it's almost a guarantee that the process in question is in one way or another linked to or dependent on this thing lots of computers these days have, I believe it's called 'windoze' or something to that effect. My solution would be get rid of that thing first >.>
Seriously though, most (not all, but most) windows I see pop up for a moment are batch files running one command or another, usually just spawning some random process the computer's administrator set up. Typically speaking, you'd expect if it were a virus that it would be a bit more subtle about it's presence than opening a window. So my guess is that it's something that's supposed to be there, though I wouldn't bet on that if the stakes were high.
Vista probably will create quit a few jobs. I mean, just look at how many people make a living writing anti-spyware and anti-virus software for XP! The only reasons Vista will create jobs, IMHO, is because somebody will have to fix what should have been made right in the first place. (And of course the usual minor things any OS migration has, transfering personal files, helping businesses adapt, etc).
Don't get me wrong, windows did a good thing in bringing computers into the average home, but I personally don't thing a user base benefits too much from a homogenous OS, even if it were completely bug free. Lack of competition slows things down for everybody. Just look how far projects such as GNOME and KDE have come in such a short while, probably largely becuase they're forced to compete to some degree. But I suppose when you have a virtual monopoly, you wouldn't want to do any real work anyway, assuming you can manage to keep a paycheck riding the 'windows tax'.
I just, and I mean JUST went on newegg to find the last pieces of the PVR I'm making. I haven't ordered anything yet, but I've organized what I'm getting. I had some, tiny, almost insiginficant doubts about making one now simply because the mytharchive plugin was only in svn up until now, and for something like this I want to build it once and not worry about it as far as updates go until there's significant reason to update.
Although I've never made a PVR with it, yet, I've used MythTV a lot. MythTV (and Freevo to a lesser extent) are great examples of what linux can do to work its way into the life of more end users. Most people using other operating systems (which shal remain nameless) are far too intimidated to use a terminal for much of anything, and quite a few seem to dislike the look of GNOME/KDE/XFCE desktops simply because they aren't exactly like what people are already familiar with. MythTV, on the other hand, has a friendly interface that I've found few people can dislike, once they find (or make) a theme that suites them.
For everyone using knoppmyth, although that's certainly an acceptible way to make a mythtv box, especially if you're not particularly familiar with linux, there are probably better ways. (I'm still trying to decide between gentoo and ubuntu for my box, or possibly slackware. Either way I'll be building the mythtv application itself from source.)
The 'Anonymous Coward' has a pretty good point there. I don't know how much research you've done before posting here, but if you ask me this sort of question exactly slashdot worthy, IMHO. Most developers should be fairly familiar with SVN/CVS/etc to consider those first, and be capable of google searching for such information. It's basic math really, figure out how much bandwidth your application consumes to be useable, then multiply by the number of people that will be using it at the same time, and add a little overhead for growth and the occasional heavy traffic moment. My guess is (based off the size of your group) 512k would probably be enough, though if you have to share bandwidth with some others you may hit a few problems (especially if they're running similar projects)
And I'm no networking expert here, but unless there was a majority of developers in the UK who need access to the code, I'd see about moving the project (at least temporarily) to your own location, or maybe make a local copy and only sync it with the UK's copy once per day (or rather, in the middle of the night when performance is likely less critical.)
When all is said and done, after you've figured out exactly how the project is going to be managed, you should really higher a professional to determine what your bandwidth needs are, or do enough research to become professional enough to take care of it yourself.
The _easiest_ way I can think of to do this without either spending a lot of money or switching operating systems, is probably just get an archiver, possibly http://www.rarlab.com/ winrar, and on the create archive screen, select to only store the data (no compression, runs faster and mp3's are already compressed anyway, why compress them again?), and tell it to split the archives into whatever size you want (depending on what kind of dvd's you use. single or double layer, etc, just input the number of bytes and it'll auto-split them into appropriate segments). Then just burn the archives to disc one at a time, which is a bit time consuming but by no means difficult to do.
This isn't the prettiest solution in the world, and it can't save a lot of things (like all your settings and such) but it works for personal files quite well. And you just need the appropriate unarchive program installed after you reinstall, so either winrar for windows, or unrar for *nix, should you ever decide to cross over. That is, assuming you choose the rar format. IMHO, as far as the windows-friendly archives go, it seems to work the best out of the common formats for this sort of backup work.
