I logged into my/. account for the first time in 6 years to say... what you already said. I also recall Clarke inventing ultrasonic windscreen wipers, at least in fiction. IIRC, the character that invented it was the same character who built an artificial lake in the shape of the mandelbrot set.
What was wrong with the method that Boeing Rocketdyne were using for their aerospike engine? They were running their cold propellant fluid (hydrogen?) through the edge of the combustion chamber and circulating it back to the top just prior to burning. This seems a great idea, since you can cool the walls and get faster ignition from the fuel at the same time.
Last time I checked you were using a cold liquid propellant. Does Armadillo have fabrication difficulties with such a design?
/* Personal wish-list for Java: 1. Use:= instead of = for assignment. Allow = for backwards compatibility. 2. Add enumerated types strictly for comparisons with other members of the same type. 3. Provide more string manipulation routines for StringBuffers. (RPAD, TRANSLATE, etc) 4. Make ResultSet.isBeforeFirstRow() and ResultSet.isAfterLastRow() both return true when there are no rows in the result set. 5. Allow ResultSets to tell you how many rows there are! */
I only had to copy and paste the above wish list from the middle of one of my Java sources.:-)
The fact that Gosling has never used the JDBC classes goes some way towards explaining some of the brain-dead "features" of those classes, such as the two main glitches outlined above.
-OzJuggler
This was alluded to in "Flawed Metaphor" by Greyfox above, but wasn't quite spelled out.
The reason why 3D web browsers have not taken off is because 3D adds absolutely no value whatsoever to the activity of web browsing. To answer why, let's consider the broader question of: Why isn't interactive 3D everywhere? (ie- not just browsers)
The answer is that a spatial representation adds value only when you have spatial relationships that you can load with meaning. The meaning is part of the browsing task at hand, which means that the spatial relationships must be set-up case-by-case for each type of task that someone wants to do. One of the few situations that don't require special setup are where the task is no more than real spatial navigation - like an action game or a CFD stream function.
If you change the axes of the coordinate system from (Right,Up,Back) to (Manufacturer,Price,Item) then you now have some spatial relationships that are loaded with meaning ("higher" means "more expensive"). But you have a "space" that is no longer intuitively navigable. This is not to say that it is difficult to get around in, but that it is diffuclt to know where you are. When you find something that looks interesting, some careful thought is needed to figure out what it is that you've found in the source data. A trivial example, to be sure, but the problem becomes worse the more complicated the dataset is. (And you'd think that's where you'd need 3D the most.)
Web sites are organised by topic and if you can organise all the topics of human knowledge using only 3 spatial axes and still keep it navigable, then you've achieved what no-one else knows how to do. That is why 3D web browsing has not taken off. (There is an arbitrary relationship between physical server location and topics stored on it.)
As an aside, UI is a big issue too because it is easier for your brain to make sense of the space around it when you can physically turn your head to see everything around you. Another reason why a little monitor window in front of you is not going to blow anybody away. (Q3A excepted)
This was nearly suggested by "Saint Stephen" above, but I have already been thinking for a coupla months now that one way to come up with a unique personal ID is to use a number which is derived in the following manner:
The first 8 bits would be a Being Type ID, which can be used for discriminating between organic/cyborg/silicon AI beings that we might have in the future.
For conventional earthly sentient beings, such as humans (or gorillas that
own their own nature reserve in Uganda), the next 128 bits will be the MD5 hash of their DNA fingerprint. For AIs and commercial cyborgs, I guess they'd have a ISSN or UPC number indentifying manufacturer or model number etc.
The last 32 bits are an instance ID which allows for cloned humans (such as natural born twins) or for mass-produced cyborgs.
The final number is obtained by concatenating the previous numbers into a 168 bit block, and then taking the 128 bit SHA hash of it if that turns out to be more convenient for processing.
This number will be embedded in a tiny little standard transponder which can optionally be bundled with a secret key and shielded with encryption.
Cyborgs and AIs must have it built in to them. People can have it implanted or just carry it in a smart card, depending on their preference. The advantage for humans is that even if they lose their smart card, their ID has can always be exactly recomputed from a hair sample!:)
What's gonna happen to OpenAL!??
