As someone who lives in a country in a remote area of the Pacific, I'd just like to express my heartfelt concern about having a Gamma-Ray laboratory falling to Earth nearby.
Despite New Zealand's nuclear-free policies, we already have quite more than our fair share of Radioactive Monsters from the Deep, and we certainly don't need any more politicians, thanks all the same...
Interesting to see another possible technique to exploit a natural physical structure for our processing needs. It'll be interesting to see if there are any other mineral deposits out there that will contribute to our computers in the future -- anyone have a favourite mineral they'd like to bet on?
If this technique does become feasible for processing, does anyone have any idea what theoretical limits there might be to speed of processing? First generation devices are probably likely to be little better (if any) that existing silicon-based ones, but then silicon is quite mature tech, nowadays.
While I'm at it, how about a TamaGeeki? We've already got Tamagotchi variant in the droves, including a Tamagothi, but there's room for niche markets (are we a niche, or what?)...
Comes in a variety of cases, such as chrome, beige, fishbowl, and penguin. Has Jolt, Ramen, Quake and Flame buttons to allow you to interact with your little pet coder. Depending on how you treat your Geeki, you might end up with a CorpSuitGeeki, an OpenSourceGeeki, a QuicheEaterGeeki, a PerlMonkGeeki, and many more! Treat them right, and they might even start producing their own kernel patches, perl poetry, or maybe even start reverse-engineering proprietary protocols! And if you tire of your little abomin... er, pet, there's a special recessed "Indict" button to make sure you never hear from it again...
(Warning - do not use TamaGeekis with IR ports in the vicinity of Furbys. OK? Don't say we didn't warn you.)
Escape from Titanic: The Movie. You get to be Jack, try to defeat the script and survive that icy Atlantic ocean, getting the girl and the necklace!
No. This should be "Escape: from Titanic the Movie". In this game, your aim should be to live as regular a life as possible, whilst avoiding everything connected with the aformentioned film. Go to the video store, gain points for hiring out a Hong Kong action film and a piece of French surrealism, but lose points for catching sight of a Titanic poster as you pass the "Really Popular Films" section. Take a taxi ride to a hip alternative nightclub, but get penalised for hearing Celine Dion wailing over the car stereo three times on the way there, and for hearing a couple of young girls trying to get into the club gushing about Leonardo is just so to die for.
The possibilities are endless. Completely inane and pointless, but endless...
"The Justice System you are using has executed an illegal immigrant, and may have become unstable.
Please close down any court facilities you are currently using, and reboot your government." ----- Now justice can be not only blind, it can be lagged and susceptible to page faults, too. I wonder how many people will slip through the memory leaks?
I believe the appropriate spurious response to this is "Blah blah Linux blah blah Crusoe blah Linus Torvalds blah blah Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans blah blah blah."
Now that that's out of the way, the just-plain-flippant response: Well, there's always Andrew Tanenbaum's MINIX OS, with microkernel and separate memory-management and fs processes...
Oh, and if someone can remind me some time not to post at six a.m. with sleep-dep up to my eyeballs, it'd be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Any wireless system needs a heck of a lot of error-correction at the link level. It's been possible to get fairly good bandwidth out of microwave beam transmitters already for at least a decade or so, so I guess similar principles would be in effect.
"Damn. They aren't paying me enough to do this crap. You get it almost _perfect_ and bug-free, and they go and change the spec on you and you need to rebuild it from scratch. No, they just don't know a thing about.. Oooh, Buffy pics. Mmm.... damned bosses. Damned code. I bet they'd love it if I were to just Delete the whole project... Yes sir, they'd be really happy then... hey, what's that progress bar doing? Uh... did I leave that stupid headset on? Oh, sh---"
"I have trouble believing this. There would be no quality control, no sterile conditions, etc."
Just because you've got a person from an unsterile place not renowned for its quality countrol doesn't mean you can't take that artisan somewhere else to do his work, and subject it to quality control.
"Furthermore, the knowledge to flake blades is alive and well. There are amateurs, including some very skilled archaeologists who want to understand how primitive peoples made points, who have such skill that they can fool experts."
I didn't say it was dead - however, the skill level needed to fool experts as to the authenticity of archaeological specimens would probably not be as high as that needed to make blades for surgery, would it?
"... it's time to back-up to, say... using bone chips as knives"
Funny you should mention that - a lot of very delicate eye-surgery these days is done with glass or obsidian knives because at the small sizes needed they're a lot sharper than steel. The blades are flaked by Aleuts, who've been fashioning such knives for centuries, because they're the only ones who still have the skills to do it (incidentally making some of the most dangerous water-based weaponry in the world).
OK, it's mostly off-topic, but it's still damned cool:-)
...how this distribution of Linux compares to Wintendo or other platforms as a usable interface for blind people. Linux is often criticised for its lack of usability for the average man-on-the-street; is it likely to suffer the same criticisms from the blind..?
It may be more a point of the quality of software engineering, but the stability of Linux would prove damned useful to musicians using their computers to sequence instruments during live performances - it'd be damned embarrassing having to reboot your drum machine/tone generator because it suffered yet another BSoD...
