Last week people were complaining about slashdot killing the lisa web server. This time the direct link to the microchip server wasn't even posted and the "machine" is already down. In fact, it's probably on fire right now.
I got that Nigerian money laundering email twice a day for a week from the same guy before I cut him an email threatening to take a squad of tanks to his contry and turn it into rubble. To my amazement, he actually replied!
Last year at the end of semester my roommate was kicking around my office reading e-mail. He recieved the Nigerian money laundering e-mail and, since he was trying to kill time, he looked up the FBI hotline number and phoned in a report of suspicious foreign money launderers. The Feds asked him for his phone number and address, and said that they would investigate it further. We were expecting the FBI to drop by the house to see some of the evidence, but they never did...
I assume you just want to know when the coffee is done (your pot is full). All your toilet does is check when the water in the tank is full by having a floating rubber ball on a stick. When the stick is bent to 90 degrees, the toilet stops filling the tank. Instead, you could hook it up to a buzzer or whatever. I think this would be perfectly accurate, and relatively easy to set up. If you wanted to know how close you were to full, you'd have to do a little more math to make this work.
"If you put an infinite
number of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the
script for Hamlet." (One may also hypothesize a small number of
monkeys and a very long period of time.) This theorem asserts
nothing about the intelligence of the one random monkey that
eventually comes up with the script (and note that the mob will
also type out all the possible incorrect versions of
Hamlet). It may be referred to semi-seriously when justifying a
brute force method; the implication is that, with enough
resources thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes a
one-banana problem. This argument gets more respect since
Linux justified the bazaar mode of development.
Sure, you can breed a dog with long hair, a short snout, and good temperment, but what if you want to breed a dog with feathers, or a fifth leg?
Look, although you can "direct" evolution, you can't completely override it. You simply can't breed a dog with a fifth leg because the dog doesn't gain natural selection advantages, and will likely lose some.
example:
As you selectively add in sections of the fifth leg gene, you gain no selective trait and lose functionality (a fifth leg stump would disrupt balance, among other things, and won't be able to run as fast). The animal will also probably be beaten up by other's in it's litter pool for being less capable, or at least different. Further more, if taken out into the real world, the animal starts to lose it's ability to breed, too (a person with three arms simply won't do as well in the dating pool).
However, if you breed for a dog with a longer snout or whatever, you're at least not disadvantaging the animal in any serious way. In actuality, these are the only kind of pushes Linus successfully makes on linux.
As an example of natural selection in code, last week Linus "directed" the evolution of linux by putting forward 2.4.15. This had the wicked bad problem of ruining your file system and was "selected out" of the linux pool very quickly. Thus we have 2.4.16 and 2.4.14, but no one will ever use 2.4.15 like how the five legged stump dog breed will die out before it ever makes an impact.
I was just addressing a hypothetical question with further speculation. This is why I used phrases like: "Without proper legal restrictions, this is a reality that we may face in the coming years." I know that we are not currently cloning or trying to clone humans, but we will be at a point where the science is possible. Human cloning is a reality that we will face in our generation and we best be prepared for what it means.
Turn off your flame engines, they're headed in the wrong direction.
However, I fail to see how reproductive cloning "has a lot of potential for good". Instead of one kid, you get identical twins. Sweet! If you wanted two kids, you could have just had another kid.
Well, the obvious frightening moral dilemma is the parents who want to "resurrect" their 13 year old child, just killed in a car crash, by bringing his embryonic clone (that they made 13 years ago) out of cryogenic statis. Without proper legal restrictions, this is a reality that we may face in the coming years.
I'm all for cloning research, but I think that the moral implications of practicing human cloning techniques outside of the laboratory are mind boggling. I think we should know the science, but not use it (at least in this fashion). Similarly, I think we should know how to build fission bombs, but I don't think we should actually build them.
I have visions of products shouting out to you to "buy me" as you walk down the product aisles. The real world equivalent of banner ads and popup displays.
Actually, combined with current LED technologies, I'd be more afraid of people walking around with Nike(tm) video commercials on their t-shirts, and the like.
Although Opera totally uninterests me, I think that you can't discount it. Opera is a slick browser alternative to IE, and I know an awful lot of people who prefer it. Personally, I think IE is the only thing currently worthwhile about Windows, and I agree, it still doesn't hold a candle to galeon, recently discussed
here
.
