Well, you had to have known, making a statement that broad, that somebody would chime in to prove you wrong. I don't use mass transit, because "mass transit" currently means the bus. The bus sucks. It is ALWAYS faster, cheaper, and more comfortable to drive somewhere than to take the bus there, even in heavy traffic. But I do live within walking distance of the proposed monorail, and you can bet that I will use it instead of driving. Driving in the city sucks, and trying to find somewhere to park sucks even worse; I walk, whenever I can, and would be thrilled to have a good mass transit option instead.
My experience is just the opposite. Easily half of the monitors at the company I work for are LCDs now. I've been using an LCD monitor for a year and a half, and I'll never go back. Freedom from eyestrain is a wonderful thing.
They and others also predicted that the West would be hopelessly overpopulated by... right around now. Both predictions have proven to be wildly inaccurate
What, you think the world is not hopelessly overpopulated? What is it going to take for you to change your mind - a sea of humans, standing shoulder to shoulder, on every inch of the earth's surface?
-Mars
Many of the old Mac hacks were really evil
on
No More Mac Tweaking?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's easy to customize the interface when the system provides a mechanism for patching any system call and offers no memory protection. You can hook yourself right into the UI code and do whatever you want. Of course Apple doesn't want to support this sort of thing anymore: it practically guarantees instability. INITs were always hard to do correctly, and I'm glad to see them go even if it does mean it's harder to customize the UI.
I don't blame Apple for messing with internal API calls. If I were in their shoes, I'd deliberately break anything that used undocumented calls in every release. This keeps hack developers on their toes, as they are forced to upgrade their OS and re-test their hacks for every release; there's no more of this "well, it worked back in 1987 on my Mac SE, so it should run fine on my G3 using OS 9.1" crap Mac users have been living with for so many years. It also preserves Apple's ability to change the OS implementation internally; if they leave undocumented APIs static for too long, developers will start to take them for granted and users will complain when Apple breaks them. Better to break them on purpose and prevent anyone from getting too comfortable.
I built myself a rubberband machine gun when I was in my early teens. It started when we found a bag of rubber bands at the local park, probably dumped by some newspaper delivery person. We couldn't just leave hundreds of thick rubber bands sitting there, so we hauled them all home and began shooting each other with them. I got tired of snapping them against my thumb and decided to build a gun. My dad had a decent wood shop in the garage, so I got some wood together and built myself a single-shot rifle.
This of course gave me a competitive advantage, and pretty soon everyone wanted guns. I built up a pretty little arsenal, and things were good. But I was ambitious and wanted to see just how cool a gun I could make. So I designed and eventually built a machine gun.
It was a crude weapon compared to my original gracefully sanded and curved rifle, but the results were dramatic. It was a length of two-by-four with a firing mechanism in back and a row of pegs at the business end. The mechanism was a thick dowel studded with a spiral of half-inserted wood screws, mounted on an axle perpendicular to the gun's line of fire. A small crank and ratchet controlled the dowel's spin. You loaded it by hooking rubber bands, one at a time, from the pegs at the end to the screws on the dowel, then advancing the ratchet one click. It took more work to load the more rubber bands you put on, so I was never able to load more than a couple dozen onto it.
To fire it you simply released the ratchet, and WHAM! The dowel turned in a blur, the rubber bands went everywhere, and it made this cool thrumming and clacking noise. Accuracy sucked, but that was fine; in fact once I loaded the rubber bands crossways, so that instead of being parallel to the gun's "bore" they angled back and forth across it. No need to wave the gun around that way - it would "spray" its shots automatically, a nice feature considering the gun would dump its entire ammunition load in a couple of seconds.
The gun was very impressive and frightened the other kids but I abandoned it shortly because it took too long to load. It's not much good blowing off all your ammunition in the first few seconds of a firefight when the other kids can pick up the rubberbands you've just plastered all over their clothing and fire them right back at you while you stand there for ten minutes getting ready for your next shot.