Although I'm not exactly an expert in such matters, I can see Linux being used by a similar kind of geek to those who currently favour it over Windows - power users. If you want an open-source musical development application that's more configurable than a very highly configurable thing, then Linux seems a good choice of platform.
The difficult part will probably come in trying to get hardware vendors to release the information necessary for drivers, but that's just as much of a problem for people who just listen to music as for those who want to make it.
...for those who haven't looked at the other, solved cipher (known plaintext makes it a lot easier, of course...) I've been reminded of something else you can do with your code to make it difficult to break - spelling mistakes don't obfuscate the plaintext very much, but can really confound attempts at decryption without keys.
The plaintext for the first few lines reads as follows:
``The soul secure in her existence smil at the drawn dagger and defies ints point the stars shall fade away the sun himoelf grow dim with age anh nature...''
A couple of the 'e's there are periods, whilst the rest are commas. Just to put a bit more of a spin on the problem...
A newer, better dosemu is all well and good, but I've yet to find a good TRS-80 emulator - I don't think those neat old nostalgiaware games like "Crush, Crumble and Chomp" or "Voyage of the Valkyrie" are going to be ported to Linux any time soon...
As far as modern compression algorithms go, gzip is one of the faster and more efficient around. Since increases in memory and processor speed seem to be coming along so often these days, do you think the algorithm could be modified to wring out a little bit of extra compression, or would we be better served by using considerably more resource-intensive compression schemes such as Burrows-Wheeler[bzip2] or PPM?
Just one more example of greedy multinationals shovelling the entrails of the poor and disenfranchised into the unslakable maw of the corporate fat cats.
But wait! I thought it was and example of the cryptofascist antianarchosyndicalist lackeys of the hypercapitalist running-dog state grilling helpless citizens over a hot flame in the name of the free market. Or was it the governmental ultracorporophiliac pseudodespotic bully-boys herding us into a slough of commercially-driven despondency? You know, in all the confusion, I'm not so sure myself...
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who lives in a country in a remote area of the Pacific, I'd just like to express my heartfelt concern about having a Gamma-Ray laboratory falling to Earth nearby.
Despite New Zealand's nuclear-free policies, we already have quite more than our fair share of Radioactive Monsters from the Deep, and we certainly don't need any more politicians, thanks all the same...
Interesting to see another possible technique to exploit a natural physical structure for our processing needs. It'll be interesting to see if there are any other mineral deposits out there that will contribute to our computers in the future -- anyone have a favourite mineral they'd like to bet on?
If this technique does become feasible for processing, does anyone have any idea what theoretical limits there might be to speed of processing? First generation devices are probably likely to be little better (if any) that existing silicon-based ones, but then silicon is quite mature tech, nowadays.
...does the phrase "Extensible Firmware Interface" sound a bit... y'know... Freudian?
While I'm at it, how about a TamaGeeki?
We've already got Tamagotchi variant in the droves, including a Tamagothi, but there's room for niche markets (are we a niche, or what?)...
Comes in a variety of cases, such as chrome, beige, fishbowl, and penguin. Has Jolt, Ramen, Quake and Flame buttons to allow you to interact with your little pet coder. Depending on how you treat your Geeki, you might end up with a CorpSuitGeeki, an OpenSourceGeeki, a QuicheEaterGeeki, a PerlMonkGeeki, and many more! Treat them right, and they might even start producing their own kernel patches, perl poetry, or maybe even start reverse-engineering proprietary protocols!
And if you tire of your little abomin... er, pet, there's a special recessed "Indict" button to make sure you never hear from it again...
(Warning - do not use TamaGeekis with IR ports in the vicinity of Furbys. OK? Don't say we didn't warn you.)
Escape from Titanic: The Movie. You get to be Jack, try to defeat the script and survive that icy Atlantic ocean, getting the girl and the necklace!
No. This should be "Escape: from Titanic the Movie". In this game, your aim should be to live as regular a life as possible, whilst avoiding everything connected with the aformentioned film. Go to the video store, gain points for hiring out a Hong Kong action film and a piece of French surrealism, but lose points for catching sight of a Titanic poster as you pass the "Really Popular Films" section. Take a taxi ride to a hip alternative nightclub, but get penalised for hearing Celine Dion wailing over the car stereo three times on the way there, and for hearing a couple of young girls trying to get into the club gushing about Leonardo is just so to die for.
The possibilities are endless. Completely inane and pointless, but endless...
ERROR
"The Justice System you are using has executed an illegal immigrant, and may have become unstable.
Please close down any court facilities you are currently using, and reboot your government."
-----
Now justice can be not only blind, it can be lagged and susceptible to page faults, too. I wonder how many people will slip through the memory leaks?
"Will it run Linux?"
I believe the appropriate spurious response to this is "Blah blah Linux blah blah Crusoe blah Linus Torvalds blah blah Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans blah blah blah."
Now that that's out of the way, the just-plain-flippant response: Well, there's always Andrew Tanenbaum's MINIX OS, with microkernel and separate memory-management and fs processes...
