sorry if this is redundant, but I have to mention it: (US Army Ranger sergeant being ordered by Peter Sellers to use his gun to blow a Coke dispenser apart to get some coins in order to avoid total nuclear war)
"if you do not get the President of the United States on that phone, you will be responsible to the Coca-Cola Company".
In maybe 50 years, computers will be powerful enough to simulate the humain brain. Just take an image of the brain before Alzheimer settles in and reincarne yourself in kind of a Mame cabinet with cameras, mics and actuators. Sounds simpler to me than the here proposed solution. There just has to be a good UPS and some backup disks.
yes, OutRun was fun ; especially because I remember we used to make fun of a nerd at my highschool who was a huge fan of the game. We would watch him play with great praise of his driving skills, when slipping a foot in between his legs to give a small amount of braking he would not notice, being so absorbed. He never got it..He was especially fun to watch playing because he would move his head in all directions, trying to look above the other cars and hills before passing, like you would when driving in "the real world".
OutRun 2 is only marginally better than the original.
The experiment described is actually a "four slit" Young experiment. It's a classical exercise to show that when you go from two to three slits you have an irregular pattern, and as you increase the number of slits only the "main" peaks survive; (nice geometric series of complex exponentials in the calculation) ; this is the principle of the diffraction grating used nowadays instead of prisms in monochromators and spectrometers. What happens here is that when going from two to four slits the diffraction and the short coherence length of a laser pointer (maybe 1mm) make that only three peaks are visible. With a better laser (say a 30 cm long He/Ne) you would see maybe 12 peaks. And if you use a photodetector on the screen, you detect the two missing peaks, which your eye cannot !
the above posters forgot the ominous swedish peacekeeping done for the UN in Katanga in the 1960s. One could see then that the Swedes are as barbaric as any other nation : flattening villages with aircraft and heavy artillery in a failed attempt to stop guerilla.
It might be the one pointed out by the Guinness book cited in the article, hence the various James Bond jokes as well as the Taiwan interest ; indeed, the french stealth frigate appears at the beginning of the last (or before-last) 007 movie, and it was sold to Taiwan by Thomoson , giving rise to a huge financial crisis. The frigate is however not made of carbon.
I hope the frigate has a lower radar signature than a 1970s Volvo...
Well, maybe we can't communicate with dolphins, but they sure enjoy a good handjob given by a Greenpeace activist. Anyone to try the same with aliens ?
It seems to me that innovations I have seen in the academic world 15-20 years ago are coming to the "real world" everyday : use of computers to predict lot of stuff, doing your own wordprocessing, the Internet and e-mail, working from home with modems..This justifies giving money to apparently useless research.
on that line of thought, Toutatis could be the remains of a spacecraft the dinosaurs built from meteorits ; that would explain an orbit passing close to Earth and the odd shape it has.
Why don't they mix DDR with a gesture based game like "Eye Toy : Groove" ? Then you could really have a disco experience ! There is no way at the moment to check in which direction the body is turned, so all the salsa or rock'n'roll moves are usually wrong in comparison to the "real" ones (not to mention the lack of an opposite sex partner you can feel in your arms).
well, the legendary reliability of 911s is due to the comparison to Jaguars or Ferraris...in comparison to a mass-produced model, on a daily use basis, it is rather a nightmare, especially if not driven soft (which rather kills the pleasure). I had the pleasure of sharing a 930, only to be passed by an old Fiat when flooring it ! The owner explained that the double ignition had a tendency to reset itself from time to time, all one had to do was to remove the key and reinsert it !
I have also heard of countless motor overhauls (rather easy since the 911 is kind of a rally car), also due to a strange inclination of Porsche hobbyists to tune the engine (what's the point if you can already go faster than 99.9 % of cars on the road ?). I have seen a tuned 930 twin turbo with 450 HP which holds the speeding ticket record , according to the cops, at a certain highway bridge (285 km/h). The engine exploded at 80 000 km at the odometer (valves gone mad). As the owner put it, he sold it after some repairs (and countless legal troubles as well with the highway patrol as with the mechanics and the tuner) to someone "who used to be a friend".
