of The Simpson's as a (Slashdot) cultural common denominator.
It brings up another interesting aspect of cultural power in this election; how many people will see Arnold as anything less than a hero? How many people will be influenced by his characters' ability to go against seemingly overwhelming odds to survive and succeed? This is not to say that the big guy isn't a good person - I was quite impressed by his charitable donations and interest in children. But he has gone against aliens, liquid metal assassins, sword weilding tribesmen, evil public servents and some villians too ridiculous to mention and succeeded each time.
How will his opponents (Ms. Russell, this question is for you) fight against this vision in the public's mind so that their issues and faces can take center stage?
myke
Hmmm... Interesting bit of trolling
on
Assembly '03
·
· Score: 1
When I first saw this post, I just did a cursory look and saw the first two paragraphs were identical to the rtf file. So, no I didn't read the full text - I've now compared it and this is the only change.
Unfortunate, because the only lesson to be learned here is to ignore posts from AC.
myke
Modded as Troll? Shouldn't it be "Informative"?
on
Assembly '03
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
I would have liked to join in - I have a peridontist's appointment at the same time.
The big question is, which would be more painful? I suspect that getting my gum's scraped will be comparable to hearing 10k slashdotter's calling Darl an asshole all at the same time.
I'm not a power supply designer, but I do have some experience with system power supplies and their affect on system operation/reliability. If I were deciding upon a power supply for my system (or product), I would carry out the same testing as in the article, but also measure the following four parameters:
1. Initial Power Up overshoot/ringing/stabilization. I would hope the supllies powered up with a basic RC curve "POWERGOOD" becoming active when each of the supplies are within 1% of their targets.
2. Transient response. This is different from the "Load" test, it would look at how the power supply worked when it went from minimum load to maximum load and back again. Say starting up the disk drives, CD-ROM and change the fan speed at the same time.
3. Transient response across supplies. What happens if there is a large transient on another supply. The different power outputs in modern power supplies are not as separate as you might think.
4. Power down characteristics. Again, this should be a smooth RC curve with no overshoots or ringing. The high power positive voltage outputs should never go negative.
The first and last parameters will be an indicator of how "gentle" the power supply is on the components and whether or not there is any danger of having them overstressed. The middle two parameters would indicate how reliable operation of the PC would be and whether or not you would get power supply induced lock ups or glitches.
Power supply design is more art and component management than strong engineering application. Modern PC power supplies really are a result of iterative cost reduction and learned experience. A lot of "common sense" ideas are just plain wrong when applied to high current output switching AC/DC converters: I have learned that heavier is not always better and is often an indicator of an inefficient design. Fires are not uncommon in PC power supply testing and development and choosing the best power supply design is often a case of figuring out which company could best understand what the ashes were teling them.
myke
Re:Rusty Glucose - Good Question...
on
Powered by Blood
·
· Score: 1
I remember in the '80s that the idea of running blood over dissimilar metals to produce electricity came up as an idea to power electronic devices. The problem was, the dissimilar metals were things like Aluminum and Cadmium. These are not metals you would want in your body if you could help it. I wonder what new toxins this invention would introduce in the body.
Of course, a possible application could be using to power RF tags for endangered species - of course if there is an issue on the toxicity of the power source then all we would be doing is allowing ourselves to document in excrutiating detail our extinction of the species.
Just the idea of the possibility of flying in space excites me. Feeling accelleration of lift off, being in free fall, watching sun rise over the Earth, seeing plasma stream by the windows on re-entry.
I suspect that this is similar to the excitement of a hundred years ago, seeing a man take off and fly around a field. Being excited about flying isn't about going somewhere.
As for there being places to go 100 years ago, why would you assume that 100 years ago there were places to go by air? The idea of flying New York to Washington by a heavier than air craft was considered science fiction at best.
It was the first few pioneers that got people excited about flying who then went on to make the thousands of incremental changes that made flying practical.
On May 20, 1927, the day Lindbergh's plane took off from New York, the young Boeing Corp. rolled out the Boeing 40-A, a simple plane used primarily to carry mail. By 1933, after thousands of flights and incremental improvements, that plane evolved into the Boeing 247, the first modern passenger airliner.
Looking at the Model 40-A (Boeing.com), you can see a fabric covered single engined biplane. Jumping to the 247 (Boeing.com), they are comparing to a dual engine, all metal monoplane with retractable landing gear.
I guess that you could say that the difference in the aircraft were a result of thousands of "incremental changes", but I would think that the difference is primarily the result of thousands of people being excited by the prospect of air travel - the incremental changes came later.
