Heh, ever tried to get access to a limited research tool?
I bet just the paperwork for getting a shot at running on that thing is a mile high, and they have every second scheduled from now until it's planned to be shut down.
Of course remote desktop works better between two Windows machines than VNC.
Microsoft wrote support for it right into the OS.
When Microsoft wants to, they can beat any program by using resources (source code) that nobody else has.
Microsoft is *always* behind the curve with features.. they wait until something is popular, is proven in the marketplace... then copy it and do whatever they can to destroy the company/team that developed it.
If I hear Gates or Balmer mention 'innovate' one more time.. I'm going to loose my lunch. Do they really belive that is what they do? Or do they laugh themselves to teh bank on the way back from the courtroom? Err, their videotapes do anyway...
Scientists should use this as an example of how to make their work accessable to the public.
With all the news centering on fluff and rather useless stories these days, we have ffinally found the solution to get people to read stories with "boring" content.. just add color!
Researchers recently discovered that the color you turn when the DMCA takes away your speech is blue. No wait, other report it's a shade of purple.. oh the controversy!
When I decide if a site is worth a few bucks a month, it's usually not because it will get rid of banners or put a star by my name or give some other minor feature... it's because I like the site and want to keep it around.
Slashdot would be one of those. No banner ads is worth $0.00 a month to me.. I ignore them anyway. But if my few dollars a month helps keep it around and running well, THAT is worth it.
Using an oven to dry out electronics isn't all that absurd.
When I was working in hardware design, many IC's that were designed to be wave soldered had to be totally free of moisture. They came shipped in air tight containers with humidity cards to tell you if they were exposed to too much moisture.
If they were not dry enough, the procedure was to bake them in an oven at several hundred degrees for a while.
Now, LCD's and plastics and other materials would not be too happy with that treatment. As others noted, a hair dryer will work to get it mostly dry. I'd suggest leaving it in a warm, dry area for at least a day after to make sure.
I once spilled an *entire* glass of water into an old Comodore 1541 disk drive. The scary thing, is they contained their own power supply. And it was on. After a day or so of drying, it worked fine.
Not so for the Commodore 128 that took a glass of grape juice (real, not flavored) into the keyboard. Although it was funny watching the keys sloooowly depress in the order you typed them in...
There are many rugged PDAs out there. Just look into companies that sell items for "Shop Floor Data Collection" and similar enviroments. They are designed to withstand greasy fingers, drops onto concrete, vibration and other abuse.
Some shops have so much oil in the air, any paper left in the open becomes soaked completely in 12 hours. Not to mention open air warehouses that can get extremely hot or cold.
However, nothing is going to protect against extreme heat. You can't keep a closed system cool, and thats what you have in an oven. At least, nothing that will last very long and can fit in your pocket.
I don't know about the legal issues, but from long experience in programming and knowing writers and other artists, an idea is only 1% of what is needed for any kind of product. The other 99% is a person or group with the skills and drive to make it a reality.
Ideas are a dime a dozen... everyone has an idea for a great game, TV show or book.. but how many people devote years of their life to actually make one happen?
I have here at work, "Programming Windows 95" by Charles Petzold, written 1996.
I see that "Programming Windows" is published in late 1998.
Is it worth it to get the new book, or am I better off with the 95 version. I suspect that they may be the same book, just diffrent titles for each revision.
What is diffrent about this game, is unlike all the other online pay RPG's this one seems to encourage people to use real money, instead og closing accounts and banning people for selling items on eBay.
As far as I can tell, all the other RPG's out there get there resources from pure virtual space. As more players join, more 'stuff' gets made available. Tying it to real money coming in is interesting.. I'd join just to watch how it all unfolds.
Action, Adventure, a Licences, Umm.. Fun anyone?
on
Farscape Video Game
·
· Score: 1
I remember, back in the days of Pac-Man, when games had to be... well.. fun to get to market.
Am I remebering things wrong, or is is not possible to make a simple but fun game anymore.
Does anyone think that the Farscape licence is here for anything but to cash in on a trend? Do the big game publishers think that it's impossible to write a *good* game, so to sell anything.. it needs to be attached to something that does sell?
For anyone worried that no handheld device could possibly play games, don't worry. The current generation (and I mean ones selling for over 12 months now) of Pocket PC's have had 200mhz processors, 16-32 meg of ram, sound and 320x240 color screens.
I have seen gameboy emulators, full speed Apple II emulators and Commodor 64 emulators.. right there you have tons of playable games.
