This is the sort of 'convergence' technology that I'll never, ever understand. It's like once a piece of technology becomes mature, we rewind time to when it was an inconvenient pain in the ass.
Land lines have high-reliability, high-quality, low per-call cost... and what does everyone move to? Cell phones, which sound like everyone's stuck under six feet of molasses, crap out on every third call, and have impenetrable service agreements in which the only certainty is that you'll be told you "don't understand pro-ration", and then fucked over.
Even small, non-SLR digital cameras can take pictures that rival the quality of film snapshots and, sometimes, 35mm film (film fetishists, this isn't the main point I'm making, so suck it up and go away)---and what do we get? Tiny, grainy cell-phone cameras that look just like handheld digital cameras did five years ago. Damn it, when I get my amateur porn off livejournal, I want it to be high-quality.
And now we're getting nice, shiny HDTV transmission, but folks're going to want it on one-inch fuzzy cell phone screens. Sheesh!
Yeah, I know everyone moves to these things voluntarily, but I still loathe them, especially since it was so hard for me to get a cell phone which was "just a fucking phone". And the big button in the middle goes to some kind of pay service I will never, ever, ever want to access, instead of something useful like the phone book.
Heh. I walked out of Episode III asking the same question about droids. In the original trilogy, they never did much, and I could overlook their relatively humanish styles of speech and interaction because it was just surface stuff.
But droids leading revolutions and commanding armies (with voice commands and 'hand' gestures, no less!)? Oh, right, General Grievous (was he a Jamaican caricature? I forget what flavor of racism we're having this week) had a meat heart. For no damned reason, just that it looked kinda neat, and gave Obi-Wan something to shoot.
And droid armies? Why the fuck would anyone use human armies? Why wouldn't the Trade Federation or, y'know, anyone, just drop a von Neumann device on a planet with good energy sources, and convert its mass into armies and ships and whatnot. Why are droid pilots not pulling moves involving hundreds of Gs of force, that would make any meat-based pilot into a pancake? Why do the droids have reflexes no faster than a human, and why do they seem fragile enough that a stiff breeze could knock their heads off?
Then I remind myself that it's fantasy, and all of these things happen Because It Looks Nifty.
But still, even within the hastily thrown-together cosmology that Lucas has... are droids in tune with the Force? Are clones? What is their moral status? Are cloneburgers okay to eat? Are they a vast underclass of sophonts, and what does it say about the Jedi that they discriminate on the basis of Force-sensitivity?
I don't think droids can really fit into the Lucasverse and make any sort of good sense. Bah.
Love triangles? I'll skip that one, because I'd be okay without it.
Drug addiction? There are no drugs - Guinan isn't licensed. But is Picard's Earl Grey decaffeinated? Why don't they use harmless customised wonderdrugs? Clearly, everyone is on Super Soma to make them such nice, well-adjusted humanoids.
Racism? Did you see "Up the Long Ladder"? There is no racism... so where are all the Hispanics, Arabs, and co? Star Trek is a paragon of tokenism. Clearly, the White Masters back home are running things. Racist enough for you?
Violence? All races and cultures are equal. Everybody has only been Americanised (rather than, say, Iranianised) because they genuinely wanted to be. We're seeing a Pax Starfleetica. All other cultures have been squashed under the thumb of the aforementioned White Masters, far better than any of the 1500s' colonists could have dreamed.
Holosuite addiction? See frickin' Super Soma.
The whole thing is horribly creepy if you think about it enough. Read the link.
They're making His Dark Materials into a movie. Haven't read the book, but I was told it's sorta like a secular humanist version of Narnia. And there's Narnia itself.
But none of that looks like it could spawn a real franchise. Damn You, Fox!!! Now Firefly will be, at best, a decent movie trilogy. Imagine what Babylon 5 would have been squeezed into seven and a half hours. Bah.
Nonsense; all Star Wars ships run at the same speed, it's the in-hyperspace navigation which can make the difference. The length of Solo's route was under 12 parsecs, hence he made the run faster.
According to Google, it's about 3.24*10^20 m^2. Now, the surface area of the Earth is 5.11*10^14 m^2. Because, you know, time and space are all the same and whatnot.
So, a square minute would cover about a million earths.
Man, that's a big minute.
