No, CPUs, RAM, DVDs, and TCP/IP don't exist in nature. Like I said, I'm pretty sure the founding fathers of the CPU were inspired by the human brain, and they knew darn well that what they were building was not a brain. It wasn't parallel. It fetched and executed instructions sequentially. It accessed memory linearly. It didn't use chemical reactions at a molecular level. These are all advantages a biological brain has. And thank god that they didn't limit themselves to that paradigm. We wouldn't have computers today if they had to be natural.
My point is that if designers limit their concept of cooperation between individuals to what nature has implemented (with visual, audible, electrical, or sensory communication), then we'd be sitting still technologically.
And here's the ultimate argument against communication-free robots: They don't exist in nature.
He's right, you know. Most robots in nature are fantastic at communication. [snicker]
Seriously, dude, that's also the ultimate argument against CPUs, RAM, DVDs, TCP/IP, Fast Fourier Transformations, floating point division, and possibly about a thousand other technologies and techniques in computer science: They don't exist in nature. So? I'm sure many inventors have been inspired by nature and occasionally model things after nature, but thank goodness they have the sense to abandon what nature does with pheromones, hormones, synapses, and chemical reactions when we're stuck working with motors, gears, and instruction cycles.
Big deal/ If they don't make money, they go the way of the z80.
You sure you want to use that analogy?! We should all be so lucky yourself to have a product that "way of the Z80"! The Z80 is/was a fantastically pervasive and successful product. It's still a cash cow for Zilog after 25 years. There are gazillions of them in use. It has tons of unforseen applications and spin-offs. Just ask any kid over the last 12 years including today that plays a Nintendo Game Boy (color or otherwise).
Here are a bunch of Z80s and dev tools you can buy.
An interesting offering from Zilog themself: an embedded Z80 web server.
And if you need 32-bit address space for your app, there's a Z80 object-code compatible Z380 in the family.
Okay, end of Z80 rant!;-) I used to code Z80 assembly for Sega GameGears and Nintendo Game Boys and I'll admit it was a bit scarring. (C and other language compilers for Z80 abound.) But it's bread and butter stuff. And still serious profit for all involved. Don't be slaggin' the Z80!
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
- Frederick Brooks
Re:Character motivations and other stuff
on
Hannibal's Return
·
· Score: 1
Verger's mobility also bothered me. In the book, he had far more motivation for his hatred for Lecter.
Decent review, but let me take exception with this point. Ummmm... so "only" being horribly disfigured and unable to speak and eat properly and being confined to a wheelchair forever isn't motivating enough for that guy?! I understand Verger's situation might be less horrible than in the book you read, but geez, but I really think what the movie showed happened to Verger would motivate him to do at least as much as hid did to pursue Hannibal.
Why don't you go and educate yourself a little before you look like an even bigger fool?
You called that guy a fool, but all you provided yourself was a ridiculous, highest-level link to "http://www.w3.org". That's kind of lazy, dude. Why don't you make yourself look good and tell us or link to something that explains what the vision impaired will get out of HTML4 or CSS. I'm not saying I doubt you, but I clicked on your link and it didn't answer any of those questions for me. Unless you're suggesting I need to read every Working Draft at W3!
A description or a link to a visual impaired site that uses HTML4 or CSS would be great. Can anyone else help here?
we could be driving cars that are filled with some chemicals that scab and repair the body underneath just like our skin does. That would be really good
Or we could drive cars that are filled with some chemicals that dissolve our bodies, so when we crash, we're removed from the gene pool and won't breed clumsy offspring. That would be really good.
"Students in a B.Eng. program should make themselves fully aware of the APEGBC Code of Ethics (http://www.apeg.bc.ca/about/act_code.htm) and apply its principles in their work."
It does apply to them. If it didn't why do they even mention it?
Ummmm. Why do they mention it? They don't mention it. UBC Engineering isn't even a B.Eng. program. It's a B.A.Sc. program for undergrads. This is a nitpick, but you're the one who started down that path of quoting little facts. Go back. Re-read the article, now go to the correct school's website before you start quoting things! It's UBC, not UVic!
