take a lion from the steppe and put him on the south pole and look how well he survives there. Then take a pinguin from south pole and put him into the steppe where the lion was, how many days would you give this poor fellow?
... and take a some bacteria from the steppe, and put it in a pH12 vat of bauxite slurry. Sure, 99% of them die, but the 1% that survive flourish beyond the telling. This technique is used in mining operations in Australia (and, I presume, around the world) as a mechanism of cleaning up the waste products from the refining process.
The simple fact is that bacteria are extremely good at adapting. They can and do adapt to environments where many experts have declared "Nothing can live here".
Personally, I'd rather err on the side of caution. It only takes one of the little buggers to get back here with a knack for eating human flesh and it's adios muchacos. If it never happens, or is later proved to be impossible (i.e., we discover Mars _is_ just a rock) - great. We've wasted a little time and money, but little else. But remember - we only get once chance to bollocks up the planet. If it turns out that something can hitch a ride, I'd rather that there were protocols in place.
Sadly - yes, it is real. I remember seeing the episode. For the record, it was crap. But then, I hated Happy Days anyway, so I'm not sure that stands for much...:-)
I believe such a thing happened to MASH. And SNL, like 17 times.
There is website for shark jumping; you can check out your favourites.
While I do not watch TV on a regular basis, my mother is an avid Buffy fan. She loved that episode
As did I. And I hate musicals (as a rule).
Does The Media really use this term?
I can't say I've ever seen it used in mainstream media. AFAIK, it's mostly used in/on fan sites.
I find it odd that I am so completely out of the loop.
I find it easier to assume that there is always a loop I'm not in. That way it's a pleasant surprise when I find a new loop:-)
"Jumped the shark" is a reference to the last episodes of Happy Days, when the studio was so desperate for ratings that they had episodes with topics like "Fonzie jumps a shark on his motorcycle."
It's now used to describe the episode in a series where long time fans give up watching a long running series because it has just become too much of a joke, too much of a cliche, or so far from the original premise that it doesn't warrant watching anymore.
Shows can also "Jump back" if they redeem themselves in a later episode.
Common examples (I don't neccesarily agree with them) are the Mulder and Scully Kiss episode of X-Files, and the Buffy Musical episode.
My personal Jump the Shark fave is the last episode, series 1 Dark Angel, where [[SPOILER WARNING]] Max's boyfriend/CO tops himself to save Max. I refuse to watch Dark Angel any more after that little travesty of scriptwriting...
The human brain is built to analze 3d information. By presenting things in 2d, we are wasting this marvelous ability.
This much is true
The fact is, most 3d interfaces in existance just plain suck.
This is very true.
The problems are with implementation and design details, though
There is also the minor point that there's no such thing as a 3D monitor.
Your average geek may be able to fly around Quake 3 with the greatest of ease, but my girlfriend gets motion sick watching me play. When she isn't getting ready to hurl, she's completely lost (which corridor is that one?). These are not desirable characteristics when trying build an easy to use UI.
Face it: 2D projections of 3D are a poor substitute for actual 3D objects. Monitors are 2D (I might even pay 2.5D if you want to count some degree of layering); trying to get them to represent 3D information (and using that representation) requires a strong capacity for spatial maths, which is not present in the vast majority of the population.
Until the basic hardware hurdle is overcome, I doubt we will see any major improvements in 3D UI's.
Do you? The precision given in an estimate should not be greater than the precision in the error bounds.
A meaningful estimate would be "Sunday, +/- 2 days".
The extra detail of "4:41 EDT" is meaningless, due to the magnitude of the error bounds, and only serves to give the illusion of precision where none exists - probably to sate the anger of the masses who don't comprehend the magnitude of the problem, and therefore don't understand why a multi billion US$ space program can't predict when something they launched will fall out of the sky.
On a somewhat related note, does anybody have any experience with drive problems resulting from the physical mounting of drives at unusual angles (i.e., at a 45 degree roll or pitch, rather than horizontal or vertical)? Should one expect higher failure rates, or lower drive lifespans, as a result of unusual mounting arrangements?
Manufacturer specifications always state that drives must be mounted horizontal or vertical, but who ever pays any attention to the manufacturer....:-)
Similarly for CD and DVD drives - are there any potential problems with mounting these drives at an angle? I have played around with mounting drives at angle; the drive trays etc seem to work fine when the drive is on an angle, but it is difficult to test long term performance or failure likelyhood when you only have one drive to play with.
The reason I'm interested: I'm working on a case mod, but it looks like I will have to mount the drives at wierd angles to accomodate the case geometry...
Yes and no. The Cocoa APIs are an extension that is not cross-platform, however if you use the Swing libraries on OS X, by default they use native widgets.
Ok - this was not my understanding. I thought the OS X Swing libraries were an Aqua-esque LnF, but not Aqua widgets themselves. However, I'm not a Mac junkie, so I don't speak from experience on this point. If they are native widgets, it certainly bodes well IMHO.
I would expect that this kind of thing will flow back into Sun's JVM around 1.5 or so.
Most people think that Java is slow, buggy and doesn't look platform native because they assume that anything that is fast, stable and looks and feels platform native wasn't written in Java
I find the example set by WorldBook 2002/MacOSX to be a stunning demonstration of Java's potential if Sun would just wake up and smell the coffee (pun intended).
