Presumably the parent is including New Spring (the prequel) in his count. I've personally felt for a long time that the series should be 13 books (13 being a rather significant number in the WoT universe) and was disappointed that the last book would be numbered 12 (also wondered how one book could wrap up all the open storylines AND fight Tarmon Gai'don). That said, counting New Spring it's 13 books and as long as the final book (whatever it's number) is good, I'll be satisfied. I'll need to re-read the whole thing ahead of time, though....
Re: assualt ships, my experience is that yes, they're viable... if you make thim into slightly slower, far more powerful interceptors. The Jaguar is the only one I've found to be really good at this, though I've not flown the Gallente AFs. You simply can't put a meaningful tank on something that small (except against other things that small) so it's all about speed tanking... and with small weapons, you are forced into web range (instant death if they have a web, see comment about tanking) if you want a respectable DPS (drone boats aside). Sure, an AF can pound the shit out of any frigate it can catch (and hold - often meaning you *need* a web) or possibly a t1 cruiser without a web, but that seems the limit of their usefulness, and that t1 cruiser costs a lot less and can actually put out more DPS in a real fight.
While I fully agree with the spirit of your comment, it's worth pointing out that snake sets certainly got a major nerf - they used to be this hideously expensive way of making any relatively fast ship nigh-invincible, and that's no longer true. Also, webbers got nerfed massively, and it sounds like they're stack-nerfed as well now. While I can't disagree with that, it means that anybody focusing on a Rapier or Huginn is going to find them much less valuable now that you can't permanently trap anything in the game (short of a jammer) at 37 km and blow it to smithereens with heavy missiles and artillery.
I think I once ran a mission in a battleship... it was boring, so I went back to 0.0 where all the action in EVE is.
Also, warp-scramming frigs are what drones are for. All battleships have a good drone bay, and light drones can be trained up within a week, easy, to the point where they'll kill an NPC frigate in seconds. your overview even shows you which ships are scramming you, now.
It also sounds like you went too aggressively for large ships without paying attention to the base skills. A battleship should easily tank most level 4 or lower missions for much longer than "seconds". Heck, I've run level 4 in battlecruisers (though it takes a long time).
Finally, with full insurance and no super-expensive PvP modules, a money-making battleship shouldn't be more than perhaps 50 million final cost (that's actually a bit high if it's a tier 1 or 2 battleship, but you also don't get the insurance back until after the ship explodes). Running level 4 missions, you can make 50 million in well under 10 hours without even bothering to collect loot.
They're not looking for a macro-based grinding system. They're looking for something that can interact with real people (aside from avoiding them, which is all the macro-ratters and macro-miners and EVE will do) and, more importantly, coordinate with them. These AIs don't need to fool people into thinking they are human so much as they need to prove themselves at least as useful as a human.
Most of the combat in EVE, at least, is highly multi-player, with individuals both acting as part of a whole and taking their own actions as needed (much like real-world soldiers). There's also the matter of sharing information - everything from giving intel on enemy forces to delivering orders (for that matter, receiving and understanding those communications isn't trivial either).
Actually, communication is an interesting one - it's often too time-critical for typing (which requires taking your hand off the mouse) so is done by voice. Can their AI handle its end of a fight coordinated over Ventrilo?
So true. Nonetheless, I find running my main account on XP as a standard user to be a real pain sometimes. There are things, like the control panel, that are... awkward... to start as a limited user.
For things like this, Vista's UAC - say what you will about it training people to click OK or whatever (you can configure it so it demands your password every time, like Linux or OS X, if that's preferable) is really actually quite handy. After a few months of running XP as a standard user, UAC was an incredibly wonderful feature.
You can't secure a stupid user who owns the computer, but you can make things a LOT less irritating for a smart user who wants to run securely. Runas is a bloody pain.
Well put. When people ask why I support Obama, this is always the first thing I mention, and often the one that gets the biggest response. The man's support comes from the people - individuals, by and large - and that is who he is financially beholden to. So long as he does a good job and can count on that kind of support again, he doesn't need to please the big corporations.
Given the democratic process and the cost of advertising, getting elected inevitably takes absolute tons of money these days. Who would you vote for: the candidate whose money comes from big corporations, or the candidate whose money comes from ordinary people? (I know it's not black and white, but it's still a fairly strong distinction.)
