For example, Chip $foo has functions A B C D E & F. E is used on average once every gigaflop, so using the CPU/other functions, they implement E and cut out all parts for E.
The best part is that this can be applied iteratively. Once E is eliminated there's a new "least used" function which can be eliminated. By extension, any CPU can ultimately be pruned down to a single NOP instruction, with the entire rest of the instruction set emulated in software.
Apollo 18 - some made up crap about something that never flew (see U-571).
Oh, come on. Isn't nearly every movie some "made up crap"? And practically every science-fiction movie revolves around some completely fictional device.
Cowboys & Aliens - "When aliens invade the 19th century West," - 'nuff said.
That one actually looks like it has potential, as long as they don't fall into the trap of assuming that the humans have 21st century moral and cultural values.
Super 8 - kids see alien walk away from train crash.
Yeah, and Sixth Sense was "kid sees dead people". What's your point?
Hell, you can burn practically every story ever made down to a trite one-sentence description, especially if you limit yourself to the story's setup.
Star Wars - Orphaned kid learns he has special powers and plays hero in space.
Harry Potter - Orphaned kid learns he has special powers and plays hero in a shadow culture of magicians.
Superman - Orphaned kid learns he has special powers and plays hero on an alien world.
TRON Legacy - Orphaned kid learns he has special powers and plays hero in a computer simulation.
Lord of the Rings - Orphaned (probably, we never see Frodo's parents) kid-size being has a magic ring which gives him special powers and plays hero on a volcano.
The Bible - Orphaned (or at least fatherless) kid learns he has special powers and plays hero in the desert. Unlike the others, this one has something of a downer ending, similar to the movie Brazil.
Ho-hum, all the same, nothing original any more, going to hell in a handbasket, not like when I was a kid, yadda yadda...
If the Système international had a swimsuit edition there'd be much more interest in science. Among males, anyway. But hey, I'd go for equal time for guys in Speedos if it'll bring more females into science.
Why does it have to be a Democrat or Republican? What we REALLY need is a viable alternative.
Agreed. But in order to have a viable alternative there must be a way to get them elected. In order to have a way to get them elected there must be a change to election law. In order to change election law you're going to need a politician in office who doesn't have a vested interest in continuing the two-party system. In order to get such a politician in office you must have a viable alternative.
Bill: Ted, while I agree that, in time, our band will be most triumphant. The truth is, Wyld Stallyns will never be a super band until we have Eddie Van Halen on guitar.
Ted: Yes, Bill. But, I do not believe we will get Eddie Van Halen until we have a triumphant video.
Bill: Ted, it's pointless to have a triumphant video before we even have decent instruments.
Ted: Well, how can we have decent instruments when we don't really even know how to play?
Bill: That is why we NEED Eddie Van Halen!
Ted: And THAT is why we need a triumphant video.
I've never really liked trackpads. I always thought they were better than the alternatives on a laptop (I really don't like the trackpoint nipple pointers) but they were always severely lacking.
Then my office bought me a MacBook Pro with the snazzy multitouch trackpad. Wow. This sucker is almost good enough to replace the mouse. Smooth as silk even after a year of heavy use. Two-finger scroll completely makes up for the lack of a scrollwheel. I just wish the thing had multiple, separate buttons instead of the whole pad area being one big button. (At least it's a physical button, not just a tap gesture.)
I don't think I'd like the evoMouse. No real buttons, obviously, and most surfaces just aren't really appropriate for constant use as a trackpad.
And before anyone accuses me of fanboyism, let me say that my preferred pointing device is a 5-button MS Intellimouse. Some RSI problems prompted me to go out and get a Kensington Expert Mouse (which, despite its name, is actually a trackball) which I can use with my left hand. So it's right-handed mouse for high-precision (gaming and drawing), left-handed trackball for most daily use, and right-handed trackpad when I'm away from my desk.
I, for one, am sick and tired of living within direct sight of an unshielded nuclear reactor. It's so close you can feel the heat it gives off, and just a few hours' exposure is enough to burn the skin. Petition the government to shut it down, NOW! Won't somebody please think of the children?
