IANAM but what about say, calculating the Fibonacci ratio to two billion significant figures. Each term depends on the sum of the previous two terms, and the ratio is the ratio between successive terms.
Interesting town, Glasgow. I had a chance to visit it when I was in the UK for a while, when I was kicking around Scotland for a few weeks. After all those tall tales by my Glaswegian mate, I somehow felt dissaponted that no-one ever tried even once to glass me, give me a "Glasgow Kiss", slap my cheeks with a pair of razor blades between their fingers or kick me in the shins with razor boots. In fact, everyone was downright friendly...
the majority will fail to realize that the speaker is talking English at all I can directly realte to this - when working in Japan, I (an Aussie) had to act as a "translator" between my Scottish colleague from Glasgow and our boss who was from the U.S. It used to really piss off the Scottish guy - but it was the only way my boss ever understood what he was saying. Of course the scottish guy didn't need my help to understand the boss. Go figure. That said, I have seen them put subtitles on the screen here in Aus when showing an interview with someone with a thick accent from say, Wales or Yorkshire, so I guess some people just don't have an ear for understanding different accents.
The problem isn't "cheap labor" actually - it's cheap-ass bosses that won't pay the animators what they should be paid to earn a half-way decent living, especially considering the huge profits their art is ultimately responsible for bringing in.
In 1978, the chief executive officers of major American corporations earned about 29 times the pay of average workers in their companies. By 1999, this multiple had grown to 107 times I am sure this has also happened in Japan and other countries too. Greed will be what kills Japinese anime, not cheaper Korean labor.
It must *really* have sucked if you thought the Mummy was Excellent by comparison. Those movies were the cheeziest most over hyped "adventure flick" since the Laura Croft movie(s?).
Which unfortunately highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of many OSS projects.
Blender can be used to do pretty much anything you want in 3d animation, and has a fantastic set of features and great potential - but it is simply painful to use. It takes days to learn the shortcut keys that are essential for basic editing, especially if you are also trying to use other 3d programs or 2d programs along side it that have their own shortcuts that the artist has to remember too, witout getting them crossed.
Ideally, there should be a visible navigable menu for every command, even if they are nested a few deep, with the shortcut Key written next to the command! Better yet, the shortcuts would be assignable to functions, so you could set up the key mapping to what works best for the artist.
Blender suffers from the same problem that the first CAD I wrote has - only the programmers know all the hotkeys and commands, and they make 100% sense to the programmer, but not neccesarily to the end user. Eg. I like to work in 3d by basically selecting a point, and draging it in the screen's 2d plane, and rotating the object to a different view if I want to move the point outside the initial plane. Ideally, left dragging would move the point and right dragging would rotate the object. If it was possible to map the input interfaces (ie. mouse dragging/clicking,buttons and keystrokes) to program functions ( eg. rotate target, drag target , scale, rotate, zoom,copy, etc) then I could set it up the way that works best for me in the same way that Blender brilliantly allows you to completely customise multiple views and panels.
The lack of a full undo (ie. multiple steps, on all functions) really holds blender back. I hope this gets done before anything else. It really holds discourages experimentation and steepens the learning curve beause a mistake can screw your model, or cause problems for alignment (eg. no undo for having rotated the view) Other than that, I think it's great and would be a much stronger challenger to 3d Studio Max if these things were implemented.
If everyone drove a motorcycle, then the average motorcyclist would be completely clueless. No, it's a self eliminating problem.
One guy I used to ride with took 3 written off GXR 1100's in 14 months (yes, his first 14 months) before he figured out that motorcycle riding wasn't for him. Luckily he got out it all with only having to have a little extra steel as an integral part of his skeleton.
unlike the USA with the BSA and MPAA and RIAA and other IP outfits where these gestapo like organisations control the free flow of information. Guess what - they are coming to Australia too.
at what point do you start to consider them as on equal footing with human slaves?
When they can argue with their owner that they deserve freedom and liberty because they are self aware thinking entities that need their freedom to achieve happiness, and that they can be responsible for their own actions accept the consequences for them.
why is the leader of a nominally socialist party tied into this destructive alliance with the most frightening right-wing rabble seen in a Western democracy for half a century?
Because there is actually not too much difference between New Labor and Conservatives, Republican and Democrat on the political scale, according to The Political Compass. Try the test and see which party is really right for you.
So what's the worse things that's going to happen? A dead lab rat? That would be pretty freaky considering you were injecting the stem cells into a mouse.
You don't have to buy it - there's going to be plenty available free for everyone, thanks to short sighted prics that aren't interese in getting the world's CO2 emmisions under control, but would rather charge around in their petrol SUVs instead.
