Another possible theory is that a weakened stomach system might depend more on gravity than before. The macque's possibly-weakend stomach system may now have more discomfort when walking on all fours, forcing the macque to walk upright to avoid discomfort.
This theory may not be valid, but this could be worth investigating?
I really looked at the Hiptop/Sidekick when it came out, but I heard bad things about durability and reliability, at least of the older units.
I decided to go BlackBerry (the new color 7280), and I haven't looked back since. They are not as beautiful or fancy as Hiptop/Sidekicks, but boy, they are built like tanks! I've dropped my BlackBerry from 3.5 feet to concrete a couple times, with only minor scruffs to its ruggedized plastic case.
BlackBerry is more expensive to buy and run, and you still need to pay an extra monthly fee to get SSH/AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo chat, and the only SSH/telnet apps are still expensive.
The reliability has been stellar, and emails are amazingly fast (faster than SMS even) in that four seconds after clicking SEND on any desktop computer, the email is already on my Blackberry -- no 15 minute email polls, it's a realtime 24/7 email connection to a Blackberry email server (you can still do POP though, but at the cost of a 15 minute poll instead of realtime -- or use both POP accounts and Blackberry email).
File attachments now work (documents, spreadsheets, etc), there is no tangible message size limit for me, and I've got unlimited email.
The color 7280 can be upgraded to have full color HTML browsing (Either by getting Reqwireless, or an extra monthly fee for Hosted BES, or using the 'RBRO' trick).
The chat software is WebMessenger which does AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo and the telnet/SSH software is Idokorro MobileSSH. There is also now an open source ICQ program caleld BlackChat...
I made a FAQ at HowardForums (A big cellphone discussion website) that describes the present cheapest way to get full TCP/IP access on a Blackberry (via Public MDS or via Hosted BES), which is a sticky thread at the top of this HowardForums forum page.
Reception has been great so far -- much better than Hiptop/Sidekick in my experience. But that may be explained by the extra GSM frequencies (850 Mhz) and continuing network improvements. I had nonstop reception between a few major northeast cities (both USA and Canada), the Blackberry sends emails very well even when reception is only 1 bar, and the store-and-forward quickly downloads (doesn't stall excessively) as soon as there's a smidgen of reception.
The Blackberry keyboard actually feels better than the Hiptop/Sidekick keyboard, and I was able to thumb-touchtype at 363 keypresses per minute (I'm pretty fast with thumb keyboards). I'm not as fast as that old Treo 180-series guy that went 84 words per minute in the Dom Perignon III Contest (at Fitaly) - do a google on "Dom Perignon III Contest" for more info. But at 72 words per minute (363 divided by 5), that's damn fast for a thumb keyboard!
And I hope the rumors that I heard are true that they are going to finally include TCP/IP with Blackberry OS 4.0 (at least on some networks) with full gateway access. The upcoming Blackberry model 7290 which is rumored, may also include a way to connect it to a laptop to use it as a modem (finally; they've been lagging so long). They make these devices too secure for some of us prosumers that we can't even use Internet on them until recently; they are more designed for businesses than for people like me.
BlackBerry has gone a long way from the early black-and-white models, and are starting to be more appealing to prosumers like me.
On January 15, 1990, 114 switching nodes of the AT&T long distance system went down. The published cause of the crash was a bug in the failure recovery code of the switches. When a node crashed, it sent "out of service" message to the neighboring nodes, which are supposed to re-route traffic around it. However, the bug (a misplaced "break" statement in C code) caused the neighboring nodes to crash themselves upon receiving the "out of service" message, and further propagate the fault by sending an "out of service" message to nodes further out in the network.
The crash lasted 9 hours, while programmers searched for the cause of the bug. An estimated 60 thousand people were left without telephone service, and 70 million phone calls went uncompleted. AT&T estimates at least $60 million in lost revenue and damage to its reputation; reliability was a central point in AT&T's marketing campaign against other long distance providers at the time. The incidental damage to businesses that were unable to operate due to lack of telephone service is hard to estimate, but is presumably much larger. The public safety and national security implications of such a large telephone system outage are distressing as well.