1500 meters is dramatically different than the 100 kilometer reward and still significantly less than even Brian Walker's goal of 30 km. Even commercial airliners fly at approximately 9000 meters.
Still, it's nice to see that the guy got things off the ground and was able to rescue (and reuse?) some of the parts at the same time.
In a world of games like Quake, Half-Life, and Ultima, one has to consider the roots of RT online strategy games. Back in the early 90's, the internet was young and slow. Only people who were spending obscene amounts of money to attend college had access to computers fast enough, and well-connected enough, to play meaningful online games against human opponents. Some games were graphical, like NetTrek or Bolo, but most were text-based. These were called MUDs. (Multi User Dungeons, and later, the broader Multi User Dimensions). These games became so detailed that entire role-playing cultures arose. This attention to detail gave players a world of opportunity to expore, strategize, and combat each other, unparalleled by most modern graphical games. For this reason, MUDs are still commonly played by people who search for the ultimate gaming strategy experience.
For example, a MUD called Genocide (or Geno) is still very popular. The premise of Genocide was that, unlike most MUDs, where you had to advance your player by completing quests and gaining experience, etc, each player started each war equal. Only knowledge of the game, superior tactics and teamwork, and typing speed separated the base newbie from the superior player. With an estimated 6000 different rooms, well over 200 different weapons and at least 160 distinctly different spells, Genocide gives unparralleled complexity and depth of strategy. It forces players to learn each others tactics in an effort to confront them and calculates a myriad of statistics and toplists so that you can best know your enemy before entering battle.
Even now, nearly 10 years after the formation of Genocide, the game still exists, and is still played. If you're interested, for more info, check out www.geno.org, or just download the damn CRT program (from www.vandyke.com) and telnet to geno.org. Once online, create a character, and read through the various informative and amusing help files and newbie guidebooks.
Apple has a single look and feel. This stems from a single company putting together a single project, and forcing everyone who wants to program for that platform to conform to the project guidelines. The problem with Linux development (and also it's greatest asset) is that there is no unifying entity with a single vision. All sorts of Linux developers work on distinct projects, release them slowly, and all have different visions of what Linux should be.
As a result, there is no big bang, no enormous release, and there will never be a relevation like MacOS 9.1 to OSX, nor Windows 3.1 to 95... As long as there is no managing Linux Headquarters saying to ALL of its developers "ok guys, you can't release your product for 1.5 more years, and make sure it follows our rules exactly- any deviation will force us to drop your app," Linux will never be able to market in the way Apple or Microsoft do. And truthfully, I never want to see Linux turn into this.
Most importantly, Apple has a marketing team. It has enough resources to show back cover spreads of single products in Time, Newsweek, US N&WR,... you name it, every week. There's no better way to stir the hearts of 20 somethings than advertising 30 second clips on MTV.
My two cents.
Actually, Mr. Walker is likely a brilliant man. He is a self made millionare as an inventor. Although only his toys have been marketable, he's produced some other really cool projects (a recreational hovercraft and submarine) and is taking his project seriously (he has trained as a cosmonaut, flown a MIG fighter, and has been training on a human centrifuge).
In the end, he is going about the project in the correct manor. He's aiming at only 30 seconds outside of the atmosphere and he's using an extremely simple propulsion system. His plan is so simple, it just might work.
All of the photos of the completed rocket (that I noticed) are of a prototype he built. He has, however, posted photos of components he's built and the human centrifuge with which he will build up high gravity tolerances. He's not planning on being done until May 2002 (not this fall, as the NYPost article reports) so he's got a bit to go. Also, he's gone through cosmonaut training and flown a MIG fighter, so it can't all be BS.
Re:This is in the New York Post, people!
on
To the Moon, Alice
·
· Score: 3
How about the Oregonian, Oregon's largest paper.
Also, St. Petersburg Times and the guy was supposedly on CBS "The Early Show", too.
For an alternate point of view, a rather liberal Chinese news site, People's Daily Online. This site is supposed to be quite radical, and not strongly moderated by the Chinese government. Here is an interesting article in english representing how the chinese think about these matters.