I dunno about you guys but I reckon the idea of an open standard easy-to-code library that is the audio equivalent of OpenGL is such a sexy idea that I don't want to see it die.
Loki have put out weekly builds from their CVS tree every week since OpenAL began. Does anyone know if sourceforge and OSS people are going to take it over?
I know that Creative are also major partners in that, but ya gotta admit... Creative Labs being in charge of an Open Audio Library project is like leaving Microsoft in charge of an Open Data Base Connectivity library... oh wait. ];-)
Hey! I dunno about you, but the soundblaster pro in my 486/33 had 16-bit playback buddy, and don't you forget it!
Woohoo! 16-bit playback, 8-bit recording! rockin!:-D
Re:Second Reality demo (1993) is still the best.
on
The Assembly In Review
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Definitely!
Skaven's music still absolutely rocks.
I still look at the "chaos clouds" sequence in 2ndreal written by wildfire (or maybe it was psi) and I still have no idea how he coded that. You figure out how they did all the other scenes, but that one sequence is still a mystery. It looks so smooth and chaotic and complex. I suspect that he is using 3 different plasma fields drawn separately on neighboring pixels in such a high resolution that your eye blends them together. That still doesn't explain how he draws each field though. It doesn't look like your usual Perlian noise, and it certainly isn't as ugly as a typical recursive "plasma" function, so how does he do it!??
That's the beauty of demos. If you've ever tried any graphics programming before, then you appreciate how tricky it is, and you ask yourself "How did he DO that?!!".
Tragically I can no longer hear the music for the demo because SB emulation doesn't seem to work under DOS for my Vortex2 chip - probably some conflict with my i815E chipset mobo. If anyone has suggestions on how to get that working again, I'd be really grateful to hear it.
-OzJuggler
The Ansi compo has been dropped due to lack of interest.
What! NOOOOO! After ALL these YEARS ! ! WHY!??:-D Haha. Is it any wonder?
Coding pretty (ugly) pictures in ANSI terminal escape sequences has obviously gone way past "hardcore" and right into "insane".
-OzJuggler
There's nothing wrong with current alert tones.
What's worse about this new tone is that if the sound really is as compelling and attention grabbing as they reckon, then it will become life-threatening if it is not applied in a conservative and controlled manner. Why? Well can you imagine if every gizmo manufacturer jumped on this bandwagon... a world filled with devices that all sound the same and that you can't resist paying instant attention to as soon as they ring! A cacocophany of distraction that would be really inappropriate in most situations I can think of, and potentially life-threatening if you happen to be driving at the time.
Treat this sound the same way you treat dialog boxes that pop up over the top of everything else and which don't let you continue with other tasks until you've acknowledged it. You wouldn't want ALL your communications to arrive that way would you? And who decides which messages are consistently so important that they need an express channel directly into your mind?
The idea is interesting in a cyborg kindof way, but I sense the potential for arrogant abuse if it ever catches on.
I fully agree that ADD is real. When I first heard about ADD I was skeptical, and I too thought the scientists were just overreacting and reading too much into the "noise" in behaviour.
But then I did my own experiment to find out, and I was shocked by the results...
ADD AX, 1
The AX register REALLY IS MODIFIED by this code. The AX register ACTUALLY does get incremented! ADD is a REAL effect people. It's not just random noise, it's a real instruction!
Also, with the claim that people with ADD should not get special privileges to overcompensate for their condition, I totally agree. We don't want to start giving away root-access INP and MOV instructions to anybody who has ADD - there should be security checks involved.
We should treat these people the same way we treat people with MMX and SSE.
Oh... you meant Attention Deficit Disorder.... Sorry.
I should have payed closer attention.
-OzJuggler.
I can see their slogan now...
on
MilSpec Biotech
·
· Score: 2
"Join the US Army... We infect more people before 6AM than you'll infect all day!"
If you want the Chinese government to keep information free enough for your EP-3Es to eavesdrop on it, then that information should probably be free enough for China's own citizens to access it.;-)
I feel compelled to make a tiny contribution to this argument.
The bullying may have started it all, but it wouldn't be anything new. The only reason this story appeared on our radar screens is because it involved that magic word "GUNS".
