Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Beetle, Reading, Streams
Can you read me? Over. With both feet in the stream of continuing evolution and convergence of distributed voting, online metaknowledge and probably a few other things, Johnathan Nightingale has created a site called Canonical Tomes, lately featured on Kuro5hin.
It's a really cool way to approach the "top picks" in a given subject, and fun to browse especially in the fields you're not very familiar with: the trick is a community voting system -- visit it and pick your favorites.
It also raises the question, though, of how to avoid an early lead from remaining permanent; how do new but excellent books gain a foothold? And what about situations where the popular books aren't the best ones? Kudos to Johnathan for putting this together, now it's your turn to point out the best books in your field to others.
Gee, Wally, I can colorize you from this "Linux" machine! starlady writes "Linux.com has an interview up with the developers of GStreamer. GStreamer, as mentioned here before, is a full featured multimedia framework with functionality for everything from mp3 playback to audio and video editing."
An excerpt, quoting developer Wim Taymans: "First of all, GStreamer is a real framework. This means that it can be used for a generic media player as well as serve as the core of large multimedia render farms. The GStreamer core is built in such a way that it is media agnostic, it doesn't know or care what media data it is handling. The interpretation of the media types is entirely handled by the plug-ins."
And though everyone is excited about video, things like this will make Linux a lot more capable as an audio capturing and manipulation platform, too.
The real question is, did you get in trouble?
Regarding the dangling beetle which caused the city fathers of San Francisco some small consternation, Ms Golden Gate 2001 writes: "In case you're still fretting, or wondering, here are a few first-hand pieces of info about the stunt (I hope you guys weren't really believing what you read in the papers, now were you? ;-)
- the Bug was hung by cable and nylon webbing from a two-point suspension system (check the math -- that's not so easy: you try figuring out how to sling cable from *both* sides of the bridge to hang something nicely centred!)
- the Bug was never in sight of any commmuter after the initial 1-minute deployment (*under* the bridge!)
- the first to be informed were the traffic helicopters
- the Ironworkers who cut it down (in minutes) thought the job was well done ("They could probably get a job as ironworkers")
- the Bug was stripped of nasties, and as the Ironworkers said, it's a new habitat (just like when they sink a ship to create an artificial reef, only smaller, MUCH smaller)
All that technology, and it's still nigh impossible to get the facts heard over the Brownian noise :-P At least this is a good forum for venting without swords!
P.S. It's National Engineering Week in Canada! (Look out below!)"
It looks like the Cannonical Tomes site has been slashdotted back to the dark ages.
I created an account and got one book added to an empty category, but now it's choking on my second try, and the home page won't even come up anymore.
Barbarians, every one of us! Let's go rent a movie!
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It WAS blocking some boats from going under, so that might have been a good reason not to make it a tourist attraction...
However as a Canadian living in SF, I thought it was great.
Another approach is posting to Usenet - when I was after a book on meteorology, I posted to sci.geo.meteorology (explaining my background and what I was looking for) and three different people from different universities recommended Wallace and Hobbs' Atmospheric Science , which turned out to be just what I was after.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I've met some of the people involved in the beetle project and had the whole hanging procedure described to me. Let's just say, it wasn't easy and some people involved must have had balls made of steel.
As a former UBC engineer, I really couldn't wipe the smile off my face for days, not just because of the stunt but of the publicity that it caused and how it will help to increase spirit in the engineering faculty. Since i've graduated i've heard and seen less and less people come out to events sponsored by the Engineering Student Society. Something like this will (hopefully) show people that there really is more to school than just going to class and doing your homework...
I was very proud to be able to meet some of hte people involved and personally congradulate them for a job well done. Of course, I have no idea what their names are or what they look like anymore :-)
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
I bet I have an idea as to "how" - use an air cannon to shoot a weighted ball of string at a near vertical (say, 15-30 degrees) angle from one side of the bridge. The length of this ball of string should be about triple (maybe more, given the thickness of the bridge - but not so long as to be longer than the bridge is high, above the waterline) the width of the bridge. The air cannon would shoot this wad of string out, and it would unravel in an arc. When the weight reached the end of travel, hopefully most of its forward momentum would be converted into an angular momentum, and the weight would start to fall, eventually swinging up and wrapping "around" the bridge, to be "caught" by individuals on the other side.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
What, they didn't engineer a "PULL HERE TO DROP CAR" tab?
