Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is one of my biggest pet peeves about breast cancer awareness.
I think the risk of prostate cancer is higher by a considerable margin. A quick Googling for information got me: 18% for prostate cancer, 14.3% for breast cancer. Plus, how many more men die from it because they leave it untreated?
As one previous poster noted, Prostate Cancer Awareness Month was September. Not a great sign for your awareness-month when nobody knows when it is.
I demand picture-in-picture to make this worth my while! That way I can watch "The Matrix," "Go," "Fight Club," and "Neon Genesis Evangelion" at the same time.
Not that I'd want to, but controlling the power of an attention-deficit grenade would be pretty sweet.
Yes, Sams body leaps with him, the fact he looks like other people makes this statement a bit odd but I remember the time when he leaped in to a man who had lost his legs... but he could walk on his invisible legs...
They played fast and loose with this rule, as the mood struck them. I remember the leap in question (Season 5, special guest star: Jennifer Aniston, pre-Friends), but there was a leap in one of the earlier season where he leapt into a pregnant woman and there was concern that Sam would have to give birth.
But, it does seem they have a workaround in place for extending the series - Sam's daughter (sired in the three-parter) tries to find her father.
Whether or not it actually gets made is another story. Apparently SciFi commissioned a miniseries on the premise after the BG miniseries was a hit, but nothing seems to have come of it.
So he just keeps leaping...as the number of leaps approaches infinity, the probablility that he'll do what I want approaches 1. I win!
(This, of course, assumes he has an infinite lifespan.)
(And yes, I did remember the final episode, but I'm one of those people to whom Quantum Leap: Prelude is dedicated; those who believe he will return home. Oh yes, I am a QL fanboy.)
Dr. Sam Beckett did this back in 1996. He used these circuits to create a senient computer named Ziggy, who in turn helped him design a time travel machine.
Then:
Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator - and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that are not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on his journey is Al, an observer from his own time who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so, Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hopin g each time that his next leap will be the leap home.
Hopefully, before he gets home, he'll leap into someone around my teenaged self and teach him/me about girls, and then I'll never have been able to type that from memory.
It's quite apparent what I'm arguing with, despite sage advice to the contrary from Ben Franklin.
And no, what you're talking about is not painfully obvious, it's painfully convoluted and poorly presented. You've uttered nothing but gibberish for two inexplicably long posts, and when I bothered to call you on it, you have nothing to say in your defense.
That silence says more than either of your tirades.
Yes, and if what I was doing was counting how long it had been since 1965, then that'd be a big error on my part. If, on the other hand, you try reading in context, you might realize that I wasn't in fact talking about today at all.
...
That's why I got the 52.3 number which you don't seem to understand - I actually looked at outputs, and I actually did a line of best fit.
So you're saying that you looked at power output of existing fusion devices, and based on the rate of increase in that figure since 1965, came up with the figure 52.3 years for when they can produce plasma for 400s.
Power output in mW from a fusion reactor does not equal length of time it produces plasma. They're certainly correlated, but assuming one-to-one correlation is a bit of a stretch.
There are other things than exponential and linear....all of which you threw completely out of the picture when you said "Generally you want to stick to linear when something has been linear throughout the vast bulk of its existence".
So, there's a four year gap before they even got the pinch working.
And this four years is of note why? If no plasma was produced during those four years, they lay outside the scope of the conversation. As for loving or hating that tidbit, I'm indifferent.
Yes. Simple, completely invented math.
Let's rephrase part of the problem this way:
How many doublings it would take to reach 400s = x: 28.6 * 2^x = 400
2^x = 400/28.6
x = log-base-two(400/28.6)
The logarithm is a widely accepted mathematical tool. Kind of like you, except for the "mathematical" and "widely accepted" parts.
The equation itself does exactly what I promised it would - find out how long it would take to produce plasma for 400s if you assume that the rate of plasma production will continue to double every two years. Then I qualified my result, because I know it's unreasonable to expect that. However, I do think it's going to be closer to 7 years than it will be to 50.
