I just installed the latest update on my 12" Powerbook and wanted to see what exactly they'd done with the battery timer. I was really pissed when my battery life was halved (literally, I timed it), instead of just the indicator lying to me as Apple swore.
Right now, as I type this post, my battery is at 96% charge and the timer is widly fluctuating starting at 8:35, then 5:35, then 4:45, now 4:10, back to 3:42, and again at 3:59.
What I really liked about 10.2.6 was that the battery timer was really accurate for some reason. I have read many posts here and on other Macintosh websites that say the battery timer is never to be trusted, but I just couldn't believe them.
Choosing a computer depends on what kind of services your school provides.
My college (HMC) has deployed a great 802.11b wireless network in the dorms, academics (classrooms, labs, offices), and in most of the common areas. If a freshman asked me what kind of computer to bring to HMC, I'd say a laptop. You can escape your room without leaving your email.
As far as Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux, I guess if you have to ask yourself how comfortable you are with computers and what you will be expected to do with your computer. If you are going to be writing a lot of papers and turning in documents electronically, Windows will be critical to run Microsoft Word. Frankly, AbiWord and WINE may be alright alternatives but when the deadlines come a barkin' things need to just work.
However, if your college has a large Mac infrastructure (Reed, Dartmouth, etc) then a Mac laptop will probably be more appropriate. Here at Mudd they're making a switch over to Windows ActiveDirectory for application distribution, logging into the network, and file servers. Things will still work with the Mac but the IT dept. has other things on its mind right now.
If I had it to do all over again I would not buy an old PC desktop from an eBay auction and instead spend a few hundred more on an Apple iBook. The size, reliability, and features of a Mac laptop are very attractive and price competitive.
So you want to know if there is an infinite number of palindromic numbers? Probably.
There can't be more palindromic numbers than natural numbers since each palindromic number is a natural number. And since we measure infinities by putting sequences in correspondence with the natural numbers, the size of the set of palindromic numbers cannot exceed the size of the set of natural numbers. Consult W. Rudin's "Real Analysis" for a good proof of this.
If there is only a finite number of palindromic numbers than a computer could exhaustively search and enumerate all of them. Then again, how would we know that we've reached the end? They could be very spaced out. What we need is a mathematical proof.
However, number theory is a very hard nut to crack. The algebraic structure of numbers is quite elusive. Showing how many palindromic numbers there are one way or the other is probably going to be exceedingly difficult. If not because number theory is hard but because there is no practical interest in this subject.
There is a very nice account of one famous computer geek's battle with this number.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/threeyears/thr ee years.html
The account reminds me that computers are more for just word processing and surfing the web. We can explore interesting and amusing phenomenon with them. I wish I weren't so jaded.
Re:What was that scifi short story?
on
DRM Helmet
·
· Score: 1
You can find it in a book called "Welcome to the Monkey HOuse," a colletion of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut.
DWG is the file format used to store AutoCAD drawings. AutoCAD, arguably, is the most popular piece of drafting software for the PC. How does AutoCAD maintain it's sales of ever more complicated releases?
A proprietary file format. Since many architectural firms have large databases of AutoCAD drawings they need to use tools that will read their previous work. Sure, DWG has been reverse-engineered a couple times by other parties, but always with mixed results.
Thus firms are a stuck buying AutoCAD to access and modify their drawings.
There have been stabs at cross-application/platform drawing formats (DXF) but they are quite limited compared to DWG.
Actually, the situation reminds me a lot of MS-Word's DOC format.
A couple of my friends here at Harvey Mudd College created a development chain for BREW applications using GCC. The project description is here
They ended up patching GCC's ARM support a lot. The phones use a offset based memory layout, but GCC ARM outputs position independent code. By the end of the project they'd gotten a large number of pre-existing games to compile and load onto the phone.
Those lucky enough to have heard Knut's Video Game Music Revue on KSPC (www.kspc.org)
As the tag line goes, "The music of video games, from the 8-bit bleeps of yesteryear's classics to the high-tech music scores of today's popular games."
Knut plays a wide range of video game music and doesn't limit himself to just transfers from games. He does play re-mixes, though usually for a request.
Tune in Friday's at 10pm on the web or on your Claremont radio dial: 88.7
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday February 14, @2:45PM
Sr. Taco,
You have just been engaged. For God's sake, man, why are you not taking the rest of the day off to reflect upon this life-altering decision that has been wrought?
A lot of the times, the software can't be released because of complex licensing arrangements. For instance, my advisor's PhD thesis used a proprietary GUI library for Scheme. He can release his code, along with the code for the Scheme runtime library, but you can't run it because he can't release the GUI library.
