Yeah, I expected all that crap too when I was 20. Of course I'm not even 30 yet (give it a few months), but I'd be surprised to see people on Mars before I'm 50. Congress frankly doesn't give a rat's ass about the space program, and I forsee terrorism being the central focus for at least the next decade, before being overcome by social security, which will get some hair-brained last-minute salvation by diverting billions of tax dollars from every other possible program (except Alaskan bridges). It's not that we can't do more than one thing simultaneously, but the people who write the checks don't see it that way, and I don't see that changing.
Bush said he wants us back on the moon in 10 years.. conveniently far enough in the future that his comments can be forgotten, and he won't be around to answer for why he didn't make it a higher priority. I believe that's called "pandering."
the display is part of ViewSonic's X series which tries to comnbine performance with style.
Me: I thought you guys said you had performance and style?!? ViewSonic: We never said that.. we said the comnbine them. Comnbine is a word we invented which most closely means "eliminate."
"Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years."
I'm pretty sure the wiring "bottleneck" has, uh, absolutely nothing to do with why clock speeds haven't been going up. CPUs can run at whatever speed they like, independent of the bus. (Well.. an arbitrary multiplier of the bus; not independent strictly speaking). The problem is that they start turning into space heaters as their frequency increases, not because of anything to do with the bus speed.
Now bus speeds definately could benefit from using fiber connections, but it doesn't really matter what speed your bus runs at if the devices can't keep up. Memory is much more of a bottleneck on the FSB, and the local bus just got an upgrade with PCIX, so I'm really not sure what bottleneck the author is referring to.
Unhappy with Atari?
on
20 Years of NES
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Atari 2600 had upset folks by flooding the market with bad software and, at first, retailers were reluctant to sell another system. But the NES was a hit, controlling a healthy 90 percent of the U.S. home videogame industry at the peak of its popularity.
I don't remember anyone being upset by the quality of games on the Atari. Everyone I know, myself included, was amazed they they could have Pong, Pitfall, Frogger, Centipede, and Asteroids right on their own TV. It didn't matter that they sucked, because we had nothing to compare them to! They were new, innovative, and best of all you didn't need a pocket full of quarters and a ride to the mall. Maybe adults were unhappy, but I distinctly remember my friends and I having to wait (im)patiently while their dads would finish that last game of Pong (before the inevitable throwing of the paddle and the obligitory "God damnit, piece of $#@% fsking...!").
Not to mention that the grandparent is assuming that Earth is a suitable environment for other intelligent life forms. There's no guarantee of that, or even the slightest bit of evidence to suggest that it's true. Earth didn't adapt to suit life (for the most part, although granted, life has altered the environment), but generally speaking, life has evolved to thrive in the environment that Earth provides.
In fact, the amount of assumptions that it takes to say that intelligent life is not common are at least equal to the amount of assumptions to say that it is common. We only have a sample size of 1. Just a few possibilities are:
Other intelligent life forms have not developed interstellar travel (be it lack of desire, physical impossibility, natural resources, fuel supply, slower progression of technology, shorter or longer lifetimes, metabolic rates, etc.).
They may not be aware Earth exists. We're a somewhat small planet fairly close to the sun. Not exactly easy to detect. We've only been broadcasting radio for 100 years or so.. our transmissions haven't traveled very far.
Other intelligences communicate by means unknown to us. This seems unlikely, because from what we know, electromagnetic propogation is an extremely effective means of communication, but it's impossible to say how much we don't know about physics. Further, radio is clearly ineffective for timely communication over vast distances.
Not enough time/we're the first (or the first 1-15%). If life is random, it's just as likely as not that human intelligence evolved at or before the universal average. (When you roll 100 dice, it's just as likely that they'll all come up 5s as any other particular scenario. That's pretty much the definition of random). Just because the universe is trillions of years old doesn't mean intelligent life should have developed elsewhere sooner. Even if there were millions of intelligent life forms within our galaxy, and they were on par with us technologically, AND used radio for communication we still would have no way of knowing of their existance since radio waves "only" travel at the speed of light.
At any rate, to say that intelligent life does not exist because Earth has not been invaded/inhabited/contacted by such life is taking a highly self-centered view of the universe.. barely a step away from claiming that the sun revolved around us.
What do you mean dinosaurs aren't reptiles? Are you referring to the fact that there is evidence that they were warm blooded? AFAIK, that doesn't mean they weren't reptiles, rather that our understanding and definition of reptiles was inaccurate and/or incomplete.
