Please. Don't argue ancient computing history with those of us who made it.
Below the Root was released in 1984. At that point in time, I was just getting my bachelor's degree. At MIT. In CS. Course VI. Lab for Computer Science. (I wrote 8-inch floppy drivers in high school for my father's company; I worked on Zork as an undergraduate.) 5-1/4 inch HD floppies were introduced the year I graduated. You are probably correct that "two sides of a 5-1/4 inch floppy" in 1984 were more likely to be 360k (single density). My analysis stands, however: at 2000 characters per page (which is generous), that would allow 180 pages per two sides of single density floppy. That's more than just a "few" comments.
Just the words on this page (no markup, no graphics, and after a few comments) would have exceeded the capacity of your beloved 5-1/4 floppy.
Huh? Have you read any documents that are 1.2 million characters long? There are about 2000 characters per page, in standard text. A plain text document that would fill a floppy would be about 600 pages long. Generously assuming that one comment is about one page of text, that's a lot of comments, somewhat substantially more than, "a few." Not so many complete threads on Slashdot get 600 comments.
Heck, if you design your circuit well enough, the ink doesn't even have to be highly conductive! I've often wondered if plain old inkjet ink or laser toner would be good enough, since the blackness in both cases comes from carbon powder.
In other English-speaking countries "industrial action" is what people in the US call a "strike". See Wikipedia, the first hit for searching for "industrial action" (with quotes) on Google.
Not all museums use AR glass for all displayed items. It is expensive, after all. In the typical museum setting, you have excellent control over the lighting and viewing angles, and can optimize reflections away through careful design, eliminating the need for AR glass in most cases. If the curator is doing his job well, that is.
1. AR (anti-reflection) coatings have been available on photographic lenses for decades. Even the ultra tiny lenses in your iPhone/Blackberry/Android phone have AR coating. AR coatings are *always* nanometers thick, by their very nature.
2. AR coatings have been available on eyeglass lenses for nearly as long. Most people these days get some sort of AR coating on their lenses.
3. AR coatings have been available on framing glass to protect valuable paintings, photographs, and other items in picture frames for the same scale of time. Drop by your local framing / art supply store and check out what's usually called museum glass.
4. AR coatings were used on nearly every CRT by the time sales started to plummet in favor of the LCD. I use a couple of them in my lab to this day.
5. AR coatings are already available on some laptop screens (eg, by Sony and Samsung, no doubt among others).
So, news about a new technology ("Solves Screen Reflection Problems")? No. Product announcement? Yes.
Go to a technical school (MIT would be your best bet) and major in Aero-Astro Engineering. You realize that's a separate discipline, right?
It's also the hardest one at MIT. I was in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering there, but had a handful of Aero-Astro friends. They were, every single one, intellectually impressive.
I dispute your implicit premise that either there is thimerosal in a vaccine vial or there is a risk of contamination: if that were the case, then every vial would have thimerosal, and yet, single-use vials do not.
In my experience (which has become much larger with the advent of children in our family), thimerosal is used in every multi-use vaccine vial (where more than one dose will be drawn from the same vial). It is not present in single-use vials. All childhood and yearly influenza vaccines, again to my experience, come in both forms.
Mercury is a neurotoxin that accumulates in the body. Why, under any circumstances, would I knowingly want to add to the level of neurotoxins in my children's bodies when there is a functionally identical option that does not?
I know that people get very passionate about their Science Fiction writing, but reading some of the responses here you'd think that there was some massive, genocidal weapon aimed to exterminate SF readers.
Get a grip, people.
It's a list. Did you vote? Remember, your favorite author, well, it might not be everyone else's favorite author. The list is based on what people voted for.
Personally, although I've heard of many of these titles, I've read only a small handful, the rest being on my list of things to do when that precious free time returns at some point in the unknown future. And I thought the flowchart was really very entertaining and insightful. Well done, I say! Hear, hear, I say -- perhaps this list will result in a few more people picking up a classic Science Fiction book and reading it, perhaps even enjoying it. Is that really so bad?
1. design a mount so that all 45 of the cameras can be pointed in exactly the same direction in a fixed array, say, 9 x 5, with exactly the same distance between each.
2. design a means to trigger and capture images simultaneously from all 45 cameras.
