The networks in many college dorms are imposing bandwidth limits as well, and that will likely keep increasing, for the same reason Time Warner is doing it (a few big bandwidth hogs can suck up inordinate amounts of resources and make it harder to keep the system usable for everyone else).
Just recently Cornell announced they will raise the price of network access in the dorms to about $40/month, the students are all yelling about it. They definitely don't want to pay real-world prices.
In games and in movies, we often like to see things exaggerated to match our imaginations. E.g. when you kick someone they go flying across the room and smash into the opposite wall. Were the acrobatics and fight scenes in The Matrix realistic? No, but they depicted a kind of idealized/stylistic imagine that many people imagine, when they picture a super-skilled warrior fighting. Another example would be the Chinese wu xia novels, one of which Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was based on (or various other Hong Kong martial-arts movies).
When I play Grand Theft Auto 3, I'm impressed by the "realism" in the way cars skid and bounce around, but on the other hand I know that if the physics in the game were truly realistic, I wouldn't have as much fun skidding and bouncing around (and then still being able to drive away afterwards). If I want more realism, I'll play Gran Turismo.
Mario Kart 64 is still one of my absolute favorite games, and it's set in a cartoon universe. There is an entire spectrum between the two poles the NYT article mentions; sometimes it's fun to play in a completely cartoon-like universe, sometimes it's fun to play in a reasonably accurate simulation of the real universe, and most of the time, it's fun to play in a world which is a mixture of the two, as long as the designers did a good job in designing the laws of physics in that world.
If I remember correctly, the last scene in the last episode several months ago showed Crichton vowing to go off and hunt down Scorpius, right? It's been so long. I don't remember what else happened in that one (although I remember it was right after one of the Crichtons died).
I knew there were going to be new episodes sometime in April, but I didn't expect it this early in April. Just yesterday I figured I'd better go look and see, and was surprised to see that the first one is tonight (and relieved I didn't wait any longer to check, though I should have known slashdot would have reminded me).
There were two more articles in Science about this "bubble fusion" stuff: one, called To publish or not to publish that explains why they published the article despite the controversy, and another one called 'Bubble Fusion' Paper Generates a Tempest in a Beaker which has some opposing viewpoints. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure you need to be a subscriber or at a university which subscribes to access those (I access it through my university account).
It's all very interesting, and I'll be curious to see what the final conclusions are. I'm still not sure if I think it was best to publish now, or wait for more independent confirmation. At least they didn't try to hide all the controversy (they even point out that senior science managers at Oak Ridge Lab contacted the journal and asked them to delay publishing the paper..)
If they're that desperate, I'll take some money to stick some Post-It(tm) notes on my monitor which have advertisements on them. Hey, I'll see them for hours every day, that should be worth something.
I avoid using the mouse whenever possible. I have function keys (in various combinations with Control and Shift keys) mapped to warp to my various windows such as xterms, netscape, xdvi, gv, etc. The mouse slows me down too much. I mainly use about 10-12 of those mapped function keys to get around my desktop; it takes very little time to get used to, and is easy and fast.
I can't imagine that using a pen would be any faster than a mouse, so I wouldn't be very interested.
Uh...racial hate crimes don't have to have a "reason" behind them...when they happen, they happen, period, it doesn't matter what the perpetrators' frame of mind was.
I thought the definition of a "hate crime" involved state of mind. I.e. if I kill someone of another race just because I was mugging them, that's a crime. But if I kill them because I hate their race or sexual orientation or whatever, that's a hate crime, and has a more severe punishment. (Not saying I necessarily agree with the reasoning, but I thought that was the legal definition of hate crimes in a nutshell.)
True, in GTA3 you do beat up on gangs of various races (the triad in Chinatown, the Japanese gang, and later the Columbians). But you aren't beating them up because of their race, whereas in Ethnic Cleansing it sounds like race is the reason for the violence. And in fact in GTA3 your loyalties change over time; for a while you are working for the Japanese, then later you are killing them while working for someone else (sorry if I spoiled it for anyone playing the game who hasn't gotten that far). (And as an aside, one of my favorite moments in the game was stealing a gang's car to do a hit, and then watching that gang get blamed for it.)
