The graphics system on the Amiga was really pretty neat. What was really neat was how the whole GELS API and the RastPort system mapped really nicely to the hardware. It was a really, really, nice graphical environment to develop in, even with my Lattice C on a 10mb hard drive.
The difference is that EGA/VGA you had to poll the card, but on the Amiga and even the Atari, you actually got notified by an interrupt. When you got the interrupt, you could be reasonably assured that there was no latency between the interrupt trigger and the event as interrupts ran at such a mega priority. And on those systems too you could also specify the memory window versus the display window and also scroll by adjusting the memory pointers as well as some shift registers. It just looked really, really good.
There is a lot of those who use intelligent design to say silly things like radioactive dating doesn't matter and that the earth is actually 5000 years old as opposed to nearly 5 billion. It's one thing to take the deist view that says God designed things and set things in motion, which I believe. It is another to say that God made it all look this way but it is really not. Why would God lie?
Back in the day, on the Atari and Amiga, you could actually do stuff in that interrupt time. The most common thing was to swap display buffers for double buffering. This made for rock steady hardware scrolling, an effect that still lacks somewhat in today's PC's, believe it or not, as there was absolutely no tearing of the display whatsover. Just a beautiful effect.
I can test Einstein's relativity by measuring the gravitational disruption of a beam of a light. Einstein will predict for me exactly how much that beam should deflect.
There is a mathematical equation, a measurable prediction given initial inputs, a means of measuring the outputs of that system. Evolution has none of those characteristics.
Does Evolution make any predictions that we can test in isolation? Can I put a species on an island with some exact constraints and predict -when- the new species will arrive? Does it make any predictions about human evolution? We've sequenced the Humane Genome and so it ought to be reasonable to calculate down the road which links in our molecules are most likely to disrupt and what sort of evolution we can have and when. Or, for any other species for that matter.
Evolution is certainly more reasonable than creationism, but it is still pretty crappy as a science and people who defend it should not be misrepresenting it as something that it is not.
Everyone keeps going on about how great SVG is, and,you know, if it wasn't a pain in the rear, maybe it would be more adopted by now. For graphics, most people are going to wind up using either Flash or whatever MS sneaks into IE8 as part of Longhorn.
Come on. How can you call this concept even novel. Too much data to load from a slow process, so load it up front and cache it. I don't think you could call yourself a geek if you haven't bumbled into that one.
Intelligence does not contradict the Bible, far from it. The best characters in the Bible are those that used moxie and intelligence to accomplish his or her goals through the will of God. In fact, if anything, the Bible encourages intelligent people to press on in the face of ignorance.
Noah knew about the Flood and built the boat despite being mocked by his ignorant neighbors, who all died.
David slew Goliath with a sling, when Goliath should have kicked his rear.
Solomon was famous for his wisdom more than his military prowess. He wrote psalms, he made a beautiful temple. He did that cut the baby in half trick to get the true mother to reveal herself.
Christ wasn't even concerned with brute force at all. His whole life was an example of sticking to your guns even if you know you are going to get crucified. In a sense, our Martin Luther King Jrs, etc, followed very literally in his footsteps - stick to what is right, even if they kill you for it.
Evolution should not be placed in the same category of theory as hard physics, say, relativity. It is a model that cannot be tested, whereas hard physics, such as the standard model, can.
That said, any levels of inference drawn from "creationism" is far less valid than evolution.
The bible contradicts itself. For example, how did Cain, after killing his brother, ostensibly the first children of humanity, go and live in another city?
Inference rules are more of a stretch in evolution. Creationists criticize sedimentary dating while at the same time accepting a "lineage" based on the ages of biblical descendants. Creationists ignore radioactive dating.
How does the other side know what bits it is supposed to get?
If sender X can send any message, then how does recipient Y know that the message should have contained some set number of 1s and 0s.
You could not, as a Spy S, intercept X's message, examine it, then resend it, without Y knowing that the message changed. But could you not still completely block X's message, then, simply send another one with the same "pattern" that Y knows about?
