Can anyone who can provide counter-examples to my claim?
Yes and no. For a few years after it was invented, the optical maser (aka "laser") was known as "a solution in search of a problem". Lots of folks had ideas for what it might be good for, but a flash lamp pumped ruby laser wasn't really good for any of those things yet.
It did, however, stir up a great degree of interest in laser research, both as pure research and as research targeting actual solutions to specific problems -- which kind of reinforces your point, with the caveat that it might well have taken a few more years if it weren't for all the theoretical research into optical masers going on in the late 1950s. (At least three different groups seem to have invented the laser more or less independently and simultaneously.)
Certainly in 1958 (when the first theoretical paper appeared) or 1960 (when the ruby laser was first demonstrated), nobody was contemplating using lasers to read plastic discs of major motion pictures in home equipment.
(Although it wasn't that long afterwards -- the LaserDisc was introduced in 1978, some years before the CD. As I recall, the first LaserDiscs used a helium-neon laser tube.)
Re:Yes, but why does Microsoft need a stand...
on
Linuxworld Fun
·
· Score: 2
"This isn't about trying to get people to move from Unix to Microsoft products, it's about offering ways for both systems to peacefully coexist," Houston stressed.
In most conflicts, this sort of sentiment means that one party (eg Microsoft) has realized that it can no longer win, and is suing for peace before it is totally defeated. Since defeat occurs first in the mind of the enemy, this means they've already lost.
It may not say much about audio on the website, but since this is a follow-on to Broadcast2000, it's capabilities are pretty good. As many tracks as you want, various effects and transitions, spatial location, and the usual cut'n'paste, transformation, etc.
In one respect it has Premiere beat hands down: adaptability.
I haven't yet looked at the source for Cinelerra (downloading it now), but I have of Bcast2000, which I've used -- and no matter how convoluted, it has to be orders of magnitude easier to modify to fit custome needs than Premiere. (And yes, I'm familiar with the Adobe Premier SDK. Pardon me while I go throw up in the bushes from the memories.)
Premiere is okay as long as you only want to do with it what the programmers decided to let you. It sucks if you want to do something a bit different.
But Cinellera's aiming for a higher level user than Premiere anyway. Using it for web media (although it probably handles some of those formats) is a joke, the thing is designed for HDTV.
I remember when I discovered Simula 67 (aka "Algol with classes") on a DecSystem-10, I thought it was pretty cool. (Burroughs') Algol was my first programming lanaguage (APL my second, talk about opposites), so learning Simula was a snap. Unfortunately there wasn't much call for it.
Imagine my joy some ten years later when I heard about this new "C with classes" language that some guy named Stroustrup was working on. (Imagine my disgust at what C++ has become...)
That reminds me of a really strange movie we saw back in first year calculus class. (Yeah, movies in math class. Weird in itself.)
Had to do with just such a situation, with the driver being referred to the cop for speeding. The trooper proceeds to explain Rolle's Theorem and Mean Value Theorem to the driver as proof that somewhere in between the two toll booths, he had to have been speeding.
I guess to the extent that I remember the name of Rolle's Theorem, the movie served its purpose. OTOH it always seemed kind of intuitively obvious to me.
This came out years ago, I found a printout of it a couple of days back while going through some papers. Picture Weird Al Yankovich singing this to Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (this isn't a Weird Al though, he did "Eat It"):
Boot It
You're processing some words when your keyboard goes dead,
Ten pages in the buffer, should have gone to bed,
The system just crashed, but don't lose your head,
Just BOOT IT, just BOOT IT.
Better think fast, better do what you can,
Read the manual or call your system man,
Don't want to fall behind in the race with Japan,
So BOOT IT,
Get the sys admin to
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Even though you'd rather shoot it.
Don't be upset, it's only some glitch.
All that you do is flip a little switch.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Get right down and restitute it.
Don't get excited, all is not lost.
CP/M, UNIX or MS-DOS
Just BOOT IT, boot it, boot it, boot it...
You gotta have your printout for the meeting at two,
The system says your jobs at the head of the queue,
Right then the thing dies but you know what to do,
BOOT IT.
You always get so worried when the system runs slow,
And when it finally crashes, man you feel so low,
But computers make mistakes (they're only human you know)
So BOOT IT,
Call the local guru to
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Go ahead re-institute it.