And yes, in GTA3 you get paid for doing the various missions. Also, I think some of the missions involve killing cops, so it is a main part of the game at least occasionally. At least, I remember in one part of the game you work for a crooked cop and have to destroy evidence, etc.
Ethnic Cleansing, made by Resistance Records (owned by the National Alliance neo-nazi group) using the Genesis3D open-source rendering software. In the game, you control a white KKK member who runs around beating up on other races. And you thought people were upset about violence in video games after Columbine...
On the other hand, on this topic someone asked "why is beating up on other races bad, but beating up cops and prostitutes (in Grand Theft Auto 3) OK?"
I agree that some competition for google would be nice. Google is too good, there is no one that even comes close, at least for me right now. That makes me a bit nervous; if google suddenly turns evil, then what will we do? It would be nice if there were someone in second place who wasn't so far behind.
I used to use altavista, I still remember when google came along. For a while, I'd still usually try altavista first, and definitely use it when I was looking for something really obscure because it had a far bigger database. But when searching for things where altavista would give me 50 million hits, I soon learned that google would almost always have what I wanted within the first page.
I hope google keeps doing everything they're doing right, but I do like a bit of diversity. I hope someone else comes along with some useful features I haven't even thought about yet.
No, I don't think it's the same as increasing penis size, etc. It's more like exercising an actual muscle to make it bigger (or maybe helping a muscle to relax so that it doesn't tense up).
In my case, the doc said that doing up-close reading was fatiguing the muscles in my eyes that allow me to focus at various depths, or something along those lines (it's been a long time, I forget the details). She said she'd seen many people with a very similar problem. At the time, she said at least hopefully it would slow down the progression of nearsightedness, but she tried not to get me too hopeful. It worked really well for me. I'm sure many peoples' nearsightedness may have other causes.
Haven't you ever stared at something up close (a few inches from your face) for a bit, then noticed that when you look away, your eyes take a while before they will focus at a farther distance again? Why is it hard to believe that muscles around the eyes can get tired?
Anyone who takes what they read on Slashdot as authoritative medical advice is gonna have problems in life at some point.
My story is just my story. Someone may read it and think of asking around in their area for a similar optometrist. I found the one I did by posting a query on Usenet (that was back in 1991 when it was still more useful), and someone posted their story, which was similar to one I just posted. It was helpful to me.
I started becoming nearsighted about 11 years ago when I started working at a computer company. It was worse after spending a lot of time in front of the computer. I was going to get glasses to correct it, but someone suggested I see a particular doctor, I think he called her a "behavioral optometrist".
Often when you get corrective lenses, they compensate for the near-sightedness (or whatever problem you are having) by making things appear closer. But that usually makes the problem worse. Most people I know with glasses say they got more and more nearsighted over time.
Anyway, the doc I saw gave me the opposite prescription -- lenses that made everything appear farther away (basically, reading glasses). I only wore them while reading or using a computer, or looking at stuff up close, but not at other times. My nearsightedness gradually got better, and eventually cleared up. My next eye test came up 20/20. Now, all these years later, my vision is still perfect. But if I ever forget to wear my reading glasses and use a computer or read a book for a couple of hours, my eyes get fatigued and I become nearsighted for a few hours or so. (And as I mentioned in my other reply, keeping the computer monitor farther away from my eyes also helps).
So a therapeutic approach may be better than a corrective approach, at least in some situations. (Probably not with the condition the submitter has, although I know nothing about that particular condition.)
I find that my eyes are less fatigued if I can be farther away from the monitor. That's hard to do in most office situations, and in my small apartment. Ideally I'd like to have a table behind my main desk, to hold the monitor, about 4 feet away from me (and just use a slightly bigger font so I can still read everything).
