I use a Kurobox (266MHz PowerPC w/ 128MB RAM) running TorrentFlux as a Bittorrent server; it functions remarkably well. I'm sure those laptops are at least as powerful as that.
The best resource for learning Processing is just taking apart the example code that comes with it.
Processing is extremely easy if you have previous programming experience. It's really just Java with a simple IDE and some automatically-loaded libraries; when a Processing 'sketch' compiles, it's actually wrapping it in a Java class and building that.
Are they actively prohibiting software from running on the phones, or is the clause in the SDK license just a legal safety net for Apple? The latter is fairly reasonable, given the eventuality that someone will write a buggy app that crashes the phone, creates something file-sharey that the MPAA/RIAA doesn't like, or treads on someone's hoarded IP patents. It could just be a loophole through which they can demonstrate that the offending app is not endorsed by the company and(correctly) place the blame/credit on the actual app developer.
I guess we'll find out eventually, once people start producing apps that violate the agreement.
I'm not surprised that astronomers' estimates of the galaxy's thickness are off by half. I've seen observatories... they only point their telescopes up.
I think I saw this demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2006. If it wasn't specifically this, it was another, virtually identical device. I know this is first-gen, but I don't yet think it's cut out for advertising. The resolution of the device I saw was extremely low, but I presume that will improve; what's more striking is that it was horribly noisy. When operating, it produced continuous arcing, cracking and buzzing noises... a sound somewhere between the noise of a vibrating metal tray full of ball bearings and a couple dozen stun guns being fired. Given how it works, I'm not sure they can make it any quieter.
I guarantee you that in a few years they'll realize that actually zygotes are better... "it's just a lump of cells... well more cells" everyone will say.
How can you possibly guarantee this? Do you have the expertise in cellular biology to make such predictions with any real accuracy?
Your argument is basically science fiction, each logical leap broader than the last. It depends on scientists as a whole being completely amoral and being given carte blanche. Organ transplants have been done for decades in this country, yet we have yet to see the poor rounded up and harvested for parts as had been predicted. When rumors arise that this sort of thing is happening to political prisoners in other countries, it is roundly condemned. It is a much, much smaller step from organ donation to organ harvesting than it is from stem-cell research to Logan's Run-like prediction, but it is still not a step that has been made.
In any case, the other side of the slope is just as slippery. At what point does legally enforcing 'respect for life' become the enforcement of 'respect for God's grand plan?'
Someone should tell them that Warner Brothers' cartoons lied to them. 'Laughing gas' doesn't really work that way. I'd think they'd have gotten less naive about drug names after all those years of disappointment with the anticlimactic effects of sodium pentothol 'truth serum'.
If I understand it correctly, the wiretapping law requires that the recorded persons have an expectation of privacy. The police are video taping any stop. How can they claim they have an expectation of privacy if they themselves are taping the stop?
My new case came with an LED illuminated fan. I discovered almost immediately that when the fan is not running at full speed, the bright blue LEDs visibly strobe -- a side effect of PWM speed control. Thing is, the fans would never run at full speed unless the CPU was actually on fire, so the LEDs always just blinked at something around 12Hz. It was a goddamn migraine factory. I ended up cutting the leads to each LED with a hobby knife.
I went to buy a second fan for the rear of the tower; 120mm with tachometer. I was unable to find one that neither lit up nor was dressed up to look like part of a 1950s jet engine. I ended up with a fan identical to the annoying one that came with my case. After performing the same minor surgery, it ended up working fine.
Is it so wrong to want devices that light up only to tell you something important? Soon, I imagine things will go dark to convey a message. Actually, I guess they already do: my old computer did it to tell me the power supply had died.
Or, even better, create a folder (or folder hierarchy) on the root level of your primary drive, then populate it with aliases to your most-used apps, organized by type or function. Navigating that folder via right-click in the Dock is easier and faster than the whole Applications folder. You can make the actual Applications folder an alias in the hierarchically-arranged one.
For eye candy goodness, put a custom icon on the folder of folders. You can paste the Applications folder icon onto your own folder, for example.
(Obviously, though, the folder doesn't need to be on the root level of the primary drive; that's just where I put mine.)
Did Microsoft invent the mouse with a scroll wheel? I'm fairly sure they were the first to market it, but I don't know if it was their idea.
If it was, as much as I hate to admit it, it was a pretty awesome innovation -- and I do consider it an innovation. The introduction of the scroll wheel was more than an iteration; it was one of the few changes to the basic design of a mouse that actually changed the way the user interacts with it. Wheel mice have essentially become the de facto standard, and have become so because they're *good* (as opposed to other MS creations that have become standards for other reasons). I have a hard time working with a mouse without a wheel now, no matter what GUI-based OS I'm using (currently Mac OS X and Xubuntu for the most part).
Sure, a software company can be pretty damned green -- if you don't count the manufacturing. How do they fare if you factor in the glossy packaging, holographic stickers, CD duplication, et cetera? Plus, there's all the hardware manufactured under their name. All the stuff they contract needs to be counted as well.
