If you had even watched the first movie, you'd know that in the Middle-Earth universe, Agent Smith is already here. In fact, he's been around since back when Elendil was still battling Sauron with a sword.
And he plays exactly the same character as he does in the Matrix: "Welcome to Rivendell... Mr Baggins".
Very interesting, and thought provoking. While we're at it, why qwerty and not Dvorak?
QWERTY keyboards were designed for mechanical typewriters - the layout of the keys is designed to minimize the chance of two keys clashing, because on a mechanical typewriter, both keys will get stuck. In the old days, a computer keyboard was an electric typewriter (a tty), which had inherited its design from mechanical typewriters because they were already entrenched.
Despite it being inefficient, and actually designed to slow typists, we're stuck with it - probably until the keyboard itself is superseded as an input device.
Re:12 bit is best for the US patriot
on
Bringing Back the PDP8
·
· Score: 3, Informative
And of course we inherited the whole system. As I recall, the "lb." abbreviation has something to do with the French "livre", and also led to the the "pound sterling" symbol
Which is interesting because the word Sterling comes from starling, which meant "small star" in mediaeval English - it was the symbol on the coin for the unit of currency. So the currency symbol should probably really be a *.
Lb is from "livre" (French for pound) and dollar comes from "taler", an old German currency.
Maybe someone would enlighten the rest of us on why a certain bit size is better than another, and why we currently use 8/16/32/64, instead of 12/24/48/96 ?
This article explains why base-3 systems are actually a lot better than base-2 from a theoretical perspective, but that it was much easier to design hardware in base-2, so base-2 became the de-facto standard. Nowadays we could probably fab base-3 hardware fairly easily, but it's not worth doing so with all the base-2 hardware already in existance.
As for 16/32/64 instead of 12/24/48, it's just one of those things. IBM's earlier AS/400s ran on 48-bit processors (now they are 64-bit). 96-bit floating point is an IEEE standard. And do you know why file permissions in Unix are rwxrwxrwx? It's because they borrowed that idea from another operating system designed for 9-bit bytes and a 36-bit processor.
The arsonist is an employee of the University, which must come as quite a shock to those involved. The University released a short statement to the press
Any halfway secure corporate intranet should already prevent Windows messages to be passed in from the outside.
For those that don't know, the way to configure a firewall is to first block everything then selectively open only the ports that you need inbound. You can run a fully functional network with no inbound ports open at all, for example if you retrieve mail from your ISP you are initiating the connection. If network administrators are even only half competent, Windows Messaging will therfore be blocked by default.
does this mean they are getting away from drive letters? what a novel concept.
The NT kernel doesn't bother with drive letters, you can see during bootup if you're watching it load drivers that it sees \HardDisk0\Partition1\Blah\Blah. And if you use DFS, it can happily mount a remote share anywhere on your filesystem. The drive letters are an illusion maintained by the user interface, nothing more.
You know, developers sometimes need to compile stuff. It's a pain to code if half of your time is spent building the binaries for testing.
So long as you aren't doing make clean between builds and you have your code neatly split into many.c and.h files (you should be doing this to make version control easier anyway) it's really not that arduous, so long as you have plenty of memory and fast disks.
I still do useful work on a 33Mhz 68040 with 32M running NeXTStep 3.3. Nothing like knowing a compile is quite an expensive operation to sharpen the mind rather than taking the "shotgun debugging" approach.
Some of the recording industry's biggest stars, such as Madonna, Mick Jagger and Eminem, have joined coalitions to combat the wholesale theft of music.
So does that means that the U.S. Propaganda Department have more power than the U.S. Naval Academy ?
On US soil, probably yes. It's remarkably difficult legally to get the armed forces to do anything within the borders of the US, which is why the National Guard, not the regular Army or Marines are called out to deal with situations like homeland security or disaster relief. It's different in different Western countries (for example in the UK we have the regular Army manning the fire service while the Labour Party have one of their traditional tussles with the unions). If the lobbyists tried to board a US Navy ship in international waters, it would be an entirely different matter:-)
So let me see if I'm getting this, your saying present day nanotech is small, fast, and efficient, but in the future nanotech will be big, bloated, slow, and propietary? Is this a prediction microsoft will go into nanotech also? Will my color changing nanotech t-shirt need to reboot 5 times a day?
No, what I mean is that the barriers to entry to any new technology tend to fall with time. In the 1950s there were few computers, they were very difficult to use, and only the brightest and best even had access to them, let alone the skill to program them. Now you can buy "teach yourself VB in 24 hrs" and even a novice can create useful programs.
