On each of the pages, there are % Minorities and % Women for each company. Why?! Why should this matter. Is this not racist or sexist? Certainly if there was a % White, it would be considered so. Why should the color of a persons skin or their sex be considered over how well they perform their job?
Women make the workplace more interesting. Even if you aren't going to sleep around the office, a little inter-gender tension keeps people on their toes, and even encourages some of the geekiest to bathe. Plus, it often means birthdays and holidays actually get celebrated.
Ditto for minorities. Most people spend more time with co-workers than their children - anything that changes the self-segregation in America is a good thing, and multi-lingual workplaces seem a lot more interesting to me. I've had fun trying to decode C-code comments in French...
Plus, if there are a large number of women in a company, women will feel more comfortable and more productive. Ditto for minorities. There's a lot of emotional pressure on you if you are the one black woman on staff.
Nah, real Aunts and Uncles are better
on
Uncle Tungsten
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· Score: 2
I agree that kids need good role models growing up. But, as far as I know, I'm the first engineer in my family, and the lack of role models didn't hurt me much. My parents did encourage me, with chemistry sets, the radio shack electrical lab, and a subscription to Discover, but I feel they would have been happy just to see me finish college.
When I told friends and family that I was studying to be an electrical engineer, the next question always was "What will you do with that?" One of the EE professors told us the standard answer on the first day of class: "Whatever they will pay me to do". That was good enough for most people, and good enough for me - I'd take any work that was intellectually challenging and stimulating, and made sure that I didn't have to eat Ramen. EEs seemed to do a lot of different things, and none seemed to be looking for work.
My Aunt was the only one that followed up: "What does that mean? What will you really be doing?"
"Um, I'm not sure. Maybe designing circuits, working with computers, something like that."
"Wow, that sounds really boring. I mean, you might find that interesting, but what will you tell people at parties?"
I had no answer. I still have no answer, and I get asked the question "what do you do" at every single party I've ever been to. Every answer I've come up with gets blank stares and/or nods. Thanks to my Aunt, I was prepared, and now I make sure I have a couple of topics of conversation in my back pocket, because no one wants to know what an engineer does.
Re:I'm replaying Half-Life this Xmas
on
Games of the Year
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· Score: 2
So.. I still think a 4 year old game engine is providing the best entertainment out there right now. Let's hope 2003 gets the PC gaming industry innovating again, instead of throwing out rehashes of other games (MOH:AA comes to mind)
Don't forget, they are still making the kick-ass FREE mods for the Half-Life engine. I'm having a lot of fun with this one. The interface is a first-person shooter, but it's actually a team-based resource management game. I'm not aware of any other game that's tried this (no, not even Warcraft - in Natural Selection, every grunt is another human player!). If you have the broadband and the time, check it out.
It turns out that Aristotle pioneered the use of hyperthreading in x86 microprocessors way back in ancient Greece. Only problem was he couldn't get any decent uptime, what with the lack of electricity and all...
That has to be wrong.
Back in 1986, Intel and Sandia built a 1 terraflop computer, capable of 1 trilion (1,000,000,000,000) operations per second. Aristotle died around 322 B.C.E. or 2324 years ago.
Under one interpretation of Moore's law, the number of operations per second doubles every 3 years or so. Working backwards, that means Aristotle's computer was capable of one operation every 10^213 years. The first computer capable of one operation per second would have had to have been built around 1882.
Conclusion: Aristotle's work must have been all theoretical.
Funny.
However, I upgraded to a modern system this year, and Ultima IX worked beautifully. There might have been one crash, so save often. This game really does look impressive when all the pieces are there.
It is far easier and cheaper to get any software and hardware in Pakistan! As you already know there are no strict laws on piracy so everything is dirt cheap. Also the second monitors should not be more than 30-40 USD per piece. But the point remains the guys did a nice job and put together a nice system.
Is this correct? Are you from Pakistan?
I tried to see if I could get a package to Pakistan. With a bit of research, I found a page for the North West Frontier Province Primary Education Project (NWFP-PEP), based in Peshawar, Pakistan. However, that website does not have a postal code as required by UPS. Is this a sign that they don't make regular deliveries there? FedEx did not require a postal code, and they claimed they could get a 4ftx4ftx4ft, 50lb box to Peshawar for only $316.43.
So, hardware from the U.S. may be a little expensive. But you think that the Pakistan hardware market would be cheaper?
Now, I imagine software piracy is pretty widespread - Microsoft Windows and Office are probably availible for the cost of a CD, and a Matrix DVD made it's way to Pakistan. But multi-monitor video is a pretty narrow application, usually provided by the vendor of a multi-head graphics card. It would probably be eaiser to get Linux tools to do the job than to try to get a pirated copy. Plus, I'm not sure what their internet connectivity is - they seem to have the basics (a yahoo email account), but I'd expect at least one of the people to have a University email account. The website is hosted on the gstreamer website, not in Pakistan.
