PS, I forgot - even if you don't like his politics, you have to give him credit for making Slashdot a part of one of his futures - middle of page 33, Chapter 2 in the UK paperback of Cosmonaut Keep if you're browsing in the bookshop.
From my reading of his work, I think he's sympathetic to Trotskyism and friends of his who are Trotskyists, but he has issues with it now. So he tends to give it some credibility in the future he depicts, while advocating libertarianism. Note how sometimes the Trotskyists "go bad" from one character's viewpoint, eg Dave Reid, or they have to face up to losing their idealism when forced to make compromises for the greater good in an imperfect world.
As a Steely Dan fan who bought most everything they did on vinyl and again on CD, I wonder if they know about this and I wonder how much they care one way or the other.
No-one is going to take you seriously until you learn to write properly. Put a disclaimer in your sig file if you have medical issues with language, but I'm guessing you don't. As an English person by your own admission, and one who seems to take pride in that fact, the least you can do is not let the side down by posting such utter drivel.
Luxury. We had to find a lump of granite, lick it flat with our tongues to serve as a blackboard, then smack ourselves in the jaw, spit out our teeth, grind them into chalk with our fingernails, that's when we hadn't sold our fingernails to pay tuition fees, wait 23 hours for the lecturer to finish his shift down the pit, we'd see one letter appear on the blackboard before we fell asleep from sheer exhaustion and WE WERE LUCKY.
Re:Most intense period of planetary exploration ev
on
Mars Express launch today
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Drivel. Why is natural good? Disease is natural, old age is natural, dinosaur killing asteroids are natural, eating your offspring is natural. Any intelligent spacefaring species worth its salt would consider primitive spaceprobes cute and worthy of a pat on the head. As for the "scientists should think" remark, tell me I had a sense of humour failure and you're trolling, because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.
fvwm passed a major milestone today, being around for a decade says something about software. WMs come and go but good ones persist. Ditto for text editors. Will EvilWM persist, will it build a user base, or will it be history inside a year? Jury's out. I await the counterexamples as regards ten years being a measure of goodness...
Good to see a hardware person here. Am I right in saying that if you have a properly clocked finite state machine metastability is only a problem for asynchronous inputs that don't meet setup and hold time? So if you set your initial conditions up and run your hardware finite state machine with no inputs then you've got a nice deterministic universe simulating away in there. Which is no barrier to free will or interesting events happening inside, if I understand Dennett's book "Freedom Evolves" properly. Of course you can only simulate a universe smaller than the number of states in your FSM..mumble... Where's Greg Egan when you need him?
I'm asking for trouble with that subject line, but many thanks and happy birthday to fvwm. I use it because you can bind everything that matters to your idea of sensible keys (using a text based config file instead of a bloated control panel with nested dialogs) and that really helps avoid RSI.
"Law-abiding motorists should have nothing to fear and will be pleased to see untaxed, uninsured and unregistered being caught in the act."
Here we go again. We _should_ have nothing to fear but we _do_ because the technology is open to abuse by a society that is increasingly run on the assumption that it's alright to do something as long as you're not caught and doubly so if you are anonymous and unaccountable.
Stuff speed cameras and stuff this as well. Now if PC Plod actually sees me speeding and comes acroos to my stopped car, at least i have the hope he'll show some common sense, show a bit of discretion when i show him the transplant kidney and the pregnant ladies in the back seat, maybe send me on my way with a telling off, then it's a fair cop.
Why bother sending an astronaut? Just for laughs, why not send a robot? Even dear old UK Beagle type thing as is going to Mars could probably pull a flag down and stick up a Union Jack.
Stuff that. Send a robot filled with fireworks and paint, could draw a Union Jack a mile across and simultaneously flatten Stars and Stripes, erase footprints.
Don't build robots, simulate them
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Human Level AI's Killer Application - Interactive Computer Games, John E Laird and Michael van Lent American Association for Artificial Intelligence AI Magazine Summer 2001 pp 15-25
My summary of the above - the AI in games might not be too hot (some would dispute with the academics about that but let it go), but game environments themselves are complex enough to pose a challenge for state-of-the-art AI researchers.
I heard some of the debate in Parliament on Radio 4 last night (I think, I was sleepy). I recall hearing an MP (member of parliament) suggesting in all seriousness that since faxes are supposed to have a reply address, requiring this for email would help matters. His heart is in the right place, no complaints there, but it shows how worryigly easy it is to pass inappropriate technology legislation if the legislators aren't clued up to understand the subtleties.
Re:My experience with SuSE 8.2 and gcc 3.3
on
Review of SuSE 8.2
·
· Score: 1
I wasn't too happy when rebuilding stuff that had built out of the box under SuSE81 but threw up lots of errors using gcc 3.3 - mjpegtools and
its various libraries and mplayer plugins, but with one exception these were minor problems with casts and initialisations or C++ back compatibility (stick LL or ULL on the end of constant long long values, use strstream not sstream in place of strstream.h). The exception was a piece of assembly code in the jpeg_mmx code that said a label appeared twice, turned out to be over zealous optimisation at -O6, (figured out with help from a friend), fixed by using __attribute__ ((noinline)). There's a typo in the zoran_update script that took a few minutes to fix.
