Audio should ALWAYS be analog for the best quality. Sure sure, digital protects against noise, but you'll never get the same quality. You always gotta drop information with digital music, 44000 samples a second for example.
Then again any difference between analog and digital quality is purely theoretical...I surely wouldn't notice the difference.
not entirely useless, it'll make finding a museum's website a hell of a lot easier. Think about it, you want to go to such-and-such museum, but you don't know it's hours, and it's in a far away town (you want to visit in the middle of your road trip.) Just try such-and-such.museum or dig it up in the (hopefully to be improved,) index.museum.
I just hope it doesn't become polluted with not really museums or have the domains sold. *shudder* sweat-stain-lookalike.elvis.museum
sucks major butt, but you don't know that because when you make the conversion you don't know it...you think you're still cool
Why do we have an organisation telling us what licenses we can and cannot use? I used a disapproved of, but still open source IMHO license...what then? Will the OSI call up the FBI to bust down my door?
Fuck the establishment, we don't need anymore conformity factories.
I got some questions that mayhaps some more imformed people might help me with. And they've probably been asked before.
- How the heck would you get a fuel pack small enough to be practical? From what I understand this thing runs off of hydrogen. Liquid fuels are of course more economical, so I'm assuming liquid hydrogen. Because making the fuel pack ultra cold would be impractical, I'm assuming they're conna use brute force (pressure) to make the molecules live nicely. I don't really know the properties of high quality metals/ceramics, but I think a reasonable guestimate would be...ohh, a pack the size of a laptop batter could only hold ~ a cubic centimeter of H2, and take most of its weight from the bulletproof container.
- Exhaust. I'm assuming the turbine is out to make water, if the fuel is H2. Easy to get the stuff from the air, but what would the product be? If it's steam I don't really see a problem, just vent it out the back of the laptop (a good application I think,) and be done with it. If it's liquid, what then? Have another container in the fuel pack that you have to drain every so often? (heh, laptop go pee-pee...yeah I know, real mature.)
- Heat. Why silicon? Sure it's realtively easier to manufacture the parts because as the article says, it's like making a computer chip, and that's been done to death. But wouldn't some stronger materials better address the problem? Something that doesn't warp under high pressure and heat. (I think something spinning that fast would make a lot of pressure, kinda like how harddrives need breath holes.) Of course that would be harder to manufacture...and going back and re-aligning all the atoms (so it warps evenly and in a way that doesn't break it) in the turbine would be a tad too hard.
- Why combustion? I think it might be worth it to look upon perfection and go biological. Make a fuel pack full of bacteria (how 'bout sulfer eaters? I'm sure they'd love to sit next to the CPU,) and an enzyme that'd take the bacterias' byproduct to turn a small spindle (circular muscles?? *shrug*) that's hooked up to a generator. Or maybe something to do with converting bioluminescent energy, or heck, even figure out how neurons shoot off electricity and do that. Of course the battery would run itself to death, and yes, you'd have to watch your battery work itself to death and buy a new one. Then again the bacteria could be made to hibernate when it lacks food, so it can be stopped & conserve fuel. Of course how would you flush all the end-products? (heh, laptop go poopie...yeah yeah, really mature, but it'd still be gross.)
So yeah...moo, that was a pleasant way to procrastinate doing homework.
I thought they'd install the virus for you with your next set of updates. That or MS agreed to add it with XP to get the FBI off their backs. Ho hum, looks like I won't be upgrading windos any time soon.
I'm a typical anti-social, hermit geek. I hate talking on the phone. I have namezero as a registrar (free domain at the time, so I snagged eightbit.org while I could, and next year I'll get something cheaper,) they specialize in redirecting your domain to your site with frames. It sucks and they don't particularly advertise that you can change your nameserver. I e-mailed them, found out you could indeed do that, and tried changing it over the e-mail. It didn't work because the nameserver wasn't registered with network solutions. I didn't know that until I picked up the phone and called them...aparently the e-mail staff doesn't know how to explain things. So when I get the matter sorted out, I bypass e-mailing them to get my nameserver changed which takes a week in itself and called them. I got it switched, bada-bing bada-boom, four days later I'm rolling in I-own-my-own-server-on-the-internet-heaven.