As soon as you Yanks realise that humans in general are too immature to be trusted with guns, and that there should not be a "right to bear arms", THEN you will immediately get rid of this problem, THEN you can save lives, AND you can start dealing with more fundamental issues (like bullying) without worrying about who's going to get shot while the bully discussions are happening.
The article also delves into the possibility of using some brain-scanning sensors to provide extra input into the music visualiser.
Can I just say that this is at best a double-edged sword and at worst is downright dangerous!
At best, you are trying to use the state of someone's mind as a clue for the most appropriate way to represent the flow and feel of the music. This is fine when the listener is in a happy mood and listening to a happy song. But! What if they are in a sad mood and trying to cheer themselves up by listening to a happy song?! Is the visualiser going to sense the "unhappy" characteristics of their brain and render their effervescent dance track in sombre blues and browns? What about a song like "Blue" by Eiffel 65, which has fairly sad lyrics if you ever read them, yet the whole song is presented in a really happy and bouncy way. Definitely some ambiguity there - and difficult to see how meaningful the visualiser would be.
At worst, you've got a situation where the visualiser output is interpreted by the brain, which supplies info to the visualiser which sends back into the brain and pretty soon you've got a potentially nasty feedback loop happening! Not a good situation to be in if you're listening to heavy metal or a particularly disturbing Eminem song!
The moral of the story? - Keep It Simple Stupid!
Besides, I have enough trouble stopping evil corporations from controlling my thoughts, let alone a psychic WinAmp!:-D
His plugin "G-Force" existed BEFORE nVidia's video card "GeForce".
Aside from the fact that he was first with the name, your comment might have some relevance if the two products were actually spelled the same way - which they are not.
>It's a high-density barcode. That's it. Move along. Nothing to see here.
But that is precisely the great NEW feature of this technology: There's nothing to see! It is invisible to the unaided eye.
The data is embedded within any full colour image. This sets it totally apart from barcodes (Code3of9, etc), which really stand out and would be somewhat distracting.
The whole idea is that the data is there if you want to get at it, but if you don't want to know such details, then you don't even see them.
Also, there are 2D "barcodes" that are in use in manufacturing environments, but they are unsuitable for publication applications for the same reason that barcodes are: they rely on changing the intensity of the area being printed on.
How long has the PIII-800 been out? Maybe 6 months tops? Certainly not more than 10 let alone 18.
I've never heard of Moore's Law being defined directly in relation to transistor density, until you mentioned it just now. You might be right, but I've always heard of Moore's law being the general observation that every eighteen months the available processing power doubles and the cost of memory halves. I'll blame my sources if that is wrong.
It's a good thing that the moderators on Slashdot are smarter than you - this explains why they rated my posting as "Funny" rather than "Informative".
Dammit! It was only a month ago that I replaced my tired old P2-233 by building a NEW Pentium III 800MHz system. Now I read that in a few months you will be able to buy a 1.6 GHz CPU !!??? That's doubled in 4 months, not 18!
And why is it that when I knock on Mr Moore's office I can hear some muffled whimpering but no-one answers the door?:)
Slashdot Mirror
I logged into my /. account for the first time in 6 years to say... what you already said. I also recall Clarke inventing ultrasonic windscreen wipers, at least in fiction.
IIRC, the character that invented it was the same character who built an artificial lake in the shape of the mandelbrot set.
Last time I checked you were using a cold liquid propellant. Does Armadillo have fabrication difficulties with such a design?
-OzJuggler.
The fact that Gosling has never used the JDBC classes goes some way towards explaining some of the brain-dead "features" of those classes, such as the two main glitches outlined above.
-OzJuggler
Darn it, Animats just nipped in ahead of me. :-(
:)
Don't you just hate a world that rewards the first rather than the best?
The reason why 3D web browsers have not taken off is because 3D adds absolutely no value whatsoever to the activity of web browsing. To answer why, let's consider the broader question of: Why isn't interactive 3D everywhere? (ie- not just browsers)
The answer is that a spatial representation adds value only when you have spatial relationships that you can load with meaning. The meaning is part of the browsing task at hand, which means that the spatial relationships must be set-up case-by-case for each type of task that someone wants to do. One of the few situations that don't require special setup are where the task is no more than real spatial navigation - like an action game or a CFD stream function.
