...and then NASA could sell them on the open market...
By them I mean the materials, not the scientists:^)
NASA and materials research
on
Redirecting NASA
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The International Space Station initiative is a great idea, but I'd like to see it used more intensively for space materials research.
If we could have scientists actually up there developing new crystalline materials, and then NASA could sell them on the open market, maybe some of its funding problems would disappear!
If NASA is going to depend on the charity of the White House and Congress, their budget is going to be cut out of existence. Better to help themselves by being a little bit market-savvy.
Lasers are also fun. Cut a small hole low-down in the side of a clear (white, preferably) soda bottle. Fill the bottle with water (covering the hole!) and shine a laser through the bottle and onto the hole.
Uncover the hole, and a small tube-like stream of water will come out. You can see the laser light bouncing through it in a fiber-optic effect, and the place where the stream hits a surface will glow. Warning: this may generate future fiber-optics engineers as a side-effect: use with care.
I can't begrudge you enjoyment of Nausicaa the movie...
But I hated it.
Fine up to here. But here we go with the real doozies!
Caveat: I would compare Nausicaa the movie to Nausicaa the anime as Dune, the abridged Lynch movie, to Dune, the series of books written by Frank Herbert.
What you mean is, the movie is to the manga as Dune the movie is to the books. Anime != manga, I'm afraid.
Thank goodness you provide an explanation. But then you really lay down the confusion with this one:
Or, another explanation; the manga is abridged and castrated in my opinion.
What you mean is, the movie is.
The movie was produced when manga vols. 1 and 2 had been published in Animage; the rest of the manga were written later and some of that work was built into Mononoke Hime. (There are even horned elk in the manga, just like Ashitaka rides!) The manga is a Miyazaki masterpiece. The movies you can debate if you like.
This is really not a troll; witness that I didn't post anonymously.
A modern kid wouldn't be seen dead with some joystick playing old Atari games. $79 dollars extra gets you a modern Game Boy Advance several orders of magnitude more powerful than this. "Tried and tested" - kids aren't CEOs!
I think it's important that this have support for compilation with the GCC 3.0 series. Otherwise it's not freeing my world from the iron grip of Enlightenment (haha!)
Seriously, though, what work is being done on this?
Sci-fi is nice. Or perhaps Buddhism? Pure Land Buddism is a sect that believes in a land which one can attain by properly following the precepts in this life, which is populated by innumerable buddhas.
One funny aspect is that there are actually 10,000 Innumerable Buddhas - but I digress. Anyway, this land has subdivisions (look at a mandala, or painting, of this land to see what I mean). So major servers could get major Buddha's names (Gautama and Shakyamuni) and other computers could get lesser names.
'Course, then you'd have to hire a monk to help out your sysadmin. On the other hand, perhaps your sysadmin would benefit from a little meditation practice in the server room.
Well at least it's not dead imprisonment. Thank God for small favors.
Re:The PS2 is very interesting
on
LinuxWorld Summary
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Amen to that.
But one thing we should be careful of is whether the compiler is actually compiling 64-bit binaries (with 128-bit code where useful).
I use Linux on an UltraSparc (64-bit with 32-bit compatibility) a lot, and only recently has the GCC series of compilers been capable of generating proper code for 64-bits.
As for the 128-bit coprocessors, I doubt whether the compiler is optimizing for these. Now that would be an awesome project!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "Linux on PlayStation2 is a bad idea", just that there's probably room for an enterprising hacker (or group thereof) to do some inteeresting things with the compilers.
This is an awesome idea IMHO, and i'm getting a PS2 real soon now just because of this announcmenet.
Re:Woah! $500 for a 40 Gig HD + Ethernet...
on
LinuxWorld Summary
·
· Score: 1
Yes it is. Chack the FAQ at this site and you'll see that it requires a PS2. And what are those USB ports for? Good looks?
Hey! Wait a second! Looking at my Windows NT (4.0) installation disk, I see that it supports:
Intel (x86)
Digital (Alpha)
SGI (Mips)
IBM (PowerPC)
Personally, I can't wait to modify the Linux boot scripts and have frickin' Windows NT system software (Wordpad and stuff) running on a patched WINE on a PS2.
Of course, afterwards I'll have to take a shower just to wash the stench of sulfur out...
