Good idea! Hmm, for some reason javac keeps giving errors when I try feeding it the Objective C code from my iPhone game engine. Boy that's weird...
You have to use the "import code wrappers".
Put the objective c code between/* and */ and it will compile just fine. Google thought of everything, don't worry. (and for most iphone apps, the result will be just as useful as the original)
Well, golly, I've got a very small chart in a spreadsheet. And you're suggesting that I could dynamically update that chart? Wow! I would never have thought of that! Truly a breakthrough that must have taken years of research and is totally worth a patent.
It's a real shame that now that it's patented I'll still be stuck with updating my graphs in OpenOffice by adding pixels with the Gimp after figuring them out with my calculator. I could have saved hours with this !
Everybody seems to assume this. However every other large institution accumulates such layers of cruft and management that it turns into a brainless behemoth fairly quickly whether or not the people inside are smart. Why would the NSA be the only different entity ?
Carpet bombing industrial (ie, population) centers. The fact that we don't anymore has more to do with the availability of precision bombs than development of new ethics.
You need some super-precision bombing to be able to hit Afghanistan's industrial centres. What will you be targeting today ? A sewing-machine ? A goat ?
If you saw this movie in the 1970's and saw a 2009-level computer photorealistic rendering of the trench sequence which is possible on a typical desktop computer today with a decent graphics card, you would probably say that the scene was obviously some model mockup because of the general idea of what a futuristic computer rendering was at the time and the fact that a photorealistic rendering is completely unexpected by the viewer.
Without going as far as photorealism, I remember thinking at the time that this display, and especially the display in the aiming computer were fairly crude and didn't quite fit with the general technological level. A bit of colour would have helped for example. All in all it looked barely better than something out of an Apple II. Of course it was all "a long time ago", maybe that's why they had such crappy computers.
This feels like "Return of the Son of Zombie Window Manager".
E has spawned some pretty good libs in its time but the WM itself is mostly dead. It probably has a handful of users but then so has pretty much any other niche WM out there, including TWM. When I last seriously ran E (other than just to poke at it for 5 minutes to see if there was anything new), it was on a 486...
While in theory it could be seen as a good thing to revive a mummified project that was promising years ago, in practice the world has moved on and there are now other active projects that do the same things or where the missing bits (if any) could be added. In short I don't see any point to this, even though it means we'll maybe, finally, someday, possibly, ultimately, after a while, see something happening on the Enlightenment front (although I wouldn't hold my breath).
As does my MSI Wind, and I think a few other netbooks do. Underclock the CPU to increase battery life.
Well spotted. It's true that a lot of subnotebooks (so called netbooks) and notebooks still have them for power saving. And you can typically pull up a software one if you don't have a hardware one, even on desktop machine. Most CPUs support speed stepping nowadays. So the turbo button never really left us, it just got "re purposed".
I've seen some pretty amazing engineering coming out of our NZ neighbors. They remind me of the Swiss more than anyone else.
Quite. A lot of small countries gave birth to wondrous inventions.
1970s Spreadable Butter - New Zealand Dairy Research Institute After years of development, the New Zealand Dairy Research Institute released the worlds first spreadable butter in 1991, which was then made by New Zealand dairy co-operatives and now by Fonterra.
Although a number of the examples given by the resident Kiwi are a bit strange, to say the least... ("The world's first referee to use a whistle to stop a game of sport." um, ok.)
The sad thing about this is that someone actually DID come up with some crazy idea for a way to tweet money to random people...
I suppose it's some kind of corollary to rule 34. "However stupid the idea, somebody will try to implement it on the Internet" Which I hereby dub "Fred's rule", unless there is prior art. Which there probably is.
The only reason it was exploitable was because of Twitter's API. Understandably, I'm not too worried about the rest of the Internet going down in flames any time soon.
Well I'm not doing my banking on Twitter anymore that's for sure !
Yes, you could upload a 3D model of your house's garage and see what your car looks like in there ! Or a 3D model of your SO and see what she/he looks like inside the car ! Or 3D models of your children and see how tall or fat they can become before you have to switch to a roomier model !
I'm thinking rendering a birds eye shot in LOTR would have taken a damn long time on a phone...
How come ? Did LOTR feature birds with unusually complex irises ? For, say, most eagles, a yellow disc, a black disk and you're done. Takes milliseconds.
Granted, the rest of the bird might take a bit longer.
