Root Access

12:24 AM

@badp Am I losing my mind or is your network Gravatar different from your SU Gravatar?

badp

@Tanner My network gravatar is different from my Arqade gravatar.

I use the Arqade gravatar on chat because if I didn't I wouldn't have mod powers on chat.

Somewhat anonimised, but still fun:

badp

@Hennes Buttumptions ahoy!

Aye.

GOOD MORNING ROOT ACCESS!

Oliver Salzburg

12:28 AM

What? superuser.com/review/suggested-edits/81684

@JourneymanGeek Cheers!

o0

go home reviewer, you are ~~drunk~~ stoned out of your mind

12:39 AM

Smashed out of a stoned gourd?

@JourneymanGeek Review audit passed. :P

@OliverSalzburg ^ I think the Review Audit inserts random related words and/or sentence parts.

;p

lol

s/reviewer/editor

/me has the flu again

@Ariane I'm home :P

@badp handles.exe or procexp.exe from SysInternals

badp

I'll make a mental note about handles.exe next time, thanks

12:44 AM

Oh, you found that second thing out already, I didn't read all what you said.

@allqui Welcome home. ^.^

Q: Why do I get the error "You must have Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 installed on your computer before proceeding." when installing Visual Studio 2010?

@Ariane what OS you running? 32-bit windows 8? or 64

64-bit. Why?

jw ^_^

?

12:52 AM

Closed as too god damn stupid:

-1

I want to install Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. I have downloaded VsSDK_sfx.exe from http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/E/D/8ED90A2C-8172-4FCA-B17B-C29C3F0A9732/VsSDK_sfx.exe When I am trying to install, I am getting this error: Setup has found an error before Microsoft Visual Studio ...

installation visual-studio-2010

http://www.gog.com/gamecard/kings_quest_7_8

Any idea of why this would be compatible with Windows 7 but not Windows 8? Sounds weird to me.

@Ariane probably because Win8 is out so recently that they haven't updated their site

@allqui Nope, most of their games list WIndows 8.

there's really very little that'd be compatible with Windows 7 (64-bit, anyway) that's not compatible with Windows 8

unless it has some kind of 16-bit component

Well, it's a 1998 game. That website takes old games, makes them compatible and sell them cheaper.

12:55 AM

@Ariane: most of their games run on dosbox, dosbox runs on windows 8 ;p

@allquixotic: I actually came across an installer that wasn't

relatively modern software too

@Journey That's an emulator? Their games run with an emulator?

@Ariane: pretty much. They custom package a dos emulator called dosbox with their older games

handles most of the compatibility issues

A DOS emulator? But but. 1998 games still ran in DOS? Inside Windows?

Oliver Salzburg

Alignment \o/

(I'm sorry but I still find that hard to read)

Oliver Salzburg

1:00 AM

@Ariane That's fine, I'm just happy about having the numbers right-aligned :P

@Ariane Windows was seen as revolutionary and experimental back in those days. there were some mainstream games for Win32 in the 90s but it wasn't taken for granted that all games only run on Windows

also consider that if it had an unusually long development cycle (delays, whatever) that they could have started development on it many years prior when DOS was still much more dominant

oo' Oh. Geez. Makes me feel old when I think about how I played a game that could work on DOS in my childhood.

King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride

King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride is an adventure game released in 1994 by Sierra On-Line. It featured high-resolution graphics in a style reminiscent of Disney animated films. It is also the only King's Quest game with multiple protagonists, and the only one to divide the story into "chapters." King's Quest VII is the only game in the King's Quest series to feature Queen Valanice in a major role, and also the only one in which King Graham is not shown or mentioned at all (with one minor exception in version 1.4). However, he is listed in the voice credits, so he may have been orig...

King's Quest 7, at least, ran on DOS or Windows... then again, the early versions of Windows had 100% DOS compatibility without an emulator because they were largely based on DOS (pre-Windows NT)

Windows 3.1 / 95 / 98 / ME were DOS with hacks to support newer hardware and a basic graphical shell on top of DOS

Windows NT was the first complete departure from DOS that had to then reach back and support DOS through some kind of compatibility layer

lol

Mhm... And now you've just gained a wonderful opportunity to explain me what Windows NT is exactly.

