I have one of the HP PSC 700-series all-in-one printers and the scans are pretty bad, but even within manufacturers it can probably vary dramatically from model to model.
If scan quality matters, perhaps looking on a domain-specific review site would get you more information than Slashdot.
My contenders for good "starting" language would be: 1. CommonLisp with CLOS: Advantage: Simple, Gets to the core of what programming is, OO concepts, much less room for errors Disadvantage: Somewhat obscure, "fun" games harder to create
2. SmallTalk Advantage: Powerful and well-structured language, has influenced a generation of languages (Objective C, Java, C#, etc.), kind of the Latin of modern languages Disadvantage: Somewhat obscure, student will be spoiled for all other lesser languages:)
3. C++ Advantage: Very common in industry, contains rudimentary OO structure, can program "fun" games and such Disadvantage: Will have to re-learn some OO for Java and other better OO languages, syntax can be nightmareish.
4. Objective C++ Advantage: Solid OO foundation, can program fun stuff especially on Macintoshes, on Macintosh can use visual layout and design Disadvantage: Syntax is fairly obscure compared to other modern languages, supported best on Macintosh which you might not have
I like the idea of digital books (especially if you can grep them!), I don't mind the DRM (if people will copy a $0.99 song they'll copy a $50 book), but the expiration thing is a show-stopper. I've referenced my best old textbooks many times since leaving school, and can't really imagine buying one that I know will "disintigrate" in 5 months. "Free" would be too expensive for such a book-- I'd rather buy a full-priced one that I could keep.
A Cessna makes a very bad terrorist delivery vehicle. It can carry a few hundred pounds, including the pilot, of payload. It flies slow, and weighs little (less than a Honda Civic.) Any serious money spent protecting against Cessnas is money wasted.
By the way, the worst thing you could do, IMHO, if you were in the Capitol building and a Cessna just violated Washington's restricted airspace is to leave the building. No way that Cessna is penetrating beyond a windowed office. Just go to an inside corridor and read a book until it's over.
Oh, and not for nothing, you can teach science, but you cannot teach creativity.
I don't believe this, myself. Nor do I believe that scientists are inherently uncreative (or at least any more so than semi-established script-writers.)
That said, there are plenty of Christians - educated ones I might add - who are Creationists and take offense to schools teaching evolution as scientific fact.
Scientists should take issue with this, too, since there is no such thing as a "scientific fact". There are only hypotheses, theories, and observations in science. Evolution is a theory that has withstood vast numbers of observations, and is therefore considered a very good model for reality.
Other scientific "theories" are that the Earth is round, that the Earth rotates on its axis and around the Sun, that the moon orbits the Earth, that matter is made of atoms, that gravity pulls things down, etc. They are all "only theories".
Perhaps, but while Einstein asserted early-on that "God doesn't play dice with the Universe", it appears that in a natural selection paradigm, God ONLY plays dice with the Universe. It does limit the extent to which God has historically affected Earthly progression-- from infinite possibilities to ones where any of His changes stem from earlier steps and are limited by geographic movement and ancestory. I think some religious types find that thought abhorrent.
Creationism is fine in philosophy, social studies, or religious studies as a demonstration and comparison of creation myths.
Intelligent Design has no purpose. It's an attempt to wrap Creationism in a pseudo-science shell and create the appearance of a "debate" when there is no debate.
Two full X,Y planes-- it's like having a trackball under your middle finger-- plus pressing the "scrollball" and squeezing the mouse...
That's 4 axes of motion and 3 buttons... all in the most elegant package I've seen a mouse be in. I want one.
Mind you, this is not the mouse you give grandma. This is the mouse you give your MechWarrior-playing buddies so they can one-hand manipulate torso and leg motions while firing both lasers and rockets...
"Unfortunately, many people (many of them calling themselves scientists) would argue that 'its a waste of time' because 'obviously intelligent design is just wrong'. Not very scientific eh."
You are obviously very unfamiliar with the arguments to keep Intelligent Design out of science classes. "Right" and "wrong," as concepts, are topics for religion, not science. Science is about "supported" and "unsupported" by evidence. I haven't heard scientists say it's "just wrong", I've heard them say its unscientific. Even if Intelligent Design is 100% correct, it would STILL be unscientific-- it would just show that science is unable to explain everything.
There are no "facts" in science, only observations and conclusions. Every testable explanation is a "theory", so saying something is "only a theory" is the scientific equivalent of saying something is "only an explanation that can be tested". Casting intentional doubt on science for the sole purpose of promoting religion is really hurting this country, I think.
