I did RTFA. I'll still contend that a good percentage of comic book readers are sharper than this fool. As with any media, comic books follow Sturgeon's Law, 90% are shite. But the other 10% are remarkable. They fly under the political/pop-culture radar, so they often address topics that are too controversial for other media. They must be concise due to the nature of the medium. Due to their stigma , they are generally not pretentious (not counting "art" comics which are the cause of all the woes of the world). Finally, due to the low relative cost of the medium it is possible get quirky innovative work accepted without focus-grouping and endless marketing driven script doctoring.
Um, comic book generation? Has this fellow just recieved "Seduction of the Innocent" via Pony Express? The average Generation Y kid has seldom seen a comic book, they don't show up on the news stand anymore. The average of the modern comic book reader is 34 and the level of the high end of the comic book market is considerably more literate than this fool. For example Warren Ellis'es issue of Planetary "Death Machine Telemetry" discusses the afterlife, nanotechnology, Richard Feynman, the Delphic oracle (and speculations on the biochemical nature of the fumes they inhaled) and the Kabbalah in one brilliant episode. Ellis probably used a shorter word count than this wanker used.
Of course he might mean manga, having been confused by the mysterious ways of the distant orient. Given that a huge percentage of the population read manga over in Japan, and use e-mail and texting, this must account for their horrific litteracy rates. Horrifically high that is.
The neat thing is that PyGame is very fast. I've used it to implement tricky realtime cluster rendering for 3d monitors as well as frame accurate animations for temporally multiplexed displays. The nice thing about Python is that since it is bound to just about everything it also supports some very fast and powerful 3d engines such as VTK, OSG, and Delta3d.
The one merit of Skype is that it "just works" at the moment while in my last foray into SIP it was nearly impossible to get working on certian broadband configurations. This is critical for VOIP because you the intended recipients are a long distance away.
ZX-81 yeah! The first computer I owned. Great fun and astoundingly capable. They always said that Woz used the minimum number of chips necessary and that Uncle Clive used a few chips less. I hear that the surplus units were all snarfed up by Argonne National Lab and ser ved as embedded controllers for years afterwards.
Celestron seems to be doing a simpler version of this with their SkyScout unit: http://www.celestron.com/skyscout/new/index.php which uses GPS and inertial sensors (coupled I assume with a digital compass) to identify the object that you are pointing at, or direct you to a specific object. Actually this sounds like a better learning tool and is available off the shelf for $400.
On the other hand, an augmented scope which is slaved to a remotely operated scope is of some interest for those of us stuck in light polluted areas.
It would be just like Palm and 3COM, elagant and beatuful designs crushed under a layers and layers of clueless management and indecision strangling innovation until the design is irrelavant.
Why don't they buy SEGA instead. We can finally get ehternet adaptors for our dreamcasts!
Acutally the secretarial, nursing and educational fields used to be male dominated when the fields were prestigious high wage positions. Actually the nursing field is still full of men particularly medics and paramedics.
Actually, in the 1950's same arguement was made with regard to any form of work outside of the house. In 1920 the same arguement was applied to voting
Been trying to get it working on the mentioned apps as well, no luck yet but will keep trying of course this is for one of my 3d monitor projects so it's a bit chreaper to work with the results. As for the 3d printers, there is always the CNC routers and glue guns that show up on makezine.com at regular intervals.
Back in the day early 90's, one of my techs at Dove Electronics (Greg if you are out there say hi!) had an Amiga running the AmigaOS with windows running the MacOS of the time, netBSD, and Windows 3.1 simultaneously. Truly astounding.
Got both a PSP and a DS. I use the DS (and my GBA micro) a lot more, even for watching movies. The four factors involved are battery life, memory stick cost, size and system fragility. The DS has an incredible battery life which is crucial when traveling and the micro still beats the PSP. The DS video solution the Play Yan uses cheap SD flash which is also supported on many of my other gadgets, on the other hand the MS Pro Duo flash is twice as expensive for the same memory size. The GBA micro which shares the movie player with the DS is small enough to fit on my belt and be used anywhere. Finally the PSP is big, fragile and more likely to be stolen, making a poor choice for travel.
Not to diss the great screen on the PSP, but the gamboy screen is quite sufficent.
Maybe if we disclose the existence of group to Bush he'll misinterpret the word and declare a war on phonography! We just have to convince him that DRM is related to WMDs
They are class enemies who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes!
Re:What about conventional fission reactors?
on
Return to the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is W's America! We base ALL policy on technology that doesn't exist! We have a missile defense system, abrogating a perfectly good treaty, based on nonexistent technology to counter nonexistent technology. We went to war in Iraq to counter nonexistent WMD technology. Our current rationale for going to the moon is to refuel for a mars trip, which would better achieved in low earth orbit.
In that context, going to the moon for He-3 is too realistic to get support in this administration!