1:04 AM

@Ariane: compatibility isn't all that great

and fwiw, when I was a kid, I used a 486 SX computer with 2 MB of RAM that had no internet connection (got a modem later on) and played games like Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3d

with dosbox, if nothing else you have a well understood, consistant environment

@Ariane Windows NT is the oldest Windows release that bears any resemblance to the current release of Windows -- at a very low operating system level, at its core, Windows 8 is still very much Windows NT

Windows NT was essentially a re-write, and the only things that stuck around from the pre-NT days were the userland Win32 API

and a limited form of DOS in the form of the command prompt

They rewrote it, all right, but what changed concretely?

well, mainly, things like memory management

pre-NT, programs themselves were primarily responsible for memory management, while with NT and later, the operating system is ultimately responsible for memory management, which limits the amount of "damage" a misbehaving program can do

1:08 AM

@Ariane : everything at a kernel level

plus there was the whole real mode / protected mode change... old DOS programs would run in real mode

and its basically designed to be modular. 'Windows' applications run on a windows 32 API module

(and there was an OS/2 module, and there is a unix module that supposedly sucks)

Windows NT was a true multi-tasking, multi-processing operating system that wisely discarded the assumption that programs would behave, and instead started to limit the level of damage that could be inflicted by a memory leak in a program, for instance

@JourneymanGeek I don't think you can even install SUA on Windows 8, but you can install it on Windows 7, and yes, it pretty much sucks, mainly because it's so hard to distribute software written with SUA

and SUA doesn't really do (any?) graphical interface stuff unless you have a completely separate X server

@allquixotic: but in theory, anyone who is crazy enough could write an API module for an entirely unrelated OS

Mhm. Basically, it's when Windows began to be a full operating system and stopped letting applications behave as they wanted.

1:10 AM

it also has a number of standards issues that keep it from cleanly compiling code targeting generic BSD/Unix/Linux flavors

Oh

and lack of direct hardware access

Right.

@allquixotic: ok, it ~~supposedly~~ definately sucks

OH

@JourneymanGeek at some level that's true, but it depends on what you mean by "direct" -- you can still issue extremely unsafe commands to hardware and crash it (ahem, GPUs) on modern OSes, but usually you have to be an admin

also, lots of old games assumed a slow clock

1:12 AM

I wonder if we could even call older Windows versions operating systems, then, because the definition of an OS that we saw at school was exactly that it managed all that Windows NT began to manage.

@Ariane: there's a question on that on SU somewhere

most old games were programmed by measuring ticks of the processor's clock cycles, so if you set your CPU to a lower or faster clock cycle rate you can control the speed of the game XD

@Ariane Well arguably, they were just DOS shells.

I personally prefer to refer to them as operating environments

@Ariane they're certainly not operating systems by any modern standards, but even the most rudimentary one did support things like filesystems and virtual memory

Q: Was Windows 95 an Operating System?

1:13 AM

43

This question maybe a bit historical, but we didn't have Superuser at the time. Around 2000 when I was starting my Computer science degree, a subject was Operating systems. The teacher asked us to list a few OS. I said Windows 95. I was immediately shot down. Windows 95 wasn't on OS, as it used...

windows operating-systems windows-95

Basically, before Windows NT, as soon as you launched a program, inside that program, Windows had no value or control whatsoever?

not really

@Ariane Well it did provide API calls, but programs could do anything they wanted.

@Ariane it was "cooperative" in the sense that programs would voluntarily yield control back to the operating system, and allow it to do things like window decorations

with 95/98/ME, I think they had their own driver models, proper 32 bit support (windows 3.11 had it tacked on), etc etc

1:15 AM

but if the program decided to be nasty, it could, and it could draw all over your screen

or write into random memory locations

@allquixotic Programs can still draw all over your screen.

which on even older systems, allowed for fun stuff

like the parable of the poker code? ;p

Right, time to get sleep. Calculating how heavy a canon ball would be if made from depleted uranium (rather then 18th century material) is just silly

@Mechanicalsnail they can, but with the DWM, they can't draw all over your framebuffer... the operating system can still say "ok, whoa, hold on, I'm going to bring up a UAC prompt" (or a secure desktop like ctrl+alt+del)

BTW: the answer would be: twice as heavy

1:16 AM

@Hennes Make it out of osmium.