Please enlighten me how they would get the needed software and extra montors for $30-40 USD each.
Re:Once again, did anyone read
on
Making A Videowall
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· Score: 3, Insightful
and realizing how lucky they are to live in a world where you can order a projector from Amazon and have it delivered in days.
Maybe we aren't lucky for it, maybe it makes us lazy?
Nietzsche is alive and posting on Slashdot?
It may make us lazier in some ways, but allows us to do more in others. I would never create a project like this - I'd just buy a projector. That may make me lazy, but it means I can invest my time and energy in the presentations I put on the display. Sure, technology and privilege makes it easier to be lazy, but it doesn't require us to be lazy. It allows us to use the same amount of energy but get much more done.
This reminds me of my earliest programming days, when I was inspired to learn programming by Mandelbrot and Julia sets, and movies like TRON (not the fantasy of living programs, but the cool 3D graphics that looked possible to duplicate). It was a difficult journey - it took a long time to find a language that was fast enough (BASIC was a little slow), and that had reasonable graphics libraries (MODULA-2 didn't). I taught myself C and C++, coded a basic driver for my graphics card, and learned matrix transforms to draw 3D graphics out of line and pixel primitives. I didn't get far - the best I did was implementing a 3D scene generator out of a book.
Today, I'd download the ActiveX libraries, or OpenGL libraries, and use gcc or Java or something else to draw my objects. I'd never have to learn how to interact with the video driver. I could be creating Quake maps without knowing how to do a matrix operation or a binary tree representation of a scene (which I never learned).
Does that mean I'd be lazier if I was born 10 years later? Nope. I'd just be able to quickly jump the hurdle of low-level details and concentrate on the higher level stuff. Maybe I'd study art more, to learn what makes a good 3D scene. Maybe I'd study basic AI, to make my creations more life-like. Or maybe I'd still learn all the way down to register instructions, because I like to see how far down I can go, but I'd have better guides down known paths (like Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book.
Remember, without this crazy, materialistic, wasteful country, no one would have developed cheap graphics cards that make their way to Pakistan in the first place. Keep ignoring the modern miracles of reliable computer networks, always-on electrical grids, indoor air conditioning, and market economies. Continue to prosper without guilt. But do try to leave something useful for those that come after you.
Once again, did anyone read
on
Making A Videowall
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· Score: 5, Insightful
...or just look at the pictures. As the author states:
I rather quick realized that the only extra component we needed in Gstreamer was one that that did the cropping for us. At the same time I also saw that my knowledge about multimedia and GStreamer was not good enough to allow me to write this element. So I tried asking my friend Wim Taymans if he would be willing to take on the task of writing such a plugin. He was kind enough to do that not only because of my need, but also because he saw it as another nice feature of Gstreamer that would be needed by many others.
So, they know that cropping is a problem. But that's just software (and maybe a bit of hardware, with those huge borders). But that isn't their biggest hardware problem.
It turned out however that our biggest problem was finding PCI video cards in Pakistan whose XFree86 drivers could do XVideo, this in a situation when its hard to even find PCI video cards at all in the market. Solving this problem of lacking parts took us 3 months and at one point we even considered abondoning the project. We still need more cards because we do not have more than these 16 s3virge/DX cards. If any of the cards stop functioning, we are out of business.
This isn't the U.S. - it's Pakistan. They can't go to eBay and find a 4-head card, or even pick and chose cards (or even monitors) based on requirements. They have to use what they can find, and I for one am impressed. How many of you would give up if it took three months to just find the hardware?
This is a great engineering story, of folks working with what they have, and a great Free Software story - they could have tried some pirated copy of commerical software, but instead they decided to use open source components, stretching what is possible. Could it have been done with a projector? Sure, if one was availible. But now the state of multi-monitor free software has been advanced a little, which may benefit you or me some day.
I hope that there were some other people who saw how cool this was, who are contacting the authors with useful suggestions about removing the shells and mounting the tubes closer together, that are looking at the GStreamer source and thinking about how to add cropping, and how to make cropping easy, and hopefully a few people that are thinking about donating equipment, and realizing how lucky they are to live in a world where you can order a projector from Amazon and have it delivered in days.
Stop w/the little jabs at the end of every fucking Microsoft related article, I really can't stand it.
I agree - the post would have been just fine without that misguided last sentence. It's the editor's job to take that stuff out. Who was the editor on that last one?
...
Nevermind, it was Timothy. There's a 50/50 chance he added the comment and forgot to add the </I> after the submission.
Is this FoxNews for Nerds? Is this now Stuff that Matters?
