No, but it's a great story. I knew of the greek one (ouroboros) because I'm trying to brush up on my mythology. But I haven't gotten around to the modern mythology of the former colonies;)
I suppose that all countries have such mythical creatures (we have the dahu) but this type, especially using a snake, is a new one for me. It's very creative. And apparently the story started quite a while ago too.
Oddly enough I believe I read a novel where something like that was mentioned, but I can't recall what it was.
This guy has been around for a long while, made plenty of wild claims, and demonstrated absolutely nothing.
I don't know the history of his project, maybe it's the same guy, maybe not, but any project of that scale that starts with "Working without blueprints" is headed straight for the wall IMO.
It's very difficult to evolve wheels, and the concrete floors/roads that make them so efficient.
There are lots of roundish animals that could have been a first step. But none of them will use rolling as a method of movement, presumably because of the difficulty of powering it from inside the sphere. A mass moving inside the sphere would be required. Possible but not as easy or efficient as mobile limbs (which is what they all use). And of course biological wheels are apparently right out, a biological axis would be extremely complex to even envision (typically some kind of fluid would have to go back and forth to carry nutriments and waste to the round limb, hard to do over a point of rotation, never mind the power transmission). It was difficult to do with mechanical systems already.
And the Microsoft tool can be used only with other people if those other people registered, downloaded, and installed their software.
*And* on a machine which happens to run a compatible operating system. Of which there are two with only one family (from the publishers of the service) fully supported the other (from a fruity company) apparently not enjoying the full experience. Others can always "upgrade". I guess.
I happened upon MS Mesh while looking at ways to sync various machines. Needless to say when I saw it was from MS I soon forgot about it. I'm doing a rsync based script myself. It's simpler.
Anyway, if anybody from Apple is reading this: Stop fooling around with the fucking iPhones and get me my iPaper! Or ePaper, or whatever you want to call it.
But, but... Surely you can get an iHooker from the AppStore with your iPhone... Or at least a hooker locator app. Wasn't that what you were originally complaining about ?
Seriously, I've only made it a quarter of the way through this thing and I've already come to the conclusion that they could have held this conference with no new product/feature announcements and it still would have been a huge success as long as they bashed Microsoft and Windows 7 for most of it.
Apple is hip, and its hip to hate PC!
The only Jobs presentation I've been to was for the unveiling of the NeXT and it already was like that (adjust for Windows/DOS versions). Since then I've never managed to look at one of those things in whole. It just looks too much like a cultist rally or something.
But at least we know its an Apple SD card reader so it must be better!
Of course it is. It ejects the cards by itself with a cute little motor and a soothing chime. Not like those primitive SD readers you find on PC clones. Also it goes to 11.
Android is optimized for small screens and low-powered devices, with no unwanted background processes. Have you tried running Ubuntu (non-netbook edition) on a 10.2" screen at 1024x600 screen?
FWIW I ran Mandrake with KDE on a Sony PictureBook C1XD (it was a pre Crusoe model, with a 400MHz PII) at 1024x480 for quite a while. Worked fine. Even back then (from 2000 to 2004 maybe, I didn't have to resize or drag around that many dialogs. The machine is still around. I have to update it (it has to boot from a floppy though, stupid hardware design) one of these days. I'm sure it'll still do fine with current software (well maybe not with digiKam or Blender).
All in all the dialogs in the X11 environments are much better behaved than the ones in Windows. I never could understand why the Windows ones couldn't be resized (those horizontal scroll bars all over the place irritate me to no end whenever I have to use that system).
Most apps simply don't fit on the screen, alt+mouse_drag only moves windows down, not up, meaning jumping through a lot of hoops simply to press OK in a dialog because it is below the screen.
Alt-Mouse1 (usually, depends on your setup in your window manager, I bind it to left-window key on full keyboards) moves the window in whatever direction you move the mouse, down, up, even to the sides ! Typically you can click anywhere in a window and drag the window from there.
And ALL of which have big powerful industries behind them. We're talking about videogames like they're endangered. There is huge industry with lobbyists on our side.
A bunch of loonies already tried this kind of thing with role playing games a few years ago. Those didn't really have a huge industry behind them and still came out ok.
On the other hand the political atmosphere was quite a bit less hysterical back then (no "think of the children" meme for one). Nowadays it seems that anything remotely suspicious or potentially dangerous ought to be banned for the general well being of the peons. It's so nice that we don't have to think for ourselves any more. It was such a chore !
I'd have thought Linux would be cheaper, but for all we know, they did a thorough analysis, discovered there were suitable savings to be made through use of Windows. Speculating that it's cheaper with so little information is pointless.