It'll probably go down to $100 or less to produce again, given time. Flash storage gets cheaper and cheaper by the minute it seems, once the custom LCD's are produced I'm sure they'll find a way to start cutting costs, and the processor upgrade isn't going to be that big of a deal cost wise if you ask me. I personally don't think the camera is needed, especially on a machine with such a slow processor and such little storage, but I'm sure they've got a good reason for it..despite the fact that it seems like virtually nobody here has thought of one.
And as most people seem to be ignoring, except for the one or two others who have mentioned this, AFAIK the LCD screen runs at such a high resolution when it it's monochrome book-mode. When in color, it'll (supposidly) have 1/4 the pixels due to the way they've designed the screen.
It'll be a while I'm sure, and I realize they'll probably still sell them $100 like originally planned, but until that time a 40%+ net loss is going to hurt bigtime if they want the project to succeed.
I know this has been said many times, but they really should start considering selling these to the average consumer at a marked up price, simply to reduce their losses on the other ones. Or, as much as I'd hate to start fragmenting the design, sell more than one version. Frankly, as long as they kept the new screen and possibly the headphone/mic jacks, the new version does nothing that the old one couldnt have with a USB hub and a couple external devices (since it only had 1 USB port to my understanding). I honestly see no reason for increasing the cost to produce by I believe an expected 38% just to add a few rarely-used features that'll mostly just suck more power from the battery.
When all is said and done though, regardless of how they design the hardware, they'll almost certainly have to make their own custom version of the distro tailored to the little things just to make them run at a decent speed, but if done correctly it could probably out perform many windows machines, or anything for that matter running a OS and software with generic or no optimization. My first linux experience was, as a junior high student, putting slackware (which turned out to be easy despite my 0 *nix knowledge at the time) on a 333mhz, 64mb ram, 7G hd Compaq machine, and I was startled by the performance increase, even when running KDE, as compaired to windows. Anyone who thinks these things will run slow because of their processor speed or lack of ram, is wrong. If they run slow, it's due to inefficient code or poor optimization. As mentioned by others, the C64 was extermely popular, and MANY times weaker in processing power, memory, etc. but that didn't matter because it ran good code.
Nothing could change the OS market faster than raising millions of children on linux.
Earth is not a planet, because it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit -- there exist Near-Earth asteroids and Earth-crossing asteroids. (One might argue that this is getting worse, what with all the space debris we keep flinging into near-Earth solar orbit).
Not to mention that whole 'the moon' thing. What if two jupiter-sized planet(oids) were found orbiting eachother. Would those be considered dwarf planets? Because they'd clearly be far from dwarfish in size. If anything I'd call such a pair, and Pluto and Charon for that matter, a 'binary planet' or some form thereof as they orbit the same point outside either object's body.
If I were at Micro$oft, I'd look at it like this...
2 options. Either A) port office, or B) don't port office. If office were ported, then they'd likely make quite a bit of cash on sales from it. However, file format support is, to my understanding, one of the major reasons businesses don't leave windoze platform. Office on linux could cause more users to make the big switch. Microsoft wouldn't like that. They'd still be making money from office sales, but why lose the income from the OS itself as well? (Though it's still rarely an option to buy a given model of computer without xp installed if it comes from any of the major OEMs). Worse yet (for M$ at least), users who switchover would be exposed to a buffet of FOSS equivilents to countless proprietary software products. A good number of users would probably decide to save themselves more money by using openoffice instead, after having been exposed to it (as it seems to come standard on most the major distro's now, or at least is easy to get).
If they follow option B, and don't port it, they miss out only on the market share currently held by the *nix variants. From the business point of view, in the long run, option B seems safer.
Fortunately, WINE and its variants are already very compatible with the staple software most people rely on, and are progressing at an impressive rate. So if M$ doesn't port it themselves, in the end anyone with an x86 can still likely run it virtually flawlessly. At this rate, in a year or two if M$ ported it, it wouldn't matter anymore. Sure, it'd be 'officially' supported, but unless they also ported to different processor architectures, I don't see it having much of an effect. (And I'm sure the last thing M$ wants is people to start buying pc's with anything but x86's or x86_64's in them).
