This is actually an urban legend. The QWERTY keyboard was not designed to slow down the writer.
It was however, as you say, designed to spread out the commonly used letters so that the bars wouldn't get stuck in each other. This does in fact speed up your writing as you want to alternate hands with each keystroke in order to write as quickly as possible.
"End of Evangelion" is the ending you're looking for. It's really quite good and it ties the end of the TV series together in a way which makes a tad bit more sense. (Although not a hell of a lot.;-) BTW, Air&Heart is the first part of EoE.
I always liked the idea that the last two eps are going on inside Shinji's head while the first part of EoE shows what happens in the normal world at the same time. Others seem to prefer the idea that the last two eps of the TV show happen after the "third impact".
In any case, the main thing I like about Eva is that it really rewards those who think about about it. Just imagine what someone like the guy who had written an essay on how things in The Matrix worked. If someone like that began working on Eva I'd almost pity them.;-)
There's a bunch of fansites which analyse the series though. Most likely you'll end up learning a lot about christianity as well, since that's the basis for a lot of the things in Eva.
When it comes to dubbing into Swedish although I haven't heard the dubbing I bet it was bad. Mainly because only movies for children are dubbed, and that's not a very high paying job. The only movies that get good voice actors (or rather normal actors that do voice overs) are big Disney productions.
At least it doesn't suffer from the "one person does all voices" syndrome which is even worse. And that is only complete if you can hear the original voices in the background.
Hmm, lousy example. If you study control theory you'll find that computers are much better at things like this than humans can ever hope to be. It does require that the computer can "experiment" a little to discover the delays and such, but a normal human would have had several years to learn about thermodynamics, so it's not really fair to put a fresh computer against a normal human.
A much harder problem than thermostats is inverted pendulums (ie balancing a stick on the palm of your hand). A human can do one fairly well, try stacking two on top of each other and balancing that. Next try three. Computers can do this quite well, a big reason is that they are much faster than humans at reacting.
Furthermore, I disagree that computers are bad at "fuzzy" computations. What computers generally are bad at are forming strategies. Hence their current inability to play strategic games such as Go.
And as has been pointed out before. Controlling a fusion plant would require extremely fast reaction time. Anyone who has tried distributed computing know that low lag is not one of the inherit benefits.
Personally I think the whole "girls are scared of tech" is not really about tech per se but more of a symptom of a different underlying issue.
First off I think it's a bigger issue with personality. And that has nothing to do with gender. Notice that there are both people of the "I don't know how to do this, I can't do this" and "I don't know how to do this, I have to learn" mentality. And I don't think that has anything to do with gender. At least I know plenty of people of both types of either gender.
Second, if you are going to use something as powerful as a computer efficiently you need to learn how it works. You're not going to learn how the computer works if you spend all your time with one program trying to get pictures "just right". I think the general issue here is that your wife treats computers like a tool which does what the programs let it do. This is the same as the majority of the population, regardless of gender. Computer proficient users treat the computer as a tool/to do what they want it to do/.
I learned to do that as I was tinkering with computers as a kid. I got my first my computer (C64) when I was about 10, naturally all that time I've spend trying to understand how a game worked for which I didn't have a manual and I didn't even know much English taught me a lot about problem solving in a directly computer related manner. Perhaps that made the link between "flexible tool" and computer easier to make for me than somone who as learned those lessons doing something else.
My point being, it's not women who are having a problem with technology. It's non-tech people.
And as an aside, I can recommend the RPG Arcanum if you/she haven't tried it yet. Lot's of non-violence problem solving there.
A big issue besides the two already posted, is optimizations. There are no really good compilers for clusters. And running an application which requires a lot of intercommunication on a cluster is going to be killed by the latency. Not so much latency between interaction and action, but mainly between memory and processors. (Because memory management on cluster systems is a bitch.)
