That renders as a light brown-yellow sort of colour. Perhaps your browser just doesn't like style-sheets. BTW, I think the wraparound in this comment box has stuck an unwanted space in that URL - you'll have to remove it.
Well, I think you could say it either way. Something (such as a park bench) on the internet simply means that it's connected to the internet.
For example; if you connected (via PC, PDA, phone, whatever) to the net and you were asked where the information your device was receiving was coming from, would you be more likely to say "My [device] is on the net." or "The net is on my [device]"?
Or am I taking your post a little too seriously : )
Let's ignore the Slashdot community for a sec - there's a vast amount of people out there *cough* AOL *cough* who have trouble doing the simplest things on their PCs (otherwise IDG wouldn't be making so much money off the Dummies series). If people really can't punch a hole in a piece of paper properly, then are they going to manage to vote over the net? Right now, I doubt it. But I think that if internet voting is publicised widely then they're likely to try for the same reasons that so many people without a clue (and only a slim chance of getting one) get on the net in the first place.
The process of voting needs to be made much much simpler and clearer, people need to be able to review their choice before they cast it, and they need to have an equally simple alternative in the real world. Try beta testing any new system on a bunch five-year-olds and you'll see just how many ways something you thought was simple can be done wrong.
And then there's all the arguments about security, skewed distribution of PC access, etc. etc.
Yup; pencils. The papers are then put in a sealed box (which the people at the polling station can't open and which is watched very carefully) before being sent to a central counting area in each constituency. They're very carefully guarded.
I agree that maybe a more permanent mark might be a good idea, but it seems to work anyway. The benefit is that it's so simple (put an X in a box next to the name/party that you want to vote for) that you'd have to be stupendously stupid to get it wrong and it thus eliminates any of the problems seem in Florida except voter apathy (turn-out was very low in our last election too). I'm not sure, but I suspect that the pencil is used to mark the paper so that if someone does mess up they can easily alter it (it's difficult to un-punch a hole).
Also, we only have to vote for one thing at a time (Parliment, European Parliment, etc.) - I understand that you USians were voting for a whole bunch of stuff all at the same time (Party, Judges etc.), or was that just FL?
Please note - The offensive parent post wasn't written by me. Why on Earth would I post as an AC but still leave my sig in there? I never post anonymously anyway since my karma's high enough to take negative moderation.
(The real) Dr_Cheeks
Seem like an intention to use the screen as a visualisation system to me.
Heh; I never suggested they wouldn't be using it as a visualisation system (what else would they use a screen for?:)).
I was questioning whether the intention had been to simply get a bigger clearer display (motivated by the same reasons that make people swap their 800x600 15 inch screen for a 1024x768 17 inch unit, though to a much greater extent), as opposed to"flooding our sensory input leaving our brains free to do what they do best - recognise patterns, holes and anomalies in the massive amount of data" (as a previous poster put it) - intentionally overwhelming the user's brain to force it to pick out patterns and work differently to how it would on a smaller screen.
The point of this screen is to display an unprecedented amount of data, too much to be taken in at once even by the subconcious, thus flooding our sensory input leaving our brains free to do what they do best - recognise patterns, holes and anomalies in the massive amount of data represented in new visual ways. Much like a graph lets you visualise a trend easily.
Is it? I didn't notice that in the article - I thought they just wanted a really big clear screen so I was wondering how well they actually managed to take in the display. I can see that the screen could be used like you suggest, but I didn't think that was why they built it.
Well, as I said, I wasn't the most dilligent optics student in my class, but...
First up - I meant really really close to the surface. The monitor I'm using at the moment has a few millimetres of glass between the flourescent bit and the surface. This is going to be an issue with most screens, but more expensive ones seem to have a thinner layer here.
My comment about the display blurring is based solely on my experiences playing around with fibre-optics - it could just be because I was using low quality fibre or something. However, I do recall that when seperate signals are simulataneously sent down fibre-optic cables (as you mention) they use seperate frequencies for each channel (frequency division multiplexing) and de-multiplex them at the other end, so perhaps they do get mixed up. Could be that it's a combination of the two, or that it wouldn't be an issue over a straight 1 foot connection. I'm sure there's someone here on Slashdot who knows more about the subject than me.
