The movie did not show some of the endings in the book: Legolas and Gimili each visit each other's homelands; The three hobbits all raise families; Sam gets to ride the boat to Valinor; Aragon has a long and productive life and dies; Arwen eventually dies.
Not to mention dropping the whole sub-story of the scouring of the shire- includes Saruman's and Wormtounge's ends.
The X Prize Web Site says its "fully funded until Jan 1, 2005", or 175 days from now. I presume some of the prize money or insurance behind it has time limits. That may be a reason why we are seeing a fair amount of activity in late 2004.
My most important apps are mail and browsing. Between work and public library terminals, I have daily access. Even if I am traveling in far-off cities and countries.
I read somewhere (but couldnt find the reference today) that some people are scanning in textbook pages for file sharing. At an average of $108 per (legal) textbook and approaching $0.50 per (legal) page, this stimulates the file sharing market. Used to be you could find reprinted textbooks (on crappy paper) in Asian cities for dimes on the dollar. Now they may be available on CD-ROMS at pennies on the dollar.
Due to the unreliability of scan-to-text conversion, this technology had to wait until the scanned page-image bandwidths were economical, i.e. shared video files paved the way. You also get the formating and figures in the page-images.
Is Cassini the last of the billion-dollar deep-space probes? I don't see much else funded. Theres and on-again, off-again flyby to Pluto next decade. The Mercury probe Messenger was axed in the current White House budget. The next four launch-cycles to Mars are being worked on. But these are relatively inexpensive, small things in the couple hundred million range. Maybe a few more lunar and comet missions in the works too.
The previous NASA administrator Goldin promoted the faster-cheaper-smaller (and less reliable) probe model. I guess the initial Hubble troubles and the decade-long Galileo & Cassini projects spooked him out. At least Cassini will last for 4 to 10 years.
Most of our planet names come from the Latin form. Sometimes I see the Greek name used as the adjective. In this case it would be "Chronus", even more awkward.
In California its like $270 for modest speeding,
$500 if you are more than 25-mph in some counties.
Then your insurance company raised your rates 25% for the next three years. Thats another grand.
IBM has been showing a 25"-9MB for at least two years;
Mitsubishu at least a year.
A direct PC screenshot looks like a postage stamp. My near vision was not acute enough to resolve many of the details. I'd probably see it better on a large screen.
The first half of MicroSoft's existance seemed to be pretty much "cowboy coding". That is maverick people and teams, slipped schedules, products moving in lots of different directions, lots and lots of vapor announcements. These was due to extreme growth and leaders who were more visonaries, than nuts and bolts software engineers. In the late 980s, early 1990s MicroSoft seemd to get more disciplined, actually shipped product on time, and products that worked together.
The cost of bulk disks is around $0.80 a gigabyte. This expansion will cost Hotmail about $0.20 er user, presuming the customer would fill it. I wonder how it takes for advertising revenue to pay for this. About one week?
The cover story in the July Scientific American is about genetic enhancements of muscle. (They havent put the article online free yet.) The thrust is finding an inhibitor for the muscle-growth inhibitor called myostatin. In the article is a picture of a bovine lacking the myostatin gene. It is so bulked up, that it looks like a cylinder of meat with a nose and four hooves sticking out.
B5 replaced the model-based F/X with CGI rendered spaceships and worlds. They used Newtek's Lightwave product which made texture-mapping cost effective.
Though it looks a little tacky now, these were cutting edge in their day.
Its been floated several times in the past to have a series about a federation police force. It could cycle amony spy missions, unusual crime investigations, and court cases. Usually there were couple episodes of such each year on the various Star Trek series.
At the beginning of this television season there was a court series set about 30 years into the future. It supposedly investigated problems caused by recent inventions such as cloning. I dont think it lasted more than a couple episodes.
During Reagan's term the military budget doubled and the federal deficit tripled. Non-military, discretionary portions of the federal government such as NASA had their budgets frozen or decreased.
This is compared to the 1970s when relations had thawed between the US and USSR and the military budget had declined.
I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968 as a young kid. At that time the Space Race was making great progress toward a lunar landing. Many thought the technical parts of the movie to be very likely. It was extremely disappointing to watch the manned parts of the US and Russian space programs dwaddle along the next 35 years with mediocre accomplishments- like that 90 giga-buck lemon up there that can barely support two people at a time and do very little science. (Space science probes and robots doing reasonably well, however.)
