"Since the player with the most money wins anyway, it would be too boring for me."
How is that any different from "the player with the most spare time" wins? If you don't have the free time available to do the massive grind effort needed to get the best gear to be competitive most of the existing online games, it is terribly frustrating - and franky, I dont really want to burn that much of my life playing a game, due to real world commitments, relationships etc. On the other hand, people that have lots of time to burn playing games are less likely to have the ready cash to buy expensive upgrades - so in a way it works out. Of course, with two players similarly equipped, the guy who has been playing longest is more likely to win over the guy who just bought his way there, so the dedicated player still has an edge.
I personally prefer a truly level playing field - like quake or unreal tournament (or chess)- where it's just down to strategy and knowledge of the game, with everyone having the same gear.
The way I see it, patents on software are wrong for two reasons.
Firstly: The software is already protected by copyright, so there should not be "double" protection by also allowing patents.
Secondly: Patents are supposed to be a "social contract", where the inventor publishes the details of how his invention works and thus improves the "state of the art", in exchange for a reasonable period of protection that allows the inventor sufficient time to get the product to market, recoup the cost of inventing it and making a profit. Society as a whole benefits because other inventors can then use the details to incorporate the ideas and mechanisms described in other inventions (possibly subject to obtaining a license).
This works great for many inventions - but fails completely for software. The reason it fails for software is that most software patents are so obfuscated as to be practically useless to a programmer to build upon. How often do you actually see the source code for a software patent? I never have in ant of the software patents I have seen.
Imagine if patents were allowed on artworks - should the first guy who paints a picture of a bridge then be able to prevent anyone else from painting a picture of a bridge? Of course there are many "prior art" examples of paintings of bridges, so it would not be allowed. What if it were something a little different? Eg. someone drawing a stick figure picture of a guy in a red shirt doing a handstand on a bridge? or the more generalised case of just a humanoid figure doing a handstand on a bridge? This is the sort of wording that many software patents have - even if following artists are able to paint much better pictures of people doing handstands on bridges.
Worse yet, if you painted a picture of something entirely different, which just happened to have a picture of a guy doing a handstand on a bridge being one small element of the entire picture ( say, it's in the background or something) you would still be in violation of the patent - even though the handstand guy is just a tiny part of the whole.
now programming is to a certain extent like art - there are many ways of implementing the same "idea", in many different languages, and in ways that are better than the originally scrappy code that might have been written. Whats more, there are so many elements that go into a program, it is all but impossible to search through all the possible patents it might potentially infringe. Software patents are not making it easier for programmers to write better programs, so therefore are entirely useless for "improving the art", and thus the social contract of exchange of information in return for a limited period of protection is broken.
This web server apparently has much better performance and scalability - so it can do the same job while using much less power. The article does explain all that pretty well if you care to read it.
I dont know - I figure the least I can do is a bit of tech support for my parents for all those free meals & lodging (not to mention all the other crap they had to deal with) while growing up. If your spending a lot of time doing tech support for them then you are doing it wrong - get them set up with Linux, set up remote login, and nearly all problems they are going to encounter are resolvable remote. On the odd occasion you have to go over & fix stuff, chances are you are getting a roast dinner out of it.
I think it's a bit selfish not to help out those that took so much time and effort to raise you.
This is a reference to the little known piece of art painted by Mchelangelo, as documented by Monty Python. Presumably, after all the ensuing trouble, the pope ended up getting Leonardo to do the much more famous one which didn't feature a fat JC & two skinny JC's, not to mention the afore mentioned mariachi band and all the rest.
Any military that uses these are going to have to prove that the primary use of the weapon is NOT to blind, as blinding weapons are banned by the Geneva convention, as stated here:
Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices. The High Contracting Parties shall not transfer such weapons to any State or non-State entity.
I think you are confusing what the butterfly effect actually means.
It doesn't mean that a butterfly flapping it's wings is going to "cause" a hurricane or a drought or a flood that had no probability of happening in a similar region in the first place - eg. no butterfly wing flapping is going to cause it to snow in the Amazon.
What it does relate to is how weather systems are chaotic, and hence no matter how finely and precisely you measure the temperature, pressure and humidity all over the planet, it will never be possible to make exact weather predictions more than a week or so out - as something even as insignificant as a butterfly flapping it's wings will cause enough perturbations to make absoltely precise prediction impossible.
That is not to say though, that the average outcome can't be predicted - which is why you see statements like "25% chance of showers two days from now" for example.
Another point to note is that the energy is not lost from the system - it is just diverted a little. The kinetic energy that is sucked out of the atmosphere from a wind turbine is going to find it's way back in again once the electricity is used - it will heat the surrounding area ( like say, under your desk where your PC is) and eventually find it's way back into the atmosphere. This will have overall less effect on the atmosphere than taking long stored energy (like from coal) and injecting that into the environment - both the waste heat from the power station and the eventual heating caused by the electricity used, let alone the much greater effects caused by the accompanying greenhouse gas emissions.