Oh, and fair point about the projector.
Hope I made myself a little clearer. If anyone wants to shoot down my answers then I'm all ears (or should that be eyes?).
You'd really need to use a seperate fibre-optic cable for each individual pixel - the image would blur together somewhat if you just used a huge fat line. You'd also need to get the fibres really close to the surface to stop them picking up light from adjacent pixels. This would be more inconvenient to produce than what you suggest (though, actually, I'm not sure how easy it would be to produce a line with such a large diameter).
Yes, it should be equally simple to do this from a curved screen, if you get a snug fit. You could even have all the screens sat in seperate places and just string the cables close to each other - no need to be limited by having them a foot apart. Assuming you could get it working of course...
There's probably also some good reason why individual fiber-optic cables have a round cross-section too (I'd guess something to do with refraction), but I didn't really pay as much attention in my optics lectures as I should have done ; )
Finally, setting all this up in an array as you suggest might be a bit tricky. It probably could be done, but whether it'd be worth the effort is questionable. It may well be more appealing (and cheaper) to just buy a bigger screen (or a high resolution projector if you're that desperate) and wait until the technology makes this simpler to do.
OK, this is very cool and all, but surely when you start getting such a huge detailed image the limitations imposed upon our vision by evolution will become more obvious; we can only see this sort of clear image in the centre of our field of vision - our peripheral vision is considerably more fuzzy.
IANAO(ptician), but I recall that it's down to the distribution (thanks to evolution) of rods and cones (light receptors) on the retina - near the centre there's one sort (can't remember which) that's good for recognising colours and shapes (useful when examining objects), and round the edge there's the other sort that's more sensitive to light/dark and movement (useful for spotting something with big teeth sneaking up on you).
On a normal computer screen we only have to focus on a small part of the image at one time (try reading the text at the top/bottom of this page while staring at the centre). Even on movie screens (which are a comparable size to this screen) we typically only need to look directly at one small part of it at a time and let our peripheral vision pick up the rest. But if this screen is going to be running hi-res images across it's whole surface (i.e. you want to watch the whole thing instead of focusing on one small part) then anyone using it is going to have difficulty seeing the whole image at once, unless they sit really far away or run the thing over and over so you get a chance to see everything.
I could just be talking out of my ass here, so I'd be interested to know if anyone here has used something like this and noticed any problems.
Oh, and before any wise-asses reply - I know my eyes move - I'm talking about trying to see the whole thing at once instead of focusing on different parts in rapid sucession and getting a killer headache.
So this is supposed to figure out what you're asking and give you an answer. I worked on a helpdesk for a year, and a significant number of the emails I received made no sense (really, some of them looked like they'd gone through Babelfish a dozen times - try the computer stupidities page over at rinkworks.com for typical examples) or gave no details of the problem other than to say something as vague as "My computer's broken" (about 5%-10%). How does the system handle these? What're the chances it'll give out the wrong information (like when web searches for innocent subjects throw up random pr0n)?
As someone's already pointed out; the name (eLiza) doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the system's ability to actually come up with meaningful answers. And I have my doubts that it'll handle the fine calibre of idiot that corporations can create.
Ahem, yes, of course; I'd forgotten all about the fine religion that is Scientology - wouldn't want them to lose the revenue from all those fine books L Ron wrote. And it's simply dreadful when sites like Operation Clambake at http://www.xenu.net publish details of those books and make them out to be some sort of wacked-out cult.
MS don't want to go through an enquiry into having an anti-competitive nature again - this would be great evidence that they've cared and learnt and shared and grown. But what do they get aside from a token competitor in a market that they've created? Well, working closely with Ximian means they can look over their shoulders and keep an eye on things to make sure they stay ahead of the competition (and Ximian are definitely the little fish here). And since their relationship is informal, MS doesn't have to divulge anything it doesn't want to. They get to encourage more people to use.NET systems, but they also get to offer the best option (well, assuming they don't just sit on their asses while Mono improves).
Sure, MS would like to keep everything secret, but it recognises there's some real competition now (Linux etc.) and now has to try to bring those of us who defected back onto their side again.