This should be the point of the X-Prize, rather than establishing a starting point for space travel, it should be an example of how low cost space flight could be achieved and then ignite the passions of many people with the result of space travel on a par with today's air travel.
I don't like to question the submitters, but this has to be one of the most questionable references I've ever seen here.
How about next time quoting somebody from an orgnaization that is involved with the spacecraft? NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), NASDA (Japan's Space Aerospace Agency) and even CSA (Canadian Space Agency) have all got hardware on the way and probably could provide a inforamtion that is more useful and authoritative than what was put here.
A good start would be explaining why you would want to send spacecraft when the planets are close together. My understanding is that they were launched to save fuel (ie the latest US Rovers were launched on Delta IIs rather than Titans because the close proximity of Mars allows this). As for why, I have no idea because I would have thought it would take as much energy climbing out of Earth's gravity well regardless of how far away the target is.
While being a bachelor here in Toronto I learned an important lesson in buying meat and how it is priced. Go to a rich neighborhood to buy your hamburger and go to a poor neighborhood to buy your expensive meats (steak, filet). What was interesting was that the quality of the lower cost meats was generally better.
When I got married, my wife didn't believe this until I did some comparison shopping with her. I suspect this is true in other cities as well.
When I read about this and saw the picture, I immediately thought of Scaled Composites' entry Space Ship One and jumping from it at apogee. Space Ship One returns to earth in a high drag configuration to minimize aerodynamic heating (which would be important for a parachutist).
I think you're missing the point that VB is very simple to create simple input -> processing -> output applications. BASIC is also quite tolerant of of syntax and declaration errors which avoids heavy groans when something upchucks because a variable isn't properly declared. Not to mention that it also has the same syntax (which is probably the root of the problems that you have mentioned) as GW-BASIC that has been available for 20+ Years.
With the Visual Studio front end, learning to create (and debug) simple applications is probably most efficiently done with VB. The color coding of statements is nice. When the student moves on to more complex tasks (say data base access and hashing), then something like C or Java would be preferable.
I'm not a MS proponent in any way, I just agree with Brian's choice of tools for introducing computers to students. As they get more experienced and knowledgeable, I would expect they would move on.
If I were asked what I would want blocked, these three would be at the top of my list...
Along with this, I would be concerned about companies "volunteering" to provide these services for the ability to get you on the line:
"Hello Mr. Predko. Like you, the Eagle Hand Laundry is concerned about cancer and we would like to talk to you about what you can to help us fight this terrible disease..."
At my workplace, we use Lotus Notes and when you add up the time to download the message into your machine, click on it to bring it up (at my work, the set up will not let you delete messages without reading them first), hit "escape" to close it and then delete, you could have lost a full minute or more doing something else.
Before reading it, I would have agreed with you, but clearly Sherman was caught flat-footed by who was identified by the ISPs and the offer to settle before going to court.
If they had done any kind of basic research they wouldn't have shot themselves in the foot like this.
Maybe this is what's needed to bring sanity into this situation.
Actually, I'm surprised that the RIAA didn't do some kind of background check on the first 100 or so targets to avoid this type of article. Along with this, I can't believe that Sherman (and his "legal eagles") hadn't prepared for contingencies like somebody's parent wanting to settle up...
In some ways its laudable that they want to make space travel as exciting as NASCAR, but it's scary at how little they understand about the situation. Even if they talked about the great airplane races of the '20s and '30s, I would be concerned.
Blast offs (to use the most exciting term for a rocket ship taking off) is not something that will keep an audience riveted for a long period of time. Re-entries, in orbit manuevering and so on, is not very exciting. Maybe sports would be exciting, although the one to get the biggest draw would be not available to those under 18...
What is exciting is the element of danger (ie Columbia and Challenger) and isn't that exactly what commercialization is focused on eliminating? Along with eliminating danger the focus is on lowering costs.
If they want to make space important to people (important is not synonomous with "exciting"), is to work at making space part of people's everyday lives. Have a contest to have the first 10,000 person city powered from space. Offer cars that are built with 100% Lunar titanium. Offer drugs made in space that will add 30 healthy years to a person's lifespan (hell, just cure baldness using drugs manufactured in space). Once these things start, you will see space becoming more and more important in people's eyes and result in them being interested and maybe going to the local spaceport to look at the different ships.
Just like people go to the airport to look at the planes. The excitment and romance will be in what they carry back and forth and where they go; not in how they do it.
As somebody who continually goes back and re-reads his various stories (I'm a big fan of "The Man in High Castle" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep") it was nice to see some quotes from PKD that I haven't seen before.
I especially liked the ambulance analogy with respect to entropy. It could be an interesting debate trying to figure out if saving the man increased or decreased the order of the universe...
