There was a series of geek books called "xxxxxx Unleashed." It reminded me of the movie "Heercules Unchained."
Re:From the Earth to the Moon.
on
Apollo 12 at 35
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· Score: 1
Yes; the scene with Bean and Conrad just after touchdown was all the funnier if you had seen the corresponding scene in the Apollo 11 episode. I encourage seeing the two episodes in quick succession.
I am not meaning to cast aspersions on people who play these games, but I have to ask if the total manhours with the associated damaged health etc. is an appropriate price to pay for a product that will a) sell some number of copies and will then become unavailable except for the used market b) will only run on a device that will itself no longer be sold in stores c) serves no real purpose other than consumers' temporary entertainment. Do the same number of people work as hard for as long to produce a movie? To write the software that can automatically land an Airbus in a rainstorm? To develop a chemo drug that's the first to target a particular kind of cancer?
How badly do we want these games, and at how low a price?
I predict that by 2008, our porn stars will be our pop stars and vice versa. Whole new meaning to the term, but our music videos will have "pop shots."
Yes, I sure noticed that. Babylon 5 very much seemed to be cleaning the Star Trek chronomet^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^clock and I sensed a gut change in the tone and tenor of ST series once B5 got established.
While I'm posting. TV Guide's Cheers and Jeers column usually wouldn't pay much attention to SF shows but it gave a "cheer" to the DS9 episode "In The Pale Moonlight," which I had seen and hed judged to be very, very good television for ANY genre.
Another DS9 episode, the two-parter "Past Tense," had the typical transporter-accident time-travel schtick but what they did with it was interesting and a bit harrowing. It involved the speculated existence of "Sanctuary Districts" in major cities by the year 2020, which, as described in the episode, seem eerily like what George W. Bush's "Opportunity Zones" might well devolve into.
"also, had the people on the planes been aware of what was going to happen I doubt they would have let that happen"
"100-200 pissed off people would OWN 2-3 terrorists with box cutters"
You seem to have forgotten about United Flight 93, on which the passengers did just that.
Once the hijacking got underway on 93, some of the passengers were tipped off by seat-back and cell phone that three other planes had been taken over for suicide attacks and they logically concluded that their flight was due the same fate. While insufficiently armed to take control of the aircraft back from the terrorists, they were sufficiently armed enough (with a food service cart, it has been theorized) to deny the terrorists their mission.
In so doing, the Flight 93 passengers also forever changed the paradigm of hijacking aircraft. The message has gone out that if you try anything, there are going to be passengers and crew who will stop you.
"I'm sure visitors would just LOVE to see a site error message 'I'm sorry, you must download Mozilla 8.0 to view this website.'"
And why the hell not? Actually, I wouldn't use exactly those words - I'd say something like "if this page renders incorrectly, you are probably using a Web browser that does not adhere to established open standards. Please consider one of the browsers below..."
It *is* a fight, and sometimes you have to take a swing.
Actually, neither one of you were quite right. It's my understanding that the entire TAS is *not* canon. The ST universe as it now stands does not have Kzinti or an M'ress or an Arex.
While I'm on the subject, for those who haven't seen TAS before: TAS shows its very low budget - lots of reused scenes (Kirk sitting in captain's chair with lips moving; close up of a character's eye while speaking; Kirk breaking into a run toward POV), same music over and over again, Nichols and Doohan doing innumerable extra voices. However, what you *do* get are the original actors doing voices - which, IMO, makes a HUGE difference and was worth every penny - and the writing. Since TOS had been gone for some time, there was apparently ample opportunity for some people to come up with some solid story work and, as someone else here has said, not being limited visually in the animation genre, some really "spacey" ideas were implemented. Some TOS episodes got what were in effect sequels, including the returns of characters like Cyrano Jones and Harry Mudd (both voiced by the original actors).
If you ever get to see some TAS episodes, consider how "heavy" they would have appeared next to other Saturday morning cartoon/live-action shows of the time!
I actually had a similar idea to that of the parent article but not quite as inhuman.
Because of the way the entire space program has gone, we expect that there ought to be a "right stuff" team of people sent to Mars - picture on the cover of Time, etc. etc. I think that a Mars trip is so much more involved in every respect from a Moon trip that we need to abandon that altogether and instead send just ONE human being with absolutely singlular resolve and capabilities, knowing all the while that he or she may not only just NOT come back, but PROBABLY won't come back.
The mission cost associated with having just one person is immensely larger than sending just the weight of one person in the form of a robot lander or rover. But, sending even just a second person adds tremendously.
