Some times I wish I was an artist. I have this mental picture of one of those political cartoons. In the background is a huge pile of CD's labeled 'Media', in the foreground is Joe six-pack, labeled 'Consumer' with a puzzled look on his face, scratching his head, while he gazes at a big dude in the middle, labeled 'RIAA' or 'MPAA' or something, who is standing with his arms crossed, legs spread, in front of a 3 foot wide fence labeled 'DRM'.
Discover magazine just ran an article about some research in this directly with lab animals.
This is extremely common in lab animals, its called stereotypical or stereotype actions. Mice will spend hours turning backflips or jumping up and down in the same spot. We're talking rep rates of 10's of thousands of times a night.
This is of course a bad thing from an animal rights perspective, its like lifetime solitary confinement in a ultra-max prision. But these animals are very bad test subjects, their brains don't work right, their immune systems are weak, all their body chemistry is off. One test showed that animals kept in 'enriched' cages (cages with a few simple toys like cardboard tubes) would tolerate 60 times the toxins of their neurotic peers, and can overcome deleberate genetic failures relating to memory more easily.
These are the kind of animals we are doing brain research on and testing potential new drugs in. Not only is it inhumane, its bad research.
Raise your hands, how many people are sure they don't have this little device in their cars?
I drive a '66 and a '71 impala. Unless Big Brother has had agents sneak into my garage and install wireless micro devices in the frames of my cars, I'm sure.
I'm also sure that in a serious accident, it won't really matter to me, both cars have what we refer to as 'death spear' steering columns.
I don't disagree in principle, but I think a different tack might work better. In most places (NB) post a suggested safe limit, and don't stop people for exceeding it. When people are involved in an accident related to speed, penalize anyone involved who was traveling over the limit (I know, thats difficult to determine wihthout tattle-tails, but no more difficult than it is now).
Frankly, I think that if they'd do a better job evaluating the limits on roads there would be less of a problem. IH-35 south of Austin, TX is about 5 lanes both directions and you can see for a good two miles in many places, but the limit is 60. Traffic routinely runs around 80, and a nice BMW or other high performance car could probably safely run 90 or 100 with no problem. The cops love this area, they get about 4 or 5 Harley cops sitting in the shade behind a small tree with low branches, and they take turns running people down.
I find use of this data to be tantamount to self-incrimination, a concept which is completely unconstitutional.
IANAL. If you have a safe that only you know the combo to, and that safe contains information that can incriminate you, the state can compell you to open the safe without incurring the self-incrimination thing. Same goes for encrypted files (which is why deniable encryption is so important).
Data recorders in devices we use could potentially become more and more common as electronics become more compact. Imagine cable modems with harddrives that loop-buffer all your transfered data (for the safety of the children of course). A simple 150gig drive would be more than sufficent to contain most peoples traffic for most of a year or more.
It might be wise to figure out now what we as a society think should be monitored and what should not, and when those things should be accessed. Is a data recorder in a car there for the consumer (to aid in diagnostics for repairs) or is it there for the government (to convict someone of wrongdoing).
IMO, people should be convicted not on what they were doing, but what the results of their actions were. E.G., in this case, it doesn't matter how fast the car was traveling, 60mph or 160mph, the fact is that the driver lost control of the vehicle at a speed obviously above the local speed limit, it shouldn't matter how fast he was going, the penalty should be the same (10kilobuck fine on the first offence, second offense, permanent license revokation, third offense, life or death penalty, depending on state. But thats just my opinion).
GWBasic lacked any way to move up and down between lines.
The GWBasic I used (version 2.12 I think) most certainly did not lack a way to 'move up and down between lines'. It had a full screen editor. You'd list the relevant range of line numbers, then cursor around, changing whatever you wanted.
Course, the better the editors got, the more pointless line numbers became.
A good architect would have a contingency plan for Neo choosing to destroy everything, perhaps something involving sending Neo not back into the real world, but into a very convincing other-matrix (where, if he was good enough, he might notice 'something is different').
