By no means I whish to troll, but I see greater irony in the fact the original document was
Microsoft Word - DMCAxxx.doc
produced by
Acrobat Distiller 5.0.5 (Windows)
I know as much as everyone else the pressure / need to have MS Office as a tool for communication, but I would have liked to see the EFF use OpenOffice or Koffice or any other open/free Office suite.
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I read somewhere (I think it was an interview with Carmack) that Doom 3 will be so polygon-heavy that even the basic gamespeed will be slower (and more realistic, no more running at 30 mph) -- not to mention that there will be few monsters at once. Last year they mentionned a GeForce 3 as a minimum for the game.
However, you'll probably be delighted by the lighting and overall atmosphere, judging by last year's screenshots. Also, if I remember, dynamic lighting computations will allow tricks like a character half hidden in the shadows, slowly revealing himself as he moves; or incredible lights-behind-fans effects including shadows.
I think Carmack and the rest of id Software know very well that yet another no-plot, dumb-action Wolf/Doom/Quake-like game will be badly perceived by the public; for my part, I wouldn't be surprised if Doom 3 is a story-driven game much closer to an interactive movie.
I'd imagine that it is possible to come up with an algorithim that's lossless and still as small as any equivalent.jpg file.
Well, the answer is a definitive NO. There are strict mathematical limits (Google keywords: shannon information) to lossless compression, and most lossless compression algorithms (used in.zip,.gif and lossless.jpg formats for example) are pretty close to that limit. This is the reason why zipping a GIF or a JPG (or an MP3) is totally useless.
The real problem with beige is not, in my opinion, the initial color. Well, beige is not really pretty, but heck, it's not really hideous. However, the problem resides in what beige becomes with aging. After 4-5 years, the "color" degrades to take a darker, greener shade (just look at old Macintoshes!). It's simply disgusting. In french, this color has a name: "caca-d'oie", which means roughly "goose shit". At least I don't see how black could take such a shade.
Apart from that, when I saw the title, I tought: "Well, black is the new beige: finally they realized that the Universe IS black, not turquoise or salmon!";-)
On Win2k + MSIE 5.5, fully patched, Minesweeper and test.txt "worked" (somehow I don't feel this is the right word), but there was an error after hitting the back button at Google. It must be because google.com redirects me first to google.ca.
I'm to lazy for doing any research on this, but does this ruling say anything about child porn created out of nothing for "personal enjoyment"? I've read something once regarding a Canadian (from British Columbia if I remember well) that was caught with drawings of nude kids. However, it was his own drawings and didn't share them with anyone... What's the status of this under the current law, in USA and in Canada? Is it kiddie porn or free speech, or what?
Ok, maybe I don't have a clue at all, but I'm wondering what is the difference between a mod (say Counter Strike) and a game for which the makers used an engine from another company (say the Quake II or Quake III engine). I mean, it looks to me that Half Life, which is based on the Quake II engine, can be considered as a mod of Quake II, albeit a very total conversion mod.
I understand that companies which use licensed engines probably modify the engine to suit their needs, which is impossible in mods, but I feel the border between a licensed-engine game and an advanced mod is being smudged. Since an engine license cost a load of money, is the difference merely financial (i.e. mods are not for sale, licensed-engine games can be sold)?
Well, it would be great if everybody could benefit from a free OS. And if it is true that Linux, or even Windows, is still high tech geek stuff, then *every* OS will be perceived that way by the casual computer user. However, it is certainly possible to hide the "high tech and geek stuff" so that mom and pop can use Linux. And by hiding, I do not mean obscuration. I know one of the reasons Linux is so popular among tech-savvy people is that it is easy to tweak and to see how it works; however, a user interface that shields (but not prevent!) the common user from the need of using the command line and following tedious configuration steps is possible and actually something that should be done. This would be possible only if the OS is able to "work by itself" without much help from the everyday user, which is not yet the case with the Linux distros that I know of. (By work by itself, I mainly mean installing, using, upgrading and uninstalling software and devices). It is however possible -- just look at MacOSX. And if someone comes with such a Linux distro, be it Lycoris' Desktop/LX or Mandrake or any other, well, that would be a great business opportunity for them as well as excellent knews for the Linux community.