You're obviously not familiar with the way corporations work. Picking a solution because it's cheaper or the best tool for the job pretty much only happens through sheer luck. Important considerations are : - the colours used on the brochure - whether the PHB liked the salesperson - how much "incentives" were offered
And for those of us with 10's of thousands of documents on our computers? How well are these going to be able to differentiate between a PDF file that involves fiction and one that is real? Hell, some of my source material for a horror screenplay I tinker with now and then has made-up schematics and lists of where and how people are going to be killed in the scenes.
That's ok, you will have done *something* wrong. In this case, it's of course nice of you to provide all the paperwork in advance. But it really works with anyone. We've seen in all. We can make pretty much anything stick to anyone.
Your friendly neighbourhood intelligence agency.
Don't you think we're in any way interested in what's in your computer. It's just a way to add some fairy dust to a case. "Lookee Mr Judge, here's what we found on this annoying person's computer with our magical widget" (hands over printouts of cesium bomb with maps of central London with ominous arrows) "What ? I've never seen those in my life" "Well, that's what they all say of course" "I propose that we resurrect quartering"
In other words, if there was no taboo against saying 'fuck', there would be no reason for Hitler to be saying 'fuck' in the first place. (Except maybe to his dear wife.)
Would a pissed-off Hitler saying "My dear Himmler, I am thoroughly bothered by those irksome developments on the eastern front" sound better to you than "Fuck those damn Russians" ?
I suggest you find a new job. That is a time bomb.
Wait ! Not yet ! First document it on The daily WTF and/. and *then* find a new job. There's no sense in letting the good bits of your current job go to waste. Of course, this thing will blow in some one's face sooner or later. You probably don't want to be around when it happens.
So you literally have to sit around and wait for something to happen, as people are watching the sky already anyway, be it birdwatchers, astronomers, air traffic controllers, military or just random guy with mobile phone.
Oddly enough, astronomers, especially amateur astronomers who spend an awful lot of time looking at the sky worldwide with their naked eyes while taking pictures and whatnot are particularly scarce among reporters of UFOs. OTOH they regularly are the ones spotting new objects before the professionals.
Windows is built to remove as many user decisions as possible on the idea that users shouldn't have to be techy to use a PC.
This idea is a major modern problem and I'm not sure it can really only be pegged on Microsoft. Ever since personal computers started to be sold en masse, they were touted as being "simple". One of the great marketing lies of our time.
So nowadays we still have some of the "older" people calling their case a hard drive (although they regularly know their word processor inside out) and a lot of teens being perfectly fluent in the subtleties of IM and community networks but still not having the faintest clue what a network is. Different generations, one having grown with the tech and they still haven't learned a thing except for a few apps. Because computers actually are complicated. Despite what Microsoft and others say.
This has a lot of not only commercial and technical consequences, but also a lot of societal ones. Because people aren't able to grasp the implications of the technologies that are being deployed.
As for the usual car analogy, if most people won't know how to fix their car, an awful lot still know more or less how it works, petrol is squirted in the engine, ignited, moves pistons which moves the wheels, you can turn the wheels, etc. This is regularly taught in generic schools nowadays. It's hight time that basic computing theory (and *not* using MS Office) was taught there too.
I'd agree that 100 Mbit is far from obsolete in the home market, but who still has 100 Mbit in the data center? Unless your "data center" is a closet with 3 servers in it, you should have moved to gigabit years ago.
But HDMI isn't very relevant to the data centre...
he was implying people would prefer hemp (or its relatives) growing in their back yard to nuclear power plants in their back yards.
Oh. My bad. Well, I'm sure I'd rather have something I could weave carpets from growing in my back yard. OTOH of course, if 40m high chimneys/evaporators suddenly sprouted in my backyard, I'd probably spot it, unless I was already growing something silly and making use of it...
Now don't take this wrong, all of my vegetables are organic (although we call them "bio" this side of the channel, which is at least as silly as "organic, so don't start). So it's not like I'm making fun of the organic people. Or at least not of the *normal* organic people. And I'm quite a tree hugger as well. It's just that... well, read on if you made it this far.
Nuclear power has quite a number of good things going for it as well as some bad things (ooh, spent fuel takes a while to cool, I wonder how long it takes for natural concentrated fuel, and yes, there's quite a bit of it... how unnatural). A lot of "green" militants see the world in black and white. But ask one of them how a solar panel is manufactured, how much water is dirtied, how much energy is used, how much carbon (including the shipping of the raw materials) and he won't have a clue. But it's still "renewable" energy. Which it is. Sure. Or will be, when we'll optimize it. Which we will.