I like Java a lot - both as a language, and as a bytecode platform. I use it daily at work, and at home for my own projects (after many years of flipping between C, C++, and a dozen other niche languages)
My only major bugbear with the JDK is not with Java itself, but with Swing: It's godawful slow (The Hello world app should not take 30 seconds to display on a P400), it's API is occasionally appalling (JTree anyone?), and it has a habit of being occasionally buggy.
Above all, it reinvents the wheel with widgets. The Look and Feel implementation very occasionally looks and feels like a platform native application (Win2k LnF anyone?). However, it usually looks and feels like someone has tried to reimplement a system native toolkit using only a blunt light blue crayon.
For many a year I have whined to all that would listen "Why the *@*)(!&*@ doesn't the Java widgeting toolkit defer to system native widgets for window display? Surely this would look better and run faster than pixel blitting a widget look-a-like!"
MacOSX provides just such an API. Although Objective-C is the `preferred' language of Cocoa, there are Java bindings. Note - this API is NOT Swing - it is a MacOSX extension API. Consequently, a MacOSX application built in Java should be almost indistinguishable from a native compiled app in terms of look and feel. And according to your comments, performance is also indistinguishable.
I have played with Java bindings for Gnome; they provide blindingly fast gui performance, using the same java runtime as is used by Swing. However, there are several java binding projects for Gnome (all partially complete), and none of them really address the general problem of widgeting across platforms.
I have also played with Eclipse, the IBM Java . Their widget toolkit is cross platform in API but system native in widget; however, I have found the performance of the Eclipse widget set to be almost as bad as Swing. However, it is beta code - we may have to wait and see if anything improves with age.
Java/Gnome demonstrates that it can be done under X. Eclipse demonstrates that it can be done cross platform. MacOSX demonstrates that it can be done well enough as to be indistinguishable from system native widgets.
So can anyone tell me: WHY hasn't it been done? (And don't say its because they don't want to break backward compatibility - Look at 1.4's NIO framework and VolatileImage).
As someone with a PhD in AI, who has lectured on the topic at University, allow me to assure you that Yes, this is AI. However, it is not what the public generally thinks of as AI.
AI research suffers from the major problem that it started out with grand intentions (machines that think like you and me!), and has had some great publicity, but 50 years on, it hasn't delivered on many of its promises.
Those in the trade generally classify Search, categorisation and optimisation problems like this into the category of Weak AI. They exhibit "intelligent" behaviours - i.e., they are driven by knowledge, and make informed decisions - but they are algorithmic, and cannot adapt, develop or expand upon their original programming.
The other form of AI - the form promised by movies and books - is referred to as Strong AI. This is a largely untouched problem - mostly because it is extremely difficult to even quantify what it is we mean by "intelligent".
In some ways, Strong AI defies quantification - if you can clearly define what an intelligent behaviour is, you can define an intelligent algorithm to follow - but this implies that your algorithm isn't intelligent, as it won't move outside its programming.
As for your Palm chess game - are you sure that on lower settings the program is "letting" people win by throwing in an "obvious dumb move", or is the move selection heuristic for the program just poorly suited to certain game positions?
How to program a computer to play chess: ($0.10 version)
The underlying idea: you try an build an exhaustive tree of every possible move, and every possible response to that move, and every possible response to that response, and so on. This gives you a full tree of all possible games; You then choose a branch on the tree which results in you winning.
The problem: This tree is huge. After just a few moves, there are literally billions of potential board positions which must be considererd. Even Deep Blue (the recent Kasparov killer) wasn't able to perform full board evaluation, even with all it's specialised chess-playing hardware.
The solution: Rather than trying to exhaustively search the entire possible move tree, only search those branches which "look promising". This is assessed using a scoring system of some kind.
It is this scoring system (called a heuristic) which is the source of all the research. This is a source of interest to information theorists as the problem of finding a chess heuristic is easy to understand, but non-trivial to solve. Essentially, the problem is to reduce the "information" describing a board position into a single boolean "this is a winning position"/"this is a losing position".
If you're interested, seek out an introductory AI textbook (or website), and look up alpha-beta pruning. I can recommend "Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach" by Russell and Norvig. The website for the book is here
The ACCC isn't trying to force US companies to produce Region 4 DVDs; they are making sure that Australians can view Region 1 DVDs.
In Australia (and, I presume, in other countries), movie distributors have been trying like mad to get legal recognition of the DVD regions. This would make it illegal to import non region 4 DVDs into Australia, and illegal to sell players modified to play non region 4 discs. At the very least, the distributors are colluding with each other to prevent the import of Region 1 discs, and sale of Region 1 players.
Region free isn't an option, as many region 4 players bork on region 0 marked discs. Don't ask me why. They just do.
This gives Fox, Sony, Columbia, etc, effective monopoly control over their respective parts of the DVD distribution market, and prevents the `little guy' from getting access to the Australian market. The Trade Practices Act bans this sort of behaviour; the ACCC is just making sure that distributors know this.
At this point, I've gotta be proud to be an Aussie.
Russ %-)
PS: as a side note, Russell Crowe is a New Zealander who just happens to have spent some time in Australia; Mel Gibson is an American who went to acting school in Australia, and most aussies are nothing like Paul Hogan. Given that we are in a australia + movie context, I just thought I should clear this up.
that's a lot like FidoNet (and uucp). The asymmetrical bandwidth is the only real difference.
Not really. Didn't you ever use a 1200/75 modem back in the day? 1200 baud down, 75 baud up.
Alternatively, ever connect to a BBS that had a sponge filter? This doesn't affect physical bandwidth, but it sure put a limit on my effective bandwidth on a number of BBSes...
