Have you tried it? Well, admittedly I haven't either -- will someone try this!?:-)
Anyway, I have seen similar setups with little toys and (I think) at the science museum. An upward air stream can support hollow plastic balls, even if from a "point" source.
I do believe you're losing touch with the DOS world (not a bad thing, mind you). Aren't DOS environment variables enclosed in percent signs rather than preceeded with a dollar sign?
I think part of the reason HDTV and IPv6 take so long to be adopted is because they affect existing established standards and, in some ways, have to be accepted all-or-none. When you decide on the HDTV standard or the IPv6 standard, everyone has to accept it at once (or you have to spend extra time working out a way that not every one needs to accept it at once). These entail technologies that affect existing users. However, in the case of BXXP, I expect that it is more of an add-on. You can have a BXXP-capable client without any BXXP-capable servers without affecting existing HTTP support. Conversely you can have BXXP servers without yet having any clients implementing BXXP, and as long as the existing HTTP servers are still up, no HTTP service is lost. You can't however, have a TV station broadcast an HDTV signal instead of a standard TV signal on its reserved frequencies, and then expect the standard TV service to be unaffected. My understanding is that it took a good deal of work to make HDTV service not affect existing sservice... and then to coordinate efforts with the FCC etc. So at this level, something like BXXP should be easier to adopt.
Alpha translucency is great, but for simple things like angled partitions, PNG still doesn't help in accomplishing the job flexibly (nothing does, that I know of). Here's the situation:
A horizontal band accross the top of the page
The band is split into one background color on the left side and another background color on the right side
Between the two areas is a diagonal split.
The only way to do this (as far as I know) is to insert an image to represent the rectangle containing the diagonal split. The problem is, what if you're using stylesheets to define these background colors? You can't affect the image along with the background colors so you are limited to using a preset number of background colors and images. What would be really nice is to be able to control certain palette entries via stylesheet attributes. <IMG SRC="Diag1.png" style="img-palette-1:#ffffff; img-palette-2:#ff00ff"> That's what I want... and I can't find anything like that in any current HTML standard or image format. Sure, half the image can be customized by making it transparent, but you can't customize both halves with different colors.
You're confusing initialization with declaration. It would indeed be stupid to eliminate variable declaration (as JavaScript does) because many of the advantages of using C/C++ have to do with data types, which you don't have if you completely eliminate declarations. The two often seem to be correlated (ala VBScript & JavaScript). My understanding is that they're referring strictly to variable initialization. This is handy; then you know that when you declare an integer, it's initial value will always be zero. You don't get strange bugs that depend on the internal memory state of the system.
Not everyone has a strict code review process for every little bit of code that goes into a product. I suspect the environment at Microsoft development is a lot less rigid than a lot of people would initially think. You gotta realize that if you turn everything into a huge formal production, you'll never get anything done. And Microsoft has really been spewing in recent years, so I can't imagine a whole lot of formal code review going on.
I myself added an easter egg to a program I've worked on (not at Microsoft). A Mandelbrot generator in an RTF print preview program doesn't take that much space. One other developer has found it for himself (in the code) in the 1.5 years the code has been out... and that's because of the blatantly obvious out-of-place "mandel.c"... sticking out right there in SourceSafe. I did it because, at the time, I had nothing better to do, and have always wanted to make an easter egg in a commercial product.
Silly me, I forgot the point of easter eggs (at least the Microsoft ones you see) and neglected to even include my name.
Firstly, I don't know, but I've been told (I think by a high school science teacher) that breathing pure oxygen would put you out if not kill you. (Ever heard of hyperventillation? That can happen even in our atmosphere.) So flammability is not the only reason not use pure oxygen. (This of course requires other materials too... Oxygen doesn't burn itself, but I assume the writer meant that the "habitat" was the fuel.)
Secondly, I thought Nitrogen was a large part of the natural Martian atmosophere. If we convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, my guess is that there would be a point where the mix of oxygen, nitrogen and other gasses would be breathable without introducing other gasses manually/explicitly.
WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO EXPAND. There are too many of us here, and being able to move a large percentage of people off of Earth before we ruin it is going to require steps in between. We can't do it right now but we can take a few steps IN THAT DIRECTION to at least increase the chances of it someday being possible.
