Well, the setting was 2050 so you can potentially make up whatever you want about available cheap, clean power sources. He obviously didn't concern himself with the economic and environmental viability of the design, given the groundrules for the contest.
Sure, if you were going to develop something in the next 3-5 years, you would obviously have all kinds of problems with comparing the energy needed to produce LN and the economics of distribution compared to petrol internal-combustion systems. But this design was for 50 years from now, so a lot of the basis for arguments here criticising this idea seems to not apply,:-)
It is plenty dangerous if you happen to be an advanced prototype cyber hunter-killer made of 'liquid metal'. Man that stuff will freeze your feet right off, and if some jerk comes along and fires a bullet into you... time to get the broom!
Yeah, I know he's happily married. Not the same thing as having a 'honey' in a tight skirt calling you 'Mr. Torvalds' and working late into the night 'taking dictation'.:-)
Seriously, I am constantly amazed and impressed at how down-to-earth Linus appears. Has to be a good day's work to keep your ego in check when you are the 'creator' of the most successful open source projects, and your day job is doing something secretive for Transmeta. Love ya, Linus!
Exactly, I would think there are already far more than $200 million in private holdings, which stay private, the IPO shares are all new.
As usual, Transmeta is holding the cards close to the vest, not much chance they'd go public only to have the majority of shares gobbled up by a much larger company.
>the success of individuals in a country reflects the strength of that country as a whole
Yes! Especially contradictory when an athlete representing a given country is not a native of that country. There was a case a while back where some US-born of 3rd or 4th generation immigrant family, who was maybe only 1/4 of the relevant ethnicity, moved back to his 'homeland' to represent that country.
So he didn't qualify for the US Olympic team so he made a deal to train and be on the itsy-bitsy-sylvania team. Except he didn't permanently relocate there. He went to train for a few months and after the Olympics, he returned to his life as a US citizen. Boy was he proud of his national heritage!
(wish I could remember enough of the particulars to find a link to this.)
But then, remember that a lot of these countries suffer from poor self-image and Olymic glory is about the only source of national pride in some cases. The whole USA!-USA!-USA! coverage by the networks is pretty sad, and does run contrary to the supposed 'spirit of the games' BS.
"Let's look at the tot-board so far... Here we see the US in the lead with 96 gold medals, 127 Silver and 200 bronze. Boy we must be a great country! Now back to coverage of the few events were there are prominent US Athletes who are expected to medal!" Bah!
>I have never seen a VAX hang nor being halted for any reason.
Ahh, memories. While at Purdue Cal 82-86 I worked as a studen lab asst. We had an 11/780 that had far too many users on it, probably at least 80 during the day, maxed 120 at night when all the night-class crowd shuffled down to do their assignments. It stood up pretty well until our moron grad student DB instructor decided to us UW-RIM to teach relational.
That killed it. It would hang or crash every night. We had to institute a policy of no more than 4 DB students running their project at a time to keep the poor thing on its feet.
I did love VMS, though. Still have a swiped VT-100 terminal and a set of VMS manuals in my garage somewhere. Sorry to see the line come to an end.
...got it. I admit I've only switched to Debian in the last year starting with 2.1 so I new to the naming conventions. Thanks for straightening me out without trying to make me feel stupid or anything (bitter sarcasm).
I was wondering about this the other day, what was the name of the female character in the last movie (voiced by Joan Cuszak?) Jessie, Jamie.. something like that.
Anyway, I was just going through the names to see what sounded fun:
Rex (sounds more gay than 'woody')
Peep (sounds like peeping tom)
Sketch (I like the way this sounds, but this was a very minor character)
Hamm (seems a lot more likely than 'Stinky Pete').
>Ugh, this was a bit more vitriolic than I expected. Ah well, (Score: -1, Troll).
No, you're right. I noticed the same sorta thing when the Phantom Menace DVD story was posted and a couple others since then. Lots of hopping up and down and calling for boycotts, but there is still a longing for cool things that seems to sometimes cause temporary amnesia.
I had the same experience with my Thinkpad i 1400 clery 366 w/32Mb.
When I got it with Windows installed, I was disgusted at how long it took to suspend/resume, might as well shutdown and then reboot!
When I got around to replacing the anemic 4Gig drive with a larger one with enough room for Linux, I was amazed at how much better/faster almost everything was, including resume from suspend.
>Yes, the "Designed for Windows 98" sticker did peel off quite easily.
:-) That made my day, thanks! I peeled mine off right away and was kinda surprised how easily it came off after having taken a blade to some of those 'intel inside' badges when I upgraded to AMD processors.