Besides, getting anything to scale on multiple processors is really really hard. It's a nice research topic though.;-)
According to a test on another site there are some issues with performance of the QCast program. Specifically it's unable to play 640x480 videostreams without dropping frames. It's not even able to play SVCD (480x480) without dropping frames. MPEG4 works at 576x432 for 25FPS but not for 30FPS streams.
Does XBM suffer from these same problems? I'd assume not as it's based on "standard" PC hardware and as such a lot easier to optimise for (you'd probably just use standard x86 codecs). (I know that the above is not an issue with the PS2 hardware, so fanboi'isms are not needed.
First off, comparing a modded XBox vs a DVD player.
A modded XBox will let you stream videos from a standard computer. A $60 DVD player will not. To me a standalone DVD player is useless, even if it plays MP3 and some DivX formats. (As there are about 5 of those out right now, and a bunch of other formats as well. Usually stand alone boxes only play one of these formats.)
Now regarding turning a XBox into a standard PC being a stupid idea I agree with you. But I already have more computers in large boxes than I need. I'm not suggesting that you buy an XBox and mod it instead of getting a normal PC, I'm suggesting you do it in addition to your PC.
If you can put together a machine which fulfills the requirements of * Standard stereo component form factor * Remote control * High quality SVideo or RGB (prefered) out * SPDIF/composite digital audio out * Can play all standard video/audio codecs
If you can do that for less than $300 then modding an XBox is something which should be reconsidered. If you can't, then perhaps an XBox is a good idea in any case. BTW there is talk about an upcoming price reduction for the XBox (and PS2) with about $50. That would make the deal even better.
So you are surprised that a system which cost about 2.5 times more is "hugely" superior?
First off all, you don't over design.
If you want a box which plays music, video and some games than you don't go out and buy a Cray supercomputer to do it, do you? If an XBox can do the job then use it.
Second, that XBox has a nice remote and RGB and SPDIF out. That puts it ahead of any standard PC I've ever seen. (Actually I've never seen a PC with RGB out. And my nVida GF4 4200 looks like shit on the TV out compared to my XBox.)
Finally, again, "don't try to use that financial argument". You spend 2.5 times more on something which is less suited for the job. Are you in marketing?;-)
I think one of the basic problems is the perception of time. To state that something has a definitive begining, middle, and end maybe a bit skewed.
Stephen Hawking present an idea on this line in "Brief history of time". The idea is that time itself is imaginary. So we percieve time along a real axis, and in this time line the universe has a beginning - big bang. The universe OTOH "percieves" time along the imaginary axis, and in this time line the universe has no beginning nor an end.
Sure, it's a tad hard to verify;-) but it just goes to show that with only theories you can create a logical argument to support many different solutions. And it's quite hard to show which one's real.
Actually I think it's more on the following line. He assumes that the reasoning behind the mutiverse theory is as follows:
P1) There is no god H1) There exist multiple universes H2) Some of these multiple universes have capacity to simulate more universes H3) These simulated universes thus have a "creator" or "god" which is in conflict with the original premise Thus RAA: there are no multiple universes
Only, AFAIK if you get an RAA you can only safely reject your/latest/ hypothesis. So his reasoning would mainly reject the idea that given P1 H3 is not possible. (That's what I've learned from my introductions to logics class at any rate.)
Furthermore I don't see why the idea that a multiverse theory must assume that there is no god. And some of the other ideas are quite a far stretch to make. The idea that we could simulate an entire Universe for instance, is quite a bit of a stretch until we have at least simulated one conciousness.
It's nice that he's attacking the multiverse theory from a scientific standpoint. (A bit of dust kicking is always good to make sure you're on solid ground. I'm not that much a fan of the multiverse theory myself anyways.) I would have expected that a professor of Natural Philosophy would be a bit more clued in on elementary logic reasoning than this though.
This is basically what was done on Bali not too long ago. (During the autumn I belive.)