Re:Mebbe I should try it some time
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OpenBSD 4.4 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
PC-BSD, like DesktopBSD, is FreeBSD based. Don't confuse FreeBSD and OpenBSD - they share many userspace utilities and their kernels have some common history, but they are not the same OS.
Basically, OpenBSD is the one that is rabid about security - makes great server software. NetBSD is the ultra-portable one - good for unusual hardware. FreeBSD has excellent support for commodity hardware. It is the one used to make the user-friendly distros.
An alternative (derived from the webmasters who objected to AVG's scan-every-search-result thing) is to redirect the traffic back at the company doing the scraping. It's a very simple rule to set up in any web server - when you see a request from a given IP range, instead of serving them the requested page you serve them a redirect header that causes the client to go scan some URL of your choosing.
It would be immediately obvious from the client's end, but it would also be a reasonably clear way of telling them the fsck off without (to the best of my knowledge, IANAL) doing anything that could result in legal trouble (especially since, due to voilating the ToS, the server is perfectly within their rights to refuse them the requested data).
Of course, this doesn't help the guy being asked to write this client, except possibly to point out that the other company could easily A) block this, and B) increase your own bandwidth usage in the meanwhile.
We (or at least, I personally) would cut him a bigger break if he hadn't made that analogy A) In a speech justifying his vote against net neutrality B) If there hadn't been aspects of said speech that actually SUPPORT net neutrality, which he clearly doesn't understand at all C) If he hadn't, in the same speech, complained of one of his aides sending him "an internet" and it getting blocked for days D) If the context of that line hadn't been something that even by/. standards would be a ridiculous automotive analogy ("The Internet is not like a big truck..." WTF?)
So, no, I really don't think he's going to get to live that one down for a while. I think at least half the humor derived from the situation is that the guy CLEARLY had no idea what he was talking about, and by some miracle managed to use *almost* the generally accepted terminology.
It sounds bad enough when you say it like this, but this also wasn't a case of a guy doing something like breaking into a house or commiting assault or some other more "everyman" criminal charge - this was a case of corruption (specifically, allowing an oil company to make massive renovations to his house without reporting them as gifts like he ought have done).
So... we're not just allowing convicted felons run for re-election, we're allowing felons convicted of abusing their position in the government run for re-election? WTF indeed!
He can also be ejected from the senate by a 2/3 vote, however - which the Dems are aiming for and may be able to achieve. Also, even the GOP can't be too proud of this stain on their party - I could see at least a few of them voting to out him as well.
His opponent in the race, incidentally, is the Democrat currently serving as mayor of Anchorage.
Hmm... it's a tablet PC. Does OS X have any support for that kind of thing? Even the iPhone stuff doesn't count, since that's a finger-driven (as opposed to primarily or exclusively stylus-driver) interface. Certainly I've never heard of handwriting recognition in OS X, and that's one feature that Vista, at least, does very well indeed (never had an XP tablet).
For the record, Microsoft has a free, supported, and well-integrated PDF exporter for Office 2007. It actually used to be part of the base install, but Adobe threw a fit so MS made it an optional download (with a link in the base install that says something like "Download a tool to safe in Adobe PDF format..."
I use it all the time, since I get free printing on the department's Linux computers and don't trust OO.o not to screw up the formatting on my papers/resumes/whatever.
I'm actually taking a course generally described as "Games" at my university (University of Washington in Seattle, one of the top CS schools in the US). Technically, it's a "Capstone Software Engineering" course - that just happens to combine the need for 3D graphics, networking, real-time interactivity, etc. in a student-designed software project. Guess what kinds of programs a group of 6 - 8 students will turn out given those requirements and 10 weeks?
In other words, games are actually good projects for students. They span a wide range of programming skills, as well as some more theoretical CS stuff (performance matters so know your algorithms, a good enemy AI is desirable, etc.), artistic elements (graphics, audio), and user interface. Game development is good practice with software development methodologies (although limited somewhat by being only a 1-quarter class), including the need to integrate various pieces of separately-developed code, the skills needed to work in a team, and the experience of having other people test your code, find bugs and defects, and expect you to correct them.
It's also fun, which helps with motivation. While real-world projects will not generally allow the same degree of doing whatever you enjoy, fun projects encourage us to do our best, push our limits, and try things. It's like hobby programming, but with a team so larger projects can be tackled and different people can contribute to the areas they are strongest in.
