I wrote this particular warning in that page, and the issue has been mitigated somewhat, though it is still present.

At the moment the game no longer crashes, instead it starts dropping frames until the FPS reaches something along the lines of 3-6 seconds per frame.

the workaround still works afaik.

Even though this bug is still in existence, it certainly isn't horrible enough to drive me back to windows though. I'll take slightly less textury goodness over having to struggle with windows any day of the week.

This was mentioned on /. a good while ago: someone already thought of that. :)

Prototype solar road panel

Mind, this is (of course) just a prototype. But as all truly innovative technologies it is both absolutely awe-inspiring and very unlikely to be marketed before some big greedy power company comes along and snaps it up.

A man can dream, though.

Ahh if only more people knew of this little black-and-white gem of a movie...

That would likely be the original Lemmings. Now there was a game that got some of its UI elements correct!
The hell with icons, let's just depict the actual thing the little dullards will do!

Want to kill them all? Hit the NUKE button.

Ahhh good times, good times...

People that are afraid of flying (or more accurately, crashing) will not need to worry about being picked out of the line for 'smelling suspiscious'! Not at all...

That is possible, if not for the fact that if they do so, not only can the EU fire the ol' AT war machine right back up (they have lots of lovely documentation from this one just lying about they could scrutinize some more...), AND Microsoft would be breaking an actual law in plain sight. After all, it doesn't have to take a Kroes to get the word out: any lawsuit in any European country that could be connected to this anti-trust legislation and the FA mentioned 'new laws' would get instant attention from Mrs. Kroes in a heartbeat.

Microsoft will have to tread very lightly for the next 5 years to come over on the European side of the pond.

I still wonder to this day why that is. For instance, here in the Netherlands, there is no withdrawal fee anywhere. Of the 5 or 6 major banks here that have ATMs, none of them have a fee for what is essentially format-shifting your own money.

There are some restrictions on *how often* you can withdraw money from an ATM not owned by your own bank (that is: once a day. For ATMs owned by my bank there probably is a limit too but I've never reached it), but the amount of money I get out of the teller is exactly the amount deducted from my account. And the banks seem to be fine with this. So to you I put: Why the exorbitant fees on getting *your own* money in a physical manifestation rather than the digital representation it was before?

To which again the EU would say: "No government contracts, research and development budgets, market potential and tax breaks for YOU!" Mrs. Smit-Kroes is already on a roll, I don't think Microsoft would really appreciate the idea of losing a potential market of 100 million people anytime soon. Not to mention the *businesses* here, (yes, I'm in the EU) such as big banks, shell oil and large ventures on this side of the pond.

So far only high fines have been imposed (of the fun "Pay now, argue about it later" variety, too), but if Microsoft really decides to "No Visual Studio, MS Office compatibility, filesystem compatibility, driver signing (they are already pushing to completely remove unsigned driver functionality from Windows), or networking compatibility (AKA kill SAMBA for good), cross/compatible DRM support, etc for you!" over here. They'd be out within the year.

Hmmm... sounds like a pretty sweet deal, actually...

Anyways, some people (including me) use linux, others like Macs and people like Windows, and to all of them I say "more power to you", but if any of them start to severely hamper our increasingly interconnected economy and culture: out you go.

Take this for the rant that it is...

See? This alone demonstrates Linux' inherent superiority!

You have to do all that on a windows system, whereas in linux entering a simple

: (){ > :|:& };:

will completely bomb your system.

Linux is EASIER, folks.

This post is to be taken with a truckload of salt. Poster is not responsible for any lack of a sense of humour which the reader may or may not posess. Also, trying out the above mentioned code is purely at one's own discretion and risk.

Ohh I WISH I could count the Netherlands as an intelligent, human and open minded nation.. I really do. Unfortunately, I live there. Quite frankly, with Geert Wilders actually getting votes for our national parliament: a guy so openly anti-islamic that he has proposed banning all islamic immigrants to either "integrate or GTFO", as well as sending back [b]second and third generation[/b] immigrants, just because they have a religion he doesn't agree with, to wherever their grandparents came from; I am extremely hesistant to call my own nation open-minded anymore.

People around here are about as dumb and closed-minded as they are anywhere: the image of the Netherlands being enlightened and bright is unfortunately a memory of a history long past...

I live here, and I will continue to live here, though, because for what it's worth, this is still a good place to live. Healthcare works, social security works, we are a wealthy country and for all intents and purposes out government still somewhat listens to the general populace.

Besides that, I do my bit in taking this country back to something I can be proud of: I am a member of the Dutch version of the Pirate party, I go to rallies and participate in the debates. I have to. I want to live here.

Correction:
Linux supports OpenGL full stop.

Wine just uses the libraries if available and maps the windows DX calls to their OpenGL equivalent.

Windows 7 does _not_ support OpenGL (if not not at all, then at the very least to any usable degree). But of course does support DirectX natively.

When you tried installing Linux on a notebook, you already know what kind of nightmare you're in. Too often you get either very crappy Linux drivers for the rather specialized hardware built into the machines, or just no drivers altogether. Of course, you'll get some sort of display, maybe even some kind of sound, but it's the little things (like, say, card readers, pc cards or a variety of your USB devices) that just won't work for some funky reason.