To keep it ontopic, imagine I ranted about how the news industry is now nothing but another form of entertainment, and how horrible it is that stuff like this is actually competing with real stories like the failure of the Bush Administration to accomplish regime change in Afghanistan.
For all those folks saying "Urban Legend!", I did do this. But I only did it once. A co-worker was making a tape backup, and had to go make a phonecall. After about 10 minutes, the tape stopped, and the screen said something like:
EOT 251002.2 R,A (R) >
I hit enter. 20 minutes later, tape stops, nearly identical message, I hit enter again. He comes back, I show him the errors. He laughs, starts the backup again, and tells me to put in the next tape when the message appears. The message makes sense now - End of tape, so label a tape with today's date, volume 2, then press R to Resume.
This was a SEL77 machine (that's probably not the proper name), and these tapes didn't have near the capacity of modern tapes, so it only took 45 minutes to make the 3 backup tapes. But from then on, I decided not to try to help coworkers unless I understood the screen messages...
I was recently in Engalnd, feeling like a teenager again, not sure which side to drive on, which way to look at an intersection, etc. But, when I filled up at the gas station, it was like they were catering to Americans (or maybe to Brits, who might still be familiar with gallons). Next to every pump, they had a handy "liters to gallons" conversion chart, so you could tell how many gallons you were filling, AND how much the gas was per gallon. I felt better pumping gas in England than I did in New Jersey (where all the pumps are full service, and you might be SOL if you work late shift and need gas at 3 in the morning).
In the U.S. we would integrate the conversions in the gas pumps, with dual sets of displays, or a button to toggle displays. Of course, we wouldn't be able to switch until most of the population had taken a thermodynamics course (or at least a chemistry/physics lab), and learned first-hand how much easier the metric system can be. And THAT won't happen until we get most Americans through a biology class without a big contreversy over evolution...
whingeintr.v., Chiefly British whinged, whinging, whinges
To complain or protest, especially in an annoying or persistent manner.
If you do the google search, it's used almost exclusively on British sites. In America, we'd use whine as a noun and verb, as in "click here to whine", and "Would you like some cheese with your whine?"
Thank you very much - that makes the test much easier to take.
On the results page, this caught my eye: "Tell me if anything looks odd, or you want to whinge, or whatever.
Did you mean "whine" instead of "whinge"? Or, is that the last test, to see if you score high on the "exaggerated attention to detail" metric? If I respond to that email, do I get contacted by a social worker?
That'd be why a search for "paypal sucks [google.com]" on Google turns up 25,000 results, right?
Oh, that's a great measure of how much something sucks. Let's see...hmm, "Linux sucks" has over 208,000 hits. Geez, it must really suck major to get that many hits.
Instant Research:
Windows Sucks: 225000 hits
Linux Sucks: 178000 hits
Conclusion: Linux sucks only 79% as much as Windows.
Further Research:
Windows sucks: 225000
Windows suxs: 534
Windows sux: 24300
Linux Sucks: 178000
Linux suxs: 287
Linux sux: 20800
BSD Sucks: 24900
BSD suxs: 59
BSD sux: 4680
Conclusions: BSD sucks 11% as much as Windows, and 14% as much as Linux. BSD suxs 11% as much as Windows, and 20% as much as Linux.
BSD sucks the least. BSD sux 19% as much as Windows, and 23% as much as Linux.
BSD's market comparisions should be based on how much is sucks. Microsoft, however, should focus more on how much it sux, since it sux only 17% more than Linux, while it sucks 26% more.
I'm beginning to wonder if I should invest the time in learning FORTRAN.
What investment? It takes a day to learn FORTRAN. Just go learn it, then decide whether you want to use it or not.
If you know any other programming language (C, C++, Perl, LISP, Visual Basic, Q-BASIC, ANYTHING), then it will take you a day or two to learn FORTRAN, especially if you don't need I/O routines. Give yourself a week if you want to learn I/O, EQUIVALENCEs, and the other details. Type "FORTRAN TUTORIAL" into your local Google search box and start working.
I wouldn't want to learn it as a first language - I think the I/O is terrible. I can't use it for 30% of my work - I use C for decent I/O, preprocessor macros, simple string manipulation, pointers and casts. For the other 70%, it's just as good as any other procedural language.
Of course, now someone will say C's I/O is terrible, and FORTRAN's is far easier. But again, it's silly to spend much time listening to debates like that, when you could learn the language in a day or two and decide for yourself. Jeeze, it's not C++ or LISP - it's just FORTRAN. It's like asking if Wordpad or Notepad is better for text editting...
Equip every car in America with one of these. If law enforcement is dumb enough to use them to monitor speeding, then people will be motivated to modify or remove them, so that will be illegal, and we'll have the Speed War to go along with the Drug War and the War on Terrorism.
