Backing up the installer, or indeed the installed binaries, does very little good if the game needs to connect to an authentication server that has gone offline. Heck, even if the server is still online, your authorization may be refused on the grounds that the current installation is different from the first one, and you're only allowed to install once (the number varies, some allow as many as 5 times - which is probably enough for most people, though not for all - but in any case there's no guarantee your backup will work).
I was just thinking this, and was surprised nobody had commented. Theoretically, yes, I think it could. However, it would be very difficult to make a sufficiently large magnetic field with sufficent strength, and I think you could only do it on one deck at a time - the magnetic field would otherwise probably prefer to go through the deck, rather than the corridor or whatever.
Much worse, however, is what happens when anything strongly ferromagnetic enters the field. *You* might get accelerated download at something approximating 1 G (or even a fraction of it) but that wrench you're carrying might become very hard to hold onto, and I strongly suspect it would destroy a computer hard drive. Solid-state storage might be OK, but the induced electric field as the wires enter or leave the magnetic field could do some pretty awful things.
Odd... Windows has had at least partial support for UDF since Windows 2000, and if you put a DVD (most of which use UDF) in the drive it certainly would work.
Riiiiight. Leaving aside the question of what this does to the MBR and partition tables on the device (which most OSes attempt to do something with) or of how you get the info back off with Windows (it's possible, but there's no built-in utility to do so), exactly how do you keep track of the number of bytes that you need to copy off? In fact, there's an awful lot of info that would be missing - file size, name, datestamps... yeah.
Seriously, is this what passes for an "interesting" post on Slashdot these days? An amusing suggestion, yes, but far from practical. Humorous as an absurd suggestion at best.
We go over the theory and history of operating systems, and in particular kernels. We consider the inherent trade-offs in scheduling and other resource allocations, consider ways to prevent deadlocks, and so forth. The course is partially pure theory (ideal algorithms, the theoretical advantages of different kernel designs, etc.), partially discussions of operating system features in the real world (processes and threads, memory mapping, hardware abstraction, program loading, etc.), and partially hands-on experience.
The NT or Linux portion of the course is simply a question of which real-world kernel we get hands-on with. Admittedly, we learn a fair bit that is specific to that kernel - having taken the one that uses the WRK, I know quite a bit about NT's IRPs (I/O Request Packets, data structures used to communicate between kernel components), for example - but the class is NOT a study of a particular operating system. We simply choose a particular implementation that we want practical experience with; in a course with only 10 weeks for instruction, there's really not time to study the implementation of multiple kernels.
Thanks, I was about to post much the same... but of course the/. crowd would rather read the random anecdote that might have been true two years ago than accept that Microsoft actually patched one of their favorite little things to whine about.
For the record, the problem mostly occurred when trying to copy really large numbers of files. Single files (including Zip archives) copied just fine. Copying using the command line also worked fine. However, Vista's version of Windows Explorer had some severe issues with recursive operations, and in the RTM build a deep copy across the network would indeed take ages.
OEM editions of Vista (actually, of any Windows release, but its particularly noticeable with Vista) are absolute shit. Anybody on this site should know to *always* reformat and do a clean install. OEMs replace system functionality, bundle unneccessary performance-eating software, and include unstable drivers that cause BSODs. A clean install will run smoothly on a laptop with 1GB of RAM, a single-core 1.8GHz Turion, and integrated video (I've done it, and no I didn't disable halpful stuff like the search or superfetch). It won't crash randomly as long as you use reliable drivers (sometimes it's hard to be sure, but most non-beta WHQL drivers are fine). Framerates in games will be within 5% of XP (admittedly wth the GPU it had this isn't saying much).
OEM installations of Vista are responsible for a large part of the public's low perception of Vista. I've given a few people clean installs (at no cost to them, using the key that came with their computer) and turned their perceptions around pretty much 180 degrees. Unfortunately it's a hassle to do once everything is already installed, but doing it once will save a lot of frustration later.
