I'm sorry, but if you're going to put up a web page in which you call
all the foremost theoretical physicsts in the world frauds, then you'd
better have more evidence than some undergraduate-level
pseudo-calculus and verbal smoke screens.
The t-axis or time-axis velocity component is 1, a dimensionless
number. Now there are relativists who will insist that it is perfectly
acceptable to express velocity in time with a dimensionless number but
the rest of us with our head on our shoulders, know that it is not
true. We know that a dimensionless number such as 1 has absolutely no
meaning in as far as expressing velocity.
Not true. Normalized velocities are perfectly reasonable things to
express. Mach 1.25 is a perfectly well-defined speed that does not
violate any laws of physics, and what do you know--it's a
dimensionless number.
I'm sorry, but this page is really quite embarassing for the author's
parents and any physics teacher's they've ever had. This sort of
reminds me of people that read things like A Brief History of
Time, a perfectly excellent book, and then try to tell me that the
physics is really great and it would be so much better unencumbered by
the mathematics.
I don't think real time travel, a-la Dr. Who is physically possible.
But the "arguments" on this web page don't really make sense, much less
prove all those physics wrong.
He's got a good rep in the PS2 LInux community.
Really? Cool! I didn't know that.
The only direct experience I had with the PlayStation 2 Linux community was a
bug report that I filed and was subsequently completely ignored. This bug was in a low-level memory allocation routine that I needed to work right for my matrix code and it was (as far as I could tell) corrupting the memory page tables on the machine.
CronoCloud: thanks for the ping--
drop me a note and introduce yourself.
What exactly someone could find "difficult" about the PS2 I can't imagine other than it isn't the same as the API they are used to.
What was difficult about it was I was trying to write a scientific matrix multiplier using VU1. I made a 28x28 multiplier with a core 4x4 multipier in VU1. What took all the time was coordinating moving the parameter matrices into the VU's data memory at the same time that the VU itself was crunching through the last parameters brought in.
It was also amusing because there were holes in the documentation that I had to look up online. For instance, the notation in the assembly language to create a statement that would end micro-mode execution wasn't documented at all as far as I could find; I had to dig into one of the examples I found on-line to figure that out. It worked much better after that.:-)
I've written a huge amount of PS2 code for various games sitting on the shelves right now
Which is why you straightforwardly posted as Anonymous Coward and didn't tell us your name or any one project you've worked on, while I listed both my employer and the web site for my project.
If you have real information to offer, please speak up and actually tell us who you are. If your "expertise" consists of playing lots of PS2 games, then please stay out of it.
I don't know about game programmer's experiences with the PlayStation 2 console, but I spent
some time programming the PS2 under the Linux kit. It was pretty gruesome; lots of writing words to registers with certain bits set to 1 to activate the vector units and so on. Lots of Vector Unit assembly.
What I've heard is that they have a development environment for the Cell processor (now
released) that has at least a working compiler. If that's true, then they've already gone beyond what was available for the PlayStation 2, at least at the level of programming the Linux kit.
For the same reason as devices still cropping up (GPS receivers, for example) that use an extremely old tech, like RS-232.
It's because you know it works, without having to worry about drivers or anything. You can buy VHS tapes anywhere, and you know they'll work in your VCR, and that you can play them back in any other VCR.
It's more a matter of not tolerating the tyrants that had taken over those countries.
Our administration tolerated Saddam Hussein just fine until sometime in 2002, when all of a sudden the White House started issuing press releases about Iraq being the next enemy. The stated motivation for invading Iraq was that they had WMDs, were capable of using them against us or our allies, and we needed to make a pre-emptive strike against them before it was too late.
or with the first glimmers of municipal democracy in Egypt and even Saudi Arabia for whether acting was a good thing to do.
Lots of things have happened as a result of our invading Iraq. Many of them have been good, first and foremost being the Iraqi people are, I believe, much better off.
That doesn't change for a second that we had no moral authority to invade. Invading someone because they might invade you someday is the sort of thing that Americans used to complain about communists doing. Bush said "Iraq is the enemy" and congress gave him blanket authority to do whatever he wanted to deal with them. Even people who would have normally opposed such broad, unspecified legislation voted for the measure out of loyalty or in fear of being viewed as "supporting terrorism".
And in our own country, we now have (among other really horrible legislation) the Patriot Act. This act, among other things, suspends civil liberties in any investigation that is declared to be related to terrorism--by the same agency that is requesting the suspension. That boils down to law enforcement agencies being able to wiretap or pull anyone's financial records without the normal process of presenting evidence for a warrant. How long until one political party is trying to use this to spy on the other one (I think it's equally likely in either direction)?