Let's see, you'd need to modify whatever OS you got to NOT use everything it has. Modify the BIOS to NOT check the memory status in certian areas (or tell the periphrial to emulate being ram for the moment. And then to actually use it you'd have to poke values into memory and peek at them after blowing off a couple clock cycles (kinda like in a Commodore 64.) Heck isn't that how normal buses work anyhow? Just slower & has a way to find your perhiphrial other than memorizing memory locations?
Then again I hardly know squat about how this stuff works, apologies to those who know what they're talking about. (:
tsk tsk, history must repeat itself
on
The Dream Handheld
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
harddrives, PAH. The guy is on the right track though. A thin peice of work that contains little more than an LCD that size of a sheet of paper. EXCEPT, it's wireless, and it uses a mainframe/terminial paradigm. A lightweight processor impliments a very lightweight, compressed X11 protocol. A relatively small flash memory will provide sufficent space for the OS, and custom window management software. Everything will be stored and run from a mainframe, allowing access from anywhere, and limited loss if you happen to drop your pad. W/o a harddrive and all the assorted goodies of an overly powerful CPU, the pad would be much much lighter, and wouldn't need as much juice. Of course it could be docked into a cradle for charging, fast wired networking, and mayhaps a keyboard as well.
It think it's time for people to seriously re-consider mainframes. PCs are great, but if you're on the go, methinks having fifty thousand copies of the same document is NOT the way to go.
In a way this can be look on as a step backwards. It limits the user's freedom to arrange the windows. But I can also see how it's a step forward. It reverts to the KISS (keep it simple stupid) paradigm, and concevably, you can increase productivity w/ ion. You don't have to waste time moving your windows around.
I personally use pwm, ion's sister. It lets me stack all my terminals into one frame, and quickly cycle through them. I rarely have to switch virtual desktops anymore. But of course, with everything, it's just preference.
More justification to love python. I use it for everything. Unfortunatly the apache mod_python interface sucks badly if you want to use it the 'proper' way. But this anygui sounds great. I wrote an app in tkinter and made it into a stand alone windows program, but it had to include so much crap to make sure it ran, the simple program turned into a 3meg bloat. I wrote another program in pygame (SDL interface,) and it came out a lil smaller, ~1.5megs. But I think the main goal with anygui would be ubiquitousness. The GUI you need is already there, so if I were to make stand-alone windows programs, it wouldn't be bloated including the GUI libraries. This is great!
For the life of me, I can't figure out why I don't like the SSSCA. I pirate information without a second thought, because I think all information is inheritly free, not something to be profited off of (info including music, movies, software, just about anything that can be turned into 1s & 0s.) But, setting aside my own reasoning towards it, the SSSCA is a reasonable way to protect against piracy...(how effective it is in the real world however. ..) So, why is this a bad law?
``Four Arab-looking guys reading the Koran are much less suspicious if they have the cards and can just slash them through card readers,'' he said.
---
Excuse me son, because you look Arab and are resing the Koran, and not at all because of your race or culture, could you please show me your voluntary ID card? What's this? You didn't opt for the ID card? Come with me...
(Later in secret underground compound...)
*bitchslap* ARE YOU A CITIZEN!
(arab dude) Y-y-yes s-s-sir!
THEN WHERE'S YOUR ID?
(arab dude) I told you! I didn't want it!
*thwap upside the back of the head* Then how do we know you're not a terrorist?
(arab dude) How do you know I wouldn't be one if I had the stupid card?
Ohh a smart guy huh? HEY JIMBOB! FIRE UP THE POKERS!
Erg...don't compare windos to other products. Not only is he trying to discredit linux and solaris, but he's mooching their security record too. For the dumb people, they'll think linux & solaris was affected by code red/nimda...for the slightly more informed but still stupid, they'll think windos is as secure as the other stuff. Tsk tsk tsk...
