Yep. There's a reason my favorite ship class for PvP is an interceptor. I'm perfectly capable of flying ships that can do 10 times as much damage per second, and absorb 50 times as much damage, but in exchange I lose the incredible speed, agility, and targeting speed of a frigate. Let somebody else bring the big guns - in the end I might do 1% of the damage to kill the enemy, but if it weren't for me he'd have gotten clean away.
Fighting two frigates against one another is even more fun, though relatively uncommon. Unlike normal combat (lock enemy ship, start orbiting them, activate guns and electronic warfare) in large ships, frigates are fast and agile enough to dogfight, and fragile enough that they must if they want to survive.
In any case, while training for interceptors will certainly take you at least a month (to be able to use them effectively, at least) and will cost you a few million ISK per hull, before the end of the tutorial missions you'll have a ship that can outfly anything bigger than a frigate and is perfectly capable of tackling. Sure, you'll do no damage and die in a second if anybody tries to kill you, but I'm talking about a ship that you can begin the game with skills to fly, and that can be purchased, outfitted, and insured for 2% of the cost of my interceptor's hull.
MS Word fully supports editable fields. You can even include "default" text (such as "XXX-YYY-YYYY" for a phone number) that is erased if somebody clicks on the field. The "Use a crap-ton of underscores" idea is from people who don't know how to use the software, not from a limitation of the format.
I'm not sure whether or not you can do verification of the fields without macros though, and I'm quite sure you can't submit them online. Not that writing macros is hard, or even terribly uncommon, but they raise security concerns of their own.
On the other hand, unlike Acrobat Reader, the default behavior in Word is *NOT* to execute macros. Hell, recent versions even have their own file extensions for macro-enabled documents (which you will still, by default, receive a warning about). Good luck trying to figure out whether a PDF has some JS in it before opening it...
You can have enough skill points to be useful in 0.0 (the unsecured space where players make all the rules and large alliances carve out empires) before the end the free trial. Sure, you won't be able to kill the most valuable NPCs or take on almost anybody in a solo fight, but you can make more than enough money to support buying the ships and gear that your skills allow you to use, and you can certainly be useful in a roaming gang or defensive camp. Heck, you might even get lucky and find some idiot with a hauler full of valuables and nobody escorting him (happened to me once) in which case you really only need a warp disrupter (cheap and easy to train for) and enough firepower to overcome the hauler's shield recharge rate (which you could get by your second day of playing the game).
EVE and CCP may never completely live down poor decisions on the part of several employees, but the game itself goes on and for most people such events are scarcely newsworthy for a week. While we'd certainly prefer if such things had never happened, they're old news - almost irrelevant by now - and the CCP has taken some fairly solid steps to prevent such things from happening again.
From the sound of it, this fight was executed wrong in almost every possible way, perhaps most importantly in that CCP wasn't notified ahead of time so they could put the system on high-end dedicated hardware. Consider also that having hundreds of people in the system used to be enough, by itself, to cause atrocious lag (even if they weren't fighting one another), a problem which is very rare today. Now, while fights with nearly 1000 player/side might still be a bit more than the game can handle, a few hundred per side is commonplace and a thousand total is well within the capabilities of the "reinforced" (with dedicated servers) nodes.
Only in EVE would you try and have thousands of players meet in a single location to fight.
From the sound of it, the number of people who were in that particular star system (or trying to get in) exceeds the number of players on many WOW instances. Yet, all in all, that was probably at most a few percent of the players online at the time, and they're all connected to the same game world.
That said, a single star system on EVE is hosted by a single physical server. Less-used systems can be grouped together to save on hardware, but for a big fight like this CCP fires up their most powerful hardware and puts the relevant system(s) on dedicated servers. While they're getting good at this - a few years ago 200 ships was a big fight, these days it's a common occurrence - it's still going to be an awful strain on the server to support that many players in combat. In a situation like that, the players need to take the limitations of computer hardware into account, and plan accordingly.
You, personally, might not want to read it - but for those of us who appreciate our science fiction without truly extensive suspension of disbelief (such as such as would be required for suspension of rocks in the sky) there's a whole lot of background information that explains much of the science, technology, and culture found in the movie.
Hopefully this isn't too much of a spoiler, but "unobtanium" is a natural, room-temperature superconductor. You remember the little chunk we're shown at the beginning? It's floating over a magnet. Take the same principle, but with chunks of mountain containing *lots* of unobtanium and a very strong magnetic field projected out of the ground, and you get flying mountains (perhaps with a little help from Pandora's low gravity). Oh, and regarding the name, I think that's a pretty good term for a material with properties like that. Science has been searching for such a thing for a long time, and it makes all sorts of interesting things possible (the term "unobtanium" has been used by scientists and engineers to describe a material currently unknown to science but which would have useful specific properties).
As far as the plot goes, yeah it's not the most original. On the other hand, the setting and backstory take an old story and give it quite a bit of new life, in my opinion. Beyond that, I thought the acting was good, the characters were brilliant, the message was not overly subtle yet I strongly agree with it, and the science as actually pretty good - they really did their homework on a lot of topics. Add in superlative special effects and the best 3D experience I've ever seen, and it's a movie I've seen twice already and will gladly see again.