You know, if even a one-hour change is so disruptive, "traveling by car/train" is certainly going to be no help to those who frequently travel between two adjacent time zones. It's not like you can move gradually across the line to avoid the shock of a one-hour jump.
I call BS on this whole thing. I'll grant that there may be a very few individuals who just can't deal with time changes, but it's no more than a slight inconvenience for 99.9999% of the population at large.
Of course, DST itself is BS for other reasons, but "health concerns" makes no more sense than the "extra hour of sun will fade my drapes" argument.
I was in the grocery store checkout lane last night, and I saw a Cosmo with the headline, "50 WAYS TO SEDUCE A MAN". Look, ladies, if you get past the second one, he's just not interested.
Many U.S. banks have offered limited fund debit cards for years. Just set one up for a kid and load it up once a month as part of their allowance.
I looked into that for my teenage son. It's a great concept, smothered by fees. Some of those cards charge several dollars each time you add more money to the account. A $2.50/deposit transaction fee is ridiculous when I'm depositing $5 at a time. Other charges for checking the balance, ATM withdrawals, and so forth pretty much nickel and dime the account to death.
Read the terms closely! And if you find a good one, drop me a line. I haven't been able to find one that's worthwhile for someone averaging $5 to $10 a week.
Who is supposed to be helped by a language like this? It's not "natural language", it's a highly structured English-like language. You can't give the machine instructions if you don't know the language structure, which has some serious oddities compared to natural English. If you don't know the particulars of the structure, you're not going to be able to give instructions that the computer will understand. And if you do know the structure, you could have just as easily learned a concise, traditional computer language.
Here's the example code, unwrapped and indented but otherwise unchanged.
Find your current position Pc. Define Hd as a 'heading direction'. Execute " Hd = Pnxt-Pc; ". Detect obstacle position Obst in heading direction Hd. If Obst is empty, then move with heading direction Hd. If Obst is not empty, then do the following. ....Compute turned heading direction Hds from Hd. ....Detect obstacle position Obst2 in heading direction Hds. ....If Obst2 is empty, then move in heading direction Hds. ....If Obst2 is not empty, then do the following. ........Compute turned heading direction Hds2 from Hds. ........Detect obstacle position Obst3 in heading direction Hds2. ........If Obst3 is empty, then move in heading direction Hds2. ....Finish conditional actions for second heading. Finish conditional actions for first heading.
Get any phrasing wrong, or omit one of those "Finish conditional actions..." clauses and you're just as boned as if you'd dropped a semicolon or a brace in C. I suppose it looks like English when you read it, but writing it is harder than writing real code because perfectly valid English expressions aren't valid sEnglish.
So who, exactly, is this supposed to help?
(Kind of like how Slashdot's text entry looks like HTML, but it's not, and pretending that it is will mess you up...)
Or maybe it's because that neither Heavy Metal nor Barbarella should be remade! Barbarella was pretty bad to begin with. Heavy Metal wasn't bad, but it's very much a product of the time it was made. You'd want to remake it with different stories, and then it wouldn't be Heavy Metal any more. And lets face it, it's hard to find anyone who would defend Heavy Metal 2000 as a worth watching.
I just re-watched Heavy Metal last week, after not having seen it in at least 20 years. I was showing it to my teenage boys (the movie's target demographic, to be sure), and they were ripping it to shreds. Sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll aren't what they used to be, apparently.
Yeah, this is pretty annoying. I'll type a series of words into Google, and get a bunch of pages back which don't include those words. You have to prefix words with a '+' to say "Really, THIS WORD. The one I typed. That's the one I want to see."
But I must admit that their search autocompletion is scary good. And it's even more scary to think of how many other people must be typing in these same seemingly unrelated words that Google can predict the rest of my terms. I often don't even need to see the results page, I find what I'm after just from the autocomplete.
Notice that all these books were published within the past decade, all are currently available through any decent bookseller, and all
can result in serious bodily injury. No, the whole world hasn't been padded
with bubble wrap yet.
