Science fiction author David Brin put sleep machines on board the earthling's space ship in his award winning novel Startide Rising. I immediately thought, "What a great idea!"
I am an ultra-light sleeper. The slightest variation in noise will rouse me. And I'm a parent of a 3 year old. As you can imagine, I don't sleep very much at all. I'm sick a lot, have migraines, and suffer all the other usual complications of sleep deprivation.
A sleep machine would be ideal. I'd lay down, set the timer, turn it on, and get a guaranteed uninterruptable rest.
That'd be version 1. Version 2 would give you accelerated sleep: set the timer for 8 minutes, and get the equivalent of 8 hours of sleep, complete with REM, long-term memory refiling, new connection formation, the works.
Another start-up, OQO, is expected to release a similar handheld computer soon,...
This coming from an October 24 (2003) C|Net article? Do these guys know what "soon" means?
Call me a troll; I'm just disappointed because I really wanted one of those things, and by the time one's finally released, we'll have Intel Septium Freon eXtreme processors which will be barely fast enough to run Micro$oft LookOut Express.
Yeah, Mule was an all-time classic...a really original and addictive game. Too many games today lack such originality, instead falling into the same molds (first person shooter, real-time strategy, etc.). Those old ground-breaking games were on the edge, experimenting with new ideas and goals. Sometimes they worked, like Mule. Sometimes they failed (ET?).
I've wasted a lot of time tricking out my PC to play the latest and greatest 3D frag fests, city builders, fleet commanders, moody adventures, etc. And I've wasted even more time finding emulators, old cartridges, and 5.25" floppy disks to revive the old games I used to adore growing up.
Problem is nostalgia colors the view of the past. Those old games just don't play like the current ones, and not even nostalgia improves the clunky graphics, primitive gameplay, limited options.
Not even MULE was as much fun as I remembered.
Daniel Lyons's article, "Linux Hit Men," seemed to conclude that the legal actions of the free software front were somehow onerous, part of its "dark side."
When Microsoft, IBM, Intuit, and other software publishers press legal action for license violations, they're doing so under the auspices of copyright law. They're doing so to protect their profits. That's a good thing; competition is what business is about.
When free software presses legal action for license violations, they're also doing so under the aegis of copyright law. But they're doing so to protect everyone else's ability to refine, improve, alter, amend, and better the state of software for everyone else. That's not a good thing?
If you're Daniel Lyons, apparently not. "Such a pity, comrade."
1. Jennifer Garner of Alias has lots of super-cute freckles.
2. Those super-cute freckles are only visible on the local HDTV broadcast.
3. This box doesn't do HDTV.
Luckily, there is an ATSC receiver card that's for Linux only that does do HDTV. And Jennifer Garner. And her super-cute freckles. And yes, it's quite hackable, and source is included.
(OK, I'll admit, I read the fscking article.) And this "Taguchi Approach" sounds interesting, even if it's being applied to spam. I've dived the Waterfall Model, united teams with the Unified Process, spun out of control with the Spiral Model, and lived on the edge with eXtreme Programming. But I never heard of Taguchi.
Anyone have a few choice pointers to just how Taguchi works? And if it's as geeky as the article says, how come it's rarely (never?) applied to software engineering?
I don't run Windows, but reading Symantec's description of the Welchia virus sounds like it's at least trying to be helpful:
Attempts to download the DCOM RPC patch from Microsoft's Windows Update Web site, install it, and then reboot the computer.
Checks for active machines to infect by sending an ICMP echo request, or PING, which will result in increased ICMP traffic.
Attempts to remove W32.Blaster.Worm.
I guess all that aggressive system patching is what brought down the visa system. At least now the department's sysadmins can go back to reading/. or something.
I have to admit that Ultima IV's system of ethics, now years old, still affects me to this day. I really do tend to think in terms on honesty, compassion, valor, justice, etc.
I would have to add, though, that System Shock 2 receive intense kudos for being one of the all-time greats as well. SS2 captured the essence of science fiction horror, distilled it to a mighty level of proof, and sold it for about 50 bucks a pop. The bleeps of consoles, the baleful gaze of Xerxes (the master computer), the groans of your possessed crewmates (who apologize as they pummel you), the darkened corridors, the tortured monkeys... it all wove a spell so thick and believable, I still yelp and jump at certain points. Even the little service marks of the various megacorps, branding their accoutrements of the ship (like door switches or pump equipment) lend an air sci-fi believability.
