It's a shame that someone can't invent some sort of mobile telephone device... whereby you take a small telephone and use "radio waves" or somesuch to connect to other phones.. erm. heh.:)
Sounds like a waste of time. Blogging with your phone will only result in mis-typed entries with poorly lit, poorly framed and blurry photos of famous landmarks that you can't quite make out....And SMS text messages just result in slowly-entered, oft-mistyped messages that could have been communicated more accurately in about 1/3 the total time, if only some sort of speech telecommunication device were available to the user (heh), but for whatever reason, SMS's sell like hotcakes.
To a computer nerd (I take the liberty of assuming) like yourself, phone blogging sounds a) impractical, b) a step backwards, and/or c) utterly useless. But to a 16 year old girl, it merely sounds "cool."
And cool makes the phone companies money, cuz there's many more 16 year old girls with cell phones than there are people such as yourself.
Re:Binary computers? How long before base4 compute
on
DNA Goes Binary
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The problem is one of line noise. In binary computing, your lines are either conveying a 1 (voltage high) or a zero (voltage nil).
If you were to go to four states, now instead of having +0V and +5V, you now also have +1.5V and +3.5V representing different states of the quad-bit.
Fluxuations in the system's power do not easily switch a line from +5 to 0, or vice versa, but could easily switch 3.5 to 5. The more signals you try to carry on a given line, the more suceptible that line is to noise. Obviously, by increasing your max voltage, you could separate your signals more, and take care of it that way, but that's not a solution; you'd be less power-efficient, you'd generate a lot more heat, and all sorts of bad things would happen.
In short, binary is Simple. And that's why it works. Once you start trying to get into multiple voltage levels, you make things far trickier.
Decade-old computer go boom. Scientist need new computer. Scientist unavailable to buy computer with ISA slots. Scientist SOL, regardless of ``research'' invested before upgrading.
Right. Because Ph.D. students never have free time. They spend all their time on serious, groundbreaking research, only. And Ph.D. students never have their own webspace. If it's on the Internet, it must be a serious, peer-reviewed, critically analyzed piece of high academic merit.
And in that supposed "free time" that Ph.D. students don't have, they'd never think about writing a mock paper using some differential equations that any second-year science student would understand because it amuses them.
For Christ's sake, the guy watches Buffy (Yes, Ph.D. students at Universities do other things besides do research and contribute to "political, social, and scientific development;" sometimes they even watch television!) and ran some variables through a model, wrote up a silly paper, and published it on his web page.
Besides, to McDonalds, $3 million is nothing compared to the amount of money they deal with, so it's not really a punishment anyway.
Actually, you're wrong. McDonalds had been sued over burns resulting from coffee spills well over a dozen times in the past. Courts had found that McDonalds' habit of serving coffee between 170-190 deg. F was dangerous, as humans can't drink beverages served above 120-130 deg F or so. They had been repeatedly warned, repeatedly told to decrease the temperature of their coffee, and repeatedly been asked to pay medical expenses.
The medical expense payments weren't much. So McDonalds didn't care.
This time, the judge got sick of it, said enough was enough, and charged them millions of dollars so that maybe, just maybe, the administration of the company would wake up and do something about it.
The $3 mil wasn't "for her" or for punative damages or whatever, so much as the fact that the cash had to go somewhere, so long as it wasn't still in McDonalds' pocket, and the judge wasn't allowed to just charge McDonalds $3M to the government -- it had to be awarded to a plaintiff.
Moral: Don't fuck with judges. They don't like being disrespected.;)
Within one day, it had reached $65. Selling it off at 50 would've yielded 36 dollars a share profit (before taxes), or a 250% return on investment. Not a bad deal at all.
A lot of IPO buyers sell the stock very quickly right afterwards -- that's why the price climbs very high and then dips back down: the massive selloff on the second day. Furthermore, the stock's now at $5.97 because people have -been- selling it now for some time.
