Here are some lovely barnacle-encrusted underwater shots of the Britannic. She was even bigger than her sister ships and was originally named Gigantic. (No, I'm not making that up.) She ended up served as a hospital ship during WW I, and was sunk.
For those who missed it, their 778 gigabyte database of the complete Awari game tree could be stored on a piece of silicon approximately 4mm square. Wait, that's just on one side! Sweet, we'll keep MP3s on the other 778 gig side.
At least the idea is nice. Attempt to keep the doc in sync with the code.
I hope you meant "keep the code in sync with the doc".;-)
in our environment most of the doc is actually in presentation forms, some diagrams, word documents, etc. These also need to be kept in synch with the code.
Ummm... You mean the code has to be kept in sync with these docs, right?! Please?
From what I've skimmed of Leo, it's certainly not designed to generate/update docs after you wrote code. Thank goodness. Having to update docs to match the code can be a serious symptom. There are exceptions, of course, but in my opinion, if you're updating your docs -after- your code has already changed so often that you need a -tool- for it, welll....
I've seen a number of people here claim that North American culture "demands" the rental store experience. Something about wandering around with friends endlessly, buying snacks, holding the boxes, etc. Well, I disagree. What do you think the growing acceptance of high-channel-count satellite/cable and pay-per-view are attributed to? More people each year are interested in "browsing" a selection of movies from the couch and opting out of the video rental store experience altogether. The leading edge of this is for the high-volume, popular, mainstream movies, but that's largely a distribution/bandwidth issue. Sure, the rental store is romantic for some, but people are ultimately price- and convenience-sensitive. Given a decent selection and price point (either monthly or per-watch), and you can see people clearly avoiding that "culture". As more interesting methods of "browsing" pay-per-view or perhaps even P2P movie sharing show up, I predict the rental culture will happily shrink. Afterall, it's -maybe- a 20 year old trend. Not like pubs or cafes or something that ingrained.
If vending machines hit the convenience and/or cost button, they'll tear some people away. Mybe for the novelty alone. Heck, even the internet video rental scene claims a growing susbscriber base over the last few years. But sit-on-the-couch-and-rent-with-your-remote is pretty compelling given a large selection (bandwidth) and convenient UI (software/hardware). And yes, you can still include your friends in that browse/argue/eat/rent "culture" at home.
This isn't news. Maybe it's still worth talking about. But let me paint you a picture from 15 years ago at my university.
CS graphics labs full of SGI, NeXT, and Sun workstations. Library word processing labs full of Apple hardware and Microsoft software with tutorials and manuals to encourage use. Another word processing lab full of IBM hardware with Big Blue banners. Students trained on proprietary software (Adobe, Microsoft, Corel), corporate posters polastered on the walls.
Okay, so this C# course is mandatory and in -theory- you could avoid all the other corporate influences. Yeah, in theory, but almost never in practice. And from looking at resumes, I know that Java(TM) has worked its way into mandatory paths of education recently. And let's not even get into the Maya, 3DS, Photoshop, and AutoCad stuff that goes on.
So let's keep talking about the downside of this trend, but as fun as it is to hate Microsoft, let's acknowledge that this practice wasn't started by them and they're not the only ones playing the game today.
you get lots of flutter and wow if the thing doesn't seat properly and moves around.
Wow and flutter are expressed as percentages of variance from the ideally constant speed of the moving tape. Wow are the low-frequency variations and flutter are the high frequency ones (sort of a quivering). There are no moving tapes in the device(s) you're describing, so it seems to me that wow & flutter are not possible. Poor alignment and cheap components could certainly degrade the sound, but I don't think it's wow or flutter you're hearing.
xbox stuff is prettier, and we all know we play games 'cus they're prettier.
Actually, some of us play games 'cus they're funner. Thus, the continuing popularity of MAME, and Win/Linux emulators for Game Boy, SNES, C64, Genesis, etc.