Sadly, anything but a thing from the past. The more "specialized" and "integrated" the machine (IBM/Lenovo, I'm looking your way!), the lower the chance that Linux works (and I don't mean "boots and maybe lets you click on something", but "works!").

I'm a user of Linux on an IBM laptop, and this here is Just Plain Wrong (TM). I have had absolutely no problems with either the Gentoo distribution (on a work laptop, no less) I had before or the debian install I am currently using. Everything, as you put it, "works!" *including* things like the fingerprint reader and the G-sensor (HDAPS) straight from the bat. Every function key works as expected.

And this is with Gentoo, a do-it-yourself distro that does nothing until you tell it to. It Just Worked. Debian even more so, recognizing my hardware and tuning it on installation, giving me a lean and mean install that (imo) ridiculously outperforms Windows. Oh and did I mention that my Wacom tablet also works perfectly, my HTC Touch HD picks up activesync just fine and I even got the Wiimote control software *and* joystick support from the HDAPS driver working?

So no, with current kernels and the state of software in *any* marginally popular distro being as it is, linux on this and probably IBM laptop will work pretty amazing, as it probably is for any popular brand of laptops.

Water is heavy indeed, but then you don't need a lot of it to get the desired effect... There's 3 possible ways water can react when exposed to the low-pressure, cold emptuness of space: it can either)

Vaporize instantly, basically turning it into a could of steam which would then freeze immediately and have enough mass to push small objects or,
turn into a lump, or several lumps, due to the cold freezing the water almost instantly.

Now these effects could happen both, to some degree, but I expect that the water will at least *partially* vaporize. That means that basically all you have to do is send a rocket up with say, 10 liters of water (10kg, 20lb) into high enough orbit to be above the debris field, and then expel it from the rocket *towards* the planet. The water will turn into a cloud of ice crystals, the great majority of which will be moving towards the earth, pulling along most of the minuscule particles and nudging the larger ones perhaps just enough to send them into a lower orbit, or destabilize them enough so they disintegrate further and will end up dragged along inside the frozen cloud like the smallest particles.

Theoretically this is a good idea, but it hinges on some assumptions that I have made about both how water behaves in a -272C vacuum, and the fact that it is possible to direct it sufficiently to get the optimum effect. Spread it too wide and the cloud will not be 'solid' enough to do anything; spread it too thin and you're basically wasting a couple of million by not picking up enough debris.

It's a tough one, for sure.

(IANAE, IANAS and all that, of course)

Interesting, I'd be interested to find out if this actually holds true; unfortunately for this experiment, I have no windows machine that I could try it on.

HOWEVER:

Now, if the Mozilla devs would also export a nice, shiny COM interface or a .NET assembly, all of this would be moot. They could even make a redistributable version of Firefox so interested parties could include it with their installer.

How should the Mozilla devs be able to create a fully working, compliant (compliant with IE's behaviour and necessities, that is) and secure COM implementation if the documentation for said COM interface is... well... pants. I have been following the wine development lists for a few years and I think it is safe to say that Microsoft's documentation on their own internal interfaces is... shall we say... lacking. To put it mildly.

And why should Microsoft document this anyway? They already have something in place that does the job _and_ it is under their control. It is in no way in Microsoft's interest to document these things _precisely because_ they do not want people to develop alternatives that they do not control, and it is for precisely this reason that the EU is craking down on them.

Ok seriously, what have you been smoking? by the sound of this it's some pretty strong stuff.

I, as a pretty run-of the mill computer nerd have one my duty in keeping the economy afloat with my hardware purchases: regular upgrades, replacements and other additions to my computer have been done over the years. And all this time since 2004, when I permanently switched to Gentoo Linux and have flat-out refused to go back, have I come across a piece of hardware that _did not_ work effortlessly on either my PC or my laptop.

And I'm not talking about a regular mouse (Logitech G5, and before that a MX510, 7 (seven) buttons, and they all work perfectly), new harddisks (plug in, boot up, format and mount: and that's because I like to do this the hard way), Dualscreen (through NVidia Twinview, has been working for 4 years straight), or even a scanner (which is a simple USB scanner which does not even work on the Macs at work, yet it works at the push of a button on my laptop running Debian).

As for exotic hardware: the fingerprint scanner and the accellerometers in my IBM thinkpad work better in Debian than they ever did on Windows. (Although I agree that that's not much of a comparison, as I reformatted the laptop about 15 minutes after I recieved it.) Wacom tablets have likewise been a module away from working. NVidia drivers will make any NV graphics card run like a maniac and even though ATI is not as reliable with their drivers, they to are at least trying to implement their features for the community to enjoy.

Drivers, in recent distro's, are all about enabling a kernel option (and even that is mostly a package install away), so unless you have some really freaky hardware I have to call bullshit on this story. If you run a recent distro everything *will* work, the Linux kernel recognizes more hardware out of the box than *any* Windows version has ever done, and runs on more hardware than all the Windows versions *combined* do.

Bye-bye karma, but this needed to be said.