"Professional Engineers and Professional Geoscientists shall act at all times... and with fidelity to the public needs"
Note the part where it says "at all times". It does not say "when being paid" or "when working". Doing something like this is not showing "fidelity to the public needs".
Undergraduate students are not Professional Engineers. Even after graduating, there is a process to go through (not the least of which involves paying regular dues) to become and remain Professional Engineers.
Quality? CD quality is pretty damn good, especially to your average clueless consumer.
Agreed. In fact, we see acceptance of MP3, which shows that most consumers are willing to take a very slight downgrade in quality.
Faster seek times? Any cheap CD player can seek to the track you want pretty damn quick.
Disagree. Show me a CD player that can seek from track 1 of disc 1 to track 20 of disc 100 in less than half a second. Dead air at the party. Dead air in the car. No ability to overlap or beat-mix. That's one area where the consumers will start to buy into hard-disk or other media that gives faster access.
Another area where CD falls down... track organization. ID3V1 is a lame start, but it still beats CD. Try searching your CD changer for a combination of genre and year. Or even just artist. Yes, some changers allow creation of playlists and "don't play" tracks. But the music itself isn't self-describing (ie, it's up to the user) as it can be with digital music. Now I'm not saying that even ID3V2 tags are the be-all-and-end-all, but at least it's an extendible format. CD Text is not sufficient to search my collection in a changer, and it's not extendible.
Please tell me what part of the following plan won't work... At some point, post decoding (once I've paid for the music once), I simply hook my DAT or another PC (running SoundForge/etc.) or a MiniDisc up to the SPDIF output of my sound card and record the digital stream that was intended to go to my preamp or receiver. Now the article talks about a secure audio path...
Other technologies being built into Windows further boost content-protection features, such as the so-called Secure Audio Path, which scrambles output from a computer sound card so that music streams can't be tapped and copied at that point.
So are we talking about the death of SPDIF? Will consumer audio devices not be allowed to feed preamps and receivers unencrypted signals? Is all our home audio gear obsolete? At what point in the audio path do I need to stick my recording software/hardware?!
Let's consider the opportunities for easier speeding when eyeball and manual speed enforcement are funded less and less while the police rely on in-car ("client-side"?) electronics more and more.
Just like other semi-illegal aftermarket "chipping" of automotive computers (fuel:air ratios, spark timing, emmissions, etc.), we're sure to see great electronic hacks to bypass the speed limiters. And since 98% of the population isn't going to bother being such an outlaw, those of us willing to risk it will probably run into far less old-style radar traps, etc.
I'm sure the aftermarket automotive tweakers are salivating at this!
This does not qualify as "news for nerds". Maybe news for marketing droids.
I'm a nerd and I'm glad to hear this news. I recently leased four HP servers. Two are running Linux now. News that HP is supporting Open Source even more by embracing and promoting GNOME is exciting to hear. You're correct, of course: if I want to run GNOME on these boxes, I will do it anyways since it's Free. But I'm glad I got that news. You must agree that HP takes a risk in certain old corporate eyes by associating itself with Free software. And I applaud HP for doing that. Get the good news out there!
When I go hiking or riding, I drop my StarTac in a (clean) sock and then put that in a small sealed baggie. My reasoning being that it adds 1) a small amount of crash-proof padding and 2) if some water does get in I'd rather see the sock soak it up and distribute it than have the phone lying naked in the accumulated water in the bag. I've done this in horrible weather for a couple of years and my phones have not suffered. The best part is that 98% of my time (when I'm out of the bush), I don't have to carry a big goofy yellow "sport" phone around with me in the city or for business.
This is probably similar in other cities, but here in rainy Vancouver the bicycle couriers wear all manner of phones and wireless gadgets and they simply wrap them fresh daily in bags or plastic sandwich wrap and seal it with a strip of duct tape or rubber bands. This seems to work for 8+ hour shifts in really crappy weather.
Global Nuclear Warfare(tm)
A fantasic non-zero sum game for the whole world to enjoy. For 2-4 players, age 45+. Children are encouraged to watch and learn so they can play if they grow up.
The make -j3 lets make run three processes at once, which would lead to a speedup even on a single processor system, because disk I/O and CPU-bound compilation can overlap.
