That might solve your problem of Command-Tab'ing to an application without changing Space. For me, I tend to open applications with the mouse. It'd be nice if I could tell Terminal and Camino to default to opening a new window on the current Space rather than transporting me to an open window on another Space. But I'm slowly forming the habit of opening new windows with right-clicks instead.
I think a large part of the fun of games is showing off your abilities to others. In the old days, "others" was family and neighbors. Board games and card games let you show your stuff to a small social group.
Pinball and arcade games extended "others" to people you haven't met but in the same town. It was fun to be the best kid in school or best regular at some hangout.
The Internet has extended "others" to anyone that speaks your language around the world. The biggest reward is pwning everyone on a server with thousands of players. Getting the high score on a pinball game can't compare, especially now that classmates and neighbors are online and won't even notice.
A niche to save pinball is personal machines. Then the game has returned to home, where family and friends give each other the incentive of attention to compete.
If the pinball manufacturer switches to LED bulbs, I sure hope they put diffusers over those things. In many applications incandescent bulbs with areas of a few square centimeters are being replaced by LED's with areas of a few square millimeters. I find those intense points of light painful to look at, like hundreds of little camera flashes burning streaks into my retinas.
The weather ain't deterministic, at least not to modern physics. Some processes like radioactive decay are truly random. Those processes are injecting unpredictable little bits of energy into the weather system. Due to the sensitivity to initial conditions, those little bits can cause drastic change.
I wouldn't dream of doing anything financial over such a link.
Why? Aren't your financial transactions encrypted between your computer and the bank's server?
I suppose a sophisticated neighbor/con artist could set up a router that acts as a superphisher. When you try to connect to Wachovia, it gets a login page from the real Wachovia (to look authentic) but changes it so that your password is actually sent to the interceptor. Then it returns an error message, let's you retry your login, and sends that second attempt to the real site. Thereby your password is stolen for use at the interceptor's leisure, and you think you simply made a typo.
I don't know if that kind of phishing would be harder to avoid than the common kind where the link address doesn't even look real. But if it works then that'd be a great scam to pull at an airport or hotel, running a superphisher posing as a legitimate router.
If you left your bike without locking it it would be advertising its presence by bouncing photons and those photons would encode the fact that it is unsecured.
To continue the analogy, the wireless thief makes a sign that says "Ride yourself to the bike shop, sell yourself, and send me the check." Photons from the Sun bounce off the sign, encode the message, and transmit it to the bike. If the bike then follows the instructions, is that also stealing?
With all of the different avenues for expression, most of us are leaving vast imprints of ourselves on the web. For me, I have comments, photos, and relationships expressed on: Slashdot, TheDailyWTF, Digg, Amazon, Facebook, Friendster, Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo Answers, Blogger, Match, Usenet boards, Battlenet, my personal web pages, and much more. Some of those are current but many are old and not an accurate reflection of my current self.
For now most of those facets of my personality are separate. Someone reading this post is unlikely to link this personality to my Flickr photos or old Usenet postings. But someday a search engine like Google will figure out which personas are linked to me, even if I used different usernames and email addresses for each one. There are enough hints in the form of interests, writing style, and secondary links to tie them together. And there are likely archives of all those web postings going back to the dawn of the web.
So now I am tending to filter what I say in any forum, knowing that someday a prospective employer, landlord, creditor, lawyer, or mate will read it. The age of freedom and anonymity online has ended. The only hope is that those seeing our former selves will learn to accept our fluidity and diversity of behavior.
I see at least two uses for pizza.com that could easily be worth $2.6 million:
1) Some major pizza chain uses it as their modern, easy-to-remember "phone number". If I wanted to order a Domino's Pizza (which I don't), I wouldn't know whether to go to dominos.com, dominospizza.com, dominopizza.com, domino-pizza.com, etc. Putting pizza.com in their conventional advertising and repeating it for years would eventually get a lot of people going there.
2) An independent business makes it easy to find and order pizza based on location. I live in a big city and have a cheeseload of pizza places around, but a surprising number of them won't deliver to my street. If one web site could tell me who will deliver to me, their menu, their price, and their current special deals, that'd be very useful.
I wouldn't look for milk at milk.com and I wouldn't buy fuel for my car at gas.com, but pizza is one item where easy access to information and ordering makes sense.
I have often wondered when dealing with eBay auctions: What's the point of a reserve price? Why not just start the bidding at the reserve price, particularly when it's public knowledge?
Also (almost off topic but on topic as the result of replying to parent's comment), why are the "Reply to This" links drawn like buttons? I usually middle click on that link so I can compose my comment in a new tab while referring back to the full discussion. I wasn't sure that was going to work since middle clicking a button is not a standard action. Fortunately, the button is not really a button.