One thing I did was to get a short-depth monitor. I have a Viewsonic PS790, it's a 19" monitor but the front-to-back size is about that of a 15" monitor, so I can push it farther back on the table. Unfortunately they're not making them any more. Anyone know of a similar monitor still being made? (Eventually I'll go with an LCD, which I'll be able to push way back.)
I understand his complaint about alarm clocks not having keypads. I don't really need one in my alarm clock. But I've noticed that most VCRs these days don't even let you punch in the start and stop recording times when setting the timer. (None of the last 3 VCRs I've bought allow it.) You have to use up and down arrows on the remote to select the recording times. It's completely stupid; it takes much longer to set the times, and there is an entire numeric keypad on the remote already! I assumed they started doing it to "dumb down" the process of setting the timer. But the VCR I had 10 years ago would let you just punch in the times using the numeric keypad, and it was much faster and easier in my opinion.
Talk about mistitled; by the time they're done, there are going to be about 50 LOTR DVDs, special edition this, boxed set that, wide screen the other thing, etc. Which one is the One DVD to rule them all?
Ah, I must have the academic version; I did get it for a pretty good price as a student, although I forget where. (I don't think it was through our campus store, but I'm pretty sure it was a company running a special promotion on academic discounts.) Anyway, then I do still wonder if there would be any strange behavior running the academic version under Crossover.
I installed Office 2000 a couple of years ago. I seem to remember it had something built in where, if you didn't register the product, it would disable itself after 50 uses. I have no idea how they implemented it. I'm assuming that it will still be able to properly register itself even when running under Wine/Crossover? (Or I wonder if running under Crossover somehow disables the time bomb?)
I agree, if they hadn't done it, someone else would have.
But for those of us who were there and lived through the firestorm following, the names Canter and Siegel will be forever burned into our memories. When it was happening, I knew the internet was about to take a serious turn, and that we'd never go back to the way things were, for better or worse.
And yeah, who knows if history will recall the names Canter and Siegel 100 years from now. But it was a pretty significant event -- the first large-scale commercial advertisement on the internet! Tell your kids or grandkids in 10 or 20 or 30 years that you were there for that. They'll look at you the same way you'd look at a great-grandparent that says they remember when the first person on their block got a telephone or television.
Re: learning welding underwater -- when I visited Australia, driving was a somewhat similar experience (driving on the opposite side of the road from what I was used to).
At first, it was hard because everything was the opposite of what I knew. But within a few days, I simply learned to reverse my innate responses, since I knew that those responses were backwards, and so it got easier. But after a couple of weeks, I had started to get accustomed to the new configuration, and so some of my natural responses were correct. That meant I could no longer just "do the opposite of what felt natural", and it actually got harder again and took more thought; I always had to think "is my gut feeling about what to do an old gut feeling from the US, or a newly acquired gut feeling from the past couple of weeks in Australia?"
I was there for about 4 or 5 weeks. When I got back to the US, within a day, I promptly drove on the wrong side of the road. (It was a small road with no traffic, so fewer cues, and I did catch myself within a few seconds before causing any major havoc.)
With people I think it's easy to ascribe this to learning, rather than built-in gravity models. A more interesting example is with animals.
My neighbor's dog (an Australian cattle dog) is fantastic at catching tennis balls. If you throw one, he can go running, look up over his shoulder, and catch the ball in midair over the shoulder. If you throw farther and he gets there too late, he's very good at knowing where it will go on the bounce and doing a flying leap to catch it off the bounce.
If we built a little enclosed park with atmosphere on the moon, I wonder how long it would take him to adapt the model in his brain to calculate the new trajectories? (I guess I believe that even in dogs, it's learned -- of course there weren't any tennis balls bouncing around over evolutionary time scales, and probably not a whole lot of birds falling out of the sky and bouncing in parabolic trajectories either.)
Asimov wrote another cute little short story called "Belief" in which a scientist was able to levitate simply because he believed he could. (I think it first started happening in his sleep, and then he was able to do it awake.)