Presently my living room has 3 HTPCs. A control unit for web browsing, MP3 playing and VNC control of two others. The second box is a dedicated SageTV box which serves as a PVR. Finally my DIY projector runs off of a dedicated PC under VNC control. For the moment we are ignoring the PS2 and the XBox.
The Zojirushi microproceessor controlled water boiler I just got has this feature. Of course since the MacBook is using Intel chips it should be able to boil water pretty quickly as well!
Jaron Lanier is the Vanilla Ice of the tech world all the way down to the dreadlocks.
Having ludicrously overhyped virtual reality, and his contribution to it, through the late '80s and early '90s he ran his startup into the ground with the VCs collecting all the IP. His predictions of ubiquitous VR were completely wrong while completely missing the rise of the Web and mobile computing.
My favorite example of of his utterly clueless pursuit of hype occured when his company was circling the drain. He announced that we could not let the millitary get their hands on VR technology and use it for destructive purposes! Of course, everything that Lainer had hyped as his new technology had been pioneered by the military at least a decade ago.
I nearly ran into him (literally) at SIGGRAPH two years ago. He had the air of a lesser rock star that had seriously gone to seed, I quickly backed off, got upwind, and made tracks to the other side of the exhibition hall.
One of the pundits who wrote in Popular Electronics (back in the day) had one ironclad rule for Media adoption: Consumers will adopt the most convienient media. CD's beat out viynl and tape due to its digital format, handy form factor, and relative indestrutabilty. Further attempts to get consumers to "move up" died horribly due to complicated setups (DVD-Audio) and horrific DRM (DAT and MiniDisk). In the same fashion, DVD has a great form factor relative to VHS, and has relative indescructabilty. The industry wants to replace it with battling formats which feature complicated setups and horrific DRM. I'm betting DVD stays around for a bit.
The other big factor in adoption is a symbiotic relationship with the PC. Most early adoption of DVDs occured because of DVD ROM drives on PC's which were far more prevalent and cheaper than cheap players. In the same fashion, I never listen to CD's directly anymore, I buy them, rip them, and store the disks as a backup. It's getting to be the same way with DVD's. Half of the titles I watch get ripped to MP4 and watched on my PSP or Play yan equipped GameBoy (so much for HD). As a result I, and I suspect most of the Slashdot crowd will avoid media that won't play well with PC's.
What will drive people to change over their collections will be something much smaller and multiresolution than DVD/CD. I watch 25% of my video on a 25" TV, 35% on a 100" projection screen, and 40% on 2-4" LCDs, and there is no way I'm splitting my video purchases across 3 formats. What I want is to be able to buy media at a airport kiosk, use it immediately, but re-watch it on the very big screen later on. And I want to own it outright. Then I'll shift to the new media.
Dead on! (to quote the Bard) My understanding of military matters and history was greatly enhanced by playing wargames. Well implemented games provide an excellent means of understanding a time period. An open ended Renaissance city such as Verona, stocked with Montagues and Capulets provides an excellent understanding of the context of the play. Keep the original dialouge but provide a dictionary.
Recently, I heard a radio segment in which Shakespeare was the most popular subject in an inner city high school. The teacher simply explained what was going on in modern terms. Beefs and drivebys (with rapiers), players (Falstaff) and gangs (Montague's vs. Capulet's and York vs Lancaster) were all there. Getting killed for wearing the wrong color or displaying disrespect to the wrong individual, and having one's compatriots avenge the deaths was far from abstract for the students.
AMD64, Audigy, hardcore mobo? I've had a dual tuner (PVR-250) PVR, with a miniATX Athlon 2000+, nVidia 5200 and a Fortissimo III (for the optical output) running without a hitch with SageTV for years. It not only records two shows at once but will replay a third without breaking a sweat!
I've got a Clie TJ-37 which is capable of playing mp3s and video (via mmplayer) both of which I have got running in the past. The limitation is not really one of memory but of battery life. Playing MP3s or worse yet, video will drain the batteries in less than an hour. While I love my Clie as a PDA and eBook Reader, it blows as a media player.
When I want a portable media player I grab my Gameboy (DS or micro)with a Play Yan which has an insane battery life (5hrs plus w/ video) and great compression (4-5hrs on a 1 GB flash) and is well nigh indestructable. Beats the hell out of the iPod and beats my PSP on battery life. I even hear you can play video games on it.
Finally PDAs get no love. Every time a PDA topic comes up, everybody on slashdot becomes a luddite insisting that a 3x5 index card and a pencil outperforms a PDA (try GPS mapping with that guys !). On the other hand Apple generates slavish devotion, even with very mediocre products.