When you consider that it's a room-temperature superconductor that makes interstellar travel (in the short range by interstellar measures; they're still limited to sub-lightspeed velocities) practical at all, I think "unobtanium" is a damn good name for the stuff. In any case, while it's probable that if the materials science folks ever do discover or develop such material they'll give it a long and inconvenient name which will be shortened to a quick and meaningless acronym, that doesn't mean "unobtanium" is an impossible name for such such a material.
Besides, for all we know it was just the "common name" for the stuff, and the scientific types did in fact have their own excessively syllabic nomenclature (a.k.a. stupidly long name).
While strictly speaking not planets, there are lots of other "heavenly bodies" that one might land on. The most obvious is Luna, although Titan and some of the other gas giant moons hold a degree of promise. Then there's the possibility of sending data to other planets but not to their surfaces - Venus' atmosphere may be hot and corrosive, but its orbital space is essentially clear. Suppose we wanted to send a manned orbital observation craft to Jupiter (for whatever reason) - would connecting it into this network not count as extending this Internet "to other planets"?
Did you even read the bits you quoted? URIs point to speciic servers, or at least to specific IP blocks behind the DNS lookup. The content might be in multiple locations, but there's no guarantee you'll get the closest or least-congested one. More importantly, once you have the content downloaded to your system, if your roommate goes looking for it (withint knowing you already have it) he or she will end up re-downloading that content from some distant machine identified by a URI, rather than asking the network for <structured-content-name> and having your computer announce the presence of a local copy.
It would either require a distributed search approach, or a content registration approach (with centralized search servers). The first is probably preferable - extend the peer-to-peer approach to cover everything one might download, rather than just the specific items that have been selected for sharing. Add some form of security/authentication/verification techniques (I'll admit I wouldn't know how to go about this, but it's still in research) to ensure that the content is available to you (not private) and that it's what you were looking for in the first place. For the actual transfer, one might use a BitTorrent-type approach (or something else entirely) but the point is the method by which you locate content.
Trying out Clear here in Seattle, it works well enough but is nothing to get excited over. Latency isn't atrocious but is unjustifiably high (pinging a server located a mile from here takes ~80ms, while on cable or the old Clearwire network it took about 9ms) and they appear to be routing my packets halfway across the country for no discernible reason. It's OK for RTS games but I wouldn't recommend it to a FPS gamer. Otherwise, it's been acceptable, and the pricing is pretty good.
Reliability isn't something I've used it long enough to determine. Over the course of 3 days it once went out for half a night (and their phone support was unavailable) but from online chat via another connection I found out that it was tower maintenance. No idea how often they need to do that, though... but if I hadn't been up really late (by the standards of the average person) I doubt I'd have noticed.
Bandwidth is actually quite good. I'm on the 3Mbps/512Kbps and speedtest.net reports average speeds of about 3.4Mbps/490Kbps. Clear WiMAX is pretty new in Seattle though, so it may be just a matter of time before the network is saturated.
Leak out, sure (if, for example, somebody hit the reactor with a bomb). How dangerous would it be? Well, you've probably heard of the Three Mile Island "disaster" (worst commercial reactor incident in US history). That reactor (of a type which was not passively safe, the way these would be) had some of its radioactive material "leak out" which certainly wasn't a good thing, but have you ever looked into how much damage it caused?
Death toll from direct exposure: 0. Not a single worker, nor anybody in the town Death toll from increased cancer incidence: estimated at possibly as high as 2 (impossible to measure exactly, no noticeable spike) Estimated average radiation exposure for people within 10 miles: a chest X-ray Estimated maximum exposure for any one person: roughly the same as four months worth of background radiation exposure by the average US citizen
This was decades ago, and we've learned a *lot* of lessons from it. The control scheme at the plant was bad, the workers were poorly trained, the equipment had a known problem (a critical valve that tended to stick), regulatory oversight was much lower than today, and the design of the reactor itself was vastly inferior to those we know how to build now. In over half a century of nuclear power, this is the worst event that has happened in the USA. Almost everything that *could* go wrong did... and the end fewer people died than one might expect from the average car accident.
You realize that for one of these reactors to melt down would require a violation of the laws of physics, right? It's about as likely as that the Titanic, with all its airspaces flooded by water, will one day spontaneously rise to the surface again.
The reason we are using up Uranium reserves isn't because we aren't mining enough, it's because we're wasting the vast majority. We could get at least 60x as much energy from current fuels if we reprocessed the usable material out of the waste. As a side effect, this would mean that very little actual waste product is produced, and that its period of dangerous radioactivity would be far, far shorter than that of current waste. In other words, we could cut Uranium consumption by well over an order of magnitude, while doing something more useful with reactor waste than trying to store it safely for millennia.
Unfortunately, it requires breeder reactors (very few are operational today, and building more would be expensive) and fuel reprocessing, which is also expensive (probably more expensive than mining and enriching raw Uranium at today's prices). The biggest problem though (and the main reason we don't do it in the US) is that the most common type of reprocessing we know of is to extract the weapons-grade fissionables, which obviously leads to proliferation concerns (although seriously, it's not like anybody is wondering whether or not the US has nukes yet... proliferation concerns within our borders seem a bit silly to me). There are other ways to do the reprocessing, which would extract usable fuel while leaving the really dangerous isotopes mixed up with the rest (and hence useless for bombs) but they're only starting to get real funding. As I mentioned before, it's expensive, especially when you're doing research rather than just using decades-old techniques.