The works you named are not copyrighted (especially the bible - what's the point in having a religion where you actually prevent possible converts from freely aquiring and distributing information about your religion?) - IIRC copyright law states that authors only retain copyright for something like 100 years, so if you want to publish Shakespeare or Plato on the net then go ahead (though including your Cliff notes as an appendix would be illegal). Of course, IANAL, but I'm sure that's how it works.
Mind you, the authors aren't likely to come chasing royalty fees, and even people who can show they're decendents of WS (I doubt any decendents of Plato or the Bible authors are going to know they are), they're likely to get laughed out of court. However, copying something more recent that's just going out of copyright might lead to a more heated battle.
Well, my old school has varied it's uniform rules quite a bit in recent years:
It used to be black blazer with school crest, black trousers, white shirt + school tie, but no-one used to wear the blazers so they gave up on that rule. Girls didn't have to wear ties at first, but then a lot of stupid parents complained that it was sexist to make their boys wear ties, so they became mandatory for girls. Nowadays though, they all wear yellow sweaters and the rules seem quite relaxed. It seems that the school gave into rebellion and met halfway.
As for the brainwashing thing - we didn't all dress alike. It may look that way from a cursory glance, but to those in the school we were all making our uniforms individual - doing stuff like wearing the ties backwards so the skinny part was at the front, wearing trainers or Doc Martens instead of regular shoes, wearing t-shirts that were visible beneath the fabric of the white shirts etc. We were forced to conform, but dressed as differently as we could within limits that had been set.
I don't think that uniforms is really a big problem (and it actually makes it easier to decide what to wear each day). But trying to turn kids into perfect consumers does suck, though I doubt it'll work (see my earlier post).
I went to a UK comprehensive secondary school, and I (and all my friends) knew full well that copying software (for my old Acorn Archimedes A3000) and taping CDs that we swapped was illegal. But our allowances went a lot further if we did.
Don't assume that kids are little angels who wouldn't do something just because an authority figure tells them not to (I'd like to cite drug use and underage drinking and smoking as examples of situations where kids go out to do exactly the opposite of what they're told is wrong). You might persuade some kids to stop, but you'll probably make it more appealing to others.
Running Win 98 on a 486DX2/66 running Windows 98 on a 340 meg laptop hard drive, huh? Phew, that barely scrapes through the minimum specs. It's gonna run like a pig, and that's not considering they'll need some space for the software too. I guess that BSOD is gonna be a very common experience. Surely a P100 wouldn't have killed their budget that much?
Woah - you shouldn't mix it with alcohol? Here in the UK there's a club-night that's run in a lot of university cities called VodBull - you can get a whole load of vodka and Red Bull cheaply (something like £1 for 2 shots and Red Bull before 10pm, £2 afterwards) and every time I've been there people order 6 or 8 at a time and down a couple at the bar because the queues are so big.
I knew it was bad to go overboard on the Taurin - it says so quite clearly on the can - but I'd never really considered the negative effects of mixing the drinks. And as I typed that last sentence I realised just how dumb that was of me.
Still, since I graduated I've got considerably less opportunity to go to these things anyway, so I guess I'll live.
Atlantis in the Pacific. Well no wonder it's been lost so long - we've been looking in the wrong ocean! Damn sneaky Atlanteans confusing everyone....
I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be the Titanic though, since it'd have to have suddenly risen from the spot on at the bottom of the Atlantic where we've known it is for years (it was crossing from the UK to the Eastern Seaboard of the US remember) and flown across North America without anyone noticing.
The post kinda reminds me of a story a software engineering lecturer once told me - he was working on an imaging system for a brain-scanner, and decided to test it on himself. When he got out of the scanner the doctors were all looking very serious and showed him a scan with a black blob in the center of his brain. After reeling from the shock he decided to go back and look at his code; it turned out that in a moment of distraction he'd started counting array elements from 1 instead of 0 - after fixing it his scan was blob-free. Anyway, this could be what your dark spot in the Pacific is.
Slashdot Mirror
color: #F9EBB4;
That renders as a light brown-yellow sort of colour. Perhaps your browser just doesn't like style-sheets. BTW, I think the wraparound in this comment box has stuck an unwanted space in that URL - you'll have to remove it.