Why?

@Hennes Densest metal.

I think making it out of DU may have other issues

the whole spontaniously catching fire thing

I got thinking about uranium since they are planning to send up a space craft with 50kg of it.

why?

1:17 AM

Make it out of rutherfordium. It will kill whoever had the idea of starting a war and dissipate before reaching the enemy, I believe.

@JourneymanGeek A cannonball isn't going to catch fire.

which turns out to be a sphrere with 8.55cm radius

@Mechanicalsnail: DU has two interesting properties

@JourneymanGeek the other thing about old Windows kernels is that they didn't have preemptive multiprocessing

its self sharpening, and it catches fire spontaniously

1:17 AM

heat, and absorbing neutrons

U (238/235) is a great material when dealing with heat

when the kernel yielded control of the operating system to a child process, that process could continue executing and occupy 100% of the CPU forever, for as long as it wanted to

@JourneymanGeek Few materials are pyrophoric when in a ball that size. Powdered DU will catch fire. A cannonball won't.

DU is used in actual munitions.

even with a single-threaded uniprocessor, a preemptive multitasking OS can interrupt a running userland task, even if it is trying to run in as many cycles as it possibly can

Aye. Density of 19.1 gr/cm^3 is usuful

Depleted uranium is uranium that's no longer radioactive?

1:19 AM

@Hennes Density of 22.59 g/cm^3 is useful...or at least it would be if the stuff weren't so expensive.

Uhm, no

I think it's still radioactive; it's just a different isotope that isn't as enriched with the very radioactive isotopes

@Ariane Still radioactive, but the stuff useful for nukes and reactors is removed, leaving U-238.

Uranium comes in a lot of flavours. MOst of it (over 99% percent when you mine it) is U 238

most "uranium" you get is a combination of different isotopes that have different rates of decay

1:20 AM

Then it's more like... natural uranium?

It is a heavy metal, so about as poisonous as similar metals (lead is also a poison)

@Ariane Natural uranium is mostly U-238, but has some useful -235.

It you hit it with neutrons it will fall apart,

"enriched" uranium is when a larger percentage of the uranium is the more active isotope, and "depleted" is when that more active isotope is mostly gone

And it will very slowly fall appart on its own.

1:21 AM

Okay. But isn't there a metal that naturally weighs about 235 and is conveniently not radioactive?

Not a big deal.

However about 0.8% of the metal is U235

@Ariane Well, osmium, iridium, etc., but they're expensive. Next best cheap metal I think is lead.

That will fall apart in random ways. When it does it releases an average of 2.4 neutrons of the right speed to split other uranium cores.

Toxic and soft instead of radioactive. Practical. xD

So make a nice ball with a lot of Uranium and some of those neutrons will hit other ataom, releasing more heat and more neutrons.

1:23 AM

@Ariane Uranium is toxic, ~~soft~~, and radioactive.

Soft?

Uranium is toxic?

And soft? I never knew.

Well, truth be told, it's not the first thing we're taught about uranium.

@Ariane Actually not soft. I was confusing it with something else.

Mhm.

Hardnesses of the elements (data page)

(GPa) !! Brinell hardness(GPa) || Brinell hardness(GPa) |- | 3 || Li || lithium | 0.6|| || || |- | 4 || Be || beryllium |5.5||1.67|| 0.6|| |- | 5 || B || boron |9.5||49|| || |- | 6 || C || carbon (graphite) | 1.5 || || || |- | 6 || C || carbon (diamond) | 10.0 ||115|| || |- | 11 || Na || sodium | 0.5|| || 0.00069|| |- | 12 || Mg || magnesium | 2.5|| ||0.26|| 0.044 (cast) |- | 13 || Al || aluminium | 3|| 0.167|| 0.245|| 0.184 (annealed) |- | 14 || Si || silicon | 6.5|| || || |- | 16 || S || sulfur | 2.0|| || || |- | 19 || K || potassium | 0.4|| || 0.000363|| |- | 20 || Ca || c...

