That's a good point. I miss my old beeb. It was much more fun. So much so, I recently took to writing a partial emulator to help disassemble some of the old games to see the craziness involved in writing them. Well, I found it entertaining... the missus gave me a strange look and backed away when I explained it.
I wonder if in 30 years we'll be looking back at the iPad 2 and wondering how we managed to do anything with something so slow, restricted and clunky. And what will we be comparing it to? Back in my day we had touchscreens, none of this neural implant junk...
You could replace "Android" with "Java" in this story and you'll probably find you have a dupe of a story from 5-6 years ago.
I worked on Java apps for cell phones and ran into all sorts of incompatibilities between handsets. Problems ranged from fundamental differences like screen sizes, variations in what libraries are implemented or not, all the way down to slight differences in behavior of library calls. It seems that unless you have one hardware/software source, like Apple and the iPhone, you're going to come across and have to work around a ton of variations.
The ebook prices are ridiculous. I was tempted to download a book for the Kindle app on my ipod touch. Amazon cheerfully informed me the digital version was $9.99, the paperback was $7 new or around $2.50 used. What?! This is exactly the reason that I haven't bought an actual Kindle device.
I have a Philips DVD drive with a usb port, and was using a 1GB flash drive to play back video files copied from my PC. The drive failed relatively quickly - I'd had it for about a year, but hadn't used it all that often. I started to notice the video files were corrupt on playback, but initially suspected the file itself, or possibly a problem with the DVD player's decoder. I diagnosed the problem by copying a file onto the drive, then repeatedly checksumming it. The first couple of times, the checksum value would be often be correct, then on subsequent checks it would change on me. I'd end up seeing several different checksum values, never seeing it return to a previous value. Whether this was due to a problem in the interface harware when reading, or memory cells failing to retain their state, I don't know.
Even though it was a year old and I had no receipt, the manufacturer (Kingmax, I think?) was happy to send a free replacement. The new drive has seen much more use, but is still working fine.
Moving from the UK to the US, one of the things I miss is having an on/off switch on every electrical socket. It's much easier to flip a switch than have to pull/push plugs. I can also be sure a device is truly off, and not slowly leaching power like the umpteen power adapters I have.
I'd love to start replacing the outlets I have with switched varieties, but I haven't found anything yet. Either my google-fu is weak, or I'm searching for the wrong thing. Anyone know where I can find such a thing?
Yeah, pretty much. Here's a project that's attempting to create an entire universe in a similar fashion.
But don't think it's restricted to just landscapes and textures. Any content can potentially be generated procedurally - buildings, creatures, music, vehicles, whatever.
That's exactly what I thought when looking at the ESA Jules Verne ATV. Sent up unmanned, it automatically docks and you've got a pressurized extension to the ISS. After taking the contents, they loaded it up with trash, undocked it and burnt it up re-entering the atmosphere. What I can't understand is why not construct the station this way? Send up a whole stream of these automated vehicles to interconnect with each other - you wouldn't even need to send people up until there was a substantial station built.
As I understand it, this is exactly the problem. I don't think the lawyers are flying in just because they're producing Mac clones, but mainly because they're producing Mac clones badly. Poor quality, buggy systems, poor customer service and the (albeit unofficial) association with Apple - the net result being a negative impact on the Apple brand.
I can understand Apple being unhappy with the situation. There was a substantial delay between PsyStar announcing their plans and Apple unleashing the lawyers, which makes me wonder if Apple were waiting to see the results. If PsyStar had produced good quality computers with excellent support, maybe Apple would have looked the other way for longer.
It's been three years since I did any J2ME development, but there was a substantial amount of time devoted to compatibility problems. There was a wide variety of different screen resolutions and storage capacities, then all kinds of idiosyncrasies with how handsets handled screen refresh, button presses, or how they implemented (or didn't implement) various API features.
J2ME apps may run almost everywhere, but often the result was far from ideal without tinkering for individual handsets. Of course, this was a while ago. Maybe life is a little easier now!