This fault happened despite fault-tolerant design principles which were present in the phone system's design. The nodes failed fast, reporting their outage to neighboring nodes, and there was enough redundancy in the system to route around the failures. The crashed nodes recovered quickly, rebooting themselves and coming back up; however, they would immediately crash because of the messages received from neighboring nodes. The failure happened on an error-recovery path, which is poorly tested. The presence of decentralized distributed control, necessary for scaling, allowed this failure to propagate. The outage demonstrates that a bug in the software can cause a widely correlated failure.
The possibility of a malicious attack on the system was seriously investigated as a cause for the crash. The investigation came up dry, but most sources acknowledge that this accidental fault could have just as easily been activated on purpose by a knowledgeable attacker. The social implications are investigated in detail in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown.
Those in the know like to build our own Home Theater Computer (HTPC) with similiar components for much cheaper, by learning information from AVSFORUM, which is kind of a HTPC geek's forum:
Over 10,000 public CCTV cameras in LONDON alone!
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: 5, Informative
That's not that many cameras in Boston. There's something like TWO ORDERS of magnitude more public monitoring cameras in London!
London Underground subway ALONE is reported to have over 6000 monitoring cameras now, being increased to 9000 source link. When including CCTV cameras elsewhere, there's well OVER 10,000 CAMERAS monitoring you.
Although, apparently, most Londoners doesn't seem to mind. As long as they're only pointed to public areas.
Catchalls are harmless until they explode. The results were not pretty. All it takes is to be targeted as a potential ISP goldmine of email accounts, and then be dictionary-attacked by a spammer, then lots of your email addresses are put on huge numbers of spam lists. Then you've moved from no spam to near infinite spam. Over one thousand spam per day, gobbling up your download bandwidth and slowing your Internet connection even if your spam filter filters 98% of it which still lets a couple dozen through, it becomes living hell!
while (true); do cat/dev/random | mail myself@mydomain.com; done
">>If we suddenly have 100 miles of superstrong material slamming down at hypersonic speed, it's going to be extremely bad"
That's funny. The proposed space elevator (which uses a paperthin ribbon cable, by the way) has only a tiny fraction of the mass of a single WTC tower.
Something like only 24 tons of material is needed for the initial anchor cable. That's something you can loft aboard in just a few rockets. What's that, one truckload of wound-up starter material that's over 60,000 kilometers long? That's it. Then after that, it's only a few truckloads more of ribbon material, and you're done. The WTC took over 1000 truckloads, the space elevator is far less material.
Space elevator ribbon - It's low density material. Superstrong yes but flexible. Drop a Mylar anti-static plastic bag (for a PC motherboard). That's 1 square feet of elevator ribbon fluttering to the ground pretty harmlessly. The space elevator ribbon will be of much tougher material. However, the space elevator ribbon is actually lighter than that mylar bag!
When a space elevator collapses (which will inevitably happen to at least one space elevator, once they start sprouting up, Murphy's Law is going to always be with us), it'll just mostly flutter down. The stuff in the vaccuum will burn up quickly as they accelerate without friction and hit the atmosphere. Now, the concern is mainly with the lower (atmospheric) portion. Some damage may occur to the platform, and a boat might be capsized if the kickback of the gigantic-rubbery-like "snap" of the most earthmost (lower 10km or so) of cable, hits nearby water with enough force to capsize a small ship. Even so, that may not even happen, because even 100 feet of atmosphere will slow down an ultralight paper-thin material very quickly from supersonic speeds to subsonic speeds. So because of this, ships and platforms are probably going to be very rarely damaged from a falling elevator ribbon! It's not going to be Apocalypse. A falling Lifter will be far more deadly - but far less dangerous than a falling space station or nuclear powered satellite. People are just going to keep reattempting the space elevator, especially if there are successful attempts. The Write Brothers versions of the first few space elevators will definitely have the equivalent of a few biplane crashlandings, a few Apollo 1's and 13's are definitely going to happen, but your scenario is a joke.
yoey, on the topic of remote controls, to help "converge" your entire home theater:
I tried many universal remote controls and couldn't make my 9-device home theater behave as one unit. Pronto macros and Marantz macros took too long, and while I became good at ProntoEdit, things kept breaking apart especially when I upgraded devices.