Don't you think it would be easier to expand on a planet that can hold an atmosphere with its own gravity than on one that must be pressurized? I think we need some intensive research on fusion energy and terraforming in order to get some process started on Mars so that it's habitable by the time we figure out a reasonable way to get there. If we figure out everything and then realize it's going to take another 50 years for the operation/reaction to complete, that will be somewhat of a disappointment. I'm hoping there's some chemical reaction or nanotechnological process that we could just set off today and wait 20-50 years and then the Martian atmosphere will be suitable for humans. (Of course practical fusion energy would be even more useful here on earth)
I think a more fun experiment would be to write a program that asks "This program contains a virus. In order to run this program you must first install the virus onto your computer. A computer virus has the potential to destroy all data contained on the system. Yes, that means you should click cancel if you want to live. [OK] [Cancel]"
When you get down to the scale on which molecules are interacting, and start building up the superstructures that could be formed by endless combinations of these structures, you'll probably conceptually end up with something like a cluster of clusters of clusters and things like that. I think that's the way the brain works anyway. No single CPU, just each part doing it's job (based on the many clusters of parts doing their job beneath it), the sum total of which ends up being the consciousness of the system.
Well, one of the ideas mentioned in the article, if I'm not mistaken, was about self-organizing molecules. If we can come up with some sort of sequence that will, say, create a transistor, or even a whole AND gate, on every silicon-atom-tipped needle on which the process is executed, we could follow by devising processes to join these components to each other. Considering the microscopic scales on which these are happening, billions of devices could be fabricated at once. It's microscopic processes happening on macroscopic scales.
I have looked through the virus source code several times myself and, while I know an arbitrary almost-nameless Slashdotter has little more credebility than a barnacle, I want to state that I cannot find any suggestion of infectability through the preview pane in the version of the virus I received. My understanding is that the only way to run code in the preview pane is to have html content with client script. The code that puts content into the e-mail that spreads the virus simply reads:
male.Body = vbcrlf&"kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me." male.Attachments.Add(dirsystem&"\LOVE-LETTER-FOR-Y OU.TXT.vbs")
The only HTML being written in the virus code, as far as I can see, is to a file called "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.htm" which is only spread through IRC.
I have been fighting with this idea for a very long time. I'm no quantum physicist so I don't know all the rules, but I have not heard a convincing explanation of why the following method could not be used for FTL communication.
First of all, my understanding of the experiment that proves the existence of a wave function is that a stream of particles passes through an "up polarity" filter and then a "down polarity" filter (something like that). If the filters are close together or the stream of particles is being observed (ie, light shining on them) nothing comes out the second filter because up and down are the only possible polarities, so each particle was filtered out by one of the filters. However, if you turn off the lights and spread out the filters, some particles do make it through both filters.
That said, I'm thinking you should be able to set up an experiment where a stream of particles is split into stream A and stream B where all (or most) of the particles in stream A are the entagled particles of stream B. Stream A goes "north" and stream B goes "south". At X units away from the source stream A hits an "up polarity" filter. At X+Y units away it hits a "down polarity" filter. Stream B simply has a light switch which can shine a light on stream B for a span which streches from X to X+Y units away from the source. Now I would think that when that light is on for stream B, nothing from stream A will get through the filters. When that light is off, some particles in stream A would make it through both filters.
What's wrong with this!? Even if I have misunderstood the original experiment, there must be *some* way to verify that a stream of particles has a wave function, otherwise, why do we believe in wave functions!? And if we can verify the existence of a wave function, we should be able to determine if it has broken down or not. Could this determination not be used to transfer 1 bit of information!?
As far as software, I spent many days searching for a good tool that could simply take a series of frames and compose some video file of any format. Then I ran accross axogon composer (http://www.axogon.com) which blew me away. I don't know if it's up to par with the level of professional video editing being discussed here, but it is free and has many features including multi-track audio/video editing and special effects. The version I have had some problems with a few of the compression codecs (maybe I don't have licenses?) but it's good for composing a basic video format file. If anyone can tell me, I'd love to know where to get a good free MPEG converter/compressor for Windows.
So, I'm not able to access much information on this right now (if there is any). So I'm just wondering if it's still going to be the text based game I played all those years ago, or if a new version of "Debbie Does Rigel" in the Trade Wars movie theater will increase the age rating of this game.
