or burglerware if you like. People rightfully don't expect their pc to be tapped, its resources used or otherwise tampered with.
That's a very good point. If you sign an agreement with your plumber to get some work done, and page three of what you signed states "You hereby grant Joe's Plumbing the right to enter your home and use the resources contained within at any time", the contract would most certainly not stand up in court. I don't see how spyware contracts are any different.
You download the track once, assured that it will be a complete, high-quality encoding with full ID3 tags.
versus
You download the track once only to discover that the end is cut off, so you download it again from somewhere else, only to discover that the quality sucks, so you download it again from somewhere else, only to discover that there are skip/stutter artifacts in it, so you download it again...
I know a lot of people (including myself) who would pay for the convenience and assurance of a legitimate system!
I can think of a very important third benefit as well. Most of the MP3s I've downloaded over the internet have been really crappy encodings. Even at 192kbps, whatever encoder the average joe uses seems to do a really lousy job! I would think that a legitimate service would provide high-quality encodings (perhaps using the Fraunhofer codec), complete with proper ID3 tags, etc. I would consider this a great convenience, because I hate having to download something 10 times from 10 different sources and then analyzing each of them to figure out which is the best. To me, that's well worth 25 cents (or even more) a track!
MULE was good, and I'm sure HoRSE will be even better, but personally I'm going to hold out until someone implements PLaTYPUS (Personalized Labor Tool Yeilding Previously Unavailable Smithore)!
I had a simulator like this on my Commodore 64
on
Simulating Societies
·
· Score: 2
I'm pretty sure I had a version of this simulator on my Commodote 64 back in the mid 1980s. Of course, with a 320x200 grid and a 1MHz processor, it took many hours for the segregation to be complete. I remember being fascinated by it.
I personally would like to see cloning technology developed, but used on humans only when it is both safe and effective.
Even if the cloning industry perfects the cloning of certain animals to the point where it's "both safe and effective", it doesn't follow that human cloning will automatically reach that state. Every animal is different, so to reach a state where human cloning is "both safe and effective", actual human cloning experiments are required to allow it to reach that state. I'm not saying that I condone the experiments; I'm just pointing out that your logic is flawed. If you want human cloning to someday be "both safe and effective", you must concede to allowing human cloning experiments that involve a certain amount of risk.
Different interpretation of 3.14159265... joke
on
Simpsons Guide to Math
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I think the writer of that article interpreted this joke differently than I did:
In Greenwald's favorite "Simpsons" math moment, Homer and Marge Simpson are considering sending their daughter Lisa to a school for the gifted.
As the camera pans, two young girls playing the game of patty-cake recite the following playground chant: "Cross my heart and hope to die / Here's the digits that make pi / 3.1415926535897932384..." and the camera pans away.
The joke, of course, is that the digits that make pi -- a circle's circumference divided by its diameter -- continue infinitely. The writers are clearly aware that pi is what's called an irrational number -- one that cannot be expressed in terms of the quotient of two integers in lowest terms. And to "get it," the viewers have to understand that it means you can never say what pi is exactly, in the same way you can say what 5 is.
I don't think the joke is "Ha ha! They're going to go on forever!". I think it's merely "Ha ha! They're so geeky that they memorized the first umpteen digits of pi for fun!".
The company I work for is actually pretty good about this sort of thing. In fact, I've occasionally written code for the product that I wanted to be in the public domain (because I knew that I'd want to re-use it myself later), so I just said "I want this code to be in the public domain". They replied "fine, as long as it's not written on company time". An example of such code is my C HashTable. (Yes, I know this has been written a million times before, but all of the other public domain implementations I've seen suck!)
Do *users* need this memory bandwidth or does the proverbial Quake benchmark need it?
They benchmarked several things that showed a dramatic improvement with the larger RDRAM memory bandwidth, including mpeg4 encoding, MP3 encoding, and 3D scene rendering. I think it's fair to say that these are all "desktop" applications. It depends on what kind of user we're talking about, of course. One can surf for pr0n on a PII 233 just fine.