1:24 AM

From my 'stuff' folder

Paul

Is this someone serial downvoting or a system thing: @JourneymanGeek

But seriously, I wonder who bothered to verify the toxicity of something already dangerous for another reason. xD

Paul

ohm. Uranium radioactivity is not that dangerous

@Ariane Depleted uranium is only very slightly radioactive! The toxicity is the main reason it's dangerous.

1:25 AM

What consumer electronics needs is more materials similar to titanium and magnesium (and alloys thereof) that are very difficult to scratch, have just the right bulk modulus, are able to affordably be melted so that they can be cast, and abundant.

We even made glass plates coloured with uranium ore, and people ate from them without problems

Just do not pile tons and tons near each other, because it it like a match

One match is harmless.

10 matches who sometimes just catch fire are harmless.

People drank mercury "without problems" too, with lead on their teeth. :p

a pile of a 1000 matches (all next to each other) is a disaster waiting to happen

@allqui Isn't magnesium a bad idea because it starts burning violently if heated too much or something?

Mah.

1:27 AM

@Ariane magnesium is used as a component of alloys in several brands of chassis for laptops and desktops

You can make bikes with magnesium frames.

@Ariane Aluminum does the same thing.

So it can't be that dangerous

Really? Aluminium burns too?

Alu in normal conditions reacts, but forms a protecting oxice layer

1:27 AM

@Ariane Powdered aluminium is pyrophoric.

Paul

Hello @OliverSalzburg - can you see what happened above? chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/8035464#8035464

Powered alu plus rust, great stuff

Used to 'burn' the rust and produce molten iron

Minol (explosive)

Minol (pronounced mine-ol) is a military explosive developed by the Admiralty early in the Second World War to augment supplies of Trinitrotoluene (TNT) and RDX, which were then in short supply. The aluminium component in Minol significantly prolongs the explosive pulse, making it ideal for use in underwater naval weapons (e.g. sea mines - for which it was developed - depth charges and torpedoes) where munitions with a longer explosive pulse are more destructive than those with high-brisance. Minol must not be used in weapons fired from gun barrels (e.g. artillery shells) because there is...

Powdered maybe, but it's a strip of magnesium we burned in class to, I think, produce hydrogen, or something. It burned quite easily. o: (And it was pretty.)

Thermite

Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide that produces an exothermic oxidation-reduction reaction known as a thermite reaction. If aluminium is the reducing agent it is called an aluminothermic reaction. Most varieties are not explosive, but can create bursts of extremely high temperatures focused on a very small area for a short period of time. The thermite is simply a mixture of metal, often called the "fuel", and an oxidizer. Its form of action is very similar to other fuel-oxidizer mixtures like black powder. Thermites can be a diverse class of compo...

1:30 AM

Oh but I get it. In an alloy, I guess it doesn't burn.

Say, is it true that you can melt any matter (say, wood) by heating it sufficiently and making sure there's no air to fuel any kind of combustion?

@Ariane No. Some will vaporize without melting.

Or decompose. Wood will form charcoal.

Aye.

Take sugar, no air. Heat -> decompose (caramel is done one way) -> carbon remains if you go on too long

Uhm, sugar heated melts into liquid sugar. No?

As in, candy. oo'

Heat it more. It will decompose

hmm... carbon seems like an element that'd be hard to turn into vapor/gas

1:33 AM

Sugar is C, H and O

And uhm, charcoal... as in, pure carbon?

