Atari 400 killed Pythagoras' Theorem
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 0
Yet another precision problem from the old days, shaken the very foundatation of my math teacher, he can't figure out what's wrong and he refused to accept what he's seen.
First part was the actual session, second part was my debug session
------
LIST 10 INPUT "1st side", A 20 INPUT "2nd side", B 30 INPUT "3rd side", C 40 E = SQRT(A*A + B*B) 50 PRINT "This is "; 60 IF E C THEN PRINT "not"; 70 PRINT " a right angled triangle" 80 END OK
RUN 1st side 3 2nd side 4 3rd side 5 This is not a right angled triangle. OK
> I highly doubt that a super weak laser beam wound be as > visible as a massively powerful output of a STAR. Does a massively powerful output must come from a STAR?
> a laserbeam that would be visible from alpha centauri from > earth, the laser equipment would be the size of australia > and the output optics would be the size of texa With our current technology, may be. But 20 years ago, we don't have laser that is powered by 2 button cell and teh size of your thumbnail.
It might be natural, but it could also be artificial.
A. Refuse to show your card or swipe it in a card reader unless the person in front of you could produce reasonable evidence he/she is works for a law enforcement agency. That excludes giving your card to a merchant in order to buy something, for instance.
By Law, we can, and we can even require to show the ID card only at the police station.
This is Hong Kong, not mainland China.
Actually, Sharp Zarus MI-EX1 has a 480x640 4" LCD capable of 64k color now selling for 2 years already. Though the price is very steep, the display itself shows really amazing quality.
> we're talking 9600bps, here folks, so this was a LONG time ago
Long time, indeed, and today's LED's response time are much much faster, ranged from 90ns~500ns, i.e.. capable of at least 2MHz flashes! I can see lots of bandwidth here.
Consistency is the king, but personalization is the kingdom. Without the kingdom, the king is nothing.
Being a user, I use to work in a heavily personalized environment: skin, background picts, icons, directory structures, window positions, namely everything customizable. If I'll have to use another machine, I want consistency, and this means not only the way to operate application programs, but the way to deal with *my* environment, not any other people's, not the defaults. "I like it" is the strongest case.
Consistency and Personalization must stay together. There is no reason we have to abandon either one of them just to make other people's live easier.
Here lies the problem of today's desktop PCs. No matter how portable the files and the programs are, the personalization settings (system, applications, interfaces, states, etc.) never migrate out of the individual's system, not to mention the ability to resume the environment on another system.
There are implementations done by then Digital Equipment, IBM and Sun that users could maintain their sessions and states across different terminals. Yes, that was the thin client model, still the concept of being able to save any individual user's environment and states and restore them later on another different machine, in my opinion, is the perfect solution. Sadly, it never make it to the desktops.
The Japanese (Docomo) got it on their color phones, though the shapes are polygonal, still that's real kewl. Would be nice to see Quake running on it:-)
It is confusing enough to explain to Joe what a computer is, and yet more confusing to explain what a UI is and worst how to work it, and even worst how to work it on a "computer" to get what you want.
I think the whole concept of UI-Computer need to be hide away from the user - the future of today's productivity computer should be called a Secretary.
Simply put, real world desktop is:
1) 3 dimensional,
2) everything stay the same when you come back from lunch - a book turned to page 112 before lunch will surely stay at p 112 after you're back.
3) there are also beer cans in aditional to folders and documents
The point is, desktop metaphor is long dead no matter the harddisk icon.
The real problem with today's desktop lies in the metaphor iteself. The real, physical desktop is dumb, filled only with beer cans and dried pizza. The computer running the desktop, on the other hand, is intelligent. The problem with the existing systems is that no matter how many great applications you have on it, the desktop is still the dumbest one. The efficiency of using the system has becomes heavely depend on how good our memory is.
File and folder names are good to have but should not be the sole dependency of looking up things on a computer. In order to work effectively, we will also need a system to help us to pick the needle in the hay.
