i work with a guy who amazed me with his last hard drive feat. he gyrostabilized a moped with some old hard drives we had laying around. i'm not quite sure how he did it, but it was something to do with the simple gyrostabilizing force from a few hard drives spinning would stabilize the moped. don't ask me, i didn't do it.
the website isn't meant to only show the videos. it's not even meant to sell, only to provide information about the comany. in response to the video showing the light flickering, i challenge you to try it with any other computer and i guarantee that when it's over you'll have a blue screen of death, ours at least keep processing. and by the way, we don't make the hard drives, they're build by seagate and are rigorously tested. they're the best for the job. of the parts we build, they don't fail. i admit, the videos are a bit tough to find, but since that's not the point of the site, i don't believe that it should matter too much. i apologize for being lazy and not linking directly to the videos. oh, and about the shift key, it is broken, but i'm afraid that's because it's an old Packard Bell keyboard. i don't have the kind of money it takes to buy one of the tag computers.
i'm a pre-production engineer from technology advancement group, a company in dulles, va. we build systems very similar, though we've moved away from the laptops and build mostly rack mounted systems. our systems are build to be ruggedized from the component level in order to survive more shock than any other system around. all the chassis are custom designed and all components are tested thoroughly. our most impressive test is the barge test. we take our machine, put it inside it's fiberglass case, turn it on and link up to it with a wireless connection. we put it on a small barge in a lake and detonate depth charges beneath the barge. most of the time the barge will fall apart, the machine will go flying in the air and land floating in the water. while all this is happening it is linked to a system on land which is monitoring its work. we don't sell a system unless it can go through this test without missing a step. this is the beauty of ruggedized computers. there's a video of a barge test on our website
okay, first off, i'm a fan of snood, i love it. though, the one game i fell more in love with was smiletris. i still don't know the rules, but i continue to waste my life with it.
secondly, going on with that whole debate that is going on about influencing children and Snood vs. UT. this is an insight i had a few days ago.
thirty years ago, children played board games. board games have rules, but you have to learn the rules and enforce them for yourself. you then have to be able to explain the rules to others when you want to play with them. you accept that you must play within the rules of the game and you're okay with that.
today, with computer games, the rules are enforced by the programming. children try to test the rules. they also try to find cheat codes and subconsciously, this gets them to feel that they don't have to adhere to the rules if they can just find the loophole.
phish has had a deal with furthernet for a while already now. furthernet is a p2p that offers downloads of live shows for free but only allows you to download shows from artists and groups who agree to it. phish was on the list of artists who signed the contract to offer free shows to anyone who was willing to download them. don't waste your money.
i read about a similar idea a few years back. there was an article in psychology today i believe it was. i have a vague recollection of it mentioning that scientists are working on mapping the functions and meanings of the placement and structure of each cell within the human brain in order to create a virtual brain solely by mapping the cell placement of your own. in this case, your brain would be scanned cell by cell, this would be loaded into a program that could decode this map into an actual virtual functioning model of you. it would contain all of your personality traits and all of your memories. there was some suggestion of keeping nanobots and nanotransmitters pulsing through your brain to map changes and transmit such changes to a database. the use of this would be so that if you were to be killed in some accident, there would be an immediate uplink of your last memories and sights which could then be read from the database. it's a bit frightening. i wish i could find that article again.
i don't know how long they've been out, at least in prototype, but where i live (alexandria, VA a couple miles outside Washington D.C.) there was a guy riding one on halloween night. i didn't get the chance to talk to him, but i was quite amazed by the sight. right now i'm in the process of tracking him down to ask for a ride. i'm savin' up for one myself.
yeah, in alexandria the red light cameras have been around for a while. they've worked quite well. red light running has gone down. along the potomac on the GW Memorial Parkway, the speeding cameras have been set up just north of Reagan National Airport. i don't know how they work because i never speed around that area. too many cops.
in terms of getting out of it, my dad's friend got busted by one of the cameras. a couple years before that i'd done a science fair project on the yellow lights in the DC area. No, they're not all 4 seconds long. most are around 3.75. one must also realize that you must allow at least a quarter second of perception time and a quarter second of reaction time before the brakes are applied. that is also assuming that you're watching the light just as it turns. so in the best case scenario, you'll have 3.5 seconds. in most cars you cannot stop if you're on a road going 35+ mph. it's not physically possible. then, of course, one must also factor in road conditions and amount of passenger/cargo weight in the car. i mean, these yellow lights don't offer enough time for most cars to stop. and then, even if they try to make it through, they get caught running it.
