The ideal keyboard I've found came with my SGI. The clickyness is just perfect, it's easy to clean, there are no windows keys (it's very difficult to find keyboard now without those evil things), and all the letters are interchangable (so after remapping them to dvorak, the topology of the keys isn't all messed up).
This keyboard is easy to clean, and the labels can't just scratch off like with alot of newer keyboards. I intend this keyboard to last forever.
I actually got 533.74 kB/s even from the main server. Perhaps everyone avoids the main server right after a release because they know it will be slow:)
I use linux on my main system, Irix on a couple others, and OpenBSD at home. I personally don't really enjoy Windows or MacOS since I've gotten good at the command line. My favorite is OpenBSD, but the more I look at the source the more I don't like it.
If a pipe-like solution were used, the audio data would effectivly have to travel N times. Now if the nodes were set up serially, each with two network cards, daisy chaining along, this may work nicely. Each node would have to specialize in a particular effect, some with dual CPU's if thier effect parelizes well, and with CPU speeds chosen such that each effect takes the same amount of time.
The system would be like lining up a bunch of colored glass plates (filters), and shining light (audio data) though them and seeing what comes out. It would be rather interesting to play with, but also a lot of work.
I recently bought a new SCSI card, and it only cost $75 (AHA-2940W). I also got a couple 4GB 10,000 RPM SCSI-3 hard drives for a little over $100 a piece. The speed increase is enormous over IDE. I use my old IDE drives for my mp3 collection, and can't stand how my whole system slows down when I move things around.
...what is the framerate of good old real existence?
This would probably be limited by quantum physics. I know that there are only a finite number of positions and velocities allowed in a given range (i.e., it's physically impossible to travel at exactly 55 mph). I'm not sure if time is also quantisized, but I imagine it is.
To get some idea, let's say we're looking at photons of light in the visable range at about 500nm. This corresponds to about 6E14 Hz, or rather, 600 trillion `frames' per second. To get much better, I suppose you would have to develop eyes that can see gamma rays or something like that.
So if the hottest video card out there (some time from now) claims it can do quake at more than like 10^15 fps, don't bother buying it.
but TeX is even more inflexible in allowing the user to determine what his screen should look like.
Try setting "\hsize=6.5in \vsize=9.0in" to fit a standard 1 inch margin paper size. Better yet, "\hsize=$windowwidth \vsize=$something_really_big", and you would get more of a webborwser like rendering (and optimisation would be easier because TeX wouldn't have to worry about page breaks).
Actually, I wouldn't run it even then. I'm running linux for a Reason. I consiously threw out hope for support for bells and whistles when I installed it.
My current instance of netscape has been running crash-free for about a week now. I only exit every so often when I need every MB of RAM for calculations. If a webpage is written correctly, netscape works just fine. Most java and javascript is poorly written, and can easily crash the browser. Since I don't like bells and whistles, I have both disabled. Now if I can just find a way to disable blinking text, animated gifs, and the <font> tag I'll be happy.
Re:SICK OF IT! Giving up moderator points to say i
on
BSD to Leapfrog Linux?
·
· Score: 1
I would like to add IRIX to your list of bad OS's. I've been dealing with it quite a bit lately (I even own an SGI), and have been extrememly disapointed in its security among other things. Every month or so SGI sends out an update telling everyone to disable a particular service or chmod a setuid root program. The easiest thing to do is just blank out the inetd.conf file and install ssh. In a multiuser system, keeping root secure is basically futile and you just need to trust your users (or have a log server).
With that said, I also have a user account on some SGI supercomputers. They have a good sysadmin, and so are kept in good working condition. So it is possible to make Irix into a good OS, it just takes a bit of work. Plus, I'm afraid linux would likey croak on systems that big and complex. Irix has its place, even if it is a pain to work with.
word format isn't that bad; whenever somebody emails me a word file, I just go throw the thing through strings and I'm looking at good 'ol plain text. However, it is nice to get a formatted printout of something worth printing. I prefer postscript for this though (it's just an lp foo.ps away from paper).
I'm taking a course in simulations (the only computer science course I've ever had), and we are free to choose any language we want for our code. I've been doing most of my stuff in fortran+gl, but think it would be rather ammusing to turn in code in something unexpected like perl or a completely random language like prolog.
we can't distinguish more than 16.77 millions colors, etc
Actually, Good film effects are done at 64bit color. Yes, that's about 1.8*10^19 colors, or rather 16m colors per channel (taking alpha to be a `color'). If you have a small gradation on a screen big like the ones in the theaters, you can quite easily see the difference between consecutive colors. Take a look at this image (note that netscape doesn't seem to display it right) and tell me if you can spot where 152 grey turns into 153 grey. I can tell. There is actually a seperate codebase of the gimp written for 64bit images (the `hollywood' edition). Now I want to know when I can get a video card that supports 64bit color:) (actually, my SGI supports 48bit which is good enough).
