Slashdot Mirror
World's Worst Dog'n'Pony Shows
Thanks to coli for passing along last Thursday's press release from VisuaLABS. This is a company that has been telling investors that they have what they call "GroutFree(tm)" technology, which joins multiple LCD screens invisibly into one, large, flat screen.
On July 3rd, investors were wowed by the demo of the company's "42 inch diagonal flat screen display" prototype. Sheldon Zelitt, VisuaLABS' Chairman and Chief Scientist, said, "It was our great pleasure to share an early look at that technology with our loyal shareholders at the Shareholders' Meeting."
And on July 26th, we got another press release -- this one titled "VisuaLABS Announces That Its Primary Technologies Are Not As Represented And Dismisses Sheldon Zelitt." It turns out that "the large screen GroutFree prototype demonstrated at the Annual Meeting was, in fact, a standard 42 inch plasma television purchased by Sheldon Zelitt ... at a local Calgary consumer electronics retailer ... The Committee believes that no working prototype of a device incorporating the GroutFree technology exists."
While all this was going on, the Pentagon was busy launching two missiles and making them smack into each other. This is the missile defense justification, the one scientists say can't be done, the umbrella that will protect the U.S. and its allies from all those Third World dictators who just have to deliver their nuclear warheads the hard way.
The big test came on July 14, when a target missile (avoiding mishaps) was launched and successfully blown to pieces by its interceptor. Bush was "pleased." CNN showed us the debris radar. And Michael Kelly of the Washington Post stuck it to the "liberal critics," pointing out that "The 'Smart People' Were Wrong." As he wrote:
"In the blink of a video screen going blinding white on July 14, it became impossible to offhandedly disdain a missile defense system as 'weapons that don't work.' It does work."
Yep! So phase one of our missile defense plan is complete. Now we go on to phase two, which is to convince all our enemies to install GPS transmitters in all their missiles.
Oh, you didn't know the test missile had a GPS transmitter on board? Well, you do now.
My favorite part is that the test missile actually launched a Mylar balloon as "chaff" to try to fool the "kill vehicle." Luckily, the balloon didn't have GPS.
So what's your favorite dog'n'pony story? Ever had a demo fail in some especially embarrassing way? Ever cheated? Ever get caught? C'mon, you can tell us...
Update: 08/01 08:00 PM by J : I'm seeing a lot of discussion of the relevance of the GPS. Here's Defense Week which claims the "prototype interceptor was able to find a target warhead partly because the target signaled its location to the interceptor for much of the flight, and the transmissions formed the basis of the targeting orders."
And thanks as always to Slashdot readers for posting more information. monopole points out this link, or take your pick, this one -- they're plans from last year, but still interesting:
SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: And we take the GPS data, and we fuzz it up quite honestly, because GPS is a lot more accurate than radars. Okay? [...]
Q: Well, actually, would you then use the degraded GPS, or would you just the regular GPS that you use as a fallback -- (inaudible word)?
SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: (Inaudible.)
STAFF: Use the regular GPS.
SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Regular GPS.
booyah! 1st!
You aren't a very good story teller, joker, or liar.
Please, shut the hell up before I kick you in the neck.
I don't understand why they use the term "GPS".
Was the missile transmitting at the same frequency as GPS satellites? Was it transmitting location coordinates?
If the beacon simply broadcasted a signal at some arbitrary frequency, it doesn't warrant the term "GPS". That's like calling a short-wave radio a GPS transmitter.
I hate it when the boss walks in to check up on me and I have to frantically close all my Slashdot windows.
that was a quote from "fortune", not intended to be part of the body. forgot to include newline...
(Score:5, Blindly Criticizing The Bush Administration)
Trolls...everywhere! The ones with the neon-colored stick-up hair and the gems in their tummies! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!
Yeah, there was this car, and I was told to "make it go faster", so I hooked up some JATO packs to the back, climbed in and, well....things didn't go as planned
Last post!
So-called intelligence is just more complex than humans can model. It doesn't take much imagination to see that intelligence could be borne out of an on-going natural process. It takes much more imagination to see that a superbeing did it. I don't see the proof for God in A.I., unless the Universe is a sort of self-derived A.I. mechanism (which would be N.I., wouldn't it?), thus making the Universe itself God.
Knowing the facts, there are only two ways to argue against missile defense: you are either in favor of M.A.D., or you believe that taxpayer dollars shouldn't pay to protect us from a very likely threat of nuclear devestation.