As a parent, I also welcome any ratings scheme that discloses content that I may or may not deem appropriate for my child.
However, I think the concern is that the powers-that-be feel compelled to enforce a law for video games, whereas other media - e.g. films, tv, music, etc - operate under voluntary schemes. Either you legally enforce ratings on them all or you allow them all to continue with the voluntary ratings system. Singling out games, the latest media bogeyman, is just not right.
I kept running into problems with what seemed like our internet connection disappearing. At first, I assigned the blame on Time Warner, as their track record isn't exactly stunning. However, once I noticed that the admin page on the router would be either extremely slow or not responding at all, I realized the problem was with the router itself. I didn't understand exactly what was going wrong, though, but your explanation makes complete sense.
Someday they could build huge solar collecting towers at these points. I guess with the low gravity and lack of wind, they could build them much taller than is possible here on Earth. I'm imagining a future moon, bristling at each pole with multiple huge solar towers.
From what I've seen, there are clear similarities in the wording when comparing the resolutions from the different districts side by side. It's unlikely that they didn't all come up with these independently, at the same time. Is it clear yet if they were just working together on this, or are they all under direction of the Discovery Institute or some other creationist think tank?
They're a popular accessory for stargazers, as seen here. Obviously, shining them at people/aircraft is a bad thing, but I didn't think their proper use was illegal.
I think you've illustrated one of the common sticking points over which people have difficulty with evolution: the timescale. When you talk of "recorded history", you're probably referring to only the last few hundred years for which we have any really detailed studies of living animals. Changes in nature during that timescale are generally going to be small, easily dismissed as not meaningful. This doesn't mean that you can extrapolate out to tens of thousands or millions of years and say that all the changes are not meaningful and therefore the animal is unchanged. It's difficult to fully comprehend just how long these evolutionary timescales are. Tiny changes over large numbers of generations produce big changes.
Gills can absorb oxygen from air or water, but out of water the structures collapse and reduce the amount of oxygen absorbing surface area. Drying out also reduces the effectiveness in absorbing oxygen. In the previous example, there is a food source that requires the fish to leave water for short amounts of time. It follows that if any fish that can survive fractionally longer out of water than its peers, it stands a fractionally better chance at getting food that the others can't, and a fractionally better chance at surviving to produce offspring with the same ability. Maybe that fractional difference comes from slightly stronger, larger or differently shaped gills. Repeat for a million generations. Is it so inconceivable that a fish could adapt to breathing air? It's just not going to happen over a few generations, though.
I've jumped into astronomy/astrophotography this summer. This goes some way towards explaining the unusually wet weather here in Texas.
I spent $1k on a Celestron 6SE scope. It's big enough for me to get a reasonably good view of deep space objects as well as the planets, but small enough so it's not a major pain to lug around and set up. It has an electronic mount that provides fairly easy auto-alignment and a substantial database to help me find and identify objects in the sky, which I think is great for a beginner.
I spent maybe around $100 on connecting rings and cables to attach my Canon 20D DSLR camera. Obviously, adding the cost of the camera itself blows the $1k total budget.
Here's some of the things I found:
Set up can take a while. I usually run a power cable down the back yard so I'm not at the mercy of 8xAA batteries in the scope in the dark. The automatic alignment (point it at three bright stars and it figures out the rest) works best when the scope is perfectly horizontal, so lots of adjusting the tripod legs and checking the spirit level. Also, the mount time/date setting recalls what the time/date was last set to, not what it currently is, which is annoying.
The alt-az mount is not brilliant for photography, as it has to track the stars in two axes of rotation. I'll add an equatorial wedge to fix this at some point, but that's an additional $200. Still, it doesn't make it impossible, just difficult to maintain a steady enough tracking of the sky to make decent long exposures. Over time, I find the tracking can deteriorate, maybe requiring re-alignment after about 45 mins.
