Many years ago, I did a job for a Big Bank... in the "raw plastic" division. That's where all the blank, unprinted credit cards live. Those things are worth an enormous amount to, say, a criminal, and the bank considered the liability very seriously.
I've worked in highly classified military environments that had less security than the old Raw Plastic Division. Not just the man-trap on the way in, mind you, they had redundant video cameras covering everything, roving armed guards, multiple safe doors locked behind employees, etc. I wasn't allowed to bring anything in or out of the facility.
But what was worst was I had a computer terminal set up in a hutch in a strange little U-shaped cement column. Basically, it was like being in a broom closet, with my back to the door. This meant that I had no idea what was going on behind me... which wouldn't have been a problem, if my employer and the security guards (who pretty much universally hated "that nerd kid" who earned $7/hr when they earned less than half that) would come up quietly behind me, clap me on the shoulder, and shout "How's it going?" I'd usually jump half out of my skin, and they'd look at me with feigned surprise: "oh, sorry to startle you."
After a month on that job, I was a nervous wreck. I finally went to the boss, and told him that it was adversely affecting the quality of the code. His response, of course, was that I'd better see to it that it didn't, or they'd find another programmer.
Still, that helped pay for a lot of college expenses. $7/hr was a lot of money in those days...
The other bad environment I once worked in was a job on a space-related military base. I was long-haired and wear an earring. I'd have to go onto the base via a road with multiple guards and cement baffles (where the road winds back and forth so you can't go faster than a few miles per hour). So one time, the guard at one end of the baffle checked my ID, waved me through, and then had second thoughts, seeing my hippy-mobile (old Volvo station wagon with leftist bumper stickers). So he radioed ahead to the guard at the other end of the baffle, who whipped out her rifle, pointed it at my head, and re-checked my ID for a few minutes. I had guns pointed at me several times during the course of that job. The base was on alert, so I suspect the guns were actually loaded. Staring down the barrel of one of those evil looking Colts really makes you reflect on life. I guess I'm glad I don't have to do it daily. I realize that people in a lot of places have to deal with that all the time.
Not to mention learning to talk in "interference." That is a basic strategy of simulating bad reception. As is:
"Hello, you s --- er is --- w --- che --- reboot, to see if --- a --- and --- te --- bi --- co --- as I told him wh --- b --- pek."
It's easy to train yourself to speak this way very convincingly. Then, the caller will claim a bad connection, and will hang up, so they can call again to get a better connection. Let that call go to voicemail.
If you get called to task later, you can always claim to have been driving through "a known dead area."
Then again, you can also just hit "cancel" (or the equivalent) on most phones when they're ringing, and it'll go to voicemail or give up.
the french were the only ones who actively aided the nazis in rounding up jews and sending them to the ovens
Bullshit!
Read your history on Poland, Latvia, Austria, Lithuania, and Romania.
(I'm not trying to start a flame war here. This is a list of countries where there was extensive collaboration with the Nazi policy of genocide against Jews and Gypsies. This is not to say that there weren't people in each of these countries who risked their lives to resist the Nazis and their policies.)
Well, there's the Foveon X3 chip, which is truly color-sensitive. I haven't seen any output from it, but the reviews are mixed. I think Sigma was going to release a camera based on the chip.
It would be possible to use the three CCD configuration some video cameras used, even in a consumer/still digital camera, except that that increases size, weight, and cost.
There's also the limiting factor of CCD resolution. Having a lens that can resolve 500 lines per millimeter doesn't do you much good if your CCD has pixels that are on the order of that size (or does Nyquest make that within a factor of two?).
Anyway, putting a really high quality lens on a consumer 1 Megapixel CCD would work for certain focal lengths, but it's not the solution people are looking for.
It is also interesting to see how it produces color photos.
This is how virtually all consumer digital cameras work (more or less). They paint a pattern of color filters over the CCD. Then they use interpolation, based on the relative intensities, to figure out the most likely color of each pixel.
Different vendors use different masks, and there is a lot of debate about the best approach. See DP Review's Glossary section for more information.
It's got plenty applications, but not normal user applications.
You haven't seen the file format for the upcoming Microsoft Word XP 2004 yet, have you?