Which is what I said.
That's why I gave those examples you conveniently clipped away.
I "conveniently clipped away" a bunch of assinine blather:
"gas consumption should fall off as the fifth logarithm if usage" - Fifth logartithm? Is that (log(log(log(log(log(x))))) or log-base-five(x) or log(x)/5 or (log(x))^5? And what does gas consumption have to do with predicting how long it will take them to produce plasma for 400s?
"we'll discover oil fields as a stepwise linear expansion of current capacity" - Great. Again, how does this help me approximate at which future point they'll be able to produce plasma for 400s?
"France's population will zero right away." - With their odiferous cheeses and their choice in sex symbols (Gerard Depardieu?!?), I don't doubt it. But zero is the only thing remotely mathematical about that statement, both in it's usage and as a measurement of relevance to the conversation.
"you'd be much better advised to look at it as an order ten polynomial" - At least this gives us something to work with. It's too reliant on the precision of existing data, though. Now if you take a few of your initial points to determine a rough approximation of your coefficients, and adjust those coefficients based on the error in predicting each of the subsequent points in your data set, then you might have something there.
While you're busy doing that, I'll content myself with my quick-and-admittedly-dirty approximation, which I find to be good enough for Slashdot purposes.
If you go by the progress rate of existing fusion devices starting from 1965, it goes right back to 50 years (52.3 specifically, but who's counting?)
2006 - 1965 = 41 years.
If we're calling the last period an anomaly, and indeed it was simply linear progression from 1965 to 2004, it was only 39 years (2004 - 1965), and they only got 0.36667s a year. I would be willing to bet (and I would love to see the data that disproves this) that when the research first started the scientists involved got milli- or microseconds of production, and that the rate at which the time-of-production increases is itself increasing.
People like you are why I think we should require a license to use statistics.
What in the holy name of fuck are you talking about? I used simple math to derive that equation, and I did it like so:
(Time to double) x (How many doublings it would take to reach 400s) = Expected time to reach 400s
How many doublings it would take to reach 400s = log-base-two(400s / Current record)
Then I used base-conversion so that Google Calculator would work. That's all.
Generally you want to stick to linear when something has been linear throughout the vast bulk of its existence
Again, I'd love to see the data that supports that statement. Or, like everything else in your post, is that full of shit too?
Let's see, 400 seconds - 28.6 seconds.... works out to about 50 years.
If you assume that they'll only be able to increase the time linearly, then yes, it's about fifty years.
If you assume that they'll be able to keep refining the technology and keep doubling the time every two years, then we're only looking at 7.6118259 [2*log(400/28.6)/log(2)] years.
It's probably somewhere in between that, though I'd guess toward the lower end. (As they keep getting closer, more attention will be given to the problem, etc.)
No, Micros 9700 (purchased new about 18 months ago) uses SCO's Vision product for all of the back-end reports and GUIs. (Another hotel I worked at (five years ago, true) used the 8700, which was all about SCO.)
As for the KISS-compliance thing, we did have an upgrade that encompassed that, but we were also upgrading to multi-property (Opera was chosen before any other property was in the works), so it wasn't like anything was forced on us. Nor at the hotel that used the 8700. Nor the hotel before that that ran various Fidelios for a decade, just like the other 600+ hotels owned by that company (Starwood, if you must know). The point is, if Micros-Fidelio had tried to force an upgrade on these folks, I'd probably have heard about it working in the accounting office as I do/did.
I was not using my response to endorse Opera; I was taking issue with what I perceived to be unfair criticism of Micros-Fidelio, as I would think you might appreciate, seeing as you sell their product. If you read my actual respose to the 'Ask Slashdot', you'd notice that I recommend finding an older version of Fidelio (I'd not heard of Fidelio Express), because Opera would be overkill and requires an Oracle license.
I know. It just pisses me off when somebody knee-jerks a response like "This is a geek forum; only geek stuff here" and doesn't seem to realize that geeks sometimes choose other professions.