Swapping between the eyepiece and the camera is fiddly, especially in the dark. One has to be unscrewed before the other the is attached, trying not to nudge the focus too much, not cross-thread the attachment and not knock the scope out of alignment too much. Finding an object via the camera rather than swapping back to the eyepiece, is almost impossible.
Focusing the telescope with the DSLR mounted is difficult. Looking through the camera view finder is both physically difficult, due to it's location on the bottom of a scope pointed skyward, and very difficult to see clearly enough to reach a decent focus level. I have the camera connected to my laptop, running the DSLR Focus software, which takes sequences of photos as you tweak the focus dial, looking for the sharpest star image on screen.
Once everything is set up, the software can be set up to take multiple images at various ISO speeds and exposures. You can sit back and relax, look at the sky, and hope that your 25 x 30 second exposures come out ok, and fingers-crossed that the focus didn't get knocked off on the third shot. If the focus behaves, I find about half to two-thirds of the shots may be unusable to to bad tracking or shakes.
Ultimately, the results can be really cool. Captured my first nebula action last week - I was really chuffed, but I know there's still a lot of room for improvement. The process can be very frustrating at times, so you need a lot of patience. I guess I've spent just over $2k for my set up so far, with a wishlist of another several hundred dollars (wedge, filters, reducer, eyepieces). As with computers, I guess it doesn't matter what your initial budget is, you're always going to find extra bits you want to add later!
Every so often, someone comments about a low UID, followed by a series of posts by 5, 4 and 3 digit UIDs all saying "that's not low, this is low". Suddenly we're surrounded by ancient 3 digit UIDs with their dusty beards and slow, wise ways, and the whole thing starts to feel like a gathering of Ents.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd get an upvote, but I haven't seen mod points in a long time...
That's a good point. I miss my old beeb. It was much more fun. So much so, I recently took to writing a partial emulator to help disassemble some of the old games to see the craziness involved in writing them. Well, I found it entertaining... the missus gave me a strange look and backed away when I explained it.
I wonder if in 30 years we'll be looking back at the iPad 2 and wondering how we managed to do anything with something so slow, restricted and clunky. And what will we be comparing it to? Back in my day we had touchscreens, none of this neural implant junk...
You could replace "Android" with "Java" in this story and you'll probably find you have a dupe of a story from 5-6 years ago.
I worked on Java apps for cell phones and ran into all sorts of incompatibilities between handsets. Problems ranged from fundamental differences like screen sizes, variations in what libraries are implemented or not, all the way down to slight differences in behavior of library calls. It seems that unless you have one hardware/software source, like Apple and the iPhone, you're going to come across and have to work around a ton of variations.
The ebook prices are ridiculous. I was tempted to download a book for the Kindle app on my ipod touch. Amazon cheerfully informed me the digital version was $9.99, the paperback was $7 new or around $2.50 used. What?! This is exactly the reason that I haven't bought an actual Kindle device.
I have a Philips DVD drive with a usb port, and was using a 1GB flash drive to play back video files copied from my PC. The drive failed relatively quickly - I'd had it for about a year, but hadn't used it all that often. I started to notice the video files were corrupt on playback, but initially suspected the file itself, or possibly a problem with the DVD player's decoder. I diagnosed the problem by copying a file onto the drive, then repeatedly checksumming it. The first couple of times, the checksum value would be often be correct, then on subsequent checks it would change on me. I'd end up seeing several different checksum values, never seeing it return to a previous value. Whether this was due to a problem in the interface harware when reading, or memory cells failing to retain their state, I don't know.
Even though it was a year old and I had no receipt, the manufacturer (Kingmax, I think?) was happy to send a free replacement. The new drive has seen much more use, but is still working fine.
...and other violent media...
Yep, so you go ahead and try to get the same message printed on all movies, too, and we'll see just how long you're representing California.
Moving from the UK to the US, one of the things I miss is having an on/off switch on every electrical socket. It's much easier to flip a switch than have to pull/push plugs. I can also be sure a device is truly off, and not slowly leaching power like the umpteen power adapters I have.