I have read somewhere that aircooling in VWs (and hence in PorSches up to 1996) is related to Hitler's wish to produce a car able to "sleep outside" (for workers not able to afford a garage) and start even during the worst German winters. Watercooling technology of the time was not able to keep up with this. Everybody recognizes that Hitler had "visions", could lead incredible brainstorming sessions, and get certain people to give more than the best of themselves ; this is what occured to Porsche during a few nights with him. Fortunately for us, AH could also be spectacularly wrong, and due to is past brilliances, noone dared to contradict him !
Speaking of tanks, the French 8-wheeled light Panhard tank of the fifties had a low lying, flat ten, gasoline engine (sounds familiar ?) whose design was taken from Porsche as war repairs (along with the ATAR turboreactor powering the Mirages)
offtopic also, but I remember when my previous lab switched from elm to the hp mailtool or pine (or the opposite). Anyway : before, p was previous, after, p was print...since the default laserprinter was quite remote from most people's desk, we would find various mails printed and never collected by the printer, the worse ones (read, shameless asslicking of the boss to get promotions, adultery, sheer stupidity) being stapled above the printer. One of the boss would complain about people hacking the e-mail system, or spreading gossip !
well, after my love of ten years left me, I failed miserably with several girls I tried to pick up, having lost the skills...After some googling, I found ESR guide and the abovementioned site, and realized that the bastard who stole my SO had used exactly the techniques described there. I started to use them myself, and in the space of 2 months had a half dozen of girls for me to choose...It even got to the point where, for the first time in my life, I had to evict a young, smart, beautiful girl with huge tits from my house because another one was to arrive the next half hour....
I have settled now, but remember the lessons learned on that, just in case I need them one day.
there was a slashdot story about the songs played at the beginning of each martian day. Did they play "Life on Mars" today ? or just "Mossbauer spectroscopy rocks" (by some artist whose name I have forgotten )
how to learn to debug any code
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 1
just teach programming courses for a few years ! Then you will learn to think of every possible cause for a bug, because else you only are used to look for bugs coming for mistakes you usually make (say, loops going from 0 to n on an n sized array), not for mistakes you assume you would never make...and that you actually make. When you look to someone else's code (or electronic circuit, or any kind of experiment for that matter), you realize that you have to have this particularly open state of mind to find bugs, especially under this pressure that students are very good to put (like : OK, I program like an idiot, forgot 90% of what you explained, but I expect you to find bugs in less than one second in this 1000 lines kludge because I need to pass the class ). Of course, a good knowledge of all classic mistakes, debugging tools and switches (array bound checking like pointed above, post mortem core dump analysis, stack printouts after segv, tests with known results, check with various optimization flags - compilers can be buggy) also helps.
well, like an above poster pointed out, this system has been in place in France for maybe 15 years...guess what, it is believed to be largely hacked. Someone even got 1 year of jail for revealing how to do it (as always, there is a design flaw and you can feed zeros until you get everything from the card or the ATM, or something like that) ; this smart card thing is only another name for security through obscurity, which only works for a while.
For satellite TV it is even believed that the chips were scanned with an electronic microscope to find the underlying algorithms.
Slashdot Mirror
now, with genetic engineering, we can create dogs of arbitrary size, color, aspect, and abilities. Oh, wait...
for me, more or less in chronological order :
"Tintin et Milou"
Casio PB-100 user manual (truly great, with nice example programs like Gauss'pivot !)
"101 computer games in BASIC"
6502 assembler manual
Asimov's science history
Jackson "Classical Electrodynamics"
"Numerical Recipes in Fortran"
Landau and Lifchitz "Classical Mechanics"
Atkins "Physical Chemistry" (all the basics of thermodynamics and statistical physics made simple !)