The same thing has been done with Linux in general (Red Hat)
Actually, I think that you picked a very poor example in that one. Red Hat realizes the value that core developers brought to Linux. A thousand or so of the major contributors -- who did it for love, not for any hope of future profit -- were given rights to buy RHAT stock at the IPO, making them all quite a boodle of cash if they were smart enough about it. Not only that, but Red Hat pays the salaries of people who used to just do linux development because they wanted to, but because Red Hat is able to make money off of it, they feed them as well.
Very rarely do the engineers and scientists and researchers grab the profits from their inventions. But businesses exist for profit, and that's how the world works: they make the money off of things invented by individuals.
Linux/open-source businesses in particular have been fairly conscious about remembering to reward those who worked to bring about that which they're profitting off of. Goodness knows, it's certainly in their best interests to do so.
I'm saying that if you want to make something last *forever*, you've got to forego the video and graphics and stick to the most basic fundamental communications medium: text.
If you want to make things last forever, you've got to buy into the "Relic" mentality. When our civilization is buried under rubble 2,000 years from now, nobody's going to remember how to decode WMA, MPG, or whatever whiz-bang video format it was last encoded in. But if you stick to a very simple text-based layout, then your data has a much better shot at being recovered.
"What we really need is some universally acceptable method to store digital data that isn't likely to decay or fall out of favor in the next ten years."
Project Gutenberg's done it for a while.
It's called "ASCII."
Readily convertable to dead-tree format by every printer. Ever. Backward and forward portable on every 7- and 8-bit machine in existance. Ever. Readable on any screen by well over 1/3 the world's population. Can convey an immense amount of information.
(They didn't have images in their records for the last 2000 years; frankly, if something's really So Important That It Must Be Saved, it can be done in the good queen's English.)
If you just take a disk and don't do any crazy filesysteming, just write one big honking text file sequentially to it, and mark down somewhere on the top that it functions in 8-bit units, well, it doesn't take too much effort to figure out how to write a driver for it to port it to the next media that comes along.
(Or just print it out. After all, high quality acid-free paper, stored in a vault somewhere, has a shelf-life measureable in centuries. Not too shabby.)
We have limited desk space for big monitors. And lots of us like to take a computer to class with us to take notes on, etc. Many people plug their laptop into the wall and use it as their primary computer as well. And do [try to] play games on them, etc.
So even if "most people" don't use them as portable supercomputers... plenty do.
but at least it's not a lingering mess, environmentally
How many routers get clogged full of spam? How long does your computer sit and whirr while it's busy downloading spam?
The electricity from all that does come from somewhere. Is it a lot? Nope. Times billions and billions of spam messages? Now it starts to add up a bit. *shrug*. It's not going to blast black ugly holes in the Earth overnight. Nor will it have any direct visible effect at all. But don't pretend there's no consequences whatsoever.
My friend in another dorm room keeps a small server there for me hitched up to the network. My computer sends file diffs there every night. The server maintains at least five levels of backups of every file, so they can be rolled back.
(We've got sprinklers, so it's a good idea that they be in separate rooms. If the whole place goes up in smoke... well, I imagine I could probably get an extension on my term papers.)
I send it all through an ssh tunnel so it's all nicely encrypted end-to-end. Server runs OpenBSD so (hopefully) it's damned difficult for somebody to crack into.
[Those] people do NOT know how to enjoy something. AICN forums are simply mediums to pick apart every film's most microscopic (and even if non-existing) flaws and state such claims that Spiderman with organic web shooters "robs my childhood"
Slashdot Mirror
...this is one way to have a portable number...
:)
It's a shame that someone can't invent some sort of mobile telephone device... whereby you take a small telephone and use "radio waves" or somesuch to connect to other phones.. erm. heh.
Sounds like a waste of time. Blogging with your phone will only result in mis-typed entries with poorly lit, poorly framed and blurry photos of famous landmarks that you can't quite make out. ...And SMS text messages just result in slowly-entered, oft-mistyped messages that could have been communicated more accurately in about 1/3 the total time, if only some sort of speech telecommunication device were available to the user (heh), but for whatever reason, SMS's sell like hotcakes.
