I agree, but many of the world's problems are social science ones, not hard science. For example, we now have the technology to make enough food for all the starving people in Africa; however, the dicatators there won't allow us to distribute it. (People are more subservient when they're living hand to mouth. Too busy to overthrow the government.) It's like the concert for Bangladesh the concerned rock stars had years ago. After using the proceeds to ship three boatloads of food to the country, the government there wouldn't let it out of port, and it sat there rotting. I'm hoping that the new presidential administration forms a cohesive policy for dealing with Africa and S. America so we can use our technological advancements (like biological engineered grains) to help the people who need it most.
I also think college should be free (I suggest being paid for by taxing businesses based on number of college graduated employees) as long as it is required to get a job better than working at Burger King or Blockbuster.
I don't think "free" college would be much of a solution. First of all, the people who need the most help are in situations where they're having a hard time getting through high school, so we need a fundamental reform of the K - 12 system before we even consider something like you propose. Secondly, it would change the value of a college degree: if everyone has a degree, then how to businesses know who the cream of the crop is? Suddenly a college degree is as valuable as a high school degree is now, and the people getting the top jobs have one or more Ph.Ds.
It would be like the rise of land grant Universities in the 1950's, when a college education went from something only pursued by doctors and lawyers to being attainable by the children of most middle class households. As a result, a college degree is no longer a guarantee that a graduate can get a decent job, let alone a high paying one. (IT is a major exception, since sysadmins and programmers jobs are more dependent on skill sets than a degree. People who graduate as English or History majors, on the other hand, have nearly no job prospects, aside from working at the pretzel hut until their screen plays get discovered.)
It's not a matter of providing info to the government regarding school lunch consumption, but a matter of submitting fingerprints to the government. As it is, the police only have the fingerprints of people who have been arrested; this system makes it easier for cops to get people's fingerprinsts. At best it lets them find people whose fingerprints are found at crime scenes. At worst this could lead to false arrests, as the accuracy of fingerprint matching has been questioned (there was a /. story on this a few months ago).
I'm guessing this will drive down the price of the Dreamcast. Always wanted to try putting BSD or Linux on the DC, and maybe lower prices will let me buy one just for that purpose (use it as a dns server or something similarly non-intensive).
Ooh, another lossy compression format. And here I'm waiting for digital music representation that is better than CD-Rom. (Mmmm... vinyl. I can hardly wait for DVD audio.) I doubt that this will be used for music as much as they seem to suggest. It might be good for streaming voice-only lectures, though.
I've been wondering about this for awhile: instead of getting a big screen tv, what about buying a presentation projector and a good quality tv tuner card for your computer (I see that Hauppage has a $400 all digital HD card now, and there was some beast of an HD card reviewed on/. a few months ago). A 1024 x 768 capable projector and a tuner card would be around the price of an HDTV set, only a bit cheaper and twice the viewing area. You could also save by using a DVD-ROM drive instead of a stand alone player (of course, there would be some quality trade off).
What do you guys/gals think? What sort of picture quality could I expect? I'm more of an audiophile than a home theater person, so I may not know what the hell I'm talking about, but I always thought this would would be a swanky setup.
I have a Ford truck. I made copies of my keys so my friends could drive it from time to time, but that didn't work too well since they had to physically come over to my place. Luckily, my room mate is an engineer, and he has a replicator machine just like in Star Trek. He was nice enough to make all my friends copies of my Ford truck. True, Ford didn't make any money, but my friends couldn't afford to buy factory-made trucks anyway.
I almost forgot: there was some crazy Finnish guy giving away free trucks, but my friends weren't interested. For one thing, they weren't compatible with normal gas, only diesel. Also, the steering wheel was in the back seat.
It's all about standard APIs. Rather than program for each possible input and output device, game programmers can write fairly generic code, e.g. instead of writing code for a specific joystick, a programmer tells MS Direct X "if there is a joystick, it will do this function." Direct X then incorporates this functionality through the Windows device driver. The same thing is done with graphics, sound, etc.
Ever since Direct X version 5 or so, the Windows game APIs have been very good, while the APIs for other platforms have been less good. OpenGL was a cross-platform exception in the 3d graphics realm for a while (remember the original Quake?!), but it was designed to be a 3d API for architects, not gamers, so the standard was slow to change. By contrast, the Windows' APIs continued to add new whiz-bang features game developers loved.
In short, until the Linux game APIs get better or they develop a cross-platform API (mentioned in another post), I don't see much happening with Linux gaming besides people porting Windows games to it.
I was in the same boat last year; undergraduate English and History degrees, the only job for which I am qualified is an eight-hour shift at the Pretzel Hut until my screen play gets discovered. One of my undergrad professors turned me on to Michigan's School of Information, a two year Masters' program. It's not hardcore CS; there are a couple different sub-specializations like Human-Computer Interaction (good for software design) or Information Economics (become a CIO or work for a VC or something). There are also dual degree programs with the law school (intellectual property law, I assume) and the school of public policy.
If you don't specify +xinerama it should work. It depends on which window manager you use, though; some just aren't aware of the other head this way. I couldn't get it to work with the old versions of KDE or Gnome (about six months ago), not sure about the new ones. I use Enlightenment myself.