The bottom line is that Intelligent Design is not "falsifiable"-- there is no experiment you can use to discredit it, since any result of any experiment can be explained by saying "God/Aliens wanted it that way." You say that the "true scientist withholds judgement until the experiments have been done," which is a good sentiment. However, now that vast numbers of experiments/observations HAVE been done, many scientists are justified in defending evolution. And if anyone ever comes up with an experiment that can be done to support/discredit Intelligent Design, it would be a boon to science to perform the experiment, and I'm sure it would make headlines on Slashdot.
I'm curious if a hybrid car changes this equation at all. In stop-and-go city driving, if you can recover up to half of the gas energy in the form of electricity, would it be more efficient to drive the peltier off the battery, or the A/C compressor off the engine?
No, employment. The farming companies go into high-gear as soon as one of these exploits are found, and hire a zillion temp workers to do as much of the duping, the money laundering, and the selling as possible before Blizzard can shut it down.
By the time Blizzard can track this stuff, only the "armchair warrior" type dupers will have their stuff taken away. The Chinese farming companies will have transferred the money ten times and converted it to cash already.
From the article: "I think it's a question of motivation," added Schindler, "and...what's the benefit for the company [...]"
That's the real question, even though that quote was almost an afterthought late in the article. What *is* the motivation for IBM to spend millions of dollars to do the cleanup, legal, and technical steps necessary to open-source OS/2? What possible return on investment could it bring IBM? That money is much better spent creating a better transition path to linux and on linux support and development projects.
On a recent trip to Toronto, I discovered that one side effect of NAFTA appears to be Canadian Coke with high fructose corn syrup. Mexico can't be far behind, if it hasn't switched already.
Any networking system that can't accommodate the billion PCs currently in existence (none of which have the hardware in question) is doomed. Either there would be a dongle, PC Card, or some other solution that the Mac could use, or the technology would become irrelevent quickly.
Microsoft does not have a good track record in creating network systems/protocols that operate outside their own limited domain, and I wouldn't expect this one to be any different and certainly nothing Apple is going to bet the farm on.
No, I'm pretty sure Apple is switching because Intel CPU+chipsets are cheaper, faster, cooler, and come in never-ending supply.
Let's not get crazy. Apple had patented a bunch of very specific UI paradigms, that they sued Microsoft over. The suit was lost by Apple largely over a technicality in which a contract signed between the two companies was deemed to have granted Microsoft the rights to use the patents. The suit did shake out certain UI patent issues (such as the patentability of "look and feel" apart from specific, individual user interface elements,) but if your assertion were true, Apple would still have been able to sue the X Windows creators, GEOS, etc.
It seems to me that the more "waste heat" a process produces, the more potential it has as a power source once fully developed. Any differential in temperature produced by a process can, in general, be turned into power.
And a not-well-known fact is that burning coal is slightly radioactive to the atmosphere as well.
"Hello, I am a Nigerian 'phishing' hacker who steals money. But I have no way to withdraw the money from the accounts I've collected. I will give you an account number containing $50,000 in exchange for $1000 pre-paid into my account. Once I verify the money is in my account, you will receive instructions for how to access the $50,000."
It's funny, I've recently been re-reading H. G. Wells' stories "A Story of the Days to Come", "When the Sleeper Wakes", and "The Time Machine", all written in the late 1890's. It's fascinating reading someone 5 years before the Wright brothers flew writing about what air to air combat might be like. And many of his stories about city life are obviously the basis for the writings of Isaac Asimov and others.
Interestingly, of his stories of 100-200 years in the future, a substantial portion appears to have come true already. In other writers' stories from 50 years or so ago about the present day, a lot of it hasn't come true. And stories 20 years ago about today, almost none of it. It's funny that one could predict 100 years in the future easier than 20 years in the future. Perhaps we need to get a little MORE speculative about our science fiction's horizons, not less.
As for the "hard science fiction" writers, obviously it's great that things like geosynchronous satellites were "invented" by science fiction writers and thus couldn't be patented by business, but in general if you limit SF to the science we know today, it seems awfully limiting. Even if H. G. Wells didn't believe a time machine would ever be invented (obviously, in his story, only one person in history ever had one, so he wasn't saying it was ubiquitous,) it was a great vehicle through which to explore his real thrust, which was the change of humanity over time. So including fantastical mechanisms in SF stories, I think, doesn't necessarily diminish the value of the story.
Photons do not "accelerate to the speed of light", as they cannot exist at a speed less than light.
Although Einstein's special and general theories of relativity specify that mass can't accelerate to the speed of light from the point of view of an outside observer, the real limitation is that information cannot be transmitted faster than light. Or, that if it can, all current understanding of physics, from conservation of energy to causality, is violated. Since the dawn of science, we haven't had to throw out ALL of physics yet, and I think most scientists agree that it's unlikely we will in the future, either.