Software isn't mathematical proof. This is my biggest problem with software. It's so hard to guarantee certain behavior. However, with recent advances in proof carrying code [Appel, et al], we can look forward to a day when black box software libraries come with guarantees that we can check against.
Sure, that's the status quo when it comes to publishing articles. However, the scientist still retains ownership of the results of the work. If the scientist wanted to, he could write another paper, or present the results in a different form elsewhere.
Computer software research isn't science research. There is no peer review, people do not publish in journals, there aren't proceedings of discussions on word processors and the like.
Computer software research is engineering. In engineering a product is built for a practical purpose and usually funded by someone with an interest in that practical purpose.
The public funds both engineering and science research because of a commitment to enhancing technology and underestanding.
Computer code, if produced for science research (like a new prime factoring algorithm, or a spanning tree algorithm for communication networks) should be published in a journal for peer review and thus in the public but copyrighted by the author.
Computer code, if produced for a product that is being used for a practical purpose and not to be published for peer review, should not be released to the public without the consent of the author and the funders.
What I object to is Universities blindly forbidding researchers to release any computer code without any thought. Just because people are making money of computer software engineering, doesn't mean that every piece of computer code is profitable.
It's got some video clips of the show, stills from the set, and a little background on the characters.
It looks like the TV show will be borrowing heavily from the cartoon show. I hope that there is some new material besides the cartoon gags. I wouldn't mind seeing some new story lines.
Like I said, my thoughts were based on my own experiences. I'm glad to have a contrasting opinion. Thank you.
I think it's important to have friends, to make time away from the computer, and to enjoy other forms of entertainment besides the computer and the TV.
Frankly, I'm not blaming this on gaming. I'm just stating what I've observed, the relationships that exist between poor communication skills and gaming, and a simple justification for each observation.
You're insight that parents are the key to successful childhood development shows that you are wiser than your age (14?). My mother is a 3rd grade teacher in the ghetto in California. I grew-up in similarly under-privledged areas. The children that succeed, no matter their habits, are the ones whose parents care for them and take an active part in their development. My mother sees this first hand in her classroom. The disciplinary cases have parents that are hardly present in their child's education. The model children have parents that come to her and ask for summer activity ideas, volunteer in the classroom, or simply attend semi-annual parent teacher conferences.
We've got a long way to go, and I'll be either senile or in the grave when the time comes.
Either way, it wont matter to me.
But how will such colloquialisms effect the advancement of our soceity and technology?
Let's face it, the Internet is developing Eubonics. How many speeches, patent applications, journal articles, and other forms of communication have you read that have been written in Eubonics?
I'm not going to draw any conclusions about this study without thinking more.
However, it has been my own anecdotal evidence that computer game playing, while improving hand-eye coordination and strategic thinking, does severly limit normal social interaction.
Modern computer games train gamers to work within the systems of chat rooms, message boards, and other online forms of communication. When the gamer is in a classical social situation (dinner party, traditional work meeting, academic classroom, etc), the result that I have noticed is that the gamer is:
1) Less social. That is, less likely to interact with other people because, for lack of a better phrase, the other people "just don't understand."
2) Think less critically about the situation. They become uninterested in anything that doesn't relate to current games or to the prospect of new games.
3) Have poor verbal skills. Nearly all computer games operate without a verbal component. The verbal skills of the gamer atrophies.
I am concerned that we are developing a culture, that is growing, of people who are less than ready to live up to their full potential.
This is just my concern. This is just based on anecdotal evidence. I accept the fact I may be totally off base.
All I know is that they better not leave their cars parked on the street over night. Claremont has very disgruntled police officers that like to ticket cars in the dark of the night.
Slashdot Mirror
Planetfall by Infocom?
I just installed the latest update on my 12" Powerbook and wanted to see what exactly they'd done with the battery timer. I was really pissed when my battery life was halved (literally, I timed it), instead of just the indicator lying to me as Apple swore.
Right now, as I type this post, my battery is at 96% charge and the timer is widly fluctuating starting at 8:35, then 5:35, then 4:45, now 4:10, back to 3:42, and again at 3:59.
What I really liked about 10.2.6 was that the battery timer was really accurate for some reason. I have read many posts here and on other Macintosh websites that say the battery timer is never to be trusted, but I just couldn't believe them.
Back to 4:02.
Choosing a computer depends on what kind of services your school provides.
