Than again, why should Amazon target foreigners? They don't spend nearly as much money on stupid impulse items. I didn't think foreigners needed to be told what to buy (via Top10 lists) like Americans. Be glad that foriegn works aren't there, it would just cheapen them.
If they went page-by-page, the movie would run approximately 32.4 hours!
And what, exactly, would be the problem with that?;-)
Steven King has had numerous mini-series that have exceeded 12 hours of crap (Tommyknockers, It, and the awful version of The Stand), and all we get is six hours out of the ultimate fantasy story?
Be ready for it. W/o a romantic slant, there's no real chick-appeal to it (except for all the SCA chicks that will see it b/c they are by default cooler than the Titanic-loving girliegirls). However, the end of TheRetOfTheKing drags on forever (IMO), so maybe they just shoehorned in a liv story, er, love story for completeness.
I swear, if they manage to invent a Jar Jar character, heads will roll.
What I fear most is the impending onslaught of Taco Bell Cups, Burger King Watches, McDonalds glasses, Target POS displays, and all the action figures and shit we're going to have to endure for the next 5 years.
Then there will be the "Collectors Edition" rerleases of all things Tolkein. And lets not forget the Platinum series DVDs which will arrive just in time for Christmas 2004, and then the rerelease of this trilogy again in 2014.
Is it? I know the Torah goes back 4k years in it's original form, but I thought that the New Testament, and the majority of the translations only popped up in the past 1k years or so.
I was originally against this idea, but I thought of a few angles that have merit. I think there is an opportunity for something beyond the mindless "video-game spelling bee" crap that most educational packages are today. Problem is, I doubt the best content creators would go work for education software companies: I suspect the authors would recieve huge salaries from major entertainment companies (Disney, Time/Warner, Seagrams, etc.). So lets look at a few things...
Everyone had at least one or two teachers in highschool who were amazing, right? Teachers who kept you interested, even if you didn't particularly like the material, ja? For example, I hated history in highschool, and I had two teachers who I looked forward to seeing: one was a really funny guy, who made a joke out everything in the 19th century; the other was a complete babe who had every guy's attention, even during the most boring history lessons. Regardless, I learned quite a bit about a subject I didn't like b/c of who/how it was taught.
IMO, it was too bad that not every student in my school could have one of these two teachers. So this leads me to the idea of virtual content that has had mass appeal.
Look at the gaming world, especially well written I.F. games that aren't gib-centric (like FPS games, and hack/slash RPGs). I'm thinking Myst, Riven, Grim Fandango, Monkey Island, etc. These games had broad appeal to large audiences over a long period of time.
I think that if LucasArts put some its s/w and entertainment muscle behind teaching software, they could make some fairly compelling teaching packages. Based on the two teachers I mentioned above, I think there is potential for a killer education suite.
Obviously, this would be an enormous challenge because in reality, school really does need to be an 8-hour a day, 200 day a year venture. You can't learn fundamental concepts in a few weeks. The games I mentioned only take 20-100 hours of playtime, whereas school is 1600+ hours a year. That would be a whole-lotta content coding. However, it would only need to be done once every decade or so, and only the initial coding would be a beotch, updates would be easier.
Bottom line: probably any class (except a discussion class) could be converted into a compelling software package for online education. But to really make it something worthwhile, it would take a band of content-creation geniuses to make it happen, and I dont' think there are enough to go around right now.
Carl came to speak at my college, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, back in 92 or 93. I didn't recognize him at all because my last memory of him was his moppy haircut and bellbottoms. He was light gray, very thin, tall and somewhat hunched. I was a little unnerved by how aged he looked.
He spoke about comets colliding w/the earth, that was his big thing at the end of his career. He had some interesting slides, and sat on a big easy-chair on our stage. All three lecture halls were filled (one live, two broadcast), and the lobbies were packed by people from three other colleges.
Sadly, the technical crew at my school were a bunch of fuckups because they constantly failed to advance the slides when he asked, and when he did, sometimes they went in the wrong direction. They even left him in the dark twice. It was very embarassing, and he even became irritated by it, ultimately scorning them. The audience chuckled uneasily.
