I think we can all agree that this guy is completely, utterly insane and has very, very strange priorities. That said, the question was how he can do this without completely destroying his life, and the parent poster answered that pretty well.
Thanks for the reply, you've given me a lot to think about. It sounds like you actually made something close to what lives in my head. It's nice to know I'm not completely off the deep end with what I want to do.
Given the fact that a pyramid scheme is guaranteed to leave the vast majority of the people who get sucked into it with absolutely nothing, do you actually expect you have a good chance to get your free stuff? What makes you luckier than the next guy?
Your robot looks really cool! I used to play with that kind of stuff, although mine wasn't nearly as sophisticated. I used a Lego Mindstorms kit to build a four-wheeled robot that could navigate independently. It used dead-reckoning to get around its world, and worked pretty well. In the end, the Mindstorms platform was just a little too limiting. With only 32k for code and data, basic navigation and communications with the controller was already beginning to fill things.
I'd love to get back into it, and I've been planning the necessary hardware in my head. What kind of computer did you use for your robot, and how did you get it to interface with motors and sensors? I would be very interested to know what kind of hardware you put together.
I don't have the software, and I haven't tried it. I have a reasonably large book collection, but it's all sitting in a garage on another continent.
If I had access to my book collection, I imagine Delicious Library might come in handy. If I scanned in all of my books, I could instantly find out whether I had a particular book or not. (More than once, I've bought a copy of a book I already owned.) Even better, I could search within (some of) the books I owned using Amazon's search feature. Of course, I can search within the books I don't own using that too, but the combination would be nice. If it lets me enter additional information, then I could mention where the book is, so maybe I could even find it.
I'm guessing none of this would be worth the price tag, but it doesn't seem completely useless.
One of the scientists on NASA TV said that Huygens's trasmission power was about the same as a normal portable phone. I don't know about you, but I barely get any signal on my phone when I simply move to the back of my apartment. Cassini is probably a hundred thousand times farther away than my local cell tower, and both spacecraft are running off of less electrical power than the lights in my room. It's amazing to me that they can get anything at all.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm 24 and I feel pretty much the same way you do. I'm just barely old enough to remember staying up all night to watch Voyager 2's Neptune flyby. I hardly got any work done all day as I watched the NASA TV feed and then, finally started watching the pictures come down. It's really amazing to look at a picture of something knowing that, an hour before, nobody had ever seen it before.
If you don't restrict your answer to C-based languages, Lisp macros are pretty damned nifty. Why use a different language for compile-time code generation and run-time code execution when you can just use the same language for everything?
The thing that's hilarious is that there's no mechanism for recovery or resend specified. So even if somehow TCP failed in its duties and the ACK actually conveyed useful information, how would the transfer recover? Extreme dain bramage if I ever saw it.
If you care so little, why did you expend the effort to post this response? How will that benefit you in the near future?
The short answer is thus: not everything that is worth doing has benefits, and not everything that will benefit you in the future is evident in the present.
Given the fact that a pyramid scheme is guaranteed to leave the vast majority of the people who get sucked into it with absolutely nothing, do you actually expect you have a good chance to get your free stuff? What makes you luckier than the next guy?
Given the fact that a pyramid scheme is guaranteed to leave the vast majority of the people who get sucked into it with absolutely nothing, do you actually expect you have a good chance to get your free stuff? What makes you luckier than the next guy?
Given the fact that a pyramid scheme is guaranteed to leave the vast majority of the people who get sucked into it with absolutely nothing, do you actually expect you have a good chance to get your free Mac Mini? What makes you luckier than the next guy?
For the cost of Hubble and all of the servicing missions, it would have been possible to build several non-serviceable versions and launch them all, which together would have provided much better results, even if some of them failed. Hubble, like Skylab and the ISS, was just another attempt by NASA to justify the great expense and general uselessness of the Shuttle launch system.
Every single version of Mac OS X has run faster than the previous version on identical hardware. If you had some old iBook that barely managed with the Public Beta, it got marginally better with 10.0, was usable with 10.1, was decent with 10.2, and is now pretty good with 10.3. There's no reason to expect this trend to stop. Yes, Tiger will take advantage of high-end video hardware more than any previous version of Mac OS X, but it will probably also be quite a bit faster than Panther even on low-end hardware.
No, Mac OS X 10.3 and below are strictly 32-bit. They run on a 64-big G5 processor by virtue of the fact that the 64-bit PowerPC is 100% compatible with 32-bit code.
Why would this decision be made at install time? Wouldn't the right thing be to make the decision at boot depending on what video card is present? What happens if you have two cards with differing capabilities?