Eventually you will be able to buy something analogous to "visual nanotech" - boot it up, click through the wizards, and it will customize your generic nano for the task at hand. Perhaps it will have a safety mechanism to prevent people from creating malicious nanobots, but some bright spark on/. will quickly apply a DeCSS equivalent so anyone can build nano to do whatever they want.
situations like this are why God invented attractive woman, italian sports cars, and the Grand Canyon. For the love of everything good and nice to stare at, please put any of these on your wall instead of a cartoon penguin or devil thingie.
Agreed. Have a look around here, find something you like, then get it framed and delivered. Some people take the whole "geek pride" thing way too far.
SQL, one of the original client-server protocols is alive and well... buzzwords change, but the concept (shipping less data across a network) will always have value.
SQL is a language, not a protocol. You are probably thinking of SQL*Net and TNS, both of which happily run on TCP/IP networks (and AppleTalk and IPX/SPX, and DECnet and plenty more).
...unless Visa (credit card corp) is planning on going into the travel visa business with a one-card system (all your info is based on the numbered tracks on your card, which reference a central database). Even then, there is no case at current until Visa owns the travel visa process.
I don't know much about Visa (I use American Express) but I do know that Amex are a massive travel agency in addition to their charge card business, one of the largest in the world. Diners Club are also heavily involved with the travel industry. It depends on what travel related services Visa provide their customers. If they (Visa) do, then they have a case that eVisa were infringing.
While R&D based on pure intellectual curiosity is wonderful, it also seems to me that one can satisfy curiosity AND work in a field like biochemistry that has a much larger chance to benefit society.
Where would doctors be today without the engineers who created their fine steel surgical instruments, without the physicists who designed and built x-ray machines and CAT scanners, without the chemists who created disinfectants and sutures and so on? And civil engineers to build hospitals and oilmen to power them?
You've got to look at the big picture. The branches of modern science and engineering are so intertwined that one could not exist without the others. Don't assume that the "public face" of the system, like your doctor, is all there is to the system.
I'd fund only stuff that is likely to eventually make a profit.
The problem is that it's very difficult to tell in advance what will. Consider the laser; at the time it was invented it was mocked as being a solution in search of a problem. Now we use them in communication, data storage, surveying, surgery, entertainment and weapons. So you have to fund a little of every sort of research, and one success pays for dozens of projects that eventually go nowhere.
It's the same model as used by venture capitalists and record company executives. Fund a little of everything, then all you need is for one in ten to make it big.
I'd say just go with what the Science Advisor says, unless we need something specific like Iron Working for Swordsmen or Democracy for the trade bonus.
Purely supposition on my part, but do you suppose that Bush isn't too keen on funding the Department of Energy to come up with a viable alternative to fossil fuels? There's a lot of physics talent working on fusion-related research, but the apparatus needed for experimentation isn't cheap.
DoE research is national security research... the problem with the Middle East will continue so long as the West is dependent on it for oil, and hence props up its various governments with oil money and military intervention. We need a viable alternative, ASAP.
The real question is, will Bush place short-term profit for the oil industry ahead of long-term strategic security for the American people? He's very popular in the polls right now, but the real judges are the historians 30 years from now.
Would that be the criminals with multi-billion dollar research AND development laboratories? Right. This is exactly the view shared by the non-tech world, and it shows a lack of understanding of what nanotech IS (no offense). I can't just go to the garage, make some nanotech, and kill someone with it.
I understand your point, but it's not so long ago that people said the same things about terrorists and nukes/nerve gas. In 50-100 years time in all likelihood assembling your own nanotech will be about as easy as assembling your own furniture - it's simply a matter of having the tools.
Think about present-day nanotech as assembly language on a mainframe in the 1950s and future nanotech as Visual Basic on a P4 laptop.
Re:Plot, and a little more.
on
War of Honor
·
· Score: 2
Nope. She reminds me of her too. In fact, Weber mentioned a possible mini-series and even though the actress who plays Ivanova isn't 6'2" and half asian, I still think she'd handle it well. She's fairly tall, and has the right, thin yet strong look. And her complexion is mostly right...
They should get the actress who played Dr Aki Ross in Final Fantasy, she's a babe.
Only kidding. But Michelle Yeoh would be a natural for this role.
Slashdot Mirror
If you had even watched the first movie, you'd know that in the Middle-Earth universe, Agent Smith is already here. In fact, he's been around since back when Elendil was still battling Sauron with a sword.
And he plays exactly the same character as he does in the Matrix: "Welcome to Rivendell... Mr Baggins".
Very interesting, and thought provoking. While we're at it, why qwerty and not Dvorak?