If you change the axes of the coordinate system from (Right,Up,Back) to (Manufacturer,Price,Item) then you now have some spatial relationships that are loaded with meaning ("higher" means "more expensive"). But you have a "space" that is no longer intuitively navigable. This is not to say that it is difficult to get around in, but that it is diffuclt to know where you are. When you find something that looks interesting, some careful thought is needed to figure out what it is that you've found in the source data. A trivial example, to be sure, but the problem becomes worse the more complicated the dataset is. (And you'd think that's where you'd need 3D the most.)
Web sites are organised by topic and if you can organise all the topics of human knowledge using only 3 spatial axes and still keep it navigable, then you've achieved what no-one else knows how to do. That is why 3D web browsing has not taken off. (There is an arbitrary relationship between physical server location and topics stored on it.)
As an aside, UI is a big issue too because it is easier for your brain to make sense of the space around it when you can physically turn your head to see everything around you. Another reason why a little monitor window in front of you is not going to blow anybody away. (Q3A excepted)
- The first 8 bits would be a Being Type ID, which can be used for discriminating between organic/cyborg/silicon AI beings that we might have in the future.
-
For conventional earthly sentient beings, such as humans (or gorillas that
own their own nature reserve in Uganda), the next 128 bits will be the MD5 hash of their DNA fingerprint.
- The last 32 bits are an instance ID which allows for cloned humans (such as natural born twins) or for mass-produced cyborgs.
The final number is obtained by concatenating the previous numbers into a 168 bit block, and then taking the 128 bit SHA hash of it if that turns out to be more convenient for processing.For AIs and commercial cyborgs, I guess they'd have a ISSN or UPC number indentifying manufacturer or model number etc.
This number will be embedded in a tiny little standard transponder which can optionally be bundled with a secret key and shielded with encryption. :)
Cyborgs and AIs must have it built in to them. People can have it implanted or just carry it in a smart card, depending on their preference. The advantage for humans is that even if they lose their smart card, their ID has can always be exactly recomputed from a hair sample!
Can I please take over the world now?
-OzJuggler
I dunno about you guys but I reckon the idea of an open standard easy-to-code library that is the audio equivalent of OpenGL is such a sexy idea that I don't want to see it die.
Loki have put out weekly builds from their CVS tree every week since OpenAL began. Does anyone know if sourceforge and OSS people are going to take it over?
I know that Creative are also major partners in that, but ya gotta admit... Creative Labs being in charge of an Open Audio Library project is like leaving Microsoft in charge of an Open Data Base Connectivity library... oh wait. ];-)
-OzJuggler
Hey! I dunno about you, but the soundblaster pro in my 486/33 had 16-bit playback buddy, and don't you forget it! :-D
Woohoo! 16-bit playback, 8-bit recording! rockin!
Skaven's music still absolutely rocks.
I still look at the "chaos clouds" sequence in 2ndreal written by wildfire (or maybe it was psi) and I still have no idea how he coded that. You figure out how they did all the other scenes, but that one sequence is still a mystery. It looks so smooth and chaotic and complex. I suspect that he is using 3 different plasma fields drawn separately on neighboring pixels in such a high resolution that your eye blends them together. That still doesn't explain how he draws each field though. It doesn't look like your usual Perlian noise, and it certainly isn't as ugly as a typical recursive "plasma" function, so how does he do it!??
That's the beauty of demos. If you've ever tried any graphics programming before, then you appreciate how tricky it is, and you ask yourself "How did he DO that?!!".
Tragically I can no longer hear the music for the demo because SB emulation doesn't seem to work under DOS for my Vortex2 chip - probably some conflict with my i815E chipset mobo. If anyone has suggestions on how to get that working again, I'd be really grateful to hear it.
-OzJuggler
What! NOOOOO! After ALL these YEARS ! ! WHY!??
Haha. Is it any wonder?
Coding pretty (ugly) pictures in ANSI terminal escape sequences has obviously gone way past "hardcore" and right into "insane".
-OzJuggler
What's worse about this new tone is that if the sound really is as compelling and attention grabbing as they reckon, then it will become life-threatening if it is not applied in a conservative and controlled manner. Why? Well can you imagine if every gizmo manufacturer jumped on this bandwagon... a world filled with devices that all sound the same and that you can't resist paying instant attention to as soon as they ring! A cacocophany of distraction that would be really inappropriate in most situations I can think of, and potentially life-threatening if you happen to be driving at the time.