Finally, even the biggest wind turbines are only a little over 100 meters tall - Skyscrapers and other much more substantial structures have a much greater blocking effect on the wind, and no one seems too worried about building those ad infinitum. most of the atmosphere is anything from 80-150 km deep depending on who you talk to.(yes, I know it decreases in density as you go higher)
How much effect do you think a little furry 1 CM covering on the bottom of a wind tunnel that was 8 to 15 meters high would have on slowing the wind? even if it was completely carpeted with little 1 cm high protrusions? (Hint: Think how much a river gets slowed down by stuff on the bottom - not a lot - most of the current moves through the center bit away from the banks)
The effect wind farms even if used to toally power the planet would be insignificant, and certainly much less significant than even using say, nuclear power, which is injecting a lot of heat into the system that wasn't there before in the first place.
If by "God" you mean "A statistical probability that approaches one given a large enough timespan and enough random reactions of molecules eventually forming something that can self replicate", then yes. Of course once you have something that can self replicate, it is only a matter of time before mutations in the replication process cause those molecules that are best able to replicate to fill any new environmental niches ans set of conditions that is conducive to further replication.
I don't know how often molecules tend to bang in to each other in space (say, in a nebula), but there sure is a lot of space, and they have had an awfully long time to hit the jackpot to form the right combination of molecules that can self replicate.
If there's a place for god then until we find a universal theory for everything, then I suppose you could choose to believe (S)He is the rule setter. That's wildly different from anything described in any existing religious texts though - and to say God made all the animals and us via this sort of process makes about as much sense as attributing lightning striking your house to God because God made thunderstorms possible. (Insurance companies not withstanding)
Wow now I know exactly what I want for Christmas. I have been looking for a low cost network & linux enabled micro controller for ages! Thanks for the link.
Perhaps I am tone deaf or something but I never really got the whole audiophile thing anyway - unless you are in a perfectly shaped room with all the right speakers and amps and the exact right seating position, with accoustic foam to suck up unwanted reflections (ie. basically an audio studio) I cant see how the losses from running over some nice chunky copper cable are going to make that much difference compared to all the other environmental factors - and as soon as you are playing the same music from another pair of speakers it's all going to get thrown about of whack anyway because of interference patterns caused by the second pair of sound sources. Besides, once you start really cranking the volume the human ear's ability to pick up subtle nuances goes right out the window.
Let my original post above (ie. grand parent) stand as a warning to all who dare post to Slashdot without researching their facts better. 1) As pointed out, 2500 to 3000 calories is excessive unless your tall, already pretty fit & doing a lot of exercise - should be 1,700 to 2,200 on average, if you are not doing much exercise. 2) I totally screwed up the amounts of calories in fat vs protein. Closer figures should be more like: Fat: 1 gram = 9 calories Protein: 1 gram = 4 calories Carbohydrates: 1 gram = 4 calories Alcohol: 1 gram = 7 calories 9calories/kg
I thought fat had 4 x the energy of carbs & protein but obviously I was mistaken. I still stand by all the other stuff I said in the original post though!
if you are still munching your way through 6 soft drinks, 2 packets of doritoes, a couple of chocolate bars and fried chicken each day you are still sucking in a hell of a lot more calories than you can burn off with just exercise? The main role of exercise in weight loss is to help you maintain your metabolic rate ( or increase it a bit) while eating a normal amount of calories.
For a regular guy this should be about 2500 to 3000 Calories depending on your body size.
If you just cut your calories, your body is going to tend to just drop it's metabolic rate, so it's harder to lose weight with diet alone. Oils and fats have 4 times the energy packed in them as carbs and protein, so if you are eating a lot of fatty food it is going to give you a lot of calories without filling you up much.
a normal healthy diet (ie. balanced protein/carbs and healthy fats, like from nuts, fish & avocados) plus exercise is the way to really succeed. Have a big heap of non-starchy veggies and it will really help fill you up without too much extra calories compared to having say, fries with your steak.
Oh. and diet drinks have been found to have a tendancy to fool your body it is starving, which gives you a bigger appetite, so avoid those & just drink fewer sugary beverages instead.
Losing weight isn't rocket science. Increase/maintain your metabolism a bit with 30 min excercise a day and reduce your calorie intake to below what your body burns is all you need to do - and be patient. Don't expect to lose more than about 2 pounds a week - any more is too fast and unsustainable in the long term.
The muscle you put on with exercise also helps you maintain your weight loss because muscle burns more energy than fat.
Break out of the overweight geek stereotype and be a healthy fit geek - you will think better too when you improve your circulation.
