maybe it's because I have a compost pile in my backyard, and on cold September mornings, I would look outside and see it steaming. Seems to have gone dormant now.
It's a nice change. Consider it kind an environmental-enema for those constipated with too much technology.
I would think that a shell starts with an initial velocity, and slows down due to air resistance and gravity as it arcs upwards.
As it begins it's decent, itmay speed up with gravity, or slow down even more, depending on the air-resistence. If it slows down, it will slow down slower (if that makes sense).
Second, a shell goes much faster than a rocket. If the aim is off by just a little, a rocket might not have moved that much. A shell would probably be long gone.
Third, I believe shells are smaller than rockets. Smaller target requires more accuracy.
I had a conversation with a friend today (yes, I have friends, and some of them are real) about Microsoft, tablet PCs, MSN 8 (with it's low-profit DSL) and Vivato's new phase-array antenna for 802.11b.
Imagine what Microsoft could do if they installed these antennas in large cities, offering MSN 8 and their tablet PC. They could leapfrog many of the broadband provider without having to aquire the "last mile".
Offer the tablet PC with Windows XP, bundling it with MSN 8, and then selling Office XP to all those people.
After all, if the tablet PC thing takes off, it's a new market that Microsoft has to dominate or their whole house of cards falls down.
There will be no point in buying Vivato during the IPO - the shares will go sky high, but what about buying stock in a company down the line, like Microsoft? That's a deal with the devil.
And to make this somewhat on-topic, it could be good for Transmeta if Tablet PCs take off.
Well, I heard it from a comp sci professor who claims he had heard of it first hand.
Could have happened back in the 60's, when computers+planes first started holding hands, and there wasn't so much discipline with regards to software developers.
I sort of agree. And Frank Herbert was pretty talented (though I lost interest after Dune, but read Dune Messiah, Children of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune).
I also think that Brian might have knowledge about what happened before and between the books that he wants to share. But maybe a "collection of notes and ideas" would be better than 4 fiction books.
1) Small company makes great, original game. They are not sure how they did it, and couldn't do it again; most game companies are one-hit-wonders with regards to original ideas.
2) Every other company makes a "me-too" product in order to cash in on the success of the original
3) The original game spawns a genre, in which the only improvements are to graphics, and sometimes (but not often) the AI. New versions force you to buy more expensive hardware. One or two companies dominate, and smaller fish nibble at the edges.
Someone decides that a bunch of game developers have some special insight into the future of gaming, while those same game developers seem to be able to do nothing but make a prettier, more CPU-intensive version of someone elses game.
This is one article I'll skip. All it will say is, "Yah, and we are going to re-write *insert game title here* but with real time vertex lighting, and more polygons..."
Also made a mistake. Said: "I can't wait for the Internet to go back to what it's good at - serving up pictures of pretty, naked women."
Should have said,
"I can't wait for the World Wide Web to go back to what it's good at - serving up pictures of pretty, naked women."
The Berners-Lee quote is not applicable. Curl is a plug in for a browser, and doesn't require a "best viewed with" label. Curl is an HTML replacement, but has a clean persistence framework via SOAP and XML (sending it back to a central server). Doesn't require pages to be refreshed with long URLS full of the items in someones shopping-cart.
Re:PHP is *the* industry standard
on
Yahoo Moving to PHP
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The concept of Industry Standard isn't defined by "running on all platforms".
It means the software has a near monopoly on web development. It's popular, but so are CGIs, Cold Fusion, Flash, VB Script, Java Script, and of course JSPs.
What irks me is that people haven't abandoned HTML for all but display. HTML was designed to be stateless; info wasn't remembered as the browser jumped from one page to the next. To overcome this, all sorts of gross, kludgy, slow and complicated technology has been created (including JSPs, PHP, etc, etc) to overcome the inherent statelessness of the web.
The most interesting technology I've seen (and one that I hope will put these lame ducks out of their misery) is Curl, a programming language that runs in a plug-in (yes, sort of like Java, but more advanced, with fewer of the drawbacks). It was started at MIT via a US DARPA-funded project, and includes Timothy Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and Director of the W3C, as one of the founders.
I can't wait for the Internet to go back to what it's good at - serving up pictures of pretty, naked women.
No, I don't work for CURL, or even for a company that uses the technology. I just think it's a better mousetrap.
VSOSub is the standard for subtitles. Will it handle that? Often, the text is tied to the frame that it is supposed to appear in. The file is a.rar. Will this piece of hardware be able to handle it.
This DivX thing is way too much of a moving target for a piece of engineered hardware to be able hit. Leave it to computers.
You better tell all the encoders that. Most new movies are encoded with ogg, and have a.ogm extension. Lower bitrates, better sound, and more room left on the CD(s) to increase your video bitrate.