We currently only use a small fraction of a percent of the energy in our Uranium fuels, and we only use a small percentage of Uranium (U235) in the majority of our current reactors. With full reprocessing (something that no nation currently does, as it's more expensive than just mining more even with the costs of storing un-reprocessed waste) we have enough fissionable fuels for breeder reactors to produce our current global electricity demand for roughly a billion (or milliard, i.e. 109) years. That's many times longer than the human race has existed thus far.
Granted, energy demand is constantly increasing, and a lot of the fuel is hard to extract (there's lots of Uranium in the oceans, but it's in very low concentration). Even so, we have decades of fuel available at current technologies and current price points. Thorium reactors would extend that by a factor of about 4, without even getting into breeder reactors or reprocessing. After a couple of centuries, we'll either have working fusion , vastly better mining technology, or vastly better reprocessing capability (this is already being worked on, via several approaches). That's not a major crisis, by any means - that long ago, we were still using coal-fired steam.
I suppose it depends on how you define "sustainable" though; eventually the sun will burn out and then your solar, wind, and hydro powers won't work anymore either. At the current rate of consumption though (roughly 15% of global electricity usage) we would *still* have plenty of fissionable fuel. That's sustainable enough for me.
You actually don't even need the BIOS emulation, though it may help. Since Vista SP1/Server 2008 (R1) it's been possible to install and run Windows on a x86/x64 machine that uses EFI (EFI was supported before for Itanium, I think).
Actually, I was somewhat impressed - compared to modern software it certainly looks dated, but not *as* dated as I expected. Things like the Font dialog, for example, were actually fairly modern in appearance. File Manager looks horribly dated compared to modern filesystem browsers with their previews and so forth, but for its time it was actually very impressive (different icons for file types, graphically hierarchical folder tree, the data at the bottom, and even the MDI - while MDI isn't used much anymore, at the time the ability to do something like look at 4 different parts of your filesystem within one application was pretty cool). Write (replaced by Wordpad in modern versions of Windows) supporting fonts and such on-screen was pretty cool too, even if the interface was lame. Sound Recorder looks shockingly similar to modern Windows versions too. Also, it's amusing how incredibly little Notepad has changed.
That's the damn catch. MS apparently figures that few enough people need SUA that they can use it as an incentive to sell the highest (most expensive) editions. I disagree with this philosophy - I think that the whole feature should be more highlighted, and more available - but they didn't ask me.
Incidentally, all editions of Windows Server can use it, and students can get Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition from http://dreamspark.com/ Since Server is essentially a superset of the functionality in the Client builds, if you want fancy features but don't want to buy Ultimate (and you're a student) then getting Server is probably the best bet.
I agree with you fully, however... DHTML (specifically, using JavaScript to make HTML dynamic) is a pretty fun and "instant gratification" sort of programming. You're using a real language that is in wide use today (albeit not one with particularly clean syntax or exceptionally large libraries), and something like a number-guessing game can be written in like 15 lines of code (plus some HTML to wrap it up).
That said, if you want to get into *programming* right off, starting with Visual Basic.NET is a decent enough pick. It's less bad-habit-inducing than previous flavors of BASIC, and a good IDE (such as Visual Basic Express Edition, which is free) will help you learn the libraries and even the syntax quite well. It's also very easy to write a simple GUI in it, and you can either go with procedural-style code or jump right into full OOP (one of the biggest advantages of VB.NET is that it is a "real* OOP language, with inheritance and generics and everything).
For bonus points, once you're familiar with core programming concepts and the standard.NET libraries, transitioning to C# is pretty easy - new syntax and slightly more complex structure but also more powerful, and it uses the same libraries. From there, moving to C/C++ isn't very difficult either. Each step changes as little as possible.
You've clearly never tried IE8's developer tools. Not to get too far off-topic, but they're extremely good, in some ways better than Firebug (not that I expect a newbie to need a script profiler). Syntax highlighting, breakpoints, debugging, immediate console, stack traces and locals windows, profiler, etc - just about everything you could want for scripting. Similar stuff for HTML and CSS.
Of course, the downside to using IE8 for scripting is that its scripting support, while much better and far, far faster than previous versions of IE, is still well behind the latest Firefox versions, and vastly inferior to something like Chrome.
Note that just because there are lots of people who don't know how to use something (Windows interface) doesn't inherently mean it's hard to use - there are lots of people who probably struggled with infant games involving putting square pegs in square holes and round ones in round holes. Some people just don't get any vaguely technical interface at all - they can learn to use it by rote, but they will never understand it really.
As a technical person who still has trouble with GNOME (I'm fine with KDE, but GNOME's configuration/customization is really unintuitive to me), I suspect that if you had equal numbers of GNOME-using friends as Widnows-using, you'd get a *lot* more questions from the GNOME users. One major advantage of Windows is that there's lots of ways to do the same thing, so whatever method somebody finds intuitive is often supported. By comparison, Linux interfaces seem to have lots of things that *look* like they should do the same thing, but in the end each is different, and you'll never find the right one on the first try.