If you're not lucky, get the book off the shelf,
But if you are, it'll do itself.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Then go find the guy who screwed it! Operating systems are built to bounce back,
Whether it's a Cray or a Radio Shack.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,....
Sorry I don't know who deserves the attributes for that.
Didn't we read in these pages (or linked to these pages) about nVidia taking a write-off on a bunch of inventory they had to scrap because Microsoft changed some requirement in response to the MIT hack?
Seems to me MSFT has figured a hardware/firmware workaround so the disclosure is no longer a big deal, and dropping the DMCA thing saves them a little negative publicity. (And, depending on the specifics of the case, if they thought they'd lose it avoids putting the DMCA to a test that might weaken it.)
That's a danger in dry climates. Your body never feels sweaty because the perspiration evaporates so fast, and you can drink enough to not feel thirsty without ever filling your bladder. You have to get in the habit of drinking more than you think you need to keep the kidneys flushed out and the blood volume reasonable.
(The latter is important at altitude, which tends to thicken the blood anyway.)
You can certainly build up a tolerance to caffeine (and similarly, exhibit withdrawal symptoms from it).
As far as losing weight goes -- I've heard that caffeine affects your metabolism such that it kicks blood sugar levels temporarily higher. This would do two things -- the higher blood sugar level prompts conversion of the sugar to fat, and when it drops again, it makes you hungry. That in turn would tempt you to eat more, and so on.
I know I tend to eat less when I drink water rather than my usual several cans of diet pop (alternate Diet Coke and Fresca -- I don't need that much caffeine).
Killing one's self by drinking too much water is exactly what happened to a girl here in the Denver area a few months ago. Coma, then death. (See my earlier post).
But yes, dehydration (especially around these parts) is more likely.
(BTW, if you happen to be female and pregnant, (or male and pregnant I suppose, but that's very very rare;-), staying hydrated is especially important -- even slight dehydration can bring on contractions and early labor. Apparently the local maternity wards had a real busy day a few years ago during the Pope's visit because of the number of people standing out for a long time in the hot dry weather.)
ecstasy promote dehydration by making the uptake of water more inefficient
WRONG! (Emphasis added because this is important).
Ecstasy just makes you feel thirsty, and tends to block the "okay, I've had enough water now" signal, so you keep feeling thirsty.
Locally we had a 16 yr old girl go into a coma and die because of this. Took ecstasy, got thirsty, kept drinking water until she'd basically OD' on the stuff. The increased fluid volume caused cerebral swelling which induced the coma which she never recovered from.
The friends that supplied the drug to her were charged, don't know what the current status of the case is.
I suppose if you "know what you're doing" (although I question that assessment of anyone who voluntarily takes mind-altering drugs of unknown provenance) you can alleviate the thirst sensation with small sips without overhydrating. She didn't, nor did her friends.
Most blank DVD media and burners only do 4.7 GB (single layer, single sided), whereas most movies are probably in the 7 to 9 GB range. The FBI warnings don't take that much space!
(Don't tell me you actually recompress all the video to a lower bit rate. You are a looney, in that case.)
My Apex 600 does something funky with the Stuar Little DVD (I don't remember the details, it has been a while since I (or rather, my kids) last watched it) -- but was easy enough to get it to actually play.
If I remember right, use the "Resume" button on the remote -- and as I type this I seem to remember that's a recommended solution for a few other discs with similar problems. A software glitch in the player firmware, which may well have been fixed in a later version. (Of course, the later firmware versions also disable the easy access to the "secret" menu that lets you disable Macrovision.)
The Apex is a nice little box for the price, perfectly adequate for watching movies on an old 21" (or whatever it is) TV with plain stereo in the playroom. When I move up to a 60" progressive scan wide screen with full 5.1 surround, I'll get a better quality DVD player too.
I've had my Apex for about three years now, still works just fine. It (model 600) uses a standard computer DVD drive, so if that ever breaks I'll just swap it out. I did open it up and put heat sink grease between the sinks and the two chips that run hot, and added a small CPU fan in there to help keep things cooler. Nothing your average slashdotter couldn't do.