Yes, goldfish have been known to jump out of their tank form time to time. I've had goldfish in a tank for years, no lid, and this has never happened.
Goldfish are dumb, trainable yes, but dumb.
Dolphins don't jump out of their tank, except durring tricks and such where they know they'll get food for it. Now, the fact that they don't jump out, IMHO, says nothing. If I were an aquatic creature, I'd like to think that jumping into the air would make me ralize "hey, there's no water here. I'm helpless. Note to self: dont jump out of tank" and be done with it.
Knowing that leaving the water could be dangerous, unless I had reason to leave (ie: something trying to eat me) I'd just assume stay put.
And of course, don't forget that dolphins are known to hold the head of a sick dolphin above water while it recovers. I don't know about the rest of you, but a creature showing complex community behaviors seems more intelligent to me than the schooling habbit of goldfish. Sure, it makes the goldfish harder to catch, but beyond that have you ever seen them work towards a common goal?
And lets not forget the fact that dolphins, if marked in some way, react strangely to the markings when they view themselves in a mirror (implying that they recognize their own reflection). Teach that to a goldfish.
If the halls are filled with vending machines, and you serve burgers, pizza & fries everyday, is it a wonder that some kids turn out to be fat fucks?
Hey, watch the language... I think the term 'overweight' is more appropriate
I agree that parents should probably have a say in what their children can and can not eat. When their children are 6. When their kids are in highschool, if they aren't capable of making their own decisions about what type of roughly Grade C meat they consume, then the parents didn't do their job somewhere.
In the specifics of this though, having gone to a highschool which implemented a very similar system, I must say, the parens probably have no idea what the children are really getting in their meals. The food may look good on a checklist, but I assure you that every tuesday's 'Crunchy Breadsticks' were just monday's leftover 'Soft Breadsticks' and every side order of "Fries" were merely soaked in moderately warm grease for 2 minutes, until slightly warm to the touch.
Lets face it, when there's an average of (guessing) one lunch room worker per 200 students in a school on average, serving hundreds of meals for about 2 dollars each, the food isn't going to be of much quality to begin with. It's by no means going to be dangerous or anything, but NO choice of food is going to be 'healthy' if you actually want your kid to leave the lunch room with more than lettice in their belly.
If you're not going to make something healthy for your kids, or let them make something themselves and bring that to school, then, if you ask me, you should at least let the kids choose what garbage they're eating from the cafeteria.
--Off Topic-- coincidentally, the 'magic word' or whatever you want to call it, to type before I can click 'preview' is 'celery' on this post. What are the odds? (don't answer that)
You know, I think I have a computer made like this. It only runs software provided specifically for it and signed by the vendor's company. It's called an X-Box, and I use it to run linux. *Evil laughs*
Seriously though, think about it, that's essentially how the recent generations of game systems have gone. Specialized hardware with software built for one purpose, signed by the vendor so as nothing else can run. And as xbox-linux shows, there will always be ways to circumvent this without direct access to the hardware.
My advice would be steer clear of an actual livecd/dvd itself, due to the significantly reduced speed of such a system. In the case of linux, just go with a setup where the majority if not all of the filesystem is read-only to the user. Or beyond that even, have the main filesystem contain a loopback read-only filesystem. A great example would be Damn Small Linux, it can copy the disc image to the harddrive and it doesn't take a lot to set up a kernel to read from that on boot. And in that particular case, DSL is modular, so adding approved software doesn't take a lot of effort.
Another potential candidate would be something like dyne:II, similar to DSL in it's live and extensible nature, but it has a much larger software library to choose from by default.
Of course, users will always need to save their doccuments and such somewhere. Retaining the ability for a less-than-computer-literate user to perform basic tasks such as saving the vacation photos of their grandkids in an email attachment, while keeping the rest of the system closed off but still functional, can be quite difficult to do without accidentally leaving a door open which could let in something potentially malicious.
I think you mean don't forget to bring a towel. And the last thing we need is clothes or towels spying on our heart rates. Anything that happens in the bathroom, stays in the bathroom.