Just count how many time you have spent on looking for a file on your harddisk knowing just what it was about. Ever try to look for a picture you long forgot its name, or a piece of music from your harddisk/floppy/cdrom/mo? Imagine if you can do these in less than a second from your computer, who would care if we put all and everything together on one single folder, or on a few "desktops"? It's like having a secretary, why should I care how s/he do the filings as long as I could find eveything I need from hir everytime?
We need to solve these problems before we can talk about a humane interface. This is a more fundamental issue, not just some icons or desktops, for those are just symbols we use to represent our work place and their usefulness are up to the individual who use them.
Mentality won't change in a night, if you feel too tire to fight the battle, do take a rest, it is good for you. But don't give up, just don't give up because the future is still bright.
OmniRemote or like, thou you may have a range of about 1.5~2 meters but I'll say it's at least practical. These apps also allow you to construct multiple screens each for one (or more) remote controlled devices. You do the loayout by drawing buttons and train them.
OmniRemote also got a IR enhancer hardware which can be attached to your Palm Pilot. Dunno it cost.
However, these apps usually only work with 32kHz remotes but not the 144kHz ones, you may want to test drive the software first.
Unless users stop using the root account or equivalent as their user account.
Why? Traditionally, PC platform allows users to change the system, applications settings at will, including installing and uninstalling masses of applications and gadgets. *IF* Linux/Un*x are to be their next desktop, then one day, I believe, the above criteria must be matched, or will be made to match, by the user.
You'll see the problem is if you are to allow the user such as freedom, then virii/worm infection are bound to be happened, even with decent security protection *available* on every Linux/Un*x boxes - If security gets in the way of letting people doing what they want to do, people are just going to turn it off for good.
One day, Linux desktop is everywhere, Mr. John Doe, being one of the billions happy Linux user, used kdesu to install a very popular game sent from his good friend Bob, called "Shoot ya boss!". Apparently, this game is just what it says but underneath, besides providing entertainment to our dear John, it will also go through all the files in John's Linux desktop for every email address it could find, then assuming John's identity, send to some of those emails containing a copy of this game with a sincere message, and the others a random copy of John's collection of files asking for "advice". As it happened, the game also is setuid root and starting sniffing John's (and probably now many other victims') network for anything interesting, and of course, a backOrfice is also installed for the sake of convinience...
Who dares to say this *won't* happen?
peltier with a large heatsinkfan combo? No.
on
Chip Chiller
·
· Score: 1
I'll say these miniature peltiers are to be used with high-temperature superconductors to cool the chips. It is a known problem to get the chips to dissipate heat thru the traditional construct. Now if they could add these miniature peltiers on top of the components, and if they could mask a layer of HT superconductor to all these peltier islands, then heat generated could be collected and transfered to any destination with ease.
May be one day, we'll see on the chip's pin out a pin to connect to a heat sink.
Now, I am really waiting for room-temperature superconductor to come.
If artwork could tempt pedophiles, and if such things known as fantasy can't be allowed and need a Law to gorven, why don't just simply forbidden children in public places, doesn't a pedophiles not have the imagination to think up those sexy things when s/he see the real thing instead?
The point is, any grown adult should has the ability to distingush between fantasy and reality, and should be able to control oneself not to act out the fantasy wrongly. It is also the responsibility of a society that encourages free-will also encourages consideration, and care of others. Adult may be tempted, but s/he will not fail if there are supports from other selfs. Sometimes, wars cannot be fight alone, and many times, war is not necessary at all.
Yeah, may be I am a moron, but the fact that I have my reservation is about the trust to this "independent" party which is essentially formed by the big players.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet another precision problem from the old days, shaken the very foundatation of my math teacher, he can't figure out what's wrong and he refused to accept what he's seen.
First part was the actual session, second part was my debug session
------
LIST
10 INPUT "1st side", A
20 INPUT "2nd side", B
30 INPUT "3rd side", C
40 E = SQRT(A*A + B*B)
50 PRINT "This is ";
60 IF E C THEN PRINT "not";
70 PRINT " a right angled triangle"
80 END
OK
RUN
1st side
3
2nd side
4
3rd side
5
This is not a right angled triangle.