Crossover (or Wine in general) isn't an emulator, just a program loader and a bunch of libraries (the Win16, Win32, and NT DLLs) that are all x86 and designed to link with x86 applications. Short answer: No.
On the flip side, a lot of these games are DOS based, and DOSBox, an open-source 286/386 emulator, does work on PPC. True emulation costs performance, of course, but given the speed these games were designed to run at any modern CPU should have more than enough clock speed.
Does anybody know if it's possible to extract the DOS game from the bundle that you get from GoG, and run it in DOSBox on another platform?
Whoa! Flame much? Skype from a phone makes all kinds of sense. Let's start with a few of the basics:
You can see who is available before you call You can do it over WiFi, which may have service where cellular networks don't It doesn't cost either party a thing It shares contact info with your other computers auomatically
Now, let's take your arguments in particular:
"... protocols that are FAR better..." - Skype is clearer than my 3G cell phone on most calls. "... too cheap to buy a phone that can run in" - Isn't that contradictory? The guy you're replying to obviously A) wanted to and B) bought a phone that could. "... cell minutes are cheap" - within the US, sure. How about US to South Africa, where my family was last year? How about Fiji (where I was at the end of high school) to the US? Skype, whether you pay for actual phone nubers or not, is a HUGE improvement on the cost of international calling. "... terminate your plan..." - What if you go outside its coverage area? I leave my home town on a regular basis. Hell, there's places within a mile of here where I get little to no cell reception butwhich are well-saturated with WiFi (the labs where I do a lot of my work being the most personally relevant example, but you can probably name at least one such place as well).
Finally, the language you're using isn't flattering to your point of view either. Indeed, it really detracts from the whole comment. Insults and swearing give a very immature impression and should be avoided if you actually want anybody to respect what you have to say.
In general, if there's the word "why" in your subject and you haven't RTFA, you're doing it wrong. A couple of quick responses, however:
Going toward an outward lanet does need fuel, because you're moving "up" the sun's gravity well. Space is not weightless; you're just in free-fall. Big difference. Free-falling AWAY from a large gravity field requires a lot of speed to get started, or continual acceleration (in which case you're not in free-fall anymore). The term "escape velocity" is related to this idea. However, it's not the real problem.
So, you've got a spaceship with the fuel to take you to Mars. What does it do when it gets there? Mars has a lot less gravity than Earth, but much more than, say, the moon. In order to safely land humans on Mars, you'd need a ship which can land on the surface with fragile cargo intact. OK, we can do this. What we can't do - not easily, at least - is get that same ship back into space.
One suggestion has been to use ships which stay in space and never land to bridge the interplanetary distance, which is a bloody long ways but which can be done at high speed without fighting planetary gravity. Then, on Earth and Mars, you'd have shuttles (like the current Space Shuttle, though probably much more advanced) that take people between the surface and the interplanetary ships. This is roughly how the moon landings worked - the Apollo spacecraft in lunar orbit, a small lander that went to the Moon's surface with just a few people, and then brought them back to the Apollo. This was very difficult, only allowed the people to be on the moon for a brief period, and was on the moon - orders of magnitude closer and with weaker gravity than Mars.
There are STILL lots of problems, though: interplanetary ships would need refueling, so shuttles would have to carry that fuel (off Earth, probably - along with everything else bound from Earth to Mars). Shuttles would need refueling, which isn't hard on Earth but might be trickier on Mars. Shuttles - especially on Mars - would need to be reusable and reliable. The Mars shuttles would need to *get* to Mars somehow (not a lot of spare storage in those interplanetary ships). There's lots of problems with this approach, but for a long time it was considered the most reasonable option.
The new idea is, loosely, to do what we've already demonstrated (usually) works with robots - put them on a spaceship, fly it to Mars, land them with parachutes and such - but with people. There's no way for those people to even get back into Mars orbit, let alone return to Earth. The spaceship that carried them might be able to return, if there's a compelling reason for it to do so, but anybody who landed would be stranded.
Cool idea, but I think a better example of simulated evolution would be to have an sim-envirnoment game where you don't control the units. Instead, you control the terrain and other environmental factors (possibly including direct, but more likely indirect, control over creatures of other species). You control things like mutation rate by affecting radiation levels, environmental toxicity, and so forth (higher means more mutations, which is good for genetic diversity but also causes higher fatality rate). You create evolutionary pressure such as climate shifts, plagues, etc. You guide the evolution by providing ways to get around these, such as trees to escape predators or plants with medicinal value. It need not be limited to evolution of intelligences either, though that is probably the most fun to play.