I've played it about once a year every year since it came out. Which reminds me, it's about time to fire it up again.
Anachronism, eh? Dang old age (and beer)...keeps messing up all the memories! From now on, I'm not celebrating any more birthdays, and I'm drinking only gin.
Outstanding news. I grew up with Bloom County, finding Doonesbury too off-topic for my young and yet geeky pursuits. BC had the same level of text, yet was a lot more accessible.
After all, what aspiring young hacker, typing BASIC programs into a TRS-80 at the local Radio Shack, wouldn't be inspired by Oliver Wendell Jones?
Hemos, why'd you pass it through as "Space"? OK, so there's a 2001 reference, so wouldn't "Movies" make more sense?
Given the serious slashdotting the cites sites have experienced, "Quickies" is right out. And were they accessible, they'd probably be mildly amusing, so perhaps "Entertainment" or "It's Funny. Laugh" should be the way to go. With so many links, you could've set it to "Links" or any number of other categories which aren't used anymore.
I didn't think I'd get into fansubs, but they're quite addicting. I find myself checking AnimeSuki daily to see what new programs fans have subtitled, and then running BitTorrent to grab them.
Fansubbers have an interesting ethical code: the stop distributing and delete their works when the program is licensed for distribution in the U.S. The benefit to English-speaking fans is that they get to see works that would never get licensed outside of Japan. The benefit to Japanese producers is that their works get an English-viewing audience for free, and can then move forward on licensing those vehicles that have a more International (or at least generally American) appeal. Win-win, for the most part.
Thanks for ripping me a new one, and good points, all. What I meant was on a technical level. Get it? He's a VP, I'm an engineer? (Honestly, I didn't mean for it to get modded as insightful.)
RIAA vice-president Matt Oppenheim...added that the claim about violating the woman's internet address "reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works".
Sorry, pal. You're a VP. I'm an engineer. I've had an email address since 1988, and I was using ed to write homework papers formatted with roff in 3rd grade on an ancient Unix system. You do not know how the Internet works.
Maybe it'll be possible some day to pack a major amount of calories and various proteins into a convenient pill form, but I really can't see have much application beyond, say, the military.
Food is supposed to be a sensual experience, part of the feedback system that ensures we eat. Sure, there are some people out there who just eat to live, but we're pre-programmed to find eating pleasurable, from the sight of a perfectly grilled steak, its brown crust glistening under a sprinkling of whole peppercorns, to the scents of exotic vanilla beans wafting up from a mound of cold, soft ice cream, to the texture of crusty, rustic bread, hand-ripped from a lovely brown loaf dusted with cornmeal, to the taste of warm, moist, yielding carrots, drizzled in honey and butter, to... to...
Seems appropriate to revive this classic at this time:
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.
"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v.8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 16MB of memory, a 300MB hard disk, and a SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
When engineers and managers clashed over the 1986 Challenger launch, the managers pulled rank.
What a dark, yet utterly true statement. Do the NASA and contracting company managers sleep well today knowing that in 1986 their decisions cost lives?
Edward Tufte, author of some amazing books on information display, wrote in Envisioning Information on the Challenger disaster. Looking at the materials prepared by engineers, he saw that they had correctly correlated temperature with O-ring failure. Yet their materials, hastily prepared during the 11th hour, failed to convince managers to abort the launch. Tufte shows a design of a simple graph that shows temperature on the abscissa and burn-through on the ordinate, and any manager could draw a line through the points and extrapolate out to the bitter cold Florida day that cost the shuttle.
Having my own share of bad managers, I have to wonder, would it have made any difference?
I tell you, it's darn difficult watching things in standard definition once you've gotten used to Jennifer Gartner on Alias in her glorious 1920 by 1080 pixels with a full color gamut.
Timeshifting her is the hard part. For that, I've resorted to the MyHD card with its Windows drivers sitting on a system with an IDE-based RAID array. Yes, it works. But it's Windows. Need I say more to a Slashdot crowd?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Science fiction author David Brin put sleep machines on board the earthling's space ship in his award winning novel Startide Rising. I immediately thought, "What a great idea!"
I am an ultra-light sleeper. The slightest variation in noise will rouse me. And I'm a parent of a 3 year old. As you can imagine, I don't sleep very much at all. I'm sick a lot, have migraines, and suffer all the other usual complications of sleep deprivation.
