And then we discarded it again.
Funny, really, when you've got all those American natives confined to reservations because you took all their land and don't want to give it back.
--
Well, if you live in the centre of Manchester, then you've got more options than you make out. There's a Tesco Metro store in the city centre, which is great for me- I get breakfast there on my way to work every day. Admittledly there's not all that much else in the centre itself, but what's stopping you boarding a Magic bus and, for a grand total of 90p getting to Sainsbury's in Fallowfield and back, or going to Salford, where there's an ample array of supermarkets. You could even go somewhere like Rusholme and buy lots of things in different smaller shops.
It sems to me that you're just being lazy- there's ample places to buy food from in Manchester. You just have to be les lazy about it.
While you Americans get your law enforcement agencies resticted to hell and back over new technologies, spare a thought for the little guy over here in England. Yes, I'm beginning to wonder what sort of people our Government is made of while they pass draconian laws over what the rest of the world is seeking to reassure the public over. Our law enforcement bodies now have the rights to walk all over us and we're powerless to stop them.
Seriously, take a look at some of the scenarios below:
Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that having a standard interface is bad, it probably isn't, but I for one see this as a bit of a no-brainer.
A Standard Interface is all well and good, but don't we all need different things from our desktops? This windows machine I'm using here is barely tolerable because the desktop is so dissimilar to the way I want to work, although the addition of Xmouse to get sloppy focus has improved things a little. If I look at each of my friends, we all have different ideas over what our ideal desktop should do. Myself, it's simplicity with Window Maker. Others go for speed with things like Fvwm2 or customisability with KDE. If we all used the same desktop, then it'd be one that was not quite right for any of us, because it does things that each of us find annoying in different places.
People, think! Standardisation isn't necessarily good for all of us- some of us like to work our own way.
I've just skimmed over the article onthe NY times site and the statistic that 88% of advertisements go unwatched. This must mean, therefore, that a new type of advertising is needed. If you integrate your product advertising *into the programme itself* you don't need to worry any more about all your viewers skipping the ads, because if they do that they'll be skipping their programmes as well.
Now, implement this properly- have guidelines in place that say "No more than X minutes of a one-hour show can be product endorsements" and that no more than X% of a show's advertising time can be taken up by one product, and you've got a basic set of rules that will work for a good deal of things.
Of course, some shows like Star Trek will have difficulty with these rules; that's only to be expected. But it's likely that alternatives to this could (and would) be found also.
--
I for one like the look of this new super-calculator apart from one thing: the 256 Shades of grey. I have found that the most useful functions of graphic calculators are for graphing functions. Now if you put more than one function on the same graphm, you need some way of distinguishing these. Drawing them in different shades may be enough, but for me the best way would to do it in colour.
256 colours are far better than 256 greys, simply because they are easier to distinguish. This is what graphing calculators have needed for a long time, and there still aren't enough of them to do it.
And am I the only one who thinks the MP3 paying is a bit over the top? If I wanted an MP3 player I'd buy a Rio. A Calculator is for mathematics. Try to move to an all-purpose device and all to often you get something which doesn't perform any of its tasks particularly well...
As far back as I can remember reading about Win ME, one of the new "features" it had listed was the final complete and total utter eradication of DOS from underneath windows. Whether this is a good thing or not, it's there and it's not going to change.
Of course, it wouldn't be difficult to move Win ME's command interpreter back a notch or two to the win 98SE version (or earlier) much in the same way it was possible to remove IE4 from Win98 and use the original explorer.exe. And hey jingo, there's you command prompt back, for those who wish to use it.
--
Seeing as the X-Box is listed as being fitted with an etherenet port, I'm wondering if this will mean that multiplayer games will be playable across many platforms, eg if a Quake deathmatch betwen myself on my PC and my housemate on the X-Box. This is something that isn't available at the moment, simply because consoles and PCs are in seperate worlds.
This then means that LAN gamesplaying becomes much easier as there is no faffing about with configurations on each others' PCs and all that is needed is to cart around the console (and maybe a TV) - far easier than your average PC.
We're about to see an explosion in multiplayer gamesplaying- this in combination with the high-speed access which is now becoming available means that soon most if not all games will be multiplayer... The trend is already visible.