"[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] is a galactic bestseller everywhere except on that backward planet Earth, where they still think digital watches are 'A pretty neat idea'.""
Then think up a new term than "intellectual property," but the concept is solid. Anything that requires substantial investment to develop and has value to people should have a system whereby that investment can be recouped. While I agree current US law has gone a little too far, saying that "intellectual property" as a general concept is bad isn't helpful. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the countries that allow invention to be rewarded in this manner are the ones that tend to do better.
As for US currency vs. gold... what's so special about gold? It's just another method of allocating and accounting for allotments of a percentage of a total valuation. We have computers for that now. Attaching it to the rarity of an abritrary element instead of its value as judged by the world market seems stupid, to me. If gold is sufficiently useful/shiny, pay money for it, but don't link its price to currencies.
My previous employer was Align Technology, Inc. ("those invisible plastic braces"). This guy sounds like he looked at what they were doing years ago and wrote a book about it. They can scan hundreds of molds a day, and probably output over 20,000 aligners a day, each a unique rigid 3D plastic shell that's accurate to less than 0.1mm in all three dimensions, then cut exactly along the gumline according to a precise algorithm, sanitized, and packaged.
Anyone interested in this stuff would probably get a kick out of the Quicktime manufacturing video they did a couple years ago. It briefly goes over being able to scan a 3D mold extremely accurately and quickly, model the dentition on 3D workstations and build a case, make the aligners, cut them out of the mold, and package them.
I believe I heard while I was there that, at the time, they had more 3D Stereolithography machines on-site than any other facility in the world. One of my jobs there was to help write the distributed computing system that processes the 3D data on a rack of servers to prepare them for manufacture. It's incredible how much data you can churn in a day.
Although the materials are as expensive as the machines these days, I agree with him that it's all becoming very accessible. There's no fundamental barriers, so far, anywhere near this technology... it's all down to getting people to come up with applications that will drive early adopters (like Align,) and getting people to write the software that will drive these machines to do EXACTLY what you want, which is tricky stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I have one of the HP PSC 700-series all-in-one printers and the scans are pretty bad, but even within manufacturers it can probably vary dramatically from model to model.
If scan quality matters, perhaps looking on a domain-specific review site would get you more information than Slashdot.
That article, was difficult, to read, between all the, commas.
My contenders for good "starting" language would be:
:)
1. CommonLisp with CLOS:
Advantage: Simple, Gets to the core of what programming is, OO concepts, much less room for errors
Disadvantage: Somewhat obscure, "fun" games harder to create
2. SmallTalk
Advantage: Powerful and well-structured language, has influenced a generation of languages (Objective C, Java, C#, etc.), kind of the Latin of modern languages
Disadvantage: Somewhat obscure, student will be spoiled for all other lesser languages
3. C++
Advantage: Very common in industry, contains rudimentary OO structure, can program "fun" games and such
Disadvantage: Will have to re-learn some OO for Java and other better OO languages, syntax can be nightmareish.
4. Objective C++
Advantage: Solid OO foundation, can program fun stuff especially on Macintoshes, on Macintosh can use visual layout and design
Disadvantage: Syntax is fairly obscure compared to other modern languages, supported best on Macintosh which you might not have
I like the idea of digital books (especially if you can grep them!), I don't mind the DRM (if people will copy a $0.99 song they'll copy a $50 book), but the expiration thing is a show-stopper. I've referenced my best old textbooks many times since leaving school, and can't really imagine buying one that I know will "disintigrate" in 5 months. "Free" would be too expensive for such a book-- I'd rather buy a full-priced one that I could keep.
A Cessna makes a very bad terrorist delivery vehicle. It can carry a few hundred pounds, including the pilot, of payload. It flies slow, and weighs little (less than a Honda Civic.) Any serious money spent protecting against Cessnas is money wasted.
By the way, the worst thing you could do, IMHO, if you were in the Capitol building and a Cessna just violated Washington's restricted airspace is to leave the building. No way that Cessna is penetrating beyond a windowed office. Just go to an inside corridor and read a book until it's over.
Oh, and not for nothing, you can teach science, but you cannot teach creativity.
I don't believe this, myself. Nor do I believe that scientists are inherently uncreative (or at least any more so than semi-established script-writers.)
That said, there are plenty of Christians - educated ones I might add - who are Creationists and take offense to schools teaching evolution as scientific fact.