In defense of C++
C++ is not inherently more unstable than any other
language. Modern C++ compilers produce good code,
and library functions are not fatally flawed.
While it may be true that other languages are more careful about type-checking, that is a choice they make which makes doing things like writing kernels more difficult.
While C++ is far from the perfect language, so is every other programming language.
I'd like to take issue with the approach you're taking to the problem. Essentially, you assume that modern hardware is pretty much going to stay constant in its abilities, and that current users will not be able to learn fast enough.
However, as the graphics card industry has shown, if there's a need the progress will come. If there are people at MIT running crazy 3-D interfaces and giving demos and generally wowing the public, then the commercial world will latch on to that craze. Business lives on the opening of new markets.
Furthermore, I think you assume that the target audience for this software is Joe Excel, who burnt out his brain cells for weeks learning basic VBScript (ugh...). I would contest that and say rather that the target audience is computer enthusiasts, and possibly scientists or sysadmins.
The learning ability of Joe Excel can be quite good, if the material is engaging. Witness that practically every computer game brings new quirks in the interface and look-and-feel department, and that the user base adjusts. We (gamers) shifted from 2-d (Lode Runner, Mario) to 3-d (Quake, F/18 Korea) very quickly.
The trick is, in short, to make this technology exciting. A cube with a different Mozilla on each face is not exciting - we need to make a UI which is so much like a game that people will enjoy it. I think it can be done, and if the software is there, even on some MIT God-box, the software - and the users - will come.
GNU = Gnu's not Unix
Since emacs is part of the GNU system, if emacs were Unix then GNU would be a superset of Unix.
Since Richard Stallman is the Second Coming of Our Lord GNU/God, and therefore is infallible, this would result in a contradiction of monstrous proportions.
If emacs ever becomes Unix (I'm not ruling that out!) GNU had better change its name or we'd all better prepare for a rain of locusts, etc...
It's interesting to see Windows CE on the Crusoe. I know that WinCE has been ported to the Intel architecture - might be nice to know what they've done in the way of optimizing for Crusoe.
Have Linus and the Microsoft WinCE team been working together? And if so, how?
This post is a very interesting experiment with the Slashdot community. The message
carbon-copies RMS's statement above (enough to
warrant a -1: Redundant).
No flamers about "just trying to grab attetion"
here, however! Far from pointing out the obvious
equality between the opinion expressed by
BConway and RMS's, the conversation is
intelligent and focuses on the facts.
Why do we bitch about RMS making a statement and
respond positively to a rehash of the same
statement from someone else?
I thought the Slashdot community prided itself
on being a little bit open-minded. Kneejerk
condemnations of people's opinions based on
their identity is not only rude, it's stupid.
Hats off to BConway for making this so clear.
Sure someone will profit - the anonymous thousands of people around the world who would just as soon see America wiped off the face of the earth - or at least get the hell out of their lives.
Not that they're right - I'm sure they're greatly outnumbered by the moderates even in their own communities - but there are enough of them that killing them would mean killing way too many civilians to be feasible.
Very true. In fact, legally it will become impossible to enforce, because one can claim selective enforcement.
You see, it's illegal to declare something illegal and then pick and choose whom you will arrest. Otherwise the government could simply declare breathing illegal, and then just use it when the police were "sure" that someone was guilty of something.
(Just like they were "sure" Armadou Diallo had a gun.)
It is important to make file sharing as ubiquitous as possible. Then any arrest made will fall under heavy criticism for selective enforcement.
Why is this post not redundant? Because it establishes a legal, not just a logistical reason for unenforcability.
I assume you think this is a bad thing,
considering the rest of the CRAP that you
wrote.
What else did she have going for her? How else were we to relate to the main character? Being infested with these creatures is a little weird, but not enough to inspire great sympathy, at least IMO.
Explinations (sic) of the attacks are given
in Aki's dreams.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only thing the dreams explain is why our spirit pals left their planet, not why they attack humans.
Most of the information comes from underlying
messages;
What exactly were the underlying messages? I can think of only the following:
If somebody does something previously thought impossible (contain Aki's infection) immediately hail them as the second coming of Christ and let them have free rein to pursue any other wild theories (Gaea's existence) at the expense of your people's safety.
I actively supported the General for most of the movie. He was by far the best character, again IMO.
Derived from Venture (an attempt) and capitalism (an economic system based on individuals' attempts to aggregate capital).
