One of the fun things about talking about geeks is how filthy rich some of them have become- allt he way back to whn A=ple was the fastest IPO of its time to YouTube of this year. I dont see many women on the rich geek list. I dont think I'd include Meg Whitman because she didnmt create the technology, just ran a booming company.
Many high school science fair projects perform some experiements they teach in college genetic lab classes. In not afraid of high school Frankensteins yet. But this is close to science fiction in my view. Sometimes I wish I was a kid again and had such access to technology at that age.
I am generally sympathetic to the climate change argument.
However I think Gore made some rather unscientific presentations.
For example the animated CO2 wiggle violates just about every recommendation the graphics guru Edward Tufte makes on the display of scientific data. The axes are not labeled; the zero reference is not on the screen; flash and ink should not overwhelm the basic numbers.
Another problem are the animations of the ozone hole and the arctic ice melting.
Gore does not distinguish the former is display of recorded data, while the latter is a simulation of a possible future.
When you exaggerate the presentation in science, it becomes rhetoric and propaganda. To some degree you cant 100% eliminate such from science, but you should try.
I not being observant, not judgmental here.
Some of the harshest laws deal with crimes against children.
Just having child pr0n on disk can get one into jail.
The long running NBC Dateline series on internet predators is fascinating[*].
Just driving on the street of a sting setup gets one busted- that demonstrates serious intent.
Anyone who spends time in the backcountry knows one of the most dangerous things is to get between a parent and its offspring.
Sometimes this leads to less than desirable side effects. Like zealous photo developers reporting beach pictures or naked-baby-on-bed photos. Or teachers, coaches, and clergy told NEVER to hug a youngster anymore, whether the youngster has made an amazing sports victory or bawling their head off.
[*] People like seeing bad guys humiliated, and Dateline does this to the extreme IMHO.
The games industry need people who can paint dazling backgrounds and tell interesting stories with interesting characters. I cant count houw many demo reels I've seen that demonstrate technical competance, but are as dull as hell.
I've been seeing good auto-steroscopic 3D displays at SIGGRAPH for over a decade. They operation on different principles, some using vertical lense systems, others using multiple depth-of-focus planes, to name a few. They all seem to be fishing for some sort of market. Some try for high-end scientific or military visualization. Others aim toward the advertisment market.
I think a lot of the "falling behind" Cassandras intermix the two arguments. The US has had a vigorous enoguh production of engineers and scientists to supply technology creation needs. But studies about falling behind in scientific literacy means that a large fraction of US population cant effectively use it. For example most store clerks would be clueless in billing their customers during a computer failure because thay lack the math skills to tally a bill. Not that the customers would understand them either.
If MGM uses the same special effects house WETA, then there could be some continuity. WETA was essentially a child of LOTR, though they do lots of other movies now.
I wonder how many other undiscovered technology advances are collecting dust in a museum because we havent [re-]invented it yet. This also goes for materials from UFOs, meteors from other planets (good candidates for Mars and Moon), and so on.
If thats not sitting ducks for crooks, I dont know what is.
Maybe the rich suburban teens have "daddy's credit card", but a lot of them dont have high credit lines and carry cash.
I go to one or two scifi conventions a year and still notice lots of storm troopers and princess leahs (or her mother). Not as many trekies except for Klingons.
Tit for tat.
If they are that sloppy, then these numbers should be easy to get.
And it "cant be wrong" because the administration let your number get out.
Most chips and circuits boards manufactured before 1978-1980 were drawn or taped by hand. By taping, I mean you pasted a mockup from thin drafting tapes, then photo-reduced them to circuit boards and chips. I did a fair share of them myself. There was a certain artistic statisfaction in doing this, somewhat like rebuilding your own car engine or remodeling a room in your house. I would dream of taping circuits in my sleep as my busy subconsious worked out upcoming issues, much like my brain computes animation grphics now.
Computer-aided circuit design allowed getting past the 10,000 gate level with much less error. The results arent as artistic, but are a lot cheaper to implement and more accurate. CAD required interative computing and a minimum of vector graphics display, both possible by the late 1970s. Kind of incestuous: using computers to design bigger computers, with a dash of human intervention.