Well, they are certainly not the firsts to make photonic chips. Optical mux/demux (cascaded couplers) are routinely built as planar waveguides on semiconductor materials. However, the size of their chip seems really small, which suggests that they use photonic bandgap technology, which uses very small arrays of refraction index changes in which light at certain wavelenght can't propagate to make it perform tricks, like turning at 90 degrees on very small distance. However, I didn't saw any mention of this in the article. Anyone can confirm it is the case?
As a matter of fact, when the two waves cancel each other, yes, you do not detect any energy coming from the noise source. You just created an interference condition where this particular soundwave can't propagate. However, conservation of energy implies that the sound wave has been reflected back to towards the source. The Silence Machine thus acts like a thick solid wall for that specific soundwave.
The Computing in Science and Engineering magazine published in Jan/Feb 2000 a "Top 10 Algorithms of the Century" article by Jack Dongarra and Francis Sullivan. Their choices for the most important / useful algorithms are:
Metropolis algorithm for Monte Carlo
Simplex Method for Linear Programming
Krylov Subspace Iteration Methods
The Decompositionnal Approach to Matrix Computations
The news come from ATC, the same company that pretended having cloned a human in november. However, these claims were probably premature. We should be skeptical about this kidney thing... publishing fist in New Scientist is not exactly standard for serious scientific results.
Hum... First of all, these are turbines/windmills, not fans. They do not run on electricity to provide wind, so that they turn rather slowly; and also, most birds can beat natural wind, so they won't be sucked in!
Confirmed... You can be sure that whenever someone has to dig the ground, they lay fibers (along pipes, copper wires, whatever) since what is costly in installing optical fibers is not the fibers themselves, it's burying them. Why aren't they used? There is a bunch of answers to this question. These fibers are laid to be rented by someone else. 'Dark fiber' does not refer to the fact that no signal goes through them, but to the fact that they are rented 'as is' without the lasers and detectors necessary to build the whole optical network. So you need someone to rent them... That would be telecom companies, but those only use backbones and WAN/MANs (Wide/Metropolitan Area Networks) and are not interested yet by the FTTH (Fiber To The Home) concept, and they won't be unless the copper wire network's cost has been written off.
MIRACL stands for Middle Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser. As its name implies, it is indeed a chemical laser, that is, one that gets the lasing medium excited with a chemical reaction instead of a more conventional current source or flash lamp. The structure of MIRACL is really one of a reactor, with the starting material being C2H4 (ethylene), NF3 and helium. This mixture is burnt to provide free fluorine atoms that reacts with injected deuterium molecules further down the stream. This reaction is really violent, so that the laser is in a perpetual explosion state. Vibrationnally excited deuterium-fluorine molecules in the produced supersonic flow thus constitutes the lasing medium. So you now have to put mirrors and windows inside this reactor to get your laser. One of my profs said once "I don't understand why they use chemical lasers as lasers; they would be much more efficient as bombs".
Main source: Lasers and Electro-Optics, Davis, Cambridge Editor.
No, the Mariners never landed on Mercury. On Venus, soviet probes of the Venera series did touch the ground. The last one transmitted data back (including pictures) for two hours only due to pressure, temperature, and sulfuric acid rain.
You will see one other before Rendezvous With Rama, tough. As previously posted on Slashdot here, the movie based on Final Fantasy will be there soon (release in 2001). They seemed to have focused a lot on the characters' faces (see the amazing wrinkles animation on the web site). So maybe Rendezvous won't be so bad in 2003.
I think you're talking about '2061', the third book in the trilogy (after '2001' and '2010', of course). '3001' is the title of its epilogue, if I remember right.
If you choose TeX/LaTeX as a standard, which is a good idea partly because of the quality of the output and because of the way it can handle complex templates, you can edit LaTeX rather easily using open source tools like LyX or KLyX. They're not perfect (yet!) but it's a good way to start using LaTeX in an almost-WYSIWYG fashion.
You could have rewritten "6th Day" without using clones, and the storyplot could still hold. The real feats here are being able to:
Record someone's memory;
Inject it in someone else's brain;
Grow an adult human in two hours.