Instead, if they use them to gather data about REAL driver habits and what really causes accidents, I believe they will find that speed is not the problem, and that most inter-city highways could safely raise the speed limit 10 mph or so, since many people are safely going over that limit anyway.
Instead, I expect that they will find that cell phones, listening to certain kinds of music, arguing while driving, weather and road conditions, or just bad driving habits like weaving in and out of traffic are causing the accidents.
Or maybe not - maybe speed will be the factor. I don't know, but I do know that, once you have generous data collection facilities, it then become possible to use science to determine what causes accidents, and how to make driving safer.
The one thing they will confirm is that speed of collision strongly affects how lethal the accident is - and they will be able to measure true speeds, rather than use the speed of the road. I see a lot more 10mph rear-end accidents at traffic lights than 65 mph head-on collisions.
Wait a sec. I thought Tivo just sold licenses for their technology to other companies and didn't actually build any of the hardware they sold. Isn't that why Tivo boxes are made by Sony, RCA, etc. and not Tivo? So I would think they would love this kind of setup. Every company that makes cable boxes would have to pay thier license fee and they don't actually have to pay make the boxes themselves.
This is true. They sell the software to hardware manufacturers, but they make the bulk of their money on subscribtion fees for the programming guide. If Time Warner is already paying for a programming guide, then they have little motivation to lose that money stream by giving the guide business to TiVo. And, if they are making money renting cable boxes to customers, they have little motivation to offer a universal interface which allows customers to get their boxes from somewhere else.
TiVo, as a business, will become successful if consumers prefer TiVo's solutions over other companies, so that companies are forced to license from TiVo to stay competative. TiVo will probably fail if every cable provider can come up with their own solution, and customers don't see enough of a difference to seek out TiVo's solution.
Why get this when you can just buy a Tivo system? Probably less cost in the long run, and a bigger HD...
Well, for one thing, you get digital cable without the IR repeater that TiVo has to use. For my setup (digital cable + TiVo), the video signal goes through the digital decoder and then into TiVo. To change channels, the TiVo has little LEDs that you place over the remote sensor for the digital cable box. TiVo emulates the digital cable remote to change the channels, and is successful about 95% of the time. The rest of the time, TiVo almost changes the channel, and you get the wrong thing.
There are ways to lessen the effect, such as building an IR cage around the IR repeater/IR receiver portion. There are other options, such as going satelite (TiVo's ReplayTV box is a satelite decoder as well, so it has no problem changing channels) or basic cable (TiVo works fine as a basic cable box). But, since digital cable decoding is non-standard, the only way is to get the cable provider to offer a PVR box.
They probably won't go the TiVo route - TiVo would rather see a standard digital cable descrambler, usable in many cable systems, then one for each market. If a cable provider wants to make one for each market, TiVo will do it, but expect the cable provider to pay for the work needed to make the box. SonicBlue, who is behind the Time Warner box, is more willing to burnn their own money and work with the cable providers.
The real solution is a single, HD-enable digital cable standard, so that any manufacturer can make a box that works on all the networks, including TiVo. I imagine the cable providers get a bit of revenue renting out the digital cable decoders, so I don't expect this any time soon. Also, I'll have to see the pricing details to determine whether Time Warner is serious about this as a mainstream product, or only selling it to the rich folks that might have gone the SonicBlue route anyway.
I'd forgotten about this project. Really, its been a long long long time since I've played Civ...I'm sure I'll enjoy this. Like a throw-back to the old days when there was Prince of Persia.
Well, since you brought up Prince of Persia...
How do you get past the evil copy of yourself in the last few levels? You kill him, then you die. You drive him off the ledge, he splats, you die. Is the point really to just get on the other side of him and pass him by?
Maybe readers of/. do that too, and if so, i would love to hear a legitimate reason for leaving the strip blank (Note, blank, not writing "CHECK MY ID" in the space).
Actually, this is probably wrong - "CHECK MY ID" is not a valid signature. I say probably, because I can only find a few passing references, such as
this one (look at item 7). The problem is, your signature on the back of the credit card acts as a legal signature on the contract saying that you will pay any charges made with the card. Without the signature, the transaction doesn't have the legal authority.
99 times out of 100, the clerk will not look at your card, or ask you to see the ID. That one time, however, the clerk will refuse to take an unsigned card, and you'll call the manager, and the manager will say "That's store policy, sign the card", and you'll have to sign or use cash.
However, it does seem perfectly legal to sign the card, and then write "CHECK MY ID" after the signature or under it. That is small comfort, because most credit card thieves will use your card where an ID is not required (like online), or make some convincing looking fake IDs with your name and their picture before going on their shopping spree at Best Buy.