I beg to differ. Like it or not, in the real world, you have to deal with other people, and sometimes, other people are dolts. This doesn't change the fact that you have to work with them.
In surveys of employers, `communications skills' are almost universally listed as the most desirable characteristic of new graduates. Actual technical proficiency usually slips in at number 4 or 5 on the list. Group projects are intended to give practical experience at communicating in and with a group of other people.
The problem with small group projects is twofold.
Firstly, they have to be simple enough so that four moderately talented people can complete it - that means that one very talented person will be able to complete it. Any small group will usually include one person more talented that the other - this person will pick up the slack of the others to preserve their own mark.
I was once of a similar opinion as you - given a group project (group of 4 or 5), I would usually end up doing the whole damn thing, and everyone else in the group shared in the good mark: a fact that pissed me off no end. Then I did a _real_ group project - in a group of 60. This was a second year uni project. We had a semester to organise a conference, each write a paper for the conference, peer review the paper between ourselves, and present the paper at the conference. We had to raise funds, organise every aspect of the conference from tea and cookies to keynote address. At the end, we published a 300 page book of proceedings, had it printed. I still have some copies sitting on my shelf.
A project this big cannot be completed by a single person. This forces you to organise, and work in groups. Rather than trying to finish everyone elses job (which is not feasible), you learn that you have to convince others to do their job.
Secondly, the marking scheme is critical. I can't stress this enough. If your entire group is given a single mark, then your lecturer/tutor is slacking off of their responsibility.
The best feature of the large project I did was the peer review at the end. Students were asked to assess every other student. These asessments formed a large part of the final grade. Surprisingly, when given the responsibility, students will identify those who are not pulling their weight.
Group projects, if done properly, can be extremely rewarding. However, if group projects are to succeed, the project needs to be big, the group needs to be big, and the marking scheme needs to be independent.
A group of people working in concert can acheive much more than a single individual - I would not have been able to publish a book of proceedings by myself. In addition, for the remainder of that degree, the entire class had a great sense of comraderie, as we had all been through something gruelling, and we had done it together.
Russ %-)
PS: Any educators who are interested in the project I talked about here; I'm more than happy to advocate student centred learning to those looking to implement it.
Congratulations on insulting many developers who are trying to get good code used as widely as possible. Meanwhile, I will interpret your use of the GPL as a sign that you are more interested in your ideological crusade than you are in the quality of your code.
Apologies for that one - in retrospect, it came out a little harsher than I intended (although it did scan really well:-).
My intent was to point out that, to my mind, BSDLing code is akin to placing no value on your code - you don't care what anyone else does with your code, because it doesn't impact upon your financial position. The GPL places a (nonmonetary) value on code, which people must pay before using the code.
Your choice, but I don't agree. If someone takes my BSD code, modifies it, and tries to sell it to me, I'm under no obligation to buy it. The only reason I would is if it gives me a good value for my money, in which case we both benefit.
Sure, but do you get a discount because you helped to write it? If not, then by my math, you are paying for the right to use code that you wrote.
At the end of the day, this is really the nub of the argument. I don't think you're an idiot who places no value on his code; I hope you don't think the same (or worse) about me. The only difference between our positions is that I want to ensure that noone is able to profit (financially or otherwise) from my altruism without being altruistic in return, whereas you don't mind what anyone else does, as long as they use your code, and credit you in the source code.
This is a fundamental difference of opinion, and I doubt that any amount of yelling, arguing, cajoling, or otherwise will convince either one of us that the other is right.
GPL isn't altruistic at all. The way I feel about it is like this:
Thats one way of looking at it. Here's another:
"I'm giving my code to the world, at no monetary cost. If you want to use my code for your project, then I ask that you play by the same rules. I'm not going to let you exploit my effort for your personal and exclusive gain."
versus:
"I'm giving my code to the world, at no monetary cost. Do whatever you want with it. If you want to take it, modify it in a way that is incompatible with my version, and then charge me (or others) for the priviledge, go right ahead - fine by me."
Personally, I find the second much more offensive.
Don't think it would happen that way? I give you the MS TCP/IP stack, and the Darwin layer of OSX. Apple and Microsoft are making buckets of money out of someone elses work. This isn't to degrade the effort made by Apple and Microsoft on code that they did engineer; however, the fact remains that they didn't engineer the BSDL'd code they use, they didn't have to pay for it, and they are not required to give anything back to the community in return. Admittedly, Apple does, but this is just PR - not a legal requirement. MS certainly doesn't.
If this code had been GPL'd, Apple and MS would have been forced to either contribute back to the community, or develop their own code, from scratch, on their own dime.
The reason I use the GPL has nothing to do with some inherent desire to conquer the rest of the code writing community. It is simply a way of ensuring that you don't profit from my altruism in a manner that I cannot or will not exploit.
If your code is BSDL'd, it may as well be in the public domain. The only advantage that the BSDL gives you is that whoever swipes your code has to credit you, in the source file: something that 99.999% of proprietary software users will never see. If this doesn't bother you, then fine. It's your choice. However, don't preach on how much more free you are. I, however, will continue to interpret your choice to use the BSDL as a sign that either:
Umm, You mean like a QWERTY keyboard? It was invneted by a left handed man. The most common keys are all in the left hand.
(Not sure if this was an emmision of your humour gland, but I'll bite anyway...)
Close, but not quite. QWERTY was developed in the early days of mechanical typewriters to slow people down.
