They had this type of question on Star Trek once...why don't other people have eyes like LaForge's?
I think we need to be more realistic: we haven't ever been able to produce anything that matches the quality of nature in terms of durability or usefulness.
Sure, we can produce things that work faster, and sometimes with greater resolution, but often the benefit is minimal: power consumption is great, they break sooner, etc.
And as far as anything that NATURE does, we haven't even come close: our eyes and brain work together to understand more about the world than anything that humans have produced.
I doubt that these will get advanced enough. How would you like to go blind while driving because you get a little smog in your eyes? How would you like to deal with intense vertigo and headaches when your chip malfunctions and sends the wrong signals?
How would you like to stay awake all night staring at white light because your chip is burnt out and constantly sending the same signal (even when you shut your eyes)?
I'd rather not risk even 10 minutes of such possible conditions. My eyes work pretty well, unlike human hardware.
I remember High School. I remember when someone died. One guy got drunk and jumped onto the highway.
One had a disease and died from that.
I think there were two others - people I didn't know. I went to a High School of about 2000 in Orlando, Fl.
If there was JUST ONE person at my high school whose neck was nearly ripped out and blood drained, it would have been a big deal - it would have seemed unreal.
I remember watching an episode of this show where the principal was eaten by a pack of werewolves, who themselves were students who were later killed.
And in the graduation episode, the mayor turned into a giant monster and destroyed the school.
Someone from the High School dies almost every episode. There is no way this is realistic . There is no way this accounts for a stable population - its B.S. Vampires aren't the only thing that kill in Sunnydale.
It would require quite a feat of temporal manipulation, considering that Xine started on August 12, 2000, and Mplayer started on September 22, 2000 (I looked at the project logs for mplayer and the registration with sourceforge for Xine).
The goal is to pick fields & tables such that: 1) Locking is minimal 2) Dependencies are minimal 3) Storage size is minimal 4) Records are meaningful
The main technique involves decomposing a database to a minimal architecture based upon all possible elements in the database, and then building it back from the basis to the desired state.
It gives you specific knowledge of the conditions by which transactions may require waiting and a way to characterize that waiting, as well as how to reduce the number of transactions you need for a given task.
Of course, that's just the database design theory that one can apply. There's also the distributed information theories that can be applied. The most primitive approach to this is to use time stamp semaphores, but it can be extended beyond that. There is actually an area of database dependency resolution devoted to making locks. I imagine the "distributed lock manager" you spoke of uses it to minimize the amount of information needed to be locked at any given node.
In both of these cases (distributed info theory and database design theory), the formalism sprang from necessity - people invented creative ways to improve how their mainframe worked, and they used the formalism to describe it. I think it might even be right to say that without using the CompSci theory, you probably won't get a terribly reliable system. You'll get a kludge - it'll work, if you're lucky.
I seem to be thinking of an identification technique involving numbers. IIRC, it was highly distributed. Each client in the system was given a 32 bit numerical representation which was used as an "address" to communicated with the other clients. These "addresses" could be assigned dynamically by various agents who were authorized to destribute a subset and report which client had which address.
The whole layout was mainly hierarchical, and completely unsynchronized.
In case you haven't caught on yet, I'm talking about the IP protocol. Its a demonstration that handing out numbers can easily be done in a distributed way.
Of course some transactions need to be sequential, like the ones you mentioned. That's why we have semaphores, and why individual records aren't usually distributed! This is basic database design, and there are plenty of good ways of doing it which DON'T require a huge amount of I/O.
Theres a good bit of Computer Science theory on the subject, and there has been for about twenty years. Many professional databases designed today can work in a distributed manner and almost all of them are capable of scaling.
Yeah that's cheap, and yes, that's correct. At the store they cost what you said.
When you have something that is easy to store, easy to transport, easy to make, and easy to advertise (via the web), the price of ordering it goes WAY down.
You bet I'm going to use a 700MB CD-R for a 40k document, just as soon as Linux has CDR UDF with variable packet sizes and the ability to deal with open UDF discs.
Examine the costs: CD: about $.01/per if you buy them in bulk Floppy about $.005/per if you buy them in bulk
CDs also don't wear out due to age (the magnetic field of the earth eventually wears out floppies), only due to heat.
So I don't mind putting a 40k document on one CD, as long as its as easy to use as a floppy is.
perl is ugly to code in, and perl OOP is obviously a hack. I had a graphics/OOP professor who said, "nobody likes to program in perl, but it gets the job done." Obviously he lives in the land of language theory, where perl doesn't, but it gets the idea across...
perl gets the job done because of its massive collection of components.