A sleep machine would be ideal. I'd lay down, set the timer, turn it on, and get a guaranteed uninterruptable rest.
That'd be version 1. Version 2 would give you accelerated sleep: set the timer for 8 minutes, and get the equivalent of 8 hours of sleep, complete with REM, long-term memory refiling, new connection formation, the works.
*yawn*. Oh, excuse me.
Another start-up, OQO, is expected to release a similar handheld computer soon,...
This coming from an October 24 (2003) C|Net article? Do these guys know what "soon" means?
Call me a troll; I'm just disappointed because I really wanted one of those things, and by the time one's finally released, we'll have Intel Septium Freon eXtreme processors which will be barely fast enough to run Micro$oft LookOut Express.
MapQuest has the aereal photos feature. 'nuff said.
Yeah, Mule was an all-time classic...a really original and addictive game. Too many games today lack such originality, instead falling into the same molds (first person shooter, real-time strategy, etc.). Those old ground-breaking games were on the edge, experimenting with new ideas and goals. Sometimes they worked, like Mule. Sometimes they failed (ET?).
I've wasted a lot of time tricking out my PC to play the latest and greatest 3D frag fests, city builders, fleet commanders, moody adventures, etc. And I've wasted even more time finding emulators, old cartridges, and 5.25" floppy disks to revive the old games I used to adore growing up.
Problem is nostalgia colors the view of the past. Those old games just don't play like the current ones, and not even nostalgia improves the clunky graphics, primitive gameplay, limited options. Not even MULE was as much fun as I remembered.
Look, it's pretty simple:
1. Jennifer Garner of Alias has lots of super-cute freckles.
2. Those super-cute freckles are only visible on the local HDTV broadcast.
3. This box doesn't do HDTV.
Luckily, there is an ATSC receiver card that's for Linux only that does do HDTV. And Jennifer Garner. And her super-cute freckles. And yes, it's quite hackable, and source is included.
'nuff said.
I have a suspicion this Roadshow might be just the boost that America's and Canada's egg farmers need.
Not that I'm suggesting anything quite so blatantly immature. Don't stoop to SCO's level, please.
(OK, I'll admit, I read the fscking article.) And this "Taguchi Approach" sounds interesting, even if it's being applied to spam. I've dived the Waterfall Model, united teams with the Unified Process, spun out of control with the Spiral Model, and lived on the edge with eXtreme Programming. But I never heard of Taguchi.
Anyone have a few choice pointers to just how Taguchi works? And if it's as geeky as the article says, how come it's rarely (never?) applied to software engineering?
- Attempts to download the DCOM RPC patch from Microsoft's Windows Update Web site, install it, and then reboot the computer.
- Checks for active machines to infect by sending an ICMP echo request, or PING, which will result in increased ICMP traffic.
- Attempts to remove W32.Blaster.Worm.
I guess all that aggressive system patching is what brought down the visa system. At least now the department's sysadmins can go back to readingI have to admit that Ultima IV's system of ethics, now years old, still affects me to this day. I really do tend to think in terms on honesty, compassion, valor, justice, etc.
... it all wove a spell so thick and believable, I still yelp and jump at certain points. Even the little service marks of the various megacorps, branding their accoutrements of the ship (like door switches or pump equipment) lend an air sci-fi believability.
I would have to add, though, that System Shock 2 receive intense kudos for being one of the all-time greats as well. SS2 captured the essence of science fiction horror, distilled it to a mighty level of proof, and sold it for about 50 bucks a pop. The bleeps of consoles, the baleful gaze of Xerxes (the master computer), the groans of your possessed crewmates (who apologize as they pummel you), the darkened corridors, the tortured monkeys
I've played it about once a year every year since it came out. Which reminds me, it's about time to fire it up again.
Thanks ESR. You've just put a team of mathematicians at SCO who were somehow related to MIT out of their jobs.
Anachronism, eh? Dang old age (and beer)...keeps messing up all the memories! From now on, I'm not celebrating any more birthdays, and I'm drinking only gin.
Outstanding news. I grew up with Bloom County, finding Doonesbury too off-topic for my young and yet geeky pursuits. BC had the same level of text, yet was a lot more accessible.
After all, what aspiring young hacker, typing BASIC programs into a TRS-80 at the local Radio Shack, wouldn't be inspired by Oliver Wendell Jones?