But rather than having Davis' questions, I would have preferred to see a transcript of the comments without editing. I feel like many of the "questions" to be leading to an interesting/profound reply was undoubtedly not related to the question that was "asked" by Davis and I'm sure he ended up cutting something out that could have been much more interesting/profound.
PKD's genius lay in his ability to look at questions which have no answers - but asking questions to pre-recorded PKD comments seems like a rigged game of cosmic "Jeopardy".
The idea was, that the plates would rotate in the "Station", slowing down close to the platfrom. I believe the theory behind it was that the number of plates going past a point in a given amount of time was always constant.
When the plates were rotated sideways and perpendicular to the direction of motion (in the Station) they moved quite slowly, but as they left the station, they would be rotated so they would be closer to being in parallel with the direction of motion. By rotating, they would "lengthen" and to maintain the same number of plates per second going by a point, their speed would increase.
Clever idea - part of the concept was to pump air and widen the "tube" at the station, so that there would note be a "wind" each time the passenger came into a station and sped up and slowed down.
1. Imagine a Beowolf cluster of... 2. In Soviet Russia... 3. Web server running off of reviewed hardware
How about rounding up everyone that uses one of these three jokes, tying them up with cat-5 cable, dropping them on Moscow after paying somebody to plug in the cable.
The "Slashdot Effect" is for real... You would go broke with the number of people accessing your page, reading sample pdfs, etc...
It would be much more efficient for you to take over a bunch of different systems, have each one create a number of Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts and send out advertisements using this tool. You know, using what's in the book to promote it.
At the very least you would find out if the methods in the book works (and probably get a better handle on your ancestry to boot).
Slashdot Mirror
of The Simpson's as a (Slashdot) cultural common denominator.
It brings up another interesting aspect of cultural power in this election; how many people will see Arnold as anything less than a hero? How many people will be influenced by his characters' ability to go against seemingly overwhelming odds to survive and succeed? This is not to say that the big guy isn't a good person - I was quite impressed by his charitable donations and interest in children. But he has gone against aliens, liquid metal assassins, sword weilding tribesmen, evil public servents and some villians too ridiculous to mention and succeeded each time.
How will his opponents (Ms. Russell, this question is for you) fight against this vision in the public's mind so that their issues and faces can take center stage?
myke
When I first saw this post, I just did a cursory look and saw the first two paragraphs were identical to the rtf file. So, no I didn't read the full text - I've now compared it and this is the only change.
Unfortunate, because the only lesson to be learned here is to ignore posts from AC.
myke
Somebody hit the wrong button?
myke
I would have liked to join in - I have a peridontist's appointment at the same time.
The big question is, which would be more painful? I suspect that getting my gum's scraped will be comparable to hearing 10k slashdotter's calling Darl an asshole all at the same time.
myke
I'm not a power supply designer, but I do have some experience with system power supplies and their affect on system operation/reliability. If I were deciding upon a power supply for my system (or product), I would carry out the same testing as in the article, but also measure the following four parameters:
1. Initial Power Up overshoot/ringing/stabilization. I would hope the supllies powered up with a basic RC curve "POWERGOOD" becoming active when each of the supplies are within 1% of their targets.
2. Transient response. This is different from the "Load" test, it would look at how the power supply worked when it went from minimum load to maximum load and back again. Say starting up the disk drives, CD-ROM and change the fan speed at the same time.
3. Transient response across supplies. What happens if there is a large transient on another supply. The different power outputs in modern power supplies are not as separate as you might think.
4. Power down characteristics. Again, this should be a smooth RC curve with no overshoots or ringing. The high power positive voltage outputs should never go negative.
The first and last parameters will be an indicator of how "gentle" the power supply is on the components and whether or not there is any danger of having them overstressed. The middle two parameters would indicate how reliable operation of the PC would be and whether or not you would get power supply induced lock ups or glitches.
Power supply design is more art and component management than strong engineering application. Modern PC power supplies really are a result of iterative cost reduction and learned experience. A lot of "common sense" ideas are just plain wrong when applied to high current output switching AC/DC converters: I have learned that heavier is not always better and is often an indicator of an inefficient design. Fires are not uncommon in PC power supply testing and development and choosing the best power supply design is often a case of figuring out which company could best understand what the ashes were teling them.
myke
I remember in the '80s that the idea of running blood over dissimilar metals to produce electricity came up as an idea to power electronic devices. The problem was, the dissimilar metals were things like Aluminum and Cadmium. These are not metals you would want in your body if you could help it. I wonder what new toxins this invention would introduce in the body.