Treat this sound the same way you treat dialog boxes that pop up over the top of everything else and which don't let you continue with other tasks until you've acknowledged it. You wouldn't want ALL your communications to arrive that way would you? And who decides which messages are consistently so important that they need an express channel directly into your mind?
The idea is interesting in a cyborg kindof way, but I sense the potential for arrogant abuse if it ever catches on.
-OzJuggler
- ADD AX, 1
The AX register REALLY IS MODIFIED by this code. The AX register ACTUALLY does get incremented! ADD is a REAL effect people. It's not just random noise, it's a real instruction!Also, with the claim that people with ADD should not get special privileges to overcompensate for their condition, I totally agree. We don't want to start giving away root-access INP and MOV instructions to anybody who has ADD - there should be security checks involved.
We should treat these people the same way we treat people with MMX and SSE.
Oh... you meant Attention Deficit Disorder.... Sorry.
I should have payed closer attention.
-OzJuggler.
We infect more people before 6AM than you'll infect all day!"
-OzJuggler
Don't ask me - you're the one who started telling the sci-fi story!
-OzJuggler.
If you want the Chinese government to keep information free enough for your EP-3Es to eavesdrop on it, then that information should probably be free enough for China's own citizens to access it. ;-)
-OzJuggler.
The bullying may have started it all, but it wouldn't be anything new. The only reason this story appeared on our radar screens is because it involved that magic word "GUNS".
As soon as you Yanks realise that humans in general are too immature to be trusted with guns, and that there should not be a "right to bear arms", THEN you will immediately get rid of this problem, THEN you can save lives, AND you can start dealing with more fundamental issues (like bullying) without worrying about who's going to get shot while the bully discussions are happening.
- OzJuggler.
Can I just say that this is at best a double-edged sword and at worst is downright dangerous!
At best, you are trying to use the state of someone's mind as a clue for the most appropriate way to represent the flow and feel of the music. This is fine when the listener is in a happy mood and listening to a happy song. But! What if they are in a sad mood and trying to cheer themselves up by listening to a happy song?! Is the visualiser going to sense the "unhappy" characteristics of their brain and render their effervescent dance track in sombre blues and browns? What about a song like "Blue" by Eiffel 65, which has fairly sad lyrics if you ever read them, yet the whole song is presented in a really happy and bouncy way. Definitely some ambiguity there - and difficult to see how meaningful the visualiser would be.
At worst, you've got a situation where the visualiser output is interpreted by the brain, which supplies info to the visualiser which sends back into the brain and pretty soon you've got a potentially nasty feedback loop happening! Not a good situation to be in if you're listening to heavy metal or a particularly disturbing Eminem song!
The moral of the story? - Keep It Simple Stupid! :-D
Besides, I have enough trouble stopping evil corporations from controlling my thoughts, let alone a psychic WinAmp!
-OzJuggler.
Aside from the fact that he was first with the name, your comment might have some relevance if the two products were actually spelled the same way - which they are not.
-OzJuggler.
- 1999
...
Ennnk! Wrong.The Matrix
In this film, released on the eve of the 21st century
What are the chances that CNN journos do have a clue about computers but don't know how to count?
CNN, you are the weakest link. Goodbye!
-OzJuggler.
But that is precisely the great NEW feature of this technology: There's nothing to see! It is invisible to the unaided eye.
The data is embedded within any full colour image. This sets it totally apart from barcodes (Code3of9, etc), which really stand out and would be somewhat distracting.
The whole idea is that the data is there if you want to get at it, but if you don't want to know such details, then you don't even see them.
Also, there are 2D "barcodes" that are in use in manufacturing environments, but they are unsuitable for publication applications for the same reason that barcodes are: they rely on changing the intensity of the area being printed on.
-OzJuggler.
It just goes to show that history is a lie because history was nearly all written by marketing departments! :-D
- Juggler (of Australia)
It's a good thing that the moderators on Slashdot are smarter than you - this explains why they rated my posting as "Funny" rather than "Informative".
And why is it that when I knock on Mr Moore's office I can hear some muffled whimpering but no-one answers the door? :)
-Andrew.