Slashdot Mirror
I did RTFA. I'll still contend that a good percentage of comic book readers are sharper than this fool. As with any media, comic books follow Sturgeon's Law, 90% are shite. But the other 10% are remarkable. They fly under the political/pop-culture radar, so they often address topics that are too controversial for other media. They must be concise due to the nature of the medium. Due to their stigma , they are generally not pretentious (not counting "art" comics which are the cause of all the woes of the world). Finally, due to the low relative cost of the medium it is possible get quirky innovative work accepted without focus-grouping and endless marketing driven script doctoring.
Um, comic book generation? Has this fellow just recieved "Seduction of the Innocent" via Pony Express? The average Generation Y kid has seldom seen a comic book, they don't show up on the news stand anymore. The average of the modern comic book reader is 34 and the level of the high end of the comic book market is considerably more literate than this fool. For example Warren Ellis'es issue of Planetary "Death Machine Telemetry" discusses the afterlife, nanotechnology, Richard Feynman, the Delphic oracle (and speculations on the biochemical nature of the fumes they inhaled) and the Kabbalah in one brilliant episode. Ellis probably used a shorter word count than this wanker used.
Of course he might mean manga, having been confused by the mysterious ways of the distant orient. Given that a huge percentage of the population read manga over in Japan, and use e-mail and texting, this must account for their horrific litteracy rates. Horrifically high that is.
The neat thing is that PyGame is very fast. I've used it to implement tricky realtime cluster rendering for 3d monitors as well as frame accurate animations for temporally multiplexed displays.
The nice thing about Python is that since it is bound to just about everything it also supports some very fast and powerful 3d engines such as VTK, OSG, and Delta3d.
The one merit of Skype is that it "just works" at the moment while in my last foray into SIP it was nearly impossible to get working on certian broadband configurations. This is critical for VOIP because you the intended recipients are a long distance away.
ZX-81 yeah! The first computer I owned. Great fun and astoundingly capable. They always said that Woz used the minimum number of chips necessary and that Uncle Clive used a few chips less. I hear that the surplus units were all snarfed up by Argonne National Lab and ser ved as embedded controllers for years afterwards.
Celestron seems to be doing a simpler version of this with their SkyScout unit: http://www.celestron.com/skyscout/new/index.php which uses GPS and inertial sensors (coupled I assume with a digital compass) to identify the object that you are pointing at, or direct you to a specific object. Actually this sounds like a better learning tool and is available off the shelf for $400.
On the other hand, an augmented scope which is slaved to a remotely operated scope is of some interest for those of us stuck in light polluted areas.
It would be just like Palm and 3COM, elagant and beatuful designs crushed under a layers and layers of clueless management and indecision strangling innovation until the design is irrelavant.
Why don't they buy SEGA instead. We can finally get ehternet adaptors for our dreamcasts!
Acutally the secretarial, nursing and educational fields used to be male dominated when the fields were prestigious high wage positions. Actually the nursing field is still full of men particularly medics and paramedics.
Actually, in the 1950's same arguement was made with regard to any form of work outside of the house. In 1920 the same arguement was applied to voting
Been trying to get it working on the mentioned apps as well, no luck yet but will keep trying of course this is for one of my 3d monitor projects so it's a bit chreaper to work with the results.
As for the 3d printers, there is always the CNC routers and glue guns that show up on makezine.com at regular intervals.
Back in the day early 90's, one of my techs at Dove Electronics (Greg if you are out there say hi!) had an Amiga running the AmigaOS with windows running the MacOS of the time, netBSD, and Windows 3.1 simultaneously. Truly astounding.
Got both a PSP and a DS. I use the DS (and my GBA micro) a lot more, even for watching movies. The four factors involved are battery life, memory stick cost, size and system fragility. The DS has an incredible battery life which is crucial when traveling and the micro still beats the PSP. The DS video solution the Play Yan uses cheap SD flash which is also supported on many of my other gadgets, on the other hand the MS Pro Duo flash is twice as expensive for the same memory size. The GBA micro which shares the movie player with the DS is small enough to fit on my belt and be used anywhere. Finally the PSP is big, fragile and more likely to be stolen, making a poor choice for travel.
Not to diss the great screen on the PSP, but the gamboy screen is quite sufficent.
Maybe if we disclose the existence of group to Bush he'll misinterpret the word and declare a war on phonography! We just have to convince him that DRM is related to WMDs
Who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Dick Cheney has had how many heart operations and how many implants?
Although personally I think he is trying to get rid of the good part.
They are class enemies who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes!
This is W's America! We base ALL policy on technology that doesn't exist! We have a missile defense system, abrogating a perfectly good treaty, based on nonexistent technology to counter nonexistent technology. We went to war in Iraq to counter nonexistent WMD technology. Our current rationale for going to the moon is to refuel for a mars trip, which would better achieved in low earth orbit.
In that context, going to the moon for He-3 is too realistic to get support in this administration!