Cloning only helps the memory 'receiver' looks like the original one... So in fact 6th Day is not much about cloning as about "memory transmission", a lot like in "Strange Days".
Slashdot Mirror
By no means I whish to troll, but I see greater irony in the fact the original document was
Microsoft Word - DMCAxxx.doc
produced by
Acrobat Distiller 5.0.5 (Windows)
I know as much as everyone else the pressure / need to have MS Office as a tool for communication, but I would have liked to see the EFF use OpenOffice or Koffice or any other open/free Office suite.
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I read somewhere (I think it was an interview with Carmack) that Doom 3 will be so polygon-heavy that even the basic gamespeed will be slower (and more realistic, no more running at 30 mph) -- not to mention that there will be few monsters at once. Last year they mentionned a GeForce 3 as a minimum for the game.
However, you'll probably be delighted by the lighting and overall atmosphere, judging by last year's screenshots. Also, if I remember, dynamic lighting computations will allow tricks like a character half hidden in the shadows, slowly revealing himself as he moves; or incredible lights-behind-fans effects including shadows.
I think Carmack and the rest of id Software know very well that yet another no-plot, dumb-action Wolf/Doom/Quake-like game will be badly perceived by the public; for my part, I wouldn't be surprised if Doom 3 is a story-driven game much closer to an interactive movie.
Well, it seems to me that it is the same interface as Mozilla's and Netscape's Sidebar, the tabs being the Bookmarks, History, Search, etc. buttons.
It also crashes on Moz0.99 / W2K. However, by entering the URL directly, I can view the page, it only crashes when closing the window or tab.
Odd.
I'd imagine that it is possible to come up with an algorithim that's lossless and still as small as any equivalent .jpg file.
.zip, .gif and lossless .jpg formats for example) are pretty close to that limit. This is the reason why zipping a GIF or a JPG (or an MP3) is totally useless.
Well, the answer is a definitive NO. There are strict mathematical limits (Google keywords: shannon information) to lossless compression, and most lossless compression algorithms (used in
The real problem with beige is not, in my opinion, the initial color. Well, beige is not really pretty, but heck, it's not really hideous. However, the problem resides in what beige becomes with aging. After 4-5 years, the "color" degrades to take a darker, greener shade (just look at old Macintoshes!). It's simply disgusting. In french, this color has a name: "caca-d'oie", which means roughly "goose shit". At least I don't see how black could take such a shade.
;-)
Apart from that, when I saw the title, I tought: "Well, black is the new beige: finally they realized that the Universe IS black, not turquoise or salmon!"
On Win2k + MSIE 5.5, fully patched, Minesweeper and test.txt "worked" (somehow I don't feel this is the right word), but there was an error after hitting the back button at Google. It must be because google.com redirects me first to google.ca.
I'm to lazy for doing any research on this, but does this ruling say anything about child porn created out of nothing for "personal enjoyment"? I've read something once regarding a Canadian (from British Columbia if I remember well) that was caught with drawings of nude kids. However, it was his own drawings and didn't share them with anyone... What's the status of this under the current law, in USA and in Canada? Is it kiddie porn or free speech, or what?
Ok, maybe I don't have a clue at all, but I'm wondering what is the difference between a mod (say Counter Strike) and a game for which the makers used an engine from another company (say the Quake II or Quake III engine). I mean, it looks to me that Half Life, which is based on the Quake II engine, can be considered as a mod of Quake II, albeit a very total conversion mod.
I understand that companies which use licensed engines probably modify the engine to suit their needs, which is impossible in mods, but I feel the border between a licensed-engine game and an advanced mod is being smudged. Since an engine license cost a load of money, is the difference merely financial (i.e. mods are not for sale, licensed-engine games can be sold)?
