"Reduced the cost of managing replacement accessories by about 35%."
They are reducing the overhead of talking to a support person, them getting a part off the shelf, marking down that it has been removed by whom for whom for what reason, and all the rest. Something mentioned in the summary.
Just how difficult is it to create your own server for these games? Are they in the habit of encrypting or using proprietary compression schemes?
Being a software engineer I'm used to writing communications and products from a requirements document and datasheets, wondering how difficult it would be to reverse-engineer the communications protocol and blindly write what's happening on the server...
Maybe because of a "you take our batteries, we buy your planes" deal?
More likely then you might think. I work in the aviation industry and crap like that is what you have to deal with once you become an international organization. We (the engineers) just learned recently that India has put in place regulations that if you want to sell planes in that market (which is a huge market) you have to use India-based work for a minimum of 20% of the development/manufacturing effort spread across all parts of the project. Which is why we now have an India-based office who gets to play in all sorts of projects... and which we have to cleanup after in all sorts of projects.
I suspect he is referring to being able to open the door without the wind tearing it off the plane, for pressure they probably dropped oxygen masks for the passengers and used the pressure bleed valves to equalize with outside pressure before opening the door.
"Version N of windows sucks, but I'm sure version N+1 will fix all those issues!" has been the Windows mantra since version 3.11. I doubt very much that 9 will be that much better, simply because it will introduce it's own issues as it tries to fix the issues in 8.
That being said, there were some versions of Windows that weren't complete trash, 98se, XP, and 7 being the ones that come to mind. However even those versions had many issues that made working with them a pain. I think Windows will always be the OS that sucks.
This was a problem in the old series as well, you start watching classic and you'll see it doing all kinds of weird things as well. There was one period/doctor where they decided it had gone too far and almost banned it from showing up and being used just so they could break the writers of the "and the Sonic Screwdriver saves the day" addiction they had going.
As someone who is currently studying to be a pilot (22 hours of flight time so far) and who has been around all sorts of airplanes all my life, including ultralights, LSAs (as long as they have been around), classics, homebuilts, kitplanes, original designs, warbirds, etc. I'm as close as you can get to being an expert in this field without being part of the FAA.
First point, homebuilt, kitplanes, and original designs are all under the "experimental" class of aircraft, this means it can't be used for commercial flight (paying passengers or cargo for hire) but this does not restrict recreational flying with passengers or cargo. Once your plane is completed and has gone through the inspections and tests it's signed-off by the FAA and it's free to fly. Flying into controlled airspace ( B, C, D, etc) simply requires the proper equipment on board (transponders, etc), same with flying in IFR conditions (though the pilot also needs IFR rating on their license). If you think that this is a bottleneck that is used to keep the majority out, just go to the annual EAA fly-in in Oshkosh WI, every year last week of July. You'll find at a minimum 1/4 of the airplanes there are homebuilt airplanes, you will even find original designs parked here and there shined and polished and being shown-off by proud owners/builders. The restriction by the FAA is non-existent, they merely regulate and ensure the safety. Judging by the rest of the nation, the FAA is one of the few government agencies that is actually working fairly well to promote freedom and independence.
Second point, yes you need a pilots license to fly. If you want to fly an LSA you can get a sport-pilot license, which has reduced cost (at the expense of increased restriction). Yes it costs more then a drivers license, but by the same token, you driving a car without a license is no less illegal then flying an airplane (other then an ultralight) without a license. Costs for pilot licenses vary, as the majority of the cost is airplane rental and paying the instructor, right now I'm budgeting about $6k for getting my license, that's airplane rental, instructor time, renters insurance, exam costs, etc. That's a lot of money, and it's taken me a while to get that much cleared for the task, but it's not an impossible sum, nor is it an impossible goal. I could go for a sport pilot license, it requires about half the time in the air (20 hours instead of the 40 hours minimum for a pilots license) but I decided to go for the full deal.