Which reminds me of a practical joke I played on my brother years ago. I opened some windows on his computer, took a screenshot, closed the windows, and set the screenshot as the background. It took a reboot before he realized why none of his programs were responding.
I didn't even realize how many subchannels WETA had until I hooked up the antenna. 26.1 (HD) looks great, at least as good as the best Comcast HD channels. 26.2, 26.3, and 26.4 seem to be standard definition digital channels. They show some compression, but not too shabby in comparison to analog channels.
The biggest problem is that sometimes (weather? radio noise?) the digital channels hiccup. Unlike analog broadcasts where noise means a little snow or static, excessive noise on the digital broadcasts leads to black screens and dropped audio. It's impossible to enjoy a show when one in ten words is missing.
The article mentions that Comcast doesn't compress local stations, but I just dropped my Comcast service in Washington, DC and was surprised at how much nicer the OTA broadcasts look on my 1080 HDTV. If it's not compression, then there was something wrong with the converter box or component video connection.
For reference, my cable bill was $112 a month for one HD and one standard converter box, extended basic channels, and HBO. I'm using simple rabbit ears now, but I'm looking for a better antenna since all the clutter in the city causes reception to drop out in very annoying ways.
His explanation is fine. The key point is that light is really a spectrum which means it has an intensity at each of countless frequencies. The human eye has three (or four) sensors that respond to some subset of those frequencies. The result is that the thousands of scalar values describing a spectrum are boiled down to three scalar values by the eye.
As a consequence, the stimulation of the eye resulting from any spectrum can be mimicked by any other spectrum that stimulates those three sensors in the same way. For simplicity, televisions, computer monitors, digital cameras, and LED light fixtures use just three narrow frequency emitters to stimulate those three sensors.
The problem is that a colored surface also has an absorption spectrum of countless frequencies. You can tune an LED fixture to appear the same as a flat white fixture, but when those two lights reflect off a surface then the illusion could be destroyed.
The traditional model of painting is to assume that the paint will be viewed under the same lighting conditions as it was applied. That wasn't a bad assumption when most light sources were some broadly spread spectrum, but it could fail horribly with modern light sources. Do not use LED fixtures if you are creating or displaying conventional art!
But the student's reaction is to exploit this spectrum interaction as an art itself. So you can either be aware of the implications of LED fixtures or use them for intentional light play.
In the USA, copyright is automatic and there is no way to legally release copyrighted work into the public domain. The only exception is work by the federal government which cannot be copyrighted. Otherwise you have to die and decompose for several decades until the copyright expires.
You can try releasing the work under some open license, but you keep the copyright whether you want it or not. In fact, the operation of licenses depends on it.
Also, no journal that I've published in will accept previously published work. But some do have policies to allow open access or non-commercial reprinting.
Most software today runs fine as a single thread anyway.
That software runs fine as a single thread because if it didn't then you wouldn't be running it. There are lots of things that computers could do that 99% of people don't do because they run too slow. Some of those things that we don't do are limited by CPU and are highly parallelizable.
We computer geeks seem to have found lots of fun and useful things to do with 2 GHz processors, 2 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drives, and 1.5 Mbps networking. Nobody needed those capabilities before, but they seem essential now. If you multiply that processor by 80 then we will write software so cool and useful that 99% of people will need it.
The experts in these articles keep forecasting processors with powers-of-2 cores (32, 64, 128). Is there a reason that the number of cores can't be some value in between, like 6?
And is the doubling time really 18 months? Aren't we due for the Intel Core 4 Quad already? If the doubling is slower, then I'd like to see the in-between core counts come sooner rather than wait for the next power of 2.
My mother always gets angry when she tries to pass somebody and they accelerate to match her speed. She thinks it's a purposeful act, done out of rudeness.
My theory is that it's a sort of herding mentality. In a group of animals, no individual wants to get too far from the group or it will be at risk of attack from predators. In a flock of birds, no individual wants to be in the lead all the time or it will tire from facing the most air resistance.
So when you're driving down the highway and you're out ahead of a pack of cars, you feel vulnerable to attack (from traffic cops) or unsafe (from poor road conditions and uncertainty of what's ahead). But if another car begins to pass you then you feel safer and unconsiously speed up. But if that car approaches and passes very rapidly then you don't have time to develop an association with them and you continue at your own rate.
