Sounds like the record companies want to move another step closer to Orwell's 1984, where music was automatically generated for the proles by a machine called the versificator.
Is this why Big Brovahz had a hit single recently?
When I get my CF Wireless card I'll be able to use my Zaurus to surf the net/answer emails/administer systems while taking a crap. Another way to maximise productivity!
The gas cloud technique will hopefully allow increase the resolution of the radio images. Most radio telescope images tend not to make "pretty pictures" of the type produced by Hubble and other optical telescopes. However, any increase in the detail that can be seen of the radio jets should be very useful. There is still much that is not understood about the processes the generate the jets.
Very strange, dreamy movie with lots of wonderful technologies (especially that Russian Bear software). Even better for featuring the great Ernie Dingo as a PI.
I saw it at the cinema and later as one of our end-of-high-school-year videos (a week of summer bludging). I think I even hired the movie out a few times later.
Alan (Back to the Future trilogy) Silvestri's music is superb, though I've yet to buy the soundtrack.
A fun movie which brings back memories of the late eighties.
It's the best adaptation of a book that I have ever seen. I came to it by first hearing the beautiful soundtrack (composed by John Williams), then reading the book by JG Ballard and finally watching the movie. Ballard is an incredibly visual writer and what astonished me was the fact that the images on the screen were so close to the pictures in my head from the book and music.
Tom Stoppard's screenplay captured the essence of the book, the potrayal of the good, the evil and the stupid in the British, Americans, Chinese and Japanese. The scenes changed from the book were done so in an intelligent way.
Empire of the Sun is a difficult, long and somewhat sombre movie to watch, but ultimately worth it. I preferred Empire of the Sun to Spielberg's Schindler's List and think it a better anti-war movie (and better movie alround) than Saving Private Ryan.
A firing squad would be a more permanent solution to stop the spammer (although John Edwards might start channelling penis enlargements and Nigerians - "I'm picking up something about money. Do you have a rich relative in Africa who died...")
Yes, for years the US has lead the world supplying useless acronyms (UA's) for anything vaguely technology or business related (VTBR). Judging from the article, it would seem that the Indians are catching up very strongly in this area (VSITA).
Maybe they've skipped actual innovation and gone straight for management and marketing.
The AFP may share some of the FBI's cross-state and international policing jurisdictional powers, but I think their scope is far smaller, partly because our police forces are state based rather than county/shire.
ASIO is our domestic spying organisation, unlike the CIA which is supposedly international only and hence is more closely related to the FBI in that regard. (modelled on MI5)
ASIS is our international spy organisation. (modelled on MI6)
The Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) is the closest thing we have to the NSA.
Re:The Science in Science Fiction
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 1
I've got background in maths and physics and I find that many of the really good SF written these days is from authors with a strong science background, such as Benford, Baxter and Egan, though there are some exceptions.
The rest of the SF books on the shelves seem to be mostly tie-ins, unoriginal cyberpunk or fantasy (why do they mix the two together at bookstores?).
According to this Spacedail article the databases of astronomical research have been salvaged, the team will keep building their instruments, probably on the main ANU campus and Stromlo will be rebuilt (though I'm guessing minus the telescopes).
Forget dual boot, when I did a couple of intro C++ courses at UOW in 95/96 we were supposed to write the programs on Macs. Once submitted they were test compiled under Unix. Not have access to either at the time I used to write them in Borland C++ 4.5 running under Windows 3.1 (very, very painful, but it was a low spec machine).
I took some photos of CSIRAC while visiting the Melbourne Museum where it's now on display. They have a 2KB Casio electronic diary placed in the exhibit an example of a recent computer of the same power.
Alston looks like a walking cadaver and maybe that explains his lack of policies. Seriously, the current Australian government never compares itself with Asia, so Korean statistics don't mean anything to them. American comparisons, maybe, but beating the Poms (in cricket) is all that really counts to Little Johnny & Co.
While metadata might not be so useful for general search engines the Australian government has mandated metadata for their websites to help generate dentral directories for govt agency activities.
Metadata can also be used for content aggregation purposes. Our parent organisation is planning on using Vignette (yuck) for it's central website and they want to suck up information from our own site (Apache yay!).
