Cry me a river. Since Mediacom bought the local remains of @Home, they've capped it to 1.5Mbpsdown/128Kbps up. And in most of the area here (IL-side Quad Cities area), there is no alternative broadband. Since they capped the bandwidth they've also nudged prices up from $34.95/mo to about $60/mo if you don't have cable TV service. Regional monopolies suck.
I haven't been able to reach it since yesterday evening sometime. I'm on through Mediacom, maybe they've blocked it?
I love the smell of maggots in the morning...
on
The Worst Jobs in Science
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
My sister-in-law works with the US Dept. of Agriculture. Her job consists primarily of zapping fruitfly maggots/larva with everything from lasers to 5000w microwaves. She also boils them, crushes them, melts them with acids, dessicates them with silica flakes then blows them away with huge fans.. you name it. Anything that can be done to kill the little doofers, she does. In bulk. They're grown by the thousands just for the purpose of dying in nasty ways.
I think the whole point is to figure out ways to remove them from crops without damaging the crops or using pesticides. She likes her job, though. The only problem is that burning fruitfly maggots smell not entirely unlike barbecue or popcorn, so she invariably leaves the lab hungry...
But we need the spaces, at least, for the word cues.
So how many "bits" of information can we strip from a sentence, on average, before we can no longer intuitively decipher it? The spaces give us information, but not as much as the letters themselves. Yet clearly the ordering of the letters contains much less information than the contents of a word's endpoints. This is odd stuff.
Okay, I know it's bad form to reply to one's own post, but I noticed something. When writting "letters", l____rs seems more recognizable than l_____s. Apparently plurals are handled by the brain as the word followed by the plural suffix. Interesting...
After 4 more years under a Republican it's the backlash again the entire USA that will be the problem. It only took Bush 2 years to turn near-universal sympathy for the United States into near-universal fear and/or hatred. Just imagine all the damage he could do with 4 more...
And I can only assume by "near 100% efficiency" they don't mean "100% of sunlight converted to energy" because otherwise there would be large dark spots on the window. To me, that does not sound like an unimpeded view...
Good point, and one I missed entirely in the parent post. Who WOULD decide? Techies like me? I know some people who definitely don't belong on the internet, but as for actually enforcing that? Frankly I wouldn't want to be the one to tell aging grandparents, "I know you just want to e-mail your grandson, but since you've been propagating viruses I cannot allow you to get on the 'net..."
You know, for 3D accelerated direct client-to-client file transfers on IRC. Yeah. I can't wait for this card to be supported under Linux so I can view BitchX in all its full, 3D text glory (as seen in Hackers).
Oh wait.. Google says it stands for "digital content creation". Poo.
You may not need a 10GHz CPU. I know I don't, at least, not yet. But as interfaces improve, as software becomes more complicated, hardware like this may well a requirement. After all, monitor images are still nothing like as detailed as a printed page, and even a very high-end monitor has only a fraction of the resolution that can be produced by a $100 printer. It's going to take serious hardware to acheive that kind of image clarity in real time. 10GHz CPUs may be just the beginning.
When I was doing inhouse tech support for a large company that makes green tractors, I got a ticket about a system that was having random lockups. After investigating, I found that the lockups were indeed random, so set out to try swapping the RAM first. Judge of my surprise to find a tiny spider caught against the base of a SIMM, blackened and crispy. If someone had told me that there's enough juice flowing through a RAM chip to fry even a spider, I wouldn't've believed it, but there the little critter was. I couldn't believe that little bug alone would be causing a problem, but on a whim I left the chip in, sans spider, and behold, the system worked perfectly.
Odd, that.
And although it's not a bug, I have had someone bring a computer into my shop for locking up, and found a live mouse in it. It escaped into the shop and I believe it lives here on Dorito crumbs to this very day.
Actually, I don't think that's true, but I can't find anything to back me up. I do know that the RealMyst engine looks nothing like the Unreal engine and performs a lot of effects that the Unreal engine wasn't capable of at the time.
If it's the Unreal engine, then they modified the bejesus out of it and ended up with something a great deal more powerful.
That's damn impressive for realtime. Hell, it's pretty impressive even for a prerendering. I wonder what the specs were on the machine that generated it...
On the other hand, RealMYST had a mind-bogglingly beautiful realtime engine, even by today's standards, so I'm glad to see that they're still making progress.
1) Everyone would see that SCO was pulling lies out of its collective ass from day one.
