1. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. Always has been, always will be. It is a unit of measurement specific to its science, like the Mole is to Chemistry, and like the Newton is to Physics. It is not meant to be a general metric measurement, in other words, a megabyte isn't 1,000,000 anymore than a "dozen" is 10. Ever since the term was coined, it has meant that value, specifically. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something, namely marketing idiots who are responsible for great advancements in human culture like MTV and the Home Shopping Network.
2. By accepting this "mebibytes" crap, you're allowing marketing people to revise history. The number 1,048,576 is an important value in Computer Science, similar to 8, 256, 1024, and other commonly-used powers of 2. An understanding of the powers of 2 is integral to having an understanding of the underlying principles that form the foundation of this discipline. If you cant think in anything but base 10, you should consider a different line of work, as most computer scientists have no problem thinking in terms of binary, octal, hexidecimal and otherwise. A failure to understand the basic nature of the device you intend on working with for the rest of your career is tantamount to unprofessionalism and neglect. After all, you can't be expected to code competently by using incorrect measurements any more than a carpenter can be expected to build a house competently if his tape measure is made out of elastic rubber.
3. Its just plain stupid. A megabyte is a megabyte. Its not less than a megabyte, or more than a megabyte. If you for some reason feel the need to apply a term to "1,000,000" an essentially meaningless number in terms of the machine, we already have a word for it. Its called "million", as in "a million bytes." Call a spade a spade. A megabyte is 1,048,576. A million bytes is 1,000,000 bytes. They are not equal, and never will be.
In my experience, Lexmark has wonderful Linux support for its products. $79 at Best Buy got me a very high quality 1200dpi inkjet printer (the Lexmark Z23) with both Windows and Linux support. The Linux side actually works better than its Windows counterpart, oddly enough. It runs as a daemon process, does PostScript exactly the way it should, and the fact that its a USB printer doesn't complicate the situation either. It all just plain works, out of the box. Even has a nice graphical config utility
It would have been interesting get Seth's reaction to the growing rumors surrounding the discovery of a signal coming from EQ Pegasus a year or so ago.
For those who don't know what i'm talking about, the scientific comunity has been argueing about the "discovery" of an extraterrestrial signal comming from EQ Pegasus, a small binary system situated about 27 lightyears from Earth.
The signal capted by Paul Dore with a small radio-telescope was distributed to several observatories for analysis. Astronomers don't really know what to think about it. A press conference was scheduled, but it was cancelled due to threats from an unnamed source. There are rumors the Air Force was involved in silencing the guy who found it, starting some suspicion that it could have been a deep space probe, a CIA "Black" project, or similar. The signal would have been capted the October 22 & 23, which is some weeks after a powerfull Radio-Telescope from Arecibo would have picked a strange signal comming from EQ Pegasus in a project called Phoenix. Astronomers had concluded that it was just interference coming from a geosynchronous satellite.
The SETI program tried in vain to pick up the signal, and they said that this was either a big joke, or interference.
My favorite Linux game is seeing how long you can read the mkisofs manpage without developing stigmata wounds, bleeding from the eyes, or going insane.
"Do you have any idea how many people live in Chinese cities? Hundreds of millions."
Mind if I move your bong, Sherlock?
The largest city in the world only (Tokyo) contains about 28 million people, followed by New York with about 20 million, not the "hundreds of millions" you're hallucinating about.
The idea that Chinese will be the predominant language on the web is absurd.
China, despite recent moves towards a more open, capitalist society, has a problem that wont go away. Saw an interesting program on PBS a few months ago that discussed how China has changed in the past 50 years. Basically, you have a situation these days where the gap between the upper class and lower class is insanely wide. The wealthier segment of the population can often afford computers, internet access and the like, but this wealthier portion only makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of China's population. Meanwhile, the bulk of China's population are subsistance farmers who aren't allowed to even BE in (let alone conduct business in) China's main citiies. In most of these rural areas, electric power and indoor plumbing are considered high tech luxuries. Infact, China's national telecom infrastructure is considerably less extensive than most states in the U.S.
China's on the move, yes, but they have a looooooooooooong long way to go before their influence on the Internet becomes anywhere near as large as Europe's or America's influence.
A couple guys I know of started an organization called the OSEF, or Open Source Education Foundation. They basically assemble machines and networks from spare parts, go out to a school and install the gear, free of charge. I know of at least one school they've helped, in downtown Tucson. About a dozen machines remotely administrated from a central server in the back room. Google for them, you might find a link or two.
"[...featuring...] an embedded RISC processor, 802.11b networking, VGA heads-up display, and 1GB microdrive. "
I don't even know where to begin how to point out how collosally stupid this idea is.
1) Good luck using ANY heads-up display during spacewalk. The glare from Earth alone is enough to blind most astronauts. If you're doing your walk during the timeframe where the sun is present, now you've got two problems to worry about in the glare departments. See, kids, thats why we have radio communication. A heads up display would be effectively useless in such an environment.
2) What idiot decided that Joe Astronaut needs a power-consuming VGA display? You want fries with that? For cryin out loud, you're life depends on battery power while you're untethered. Gee, lets make a suit that needlessly takes power away from those annoying non-essential features like pumps for HEAT and OXYGEN...Jeezus, this is stupid.
