Well, you guys seem to have the right ideas here but I'll post anyway, mainly because I'm a physics major and am supposed to know this stuff...:) If I'm wrong on any points here please let me know.
There are two main types of balance: static balance and dynamic balance. Static balance is how the object behaves under a force (usually gravity) if it is not being accelerated. Dynamic balance is how the object is balanced if it is being accelerated. In our example, the CD is being given a rotational acceleration around its principle axis. Interesting side note: your auto-mechanic has to do both sorts of balance when he rotates your tires, except he probably calls the second kind "spin balance".
To calculate dynamic balance you need to find the moment of inertia of the object. This is fairly easy for symetrical objects like normal CD's but with these weird shapes you will likely have to use a tensor and calculate moments and products of inertia. I'll make mistakes if I try to explain this.:)
Anyways, bottom line is that it is possible to have spin balance with weird shapes. Just try to keep the principle axis in the center.
Try Earthlink (er, ok I think they are now owned by mindspring- dont know what they are called now...). They have a good history of supporting alternate OSes.
Why do you think Andover bought Slashdot in the first place? Because it generates ad revenue like nobody's business! If VA cuts the banner ads or if they do "community banners" how will they be making money from/.?
I'm sure this is going to be mentioned by someone else but you can't go wrong if you get a book which has received a Hugo award or a Nebula award or even the Phillip K Dick award.
Sometimes a book will win two or three of these, in which case it is a must-read. A lot of the books already mentioned, like Ender's Game, Left Hand of Darkness, Neuromancer, and Ringworld fall into this category. Happy reading!
[from Vietnam-era U.S. military slang via the games Doom and Quake] 1. To kill another player's avatar in a multiuser game. "I hold the office Quake record with 40 frags." 2. To completely ruin something. "Forget that power supply, the lightning strike fragged it.
I saw the keynote via a live sat. feed yesterday and MacOS X is truly amazing. You don't get a good feel of it from the pictures; I think you need to see it in motion.
Firstly, icons in the dock can be re-arranged on the fly- they can be simply dragged from one spot to another and if you drag them off the dock, they maxamize. As you add more icons to the dock, the size of the icons shrinks. This at first disturbed me because the icons can get pretty small and Jobs mentioned something about the dock handling 128 icons. Then he showed the magnify feature and stunned everyone. Yes, it works and yes, it is really slick. I think you have to see it in action to appreciate it.
Another slick feature that nobody has mentioned yet (I think) is the system wide "genie" effect. I'm not sure if I can explain this, but I'll try: Basically, when a window is mazimized or minimized, you don't just see the outline of the window move. Rather, the window looks like it is being sucked into a smaller size by a black hole (at least to me:). It looks very liquid and very slick. Steve actually demonstrated this with a playing quicktime movie and it didn't miss a beat! I am sure that this type of effect (and the systemwide transparency too) is only possible because of openGL.
It can be really, _really_ easy to accidentally mark a post as "redundant" if you want to moderate it up and are also in the habit of using page down to scroll down the page... (Whoops.. the keyboard focus was on the radio buttons, not the whole page...)
Yes, I have done it myself, and no you can't un-moderate when things go horribly wrong.:)
This post is gonna make me sound like THE MAN:) but if you don't like the story, just don't read it! There is really is no reason to complain in the thread and use up needless bytes.
With that said, maybe it is time for a "financial" icon so those not interested can simply filter it all out. Filters are great- I filtered out Katz a few months ago and have never looked back.
I feel like I have been reading alot about this type of thing lately. It seems like everything is trojened: realplayer and even quake (although in this case it was disclosed) and others that I likely don't remember. I think it is the time for grassroots action.
Does anyone know of some organizations already set-up to address these issues?
We tackled population models in my ODE (ordinary differential equations) class just last week. And we made some rather startling conclusions. Our model was a modified Von Foester growth rate equation (sometimes called a coalition model since it claims that humans, due to technology and other factors, are able to beat the standard Malthusian model) altered to have a delay factor and also a unequal use of resources factor. That is, we took into account the fact that you dont have kids if youre an very young or very old and that an infant does not require the same amount of resources as an adult.
These delay-differential equations can be tricky to solve (at least for me, I don't claim to be a math genuis) and certainly as with any model the values picked for the parameters can have big effects on the model. So we analyzed our model qualitatively:
Essentially, our model predicted that the Earth would have an infinate population in real time (in about 40 years). This clearly can't happen! So we modified our model again to include a carying capacity for the earth. Obviously, no one knows how many people the earth can support- so we tried many values for this parameter.