Of course, one could also measure the actual surface area of the film. Assuming it's projected in standard 35mm (that is, 24mm by 36mm). Since the sound is irrelevant here, we'll assume we're just talking about that, at a rate of 24 frames per second, ignoring space between the frames. So that's 0.576 meters for a second of film. A minute would be 34.56 meters. Squaring that gives around 1200 square meters. Now, if we divide that area by the size of an individual film frame, we get like a million and a half, which means... eh, I'm tired of this.
Man, you're lucky your liability for copyright infringement and massive distribution of Salon's intellectual property can be limited, via some keen legal judo, to give bucks.
I concur. An interesting supporting cast, a villain who's not just a copy of Vader or Palpatine, and those wacky ysalamiri. (Fun to pronounce! Not as fun as 'noghri', but fun!)
But, alas, they include the original cast, and unfortunately, real actors age. Eh, it's good to wipe the SF-on-film slate clean. No more Star Wars, no more Star Trek. Wonder what's next.
Damn, that's subtle. I mean, I can figure out how it would work, but still. I didn't know it was possible to time anything as (ostensibly) quick as strcmp.
So, what's the solution? Adding a random delay to the loop?
Excellent link. I'm going to send this to the guy in the next cubicle who insisted that I tell him why his BLINK tags weren't working, because he really needed BLINK. (Not to mention its horrible, horrible succcessor, MARQUEE.)
If someone can't view your site as influenced by some Greasemonkey script or another, it's their fault and their problem. Not yours. You go ahead and provide standards-compliant, semantic markup, and folks'll use it as-is or filter it through something like Greasemonkey.
What's next---are you going to tell people they can't visit your site using lynx, or with images turned off, or that they can't change their font size, so they'll have to squint like everyone else?
What's the point of making it harder on your users, of taking away functionality from them?
Have you been reading any of this? The whole point is that peer reviewers work for free, for the prestige of appearing on the journals' list of editors. Let's review.
Researchers write the articles for free. Reviewers review the articles for free. Publishers take the results of this work and make mega, mega fucking dollars from it, for doing pretty much nothing at all.
The University of Connecticut has a rather impressively large research library (three million books, plus two and a half million more on microfilm, plus seventy-five thousand journal titles (plus seven thousand current subscriptions)), but if you can walk to the library, you can read to your heart's content. Photocopying costs more than it should, but it's still something like a dime a page.
When I was a student there, you could request a PDF coupy of a journal article and a scanned version would show up in a week or so, free for downloading and keeping. I suppose you'd need an account for that, but it's still really frickin' cool.
Now that I'm no longer a student, the privilege to borrow books from the library is twenty-five bucks a year, which is still really, really cheap for access to all of that. (Their missing-book fees, however, are positively draconian.)
There's a public library downtown, but it's tiny. I suppose I've been spoiled by being able to find everything I'm looking for actually on the shelves, and not waiting for ILL.
Then what the hell are you doing here? You must have missed the signs on all the doors saying that this is the Secret Dork Lair, where people would rather learn something new than impair themselves with alcohol and bang their fuckin' skulls together.
Oh, I see. You came here to lay your stunning wit on the unsuspecting Slashdot masses, who've been long enough without a real troll that they forgot what the word really means. "Geeks don't get laid." Oh, the hilarity!
He still made a valid point, and even if he's an AC who'll never come back here, I'd like to know how teaching a few handpicked elites is less "ivory tower" than a large state university.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the sort of 'convergence' technology that I'll never, ever understand. It's like once a piece of technology becomes mature, we rewind time to when it was an inconvenient pain in the ass.
Land lines have high-reliability, high-quality, low per-call cost... and what does everyone move to? Cell phones, which sound like everyone's stuck under six feet of molasses, crap out on every third call, and have impenetrable service agreements in which the only certainty is that you'll be told you "don't understand pro-ration", and then fucked over.
Even small, non-SLR digital cameras can take pictures that rival the quality of film snapshots and, sometimes, 35mm film (film fetishists, this isn't the main point I'm making, so suck it up and go away)---and what do we get? Tiny, grainy cell-phone cameras that look just like handheld digital cameras did five years ago. Damn it, when I get my amateur porn off livejournal, I want it to be high-quality.