I finally found family-friendly heaven in a Harmony SST-659. It is a macroless remote that remembers which of your devices are on and which are off, and correctly powers up everything. It has wife-friendly buttons such as "Watch TV", "Watch Movies", and even a "Help" button. The Help button automatically fixes your home theater if your remote control ever goes out of sync, with user friendly step-by-step menus on its LCD that is easier to follow than cellphone menus. And it's a drop-in replacement for a common digital cable/satellite/PVR remote. It is an Internet-programmed remote, with Harmony's database so I didn't even need to teach any IR codes and Harmony automatically "created" the macros. It controlled a major my entire 9-device home theater just 15-30 minutes of configuration (shocking...I'm a Pronto fan). Even things like "OFF" happens instantly turning everything off almost simultaneously, because there is virtually no inter-device delay when transmitting IR codes that belongs to different devices. (and it's automatically programmed by your Harmony)
As a result, it is a universal remote heaven for family. This remote actually saved a few marriages, according to some posts on AVSFORUM.com (do a search)
Although it's an expensive remote, I'm the type of guy who gets $300 remotes. (So this $130 rapidly-programmable universal remote on eBay is a literal bargain, considering it takes hours to program a $300 remote) There are tradeoffs, but I was able to do in 15 minutes what took me 6 hours with a Philips Pronto (TSU-300), and 4 hours with a Marantz RC2000 MKII! For me, it is the interim solution to "convergence" of my 9 devices into 1 device! And very easy to change whenever my configuration changes.
One disadvantage: Don't get this remote if you do not have an Internet connection! (But you ARE reading this, aren't ya...)
Re:Actually...Convergence happened ALREADY
on
Big Bang of Convergence
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And least to those people who say cellphones did not exist in 1980's...
1980's guy: Yeah, I have heard of them cell phones. Those amazingly small wireless radios that act as telephones just arrived at RadioShack last year. It is a little larger than my Walkman. Don't think I'll ever afford a cell phone in my lifetime, it costs half as much as my Datsun Rabbit car.
And you say your cellphone can double as a PDA (Public Displays of Affection) and a camera AND a videogame system? It must be as large as my toaster and more boring than my Football LED game. You're crazy.
Actually, convergence is happening all over the place. Just that we don't really know where we're converging to.
Videogame consoles are nowadays video and music players too, with the XBox and PlayStation2.
(1980's guy: How the hell do I insert Betamax tapes into my Atari!?)
Cellphones now double as PDA and cameras too. (1980's guy: PDA? Public Displays of Affection and voyeurism with a cellphone? You're crazy.)
Some printers are now copiers, scanners and faxes too. (1980's guy: Wow, my own Xerox! Where can I get one of these for the price of my Commodore dot matrix?)
Most DVD video players are now CD/VCD/MP3 players too. (1980's guy: DVD? MP3? Oh, a disc format? Is that like the 12 inch LaserDisc?)
Our cable TV is also an Internet conection (and even phone line too). (1980's guy: What's an Internet? And tell me, how the hell is phone over cable possible?)
Cable and satellite TV boxes that also double as 100 hour tapeless recorders (PVR's). (1980's guy: A VCR that can record 100 hours with no videotape? You're kidding.)
You name it, various kinds of convergence is happening today, all over the place. Who knows what's gonna happen next.
I learned 6502 assembly in the 1980's on a Commodore 64. I even have it all imported into my system, into a few D64's full of software I wrote myself - to run in an emulator for old time's sake. (Gee, hard to believe that some of the programs are almost 20 years old now.)
I had a lot of the habits that you describe, and I now program simply in C++ for either Linux or XP.
However, I had run into some performance issues with certain critical loops that were executed millions of times, such as a loop that iterates through pixels in image processing, and I wanted to view the disassembly of it. I understood enough assembly to be able to optimize a tight loop in a plain C code routine, and verified that the assembly was just as good as handcoded non-MMX assembly. (Some compilers do an amazing job now) The only way to improve the performance further in my case, would have to have written MMX/SSE/SSE2 for this 0.05% of a computer program, but even so, I deemed it not to be still worth the effort.