Of course, a possible application could be using to power RF tags for endangered species - of course if there is an issue on the toxicity of the power source then all we would be doing is allowing ourselves to document in excrutiating detail our extinction of the species.
myke
Just the idea of the possibility of flying in space excites me. Feeling accelleration of lift off, being in free fall, watching sun rise over the Earth, seeing plasma stream by the windows on re-entry.
I suspect that this is similar to the excitement of a hundred years ago, seeing a man take off and fly around a field. Being excited about flying isn't about going somewhere.
As for there being places to go 100 years ago, why would you assume that 100 years ago there were places to go by air? The idea of flying New York to Washington by a heavier than air craft was considered science fiction at best.
It was the first few pioneers that got people excited about flying who then went on to make the thousands of incremental changes that made flying practical.
myke
In the article, the author makes the comment:
On May 20, 1927, the day Lindbergh's plane took off from New York, the young Boeing Corp. rolled out the Boeing 40-A, a simple plane used primarily to carry mail. By 1933, after thousands of flights and incremental improvements, that plane evolved into the Boeing 247, the first modern passenger airliner.
Looking at the Model 40-A (Boeing.com), you can see a fabric covered single engined biplane. Jumping to the 247 (Boeing.com), they are comparing to a dual engine, all metal monoplane with retractable landing gear.
I guess that you could say that the difference in the aircraft were a result of thousands of "incremental changes", but I would think that the difference is primarily the result of thousands of people being excited by the prospect of air travel - the incremental changes came later.
This should be the point of the X-Prize, rather than establishing a starting point for space travel, it should be an example of how low cost space flight could be achieved and then ignite the passions of many people with the result of space travel on a par with today's air travel.
myke
I don't like to question the submitters, but this has to be one of the most questionable references I've ever seen here.
How about next time quoting somebody from an orgnaization that is involved with the spacecraft? NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), NASDA (Japan's Space Aerospace Agency) and even CSA (Canadian Space Agency) have all got hardware on the way and probably could provide a inforamtion that is more useful and authoritative than what was put here.
A good start would be explaining why you would want to send spacecraft when the planets are close together. My understanding is that they were launched to save fuel (ie the latest US Rovers were launched on Delta IIs rather than Titans because the close proximity of Mars allows this). As for why, I have no idea because I would have thought it would take as much energy climbing out of Earth's gravity well regardless of how far away the target is.
myke
In response to "you'll have to pry my iTrip from my cold, dead hands."
Your Proposal is Acceptable.
Now, where's a giant space cockroach when you need it.
myke
While being a bachelor here in Toronto I learned an important lesson in buying meat and how it is priced. Go to a rich neighborhood to buy your hamburger and go to a poor neighborhood to buy your expensive meats (steak, filet). What was interesting was that the quality of the lower cost meats was generally better.
When I got married, my wife didn't believe this until I did some comparison shopping with her. I suspect this is true in other cities as well.
myke
When I read about this and saw the picture, I immediately thought of Scaled Composites' entry Space Ship One and jumping from it at apogee. Space Ship One returns to earth in a high drag configuration to minimize aerodynamic heating (which would be important for a parachutist).
As for the technology being available, this was first done in 1962 by USAF Capt. Joe Kittinger.
The only element required now is to find somebody stupid enough to try it.
myke
I think you're missing the point that VB is very simple to create simple input -> processing -> output applications. BASIC is also quite tolerant of of syntax and declaration errors which avoids heavy groans when something upchucks because a variable isn't properly declared. Not to mention that it also has the same syntax (which is probably the root of the problems that you have mentioned) as GW-BASIC that has been available for 20+ Years.
With the Visual Studio front end, learning to create (and debug) simple applications is probably most efficiently done with VB. The color coding of statements is nice. When the student moves on to more complex tasks (say data base access and hashing), then something like C or Java would be preferable.
I'm not a MS proponent in any way, I just agree with Brian's choice of tools for introducing computers to students. As they get more experienced and knowledgeable, I would expect they would move on.
myke
If I were asked what I would want blocked, these three would be at the top of my list...
Along with this, I would be concerned about companies "volunteering" to provide these services for the ability to get you on the line:
"Hello Mr. Predko. Like you, the Eagle Hand Laundry is concerned about cancer and we would like to talk to you about what you can to help us fight this terrible disease..."
myke
We have a "No Soliciting" sign on our Mailbox. I think it cuts down on the number of salespeople that ring the bell by about 50%.
Our immediate response is to point out the sign (right beside the front door) and the responses are pretty comical. Here are the biggest ones we get.
1. "I thought that sign was put up by the previous owners of the house."
2. "I'm not soliciting - I want to find out if you are interested in..."
