As I understand it, aside from general tuning, they're moving toward removing legacy dependencies on older runtime libraries and plan to run applications that depend on those older libraries in virtual spaces, which will allow for less resident memory usage and faster performance in general. I'm not sure if that was scrapped or not, however, when MS scaled back their Windows 7 efforts. Since this is an incremental release, they've also probably tweaked out performance by improving the codebase itself.
OSX dock can be anything from a couple of giant icon (get rid of all apps and maximize it) to a tiny barely readable row of icons taking up much less real-estate than the Windows taskbar, so calling it a "big ass dock" depends on how you customize it. Sure it defaults to big, but right click the divider on the dock (Control Click if you don't have a "real" mouse) and choose Preferences, then make it big or small, mess with effects, magnification, etc.
Incidentally, when I used NeXT Dock it was limited to square icons and was not resizable or scalable, but that was a while ago and I'm not sure what modern features are in later incarnations. In fact, it behaved like many other desktop managers in how it minimized, but it did have those cool animated icons and put everything in a box (as opposed to other Window Managers which usually ran them in a row along the left side of the desktop)
I can only assume Windows will be fairly flexible with their dock using hardware accelerated scaling and dock scaling based on options.
Part of this was a chain reaction. Linksys was a low end router company and they adopted Linux to save money on development. As such, they had no need to cripple their routers to not compete against their high end brand, since they didn't have one. Unfortunately for Cisco, who bought them, they do have a high end brand, and releasing the source for their low end brand that people have tuned to outperform their high end routers (with overclocking and mods) is not really in their best interest (illegal, yes, in best interest, no).
Personally, I think they were gambling as long as possible that the FSF wouldn't file a suit.
I know a few of you are similar, but he could have just said Silas Warner without all the vague references. The part about being "best to be buried deep, never to be seen again" is a very sinister reference - don't creep me out like that, Bjarne!
You and grandparent obviously haven't worked tech support. The only time you really get angry is when you get your third call in a row for something like a full reinstall of Windows while management is monitoring your call times (and each takes 2-3 hours - so much for your 20 minute average).
What you do realize is 99% of the human population is dumber than headless chickens. Then you gather up all the idiotic stories from the people you talked to that day and share them in the break room. The old jokes about the footpedal, drink holder, and trying to use the computer in a blackout? Not even scratching the surface of people I've talked to on tech support...
There are liquid coolers now being sold that are fully sealed rather than sealed using gaskets, and the potential for a leak with such systems is much smaller than traditional gasket coolers, however, there is usually no way to inspect, clean, or add coolant to these (they would need to be replaced).
Looking at the patent, I see two differences to traditional liquid cooling that could be the entire basis of the patent. Claim 16: metal particles in the coolant, and Claim 19: a cold plate (which could mean many things, even wild solutions like a miniature Sterling Engine, though I would think it's something simple).
Here's my breakdown of the patent, at least to my understanding:
Claim 1 - this is specific to a computing system with liquid cooling of the power source.
Claim 2 - the IC included in the power source contains a processor. This makes me think the IC is a controller for the pump because the claim is for the power source, not the laptop itself.
Claim 3-11 specifics about pump and coolants
Claim 12 - used in a laptop
Claim 13 - 15 - dual phase (typical phase change coolant from liquid to gas and back)
Claim 16 - metal particles in the coolant to increase thermal transfer.
Claim 17 - describes pump activity
Claim 18 - describes a heatsink
Claim 19 - a cold plate for increased thermal transfer
Claim 20 - describes the lithography size of the laptop (how small the wires are).
Claim 21 - describes using liquid cooling on the laptop itself.
Less spaceships doesn't mean it will be bad, just that it probably will have a more terrestrial plot than the remake could have had (having your home blown up and fleeing an armada kinda limits the amount of ground time).
Personally, my peeve with the remake was bad medicine - it was even worse than 60s Star Trek (he's dead Jim... well f*cking try to revive him already, you ninny!). The second time they focused on a medical event that was pre-21th century medicine I wanted to punch the screenwriters. The tech in the original BSG had rejuvenation centers - what the hell happened to them in the remake?
I also didn't buy all the Democracy crap and terrorism - if I were Adama, I'd say submit to military rule or get shot down. Problems on board ships that are following can be dealt with using a civilian police of some kind. The Galactica is top dog - if they don't want to follow, they can leave and fend for themselves.
And no cure for cancer in a society with advanced robotics and giant spaceships is preposterous (if all medical ships that could treat cancer were destroyed, I'd say OK, I can buy that, but no cure or even decent treatment is silly and that's the way it was portrayed).
And the reimagining had no excuses for bad plot and limited tech like Galactica 1980, which had its 1 million dollar per episode budget slashed to a fraction of that and they couldn't even get most of the original cast to re-sign on (iirc, they got Lorne Green and that was about it). Galactica 1980 was originally written to be a time-travel episodic format but the studios disliked that in the pilot and made it the hastily written crap we know and remember (the time travel part was then used as the basis for Quantum Leap).
Part of the issue is that these are Executive Orders issued under National Security directives, so they are not public records. By exposing secret wiretapping, a judge could ask for the (probably illegal) executive order that allowed it and that, according to the Bush administration, would be a national security risk.