I made my FM transmitter from a kit (not this one - unfortunately the kit I used isn't sold from the place I bought it any more) because I just like doing that sort of thing, but you can buy them pre-made too. Total cost: About $40 Range of the device: About 30 meters.
That way any stereo in your house can pick it up, no wires needed. If your amp doesnt have an FM receiver you can of course pick one up pretty cheaply - even a cheapo FM receiver which sounds terrible will sound good once you have it playing through proper speakers instead of the litte 4" speaker in the receiver.
Sound wont be as perfect as it would be connected directly to your stereo, with just the one stereo playing, but if you have multiple sound sources playing the same thing from different parts of your house they are going to be interfering with each other and distorting the sound anyway due to reflections and different levels of attenuation of the treble or bass cause by walls between ajacent rooms etc.
The FM transmitters you get for your iPod is much weaker and only has a range of a few feet, but the kit form transmitters seem to have about a 30 foot range. I can pretty much receive the signal anywhere in my house, but not much further than my boundary, so there is little problem with causing interference. Of course you tune the transmitter into a blank spot in the FM band too.
Best of all - you can have a "silent disco" house party or whatever - everyone just brings their own FM receiver/ipod or whatever and can crank the music as loud as they want, with just low level sound playing over the house system. If you use Linux, you can even hack an old broken USB headset, (I have a couple of broken USB headsets from where I have stood up and walked away from my PC with the things still on my head) and basically create a USB interface for your FM transmitter - just snip off the broken headphones, and connect the wires that were for the headphones to the input of the FM transmitter. That way you can route just the sound from your media player to the radio (mabey have a bit of script or somethign to start the player with the appropriate parameters), and leave all other system sounds playing through the PC speakers.
Use one of the many remote PC music player programs to enable you to switch selection - eg. there's a program to control winamp from a PDA. I am sure if you are halfway technically competent you should be able to easily put something together to control what your PC is playing - through a program you write for your phone, to mabey an IR receiver and a bit of script and an old remote control or something like that.
I too would love to see this work - though they are going to have to be moving a hell of a lot faster than 5 M/s (18 kM/h) for it to be anything like a practical solution.
Since there is no tangential velocity, unless the thing gets up to geo, there's going to have to be a big rocket to supply the additional deltav to reach orbit. To reach geosynchronous orbit (about 36000 kM above sea level, I think) is going to take about 2000 hours, or 83 days. I imagine you wouldn't want to take more than a week or so to climb a cable.
To make it to geosynchronous orbit in a week you would have to be moving at about 214 kM/h, or approximately 60 meters/second.
The only other option is to have a climber that can carry enough fuel up with it for a rocket to give the additional delta v needed for orbit. Since I'm not a rocket scientist, I'll leave the calculation of how much fuel you'd need for that to someone else. Just how much additional velocity is needed if you make it say, half way up? Could you use a scramjet or something like that instead of a rocket since you would be in thin upper atmosphere with plenty of drop available to get the thing firing?
at any rate, I think we will probably have a viable ribbon or cable material before we have a viable climber.
I've never understood this. You do realize, don't you, that without feminism, you wouldn't be a female programmer today?
I believe Female programmers existed way before the feminism movement. In fact, they existed way before male programmers too for that matter.
Re:Do we need the anti-smoking jab
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A Geek Funeral
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Solutions: Instead of driving your car or catching a bus: Ride a bike - a decent hybrid makes a 20 km trip a snap - I literally just started riding again last week and covered 20 km easily in under an hour.
Instead of using a petrol mower: Use a push mower or Replace your lawn with a small leaf ground cover and paved pathways or "stepping stones" for high traffic areas. A small leaf ground cover works great as a replacement for lawn unless you really do a lot of running etc on it - but if its only for around under the washing line and the open bits of your backyard where you dont want plants, it is fine. I only have to mow the council owned bit outside my fence now, never inside. Groundcover needs a bit of a trim a couple of times a year, which in my case I just do with a pair of edgr trimmers since it's only about 5 square meters to trim - the rest of my garden is all ferns, bushes & trees, where it isn't groundcover, brick paving or leaf litter/mulch under dense trees.
Onh and you can use an electric barbecue or even a solar cooker if you really want to go green.
Yes, electricity is mostly generated by burning stuff - but its burnt in one place with big scrubbers to catch most of the particulate matter.
If there was something that bought those two great genres together, what would you call it? Asterpong? Pongeroids? I suspect its only the the naming difficulty that has held such a great game back all these years.
Of course, if you don't care quite as much about efficiency, or you are only stepping down your voltage a little, you can always use an LM78xx (where xx is the output voltage needed) they cost a buck or two also, and with very few additional components needed.
Of course the best action is to not drink sugary drinks at all - but if you absolutely have to have that Coke, then have one with real sugar in it - and be aware of the additional calories you are eating. At least it wont make you hungrier, as the artificially sweetened drinks do, according to that study I linked.