Third point, why would you want to? You call up the FAA and tell them you are building an airplane and they'll say "ok, let us know when it's done, oh, and here are some resources to help you out.". You call up the FBI and they'll say "that's nice" and hang up. You call up Secret Service, CIA, TSA, even the IRS and they won't care.
As for the explosives angle, that's a completely different subject and doesn't have anything to do with aircraft. While the 9/11 incident was spectacular it's a fairly isolated incident, most explosives you hear about are driven there in cars or trucks. Explosives themselves can be made from a host of compounds, many of which can be procured just driving past a farm or two, or visiting a hardware store. Other then the TSA playing patty-cake with your privates there is no reason for flying and explosives to be in the same discussion.
If you have any questions or are interested in learning more, just come to the Oshkosh fly-in, or any local fly-in (call your local small airport to find out when the next one is happening, don't bother the big airports, they are too busy with airliners) walk around, talk to the pilots, talk to the people there, and go for a ride (there's usually at least one giving rides at the local fly-ins). You'll find great people, beautiful airplanes, and frank discussions about the realities of flying in the USA and why these people have a big grin on their faces ever time they leave the ground.
Having played both Skyrim and Kingdoms, I loved the way Kingdoms worked and preferred it over Skyrim and Oblivion. The gameplay was great and the action seamless and fast, being able to switch from ranged to melee to magic and back and forth with the speed that Kingdoms had was amazing. I enjoyed the world, the story, the design, everything.
Hopefully a decent studio will take up the title for future installments, cuz it was a great game.
It's a pretty stiff competition between Switzerland and Wisconsin, USA for who will find the Hicks-Boozehound particle, for the moment I think WI is in the lead after formalizing the "Teeth to Tattoo" ratio, and important step in finding the Hicks-Boozehound particle.
From what I understand it's like Firewire, it daisy-chains instead of splitting. That being said I'm sure someone will come up with a thunderbolt hub at some point.
So, just to be clear, you are saying that the average non-US citizen has no problems taking apart their stereo to find and replace the failed MOSFET or capacitor? Or taking apart the compressor on their fridge to replace the windings and refill the freon?
The name is somewhat missleading, you aren't sponsoring a 'valve' but instead your logo covering portion of an image of the valves used... I would much rather be part of it if the sponsorship was tied to an actual valve, however I understand how that would be less for them.
What they are currently 'selling' is 1,000,000 pixels at 0.1£ per pixel, minimum donation of 100 pixels (10£). So in the end they would be getting 1,000,000£ minus paypal costs.
If you could be a sponsor to the upkeep of a physical valve the corresponding cost would be 400£ per valve. Truth be told, I'd be interested in doing that as an annual contribution, especially if there was some sort of physical plaque somewhere on site stating who was sponsoring the project and how many valves they sponsored.
The "Experimental" tag is applied to anything except for vanilla factory builds, even changing engine from factory default usually ends up with an "experimental" sign on the aircraft. The tag does not reflect on it's safety. They do have a higher incidence of accidents then factory, but that seems to be attributed to second owners rather than builders, and very rarely to the aircraft itself.
Actually I give up, you have so much wrong about firewire that it's pointless to correct you point for point...
The reason Firewire is more expensive is that it's a system that requires some processing on both sides, any device that plugs into firewire has to have sufficient smarts to know what it needs in order to operate, USB on the other hand is a dumb protocol, all the processing is handled on the Host (PC) side, and all the devices plugged into it need very little smarts, this directly effects chip/design costs of peripherals. Firewire was actually designed with the concept that a scanner with a firewire port and a printer with a firewire port could be connected together and pictures printed without using computer resources.
USB also has the limitation of regimented and inflexible bandwidth (at least as of USBv2, v3 might change that). Which means while USB 2 may have 480mb of 'bandwidth' only a small chunk of that is usable by any one device, Firewire however is flexible, not only can it portion the bandwidth to the devices need but it can also use "Isochronous" (regular dedicated) bandwidth, allowing high-priority/bandwidth systems to transfer information, such as video/audio streams and critical systems (some internal aircraft systems use 1394 bus).
