Now that is the real reason to use Linux and Open Source software: because you have to. When you need a cheap, easy server-based solution to compete with entrenched Windows IT influences, a lean Unix-based system can fill the bill. Nobody can argue against its cost effectiveness, as long as you have your own support systems (which I guess is easy if you develop your own custom apps).
Oh, the old show had its moments. I remember one particularly deadly battlebot, it had a spinning steel blade on top, like an inverted lawn mower. It would just cut the opponents to pieces. It was a pretty brilliant design, it was so low that in order to get under the blade to kill it or invert it, you had to get close enough for it to rip you to shreds. Other designs were obviously intended to be crowd-pleasers, tall robots with spinning circular saws or huge claws that looked great but performed badly. Oh but when they did manage to get a few blows in, it was spectacular.
Anyway, the article is pretty accurate about the old show, it did go down the tubes with too much talk and not enough battles. I think I clocked one episode and there was about 3 minutes of actual battling in a half-hour show.
As a scientist I am likely to disregard most attempts at serious conversation on the subject of astrology.
Well if that's the case, you missed out on a lot of the interesting historical bits. Astrology precedes astronomy by decades, it could be argued that we wouldn't have developed astronomy as a science without the astrological mumbo jumbo that came before it. All the old lore like Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho, Gallileo, at the time they were all battling over astrology to some extent.
Anyway, I had ex-girlfriends who were into stuff like Tarot and astrology, so I learned a fair bit by accident. Oddly enough, my ex-GF had a famous mystic do my card readings, he said I absolutely do not believe in any of that mystical junk, and though I have abundant natural mystical talents, I don't believe in them one single bit. I suppose he is right, but if you put it that way, it's not even disprovable. I like tarot and astrology as a meditative exercise, it says: here are certain energies in people's lives, here's how they might interact, think about that and try to live better. Hey whatever gives you hope is fine by me. But I don't view it as a religion, there's an old saying about astrology, "the stars impel, they do not compel."
Gates and Microsoft were convicted of ABUSING their monopoly in computer software. I never meant to imply that the Gates Foundation is illegally abusing a monopoly position on charity. I merely indicate that it is a really really bad thing to have any one person with such a concentration of power over charities. Do I have to spell it out for you in such detail, or are you being deliberately obtuse?
I don't buy his products. But many people do, and they pay inflated prices because of Gates' monopoly. That is how Gates acquired his wealth, through illegal means. Do I need to remind you that Gates is a convicted monopolist? You may earn your money selling products in a manner similar to Gates, but I suspect you earn your money honestly. Bill Gates did not.
Furthermore, I frequently have no choice in how my government spends the tax dollars I contribute to the treasury. My money is wasted on inefficient, insecure, and overpriced monopoly products sold by Microsoft. They're installed in my local governments offices, even down to the local library. Money spent on those overpriced MS products diverts funding from other projects that provide tangible services to taxpayers. I do not pay my taxes so that Bill Gates can siphon off funding for his monopoly on philanthropy.
Yep, I've been saying this for ages, and nobody believes me. It's like the old joke by Craig Kilborn:
"Bill Gates announced his initiative to eradicate the AIDS virus. He plans to buy all competing viruses and use his power of monopoly to drive the AIDS virus to extinction."
But this is no joke. Gates has established a monopoly on philanthropy and the addition of money from Warren Buffet has given even more power to the Gates Foundation. They don't fund charities, they assimilate them. It is impossible to fund any alternative charities when the overwhelming majority of monies are going to the Officially Approved Gates Foundation Charities. Those charities have become a monoculture, as this document asserts. And those charities are designed to get third-world companies hooked on first-world Big Pharmaceuticals. Guess what? Bill Gates is a major shareholder in Big Pharma, from Merck to Schering-Plough to a dozen others. Gates can't help but apply his business mindset to everything he does, he seeks to rebuild the world in his own image, even if this means working his will through phony philanthropy. But what galls me the most is that the billions of dollars he's "donating" came out of the pockets of Microsoft customers: governments, corporations, and individuals. What diverse charities might WE have funded, if Bill Gates hadn't stolen those dollars from OUR wallets?
Safety can also depend on intensity. I read about how the Army experimented with aerial flash photography, they had some massive flash units that could illuminate the ground from an airplane at a high altitude. But if you set one off when it was on the ground, anyone nearby would be burned badly. Now today they make commercial ovens using that same principle, the Flash-Bake oven can cook a pizza in 1 minute with high intensity flash units.