Re:An Architect's Perspective
on
The Renaissance
·
· Score: 1
We need to look at what's truly missing: there is no paradigm shift like there was in the Renaissance. They went from an abstract view of spirituality to a new form where worldly characteristics were combined with spritual ones. For example, pre-Renaissance art is usually two dimensional iconographic depictions of religious figures, and it would be thought blasphemous to try to represent them realistically. Contrast that with, say, Michaelangelo's David, whose "perfect" physical body represents his worthiness in the eyes of God.
The combination of physical and ethereal space was a major breakthrough in the culture, influencing both art (perspective drawings especially) and architecture (grandiose monuments to God, to the worthiness of a region's people, etc). While the Internet may foster more communication, so far is has not changed how the dominant culture sees itself and the world.
I highly recommend Margaret Wertheim's (sp?) book _The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace_ for a good synopsis of how people viewed the world throughout European history (though I think her parallels with our time are a bit weak).
I don't think legislation would go after normal users chatting with buddies through a UDP connection from their dorm room's ethernet. The real target would be upstart companies that threaten the phone monopoly, especially cable companies that can provide cheap VoIP. For example, Media One recently had a "three months free" VoIP promotion in my area, and between that and their "three services (cable modem, telephony, cable TV) one monthly bill" slogan, people here are dying to break free of their substandard Ameritech service.
I prefer paper ballots to, say, an online form. Here's why: with a paper ballot, there is a permanent record. It would be far easier to falsify results if the process were only digital. I'm afraid that a politically motivated leet haxor could break into pollingbooth.gov (after all, Al Gore invented the Internet), or that a Jeb Bush crony could modify the log file on the Florida server. At least with paper ballots, there is something tangible we can recount.
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I agree, but many of the world's problems are social science ones, not hard science. For example, we now have the technology to make enough food for all the starving people in Africa; however, the dicatators there won't allow us to distribute it. (People are more subservient when they're living hand to mouth. Too busy to overthrow the government.) It's like the concert for Bangladesh the concerned rock stars had years ago. After using the proceeds to ship three boatloads of food to the country, the government there wouldn't let it out of port, and it sat there rotting. I'm hoping that the new presidential administration forms a cohesive policy for dealing with Africa and S. America so we can use our technological advancements (like biological engineered grains) to help the people who need it most.
I don't think "free" college would be much of a solution. First of all, the people who need the most help are in situations where they're having a hard time getting through high school, so we need a fundamental reform of the K - 12 system before we even consider something like you propose. Secondly, it would change the value of a college degree: if everyone has a degree, then how to businesses know who the cream of the crop is? Suddenly a college degree is as valuable as a high school degree is now, and the people getting the top jobs have one or more Ph.Ds.
It would be like the rise of land grant Universities in the 1950's, when a college education went from something only pursued by doctors and lawyers to being attainable by the children of most middle class households. As a result, a college degree is no longer a guarantee that a graduate can get a decent job, let alone a high paying one. (IT is a major exception, since sysadmins and programmers jobs are more dependent on skill sets than a degree. People who graduate as English or History majors, on the other hand, have nearly no job prospects, aside from working at the pretzel hut until their screen plays get discovered.)
It's not a matter of providing info to the government regarding school lunch consumption, but a matter of submitting fingerprints to the government. As it is, the police only have the fingerprints of people who have been arrested; this system makes it easier for cops to get people's fingerprinsts. At best it lets them find people whose fingerprints are found at crime scenes. At worst this could lead to false arrests, as the accuracy of fingerprint matching has been questioned (there was a /. story on this a few months ago).
Back to the Future II was neat... except for that whole your-mom-having-enormous-breasts-and-being-a-slut part.
I'm guessing this will drive down the price of the Dreamcast. Always wanted to try putting BSD or Linux on the DC, and maybe lower prices will let me buy one just for that purpose (use it as a dns server or something similarly non-intensive).
Ooh, another lossy compression format. And here I'm waiting for digital music representation that is better than CD-Rom. (Mmmm... vinyl. I can hardly wait for DVD audio.) I doubt that this will be used for music as much as they seem to suggest. It might be good for streaming voice-only lectures, though.
What do you guys/gals think? What sort of picture quality could I expect? I'm more of an audiophile than a home theater person, so I may not know what the hell I'm talking about, but I always thought this would would be a swanky setup.
I almost forgot: there was some crazy Finnish guy giving away free trucks, but my friends weren't interested. For one thing, they weren't compatible with normal gas, only diesel. Also, the steering wheel was in the back seat.
Ever since Direct X version 5 or so, the Windows game APIs have been very good, while the APIs for other platforms have been less good. OpenGL was a cross-platform exception in the 3d graphics realm for a while (remember the original Quake?!), but it was designed to be a 3d API for architects, not gamers, so the standard was slow to change. By contrast, the Windows' APIs continued to add new whiz-bang features game developers loved.
In short, until the Linux game APIs get better or they develop a cross-platform API (mentioned in another post), I don't see much happening with Linux gaming besides people porting Windows games to it.
Their web site is www.si.umich.edu
The combination of physical and ethereal space was a major breakthrough in the culture, influencing both art (perspective drawings especially) and architecture (grandiose monuments to God, to the worthiness of a region's people, etc). While the Internet may foster more communication, so far is has not changed how the dominant culture sees itself and the world.
I highly recommend Margaret Wertheim's (sp?) book _The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace_ for a good synopsis of how people viewed the world throughout European history (though I think her parallels with our time are a bit weak).