Well, I was interested - I heard about this story, but I was unable to find a good summary.
That being said, I found one story interesting today: China cracking down on Internet cafes after a fire in an illegal cafe kills 24. The Beijing government is using it as an excuse to stop public Internet access, and the Chinese PR machine is putting local news stations to shame saying how the Internet and computer games corrupt the young. The info noose is pulled a little tighter in China tonight...
Some people seem to think open source wins when Microsoft looses so much money to Linux that it has to close up shop, and no one can make money at programming because the open-source horde can do it for free.
I just want a robust community of open source programmers making robust implementations for known computer problems. When Apache makes web servers easy and free, there is little money in making cheap web servers for individuals, and no programmers get stuck reinventing the wheel. Instead, programmers can get paid to take web servers to the next level, to iron out security holes, to improve reliability and scalability, and work on the really interesting stuff.
Neal Stephenson had a great model for thinking about the software world. On earth, life exists in a narrow band - a few feet into the ground and about a mile above. Some organisms survive at the extremes of temperature or pressure or lack of atmosphere, but the ecosphere really is just a thin shell.
Microsoft and other software producers live in that narrow shell. Open source takes up room in that shell, pushing the non-free producers out of easy habitats like web servers and legacy hardware support. It forces them to move into more difficult terrains, to work harder to make the same amount of money. Stephenson seems to think the software ecosphere might be restricted, that eventually open source will push the closed source developers off the map - instead, I believe the closed source developers will now be free to chart that uncharted territory, to expand the survivability sphere.
As long as there are clients that need customized solutions, there will be programmers getting paid. As long as there are general solutions that everyone agrees on, open source will be squeezing out the closed source producers. I, for one, hope that Microsoft continues to "innovate", pushing computers into new territories, and creating homogenized landscapes in it's wake that the open-source virus can take over. Because, at my heart, I'm a programmer, and I hate the thought of doing something twice...
The interesting idea is that AFAIK China has the largest population on earth, what will happen to the internet once the chinese politicians give up and let them roam free? Even if just a small part is on the net we will begin to see the influence of chinese culture. And what about language? Today english is de dominant language in the internet, but there is an awful lot of chinese speakin people that might get connected. Time for a new language class anyone?
Just like India dominates the Internet, followed closely by Russia...
Remember, China has traditionally given intellectuals and artists a choice - bend your works to the party line, or supress them, or be imprisioned or killed. That kind of psycopathic natural selection will keep China from being a cultural leader for a long time after the party is gone...
The U.S. is much better - bend your works to the capitalist line, or have a hard time feeding yourself. Still, that's the best we'll get, outside of a college campus. And that depends on rich parents or mortaging future earnings...
Slashdot Mirror
Women make the workplace more interesting. Even if you aren't going to sleep around the office, a little inter-gender tension keeps people on their toes, and even encourages some of the geekiest to bathe. Plus, it often means birthdays and holidays actually get celebrated.
Ditto for minorities. Most people spend more time with co-workers than their children - anything that changes the self-segregation in America is a good thing, and multi-lingual workplaces seem a lot more interesting to me. I've had fun trying to decode C-code comments in French...
Plus, if there are a large number of women in a company, women will feel more comfortable and more productive. Ditto for minorities. There's a lot of emotional pressure on you if you are the one black woman on staff.
When I told friends and family that I was studying to be an electrical engineer, the next question always was "What will you do with that?" One of the EE professors told us the standard answer on the first day of class: "Whatever they will pay me to do". That was good enough for most people, and good enough for me - I'd take any work that was intellectually challenging and stimulating, and made sure that I didn't have to eat Ramen. EEs seemed to do a lot of different things, and none seemed to be looking for work.
My Aunt was the only one that followed up: "What does that mean? What will you really be doing?"
"Um, I'm not sure. Maybe designing circuits, working with computers, something like that."
"Wow, that sounds really boring. I mean, you might find that interesting, but what will you tell people at parties?"
I had no answer. I still have no answer, and I get asked the question "what do you do" at every single party I've ever been to. Every answer I've come up with gets blank stares and/or nods. Thanks to my Aunt, I was prepared, and now I make sure I have a couple of topics of conversation in my back pocket, because no one wants to know what an engineer does.
while (e_coyote)
/* code goes here */
{
}
Don't forget, they are still making the kick-ass FREE mods for the Half-Life engine. I'm having a lot of fun with this one. The interface is a first-person shooter, but it's actually a team-based resource management game. I'm not aware of any other game that's tried this (no, not even Warcraft - in Natural Selection, every grunt is another human player!). If you have the broadband and the time, check it out.
That has to be wrong.
Back in 1986, Intel and Sandia built a 1 terraflop computer, capable of 1 trilion (1,000,000,000,000) operations per second. Aristotle died around 322 B.C.E. or 2324 years ago.