Useability does beat ideology. However, in the case of ATI drivers, the proprietary ones are only partly useable. The open source ones have little to no hardware rendering support, and the proprietary ones are limited to 24 bit depth, which can be far more troublesome than it appears, such as when a piece of proprietary software is written to run in 16 or 32 bit modes only--it's rare, but it does happen.
If a company refuses to supply source code to their drivers, or sufficient doccumentation about their hardware--which is understandable despite being a bit cruel--then I feel the company is at least entitled to provide decent support and approximately equal functionality on all platforms.
It would be interesting to make a list of what basic (computer related) services Google DOESNT provide yet.
1: Not yet an ISP! - Give me WiFi, damnit!
*Reads This * "Good boy Google, now fetch"
2: Webpages - With the amount of storage they have for gmail, they could certainly fork up 50mb free webpage accounts by now, right? Just like with the mail, the average person probably wont use 50 megs, I'm sure that's what they'd count on. But it would be really interesting to see something like this happen with google. Oooh, what's this, searching appears to imply it exists, dispite the fact that it links nowhere...
3: Coffee and TV - It's true you can search froogle for just about anything, and it's true google has a small merchandising department (appairently), but they don't have anything like...amazon.com as an example (all be it a rather poor one). I think you get the point...if your company makes something, they cant add it to a google store, and if you want something, you cant buy it through google. (again, froogle, I know, but it's just not the same).
4: A Better Blogger - What the hell is up with blogging everything these days? I mean...it's like a diary, except anyone has access to read it. Now, this was fine until one day you turn on the news and they're reading some random John Doe's opinion on the economy, and acting like it's important. *ahem* but anyways, Blogger. If they slapped the google name on blogger, and wrote just a tad bit of support into the client their Google Talk client right here (something really simple, like, link your gmail account to your blogger account, and then just a little link in the drop down menu) and I'd bet my Bawls they'd see a sudden spike in blogger's popularity and it crushes other services as quickly as blogging crushed my hope in humanity.
5: Google Browser - a Gowser? I don't know what to call it, but it's an idea that I've seen google talk about as early as September 2001. Fork mozilla already! Just think about it though, how many of you have google as your start page? (or something that links to google in bright bold letters at the top of the page, such as this lovely one you're reading right now). If they've already made a messenger client and service, then they've clearly invested at least a reasonable amount of effort into software. It's not hard to imagine a massively google-customized fork of firefox, or mozilla, finding it's way onto my desktop, laptop, and PSP (once I get a good linux port running, emulating an x86 is too much of a round-about way of doing things for me). Of course, then someone would suggest they make a google media player, and they'd jump on the idea. And people would keep naming off apps they want google to make until one day they make a google kernel (goognel? or something...) and we have a complete google operating system running. I wish.
More importanlty, why did I stay up till 5 AM reading/posting on here? And when exactly in the night did I misplace my pants?
This won't work for anyone that has upgraded their PSP to anything above 1.0 of the Firmware. A little detail that got left out of the article..
Tell that to my 1.50 firmware. It loads linux just fine. At least, last time I checked, which was about 2 hours ago.
But let me check again... *Boots up to see a windows BSOD* NOOOOOOO, THE HORROR!
An ordinary post on an ordinary thread, hosted on an ordinary site, which just so happens to be in The Twilight Zone.
*ahem* Excuse me. But in all seriousness, having BOCHS run on PSP is a good thing. Now only if we werent' running an x86 based emulator, so we didnt have to emulate all those CPU cycles...
It's hard to judge how a finished product will turn out from a few breif minutes of video. There are many questions about the engine we likely will not have answered anytime soon.
We can't very well say much about the engine itself, how easy it is to use, or when it really comes down to it, how much money would it save so-and-so when they're making this game or that.
But we can say a few things about the game itself. We may not be able to judge the plot very well at this stage, but if it's even half as promising as the visuals in the game, I have three little words I'd like to share with those of you who have not seen the video yet for whatever reason...
<sarcasm> Yes, let's make a giant halo of ships or particles. There's no chance it will cause catastrophic waves to destroy thousands of cities. And if we go the particle rout, let's just blow up the moon! It's right there, c'mon! </sarcasm>
How about we just use more solar power and quit driving gas guzzeling machines. Or at the very least, use more ethanol. E88 works fine, they should make more of it.
