For those wondering, since it didn't appear in TFS anywhere. The exact rate today is 1 SFr = $0.99, it's been sliding a bit over the past month.
By comparison, the US $1000 bill hasn't been printed since 1945, and although technically still legal tender, was officially withdrawn in 1969 (which means the Fed started destroying such bills turned in by banks). They're worth more than face value to collectors.
Not really. First Sale Doctrine applies. If I buy a physical copy of a book, I can give or sell it to somebody else, but then I won't have it any more. It's even legal to "edit" the book by marking it up or cutting and pasting and then to sell that modified physical copy.
Some textbook publishers have gone to some great lengths to get around this, everything from trying to ban the import of used copies from other countries, to publishing new "editions" with almost nothing changed but the end-of-chapter questions or links to a website they can make obsolete annually.
Yep. A lot of Amazon Kindle content is DRM-free also, but not all. My books are all DRM-free, but there's no obvious flag in the sales page details (you have to interpret what it means by unlimited devices, lending enabled, etc).
Calibre is a pretty good program for both converting ebooks between formats and managing your collection.
If this printing process used only the blue light, it would immediately harden the first bit of resin it encounters in the basin -- the stuff just inside the glass.
So you shine the blue light at the surface, and slowly lower a platform into the resin. A technique which I'm sure is already in use. (It's analogous to selective laser sintering... hard to shine a laser through metal powder.)
"The conclusion was very, very strong just from looking at this picture that these objects had been ejected from the central galaxy, and that they were initially at high redshift,
Were that the case, shouldn't we also be seeing ejected objects with a high blueshift? Why are they preferentially being ejected away from us?
This is probably a stupid question because I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet, but why would you want a 000 file? That's just an inode and a chunk of disk space that can't be used for anything.
Oh. It still has attributes. It can be used for something. Never mind.
The kind who edits the stuff he gets paid for, but doesn't worry too much about unpaid postings on Slashdot.
While it's true that anyone who has been paid even a penny for their writing could call themselves a professional writer, there are bodies who vet their memberships for a certain minimum income and quality of publication. Not that I care what you think, but for others who might, I'm an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, SFWA, (which has professional requirements for membership), and of the Colorado Authors' League (ditto).
Of course if you've been around the business long enough, (I doubt you have, with your high six-digit number), you might recall my name from the masthead of Byte Magazine, as Contributing Editor, Software.
Among other things, I'm a professional writer. My stuff might be worth 250k if you compared my royalties to what an annuity would get you. Or maybe I'm being optimistic; novels have something of a half-life.
Either way, when I'm done with a writing/editing session, a save script copies the files (as new files, it does not overwrite) to my other desktop computer, to an NFS server, and to a RAID'ed NAS. And to a USB flash drive which I keep on my person at (almost) all times. Occasionally I'll burn a disc to store off-site. Now, I realize a photographer's files are going to take up a hell of a lot more disk space than my mostly-text files, but drives (and optical discs) are cheap.
If your livelihood even partly depends on digital data, make more freakin' backups than you know what to do with. A writer friend of mine had a house fire (years ago) and lost all his manuscripts. He now keeps more backups than I do. (And no, the cloud is for convenience, not for real backups.)
(Of course, if worst came to worst, all my previously-published works are backed up on Amazon's servers and hard-copies all over the place. I'd only lose the as yet unpublished stuff.);)
Burroughs was clever and designed its mainframe series (B6700 etc) to use 48-bit words consisting of either 8 6-bit or 6 8-bit bytes. The hardware could handle either (when dealing with character strings).
Quite a few years later I was working on a Control Data Cyber series which still used 6-bit characters, in a 60-bit word. Text processing on that was so painful I wrote my own, in Pascal, which handled everything internally as ASCII.
I'd love it for watching movies with virtual screens as large as I want too.
I don't get this. It's still going to be a movie -- fixed POV, passive.
I want to be able to (virtually) walk into the scene, look around at what the actors can see, look at what's on the other side of the (virtual) camera. What's behind that tree? On the other side of that hill?
Somebody needs to port Colossal Cave or Zork to VR (if they haven't already). Or Myst.
I don't see why flight simulation is ideally suited to VR. You can do flight sims just fine on a (couple of) 2D screens and, if you want to get fancy, a mocked up control panel. I guess being able to change views just by moving your head is cool, but that's not taking advantage of what VR is capable of.
Now, simulating flying like Superman, yeah, that'd be cool.
Reading the above comments from some of the naysayers, I get the distinct impression that they have never used it for more than a couple of minutes, or have only played with Google Cardboard.
Games? A small part of the use cases, but there are some great ones out there. Mostly I get this secondhand from my coworkers who are gamers (I'm not) and have VR setups, but I have played with the Spiderman demo. Pretty cool.