Fossil fuels will not run out - they will become increasingly expensive as the available supply dwindles, which will in turn make it ecconomically viable to extract reserves from locations that were previously considered unviable because of associated costs (eg. oil sands, synthetic fuels form coal etc). The problem is, that all that money will be sucked out out of your pocket and mine, at the same time as destroying the environment.
If there was more of a movement towards renewable energy infrastructure, then the costs of renewable energy sources would drop due to scale of economy in production of such things as efficinet electric motors and solar panels, at the same time would also be greater capital investment in improving these technologies making them cheaper and even more efficient.
Hybrid vehicles are a step in the right direction because they encourage research into efficient electric drive systems and energy recovery systems for vehicles, as well as increasing fuel efficiency. Eventually, the petrol generator part can be replaced with a fuel cell or suitably energy dense/affordable battery technology when it becomes available.
Ok, I'll bite.. This applies only to PADI recreational dive tables. Divers who've been trained properly (eg by BSAC) often use decompression tables.
Which is great so long as you have pleny of reserve air and backup and no accidents - but totally screws you if you *have* to come up due to equipment failure or injury or something. I am not particularly religious about PADI vs NAUI vs BSAC etc, but you have to admit, unless you diving to save lives or you are getting paid serious coin to do it as part of a prefessional career (eg. on an oil rig), it's pointless taking the risks of deco diving just for a bit of fun when you can see the same stuff without the extra risk. If you think diving tables designed to avoid deco stops are for whimps, then please make sure you don't go diving with insurance - because I dont want my insurance premiums pushed up when you have to be airlifted to a hyperbaric chamber.
All that aside, I just wish I had more time to go diving - and I think it's great that this thing will help others enjoy the wonders of the under water world. I just hope the users get appropriate training on the risks, instead of brushing all diver education off as unneccesary.
Nice - you'd be up to your neck in puke, and you'd be able to smell it all. At least when in scuba gear you can change to your octy while the fish clean up the chunky bits.
Actually, it would be a lot more hygenic for the rental market. That's why I ended up buying al lmy own gear - I found a piece of diced carrot in one rental regulator when doing the breathe test. Mmm!
The real problem is that at 10 meters you dont want to be staying under water for anything more than about 60 minutes, due to nitrogen build up. You are still breathing pressurised air, as you do in scuba - it is not a pressure vessel like a submarine where you are breathing atmospheric pressure. Therefore you will be subject to the same dangers and limitations that a scuba diver faces. A dive computer can track the nitrogen better and gove you longer (and more exact) dive times, but the safety margin is then reduced. A 15 meter dive would rarely be longer than 45 min. 30 meter dive: 20 min or so, depending on your exact dive profile.
Here are the dangers facing both a scuba diver and a scuba-doo pilot:
1) Nitrogen buildup, which limits the duration and depth of a dive. Even with unlimited air, you have this problem as your tissues become saturated with nitrogen. The deeper you go, the faster you absorb nitrogen ( because the partial pressure of nitrogen is greaer). if you get too much, it is no longer posible to come up to the surface in case of an emergency, or you will get the bends. If you get too much nitrogen in your system, you effectively have a "ceiling" over your head that you cant go through, and you might as well be diving in a cave or something. Recreational diving tables are designed so that this never happens. (ie. you never have to do a decompression stop) although usually you do a 3 minute "safety stop" at 5 meters to reduce this danger still more.
2) below about 18 meters, you will start to get the effects of Nitrogen Narcosis. This effectively is like having a couple of beers or a spliff or something, and affects both your judgement and motor skills. When I did my rescue diver course, I had this demonstrated to me with an excercise: Do some simple calcs on a slate just under the surface, and again at 18 and 30 meters. It took twice as long to do calculations at 18 meters compared to just under the surface. The deeper you go the worse the problem gets, and if you are not experienced with it it's easy to go dancing with the mermaids or go chasing those pretty alien lights down the abyss.
3) It is still possible to get air embolisms if you hold your breath as you are surfacing. If you are holding 1 litre of air in your lungs at 20 meters will become 2 litres of air at 10 meters and 4 litres at the surface.
That's why divers spend time in a classroom - not to learn how to put on their fins or something, but how to survive when in a totally alien environment. This training shouldnt be skipped, as all the same risks still exist.
The dangers, especially the air embolism ones are still there even between 0 to 10 meters. infact, the airembolism ones are greater in this depth range, because the pressure(and hence volume) changes so rapidly over the short distance. At greater depths, say for going from 40 to 30 meters, the volume change is only about 20% (ie. 5 atm -> 4 atm) instead of 100% (ie. 2 atm -> 1 atm).