People were starting to type so fast (up to 80 wpm!:-) that the keys were constantly jamming. The QWERTY layout was specifically designed to slow down typists, so that the most commonly used keys were in the most inconvenience positions, and so that keystrokes alternated from left to right as often as possible.
The left hand, being weaker for 90% of the population, is therefore the best (worst?) place to put the common vowels a and e, and the common consonants s,c, etc.
Ironically, people just got used to the new layout, and were soon typing at 80wpm again, regardless of the inconvenience. But, the delay was long enough for the engineering of typewriters to catch up.
IIRC, DVORAK keyboards are designed to do the exact opposite, putting common keys on the home line. Can't say I've seen any studies showing faster typing for dvorak's, though...
Russ %-)
Re:So where does the information come from?
on
A Map to Nowhere?
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· Score: 2
Obviously, it is. So where is this extra information located? It is obvious that there must be some other mechanism at work. I would posit that the mechanism is supernatural.
There really is no other explanation.
Rubbish. I can easily give you an excellent explanation, and a demonstration to the contrary.
The genome contains a set of simple information. It is then expressed using a series of decoding rules. The 640MB of info is then turned into several GB/TB/PB of information, which is used to build a human/dog/etc.
As an example, consider the Mandelbrot set. It is based upon a very simple piece of information; the repeated iteration of the rule z = z^2-1.
This rule can be stated as a few mathematical symbols; alternatively, it could be coded in just about any language and still fit in a few kb.
However, the expression of the Mandelbrot set is infinitely detailed - and I do mean infinite. It would require an infinite amount of information to uniquely encode the detail in the Mandelbrot set in a point by point fashion. The Mandelbrot set contains all sorts of interesting patterns, repeats of patterns, unique bits and bobs; yet it comes from a simple expression rule, applied to a single complex number.
If you look at a cloud, and see a fish, it doesn't mean that there is a fish in the sky. It means there is a cloud in the sky, which might bear some sort of resemblance to a fish. Please resist the temptation to declare that magic and jiggery-pokery is the only reasonable explanation for a complex phenomenon. Sometimes a simple explanation will do the trick.
So this steel wire I'm holding is plastic? I can bend it, and it stays bent. Smells like plastic deformation to me.
Yes. Steel wire is plastic when bent past its critical point. Glad to see you're catching on:-) It is elastic when the deforming force is small.
Or perhaps you don't realize that most people use the term "plastic" to mean "polymer".
Thats exactly what I do realise, and what I was trying to impress upon the madding throng. Most people use the term plastic incorrectly, by using "plastic" to refer to a large group of hydrocarbon based long chain polymer solids commonly found in drink bottles, etc. It doesn't. The term "Plastic" is a property, not a material; an adjective, not a noun.
People who use the term "plastic" don't mean "polymer" either. The term "polymer" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does; a polymer is a ANY material which forms long repetitive chains of identical molecular groups. Again, Hydrocarbons tend to form nice polymers, but they are by no means the ONLY molecules that form polymers.
Drink bottles, etc, are made of a hydrocarbon based polymer which have the property of being plastic; however, this is a _VERY_ small subset of the materials which are 1) plastic, 2) polymers, or 3) both.
The NY Times article doesn't go into enough detail about the composition of Polythiophene to make any specific comments about its molecular composition; but the fact that it is a plastic polymer does not require that it is in any way related to the "plastic" in a drink bottle, nor that it will require hydrocarbons and crude oil to create said "plastic superconductor".
BTW, do linguistic semantics give you a woody? I'm just wondering.
Yes. They do. The English language is a beautiful thing, and there are so many enormously precise ways of expressing exactly what you mean. It seems a waste to restrict yourself to the lowest common denominator of grunts and bellows.
Plastic is a desciption of a quality of a material, not a description of composition.
A material is plastic if it can undergo plastic deformation - ie, it doesn't bouce back to its original shape when bent/twisted (opposite of elastic deformation)
There is no proviso that a plastic be made from hydrocarbons - however, most hydrocarbon compounds tend to have good plastic properties.
The problem with really great supporting characters is that they're really great supporting characters -- you usually just can't give 'em enough to do on their own. Think of all those spin-offs that failed horribly; the only ones I can think of which succeed are complete departures from the original premise (for example Fraiser is technically spun off from Cheers, but is in all important respects completely unrecognizable as a derivative).
Angel, the spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has done pretty well - I would go so far as to say that the first series of Angel was much better than the fourth series poutings of Buff + friends. Angel was a fairly major supporting character throughout series 1-3 of Buffy, and the rules and standards of the `Buffyverse' are maintained through the transition to Angel.
The consistent failure of spinoffs isn't related to the fact that they _are_ spinoffs, its a matter of motive.If the spinoff is done to allow explore a legitimite plot arc/character/etc, the writers will come, the stories will seem natural, and the support of the fans will carry it. However, if it's just an attempt to bleed more money from the merchandising stone, no amount of association with past glory will save it.
Whether this applies to Lone Gunmen - we will just have to wait and see. The wait will be especially long for me, as I live in Australia, and unless Lone Gunmen is a ratings boom, I can reasonably expect to see it sometime in 2033, probably in a late night time slot.
Convert, a part of the ImageMagick suite, is well worth a gander.
With it, you can convert almost any graphics/text format to almost any other format. Sometimes, it does the conversion by outsourcing to another program (such as ghostview), but most are handled internally. The results are generally pretty good.
