I just need to twitter about it, then update my facebook status about it, then post about it on my blog on blogspot, then adjust my myspace page and/or livejournal.
And maybe do a sketch of the cover to put on my deviant art.
(Point is: Do we need more social networking sites? Why would I start my own...)
By conducting your experiment I think I like bing more, since not only does it show me the top 5 results (About the amount most people look at on Google anyways) but it also has sections regarding Downloads, services, and jobs, right on the front page. Something I would have to type an extra Keyword to find with Google.
It's like that James Bond movie, where they report the news quickly because they are the ones causing the news? I think its Tomorrow Never Dies but I can't be sure.
They were so good the first time they left no trace of their doings and even framed it on some other probable cause.
One of the hackers (I'm guessing the one who likes polo shirts) obviously thought it'd be way cooler to take public credit. They have now revoked his invitation to DEF CON.
There is no real planetary Alignment scheduled for Dec 21, 2012, which the Movie shows as the Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, etc, all being PERFECTLY in line. Yeah no, not going to happen.
As for the whole, Earth, and one of the constellations making a perfect line with the "Dark Rift" - Yes, that IS scheduled to happen! But guess how rare it is? It happened in 2008, and 2004, and 2000... and you get the idea. Its not very rare at all.
A friend of mine is taking an Arky (Archaeology for those less hip) Class, as she is an ancient & medieval history major, and she is taking a class this semester SPECIFICALLY on the Mayans. Her Prof is one of the archaelogists who work on sites like Tucan. The prof held an open public lecture in the University of Calgary in the first week of November here. My friend and I both attended, and while I never did believe in the whole Mayan Myth it's interesting to see where its origins begin.
So this prof is basically a Mayan pro, she can translate most inscriptions just by looking at them (no reference needed) and she intimately understands their number and Calendar system. The first thing to know about Mayan numbers is that they don't use Base 10, they use base 20. The other thing to know is that there is not ONE Mayan Language. They were similar to all of Europe, where the europeans had french, English, spanish, german, etc, the Mayans had about 6 to 8 different Variants. And with that in mind, they were never a single nation, each city had it's own king/queen type leader, and they peacably would trade with the other cities of the area. No one city was truly the capital, but those major trade hubs and those with rarer goods tended to prosper more than the little towns.
Anyways, so the Mayans used 2 different Calendars, and I can't remember how big, but there was a sizable gap in between the usage of each (I think like 800 years?). But basically what it breaks down into is the Short count and the Long count.
The Short count is very much like our Calendar today, 18 months of 20 days each with 5 days at the end of the year for some religious purpose (Similar to the egyptians). They also had Names for days of their week, like Monday Tuesday Wednesday (Except Mayan Gods instead of Norse Gods). So if I were to say, Friday, December 25th, you'd know I mean this Christmas and not last Christmas or the next Christmas because they don't land on a Friday. This works well for 8 years until Christmas lands on a Friday again. You could be more precise about the date if you gave me the year, which is where the Long Count comes in.
We attribute a year to 365 days. So I would say that Dec 31 2009 would be day 733285. The Mayans didn't use years, they merely counted days. Which is neat in some ways because there were 20 days in a month (And they're number system is base 20, remember?) But also a bit of a hassle in others, because there are 18 months.
So the way Archaeologists expressed their long count is in a series of numbers seperated by decimals (It looks like a long IP Address to me). Day 1 would be like 0.0.0.0.0.1 and Day 23 would be like 0.0.0.2.3 - - Except here's the kicker - Mayans didn't set day 0 as anything in particular. In fact, their creation story takes place well after 0. This leads many people to believe that the Mayans set a date in the future as some signifigance and worked their way backwards. What day that could be or what they believed it would be has yet to be discovered. There are some speculations. No, its not 2012.