So the EU is taking action against Microsoft after a complaint by Sun Microsystems. Well that just about makes my day. As a citizen of the EU I think that just about enough of my tax money is wasted as it is. There's the Big Tent, Big Wheel and that bridge thing in London, paid for by my government and I think I can speak for a large number of my fellow citizens when I say that I could quite comfortably live without these things.
And now I find that as part of the EU we're trying Microsoft on Sun's request. Isn't it enough that Sun are a huge company who could probably afford to take this case to court for themselbes? Obviously not. Someone in the M$ ie Evil brigade has decided to spend my tax money on it too.
Or of course it could be that Tony (and the other EU leaders) wants so much to be like Bill that he's decided that the EU should take a stance against MS. Well maybe not, but you get my point? There are better things to spend my taxes on (like hospitals and schools) than taking MS to a horribly long and complex court battle. Why can't we do that instead?
This page is one of the better ideas I've found for checking that your pages degrade gracefully. It's all very well having a wonderful new webpage that conforms to XHTML1.0 and looks superb in IE5.5 but if it doesn't work in older brosers you are losing a huge amount of audience. As you look at the page in older and older browsers the information should stay readable, if not near-perfect to the way it is in the top-range browser.
Strict HTML is one way of doing this; adding javascript and stylesheets allows prettiness in new browsers but the older ones can still see the info. This tool ensures you can still get the info across even when half your layout has gone.
I live in Manchester, which is only a short distance from the Lakes. Several of my friends from uni have gone to the fest and from what I'm hearing, the're having a great time with the tech stuff and the beer and not bothering about the hiking.
However, a far greater quantity of my friends (and myself) have been unable to attend simply due to timing. Being the poor penniless students that we are, we all have summer jobs. Had it been arranged such that the Linuxbierwanderung was at the start of July, or the end of August, we would have had more luck getting there as we wouldn't have been in the middle of our working period. I suspect others up and down the EU are in a similar position.
I've whiled away many a dreary evening by trying to make a guess at the amount of data available on the Web. Once upon a time I thought there were no more than maybe a couple of terabytes out there. NOw I know that this is wrong by several orders of magnitude. I'm starting to think that we're on the order of tens of petabytes here- maybe more. The *useful* information is of course a tiny fraction of that.
The difficulty I think is that I have no concept of size above about a megabyte. It just loses all meaning, and becomes purely "big". The same applies to the count of the hosts on the net, or the number of people reading this. It means nothing more than a number to me...
I'm a user still clinging on to my socket 7 board, and I'll tell you why. My socket 7 board, with its WinChip 3d Processor does everything I want it to do at a speed I'm happy with. I'm no great games player, and I'm happy with just Quake and other older games, which incidentally are cheaper than newer variants. It plays MP3s perfectly well, something I'm happy with, and it exports directories across the network for other machines jes' fine.
Why do I need to upgrade to some fancy new CPU? I don't. The one I've got here does perfectly well thankyou very much. And I think that this goes for hunders of other users too.
-- Moderators: This post isn't redundant. If it was, I wouldn't be posting it.
It seems to me that there are a good deal of geeks on here who have terrible handwriting. Now think I'm jumping the gun if you like, but maybe their handwriting is so terrible *because they use a keyboard more*? If you don't excercise a skill then in my experience, you get less good at it.This is just as applicable to handwriting as to Quake (or your choice of game). As a smaller example, I find it difficult to type on standard keyboards after having got used to my ergonomic curved one.
Now, if computers take handwriting as input, then perhaps the next generation will have better handwriting. Quite likely, I think.
The input device of today isn't necessarily the choice of tomorrow.
Is it? Earlier this year, after hacking around with festival and viavoince and some turing test programs (MegaHAL springs to mind) I was able to hold a (very basic) conversation with my computer. If I asked, it could tell me what new messages were in my inbox, what the headlines were at the BBC news website and if a given user was logged on to a certain BBS. The megahal component also allowed a general conversation, which was usually extremely strange in nature, but often made some sort of sense.
Now I'm certainly not the worlds greatest programmer, and this was extremely slow, mainly becuase it was a horribly hacky collection of shell and perl scripts and, in one case, used a state file to pass information between programs. The computer would taike about 3 times as long to formulate a reply as it did to say it. I haven't had the time to go back to it again- but if I can knock together something that does this, then a company employing people to work on this full time could quite probably do a *lot* better. Voice interface isn't nearly as far in the future as people believe.
