solar power is crappy enough here on earth and even worse on mars.
If we ever get arround to doing anything on a large scale on mars (rather than tiny little rovers that manage less than a kilometer per week) I would strongly expect it to be nuclear powered.
still you are correct, water is very usefull for habitation (you can make oxygen and food from CO2 and water simply by growing plants)
I think I first heard it used about the PSPBrick trojan, which really turns the PSP into a BRICK. Like, you can't do anything with it anymore. There isn't a thing in the world that you can do with your PSP, ever again, except keep a table from wobbling. Are you sure? IIRC at some point it was discovered that you could make a "pandora's battery" which could then get almost any PSP into a mode where it's firmware could be reflashed
More generally it is very hard to say that there is no method of recovery, only that there is no known method of recovery (or there is a known method of recovery but it's impracitcally difficult/expensive)
Finding out that Win7 is just Windows Vista with some UI and performance enhancements People hate vista primerally for three reasons
UI issues Performance issues Compatibility issues
The third issue will mostly fade away over time as vendors update thier products. So if windows 7 manages to address the first two issues it should address most of the gripes people have with vista.
No, XP was a fairly major merge of the NT and 9X product lines. From a marketing perspective yes , from a technical perspective no.
They added marginally better support for dos and I belive some old badly behaved windows apps but it was just that marginally better still not much good.
The important stuff like WDM (which allows drivers to be shared between the two lines and brought support for plug and play to the NT line) and directx was already there in 2K.
IIRC they were planning to make 2K be the release that unified the consumer and proffesional lines of windows but they bottled out at the last minuite and made ME because too many people were still relying on old dos or badly behaved windows apps.
Afaict thier aim is not to make money from the actual court actions. Instead it is to scare people out of filesharing. It's kinda like the lottery in reverse, filesharing probablly won't cost you anything but if they do decide to pick on you then you are screwed.
Does it work? I'm guessing it probablly does to some extent. Whether it will be enough to save them is another matter.
Then why the fuck is its primary windowing library (and a lot of other stuff) written in something as absolutely cretinous as object-oriented C?
So what were the other alternatives?
C++ until fairly recently had a very unstable ABI on linux. The libstdc++ on linux is at major version 6. The gtk/glib stuff is only at major version 2, Also has the same problem of breaking abi if you change the field structure of core objects. Also hard to bind with from other languages.
bytecode languages like java get arround the "abi is broken by adding fields" problem but they intoroduce a load of problems of thier own.
The gtk1 to gtk2 transition has indeed been painfull but that was mostly because they decided (rightly or wrongly) to break API as well as ABI.
If I were Microsoft I would simply stop licensing Windows for any computer sold in Europe. For better or worse MS is a publically traded corportation and publically traded corporations mainly care about making money. MS is generally better off paying fines than either complying or getting out so that is what they do.
Ok so vmware only does PC on PC (which is still very usefull because it allows use of older PC operating systems that don't get on with modern PC hardware and/or need to be kept in a security sandbox)
but there are emulators out there for other platforms, HP seem to reccomend charon-vax or charon-axp (depending on whether you need the VAX version or the alpha version) for running openvms on a PC. They don't seem to want to publish the price openly though which is generally a sign it will be expensive (they offer a "freeware" version for non-commercial use though).
primeos on the other hand I couldn't find anything for (I couldn't every find a description of what primeos was capable of)
The PC platform is incrediblly common though, if and when it does start to get phased out I strongly suspect the situation will be much more similar to the VMS one (supported through emulation) than to the primeos one (dissapeared into obscurity).
your hardware upgrade make the software incompatible I can see this being a problem for software that interacts with specialist hardware but most software doesn't really care too much about the hardware.
It may have problems with modern operating systems but vmware and similar products get arround that.
BTW, EU makes heavy use of Russian natural gas for heating And for electricity generation which means we get hit with a double whammy when the gas supplies are disrupted.
Lukilly afaict our supplies in the UK come as LNG so we brits have avoided the affects of russias squables wit it's neighbours (though if there was a cold war 2 we would really be in the shit).
Afaict it's possible to modify most engines to run on ordinary unleaded petrol without too much trouble or buy seperate adatives to protect the engine.
The thing that has to be remembered is that XP SP2 while marketed as a service pack was not really a service pack in the conventional sense. It completely overhauled the windows firewall and introduced some data execute protection feature that (supposedly) improved security but broke a number of apps (nero 5.x being the one that sticks out most in my memory)
That feature has been there for quite some time, it's certainly in XP and I think it's in 2K as well. It wouldn't even surprise me if it dates back further than that.
Drive letters serve two purposes in the modern windows world
1: they are a familiar and convinant way for users to identify thier drives and network resources (you CAN access network resources directly by thier UNC paths but afaict most people don't) especially on those occasions where they need to type a path in (contrast this to most desktop linux systems where automounted removable stuff gets a horrible path along the lines of/media/ 2: lots of software (including almost certainly parts of windows itself) expects paths starting with a drive letter.