In some respects, if true, this is as illegal as Watergate, but because it was issued as an EO and EOs are by definition law, a judge needs to review and strike down the order as unconstitutional, but that is hard to do when the only people that need to know it even exists is the National Security Council (if I remember right, its 7 members are the President, Vice President, Secretaries of Defense, State, and National Security, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, and... National Intelligence Director? Some Intelligence guy).
I personally think it's an illegal law and should be brought forward and into the public.
The only blackouts I've seen in ~20 years on the intertubes (since before it was a public network) was due to cable cuts, router or power failures, or routine maintenance (oh, and the two weeks I had no service after Northpoint disappeared overnight - incidentally, my part of the lawsuit was finally settled - 7 years later).
This is all a bunch of fear mongering. The protocol isn't the issue, it's throttling it, and there's no reason you can't throttle UDP. In fact, UDP doesn't guarantee delivery, so if there's too much UDP on the fat pipes, just start tossing packets at random - who's gonna know (ok, if you do too many the WoW players might complain, but lag happens, right)? ISPs can start tossing packets for anyone abusing their network and if asked could claim the packets never arrived. It's not like there are records of UDP packets moving through a network.
People have predicted the backbones would collapse for years and guess what? It's never happened (completely, at least - I recall one backbone had a failure for a couple of days, but I wasn't on that one, however some major sites were).
This is true, however, the government does have the right to regulate its facilities without talking to congress, and government facilities include public schools, so they could say "you can't say this here" and if you said it, you could face consequences (they can't send you to jail for it, however).
Incidentally, long before Columbine I brought a page of the online (as in BBS) anarchist cookbook to school and after I was busted (because I trusted an idiot with it and he photo copied it and started selling the copies...) I was told that it was inappropriate for school and they were adding it to the school regulations as grounds for expulsion (they do the same thing for guns now with zero tolerance laws). The page I had photocopied? Smoke bombs and making black powder - not even the really dangerous stuff the book had like pipe bombs.
My point of telling this story, however, is more about rules - while Congress can set reasons for you to go to jail, places like schools can tell you whether you stay in or out and you have to live by their rules. When you are at home, you are under the supervision of your parents and parent's rules (after that, it's all government or employer rules). Of course, not every parent can keep up with everything their child does, but it is still the parent's responsibility to try and to dole out punishment when necessary. My mom was LIVID when she found out about that one page (I had a chat with mom, the principal, a cop, and the idiot that photocopied it - and thank GOD mom didn't find the full copy) - I was grounded and stripped of computer and TV privileges for a month. It was the worst punishment I had ever been given in my life, and was probably the turning point for when I started to stray from the pirate/hacker crowd. Mom watched my online activities much more closely then (she knew I pirated, but not hacked).
You are correct that DVI is limited to 8 bits of color information per channel and does not support encoding (is RGB only). HDMI, however, supports several colorspace encodings including YCbCr (raw encoding for MPEG 2 and JPEG), sRGB (standard RGB colorspace), and xvYCC (in the YCbCr family, but has almost twice as many colors as RGB) natively, not just one.
Colorspace encodings don't define any lossiness, only color information - any lossiness is done in compression where some of the encoded data may be thrown out (JPEG, for instance, tosses a lot of saturation info and favors hue and brightness because the human eye is least sensitive to saturation).
Support for several colorspaces really means you can throw the raw decoded data directly to the adapter without converting it first, so for instance, if you had, say, YCbCr (say standard DVDs in MPEG-2) you can throw data directly to the HDMI adapter instead of converting it to RGB and then send it to the adapter (think of it like a GPU - you offload some work from the CPU). In many cases it is better to not have to convert the color because, as I stated above, some schemes like xvYCC have more colors than RGB and most displays are not discrete (I'd better explain that - in RGB terms, 8 bits is up to 256 values or brightnesses for each color, 256*256*256 is roughly 16.8 million total variations for red, green, and blue channels, and by non-discrete I mean displays can show more than 256 levels of brightness for each channel of color, so some gamuts may find more colors).
HDMI and DVI both use lossless TMDS, which is a replacement for RAMDAC (VGA) for transmission. This has nothing to do with colorspace, however (just noting that transmission is lossless and not related to colorspace).
Ah, true - I read this from a technological standpoint, but really I wanted to find a nice happy place to talk about why this happened in the first place.
I personally don't advocate any OS - I say learn them all and let the ignorant masses sort out which one is dominant. I also prefer to educate - every time I see one of those "Use a Windows Media PC to replace your DVR!" commercials I point out if you just want to use a PC for that, install Linux and MythTV and you get a much cheaper solution that has (IMO) a better interface. Macs can also be used as a DVR, though I've never personally used one (my brother has this setup on his mini, but he likes pretty much only sports and I like pretty much the opposite of that, so I've never used it).
Windows 7 is built on top of the Server 2003 codebase, same as Vista, so don't expect a miracle.
Vista Basic can run on fairly low specced machines if you don't have too many services running - I bet it would run on my 8 year old desktop PC (which does have a gig of RAM and a $25 DX9 capable card, so it probably could even run Aero). The requirements skyrocket is if you want to run everything and want Aero.
Windows 7 will likely have a smaller base memory footprint unless you run older applications on it because they plan to move to the virtual machine paradigm (like how OSX machines could run OS9) to support legacy applications. Legacy libraries won't be hogging memory unless they're needed and there should be less compatibility issues because developers will be forced to work with the same API functions rather than falling back on legacy ones when writing new code.