Now, if you are talking about realtime video filters, such as deinterlacing and sharpening (think Adobe Photoshop style plugins executed 50 or 60 times per second for every interlaced video field at 60 Hz for NTSC, 50 Hz for PAL), you still need matrix math operations such as MMX/SSE/SSE2 assembly language if you want to do lots of video enhancement realtime on a live video source.
One example program is the open-source dScaler project - dScaler Realtime Video Processor. You can do REALTIME sharpening filters, denoising filters, motion-compensated deinterlace filters, 3D-like chroma filters, diagonal-jaggie removal filters, etc, all the above simultaneously, on a LIVE real-time video source from a cheap $30 PCI TV tuner card, on today's high end Pentium 4 and Athlon systems. All this would not be possible without assembly language. Now, they are talking about adding realtime HDTV enhancement (1080 interlaced -> 1080 progressive). Run your cable/satellite/DVD box connected to your home theater PC running dScaler, and hook the home theater PC to your HDTV, and the live homemade "upconversions-on-the-fly" you are seeing are shockingly better looking than the bad quality upconvered video you watch on TV; (Important: Don't use S-Video output, connect the VGA output directly to the TV using a component-output adaptor. It's 6 times sharper than S-Video. For more information, see AVSFORUM's Home Theater Computers Forum section for more information about getting HDTV-quality video out of your computer to your HDTV television, especially if the HDTV television does not have a native VGA input.)
(For watching live realtime videoprocessed video, I don't recommend a $30 TV tuner card, the power users like to get more expensive cards such as approx-$250 PDI Deluxe card, which is a Conextant 23882-compatible card that actually has a Y-Pr-Pb component input for computers! Supposedly better analog signal-to-noise ratio, better A/D converter electronics, better power filtering.)
The point is that you don't need assembly language most of the time, but there definitely sure are times that it's exeedingly, absolutely critical.
A lot of us Canadians love to hate Rogers -- and I don't use Rogers Internet (I use DSL):
Incidentially, according to DSLReports, incidentally a few users are getting lucky where Rogers actually called them (huh?) and offered a free upgrade to DOCSIS 2.0 compatible cable modems. Some users' download speeds actually doubled.
According to forums on this site, Rogers finished deploying a new 850 Mhz GSM cellphone network at the end of December 2003 where there's been great improvements (i.e. some HowardForums.com claims from worse than Fido/Bell/Telus to better than Fido/Bell/Telus). Pity you need a new cellphone to take advantage of the new reception and less dropped calls. There were a couple of reports at the HowardForums of big jumps in receptions in lots of areas, 1 bar reception in Toronto Union station jumped to 5 bars with new 850 Mhz GSM phone. This is attributable to 850 Mhz penetrating buildings and foilage much better than 1900 Mhz. (On HowardForums.com, search for "850 improvement" (click here), perhaps combined with the term "Mad Seeg", a humorous term used by dozens of posters there, slang phrase for "amazing signal")
It's a little easier to get lucky with cable Internet and cellphones now with them, and maybe a couple less unlucky Rogers victims, but Rogers customer service is still MIA. At least, Rogers cellphone reception is finally now easier to get than Rogers customer service.
You got it right. In fact, most of the beautiful Hubble Telescope photos take advantage of falsecolor, at least for one component, such as infrared light combined with visible light. Obviously, a color has to be assigned to the infrared light or any other wavelength not in visible range. For Hubble, the falsecolor images often end up having far more useful science than the realcolor images.
There is definitely science in turning non-acoustical phenomena into sound, and it does a hell of a good job introducing science to the masses, just like Hubble Telescope photos. Zero/One-dimensional phenomena (time) can most easily be converted to sound frequency ranges, since you only have a single sample point for a given moment. Background noise is one example since certain types are fairly uniform in all directions of the universe. Thus, there is, indeed, a certain amount of legitimate science in converting this to sound, just like hubble falsecolor (most of 'em!) is legitimate science. Just bear in mind that human hearing is very narrow slice of all the frequencies in the universe, just like the human eye eye is another very narrow slice of (much higher) frequencies in the universe. Sound equivalents for things like black holes, pulsars (beep...beep...beep), etc, have been done, and have proved very useful science in the past.
Obviously, it shouldn't be your only science (just like you have to do things like graphs, charts, mathematics, write proper papers, comparative analysis, etc.)