Or maybe the whole line about destroying everything is total bull, its just that if he makes that choice its a huge pain in the ass for the architect, forcing him to go around resetting stuff, clearing out tables, fixing primary keys, etc, so he is just trying to get Neo to make the choice that makes his job easier.
Windows is more an application suite than an OS. Around Win 3.1 it was a multi-tasking program manager application with some extra goodies, and it just kept growing from there.
The only reason microsoft has ever allowed you to run non-microsoft programs is because they need a migration path to get you onto their modular do-everything product (i.e., windows). Eventually they plan to have one of every application and they won't have to allow you to run non-microsoft applications.
If you want an OS, us a *nix, if you want an application that can do everything for you and that, for now, will allow you to run your own apps, use Windows.
I'm currently working with a tool that Borland just bought called BOLD. Currently it seems to be geared toward Delphi (which is what I use) but I believe they are setting it up to work with C Builder and their.Net product.
Basicly you use a tool like Model Maker or Rational rose to model the classes you want, and then import the model and generate code from it and you get all your classes with (if you want it) built in persistance to the database of your choice (or XML).
Its not perfect, but its pretty darn good, and there are a number of people using it successfuly on large projects (the one I'm on has around 200 classes, and links to an existing database).
BOLD was developed by a company called BoldSoft, and it appears that borland is renaming it to Model Drive Architecture. It is included with the Architect version of Delphi 7.
I particularly like tools that take my UML model, to which I've just added a standard pattern, and generate the code for me. Saves a lot of typing and I don't have to worry about the details of what someone elses code does.
Unless you are familiar with a library, I don't blame anybody for not using it for small projects.
The problem with that is that small projects are good places to learn how to apply those libraries, so that on the big projects you'll realize how much time and effort you can save because you already know where to get the functionality you need. If you don't know the libraries, they will probably seem too big and risky to include in your big important project.
As a professional Delphi programmer (also since the 16 bit betas), and a hobbiest with programming of microcontrollers, I'd have to agree that as a general purpose language, Delphi falls way short. Obviously because its not intended to be one.
Its damn hard to beat if you are writing a buisness application though, particularly with the addition of Boldsoft's model driven design and ModelMaker.
I'd sure hate to have to use it for some of the things C/C++ is particularly good for.
I just figured it was one book entitled 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Leaf' written by two guys named Niggle and Smith from some place called 'Wootton Major'
I found Silmarillion to be a really heavy read. I could never sit still very long to read it. I solved this by leaving it on the back of the toilet, now I'm making good progress on it. Slow and steady wins the race.
Likewise I haven't tried it. However, since the video card cannot control the polarization of light leaving the monitor, it simply alternates left and right eye view with each frame refresh. In sync with this it makes the left or right lens of the glasses opaque using standard LCD technology.
If the glasses are set up so that they are clear when not opaque (IE, not using a standard film polarizer), they should work with an LCD that does use a polarizer.
On a side note, I've noticed that I can actually see the CRT screen flickering at 72Hz when I am looking at it from the side, on the edge of my peripheral vision, but not straight on. Does anyone know why that is?
Different areas of the visual system are optomized for different functions. The center of the retina where receptors are most closly packed is great for picking up detail, the periperal areas are set up to catch motion, to catch your attention.
I don't know if the differences are mostly chemical or neurological though. The brain does only have certain amounts of resources for processing visual data though. There are some simple experiments that demostrate this. One involves viewing in ones perihiperal vision a figure of a 5 composed of small 3's or something similar. Under certain conditions one can see the 3's, under others resource exaustion only allows the larger figure to be seen.
Individual pixels would still need to be discernable at a distance of about 3 feet,
Hey, keep those visible pixels away from me. If I want to see visible pixels, I'll use the zoom button. Give me a 2000dpi display and quit making GUIs think in pixels.
you know you're a geek when you feel cramped with "only" two monitors
Indeed. I have one of those old 1960's brown, metal air-force desks, 5 feet wide and a full 3 feet deep. I've discovered that its quite comfortable to put 4 17" monitors across it. Two computers with dual desktop and Win2VNC, and it works pretty much like one massive desktop, and I still have 10 square feet of desk space to play with.
