Steam engines? Engineers were around long before those were in vogue. Take this famous quote from William Shakespeare's Hamlet: "For tis the sport to haue the enginer / Hoist with his owne petar." It's normally rendered as "the engineer, hoist by his own petard" and really means 'a sapper/military engineer blown up by his own grenade'. Hamlet was written in about 1600 and steam engines post date it by a century.
What happened in the anecdote I related had nothing to do with leanings to either side. Asking the scientists and engineers to identify themselves occured almost at the beginning of the jury selection process. This was all about removing people with critical thinking skills.
This is a court of law and everyone in the jury pool is sworn in before answering questions. Lying is a crime.
I don't know what would happened if you refused to answer a question, but I'm sure the judge would jail you for contempt if he/she were sufficiently pissed off.
I haven't followed Pao's case so I have no informed opinion on it.
However, I do believe that jury selection processes are so tainted that it's tough to get a fair trial. The process is supposed to be about finding jurors without biases that would affect their decision, but it's actually about putting people on the jury that can be swayed by the prosecution and defense.
I had jury duty a few months ago and, during the selection process, the prosecutor asked who all the scientists and engineers were. It turned out to be about a third of the jury pool, and none of us was selected except a single one who worked for a government lab. Did the case involve any scientific or engineering matters? Not really. It was a drunk driving/hit and run/leaving the scene of an accident thing. My hypothesis is that the police botched the investigation and there was no real physical evidence of guilt, and that the case was based on he said/she said.
The prosecutor deliberately removed people from the jury pool because they could think critically and would not blindly swallow assertions. And it worked: I checked the court records and the defendant was convicted.
Don't buy a telescope. Instead, get a good pair of 10x50 binoculars and an intro astronomy book with pictures.
A telescope will always take some setup and you'll be less likely to go to the effort as time goes on. With binoculars, you just grab them and go. That's a much better way to keep beginners interested.
Tactile feedback is very nice, but I hate audible clicks.
A couple of decades ago I worked for Wang Laboratories and extensively used their "workstations" (basically smart terminals with a proprietary interface). Wang was the king of word processing when the professional world was just switching over from their Selectric typewriters.
To make these users feel more at home, the workstations included a mechanical solenoid that would trigger on every keystroke. This not only produced a loud, typewriter-like click, but also yielded a a tactile, typewriter-like thud.
I'm sure some engineer worked very hard on that solenoid to make the workstation sound and feel just like a Selectric, but I hated the noise and implemented a hardware solution: I clipped a solenoid wire with a pair of cutters and regained blessed silence. Many of my co-workers asked me to perform this simple service for them as well.
Later workstation models would mimic the key click by playing a sound through the speaker, but I could turn that off with an option.
Kind of like those safety signs at industrial sites that brag about the number of days without an accident.
Program the display so that the number of seconds continuously counts up, and then resets to zero after a random interval -- say thirty or forty seconds.
You can read about it in the tech report. Although this system was not modifiable in real-time like the one in the article (older hardware), the model of the smart "lego-like" bricks was automatically slurped into Quake 2 and much FPS fun was had.
The press spends more money covering SETI than the scientists spend actually doing it. Just because something involves "space" doesn't mean that it has a NASA-like budget.
Software that compares the input from the hardware with what the game sees? No problem: just make sure that the input comes from the hardware itself, and not from a piece of emulator software.
I built a cheat box for GTA San Andreas soley because I am lazy. The game requires that the player have their character "exercise" in a gym in order to build strength and stamina. I didn't like the idea of abusing my fingers and keyboard by rapidly typing the necessary keyboard combinations, so I buit a box with three big buttons on it that emulates a USB keyboard. It emits the correct key combinations when I press a button. (NB: I didn't use a programmable keyboard because I'm a hardware guy and was playing with USB anyway. I like my form factor better and used actual arcade game buttons for feel and durability.)
Want to run on the treadmill for the maximum allowed time? Press and hold a button. Want to lift heavy weights quickly and repeatedly? Press a different button. Yes, folks, I was cheating at virtual exercise.
It actually gets worse. I got tired of holding the button down, so I set an old disk drive on it. Then I could just sit back and watch my character get buff. This was the ultimate in laziness: I was cheating at cheating at virtual exercise.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... NVIDIA. Giant chip.
Bill Dally, are you going for a "jump approximate" instruction again?
This is just a trial balloon to see how many people will be willing to sell their Microsoft stock for ten cents on the dollar.
Is that you Thomas Edison?
Stop electrocuting elephants!
So the FBI doesn't need Apple to help them get the information on the San Bernadino shooter's phone after all. They can just ask the Chinese.
I wonder if there's an inverse version of shibboleet that would be helpful when newbies ask for support in knowledgeable forums.
But they aren't very organized. Once they set up a twitter feed, or at least unionize, I'll start being concerned.
Steam engines? Engineers were around long before those were in vogue. Take this famous quote from William Shakespeare's Hamlet: "For tis the sport to haue the enginer / Hoist with his owne petar." It's normally rendered as "the engineer, hoist by his own petard" and really means 'a sapper/military engineer blown up by his own grenade'. Hamlet was written in about 1600 and steam engines post date it by a century.