If you think about it, the desire to exchange "evaluation copies" of software or other copyable media has been around as long as the medium being copied itself. The internet has simply made it easier to exchange information and, in many cases, the media itself. This brings the problem to a point where people are noticing and getting upset. But attempting to place restrictions on the internet to solve this problem would be going about it the wrong way. It's not the exchange of information itself that's the problem, but the failure to compensate or credit the author. The focus needs to be on protecting the media itself or the people copying it illegally, or finding another way for authors to be compensated.
The providers of the internet should have nothing to do with such restrictions. After all, there's still the issue of CD copy houses which don't need the internet at all... it's part of the same problem.
Re:Uh, doesn't seem very "rational" at all
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
Of course there's the possibility that the one paper clip dropped onto the pile is infected with something that will eventually spread throughout. I hope the paper clip of humanity can "infect" the universal "pile":-)
But this is a different topic. I suspect "meaning" in the author's sense of the word is related to some pre-existing meaning, not simply the effect we have on the universal scale.
Maybe buy/burn her a Linux/*BSD disc or something.
Can you say "Teacher's Pet"? Sorry, my intention is not to belittle the idea, I'm just sitting here being amused by various scenarios. In the unlikely event that there should be a bully/jerk in this computer class, can you imagine how hard he'd want to pound someone who enters and gives the teacher what looks like a gift... not only that, but a gift only a geek could give?:)
By no means is that a scenario I consider very likely these days, but that scene just composes itself from stereotypical TV schools and students.
Apparently none of these inaccuracies were too glaring because they didn't interfere with my understanding of the movie... I mean I didn't notice them -- although I was curious about the fuel leakage. I thought fuel would approach the burners in separate channels, so that any leakage on the way would not be combistible because it would be only one of the two (or more) components required in the reaction... no matter what components are being used. Seems like a sensible way to arrange things. *shrug* I'm no expert on such things though.
Speaking of inaccuracies, did anyone else notice an STTNG episode where Geordi La Forge reported a temperature of negative 300 some degrees celcius? Seems like a really glaring problem there. Sorry my memory isn't what it used to be, but I was shocked that such a simple error could be made.
I for one thought that the universe was 12 billion years old and that the oldest stars in the universe were found to be older than the universe, which scientists had not yet been able to explain.
That said, after reading this comment I started to wonder if we're being to self-centric again. Maybe we thought the oldest stars were older than the universe because we assumed the distance in light years indicated age. But actually if you subtract our distance from some "center" from the distance of the star from that "center" (assiming we are exactly opposite the center) maybe it would come out and make sense? I can't imagine all those brilliant scientists would have been that foolish, though. I for one still can't quite comprehend how the universe doesn't have a center, if indeed it doesn't. I don't even remember learning that it didn't have a center!
If indeed it doesn't have any sort of center then my whole comment may be nonsense.
On my computer, the fast forward will stop being in effect when it reaches another "track" or "file" or whatever. I think the FBI warning and such are in separate files. When I saw that Fast Forward stopped and it started playing a regular speed for the FBI warning, I hit fast forward again and it went fast again. (Also, hitting fast forward a third time makes it go even faster, don't know if that's universally true.)
Slashdot Mirror
Have you tried it? Well, admittedly I haven't either -- will someone try this!? :-)
Anyway, I have seen similar setups with little toys and (I think) at the science museum. An upward air stream can support hollow plastic balls, even if from a "point" source.
I do believe you're losing touch with the DOS world (not a bad thing, mind you). Aren't DOS environment variables enclosed in percent signs rather than preceeded with a dollar sign?
I think part of the reason HDTV and IPv6 take so long to be adopted is because they affect existing established standards and, in some ways, have to be accepted all-or-none. When you decide on the HDTV standard or the IPv6 standard, everyone has to accept it at once (or you have to spend extra time working out a way that not every one needs to accept it at once). These entail technologies that affect existing users. However, in the case of BXXP, I expect that it is more of an add-on. You can have a BXXP-capable client without any BXXP-capable servers without affecting existing HTTP support. Conversely you can have BXXP servers without yet having any clients implementing BXXP, and as long as the existing HTTP servers are still up, no HTTP service is lost. You can't however, have a TV station broadcast an HDTV signal instead of a standard TV signal on its reserved frequencies, and then expect the standard TV service to be unaffected. My understanding is that it took a good deal of work to make HDTV service not affect existing sservice... and then to coordinate efforts with the FCC etc.