Oh dear, my pet peeve again, self-annointed Computer Experts propounding about Turing's theories, while displaying an utter lack of comprehension of what Turing actually said.
Computers are finite state machines. We cannot create a computer with an infinite amount of memory, and there are only a finite number of steps a program can run unless we're prepared to let the program run forever. Therefore there are a finite number of final states that any program can arrive at. Ergo, there are only a finite number of "tree programs' that can be created, and the hardware and software limits create a substantial limit on the number of possible trees a computer can generate.
If you don't believe me, go read Turing's papers on morphogenesis and phyllotaxis. He specifically addressed the issue of tree growth. We may think of Earth as having unlimited resources, but it really is finite. There are limits on the possible trees that nature generates, analogous to what I have argued above.
Yes, there have been programs to do this for quite a while. I remember using one standalone program, unsurprisingly called "Tree" that works exactly as this new article describes. So congratulations to the programmers for reinventing the wheel!
But there are better programs than this. Aladrin complains that the models are static OBJ files. Maya has a wide range of dynamic tree generators, with parameters that can be animated over time.
You are absolutely correct. The IT staff is not responsible for eliminating infections in hospitals, that is the responsibility of the medical staff and the janitors.
I'll give a good example. My local hospital had an outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease. They had a hell of a time tracking it down. The infection was transmitted by water, so all drinking fountains, faucets, and showers were shut down in the entire wing where the first patients had been infected. Patients were moved to other wings, those facilities that couldn't be moved were dry so pallets full of bottled water were placed everywhere, and freely dispensed to anyone with a thirst. Checkpoints were set up where all persons were required to clean their hands before passing. Teams of epidemiologists took bacterial samples from every room in the hospital wing. Finally a weak hit was found in one room, so they took swabs from almost every square inch of the room, and then it was isolated while waiting for test results. The final result: a dirty shower head was partially clogged, so it didn't drain completely when the water stopped, creating a place for the bacteria to grow. Solution: replace shower head, cost = $5. End of minor epidemic.
You can write all the fancy software you like, but somebody's got to take bacterial samples, grow the test cultures, and eventually, replace the damn shower head.
Well, I had met John Knoll personally, but incredibly enough, for a while, he used to read and respond to questions via the AOL Photoshop Forum. That's where I contacted him. But he eventually quit the AOL Forums after he got sick of all the stupid questions. My understanding is that currently, ILM has a policy that employees (like John) are completely forbidden from posting on internet forums like usenet, blogs, etc.
But I don't think.sgi is the lock-in it used to be. As I understand it, back then, Irix apps only output.sgi files, but today, any software worth using would be able to save in other file formats like.tga or.tiff at a minimum.
Now, if he had saved in some odd SGI format circa 1990, I'd agree with you.
Gee, it's funny you mention that. A long time ago, maybe Photoshop 2.0 era, I had a client who liked to submit files in.sgi format. He worked on an SGI Irix or something, he didn't have any way to convert them to something I could read. So I emailed John Knoll to ask how I could read.sgi files in Photoshop. He wrote back and asked for a sample.sgi file for testing. I sent him one, and the next day, he emailed me a brand new.sgi file import plugin. I was amazed, so I emailed him back that I couldn't read Scitex CT files either. He wrote me a plugin for that too, same 24 hour turnaround. They were both publicly released through Adobe. I don't see any.sgi support in the current CS3 release, but that's probably because it's deprecated. It does have Scitex CT support, though.
How do you know he was an asshole? Were you there?
I don't have to be there to know how Winer acts, I know him and have worked with him, and Winer is always an asshole. He wrote at length on this very subject, describing how he acted like an asshole to the Apple techs.
I suspect that Dave got the "whiner surcharge" that many techs apply to customers who act like assholes. He could have replaced his drive by himself, but instead, chose to pay extra for a speedy Apple replacement (remember, Winer is a multi-fucking-millionaire, he can afford it). Then he gets all pissy at the repair techs. This is exactly how NOT to get cooperation from the techs. If Winer wasn't such an asshole, and if he didn't go out of his way to prove that to the techs, they might have found a way to return his drive. But he was an asshole that clearly couldn't be satisfied, so they didn't bother. As the saying goes, "you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."