One of the proposals for the SKA is to use an array of Luneburg lenses, which are basically big balls of polystyrene like material. The material is a dielectric differentially doped so as to focus the incoming signals. Instead of moving a large dish, you only need to move the receiver to focus on a particular signal.
One of the proposed locations for the SKA is in Australia and a number of schools are involved in the SEARFE Project which hooks up a radio receivers to a computers to produce a database of radio frequency usage ("pollution") across the country.
On the day I was made redundant from my (pretty good) commercial sysadmin job I saw an ad for a webmaster at a large astronomy research organisation. It took a lot of work to get this job, but I wouldn't want it any other way.
Although it means a 4 hour daily commute, I feel invigorated by an environment where most of my colleagues have a passion for learning and science rather than lining their pockets. Great conversations and interesting lectures to listen to. I may only be looking after the website, but I feel that at least I am helping people who are expanding humanity's knowledge. (And our research helped build your wireless networking cards).
Contrast this with a commercial job with a software development company which was also a 4 hours commute. At the end of each day I was dead tired from the travelling and stupidity of their marketing driving "strategies". Weekends were a write off I was that zonked. I felt like I was wasting 60 hours a week of my life in exchange for this intrisically worthless thing called money, which I was too tired to use.
I'm glad I had the opportunity to return to science. I hope I can stay here for a long time yet.
At the large astronomy research organisation where I am webmaster we still use Netscape 4.x as it is the only common browser that currently works properly on the older Solaris boxes. We tried Mozilla, but encountered problems - it's also a comparative resource hog.
Don't think even NS4 runs on our Vax machines though.
They used to be able to rely on Microsoft churning out bloated software that the majority of users feel they must upgrade to. However, thanks to Microsoft's wonderful licensing structure and less resource hungry alternatives maybe the hardware manufacturers will go this way.
In my (albeit brief) investigations into the personal diary style of blog I seem to have found a correlation between being a female PD blogger and the ownership of a cat. Any suggestions why?
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like the record companies want to move another step closer to Orwell's 1984, where music was automatically generated for the proles by a machine called the versificator.
Is this why Big Brovahz had a hit single recently?
When I get my CF Wireless card I'll be able to use my Zaurus to surf the net/answer emails/administer systems while taking a crap. Another way to maximise productivity!
The paper is available at: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0211451
The gas cloud technique will hopefully allow increase the resolution of the radio images. Most radio telescope images tend not to make "pretty pictures" of the type produced by Hubble and other optical telescopes. However, any increase in the detail that can be seen of the radio jets should be very useful. There is still much that is not understood about the processes the generate the jets.
And here I was trying to stress test our server... :)
The high-res images are meant for the print media. Don't forget that they are copyrighted.
Very strange, dreamy movie with lots of wonderful technologies (especially that Russian Bear software). Even better for featuring the great Ernie Dingo as a PI.
I saw it at the cinema and later as one of our end-of-high-school-year videos (a week of summer bludging). I think I even hired the movie out a few times later.
Alan (Back to the Future trilogy) Silvestri's music is superb, though I've yet to buy the soundtrack.
A fun movie which brings back memories of the late eighties.
It's the best adaptation of a book that I have ever seen. I came to it by first hearing the beautiful soundtrack (composed by John Williams), then reading the book by JG Ballard and finally watching the movie. Ballard is an incredibly visual writer and what astonished me was the fact that the images on the screen were so close to the pictures in my head from the book and music.
Tom Stoppard's screenplay captured the essence of the book, the potrayal of the good, the evil and the stupid in the British, Americans, Chinese and Japanese. The scenes changed from the book were done so in an intelligent way.
Empire of the Sun is a difficult, long and somewhat sombre movie to watch, but ultimately worth it. I preferred Empire of the Sun to Spielberg's Schindler's List and think it a better anti-war movie (and better movie alround) than Saving Private Ryan.
A firing squad would be a more permanent solution to stop the spammer (although John Edwards might start channelling penis enlargements and Nigerians - "I'm picking up something about money. Do you have a rich relative in Africa who died...")
Yes, for years the US has lead the world supplying useless acronyms (UA's) for anything vaguely technology or business related (VTBR). Judging from the article, it would seem that the Indians are catching up very strongly in this area (VSITA).
Maybe they've skipped actual innovation and gone straight for management and marketing.
Nope,
The AFP may share some of the FBI's cross-state and international policing jurisdictional powers, but I think their scope is far smaller, partly because our police forces are state based rather than county/shire.