The performance of XP vs Vista is not really that huge of difference - maybe 2%-5% for most things (I get about an 80% hit for OpenGL in a Window, however, which is odd because context switches should only give about a 20% hit at most, but I haven't checked recently and it's possible new drivers and/or SP1 fixed this). Part of that is likely more services running or tuning that needs to be done on the OS. I don't think it's that big of deal. My main problem with Vista is other issues (it nags too much, I've had to reinstall Vista 5x now due to it not liking updates, some things like network shares are painful to configure, some things that shouldn't have been changed or renamed were, etc - I have not had driver issues, but some people have).
Oh, where to begin. I'll just stick with graphics since that is the heart of this debacle, anyway.
Vista Basic is a software context, just like XP, XWindows on UNIX + likes, or non-Quartz Compositor (formerly Quartz Extreme) accelerated MacOSX contexts. Gnome and KDE are traditionally software based, but there has been some effort to add hardware acceleration on both fronts and I haven't kept up on where exactly they are at (I have Ubuntu and SuSE and neither are hardware accelerated AFAIK).
Vista Aero uses Desktop Window Manager (DWM) hardware context (specifically a DirectX 9 context) and offloads much of rendering responsibility to hardware. This is actually the root of the hardware issue where MS eased up on requirements for Vista. From what I've read, the story is something like this: originally, Vista Capable machines had to have graphics acceleration, but not necessarily hardware transformation and lighting (T&L), so Intel continued to develop software T&L in their GMA 3000 series of chips released in 2006. However, Microsoft failed to disclose that Vista would also require a hardware accelerated timer and because T&L on these Intel chips was in software, the timer also needed to be in software. Intel believed they had met all the requirements and suddenly had millions of chips they wouldn't be able to sell because MS didn't disclose one piece of necessary info and was pissed at MS, MS couldn't believe anyone was still making software T&L in 2006, and everyone was pissed at everyone else.
For one, OS X isn't tuned to be a server unless you get OSX Server. Not that OOTB OS X can't be tuned for decent server performance, but it does require a lot of BSD knowledge and tweaking (I would start with a sysctl -a and start tweaking those settings, then move to applications and dependencies).
I've never set up a mac as a UNIX file server (I user SMB/CIFS to back up my Windows machines), but AFP is the default (as others mentioned - it is NOT Andrew File System, but you can dl/use that if you want) and nfsd is included in the os install (/sbin/nfsd). I'm sure you can tweak your system to run that fairly well, but again, you'll probably be messing with a lot of settings you get for free in an OS tweaked for being a server rather than a client. AFP is traditional and probably default for the same reason SMB/CIFS is default on Windows - to maintain a fair degree of network compatibility with older systems. I would personally take NFS or AFS over either of them (AFS because I think it's cool, NFS because I'm intimately familiar with it from over 15 years of experience).
By the GPL supersedure clause - the GPL license forbids linking with any of its libraries without your software also being GPL and if it is not GPL, the GPL license supersedes your license. Many libraries are released with an exception to that rule (like gcc), but if you build, say, on Linux and want to release using BSD you'd better be very careful and check to make sure every library you use is not strict GPL.
The LGPL was written for anyone that wants to allow the library to be used in commercial applications but the FSF strongly discourages its use. It also is explicitly only valid for dynamic libraries, although plugins are valid if and only if the parent library is also LGPL.
The simple solution would be to not link against GPL'd libraries if you don't want to release as GPL, but on some platforms that is easier said than done.
Assuming the term 'vaporize' is truly meant and not disintegrated, which is more like what is shown (otherwise we'd see bones). Human perception would view them as roughly the same thing, so calling it vaporization could be human error. On the other hand, you'd probably have a sonic boom as elements expand in disintegration, so...
screw it - it's pseudo-science - they MADE IT UP.
Lightsabers are even more far-fetched - they would need a heated arcing plasma (or something like that) as well as a strong repulsive energy and one hell of a power source.
WoW battlegrounds also raised the bar. They have no equivalent.
wasn't Warhammer Online almost completely designed around battlegrounds? I've heard it was better, but that was by Warhammer players.
I have only had a 30 day free acct for WoW and played exclusively PvE so I don't know how the PvP is, but I played lots of PvP in the Warhammer beta and heard it was similar to battlegrounds.
OTOH, I've never played Tabula Rasa, and yes their decision to scrap most of the game and start over was probably the major reason it cost so much.
I still don't think the monthly fee model will be successful for many games, yet many still try it. I think Guild Wars is probably the best content model, which basically took the magazine as a subscription model but I think they failed on execution by exclusively using zones, making PvE difficulty ramp up too quickly (esp. mid-to-late game - then compensating with consumables and heroes which makes those areas too easy) and putting the game too much on rails which I think limits the fun factor, not to mention almost completely killed the necessity for parties with skill programmable heroes (killing the social aspect almost completely). About the only time I play GW these days is when I delete a character and start over or play PvP - the early game is the only social part.
Which always goes back to WoW - they did the world model correct but I wish they'd have a different content model, which is basically charge for content and a monthy service fee to even play (which I call the ISP model), which to be honest is sustainable for that game and maybe a couple of other A list titles, but software as a service is easy to budget out (and fell to the budget axe at my house without me ever paying a service fee, as did Age of Conan, which I paid for the box and played only until the initial subscription expired) so most games that are not in this top tier are doomed to failure if they use that model.