I learned a bit more about fixing code and writing better code. I'm grateful to SuSE for
introducing me to gcc 3.3.
I've done 2 upgrades and 1 died, so I had to do a clean install, but thanks to sensible partitioning my home directory didn't get trashed.
Thing is, I'm not complaining. It just seems petty to expect any Linux distro to be perfect,
and what's the point of having the source if you don't want t get your hands a little dirty?
PS - If anyone knows why ctrl-alt-backspace doesn't let me quit my X server under SuSE82, with or without DontZap set, much appreciated
Look here for CPU info Mine is a 1400 MHz Thunderbird, 133 MHz FSB so I'd expect it to be hot, but your 1600 MHz takes about teh same amount of power, so my heatsinking isn't as efficient. (I don't have the flower cooler, but the cheaper ducted quiet fan thingy - maybe it isn't a Zlaman after all, but I recall it came from QuietPC) OTOH, I do have a 20C to 25C margin of error remaining, so AMD expect this puppy to cook!
I fitted a Zalman heatsink (QuietPC.com) to my Athlon, it came with quite a lot of thermal paste preapplied, so I wondered if I should take some off, since I agree with your point about not using too much. I chickened out and convinced myself I'd done the right thing by not wiping any away on the grounds that as long as the paste could flow, the stupidly high pressure applied when mounting should squeeze most of it out
According to libsensors, it runs at 57C idle (with ambient inside the case at 33C), rising to 70C at full load (encoding stuff). Since the chip dissipates 72W, that doesn't sound too bad, albeit it still seems a bit on the high side. Did I do wrong? I dunno.
Stomping on scientific research, technical innovation and in this case open source, all in the name of fighting terrorism is deeply unhealthy. Well duh, you might say, but my point is it's unhealthy not only for people being stomped on, but those doing the stomping, simply because the competition, whether military, political or economic, will be happily beavering away doing said research, innovating, using said open source, and so on. Why don't those in charge understand that it isn't in _their_ long term interests? I
can hazard a guess, but I'd divert the thread. To prevent a couple of spurious objections, I'm not in favour of declassifying the usual military secrets, but I think things are being taken too far at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad they're getting too old for the girls to notice
Now they get noticed by women ...
tee hee (a hint to any moderators)
I agre about Ken. My candidate for best anarchist SF novel ever is Ursula K LeGuin's The Dispossessed. (Look at my website URL)
his writing is beautiful, where MacLeod's is merely functional.
regolith regolith regolith regolith regolith regolith regolith regolith regolith regolith ???
PS, I forgot - even if you don't like his politics, you have to give him credit for making Slashdot a part of one of his futures - middle of page 33, Chapter 2 in the UK paperback of Cosmonaut Keep if you're browsing in the bookshop.
From my reading of his work, I think he's sympathetic to Trotskyism and friends of his who are Trotskyists, but he has issues with it now. So he tends to give it some credibility in the future he depicts, while advocating libertarianism. Note how sometimes the Trotskyists "go bad" from one character's viewpoint, eg Dave Reid, or they have to face up to losing their idealism when forced to make compromises for the greater good in an imperfect world.
As a Steely Dan fan who bought most everything they did on vinyl and again on CD, I wonder if they know about this and I wonder how much they care one way or the other.
No-one is going to take you seriously until you learn to write properly. Put a disclaimer in your sig file if you have medical issues with language, but I'm guessing you don't. As an English person by your own admission, and one who seems to take pride in that fact, the least you can do is not let the side down by posting such utter drivel.
British journalists - don't get me started.
Last night on BBC2's University Challenge, as reported in the Times 10th June page 3 - Journalist team scored 215, House of Commons team 25.
Luxury. We had to find a lump of granite, lick it flat with our tongues to serve as a blackboard, then smack ourselves in the jaw, spit out our teeth, grind them into chalk with our fingernails, that's when we hadn't sold our fingernails to pay tuition fees, wait 23 hours for the lecturer to finish his shift down the pit, we'd see one letter appear on the blackboard before we fell asleep from sheer exhaustion and WE WERE LUCKY.
Drivel. Why is natural good? Disease is natural, old age is natural, dinosaur killing asteroids are natural, eating your offspring is natural. Any intelligent spacefaring species worth its salt would consider primitive spaceprobes cute and worthy of a pat on the head. As for the "scientists should think" remark, tell me I had a sense of humour failure and you're trolling, because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.
For the same reason the dinosaurs lasted 100+ million years.
fvwm passed a major milestone today, being around for a decade says something about software. WMs come and go but good ones persist. Ditto for text editors. Will EvilWM persist, will it build a user base, or will it be history inside a year? Jury's out. I await the counterexamples as regards ten years being a measure of goodness ...