True, this particular method might not make sense. But most metals, when powdered, are inflammable (which oddly means the exact same thing as flammable, making it even more redundant than a PIN number, since at least the word "number" differentiates it from a button or sewing tool).
Anyway, the New Scientist article linked above mentions using iron which, unlike Al, is readily available and requires minimal processing. But what sort of container (engine) do you burn metal in? Could it be powdered finely enough that it could be sprayed into the air in a cylinder? Would it even burn fast enough? Or would it need to be burned in some sort of heavily insulated chamber which in turn heats water to power a turbine?
I imagine distribution would be difficult as well.. how would one fill up on powdered fuel? How much would it weigh? How would you prevent caking? Would the friction of pouring a large quantity cause it to spontaneously ignite?
Maybe horses are the transportation of the future.
I doubt it will work (well) with tap water. It will likely need pure deionized water, or you'll get all sorts of buildup. Although, I suppose the costs of replacing parts more frequently might be offset by the lower costs of cheaper water. Not that I expect drivers will actually be facing this decision anytime soon.
Bleh, reauthoring.. I just rip 'em and convert to AVI. Works great for viewing in MCE and I can play movies on a whim. I only wish there was a way to search by and/or display metadata such as actors, director, year, etc., like MP3 tags.
If lighting were go to DC, then a re-think of the home wiring would really be in order.
Incandescent lights do not prefer AC over DC; in fact I believe they work more efficiently at an equivalent voltage (VDC vs VACrms) because the filament isn't being deprived of current every 500ms. I don't think flourescent bulbs have a preference either, but the ballasts would have to be redesigned. In fact, some people who use solar panels and batteries to augment their electricity choose to wire their homes for DC (in addition to AC) for specific applications. This skips the inefficiency of inverting the power to AC, then rectifying it back to DC.
It's not lighting that prevents in-home DC; it's the cost of redesigning and manufacturing the power supplies and voltage regulation system that would be required. The costs would be nontrivial, and the benefits marginal.
They mentioned that the ships didn't have sails back then.
Cruise ships tend to be nice and reflective yes, but also fairly useless for warfare. Modern naval ships* are haze gray, which is more, uh, hazy than reflective. The paint would probably absorb light energy pretty well. The fact that they're also made out of steel, however, means the heat would probably be dissipated pretty quickly. And it would have to be damned hot to get the steel to burn. Easier to throw some magnesium at it.
*Except for the Canuks.. I believe their boats are white.
Ironically, another biological/mechanical combination has been in use for.. well.. I'm not sure how long. Human hair hygrometers have been around for ages. The hair(s) expand and contract along a fairly linear range, and the change in length can be measured and recorded with a simple lever and graph.
I'll just avoid double posting by killing two semi-related birds with one stone here..
According to MS, while you can give people free software or computers, they won't have the expertise to use it.
Because people develop expertise prior to using something?!? By that logic, we shouldn't give anything to anyone who doesn't know how to use it. But they're just ignorant 3rd worlders anyway, they'd probably just try to stack the computers together in such a way as to form a shanty. Silly Africans!
In many cases, what they need is food, clean drinking water, and shelter. Let's get those bases covered before we start doling out the software, shall we?
That's not true for the entire continent. There are many countries that already have cities and basic infrastructures in place. To my knowledge, there is only one country that is currently facing starvation, which is Niger, and that's being addressed by the UN et al at a typical bureaucratic pace.
More to the point, given the chance, people will become familiar with technology and will become employable and able to fill jobs and build companies so more people can afford to buy their own food. AKA, teaching a man to fish. It happened in India, and it can happen in Africa as well (much to the chagrin of a good percentage of/. regulars).
Interestingly, when I do quit for periods of time, the habit goes away in as little as a day or two, although the cravings never stop; they just become more spaced apart.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I expected all that crap too when I was 20. Of course I'm not even 30 yet (give it a few months), but I'd be surprised to see people on Mars before I'm 50. Congress frankly doesn't give a rat's ass about the space program, and I forsee terrorism being the central focus for at least the next decade, before being overcome by social security, which will get some hair-brained last-minute salvation by diverting billions of tax dollars from every other possible program (except Alaskan bridges). It's not that we can't do more than one thing simultaneously, but the people who write the checks don't see it that way, and I don't see that changing.
Bush said he wants us back on the moon in 10 years.. conveniently far enough in the future that his comments can be forgotten, and he won't be around to answer for why he didn't make it a higher priority. I believe that's called "pandering."