Slashdot Mirror
it's almost a guarantee that the process in question is in one way or another linked to or dependent on this thing lots of computers these days have, I believe it's called 'windoze' or something to that effect. My solution would be get rid of that thing first >.> Seriously though, most (not all, but most) windows I see pop up for a moment are batch files running one command or another, usually just spawning some random process the computer's administrator set up. Typically speaking, you'd expect if it were a virus that it would be a bit more subtle about it's presence than opening a window. So my guess is that it's something that's supposed to be there, though I wouldn't bet on that if the stakes were high.
"These aren't the job's you're looking for."
Vista probably will create quit a few jobs. I mean, just look at how many people make a living writing anti-spyware and anti-virus software for XP! The only reasons Vista will create jobs, IMHO, is because somebody will have to fix what should have been made right in the first place. (And of course the usual minor things any OS migration has, transfering personal files, helping businesses adapt, etc).
Don't get me wrong, windows did a good thing in bringing computers into the average home, but I personally don't thing a user base benefits too much from a homogenous OS, even if it were completely bug free. Lack of competition slows things down for everybody. Just look how far projects such as GNOME and KDE have come in such a short while, probably largely becuase they're forced to compete to some degree. But I suppose when you have a virtual monopoly, you wouldn't want to do any real work anyway, assuming you can manage to keep a paycheck riding the 'windows tax'.
I just, and I mean JUST went on newegg to find the last pieces of the PVR I'm making. I haven't ordered anything yet, but I've organized what I'm getting. I had some, tiny, almost insiginficant doubts about making one now simply because the mytharchive plugin was only in svn up until now, and for something like this I want to build it once and not worry about it as far as updates go until there's significant reason to update.
Although I've never made a PVR with it, yet, I've used MythTV a lot. MythTV (and Freevo to a lesser extent) are great examples of what linux can do to work its way into the life of more end users. Most people using other operating systems (which shal remain nameless) are far too intimidated to use a terminal for much of anything, and quite a few seem to dislike the look of GNOME/KDE/XFCE desktops simply because they aren't exactly like what people are already familiar with. MythTV, on the other hand, has a friendly interface that I've found few people can dislike, once they find (or make) a theme that suites them.
For everyone using knoppmyth, although that's certainly an acceptible way to make a mythtv box, especially if you're not particularly familiar with linux, there are probably better ways. (I'm still trying to decide between gentoo and ubuntu for my box, or possibly slackware. Either way I'll be building the mythtv application itself from source.)
Remember Remember the Eighth of September
The Enterprise, phasers, and Spock
I know of no reason that Star Trek's first season
Should ever be forgot
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
The 'Anonymous Coward' has a pretty good point there. I don't know how much research you've done before posting here, but if you ask me this sort of question exactly slashdot worthy, IMHO. Most developers should be fairly familiar with SVN/CVS/etc to consider those first, and be capable of google searching for such information. It's basic math really, figure out how much bandwidth your application consumes to be useable, then multiply by the number of people that will be using it at the same time, and add a little overhead for growth and the occasional heavy traffic moment. My guess is (based off the size of your group) 512k would probably be enough, though if you have to share bandwidth with some others you may hit a few problems (especially if they're running similar projects)
And I'm no networking expert here, but unless there was a majority of developers in the UK who need access to the code, I'd see about moving the project (at least temporarily) to your own location, or maybe make a local copy and only sync it with the UK's copy once per day (or rather, in the middle of the night when performance is likely less critical.)
When all is said and done, after you've figured out exactly how the project is going to be managed, you should really higher a professional to determine what your bandwidth needs are, or do enough research to become professional enough to take care of it yourself.
The _easiest_ way I can think of to do this without either spending a lot of money or switching operating systems, is probably just get an archiver, possibly http://www.rarlab.com/ winrar, and on the create archive screen, select to only store the data (no compression, runs faster and mp3's are already compressed anyway, why compress them again?), and tell it to split the archives into whatever size you want (depending on what kind of dvd's you use. single or double layer, etc, just input the number of bytes and it'll auto-split them into appropriate segments). Then just burn the archives to disc one at a time, which is a bit time consuming but by no means difficult to do.