Under one interpretation of Moore's law, the number of operations per second doubles every 3 years or so. Working backwards, that means Aristotle's computer was capable of one operation every 10^213 years. The first computer capable of one operation per second would have had to have been built around 1882.
Conclusion: Aristotle's work must have been all theoretical.
Funny. However, I upgraded to a modern system this year, and Ultima IX worked beautifully. There might have been one crash, so save often. This game really does look impressive when all the pieces are there.
Is this correct? Are you from Pakistan?
I tried to see if I could get a package to Pakistan. With a bit of research, I found a page for the North West Frontier Province Primary Education Project (NWFP-PEP), based in Peshawar, Pakistan. However, that website does not have a postal code as required by UPS. Is this a sign that they don't make regular deliveries there? FedEx did not require a postal code, and they claimed they could get a 4ftx4ftx4ft, 50lb box to Peshawar for only $316.43.
So, hardware from the U.S. may be a little expensive. But you think that the Pakistan hardware market would be cheaper?
Now, I imagine software piracy is pretty widespread - Microsoft Windows and Office are probably availible for the cost of a CD, and a Matrix DVD made it's way to Pakistan. But multi-monitor video is a pretty narrow application, usually provided by the vendor of a multi-head graphics card. It would probably be eaiser to get Linux tools to do the job than to try to get a pirated copy. Plus, I'm not sure what their internet connectivity is - they seem to have the basics (a yahoo email account), but I'd expect at least one of the people to have a University email account. The website is hosted on the gstreamer website, not in Pakistan.
Please enlighten me how they would get the needed software and extra montors for $30-40 USD each.
Maybe we aren't lucky for it, maybe it makes us lazy?
Nietzsche is alive and posting on Slashdot?
It may make us lazier in some ways, but allows us to do more in others. I would never create a project like this - I'd just buy a projector. That may make me lazy, but it means I can invest my time and energy in the presentations I put on the display. Sure, technology and privilege makes it easier to be lazy, but it doesn't require us to be lazy. It allows us to use the same amount of energy but get much more done.
This reminds me of my earliest programming days, when I was inspired to learn programming by Mandelbrot and Julia sets, and movies like TRON (not the fantasy of living programs, but the cool 3D graphics that looked possible to duplicate). It was a difficult journey - it took a long time to find a language that was fast enough (BASIC was a little slow), and that had reasonable graphics libraries (MODULA-2 didn't). I taught myself C and C++, coded a basic driver for my graphics card, and learned matrix transforms to draw 3D graphics out of line and pixel primitives. I didn't get far - the best I did was implementing a 3D scene generator out of a book.
Today, I'd download the ActiveX libraries, or OpenGL libraries, and use gcc or Java or something else to draw my objects. I'd never have to learn how to interact with the video driver. I could be creating Quake maps without knowing how to do a matrix operation or a binary tree representation of a scene (which I never learned).
Does that mean I'd be lazier if I was born 10 years later? Nope. I'd just be able to quickly jump the hurdle of low-level details and concentrate on the higher level stuff. Maybe I'd study art more, to learn what makes a good 3D scene. Maybe I'd study basic AI, to make my creations more life-like. Or maybe I'd still learn all the way down to register instructions, because I like to see how far down I can go, but I'd have better guides down known paths (like Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book.
Remember, without this crazy, materialistic, wasteful country, no one would have developed cheap graphics cards that make their way to Pakistan in the first place. Keep ignoring the modern miracles of reliable computer networks, always-on electrical grids, indoor air conditioning, and market economies. Continue to prosper without guilt. But do try to leave something useful for those that come after you.
This is a great engineering story, of folks working with what they have, and a great Free Software story - they could have tried some pirated copy of commerical software, but instead they decided to use open source components, stretching what is possible. Could it have been done with a projector? Sure, if one was availible. But now the state of multi-monitor free software has been advanced a little, which may benefit you or me some day.
I hope that there were some other people who saw how cool this was, who are contacting the authors with useful suggestions about removing the shells and mounting the tubes closer together, that are looking at the GStreamer source and thinking about how to add cropping, and how to make cropping easy, and hopefully a few people that are thinking about donating equipment, and realizing how lucky they are to live in a world where you can order a projector from Amazon and have it delivered in days.
I agree - the post would have been just fine without that misguided last sentence. It's the editor's job to take that stuff out. Who was the editor on that last one?
Nevermind, it was Timothy. There's a 50/50 chance he added the comment and forgot to add the </I> after the submission.
To keep it ontopic, imagine I ranted about how the news industry is now nothing but another form of entertainment, and how horrible it is that stuff like this is actually competing with real stories like the failure of the Bush Administration to accomplish regime change in Afghanistan.
