I'm sure that the rate of registration in the first months was a small fraction of the rate of registration today. So Mr. 431 may well have signed up 6 months after the site went public and your assumptions about free time goes out the window.
However, 19 is probably a good lower bound for a person who would be interested in reading and posting on Slashdot. So if you know how long ago an account was created, add 19 to get a lower bound.
For one real data point: UID 32307 is 35 years old. I was in my first year of grad school when I heard about Slashdot. It's not so much that I had more free time there, but I was surrounded by people with interest in computers and the social impact of technology.
Your situation sounds very much like mine. I live in the first floor of a three-story apartment building in a major city. The broadcast towers are just a couple miles away, but there are small hills, woods, and reflections from other buildings. So I can tune up to 20 channels, but intermittent interference can make many of the digital ones unwatchable. Being an apartment, a rooftop antenna or satellite dish is not an option.
I don't usually watch more than thirty minutes of TV a day, so I tried dropping cable and living on OTA channels. It worked so-so in the winter, but when the trees got leaves my signal deteriorated even more to the point that only a couple channels were reliable.
And then I got sick -- recurrence of cancer, return to chemotherapy and radiation. I already got the cable reconnected and it's a life saver for those days when fatigue and chemobrain leaves me as a couch potato. And soon I'm going to sign up for movie channels for those long nights when the side effects keep me awake.
So if you can afford it (or one of your relatives can make a donation to help keep everyone's sanity) then I'd recommend getting cable for a while.
I watched the ceremony as it was broadcast on NBC. I heard the talk about how cinematic the ceremony would be and took it to mean: "The theatrics are so magnificent, so sophisticated, and so finely rehearsed that they look like a movie performed live."
When they said the footsteps are actual animation that meant that there was an illusion of motion created not with film but with real, physical fireworks. That was cool, that was something I had never seen before, and that was awesome. The part that seemed incredible is that they shut down so much of the city for the vast fireworks and that they managed to get a helicopter or a sky wire to follow the series of fireworks so accurately.
I feel betrayed by the fakery. What's next? Enhanced cheers so that the audience seems more excited? Enhanced thuds to add impact to tackles and falls? Enhanced crowds to make public events look more popular?
A reasoned explanation for what TV viewers saw, what Internet viewers saw, and a mechanism by which the difference could arise from stupidity rather than malice. When a thread has 441 comments and one of those comments answers all that, sometimes you just need a Score:6, Informative.
I'm impressed with Blizzard's attention to detail. Some game designers (and designers in other fields) don't pay enough attention to things like visibility, subtly, utility, and balance in visuals. You might not like the style they chose, but you have to respect that they can justify the decision rather than just say "we like it that way".
Do you and I have some strange visual sense that makes stretched images look crappy while everybody else thinks they're fine?
The second time I got Comcast HD the technician set it up, put on some "Comcast HD is Wonderful!" commercial that he said I had to leave running for 15 minutes, and left. When I turned to channels that I know Comcast broadcasts in HD (like primetime NBC) it was clear to me that they were just 480p video stretched to fill the screen.
Tech support fixed the problem in ten minutes. For some reason the converter box was set to output in 480p. But shouldn't the CABLE COMPANY TECHNICIAN notice something like that himself? How many of my neighbors will be stuck watching stretched 480d for the next ten years because they're not as technologically savvy as I am?
A year ago History Channel started broadcasting letterboxed shows on their standard definition channel. I took that as a good sign that they were now producing them in HD. But after my Comcast system started carrying History HD last month, many of those letterboxed 4:3 shows are *stretched* to fill the my 16:9 screen. Egad, standard definition, stretch, and black bars. Could they do any worse?
The only hope is that the HD conversion was a little rushed and they'll settle on a more sensible setup soon.
When you say "I watch a game at a place with HDTV" do you mean something like a bar? Those places were probably the first in their area to offer HDTV, so their connection is probably satellite. I think satellite has the most incentive to compress the "HD" signal to hell, though cable isn't far behind.
I have a 32-inch HDTV plus Comcast cable and the image is dramatically better than standard definition, especially with good feeds like sports on major networks or movies on HBO HD. Lower tier channels like TBS HD and History HD don't look so great.
The other advantage of HD is being able to watch all the 16:9 programming without letterboxing or cropping.