Nah. Carbon to CO2

@allquixotic Yes. It has a very high BP (3915 K).

we were talking about the opposite, solid hydrogen, the other day ;)

That's below 10 kelvins or something, right? xD

1:36 AM

wolframalpha.com/input/?i=element+with+lowest+freezing+point

@Ariane Or high pressure.

wolframalpha.com/input/?i=element+with+highest+boiling+point

so rhenium at standard pressure would have to be heated to 10,100 Fahrenheit, which is considerably hotter than the mean surface temperature of the sun

.......

we could send a probe made of rhenium (how to make it do something useful just with that one element?) into the sun and it wouldn't melt O_O

Is there something that reflects heat just like a mirror reflects light?

I wonder what vapour iron smells like, assuming a super-resistant nose.

@Ariane Well in a vacuum, heat is basically transferred as light.

@Ariane Probably similar to mercury vapor. Not that I know what that smells like.

Why? Can't heat remain as energy? When it doesn't have any matter to bind to, it transforms?

1:49 AM

@Ariane Hot things emit blackbody radiation.

Blackbody radiation?

"0" SU questions?

Anyone else see that?

Black-body radiation

Black-body radiation is the type of electromagnetic radiation within or surrounding a body in thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment, or emitted by a black body (an opaque and non-reflective body) held at constant, uniform temperature. The radiation has a specific spectrum and intensity that depends only on the temperature of the body. A perfectly insulated enclosure that is in thermal equilibrium internally contains black body radiation and will emit it through a hole made in its wall, provided the hole is small enough to have negligible effect upon the equilibrium. A black ...

Heat transfer

Heat transfer is a discipline of thermal engineering that concerns the generation, use, conversion, and exchange of thermal energy and heat between physical systems. Heat transfer is classified into various mechanisms, such as thermal conduction, thermal convection, thermal radiation, and transfer of energy by phase changes. Engineers also consider the transfer of mass of differing chemical species, either cold or hot, to achieve heat transfer. While these mechanisms have distinct characteristics, they often occur simultaneously in the same system. Heat conduction, also called diffusion, ...

@David Where?

superuser.com/questions

hmm...

@David I see 159,347

1:54 AM

weird

I just checked from my DC's gateway and it showed the correct number

chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/118/root-access?tab=schedule gives an error. Asked on meta.

@Ariane A mirror would reflect radiated heat

Probably they're changing stuff, giving intermittent errors.

that is weird/scarey

1:55 AM

@Journey but not so much that heat doesn't make it to the other side, right?

everyone knows the world is flat right?

@Ariane: A perfect mirror would

but even clear glass reflects heat.

that's how greenhouses work

@David All the questions are missing on the main page.

A perfect mirror would be... what?

theoratical? ;p

1:57 AM

@Mechanicalsnail intermittently... (or however you spell it)

or a mirror that has very good reflectivity at infra red wavelengths

I mean... It would be super flat, so flat that not even the best microscope would see a dent?

I suppose

Okay.

though something thats a parabola or a caustic curve may be useful too

depending on what you intend to do

2:01 AM

Yeah, well, I meant flat as in smooth.

@Ariane The best microscopes can see individual atoms, so that's not possible.

?! It's possible to see atoms? I didn't even know it was possible to see a molecule.

Scanning tunneling microscope

A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is an instrument for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer (at IBM Zürich), the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. For an STM, good resolution is considered to be 0.1 nm lateral resolution and 0.01 nm depth resolution. With this resolution, individual atoms within materials are routinely imaged and manipulated. The STM can be used not only in ultra-high vacuum but also in air, water, and various other liquid or gas ambients, and at temperatures ranging from near zer...

Oooh. But then, they're deducting their presence and displaying an interpretation of that deduction, not magnifying them in an optical sense, right?

2:17 AM

@Ariane Ah, but then when you look through an optical microscope, are you not just deducing the shape by the pattern of photons that arrive at your retina?

Yeah, but that adds another layer of deduction that isn't optical information. Meaning that an actual atom might not really look that way.

@Ariane Atoms don't really look like anything, because the properties we normally associate with appearance (e.g. reflectiveness) arise at the level of atomic interactions.

So any view of individual atoms is necessarily some sort of "artificial" visualization.