Furthermore, if we can't see faster than 60 fps, why are the gamers always talking about how their new video card can do 120 fps and such? I almost never watch TV, but whenever I see those screens, I am completely dumbstruck by how terrible the quality is. The resolution is awfully small, and colors are so bad I would prefer a b/w TV (I once heard that TV's output less than 50 colors at a time, although I'm not sure if it's true). As a person who is used to a crisp 1600x1200 (though I can still see the pixels) high-color display in front of me, I don't think I would be able to stomach watching the pixelated, grainy, star wars movie when it comes out.
I suppose having good vision has its disadvantages at times...
However, you, of course, don't have to read the whole thing from page to page. This is a sweet link to have bookmarked when some jerk on irc claims he is quoting "Matteus 5:1" or whatever.
If reading normal books on line if tough for you, this one should give you a head ache in about 30 seconds (just to figure out what the letters are in a given word is a chore). Note as well that it's in latin, and the IRC jerk will probabily claim that you don't know Latin well enough to translate it. At any rate, most of the bible is written in Hebrew and Greek, IIRC; and only a few Letters were written in Latin, so your argument would not be valid anyway. Now if you found a copy of a scribe-written bible in the origonal laguages, you might be in luck.
2.It was decided to increase the number of lines per page, presumably to save paper.
And how many lines did they decide to fit per collumn (actually after 18 collumns)? 42!! Obviously Gutenberg knew that to make the most famous book of all time he should use a magical number of lines.
Another little tidbit: The first letter of each book of the bible and section starts with a hand drawn letter. For the cheeper versions, these hand drawn letters are rather plain, but as one can see from the Kings version at the site, some versions had very elaboratly drawn letters. This was done after the printing by specialized painters (getting paid in proportion to how elaboratley they could draw).
When building stringed instruments (violins, 'cellos, etc.), they use horse hide glue because it is heat sensitive. Sure, it's a pain to heat up the stuff (it stinks like crazy), and apply it quickly before it cools, but when the instrument gets cracked later in its life, and needs to be opened, all the repairperson needs to do is heat the seems. Much safer than prying things apart. Some of these instruments are hundreds of years old, and have undergone many repairs.
Of course, I wouldn't want my overheating motherboard to start smelling like dead rats, so perhaps horse hide glue wouldn't be the best thing to use;)
I think people just say `Silicon' because it's below Carbon on the periodic table,and should have similar properties. In reality, Silicon has markedly different properties due to the presence of d orbitals, and a much larger size (covalent radius is 1.11A versus 0.77A for Carbon). The low electronegativity for Silicon also hinders formation of covalent bonds necessary for complex chains. Silicon does not like to bond to itself either, which is quite necessary for making molecular chains (i.e. DNA). In short, Silicon only works as basis for `life' in computers.
I think a more likely candidate for life molecules would be Boron. This atom couples well with Nitrogen, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon, and halides. Boron forms long chains (boranes) similar to Carbon's alkanes, and with nitrogen, makes structures nearly identical to some more complex carbon molecules (benzene, polymers, etc.). The problem with Boron-based life forms on earth is that most Boron-containing molecules are explosive in the presence of molecular Oxygen or water, which the earth's atmosphere is filled with. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem on a different planet.
Oh, and I'm a phd student in theoretical chemistry, so I'm not completely talking out of my butt.
Re:Getting the materials to the factory?
on
On Asteroid Mining
·
· Score: 1
Of course, these colonists would never be able to return to Earth; living in a nearly gravityless environment would weaken thier bone structure to the point where they would look like a jellyfish blob if they came back to Earth's 1G. Plus, the people would probably grow to be rather large after a few generations, so space ships would need to have larger living quarters. Gotta remember these little things...
...even FVWM was only limited by the fact it did WAY MORE than most people could figure out how to configure.... and FVWM is HOW old
I still use fvwm; took a day or so reading the documentation on how to configure it, and have come up with a very minimalist yet pleasant setup.
I even got rid of those useless buttons on the top of the windows, so as soon as I switch around a few keys on my keyboard, my workstation will be completely baffeling to any of my coworkers that try to use it:)
I've seen far to many websites where java script or graphics were critical (forcing me to abandon lynx for netscape)
The latest development version of lynx does support javascript. I'm compiling it now to see how well it works (I hope it doesn't support pop-up windows;) It also supports images by opening them in an external program (xv is default IIRC), and I have used this for quite some time (not only the development version). There's more there than meets the eyes.