2) It will become clear that Linux's developers are not, in fact, in the habit of inserting proprietary code into the kernel. I guess this sort of falls under 1.
3) The SEC will come down on SCO's executives like a solar mass of bricks.
Really? And here I thought the mile was based on some sensible measurement, like 2/3 the distance one of the King's oxen could walk in one afternoon in clear weather.
Well, if judged by its overall cumulative effects, I'd have to say that the job of religion is to cause misery and suffering, propagate and encourage ignorance, and divide in war those who might otherwise work together for peace.
Yeah, I can see how you can confuse a multi-billion dollar corporation with a disturbing amount of mindshare, a die-hard fan-base that can make some practicioners of Scientology look sane in comparison, and a nasty track record of using/abusing copyright law (and those who write it) with, say, BSD.
This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say Disney is dying.
The company that pioneered many aspects of robotics and automation, the company that is largely responsible for the adoption of color TV, the company that created beautiful, movie-length cartoons using state-of-the-art technology at a time when cartoons were thought to be cheap, low-class entertainment, the company that spent vast, VAST amounts of money to try to give people a glimpse of the future's wonders... THAT is what's dying. Hell, maybe it died along with Walt and the corpse just hasn't stopped moving yet.
I think Walt himself would have been happy to release Mickey to the world. The soulless mess that bears his name, though, just can't do that, and that's why I say Disney is dying. This thing that's left behind is not Walt's Disney.
Ah, but companies who pay now will pay less. You can bet that if by some miracle of chance (or more likely, idiocy of judge) SCO wins their court case, companies who were given the "chance" to pay earlier will be paying a lot more afterwards.
It's a gamble: Pay a little now or risk a chance of paying a lot later. Pointy-haired bosses don't like gambles. If they can pay a little now to make the problem go away (and incidentally add strength to SCO's claims), they'll do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except the programming will probably be ROT13 "encrypted", and therefore getting in to modify it will violate the DMCA.
No porn wheaties for you!
You're close. But replace the window with a CC camera/TV setup; otherwise people might be able to see you through the window.
And we can't have THAT, now can we?
Cry me a river. Since Mediacom bought the local remains of @Home, they've capped it to 1.5Mbpsdown/128Kbps up. And in most of the area here (IL-side Quad Cities area), there is no alternative broadband. Since they capped the bandwidth they've also nudged prices up from $34.95/mo to about $60/mo if you don't have cable TV service. Regional monopolies suck.
I haven't been able to reach it since yesterday evening sometime. I'm on through Mediacom, maybe they've blocked it?
My sister-in-law works with the US Dept. of Agriculture. Her job consists primarily of zapping fruitfly maggots/larva with everything from lasers to 5000w microwaves. She also boils them, crushes them, melts them with acids, dessicates them with silica flakes then blows them away with huge fans.. you name it. Anything that can be done to kill the little doofers, she does. In bulk. They're grown by the thousands just for the purpose of dying in nasty ways.
I think the whole point is to figure out ways to remove them from crops without damaging the crops or using pesticides. She likes her job, though. The only problem is that burning fruitfly maggots smell not entirely unlike barbecue or popcorn, so she invariably leaves the lab hungry...
Bt we nd te ss fr te wd cs.
But we need the spaces, at least, for the word cues.
So how many "bits" of information can we strip from a sentence, on average, before we can no longer intuitively decipher it? The spaces give us information, but not as much as the letters themselves. Yet clearly the ordering of the letters contains much less information than the contents of a word's endpoints. This is odd stuff.
Okay, I know it's bad form to reply to one's own post, but I noticed something. When writting "letters", l____rs seems more recognizable than l_____s. Apparently plurals are handled by the brain as the word followed by the plural suffix. Interesting...
So d__s t__s m__n t__t we d_n't n__d t_e m____e l____s at all?
After 4 more years under a Republican it's the backlash again the entire USA that will be the problem. It only took Bush 2 years to turn near-universal sympathy for the United States into near-universal fear and/or hatred. Just imagine all the damage he could do with 4 more...
And I can only assume by "near 100% efficiency" they don't mean "100% of sunlight converted to energy" because otherwise there would be large dark spots on the window. To me, that does not sound like an unimpeded view...
Good point, and one I missed entirely in the parent post. Who WOULD decide? Techies like me? I know some people who definitely don't belong on the internet, but as for actually enforcing that? Frankly I wouldn't want to be the one to tell aging grandparents, "I know you just want to e-mail your grandson, but since you've been propagating viruses I cannot allow you to get on the 'net..."