Essentially the numbers further to the left represent longer periods of time, so each 1.0.0.0.0 in the long count is really like 8767 years give or take, which is a really long friggen time, right? We celebrate every year pretty much, but every odd once in a while we hold huge celebrations, like when we ushered in the new millenia in the year 2000. That sort of thing was also important to the Mayans. If I recall correctly, we're roughly around the 13.0.19.0.0 era on the Mayan Calendar. So when it rolls around to be 13.1.0.0.0 - wouldn't that be a rollover worth celebrating? To the Mayans it would be. Guess what day that happens to fall on? You're right, December 21 2012.
So now that you've got a crash course on the Calendar and how it works, where exactly does the Prophecy come in? I'll tell you. Amongst the ruins of cities, Mayans had what we call Stelas. They are basically big stones which have stories and such carved into them, very much like a monu
It's nice to have a Sandbox for testing the latest and greatest hacks and security protocols, where no one cares about the user and/or what information they've posted on the site.
Double standards also cause these problems - we had a Web page designer and a coder to handle the back end of a web page form. Simple form, name, number, address, email, and a few handful of other things, basically to get some client info.
But because the coder was used to putting underscores to seperate words where the web page designer just uses a new capital Letter, basically this_and_that versus thisAndThat.
In the end, about 2 of 15 fields worked properly, making the entire thing pretty much useless. I don't know how - I don't know why - but this was pushed live to production and remained that way for 3 years before anyone noticed. I took one look at it and went insane.
The code worked, but I didn't understand why and said so. Is that bad coding?
Yes. Period. If you don't understand what your code is doing - how each variable is being assigned, used, and altered - from start to finish, then it is bad coding.
The "It Worked!" Arguement goes almost nowhere in programming. You got it going, great stuff. What happens when a year down the road a change needs to be made, and you are absolutely blundered on how it was working in the first place?
What if someone ELSE has to maintain your code? The "It worked!" is the reason why Programming can be such a painful job. PLEASE leave it to the professionals or keep it to private use.
Except they -DID- have days of the week and they -DID- Have months, just like we did! They had 18 months of 20 days each (and 5 days at the end of the year seperate from the months altogether), and they also had a seperate cycle, like us, for "days of the week" like Sunday to Saturday except not 7 days (I can't recall the correct number right now).
To put it in perspective, While December 25th occurs each year and every year, it does not always occur on a Friday. Thus, if I wrote down "I got an awesome present on Friday, December 25th" you can assume its 2009 because thats coming up pretty shortly. However, if this document is not found for 2000 years, Friday December 25th will have occured more than once, so it'll be difficult to place exactly which Christmas I was talking about.
Now, the mayans had a period where they stopped using that Calendar and started using a different one called "The Long Count". Which is essentially just the number of days that have passed. (Similar to how we choose Year 0 as the birth of Jesus) - and they just go from there. Except the odd part is that they don't place their creation story at 0. Which suggests that they planted a day in the future and went backwards. Now, a day of signifigance happens to be Dec 21 2012. Why is it signifigant? (I feel like I'm spelling that wrong... anyways).
The long count looks alot like an IPV6 Address, in that its usually read as 13.0.0.0.0.1 - Except they didn't use a base 10 system, they used Base 20, so instead of 13.0.0.0.0.20 you'd get 13.0.0.0.1.0
Now, When one of the farther left number rolls around and everything becomes something like 14.0.0.0.0.0 thats kind of like our "Y2K". That just so happens to land on (or I believe within 8 days) of Dec 21 2012.
Except thats not how we do things - we do not Put a shuttle in orbit, then give it payload, then give it fuel. We put all that in the shuttle at once, and launch it from Earth.
For a far away mission, each piece of weight you add to the shuttle makes it that much harder to break Earths Gravity, requiring more fuel, which is also adding more weight.
So the benefit of launching from the Moon is that Sending 8 trips of 1/8th the fuel cost to the moon (and assembling it there) and then launching is going to be less fuel costly than trying to send the full 8 parts in 1 piece from Earth.