Oh, and if someone can remind me some time not to post at six a.m. with sleep-dep up to my eyeballs, it'd be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
how'll they keep pigeons out of the laser path?
:-)
Any wireless system needs a heck of a lot of error-correction at the link level. It's been possible to get fairly good bandwidth out of microwave beam transmitters already for at least a decade or so, so I guess similar principles would be in effect.
Besides, isn't it just another parroty error?
[sings] "Hey, Arianne, what's your game now, can anybody play..?"
One wonders what they have in mind next; a TCP/IP connection to God? Amusing.
Nope. God would use UDP - the Universal Deity Protocol.
"Damn. They aren't paying me enough to do this crap. You get it almost _perfect_ and bug-free, and they go and change the spec on you and you need to rebuild it from scratch. No, they just don't know a thing about.. Oooh, Buffy pics. Mmm.... damned bosses. Damned code. I bet they'd love it if I were to just Delete the whole project... Yes sir, they'd be really happy then... hey, what's that progress bar doing? Uh... did I leave that stupid headset on? Oh, sh---"
[BRAIN NOT FOUND: TRACKING LOST]
NASA Shuttle Avionics System
One of your applications has violated system integrity.
Please shut down all systems and restart Shuttle.
[OK][Help]
(Original message source: Shoei, RoI, 1994)
"I have trouble believing this. There would be no quality control, no sterile conditions, etc."
Just because you've got a person from an unsterile place not renowned for its quality countrol doesn't mean you can't take that artisan somewhere else to do his work, and subject it to quality control.
"Furthermore, the knowledge to flake blades is alive and well. There are amateurs, including some very skilled archaeologists who want to understand how primitive peoples made points, who have such skill that they can fool experts."
I didn't say it was dead - however, the skill level needed to fool experts as to the authenticity of archaeological specimens would probably not be as high as that needed to make blades for surgery, would it?
"... it's time to back-up to, say ... using bone chips as knives"
:-)
Funny you should mention that - a lot of very delicate eye-surgery these days is done with glass or obsidian knives because at the small sizes needed they're a lot sharper than steel. The blades are flaked by Aleuts, who've been fashioning such knives for centuries, because they're the only ones who still have the skills to do it (incidentally making some of the most dangerous water-based weaponry in the world).
OK, it's mostly off-topic, but it's still damned cool
Hmmm. Military, "Penguin Patches".... any chance I can see the CVS tree for a Lieutenant Colonel?
...how this distribution of Linux compares to Wintendo or other platforms as a usable interface for blind people.
Linux is often criticised for its lack of usability for the average man-on-the-street; is it likely to suffer the same criticisms from the blind..?
Hmm. Give five astronauts a map of the Martian surface, a few supplies and a couple of cameras - "The Cydonia Martian Project", anyone..?
It may be more a point of the quality of software engineering, but the stability of Linux would prove damned useful to musicians using their computers to sequence instruments during live performances - it'd be damned embarrassing having to reboot your drum machine/tone generator because it suffered yet another BSoD...
Although I'm not exactly an expert in such matters, I can see Linux being used by a similar kind of geek to those who currently favour it over Windows - power users. If you want an open-source musical development application that's more configurable than a very highly configurable thing, then Linux seems a good choice of platform.
The difficult part will probably come in trying to get hardware vendors to release the information necessary for drivers, but that's just as much of a problem for people who just listen to music as for those who want to make it.
...for those who haven't looked at the other, solved cipher (known plaintext makes it a lot easier, of course...) I've been reminded of something else you can do with your code to make it difficult to break - spelling mistakes don't obfuscate the plaintext very much, but can really confound attempts at decryption without keys.
The plaintext for the first few lines reads as follows:
``The soul secure in her existence smil at the drawn dagger and defies ints point the stars shall fade away the sun himoelf grow dim with age anh nature...''
A couple of the 'e's there are periods, whilst the rest are commas. Just to put a bit more of a spin on the problem...
"Say, Kid, you haven't seen a couple of solid-fuel rocket motors lying around these parts, have you?"
"What do you mean, your dad's bolting them to the back of his pickup..?"
A newer, better dosemu is all well and good, but I've yet to find a good TRS-80 emulator - I don't think those neat old nostalgiaware games like "Crush, Crumble and Chomp" or "Voyage of the Valkyrie" are going to be ported to Linux any time soon...
*mope*
As far as modern compression algorithms go, gzip is one of the faster and more efficient around. Since increases in memory and processor speed seem to be coming along so often these days, do you think the algorithm could be modified to wring out a little bit of extra compression, or would we be better served by using considerably more resource-intensive compression schemes such as Burrows-Wheeler[bzip2] or PPM?
Just one more example of greedy multinationals shovelling the entrails of the poor and disenfranchised into the unslakable maw of the corporate fat cats.
But wait! I thought it was and example of the cryptofascist antianarchosyndicalist lackeys of the hypercapitalist running-dog state grilling helpless citizens over a hot flame in the name of the free market.
Or was it the governmental ultracorporophiliac pseudodespotic bully-boys herding us into a slough of commercially-driven despondency?
You know, in all the confusion, I'm not so sure myself...