I'm an linux/alpha person too, and allow me to point out to all those lintel people out there that Netscape has only been available on our platform for less than a year. My alpha's about three years old, so to browse I would have to make do with lynx, or send netscape to my X display from a lintel box. Even up to a few months ago the netscape (which Compaq ported for us) we had was extremely unstable and randomly crashed every 20 minutes or so (with java* disabled).
I can't wait until Antartica gets connected; then I can set up shop there, and live in a censorship-free utopia! Well, perhaps that's mostly what Australia is...
It's scary that you college types can't even spell
Hey, this is slashdot; I thought spelling was optional:) Anyway, the English spelling rules are crazy enough to drive any mathematician insane, so I'm merely trying to keep my mind together by misspelling (and it's not like spelling/grammar is taught in college). Perhaps slash should incorporate a spell-checker: try to post, and it reports which words aren't in its dictionary (perhaps even with recommendations for what they should be).
$ cat post | spell
encorperate
mathematition
mearly
slashdot
I'm a theoretical chemist. I spend my time studying things on a scale of several atoms. I also enjoy quantum physics which deals with smaller stuff, so these atoms seem humungous. Now I step back and look at the stuff the organic chemists are doing, and wonder at the size of the molecules in amazement. But that's really nothing compaired to the biochemists and thier macromolecules. Then there are the structural engineers who deal with unimmagniable amounts of stuff; where the sheer number of atoms involved is unifathomable. But the geographers deal with masses; contenents; worlds! of this stuff. Then I look up at the sky and see white dots, some of which are galexy clusters containing thousands of galexies. And I fall down on the ground dizzy...
I believe this chemical is used in most shampoo's. I often read whatever I can whenever I can, and since there isn't much reading material in the shower, I have read the ingredients upon several occations. This chemical sounds aufully familiar (and sodium laureth sulfate). (BTW, I am also a chemist, so it's not _too_ wierd that I remember that sort of thing).
I acutally turned on java to do the maze, and was quite pleased when it actually worked. For once netscape didn't die at the thought of loading a java applet. Perhaps this was one of the few correctly coded applets on the net (the simplicity of his html gave me the idea that the applet might be equally well-coded).
Slashdot Mirror
The ideal keyboard I've found came with my SGI. The clickyness is just perfect, it's easy to clean, there are no windows keys (it's very difficult to find keyboard now without those evil things), and all the letters are interchangable (so after remapping them to dvorak, the topology of the keys isn't all messed up).
This keyboard is easy to clean, and the labels can't just scratch off like with alot of newer keyboards. I intend this keyboard to last forever.
I actually got 533.74 kB/s even from the main server. Perhaps everyone avoids the main server right after a release because they know it will be slow :)
I use linux on my main system, Irix on a couple others, and OpenBSD at home. I personally don't really enjoy Windows or MacOS since I've gotten good at the command line. My favorite is OpenBSD, but the more I look at the source the more I don't like it.
If a pipe-like solution were used, the audio data would effectivly have to travel N times. Now if the nodes were set up serially, each with two network cards, daisy chaining along, this may work nicely. Each node would have to specialize in a particular effect, some with dual CPU's if thier effect parelizes well, and with CPU speeds chosen such that each effect takes the same amount of time.
The system would be like lining up a bunch of colored glass plates (filters), and shining light (audio data) though them and seeing what comes out. It would be rather interesting to play with, but also a lot of work.
I recently bought a new SCSI card, and it only cost $75 (AHA-2940W). I also got a couple 4GB 10,000 RPM SCSI-3 hard drives for a little over $100 a piece. The speed increase is enormous over IDE. I use my old IDE drives for my mp3 collection, and can't stand how my whole system slows down when I move things around.
This would probably be limited by quantum physics. I know that there are only a finite number of positions and velocities allowed in a given range (i.e., it's physically impossible to travel at exactly 55 mph). I'm not sure if time is also quantisized, but I imagine it is.
To get some idea, let's say we're looking at photons of light in the visable range at about 500nm. This corresponds to about 6E14 Hz, or rather, 600 trillion `frames' per second. To get much better, I suppose you would have to develop eyes that can see gamma rays or something like that.
So if the hottest video card out there (some time from now) claims it can do quake at more than like 10^15 fps, don't bother buying it.
but TeX is even more inflexible in allowing the user to determine what his screen should look like.