LCDs are static. There is no blanking period, so shutter glasses are never going to work with LCDs
Static? Damn, why don't they just call them paintings then?
If the LCD would refresh at high rates, the glasses would work. Ok, technicly they'd work at 60 hz, but the flicker would suck. The video card just has to alternate between the left and right eye views for every cycle period. Its not difficult.
Re:They help, and they hurt.
on
Steal This Idea
·
· Score: 1
What's wrong with licensing the patent to the large corporation?
Nothing at all, unless you are being forced into it by someone.
a bay-to-bay transfer in EVA suits seems to be something that any astronaut should be able to accomplish
come to think of it, it might be worthwhile to provide special suits for this kind of thing. EVA suits are big, bulky things designed for extended work outside the vehicle, and are therefore expensive to launch and require lots of space to store.
Since human skin is plenty strong enough to hold people together for short periods under vaccum conditions (sci-fi movies not withstanding), I'll bet it would be fairly easy to design a simple, lightwight EV suit for just this kind of thing.
A half hour air tank, scuba-style full face mask, and a heavy-duty spandex suit (mechanical counter pressure prevents problems with vaccum, and is necessary to prevent the bends, which would really suck in an emergency situation) with built in saftey harness would be all thats required for an emergency vehicle transfer (gecko-tape style pads on the suit would rock). You'd sure get your lifetime quota of radiation in a hurry, but thats better than hyperventilating, jumping out and hoping the Heart of Gold will scoop you up. The whole package would be under 20 pounds
True, I'd expect the tag to be inspected in that case though, so it would have to be a very good counterfit, and you'd then be deliberately drawing managment attention. You'd save much more by discounting all your random weight items (price encoded on the ticket) by some large percentage.
Taking it further, you could retag normal items with valid UPC/GTIN numbers from other cheaper products, preferably of the same brand. But that would be much more obvious as you wandered around the store, peeling stickers off of a big sheet and sticking them on all your products.
Slashdot Mirror
Some times I wish I was an artist. I have this mental picture of one of those political cartoons. In the background is a huge pile of CD's labeled 'Media', in the foreground is Joe six-pack, labeled 'Consumer' with a puzzled look on his face, scratching his head, while he gazes at a big dude in the middle, labeled 'RIAA' or 'MPAA' or something, who is standing with his arms crossed, legs spread, in front of a 3 foot wide fence labeled 'DRM'.
Discover magazine just ran an article about some research in this directly with lab animals.
This is extremely common in lab animals, its called stereotypical or stereotype actions. Mice will spend hours turning backflips or jumping up and down in the same spot. We're talking rep rates of 10's of thousands of times a night.
This is of course a bad thing from an animal rights perspective, its like lifetime solitary confinement in a ultra-max prision. But these animals are very bad test subjects, their brains don't work right, their immune systems are weak, all their body chemistry is off. One test showed that animals kept in 'enriched' cages (cages with a few simple toys like cardboard tubes) would tolerate 60 times the toxins of their neurotic peers, and can overcome deleberate genetic failures relating to memory more easily.
These are the kind of animals we are doing brain research on and testing potential new drugs in. Not only is it inhumane, its bad research.
Raise your hands, how many people are sure they don't have this little device in their cars?
I drive a '66 and a '71 impala. Unless Big Brother has had agents sneak into my garage and install wireless micro devices in the frames of my cars, I'm sure.
I'm also sure that in a serious accident, it won't really matter to me, both cars have what we refer to as 'death spear' steering columns.
I don't disagree in principle, but I think a different tack might work better. In most places (NB) post a suggested safe limit, and don't stop people for exceeding it. When people are involved in an accident related to speed, penalize anyone involved who was traveling over the limit (I know, thats difficult to determine wihthout tattle-tails, but no more difficult than it is now).
Frankly, I think that if they'd do a better job evaluating the limits on roads there would be less of a problem. IH-35 south of Austin, TX is about 5 lanes both directions and you can see for a good two miles in many places, but the limit is 60. Traffic routinely runs around 80, and a nice BMW or other high performance car could probably safely run 90 or 100 with no problem. The cops love this area, they get about 4 or 5 Harley cops sitting in the shade behind a small tree with low branches, and they take turns running people down.