Slashdot Mirror
The networks in many college dorms are imposing bandwidth limits as well, and that will likely keep increasing, for the same reason Time Warner is doing it (a few big bandwidth hogs can suck up inordinate amounts of resources and make it harder to keep the system usable for everyone else).
Just recently Cornell announced they will raise the price of network access in the dorms to about $40/month, the students are all yelling about it. They definitely don't want to pay real-world prices.
In games and in movies, we often like to see things exaggerated to match our imaginations. E.g. when you kick someone they go flying across the room and smash into the opposite wall. Were the acrobatics and fight scenes in The Matrix realistic? No, but they depicted a kind of idealized/stylistic imagine that many people imagine, when they picture a super-skilled warrior fighting. Another example would be the Chinese wu xia novels, one of which Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was based on (or various other Hong Kong martial-arts movies).
When I play Grand Theft Auto 3, I'm impressed by the "realism" in the way cars skid and bounce around, but on the other hand I know that if the physics in the game were truly realistic, I wouldn't have as much fun skidding and bouncing around (and then still being able to drive away afterwards). If I want more realism, I'll play Gran Turismo.
Mario Kart 64 is still one of my absolute favorite games, and it's set in a cartoon universe. There is an entire spectrum between the two poles the NYT article mentions; sometimes it's fun to play in a completely cartoon-like universe, sometimes it's fun to play in a reasonably accurate simulation of the real universe, and most of the time, it's fun to play in a world which is a mixture of the two, as long as the designers did a good job in designing the laws of physics in that world.
If I remember correctly, the last scene in the last episode several months ago showed Crichton vowing to go off and hunt down Scorpius, right? It's been so long. I don't remember what else happened in that one (although I remember it was right after one of the Crichtons died).
I knew there were going to be new episodes sometime in April, but I didn't expect it this early in April. Just yesterday I figured I'd better go look and see, and was surprised to see that the first one is tonight (and relieved I didn't wait any longer to check, though I should have known slashdot would have reminded me).
There were two more articles in Science about this "bubble fusion" stuff: one, called To publish or not to publish that explains why they published the article despite the controversy, and another one called 'Bubble Fusion' Paper Generates a Tempest in a Beaker which has some opposing viewpoints. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure you need to be a subscriber or at a university which subscribes to access those (I access it through my university account).
It's all very interesting, and I'll be curious to see what the final conclusions are. I'm still not sure if I think it was best to publish now, or wait for more independent confirmation. At least they didn't try to hide all the controversy (they even point out that senior science managers at Oak Ridge Lab contacted the journal and asked them to delay publishing the paper..)
If they're that desperate, I'll take some money to stick some Post-It(tm) notes on my monitor which have advertisements on them. Hey, I'll see them for hours every day, that should be worth something.
I avoid using the mouse whenever possible. I have function keys (in various combinations with Control and Shift keys) mapped to warp to my various windows such as xterms, netscape, xdvi, gv, etc. The mouse slows me down too much. I mainly use about 10-12 of those mapped function keys to get around my desktop; it takes very little time to get used to, and is easy and fast.
I can't imagine that using a pen would be any faster than a mouse, so I wouldn't be very interested.
Do they have these machines installed in music stores? That would be really handy.
Uh...racial hate crimes don't have to have a "reason" behind them...when they happen, they happen, period, it doesn't matter what the perpetrators' frame of mind was.
I thought the definition of a "hate crime" involved state of mind. I.e. if I kill someone of another race just because I was mugging them, that's a crime. But if I kill them because I hate their race or sexual orientation or whatever, that's a hate crime, and has a more severe punishment. (Not saying I necessarily agree with the reasoning, but I thought that was the legal definition of hate crimes in a nutshell.)
True, in GTA3 you do beat up on gangs of various races (the triad in Chinatown, the Japanese gang, and later the Columbians). But you aren't beating them up because of their race, whereas in Ethnic Cleansing it sounds like race is the reason for the violence. And in fact in GTA3 your loyalties change over time; for a while you are working for the Japanese, then later you are killing them while working for someone else (sorry if I spoiled it for anyone playing the game who hasn't gotten that far). (And as an aside, one of my favorite moments in the game was stealing a gang's car to do a hit, and then watching that gang get blamed for it.)