Sim City 2000 is a best seller on the Pocket PC. My company is porting one of our best sellers to it as well. Not as powerfull as a desktop by far.. but better than the computer on your desk 5 years ago!
The problem with wireless games that makes them suck is content. It's HARD to come up with a game that people want to play while at the corner store buying a newspaper. Regardless of how good handhelds get, the public just doesn't *see* handhelds as the next gaming platform.
Wait for some bright person to write "The Killer Wireless Game" and in a month the market will explode.
Is regenerative aerobreaking feasable at our technology level?
It would have to gather up reachtion mass plus generate power to use it. Perhaps a scoop and long cables to use the planets electro-magnetic field to store up power.
Nothing we have comes close to pulling off this sort of trick.
Anyway.. why bother about getting it back? Who would want it? I mean, my last car lost enough resale value in the past few years.. the trade-in value for a vehicle with a billion miles on it would really suck.:-)
I am split on the problems with contaminating other planets with bacteria and Earth-based life.
I don't seriously worry about destroying the possible chance of life evolving in a billion years time (not sure how serious the above poster is either), but I *do* worry about contaminating planets and moons before we have the ability to do a detailed examination.
That said.. I'd rather send people there than have it sit in pristine condition. Pretty, but useless.
I'm still sad we don't have a moon base. Oh well, back to Space 1999 reruns...
Well, don't put a page with 14 huge pictures equalling several megabytes on a 128k link and be suprised when people looking at it clobbers the connection.
Also don't be suprised when a site with few links to it gets bombarded when people (guys) discover it's featuring the rise of cleavage. No matter how obscure, eventually ALL pages like that get hammered as the URL spreads exponentially.
Now.. is there a mirror anywhere? Only a few pictures loaded for me before the page was turned off and I feel cheated somehow.:-)
You can NOT opt-out from them selling your personal information, including when and where you are calling.
Thats a serious privacy issue. Why should some telemarketer know who my friends and business relationships are? What if a competetor to your company decides they want a list of who you call? I can see them selling real-time information to telemarketers so whenever you make a phone call, you get 10 telemarketer calls right after you hang up.
I think many would agree that Tolkien set the stage for modern fantasy. Most of what has followed has been a copy / rip off / imitation / homeage / pick-your-term of his classics.
Add that to the fact that there are only a limited number of plot types, and you are going to see the same basic things over and over.
Yet another issue, is if someone wants to write a book where people with magical powers battle to save the world, it's obviously going to be Fantasy. If howver, one wants to write a book that details the life of some average citizen looking for love, or happiness or looking for their long lost father just to find him, not because he is acrually a Prince or something, then they are usually not written in a fantasy setting. Some types of stories demand to be set in World War II, in space, in Camelot, or in 1632.
Fantasy and science fiction is very good for showing how people would react in situations very much unlike what we have today, to explore values and views. Unfortunatly, the bad action-adventure type is as common as bad works in every other genere.
I have found Bujold an enjoyable author to read. She deals with a lot of issues in her books, where characters have morally tough decisions, and sometimes don't make the right ones.
She is also online... she joins in the discussion boards about her books on a regular basis at www.baen.com which is interesting. (It also sells e-books there, which I give as an example on how to do e-books RIGHT. I am a happy customer.)
I have been using a Jornada 540 series Pocket PC for a year now as an MP3 player, and recently upgraded to the 568.
I get 12 hours of battery life playing MP3's and you can purchace 512 megabyte CF cards for it. Makes an *awesome* player, and can do videos as well as all the PDA stuff.
The IQ test defines 100 to be the average, so no matter what happens, the average IQ will always be, 100!
I don't think intelligence is increasing. What is increasing is our stored knowledge and experience in teaching. Is the capacity to LEARN going up or down? Down I would think, but not enough to notice for a long, long time.
I am a longtime user of HP's calculator products. RPN is the one for me. I had them from the 16C to the 28 (clamshell!) and finally a 48.
Now I have been buying another line of products from HP, their Pocket PC line. You can see from theit HandHeld versions the same keys and engineering that went into their calculators.
On my new HP 568 Pocket PC I have a fully functional HP48 empulator. It runs about as fast as the real thing, but it's just not quite the same. The interface is just plain difficult to use, being a mock up on touch screen. Too bad.. I really loved the HP for being able to whip up quick programs on the fly when I needed.
I even had some extended percision math routines I wrote in assembly for it. Those were the days.
At least HP includes an RPN calculator for the Pocke PC in ROM now. The funny thing is they didn't even make it! THey just include another companies product. Kind of sad.