But the real world still is shades of grey. I could bring you to a place in the Pyrenees (the mountains between France and Spain) that has enough natural radio activity that you wouldn't last the night. Hey, it's natural, it can't be bad, right ?
Lots of "green people probably use "natural" plant remedies (which is pretty much what you'll find in any pill, minus the assorted other chemicals the plant has). How many molecules are in a plant beyond the couple they need ? 100 ? 1000 ? 100 000 ? Probably the latter. A plant is the descendant of one of the very first life forms to set foot (root ?) on Earth. A plant has had 3 billion years to evolve its chemistry. You and your kin have had maybe 800 million years... And you still believe you can beat a plant at its game by eating it ? That you're better than it with your silly body chemistry with no lab to back you up ? What are you ? Some kind of suicidal back to earther ? Why do you think we extracted the useful bit out of plants *while leaving the rest out* ? Which by the way is what chemistry is all about ? What do you think a chemical compound is ? What is the difference between the carbon atom in that "chemical" molecule and the one in that "organic" compound ? What if they're the same molecule ? If you get a sample of two similar molecules, one extracted from an "organic" source, the other synthesized, will there be a difference ? What if there's a guarantee that all the *atoms* are from organic sources ?
And so does a whole industry spawn, targeted at people who don't understand the first thing about chemistry (which is kind of puzzling given the way school is organized, at least in Europe, but they prosper here nevertheless). So when you go to school and say, "bah, chemistry, I'll never use this IRL". Think again.
This is also true for physics ("stick on device protects you against radiation from your cell phone") or pretty much any topic. Sounds weird, I know, but crooks are counting on you to fail.
Slashdot Mirror
You've never heard of the hoop snake then?
No, but it's a great story. I knew of the greek one (ouroboros) because I'm trying to brush up on my mythology. But I haven't gotten around to the modern mythology of the former colonies ;)
I suppose that all countries have such mythical creatures (we have the dahu) but this type, especially using a snake, is a new one for me. It's very creative. And apparently the story started quite a while ago too.
Oddly enough I believe I read a novel where something like that was mentioned, but I can't recall what it was.
This guy has been around for a long while, made plenty of wild claims, and demonstrated absolutely nothing.
I don't know the history of his project, maybe it's the same guy, maybe not, but any project of that scale that starts with "Working without blueprints" is headed straight for the wall IMO.
It's very difficult to evolve wheels, and the concrete floors/roads that make them so efficient.
There are lots of roundish animals that could have been a first step. But none of them will use rolling as a method of movement, presumably because of the difficulty of powering it from inside the sphere. A mass moving inside the sphere would be required. Possible but not as easy or efficient as mobile limbs (which is what they all use).
And of course biological wheels are apparently right out, a biological axis would be extremely complex to even envision (typically some kind of fluid would have to go back and forth to carry nutriments and waste to the round limb, hard to do over a point of rotation, never mind the power transmission).
It was difficult to do with mechanical systems already.
He's probably mad a little progress since then.
Absolutely. He used to be a raving lunatic.
Another few years and he should be quite sane.
(ps: use commas, your sentences are hard to read)
And the Microsoft tool can be used only with other people if those other people registered, downloaded, and installed their software.
*And* on a machine which happens to run a compatible operating system. Of which there are two with only one family (from the publishers of the service) fully supported the other (from a fruity company) apparently not enjoying the full experience. Others can always "upgrade". I guess.
I happened upon MS Mesh while looking at ways to sync various machines. Needless to say when I saw it was from MS I soon forgot about it.
I'm doing a rsync based script myself. It's simpler.
The majority of 3D movies are such that you know that they're awful before you see them. No time-travel necessary.
But after you've seen them you really wish you could travel back in time.
That's why 4D would be a breakthrough.
Anyway, if anybody from Apple is reading this: Stop fooling around with the fucking iPhones and get me my iPaper! Or ePaper, or whatever you want to call it.
But, but... Surely you can get an iHooker from the AppStore with your iPhone... Or at least a hooker locator app. Wasn't that what you were originally complaining about ?
See ? Apple *does* care !
Seriously, I've only made it a quarter of the way through this thing and I've already come to the conclusion that they could have held this conference with no new product/feature announcements and it still would have been a huge success as long as they bashed Microsoft and Windows 7 for most of it.
Apple is hip, and its hip to hate PC!
The only Jobs presentation I've been to was for the unveiling of the NeXT and it already was like that (adjust for Windows/DOS versions).
Since then I've never managed to look at one of those things in whole. It just looks too much like a cultist rally or something.
But at least we know its an Apple SD card reader so it must be better!