I believe that the only reason to send even one person is to get an answer one and only one question: did anything ever live on Mars or does anything live on Mars? All other science is a very distant second. You would only risk one person because a robot's ability to get a definitive answer is limited. It's probably almost impossible to geta firm "no" answer about life on Mars but in order to get a definite "yes," then you've got to send some incredible hardware, and a human being is awesome hardware!
It's taken DAYS for the current rover team just to get the rover off the lander. Every day, every minute, is a huge risk for human or machine; a committed, able person is going to get out there and start digging!
What kind of a person could do this? I have no idea; I have trouble imagining what kind of person could stay cooped up in something of any size by himself for however many months and still be able to perform before, during, and after landing. But I'm sure someone is out there who could do it, even if it meant they only had maybe a one in ten shot at returning.
I consider a planned one-way mission abhorrent and I'd never support it, no matter how much more it costs.
I know that there's no perfect way to maintain color fidelity in any image transmission system, but just for my edification I'd appreciate it if they would release images adjusted best they can to look as the scene would if I were there with my Nikon and a roll of K64.
Actually, the first "video scratch" effect I recall seeing was in the video for Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" and also one for a subsequent tune which I think was named "Hardrock." I saw a lot of Max Headroom (not the TV series that had Matt Frewer as a reporter for a TV network in a dystopian "20 minutes into the" future) but the oddball chat show that (IIRC) ran on Showtime (I still have some of that stuff on VHS) and the time-domain video effects there were pretty much entirely freeze-frame or just plain cut in nature, i.e., freeze then alternate the freeze with the live or just throw in odd cuts.
By the way, I loved this:
Rutger Hauer: "I wonder...about your soul." Max: "I haven't got any feet; how can I have a sole?"
In the last entry of his three-part autobiography (GET A LIFE), he explains that his ST:TOS delivery was a combination of influences, one being a play he was in years before that had everyone practically asleep every show. Bill said that he decided to turn everything up a notch to see what would happen. So, "I'd love some coffee" became "I'd LOVE...some COFFEE!" and right away, people were sitting up straight in their seats because the intensity was contagious. As for the...famouspause, he said that that was caused in part by dealing with the mind-numbing dialogue and the sheer volume of it they had to memorize every week, so, when you...hear...oneofthosepauses, you know that that's actually Bill trying to come up with his line.
I highly recommend both the STAR TREK MEMORIES books and GET A LIFE because it gives you an idea of where the actors' heads were at at the time the series was being made. Bill also tells some fascinating stories about things that have happened in more recent years related to the show.
I knew something serious was up when MSNBC's Web Site curled up and died after displaying "BREAKING NEWS". As has happened before, a trip to/. told me what was going on!
I don't know - if a product is defective in a way that causes harm to the user (supposing we define harm as unauthorized disclosure of information or denial of service, among other things), who should a good citizen notify first - the creator or the users? If the goal is to minimize harm - and the number of affected users has to be taken into account - then it would seem that the good citizen would notify the users.
Yeah, pretty much! But, it's no different than what record execs do with their own ears.
I would LOVE to run Emerson Lake and Palmer's "Tarkus" through this algorithm. I'm a big fan of ELP, but not even *I* listen to the studio version other than as an exercise. By contrast, the 1973-74 live version practically jumps out of your speakers.
And, you can say what you want about 80s pop music but that was a decade in which people were going out of their way to give songs uniqueness - not so this decade!
Exactly. MS knows full well that plenty of that giveaway money will come right back to them in the end; few school IT types are clueful enough to shun the MS racket.
I tell you one thing - I resent that my daughter's school is trying to hawk something to parents or the population at large EVERY WEEK in order to raise money for basic upkeep and decent (not extravagant) materials when they still mindlessly pursue MS software purchases.
Re:This sounds similar to the AS400 Filesystem
on
CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
I was having similar thoughts, but I was thinking about Files-11 under VAX/VMS. I worked in VMS for a long time before I got into Linux, but it wasn't until I tried to do some Linux/VMS interoperability and read the docs associated with the Linux DECnet utilities that I appreciated how sophisticated VMS was in that regard. Files-11 had a whole metadata and stored-attributes thing going on, which I assumed was heavily exploited by DEC's database products like DBMS, RDB, and Datatrieve.
Can someone who knows or at least remembers more VMS than me refute or elaborate?
That's a reasonable question. My response is that you may not necessarily be right about the efficiency thing. Think of a turbine; the hot gas coming out the tailpipe carries away waste heat - heat that the engine could not transform into mechanical energy. On the other hand, if you fed human bodies and were able to get their heat out really, really well, then you might be onto something better.