There was an explosion in one of the big discos. Once a lot of people had fled out from the building a second, much larger, bomb detonated outside. (It was a car bomb.) Lot's of people died and were severely injured.
MR could have been great even if they had kept it in the current bastardized version of Dicks original. (The short story is a lot darker.)
If they had just shrown out 1 hour or so of the movie of the CRAP that Spielberg found it necessary to add. Like the scene with police with Jetpacks. Or the crazy eye-doctor. (Since I'm Swedish I actually understood what the nurse was singing, and it was just stupid. It's a song for children BTW.)
The same can be said about AI. If you want me to keep attention for 2.5 hours than at least bother to keep the world consistent for that time. AI has discrepencies, MR has discrepencies large enough to drive a truck through.
There is a second an IMHO/very/ important thing which is missed in this reasoning.
When you are getting the file from AOL/TW you are not only putting a load on their servers and bandwidth. You are also putting a load on all the networks in between.
What BitTorrent and similar tools do is make sure that if your neighbour has downloaded the file already you will get the biggest part of the file from him. And if you have noone in your vicinity who has the file at least your bandwidth consumtion will be divided more evenly across the net. And this will happen automatically since you try to get the file "as fast as possible" from a number of sources. The sources with the least load on or which are closest to you (network wise) will provide you with a higher bandwidth, thus automagically load balancing over the network. (Now it's not quite this good in the wild, but it comes closer than most other systems, and it's simple too.)
Don't use BitTorrent because you want the file faster. Use BitTorrent for the sake of the Internet. If more P2P applications had used this in the design (and not been "designed" as a VB hack) load on the net would be a lot lower. (And it would be faster too.)
Unfortunately "real internet-wide multicast" doesn't exist. The protocols aren't fully implemented and at least for IPv4 they most likely never will be.
And for a good system like that you'd need some good information coding. The guys who did SwarmCast had some ideas about how that could be used for multicasting over the net. (SwarmCast uses Forward Error Codes, which is also used in eg satellites. Because they have pretty much the same problem. They send the same data over and over and hope that the recipient gets it all.)
Does anyone know where I can read the stupid paper without subscribing to that site?
Atleaast I can view the paper without any subscription.
Also the guy is a botanist, not a mathematician. And the journal he published in is a botanical paper. So I don't think it's surprising that it passed the checks.
I thought Event Horizon was so-so... Worth watching once at least. Supernova sucked ass. (It had all the stupidity you normally see in bad Sci-Fi. And a bit of skin thrown in for good measure IIRC.
Pitch Black I did like though. Probably because I didn't exepect anything from it. I liked the details like how they had different filters for the different suns. So when the red sun was up everything was very red and so on.
Also since there were no really big actors (one of Vin D's earlier movies) you're not quite sure what's going to happen and who's going to die.
Total Recall was based on the short story "We can remember it for you wholesale" and is available in a collection of his short stories with the same name.
The movie is only very loosely based on the story though. It goes without saying (but I'll do it anyways) that PKDs version was better.
Furthermore the movie Screamers (with the burrowing robot/mines) was also based on one of PKDs stories. Not sure of the name of that one though.
Of the movies I like Bladerunner the best. (But it is very loosely based on the story.) Total Recall I've always liked as one of Arnolds more interesting movies. Screamers was also pretty interesting, if for no other reason than that it's quite unpredictable. Minority Report is an abomination.
How did you make sure that you weren't comparing the quality of photo-paper vs printer? You can't just print an image and compare to a developed film which cost less to develop than one piece of "photo grade" printer paper.
Use eg Kodak photo CD, the expensive one. Then compare prints and in particular blow ups of the photos.
Slashdot Mirror
This is actually an urban legend. The QWERTY keyboard was not designed to slow down the writer.
It was however, as you say, designed to spread out the commonly used letters so that the bars wouldn't get stuck in each other. This does in fact speed up your writing as you want to alternate hands with each keystroke in order to write as quickly as possible.