No, people who act like animals routinely do get treated like them. People who treat children like sex toys are beneath contempt, and fixing something to them for tracking doesn't even put a dent in what they deserve.
I don't suppose you voiced this same concern about Martha Stewart's tracking bracelet, did you? Or is she worse than a child molester, somehow?
I didn't say anything about what they deserved. I was merely stating how I thought the court system would react.
Just for the record, I think that sex offenders are among the worse kind of human beings around. I also think that
politicians
who use fear of terrorist attacks to push their agendas of invading countries they don't like and secret laws that suspend basic civil liberties to be even worse.
This is political grandstanding. An example of making a point of "doing something" that looks good on camera and in the newspapers, but doesn't actually accomplish anything. It's technically infesable and actually attaching a tracking device to a person, like a tagged animal, would involve so much legal fighting that it would probably end up in the US Supreme court.
The proposed ammendment to the US Constitution was a similar strategy; the White House knew it didn't stand a chance, but it put the issue in the minds of voters and polarized people around the issue.
Personally, I think most of the hate directed at the previous two, Jar-Jar comments aside, was a media invention. Things get repeated enough and people start to believe it.
True in general, but in this case, it's because those films kind of stank.
I'll list a few specifics
The podrace sequence that took up the middle half of the first movie. That should have been about 15 minutes.
Amidahla, who in Ep 1 was "queen", talking in Ep 2 about how wonderful democracy is
The "evil trade empire" made up of aliens with pronounced asian accents
The Jedi, who are supposed to be very very smart, attacking into what is completely obviously a trap
The dialog between Annakin and Amidalhla that left me wanting to puke.
I'm sorry, the Geoge Lucas of the 70's knew about pacing. Episodes IV, V, and VI were very fast and snappy. Episodes I and II just dragged terribly. I'm hoping that III picks up the pace a bit.
I would say it's still worth pinging him about it, particularly if the daddypants account is being ignored. My impression of Jeff is that although he's wierd in innumerable ways, he cares a lot about what slashdot is and what it stands for, and would be very annoyed about an editor who ignored a message about a duplicate post and posted it anyway.
Last time I checked, the sun was embedded in a vaccum as well and no one seemed to question the ability to assign a 'conventional' temperature to it.
The sun also has its own atmosphere. The temperature of that atmosphere (5000-ish degrees F) is what gives the sun its color.
In any case, my beef isn't with the scienists. They did something very useful and cool, which I expect will be very useful in the very near future. My beef is with the Times and other papers like it, which post headlines of "scientists discover fusion" without any really clear idea of what any of those words really mean.
As a matter of fact, I'm not working in "science". I finished my Ph.D., but I couldn't stand the idea of spending my first 7 years as a faculty person writing papers, serving on committees, and scrambling like mad to get tenure. So I got a
job where I can real work done on a daily basis.
First of all, humans "discovered" fusion in 1953 with the first
fusion bomb, or "hydrogen" bomb. What this speaks of is
controlled fusion.
Secondly, this isn't fusion on even a battery scale; this is a few
thousand atoms per second or so. So unfortunately, it's not a matter
of scaling up to produce a reactor. The amount of energy being put
into the system dwarfs by thousands of times the energy from fusion
being put out.
Third, this isn't even the discovery of table-top laboratory scale
fusion. As an undergraduate, I worked on a
muon catalyzed fusion
experiment at
TRIUMF in Vancouver. By the
time I was working on the experiment in 1994, the fusion reaction in
the experiment was so well understood that it was being used to
analyze other properties of solidified Hydrogen.
And I'm afraid it's a little bit of a dodge to say it's "at room
temperature". The article doesn't say this, but presumably this takes
place in a vaccum, where temperature is basically undefined in any
conventional sense.
So a very nifty result, but not a discovery, I'm afraid. It will very
likely be useful to study the fusion process, or perhaps other things
as well.
Digital TV has 18 different formats (resolutions), 6 of which are considered "HD". A couple of them are equivalent to NTSC resolution; 640x480 pixels. So NTSC stuff would presumably be broadcast in the standard appropriate digital format, taking up less bandwidth than one of the HD formats.
The following conversation with my yet-as-unborn child:
- Dad, why can't we watch that movie that you liked so much as a kid? - Sally, that's because it was content protected with a 4000-bit key. But the company that served the keys went out of business, so that movie is lost forever. Since watching this movie would be against federal law, it's illegal to ever see it.
Actually, fiberglass is quite strong. If you lay fiberglass over styrafoam, you get "composite" material, which is the construction method for pretty much everything Burt Rutan builds. (Voyager, White Knight, SpaceShip One, and the Beech Starships).
