Let me nitpick your nitpick of my nitpick. If I spell "ubiquitous" with a g (a sign that I'm getting old) people still know what word I was trying to use. But when you use "hard drive" to describe technology that predates hard drives by 17 years, it looks ignorant.
There are ways around those problems, like having some kind of feed device to access the cards randomly and feed in new cards as needed. All beside the point, because such a device would be horribly complicated, and therefore unreliable. Anything you can do do reduce the number of mechanical parts in a device makes it more reliable. And magnetic recording is a lot less mechanical than punching holes in paper.
Probably the same day, or at least the same week. The disk platters were open to the air, and the read-write head "flew" a few micrometers above the disk surface, kept apart only by the cushioning effect of the air. If a speck of dust got between the head and the platter, the head would crash into the platter like an airplane that had lost its wings. Probably where our notion of "system crash" comes from, come to think of it.
Usual/. sloppiness with language. What we call a hard drive uses Winchester Technology where the drive platters are sealed in an airtight contain. Ubiguitous now, but anybody old enough remembers the old big drives where the platters were bare, like modern floppies. Very sensitive to dust.
Saying that the hard drive was invented 50 years ago implies that before that people used floppies. In fact, this was the first disk drive of any kind.
Actually, it always bugged me that the TV series put the Stargate in Cheyene Mountain. If I remember the movie right, it was in an abandoned missle silo in North Dakota. Which made a lot more sense storywise — why locate such a secret operation in a base where thousands of people work? But of course, to make Vancouver look like Colorado Springs, you just have to avoid getting the Fraser River in the background. Lot harder to make it look like Grand Forks.
Well, I'm not a big fan of the Stargate franchise, but I think you've sort of answered your own question by mentioning them. You like a good story, and Stargate relies mostly on stories to hold its audience. They have to, because, by entertainment industry standards, they're a shoestring operation. Yeah, they do have some fancy special effects. But its cheap stuff. I can't be bothered to look up the figures, but I know that Stargate and Battlestar spend less for a whole season's SFX than a lot of movies (including some non-SF movies!) spend for a couple of hours.
Movies, by contrast, have huge budgets. Even so-called Indies cost tens of millions. And the kind of movie most people go to see costs at least $100 million to make. When you're risking that much money, you don't take chances. You put those millions into name stars, fancy effects, epic scenes — things people can see. You're so busy with that stuff, and with all the politics and ego-soothing, you don't worry about coming up with a good script. And you don't need to — a script doesn't sell a movie. Except, of course, to a tiny few like you and me.
Strictly speaking, you have absolutely no proof the universe isn't antrocentric
In college, my Critical Thinking prof liked to say that "strictly true" is just another way of saying "false".
I can't prove a lot of things. I can't prove that the universe isn't 5 minutes old and all my memories are manufactured. I can't prove that my landlord isn't an evil genius who's performing nasty experiments on me by tampering with the water supply. I can't prove that Donald Rumsfeld isn't a Al Qaida mole, and the whole war in Iraq isn't part of an elaborate scheme to destroy the U.S. But I don't believe any of these things, but it would be damned silly of me to waste any time thinking about the remote possibility that there's any truth to any of them. Except maybe that last one...
Consider: Our species has only existed a brief period of time (if the history of Earth were a cross-country airplane ride, the whole story of humanity would be the time it takes the stewardess to crack the cabin door at the end of the trip) on a planet orbiting a sun that one of 200 billion in our galaxy. Oh yeah, and the observable universe (not the whole universe, mind you, just the part we can see) contains 100 billion galaxies. And you think God built all this shit just for us? I can't prove you wrong, but forgive me if I think that you think too highly of yourself.
And this has nothing to do with faith. I don't know whether your faith about the imporant of our species is religious or just "I need this to be true". If it's religious, I can agree to disagree, but I feel compelled to point out that not all the faithful agree with you. There's nothing inconsistent between religious faith and acknowledging how insignificant we are. That air flight analogy was first told to me by a Christian pastor. I mean hey, just because there's a God who cares about each of us, doesn't mean he cares more about us than the rest of the universe.
And if you choose to believe that humanity is the center of the universe just because that's something you need to believe, then you're ignoring tons of contrary evidence just because you don't like what they're evidence of. That's not faith. That's just denial.