To a computer nerd (I take the liberty of assuming) like yourself, phone blogging sounds a) impractical, b) a step backwards, and/or c) utterly useless. But to a 16 year old girl, it merely sounds "cool."
And cool makes the phone companies money, cuz there's many more 16 year old girls with cell phones than there are people such as yourself.
The problem is one of line noise. In binary computing, your lines are either conveying a 1 (voltage high) or a zero (voltage nil).
If you were to go to four states, now instead of having +0V and +5V, you now also have +1.5V and +3.5V representing different states of the quad-bit.
Fluxuations in the system's power do not easily switch a line from +5 to 0, or vice versa, but could easily switch 3.5 to 5. The more signals you try to carry on a given line, the more suceptible that line is to noise. Obviously, by increasing your max voltage, you could separate your signals more, and take care of it that way, but that's not a solution; you'd be less power-efficient, you'd generate a lot more heat, and all sorts of bad things would happen.
In short, binary is Simple. And that's why it works. Once you start trying to get into multiple voltage levels, you make things far trickier.
Decade-old computer go boom. Scientist need new computer. Scientist unavailable to buy computer with ISA slots. Scientist SOL, regardless of ``research'' invested before upgrading.
That design is so 1970s. ;)
Uhm... Just one correction: in Half-Life, you can bind your controls to anything you'd like. Unreal Tournament is the same.
I think most modern games allow you to rebind your keys; everyone has their own "perfect" layout and they want it just a bit different.
If the future of the academic elite cannot crack a joke without the rest of society jumping all over him... I weep for the future.
Right. Because Ph.D. students never have free time. They spend all their time on serious, groundbreaking research, only. And Ph.D. students never have their own webspace. If it's on the Internet, it must be a serious, peer-reviewed, critically analyzed piece of high academic merit.
;)
And in that supposed "free time" that Ph.D. students don't have, they'd never think about writing a mock paper using some differential equations that any second-year science student would understand because it amuses them.
For Christ's sake, the guy watches Buffy (Yes, Ph.D. students at Universities do other things besides do research and contribute to "political, social, and scientific development;" sometimes they even watch television!) and ran some variables through a model, wrote up a silly paper, and published it on his web page.
It's funny. Laugh.
Besides, to McDonalds, $3 million is nothing compared to the amount of money they deal with, so it's not really a punishment anyway.
;)
Actually, you're wrong. McDonalds had been sued over burns resulting from coffee spills well over a dozen times in the past. Courts had found that McDonalds' habit of serving coffee between 170-190 deg. F was dangerous, as humans can't drink beverages served above 120-130 deg F or so. They had been repeatedly warned, repeatedly told to decrease the temperature of their coffee, and repeatedly been asked to pay medical expenses.
The medical expense payments weren't much. So McDonalds didn't care.
This time, the judge got sick of it, said enough was enough, and charged them millions of dollars so that maybe, just maybe, the administration of the company would wake up and do something about it.
The $3 mil wasn't "for her" or for punative damages or whatever, so much as the fact that the cash had to go somewhere, so long as it wasn't still in McDonalds' pocket, and the judge wasn't allowed to just charge McDonalds $3M to the government -- it had to be awarded to a plaintiff.
Moral: Don't fuck with judges. They don't like being disrespected.
You naively assume that they held this long.
Within one day, it had reached $65. Selling it off at 50 would've yielded 36 dollars a share profit (before taxes), or a 250% return on investment. Not a bad deal at all.
A lot of IPO buyers sell the stock very quickly right afterwards -- that's why the price climbs very high and then dips back down: the massive selloff on the second day. Furthermore, the stock's now at $5.97 because people have -been- selling it now for some time.
The same thing has been done with Linux in general (Red Hat)
Actually, I think that you picked a very poor example in that one. Red Hat realizes the value that core developers brought to Linux. A thousand or so of the major contributors -- who did it for love, not for any hope of future profit -- were given rights to buy RHAT stock at the IPO, making them all quite a boodle of cash if they were smart enough about it. Not only that, but Red Hat pays the salaries of people who used to just do linux development because they wanted to, but because Red Hat is able to make money off of it, they feed them as well.