3. "I'm sorry, I missed the sign. But while I've got your attention..."
4. "I thought the sign was only for the mailman."
5. "Your neighbor thought that this was such a fantastic opportunity that I should go knock on your door and tell you about it."
Montgomery Burns has it right when he says "Release the Hounds!"
myke
Depending on your mail system.
At my workplace, we use Lotus Notes and when you add up the time to download the message into your machine, click on it to bring it up (at my work, the set up will not let you delete messages without reading them first), hit "escape" to close it and then delete, you could have lost a full minute or more doing something else.
Sigh.
myke
Don't forget to bring your video camera along and come up with a great come on using the words:
LARGE HARD DRIVE
Maybe this is the road to riches they are thinking about.
myke
Read the article again.
Before reading it, I would have agreed with you, but clearly Sherman was caught flat-footed by who was identified by the ISPs and the offer to settle before going to court.
If they had done any kind of basic research they wouldn't have shot themselves in the foot like this.
myke
Maybe this is what's needed to bring sanity into this situation.
Actually, I'm surprised that the RIAA didn't do some kind of background check on the first 100 or so targets to avoid this type of article. Along with this, I can't believe that Sherman (and his "legal eagles") hadn't prepared for contingencies like somebody's parent wanting to settle up...
myke
In some ways its laudable that they want to make space travel as exciting as NASCAR, but it's scary at how little they understand about the situation. Even if they talked about the great airplane races of the '20s and '30s, I would be concerned.
Blast offs (to use the most exciting term for a rocket ship taking off) is not something that will keep an audience riveted for a long period of time. Re-entries, in orbit manuevering and so on, is not very exciting. Maybe sports would be exciting, although the one to get the biggest draw would be not available to those under 18...
What is exciting is the element of danger (ie Columbia and Challenger) and isn't that exactly what commercialization is focused on eliminating? Along with eliminating danger the focus is on lowering costs.
If they want to make space important to people (important is not synonomous with "exciting"), is to work at making space part of people's everyday lives. Have a contest to have the first 10,000 person city powered from space. Offer cars that are built with 100% Lunar titanium. Offer drugs made in space that will add 30 healthy years to a person's lifespan (hell, just cure baldness using drugs manufactured in space). Once these things start, you will see space becoming more and more important in people's eyes and result in them being interested and maybe going to the local spaceport to look at the different ships.
Just like people go to the airport to look at the planes. The excitment and romance will be in what they carry back and forth and where they go; not in how they do it.
myke
As somebody who continually goes back and re-reads his various stories (I'm a big fan of "The Man in High Castle" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep") it was nice to see some quotes from PKD that I haven't seen before.
I especially liked the ambulance analogy with respect to entropy. It could be an interesting debate trying to figure out if saving the man increased or decreased the order of the universe...
But rather than having Davis' questions, I would have preferred to see a transcript of the comments without editing. I feel like many of the "questions" to be leading to an interesting/profound reply was undoubtedly not related to the question that was "asked" by Davis and I'm sure he ended up cutting something out that could have been much more interesting/profound.
PKD's genius lay in his ability to look at questions which have no answers - but asking questions to pre-recorded PKD comments seems like a rigged game of cosmic "Jeopardy".
myke
Or Popular Mechanics - I don't remember which.
The idea was, that the plates would rotate in the "Station", slowing down close to the platfrom. I believe the theory behind it was that the number of plates going past a point in a given amount of time was always constant.
When the plates were rotated sideways and perpendicular to the direction of motion (in the Station) they moved quite slowly, but as they left the station, they would be rotated so they would be closer to being in parallel with the direction of motion. By rotating, they would "lengthen" and to maintain the same number of plates per second going by a point, their speed would increase.
Clever idea - part of the concept was to pump air and widen the "tube" at the station, so that there would note be a "wind" each time the passenger came into a station and sped up and slowed down.
myke
They are:
1. Imagine a Beowolf cluster of...
2. In Soviet Russia...
3. Web server running off of reviewed hardware
How about rounding up everyone that uses one of these three jokes, tying them up with cat-5 cable, dropping them on Moscow after paying somebody to plug in the cable.
myke
I was looking for a good platform for a home grown TiVo, the GP+ looked just about perfect with its video in/out and networking capability.
I guess this ain't it.
myke
The "Slashdot Effect" is for real... You would go broke with the number of people accessing your page, reading sample pdfs, etc...
It would be much more efficient for you to take over a bunch of different systems, have each one create a number of Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts and send out advertisements using this tool. You know, using what's in the book to promote it.
At the very least you would find out if the methods in the book works (and probably get a better handle on your ancestry to boot).
myke