I was always under the impression that Freeman was a scientist, but this particualr lab the "lowly" Phd's were the equivalent of technicians... Because the rest of them were mega-uber-alpha geeks, and couldn't be bothered with trivial tasks. Sorta' like a pack of BOFHs with labcoats and pocket protectors.
You bet. He's from the future all right! See, his future self read about his previous arrest in the newspaper archive, and realized that he would be caught if he got so much money so fast. So, he went back the day before he got arrested, told his future self to run to Jamaica, and now the Govt. is scapegoating some poor bastard who's now in Guantanamo Bay under the powers of the Patriot Act.
You heard it here first!
BUT... The real question is what he needed the money for anyway. Anyone who's been to the future knows that the currency is 22nd century antique porno.
Anybody remember Lord of the Rings 2? What's his name.. uh.. the long haired dweeb with the semi-automatic bow.. Legolas? Anyway, he mounted his horse in a very peculiar way. He did grabbed it's reins with one arm and with a good yank he rolled up onto the horse's back. That was a digital effect, but most people could see that as a stuntman with a hell of a lot of strength in his arm.
I dunno. I found that particular action VERY fake. We all know elves are supposed to be super nimble, and relatively strong, etc. I guess the movement just seemed totally implausible to me. Add to that the fact that they motion-blurred/antialiased the hell out of JUST that particular part of the scene... well it made Jaba The Hut in the origional film look lifelike.
I really wondered why they had to do that. Just eyecandy for the masses to drewl over, I suppose.
Oh, I thought you were referring to plotters in general... The Xenix system I referred to had an HP legal size plotter with a 6 pen carosel (for small drafts). I think someone finally took it home, or chucked it. You're right, though, that smaller plotters are on the way out. I was looking for an older draft plotter (in the 48" range) a couple years back, and had about zero luck. Inkjets have just about replaced them all, I guess.
On the contrary, large flatbed plotters are pretty popular for sign cutting, routing, etc. I used to work at a large custom print company, and we had a couple WILD plotters hooked up to a Xenix server.
At the time I left, they had 2 Zund tables, complete with conveyors, automatic sheet feeders, roll feeders, with a nifty camera hooked up to the cutting head that would track 1/4" dots on the media and compensate for stretching/shrinking that is common with the 3M vinyl that we used.
A while back I was looking through the Zund catalog, and they have all sorts of heads for their plotters, such as routers with z axis, laser, etc.
When we bought the Zunds, we sold the WILD tables to someone else (though I'm not sure why anyone would bother, they were known for their controller board problems.) I doubt that any functioning table would be trashed so readily.
Yeah. Iv'e had the same experience, more or less. I play UrT CTF. I used to be a maniac, playing every time I could, but I've slowed down a bunch--mostly playing with the members of various clans that are known for their hardline stance on cheating--largely due to the fact that cheating on CTF is very rampant.
There's noting more fun than running around a corner, have a SR-8 weilding sniper jump up and take your head off...repeatedly. With the possible exception of sneaking around his flank and giving him a good 'ol pistol 'whippin.
Aimbots, wallhacks... It sucks the fun out of any game damn fast.
Most of those little LED flashlights with insane battery life use PWM, or so I hear. I suppose that a LED aught to be pretty resiliant in the 30-60hz range, more than enough for this project.
Ugh... My Grandmother, a sucriber to AOL had a fit the first time she got one of those...
She was convinced she was having a conversation with some guy named Damien, or that somebody IMed her.
I took a look, and it was addressed to one of my cousins across the country, save for the mispelling. After this, I helped her set up the address book--with all of her friends' and relatives' addresses. She's happy 'cause she can point and click, and I'm happy because I don't have to hear about Damien.
Now if only she could form a coherent sentance, so that she could use some voice recognition software.
If nothing else, one of those RAM drives would be an AWESOME place to put a swap file/partition! A server motherboard with 4Gigs, one of those for virtual memory would be quite the insane combo...
You might be able to attribute that rise in price with the general rise in price of petroleum.
Lots of things go out of whack when petro prices rise, foam for example has gone up about 30% in the last year...
Anyway, I think that in Canadia regular CD-Rs have a music tax on them as well, even if they aren't going to be used in that manner. I wouldn't discount the RIAA from pusing our govt. for similar measures here.