Maybe not the phone - I can't imagine why anyone would really need high quality photo realistic Renderings on your phone - I mean once the image is rendered you can just put it on your phone and show people, if thats what you're going for. But there isn't exactly an Engineering or Architect App for the iPhone, as far as I'm aware (don't hold me to that).
However, in my experience, the only time where rendering is preferable over a picture is for entertainment purposes. Though someone above mentioned this would be handy for Engineers and Designers, thats a very small group of people to benefit from this. What was so slow and painful about the old way of dealing with Wireframes and sprites and spending 30 minutes Rendering your final products that way?
If there isn't going to be a push towards some form of animation, I don't see it going much of anywhere. There isn't enough of a need for high performance rendering like this when people achieve these results already at a slower pace.
Rather - let me just ask - what will YOU use this for?
Aren't Photo-Realistic Images pretty big in size? If I want to get 30 Frames per second, how am I ever going to push 30 Photorealistic Frames through the internet - I can hardly get 5 Mb/s from my ISP.
I know its for the lolz, but I can't believe the way pop culture has really spun the whole 2012 thing.
The Mayans predicted -multiple- events to happen after 2012, some as far as 4600+ A.D., and only one inscription ever, in terrible condition, predicts that anything will happen in 2012. It translates roughly to mean that on Dec 21 2012, There will be something black or dark. And (possibly) the return of many strides...(?) very open to interpretation. The whole thing started in the 70's when this guy wrote a book - and he believed that humans came about by Aliens sprinkling their DNA all over the planet, and that Mayans travelled to Central America from the lost continent of Atlantis. That same fellow, still alive today, claims he can channel the spirit of one of the Mayan Kings.
The Electrical storms around the Sun that are supposedly 1 way to wipe us out have been occuring every 20 years or so for as long as we've been recording the suns activity, and we're still around. The "Planet" that could come back to hit us or affect us would (supposedly) have a 2600 earth year orbit around the sun, be the size of jupiter, but be Highly eliptical explaining why we couldn't see it in our immediate solar system. However, if its 3 years away, You'd think any amateur astronomers might have noticed a new star moving differently than all the others. Especially since we observe Jupiter daily, its not like something that size would be terribly hard to miss. And for the "Galactic Alignment" - where they talk about us lining up with the Dark Rift and all that. This "Rare" astrological occurence has occured every 3 years for the past 12 years (at least), and I believe it was also recorded as happening a few times in the 60's and 70's. It is by no means Rare.
I know no one will probably read this - except you scorp1us.
Its up to you to educate everyone you know and Debunk this terrible myth.
Supposedly it would be - or thats what people on/. have said before (though thats hardly a reliable source). Because the Moon's Gravity is so much lower than Earth's, it'd be SO much cheaper to launch a LONG RANGE shuttle from there (say, one past mars), that the cost of sending a simple cargo run to the moon is less than the amount you'd save.
First off, you shouldn't need to use Winzip, every computer since like Windows 95 has had its own method of compression to send files. Toss that out, and just use the right click "Send to compressed (zip) folder".
Secondly, If your boss is saying that you had to have paid for software at one point, tell him that you're going to have to buy licenses for each time that software is used.
This means that either A) Your IT Budget is going way up or B) Other Departments are going to have to expense their own software, and you just aid in the installation and support.
If your IT Manager is content with what software you've got going on, either knowing full well that its trial version or doesn't care, than its really not your place to challenge that, and you go with it.
If YOU are the IT Manager, you need to get some backbone and tell the Chief that you are at serious risk of lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
I just need to twitter about it, then update my facebook status about it, then post about it on my blog on blogspot, then adjust my myspace page and/or livejournal.
And maybe do a sketch of the cover to put on my deviant art.
(Point is: Do we need more social networking sites? Why would I start my own...)
By conducting your experiment I think I like bing more, since not only does it show me the top 5 results (About the amount most people look at on Google anyways) but it also has sections regarding Downloads, services, and jobs, right on the front page. Something I would have to type an extra Keyword to find with Google.