Yes, commitment from Microsoft explains why there is no service pack 3 for 64 bit XP proffessional x64 edition is really a cut down version of server 2003. As such it uses the same service packs as server 2003 which are released on a totally seperate schedule from the XP service packs (BTW server 2003 service pack 2 is a lot newer than XP service pack 2)
Calling it XP probablly was a little misleading but making a windows desktop 2003 with only a 64 bit edition would probablly have confused things even more.
Do you have any evidence of MS not providing a security update or other critical update for server 2003 and XP proffesional x64 edition?
Slashdot and other sources are filled with stories of how Microsoft has gone back on their word and broken deals. Oh sure but that is not in itself evidence that they are any more likely to do so for server 2003 and XP proffesional x64 edition than they are for the 32 bit editions of XP.
XP had marginally better compatibility with dos games than 2K but it was just that marginally better still not really good enough.
What really allowed the NT line into the home market IMO was the gradual death of dos games in favor of windows/directx games (which generally work fine on both 2K and XP)
The OEMs seem to be less enthusiastic though, while loads of them offer supported downgrades to XP proffesional I haven't seen any offering them to XP proffesional X64 edition (both editions are covered under the vista buisness downgrade rights afaict).
Windows 7 will do fine for one major reason. Buisnesses who want to keep getting security patches will have to upgrade from XP sooner or later. So as long as MS manage to make 7 the same or marginally better than vista buisnesses will see it as more sensible to upgrade to 7 that to upgrade to vista.
Ordinary consumers will get each new version of windows force fed to them like usual.
Just how much power do you need? The VIA epia range has fanless models if you can live with it's low performance. CF cards can be used as cheap (but low capacity and low performance) SSDs with the appropriate adaptor.
It's hard to say how long current computer hardware will last even with the elimination of rotating components. Current computer hardware simply hasn't been arround long enough to know.
the nice thing about serial ports (they aren't really RS232 until you add the level shifter) is they are generally very simple to work with (in terms of what software you need on the microcontroller). So it is very common to use the serial port on a microcontroller for a diagnostic/configuration interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Martian Water: Now only $1,000 a liter!
I think you need to add a few zeros to your estimate.
solar power is crappy enough here on earth and even worse on mars.
If we ever get arround to doing anything on a large scale on mars (rather than tiny little rovers that manage less than a kilometer per week) I would strongly expect it to be nuclear powered.
still you are correct, water is very usefull for habitation (you can make oxygen and food from CO2 and water simply by growing plants)
I think I first heard it used about the PSPBrick trojan, which really turns the PSP into a BRICK. Like, you can't do anything with it anymore. There isn't a thing in the world that you can do with your PSP, ever again, except keep a table from wobbling.
Are you sure? IIRC at some point it was discovered that you could make a "pandora's battery" which could then get almost any PSP into a mode where it's firmware could be reflashed
http://www.noobz.eu/joomla/news/pandoras-battery.html
More generally it is very hard to say that there is no method of recovery, only that there is no known method of recovery (or there is a known method of recovery but it's impracitcally difficult/expensive)
Finding out that Win7 is just Windows Vista with some UI and performance enhancements
People hate vista primerally for three reasons
UI issues
Performance issues
Compatibility issues
The third issue will mostly fade away over time as vendors update thier products. So if windows 7 manages to address the first two issues it should address most of the gripes people have with vista.
No, XP was a fairly major merge of the NT and 9X product lines.
From a marketing perspective yes , from a technical perspective no.
They added marginally better support for dos and I belive some old badly behaved windows apps but it was just that marginally better still not much good.
The important stuff like WDM (which allows drivers to be shared between the two lines and brought support for plug and play to the NT line) and directx was already there in 2K.
IIRC they were planning to make 2K be the release that unified the consumer and proffesional lines of windows but they bottled out at the last minuite and made ME because too many people were still relying on old dos or badly behaved windows apps.
Scaring the majority of users of filesharing systems into leeching (downloading without sharing) would be a big win for the ??AA .
The slower they can make illegal downloads the more attractive legal ones will be.
Afaict thier aim is not to make money from the actual court actions. Instead it is to scare people out of filesharing. It's kinda like the lottery in reverse, filesharing probablly won't cost you anything but if they do decide to pick on you then you are screwed.
Does it work? I'm guessing it probablly does to some extent. Whether it will be enough to save them is another matter.
Then why the fuck is its primary windowing library (and a lot of other stuff) written in something as absolutely cretinous as object-oriented C?
So what were the other alternatives?
C++ until fairly recently had a very unstable ABI on linux. The libstdc++ on linux is at major version 6. The gtk/glib stuff is only at major version 2, Also has the same problem of breaking abi if you change the field structure of core objects. Also hard to bind with from other languages.
bytecode languages like java get arround the "abi is broken by adding fields" problem but they intoroduce a load of problems of thier own.
The gtk1 to gtk2 transition has indeed been painfull but that was mostly because they decided (rightly or wrongly) to break API as well as ABI.
If I were Microsoft I would simply stop licensing Windows for any computer sold in Europe.