I can't beleive they're doing this. They're trying to capture the same hype as aibo, same price, same quantity limit...but this cat just sucks. Ohhh, all it does it purr when you pet it. *gives a little golf clap* Just stick to making me mouse buttons omron.
I know that the technology wasn't available to do some of the special effects during the original series, but KLINGONS WERE NOT WRINKLY AND ODD BACK THEN! I think the trouble w/ tribbles 2.0 episode settled that when they went back in time and whats her face said that there were biological experiments since then and it wasn't to be talked about. Blah blah blah. Other than that I liked it. Albeit a couple of contradictions, whatever. I think it should be interesting. and WTF, that guy from quantum leap doesn't look a day older since he did quantum leap.
WW2 was much larger in scale that this is now. It was a WORLD WAR, you didn't know if they had people intercepting our mail or if they bought our news papers. These are 'public' forms of communication (snail mail is very public, do you think that dinky envelope is gonna stop someone?) People could still get together in private and speak their mind. By encrypting our e-mail we can do the same. E-mail is just as public as snail mail, someone can intercept it and read it, excryption just welds it in an iron envelope.
The reason mail was censored in WW2 was because they didn't want troops acidentally leaking information if those letters were intercepted. And likewise, they didn't want the axis powers buying the new york times and know what was going on. This is not 'conventional' war, if it even should be called war. What good will it do to stop US from encrypting our e-mail? 'THEY' can still encrypt their stuff and just use secret code if they want to communicate to agents on our turf.
Another thing to consider is the feasability of it all. Do you realize the sheer volume of crap the CIA has to sift through? Do you know how hard it would be to enforce such a law? How would they write a filter to find PGP encrypted letters? Mind you I could just hide it inside other files, ZIP files, or even inside GIFs of fam & friends. I think they should give up now and not even try. Besides, if it's enforced, they could always twist it to new purposes as they see fit (say, after the war is over, 'this guy encrypts his e-mail, he must be a hacker, let's seize his computer'.)
I also heard some nonsense about manditory backdoors in security?!!? Gee that'll work well, just give the script kiddies the world in a hand basket why don't ya...
No matter how much liberties the gov't takes away from us, the 'enemy' will always find ways to circumvent it, thus screwing us over 2-fold. Go read 1984.
Imagine in the not too distant future (say 10 years most) when gigabit ether is considered slow, that computers will automatically cluster, sending threads to other computers anonomously, and runing off idle time. The internet will have a collective mind, and of course programmers will be forced to improve their own minds by having to prioritize threads so as to keep the important crap running locally. Now if only I could easily cluster with FreeBSD...
I'm starting to think OSC had the right idea when he gave people 'house computers' and terminals in the ender/speaker books. Certainly to begin with this 1tb cube wouldn't be that cheap, but probably cheap enough to put in a house mainframe. What with keyboards and crts costing a dime a dozen and 2ghz processors on the way, I say it would be a cheap alternative to having multiple computers and/or listening to the children complain about never having time on the computer. And as for size, I don't really care so long as it's no bigger than my TV. I mean, ONE TERRABYTE per cm^3! Make me a m^3 block and I'll be set for life.
he means API and you know it...the problem with gnome and kde are it's separate use of GTK and Qt. Well fiddlesticks, I don't want to install both! But I think it's about 80% true that any new X software for unix is made with GTK in mind. So in a way it has become the 'standard'.
I lot of you seem to be missing the point. I think what he is trying to say is that our personalized sites (my netscape, amazon) and daily web haunts are narrowing our perspective. By looking at the same sites every day you get exposed to relatively the same stuff every day. Slashdot, for example, is pro-linux. It rarely says anything pro-microsoft, pro-freebsd, or anything like that. By limiting yourself to only pro-linux views you will start to think that linux if great just because. Windows is an OK product when it's running, so you close-minded people should stop bashing it.
I think what he said about moderation is a little exaggerated. True, a very bigotted group could sign up for hundereds of users (on slashdot) and start moding down anything they don't like. But that's a little extreme.