I came to browse Slashdot while waiting for some ray tracing of my own. I do atomistic modeling of nanomechanics and I'm rendering movies of how atoms wiggle and move during deformation. Here is a test shot of a 4 nm tall aluminum cylinder rendered at 150 femtoseconds per second of animation:
It's amazing how nice ray tracing can look compared to other visualization methods. It took three hours to generate this 1000 frame movie. But as processors add cores or ray tracing gets hardware acceleration this can speed up dramatically.
Doing ray tracing on small screens makes a lot of sense since you're restricted to low resolution anyway. A Nintendo DS or Apple iPhone has a fraction of the resolution of a desktop, but the ratio of processor speed to screen pixels might be better (or become better in the near future).
I needed these bits of code for my research and couldn't find any existing code that met my needs. Two of those needs were simplicity and portability. The programs I write must run on various architectures and without the installation of other packages. So I wrote them myself, borrowing and adapting bits from other open code. So far the cost to me was the same whether I kept the source closed or open.
Then I released the code for the extra cost of cleaning up the comments and making a simple Web page. In return, users of my code gave me bug fixes, better portability, and speed improvements. They also taught me some better programming habits. All of that makes my scientific code, which I don't give away, better and helps me compete in the field of science.
I suspect that the producers of those open source libraries receive similar benefits. They needed software to perform a certain task, but that task isn't the end goal of their own work. By sharing their libraries they make the rest of their work better.
In the 2007 ConnectKentucky residential survey, 66% of broadband users report driving an average of 102 fewer miles per month because of their online activity.
The error is in the Computerworld article which misstates:
[R]esidents there drove more than 100 fewer hours per month because of transactions done online.
I am a SiGe quantum dot researcher. You see that first image with SiGe quantum dots "a mere 15 nanometers high and 70 nanometers in diameter"? They are shallow mounds, not long spikes. It's a shame they blew up the vertical scale like that, since the dots have interesting features like facets, atomic steps, and clearly visible atomic dimers aligned in rows if you look at them in true perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank Jobs, they fixed this:
Text-to-Speech and Hysterical voice no longer causes hang
Now my business can finally make the switch to 10.5.
I think Anonymous Grump is referring to a hidden preference:
Disable Space switching on Command-Tab in 10.5.2
That might solve your problem of Command-Tab'ing to an application without changing Space. For me, I tend to open applications with the mouse. It'd be nice if I could tell Terminal and Camino to default to opening a new window on the current Space rather than transporting me to an open window on another Space. But I'm slowly forming the habit of opening new windows with right-clicks instead.
On the Science Channel, 7-9 PM Eastern Time:
Mars Live: The Phoenix Lands
And I see that my cable company now carries Science Channel HD. Woot!
How much artificial gravity do you need? 1.0 G? 0.2 G?
Will some experimental drugs help counteract the effects of weightlessness?
Can the problems be alleviated with specific exercises during weightlessness?
How long will it take to recover after returning to gravity? If an astronaut is weightless on a trip to Mars, can he be back up in a week or a month?
If you want to treat something as a problem to overcome, you might need to know more than "It's bad", ok?
I think a large part of the fun of games is showing off your abilities to others. In the old days, "others" was family and neighbors. Board games and card games let you show your stuff to a small social group.
Pinball and arcade games extended "others" to people you haven't met but in the same town. It was fun to be the best kid in school or best regular at some hangout.
The Internet has extended "others" to anyone that speaks your language around the world. The biggest reward is pwning everyone on a server with thousands of players. Getting the high score on a pinball game can't compare, especially now that classmates and neighbors are online and won't even notice.
A niche to save pinball is personal machines. Then the game has returned to home, where family and friends give each other the incentive of attention to compete.
If the pinball manufacturer switches to LED bulbs, I sure hope they put diffusers over those things. In many applications incandescent bulbs with areas of a few square centimeters are being replaced by LED's with areas of a few square millimeters. I find those intense points of light painful to look at, like hundreds of little camera flashes burning streaks into my retinas.
The weather ain't deterministic, at least not to modern physics. Some processes like radioactive decay are truly random. Those processes are injecting unpredictable little bits of energy into the weather system. Due to the sensitivity to initial conditions, those little bits can cause drastic change.
Why? Aren't your financial transactions encrypted between your computer and the bank's server?
I suppose a sophisticated neighbor/con artist could set up a router that acts as a superphisher. When you try to connect to Wachovia, it gets a login page from the real Wachovia (to look authentic) but changes it so that your password is actually sent to the interceptor. Then it returns an error message, let's you retry your login, and sends that second attempt to the real site. Thereby your password is stolen for use at the interceptor's leisure, and you think you simply made a typo.
I don't know if that kind of phishing would be harder to avoid than the common kind where the link address doesn't even look real. But if it works then that'd be a great scam to pull at an airport or hotel, running a superphisher posing as a legitimate router.