This isn't the prettiest solution in the world, and it can't save a lot of things (like all your settings and such) but it works for personal files quite well. And you just need the appropriate unarchive program installed after you reinstall, so either winrar for windows, or unrar for *nix, should you ever decide to cross over. That is, assuming you choose the rar format. IMHO, as far as the windows-friendly archives go, it seems to work the best out of the common formats for this sort of backup work.
It'll probably go down to $100 or less to produce again, given time. Flash storage gets cheaper and cheaper by the minute it seems, once the custom LCD's are produced I'm sure they'll find a way to start cutting costs, and the processor upgrade isn't going to be that big of a deal cost wise if you ask me. I personally don't think the camera is needed, especially on a machine with such a slow processor and such little storage, but I'm sure they've got a good reason for it..despite the fact that it seems like virtually nobody here has thought of one.
And as most people seem to be ignoring, except for the one or two others who have mentioned this, AFAIK the LCD screen runs at such a high resolution when it it's monochrome book-mode. When in color, it'll (supposidly) have 1/4 the pixels due to the way they've designed the screen.
It'll be a while I'm sure, and I realize they'll probably still sell them $100 like originally planned, but until that time a 40%+ net loss is going to hurt bigtime if they want the project to succeed.
I know this has been said many times, but they really should start considering selling these to the average consumer at a marked up price, simply to reduce their losses on the other ones. Or, as much as I'd hate to start fragmenting the design, sell more than one version. Frankly, as long as they kept the new screen and possibly the headphone/mic jacks, the new version does nothing that the old one couldnt have with a USB hub and a couple external devices (since it only had 1 USB port to my understanding). I honestly see no reason for increasing the cost to produce by I believe an expected 38% just to add a few rarely-used features that'll mostly just suck more power from the battery.
When all is said and done though, regardless of how they design the hardware, they'll almost certainly have to make their own custom version of the distro tailored to the little things just to make them run at a decent speed, but if done correctly it could probably out perform many windows machines, or anything for that matter running a OS and software with generic or no optimization. My first linux experience was, as a junior high student, putting slackware (which turned out to be easy despite my 0 *nix knowledge at the time) on a 333mhz, 64mb ram, 7G hd Compaq machine, and I was startled by the performance increase, even when running KDE, as compaired to windows. Anyone who thinks these things will run slow because of their processor speed or lack of ram, is wrong. If they run slow, it's due to inefficient code or poor optimization. As mentioned by others, the C64 was extermely popular, and MANY times weaker in processing power, memory, etc. but that didn't matter because it ran good code.
Nothing could change the OS market faster than raising millions of children on linux.
Not to mention that whole 'the moon' thing.
What if two jupiter-sized planet(oids) were found orbiting eachother. Would those be considered dwarf planets? Because they'd clearly be far from dwarfish in size. If anything I'd call such a pair, and Pluto and Charon for that matter, a 'binary planet' or some form thereof as they orbit the same point outside either object's body.
...does it run linux?
I thought not.
If I were at Micro$oft, I'd look at it like this...
2 options. Either A) port office, or B) don't port office. If office were ported, then they'd likely make quite a bit of cash on sales from it. However, file format support is, to my understanding, one of the major reasons businesses don't leave windoze platform. Office on linux could cause more users to make the big switch. Microsoft wouldn't like that. They'd still be making money from office sales, but why lose the income from the OS itself as well? (Though it's still rarely an option to buy a given model of computer without xp installed if it comes from any of the major OEMs). Worse yet (for M$ at least), users who switchover would be exposed to a buffet of FOSS equivilents to countless proprietary software products. A good number of users would probably decide to save themselves more money by using openoffice instead, after having been exposed to it (as it seems to come standard on most the major distro's now, or at least is easy to get).
If they follow option B, and don't port it, they miss out only on the market share currently held by the *nix variants. From the business point of view, in the long run, option B seems safer.
Fortunately, WINE and its variants are already very compatible with the staple software most people rely on, and are progressing at an impressive rate. So if M$ doesn't port it themselves, in the end anyone with an x86 can still likely run it virtually flawlessly. At this rate, in a year or two if M$ ported it, it wouldn't matter anymore. Sure, it'd be 'officially' supported, but unless they also ported to different processor architectures, I don't see it having much of an effect. (And I'm sure the last thing M$ wants is people to start buying pc's with anything but x86's or x86_64's in them).