--
Ian
(www.ian.org for HP, Amiga and Imagine stuff)
(www.sportsmogul.com for Baseball simulation!)
I bet you could tune Apache on a 486 to saturate a T1. I have a single CPU server here that has a 3000 line Perl script that contacts another computer to chug user data, parses the returned information, compresses the final web page and sends it off.. and after all that it STILL can overwhelm a single T1. I bet a single high-end PC server could saturate a T3 with ease if all you need are static pages.
Has anyone mentioned that Apache 2.0 will be using threads when it is out? It's in Beta now, and it runs great on my test machine.
I have been using guestures in Opera and have fallen in love.
I can go back, forward, open new windows on links, duplicate windows, refresh... all without ever touching the keyboard.
The Opera guestures are simple and usefull. The Black and White guestures are complex and hard to use.
I agreee though, that this is a somewhat lame article for Slashdot.
I don't see it being abandonded. Those that used it in teh past still do, and the same types of big projects still go with it.
It's just that Linux and GTK/GNOME/ect are growing at a much faster pace. He was quite right that Linux is geared to programmers and open software.
Linux will never become a true force on the desktop until a GUI reference is standardized. In some cases, it's GOOD to have a Monopoly. The user interface is one. Lets just hope it is one that is for the good of the community, and not one that just wants to dominate the world.
Will RAM speed and peripheral data tranfer speed ever equal CPU clock speed? Talk about heat!
Consumer computers will never ever match CPU speed and bus speed until Intel or AMD brings out a single-chip computer.. CPU, RAM, Video, ect. PErsonally.. I'm waiting for a FPGA based computer. Forget dual-booting diffrent OS's, you could dual-boot diffrent CPU's and video cards.:-)
The problem is simply cost. It's far easier to make fast CPU's cheaply than to make motherboards and components that can run at that speed cheaply.
If you want a system that has near maximum performance for CPU and bus speed, go buy a 12 processor SGI Power Onyx for a few million dollars. Oh, and you DON'T want this in your living room. Aside from needing several 220 volt lines, at idle it produces 65db of nouse, and requires an air conditioning system that can handle 16000 BTU/hour! The average window air conditioner in the home only is rated at 2000 BTU.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, ever tried to get access to a limited research tool?
I bet just the paperwork for getting a shot at running on that thing is a mile high, and they have every second scheduled from now until it's planned to be shut down.
Both AI and nanotech suffer from the same problem.
The more we learn, the further away we realise they are.
I don't expect to see human or programmer level AI within my lifetime, or the ability to build items at the molecular level.
However.. I'd love to be proven wrong and see it.
--
Ian
Of course remote desktop works better between two Windows machines than VNC.
Microsoft wrote support for it right into the OS.
When Microsoft wants to, they can beat any program by using resources (source code) that nobody else has.
Microsoft is *always* behind the curve with features.. they wait until something is popular, is proven in the marketplace... then copy it and do whatever they can to destroy the company/team that developed it.
If I hear Gates or Balmer mention 'innovate' one more time.. I'm going to loose my lunch. Do they really belive that is what they do? Or do they laugh themselves to teh bank on the way back from the courtroom? Err, their videotapes do anyway...
Scientists should use this as an example of how to make their work accessable to the public.
With all the news centering on fluff and rather useless stories these days, we have ffinally found the solution to get people to read stories with "boring" content.. just add color!
Researchers recently discovered that the color you turn when the DMCA takes away your speech is blue. No wait, other report it's a shade of purple.. oh the controversy!
When I decide if a site is worth a few bucks a month, it's usually not because it will get rid of banners or put a star by my name or give some other minor feature... it's because I like the site and want to keep it around.
Slashdot would be one of those. No banner ads is worth $0.00 a month to me.. I ignore them anyway. But if my few dollars a month helps keep it around and running well, THAT is worth it.
Using an oven to dry out electronics isn't all that absurd.
When I was working in hardware design, many IC's that were designed to be wave soldered had to be totally free of moisture. They came shipped in air tight containers with humidity cards to tell you if they were exposed to too much moisture.
If they were not dry enough, the procedure was to bake them in an oven at several hundred degrees for a while.
Now, LCD's and plastics and other materials would not be too happy with that treatment. As others noted, a hair dryer will work to get it mostly dry. I'd suggest leaving it in a warm, dry area for at least a day after to make sure.
I once spilled an *entire* glass of water into an old Comodore 1541 disk drive. The scary thing, is they contained their own power supply. And it was on. After a day or so of drying, it worked fine.