It's a very rough idea at present, but I think this kind of game could really work. Of course, its mass-market appeal and scientific accuracy are probably in a somewhat inverse relationship, but I still think it would be fun. Try something like re-creating the Galapagos, or separate two populations of a species for a while (in evolutionary terms; obviously the time scale would be vastly faster than in reality) then reunite them, or whatever. The win conditions could be anything from timed survival to development of a specific trait to attaining a given population or size of territory, or even something like the ability to fill a specified ecological niche.
I suspect the comment on "power users" referred to the ability to tweak the OS. It's not trivial but not terribly difficult to set up a repeating scheduled task that runs with another user's permissions in either OS, but it's *DIFFERENT* in Linux (it's the same in Vista as in XP). There's nothing really equivalent to Windows' Device Manager on Linux that I've found in nearly 3 years. It's tricky to get used to typing / instead of \ in the CLI, for $DEITY's sake!
Then there's the completely random stuff. If I bring my Linux box up with the wifi hardware switch off, the OS doesn't detect it correctly. I found how to correct this through exploration and trial-and-error, but in windows it's a non-issue. While it can be fun to tinker, sometimes it's preferable that the thing just work under all circumstances (there's a setting that seems to enable this, but it wasn't the default after a driver update).
Out of curiosity, have you introduced any users to Wine? Photoshop and Office (especially Office 2003) run great on Wine these days. So do many games, especially popular ones that aren't bleeding-edge (WOW, for example - not that the hardware would give good performance, I suppose).
I don't know if the system comes with Wine or not, but I'm sure it will run. Most distros have it in their repositories. Programs installed through Wine will appear in the application menus on GNOME and KDE (not sure about other desktop environments) and you could even associate wine with.exe files if you want.
Most people are willing to use a slightly different Linux-based version of their image viewer or instant message or torrent program. However, they will usually have at least one application that they simply must have (often either a game or Photoshop) and for those people, Wine is *the* essential ingredient to get them to switch.
You're correct, but you totally missed the point. The Limited versions of the MS Open Source licenses prohibit you from using the code with other OSes than Windows. This applies even to derived works, such as the result of a porting project. Redistributing non-Windows versions of that code would almost certainly constitute copyright infringement, just as binary-only redistribution of GPLed code is copyright infringement.
No it's not actually a loan, then. However, in a world where "file sharing" means allowing anybody with a computer to make a complete, indistinguishable copy without disrupting or depriving the original owner in any way, I'm not terribly surprised that so many people think that burning a copy for their friends counts as "loaning".
You're thinking of the 1st-get 30GB Zunes. While I don't know who makes the new ones, the design is in-house - they're certainly not just re-cased Gigabeats. Besides, even the Gigabeat doesn't have WiFi - which if used properly could do all kinds of great stuff. The Zune 3.0 firmware unlocked a lot of that potential, allowing users to browse, sample, and purchase music on their Zunes wirelessly without a computer present at all, but there's still more that they could stand to have.
My only SERIOUS complaint about the Zune, aside from the 3-play limitation on transferred songs (which I understand, but is occasionally irksome with stuff that's freely licensed to redistribute), is the inability to use it as a USB Mass Storage device. This limits it to Windows (thankfully the new software is far better than that crappy re-skin of WMP that version 1 had) and prevents me from using the gigs of storage that I don't have any media for. My next biggest complaint is the inability to use ogg or FLAC, though that's not a big issue since FLAC can be transcoded and I don't seem to have more than a couple ogg files.
It's a bit bigger than that. Multi-touch capabilities, vastly improved BitLocker, new networking capabilities that simplify sending/sharing files, a couple substantial changes to UAC (in some cases simply changing simple config options to make it less "annoying", in other cases adding new capabilities such as automatic elevation for MS-signed binaries). Bootup and hibernation are being parallelized and should run faster on multi-core machines now. Many apps, including the calculator, notepad, and Paint have undergone significant UI and/or feature upgrades. The general UI has been updated somewhat as well.
The kernel sounds remarkably similar, though. More like 6.1 or 6.2 than 7.0.