This has been around in the movie industry for a while, now. I'm not at all suprized that game makers are picking up on it. For instance, remember E.T. and Resses Pieces? Blade Runner and Coca Cola? All paid for advertisements.
Look what I'm talking about is general use. I'm not talking about what your math department uses, I'm talking about what your history or english departments use. These are highschool kids we're refering to, and they don't have focus yet. 95% of them that even end up involving a computer will land jobs, out of highschool or after university, in companies where they will only use Windows. Exclusively. How should highschools across the nation prepare their students? By teaching them how to use Windows machines. I'm not saying make all of the machines Windows, but make most of them.
At my current college about 10% of the total student body is in math, chemistry or physics related majors. Along similar lines, if the highschool has a lab of 20 computers, maybe 2 of them should have linux on them.
Infact, it's for very few people. Although, yes, I think it is wise to encourage school children to use alternative operating systems to expand their minds, yadda yadda...
I can't but empathize for the ordinary students who are going to school to get an ordinary degree and later an ordinary job. These kids will only be retarded in their persuits if you force them to learn Linux when they will really only benefit from a Windows education in the long run.
If your budget allows, provide a box, maybe two. But not a whole lab of 10 computers over 100 schools. Don't waste your 10 computer budget on dedicated linux machines which will be used rarely by rare individuals.
At the collegiate level, I've schooled at Dartmouth College which provided a small corner of absolutely never used SGI machines and at Reed College which has a lab of LinuxPPC machines, all completely idle. The respective linux/unix machines are nice for me to dick around on, but not the average student. Additionally, that's all I do on them- dick around. I'm not about to write a term paper with Emacs when there is a Macintosh lab just down the hallway.
Slashdot Mirror
Last week people were complaining about slashdot killing the lisa web server. This time the direct link to the microchip server wasn't even posted and the "machine" is already down. In fact, it's probably on fire right now.
I got that Nigerian money laundering email twice a day for a week from the same guy before I cut him an email threatening to take a squad of tanks to his contry and turn it into rubble. To my amazement, he actually replied!
Last year at the end of semester my roommate was kicking around my office reading e-mail. He recieved the Nigerian money laundering e-mail and, since he was trying to kill time, he looked up the FBI hotline number and phoned in a report of suspicious foreign money launderers. The Feds asked him for his phone number and address, and said that they would investigate it further. We were expecting the FBI to drop by the house to see some of the evidence, but they never did...
I assume you just want to know when the coffee is done (your pot is full). All your toilet does is check when the water in the tank is full by having a floating rubber ball on a stick. When the stick is bent to 90 degrees, the toilet stops filling the tank. Instead, you could hook it up to a buzzer or whatever. I think this would be perfectly accurate, and relatively easy to set up. If you wanted to know how close you were to full, you'd have to do a little more math to make this work.
It turns out that sensing the amount of water in the pot is quite difficult.
Use a rubber ball on a stick like your toilet. You goddam nerds try to complicate everything.
Infinite-Monkey Theorem n.
"If you put an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script for Hamlet." (One may also hypothesize a small number of monkeys and a very long period of time.) This theorem asserts nothing about the intelligence of the one random monkey that eventually comes up with the script (and note that the mob will also type out all the possible incorrect versions of Hamlet). It may be referred to semi-seriously when justifying a brute force method; the implication is that, with enough resources thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes a one-banana problem . This argument gets more respect since Linux justified the bazaar mode of development.
Sure, you can breed a dog with long hair, a short snout, and good temperment, but what if you want to breed a dog with feathers, or a fifth leg?
Look, although you can "direct" evolution, you can't completely override it. You simply can't breed a dog with a fifth leg because the dog doesn't gain natural selection advantages, and will likely lose some.
example:
As you selectively add in sections of the fifth leg gene, you gain no selective trait and lose functionality (a fifth leg stump would disrupt balance, among other things, and won't be able to run as fast). The animal will also probably be beaten up by other's in it's litter pool for being less capable, or at least different. Further more, if taken out into the real world, the animal starts to lose it's ability to breed, too (a person with three arms simply won't do as well in the dating pool).
However, if you breed for a dog with a longer snout or whatever, you're at least not disadvantaging the animal in any serious way. In actuality, these are the only kind of pushes Linus successfully makes on linux.