Scientists should take issue with this, too, since there is no such thing as a "scientific fact". There are only hypotheses, theories, and observations in science. Evolution is a theory that has withstood vast numbers of observations, and is therefore considered a very good model for reality.
Other scientific "theories" are that the Earth is round, that the Earth rotates on its axis and around the Sun, that the moon orbits the Earth, that matter is made of atoms, that gravity pulls things down, etc. They are all "only theories".
Perhaps, but while Einstein asserted early-on that "God doesn't play dice with the Universe", it appears that in a natural selection paradigm, God ONLY plays dice with the Universe. It does limit the extent to which God has historically affected Earthly progression-- from infinite possibilities to ones where any of His changes stem from earlier steps and are limited by geographic movement and ancestory. I think some religious types find that thought abhorrent.
Creationism is fine in philosophy, social studies, or religious studies as a demonstration and comparison of creation myths.
Intelligent Design has no purpose. It's an attempt to wrap Creationism in a pseudo-science shell and create the appearance of a "debate" when there is no debate.
Two full X,Y planes-- it's like having a trackball under your middle finger-- plus pressing the "scrollball" and squeezing the mouse...
That's 4 axes of motion and 3 buttons... all in the most elegant package I've seen a mouse be in. I want one.
Mind you, this is not the mouse you give grandma. This is the mouse you give your MechWarrior-playing buddies so they can one-hand manipulate torso and leg motions while firing both lasers and rockets...
"Unfortunately, many people (many of them calling themselves scientists) would argue that 'its a waste of time' because 'obviously intelligent design is just wrong'. Not very scientific eh."
You are obviously very unfamiliar with the arguments to keep Intelligent Design out of science classes. "Right" and "wrong," as concepts, are topics for religion, not science. Science is about "supported" and "unsupported" by evidence. I haven't heard scientists say it's "just wrong", I've heard them say its unscientific. Even if Intelligent Design is 100% correct, it would STILL be unscientific-- it would just show that science is unable to explain everything.
There are no "facts" in science, only observations and conclusions. Every testable explanation is a "theory", so saying something is "only a theory" is the scientific equivalent of saying something is "only an explanation that can be tested". Casting intentional doubt on science for the sole purpose of promoting religion is really hurting this country, I think.
The bottom line is that Intelligent Design is not "falsifiable"-- there is no experiment you can use to discredit it, since any result of any experiment can be explained by saying "God/Aliens wanted it that way." You say that the "true scientist withholds judgement until the experiments have been done," which is a good sentiment. However, now that vast numbers of experiments/observations HAVE been done, many scientists are justified in defending evolution. And if anyone ever comes up with an experiment that can be done to support/discredit Intelligent Design, it would be a boon to science to perform the experiment, and I'm sure it would make headlines on Slashdot.
I'm curious if a hybrid car changes this equation at all. In stop-and-go city driving, if you can recover up to half of the gas energy in the form of electricity, would it be more efficient to drive the peltier off the battery, or the A/C compressor off the engine?
No, employment. The farming companies go into high-gear as soon as one of these exploits are found, and hire a zillion temp workers to do as much of the duping, the money laundering, and the selling as possible before Blizzard can shut it down.
By the time Blizzard can track this stuff, only the "armchair warrior" type dupers will have their stuff taken away. The Chinese farming companies will have transferred the money ten times and converted it to cash already.
"and what does IBM have to lose?"
Money.
From the article: "I think it's a question of motivation," added Schindler, "and...what's the benefit for the company [...]"
That's the real question, even though that quote was almost an afterthought late in the article. What *is* the motivation for IBM to spend millions of dollars to do the cleanup, legal, and technical steps necessary to open-source OS/2? What possible return on investment could it bring IBM? That money is much better spent creating a better transition path to linux and on linux support and development projects.
On a recent trip to Toronto, I discovered that one side effect of NAFTA appears to be Canadian Coke with high fructose corn syrup. Mexico can't be far behind, if it hasn't switched already.
Any networking system that can't accommodate the billion PCs currently in existence (none of which have the hardware in question) is doomed. Either there would be a dongle, PC Card, or some other solution that the Mac could use, or the technology would become irrelevent quickly.
Microsoft does not have a good track record in creating network systems/protocols that operate outside their own limited domain, and I wouldn't expect this one to be any different and certainly nothing Apple is going to bet the farm on.
No, I'm pretty sure Apple is switching because Intel CPU+chipsets are cheaper, faster, cooler, and come in never-ending supply.