It's kind of sad how nobody seems to understand how big the universe is. If they did, we'd have a lot less anthrocentric crap, and maybe a little less bad science fiction.
I'm for the bill! Kids should not be allowed on social sites! Or send email! Or talk on the phone! Or leave the house! THESE ARE ALL RISKY BEHAVIORS! Let's lock them in their rooms until they're 30!
Oh well, look at the bright side. If perchance the Senate is silly enough to pass this bill (possible) and W is stupid enough to sign it (likely), every single librarian in the country will refuse to enforce it.
In my limited experience, research labs for technology companies (like IBM, HP and Sun) employ a very diverse group of people from multiple disciplines.
Your experience is not only limited, but dated. Tech companies are now under a lot of pressure to show short-term results, and don't hire a lot of people for blue-sky projects. IBM, HP, and Sun are all cases in point. IBM is becoming less and less about hardware, and more and more about selling services. HP used to be the leading electronics company, but they've spun off everything except computers and services. And Sun's big priority is to find a way to stay in business.
I don't think anybody (or at least, not a lot of people) has used 3.1 for embedded systems. Back when it came out, 3.1 dominated the home/desktop market, but there was still a lot of competition in the embedded systems market, with a lot of OSs that were better suited for the purpose. Microsoft didn't begin to dominate that market until they started providing OSs tailored to that purpose — and cheap hardware got powerful enough so that you could build an affordable embedded system that could deal with Microsoft feature bloat.
The one thing that keeps something like 3.1 going is legacy software. There probably isn't a lot, but it does exist. I used to work at a software company where the manuals were transmitted to the print contractors using Postscript. That was an obsolete procedure (PDF has been the de facto standard format for prepress for a long time), but the people involved had resisted any change to their procedures with a zeal that bordered on the psychotic. And the only way to generate the correct variant of Postscript was to use a particular print driver that only ran on 3.1! So they kept a single 3.1 machine around for that sole purpose.
It's take more than a good pagerank to make a name valuable. The name itself has to mean something. There are porn folks who'll buy a popular name just to grab they extra hits, but they're not going to pay very much for it.
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Let me nitpick your nitpick of my nitpick. If I spell "ubiquitous" with a g (a sign that I'm getting old) people still know what word I was trying to use. But when you use "hard drive" to describe technology that predates hard drives by 17 years, it looks ignorant.
An encrypted line can be installed anywhere. And why does the Stargate have to be "far from the surface"?
Dude, Alpha Micro wasn't even founded until 1977. That's a day or two after 1956.
There are ways around those problems, like having some kind of feed device to access the cards randomly and feed in new cards as needed. All beside the point, because such a device would be horribly complicated, and therefore unreliable. Anything you can do do reduce the number of mechanical parts in a device makes it more reliable. And magnetic recording is a lot less mechanical than punching holes in paper.
Probably the same day, or at least the same week. The disk platters were open to the air, and the read-write head "flew" a few micrometers above the disk surface, kept apart only by the cushioning effect of the air. If a speck of dust got between the head and the platter, the head would crash into the platter like an airplane that had lost its wings. Probably where our notion of "system crash" comes from, come to think of it.
Saying that the hard drive was invented 50 years ago implies that before that people used floppies. In fact, this was the first disk drive of any kind.
Actually, it always bugged me that the TV series put the Stargate in Cheyene Mountain. If I remember the movie right, it was in an abandoned missle silo in North Dakota. Which made a lot more sense storywise — why locate such a secret operation in a base where thousands of people work? But of course, to make Vancouver look like Colorado Springs, you just have to avoid getting the Fraser River in the background. Lot harder to make it look like Grand Forks.
90% of all excuses are lame.
If it's that accurate, then there's a 90% chance that you're an asshole.
How did you get from "90% of everything is crap" to "100% of overbudgeted unoriginal Hollywood movies are crap?"?
Well, I'm not a big fan of the Stargate franchise, but I think you've sort of answered your own question by mentioning them. You like a good story, and Stargate relies mostly on stories to hold its audience. They have to, because, by entertainment industry standards, they're a shoestring operation. Yeah, they do have some fancy special effects. But its cheap stuff. I can't be bothered to look up the figures, but I know that Stargate and Battlestar spend less for a whole season's SFX than a lot of movies (including some non-SF movies!) spend for a couple of hours.