3) Suppose you had superpowerful eyeballs capable of overcoming the glare, and a massive slip in the oversight commitee allowed you to go up there with your go-go-gadget space suit to try out your wattage eating heads-up display. Does it _really_ take a RISC processor to tell you how much air you have left, how much power you have left, and other critical information? Nope. This smacks of buzzword bingo, and stinks of collosal stupidity perhaps even moreso than items #1 and #2.
4) If you look at the HUD mock-up they cleverly whipped up in MS Paint, you'll notice that their display is predominantly taken up with a window showing "mission objectives". If you need to be reminded of what the hell you're doing up there, you don't belong in the suit in the first place!! Jesus!
5) A 1GB Microdrive. Well, thats lovely. Now what are you going to do with it...It eats more power than static DRAM, and the microdrive would have to be protected from radiation exposure. A 1GB Microdrive also infers an IDE controller, which infers even more onboard power-consuming crap succepible to radiation and power loss. Oh, and not to mention, the platter will get demagnetized within seconds.
5) You want OTHER crew members both onboard and on the ground to monitor your bio stats while you're working. There are plenty of stories of astronauts who having gone on spacewalks, freak out and start drifting off. The whole point of such an operation is that the people inside the craft help guide the person in the suit. You dont go zipping off leaving a post-it note on the hull saying "I'm gonna go take some pictures!!!! bbak in 30 min!"
I want to hold my head in disbelief that this crap made the front page on Slashdot at the expense of perhaps hundreds of other stories, let alone the fact that MIT is sponsoring this diarrhea.
Every time someone whines, "Go make more tiles for us, Bowie!" i'm that much less inclined to actually do so.
Despite apperances to the contrary, I have a sense of humor. My comment wasnt meant as a "slam" of their efforts, but I do appreciate you expecting the worst from me, that oh-so-evil guy who pissed you off a year ago when I flipped VA the bird and walked away. Well, guess what. Everyone else did the same thing a month ago. Go label them pariahs. I'll foot the bill for the ink.
In the meantime, cool down and wise up. It wont hurt, I promise.
You can form a line to the left with the other pump-action retards and kiss my ass if you don't like what I have to say. Nobody's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to read my posts, so PLEASE shut up. Please?
I contributed work (and continue to contribute work) to Ximian's distribution. In return, I get to use their distribution for free. But now i'm going to be charged for accessing my own work?! Hooooray for free software!
Caveat emptor, folks. By going with this scam, you're essentially entering into a pay-per-download arrangement. You're allowing someone to charge you for material you are entitled to obtain freely.
Yes, yes, whiners... I know what the GPL says about charging a reasonable cost to cover mass production. This is neither reasonable, nor is it mass production, plus its been shown that network-based distribution of software does not incurr significant cost to the provider. Have a look at Debian's, Red Hat's, or Mandrake's mirror list if you don't believe me. Half of them have mirror sites in friggin Uganda.
Something tells me all the money goes towards affording progressively larger and larger hats to fit Miguel De Icaza's head.
One of those formats is called MPEG Audio Layer 3 Compression. That's what you youngsters call "an MP3 file".
The other is called MPEG Video, or, as you call it, an "MPG file".
See the similarities between the two? Those four pesky little letters that you keep hearing about? Its an acronym, gang. Motion Picture Experts Group. The same standard yeilds two different media formats.
Saying your product supports both MP3 and MPG is redundant. Its like saying your vaccum cleaner pulls up dirt and as an added bonus, it also pulls up dirt as well.
Here's how you do make stereoscopic images with a digital camera:
Take a picture like you normally would, but be mindful of the position and angle of your camera.
2) Snap a picture.
3) If the subject you're photographing is close to you, take a small step to the right. If the subject is far away, take a large step to the right.
4) Aim your camera at the subject and photograph it again.
5) Pull up both images in the photo editor of your choice.
6) Arrange the photos side by side. The first image you took should be on the left, the second image you took should be on the right.
7) Sit directly infront of your monitor, and blur your eyes. If you cant blur them, try crossing them slightly. Try to focus on "the picture in the middle". If you still cant do it, hold up a pencil (eraser-side up) exactly halfway between your eyeball and the screen. Focus on the eraser. The image on the screen should pop out at you in stereoscopic 3D.
For some good examples of a stereoscopic images I took, go here. Try the picture of the steering wheel first...Its really easy. You'll also see a number of stereo photos of Tumacoccori, an 18th century Spanish mission that got the shit beat out of it by native americans. You'll also find another picture thats rather interesting---It's a downward view of a deactivated nuclear missile still in the silo at the Titan Missile Museum outside of Tucson. The view extends about 20 floors below ground. If I were to have taken this photo in 1981 versus 2001, I would have been shot on sight.:)
The desktop metaphor isn't dead. Anyone who tells you this should be taken out back and shot, to put it bluntly. What IS dead, however, are non-ergonomic, clumsy, single-workspace, non-intuitive desktops that disallow fast expression of a user's wishes. Like Windows. Like the OSX. Like Gnome. Like KDE.