As an example of natural selection in code, last week Linus "directed" the evolution of linux by putting forward 2.4.15. This had the wicked bad problem of ruining your file system and was "selected out" of the linux pool very quickly. Thus we have 2.4.16 and 2.4.14, but no one will ever use 2.4.15 like how the five legged stump dog breed will die out before it ever makes an impact.
I was just addressing a hypothetical question with further speculation. This is why I used phrases like: "Without proper legal restrictions, this is a reality that we may face in the coming years." I know that we are not currently cloning or trying to clone humans, but we will be at a point where the science is possible. Human cloning is a reality that we will face in our generation and we best be prepared for what it means.
Turn off your flame engines, they're headed in the wrong direction.
However, I fail to see how reproductive cloning "has a lot of potential for good". Instead of one kid, you get identical twins. Sweet! If you wanted two kids, you could have just had another kid.
Well, the obvious frightening moral dilemma is the parents who want to "resurrect" their 13 year old child, just killed in a car crash, by bringing his embryonic clone (that they made 13 years ago) out of cryogenic statis. Without proper legal restrictions, this is a reality that we may face in the coming years.
I'm all for cloning research, but I think that the moral implications of practicing human cloning techniques outside of the laboratory are mind boggling. I think we should know the science, but not use it (at least in this fashion). Similarly, I think we should know how to build fission bombs, but I don't think we should actually build them.
I have visions of products shouting out to you to "buy me" as you walk down the product aisles. The real world equivalent of banner ads and popup displays.
Actually, combined with current LED technologies, I'd be more afraid of people walking around with Nike(tm) video commercials on their t-shirts, and the like.
Although Opera totally uninterests me, I think that you can't discount it. Opera is a slick browser alternative to IE, and I know an awful lot of people who prefer it. Personally, I think IE is the only thing currently worthwhile about Windows, and I agree, it still doesn't hold a candle to galeon, recently discussed here .
1500 meters is dramatically different than the 100 kilometer reward and still significantly less than even Brian Walker's goal of 30 km. Even commercial airliners fly at approximately 9000 meters.
Still, it's nice to see that the guy got things off the ground and was able to rescue (and reuse?) some of the parts at the same time.
I hope they don't really mean that "these new chips will also consume less heat than current AMD notebooks chips.
fear using your AMD notebook to check your e-mail and simultaneously toast your english muffins in the morning.
In a world of games like Quake, Half-Life, and Ultima, one has to consider the roots of RT online strategy games. Back in the early 90's, the internet was young and slow. Only people who were spending obscene amounts of money to attend college had access to computers fast enough, and well-connected enough, to play meaningful online games against human opponents. Some games were graphical, like NetTrek or Bolo, but most were text-based. These were called MUDs. (Multi User Dungeons, and later, the broader Multi User Dimensions). These games became so detailed that entire role-playing cultures arose. This attention to detail gave players a world of opportunity to expore, strategize, and combat each other, unparalleled by most modern graphical games. For this reason, MUDs are still commonly played by people who search for the ultimate gaming strategy experience.
For example, a MUD called Genocide (or Geno) is still very popular. The premise of Genocide was that, unlike most MUDs, where you had to advance your player by completing quests and gaining experience, etc, each player started each war equal. Only knowledge of the game, superior tactics and teamwork, and typing speed separated the base newbie from the superior player. With an estimated 6000 different rooms, well over 200 different weapons and at least 160 distinctly different spells, Genocide gives unparralleled complexity and depth of strategy. It forces players to learn each others tactics in an effort to confront them and calculates a myriad of statistics and toplists so that you can best know your enemy before entering battle.
Even now, nearly 10 years after the formation of Genocide, the game still exists, and is still played. If you're interested, for more info, check out www.geno.org, or just download the damn CRT program (from www.vandyke.com) and telnet to geno.org. Once online, create a character, and read through the various informative and amusing help files and newbie guidebooks.
Apple has a single look and feel. This stems from a single company putting together a single project, and forcing everyone who wants to program for that platform to conform to the project guidelines. The problem with Linux development (and also it's greatest asset) is that there is no unifying entity with a single vision. All sorts of Linux developers work on distinct projects, release them slowly, and all have different visions of what Linux should be.