If you can find a used Fidelio 4 system anywhere, I'd recommend that. DOS-based (think Borland IDE), and configurable as all hell.
Failing that, if you can find a Fidelio 7 system, try that. It's Windows-based and a bit finicky, but basically the DOS-based Fidelio with a GUI and uses SQL instead of dbIII.
Opera, the current incarnation of Fidelio, would be overkill for your needs. (And requires an Oracle license.)
You mean Micros-Fidelio. I can vouch that their support is a little bit shaky, but I've never heard of them trying to force an install or upgrade on anybody who didn't want it.
Their latest system, Opera, is pretty cool. It's written in Java and run from a standard web server (in our case, on the intranet). I haven't had time to test this theory, but I'd be willing to bet that it would work just fine on a standard Linux box with Java and Samba installed.
Micros, the restaurant software, is pure crap. The back-of-house software requires SCO Vision to run.:/
It was a reasonable piece of kit for the time, but the fact remains it was a 'sweet peice of gaming machine' because of the games that were on it.
Wrong, and dead-on. The SNES was woefully underpowered next to the Genesis, TurboGrafx, Jaguar, etc. That Nintendo made intelligent design decisions to make games playable on the SNES, and leveraged their success with the 8-bit NES to lure in players and developers to begin with, made it a sweet gaming platform.
What Nintendo has always understood (Virtual Boy aside for a moment) is that the gameplay is really the most important element. That's why experiments like the DS worked. That's why the GameCube was routinely profitable, even though it was an also-ran in the marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is one of my biggest pet peeves about breast cancer awareness.
I think the risk of prostate cancer is higher by a considerable margin. A quick Googling for information got me: 18% for prostate cancer, 14.3% for breast cancer. Plus, how many more men die from it because they leave it untreated?
As one previous poster noted, Prostate Cancer Awareness Month was September. Not a great sign for your awareness-month when nobody knows when it is.
I thought they were just patrolling the information superhighway.
Heh heh..you kow...because people used to call it that.
I give up.
I demand picture-in-picture to make this worth my while! That way I can watch "The Matrix," "Go," "Fight Club," and "Neon Genesis Evangelion" at the same time.
Not that I'd want to, but controlling the power of an attention-deficit grenade would be pretty sweet.
Not to mention, the iFold...
which were showcased in some jewel Street Fighter based game
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, which had anime-ish versions of characters from SF2 and Dark Stalkers.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things. ...covered in hot grits.
I, for one, welcome our new Natalie-Portman-avatarred overlords.
That explains your use of GOTO!
And you can't cancel (change) your fingerprint if someone finds out what it is.
Quoth Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club:
"They're inside burning their fingerprints off with lye. The smell is terrible."
A little more painful than cutting up a credit cArd, granted. At least to some people.
I do that with my laptop, but then I always have to reset the clock.
Jimmy LaMotta! Excellent point!
He had those problems the first time, but the second time he leapt in, he was much too concerned with the doings of the Evil Leaper to be affected.
Yes, Sams body leaps with him, the fact he looks like other people makes this statement a bit odd but I remember the time when he leaped in to a man who had lost his legs ... but he could walk on his invisible legs...
They played fast and loose with this rule, as the mood struck them. I remember the leap in question (Season 5, special guest star: Jennifer Aniston, pre-Friends), but there was a leap in one of the earlier season where he leapt into a pregnant woman and there was concern that Sam would have to give birth.
I know. :(
But, it does seem they have a workaround in place for extending the series - Sam's daughter (sired in the three-parter) tries to find her father.
Whether or not it actually gets made is another story. Apparently SciFi commissioned a miniseries on the premise after the BG miniseries was a hit, but nothing seems to have come of it.
So he just keeps leaping...as the number of leaps approaches infinity, the probablility that he'll do what I want approaches 1. I win!
(This, of course, assumes he has an infinite lifespan.)
(And yes, I did remember the final episode, but I'm one of those people to whom Quantum Leap: Prelude is dedicated; those who believe he will return home. Oh yes, I am a QL fanboy.)