I think I'd go further to say that the big improvement there is in repositories where you can get massive collections of components, as there have been languages like perl (in terms of having lots of stuff - PL/1 comes to mind) in the past.
Places like CPAN, Sourceforge and Freshmeat really make the difference. So ultimately, the internet is the means through which software development has sped up (at least when you're not talking about RAD-GUI development, which is another thing entirely).
Its creator's M.O. is the ransom model. He released the game engine of his best game, Dink Smallwood, after he felt he had earned enough from it.
Now there are tons of modules that you can get for that game. Its inspired a lot of creativity. Of course, he didn't do it just because it was ransomware. He did it because it was about to become abandonware.
This seems like a good strategy for companies. If he released another Dinkesque game he'd have an instant fanbase bolstered by the freeware engine and the knowledge that eventually it would become another freeware engine.
running a PUBLIC server is against the liscensing agreement, at least for my ISP.
If other people can access your server you have a problem...can anybody think of any servers that aren't public access.
SSH perhaps? X tunnelled through it? I think that would work, don't you? Nobody can access that service without username and password, or if you're really a security nut, a public key and passcode.
A reasonable person might assume that, but only if their business had nothing to do with travel. The name "evisa" conjures up the image of having to apply for a visa, and all the paperwork therin. The "e" part makes it sound electronic.
In essence, it could be just a marketing tool that comforts people into believing that the trip will be easier to obtain with the help of evisa, whether or not they issue travel visa.
But that's really beside the point. Copyrights apply to a single domain - it doesn't matter what word it is that you're copyrighting. All they have to prove is that evisa does not work in the same domain as Visa. This could be an issue because of the vast area of application by Visa, but I think it'll probably be an open and shut case because copyrights are usually restricted to not what the business does, but to some particular statement on the copyright, in this case, probably to all things credit card.
You've mentioned several applications that have known less reliability than the medical industry. Still, you should consider that the amount of reliance upon the software in the aforementioned applications is very small compared to the reliance on non-software based control systems. The fine level control (such as the guidance lock, stability, propulsion) are all handled by individual controllers almost all of the time.
In THIS application, the course control is handled by a human rather than a software AI. So no software is needed.
When it comes to something that needs to be that robust, I want a control system consisting of highly reliable real-time (not pseudo-realtime like embedded distros) microcontrollers.
I want parts designed to last 20 years, not something that could fail in one due to a motherboard failure, or at any time due to a hard drive failure. Software just doesn't cut it here.
I've always been rather partial to Crystalis(NES) as the best console game ever made, with Chronotrigger(SNES) in close second.
All Zelda games I would rate a distant third, behind all Final Fantasy games. (Except Zelda 2, which is on my list of "What the heck where they thinking?" games, right next to Super Mario 2).
I stopped using AIM because I couldn't organize my friends list into categories. Falls somewhere into the "I need to boot to Linux" category.
Also ironic is that my Video Capture card, a Buz! won't work on the latest version of Windows I used before I stopped (Win2K). Also, system tasks are far more difficult. If I want to search for a file named "test1.3p2" under every subdirectory of a particular system, zip it up, remove the original, and spit it back out (which is something I've done), its a one-liner in Linux...I wouldn't even want to attempt that in Windows.
Its a general feel more than anything else. Do I want to program in Perl in Windows? I'd better go download activeperl, change my autoexec.bat to have the right environment variables and path, and associate the "perl" extension with.pl files, since I can't run them on the command line automatically. Do I want python? Roughly the same thing. System scripting? Well, I can't just type commands into a file, 'cause Windows batch files can't do much on their own. I have to learn another language.
I have minimized my Windows use to three programs: mIRC (don't like the Linux ones as much; I've tried MANY), IE (only to test webpages; using Phoenix at the moment), and Access (AFAIK the only thing that can open access files is Access). Of course, for those, I can just use win4lin, so I don't boot to Windows. If I leave the emulator running too long, my system runs out of memory due to leaks, and I have to reboot to fix it (I have 512MB).
In Linux, setting up and running development environments is trivial. Of course, there is always Cygwin, but at crucial times it sometimes doesn't work, especially when you need some esoteric package to do what you want.
HOWEVER...there are still some TASKS that Linux can't do that I would really like to (notice I'm avoiding the whole game thing). Some of them are on the way, and some of them are not. But they are all definitely something to think about: 1) High level networking. Samba's not as nice to develop for as WSH. 2) GUI coding. There are many better ways to do it in Linux than in Windows, and you get a nice uniform look. 3) CD-R UDF. How much I want it. The lack of this means that the all important non-network based portability is much, much better in Windows, as are backups. Considering that copying files to CD using such an approach takes less time than copying to a floppy, and CDs now cost less than a cent each, it is the one thing that makes me constantly reconsider my decision to give up Windows. They say its on the way...its been on the way for two years though.