Anyway, I remember seeing this guy's Gatling at the California State Fair a few years back. I could have sworn it was the 144-shot model even then, so either I'm remembering wrong and it was actually the 72-shot model, or there's some other nutcase out there building 144-shot rubber band machine guns with a similar design.
-Mars
Re:You own personal transponder
on
GPS Meets PCS
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· Score: 2
Is this true only when the phone is in use, or can a cell phone be tracked as long as it is powered on?
"directed acyclic graph", abbreviated "DAG", is a generic term describing a data structure. You might also call it a "tree". That their internal data is stored in such a structure is almost implied by the nature of the software. That is how compilers generally store their internal data.
That's what this is: a compiler. Its input is a machine language instead of a high level language. This is interesting, but not necessarily all that useful. It solves a piece of the problem, but not the hardest piece.
The ability to take an existing piece of code and run a static optimizer on it might be interesting, but I suspect that such a device would exercise enough previously undiscovered bugs in the targeted software to make its use as anything but a testing & debugging tool rather impractical.
The idea you suggest resurfaces every few years. A while back it was called "thin binaries"; in the late nineties it was called "Java". In any case, it never takes off quite as well as everyone seems to think it should, simply because the processor is only one part of the machine, and not the hardest one to emulate.
If they have the fuel, indeed. This object is travelling at more than 27,000 miles per hour. It never carried anything remotely close to the quantity of fuel that would be required to accelerate enough to "turn it around". I'm amazed it still has enough fuel to stay stabilized.
The GPL is a license which applies to copyrighted material. It is irrelevant.
Anyone can read the source code and understand how it works. If you then write new source code based on the same ideas, you have created a new piece of software.
You are perhaps confusing "copyright" with "patent".
There is no point in trying to convince the "non-believers". The issue has been settled for so many years that the only people who even think of it as an issue are the ones who have religious objections. Religious objections are, by definition, not in the domain of science, and no scientist need waste their time answering them.
I have no idea where you got this idea from, but its lack of accuracy is fairly profound. FireWire and Fibre Channel aren't even close to compatible. They use different hardware, different protocols, different strategies; they're designed for different uses, sold to different markets.
FireWire lives somewhere between USB and Fibre Channel, but is not related to either one. It is designed for media devices, consumer disk storage, etc. It's a useful bus for hot-plugging peripherals; a convenient way to attach scanners, cameras, portable storage, and so on. It can transfer data fast enough to avoid frustrating consumers. It's convenient, resilient, and cheap.
Fibre channel is a streaming system for RAID applications. IP over fibre channel - at least when I was last working on it - is kind of secondary. It's more of a "you get this for free" ability; you don't run fibre channel to everyone's desktop to provide an Internet connection. Fibre channel is for when you have a couple dozen Silicon Graphics boxes, a half terabyte of Barracudas on a rack with a fabric box or two, and you want to edit video without waiting for file copies. It is for streaming massive quantities of data at high speeds. I don't know if this is still true, but it used to be the case that most PC motherboard buses could not supply data as fast as fibre channel could absorb it. This is heavy duty serious stuff.
I suggest you not get any more ideas from wherever you found this one.
Of course the wheels were left there on purpose. The junkyard was built specially for the show and is seeded before each episode begins, ensuring that it actually contains enough parts to successfully accomplish the challenge. That's why there just happened to be a crashed plane in the junkyard on the flying machines episode and a bunch of working auto engines in the power pullers episode. The point is to see how the teams come up with solutions to the problems, not to make them play MacGyver.
Oddly, I came away with the impression that Jane was a fairly sophisticated user, someone who knew enough to worry about the security concerns inherent in running your workstation as a firewall.
Who are you to say who should be allowed to fuck whom, and on what schedule they should be able to do it?
What's the difference between you, sounding off on your opinions about sexuality, and some religious conservative demanding abstinence until marriage? Bully for you if you can stick to your code of ethics, but you have no business lecturing the rest of us.
It just takes a little bit of common sense, which most humans don't seem to have.