Not so for the Commodore 128 that took a glass of grape juice (real, not flavored) into the keyboard. Although it was funny watching the keys sloooowly depress in the order you typed them in...
There are many rugged PDAs out there. Just look into companies that sell items for "Shop Floor Data Collection" and similar enviroments. They are designed to withstand greasy fingers, drops onto concrete, vibration and other abuse.
Some shops have so much oil in the air, any paper left in the open becomes soaked completely in 12 hours. Not to mention open air warehouses that can get extremely hot or cold.
However, nothing is going to protect against extreme heat. You can't keep a closed system cool, and thats what you have in an oven. At least, nothing that will last very long and can fit in your pocket.
I don't know about the legal issues, but from long experience in programming and knowing writers and other artists, an idea is only 1% of what is needed for any kind of product. The other 99% is a person or group with the skills and drive to make it a reality.
Ideas are a dime a dozen... everyone has an idea for a great game, TV show or book.. but how many people devote years of their life to actually make one happen?
I have here at work, "Programming Windows 95" by Charles Petzold, written 1996.
I see that "Programming Windows" is published in late 1998.
Is it worth it to get the new book, or am I better off with the 95 version. I suspect that they may be the same book, just diffrent titles for each revision.
--
Ian
What is diffrent about this game, is unlike all the other online pay RPG's this one seems to encourage people to use real money, instead og closing accounts and banning people for selling items on eBay.
As far as I can tell, all the other RPG's out there get there resources from pure virtual space. As more players join, more 'stuff' gets made available. Tying it to real money coming in is interesting.. I'd join just to watch how it all unfolds.
I remember, back in the days of Pac-Man, when games had to be... well.. fun to get to market.
Am I remebering things wrong, or is is not possible to make a simple but fun game anymore.
Does anyone think that the Farscape licence is here for anything but to cash in on a trend? Do the big game publishers think that it's impossible to write a *good* game, so to sell anything.. it needs to be attached to something that does sell?
Ohmygod.. I'm jaded! Help!
For anyone worried that no handheld device could possibly play games, don't worry. The current generation (and I mean ones selling for over 12 months now) of Pocket PC's have had 200mhz processors, 16-32 meg of ram, sound and 320x240 color screens.
I have seen gameboy emulators, full speed Apple II emulators and Commodor 64 emulators.. right there you have tons of playable games.
Sim City 2000 is a best seller on the Pocket PC. My company is porting one of our best sellers to it as well. Not as powerfull as a desktop by far.. but better than the computer on your desk 5 years ago!
The problem with wireless games that makes them suck is content. It's HARD to come up with a game that people want to play while at the corner store buying a newspaper. Regardless of how good handhelds get, the public just doesn't *see* handhelds as the next gaming platform.
Wait for some bright person to write "The Killer Wireless Game" and in a month the market will explode.
Is regenerative aerobreaking feasable at our technology level?
:-)
It would have to gather up reachtion mass plus generate power to use it. Perhaps a scoop and long cables to use the planets electro-magnetic field to store up power.
Nothing we have comes close to pulling off this sort of trick.
Anyway.. why bother about getting it back? Who would want it? I mean, my last car lost enough resale value in the past few years.. the trade-in value for a vehicle with a billion miles on it would really suck.
I am split on the problems with contaminating other planets with bacteria and Earth-based life.
I don't seriously worry about destroying the possible chance of life evolving in a billion years time (not sure how serious the above poster is either), but I *do* worry about contaminating planets and moons before we have the ability to do a detailed examination.
That said.. I'd rather send people there than have it sit in pristine condition. Pretty, but useless.
I'm still sad we don't have a moon base. Oh well, back to Space 1999 reruns...
Well, don't put a page with 14 huge pictures equalling several megabytes on a 128k link and be suprised when people looking at it clobbers the connection.
:-)
Also don't be suprised when a site with few links to it gets bombarded when people (guys) discover it's featuring the rise of cleavage. No matter how obscure, eventually ALL pages like that get hammered as the URL spreads exponentially.
Now.. is there a mirror anywhere? Only a few pictures loaded for me before the page was turned off and I feel cheated somehow.
It is a big deal.
You can NOT opt-out from them selling your personal information, including when and where you are calling.
Thats a serious privacy issue. Why should some telemarketer know who my friends and business relationships are? What if a competetor to your company decides they want a list of who you call? I can see them selling real-time information to telemarketers so whenever you make a phone call, you get 10 telemarketer calls right after you hang up.