4) Remote desktops. Windows XP now has it pretty much down pat, and its faster than X.
If you look carefully, you'll see that this is a FAQ for the currently existing Wrist PDA, as it mentions problems that have occurred since the device's inception (look at the title of the FAQ). This is not a FAQ for the new watch.
The only thing available for the new watch are specs , data, and a really, really bad flash demo.
A likely absence of features
on
Real PDA Wristwatch
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is not the first wrist-pda made by fossil, just the first Palm based one.
They've been advertising their products as something that could interface with a PDA. In other words, they expect you to already have a PDA when you use it. The process of inputting data into it is something like this: 1) Buy a PDA 2) Put your data on your PDA 3) Beam your data from your PDA to your fossil.
I don't really like that too much. What's the point of the middle man? I want a pda for two reason, and two only: 1) Addressbook 2) Expenses data entry (not NEARLY as important).
I need to be able to get data to my PC and from my PC, and I don't need another PDA. And for what I need, I don't need a touch screen, really. I'd rather have a more rugged watch than a touch screen.
I expect that I am not alone in this assessment. I wonder when fossil will get the idea; reviewers have been talking about the serious shortcoming in their product (that they can't interface directly with PCs) for quite some time.
Be able to have my watch not run out of batteries after an hour like it would running one of those. Also, do you think you could fit PocketWindows on a 2MB device? That thing is horribly bloated by comparison to PalmOS.
This is exactly what I'm looking for, or at least it could be: a step up from my Timex Ironman Datalink. Now if they just get rid of the touchscreen, make it interface with the PC the same way as my watch, make it have night light, and 100M water resistant, ti'll be perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
They had this type of question on Star Trek once...why don't other people have eyes like LaForge's?
I think we need to be more realistic: we haven't ever been able to produce anything that matches the quality of nature in terms of durability or usefulness.
Sure, we can produce things that work faster, and sometimes with greater resolution, but often the benefit is minimal: power consumption is great, they break sooner, etc.
And as far as anything that NATURE does, we haven't even come close: our eyes and brain work together to understand more about the world than anything that humans have produced.
I doubt that these will get advanced enough. How would you like to go blind while driving because you get a little smog in your eyes? How would you like to deal with intense vertigo and headaches when your chip malfunctions and sends the wrong signals?
How would you like to stay awake all night staring at white light because your chip is burnt out and constantly sending the same signal (even when you shut your eyes)?
I'd rather not risk even 10 minutes of such possible conditions. My eyes work pretty well, unlike human hardware.
I remember High School. I remember when someone died. One guy got drunk and jumped onto the highway.
One had a disease and died from that.
I think there were two others - people I didn't know. I went to a High School of about 2000 in Orlando, Fl.
If there was JUST ONE person at my high school whose neck was nearly ripped out and blood drained, it would have been a big deal - it would have seemed unreal.
I remember watching an episode of this show where the principal was eaten by a pack of werewolves, who themselves were students who were later killed.
And in the graduation episode, the mayor turned into a giant monster and destroyed the school.
Someone from the High School dies almost every episode. There is no way this is realistic . There is no way this accounts for a stable population - its B.S. Vampires aren't the only thing that kill in Sunnydale.
Of course, I must admire such a great work of BS.
You can major in GameBoy if you know how to BS.
Hmm...that's an interesting thought.
It would require quite a feat of temporal manipulation, considering that Xine started on August 12, 2000, and Mplayer started on September 22, 2000 (I looked at the project logs for mplayer and the registration with sourceforge for Xine).
Did you just make that up?
That's just asking for it to break.
I think the price of buying new lead-filled motors every year would offset any benefit of such a system.
Database design theory comes to mind.
The goal is to pick fields & tables such that:
1) Locking is minimal
2) Dependencies are minimal
3) Storage size is minimal
4) Records are meaningful
The main technique involves decomposing a database to a minimal architecture based upon all possible elements in the database, and then building it back from the basis to the desired state.
It gives you specific knowledge of the conditions by which transactions may require waiting and a way to characterize that waiting, as well as how to reduce the number of transactions you need for a given task.
Of course, that's just the database design theory that one can apply. There's also the distributed information theories that can be applied. The most primitive approach to this is to use time stamp semaphores, but it can be extended beyond that. There is actually an area of database dependency resolution devoted to making locks. I imagine the "distributed lock manager" you spoke of uses it to minimize the amount of information needed to be locked at any given node.