Yeah, the Apex will output either NTSC or PAL from either kind of disc (including video-CD) at the push of a button. Came in very handy when I was testing some software with a PAL VCR for a customer in Australia -- I had the PAL VCR and monitor but no source of PAL signal, so I just brought in my Apex from home.
It does (at least, my old AD600 does) occasionally hiccup on a couple of DVDs I have (eg push the "back to main menu" button and it launches off into the middle of the movie somewhere) -- I remember "Stuart Little" as one such. But you can still navigate around using the block numbers. And most discs are fine.
Well yeah, any signal sent over the airwaves is fundamentally analog at the carrier level -- as is the "digital" signal carrying this message over at least some portion of the phonelines between my computer, Slashdot's, and yours. Unwrap that layer and the useful part of the signal is digital.
I'll pass. Sounds like it bears as much relation to real biology as Star Trek does to real physics. Lots of nice buzz phrases that sound like they might make sense, but totally meaningless in actuality.
(Not that that can't make for a good story if you're willing to suspend disbelief, a lot of folks like Greg's writing -- it's just his style tends not to match my taste.)
The FCC didn't mandate that all new televisions be color when color tv started.
No, but they did mandate that a color TV signal be viewable on a B&W TV -- which is how we ended up with NTSC (which is basically just a black and white signal (luma) with a color signal (chroma) superimposed (shoehorned into a little extra bandwidth)).
Similarly FM (or AM) stereo broadcasts can be listened to an an FM (or AM) mono receiver.
Unfortunately there's essentially no way for an analog receiver to get anything meaningful out of a digital signal.
I don't know about other instruments, but lab video cameras are using 1394. Note this is not the same as a firewire-enabled DV camcorder, the lab cameras send uncompressed video at higher data rates. (Video compression loses data, and compression artifacts screw up any computer analysis of the image.)
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone who can provide counter-examples to my claim?
Yes and no. For a few years after it was invented, the optical maser (aka "laser") was known as "a solution in search of a problem". Lots of folks had ideas for what it might be good for, but a flash lamp pumped ruby laser wasn't really good for any of those things yet.
It did, however, stir up a great degree of interest in laser research, both as pure research and as research targeting actual solutions to specific problems -- which kind of reinforces your point, with the caveat that it might well have taken a few more years if it weren't for all the theoretical research into optical masers going on in the late 1950s. (At least three different groups seem to have invented the laser more or less independently and simultaneously.)
Certainly in 1958 (when the first theoretical paper appeared) or 1960 (when the ruby laser was first demonstrated), nobody was contemplating using lasers to read plastic discs of major motion pictures in home equipment.
(Although it wasn't that long afterwards -- the LaserDisc was introduced in 1978, some years before the CD. As I recall, the first LaserDiscs used a helium-neon laser tube.)
"This isn't about trying to get people to move from Unix to Microsoft products, it's about offering ways for both systems to peacefully coexist," Houston stressed.
In most conflicts, this sort of sentiment means that one party (eg Microsoft) has realized that it can no longer win, and is suing for peace before it is totally defeated. Since defeat occurs first in the mind of the enemy, this means they've already lost.
OTOH, they could just be spewing a line of BS.
Um, you are aware, of course, that Steve Jobs, as the founder and CEO of NeXT, is responsible for NeXTStep existing in the first place?
It may not say much about audio on the website, but since this is a follow-on to Broadcast2000, it's capabilities are pretty good. As many tracks as you want, various effects and transitions, spatial location, and the usual cut'n'paste, transformation, etc.
In one respect it has Premiere beat hands down: adaptability.
I haven't yet looked at the source for Cinelerra (downloading it now), but I have of Bcast2000, which I've used -- and no matter how convoluted, it has to be orders of magnitude easier to modify to fit custome needs than Premiere. (And yes, I'm familiar with the Adobe Premier SDK. Pardon me while I go throw up in the bushes from the memories.)
Premiere is okay as long as you only want to do with it what the programmers decided to let you. It sucks if you want to do something a bit different.
But Cinellera's aiming for a higher level user than Premiere anyway. Using it for web media (although it probably handles some of those formats) is a joke, the thing is designed for HDTV.
Er, sorry.
I remember when I discovered Simula 67 (aka "Algol with classes") on a DecSystem-10, I thought it was pretty cool. (Burroughs') Algol was my first programming lanaguage (APL my second, talk about opposites), so learning Simula was a snap. Unfortunately there wasn't much call for it.