If I could find a wireless optical three button mouse without that silly scroll wheel, I'd buy it in an instant. Unfortunately, since scroll wheels for some reason are becoming seen as "necessary" on a mouse nowadays, I suspect I'll never see such a combination.
I'm thinking that Slashdot should temporarily mirror the smaller sites it links to. This slashdot effect is getting ridiculous. Sometimes they don't even last five minutes under the load of traffic that's directed their way.
The article actually claims that the unit has a 10-gigaBIT hard drive. I wonder if that was a mistake, or an intentional marketing ploy to make it sound more impressive than it actually is.
I wouldn't be so sure of that! Once a GC celebrity is modelled, it still takes a lot of talent to animate it. In fact, a lot of the subtle character quirks of a CG celebrity are probably inherited from the animator. In that sense, the real actor is the person at the computer. This person could surely demand a salary increase if his/her CG character becomes overly popular. This person isn't as expendable as you might think. Kermit The Frog has never been the same since someone took over Jim Henson's job, and that's just an overdeveloped sock.
Here's something I've been wondering for while. Like a lot of people, I've known for many years a lot of the details of the pre-Episode IV Star Wars history, such as the big Obi-wan/Anakin fight, etc. However, for the life of me I can't figure out how I came to know all this. It wasn't mentioned in any of the movies. I don't think it was in any of the books that I read. Yet it's been hard fact for me for as long as I can remember. Does anybody remember where they first heard or read about this?
Another thing I've always been curious about is the details of the clone wars. They've been alluded to since Episode IV, but until the Timothy Zahn books came out hardly anything was known about them. From the Episode II trailer that I saw, it looks like we're actually going to see the clone wars in action. That oughta be cool. As long as it doesn't involve a million clones of Jar-Jar (*shudder*)!
A couple of years ago I was in a Radio Shack in the Boston area. They wouldn't let me purchase my item (a $2 adaptor) until I gave them my mailing address. When they asked me what state I live in, I said that I live in the province of Ontario. They asked what the two-letter abbreviation for that was, and I said "ON". Their computer wouldn't accept that, saying "invalid state". So they just entered "CA" (for Canada) as the state. They then asked me what my zip code was, and I told them that my postal code was "K1N 1B7". They said that their computers didn't accept letters, only numbers. So I said "argh! Okay, try '12345'!". They tried, and the computer complained that the zip code didn't match the entered state (California). So I then gave them the only California zip code I know by heart - 90210. Thus, Radio Shack now thinks I live in Beverly Hills.
Does anybody know what the number actually is? And isn't it a bit odd that it hasn't shown up as news on either the GIMPS Home Page or the PrimeNet Home Page yet?
According to the CBC News report, at least four buildings are on fire as a result of the crash. Also, "Witnesses say residents have been ordered out of the area. All New York airports are said to be closed."
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada is another interesting neutrino telescope. It's not nearly as large as the Ice Cube, but it's still very impressive. From their web page:
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (
SNO) is taking data that has provided
revolutionary insight into the properties of neutrinos and the core of
the sun. The detector, shown in the artist's conception below, was built
6800 feet under ground, in INCO's Creighton
mine near Sudbury, Ontario. SNO is a heavy-water Cherenkov detector that is
designed to detect neutrinos produced by fusion reactions in the sun.
It uses 1000 tonnes of heavy
water, on loan from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), contained
in a 12 meter diameter acrylic vessel. Neutrinos
react with the heavy water (D2O) to produce flashes of light called Cherenkov
radiation. This light is then detected by an array of 9600 photomultiplier
tubes mounted on a geodesic support structure
surrounding the heavy water vessel.
The detector is immersed in light (normal) water within a 30 meter
barrel-shaped cavity (the size of a 10 story building!)
excavated from Norite rock. Located in the deepest part of the mine, the overburden of
rock shields the detector from cosmic rays. The detector laboratory
is extremely clean to reduce background signals from radioactive elements
present in the mine dust which would otherwise
hide the very weak signal from neutrinos.
My development environment of choice...
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 1
My development environment of choice has the following advantages:
It has a small memory footprint and requires very little CPU power.