But anyway, time will tell.
Great.. now there's gonna be 1000s of players with this mod.
"No, I'm CmdrTaco."
"But you're a troll!"
"Who are you calling a troll? I make legitimate comments!"
"No, I mean CmdrTaco was a human paladin. Your character.. oh nevermind."
SUVs and pickups are both included in the "light truck" category.
the display is part of ViewSonic's X series which tries to comnbine performance with style.
Me: I thought you guys said you had performance and style?!?
ViewSonic: We never said that.. we said the comnbine them. Comnbine is a word we invented which most closely means "eliminate."
Amazon doesn't say either, but interestingly they list the response time as 4ms, not 3. Additionally, the native resolution is only 1280x1024.
"Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years."
I'm pretty sure the wiring "bottleneck" has, uh, absolutely nothing to do with why clock speeds haven't been going up. CPUs can run at whatever speed they like, independent of the bus. (Well.. an arbitrary multiplier of the bus; not independent strictly speaking). The problem is that they start turning into space heaters as their frequency increases, not because of anything to do with the bus speed.
Now bus speeds definately could benefit from using fiber connections, but it doesn't really matter what speed your bus runs at if the devices can't keep up. Memory is much more of a bottleneck on the FSB, and the local bus just got an upgrade with PCIX, so I'm really not sure what bottleneck the author is referring to.
The Atari 2600 had upset folks by flooding the market with bad software and, at first, retailers were reluctant to sell another system. But the NES was a hit, controlling a healthy 90 percent of the U.S. home videogame industry at the peak of its popularity.
I don't remember anyone being upset by the quality of games on the Atari. Everyone I know, myself included, was amazed they they could have Pong, Pitfall, Frogger, Centipede, and Asteroids right on their own TV. It didn't matter that they sucked, because we had nothing to compare them to! They were new, innovative, and best of all you didn't need a pocket full of quarters and a ride to the mall. Maybe adults were unhappy, but I distinctly remember my friends and I having to wait (im)patiently while their dads would finish that last game of Pong (before the inevitable throwing of the paddle and the obligitory "God damnit, piece of $#@% fsking...!").
Not to mention that the grandparent is assuming that Earth is a suitable environment for other intelligent life forms. There's no guarantee of that, or even the slightest bit of evidence to suggest that it's true. Earth didn't adapt to suit life (for the most part, although granted, life has altered the environment), but generally speaking, life has evolved to thrive in the environment that Earth provides.
In fact, the amount of assumptions that it takes to say that intelligent life is not common are at least equal to the amount of assumptions to say that it is common. We only have a sample size of 1. Just a few possibilities are:
Other intelligent life forms have not developed interstellar travel (be it lack of desire, physical impossibility, natural resources, fuel supply, slower progression of technology, shorter or longer lifetimes, metabolic rates, etc.).
They may not be aware Earth exists. We're a somewhat small planet fairly close to the sun. Not exactly easy to detect. We've only been broadcasting radio for 100 years or so.. our transmissions haven't traveled very far.
Other intelligences communicate by means unknown to us. This seems unlikely, because from what we know, electromagnetic propogation is an extremely effective means of communication, but it's impossible to say how much we don't know about physics. Further, radio is clearly ineffective for timely communication over vast distances.
Not enough time/we're the first (or the first 1-15%). If life is random, it's just as likely as not that human intelligence evolved at or before the universal average. (When you roll 100 dice, it's just as likely that they'll all come up 5s as any other particular scenario. That's pretty much the definition of random). Just because the universe is trillions of years old doesn't mean intelligent life should have developed elsewhere sooner. Even if there were millions of intelligent life forms within our galaxy, and they were on par with us technologically, AND used radio for communication we still would have no way of knowing of their existance since radio waves "only" travel at the speed of light.
At any rate, to say that intelligent life does not exist because Earth has not been invaded/inhabited/contacted by such life is taking a highly self-centered view of the universe.. barely a step away from claiming that the sun revolved around us.
What do you mean dinosaurs aren't reptiles? Are you referring to the fact that there is evidence that they were warm blooded? AFAIK, that doesn't mean they weren't reptiles, rather that our understanding and definition of reptiles was inaccurate and/or incomplete.
True, this particular method might not make sense. But most metals, when powdered, are inflammable (which oddly means the exact same thing as flammable, making it even more redundant than a PIN number, since at least the word "number" differentiates it from a button or sewing tool).