But it's fantastic for modeling. Face it, most 3D modeling tools suck, because a mouse is not a 3D interface. When you can shape your model like it was clay, or build it around you with broad sweeps (like with Tilt Brush), it's freakin' awesome.
HTC (and some 3rd parties) already have wireless headsets and adapters, so the tripping over the cable issue is gone.
With the next gen cards from NVidia, expect to see higher-rez goggles soon.
I would love to see better hand interfaces. The controllers are pretty good, but the finger motions are very limited. How about a glove interface, and show me my virtual hands?
There are a couple. The obvious key problem with Oculus is Facebook and Zuck. Most people I know who own VR rigs go with Vive.
On the hardware side, it didn't help that cryptocurrency miners sucked the air out of the high-end graphic card market (and ballooned the prices) just around the same time that HTC, Oculus, etc were introducing their gear. If you bought VR gear, good luck finding a card to run it on at less than some multiple of what you paid for the headset. (That has changed in recent months, thankfully.)
Some of the problems others have mentioned above are there too, but are already being worked on or have solutions.
Although some of the children had programmed in the visual programming language, none of them knew how the commands they wrote in Scratch would be executed in the hardware inside a computer.
Okay, you software developers out there, how many of you understand every step of how your code gets converted to binary, then executed on the silicon, down how to make logic gates from transistors and how those transistors actually work?
(Not that we need to, but I imagine some number of the nerdiest among us actually do.)
Who says the space elevator cable can't be tapered? Of course it can.
Hell, with a big enough (okay, ridiculous) taper factor, you could build a space elevator out of kevlar. This stuff brings it out of the realm of ridiculous.
(Sure, the idea has all kinds of other practical problems, but you're barking up the wrong beanstalk on this one.)
Of the several kinds of naturally-occurring asbestos, some already are safe. Just not the kind formerly used in applications where you want short fibers to make it easy to mold into things like brake pads, etc.
(Still recapitulating phylogeny with my first cup of coffee, don't recall which asbestos type is which.)
Slashdot Mirror
For those wondering, since it didn't appear in TFS anywhere. The exact rate today is 1 SFr = $0.99, it's been sliding a bit over the past month.
By comparison, the US $1000 bill hasn't been printed since 1945, and although technically still legal tender, was officially withdrawn in 1969 (which means the Fed started destroying such bills turned in by banks). They're worth more than face value to collectors.
Not really. First Sale Doctrine applies. If I buy a physical copy of a book, I can give or sell it to somebody else, but then I won't have it any more. It's even legal to "edit" the book by marking it up or cutting and pasting and then to sell that modified physical copy.
Some textbook publishers have gone to some great lengths to get around this, everything from trying to ban the import of used copies from other countries, to publishing new "editions" with almost nothing changed but the end-of-chapter questions or links to a website they can make obsolete annually.
Yep. A lot of Amazon Kindle content is DRM-free also, but not all. My books are all DRM-free, but there's no obvious flag in the sales page details (you have to interpret what it means by unlimited devices, lending enabled, etc).
Calibre is a pretty good program for both converting ebooks between formats and managing your collection.
If this printing process used only the blue light, it would immediately harden the first bit of resin it encounters in the basin -- the stuff just inside the glass.
So you shine the blue light at the surface, and slowly lower a platform into the resin. A technique which I'm sure is already in use. (It's analogous to selective laser sintering ... hard to shine a laser through metal powder.)
Although, on my home machines I never left. Firefox isn't perfect, but at least it lets me run NoScript.
Just as well. A browser monoculture, whether the old IE or the new Chrome, is and was never a good thing, however much web developers might think so.
While not perfect, it seems to me that a filtering proxy would take care of a lot of ads, at least those from 3rd party ad-servers.
Not quite. It was insulating foam falling off the tank.
Nobody thought that would be a problem, because foam, right? Unless that foam happens to get accelerated by a 500 MPH relative windstream.
Who gave you the idea that Republicans were libertarian? Democrats?
Both sides slander libertarians; they don't want an effective third party.
Gilligan, little buddy, is that you?
"The conclusion was very, very strong just from looking at this picture that these objects had been ejected from the central galaxy, and that they were initially at high redshift,
Were that the case, shouldn't we also be seeing ejected objects with a high blueshift? Why are they preferentially being ejected away from us?
This is probably a stupid question because I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet, but why would you want a 000 file? That's just an inode and a chunk of disk space that can't be used for anything.
Oh. It still has attributes. It can be used for something.
Never mind.
The kind who edits the stuff he gets paid for, but doesn't worry too much about unpaid postings on Slashdot.
While it's true that anyone who has been paid even a penny for their writing could call themselves a professional writer, there are bodies who vet their memberships for a certain minimum income and quality of publication. Not that I care what you think, but for others who might, I'm an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, SFWA, (which has professional requirements for membership), and of the Colorado Authors' League (ditto).
Of course if you've been around the business long enough, (I doubt you have, with your high six-digit number), you might recall my name from the masthead of Byte Magazine, as Contributing Editor, Software.