3. design a means to stitch together all 45 images that takes advantage of overlapping areas to increase resolution
So does this one ----
1. lay the 45 cameras out in a line, all pointing in the same direction, slightly upward
2. arrange a way to capture images from all of them simultaneously
3. write software to present any pair of these two to the user, who wears special heads-up stereo goggles and, therefore, has an adjustable depth perspective on the scene
4. make a new version of the same thing where the cameras are all in a (big) circle pointing inward
This one requires much less engineering work ---
1. Donate them to a worthy cause, like a school in a 3rd world country. Or, sell them on eBay and donate the proceeds instead.
Actually, a better solution might be a bit lower tech - a long wire. It doesn't matter if it's a single-use thing. Just fire it out, unspool the wire, and stream back (and record) videos until the wire snaps.
I skimmed the PDF of their report. It's quite interesting, and despite the armchair quaterbacking on Slashdot, these people have done a pretty good job of using a life-critical system for testing out high-reliability wireless connections.
The one issue I have with their work is that they imposed an acceptability limit of 250 ms -- that is, there could be no more than 250 ms lag between a change in command (squeezing more or less hard on the brake handle) and the brake shoes actuating. That seems quite long, even unnecessarily so.
I am an educator by secondary profession. I've won awards for my skill.
1. This kid belongs in a top college now, not in three, four, or five years. Screw the socialization aspects to high school, he'll do quite well without them.
2. The number of kids that get held back by actual instruction are, in my experience, nearly zero. I've taught many hundreds of undergraduates (granted, not secondary or even primary school students, but undergraduates) and the number of students I've found who didn't do well just because they were an ill fit for standard, structured instruction is -- ready? -- one. That one student (Iris, and I won't give you her last name), with personal attention, went from nearly failing to getting an A. Sure there were plenty of students who don't do as well as they could or should, but they are typically getting in their own way, rather than having some fundamental impediment to learning in a traditional style.
There was a project at MIT LCS/AI back in the mid-80s to explore what it would mean to have massive amounts of RAM. A machine was designed with 1 GB of main memory. By today's standards, that's pathetic, but recall that this is in the era where PCs had 640 KB, max, and 1 GB was not only larger than every hard disk (desktop ones were at 10 MB, and even the big enterprise drives were only on order of 10 times bigger), but --- and this was the really important part -- would fill out the virtual address space, so there would be no need for a VM system. Hal Abelson and Gerry Sussman were behind these big ideas (the same duo who wrote Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs). I don't recall if the machine was actually built (maybe it was the Digital Orrery?), but I do recall one of the contrary viewpoints being that VM was considered important not just for simulating a larger memory system, but that for type-driven hardware like Lisp Machines, a huge address space was useful because the upper addressing bits could be used to encode type, even if that address space was too large to ever be populated.
I did this just the other day! It's actually a bit scary because if you are just working with the magnets (and not a subject), then it only happens with high field systems. You know, the ones that can accelerate a forgotten pen or a paper clip into a lethal weapon. And it happens just when you're leaning your head over the entrance to the magnet, making an adjustment, and likely to be doing something stupid. It was scary the first time it happened to me, and it still gives me serious pause when I approach the barrel.
You only have one muscle memory map? I know I have different ones for the top row of keys on a keyboard, for the few different keyboards I use, for a numpad (on the right of standard keyboards), and for telephone pads. While there are normally number strings that I only type on one keyboard versus another, it isn't *that* hard to translate.
But then again, I speak more than one language, and can reason in more than one unit system with ease, so maybe that helps. The amount of work to learn a new muscle memory map is non-trivial, but I'd wager it is on par with rebuilding a keyboard, and given my multiple-heritage background, I relish knowing how to do the same thing with more than one set of tools.
This is a remarkably naive viewpoint. I am responding only because it has been modded (at this point) to +3.
Journals who require payment for full text or PDF download do not "ensure that only academia and the richest institutions have full access..." I work at one of the oldest and most famous institutions in the world. Many of the journals where my peers publish are not on the subscription list, and thus I must pay for each access. So, that assertion is not true.
Each paper costs perhaps $10 to $20. Please show me someone who is smart and motivated enough to be able to contribute to scientific thought and advancement who cannot afford that on occasion. And yes, I pay for those articles out of my own pocket.