The zero calorie drinks dont give you calories directly - but they apparently do make you hungrier, which in turn makes you want to eat more. Read the link.
Losing fat comes down to a simple equation. If calories in is less than calories burnt, you WILL lose weight. Its as simple as that. No amount of "glandular" problem is going to make you put on weight if you are eating less calories than you use in your daily activites. So you need to either eat less, or do more ecercise, or both. Exercise helps because as you get fitter and have more muscle, as just having more muscle makes you burn more energy - so in that respect it is easier for a fit person to stay slim, but there is no reason in the world that anyone needs to be fat, regardless of any "glandular" problem. Getting more excercise is trivial too. It takes no more 5 minutes to do 30 pushups and 60 crunches - you can do them last thing at night before going to bed. Likewise, you can get off the bus/train one stop earlier ( or walk to the next stop along from where you get on) and easily get a 15 to 30 min walk in a day. Losing weight doesnt have to mean hours and hours in the Gym - just a bit of self motivation to be a bit more active in your daily routine. One other thing - Diet drinks - stay the hell away from them. Ever see slim people in the supermarket buying diet coke? no - its always the huge people. Diet drinks have less calories, but there's an interesting littlel experiment they did, where two groups of rats were allowed to eat as much as they wanted - one group was given diet drinks, and the other normal non diet drinks. The ones on diet drinks porked up. The theory: The sweetners give your body signals to get ready to deal with a lot of sugar. When the sugar doesnt arrive, your body goes "Holy crap - we're starving! better eat more!" So diet drinks may actually make you fatter by making you have a bigger appetite. Here's a not very authoritive link http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/06/its_been_recognized_for_a.php to one article about this - Im sure with a more thorough search the actual paper would turn up somewhere.
Hopefully this latest news about swine flu will be that final bit of motivation a lot of people need to actually do something about their weight.
I think the texturing is more important than the polygon count - good quality texturing can make up for a lot of polygons. More important than both of these however, is the AI and game physics. If I had a choice between a photorealistic game where everything was indestructible, vs a game that was more like say, WoW but you could actually dig holes in the landscape, destroy or build things and actually physically change the world (even if only temporarily) then this would add much more value to the game, in my opinion.
AI is also important - there's nothing more boring than mobs that act in a predictable way, or worse, have been given god like reflexes and omipotence in order to make up for crappy AI. Ideally, mobs in the game should be indistinguishable from other players, at least until you go and try and talk to them.
of course this also depends on the genre of the game. If you are writing a flight simulator or something, then visual realism is much more important than say, being able to create a big hole in the ground when you crash. I would love a FPS where you could actually blow a shortcut through the wall (at the expense of wating a lot of ammo) or an RPG where your lvl 80 fireball was actually able to blow down that door or at least scorch it a bit.
Actually mabey his original quote should have been 640g. From here,http://www.amazon.ca/Kingston-2gb-Ddr2-800mhz-Module/dp/B0014G4RS0 you can see that a 2G DDR2 ram module weighs 23g. Since at any time in the last 20 years, most personal computers have rarely needed more then two to four memory sticks, and they all weigh about the same, actually on average you would only need about 100G of RAM, at most. ( ie 4 sticks). so 640g would be a healthy 6.4x margin! Since ram continues to increase in memory/mass, this is likely to hold true or the indefinite future.
I forgot to mention - if you use a desk bracket, and you really value your vertical resolution, you can also mount your monitors on it sideways, so you the monitor(s) are in portrait mode. most video cards support rotating your monitors, so this gives you an excellent way for looking at single page portrait documents, or more code than you should ever have in a single function all at once.
The other option of course is to get an LCD and a wall bracket or a desk bracket that allows you to have the monitor off the desk alltogether. You can also get brackets that allow two or three monitors to be mounted to it, but still have just the one upright pole that comes off your desk ( or bolts onto a wall. http://www.megamounts.com.au/shop/lcd-desk-mounts.htm?gclid=COGlvZK5x5sCFcEtpAod-U9fLg
There are many many similar products out there - this is just the first I came across with a quick google search.
I used to think I needed nothing more than a 17" LCD, but after going to 2x24" monitors @1920x1280 theres no way im ever going back. Virtual desktop space is a lot more valuable to me than real desktop space. if I ever go to 3 monitors though, Im getting myself one of these brackets.
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"Since the player with the most money wins anyway, it would be too boring for me."
How is that any different from "the player with the most spare time" wins? If you don't have the free time available to do the massive grind effort needed to get the best gear to be competitive most of the existing online games, it is terribly frustrating - and franky, I dont really want to burn that much of my life playing a game, due to real world commitments, relationships etc. On the other hand, people that have lots of time to burn playing games are less likely to have the ready cash to buy expensive upgrades - so in a way it works out. Of course, with two players similarly equipped, the guy who has been playing longest is more likely to win over the guy who just bought his way there, so the dedicated player still has an edge.