If you sincerely think that the average user is happier to hunt down a option somewhere in their new program that sets what file types it opens (as opposed to being presented with a one-time dialog during installation) you are so far out of touch with the reality of how people use computers that I honestly can't help but wonder if you're just trolling. Real *used* to just hijack all the extensions (I don't think it does anymore, but I can't say for sure as I don't use it) but a one-time dialog makes perfect sense. Do you walso think that every time you install a new web browser, it shouldn't have an option for making the newly-installed browser your default?
Besides, you're still not addressing the main point of the GP. On a Mac, you're not even able to set those defaults. They're part of each file's metadata, editable only on a case-by-case basis. If a file happens to lack such metadata you can change what the preferred fallback is, but you can't say "I just installed VLC because I like it, now make all my media open in it."
Your post is so internally inconsistent it's ridiculous. You claim
You'd have to switch your iTunes or WinAmp or whatever over to Linux. No photoshop, different camera software, OpenOffice instead of Word, no games, etc., etc.
but just a little further down you point out the option to
either dual-boot or run Windows in a VM.
You can still use the software you like, the interface you know, the system that you've set up over time - and simultaneously be able to run the software needed for school (or work).
Assuming you have a x86-based CPU and a reasonably-sized hard drive (most laptops come with at least 160GB these days), installing Windows is not difficult, and no more expensive than the cost of the license (often very cheap for students, and worth asking about if you'll need it) and your time. Dual-booting is annoying, but assuming you have a Linux system that actually hibernates reliably it doesn't actually take that long. Virtualizing is even faster, and although it stresses your system more, most computers have easily enough RAM and processing power to do so.
Baseless accusations, much? For the TL;DR folks: UW uses Linux extensively, and it is required for many of our CSE clesses.
The UW offers OS courses on both the NT and Linux kernels - Neil chose to take the NT one, but in terms of degree progress the Linux version of the OS course is exactly equivalent. The CSE undergraduate labs are a mix of Windows and Linux boxes. The department offers a few Windows servers for student use, but the majority of the servers, including the file server, mail server, and cycle server are all Linux-based.
As for the required courses, one of the earliest courses in the curriculum teaches basic Linux knowledge, ranging from shell familiarity and manpages to scripting and regular expressions, plus gcc, make (and writing makefiles), and so forth. Later classes include security (one of the programming projects specificaly requires Linux and GDB knowledge), embedded systems (the latter half of the class uses an ARM chip running Linux, and we are required to modify a kernel driver and use the ALSA API), Networking (this one varies, but usually involves developing for a device like a router or N800, running Linux).
For those who don't know, the WRK is a mostly-complete source code distribution of the Windows 2000 kernel (NT 5.0). It's made available for academic and research uses. While the source isn't included for every single component, there's more then enough there to understand how the kernel works, how its components communicate, and to write your own extensions or modifications (system calls, changes to the scheduler, doing things at different points during initialization, modifying included drivers and so forth).
UW also offers OS courses based on the Linux kernel; which you take is a matter of preference as they satisfy the same prerequisites and are treated as equal in terms of degree progress.
While partially true, this is much like the way that, a hundred years ago, natural oild wells were under enough pressure that the oil could be extracted without pumping at all. This made oil cheap and plentiful, which led us to build an economy around it, such that when the easy oil ran out, it was economically feasible to drill for deeper deposits, pump the oil out of the ground, use offshore rigs, and so forth.
Similarly, just because the easily-accessible natural U238/U235 deposits will run out within a century or so doesn't mean that we can't use them - there's more down there, it'll just cost a bit more to extract. Then, as you mention, there are breeder reactors - lots of fuel for those already available from the waste of current reactors.
Indeed. OP should have said "so long since we have built a new commercial reactor in this country" since the Navy has been building them into its ships and submarines for decades now.
No, you're actually about right. The WoT books are typically around 800 pages (only one that I can remember broke 1000, and a few were in the 600s). Sanderson's conclusion was going to be over 1200 (but not by a huge amount, IIRC) and wouldn't have been finished by the end of this year (when it was promised). He would ahve split it into two books about the length of the rest of the series, but there was no good splitting point near the middle. So he split it into three books, each substantially shorter than the others, and finished the first one on time.