I'd love to start replacing the outlets I have with switched varieties, but I haven't found anything yet. Either my google-fu is weak, or I'm searching for the wrong thing. Anyone know where I can find such a thing?
Yeah, pretty much. Here's a project that's attempting to create an entire universe in a similar fashion.
But don't think it's restricted to just landscapes and textures. Any content can potentially be generated procedurally - buildings, creatures, music, vehicles, whatever.
That's exactly what I thought when looking at the ESA Jules Verne ATV. Sent up unmanned, it automatically docks and you've got a pressurized extension to the ISS. After taking the contents, they loaded it up with trash, undocked it and burnt it up re-entering the atmosphere. What I can't understand is why not construct the station this way? Send up a whole stream of these automated vehicles to interconnect with each other - you wouldn't even need to send people up until there was a substantial station built.
As I understand it, this is exactly the problem. I don't think the lawyers are flying in just because they're producing Mac clones, but mainly because they're producing Mac clones badly. Poor quality, buggy systems, poor customer service and the (albeit unofficial) association with Apple - the net result being a negative impact on the Apple brand.
I can understand Apple being unhappy with the situation. There was a substantial delay between PsyStar announcing their plans and Apple unleashing the lawyers, which makes me wonder if Apple were waiting to see the results. If PsyStar had produced good quality computers with excellent support, maybe Apple would have looked the other way for longer.
It's been three years since I did any J2ME development, but there was a substantial amount of time devoted to compatibility problems. There was a wide variety of different screen resolutions and storage capacities, then all kinds of idiosyncrasies with how handsets handled screen refresh, button presses, or how they implemented (or didn't implement) various API features.
J2ME apps may run almost everywhere, but often the result was far from ideal without tinkering for individual handsets. Of course, this was a while ago. Maybe life is a little easier now!
As a parent, I also welcome any ratings scheme that discloses content that I may or may not deem appropriate for my child.
However, I think the concern is that the powers-that-be feel compelled to enforce a law for video games, whereas other media - e.g. films, tv, music, etc - operate under voluntary schemes. Either you legally enforce ratings on them all or you allow them all to continue with the voluntary ratings system. Singling out games, the latest media bogeyman, is just not right.
Ah, another of life's mysteries is solved!
I kept running into problems with what seemed like our internet connection disappearing. At first, I assigned the blame on Time Warner, as their track record isn't exactly stunning. However, once I noticed that the admin page on the router would be either extremely slow or not responding at all, I realized the problem was with the router itself. I didn't understand exactly what was going wrong, though, but your explanation makes complete sense.
I keep trying, but I can't get to this site. :(
Never mind the levels of confusion it would be creating.
Especially when I start registering common file extensions, like .exe, .bat, .jpg, .txt...
Someday they could build huge solar collecting towers at these points. I guess with the low gravity and lack of wind, they could build them much taller than is possible here on Earth. I'm imagining a future moon, bristling at each pole with multiple huge solar towers.
From what I've seen, there are clear similarities in the wording when comparing the resolutions from the different districts side by side. It's unlikely that they didn't all come up with these independently, at the same time. Is it clear yet if they were just working together on this, or are they all under direction of the Discovery Institute or some other creationist think tank?
Misdemeanor? Are you sure about that?
They're a popular accessory for stargazers, as seen here. Obviously, shining them at people/aircraft is a bad thing, but I didn't think their proper use was illegal.
I play PC games. I'm a games developer - have been since the early 90s. I'm working on a PC game right now. In Austin.
I've never heard of "Gamecock" before. I guess it's not exactly a household name in the industry, either.
ripthepissoutofatelemarketr.com for the full Web 2.0 effect.
I think you've illustrated one of the common sticking points over which people have difficulty with evolution: the timescale. When you talk of "recorded history", you're probably referring to only the last few hundred years for which we have any really detailed studies of living animals. Changes in nature during that timescale are generally going to be small, easily dismissed as not meaningful. This doesn't mean that you can extrapolate out to tens of thousands or millions of years and say that all the changes are not meaningful and therefore the animal is unchanged. It's difficult to fully comprehend just how long these evolutionary timescales are. Tiny changes over large numbers of generations produce big changes.