Gutzwiller "Chaos in classical and Quantum mechanics"
TeX and LaTeX books
sorry if this is redundant, but I have to mention it :
(US Army Ranger sergeant being ordered by Peter Sellers to use his gun to blow a Coke dispenser apart to get some coins in order to avoid total nuclear war)
"if you do not get the President of the United States on that phone, you will be responsible to the Coca-Cola Company".
In maybe 50 years, computers will be powerful enough to simulate the humain brain. Just take an image of the brain before Alzheimer settles in and reincarne yourself in kind of a Mame cabinet with cameras, mics and actuators. Sounds simpler to me than the here proposed solution. There just has to be a good UPS and some backup disks.
well, they actually changed the name from NMR to MRI becaude "NMR" sounded like another, not too pleasant for many people, medical procedure
yes, OutRun was fun ; especially because I remember we used to make fun of a nerd at my highschool who was a huge fan of the game. We would watch him play with great praise of his driving skills, when slipping a foot in between his legs to give a small amount of braking he would not notice, being so absorbed. He never got it..He was especially fun to watch playing because he would move his head in all directions, trying to look above the other cars and hills before passing, like you would when driving in "the real world".
OutRun 2 is only marginally better than the original.
seems also to be down. I was trying to access it after the Cannes result, and thought the US government had censored it...
The experiment described is actually a "four slit" Young experiment. It's a classical exercise to show that when you go from two to three slits you have an irregular pattern, and as you increase the number of slits only the "main" peaks survive ;
(nice geometric series of complex exponentials in the calculation) ; this is the principle of the diffraction grating used nowadays instead of prisms in monochromators and spectrometers. What happens here is that when going from two to four slits the diffraction and the short coherence length of a laser pointer (maybe 1mm) make that only three peaks are visible. With a better laser (say a 30 cm long He/Ne) you would see maybe 12 peaks. And if you use a photodetector on the screen, you detect the two missing peaks, which your eye cannot !
the above posters forgot the ominous swedish
peacekeeping done for the UN in Katanga in the 1960s. One could see then that the Swedes are as barbaric as any other nation : flattening villages with aircraft and heavy artillery in a failed attempt to stop guerilla.
It might be the one pointed out by the Guinness book cited in the article, hence the various James Bond jokes as well as the Taiwan interest ; indeed, the french stealth frigate appears at the beginning of the last (or before-last) 007 movie, and it was sold to Taiwan by Thomoson , giving rise to a huge financial crisis. The frigate is however not made of carbon.
I hope the frigate has a lower radar signature than a 1970s Volvo...
Well, maybe we can't communicate with dolphins, but they sure enjoy a good handjob given by a Greenpeace activist. Anyone to try the same with aliens ?
It seems to me that innovations I have seen in the academic world 15-20 years ago are coming to the "real world" everyday : use of computers to predict lot of stuff, doing your own wordprocessing, the Internet and e-mail, working from home with modems..This justifies giving money to apparently useless research.
I remember trying that one once (mainly because of a co-worker). Well, it sucked **NOT !**.
on that line of thought, Toutatis could be the remains of a spacecraft the dinosaurs built from meteorits ; that would explain an orbit passing close to Earth and the odd shape it has.
what I meant was feet and hands at the same time..the machine shown on your link seems to be hands only.
Why don't they mix DDR with a gesture based game like "Eye Toy : Groove" ? Then you could really have a disco experience ! There is no way at the moment to check in which direction the body is turned, so all the salsa or rock'n'roll moves are usually wrong in comparison to the "real" ones (not to mention the lack of an opposite sex partner you can feel in your arms).
well, the legendary reliability of 911s is due to the comparison to Jaguars or Ferraris...in comparison to a mass-produced model, on a daily use basis, it is rather a nightmare, especially if not driven soft (which rather kills the pleasure). I had the pleasure of sharing a 930, only to be passed by an old Fiat when flooring it ! The owner explained that the double ignition had a tendency to reset itself from time to time, all one had to do was to remove the key and reinsert it !