The rest have to do something different if they want to succeed, whether that be micro payments or using a different model such as quarterly or yearly fees. The micro payment model tends to work better in Asia than the US because they tend to do everything around micro payments, including gaming time (in cafes). In the US I think the magazine model works better - charge a fixed fee for the game and a fixed fee for content updates, however, an in-game store or real-world trading auction house could be very profitable if done correctly (i.e. the auction house takes 10-20%, just like in the real world).
Funny thing is, MST3K's first day on KTMA is probably one of the most memorable days of my life, but not because of MST3K. I was sick with the worst case of strep throat I've ever had along with a high fever, and I couldn't go to the doctor because it was turkey day (plus my parents had company over). Between bouts of sleep (that never lasted long because of the pain) I was flipping through the channels on the TV in my room and I came across the show. I missed about the first 10 minutes and wasn't sure what was going on with the people in front. The jokes weren't funny or didn't make much sense to me for about the next 20-30 minutes before I realized they were trying to be funny (and I remember that joke was funny).
The jokes really were hit-and-miss early on. I think I missed episode 2 and maybe 3 (I thought it was a one-off and didn't realize it was a series), but I remember the second one I saw was better than the first and it generally improved from there.
I found Syberia boring aside from a few of the puzzles. I didn't connect in any way with the main character and for me that is a bad omen for non-violent games, though it certainly wasn't as bad as Midnight Nowhere (I *hated* that character). I should note that part of the problem was I had just finished The Longest Journey, which was fantastic. I actually didn't care much for the sequel, Dreamfall, however. The plot was good, but the action sequences were frustrating (not hard - it was more of a fighting the controls issue) and the game had more violence than the previous title. There really haven't been a lot of great adventure games in the past few years, IMO, certainly nothing that got me into the story like the old LucasArts games like Monkey Island, Full Throttle, or Grim Fandango, though it is possible the new Sam and Max episodes are good (unfortunately, I didn't find the original funny at all - each to their own humor-wise, I guess - so I haven't tried the episodes).
Um, while Settlers of Catan has no war, it does have Soldiers and a bandit that can steal all resources from a hex (soldiers can drive away the bandit). You can even win points by having the largest military (though personally I seem to always win by longest road). I have not played Pioneers, but from your description I would guess the mechanics are similar.
Well, there's also GNUStep, but that wouldn't be possible if Core Data is used. From my understanding, Core Data is more-or-less a database without a database - basically a uniform way of storing data objects so they can be read by many different programs (much like the dicts in mac, which are XML files, if I remember correctly).
The alternative would be to have an actual database backend and write the programs to use those data objects.
The advantage from the mac end is their data model ties directly into the Model part of the model-view-controller (MVC) presentation model, so it is fairly easy to write front-ends because you can do almost everything with gui tools where in the past you needed to write the data model as code. All data processing is still code, however (it's more of a convenient way to tie in the displaying and storage of data). I'm not sure how reusable it is because I've mostly just looked at some demos (most of my serious dev time has been devoted to Vista... not intentionally, more because Vista has been a hellish nightmare to support).
Most criminals think they won't get caught - if they thought they were going to get caught, they wouldn't be stupid enough to commit the crime.
There are smart criminals, but they think they can outsmart the system and usually make enough mistakes that they get caught (example: Hans Reiser). Then there are the somewhat smart ones that may pull off a spree for a while before screwing up (serial killers, some bank robbers). The really smart ones are not even detected or only leave evidence that a crime was committed, but not by who, which leaves us with what's left - the stupid ones. These are the ones that want to make a quick buck any way that is possible and don't do anything to cover their tracks (the "Hey Earl - let's do meth and rob us a bank just like on that there TV set!" type). I've known a few of these, like my ex-neighbor who liked to get drunk and beat his wife and daughter. He did that until he beat his daughter's friend and threatened to kill her in broad daylight in front of several witnesses (at least three called 911, including my wife, and we have a police station 4 blocks away), then he was dumb enough to also deck one of the officers that showed up about 2 minutes later (then they tazed him - wish I had been there - I got the story secondhand from my wife and this guy was on my top 10 list of people I'd love to see tazed or flogged - no part of him was nice). I didn't hear anything more directly, but according to another neighbor, he had been charged with aggravated assault, assaulting an officer and a couple of others (intent to do grievous bodily harm? This was about eight years ago - I forget the details).
Too bad the justice system and his poor little abused mouse of a wife were stupid. She posted bail (I don't know what it was set at, but he was free two days later) and the guy sold his house (at a fire sale price, I'm sure - I didn't think mortgages could close as fast as that one did) and left the state, wife and daughter in tow instead of going to trial. Police actually broke down the door of the new neighbor's house in a 5AM raid because they thought he was still there and was planning to flee (they missed him by 48 hours - he'd fled and the new people moved in the next day). I don't know if the guy was ever caught or extradited. Moral of story? You can be a jackass and an idiot and still get away with the crime without doing the time (but it will cost you).
