All you need to know about the quality of this movie is summed up in the following sentence - "This film would have been better with more Keanu Reeves."
I thought the real point behind having ownership in a company was getting a slice of the company's profits. Then the buying and selling of shares is based on the expectations of distributions. But double taxation of such distributions discourage companies from distributing profits, instead using those profits to fuel growth. At that point, the share price can no longer ride on the future expectation of distributions. It can only ride on the expectation that someone else will buy the stock from you for more than you paid for it. And then it seems that everyone only values how much the company grows, not how much the company is profitable. We know from recent history that this is a bad thing.
I'm a heavy NetFlix user, and I do indeed have a lot of discs stuck in "long wait" mode. However, I've found that it is still very easy for me to get brand new releases so long as I have a disc being returned to the center on the day of the release. However, if I miss the release date, the movie almost immediately goes to "long wait" mode.
Re:Not necessarily the war yet
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
Get rid of those pesky citizens, and the paid professionals can run things much smoother.
Did you mean to say that our paid professionals are not citizens?
I've been working on the software for these types of instruments since 1991. Making something that resolves atoms at room temperature is quite a daunting task. In electronics, just the basic Johnson Noise of resistors becomes significant when trying to resolve such tiny measurements. On top of that, the thermal drift of the metal in your instrument which moves your measuring device relative to what your measuring is enough to prevent you from seeing atoms. Then you also have to worry about digital noise generated by your processors radiating into the sensor electronics over ground and power leads.
To make a commerically viable AFM, you need a lot of smart people from several different fields. But even then, these people have to have a few years of building this sort of instrumentation under their belt. It is not easy at all. And the machining costs alone will always dictate a high price for these instruments.
-todd-
PS - Although atoms get a lot of press, I think the most interesting uses of AFM are in biology and hard drive research. These certainly produce the more spectacular looking images.
The only time I get hiccups is if I do something like eat too big a chunk of bread without adding enough liquid to get it down the pipe quickly. I'm only this stupid a couple times a year. I can kinda feel the food going down too slow, and I know a hiccup fit is coming, especially if I can't get water down there quick enough. And sure enough, it does. I continue to hiccup until the food passes.
The mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc, engineering fields all have various degrees of abstractions via object hiding. It just isn't called "object hiding" because these are in fact real objects and there is no need to call them objects because it is natural to think of them that way. When debugging a design in any of these fields, it is not unusual to have to strip down layers and layers of "abstraction" (ie, pry into physical objects) to get to the bottom of a real tough problem. Those engineers with the broadest skills are usually the best at dealing with such problems. There isn't really anything new in the article.
We hear of a "Digital Divide", but never a "Health Halving" or a "Food Fjord" or a "Freedom Fission". "Digital Divide" seems to be just a handy buzz term to throw around when you are a technologist and have no real ideas that address a country's true problems...
I was about to call "bullshit" on this article, because alcohol combustion does indeed produce CO2, but a web search showed me this USENET post, which explains that this is not a problem because the CO2 came from the atmosphere in the first place (used by the plant that ended up as alcohol). Read it in context with followups for an interesting comparison to fossil fuels. One poster remarked that the main difference between CO2 released by fossil fuels and that of alcohol is that the alcohol carbon was very recently in the atmosphere, but the fossil fuel carbon has been dead and buried for some time.
I don't even know why this went to court. If I was this guy, with nothing written down, I would either say, "Sorry, I hit my head on a coffee table and I forgot", or write down a very crappy implementation or a non-sequitir solution.
Re:Y2K ruined the hottest date of the Millenium
on
1985 Usenet About Y2k
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· Score: 1
I couldn't believe how many people fell for that. It was reposted to just about every car list on the net. I even got big media people emailing me about it. No one who fell for it thought to question why the hell a car manufacturer bent on keeping costs down would put a real-time clock into an ECU in the first place, especially since it would likely massively drift over its lifetime (thus negating any advantage) as there is no external interface for resetting such a clock (the factory clock radio has no date display).