I dont know if they still contnue this, but when I was in grade-school they always taught us generally useless set theory in elecmentary school arithmentic. Concepts like "associative", "communitive', "union", "intersection", etc. Ironically this stuff become more useful in CS- for structured programming, compilers, digital circuit design.
I recall self-charging watches, charged from the arm movement of their owners. I dont know this would work for other devices. I've seen protypes of shoe-powered devices, but they have wires, or require moving batteries.
There are prototypes of self-charging medical devices from thermal or chemical gradients in the body.
Lotus 123 was the VisiCalc killer, not Excel. Lotus integrated three applications- spreadsheet, graphs and a relational database. I remember lots of marketing hype.
MicroSoft eventually delivered The Office site with several more intergrations including email and slideshows. They were the first to effectively use a graphical GUI, roundabout via their Macintosh software. The Excel ancestor was called Multiplan then.
I know people are sick of the market hype, but 2006 is the year EVERYONE could publish and view video on the web. (And damn it, everyone did!) Before that video required special players, high bandwidth, and special web servers. And I dont think we've begun to the most creative and useful applications of that media yet.
Some of the Rover software initially just allowed three-digit dates.
Spirit reach 1000 Sols late October and Opportunity next week.
Fortunately the software was repaired during a winter slowdown tuneup.
Nice idea: reprogrammable robots.
From about Oct 25 to Nov 10 Mars was on the the other side of the Sun.
The Suns radio noise effectively blocks transmission either way.
I notice Opportunity started returning images this week.
Inside joke. The Chinese word for compass is "south pointing device". Thats because they first used it for geomancy, where "good energy" comes from the south. The Vikings and other Europeans used the compass as a navigational aid for when the north star was occluded, so the European compass points north.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheers to great engineers at NASA.
One of the fun things about talking about geeks is how filthy rich some of them have become- allt he way back to whn A=ple was the fastest IPO of its time to YouTube of this year. I dont see many women on the rich geek list. I dont think I'd include Meg Whitman because she didnmt create the technology, just ran a booming company.
Many high school science fair projects perform some experiements they teach in college genetic lab classes. In not afraid of high school Frankensteins yet. But this is close to science fiction in my view. Sometimes I wish I was a kid again and had such access to technology at that age.
I am generally sympathetic to the climate change argument. However I think Gore made some rather unscientific presentations. For example the animated CO2 wiggle violates just about every recommendation the graphics guru Edward Tufte makes on the display of scientific data. The axes are not labeled; the zero reference is not on the screen; flash and ink should not overwhelm the basic numbers.
Another problem are the animations of the ozone hole and the arctic ice melting. Gore does not distinguish the former is display of recorded data, while the latter is a simulation of a possible future.
When you exaggerate the presentation in science, it becomes rhetoric and propaganda. To some degree you cant 100% eliminate such from science, but you should try.
I not being observant, not judgmental here. Some of the harshest laws deal with crimes against children. Just having child pr0n on disk can get one into jail. The long running NBC Dateline series on internet predators is fascinating[*]. Just driving on the street of a sting setup gets one busted- that demonstrates serious intent. Anyone who spends time in the backcountry knows one of the most dangerous things is to get between a parent and its offspring.
Sometimes this leads to less than desirable side effects. Like zealous photo developers reporting beach pictures or naked-baby-on-bed photos. Or teachers, coaches, and clergy told NEVER to hug a youngster anymore, whether the youngster has made an amazing sports victory or bawling their head off.
[*] People like seeing bad guys humiliated, and Dateline does this to the extreme IMHO.
The games industry need people who can paint dazling backgrounds and tell interesting stories with interesting characters. I cant count houw many demo reels I've seen that demonstrate technical competance, but are as dull as hell.
I immediately discount anything he writes. He just likes to take contrarian positions to irritate readers.