"End of Evangelion" is the ending you're looking for. It's really quite good and it ties the end of the TV series together in a way which makes a tad bit more sense. (Although not a hell of a lot. ;-) BTW, Air&Heart is the first part of EoE.
;-)
I always liked the idea that the last two eps are going on inside Shinji's head while the first part of EoE shows what happens in the normal world at the same time. Others seem to prefer the idea that the last two eps of the TV show happen after the "third impact".
In any case, the main thing I like about Eva is that it really rewards those who think about about it. Just imagine what someone like the guy who had written an essay on how things in The Matrix worked. If someone like that began working on Eva I'd almost pity them.
There's a bunch of fansites which analyse the series though. Most likely you'll end up learning a lot about christianity as well, since that's the basis for a lot of the things in Eva.
When it comes to dubbing into Swedish although I haven't heard the dubbing I bet it was bad. Mainly because only movies for children are dubbed, and that's not a very high paying job. The only movies that get good voice actors (or rather normal actors that do voice overs) are big Disney productions.
At least it doesn't suffer from the "one person does all voices" syndrome which is even worse. And that is only complete if you can hear the original voices in the background.
Hmm, lousy example. If you study control theory you'll find that computers are much better at things like this than humans can ever hope to be. It does require that the computer can "experiment" a little to discover the delays and such, but a normal human would have had several years to learn about thermodynamics, so it's not really fair to put a fresh computer against a normal human.
A much harder problem than thermostats is inverted pendulums (ie balancing a stick on the palm of your hand). A human can do one fairly well, try stacking two on top of each other and balancing that. Next try three. Computers can do this quite well, a big reason is that they are much faster than humans at reacting.
Furthermore, I disagree that computers are bad at "fuzzy" computations. What computers generally are bad at are forming strategies. Hence their current inability to play strategic games such as Go.
And as has been pointed out before. Controlling a fusion plant would require extremely fast reaction time. Anyone who has tried distributed computing know that low lag is not one of the inherit benefits.
Personally I think the whole "girls are scared of tech" is not really about tech per se but more of a symptom of a different underlying issue.
/to do what they want it to do/.
First off I think it's a bigger issue with personality. And that has nothing to do with gender. Notice that there are both people of the "I don't know how to do this, I can't do this" and "I don't know how to do this, I have to learn" mentality. And I don't think that has anything to do with gender. At least I know plenty of people of both types of either gender.
Second, if you are going to use something as powerful as a computer efficiently you need to learn how it works. You're not going to learn how the computer works if you spend all your time with one program trying to get pictures "just right". I think the general issue here is that your wife treats computers like a tool which does what the programs let it do. This is the same as the majority of the population, regardless of gender. Computer proficient users treat the computer as a tool
I learned to do that as I was tinkering with computers as a kid. I got my first my computer (C64) when I was about 10, naturally all that time I've spend trying to understand how a game worked for which I didn't have a manual and I didn't even know much English taught me a lot about problem solving in a directly computer related manner. Perhaps that made the link between "flexible tool" and computer easier to make for me than somone who as learned those lessons doing something else.
My point being, it's not women who are having a problem with technology. It's non-tech people.
And as an aside, I can recommend the RPG Arcanum if you/she haven't tried it yet. Lot's of non-violence problem solving there.
And this is while guys like Peter Jackson instead have a callback of actors to reshoot scenes they were not happy about.
No wonder why the latest SW movies have seemed devoid of acting.
A big issue besides the two already posted, is optimizations. There are no really good compilers for clusters. And running an application which requires a lot of intercommunication on a cluster is going to be killed by the latency. Not so much latency between interaction and action, but mainly between memory and processors. (Because memory management on cluster systems is a bitch.)
;-)
Besides, getting anything to scale on multiple processors is really really hard. It's a nice research topic though.