This is a pretty old theory. It's the basis of the 1970's book and TV show "The Ascent of Man" by Jacob Bronowski. His final chapter (as I recall it, it's been years since I read it) says that human evolution accelerated because of "cultural evolution." In other words, Man is the only species that can pass its knowledge to future generations by means of words. This allows each generation to evolve beyond the previous, without having to create everything from scratch. But Bronowski also said that alongside Cultural Evolution, there was also real biological evolution, because people tend to fall in love with people like themselves, and intelligent people marry intelligent people, a form of natural selection for intelligence.
Many television networks are putting many of their popular shows online now, for free. All the major networks: CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox -- are all putting full episode content on their websites now.
That's what the Writer's Guild strike is all about. The studios would vastly prefer to distribute their shows via the internet, because they do not have to pay royalties for online distribution. None. Zero. This gives them a huge incentive to avoid distribution under the well-negotiated royalty rates for broadcast TV, and instead, use the internet, which did not really exist when the last contracts were negotiated. That's how they can afford to give the shows away for free, they don't have to pay for them.
Every authorized internet distribution of a TV show is screwing someone who worked hard to create it.
I know that the IP owners watch piracy to see what's hot. I noticed this a long time ago on usenet in a few.mp3 subgenres. Some extremely rare audio tracks that were not in print and only available in very old, extremely limited editions on vinyl were restored by certain (ahem) users. They were immensely popular, were constantly reposted, and basically became the only copies available in any media. The studios apparently noticed the popularity of these tracks, and the vinyl LPs were suddenly released on CD. I've seen this happen numerous times. They watch to see what the collectors consider worth investing their time in audio restoration, what the users consider worth collecting, and then they see money and rerelease the product from their vaults.
Ah, you beat me to it. The phenomenon of beneficial low-dose radiation is known as Radiation Hormesis. It was discovered by insurance actuaries, who discovered that radiologists that worked around continual low doses of radiation had longer lifespans than other doctors working in comparable jobs.
I always like point out that humans evolved in an environment filled with background radiation, our biology is well adapted to low level radioactivity. Even the chemical components of our bodies have significant amounts of radioactive isotopes. Radiation, sometimes even transient high doses from cosmic rays, falls from the skies constantly, and we seem to still be thriving as a race.
I love reading documents on my iPhone. I can email PDFs to myself, then read them in landscape mode. The resolution is better than anything I've seen before. I can zoom in to the column's width and flick down the page to scroll, reading about a paragraph or two at a time, it feels very natural. The only thing lacking is a convenient way to jump around long, multipage documents.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that is the real reason to use Linux and Open Source software: because you have to. When you need a cheap, easy server-based solution to compete with entrenched Windows IT influences, a lean Unix-based system can fill the bill. Nobody can argue against its cost effectiveness, as long as you have your own support systems (which I guess is easy if you develop your own custom apps).
Oh, the old show had its moments. I remember one particularly deadly battlebot, it had a spinning steel blade on top, like an inverted lawn mower. It would just cut the opponents to pieces. It was a pretty brilliant design, it was so low that in order to get under the blade to kill it or invert it, you had to get close enough for it to rip you to shreds.
Other designs were obviously intended to be crowd-pleasers, tall robots with spinning circular saws or huge claws that looked great but performed badly. Oh but when they did manage to get a few blows in, it was spectacular.
Anyway, the article is pretty accurate about the old show, it did go down the tubes with too much talk and not enough battles. I think I clocked one episode and there was about 3 minutes of actual battling in a half-hour show.
Well if that's the case, you missed out on a lot of the interesting historical bits. Astrology precedes astronomy by decades, it could be argued that we wouldn't have developed astronomy as a science without the astrological mumbo jumbo that came before it. All the old lore like Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho, Gallileo, at the time they were all battling over astrology to some extent.
Anyway, I had ex-girlfriends who were into stuff like Tarot and astrology, so I learned a fair bit by accident. Oddly enough, my ex-GF had a famous mystic do my card readings, he said I absolutely do not believe in any of that mystical junk, and though I have abundant natural mystical talents, I don't believe in them one single bit. I suppose he is right, but if you put it that way, it's not even disprovable.
I like tarot and astrology as a meditative exercise, it says: here are certain energies in people's lives, here's how they might interact, think about that and try to live better. Hey whatever gives you hope is fine by me. But I don't view it as a religion, there's an old saying about astrology, "the stars impel, they do not compel."
You could have worked it out with a pencil.
It's not funny to the slobs. We're not laughing with them, we're laughing AT them.
You might be right. Women don't go for guys who dress like slobs.