We concluded that there are two possible futures: In the first the case there is a "doomsday" in about 40 years where we hit a maximum sustainable population and then become extinct. In the second case we don't quite hit the maximum population and oscillate between it and a lower population level with a period of about 100 years. The delay factor (ie how long before you have kids) determines which side of the bifucation point lies our future.
Its interesting to note that the Von Foester model (which by the way agrees extremely well with historical population data) predicts a faster-than exponential-growth rate. Only humans, and a few organisims like rats that live with humans, display a growth rate this fast!
Katz almost made that point. He got really close. I could see it there in between the lines. But he didn't quite make it. In truth, I couldn't figure out what point he had made!
Questions raised about Christianity are going to be met defensively almost by definition. Take Apple supporters for example:)
Seriously though, Katz did make serveral near-attacks on Christianity. "self-proclaimed forces of morality" for example. And why did he make a special point of saying that Charlton Heston is the president of the NRA? Sure, he is a christian. Hell, alot of people in jail are christians. But they certainly don't represent me.
First of all I want to point out that Katz actually said "post-Columbine era". In my opinion, that statement alone ruins his credibility.
But back to my main point: how is this any different than any other "shoot-em-up" game? Does changing the subject matter from shooting aliens (a la Half-life, for example) to shooting demons in this game really have any effect on the "worth" of this game. I thought that the graphic depiction of violence was what people had problems with- not whom the violence was directed against. As far as I'm concerned this game is merely another Quake clone with with an Angel-Devil MOD file tacked on there- and Katz has not given me reason to think otherwise.
Perhaps games like "The War In Heaven" suggest some looming confrontation, an Armageddon-like battle out there in the digital ether for the collective souls of geeks. It's one battle geeks are well prepared to fight. They'll grab their joysticks, deploy their amassed arsenals and rush out to meet the Millenial Crusaders. Geeks have been trained for this thier whole lives; the forces of righteousness will surely be blasted to bits.
This paragraph is close to pure drivel. What is he saying here? That Geeks are on the side opposed to the "forces of righteousness"? That if you play as the Demons rather than as the Angels you are a bad peson? I certainly hope that Katz' morality is not so undeveloped.
If the authors truly believe that they are being called by God to make this game, then I applaud them and wish them well. Unfortunately, I think that this game is an attempt to capitalize on the lack of "cool" religious games out there (and, no, those board games that you see Flanders' children play are not cool:)
The only controversy that I see this game raising is a possible stink with some brands of christianity who may find it sacreligious. Don't expect much though, most of them have more important things to deal with- poverty, and injustice and minor things like that.
On the topic of do it yourself cpu cooling, are there any cpu fans that stick out in anyones mind? I have an overclocked Celeron 300a (@450) that is actually running nice and cool with the generic fan that I stuck on there. But for some reason over the last month the fan has become really, really noisy, and I want to replace it. Know of any fans that run quietly?
Its interesting what the article says about the G4. I hadn't thought of it before, but that velocity engine (vector unit) must have a whole lot of instructions...
There is a program called Ghostwalker that explicitly addresses the problem of the SID's. After restoring an image on a computer you can run ghostwalker from a boot floppy and give that installation any SID number you want (I think it must be the same length as the old SID)
One caveat: make sure that your boot floppy has HIMEM or else it can take a Loooooong time to change that SID!
Well, then, I must complain about your complaining. True Technocrat.Net looks a lot like/. It may even be based on the slash code (I'm not absolutely positive on this thought). But guess what, there are a a number of sites based on Slash and I expect that number to grow. Heck I'd make one of my own if I had the time and I was better at perl.
Personally, I find that Technocrat, while more limited in scope than slashdot, to be alot like slashdot was in the old days.//end old man mode
Finally, let me say that what you put in your.sig is your own business. If you don't like seeing sigs, disable them. It's not all that hard.
I imagine this could work much like SecureID cards work for Citrix. It is the challenge and response method (I think some one else mentions this further up in the thread).
SecureID cards generate a [pseudo]random number that changes every 60 seconds. This is number in sync with whatever you are trying to get access to. The cards that I have seen have an LCD where you can read off the number and punch it in. This way you must be in posession of the card at the time of the transaction. A card reader would just add a further layer of abstraction.
As for how the card is kept in sync with the main server, I can only guess. The card likely encrypts the clock time modulo some granularity with a secret key that is stored on the card. The server performs the same encryption using its clock, then applies a skew based on the last time the card successfully authenticated, with a sliding window to allow for greater drift latitude over time. Just a guess, though.:)
I think that a side affect of this is that the cards must be changed fairly frequently. Or at least more frequently than most people get new credit cards.