To continue the analogy, the wireless thief makes a sign that says "Ride yourself to the bike shop, sell yourself, and send me the check." Photons from the Sun bounce off the sign, encode the message, and transmit it to the bike. If the bike then follows the instructions, is that also stealing?
With all of the different avenues for expression, most of us are leaving vast imprints of ourselves on the web. For me, I have comments, photos, and relationships expressed on: Slashdot, TheDailyWTF, Digg, Amazon, Facebook, Friendster, Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo Answers, Blogger, Match, Usenet boards, Battlenet, my personal web pages, and much more. Some of those are current but many are old and not an accurate reflection of my current self.
For now most of those facets of my personality are separate. Someone reading this post is unlikely to link this personality to my Flickr photos or old Usenet postings. But someday a search engine like Google will figure out which personas are linked to me, even if I used different usernames and email addresses for each one. There are enough hints in the form of interests, writing style, and secondary links to tie them together. And there are likely archives of all those web postings going back to the dawn of the web.
So now I am tending to filter what I say in any forum, knowing that someday a prospective employer, landlord, creditor, lawyer, or mate will read it. The age of freedom and anonymity online has ended. The only hope is that those seeing our former selves will learn to accept our fluidity and diversity of behavior.
The real WTF is that so much Linux and UNIX software still requires root permission and mucking around with system directories.
I see at least two uses for pizza.com that could easily be worth $2.6 million:
1) Some major pizza chain uses it as their modern, easy-to-remember "phone number". If I wanted to order a Domino's Pizza (which I don't), I wouldn't know whether to go to dominos.com, dominospizza.com, dominopizza.com, domino-pizza.com, etc. Putting pizza.com in their conventional advertising and repeating it for years would eventually get a lot of people going there.
2) An independent business makes it easy to find and order pizza based on location. I live in a big city and have a cheeseload of pizza places around, but a surprising number of them won't deliver to my street. If one web site could tell me who will deliver to me, their menu, their price, and their current special deals, that'd be very useful.
I wouldn't look for milk at milk.com and I wouldn't buy fuel for my car at gas.com, but pizza is one item where easy access to information and ordering makes sense.
I have often wondered when dealing with eBay auctions: What's the point of a reserve price? Why not just start the bidding at the reserve price, particularly when it's public knowledge?
Also (almost off topic but on topic as the result of replying to parent's comment), why are the "Reply to This" links drawn like buttons? I usually middle click on that link so I can compose my comment in a new tab while referring back to the full discussion. I wasn't sure that was going to work since middle clicking a button is not a standard action. Fortunately, the button is not really a button.
Which reminds me of a practical joke I played on my brother years ago. I opened some windows on his computer, took a screenshot, closed the windows, and set the screenshot as the background. It took a reboot before he realized why none of his programs were responding.
I didn't even realize how many subchannels WETA had until I hooked up the antenna. 26.1 (HD) looks great, at least as good as the best Comcast HD channels. 26.2, 26.3, and 26.4 seem to be standard definition digital channels. They show some compression, but not too shabby in comparison to analog channels.
The biggest problem is that sometimes (weather? radio noise?) the digital channels hiccup. Unlike analog broadcasts where noise means a little snow or static, excessive noise on the digital broadcasts leads to black screens and dropped audio. It's impossible to enjoy a show when one in ten words is missing.
The article mentions that Comcast doesn't compress local stations, but I just dropped my Comcast service in Washington, DC and was surprised at how much nicer the OTA broadcasts look on my 1080 HDTV. If it's not compression, then there was something wrong with the converter box or component video connection.
For reference, my cable bill was $112 a month for one HD and one standard converter box, extended basic channels, and HBO. I'm using simple rabbit ears now, but I'm looking for a better antenna since all the clutter in the city causes reception to drop out in very annoying ways.
I think this analogy is better:
1) I see that my neighbor waters his lawn every week
2) I post a sign on my lawn saying "Please water"
3) My neighbor waters my lawn
Did I steal his water? Then why would this be stealing:
1) My neighbor broadcasts availability of wireless access
2) I broadcast a request for access
3) My neighbor provides access
His explanation is fine. The key point is that light is really a spectrum which means it has an intensity at each of countless frequencies. The human eye has three (or four) sensors that respond to some subset of those frequencies. The result is that the thousands of scalar values describing a spectrum are boiled down to three scalar values by the eye.
As a consequence, the stimulation of the eye resulting from any spectrum can be mimicked by any other spectrum that stimulates those three sensors in the same way. For simplicity, televisions, computer monitors, digital cameras, and LED light fixtures use just three narrow frequency emitters to stimulate those three sensors.