This article would have been better suited to bashing "unnatural storage heirarchies" that the typical Joe User puts up with on a daily basis, instead of trying to drive another nail into the Desktop coffin. The reality of it is, it never began this way. Heirarchical storage management never hit the mainstream until the early 90's, despite having been around for at least 20 years by that point (re: Doug Englebart, his NLS "here's a mouse" demo in SF '68..it discusses other ideas besides using a mouse, like heirarchical storage)
Most systems prior to Windows, including Desqview, GEOS, and even the lowly Atari ST's GEM desktop were non-heirarchical. They were also far easier to use for people who didn't want to have a degree in computer science in order to use their computers effectively. It was only in the mid 80's that "heirarchical storage"-based desktops began to appear on mainstream computers ala AmigaDOS, MacOS, etc.
Anyway, enough history. I propose a solution. There needs to be a new GUI project started which is willing to accept, employ, and demonstrate new, unorthodox ideas. Lets just see what works. Lets try new ideas and see if people like them. If it floats, it stays. If it sinks it sucks--Simple as that. You cant call the desktop metaphor dead until you *try* to you've exhausted every thread of discovery, and tried everything there is to try, and thats clearly not whats happening these days. Gnome and KDE, are in their own niches now, neither project is willing to change horses in midstream and overhaul the appearance and function of their respective systems. There needs to be a third entity. I tried, back in '97 with InSight. Some of the ideas we developed during numerous late night brainstorming sessions were good enough to get published, and utimately earn a citation from ACM. Its not that hard, guys. You just have to recognize what you use because you're stuck with it, and what you use because it makes sense. Document-centric desktops, for example. Do you really need a document-centric desktop? Wouldn't it be more condusive to have a xanalogically oriented [keio.ac.jp] desktop? Why is the web 1-dimensional? Wouldn't it be better if HTML was a parallel data structure you could use to "drill down" to the original source of the information you're reading instead of wandering down a one-way street? Why do you use scrollbars? Do you use them because they're the only thing you know about? Do you recognize how clumsy they are, how counter-intuitive they are to use, and how much real-estate they waste? Can you think of how to implement scrolling in a different, better way?
Well, I have. Infact, i've been working with a guy named Johnathan Walther (and have been for the past month and a half) on designing a demo for such a device. Thats right, we have something we feel will finally deliver a death blow to scrollbars. We already have a working model, which is undergoing the final stages of fine-tuning prior to release. Prior to releasing the demo, we'll be co-authoring a whitepaper for publication on how to build it, and how to implement it anywhere you like. The code will be meticulously documented, and we're going to throw it at anyone willing to see it. Hopefully,/. will run the story, and you'll still be interested enough to see what we've been building damn near every day for the past 8 weeks.
You have a group of people consuming copious amounts of a drug known to cause low birth weight, birth defects, mental retardation, and complications during pregnancy. Caffiene. A fetus isn't able to metabolize caffiene, so it builds up in the fetus' body eventually interfereing with nervous system growth. To the mother, Caffiene is also a diuretic, and an appetite supressant. The more caffiene the mother takes in, the less likely she is to eat well, and provide her unborn baby with the nutrients it needs.
The mothers and fathers spend alot of time near high-strength EMF from computer monitors, at least 8 hours a day if theyre employed. EMF causes chromosomal abnormalities.
The mother and the father of the children live in one of the most polluted areas of the entire country in terms of air quality. Carcinogens given off by automobiles make their way into the air, into the water, and in some cases, even into the food they eat on a daily basis. Welcome to California.
But it would be pretty hard to get them where you want them to go. So it's prolly not the best.
Thats the whole point. Who cares where they end up? With enough of them, over time they'll map everything anyway without any sort of guidance.
If they can take photos, they will require fuel. Also, if you can't control them, then they're pretty usless. And I'd imagine that if they landed on the side of a bolder, they'd probably end up up-side down. If they where 'intelligent' they might be able to filp themselves back up. And they also can't cross big cliffs/canyons very well.
You're wrong here. The energy required to take photos can be stored in a spring. Apparently you've missed Slashdot's umpteen billion stories on the "wind-up radio". And so what if the grasshopper lands upside down, or on an angle? The images are going to undergo image processing back on Earth anyway--All you have to do is just rotate the image so that its oriented correctly. Use your head, man. And use GIMP while you're at it.:)
This sounds more like a "Lets build an unorthodox. unusual and attention-getting device so we can attract supporters for the idea!" concept rather than a truly practical and realistic one. Sounds like a varitable CueCat of Mars exploration.
Being able to navigate in a particular direction isn't the issue. There are solutions to the navigation problem that are far cheaper, and yeild far better results than "insect robots". For example:
Balloons. Whats wrong with having a computer-controlled balloon with a cannister of hydrogen or helium beneath it? As local temperature and air pressure change, the computer could inflate or deflate accordingly. Toss in a good altimeter, and you can drift across the surface within a few feet for months on end. A small armada of these could cover a very wide area in a relatively short amount of time. It requires no propulsion, it will never run out of fuel, its a simple device that by its very design lessens the risk of mechanical failure, and its extremely cheap to produce and deploy.
