Slashdot Mirror


User: Redglasses

Redglasses's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
7
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 7

  1. Catapults on Lego Vs. Meccano & Engineering Knowledge · · Score: 1

    Perhaps some of the popularity of LEGO over the erector set can be attributed to how well one can build a catapult in each. When I built a torsion catapult out of LEGO technic pieces (and some twine), I was quite successful. One of the axles did get twisted beyond repair, but that thing could throw a minifig 20 feet. On the other hand, when I tried to build a trebuchet from an erector set, it was only successful in bending some of the girders. That wasn't fun at all.

  2. Re:---Speed of Light--- on A Well-Chilled 750GHz Feasible Within 5 Years · · Score: 1

    There's a difference between a signal and a fluxon. The fluxon couldn't travel faster than light, but it's possible for a signal to do so, since it's just information. A macroscopic example can be given with a well-trained marching line. Say that there is a gap between the first third of the line and the rest. Someone gives an order, and the middle third moves forward -- all the people moving simultaneously, since they're well trained -- to close the gap, while the back third remains in place. The gap has just instantaneously moved 1/3 the length of the marching line, without any actual object having to move faster than the speed of light.

  3. Vorbis & DeCSS on Ogg Vorbis Update: Thomson Trouble · · Score: 1

    If this lawsuit actually goes through -- which is fairly likely -- Ogg Vorbis stands to fall into the same land where DeCSS roams. If enough dedicated people keep up-to-date mirrors of the source, development can go on even when the original team gets sued. This will probably cause a few forks before settling down with some new people, but the project will go on. I doubt that Thompson Multimedia has the sort of resources the MPAA has, and even that behemoth hasn't been able to stamp out DeCSS.

  4. If Metallica sues CMU... on Metallica Vs. Harvard · · Score: 1

    ...wouldn't that be impeding my education by either raising my tution or dropping the quality of education I receive for it? I could sue for that. 8,000 student class action!

  5. Re:Non-RIAA labels already suing Napster on Non-RIAA Record Companies? · · Score: 1

    If you care to look at the members list, TVT is also a member of RIAA. Unfortunately, many of my favorite bands are on Wax Trax! I wonder what criteria record companies use to label themselves indie or not. I suspect it just has more to do with the image they want to project than actual independance or listener opinion. So TVT calls itself indie as a policy ploy while being an RIAA ogre for corporate purposes.

  6. Experiences in APCS on Ideas for High School Computer Projects? · · Score: 1
    When I took APCS three years ago (the last year that the AP exam was in pascal, even though the class was taught in C++) the curriculum seemed to be about right for most of the students. The projects were challenging enough to keep them busy until the next project. Those of us who were better, however, would finish off the class projects quickly and move on to our own projects. We would expand the functionality of the AP classes (such as overloading the > i/o operators for the apvector class) or reimplement them to be more efficient, work on our personal webpages, write games, experiment with video drivers, and we started coding a mud. Because we weren't restricted to only using the computers for classwork, we found interesting and productive things to do while we waited for the rest of the class to finish. We also were enlisted by the teacher to help the other students when they had problems.

    Perhaps the best class project that we did was with the apstack class. After one stack-using project, the teacher had the class take a look at the source for the stack. It was deliberately inefficient. The next project was to reimplement a templated stack class using a linked list. The project was probably the most interesting that year, as it forced the students to take a look at what was underlying their programs and how they could create a reuseable module.

  7. What's the difference? on NYT On DeCSS Case · · Score: 1

    How is using DeCSS to decode a DVD and capture it to another format (say, Divx) different from saving the output from a DVD player to raw video and converting that to Divx? How is it different from capturing the image of the DVD and distributing that, so that others can burn it directly to new DVDs without having to bother to decrypt it? Of these three options, DeCSS is probably the least harmful to the movie industry. The losses to pirates who would not use another method are outweighed by the gains from Linux, BSD, Be, etc users buying DVDs that they can now view without dual-booting.