Lets say I have a computer in my house that uses 300W of power (if it's a gaming machine, that's actually quite low even before you consider a monitor). I use it 3-4 hours a day (less on worknights, more on weekends or when friends come over for a LAN party). That's a KWH right there. Now lets suppose my son also likes playing games, and when he's not on his PC (separate from mine) he's on the Xbox 360. That could easily be another KWH (more if you have multiple children, or they have a lot of friends). Suppose my wife works from home as a writer. Her computer isn't terribly powerful, but she's on it 8 hours a day, and when she's off the computer she'll have the TV on.
Now on top of an easy 2-3 KWH/day from that kind of technology alone, you've got things like electric stove/oven, electric water heater, refridgerator (at least one), lights, AC or heating (depending on time of year / climate), and various auxilliary power draws (spend an hour a week using a 700W vacuum cleaner? That's 0.1 KWH/day for that alone). Power demand also grows quickly if you have things like a pool or hot tub, a serious home theatre, a plug-in hybrid car (not common but available), heat lamps (for pets or any other reason), or lots of other things like that. Those KWHs add up quickly.
You're just perpetuating the problem (people thinking that the beam is dangerous, that it even *can* go off track, or that it's something you'd want "out of the way"). Do you honestly think these concerns haven't been brought up before to the people involved? Don't you think those people probably know a lot more about the topic than you? They're probably even smart enough to do a little research before running their mouth (keyboard?) on a public forum.
You could start with Wikipedia and maybe some of the external links at the bottom if you're not willing to look into it seriously, but please put in at least a little effort? Offshore stations create more problems than they solve, largely because they are "solutions" in search of a problem.
99%+ of the heat energy on the Earth is from the sun... Now beam in more
while reducing greenhouse gases, so we trap much less and that excess energy can escape into space!
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good idea.
(Please note utter lack of sarcasm. You really should do some research on this topic - the amount of extra energy is trivial compared to the issule of how we're stopping energy from radiating away from Earth)
Pollution would be less of a problem if there were fewer people creating it.
Only if you assume that per-capita pollution remains the same. This is a completely unreasonable assumption - if it were true, the US wouldn't have ever become the massive polluter that we are today, simply because we have 1/12th or so of the total global population (yet produce a far greater percentage of the total pollution).
Japan's population could drop by 50% in 20 years (they probably won't, but it could) and they would still end up needing more energy, most likely. It's not just a matter of homes - there's also manufacturing, transportation, computing (data clusters are a significant consumer of US energy supplies), communication, and all the myriad other things that require energy in modern society (and will require more energy in future society). People will be carrying more hardware that needs more electricity to charge (it'll get the same battery life, but simply because battery technology is also improving), using electric-powered cars more (which may use less total energy than gasoline-powered cars, but use far more electricity), and houses will have more power-using technology as it becomes more affordable and usable.
Mind you, I completely agree that overpopulation is problem that needs to be addressed. However, to claim that we shouldn't be trying to increase our resources - in particular, trying to increase our supply of a resource for which demand grows far out of proportion to population - is foolish. The best option is to address both at once, and create a better life with a stable and sustainable population, without hindering technological advancement. The approach under discussion here is a partial solution, and only a fool as great as you seem to be would imply it either solves nothing or solves everything.
Leaving aside the question of security, why the hell would somebody run such an outdated web server on brand new hardware? Web servers, database serers, mail servers... all software of that nature has been becoming increasingly multi-threaded over the past few years. IIS 5 is pushing a decade old; the only place you'd run something like that would be on a virtualized system that probably can't access more than 1 core anyhow (making it perfectly reasonable to use software that isn't incredibly parallel).
Please don't take the following as a direct support of the GP post; it is a refutation of the parent post and not a support fo the practice of copy/pasting quotes into largely unrelated discussions. If the parent hadn't been modded up, I wouldn't have bothered. Something like this really needs a response, though.
GNU (recursive acronym for "GNU's Not UNIX!") is an operating system. The only portion of the system that is called HURD is the kernel, which is certainly not an entire OS. It's quite possibly the most important of one, but does not constitute a complete operating system by any means.
