The early source engine games were modded by recompiling a dll but afaict since source 2009 (the first version with mac support) the source needed to do that is no longer released. Later source games introduced scripting functionality but afaict it's really designed for putting small ammounts of inteligence into a level, not building new enemies, weapons etc.
bringing the gravity gun and your leg braces out into the world.
I assume you mean the portal gun not the gravity gun (which was a half live 2 thing) and the long fall boots not the "leg braces" (which were a portal 1 thing).
IIRC in the ending cutscene it's not made clear whether you are still carrying the portalgun and wearing the long fall boots when you leave the facility or not.
Lets not forget that hitler and stalin made a deal to split eastern europe between them rather than fighting each other and that hitler broke said deal. Making a deal with the devil doesn't gaurantee they won't turn on you after they have built up their power base.
Did hitler really admire the british or did he just want us out of the way for a while so he could deal with other things? since he is dead we will never know for sure.
Disclaimer: I have used Mate but I have not used Cinnamon.
AIUI Mate and cinnamon are two different approaches to the same problem.
The problem being that the gnome developers decided to throw out the boring but functional gnome2 and replace it with the radical gnome3 and further the distro vendors decided to allow gnome3 to take the package names previously used by gnome2 thereby screwing those users who wanted to stick with the desktop they knew while upgrading the rest of their OS (and things are sufficiantly tightly coupled in the linux world that sticking with an old OS version is not really a reasonable option).
The mate approach has been to fork gnome2 and rename the components to remove the config. This produced immediate results but long term leaves them with a load of forked stuff that perhaps doesn't really need to be forked and no easy way of getting any good stuff that comes out of gnome3. The cinnamon approach is to try and build a traditional GUI within the gnome3 framework, this avoids relying on outdated and barely maintained foundations but it also means a lot more work upfront and probablly more user visible change and runs the risk that gnome will decide to screw everyone again.
It sucks a lot less than it used to though. It's still not up there with discrete soloutions but afaict the HD4000 is enough to play many recent games on low settings at playable framerates.
A lot of the noise reduction has come from better cooling devices. Heatpipe coolers and sealed unit watercoolers are much quieter than simple blocks of finned metal with fans strapped on and even the design of simple blocks of metal with fans strapped on has improved over the years.
But yes PC processors have improved considerablly on both work done per watt and perhaps more importantly on idle power consumption.
It seems that in the Intel x86 world the higher you move up the product line the older the technology gets.
Intels x86 processors right now are best grouped by the sockets they use. There are basically three "current" (that is not "replaced" by a newer socket) sockets.
LGA1155 is the mainstream desktop and low end single socket server socket. This is the only socket for which 22nm parts are currently available. LGA1356 is intended for low end dual socket systems but I get the impression it didn't really catch on (newegg lists 10 dual lga1356 boards and 34 dual lga2011 boards under "server motherboards"). Afaict it is currently using 32nm sandy bridge based parts. LGA2011 is used for high end desktop parts and 1-4 socket servers. It is currently using 32nm sandy bridge based parts. LGA1567 is used for systems that need 8 sockets or insane ammounts of ram. It's also 32nm but is using the older westmere microarchitecture.
Intel do have xeon processors that support 8-socket systems and afaict at least HP and supermicro make 8-socket xeon solutions (I think HP sell them as fully-built servers while supermicro sell them as a "barebones" system to which you add processors and drives yourself).
However afaict the processors that support 8 socket setups are both underwhelming (high core counts but low clockspeeds and still on nahelm technology) and expensive compare to those for 2-socket systems.
Arm seems to be pretty strongly pushing linux support for 64-bit arm devices and I imagine the opensource server apps will pretty quickly follow. Samba4 will probablly run too if you want to host an AD tree.
It will be insteresting to see what MS does and whether they gimp the 64-bit arm version of windows in the same way they gimp the 32-bit one but even if they don't I wouldn't expect specialist propietry server apps to be ported any time soon. So for those uses arm is probablly out of the running for now.
I dunno about other places but here at uni the general system for central resources tends to be mapping drives through login scripts. This has the advantage that a user doesn't need to care where exactly their personal storage is, just that it is found on the P: drive, stuff for the EEE department in general is on the R: drive and so-on.
Afaict there are two big problems with the concept of the space elevator.
One is materials, you need a material that is strong enough to support it's own weight without the CSA ratio* becoming insane. The other is how do you put the thing into place? Afaict the normal technique for reaching high orbits is to gradually increase the orbit but that won't work for a craft towing a space elevator cable (you'd wrap the cable round the planet) so you would need a rocket that could go "straight up" which aiui is much harder to build.
So space elevators if possible at all are something that comes AFTER you have a rocket based space program and want to expand it.