So at this level, something like BXXP should be easier to adopt.
- A horizontal band accross the top of the page
- The band is split into one background color on the left side and another background color on the right side
- Between the two areas is a diagonal split.
The only way to do this (as far as I know) is to insert an image to represent the rectangle containing the diagonal split. The problem is, what if you're using stylesheets to define these background colors? You can't affect the image along with the background colors so you are limited to using a preset number of background colors and images. What would be really nice is to be able to control certain palette entries via stylesheet attributes.<IMG SRC="Diag1.png" style="img-palette-1:#ffffff; img-palette-2:#ff00ff">
That's what I want... and I can't find anything like that in any current HTML standard or image format. Sure, half the image can be customized by making it transparent, but you can't customize both halves with different colors.
You're confusing initialization with declaration. It would indeed be stupid to eliminate variable declaration (as JavaScript does) because many of the advantages of using C/C++ have to do with data types, which you don't have if you completely eliminate declarations. The two often seem to be correlated (ala VBScript & JavaScript). My understanding is that they're referring strictly to variable initialization. This is handy; then you know that when you declare an integer, it's initial value will always be zero. You don't get strange bugs that depend on the internal memory state of the system.
Not everyone has a strict code review process for every little bit of code that goes into a product. I suspect the environment at Microsoft development is a lot less rigid than a lot of people would initially think. You gotta realize that if you turn everything into a huge formal production, you'll never get anything done. And Microsoft has really been spewing in recent years, so I can't imagine a whole lot of formal code review going on.
I myself added an easter egg to a program I've worked on (not at Microsoft). A Mandelbrot generator in an RTF print preview program doesn't take that much space. One other developer has found it for himself (in the code) in the 1.5 years the code has been out... and that's because of the blatantly obvious out-of-place "mandel.c"... sticking out right there in SourceSafe. I did it because, at the time, I had nothing better to do, and have always wanted to make an easter egg in a commercial product.
Silly me, I forgot the point of easter eggs (at least the Microsoft ones you see) and neglected to even include my name.
BTW, Ctrl-Alt-Shift-NumPad*
- Split up the US operations
- Move the accounting division or whatever it's called to Canada
- Have each US component company partner with the accounting division in Canada
Does that work? Then they wouldn't have to move as many people.Secondly, I thought Nitrogen was a large part of the natural Martian atmosophere. If we convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, my guess is that there would be a point where the mix of oxygen, nitrogen and other gasses would be breathable without introducing other gasses manually/explicitly.
Don't you think it would be easier to expand on a planet that can hold an atmosphere with its own gravity than on one that must be pressurized? I think we need some intensive research on fusion energy and terraforming in order to get some process started on Mars so that it's habitable by the time we figure out a reasonable way to get there. If we figure out everything and then realize it's going to take another 50 years for the operation/reaction to complete, that will be somewhat of a disappointment. I'm hoping there's some chemical reaction or nanotechnological process that we could just set off today and wait 20-50 years and then the Martian atmosphere will be suitable for humans. (Of course practical fusion energy would be even more useful here on earth)
On a related note, I heard that studies have shown that half of the population make up 50% of the people.
I won't be convinced until 34% try to do the same in 2000 :)
I think a more fun experiment would be to write a program that asks "This program contains a virus. In order to run this program you must first install the virus onto your computer. A computer virus has the potential to destroy all data contained on the system. Yes, that means you should click cancel if you want to live. [OK] [Cancel]"
When you get down to the scale on which molecules are interacting, and start building up the superstructures that could be formed by endless combinations of these structures, you'll probably conceptually end up with something like a cluster of clusters of clusters and things like that. I think that's the way the brain works anyway. No single CPU, just each part doing it's job (based on the many clusters of parts doing their job beneath it), the sum total of which ends up being the consciousness of the system.
Well, one of the ideas mentioned in the article, if I'm not mistaken, was about self-organizing molecules. If we can come up with some sort of sequence that will, say, create a transistor, or even a whole AND gate, on every silicon-atom-tipped needle on which the process is executed, we could follow by devising processes to join these components to each other. Considering the microscopic scales on which these are happening, billions of devices could be fabricated at once. It's microscopic processes happening on macroscopic scales.