Before the Internet, we had manuscript request cards where, if you saw a paper referenced, you could send a card to the author, and they would mail you back a hardcopy of the manuscript. Up until a few years ago, I would still get one every now and then from somewhere in the far east or Africa. The cost for those is a stamp and a postcard. Please show me someone -- anyone, even one person -- who is sane enough to be able to contribute to science and cannot afford that.
Even now, most publishers allow authors to post PDFs of their work on the author's private web site. If you can afford internet access, you can get nearly every paper. If you can't get one immediately, you can still send email to the author and request a copy in the email equivalent of the post cards from yesteryear. Please show me anyone -- even one person -- who can afford internet access who cannot get email access and request PDFs, or printed manuscripts, that way.
Yes, it is not quite as convenient as being able to immediately download manuscripts from the publisher's web sites as soon as they are published. Boo-hoo. I can't afford to live in the best neighborhood, and that impedes my ability to be a professional scientist because I have a longer commute. Is that also despicable? Should I be allowed to live in the best areas for no cost just because I *want* to?
Modern science, in most but not all fields, is an expensive proposition. The days of amateur scientists making serious contributions in all but a small number of areas are long gone. Saying that we must make all access free (and thus eliminating the valuable filtering service that the journals provide) is a nice pipe-dream but is not rooted in reality. Furthermore, a smart and sufficiently motivated person can make contributions to science -- I had an intern two summers ago who overcame some serious hurdles, including coming from a third-world country, stayed 1-1/2 months in my lab and did enough work to have two publications come out of it -- and not having immediate and free access to all articles is not a limiting factor.
A better headline would be, Physicists Come up with Idea to Build Perfect Magnetic Shield. As the article states, the device itself is hypothetical no proof of concept has been built.
Slashdot Mirror
Please. Don't argue ancient computing history with those of us who made it.
Below the Root was released in 1984. At that point in time, I was just getting my bachelor's degree. At MIT. In CS. Course VI. Lab for Computer Science. (I wrote 8-inch floppy drivers in high school for my father's company; I worked on Zork as an undergraduate.) 5-1/4 inch HD floppies were introduced the year I graduated. You are probably correct that "two sides of a 5-1/4 inch floppy" in 1984 were more likely to be 360k (single density). My analysis stands, however: at 2000 characters per page (which is generous), that would allow 180 pages per two sides of single density floppy. That's more than just a "few" comments.
So, again, your hyperbolic statement is false.
Just the words on this page (no markup, no graphics, and after a few comments) would have exceeded the capacity of your beloved 5-1/4 floppy.
Huh? Have you read any documents that are 1.2 million characters long? There are about 2000 characters per page, in standard text. A plain text document that would fill a floppy would be about 600 pages long. Generously assuming that one comment is about one page of text, that's a lot of comments, somewhat substantially more than, "a few." Not so many complete threads on Slashdot get 600 comments.
So, no, your hyperbolic statement is incorrect.
Heck, if you design your circuit well enough, the ink doesn't even have to be highly conductive! I've often wondered if plain old inkjet ink or laser toner would be good enough, since the blackness in both cases comes from carbon powder.
Agreed.
Since Taco left, the downhill slide has accelerated. It looks like I might have to block yet ANOTHER editor's crap.
In other English-speaking countries "industrial action" is what people in the US call a "strike". See Wikipedia, the first hit for searching for "industrial action" (with quotes) on Google.
Hear, hear!
Not all museums use AR glass for all displayed items. It is expensive, after all. In the typical museum setting, you have excellent control over the lighting and viewing angles, and can optimize reflections away through careful design, eliminating the need for AR glass in most cases. If the curator is doing his job well, that is.
This isn't news, this is an advertisement.
1. AR (anti-reflection) coatings have been available on photographic lenses for decades. Even the ultra tiny lenses in your iPhone/Blackberry/Android phone have AR coating. AR coatings are *always* nanometers thick, by their very nature.
2. AR coatings have been available on eyeglass lenses for nearly as long. Most people these days get some sort of AR coating on their lenses.
3. AR coatings have been available on framing glass to protect valuable paintings, photographs, and other items in picture frames for the same scale of time. Drop by your local framing / art supply store and check out what's usually called museum glass.
4. AR coatings were used on nearly every CRT by the time sales started to plummet in favor of the LCD. I use a couple of them in my lab to this day.