I am no scientist, but I know enough to tell you that falsecolor is useful science.
PHP OpenGL on SourceForge
on
OpenGL in PHP
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Very impressive -- A while back I heard about PHPOpenGL.
But he didn't even use this at all! Pretty self contained, even to the gzipped uuencoded DLL file embedded in this PHP script whose sole purpose is to create the window that this PHP demo needs for the 3D graphics.
...Then again, Borg now runs Linux, ever since the Bill Gates Disaster at Wolf 359 long time ago. Borg communication Node #63 had a Windows Protection Fault 0xC0000005, causing a massive chain reaction.
Now, back on topic, there's a good good reason: Gentoo Linux is just too cute and huggable. This penguin actually has better IQ than Bill Gates -- I love it!!
Slashdot Mirror
Another possible theory is that a weakened stomach system might depend more on gravity than before. The macque's possibly-weakend stomach system may now have more discomfort when walking on all fours, forcing the macque to walk upright to avoid discomfort.
This theory may not be valid, but this could be worth investigating?
Hi,
...
I really looked at the Hiptop/Sidekick when it came out, but I heard bad things about durability and reliability, at least of the older units.
I decided to go BlackBerry (the new color 7280), and I haven't looked back since. They are not as beautiful or fancy as Hiptop/Sidekicks, but boy, they are built like tanks! I've dropped my BlackBerry from 3.5 feet to concrete a couple times, with only minor scruffs to its ruggedized plastic case.
BlackBerry is more expensive to buy and run, and you still need to pay an extra monthly fee to get SSH/AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo chat, and the only SSH/telnet apps are still expensive.
The reliability has been stellar, and emails are amazingly fast (faster than SMS even) in that four seconds after clicking SEND on any desktop computer, the email is already on my Blackberry -- no 15 minute email polls, it's a realtime 24/7 email connection to a Blackberry email server (you can still do POP though, but at the cost of a 15 minute poll instead of realtime -- or use both POP accounts and Blackberry email).
File attachments now work (documents, spreadsheets, etc), there is no tangible message size limit for me, and I've got unlimited email.
The color 7280 can be upgraded to have full color HTML browsing (Either by getting Reqwireless, or an extra monthly fee for Hosted BES, or using the 'RBRO' trick).
The chat software is WebMessenger which does AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo and the telnet/SSH software is Idokorro MobileSSH. There is also now an open source ICQ program caleld BlackChat
I made a FAQ at HowardForums (A big cellphone discussion website) that describes the present cheapest way to get full TCP/IP access on a Blackberry (via Public MDS or via Hosted BES), which is a sticky thread at the top of this HowardForums forum page.
Reception has been great so far -- much better than Hiptop/Sidekick in my experience. But that may be explained by the extra GSM frequencies (850 Mhz) and continuing network improvements. I had nonstop reception between a few major northeast cities (both USA and Canada), the Blackberry sends emails very well even when reception is only 1 bar, and the store-and-forward quickly downloads (doesn't stall excessively) as soon as there's a smidgen of reception.
The Blackberry keyboard actually feels better than the Hiptop/Sidekick keyboard, and I was able to thumb-touchtype at 363 keypresses per minute (I'm pretty fast with thumb keyboards). I'm not as fast as that old Treo 180-series guy that went 84 words per minute in the Dom Perignon III Contest (at Fitaly) - do a google on "Dom Perignon III Contest" for more info. But at 72 words per minute (363 divided by 5), that's damn fast for a thumb keyboard!
And I hope the rumors that I heard are true that they are going to finally include TCP/IP with Blackberry OS 4.0 (at least on some networks) with full gateway access. The upcoming Blackberry model 7290 which is rumored, may also include a way to connect it to a laptop to use it as a modem (finally; they've been lagging so long). They make these devices too secure for some of us prosumers that we can't even use Internet on them until recently; they are more designed for businesses than for people like me.
BlackBerry has gone a long way from the early black-and-white models, and are starting to be more appealing to prosumers like me.
I can imagine this sponsored T-Shirt included in the obligatory frosh welcome kit:
"iPod University Graduate
Class of 2008"
(In an Apple Computer font. too.)