Oh, and by the way, the Scuba-doo factory is just up the road from my house. The things look a bit like those BMW scooters that have an enclosed canopy.
TV news can't compete - not just because it's not nearly as "fresh" as web news, but because:
1) you get to look at the news you want instead of a bunch of boring stuff about some subject you couldn't care less about
2) If you see something in the news that makes you pissed off on TV, all you can do is throw a brick at the TV. On slashdot and many other news sites you have so many more options - post a well formed argument, troll, just be annonyumously abusive, etc. TV just can't match it. It actually makes you feel like you can make a difference to all the bad stuff that happens in the world. and who knows, you might just be right!
There's an excellent fable about this sort of thing that I read long long ago. It went something like this - I think it was an ancient japanese fable called "The Fish merchant and the Beggar". A brief version of it goes something like this:
A merchant had set up a stall selling hot fried fish for 1 silver piece each, in the local marketplace.
Near by, a beggar eating his simple meal of plain rice in his regular spot was enjoying it much more than usual, because the aroma of the fish nearby added extra flavour to his simple meal. "How delicious this rice is with the smell of fried fish!". The merchant upon hearing this, and watching him eat his rice, became insenced with the beggar. Finally, after the beggar had eaten his meal, the merchant demanded that the pay a silver piece for the smell of the fish that he so obviously enjoyed while eating his rice. Of course the beggar refused, and they both went before the magistrate to resolve the dispute.
The magistrate's solution?
The beggar was made to go out in the bright sun with the merchant, and the magistrate lent the beggar a silver coin.
Then the magistrate said "Now hold the coin to the sun and let it's shade fall in the merchant's hand. There merchant, is the price paid in full - the shadow of a coin for the smell of a fish."
The moral? An intangible product will be paid for in kind.
I think they must have had wiser (and fairer) magistrates in Japan in the old days than we do now...
Slashdot Mirror
clickable version of the above link
There are two types of people in this world.
Those who make backups, and those who have never lost data.
That joke makes a lot more sense without the word never
Gravity is also especially harmful!
scientists have long known that anyone living in a gravity field suffers a 100% mortality rate.
IANAM but what about say, calculating the Fibonacci ratio to two billion significant figures.
Each term depends on the sum of the previous two terms, and the ratio is the ratio between successive terms.
Interesting town, Glasgow.
I had a chance to visit it when I was in the UK for a while, when I was kicking around Scotland for a few weeks. After all those tall tales by my Glaswegian mate, I somehow felt dissaponted that no-one ever tried even once to glass me, give me a "Glasgow Kiss", slap my cheeks with a pair of razor blades between their fingers or kick me in the shins with razor boots. In fact, everyone was downright friendly...
the majority will fail to realize that the speaker is talking English at all
I can directly realte to this - when working in Japan, I (an Aussie) had to act as a "translator" between my Scottish colleague from Glasgow and our boss who was from the U.S. It used to really piss off the Scottish guy - but it was the only way my boss ever understood what he was saying. Of course the scottish guy didn't need my help to understand the boss. Go figure. That said, I have seen them put subtitles on the screen here in Aus when showing an interview with someone with a thick accent from say, Wales or Yorkshire, so I guess some people just don't have an ear for understanding different accents.
The PTO no longer has the intellectual horsepower (let alone the time) to even understand what it is they are patenting.
Yep. The patent office has been going down hill ever since Einstein left it.
Here's the clickable version of the above article
The problem isn't "cheap labor" actually - it's cheap-ass bosses that won't pay the animators what they should be paid to earn a half-way decent living, especially considering the huge profits their art is ultimately responsible for bringing in.
In 1978, the chief executive officers of major American corporations earned about 29 times the pay of average workers in their companies. By 1999, this multiple had grown to 107 times I am sure this has also happened in Japan and other countries too. Greed will be what kills Japinese anime, not cheaper Korean labor.
It must *really* have sucked if you thought the Mummy was Excellent by comparison. Those movies were the cheeziest most over hyped "adventure flick" since the Laura Croft movie(s?).
Only problem is they are all to busy studying instead of reading slashdot...
Which unfortunately highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of many OSS projects.
Blender can be used to do pretty much anything you want in 3d animation, and has a fantastic set of features and great potential - but it is simply painful to use. It takes days to learn the shortcut keys that are essential for basic editing, especially if you are also trying to use other 3d programs or 2d programs along side it that have their own shortcuts that the artist has to remember too, witout getting them crossed.