Bullshit. Human beings are built to fuck. It's part of who we are, it's part of being a living organism. Sexual diseases and unwanted pregnancies are unfortunate, sad, and inevitable; avoiding them takes knowledge, willpower, and a cultural context that is by no means universal. Do you have any idea how recent the idea that sex can kill you really is? How can another way to prevent disease be anything but a step forward?
Your attitude toward rape is sickening. Learn some compassion.
Even those of us with fancy nice-paying jobs don't necessarily have $135 for a 256MB DIMM.
This sort of thing has been done with hard drives for ages, and it's about time someone did it with RAM. Reminds me of that supercomputer some bunch of Hewlett Packard engineers built out of defective processors.
Brilliant idea! But we haven't gone far enough. Let's borrow a trillion dollars and go to Mars - next year. Why not max out all the governmental credit cards, all over the world, and do everything we can, all at once? After all, we've got forever to pay for it...
Don't try to latinize the plural, as the original word had no plural. "Virus" and its plural, in the senses in which we use them, are English words that behave according to English rules of grammar.
I'm sorry to be a grammar cop, but this mistake bugs the hell out of me, and your post is an unusually bad example. Aside from that, it was funny.
The police did not make those laws, they enforce them.
You're right, of course. I wasn't trying to imply that the arrests were made on police whim. The phrase "morality cops" was a metaphorical reference to the people who think the drug laws are a good idea, not to the people whose job it is to enforce said laws.
There seems to be quite a bit of overlap, of course.
I love DSL. I'm completely sold. It would take insane levels of compensation to convince me to move somewhere without DSL access.
I have had nothing but good experiences with DSL. Granted, I've only used two providers - but experiences with both have been everything I could hope for.
I don't have the depth of experience to say whether this is a temporary state - this campaign vs the others - or really the way things are going to stay, but Katz' description sounds pretty accurate to me.
The U.S. political system increasingly resembles a three year old swinging a chainsaw.
The real exchanges of ideas and opinions, the real shifts in thought, are taking place on the 'net and in the burgeoning global protest movement - a movement enabled, one might even say created, by the arrival of the 'net as an omnipresent utility.
Bush and Gore are spending all their time whining about the high cost of prescription drugs, the sad state of public education, and a couple of other things I can't remember. The reporters who cover them are spending all their time sniping about this or that campaign tactic and don't seem to think there is anything more going on than a complicated public relations campaign.
They're right, of course: the candidates are using irrelevant made-up "issues" to joust and spar and make each other look bad. Where's the discussion about the sanity of putting 1.5 million people in jail for possessing substances the morality cops don't like? Who's talking about the morally bankrupt foreign policy of guns, bombs, dirty tricks and lies? Why won't either of these guys talk about the fact that three out of every four Americans is making the same or less money now than before this new miracle economy began, much less suggest something to do about it? Why won't either of them point out that the general has no clothes, and demand an end to the insane levels of military spending relative to the actual threat? (Do they really think the U.S. needs to be able to fight off the entire rest of the planet, at once? Do they know something I don't?) Why won't they address the economic and labour injustices perpetrated by the policies of the WTO & World Bank and the US' participation in those organizations?
Do they not realize that these conversations are all happening, and they're missing out on the chance to be relevant by ignoring them? Do they not realize that we're all busy deciding for ourselves what's going on?
Of course she's going to lose. That's the point. When the record company fights her suit, all their rhetoric about "protecting the artists" will fall apart, because it will become obvious that it's the record company's profits they're protecting.
Love has a really nice position here, because if she wins, Universal loses the entire hundred million when thousands of other musicians join the dogpile and sue for their piece. If she loses, the entire premise for the suit against MP3 falls apart, and Universal will be revealed (to the accompaniment of lots of press) as the greedy, scum-sucking bastards they really are.
Either way, Universal loses, and Courtney Love increases her heap of cred.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a point - that does look a bit silly. I suppose I should have stuck a smiley in there...