Instead of spending billions of dollars on hardware to try and eliminate the risk of manned space flight, bring back go fever and pay astronauts ten million dollars a flight. Yes, safety might even drop - you might to get a 1-50 margin. But, astronauts would be paid for work commensurate with the risk. Accept that some astronauts can and will be killed and pay them to take that risk. Instead of trying to engineer to prevent every conceivable disaster - there are just too many, engineer to the best you can to make a deadline. Then, fix only the problem that caused the accident, when it happens, and move on from there.
If we actually did the bad thing and used selectors rather than the flat memory model, it would compromise performance, but it would be a lot more secure. You could, for example, put code for each module in an application in its own segment and then use only special segments to facilitate communication between application and libraries.
The lunar surface has a huge amount of oxygen in it. Spend a few hundred million to get O2 out of the surface and you are in business.
Biosphere failed because the people involved were all a bunch of arrogant scientists and academics, iconoclasts that could not get along. If you want to put lots of people into space, you have to do it military style, run things like an 18th century warship. They would be out at sea for years and order was kept by a rigid social hierarchy. There are no worker's rights in space exploration!
Ok, some quotes from the Koran, which I incidentally read.
"Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage"
"Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate."
"Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient"
Look, the Koran is an old book and riddled with as much contradiction and cruelty as the Christian bible. But obviously most Muslims are just people , and can interpret the goodness within it for themselves and arrive at a just society. God imbues every Muslim with a soul, not just the Mullahs, so, in light of that, why should not God decide that only a special set of "mullahs" should hold political power? Why should the interpretation of the Koran by a bad Mullah be better than the good works of a good Muslim citizen? Who is closer to the divine, the Ayatollah Khoemini that ordered so many people killed that opposed Islam, or, the westernized Islamic student that might cure cancer and save millions of muslims? Who would have more of a right to lead a nation? A man that has memorized the Koran or an economist?
Look, if the people of the middle east democratically elect a fundamentalist Islamic state and decide for themselves that they would rather not have as much technical or economic progress in order to satisfy their spiritual goals, that's fine. Just don't go blaming the West for making that decision, that's all!
And again, I add that our Christian religious leaders are money grubbing frauds for the most part, as are the leaders of most religious and political groups. It's just human nature - if you can invent the rules of the book of god, why not use that power to cash in?
You want an end to western interference? I'm all about that!
I cannot wait for the day that we in the west perfect nuclear fusion, adopt nuclear power, switch to biodiesel and fuel cell cars and pull the plug on the whole billion dollar lifeline we prop your feable caliphates up with.
Then, Islamic states will have absolutely nothing to offer and they will be begging for the West to continue its interference of a hundreds of billions of dollars that a year it so ungratefully spits on today.
For a merchant people, Islamic nations have certainly shown no appreciation for the business of the west, have had the -worst- customer service in the history of humanity. We in the West have invested billions of dollars into the middle east and at every turn we have been spit on for it.
If the governments of Islam fundamentalists are so great for the people, as you say, then why not dispense with the check that the mullahs have on them, and let the people elect leaders with real power and not puppets that can be undermined by clerics on a whim. Let the people choose their religion themselves, and not be compelled by any law or force of arms to do that.
Face it, the reforms you speak of in Iran are a futile farce. Your mullahs are all money grubbing frauds, in Iran, in the Taliban you love so much, even in Iraq. For all this talk of spiritual bliss and living completely before god, these holy men of yours show a surprisingly secular willingness to gather all power and money for themselves, and a supreme willingness to martyr everyone else but themselves.
But I'm thinking that if you could put one of these accelerators on top of a kill vehicle, it could sense, via neutron bombardment, which radar or infrared target was the real thing and which was the decoy.
I should also mention that my criticisms are equally valid for Christianity to. They are universal. For example, christian fundamentalist efforts to ban teaching of evolution, efforts to reject the results of carbon or radioisotope dating, or to control cultural values through the government, are just as damaging to American democracy as Islamic clerics are to the prospect of democracy in Iran.