There are reasonable explainations: The US practically bankrupted itself in an endless series of international military adventures: the Vietnam War, The Energy war, the Reagan Cold War. Not to mention the expensive socialist expansion of health, welfare, and retirement costs. Only in 1990s was there enough capital suspluses to seriously consider commercial space again.
In the late 1970s ATT Unix source code license for non-profits like schools was $2000. I was in a group that had a license and I added drivers to the code.
Even so, $2000 would be a lot for an independent-mineded student like Linus.
Moores law predicts an increase of a thousand every 15 years. We are now in gigas, transitting into teras 40 years later.
A lot of basic technology in compilers, OSes, user interfaces, and artificial intelligence was invented under those terrible constraints.
The biggest gaff during John's N. series of columns in Wired and the Being Digital book is that he missed predicting the explosive rise the World Wide Web, browser technology, and e-commerce. It was happening right under his nose, but he was too wrapped up in own pet ideas.
I've heard a number of candidates claiming the title of "4th generation", but nothing definitive.
The earlier generations include:
-Machine language; panel switch or re-wiring programming; (gen 0?)
-Assembly language and assemblers; (gen 1?)
-Early compiled languages; (gen 2?)
-Structured programming; (gen 2.5?)
-Object-oriented programming; (gen 3?)
Each generation makes the claim: "programs that practically write themelves!":-):-):-)
Some next-gen candidates I've heard include:
-Flexible applications like spreadsheets and databases;
-More abstraction, such as when Patterns and Aspects become integrated into OOPS;
-Interactive development environments such as integrated compilers-editors-developers;
-Visual generators from icons, flowcharts, UML diagrams;
-Scripting languages;
-Auto-learning programs from examples (neural net, A.I., google sets);
-Natural human language; domain-languages like mathematics;
-Your_favourite_pet_idea_here.
Slashdot Mirror
The movie did not show some of the endings in the book: Legolas and Gimili each visit each other's homelands; The three hobbits all raise families; Sam gets to ride the boat to Valinor; Aragon has a long and productive life and dies; Arwen eventually dies.
Not to mention dropping the whole sub-story of the scouring of the shire- includes Saruman's and Wormtounge's ends.
The X Prize Web Site says its "fully funded until Jan 1, 2005", or 175 days from now. I presume some of the prize money or insurance behind it has time limits. That may be a reason why we are seeing a fair amount of activity in late 2004.
My most important apps are mail and browsing. Between work and public library terminals, I have daily access. Even if I am traveling in far-off cities and countries.
I read somewhere (but couldnt find the reference today) that some people are scanning in textbook pages for file sharing. At an average of $108 per (legal) textbook and approaching $0.50 per (legal) page, this stimulates the file sharing market. Used to be you could find reprinted textbooks (on crappy paper) in Asian cities for dimes on the dollar. Now they may be available on CD-ROMS at pennies on the dollar.
Due to the unreliability of scan-to-text conversion, this technology had to wait until the scanned page-image bandwidths were economical, i.e. shared video files paved the way. You also get the formating and figures in the page-images.
Is Cassini the last of the billion-dollar deep-space probes? I don't see much else funded. Theres and on-again, off-again flyby to Pluto next decade. The Mercury probe Messenger was axed in the current White House budget. The next four launch-cycles to Mars are being worked on. But these are relatively inexpensive, small things in the couple hundred million range. Maybe a few more lunar and comet missions in the works too.
The previous NASA administrator Goldin promoted the faster-cheaper-smaller (and less reliable) probe model. I guess the initial Hubble troubles and the decade-long Galileo & Cassini projects spooked him out. At least Cassini will last for 4 to 10 years.
Most of our planet names come from the Latin form. Sometimes I see the Greek name used as the adjective. In this case it would be "Chronus", even more awkward.
If I waited more than 5 seconds for a search engine to respond, I'd flee it like the plague. Google has no fear. I might consider shorting MSFT.
In California its like $270 for modest speeding, $500 if you are more than 25-mph in some counties. Then your insurance company raised your rates 25% for the next three years. Thats another grand.
IBM has been showing a 25"-9MB for at least two years; Mitsubishu at least a year.
A direct PC screenshot looks like a postage stamp. My near vision was not acute enough to resolve many of the details. I'd probably see it better on a large screen.
Fractals are subset of power laws.
Not all power law phenomena are fractal (e.g. brain size and body weight is power law, but not fractal).