-Mars
Well, you had to have known, making a statement that broad, that somebody would chime in to prove you wrong. I don't use mass transit, because "mass transit" currently means the bus. The bus sucks. It is ALWAYS faster, cheaper, and more comfortable to drive somewhere than to take the bus there, even in heavy traffic. But I do live within walking distance of the proposed monorail, and you can bet that I will use it instead of driving. Driving in the city sucks, and trying to find somewhere to park sucks even worse; I walk, whenever I can, and would be thrilled to have a good mass transit option instead.
The Green Line is just the beginning!
-Mars
My experience is just the opposite. Easily half of the monitors at the company I work for are LCDs now. I've been using an LCD monitor for a year and a half, and I'll never go back. Freedom from eyestrain is a wonderful thing.
-Mars
They and others also predicted that the West would be hopelessly overpopulated by... right around now. Both predictions have proven to be wildly inaccurate
What, you think the world is not hopelessly overpopulated? What is it going to take for you to change your mind - a sea of humans, standing shoulder to shoulder, on every inch of the earth's surface?
-Mars
It's easy to customize the interface when the system provides a mechanism for patching any system call and offers no memory protection. You can hook yourself right into the UI code and do whatever you want. Of course Apple doesn't want to support this sort of thing anymore: it practically guarantees instability. INITs were always hard to do correctly, and I'm glad to see them go even if it does mean it's harder to customize the UI.
I don't blame Apple for messing with internal API calls. If I were in their shoes, I'd deliberately break anything that used undocumented calls in every release. This keeps hack developers on their toes, as they are forced to upgrade their OS and re-test their hacks for every release; there's no more of this "well, it worked back in 1987 on my Mac SE, so it should run fine on my G3 using OS 9.1" crap Mac users have been living with for so many years. It also preserves Apple's ability to change the OS implementation internally; if they leave undocumented APIs static for too long, developers will start to take them for granted and users will complain when Apple breaks them. Better to break them on purpose and prevent anyone from getting too comfortable.
-Mars
I built myself a rubberband machine gun when I was in my early teens. It started when we found a bag of rubber bands at the local park, probably dumped by some newspaper delivery person. We couldn't just leave hundreds of thick rubber bands sitting there, so we hauled them all home and began shooting each other with them. I got tired of snapping them against my thumb and decided to build a gun. My dad had a decent wood shop in the garage, so I got some wood together and built myself a single-shot rifle.
This of course gave me a competitive advantage, and pretty soon everyone wanted guns. I built up a pretty little arsenal, and things were good. But I was ambitious and wanted to see just how cool a gun I could make. So I designed and eventually built a machine gun.
It was a crude weapon compared to my original gracefully sanded and curved rifle, but the results were dramatic. It was a length of two-by-four with a firing mechanism in back and a row of pegs at the business end. The mechanism was a thick dowel studded with a spiral of half-inserted wood screws, mounted on an axle perpendicular to the gun's line of fire. A small crank and ratchet controlled the dowel's spin. You loaded it by hooking rubber bands, one at a time, from the pegs at the end to the screws on the dowel, then advancing the ratchet one click. It took more work to load the more rubber bands you put on, so I was never able to load more than a couple dozen onto it.
To fire it you simply released the ratchet, and WHAM! The dowel turned in a blur, the rubber bands went everywhere, and it made this cool thrumming and clacking noise. Accuracy sucked, but that was fine; in fact once I loaded the rubber bands crossways, so that instead of being parallel to the gun's "bore" they angled back and forth across it. No need to wave the gun around that way - it would "spray" its shots automatically, a nice feature considering the gun would dump its entire ammunition load in a couple of seconds.
The gun was very impressive and frightened the other kids but I abandoned it shortly because it took too long to load. It's not much good blowing off all your ammunition in the first few seconds of a firefight when the other kids can pick up the rubberbands you've just plastered all over their clothing and fire them right back at you while you stand there for ten minutes getting ready for your next shot.
Anyway, I remember seeing this guy's Gatling at the California State Fair a few years back. I could have sworn it was the 144-shot model even then, so either I'm remembering wrong and it was actually the 72-shot model, or there's some other nutcase out there building 144-shot rubber band machine guns with a similar design.
-Mars
Is this true only when the phone is in use, or can a cell phone be tracked as long as it is powered on?