Syntax would be: convert blah.tiff blah.ps (change the extensions if you want different conversions)
ImageMagick RPM's are usually included in a base RedHat install; it shouldn't be too hard to get a deb or tarball package.
The content/form separation which LaTeX provides - which the real source of power for the language - is the same power provided by a good XML DTD (like DocBook), when combined with a good cascading style sheet or XSL defnition. Of course, this relies upon the existence of browsers which implement CSS and XSL correctly.... A nice set of design tools to handle the same also would not go astray...
Slashdot Mirror
take a lion from the steppe and put him on the south pole and look how well he survives there. Then take a pinguin from south pole and put him into the steppe where the lion was, how many days would you give this poor fellow?
... and take a some bacteria from the steppe, and put it in a pH12 vat of bauxite slurry. Sure, 99% of them die, but the 1% that survive flourish beyond the telling. This technique is used in mining operations in Australia (and, I presume, around the world) as a mechanism of cleaning up the waste products from the refining process.
The simple fact is that bacteria are extremely good at adapting. They can and do adapt to environments where many experts have declared "Nothing can live here".
Personally, I'd rather err on the side of caution. It only takes one of the little buggers to get back here with a knack for eating human flesh and it's adios muchacos. If it never happens, or is later proved to be impossible (i.e., we discover Mars _is_ just a rock) - great. We've wasted a little time and money, but little else. But remember - we only get once chance to bollocks up the planet. If it turns out that something can hitch a ride, I'd rather that there were protocols in place.
Russ %-)
Is that a real example, or hypothetical?
:-)
:-)
Sadly - yes, it is real. I remember seeing the episode. For the record, it was crap. But then, I hated Happy Days anyway, so I'm not sure that stands for much...
I believe such a thing happened to MASH. And SNL, like 17 times.
There is website for shark jumping; you can check out your favourites.
While I do not watch TV on a regular basis, my mother is an avid Buffy fan. She loved that episode
As did I. And I hate musicals (as a rule).
Does The Media really use this term?
I can't say I've ever seen it used in mainstream media. AFAIK, it's mostly used in/on fan sites.
I find it odd that I am so completely out of the loop.
I find it easier to assume that there is always a loop I'm not in. That way it's a pleasant surprise when I find a new loop
Russ %-)
"Jumped the shark" is a reference to the last episodes of Happy Days, when the studio was so desperate for ratings that they had episodes with topics like "Fonzie jumps a shark on his motorcycle."
It's now used to describe the episode in a series where long time fans give up watching a long running series because it has just become too much of a joke, too much of a cliche, or so far from the original premise that it doesn't warrant watching anymore.
Shows can also "Jump back" if they redeem themselves in a later episode.
Common examples (I don't neccesarily agree with them) are the Mulder and Scully Kiss episode of X-Files, and the Buffy Musical episode.
My personal Jump the Shark fave is the last episode, series 1 Dark Angel, where [[SPOILER WARNING]] Max's boyfriend/CO tops himself to save Max. I refuse to watch Dark Angel any more after that little travesty of scriptwriting...
Russ %-)
Yeah - but how much of that $40 billion debt does MS already own, by way of invoices for Windows, Office, IIS,... :-)
Russ %-)
The human brain is built to analze 3d information. By presenting things in 2d, we are wasting this marvelous ability.
This much is true
The fact is, most 3d interfaces in existance just plain suck.
This is very true.
The problems are with implementation and design details, though
There is also the minor point that there's no such thing as a 3D monitor.
Your average geek may be able to fly around Quake 3 with the greatest of ease, but my girlfriend gets motion sick watching me play. When she isn't getting ready to hurl, she's completely lost (which corridor is that one?). These are not desirable characteristics when trying build an easy to use UI.
Face it: 2D projections of 3D are a poor substitute for actual 3D objects. Monitors are 2D (I might even pay 2.5D if you want to count some degree of layering); trying to get them to represent 3D information (and using that representation) requires a strong capacity for spatial maths, which is not present in the vast majority of the population.
Until the basic hardware hurdle is overcome, I doubt we will see any major improvements in 3D UI's.
Russ %-)
> Do you remember math?
Do you? The precision given in an estimate should not be greater than the precision in the error bounds.
A meaningful estimate would be "Sunday, +/- 2 days".
The extra detail of "4:41 EDT" is meaningless, due to the magnitude of the error bounds, and only serves to give the illusion of precision where none exists - probably to sate the anger of the masses who don't comprehend the magnitude of the problem, and therefore don't understand why a multi billion US$ space program can't predict when something they launched will fall out of the sky.
Russ %-)
I thought the Salmon of Doubt would be more appropriate...
Russ %-)
On a somewhat related note, does anybody have any experience with drive problems resulting from the physical mounting of drives at unusual angles (i.e., at a 45 degree roll or pitch, rather than horizontal or vertical)? Should one expect higher failure rates, or lower drive lifespans, as a result of unusual mounting arrangements?
:-)
Manufacturer specifications always state that drives must be mounted horizontal or vertical, but who ever pays any attention to the manufacturer....
Similarly for CD and DVD drives - are there any potential problems with mounting these drives at an angle? I have played around with mounting drives at angle; the drive trays etc seem to work fine when the drive is on an angle, but it is difficult to test long term performance or failure likelyhood when you only have one drive to play with.
The reason I'm interested: I'm working on a case mod, but it looks like I will have to mount the drives at wierd angles to accomodate the case geometry...
Thanks,
Russ Magee %-)
Yes and no. The Cocoa APIs are an extension that is not cross-platform, however if you use the Swing libraries on OS X, by default they use native widgets.