If not balloons, why not use spring-loaded "grasshoppers" ? Essentially big wind-up toys, you can deploy thousands of these on the surface. They dont require intelligence, they dont consume fuel, and they dont require supervision of any sort. They simply pop around the surface taking photographs both on the ground and in the air, and when their spring begins to run low, they use the remainder of the spring's potential energy to broadcast the pictures and atmospheric data they recorded during their lifespan of hopping around Mars for a few weeks. Both of these ideas make sense, because when used in large groups, you can map enormous areas of terrain fairly well, like sending out guys in every direction at the beginning of a game of Command & Conquer. Once all the balloons (or grasshoppers) collect all their data, you can decide an interesting path for any subsequent rover to take.
I think this guy fails to realize that the more complicated his device becomes, the more risks of failure you encounter, the higher the pricetag becomes, and the more problems you'll have no way of addressing. As the old saying goes, "Keep it simple, stupid!". Sure, brainless observers & reporters arent nearly as glamorous as FLYING ROBOT INSECTS, but Mars exploration isnt about being able to license the design to Matchbox to sell miniatures of your invention to kids. Its about getting the job done as cheaply and reliably as possible.
This response was, yes, meant to be sarcastic. Brian Eno is one of those guys who people in the music industry seem to attribute everything to. First he invented synth music. Then he invented electronica. Then he invented synthesized drums. On and on and on, like a snowball of stupidity. The guy is basically responsible for nothing. Synth music is over a hundred years old. Electronica was around in the late 1930s. Synthesized drums were around in the 1950s. Brian Eno popped up in the mid '70s, and took credit for the work of other obscure musicians and inventors..
I felt it was worthy of pointing this out, because to this day people still slap his name on news articles like he's some sort of authority. He isn't. Brian Eno's opinion on X, whatever X is, matters about as much as asking the local assistant pastry chef at a bakery about subatomic physics.
Hi. I'm Brian Eno. I'm one of the music industry's most overhyped, overcredited and overrated "producer".
Back when I invented ambient eletronic music, I....err..wait, Raymond Scott was doing that in the 50's..Ok, nix that, so what if I didn't invent ambient. I'm real good at "pioneering" new technologicies like the Moog, a device that....er, wait.. Bob Moog designed them, not me. Oh, whatever. I have industry connections!! I discovered Devo! Back when I...uhhh, wait a minute, Devo had been around for like 8 years before I...umm..I'm an important guy. Really. Hey, I know Giorgio Moroder!! That's gotta count for something!
"Anthill is a frameworkDING! being developed at University of Bologna to support the designDING! , implementationDING! and evaluationDING! of P2PDING! applications, viewing them as instances of Complex Adaptive SystemsDING! , typically found in biologicalDING! and social sciencesDING! . In Anthill, desired properties such as resilienceDING! , adaptationDING! and self-organizationDING! correspond to the "emergent behavior"DING! of the underlying CA systemDING! . An Anthill system consists of a dynamic networkDING! of peer nodes; societies of adaptive agentsDING! (ants) travel through this network, interacting DING! with nodes and cooperating with other agents in order to solve complexDING! problems. The source code for Anthill v1.0 is available for downloading. MORE on this is at ebiquity.org."
I love mine..got a Casio PZ-5000 about a month ago. Its an portable Audio CD + MP3 CD player, complete with digital shock absorbpion, car casette adapter, headphones, DC to AC converter for plugging into your car's lighter, two batteries and a normal wall-outlet AC adapter for $79.00... You can buy them off the rack at CompUSA. That way, you can burn your own Audio CDs, or burn an ISO9660 packed to the brim with MP3s. A remarkably cheap price for such a nice player, basically, an 800MB portable MP3 player for the price. Why anyone would want one of those shitty compact-flash powered MP3 players is beyond me. Then again, if you feel like spending $300 for an MP3 player with less features, be my guest.:)
A few years ago when I used to be a SysAdmin for U of A's Chemistry Department, I remember one morning coming into the lab and seeing a group of grad students huddled around an SGI terminal, where the teacher was giving a demonstration. The demonstration was of a "hydrogen ion engine"..One of the faculty researchers within the department had managed to successfully model the tail section of a spermatazoa using a 3D molecular modeller we had. After giving a short (somewhat technical) explanation of the atomic structure of the tail, he demonstrated how the "motor" of a spermatazoa tail works. The sperm absorbs hydrogen ions with its head, and passes them through its body to the tail section. The interaction of a single hydrogen atom with a portion of the tail section causes the entire base of the tail to whip around 360 degrees, like the crank shaft on a car engine. The simulation was played, so that the students could see how hydrogen ions were absorbed, and essentially turned into fuel for the motor housed within the tail of the sperm.
Keep in mind, this wasn't a "simulation". The software being used is an atomic modeller and conformation engine designed to run on supercomputers that costs a hefty $15,000 per license. It was quite a feat to completely reconstruct the tail of a spermatazoa out of individual atoms and have it function exactly as it does in nature.
Slashdot Mirror
1. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. Always has been, always will be. It is a unit of measurement specific to its science, like the Mole is to Chemistry, and like the Newton is to Physics. It is not meant to be a general metric measurement, in other words, a megabyte isn't 1,000,000 anymore than a "dozen" is 10. Ever since the term was coined, it has meant that value, specifically. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something, namely marketing idiots who are responsible for great advancements in human culture like MTV and the Home Shopping Network.