Venture capitalism is a system in which persons with large amounts of money invest in a company which is just getting on its feet, giving it a chance even though it is not as yet generating profit.
A venture capitalist takes calculated risks. Usually, venture capitalists try to find new, untapped areas, and invest smaller amounts of money to, so to speak, "test the waters."
It seems to me that a small software Kompany would not need a heluva lot of capital. I mean, they don't need big buildings & stuff...
I think that there needs to be an effort to increase distribution of the tools for biological and genetic research to private individuals.
I welcome moral discussion of the issue, but I think that I would generally trust the public to work things out more than corporations that really don't care. If everybody has a DNA sequencer, we'll have to invent some rules double-quick. If only companies do, they can sneak stuff by and people might never notice.
However, a well-stocked genetics lab isn't only composed of sequencers, as other posters implicitly assume. A lab also requires stable environments for the growth of organisms: "artificial wombs" where food is supplied to the growing embryo and the temperature, pH, etc. are kept well-regulated.
What we would need before large-scale dissemination of genetic engineering technology is some basic education on pH, temperature (yep, ya can't put that embryo in the freezer, Bobby!) etc. It wouldn't have to be complicated (the machines could handle most of it) but people would need to recognize that spilling lemon juice onto their latest experiment won't work.
I personally am genuinely intrigued by the possibilities presented. Any thoughts on other prerequisites for consumer genetic engineering?
I would like to take to task the "middle road" which the speech proposes.
Microsoft wishes corporations and the open-source community could "just get along." The fact is, the open-source community, with its tradition of giving away intellectual property, must fight very hard whenever there is "interaction" to protect the freedom to share.
New laws continue to strengthen the "intellectual property" of corporations that choose to close their source and disallow copying of their software; their business models play well into the traditional business models lawmakers are used to. However, legislation which supports the rights of the open-source software creators is slow in coming.
The fact is that when a company allies itself with a group of open-source developers, the open-source developers must fight to protect the openness of the software they created; if it weren't for the protections of the GPL which Microsoft condemns, the company could walk away with thousands of programmer-hours worth of code free.
It is Microsoft's (and others') fault that the GPL must be so restrictive; the business model of traditional IP-based companies encourages the practice of acquisition of IP, whatever it takes.
Slashdot Mirror
...and then NASA could sell them on the open market...
:^)
By them I mean the materials, not the scientists
The International Space Station initiative is a great idea, but I'd like to see it used more intensively for space materials research.
If we could have scientists actually up there developing new crystalline materials, and then NASA could sell them on the open market, maybe some of its funding problems would disappear!
If NASA is going to depend on the charity of the White House and Congress, their budget is going to be cut out of existence. Better to help themselves by being a little bit market-savvy.
Other than the sometimes daunting install process, Debian is one of the best linux distributions
Pardon me, but I though Debian was one of the best anyway, and for the record I had no difficulty installing it the first time.
Lasers are also fun. Cut a small hole low-down in the side of a clear (white, preferably) soda bottle. Fill the bottle with water (covering the hole!) and shine a laser through the bottle and onto the hole.
Uncover the hole, and a small tube-like stream of water will come out. You can see the laser light bouncing through it in a fiber-optic effect, and the place where the stream hits a surface will glow.
Warning: this may generate future fiber-optics engineers as a side-effect: use with care.
I can't begrudge you enjoyment of Nausicaa the movie...
But I hated it.
Fine up to here. But here we go with the real doozies!
Caveat: I would compare Nausicaa the movie to Nausicaa the anime as Dune, the abridged Lynch movie, to Dune, the series of books written by Frank Herbert.
What you mean is, the movie is to the manga as Dune the movie is to the books. Anime != manga, I'm afraid.
Thank goodness you provide an explanation. But then you really lay down the confusion with this one:
Or, another explanation; the manga is abridged and castrated in my opinion.
What you mean is, the movie is.
The movie was produced when manga vols. 1 and 2 had been published in Animage; the rest of the manga were written later and some of that work was built into Mononoke Hime. (There are even horned elk in the manga, just like Ashitaka rides!) The manga is a Miyazaki masterpiece. The movies you can debate if you like.
This is really not a troll; witness that I didn't post anonymously.