How is it better, please? You've completely failed to explain anything.
List of things I *dislike* about it:
* Results in a huge number of open windows, most of which you don't want to use.
* At the end, you have a crapload of open windows to close
* Each new window open in a slightly different location, meaning your mouse pointer is no longer over the same part of the interface.
* There's no "Back" or "Up" buttons - to go to the previous or parent folder you must hunt out the desired window by mouse (or use Alt-Tab).
* No one-click navigation to just view a folder then go back (I use the back button on my mouse constantly).
* Once you close an un-wanted window, there's no way to get back to it (it if suddenly becomes wanted) short of re-opening every window between wherever your shortcut opens Nautilus, and that location.
* There's no easy way to jump from one part to a widely separated part of the filesystem (technically a feature of tree view, common in browser-view file managers).
So... what *is* the reasoning for spatial view? To me it's nothing but a hassle, a slowdown in the process, and cluttering of the screen/taskbar, and an inconvenience to those of us used to very rapid navigation using the mouse alone.
So do the Fedora (10, I think) machines in my school's computer lab. It drives me nuts trying to get those things behaving how I like - they seem to have basically every default wrong (it doesn't help that I'm not a GNOME user by default and thus don't have a lot of experience customizing it...)
Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?
on
Cygwin 1.7 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
You missed the part of the Wikipedia page that pointed out the Subsystem for UNIX Applications (SUA) which is the same feature on Vista, Win7, Server 2003 - 2008 R2, and presumeably future releases. There's no sign of it going away soon.
I use SUA (which, aside from install mechanic, is functionally identical to SFU plus some new features) all the time on Win7. My main CLI shell is bash (pinned to my taskbar), I use ssh more often than remote desktop, I use subversion in Interix rather than something like TortoiseSVN, and I once completed a substantial programming project (involving a multi-threaded, multi-process, networked program for embedded Linux) by developing (and testing) on Interix before (testing and) deploying on Linux. It was substantially easier than rebooting, virtualizing, or working remotely on my school's Linux servers.
Mingw may be faster than Cygwin (not hard), but I'd be surprised if it's faster than Interix (SFU/SUA). Interix binaries are "native" in the same sense that Win32 binaries are (technically speaking the NT kernel doesn't support either Win32 or POSIX syscalls directly; that's what its subsystems are for).
Furthermore, Interix is simultaneously better integrated with the OS and uses more *NIX-type behavior (case-sensitive UNIX-path filesystem, allows any extension or none at all on executables, etc.) Frankly, I also found it to be less of a hassle to set up than mingw.
To echo the thread-starter's question: what does it do that Interix doesn't, or what does it do better?
Re:makes windows marginally bearable
on
Cygwin 1.7 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
While it requires the higher editions of Windows (XP Pro, Vista/7 Enterprise or Ultimate, any Server edition), you must have missed the presence of the POSIX subsystem in NT (it's been there since the first releases of the OS, incidentally). Called the Subsystem for UNIX Applications (SUA) on recent versions, or Services For UNIX (SFU) on XP and before, the POSIX subsystem is free on supported Windows and includes a decent operating environment called Interix.
Interix includes a few hundred libraries and utilities, mostly BSD derived or SVR5-derived (you can choose which lineage you want at install) but also including things like the GNU build toolchain (gcc 3 and 4, with support for at least C, C++, and Fortran; I haven't tried any others). Additionally, you can install a package manager and an expanded/updated collection of tools and software from http://suacommunity.com/sua.aspx. Manpages are also included (both for bundled software and Interix packages).
Bash (along with other shells such as zsh) is available from suacommunity. Interix ships with csh and ksh. I use Interix bash as my standard Windows command line these days, including running Windows CLI utilities. I also run Python and Ruby interpreters from within Interix (suacommunity packages). You can even run graphical applications if you have an X server such as xming (the suacommunity bootstrapper will offer to install it).
If you have a version of Windows that supports the POSIX subsystem (businesses mostly will), I recommend it over Cygwin. For one thing, you get true *NIX behavior - executables are marked by permissions bits, not by extensions, the filesystem is case-sensitive (technically an install option for Interix, but one you definitely want), and you get UNIX-style permissions including working setUID and setGID (having a working sudo makes using the command line on a non-Administrator Windows session much more pleasant).
Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?
on
Cygwin 1.7 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
They are complimentary.
Just don't try running them side-by-side without a lot of tweaking. Both use a handful of system environment variables, with a number of collisions (PATH being an obvious one). Cygwin binaries are just wimple Win32 programs (exe/dll extension and all) while SUA binaries are not (they are true POSIX applications, although they use the PE binary format), but since SUA shells will also execute Win32 applications, typing something as simple as "ls" can be ambiguous - is it SUA's/bin/ls or Cygwin's/bin/ls.exe?
I had the bloody hardest time getting SUA working on a friend's machine once, until I realized he used Cygwin already. At that point I told him to just stick with one or the other per system - there's not enough advantage, and too much hassle, to having them installed on the same box.
