Well, that's the point of the 6-axis sensors. They are the exact electronic equivalent of the semi-circular canals of the inner ear. In fact even if you're magneto-sensitive, the current sensors can track that as well.
It's really a psycho-physiological problem. We are able to watch the flickering pictures in movies and scan-line television because the perception of the eyes isn't as important as the perception of the brain. One of the tricks that I have heard of in tracking head/body motion is to take advantage of the fact that the human eye cannot focus on all the interim points between point A and point B, so you can do fast/fuzzy rendering while motion is going on and only have to fill things in when everything is stable.
Well, I'm not well-experienced in the field, but 6-axis motion/attitude sensors are very small and very cheap - almost every smartphone has one. And outfits like Oculus have reportedly spent a lot of effort into learning psychological tricks to ensure that your perception of the image appears to track what the sensor detects.
So I'll defer my sneering until I actually have a chance to try some out. I'm definitely not in the snowflake category. Can't even sit in the front rows of a movie theatre without getting motion sick.
Actually, I think the more accurate word is "channel", not device. Certainly ALSA has mixing capabilities. PulseAudio is more into routing multiple sound pipelines, at least if my memory on the subject isn't too blurred.
I had to work with that stuff a while back and learned to appreciate the virtues of both systems alone and in combination.
I also developed a splitting headache because there's no idiot's guide to Linux sound document I know of that covers all the options (much less when you start adding MIDI and Jack into it). So I forgot a lot of it in self-defense.
OR it could just be that that's been a steady stream of propaganda from a certain political party and Corporate America for 100 years. A Big Lie repeated over and over again until it "becomes" the unassailable Truth.
Any organization can become corrupt at times but that does not mean that you can automatically assume that all such organizations are all corrupt at all times.
Indeed, it is often the case that the more people need something, the more that unsavoury types will move in. And if they need something desperately and someone rich and powerful opposes them, it's not unthinkable that the unsavoury types could get a little extra "help", if you know what I mean.
There are a lot of things to dislike about Unions. But thinking you can stand up as a single individual and negotiate on an even footing with an organization which is stocked with cash, "Human Resources", lawyers, and the patience to starve you out is pitiably naive.
Well, if I'd said "another black person lining up for the slave ship", you'd have probably called me racist. The point isn't the race, nationality or religion of the person, it's whether they accept their fate meekly or they fight back, even if they'll ultimately lose.
I'm sure it's more widespread than that. Offices where virtually everything has to be a Word document.
But there's a difference between casually banging out a memo and a formatted document. I can forgive brute-force spacing for the quick-and-dirty stuff. I might even have been guilty of it myself on occasion. It's the words that count there, not so much the appearance.
What I'm railing against are the people who are complaining about the "wrong" word processor ruining their document formatting. These are the people who should know better. They are the "professionals writing word documents". People who are going to be sending copies of those documents to possibly unknown destinations with possibly unknown software versions. Business letters, user manuals, and other archival-worthy documentation.
Back in an earlier century I worked in an office where we shared 2 HP Laserjet printers. One was a LaserJet 2 and one was a LaserJet 3. They had different hardware font sets and it very definitely made a difference in how documents would appear when printed and the users complained to the support person (me). So there was some incentive to make the documents portable even within a relative monoculture.
WIH Are you even using Word instead of simply using Windows Notepad?
The whole point of having a word processor over a simple text editor is because it provides a smarter, more powerful way of creating and maintaining formatted documents.
When you want to double-space between paragraphs, you hit Enter twice between each paragraph. And, of course, subject yourself to random format changes when you port the document.
When I want to double-space between paragraphs, I edit the paragraph style and change the spacing there. And immediately, every paragraph in the document gets spaced automatically. The random reformatting is greatly reduced, because intelligent style spacing doesn't count the extra "blank" lines as lines.
Plus I can control spacing to fractions of lines, automatic paragraph numbering doesn't count the blank spaces in the paragraph count (something lawyers wouldn't want to do). And so forth.
Styles are one of the most basic concepts of word processing, whether it's Open/Libre Office or MS-Word or virtually any other product. I think even WordPerfect had them.
If it's too much trouble to learn how to use a program as anything than a blunt instrument, then you probably ought to just use a blunt instrument.
The telling phrase there is "And only MS Office nails it, and then only within the current version."
That's a dead giveaway that you don't have a document, you have an artifact of a very specific release (and possibly even very specific maintenance) of a certain software product. Not exactly something you can enjoy through the ages.