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As I understand it, aside from general tuning, they're moving toward removing legacy dependencies on older runtime libraries and plan to run applications that depend on those older libraries in virtual spaces, which will allow for less resident memory usage and faster performance in general. I'm not sure if that was scrapped or not, however, when MS scaled back their Windows 7 efforts. Since this is an incremental release, they've also probably tweaked out performance by improving the codebase itself.
OSX dock can be anything from a couple of giant icon (get rid of all apps and maximize it) to a tiny barely readable row of icons taking up much less real-estate than the Windows taskbar, so calling it a "big ass dock" depends on how you customize it. Sure it defaults to big, but right click the divider on the dock (Control Click if you don't have a "real" mouse) and choose Preferences, then make it big or small, mess with effects, magnification, etc.
Incidentally, when I used NeXT Dock it was limited to square icons and was not resizable or scalable, but that was a while ago and I'm not sure what modern features are in later incarnations. In fact, it behaved like many other desktop managers in how it minimized, but it did have those cool animated icons and put everything in a box (as opposed to other Window Managers which usually ran them in a row along the left side of the desktop)
I can only assume Windows will be fairly flexible with their dock using hardware accelerated scaling and dock scaling based on options.
yeah - probably true.
Part of this was a chain reaction. Linksys was a low end router company and they adopted Linux to save money on development. As such, they had no need to cripple their routers to not compete against their high end brand, since they didn't have one. Unfortunately for Cisco, who bought them, they do have a high end brand, and releasing the source for their low end brand that people have tuned to outperform their high end routers (with overclocking and mods) is not really in their best interest (illegal, yes, in best interest, no).
Personally, I think they were gambling as long as possible that the FSF wouldn't file a suit.
I know a few of you are similar, but he could have just said Silas Warner without all the vague references. The part about being "best to be buried deep, never to be seen again" is a very sinister reference - don't creep me out like that, Bjarne!
Um, the math co-processor never became obsolete; they started building it on-die rather than in a separate package.
And yes, it is similar to CUDA and CAL, but designed for any general purpose parallel computing, not just GPU from what I can tell.
Reading this reminded me of Rex Nebular for some reason...
combine that with planet of the apes:
Wait a minute... Statue of Liberty... that was our planet! You maniacs!
My mind is making some weird connections today ;)
You and grandparent obviously haven't worked tech support. The only time you really get angry is when you get your third call in a row for something like a full reinstall of Windows while management is monitoring your call times (and each takes 2-3 hours - so much for your 20 minute average).
What you do realize is 99% of the human population is dumber than headless chickens. Then you gather up all the idiotic stories from the people you talked to that day and share them in the break room. The old jokes about the footpedal, drink holder, and trying to use the computer in a blackout? Not even scratching the surface of people I've talked to on tech support...
There are liquid coolers now being sold that are fully sealed rather than sealed using gaskets, and the potential for a leak with such systems is much smaller than traditional gasket coolers, however, there is usually no way to inspect, clean, or add coolant to these (they would need to be replaced).
Looking at the patent, I see two differences to traditional liquid cooling that could be the entire basis of the patent. Claim 16: metal particles in the coolant, and Claim 19: a cold plate (which could mean many things, even wild solutions like a miniature Sterling Engine, though I would think it's something simple).
Here's my breakdown of the patent, at least to my understanding:
Claim 1 - this is specific to a computing system with liquid cooling of the power source.
Claim 2 - the IC included in the power source contains a processor. This makes me think the IC is a controller for the pump because the claim is for the power source, not the laptop itself.
Claim 3-11 specifics about pump and coolants
Claim 12 - used in a laptop
Claim 13 - 15 - dual phase (typical phase change coolant from liquid to gas and back)
Claim 16 - metal particles in the coolant to increase thermal transfer.
Claim 17 - describes pump activity
Claim 18 - describes a heatsink
Claim 19 - a cold plate for increased thermal transfer
Claim 20 - describes the lithography size of the laptop (how small the wires are).
Claim 21 - describes using liquid cooling on the laptop itself.
Less spaceships doesn't mean it will be bad, just that it probably will have a more terrestrial plot than the remake could have had (having your home blown up and fleeing an armada kinda limits the amount of ground time).
Personally, my peeve with the remake was bad medicine - it was even worse than 60s Star Trek (he's dead Jim... well f*cking try to revive him already, you ninny!). The second time they focused on a medical event that was pre-21th century medicine I wanted to punch the screenwriters. The tech in the original BSG had rejuvenation centers - what the hell happened to them in the remake?
I also didn't buy all the Democracy crap and terrorism - if I were Adama, I'd say submit to military rule or get shot down. Problems on board ships that are following can be dealt with using a civilian police of some kind. The Galactica is top dog - if they don't want to follow, they can leave and fend for themselves.
And no cure for cancer in a society with advanced robotics and giant spaceships is preposterous (if all medical ships that could treat cancer were destroyed, I'd say OK, I can buy that, but no cure or even decent treatment is silly and that's the way it was portrayed).
And the reimagining had no excuses for bad plot and limited tech like Galactica 1980, which had its 1 million dollar per episode budget slashed to a fraction of that and they couldn't even get most of the original cast to re-sign on (iirc, they got Lorne Green and that was about it). Galactica 1980 was originally written to be a time-travel episodic format but the studios disliked that in the pilot and made it the hastily written crap we know and remember (the time travel part was then used as the basis for Quantum Leap).