As for "redefining words" you're doing more than a bit of that yourself. A kernel is "the central or most important part" and, in a computing context, "The essential part of Unix or other operating systems, responsible for resource allocation, low-level hardware interfaces, security etc." (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/kernel) Note the key word "part" that is present in both definitions. A kernel, such as Linux or HURD, is definitely only part of an operating system.
That said, "GNU slash Linux" or "GNU plus Linux" is a pretty silly name. Referring to an OS by its kernel is not a universal practice - OS X is almost never referred to by the name of its kernel (XNU, a derivative of Mach), although of Windows such as Vista or Windows 7 are occasionally referred to as "Windows NT" or even "NT" - but it suffices for the purposes of Linux. That said, it's understandable that Stallman and the GNU project in general would like acknowledgement of how much of the OS that most people call "Linux" was not written by, or in any conjunction with, Linus Torvalds.
Hmm... my CS curriculum must be pretty weird, then. In neither high school nor university have I taken any class that even suggested Visual Studio. I can and have used it on some of my assignments, but I've also used kate, gvim, netbeans, eclipse (OK, this one was for work; I prefer NB for my Java coding), and even Monodevelop (which is sadly inferior to VS, but gets the job done for C# and can even use VS project files). I think the only major code editor I've never used is Xcode, although I'm not personally a fan of emacs.
As for using a makefile... makefiles are easy; the basic knowledge required is the material of a single 50-minute lesson at worst. Learning the intricacies of GNU make vs. bmake vs. cmake vs. nmake is an irritating, but not difficult, exercise in use of a search engine. On the other hand, I've not found much where a makefile is actually the best possible way to do something. Sometimes it's the best solution easily available, but I'd really rather let my development tools take care fo that for me, so I can focus on writing and testing code.
As for high-cost, you do realize the "Express" editions of Visual Studio (which are basically the same as the normal editions, except each one provides support for only one language) are free of charge, don't you?
Out of curiosity, excactly how is the OS supposed to stop me? The encryption keys for Blu-Ray get found and released on a regular basis. Once you have those, it's just a matter of opening the drive at the block level and decrypting the bits. Write them out with a nice.avi container or something, and you can play them just fine. The protected media path is never even entered.
To put it another way, if it's so hard to rip blu-ray, why are the rips already out there on the Internet? As far as Windows is concerned, they're just high-resolution videos, typically compresed with some form of MPEG4 I believe. Win7 comes with the codec to play that built in, and it's trivially available for older versions.
Out of curiosity, how does Windows do any better or worse at this than any other OS? Unless you're referring to the ability to edit the source code (and face it, the *vast* majority of computer users have no interest in doing this, and most don't even know the interest between a kernel and a desktop environment, nor dot hey care to know), Windows is an OS much like any other, from the user standpoint. It stores files, runs programs, communicates with other computers, connects with peripherals, handles multiple user accounts, and provides a UI. In fact, the perspective of the average user is even simpler - a computer has to be able to open documents and photos, connect to printers and cameras, install and run tax software (or whatever), browse the web, and download / manage music libraries.
I'll grant you taht the Windows way of doing these things is different from that of other OSes, but then, so is the OS X way, the GNOME-on-Debian-based-LInux way, the KDE-on-RPM-based-Linux way, the custom-configured OpenBSD way, and so on. There's no OS that the average person can use that will teach that average person about computers in general rather that system-specific knowledge. Nor does this surprise me; when people say that they view computers as tools, they don't usually mean the hardware, they mean the software they use and the devices connected to it.
Indeed. I can also rip CDs (and, with the right software, DVDs), record TV (built-in with Media Center), stream music and video (Media Center), share media with other computers (Homegroups, a vastly simplified form of Windows Networking added in Win7)... need I really continue? I've yet to run into anything that I could do in XP but can't with Vista (or Win7) due to DRM, and I've been using Vista since its beta.
On the flip side, my new computer has a Blu-Ray drive (I wan't planning to get one, but it was a hell of a package deal with the other features I wanted). I'll probably get some Blu-Ray media at some point, and you know what? I'll be able to play it out-of-the-box. If I decide to crack the encryption and rip it, I'll be able to do that too (third-party software, but the OS won't stop me).