Lessig is really good at losing.
Gates and Microsoft were convicted of ABUSING their monopoly in computer software. I never meant to imply that the Gates Foundation is illegally abusing a monopoly position on charity. I merely indicate that it is a really really bad thing to have any one person with such a concentration of power over charities. Do I have to spell it out for you in such detail, or are you being deliberately obtuse?
I don't buy his products. But many people do, and they pay inflated prices because of Gates' monopoly. That is how Gates acquired his wealth, through illegal means. Do I need to remind you that Gates is a convicted monopolist? You may earn your money selling products in a manner similar to Gates, but I suspect you earn your money honestly. Bill Gates did not.
Furthermore, I frequently have no choice in how my government spends the tax dollars I contribute to the treasury. My money is wasted on inefficient, insecure, and overpriced monopoly products sold by Microsoft. They're installed in my local governments offices, even down to the local library. Money spent on those overpriced MS products diverts funding from other projects that provide tangible services to taxpayers. I do not pay my taxes so that Bill Gates can siphon off funding for his monopoly on philanthropy.
Yep, I've been saying this for ages, and nobody believes me. It's like the old joke by Craig Kilborn:
"Bill Gates announced his initiative to eradicate the AIDS virus. He plans to buy all competing viruses and use his power of monopoly to drive the AIDS virus to extinction."
But this is no joke. Gates has established a monopoly on philanthropy and the addition of money from Warren Buffet has given even more power to the Gates Foundation. They don't fund charities, they assimilate them. It is impossible to fund any alternative charities when the overwhelming majority of monies are going to the Officially Approved Gates Foundation Charities. Those charities have become a monoculture, as this document asserts. And those charities are designed to get third-world companies hooked on first-world Big Pharmaceuticals. Guess what? Bill Gates is a major shareholder in Big Pharma, from Merck to Schering-Plough to a dozen others. Gates can't help but apply his business mindset to everything he does, he seeks to rebuild the world in his own image, even if this means working his will through phony philanthropy.
But what galls me the most is that the billions of dollars he's "donating" came out of the pockets of Microsoft customers: governments, corporations, and individuals. What diverse charities might WE have funded, if Bill Gates hadn't stolen those dollars from OUR wallets?
Safety can also depend on intensity. I read about how the Army experimented with aerial flash photography, they had some massive flash units that could illuminate the ground from an airplane at a high altitude. But if you set one off when it was on the ground, anyone nearby would be burned badly. Now today they make commercial ovens using that same principle, the Flash-Bake oven can cook a pizza in 1 minute with high intensity flash units.
Oh dear, my pet peeve again, self-annointed Computer Experts propounding about Turing's theories, while displaying an utter lack of comprehension of what Turing actually said.
Computers are finite state machines. We cannot create a computer with an infinite amount of memory, and there are only a finite number of steps a program can run unless we're prepared to let the program run forever. Therefore there are a finite number of final states that any program can arrive at. Ergo, there are only a finite number of "tree programs' that can be created, and the hardware and software limits create a substantial limit on the number of possible trees a computer can generate.
If you don't believe me, go read Turing's papers on morphogenesis and phyllotaxis. He specifically addressed the issue of tree growth. We may think of Earth as having unlimited resources, but it really is finite. There are limits on the possible trees that nature generates, analogous to what I have argued above.
Yes, there have been programs to do this for quite a while. I remember using one standalone program, unsurprisingly called "Tree" that works exactly as this new article describes. So congratulations to the programmers for reinventing the wheel!
But there are better programs than this. Aladrin complains that the models are static OBJ files. Maya has a wide range of dynamic tree generators, with parameters that can be animated over time.
Huh? I'm not sure you understood that I was agreeing with you, and enhancing you argument. But nonetheless..
I wouldn't worry about your friend's clogged shower head, unless he recently died of Legionnaire's Disease.
You are absolutely correct. The IT staff is not responsible for eliminating infections in hospitals, that is the responsibility of the medical staff and the janitors.
I'll give a good example. My local hospital had an outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease. They had a hell of a time tracking it down. The infection was transmitted by water, so all drinking fountains, faucets, and showers were shut down in the entire wing where the first patients had been infected. Patients were moved to other wings, those facilities that couldn't be moved were dry so pallets full of bottled water were placed everywhere, and freely dispensed to anyone with a thirst. Checkpoints were set up where all persons were required to clean their hands before passing.