The noise you hear is the sound of thousands of single-CPU/. readers typing "make -j3 bzImage".
...if a song cuts out in mid-download it is a pain... Once money gets involved I will expect a much better quality of servers...
It'll be hard for Napster to meet those expectations. The song cutting out mid-download has very little to do with the quality of Napster's servers and _everything_ to do with Joe Blow on the other end. I haven't heard how they're going to improve that situation under the subscription scheme, if at all.
Unless, of course, the new Napster clients we all have to run will prevent us from shutting down our computers or dropping our ISP connection while there's a download in progress.
From a business strategy point of view, I'm not sure if it has an edge over other games, but Homeworld has a lot going for it as an intro to RTS for a user who hasn't played this genre before:
- fantastic suspension of disbelief
- no cut scenes used for cinematic sequences (helps above point)
- deeply designed visuals and audio (consistent aesthetic also helps above point)
- good tutorials to hold your hand thru initial single-player missions before you venture out onto the net
Strategically, it's fantastic (but so are other RTS games, to be honest). Many games shoot for those goals above, but I believe Homeworld was conceived and implemented by a team that gave a shit, without a spin-off-a-sequel-or-copy-an-existing-formula mindset. Support it!
These are breasts; this is source code.
Why do you have a problem with those two things belonging to one person?
I have a problem with them "belonging" to you. Slap a GPL on them, and I'll contribute to the code base. I promise. "Free" as in "Free Breasts". (Which, I'm thinking, would go really well with Free Beer.)
Slashdot Mirror
No, CPUs, RAM, DVDs, and TCP/IP don't exist in nature. Like I said, I'm pretty sure the founding fathers of the CPU were inspired by the human brain, and they knew darn well that what they were building was not a brain. It wasn't parallel. It fetched and executed instructions sequentially. It accessed memory linearly. It didn't use chemical reactions at a molecular level. These are all advantages a biological brain has. And thank god that they didn't limit themselves to that paradigm. We wouldn't have computers today if they had to be natural.
My point is that if designers limit their concept of cooperation between individuals to what nature has implemented (with visual, audible, electrical, or sensory communication), then we'd be sitting still technologically.
Do what works now. Then refine, refine, refine.
And here's the ultimate argument against communication-free robots: They don't exist in nature.
He's right, you know. Most robots in nature are fantastic at communication. [snicker]
Seriously, dude, that's also the ultimate argument against CPUs, RAM, DVDs, TCP/IP, Fast Fourier Transformations, floating point division, and possibly about a thousand other technologies and techniques in computer science: They don't exist in nature. So? I'm sure many inventors have been inspired by nature and occasionally model things after nature, but thank goodness they have the sense to abandon what nature does with pheromones, hormones, synapses, and chemical reactions when we're stuck working with motors, gears, and instruction cycles.
The FSF owns tradmark and controls usage of the term "open source"
No. You are incorrect. The FSF does neither of those things.
See the OSI for more. Even they abandoned attempts to trademark the term "open source".
I've done it before, works like a charm.
And how did you confirm that the data was fully wiped?
By doing something more than double-clicking on the C: icon in Windows Explorer, I hope!
Details, man! Need details!
That is the stupidest crap I have ever heard. What if you don't have a debugger?
;-)
Ok... I'll bite... If you don't have a debugger, you have no business writing code.
Maybe you have a future in technical writing or user training. Or marketing.
Big deal/ If they don't make money, they go the way of the z80.
.
;-) I used to code Z80 assembly for Sega GameGears and Nintendo Game Boys and I'll admit it was a bit scarring. (C and other language compilers for Z80 abound.) But it's bread and butter stuff. And still serious profit for all involved. Don't be slaggin' the Z80!
You sure you want to use that analogy?! We should all be so lucky yourself to have a product that "way of the Z80"! The Z80 is/was a fantastically pervasive and successful product. It's still a cash cow for Zilog after 25 years. There are gazillions of them in use. It has tons of unforseen applications and spin-offs. Just ask any kid over the last 12 years including today that plays a Nintendo Game Boy (color or otherwise).