Don't waste your Dreamcast! If you have physical access to the building, desks, etc, then why not just jam in a bootable floppy and reboot an unattended machine to: 1) port and service scan 2) send out results via http/ftp/ping/email/etc 3) wipe the floppy clean 4) write an innoculous text or word document on the floppy 4) reboot the workstation again
This leaves nearly zero physical evidence that there was an intrusion. Just an abandoned floppy and a rebooted machine.
Sure, you _might_ get past building security with a video game console in your bag. But I guarantee you'll get in with a floppy. And would you rather be caught plugging a floppy into a workstation or a video game console into the network?
And you'll still have your Dreamcast at home, running DCMAME!
Take a look at the Dallas Semiconductor TINI. It's a Java runtime environment on a 72-pin SIMM, complete with ethernet, serial, I2C, parallel IO, battery up to 1 meg of NVRAM, filesystem emulated in RAM, etc, etc. You can write web or ftp services for it in a few lines of Java, thanks to the supplied classes. You develop your Java code on your PC, compile it to Java bytecode, and then FTP it up to the little TINI device. My description is not doing this hardware justice, so I'll leave some links below.
Anyways, my point is this type of device is probably easier to program than a Linux Dreamcast. It may or may not be cheaper (sub-$100). And it's a lot easier to hide, if that's the goal. I've programmed a handful of hobby projects with this board, and it's really quite amazing for the price. (Compared to trying to implement an TCP/IP stack on a PIC microcontroller, say.)
4. This is, IMO, Linux's top strength on the desktop... Linux comes with a wealth of applications and toys that could keep the user busy for years without ever downloading or purchasing any additional software.
Is keeping the user busy with built-in apps really what an OS should be striving to do?! When Microsoft keeps the user busy without having to download additional software, it's considered anti-competitive.
Give me a good application search/install/update facility (Debian apt, anyone?), but PLEASE don't give me a crapload of built-in things to 'keep me busy for years'.
If you're concerned about them fooling with your computer equipment, just put that stuff in a offlimits-to-Kitty-room.
That might be cruel to both pet and human, since by definition, the nerd would need to spend a lot of time in the 'computer room', away from their companion. Besides, Real Nerds(tm) can't limit their lifestyles and gear to one room. Roaming laptops, servers, cabling, PDAs, Gameboys, Lego, remote controls, board games, dice, etc. Be aware of small toys and choking hazards! Geez, this sounds a lot like gettind ready for a newborn!
I cannot but wonder what this topic has to do with Java... what the heck is J# to do with Java and what is the coffee cup doing in the story?
You're right; this could belong in "Developers", "Microsoft", and "Java. But certainly in "Java" and I'll tell you why... This is such an obvious attack on Java's beach head of developers that we need to keep apprised of it. We're not talking about switching to something entirely different like Python or Lisp; this J# stuff is SO conceptually and syntactically similar (but with some scary implications). Competition and alternatives to Java (especially one so obvious as this) should always be in the mind of a Java developer. Otherwise, you risk becoming an ignorant Java zealot, rather than using Java for the right reasons. And there are lots of right reasons, today, don't get me wrong!
Java wins my vote for certain projects today, simply because it has run time environments available for everything from PDAs to pagers to phones, multiple server and workstation OSs, inside cross-platform DBs, inside cross-platform web servers, etc. But that is likely to change and I need to know what's on the horizon, lest my clients be the ones to tell me!
Thoe numbers can be divided by many integers, e.g. 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, while 10 can only be divided by 2 and 5.
10 can be divided into a VERY important number of subdivisions. Namely, TEN! Sure, you can have quarters and halves and twelfths (?!) of an hour. But with a base-10 hour, you could easily write, express, and print.1,.2,.3,.4,.5,.6,.7,.8,.9. Those increments are easy to relate to (you point out the fingers and toes thing), and VERY easy to do arithmetic with. Classic example: I read that a particular movie is "212 minutes" long and it starts at "9:45pm". I need to be home by "midnight", the trip takes "half and hour", and buses run "on the quarter hour". YOU do the math. Sure, it can be done, but yuck. SHOW ME THE DECIMALS!;-)
The characteristic is so useful but most people don't realize.