I don't use ICQ very often, but when I did it was extremely useful to me. I started using ICQ back in 1997 when I was doing some work for a client over the 'net. It made sense, as at the time it was near real-time and private. After I have finished the job, I continued to use it as it seemed a good way of keeping in touch with people.
Then, suddenly, about 2 months ago, I recieved an e-mail from mirabilis or ICQ or whatever they call themselves now, informing me that as my user details listed me as being under 13, I would have my account deleted within 28 days if I did not change it, or within 2 days or my next log on to the ICQ network. Sure enough, the next time I logged on, I was messaged with a very simialr message. Being a linux user as I was, there was no way to change these details in the user directory using the client I was using, and I couldn't find anything obvious on the web site, so having no other option, I left it.
And so my account was deleted soon after. I haven't opened another one, partly because of all the hassles of telling everyone my new number, and partly because I don't agree with a company forcing the laws of one country on to a citizen of another (I live in the UK). Nowadays, anyone who wants to contact me is referred to a BBS I frequent, and told to find me there. Unfortunate, but that's the way it is.
"The chip contains about 3,500 microscopic solar cells that convert light into electrical impulses. "
Now, by my maths that would give the eye a "resolution" of about 60x60 pixels. And that's assuming that it's black and white rather than colour that the implant allows viewing in. If it is in colour, assuming one receptor for each of Red/Green/Blue, you're down to about 34x34. I don't know about you, but with that sort of vision resolution I'd just about be able to tell light levels and maybe buildings, if the ywere big/near enough. It's not quite up to human-style vision or even something which can be useful for any particular task other than "seeing" big objects.
Also, someone further down the thread mentioned using these combined with microchips to correct for other deficiancies of the eye, such as short-sightedness. How? The details have already been lost. Additional lenses on the outside of the eye are used to prevent the loss of the detail, not to fill it in again. Try this:
Take a digital photo, any digital photo and load it into you favourite image editor. Now scale it down to 10% of its previous size, and scale that back up again. The image will be blurred, and there won't be any way of getting that lost detail back no matter how hard you tell it to interpolate from the shrunken image.
In short, even if these things did have a good resolution, they wouldn't be useful for the things people have been suggesting.
I don't know about the majority of/.ers but one of the major algorithms which has influenced my life is those which encode/decode MPEG encoded data. If I turn on my TV, which happens to be digital, I will see pictures decoded from an MPEG stream sent over the airwaves.
I want to listen to music? I pick up my Rio or turn on my computer and listen to MP3s of tracks, again encoded using MPEG algorithms.
The whole Napster thing is caused by people using these algorithms to encode music to such an extent that it becomes distributable across the internet. Imagine- only a few minutes to download a track rather than the hours it would take using CD-style encoding! Magic!
Attitudes in the world have changed a lot over the last few years, and all because of the application of a simple algorithm to a form of mass entertainment.
The newsagent just down the street from where I go to uni used to stock Jolt. Every morning, I'd go there and pick up a bottle before going to lectures.
They stopped stocking it a few months ago due to the fact that I was the only one buying it and it wasn't worth their stocking it any more. I was disappointed. Now I have a cup of strong coffee in the mornings instead, One up for Nescafe.
This is the problem in a lot of situations, I think. This was a shop frequented by lots of geeks, but it would appear that most of them would drink Red Bull instead, a (very expensive) fizzy drink with caffein and taurine, or even Coca-cola.
To add insult to injury, when I tried to order a crate of Jolt from thinkgeek.com, I was told they wouldn't ship to the EU (I think, could have been just the UK). I miss Jolt, and I want to get some more....
It seems only a year ago since due to high demand and short supply, memory prices shot up to a ridiculous amount as supplies dropped. Until of course, they got so high that almost no-one would buy them. Then they dropped again/ Oh, wait a minute, it *WAS* only a year ago. The way memory prices shoot up at around the summer and then take a dive again is almost a reflection of the UK car market until recently, when prices were at their highest as new numberplate letters came out in August and people wanted new cars then, to the decline until the next August when it started again. In this case, the government took steps to ensure a steady flow of car-buying by changing the times at which number plates to twice a year and soon to four times (I think). I believe it would be sensible for memory manufacturers to adopt a similar timetable. Decide on what would be a "fair price" for memory, and release their goods to the world steadily across a whole year. If the prices are too low, then release less memory to the world that month. Should they be too high, release more to the markets, or even turn a higher profit. It wouldn't be that hard, it would prevent the price of memory dropping to too low, and everybody wins. --
In the Star Wars films, we don't see computers as we do in many other sci-fi films- the theory being that they've integrated so far into the society so far they're invisible. There are still computers, though- the droids for a start.