You want lots of high-speed external storage access, check some benchmarks, firewire will beat out USB for real-world performance, even though they are fairly matched just reading spec numbers.
Firewire is both faster and better than USB, however it's more expensive in both hardware and design/implementation, which is why USB has won that fight, the majority of people are all about cheep, not better.
Maybe it took so long to get through because the Apple people kept having it crash on them.
I experienced my first crash using the Google+ app for 2 min... I mean... I know Google is the "Beta" Company but come on now! Between the few friends I have on Google+ with iPhones, and myself, I think we've racked up maybe 10 to 15 crashes on the first afternoon of use. We've also experienced issues with it properly updating comments and such.
Hopefully they will get crackin and improve the stability quickly.
Hard linking of files yes, but hard linking of directories no.
This is important for Time Machine space saving because instead a directory full of hard links to files it's one hard link to the directory. Each link takes a bit of space, dropping several thousand of them saves a lot of space on the backup drive without losing any information.
My personal take on "Geek" is that it is an in-depth knowledge and enthusiasm for a particular subject, whether that subject be computers, books, engines, figures, trading cards, manga, or history is merely flavors or subcategories, those first two items pretty much make up the entrance exam for being a geek.
The specifics aren't really spelled out, the general understanding is that we will ascend to meet Jesus 'in the clouds', so ducking airliners here and there... From there we go to be with Him in heaven.
The exact location of heaven isn't spelled out. My personal theory is that it is actually outside the universe, outside of space-time (one easy way to get a human body to live forever). However that is mostly personal speculation, I'm sure there are theologists who would better answer your question.
And yes, I am a Christian, I do believe the rapture will happen, I expect to mow the lawn and do some other chores over the weekend, and going to work Monday.
Slashdot Mirror
Volvo has the V60 Diesel Electric Hybrid, but it's only available overseas, not in the US. Really pisses me off as I would love to own one.
Rumor has it that Ford and VW are also working on them and will have models out soon.
"Reduced the cost of managing replacement accessories by about 35%."
They are reducing the overhead of talking to a support person, them getting a part off the shelf, marking down that it has been removed by whom for whom for what reason, and all the rest. Something mentioned in the summary.
Just how difficult is it to create your own server for these games? Are they in the habit of encrypting or using proprietary compression schemes?
Being a software engineer I'm used to writing communications and products from a requirements document and datasheets, wondering how difficult it would be to reverse-engineer the communications protocol and blindly write what's happening on the server...
Maybe because of a "you take our batteries, we buy your planes" deal?
More likely then you might think. I work in the aviation industry and crap like that is what you have to deal with once you become an international organization. We (the engineers) just learned recently that India has put in place regulations that if you want to sell planes in that market (which is a huge market) you have to use India-based work for a minimum of 20% of the development/manufacturing effort spread across all parts of the project. Which is why we now have an India-based office who gets to play in all sorts of projects... and which we have to cleanup after in all sorts of projects.
I suspect he is referring to being able to open the door without the wind tearing it off the plane, for pressure they probably dropped oxygen masks for the passengers and used the pressure bleed valves to equalize with outside pressure before opening the door.
"Version N of windows sucks, but I'm sure version N+1 will fix all those issues!" has been the Windows mantra since version 3.11. I doubt very much that 9 will be that much better, simply because it will introduce it's own issues as it tries to fix the issues in 8.
That being said, there were some versions of Windows that weren't complete trash, 98se, XP, and 7 being the ones that come to mind. However even those versions had many issues that made working with them a pain. I think Windows will always be the OS that sucks.
This was a problem in the old series as well, you start watching classic and you'll see it doing all kinds of weird things as well. There was one period/doctor where they decided it had gone too far and almost banned it from showing up and being used just so they could break the writers of the "and the Sonic Screwdriver saves the day" addiction they had going.
As someone who is currently studying to be a pilot (22 hours of flight time so far) and who has been around all sorts of airplanes all my life, including ultralights, LSAs (as long as they have been around), classics, homebuilts, kitplanes, original designs, warbirds, etc. I'm as close as you can get to being an expert in this field without being part of the FAA.