i gave my dad's friend a copy of the project and he took it to court. he presented it for fifteen minutes and was let off the hook, no questions asked. it's not the cameras that are at fault, it is the traffic lights that do not allow enough time.
i just bought an original NES because the old games were better. it was from back in the day when a game had to rely on a good plot, or at least good gameplay rather than using graphics as a crutch for a bad game.
global climate change is a naturally occurring phenomenon. all of the global warming crap is simply an ignorant observation. people have not been paying any attention to the global climate changes that happened long before humans evolved. in fact, the earth is likely to plunge into an ice age in a few hundred years. don't worry about global warming. since the ice age ended, the average temperature of the earth has risen only two degrees farenheit and in fact, that rise has been slower since the advent of internal combustion engines and mass production in factories. that is not to say that we have been helping to slow the rise, it is simply to point out that we aren't really affecting it, we are totally at the mercy of mother nature.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
-- Karen Price, Nintendo Representative
smiletris is the shit. it came loaded with my caldera. i haven't figured out the rules of it yet, but i've been playing it at least 2 hours a day for the last 4 months. it's just cool.
i'm at school right now and though most school sysadmins really have no clue what they're doing and leave tons of holes in the network, i'm at a school with a guy who really does know what's going on. I'm pretty locked down here. I have no access to any file management, i can't install anything, and i can't get to a command prompt. I've found a few discrete loopholes, but it's really a horrible environment to work in. When i have to get things done and i need to get something installed in order to complete an assignment, it's a horrible idea to be in complete lockdown. businesses really should reconsider and perhaps just try it out for a while and realize how much productivity is reduced.
i never said it was the most efficient, but it became a standard. anyways, it has become the most efficient because that's what we all know how to use. If we switched to dvorak, then the efficiency would be greatly reduced as everyone had to buy new keyboards and had to learn a whole new system. everyone would be making errors left and right and taking twice as long to type. QWERTY has become our standard and cannot be changed without serious consequences.
i will personally say why i don't want to pay for content online. I'm sure someone's already said everything i'm about to say, but i'm in a hurry and i don't have time to read all the previous posts. Anyways, in order to pay online you must use a credit card (no, don't get into virtual currency or the need for stuff like cryptonomicon, i'm being realistic). You really must use a credit card and those are a pain in the ass to go dig up every time you want to buy something online. As for the rings, people know exactly when the bill for the cell phone is coming so they're gonna have a credit card close at hand in order to make the payment. When they're surfing the net they aren't prepared to start buying stuff. They don't have the credit cards next to them. Anyways, by now they've been spoiled by the peak of e-commerce and think that it should be free and therefore refuse to pay. I don't know. make payment easier and it'll all be good. Like a little money slot from a vending machine put into your computer so you can just pump cash in there...though...how would it be physically transferred? damn.
the reason the AP people have probably chosen to change to java is that it has so many internet related uses. C++ on the other hand, does not have many at all. They made this decision while the internet was this huge new thing that they thought everone should be in on. Unfortunately, during the delay before the switch, the internet, though going quite strong, has passed its prime. It will continue to go on strong, but with the economic troubles of the IT industry and the country as a whole, the internet is becoming more expensive. The industry is supersaturated with all these "budding" companies. Currently, though java is a useful language, it should not be the basis of programming knowledge. C++ is must more logical, faster to run, and more useful for general purposes.
Actually, this has already been done. www.bwgen.com It is a brainwave generator that does exactly what you've just stated except that instead of using it to hallucinate, it tricks your brain into being rested or optimizes brainwaves to absorb information.
Okay, if you're using an encryption program that you want to be as easy as breathing, you've defeated the purpose. If you want to be able to have easy, private communications with whomever you want, then you'd first have to agree on a passphrase. Now, that'd be a royal pain to be sure you make a passphrase with everyone, and if you did that online, of course, those government bastards would intercept that. If you didn't use a passphrase and used a caesar shift cipher like rot-13 or a cipher that was a bit more advanced, but still standardized, then it would all be easily read by the government snoops anyways. until you're working with truly classified information, don't worry about the ciphers.