Maybe it puts me in the category of Old Fart, but my first word processor could hold a ten page college paper in 25 kilobytes (this was before kibibytes). I don't think I can sneeze in Word 2000 in less than 32 kb.
I was the guy in college who used to take the discarded (out of date) sheet film from the Physics department's optics lab, and cut it down to 220 for my ancient Rolleiflex.
Half the pictures would be grain monsters, incomprehensible flares, and/or fully exposed. But hey, it was cheap.
"Does this mean they're NOT GOING TO SUPPORT my Brownie anymore???"
Fortunately, there haven't been too many security upgrades for my older cameras. Flashing the ROM is pretty gnarly on those pre-1990 models. Well, actually, if they have sync connectors, flashing's easy, but... nevermind....
Hm. I don't watch TV, so my image of IBM is a bunch of guys running around in lab coats, with a manager-type cracking the whip and screaming "That HAL unit was supposed to go on line FOUR YEARS AGO! We can't miss another deadline!"
For what it's worth, it's always seemed to me that Dell was the most MS-cozy of the major computer manufacturers, HP least so. So I'm not surprised that Dell has come out in support of MS on this.
Historically, perhaps. But I'm thinking that IBM is gunning for that particular honor today.
Yeah. Ten dollars say that they deliver the whole kernel source (or a vast majority of it) and say that that's the infringing code. We're not going to be seeing CVS commit logs or detailed timelines.
Unless, of course, SCO actually has something legitimate that we've all missed. I can't say I'm very worried.
In any case, the latest two versions of OS X *do* include an X server (Xfree variant). You can run it in rootless mode, which is quite functional and nice.
(*) in the event you're not, we'd have to start with ancient history, when Mac OS was sold for clone systems, when the NeXTStep version of Mac OS was called OS 8, and... er... well, other things too far lost in the haze of Steve-induced fog to recall.
I have a friend who cleverly left an empty cooler in the back of a Honda hatchback in Yosemite valley and went off on a hike.
Upon return a few hours later, the hatch had been neatly peeled off the car. The hatchback hinges and little hydraulic brace were torn right out. The remnants of the cooler had tooth marks all over it.
If you think you've ever had trouble with insurance companies, just try getting 'em to pay for the car that a bear ripped open...
(Of course, the Black Bears that inhabit Yosemite may be smart, extremely strong, etc, but they're stupid weaklings compared to Alaskan Grizzlies. Most of 'em don't even use cell phones, much less notebooks.)
One thing that for some reason really annoyed me was the cribbed-from-Fyodor's place descriptions. It was all tour-guide size comparisons. How many times must I read the square footage of a building or a plaza? And must I be told that the Louvre is longer than three Eiffel Towers laid end to end, while the Grand Gallery is as long as three Washington Monuments?
Unfortunately, Brown felt the need to go into detail on how all the high-tech gadgets (that were secondary to the plot) work; even more unfortunately, he got it all wrong. Cell phones ringing on planes over the mid- Atlantic? A tracking dot that "continuously transmits its location to a Global Positioning System satellite that [police] can monitor" which works to an accuracy of two feet, even when the trackee is underground? Please. It'd be better to leave out the details, and let us imagine our own implementations.
I dunno. Having recently read the Gnostic writings fron Nag Hammadi (in translation), I liked how he wove the writings into the plot. But I'd recommend reading the nonfiction The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels for an even more amazing read. That certainly made me think more about what I thought I knew about the history of Christianity than anything else I've ever read...
I'll keep posting on this thread, and damn' be the mods:)
OK, I'll admit to some exaggeration here. Of course, I'm approaching this from a dilletante perspective, whereas you appear to do serious production work, so I hope I can be forgiven for my presumption.
I acknowledge the advances you mention. I hadn't even thought about hydraulic presses. I'll even admit to having used some of the Mayco One Stroke encapsulated metal glazes (and I've been amazed to get nice buttercup yellow in Cone 10 reduction). But haven't extrusion techniques have been around for a long time? Didn't the Romans extrude ceramic pipes?