To say nothing of the various kit plan designs that are composites.
I looked at the volunteer page. They want people to deal with crowd
control, ticketing, hospitality, etc. Where's the check box for
"I'd like to ride into space"!?!
Uh, aside from the minor fact that the XL1 records 720x480 SDTV resolution while the Sony records 1920x1080 HDTV resolution!
Right--I understand the difference in resolutions. My point was that the people in the market for the new camera are the people who are used to looking at a $2500 camera as a reasonable one, not the people who go to Wal-Mart and get something that's $300. Thus, the price is in the same ball-park as similarly targeted products, and so $3700, while more than I want to spend in a shopping trip, is quite reasonable.
Suspected terrorists will have Rob's in-box forwarded to them until
they turn themselves in for questioning. Even if people could stand
the flood of messages, their ISPs would turn them in just to get them
off the system.
Hmm...the people with the 10 highest karma scores (I know the numbers are
hidden, but they're still available internally) get cabinet
positions.
It will be competing in the super-high-end consumer market through the professional market. It's similar to the
Canon XL1 series, which go for similar prices, with similar characteristics (high end digital video, everything manual, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
m = s / x
m is the mach number
s is the speed of whatever through the air
x is the speed of sound under those conditions.
s has dimensions of speed (obviously) which are distance over time
x also has the dimensions of speed.
s divided by x, where s and x are the same dimensionality (and units, usually) make m (mach number) a dimensionless number.
I'm sorry, but if you're going to put up a web page in which you call all the foremost theoretical physicsts in the world frauds, then you'd better have more evidence than some undergraduate-level pseudo-calculus and verbal smoke screens.
The t-axis or time-axis velocity component is 1, a dimensionless number. Now there are relativists who will insist that it is perfectly acceptable to express velocity in time with a dimensionless number but the rest of us with our head on our shoulders, know that it is not true. We know that a dimensionless number such as 1 has absolutely no meaning in as far as expressing velocity.
Not true. Normalized velocities are perfectly reasonable things to express. Mach 1.25 is a perfectly well-defined speed that does not violate any laws of physics, and what do you know--it's a dimensionless number.
I'm sorry, but this page is really quite embarassing for the author's parents and any physics teacher's they've ever had. This sort of reminds me of people that read things like A Brief History of Time, a perfectly excellent book, and then try to tell me that the physics is really great and it would be so much better unencumbered by the mathematics.
I don't think real time travel, a-la Dr. Who is physically possible. But the "arguments" on this web page don't really make sense, much less prove all those physics wrong.
Craig Steffen
Ph.D. Physics, Indiana Unversity, 2001
He's got a good rep in the PS2 LInux community.
Really? Cool! I didn't know that.
The only direct experience I had with the PlayStation 2 Linux community was a bug report that I filed and was subsequently completely ignored. This bug was in a low-level memory allocation routine that I needed to work right for my matrix code and it was (as far as I could tell) corrupting the memory page tables on the machine.
CronoCloud: thanks for the ping-- drop me a note and introduce yourself.
What was difficult about it was I was trying to write a scientific matrix multiplier using VU1. I made a 28x28 multiplier with a core 4x4 multipier in VU1. What took all the time was coordinating moving the parameter matrices into the VU's data memory at the same time that the VU itself was crunching through the last parameters brought in.
It was also amusing because there were holes in the documentation that I had to look up online. For instance, the notation in the assembly language to create a statement that would end micro-mode execution wasn't documented at all as far as I could find; I had to dig into one of the examples I found on-line to figure that out. It worked much better after that. :-)
I've written a huge amount of PS2 code for various games sitting on the shelves right now
Which is why you straightforwardly posted as Anonymous Coward and didn't tell us your name or any one project you've worked on, while I listed both my employer and the web site for my project.
If you have real information to offer, please speak up and actually tell us who you are. If your "expertise" consists of playing lots of PS2 games, then please stay out of it.
What I've heard is that they have a development environment for the Cell processor (now released) that has at least a working compiler. If that's true, then they've already gone beyond what was available for the PlayStation 2, at least at the level of programming the Linux kit.
Craig Steffen
It's because you know it works, without having to worry about drivers or anything. You can buy VHS tapes anywhere, and you know they'll work in your VCR, and that you can play them back in any other VCR.
That doesn't change for a second that we had no moral authority to invade. Invading someone because they might invade you someday is the sort of thing that Americans used to complain about communists doing. Bush said "Iraq is the enemy" and congress gave him blanket authority to do whatever he wanted to deal with them. Even people who would have normally opposed such broad, unspecified legislation voted for the measure out of loyalty or in fear of being viewed as "supporting terrorism".