As much as I hate to indirectly promote M$ website, checkout the Terraserver. It's pretty cool, even though the pictures are a little on the old side, the resolution isn't that good, and for some reason they just miss my house by a few miles- but thats a Good Thing(tm) right!:)
Also they try to make you use a M$ browser to print the Images. Bah!/Me uses print screen:)
An excellent article about USB2 and Firewire
on
Is firewire dying?
·
· Score: 1
MacKiDo has this article about USB 2.0 and Firewire. It's on the long side and tends to look at things from a Mac perspective, but is a really good read nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two main types of balance: static balance and dynamic balance. Static balance is how the object behaves under a force (usually gravity) if it is not being accelerated. Dynamic balance is how the object is balanced if it is being accelerated. In our example, the CD is being given a rotational acceleration around its principle axis. Interesting side note: your auto-mechanic has to do both sorts of balance when he rotates your tires, except he probably calls the second kind "spin balance".
To calculate dynamic balance you need to find the moment of inertia of the object. This is fairly easy for symetrical objects like normal CD's but with these weird shapes you will likely have to use a tensor and calculate moments and products of inertia. I'll make mistakes if I try to explain this. :)
Anyways, bottom line is that it is possible to have spin balance with weird shapes. Just try to keep the principle axis in the center.
/joeyo
Related question: are there any schools in the US offering degrees in Cybernetics? The only one I know of is the University of Reading in the UK...
/joeyo
/joeyo
On a side-note, what happened to TacoHell?
/joeyo
Sometimes a book will win two or three of these, in which case it is a must-read. A lot of the books already mentioned, like Ender's Game, Left Hand of Darkness, Neuromancer, and Ringworld fall into this category. Happy reading!
/joeyo
/joeyo
frag n.,v.
[from Vietnam-era U.S. military slang via the games Doom and Quake] 1. To kill another player's avatar in a multiuser game. "I hold the office Quake record with 40 frags." 2. To completely ruin something. "Forget that power supply, the lightning strike fragged it.
/joeyo
Btw Congrats, John!
/joeyo
Firstly, icons in the dock can be re-arranged on the fly- they can be simply dragged from one spot to another and if you drag them off the dock, they maxamize. As you add more icons to the dock, the size of the icons shrinks. This at first disturbed me because the icons can get pretty small and Jobs mentioned something about the dock handling 128 icons. Then he showed the magnify feature and stunned everyone. Yes, it works and yes, it is really slick. I think you have to see it in action to appreciate it.
Another slick feature that nobody has mentioned yet (I think) is the system wide "genie" effect. I'm not sure if I can explain this, but I'll try: Basically, when a window is mazimized or minimized, you don't just see the outline of the window move. Rather, the window looks like it is being sucked into a smaller size by a black hole (at least to me :). It looks very liquid and very slick. Steve actually demonstrated this with a playing quicktime movie and it didn't miss a beat! I am sure that this type of effect (and the systemwide transparency too) is only possible because of openGL.
Yes, I have done it myself, and no you can't un-moderate when things go horribly wrong. :)
/joeyo
This post is gonna make me sound like THE MAN :) but if you don't like the story, just don't read it! There is really is no reason to complain in the thread and use up needless bytes.
With that said, maybe it is time for a "financial" icon so those not interested can simply filter it all out. Filters are great- I filtered out Katz a few months ago and have never looked back.
/joeyo
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=w ahiscool. (Hi Wah!)
/joeyo
/joeyo
aka the MacJedi
I feel like I have been reading alot about this type of thing lately. It seems like everything is trojened: realplayer and even quake (although in this case it was disclosed) and others that I likely don't remember. I think it is the time for grassroots action.
Does anyone know of some organizations already set-up to address these issues?
We tackled population models in my ODE (ordinary differential equations) class just last week. And we made some rather startling conclusions. Our model was a modified Von Foester growth rate equation (sometimes called a coalition model since it claims that humans, due to technology and other factors, are able to beat the standard Malthusian model) altered to have a delay factor and also a unequal use of resources factor. That is, we took into account the fact that you dont have kids if youre an very young or very old and that an infant does not require the same amount of resources as an adult.
These delay-differential equations can be tricky to solve (at least for me, I don't claim to be a math genuis) and certainly as with any model the values picked for the parameters can have big effects on the model. So we analyzed our model qualitatively:
Essentially, our model predicted that the Earth would have an infinate population in real time (in about 40 years). This clearly can't happen! So we modified our model again to include a carying capacity for the earth. Obviously, no one knows how many people the earth can support- so we tried many values for this parameter.
We concluded that there are two possible futures: In the first the case there is a "doomsday" in about 40 years where we hit a maximum sustainable population and then become extinct. In the second case we don't quite hit the maximum population and oscillate between it and a lower population level with a period of about 100 years. The delay factor (ie how long before you have kids) determines which side of the bifucation point lies our future.