In conclusion, You fail at bashing Bing.
It's like that James Bond movie, where they report the news quickly because they are the ones causing the news? I think its Tomorrow Never Dies but I can't be sure.
They were so good the first time they left no trace of their doings and even framed it on some other probable cause.
One of the hackers (I'm guessing the one who likes polo shirts) obviously thought it'd be way cooler to take public credit. They have now revoked his invitation to DEF CON.
AH!
I forgot "The Great Alignment".
There is no real planetary Alignment scheduled for Dec 21, 2012, which the Movie shows as the Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, etc, all being PERFECTLY in line. Yeah no, not going to happen.
As for the whole, Earth, and one of the constellations making a perfect line with the "Dark Rift" - Yes, that IS scheduled to happen! But guess how rare it is? It happened in 2008, and 2004, and 2000... and you get the idea. Its not very rare at all.
A friend of mine is taking an Arky (Archaeology for those less hip) Class, as she is an ancient & medieval history major, and she is taking a class this semester SPECIFICALLY on the Mayans. Her Prof is one of the archaelogists who work on sites like Tucan. The prof held an open public lecture in the University of Calgary in the first week of November here. My friend and I both attended, and while I never did believe in the whole Mayan Myth it's interesting to see where its origins begin.
So this prof is basically a Mayan pro, she can translate most inscriptions just by looking at them (no reference needed) and she intimately understands their number and Calendar system. The first thing to know about Mayan numbers is that they don't use Base 10, they use base 20. The other thing to know is that there is not ONE Mayan Language. They were similar to all of Europe, where the europeans had french, English, spanish, german, etc, the Mayans had about 6 to 8 different Variants. And with that in mind, they were never a single nation, each city had it's own king/queen type leader, and they peacably would trade with the other cities of the area. No one city was truly the capital, but those major trade hubs and those with rarer goods tended to prosper more than the little towns.
Anyways, so the Mayans used 2 different Calendars, and I can't remember how big, but there was a sizable gap in between the usage of each (I think like 800 years?). But basically what it breaks down into is the Short count and the Long count.
The Short count is very much like our Calendar today, 18 months of 20 days each with 5 days at the end of the year for some religious purpose (Similar to the egyptians). They also had Names for days of their week, like Monday Tuesday Wednesday (Except Mayan Gods instead of Norse Gods). So if I were to say, Friday, December 25th, you'd know I mean this Christmas and not last Christmas or the next Christmas because they don't land on a Friday. This works well for 8 years until Christmas lands on a Friday again. You could be more precise about the date if you gave me the year, which is where the Long Count comes in.
We attribute a year to 365 days. So I would say that Dec 31 2009 would be day 733285. The Mayans didn't use years, they merely counted days. Which is neat in some ways because there were 20 days in a month (And they're number system is base 20, remember?) But also a bit of a hassle in others, because there are 18 months.
So the way Archaeologists expressed their long count is in a series of numbers seperated by decimals (It looks like a long IP Address to me). Day 1 would be like 0.0.0.0.0.1 and Day 23 would be like 0.0.0.2.3 - - Except here's the kicker - Mayans didn't set day 0 as anything in particular. In fact, their creation story takes place well after 0. This leads many people to believe that the Mayans set a date in the future as some signifigance and worked their way backwards. What day that could be or what they believed it would be has yet to be discovered. There are some speculations. No, its not 2012.
Essentially the numbers further to the left represent longer periods of time, so each 1.0.0.0.0 in the long count is really like 8767 years give or take, which is a really long friggen time, right? We celebrate every year pretty much, but every odd once in a while we hold huge celebrations, like when we ushered in the new millenia in the year 2000. That sort of thing was also important to the Mayans. If I recall correctly, we're roughly around the 13.0.19.0.0 era on the Mayan Calendar. So when it rolls around to be 13.1.0.0.0 - wouldn't that be a rollover worth celebrating? To the Mayans it would be. Guess what day that happens to fall on? You're right, December 21 2012.