Teams of epidemiologists took bacterial samples from every room in the hospital wing. Finally a weak hit was found in one room, so they took swabs from almost every square inch of the room, and then it was isolated while waiting for test results. The final result: a dirty shower head was partially clogged, so it didn't drain completely when the water stopped, creating a place for the bacteria to grow. Solution: replace shower head, cost = $5. End of minor epidemic.
You can write all the fancy software you like, but somebody's got to take bacterial samples, grow the test cultures, and eventually, replace the damn shower head.
Well, I had met John Knoll personally, but incredibly enough, for a while, he used to read and respond to questions via the AOL Photoshop Forum. That's where I contacted him. But he eventually quit the AOL Forums after he got sick of all the stupid questions. My understanding is that currently, ILM has a policy that employees (like John) are completely forbidden from posting on internet forums like usenet, blogs, etc.
.sgi is the lock-in it used to be. As I understand it, back then, Irix apps only output .sgi files, but today, any software worth using would be able to save in other file formats like .tga or .tiff at a minimum.
But I don't think
Gee, it's funny you mention that. A long time ago, maybe Photoshop 2.0 era, I had a client who liked to submit files in
So I emailed John Knoll to ask how I could read
I don't see any
They've been saying it since the Nixon/Watergate era, "it's not the crime, it's the coverup."
I don't have to be there to know how Winer acts, I know him and have worked with him, and Winer is always an asshole. He wrote at length on this very subject, describing how he acted like an asshole to the Apple techs.
I suspect that Dave got the "whiner surcharge" that many techs apply to customers who act like assholes. He could have replaced his drive by himself, but instead, chose to pay extra for a speedy Apple replacement (remember, Winer is a multi-fucking-millionaire, he can afford it). Then he gets all pissy at the repair techs. This is exactly how NOT to get cooperation from the techs. If Winer wasn't such an asshole, and if he didn't go out of his way to prove that to the techs, they might have found a way to return his drive. But he was an asshole that clearly couldn't be satisfied, so they didn't bother. As the saying goes, "you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."
This is a pretty old theory. It's the basis of the 1970's book and TV show "The Ascent of Man" by Jacob Bronowski. His final chapter (as I recall it, it's been years since I read it) says that human evolution accelerated because of "cultural evolution." In other words, Man is the only species that can pass its knowledge to future generations by means of words. This allows each generation to evolve beyond the previous, without having to create everything from scratch. But Bronowski also said that alongside Cultural Evolution, there was also real biological evolution, because people tend to fall in love with people like themselves, and intelligent people marry intelligent people, a form of natural selection for intelligence.
That's what the Writer's Guild strike is all about. The studios would vastly prefer to distribute their shows via the internet, because they do not have to pay royalties for online distribution. None. Zero. This gives them a huge incentive to avoid distribution under the well-negotiated royalty rates for broadcast TV, and instead, use the internet, which did not really exist when the last contracts were negotiated. That's how they can afford to give the shows away for free, they don't have to pay for them.
Every authorized internet distribution of a TV show is screwing someone who worked hard to create it.
I know that the IP owners watch piracy to see what's hot. I noticed this a long time ago on usenet in a few .mp3 subgenres. Some extremely rare audio tracks that were not in print and only available in very old, extremely limited editions on vinyl were restored by certain (ahem) users. They were immensely popular, were constantly reposted, and basically became the only copies available in any media. The studios apparently noticed the popularity of these tracks, and the vinyl LPs were suddenly released on CD. I've seen this happen numerous times. They watch to see what the collectors consider worth investing their time in audio restoration, what the users consider worth collecting, and then they see money and rerelease the product from their vaults.
Ah, you beat me to it. The phenomenon of beneficial low-dose radiation is known as Radiation Hormesis. It was discovered by insurance actuaries, who discovered that radiologists that worked around continual low doses of radiation had longer lifespans than other doctors working in comparable jobs.
I always like point out that humans evolved in an environment filled with background radiation, our biology is well adapted to low level radioactivity. Even the chemical components of our bodies have significant amounts of radioactive isotopes. Radiation, sometimes even transient high doses from cosmic rays, falls from the skies constantly, and we seem to still be thriving as a race.
I love reading documents on my iPhone. I can email PDFs to myself, then read them in landscape mode. The resolution is better than anything I've seen before. I can zoom in to the column's width and flick down the page to scroll, reading about a paragraph or two at a time, it feels very natural. The only thing lacking is a convenient way to jump around long, multipage documents.