-Mars
Well... yes. But I didn't want to spend half an hour discussing the issue. How would *you* have explained it?
-Mars
"directed acyclic graph", abbreviated "DAG", is a generic term describing a data structure. You might also call it a "tree". That their internal data is stored in such a structure is almost implied by the nature of the software. That is how compilers generally store their internal data.
That's what this is: a compiler. Its input is a machine language instead of a high level language. This is interesting, but not necessarily all that useful. It solves a piece of the problem, but not the hardest piece.
The ability to take an existing piece of code and run a static optimizer on it might be interesting, but I suspect that such a device would exercise enough previously undiscovered bugs in the targeted software to make its use as anything but a testing & debugging tool rather impractical.
The idea you suggest resurfaces every few years. A while back it was called "thin binaries"; in the late nineties it was called "Java". In any case, it never takes off quite as well as everyone seems to think it should, simply because the processor is only one part of the machine, and not the hardest one to emulate.
-Mars
If they have the fuel, indeed. This object is travelling at more than 27,000 miles per hour. It never carried anything remotely close to the quantity of fuel that would be required to accelerate enough to "turn it around". I'm amazed it still has enough fuel to stay stabilized.
-Mars
You cannot copyright an idea.
The GPL is a license which applies to copyrighted material. It is irrelevant.
Anyone can read the source code and understand how it works. If you then write new source code based on the same ideas, you have created a new piece of software.
You are perhaps confusing "copyright" with "patent".
-Mars
If it's an x86 box, then - by definition - it can't be "much better".
-Mars, RISC chauvinist
There is no point in trying to convince the "non-believers". The issue has been settled for so many years that the only people who even think of it as an issue are the ones who have religious objections. Religious objections are, by definition, not in the domain of science, and no scientist need waste their time answering them.
-Mars
I have no idea where you got this idea from, but its lack of accuracy is fairly profound. FireWire and Fibre Channel aren't even close to compatible. They use different hardware, different protocols, different strategies; they're designed for different uses, sold to different markets.
FireWire lives somewhere between USB and Fibre Channel, but is not related to either one. It is designed for media devices, consumer disk storage, etc. It's a useful bus for hot-plugging peripherals; a convenient way to attach scanners, cameras, portable storage, and so on. It can transfer data fast enough to avoid frustrating consumers. It's convenient, resilient, and cheap.
Fibre channel is a streaming system for RAID applications. IP over fibre channel - at least when I was last working on it - is kind of secondary. It's more of a "you get this for free" ability; you don't run fibre channel to everyone's desktop to provide an Internet connection. Fibre channel is for when you have a couple dozen Silicon Graphics boxes, a half terabyte of Barracudas on a rack with a fabric box or two, and you want to edit video without waiting for file copies. It is for streaming massive quantities of data at high speeds. I don't know if this is still true, but it used to be the case that most PC motherboard buses could not supply data as fast as fibre channel could absorb it. This is heavy duty serious stuff.
I suggest you not get any more ideas from wherever you found this one.
-Mars
Goths don't have this problem.
-Mars
Of course the wheels were left there on purpose. The junkyard was built specially for the show and is seeded before each episode begins, ensuring that it actually contains enough parts to successfully accomplish the challenge. That's why there just happened to be a crashed plane in the junkyard on the flying machines episode and a bunch of working auto engines in the power pullers episode. The point is to see how the teams come up with solutions to the problems, not to make them play MacGyver.
-Mars
Oddly, I came away with the impression that Jane was a fairly sophisticated user, someone who knew enough to worry about the security concerns inherent in running your workstation as a firewall.
-Mars
Who are you to say who should be allowed to fuck whom, and on what schedule they should be able to do it?
What's the difference between you, sounding off on your opinions about sexuality, and some religious conservative demanding abstinence until marriage? Bully for you if you can stick to your code of ethics, but you have no business lecturing the rest of us.
It just takes a little bit of common sense, which most humans don't seem to have.