For better or worse MS is a publically traded corportation and publically traded corporations mainly care about making money. MS is generally better off paying fines than either complying or getting out so that is what they do.
IIRC the windows ftp client does have a help command and behaves in just the same way as the basic ftp client on linux in my experiance.
Ok so vmware only does PC on PC (which is still very usefull because it allows use of older PC operating systems that don't get on with modern PC hardware and/or need to be kept in a security sandbox)
but there are emulators out there for other platforms, HP seem to reccomend charon-vax or charon-axp (depending on whether you need the VAX version or the alpha version) for running openvms on a PC. They don't seem to want to publish the price openly though which is generally a sign it will be expensive (they offer a "freeware" version for non-commercial use though).
primeos on the other hand I couldn't find anything for (I couldn't every find a description of what primeos was capable of)
The PC platform is incrediblly common though, if and when it does start to get phased out I strongly suspect the situation will be much more similar to the VMS one (supported through emulation) than to the primeos one (dissapeared into obscurity).
your hardware upgrade make the software incompatible
I can see this being a problem for software that interacts with specialist hardware but most software doesn't really care too much about the hardware.
It may have problems with modern operating systems but vmware and similar products get arround that.
BTW, EU makes heavy use of Russian natural gas for heating
And for electricity generation which means we get hit with a double whammy when the gas supplies are disrupted.
Lukilly afaict our supplies in the UK come as LNG so we brits have avoided the affects of russias squables wit it's neighbours (though if there was a cold war 2 we would really be in the shit).
Afaict it's possible to modify most engines to run on ordinary unleaded petrol without too much trouble or buy seperate adatives to protect the engine.
I just checked on my XP system and the option is there in the disk management GUI.
I don't have a 2K system handy right now to check.
The thing that has to be remembered is that XP SP2 while marketed as a service pack was not really a service pack in the conventional sense. It completely overhauled the windows firewall and introduced some data execute protection feature that (supposedly) improved security but broke a number of apps (nero 5.x being the one that sticks out most in my memory)
That feature has been there for quite some time, it's certainly in XP and I think it's in 2K as well. It wouldn't even surprise me if it dates back further than that.
Drive letters serve two purposes in the modern windows world
1: they are a familiar and convinant way for users to identify thier drives and network resources (you CAN access network resources directly by thier UNC paths but afaict most people don't) especially on those occasions where they need to type a path in (contrast this to most desktop linux systems where automounted removable stuff gets a horrible path along the lines of /media/
2: lots of software (including almost certainly parts of windows itself) expects paths starting with a drive letter.
Yes, commitment from Microsoft explains why there is no service pack 3 for 64 bit
XP proffessional x64 edition is really a cut down version of server 2003. As such it uses the same service packs as server 2003 which are released on a totally seperate schedule from the XP service packs (BTW server 2003 service pack 2 is a lot newer than XP service pack 2)
Calling it XP probablly was a little misleading but making a windows desktop 2003 with only a 64 bit edition would probablly have confused things even more.
Do you have any evidence of MS not providing a security update or other critical update for server 2003 and XP proffesional x64 edition?
Slashdot and other sources are filled with stories of how Microsoft has gone back on their word and broken deals.
Oh sure but that is not in itself evidence that they are any more likely to do so for server 2003 and XP proffesional x64 edition than they are for the 32 bit editions of XP.
XP had marginally better compatibility with dos games than 2K but it was just that marginally better still not really good enough.
What really allowed the NT line into the home market IMO was the gradual death of dos games in favor of windows/directx games (which generally work fine on both 2K and XP)
well MS claim ( http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?C2=1173 ) they will be supporting XP proffesional x64 edition for as long as they are supporting the other editions of XP.
The OEMs seem to be less enthusiastic though, while loads of them offer supported downgrades to XP proffesional I haven't seen any offering them to XP proffesional X64 edition (both editions are covered under the vista buisness downgrade rights afaict).
Windows 7 will do fine for one major reason. Buisnesses who want to keep getting security patches will have to upgrade from XP sooner or later. So as long as MS manage to make 7 the same or marginally better than vista buisnesses will see it as more sensible to upgrade to 7 that to upgrade to vista.
Ordinary consumers will get each new version of windows force fed to them like usual.
Just how much power do you need? The VIA epia range has fanless models if you can live with it's low performance. CF cards can be used as cheap (but low capacity and low performance) SSDs with the appropriate adaptor.
It's hard to say how long current computer hardware will last even with the elimination of rotating components. Current computer hardware simply hasn't been arround long enough to know.
here is a link explaining what TLER is and why it should only be used in raid setups.
http://www.techworld.com/storage/features/index.cfm?featureid=1019
the nice thing about serial ports (they aren't really RS232 until you add the level shifter) is they are generally very simple to work with (in terms of what software you need on the microcontroller). So it is very common to use the serial port on a microcontroller for a diagnostic/configuration interface.
IIRC they have recently dropped the 5 year warranty to 3 years on thier ordinary "OEM" drives.