Look, we all agree that technology is neutral, right?
No I don't agree at all.
For example, DRM has been *used* for lots of obnoxious purposes (including limiting fair-use rights), but the basic technology of DRM is neither good nor bad - it just is.
DRM is fundamentally the process of trusting a users device to do what you deem allowable rather than do anything it is technically capable of and which it's owner wishes it to do.
There are two foundations this can be based on, one foundation is obfuscation, the key is there and the user can find it if they try hard enough but you hope they won't try hard enough. This is however a foundation of sand and only has any impact at all because of draconian anti-circumvention laws preventing the cracks being productised. The other foundation is to build on a locked down system where the user is not allowed to see or modify the code that works withe the protected media through it's whole path from decryption to display, this is a much stronger foundation and so is what the media giants have tried to push for but it is also the antithesis of computing freedom. .
I highly doubt they are remotely monitoring most users most of the time, the data volume would just be huge and they would never have the resources to check all of it.
The question that only insiders can answer is do they have the ability to monitor specific users and if so do they actually use that ability.
IRC is fine as a chatroom protocol. It's not so hot as an IM protocol. Nicks are poor as a way of idenfitying users due to the fact that many users change them to indicate status and in many cases nick ownership is not enforced but nicks are the only identifier you can use to query if a user is online. Further there is no command to take a list of users and give you all their statuses at once and combined with the relatively dumb rate limiting system* this makes updating a buddy list slow even if the nicks are stable. Finally as someone else mentioned it isn't federated so you have to maintain seperate connections to every IRC network you have friends on.
XMPP (formerly jabber) on the other hand does things right for an IM protocol. Anyone can run a server and users on different servers can talk to each other with users identified by user@host like with email. Sadly unlike email which had developed in the days when the internet was built on openness and interoperability jabber came along while everyone else was trying to lock users into their proprietary IM systems and didn't really gain much traction.
* Rate limiting makes sense but limiting queries that can be served locally to the same rate used to limit state changes that traverse the whole network doesn't.
The problem is afaict there are no open implementations of the skype protocol. There is an API but iirc you have to keep the skype client running to use it and platform support is somewhat limited. Here in the UK msn messenger (or whatever MS is calling it this month) seems to be the dominant IM network. If those users migrate to skype it will be a PITA.
Sure a provider can and should filter routes from small customers and small peers.
But a providers can't really filter routes from their upstreams (since the whole point of them is to provide you with routes to the whole internet) and it's difficult for them to filter routes from other large networks (since they have so many direct and indirect customers). So it just takes one large provider to be either sloppy (not filtering routes from their small customers) or malicious (introducing bogus routes themselves) for a bad route to reach large parts of the internet.
I've never had a problem using the refactoring tools (including renaming fields and methods, extracting chunks of code, adding extra parameters etc) in eclipse for java. Having said that java is probablly one of the easiest languages to do this in because it doesn't have a preprocessor.
Afaict you are wrong. Certainly amazon.co.uk contradicts what you say talking about charging different VAT rates to customers in different countries.
My understanding is that small buisnesses in the EU are allowed to charge their home rate of VAT to everyone but larger buisnesses like amazon don't get that luxury.
They can't totally fix it but AIUI nz currently relies on links to australia for it's internet connection and the pacific fiber plan was for a direct link to the US which would presumably shave a bit of the latency.
to withstand 7 days of utility outage a house might want 300 gallons of diesel.
umm, that sounds like rather a lot. According to http://www.dieselserviceandsupply.com/Diesel_Fuel_Consumption.aspx that is enough fuel to keep a 20KW generator running at full load for a week. Afaict average domestic power consumption is more like a tenth of that.
According to wikipedia in the second case apple corps lost at trial court, claimed they would appeal but never actually did and in the end the issue was settled (apple corps got a big chunk of cash, apple computer got the trademarks and the companies put their differences behind them and started cooperating).
I think there will always be a market for arm microcontroller cores. Probablly even for cores that can run a regular OS but whose primary job is to manage a GPU or DSP or whatever that does the real work. The trouble is while those markets are big afaict they don't pay much in the way of royalties (if arm try to charge too much people will just jump ship to the chinese mips clones or whatever).
The question is will arm be able to maintain their presense in smartphone/tablet processors (which afaict intel is currently agressively targetting with atom though they haven't made much of a dent yet) and will they be able to expand their market into server processors (where afaict x86 currently dominates).
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I wonder if they will open up to modders again.
The early source engine games were modded by recompiling a dll but afaict since source 2009 (the first version with mac support) the source needed to do that is no longer released. Later source games introduced scripting functionality but afaict it's really designed for putting small ammounts of inteligence into a level, not building new enemies, weapons etc.