I'm sure if everybody at the Slashdot community burns at least one disk then we should be able to make up the difference.
It's too late, I burned my Vista disk (that came with my laptop) ages ago. And it didn't make any difference. Nobody cared. It just made pretty sparks in the microwaves.
I think everyone should own all the processing power they need - but cloud computing is here, it's real, and it performs a valuable economic function.
Old news. It used to be called "server time". There are bits and pieces related to "server time" billing left in most Unix or Unix-like systems (which could probably be brought back to life if need be). No need to bring any meteorology in it.
"Sorry, your cloud computing operations have been cancelled because of an unexpected storm which washed away our reserve of zeroes"
“Nobody knows how it got there,” she told The Times. “The best guess is that it was dropped by a bird, either that or it was thrown out of a passing aeroplane.”
If they've regularly got aeroplanes flying unnoticed through their buildings, they probably have bigger problems than birds and pieces of bread...
Obviously they should put up "no flying in buildings" signs.
Anyone with a preference for Electro Pop will likely have been wondering when the hell Pandora would learn the difference between Miss Kittin and Scooter after mindlessly clicking "Dislike" on eurodance tracks when Pandora fails to see the difference between one type of electronic music with a repetitive beat and another.
I've been wondering about that for a while. That Pandora actually sees any difference at all in some cases shows that it's already a pretty amazing tool. ob xkcd
Slashdot Mirror
Olympics? Come on. This is Slashdot.
Olympics... Isn't it that thing with lots of people in shorts running about that prevents me from watching my regular programs on TV ?
Good idea! Hmm, for some reason javac keeps giving errors when I try feeding it the Objective C code from my iPhone game engine. Boy that's weird...
You have to use the "import code wrappers".
Put the objective c code between /* and */ and it will compile just fine. Google thought of everything, don't worry.
(and for most iphone apps, the result will be just as useful as the original)
Well, golly, I've got a very small chart in a spreadsheet. And you're suggesting that I could dynamically update that chart? Wow! I would never have thought of that! Truly a breakthrough that must have taken years of research and is totally worth a patent.
It's a real shame that now that it's patented I'll still be stuck with updating my graphs in OpenOffice by adding pixels with the Gimp after figuring them out with my calculator. I could have saved hours with this !
Damn you Microsoft !
The NSA is not stupid;
Everybody seems to assume this. However every other large institution accumulates such layers of cruft and management that it turns into a brainless behemoth fairly quickly whether or not the people inside are smart. Why would the NSA be the only different entity ?
Some fanboi your are... Shameful really. Hand in your turtleneck and your latte at the office.
It just goes to show that computers are just bits of hardware and that companies are just in the business for the money, not for some higher ideal.
People should just use what works for them. It's all the same anyway and it all works together reasonably well.
Carpet bombing industrial (ie, population) centers. The fact that we don't anymore has more to do with the availability of precision bombs than development of new ethics.
You need some super-precision bombing to be able to hit Afghanistan's industrial centres. What will you be targeting today ? A sewing-machine ? A goat ?
>"A vulgarity"? You mean the word pussy? OMFG WHAT WOULD JESUS THINK IF HE SAW THAT WORD? Guess what? People have sex.
Not in the US they don't. Decent people have their babies delivered by Fedex. Only European heathens have sex.
Pervert.
If you saw this movie in the 1970's and saw a 2009-level computer photorealistic rendering of the trench sequence which is possible on a typical desktop computer today with a decent graphics card, you would probably say that the scene was obviously some model mockup because of the general idea of what a futuristic computer rendering was at the time and the fact that a photorealistic rendering is completely unexpected by the viewer.
Without going as far as photorealism, I remember thinking at the time that this display, and especially the display in the aiming computer were fairly crude and didn't quite fit with the general technological level. A bit of colour would have helped for example. All in all it looked barely better than something out of an Apple II.
Of course it was all "a long time ago", maybe that's why they had such crappy computers.
This feels like "Return of the Son of Zombie Window Manager".
E has spawned some pretty good libs in its time but the WM itself is mostly dead. It probably has a handful of users but then so has pretty much any other niche WM out there, including TWM.
When I last seriously ran E (other than just to poke at it for 5 minutes to see if there was anything new), it was on a 486...