Sometimes it's nice to be called Dr. Brin or Dr. Page. Especially when dealing with somebody who doesn't know you or talking to a roomful of PhD's (such as their employees).
The article itself is pretty dreadful, but it would be nice if someone wrote a clear and simple competitor. I search for technical topics on Wikipedia and find that they're too complicated to follow unless you already know the subject.
I think what happens in Wikipedia is that someone writes an original article that is fairly simple. Then someone else comes by and says "Hey, you forgot about this generalization and that complicated special case" and revises the article to be more accurate but less simple. Over months of edits, the article morphs into something that only the experts can understand and is pretty worthless for new readers.
Once in a while I get lucky and find some online tutorial or an independent article written by an academic. If Knol leads to more introductory articles like that then I'll be happy with it.
I'm confused about how seeing the Moon transit Earth is relevant to extrasolar planetary observation. I thought that we were detecting extrasolar planets by tracking the wobble they induce in their star, not by direct observation of light reflected from the planet. If so, then how will dimming of the planet by a transiting moon be observable?
I thought the cutting edge in astronomy was the idea of a giant space telescope that might directly observe superjovian gas planets, not Earth-like planets.
There was a great 6-hour documentary on the Discovery Channel recently called When We Left Earth. Looking back at the hurdles NASA faced in getting men to the Moon and back, it's astounding that it went so well.
There was a tremendous series of technical and organizational challenges to pulling off that project. Rockets kept blowing up until just before they started strapping astronauts on them. In-space docking failed to connect until the astronauts simply plowed the ships together hard enough to force a lock. The navigation software was bloated and slow, so they scaled back the role of the in-flight computer and relied more on Earth-based navigation. The lunar rover was an afterthought but a brilliant team of engineers dreamt up a design that was lightweight, reliable, and folded like origami to fit in the lunar lander.
So technical surprises are nothing new. One difference now is that all of our technology is so complex and our experts are so specialized that it's really, really hard to get the right person for the right problem at the right time.
The lack of budgetary support is new. Getting to the Moon in the 1960's was an issue of national pride, economic advantage, and military power. Getting to the Moon in the 2000's is an issue of fantasy and questionable scientific value. The technical problems could be overcome by throwing money at them, but we're not in a mood to do it that way.
In science and engineering we often talk about comparing numbers by order of magnitude. If two numbers are added together and one of them is more than ten times the other (log a - log b > 1), then to a first approximation you can just ignore the smaller one. I don't know if that's simply because we use ten as the base for our number system or if there really is something more happening around that ratio.
You certainly can't ignore either number in a 50:50 ratio and you certainly can at 0:100. Intuitively, even 25:75 is too balanced to ignore the smaller part. So the magic number is somewhere between 0% and 25%. Take the midpoint, round to one significant figure, and you have 10%.
Whoa, just yesterday I was wishing for something like that. I listen to a lot of Internet radio but that ties me to the one room with a computer/stereo setup. I was thinking it'd be nice to have a device (cheaper than a computer) that could do that one function.
I believe that we developed a decimal number system because of our fingers. And when the number system developed so did our language. Our adult brains are tuned to decimal numbers because that is the language and system we were educated with. I don't believe that the brains of children are specially tuned to accept a decimal system.
In modern life we don't often use our fingers for manipulating large numbers. In fact our technology works more naturally in binary or hexadecimal. The only thing keeping us using decimal is our language and history, not our fingers.
So the magical thing about SI is not its use of base ten, but rather its use of a consistent base regardless of unit. The cumbersome thing about Imperial units is that the base changes when measuring different things: 12 inches to the foot, 3 feet to the yard, 1760 yards to the mile, 16 ounces to the pound, 4 quarts to the gallon. It's hard to remember which base applies to each unit and it's hard to constantly switch among bases when doing calculations.
The funny thing about non base-10 number systems is that our language can't say them without spelling them out. The old joke about "There are 10 kinds of people in the world..." isn't very funny if you say it aloud or in your head: "There are two kinds of people in the world" or "There are one zero kinds of people in the world".
So I believe it's our language, not our fingers, that makes base ten feel natural. If we had grown up accustomed to counting "one two three ten eleven twelve thirteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three thirty" then base four would feel natural. The characters "2506" would look as strange as hexadecimal and be as impossible to pronounce without spelling or conversion.