These microscopes do give the actual shape that is observed by the probe, so it's reasonable to say it's showing the atoms.

Photons don't bounce off atoms, so it's impossible to actually see them, is that what you're saying?

@Ariane Glass beads don't look much like their image in a kaleidoscope, which is a purely optical instrument.

2:36 AM

@Ariane Well... they do bounce off of atoms. It's just they units are so small you're not going to get a shape out of it. I'm not big on quantum mechanics, but I think it's safe to say that when a photon hits an atom, it "absorbs" (or at least an electron absorbs) the entire photon and emits it at with lesser energy/frequency. This is what produces colors.

Okay.

So... you can't really get any sense of position out of the photons. If you look at the probability fields of where an electron might be, you'd get a good idea of why this would be impossible.

It's really fascinating and mysterious when stuff gets that small =D

They're not really anywhere so much as they are probably in this position at any given moment. (speaking about electrons)

I thought electrons sort of dissolved into a spherical area?

Nope. :)

Bleh, past Bohr's model, stuff just gets too complicated.

2:42 AM

and bohr's model is bohring.

3

Yeah it's after Bohr's model and that whole "planets orbiting the sun = electrons orbiting the nucleus" that stuff get's interesting.

@Tanner: that's an abstraction tho

Yes, and practically entirely false

as a certain british writer put it

But Bohr's model is the only understandable one for me. Conveniently it's more or less what is still taught at school because even though the truth is too hard to understand, it represents the truth pretty well.

2:44 AM

"Lies to children"

well they teach us newtonian mechanics in school, too, and those are pretty false unless you consider that at an extremely macro level they are accurate enough for everyday temperatures/pressures/forces

@allquixotic: actually a very important lesson that

good enough works ;p

boop.

Pondering asking about this 'High static pressure' thing on fans

@Ariane See, I've always done really well when it gets abstract. =\ I have an awesome sense of all the possible positions in which a molecule could arrange itself, but when I take one of those IQ tests that involve folding boxes in your head I score "functionally retarded."

Ahaha. I'm not exactly good or particularly smart, but I still manage to score slightly higher than average. Proof that IQ tests really, really aren't a global picture.

lol

I think I tested well on IQ tests

then dropped out of uni twice.

so neither IQ tests nor exams prove anything >_>

2:50 AM

I even wanted to be a nurse once (doing everything I could to escape IT). I aced cell biology and microbiology, because it all dealt with chemistry. Anatomy and physiology? Flunked it three times. :|

lol

@Tanner: chemistry is fun. Just as long as I don't need to titrate

/me has problems reading a burette :/

Chemistry is hard because of the time limit on labs. But physics are harder because if you miss a class, it's over, because you (I) have no chance of understanding it from the book or experience alone.

lol

I have the contents of a lower sec physics lab around here

glass blocks, resistors...

also some chemistry glassware

my favorite class was Philosophy of Logic

Sounds expensive.

@allqui You are different from 95% students or more. xD

I'm amongst the small minority who considers philosophy as something else than torture, so favourite subject... Yeah, a rare find.

2:58 AM

@Ariane vimeo.com/4845944 my professor is in that talk (Jeffrey Bub), but i dunno who the guy is who starts out talking at the beginning of the video.

he comes in at around 30 minutes

In all honesty I have this very strong urge not to watch this, out of laziness.

xD

wouldnt blame you

I wonder how much gold would be worth if it were as common as iron.

not much

I mean, it's pretty and has special electrical properties, and stuff, so I wonder if it would be worth more or less than iron and other similar metals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum_as_an_investment
o_o Why do people even bother with stock trade and banks? Platinum can't go bankrupt.

3:16 AM

@Ariane It can fall.

Yeah, but if you buy it at a low price, eventually it'll get high.

Whilst a company can always disappear, and actually risks doing so if it's currently cheap.

@Ariane because a company can be worth many times its old value, while the "demand" for platinum never gets that high, even with hybrid cars etc

@Ariane It might start high, fall, and never approach its old price. Like aluminium did.

company stocks are much more volatile and have a greater tendency to spike or flatline (which is a double-edged sword, obviously), whereas raw materials don't show changes quite that dramatic

Hmm... But from what I saw, there are no square parts in the graph, just spikes.