Ok - this was not my understanding. I thought the OS X Swing libraries were an Aqua-esque LnF, but not Aqua widgets themselves. However, I'm not a Mac junkie, so I don't speak from experience on this point. If they are native widgets, it certainly bodes well IMHO.
I would expect that this kind of thing will flow back into Sun's JVM around 1.5 or so.
I certainly hope so...
Russ Magee %-)
Most people think that Java is slow, buggy and doesn't look platform native because they assume that anything that is fast, stable and looks and feels platform native wasn't written in Java
I find the example set by WorldBook 2002/MacOSX to be a stunning demonstration of Java's potential if Sun would just wake up and smell the coffee (pun intended).
I like Java a lot - both as a language, and as a bytecode platform. I use it daily at work, and at home for my own projects (after many years of flipping between C, C++, and a dozen other niche languages)
My only major bugbear with the JDK is not with Java itself, but with Swing: It's godawful slow (The Hello world app should not take 30 seconds to display on a P400), it's API is occasionally appalling (JTree anyone?), and it has a habit of being occasionally buggy.
Above all, it reinvents the wheel with widgets. The Look and Feel implementation very occasionally looks and feels like a platform native application (Win2k LnF anyone?). However, it usually looks and feels like someone has tried to reimplement a system native toolkit using only a blunt light blue crayon.
For many a year I have whined to all that would listen "Why the *@*)(!&*@ doesn't the Java widgeting toolkit defer to system native widgets for window display? Surely this would look better and run faster than pixel blitting a widget look-a-like!"
MacOSX provides just such an API. Although Objective-C is the `preferred' language of Cocoa, there are Java bindings. Note - this API is NOT Swing - it is a MacOSX extension API. Consequently, a MacOSX application built in Java should be almost indistinguishable from a native compiled app in terms of look and feel. And according to your comments, performance is also indistinguishable.
I have played with Java bindings for Gnome; they provide blindingly fast gui performance, using the same java runtime as is used by Swing. However, there are several java binding projects for Gnome (all partially complete), and none of them really address the general problem of widgeting across platforms.
I have also played with Eclipse, the IBM Java . Their widget toolkit is cross platform in API but system native in widget; however, I have found the performance of the Eclipse widget set to be almost as bad as Swing. However, it is beta code - we may have to wait and see if anything improves with age.
Java/Gnome demonstrates that it can be done under X. Eclipse demonstrates that it can be done cross platform. MacOSX demonstrates that it can be done well enough as to be indistinguishable from system native widgets.
So can anyone tell me: WHY hasn't it been done? (And don't say its because they don't want to break backward compatibility - Look at 1.4's NIO framework and VolatileImage).
Russ Magee %-)
As someone with a PhD in AI, who has lectured on the topic at University, allow me to assure you that Yes, this is AI. However, it is not what the public generally thinks of as AI.
AI research suffers from the major problem that it started out with grand intentions (machines that think like you and me!), and has had some great publicity, but 50 years on, it hasn't delivered on many of its promises.
Those in the trade generally classify Search, categorisation and optimisation problems like this into the category of Weak AI. They exhibit "intelligent" behaviours - i.e., they are driven by knowledge, and make informed decisions - but they are algorithmic, and cannot adapt, develop or expand upon their original programming.
The other form of AI - the form promised by movies and books - is referred to as Strong AI. This is a largely untouched problem - mostly because it is extremely difficult to even quantify what it is we mean by "intelligent".
In some ways, Strong AI defies quantification - if you can clearly define what an intelligent behaviour is, you can define an intelligent algorithm to follow - but this implies that your algorithm isn't intelligent, as it won't move outside its programming.
As for your Palm chess game - are you sure that on lower settings the program is "letting" people win by throwing in an "obvious dumb move", or is the move selection heuristic for the program just poorly suited to certain game positions?
Russ %-)
How to program a computer to play chess: ($0.10 version)
The underlying idea: you try an build an exhaustive tree of every possible move, and every possible response to that move, and every possible response to that response, and so on. This gives you a full tree of all possible games; You then choose a branch on the tree which results in you winning.
The problem: This tree is huge. After just a few moves, there are literally billions of potential board positions which must be considererd. Even Deep Blue (the recent Kasparov killer) wasn't able to perform full board evaluation, even with all it's specialised chess-playing hardware.
The solution: Rather than trying to exhaustively search the entire possible move tree, only search those branches which "look promising". This is assessed using a scoring system of some kind.
It is this scoring system (called a heuristic) which is the source of all the research. This is a source of interest to information theorists as the problem of finding a chess heuristic is easy to understand, but non-trivial to solve. Essentially, the problem is to reduce the "information" describing a board position into a single boolean "this is a winning position"/"this is a losing position".
If you're interested, seek out an introductory AI textbook (or website), and look up alpha-beta pruning. I can recommend "Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach" by Russell and Norvig. The website for the book is here
Russ %-)
In Australia (and, I presume, in other countries), movie distributors have been trying like mad to get legal recognition of the DVD regions. This would make it illegal to import non region 4 DVDs into Australia, and illegal to sell players modified to play non region 4 discs. At the very least, the distributors are colluding with each other to prevent the import of Region 1 discs, and sale of Region 1 players.
Region free isn't an option, as many region 4 players bork on region 0 marked discs. Don't ask me why. They just do.