We went DivX 3.11, 4.0, 5.0, and XVid, etc. This player can play DivX 4.0 and 5.0, but what about 5.03, the upcoming version? Or DivX 6? What about XVid, or old 3.11 movies you have kicking around?
But video is only a small part of the puzzle. Of the hundred or so DivX "backups" I have, only half have MP3 audio. A big chunk have ogg (and ogg is probably the most popular for new movies), and a few have AC3.
My point boils down to this: I spend alot of time watching movies encoded in DivX. I even do some encoding. With a PC that is almost infinately upgradable, with all the DivX sites out there offering support, I still have trouble playing some movies.
Some machine with hard-coded firmware is not going to make the grade.
If you want to watch DivX on your tv, then get one of these things. That's what I did - it's a stereo, DVD player, and it plays DivX in all it's formats. It sits under the TV, is plugged into the 100 megabit network, and makes life very simple. We don't even have cable any more.
that was told to my class about the altitude of fighter jets.
A company was hired to rewrite the code that was used on one of the models of fighter jets, and they offered to fix an unusual bug.
The details are: apparently they had two altimeters - one was barometric, and the other I don't remember.
Anyway, the programmer was coding along, and was writing code to determine what would happen if the altimeters stopped functioning.
He came to the case where they both weren't working, and couldn't figure out what to do, so called one of the pilots that was acting as an information source for the developers, and asked him what altitude they normally flew at, and he answered, "12,000 feet" or something similar.
So the programmer wrote,
if altimeter1 not working {
if altimeter2 not working
{
set height = 12000;
} }
Stupid, but this code could not be changed. The pilots had the following rule deeply ingrained: if the altitude stays at 12,000 for more than a few seconds, pull up, as your altimeters aren't working.
A comp sci teachers assistant (read: grad student) of mine back in my University days told a story about a friend of his who did some contract work for some company. He'd heard that the company didn't pay their bills sometimes, so he left a timebomb in the code he wrote (3 months, stop running).
Sure enough, he had problems collecting, and sure enough, they called in 3 months when they had problems. He agreed to come in to look providing that,
1) They have a check waiting for his unpaid invoce
2) The hours he spent fixing the problem was at an overtime rate and paid onsite. He spent 2 hours playing some UNIX net-game, removed the timebomb, recompiled, and left.
Knowledge is power, and in certain situations you may have to so something unethical to ensure you aren't screwed over.
Lots of motherboards come with SCSI. Most Intel server boards do, as do boards from SuperMicro (P3TDE6-G, S370DL3, P3TDDR), Tyan (S2721, S2720), etc, etc. I've been looking into them for server upgrades (I just don't have time to track down a few dozen model numbers).
SCSI does have a faster spin time, and is in general much faster, but for small, random chunks of data, it can be slower (but it's a small penalty in a rare case). The width of the SCSI bus is much better (320 MB/s for SCSI 320), assuming you have alot of drives in big striped arrays.
Don't forget - most IDE drives (except for a few premium models) just had their warranty chopped from 3-years to 1-year. Not a reflection on declining quality of IDE drives, but rather the economics of the market place. SCSI still has decent warranties, and they last longer regardless.
SCSI is (much) better; could they be as cheap as IDE if everyone used them? Probably pretty close. But it's a chicken and an egg thing. Home-users don't buy them because they are expensive, and they are expensive because consumers won't buy them.
Ironically, SCSI stands for Small Computer Standard Interface, but SCSI is most frequently found in Servers (large, not small computers), in large RAID arrays. And more ironically, the SCSI drives usually used in RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) usually are not that inexpensive at 3x the cost of IDE.
but I don't care. I'm pretty pissed off about this.
You can't patent a gene; it's design was created either by 1) Evolution, 2) a Higher Power, or 3) Some combination of 1&2.
As a British-Columbian with a wife, sister, mother-in-law, aunts, etc, who might have to travel 3000 miles for testing to determine if they carry either of these genes, I'd like to say to Myriad Genetics, Fuck You.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe it's because I have a compost pile in my backyard, and on cold September mornings, I would look outside and see it steaming. Seems to have gone dormant now.
It's a nice change. Consider it kind an environmental-enema for those constipated with too much technology.
Really?
I would think that a shell starts with an initial velocity, and slows down due to air resistance and gravity as it arcs upwards.
As it begins it's decent, itmay speed up with gravity, or slow down even more, depending on the air-resistence. If it slows down, it will slow down slower (if that makes sense).
Second, a shell goes much faster than a rocket. If the aim is off by just a little, a rocket might not have moved that much. A shell would probably be long gone.
Third, I believe shells are smaller than rockets. Smaller target requires more accuracy.
Ergo, a shell *IS* harder to hit than a rocket.