First point, homebuilt, kitplanes, and original designs are all under the "experimental" class of aircraft, this means it can't be used for commercial flight (paying passengers or cargo for hire) but this does not restrict recreational flying with passengers or cargo. Once your plane is completed and has gone through the inspections and tests it's signed-off by the FAA and it's free to fly. Flying into controlled airspace ( B, C, D, etc) simply requires the proper equipment on board (transponders, etc), same with flying in IFR conditions (though the pilot also needs IFR rating on their license). If you think that this is a bottleneck that is used to keep the majority out, just go to the annual EAA fly-in in Oshkosh WI, every year last week of July. You'll find at a minimum 1/4 of the airplanes there are homebuilt airplanes, you will even find original designs parked here and there shined and polished and being shown-off by proud owners/builders. The restriction by the FAA is non-existent, they merely regulate and ensure the safety. Judging by the rest of the nation, the FAA is one of the few government agencies that is actually working fairly well to promote freedom and independence.
Second point, yes you need a pilots license to fly. If you want to fly an LSA you can get a sport-pilot license, which has reduced cost (at the expense of increased restriction). Yes it costs more then a drivers license, but by the same token, you driving a car without a license is no less illegal then flying an airplane (other then an ultralight) without a license. Costs for pilot licenses vary, as the majority of the cost is airplane rental and paying the instructor, right now I'm budgeting about $6k for getting my license, that's airplane rental, instructor time, renters insurance, exam costs, etc. That's a lot of money, and it's taken me a while to get that much cleared for the task, but it's not an impossible sum, nor is it an impossible goal. I could go for a sport pilot license, it requires about half the time in the air (20 hours instead of the 40 hours minimum for a pilots license) but I decided to go for the full deal.
Third point, why would you want to? You call up the FAA and tell them you are building an airplane and they'll say "ok, let us know when it's done, oh, and here are some resources to help you out.". You call up the FBI and they'll say "that's nice" and hang up. You call up Secret Service, CIA, TSA, even the IRS and they won't care.
As for the explosives angle, that's a completely different subject and doesn't have anything to do with aircraft. While the 9/11 incident was spectacular it's a fairly isolated incident, most explosives you hear about are driven there in cars or trucks. Explosives themselves can be made from a host of compounds, many of which can be procured just driving past a farm or two, or visiting a hardware store. Other then the TSA playing patty-cake with your privates there is no reason for flying and explosives to be in the same discussion.
If you have any questions or are interested in learning more, just come to the Oshkosh fly-in, or any local fly-in (call your local small airport to find out when the next one is happening, don't bother the big airports, they are too busy with airliners) walk around, talk to the pilots, talk to the people there, and go for a ride (there's usually at least one giving rides at the local fly-ins). You'll find great people, beautiful airplanes, and frank discussions about the realities of flying in the USA and why these people have a big grin on their faces ever time they leave the ground.
Having played both Skyrim and Kingdoms, I loved the way Kingdoms worked and preferred it over Skyrim and Oblivion. The gameplay was great and the action seamless and fast, being able to switch from ranged to melee to magic and back and forth with the speed that Kingdoms had was amazing. I enjoyed the world, the story, the design, everything.
Hopefully a decent studio will take up the title for future installments, cuz it was a great game.
It's a pretty stiff competition between Switzerland and Wisconsin, USA for who will find the Hicks-Boozehound particle, for the moment I think WI is in the lead after formalizing the "Teeth to Tattoo" ratio, and important step in finding the Hicks-Boozehound particle.
From what I understand it's like Firewire, it daisy-chains instead of splitting. That being said I'm sure someone will come up with a thunderbolt hub at some point.
So, just to be clear, you are saying that the average non-US citizen has no problems taking apart their stereo to find and replace the failed MOSFET or capacitor? Or taking apart the compressor on their fridge to replace the windings and refill the freon?
Sound more like "less sleep needed" then "more sleep deprived", especially with only 23 minutes separating the most sleep from the least sleep.