Part of the issue is that these are Executive Orders issued under National Security directives, so they are not public records. By exposing secret wiretapping, a judge could ask for the (probably illegal) executive order that allowed it and that, according to the Bush administration, would be a national security risk.
In some respects, if true, this is as illegal as Watergate, but because it was issued as an EO and EOs are by definition law, a judge needs to review and strike down the order as unconstitutional, but that is hard to do when the only people that need to know it even exists is the National Security Council (if I remember right, its 7 members are the President, Vice President, Secretaries of Defense, State, and National Security, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, and... National Intelligence Director? Some Intelligence guy).
I personally think it's an illegal law and should be brought forward and into the public.
The only blackouts I've seen in ~20 years on the intertubes (since before it was a public network) was due to cable cuts, router or power failures, or routine maintenance (oh, and the two weeks I had no service after Northpoint disappeared overnight - incidentally, my part of the lawsuit was finally settled - 7 years later).
This is all a bunch of fear mongering. The protocol isn't the issue, it's throttling it, and there's no reason you can't throttle UDP. In fact, UDP doesn't guarantee delivery, so if there's too much UDP on the fat pipes, just start tossing packets at random - who's gonna know (ok, if you do too many the WoW players might complain, but lag happens, right)? ISPs can start tossing packets for anyone abusing their network and if asked could claim the packets never arrived. It's not like there are records of UDP packets moving through a network.
People have predicted the backbones would collapse for years and guess what? It's never happened (completely, at least - I recall one backbone had a failure for a couple of days, but I wasn't on that one, however some major sites were).
This is true, however, the government does have the right to regulate its facilities without talking to congress, and government facilities include public schools, so they could say "you can't say this here" and if you said it, you could face consequences (they can't send you to jail for it, however).
Incidentally, long before Columbine I brought a page of the online (as in BBS) anarchist cookbook to school and after I was busted (because I trusted an idiot with it and he photo copied it and started selling the copies...) I was told that it was inappropriate for school and they were adding it to the school regulations as grounds for expulsion (they do the same thing for guns now with zero tolerance laws). The page I had photocopied? Smoke bombs and making black powder - not even the really dangerous stuff the book had like pipe bombs.
My point of telling this story, however, is more about rules - while Congress can set reasons for you to go to jail, places like schools can tell you whether you stay in or out and you have to live by their rules. When you are at home, you are under the supervision of your parents and parent's rules (after that, it's all government or employer rules). Of course, not every parent can keep up with everything their child does, but it is still the parent's responsibility to try and to dole out punishment when necessary. My mom was LIVID when she found out about that one page (I had a chat with mom, the principal, a cop, and the idiot that photocopied it - and thank GOD mom didn't find the full copy) - I was grounded and stripped of computer and TV privileges for a month. It was the worst punishment I had ever been given in my life, and was probably the turning point for when I started to stray from the pirate/hacker crowd. Mom watched my online activities much more closely then (she knew I pirated, but not hacked).
Not entirely correct.
You are correct that DVI is limited to 8 bits of color information per channel and does not support encoding (is RGB only). HDMI, however, supports several colorspace encodings including YCbCr (raw encoding for MPEG 2 and JPEG), sRGB (standard RGB colorspace), and xvYCC (in the YCbCr family, but has almost twice as many colors as RGB) natively, not just one.
Colorspace encodings don't define any lossiness, only color information - any lossiness is done in compression where some of the encoded data may be thrown out (JPEG, for instance, tosses a lot of saturation info and favors hue and brightness because the human eye is least sensitive to saturation).
Support for several colorspaces really means you can throw the raw decoded data directly to the adapter without converting it first, so for instance, if you had, say, YCbCr (say standard DVDs in MPEG-2) you can throw data directly to the HDMI adapter instead of converting it to RGB and then send it to the adapter (think of it like a GPU - you offload some work from the CPU). In many cases it is better to not have to convert the color because, as I stated above, some schemes like xvYCC have more colors than RGB and most displays are not discrete (I'd better explain that - in RGB terms, 8 bits is up to 256 values or brightnesses for each color, 256*256*256 is roughly 16.8 million total variations for red, green, and blue channels, and by non-discrete I mean displays can show more than 256 levels of brightness for each channel of color, so some gamuts may find more colors).
HDMI and DVI both use lossless TMDS, which is a replacement for RAMDAC (VGA) for transmission. This has nothing to do with colorspace, however (just noting that transmission is lossless and not related to colorspace).
Ah, true - I read this from a technological standpoint, but really I wanted to find a nice happy place to talk about why this happened in the first place.
I personally don't advocate any OS - I say learn them all and let the ignorant masses sort out which one is dominant. I also prefer to educate - every time I see one of those "Use a Windows Media PC to replace your DVR!" commercials I point out if you just want to use a PC for that, install Linux and MythTV and you get a much cheaper solution that has (IMO) a better interface. Macs can also be used as a DVR, though I've never personally used one (my brother has this setup on his mini, but he likes pretty much only sports and I like pretty much the opposite of that, so I've never used it).
Windows 7 is built on top of the Server 2003 codebase, same as Vista, so don't expect a miracle.
Vista Basic can run on fairly low specced machines if you don't have too many services running - I bet it would run on my 8 year old desktop PC (which does have a gig of RAM and a $25 DX9 capable card, so it probably could even run Aero). The requirements skyrocket is if you want to run everything and want Aero.