And yes, in GTA3 you get paid for doing the various missions. Also, I think some of the missions involve killing cops, so it is a main part of the game at least occasionally. At least, I remember in one part of the game you work for a crooked cop and have to destroy evidence, etc.
Ethnic Cleansing, made by Resistance Records (owned by the National Alliance neo-nazi group) using the Genesis3D open-source rendering software. In the game, you control a white KKK member who runs around beating up on other races. And you thought people were upset about violence in video games after Columbine...
On the other hand, on this topic someone asked "why is beating up on other races bad, but beating up cops and prostitutes (in Grand Theft Auto 3) OK?"
After all, there is a textmode quake, always one of my favorites.
I agree that some competition for google would be nice. Google is too good, there is no one that even comes close, at least for me right now. That makes me a bit nervous; if google suddenly turns evil, then what will we do? It would be nice if there were someone in second place who wasn't so far behind.
I used to use altavista, I still remember when google came along. For a while, I'd still usually try altavista first, and definitely use it when I was looking for something really obscure because it had a far bigger database. But when searching for things where altavista would give me 50 million hits, I soon learned that google would almost always have what I wanted within the first page.
I hope google keeps doing everything they're doing right, but I do like a bit of diversity. I hope someone else comes along with some useful features I haven't even thought about yet.
No, I don't think it's the same as increasing penis size, etc. It's more like exercising an actual muscle to make it bigger (or maybe helping a muscle to relax so that it doesn't tense up).
In my case, the doc said that doing up-close reading was fatiguing the muscles in my eyes that allow me to focus at various depths, or something along those lines (it's been a long time, I forget the details). She said she'd seen many people with a very similar problem. At the time, she said at least hopefully it would slow down the progression of nearsightedness, but she tried not to get me too hopeful. It worked really well for me. I'm sure many peoples' nearsightedness may have other causes.
Haven't you ever stared at something up close (a few inches from your face) for a bit, then noticed that when you look away, your eyes take a while before they will focus at a farther distance again? Why is it hard to believe that muscles around the eyes can get tired?
Anyone who takes what they read on Slashdot as authoritative medical advice is gonna have problems in life at some point.
My story is just my story. Someone may read it and think of asking around in their area for a similar optometrist. I found the one I did by posting a query on Usenet (that was back in 1991 when it was still more useful), and someone posted their story, which was similar to one I just posted. It was helpful to me.
Oh yeah, I forgot the ironic punchline of my little story -- I wear glasses so that I won't have to wear glasses.
I started becoming nearsighted about 11 years ago when I started working at a computer company. It was worse after spending a lot of time in front of the computer. I was going to get glasses to correct it, but someone suggested I see a particular doctor, I think he called her a "behavioral optometrist".
Often when you get corrective lenses, they compensate for the near-sightedness (or whatever problem you are having) by making things appear closer. But that usually makes the problem worse. Most people I know with glasses say they got more and more nearsighted over time.
Anyway, the doc I saw gave me the opposite prescription -- lenses that made everything appear farther away (basically, reading glasses). I only wore them while reading or using a computer, or looking at stuff up close, but not at other times. My nearsightedness gradually got better, and eventually cleared up. My next eye test came up 20/20. Now, all these years later, my vision is still perfect. But if I ever forget to wear my reading glasses and use a computer or read a book for a couple of hours, my eyes get fatigued and I become nearsighted for a few hours or so. (And as I mentioned in my other reply, keeping the computer monitor farther away from my eyes also helps).
So a therapeutic approach may be better than a corrective approach, at least in some situations. (Probably not with the condition the submitter has, although I know nothing about that particular condition.)
I find that my eyes are less fatigued if I can be farther away from the monitor. That's hard to do in most office situations, and in my small apartment. Ideally I'd like to have a table behind my main desk, to hold the monitor, about 4 feet away from me (and just use a slightly bigger font so I can still read everything).