Anyway, he was a very dramatic and passionate speaker, even in his old age. We were lucky to have him, and other flamboyant personalities, like Feynman. He may not have penned any important constants or equations, but he was definitely one of the heartiest thinkers of his discipline in our generation.
When I was in HighSchool (86-90), the main stereotypes pretty much followed the 5 set down by John Hughes in "The Breakfast Club" (nerd, jock, freak, hoodlum, princess). There were very very few minorities in my school, so everything matched the mold w/o much deviation.
Has any recent movie captured the stereotypes of today's public schools? If so, what movies, and what are the generalizations/stereotypes most prevelant?
The "Ideal RISC vs. real-life x86 CISC" argument is well founded. The paper-RISC ideals that people have in their heads are much better than the legacy x86 compatbile stuff, obviously. So don't be fooled by the blank-ISC is better. There's solid proof that Intel's IA32 cores would be far more powerful if they didn't tote legacy hw.
Let's say you took Intel's IA-32 and pruned out the following:
* 8/16-bit operands and addressing modes
* x86 floating point instructions
* prefixes/overrides
90% of the decode hardware is simply there to handle this legacy crap, at least according to Intel at ISSCC'96.
The decode pipeline alone on the P3 (don't know about P4) would be 4x smaller. That is a huge performance gain. So it isn't Cisc vs Risc, it is 20-year old legacy Cisc vs clean-slate Risc. The fact that the former holds it's own against the latter in its current state is a powerful message.
Thing is, the NT kernel never even has to use the three bullets above, but the poor decoder has to handle anything. Sad.
As for loop unrolling, bundling and register renaming, try this: write some trivial C code with some loops and doubles and fp math. Compare the ASM code compiled by the MSVC 6 (barf) default compiler, and Intel's beta proton 5. You'll be surprised at how weird the resulting code looks, and how much faster it runs.
I think his last statement about inventions happening "on the heels" of other inventions tends to obscure all of them, is the most significant observation.
However I do think that the @ sign will last longer then the http:// and.html syntax/prefix will exist (I forgot who invented those). It feels like a more elegant notation, like Mr., Mrs, or Jr.
I suspect that when the "website" and "web address" have been replaced by something cleaner, I still think plaintext name@domain will still exist because I can't think of way to make it any simpler.
This guy's name will be remembered. What was it again?
Gamers are the new artists, visionaries, and story-tellers of our time
What the fuck are you talking about? Game AUTHORS fit that role, not the drooling, twitching, haunched-overs masses of stimulus/response driven junkies.
Gamers are the new consumers. The new target markets. The new clique. The new buzzword. The new genre.
Jeez, it's like Yngvie Malmsteen (sp?) comparing himself to Beethoven. So does that mean that just because I can type 200 words per minute that I'm William Shakespeare (even more spelling errors).
Interesting point. It makes me wonder if there was some kind of disclaimer signed ahead of time so that finger pointing would be kept to a minimum if some crew members died. Maybe some giant international pre-nuptual agreement...
Much like parvenu: one that has recently or suddenly risen to an unaccustomed position of wealth or power and has not yet gained the prestige, dignity, or manner associated with it
I remember learning those terms in 7th grade French class, and thought it applied to the cheerleaders in my class who all had to have Gucci bags.
It's all so clear now: A bazillion dollars on a home theater, and media selections from the bulk bins of Columbia House. Does it make sense to contain a $6 million stereo in walls made from fir 2x4s, plywood and sheetrock, picked up at the local Home Depot?
Why can't one of these bazillionaires build a castle or an architecturally unique dwelling out marble and iron that will last for centuries? That would be so much cooler.
It reminds me of the guns before butter cliche.
I'm so jealous.
How about combining the Jacuzzi and the subwoofer into one giant, human cocktail mixer? Instead of hot and cold water taps, vermouth and bombay gin taps. Genetically engineer some giant cocktail onions. That'd be cool.
I can't believe the car came in 3rd after the lamp and clock! I think someone who takes the time to cut AOL CD's into tile-able shapes, and then proceed to cover their entire auto is pretty impressive.
And all along I thought I was cool for making AOL floor- and placemats.