Let's not get crazy. Apple had patented a bunch of very specific UI paradigms, that they sued Microsoft over. The suit was lost by Apple largely over a technicality in which a contract signed between the two companies was deemed to have granted Microsoft the rights to use the patents. The suit did shake out certain UI patent issues (such as the patentability of "look and feel" apart from specific, individual user interface elements,) but if your assertion were true, Apple would still have been able to sue the X Windows creators, GEOS, etc.
It seems to me that the more "waste heat" a process produces, the more potential it has as a power source once fully developed. Any differential in temperature produced by a process can, in general, be turned into power.
And a not-well-known fact is that burning coal is slightly radioactive to the atmosphere as well.
It's all relative.
"Hello, I am a Nigerian 'phishing' hacker who steals money. But I have no way to withdraw the money from the accounts I've collected. I will give you an account number containing $50,000 in exchange for $1000 pre-paid into my account. Once I verify the money is in my account, you will receive instructions for how to access the $50,000."
It's funny, I've recently been re-reading H. G. Wells' stories "A Story of the Days to Come", "When the Sleeper Wakes", and "The Time Machine", all written in the late 1890's. It's fascinating reading someone 5 years before the Wright brothers flew writing about what air to air combat might be like. And many of his stories about city life are obviously the basis for the writings of Isaac Asimov and others.
Interestingly, of his stories of 100-200 years in the future, a substantial portion appears to have come true already. In other writers' stories from 50 years or so ago about the present day, a lot of it hasn't come true. And stories 20 years ago about today, almost none of it. It's funny that one could predict 100 years in the future easier than 20 years in the future. Perhaps we need to get a little MORE speculative about our science fiction's horizons, not less.
As for the "hard science fiction" writers, obviously it's great that things like geosynchronous satellites were "invented" by science fiction writers and thus couldn't be patented by business, but in general if you limit SF to the science we know today, it seems awfully limiting. Even if H. G. Wells didn't believe a time machine would ever be invented (obviously, in his story, only one person in history ever had one, so he wasn't saying it was ubiquitous,) it was a great vehicle through which to explore his real thrust, which was the change of humanity over time. So including fantastical mechanisms in SF stories, I think, doesn't necessarily diminish the value of the story.
Photons do not "accelerate to the speed of light", as they cannot exist at a speed less than light.
Although Einstein's special and general theories of relativity specify that mass can't accelerate to the speed of light from the point of view of an outside observer, the real limitation is that information cannot be transmitted faster than light. Or, that if it can, all current understanding of physics, from conservation of energy to causality, is violated. Since the dawn of science, we haven't had to throw out ALL of physics yet, and I think most scientists agree that it's unlikely we will in the future, either.
"[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] is a galactic bestseller everywhere except on that backward planet Earth, where they still think digital watches are 'A pretty neat idea'.""
Then think up a new term than "intellectual property," but the concept is solid. Anything that requires substantial investment to develop and has value to people should have a system whereby that investment can be recouped. While I agree current US law has gone a little too far, saying that "intellectual property" as a general concept is bad isn't helpful. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the countries that allow invention to be rewarded in this manner are the ones that tend to do better.
As for US currency vs. gold... what's so special about gold? It's just another method of allocating and accounting for allotments of a percentage of a total valuation. We have computers for that now. Attaching it to the rarity of an abritrary element instead of its value as judged by the world market seems stupid, to me. If gold is sufficiently useful/shiny, pay money for it, but don't link its price to currencies.
My previous employer was Align Technology, Inc. ("those invisible plastic braces"). This guy sounds like he looked at what they were doing years ago and wrote a book about it. They can scan hundreds of molds a day, and probably output over 20,000 aligners a day, each a unique rigid 3D plastic shell that's accurate to less than 0.1mm in all three dimensions, then cut exactly along the gumline according to a precise algorithm, sanitized, and packaged.
Anyone interested in this stuff would probably get a kick out of the Quicktime manufacturing video they did a couple years ago. It briefly goes over being able to scan a 3D mold extremely accurately and quickly, model the dentition on 3D workstations and build a case, make the aligners, cut them out of the mold, and package them.
I believe I heard while I was there that, at the time, they had more 3D Stereolithography machines on-site than any other facility in the world. One of my jobs there was to help write the distributed computing system that processes the 3D data on a rack of servers to prepare them for manufacture. It's incredible how much data you can churn in a day.
Although the materials are as expensive as the machines these days, I agree with him that it's all becoming very accessible. There's no fundamental barriers, so far, anywhere near this technology... it's all down to getting people to come up with applications that will drive early adopters (like Align,) and getting people to write the software that will drive these machines to do EXACTLY what you want, which is tricky stuff.
Actually, Apple hasn't decided yet. It sounds to me like the front-runner is EFI.
(The devkits will be BIOS, but that's apparently not the final word.)