In both of these cases (distributed info theory and database design theory), the formalism sprang from necessity - people invented creative ways to improve how their mainframe worked, and they used the formalism to describe it. I think it might even be right to say that without using the CompSci theory, you probably won't get a terribly reliable system. You'll get a kludge - it'll work, if you're lucky.
They must coordinate? Completely?
Are you sure?
I seem to be thinking of an identification technique involving numbers. IIRC, it was highly distributed. Each client in the system was given a 32 bit numerical representation which was used as an "address" to communicated with the other clients. These "addresses" could be assigned dynamically by various agents who were authorized to destribute a subset and report which client had which address.
The whole layout was mainly hierarchical, and completely unsynchronized.
In case you haven't caught on yet, I'm talking about the IP protocol. Its a demonstration that handing out numbers can easily be done in a distributed way.
Of course some transactions need to be sequential, like the ones you mentioned. That's why we have semaphores, and why individual records aren't usually distributed! This is basic database design, and there are plenty of good ways of doing it which DON'T require a huge amount of I/O.
Theres a good bit of Computer Science theory on the subject, and there has been for about twenty years. Many professional databases designed today can work in a distributed manner and almost all of them are capable of scaling.
Yeah...the "bless" operator is just beautiful, as is the non-orthogonal nature of the the language.
Its ugly because of the language; programmers can make it UGLIER.
Just live with it. Ugly isn't necessarily incredibly bad.
Yeah that's cheap, and yes, that's correct. At the store they cost what you said.
When you have something that is easy to store, easy to transport, easy to make, and easy to advertise (via the web), the price of ordering it goes WAY down.
You bet I'm going to use a 700MB CD-R for a 40k document, just as soon as Linux has CDR UDF with variable packet sizes and the ability to deal with open UDF discs.
Examine the costs:
CD: about $.01/per if you buy them in bulk
Floppy about $.005/per if you buy them in bulk
CDs also don't wear out due to age (the magnetic field of the earth eventually wears out floppies), only due to heat.
So I don't mind putting a 40k document on one CD, as long as its as easy to use as a floppy is.
Off the shelf components have helped a LOT.
perl is ugly to code in, and perl OOP is obviously a hack. I had a graphics/OOP professor who said, "nobody likes to program in perl, but it gets the job done." Obviously he lives in the land of language theory, where perl doesn't, but it gets the idea across...
perl gets the job done because of its massive collection of components.
I think I'd go further to say that the big improvement there is in repositories where you can get massive collections of components, as there have been languages like perl (in terms of having lots of stuff - PL/1 comes to mind) in the past.
Places like CPAN, Sourceforge and Freshmeat really make the difference. So ultimately, the internet is the means through which software development has sped up (at least when you're not talking about RAD-GUI development, which is another thing entirely).
Its creator's M.O. is the ransom model. He released the game engine of his best game, Dink Smallwood, after he felt he had earned enough from it.
Now there are tons of modules that you can get for that game. Its inspired a lot of creativity. Of course, he didn't do it just because it was ransomware. He did it because it was about to become abandonware.
This seems like a good strategy for companies. If he released another Dinkesque game he'd have an instant fanbase bolstered by the freeware engine and the knowledge that eventually it would become another freeware engine.
running a PUBLIC server is against the liscensing agreement, at least for my ISP.
If other people can access your server you have a problem...can anybody think of any servers that aren't public access.
SSH perhaps? X tunnelled through it? I think that would work, don't you? Nobody can access that service without username and password, or if you're really a security nut, a public key and passcode.
Whoa...I suck. Using copyright like four times when I meant trademark. Yes, I know that.
Obviously I was referring to trademark in my post.
A reasonable person might assume that, but only if their business had nothing to do with travel. The name "evisa" conjures up the image of having to apply for a visa, and all the paperwork therin. The "e" part makes it sound electronic.
In essence, it could be just a marketing tool that comforts people into believing that the trip will be easier to obtain with the help of evisa, whether or not they issue travel visa.
But that's really beside the point. Copyrights apply to a single domain - it doesn't matter what word it is that you're copyrighting. All they have to prove is that evisa does not work in the same domain as Visa. This could be an issue because of the vast area of application by Visa, but I think it'll probably be an open and shut case because copyrights are usually restricted to not what the business does, but to some particular statement on the copyright, in this case, probably to all things credit card.
You've mentioned several applications that have known less reliability than the medical industry. Still, you should consider that the amount of reliance upon the software in the aforementioned applications is very small compared to the reliance on non-software based control systems. The fine level control (such as the guidance lock, stability, propulsion) are all handled by individual controllers almost all of the time.