By the way, isn't the term "base 10" devoid of meaning? If our system were base four, then "base 10" would mean "base four" since the characters "10" in base four mean "4" in base ten. Whatever base you use, "10" is your way of writing the value of that base.
Back to the tsunami, it's disappointing to hear that the water was 290 fathoms high only very near it's source (the landslide). That's like saying "Your mama's so fat she jumped in the Pacific and made a tsunami a billion nanometers high."
Oh pshaw. The advantage of Imperial units over Metric is that the size of the units is a better match for our everyday experiences.
A foot is about the length of my foot. A pound is a filling dinner. And a pint is a refreshing amount of beverage.
-70 F is like room temperature but cold and -109 F is like too damn hot but too damn cold instead. In America, we don't have to use Google to figure out whether to wear a jacket to work.
I was hoping to hear about some interesting feeds that I've been missing out on. Most of the suggestions seem to be in the categories of Comics, Tech/Gadgets, Coding, Politics, Photos.
Meh. Comics can be fun for five seconds, but won't really solve the problem of being online and bored. Tech/Gadgets is interesting a few times a year but not every day. I don't code enough to warrant reading about that unless I'm trying to solve a specific problem. Politics is moderately interesting in an election year, but it's a lot like talking about baseball scores (and I don't think much about sports). Photos are like comics, interesting for about five seconds.
Here's my list of Web sites that I visit daily. Because I'm older (or just less compulsive) I check them manually rather than as a feed:
Slashdot Ars Technica Digg New York Times Rotten Tomatoes (weekly)
On a good day there's an hour of interesting material on those sites combined. Maybe I need to go back to reading more magazines, books, and newspapers. But in this age of bite-size, instantaneous news at least two of those three seem to be dying.
I was going to mod you up but felt it was better to chime in.
I never experience road rage until I moved to a big city (Washington, DC). Since then I have had at least two incidents where someone got pissed at me then followed, honked, and yelled at me for miles.
One was when I stopped in a yield lane making a right turn from one busy road to another. Traffic wasn't clear for me to merge, so I slowed and stopped until I could get in safely. The asshole in a huge, shiny SUV behind me didn't like me wasting his time. After I merged, he pulled up along side and yelled. I just looked over, decided he was an idiot, then looked back at the road and continued driving. He kept following me, tailgating and changing lanes to stay behind me, until I pulled into the entrance gate at work. Thank god for armed guards. The asshole fled.
The other time I don't know what I supposedly did wrong. My best guess is that he thought I ran a red light against him. But he had a flashing red and my road was only a flashing yellow. Anyway, he pulled up next to me, honking and yelling for a mile. I just acted casual and slowed down, refusing to pull alongside. Eventually I made a left turn when he was boxed in and couldn't follow me.
I can definitely see the desire to carry a gun. Just two problems: it's illegal in DC, and I might use it. It doesn't matter how safe and courteous you are. If you spend much time in a crowded city you'll encounter some some hyperactive self-important assholes on the road.
Baseball isn't exactly the most aggressive sport. I don't think an outfielder will overthrow the ball because he sees an opponent in a red jersey 250 feet away. (That is, even if the Red Sox did wear lots of red.)
I disable the VoIP box through a router rule at night, so I simply don't get calls at 4AM (though a voicemail will bounce to my computer and if it's from a whitelist caller, my computer wakes me, as it's likely a family medical issue.
That sounds great as long as the VoIP box is being used by a tech savvy person like you. And as long as the emergency call originates from your family member's home and not an unfamiliar cell phone, pay phone, hospital phone, jail phone, friend's phone....
One problem is that it's hard to judge the distance of a point source of light like an LED. If it's dark enough that the driver can't see your body, then all they know is that there is *something* in the road. And since most somethings on a road that are not a car go much slower than a car, they try to pass.
I notice this problem with those annoying high intensity headlights. The lamps are very small, so they each seem distant. But they're very bright so they both seem close. It makes it hard to judge the distance of an approaching car when your used to big yellow conventional headlights.
If you lights are flashing or, even worse, strobing then the problem is magnified.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that the rate of registration in the first months was a small fraction of the rate of registration today. So Mr. 431 may well have signed up 6 months after the site went public and your assumptions about free time goes out the window.