I asked a cleric point blank, on the pro-islam web site, why there was no separation of church and state in Islam, and he said flat out it that it was because no seperation was necessary as Islam was a practical religion and the Koran held all the truths. This is the same kind of answer that we get from our own fundamentalists here and the results of that are generally non-conducive to science.
I've long argued that a democracy in the middle east is possible and have supported President Bush's efforts to bring Democracy to Iraq. On the other hand, those who are against the idea of democracy in the middle east generally believe that arabs are "animals" and are incapable of forming an elected government. I reject that position and I say, yes, I do think that arabs can build a democracy, but I say that knowing that those arabs working to do so are bringing with them a new kind of islam that addresses some of the criticisms that I have mentioned.
IF the experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan succeed, then yes, we can look back and view it as a turning point where Islamic states began to move towards modern times. But, barring those two nations, there is not much movement. There is no free press in Saudi Arabia or Iran. There is no wide open internet in Iran.
On the plus side, F-22 is now officially in full rate production with operational status in December 2005.
It certainly seems that the military since the 1990s has adopted the same strategies for procurement that gave the French their excellent aircraft carrier:-).
The F-22 had some serious scope creep, budget changes, everything. But all of our defense systems it seems as of late have been really bad or even failures. The Osprey is bad, the Navy DD(X) shows how to build destroyers as cheap as aircraft carriers and the next carrier is going to cost 12 billion dollars. The Comanche program that was cancelled was billions of dollars on a helicopter. And the Crusader, what was that all about?
Sounds like this is essentially a scanner that will bombard a target with neutrons and then eventually analyze the ones that bounce back. If so, one of these babies on top of a missile makes it possible, theoretically, to discriminate between balloons and real warheads.
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The graphics system on the Amiga was really pretty neat. What was really neat was how the whole GELS API and the RastPort system mapped really nicely to the hardware. It was a really, really, nice graphical environment to develop in, even with my Lattice C on a 10mb hard drive.
The difference is that EGA/VGA you had to poll the card, but on the Amiga and even the Atari, you actually got notified by an interrupt. When you got the interrupt, you could be reasonably assured that there was no latency between the interrupt trigger and the event as interrupts ran at such a mega priority. And on those systems too you could also specify the memory window versus the display window and also scroll by adjusting the memory pointers as well as some shift registers. It just looked really, really good.
There is a lot of those who use intelligent design to say silly things like radioactive dating doesn't matter and that the earth is actually 5000 years old as opposed to nearly 5 billion. It's one thing to take the deist view that says God designed things and set things in motion, which I believe. It is another to say that God made it all look this way but it is really not. Why would God lie?
Back in the day, on the Atari and Amiga, you could actually do stuff in that interrupt time. The most common thing was to swap display buffers for double buffering. This made for rock steady hardware scrolling, an effect that still lacks somewhat in today's PC's, believe it or not, as there was absolutely no tearing of the display whatsover. Just a beautiful effect.
I can test Einstein's relativity by measuring the gravitational disruption of a beam of a light. Einstein will predict for me exactly how much that beam should deflect.
There is a mathematical equation, a measurable prediction given initial inputs, a means of measuring the outputs of that system. Evolution has none of those characteristics.
Does Evolution make any predictions that we can test in isolation? Can I put a species on an island with some exact constraints and predict -when- the new species will arrive? Does it make any predictions about human evolution? We've sequenced the Humane Genome and so it ought to be reasonable to calculate down the road which links in our molecules are most likely to disrupt and what sort of evolution we can have and when. Or, for any other species for that matter.
Evolution is certainly more reasonable than creationism, but it is still pretty crappy as a science and people who defend it should not be misrepresenting it as something that it is not.
Everyone keeps going on about how great SVG is, and,you know, if it wasn't a pain in the rear, maybe it would be more adopted by now. For graphics, most people are going to wind up using either Flash or whatever MS sneaks into IE8 as part of Longhorn.