You get to sell tickets.
The name is somewhat missleading, you aren't sponsoring a 'valve' but instead your logo covering portion of an image of the valves used... I would much rather be part of it if the sponsorship was tied to an actual valve, however I understand how that would be less for them.
What they are currently 'selling' is 1,000,000 pixels at 0.1£ per pixel, minimum donation of 100 pixels (10£). So in the end they would be getting 1,000,000£ minus paypal costs.
If you could be a sponsor to the upkeep of a physical valve the corresponding cost would be 400£ per valve. Truth be told, I'd be interested in doing that as an annual contribution, especially if there was some sort of physical plaque somewhere on site stating who was sponsoring the project and how many valves they sponsored.
The "Experimental" tag is applied to anything except for vanilla factory builds, even changing engine from factory default usually ends up with an "experimental" sign on the aircraft. The tag does not reflect on it's safety. They do have a higher incidence of accidents then factory, but that seems to be attributed to second owners rather than builders, and very rarely to the aircraft itself.
Platteville, WI
Active quarry right next to the movie theater... every once in a while they decide to help out with special effects. :)
Wow, how many points wrong can you get...
Actually I give up, you have so much wrong about firewire that it's pointless to correct you point for point...
The reason Firewire is more expensive is that it's a system that requires some processing on both sides, any device that plugs into firewire has to have sufficient smarts to know what it needs in order to operate, USB on the other hand is a dumb protocol, all the processing is handled on the Host (PC) side, and all the devices plugged into it need very little smarts, this directly effects chip/design costs of peripherals. Firewire was actually designed with the concept that a scanner with a firewire port and a printer with a firewire port could be connected together and pictures printed without using computer resources.
USB also has the limitation of regimented and inflexible bandwidth (at least as of USBv2, v3 might change that). Which means while USB 2 may have 480mb of 'bandwidth' only a small chunk of that is usable by any one device, Firewire however is flexible, not only can it portion the bandwidth to the devices need but it can also use "Isochronous" (regular dedicated) bandwidth, allowing high-priority/bandwidth systems to transfer information, such as video/audio streams and critical systems (some internal aircraft systems use 1394 bus).
You want lots of high-speed external storage access, check some benchmarks, firewire will beat out USB for real-world performance, even though they are fairly matched just reading spec numbers.
Firewire is both faster and better than USB, however it's more expensive in both hardware and design/implementation, which is why USB has won that fight, the majority of people are all about cheep, not better.
Maybe it took so long to get through because the Apple people kept having it crash on them.
I experienced my first crash using the Google+ app for 2 min... I mean... I know Google is the "Beta" Company but come on now! Between the few friends I have on Google+ with iPhones, and myself, I think we've racked up maybe 10 to 15 crashes on the first afternoon of use. We've also experienced issues with it properly updating comments and such.
Hopefully they will get crackin and improve the stability quickly.
Hard linking of files yes, but hard linking of directories no.
This is important for Time Machine space saving because instead a directory full of hard links to files it's one hard link to the directory. Each link takes a bit of space, dropping several thousand of them saves a lot of space on the backup drive without losing any information.
Thanks, found it!
Thanks for the invite!
BTW, how do I invite my friends, just add them to a circle?
I'd appreciate one erikofekedahl(gmail)
My personal take on "Geek" is that it is an in-depth knowledge and enthusiasm for a particular subject, whether that subject be computers, books, engines, figures, trading cards, manga, or history is merely flavors or subcategories, those first two items pretty much make up the entrance exam for being a geek.
The specifics aren't really spelled out, the general understanding is that we will ascend to meet Jesus 'in the clouds', so ducking airliners here and there... From there we go to be with Him in heaven.
The exact location of heaven isn't spelled out. My personal theory is that it is actually outside the universe, outside of space-time (one easy way to get a human body to live forever). However that is mostly personal speculation, I'm sure there are theologists who would better answer your question.
And yes, I am a Christian, I do believe the rapture will happen, I expect to mow the lawn and do some other chores over the weekend, and going to work Monday.