I think that the internet may well folllow a similar course. Yes it will become more tightly integrated with society. Yes it will be available to increasing numbers of users at the touch of a button wherever they are, but it will still be visible in other ways.
I think the eventual advent of intelligent agents which interface to the net for us with more 'natural-language' interfaces is inevitable. Yes, Holly, Eddie, the Star Trek computer, are all possible futures, but they are a long way off.
I for one, though, look forward to that time. My third year project at uni is to develop a primitive version of one of these agents who can pick out information from a web page and read it to you.
It's there as plain as day. Linus says: "It's not a real 2.4.0 release, but we should be getting closer"
In other words, this kernel may as well be called 2.3.99pre10 for all that it counts. I hate to make the comparison, but I'm going to: was Win2000 RC1 beta software or was it the final version? It was a beta. The same goes for this - in this case I think the 2.4 designation is worth very little. It's still got significant bug levels and people shouldn't be jumping the gun to get at it.
Surely the refresh rate will be different for the projector than the built in display?
I've had similar problems getting X to appear on my TV using the TV out feature on my video card. The TV needs to be set to have a refresh rate of 50Hz or less (PAL) for the TV to display a picture. Therefore, I needed different modelines for the TV than just with the monitor.
Text mode will work for both as the refresh rate is less than 50 Hz and MS Windows will automagically move the refresh rate down to one that the projector supports- which is why each of these work. Again, if the internal display is disabled, then X is forced into using a lower refresh rate and so the projector works.
In short, specify *exactly* what refresh rate and res to use, comment out all the rest and it should work fine.
Less, actually, triangulation can get it down to less. Of course, this means the cells have to overlap. They do of course- what happens if a n antenna has to go offline for a short while?
> A reverse directory lookup shouldn't really be that hard for a phone company.
I've never called them using my cellphone. Perhaps I shouldn't heve neglected to mention this. All can be derived simply by 'pinging' the phone (as the network does every 90 minutes).
Slashdot Mirror
And then we discarded it again. Funny, really, when you've got all those American natives confined to reservations because you took all their land and don't want to give it back. --
Well, if you live in the centre of Manchester, then you've got more options than you make out. There's a Tesco Metro store in the city centre, which is great for me- I get breakfast there on my way to work every day. Admittledly there's not all that much else in the centre itself, but what's stopping you boarding a Magic bus and, for a grand total of 90p getting to Sainsbury's in Fallowfield and back, or going to Salford, where there's an ample array of supermarkets. You could even go somewhere like Rusholme and buy lots of things in different smaller shops.
It sems to me that you're just being lazy- there's ample places to buy food from in Manchester. You just have to be les lazy about it.
--
Seriously, take a look at some of the scenarios below:
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl/scenarios. html
Consider yourselves lucky you live in an enlightened coutry and not a polic state like ourselves.
--
Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that having a standard interface is bad, it probably isn't, but I for one see this as a bit of a no-brainer.
A Standard Interface is all well and good, but don't we all need different things from our desktops? This windows machine I'm using here is barely tolerable because the desktop is so dissimilar to the way I want to work, although the addition of Xmouse to get sloppy focus has improved things a little. If I look at each of my friends, we all have different ideas over what our ideal desktop should do. Myself, it's simplicity with Window Maker. Others go for speed with things like Fvwm2 or customisability with KDE. If we all used the same desktop, then it'd be one that was not quite right for any of us, because it does things that each of us find annoying in different places.
People, think! Standardisation isn't necessarily good for all of us- some of us like to work our own way.
--
I've just skimmed over the article onthe NY times site and the statistic that 88% of advertisements go unwatched. This must mean, therefore, that a new type of advertising is needed. If you integrate your product advertising *into the programme itself* you don't need to worry any more about all your viewers skipping the ads, because if they do that they'll be skipping their programmes as well. Now, implement this properly- have guidelines in place that say "No more than X minutes of a one-hour show can be product endorsements" and that no more than X% of a show's advertising time can be taken up by one product, and you've got a basic set of rules that will work for a good deal of things. Of course, some shows like Star Trek will have difficulty with these rules; that's only to be expected. But it's likely that alternatives to this could (and would) be found also. --
I for one like the look of this new super-calculator apart from one thing: the 256 Shades of grey. I have found that the most useful functions of graphic calculators are for graphing functions. Now if you put more than one function on the same graphm, you need some way of distinguishing these. Drawing them in different shades may be enough, but for me the best way would to do it in colour.