Those in the know like to build our own Home Theater Computer (HTPC) with similiar components for much cheaper, by learning information from AVSFORUM, which is kind of a HTPC geek's forum:
AVSFORUM Home Theater Computers Forum
(Claimed to be the world's biggest Home Theater Computers forum - over 100,000 posts)
That's not that many cameras in Boston. There's something like TWO ORDERS of magnitude more public monitoring cameras in London!
London Underground subway ALONE is reported to have over 6000 monitoring cameras now, being increased to 9000 source link. When including CCTV cameras elsewhere, there's well OVER 10,000 CAMERAS monitoring you.
Although, apparently, most Londoners doesn't seem to mind. As long as they're only pointed to public areas.
Catchalls are harmless until they explode. The results were not pretty. All it takes is to be targeted as a potential ISP goldmine of email accounts, and then be dictionary-attacked by a spammer, then lots of your email addresses are put on huge numbers of spam lists. Then you've moved from no spam to near infinite spam. Over one thousand spam per day, gobbling up your download bandwidth and slowing your Internet connection even if your spam filter filters 98% of it which still lets a couple dozen through, it becomes living hell!
/dev/random | mail myself@mydomain.com; done
while (true); do cat
">>Yes, of course it's the right cabl [le0: NO CARRIER]"
:D
What the hell did you do?
Anchor the balloon with CAT5 Ethernet cable instead of Kevlar rope?
">>If we suddenly have 100 miles of superstrong material slamming down at hypersonic speed, it's going to be extremely bad"
That's funny. The proposed space elevator (which uses a paperthin ribbon cable, by the way) has only a tiny fraction of the mass of a single WTC tower.
Something like only 24 tons of material is needed for the initial anchor cable. That's something you can loft aboard in just a few rockets. What's that, one truckload of wound-up starter material that's over 60,000 kilometers long? That's it. Then after that, it's only a few truckloads more of ribbon material, and you're done. The WTC took over 1000 truckloads, the space elevator is far less material.
Space elevator ribbon - It's low density material. Superstrong yes but flexible. Drop a Mylar anti-static plastic bag (for a PC motherboard). That's 1 square feet of elevator ribbon fluttering to the ground pretty harmlessly. The space elevator ribbon will be of much tougher material. However, the space elevator ribbon is actually lighter than that mylar bag!
When a space elevator collapses (which will inevitably happen to at least one space elevator, once they start sprouting up, Murphy's Law is going to always be with us), it'll just mostly flutter down. The stuff in the vaccuum will burn up quickly as they accelerate without friction and hit the atmosphere. Now, the concern is mainly with the lower (atmospheric) portion. Some damage may occur to the platform, and a boat might be capsized if the kickback of the gigantic-rubbery-like "snap" of the most earthmost (lower 10km or so) of cable, hits nearby water with enough force to capsize a small ship. Even so, that may not even happen, because even 100 feet of atmosphere will slow down an ultralight paper-thin material very quickly from supersonic speeds to subsonic speeds. So because of this, ships and platforms are probably going to be very rarely damaged from a falling elevator ribbon! It's not going to be Apocalypse. A falling Lifter will be far more deadly - but far less dangerous than a falling space station or nuclear powered satellite. People are just going to keep reattempting the space elevator, especially if there are successful attempts. The Write Brothers versions of the first few space elevators will definitely have the equivalent of a few biplane crashlandings, a few Apollo 1's and 13's are definitely going to happen, but your scenario is a joke.
yoey, on the topic of remote controls, to help "converge" your entire home theater:
I tried many universal remote controls and couldn't make my 9-device home theater behave as one unit. Pronto macros and Marantz macros took too long, and while I became good at ProntoEdit, things kept breaking apart especially when I upgraded devices.