So I guess company investments are more risky but also more profitable if planned carefully, whilst materials are less profitable but less risky?

3:22 AM

@Ariane yeah, although once in a blue moon you can also see materials with dramatic changes, like the 1970s oil crisis

But seriously, how greedy do people get, considering platinum is pretty stable in its exponential-ish increase. :/

@Ariane The gold price is quite volatile. Compare with the S&P 500: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:S%26P500_%281950-12%29.jpg

and that'll happen again after peak oil production

0

Q: Why are there 0 questions?

According to http://superuser.com/questions, there are currently 0 questions on Super User. http://meta.superuser.com/questions says the same about Meta Super User. The other tabs (featured, unanswered, etc.) are also affected. The main pages (http://superuser.com and http://meta.superuser.com) ...

bug

Mmmh, but then again, even if there's a catastrophe, you're almost guaranteed that eventually, it'll come back higher. Besides, aren't catastrophes in materials a great opportunity for purchase, considering how high the possibility of the value going back up again is? I mean, buying a company's stock when it's cheap can be great, but the company can also very well go bankrupt and leave you with zero. o:

@Ariane Hunks of metal don't pay dividends.

> even if there's a catastrophe, you're almost guaranteed that eventually, it'll come back higher

Aluminium didn't.

3:32 AM

Uhm, can't talk about that much as I don't know the story.

But uhm dividends... those are a part of a company's profit, right? I had forgotten about those.

Changes in technology can make materials permanently cheaper, if production gets cheaper, or a large-scale use is obsoleted. If somebody invents a better computer that doesn't use silicon, the price of refined silicon will collapse.

@Ariane Dividends are the reason stocks are worth anything! The price of a stock reflects the future dividends it is expected to pay out.

Hmm... Makes sense!

Though by reading scientific things, wouldn't the drop of silicon price be more safely predictable than a company's downfall? I mean, the price wouldn't drop until the new thing actually enters the market, because people would still be using silicon for a while even after the new product was discovered, and then you could safely sell, no?

@Ariane Also, the question is not whether the price will rise, but whether they'll rise faster than the market. The S&P 500 has more than doubled since 2009.

See historical S&P.

But isn't a raise slower than the market still a good thing? o:

Or is it similar to a salary raise that's lower than the increase in the cost of life?

@Ariane No, because it means that you are poorer than if you had invested your starting money it in the stock market.

3:41 AM

So, second option?

(Off-topic: this is a pretty material. Would be prettier in white, but.)

Since you're good in economics, perhaps you can explain to me why inflation, where the value of everything always goes up (in average), can't be prevented, and why we can't decide that currencies will always have a more or less fixed real-world value.

@Ariane I'm not sure why people don't index things to CPI. In principle somebody could issue certificates redeemable for however many dollars are equivalent to one 2013-USD. Assuming people consider the issuer sufficiently reliable, those certificates would be a roughly zero-inflation currency.

For example, it's just a matter of decision that the US doesn't yearly decide that if an apple is worth a dollar, unless apples have become more valuable than the average of things, they should still be worth a dollar, or something?

But you could still have local inflation if prices rise in one place. For example, if the road to a remote location becomes impassable, prices would rise there.

Yeah, but that's not what I had in mind when I meant inflation. By that I meant how the price and amounts of money always become higher with time.

@Ariane if you made what I make now back when my parents were young, you were well-off. Now it's barely, barely a living wage.

3:56 AM

Also, it's historically not true that inflation is inevitable. That's only been since the mid-20th century.

Yeah, I figure. My father told me that in his youth, 25 ¢ would buy him fries and a soft drink, and that swedish berry candies were 3 / 1 ¢, whilst now they're 1 / 5 ¢.

Not really the point, but I also wonder why we bother to have "big" currencies like dollars. I think everything would be simpler if we only had "small" currencies like yens, and would always use whole values, never cents.