A friend and I used to deliberately go to see the worst movies playing, so of course we saw the first Street Fighter movie. He took his son, who was four or five at the time. At the end, he turned to his dad and asked: "Why did they call it Street Fighter if they're in the jungle all the time?"
That pretty much sums up the movie in a sentence.
So, I suppose the moral of the story is that they couldn't do any worse in a new version.
[1] I'm sorry, but if long experience developing has taught me anything, it's this: If you don't know how to code, and have no experience of coding, you have no idea what you want.
I disagree. I think people who know how to code can sometimes get tunnel vision; they try to think of an idea but unconsciously return to what they know about coding -- standard UI widgets, common practices, how other applications they've written worked, et cetera. I sometimes get trapped like this myself. Someone who is just a user will describe what they want and not consider that stock widget x can't do what they're describing.
The problem isn't people who don't know how to code, but people who don't think things through.
Not very cool at all, at least in a literal sense... Energy turns into heat; even if the magic generator itself doesn't produce heat, what we'll do with the energy will. Unlimited energy would mean we wouldn't care too much about wasting energy as heat -- we'd just power more cooling devices. Cooling devices don't really cool things so much as move the heat somewhere else, and that's done at a loss (more heat generated). Things would start to get pretty warm.
Anyhow, in your opening sentence, did you mean to imply that it's the potential repercussions that fuel skepticism? If so, I absolutely disagree. Skepticism doesn't mean "It would mean too many bad things if it were true so I don't want to believe in it." I'm skeptical because it doesn't make any sense in my understanding of basic physics. I enjoy considering the repercussions of such a fundamental change in human technology, but I'd remain skeptical even if it were mathematically proven that the device (should it actually exist) would produce Heaven on Earth.
Well, the timeframe was twenty-five years, i.e. 1981 to the present. TCP/IP was created before that. People were also saying the Apple II should have been on the list, but it's also a product of the 1970s.
This isn't, however, to say the list isn't a load of hooey.
As much as I hate misleading meta keywords, this legal approach seems to just be blowing smoke. American English has all sorts of crude euphamisms for sexual acts, but most of them are just combinations of multiple, commonplace, non-obscene words. A naive child, unaware of the connotations, could easily combine the words by accident and get something other than what they were intending to find. For example, I've got a little cousin who loves horses; if she were to do a search on the terms "girl" and "pony", she wouldn't get the response she was expecting.
Then again, this is coming from a guy who, while working on a lip-synch script for a 3D animation application, unthinkingly did a search for "facial animation".
It didn't turn up the information I was looking for, either.
"Barbie" is a real, albeit dated, contraction of Barbara that predates the fashion doll. There shouldn't be any problem so long as the web site isn't selling a toy of that name.
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I use a Kurobox (266MHz PowerPC w/ 128MB RAM) running TorrentFlux as a Bittorrent server; it functions remarkably well. I'm sure those laptops are at least as powerful as that.
The best resource for learning Processing is just taking apart the example code that comes with it.
Processing is extremely easy if you have previous programming experience. It's really just Java with a simple IDE and some automatically-loaded libraries; when a Processing 'sketch' compiles, it's actually wrapping it in a Java class and building that.
Are they actively prohibiting software from running on the phones, or is the clause in the SDK license just a legal safety net for Apple? The latter is fairly reasonable, given the eventuality that someone will write a buggy app that crashes the phone, creates something file-sharey that the MPAA/RIAA doesn't like, or treads on someone's hoarded IP patents. It could just be a loophole through which they can demonstrate that the offending app is not endorsed by the company and(correctly) place the blame/credit on the actual app developer.
I guess we'll find out eventually, once people start producing apps that violate the agreement.
I'm not surprised that astronomers' estimates of the galaxy's thickness are off by half. I've seen observatories... they only point their telescopes up.
I saw my IT guy try to dance at this year's company Christmas party.
It could provide social cues for the mildly autistic and victims of brain injury who are incapable of interpreting facial expression.
I'd have expected him to have been listening to Bruce Cockburn.
I think I saw this demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2006. If it wasn't specifically this, it was another, virtually identical device. I know this is first-gen, but I don't yet think it's cut out for advertising. The resolution of the device I saw was extremely low, but I presume that will improve; what's more striking is that it was horribly noisy. When operating, it produced continuous arcing, cracking and buzzing noises... a sound somewhere between the noise of a vibrating metal tray full of ball bearings and a couple dozen stun guns being fired. Given how it works, I'm not sure they can make it any quieter.
Your argument is basically science fiction, each logical leap broader than the last. It depends on scientists as a whole being completely amoral and being given carte blanche. Organ transplants have been done for decades in this country, yet we have yet to see the poor rounded up and harvested for parts as had been predicted. When rumors arise that this sort of thing is happening to political prisoners in other countries, it is roundly condemned. It is a much, much smaller step from organ donation to organ harvesting than it is from stem-cell research to Logan's Run-like prediction, but it is still not a step that has been made.
In any case, the other side of the slope is just as slippery. At what point does legally enforcing 'respect for life' become the enforcement of 'respect for God's grand plan?'