5. AR coatings are already available on some laptop screens (eg, by Sony and Samsung, no doubt among others).
So, news about a new technology ("Solves Screen Reflection Problems")? No. Product announcement? Yes.
Go to a technical school (MIT would be your best bet) and major in Aero-Astro Engineering. You realize that's a separate discipline, right?
It's also the hardest one at MIT. I was in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering there, but had a handful of Aero-Astro friends. They were, every single one, intellectually impressive.
I dispute your implicit premise that either there is thimerosal in a vaccine vial or there is a risk of contamination: if that were the case, then every vial would have thimerosal, and yet, single-use vials do not.
In my experience (which has become much larger with the advent of children in our family), thimerosal is used in every multi-use vaccine vial (where more than one dose will be drawn from the same vial). It is not present in single-use vials. All childhood and yearly influenza vaccines, again to my experience, come in both forms.
Mercury is a neurotoxin that accumulates in the body. Why, under any circumstances, would I knowingly want to add to the level of neurotoxins in my children's bodies when there is a functionally identical option that does not?
I know that people get very passionate about their Science Fiction writing, but reading some of the responses here you'd think that there was some massive, genocidal weapon aimed to exterminate SF readers.
Get a grip, people.
It's a list. Did you vote? Remember, your favorite author, well, it might not be everyone else's favorite author. The list is based on what people voted for.
Personally, although I've heard of many of these titles, I've read only a small handful, the rest being on my list of things to do when that precious free time returns at some point in the unknown future. And I thought the flowchart was really very entertaining and insightful. Well done, I say! Hear, hear, I say -- perhaps this list will result in a few more people picking up a classic Science Fiction book and reading it, perhaps even enjoying it. Is that really so bad?
Um, it's pretty easy to check. Wikipedia shows the first high Tc discovery was in 1986. I remember it well, as I was dating a physicist at the time.
Does MacOS have crontabs?
Can you write (a) a new script you want to execute every minute, and (b) a new crontab to activate it automatically?
This requires lots of work---
1. design a mount so that all 45 of the cameras can be pointed in exactly the same direction in a fixed array, say, 9 x 5, with exactly the same distance between each.
2. design a means to trigger and capture images simultaneously from all 45 cameras.
3. design a means to stitch together all 45 images that takes advantage of overlapping areas to increase resolution
So does this one ----
1. lay the 45 cameras out in a line, all pointing in the same direction, slightly upward
2. arrange a way to capture images from all of them simultaneously
3. write software to present any pair of these two to the user, who wears special heads-up stereo goggles and, therefore, has an adjustable depth perspective on the scene
4. make a new version of the same thing where the cameras are all in a (big) circle pointing inward
This one requires much less engineering work ---
1. Donate them to a worthy cause, like a school in a 3rd world country. Or, sell them on eBay and donate the proceeds instead.
Actually, a better solution might be a bit lower tech - a long wire. It doesn't matter if it's a single-use thing. Just fire it out, unspool the wire, and stream back (and record) videos until the wire snaps.
That's how many missiles are guided already, so doing the same thing for a maybe-recoverable camera seems reasonable.
I skimmed the PDF of their report. It's quite interesting, and despite the armchair quaterbacking on Slashdot, these people have done a pretty good job of using a life-critical system for testing out high-reliability wireless connections.
The one issue I have with their work is that they imposed an acceptability limit of 250 ms -- that is, there could be no more than 250 ms lag between a change in command (squeezing more or less hard on the brake handle) and the brake shoes actuating. That seems quite long, even unnecessarily so.
I am an educator by secondary profession. I've won awards for my skill.
1. This kid belongs in a top college now, not in three, four, or five years. Screw the socialization aspects to high school, he'll do quite well without them.
2. The number of kids that get held back by actual instruction are, in my experience, nearly zero. I've taught many hundreds of undergraduates (granted, not secondary or even primary school students, but undergraduates) and the number of students I've found who didn't do well just because they were an ill fit for standard, structured instruction is -- ready? -- one. That one student (Iris, and I won't give you her last name), with personal attention, went from nearly failing to getting an A. Sure there were plenty of students who don't do as well as they could or should, but they are typically getting in their own way, rather than having some fundamental impediment to learning in a traditional style.
What is old is new again.