Very rarely do the engineers and scientists and researchers grab the profits from their inventions. But businesses exist for profit, and that's how the world works: they make the money off of things invented by individuals.
Linux/open-source businesses in particular have been fairly conscious about remembering to reward those who worked to bring about that which they're profitting off of. Goodness knows, it's certainly in their best interests to do so.
"Enlightened is the man who can consider an idea without first accepting it."
-- Voltare.
I'm saying that if you want to make something last *forever*, you've got to forego the video and graphics and stick to the most basic fundamental communications medium: text.
If you want to make things last forever, you've got to buy into the "Relic" mentality. When our civilization is buried under rubble 2,000 years from now, nobody's going to remember how to decode WMA, MPG, or whatever whiz-bang video format it was last encoded in. But if you stick to a very simple text-based layout, then your data has a much better shot at being recovered.
"What we really need is some universally acceptable method to store digital data that isn't likely to decay or fall out of favor in the next ten years."
Project Gutenberg's done it for a while.
It's called "ASCII."
Readily convertable to dead-tree format by every printer. Ever. Backward and forward portable on every 7- and 8-bit machine in existance. Ever. Readable on any screen by well over 1/3 the world's population. Can convey an immense amount of information.
(They didn't have images in their records for the last 2000 years; frankly, if something's really So Important That It Must Be Saved, it can be done in the good queen's English.)
If you just take a disk and don't do any crazy filesysteming, just write one big honking text file sequentially to it, and mark down somewhere on the top that it functions in 8-bit units, well, it doesn't take too much effort to figure out how to write a driver for it to port it to the next media that comes along.
(Or just print it out. After all, high quality acid-free paper, stored in a vault somewhere, has a shelf-life measureable in centuries. Not too shabby.)
Yup. ;)
It's only copyrighted if it's 4:14 in length. :)
If I could, I'd mod you +1, Troll.
;)
Good job.
One of the better ones I've read in a while.
2 months later I had to see the principle again. "Please design the school webpage for us..".
Well, come on. Don't leave us hangin' like that... Did you?
... often do replace their desktop with a laptop.
We have limited desk space for big monitors. And lots of us like to take a computer to class with us to take notes on, etc. Many people plug their laptop into the wall and use it as their primary computer as well. And do [try to] play games on them, etc.
So even if "most people" don't use them as portable supercomputers... plenty do.
but at least it's not a lingering mess, environmentally
How many routers get clogged full of spam? How long does your computer sit and whirr while it's busy downloading spam?
The electricity from all that does come from somewhere. Is it a lot? Nope. Times billions and billions of spam messages? Now it starts to add up a bit. *shrug*. It's not going to blast black ugly holes in the Earth overnight. Nor will it have any direct visible effect at all. But don't pretend there's no consequences whatsoever.
Thanks, but my primary system is win 2K.
I rolled my own system to do the backing up. One of these days I'll clean it up and release it or something.
My friend in another dorm room keeps a small server there for me hitched up to the network. My computer sends file diffs there every night. The server maintains at least five levels of backups of every file, so they can be rolled back.
(We've got sprinklers, so it's a good idea that they be in separate rooms. If the whole place goes up in smoke... well, I imagine I could probably get an extension on my term papers.)
I send it all through an ssh tunnel so it's all nicely encrypted end-to-end. Server runs OpenBSD so (hopefully) it's damned difficult for somebody to crack into.
Now why in the hell would Kiwi want to do that?
:P
"Look! Just buy this one can of shoe polish from us, and you'll never need another."
"Erm. Hm. Scratch that. Just buy the old stuff. Over. and over."
[Those] people do NOT know how to enjoy something. AICN forums are simply mediums to pick apart every film's most microscopic (and even if non-existing) flaws and state such claims that Spiderman with organic web shooters "robs my childhood"
And yet you post on Slashdot. Riiiight.
Everyone knows that one gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes
Hm. And here I thought that it was 1024^3.