The internet is dumbing down america, but by God it's our constitutional right to do so. If you really cared about the other side's view you'd go to their sites too.
computer science (programming) is more like engeneering, you build something, and work out the kinks through logical analisis. Science is formulating a hypothesis and running experiments to validate your theory (scientific method). I don't know about you, but when I start coding I don't go to prove anything, I just want to make something and make it work.
According to websters, science is: Knowledge; knowledge of principles and causes; ascertained truth of facts.
Physics is science, you learn about laws already ascertained and go about smashing atoms to invent new laws.
Biology is science, you learn about various species, and invent things like darwinism.
Although I haven't actually read the article, I'm going to assume these scientific strides are things like cloning, genetically modified species and stuff like that. Those are infact bio-engeneering tasks, not really science. To make a goat that makes spider silk is a lot like making a complex protien or a program. You have to take what you know, and apply it, if it doesn't work kill the goat and try again. (:
In conclusion: Science is observation. Engeneering is making/doing. Programming is engeneering.
Really, people always mistrust themselves. I personally use paper, mostly because I can't affort a decent PDA and because I like being backwards and archaic (despite being a big computer nut.) On the other hand, technology IS making us stupid, not just stealing our memory. Calculators and digital watches have stolen my ability to do math in my head or read analog clocks (okay, I can do both, but it takes a while.) The internet lets stupid people share stupid ideas faster than ever, and most people, stupid or not, tend to beleive what they read on a website...so long as it looks semi-professional. Sometimes I wonder just how dependant on technology we are, and what would happen if there was no electricity for a month.
On a semi-related tanget. Why do we `advance' as a race by inventing things and researching our world? We can be (and was) perfectly happy (as happy as we are now, which is to say, never satisfied) w/o all these nifty convoluted doodads.
Slashdot Mirror
Audio should ALWAYS be analog for the best quality. Sure sure, digital protects against noise, but you'll never get the same quality. You always gotta drop information with digital music, 44000 samples a second for example.
Then again any difference between analog and digital quality is purely theoretical...I surely wouldn't notice the difference.
not entirely useless, it'll make finding a museum's website a hell of a lot easier. Think about it, you want to go to such-and-such museum, but you don't know it's hours, and it's in a far away town (you want to visit in the middle of your road trip.) Just try such-and-such.museum or dig it up in the (hopefully to be improved,) index.museum.
I just hope it doesn't become polluted with not really museums or have the domains sold. *shudder* sweat-stain-lookalike.elvis.museum
sucks major butt, but you don't know that because when you make the conversion you don't know it...you think you're still cool
Why do we have an organisation telling us what licenses we can and cannot use? I used a disapproved of, but still open source IMHO license...what then? Will the OSI call up the FBI to bust down my door?
Fuck the establishment, we don't need anymore conformity factories.
I got some questions that mayhaps some more imformed people might help me with. And they've probably been asked before.
- How the heck would you get a fuel pack small enough to be practical? From what I understand this thing runs off of hydrogen. Liquid fuels are of course more economical, so I'm assuming liquid hydrogen. Because making the fuel pack ultra cold would be impractical, I'm assuming they're conna use brute force (pressure) to make the molecules live nicely. I don't really know the properties of high quality metals/ceramics, but I think a reasonable guestimate would be...ohh, a pack the size of a laptop batter could only hold ~ a cubic centimeter of H2, and take most of its weight from the bulletproof container.
- Exhaust. I'm assuming the turbine is out to make water, if the fuel is H2. Easy to get the stuff from the air, but what would the product be? If it's steam I don't really see a problem, just vent it out the back of the laptop (a good application I think,) and be done with it. If it's liquid, what then? Have another container in the fuel pack that you have to drain every so often? (heh, laptop go pee-pee...yeah I know, real mature.)
- Heat. Why silicon? Sure it's realtively easier to manufacture the parts because as the article says, it's like making a computer chip, and that's been done to death. But wouldn't some stronger materials better address the problem? Something that doesn't warp under high pressure and heat. (I think something spinning that fast would make a lot of pressure, kinda like how harddrives need breath holes.) Of course that would be harder to manufacture...and going back and re-aligning all the atoms (so it warps evenly and in a way that doesn't break it) in the turbine would be a tad too hard.