I'd argue that characteristic is primarily useful for numbers that aren't based on TEN itself. We go searching for more divisions because we can't express it well in the number system we typically use: base-10.
I have an IBM Thinkpad A20P. Great machine, but one day I was typing on it and felt unbelievable amounts of heat coming off the top of the keyboard. Just as I was remarking to my coworkers about it, the machine halted to a black (no, not a blue screen; I can't remember if I was booted into Linux or Win2K at the time). Anyways, I power-cycled, and the BIOS halted again with a "Fan Failure" error. Aha. So I whistled it over to the service depot (under warranty) and they found that a long human hair had been sucked into the air intake and wrapped itself around the fan, halting it.
Thank you IBM, for building systems that watch for this kind of thing. One step friendlier could have been a user warning (through a BIOS video overlay) that said "HIGH TEMPERATURE ALARM - POWERING DOWN IN 10 SECONDS" or something, to allow a user (if present) to save some of their work. Anyways, at least it didn't keep running and cook my CPU, hard disk, and everything else they pack into such a small space on these notebooks.
Maybe insurance companies should offer discounts to those of us with common sense enough to buy and configure motherboards that have a "Power Off on High Temperature" option in the BIOS. Haven't these motherboards been available for a long time?!
Wow. Maybe it's the beer I just drank, but this is truly TRULY the coolest thing/. has shown in some time. Okay, maybe it's not strictly _news_, but WOW.
From that crucifixion photography link, the site shows us a very modern, very clear, very unrealistic (in my opinion) photo of an actual crucified foot (near the bottom of the page). Is it just me, or does that just look too nice and neat with carefully arranged (but not too messy) bright red blood? Thankfully I'm no expert on the subject, but it just looks so 'perfect'. Nice clean, attractive foot, nice rustic piece of timber (artistically angled for composition), artsy clouds in the background, carefully spread bloodflow on feet and wood, etc.
One obviously questionable assertion that they try to pass off in the details makes for a whole site of suspicion.
While "the Xbox is a full-feature BMW, the PS2 is a Toyota," says Bruno Bonnell, chairman and chief executive of French game maker Infogrames Entertainment SA.
Bruno's point can be taken either way. Okay, so he's French and there's probably some Euro-snobbery going on here. But consider that a fast, cheap, and arguably more reliable Toyota MR2 Spyder or Celica GT can give any "full-feature" BMW (read: bloated/luxurious) a good run in the real world. This is gaming. We're talking entertainment here. Bang for the buck. Not prestige or old reputation!
It's also fairly untraceable because each streamer 'host' doesn't reveal any information about whether it is actually the transmitter or not, or where it is getting it's signal from.
I'm taking a guess here, but as long as you're still one of the upstream hosts serving an unauthorized/unroyaltied/unlicensed stream of audio, you might be shut down. Would it really matter if you were the root of a tree where the stream originated from? Even if you're not the root, you're copying and re-serving the stream yourself.
"Did you steal this music?" "No, I just found this stream and I'm sharing it."
Defendants generally don't need to speak. (Consider the examples of hostile, mute, comatose, or autistic defendants.) I'm pretty sure there will be an attorney arguing the defendant's case.
The bigger question in my mind is how American courts would permit an inanimate object to be the defendant. Or is this just CNN's mistake?
Slashdot Mirror
What about their triplet ship, the Britannic?
Here are some lovely barnacle-encrusted underwater shots of the Britannic. She was even bigger than her sister ships and was originally named Gigantic. (No, I'm not making that up.) She ended up served as a hospital ship during WW I, and was sunk.
For those who missed it, their 778 gigabyte database of the complete Awari game tree could be stored on a piece of silicon approximately 4mm square. Wait, that's just on one side! Sweet, we'll keep MP3s on the other 778 gig side.