So now that you've got a crash course on the Calendar and how it works, where exactly does the Prophecy come in? I'll tell you. Amongst the ruins of cities, Mayans had what we call Stelas. They are basically big stones which have stories and such carved into them, very much like a monu
Now they'll either lace the entire field with C4, or they'll start using remote detonators when people move in to disarm.
It's nice to have a Sandbox for testing the latest and greatest hacks and security protocols, where no one cares about the user and/or what information they've posted on the site.
The laser from the mouse will heat up the chocolate inside of counterfeit coins, thus exposing the fakes and creating a mess.
Instant, or is there a "speed of light" delay?
And I think that Cameo with Ben Stiller was a little over the top.
Double standards also cause these problems - we had a Web page designer and a coder to handle the back end of a web page form. Simple form, name, number, address, email, and a few handful of other things, basically to get some client info.
But because the coder was used to putting underscores to seperate words where the web page designer just uses a new capital Letter, basically this_and_that versus thisAndThat.
In the end, about 2 of 15 fields worked properly, making the entire thing pretty much useless. I don't know how - I don't know why - but this was pushed live to production and remained that way for 3 years before anyone noticed. I took one look at it and went insane.
The code worked, but I didn't understand why and said so. Is that bad coding?
Yes. Period. If you don't understand what your code is doing - how each variable is being assigned, used, and altered - from start to finish, then it is bad coding.
The "It Worked!" Arguement goes almost nowhere in programming. You got it going, great stuff. What happens when a year down the road a change needs to be made, and you are absolutely blundered on how it was working in the first place?
What if someone ELSE has to maintain your code? The "It worked!" is the reason why Programming can be such a painful job. PLEASE leave it to the professionals or keep it to private use.
Except they -DID- have days of the week and they -DID- Have months, just like we did! They had 18 months of 20 days each (and 5 days at the end of the year seperate from the months altogether), and they also had a seperate cycle, like us, for "days of the week" like Sunday to Saturday except not 7 days (I can't recall the correct number right now).
To put it in perspective, While December 25th occurs each year and every year, it does not always occur on a Friday. Thus, if I wrote down "I got an awesome present on Friday, December 25th" you can assume its 2009 because thats coming up pretty shortly. However, if this document is not found for 2000 years, Friday December 25th will have occured more than once, so it'll be difficult to place exactly which Christmas I was talking about.
Now, the mayans had a period where they stopped using that Calendar and started using a different one called "The Long Count". Which is essentially just the number of days that have passed. (Similar to how we choose Year 0 as the birth of Jesus) - and they just go from there. Except the odd part is that they don't place their creation story at 0. Which suggests that they planted a day in the future and went backwards. Now, a day of signifigance happens to be Dec 21 2012. Why is it signifigant? (I feel like I'm spelling that wrong... anyways).
The long count looks alot like an IPV6 Address, in that its usually read as 13.0.0.0.0.1 - Except they didn't use a base 10 system, they used Base 20, so instead of 13.0.0.0.0.20 you'd get 13.0.0.0.1.0
Now, When one of the farther left number rolls around and everything becomes something like 14.0.0.0.0.0 thats kind of like our "Y2K". That just so happens to land on (or I believe within 8 days) of Dec 21 2012.
Except thats not how we do things - we do not Put a shuttle in orbit, then give it payload, then give it fuel. We put all that in the shuttle at once, and launch it from Earth.
For a far away mission, each piece of weight you add to the shuttle makes it that much harder to break Earths Gravity, requiring more fuel, which is also adding more weight.
So the benefit of launching from the Moon is that Sending 8 trips of 1/8th the fuel cost to the moon (and assembling it there) and then launching is going to be less fuel costly than trying to send the full 8 parts in 1 piece from Earth.
Then I beg you to come up with more than 5 practical applications.