The problem is that a colored surface also has an absorption spectrum of countless frequencies. You can tune an LED fixture to appear the same as a flat white fixture, but when those two lights reflect off a surface then the illusion could be destroyed.
The traditional model of painting is to assume that the paint will be viewed under the same lighting conditions as it was applied. That wasn't a bad assumption when most light sources were some broadly spread spectrum, but it could fail horribly with modern light sources. Do not use LED fixtures if you are creating or displaying conventional art!
But the student's reaction is to exploit this spectrum interaction as an art itself. So you can either be aware of the implications of LED fixtures or use them for intentional light play.
In the USA, copyright is automatic and there is no way to legally release copyrighted work into the public domain. The only exception is work by the federal government which cannot be copyrighted. Otherwise you have to die and decompose for several decades until the copyright expires.
You can try releasing the work under some open license, but you keep the copyright whether you want it or not. In fact, the operation of licenses depends on it.
Also, no journal that I've published in will accept previously published work. But some do have policies to allow open access or non-commercial reprinting.
That software runs fine as a single thread because if it didn't then you wouldn't be running it. There are lots of things that computers could do that 99% of people don't do because they run too slow. Some of those things that we don't do are limited by CPU and are highly parallelizable.
We computer geeks seem to have found lots of fun and useful things to do with 2 GHz processors, 2 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drives, and 1.5 Mbps networking. Nobody needed those capabilities before, but they seem essential now. If you multiply that processor by 80 then we will write software so cool and useful that 99% of people will need it.
The experts in these articles keep forecasting processors with powers-of-2 cores (32, 64, 128). Is there a reason that the number of cores can't be some value in between, like 6?
And is the doubling time really 18 months? Aren't we due for the Intel Core 4 Quad already? If the doubling is slower, then I'd like to see the in-between core counts come sooner rather than wait for the next power of 2.
My mother always gets angry when she tries to pass somebody and they accelerate to match her speed. She thinks it's a purposeful act, done out of rudeness.
My theory is that it's a sort of herding mentality. In a group of animals, no individual wants to get too far from the group or it will be at risk of attack from predators. In a flock of birds, no individual wants to be in the lead all the time or it will tire from facing the most air resistance.
So when you're driving down the highway and you're out ahead of a pack of cars, you feel vulnerable to attack (from traffic cops) or unsafe (from poor road conditions and uncertainty of what's ahead). But if another car begins to pass you then you feel safer and unconsiously speed up. But if that car approaches and passes very rapidly then you don't have time to develop an association with them and you continue at your own rate.
I came to browse Slashdot while waiting for some ray tracing of my own. I do atomistic modeling of nanomechanics and I'm rendering movies of how atoms wiggle and move during deformation. Here is a test shot of a 4 nm tall aluminum cylinder rendered at 150 femtoseconds per second of animation:
Aluminum nanocolumn vibration (Quicktime, 14 MB)
It's amazing how nice ray tracing can look compared to other visualization methods. It took three hours to generate this 1000 frame movie. But as processors add cores or ray tracing gets hardware acceleration this can speed up dramatically.
Doing ray tracing on small screens makes a lot of sense since you're restricted to low resolution anyway. A Nintendo DS or Apple iPhone has a fraction of the resolution of a desktop, but the ratio of processor speed to screen pixels might be better (or become better in the near future).
I work as a scientist, and I have released a couple of classes as open source: a C++ implementation of a certain random number generator and a simple but flexible configuration file reader.
I needed these bits of code for my research and couldn't find any existing code that met my needs. Two of those needs were simplicity and portability. The programs I write must run on various architectures and without the installation of other packages. So I wrote them myself, borrowing and adapting bits from other open code. So far the cost to me was the same whether I kept the source closed or open.
Then I released the code for the extra cost of cleaning up the comments and making a simple Web page. In return, users of my code gave me bug fixes, better portability, and speed improvements. They also taught me some better programming habits. All of that makes my scientific code, which I don't give away, better and helps me compete in the field of science.
I suspect that the producers of those open source libraries receive similar benefits. They needed software to perform a certain task, but that task isn't the end goal of their own work. By sharing their libraries they make the rest of their work better.
From the report:
The error is in the Computerworld article which misstates:
I am a SiGe quantum dot researcher. You see that first image with SiGe quantum dots "a mere 15 nanometers high and 70 nanometers in diameter"? They are shallow mounds, not long spikes. It's a shame they blew up the vertical scale like that, since the dots have interesting features like facets, atomic steps, and clearly visible atomic dimers aligned in rows if you look at them in true perspective.