Here are a bunch of Z80s and dev tools you can buy
An interesting offering from Zilog themself: an embedded Z80 web server.
And if you need 32-bit address space for your app, there's a Z80 object-code compatible Z380 in the family.
Okay, end of Z80 rant!
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
- Frederick Brooks
Verger's mobility also bothered me. In the book, he had far more motivation for his hatred for Lecter.
Decent review, but let me take exception with this point. Ummmm... so "only" being horribly disfigured and unable to speak and eat properly and being confined to a wheelchair forever isn't motivating enough for that guy?! I understand Verger's situation might be less horrible than in the book you read, but geez, but I really think what the movie showed happened to Verger would motivate him to do at least as much as hid did to pursue Hannibal.
Child porn is almost universally hated.
I agree. Microsoft is almost universally hated. We should ban *.microsoft.* newsgroups also.
Why don't you go and educate yourself a little before you look like an even bigger fool?
You called that guy a fool, but all you provided yourself was a ridiculous, highest-level link to "http://www.w3.org". That's kind of lazy, dude. Why don't you make yourself look good and tell us or link to something that explains what the vision impaired will get out of HTML4 or CSS. I'm not saying I doubt you, but I clicked on your link and it didn't answer any of those questions for me. Unless you're suggesting I need to read every Working Draft at W3!
A description or a link to a visual impaired site that uses HTML4 or CSS would be great. Can anyone else help here?
we could be driving cars that are filled with some chemicals that scab and repair the body underneath just like our skin does. That would be really good
Or we could drive cars that are filled with some chemicals that dissolve our bodies, so when we crash, we're removed from the gene pool and won't breed clumsy offspring. That would be really good.
"Students in a B.Eng. program should make themselves fully aware of the APEGBC Code of Ethics (http://www.apeg.bc.ca/about/act_code.htm) and apply its principles in their work."
... and with fidelity to the public needs"
It does apply to them. If it didn't why do they even mention it?
Ummmm. Why do they mention it? They don't mention it. UBC Engineering isn't even a B.Eng. program. It's a B.A.Sc. program for undergrads. This is a nitpick, but you're the one who started down that path of quoting little facts. Go back. Re-read the article, now go to the correct school's website before you start quoting things! It's UBC, not UVic!
"Professional Engineers and Professional Geoscientists shall act at all times
Note the part where it says "at all times". It does not say "when being paid" or "when working". Doing something like this is not showing "fidelity to the public needs".
Undergraduate students are not Professional Engineers. Even after graduating, there is a process to go through (not the least of which involves paying regular dues) to become and remain Professional Engineers.
Quality? CD quality is pretty damn good, especially to your average clueless consumer.
Agreed. In fact, we see acceptance of MP3, which shows that most consumers are willing to take a very slight downgrade in quality.
Faster seek times? Any cheap CD player can seek to the track you want pretty damn quick.
Disagree. Show me a CD player that can seek from track 1 of disc 1 to track 20 of disc 100 in less than half a second. Dead air at the party. Dead air in the car. No ability to overlap or beat-mix. That's one area where the consumers will start to buy into hard-disk or other media that gives faster access.
Another area where CD falls down... track organization. ID3V1 is a lame start, but it still beats CD. Try searching your CD changer for a combination of genre and year. Or even just artist. Yes, some changers allow creation of playlists and "don't play" tracks. But the music itself isn't self-describing (ie, it's up to the user) as it can be with digital music. Now I'm not saying that even ID3V2 tags are the be-all-and-end-all, but at least it's an extendible format. CD Text is not sufficient to search my collection in a changer, and it's not extendible.
- Other technologies being built into Windows further boost content-protection features, such as the so-called Secure Audio Path, which scrambles output from a computer sound card so that music streams can't be tapped and copied at that point.
So are we talking about the death of SPDIF? Will consumer audio devices not be allowed to feed preamps and receivers unencrypted signals? Is all our home audio gear obsolete? At what point in the audio path do I need to stick my recording software/hardware?!Really? So I can have a row with 2 columns: one unique key and one nice long text field? Bummer.
Maximum row size: 64K
;-)
And don't forget, Interbase/Firebird is absolutely free and open source!