Try setting "\hsize=6.5in \vsize=9.0in" to fit a standard 1 inch margin paper size. Better yet, "\hsize=$windowwidth \vsize=$something_really_big", and you would get more of a webborwser like rendering (and optimisation would be easier because TeX wouldn't have to worry about page breaks).
Now if only VMware ran on my alpha...
Actually, I wouldn't run it even then. I'm running linux for a Reason. I consiously threw out hope for support for bells and whistles when I installed it.
My current instance of netscape has been running crash-free for about a week now. I only exit every so often when I need every MB of RAM for calculations. If a webpage is written correctly, netscape works just fine. Most java and javascript is poorly written, and can easily crash the browser. Since I don't like bells and whistles, I have both disabled. Now if I can just find a way to disable blinking text, animated gifs, and the <font> tag I'll be happy.
I would like to add IRIX to your list of bad OS's. I've been dealing with it quite a bit lately (I even own an SGI), and have been extrememly disapointed in its security among other things. Every month or so SGI sends out an update telling everyone to disable a particular service or chmod a setuid root program. The easiest thing to do is just blank out the inetd.conf file and install ssh. In a multiuser system, keeping root secure is basically futile and you just need to trust your users (or have a log server).
With that said, I also have a user account on some SGI supercomputers. They have a good sysadmin, and so are kept in good working condition. So it is possible to make Irix into a good OS, it just takes a bit of work. Plus, I'm afraid linux would likey croak on systems that big and complex. Irix has its place, even if it is a pain to work with.
word format isn't that bad; whenever somebody emails me a word file, I just go throw the thing through strings and I'm looking at good 'ol plain text. However, it is nice to get a formatted printout of something worth printing. I prefer postscript for this though (it's just an lp foo.ps away from paper).
I'm taking a course in simulations (the only computer science course I've ever had), and we are free to choose any language we want for our code. I've been doing most of my stuff in fortran+gl, but think it would be rather ammusing to turn in code in something unexpected like perl or a completely random language like prolog.
we can't distinguish more than 16.77 millions colors, etc
Actually, Good film effects are done at 64bit color. Yes, that's about 1.8*10^19 colors, or rather 16m colors per channel (taking alpha to be a `color'). If you have a small gradation on a screen big like the ones in the theaters, you can quite easily see the difference between consecutive colors. Take a look at this image (note that netscape doesn't seem to display it right) and tell me if you can spot where 152 grey turns into 153 grey. I can tell. There is actually a seperate codebase of the gimp written for 64bit images (the `hollywood' edition). Now I want to know when I can get a video card that supports 64bit color :) (actually, my SGI supports 48bit which is good enough).
Furthermore, if we can't see faster than 60 fps, why are the gamers always talking about how their new video card can do 120 fps and such? I almost never watch TV, but whenever I see those screens, I am completely dumbstruck by how terrible the quality is. The resolution is awfully small, and colors are so bad I would prefer a b/w TV (I once heard that TV's output less than 50 colors at a time, although I'm not sure if it's true). As a person who is used to a crisp 1600x1200 (though I can still see the pixels) high-color display in front of me, I don't think I would be able to stomach watching the pixelated, grainy, star wars movie when it comes out.
I suppose having good vision has its disadvantages at times...
However, you, of course, don't have to read the whole thing from page to page. This is a sweet link to have bookmarked when some jerk on irc claims he is quoting "Matteus 5:1" or whatever.
If reading normal books on line if tough for you, this one should give you a head ache in about 30 seconds (just to figure out what the letters are in a given word is a chore). Note as well that it's in latin, and the IRC jerk will probabily claim that you don't know Latin well enough to translate it. At any rate, most of the bible is written in Hebrew and Greek, IIRC; and only a few Letters were written in Latin, so your argument would not be valid anyway. Now if you found a copy of a scribe-written bible in the origonal laguages, you might be in luck.
2.It was decided to increase the number of lines per page, presumably to save paper.
And how many lines did they decide to fit per collumn (actually after 18 collumns)? 42!! Obviously Gutenberg knew that to make the most famous book of all time he should use a magical number of lines.
Another little tidbit: The first letter of each book of the bible and section starts with a hand drawn letter. For the cheeper versions, these hand drawn letters are rather plain, but as one can see from the Kings version at the site, some versions had very elaboratly drawn letters. This was done after the printing by specialized painters (getting paid in proportion to how elaboratley they could draw).