Presently my living room has 3 HTPCs. A control unit for web browsing, MP3 playing and VNC control of two others. The second box is a dedicated SageTV box which serves as a PVR. Finally my DIY projector runs off of a dedicated PC under VNC control. For the moment we are ignoring the PS2 and the XBox.
Google will be changing its name to Forbin.
The Zojirushi microproceessor controlled water boiler I just got has this feature. Of course since the MacBook is using Intel chips it should be able to boil water pretty quickly as well!
As Sir Mix-A-Lot said "I'm not PC baby, I'm a Mac!"
Jaron Lanier is the Vanilla Ice of the tech world all the way down to the dreadlocks.
Having ludicrously overhyped virtual reality, and his contribution to it, through the late '80s and early '90s he ran his startup into the ground with the VCs collecting all the IP. His predictions of ubiquitous VR were completely wrong while completely missing the rise of the Web and mobile computing.
My favorite example of of his utterly clueless pursuit of hype occured when his company was circling the drain. He announced that we could not let the millitary get their hands on VR technology and use it for destructive purposes! Of course, everything that Lainer had hyped as his new technology had been pioneered by the military at least a decade ago.
I nearly ran into him (literally) at SIGGRAPH two years ago. He had the air of a lesser rock star that had seriously gone to seed, I quickly backed off, got upwind, and made tracks to the other side of the exhibition hall.
One of the pundits who wrote in Popular Electronics (back in the day) had one ironclad rule for Media adoption: Consumers will adopt the most convienient media. CD's beat out viynl and tape due to its digital format, handy form factor, and relative indestrutabilty. Further attempts to get consumers to "move up" died horribly due to complicated setups (DVD-Audio) and horrific DRM (DAT and MiniDisk). In the same fashion, DVD has a great form factor relative to VHS, and has relative indescructabilty. The industry wants to replace it with battling formats which feature complicated setups and horrific DRM. I'm betting DVD stays around for a bit.
The other big factor in adoption is a symbiotic relationship with the PC. Most early adoption of DVDs occured because of DVD ROM drives on PC's which were far more prevalent and cheaper than cheap players. In the same fashion, I never listen to CD's directly anymore, I buy them, rip them, and store the disks as a backup. It's getting to be the same way with DVD's. Half of the titles I watch get ripped to MP4 and watched on my PSP or Play yan equipped GameBoy (so much for HD). As a result I, and I suspect most of the Slashdot crowd will avoid media that won't play well with PC's.
What will drive people to change over their collections will be something much smaller and multiresolution than DVD/CD. I watch 25% of my video on a 25" TV, 35% on a 100" projection screen, and 40% on 2-4" LCDs, and there is no way I'm splitting my video purchases across 3 formats. What I want is to be able to buy media at a airport kiosk, use it immediately, but re-watch it on the very big screen later on. And I want to own it outright. Then I'll shift to the new media.
Supposedly, when Fermi ran an office pool allowing the staff to guess the yield of the Trinity device, "ignite the atmosphere" was a side bet.
Dead on! (to quote the Bard) My understanding of military matters and history was greatly enhanced by playing wargames. Well implemented games provide an excellent means of understanding a time period. An open ended Renaissance city such as Verona, stocked with Montagues and Capulets provides an excellent understanding of the context of the play. Keep the original dialouge but provide a dictionary.
Recently, I heard a radio segment in which Shakespeare was the most popular subject in an inner city high school. The teacher simply explained what was going on in modern terms. Beefs and drivebys (with rapiers), players (Falstaff) and gangs (Montague's vs. Capulet's and York vs Lancaster) were all there. Getting killed for wearing the wrong color or displaying disrespect to the wrong individual, and having one's compatriots avenge the deaths was far from abstract for the students.
AMD64, Audigy, hardcore mobo? I've had a dual tuner (PVR-250) PVR, with a miniATX Athlon 2000+, nVidia 5200 and a Fortissimo III (for the optical output) running without a hitch with SageTV for years. It not only records two shows at once but will replay a third without breaking a sweat!
I've got a Clie TJ-37 which is capable of playing mp3s and video (via mmplayer) both of which I have got running in the past. The limitation is not really one of memory but of battery life. Playing MP3s or worse yet, video will drain the batteries in less than an hour. While I love my Clie as a PDA and eBook Reader, it blows as a media player.
When I want a portable media player I grab my Gameboy (DS or micro)with a Play Yan which has an insane battery life (5hrs plus w/ video) and great compression (4-5hrs on a 1 GB flash) and is well nigh indestructable. Beats the hell out of the iPod and beats my PSP on battery life. I even hear you can play video games on it.
Finally PDAs get no love. Every time a PDA topic comes up, everybody on slashdot becomes a luddite insisting that a 3x5 index card and a pencil outperforms a PDA (try GPS mapping with that guys !). On the other hand Apple generates slavish devotion, even with very mediocre products.