256 colours are far better than 256 greys, simply because they are easier to distinguish. This is what graphing calculators have needed for a long time, and there still aren't enough of them to do it.
And am I the only one who thinks the MP3 paying is a bit over the top? If I wanted an MP3 player I'd buy a Rio. A Calculator is for mathematics. Try to move to an all-purpose device and all to often you get something which doesn't perform any of its tasks particularly well...
--
As far back as I can remember reading about Win ME, one of the new "features" it had listed was the final complete and total utter eradication of DOS from underneath windows. Whether this is a good thing or not, it's there and it's not going to change. Of course, it wouldn't be difficult to move Win ME's command interpreter back a notch or two to the win 98SE version (or earlier) much in the same way it was possible to remove IE4 from Win98 and use the original explorer.exe. And hey jingo, there's you command prompt back, for those who wish to use it. --
Seeing as the X-Box is listed as being fitted with an etherenet port, I'm wondering if this will mean that multiplayer games will be playable across many platforms, eg if a Quake deathmatch betwen myself on my PC and my housemate on the X-Box. This is something that isn't available at the moment, simply because consoles and PCs are in seperate worlds.
This then means that LAN gamesplaying becomes much easier as there is no faffing about with configurations on each others' PCs and all that is needed is to cart around the console (and maybe a TV) - far easier than your average PC.
We're about to see an explosion in multiplayer gamesplaying- this in combination with the high-speed access which is now becoming available means that soon most if not all games will be multiplayer... The trend is already visible.
--
So the EU is taking action against Microsoft after a complaint by Sun Microsystems. Well that just about makes my day. As a citizen of the EU I think that just about enough of my tax money is wasted as it is. There's the Big Tent, Big Wheel and that bridge thing in London, paid for by my government and I think I can speak for a large number of my fellow citizens when I say that I could quite comfortably live without these things.
And now I find that as part of the EU we're trying Microsoft on Sun's request. Isn't it enough that Sun are a huge company who could probably afford to take this case to court for themselbes? Obviously not. Someone in the M$ ie Evil brigade has decided to spend my tax money on it too.
Or of course it could be that Tony (and the other EU leaders) wants so much to be like Bill that he's decided that the EU should take a stance against MS. Well maybe not, but you get my point? There are better things to spend my taxes on (like hospitals and schools) than taking MS to a horribly long and complex court battle. Why can't we do that instead?
--
This page is one of the better ideas I've found for checking that your pages degrade gracefully. It's all very well having a wonderful new webpage that conforms to XHTML1.0 and looks superb in IE5.5 but if it doesn't work in older brosers you are losing a huge amount of audience. As you look at the page in older and older browsers the information should stay readable, if not near-perfect to the way it is in the top-range browser.
Strict HTML is one way of doing this; adding javascript and stylesheets allows prettiness in new browsers but the older ones can still see the info. This tool ensures you can still get the info across even when half your layout has gone.
--
I live in Manchester, which is only a short distance from the Lakes. Several of my friends from uni have gone to the fest and from what I'm hearing, the're having a great time with the tech stuff and the beer and not bothering about the hiking.
However, a far greater quantity of my friends (and myself) have been unable to attend simply due to timing. Being the poor penniless students that we are, we all have summer jobs. Had it been arranged such that the Linuxbierwanderung was at the start of July, or the end of August, we would have had more luck getting there as we wouldn't have been in the middle of our working period. I suspect others up and down the EU are in a similar position.
Sad, really. It could have been so much bigger.
--
I've whiled away many a dreary evening by trying to make a guess at the amount of data available on the Web. Once upon a time I thought there were no more than maybe a couple of terabytes out there. NOw I know that this is wrong by several orders of magnitude. I'm starting to think that we're on the order of tens of petabytes here- maybe more. The *useful* information is of course a tiny fraction of that.
The difficulty I think is that I have no concept of size above about a megabyte. It just loses all meaning, and becomes purely "big". The same applies to the count of the hosts on the net, or the number of people reading this. It means nothing more than a number to me...
