We often view bones as the skeltons of the dead, but bones are amazing alive and active organs in body. The American who won then lost Tour de France last year had a dead hip joint during the race. Its was supposed to have been excruciatingly painful and most pain drugs were banned by the Tour.
The 2008 lander left earth Aug 3 for a polar region landing May 25, 2008. Surpisingly it is still solar powered, though the solar intensity is much low at that latitude. It doesnt move, but digs deep into the permafrost. It is a replacement for craft that crashed due to the meter-feet mixup.
The 2009 rover is nuclear powered. Its the size of a minivan and considered too large for solar power. Its also too large for an airbag landing like the last three rovers, so it has retro rockets.
37 kilometers in eleven months in 1973. ABout three times further than Opportunity. Since computers werent that great in those days, it was operated in real time with two-second delay controller. Mars can have time lag up to 30 minutes.
I heard the [ recently deceased ] inventor of FORTRAN talk about the future of computer programming in the late 1980s. Kind of remineded me Bjorn's talk. You can only take a dead horse so far. Incidentally Backus was working on Functional Programming languages at that time, kind of APL for the those with long memories.
I'm looking forward to the caveman TV series this autumn, although I heard the early reviews were mixed and the network has not yet ordered a full season of episodes yet.
I vaguely remember some 1960s TV show about astronauts mixing with cavemen ("Its about Time").
I've attended many conferences in computer science and the physical sciences (I develop visualization tools for the energy industry) and I have to say SIGGRAPH is hands-down the most fun conference I attend. SIGGRAPH includes core graphics, advanced hardware, and special techniques used for movies and video games. This year there were several "how they did it" sessions from major movie studios. The young F/X Turks get up and expalin their amazing tricks to adulation of the audience. You can skim the exhibits and showrooms for a day for less than hundred dollars or listen to mathematically intense courses and papers all week.
2007 San Diego conference ended today. Los Angeles in 2008! (Big party city with all the studios)
I've mentioned MicroSoft's SIGGRAPH prowess several times in earlier threads.
I'm glad they are starting to get results out into products.
I asked this of a DirectX MicroSoft Developer at an earlier SIGGRAPH.
He said the slowness was due to internal company politics.
The people working on conventional products (such as that developer) view
many of the researchers as pampered prima-donas and shy away from using their results.
I've seen this happen in other companies too.
Mass is almost the cube of animal's size, not the square.
So the quadratic BMI law is generally only valid for average height people.
This screws children and big athletes.
A culture with deeply incalcated motif of growth and progress is going to by definition cush or absorb all other cultures eventually. Capitalism was the first culture of "economic growth" is good. You could argue that early Christianity and Islam culture of conversion were cultures of growth- but that only applied to religious belief. Both those religions were apposed to banking (lending with interest) which was early captialism. Islam still retains muchof that aversion. Empires like Rome, Persia, Greece and China encouraged political and geographic growth, but not economic growth. Rome collpased under its parasitic explotation of conquered provinces.
Probably if it wasnt for the Little Ice age, which crshed the Viking explorers, and a series of medievel palgues, the industrial revolution may have begun a couple centuries earlier.
Automated 3D scene reconstruction software has been an active topic at the SIGGRAPH meeting (occuring in San Diego this week) for a decade. The object is to be able to move a camera(s) through a space such as a city block or building hallway, snap hundreds of pictures, then reconstruct the 3D shape and surface textures in real time. Google's "Street View" is an early application of this technology. I've seen one group promote this for insurance companies and superintendents to walk thorugh a building and inventory the architcture and contents automatically. Then they can turn this into an interative walk through along any path. Its spectacular when they zoom out and you see a multi-story office building as giant 3D twisty maze...
In recent years MicroSoft labs (inluding UK and Beijing) have been co-authors on 20% of the papers. Thats pretty spectacular considering the conference has 90% paper rejection rate. Theyve talked about their photo-reconstruction R&D a couple times there. To me the main disappointment has been the lack of technology to mainstream MicroSoft computer products. Occasionally they've spunoff some of these results to startups.
MicroSoft has had one of the ten largest industrial research labs in the world. Some people have accused it being a tax writeoff. They are sort of like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC in not commercializing alot of results and less like IBM and GE who are more successful. Many of MSFT's publiched results are linked on their website.
All that meant was it emulated the Posix APIs and passed a test.
Didnt have to be efficent or clever.
Posix certifiation was required for some goverment agencies at one time,
so MSFT hacked together an emulator almost no one actually used.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the "sky is falling" articles come from the UK especially global warming. I immediately discount any news article from UK.
We often view bones as the skeltons of the dead, but bones are amazing alive and active organs in body. The American who won then lost Tour de France last year had a dead hip joint during the race. Its was supposed to have been excruciatingly painful and most pain drugs were banned by the Tour.
The 2008 lander left earth Aug 3 for a polar region landing May 25, 2008. Surpisingly it is still solar powered, though the solar intensity is much low at that latitude. It doesnt move, but digs deep into the permafrost. It is a replacement for craft that crashed due to the meter-feet mixup.