Imagine my joy some ten years later when I heard about this new "C with classes" language that some guy named Stroustrup was working on. (Imagine my disgust at what C++ has become...)
That reminds me of a really strange movie we saw back in first year calculus class. (Yeah, movies in math class. Weird in itself.)
Had to do with just such a situation, with the driver being referred to the cop for speeding. The trooper proceeds to explain Rolle's Theorem and Mean Value Theorem to the driver as proof that somewhere in between the two toll booths, he had to have been speeding.
I guess to the extent that I remember the name of Rolle's Theorem, the movie served its purpose. OTOH it always seemed kind of intuitively obvious to me.
Well, if you're going to go posting lyrics...
....
This came out years ago, I found a printout of it a couple of days back while going through some papers. Picture Weird Al Yankovich singing this to Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (this isn't a Weird Al though, he did "Eat It"):
Boot It
You're processing some words when your keyboard goes dead,
Ten pages in the buffer, should have gone to bed,
The system just crashed, but don't lose your head,
Just BOOT IT, just BOOT IT.
Better think fast, better do what you can,
Read the manual or call your system man,
Don't want to fall behind in the race with Japan,
So BOOT IT,
Get the sys admin to
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Even though you'd rather shoot it.
Don't be upset, it's only some glitch.
All that you do is flip a little switch.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Get right down and restitute it.
Don't get excited, all is not lost.
CP/M, UNIX or MS-DOS
Just BOOT IT, boot it, boot it, boot it...
You gotta have your printout for the meeting at two,
The system says your jobs at the head of the queue,
Right then the thing dies but you know what to do,
BOOT IT.
You always get so worried when the system runs slow,
And when it finally crashes, man you feel so low,
But computers make mistakes (they're only human you know)
So BOOT IT,
Call the local guru to
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Go ahead re-institute it.
If you're not lucky, get the book off the shelf,
But if you are, it'll do itself.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Then go find the guy who screwed it! Operating systems are built to bounce back,
Whether it's a Cray or a Radio Shack.
BOOT IT, BOOT IT,
Sorry I don't know who deserves the attributes for that.
Ultimately, the sound still has to become analog before you can hear it. (This may change in the future I'm sure)
Yeah, everyone will be required to have cochlear implants that take a digital signal.
And they're getting closer with retinal implants to handle the video side of things, too...
And just to confuse the issue, IBM's OS/390 (now z/OS) is a UNIX® brand system.
Probably the only UNIX® system whose native character set is EBCDIC.
Didn't we read in these pages (or linked to these pages) about nVidia taking a write-off on a bunch of inventory they had to scrap because Microsoft changed some requirement in response to the MIT hack?
Seems to me MSFT has figured a hardware/firmware workaround so the disclosure is no longer a big deal, and dropping the DMCA thing saves them a little negative publicity. (And, depending on the specifics of the case, if they thought they'd lose it avoids putting the DMCA to a test that might weaken it.)
That's a danger in dry climates. Your body never feels sweaty because the perspiration evaporates so fast, and you can drink enough to not feel thirsty without ever filling your bladder. You have to get in the habit of drinking more than you think you need to keep the kidneys flushed out and the blood volume reasonable.
(The latter is important at altitude, which tends to thicken the blood anyway.)
You can certainly build up a tolerance to caffeine (and similarly, exhibit withdrawal symptoms from it).
As far as losing weight goes -- I've heard that caffeine affects your metabolism such that it kicks blood sugar levels temporarily higher. This would do two things -- the higher blood sugar level prompts conversion of the sugar to fat, and when it drops again, it makes you hungry. That in turn would tempt you to eat more, and so on.
I know I tend to eat less when I drink water rather than my usual several cans of diet pop (alternate Diet Coke and Fresca -- I don't need that much caffeine).
Killing one's self by drinking too much water is exactly what happened to a girl here in the Denver area a few months ago. Coma, then death. (See my earlier post).
;-), staying hydrated is especially important -- even slight dehydration can bring on contractions and early labor. Apparently the local maternity wards had a real busy day a few years ago during the Pope's visit because of the number of people standing out for a long time in the hot dry weather.)