But anyway, I digress even farther. Maybe my argument is nonsensical -- I suppose one could similarly claim that metalwork is the same today as it was two thousand years ago, but that we just have better equipment and purer ores... Still, it feels like clay is closer to where it was 10,000 years ago in Jiangxi than, say, agriculture or transportation.
Do you think we'd have an audience to create Slashpot?
Ah, but the beauty of clay is that it basically has infinite levels of "undo" until you perform a structure commit (e.g., bisque it). Then, of course, you can apply textures and shaders (glazes, oxides, lustres), which also have reasonable levels of undo, until you render (e.g., fire at Cone 10).
For some examples, please see http://teapots.fogbound.net
The other cool thing about clay is that the basics of the OS have been in use for, oh, say around 10,000 years, and the latest major upgrade was about 2,000 years ago when people compiled kaolin into the kernel*.
(* You'll find people who will tell you that "paper clay" techniques were invented around 1970 -- these people are ignorant. Amazonian Indians along the Rio Napo have been mixing leaf fibres into their earthenware vessels (to give rigidity during pit firing) for thousands of years. It's the same basic principle. Other advances tend to be in the control space: kiln temperature and atmosphere, better refinement and greater availability of minerals and materials, etc. The basic technology, though, hasn't had much in the way of advancement).
I bought a eMachine for my grandmother back in the PII/300 MHz days. The floppy drive died in the first week; took it back to Fry's, got my replacement. Two weeks later, the power button went intermittent, and after another week, failed completely. Took the machine back to Fry's, got my replacement. This third machine is still running fine.
My room-mate at the time sprang for the next model up eMachine (366MHz, if I remember right, which is questionable). He also had the floppy drive die within a few weeks, but he never bothered to take the machine back. He just replaced it this year, so it survived a while.
Slashdot Mirror
What, you don't have a roof on your room?
Many years ago, I did a job for a Big Bank ... in the "raw plastic" division. That's where all the blank, unprinted credit cards live. Those things are worth an enormous amount to, say, a criminal, and the bank considered the liability very seriously.
I've worked in highly classified military environments that had less security than the old Raw Plastic Division. Not just the man-trap on the way in, mind you, they had redundant video cameras covering everything, roving armed guards, multiple safe doors locked behind employees, etc. I wasn't allowed to bring anything in or out of the facility.
But what was worst was I had a computer terminal set up in a hutch in a strange little U-shaped cement column. Basically, it was like being in a broom closet, with my back to the door. This meant that I had no idea what was going on behind me... which wouldn't have been a problem, if my employer and the security guards (who pretty much universally hated "that nerd kid" who earned $7/hr when they earned less than half that) would come up quietly behind me, clap me on the shoulder, and shout "How's it going?" I'd usually jump half out of my skin, and they'd look at me with feigned surprise: "oh, sorry to startle you."
After a month on that job, I was a nervous wreck. I finally went to the boss, and told him that it was adversely affecting the quality of the code. His response, of course, was that I'd better see to it that it didn't, or they'd find another programmer.
Still, that helped pay for a lot of college expenses. $7/hr was a lot of money in those days...
The other bad environment I once worked in was a job on a space-related military base. I was long-haired and wear an earring. I'd have to go onto the base via a road with multiple guards and cement baffles (where the road winds back and forth so you can't go faster than a few miles per hour). So one time, the guard at one end of the baffle checked my ID, waved me through, and then had second thoughts, seeing my hippy-mobile (old Volvo station wagon with leftist bumper stickers). So he radioed ahead to the guard at the other end of the baffle, who whipped out her rifle, pointed it at my head, and re-checked my ID for a few minutes. I had guns pointed at me several times during the course of that job. The base was on alert, so I suspect the guns were actually loaded. Staring down the barrel of one of those evil looking Colts really makes you reflect on life. I guess I'm glad I don't have to do it daily. I realize that people in a lot of places have to deal with that all the time.
Not to mention learning to talk in "interference." That is a basic strategy of simulating bad reception. As is:
"Hello, you s --- er is --- w --- che --- reboot, to see if --- a --- and --- te --- bi --- co --- as I told him wh --- b --- pek."