I read this article a few years back in Reader's Digest. I haven't gotten around to reading the article this one's about, but from what i remember, the kid had earlier proven himself as a scientific genius by making nitro-glycerine at the age of 12 by modifying an old chemistry set. it appears that the way he created the nuclear reactor was that he went to a firehouse on a day when they were discarding old smoke detectors. he already knew that Americium was contained in smoke detectors and that it could be used to create the nuclear reactor. He simply stole a whole bunch of smoke detectors and extracted the element.
i read the article yesterday in the post. One of the most amazing parts of this whole project is that the main man is legally blind and mostly deaf. he put the plane together in his basement using lots of really thick pairs of glasses and he dyed the glue pink so that he could see it. i think that's pretty cool.
what's up with the stealth geese comments? they're getting really old. anyways, i must say that i've had three great teachers in my time. all of them around 10th grade. the summer after 9th grade i went to military school to take chemistry. my teacher there kicked ass. any time we didn't understand something she'd let us go back to the chemical closet and blow shit up. had i taken it at public school like i would have i wouldn't have gotten to blow shit up like that. She was an awesome teacher. she'd tell us stories about old russian spies and always stressed that we should follow our joy. she was awesome. in 10th grade i had 2 great teachers. my creative writing teacher was cool because he was so laid back. we'd just sit around, laugh at each other, and listen to porno music. it was really quite fun. he'd sit there and talk about the time he was fired for selling weed to a student. my computer science teacher from that year was pretty damn cool as well. we'd just chill in her class, and help out people who had no fuckin' clue about how program C++ and then play around with network settings to freak out our network admins that had no clue how to administrate a network. i got 105% in that class every quarter 'cause it was so damn easy, but it was fun and educational. those were my best teachers.
everybody seems to be talking about star trek. there's also a short story by Zvi Zaks about this type of thing. if you go onto palm.com go into free software, and go to literature you can find a story called "Jumper" about people on a space station who see earth, get put into a trance by their wish to be on earth, steal a space suit, and try to jump back. they don't make it. they always burn up on reentry. but that's not the plot, so read it.
Slashdot Mirror
i work with a guy who amazed me with his last hard drive feat. he gyrostabilized a moped with some old hard drives we had laying around. i'm not quite sure how he did it, but it was something to do with the simple gyrostabilizing force from a few hard drives spinning would stabilize the moped. don't ask me, i didn't do it.
the website isn't meant to only show the videos. it's not even meant to sell, only to provide information about the comany. in response to the video showing the light flickering, i challenge you to try it with any other computer and i guarantee that when it's over you'll have a blue screen of death, ours at least keep processing. and by the way, we don't make the hard drives, they're build by seagate and are rigorously tested. they're the best for the job. of the parts we build, they don't fail. i admit, the videos are a bit tough to find, but since that's not the point of the site, i don't believe that it should matter too much. i apologize for being lazy and not linking directly to the videos. oh, and about the shift key, it is broken, but i'm afraid that's because it's an old Packard Bell keyboard. i don't have the kind of money it takes to buy one of the tag computers.
i'm a pre-production engineer from technology advancement group, a company in dulles, va. we build systems very similar, though we've moved away from the laptops and build mostly rack mounted systems. our systems are build to be ruggedized from the component level in order to survive more shock than any other system around. all the chassis are custom designed and all components are tested thoroughly. our most impressive test is the barge test. we take our machine, put it inside it's fiberglass case, turn it on and link up to it with a wireless connection. we put it on a small barge in a lake and detonate depth charges beneath the barge. most of the time the barge will fall apart, the machine will go flying in the air and land floating in the water. while all this is happening it is linked to a system on land which is monitoring its work. we don't sell a system unless it can go through this test without missing a step. this is the beauty of ruggedized computers. there's a video of a barge test on our website
okay, first off, i'm a fan of snood, i love it. though, the one game i fell more in love with was smiletris. i still don't know the rules, but i continue to waste my life with it.
secondly, going on with that whole debate that is going on about influencing children and Snood vs. UT. this is an insight i had a few days ago.
thirty years ago, children played board games. board games have rules, but you have to learn the rules and enforce them for yourself. you then have to be able to explain the rules to others when you want to play with them. you accept that you must play within the rules of the game and you're okay with that.