First of all, my understanding of the experiment that proves the existence of a wave function is that a stream of particles passes through an "up polarity" filter and then a "down polarity" filter (something like that). If the filters are close together or the stream of particles is being observed (ie, light shining on them) nothing comes out the second filter because up and down are the only possible polarities, so each particle was filtered out by one of the filters. However, if you turn off the lights and spread out the filters, some particles do make it through both filters.
That said, I'm thinking you should be able to set up an experiment where a stream of particles is split into stream A and stream B where all (or most) of the particles in stream A are the entagled particles of stream B.
Stream A goes "north" and stream B goes "south". At X units away from the source stream A hits an "up polarity" filter. At X+Y units away it hits a "down polarity" filter. Stream B simply has a light switch which can shine a light on stream B for a span which streches from X to X+Y units away from the source.
Now I would think that when that light is on for stream B, nothing from stream A will get through the filters. When that light is off, some particles in stream A would make it through both filters.
What's wrong with this!? Even if I have misunderstood the original experiment, there must be *some* way to verify that a stream of particles has a wave function, otherwise, why do we believe in wave functions!? And if we can verify the existence of a wave function, we should be able to determine if it has broken down or not. Could this determination not be used to transfer 1 bit of information!?
As far as software, I spent many days searching for a good tool that could simply take a series of frames and compose some video file of any format. Then I ran accross axogon composer (http://www.axogon.com) which blew me away. I don't know if it's up to par with the level of professional video editing being discussed here, but it is free and has many features including multi-track audio/video editing and special effects. The version I have had some problems with a few of the compression codecs (maybe I don't have licenses?) but it's good for composing a basic video format file. If anyone can tell me, I'd love to know where to get a good free MPEG converter/compressor for Windows.
So, I'm not able to access much information on this right now (if there is any). So I'm just wondering if it's still going to be the text based game I played all those years ago, or if a new version of "Debbie Does Rigel" in the Trade Wars movie theater will increase the age rating of this game.
The providers of the internet should have nothing to do with such restrictions. After all, there's still the issue of CD copy houses which don't need the internet at all... it's part of the same problem.
Of course there's the possibility that the one paper clip dropped onto the pile is infected with something that will eventually spread throughout. I hope the paper clip of humanity can "infect" the universal "pile" :-)
But this is a different topic. I suspect "meaning" in the author's sense of the word is related to some pre-existing meaning, not simply the effect we have on the universal scale.
Can you say "Teacher's Pet"? Sorry, my intention is not to belittle the idea, I'm just sitting here being amused by various scenarios. In the unlikely event that there should be a bully/jerk in this computer class, can you imagine how hard he'd want to pound someone who enters and gives the teacher what looks like a gift... not only that, but a gift only a geek could give? :)
By no means is that a scenario I consider very likely these days, but that scene just composes itself from stereotypical TV schools and students.
Speaking of inaccuracies, did anyone else notice an STTNG episode where Geordi La Forge reported a temperature of negative 300 some degrees celcius? Seems like a really glaring problem there. Sorry my memory isn't what it used to be, but I was shocked that such a simple error could be made.
I for one thought that the universe was 12 billion years old and that the oldest stars in the universe were found to be older than the universe, which scientists had not yet been able to explain.
That said, after reading this comment I started to wonder if we're being to self-centric again. Maybe we thought the oldest stars were older than the universe because we assumed the distance in light years indicated age. But actually if you subtract our distance from some "center" from the distance of the star from that "center" (assiming we are exactly opposite the center) maybe it would come out and make sense? I can't imagine all those brilliant scientists would have been that foolish, though. I for one still can't quite comprehend how the universe doesn't have a center, if indeed it doesn't. I don't even remember learning that it didn't have a center!
If indeed it doesn't have any sort of center then my whole comment may be nonsense.
Did you try pressing fast forward again?
On my computer, the fast forward will stop being in effect when it reaches another "track" or "file" or whatever. I think the FBI warning and such are in separate files. When I saw that Fast Forward stopped and it started playing a regular speed for the FBI warning, I hit fast forward again and it went fast again. (Also, hitting fast forward a third time makes it go even faster, don't know if that's universally true.)