Back before soft fonts were the norm, we used to have horrible problems in my office with documents that when passed from one person to another would completely lose their page integrity even though everyone was using the same version of Windows and the same version of Office. Because the typesetting metrics were computed based on what physical fonts were installed in their printers. Soft fonts reduced the problem, since every user could be supplied with the exact same fontset irrespective of their brand, model, and options of printer(s).
If you absolutely, positively must have pixel-accurate page rendition, generate a PDF. That's what they're designed for. If you simply want word-processing rather than page layout, you can make your documents a LOT more portable simply by not using the word-processing program as a dumb typewriter. Don't use the "Return" key to determine vertical spacing or the space bar to determine horizontal spacing. Use tabs and styles. Use the paragraph widow/orphan attributes. Use hard page breaks if you want an absolute location for a page break.
Do this and you'll be amazed at how well most documents will travel to/from Open/Libre Writer and MS-Word. And, for that matter, between different copies of MS-Word.
Fortunately, in the Real World, there are people who don't know better. People like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. People like the US Founding Fathers. Even people like Fidel Castro (you don't have to be a Good Guy to fight the state).
You may not lead a long and happy life, but at least you're not likely to be forgotten by History as merely another Jew queueing up to get into the boxcar.
Apache HTTPD - more commonly known as simply "Apache" is the flagship product of the Apache Foundation.
But they took over the Tomcat J2EE server and spread out into an entire Java domain - "Jakarta".
Jakarta Tomcat is now known as Apache Tomcat, however, and most of the other jakarta projects have been made into "apache" projects.
And yes, as a Tomcat support person, I do find it annoying that clueless people will ask me questions about "apache" and the first thing I have do do is figure out which Apache they are talking about. Especially since it's very common for Apache HTTPD to reverse proxy one or more Apache Tomcat servers and they may be referring to both as though it was one product.
Well, the stock Libertarian/Conservative view is "go make yourself a job, you lazy bums"!
The pollyanna view is that "if you automate farms, people will flood to the factories". "If you automate the factories, they'll learn to program". "If you automate (or outsource) programming they'll (mumble, mumble)", because things always work out in this Best of all Possible Worlds.
Which smacks of supply-side economics plus expecting a long lucky streak to continue forever. And, someone who's more up on the history can correct me, but I'm suspecting that a lot of the farm automation came because - as in modern-day China - people fled the farms because factories opened up and hired at better wages than farm work. Certainly in the modern USA, farms are more likely to be run by large corporations who have the capital to buy expensive equipment that few individual farmers ever could afford.
Hacking into the banks is really no different than taxation. Either way, in the eyes of the fat cats, you're "stealing" "their" money.
The solution? Don't look at me. The only thing I'm reasonably sure if is that the times are changing and we need to stop thinking that many of the precepts we've been using to underpin our economy are Eternal Truths applicable to all times, all places, and all circumstances. Only when we refuse to blinker ourselves with dogmatism will we be free to find a solution that actually works.
And if you use something like a Roku to get your Netflix, DVR content seems totally insignificant by comparison. Because if Netflix isn't enough, there are dozens of other popular channels at (mostly) reasonable prices.
DVR+cable is not only atrociously more expensive than Netflix, but Netflix can deliver anything in its online library any time you want it (allowing for library turnover). With a DVR, you have to set up the capture in advance, and you're limited to what someone else chooses to push your way. Many of the most popular cable channels have only a handful of programs a month - they simply cycle through them. Plus the cable bundling deal means that you end up having to pay fat fees when you maybe only want to watch one or 2 of the offered channels.
At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
Cute, and entirely misses the point as so many popular anecdotes do.
I think we can take it for granted that the canal was actually needed, otherwise there would have been another team down the line filling it back in again. And I think it's probable that there weren't so many people in need of employment that they had to resort to absurdly inefficient processes.
And finally, earth-moving equipment is expensive and requires specialized parts and maintenance. In some Asian (and for that matter non-Asian) countries, it might have actually been more cost-effective to do things by hand. How many $2/day workers can you hire for the price of a Caterpillar backhoe, driver, and mechanic? Not to mention the price of fuel and lubricants and a transport to get it to/from the job site?
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he could starve before sundown because knowing how to fish is useless when the only lake belongs to some bastard who demands more than you can afford just to use the lake. And owns the local bait and tackle shop, the dock, and the boats. Not to mention the local government that sells fishing permits.
If I own Mar-a-Lago, do I have to work to pay the property tax? Of course not! I put up a Trump resort, charge $200K a head membership and presto! Other people end up paying my taxes for me.
Proles work because that's the only way they can earn enough to pay for their essentials, much less their toys.
Real 1-percenters don't work to pay for things, they work because they are using money as a score-keeping system relative to their fellow 1-percenters. Or they don't work and live off rents, dividends, interest and other non-work sources of income.