You do escape, in Portal 2,
Indeed
bringing the gravity gun and your leg braces out into the world.
I assume you mean the portal gun not the gravity gun (which was a half live 2 thing) and the long fall boots not the "leg braces" (which were a portal 1 thing).
IIRC in the ending cutscene it's not made clear whether you are still carrying the portalgun and wearing the long fall boots when you leave the facility or not.
Lets not forget that hitler and stalin made a deal to split eastern europe between them rather than fighting each other and that hitler broke said deal. Making a deal with the devil doesn't gaurantee they won't turn on you after they have built up their power base.
Did hitler really admire the british or did he just want us out of the way for a while so he could deal with other things? since he is dead we will never know for sure.
to remove the config
That should have said to remove the conflict.
Disclaimer: I have used Mate but I have not used Cinnamon.
AIUI Mate and cinnamon are two different approaches to the same problem.
The problem being that the gnome developers decided to throw out the boring but functional gnome2 and replace it with the radical gnome3 and further the distro vendors decided to allow gnome3 to take the package names previously used by gnome2 thereby screwing those users who wanted to stick with the desktop they knew while upgrading the rest of their OS (and things are sufficiantly tightly coupled in the linux world that sticking with an old OS version is not really a reasonable option).
The mate approach has been to fork gnome2 and rename the components to remove the config. This produced immediate results but long term leaves them with a load of forked stuff that perhaps doesn't really need to be forked and no easy way of getting any good stuff that comes out of gnome3. The cinnamon approach is to try and build a traditional GUI within the gnome3 framework, this avoids relying on outdated and barely maintained foundations but it also means a lot more work upfront and probablly more user visible change and runs the risk that gnome will decide to screw everyone again.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Win8 64-bit only?
At least according to wikipedia there is a 32-bit win8 available.
Is there even a such thing as a Pentium 4 capable of executing x64 code?
Yes, intel added 64-bit support towards the end of the pentium 4's life.
It sucks a lot less than it used to though. It's still not up there with discrete soloutions but afaict the HD4000 is enough to play many recent games on low settings at playable framerates.
A lot of the noise reduction has come from better cooling devices. Heatpipe coolers and sealed unit watercoolers are much quieter than simple blocks of finned metal with fans strapped on and even the design of simple blocks of metal with fans strapped on has improved over the years.
But yes PC processors have improved considerablly on both work done per watt and perhaps more importantly on idle power consumption.
Intel has been shipping 22nm x86 since spring.
It seems that in the Intel x86 world the higher you move up the product line the older the technology gets.
Intels x86 processors right now are best grouped by the sockets they use. There are basically three "current" (that is not "replaced" by a newer socket) sockets.
LGA1155 is the mainstream desktop and low end single socket server socket. This is the only socket for which 22nm parts are currently available.
LGA1356 is intended for low end dual socket systems but I get the impression it didn't really catch on (newegg lists 10 dual lga1356 boards and 34 dual lga2011 boards under "server motherboards"). Afaict it is currently using 32nm sandy bridge based parts.
LGA2011 is used for high end desktop parts and 1-4 socket servers. It is currently using 32nm sandy bridge based parts.
LGA1567 is used for systems that need 8 sockets or insane ammounts of ram. It's also 32nm but is using the older westmere microarchitecture.
I don't think the Xeons go up to 8-sockets.
Intel do have xeon processors that support 8-socket systems and afaict at least HP and supermicro make 8-socket xeon solutions (I think HP sell them as fully-built servers while supermicro sell them as a "barebones" system to which you add processors and drives yourself).
However afaict the processors that support 8 socket setups are both underwhelming (high core counts but low clockspeeds and still on nahelm technology) and expensive compare to those for 2-socket systems.
Game servers may be problematic because afaict they are usually propietary.
Arm seems to be pretty strongly pushing linux support for 64-bit arm devices and I imagine the opensource server apps will pretty quickly follow. Samba4 will probablly run too if you want to host an AD tree.
It will be insteresting to see what MS does and whether they gimp the 64-bit arm version of windows in the same way they gimp the 32-bit one but even if they don't I wouldn't expect specialist propietry server apps to be ported any time soon. So for those uses arm is probablly out of the running for now.
I dunno about other places but here at uni the general system for central resources tends to be mapping drives through login scripts. This has the advantage that a user doesn't need to care where exactly their personal storage is, just that it is found on the P: drive, stuff for the EEE department in general is on the R: drive and so-on.
Afaict there are two big problems with the concept of the space elevator.
One is materials, you need a material that is strong enough to support it's own weight without the CSA ratio* becoming insane.