Gills can absorb oxygen from air or water, but out of water the structures collapse and reduce the amount of oxygen absorbing surface area. Drying out also reduces the effectiveness in absorbing oxygen. In the previous example, there is a food source that requires the fish to leave water for short amounts of time. It follows that if any fish that can survive fractionally longer out of water than its peers, it stands a fractionally better chance at getting food that the others can't, and a fractionally better chance at surviving to produce offspring with the same ability. Maybe that fractional difference comes from slightly stronger, larger or differently shaped gills. Repeat for a million generations. Is it so inconceivable that a fish could adapt to breathing air? It's just not going to happen over a few generations, though.
We can usher in a new era of leg reduction surgery...
I've jumped into astronomy/astrophotography this summer. This goes some way towards explaining the unusually wet weather here in Texas.
I spent $1k on a Celestron 6SE scope. It's big enough for me to get a reasonably good view of deep space objects as well as the planets, but small enough so it's not a major pain to lug around and set up. It has an electronic mount that provides fairly easy auto-alignment and a substantial database to help me find and identify objects in the sky, which I think is great for a beginner.
I spent maybe around $100 on connecting rings and cables to attach my Canon 20D DSLR camera. Obviously, adding the cost of the camera itself blows the $1k total budget.
Here's some of the things I found:
Set up can take a while. I usually run a power cable down the back yard so I'm not at the mercy of 8xAA batteries in the scope in the dark. The automatic alignment (point it at three bright stars and it figures out the rest) works best when the scope is perfectly horizontal, so lots of adjusting the tripod legs and checking the spirit level. Also, the mount time/date setting recalls what the time/date was last set to, not what it currently is, which is annoying.
The alt-az mount is not brilliant for photography, as it has to track the stars in two axes of rotation. I'll add an equatorial wedge to fix this at some point, but that's an additional $200. Still, it doesn't make it impossible, just difficult to maintain a steady enough tracking of the sky to make decent long exposures. Over time, I find the tracking can deteriorate, maybe requiring re-alignment after about 45 mins.
Swapping between the eyepiece and the camera is fiddly, especially in the dark. One has to be unscrewed before the other the is attached, trying not to nudge the focus too much, not cross-thread the attachment and not knock the scope out of alignment too much. Finding an object via the camera rather than swapping back to the eyepiece, is almost impossible.
Focusing the telescope with the DSLR mounted is difficult. Looking through the camera view finder is both physically difficult, due to it's location on the bottom of a scope pointed skyward, and very difficult to see clearly enough to reach a decent focus level. I have the camera connected to my laptop, running the DSLR Focus software, which takes sequences of photos as you tweak the focus dial, looking for the sharpest star image on screen.
Once everything is set up, the software can be set up to take multiple images at various ISO speeds and exposures. You can sit back and relax, look at the sky, and hope that your 25 x 30 second exposures come out ok, and fingers-crossed that the focus didn't get knocked off on the third shot. If the focus behaves, I find about half to two-thirds of the shots may be unusable to to bad tracking or shakes.
Ultimately, the results can be really cool. Captured my first nebula action last week - I was really chuffed, but I know there's still a lot of room for improvement. The process can be very frustrating at times, so you need a lot of patience. I guess I've spent just over $2k for my set up so far, with a wishlist of another several hundred dollars (wedge, filters, reducer, eyepieces). As with computers, I guess it doesn't matter what your initial budget is, you're always going to find extra bits you want to add later!
Every so often, someone comments about a low UID, followed by a series of posts by 5, 4 and 3 digit UIDs all saying "that's not low, this is low". Suddenly we're surrounded by ancient 3 digit UIDs with their dusty beards and slow, wise ways, and the whole thing starts to feel like a gathering of Ents.