There was a project at MIT LCS/AI back in the mid-80s to explore what it would mean to have massive amounts of RAM. A machine was designed with 1 GB of main memory. By today's standards, that's pathetic, but recall that this is in the era where PCs had 640 KB, max, and 1 GB was not only larger than every hard disk (desktop ones were at 10 MB, and even the big enterprise drives were only on order of 10 times bigger), but --- and this was the really important part -- would fill out the virtual address space, so there would be no need for a VM system. Hal Abelson and Gerry Sussman were behind these big ideas (the same duo who wrote Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs). I don't recall if the machine was actually built (maybe it was the Digital Orrery?), but I do recall one of the contrary viewpoints being that VM was considered important not just for simulating a larger memory system, but that for type-driven hardware like Lisp Machines, a huge address space was useful because the upper addressing bits could be used to encode type, even if that address space was too large to ever be populated.
Are you planning any more collaborations with Henry Rollins?
I did this just the other day! It's actually a bit scary because if you are just working with the magnets (and not a subject), then it only happens with high field systems. You know, the ones that can accelerate a forgotten pen or a paper clip into a lethal weapon. And it happens just when you're leaning your head over the entrance to the magnet, making an adjustment, and likely to be doing something stupid. It was scary the first time it happened to me, and it still gives me serious pause when I approach the barrel.
1x1 "spacer" image the same color as the background
GIF has a transparent color value, easing this issue for the nefariously inclined.
You only have one muscle memory map? I know I have different ones for the top row of keys on a keyboard, for the few different keyboards I use, for a numpad (on the right of standard keyboards), and for telephone pads. While there are normally number strings that I only type on one keyboard versus another, it isn't *that* hard to translate.
But then again, I speak more than one language, and can reason in more than one unit system with ease, so maybe that helps. The amount of work to learn a new muscle memory map is non-trivial, but I'd wager it is on par with rebuilding a keyboard, and given my multiple-heritage background, I relish knowing how to do the same thing with more than one set of tools.
This is a remarkably naive viewpoint. I am responding only because it has been modded (at this point) to +3.
Journals who require payment for full text or PDF download do not "ensure that only academia and the richest institutions have full access ..." I work at one of the oldest and most famous institutions in the world. Many of the journals where my peers publish are not on the subscription list, and thus I must pay for each access. So, that assertion is not true.
Each paper costs perhaps $10 to $20. Please show me someone who is smart and motivated enough to be able to contribute to scientific thought and advancement who cannot afford that on occasion. And yes, I pay for those articles out of my own pocket.
Before the Internet, we had manuscript request cards where, if you saw a paper referenced, you could send a card to the author, and they would mail you back a hardcopy of the manuscript. Up until a few years ago, I would still get one every now and then from somewhere in the far east or Africa. The cost for those is a stamp and a postcard. Please show me someone -- anyone, even one person -- who is sane enough to be able to contribute to science and cannot afford that.
Even now, most publishers allow authors to post PDFs of their work on the author's private web site. If you can afford internet access, you can get nearly every paper. If you can't get one immediately, you can still send email to the author and request a copy in the email equivalent of the post cards from yesteryear. Please show me anyone -- even one person -- who can afford internet access who cannot get email access and request PDFs, or printed manuscripts, that way.
Yes, it is not quite as convenient as being able to immediately download manuscripts from the publisher's web sites as soon as they are published. Boo-hoo. I can't afford to live in the best neighborhood, and that impedes my ability to be a professional scientist because I have a longer commute. Is that also despicable? Should I be allowed to live in the best areas for no cost just because I *want* to?
Modern science, in most but not all fields, is an expensive proposition. The days of amateur scientists making serious contributions in all but a small number of areas are long gone. Saying that we must make all access free (and thus eliminating the valuable filtering service that the journals provide) is a nice pipe-dream but is not rooted in reality. Furthermore, a smart and sufficiently motivated person can make contributions to science -- I had an intern two summers ago who overcame some serious hurdles, including coming from a third-world country, stayed 1-1/2 months in my lab and did enough work to have two publications come out of it -- and not having immediate and free access to all articles is not a limiting factor.
A better headline would be, Physicists Come up with Idea to Build Perfect Magnetic Shield. As the article states, the device itself is hypothetical no proof of concept has been built.