. I can shuttle files around between work and home using FileBox. I even have goofy things like a solar compass and the "Tricorder" app. And, all this stuff gets backed up, so if I lose the PalmPilot, or a dog eats it or something, I still have all the data.
And, the amount of space this takes up is getting smaller.
Jon Acheson
There is a maximum size to any community, virtual or otherwise, beyond which it stops being a place where everybody knows everybody else, and starts being more like a small city, where you have your circle of friends but most of the people on the street are strangers to you. At which point you begin to form subcultures around common interests.
I think of it as being like living cells, which can only get so big before they either divide or die of bloat.
USENET was like that too, back in the day. There was a real online community there, and there were rules you had to learn or you'd be voted off the island (and they could make it stick!). It worked even though it was huge, because accounts were largely metered out by colleges and universities. So, every fall a new batch of students would arrive and go online, but by the end of September they would have been mostly civilized, and things would calm down again. This worked up until 1993, when AOL came online and there was a flood of newbies that never ended (Hence the term "The September that Never Ended"). The result was that large swaths of Usenet effectively died of overpopulation and spam, because the constant flood of newbies just couldn't be acclimitized before the next newbies showed up, and that culture was pretty much crippled. Fortunately, many smaller newsgroups that the masses just aren't interested in still survive (anything involving strenuous thought is generally safe).
You even see the same thing happening in radio and TV. If your college has a single radio station, its programming is split up to try and cover every possible interest on the one channel. In a metropolitan area, though, there are lots of channels, and so the dominant formats each get their own stations, and the fringe formats get time in the late-night shifts. Sometimes a fringe format gets big enough to take over a station, like hip-hop or talk radio. But nobody listens to every channel at once.
I'm assuming someone has already postulated this as a law of sociology, but since I never studied sociology, I wouldn't know.
Jon Acheson
Not surprising. A rifle range is one of the few bastions of genuine politeness left.
"Hmm," you say to yourself, "everyone in this room has a real live gun and it's loaded with real live ammunition. In theory, this means that the only thing keeping me alive is the continued good will of my fellow man. I will, therefore, do all that is within my power to engender such good will!"
Jon Acheson
The big deal about using hydrogen peroxide as fuel is the simplicity of the engine design. All you have to do is run the peroxide (which is, btw, far, far more concentrated than what you buy at the drugstore) over a platinum mesh, and there is a catalyzed reaction and the stuff goes off.
Combine that with a simple, pressurized fuel tank instead of turbopumps, and you have a rocket engine with the minimum of moving parts. Perfect for a technology demonstrator that's more about the other parts of the system than the rocket itself.
The late, lamented Beal Aerospace was building a big booster rocket by scaling up this technology, and with a fair degree of success. (Then NASA stomped them flat by announcing a "civilian space launch initiative" that would have amounted to subsidizing Beal's competitors. Beal closed up shop.) Read the Space Access Society's pages to see what they think of NASA these days.
For more fun with peroxide rockets, see here.
Jon Acheson
First of all, as far as distributing dangerous technology goes, the Soyuz isn't exactly The Bomb. They've been used since the seventies, at least, and like most things in the Russian space program, have received upgrades over their long service life, instead of trying to come out with some next-generation superwidget that used 12 unproven technologies and consequently never gets off the ground (*cough*-X-33-*cough*). Frankly, the F-18s the Chinese are flying probably contain a lot more sensitive stuff.
Secondly, this is just a cool idea, and it's one that would have been rejected flatly by the bureaucrats at NASA. The Russian space program is actually embracing capitalism and trying to make a go of it as a moneymaking venture. Three cheers for them: at least they have the courage to try!
Jon Acheson
My ideal convergence system has individual a/v components, each with a single data/control port in the back. These go into either a router or the back of the Borg Box. The analog sources all go into the components, not the Borg Box.
The borg box then becomes all about issuing commands and manipulating data streams, something that Linux should be well suited for, and not about tons of specialized hardware doing endless conversions between analog signals. It also lets me swap out and upgrade a/v components, and choose the ones that fit my needs and price range.
Then, only the Borg Box gets to talk to the screen, the keyboard, the mouse and the speaker amps.
I don't have a lot of hope for consumer-grade components with FireWire ports in them any time soon, though.
Jon Acheson
Honestly, just flying unrefueled is fairly trivial, and as for guidance, does the term "cruise missile" ring a bell?
I wonder how it's programmed to respond to other aircraft in the same airspace?
Jon Acheson
If the CPU can't handle it, put in a decoder chip for MP3. Shouldn't be too expensive.
If I could buy a CF MP3 decoder for the Handera, I'd buy it in a flash.
Sadly, CompactFlash seems to be relegated to just storage.
Jon Acheson
I know what you mean about the 15" screen. I got a Hollywood Plus card and a DVD drive, but I was still watching on an old 15" monitor that wouldn't die. As soon as we got DVD in the living room, I stopped using the drive on my PC upstairs. Then I bought a nice 19" monitor (Stealth Black IBM G96, Trinitron tube: buy one). DVD on the computer got a LOT better, to the point where it's my favorite way to watch a movie when I'm by myself. It's basically an HDTV picture, and if you're sitting in front of it it's plenty big.
I'm split on DVD on the laptop: it's nice, but it's too expensive, and the machines I want (older, cheap laptops) don't have it.
Jon
The Hidden Fortress was mainly the inspiration for the two droids and their bickering comedy-relief relationship. That's just about it.
The Hidden Fortress largely follows the misadventures of two camp followers, who are basically scavengers, scumbags, and comic relief. They encounter the hero, a lone samurai general (Toshiro Mifune) travelling incognito, and get pulled along with him out of greed as they try and find a stash of gold in a (dum-dum-dum!) hidden fortress, really a kind of hole-in-the-wall hideout located in a rugged wasteland. There is also a bunch of bad guys, and a princess. There are a lot of twists and turns and treachery, and some nice sword and spear fighting at the end.
The two movies just don't fit together as neatly as people seem to believe. Star Wars has a lot of plot threads going: saving the princess, saving the rebellion from the Death Star, Luke losing his old life and becoming a hero and proto-Jedi, Han Solo demonstrating that he's not just a mercenary, Obi-wan coming out of seclusion and moving towards his final confrontation with Vader. In contrast, The Hidden Fortress is just about Toshiro Mifune's character accomplishing his quest, and, to a much lesser extent, the two camp followers trying to reap a reward through treachery and survive the results of their own actions.
Lastly, the tone of the two movies is very different. Star Wars is a saturday matinee romp, whereas The Hidden Fortress was a straightforward samurai flick with two offbeat characters for comic relief.
In short, you can see the influences, but they're really two different movies.
Jon Acheson
Jon Acheson
I know, and I could have, what, a gigabyte of secondary storage with a TRGPro and an IBM CompactFlash minidrive.
Onboard ram would be cooler than the secondary storage, though, because it would probably use less power, and because it would be real memory you could use without the hassle of accessing the storage media.
Jon