Other thoughts have come to mind: the pods ought to look like they're pretty well-insulated; maybe they are - I can't tell. There's the massive-parallelization aspect and the self-replicating aspect. It also occurs to me that maybe the people should be made to swim around or something in their pods.
One conscious but mostly static person, IIRC, is good for about 75 watts. So, we'd all be good for about 450GW.
One self-saving concept is that once we "scorched the sky," the AI system would have run through its options and somehow arrived at what we are shown it eventually does in the movie; its logic and process for doing that may be inscrutable for us because, well, it wouldn't think the way we think. It may have traded away efficiency for longevity, for example.
It also occurs to me that somehow, in some fashion, the great driver behind this human/pod "engine" still must be the sun - unless it also or instead tapped into something like the heat inside the Earth (possibly nuclear-reaction-driven) or the Earth's rotation.
The system may have needed the "coppertops" as a stopgap measure until the sky cleared itself, however, one wonders if the system could have just as easily built a "sky cleaner" as it could have built a Matrix for people to "live" in.
Anyway, that's how I kind of filled in the missing information in my own mind.
I had a Smith-Corona electronic daisy-wheel typewriter that IIRC had an optional box that would give it an RS-232 input. I'm sorry I never sprung for that because it would have been fun to get it working as a printer.
I got an extra daisy-wheel for it that made real neat-looking block characters - even had a slash through the zero, if I recall.
I've seen two techniques used to facilitate pipe bending. One is to fill the pipe with sand first, and the other is to fill it with water and flash-freeze it by dipping it in liquid nitrogen.
You know what? I've heard what this guy means!!
on
Is Louder Better?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've been listening to the VAPOR TRAILS CD in the car, and I thought I was hearing clipping. Knowing that Rush albums are among the most meticulously crafted in the business, it never occured to me that the CD might have been mastered clipped, but that is exactly what seems to have happened.
I don't recall the name of the person or company that did this, but the video for the Emerson Lake and Palmer song "Black Moon" utilized a largish RC helicopter with a film camera that shot the band inside a limestone quarry. In addition to dramatic overhead shots from the swooping copter, it was able to do the job of a dolly or crane.
One problem that does crop up is that the helicopter has to shoot upwind lest its exhaust screws up the shot.
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From Yahoo Jobs:
Software Engineer Cincinnati, OH $40K -$50K
There was a series of geek books called "xxxxxx Unleashed." It reminded me of the movie "Heercules Unchained."
Yes; the scene with Bean and Conrad just after touchdown was all the funnier if you had seen the corresponding scene in the Apollo 11 episode. I encourage seeing the two episodes in quick succession.
Something is seriously wrong here.
I am not meaning to cast aspersions on people who play these games, but I have to ask if the total manhours with the associated damaged health etc. is an appropriate price to pay for a product that will a) sell some number of copies and will then become unavailable except for the used market b) will only run on a device that will itself no longer be sold in stores c) serves no real purpose other than consumers' temporary entertainment. Do the same number of people work as hard for as long to produce a movie? To write the software that can automatically land an Airbus in a rainstorm? To develop a chemo drug that's the first to target a particular kind of cancer?
How badly do we want these games, and at how low a price?
I predict that by 2008, our porn stars will be our pop stars and vice versa. Whole new meaning to the term, but our music videos will have "pop shots."
Yes, I sure noticed that. Babylon 5 very much seemed to be cleaning the Star Trek chronomet^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^clock and I sensed a gut change in the tone and tenor of ST series once B5 got established.
While I'm posting. TV Guide's Cheers and Jeers column usually wouldn't pay much attention to SF shows but it gave a "cheer" to the DS9 episode "In The Pale Moonlight," which I had seen and hed judged to be very, very good television for ANY genre.
Another DS9 episode, the two-parter "Past Tense," had the typical transporter-accident time-travel schtick but what they did with it was interesting and a bit harrowing. It involved the speculated existence of "Sanctuary Districts" in major cities by the year 2020, which, as described in the episode, seem eerily like what George W. Bush's "Opportunity Zones" might well devolve into.
"also, had the people on the planes been aware of what was going to happen I doubt they would have let that happen"
"100-200 pissed off people would OWN 2-3 terrorists with box cutters"
You seem to have forgotten about United Flight 93, on which the passengers did just that.
Once the hijacking got underway on 93, some of the passengers were tipped off by seat-back and cell phone that three other planes had been taken over for suicide attacks and they logically concluded that their flight was due the same fate. While insufficiently armed to take control of the aircraft back from the terrorists, they were sufficiently armed enough (with a food service cart, it has been theorized) to deny the terrorists their mission.