I was thinking the same thing. Didn't some poor schmuck a while ago work on the idea of a Linux distro that ran entirely from FAT? That would be scary indeed.
"Press Enter to start AOL"
"Windows is now shutting down..."
"You've got Mail!"
Actually, the problem would be that unless you are pretty much flying straight and level, or modestly banking, you lose your only reference, the horizon.
Flying from the ground is easy, just takes some getting used to. Stop by any R/C airfield some Saturday morning and you will se dozens of grandpas and dads and kids who cal all do it. It's not that hard.
Flying from a video monitor where you only have a 2D image of the horizon as a reference, without anything like altimeter, attitude/pitch indicator, compass, airspeed or artificial horizon to aid you... you almost certainly will be unable to adequately control the plane.
That has been done, at least mounting cameras with transmitters to watch from the ground, I don't know of anyone ever flying that way though. Would imagine the field of view would be limited and unless you could also have some kind of instrumentation show up to compensate, I would be very doubtful that this could work.
It does take some getting used to, but flying a plane from a fixed position is pretty easy. If you've ever tried a R/C car, you know what it is like at first. You get quickly disoriented and turn the wrong way unless the car is heading directly away.
After a bit, your brain learns to compensate for the orentation of the vehicle and you automatically make the proper control inputs. The same thing happens with a R/C plane, only in 3 degrees instead of 2. I found that getting the PC simulator helped me the most. After a few hours of crashing the plane everytime I turned, I got quite proficient at recognizing the position and attitude of the aircraft and was soon flying inverted with no problem.
When I finally got out to the field with my trainer R/C, I had little trouble adjusting to it. R/C flying is great.
Yes, I still fly R/C and get the AMA magazine every month and remember seeing a R/C Turbojet competiton a while back. They have been around for a while, but you won't see one at your local airfield. Here's a link to a 4lbs model back in '97.
For one, like you say, they are very expensive. They obviously fly much faster than traditional prop R/C and require a much larger flying field. Most fields in the area here around Chicago either have grass strips or short asphalt.
Another problem would be the noise. It is hard enough these days to get away with 2-stroke gas prop engines. Many of the fields around here are now sitting close to residential areas and restrictions on flying hours have been imposed because of noise (you did see the park-district R/C field out the back _before_ you bought your $400,000 town house, right?).
And aside from all that, they are harder than hell to fly. I've obviously never personally flown one, but I have the Dave Brown simulator that let's you fly R/C planes, helicopters and jets on the PC. Flying a jet is _damn_ hard. (no, actually _landing_ is the tricky bit.)
In addition to turbojets, there have been ducted-fan propelled 'jet' models around for a while too. These still have a prop for propulsion and are quite a bit slower than turbojets, but are much less expensive and heavy (doesn't need to fly as fast to generate enough lift to overcome weight) and can been seen at larger AMA events.
yeah, I'm actually old enough to remember when blank VHS tapes could cost over $20 each. I remember something about how there was a cost built-in to cover money lost to the studios from prople copying movies. Funny thing, it was a huge luxury to even own one VCR, let alone the two you'd need to make copies and rob the poverty-stricken movie studios of the VHS sales (except everyone rented anyway because movies on VHS didn't cost $19.95, more like $50 and up)
Well, it is the potential strings attached to that money that is probably more troubling than the money in itself. It's all well and good if Glaxco or someone puts money into university research and society as a whole benefits from progress made in medical research and Glaxco gets a reasonable return on it's investment. I don't personally have a problem with this straightforward scenario.
But, if the independance of the researchers is somehow undermined by the threat of withholding money, then you could have a problem. "Here, this $100 million ought to tide you over for a bit on that cure-for-baldness research you are doing. BTW, why are all your best grad students still working on that dead-end cure for juvenile diabetes research project? Heck, the profit potential for a baldness drug is 100 times that of almost anything else. We sure would like to see a few more of your top people working on 'our' project (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)."
>Is it really anything more than a really inconvenient laptop made out of non-miniaturized parts?
If it has a real 3D video card like a TNT or 3dfx (which I assume it would, this is QuakeCon, afterall), then yes, it probably plays quake like no laptop can ever hope to.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the setting was 2050 so you can potentially make up whatever you want about available cheap, clean power sources. He obviously didn't concern himself with the economic and environmental viability of the design, given the groundrules for the contest.