While in theory it could be seen as a good thing to revive a mummified project that was promising years ago, in practice the world has moved on and there are now other active projects that do the same things or where the missing bits (if any) could be added. In short I don't see any point to this, even though it means we'll maybe, finally, someday, possibly, ultimately, after a while, see something happening on the Enlightenment front (although I wouldn't hold my breath).
My 486 DX2 66 had a turbo button. :)
As does my MSI Wind, and I think a few other netbooks do. Underclock the CPU to increase battery life.
Well spotted. It's true that a lot of subnotebooks (so called netbooks) and notebooks still have them for power saving. And you can typically pull up a software one if you don't have a hardware one, even on desktop machine. Most CPUs support speed stepping nowadays.
So the turbo button never really left us, it just got "re purposed".
But they are on the bottom of the planet - won't they be firing the wrong way?
Of course not, it's a huge advantage, they just have to drop the rocket. They'll save loads of fuel.
I've seen some pretty amazing engineering coming out of our NZ neighbors. They remind me of the Swiss more than anyone else.
Quite. A lot of small countries gave birth to wondrous inventions.
1970s Spreadable Butter - New Zealand Dairy Research Institute
After years of development, the New Zealand Dairy Research Institute released the worlds first spreadable butter in 1991, which was then made by New Zealand dairy co-operatives and now by Fonterra.
Although a number of the examples given by the resident Kiwi are a bit strange, to say the least...
("The world's first referee to use a whistle to stop a game of sport." um, ok.)
PS: When did the turbo buttons disappear?
When you changed your case ? :)
I had one on my 286/16 with a pizzabox case, not on my 486DX50 tower. I *think* some 386 SX (not sure about the DX) still had them.
Computer science work gets done at universities and research institutions, not at Initech.
That's because computer science isn't good for the company.
Doesn't modular programming solve this problem?
Theory, I'd like to introduce you to practice. You two are very different, you should have lots of things to talk about.
The sad thing about this is that someone actually DID come up with some crazy idea for a way to tweet money to random people...
I suppose it's some kind of corollary to rule 34.
"However stupid the idea, somebody will try to implement it on the Internet"
Which I hereby dub "Fred's rule", unless there is prior art. Which there probably is.
The only reason it was exploitable was because of Twitter's API. Understandably, I'm not too worried about the rest of the Internet going down in flames any time soon.
Well I'm not doing my banking on Twitter anymore that's for sure !
Yes, you could upload a 3D model of your house's garage and see what your car looks like in there !
Or a 3D model of your SO and see what she/he looks like inside the car !
Or 3D models of your children and see how tall or fat they can become before you have to switch to a roomier model !
Just think of the possibilities !
I'm thinking rendering a birds eye shot in LOTR would have taken a damn long time on a phone...
How come ? Did LOTR feature birds with unusually complex irises ? For, say, most eagles, a yellow disc, a black disk and you're done. Takes milliseconds.
Granted, the rest of the bird might take a bit longer.
I'm sure if everybody at the Slashdot community burns at least one disk then we should be able to make up the difference.
It's too late, I burned my Vista disk (that came with my laptop) ages ago. And it didn't make any difference. Nobody cared. It just made pretty sparks in the microwaves.
this -425C hole
Physics, you're doing it wrong.
I think everyone should own all the processing power they need - but cloud computing is here, it's real, and it performs a valuable economic function.
Old news. It used to be called "server time". There are bits and pieces related to "server time" billing left in most Unix or Unix-like systems (which could probably be brought back to life if need be). No need to bring any meteorology in it.
"Sorry, your cloud computing operations have been cancelled because of an unexpected storm which washed away our reserve of zeroes"
The idea that there's a special chemical signal for "fear in relation to criminal acts" seems to come out of absolutely nowhere.
It comes from studying skydivers. What more can you ask for. We know they're up to no good.
“Nobody knows how it got there,” she told The Times. “The best guess is that it was dropped by a bird, either that or it was thrown out of a passing aeroplane.”
If they've regularly got aeroplanes flying unnoticed through their buildings, they probably have bigger problems than birds and pieces of bread...
Obviously they should put up "no flying in buildings" signs.
Anyone with a preference for Electro Pop will likely have been wondering when the hell Pandora would learn the difference between Miss Kittin and Scooter after mindlessly clicking "Dislike" on eurodance tracks when Pandora fails to see the difference between one type of electronic music with a repetitive beat and another.
I've been wondering about that for a while. That Pandora actually sees any difference at all in some cases shows that it's already a pretty amazing tool.
ob xkcd