I personally prefer a truly level playing field - like quake or unreal tournament (or chess)- where it's just down to strategy and knowledge of the game, with everyone having the same gear.
The way I see it, patents on software are wrong for two reasons.
Firstly: The software is already protected by copyright, so there should not be "double" protection by also allowing patents.
Secondly: Patents are supposed to be a "social contract", where the inventor publishes the details of how his invention works and thus improves the "state of the art", in exchange for a reasonable period of protection that allows the inventor sufficient time to get the product to market, recoup the cost of inventing it and making a profit. Society as a whole benefits because other inventors can then use the details to incorporate the ideas and mechanisms described in other inventions (possibly subject to obtaining a license).
This works great for many inventions - but fails completely for software.
The reason it fails for software is that most software patents are so obfuscated as to be practically useless to a programmer to build upon.
How often do you actually see the source code for a software patent? I never have in ant of the software patents I have seen.
Imagine if patents were allowed on artworks - should the first guy who paints a picture of a bridge then be able to prevent anyone else from painting a picture of a bridge? Of course there are many "prior art" examples of paintings of bridges, so it would not be allowed. What if it were something a little different? Eg. someone drawing a stick figure picture of a guy in a red shirt doing a handstand on a bridge? or the more generalised case of just a humanoid figure doing a handstand on a bridge? This is the sort of wording that many software patents have - even if following artists are able to paint much better pictures of people doing handstands on bridges.
Worse yet, if you painted a picture of something entirely different, which just happened to have a picture of a guy doing a handstand on a bridge being one small element of the entire picture ( say, it's in the background or something) you would still be in violation of the patent - even though the handstand guy is just a tiny part of the whole.
now programming is to a certain extent like art - there are many ways of implementing the same "idea", in many different languages, and in ways that are better than the originally scrappy code that might have been written. Whats more, there are so many elements that go into a program, it is all but impossible to search through all the possible patents it might potentially infringe. Software patents are not making it easier for programmers to write better programs, so therefore are entirely useless for "improving the art", and thus the social contract of exchange of information in return for a limited period of protection is broken.
This web server apparently has much better performance and scalability - so it can do the same job while using much less power. The article does explain all that pretty well if you care to read it.
I dont know - I figure the least I can do is a bit of tech support for my parents for all those free meals & lodging (not to mention all the other crap they had to deal with) while growing up. If your spending a lot of time doing tech support for them then you are doing it wrong - get them set up with Linux, set up remote login, and nearly all problems they are going to encounter are resolvable remote. On the odd occasion you have to go over & fix stuff, chances are you are getting a roast dinner out of it.
I think it's a bit selfish not to help out those that took so much time and effort to raise you.
Time to hand in your geek card.
This is a reference to the little known piece of art painted by Mchelangelo, as documented by Monty Python. Presumably, after all the ensuing trouble, the pope ended up getting Leonardo to do the much more famous one which didn't feature a fat JC & two skinny JC's, not to mention the afore mentioned mariachi band and all the rest.
Any military that uses these are going to have to prove that the primary use of the weapon is NOT to blind, as blinding weapons are banned by the Geneva convention, as stated here:
Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices. The High Contracting Parties shall not transfer such weapons to any State or non-State entity.
I think you are confusing what the butterfly effect actually means.
It doesn't mean that a butterfly flapping it's wings is going to "cause" a hurricane or a drought or a flood that had no probability of happening in a similar region in the first place - eg. no butterfly wing flapping is going to cause it to snow in the Amazon.
What it does relate to is how weather systems are chaotic, and hence no matter how finely and precisely you measure the temperature, pressure and humidity all over the planet, it will never be possible to make exact weather predictions more than a week or so out - as something even as insignificant as a butterfly flapping it's wings will cause enough perturbations to make absoltely precise prediction impossible.
That is not to say though, that the average outcome can't be predicted - which is why you see statements like "25% chance of showers two days from now" for example.
Another point to note is that the energy is not lost from the system - it is just diverted a little.
The kinetic energy that is sucked out of the atmosphere from a wind turbine is going to find it's way back in again once the electricity is used - it will heat the surrounding area ( like say, under your desk where your PC is) and eventually find it's way back into the atmosphere. This will have overall less effect on the atmosphere than taking long stored energy (like from coal) and injecting that into the environment - both the waste heat from the power station and the eventual heating caused by the electricity used, let alone the much greater effects caused by the accompanying greenhouse gas emissions.