Windows 7 will likely have a smaller base memory footprint unless you run older applications on it because they plan to move to the virtual machine paradigm (like how OSX machines could run OS9) to support legacy applications. Legacy libraries won't be hogging memory unless they're needed and there should be less compatibility issues because developers will be forced to work with the same API functions rather than falling back on legacy ones when writing new code.
The performance of XP vs Vista is not really that huge of difference - maybe 2%-5% for most things (I get about an 80% hit for OpenGL in a Window, however, which is odd because context switches should only give about a 20% hit at most, but I haven't checked recently and it's possible new drivers and/or SP1 fixed this). Part of that is likely more services running or tuning that needs to be done on the OS. I don't think it's that big of deal. My main problem with Vista is other issues (it nags too much, I've had to reinstall Vista 5x now due to it not liking updates, some things like network shares are painful to configure, some things that shouldn't have been changed or renamed were, etc - I have not had driver issues, but some people have).
Oh, where to begin. I'll just stick with graphics since that is the heart of this debacle, anyway.
Vista Basic is a software context, just like XP, XWindows on UNIX + likes, or non-Quartz Compositor (formerly Quartz Extreme) accelerated MacOSX contexts. Gnome and KDE are traditionally software based, but there has been some effort to add hardware acceleration on both fronts and I haven't kept up on where exactly they are at (I have Ubuntu and SuSE and neither are hardware accelerated AFAIK).
Vista Aero uses Desktop Window Manager (DWM) hardware context (specifically a DirectX 9 context) and offloads much of rendering responsibility to hardware. This is actually the root of the hardware issue where MS eased up on requirements for Vista. From what I've read, the story is something like this: originally, Vista Capable machines had to have graphics acceleration, but not necessarily hardware transformation and lighting (T&L), so Intel continued to develop software T&L in their GMA 3000 series of chips released in 2006. However, Microsoft failed to disclose that Vista would also require a hardware accelerated timer and because T&L on these Intel chips was in software, the timer also needed to be in software. Intel believed they had met all the requirements and suddenly had millions of chips they wouldn't be able to sell because MS didn't disclose one piece of necessary info and was pissed at MS, MS couldn't believe anyone was still making software T&L in 2006, and everyone was pissed at everyone else.
For one, OS X isn't tuned to be a server unless you get OSX Server. Not that OOTB OS X can't be tuned for decent server performance, but it does require a lot of BSD knowledge and tweaking (I would start with a sysctl -a and start tweaking those settings, then move to applications and dependencies).
I've never set up a mac as a UNIX file server (I user SMB/CIFS to back up my Windows machines), but AFP is the default (as others mentioned - it is NOT Andrew File System, but you can dl/use that if you want) and nfsd is included in the os install (/sbin/nfsd). I'm sure you can tweak your system to run that fairly well, but again, you'll probably be messing with a lot of settings you get for free in an OS tweaked for being a server rather than a client. AFP is traditional and probably default for the same reason SMB/CIFS is default on Windows - to maintain a fair degree of network compatibility with older systems. I would personally take NFS or AFS over either of them (AFS because I think it's cool, NFS because I'm intimately familiar with it from over 15 years of experience).
By the GPL supersedure clause - the GPL license forbids linking with any of its libraries without your software also being GPL and if it is not GPL, the GPL license supersedes your license. Many libraries are released with an exception to that rule (like gcc), but if you build, say, on Linux and want to release using BSD you'd better be very careful and check to make sure every library you use is not strict GPL.
The LGPL was written for anyone that wants to allow the library to be used in commercial applications but the FSF strongly discourages its use. It also is explicitly only valid for dynamic libraries, although plugins are valid if and only if the parent library is also LGPL.
The simple solution would be to not link against GPL'd libraries if you don't want to release as GPL, but on some platforms that is easier said than done.
Assuming the term 'vaporize' is truly meant and not disintegrated, which is more like what is shown (otherwise we'd see bones). Human perception would view them as roughly the same thing, so calling it vaporization could be human error. On the other hand, you'd probably have a sonic boom as elements expand in disintegration, so...
screw it - it's pseudo-science - they MADE IT UP.
Lightsabers are even more far-fetched - they would need a heated arcing plasma (or something like that) as well as a strong repulsive energy and one hell of a power source.
wasn't Warhammer Online almost completely designed around battlegrounds? I've heard it was better, but that was by Warhammer players.
I have only had a 30 day free acct for WoW and played exclusively PvE so I don't know how the PvP is, but I played lots of PvP in the Warhammer beta and heard it was similar to battlegrounds.
OTOH, I've never played Tabula Rasa, and yes their decision to scrap most of the game and start over was probably the major reason it cost so much.
I still don't think the monthly fee model will be successful for many games, yet many still try it. I think Guild Wars is probably the best content model, which basically took the magazine as a subscription model but I think they failed on execution by exclusively using zones, making PvE difficulty ramp up too quickly (esp. mid-to-late game - then compensating with consumables and heroes which makes those areas too easy) and putting the game too much on rails which I think limits the fun factor, not to mention almost completely killed the necessity for parties with skill programmable heroes (killing the social aspect almost completely). About the only time I play GW these days is when I delete a character and start over or play PvP - the early game is the only social part.