Dr. Sam Beckett did this back in 1996. He used these circuits to create a senient computer named Ziggy, who in turn helped him design a time travel machine.
Then:
Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator - and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that are not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on his journey is Al, an observer from his own time who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so, Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hopin g each time that his next leap will be the leap home.
Hopefully, before he gets home, he'll leap into someone around my teenaged self and teach him/me about girls, and then I'll never have been able to type that from memory.
It's quite apparent what I'm arguing with, despite sage advice to the contrary from Ben Franklin.
And no, what you're talking about is not painfully obvious, it's painfully convoluted and poorly presented. You've uttered nothing but gibberish for two inexplicably long posts, and when I bothered to call you on it, you have nothing to say in your defense.
That silence says more than either of your tirades.
...
That's why I got the 52.3 number which you don't seem to understand - I actually looked at outputs, and I actually did a line of best fit.
So you're saying that you looked at power output of existing fusion devices, and based on the rate of increase in that figure since 1965, came up with the figure 52.3 years for when they can produce plasma for 400s.
Power output in mW from a fusion reactor does not equal length of time it produces plasma. They're certainly correlated, but assuming one-to-one correlation is a bit of a stretch.
There are other things than exponential and linear.
So, there's a four year gap before they even got the pinch working.
And this four years is of note why? If no plasma was produced during those four years, they lay outside the scope of the conversation. As for loving or hating that tidbit, I'm indifferent.
Yes. Simple, completely invented math.
Let's rephrase part of the problem this way:
The logarithm is a widely accepted mathematical tool. Kind of like you, except for the "mathematical" and "widely accepted" parts.
The equation itself does exactly what I promised it would - find out how long it would take to produce plasma for 400s if you assume that the rate of plasma production will continue to double every two years. Then I qualified my result, because I know it's unreasonable to expect that. However, I do think it's going to be closer to 7 years than it will be to 50.
Which is what I said.
That's why I gave those examples you conveniently clipped away.
I "conveniently clipped away" a bunch of assinine blather:
"gas consumption should fall off as the fifth logarithm if usage" - Fifth logartithm? Is that (log(log(log(log(log(x))))) or log-base-five(x) or log(x)/5 or (log(x))^5? And what does gas consumption have to do with predicting how long it will take them to produce plasma for 400s?
"we'll discover oil fields as a stepwise linear expansion of current capacity" - Great. Again, how does this help me approximate at which future point they'll be able to produce plasma for 400s?
"France's population will zero right away." - With their odiferous cheeses and their choice in sex symbols (Gerard Depardieu?!?), I don't doubt it. But zero is the only thing remotely mathematical about that statement, both in it's usage and as a measurement of relevance to the conversation.
"you'd be much better advised to look at it as an order ten polynomial" - At least this gives us something to work with. It's too reliant on the precision of existing data, though. Now if you take a few of your initial points to determine a rough approximation of your coefficients, and adjust those coefficients based on the error in predicting each of the subsequent points in your data set, then you might have something there.
While you're busy doing that, I'll content myself with my quick-and-admittedly-dirty approximation, which I find to be good enough for Slashdot purposes.
blah blah fusion blah 1951 blah declassified blah blah
Aside from you, who's talking about fusion? The 400s figure that both the OP and I quoted is the length of time they'd want to produce plasma for.
(yeah, I know I said 1965 before; remember, I wasn't talking about the history of fusion like you pretended I was)
I
If you go by the progress rate of existing fusion devices starting from 1965, it goes right back to 50 years (52.3 specifically, but who's counting?)
2006 - 1965 = 41 years.
If we're calling the last period an anomaly, and indeed it was simply linear progression from 1965 to 2004, it was only 39 years (2004 - 1965), and they only got 0.36667s a year. I would be willing to bet (and I would love to see the data that disproves this) that when the research first started the scientists involved got milli- or microseconds of production, and that the rate at which the time-of-production increases is itself increasing.