We license people to drive, but traffic cops and state troopers don't seem to have much trouble holding on to their jobs...
You know, for 3D accelerated direct client-to-client file transfers on IRC. Yeah. I can't wait for this card to be supported under Linux so I can view BitchX in all its full, 3D text glory (as seen in Hackers).
Oh wait.. Google says it stands for "digital content creation". Poo.
You may not need a 10GHz CPU. I know I don't, at least, not yet. But as interfaces improve, as software becomes more complicated, hardware like this may well a requirement. After all, monitor images are still nothing like as detailed as a printed page, and even a very high-end monitor has only a fraction of the resolution that can be produced by a $100 printer. It's going to take serious hardware to acheive that kind of image clarity in real time. 10GHz CPUs may be just the beginning.
When I was doing inhouse tech support for a large company that makes green tractors, I got a ticket about a system that was having random lockups. After investigating, I found that the lockups were indeed random, so set out to try swapping the RAM first. Judge of my surprise to find a tiny spider caught against the base of a SIMM, blackened and crispy. If someone had told me that there's enough juice flowing through a RAM chip to fry even a spider, I wouldn't've believed it, but there the little critter was. I couldn't believe that little bug alone would be causing a problem, but on a whim I left the chip in, sans spider, and behold, the system worked perfectly.
Odd, that.
And although it's not a bug, I have had someone bring a computer into my shop for locking up, and found a live mouse in it. It escaped into the shop and I believe it lives here on Dorito crumbs to this very day.
Nice work, and here I am without my mod points. Any way you can get this to McBride?
Actually, I don't think that's true, but I can't find anything to back me up. I do know that the RealMyst engine looks nothing like the Unreal engine and performs a lot of effects that the Unreal engine wasn't capable of at the time.
If it's the Unreal engine, then they modified the bejesus out of it and ended up with something a great deal more powerful.
That's damn impressive for realtime. Hell, it's pretty impressive even for a prerendering. I wonder what the specs were on the machine that generated it...
On the other hand, RealMYST had a mind-bogglingly beautiful realtime engine, even by today's standards, so I'm glad to see that they're still making progress.
Frankly, I'd count that as a happy ending.
1) Everyone would see that SCO was pulling lies out of its collective ass from day one.
2) It will become clear that Linux's developers are not, in fact, in the habit of inserting proprietary code into the kernel. I guess this sort of falls under 1.
3) The SEC will come down on SCO's executives like a solar mass of bricks.
That would make me happy.
Really? And here I thought the mile was based on some sensible measurement, like 2/3 the distance one of the King's oxen could walk in one afternoon in clear weather.
Well, if judged by its overall cumulative effects, I'd have to say that the job of religion is to cause misery and suffering, propagate and encourage ignorance, and divide in war those who might otherwise work together for peace.
Does that about sum it up?
Yeah, I can see how you can confuse a multi-billion dollar corporation with a disturbing amount of mindshare, a die-hard fan-base that can make some practicioners of Scientology look sane in comparison, and a nasty track record of using/abusing copyright law (and those who write it) with, say, BSD.
This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say Disney is dying.
The company that pioneered many aspects of robotics and automation, the company that is largely responsible for the adoption of color TV, the company that created beautiful, movie-length cartoons using state-of-the-art technology at a time when cartoons were thought to be cheap, low-class entertainment, the company that spent vast, VAST amounts of money to try to give people a glimpse of the future's wonders... THAT is what's dying. Hell, maybe it died along with Walt and the corpse just hasn't stopped moving yet.
I think Walt himself would have been happy to release Mickey to the world. The soulless mess that bears his name, though, just can't do that, and that's why I say Disney is dying. This thing that's left behind is not Walt's Disney.
Thanks for the info. I recant the paranthesized "idiocy of judge" portion of my comment. The rest of it stands.
Every time I think that Disney is dying, they come up with something like this that convinces me Walt's spirit is still in there somewhere.
I forget who said this...
"Walt Disney has contributed more happiness to the world than all the religions combined."
Now if only the spirit of Walt would appear to take care of this copyright extension nonsense...
Ah, but companies who pay now will pay less. You can bet that if by some miracle of chance (or more likely, idiocy of judge) SCO wins their court case, companies who were given the "chance" to pay earlier will be paying a lot more afterwards.
It's a gamble: Pay a little now or risk a chance of paying a lot later. Pointy-haired bosses don't like gambles. If they can pay a little now to make the problem go away (and incidentally add strength to SCO's claims), they'll do so.