According to a test on another site there are some issues with performance of the QCast program. Specifically it's unable to play 640x480 videostreams without dropping frames. It's not even able to play SVCD (480x480) without dropping frames. MPEG4 works at 576x432 for 25FPS but not for 30FPS streams.
Does XBM suffer from these same problems? I'd assume not as it's based on "standard" PC hardware and as such a lot easier to optimise for (you'd probably just use standard x86 codecs). (I know that the above is not an issue with the PS2 hardware, so fanboi'isms are not needed.
First off, comparing a modded XBox vs a DVD player.
A modded XBox will let you stream videos from a standard computer. A $60 DVD player will not. To me a standalone DVD player is useless, even if it plays MP3 and some DivX formats. (As there are about 5 of those out right now, and a bunch of other formats as well. Usually stand alone boxes only play one of these formats.)
Now regarding turning a XBox into a standard PC being a stupid idea I agree with you. But I already have more computers in large boxes than I need. I'm not suggesting that you buy an XBox and mod it instead of getting a normal PC, I'm suggesting you do it in addition to your PC.
If you can put together a machine which fulfills the requirements of
* Standard stereo component form factor
* Remote control
* High quality SVideo or RGB (prefered) out
* SPDIF/composite digital audio out
* Can play all standard video/audio codecs
If you can do that for less than $300 then modding an XBox is something which should be reconsidered. If you can't, then perhaps an XBox is a good idea in any case. BTW there is talk about an upcoming price reduction for the XBox (and PS2) with about $50. That would make the deal even better.
A nice remote as in a remote control, moron.
So you are surprised that a system which cost about 2.5 times more is "hugely" superior?
;-)
First off all, you don't over design.
If you want a box which plays music, video and some games than you don't go out and buy a Cray supercomputer to do it, do you? If an XBox can do the job then use it.
Second, that XBox has a nice remote and RGB and SPDIF out. That puts it ahead of any standard PC I've ever seen. (Actually I've never seen a PC with RGB out. And my nVida GF4 4200 looks like shit on the TV out compared to my XBox.)
Finally, again, "don't try to use that financial argument". You spend 2.5 times more on something which is less suited for the job. Are you in marketing?
Stephen Hawking present an idea on this line in "Brief history of time". The idea is that time itself is imaginary. So we percieve time along a real axis, and in this time line the universe has a beginning - big bang. The universe OTOH "percieves" time along the imaginary axis, and in this time line the universe has no beginning nor an end.
Sure, it's a tad hard to verify
Actually I think it's more on the following line. He assumes that the reasoning behind the mutiverse theory is as follows:
/latest/ hypothesis. So his reasoning would mainly reject the idea that given P1 H3 is not possible. (That's what I've learned from my introductions to logics class at any rate.)
P1) There is no god
H1) There exist multiple universes
H2) Some of these multiple universes have capacity to simulate more universes
H3) These simulated universes thus have a "creator" or "god" which is in conflict with the original premise
Thus RAA: there are no multiple universes
Only, AFAIK if you get an RAA you can only safely reject your
Furthermore I don't see why the idea that a multiverse theory must assume that there is no god. And some of the other ideas are quite a far stretch to make. The idea that we could simulate an entire Universe for instance, is quite a bit of a stretch until we have at least simulated one conciousness.
It's nice that he's attacking the multiverse theory from a scientific standpoint. (A bit of dust kicking is always good to make sure you're on solid ground. I'm not that much a fan of the multiverse theory myself anyways.) I would have expected that a professor of Natural Philosophy would be a bit more clued in on elementary logic reasoning than this though.
Show your work Mr Davies!
This is basically what was done on Bali not too long ago. (During the autumn I belive.)
There was an explosion in one of the big discos. Once a lot of people had fled out from the building a second, much larger, bomb detonated outside. (It was a car bomb.) Lot's of people died and were severely injured.
So you're saying that you beat your wife in front of your children?