And you'll have free license to use it as you wish. The workings of rockets and guns are fair similar.
(OK, MicroSoft is only 29 years old ...)
The first half of MicroSoft's existance seemed to be pretty much "cowboy coding". That is maverick people and teams, slipped schedules, products moving in lots of different directions, lots and lots of vapor announcements. These was due to extreme growth and leaders who were more visonaries, than nuts and bolts software engineers. In the late 980s, early 1990s MicroSoft seemd to get more disciplined, actually shipped product on time, and products that worked together.
Sort of like national identity or tax numbers; get a URL at birth to last you your life. If only the system would change every few years ...
The cost of bulk disks is around $0.80 a gigabyte. This expansion will cost Hotmail about $0.20 er user, presuming the customer would fill it. I wonder how it takes for advertising revenue to pay for this. About one week?
The cover story in the July Scientific American is about genetic enhancements of muscle. (They havent put the article online free yet.) The thrust is finding an inhibitor for the muscle-growth inhibitor called myostatin. In the article is a picture of a bovine lacking the myostatin gene. It is so bulked up, that it looks like a cylinder of meat with a nose and four hooves sticking out.
B5 replaced the model-based F/X with CGI rendered spaceships and worlds. They used Newtek's Lightwave product which made texture-mapping cost effective. Though it looks a little tacky now, these were cutting edge in their day.
Its been floated several times in the past to have a series about a federation police force. It could cycle amony spy missions, unusual crime investigations, and court cases. Usually there were couple episodes of such each year on the various Star Trek series.
At the beginning of this television season there was a court series set about 30 years into the future. It supposedly investigated problems caused by recent inventions such as cloning. I dont think it lasted more than a couple episodes.
During Reagan's term the military budget doubled and the federal deficit tripled. Non-military, discretionary portions of the federal government such as NASA had their budgets frozen or decreased. This is compared to the 1970s when relations had thawed between the US and USSR and the military budget had declined.
Here lies Trek, R.I.P. 2004.
Notice the test pilot was 62-years old. He was very experienced (and more expendable than Rutan). Hope I can fly as a apce tourist before age 62.
P.S. Is he like the third oldest astronaut after Glenn and Garn?
I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968 as a young kid. At that time the Space Race was making great progress toward a lunar landing. Many thought the technical parts of the movie to be very likely. It was extremely disappointing to watch the manned parts of the US and Russian space programs dwaddle along the next 35 years with mediocre accomplishments- like that 90 giga-buck lemon up there that can barely support two people at a time and do very little science. (Space science probes and robots doing reasonably well, however.)
There are reasonable explainations: The US practically bankrupted itself in an endless series of international military adventures: the Vietnam War, The Energy war, the Reagan Cold War. Not to mention the expensive socialist expansion of health, welfare, and retirement costs. Only in 1990s was there enough capital suspluses to seriously consider commercial space again.
In the late 1970s ATT Unix source code license for non-profits like schools was $2000. I was in a group that had a license and I added drivers to the code.
Even so, $2000 would be a lot for an independent-mineded student like Linus.
Moores law predicts an increase of a thousand every 15 years. We are now in gigas, transitting into teras 40 years later.
A lot of basic technology in compilers, OSes, user interfaces, and artificial intelligence was invented under those terrible constraints.
The biggest gaff during John's N. series of columns in Wired and the Being Digital book is that he missed predicting the explosive rise the World Wide Web, browser technology, and e-commerce. It was happening right under his nose, but he was too wrapped up in own pet ideas.
I've heard a number of candidates claiming the title of "4th generation", but nothing definitive. The earlier generations include:
:-) :-) :-)
-Machine language; panel switch or re-wiring programming; (gen 0?)
-Assembly language and assemblers; (gen 1?)
-Early compiled languages; (gen 2?)
-Structured programming; (gen 2.5?)
-Object-oriented programming; (gen 3?)
Each generation makes the claim: "programs that practically write themelves!"
Some next-gen candidates I've heard include:
-Flexible applications like spreadsheets and databases;
-More abstraction, such as when Patterns and Aspects become integrated into OOPS;
-Interactive development environments such as integrated compilers-editors-developers;
-Visual generators from icons, flowcharts, UML diagrams;
-Scripting languages;
-Auto-learning programs from examples (neural net, A.I., google sets);
-Natural human language; domain-languages like mathematics;
-Your_favourite_pet_idea_here.