There has been some rumor that future DRM enabled receivers may output only 480p on component and VGA video, because the content providers are worried about massive piracy. Supposedly, you would have to have a DVI/DTCP, a proprietary encrypted variant of DVI, or some sort of secure Firewire to get the 720p or 1080i resolutions to display...
Whether it comes to pass or not is yet to be seen, but there is definitely some worry surrounding the issue.
I learned this a few days after we purchased a new Samsung 42" HDTV rear-projector (which I love so far), with only component for HDTV signals. We still haven't purchased a DTV STB, but are looking at an Echostar model 6000 that can be used for OTA and Dish Network HDTV. It dosen't have DVI/DTCP either, but Echostar dosen't seem as worried about piracy as some other companies.
A CC company has denied my purchase of gas whilst doing something as innocuous as traversing Wyoming. I had to dial the 1-800 number, and they set everthing straight.
It was the first time I realized they watch stuff so closely.
I have no idea typically what one of these boards (and specialized development environments) might go for. I know that Xilinx is particullarly pricy, and FPGA stuff in general is pretty steep, though. That said, I'm more of a software guy who's always been a interested in the hardware side. I'd love to learn more about FPGA programming, embedded controllers, etc. but I can't justify the cost of a board like that.
The real reason these things (as I see it) are so expensive is the short runs they do: it costs a pretty good chunk to develop and fab a board like that. If you look at the components on the board, there's nothing really remarkable. It has a PCI bridge, a few 1000BT ports, a couple PCMCIA slots, an IDE channel, some BIOS stuff, an IBM MicroDrive, a PPC CPU and a Xilinx FPGA. There's no way that it's worth $5K in hardware pieces, IMO. On the other hand, it does seem to come with some nice debugging tools, and everything else you would need. It's probably worth it to someone who needs these things for their business.
Of course, I could be wrong; I just think it's ungodly expensive, because they need to rocoup the cost of putting it all together.
There just isn't enough demand to warrant making a ton of them (and thusly lowering the price), I guess.
If I could get a prototype board for around $500 that didn't have all the fancy bells and whistles, but was still functional as a development platform, I'd probably jump on it.
Cool! Thanks for the info! I have been looking for some boards like this to do some experimenting with FPGAs. I've always been disturbed by the cost of referance boards from xilinx, et. al. (I think for $6K+ I'd rather invest in a new Ducati or something), and I'm not typically a hardware guy... I don't have the skills or patience to roll my own.
I searched MS's site for about 30 minutes trying to find the text to Windows XP's EULA, before I finally got bored, and forgot what point it was that I was trying to prove.
If it really is there, it's going to take some FBI agents or something to find it (they don't get bored so easily.)
I don't think that this technology would ever have much of anything to do with solar planels. This paint probably can't behave as a photovoltaic source in the least. It would probably be more useful as the foci point at a large solar plant such as this. If you could sqweek another 2. something percent from a facility that produces 10MW, you might be onto something. Of course, that depends on whether it's a. resilant at very high temperatures, and b. cost effective.
I agree totally. The previews sucked big time. They certianly left me with no motivation to go see it.
The thing that really pointed out that it was going to be a stinker was the stupid logo they used. Ok... It's a bird thingie, with two giant balls in it's talons. The first thing I said when I seen it on TV was this: "What the fuck is that?!" I'm a demi-star trek geek, and the only correlation I could draw between the logo and anything meaningful was the Romulan connection (bird of prey). I'd hate to think what the general populus thought the logo was supposed to mean...
The biggest thing the studios should realize: make something worth watching, and people will watch it (despite it being Star Trek)...
The situation is the same in Colorado. What's worse than ClearChannel owning everything is the apparent commercial synchronization they pull off. More often than not, all of ClearChannel's stations seem* to play commercials at the same time. You go looking for some decent radio, and get an earful of TacoBell and car dealership commercials no matter where you turn the dial.
*Just an observation of my own. I might be a paranoid freak, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I was always under the impression that Freeman was a scientist, but this particualr lab the "lowly" Phd's were the equivalent of technicians... Because the rest of them were mega-uber-alpha geeks, and couldn't be bothered with trivial tasks. Sorta' like a pack of BOFHs with labcoats and pocket protectors.