- Why combustion? I think it might be worth it to look upon perfection and go biological. Make a fuel pack full of bacteria (how 'bout sulfer eaters? I'm sure they'd love to sit next to the CPU,) and an enzyme that'd take the bacterias' byproduct to turn a small spindle (circular muscles?? *shrug*) that's hooked up to a generator. Or maybe something to do with converting bioluminescent energy, or heck, even figure out how neurons shoot off electricity and do that. Of course the battery would run itself to death, and yes, you'd have to watch your battery work itself to death and buy a new one. Then again the bacteria could be made to hibernate when it lacks food, so it can be stopped & conserve fuel. Of course how would you flush all the end-products? (heh, laptop go poopie...yeah yeah, really mature, but it'd still be gross.)
So yeah...moo, that was a pleasant way to procrastinate doing homework.
I thought they'd install the virus for you with your next set of updates. That or MS agreed to add it with XP to get the FBI off their backs. Ho hum, looks like I won't be upgrading windos any time soon.
I'm a typical anti-social, hermit geek. I hate talking on the phone. I have namezero as a registrar (free domain at the time, so I snagged eightbit.org while I could, and next year I'll get something cheaper,) they specialize in redirecting your domain to your site with frames. It sucks and they don't particularly advertise that you can change your nameserver. I e-mailed them, found out you could indeed do that, and tried changing it over the e-mail. It didn't work because the nameserver wasn't registered with network solutions. I didn't know that until I picked up the phone and called them...aparently the e-mail staff doesn't know how to explain things. So when I get the matter sorted out, I bypass e-mailing them to get my nameserver changed which takes a week in itself and called them. I got it switched, bada-bing bada-boom, four days later I'm rolling in I-own-my-own-server-on-the-internet-heaven.
PICK UP THE PHONE. DON"T BE AFRAID.
Let's see, you'd need to modify whatever OS you got to NOT use everything it has. Modify the BIOS to NOT check the memory status in certian areas (or tell the periphrial to emulate being ram for the moment. And then to actually use it you'd have to poke values into memory and peek at them after blowing off a couple clock cycles (kinda like in a Commodore 64.) Heck isn't that how normal buses work anyhow? Just slower & has a way to find your perhiphrial other than memorizing memory locations?
Then again I hardly know squat about how this stuff works, apologies to those who know what they're talking about. (:
harddrives, PAH. The guy is on the right track though. A thin peice of work that contains little more than an LCD that size of a sheet of paper. EXCEPT, it's wireless, and it uses a mainframe/terminial paradigm. A lightweight processor impliments a very lightweight, compressed X11 protocol. A relatively small flash memory will provide sufficent space for the OS, and custom window management software. Everything will be stored and run from a mainframe, allowing access from anywhere, and limited loss if you happen to drop your pad. W/o a harddrive and all the assorted goodies of an overly powerful CPU, the pad would be much much lighter, and wouldn't need as much juice. Of course it could be docked into a cradle for charging, fast wired networking, and mayhaps a keyboard as well.
It think it's time for people to seriously re-consider mainframes. PCs are great, but if you're on the go, methinks having fifty thousand copies of the same document is NOT the way to go.
In a way this can be look on as a step backwards. It limits the user's freedom to arrange the windows. But I can also see how it's a step forward. It reverts to the KISS (keep it simple stupid) paradigm, and concevably, you can increase productivity w/ ion. You don't have to waste time moving your windows around.
I personally use pwm, ion's sister. It lets me stack all my terminals into one frame, and quickly cycle through them. I rarely have to switch virtual desktops anymore. But of course, with everything, it's just preference.