It's easy to train yourself to speak this way very convincingly. Then, the caller will claim a bad connection, and will hang up, so they can call again to get a better connection. Let that call go to voicemail.
If you get called to task later, you can always claim to have been driving through "a known dead area."
Then again, you can also just hit "cancel" (or the equivalent) on most phones when they're ringing, and it'll go to voicemail or give up.
Bullshit!
Read your history on Poland, Latvia, Austria, Lithuania, and Romania.
(I'm not trying to start a flame war here. This is a list of countries where there was extensive collaboration with the Nazi policy of genocide against Jews and Gypsies. This is not to say that there weren't people in each of these countries who risked their lives to resist the Nazis and their policies.)
Well, there's the Foveon X3 chip, which is truly color-sensitive. I haven't seen any output from it, but the reviews are mixed. I think Sigma was going to release a camera based on the chip.
It would be possible to use the three CCD configuration some video cameras used, even in a consumer/still digital camera, except that that increases size, weight, and cost.
There's also the limiting factor of CCD resolution. Having a lens that can resolve 500 lines per millimeter doesn't do you much good if your CCD has pixels that are on the order of that size (or does Nyquest make that within a factor of two?).
Anyway, putting a really high quality lens on a consumer 1 Megapixel CCD would work for certain focal lengths, but it's not the solution people are looking for.
This is how virtually all consumer digital cameras work (more or less). They paint a pattern of color filters over the CCD. Then they use interpolation, based on the relative intensities, to figure out the most likely color of each pixel.
Different vendors use different masks, and there is a lot of debate about the best approach. See DP Review's Glossary section for more information.
Or over local maxima.
You haven't seen the file format for the upcoming Microsoft Word XP 2004 yet, have you?
Maybe it puts me in the category of Old Fart, but my first word processor could hold a ten page college paper in 25 kilobytes (this was before kibibytes). I don't think I can sneeze in Word 2000 in less than 32 kb.
And here I thought we were electrochemical devices for moving water from one place to another.
Oh, you're telling me.
I was the guy in college who used to take the discarded (out of date) sheet film from the Physics department's optics lab, and cut it down to 220 for my ancient Rolleiflex.
Half the pictures would be grain monsters, incomprehensible flares, and/or fully exposed. But hey, it was cheap.
I'd be screaming
... nevermind....
"Does this mean they're NOT GOING TO SUPPORT my Brownie anymore???"
Fortunately, there haven't been too many security upgrades for my older cameras. Flashing the ROM is pretty gnarly on those pre-1990 models. Well, actually, if they have sync connectors, flashing's easy, but
Hm. I don't watch TV, so my image of IBM is a bunch of guys running around in lab coats, with a manager-type cracking the whip and screaming "That HAL unit was supposed to go on line FOUR YEARS AGO! We can't miss another deadline!"
Historically, perhaps. But I'm thinking that IBM is gunning for that particular honor today.
Really? Then I stand corrected.
I missed this development. Is this detailed list what is due in the current set of discovery documents?
Yeah. Ten dollars say that they deliver the whole kernel source (or a vast majority of it) and say that that's the infringing code. We're not going to be seeing CVS commit logs or detailed timelines.
Unless, of course, SCO actually has something legitimate that we've all missed. I can't say I'm very worried.
I know you're joking, but(*) ...
... er ... well, other things too far lost in the haze of Steve-induced fog to recall.
In any case, the latest two versions of OS X *do* include an X server (Xfree variant). You can run it in rootless mode, which is quite functional and nice.
(*) in the event you're not, we'd have to start with ancient history, when Mac OS was sold for clone systems, when the NeXTStep version of Mac OS was called OS 8, and
I have a friend who cleverly left an empty cooler in the back of a Honda hatchback in Yosemite valley and went off on a hike.
Upon return a few hours later, the hatch had been neatly peeled off the car. The hatchback hinges and little hydraulic brace were torn right out. The remnants of the cooler had tooth marks all over it.
If you think you've ever had trouble with insurance companies, just try getting 'em to pay for the car that a bear ripped open...
(Of course, the Black Bears that inhabit Yosemite may be smart, extremely strong, etc, but they're stupid weaklings compared to Alaskan Grizzlies. Most of 'em don't even use cell phones, much less notebooks.)