It works the other way, too. Last summer my family and I were driving across Wyoming. And not on some dinky little back road, either but on I-90. We drove past a gas station and I glanced at my gas gauge. A little under 1/4 tank left, probably a good 60 or 70 miles. I kept on going, planning to stop in 45 miles or so.
About 20 miles later I told the GPS to find me a gas station along my current route. There isn't one, it said. Not for another 80 miles. I told it to look for the nearest station in any direction. It found two -- the one 80 miles in front of me, and the one 20 miles behind me. Nothing else in any direction. Having only about another 40 miles worth of fuel, I turned around. (About that time my wife commented, "Well, at least the low fuel indicator isn't on yet." Not 5 seconds later... Bing! Bing!)
Anyway, without the GPS I would surely have kept going forward. I'm from the midwest, and it's utterly inconceivable (and yes, that word means exactly what I think it means) that there wouldn't be any gas stations along the freakin' interstate for 100 miles! Just plain not possible. We would have been stranded. We would also have been stranded if the GPS had incorrectly told us that there was a station 20 miles in front of us.
So I can understand how someone from a different region could get faked out by wrong assumptions. But still, that Death Valley thing is simple stupidity.
Wow, guys. This is bad. I mean, you've hosed the frickin' <i> tag. It's covered by a blanket "font-style: inherit" rule, which inherits from nothing. So there's no styling for italics.
rsnapshot on a regular basis to a off-site service, that's read-only to the organization. I run that kind of service for several organizations for exactly that reason.
Ah, but what do they do when you decide to go rogue?
Theoretically, security questions could be used as an ADDED security measure and be marginally effective at that, but in most times you can't know exactly how your answer will be used, so the sane response would be something like kashiqewnchkdhsflakjshflvkdsvhpexiojnasdjlna.
Hey! How did you know my response?!
Seriously, when I'm required to give an answer to one of these I just use my regular password generator to create another password for the site, then use that. "What was your first pet's name?" "w8ZRjkynm18ZVL9RWVhK" I don't think that's going to be cracked any time soon.
The whole idea is pretty stupid, though.
Re:The writing was idiotic (Spoilers?)
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 1
#4: The movie strongly implies the villain in question is intelligent and has a degree of free will. The character obviously summoned his strength to exercise his free will in a way contrary to his masters wishes.
Not to mention that the movie plainly states that the villain in question is not just a villain. He has a history that makes his change of heart fairly reasonable (at least by movie standards).
Re:Not Solaris - SunOS
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 1
Somebody, somewhere, cared about that scene.
Yeah, I liked that. The only part that bothered me was the super-modern touchscreen keyboard connected to the old 1989 computer. They got all the tiny OS details right, but they flubbed the hardware big-time. Should have had an old Sun keyboard and a Mouse Systems mouse with the tracking grid... Ah, memories...
Slashdot Mirror
The best part is that this can be applied iteratively. Once E is eliminated there's a new "least used" function which can be eliminated. By extension, any CPU can ultimately be pruned down to a single NOP instruction, with the entire rest of the instruction set emulated in software.
Oh, come on. Isn't nearly every movie some "made up crap"? And practically every science-fiction movie revolves around some completely fictional device.
That one actually looks like it has potential, as long as they don't fall into the trap of assuming that the humans have 21st century moral and cultural values.
Yeah, and Sixth Sense was "kid sees dead people". What's your point?
Hell, you can burn practically every story ever made down to a trite one-sentence description, especially if you limit yourself to the story's setup.
Star Wars - Orphaned kid learns he has special powers and plays hero in space.
Harry Potter - Orphaned kid learns he has special powers and plays hero in a shadow culture of magicians.
Superman - Orphaned kid learns he has special powers and plays hero on an alien world.
TRON Legacy - Orphaned kid learns he has special powers and plays hero in a computer simulation.
Lord of the Rings - Orphaned (probably, we never see Frodo's parents) kid-size being has a magic ring which gives him special powers and plays hero on a volcano.