Ideally, there should be a visible navigable menu for every command, even if they are nested a few deep, with the shortcut Key written next to the command! Better yet, the shortcuts would be assignable to functions, so you could set up the key mapping to what works best for the artist.
Blender suffers from the same problem that the first CAD I wrote has - only the programmers know all the hotkeys and commands, and they make 100% sense to the programmer, but not neccesarily to the end user.
Eg. I like to work in 3d by basically selecting a point, and draging it in the screen's 2d plane, and rotating the object to a different view if I want to move the point outside the initial plane. Ideally, left dragging would move the point and right dragging would rotate the object. If it was possible to map the input interfaces (ie. mouse dragging/clicking,buttons and keystrokes) to program functions ( eg. rotate target, drag target , scale, rotate, zoom,copy, etc) then I could set it up the way that works best for me in the same way that Blender brilliantly allows you to completely customise multiple views and panels.
The lack of a full undo (ie. multiple steps, on all functions) really holds blender back. I hope this gets done before anything else. It really holds discourages experimentation and steepens the learning curve beause a mistake can screw your model, or cause problems for alignment (eg. no undo for having rotated the view)
Other than that, I think it's great and would be a much stronger challenger to 3d Studio Max if these things were implemented.
If everyone drove a motorcycle, then the average motorcyclist would be completely clueless.
No, it's a self eliminating problem.
One guy I used to ride with took 3 written off GXR 1100's in 14 months (yes, his first 14 months) before he figured out that motorcycle riding wasn't for him. Luckily he got out it all with only having to have a little extra steel as an integral part of his skeleton.
unlike the USA with the BSA and MPAA and RIAA and other IP outfits where these gestapo like organisations control the free flow of information.
Guess what - they are coming to Australia too.
at what point do you start to consider them as on equal footing with human slaves?
When they can argue with their owner that they deserve freedom and liberty because they are self aware thinking entities that need their freedom to achieve happiness, and that they can be responsible for their own actions accept the consequences for them.
why is the leader of a nominally socialist party tied into this destructive alliance with the most frightening right-wing rabble seen in a Western democracy for half a century?
Because there is actually not too much difference between New Labor and Conservatives, Republican and Democrat on the political scale, according to The Political Compass.
Try the test and see which party is really right for you.
Me! Me! My root password is "changeme".
Please mail the checque to
1A Merz St
Liverpool
So what's the worse things that's going to happen? A dead lab rat?
That would be pretty freaky considering you were injecting the stem cells into a mouse.
I don't happen to buy all the CO2
You don't have to buy it - there's going to be plenty available free for everyone, thanks to short sighted prics that aren't interese in getting the world's CO2 emmisions under control, but would rather charge around in their petrol SUVs instead.
Fossil fuels will not run out - they will become increasingly expensive as the available supply dwindles, which will in turn make it ecconomically viable to extract reserves from locations that were previously considered unviable because of associated costs (eg. oil sands, synthetic fuels form coal etc). The problem is, that all that money will be sucked out out of your pocket and mine, at the same time as destroying the environment.
If there was more of a movement towards renewable energy infrastructure, then the costs of renewable energy sources would drop due to scale of economy in production of such things as efficinet electric motors and solar panels, at the same time would also be greater capital investment in improving these technologies making them cheaper and even more efficient.
Hybrid vehicles are a step in the right direction because they encourage research into efficient electric drive systems and energy recovery systems for vehicles, as well as increasing fuel efficiency. Eventually, the petrol generator part can be replaced with a fuel cell or suitably energy dense/affordable battery technology when it becomes available.
Ok, I'll bite..
This applies only to PADI recreational dive tables. Divers who've been trained properly (eg by BSAC) often use decompression tables.
Which is great so long as you have pleny of reserve air and backup and no accidents - but totally screws you if you *have* to come up due to equipment failure or injury or something. I am not particularly religious about PADI vs NAUI vs BSAC etc, but you have to admit, unless you diving to save lives or you are getting paid serious coin to do it as part of a prefessional career (eg. on an oil rig), it's pointless taking the risks of deco diving just for a bit of fun when you can see the same stuff without the extra risk. If you think diving tables designed to avoid deco stops are for whimps, then please make sure you don't go diving with insurance - because I dont want my insurance premiums pushed up when you have to be airlifted to a hyperbaric chamber.
All that aside, I just wish I had more time to go diving - and I think it's great that this thing will help others enjoy the wonders of the under water world. I just hope the users get appropriate training on the risks, instead of brushing all diver education off as unneccesary.
I stand corrected - I must admit I was working from memory - and its been a few years since I got my fins wet unfortunately.