Anyway, the New Scientist article linked above mentions using iron which, unlike Al, is readily available and requires minimal processing. But what sort of container (engine) do you burn metal in? Could it be powdered finely enough that it could be sprayed into the air in a cylinder? Would it even burn fast enough? Or would it need to be burned in some sort of heavily insulated chamber which in turn heats water to power a turbine?
I imagine distribution would be difficult as well.. how would one fill up on powdered fuel? How much would it weigh? How would you prevent caking? Would the friction of pouring a large quantity cause it to spontaneously ignite?
Maybe horses are the transportation of the future.
I doubt it will work (well) with tap water. It will likely need pure deionized water, or you'll get all sorts of buildup. Although, I suppose the costs of replacing parts more frequently might be offset by the lower costs of cheaper water. Not that I expect drivers will actually be facing this decision anytime soon.
If money could create good content, Waterworld would be one of the best movies of all time.
Bleh, reauthoring.. I just rip 'em and convert to AVI. Works great for viewing in MCE and I can play movies on a whim. I only wish there was a way to search by and/or display metadata such as actors, director, year, etc., like MP3 tags.
Just change the spelling to "s-e-a-l," like the animal. Seal of the President of the United States.
Wait..
I dunno, but for the first time ever, thousands of users were correct when they called tech support to claim that "the internet is broken."
If lighting were go to DC, then a re-think of the home wiring would really be in order.
Incandescent lights do not prefer AC over DC; in fact I believe they work more efficiently at an equivalent voltage (VDC vs VACrms) because the filament isn't being deprived of current every 500ms. I don't think flourescent bulbs have a preference either, but the ballasts would have to be redesigned. In fact, some people who use solar panels and batteries to augment their electricity choose to wire their homes for DC (in addition to AC) for specific applications. This skips the inefficiency of inverting the power to AC, then rectifying it back to DC.
It's not lighting that prevents in-home DC; it's the cost of redesigning and manufacturing the power supplies and voltage regulation system that would be required. The costs would be nontrivial, and the benefits marginal.
Consistent misspelling is a virtue.
IHNIWYAM
No kidding.. just take a look at some examples. No celebrity marketing there.
I'd rather take a Libet machine and wire it to my left mouse button in Q4.
We do, when we need a laugh.
-The Military
They mentioned that the ships didn't have sails back then.
Cruise ships tend to be nice and reflective yes, but also fairly useless for warfare. Modern naval ships* are haze gray, which is more, uh, hazy than reflective. The paint would probably absorb light energy pretty well. The fact that they're also made out of steel, however, means the heat would probably be dissipated pretty quickly. And it would have to be damned hot to get the steel to burn. Easier to throw some magnesium at it.
*Except for the Canuks.. I believe their boats are white.
Ironically, another biological/mechanical combination has been in use for.. well.. I'm not sure how long. Human hair hygrometers have been around for ages. The hair(s) expand and contract along a fairly linear range, and the change in length can be measured and recorded with a simple lever and graph.
I'll just avoid double posting by killing two semi-related birds with one stone here..
/. regulars).
According to MS, while you can give people free software or computers, they won't have the expertise to use it.
Because people develop expertise prior to using something?!? By that logic, we shouldn't give anything to anyone who doesn't know how to use it. But they're just ignorant 3rd worlders anyway, they'd probably just try to stack the computers together in such a way as to form a shanty. Silly Africans!
In many cases, what they need is food, clean drinking water, and shelter. Let's get those bases covered before we start doling out the software, shall we?
That's not true for the entire continent. There are many countries that already have cities and basic infrastructures in place. To my knowledge, there is only one country that is currently facing starvation, which is Niger, and that's being addressed by the UN et al at a typical bureaucratic pace.
More to the point, given the chance, people will become familiar with technology and will become employable and able to fill jobs and build companies so more people can afford to buy their own food. AKA, teaching a man to fish. It happened in India, and it can happen in Africa as well (much to the chagrin of a good percentage of
It's interesting then that smoking in particular doesn't generally give a reward. Most smokers will say they don't get a buzz from a cigarette, but still crave it immensely. This article posted a few weeks ago discusses the difference between things we want, and things that actually make us happy (rewards). But maybe stemming the crave is reward enough.
Interestingly, when I do quit for periods of time, the habit goes away in as little as a day or two, although the cravings never stop; they just become more spaced apart.
'very popular Linux ISO'.. LOL...