The Bible - Orphaned (or at least fatherless) kid learns he has special powers and plays hero in the desert. Unlike the others, this one has something of a downer ending, similar to the movie Brazil.
Ho-hum, all the same, nothing original any more, going to hell in a handbasket, not like when I was a kid, yadda yadda...
Bah, it's just a cheap derivative of the Halo franchise. Without Master Chief you've got nothing.
If the Système international had a swimsuit edition there'd be much more interest in science. Among males, anyway. But hey, I'd go for equal time for guys in Speedos if it'll bring more females into science.
Agreed. But in order to have a viable alternative there must be a way to get them elected. In order to have a way to get them elected there must be a change to election law. In order to change election law you're going to need a politician in office who doesn't have a vested interest in continuing the two-party system. In order to get such a politician in office you must have a viable alternative.
Bill: Ted, while I agree that, in time, our band will be most triumphant. The truth is, Wyld Stallyns will never be a super band until we have Eddie Van Halen on guitar.
Ted: Yes, Bill. But, I do not believe we will get Eddie Van Halen until we have a triumphant video.
Bill: Ted, it's pointless to have a triumphant video before we even have decent instruments.
Ted: Well, how can we have decent instruments when we don't really even know how to play?
Bill: That is why we NEED Eddie Van Halen!
Ted: And THAT is why we need a triumphant video.
I've never really liked trackpads. I always thought they were better than the alternatives on a laptop (I really don't like the trackpoint nipple pointers) but they were always severely lacking.
Then my office bought me a MacBook Pro with the snazzy multitouch trackpad. Wow. This sucker is almost good enough to replace the mouse. Smooth as silk even after a year of heavy use. Two-finger scroll completely makes up for the lack of a scrollwheel. I just wish the thing had multiple, separate buttons instead of the whole pad area being one big button. (At least it's a physical button, not just a tap gesture.)
I don't think I'd like the evoMouse. No real buttons, obviously, and most surfaces just aren't really appropriate for constant use as a trackpad.
And before anyone accuses me of fanboyism, let me say that my preferred pointing device is a 5-button MS Intellimouse. Some RSI problems prompted me to go out and get a Kensington Expert Mouse (which, despite its name, is actually a trackball) which I can use with my left hand. So it's right-handed mouse for high-precision (gaming and drawing), left-handed trackball for most daily use, and right-handed trackpad when I'm away from my desk.
I, for one, am sick and tired of living within direct sight of an unshielded nuclear reactor. It's so close you can feel the heat it gives off, and just a few hours' exposure is enough to burn the skin. Petition the government to shut it down, NOW! Won't somebody please think of the children?
You know, if even a one-hour change is so disruptive, "traveling by car/train" is certainly going to be no help to those who frequently travel between two adjacent time zones. It's not like you can move gradually across the line to avoid the shock of a one-hour jump.
I call BS on this whole thing. I'll grant that there may be a very few individuals who just can't deal with time changes, but it's no more than a slight inconvenience for 99.9999% of the population at large.
Of course, DST itself is BS for other reasons, but "health concerns" makes no more sense than the "extra hour of sun will fade my drapes" argument.
"Commercial will always triumph over open, because open is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Or something like that.
I was in the grocery store checkout lane last night, and I saw a Cosmo with the headline, "50 WAYS TO SEDUCE A MAN". Look, ladies, if you get past the second one, he's just not interested.
"Would you like to—"
"Yes!"
I looked into that for my teenage son. It's a great concept, smothered by fees. Some of those cards charge several dollars each time you add more money to the account. A $2.50/deposit transaction fee is ridiculous when I'm depositing $5 at a time. Other charges for checking the balance, ATM withdrawals, and so forth pretty much nickel and dime the account to death.
Read the terms closely! And if you find a good one, drop me a line. I haven't been able to find one that's worthwhile for someone averaging $5 to $10 a week.
Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ah-ha! Oh, stop, yer killin' me!
+1 Funny
What's that expressed as houses of popcorn?