Engineers originally built siege engines, i.e. military contraptions. See good old Wikipedia for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_engineering
Fifteen years ago! The Autowatch a.k.a. "Narc on Lisa"
https://news.google.com/newspa...
There, I fixed the headline to be more accurate.
What happened in the anecdote I related had nothing to do with leanings to either side. Asking the scientists and engineers to identify themselves occured almost at the beginning of the jury selection process. This was all about removing people with critical thinking skills.
This is a court of law and everyone in the jury pool is sworn in before answering questions. Lying is a crime.
I don't know what would happened if you refused to answer a question, but I'm sure the judge would jail you for contempt if he/she were sufficiently pissed off.
I haven't followed Pao's case so I have no informed opinion on it.
However, I do believe that jury selection processes are so tainted that it's tough to get a fair trial. The process is supposed to be about finding jurors without biases that would affect their decision, but it's actually about putting people on the jury that can be swayed by the prosecution and defense.
I had jury duty a few months ago and, during the selection process, the prosecutor asked who all the scientists and engineers were. It turned out to be about a third of the jury pool, and none of us was selected except a single one who worked for a government lab. Did the case involve any scientific or engineering matters? Not really. It was a drunk driving/hit and run/leaving the scene of an accident thing. My hypothesis is that the police botched the investigation and there was no real physical evidence of guilt, and that the case was based on he said/she said.
The prosecutor deliberately removed people from the jury pool because they could think critically and would not blindly swallow assertions. And it worked: I checked the court records and the defendant was convicted.
The movie had an old lady on the church steps singing:
"Feed them birds. Turbines. Turbines.
Feed them birds. Turbines go slash."
She's not stupid at all. But she is a narcissist, which means that she actually believes that the world owes her admiration and greatness.
Her brain works differently from yours, and the vast majority of the population. This is not an area of rational thought for her.
Another narcissist whose business failures are repeatedly blamed on others. (HP's market cap rose by billions on the day she was ousted.)
We need to diagnose narcissists early and send them all to Empathyless Island, where they can prey on each other instead of us.
A good article on why narcissism is bad, even in the cold, sociopathic world of capitalism.
Don't buy a telescope. Instead, get a good pair of 10x50 binoculars and an intro astronomy book with pictures.
A telescope will always take some setup and you'll be less likely to go to the effort as time goes on. With binoculars, you just grab them and go. That's a much better way to keep beginners interested.
I'm sure my HOA won't mind at all if I set one of these up and create a personal plague of winged insects to fill my belly and do my bidding.
"Fly, grasshoppers! Vanquish my enemies and bring back all the yummy meat from their refrigerators!"
Hmmm... This Lepsis thing might actually work.
Tactile feedback is very nice, but I hate audible clicks.
A couple of decades ago I worked for Wang Laboratories and extensively used their "workstations" (basically smart terminals with a proprietary interface). Wang was the king of word processing when the professional world was just switching over from their Selectric typewriters.
To make these users feel more at home, the workstations included a mechanical solenoid that would trigger on every keystroke. This not only produced a loud, typewriter-like click, but also yielded a a tactile, typewriter-like thud.
I'm sure some engineer worked very hard on that solenoid to make the workstation sound and feel just like a Selectric, but I hated the noise and implemented a hardware solution: I clipped a solenoid wire with a pair of cutters and regained blessed silence. Many of my co-workers asked me to perform this simple service for them as well.
Later workstation models would mimic the key click by playing a sound through the speaker, but I could turn that off with an option.
Kind of like those safety signs at industrial sites that brag about the number of days without an accident.
Program the display so that the number of seconds continuously counts up, and then resets to zero after a random interval -- say thirty or forty seconds.
You can read about it in the tech report. Although this system was not modifiable in real-time like the one in the article (older hardware), the model of the smart "lego-like" bricks was automatically slurped into Quake 2 and much FPS fun was had.
The press spends more money covering SETI than the scientists spend actually doing it.
Just because something involves "space" doesn't mean that it has a NASA-like budget.
Including this.
And this and this.
And this.
Software that compares the input from the hardware with what the game sees? No problem: just make sure that the input comes from the hardware itself, and not from a piece of emulator software.
I built a cheat box for GTA San Andreas soley because I am lazy. The game requires that the player have their character "exercise" in a gym in order to build strength and stamina. I didn't like the idea of abusing my fingers and keyboard by rapidly typing the necessary keyboard combinations, so I buit a box with three big buttons on it that emulates a USB keyboard. It emits the correct key combinations when I press a button. (NB: I didn't use a programmable keyboard because I'm a hardware guy and was playing with USB anyway. I like my form factor better and used actual arcade game buttons for feel and durability.)
Want to run on the treadmill for the maximum allowed time? Press and hold a button. Want to lift heavy weights quickly and repeatedly? Press a different button. Yes, folks, I was cheating at virtual exercise.
It actually gets worse. I got tired of holding the button down, so I set an old disk drive on it. Then I could just sit back and watch my character get buff. This was the ultimate in laziness: I was cheating at cheating at virtual exercise.
Xerox PARC in the 1980s. This may have been done at the raw ethernet level, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did work at the IP layer as well.
... I kept peering around corners wanting to shoot fire extinguishers.
Not that I ever actually did it.
Of course, if I could've gotten my hands on that shrink ray gun thing...