You are forbidden from deploying this design. Dear $(GOD), what the hell is the matter with you? Who told you this was a good idea? Which three-pleat consultant said that this highly technical readership wanted this site to look like a fluffy blog with fscktons of whitespace? How much money did s/he take from you? Have you caught them yet?

For those of you who would rather browse Slashdot without pictures, click the icon at the top right of the story column, and switch to Classic View.

Does. Not. Work.

This is real, pathetically simple, Mr. S:

• Install Firefox.
• Install NoScript plugin. Leave at default settings.
• Surf to your site.

If your site does not operate correctly using this browser setup, --== YOUR SITE IS BROKEN!!==-- Please do not assume that the users on this of all sites are fscking morons who leave their browsers in an insecure state and happily execute just Any Damned Script. You're lucky I'm willing to whitelist fsdn.com, but just who the fsck is rpxnow.com, or ooyala.com?

Scrap the whole damned thing and start over. Better still: Don't start over. It's fine the way it is.

A press release is not a fiber rollout. I seriously doubt they have any genuine plans for an actual fiber roll-out, except possibly to the most lucrative neighborhoods.

Also, this mealy-mouthed "up to 1Gb" sets off my bullshit meter, and leads me to suspect that AT&T are going to try and do this on the cheap. OTOH, GFiber starts at 1Gb, and there's plenty of upside built in to their backbone.

What I would be very careful of is the agreements AT&T manages to strong-arm out of Austin in "exchange" for promsing to think about maybe deploying fiber someday. I could easily see AT&T wresting an agreement that grants AT&T exclusive access for 50 years to municipal poles for deploying new information services (as an "incentive," of course). Oh, and the agreement will have no or an extremely vague performance clause. Once they get that agreement, they can shut out all competitors and then do nothing, or as close to nothing as they can get away with.

This might as well be how Blackberry, Nokia, and Palm blew it. And I'm probably leaving off a few companies.

IMO it all comes down to arrogance about your own platform. In Nokia's case that was Symbian.

Yes, when I saw this I thought that this was a reason to make motherboard IOMMUs a security feature. Also, the DMA destination memory pages should not have the executable bit turned on. Recent generations of Intel/AMD CPUs have provided the ability to turn that bit off.

This sounds curiously like the model that the 3DO console was supposed to embody 20 years ago (well, 20 years minus ten days or so). In fact, I'm having trouble identifying any significant differences from it.

The idea as presented was to create a common reference platform and get multiple HW vendors to build to the spec and compete on price, like they all were doing with VCRs at the time. The 3DO Company itself wouldn't build anything, getting its money from per-disc royalties ($3/copy). Ultimately, three manufacturers put out 3DO-compatible machines -- Matsushita (Panasonic), LG (nee Goldstar), and Sanyo.

However, the 3DO console famously released at a staggering $700 (1993) and, despite several price drops, never really lost the stigma of being, "too expensive." As a consequence, the installed base never really took off to the same degree as Nintendo and Sega (Sony's Playstation didn't exist back then). As such, 3DO started publishing its own games, and doubled the per-disc fees. Still not enough. 3DO eventually shed all of its platform development talent and become another game development house until it died around 2003.

It'll be interesting to see if Newell can succeed where Hawkins failed.

I hear that somewhere in the company there's a short video that serves as an introduction to their GPU architecture for new driver engineers. I wonder if they'll release it, too?

(*uncontrollable giggling*)

Cinelerra works well - and has for years.

You have got to be kidding.

I have tried on several different occasions to get Cinelerra to do something useful, and have failed every time. The program is incredibly unreliable, and will crash or hang at the slightest provocation.

There are two versions in circulation -- the "original" Heroine Virtual version, still occasionally updated; and the "community" version. I have no idea what the alleged differences are.

It claims to accept a wide variety of video codecs, but in my experiments only appears to reliably support DV -- an uncompressed format that will quickly fill every disk you have.

Like Blender 3D, Cinelerra blazes its own trail for the user interface. In fairness, if you have some patience, it will gradually start to make sense. It's ugly as hell, but that ugliness could be forgiven if the program worked reliably and produced decent videos.

There are enough glowing reviews of Cinelerra out there to make me wonder if my setup is the problem, but I rather doubt it, since Kdenlive has worked just fine on the same machine. My current theory is that long-time Cinelerra users have learned over the years what bits are irredeemably flaky and just automatically avoid them.

The last time I tried Cinelerra in earnest was about two years ago. After about half a dozen crashes in an hour just trying to put together a slideshow-ish thing, I gave up and started using Kdenlive fairly successfully. But I still watch for updates to the Cinelerra packages. Given the number of updates I've seen over the past two years (very few), I'm not confident the warts have been addressed.

There are some nice things that Cinelerra (allegedly) does, and its timeline has a few advantages over Kdenline. If you know of some magical incantation that will get Cinelerra working crash-free, I will honestly give it another shot. But I'm not sanguine about the results.

A giant wall of ice? Where have I seen that before?

It's supposed to be in the Presidio, but the movie shot put it in the Marin headlands.

I was there last week and there was really bad smoke from the American fire, which is still burning. You might be getting both that and the Rim fire.

To heck with that. I would have liked to see Project Orion. That is, from a distance :-)

But it does not allow rockets to reenter the Earth's atmosphere at orbital velocities, slow down, and land.

How about the Moon and Mars? It seems to me that the fuel capacity of Dragon isn't enough to do both lunar descent and ascent just on the Super Draco thrusters and the trunk's fuel capacity.

The impressive part is that they do it with an actual rocket that is 106 feet tall, and that they have launched it 7 times with 0 failures.

Using the same engine, rather than treating the engine as a disposable object that only performs one burn in its lifetime. Most rocket engines can't be throttled, can't be shut down and then restarted in flight or otherwise.

The tricky part is going to be for any stage to have enough delta-V to return to the pad after lifting a payload to orbit. Also, as far as I can tell, this takes a drag chute for lower stages, and a re-entry shield for upper ones.

Bruce

I made the mistake of eating a hamburger in London in 2001. I was on a long business trip and just wanted something quick to eat, so I ducked into a McDonalds.

Little did I know that, thanks to the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease, this simple act would make me ineligible to become a blood donor for years to come.

Aren't these units similar to the ASUS Transformer Infinity, which sells just fine at $400 or more?

I guess that's why you won't see them with an Android load and a discount. MS has probably contracted with ASUS not to do that.