I finally found family-friendly heaven in a Harmony SST-659. It is a macroless remote that remembers which of your devices are on and which are off, and correctly powers up everything. It has wife-friendly buttons such as "Watch TV", "Watch Movies", and even a "Help" button. The Help button automatically fixes your home theater if your remote control ever goes out of sync, with user friendly step-by-step menus on its LCD that is easier to follow than cellphone menus. And it's a drop-in replacement for a common digital cable/satellite/PVR remote. It is an Internet-programmed remote, with Harmony's database so I didn't even need to teach any IR codes and Harmony automatically "created" the macros. It controlled a major my entire 9-device home theater just 15-30 minutes of configuration (shocking...I'm a Pronto fan). Even things like "OFF" happens instantly turning everything off almost simultaneously, because there is virtually no inter-device delay when transmitting IR codes that belongs to different devices. (and it's automatically programmed by your Harmony)
As a result, it is a universal remote heaven for family. This remote actually saved a few marriages, according to some posts on AVSFORUM.com (do a search)
Although it's an expensive remote, I'm the type of guy who gets $300 remotes. (So this $130 rapidly-programmable universal remote on eBay is a literal bargain, considering it takes hours to program a $300 remote) There are tradeoffs, but I was able to do in 15 minutes what took me 6 hours with a Philips Pronto (TSU-300), and 4 hours with a Marantz RC2000 MKII! For me, it is the interim solution to "convergence" of my 9 devices into 1 device! And very easy to change whenever my configuration changes.
One disadvantage: Don't get this remote if you do not have an Internet connection! (But you ARE reading this, aren't ya...)
You name it, various kinds of convergence is happening today, all over the place. Who knows what's gonna happen next.
I learned 6502 assembly in the 1980's on a Commodore 64. I even have it all imported into my system, into a few D64's full of software I wrote myself - to run in an emulator for old time's sake. (Gee, hard to believe that some of the programs are almost 20 years old now.)
I had a lot of the habits that you describe, and I now program simply in C++ for either Linux or XP.
However, I had run into some performance issues with certain critical loops that were executed millions of times, such as a loop that iterates through pixels in image processing, and I wanted to view the disassembly of it. I understood enough assembly to be able to optimize a tight loop in a plain C code routine, and verified that the assembly was just as good as handcoded non-MMX assembly. (Some compilers do an amazing job now) The only way to improve the performance further in my case, would have to have written MMX/SSE/SSE2 for this 0.05% of a computer program, but even so, I deemed it not to be still worth the effort.
Now, if you are talking about realtime video filters, such as deinterlacing and sharpening (think Adobe Photoshop style plugins executed 50 or 60 times per second for every interlaced video field at 60 Hz for NTSC, 50 Hz for PAL), you still need matrix math operations such as MMX/SSE/SSE2 assembly language if you want to do lots of video enhancement realtime on a live video source.
One example program is the open-source dScaler project - dScaler Realtime Video Processor . You can do REALTIME sharpening filters, denoising filters, motion-compensated deinterlace filters, 3D-like chroma filters, diagonal-jaggie removal filters, etc, all the above simultaneously, on a LIVE real-time video source from a cheap $30 PCI TV tuner card, on today's high end Pentium 4 and Athlon systems. All this would not be possible without assembly language. Now, they are talking about adding realtime HDTV enhancement (1080 interlaced -> 1080 progressive). Run your cable/satellite/DVD box connected to your home theater PC running dScaler, and hook the home theater PC to your HDTV, and the live homemade "upconversions-on-the-fly" you are seeing are shockingly better looking than the bad quality upconvered video you watch on TV; (Important: Don't use S-Video output, connect the VGA output directly to the TV using a component-output adaptor. It's 6 times sharper than S-Video. For more information, see AVSFORUM's Home Theater Computers Forum section for more information about getting HDTV-quality video out of your computer to your HDTV television, especially if the HDTV television does not have a native VGA input.)
(For watching live realtime videoprocessed video, I don't recommend a $30 TV tuner card, the power users like to get more expensive cards such as approx-$250 PDI Deluxe card, which is a Conextant 23882-compatible card that actually has a Y-Pr-Pb component input for computers! Supposedly better analog signal-to-noise ratio, better A/D converter electronics, better power filtering.)
The point is that you don't need assembly language most of the time, but there definitely sure are times that it's exeedingly, absolutely critical.
The question isn't always customer service or cellphone reception, but which of the two is easier to find.