QWERTY keyboards were designed for mechanical typewriters - the layout of the keys is designed to minimize the chance of two keys clashing, because on a mechanical typewriter, both keys will get stuck. In the old days, a computer keyboard was an electric typewriter (a tty), which had inherited its design from mechanical typewriters because they were already entrenched.
Despite it being inefficient, and actually designed to slow typists, we're stuck with it - probably until the keyboard itself is superseded as an input device.
And of course we inherited the whole system. As I recall, the "lb." abbreviation has something to do with the French "livre", and also led to the the "pound sterling" symbol
Which is interesting because the word Sterling comes from starling, which meant "small star" in mediaeval English - it was the symbol on the coin for the unit of currency. So the currency symbol should probably really be a *.
Lb is from "livre" (French for pound) and dollar comes from "taler", an old German currency.
Maybe someone would enlighten the rest of us on why a certain bit size is better than another, and why we currently use 8/16/32/64, instead of 12/24/48/96 ?
This article explains why base-3 systems are actually a lot better than base-2 from a theoretical perspective, but that it was much easier to design hardware in base-2, so base-2 became the de-facto standard. Nowadays we could probably fab base-3 hardware fairly easily, but it's not worth doing so with all the base-2 hardware already in existance.
As for 16/32/64 instead of 12/24/48, it's just one of those things. IBM's earlier AS/400s ran on 48-bit processors (now they are 64-bit). 96-bit floating point is an IEEE standard. And do you know why file permissions in Unix are rwxrwxrwx? It's because they borrowed that idea from another operating system designed for 9-bit bytes and a 36-bit processor.
The arsonist is an employee of the University, which must come as quite a shock to those involved. The University released a short statement to the press
English text here.
automatic boxing/unboxing of primitive types [e.g., an int can be cast to an object]
Not only that but a common C mistake won't compile in C#:
if (a = 5) {
doStuff();
}
Any halfway secure corporate intranet should already prevent Windows messages to be passed in from the outside.
For those that don't know, the way to configure a firewall is to first block everything then selectively open only the ports that you need inbound. You can run a fully functional network with no inbound ports open at all, for example if you retrieve mail from your ISP you are initiating the connection. If network administrators are even only half competent, Windows Messaging will therfore be blocked by default.
Step 1) Buy this.
Step 2) Put lunar lander sticker on lens.
Step 3) Profit!!!
There is a community of Windows enthusiasts? Who are these sick bastards??!! ;-)
:-)
They hang out on some web site called c-colon-backslash
does this mean they are getting away from drive letters? what a novel concept.
The NT kernel doesn't bother with drive letters, you can see during bootup if you're watching it load drivers that it sees \HardDisk0\Partition1\Blah\Blah. And if you use DFS, it can happily mount a remote share anywhere on your filesystem. The drive letters are an illusion maintained by the user interface, nothing more.
You know, developers sometimes need to compile stuff. It's a pain to code if half of your time is spent building the binaries for testing.
.c and .h files (you should be doing this to make version control easier anyway) it's really not that arduous, so long as you have plenty of memory and fast disks.
So long as you aren't doing make clean between builds and you have your code neatly split into many
I still do useful work on a 33Mhz 68040 with 32M running NeXTStep 3.3. Nothing like knowing a compile is quite an expensive operation to sharpen the mind rather than taking the "shotgun debugging" approach.
I doubt they'll ever get a version of NT working from read-only media.
Isn't that what the X-box does?
Some of the recording industry's biggest stars, such as Madonna, Mick Jagger and Eminem, have joined coalitions to combat the wholesale theft of music.
Eminem who says download the audio on MP3 you mean?
So does that means that the U.S. Propaganda Department have more power than the U.S. Naval Academy ?
:-)
On US soil, probably yes. It's remarkably difficult legally to get the armed forces to do anything within the borders of the US, which is why the National Guard, not the regular Army or Marines are called out to deal with situations like homeland security or disaster relief. It's different in different Western countries (for example in the UK we have the regular Army manning the fire service while the Labour Party have one of their traditional tussles with the unions). If the lobbyists tried to board a US Navy ship in international waters, it would be an entirely different matter
I bet Fresco will be finished before Xrender has image transformations, true hardware alpha channel, etc.
Why bother with XRender when there's the proven GLX?
So let me see if I'm getting this, your saying present day nanotech is small, fast, and efficient, but in the future nanotech will be big, bloated, slow, and propietary? Is this a prediction microsoft will go into nanotech also? Will my color changing nanotech t-shirt need to reboot 5 times a day?
/. will quickly apply a DeCSS equivalent so anyone can build nano to do whatever they want.