Its interesting to note that the Von Foester model (which by the way agrees extremely well with historical population data) predicts a faster-than exponential-growth rate. Only humans, and a few organisims like rats that live with humans, display a growth rate this fast!
Katz almost made that point. He got really close. I could see it there in between the lines. But he didn't quite make it. In truth, I couldn't figure out what point he had made!
Questions raised about Christianity are going to be met defensively almost by definition. Take Apple supporters for example :)
Seriously though, Katz did make serveral near-attacks on Christianity. "self-proclaimed forces of morality" for example. And why did he make a special point of saying that Charlton Heston is the president of the NRA? Sure, he is a christian. Hell, alot of people in jail are christians. But they certainly don't represent me.
First of all I want to point out that Katz actually said "post-Columbine era". In my opinion, that statement alone ruins his credibility.
But back to my main point: how is this any different than any other "shoot-em-up" game? Does changing the subject matter from shooting aliens (a la Half-life, for example) to shooting demons in this game really have any effect on the "worth" of this game. I thought that the graphic depiction of violence was what people had problems with- not whom the violence was directed against. As far as I'm concerned this game is merely another Quake clone with with an Angel-Devil MOD file tacked on there- and Katz has not given me reason to think otherwise.
Perhaps games like "The War In Heaven" suggest some looming confrontation, an Armageddon-like battle out there in the digital ether for the collective souls of geeks. It's one battle geeks are well prepared to fight. They'll grab their joysticks, deploy their amassed arsenals and rush out to meet the Millenial Crusaders. Geeks have been trained for this thier whole lives; the forces of righteousness will surely be blasted to bits.
This paragraph is close to pure drivel. What is he saying here? That Geeks are on the side opposed to the "forces of righteousness"? That if you play as the Demons rather than as the Angels you are a bad peson? I certainly hope that Katz' morality is not so undeveloped.
If the authors truly believe that they are being called by God to make this game, then I applaud them and wish them well. Unfortunately, I think that this game is an attempt to capitalize on the lack of "cool" religious games out there (and, no, those board games that you see Flanders' children play are not cool :)
The only controversy that I see this game raising is a possible stink with some brands of christianity who may find it sacreligious. Don't expect much though, most of them have more important things to deal with- poverty, and injustice and minor things like that.
On the topic of do it yourself cpu cooling, are there any cpu fans that stick out in anyones mind? I have an overclocked Celeron 300a (@450) that is actually running nice and cool with the generic fan that I stuck on there. But for some reason over the last month the fan has become really, really noisy, and I want to replace it. Know of any fans that run quietly?
thanks,
/joeyo
Its interesting what the article says about the G4. I hadn't thought of it before, but that velocity engine (vector unit) must have a whole lot of instructions...
Has anyone gotten their G4 yet?
There is a program called Ghostwalker that explicitly addresses the problem of the SID's. After restoring an image on a computer you can run ghostwalker from a boot floppy and give that installation any SID number you want (I think it must be the same length as the old SID)
One caveat: make sure that your boot floppy has HIMEM or else it can take a Loooooong time to change that SID!
Well, then, I must complain about your complaining. True Technocrat.Net looks a lot like /. It may even be based on the slash code (I'm not absolutely positive on this thought). But guess what, there are a a number of sites based on Slash and I expect that number to grow. Heck I'd make one of my own if I had the time and I was better at perl.
Personally, I find that Technocrat, while more limited in scope than slashdot, to be alot like slashdot was in the old days. //end old man mode
Finally, let me say that what you put in your .sig is your own business. If you don't like seeing sigs, disable them. It's not all that hard.
Read all about the Tasmanian Tiger here
I imagine this could work much like SecureID cards work for Citrix. It is the challenge and response method (I think some one else mentions this further up in the thread).
SecureID cards generate a [pseudo]random number that changes every 60 seconds. This is number in sync with whatever you are trying to get access to. The cards that I have seen have an LCD where you can read off the number and punch it in. This way you must be in posession of the card at the time of the transaction. A card reader would just add a further layer of abstraction.
As for how the card is kept in sync with the main server, I can only guess. The card likely encrypts the clock time modulo some granularity with a secret key that is stored on the card. The server performs the same encryption using its clock, then applies a skew based on the last time the card successfully authenticated, with a sliding window to allow for greater drift latitude over time. Just a guess, though. :)
I think that a side affect of this is that the cards must be changed fairly frequently. Or at least more frequently than most people get new credit cards.
Also they try to make you use a M$ browser to print the Images. Bah! /Me uses print screen :)
MacKiDo has this article about USB 2.0 and Firewire. It's on the long side and tends to look at things from a Mac perspective, but is a really good read nonetheless.