And in our own country, we now have (among other really horrible legislation) the Patriot Act. This act, among other things, suspends civil liberties in any investigation that is declared to be related to terrorism--by the same agency that is requesting the suspension. That boils down to law enforcement agencies being able to wiretap or pull anyone's financial records without the normal process of presenting evidence for a warrant. How long until one political party is trying to use this to spy on the other one (I think it's equally likely in either direction)?
I didn't say anything about what they deserved. I was merely stating how I thought the court system would react.
Just for the record, I think that sex offenders are among the worse kind of human beings around. I also think that politicians who use fear of terrorist attacks to push their agendas of invading countries they don't like and secret laws that suspend basic civil liberties to be even worse.
The proposed ammendment to the US Constitution was a similar strategy; the White House knew it didn't stand a chance, but it put the issue in the minds of voters and polarized people around the issue.
True in general, but in this case, it's because those films kind of stank.
I'll list a few specifics
I'm sorry, the Geoge Lucas of the 70's knew about pacing. Episodes IV, V, and VI were very fast and snappy. Episodes I and II just dragged terribly. I'm hoping that III picks up the pace a bit.
I would say it's still worth pinging him about it, particularly if the daddypants account is being ignored. My impression of Jeff is that although he's wierd in innumerable ways, he cares a lot about what slashdot is and what it stands for, and would be very annoyed about an editor who ignored a message about a duplicate post and posted it anyway.
In any case, my beef isn't with the scienists. They did something very useful and cool, which I expect will be very useful in the very near future. My beef is with the Times and other papers like it, which post headlines of "scientists discover fusion" without any really clear idea of what any of those words really mean.
As a matter of fact, I'm not working in "science". I finished my Ph.D., but I couldn't stand the idea of spending my first 7 years as a faculty person writing papers, serving on committees, and scrambling like mad to get tenure. So I got a job where I can real work done on a daily basis.
First of all, humans "discovered" fusion in 1953 with the first fusion bomb, or "hydrogen" bomb. What this speaks of is controlled fusion.
Secondly, this isn't fusion on even a battery scale; this is a few thousand atoms per second or so. So unfortunately, it's not a matter of scaling up to produce a reactor. The amount of energy being put into the system dwarfs by thousands of times the energy from fusion being put out.
Third, this isn't even the discovery of table-top laboratory scale fusion. As an undergraduate, I worked on a muon catalyzed fusion experiment at TRIUMF in Vancouver. By the time I was working on the experiment in 1994, the fusion reaction in the experiment was so well understood that it was being used to analyze other properties of solidified Hydrogen.
And I'm afraid it's a little bit of a dodge to say it's "at room temperature". The article doesn't say this, but presumably this takes place in a vaccum, where temperature is basically undefined in any conventional sense.
So a very nifty result, but not a discovery, I'm afraid. It will very likely be useful to study the fusion process, or perhaps other things as well.
Digital TV has 18 different formats (resolutions), 6 of which are considered "HD". A couple of them are equivalent to NTSC resolution; 640x480 pixels. So NTSC stuff would presumably be broadcast in the standard appropriate digital format, taking up less bandwidth than one of the HD formats.
er...no...how about a Beowulf cluster of...
er...no...how about the world's best Myth-TV setup? Yeah, that'd be good!
No. I will never accept it in any form.
The following conversation with my yet-as-unborn child:
- Dad, why can't we watch that movie that you liked so much as a kid?
- Sally, that's because it was content protected with a 4000-bit key. But the company that served the keys went out of business, so that movie is lost forever. Since watching this movie would be against federal law, it's illegal to ever see it.
To say nothing of the various kit plan designs that are composites.
I looked at the volunteer page. They want people to deal with crowd control, ticketing, hospitality, etc. Where's the check box for "I'd like to ride into space"!?!
Right--I understand the difference in resolutions. My point was that the people in the market for the new camera are the people who are used to looking at a $2500 camera as a reasonable one, not the people who go to Wal-Mart and get something that's $300. Thus, the price is in the same ball-park as similarly targeted products, and so $3700, while more than I want to spend in a shopping trip, is quite reasonable.
Rob's platform:
It will be competing in the super-high-end consumer market through the professional market. It's similar to the Canon XL1 series, which go for similar prices, with similar characteristics (high end digital video, everything manual, etc.).
Billy My dog ate...uh...the Internet! So I can't access my homework.
teacher Really? It must have been a very large dog, then.
It looks to be a fairly new place. They have an electronic newsletter, but it only goes back to the middle of last year.
I'm going to the UK in August, and it's now definitely on my list of places to go!
For those like me who are geographically challenged, Bath is in the United Kingdom, a couple of hours west of London.