That's what "working class" really means. Working-class people have to work, or they don't earn enough to live, blue collar, white collar, whatever. If you are truly wealthy you don't need to obtain income from your work, you can get it from someone else's work. And I can tell you from experience, you'll earn a lot more that way than you will just from working hard yourself.
And here's the thing. It doesn't matter to me whether my non-work income comes from sweat labor, talent, financial instruments or robots. The money is the same regardless.
Occasional inspection is a good idea, though. I'm thinking of cases where a rat is running up the wall just as the robot jams an item into a slot. Ick.
If you ever get to management and you have to answer for errors of your subordinates your opinion will change.
And by outsourcing your critical IT resources and eliminating subordinate positions, that will make it that much more obvious where the blame should go.
Just because something is funded by taxes doesn't mean that it automatically lands in the public domain. Sorry.
Well, actually, it did once. Back before universities routinely monetized their work and R&D was allowed to do things without guaranteeing a profit by next quarter. And everything the government did was expected to be privatized.
One of the first RDBMS's was a public domain NASA project (developed by Boeing, I believe).
Legend has it that Prime Computer was founded when a bunch of engineers at Honeywell got fed up with their employer's apathy towards developing computer systems in-house, took a public-domain NASA OS written in Fortran, and developed hardware optimized to run it. NASA certainly was one of their clients, because every time one of their systems at KSC blew a board, an Prime engineer would yank one of ours (the price of getting a high-end minicomputer at a discount).
Supposedly, even software designed for the CIA was open-sourced as long as it was considered safe for national security. I've heard claims that some of the prototype code for Oracle was available that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's the point of the 6-axis sensors. They are the exact electronic equivalent of the semi-circular canals of the inner ear. In fact even if you're magneto-sensitive, the current sensors can track that as well.
It's really a psycho-physiological problem. We are able to watch the flickering pictures in movies and scan-line television because the perception of the eyes isn't as important as the perception of the brain. One of the tricks that I have heard of in tracking head/body motion is to take advantage of the fact that the human eye cannot focus on all the interim points between point A and point B, so you can do fast/fuzzy rendering while motion is going on and only have to fill things in when everything is stable.
Well, I'm not well-experienced in the field, but 6-axis motion/attitude sensors are very small and very cheap - almost every smartphone has one. And outfits like Oculus have reportedly spent a lot of effort into learning psychological tricks to ensure that your perception of the image appears to track what the sensor detects.
So I'll defer my sneering until I actually have a chance to try some out. I'm definitely not in the snowflake category. Can't even sit in the front rows of a movie theatre without getting motion sick.
Actually, I think the more accurate word is "channel", not device. Certainly ALSA has mixing capabilities. PulseAudio is more into routing multiple sound pipelines, at least if my memory on the subject isn't too blurred.
I had to work with that stuff a while back and learned to appreciate the virtues of both systems alone and in combination.
I also developed a splitting headache because there's no idiot's guide to Linux sound document I know of that covers all the options (much less when you start adding MIDI and Jack into it). So I forgot a lot of it in self-defense.
Until next time, anyway.
OR it could just be that that's been a steady stream of propaganda from a certain political party and Corporate America for 100 years. A Big Lie repeated over and over again until it "becomes" the unassailable Truth.
Any organization can become corrupt at times but that does not mean that you can automatically assume that all such organizations are all corrupt at all times.
Indeed, it is often the case that the more people need something, the more that unsavoury types will move in. And if they need something desperately and someone rich and powerful opposes them, it's not unthinkable that the unsavoury types could get a little extra "help", if you know what I mean.
There are a lot of things to dislike about Unions. But thinking you can stand up as a single individual and negotiate on an even footing with an organization which is stocked with cash, "Human Resources", lawyers, and the patience to starve you out is pitiably naive.
Well, if I'd said "another black person lining up for the slave ship", you'd have probably called me racist. The point isn't the race, nationality or religion of the person, it's whether they accept their fate meekly or they fight back, even if they'll ultimately lose.
I'm sure it's more widespread than that. Offices where virtually everything has to be a Word document.
But there's a difference between casually banging out a memo and a formatted document. I can forgive brute-force spacing for the quick-and-dirty stuff. I might even have been guilty of it myself on occasion. It's the words that count there, not so much the appearance.
What I'm railing against are the people who are complaining about the "wrong" word processor ruining their document formatting. These are the people who should know better. They are the "professionals writing word documents". People who are going to be sending copies of those documents to possibly unknown destinations with possibly unknown software versions. Business letters, user manuals, and other archival-worthy documentation.