(0.778 terabytes) / ((250 terabits/sq.inch) / (8 bits/byte)) = 0.024896 sq.inch =~ 4mm square
At least the idea is nice. Attempt to keep the doc in sync with the code.
;-)
I hope you meant "keep the code in sync with the doc".
in our environment most of the doc is actually in presentation forms, some diagrams, word documents, etc. These also need to be kept in synch with the code.
Ummm... You mean the code has to be kept in sync with these docs, right?! Please?
From what I've skimmed of Leo, it's certainly not designed to generate/update docs after you wrote code. Thank goodness. Having to update docs to match the code can be a serious symptom. There are exceptions, of course, but in my opinion, if you're updating your docs -after- your code has already changed so often that you need a -tool- for it, welll....
I've seen a number of people here claim that North American culture "demands" the rental store experience. Something about wandering around with friends endlessly, buying snacks, holding the boxes, etc. Well, I disagree. What do you think the growing acceptance of high-channel-count satellite/cable and pay-per-view are attributed to? More people each year are interested in "browsing" a selection of movies from the couch and opting out of the video rental store experience altogether. The leading edge of this is for the high-volume, popular, mainstream movies, but that's largely a distribution/bandwidth issue. Sure, the rental store is romantic for some, but people are ultimately price- and convenience-sensitive. Given a decent selection and price point (either monthly or per-watch), and you can see people clearly avoiding that "culture". As more interesting methods of "browsing" pay-per-view or perhaps even P2P movie sharing show up, I predict the rental culture will happily shrink. Afterall, it's -maybe- a 20 year old trend. Not like pubs or cafes or something that ingrained.
If vending machines hit the convenience and/or cost button, they'll tear some people away. Mybe for the novelty alone. Heck, even the internet video rental scene claims a growing susbscriber base over the last few years. But sit-on-the-couch-and-rent-with-your-remote is pretty compelling given a large selection (bandwidth) and convenient UI (software/hardware). And yes, you can still include your friends in that browse/argue/eat/rent "culture" at home.
What does the labour code north of the 49th parallel say?
Something about giving away 40%+ of your already discounted gross wages to CCRA, but having enough beautiful women and tasty beer around to not care.
This isn't news. Maybe it's still worth talking about. But let me paint you a picture from 15 years ago at my university.
CS graphics labs full of SGI, NeXT, and Sun workstations. Library word processing labs full of Apple hardware and Microsoft software with tutorials and manuals to encourage use. Another word processing lab full of IBM hardware with Big Blue banners. Students trained on proprietary software (Adobe, Microsoft, Corel), corporate posters polastered on the walls.
Okay, so this C# course is mandatory and in -theory- you could avoid all the other corporate influences. Yeah, in theory, but almost never in practice. And from looking at resumes, I know that Java(TM) has worked its way into mandatory paths of education recently. And let's not even get into the Maya, 3DS, Photoshop, and AutoCad stuff that goes on.
So let's keep talking about the downside of this trend, but as fun as it is to hate Microsoft, let's acknowledge that this practice wasn't started by them and they're not the only ones playing the game today.
you get lots of flutter and wow if the thing doesn't seat properly and moves around.
Wow and flutter are expressed as percentages of variance from the ideally constant speed of the moving tape. Wow are the low-frequency variations and flutter are the high frequency ones (sort of a quivering). There are no moving tapes in the device(s) you're describing, so it seems to me that wow & flutter are not possible. Poor alignment and cheap components could certainly degrade the sound, but I don't think it's wow or flutter you're hearing.
xbox stuff is prettier, and we all know we play games 'cus they're prettier.
Actually, some of us play games 'cus they're funner. Thus, the continuing popularity of MAME, and Win/Linux emulators for Game Boy, SNES, C64, Genesis, etc.
Don't waste your Dreamcast! If you have physical access to the building, desks, etc, then why not just jam in a bootable floppy and reboot an unattended machine to:
1) port and service scan
2) send out results via http/ftp/ping/email/etc
3) wipe the floppy clean
4) write an innoculous text or word document on the floppy
4) reboot the workstation again
This leaves nearly zero physical evidence that there was an intrusion. Just an abandoned floppy and a rebooted machine.