Slashdot Mirror
Backing up the installer, or indeed the installed binaries, does very little good if the game needs to connect to an authentication server that has gone offline. Heck, even if the server is still online, your authorization may be refused on the grounds that the current installation is different from the first one, and you're only allowed to install once (the number varies, some allow as many as 5 times - which is probably enough for most people, though not for all - but in any case there's no guarantee your backup will work).
I was just thinking this, and was surprised nobody had commented. Theoretically, yes, I think it could. However, it would be very difficult to make a sufficiently large magnetic field with sufficent strength, and I think you could only do it on one deck at a time - the magnetic field would otherwise probably prefer to go through the deck, rather than the corridor or whatever.
Much worse, however, is what happens when anything strongly ferromagnetic enters the field. *You* might get accelerated download at something approximating 1 G (or even a fraction of it) but that wrench you're carrying might become very hard to hold onto, and I strongly suspect it would destroy a computer hard drive. Solid-state storage might be OK, but the induced electric field as the wires enter or leave the magnetic field could do some pretty awful things.
Odd... Windows has had at least partial support for UDF since Windows 2000, and if you put a DVD (most of which use UDF) in the drive it certainly would work.
Riiiiight. Leaving aside the question of what this does to the MBR and partition tables on the device (which most OSes attempt to do something with) or of how you get the info back off with Windows (it's possible, but there's no built-in utility to do so), exactly how do you keep track of the number of bytes that you need to copy off? In fact, there's an awful lot of info that would be missing - file size, name, datestamps... yeah.
Seriously, is this what passes for an "interesting" post on Slashdot these days? An amusing suggestion, yes, but far from practical. Humorous as an absurd suggestion at best.
We go over the theory and history of operating systems, and in particular kernels. We consider the inherent trade-offs in scheduling and other resource allocations, consider ways to prevent deadlocks, and so forth. The course is partially pure theory (ideal algorithms, the theoretical advantages of different kernel designs, etc.), partially discussions of operating system features in the real world (processes and threads, memory mapping, hardware abstraction, program loading, etc.), and partially hands-on experience.
The NT or Linux portion of the course is simply a question of which real-world kernel we get hands-on with. Admittedly, we learn a fair bit that is specific to that kernel - having taken the one that uses the WRK, I know quite a bit about NT's IRPs (I/O Request Packets, data structures used to communicate between kernel components), for example - but the class is NOT a study of a particular operating system. We simply choose a particular implementation that we want practical experience with; in a course with only 10 weeks for instruction, there's really not time to study the implementation of multiple kernels.
Thanks, I was about to post much the same... but of course the /. crowd would rather read the random anecdote that might have been true two years ago than accept that Microsoft actually patched one of their favorite little things to whine about.
For the record, the problem mostly occurred when trying to copy really large numbers of files. Single files (including Zip archives) copied just fine. Copying using the command line also worked fine. However, Vista's version of Windows Explorer had some severe issues with recursive operations, and in the RTM build a deep copy across the network would indeed take ages.
OEM editions of Vista (actually, of any Windows release, but its particularly noticeable with Vista) are absolute shit. Anybody on this site should know to *always* reformat and do a clean install. OEMs replace system functionality, bundle unneccessary performance-eating software, and include unstable drivers that cause BSODs. A clean install will run smoothly on a laptop with 1GB of RAM, a single-core 1.8GHz Turion, and integrated video (I've done it, and no I didn't disable halpful stuff like the search or superfetch). It won't crash randomly as long as you use reliable drivers (sometimes it's hard to be sure, but most non-beta WHQL drivers are fine). Framerates in games will be within 5% of XP (admittedly wth the GPU it had this isn't saying much).
OEM installations of Vista are responsible for a large part of the public's low perception of Vista. I've given a few people clean installs (at no cost to them, using the key that came with their computer) and turned their perceptions around pretty much 180 degrees. Unfortunately it's a hassle to do once everything is already installed, but doing it once will save a lot of frustration later.