Come on. How can you call this concept even novel. Too much data to load from a slow process, so load it up front and cache it. I don't think you could call yourself a geek if you haven't bumbled into that one.
Come on guys, you can do better than this!
Intelligence does not contradict the Bible, far from it. The best characters in the Bible are those that used moxie and intelligence to accomplish his or her goals through the will of God. In fact, if anything, the Bible encourages intelligent people to press on in the face of ignorance.
Noah knew about the Flood and built the boat despite being mocked by his ignorant neighbors, who all died.
David slew Goliath with a sling, when Goliath should have kicked his rear.
Solomon was famous for his wisdom more than his military prowess. He wrote psalms, he made a beautiful temple. He did that cut the baby in half trick to get the true mother to reveal herself.
Christ wasn't even concerned with brute force at all. His whole life was an example of sticking to your guns even if you know you are going to get crucified. In a sense, our Martin Luther King Jrs, etc, followed very literally in his footsteps - stick to what is right, even if they kill you for it.
Evolution should not be placed in the same category of theory as hard physics, say, relativity. It is a model that cannot be tested, whereas hard physics, such as the standard model, can.
That said, any levels of inference drawn from "creationism" is far less valid than evolution.
The bible contradicts itself. For example, how did Cain, after killing his brother, ostensibly the first children of humanity, go and live in another city?
Inference rules are more of a stretch in evolution. Creationists criticize sedimentary dating while at the same time accepting a "lineage" based on the ages of biblical descendants. Creationists ignore radioactive dating.
How does the other side know what bits it is supposed to get?
If sender X can send any message, then how does recipient Y know that the message should have contained some set number of 1s and 0s.
You could not, as a Spy S, intercept X's message, examine it, then resend it, without Y knowing that the message changed. But could you not still completely block X's message, then, simply send another one with the same "pattern" that Y knows about?
Instead of spending billions of dollars on hardware to try and eliminate the risk of manned space flight, bring back go fever and pay astronauts ten million dollars a flight. Yes, safety might even drop - you might to get a 1-50 margin. But, astronauts would be paid for work commensurate with the risk. Accept that some astronauts can and will be killed and pay them to take that risk. Instead of trying to engineer to prevent every conceivable disaster - there are just too many, engineer to the best you can to make a deadline. Then, fix only the problem that caused the accident, when it happens, and move on from there.
If we actually did the bad thing and used selectors rather than the flat memory model, it would compromise performance, but it would be a lot more secure. You could, for example, put code for each module in an application in its own segment and then use only special segments to facilitate communication between application and libraries.
The lunar surface has a huge amount of oxygen in it. Spend a few hundred million to get O2 out of the surface and you are in business.
Biosphere failed because the people involved were all a bunch of arrogant scientists and academics, iconoclasts that could not get along. If you want to put lots of people into space, you have to do it military style, run things like an 18th century warship. They would be out at sea for years and order was kept by a rigid social hierarchy. There are no worker's rights in space exploration!
:-)
Keep passing taxes like that Republicans will be winning elections in Europe!
Ok, some quotes from the Koran, which I incidentally read.
"Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage"
"Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate."
"Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient"
Look, the Koran is an old book and riddled with as much contradiction and cruelty as the Christian bible. But obviously most Muslims are just people , and can interpret the goodness within it for themselves and arrive at a just society. God imbues every Muslim with a soul, not just the Mullahs, so, in light of that, why should not God decide that only a special set of "mullahs" should hold political power? Why should the interpretation of the Koran by a bad Mullah be better than the good works of a good Muslim citizen? Who is closer to the divine, the Ayatollah Khoemini that ordered so many people killed that opposed Islam, or, the westernized Islamic student that might cure cancer and save millions of muslims? Who would have more of a right to lead a nation? A man that has memorized the Koran or an economist?
Look, if the people of the middle east democratically elect a fundamentalist Islamic state and decide for themselves that they would rather not have as much technical or economic progress in order to satisfy their spiritual goals, that's fine. Just don't go blaming the West for making that decision, that's all!