And now we're getting nice, shiny HDTV transmission, but folks're going to want it on one-inch fuzzy cell phone screens. Sheesh!
Yeah, I know everyone moves to these things voluntarily, but I still loathe them, especially since it was so hard for me to get a cell phone which was "just a fucking phone". And the big button in the middle goes to some kind of pay service I will never, ever, ever want to access, instead of something useful like the phone book.
--grendel drago
I never, ever heard that, or heard of it. That's an impressive bit of supposition---where'd you get it?
--grendel drago
Heh. I walked out of Episode III asking the same question about droids. In the original trilogy, they never did much, and I could overlook their relatively humanish styles of speech and interaction because it was just surface stuff.
But droids leading revolutions and commanding armies (with voice commands and 'hand' gestures, no less!)? Oh, right, General Grievous (was he a Jamaican caricature? I forget what flavor of racism we're having this week) had a meat heart. For no damned reason, just that it looked kinda neat, and gave Obi-Wan something to shoot.
And droid armies? Why the fuck would anyone use human armies? Why wouldn't the Trade Federation or, y'know, anyone, just drop a von Neumann device on a planet with good energy sources, and convert its mass into armies and ships and whatnot. Why are droid pilots not pulling moves involving hundreds of Gs of force, that would make any meat-based pilot into a pancake? Why do the droids have reflexes no faster than a human, and why do they seem fragile enough that a stiff breeze could knock their heads off?
Then I remind myself that it's fantasy, and all of these things happen Because It Looks Nifty.
But still, even within the hastily thrown-together cosmology that Lucas has... are droids in tune with the Force? Are clones? What is their moral status? Are cloneburgers okay to eat? Are they a vast underclass of sophonts, and what does it say about the Jedi that they discriminate on the basis of Force-sensitivity?
I don't think droids can really fit into the Lucasverse and make any sort of good sense. Bah.
--grendel drago
Where, you ask? Let's ask Justin B. Rye...
Love triangles? I'll skip that one, because I'd be okay without it.
Drug addiction? There are no drugs - Guinan isn't licensed. But is Picard's Earl Grey decaffeinated? Why don't they use harmless customised wonderdrugs? Clearly, everyone is on Super Soma to make them such nice, well-adjusted humanoids.
Racism? Did you see "Up the Long Ladder"? There is no racism... so where are all the Hispanics, Arabs, and co? Star Trek is a paragon of tokenism. Clearly, the White Masters back home are running things. Racist enough for you?
Violence? All races and cultures are equal. Everybody has only been Americanised (rather than, say, Iranianised) because they genuinely wanted to be. We're seeing a Pax Starfleetica. All other cultures have been squashed under the thumb of the aforementioned White Masters, far better than any of the 1500s' colonists could have dreamed.
Holosuite addiction? See frickin' Super Soma.
The whole thing is horribly creepy if you think about it enough. Read the link.
--grendel drago
Those were exocomps, from "The Quality of Life".
--grendel drago
Neverwhere was made into a miniseries. Six episodes, with reportedly horrible acting. I have it, but never got around to watching it.
Bah, if they did anything really good SF or fantasy, they'd make another "I, Robot" or "LXG" out of it.
--grendel drago
They're making His Dark Materials into a movie. Haven't read the book, but I was told it's sorta like a secular humanist version of Narnia. And there's Narnia itself.
.
But, well, that's fantasy. There's A Scanner Darkly
But none of that looks like it could spawn a real franchise. Damn You, Fox!!! Now Firefly will be, at best, a decent movie trilogy. Imagine what Babylon 5 would have been squeezed into seven and a half hours. Bah.
--grendel drago
Nonsense; all Star Wars ships run at the same speed, it's the in-hyperspace navigation which can make the difference. The length of Solo's route was under 12 parsecs, hence he made the run faster.
Really, I read that somewhere.
--grendel drago
According to Google, it's about 3.24*10^20 m^2. Now, the surface area of the Earth is 5.11*10^14 m^2. Because, you know, time and space are all the same and whatnot.
So, a square minute would cover about a million earths.
Man, that's a big minute.