BTW, I produced a half decent résumé in LaTeX (got me 3 interviews and 3 job offers, each interviewer mentioned that it stood out from the pack). If anyone wants the source, send me an email.
Don't know if this applies to you, but almost all hitech companies scan resumes into a database (mine does), which means no matter how well tuned the original is, the potential hiring manager only sees 10pt Courier plaintext. And if you get too fancy, the OCR includes tons of graphics characters and typos into the scan.
HTML is better because if we just used LaTeX, every web page would look like a technical paper. There would be too many hacks into the layout control of LaTeX to add flexibility (to make wacky websites), and it would be a much bigger mess than HTML right now. I love the look of LaTeX when I write internal documents (windows word uses cower under its elegance), but considering the messy evolution of HTML, I'd hate to see the mess they'd make of LaTeX.
Levin's method is pretty ingeneous: determine whether anything is 'breathing' by giving it radio-active carbon dioxide to exhale.
Don't you think it's kinda cruel? I mean, the first thing we do on another planet is try to poison some of its life forms to see if they are actually present.
Is it necessary to identify these moons? It starting to seem a bit mundane, like that website where you can buy a star and name it. What use is it, if they aren't doing something exciting like erupting? Do astronomers hope to one day tabulate every "moon" in Saturn's rings? (Like Foghorn Leghorn's feathers;-).
If you take a child and begin desensitizing it to violence -- the same as if you were to desensitize it to the heat of chili peppers -- you *will* end up with an adult who is not sensitive to violence.
Have any of you who have made this common claim actually killed someone? No? Then shut the hell up. God, the way you talk, it sounds like you were all in 'nam or something and can trivially compare Shindler's List or Quake with the reality of putting a gun to someone's head and splattering their brains all over.
Ask one of these "desensitized" kids from the suburbs to kill, pluck, and gut a chicken, and I'm willing to bet the vast majority of them would wretch and faint.
Ask some 7 yr old from Kosovo to do the same, and, well, you see where I'm going...
It's pointless to argue desensitization to violence via video games. Chili peppers? Sure, you can actually eat a bunch and become desensitized. Wisconsin winters? Sure, spend enough time in a colder climate, etc. But killing and brain splattering? 'fraid not. By the time you experienced enough (in America), you would long since have been locked up.
I've always wondered what word process people have in mind when they make that claim.
DOS EDIT runs fine on an 8086. I'm sure vi would work just as well. Markup like the old WordPerfect? 286 is just dandy. Antialiased-WYSIWYG, with multiple fonts, spelling and grammar checker, plus integrated graphics? I don't think a 486 will cut it. Add speech-to-text (Dragon NS) and suddenly the motto "a 486 is good enough for word processing" is obviously uninformed.
First off, lots of discussion about this "new color" doesn't sound like what the author intended. An extra photopigment wouldn't invent new colors, it would just more of the spectrum perceptible. For example, I can barely tell the difference between lapis lazuli and indigo, but a woman I used to date could easily. It's not a new color, and it's not a brain bender to conceive of it, it just means that more of the spectrum stands out.
I suspect it would be a similar effect as looking at a bunch of red green squiggles through red lenses, but not needing the lenses. The point is, more data could be encoded using an extended palette. But then again, MS Windows excessive use of color in icons has pretty much thrown that theory out the window.
On another note, the only two examples the author could come up with were: knowing when I child is flushed, and an enhanced accessory matching ability. That ruffled me a bit, but I guess child-rearing and accessorizing are fair female distinguishers.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of those books on the list were
TRANSLATIONS
of foreign books.
But I completely agree with you.
Than again, why should Amazon target foreigners? They don't spend nearly as much money on stupid impulse items. I didn't think foreigners needed to be told what to buy (via Top10 lists) like Americans. Be glad that foriegn works aren't there, it would just cheapen them.
---
If they went page-by-page, the movie would run approximately 32.4 hours!
;-)
And what, exactly, would be the problem with that?
Steven King has had numerous mini-series that have exceeded 12 hours of crap (Tommyknockers, It, and the awful version of The Stand), and all we get is six hours out of the ultimate fantasy story?