/dev/random /dev/cellphone
The unluckiest people are the ones where cellphone reception is EVEN HARDER to find than customer service!
ln -sf
A lot of us Canadians love to hate Rogers -- and I don't use Rogers Internet (I use DSL):
/dev/random /dev/RogersCustomerService
Incidentially, according to DSLReports, incidentally a few users are getting lucky where Rogers actually called them (huh?) and offered a free upgrade to DOCSIS 2.0 compatible cable modems. Some users' download speeds actually doubled.
According to forums on this site, Rogers finished deploying a new 850 Mhz GSM cellphone network at the end of December 2003 where there's been great improvements (i.e. some HowardForums.com claims from worse than Fido/Bell/Telus to better than Fido/Bell/Telus). Pity you need a new cellphone to take advantage of the new reception and less dropped calls. There were a couple of reports at the HowardForums of big jumps in receptions in lots of areas, 1 bar reception in Toronto Union station jumped to 5 bars with new 850 Mhz GSM phone. This is attributable to 850 Mhz penetrating buildings and foilage much better than 1900 Mhz. (On HowardForums.com, search for "850 improvement" (click here), perhaps combined with the term "Mad Seeg", a humorous term used by dozens of posters there, slang phrase for "amazing signal")
It's a little easier to get lucky with cable Internet and cellphones now with them, and maybe a couple less unlucky Rogers victims, but Rogers customer service is still MIA. At least, Rogers cellphone reception is finally now easier to get than Rogers customer service.
ln -sf
Dammmit, not another Bluetooth standard, now I have to upgrade my P-P-P-Powerbook.com Bluetooth mouse:
Photo: www.p-p-p-powerbook.com/images/g4 resized/bluetoothmouse1.jpg
The art of cryptography can be summed up as: Easy to encode, but hard to decode.
Prime numbers are easy to multiply together. Little CPU needed.
But it's hard to do the reverse: Factor a big number into two separate prime numbers. Lots of CPU needed.
It's based on that principle.
You got it right. In fact, most of the beautiful Hubble Telescope photos take advantage of falsecolor, at least for one component, such as infrared light combined with visible light. Obviously, a color has to be assigned to the infrared light or any other wavelength not in visible range. For Hubble, the falsecolor images often end up having far more useful science than the realcolor images.
There is definitely science in turning non-acoustical phenomena into sound, and it does a hell of a good job introducing science to the masses, just like Hubble Telescope photos. Zero/One-dimensional phenomena (time) can most easily be converted to sound frequency ranges, since you only have a single sample point for a given moment. Background noise is one example since certain types are fairly uniform in all directions of the universe. Thus, there is, indeed, a certain amount of legitimate science in converting this to sound, just like hubble falsecolor (most of 'em!) is legitimate science. Just bear in mind that human hearing is very narrow slice of all the frequencies in the universe, just like the human eye eye is another very narrow slice of (much higher) frequencies in the universe. Sound equivalents for things like black holes, pulsars (beep...beep...beep), etc, have been done, and have proved very useful science in the past.
Obviously, it shouldn't be your only science (just like you have to do things like graphs, charts, mathematics, write proper papers, comparative analysis, etc.)
I am no scientist, but I know enough to tell you that falsecolor is useful science.
When I first heard about Sempron, I immediately thought it was a new brand of tampons.
A CPU called a Sempron? No wonder we're running out of trademark namespace!
This is great -- more PVR software to help innovate PVR along.
But remember, TiVo uses Linux too! There's a TiVo hacker forum here.
Very impressive -- A while back I heard about PHPOpenGL.
But he didn't even use this at all! Pretty self contained, even to the gzipped uuencoded DLL file embedded in this PHP script whose sole purpose is to create the window that this PHP demo needs for the 3D graphics.
Isn't WIPO another acronym for WMD, since WIPO was Pressured to Kill Meeting on Open Source
...Then again, Borg now runs Linux, ever since the Bill Gates Disaster at Wolf 359 long time ago. Borg communication Node #63 had a Windows Protection Fault 0xC0000005, causing a massive chain reaction.
Now, back on topic, there's a good good reason: Gentoo Linux is just too cute and huggable. This penguin actually has better IQ than Bill Gates -- I love it!!
Resistance is futile.
Incidentially, the early (1980's) Apple Computer rainbow logo roughly corresponds to the rainbow flag symbol used by the gay community.
Another coincidence, eh?