Sure, you _might_ get past building security with a video game console in your bag. But I guarantee you'll get in with a floppy. And would you rather be caught plugging a floppy into a workstation or a video game console into the network?
And you'll still have your Dreamcast at home, running DCMAME!
Take a look at the Dallas Semiconductor TINI. It's a Java runtime environment on a 72-pin SIMM, complete with ethernet, serial, I2C, parallel IO, battery up to 1 meg of NVRAM, filesystem emulated in RAM, etc, etc. You can write web or ftp services for it in a few lines of Java, thanks to the supplied classes. You develop your Java code on your PC, compile it to Java bytecode, and then FTP it up to the little TINI device. My description is not doing this hardware justice, so I'll leave some links below.
Anyways, my point is this type of device is probably easier to program than a Linux Dreamcast. It may or may not be cheaper (sub-$100). And it's a lot easier to hide, if that's the goal. I've programmed a handful of hobby projects with this board, and it's really quite amazing for the price. (Compared to trying to implement an TCP/IP stack on a PIC microcontroller, say.)
TINI hardware
TINI
TINI board resource center
more resources
DalSemi discussions
4. This is, IMO, Linux's top strength on the desktop. .. Linux comes with a wealth of applications and toys that could keep the user busy for years without ever downloading or purchasing any additional software.
Is keeping the user busy with built-in apps really what an OS should be striving to do?! When Microsoft keeps the user busy without having to download additional software, it's considered anti-competitive.
Give me a good application search/install/update facility (Debian apt, anyone?), but PLEASE don't give me a crapload of built-in things to 'keep me busy for years'.
If you're concerned about them fooling with your computer equipment, just put that stuff in a offlimits-to-Kitty-room.
That might be cruel to both pet and human, since by definition, the nerd would need to spend a lot of time in the 'computer room', away from their companion. Besides, Real Nerds(tm) can't limit their lifestyles and gear to one room. Roaming laptops, servers, cabling, PDAs, Gameboys, Lego, remote controls, board games, dice, etc. Be aware of small toys and choking hazards! Geez, this sounds a lot like gettind ready for a newborn!
I cannot but wonder what this topic has to do with Java... what the heck is J# to do with Java and what is the coffee cup doing in the story?
You're right; this could belong in "Developers", "Microsoft", and "Java. But certainly in "Java" and I'll tell you why... This is such an obvious attack on Java's beach head of developers that we need to keep apprised of it. We're not talking about switching to something entirely different like Python or Lisp; this J# stuff is SO conceptually and syntactically similar (but with some scary implications). Competition and alternatives to Java (especially one so obvious as this) should always be in the mind of a Java developer. Otherwise, you risk becoming an ignorant Java zealot, rather than using Java for the right reasons. And there are lots of right reasons, today, don't get me wrong!
Java wins my vote for certain projects today, simply because it has run time environments available for everything from PDAs to pagers to phones, multiple server and workstation OSs, inside cross-platform DBs, inside cross-platform web servers, etc. But that is likely to change and I need to know what's on the horizon, lest my clients be the ones to tell me!
Thoe numbers can be divided by many integers, e.g. 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, while 10 can only be divided by 2 and 5.
.1, .2, .3, .4, .5, .6, .7, .8, .9. Those increments are easy to relate to (you point out the fingers and toes thing), and VERY easy to do arithmetic with. Classic example: I read that a particular movie is "212 minutes" long and it starts at "9:45pm". I need to be home by "midnight", the trip takes "half and hour", and buses run "on the quarter hour". YOU do the math. Sure, it can be done, but yuck. SHOW ME THE DECIMALS! ;-)
10 can be divided into a VERY important number of subdivisions. Namely, TEN! Sure, you can have quarters and halves and twelfths (?!) of an hour. But with a base-10 hour, you could easily write, express, and print
The characteristic is so useful but most people don't realize.