But yes, dehydration (especially around these parts) is more likely.
(BTW, if you happen to be female and pregnant, (or male and pregnant I suppose, but that's very very rare
ecstasy promote dehydration by making the uptake of water more inefficient
WRONG! (Emphasis added because this is important).
Ecstasy just makes you feel thirsty, and tends to block the "okay, I've had enough water now" signal, so you keep feeling thirsty.
Locally we had a 16 yr old girl go into a coma and die because of this. Took ecstasy, got thirsty, kept drinking water until she'd basically OD' on the stuff. The increased fluid volume caused cerebral swelling which induced the coma which she never recovered from.
The friends that supplied the drug to her were charged, don't know what the current status of the case is.
I suppose if you "know what you're doing" (although I question that assessment of anyone who voluntarily takes mind-altering drugs of unknown provenance) you can alleviate the thirst sensation with small sips without overhydrating. She didn't, nor did her friends.
So what do you burn them to (and with)?
Most blank DVD media and burners only do 4.7 GB (single layer, single sided), whereas most movies are probably in the 7 to 9 GB range. The FBI warnings don't take that much space!
(Don't tell me you actually recompress all the video to a lower bit rate. You are a looney, in that case.)
My Apex 600 does something funky with the Stuar Little DVD (I don't remember the details, it has been a while since I (or rather, my kids) last watched it) -- but was easy enough to get it to actually play.
If I remember right, use the "Resume" button on the remote -- and as I type this I seem to remember that's a recommended solution for a few other discs with similar problems. A software glitch in the player firmware, which may well have been fixed in a later version. (Of course, the later firmware versions also disable the easy access to the "secret" menu that lets you disable Macrovision.)
The Apex is a nice little box for the price, perfectly adequate for watching movies on an old 21" (or whatever it is) TV with plain stereo in the playroom. When I move up to a 60" progressive scan wide screen with full 5.1 surround, I'll get a better quality DVD player too.
I've had my Apex for about three years now, still works just fine. It (model 600) uses a standard computer DVD drive, so if that ever breaks I'll just swap it out. I did open it up and put heat sink grease between the sinks and the two chips that run hot, and added a small CPU fan in there to help keep things cooler. Nothing your average slashdotter couldn't do.
Yeah, the Apex will output either NTSC or PAL from either kind of disc (including video-CD) at the push of a button. Came in very handy when I was testing some software with a PAL VCR for a customer in Australia -- I had the PAL VCR and monitor but no source of PAL signal, so I just brought in my Apex from home.
It does (at least, my old AD600 does) occasionally hiccup on a couple of DVDs I have (eg push the "back to main menu" button and it launches off into the middle of the movie somewhere) -- I remember "Stuart Little" as one such. But you can still navigate around using the block numbers. And most discs are fine.
Well yeah, any signal sent over the airwaves is fundamentally analog at the carrier level -- as is the "digital" signal carrying this message over at least some portion of the phonelines between my computer, Slashdot's, and yours. Unwrap that layer and the useful part of the signal is digital.
I'll pass. Sounds like it bears as much relation to real biology as Star Trek does to real physics. Lots of nice buzz phrases that sound like they might make sense, but totally meaningless in actuality.
(Not that that can't make for a good story if you're willing to suspend disbelief, a lot of folks like Greg's writing -- it's just his style tends not to match my taste.)
If the science in it is as silly as that in Bear's "Blood Music", I'll give it a pass, thanks.
Well, ontogeny may or may not recapitulate phylogeny -- but that first cup of coffee sure does.
The FCC didn't mandate that all new televisions be color when color tv started.
No, but they did mandate that a color TV signal be viewable on a B&W TV -- which is how we ended up with NTSC (which is basically just a black and white signal (luma) with a color signal (chroma) superimposed (shoehorned into a little extra bandwidth)).
Similarly FM (or AM) stereo broadcasts can be listened to an an FM (or AM) mono receiver.
Unfortunately there's essentially no way for an analog receiver to get anything meaningful out of a digital signal.
I don't know about other instruments, but lab video cameras are using 1394. Note this is not the same as a firewire-enabled DV camcorder, the lab cameras send uncompressed video at higher data rates. (Video compression loses data, and compression artifacts screw up any computer analysis of the image.)