Windage on a long string is pretty high. I hope you have enough momentum in the fall to go the distance and come up the other side. Remember free falling people (skydiving) only reach terminal velocities of only 140 - 200 MPH due to windage. I think the fall and return up the other side distance is too great to overcome the windage. The bridge is too wide requiring too far of a swing. That's part of being an engineer is comming up with solutions that will work in the real world. To get an idea of the windage on a string, take your average gas powered string trimmer. If the string is too long, it overloads the motor even when it is not cutting anything but air. That's with less than 2 feet of string exposed. The engineers that pulled the stunt used a solution that worked!
The truth shall set you free!
Personally I thought they should have left it there, given it's apparent well-designed linkage. It'd make an interesting monument to human ingenuity as well as a slightly subversive statement regarding people being too uptight to see the humor in a VW bridge-dingleberry ("dingleberry- n. southern US slang, the little bits of fecal matter that stick to the fur/feathers of an animal's nether regions post-evacuation"). And hey, the beetle is also a nod to the counter-culture mecca SF was in the 60s.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
No - you don't shoot a weight, and have the string on a reel - instead you shoot a ball of string (I would use a lightweight monofilament, maybe mylar monofilament - with the weight in the middle), with one end tied to the bridge. I would think, properly wound (beforehand, in a shop somewhere) in a ball, that you could get it down to the size of a baseball, probably less.
The hope is to shoot the string and weight out until it is taut, then let gravity (coupled with centrifugal force to keep the string taut) swing it down and around.
I really don't know how wide the bridge is, nor how high above the water it is - but I doubt it is very wide - doesn't it only have 2 or 3 lanes of traffic in each direction? - so maybe only 50 or 60 feet wide or so? Make it about 20 feet thick, and you are looking at perhaps 100-130 feet of monofilament, tops.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I don't really think that this is true. Most of the Linux media apps i've used in the last while seem to be standardized on (for video at least) the avifile stuff which is a clever hack that allows some (most, all, i don't know) windows codecs in the form of dlls to be run natively under linux. While i'm sure that we we would all like to see pure linux versions of these codecs, we have to take what we can get, and if people are clever enough to hijack the windows ones, so be it. It's the result that matters. Let people write for media player if they want to, if we can take and use the result under Linux, the problem is solved.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Couple of comments about the VW beetle hanging from the GG bridge:
the Bug was never in sight of any commmuter after the initial 1-minute deployment (*under* the bridge!)
This isn't quite true. On the northbound approach to the bridge, coming from SF, there is a stretch of road (Marina Blvd I believe) that has a full sideview of the bridge, from maybe a mile away. By the peak of commute time, news of the event was all over the radio, so people were slowing down along this stretch of road to have a look.
So yes, you couldn't see the car from the bridge itself, but to imply there was no impact on the commute is very wrong.
the Bug was stripped of nasties, and as the Ironworkers said, it's a new habitat (just like when they sink a ship to create an artificial reef, only smaller, MUCH smaller)
Like Neal Stephenson says in Zodiac, ANYTHING you drop in the ocean will become a habitat, because that's where the fish live! Just because you dropped garbage down there and the fish start swimming around it, that doesn't make it a good, environmental thing to do. That iron and steel will be down there, rusting, for decades. For no good reason. In fact, I'm surprised they chose to snip the cables instead of pull it up, or instead of lowering it onto a barge.