When building stringed instruments (violins, 'cellos, etc.), they use horse hide glue because it is heat sensitive. Sure, it's a pain to heat up the stuff (it stinks like crazy), and apply it quickly before it cools, but when the instrument gets cracked later in its life, and needs to be opened, all the repairperson needs to do is heat the seems. Much safer than prying things apart. Some of these instruments are hundreds of years old, and have undergone many repairs.
Of course, I wouldn't want my overheating motherboard to start smelling like dead rats, so perhaps horse hide glue wouldn't be the best thing to use ;)
I think people just say `Silicon' because it's below Carbon on the periodic table ,and should have similar properties. In reality, Silicon has markedly different properties due to the presence of d orbitals, and a much larger size (covalent radius is 1.11A versus 0.77A for Carbon). The low electronegativity for Silicon also hinders formation of covalent bonds necessary for complex chains. Silicon does not like to bond to itself either, which is quite necessary for making molecular chains (i.e. DNA). In short, Silicon only works as basis for `life' in computers.
I think a more likely candidate for life molecules would be Boron. This atom couples well with Nitrogen, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon, and halides. Boron forms long chains (boranes) similar to Carbon's alkanes, and with nitrogen, makes structures nearly identical to some more complex carbon molecules (benzene, polymers, etc.). The problem with Boron-based life forms on earth is that most Boron-containing molecules are explosive in the presence of molecular Oxygen or water, which the earth's atmosphere is filled with. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem on a different planet.
Oh, and I'm a phd student in theoretical chemistry, so I'm not completely talking out of my butt.
Of course, these colonists would never be able to return to Earth; living in a nearly gravityless environment would weaken thier bone structure to the point where they would look like a jellyfish blob if they came back to Earth's 1G. Plus, the people would probably grow to be rather large after a few generations, so space ships would need to have larger living quarters. Gotta remember these little things...
I still use fvwm; took a day or so reading the documentation on how to configure it, and have come up with a very minimalist yet pleasant setup.
I even got rid of those useless buttons on the top of the windows, so as soon as I switch around a few keys on my keyboard, my workstation will be completely baffeling to any of my coworkers that try to use it :)
I've seen far to many websites where java script or graphics were critical (forcing me to abandon lynx for netscape)
The latest development version of lynx does support javascript. I'm compiling it now to see how well it works (I hope it doesn't support pop-up windows ;) It also supports images by opening them in an external program (xv is default IIRC), and I have used this for quite some time (not only the development version). There's more there than meets the eyes.
I'm an linux/alpha person too, and allow me to point out to all those lintel people out there that Netscape has only been available on our platform for less than a year. My alpha's about three years old, so to browse I would have to make do with lynx, or send netscape to my X display from a lintel box. Even up to a few months ago the netscape (which Compaq ported for us) we had was extremely unstable and randomly crashed every 20 minutes or so (with java* disabled).
I can't wait until Antartica gets connected; then I can set up shop there, and live in a censorship-free utopia! Well, perhaps that's mostly what Australia is...
It's scary that you college types can't even spell
Hey, this is slashdot; I thought spelling was optional :) Anyway, the English spelling rules are crazy enough to drive any mathematician insane, so I'm merely trying to keep my mind together by misspelling (and it's not like spelling/grammar is taught in college). Perhaps slash should incorporate a spell-checker: try to post, and it reports which words aren't in its dictionary (perhaps even with recommendations for what they should be).
$ cat post | spell
encorperate
mathematition
mearly
slashdot
Goes back and fixes spelling...
I'm a theoretical chemist. I spend my time studying things on a scale of several atoms. I also enjoy quantum physics which deals with smaller stuff, so these atoms seem humungous. Now I step back and look at the stuff the organic chemists are doing, and wonder at the size of the molecules in amazement. But that's really nothing compaired to the biochemists and thier macromolecules. Then there are the structural engineers who deal with unimmagniable amounts of stuff; where the sheer number of atoms involved is unifathomable. But the geographers deal with masses; contenents; worlds! of this stuff. Then I look up at the sky and see white dots, some of which are galexy clusters containing thousands of galexies. And I fall down on the ground dizzy...
I believe this chemical is used in most shampoo's. I often read whatever I can whenever I can, and since there isn't much reading material in the shower, I have read the ingredients upon several occations. This chemical sounds aufully familiar (and sodium laureth sulfate). (BTW, I am also a chemist, so it's not _too_ wierd that I remember that sort of thing).
I acutally turned on java to do the maze, and was quite pleased when it actually worked. For once netscape didn't die at the thought of loading a java applet. Perhaps this was one of the few correctly coded applets on the net (the simplicity of his html gave me the idea that the applet might be equally well-coded).