Someone should tell them that Warner Brothers' cartoons lied to them. 'Laughing gas' doesn't really work that way. I'd think they'd have gotten less naive about drug names after all those years of disappointment with the anticlimactic effects of sodium pentothol 'truth serum'.
If I understand it correctly, the wiretapping law requires that the recorded persons have an expectation of privacy. The police are video taping any stop. How can they claim they have an expectation of privacy if they themselves are taping the stop?
My new case came with an LED illuminated fan. I discovered almost immediately that when the fan is not running at full speed, the bright blue LEDs visibly strobe -- a side effect of PWM speed control. Thing is, the fans would never run at full speed unless the CPU was actually on fire, so the LEDs always just blinked at something around 12Hz. It was a goddamn migraine factory. I ended up cutting the leads to each LED with a hobby knife.
I went to buy a second fan for the rear of the tower; 120mm with tachometer. I was unable to find one that neither lit up nor was dressed up to look like part of a 1950s jet engine. I ended up with a fan identical to the annoying one that came with my case. After performing the same minor surgery, it ended up working fine.
Is it so wrong to want devices that light up only to tell you something important? Soon, I imagine things will go dark to convey a message. Actually, I guess they already do: my old computer did it to tell me the power supply had died.
What is he, some kind of anthropomorphic Ouija Board pointer? I remember wondering that when I first saw the Java AWT demos.
The only problem is that the screen and number pad are also upside-down.
Or, even better, create a folder (or folder hierarchy) on the root level of your primary drive, then populate it with aliases to your most-used apps, organized by type or function. Navigating that folder via right-click in the Dock is easier and faster than the whole Applications folder. You can make the actual Applications folder an alias in the hierarchically-arranged one.
For eye candy goodness, put a custom icon on the folder of folders. You can paste the Applications folder icon onto your own folder, for example.
(Obviously, though, the folder doesn't need to be on the root level of the primary drive; that's just where I put mine.)
Did Microsoft invent the mouse with a scroll wheel? I'm fairly sure they were the first to market it, but I don't know if it was their idea.
If it was, as much as I hate to admit it, it was a pretty awesome innovation -- and I do consider it an innovation. The introduction of the scroll wheel was more than an iteration; it was one of the few changes to the basic design of a mouse that actually changed the way the user interacts with it. Wheel mice have essentially become the de facto standard, and have become so because they're *good* (as opposed to other MS creations that have become standards for other reasons). I have a hard time working with a mouse without a wheel now, no matter what GUI-based OS I'm using (currently Mac OS X and Xubuntu for the most part).
Sure, a software company can be pretty damned green -- if you don't count the manufacturing. How do they fare if you factor in the glossy packaging, holographic stickers, CD duplication, et cetera? Plus, there's all the hardware manufactured under their name. All the stuff they contract needs to be counted as well.
A friend and I used to deliberately go to see the worst movies playing, so of course we saw the first Street Fighter movie. He took his son, who was four or five at the time. At the end, he turned to his dad and asked: "Why did they call it Street Fighter if they're in the jungle all the time?"
That pretty much sums up the movie in a sentence.
So, I suppose the moral of the story is that they couldn't do any worse in a new version.
You mean they're not going to name planets after TV shows any more? I was hoping the next planet/moon pair discovered would be names Sanford and Son.
Not very cool at all, at least in a literal sense... Energy turns into heat; even if the magic generator itself doesn't produce heat, what we'll do with the energy will. Unlimited energy would mean we wouldn't care too much about wasting energy as heat -- we'd just power more cooling devices. Cooling devices don't really cool things so much as move the heat somewhere else, and that's done at a loss (more heat generated). Things would start to get pretty warm.
Anyhow, in your opening sentence, did you mean to imply that it's the potential repercussions that fuel skepticism? If so, I absolutely disagree. Skepticism doesn't mean "It would mean too many bad things if it were true so I don't want to believe in it." I'm skeptical because it doesn't make any sense in my understanding of basic physics. I enjoy considering the repercussions of such a fundamental change in human technology, but I'd remain skeptical even if it were mathematically proven that the device (should it actually exist) would produce Heaven on Earth.
Sounds like the worst law firm ever.
Well, the timeframe was twenty-five years, i.e. 1981 to the present. TCP/IP was created before that. People were also saying the Apple II should have been on the list, but it's also a product of the 1970s.
This isn't, however, to say the list isn't a load of hooey.
As much as I hate misleading meta keywords, this legal approach seems to just be blowing smoke. American English has all sorts of crude euphamisms for sexual acts, but most of them are just combinations of multiple, commonplace, non-obscene words. A naive child, unaware of the connotations, could easily combine the words by accident and get something other than what they were intending to find. For example, I've got a little cousin who loves horses; if she were to do a search on the terms "girl" and "pony", she wouldn't get the response she was expecting.
Then again, this is coming from a guy who, while working on a lip-synch script for a 3D animation application, unthinkingly did a search for "facial animation".
It didn't turn up the information I was looking for, either.
"Barbie" is a real, albeit dated, contraction of Barbara that predates the fashion doll. There shouldn't be any problem so long as the web site isn't selling a toy of that name.