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Presumably the parent is including New Spring (the prequel) in his count. I've personally felt for a long time that the series should be 13 books (13 being a rather significant number in the WoT universe) and was disappointed that the last book would be numbered 12 (also wondered how one book could wrap up all the open storylines AND fight Tarmon Gai'don). That said, counting New Spring it's 13 books and as long as the final book (whatever it's number) is good, I'll be satisfied. I'll need to re-read the whole thing ahead of time, though....
Re: assualt ships, my experience is that yes, they're viable... if you make thim into slightly slower, far more powerful interceptors. The Jaguar is the only one I've found to be really good at this, though I've not flown the Gallente AFs. You simply can't put a meaningful tank on something that small (except against other things that small) so it's all about speed tanking... and with small weapons, you are forced into web range (instant death if they have a web, see comment about tanking) if you want a respectable DPS (drone boats aside). Sure, an AF can pound the shit out of any frigate it can catch (and hold - often meaning you *need* a web) or possibly a t1 cruiser without a web, but that seems the limit of their usefulness, and that t1 cruiser costs a lot less and can actually put out more DPS in a real fight.
While I fully agree with the spirit of your comment, it's worth pointing out that snake sets certainly got a major nerf - they used to be this hideously expensive way of making any relatively fast ship nigh-invincible, and that's no longer true. Also, webbers got nerfed massively, and it sounds like they're stack-nerfed as well now. While I can't disagree with that, it means that anybody focusing on a Rapier or Huginn is going to find them much less valuable now that you can't permanently trap anything in the game (short of a jammer) at 37 km and blow it to smithereens with heavy missiles and artillery.
I think I once ran a mission in a battleship... it was boring, so I went back to 0.0 where all the action in EVE is.
Also, warp-scramming frigs are what drones are for. All battleships have a good drone bay, and light drones can be trained up within a week, easy, to the point where they'll kill an NPC frigate in seconds. your overview even shows you which ships are scramming you, now.
It also sounds like you went too aggressively for large ships without paying attention to the base skills. A battleship should easily tank most level 4 or lower missions for much longer than "seconds". Heck, I've run level 4 in battlecruisers (though it takes a long time).
Finally, with full insurance and no super-expensive PvP modules, a money-making battleship shouldn't be more than perhaps 50 million final cost (that's actually a bit high if it's a tier 1 or 2 battleship, but you also don't get the insurance back until after the ship explodes). Running level 4 missions, you can make 50 million in well under 10 hours without even bothering to collect loot.
They're not looking for a macro-based grinding system. They're looking for something that can interact with real people (aside from avoiding them, which is all the macro-ratters and macro-miners and EVE will do) and, more importantly, coordinate with them. These AIs don't need to fool people into thinking they are human so much as they need to prove themselves at least as useful as a human.
Most of the combat in EVE, at least, is highly multi-player, with individuals both acting as part of a whole and taking their own actions as needed (much like real-world soldiers). There's also the matter of sharing information - everything from giving intel on enemy forces to delivering orders (for that matter, receiving and understanding those communications isn't trivial either).
Actually, communication is an interesting one - it's often too time-critical for typing (which requires taking your hand off the mouse) so is done by voice. Can their AI handle its end of a fight coordinated over Ventrilo?
So true. Nonetheless, I find running my main account on XP as a standard user to be a real pain sometimes. There are things, like the control panel, that are... awkward... to start as a limited user.
For things like this, Vista's UAC - say what you will about it training people to click OK or whatever (you can configure it so it demands your password every time, like Linux or OS X, if that's preferable) is really actually quite handy. After a few months of running XP as a standard user, UAC was an incredibly wonderful feature.
You can't secure a stupid user who owns the computer, but you can make things a LOT less irritating for a smart user who wants to run securely. Runas is a bloody pain.
Well put. When people ask why I support Obama, this is always the first thing I mention, and often the one that gets the biggest response. The man's support comes from the people - individuals, by and large - and that is who he is financially beholden to. So long as he does a good job and can count on that kind of support again, he doesn't need to please the big corporations.
Given the democratic process and the cost of advertising, getting elected inevitably takes absolute tons of money these days. Who would you vote for: the candidate whose money comes from big corporations, or the candidate whose money comes from ordinary people? (I know it's not black and white, but it's still a fairly strong distinction.)