Which always goes back to WoW - they did the world model correct but I wish they'd have a different content model, which is basically charge for content and a monthy service fee to even play (which I call the ISP model), which to be honest is sustainable for that game and maybe a couple of other A list titles, but software as a service is easy to budget out (and fell to the budget axe at my house without me ever paying a service fee, as did Age of Conan, which I paid for the box and played only until the initial subscription expired) so most games that are not in this top tier are doomed to failure if they use that model.
The rest have to do something different if they want to succeed, whether that be micro payments or using a different model such as quarterly or yearly fees. The micro payment model tends to work better in Asia than the US because they tend to do everything around micro payments, including gaming time (in cafes). In the US I think the magazine model works better - charge a fixed fee for the game and a fixed fee for content updates, however, an in-game store or real-world trading auction house could be very profitable if done correctly (i.e. the auction house takes 10-20%, just like in the real world).
Funny thing is, MST3K's first day on KTMA is probably one of the most memorable days of my life, but not because of MST3K. I was sick with the worst case of strep throat I've ever had along with a high fever, and I couldn't go to the doctor because it was turkey day (plus my parents had company over). Between bouts of sleep (that never lasted long because of the pain) I was flipping through the channels on the TV in my room and I came across the show. I missed about the first 10 minutes and wasn't sure what was going on with the people in front. The jokes weren't funny or didn't make much sense to me for about the next 20-30 minutes before I realized they were trying to be funny (and I remember that joke was funny).
The jokes really were hit-and-miss early on. I think I missed episode 2 and maybe 3 (I thought it was a one-off and didn't realize it was a series), but I remember the second one I saw was better than the first and it generally improved from there.
I found Syberia boring aside from a few of the puzzles. I didn't connect in any way with the main character and for me that is a bad omen for non-violent games, though it certainly wasn't as bad as Midnight Nowhere (I *hated* that character). I should note that part of the problem was I had just finished The Longest Journey, which was fantastic. I actually didn't care much for the sequel, Dreamfall, however. The plot was good, but the action sequences were frustrating (not hard - it was more of a fighting the controls issue) and the game had more violence than the previous title. There really haven't been a lot of great adventure games in the past few years, IMO, certainly nothing that got me into the story like the old LucasArts games like Monkey Island, Full Throttle, or Grim Fandango, though it is possible the new Sam and Max episodes are good (unfortunately, I didn't find the original funny at all - each to their own humor-wise, I guess - so I haven't tried the episodes).
Um, while Settlers of Catan has no war, it does have Soldiers and a bandit that can steal all resources from a hex (soldiers can drive away the bandit). You can even win points by having the largest military (though personally I seem to always win by longest road). I have not played Pioneers, but from your description I would guess the mechanics are similar.
Well, there's also GNUStep, but that wouldn't be possible if Core Data is used. From my understanding, Core Data is more-or-less a database without a database - basically a uniform way of storing data objects so they can be read by many different programs (much like the dicts in mac, which are XML files, if I remember correctly).
The alternative would be to have an actual database backend and write the programs to use those data objects.
The advantage from the mac end is their data model ties directly into the Model part of the model-view-controller (MVC) presentation model, so it is fairly easy to write front-ends because you can do almost everything with gui tools where in the past you needed to write the data model as code. All data processing is still code, however (it's more of a convenient way to tie in the displaying and storage of data). I'm not sure how reusable it is because I've mostly just looked at some demos (most of my serious dev time has been devoted to Vista... not intentionally, more because Vista has been a hellish nightmare to support).
Most criminals think they won't get caught - if they thought they were going to get caught, they wouldn't be stupid enough to commit the crime.
There are smart criminals, but they think they can outsmart the system and usually make enough mistakes that they get caught (example: Hans Reiser). Then there are the somewhat smart ones that may pull off a spree for a while before screwing up (serial killers, some bank robbers). The really smart ones are not even detected or only leave evidence that a crime was committed, but not by who, which leaves us with what's left - the stupid ones. These are the ones that want to make a quick buck any way that is possible and don't do anything to cover their tracks (the "Hey Earl - let's do meth and rob us a bank just like on that there TV set!" type). I've known a few of these, like my ex-neighbor who liked to get drunk and beat his wife and daughter. He did that until he beat his daughter's friend and threatened to kill her in broad daylight in front of several witnesses (at least three called 911, including my wife, and we have a police station 4 blocks away), then he was dumb enough to also deck one of the officers that showed up about 2 minutes later (then they tazed him - wish I had been there - I got the story secondhand from my wife and this guy was on my top 10 list of people I'd love to see tazed or flogged - no part of him was nice). I didn't hear anything more directly, but according to another neighbor, he had been charged with aggravated assault, assaulting an officer and a couple of others (intent to do grievous bodily harm? This was about eight years ago - I forget the details).
Too bad the justice system and his poor little abused mouse of a wife were stupid. She posted bail (I don't know what it was set at, but he was free two days later) and the guy sold his house (at a fire sale price, I'm sure - I didn't think mortgages could close as fast as that one did) and left the state, wife and daughter in tow instead of going to trial. Police actually broke down the door of the new neighbor's house in a 5AM raid because they thought he was still there and was planning to flee (they missed him by 48 hours - he'd fled and the new people moved in the next day). I don't know if the guy was ever caught or extradited. Moral of story? You can be a jackass and an idiot and still get away with the crime without doing the time (but it will cost you).