---
overemphasizing Aragorn and Arwen's love story).
Be ready for it. W/o a romantic slant, there's no real chick-appeal to it (except for all the SCA chicks that will see it b/c they are by default cooler than the Titanic-loving girliegirls). However, the end of TheRetOfTheKing drags on forever (IMO), so maybe they just shoehorned in a liv story, er, love story for completeness.
I swear, if they manage to invent a Jar Jar character, heads will roll.
What I fear most is the impending onslaught of Taco Bell Cups, Burger King Watches, McDonalds glasses, Target POS displays, and all the action figures and shit we're going to have to endure for the next 5 years.
Then there will be the "Collectors Edition" rerleases of all things Tolkein. And lets not forget the Platinum series DVDs which will arrive just in time for Christmas 2004, and then the rerelease of this trilogy again in 2014.
Marketing frightens me.
---
HE DIDN'T WRITE BOOKS!
;-)
So he scribed his plays on the backs of sheep or bananas? Of course he wrote books you idgit!
If you mean "novels", they've been around since 1st century AD (Satyricon by Petronius).
---
The Bible's a lot older than that, so
Is it? I know the Torah goes back 4k years in it's original form, but I thought that the New Testament, and the majority of the translations only popped up in the past 1k years or so.
---
I was originally against this idea, but I thought of a few angles that have merit. I think there is an opportunity for something beyond the mindless "video-game spelling bee" crap that most educational packages are today. Problem is, I doubt the best content creators would go work for education software companies: I suspect the authors would recieve huge salaries from major entertainment companies (Disney, Time/Warner, Seagrams, etc.). So lets look at a few things...
Everyone had at least one or two teachers in highschool who were amazing, right? Teachers who kept you interested, even if you didn't particularly like the material, ja? For example, I hated history in highschool, and I had two teachers who I looked forward to seeing: one was a really funny guy, who made a joke out everything in the 19th century; the other was a complete babe who had every guy's attention, even during the most boring history lessons. Regardless, I learned quite a bit about a subject I didn't like b/c of who/how it was taught.
IMO, it was too bad that not every student in my school could have one of these two teachers. So this leads me to the idea of virtual content that has had mass appeal.
Look at the gaming world, especially well written I.F. games that aren't gib-centric (like FPS games, and hack/slash RPGs). I'm thinking Myst, Riven, Grim Fandango, Monkey Island, etc. These games had broad appeal to large audiences over a long period of time.
I think that if LucasArts put some its s/w and entertainment muscle behind teaching software, they could make some fairly compelling teaching packages. Based on the two teachers I mentioned above, I think there is potential for a killer education suite.
Obviously, this would be an enormous challenge because in reality, school really does need to be an 8-hour a day, 200 day a year venture. You can't learn fundamental concepts in a few weeks. The games I mentioned only take 20-100 hours of playtime, whereas school is 1600+ hours a year. That would be a whole-lotta content coding. However, it would only need to be done once every decade or so, and only the initial coding would be a beotch, updates would be easier.
Bottom line: probably any class (except a discussion class) could be converted into a compelling software package for online education. But to really make it something worthwhile, it would take a band of content-creation geniuses to make it happen, and I dont' think there are enough to go around right now.
---
Carl came to speak at my college, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, back in 92 or 93. I didn't recognize him at all because my last memory of him was his moppy haircut and bellbottoms. He was light gray, very thin, tall and somewhat hunched. I was a little unnerved by how aged he looked.
He spoke about comets colliding w/the earth, that was his big thing at the end of his career. He had some interesting slides, and sat on a big easy-chair on our stage. All three lecture halls were filled (one live, two broadcast), and the lobbies were packed by people from three other colleges.
Sadly, the technical crew at my school were a bunch of fuckups because they constantly failed to advance the slides when he asked, and when he did, sometimes they went in the wrong direction. They even left him in the dark twice. It was very embarassing, and he even became irritated by it, ultimately scorning them. The audience chuckled uneasily.
Anyway, he was a very dramatic and passionate speaker, even in his old age. We were lucky to have him, and other flamboyant personalities, like Feynman. He may not have penned any important constants or equations, but he was definitely one of the heartiest thinkers of his discipline in our generation.