People like you are why I think we should require a license to use statistics.
What in the holy name of fuck are you talking about? I used simple math to derive that equation, and I did it like so:
(Time to double) x (How many doublings it would take to reach 400s) = Expected time to reach 400s
How many doublings it would take to reach 400s = log-base-two(400s / Current record)
Then I used base-conversion so that Google Calculator would work. That's all.
Generally you want to stick to linear when something has been linear throughout the vast bulk of its existence
Again, I'd love to see the data that supports that statement. Or, like everything else in your post, is that full of shit too?
Let's see, 400 seconds - 28.6 seconds .... works out to about 50 years.
If you assume that they'll only be able to increase the time linearly, then yes, it's about fifty years.
If you assume that they'll be able to keep refining the technology and keep doubling the time every two years, then we're only looking at 7.6118259 [2*log(400/28.6)/log(2)] years.
It's probably somewhere in between that, though I'd guess toward the lower end. (As they keep getting closer, more attention will be given to the problem, etc.)
now understanding which product you were refering to. *shudder*
Agreed on the quantity of ass it sucks. That's why the new property is eschewing Micros for their POS and using Aloha.
No, Micros 9700 (purchased new about 18 months ago) uses SCO's Vision product for all of the back-end reports and GUIs. (Another hotel I worked at (five years ago, true) used the 8700, which was all about SCO.)
As for the KISS-compliance thing, we did have an upgrade that encompassed that, but we were also upgrading to multi-property (Opera was chosen before any other property was in the works), so it wasn't like anything was forced on us. Nor at the hotel that used the 8700. Nor the hotel before that that ran various Fidelios for a decade, just like the other 600+ hotels owned by that company (Starwood, if you must know). The point is, if Micros-Fidelio had tried to force an upgrade on these folks, I'd probably have heard about it working in the accounting office as I do/did.
I was not using my response to endorse Opera; I was taking issue with what I perceived to be unfair criticism of Micros-Fidelio, as I would think you might appreciate, seeing as you sell their product. If you read my actual respose to the 'Ask Slashdot', you'd notice that I recommend finding an older version of Fidelio (I'd not heard of Fidelio Express), because Opera would be overkill and requires an Oracle license.
I know. It just pisses me off when somebody knee-jerks a response like "This is a geek forum; only geek stuff here" and doesn't seem to realize that geeks sometimes choose other professions.
If you can find a used Fidelio 4 system anywhere, I'd recommend that. DOS-based (think Borland IDE), and configurable as all hell.
Failing that, if you can find a Fidelio 7 system, try that. It's Windows-based and a bit finicky, but basically the DOS-based Fidelio with a GUI and uses SQL instead of dbIII.
Opera, the current incarnation of Fidelio, would be overkill for your needs. (And requires an Oracle license.)
You mean Micros-Fidelio. I can vouch that their support is a little bit shaky, but I've never heard of them trying to force an install or upgrade on anybody who didn't want it.
:/
Their latest system, Opera, is pretty cool. It's written in Java and run from a standard web server (in our case, on the intranet). I haven't had time to test this theory, but I'd be willing to bet that it would work just fine on a standard Linux box with Java and Samba installed.
Micros, the restaurant software, is pure crap. The back-of-house software requires SCO Vision to run.
I've worked in hotels for over ten years, and I have a Slashdot ID not too much higher than yours...
It was a reasonable piece of kit for the time, but the fact remains it was a 'sweet peice of gaming machine' because of the games that were on it.
Wrong, and dead-on. The SNES was woefully underpowered next to the Genesis, TurboGrafx, Jaguar, etc. That Nintendo made intelligent design decisions to make games playable on the SNES, and leveraged their success with the 8-bit NES to lure in players and developers to begin with, made it a sweet gaming platform.
What Nintendo has always understood (Virtual Boy aside for a moment) is that the gameplay is really the most important element. That's why experiments like the DS worked. That's why the GameCube was routinely profitable, even though it was an also-ran in the marketplace.