Of course, one could also measure the actual surface area of the film. Assuming it's projected in standard 35mm (that is, 24mm by 36mm). Since the sound is irrelevant here, we'll assume we're just talking about that, at a rate of 24 frames per second, ignoring space between the frames. So that's 0.576 meters for a second of film. A minute would be 34.56 meters. Squaring that gives around 1200 square meters. Now, if we divide that area by the size of an individual film frame, we get like a million and a half, which means... eh, I'm tired of this.
--grendel drago
Man, you're lucky your liability for copyright infringement and massive distribution of Salon's intellectual property can be limited, via some keen legal judo, to give bucks.
--grendel drago
Nah, I think it was funnier that Watto (the gigantic ugly blue flying rat with the huge, hooked nose) spoke with a bit of a Yiddish accent.
I, for one, welcome our new crypto-Jewish slavemasters.
--grendel drago
I concur. An interesting supporting cast, a villain who's not just a copy of Vader or Palpatine, and those wacky ysalamiri. (Fun to pronounce! Not as fun as 'noghri', but fun!)
But, alas, they include the original cast, and unfortunately, real actors age. Eh, it's good to wipe the SF-on-film slate clean. No more Star Wars, no more Star Trek. Wonder what's next.
--grendel drago
Damn, that's subtle. I mean, I can figure out how it would work, but still. I didn't know it was possible to time anything as (ostensibly) quick as strcmp.
So, what's the solution? Adding a random delay to the loop?
--grendel drago
No.
That camera has "QVGA" video. Quarter VGA. Meaning that it's a quarter of 640x480, which is 320x240.
Not very impressive.
--grendel drago
Damn, that's harsh.
How long did it take you to bounce back and find other work?
--grendel drago
That's awesome. Thanks!
--grendel drago
Excellent link. I'm going to send this to the guy in the next cubicle who insisted that I tell him why his BLINK tags weren't working, because he really needed BLINK. (Not to mention its horrible, horrible succcessor, MARQUEE.)
--grendel drago
If someone can't view your site as influenced by some Greasemonkey script or another, it's their fault and their problem. Not yours. You go ahead and provide standards-compliant, semantic markup, and folks'll use it as-is or filter it through something like Greasemonkey.
What's next---are you going to tell people they can't visit your site using lynx, or with images turned off, or that they can't change their font size, so they'll have to squint like everyone else?
What's the point of making it harder on your users, of taking away functionality from them?
--grendel drago
Malcolm Reynolds? Anyone?
--grendel drago
Man, I wish I knew what that meant. It sounds pretty frickin' sweet.
--grendel drago
Have you been reading any of this? The whole point is that peer reviewers work for free, for the prestige of appearing on the journals' list of editors. Let's review.
Researchers write the articles for free. Reviewers review the articles for free. Publishers take the results of this work and make mega, mega fucking dollars from it, for doing pretty much nothing at all.
It's a racket. Do you understand?
--grendel drago
The University of Connecticut has a rather impressively large research library (three million books, plus two and a half million more on microfilm, plus seventy-five thousand journal titles (plus seven thousand current subscriptions)), but if you can walk to the library, you can read to your heart's content. Photocopying costs more than it should, but it's still something like a dime a page.
When I was a student there, you could request a PDF coupy of a journal article and a scanned version would show up in a week or so, free for downloading and keeping. I suppose you'd need an account for that, but it's still really frickin' cool.
Now that I'm no longer a student, the privilege to borrow books from the library is twenty-five bucks a year, which is still really, really cheap for access to all of that. (Their missing-book fees, however, are positively draconian.)
There's a public library downtown, but it's tiny. I suppose I've been spoiled by being able to find everything I'm looking for actually on the shelves, and not waiting for ILL.
--grendel drago
I'm at work behind a porn-blocking proxy, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, what is it? I can't get there.
--grendel drago
Then what the hell are you doing here? You must have missed the signs on all the doors saying that this is the Secret Dork Lair, where people would rather learn something new than impair themselves with alcohol and bang their fuckin' skulls together.
Oh, I see. You came here to lay your stunning wit on the unsuspecting Slashdot masses, who've been long enough without a real troll that they forgot what the word really means. "Geeks don't get laid." Oh, the hilarity!
--grendel drago
He still made a valid point, and even if he's an AC who'll never come back here, I'd like to know how teaching a few handpicked elites is less "ivory tower" than a large state university.
--grendel drago