Cheers.
Among other things, I'm a professional writer. My stuff might be worth 250k if you compared my royalties to what an annuity would get you. Or maybe I'm being optimistic; novels have something of a half-life.
Either way, when I'm done with a writing/editing session, a save script copies the files (as new files, it does not overwrite) to my other desktop computer, to an NFS server, and to a RAID'ed NAS. And to a USB flash drive which I keep on my person at (almost) all times. Occasionally I'll burn a disc to store off-site. Now, I realize a photographer's files are going to take up a hell of a lot more disk space than my mostly-text files, but drives (and optical discs) are cheap.
If your livelihood even partly depends on digital data, make more freakin' backups than you know what to do with. A writer friend of mine had a house fire (years ago) and lost all his manuscripts. He now keeps more backups than I do. (And no, the cloud is for convenience, not for real backups.)
(Of course, if worst came to worst, all my previously-published works are backed up on Amazon's servers and hard-copies all over the place. I'd only lose the as yet unpublished stuff.) ;)
Burroughs was clever and designed its mainframe series (B6700 etc) to use 48-bit words consisting of either 8 6-bit or 6 8-bit bytes. The hardware could handle either (when dealing with character strings).
Quite a few years later I was working on a Control Data Cyber series which still used 6-bit characters, in a 60-bit word. Text processing on that was so painful I wrote my own, in Pascal, which handled everything internally as ASCII.
I'd love it for watching movies with virtual screens as large as I want too.
I don't get this. It's still going to be a movie -- fixed POV, passive.
I want to be able to (virtually) walk into the scene, look around at what the actors can see, look at what's on the other side of the (virtual) camera. What's behind that tree? On the other side of that hill?
Somebody needs to port Colossal Cave or Zork to VR (if they haven't already). Or Myst.
I don't see why flight simulation is ideally suited to VR. You can do flight sims just fine on a (couple of) 2D screens and, if you want to get fancy, a mocked up control panel. I guess being able to change views just by moving your head is cool, but that's not taking advantage of what VR is capable of.
Now, simulating flying like Superman, yeah, that'd be cool.
And I agree about Zuck.
Reading the above comments from some of the naysayers, I get the distinct impression that they have never used it for more than a couple of minutes, or have only played with Google Cardboard.
Games? A small part of the use cases, but there are some great ones out there. Mostly I get this secondhand from my coworkers who are gamers (I'm not) and have VR setups, but I have played with the Spiderman demo. Pretty cool.
But it's fantastic for modeling. Face it, most 3D modeling tools suck, because a mouse is not a 3D interface. When you can shape your model like it was clay, or build it around you with broad sweeps (like with Tilt Brush), it's freakin' awesome.
HTC (and some 3rd parties) already have wireless headsets and adapters, so the tripping over the cable issue is gone.
With the next gen cards from NVidia, expect to see higher-rez goggles soon.
I would love to see better hand interfaces. The controllers are pretty good, but the finger motions are very limited. How about a glove interface, and show me my virtual hands?
There are a couple. The obvious key problem with Oculus is Facebook and Zuck. Most people I know who own VR rigs go with Vive.
On the hardware side, it didn't help that cryptocurrency miners sucked the air out of the high-end graphic card market (and ballooned the prices) just around the same time that HTC, Oculus, etc were introducing their gear. If you bought VR gear, good luck finding a card to run it on at less than some multiple of what you paid for the headset. (That has changed in recent months, thankfully.)
Some of the problems others have mentioned above are there too, but are already being worked on or have solutions.
Although some of the children had programmed in the visual programming language, none of them knew how the commands they wrote in Scratch would be executed in the hardware inside a computer.
Okay, you software developers out there, how many of you understand every step of how your code gets converted to binary, then executed on the silicon, down how to make logic gates from transistors and how those transistors actually work?
(Not that we need to, but I imagine some number of the nerdiest among us actually do.)
Ah, crap. wouldn't be on earth.
Note to self: Way to ruin a joke, Al. Finish your coffee.
Well, but they would be on earth, would they?
(Geez, some people.)
See that word "untapered" in your quote?
Who says the space elevator cable can't be tapered? Of course it can.
Hell, with a big enough (okay, ridiculous) taper factor, you could build a space elevator out of kevlar. This stuff brings it out of the realm of ridiculous.
(Sure, the idea has all kinds of other practical problems, but you're barking up the wrong beanstalk on this one.)
I dunno man. Wait until the Fithp hear about this. It won't end well.
We can only call it scrith if it screens out 50% of incoming neutrinos.
Scientists, start your detectors!
Of the several kinds of naturally-occurring asbestos, some already are safe. Just not the kind formerly used in applications where you want short fibers to make it easy to mold into things like brake pads, etc.
(Still recapitulating phylogeny with my first cup of coffee, don't recall which asbestos type is which.)