Finally, even the biggest wind turbines are only a little over 100 meters tall - Skyscrapers and other much more substantial structures have a much greater blocking effect on the wind, and no one seems too worried about building those ad infinitum.
most of the atmosphere is anything from 80-150 km deep depending on who you talk to.(yes, I know it decreases in density as you go higher)
How much effect do you think a little furry 1 CM covering on the bottom of a wind tunnel that was 8 to 15 meters high would have on slowing the wind? even if it was completely carpeted with little 1 cm high protrusions? (Hint: Think how much a river gets slowed down by stuff on the bottom - not a lot - most of the current moves through the center bit away from the banks)
The effect wind farms even if used to toally power the planet would be insignificant, and certainly much less significant than even using say, nuclear power, which is injecting a lot of heat into the system that wasn't there before in the first place.
I couldnt agree more.
If by "God" you mean "A statistical probability that approaches one given a large enough timespan and enough random reactions of molecules eventually forming something that can self replicate", then yes. Of course once you have something that can self replicate, it is only a matter of time before mutations in the replication process cause those molecules that are best able to replicate to fill any new environmental niches ans set of conditions that is conducive to further replication.
I don't know how often molecules tend to bang in to each other in space (say, in a nebula), but there sure is a lot of space, and they have had an awfully long time to hit the jackpot to form the right combination of molecules that can self replicate.
If there's a place for god then until we find a universal theory for everything, then I suppose you could choose to believe (S)He is the rule setter. That's wildly different from anything described in any existing religious texts though - and to say God made all the animals and us via this sort of process makes about as much sense as attributing lightning striking your house to God because God made thunderstorms possible. (Insurance companies not withstanding)
Wow now I know exactly what I want for Christmas. I have been looking for a low cost network & linux enabled micro controller for ages! Thanks for the link.
Perhaps I am tone deaf or something but I never really got the whole audiophile thing anyway - unless you are in a perfectly shaped room with all the right speakers and amps and the exact right seating position, with accoustic foam to suck up unwanted reflections (ie. basically an audio studio) I cant see how the losses from running over some nice chunky copper cable are going to make that much difference compared to all the other environmental factors - and as soon as you are playing the same music from another pair of speakers it's all going to get thrown about of whack anyway because of interference patterns caused by the second pair of sound sources. Besides, once you start really cranking the volume the human ear's ability to pick up subtle nuances goes right out the window.
Let my original post above (ie. grand parent) stand as a warning to all who dare post to Slashdot without researching their facts better.
1) As pointed out, 2500 to 3000 calories is excessive unless your tall, already pretty fit & doing a lot of exercise - should be 1,700 to 2,200 on average, if you are not doing much exercise.
2) I totally screwed up the amounts of calories in fat vs protein. Closer figures should be more like:
Fat: 1 gram = 9 calories
Protein: 1 gram = 4 calories
Carbohydrates: 1 gram = 4 calories
Alcohol: 1 gram = 7 calories 9calories/kg
I thought fat had 4 x the energy of carbs & protein but obviously I was mistaken.
I still stand by all the other stuff I said in the original post though!
hmm your right - for me its close to 3000 but then Im cycling an hour a day at 25km/h and am 6'4" and doing a few pushups & stuff like that.
if you are still munching your way through 6 soft drinks, 2 packets of doritoes, a couple of chocolate bars and fried chicken each day you are still sucking in a hell of a lot more calories than you can burn off with just exercise?
The main role of exercise in weight loss is to help you maintain your metabolic rate ( or increase it a bit) while eating a normal amount of calories.
For a regular guy this should be about 2500 to 3000 Calories depending on your body size.
If you just cut your calories, your body is going to tend to just drop it's metabolic rate, so it's harder to lose weight with diet alone.
Oils and fats have 4 times the energy packed in them as carbs and protein, so if you are eating a lot of fatty food it is going to give you a lot of calories without filling you up much.
a normal healthy diet (ie. balanced protein/carbs and healthy fats, like from nuts, fish & avocados) plus exercise is the way to really succeed. Have a big heap of non-starchy veggies and it will really help fill you up without too much extra calories compared to having say, fries with your steak.
Oh. and diet drinks have been found to have a tendancy to fool your body it is starving, which gives you a bigger appetite, so avoid those & just drink fewer sugary beverages instead.
Losing weight isn't rocket science. Increase /maintain your metabolism a bit with 30 min excercise a day and reduce your calorie intake to below what your body burns is all you need to do - and be patient. Don't expect to lose more than about 2 pounds a week - any more is too fast and unsustainable in the long term.
The muscle you put on with exercise also helps you maintain your weight loss because muscle burns more energy than fat.
Break out of the overweight geek stereotype and be a healthy fit geek - you will think better too when you improve your circulation.
Sorry got the above link slightly wrong - I accidentally added a trailing slash.
here it is again:
http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/radi/ck301.htm
I had a similar problem of how to get sound from my PC to everywhere in the house.
Simplest Solution: an FM Stereo transmitter.