In so doing, the Flight 93 passengers also forever changed the paradigm of hijacking aircraft. The message has gone out that if you try anything, there are going to be passengers and crew who will stop you.
"I'm sure visitors would just LOVE to see a site error message 'I'm sorry, you must download Mozilla 8.0 to view this website.'"
And why the hell not? Actually, I wouldn't use exactly those words - I'd say something like "if this page renders incorrectly, you are probably using a Web browser that does not adhere to established open standards. Please consider one of the browsers below..."
It *is* a fight, and sometimes you have to take a swing.
Actually, neither one of you were quite right. It's my understanding that the entire TAS is *not* canon. The ST universe as it now stands does not have Kzinti or an M'ress or an Arex.
While I'm on the subject, for those who haven't seen TAS before: TAS shows its very low budget - lots of reused scenes (Kirk sitting in captain's chair with lips moving; close up of a character's eye while speaking; Kirk breaking into a run toward POV), same music over and over again, Nichols and Doohan doing innumerable extra voices. However, what you *do* get are the original actors doing voices - which, IMO, makes a HUGE difference and was worth every penny - and the writing. Since TOS had been gone for some time, there was apparently ample opportunity for some people to come up with some solid story work and, as someone else here has said, not being limited visually in the animation genre, some really "spacey" ideas were implemented. Some TOS episodes got what were in effect sequels, including the returns of characters like Cyrano Jones and Harry Mudd (both voiced by the original actors).
If you ever get to see some TAS episodes, consider how "heavy" they would have appeared next to other Saturday morning cartoon/live-action shows of the time!
I actually had a similar idea to that of the parent article but not quite as inhuman.
Because of the way the entire space program has gone, we expect that there ought to be a "right stuff" team of people sent to Mars - picture on the cover of Time, etc. etc. I think that a Mars trip is so much more involved in every respect from a Moon trip that we need to abandon that altogether and instead send just ONE human being with absolutely singlular resolve and capabilities, knowing all the while that he or she may not only just NOT come back, but PROBABLY won't come back.
The mission cost associated with having just one person is immensely larger than sending just the weight of one person in the form of a robot lander or rover. But, sending even just a second person adds tremendously.
I believe that the only reason to send even one person is to get an answer one and only one question: did anything ever live on Mars or does anything live on Mars? All other science is a very distant second. You would only risk one person because a robot's ability to get a definitive answer is limited. It's probably almost impossible to geta firm "no" answer about life on Mars but in order to get a definite "yes," then you've got to send some incredible hardware, and a human being is awesome hardware!
It's taken DAYS for the current rover team just to get the rover off the lander. Every day, every minute, is a huge risk for human or machine; a committed, able person is going to get out there and start digging!
What kind of a person could do this? I have no idea; I have trouble imagining what kind of person could stay cooped up in something of any size by himself for however many months and still be able to perform before, during, and after landing. But I'm sure someone is out there who could do it, even if it meant they only had maybe a one in ten shot at returning.
I consider a planned one-way mission abhorrent and I'd never support it, no matter how much more it costs.
I know that there's no perfect way to maintain color fidelity in any image transmission system, but just for my edification I'd appreciate it if they would release images adjusted best they can to look as the scene would if I were there with my Nikon and a roll of K64.
Actually, the first "video scratch" effect I recall seeing was in the video for Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" and also one for a subsequent tune which I think was named "Hardrock." I saw a lot of Max Headroom (not the TV series that had Matt Frewer as a reporter for a TV network in a dystopian "20 minutes into the" future) but the oddball chat show that (IIRC) ran on Showtime (I still have some of that stuff on VHS) and the time-domain video effects there were pretty much entirely freeze-frame or just plain cut in nature, i.e., freeze then alternate the freeze with the live or just throw in odd cuts.
By the way, I loved this:
Rutger Hauer: "I wonder...about your soul."
Max: "I haven't got any feet; how can I have a sole?"
Guess you had to be there.
In the last entry of his three-part autobiography (GET A LIFE), he explains that his ST:TOS delivery was a combination of influences, one being a play he was in years before that had everyone practically asleep every show. Bill said that he decided to turn everything up a notch to see what would happen. So, "I'd love some coffee" became "I'd LOVE...some COFFEE!" and right away, people were sitting up straight in their seats because the intensity was contagious. As for the...famouspause, he said that that was caused in part by dealing with the mind-numbing dialogue and the sheer volume of it they had to memorize every week, so, when you...hear...oneofthosepauses, you know that that's actually Bill trying to come up with his line.
I highly recommend both the STAR TREK MEMORIES books and GET A LIFE because it gives you an idea of where the actors' heads were at at the time the series was being made. Bill also tells some fascinating stories about things that have happened in more recent years related to the show.