Of course it is. It ejects the cards by itself with a cute little motor and a soothing chime. Not like those primitive SD readers you find on PC clones.
Also it goes to 11.
Works fine with Kde. Another strange design decision by Gnome. Maybe you can switch this off in their Gconf thing...
Android is optimized for small screens and low-powered devices, with no unwanted background processes.
Have you tried running Ubuntu (non-netbook edition) on a 10.2" screen at 1024x600 screen?
FWIW I ran Mandrake with KDE on a Sony PictureBook C1XD (it was a pre Crusoe model, with a 400MHz PII) at 1024x480 for quite a while. Worked fine. Even back then (from 2000 to 2004 maybe, I didn't have to resize or drag around that many dialogs. The machine is still around. I have to update it (it has to boot from a floppy though, stupid hardware design) one of these days. I'm sure it'll still do fine with current software (well maybe not with digiKam or Blender).
All in all the dialogs in the X11 environments are much better behaved than the ones in Windows. I never could understand why the Windows ones couldn't be resized (those horizontal scroll bars all over the place irritate me to no end whenever I have to use that system).
Most apps simply don't fit on the screen, alt+mouse_drag only moves windows down, not up, meaning jumping through a lot of hoops simply to press OK in a dialog because it is below the screen.
Alt-Mouse1 (usually, depends on your setup in your window manager, I bind it to left-window key on full keyboards) moves the window in whatever direction you move the mouse, down, up, even to the sides ! Typically you can click anywhere in a window and drag the window from there.
(Also, Germany produces lots of real world weapons for export only... )
Oh, so that's why their army only uses slings and pointy sticks ? I always wondered about that.
(duh)
And ALL of which have big powerful industries behind them. We're talking about videogames like they're endangered. There is huge industry with lobbyists on our side.
A bunch of loonies already tried this kind of thing with role playing games a few years ago. Those didn't really have a huge industry behind them and still came out ok.
On the other hand the political atmosphere was quite a bit less hysterical back then (no "think of the children" meme for one). Nowadays it seems that anything remotely suspicious or potentially dangerous ought to be banned for the general well being of the peons. It's so nice that we don't have to think for ourselves any more. It was such a chore !
We need a Ribbon!
Not one that loops mid you. It must be an open ribbon !
Possibly in hex.
How about they actually make games that have replay value and don't suck so that nobody will want to trade them in?
Because it would be an all-too-easy alternative to buying a new game of course.
(duh)
I hope you weren't planning on becoming a marketing executive in a game company.
I'd have thought Linux would be cheaper, but for all we know, they did a thorough analysis, discovered there were suitable savings to be made through use of Windows. Speculating that it's cheaper with so little information is pointless.
You're obviously not familiar with the way corporations work. Picking a solution because it's cheaper or the best tool for the job pretty much only happens through sheer luck.
Important considerations are :
- the colours used on the brochure
- whether the PHB liked the salesperson
- how much "incentives" were offered
And for those of us with 10's of thousands of documents on our computers? How well are these going to be able to differentiate between a PDF file that involves fiction and one that is real? Hell, some of my source material for a horror screenplay I tinker with now and then has made-up schematics and lists of where and how people are going to be killed in the scenes.
That's ok, you will have done *something* wrong. In this case, it's of course nice of you to provide all the paperwork in advance. But it really works with anyone. We've seen in all. We can make pretty much anything stick to anyone.
Your friendly neighbourhood intelligence agency.
Don't you think we're in any way interested in what's in your computer. It's just a way to add some fairy dust to a case.
"Lookee Mr Judge, here's what we found on this annoying person's computer with our magical widget"
(hands over printouts of cesium bomb with maps of central London with ominous arrows)
"What ? I've never seen those in my life"
"Well, that's what they all say of course"
"I propose that we resurrect quartering"
In other words, if there was no taboo against saying 'fuck', there would be no reason for Hitler to be saying 'fuck' in the first place. (Except maybe to his dear wife.)
Would a pissed-off Hitler saying
"My dear Himmler, I am thoroughly bothered by those irksome developments on the eastern front"
sound better to you than
"Fuck those damn Russians" ?
I suggest you find a new job. That is a time bomb.
Wait ! Not yet ! /. and *then* find a new job. There's no sense in letting the good bits of your current job go to waste. Of course, this thing will blow in some one's face sooner or later. You probably don't want to be around when it happens.
First document it on The daily WTF and
So you literally have to sit around and wait for something to happen, as people are watching the sky already anyway, be it birdwatchers, astronomers, air traffic controllers, military or just random guy with mobile phone.