If you sincerely think that the average user is happier to hunt down a option somewhere in their new program that sets what file types it opens (as opposed to being presented with a one-time dialog during installation) you are so far out of touch with the reality of how people use computers that I honestly can't help but wonder if you're just trolling. Real *used* to just hijack all the extensions (I don't think it does anymore, but I can't say for sure as I don't use it) but a one-time dialog makes perfect sense. Do you walso think that every time you install a new web browser, it shouldn't have an option for making the newly-installed browser your default?
Besides, you're still not addressing the main point of the GP. On a Mac, you're not even able to set those defaults. They're part of each file's metadata, editable only on a case-by-case basis. If a file happens to lack such metadata you can change what the preferred fallback is, but you can't say "I just installed VLC because I like it, now make all my media open in it."
Your post is so internally inconsistent it's ridiculous. You claim
You'd have to switch your iTunes or WinAmp or whatever over to Linux. No photoshop, different camera software, OpenOffice instead of Word, no games, etc., etc.
but just a little further down you point out the option to
either dual-boot or run Windows in a VM.
You can still use the software you like, the interface you know, the system that you've set up over time - and simultaneously be able to run the software needed for school (or work).
Assuming you have a x86-based CPU and a reasonably-sized hard drive (most laptops come with at least 160GB these days), installing Windows is not difficult, and no more expensive than the cost of the license (often very cheap for students, and worth asking about if you'll need it) and your time. Dual-booting is annoying, but assuming you have a Linux system that actually hibernates reliably it doesn't actually take that long. Virtualizing is even faster, and although it stresses your system more, most computers have easily enough RAM and processing power to do so.
Baseless accusations, much? For the TL;DR folks: UW uses Linux extensively, and it is required for many of our CSE clesses.
The UW offers OS courses on both the NT and Linux kernels - Neil chose to take the NT one, but in terms of degree progress the Linux version of the OS course is exactly equivalent. The CSE undergraduate labs are a mix of Windows and Linux boxes. The department offers a few Windows servers for student use, but the majority of the servers, including the file server, mail server, and cycle server are all Linux-based.
As for the required courses, one of the earliest courses in the curriculum teaches basic Linux knowledge, ranging from shell familiarity and manpages to scripting and regular expressions, plus gcc, make (and writing makefiles), and so forth. Later classes include security (one of the programming projects specificaly requires Linux and GDB knowledge), embedded systems (the latter half of the class uses an ARM chip running Linux, and we are required to modify a kernel driver and use the ALSA API), Networking (this one varies, but usually involves developing for a device like a router or N800, running Linux).
For those who don't know, the WRK is a mostly-complete source code distribution of the Windows 2000 kernel (NT 5.0). It's made available for academic and research uses. While the source isn't included for every single component, there's more then enough there to understand how the kernel works, how its components communicate, and to write your own extensions or modifications (system calls, changes to the scheduler, doing things at different points during initialization, modifying included drivers and so forth).
UW also offers OS courses based on the Linux kernel; which you take is a matter of preference as they satisfy the same prerequisites and are treated as equal in terms of degree progress.
While partially true, this is much like the way that, a hundred years ago, natural oild wells were under enough pressure that the oil could be extracted without pumping at all. This made oil cheap and plentiful, which led us to build an economy around it, such that when the easy oil ran out, it was economically feasible to drill for deeper deposits, pump the oil out of the ground, use offshore rigs, and so forth.
Similarly, just because the easily-accessible natural U238/U235 deposits will run out within a century or so doesn't mean that we can't use them - there's more down there, it'll just cost a bit more to extract. Then, as you mention, there are breeder reactors - lots of fuel for those already available from the waste of current reactors.
Indeed. OP should have said "so long since we have built a new commercial reactor in this country" since the Navy has been building them into its ships and submarines for decades now.
No, you're actually about right. The WoT books are typically around 800 pages (only one that I can remember broke 1000, and a few were in the 600s). Sanderson's conclusion was going to be over 1200 (but not by a huge amount, IIRC) and wouldn't have been finished by the end of this year (when it was promised). He would ahve split it into two books about the length of the rest of the series, but there was no good splitting point near the middle. So he split it into three books, each substantially shorter than the others, and finished the first one on time.