For example; if you connected (via PC, PDA, phone, whatever) to the net and you were asked where the information your device was receiving was coming from, would you be more likely to say "My [device] is on the net." or "The net is on my [device]"?
Or am I taking your post a little too seriously : )
The process of voting needs to be made much much simpler and clearer, people need to be able to review their choice before they cast it, and they need to have an equally simple alternative in the real world. Try beta testing any new system on a bunch five-year-olds and you'll see just how many ways something you thought was simple can be done wrong.
And then there's all the arguments about security, skewed distribution of PC access, etc. etc.
I agree that maybe a more permanent mark might be a good idea, but it seems to work anyway. The benefit is that it's so simple (put an X in a box next to the name/party that you want to vote for) that you'd have to be stupendously stupid to get it wrong and it thus eliminates any of the problems seem in Florida except voter apathy (turn-out was very low in our last election too). I'm not sure, but I suspect that the pencil is used to mark the paper so that if someone does mess up they can easily alter it (it's difficult to un-punch a hole).
Also, we only have to vote for one thing at a time (Parliment, European Parliment, etc.) - I understand that you USians were voting for a whole bunch of stuff all at the same time (Party, Judges etc.), or was that just FL?
Didn't we hear about the name change in Last Night's Slashback?
Please ignore the offensive post - it wasn't me. An AC copied my sig - I always post as myself. Thanks for the info.
Please note - The offensive parent post wasn't written by me. Why on Earth would I post as an AC but still leave my sig in there? I never post anonymously anyway since my karma's high enough to take negative moderation. (The real) Dr_Cheeks
I was questioning whether the intention had been to simply get a bigger clearer display (motivated by the same reasons that make people swap their 800x600 15 inch screen for a 1024x768 17 inch unit, though to a much greater extent), as opposed to "flooding our sensory input leaving our brains free to do what they do best - recognise patterns, holes and anomalies in the massive amount of data" (as a previous poster put it) - intentionally overwhelming the user's brain to force it to pick out patterns and work differently to how it would on a smaller screen.
Heh, check it out; I'm a sex-symbol on Slashdot! ROFL!
First up - I meant really really close to the surface. The monitor I'm using at the moment has a few millimetres of glass between the flourescent bit and the surface. This is going to be an issue with most screens, but more expensive ones seem to have a thinner layer here.
My comment about the display blurring is based solely on my experiences playing around with fibre-optics - it could just be because I was using low quality fibre or something. However, I do recall that when seperate signals are simulataneously sent down fibre-optic cables (as you mention) they use seperate frequencies for each channel (frequency division multiplexing) and de-multiplex them at the other end, so perhaps they do get mixed up. Could be that it's a combination of the two, or that it wouldn't be an issue over a straight 1 foot connection. I'm sure there's someone here on Slashdot who knows more about the subject than me.
Oh, and fair point about the projector.
Hope I made myself a little clearer. If anyone wants to shoot down my answers then I'm all ears (or should that be eyes?).
Yes, it should be equally simple to do this from a curved screen, if you get a snug fit. You could even have all the screens sat in seperate places and just string the cables close to each other - no need to be limited by having them a foot apart. Assuming you could get it working of course...
There's probably also some good reason why individual fiber-optic cables have a round cross-section too (I'd guess something to do with refraction), but I didn't really pay as much attention in my optics lectures as I should have done ; )
Finally, setting all this up in an array as you suggest might be a bit tricky. It probably could be done, but whether it'd be worth the effort is questionable. It may well be more appealing (and cheaper) to just buy a bigger screen (or a high resolution projector if you're that desperate) and wait until the technology makes this simpler to do.
IANAO(ptician), but I recall that it's down to the distribution (thanks to evolution) of rods and cones (light receptors) on the retina - near the centre there's one sort (can't remember which) that's good for recognising colours and shapes (useful when examining objects), and round the edge there's the other sort that's more sensitive to light/dark and movement (useful for spotting something with big teeth sneaking up on you).
On a normal computer screen we only have to focus on a small part of the image at one time (try reading the text at the top/bottom of this page while staring at the centre). Even on movie screens (which are a comparable size to this screen) we typically only need to look directly at one small part of it at a time and let our peripheral vision pick up the rest. But if this screen is going to be running hi-res images across it's whole surface (i.e. you want to watch the whole thing instead of focusing on one small part) then anyone using it is going to have difficulty seeing the whole image at once, unless they sit really far away or run the thing over and over so you get a chance to see everything.