Oddly enough, astronomers, especially amateur astronomers who spend an awful lot of time looking at the sky worldwide with their naked eyes while taking pictures and whatnot are particularly scarce among reporters of UFOs. OTOH they regularly are the ones spotting new objects before the professionals.
Windows is built to remove as many user decisions as possible on the idea that users shouldn't have to be techy to use a PC.
This idea is a major modern problem and I'm not sure it can really only be pegged on Microsoft. Ever since personal computers started to be sold en masse, they were touted as being "simple". One of the great marketing lies of our time.
So nowadays we still have some of the "older" people calling their case a hard drive (although they regularly know their word processor inside out) and a lot of teens being perfectly fluent in the subtleties of IM and community networks but still not having the faintest clue what a network is. Different generations, one having grown with the tech and they still haven't learned a thing except for a few apps. Because computers actually are complicated. Despite what Microsoft and others say.
This has a lot of not only commercial and technical consequences, but also a lot of societal ones. Because people aren't able to grasp the implications of the technologies that are being deployed.
As for the usual car analogy, if most people won't know how to fix their car, an awful lot still know more or less how it works, petrol is squirted in the engine, ignited, moves pistons which moves the wheels, you can turn the wheels, etc. This is regularly taught in generic schools nowadays. It's hight time that basic computing theory (and *not* using MS Office) was taught there too.
I'd agree that 100 Mbit is far from obsolete in the home market, but who still has 100 Mbit in the data center? Unless your "data center" is a closet with 3 servers in it, you should have moved to gigabit years ago.
But HDMI isn't very relevant to the data centre...
I bought a 52" 1080p LCD *AS* my Computer Monitor.
Wow, *huge* pixels !
Running "cat /dev/sda > /dev/null" on boot.
Was this ment to be funny? I sure hope so....
Cat ? Funny ?
lolcat sez man 1 cat.
he was implying people would prefer hemp (or its relatives) growing in their back yard to nuclear power plants in their back yards.
Oh.
My bad. Well, I'm sure I'd rather have something I could weave carpets from growing in my back yard. OTOH of course, if 40m high chimneys/evaporators suddenly sprouted in my backyard, I'd probably spot it, unless I was already growing something silly and making use of it...
Now don't take this wrong, all of my vegetables are organic (although we call them "bio" this side of the channel, which is at least as silly as "organic, so don't start). So it's not like I'm making fun of the organic people. Or at least not of the *normal* organic people. And I'm quite a tree hugger as well. It's just that... well, read on if you made it this far.
Nuclear power has quite a number of good things going for it as well as some bad things (ooh, spent fuel takes a while to cool, I wonder how long it takes for natural concentrated fuel, and yes, there's quite a bit of it... how unnatural). A lot of "green" militants see the world in black and white. But ask one of them how a solar panel is manufactured, how much water is dirtied, how much energy is used, how much carbon (including the shipping of the raw materials) and he won't have a clue. But it's still "renewable" energy. Which it is. Sure. Or will be, when we'll optimize it. Which we will.
But the real world still is shades of grey.
I could bring you to a place in the Pyrenees (the mountains between France and Spain) that has enough natural radio activity that you wouldn't last the night. Hey, it's natural, it can't be bad, right ?
Lots of "green people probably use "natural" plant remedies (which is pretty much what you'll find in any pill, minus the assorted other chemicals the plant has). How many molecules are in a plant beyond the couple they need ? 100 ? 1000 ? 100 000 ? Probably the latter. A plant is the descendant of one of the very first life forms to set foot (root ?) on Earth. A plant has had 3 billion years to evolve its chemistry. You and your kin have had maybe 800 million years... And you still believe you can beat a plant at its game by eating it ? That you're better than it with your silly body chemistry with no lab to back you up ?
What are you ? Some kind of suicidal back to earther ? Why do you think we extracted the useful bit out of plants *while leaving the rest out* ? Which by the way is what chemistry is all about ? What do you think a chemical compound is ? What is the difference between the carbon atom in that "chemical" molecule and the one in that "organic" compound ? What if they're the same molecule ?
If you get a sample of two similar molecules, one extracted from an "organic" source, the other synthesized, will there be a difference ? What if there's a guarantee that all the *atoms* are from organic sources ?
And so does a whole industry spawn, targeted at people who don't understand the first thing about chemistry (which is kind of puzzling given the way school is organized, at least in Europe, but they prosper here nevertheless).
So when you go to school and say, "bah, chemistry, I'll never use this IRL". Think again.
This is also true for physics ("stick on device protects you against radiation from your cell phone") or pretty much any topic. Sounds weird, I know, but crooks are counting on you to fail.