Here's one place you can get an FM transmitter kit.
http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/radi/ck301.htm/
I made my FM transmitter from a kit (not this one - unfortunately the kit I used isn't sold from the place I bought it any more) because I just like doing that sort of thing, but you can buy them pre-made too.
Total cost: About $40
Range of the device: About 30 meters.
That way any stereo in your house can pick it up, no wires needed.
If your amp doesnt have an FM receiver you can of course pick one up pretty cheaply - even a cheapo FM receiver which sounds terrible will sound good once you have it playing through proper speakers instead of the litte 4" speaker in the receiver.
Sound wont be as perfect as it would be connected directly to your stereo, with just the one stereo playing, but if you have multiple sound sources playing the same thing from different parts of your house they are going to be interfering with each other and distorting the sound anyway due to reflections and different levels of attenuation of the treble or bass cause by walls between ajacent rooms etc.
The FM transmitters you get for your iPod is much weaker and only has a range of a few feet, but the kit form transmitters seem to have about a 30 foot range.
I can pretty much receive the signal anywhere in my house, but not much further than my boundary, so there is little problem with causing interference. Of course you tune the transmitter into a blank spot in the FM band too.
Best of all - you can have a "silent disco" house party or whatever - everyone just brings their own FM receiver/ipod or whatever and can crank the music as loud as they want, with just low level sound playing over the house system. If you use Linux, you can even hack an old broken USB headset, (I have a couple of broken USB headsets from where I have stood up and walked away from my PC with the things still on my head) and basically create a USB interface for your FM transmitter - just snip off the broken headphones, and connect the wires that were for the headphones to the input of the FM transmitter. That way you can route just the sound from your media player to the radio (mabey have a bit of script or somethign to start the player with the appropriate parameters), and leave all other system sounds playing through the PC speakers.
Use one of the many remote PC music player programs to enable you to switch selection - eg. there's a program to control winamp from a PDA. I am sure if you are halfway technically competent you should be able to easily put something together to control what your PC is playing - through a program you write for your phone, to mabey an IR receiver and a bit of script and an old remote control or something like that.
I too would love to see this work - though they are going to have to be moving a hell of a lot faster than 5 M/s (18 kM/h) for it to be anything like a practical solution.
Since there is no tangential velocity, unless the thing gets up to geo, there's going to have to be a big rocket to supply the additional deltav to reach orbit.
To reach geosynchronous orbit (about 36000 kM above sea level, I think) is going to take about 2000 hours, or 83 days.
I imagine you wouldn't want to take more than a week or so to climb a cable.
To make it to geosynchronous orbit in a week you would have to be moving at about 214 kM/h, or approximately 60 meters/second.
The only other option is to have a climber that can carry enough fuel up with it for a rocket to give the additional delta v needed for orbit.
Since I'm not a rocket scientist, I'll leave the calculation of how much fuel you'd need for that to someone else. Just how much additional velocity is needed if you make it say, half way up? Could you use a scramjet or something like that instead of a rocket since you would be in thin upper atmosphere with plenty of drop available to get the thing firing?
at any rate, I think we will probably have a viable ribbon or cable material before we have a viable climber.
I've never understood this. You do realize, don't you, that without feminism, you wouldn't be a female programmer today?
I believe Female programmers existed way before the feminism movement. In fact, they existed way before male programmers too for that matter.
Solutions:
Instead of driving your car or catching a bus:
Ride a bike - a decent hybrid makes a 20 km trip a snap - I literally just started riding again last week and covered 20 km easily in under an hour.
Instead of using a petrol mower:
Use a push mower or
Replace your lawn with a small leaf ground cover and paved pathways or "stepping stones" for high traffic areas. A small leaf ground cover works great as a replacement for lawn unless you really do a lot of running etc on it - but if its only for around under the washing line and the open bits of your backyard where you dont want plants, it is fine. I only have to mow the council owned bit outside my fence now, never inside. Groundcover needs a bit of a trim a couple of times a year, which in my case I just do with a pair of edgr trimmers since it's only about 5 square meters to trim - the rest of my garden is all ferns, bushes & trees, where it isn't groundcover, brick paving or leaf litter/mulch under dense trees.
Onh and you can use an electric barbecue or even a solar cooker if you really want to go green.
Yes, electricity is mostly generated by burning stuff - but its burnt in one place with big scrubbers to catch most of the particulate matter.
If there was something that bought those two great genres together, what would you call it? Asterpong? Pongeroids? I suspect its only the the naming difficulty that has held such a great game back all these years.
DC to DC regulators are very cheap, for low power needs - which is what you are talking about for most small devices that use wall warts.
Here's a bunch of devices, with datasheets & prices.
ahref=http://www.semiconductorstore.com/pages/asp/category.asp?id=56rel=url2html-27418http://www.semiconductorstore.com/pages/asp/category.asp?id=56>
They start at about $1 and go all the way up to 3.86 for a device that can do dual power rails of exactly that spec - 5v to 3.3v.