However, 19 is probably a good lower bound for a person who would be interested in reading and posting on Slashdot. So if you know how long ago an account was created, add 19 to get a lower bound.
For one real data point: UID 32307 is 35 years old. I was in my first year of grad school when I heard about Slashdot. It's not so much that I had more free time there, but I was surrounded by people with interest in computers and the social impact of technology.
Your situation sounds very much like mine. I live in the first floor of a three-story apartment building in a major city. The broadcast towers are just a couple miles away, but there are small hills, woods, and reflections from other buildings. So I can tune up to 20 channels, but intermittent interference can make many of the digital ones unwatchable. Being an apartment, a rooftop antenna or satellite dish is not an option.
I don't usually watch more than thirty minutes of TV a day, so I tried dropping cable and living on OTA channels. It worked so-so in the winter, but when the trees got leaves my signal deteriorated even more to the point that only a couple channels were reliable.
And then I got sick -- recurrence of cancer, return to chemotherapy and radiation. I already got the cable reconnected and it's a life saver for those days when fatigue and chemobrain leaves me as a couch potato. And soon I'm going to sign up for movie channels for those long nights when the side effects keep me awake.
So if you can afford it (or one of your relatives can make a donation to help keep everyone's sanity) then I'd recommend getting cable for a while.
I watched the ceremony as it was broadcast on NBC. I heard the talk about how cinematic the ceremony would be and took it to mean: "The theatrics are so magnificent, so sophisticated, and so finely rehearsed that they look like a movie performed live."
When they said the footsteps are actual animation that meant that there was an illusion of motion created not with film but with real, physical fireworks. That was cool, that was something I had never seen before, and that was awesome. The part that seemed incredible is that they shut down so much of the city for the vast fireworks and that they managed to get a helicopter or a sky wire to follow the series of fireworks so accurately.
I feel betrayed by the fakery. What's next? Enhanced cheers so that the audience seems more excited? Enhanced thuds to add impact to tackles and falls? Enhanced crowds to make public events look more popular?
A reasoned explanation for what TV viewers saw, what Internet viewers saw, and a mechanism by which the difference could arise from stupidity rather than malice. When a thread has 441 comments and one of those comments answers all that, sometimes you just need a Score:6, Informative.
I'm impressed with Blizzard's attention to detail. Some game designers (and designers in other fields) don't pay enough attention to things like visibility, subtly, utility, and balance in visuals. You might not like the style they chose, but you have to respect that they can justify the decision rather than just say "we like it that way".
This is a clbuttic problem with automated censorship.
Do you and I have some strange visual sense that makes stretched images look crappy while everybody else thinks they're fine?
The second time I got Comcast HD the technician set it up, put on some "Comcast HD is Wonderful!" commercial that he said I had to leave running for 15 minutes, and left. When I turned to channels that I know Comcast broadcasts in HD (like primetime NBC) it was clear to me that they were just 480p video stretched to fill the screen.
Tech support fixed the problem in ten minutes. For some reason the converter box was set to output in 480p. But shouldn't the CABLE COMPANY TECHNICIAN notice something like that himself? How many of my neighbors will be stuck watching stretched 480d for the next ten years because they're not as technologically savvy as I am?
Dear Herodotus, yes!
A year ago History Channel started broadcasting letterboxed shows on their standard definition channel. I took that as a good sign that they were now producing them in HD. But after my Comcast system started carrying History HD last month, many of those letterboxed 4:3 shows are *stretched* to fill the my 16:9 screen. Egad, standard definition, stretch, and black bars. Could they do any worse?
The only hope is that the HD conversion was a little rushed and they'll settle on a more sensible setup soon.
When you say "I watch a game at a place with HDTV" do you mean something like a bar? Those places were probably the first in their area to offer HDTV, so their connection is probably satellite. I think satellite has the most incentive to compress the "HD" signal to hell, though cable isn't far behind.
I have a 32-inch HDTV plus Comcast cable and the image is dramatically better than standard definition, especially with good feeds like sports on major networks or movies on HBO HD. Lower tier channels like TBS HD and History HD don't look so great.
The other advantage of HD is being able to watch all the 16:9 programming without letterboxing or cropping.