@Mech What's the cause?

@Ariane Government policy aimed to maintain low positive inflation. If deflation seems likely, the government can print more money to cancel it out.

Before recently, governments followed a gold or silver standard, so they couldn't just print unlimited money.

See this chart.

>.<" But I mean, what is the motivation for their decision of letting the currency's real-world value decrease constantly?

@Ariane Or Hungarian pengős.

@Ariane Supposedly it encourages people to invest rather than sitting on cash.

There are some other arguments. It's hard for employers to cut wages in nominal terms, so an inflating currency better allows wages to fall.

A lot of the arguments rest on psychological effects or transaction costs.

Yeaaaah. That second one sounds just treacherous. I'd rather have wages rise and drop reflecting actual needs than see them drop perpetually and needing raises, raises, raises, to cover it.

Besides, come to think of it, why do we bother to have different currencies? Can't we just trade in "credits" or whatever we'd call the global currency? Sounds like it would solve a lot of headache.

4:06 AM

@Ariane A lot of the same arguments. It allows governments to choose to manipulate the currency according to local economic conditions, which don't necessarily match the world economy.

Yeah, but if no one can manipulate a currency, they need to use actual honest means to solve problems. Isn't that a good thing?

@Ariane It depends on whether you think monetary policy is effective. Certainly it's vulnerable to mismanagement, but when done well it is thought that it can stimulate the economy.

Yeah, well, I think it sounds pretty artificial and likely to fail at some point.

@Ariane If it fails, like it did in Zimbabwe, people can switch to using other countries' currencies.

But actually, I feel it's -doomed- to fail at some point. I don't have a rational explanation, but I feel if you make the price of everything go up all the time, it'll collapse eventually.

Besides, using just one currency prevents that issue altogether :/

4:15 AM

@Ariane Eventually the currency gets redenominated.

That sounds even more wrong to me.

Anyway! It's really late now, and I should be sleeping. Thanks for discussing off-topic things with me though. It was interesting. ^.^

Bye, and good night!

Q: Notorious Visual Studio Error C1902, VS configuration

wtf

3

I am getting the notorious "Error C1902: Program database manager mismatch; please check your installation" in my VC++ builds in Visual Studio 2010. My VS will not even build hello world, there is no pdb file even in existence in the folder. Steps I have tried: cleaning and rebuilding (3 diffe...

visual-studio-2010

the accepted solution works -- Microsoft, what is WRONG with you?!

installs broken out of the box? wut?

4:39 AM

Thanks @Mechanicalsnail for mentioning me in your post about the intermittent "0 questions" post! I feel like a celebrity or something. :D

6:17 AM

my cat meowing :D docs.google.com/file/d/0B7gkrXPjBdybRE95X1FrM0ZQQU0/…

7:31 AM

hothardware.com/Reviews/… I'm oddly amused, since the setup I might have run in one of my build scenarios was very similar to this

@allquixotic: mono.. flac?

@JourneymanGeek it's only 1 MB :P

tested is doing a pretty epic series on computer builds >_>

hmm

@Ariane / @allquixotic : blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/02/08/10392028.aspx totally related to the conversation we were having earilier methinks

7:59 AM

@JourneymanGeek my conclusion from all of that is old CPUs don't drive new games well even with powerful GPUs because the game gets CPU-bound

@JourneymanGeek funny... February 8th must be "let's all think about Windows releases from 15-20 years ago" day

@allquixotic: well, yeah, but I was trying to buy either the GPU or the motherboard first, then upgrading the next month

then I got smart, and got the motherboard cheap enough that I could get both ;p

(yay comparison shopping!)

cool :)

also, new fan looks cool

/me got one of those oddly coloured noctuas

HackToHell

10:20 AM

portal == nausea

4

10:38 AM

OOH

thats pretty

Boris_yo

Looks like chimera virus from Mission Impossible 2 @JourneymanGeek @HackToHell

Bob

11:40 AM

@allquixotic Your cat is named Nikki?

@allquixotic Why do I need to log in?? stupid Google..