I have also heard of countless motor overhauls (rather easy since the 911 is kind of a rally car), also due to a strange inclination of Porsche hobbyists to tune the engine (what's the point if you can already go faster than 99.9 % of cars on the road ?). I have seen a tuned 930 twin turbo with 450 HP which holds the speeding ticket record , according to the cops, at a certain highway bridge (285 km/h). The engine exploded at 80 000 km at the odometer (valves gone mad). As the owner put it, he sold it after some repairs (and countless legal troubles as well with the highway patrol as with the mechanics and the tuner) to someone "who used to be a friend".
You are right.
what I had in mind was the introduction of the Boxster which prefigured the Porsche 996, the name of which isn't a coincidence.
I have read somewhere that aircooling in VWs (and hence in PorSches up to 1996) is related to Hitler's wish to produce a car able to "sleep outside" (for workers not able to afford a garage) and start even during the worst German winters. Watercooling technology of the time was not able to keep up with this. Everybody recognizes that Hitler had "visions", could lead incredible brainstorming sessions, and get certain people to give more than the best of themselves ; this is what occured to Porsche during a few nights with him. Fortunately for us, AH could also be spectacularly wrong, and due to is past brilliances, noone dared to contradict him !
Speaking of tanks, the French 8-wheeled light Panhard tank of the fifties had a low lying, flat ten, gasoline engine (sounds familiar ?) whose design was taken from Porsche as war repairs (along with the ATAR turboreactor powering the Mirages)
offtopic also, but I remember when my previous lab switched from elm to the hp mailtool or pine (or the opposite). Anyway : before, p was previous, after, p was print...since the default laserprinter was quite remote from most people's desk, we would find various mails printed and never collected by the printer, the worse ones (read, shameless asslicking of the boss to get promotions, adultery, sheer stupidity) being stapled above the printer. One of the boss would complain about people hacking the e-mail system, or spreading gossip !
well, after my love of ten years left me, I failed miserably with several girls I tried to pick up, having lost the skills...After some googling, I found ESR guide and the abovementioned site, and realized that the bastard who stole my SO had used exactly the techniques described there. I started to use them myself, and in the space of 2 months had a half dozen of girls for me to choose...It even got to the point where, for the first time in my life, I had to evict a young, smart, beautiful girl with huge tits from my house because another one was to arrive the next half hour....
I have settled now, but remember the lessons learned on that, just in case I need them one day.
there was a slashdot story about the songs played at the beginning of each martian day. Did they play "Life on Mars" today ? or just "Mossbauer spectroscopy rocks" (by some artist whose name I have forgotten )
just teach programming courses for a few years ! Then you will learn to think of every possible cause for a bug, because else you only are used to look for bugs coming for mistakes you usually make (say, loops going from 0 to n on an n sized array), not for mistakes you assume you would never make...and that you actually make. When you look to someone else's code (or electronic circuit, or any kind of experiment for that matter), you realize that you have to have this particularly open state of mind to find bugs, especially under this pressure that students are very good to put (like : OK, I program like an idiot, forgot 90% of what you explained, but I expect you to find bugs in less than one second in this 1000 lines kludge because I need to pass the class ). Of course, a good knowledge of all classic mistakes, debugging tools and switches (array bound checking like pointed above, post mortem core dump analysis, stack printouts after segv, tests with known results, check with various optimization flags - compilers can be buggy) also helps.
well, like an above poster pointed out, this system has been in place in France for maybe 15 years...guess what, it is believed to be largely hacked. Someone even got 1 year of jail for revealing how to do it (as always, there is a design flaw and you can feed zeros until you get everything from the card or the ATM, or something like that) ; this smart card thing is only another name for security through obscurity, which only works for a while.
For satellite TV it is even believed that the chips were scanned with an electronic microscope to find the underlying algorithms.
hey moderators !
my post was 3 minutes younger than the post above saying the same thing (but with different arguments).