Its the same pretty much anywhere in the US. I don't think there are any states left that do not have a seatbelt law.
I find use of this data to be tantamount to self-incrimination, a concept which is completely unconstitutional.
IANAL. If you have a safe that only you know the combo to, and that safe contains information that can incriminate you, the state can compell you to open the safe without incurring the self-incrimination thing. Same goes for encrypted files (which is why deniable encryption is so important).
Data recorders in devices we use could potentially become more and more common as electronics become more compact. Imagine cable modems with harddrives that loop-buffer all your transfered data (for the safety of the children of course). A simple 150gig drive would be more than sufficent to contain most peoples traffic for most of a year or more.
It might be wise to figure out now what we as a society think should be monitored and what should not, and when those things should be accessed. Is a data recorder in a car there for the consumer (to aid in diagnostics for repairs) or is it there for the government (to convict someone of wrongdoing).
IMO, people should be convicted not on what they were doing, but what the results of their actions were. E.G., in this case, it doesn't matter how fast the car was traveling, 60mph or 160mph, the fact is that the driver lost control of the vehicle at a speed obviously above the local speed limit, it shouldn't matter how fast he was going, the penalty should be the same (10kilobuck fine on the first offence, second offense, permanent license revokation, third offense, life or death penalty, depending on state. But thats just my opinion).
Yup, thats it:
Heres a screenshot and a download
Trillian Pro, the pay version, supports plugins, but weakly.
The 'new improved' plugin API has been coming with the new realease 'Real Soon Now' for about two years.
GWBasic lacked any way to move up and down between lines.
The GWBasic I used (version 2.12 I think) most certainly did not lack a way to 'move up and down between lines'. It had a full screen editor. You'd list the relevant range of line numbers, then cursor around, changing whatever you wanted.
Course, the better the editors got, the more pointless line numbers became.
(is it really the real world? hmmm)
A good architect would have a contingency plan for Neo choosing to destroy everything, perhaps something involving sending Neo not back into the real world, but into a very convincing other-matrix (where, if he was good enough, he might notice 'something is different').
Or maybe the whole line about destroying everything is total bull, its just that if he makes that choice its a huge pain in the ass for the architect, forcing him to go around resetting stuff, clearing out tables, fixing primary keys, etc, so he is just trying to get Neo to make the choice that makes his job easier.
Windows is more an application suite than an OS. Around Win 3.1 it was a multi-tasking program manager application with some extra goodies, and it just kept growing from there.
The only reason microsoft has ever allowed you to run non-microsoft programs is because they need a migration path to get you onto their modular do-everything product (i.e., windows). Eventually they plan to have one of every application and they won't have to allow you to run non-microsoft applications.
If you want an OS, us a *nix, if you want an application that can do everything for you and that, for now, will allow you to run your own apps, use Windows.
I'm currently working with a tool that Borland just bought called BOLD. Currently it seems to be geared toward Delphi (which is what I use) but I believe they are setting it up to work with C Builder and their .Net product.
Basicly you use a tool like Model Maker or Rational rose to model the classes you want, and then import the model and generate code from it and you get all your classes with (if you want it) built in persistance to the database of your choice (or XML).
Its not perfect, but its pretty darn good, and there are a number of people using it successfuly on large projects (the one I'm on has around 200 classes, and links to an existing database).
BOLD was developed by a company called BoldSoft, and it appears that borland is renaming it to Model Drive Architecture. It is included with the Architect version of Delphi 7.
That's why patterns are all the rage
I particularly like tools that take my UML model, to which I've just added a standard pattern, and generate the code for me. Saves a lot of typing and I don't have to worry about the details of what someone elses code does.
Unless you are familiar with a library, I don't blame anybody for not using it for small projects.
The problem with that is that small projects are good places to learn how to apply those libraries, so that on the big projects you'll realize how much time and effort you can save because you already know where to get the functionality you need. If you don't know the libraries, they will probably seem too big and risky to include in your big important project.
As a professional Delphi programmer (also since the 16 bit betas), and a hobbiest with programming of microcontrollers, I'd have to agree that as a general purpose language, Delphi falls way short. Obviously because its not intended to be one.