The 2009 rover is nuclear powered. Its the size of a minivan and considered too large for solar power. Its also too large for an airbag landing like the last three rovers, so it has retro rockets.
37 kilometers in eleven months in 1973. ABout three times further than Opportunity. Since computers werent that great in those days, it was operated in real time with two-second delay controller. Mars can have time lag up to 30 minutes.
And they've slowed it down since then to check against digging oneself into a sand dune as they did for six weeks two years ago.
I heard the [ recently deceased ] inventor of FORTRAN talk about the future of computer programming in the late 1980s. Kind of remineded me Bjorn's talk. You can only take a dead horse so far. Incidentally Backus was working on Functional Programming languages at that time, kind of APL for the those with long memories.
Niot theat their sciecne was that great before.
Asia is so far ahead of the USA in wireles technology.
I'm looking forward to the caveman TV series this autumn, although I heard the early reviews were mixed and the network has not yet ordered a full season of episodes yet. I vaguely remember some 1960s TV show about astronauts mixing with cavemen ("Its about Time").
I've attended many conferences in computer science and the physical sciences (I develop visualization tools for the energy industry) and I have to say SIGGRAPH is hands-down the most fun conference I attend. SIGGRAPH includes core graphics, advanced hardware, and special techniques used for movies and video games. This year there were several "how they did it" sessions from major movie studios. The young F/X Turks get up and expalin their amazing tricks to adulation of the audience. You can skim the exhibits and showrooms for a day for less than hundred dollars or listen to mathematically intense courses and papers all week.
2007 San Diego conference ended today. Los Angeles in 2008! (Big party city with all the studios)
I've mentioned MicroSoft's SIGGRAPH prowess several times in earlier threads. I'm glad they are starting to get results out into products. I asked this of a DirectX MicroSoft Developer at an earlier SIGGRAPH. He said the slowness was due to internal company politics. The people working on conventional products (such as that developer) view many of the researchers as pampered prima-donas and shy away from using their results. I've seen this happen in other companies too.
Group gives paper at conference, then endlessly spams media with paper.
That would give it a low density. Maybe a playgroup, a housing development, or a temple - its your imagination.
and a small operation? Price is relative to benefit.
http://trowley.org/ maintains a link to all SIGGRAPH papers which have been posted online. ACM, if you are member, has similar.
Mass is almost the cube of animal's size, not the square. So the quadratic BMI law is generally only valid for average height people. This screws children and big athletes.
A culture with deeply incalcated motif of growth and progress is going to by definition cush or absorb all other cultures eventually. Capitalism was the first culture of "economic growth" is good. You could argue that early Christianity and Islam culture of conversion were cultures of growth- but that only applied to religious belief. Both those religions were apposed to banking (lending with interest) which was early captialism. Islam still retains muchof that aversion. Empires like Rome, Persia, Greece and China encouraged political and geographic growth, but not economic growth. Rome collpased under its parasitic explotation of conquered provinces.
Probably if it wasnt for the Little Ice age, which crshed the Viking explorers, and a series of medievel palgues, the industrial revolution may have begun a couple centuries earlier.
A decent plow, draft animals to pull the plow, field rotation (though Chinese invented that earlier too), waterwheels for grinding and so on.
Automated 3D scene reconstruction software has been an active topic at the SIGGRAPH meeting (occuring in San Diego this week) for a decade. The object is to be able to move a camera(s) through a space such as a city block or building hallway, snap hundreds of pictures, then reconstruct the 3D shape and surface textures in real time. Google's "Street View" is an early application of this technology. I've seen one group promote this for insurance companies and superintendents to walk thorugh a building and inventory the architcture and contents automatically. Then they can turn this into an interative walk through along any path. Its spectacular when they zoom out and you see a multi-story office building as giant 3D twisty maze ...
In recent years MicroSoft labs (inluding UK and Beijing) have been co-authors on 20% of the papers. Thats pretty spectacular considering the conference has 90% paper rejection rate. Theyve talked about their photo-reconstruction R&D a couple times there. To me the main disappointment has been the lack of technology to mainstream MicroSoft computer products. Occasionally they've spunoff some of these results to startups.
MicroSoft has had one of the ten largest industrial research labs in the world. Some people have accused it being a tax writeoff. They are sort of like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC in not commercializing alot of results and less like IBM and GE who are more successful. Many of MSFT's publiched results are linked on their website.
Yum. Yum.
Almost all intenet medicine is fake according Dateline and other stories.
This has been a marketing ploy for decades: calling a supercomputer from a few years ago a cheap supercomputer. Well, its no longer a supercomputer.
In the early 1980s a 60 megaflop Cray-1 defined "supercomputer" and the video processing in my cell phone is faster than that.
The new prize is a petaflop, with anything within a magnitude of that range a true super- at least for this year.
All that meant was it emulated the Posix APIs and passed a test. Didnt have to be efficent or clever. Posix certifiation was required for some goverment agencies at one time, so MSFT hacked together an emulator almost no one actually used.