ASIO is our domestic spying organisation, unlike the CIA which is supposedly international only and hence is more closely related to the FBI in that regard. (modelled on MI5)
ASIS is our international spy organisation. (modelled on MI6)
The Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) is the closest thing we have to the NSA.
When you can make your own craters in Iraq?
Now if there was oil on the Moon...
it would imply life
or a leaky spaceship
or astronauts frying food...
I've got background in maths and physics and I find that many of the really good SF written these days is from authors with a strong science background, such as Benford, Baxter and Egan, though there are some exceptions.
The rest of the SF books on the shelves seem to be mostly tie-ins, unoriginal cyberpunk or fantasy (why do they mix the two together at bookstores?).
According to this Spacedail article the databases of astronomical research have been salvaged, the team will keep building their instruments, probably on the main ANU campus and Stromlo will be rebuilt (though I'm guessing minus the telescopes).
I've written down some of my own memories of Mt Stromlo observatory.
Forget dual boot, when I did a couple of intro C++ courses at UOW in 95/96 we were supposed to write the programs on Macs. Once submitted they were test compiled under Unix. Not have access to either at the time I used to write them in Borland C++ 4.5 running under Windows 3.1 (very, very painful, but it was a low spec machine).
I took some photos of CSIRAC while visiting the Melbourne Museum where it's now on display. They have a 2KB Casio electronic diary placed in the exhibit an example of a recent computer of the same power.
Alston looks like a walking cadaver and maybe that explains his lack of policies. Seriously, the current Australian government never compares itself with Asia, so Korean statistics don't mean anything to them. American comparisons, maybe, but beating the Poms (in cricket) is all that really counts to Little Johnny & Co.
While metadata might not be so useful for general search engines the Australian government has mandated metadata for their websites to help generate dentral directories for govt agency activities.
Metadata can also be used for content aggregation purposes. Our parent organisation is planning on using Vignette (yuck) for it's central website and they want to suck up information from our own site (Apache yay!).
One of the proposals for the SKA is to use an array of Luneburg lenses, which are basically big balls of polystyrene like material. The material is a dielectric differentially doped so as to focus the incoming signals. Instead of moving a large dish, you only need to move the receiver to focus on a particular signal.
You can see pictures of a Luneburg lens (which was made in Russia) and an artist's conception of the array at the CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility website.
One of the proposed locations for the SKA is in Australia and a number of schools are involved in the SEARFE Project which hooks up a radio receivers to a computers to produce a database of radio frequency usage ("pollution") across the country.
On the day I was made redundant from my (pretty good) commercial sysadmin job I saw an ad for a webmaster at a large astronomy research organisation. It took a lot of work to get this job, but I wouldn't want it any other way.
Although it means a 4 hour daily commute, I feel invigorated by an environment where most of my colleagues have a passion for learning and science rather than lining their pockets. Great conversations and interesting lectures to listen to. I may only be looking after the website, but I feel that at least I am helping people who are expanding humanity's knowledge. (And our research helped build your wireless networking cards).
Contrast this with a commercial job with a software development company which was also a 4 hours commute. At the end of each day I was dead tired from the travelling and stupidity of their marketing driving "strategies". Weekends were a write off I was that zonked. I felt like I was wasting 60 hours a week of my life in exchange for this intrisically worthless thing called money, which I was too tired to use.
I'm glad I had the opportunity to return to science. I hope I can stay here for a long time yet.
I think we understand where all those "false-positive" error messages are coming from.
At the large astronomy research organisation where I am webmaster we still use Netscape 4.x as it is the only common browser that currently works properly on the older Solaris boxes. We tried Mozilla, but encountered problems - it's also a comparative resource hog.
Don't think even NS4 runs on our Vax machines though.
They used to be able to rely on Microsoft churning out bloated software that the majority of users feel they must upgrade to. However, thanks to Microsoft's wonderful licensing structure and less resource hungry alternatives maybe the hardware manufacturers will go this way.
Maybe that's why they didn't accept my suggestion for a wireless network at our radio astronomy observatories... :)
In my (albeit brief) investigations into the personal diary style of blog I seem to have found a correlation between being a female PD blogger and the ownership of a cat. Any suggestions why?
Where are the dog people?