Sometimes it's nice to be called Dr. Brin or Dr. Page. Especially when dealing with somebody who doesn't know you or talking to a roomful of PhD's (such as their employees).
The plain old bag o' knols showed me An Introduction To Binary.
The article itself is pretty dreadful, but it would be nice if someone wrote a clear and simple competitor. I search for technical topics on Wikipedia and find that they're too complicated to follow unless you already know the subject.
I think what happens in Wikipedia is that someone writes an original article that is fairly simple. Then someone else comes by and says "Hey, you forgot about this generalization and that complicated special case" and revises the article to be more accurate but less simple. Over months of edits, the article morphs into something that only the experts can understand and is pretty worthless for new readers.
Once in a while I get lucky and find some online tutorial or an independent article written by an academic. If Knol leads to more introductory articles like that then I'll be happy with it.
I'm confused about how seeing the Moon transit Earth is relevant to extrasolar planetary observation. I thought that we were detecting extrasolar planets by tracking the wobble they induce in their star, not by direct observation of light reflected from the planet. If so, then how will dimming of the planet by a transiting moon be observable?
I thought the cutting edge in astronomy was the idea of a giant space telescope that might directly observe superjovian gas planets, not Earth-like planets.
There was a great 6-hour documentary on the Discovery Channel recently called When We Left Earth. Looking back at the hurdles NASA faced in getting men to the Moon and back, it's astounding that it went so well.
There was a tremendous series of technical and organizational challenges to pulling off that project. Rockets kept blowing up until just before they started strapping astronauts on them. In-space docking failed to connect until the astronauts simply plowed the ships together hard enough to force a lock. The navigation software was bloated and slow, so they scaled back the role of the in-flight computer and relied more on Earth-based navigation. The lunar rover was an afterthought but a brilliant team of engineers dreamt up a design that was lightweight, reliable, and folded like origami to fit in the lunar lander.
So technical surprises are nothing new. One difference now is that all of our technology is so complex and our experts are so specialized that it's really, really hard to get the right person for the right problem at the right time.
The lack of budgetary support is new. Getting to the Moon in the 1960's was an issue of national pride, economic advantage, and military power. Getting to the Moon in the 2000's is an issue of fantasy and questionable scientific value. The technical problems could be overcome by throwing money at them, but we're not in a mood to do it that way.
10% is 0.1
100% is 1.0
Are you saying that sqrt(1.0) = 0.1?
In science and engineering we often talk about comparing numbers by order of magnitude. If two numbers are added together and one of them is more than ten times the other (log a - log b > 1), then to a first approximation you can just ignore the smaller one. I don't know if that's simply because we use ten as the base for our number system or if there really is something more happening around that ratio.
You certainly can't ignore either number in a 50:50 ratio and you certainly can at 0:100. Intuitively, even 25:75 is too balanced to ignore the smaller part. So the magic number is somewhere between 0% and 25%. Take the midpoint, round to one significant figure, and you have 10%.
Whoa, just yesterday I was wishing for something like that. I listen to a lot of Internet radio but that ties me to the one room with a computer/stereo setup. I was thinking it'd be nice to have a device (cheaper than a computer) that could do that one function.
Any recommendations for a wifi radio?
I believe that we developed a decimal number system because of our fingers. And when the number system developed so did our language. Our adult brains are tuned to decimal numbers because that is the language and system we were educated with. I don't believe that the brains of children are specially tuned to accept a decimal system.
In modern life we don't often use our fingers for manipulating large numbers. In fact our technology works more naturally in binary or hexadecimal. The only thing keeping us using decimal is our language and history, not our fingers.
So the magical thing about SI is not its use of base ten, but rather its use of a consistent base regardless of unit. The cumbersome thing about Imperial units is that the base changes when measuring different things: 12 inches to the foot, 3 feet to the yard, 1760 yards to the mile, 16 ounces to the pound, 4 quarts to the gallon. It's hard to remember which base applies to each unit and it's hard to constantly switch among bases when doing calculations.
"Grandma, I walked eleven miles to see you."
The funny thing about non base-10 number systems is that our language can't say them without spelling them out. The old joke about "There are 10 kinds of people in the world..." isn't very funny if you say it aloud or in your head: "There are two kinds of people in the world" or "There are one zero kinds of people in the world".