EOT 251002.2 R,A (R) >
I hit enter. 20 minutes later, tape stops, nearly identical message, I hit enter again. He comes back, I show him the errors. He laughs, starts the backup again, and tells me to put in the next tape when the message appears. The message makes sense now - End of tape, so label a tape with today's date, volume 2, then press R to Resume.
This was a SEL77 machine (that's probably not the proper name), and these tapes didn't have near the capacity of modern tapes, so it only took 45 minutes to make the 3 backup tapes. But from then on, I decided not to try to help coworkers unless I understood the screen messages...
In the U.S. we would integrate the conversions in the gas pumps, with dual sets of displays, or a button to toggle displays. Of course, we wouldn't be able to switch until most of the population had taken a thermodynamics course (or at least a chemistry/physics lab), and learned first-hand how much easier the metric system can be. And THAT won't happen until we get most Americans through a biology class without a big contreversy over evolution...
No, I meant whinge, as in "to whine". You're the second one to ask this, do Americans not have this word or something? :)
That's correct. Here's one definition:
If you do the google search, it's used almost exclusively on British sites. In America, we'd use whine as a noun and verb, as in "click here to whine", and "Would you like some cheese with your whine?"On the results page, this caught my eye:
"Tell me if anything looks odd, or you want to whinge, or whatever.
Did you mean "whine" instead of "whinge"? Or, is that the last test, to see if you score high on the "exaggerated attention to detail" metric? If I respond to that email, do I get contacted by a social worker?
Oh, that's a great measure of how much something sucks. Let's see...hmm, "Linux sucks" has over 208,000 hits. Geez, it must really suck major to get that many hits.
Instant Research:
Windows Sucks: 225000 hits
Linux Sucks: 178000 hits
Conclusion: Linux sucks only 79% as much as Windows.
Further Research:
Windows sucks: 225000
Windows suxs: 534
Windows sux: 24300
Linux Sucks: 178000
Linux suxs: 287
Linux sux: 20800
BSD Sucks: 24900
BSD suxs: 59
BSD sux: 4680
Conclusions: BSD sucks 11% as much as Windows, and 14% as much as Linux. BSD suxs 11% as much as Windows, and 20% as much as Linux. BSD sucks the least. BSD sux 19% as much as Windows, and 23% as much as Linux.
BSD's market comparisions should be based on how much is sucks. Microsoft, however, should focus more on how much it sux, since it sux only 17% more than Linux, while it sucks 26% more.
What investment? It takes a day to learn FORTRAN. Just go learn it, then decide whether you want to use it or not.
If you know any other programming language (C, C++, Perl, LISP, Visual Basic, Q-BASIC, ANYTHING), then it will take you a day or two to learn FORTRAN, especially if you don't need I/O routines. Give yourself a week if you want to learn I/O, EQUIVALENCEs, and the other details. Type "FORTRAN TUTORIAL" into your local Google search box and start working.
I wouldn't want to learn it as a first language - I think the I/O is terrible. I can't use it for 30% of my work - I use C for decent I/O, preprocessor macros, simple string manipulation, pointers and casts. For the other 70%, it's just as good as any other procedural language.
Of course, now someone will say C's I/O is terrible, and FORTRAN's is far easier. But again, it's silly to spend much time listening to debates like that, when you could learn the language in a day or two and decide for yourself. Jeeze, it's not C++ or LISP - it's just FORTRAN. It's like asking if Wordpad or Notepad is better for text editting...
Instead, if they use them to gather data about REAL driver habits and what really causes accidents, I believe they will find that speed is not the problem, and that most inter-city highways could safely raise the speed limit 10 mph or so, since many people are safely going over that limit anyway.
Instead, I expect that they will find that cell phones, listening to certain kinds of music, arguing while driving, weather and road conditions, or just bad driving habits like weaving in and out of traffic are causing the accidents.
Or maybe not - maybe speed will be the factor. I don't know, but I do know that, once you have generous data collection facilities, it then become possible to use science to determine what causes accidents, and how to make driving safer.
The one thing they will confirm is that speed of collision strongly affects how lethal the accident is - and they will be able to measure true speeds, rather than use the speed of the road. I see a lot more 10mph rear-end accidents at traffic lights than 65 mph head-on collisions.
This is true. They sell the software to hardware manufacturers, but they make the bulk of their money on subscribtion fees for the programming guide. If Time Warner is already paying for a programming guide, then they have little motivation to lose that money stream by giving the guide business to TiVo. And, if they are making money renting cable boxes to customers, they have little motivation to offer a universal interface which allows customers to get their boxes from somewhere else.
TiVo, as a business, will become successful if consumers prefer TiVo's solutions over other companies, so that companies are forced to license from TiVo to stay competative. TiVo will probably fail if every cable provider can come up with their own solution, and customers don't see enough of a difference to seek out TiVo's solution.