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Yep. There's a reason my favorite ship class for PvP is an interceptor. I'm perfectly capable of flying ships that can do 10 times as much damage per second, and absorb 50 times as much damage, but in exchange I lose the incredible speed, agility, and targeting speed of a frigate. Let somebody else bring the big guns - in the end I might do 1% of the damage to kill the enemy, but if it weren't for me he'd have gotten clean away.
Fighting two frigates against one another is even more fun, though relatively uncommon. Unlike normal combat (lock enemy ship, start orbiting them, activate guns and electronic warfare) in large ships, frigates are fast and agile enough to dogfight, and fragile enough that they must if they want to survive.
In any case, while training for interceptors will certainly take you at least a month (to be able to use them effectively, at least) and will cost you a few million ISK per hull, before the end of the tutorial missions you'll have a ship that can outfly anything bigger than a frigate and is perfectly capable of tackling. Sure, you'll do no damage and die in a second if anybody tries to kill you, but I'm talking about a ship that you can begin the game with skills to fly, and that can be purchased, outfitted, and insured for 2% of the cost of my interceptor's hull.
MS Word fully supports editable fields. You can even include "default" text (such as "XXX-YYY-YYYY" for a phone number) that is erased if somebody clicks on the field. The "Use a crap-ton of underscores" idea is from people who don't know how to use the software, not from a limitation of the format.
I'm not sure whether or not you can do verification of the fields without macros though, and I'm quite sure you can't submit them online. Not that writing macros is hard, or even terribly uncommon, but they raise security concerns of their own.
On the other hand, unlike Acrobat Reader, the default behavior in Word is *NOT* to execute macros. Hell, recent versions even have their own file extensions for macro-enabled documents (which you will still, by default, receive a warning about). Good luck trying to figure out whether a PDF has some JS in it before opening it...
Mod parent up!
You can have enough skill points to be useful in 0.0 (the unsecured space where players make all the rules and large alliances carve out empires) before the end the free trial. Sure, you won't be able to kill the most valuable NPCs or take on almost anybody in a solo fight, but you can make more than enough money to support buying the ships and gear that your skills allow you to use, and you can certainly be useful in a roaming gang or defensive camp. Heck, you might even get lucky and find some idiot with a hauler full of valuables and nobody escorting him (happened to me once) in which case you really only need a warp disrupter (cheap and easy to train for) and enough firepower to overcome the hauler's shield recharge rate (which you could get by your second day of playing the game).
EVE and CCP may never completely live down poor decisions on the part of several employees, but the game itself goes on and for most people such events are scarcely newsworthy for a week. While we'd certainly prefer if such things had never happened, they're old news - almost irrelevant by now - and the CCP has taken some fairly solid steps to prevent such things from happening again.
From the sound of it, this fight was executed wrong in almost every possible way, perhaps most importantly in that CCP wasn't notified ahead of time so they could put the system on high-end dedicated hardware. Consider also that having hundreds of people in the system used to be enough, by itself, to cause atrocious lag (even if they weren't fighting one another), a problem which is very rare today. Now, while fights with nearly 1000 player/side might still be a bit more than the game can handle, a few hundred per side is commonplace and a thousand total is well within the capabilities of the "reinforced" (with dedicated servers) nodes.
Only in EVE would you try and have thousands of players meet in a single location to fight.
From the sound of it, the number of people who were in that particular star system (or trying to get in) exceeds the number of players on many WOW instances. Yet, all in all, that was probably at most a few percent of the players online at the time, and they're all connected to the same game world.
That said, a single star system on EVE is hosted by a single physical server. Less-used systems can be grouped together to save on hardware, but for a big fight like this CCP fires up their most powerful hardware and puts the relevant system(s) on dedicated servers. While they're getting good at this - a few years ago 200 ships was a big fight, these days it's a common occurrence - it's still going to be an awful strain on the server to support that many players in combat. In a situation like that, the players need to take the limitations of computer hardware into account, and plan accordingly.
You, personally, might not want to read it - but for those of us who appreciate our science fiction without truly extensive suspension of disbelief (such as such as would be required for suspension of rocks in the sky) there's a whole lot of background information that explains much of the science, technology, and culture found in the movie.
Hopefully this isn't too much of a spoiler, but "unobtanium" is a natural, room-temperature superconductor. You remember the little chunk we're shown at the beginning? It's floating over a magnet. Take the same principle, but with chunks of mountain containing *lots* of unobtanium and a very strong magnetic field projected out of the ground, and you get flying mountains (perhaps with a little help from Pandora's low gravity). Oh, and regarding the name, I think that's a pretty good term for a material with properties like that. Science has been searching for such a thing for a long time, and it makes all sorts of interesting things possible (the term "unobtanium" has been used by scientists and engineers to describe a material currently unknown to science but which would have useful specific properties).
As far as the plot goes, yeah it's not the most original. On the other hand, the setting and backstory take an old story and give it quite a bit of new life, in my opinion. Beyond that, I thought the acting was good, the characters were brilliant, the message was not overly subtle yet I strongly agree with it, and the science as actually pretty good - they really did their homework on a lot of topics. Add in superlative special effects and the best 3D experience I've ever seen, and it's a movie I've seen twice already and will gladly see again.