It will allow you to develop in many languages, including Java, C, C++ and FORTRAN.
It also allows you to compose e-mail messages.
It also allows you to build HTML pages (including ones containing JavaScript).
It's available for just about every platform on the market.
As most of you might have guessed by now, of course I'm talking about "vi". I'm willing to do without an integrated debugger and whatever else a dedicated Java IDE has to offer in favor of the above features. I do not wish to learn a new editor and a new environment every time a new programming language comes out or every time I switch operating systems. I learned to use one editor, and I learned to use it well. In conjunction with a command-line compiler, a command-line debugger and a code repository tool such as CVS (all of which are usually free and available of most platforms), I feel that I have everything I need for a development environment. And this is NOT lack of experience talking; I've been developing code for 15 years.
Of course, to each their own.
A great show is only a possibility.
on
Leonid Meteor Shower
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'd like to point out that there's only the possibility of a great show. The Leonids are usually quite unimpressive, and only once every several years does it turn into a meteor storm. It's about time for another storm, but it's hard to predict with certainty. Last year astronomers were saying the same thing. They crossed their fingers and stood out shivering in a dark field in the middle of the night, only to see a very disappointing display.
I for one am planning on standing out shivering in a dark field in the middle of the night this year to see it (assuming a clear night, of course), but I'm prepared for disappointment.
I really don't think there's such a thing as "too much information", as long as the majority of it is accurate. The problem society is experiencing now is that it's not used to receiviing so much information. Back "a generation ago", when "most Americans got their news once or twice a day", just about everything that was reported in these newscasts was considered generally important. It had to be, because the media only had a small window of time and space per day in which to report. Therefore, society has grown used to assuming that if they heard it from the media, it must be important (and therefore something to fear, etc.). However, now that we're able to get up-to-the-minute reports on most news stories, not everything is necessarily important or relevant. It's up to the individual receiving the information to determine how much relevance a particular piece of news has to his/her life.
Some may see this as a bad thing, using the argument that it should be the media's job of filtering out the unimportant or irrelevant information. However, that assumes that the media knows what's important or relevant. These things are highly subjective.
So, to sum up what I'm trying to say, I think that today's abundance of hypermedia is a good thing, but it may take a while (a year, a generation?) for the public to adapt to knowning how to judge the imporetance or relevance of the news they hear.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very good point. If you sign an agreement with your plumber to get some work done, and page three of what you signed states "You hereby grant Joe's Plumbing the right to enter your home and use the resources contained within at any time", the contract would most certainly not stand up in court. I don't see how spyware contracts are any different.
Okay, how about:
You download the track once, assured that it will be a complete, high-quality encoding with full ID3 tags.
versus
You download the track once only to discover that the end is cut off, so you download it again from somewhere else, only to discover that the quality sucks, so you download it again from somewhere else, only to discover that there are skip/stutter artifacts in it, so you download it again...
I know a lot of people (including myself) who would pay for the convenience and assurance of a legitimate system!
I can think of a very important third benefit as well. Most of the MP3s I've downloaded over the internet have been really crappy encodings. Even at 192kbps, whatever encoder the average joe uses seems to do a really lousy job! I would think that a legitimate service would provide high-quality encodings (perhaps using the Fraunhofer codec), complete with proper ID3 tags, etc. I would consider this a great convenience, because I hate having to download something 10 times from 10 different sources and then analyzing each of them to figure out which is the best. To me, that's well worth 25 cents (or even more) a track!
MULE was good, and I'm sure HoRSE will be even better, but personally I'm going to hold out until someone implements PLaTYPUS (Personalized Labor Tool Yeilding Previously Unavailable Smithore)!
I'm pretty sure I had a version of this simulator on my Commodote 64 back in the mid 1980s. Of course, with a 320x200 grid and a 1MHz processor, it took many hours for the segregation to be complete. I remember being fascinated by it.
actually, nah, those are probably akin to neutrinos.
No, they're described as "tiny life forms", and are presumably intelligent. Hardly elemental!