One thing I did was to get a short-depth monitor. I have a Viewsonic PS790, it's a 19" monitor but the front-to-back size is about that of a 15" monitor, so I can push it farther back on the table. Unfortunately they're not making them any more. Anyone know of a similar monitor still being made? (Eventually I'll go with an LCD, which I'll be able to push way back.)
I understand his complaint about alarm clocks not having keypads. I don't really need one in my alarm clock. But I've noticed that most VCRs these days don't even let you punch in the start and stop recording times when setting the timer. (None of the last 3 VCRs I've bought allow it.) You have to use up and down arrows on the remote to select the recording times. It's completely stupid; it takes much longer to set the times, and there is an entire numeric keypad on the remote already! I assumed they started doing it to "dumb down" the process of setting the timer. But the VCR I had 10 years ago would let you just punch in the times using the numeric keypad, and it was much faster and easier in my opinion.
Talk about mistitled; by the time they're done, there are going to be about 50 LOTR DVDs, special edition this, boxed set that, wide screen the other thing, etc. Which one is the One DVD to rule them all?
Ah, I must have the academic version; I did get it for a pretty good price as a student, although I forget where. (I don't think it was through our campus store, but I'm pretty sure it was a company running a special promotion on academic discounts.) Anyway, then I do still wonder if there would be any strange behavior running the academic version under Crossover.
I installed Office 2000 a couple of years ago. I seem to remember it had something built in where, if you didn't register the product, it would disable itself after 50 uses. I have no idea how they implemented it. I'm assuming that it will still be able to properly register itself even when running under Wine/Crossover? (Or I wonder if running under Crossover somehow disables the time bomb?)
I agree, if they hadn't done it, someone else would have.
But for those of us who were there and lived through the firestorm following, the names Canter and Siegel will be forever burned into our memories. When it was happening, I knew the internet was about to take a serious turn, and that we'd never go back to the way things were, for better or worse.
And yeah, who knows if history will recall the names Canter and Siegel 100 years from now. But it was a pretty significant event -- the first large-scale commercial advertisement on the internet! Tell your kids or grandkids in 10 or 20 or 30 years that you were there for that. They'll look at you the same way you'd look at a great-grandparent that says they remember when the first person on their block got a telephone or television.
Re: learning welding underwater -- when I visited Australia, driving was a somewhat similar experience (driving on the opposite side of the road from what I was used to).
At first, it was hard because everything was the opposite of what I knew. But within a few days, I simply learned to reverse my innate responses, since I knew that those responses were backwards, and so it got easier. But after a couple of weeks, I had started to get accustomed to the new configuration, and so some of my natural responses were correct. That meant I could no longer just "do the opposite of what felt natural", and it actually got harder again and took more thought; I always had to think "is my gut feeling about what to do an old gut feeling from the US, or a newly acquired gut feeling from the past couple of weeks in Australia?"
I was there for about 4 or 5 weeks. When I got back to the US, within a day, I promptly drove on the wrong side of the road. (It was a small road with no traffic, so fewer cues, and I did catch myself within a few seconds before causing any major havoc.)
With people I think it's easy to ascribe this to learning, rather than built-in gravity models. A more interesting example is with animals.
My neighbor's dog (an Australian cattle dog) is fantastic at catching tennis balls. If you throw one, he can go running, look up over his shoulder, and catch the ball in midair over the shoulder. If you throw farther and he gets there too late, he's very good at knowing where it will go on the bounce and doing a flying leap to catch it off the bounce.
If we built a little enclosed park with atmosphere on the moon, I wonder how long it would take him to adapt the model in his brain to calculate the new trajectories? (I guess I believe that even in dogs, it's learned -- of course there weren't any tennis balls bouncing around over evolutionary time scales, and probably not a whole lot of birds falling out of the sky and bouncing in parabolic trajectories either.)
Asimov wrote another cute little short story called "Belief" in which a scientist was able to levitate simply because he believed he could. (I think it first started happening in his sleep, and then he was able to do it awake.)