I knew something serious was up when MSNBC's Web Site curled up and died after displaying "BREAKING NEWS". As has happened before, a trip to /. told me what was going on!
I don't know - if a product is defective in a way that causes harm to the user (supposing we define harm as unauthorized disclosure of information or denial of service, among other things), who should a good citizen notify first - the creator or the users? If the goal is to minimize harm - and the number of affected users has to be taken into account - then it would seem that the good citizen would notify the users.
What it MS sat on the info for weeks or months?
Yeah, pretty much! But, it's no different than what record execs do with their own ears.
I would LOVE to run Emerson Lake and Palmer's "Tarkus" through this algorithm. I'm a big fan of ELP, but not even *I* listen to the studio version other than as an exercise. By contrast, the 1973-74 live version practically jumps out of your speakers.
And, you can say what you want about 80s pop music but that was a decade in which people were going out of their way to give songs uniqueness - not so this decade!
Exactly. MS knows full well that plenty of that giveaway money will come right back to them in the end; few school IT types are clueful enough to shun the MS racket.
I tell you one thing - I resent that my daughter's school is trying to hawk something to parents or the population at large EVERY WEEK in order to raise money for basic upkeep and decent (not extravagant) materials when they still mindlessly pursue MS software purchases.
I was having similar thoughts, but I was thinking about Files-11 under VAX/VMS. I worked in VMS for a long time before I got into Linux, but it wasn't until I tried to do some Linux/VMS interoperability and read the docs associated with the Linux DECnet utilities that I appreciated how sophisticated VMS was in that regard. Files-11 had a whole metadata and stored-attributes thing going on, which I assumed was heavily exploited by DEC's database products like DBMS, RDB, and Datatrieve.
Can someone who knows or at least remembers more VMS than me refute or elaborate?
FORTRAN, like BASIC and COBOL, are supposed to be written in all caps. Pascal and Ada are exceptions.
That's a reasonable question. My response is that you may not necessarily be right about the efficiency thing. Think of a turbine; the hot gas coming out the tailpipe carries away waste heat - heat that the engine could not transform into mechanical energy. On the other hand, if you fed human bodies and were able to get their heat out really, really well, then you might be onto something better.
Other thoughts have come to mind: the pods ought to look like they're pretty well-insulated; maybe they are - I can't tell. There's the massive-parallelization aspect and the self-replicating aspect. It also occurs to me that maybe the people should be made to swim around or something in their pods.
One conscious but mostly static person, IIRC, is good for about 75 watts. So, we'd all be good for about 450GW.
One self-saving concept is that once we "scorched the sky," the AI system would have run through its options and somehow arrived at what we are shown it eventually does in the movie; its logic and process for doing that may be inscrutable for us because, well, it wouldn't think the way we think. It may have traded away efficiency for longevity, for example.
It also occurs to me that somehow, in some fashion, the great driver behind this human/pod "engine" still must be the sun - unless it also or instead tapped into something like the heat inside the Earth (possibly nuclear-reaction-driven) or the Earth's rotation.
The system may have needed the "coppertops" as a stopgap measure until the sky cleared itself, however, one wonders if the system could have just as easily built a "sky cleaner" as it could have built a Matrix for people to "live" in.
Anyway, that's how I kind of filled in the missing information in my own mind.
I had a Smith-Corona electronic daisy-wheel typewriter that IIRC had an optional box that would give it an RS-232 input. I'm sorry I never sprung for that because it would have been fun to get it working as a printer.
I got an extra daisy-wheel for it that made real neat-looking block characters - even had a slash through the zero, if I recall.
I've seen two techniques used to facilitate pipe bending. One is to fill the pipe with sand first, and the other is to fill it with water and flash-freeze it by dipping it in liquid nitrogen.
I've been listening to the VAPOR TRAILS CD in the car, and I thought I was hearing clipping. Knowing that Rush albums are among the most meticulously crafted in the business, it never occured to me that the CD might have been mastered clipped, but that is exactly what seems to have happened.
I don't recall the name of the person or company that did this, but the video for the Emerson Lake and Palmer song "Black Moon" utilized a largish RC helicopter with a film camera that shot the band inside a limestone quarry. In addition to dramatic overhead shots from the swooping copter, it was able to do the job of a dolly or crane.
One problem that does crop up is that the helicopter has to shoot upwind lest its exhaust screws up the shot.
Integrated file, print, messaging, directory and management services on a Unix-like operating system?
Too bad no one COUGH-BANYAN-COUGH did this earlier COUGH-VINES!