In THIS application, the course control is handled by a human rather than a software AI. So no software is needed.
"...it better not have any software."
When it comes to something that needs to be that robust, I want a control system consisting of highly reliable real-time (not pseudo-realtime like embedded distros) microcontrollers.
I want parts designed to last 20 years, not something that could fail in one due to a motherboard failure, or at any time due to a hard drive failure. Software just doesn't cut it here.
This one. Yeah, its not Penny Arcade, Dilbert or User Friendly. Shocking, huh?
I've always been rather partial to Crystalis(NES) as the best console game ever made, with Chronotrigger(SNES) in close second.
All Zelda games I would rate a distant third, behind all Final Fantasy games. (Except Zelda 2, which is on my list of "What the heck where they thinking?" games, right next to Super Mario 2).
I stopped using AIM because I couldn't organize my friends list into categories. Falls somewhere into the "I need to boot to Linux" category.
.pl files, since I can't run them on the command line automatically. Do I want python? Roughly the same thing. System scripting? Well, I can't just type commands into a file, 'cause Windows batch files can't do much on their own. I have to learn another language.
Also ironic is that my Video Capture card, a Buz! won't work on the latest version of Windows I used before I stopped (Win2K). Also, system tasks are far more difficult. If I want to search for a file named "test1.3p2" under every subdirectory of a particular system, zip it up, remove the original, and spit it back out (which is something I've done), its a one-liner in Linux...I wouldn't even want to attempt that in Windows.
Its a general feel more than anything else. Do I want to program in Perl in Windows? I'd better go download activeperl, change my autoexec.bat to have the right environment variables and path, and associate the "perl" extension with
I have minimized my Windows use to three programs: mIRC (don't like the Linux ones as much; I've tried MANY), IE (only to test webpages; using Phoenix at the moment), and Access (AFAIK the only thing that can open access files is Access). Of course, for those, I can just use win4lin, so I don't boot to Windows. If I leave the emulator running too long, my system runs out of memory due to leaks, and I have to reboot to fix it (I have 512MB).
In Linux, setting up and running development environments is trivial. Of course, there is always Cygwin, but at crucial times it sometimes doesn't work, especially when you need some esoteric package to do what you want.
HOWEVER...there are still some TASKS that Linux can't do that I would really like to (notice I'm avoiding the whole game thing). Some of them are on the way, and some of them are not. But they are all definitely something to think about:
1) High level networking. Samba's not as nice to develop for as WSH.
2) GUI coding. There are many better ways to do it in Linux than in Windows, and you get a nice uniform look.
3) CD-R UDF. How much I want it. The lack of this means that the all important non-network based portability is much, much better in Windows, as are backups. Considering that copying files to CD using such an approach takes less time than copying to a floppy, and CDs now cost less than a cent each, it is the one thing that makes me constantly reconsider my decision to give up Windows. They say its on the way...its been on the way for two years though.
4) Remote desktops. Windows XP now has it pretty much down pat, and its faster than X.
...completely full. Half with liquid and half with gas.
Near miss, near hit...whatever. Just give me the distance between objects, N, and I'll call it a "miss by N."
If you look carefully, you'll see that this is a FAQ for the currently existing Wrist PDA, as it mentions problems that have occurred since the device's inception (look at the title of the FAQ). This is not a FAQ for the new watch.
The only thing available for the new watch are specs , data, and a really, really bad flash demo.
Uh...it recharges. Probably from the USB port.
This is not the first wrist-pda made by fossil, just the first Palm based one.
They've been advertising their products as something that could interface with a PDA. In other words, they expect you to already have a PDA when you use it. The process of inputting data into it is something like this:
1) Buy a PDA
2) Put your data on your PDA
3) Beam your data from your PDA to your fossil.
I don't really like that too much. What's the point of the middle man? I want a pda for two reason, and two only:
1) Addressbook
2) Expenses data entry (not NEARLY as important).
I need to be able to get data to my PC and from my PC, and I don't need another PDA. And for what I need, I don't need a touch screen, really. I'd rather have a more rugged watch than a touch screen.
I expect that I am not alone in this assessment. I wonder when fossil will get the idea; reviewers have been talking about the serious shortcoming in their product (that they can't interface directly with PCs) for quite some time.
Be able to have my watch not run out of batteries after an hour like it would running one of those. Also, do you think you could fit PocketWindows on a 2MB device? That thing is horribly bloated by comparison to PalmOS.
This is exactly what I'm looking for, or at least it could be: a step up from my Timex Ironman Datalink. Now if they just get rid of the touchscreen, make it interface with the PC the same way as my watch, make it have night light, and 100M water resistant, ti'll be perfect.