I had a conversation with a friend today (yes, I have friends, and some of them are real) about Microsoft, tablet PCs, MSN 8 (with it's low-profit DSL) and Vivato's new phase-array antenna for 802.11b.
Imagine what Microsoft could do if they installed these antennas in large cities, offering MSN 8 and their tablet PC. They could leapfrog many of the broadband provider without having to aquire the "last mile".
Offer the tablet PC with Windows XP, bundling it with MSN 8, and then selling Office XP to all those people.
After all, if the tablet PC thing takes off, it's a new market that Microsoft has to dominate or their whole house of cards falls down.
There will be no point in buying Vivato during the IPO - the shares will go sky high, but what about buying stock in a company down the line, like Microsoft? That's a deal with the devil.
And to make this somewhat on-topic, it could be good for Transmeta if Tablet PCs take off.
ha ha.
Brings a whole new meaning to the money-shot...
as in...
"That will be $100 for the new motherboard..."
or this was posted earlier today, pulled and reposted.
If you remember this too, let me know. I wouldn't want to be the only one caught in a paradox of time and space.
Well, I heard it from a comp sci professor who claims he had heard of it first hand.
Could have happened back in the 60's, when computers+planes first started holding hands, and there wasn't so much discipline with regards to software developers.
I sort of agree. And Frank Herbert was pretty talented (though I lost interest after Dune, but read Dune Messiah, Children of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune).
I also think that Brian might have knowledge about what happened before and between the books that he wants to share. But maybe a "collection of notes and ideas" would be better than 4 fiction books.
The game industry can be summed up as thus:
1) Small company makes great, original game. They are not sure how they did it, and couldn't do it again; most game companies are one-hit-wonders with regards to original ideas.
2) Every other company makes a "me-too" product in order to cash in on the success of the original
3) The original game spawns a genre, in which the only improvements are to graphics, and sometimes (but not often) the AI. New versions force you to buy more expensive hardware. One or two companies dominate, and smaller fish nibble at the edges.
Someone decides that a bunch of game developers have some special insight into the future of gaming, while those same game developers seem to be able to do nothing but make a prettier, more CPU-intensive version of someone elses game.
This is one article I'll skip. All it will say is, "Yah, and we are going to re-write *insert game title here* but with real time vertex lighting, and more polygons..."
They get the plugin, I guess.
Works on Windows (IE and Netscape), and I believe Linux is under development.
But it doesn't work best in some browsers - works or it doesn't.
Sort of like saying Flash (which is more ubiquitous) uses a "best viewed with browser xxx".
Anyway, there are rumours that Curl is in trouble. Hope they open source and set it free.
Yup - sorry - http, not html.
Also made a mistake. Said: "I can't wait for the Internet to go back to what it's good at - serving up pictures of pretty, naked women."
Should have said,
"I can't wait for the World Wide Web to go back to what it's good at - serving up pictures of pretty, naked women."
The Berners-Lee quote is not applicable. Curl is a plug in for a browser, and doesn't require a "best viewed with" label. Curl is an HTML replacement, but has a clean persistence framework via SOAP and XML (sending it back to a central server). Doesn't require pages to be refreshed with long URLS full of the items in someones shopping-cart.
See my comment here
The concept of Industry Standard isn't defined by "running on all platforms".
It means the software has a near monopoly on web development. It's popular, but so are CGIs, Cold Fusion, Flash, VB Script, Java Script, and of course JSPs.
What irks me is that people haven't abandoned HTML for all but display. HTML was designed to be stateless; info wasn't remembered as the browser jumped from one page to the next. To overcome this, all sorts of gross, kludgy, slow and complicated technology has been created (including JSPs, PHP, etc, etc) to overcome the inherent statelessness of the web.
The most interesting technology I've seen (and one that I hope will put these lame ducks out of their misery) is Curl, a programming language that runs in a plug-in (yes, sort of like Java, but more advanced, with fewer of the drawbacks). It was started at MIT via a US DARPA-funded project, and includes Timothy Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and Director of the W3C, as one of the founders.
I can't wait for the Internet to go back to what it's good at - serving up pictures of pretty, naked women.
No, I don't work for CURL, or even for a company that uses the technology. I just think it's a better mousetrap.
Only DivX 3.11 was a hacked Microsoft coded.
4.0 and onwards were developed from scratch.
I download from newsgroups. Ogg movies I currently have on my HD (haven't burned yet):
The Thin Red Line
Elizabeth
The Shining
I checked monter-movies, and at least half were ogg movies.
Unfort not. The article says,
"The KiSS DP-450, set for release in late October, will enable playback of videos encoded in DivX versions 4.xx and 5.xx."
I have about 20 3.11 movies that would be useless.
Good point.