Back in an earlier century I worked in an office where we shared 2 HP Laserjet printers. One was a LaserJet 2 and one was a LaserJet 3. They had different hardware font sets and it very definitely made a difference in how documents would appear when printed and the users complained to the support person (me). So there was some incentive to make the documents portable even within a relative monoculture.
WIH Are you even using Word instead of simply using Windows Notepad?
The whole point of having a word processor over a simple text editor is because it provides a smarter, more powerful way of creating and maintaining formatted documents.
When you want to double-space between paragraphs, you hit Enter twice between each paragraph. And, of course, subject yourself to random format changes when you port the document.
When I want to double-space between paragraphs, I edit the paragraph style and change the spacing there. And immediately, every paragraph in the document gets spaced automatically. The random reformatting is greatly reduced, because intelligent style spacing doesn't count the extra "blank" lines as lines.
Plus I can control spacing to fractions of lines, automatic paragraph numbering doesn't count the blank spaces in the paragraph count (something lawyers wouldn't want to do). And so forth.
Styles are one of the most basic concepts of word processing, whether it's Open/Libre Office or MS-Word or virtually any other product. I think even WordPerfect had them.
If it's too much trouble to learn how to use a program as anything than a blunt instrument, then you probably ought to just use a blunt instrument.
The telling phrase there is "And only MS Office nails it, and then only within the current version."
That's a dead giveaway that you don't have a document, you have an artifact of a very specific release (and possibly even very specific maintenance) of a certain software product. Not exactly something you can enjoy through the ages.
Back before soft fonts were the norm, we used to have horrible problems in my office with documents that when passed from one person to another would completely lose their page integrity even though everyone was using the same version of Windows and the same version of Office. Because the typesetting metrics were computed based on what physical fonts were installed in their printers. Soft fonts reduced the problem, since every user could be supplied with the exact same fontset irrespective of their brand, model, and options of printer(s).
If you absolutely, positively must have pixel-accurate page rendition, generate a PDF. That's what they're designed for. If you simply want word-processing rather than page layout, you can make your documents a LOT more portable simply by not using the word-processing program as a dumb typewriter. Don't use the "Return" key to determine vertical spacing or the space bar to determine horizontal spacing. Use tabs and styles. Use the paragraph widow/orphan attributes. Use hard page breaks if you want an absolute location for a page break.
Do this and you'll be amazed at how well most documents will travel to/from Open/Libre Writer and MS-Word. And, for that matter, between different copies of MS-Word.
Fortunately, in the Real World, there are people who don't know better. People like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. People like the US Founding Fathers. Even people like Fidel Castro (you don't have to be a Good Guy to fight the state).
You may not lead a long and happy life, but at least you're not likely to be forgotten by History as merely another Jew queueing up to get into the boxcar.
I thought that was supposed to be WebSphere.
Apache HTTPD - more commonly known as simply "Apache" is the flagship product of the Apache Foundation.
But they took over the Tomcat J2EE server and spread out into an entire Java domain - "Jakarta".
Jakarta Tomcat is now known as Apache Tomcat, however, and most of the other jakarta projects have been made into "apache" projects.
And yes, as a Tomcat support person, I do find it annoying that clueless people will ask me questions about "apache" and the first thing I have do do is figure out which Apache they are talking about. Especially since it's very common for Apache HTTPD to reverse proxy one or more Apache Tomcat servers and they may be referring to both as though it was one product.
Well obviously, it was by travelling back in time that Obama instigated the Great Recession before he took office.
And by travelling forward in time, he set up the Trump wiretaps.
Considering some of the conspiracy theories swirling around these days, that almost makes sense.
Screw politics anyhow!
Well, the stock Libertarian/Conservative view is "go make yourself a job, you lazy bums"!
The pollyanna view is that "if you automate farms, people will flood to the factories". "If you automate the factories, they'll learn to program". "If you automate (or outsource) programming they'll (mumble, mumble)", because things always work out in this Best of all Possible Worlds.
Which smacks of supply-side economics plus expecting a long lucky streak to continue forever. And, someone who's more up on the history can correct me, but I'm suspecting that a lot of the farm automation came because - as in modern-day China - people fled the farms because factories opened up and hired at better wages than farm work. Certainly in the modern USA, farms are more likely to be run by large corporations who have the capital to buy expensive equipment that few individual farmers ever could afford.
Hacking into the banks is really no different than taxation. Either way, in the eyes of the fat cats, you're "stealing" "their" money.
The solution? Don't look at me. The only thing I'm reasonably sure if is that the times are changing and we need to stop thinking that many of the precepts we've been using to underpin our economy are Eternal Truths applicable to all times, all places, and all circumstances. Only when we refuse to blinker ourselves with dogmatism will we be free to find a solution that actually works.