I could just be talking out of my ass here, so I'd be interested to know if anyone here has used something like this and noticed any problems.
Oh, and before any wise-asses reply - I know my eyes move - I'm talking about trying to see the whole thing at once instead of focusing on different parts in rapid sucession and getting a killer headache.
As someone's already pointed out; the name (eLiza) doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the system's ability to actually come up with meaningful answers. And I have my doubts that it'll handle the fine calibre of idiot that corporations can create.
Ahem, yes, of course; I'd forgotten all about the fine religion that is Scientology - wouldn't want them to lose the revenue from all those fine books L Ron wrote. And it's simply dreadful when sites like Operation Clambake at http://www.xenu.net publish details of those books and make them out to be some sort of wacked-out cult.
Sure, MS would like to keep everything secret, but it recognises there's some real competition now (Linux etc.) and now has to try to bring those of us who defected back onto their side again.
Or am I just being paranoid?
Mind you, the authors aren't likely to come chasing royalty fees, and even people who can show they're decendents of WS (I doubt any decendents of Plato or the Bible authors are going to know they are), they're likely to get laughed out of court. However, copying something more recent that's just going out of copyright might lead to a more heated battle.
It used to be black blazer with school crest, black trousers, white shirt + school tie, but no-one used to wear the blazers so they gave up on that rule. Girls didn't have to wear ties at first, but then a lot of stupid parents complained that it was sexist to make their boys wear ties, so they became mandatory for girls. Nowadays though, they all wear yellow sweaters and the rules seem quite relaxed. It seems that the school gave into rebellion and met halfway.
As for the brainwashing thing - we didn't all dress alike. It may look that way from a cursory glance, but to those in the school we were all making our uniforms individual - doing stuff like wearing the ties backwards so the skinny part was at the front, wearing trainers or Doc Martens instead of regular shoes, wearing t-shirts that were visible beneath the fabric of the white shirts etc. We were forced to conform, but dressed as differently as we could within limits that had been set.
I don't think that uniforms is really a big problem (and it actually makes it easier to decide what to wear each day). But trying to turn kids into perfect consumers does suck, though I doubt it'll work (see my earlier post).
"...kids go out to do exactly the opposite of what they're told is wrong..."
Mmmm, double negative hell. Please pretend that I said "do exactly the opposite of what they're told".
Don't assume that kids are little angels who wouldn't do something just because an authority figure tells them not to (I'd like to cite drug use and underage drinking and smoking as examples of situations where kids go out to do exactly the opposite of what they're told is wrong). You might persuade some kids to stop, but you'll probably make it more appealing to others.
Running Win 98 on a 486DX2/66 running Windows 98 on a 340 meg laptop hard drive, huh? Phew, that barely scrapes through the minimum specs. It's gonna run like a pig, and that's not considering they'll need some space for the software too. I guess that BSOD is gonna be a very common experience. Surely a P100 wouldn't have killed their budget that much?
I knew it was bad to go overboard on the Taurin - it says so quite clearly on the can - but I'd never really considered the negative effects of mixing the drinks. And as I typed that last sentence I realised just how dumb that was of me.
Still, since I graduated I've got considerably less opportunity to go to these things anyway, so I guess I'll live.
I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be the Titanic though, since it'd have to have suddenly risen from the spot on at the bottom of the Atlantic where we've known it is for years (it was crossing from the UK to the Eastern Seaboard of the US remember) and flown across North America without anyone noticing.
The post kinda reminds me of a story a software engineering lecturer once told me - he was working on an imaging system for a brain-scanner, and decided to test it on himself. When he got out of the scanner the doctors were all looking very serious and showed him a scan with a black blob in the center of his brain. After reeling from the shock he decided to go back and look at his code; it turned out that in a moment of distraction he'd started counting array elements from 1 instead of 0 - after fixing it his scan was blob-free. Anyway, this could be what your dark spot in the Pacific is.
PS - yes, I do know you were joking
Cheers, British.