2. By accepting this "mebibytes" crap, you're allowing marketing people to revise history. The number 1,048,576 is an important value in Computer Science, similar to 8, 256, 1024, and other commonly-used powers of 2. An understanding of the powers of 2 is integral to having an understanding of the underlying principles that form the foundation of this discipline. If you cant think in anything but base 10, you should consider a different line of work, as most computer scientists have no problem thinking in terms of binary, octal, hexidecimal and otherwise. A failure to understand the basic nature of the device you intend on working with for the rest of your career is tantamount to unprofessionalism and neglect. After all, you can't be expected to code competently by using incorrect measurements any more than a carpenter can be expected to build a house competently if his tape measure is made out of elastic rubber.
3. Its just plain stupid. A megabyte is a megabyte. Its not less than a megabyte, or more than a megabyte. If you for some reason feel the need to apply a term to "1,000,000" an essentially meaningless number in terms of the machine, we already have a word for it. Its called "million", as in "a million bytes." Call a spade a spade. A megabyte is 1,048,576. A million bytes is 1,000,000 bytes. They are not equal, and never will be.
In my experience, Lexmark has wonderful Linux support for its products. $79 at Best Buy got me a very high quality 1200dpi inkjet printer (the Lexmark Z23) with both Windows and Linux support. The Linux side actually works better than its Windows counterpart, oddly enough. It runs as a daemon process, does PostScript exactly the way it should, and the fact that its a USB printer doesn't complicate the situation either. It all just plain works, out of the box. Even has a nice graphical config utility
Kudos to Lexmark for doing it right!
It would have been interesting get Seth's reaction to the growing rumors surrounding the discovery of a signal coming from EQ Pegasus a year or so ago.
For those who don't know what i'm talking about, the scientific comunity has been argueing about the "discovery" of an extraterrestrial signal comming from EQ Pegasus, a small binary system situated about 27 lightyears from Earth.
The signal capted by Paul Dore with a small radio-telescope was distributed to several observatories for analysis. Astronomers don't really know what to think about it. A press conference was scheduled, but it was cancelled due to threats from an unnamed source. There are rumors the Air Force was involved in silencing the guy who found it, starting some suspicion that it could have been a deep space probe, a CIA "Black" project, or similar. The signal would have been capted the October 22 & 23, which is some weeks after a powerfull Radio-Telescope from Arecibo would have picked a strange signal comming from EQ Pegasus in a project called Phoenix. Astronomers had concluded that it was just interference coming from a geosynchronous satellite.
The SETI program tried in vain to pick up the signal, and they said that this was either a big joke, or interference.
Makes you wonder.
Cheers,
My favorite Linux game is seeing how long you can read the mkisofs manpage without developing stigmata wounds, bleeding from the eyes, or going insane.
"Do you have any idea how many people live in Chinese cities? Hundreds of millions."
Mind if I move your bong, Sherlock?
The largest city in the world only (Tokyo) contains about 28 million people, followed by New York with about 20 million, not the "hundreds of millions" you're hallucinating about.
Here, ride the snake with some stats, ya moron:
Top 10 Most Populated Cities On Earth
I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft sues the squid.
The idea that Chinese will be the predominant language on the web is absurd.
China, despite recent moves towards a more open, capitalist society, has a problem that wont go away. Saw an interesting program on PBS a few months ago that discussed how China has changed in the past 50 years. Basically, you have a situation these days where the gap between the upper class and lower class is insanely wide. The wealthier segment of the population can often afford computers, internet access and the like, but this wealthier portion only makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of China's population. Meanwhile, the bulk of China's population are subsistance farmers who aren't allowed to even BE in (let alone conduct business in) China's main citiies. In most of these rural areas, electric power and indoor plumbing are considered high tech luxuries. Infact, China's national telecom infrastructure is considerably less extensive than most states in the U.S.
China's on the move, yes, but they have a looooooooooooong long way to go before their influence on the Internet becomes anywhere near as large as Europe's or America's influence.
Cheers,
If i'm as ugly as my tiles, i'll take that as a compliment. Thank you!
And hey, don't blame me for going bald. History repeats an order it must protect, and dihydrotestosterone is the guilty party, not my barber.
Trolls need love too,
A couple guys I know of started an organization called the OSEF, or Open Source Education Foundation. They basically assemble machines and networks from spare parts, go out to a school and install the gear, free of charge. I know of at least one school they've helped, in downtown Tucson. About a dozen machines remotely administrated from a central server in the back room. Google for them, you might find a link or two.
"[...featuring...] an embedded RISC processor, 802.11b networking, VGA heads-up display, and 1GB microdrive. "
I don't even know where to begin how to point out how collosally stupid this idea is.
1) Good luck using ANY heads-up display during spacewalk. The glare from Earth alone is enough to blind most astronauts. If you're doing your walk during the timeframe where the sun is present, now you've got two problems to worry about in the glare departments. See, kids, thats why we have radio communication. A heads up display would be effectively useless in such an environment.