Get any phrasing wrong, or omit one of those "Finish conditional actions..." clauses and you're just as boned as if you'd dropped a semicolon or a brace in C. I suppose it looks like English when you read it, but writing it is harder than writing real code because perfectly valid English expressions aren't valid sEnglish.
So who, exactly, is this supposed to help?
(Kind of like how Slashdot's text entry looks like HTML, but it's not, and pretending that it is will mess you up...)
Or maybe it's because that neither Heavy Metal nor Barbarella should be remade! Barbarella was pretty bad to begin with. Heavy Metal wasn't bad, but it's very much a product of the time it was made. You'd want to remake it with different stories, and then it wouldn't be Heavy Metal any more. And lets face it, it's hard to find anyone who would defend Heavy Metal 2000 as a worth watching.
I just re-watched Heavy Metal last week, after not having seen it in at least 20 years. I was showing it to my teenage boys (the movie's target demographic, to be sure), and they were ripping it to shreds. Sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll aren't what they used to be, apparently.
Yeah, this is pretty annoying. I'll type a series of words into Google, and get a bunch of pages back which don't include those words. You have to prefix words with a '+' to say "Really, THIS WORD. The one I typed. That's the one I want to see."
But I must admit that their search autocompletion is scary good. And it's even more scary to think of how many other people must be typing in these same seemingly unrelated words that Google can predict the rest of my terms. I often don't even need to see the results page, I find what I'm after just from the autocomplete.
Still, it's not so hard to find decent hands-on science books. On my bookshelf:
Notice that all these books were published within the past decade, all are currently available through any decent bookseller, and all can result in serious bodily injury. No, the whole world hasn't been padded with bubble wrap yet.
Oh? Replace "murderer" with "terrorist" and we're already there.
It works the other way, too. Last summer my family and I were driving across Wyoming. And not on some dinky little back road, either but on I-90. We drove past a gas station and I glanced at my gas gauge. A little under 1/4 tank left, probably a good 60 or 70 miles. I kept on going, planning to stop in 45 miles or so.
About 20 miles later I told the GPS to find me a gas station along my current route. There isn't one, it said. Not for another 80 miles. I told it to look for the nearest station in any direction. It found two -- the one 80 miles in front of me, and the one 20 miles behind me. Nothing else in any direction. Having only about another 40 miles worth of fuel, I turned around. (About that time my wife commented, "Well, at least the low fuel indicator isn't on yet." Not 5 seconds later... Bing! Bing!)
Anyway, without the GPS I would surely have kept going forward. I'm from the midwest, and it's utterly inconceivable (and yes, that word means exactly what I think it means) that there wouldn't be any gas stations along the freakin' interstate for 100 miles! Just plain not possible. We would have been stranded. We would also have been stranded if the GPS had incorrectly told us that there was a station 20 miles in front of us.
So I can understand how someone from a different region could get faked out by wrong assumptions. But still, that Death Valley thing is simple stupidity.
The meta-syntactic variable 'foo' now redirects to 'bar'. Please update your placeholders accordingly.
Wow, guys. This is bad. I mean, you've hosed the frickin' <i> tag. It's covered by a blanket "font-style: inherit" rule, which inherits from nothing. So there's no styling for italics.
What actually gets styled here?
bold
italic
emphasis
strong
teletype
Ah, but what do they do when you decide to go rogue?
It's just rogue admin turtles all the way down...
Hey! How did you know my response?!
Seriously, when I'm required to give an answer to one of these I just use my regular password generator to create another password for the site, then use that. "What was your first pet's name?" "w8ZRjkynm18ZVL9RWVhK" I don't think that's going to be cracked any time soon.
The whole idea is pretty stupid, though.
Not to mention that the movie plainly states that the villain in question is not just a villain. He has a history that makes his change of heart fairly reasonable (at least by movie standards).
Yeah, I liked that. The only part that bothered me was the super-modern touchscreen keyboard connected to the old 1989 computer. They got all the tiny OS details right, but they flubbed the hardware big-time. Should have had an old Sun keyboard and a Mouse Systems mouse with the tracking grid... Ah, memories...