I've been seeing good auto-steroscopic 3D displays at SIGGRAPH for over a decade. They operation on different principles, some using vertical lense systems, others using multiple depth-of-focus planes, to name a few. They all seem to be fishing for some sort of market. Some try for high-end scientific or military visualization. Others aim toward the advertisment market.
I think a lot of the "falling behind" Cassandras intermix the two arguments. The US has had a vigorous enoguh production of engineers and scientists to supply technology creation needs. But studies about falling behind in scientific literacy means that a large fraction of US population cant effectively use it. For example most store clerks would be clueless in billing their customers during a computer failure because thay lack the math skills to tally a bill. Not that the customers would understand them either.
If MGM uses the same special effects house WETA, then there could be some continuity. WETA was essentially a child of LOTR, though they do lots of other movies now.
I wonder how many other undiscovered technology advances are collecting dust in a museum because we havent [re-]invented it yet. This also goes for materials from UFOs, meteors from other planets (good candidates for Mars and Moon), and so on.
Since their main business strategyis to copy someone else's product (Zune this year), I find the claim of 'IP" to be a bit far-fetched.
If thats not sitting ducks for crooks, I dont know what is. Maybe the rich suburban teens have "daddy's credit card", but a lot of them dont have high credit lines and carry cash.
If the games actually move on the auction sites at $2500, that might be a pretty good return.
I go to one or two scifi conventions a year and still notice lots of storm troopers and princess leahs (or her mother). Not as many trekies except for Klingons.
Tit for tat.
If they are that sloppy, then these numbers should be easy to get. And it "cant be wrong" because the administration let your number get out.
Most chips and circuits boards manufactured before 1978-1980 were drawn or taped by hand. By taping, I mean you pasted a mockup from thin drafting tapes, then photo-reduced them to circuit boards and chips. I did a fair share of them myself. There was a certain artistic statisfaction in doing this, somewhat like rebuilding your own car engine or remodeling a room in your house. I would dream of taping circuits in my sleep as my busy subconsious worked out upcoming issues, much like my brain computes animation grphics now.
Computer-aided circuit design allowed getting past the 10,000 gate level with much less error. The results arent as artistic, but are a lot cheaper to implement and more accurate. CAD required interative computing and a minimum of vector graphics display, both possible by the late 1970s. Kind of incestuous: using computers to design bigger computers, with a dash of human intervention.
I dont know if they still contnue this, but when I was in grade-school they always taught us generally useless set theory in elecmentary school arithmentic. Concepts like "associative", "communitive', "union", "intersection", etc. Ironically this stuff become more useful in CS- for structured programming, compilers, digital circuit design.
I recall self-charging watches, charged from the arm movement of their owners. I dont know this would work for other devices. I've seen protypes of shoe-powered devices, but they have wires, or require moving batteries.
There are prototypes of self-charging medical devices from thermal or chemical gradients in the body.
Lotus 123 was the VisiCalc killer, not Excel.
Lotus integrated three applications- spreadsheet, graphs and a relational database. I remember lots of marketing hype.
MicroSoft eventually delivered The Office site with several more intergrations including email and slideshows. They were the first to effectively use a graphical GUI, roundabout via their Macintosh software. The Excel ancestor was called Multiplan then.
I know people are sick of the market hype, but 2006 is the year EVERYONE could publish and view video on the web. (And damn it, everyone did!) Before that video required special players, high bandwidth, and special web servers. And I dont think we've begun to the most creative and useful applications of that media yet.
A billion dollars is too small for the Forbes 400 list and a teraflop is too smal for the SC500 list.
Some of the Rover software initially just allowed three-digit dates. Spirit reach 1000 Sols late October and Opportunity next week. Fortunately the software was repaired during a winter slowdown tuneup. Nice idea: reprogrammable robots.
From about Oct 25 to Nov 10 Mars was on the the other side of the Sun. The Suns radio noise effectively blocks transmission either way. I notice Opportunity started returning images this week.
Inside joke. The Chinese word for compass is "south pointing device". Thats because they first used it for geomancy, where "good energy" comes from the south. The Vikings and other Europeans used the compass as a navigational aid for when the north star was occluded, so the European compass points north.