---
When I was in HighSchool (86-90), the main stereotypes pretty much followed the 5 set down by John Hughes in "The Breakfast Club" (nerd, jock, freak, hoodlum, princess). There were very very few minorities in my school, so everything matched the mold w/o much deviation.
Has any recent movie captured the stereotypes of today's public schools? If so, what movies, and what are the generalizations/stereotypes most prevelant?
---
...i'm glad to see supercomputers used for fighting disease, rather than predicting weather or simulating nuclear explosions.
---
Ah! Real discussion!
The "Ideal RISC vs. real-life x86 CISC" argument is well founded. The paper-RISC ideals that people have in their heads are much better than the legacy x86 compatbile stuff, obviously. So don't be fooled by the blank-ISC is better. There's solid proof that Intel's IA32 cores would be far more powerful if they didn't tote legacy hw.
Let's say you took Intel's IA-32 and pruned out the following:
* 8/16-bit operands and addressing modes
* x86 floating point instructions
* prefixes/overrides
90% of the decode hardware is simply there to handle this legacy crap, at least according to Intel at ISSCC'96.
The decode pipeline alone on the P3 (don't know about P4) would be 4x smaller. That is a huge performance gain. So it isn't Cisc vs Risc, it is 20-year old legacy Cisc vs clean-slate Risc. The fact that the former holds it's own against the latter in its current state is a powerful message.
Thing is, the NT kernel never even has to use the three bullets above, but the poor decoder has to handle anything. Sad.
As for loop unrolling, bundling and register renaming, try this: write some trivial C code with some loops and doubles and fp math. Compare the ASM code compiled by the MSVC 6 (barf) default compiler, and Intel's beta proton 5. You'll be surprised at how weird the resulting code looks, and how much faster it runs.
---
I think his last statement about inventions happening "on the heels" of other inventions tends to obscure all of them, is the most significant observation.
.html syntax/prefix will exist (I forgot who invented those). It feels like a more elegant notation, like Mr., Mrs, or Jr.
However I do think that the @ sign will last longer then the http:// and
I suspect that when the "website" and "web address" have been replaced by something cleaner, I still think plaintext name@domain will still exist because I can't think of way to make it any simpler.
This guy's name will be remembered. What was it again?
---
Gamers are the new artists, visionaries, and story-tellers of our time
What the fuck are you talking about? Game AUTHORS fit that role, not the drooling, twitching, haunched-overs masses of stimulus/response driven junkies.
Gamers are the new consumers. The new target markets. The new clique. The new buzzword. The new genre.
Jeez, it's like Yngvie Malmsteen (sp?) comparing himself to Beethoven. So does that mean that just because I can type 200 words per minute that I'm William Shakespeare (even more spelling errors).
---
Interesting point. It makes me wonder if there was some kind of disclaimer signed ahead of time so that finger pointing would be kept to a minimum if some crew members died. Maybe some giant international pre-nuptual agreement...
---
Much like parvenu: one that has recently or suddenly risen to an unaccustomed position of wealth or power and has not yet gained the prestige, dignity, or manner associated with it
I remember learning those terms in 7th grade French class, and thought it applied to the cheerleaders in my class who all had to have Gucci bags.
It's all so clear now: A bazillion dollars on a home theater, and media selections from the bulk bins of Columbia House. Does it make sense to contain a $6 million stereo in walls made from fir 2x4s, plywood and sheetrock, picked up at the local Home Depot?
Why can't one of these bazillionaires build a castle or an architecturally unique dwelling out marble and iron that will last for centuries? That would be so much cooler.
It reminds me of the guns before butter cliche.
I'm so jealous.
How about combining the Jacuzzi and the subwoofer into one giant, human cocktail mixer? Instead of hot and cold water taps, vermouth and bombay gin taps. Genetically engineer some giant cocktail onions. That'd be cool.
---
I can't believe the car came in 3rd after the lamp and clock! I think someone who takes the time to cut AOL CD's into tile-able shapes, and then proceed to cover their entire auto is pretty impressive.
And all along I thought I was cool for making AOL floor- and placemats.