Yes, goldfish have been known to jump out of their tank form time to time. I've had goldfish in a tank for years, no lid, and this has never happened.
Goldfish are dumb, trainable yes, but dumb.
Dolphins don't jump out of their tank, except durring tricks and such where they know they'll get food for it. Now, the fact that they don't jump out, IMHO, says nothing. If I were an aquatic creature, I'd like to think that jumping into the air would make me ralize "hey, there's no water here. I'm helpless. Note to self: dont jump out of tank" and be done with it.
Knowing that leaving the water could be dangerous, unless I had reason to leave (ie: something trying to eat me) I'd just assume stay put.
And of course, don't forget that dolphins are known to hold the head of a sick dolphin above water while it recovers. I don't know about the rest of you, but a creature showing complex community behaviors seems more intelligent to me than the schooling habbit of goldfish. Sure, it makes the goldfish harder to catch, but beyond that have you ever seen them work towards a common goal?
And lets not forget the fact that dolphins, if marked in some way, react strangely to the markings when they view themselves in a mirror (implying that they recognize their own reflection). Teach that to a goldfish.
Hey, watch the language... I think the term 'overweight' is more appropriate
I agree that parents should probably have a say in what their children can and can not eat. When their children are 6. When their kids are in highschool, if they aren't capable of making their own decisions about what type of roughly Grade C meat they consume, then the parents didn't do their job somewhere.
In the specifics of this though, having gone to a highschool which implemented a very similar system, I must say, the parens probably have no idea what the children are really getting in their meals. The food may look good on a checklist, but I assure you that every tuesday's 'Crunchy Breadsticks' were just monday's leftover 'Soft Breadsticks' and every side order of "Fries" were merely soaked in moderately warm grease for 2 minutes, until slightly warm to the touch.
Lets face it, when there's an average of (guessing) one lunch room worker per 200 students in a school on average, serving hundreds of meals for about 2 dollars each, the food isn't going to be of much quality to begin with. It's by no means going to be dangerous or anything, but NO choice of food is going to be 'healthy' if you actually want your kid to leave the lunch room with more than lettice in their belly.
If you're not going to make something healthy for your kids, or let them make something themselves and bring that to school, then, if you ask me, you should at least let the kids choose what garbage they're eating from the cafeteria.
--Off Topic-- coincidentally, the 'magic word' or whatever you want to call it, to type before I can click 'preview' is 'celery' on this post. What are the odds? (don't answer that)
You know, I think I have a computer made like this. It only runs software provided specifically for it and signed by the vendor's company. It's called an X-Box, and I use it to run linux. *Evil laughs*
Seriously though, think about it, that's essentially how the recent generations of game systems have gone. Specialized hardware with software built for one purpose, signed by the vendor so as nothing else can run. And as xbox-linux shows, there will always be ways to circumvent this without direct access to the hardware.
My advice would be steer clear of an actual livecd/dvd itself, due to the significantly reduced speed of such a system. In the case of linux, just go with a setup where the majority if not all of the filesystem is read-only to the user. Or beyond that even, have the main filesystem contain a loopback read-only filesystem. A great example would be Damn Small Linux, it can copy the disc image to the harddrive and it doesn't take a lot to set up a kernel to read from that on boot. And in that particular case, DSL is modular, so adding approved software doesn't take a lot of effort.
Another potential candidate would be something like dyne:II, similar to DSL in it's live and extensible nature, but it has a much larger software library to choose from by default.
Of course, users will always need to save their doccuments and such somewhere. Retaining the ability for a less-than-computer-literate user to perform basic tasks such as saving the vacation photos of their grandkids in an email attachment, while keeping the rest of the system closed off but still functional, can be quite difficult to do without accidentally leaving a door open which could let in something potentially malicious.
But then again, what is life without risk?
I think you mean don't forget to bring a towel. And the last thing we need is clothes or towels spying on our heart rates. Anything that happens in the bathroom, stays in the bathroom.