:-)
Sure, if you were going to develop something in the next 3-5 years, you would obviously have all kinds of problems with comparing the energy needed to produce LN and the economics of distribution compared to petrol internal-combustion systems. But this design was for 50 years from now, so a lot of the basis for arguments here criticising this idea seems to not apply,
It is plenty dangerous if you happen to be an advanced prototype cyber hunter-killer made of 'liquid metal'. Man that stuff will freeze your feet right off, and if some jerk comes along and fires a bullet into you... time to get the broom!
oops, /to/too/
It has been mentioned many times here on /. and other places. Tove is pretty amazing.
Think some of that FKC comes in handy in keeping the 'geek god' from getting to full of himself?
>Uhh, Linus has children.
:-)
:-)
Yeah, and your point is?
Yeah, I know he's happily married. Not the same thing as having a 'honey' in a tight skirt calling you 'Mr. Torvalds' and working late into the night 'taking dictation'.
Seriously, I am constantly amazed and impressed at how down-to-earth Linus appears. Has to be a good day's work to keep your ego in check when you are the 'creator' of the most successful open source projects, and your day job is doing something secretive for Transmeta. Love ya, Linus!
Somebody email rob with the CID link, this is moderator abuse if I've ever seen it. Flamebait?
Exactly, I would think there are already far more than $200 million in private holdings, which stay private, the IPO shares are all new.
As usual, Transmeta is holding the cards close to the vest, not much chance they'd go public only to have the majority of shares gobbled up by a much larger company.
"But I don't want any of that, Father. The girl I marry will have a certain... special..."
"HOLD ON! HOLD ON! No Singing!"
heh, rather watch that one again than sit through another hour and 40 of "Jar Jar does Amidala in front of Anakin."
>the success of individuals in a country reflects the strength of that country as a whole
Yes! Especially contradictory when an athlete representing a given country is not a native of that country. There was a case a while back where some US-born of 3rd or 4th generation immigrant family, who was maybe only 1/4 of the relevant ethnicity, moved back to his 'homeland' to represent that country.
So he didn't qualify for the US Olympic team so he made a deal to train and be on the itsy-bitsy-sylvania team. Except he didn't permanently relocate there. He went to train for a few months and after the Olympics, he returned to his life as a US citizen. Boy was he proud of his national heritage!
(wish I could remember enough of the particulars to find a link to this.)
But then, remember that a lot of these countries suffer from poor self-image and Olymic glory is about the only source of national pride in some cases. The whole USA!-USA!-USA! coverage by the networks is pretty sad, and does run contrary to the supposed 'spirit of the games' BS.
"Let's look at the tot-board so far... Here we see the US in the lead with 96 gold medals, 127 Silver and 200 bronze. Boy we must be a great country! Now back to coverage of the few events were there are prominent US Athletes who are expected to medal!" Bah!
>I have never seen a VAX hang nor being halted for any reason.
Ahh, memories. While at Purdue Cal 82-86 I worked as a studen lab asst. We had an 11/780 that had far too many users on it, probably at least 80 during the day, maxed 120 at night when all the night-class crowd shuffled down to do their assignments. It stood up pretty well until our moron grad student DB instructor decided to us UW-RIM to teach relational.
That killed it. It would hang or crash every night. We had to institute a policy of no more than 4 DB students running their project at a time to keep the poor thing on its feet.
I did love VMS, though. Still have a swiped VT-100 terminal and a set of VMS manuals in my garage somewhere. Sorry to see the line come to an end.
1.1 was buzz
1.2 was rex
1.3 was bo
2.0 was hamm
got it!!??
...got it. I admit I've only switched to Debian in the last year starting with 2.1 so I new to the naming conventions. Thanks for straightening me out without trying to make me feel stupid or anything (bitter sarcasm).
I was wondering about this the other day, what was the name of the female character in the last movie (voiced by Joan Cuszak?) Jessie, Jamie.. something like that.
Anyway, I was just going through the names to see what sounded fun:
Rex (sounds more gay than 'woody')
Peep (sounds like peeping tom)
Sketch (I like the way this sounds, but this was a very minor character)
Hamm (seems a lot more likely than 'Stinky Pete').
>Ugh, this was a bit more vitriolic than I expected. Ah well, (Score: -1, Troll).
No, you're right. I noticed the same sorta thing when the Phantom Menace DVD story was posted and a couple others since then. Lots of hopping up and down and calling for boycotts, but there is still a longing for cool things that seems to sometimes cause temporary amnesia.
*chuckle*
I had the same experience with my Thinkpad i 1400 clery 366 w/32Mb.
When I got it with Windows installed, I was disgusted at how long it took to suspend/resume, might as well shutdown and then reboot!