But the worst part was that not a single person asked me for clarification, verification, or permission of some kind before reprinting it everywhere as fact... helping to confirm for me that Y2K was largely hype-driven frenzy... while making my own special contribution to that frenzy.:-)
If you have the opportunity to go to college, take it. At this point in your life, you do not *really* know what you want to do. College will expose you to many possible careers. Not only that, but you might acquire additional skills that will provide you with a backup plan when you burn out on sysadmin'ing...
Perhaps you should actually go and *see* the technology in action before you put it down.
At the last *two* Consumer Electronics Shows in Vegas, TI was there showing DLP on a screen I estimate was half the size of a normal theater screen. I think the DLP unit was 1024 x something. First, they showed cuts of various films. Looked awesome, no pixels. Then they showed some HDTV pictures. I was blown away! Looked like I was looking out of a window, very lifelike, almost 3D. Unlike film (especially 35mm film). Later, I went close to the screen to see if I could see pixels. I could see them at about three feet from the screen. Otherwise, they blended so damn well I just couldn't tell.
Given a bit more time to get the resolution up to 1500x, on a fullsize screen, I am confident that DLP will look just great showing film!
I like how confident you are about the future. In my version of the future, I simply say, "Computer! 8 track player, Earth, circa 1972". Problem solved...
Hey! Guess what! Your experiment above proves that CCD is less lossy than film. You are not the only to notice this. There is a company in Hollywood that has made a box that takes "cold" digital shots and "warms" them up by applying the effective transfer function of film to the digital data.
The problem does not lie in CCDs or "digital". This kind of thinking is akin to the freaks who think that listening to vinyl recordings through tube amps is a truer reproduction than CD recordings through a transistor amp. Despite the fact the signal from the record goes through the nastiest-ass filter you've ever seen (RIAA equalization). The sound is not purer, it is more distorted, via the analog method. It might sound better, but you are fooling yourself if you think it is a truer representation.
Slashdot Mirror
All you need to know about the quality of this movie is summed up in the following sentence - "This film would have been better with more Keanu Reeves."
How do you make a logarithmic A/D?
I thought the real point behind having ownership in a company was getting a slice of the company's profits. Then the buying and selling of shares is based on the expectations of distributions. But double taxation of such distributions discourage companies from distributing profits, instead using those profits to fuel growth. At that point, the share price can no longer ride on the future expectation of distributions. It can only ride on the expectation that someone else will buy the stock from you for more than you paid for it. And then it seems that everyone only values how much the company grows, not how much the company is profitable. We know from recent history that this is a bad thing.
...because it gets more miles to the gallon.
I'm a heavy NetFlix user, and I do indeed have a lot of discs stuck in "long wait" mode. However, I've found that it is still very easy for me to get brand new releases so long as I have a disc being returned to the center on the day of the release. However, if I miss the release date, the movie almost immediately goes to "long wait" mode.
I've been working on the software for these types of instruments since 1991. Making something that resolves atoms at room temperature is quite a daunting task. In electronics, just the basic Johnson Noise of resistors becomes significant when trying to resolve such tiny measurements. On top of that, the thermal drift of the metal in your instrument which moves your measuring device relative to what your measuring is enough to prevent you from seeing atoms. Then you also have to worry about digital noise generated by your processors radiating into the sensor electronics over ground and power leads.
To make a commerically viable AFM, you need a lot of smart people from several different fields. But even then, these people have to have a few years of building this sort of instrumentation under their belt. It is not easy at all. And the machining costs alone will always dictate a high price for these instruments.
-todd-
PS - Although atoms get a lot of press, I think the most interesting uses of AFM are in biology and hard drive research. These certainly produce the more spectacular looking images.
The only time I get hiccups is if I do something like eat too big a chunk of bread without adding enough liquid to get it down the pipe quickly. I'm only this stupid a couple times a year. I can kinda feel the food going down too slow, and I know a hiccup fit is coming, especially if I can't get water down there quick enough. And sure enough, it does. I continue to hiccup until the food passes.
Or isn't this a hiccup?