today, with computer games, the rules are enforced by the programming. children try to test the rules. they also try to find cheat codes and subconsciously, this gets them to feel that they don't have to adhere to the rules if they can just find the loophole.
that's why kids these days are bastards.
phish has had a deal with furthernet for a while already now. furthernet is a p2p that offers downloads of live shows for free but only allows you to download shows from artists and groups who agree to it. phish was on the list of artists who signed the contract to offer free shows to anyone who was willing to download them. don't waste your money.
i read about a similar idea a few years back. there was an article in psychology today i believe it was. i have a vague recollection of it mentioning that scientists are working on mapping the functions and meanings of the placement and structure of each cell within the human brain in order to create a virtual brain solely by mapping the cell placement of your own. in this case, your brain would be scanned cell by cell, this would be loaded into a program that could decode this map into an actual virtual functioning model of you. it would contain all of your personality traits and all of your memories. there was some suggestion of keeping nanobots and nanotransmitters pulsing through your brain to map changes and transmit such changes to a database. the use of this would be so that if you were to be killed in some accident, there would be an immediate uplink of your last memories and sights which could then be read from the database. it's a bit frightening. i wish i could find that article again.
i don't know how long they've been out, at least in prototype, but where i live (alexandria, VA a couple miles outside Washington D.C.) there was a guy riding one on halloween night. i didn't get the chance to talk to him, but i was quite amazed by the sight. right now i'm in the process of tracking him down to ask for a ride. i'm savin' up for one myself.
yeah, in alexandria the red light cameras have been around for a while. they've worked quite well. red light running has gone down. along the potomac on the GW Memorial Parkway, the speeding cameras have been set up just north of Reagan National Airport. i don't know how they work because i never speed around that area. too many cops. in terms of getting out of it, my dad's friend got busted by one of the cameras. a couple years before that i'd done a science fair project on the yellow lights in the DC area. No, they're not all 4 seconds long. most are around 3.75. one must also realize that you must allow at least a quarter second of perception time and a quarter second of reaction time before the brakes are applied. that is also assuming that you're watching the light just as it turns. so in the best case scenario, you'll have 3.5 seconds. in most cars you cannot stop if you're on a road going 35+ mph. it's not physically possible. then, of course, one must also factor in road conditions and amount of passenger/cargo weight in the car. i mean, these yellow lights don't offer enough time for most cars to stop. and then, even if they try to make it through, they get caught running it. i gave my dad's friend a copy of the project and he took it to court. he presented it for fifteen minutes and was let off the hook, no questions asked. it's not the cameras that are at fault, it is the traffic lights that do not allow enough time.
Van Eck Monitoring Device? hmm, quite a security risk under any circumstances.
i just bought an original NES because the old games were better. it was from back in the day when a game had to rely on a good plot, or at least good gameplay rather than using graphics as a crutch for a bad game.
global climate change is a naturally occurring phenomenon. all of the global warming crap is simply an ignorant observation. people have not been paying any attention to the global climate changes that happened long before humans evolved. in fact, the earth is likely to plunge into an ice age in a few hundred years. don't worry about global warming. since the ice age ended, the average temperature of the earth has risen only two degrees farenheit and in fact, that rise has been slower since the advent of internal combustion engines and mass production in factories. that is not to say that we have been helping to slow the rise, it is simply to point out that we aren't really affecting it, we are totally at the mercy of mother nature.
that's the point.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
-- Karen Price, Nintendo Representative
smiletris is the shit. it came loaded with my caldera. i haven't figured out the rules of it yet, but i've been playing it at least 2 hours a day for the last 4 months. it's just cool.
i'm at school right now and though most school sysadmins really have no clue what they're doing and leave tons of holes in the network, i'm at a school with a guy who really does know what's going on. I'm pretty locked down here. I have no access to any file management, i can't install anything, and i can't get to a command prompt. I've found a few discrete loopholes, but it's really a horrible environment to work in. When i have to get things done and i need to get something installed in order to complete an assignment, it's a horrible idea to be in complete lockdown. businesses really should reconsider and perhaps just try it out for a while and realize how much productivity is reduced.
i never said it was the most efficient, but it became a standard. anyways, it has become the most efficient because that's what we all know how to use. If we switched to dvorak, then the efficiency would be greatly reduced as everyone had to buy new keyboards and had to learn a whole new system. everyone would be making errors left and right and taking twice as long to type. QWERTY has become our standard and cannot be changed without serious consequences.