Oh right, this is Microsoft, who can't do the right thing if their lives depended on it. I'm so glad I have a Mac.
Smart people separate NASA's robotic probes program from NASA's manned spaceflight program. The former is amazingly successful and has produced incredible benefits. The latter hasn't done anything really interesting since Apollo, and it's that program which is foundering and has no credibility.
Every so often, a slashdot editor wakes up and realises that they should, well, edit. Since they have no idea how, they make some bizarre attempt, and this is one example. Having done so, they go back to posting the usual round of inanities, inadvertent shills for blogs, and two-day-old dupes of stories everybody already heard.
Why not get a laptop? One big reason is because it's $500 cheaper than Apple's cheapest laptop (and presumably similarly cheaper than equivalent PC laptops). It doesn't come with a screen or anything, but if you already have those, it'll be a significant savings. Even if you don't, you can put together a nice desktop computer with a much larger screen for much less money than simply buying a portable.
There probably is no mic port. Apple doesn't seem to feel that they are cost-effective these days. You can get inexpensive USB audio input devices with mic ports if you really need one.
I currently own a PowerBook G4 and use it for my work (Mac application programming). It's a bit more powerful than the Mac Mini, but not hugely so. It has a 1.5GHz processor, which is comparable to the 1.25GHz processor in the base Mini. The video card is quite a bit better, but gcc doesn't really care about that. I have 1.25GB of memory in mine, and sometimes that doesn't even seem like enough, and that is the one place where the Mini will be restrictive compared to this computer. However, most people won't need more than 1GB of memory, and will probably be quite happy with 512MB.
That said, I probably won't get one for myself. I already have something like it anyway, and I need something portable which the Mac Mini won't be once you throw in the screen. I would love to get one otherwise, though. I might get one for some members of my family who have suffered with PCs for too long, and that seems like the primary target market to me.
You don't need to do anything special to turn a Mini into a PVR. Buy an eyeTV, plug it in, and you have a PVR.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we can all agree that this guy is completely, utterly insane and has very, very strange priorities. That said, the question was how he can do this without completely destroying his life, and the parent poster answered that pretty well.
Thanks for the reply, you've given me a lot to think about. It sounds like you actually made something close to what lives in my head. It's nice to know I'm not completely off the deep end with what I want to do.
Given the fact that a pyramid scheme is guaranteed to leave the vast majority of the people who get sucked into it with absolutely nothing, do you actually expect you have a good chance to get your free stuff? What makes you luckier than the next guy?
Show me one program, just one program that was written in any kind of portable manner that looks and works nice on the Mac.
OpenOffice is, of course, completely out, because the X11 port looks and acts like something from 1990.
MS Office is also out, it has tons of Mac-specific code.
FireFox is close, but it still looks and acts like a Windows/Linux app in many ways.
I haven't seen anything written in Java that even vaguely approaches a decent Mac application. LimeWire and Azureus are jokes in this regard.
What makes you think Java would be any better in this regard?
Your robot looks really cool! I used to play with that kind of stuff, although mine wasn't nearly as sophisticated. I used a Lego Mindstorms kit to build a four-wheeled robot that could navigate independently. It used dead-reckoning to get around its world, and worked pretty well. In the end, the Mindstorms platform was just a little too limiting. With only 32k for code and data, basic navigation and communications with the controller was already beginning to fill things.
I'd love to get back into it, and I've been planning the necessary hardware in my head. What kind of computer did you use for your robot, and how did you get it to interface with motors and sensors? I would be very interested to know what kind of hardware you put together.
You can blame various goverments for that, they've been doing it for a long, long time.
I don't have the software, and I haven't tried it. I have a reasonably large book collection, but it's all sitting in a garage on another continent.
If I had access to my book collection, I imagine Delicious Library might come in handy. If I scanned in all of my books, I could instantly find out whether I had a particular book or not. (More than once, I've bought a copy of a book I already owned.) Even better, I could search within (some of) the books I owned using Amazon's search feature. Of course, I can search within the books I don't own using that too, but the combination would be nice. If it lets me enter additional information, then I could mention where the book is, so maybe I could even find it.
I'm guessing none of this would be worth the price tag, but it doesn't seem completely useless.
You're closer to the mark than you may know.
One of the scientists on NASA TV said that Huygens's trasmission power was about the same as a normal portable phone. I don't know about you, but I barely get any signal on my phone when I simply move to the back of my apartment. Cassini is probably a hundred thousand times farther away than my local cell tower, and both spacecraft are running off of less electrical power than the lights in my room. It's amazing to me that they can get anything at all.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm 24 and I feel pretty much the same way you do. I'm just barely old enough to remember staying up all night to watch Voyager 2's Neptune flyby. I hardly got any work done all day as I watched the NASA TV feed and then, finally started watching the pictures come down. It's really amazing to look at a picture of something knowing that, an hour before, nobody had ever seen it before.