.rar. Will this piece of hardware be able to handle it.
VSOSub is the standard for subtitles. Will it handle that? Often, the text is tied to the frame that it is supposed to appear in. The file is a
This DivX thing is way too much of a moving target for a piece of engineered hardware to be able hit. Leave it to computers.
You better tell all the encoders that. Most new movies are encoded with ogg, and have a .ogm extension. Lower bitrates, better sound, and more room left on the CD(s) to increase your video bitrate.
We went DivX 3.11, 4.0, 5.0, and XVid, etc. This player can play DivX 4.0 and 5.0, but what about 5.03, the upcoming version? Or DivX 6? What about XVid, or old 3.11 movies you have kicking around?
But video is only a small part of the puzzle. Of the hundred or so DivX "backups" I have, only half have MP3 audio. A big chunk have ogg (and ogg is probably the most popular for new movies), and a few have AC3.
My point boils down to this: I spend alot of time watching movies encoded in DivX. I even do some encoding. With a PC that is almost infinately upgradable, with all the DivX sites out there offering support, I still have trouble playing some movies.
Some machine with hard-coded firmware is not going to make the grade.
If you want to watch DivX on your tv, then get one of these things. That's what I did - it's a stereo, DVD player, and it plays DivX in all it's formats. It sits under the TV, is plugged into the 100 megabit network, and makes life very simple. We don't even have cable any more.
Yah, it's silly - that's the point of the story - stupid mistakes developers have made :)
Puppetman
that was told to my class about the altitude of fighter jets.
A company was hired to rewrite the code that was used on one of the models of fighter jets, and they offered to fix an unusual bug.
The details are: apparently they had two altimeters - one was barometric, and the other I don't remember.
Anyway, the programmer was coding along, and was writing code to determine what would happen if the altimeters stopped functioning.
He came to the case where they both weren't working, and couldn't figure out what to do, so called one of the pilots that was acting as an information source for the developers, and asked him what altitude they normally flew at, and he answered, "12,000 feet" or something similar.
So the programmer wrote,
if altimeter1 not working
{
if altimeter2 not working
{
set height = 12000;
}
}
Stupid, but this code could not be changed. The pilots had the following rule deeply ingrained: if the altitude stays at 12,000 for more than a few seconds, pull up, as your altimeters aren't working.
A comp sci teachers assistant (read: grad student) of mine back in my University days told a story about a friend of his who did some contract work for some company. He'd heard that the company didn't pay their bills sometimes, so he left a timebomb in the code he wrote (3 months, stop running).
Sure enough, he had problems collecting, and sure enough, they called in 3 months when they had problems. He agreed to come in to look providing that,
1) They have a check waiting for his unpaid invoce
2) The hours he spent fixing the problem was at an overtime rate and paid onsite. He spent 2 hours playing some UNIX net-game, removed the timebomb, recompiled, and left.
Knowledge is power, and in certain situations you may have to so something unethical to ensure you aren't screwed over.
Lots of motherboards come with SCSI. Most Intel server boards do, as do boards from SuperMicro (P3TDE6-G, S370DL3, P3TDDR), Tyan (S2721, S2720), etc, etc. I've been looking into them for server upgrades (I just don't have time to track down a few dozen model numbers).
SCSI does have a faster spin time, and is in general much faster, but for small, random chunks of data, it can be slower (but it's a small penalty in a rare case). The width of the SCSI bus is much better (320 MB/s for SCSI 320), assuming you have alot of drives in big striped arrays.
Don't forget - most IDE drives (except for a few premium models) just had their warranty chopped from 3-years to 1-year. Not a reflection on declining quality of IDE drives, but rather the economics of the market place. SCSI still has decent warranties, and they last longer regardless.
SCSI is (much) better; could they be as cheap as IDE if everyone used them? Probably pretty close. But it's a chicken and an egg thing. Home-users don't buy them because they are expensive, and they are expensive because consumers won't buy them.
Ironically, SCSI stands for Small Computer Standard Interface, but SCSI is most frequently found in Servers (large, not small computers), in large RAID arrays. And more ironically, the SCSI drives usually used in RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) usually are not that inexpensive at 3x the cost of IDE.
Now I know why my Tribes 2 experience lagged last night.
I'm going to beat the crap out of that 12-year-old as soon as I find him; he made me look like I had no skillzzz.
but I don't care. I'm pretty pissed off about this.
You can't patent a gene; it's design was created either by 1) Evolution, 2) a Higher Power, or 3) Some combination of 1&2.
As a British-Columbian with a wife, sister, mother-in-law, aunts, etc, who might have to travel 3000 miles for testing to determine if they carry either of these genes, I'd like to say to Myriad Genetics, Fuck You.
I steal power from BC Hydro to run my marijuana-grow-operation.