QWERTY's fine. check out this site for the history of qwerty and why it was invented.
i will personally say why i don't want to pay for content online. I'm sure someone's already said everything i'm about to say, but i'm in a hurry and i don't have time to read all the previous posts. Anyways, in order to pay online you must use a credit card (no, don't get into virtual currency or the need for stuff like cryptonomicon, i'm being realistic). You really must use a credit card and those are a pain in the ass to go dig up every time you want to buy something online. As for the rings, people know exactly when the bill for the cell phone is coming so they're gonna have a credit card close at hand in order to make the payment. When they're surfing the net they aren't prepared to start buying stuff. They don't have the credit cards next to them. Anyways, by now they've been spoiled by the peak of e-commerce and think that it should be free and therefore refuse to pay. I don't know. make payment easier and it'll all be good. Like a little money slot from a vending machine put into your computer so you can just pump cash in there...though...how would it be physically transferred? damn.
the reason the AP people have probably chosen to change to java is that it has so many internet related uses. C++ on the other hand, does not have many at all. They made this decision while the internet was this huge new thing that they thought everone should be in on. Unfortunately, during the delay before the switch, the internet, though going quite strong, has passed its prime. It will continue to go on strong, but with the economic troubles of the IT industry and the country as a whole, the internet is becoming more expensive. The industry is supersaturated with all these "budding" companies. Currently, though java is a useful language, it should not be the basis of programming knowledge. C++ is must more logical, faster to run, and more useful for general purposes.
Actually, this has already been done. www.bwgen.com It is a brainwave generator that does exactly what you've just stated except that instead of using it to hallucinate, it tricks your brain into being rested or optimizes brainwaves to absorb information.
Okay, if you're using an encryption program that you want to be as easy as breathing, you've defeated the purpose. If you want to be able to have easy, private communications with whomever you want, then you'd first have to agree on a passphrase. Now, that'd be a royal pain to be sure you make a passphrase with everyone, and if you did that online, of course, those government bastards would intercept that. If you didn't use a passphrase and used a caesar shift cipher like rot-13 or a cipher that was a bit more advanced, but still standardized, then it would all be easily read by the government snoops anyways. until you're working with truly classified information, don't worry about the ciphers.
I read this article a few years back in Reader's Digest. I haven't gotten around to reading the article this one's about, but from what i remember, the kid had earlier proven himself as a scientific genius by making nitro-glycerine at the age of 12 by modifying an old chemistry set. it appears that the way he created the nuclear reactor was that he went to a firehouse on a day when they were discarding old smoke detectors. he already knew that Americium was contained in smoke detectors and that it could be used to create the nuclear reactor. He simply stole a whole bunch of smoke detectors and extracted the element.
i read the article yesterday in the post. One of the most amazing parts of this whole project is that the main man is legally blind and mostly deaf. he put the plane together in his basement using lots of really thick pairs of glasses and he dyed the glue pink so that he could see it. i think that's pretty cool.
what's up with the stealth geese comments? they're getting really old. anyways, i must say that i've had three great teachers in my time. all of them around 10th grade. the summer after 9th grade i went to military school to take chemistry. my teacher there kicked ass. any time we didn't understand something she'd let us go back to the chemical closet and blow shit up. had i taken it at public school like i would have i wouldn't have gotten to blow shit up like that. She was an awesome teacher. she'd tell us stories about old russian spies and always stressed that we should follow our joy. she was awesome. in 10th grade i had 2 great teachers. my creative writing teacher was cool because he was so laid back. we'd just sit around, laugh at each other, and listen to porno music. it was really quite fun. he'd sit there and talk about the time he was fired for selling weed to a student. my computer science teacher from that year was pretty damn cool as well. we'd just chill in her class, and help out people who had no fuckin' clue about how program C++ and then play around with network settings to freak out our network admins that had no clue how to administrate a network. i got 105% in that class every quarter 'cause it was so damn easy, but it was fun and educational. those were my best teachers.
everybody seems to be talking about star trek. there's also a short story by Zvi Zaks about this type of thing. if you go onto palm.com go into free software, and go to literature you can find a story called "Jumper" about people on a space station who see earth, get put into a trance by their wish to be on earth, steal a space suit, and try to jump back. they don't make it. they always burn up on reentry. but that's not the plot, so read it.