No, what I mean is that the barriers to entry to any new technology tend to fall with time. In the 1950s there were few computers, they were very difficult to use, and only the brightest and best even had access to them, let alone the skill to program them. Now you can buy "teach yourself VB in 24 hrs" and even a novice can create useful programs.
Eventually you will be able to buy something analogous to "visual nanotech" - boot it up, click through the wizards, and it will customize your generic nano for the task at hand. Perhaps it will have a safety mechanism to prevent people from creating malicious nanobots, but some bright spark on
Genesi has been demonstrating prototypes all around Europe, most recently in Poland, in the USA, and is even making noise about Moscow.
:-)
Everytime they invent a new technology the first thing they try to do with it is invade Poland and Russia!
situations like this are why God invented attractive woman, italian sports cars, and the Grand Canyon. For the love of everything good and nice to stare at, please put any of these on your wall instead of a cartoon penguin or devil thingie.
Agreed. Have a look around here, find something you like, then get it framed and delivered. Some people take the whole "geek pride" thing way too far.
SQL, one of the original client-server protocols is alive and well... buzzwords change, but the concept (shipping less data across a network) will always have value.
SQL is a language, not a protocol. You are probably thinking of SQL*Net and TNS, both of which happily run on TCP/IP networks (and AppleTalk and IPX/SPX, and DECnet and plenty more).
...unless Visa (credit card corp) is planning on going into the travel visa business with a one-card system (all your info is based on the numbered tracks on your card, which reference a central database). Even then, there is no case at current until Visa owns the travel visa process.
I don't know much about Visa (I use American Express) but I do know that Amex are a massive travel agency in addition to their charge card business, one of the largest in the world. Diners Club are also heavily involved with the travel industry. It depends on what travel related services Visa provide their customers. If they (Visa) do, then they have a case that eVisa were infringing.
While R&D based on pure intellectual curiosity is wonderful, it also seems to me that one can satisfy curiosity AND work in a field like biochemistry that has a much larger chance to benefit society.
Where would doctors be today without the engineers who created their fine steel surgical instruments, without the physicists who designed and built x-ray machines and CAT scanners, without the chemists who created disinfectants and sutures and so on? And civil engineers to build hospitals and oilmen to power them?
You've got to look at the big picture. The branches of modern science and engineering are so intertwined that one could not exist without the others. Don't assume that the "public face" of the system, like your doctor, is all there is to the system.
I'd fund only stuff that is likely to eventually make a profit.
The problem is that it's very difficult to tell in advance what will. Consider the laser; at the time it was invented it was mocked as being a solution in search of a problem. Now we use them in communication, data storage, surveying, surgery, entertainment and weapons. So you have to fund a little of every sort of research, and one success pays for dozens of projects that eventually go nowhere.
It's the same model as used by venture capitalists and record company executives. Fund a little of everything, then all you need is for one in ten to make it big.
I'd say just go with what the Science Advisor says, unless we need something specific like Iron Working for Swordsmen or Democracy for the trade bonus.
Purely supposition on my part, but do you suppose that Bush isn't too keen on funding the Department of Energy to come up with a viable alternative to fossil fuels? There's a lot of physics talent working on fusion-related research, but the apparatus needed for experimentation isn't cheap.
DoE research is national security research... the problem with the Middle East will continue so long as the West is dependent on it for oil, and hence props up its various governments with oil money and military intervention. We need a viable alternative, ASAP.
The real question is, will Bush place short-term profit for the oil industry ahead of long-term strategic security for the American people? He's very popular in the polls right now, but the real judges are the historians 30 years from now.
Would that be the criminals with multi-billion dollar research AND development laboratories? Right. This is exactly the view shared by the non-tech world, and it shows a lack of understanding of what nanotech IS (no offense). I can't just go to the garage, make some nanotech, and kill someone with it.
I understand your point, but it's not so long ago that people said the same things about terrorists and nukes/nerve gas. In 50-100 years time in all likelihood assembling your own nanotech will be about as easy as assembling your own furniture - it's simply a matter of having the tools.
Think about present-day nanotech as assembly language on a mainframe in the 1950s and future nanotech as Visual Basic on a P4 laptop.
Nope. She reminds me of her too. In fact, Weber mentioned a possible mini-series and even though the actress who plays Ivanova isn't 6'2" and half asian, I still think she'd handle it well. She's fairly tall, and has the right, thin yet strong look. And her complexion is mostly right...
They should get the actress who played Dr Aki Ross in Final Fantasy, she's a babe.
Only kidding. But Michelle Yeoh would be a natural for this role.