It works much better if you use just a standard http access.
Try this: http://www.digitalglobe.com/?goto=gallery instead and stop torturing tose poor servers.
Maybe this article will get updated URLs soon?
I think many would agree that Tolkien set the stage for modern fantasy. Most of what has followed has been a copy / rip off / imitation / homeage / pick-your-term of his classics.
Add that to the fact that there are only a limited number of plot types, and you are going to see the same basic things over and over.
Yet another issue, is if someone wants to write a book where people with magical powers battle to save the world, it's obviously going to be Fantasy. If howver, one wants to write a book that details the life of some average citizen looking for love, or happiness or looking for their long lost father just to find him, not because he is acrually a Prince or something, then they are usually not written in a fantasy setting. Some types of stories demand to be set in World War II, in space, in Camelot, or in 1632.
Fantasy and science fiction is very good for showing how people would react in situations very much unlike what we have today, to explore values and views. Unfortunatly, the bad action-adventure type is as common as bad works in every other genere.
I have found Bujold an enjoyable author to read. She deals with a lot of issues in her books, where characters have morally tough decisions, and sometimes don't make the right ones.
She is also online... she joins in the discussion boards about her books on a regular basis at www.baen.com which is interesting. (It also sells e-books there, which I give as an example on how to do e-books RIGHT. I am a happy customer.)
I have been using a Jornada 540 series Pocket PC for a year now as an MP3 player, and recently upgraded to the 568.
I get 12 hours of battery life playing MP3's and you can purchace 512 megabyte CF cards for it. Makes an *awesome* player, and can do videos as well as all the PDA stuff.
A bit expensive, but a neat toy.
--
Ian
You can't "drag down" the average IQ.
The IQ test defines 100 to be the average, so no matter what happens, the average IQ will always be, 100!
I don't think intelligence is increasing. What is increasing is our stored knowledge and experience in teaching. Is the capacity to LEARN going up or down? Down I would think, but not enough to notice for a long, long time.
I am a longtime user of HP's calculator products. RPN is the one for me. I had them from the 16C to the 28 (clamshell!) and finally a 48.
Now I have been buying another line of products from HP, their Pocket PC line. You can see from theit HandHeld versions the same keys and engineering that went into their calculators.
On my new HP 568 Pocket PC I have a fully functional HP48 empulator. It runs about as fast as the real thing, but it's just not quite the same. The interface is just plain difficult to use, being a mock up on touch screen. Too bad.. I really loved the HP for being able to whip up quick programs on the fly when I needed.
I even had some extended percision math routines I wrote in assembly for it. Those were the days.
At least HP includes an RPN calculator for the Pocke PC in ROM now. The funny thing is they didn't even make it! THey just include another companies product. Kind of sad.
--
Ian
(www.ian.org for HP, Amiga and Imagine stuff)
(www.sportsmogul.com for Baseball simulation!)
Has anyone mentioned that Apache 2.0 will be using threads when it is out? It's in Beta now, and it runs great on my test machine.
I have been using guestures in Opera and have fallen in love. I can go back, forward, open new windows on links, duplicate windows, refresh... all without ever touching the keyboard. The Opera guestures are simple and usefull. The Black and White guestures are complex and hard to use. I agreee though, that this is a somewhat lame article for Slashdot.
I don't see it being abandonded. Those that used it in teh past still do, and the same types of big projects still go with it. It's just that Linux and GTK/GNOME/ect are growing at a much faster pace. He was quite right that Linux is geared to programmers and open software. Linux will never become a true force on the desktop until a GUI reference is standardized. In some cases, it's GOOD to have a Monopoly. The user interface is one. Lets just hope it is one that is for the good of the community, and not one that just wants to dominate the world.
Consumer computers will never ever match CPU speed and bus speed until Intel or AMD brings out a single-chip computer.. CPU, RAM, Video, ect. PErsonally.. I'm waiting for a FPGA based computer. Forget dual-booting diffrent OS's, you could dual-boot diffrent CPU's and video cards. :-)
The problem is simply cost. It's far easier to make fast CPU's cheaply than to make motherboards and components that can run at that speed cheaply.
If you want a system that has near maximum performance for CPU and bus speed, go buy a 12 processor SGI Power Onyx for a few million dollars. Oh, and you DON'T want this in your living room. Aside from needing several 220 volt lines, at idle it produces 65db of nouse, and requires an air conditioning system that can handle 16000 BTU/hour! The average window air conditioner in the home only is rated at 2000 BTU.