A modern kid wouldn't be seen dead with some joystick playing old Atari games. $79 dollars extra gets you a modern Game Boy Advance several orders of magnitude more powerful than this. "Tried and tested" - kids aren't CEOs!
I think it's important that this have support for compilation with the GCC 3.0 series. Otherwise it's not freeing my world from the iron grip of Enlightenment (haha!)
Seriously, though, what work is being done on this?
Sci-fi is nice. Or perhaps Buddhism? Pure Land Buddism is a sect that believes in a land which one can attain by properly following the precepts in this life, which is populated by innumerable buddhas.
One funny aspect is that there are actually 10,000 Innumerable Buddhas - but I digress. Anyway, this land has subdivisions (look at a mandala, or painting, of this land to see what I mean). So major servers could get major Buddha's names (Gautama and Shakyamuni) and other computers could get lesser names.
'Course, then you'd have to hire a monk to help out your sysadmin. On the other hand, perhaps your sysadmin would benefit from a little meditation practice in the server room.
You'll get live imprisonment if caught.
Well at least it's not dead imprisonment. Thank God for small favors.
Amen to that.
But one thing we should be careful of is whether the compiler is actually compiling 64-bit binaries (with 128-bit code where useful).
I use Linux on an UltraSparc (64-bit with 32-bit compatibility) a lot, and only recently has the GCC series of compilers been capable of generating proper code for 64-bits.
As for the 128-bit coprocessors, I doubt whether the compiler is optimizing for these. Now that would be an awesome project!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "Linux on PlayStation2 is a bad idea", just that there's probably room for an enterprising hacker (or group thereof) to do some inteeresting things with the compilers.
This is an awesome idea IMHO, and i'm getting a PS2 real soon now just because of this announcmenet.
Yes it is. Chack the FAQ at this site and you'll see that it requires a PS2. And what are those USB ports for? Good looks?
Personally, I can't wait to modify the Linux boot scripts and have frickin' Windows NT system software (Wordpad and stuff) running on a patched WINE on a PS2.
Of course, afterwards I'll have to take a shower just to wash the stench of sulfur out...
Good heavens, I think now hell can freeze over.
JonKatz has posted as an AC.
and send it to some orbital gambling station where nobody would find it.
In defense of C++
C++ is not inherently more unstable than any other language. Modern C++ compilers produce good code, and library functions are not fatally flawed.
While it may be true that other languages are more careful about type-checking, that is a choice they make which makes doing things like writing kernels more difficult.
While C++ is far from the perfect language, so is every other programming language.
I'd like to take issue with the approach you're taking to the problem. Essentially, you assume that modern hardware is pretty much going to stay constant in its abilities, and that current users will not be able to learn fast enough.
However, as the graphics card industry has shown, if there's a need the progress will come. If there are people at MIT running crazy 3-D interfaces and giving demos and generally wowing the public, then the commercial world will latch on to that craze. Business lives on the opening of new markets.
Furthermore, I think you assume that the target audience for this software is Joe Excel, who burnt out his brain cells for weeks learning basic VBScript (ugh...). I would contest that and say rather that the target audience is computer enthusiasts, and possibly scientists or sysadmins.
The learning ability of Joe Excel can be quite good, if the material is engaging. Witness that practically every computer game brings new quirks in the interface and look-and-feel department, and that the user base adjusts. We (gamers) shifted from 2-d (Lode Runner, Mario) to 3-d (Quake, F/18 Korea) very quickly.
The trick is, in short, to make this technology exciting. A cube with a different Mozilla on each face is not exciting - we need to make a UI which is so much like a game that people will enjoy it. I think it can be done, and if the software is there, even on some MIT God-box, the software - and the users - will come.
GNU = Gnu's not Unix
Since emacs is part of the GNU system, if emacs were Unix then GNU would be a superset of Unix.
Since Richard Stallman is the Second Coming of Our Lord GNU/God, and therefore is infallible, this would result in a contradiction of monstrous proportions.
If emacs ever becomes Unix (I'm not ruling that out!) GNU had better change its name or we'd all better prepare for a rain of locusts, etc...
It's interesting to see Windows CE on the Crusoe. I know that WinCE has been ported to the Intel architecture - might be nice to know what they've done in the way of optimizing for Crusoe.
Have Linus and the Microsoft WinCE team been working together? And if so, how?