2) What idiot decided that Joe Astronaut needs a power-consuming VGA display? You want fries with that? For cryin out loud, you're life depends on battery power while you're untethered. Gee, lets make a suit that needlessly takes power away from those annoying non-essential features like pumps for HEAT and OXYGEN...Jeezus, this is stupid.
3) Suppose you had superpowerful eyeballs capable of overcoming the glare, and a massive slip in the oversight commitee allowed you to go up there with your go-go-gadget space suit to try out your wattage eating heads-up display. Does it _really_ take a RISC processor to tell you how much air you have left, how much power you have left, and other critical information? Nope. This smacks of buzzword bingo, and stinks of collosal stupidity perhaps even moreso than items #1 and #2.
4) If you look at the HUD mock-up they cleverly whipped up in MS Paint, you'll notice that their display is predominantly taken up with a window showing "mission objectives". If you need to be reminded of what the hell you're doing up there, you don't belong in the suit in the first place!! Jesus!
5) A 1GB Microdrive. Well, thats lovely. Now what are you going to do with it...It eats more power than static DRAM, and the microdrive would have to be protected from radiation exposure. A 1GB Microdrive also infers an IDE controller, which infers even more onboard power-consuming crap succepible to radiation and power loss. Oh, and not to mention, the platter will get demagnetized within seconds.
5) You want OTHER crew members both onboard and on the ground to monitor your bio stats while you're working. There are plenty of stories of astronauts who having gone on spacewalks, freak out and start drifting off. The whole point of such an operation is that the people inside the craft help guide the person in the suit. You dont go zipping off leaving a post-it note on the hull saying "I'm gonna go take some pictures!!!! bbak in 30 min!"
I want to hold my head in disbelief that this crap made the front page on Slashdot at the expense of perhaps hundreds of other stories, let alone the fact that MIT is sponsoring this diarrhea.
And yes, thats how I really feel.
Cheers,
Every time someone whines, "Go make more tiles for us, Bowie!" i'm that much less inclined to actually do so.
Despite apperances to the contrary, I have a sense of humor. My comment wasnt meant as a "slam" of their efforts, but I do appreciate you expecting the worst from me, that oh-so-evil guy who pissed you off a year ago when I flipped VA the bird and walked away. Well, guess what. Everyone else did the same thing a month ago. Go label them pariahs. I'll foot the bill for the ink.
In the meantime, cool down and wise up. It wont hurt, I promise.
What, was "Wolfram Graphics" taken?
You can form a line to the left with the other pump-action retards and kiss my ass if you don't like what I have to say. Nobody's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to read my posts, so PLEASE shut up. Please?
Merry Christmas,
Let me get this straight, here...
I contributed work (and continue to contribute work) to Ximian's distribution. In return, I get to use their distribution for free. But now i'm going to be charged for accessing my own work?! Hooooray for free software!
Caveat emptor, folks. By going with this scam, you're essentially entering into a pay-per-download arrangement. You're allowing someone to charge you for material you are entitled to obtain freely.
Yes, yes, whiners... I know what the GPL says about charging a reasonable cost to cover mass production. This is neither reasonable, nor is it mass production, plus its been shown that network-based distribution of software does not incurr significant cost to the provider. Have a look at Debian's, Red Hat's, or Mandrake's mirror list if you don't believe me. Half of them have mirror sites in friggin Uganda.
Something tells me all the money goes towards affording progressively larger and larger hats to fit Miguel De Icaza's head.
Cheers,
"[..supports MP3 and MPG..]"
*Sigh*.... Kids these days..I swear.
Time for a clue, children:
One of those formats is called MPEG Audio Layer 3 Compression. That's what you youngsters call "an MP3 file".
The other is called MPEG Video, or, as you call it, an "MPG file".
See the similarities between the two? Those four pesky little letters that you keep hearing about? Its an acronym, gang. Motion Picture Experts Group. The same standard yeilds two different media formats.
Saying your product supports both MP3 and MPG is redundant. Its like saying your vaccum cleaner pulls up dirt and as an added bonus, it also pulls up dirt as well.
Here's how you do make stereoscopic images with a digital camera:
Take a picture like you normally would, but be mindful of the position and angle of your camera.
2) Snap a picture.
3) If the subject you're photographing is close to you, take a small step to the right. If the subject is far away, take a large step to the right.
4) Aim your camera at the subject and photograph it again.
5) Pull up both images in the photo editor of your choice.
6) Arrange the photos side by side. The first image you took should be on the left, the second image you took should be on the right.
7) Sit directly infront of your monitor, and blur your eyes. If you cant blur them, try crossing them slightly. Try to focus on "the picture in the middle". If you still cant do it, hold up a pencil (eraser-side up) exactly halfway between your eyeball and the screen. Focus on the eraser. The image on the screen should pop out at you in stereoscopic 3D.
For some good examples of a stereoscopic images I took, go here. Try the picture of the steering wheel first...Its really easy. You'll also see a number of stereo photos of Tumacoccori, an 18th century Spanish mission that got the shit beat out of it by native americans. You'll also find another picture thats rather interesting---It's a downward view of a deactivated nuclear missile still in the silo at the Titan Missile Museum outside of Tucson. The view extends about 20 floors below ground. If I were to have taken this photo in 1981 versus 2001, I would have been shot on sight.