MR could have been great even if they had kept it in the current bastardized version of Dicks original. (The short story is a lot darker.)
If they had just shrown out 1 hour or so of the movie of the CRAP that Spielberg found it necessary to add. Like the scene with police with Jetpacks. Or the crazy eye-doctor. (Since I'm Swedish I actually understood what the nurse was singing, and it was just stupid. It's a song for children BTW.)
The same can be said about AI. If you want me to keep attention for 2.5 hours than at least bother to keep the world consistent for that time. AI has discrepencies, MR has discrepencies large enough to drive a truck through.
There is a second an IMHO /very/ important thing which is missed in this reasoning.
When you are getting the file from AOL/TW you are not only putting a load on their servers and bandwidth. You are also putting a load on all the networks in between.
What BitTorrent and similar tools do is make sure that if your neighbour has downloaded the file already you will get the biggest part of the file from him. And if you have noone in your vicinity who has the file at least your bandwidth consumtion will be divided more evenly across the net. And this will happen automatically since you try to get the file "as fast as possible" from a number of sources. The sources with the least load on or which are closest to you (network wise) will provide you with a higher bandwidth, thus automagically load balancing over the network. (Now it's not quite this good in the wild, but it comes closer than most other systems, and it's simple too.)
Don't use BitTorrent because you want the file faster. Use BitTorrent for the sake of the Internet. If more P2P applications had used this in the design (and not been "designed" as a VB hack) load on the net would be a lot lower. (And it would be faster too.)
Unfortunately "real internet-wide multicast" doesn't exist. The protocols aren't fully implemented and at least for IPv4 they most likely never will be.
And for a good system like that you'd need some good information coding. The guys who did SwarmCast had some ideas about how that could be used for multicasting over the net. (SwarmCast uses Forward Error Codes, which is also used in eg satellites. Because they have pretty much the same problem. They send the same data over and over and hope that the recipient gets it all.)
Atleaast I can view the paper without any subscription.
Also the guy is a botanist, not a mathematician. And the journal he published in is a botanical paper. So I don't think it's surprising that it passed the checks.
Yes, I think that was his point. But it was a while since I saw the quote, and unformtuantely I didn't save it in my "big file of quotes".
I don't really agree with the quote though.
When I think of it it might have been from the book Starship Troopers, in the beginning with the warmongering teacher.
I thought Event Horizon was so-so... Worth watching once at least. Supernova sucked ass. (It had all the stupidity you normally see in bad Sci-Fi. And a bit of skin thrown in for good measure IIRC.
Pitch Black I did like though. Probably because I didn't exepect anything from it. I liked the details like how they had different filters for the different suns. So when the red sun was up everything was very red and so on.
Also since there were no really big actors (one of Vin D's earlier movies) you're not quite sure what's going to happen and who's going to die.
Total Recall was based on the short story "We can remember it for you wholesale" and is available in a collection of his short stories with the same name.
The movie is only very loosely based on the story though. It goes without saying (but I'll do it anyways) that PKDs version was better.
Furthermore the movie Screamers (with the burrowing robot/mines) was also based on one of PKDs stories. Not sure of the name of that one though.
Of the movies I like Bladerunner the best. (But it is very loosely based on the story.) Total Recall I've always liked as one of Arnolds more interesting movies. Screamers was also pretty interesting, if for no other reason than that it's quite unpredictable. Minority Report is an abomination.
You can only use BT for controllers. You still have to hook it up to stereo and TV with wires.
And you can get wireless controllers today if you want 'em.
I think it was Heinlein who commented that (from a book in the Foundation series by Asimov for those not in know) with this:
"Only the incompetent would wait until violence is the last refuge."
How did you make sure that you weren't comparing the quality of photo-paper vs printer? You can't just print an image and compare to a developed film which cost less to develop than one piece of "photo grade" printer paper.
Use eg Kodak photo CD, the expensive one. Then compare prints and in particular blow ups of the photos.