He's been spending way too much time in the back of a limousine....
"We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit."
We had a War On Poverty in the 60s. It went about as well as the War On Drugs.
The mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc, engineering fields all have various degrees of abstractions via object hiding. It just isn't called "object hiding" because these are in fact real objects and there is no need to call them objects because it is natural to think of them that way. When debugging a design in any of these fields, it is not unusual to have to strip down layers and layers of "abstraction" (ie, pry into physical objects) to get to the bottom of a real tough problem. Those engineers with the broadest skills are usually the best at dealing with such problems. There isn't really anything new in the article.
We hear of a "Digital Divide", but never a "Health Halving" or a "Food Fjord" or a "Freedom Fission". "Digital Divide" seems to be just a handy buzz term to throw around when you are a technologist and have no real ideas that address a country's true problems...
I was about to call "bullshit" on this article, because alcohol combustion does indeed produce CO2, but a web search showed me this USENET post, which explains that this is not a problem because the CO2 came from the atmosphere in the first place (used by the plant that ended up as alcohol). Read it in context with followups for an interesting comparison to fossil fuels. One poster remarked that the main difference between CO2 released by fossil fuels and that of alcohol is that the alcohol carbon was very recently in the atmosphere, but the fossil fuel carbon has been dead and buried for some time.
I don't even know why this went to court. If I was this guy, with nothing written down, I would either say, "Sorry, I hit my head on a coffee table and I forgot", or write down a very crappy implementation or a non-sequitir solution.
I couldn't believe how many people fell for that. It was reposted to just about every car list on the net. I even got big media people emailing me about it. No one who fell for it thought to question why the hell a car manufacturer bent on keeping costs down would put a real-time clock into an ECU in the first place, especially since it would likely massively drift over its lifetime (thus negating any advantage) as there is no external interface for resetting such a clock (the factory clock radio has no date display).
:-)
But the worst part was that not a single person asked me for clarification, verification, or permission of some kind before reprinting it everywhere as fact... helping to confirm for me that Y2K was largely hype-driven frenzy... while making my own special contribution to that frenzy.
-todd-
If you have the opportunity to go to college, take it. At this point in your life, you do not *really* know what you want to do. College will expose you to many possible careers. Not only that, but you might acquire additional skills that will provide you with a backup plan when you burn out on sysadmin'ing...
I can't wait to hear the wanking from people who remember the good ol' days of flat-2D 30-degree passive film viewing...
The "warmth" you are talking about is distorition. It might sound better, but it is distortion, nonetheless.
Perhaps you should actually go and *see* the technology in action before you put it down.
At the last *two* Consumer Electronics Shows in Vegas, TI was there showing DLP on a screen I estimate was half the size of a normal theater screen. I think the DLP unit was 1024 x something. First, they showed cuts of various films. Looked awesome, no pixels. Then they showed some HDTV pictures. I was blown away! Looked like I was looking out of a window, very lifelike, almost 3D. Unlike film (especially 35mm film). Later, I went close to the screen to see if I could see pixels. I could see them at about three feet from the screen. Otherwise, they blended so damn well I just couldn't tell.
Given a bit more time to get the resolution up to 1500x, on a fullsize screen, I am confident that DLP will look just great showing film!
-todd-
I like how confident you are about the future. In my version of the future, I simply say, "Computer! 8 track player, Earth, circa 1972". Problem solved...
Hey! Guess what! Your experiment above proves that CCD is less lossy than film. You are not the only to notice this. There is a company in Hollywood that has made a box that takes "cold" digital shots and "warms" them up by applying the effective transfer function of film to the digital data.
The problem does not lie in CCDs or "digital". This kind of thinking is akin to the freaks who think that listening to vinyl recordings through tube amps is a truer reproduction than CD recordings through a transistor amp. Despite the fact the signal from the record goes through the nastiest-ass filter you've ever seen (RIAA equalization). The sound is not purer, it is more distorted, via the analog method. It might sound better, but you are fooling yourself if you think it is a truer representation.
Same goes for film.
-todd-