Well, it would be great if everybody could benefit from a free OS. And if it is true that Linux, or even Windows, is still high tech geek stuff, then *every* OS will be perceived that way by the casual computer user. However, it is certainly possible to hide the "high tech and geek stuff" so that mom and pop can use Linux. And by hiding, I do not mean obscuration. I know one of the reasons Linux is so popular among tech-savvy people is that it is easy to tweak and to see how it works; however, a user interface that shields (but not prevent!) the common user from the need of using the command line and following tedious configuration steps is possible and actually something that should be done. This would be possible only if the OS is able to "work by itself" without much help from the everyday user, which is not yet the case with the Linux distros that I know of. (By work by itself, I mainly mean installing, using, upgrading and uninstalling software and devices). It is however possible -- just look at MacOSX. And if someone comes with such a Linux distro, be it Lycoris' Desktop/LX or Mandrake or any other, well, that would be a great business opportunity for them as well as excellent knews for the Linux community.
Well, they are certainly not the firsts to make photonic chips. Optical mux/demux (cascaded couplers) are routinely built as planar waveguides on semiconductor materials. However, the size of their chip seems really small, which suggests that they use photonic bandgap technology, which uses very small arrays of refraction index changes in which light at certain wavelenght can't propagate to make it perform tricks, like turning at 90 degrees on very small distance. However, I didn't saw any mention of this in the article. Anyone can confirm it is the case?
As a matter of fact, when the two waves cancel each other, yes, you do not detect any energy coming from the noise source. You just created an interference condition where this particular soundwave can't propagate. However, conservation of energy implies that the sound wave has been reflected back to towards the source. The Silence Machine thus acts like a thick solid wall for that specific soundwave.
Metropolis algorithm for Monte Carlo
Simplex Method for Linear Programming
Krylov Subspace Iteration Methods
The Decompositionnal Approach to Matrix Computations
The Fortran Optimizing Compiler
QR Algorithm for Computing Eigenvalues
Quicksort Algorithm
Fast Fourier Transform
Integer Relation Detection
Fast Multipole Method
It's just sad that Operation Clambake still proclames "THIS SITE CENSORED BY GOOGLE.COM". Well, I guess it's still early in the morning in Europe...
I smell the smell of an IgNobel prize in the air.
The news come from ATC, the same company that pretended having cloned a human in november. However, these claims were probably premature. We should be skeptical about this kidney thing... publishing fist in New Scientist is not exactly standard for serious scientific results.
Hum... First of all, these are turbines/windmills, not fans. They do not run on electricity to provide wind, so that they turn rather slowly; and also, most birds can beat natural wind, so they won't be sucked in!
Confirmed... You can be sure that whenever someone has to dig the ground, they lay fibers (along pipes, copper wires, whatever) since what is costly in installing optical fibers is not the fibers themselves, it's burying them. Why aren't they used? There is a bunch of answers to this question. These fibers are laid to be rented by someone else. 'Dark fiber' does not refer to the fact that no signal goes through them, but to the fact that they are rented 'as is' without the lasers and detectors necessary to build the whole optical network. So you need someone to rent them... That would be telecom companies, but those only use backbones and WAN/MANs (Wide/Metropolitan Area Networks) and are not interested yet by the FTTH (Fiber To The Home) concept, and they won't be unless the copper wire network's cost has been written off.
Main source: Lasers and Electro-Optics, Davis, Cambridge Editor.
No, the Mariners never landed on Mercury. On Venus, soviet probes of the Venera series did touch the ground. The last one transmitted data back (including pictures) for two hours only due to pressure, temperature, and sulfuric acid rain.
... that his name is not D.A.R.Y.L..
You will see one other before Rendezvous With Rama, tough. As previously posted on Slashdot here, the movie based on Final Fantasy will be there soon (release in 2001). They seemed to have focused a lot on the characters' faces (see the amazing wrinkles animation on the web site). So maybe Rendezvous won't be so bad in 2003.
I think you're talking about '2061', the third book in the trilogy (after '2001' and '2010', of course). '3001' is the title of its epilogue, if I remember right.
If you choose TeX/LaTeX as a standard, which is a good idea partly because of the quality of the output and because of the way it can handle complex templates, you can edit LaTeX rather easily using open source tools like LyX or KLyX. They're not perfect (yet!) but it's a good way to start using LaTeX in an almost-WYSIWYG fashion.
Record someone's memory;
Inject it in someone else's brain;
Grow an adult human in two hours.
Cloning only helps the memory 'receiver' looks like the original one... So in fact 6th Day is not much about cloning as about "memory transmission", a lot like in "Strange Days".