You bet. He's from the future all right! See, his future self read about his previous arrest in the newspaper archive, and realized that he would be caught if he got so much money so fast. So, he went back the day before he got arrested, told his future self to run to Jamaica, and now the Govt. is scapegoating some poor bastard who's now in Guantanamo Bay under the powers of the Patriot Act.
You heard it here first!
BUT... The real question is what he needed the money for anyway. Anyone who's been to the future knows that the currency is 22nd century antique porno.
...and squeezing rocks?
Yeah, that just about sums it up... Haha.
Anybody remember Lord of the Rings 2? What's his name.. uh.. the long haired dweeb with the semi-automatic bow.. Legolas? Anyway, he mounted his horse in a very peculiar way. He did grabbed it's reins with one arm and with a good yank he rolled up onto the horse's back. That was a digital effect, but most people could see that as a stuntman with a hell of a lot of strength in his arm.
I dunno. I found that particular action VERY fake. We all know elves are supposed to be super nimble, and relatively strong, etc. I guess the movement just seemed totally implausible to me. Add to that the fact that they motion-blurred/antialiased the hell out of JUST that particular part of the scene... well it made Jaba The Hut in the origional film look lifelike.
I really wondered why they had to do that. Just eyecandy for the masses to drewl over, I suppose.
Bow Chicka Ckicha Bow Wow.
"Bullet time", eh?!
Oh, I thought you were referring to plotters in general... The Xenix system I referred to had an HP legal size plotter with a 6 pen carosel (for small drafts). I think someone finally took it home, or chucked it. You're right, though, that smaller plotters are on the way out. I was looking for an older draft plotter (in the 48" range) a couple years back, and had about zero luck. Inkjets have just about replaced them all, I guess.
On the contrary, large flatbed plotters are pretty popular for sign cutting, routing, etc. I used to work at a large custom print company, and we had a couple WILD plotters hooked up to a Xenix server.
At the time I left, they had 2 Zund tables, complete with conveyors, automatic sheet feeders, roll feeders, with a nifty camera hooked up to the cutting head that would track 1/4" dots on the media and compensate for stretching/shrinking that is common with the 3M vinyl that we used.
A while back I was looking through the Zund catalog, and they have all sorts of heads for their plotters, such as routers with z axis, laser, etc.
When we bought the Zunds, we sold the WILD tables to someone else (though I'm not sure why anyone would bother, they were known for their controller board problems.) I doubt that any functioning table would be trashed so readily.
Yeah. Iv'e had the same experience, more or less. I play UrT CTF. I used to be a maniac, playing every time I could, but I've slowed down a bunch--mostly playing with the members of various clans that are known for their hardline stance on cheating--largely due to the fact that cheating on CTF is very rampant.
There's noting more fun than running around a corner, have a SR-8 weilding sniper jump up and take your head off...repeatedly. With the possible exception of sneaking around his flank and giving him a good 'ol pistol 'whippin.
Aimbots, wallhacks... It sucks the fun out of any game damn fast.
Most of those little LED flashlights with insane battery life use PWM, or so I hear. I suppose that a LED aught to be pretty resiliant in the 30-60hz range, more than enough for this project.
Ugh... My Grandmother, a sucriber to AOL had a fit the first time she got one of those...
She was convinced she was having a conversation with some guy named Damien, or that somebody IMed her.
I took a look, and it was addressed to one of my cousins across the country, save for the mispelling. After this, I helped her set up the address book--with all of her friends' and relatives' addresses. She's happy 'cause she can point and click, and I'm happy because I don't have to hear about Damien.
Now if only she could form a coherent sentance, so that she could use some voice recognition software.
I'd say that's the cost of the technician coming out and hooking all of your computers to your router. IE: nothing you couldn't do yourself
That's about standard pricing for that kind of work anywhere.
Just a couple days ago I was thinking it would be fun to make a similar device--to be used in evil ways, of course!
It would be used to coat your least-favorite cow-orker's car with a generous layer of solid ice. Now, THAT would be funny!
If nothing else, one of those RAM drives would be an AWESOME place to put a swap file/partition! A server motherboard with 4Gigs, one of those for virtual memory would be quite the insane combo...
This is why the GPL is a useless license.
Except that GPL grants you freedoms, it does not take them away.
You might be able to attribute that rise in price with the general rise in price of petroleum.
Lots of things go out of whack when petro prices rise, foam for example has gone up about 30% in the last year...