Good thing it's open... Someone email me the source for it and I'll increase the ridiculous 64K row size limit.
Let's consider the opportunities for easier speeding when eyeball and manual speed enforcement are funded less and less while the police rely on in-car ("client-side"?) electronics more and more.
Just like other semi-illegal aftermarket "chipping" of automotive computers (fuel:air ratios, spark timing, emmissions, etc.), we're sure to see great electronic hacks to bypass the speed limiters. And since 98% of the population isn't going to bother being such an outlaw, those of us willing to risk it will probably run into far less old-style radar traps, etc.
I'm sure the aftermarket automotive tweakers are salivating at this!
This is certain to kill off the sports car market.
Bull. I'd rather drive a sports car than an unsporty car at or under any speed limit. Am I alone?
This does not qualify as "news for nerds". Maybe news for marketing droids.
I'm a nerd and I'm glad to hear this news. I recently leased four HP servers. Two are running Linux now. News that HP is supporting Open Source even more by embracing and promoting GNOME is exciting to hear. You're correct, of course: if I want to run GNOME on these boxes, I will do it anyways since it's Free. But I'm glad I got that news. You must agree that HP takes a risk in certain old corporate eyes by associating itself with Free software. And I applaud HP for doing that. Get the good news out there!
for the most part, a ziplock bag could help a lot
When I go hiking or riding, I drop my StarTac in a (clean) sock and then put that in a small sealed baggie. My reasoning being that it adds 1) a small amount of crash-proof padding and 2) if some water does get in I'd rather see the sock soak it up and distribute it than have the phone lying naked in the accumulated water in the bag. I've done this in horrible weather for a couple of years and my phones have not suffered. The best part is that 98% of my time (when I'm out of the bush), I don't have to carry a big goofy yellow "sport" phone around with me in the city or for business.
This is probably similar in other cities, but here in rainy Vancouver the bicycle couriers wear all manner of phones and wireless gadgets and they simply wrap them fresh daily in bags or plastic sandwich wrap and seal it with a strip of duct tape or rubber bands. This seems to work for 8+ hour shifts in really crappy weather.
Global Nuclear Warfare(tm)
A fantasic non-zero sum game for the whole world to enjoy.
For 2-4 players, age 45+.
Children are encouraged to watch and learn so they can play if they grow up.
The make -j3 lets make run three processes at once, which would lead to a speedup even on a single processor system, because disk I/O and CPU-bound compilation can overlap.
/. readers typing "make -j3 bzImage".
The noise you hear is the sound of thousands of single-CPU
...if a song cuts out in mid-download it is a pain ... Once money gets involved I will expect a much better quality of servers...
It'll be hard for Napster to meet those expectations. The song cutting out mid-download has very little to do with the quality of Napster's servers and _everything_ to do with Joe Blow on the other end. I haven't heard how they're going to improve that situation under the subscription scheme, if at all.
Unless, of course, the new Napster clients we all have to run will prevent us from shutting down our computers or dropping our ISP connection while there's a download in progress.
From a business strategy point of view, I'm not sure if it has an edge over other games, but Homeworld has a lot going for it as an intro to RTS for a user who hasn't played this genre before:
- fantastic suspension of disbelief
- no cut scenes used for cinematic sequences (helps above point)
- deeply designed visuals and audio (consistent aesthetic also helps above point)
- good tutorials to hold your hand thru initial single-player missions before you venture out onto the net
Strategically, it's fantastic (but so are other RTS games, to be honest). Many games shoot for those goals above, but I believe Homeworld was conceived and implemented by a team that gave a shit, without a spin-off-a-sequel-or-copy-an-existing-formula mindset. Support it!
You can find a lot of Homeworld sites out there, but here's an official site and a user forum on strategy to browse.
Disclosure: Yes, I was a Homeworld coder. No, I won't make any money if you buy it now.
These are breasts; this is source code. Why do you have a problem with those two things belonging to one person?
I have a problem with them "belonging" to you. Slap a GPL on them, and I'll contribute to the code base. I promise. "Free" as in "Free Breasts". (Which, I'm thinking, would go really well with Free Beer.)