Lets say I have a computer in my house that uses 300W of power (if it's a gaming machine, that's actually quite low even before you consider a monitor). I use it 3-4 hours a day (less on worknights, more on weekends or when friends come over for a LAN party). That's a KWH right there. Now lets suppose my son also likes playing games, and when he's not on his PC (separate from mine) he's on the Xbox 360. That could easily be another KWH (more if you have multiple children, or they have a lot of friends). Suppose my wife works from home as a writer. Her computer isn't terribly powerful, but she's on it 8 hours a day, and when she's off the computer she'll have the TV on.
Now on top of an easy 2-3 KWH/day from that kind of technology alone, you've got things like electric stove/oven, electric water heater, refridgerator (at least one), lights, AC or heating (depending on time of year / climate), and various auxilliary power draws (spend an hour a week using a 700W vacuum cleaner? That's 0.1 KWH/day for that alone). Power demand also grows quickly if you have things like a pool or hot tub, a serious home theatre, a plug-in hybrid car (not common but available), heat lamps (for pets or any other reason), or lots of other things like that. Those KWHs add up quickly.
*SIGH*
You're just perpetuating the problem (people thinking that the beam is dangerous, that it even *can* go off track, or that it's something you'd want "out of the way"). Do you honestly think these concerns haven't been brought up before to the people involved? Don't you think those people probably know a lot more about the topic than you? They're probably even smart enough to do a little research before running their mouth (keyboard?) on a public forum.
You could start with Wikipedia and maybe some of the external links at the bottom if you're not willing to look into it seriously, but please put in at least a little effort? Offshore stations create more problems than they solve, largely because they are "solutions" in search of a problem.
while reducing greenhouse gases, so we trap much less and that excess energy can escape into space!
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good idea.
(Please note utter lack of sarcasm. You really should do some research on this topic - the amount of extra energy is trivial compared to the issule of how we're stopping energy from radiating away from Earth)
Only if you assume that per-capita pollution remains the same. This is a completely unreasonable assumption - if it were true, the US wouldn't have ever become the massive polluter that we are today, simply because we have 1/12th or so of the total global population (yet produce a far greater percentage of the total pollution).
Japan's population could drop by 50% in 20 years (they probably won't, but it could) and they would still end up needing more energy, most likely. It's not just a matter of homes - there's also manufacturing, transportation, computing (data clusters are a significant consumer of US energy supplies), communication, and all the myriad other things that require energy in modern society (and will require more energy in future society). People will be carrying more hardware that needs more electricity to charge (it'll get the same battery life, but simply because battery technology is also improving), using electric-powered cars more (which may use less total energy than gasoline-powered cars, but use far more electricity), and houses will have more power-using technology as it becomes more affordable and usable.
Mind you, I completely agree that overpopulation is problem that needs to be addressed. However, to claim that we shouldn't be trying to increase our resources - in particular, trying to increase our supply of a resource for which demand grows far out of proportion to population - is foolish. The best option is to address both at once, and create a better life with a stable and sustainable population, without hindering technological advancement. The approach under discussion here is a partial solution, and only a fool as great as you seem to be would imply it either solves nothing or solves everything.
Leaving aside the question of security, why the hell would somebody run such an outdated web server on brand new hardware? Web servers, database serers, mail servers... all software of that nature has been becoming increasingly multi-threaded over the past few years. IIS 5 is pushing a decade old; the only place you'd run something like that would be on a virtualized system that probably can't access more than 1 core anyhow (making it perfectly reasonable to use software that isn't incredibly parallel).
Please don't take the following as a direct support of the GP post; it is a refutation of the parent post and not a support fo the practice of copy/pasting quotes into largely unrelated discussions. If the parent hadn't been modded up, I wouldn't have bothered. Something like this really needs a response, though.
GNU (recursive acronym for "GNU's Not UNIX!") is an operating system. The only portion of the system that is called HURD is the kernel, which is certainly not an entire OS. It's quite possibly the most important of one, but does not constitute a complete operating system by any means.
As for "redefining words" you're doing more than a bit of that yourself. A kernel is "the central or most important part" and, in a computing context, "The essential part of Unix or other operating systems, responsible for resource allocation, low-level hardware interfaces, security etc." (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/kernel) Note the key word "part" that is present in both definitions. A kernel, such as Linux or HURD, is definitely only part of an operating system.