According to the insurance industry, 50% of all laptops get stolen.
According to the naturalists I know, grizzly bears are extremely smart, and damn near unstoppable when they want something.
When the grizzlies look in through that window and see that shiny new glowy-apple Powerbook, you *know* they're gonna want it.
Just be careful out there, is all...
I was actually disappointed by the DaVinci Code.
One thing that for some reason really annoyed me was the cribbed-from-Fyodor's place descriptions. It was all tour-guide size comparisons. How many times must I read the square footage of a building or a plaza? And must I be told that the Louvre is longer than three Eiffel Towers laid end to end, while the Grand Gallery is as long as three Washington Monuments?
Unfortunately, Brown felt the need to go into detail on how all the high-tech gadgets (that were secondary to the plot) work; even more unfortunately, he got it all wrong. Cell phones ringing on planes over the mid- Atlantic? A tracking dot that "continuously transmits its location to a Global Positioning System satellite that [police] can monitor" which works to an accuracy of two feet, even when the trackee is underground? Please. It'd be better to leave out the details, and let us imagine our own implementations.
I dunno. Having recently read the Gnostic writings fron Nag Hammadi (in translation), I liked how he wove the writings into the plot. But I'd recommend reading the nonfiction The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels for an even more amazing read. That certainly made me think more about what I thought I knew about the history of Christianity than anything else I've ever read...
hear, hear!
Also "Slaughterhouse Five." Kurt Vonnegut himself said that the movie was what he wanted the book to be.
I'll keep posting on this thread, and damn' be the mods :)
OK, I'll admit to some exaggeration here. Of course, I'm approaching this from a dilletante perspective, whereas you appear to do serious production work, so I hope I can be forgiven for my presumption.
I acknowledge the advances you mention. I hadn't even thought about hydraulic presses. I'll even admit to having used some of the Mayco One Stroke encapsulated metal glazes (and I've been amazed to get nice buttercup yellow in Cone 10 reduction). But haven't extrusion techniques have been around for a long time? Didn't the Romans extrude ceramic pipes?
But anyway, I digress even farther. Maybe my argument is nonsensical -- I suppose one could similarly claim that metalwork is the same today as it was two thousand years ago, but that we just have better equipment and purer ores... Still, it feels like clay is closer to where it was 10,000 years ago in Jiangxi than, say, agriculture or transportation.
Do you think we'd have an audience to create Slashpot?
Ah, but the beauty of clay is that it basically has infinite levels of "undo" until you perform a structure commit (e.g., bisque it). Then, of course, you can apply textures and shaders (glazes, oxides, lustres), which also have reasonable levels of undo, until you render (e.g., fire at Cone 10).
For some examples, please see http://teapots.fogbound.net
The other cool thing about clay is that the basics of the OS have been in use for, oh, say around 10,000 years, and the latest major upgrade was about 2,000 years ago when people compiled kaolin into the kernel*.
(* You'll find people who will tell you that "paper clay" techniques were invented around 1970 -- these people are ignorant. Amazonian Indians along the Rio Napo have been mixing leaf fibres into their earthenware vessels (to give rigidity during pit firing) for thousands of years. It's the same basic principle. Other advances tend to be in the control space: kiln temperature and atmosphere, better refinement and greater availability of minerals and materials, etc. The basic technology, though, hasn't had much in the way of advancement).
He seems to have flown right over my house.
My network doesn't show up in the list, though.
For the record, it's called "ACCESS DENIED" and it's got WEP enabled...
If you are in the neighborhood, and need access, just gimme a holler. Pants-less one-handed wardrivers need not apply.
Well, I've had mixed experiences.
I bought a eMachine for my grandmother back in the PII/300 MHz days. The floppy drive died in the first week; took it back to Fry's, got my replacement. Two weeks later, the power button went intermittent, and after another week, failed completely. Took the machine back to Fry's, got my replacement. This third machine is still running fine.
My room-mate at the time sprang for the next model up eMachine (366MHz, if I remember right, which is questionable). He also had the floppy drive die within a few weeks, but he never bothered to take the machine back. He just replaced it this year, so it survived a while.