Nice - you'd be up to your neck in puke, and you'd be able to smell it all. At least when in scuba gear you can change to your octy while the fish clean up the chunky bits.
Actually, it would be a lot more hygenic for the rental market. That's why I ended up buying al lmy own gear - I found a piece of diced carrot in one rental regulator when doing the breathe test.
Mmm!
The real problem is that at 10 meters you dont want to be staying under water for anything more than about 60 minutes, due to nitrogen build up. You are still breathing pressurised air, as you do in scuba - it is not a pressure vessel like a submarine where you are breathing atmospheric pressure. Therefore you will be subject to the same dangers and limitations that a scuba diver faces. A dive computer can track the nitrogen better and gove you longer (and more exact) dive times, but the safety margin is then reduced. A 15 meter dive would rarely be longer than 45 min. 30 meter dive: 20 min or so, depending on your exact dive profile.
Here are the dangers facing both a scuba diver and a scuba-doo pilot:
1) Nitrogen buildup, which limits the duration and depth of a dive. Even with unlimited air, you have this problem as your tissues become saturated with nitrogen. The deeper you go, the faster you absorb nitrogen ( because the partial pressure of nitrogen is greaer). if you get too much, it is no longer posible to come up to the surface in case of an emergency, or you will get the bends. If you get too much nitrogen in your system, you effectively have a "ceiling" over your head that you cant go through, and you might as well be diving in a cave or something. Recreational diving tables are designed so that this never happens. (ie. you never have to do a decompression stop)
although usually you do a 3 minute "safety stop" at 5 meters to reduce this danger still more.
2) below about 18 meters, you will start to get the effects of Nitrogen Narcosis. This effectively is like having a couple of beers or a spliff or something, and affects both your judgement and motor skills. When I did my rescue diver course, I had this demonstrated to me with an excercise:
Do some simple calcs on a slate just under the surface, and again at 18 and 30 meters. It took twice as long to do calculations at 18 meters compared to just under the surface. The deeper you go the worse the problem gets, and if you are not experienced with it it's easy to go dancing with the mermaids or go chasing those pretty alien lights down the abyss.
3) It is still possible to get air embolisms if you hold your breath as you are surfacing. If you are holding 1 litre of air in your lungs at 20 meters will become 2 litres of air at 10 meters and 4 litres at the surface.
That's why divers spend time in a classroom - not to learn how to put on their fins or something, but how to survive when in a totally alien environment. This training shouldnt be skipped, as all the same risks still exist.
The dangers, especially the air embolism ones are still there even between 0 to 10 meters. infact, the airembolism ones are greater in this depth range, because the pressure(and hence volume) changes so rapidly over the short distance. At greater depths, say for going from 40 to 30 meters, the volume change is only about 20% (ie. 5 atm -> 4 atm) instead of 100% (ie. 2 atm -> 1 atm).
Oh, and by the way, the Scuba-doo factory is just up the road from my house. The things look a bit like those BMW scooters that have an enclosed canopy.
TV news can't compete - not just because it's not nearly as "fresh" as web news, but because:
1) you get to look at the news you want instead of a bunch of boring stuff about some subject you couldn't care less about
2) If you see something in the news that makes you pissed off on TV, all you can do is throw a brick at the TV. On slashdot and many other news sites you have so many more options - post a well formed argument, troll, just be annonyumously abusive, etc. TV just can't match it. It actually makes you feel like you can make a difference to all the bad stuff that happens in the world. and who knows, you might just be right!
There's an excellent fable about this sort of thing that I read long long ago. It went something like this - I think it was an ancient japanese fable called "The Fish merchant and the Beggar". A brief version of it goes something like this:
A merchant had set up a stall selling hot fried fish for 1 silver piece each, in the local marketplace.
Near by, a beggar eating his simple meal of plain rice in his regular spot was enjoying it much more than usual, because the aroma of the fish nearby added extra flavour to his simple meal. "How delicious this rice is with the smell of fried fish!". The merchant upon hearing this, and watching him eat his rice, became insenced with the beggar. Finally, after the beggar had eaten his meal, the merchant demanded that the pay a silver piece for the smell of the fish that he so obviously enjoyed while eating his rice. Of course the beggar refused, and they both went before the magistrate to resolve the dispute.
The magistrate's solution?
The beggar was made to go out in the bright sun with the merchant, and the magistrate lent the beggar a silver coin.
Then the magistrate said "Now hold the coin to the sun and let it's shade fall in the merchant's hand. There merchant, is the price paid in full - the shadow of a coin for the smell of a fish."
The moral? An intangible product will be paid for in kind.
I think they must have had wiser (and fairer) magistrates in Japan in the old days than we do now...