So I believe it's our language, not our fingers, that makes base ten feel natural. If we had grown up accustomed to counting "one two three ten eleven twelve thirteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three thirty" then base four would feel natural. The characters "2506" would look as strange as hexadecimal and be as impossible to pronounce without spelling or conversion.
By the way, isn't the term "base 10" devoid of meaning? If our system were base four, then "base 10" would mean "base four" since the characters "10" in base four mean "4" in base ten. Whatever base you use, "10" is your way of writing the value of that base.
Back to the tsunami, it's disappointing to hear that the water was 290 fathoms high only very near it's source (the landslide). That's like saying "Your mama's so fat she jumped in the Pacific and made a tsunami a billion nanometers high."
What in the world were you eating to get good nutrition on $3 per day?
Or do you mean "I spent less than $100 a month on groceries because I ate mostly at restaurants and cafeterias"?
Oh pshaw. The advantage of Imperial units over Metric is that the size of the units is a better match for our everyday experiences.
A foot is about the length of my foot. A pound is a filling dinner. And a pint is a refreshing amount of beverage.
-70 F is like room temperature but cold and -109 F is like too damn hot but too damn cold instead. In America, we don't have to use Google to figure out whether to wear a jacket to work.
I was hoping to hear about some interesting feeds that I've been missing out on. Most of the suggestions seem to be in the categories of Comics, Tech/Gadgets, Coding, Politics, Photos.
Meh. Comics can be fun for five seconds, but won't really solve the problem of being online and bored. Tech/Gadgets is interesting a few times a year but not every day. I don't code enough to warrant reading about that unless I'm trying to solve a specific problem. Politics is moderately interesting in an election year, but it's a lot like talking about baseball scores (and I don't think much about sports). Photos are like comics, interesting for about five seconds.
Here's my list of Web sites that I visit daily. Because I'm older (or just less compulsive) I check them manually rather than as a feed:
Slashdot
Ars Technica
Digg
New York Times
Rotten Tomatoes (weekly)
On a good day there's an hour of interesting material on those sites combined. Maybe I need to go back to reading more magazines, books, and newspapers. But in this age of bite-size, instantaneous news at least two of those three seem to be dying.
I was going to mod you up but felt it was better to chime in.
I never experience road rage until I moved to a big city (Washington, DC). Since then I have had at least two incidents where someone got pissed at me then followed, honked, and yelled at me for miles.
One was when I stopped in a yield lane making a right turn from one busy road to another. Traffic wasn't clear for me to merge, so I slowed and stopped until I could get in safely. The asshole in a huge, shiny SUV behind me didn't like me wasting his time. After I merged, he pulled up along side and yelled. I just looked over, decided he was an idiot, then looked back at the road and continued driving. He kept following me, tailgating and changing lanes to stay behind me, until I pulled into the entrance gate at work. Thank god for armed guards. The asshole fled.
The other time I don't know what I supposedly did wrong. My best guess is that he thought I ran a red light against him. But he had a flashing red and my road was only a flashing yellow. Anyway, he pulled up next to me, honking and yelling for a mile. I just acted casual and slowed down, refusing to pull alongside. Eventually I made a left turn when he was boxed in and couldn't follow me.
I can definitely see the desire to carry a gun. Just two problems: it's illegal in DC, and I might use it. It doesn't matter how safe and courteous you are. If you spend much time in a crowded city you'll encounter some some hyperactive self-important assholes on the road.
Baseball isn't exactly the most aggressive sport. I don't think an outfielder will overthrow the ball because he sees an opponent in a red jersey 250 feet away. (That is, even if the Red Sox did wear lots of red.)
That sounds great as long as the VoIP box is being used by a tech savvy person like you. And as long as the emergency call originates from your family member's home and not an unfamiliar cell phone, pay phone, hospital phone, jail phone, friend's phone....
One problem is that it's hard to judge the distance of a point source of light like an LED. If it's dark enough that the driver can't see your body, then all they know is that there is *something* in the road. And since most somethings on a road that are not a car go much slower than a car, they try to pass.
I notice this problem with those annoying high intensity headlights. The lamps are very small, so they each seem distant. But they're very bright so they both seem close. It makes it hard to judge the distance of an approaching car when your used to big yellow conventional headlights.
If you lights are flashing or, even worse, strobing then the problem is magnified.