My college (HMC) has deployed a great 802.11b wireless network in the dorms, academics (classrooms, labs, offices), and in most of the common areas. If a freshman asked me what kind of computer to bring to HMC, I'd say a laptop. You can escape your room without leaving your email.
As far as Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux, I guess if you have to ask yourself how comfortable you are with computers and what you will be expected to do with your computer. If you are going to be writing a lot of papers and turning in documents electronically, Windows will be critical to run Microsoft Word. Frankly, AbiWord and WINE may be alright alternatives but when the deadlines come a barkin' things need to just work.
However, if your college has a large Mac infrastructure (Reed, Dartmouth, etc) then a Mac laptop will probably be more appropriate. Here at Mudd they're making a switch over to Windows ActiveDirectory for application distribution, logging into the network, and file servers. Things will still work with the Mac but the IT dept. has other things on its mind right now.
If I had it to do all over again I would not buy an old PC desktop from an eBay auction and instead spend a few hundred more on an Apple iBook. The size, reliability, and features of a Mac laptop are very attractive and price competitive.
But I think that the idea is that you have to reverse and add the digits of the number at least once before it is a palindrome.
So we could run into a problem if there is a palindromic number that when multiplied by 2 is no longer a palindrome. Any thoughts?
So you want to know if there is an infinite number of palindromic numbers? Probably.
There can't be more palindromic numbers than natural numbers since each palindromic number is a natural number. And since we measure infinities by putting sequences in correspondence with the natural numbers, the size of the set of palindromic numbers cannot exceed the size of the set of natural numbers. Consult W. Rudin's "Real Analysis" for a good proof of this.
If there is only a finite number of palindromic numbers than a computer could exhaustively search and enumerate all of them. Then again, how would we know that we've reached the end? They could be very spaced out. What we need is a mathematical proof.
However, number theory is a very hard nut to crack. The algebraic structure of numbers is quite elusive. Showing how many palindromic numbers there are one way or the other is probably going to be exceedingly difficult. If not because number theory is hard but because there is no practical interest in this subject.
There is a very nice account of one famous
r ee years.html
computer geek's battle with this number.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/threeyears/th
The account reminds me that computers are more
for just word processing and surfing the web. We
can explore interesting and amusing phenomenon
with them. I wish I weren't so jaded.
You can find it in a book called "Welcome to the Monkey HOuse," a colletion of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut.
Just in case the webpage gets pulled.
Best Male Performance Video
Will Smith
Ali
Best Female Performance Video
Nicole Kidman
Moulin Rouge!
Best On-Screen Team Video
The Fast and the Furious
Vin Diesel, Paul Walker
Best Villain Video
Denzel Washington
Training Day
Best Comedic Performance Video
Reese Witherspoon
Legally Blonde
Best Musical Sequence Video
Moulin Rouge!
Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman
Best Kiss Video
American Pie 2
Jason Biggs and Seann William Scott
Best Action Sequence Video
Pearl Harbor
The Attack Scene
Best Fight Video
Rush Hour 2
Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan versus The Hong Kong Gang
Best Breakthrough Male Video
Orlando Bloom
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Best Breakthrough Female Video
Mandy Moore
A Walk to Remember
Best Movie Video
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
DWG is the file format used to store AutoCAD drawings. AutoCAD, arguably, is the most popular piece of drafting software for the PC. How does AutoCAD maintain it's sales of ever more complicated releases?
A proprietary file format. Since many architectural firms have large databases of AutoCAD drawings they need to use tools that will read their previous work. Sure, DWG has been reverse-engineered a couple times by other parties, but always with mixed results.
Thus firms are a stuck buying AutoCAD to access and modify their drawings.
There have been stabs at cross-application/platform drawing formats (DXF) but they are quite limited compared to DWG.
Actually, the situation reminds me a lot of MS-Word's DOC format.
A couple of my friends here at Harvey Mudd College created a development chain for BREW applications using GCC. The project description is here
They ended up patching GCC's ARM support a lot. The phones use a offset based memory layout, but GCC ARM outputs position independent code. By the end of the project they'd gotten a large number of pre-existing games to compile and load onto the phone.
Look for these tools soon.
Those lucky enough to have heard Knut's Video Game Music Revue on KSPC (www.kspc.org)
As the tag line goes, "The music of video games, from the 8-bit bleeps of yesteryear's classics to the high-tech music scores of today's popular games."
Knut plays a wide range of video game music and doesn't limit himself to just transfers from games. He does play re-mixes, though usually for a request.
Tune in Friday's at 10pm on the web or on your Claremont radio dial: 88.7
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday February 14, @2:45PM
Sr. Taco,
You have just been engaged. For God's sake, man, why are you not taking the rest of the day off to reflect upon this life-altering decision that has been wrought?