When I got around to replacing the anemic 4Gig drive with a larger one with enough room for Linux, I was amazed at how much better/faster almost everything was, including resume from suspend.
>Yes, the "Designed for Windows 98" sticker did peel off quite easily.
:-) That made my day, thanks! I peeled mine off right away and was kinda surprised how easily it came off after having taken a blade to some of those 'intel inside' badges when I upgraded to AMD processors.
>Linux supports FAT pretty well...
I was thinking the same thing. Didn't some poor schmuck a while ago work on the idea of a Linux distro that ran entirely from FAT? That would be scary indeed.
"Press Enter to start AOL"
"Windows is now shutting down..."
"You've got Mail!"
Actually, the problem would be that unless you are pretty much flying straight and level, or modestly banking, you lose your only reference, the horizon.
Flying from the ground is easy, just takes some getting used to. Stop by any R/C airfield some Saturday morning and you will se dozens of grandpas and dads and kids who cal all do it. It's not that hard.
Flying from a video monitor where you only have a 2D image of the horizon as a reference, without anything like altimeter, attitude/pitch indicator, compass, airspeed or artificial horizon to aid you... you almost certainly will be unable to adequately control the plane.
That has been done, at least mounting cameras with transmitters to watch from the ground, I don't know of anyone ever flying that way though. Would imagine the field of view would be limited and unless you could also have some kind of instrumentation show up to compensate, I would be very doubtful that this could work.
It does take some getting used to, but flying a plane from a fixed position is pretty easy. If you've ever tried a R/C car, you know what it is like at first. You get quickly disoriented and turn the wrong way unless the car is heading directly away.
After a bit, your brain learns to compensate for the orentation of the vehicle and you automatically make the proper control inputs. The same thing happens with a R/C plane, only in 3 degrees instead of 2. I found that getting the PC simulator helped me the most. After a few hours of crashing the plane everytime I turned, I got quite proficient at recognizing the position and attitude of the aircraft and was soon flying inverted with no problem.
When I finally got out to the field with my trainer R/C, I had little trouble adjusting to it. R/C flying is great.
For one, like you say, they are very expensive. They obviously fly much faster than traditional prop R/C and require a much larger flying field. Most fields in the area here around Chicago either have grass strips or short asphalt.
Another problem would be the noise. It is hard enough these days to get away with 2-stroke gas prop engines. Many of the fields around here are now sitting close to residential areas and restrictions on flying hours have been imposed because of noise (you did see the park-district R/C field out the back _before_ you bought your $400,000 town house, right?).
And aside from all that, they are harder than hell to fly. I've obviously never personally flown one, but I have the Dave Brown simulator that let's you fly R/C planes, helicopters and jets on the PC. Flying a jet is _damn_ hard. (no, actually _landing_ is the tricky bit.)
In addition to turbojets, there have been ducted-fan propelled 'jet' models around for a while too. These still have a prop for propulsion and are quite a bit slower than turbojets, but are much less expensive and heavy (doesn't need to fly as fast to generate enough lift to overcome weight) and can been seen at larger AMA events.
yeah, I'm actually old enough to remember when blank VHS tapes could cost over $20 each. I remember something about how there was a cost built-in to cover money lost to the studios from prople copying movies. Funny thing, it was a huge luxury to even own one VCR, let alone the two you'd need to make copies and rob the poverty-stricken movie studios of the VHS sales (except everyone rented anyway because movies on VHS didn't cost $19.95, more like $50 and up)
oooOOOOoooohhh!
...forget about that one!
>Katz say money bad.
Well, it is the potential strings attached to that money that is probably more troubling than the money in itself. It's all well and good if Glaxco or someone puts money into university research and society as a whole benefits from progress made in medical research and Glaxco gets a reasonable return on it's investment. I don't personally have a problem with this straightforward scenario.
But, if the independance of the researchers is somehow undermined by the threat of withholding money, then you could have a problem. "Here, this $100 million ought to tide you over for a bit on that cure-for-baldness research you are doing. BTW, why are all your best grad students still working on that dead-end cure for juvenile diabetes research project? Heck, the profit potential for a baldness drug is 100 times that of almost anything else. We sure would like to see a few more of your top people working on 'our' project (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)."
I wondered if AIM gets as much spam and porno as ICQ seems to?
>How are we clapping?
:-)
>I have no idea...
Gerry, fire up the "wall-minator!"
>Is it really anything more than a really inconvenient laptop made out of non-miniaturized parts?
If it has a real 3D video card like a TNT or 3dfx (which I assume it would, this is QuakeCon, afterall), then yes, it probably plays quake like no laptop can ever hope to.