Movies, by contrast, have huge budgets. Even so-called Indies cost tens of millions. And the kind of movie most people go to see costs at least $100 million to make. When you're risking that much money, you don't take chances. You put those millions into name stars, fancy effects, epic scenes — things people can see. You're so busy with that stuff, and with all the politics and ego-soothing, you don't worry about coming up with a good script. And you don't need to — a script doesn't sell a movie. Except, of course, to a tiny few like you and me.
God, I'm so tired of "Sturgeon's Law". It's just a lame excuse for bad writing.
And nowhere in my original post did I claimed to have "proved" the non-anthrocentric view.
In college, my Critical Thinking prof liked to say that "strictly true" is just another way of saying "false".
I can't prove a lot of things. I can't prove that the universe isn't 5 minutes old and all my memories are manufactured. I can't prove that my landlord isn't an evil genius who's performing nasty experiments on me by tampering with the water supply. I can't prove that Donald Rumsfeld isn't a Al Qaida mole, and the whole war in Iraq isn't part of an elaborate scheme to destroy the U.S. But I don't believe any of these things, but it would be damned silly of me to waste any time thinking about the remote possibility that there's any truth to any of them. Except maybe that last one...
Consider: Our species has only existed a brief period of time (if the history of Earth were a cross-country airplane ride, the whole story of humanity would be the time it takes the stewardess to crack the cabin door at the end of the trip) on a planet orbiting a sun that one of 200 billion in our galaxy. Oh yeah, and the observable universe (not the whole universe, mind you, just the part we can see) contains 100 billion galaxies. And you think God built all this shit just for us? I can't prove you wrong, but forgive me if I think that you think too highly of yourself.
And this has nothing to do with faith. I don't know whether your faith about the imporant of our species is religious or just "I need this to be true". If it's religious, I can agree to disagree, but I feel compelled to point out that not all the faithful agree with you. There's nothing inconsistent between religious faith and acknowledging how insignificant we are. That air flight analogy was first told to me by a Christian pastor. I mean hey, just because there's a God who cares about each of us, doesn't mean he cares more about us than the rest of the universe.
And if you choose to believe that humanity is the center of the universe just because that's something you need to believe, then you're ignoring tons of contrary evidence just because you don't like what they're evidence of. That's not faith. That's just denial.
It's kind of sad how nobody seems to understand how big the universe is. If they did, we'd have a lot less anthrocentric crap, and maybe a little less bad science fiction.
Don't be silly. If I'm not going to let my kids access the Internet, I'm sure as hell not going to let them have cable TV!
I don't wear a shock collar! I'm an adult! I've graduated to a ball and chain!
Electric shocks tend to relieve depression. Children need to be depressed, to prepare them for adulthood!
I'm for the bill! Kids should not be allowed on social sites! Or send email! Or talk on the phone! Or leave the house! THESE ARE ALL RISKY BEHAVIORS! Let's lock them in their rooms until they're 30!
Oh well, look at the bright side. If perchance the Senate is silly enough to pass this bill (possible) and W is stupid enough to sign it (likely), every single librarian in the country will refuse to enforce it.
I don't think anybody (or at least, not a lot of people) has used 3.1 for embedded systems. Back when it came out, 3.1 dominated the home/desktop market, but there was still a lot of competition in the embedded systems market, with a lot of OSs that were better suited for the purpose. Microsoft didn't begin to dominate that market until they started providing OSs tailored to that purpose — and cheap hardware got powerful enough so that you could build an affordable embedded system that could deal with Microsoft feature bloat.
The one thing that keeps something like 3.1 going is legacy software. There probably isn't a lot, but it does exist. I used to work at a software company where the manuals were transmitted to the print contractors using Postscript. That was an obsolete procedure (PDF has been the de facto standard format for prepress for a long time), but the people involved had resisted any change to their procedures with a zeal that bordered on the psychotic. And the only way to generate the correct variant of Postscript was to use a particular print driver that only ran on 3.1! So they kept a single 3.1 machine around for that sole purpose.
On Slashdot it seems to mean, "imagining you're the only person who can see an obvious joke".
It's take more than a good pagerank to make a name valuable. The name itself has to mean something. There are porn folks who'll buy a popular name just to grab they extra hits, but they're not going to pay very much for it.
Sorry dude, someone made the ID joke 4 minutes before you did.
We're talking about classifying all 5-year-olds as terrorists, and you don't get that it's a joke? That's sad.