Cheers,
The desktop metaphor isn't dead. Anyone who tells you this should be taken out back and shot, to put it bluntly. What IS dead, however, are non-ergonomic, clumsy, single-workspace, non-intuitive desktops that disallow fast expression of a user's wishes. Like Windows. Like the OSX. Like Gnome. Like KDE.
This article would have been better suited to bashing "unnatural storage heirarchies" that the typical Joe User puts up with on a daily basis, instead of trying to drive another nail into the Desktop coffin. The reality of it is, it never began this way. Heirarchical storage management never hit the mainstream until the early 90's, despite having been around for at least 20 years by that point (re: Doug Englebart, his NLS "here's a mouse" demo in SF '68..it discusses other ideas besides using a mouse, like heirarchical storage)
Most systems prior to Windows, including Desqview, GEOS, and even the lowly Atari ST's GEM desktop were non-heirarchical. They were also far easier to use for people who didn't want to have a degree in computer science in order to use their computers effectively. It was only in the mid 80's that "heirarchical storage"-based desktops began to appear on mainstream computers ala AmigaDOS, MacOS, etc.
Anyway, enough history. I propose a solution. There needs to be a new GUI project started which is willing to accept, employ, and demonstrate new, unorthodox ideas. Lets just see what works. Lets try new ideas and see if people like them. If it floats, it stays. If it sinks it sucks--Simple as that. You cant call the desktop metaphor dead until you *try* to you've exhausted every thread of discovery, and tried everything there is to try, and thats clearly not whats happening these days. Gnome and KDE, are in their own niches now, neither project is willing to change horses in midstream and overhaul the appearance and function of their respective systems. There needs to be a third entity. I tried, back in '97 with InSight. Some of the ideas we developed during numerous late night brainstorming sessions were good enough to get published, and utimately earn a citation from ACM. Its not that hard, guys. You just have to recognize what you use because you're stuck with it, and what you use because it makes sense. Document-centric desktops, for example. Do you really need a document-centric desktop? Wouldn't it be more condusive to have a xanalogically oriented [keio.ac.jp] desktop? Why is the web 1-dimensional? Wouldn't it be better if HTML was a parallel data structure you could use to "drill down" to the original source of the information you're reading instead of wandering down a one-way street? Why do you use scrollbars? Do you use them because they're the only thing you know about? Do you recognize how clumsy they are, how counter-intuitive they are to use, and how much real-estate they waste? Can you think of how to implement scrolling in a different, better way?
Well, I have. Infact, i've been working with a guy named Johnathan Walther (and have been for the past month and a half) on designing a demo for such a device. Thats right, we have something we feel will finally deliver a death blow to scrollbars. We already have a working model, which is undergoing the final stages of fine-tuning prior to release. Prior to releasing the demo, we'll be co-authoring a whitepaper for publication on how to build it, and how to implement it anywhere you like. The code will be meticulously documented, and we're going to throw it at anyone willing to see it. Hopefully,
So, what are you doing to make things better?
Well gee, lets look at the facts..
You have a group of people consuming copious amounts of a drug known to cause low birth weight, birth defects, mental retardation, and complications during pregnancy. Caffiene. A fetus isn't able to metabolize caffiene, so it builds up in the fetus' body eventually interfereing with nervous system growth. To the mother, Caffiene is also a diuretic, and an appetite supressant. The more caffiene the mother takes in, the less likely she is to eat well, and provide her unborn baby with the nutrients it needs.
The mothers and fathers spend alot of time near high-strength EMF from computer monitors, at least 8 hours a day if theyre employed. EMF causes chromosomal abnormalities.
The mother and the father of the children live in one of the most polluted areas of the entire country in terms of air quality. Carcinogens given off by automobiles make their way into the air, into the water, and in some cases, even into the food they eat on a daily basis. Welcome to California.
Is it any wonder your kid turns out autistic?
Cheers,
But it would be pretty hard to get them where you want them to go. So it's prolly not the best.
:)
Thats the whole point. Who cares where they end up? With enough of them, over time they'll map everything anyway without any sort of guidance.
If they can take photos, they will require fuel. Also, if you can't control them, then they're pretty usless. And I'd imagine that if they landed on the side of a bolder, they'd probably end up up-side down. If they where 'intelligent' they might be able to filp themselves back up. And they also can't cross big cliffs/canyons very well.
You're wrong here. The energy required to take photos can be stored in a spring. Apparently you've missed Slashdot's umpteen billion stories on the "wind-up radio". And so what if the grasshopper lands upside down, or on an angle? The images are going to undergo image processing back on Earth anyway--All you have to do is just rotate the image so that its oriented correctly. Use your head, man. And use GIMP while you're at it.
Cheers,
This sounds more like a "Lets build an unorthodox. unusual and attention-getting device so we can attract supporters for the idea!" concept rather than a truly practical and realistic one. Sounds like a varitable CueCat of Mars exploration.