This gives Fox, Sony, Columbia, etc, effective monopoly control over their respective parts of the DVD distribution market, and prevents the `little guy' from getting access to the Australian market. The Trade Practices Act bans this sort of behaviour; the ACCC is just making sure that distributors know this.
At this point, I've gotta be proud to be an Aussie.
Russ %-)
PS: as a side note, Russell Crowe is a New Zealander who just happens to have spent some time in Australia; Mel Gibson is an American who went to acting school in Australia, and most aussies are nothing like Paul Hogan. Given that we are in a australia + movie context, I just thought I should clear this up.
Not really. Didn't you ever use a 1200/75 modem back in the day? 1200 baud down, 75 baud up.
Alternatively, ever connect to a BBS that had a sponge filter? This doesn't affect physical bandwidth, but it sure put a limit on my effective bandwidth on a number of BBSes...
Russ %-)
I beg to differ. Like it or not, in the real world, you have to deal with other people, and sometimes, other people are dolts. This doesn't change the fact that you have to work with them.
In surveys of employers, `communications skills' are almost universally listed as the most desirable characteristic of new graduates. Actual technical proficiency usually slips in at number 4 or 5 on the list. Group projects are intended to give practical experience at communicating in and with a group of other people.
The problem with small group projects is twofold.
I was once of a similar opinion as you - given a group project (group of 4 or 5), I would usually end up doing the whole damn thing, and everyone else in the group shared in the good mark: a fact that pissed me off no end. Then I did a _real_ group project - in a group of 60. This was a second year uni project. We had a semester to organise a conference, each write a paper for the conference, peer review the paper between ourselves, and present the paper at the conference. We had to raise funds, organise every aspect of the conference from tea and cookies to keynote address. At the end, we published a 300 page book of proceedings, had it printed. I still have some copies sitting on my shelf.
A project this big cannot be completed by a single person. This forces you to organise, and work in groups. Rather than trying to finish everyone elses job (which is not feasible), you learn that you have to convince others to do their job.
The best feature of the large project I did was the peer review at the end. Students were asked to assess every other student. These asessments formed a large part of the final grade. Surprisingly, when given the responsibility, students will identify those who are not pulling their weight.
Group projects, if done properly, can be extremely rewarding. However, if group projects are to succeed, the project needs to be big, the group needs to be big, and the marking scheme needs to be independent.
A group of people working in concert can acheive much more than a single individual - I would not have been able to publish a book of proceedings by myself. In addition, for the remainder of that degree, the entire class had a great sense of comraderie, as we had all been through something gruelling, and we had done it together.
Russ %-)
PS: Any educators who are interested in the project I talked about here; I'm more than happy to advocate student centred learning to those looking to implement it.
Apologies for that one - in retrospect, it came out a little harsher than I intended (although it did scan really well :-).
My intent was to point out that, to my mind, BSDLing code is akin to placing no value on your code - you don't care what anyone else does with your code, because it doesn't impact upon your financial position. The GPL places a (nonmonetary) value on code, which people must pay before using the code.
Sure, but do you get a discount because you helped to write it? If not, then by my math, you are paying for the right to use code that you wrote.
At the end of the day, this is really the nub of the argument. I don't think you're an idiot who places no value on his code; I hope you don't think the same (or worse) about me. The only difference between our positions is that I want to ensure that noone is able to profit (financially or otherwise) from my altruism without being altruistic in return, whereas you don't mind what anyone else does, as long as they use your code, and credit you in the source code.
This is a fundamental difference of opinion, and I doubt that any amount of yelling, arguing, cajoling, or otherwise will convince either one of us that the other is right.
Russ %-)
Thats one way of looking at it. Here's another:
"I'm giving my code to the world, at no monetary cost. If you want to use my code for your project, then I ask that you play by the same rules. I'm not going to let you exploit my effort for your personal and exclusive gain."
versus:
"I'm giving my code to the world, at no monetary cost. Do whatever you want with it. If you want to take it, modify it in a way that is incompatible with my version, and then charge me (or others) for the priviledge, go right ahead - fine by me."
Personally, I find the second much more offensive.
Don't think it would happen that way? I give you the MS TCP/IP stack, and the Darwin layer of OSX. Apple and Microsoft are making buckets of money out of someone elses work. This isn't to degrade the effort made by Apple and Microsoft on code that they did engineer; however, the fact remains that they didn't engineer the BSDL'd code they use, they didn't have to pay for it, and they are not required to give anything back to the community in return. Admittedly, Apple does, but this is just PR - not a legal requirement. MS certainly doesn't.
If this code had been GPL'd, Apple and MS would have been forced to either contribute back to the community, or develop their own code, from scratch, on their own dime.
The reason I use the GPL has nothing to do with some inherent desire to conquer the rest of the code writing community. It is simply a way of ensuring that you don't profit from my altruism in a manner that I cannot or will not exploit.
If your code is BSDL'd, it may as well be in the public domain. The only advantage that the BSDL gives you is that whoever swipes your code has to credit you, in the source file: something that 99.999% of proprietary software users will never see. If this doesn't bother you, then fine. It's your choice. However, don't preach on how much more free you are. I, however, will continue to interpret your choice to use the BSDL as a sign that either:
Russ %-)
Umm, You mean like a QWERTY keyboard? It was invneted by a left handed man. The most common keys are all in the left hand.
(Not sure if this was an emmision of your humour gland, but I'll bite anyway...)
Close, but not quite. QWERTY was developed in the early days of mechanical typewriters to slow people down.