Prof: This proton accelerator destabilizes the atom in this chamber here, then propels it--
Homer: Uh, excuse me, Professor Brainiac, but I worked in a nuclear power plant for ten years, and, uh, I think I know how a proton accelerator works.
Prof: Well, please, come down and show us.
Homer: All right, I will.
Everyone abandons the glowing green building. Homer walks out, glowing green himself.
Homer: [to meltdown men] In there, guys.
Men: Thanks, Homer.
-- Homer Goes to College
Hemos, why'd you pass it through as "Space"? OK, so there's a 2001 reference, so wouldn't "Movies" make more sense?
Given the serious slashdotting the cites sites have experienced, "Quickies" is right out. And were they accessible, they'd probably be mildly amusing, so perhaps "Entertainment" or "It's Funny. Laugh" should be the way to go. With so many links, you could've set it to "Links" or any number of other categories which aren't used anymore.
But space?
OK, so eBay says: "eBay prohibits the listing of items or products to be delivered electronically through the Internet."
How about X.25? DecNET? AppleTalk? Token Ring? Maybe they could do IrDA? Or just use IP over a LAN instead of the Internet?
I didn't think I'd get into fansubs, but they're quite addicting. I find myself checking AnimeSuki daily to see what new programs fans have subtitled, and then running BitTorrent to grab them.
Fansubbers have an interesting ethical code: the stop distributing and delete their works when the program is licensed for distribution in the U.S. The benefit to English-speaking fans is that they get to see works that would never get licensed outside of Japan. The benefit to Japanese producers is that their works get an English-viewing audience for free, and can then move forward on licensing those vehicles that have a more International (or at least generally American) appeal. Win-win, for the most part.
Thanks for ripping me a new one, and good points, all. What I meant was on a technical level. Get it? He's a VP, I'm an engineer? (Honestly, I didn't mean for it to get modded as insightful.)
Toodles.
RIAA vice-president Matt Oppenheim...added that the claim about violating the woman's internet address "reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works".
Sorry, pal. You're a VP. I'm an engineer. I've had an email address since 1988, and I was using ed to write homework papers formatted with roff in 3rd grade on an ancient Unix system. You do not know how the Internet works.
Maybe it'll be possible some day to pack a major amount of calories and various proteins into a convenient pill form, but I really can't see have much application beyond, say, the military.
... to ...
Food is supposed to be a sensual experience, part of the feedback system that ensures we eat. Sure, there are some people out there who just eat to live, but we're pre-programmed to find eating pleasurable, from the sight of a perfectly grilled steak, its brown crust glistening under a sprinkling of whole peppercorns, to the scents of exotic vanilla beans wafting up from a mound of cold, soft ice cream, to the texture of crusty, rustic bread, hand-ripped from a lovely brown loaf dusted with cornmeal, to the taste of warm, moist, yielding carrots, drizzled in honey and butter, to
I need to change my shorts. Back soon.
Seems appropriate to revive this classic at this time:
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.
"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v.8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 16MB of memory, a 300MB hard disk, and a SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
When engineers and managers clashed over the 1986 Challenger launch, the managers pulled rank.
What a dark, yet utterly true statement. Do the NASA and contracting company managers sleep well today knowing that in 1986 their decisions cost lives?
Edward Tufte, author of some amazing books on information display, wrote in Envisioning Information on the Challenger disaster. Looking at the materials prepared by engineers, he saw that they had correctly correlated temperature with O-ring failure. Yet their materials, hastily prepared during the 11th hour, failed to convince managers to abort the launch. Tufte shows a design of a simple graph that shows temperature on the abscissa and burn-through on the ordinate, and any manager could draw a line through the points and extrapolate out to the bitter cold Florida day that cost the shuttle.
Having my own share of bad managers, I have to wonder, would it have made any difference?
I tell you, it's darn difficult watching things in standard definition once you've gotten used to Jennifer Gartner on Alias in her glorious 1920 by 1080 pixels with a full color gamut.
;-)
Timeshifting her is the hard part. For that, I've resorted to the MyHD card with its Windows drivers sitting on a system with an IDE-based RAID array. Yes, it works. But it's Windows. Need I say more to a Slashdot crowd?
Let's just hope they never have to say, "We're sitting on the biggest bomb man's ever made."
(Yes, I'm seriously dating myself. No, not in that way.)