Won't translucent structures lead to an increase rate of smack death amongst bird populations?
A lot of the times, the software can't be released because of complex licensing arrangements. For instance, my advisor's PhD thesis used a proprietary GUI library for Scheme. He can release his code, along with the code for the Scheme runtime library, but you can't run it because he can't release the GUI library.
Software isn't mathematical proof. This is my biggest problem with software. It's so hard to guarantee certain behavior. However, with recent advances in proof carrying code [Appel, et al], we can look forward to a day when black box software libraries come with guarantees that we can check against.
Sure, that's the status quo when it comes to publishing articles. However, the scientist still retains ownership of the results of the work. If the scientist wanted to, he could write another paper, or present the results in a different form elsewhere.
Actually, I read them as often as possible. And in them, software code is rarely published but design decisions are discussed and analyzed.
Computer software research isn't science research. There is no peer review, people do not publish in journals, there aren't proceedings of discussions on word processors and the like.
Computer software research is engineering. In engineering a product is built for a practical purpose and usually funded by someone with an interest in that practical purpose.
The public funds both engineering and science research because of a commitment to enhancing technology and underestanding.
Computer code, if produced for science research (like a new prime factoring algorithm, or a spanning tree algorithm for communication networks) should be published in a journal for peer review and thus in the public but copyrighted by the author.
Computer code, if produced for a product that is being used for a practical purpose and not to be published for peer review, should not be released to the public without the consent of the author and the funders.
What I object to is Universities blindly forbidding researchers to release any computer code without any thought. Just because people are making money of computer software engineering, doesn't mean that every piece of computer code is profitable.
If it was hard to write it should be hard to understand.
The official TV Show website is here.
It's got some video clips of the show, stills from the set, and a little background on the characters.
It looks like the TV show will be borrowing heavily from the cartoon show. I hope that there is some new material besides the cartoon gags. I wouldn't mind seeing some new story lines.
Those pesky Russians, they probably forgot to use the scroll bar to see the rest of their query's results.
Very good point.
It's interesting to ask if chat rooms are making us a lesser society or if chat rooms are bringing together otherwise socially disenfranchsied people.
Perhaps a little of both, but the latter makes me feel better about the technolgoy.
Like I said, my thoughts were based on my own experiences. I'm glad to have a contrasting opinion. Thank you.
I think it's important to have friends, to make time away from the computer, and to enjoy other forms of entertainment besides the computer and the TV.
Frankly, I'm not blaming this on gaming. I'm just stating what I've observed, the relationships that exist between poor communication skills and gaming, and a simple justification for each observation.
You're insight that parents are the key to successful childhood development shows that you are wiser than your age (14?). My mother is a 3rd grade teacher in the ghetto in California. I grew-up in similarly under-privledged areas. The children that succeed, no matter their habits, are the ones whose parents care for them and take an active part in their development. My mother sees this first hand in her classroom. The disciplinary cases have parents that are hardly present in their child's education. The model children have parents that come to her and ask for summer activity ideas, volunteer in the classroom, or simply attend semi-annual parent teacher conferences.
We've got a long way to go, and I'll be either senile or in the grave when the time comes.
Either way, it wont matter to me.
But how will such colloquialisms effect the advancement of our soceity and technology?
Let's face it, the Internet is developing Eubonics. How many speeches, patent applications, journal articles, and other forms of communication have you read that have been written in Eubonics?
I'm not going to draw any conclusions about this study without thinking more.
However, it has been my own anecdotal evidence that computer game playing, while improving hand-eye coordination and strategic thinking, does severly limit normal social interaction.
Modern computer games train gamers to work within the systems of chat rooms, message boards, and other online forms of communication. When the gamer is in a classical social situation (dinner party, traditional work meeting, academic classroom, etc), the result that I have noticed is that the gamer is:
1) Less social. That is, less likely to interact with other people because, for lack of a better phrase, the other people "just don't understand."
2) Think less critically about the situation. They become uninterested in anything that doesn't relate to current games or to the prospect of new games.
3) Have poor verbal skills. Nearly all computer games operate without a verbal component. The verbal skills of the gamer atrophies.
I am concerned that we are developing a culture, that is growing, of people who are less than ready to live up to their full potential.
This is just my concern. This is just based on anecdotal evidence. I accept the fact I may be totally off base.
All I know is that they better not leave their cars parked on the street over night. Claremont has very disgruntled police officers that like to ticket cars in the dark of the night.