People were starting to type so fast (up to 80 wpm! :-) that the keys were constantly jamming. The QWERTY layout was specifically designed to slow down typists, so that the most commonly used keys were in the most inconvenience positions, and so that keystrokes alternated from left to right as often as possible.
The left hand, being weaker for 90% of the population, is therefore the best (worst?) place to put the common vowels a and e, and the common consonants s,c, etc.
Ironically, people just got used to the new layout, and were soon typing at 80wpm again, regardless of the inconvenience. But, the delay was long enough for the engineering of typewriters to catch up.
IIRC, DVORAK keyboards are designed to do the exact opposite, putting common keys on the home line. Can't say I've seen any studies showing faster typing for dvorak's, though...
Russ %-)
There really is no other explanation.
Rubbish. I can easily give you an excellent explanation, and a demonstration to the contrary.
The genome contains a set of simple information. It is then expressed using a series of decoding rules. The 640MB of info is then turned into several GB/TB/PB of information, which is used to build a human/dog/etc.
As an example, consider the Mandelbrot set. It is based upon a very simple piece of information; the repeated iteration of the rule z = z^2-1.
This rule can be stated as a few mathematical symbols; alternatively, it could be coded in just about any language and still fit in a few kb.
However, the expression of the Mandelbrot set is infinitely detailed - and I do mean infinite. It would require an infinite amount of information to uniquely encode the detail in the Mandelbrot set in a point by point fashion. The Mandelbrot set contains all sorts of interesting patterns, repeats of patterns, unique bits and bobs; yet it comes from a simple expression rule, applied to a single complex number.
If you look at a cloud, and see a fish, it doesn't mean that there is a fish in the sky. It means there is a cloud in the sky, which might bear some sort of resemblance to a fish. Please resist the temptation to declare that magic and jiggery-pokery is the only reasonable explanation for a complex phenomenon. Sometimes a simple explanation will do the trick.
Russ %-)
So this steel wire I'm holding is plastic? I can bend it, and it stays bent. Smells like plastic deformation to me.
Yes. Steel wire is plastic when bent past its critical point. Glad to see you're catching on :-) It is elastic when the deforming force is small.
Or perhaps you don't realize that most people use the term "plastic" to mean "polymer".
Thats exactly what I do realise, and what I was trying to impress upon the madding throng. Most people use the term plastic incorrectly, by using "plastic" to refer to a large group of hydrocarbon based long chain polymer solids commonly found in drink bottles, etc. It doesn't. The term "Plastic" is a property, not a material; an adjective, not a noun.
People who use the term "plastic" don't mean "polymer" either. The term "polymer" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does; a polymer is a ANY material which forms long repetitive chains of identical molecular groups. Again, Hydrocarbons tend to form nice polymers, but they are by no means the ONLY molecules that form polymers.
Drink bottles, etc, are made of a hydrocarbon based polymer which have the property of being plastic; however, this is a _VERY_ small subset of the materials which are 1) plastic, 2) polymers, or 3) both.
The NY Times article doesn't go into enough detail about the composition of Polythiophene to make any specific comments about its molecular composition; but the fact that it is a plastic polymer does not require that it is in any way related to the "plastic" in a drink bottle, nor that it will require hydrocarbons and crude oil to create said "plastic superconductor".
BTW, do linguistic semantics give you a woody? I'm just wondering.
Yes. They do. The English language is a beautiful thing, and there are so many enormously precise ways of expressing exactly what you mean. It seems a waste to restrict yourself to the lowest common denominator of grunts and bellows.
Russ %-)
Plastic is a desciption of a quality of a material, not a description of composition.
A material is plastic if it can undergo plastic deformation - ie, it doesn't bouce back to its original shape when bent/twisted (opposite of elastic deformation)
There is no proviso that a plastic be made from hydrocarbons - however, most hydrocarbon compounds tend to have good plastic properties.
Russ %-)
Angel, the spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has done pretty well - I would go so far as to say that the first series of Angel was much better than the fourth series poutings of Buff + friends. Angel was a fairly major supporting character throughout series 1-3 of Buffy, and the rules and standards of the `Buffyverse' are maintained through the transition to Angel.
The consistent failure of spinoffs isn't related to the fact that they _are_ spinoffs, its a matter of motive.If the spinoff is done to allow explore a legitimite plot arc/character/etc, the writers will come, the stories will seem natural, and the support of the fans will carry it. However, if it's just an attempt to bleed more money from the merchandising stone, no amount of association with past glory will save it.
Whether this applies to Lone Gunmen - we will just have to wait and see. The wait will be especially long for me, as I live in Australia, and unless Lone Gunmen is a ratings boom, I can reasonably expect to see it sometime in 2033, probably in a late night time slot.
Russ %-)
With it, you can convert almost any graphics/text format to almost any other format. Sometimes, it does the conversion by outsourcing to another program (such as ghostview), but most are handled internally. The results are generally pretty good.
Syntax would be: convert blah.tiff blah.ps (change the extensions if you want different conversions)
ImageMagick RPM's are usually included in a base RedHat install; it shouldn't be too hard to get a deb or tarball package.
Russ %-)
Hmmm... I stand corrected. Couldn't find a reference for the doubling, but it does sound a very Knuth thing to do.
Wierd, though - I swear the bounty used to be $3.14. Maybe I'm just getting it confused with the version number...
Russ %-)
Also - a hyperlink extension to LaTeX has been written - it's called HyperTeX. There is also a `Companion' book on the subject:"The LaTeX Web Companion : Integrating TeX, HTML and XML".
Russ