Maybe not the phone - I can't imagine why anyone would really need high quality photo realistic Renderings on your phone - I mean once the image is rendered you can just put it on your phone and show people, if thats what you're going for. But there isn't exactly an Engineering or Architect App for the iPhone, as far as I'm aware (don't hold me to that).
However, in my experience, the only time where rendering is preferable over a picture is for entertainment purposes. Though someone above mentioned this would be handy for Engineers and Designers, thats a very small group of people to benefit from this. What was so slow and painful about the old way of dealing with Wireframes and sprites and spending 30 minutes Rendering your final products that way?
If there isn't going to be a push towards some form of animation, I don't see it going much of anywhere. There isn't enough of a need for high performance rendering like this when people achieve these results already at a slower pace.
Rather - let me just ask - what will YOU use this for?
Video's pretty big - but its always compressed to a point I wouldn't call it photo realistic.
Aren't Photo-Realistic Images pretty big in size? If I want to get 30 Frames per second, how am I ever going to push 30 Photorealistic Frames through the internet - I can hardly get 5 Mb/s from my ISP.
I know its for the lolz, but I can't believe the way pop culture has really spun the whole 2012 thing.
The Mayans predicted -multiple- events to happen after 2012, some as far as 4600+ A.D., and only one inscription ever, in terrible condition, predicts that anything will happen in 2012. It translates roughly to mean that on Dec 21 2012, There will be something black or dark. And (possibly) the return of many strides...(?) very open to interpretation. The whole thing started in the 70's when this guy wrote a book - and he believed that humans came about by Aliens sprinkling their DNA all over the planet, and that Mayans travelled to Central America from the lost continent of Atlantis. That same fellow, still alive today, claims he can channel the spirit of one of the Mayan Kings.
The Electrical storms around the Sun that are supposedly 1 way to wipe us out have been occuring every 20 years or so for as long as we've been recording the suns activity, and we're still around. The "Planet" that could come back to hit us or affect us would (supposedly) have a 2600 earth year orbit around the sun, be the size of jupiter, but be Highly eliptical explaining why we couldn't see it in our immediate solar system. However, if its 3 years away, You'd think any amateur astronomers might have noticed a new star moving differently than all the others. Especially since we observe Jupiter daily, its not like something that size would be terribly hard to miss. And for the "Galactic Alignment" - where they talk about us lining up with the Dark Rift and all that. This "Rare" astrological occurence has occured every 3 years for the past 12 years (at least), and I believe it was also recorded as happening a few times in the 60's and 70's. It is by no means Rare.
I know no one will probably read this - except you scorp1us.
Its up to you to educate everyone you know and Debunk this terrible myth.
Supposedly it would be - or thats what people on /. have said before (though thats hardly a reliable source). Because the Moon's Gravity is so much lower than Earth's, it'd be SO much cheaper to launch a LONG RANGE shuttle from there (say, one past mars), that the cost of sending a simple cargo run to the moon is less than the amount you'd save.
What about Cheaper mission costs if shuttles can be assembled on the moon and then launched from there with low orbit?
I mean, by your logic, the ISS is a complete waste of time and money, yet we still did it. Why would we back down from terrible Ideas NOW?
Neither does using pirated software in the workplace where this sort of stuff is bound to happen...
But there you have it.
First off, you shouldn't need to use Winzip, every computer since like Windows 95 has had its own method of compression to send files. Toss that out, and just use the right click "Send to compressed (zip) folder".
Secondly, If your boss is saying that you had to have paid for software at one point, tell him that you're going to have to buy licenses for each time that software is used.
This means that either
A) Your IT Budget is going way up
or
B) Other Departments are going to have to expense their own software, and you just aid in the installation and support.
If your IT Manager is content with what software you've got going on, either knowing full well that its trial version or doesn't care, than its really not your place to challenge that, and you go with it.
If YOU are the IT Manager, you need to get some backbone and tell the Chief that you are at serious risk of lawsuit.
I lost count. Can someone help me out again? This time I'll count using Binary on my fingers.