Anyway, I think that in Canadia regular CD-Rs have a music tax on them as well, even if they aren't going to be used in that manner. I wouldn't discount the RIAA from pusing our govt. for similar measures here.
There has been some rumor that future DRM enabled receivers may output only 480p on component and VGA video, because the content providers are worried about massive piracy. Supposedly, you would have to have a DVI/DTCP, a proprietary encrypted variant of DVI, or some sort of secure Firewire to get the 720p or 1080i resolutions to display...
Whether it comes to pass or not is yet to be seen, but there is definitely some worry surrounding the issue.
I learned this a few days after we purchased a new Samsung 42" HDTV rear-projector (which I love so far), with only component for HDTV signals. We still haven't purchased a DTV STB, but are looking at an Echostar model 6000 that can be used for OTA and Dish Network HDTV. It dosen't have DVI/DTCP either, but Echostar dosen't seem as worried about piracy as some other companies.
Here's hoping for the death of DRM!
A CC company has denied my purchase of gas whilst doing something as innocuous as traversing Wyoming. I had to dial the 1-800 number, and they set everthing straight.
It was the first time I realized they watch stuff so closely.
I have no idea typically what one of these boards (and specialized development environments) might go for. I know that Xilinx is particullarly pricy, and FPGA stuff in general is pretty steep, though. That said, I'm more of a software guy who's always been a interested in the hardware side. I'd love to learn more about FPGA programming, embedded controllers, etc. but I can't justify the cost of a board like that.
The real reason these things (as I see it) are so expensive is the short runs they do: it costs a pretty good chunk to develop and fab a board like that. If you look at the components on the board, there's nothing really remarkable. It has a PCI bridge, a few 1000BT ports, a couple PCMCIA slots, an IDE channel, some BIOS stuff, an IBM MicroDrive, a PPC CPU and a Xilinx FPGA. There's no way that it's worth $5K in hardware pieces, IMO. On the other hand, it does seem to come with some nice debugging tools, and everything else you would need. It's probably worth it to someone who needs these things for their business.
Of course, I could be wrong; I just think it's ungodly expensive, because they need to rocoup the cost of putting it all together.
There just isn't enough demand to warrant making a ton of them (and thusly lowering the price), I guess.
If I could get a prototype board for around $500 that didn't have all the fancy bells and whistles, but was still functional as a development platform, I'd probably jump on it.
Cool! Thanks for the info! I have been looking for some boards like this to do some experimenting with FPGAs. I've always been disturbed by the cost of referance boards from xilinx, et. al. (I think for $6K+ I'd rather invest in a new Ducati or something), and I'm not typically a hardware guy... I don't have the skills or patience to roll my own.
Very helpful! Thanks again!
The board comes with all the peripherals that a standard motherboard or laptop has and then some.
With a $6k price tag, it should come with a high class hooker.
I'm not sure, but I do know this:
I searched MS's site for about 30 minutes trying to find the text to Windows XP's EULA, before I finally got bored, and forgot what point it was that I was trying to prove.
If it really is there, it's going to take some FBI agents or something to find it (they don't get bored so easily.)
I don't think that this technology would ever have much of anything to do with solar planels. This paint probably can't behave as a photovoltaic source in the least. It would probably be more useful as the foci point at a large solar plant such as this. If you could sqweek another 2. something percent from a facility that produces 10MW, you might be onto something. Of course, that depends on whether it's a. resilant at very high temperatures, and b. cost effective.
I agree totally. The previews sucked big time. They certianly left me with no motivation to go see it.
The thing that really pointed out that it was going to be a stinker was the stupid logo they used. Ok... It's a bird thingie, with two giant balls in it's talons. The first thing I said when I seen it on TV was this: "What the fuck is that?!" I'm a demi-star trek geek, and the only correlation I could draw between the logo and anything meaningful was the Romulan connection (bird of prey). I'd hate to think what the general populus thought the logo was supposed to mean...
The biggest thing the studios should realize: make something worth watching, and people will watch it (despite it being Star Trek)...
Our platters have gone plaid!
The situation is the same in Colorado. What's worse than ClearChannel owning everything is the apparent commercial synchronization they pull off. More often than not, all of ClearChannel's stations seem* to play commercials at the same time. You go looking for some decent radio, and get an earful of TacoBell and car dealership commercials no matter where you turn the dial.
*Just an observation of my own. I might be a paranoid freak, though.