Well, for one thing, you get digital cable without the IR repeater that TiVo has to use. For my setup (digital cable + TiVo), the video signal goes through the digital decoder and then into TiVo. To change channels, the TiVo has little LEDs that you place over the remote sensor for the digital cable box. TiVo emulates the digital cable remote to change the channels, and is successful about 95% of the time. The rest of the time, TiVo almost changes the channel, and you get the wrong thing.
There are ways to lessen the effect, such as building an IR cage around the IR repeater/IR receiver portion. There are other options, such as going satelite (TiVo's ReplayTV box is a satelite decoder as well, so it has no problem changing channels) or basic cable (TiVo works fine as a basic cable box). But, since digital cable decoding is non-standard, the only way is to get the cable provider to offer a PVR box.
They probably won't go the TiVo route - TiVo would rather see a standard digital cable descrambler, usable in many cable systems, then one for each market. If a cable provider wants to make one for each market, TiVo will do it, but expect the cable provider to pay for the work needed to make the box. SonicBlue, who is behind the Time Warner box, is more willing to burnn their own money and work with the cable providers.
The real solution is a single, HD-enable digital cable standard, so that any manufacturer can make a box that works on all the networks, including TiVo. I imagine the cable providers get a bit of revenue renting out the digital cable decoders, so I don't expect this any time soon. Also, I'll have to see the pricing details to determine whether Time Warner is serious about this as a mainstream product, or only selling it to the rich folks that might have gone the SonicBlue route anyway.
Well, since you brought up Prince of Persia...
How do you get past the evil copy of yourself in the last few levels? You kill him, then you die. You drive him off the ledge, he splats, you die. Is the point really to just get on the other side of him and pass him by?
Actually, this is probably wrong - "CHECK MY ID" is not a valid signature. I say probably, because I can only find a few passing references, such as this one (look at item 7). The problem is, your signature on the back of the credit card acts as a legal signature on the contract saying that you will pay any charges made with the card. Without the signature, the transaction doesn't have the legal authority.
99 times out of 100, the clerk will not look at your card, or ask you to see the ID. That one time, however, the clerk will refuse to take an unsigned card, and you'll call the manager, and the manager will say "That's store policy, sign the card", and you'll have to sign or use cash.
However, it does seem perfectly legal to sign the card, and then write "CHECK MY ID" after the signature or under it. That is small comfort, because most credit card thieves will use your card where an ID is not required (like online), or make some convincing looking fake IDs with your name and their picture before going on their shopping spree at Best Buy.
That being said, I found one story interesting today: China cracking down on Internet cafes after a fire in an illegal cafe kills 24. The Beijing government is using it as an excuse to stop public Internet access, and the Chinese PR machine is putting local news stations to shame saying how the Internet and computer games corrupt the young. The info noose is pulled a little tighter in China tonight...
I just want a robust community of open source programmers making robust implementations for known computer problems. When Apache makes web servers easy and free, there is little money in making cheap web servers for individuals, and no programmers get stuck reinventing the wheel. Instead, programmers can get paid to take web servers to the next level, to iron out security holes, to improve reliability and scalability, and work on the really interesting stuff.
Neal Stephenson had a great model for thinking about the software world. On earth, life exists in a narrow band - a few feet into the ground and about a mile above. Some organisms survive at the extremes of temperature or pressure or lack of atmosphere, but the ecosphere really is just a thin shell.
Microsoft and other software producers live in that narrow shell. Open source takes up room in that shell, pushing the non-free producers out of easy habitats like web servers and legacy hardware support. It forces them to move into more difficult terrains, to work harder to make the same amount of money. Stephenson seems to think the software ecosphere might be restricted, that eventually open source will push the closed source developers off the map - instead, I believe the closed source developers will now be free to chart that uncharted territory, to expand the survivability sphere.
As long as there are clients that need customized solutions, there will be programmers getting paid. As long as there are general solutions that everyone agrees on, open source will be squeezing out the closed source producers. I, for one, hope that Microsoft continues to "innovate", pushing computers into new territories, and creating homogenized landscapes in it's wake that the open-source virus can take over. Because, at my heart, I'm a programmer, and I hate the thought of doing something twice...
Just like India dominates the Internet, followed closely by Russia...
Remember, China has traditionally given intellectuals and artists a choice - bend your works to the party line, or supress them, or be imprisioned or killed. That kind of psycopathic natural selection will keep China from being a cultural leader for a long time after the party is gone...
The U.S. is much better - bend your works to the capitalist line, or have a hard time feeding yourself. Still, that's the best we'll get, outside of a college campus. And that depends on rich parents or mortaging future earnings...