I'd argue that characteristic is primarily useful for numbers that aren't based on TEN itself. We go searching for more divisions because we can't express it well in the number system we typically use: base-10.
I have an IBM Thinkpad A20P. Great machine, but one day I was typing on it and felt unbelievable amounts of heat coming off the top of the keyboard. Just as I was remarking to my coworkers about it, the machine halted to a black (no, not a blue screen; I can't remember if I was booted into Linux or Win2K at the time). Anyways, I power-cycled, and the BIOS halted again with a "Fan Failure" error. Aha. So I whistled it over to the service depot (under warranty) and they found that a long human hair had been sucked into the air intake and wrapped itself around the fan, halting it.
Thank you IBM, for building systems that watch for this kind of thing. One step friendlier could have been a user warning (through a BIOS video overlay) that said "HIGH TEMPERATURE ALARM - POWERING DOWN IN 10 SECONDS" or something, to allow a user (if present) to save some of their work. Anyways, at least it didn't keep running and cook my CPU, hard disk, and everything else they pack into such a small space on these notebooks.
Maybe insurance companies should offer discounts to those of us with common sense enough to buy and configure motherboards that have a "Power Off on High Temperature" option in the BIOS. Haven't these motherboards been available for a long time?!
From the article reporter: "An unlikely combination of interests -- cartoons and math"
Um. Has this guy never met a math or science student before?!
Microsoft's Booth is right between "Cybozu Corporation" and "LTrix Engineering". Oooo. Prestigious location.
did he leave his foreskin behind?
Sure. Along with baby teeth and pounds of dead skin, shed hair, and toenail clippings.
Not to mention countless gallons of solid and liquid waste.
Wow. Maybe it's the beer I just drank, but this is truly TRULY the coolest thing /. has shown in some time. Okay, maybe it's not strictly _news_, but WOW.
From that crucifixion photography link, the site shows us a very modern, very clear, very unrealistic (in my opinion) photo of an actual crucified foot (near the bottom of the page). Is it just me, or does that just look too nice and neat with carefully arranged (but not too messy) bright red blood? Thankfully I'm no expert on the subject, but it just looks so 'perfect'. Nice clean, attractive foot, nice rustic piece of timber (artistically angled for composition), artsy clouds in the background, carefully spread bloodflow on feet and wood, etc.
One obviously questionable assertion that they try to pass off in the details makes for a whole site of suspicion.
While "the Xbox is a full-feature BMW, the PS2 is a Toyota," says Bruno Bonnell, chairman and chief executive of French game maker Infogrames Entertainment SA.
Bruno's point can be taken either way. Okay, so he's French and there's probably some Euro-snobbery going on here. But consider that a fast, cheap, and arguably more reliable Toyota MR2 Spyder or Celica GT can give any "full-feature" BMW (read: bloated/luxurious) a good run in the real world. This is gaming. We're talking entertainment here. Bang for the buck. Not prestige or old reputation!
It's also fairly untraceable because each streamer 'host' doesn't reveal any information about whether it is actually the transmitter or not, or where it is getting it's signal from.
I'm taking a guess here, but as long as you're still one of the upstream hosts serving an unauthorized/unroyaltied/unlicensed stream of audio, you might be shut down. Would it really matter if you were the root of a tree where the stream originated from? Even if you're not the root, you're copying and re-serving the stream yourself.
"Did you steal this music?"
"No, I just found this stream and I'm sharing it."
unless it speaks... how's it gonna defend itself?
Defendants generally don't need to speak. (Consider the examples of hostile, mute, comatose, or autistic defendants.) I'm pretty sure there will be an attorney arguing the defendant's case.
The bigger question in my mind is how American courts would permit an inanimate object to be the defendant. Or is this just CNN's mistake?
I've seen other, more sophisticated network tank combat games. But this one is striving to be true to the original...
/ combat.as p
The Atari 2600 Combat Project
http://nehe.gamedev.net/nehegames/combat