And if you use something like a Roku to get your Netflix, DVR content seems totally insignificant by comparison. Because if Netflix isn't enough, there are dozens of other popular channels at (mostly) reasonable prices.
DVR+cable is not only atrociously more expensive than Netflix, but Netflix can deliver anything in its online library any time you want it (allowing for library turnover). With a DVR, you have to set up the capture in advance, and you're limited to what someone else chooses to push your way. Many of the most popular cable channels have only a handful of programs a month - they simply cycle through them. Plus the cable bundling deal means that you end up having to pay fat fees when you maybe only want to watch one or 2 of the offered channels.
At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
Cute, and entirely misses the point as so many popular anecdotes do.
I think we can take it for granted that the canal was actually needed, otherwise there would have been another team down the line filling it back in again. And I think it's probable that there weren't so many people in need of employment that they had to resort to absurdly inefficient processes.
And finally, earth-moving equipment is expensive and requires specialized parts and maintenance. In some Asian (and for that matter non-Asian) countries, it might have actually been more cost-effective to do things by hand. How many $2/day workers can you hire for the price of a Caterpillar backhoe, driver, and mechanic? Not to mention the price of fuel and lubricants and a transport to get it to/from the job site?
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he could starve before sundown because knowing how to fish is useless when the only lake belongs to some bastard who demands more than you can afford just to use the lake. And owns the local bait and tackle shop, the dock, and the boats. Not to mention the local government that sells fishing permits.
You talk like a proletarian.
If I own Mar-a-Lago, do I have to work to pay the property tax? Of course not! I put up a Trump resort, charge $200K a head membership and presto! Other people end up paying my taxes for me.
Proles work because that's the only way they can earn enough to pay for their essentials, much less their toys.
Real 1-percenters don't work to pay for things, they work because they are using money as a score-keeping system relative to their fellow 1-percenters. Or they don't work and live off rents, dividends, interest and other non-work sources of income.
That's what "working class" really means. Working-class people have to work, or they don't earn enough to live, blue collar, white collar, whatever. If you are truly wealthy you don't need to obtain income from your work, you can get it from someone else's work. And I can tell you from experience, you'll earn a lot more that way than you will just from working hard yourself.
And here's the thing. It doesn't matter to me whether my non-work income comes from sweat labor, talent, financial instruments or robots. The money is the same regardless.
Probably better to just stick RFID tags on them.
Occasional inspection is a good idea, though. I'm thinking of cases where a rat is running up the wall just as the robot jams an item into a slot. Ick.
It would probably also behoove whoever is designing this algorithm to consider items purchased together,
Seems to me that Amazon - and others - have been doing that for many years now.
Heh. I would like to see a defrag process run upon such a warehouse. I expect it would look something like playing Freecell...
I think actually we're looking at the physical equivalent of a hashtable, With probably MRU pre-fetch on the "cache" storage area.
That's how business works today. Cheaper, faster, and external.
If you don't like it you are welcome to play the startup game.
If, of course, you can raise the capital.
Enough capital, in fact, to overcome the fact that established players will probably be paying much less for virtually everything than you will.
But at least AC doesn't have to pay for the sky!
And now you've got the Firefly theme running through my head!
If you ever get to management and you have to answer for errors of your subordinates your opinion will change.
And by outsourcing your critical IT resources and eliminating subordinate positions, that will make it that much more obvious where the blame should go.
Yeah. And the ISS was in part paid by me, so I want a ticket on the next ride there to inspect my property!
The local municipal sewage plant was paid for by me. And the city would be happy to arrange an inspection tour.
But they'd still expect me to drive myself there.
Just because something is funded by taxes doesn't mean that it automatically lands in the public domain. Sorry.
Well, actually, it did once. Back before universities routinely monetized their work and R&D was allowed to do things without guaranteeing a profit by next quarter. And everything the government did was expected to be privatized.
One of the first RDBMS's was a public domain NASA project (developed by Boeing, I believe).
Legend has it that Prime Computer was founded when a bunch of engineers at Honeywell got fed up with their employer's apathy towards developing computer systems in-house, took a public-domain NASA OS written in Fortran, and developed hardware optimized to run it. NASA certainly was one of their clients, because every time one of their systems at KSC blew a board, an Prime engineer would yank one of ours (the price of getting a high-end minicomputer at a discount).
Supposedly, even software designed for the CIA was open-sourced as long as it was considered safe for national security. I've heard claims that some of the prototype code for Oracle was available that way.
Well that all sounds easy enough
Well, computers are easy. A child can program one. That's why you should always hire the cheapest IT workers you can get.