This post is a very interesting experiment with the Slashdot community. The message carbon-copies RMS's statement above (enough to warrant a -1: Redundant).
No flamers about "just trying to grab attetion" here, however! Far from pointing out the obvious equality between the opinion expressed by BConway and RMS's, the conversation is intelligent and focuses on the facts.
Why do we bitch about RMS making a statement and respond positively to a rehash of the same statement from someone else?
I thought the Slashdot community prided itself on being a little bit open-minded. Kneejerk condemnations of people's opinions based on their identity is not only rude, it's stupid. Hats off to BConway for making this so clear.
Sure someone will profit - the anonymous thousands of people around the world who would just as soon see America wiped off the face of the earth - or at least get the hell out of their lives.
Not that they're right - I'm sure they're greatly outnumbered by the moderates even in their own communities - but there are enough of them that killing them would mean killing way too many civilians to be feasible.
Very true. In fact, legally it will become impossible to enforce, because one can claim selective enforcement. You see, it's illegal to declare something illegal and then pick and choose whom you will arrest. Otherwise the government could simply declare breathing illegal, and then just use it when the police were "sure" that someone was guilty of something. (Just like they were "sure" Armadou Diallo had a gun.) It is important to make file sharing as ubiquitous as possible. Then any arrest made will fall under heavy criticism for selective enforcement. Why is this post not redundant? Because it establishes a legal, not just a logistical reason for unenforcability.
I assume you think this is a bad thing, considering the rest of the CRAP that you wrote.
What else did she have going for her? How else were we to relate to the main character? Being infested with these creatures is a little weird, but not enough to inspire great sympathy, at least IMO.Explinations (sic) of the attacks are given in Aki's dreams.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only thing the dreams explain is why our spirit pals left their planet, not why they attack humans.Most of the information comes from underlying messages;
What exactly were the underlying messages? I can think of only the following: If somebody does something previously thought impossible (contain Aki's infection) immediately hail them as the second coming of Christ and let them have free rein to pursue any other wild theories (Gaea's existence) at the expense of your people's safety. I actively supported the General for most of the movie. He was by far the best character, again IMO.Derived from Venture (an attempt) and capitalism (an economic system based on individuals' attempts to aggregate capital).
Venture capitalism is a system in which persons with large amounts of money invest in a company which is just getting on its feet, giving it a chance even though it is not as yet generating profit.
A venture capitalist takes calculated risks. Usually, venture capitalists try to find new, untapped areas, and invest smaller amounts of money to, so to speak, "test the waters."
It seems to me that a small software Kompany would not need a heluva lot of capital. I mean, they don't need big buildings & stuff...
I welcome moral discussion of the issue, but I think that I would generally trust the public to work things out more than corporations that really don't care. If everybody has a DNA sequencer, we'll have to invent some rules double-quick. If only companies do, they can sneak stuff by and people might never notice.
However, a well-stocked genetics lab isn't only composed of sequencers, as other posters implicitly assume. A lab also requires stable environments for the growth of organisms: "artificial wombs" where food is supplied to the growing embryo and the temperature, pH, etc. are kept well-regulated.
What we would need before large-scale dissemination of genetic engineering technology is some basic education on pH, temperature (yep, ya can't put that embryo in the freezer, Bobby!) etc. It wouldn't have to be complicated (the machines could handle most of it) but people would need to recognize that spilling lemon juice onto their latest experiment won't work.
I personally am genuinely intrigued by the possibilities presented. Any thoughts on other prerequisites for consumer genetic engineering?
I would like to take to task the "middle road" which the speech proposes. Microsoft wishes corporations and the open-source community could "just get along." The fact is, the open-source community, with its tradition of giving away intellectual property, must fight very hard whenever there is "interaction" to protect the freedom to share. New laws continue to strengthen the "intellectual property" of corporations that choose to close their source and disallow copying of their software; their business models play well into the traditional business models lawmakers are used to. However, legislation which supports the rights of the open-source software creators is slow in coming. The fact is that when a company allies itself with a group of open-source developers, the open-source developers must fight to protect the openness of the software they created; if it weren't for the protections of the GPL which Microsoft condemns, the company could walk away with thousands of programmer-hours worth of code free. It is Microsoft's (and others') fault that the GPL must be so restrictive; the business model of traditional IP-based companies encourages the practice of acquisition of IP, whatever it takes.