When you consider that it's a room-temperature superconductor that makes interstellar travel (in the short range by interstellar measures; they're still limited to sub-lightspeed velocities) practical at all, I think "unobtanium" is a damn good name for the stuff. In any case, while it's probable that if the materials science folks ever do discover or develop such material they'll give it a long and inconvenient name which will be shortened to a quick and meaningless acronym, that doesn't mean "unobtanium" is an impossible name for such such a material.
Besides, for all we know it was just the "common name" for the stuff, and the scientific types did in fact have their own excessively syllabic nomenclature (a.k.a. stupidly long name).
While strictly speaking not planets, there are lots of other "heavenly bodies" that one might land on. The most obvious is Luna, although Titan and some of the other gas giant moons hold a degree of promise. Then there's the possibility of sending data to other planets but not to their surfaces - Venus' atmosphere may be hot and corrosive, but its orbital space is essentially clear. Suppose we wanted to send a manned orbital observation craft to Jupiter (for whatever reason) - would connecting it into this network not count as extending this Internet "to other planets"?
Did you even read the bits you quoted? URIs point to speciic servers, or at least to specific IP blocks behind the DNS lookup. The content might be in multiple locations, but there's no guarantee you'll get the closest or least-congested one. More importantly, once you have the content downloaded to your system, if your roommate goes looking for it (withint knowing you already have it) he or she will end up re-downloading that content from some distant machine identified by a URI, rather than asking the network for <structured-content-name> and having your computer announce the presence of a local copy.
It would either require a distributed search approach, or a content registration approach (with centralized search servers). The first is probably preferable - extend the peer-to-peer approach to cover everything one might download, rather than just the specific items that have been selected for sharing. Add some form of security/authentication/verification techniques (I'll admit I wouldn't know how to go about this, but it's still in research) to ensure that the content is available to you (not private) and that it's what you were looking for in the first place. For the actual transfer, one might use a BitTorrent-type approach (or something else entirely) but the point is the method by which you locate content.
Trying out Clear here in Seattle, it works well enough but is nothing to get excited over. Latency isn't atrocious but is unjustifiably high (pinging a server located a mile from here takes ~80ms, while on cable or the old Clearwire network it took about 9ms) and they appear to be routing my packets halfway across the country for no discernible reason. It's OK for RTS games but I wouldn't recommend it to a FPS gamer. Otherwise, it's been acceptable, and the pricing is pretty good.
Reliability isn't something I've used it long enough to determine. Over the course of 3 days it once went out for half a night (and their phone support was unavailable) but from online chat via another connection I found out that it was tower maintenance. No idea how often they need to do that, though... but if I hadn't been up really late (by the standards of the average person) I doubt I'd have noticed.
Bandwidth is actually quite good. I'm on the 3Mbps/512Kbps and speedtest.net reports average speeds of about 3.4Mbps/490Kbps. Clear WiMAX is pretty new in Seattle though, so it may be just a matter of time before the network is saturated.
Leak out, sure (if, for example, somebody hit the reactor with a bomb). How dangerous would it be? Well, you've probably heard of the Three Mile Island "disaster" (worst commercial reactor incident in US history). That reactor (of a type which was not passively safe, the way these would be) had some of its radioactive material "leak out" which certainly wasn't a good thing, but have you ever looked into how much damage it caused?
Death toll from direct exposure: 0. Not a single worker, nor anybody in the town
Death toll from increased cancer incidence: estimated at possibly as high as 2 (impossible to measure exactly, no noticeable spike)
Estimated average radiation exposure for people within 10 miles: a chest X-ray
Estimated maximum exposure for any one person: roughly the same as four months worth of background radiation exposure by the average US citizen
This was decades ago, and we've learned a *lot* of lessons from it. The control scheme at the plant was bad, the workers were poorly trained, the equipment had a known problem (a critical valve that tended to stick), regulatory oversight was much lower than today, and the design of the reactor itself was vastly inferior to those we know how to build now. In over half a century of nuclear power, this is the worst event that has happened in the USA. Almost everything that *could* go wrong did... and the end fewer people died than one might expect from the average car accident.
You realize that for one of these reactors to melt down would require a violation of the laws of physics, right? It's about as likely as that the Titanic, with all its airspaces flooded by water, will one day spontaneously rise to the surface again.
The reason we are using up Uranium reserves isn't because we aren't mining enough, it's because we're wasting the vast majority. We could get at least 60x as much energy from current fuels if we reprocessed the usable material out of the waste. As a side effect, this would mean that very little actual waste product is produced, and that its period of dangerous radioactivity would be far, far shorter than that of current waste. In other words, we could cut Uranium consumption by well over an order of magnitude, while doing something more useful with reactor waste than trying to store it safely for millennia.