The other is how do you put the thing into place? Afaict the normal technique for reaching high orbits is to gradually increase the orbit but that won't work for a craft towing a space elevator cable (you'd wrap the cable round the planet) so you would need a rocket that could go "straight up" which aiui is much harder to build.
So space elevators if possible at all are something that comes AFTER you have a rocket based space program and want to expand it.
Look, we all agree that technology is neutral, right?
No I don't agree at all.
For example, DRM has been *used* for lots of obnoxious purposes (including limiting fair-use rights), but the basic technology of DRM is neither good nor bad - it just is.
DRM is fundamentally the process of trusting a users device to do what you deem allowable rather than do anything it is technically capable of and which it's owner wishes it to do.
There are two foundations this can be based on, one foundation is obfuscation, the key is there and the user can find it if they try hard enough but you hope they won't try hard enough. This is however a foundation of sand and only has any impact at all because of draconian anti-circumvention laws preventing the cracks being productised. The other foundation is to build on a locked down system where the user is not allowed to see or modify the code that works withe the protected media through it's whole path from decryption to display, this is a much stronger foundation and so is what the media giants have tried to push for but it is also the antithesis of computing freedom.
.
I highly doubt they are remotely monitoring most users most of the time, the data volume would just be huge and they would never have the resources to check all of it.
The question that only insiders can answer is do they have the ability to monitor specific users and if so do they actually use that ability.
IRC is fine as a chatroom protocol. It's not so hot as an IM protocol. Nicks are poor as a way of idenfitying users due to the fact that many users change them to indicate status and in many cases nick ownership is not enforced but nicks are the only identifier you can use to query if a user is online. Further there is no command to take a list of users and give you all their statuses at once and combined with the relatively dumb rate limiting system* this makes updating a buddy list slow even if the nicks are stable. Finally as someone else mentioned it isn't federated so you have to maintain seperate connections to every IRC network you have friends on.
XMPP (formerly jabber) on the other hand does things right for an IM protocol. Anyone can run a server and users on different servers can talk to each other with users identified by user@host like with email. Sadly unlike email which had developed in the days when the internet was built on openness and interoperability jabber came along while everyone else was trying to lock users into their proprietary IM systems and didn't really gain much traction.
* Rate limiting makes sense but limiting queries that can be served locally to the same rate used to limit state changes that traverse the whole network doesn't.
The problem is afaict there are no open implementations of the skype protocol. There is an API but iirc you have to keep the skype client running to use it and platform support is somewhat limited. Here in the UK msn messenger (or whatever MS is calling it this month) seems to be the dominant IM network. If those users migrate to skype it will be a PITA.
Route filters are your friends!
Sure a provider can and should filter routes from small customers and small peers.
But a providers can't really filter routes from their upstreams (since the whole point of them is to provide you with routes to the whole internet) and it's difficult for them to filter routes from other large networks (since they have so many direct and indirect customers). So it just takes one large provider to be either sloppy (not filtering routes from their small customers) or malicious (introducing bogus routes themselves) for a bad route to reach large parts of the internet.
I've never had a problem using the refactoring tools (including renaming fields and methods, extracting chunks of code, adding extra parameters etc) in eclipse for java. Having said that java is probablly one of the easiest languages to do this in because it doesn't have a preprocessor.
Afaict you are wrong. Certainly amazon.co.uk contradicts what you say talking about charging different VAT rates to customers in different countries.
My understanding is that small buisnesses in the EU are allowed to charge their home rate of VAT to everyone but larger buisnesses like amazon don't get that luxury.
They can't totally fix it but AIUI nz currently relies on links to australia for it's internet connection and the pacific fiber plan was for a direct link to the US which would presumably shave a bit of the latency.
to withstand 7 days of utility outage a house might want 300 gallons of diesel.
umm, that sounds like rather a lot. According to http://www.dieselserviceandsupply.com/Diesel_Fuel_Consumption.aspx that is enough fuel to keep a 20KW generator running at full load for a week. Afaict average domestic power consumption is more like a tenth of that.
According to wikipedia in the second case apple corps lost at trial court, claimed they would appeal but never actually did and in the end the issue was settled (apple corps got a big chunk of cash, apple computer got the trademarks and the companies put their differences behind them and started cooperating).
I think there will always be a market for arm microcontroller cores. Probablly even for cores that can run a regular OS but whose primary job is to manage a GPU or DSP or whatever that does the real work. The trouble is while those markets are big afaict they don't pay much in the way of royalties (if arm try to charge too much people will just jump ship to the chinese mips clones or whatever).
The question is will arm be able to maintain their presense in smartphone/tablet processors (which afaict intel is currently agressively targetting with atom though they haven't made much of a dent yet) and will they be able to expand their market into server processors (where afaict x86 currently dominates).