I've worked four ten-hour days at several companies, and I love it. Recently I had a little boy, and with his sleep schedule I found it really hard to spend enough time with him after work, so I'm back to five eight-hour days. It feels like cheating, going home every day at 4pm. Until Friday morning :)

Four other folks at our company work 4x10, including the CEO, and it works just fine. Friday is fucking sacrosanct: no emails, no phone calls, no contact of any kind. If a fire flares up, other people in the office deal with it.

And when I say 4x10, I mean it. We track our time pretty religiously, and our most bust-ass employee has averaged about 42 hours a week over 18 months.

And yes, we're a tech company :) Live in Portland? Want to move here? We're hiring.

Hydrogen peroxide powered rocket packs fly for around 30 seconds, because they have a specific impulse of around 125, meaning that one pound of propellant can make 125 pound-seconds of thrust, meaning that it takes about two pounds of propellant for every second you are in the air. Mass ratios are low for anything strapped to a human, so the exponential nature of the rocket equation can be safely ignored.

A pretty hot (both literally and figuratively) bipropellant rocket could manage about twice the specific impulse, and you could carry somewhat heavier tanks, but two minutes of flight on a rocket pack is probably about the upper limit with conventional propellants.

However, an actual jet pack that used atmospheric oxygen could have an Isp ten times higher, allowing theoretical flights of fifteen minutes or so. Here, it really is a matter of technical development, since jet engines have thrust to weight ratios too low to make it practical. There is movement on this technical front, but it will still take a while.

John Carmack

How long should it have taken? Is there some standard for how long a new language and VM are supposed to take to implement?

IMHO Bloom County is better than Calvin & Hobbes. I think Bill Watterson is probably the best artist ever to see wide newspaper comic publication, but Bloom County had it where it matters: character and story. As wonderful as Calvin & Hobbes was (and I have every collection ever published), Bloom County gave us characters who changed and grew over time. The stories were varied, interesting, and sometimes lasted months. On top of that it was bloody hilarious.

I won't write a novel and try to convince you right away. Next time you're in a book store (or on Amazon :), pick up a Bloom County collection and see what you think.

go AC go!

There's actually a player made server (AADS) for Tribes:AA that runs on a PC. it actually fixes a lot of the bugs in the game, too.

This sort of thing really isn't a tricky thing for console game makers to do; they just don't want to let the players have that much control over the server environment.

I always thought the Freespace games would make a kick-ass movie, as long as the mistakes made in Wing Commander were avoided by shooting the director of that cinematic abortion.

And Freedy Prinze Jr., on general principle.

3 years old. Wow, how did they do all that in three years?

I really wouldn't bet my life on any OS. I would be happier if they ran on at the very least Trusted Debian. OpenBSD would be better, but I'd only trust my life to a machine that runs a completely custom OS built for one purpose that does one thing, and does it well. Thats why I'd trust the computers in a car before I trust any other sort of OS.

I really don't have a choice, though, so here's to hoping that people have enough sense to at least stop using Windows on mission critical systems.