OK
-------
PRINT SQRT(25)
5
OK
PRINT (SQRT(25) - 5) * 10000
0.00001
OK
Damn!
SYNTAX ERROR
> I highly doubt that a super weak laser beam wound be as
> visible as a massively powerful output of a STAR.
Does a massively powerful output must come from a STAR?
> a laserbeam that would be visible from alpha centauri from
> earth, the laser equipment would be the size of australia
> and the output optics would be the size of texa
With our current technology, may be. But 20 years ago, we don't have laser that is powered by 2 button cell and teh size of your thumbnail.
It might be natural, but it could also be artificial.
A. Refuse to show your card or swipe it in a card reader unless the person in front of you could produce reasonable evidence he/she is works for a law enforcement agency. That excludes giving your card to a merchant in order to buy something, for instance.
By Law, we can, and we can even require to show the ID card only at the police station.
This is Hong Kong, not mainland China.
> There are zero known stars within that radius which could become supernovae
Assuming all those stars are under natural evolution processes and as predicted from today's theories. A big bet it seems to me.
Actually, Sharp Zarus MI-EX1 has a 480x640 4" LCD capable of 64k color now selling for 2 years already. Though the price is very steep, the display itself shows really amazing quality.
How about a Bluetooth stick together with a Bluetooth phone??
> we're talking 9600bps, here folks, so this was a LONG time ago
Long time, indeed, and today's LED's response time are much much faster, ranged from 90ns~500ns, i.e.. capable of at least 2MHz flashes! I can see lots of bandwidth here.
Obvious he understands nothing about OS X or he would not made such arrogant comments about leaving-things-at-defaults kind of B.S.
Consistency is the king, but personalization is the kingdom. Without the kingdom, the king is nothing.
Being a user, I use to work in a heavily personalized environment: skin, background picts, icons, directory structures, window positions, namely everything customizable. If I'll have to use another machine, I want consistency, and this means not only the way to operate application programs, but the way to deal with *my* environment, not any other people's, not the defaults. "I like it" is the strongest case.
Consistency and Personalization must stay together. There is no reason we have to abandon either one of them just to make other people's live easier.
Here lies the problem of today's desktop PCs. No matter how portable the files and the programs are, the personalization settings (system, applications, interfaces, states, etc.) never migrate out of the individual's system, not to mention the ability to resume the environment on another system.
There are implementations done by then Digital Equipment, IBM and Sun that users could maintain their sessions and states across different terminals. Yes, that was the thin client model, still the concept of being able to save any individual user's environment and states and restore them later on another different machine, in my opinion, is the perfect solution. Sadly, it never make it to the desktops.
J. Tachyon Bates
tachyon_at_m1_dot_ffn_dot_ne.jp
That would surely make an i486 much faster than the Cray II Y-MP...
The Japanese (Docomo) got it on their color phones, though the shapes are polygonal, still that's real kewl. Would be nice to see Quake running on it :-)
It is confusing enough to explain to Joe what a computer is, and yet more confusing to explain what a UI is and worst how to work it, and even worst how to work it on a "computer" to get what you want. I think the whole concept of UI-Computer need to be hide away from the user - the future of today's productivity computer should be called a Secretary.
Desktop is never a desktop to me.
Simply put, real world desktop is:
1) 3 dimensional,
2) everything stay the same when you come back from lunch - a book turned to page 112 before lunch will surely stay at p 112 after you're back.
3) there are also beer cans in aditional to folders and documents
The point is, desktop metaphor is long dead no matter the harddisk icon.
The real problem with today's desktop lies in the metaphor iteself. The real, physical desktop is dumb, filled only with beer cans and dried pizza. The computer running the desktop, on the other hand, is intelligent. The problem with the existing systems is that no matter how many great applications you have on it, the desktop is still the dumbest one. The efficiency of using the system has becomes heavely depend on how good our memory is.
File and folder names are good to have but should not be the sole dependency of looking up things on a computer. In order to work effectively, we will also need a system to help us to pick the needle in the hay.