Bullshit. Human beings are built to fuck. It's part of who we are, it's part of being a living organism. Sexual diseases and unwanted pregnancies are unfortunate, sad, and inevitable; avoiding them takes knowledge, willpower, and a cultural context that is by no means universal. Do you have any idea how recent the idea that sex can kill you really is? How can another way to prevent disease be anything but a step forward?
Your attitude toward rape is sickening. Learn some compassion.
-Mars
Even those of us with fancy nice-paying jobs don't necessarily have $135 for a 256MB DIMM.
This sort of thing has been done with hard drives for ages, and it's about time someone did it with RAM. Reminds me of that supercomputer some bunch of Hewlett Packard engineers built out of defective processors.
-Mars
Brilliant idea! But we haven't gone far enough. Let's borrow a trillion dollars and go to Mars - next year. Why not max out all the governmental credit cards, all over the world, and do everything we can, all at once? After all, we've got forever to pay for it...
-Mars
"A virii" is incorrect, and sounds silly to boot.
"Virus" is the singular.
"Viruses" is the plural.
Don't try to latinize the plural, as the original word had no plural. "Virus" and its plural, in the senses in which we use them, are English words that behave according to English rules of grammar.
I'm sorry to be a grammar cop, but this mistake bugs the hell out of me, and your post is an unusually bad example. Aside from that, it was funny.
-Mars
The police did not make those laws, they enforce them.
You're right, of course. I wasn't trying to imply that the arrests were made on police whim. The phrase "morality cops" was a metaphorical reference to the people who think the drug laws are a good idea, not to the people whose job it is to enforce said laws.
There seems to be quite a bit of overlap, of course.
-Mars
I love DSL. I'm completely sold. It would take insane levels of compensation to convince me to move somewhere without DSL access.
I have had nothing but good experiences with DSL. Granted, I've only used two providers - but experiences with both have been everything I could hope for.
Cable modem? What's a cable modem?
-Mars
I don't have the depth of experience to say whether this is a temporary state - this campaign vs the others - or really the way things are going to stay, but Katz' description sounds pretty accurate to me.
The U.S. political system increasingly resembles a three year old swinging a chainsaw.
The real exchanges of ideas and opinions, the real shifts in thought, are taking place on the 'net and in the burgeoning global protest movement - a movement enabled, one might even say created, by the arrival of the 'net as an omnipresent utility.
Bush and Gore are spending all their time whining about the high cost of prescription drugs, the sad state of public education, and a couple of other things I can't remember. The reporters who cover them are spending all their time sniping about this or that campaign tactic and don't seem to think there is anything more going on than a complicated public relations campaign.
They're right, of course: the candidates are using irrelevant made-up "issues" to joust and spar and make each other look bad. Where's the discussion about the sanity of putting 1.5 million people in jail for possessing substances the morality cops don't like? Who's talking about the morally bankrupt foreign policy of guns, bombs, dirty tricks and lies? Why won't either of these guys talk about the fact that three out of every four Americans is making the same or less money now than before this new miracle economy began, much less suggest something to do about it? Why won't either of them point out that the general has no clothes, and demand an end to the insane levels of military spending relative to the actual threat? (Do they really think the U.S. needs to be able to fight off the entire rest of the planet, at once? Do they know something I don't?) Why won't they address the economic and labour injustices perpetrated by the policies of the WTO & World Bank and the US' participation in those organizations?
Do they not realize that these conversations are all happening, and they're missing out on the chance to be relevant by ignoring them? Do they not realize that we're all busy deciding for ourselves what's going on?
-Mars
Of course she's going to lose. That's the point. When the record company fights her suit, all their rhetoric about "protecting the artists" will fall apart, because it will become obvious that it's the record company's profits they're protecting.
Love has a really nice position here, because if she wins, Universal loses the entire hundred million when thousands of other musicians join the dogpile and sue for their piece. If she loses, the entire premise for the suit against MP3 falls apart, and Universal will be revealed (to the accompaniment of lots of press) as the greedy, scum-sucking bastards they really are.
Either way, Universal loses, and Courtney Love increases her heap of cred.
-Mars