Useability does beat ideology. However, in the case of ATI drivers, the proprietary ones are only partly useable. The open source ones have little to no hardware rendering support, and the proprietary ones are limited to 24 bit depth, which can be far more troublesome than it appears, such as when a piece of proprietary software is written to run in 16 or 32 bit modes only--it's rare, but it does happen.
If a company refuses to supply source code to their drivers, or sufficient doccumentation about their hardware--which is understandable despite being a bit cruel--then I feel the company is at least entitled to provide decent support and approximately equal functionality on all platforms.
It would be interesting to make a list of what basic (computer related) services Google DOESNT provide yet.
1: Not yet an ISP! - Give me WiFi, damnit!
*Reads This * "Good boy Google, now fetch"
2: Webpages - With the amount of storage they have for gmail, they could certainly fork up 50mb free webpage accounts by now, right? Just like with the mail, the average person probably wont use 50 megs, I'm sure that's what they'd count on. But it would be really interesting to see something like this happen with google. Oooh, what's this, searching appears to imply it exists, dispite the fact that it links nowhere...
3: Coffee and TV - It's true you can search froogle for just about anything, and it's true google has a small merchandising department (appairently), but they don't have anything like...amazon.com as an example (all be it a rather poor one). I think you get the point...if your company makes something, they cant add it to a google store, and if you want something, you cant buy it through google. (again, froogle, I know, but it's just not the same).
4: A Better Blogger - What the hell is up with blogging everything these days? I mean...it's like a diary, except anyone has access to read it. Now, this was fine until one day you turn on the news and they're reading some random John Doe's opinion on the economy, and acting like it's important. *ahem* but anyways, Blogger. If they slapped the google name on blogger, and wrote just a tad bit of support into the client their Google Talk client right here (something really simple, like, link your gmail account to your blogger account, and then just a little link in the drop down menu) and I'd bet my Bawls they'd see a sudden spike in blogger's popularity and it crushes other services as quickly as blogging crushed my hope in humanity.
5: Google Browser - a Gowser? I don't know what to call it, but it's an idea that I've seen google talk about as early as September 2001. Fork mozilla already! Just think about it though, how many of you have google as your start page? (or something that links to google in bright bold letters at the top of the page, such as this lovely one you're reading right now). If they've already made a messenger client and service, then they've clearly invested at least a reasonable amount of effort into software. It's not hard to imagine a massively google-customized fork of firefox, or mozilla, finding it's way onto my desktop, laptop, and PSP (once I get a good linux port running, emulating an x86 is too much of a round-about way of doing things for me). Of course, then someone would suggest they make a google media player, and they'd jump on the idea. And people would keep naming off apps they want google to make until one day they make a google kernel (goognel? or something...) and we have a complete google operating system running. I wish.
More importanlty, why did I stay up till 5 AM reading/posting on here? And when exactly in the night did I misplace my pants?
This won't work for anyone that has upgraded their PSP to anything above 1.0 of the Firmware. A little detail that got left out of the article..
Tell that to my 1.50 firmware. It loads linux just fine. At least, last time I checked, which was about 2 hours ago.
But let me check again...
*Boots up to see a windows BSOD*
NOOOOOOO, THE HORROR!
An ordinary post on an ordinary thread, hosted on an ordinary site, which just so happens to be in The Twilight Zone.
*ahem* Excuse me. But in all seriousness, having BOCHS run on PSP is a good thing. Now only if we werent' running an x86 based emulator, so we didnt have to emulate all those CPU cycles...
It's hard to judge how a finished product will turn out from a few breif minutes of video. There are many questions about the engine we likely will not have answered anytime soon.
We can't very well say much about the engine itself, how easy it is to use, or when it really comes down to it, how much money would it save so-and-so when they're making this game or that.
But we can say a few things about the game itself. We may not be able to judge the plot very well at this stage, but if it's even half as promising as the visuals in the game, I have three little words I'd like to share with those of you who have not seen the video yet for whatever reason...
Oh My God
<sarcasm>
Yes, let's make a giant halo of ships or particles. There's no chance it will cause catastrophic waves to destroy thousands of cities. And if we go the particle rout, let's just blow up the moon! It's right there, c'mon!
</sarcasm>
How about we just use more solar power and quit driving gas guzzeling machines. Or at the very least, use more ethanol. E88 works fine, they should make more of it.