I'm a user still clinging on to my socket 7 board, and I'll tell you why. My socket 7 board, with its WinChip 3d Processor does everything I want it to do at a speed I'm happy with. I'm no great games player, and I'm happy with just Quake and other older games, which incidentally are cheaper than newer variants. It plays MP3s perfectly well, something I'm happy with, and it exports directories across the network for other machines jes' fine.
Why do I need to upgrade to some fancy new CPU? I don't. The one I've got here does perfectly well thankyou very much. And I think that this goes for hunders of other users too.
--
Moderators: This post isn't redundant. If it was, I wouldn't be posting it.
It seems to me that there are a good deal of geeks on here who have terrible handwriting. Now think I'm jumping the gun if you like, but maybe their handwriting is so terrible *because they use a keyboard more*? If you don't excercise a skill then in my experience, you get less good at it.This is just as applicable to handwriting as to Quake (or your choice of game). As a smaller example, I find it difficult to type on standard keyboards after having got used to my ergonomic curved one.
Now, if computers take handwriting as input, then perhaps the next generation will have better handwriting. Quite likely, I think.
The input device of today isn't necessarily the choice of tomorrow.
--
> Now thats Science Fiction!
Is it? Earlier this year, after hacking around with festival and viavoince and some turing test programs (MegaHAL springs to mind) I was able to hold a (very basic) conversation with my computer. If I asked, it could tell me what new messages were in my inbox, what the headlines were at the BBC news website and if a given user was logged on to a certain BBS. The megahal component also allowed a general conversation, which was usually extremely strange in nature, but often made some sort of sense.
Now I'm certainly not the worlds greatest programmer, and this was extremely slow, mainly becuase it was a horribly hacky collection of shell and perl scripts and, in one case, used a state file to pass information between programs. The computer would taike about 3 times as long to formulate a reply as it did to say it. I haven't had the time to go back to it again- but if I can knock together something that does this, then a company employing people to work on this full time could quite probably do a *lot* better. Voice interface isn't nearly as far in the future as people believe.
--
I don't use ICQ very often, but when I did it was extremely useful to me. I started using ICQ back in 1997 when I was doing some work for a client over the 'net. It made sense, as at the time it was near real-time and private. After I have finished the job, I continued to use it as it seemed a good way of keeping in touch with people.
Then, suddenly, about 2 months ago, I recieved an e-mail from mirabilis or ICQ or whatever they call themselves now, informing me that as my user details listed me as being under 13, I would have my account deleted within 28 days if I did not change it, or within 2 days or my next log on to the ICQ network. Sure enough, the next time I logged on, I was messaged with a very simialr message. Being a linux user as I was, there was no way to change these details in the user directory using the client I was using, and I couldn't find anything obvious on the web site, so having no other option, I left it.
And so my account was deleted soon after. I haven't opened another one, partly because of all the hassles of telling everyone my new number, and partly because I don't agree with a company forcing the laws of one country on to a citizen of another (I live in the UK). Nowadays, anyone who wants to contact me is referred to a BBS I frequent, and told to find me there. Unfortunate, but that's the way it is.
--
From the story:
"The chip contains about 3,500 microscopic solar cells that convert light into electrical impulses. "
Now, by my maths that would give the eye a "resolution" of about 60x60 pixels. And that's assuming that it's black and white rather than colour that the implant allows viewing in. If it is in colour, assuming one receptor for each of Red/Green/Blue, you're down to about 34x34. I don't know about you, but with that sort of vision resolution I'd just about be able to tell light levels and maybe buildings, if the ywere big/near enough. It's not quite up to human-style vision or even something which can be useful for any particular task other than "seeing" big objects.
Also, someone further down the thread mentioned using these combined with microchips to correct for other deficiancies of the eye, such as short-sightedness. How? The details have already been lost. Additional lenses on the outside of the eye are used to prevent the loss of the detail, not to fill it in again. Try this:
Take a digital photo, any digital photo and load it into you favourite image editor. Now scale it down to 10% of its previous size, and scale that back up again. The image will be blurred, and there won't be any way of getting that lost detail back no matter how hard you tell it to interpolate from the shrunken image.
In short, even if these things did have a good resolution, they wouldn't be useful for the things people have been suggesting.