Unfortunately, it requires breeder reactors (very few are operational today, and building more would be expensive) and fuel reprocessing, which is also expensive (probably more expensive than mining and enriching raw Uranium at today's prices). The biggest problem though (and the main reason we don't do it in the US) is that the most common type of reprocessing we know of is to extract the weapons-grade fissionables, which obviously leads to proliferation concerns (although seriously, it's not like anybody is wondering whether or not the US has nukes yet... proliferation concerns within our borders seem a bit silly to me). There are other ways to do the reprocessing, which would extract usable fuel while leaving the really dangerous isotopes mixed up with the rest (and hence useless for bombs) but they're only starting to get real funding. As I mentioned before, it's expensive, especially when you're doing research rather than just using decades-old techniques.
We currently only use a small fraction of a percent of the energy in our Uranium fuels, and we only use a small percentage of Uranium (U235) in the majority of our current reactors. With full reprocessing (something that no nation currently does, as it's more expensive than just mining more even with the costs of storing un-reprocessed waste) we have enough fissionable fuels for breeder reactors to produce our current global electricity demand for roughly a billion (or milliard, i.e. 109) years. That's many times longer than the human race has existed thus far.
Granted, energy demand is constantly increasing, and a lot of the fuel is hard to extract (there's lots of Uranium in the oceans, but it's in very low concentration). Even so, we have decades of fuel available at current technologies and current price points. Thorium reactors would extend that by a factor of about 4, without even getting into breeder reactors or reprocessing. After a couple of centuries, we'll either have working fusion , vastly better mining technology, or vastly better reprocessing capability (this is already being worked on, via several approaches). That's not a major crisis, by any means - that long ago, we were still using coal-fired steam.
I suppose it depends on how you define "sustainable" though; eventually the sun will burn out and then your solar, wind, and hydro powers won't work anymore either. At the current rate of consumption though (roughly 15% of global electricity usage) we would *still* have plenty of fissionable fuel. That's sustainable enough for me.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_power#Conventional_fuel_resources
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html
You actually don't even need the BIOS emulation, though it may help. Since Vista SP1/Server 2008 (R1) it's been possible to install and run Windows on a x86/x64 machine that uses EFI (EFI was supported before for Itanium, I think).
In any case, Win7 certainly supports EFI.
Actually, I was somewhat impressed - compared to modern software it certainly looks dated, but not *as* dated as I expected. Things like the Font dialog, for example, were actually fairly modern in appearance. File Manager looks horribly dated compared to modern filesystem browsers with their previews and so forth, but for its time it was actually very impressive (different icons for file types, graphically hierarchical folder tree, the data at the bottom, and even the MDI - while MDI isn't used much anymore, at the time the ability to do something like look at 4 different parts of your filesystem within one application was pretty cool). Write (replaced by Wordpad in modern versions of Windows) supporting fonts and such on-screen was pretty cool too, even if the interface was lame. Sound Recorder looks shockingly similar to modern Windows versions too. Also, it's amusing how incredibly little Notepad has changed.
That's the damn catch. MS apparently figures that few enough people need SUA that they can use it as an incentive to sell the highest (most expensive) editions. I disagree with this philosophy - I think that the whole feature should be more highlighted, and more available - but they didn't ask me.
Incidentally, all editions of Windows Server can use it, and students can get Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition from http://dreamspark.com/ Since Server is essentially a superset of the functionality in the Client builds, if you want fancy features but don't want to buy Ultimate (and you're a student) then getting Server is probably the best bet.
I agree with you fully, however... DHTML (specifically, using JavaScript to make HTML dynamic) is a pretty fun and "instant gratification" sort of programming. You're using a real language that is in wide use today (albeit not one with particularly clean syntax or exceptionally large libraries), and something like a number-guessing game can be written in like 15 lines of code (plus some HTML to wrap it up).
That said, if you want to get into *programming* right off, starting with Visual Basic.NET is a decent enough pick. It's less bad-habit-inducing than previous flavors of BASIC, and a good IDE (such as Visual Basic Express Edition, which is free) will help you learn the libraries and even the syntax quite well. It's also very easy to write a simple GUI in it, and you can either go with procedural-style code or jump right into full OOP (one of the biggest advantages of VB.NET is that it is a "real* OOP language, with inheritance and generics and everything).
For bonus points, once you're familiar with core programming concepts and the standard .NET libraries, transitioning to C# is pretty easy - new syntax and slightly more complex structure but also more powerful, and it uses the same libraries. From there, moving to C/C++ isn't very difficult either. Each step changes as little as possible.
You've clearly never tried IE8's developer tools. Not to get too far off-topic, but they're extremely good, in some ways better than Firebug (not that I expect a newbie to need a script profiler). Syntax highlighting, breakpoints, debugging, immediate console, stack traces and locals windows, profiler, etc - just about everything you could want for scripting. Similar stuff for HTML and CSS.
Of course, the downside to using IE8 for scripting is that its scripting support, while much better and far, far faster than previous versions of IE, is still well behind the latest Firefox versions, and vastly inferior to something like Chrome.
Note that just because there are lots of people who don't know how to use something (Windows interface) doesn't inherently mean it's hard to use - there are lots of people who probably struggled with infant games involving putting square pegs in square holes and round ones in round holes. Some people just don't get any vaguely technical interface at all - they can learn to use it by rote, but they will never understand it really.