Being able to navigate in a particular direction isn't the issue. There are solutions to the navigation problem that are far cheaper, and yeild far better results than "insect robots". For example:
Balloons. Whats wrong with having a computer-controlled balloon with a cannister of hydrogen or helium beneath it? As local temperature and air pressure change, the computer could inflate or deflate accordingly. Toss in a good altimeter, and you can drift across the surface within a few feet for months on end. A small armada of these could cover a very wide area in a relatively short amount of time. It requires no propulsion, it will never run out of fuel, its a simple device that by its very design lessens the risk of mechanical failure, and its extremely cheap to produce and deploy.
If not balloons, why not use spring-loaded "grasshoppers" ? Essentially big wind-up toys, you can deploy thousands of these on the surface. They dont require intelligence, they dont consume fuel, and they dont require supervision of any sort. They simply pop around the surface taking photographs both on the ground and in the air, and when their spring begins to run low, they use the remainder of the spring's potential energy to broadcast the pictures and atmospheric data they recorded during their lifespan of hopping around Mars for a few weeks. Both of these ideas make sense, because when used in large groups, you can map enormous areas of terrain fairly well, like sending out guys in every direction at the beginning of a game of Command & Conquer. Once all the balloons (or grasshoppers) collect all their data, you can decide an interesting path for any subsequent rover to take.
I think this guy fails to realize that the more complicated his device becomes, the more risks of failure you encounter, the higher the pricetag becomes, and the more problems you'll have no way of addressing. As the old saying goes, "Keep it simple, stupid!". Sure, brainless observers & reporters arent nearly as glamorous as FLYING ROBOT INSECTS, but Mars exploration isnt about being able to license the design to Matchbox to sell miniatures of your invention to kids. Its about getting the job done as cheaply and reliably as possible.
Cheers,
Thank you for the compliment.
This response was, yes, meant to be sarcastic. Brian Eno is one of those guys who people in the music industry seem to attribute everything to. First he invented synth music. Then he invented electronica. Then he invented synthesized drums. On and on and on, like a snowball of stupidity. The guy is basically responsible for nothing. Synth music is over a hundred years old. Electronica was around in the late 1930s. Synthesized drums were around in the 1950s. Brian Eno popped up in the mid '70s, and took credit for the work of other obscure musicians and inventors..
I felt it was worthy of pointing this out, because to this day people still slap his name on news articles like he's some sort of authority. He isn't. Brian Eno's opinion on X, whatever X is, matters about as much as asking the local assistant pastry chef at a bakery about subatomic physics.
.
Hi. I'm Brian Eno. I'm one of the music industry's most overhyped, overcredited and overrated "producer".
Back when I invented ambient eletronic music, I....err..wait, Raymond Scott was doing that in the 50's..Ok, nix that, so what if I didn't invent ambient. I'm real good at "pioneering" new technologicies like the Moog, a device that....er, wait.. Bob Moog designed them, not me. Oh, whatever. I have industry connections!! I discovered Devo! Back when I...uhhh, wait a minute, Devo had been around for like 8 years before I...umm..I'm an important guy. Really. Hey, I know Giorgio Moroder!! That's gotta count for something!
Got any peanuts? I'm hungry.
"Anthill is a frameworkDING! being developed at University of Bologna to support the designDING! , implementationDING! and evaluationDING! of P2PDING! applications, viewing them as instances of Complex Adaptive SystemsDING! , typically found in biologicalDING! and social sciencesDING! . In Anthill, desired properties such as resilienceDING! , adaptationDING! and self-organizationDING! correspond to the "emergent behavior"DING! of the underlying CA systemDING! . An Anthill system consists of a dynamic networkDING! of peer nodes; societies of adaptive agentsDING! (ants) travel through this network, interacting DING! with nodes and cooperating with other agents in order to solve complexDING! problems. The source code for Anthill v1.0 is available for downloading. MORE on this is at ebiquity.org."
Ladies and gentlemen, we haaaave a winner..
Here's a good reccomendation for you:
I love mine..got a Casio PZ-5000 about a month ago. Its an portable Audio CD + MP3 CD player , complete with digital shock absorbpion, car casette adapter, headphones, DC to AC converter for plugging into your car's lighter, two batteries and a normal wall-outlet AC adapter for $79.00
Cheers,
An interesting story..
A few years ago when I used to be a SysAdmin for U of A's Chemistry Department, I remember one morning coming into the lab and seeing a group of grad students huddled around an SGI terminal, where the teacher was giving a demonstration. The demonstration was of a "hydrogen ion engine"..One of the faculty researchers within the department had managed to successfully model the tail section of a spermatazoa using a 3D molecular modeller we had. After giving a short (somewhat technical) explanation of the atomic structure of the tail, he demonstrated how the "motor" of a spermatazoa tail works. The sperm absorbs hydrogen ions with its head, and passes them through its body to the tail section. The interaction of a single hydrogen atom with a portion of the tail section causes the entire base of the tail to whip around 360 degrees, like the crank shaft on a car engine. The simulation was played, so that the students could see how hydrogen ions were absorbed, and essentially turned into fuel for the motor housed within the tail of the sperm.
Keep in mind, this wasn't a "simulation". The software being used is an atomic modeller and conformation engine designed to run on supercomputers that costs a hefty $15,000 per license. It was quite a feat to completely reconstruct the tail of a spermatazoa out of individual atoms and have it function exactly as it does in nature.
Cheers,