Even if the cloning industry perfects the cloning of certain animals to the point where it's "both safe and effective", it doesn't follow that human cloning will automatically reach that state. Every animal is different, so to reach a state where human cloning is "both safe and effective", actual human cloning experiments are required to allow it to reach that state. I'm not saying that I condone the experiments; I'm just pointing out that your logic is flawed. If you want human cloning to someday be "both safe and effective", you must concede to allowing human cloning experiments that involve a certain amount of risk.
The company I work for is actually pretty good about this sort of thing. In fact, I've occasionally written code for the product that I wanted to be in the public domain (because I knew that I'd want to re-use it myself later), so I just said "I want this code to be in the public domain". They replied "fine, as long as it's not written on company time". An example of such code is my C HashTable. (Yes, I know this has been written a million times before, but all of the other public domain implementations I've seen suck!)
He didn't say that there wasn't nuclear decay. He said that smoke detectors aren't powered by the nuclear decay.
They benchmarked several things that showed a dramatic improvement with the larger RDRAM memory bandwidth, including mpeg4 encoding, MP3 encoding, and 3D scene rendering. I think it's fair to say that these are all "desktop" applications. It depends on what kind of user we're talking about, of course. One can surf for pr0n on a PII 233 just fine.
Can't do that... the scroll wheel doubles as the middle button.
Heck, even if it wasn't optical I'd be happy.
I'm thinking that Slashdot should temporarily mirror the smaller sites it links to. This slashdot effect is getting ridiculous. Sometimes they don't even last five minutes under the load of traffic that's directed their way.
The article actually claims that the unit has a 10-gigaBIT hard drive. I wonder if that was a mistake, or an intentional marketing ploy to make it sound more impressive than it actually is.
Granted, the images are timing out, but I'm still getting the main HTML page back from it.
I wouldn't be so sure of that! Once a GC celebrity is modelled, it still takes a lot of talent to animate it. In fact, a lot of the subtle character quirks of a CG celebrity are probably inherited from the animator. In that sense, the real actor is the person at the computer. This person could surely demand a salary increase if his/her CG character becomes overly popular. This person isn't as expendable as you might think. Kermit The Frog has never been the same since someone took over Jim Henson's job, and that's just an overdeveloped sock.
Another thing I've always been curious about is the details of the clone wars. They've been alluded to since Episode IV, but until the Timothy Zahn books came out hardly anything was known about them. From the Episode II trailer that I saw, it looks like we're actually going to see the clone wars in action. That oughta be cool. As long as it doesn't involve a million clones of Jar-Jar (*shudder*)!
Does anybody know what the number actually is? And isn't it a bit odd that it hasn't shown up as news on either the GIMPS Home Page or the PrimeNet Home Page yet?
- It has a small memory footprint and requires very little CPU power.
- It will allow you to develop in many languages, including Java, C, C++ and FORTRAN.
- It also allows you to compose e-mail messages.
- It also allows you to build HTML pages (including ones containing JavaScript).
- It's available for just about every platform on the market.
As most of you might have guessed by now, of course I'm talking about "vi". I'm willing to do without an integrated debugger and whatever else a dedicated Java IDE has to offer in favor of the above features. I do not wish to learn a new editor and a new environment every time a new programming language comes out or every time I switch operating systems. I learned to use one editor, and I learned to use it well. In conjunction with a command-line compiler, a command-line debugger and a code repository tool such as CVS (all of which are usually free and available of most platforms), I feel that I have everything I need for a development environment. And this is NOT lack of experience talking; I've been developing code for 15 years.Of course, to each their own.
I for one am planning on standing out shivering in a dark field in the middle of the night this year to see it (assuming a clear night, of course), but I'm prepared for disappointment.
Some may see this as a bad thing, using the argument that it should be the media's job of filtering out the unimportant or irrelevant information. However, that assumes that the media knows what's important or relevant. These things are highly subjective.
So, to sum up what I'm trying to say, I think that today's abundance of hypermedia is a good thing, but it may take a while (a year, a generation?) for the public to adapt to knowning how to judge the imporetance or relevance of the news they hear.