Its damn hard to beat if you are writing a buisness application though, particularly with the addition of Boldsoft's model driven design and ModelMaker.
I'd sure hate to have to use it for some of the things C/C++ is particularly good for.
I just figured it was one book entitled 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Leaf' written by two guys named Niggle and Smith from some place called 'Wootton Major'
I found Silmarillion to be a really heavy read. I could never sit still very long to read it. I solved this by leaving it on the back of the toilet, now I'm making good progress on it. Slow and steady wins the race.
Likewise I haven't tried it. However, since the video card cannot control the polarization of light leaving the monitor, it simply alternates left and right eye view with each frame refresh. In sync with this it makes the left or right lens of the glasses opaque using standard LCD technology.
If the glasses are set up so that they are clear when not opaque (IE, not using a standard film polarizer), they should work with an LCD that does use a polarizer.
On a side note, I've noticed that I can actually see the CRT screen flickering at 72Hz when I am looking at it from the side, on the edge of my peripheral vision, but not straight on. Does anyone know why that is?
Different areas of the visual system are optomized for different functions. The center of the retina where receptors are most closly packed is great for picking up detail, the periperal areas are set up to catch motion, to catch your attention.
I don't know if the differences are mostly chemical or neurological though. The brain does only have certain amounts of resources for processing visual data though. There are some simple experiments that demostrate this. One involves viewing in ones perihiperal vision a figure of a 5 composed of small 3's or something similar. Under certain conditions one can see the 3's, under others resource exaustion only allows the larger figure to be seen.
Individual pixels would still need to be discernable at a distance of about 3 feet,
Hey, keep those visible pixels away from me. If I want to see visible pixels, I'll use the zoom button. Give me a 2000dpi display and quit making GUIs think in pixels.
you know you're a geek when you feel cramped with "only" two monitors
Indeed. I have one of those old 1960's brown, metal air-force desks, 5 feet wide and a full 3 feet deep. I've discovered that its quite comfortable to put 4 17" monitors across it. Two computers with dual desktop and Win2VNC, and it works pretty much like one massive desktop, and I still have 10 square feet of desk space to play with.
How I'd love to replace them with LCDs... mmm...
LCDs are static. There is no blanking period, so shutter glasses are never going to work with LCDs
Static? Damn, why don't they just call them paintings then?
If the LCD would refresh at high rates, the glasses would work. Ok, technicly they'd work at 60 hz, but the flicker would suck. The video card just has to alternate between the left and right eye views for every cycle period. Its not difficult.
What's wrong with licensing the patent to the large corporation?
Nothing at all, unless you are being forced into it by someone.
a bay-to-bay transfer in EVA suits seems to be something that any astronaut should be able to accomplish
come to think of it, it might be worthwhile to provide special suits for this kind of thing. EVA suits are big, bulky things designed for extended work outside the vehicle, and are therefore expensive to launch and require lots of space to store.
Since human skin is plenty strong enough to hold people together for short periods under vaccum conditions (sci-fi movies not withstanding), I'll bet it would be fairly easy to design a simple, lightwight EV suit for just this kind of thing.
A half hour air tank, scuba-style full face mask, and a heavy-duty spandex suit (mechanical counter pressure prevents problems with vaccum, and is necessary to prevent the bends, which would really suck in an emergency situation) with built in saftey harness would be all thats required for an emergency vehicle transfer (gecko-tape style pads on the suit would rock). You'd sure get your lifetime quota of radiation in a hurry, but thats better than hyperventilating, jumping out and hoping the Heart of Gold will scoop you up. The whole package would be under 20 pounds
True, I'd expect the tag to be inspected in that case though, so it would have to be a very good counterfit, and you'd then be deliberately drawing managment attention. You'd save much more by discounting all your random weight items (price encoded on the ticket) by some large percentage.
Taking it further, you could retag normal items with valid UPC/GTIN numbers from other cheaper products, preferably of the same brand. But that would be much more obvious as you wandered around the store, peeling stickers off of a big sheet and sticking them on all your products.