And again, I add that our Christian religious leaders are money grubbing frauds for the most part, as are the leaders of most religious and political groups. It's just human nature - if you can invent the rules of the book of god, why not use that power to cash in?
You want an end to western interference? I'm all about that!
I cannot wait for the day that we in the west perfect nuclear fusion, adopt nuclear power, switch to biodiesel and fuel cell cars and pull the plug on the whole billion dollar lifeline we prop your feable caliphates up with.
Then, Islamic states will have absolutely nothing to offer and they will be begging for the West to continue its interference of a hundreds of billions of dollars that a year it so ungratefully spits on today.
For a merchant people, Islamic nations have certainly shown no appreciation for the business of the west, have had the -worst- customer service in the history of humanity. We in the West have invested billions of dollars into the middle east and at every turn we have been spit on for it.
If the governments of Islam fundamentalists are so great for the people, as you say, then why not dispense with the check that the mullahs have on them, and let the people elect leaders with real power and not puppets that can be undermined by clerics on a whim. Let the people choose their religion themselves, and not be compelled by any law or force of arms to do that.
Face it, the reforms you speak of in Iran are a futile farce. Your mullahs are all money grubbing frauds, in Iran, in the Taliban you love so much, even in Iraq. For all this talk of spiritual bliss and living completely before god, these holy men of yours show a surprisingly secular willingness to gather all power and money for themselves, and a supreme willingness to martyr everyone else but themselves.
I'm already planning on building a Fusor with him when he gets older. So, if he ain't college material, he'd still make a pretty good terrorist.
My wife is due on the same day ROTS is released. Should I be in the delivery room, or should I partake of Star Wars? Boy I just don't know! :-)
But I'm thinking that if you could put one of these accelerators on top of a kill vehicle, it could sense, via neutron bombardment, which radar or infrared target was the real thing and which was the decoy.
I should also mention that my criticisms are equally valid for Christianity to. They are universal. For example, christian fundamentalist efforts to ban teaching of evolution, efforts to reject the results of carbon or radioisotope dating, or to control cultural values through the government, are just as damaging to American democracy as Islamic clerics are to the prospect of democracy in Iran.
I asked a cleric point blank, on the pro-islam web site, why there was no separation of church and state in Islam, and he said flat out it that it was because no seperation was necessary as Islam was a practical religion and the Koran held all the truths. This is the same kind of answer that we get from our own fundamentalists here and the results of that are generally non-conducive to science.
I've long argued that a democracy in the middle east is possible and have supported President Bush's efforts to bring Democracy to Iraq. On the other hand, those who are against the idea of democracy in the middle east generally believe that arabs are "animals" and are incapable of forming an elected government. I reject that position and I say, yes, I do think that arabs can build a democracy, but I say that knowing that those arabs working to do so are bringing with them a new kind of islam that addresses some of the criticisms that I have mentioned.
IF the experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan succeed, then yes, we can look back and view it as a turning point where Islamic states began to move towards modern times. But, barring those two nations, there is not much movement. There is no free press in Saudi Arabia or Iran. There is no wide open internet in Iran.
Yeah but when you are talking about particles with a halflife of millions of years, who cares how much it is spread out.
On the plus side, F-22 is now officially in full rate production with operational status in December 2005.
:-).
It certainly seems that the military since the 1990s has adopted the same strategies for procurement that gave the French their excellent aircraft carrier
The F-22 had some serious scope creep, budget changes, everything. But all of our defense systems it seems as of late have been really bad or even failures. The Osprey is bad, the Navy DD(X) shows how to build destroyers as cheap as aircraft carriers and the next carrier is going to cost 12 billion dollars. The Comanche program that was cancelled was billions of dollars on a helicopter. And the Crusader, what was that all about?
Sounds like this is essentially a scanner that will bombard a target with neutrons and then eventually analyze the ones that bounce back. If so, one of these babies on top of a missile makes it possible, theoretically, to discriminate between balloons and real warheads.