That said, "GNU slash Linux" or "GNU plus Linux" is a pretty silly name. Referring to an OS by its kernel is not a universal practice - OS X is almost never referred to by the name of its kernel (XNU, a derivative of Mach), although of Windows such as Vista or Windows 7 are occasionally referred to as "Windows NT" or even "NT" - but it suffices for the purposes of Linux. That said, it's understandable that Stallman and the GNU project in general would like acknowledgement of how much of the OS that most people call "Linux" was not written by, or in any conjunction with, Linus Torvalds.
Actually, since it's based on suse, that would be
sudo zypper in oz-flight-simulator
Well, I suppose you could use yum instead, but... why?
Hmm... my CS curriculum must be pretty weird, then. In neither high school nor university have I taken any class that even suggested Visual Studio. I can and have used it on some of my assignments, but I've also used kate, gvim, netbeans, eclipse (OK, this one was for work; I prefer NB for my Java coding), and even Monodevelop (which is sadly inferior to VS, but gets the job done for C# and can even use VS project files). I think the only major code editor I've never used is Xcode, although I'm not personally a fan of emacs.
As for using a makefile... makefiles are easy; the basic knowledge required is the material of a single 50-minute lesson at worst. Learning the intricacies of GNU make vs. bmake vs. cmake vs. nmake is an irritating, but not difficult, exercise in use of a search engine. On the other hand, I've not found much where a makefile is actually the best possible way to do something. Sometimes it's the best solution easily available, but I'd really rather let my development tools take care fo that for me, so I can focus on writing and testing code.
As for high-cost, you do realize the "Express" editions of Visual Studio (which are basically the same as the normal editions, except each one provides support for only one language) are free of charge, don't you?
Out of curiosity, excactly how is the OS supposed to stop me? The encryption keys for Blu-Ray get found and released on a regular basis. Once you have those, it's just a matter of opening the drive at the block level and decrypting the bits. Write them out with a nice .avi container or something, and you can play them just fine. The protected media path is never even entered.
To put it another way, if it's so hard to rip blu-ray, why are the rips already out there on the Internet? As far as Windows is concerned, they're just high-resolution videos, typically compresed with some form of MPEG4 I believe. Win7 comes with the codec to play that built in, and it's trivially available for older versions.
Out of curiosity, how does Windows do any better or worse at this than any other OS? Unless you're referring to the ability to edit the source code (and face it, the *vast* majority of computer users have no interest in doing this, and most don't even know the interest between a kernel and a desktop environment, nor dot hey care to know), Windows is an OS much like any other, from the user standpoint. It stores files, runs programs, communicates with other computers, connects with peripherals, handles multiple user accounts, and provides a UI. In fact, the perspective of the average user is even simpler - a computer has to be able to open documents and photos, connect to printers and cameras, install and run tax software (or whatever), browse the web, and download / manage music libraries.
I'll grant you taht the Windows way of doing these things is different from that of other OSes, but then, so is the OS X way, the GNOME-on-Debian-based-LInux way, the KDE-on-RPM-based-Linux way, the custom-configured OpenBSD way, and so on. There's no OS that the average person can use that will teach that average person about computers in general rather that system-specific knowledge. Nor does this surprise me; when people say that they view computers as tools, they don't usually mean the hardware, they mean the software they use and the devices connected to it.
Indeed. I can also rip CDs (and, with the right software, DVDs), record TV (built-in with Media Center), stream music and video (Media Center), share media with other computers (Homegroups, a vastly simplified form of Windows Networking added in Win7)... need I really continue? I've yet to run into anything that I could do in XP but can't with Vista (or Win7) due to DRM, and I've been using Vista since its beta.
On the flip side, my new computer has a Blu-Ray drive (I wan't planning to get one, but it was a hell of a package deal with the other features I wanted). I'll probably get some Blu-Ray media at some point, and you know what? I'll be able to play it out-of-the-box. If I decide to crack the encryption and rip it, I'll be able to do that too (third-party software, but the OS won't stop me).