PC-BSD, like DesktopBSD, is FreeBSD based. Don't confuse FreeBSD and OpenBSD - they share many userspace utilities and their kernels have some common history, but they are not the same OS.
Basically, OpenBSD is the one that is rabid about security - makes great server software.
NetBSD is the ultra-portable one - good for unusual hardware.
FreeBSD has excellent support for commodity hardware. It is the one used to make the user-friendly distros.
An alternative (derived from the webmasters who objected to AVG's scan-every-search-result thing) is to redirect the traffic back at the company doing the scraping. It's a very simple rule to set up in any web server - when you see a request from a given IP range, instead of serving them the requested page you serve them a redirect header that causes the client to go scan some URL of your choosing.
It would be immediately obvious from the client's end, but it would also be a reasonably clear way of telling them the fsck off without (to the best of my knowledge, IANAL) doing anything that could result in legal trouble (especially since, due to voilating the ToS, the server is perfectly within their rights to refuse them the requested data).
Of course, this doesn't help the guy being asked to write this client, except possibly to point out that the other company could easily A) block this, and B) increase your own bandwidth usage in the meanwhile.
We (or at least, I personally) would cut him a bigger break if he hadn't made that analogy /. standards would be a ridiculous automotive analogy ("The Internet is not like a big truck..." WTF?)
A) In a speech justifying his vote against net neutrality
B) If there hadn't been aspects of said speech that actually SUPPORT net neutrality, which he clearly doesn't understand at all
C) If he hadn't, in the same speech, complained of one of his aides sending him "an internet" and it getting blocked for days
D) If the context of that line hadn't been something that even by
So, no, I really don't think he's going to get to live that one down for a while. I think at least half the humor derived from the situation is that the guy CLEARLY had no idea what he was talking about, and by some miracle managed to use *almost* the generally accepted terminology.
It sounds bad enough when you say it like this, but this also wasn't a case of a guy doing something like breaking into a house or commiting assault or some other more "everyman" criminal charge - this was a case of corruption (specifically, allowing an oil company to make massive renovations to his house without reporting them as gifts like he ought have done).
So... we're not just allowing convicted felons run for re-election, we're allowing felons convicted of abusing their position in the government run for re-election? WTF indeed!
He can also be ejected from the senate by a 2/3 vote, however - which the Dems are aiming for and may be able to achieve. Also, even the GOP can't be too proud of this stain on their party - I could see at least a few of them voting to out him as well.
His opponent in the race, incidentally, is the Democrat currently serving as mayor of Anchorage.
Hmm... it's a tablet PC. Does OS X have any support for that kind of thing? Even the iPhone stuff doesn't count, since that's a finger-driven (as opposed to primarily or exclusively stylus-driver) interface. Certainly I've never heard of handwriting recognition in OS X, and that's one feature that Vista, at least, does very well indeed (never had an XP tablet).
For the record, Microsoft has a free, supported, and well-integrated PDF exporter for Office 2007. It actually used to be part of the base install, but Adobe threw a fit so MS made it an optional download (with a link in the base install that says something like "Download a tool to safe in Adobe PDF format..."
Download link (first hit on Office 2007 PDF): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en
I use it all the time, since I get free printing on the department's Linux computers and don't trust OO.o not to screw up the formatting on my papers/resumes/whatever.
I'm actually taking a course generally described as "Games" at my university (University of Washington in Seattle, one of the top CS schools in the US). Technically, it's a "Capstone Software Engineering" course - that just happens to combine the need for 3D graphics, networking, real-time interactivity, etc. in a student-designed software project. Guess what kinds of programs a group of 6 - 8 students will turn out given those requirements and 10 weeks?
In other words, games are actually good projects for students. They span a wide range of programming skills, as well as some more theoretical CS stuff (performance matters so know your algorithms, a good enemy AI is desirable, etc.), artistic elements (graphics, audio), and user interface. Game development is good practice with software development methodologies (although limited somewhat by being only a 1-quarter class), including the need to integrate various pieces of separately-developed code, the skills needed to work in a team, and the experience of having other people test your code, find bugs and defects, and expect you to correct them.
It's also fun, which helps with motivation. While real-world projects will not generally allow the same degree of doing whatever you enjoy, fun projects encourage us to do our best, push our limits, and try things. It's like hobby programming, but with a team so larger projects can be tackled and different people can contribute to the areas they are strongest in.