As a technical person who still has trouble with GNOME (I'm fine with KDE, but GNOME's configuration/customization is really unintuitive to me), I suspect that if you had equal numbers of GNOME-using friends as Widnows-using, you'd get a *lot* more questions from the GNOME users. One major advantage of Windows is that there's lots of ways to do the same thing, so whatever method somebody finds intuitive is often supported. By comparison, Linux interfaces seem to have lots of things that *look* like they should do the same thing, but in the end each is different, and you'll never find the right one on the first try.
How is it better, please? You've completely failed to explain anything.
List of things I *dislike* about it:
* Results in a huge number of open windows, most of which you don't want to use.
* At the end, you have a crapload of open windows to close
* Each new window open in a slightly different location, meaning your mouse pointer is no longer over the same part of the interface.
* There's no "Back" or "Up" buttons - to go to the previous or parent folder you must hunt out the desired window by mouse (or use Alt-Tab).
* No one-click navigation to just view a folder then go back (I use the back button on my mouse constantly).
* Once you close an un-wanted window, there's no way to get back to it (it if suddenly becomes wanted) short of re-opening every window between wherever your shortcut opens Nautilus, and that location.
* There's no easy way to jump from one part to a widely separated part of the filesystem (technically a feature of tree view, common in browser-view file managers).
So... what *is* the reasoning for spatial view? To me it's nothing but a hassle, a slowdown in the process, and cluttering of the screen/taskbar, and an inconvenience to those of us used to very rapid navigation using the mouse alone.
So do the Fedora (10, I think) machines in my school's computer lab. It drives me nuts trying to get those things behaving how I like - they seem to have basically every default wrong (it doesn't help that I'm not a GNOME user by default and thus don't have a lot of experience customizing it...)
You missed the part of the Wikipedia page that pointed out the Subsystem for UNIX Applications (SUA) which is the same feature on Vista, Win7, Server 2003 - 2008 R2, and presumeably future releases. There's no sign of it going away soon.
I use SUA (which, aside from install mechanic, is functionally identical to SFU plus some new features) all the time on Win7. My main CLI shell is bash (pinned to my taskbar), I use ssh more often than remote desktop, I use subversion in Interix rather than something like TortoiseSVN, and I once completed a substantial programming project (involving a multi-threaded, multi-process, networked program for embedded Linux) by developing (and testing) on Interix before (testing and) deploying on Linux. It was substantially easier than rebooting, virtualizing, or working remotely on my school's Linux servers.
Mingw may be faster than Cygwin (not hard), but I'd be surprised if it's faster than Interix (SFU/SUA). Interix binaries are "native" in the same sense that Win32 binaries are (technically speaking the NT kernel doesn't support either Win32 or POSIX syscalls directly; that's what its subsystems are for).
Furthermore, Interix is simultaneously better integrated with the OS and uses more *NIX-type behavior (case-sensitive UNIX-path filesystem, allows any extension or none at all on executables, etc.) Frankly, I also found it to be less of a hassle to set up than mingw.
To echo the thread-starter's question: what does it do that Interix doesn't, or what does it do better?
While it requires the higher editions of Windows (XP Pro, Vista/7 Enterprise or Ultimate, any Server edition), you must have missed the presence of the POSIX subsystem in NT (it's been there since the first releases of the OS, incidentally). Called the Subsystem for UNIX Applications (SUA) on recent versions, or Services For UNIX (SFU) on XP and before, the POSIX subsystem is free on supported Windows and includes a decent operating environment called Interix.
Interix includes a few hundred libraries and utilities, mostly BSD derived or SVR5-derived (you can choose which lineage you want at install) but also including things like the GNU build toolchain (gcc 3 and 4, with support for at least C, C++, and Fortran; I haven't tried any others). Additionally, you can install a package manager and an expanded/updated collection of tools and software from http://suacommunity.com/sua.aspx. Manpages are also included (both for bundled software and Interix packages).
Bash (along with other shells such as zsh) is available from suacommunity. Interix ships with csh and ksh. I use Interix bash as my standard Windows command line these days, including running Windows CLI utilities. I also run Python and Ruby interpreters from within Interix (suacommunity packages). You can even run graphical applications if you have an X server such as xming (the suacommunity bootstrapper will offer to install it).
If you have a version of Windows that supports the POSIX subsystem (businesses mostly will), I recommend it over Cygwin. For one thing, you get true *NIX behavior - executables are marked by permissions bits, not by extensions, the filesystem is case-sensitive (technically an install option for Interix, but one you definitely want), and you get UNIX-style permissions including working setUID and setGID (having a working sudo makes using the command line on a non-Administrator Windows session much more pleasant).
Just don't try running them side-by-side without a lot of tweaking. Both use a handful of system environment variables, with a number of collisions (PATH being an obvious one). Cygwin binaries are just wimple Win32 programs (exe/dll extension and all) while SUA binaries are not (they are true POSIX applications, although they use the PE binary format), but since SUA shells will also execute Win32 applications, typing something as simple as "ls" can be ambiguous - is it SUA's /bin/ls or Cygwin's /bin/ls.exe?
I had the bloody hardest time getting SUA working on a friend's machine once, until I realized he used Cygwin already. At that point I told him to just stick with one or the other per system - there's not enough advantage, and too much hassle, to having them installed on the same box.