Good to see a hardware person here. Am I right in saying that if you have a properly clocked finite state machine metastability is only a problem for asynchronous inputs that don't meet setup and hold time? So if you set your initial conditions up and run your hardware finite state machine with no inputs then you've got a nice deterministic universe simulating away in there. Which is no barrier to free will or interesting events happening inside, if I understand Dennett's book "Freedom Evolves" properly. Of course you can only simulate a universe smaller than the number of states in your FSM ..mumble... Where's Greg Egan when you need him?
I'm asking for trouble with that subject line, but many thanks and happy birthday to fvwm. I use it because you can bind everything that matters to your idea of sensible keys (using a text based config file instead of a bloated control panel with nested dialogs) and that really helps avoid RSI.
I know! I like people who appeciate my carefully crafted prose :)
"Law-abiding motorists should have nothing to fear and will be pleased to see untaxed, uninsured and unregistered being caught in the act."
Here we go again. We _should_ have nothing to fear but we _do_ because the technology is open to abuse by a society that is increasingly run on the assumption that it's alright to do something as long as you're not caught and doubly so if you are anonymous and unaccountable.
Stuff speed cameras and stuff this as well. Now if PC Plod actually sees me speeding and comes acroos to my stopped car, at least i have the hope he'll show some common sense, show a bit of discretion when i show him the transplant kidney and the pregnant ladies in the back seat, maybe send me on my way with a telling off, then it's a fair cop.
Using bold like that is as naff as using UPPERCASE for emphasis.
Why bother sending an astronaut? Just for laughs, why not send a robot? Even dear old UK Beagle type thing as is going to Mars could probably pull a flag down and stick up a Union Jack. Stuff that. Send a robot filled with fireworks and paint, could draw a Union Jack a mile across and simultaneously flatten Stars and Stripes, erase footprints.
Human Level AI's Killer Application - Interactive Computer Games, John E Laird and Michael van Lent American Association for Artificial Intelligence AI Magazine Summer 2001 pp 15-25
My summary of the above - the AI in games might not be too hot (some would dispute with the academics about that but let it go), but game environments themselves are complex enough to pose a challenge for state-of-the-art AI researchers.
I heard some of the debate in Parliament on Radio 4 last night (I think, I was sleepy). I recall hearing an MP (member of parliament) suggesting in all seriousness that since faxes are supposed to have a reply address, requiring this for email would help matters. His heart is in the right place, no complaints there, but it shows how worryigly easy it is to pass inappropriate technology legislation if the legislators aren't clued up to understand the subtleties.
I wasn't too happy when rebuilding stuff that had built out of the box under SuSE81 but threw up lots of errors using gcc 3.3 - mjpegtools and its various libraries and mplayer plugins, but with one exception these were minor problems with casts and initialisations or C++ back compatibility (stick LL or ULL on the end of constant long long values, use strstream not sstream in place of strstream.h). The exception was a piece of assembly code in the jpeg_mmx code that said a label appeared twice, turned out to be over zealous optimisation at -O6, (figured out with help from a friend), fixed by using __attribute__ ((noinline)). There's a typo in the zoran_update script that took a few minutes to fix.
I learned a bit more about fixing code and writing better code. I'm grateful to SuSE for introducing me to gcc 3.3.
I've done 2 upgrades and 1 died, so I had to do a clean install, but thanks to sensible partitioning my home directory didn't get trashed.
Thing is, I'm not complaining. It just seems petty to expect any Linux distro to be perfect, and what's the point of having the source if you don't want t get your hands a little dirty?
PS - If anyone knows why ctrl-alt-backspace doesn't let me quit my X server under SuSE82, with or without DontZap set, much appreciated
Look here for CPU info Mine is a 1400 MHz Thunderbird, 133 MHz FSB so I'd expect it to be hot, but your 1600 MHz takes about teh same amount of power, so my heatsinking isn't as efficient. (I don't have the flower cooler, but the cheaper ducted quiet fan thingy - maybe it isn't a Zlaman after all, but I recall it came from QuietPC) OTOH, I do have a 20C to 25C margin of error remaining, so AMD expect this puppy to cook!
I fitted a Zalman heatsink (QuietPC.com) to my Athlon, it came with quite a lot of thermal paste preapplied, so I wondered if I should take some off, since I agree with your point about not using too much. I chickened out and convinced myself I'd done the right thing by not wiping any away on the grounds that as long as the paste could flow, the stupidly high pressure applied when mounting should squeeze most of it out
According to libsensors, it runs at 57C idle (with ambient inside the case at 33C), rising to 70C at full load (encoding stuff). Since the chip dissipates 72W, that doesn't sound too bad, albeit it still seems a bit on the high side. Did I do wrong? I dunno.
Stomping on scientific research, technical innovation and in this case open source, all in the name of fighting terrorism is deeply unhealthy. Well duh, you might say, but my point is it's unhealthy not only for people being stomped on, but those doing the stomping, simply because the competition, whether military, political or economic, will be happily beavering away doing said research, innovating, using said open source, and so on. Why don't those in charge understand that it isn't in _their_ long term interests? I can hazard a guess, but I'd divert the thread. To prevent a couple of spurious objections, I'm not in favour of declassifying the usual military secrets, but I think things are being taken too far at the moment.