If you don't restrict your answer to C-based languages, Lisp macros are pretty damned nifty. Why use a different language for compile-time code generation and run-time code execution when you can just use the same language for everything?
The thing that's hilarious is that there's no mechanism for recovery or resend specified. So even if somehow TCP failed in its duties and the ACK actually conveyed useful information, how would the transfer recover? Extreme dain bramage if I ever saw it.
If you care so little, why did you expend the effort to post this response? How will that benefit you in the near future?
The short answer is thus: not everything that is worth doing has benefits, and not everything that will benefit you in the future is evident in the present.
Given the fact that a pyramid scheme is guaranteed to leave the vast majority of the people who get sucked into it with absolutely nothing, do you actually expect you have a good chance to get your free stuff? What makes you luckier than the next guy?
Given the fact that a pyramid scheme is guaranteed to leave the vast majority of the people who get sucked into it with absolutely nothing, do you actually expect you have a good chance to get your free stuff? What makes you luckier than the next guy?
Given the fact that a pyramid scheme is guaranteed to leave the vast majority of the people who get sucked into it with absolutely nothing, do you actually expect you have a good chance to get your free Mac Mini? What makes you luckier than the next guy?
For the cost of Hubble and all of the servicing missions, it would have been possible to build several non-serviceable versions and launch them all, which together would have provided much better results, even if some of them failed. Hubble, like Skylab and the ISS, was just another attempt by NASA to justify the great expense and general uselessness of the Shuttle launch system.
I expect a bit more from a /. news....
You're new here, aren't you?
Every single version of Mac OS X has run faster than the previous version on identical hardware. If you had some old iBook that barely managed with the Public Beta, it got marginally better with 10.0, was usable with 10.1, was decent with 10.2, and is now pretty good with 10.3. There's no reason to expect this trend to stop. Yes, Tiger will take advantage of high-end video hardware more than any previous version of Mac OS X, but it will probably also be quite a bit faster than Panther even on low-end hardware.
No, Mac OS X 10.3 and below are strictly 32-bit. They run on a 64-big G5 processor by virtue of the fact that the 64-bit PowerPC is 100% compatible with 32-bit code.
Why would this decision be made at install time? Wouldn't the right thing be to make the decision at boot depending on what video card is present? What happens if you have two cards with differing capabilities?
Oh right, this is Microsoft, who can't do the right thing if their lives depended on it. I'm so glad I have a Mac.
Smart people separate NASA's robotic probes program from NASA's manned spaceflight program. The former is amazingly successful and has produced incredible benefits. The latter hasn't done anything really interesting since Apollo, and it's that program which is foundering and has no credibility.
Stuff like this is why my computer has a Guest account.
Every so often, a slashdot editor wakes up and realises that they should, well, edit. Since they have no idea how, they make some bizarre attempt, and this is one example. Having done so, they go back to posting the usual round of inanities, inadvertent shills for blogs, and two-day-old dupes of stories everybody already heard.
Why not get a laptop? One big reason is because it's $500 cheaper than Apple's cheapest laptop (and presumably similarly cheaper than equivalent PC laptops). It doesn't come with a screen or anything, but if you already have those, it'll be a significant savings. Even if you don't, you can put together a nice desktop computer with a much larger screen for much less money than simply buying a portable.
There probably is no mic port. Apple doesn't seem to feel that they are cost-effective these days. You can get inexpensive USB audio input devices with mic ports if you really need one.
I currently own a PowerBook G4 and use it for my work (Mac application programming). It's a bit more powerful than the Mac Mini, but not hugely so. It has a 1.5GHz processor, which is comparable to the 1.25GHz processor in the base Mini. The video card is quite a bit better, but gcc doesn't really care about that. I have 1.25GB of memory in mine, and sometimes that doesn't even seem like enough, and that is the one place where the Mini will be restrictive compared to this computer. However, most people won't need more than 1GB of memory, and will probably be quite happy with 512MB.
That said, I probably won't get one for myself. I already have something like it anyway, and I need something portable which the Mac Mini won't be once you throw in the screen. I would love to get one otherwise, though. I might get one for some members of my family who have suffered with PCs for too long, and that seems like the primary target market to me.
You don't need to do anything special to turn a Mini into a PVR. Buy an eyeTV, plug it in, and you have a PVR.