More justification to love python. I use it for everything. Unfortunatly the apache mod_python interface sucks badly if you want to use it the 'proper' way. But this anygui sounds great. I wrote an app in tkinter and made it into a stand alone windows program, but it had to include so much crap to make sure it ran, the simple program turned into a 3meg bloat. I wrote another program in pygame (SDL interface,) and it came out a lil smaller, ~1.5megs. But I think the main goal with anygui would be ubiquitousness. The GUI you need is already there, so if I were to make stand-alone windows programs, it wouldn't be bloated including the GUI libraries. This is great!
Are you not 100$ richer if you don't spend 100$ on music/software/movies/whatever? That Ben Franklin quote comes to mind, something about pennys...
For the life of me, I can't figure out why I don't like the SSSCA. I pirate information without a second thought, because I think all information is inheritly free, not something to be profited off of (info including music, movies, software, just about anything that can be turned into 1s & 0s.) But, setting aside my own reasoning towards it, the SSSCA is a reasonable way to protect against piracy...(how effective it is in the real world however. . .) So, why is this a bad law?
``Four Arab-looking guys reading the Koran are much less suspicious if they have the cards and can just slash them through card readers,'' he said.
---
Excuse me son, because you look Arab and are resing the Koran, and not at all because of your race or culture, could you please show me your voluntary ID card? What's this? You didn't opt for the ID card? Come with me...
(Later in secret underground compound...)
*bitchslap* ARE YOU A CITIZEN!
(arab dude) Y-y-yes s-s-sir!
THEN WHERE'S YOUR ID?
(arab dude) I told you! I didn't want it!
*thwap upside the back of the head* Then how do we know you're not a terrorist?
(arab dude) How do you know I wouldn't be one if I had the stupid card?
Ohh a smart guy huh? HEY JIMBOB! FIRE UP THE POKERS!
Erg...don't compare windos to other products. Not only is he trying to discredit linux and solaris, but he's mooching their security record too. For the dumb people, they'll think linux & solaris was affected by code red/nimda...for the slightly more informed but still stupid, they'll think windos is as secure as the other stuff. Tsk tsk tsk...
I can't beleive they're doing this. They're trying to capture the same hype as aibo, same price, same quantity limit...but this cat just sucks. Ohhh, all it does it purr when you pet it. *gives a little golf clap* Just stick to making me mouse buttons omron.
I know that the technology wasn't available to do some of the special effects during the original series, but KLINGONS WERE NOT WRINKLY AND ODD BACK THEN! I think the trouble w/ tribbles 2.0 episode settled that when they went back in time and whats her face said that there were biological experiments since then and it wasn't to be talked about. Blah blah blah. Other than that I liked it. Albeit a couple of contradictions, whatever. I think it should be interesting. and WTF, that guy from quantum leap doesn't look a day older since he did quantum leap.
moo
WW2 was much larger in scale that this is now. It was a WORLD WAR, you didn't know if they had people intercepting our mail or if they bought our news papers. These are 'public' forms of communication (snail mail is very public, do you think that dinky envelope is gonna stop someone?) People could still get together in private and speak their mind. By encrypting our e-mail we can do the same. E-mail is just as public as snail mail, someone can intercept it and read it, excryption just welds it in an iron envelope.
The reason mail was censored in WW2 was because they didn't want troops acidentally leaking information if those letters were intercepted. And likewise, they didn't want the axis powers buying the new york times and know what was going on. This is not 'conventional' war, if it even should be called war. What good will it do to stop US from encrypting our e-mail? 'THEY' can still encrypt their stuff and just use secret code if they want to communicate to agents on our turf.
Another thing to consider is the feasability of it all. Do you realize the sheer volume of crap the CIA has to sift through? Do you know how hard it would be to enforce such a law? How would they write a filter to find PGP encrypted letters? Mind you I could just hide it inside other files, ZIP files, or even inside GIFs of fam & friends. I think they should give up now and not even try. Besides, if it's enforced, they could always twist it to new purposes as they see fit (say, after the war is over, 'this guy encrypts his e-mail, he must be a hacker, let's seize his computer'.)
I also heard some nonsense about manditory backdoors in security?!!? Gee that'll work well, just give the script kiddies the world in a hand basket why don't ya...