... you name it, every week. There's no better way to stir the hearts of 20 somethings than advertising 30 second clips on MTV.
My two cents.
As a result, there is no big bang, no enormous release, and there will never be a relevation like MacOS 9.1 to OSX, nor Windows 3.1 to 95... As long as there is no managing Linux Headquarters saying to ALL of its developers "ok guys, you can't release your product for 1.5 more years, and make sure it follows our rules exactly- any deviation will force us to drop your app," Linux will never be able to market in the way Apple or Microsoft do. And truthfully, I never want to see Linux turn into this.
Most importantly, Apple has a marketing team. It has enough resources to show back cover spreads of single products in Time, Newsweek, US N&WR,
Actually, Mr. Walker is likely a brilliant man. He is a self made millionare as an inventor. Although only his toys have been marketable, he's produced some other really cool projects (a recreational hovercraft and submarine) and is taking his project seriously (he has trained as a cosmonaut, flown a MIG fighter, and has been training on a human centrifuge).
In the end, he is going about the project in the correct manor. He's aiming at only 30 seconds outside of the atmosphere and he's using an extremely simple propulsion system. His plan is so simple, it just might work.
All of the photos of the completed rocket (that I noticed) are of a prototype he built. He has, however, posted photos of components he's built and the human centrifuge with which he will build up high gravity tolerances. He's not planning on being done until May 2002 (not this fall, as the NYPost article reports) so he's got a bit to go. Also, he's gone through cosmonaut training and flown a MIG fighter, so it can't all be BS.
How about the Oregonian, Oregon's largest paper.
Also, St. Petersburg Times and the guy was supposedly on CBS "The Early Show", too.
Brian Walker's webpage (www.rocketguy.com) gives info about his rocket shows photographs. You can also see some of his other wacky inventions.
For an alternate point of view, a rather liberal Chinese news site, People's Daily Online. This site is supposed to be quite radical, and not strongly moderated by the Chinese government. Here is an interesting article in english representing how the chinese think about these matters.
This has been around in the movie industry for a while, now. I'm not at all suprized that game makers are picking up on it. For instance, remember E.T. and Resses Pieces? Blade Runner and Coca Cola? All paid for advertisements.
Here is an actually quite readable paper from ACM about the hashing routine that Akamai uses, called Consistent hashing and random trees: distributed caching protocols for relieving hot spots on the World Wide Web by David Karger et al (1997).
The Tablet PC press release is here. Images of the Tablet PC from the press release are:
Tablet Prototype
Bert Keely holding Tablet for size
Look what I'm talking about is general use. I'm not talking about what your math department uses, I'm talking about what your history or english departments use. These are highschool kids we're refering to, and they don't have focus yet. 95% of them that even end up involving a computer will land jobs, out of highschool or after university, in companies where they will only use Windows. Exclusively. How should highschools across the nation prepare their students? By teaching them how to use Windows machines. I'm not saying make all of the machines Windows, but make most of them.
At my current college about 10% of the total student body is in math, chemistry or physics related majors. Along similar lines, if the highschool has a lab of 20 computers, maybe 2 of them should have linux on them.
It's sad. I know. But it's the truth.
Infact, it's for very few people. Although, yes, I think it is wise to encourage school children to use alternative operating systems to expand their minds, yadda yadda...
I can't but empathize for the ordinary students who are going to school to get an ordinary degree and later an ordinary job. These kids will only be retarded in their persuits if you force them to learn Linux when they will really only benefit from a Windows education in the long run.
If your budget allows, provide a box, maybe two. But not a whole lab of 10 computers over 100 schools. Don't waste your 10 computer budget on dedicated linux machines which will be used rarely by rare individuals.
At the collegiate level, I've schooled at Dartmouth College which provided a small corner of absolutely never used SGI machines and at Reed College which has a lab of LinuxPPC machines, all completely idle. The respective linux/unix machines are nice for me to dick around on, but not the average student. Additionally, that's all I do on them- dick around. I'm not about to write a term paper with Emacs when there is a Macintosh lab just down the hallway.
There won't be a cure for cancer until we stop breathing oxygen and going outside of ultraviolet light bubble shields.