Just count how many time you have spent on looking for a file on your harddisk knowing just what it was about. Ever try to look for a picture you long forgot its name, or a piece of music from your harddisk/floppy/cdrom/mo? Imagine if you can do these in less than a second from your computer, who would care if we put all and everything together on one single folder, or on a few "desktops"? It's like having a secretary, why should I care how s/he do the filings as long as I could find eveything I need from hir everytime?
We need to solve these problems before we can talk about a humane interface. This is a more fundamental issue, not just some icons or desktops, for those are just symbols we use to represent our work place and their usefulness are up to the individual who use them.
Just my $0.02
Why not those who choose to use those crappy M$ products, or those silly MC?? sys admins?
Mentality won't change in a night, if you feel too tire to fight the battle, do take a rest, it is good for you. But don't give up, just don't give up because the future is still bright.
And also this:s k_ utilities/panalex.html
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_di
OmniRemote or like, thou you may have a range of about 1.5~2 meters but I'll say it's at least practical. These apps also allow you to construct multiple screens each for one (or more) remote controlled devices. You do the loayout by drawing buttons and train them.
OmniRemote also got a IR enhancer hardware which can be attached to your Palm Pilot. Dunno it cost.
However, these apps usually only work with 32kHz remotes but not the 144kHz ones, you may want to test drive the software first.
Unless users stop using the root account or equivalent as their user account.
Why? Traditionally, PC platform allows users to change the system, applications settings at will, including installing and uninstalling masses of applications and gadgets. *IF* Linux/Un*x are to be their next desktop, then one day, I believe, the above criteria must be matched, or will be made to match, by the user.
You'll see the problem is if you are to allow the user such as freedom, then virii/worm infection are bound to be happened, even with decent security protection *available* on every Linux/Un*x boxes - If security gets in the way of letting people doing what they want to do, people are just going to turn it off for good.
One day, Linux desktop is everywhere, Mr. John Doe, being one of the billions happy Linux user, used kdesu to install a very popular game sent from his good friend Bob, called "Shoot ya boss!". Apparently, this game is just what it says but underneath, besides providing entertainment to our dear John, it will also go through all the files in John's Linux desktop for every email address it could find, then assuming John's identity, send to some of those emails containing a copy of this game with a sincere message, and the others a random copy of John's collection of files asking for "advice". As it happened, the game also is setuid root and starting sniffing John's (and probably now many other victims') network for anything interesting, and of course, a backOrfice is also installed for the sake of convinience...
Who dares to say this *won't* happen?
I'll say these miniature peltiers are to be used with high-temperature superconductors to cool the chips. It is a known problem to get the chips to dissipate heat thru the traditional construct. Now if they could add these miniature peltiers on top of the components, and if they could mask a layer of HT superconductor to all these peltier islands, then heat generated could be collected and transfered to any destination with ease.
May be one day, we'll see on the chip's pin out a pin to connect to a heat sink.
Now, I am really waiting for room-temperature superconductor to come.
If artwork could tempt pedophiles, and if such things known as fantasy can't be allowed and need a Law to gorven, why don't just simply forbidden children in public places, doesn't a pedophiles not have the imagination to think up those sexy things when s/he see the real thing instead? The point is, any grown adult should has the ability to distingush between fantasy and reality, and should be able to control oneself not to act out the fantasy wrongly. It is also the responsibility of a society that encourages free-will also encourages consideration, and care of others. Adult may be tempted, but s/he will not fail if there are supports from other selfs. Sometimes, wars cannot be fight alone, and many times, war is not necessary at all.
Yeah, may be I am a moron, but the fact that I have my reservation is about the trust to this "independent" party which is essentially formed by the big players.
Embrace and asimulate...
---
From: HAL
To: BigBoss, my dear partner
Re: Linux compatibility with our new S/361 hw
HALinux/361(R) 100% compatible, certified
Linux1 90% compatible, certified
Linux2 84% compatible, certified
...
LinuxN 50% compatible, certified.
---
Now, which one do you think your boss would choose?
Think!