--
Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.-- Cool Hand Luke
just the shell of the car would still be better than what I have now....(hint...no car)
The anti-salmon
It seems to me that an awful lot of this is dependant on things like attitude of the community. For example, take a look at the content of freenet. As described, the typical member could be "a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn"
Somehow I think that the books recommended by that cultural cross section would be different than that of the Reader's Digest (which has a circulation approaching 100 million)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The success of WMP is mainly thanks to its strong foundation in the form of DirectShow. DirectShow allows the programmer to dynamically create graphs that are capable of playing a variety of formats extensively reusing parts of the graph that can be reused (such as the source filters and renderers). The architecture is also flexible and extendible. This is exactly what the GStreamer team is trying to accomplish. In other words GStreamer is very much different from all other players you mentioned in your comment in that GStreamer is more of a filter graph than just another media player. It's precisely what Linux media needs.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Rusting iron and steel is not the best thing to have in your drinking water, but it's a perfectly normal component of ocean water.
As you know, sea water is about 3% "salt". That does not only mean regular table salt, NaCl, but pretty much any element or compound that exists on the planet and is soluble in water. I haven't checked the iron content of the ocean, but I'd be surprised if it's not in the megazillions of tonnes.
insufferable preaching section:
Iron is a perfectly natural element in nature, and to put it back in nature is not in general a bad thing.
More controversially, the same can be said of, among many other things, uranium, which is quite common in ocean water.
end of preaching. phew!
PS. Could the bug actually be seen from Marina Blvd? It was reported to be a very foggy day.
Yeah, but remember: There's a whole slew of architectures that Linux runs on. I'd personally like to be able to use one ap on all flavors of Linux, beit x86, PPC, Sparc, Alpha, Mips...what have you. This cute hack won't work so sweetly for these ports because it would have to be emulated, or otherwise wrappered (anyone actually done this yet?), and as we all know, this would slow the operation down so much that it would be unberable. Please don't think about intel compatible chips alone, Linux has a great deal to offer on other platforms as well.
I know several easy ways. The first to come to mind is use the wind. Lower a lightweight string on the upwind side of the bridge and let it blow under. On the downwind side, use a weighted hook to snag it and pull it up the other side. That is the easiest since it's almost always windy there. There is two other easy ways I can think of at the moment and there are probably many more. Use your immagination! It's what engineers get paid to do. Solve problems.
The truth shall set you free!
How many times do we have to go through the same thing before someone decides that the *framework* is done and the real work can begin? I love gstreamer a great deal, but it's sad that Linux dosen't have what windows does in this area. I mean, we have xine, xmms, oms and gstreamer, but we don't have waht "video for windows" had what, like 3 years ago? 1. Extensibility through platform independent codecs. 2. Access to hardware accelerators and capture cards. 3. Network transparancy for remote displaying. I don't know how we can get there, but if someone put the amount of work into one project that was being put into 5 or 6, we'd be there already! Not that I'm saing gstreamer is bad - it looks to be the best of the lot. But a kind of sorry lot. Let's wipe the floor of that "Windows Media Player!"
I'm the best IRC client ever.
That's pretty wide - didn't think it would be that wide. I still think that if it isn't too "thick", it could still be done with a thin enough monofilament. Heck, even if it was 50 feet thick, there would still be enough clearance between the end of the filament and the water as it swings around. Also remember that as it wraps around the bridge, the "attachment" point changes, in effect speeding up the swing.
Heh - all of this is sounding to complicated to be practical, though - there is probably a simpler solution.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I mean, much of what people feel *must* be read is actually just stuff that everyone else has - what linguists call creating common language rather than actually expanding knowledge. As such, to rely on common knowlege to create a list of common knowledge might create stagnancy rather than a dynamic work.
Not that I'm saying having a set of liturature people are expected to read is a bad thing - rather, that cannonizing that liturature via plebian masses might stifle the ability for others to truly create.
As such, though I hate sounding so incredibly elitist, creating the sight for "everyman" to decide the cannonical works is less meaningful than just letting the college professors do it - at least they are going out there to find the new stuff, and include works that challenge traditional thought - even if they personally find those works "wrong."
What's a class on government without facsim, for instance? But, who'se going to be the gutsy one to add "My Struggle" to the list of political works? Certainly not me!
At the same time, however, this does open the "cannonical" list up to works that would not otherwise see play - things like "stomp" as a cannonical play, as opposed to "le mis," or something. It's certainly a project that I'll watch, if not participate in!
--
I'm the best IRC client ever.