Of course, if you don't care quite as much about efficiency, or you are only stepping down your voltage a little, you can always use an LM78xx (where xx is the output voltage needed) they cost a buck or two also, and with very few additional components needed.
Of course the best action is to not drink sugary drinks at all - but if you absolutely have to have that Coke, then have one with real sugar in it - and be aware of the additional calories you are eating. At least it wont make you hungrier, as the artificially sweetened drinks do, according to that study I linked.
The zero calorie drinks dont give you calories directly - but they apparently do make you hungrier, which in turn makes you want to eat more. Read the link.
Losing fat comes down to a simple equation.
If calories in is less than calories burnt, you WILL lose weight. Its as simple as that.
No amount of "glandular" problem is going to make you put on weight if you are eating less calories than you use in your daily activites.
So you need to either eat less, or do more ecercise, or both. Exercise helps because as you get fitter and have more muscle, as just having more muscle makes you burn more energy - so in that respect it is easier for a fit person to stay slim, but there is no reason in the world that anyone needs to be fat, regardless of any "glandular" problem.
Getting more excercise is trivial too. It takes no more 5 minutes to do 30 pushups and 60 crunches - you can do them last thing at night before going to bed.
Likewise, you can get off the bus/train one stop earlier ( or walk to the next stop along from where you get on) and easily get a 15 to 30 min walk in a day. Losing weight doesnt have to mean hours and hours in the Gym - just a bit of self motivation to be a bit more active in your daily routine.
One other thing - Diet drinks - stay the hell away from them. Ever see slim people in the supermarket buying diet coke? no - its always the huge people. Diet drinks have less calories, but there's an interesting littlel experiment they did, where two groups of rats were allowed to eat as much as they wanted - one group was given diet drinks, and the other normal non diet drinks. The ones on diet drinks porked up. The theory: The sweetners give your body signals to get ready to deal with a lot of sugar. When the sugar doesnt arrive, your body goes "Holy crap - we're starving! better eat more!"
So diet drinks may actually make you fatter by making you have a bigger appetite. Here's a not very authoritive link http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/06/its_been_recognized_for_a.php to one article about this - Im sure with a more thorough search the actual paper would turn up somewhere.
Hopefully this latest news about swine flu will be that final bit of motivation a lot of people need to actually do something about their weight.
I think the texturing is more important than the polygon count - good quality texturing can make up for a lot of polygons.
More important than both of these however, is the AI and game physics.
If I had a choice between a photorealistic game where everything was indestructible, vs a game that was more like say, WoW but you could actually dig holes in the landscape, destroy or build things and actually physically change the world (even if only temporarily) then this would add much more value to the game, in my opinion.
AI is also important - there's nothing more boring than mobs that act in a predictable way, or worse, have been given god like reflexes and omipotence in order to make up for crappy AI. Ideally, mobs in the game should be indistinguishable from other players, at least until you go and try and talk to them.
of course this also depends on the genre of the game. If you are writing a flight simulator or something, then visual realism is much more important than say, being able to create a big hole in the ground when you crash.
I would love a FPS where you could actually blow a shortcut through the wall (at the expense of wating a lot of ammo) or an RPG where your lvl 80 fireball was actually able to blow down that door or at least scorch it a bit.
Actually mabey his original quote should have been 640g.
From here,http://www.amazon.ca/Kingston-2gb-Ddr2-800mhz-Module/dp/B0014G4RS0 you can see that a 2G DDR2 ram module weighs 23g.
Since at any time in the last 20 years, most personal computers have rarely needed more then two to four memory sticks, and they all weigh about the same, actually on average you would only need about 100G of RAM, at most. ( ie 4 sticks). so 640g would be a healthy 6.4x margin! Since ram continues to increase in memory/mass, this is likely to hold true or the indefinite future.
I forgot to mention - if you use a desk bracket, and you really value your vertical resolution, you can also mount your monitors on it sideways, so you the monitor(s) are in portrait mode. most video cards support rotating your monitors, so this gives you an excellent way for looking at single page portrait documents, or more code than you should ever have in a single function all at once.
The other option of course is to get an LCD and a wall bracket or a desk bracket that allows you to have the monitor off the desk alltogether. You can also get brackets that allow two or three monitors to be mounted to it, but still have just the one upright pole that comes off your desk ( or bolts onto a wall.
http://www.megamounts.com.au/shop/lcd-desk-mounts.htm?gclid=COGlvZK5x5sCFcEtpAod-U9fLg
There are many many similar products out there - this is just the first I came across with a quick google search.
I used to think I needed nothing more than a 17" LCD, but after going to 2x24" monitors @1920x1280 theres no way im ever going back. Virtual desktop space is a lot more valuable to me than real desktop space. if I ever go to 3 monitors though, Im getting myself one of these brackets.