If you beleive the former, you are simply un-American
Thank you for implying that EVERY military and political leader for the past 50 years has been un-American.
I could pay an extra $2 to prevent my face turning into what a french fry from dropped into a deep fryer looks like, I think I'll pony up the cash.
I would, too. What I don't want to do is to spend $2/paycheck to make weapons manufacturers rich.
We should take the Israeli approach and start blowing up any facility among our potential enemies that looks like it might be used to create weapons of mass destruction. If you suggest otherwise, then you are UN-AMERICAN. And an ANTI-SEMITIC. And a NAZI.
This Fortnight in Perl 6 (17 - 30 June 2001)
./configure -des, make, make test, make install. Done.
0 1.tar.gz
By Bryan Warnock
This Week
Perl Doesn't Suck
Multiple Classifications
Once Inherited, Twice Shy
Class::Object
The Internal String API
Miscellany
Last Words
You can subscribe to an email version of this summary by sending an empty message to perl6-digest-subscribe@netthink.co.uk.
Please send corrections and additions to bwarnock@capita.com.
The lists have been very light recently. During the last two weeks of June, three of the mailing lists received a mere 142 messages across 20 different threads. 40 different authors contributed. Only 5 threads generated much traffic. Eventually, I'll come up with a better way of reporting these meaningless metrics.
Perl Doesn't Suck
Adam Turoff provided a detailed summary of some recent battles against The Big Bean:
Now, at the end of the day, I have no fewer than five JVMs installed, all completely different implementations of two Java standards. As a Perl programmer, I find this abhorrent. Installing any version of Perl release in the last 7 years is no different from installing any other release: download, extract,
Elaine Ashton, however, disagreed, to a point:
I don't believe I was saying that. My point was that you had a bad experience installing Java on FreeBSD and have declared that it sucks to install it. Unsurprisingly, I have never had a problem installing or supporting Java on Solaris but there are plenty of things to grumble about Perl sometimes, especially if you deploy multiple versions and configurations across multiple platforms and multiple versions of those platforms.
Michael Schwern pointed out that Solaris is "Sun's Blessed Platform", and it shouldn't be surprising that Java should install easily there. The discussion then touched a bit on distributions, licensing, support roles, and, yes, even George Carlin.
Once Inherited, Twice Shy
Multiple Classifications
David Whipp asked if bless could take, and ref return, a list, allowing for a cleaner multiple-inheritance model for objects in Perl. Dan Sugalski simplified the request to object-based vice class-based inheritance, and then provided some potential trade-offs.
Damian, of course, submitted code to fake it in Perl 5. He did muse about an ISA property, though, which would act like @ISA, but at the object level.
Class::Object
Michael "Class::Object" Schwern asked why all this (Class::Object) had to be (Class::Object) in the core (Class::Object). Dan Sugalski opined:
Doing it properly in a module is significantly more of a pain than doing it in the core. Faking it with a module means a fair amount of (reasonably slow) perl code, doing it in the core requires a few extra lines of C code in the method dispatch opcode function.
To which, of course, Michael Class::Objected:
I've already done it, it was easy. Adding in an object-based inheritance system should be just as easy, I just need an interface. $obj->parents(@other_objs) is a little clunky.
...Look at Class::Object! Its really, really thin. Benchmark it, its no slower than regular objects. http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/src/Class-Object-0.
[The Golden Troll Award goes to Dan Brien for this gem.]
The Internal String API
Dan Sugalski initiated discussion on the internal API for strings:
Since we're going to try and take a shot at being encoding-neutral in the core, we're going to need some form of string API so the core can actually manipulate string data. I'm thinking we'll need to be able to at least do this with string:
Convert from and to UTF-32
lengths in bytes, characters, and possibly glyphs
character size (with the variable length ones reporting in negative numbers)
get and set the locale (This might not be the spot for this)
normalize (a noop for non-Unicode data)
Get the encoding name
Do a substr operation by character and glyph
David Nicol suggested implementing strings as a tree, vice a contiguous memory block. After some pondering, this seemed to grow on Dan, and he is awaiting a yea-or-nay from Larry. Copy-On-Write for Strings will also be implemented, although there was no mention of a potential key signature.
Miscellany
Simon Cozens released an updated version of his Perl 6 emulator.
Marcel Grunauer announced a Proof-of-Concepts page for Perl 6, which contains info and links to Perl 5 modules that may provide a glimpse of things to come.
There were more complaints about operator choices. (Specifically, ~ for string concatenation, and . (the dot) for dereference (vice ->).)
Last Words
- Mike T.