--
I don't know about the majority of /.ers but one of the major algorithms which has influenced my life is those which encode/decode MPEG encoded data. If I turn on my TV, which happens to be digital, I will see pictures decoded from an MPEG stream sent over the airwaves.
I want to listen to music? I pick up my Rio or turn on my computer and listen to MP3s of tracks, again encoded using MPEG algorithms.
The whole Napster thing is caused by people using these algorithms to encode music to such an extent that it becomes distributable across the internet. Imagine- only a few minutes to download a track rather than the hours it would take using CD-style encoding! Magic!
Attitudes in the world have changed a lot over the last few years, and all because of the application of a simple algorithm to a form of mass entertainment.
--
The newsagent just down the street from where I go to uni used to stock Jolt. Every morning, I'd go there and pick up a bottle before going to lectures.
They stopped stocking it a few months ago due to the fact that I was the only one buying it and it wasn't worth their stocking it any more. I was disappointed. Now I have a cup of strong coffee in the mornings instead, One up for Nescafe.
This is the problem in a lot of situations, I think. This was a shop frequented by lots of geeks, but it would appear that most of them would drink Red Bull instead, a (very expensive) fizzy drink with caffein and taurine, or even Coca-cola.
To add insult to injury, when I tried to order a crate of Jolt from thinkgeek.com, I was told they wouldn't ship to the EU (I think, could have been just the UK). I miss Jolt, and I want to get some more....
It seems only a year ago since due to high demand and short supply, memory prices shot up to a ridiculous amount as supplies dropped. Until of course, they got so high that almost no-one would buy them. Then they dropped again/ Oh, wait a minute, it *WAS* only a year ago. The way memory prices shoot up at around the summer and then take a dive again is almost a reflection of the UK car market until recently, when prices were at their highest as new numberplate letters came out in August and people wanted new cars then, to the decline until the next August when it started again. In this case, the government took steps to ensure a steady flow of car-buying by changing the times at which number plates to twice a year and soon to four times (I think). I believe it would be sensible for memory manufacturers to adopt a similar timetable. Decide on what would be a "fair price" for memory, and release their goods to the world steadily across a whole year. If the prices are too low, then release less memory to the world that month. Should they be too high, release more to the markets, or even turn a higher profit. It wouldn't be that hard, it would prevent the price of memory dropping to too low, and everybody wins. --
In the Star Wars films, we don't see computers as we do in many other sci-fi films- the theory being that they've integrated so far into the society so far they're invisible. There are still computers, though- the droids for a start.
I think that the internet may well folllow a similar course. Yes it will become more tightly integrated with society. Yes it will be available to increasing numbers of users at the touch of a button wherever they are, but it will still be visible in other ways.
I think the eventual advent of intelligent agents which interface to the net for us with more 'natural-language' interfaces is inevitable. Yes, Holly, Eddie, the Star Trek computer, are all possible futures, but they are a long way off.
I for one, though, look forward to that time. My third year project at uni is to develop a primitive version of one of these agents who can pick out information from a web page and read it to you.
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"It's not a real 2.4.0 release, but we should be getting closer"
In other words, this kernel may as well be called 2.3.99pre10 for all that it counts. I hate to make the comparison, but I'm going to: was Win2000 RC1 beta software or was it the final version? It was a beta.
The same goes for this - in this case I think the 2.4 designation is worth very little. It's still got significant bug levels and people shouldn't be jumping the gun to get at it.
All MHO, of course.
--
Surely the refresh rate will be different for the projector than the built in display?
I've had similar problems getting X to appear on my TV using the TV out feature on my video card. The TV needs to be set to have a refresh rate of 50Hz or less (PAL) for the TV to display a picture. Therefore, I needed different modelines for the TV than just with the monitor.
Text mode will work for both as the refresh rate is less than 50 Hz and MS Windows will automagically move the refresh rate down to one that the projector supports- which is why each of these work. Again, if the internal display is disabled, then X is forced into using a lower refresh rate and so the projector works.
In short, specify *exactly* what refresh rate and res to use, comment out all the rest and it should work fine.
> within a couple of miles.
Less, actually, triangulation can get it down to less. Of course, this means the cells have to overlap. They do of course- what happens if a n antenna has to go offline for a short while?
> A reverse directory lookup shouldn't really be that hard for a phone company.
I've never called them using my cellphone. Perhaps I shouldn't heve neglected to mention this. All can be derived simply by 'pinging' the phone (as the network does every 90 minutes).