Crossover (or Wine in general) isn't an emulator, just a program loader and a bunch of libraries (the Win16, Win32, and NT DLLs) that are all x86 and designed to link with x86 applications. Short answer: No.
On the flip side, a lot of these games are DOS based, and DOSBox, an open-source 286/386 emulator, does work on PPC. True emulation costs performance, of course, but given the speed these games were designed to run at any modern CPU should have more than enough clock speed.
Does anybody know if it's possible to extract the DOS game from the bundle that you get from GoG, and run it in DOSBox on another platform?
Whoa! Flame much? Skype from a phone makes all kinds of sense. Let's start with a few of the basics:
You can see who is available before you call
You can do it over WiFi, which may have service where cellular networks don't
It doesn't cost either party a thing
It shares contact info with your other computers auomatically
Now, let's take your arguments in particular:
"... protocols that are FAR better..." - Skype is clearer than my 3G cell phone on most calls.
"... too cheap to buy a phone that can run in" - Isn't that contradictory? The guy you're replying to obviously A) wanted to and B) bought a phone that could.
"... cell minutes are cheap" - within the US, sure. How about US to South Africa, where my family was last year? How about Fiji (where I was at the end of high school) to the US? Skype, whether you pay for actual phone nubers or not, is a HUGE improvement on the cost of international calling.
"... terminate your plan..." - What if you go outside its coverage area? I leave my home town on a regular basis. Hell, there's places within a mile of here where I get little to no cell reception butwhich are well-saturated with WiFi (the labs where I do a lot of my work being the most personally relevant example, but you can probably name at least one such place as well).
Finally, the language you're using isn't flattering to your point of view either. Indeed, it really detracts from the whole comment. Insults and swearing give a very immature impression and should be avoided if you actually want anybody to respect what you have to say.
In general, if there's the word "why" in your subject and you haven't RTFA, you're doing it wrong.
A couple of quick responses, however:
Going toward an outward lanet does need fuel, because you're moving "up" the sun's gravity well. Space is not weightless; you're just in free-fall. Big difference. Free-falling AWAY from a large gravity field requires a lot of speed to get started, or continual acceleration (in which case you're not in free-fall anymore). The term "escape velocity" is related to this idea. However, it's not the real problem.
So, you've got a spaceship with the fuel to take you to Mars. What does it do when it gets there? Mars has a lot less gravity than Earth, but much more than, say, the moon. In order to safely land humans on Mars, you'd need a ship which can land on the surface with fragile cargo intact. OK, we can do this. What we can't do - not easily, at least - is get that same ship back into space.
One suggestion has been to use ships which stay in space and never land to bridge the interplanetary distance, which is a bloody long ways but which can be done at high speed without fighting planetary gravity. Then, on Earth and Mars, you'd have shuttles (like the current Space Shuttle, though probably much more advanced) that take people between the surface and the interplanetary ships. This is roughly how the moon landings worked - the Apollo spacecraft in lunar orbit, a small lander that went to the Moon's surface with just a few people, and then brought them back to the Apollo. This was very difficult, only allowed the people to be on the moon for a brief period, and was on the moon - orders of magnitude closer and with weaker gravity than Mars.
There are STILL lots of problems, though: interplanetary ships would need refueling, so shuttles would have to carry that fuel (off Earth, probably - along with everything else bound from Earth to Mars). Shuttles would need refueling, which isn't hard on Earth but might be trickier on Mars. Shuttles - especially on Mars - would need to be reusable and reliable. The Mars shuttles would need to *get* to Mars somehow (not a lot of spare storage in those interplanetary ships). There's lots of problems with this approach, but for a long time it was considered the most reasonable option.
The new idea is, loosely, to do what we've already demonstrated (usually) works with robots - put them on a spaceship, fly it to Mars, land them with parachutes and such - but with people. There's no way for those people to even get back into Mars orbit, let alone return to Earth. The spaceship that carried them might be able to return, if there's a compelling reason for it to do so, but anybody who landed would be stranded.
Cool idea, but I think a better example of simulated evolution would be to have an sim-envirnoment game where you don't control the units. Instead, you control the terrain and other environmental factors (possibly including direct, but more likely indirect, control over creatures of other species). You control things like mutation rate by affecting radiation levels, environmental toxicity, and so forth (higher means more mutations, which is good for genetic diversity but also causes higher fatality rate). You create evolutionary pressure such as climate shifts, plagues, etc. You guide the evolution by providing ways to get around these, such as trees to escape predators or plants with medicinal value. It need not be limited to evolution of intelligences either, though that is probably the most fun to play.