No matter how much liberties the gov't takes away from us, the 'enemy' will always find ways to circumvent it, thus screwing us over 2-fold. Go read 1984.
Not where I live (delaware)
Just thought I'd let ya know
Imagine in the not too distant future (say 10 years most) when gigabit ether is considered slow, that computers will automatically cluster, sending threads to other computers anonomously, and runing off idle time. The internet will have a collective mind, and of course programmers will be forced to improve their own minds by having to prioritize threads so as to keep the important crap running locally. Now if only I could easily cluster with FreeBSD...
:wq! DOH!
Roy Miller
I'm starting to think OSC had the right idea when he gave people 'house computers' and terminals in the ender/speaker books. Certainly to begin with this 1tb cube wouldn't be that cheap, but probably cheap enough to put in a house mainframe. What with keyboards and crts costing a dime a dozen and 2ghz processors on the way, I say it would be a cheap alternative to having multiple computers and/or listening to the children complain about never having time on the computer. And as for size, I don't really care so long as it's no bigger than my TV. I mean, ONE TERRABYTE per cm^3! Make me a m^3 block and I'll be set for life.
:wq! DOH!
Roy Miller
he means API and you know it...the problem with gnome and kde are it's separate use of GTK and Qt. Well fiddlesticks, I don't want to install both! But I think it's about 80% true that any new X software for unix is made with GTK in mind. So in a way it has become the 'standard'.
:wq! DOH!
Roy Miller
I lot of you seem to be missing the point. I think what he is trying to say is that our personalized sites (my netscape, amazon) and daily web haunts are narrowing our perspective. By looking at the same sites every day you get exposed to relatively the same stuff every day. Slashdot, for example, is pro-linux. It rarely says anything pro-microsoft, pro-freebsd, or anything like that. By limiting yourself to only pro-linux views you will start to think that linux if great just because. Windows is an OK product when it's running, so you close-minded people should stop bashing it.
:wq! DOH!
I think what he said about moderation is a little exaggerated. True, a very bigotted group could sign up for hundereds of users (on slashdot) and start moding down anything they don't like. But that's a little extreme.
The internet is dumbing down america, but by God it's our constitutional right to do so. If you really cared about the other side's view you'd go to their sites too.
Roy Miller
computer science (programming) is more like engeneering, you build something, and work out the kinks through logical analisis. Science is formulating a hypothesis and running experiments to validate your theory (scientific method). I don't know about you, but when I start coding I don't go to prove anything, I just want to make something and make it work.
:wq! DOH!
According to websters, science is: Knowledge; knowledge of principles and causes; ascertained truth of facts.
Physics is science, you learn about laws already ascertained and go about smashing atoms to invent new laws.
Biology is science, you learn about various species, and invent things like darwinism.
Although I haven't actually read the article, I'm going to assume these scientific strides are things like cloning, genetically modified species and stuff like that. Those are infact bio-engeneering tasks, not really science. To make a goat that makes spider silk is a lot like making a complex protien or a program. You have to take what you know, and apply it, if it doesn't work kill the goat and try again. (:
In conclusion: Science is observation. Engeneering is making/doing. Programming is engeneering.
Roy Miller
Am I just stupid or did the DEC Alpha never happen?
:wq! DOH!
Roy Miller
Really, people always mistrust themselves. I personally use paper, mostly because I can't affort a decent PDA and because I like being backwards and archaic (despite being a big computer nut.) On the other hand, technology IS making us stupid, not just stealing our memory. Calculators and digital watches have stolen my ability to do math in my head or read analog clocks (okay, I can do both, but it takes a while.) The internet lets stupid people share stupid ideas faster than ever, and most people, stupid or not, tend to beleive what they read on a website...so long as it looks semi-professional. Sometimes I wonder just how dependant on technology we are, and what would happen if there was no electricity for a month.
:wq! DOH!
On a semi-related tanget. Why do we `advance' as a race by inventing things and researching our world? We can be (and was) perfectly happy (as happy as we are now, which is to say, never satisfied) w/o all these nifty convoluted doodads.
Roy Miller