---
I look forward to seeing more CEO's with Knox spiked purple hair
Why? Any 7th grader can dye their hair w/o parental consent. What does it demonstrate? Bad-assness?
---
either glue, egg whites, or Knox (unflavored gelatin). Just wanted to clear that up.
It's man juice BABY! eeew.
---
BTW, I produced a half decent résumé in LaTeX (got me 3 interviews and 3 job offers, each interviewer mentioned that it stood out from the pack). If anyone wants the source, send me an email.
Don't know if this applies to you, but almost all hitech companies scan resumes into a database (mine does), which means no matter how well tuned the original is, the potential hiring manager only sees 10pt Courier plaintext. And if you get too fancy, the OCR includes tons of graphics characters and typos into the scan.
---
HTML is better because if we just used LaTeX, every web page would look like a technical paper. There would be too many hacks into the layout control of LaTeX to add flexibility (to make wacky websites), and it would be a much bigger mess than HTML right now. I love the look of LaTeX when I write internal documents (windows word uses cower under its elegance), but considering the messy evolution of HTML, I'd hate to see the mess they'd make of LaTeX.
---
Levin's method is pretty ingeneous: determine whether anything is 'breathing' by giving it radio-active carbon dioxide to exhale.
Don't you think it's kinda cruel? I mean, the first thing we do on another planet is try to poison some of its life forms to see if they are actually present.
---
Is it necessary to identify these moons? It starting to seem a bit mundane, like that website where you can buy a star and name it. What use is it, if they aren't doing something exciting like erupting? Do astronomers hope to one day tabulate every "moon" in Saturn's rings? (Like Foghorn Leghorn's feathers ;-).
---
If you take a child and begin desensitizing it to violence -- the same as if you were to desensitize it to the heat of chili peppers -- you *will* end up with an adult who is not sensitive to violence.
Have any of you who have made this common claim actually killed someone? No? Then shut the hell up. God, the way you talk, it sounds like you were all in 'nam or something and can trivially compare Shindler's List or Quake with the reality of putting a gun to someone's head and splattering their brains all over.
Ask one of these "desensitized" kids from the suburbs to kill, pluck, and gut a chicken, and I'm willing to bet the vast majority of them would wretch and faint.
Ask some 7 yr old from Kosovo to do the same, and, well, you see where I'm going...
It's pointless to argue desensitization to violence via video games. Chili peppers? Sure, you can actually eat a bunch and become desensitized. Wisconsin winters? Sure, spend enough time in a colder climate, etc. But killing and brain splattering? 'fraid not. By the time you experienced enough (in America), you would long since have been locked up.
---
I've always wondered what word process people have in mind when they make that claim.
DOS EDIT runs fine on an 8086. I'm sure vi would work just as well. Markup like the old WordPerfect? 286 is just dandy. Antialiased-WYSIWYG, with multiple fonts, spelling and grammar checker, plus integrated graphics? I don't think a 486 will cut it. Add speech-to-text (Dragon NS) and suddenly the motto "a 486 is good enough for word processing" is obviously uninformed.
---
First off, lots of discussion about this "new color" doesn't sound like what the author intended. An extra photopigment wouldn't invent new colors, it would just more of the spectrum perceptible. For example, I can barely tell the difference between lapis lazuli and indigo, but a woman I used to date could easily. It's not a new color, and it's not a brain bender to conceive of it, it just means that more of the spectrum stands out.
I suspect it would be a similar effect as looking at a bunch of red green squiggles through red lenses, but not needing the lenses. The point is, more data could be encoded using an extended palette. But then again, MS Windows excessive use of color in icons has pretty much thrown that theory out the window.
On another note, the only two examples the author could come up with were: knowing when I child is flushed, and an enhanced accessory matching ability. That ruffled me a bit, but I guess child-rearing and accessorizing are fair female distinguishers.
---
...all i have to say is: "Holy fuckin' fuck, batman!"
Considering the cost of catridges in the 80's, I suspect 15k is bargain, or at least close to the original cost.
It would be one kick-ass retro gaming party for whoever buys it... assuming it includes an RF switchbox. D'oh!
---