It's a very rough idea at present, but I think this kind of game could really work. Of course, its mass-market appeal and scientific accuracy are probably in a somewhat inverse relationship, but I still think it would be fun. Try something like re-creating the Galapagos, or separate two populations of a species for a while (in evolutionary terms; obviously the time scale would be vastly faster than in reality) then reunite them, or whatever. The win conditions could be anything from timed survival to development of a specific trait to attaining a given population or size of territory, or even something like the ability to fill a specified ecological niche.
Damn, now I want to develop this...
I suspect the comment on "power users" referred to the ability to tweak the OS. It's not trivial but not terribly difficult to set up a repeating scheduled task that runs with another user's permissions in either OS, but it's *DIFFERENT* in Linux (it's the same in Vista as in XP). There's nothing really equivalent to Windows' Device Manager on Linux that I've found in nearly 3 years. It's tricky to get used to typing / instead of \ in the CLI, for $DEITY's sake!
Then there's the completely random stuff. If I bring my Linux box up with the wifi hardware switch off, the OS doesn't detect it correctly. I found how to correct this through exploration and trial-and-error, but in windows it's a non-issue. While it can be fun to tinker, sometimes it's preferable that the thing just work under all circumstances (there's a setting that seems to enable this, but it wasn't the default after a driver update).
Out of curiosity, have you introduced any users to Wine? Photoshop and Office (especially Office 2003) run great on Wine these days. So do many games, especially popular ones that aren't bleeding-edge (WOW, for example - not that the hardware would give good performance, I suppose).
I don't know if the system comes with Wine or not, but I'm sure it will run. Most distros have it in their repositories. Programs installed through Wine will appear in the application menus on GNOME and KDE (not sure about other desktop environments) and you could even associate wine with .exe files if you want.
Most people are willing to use a slightly different Linux-based version of their image viewer or instant message or torrent program. However, they will usually have at least one application that they simply must have (often either a game or Photoshop) and for those people, Wine is *the* essential ingredient to get them to switch.
You're correct, but you totally missed the point. The Limited versions of the MS Open Source licenses prohibit you from using the code with other OSes than Windows. This applies even to derived works, such as the result of a porting project. Redistributing non-Windows versions of that code would almost certainly constitute copyright infringement, just as binary-only redistribution of GPLed code is copyright infringement.
No it's not actually a loan, then. However, in a world where "file sharing" means allowing anybody with a computer to make a complete, indistinguishable copy without disrupting or depriving the original owner in any way, I'm not terribly surprised that so many people think that burning a copy for their friends counts as "loaning".
You're thinking of the 1st-get 30GB Zunes. While I don't know who makes the new ones, the design is in-house - they're certainly not just re-cased Gigabeats. Besides, even the Gigabeat doesn't have WiFi - which if used properly could do all kinds of great stuff. The Zune 3.0 firmware unlocked a lot of that potential, allowing users to browse, sample, and purchase music on their Zunes wirelessly without a computer present at all, but there's still more that they could stand to have.
My only SERIOUS complaint about the Zune, aside from the 3-play limitation on transferred songs (which I understand, but is occasionally irksome with stuff that's freely licensed to redistribute), is the inability to use it as a USB Mass Storage device. This limits it to Windows (thankfully the new software is far better than that crappy re-skin of WMP that version 1 had) and prevents me from using the gigs of storage that I don't have any media for. My next biggest complaint is the inability to use ogg or FLAC, though that's not a big issue since FLAC can be transcoded and I don't seem to have more than a couple ogg files.
It's a bit bigger than that. Multi-touch capabilities, vastly improved BitLocker, new networking capabilities that simplify sending/sharing files, a couple substantial changes to UAC (in some cases simply changing simple config options to make it less "annoying", in other cases adding new capabilities such as automatic elevation for MS-signed binaries). Bootup and hibernation are being parallelized and should run faster on multi-core machines now. Many apps, including the calculator, notepad, and Paint have undergone significant UI and/or feature upgrades. The general UI has been updated somewhat as well.
The kernel sounds remarkably similar, though. More like 6.1 or 6.2 than 7.0.