I've read Souls in the Great Machine, and its sequels, The Miocene Arrow and Eyes of the Calculor, and I thought they were all three really good. If you have ever read Dune, Butlerian Jihad (approved by the estate of Frank Herbert), you will find some other interesting human-powered computation. Also, The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling is a great book about mechanical steam powered computing. (i.e. if Mr. Babbage had successfully built the Analytical Engine, the industrial revolution and the information revoultion could have occured at the same time.)
As far as infrastructure is concerned. Consider that just about every airplane I've been on has Airfones in the backs of the seats. Those must be getting some kind of signal. I'm not sure if it is terrestrial or satellite based though. Also, I've got a friend who is a commercial pilot on small to medium sized jets, and he told me that he gets pretty good cell phone signal in the air.
The US Postal Service has thousands of SGI O200 and 1100 computers in use as backend processors for image recognition. Any time you send a letter, an image of the mail piece is sent to a system with racks of them, to be recognized on custom software from Lockheed-Martin. The O200s are actually not bad computers, they have a lot of ram and fast scsi drives, and quad Mips processors running between 200 and 400 Mhz, although parts for them are fantastically expensive. Of course they are running IRIX. The 1100s are just 1U rackmount dual proc Pentium IIIs running linux. One of the main reasons IRIX was used was the availability of an OSI networking stack, which is used to communicate to some of the ancient-but-still-working-well sorting machines. The strange thing about all this is that I am usually the first one to evangelize the networking abilities of Linux, but I've never seen an OSI stack for it.
I was sorting a bunch of donated computers for a non-profit org. one time, and some of the computers were complete junk, the mobos and cases were all corroded, etc. There was one that had about half an inch of orange dust all over everything. At first, I thought it was rust, but then I noticed a srong aromatic smell. It turned out that the computer had been in a tea factory, and the orange powder was tea dust. The computer still worked fine (well, except for the fact that it was a 286).
I remember thinking that this sounded quite familiar (apart from Dune of course), and of course this was the story I was thinking about. Oddly The current article seems to think they have the corner on the market, what with the patents and all.
I always thought it would be cool to try to do all of the things on Heinlein's list:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. --Robert A. Heinlein
I have tried to remove NAV / SAV manually. I removed all the files I could find, every registry key matching SAV, NAV, cc, norton, sym, etc. and still wound up with an un-installable and un-uninstallable setup of the software. This has happened to me on several machines.
I was always puzzled by the idea of installing gentoo by following the step by step directions in the manual. Since they have step by step instructions already, why don't they use those same steps automatically. I mean, instead of saying, if you want to use stage one, type the following commands, say, which stage would you like to use, present a choice, user inputs something, and the script runs the same sequence of commands. Hopefully this installer would do that. It is not that I don't like getting to know the internals, it is just that the whole point of using computers is that they can automate tasks. I can follow the instructions in the manual pretty well, but I might make a mistake. The shell, or perl, python, whatever, on the other hand, when given the same sequence of instructions will always follow the steps exactly. On the gripping hand, I understand about corner cases, what do do when something goes wrong, etc. that a script might not be able to handle.
Ah, that would be sensible. How many shows that I like have gotten canceled. And if they don't cancel it, they shuffle it all around. I would occasionally buy a show if it was current and I missed an episode, for instance.
I am sure this is becomming a standard slashdot comment now, but instead of posting torrents (although for large files, they should), they should use coral cache (append.nyud.net:8090 to the host name)
actually, I think there is even a bookmaklet to do this automatically. *googles* Yep, here it is: Coral Cache Bookmarklet
Actually, even most solar plants use steam. They use an array of mirrors to focus sunlight on a tower that has water in it that boils to steam, which powers a turbine. A more interesting exception is gas-generating coal and fossil fuel plants. Instead of burning coal to produce steam, they chemically react it to produce gas which directly powers the turbines. Some of the reactions are exothermic, so steam can still be used in the process.
The parent has a good point though. Yes, it is on company-owned serverers. However, in the case of searching employee lockers, the locker is owned by the company as well.
I am not a Punctuation Nazi, although the use of apostrophes in plurals really bugs me. I think that proper punctuation is an aid to written communication, in much the same way that RFCs are an aid to electronic communication. When I see intentionally (or unintentionally) bad punctuation, it is the same feeling as when I visit a website that only works in MSIE. Yes, I realize your post is being humorous, but I think the punctuation guys may be higher on the pecking order, but consider how many millions of copies Eats, Shoots, and Leaves has sold, both in the UK and US markets.
You are right that foir a lot of things like menus, flash has largely replaced java applets. However, there are still lots of sites using java applets. For instance a few that I use are pogo.com (a gaming site that I play spades and backgammon on), yahoo games, hushmail.com (an end-to-end encrypted free webmail that uses applets to do OpenPGP email), and lots of educational sites. On the other hand, many sites like neopets and other games sites are using flash in much the same way.
I was just talking with a guy the other day whose company uses an SQL database for some things (it is MS SQL server) but most of their data is not in the database. Instead they have freaking huge servers, running java software that just keeps about half a terabyte of instantiated java classes in core. He said it works really well too! I was rather taken aback, but he said that it works pretty well.
That sounds specific and reproducible enough that you should report it to valve. Valve Contact Information I don't know how good they are at listening to bug reports, but chances are, something specific like that could be fixed pretty easily.
Imagine if the Library of Congress was indexed by google (or whoever.) I would imagine the Wikipedia's authority would increase exponentially! Maybe one day . ..
That does indeed sound like a phenomenal idea. I know it is not here yet, but perhaps Google Print is a step in the right direction.
The focus of the parent comment is not "Vincent", which both Wikipedia and Brittanica agree upon, it was "Frank" versus "Francis". The parent asserts that "Francis", which Brittanica has, is incorrect, and that Mr. Zappa was originally named, or christened "Frank", and was never named "Francis"
Considering that almost anybody that has attended public school knows how to fill out a Scan-Tron sheet blindfoled
You raise an interesting point. What about visually impaired people. The main trouble with optical mark ballots (or at least one serious concern) is that they are not accessible. However, a well-designed system would have some sort of audible voting. In fact, here in Maryland (yes, we also have Diebold touch screen machines and I don't like them either) we have an accessible system that has voice prompts, and a numeric keypad with braille to enter the choice. It then reads back your ballot, and if it sounds correct, you confirm it. I don't know how it stores the ballot after that, maybe the same way as the touch-screen machines.
Did anyone else notice the single paragraph in the article about an inflatable hotel in space next year!?!?!?!
SpaceX certainly isn't opposed to space tourism, however. Its first customer for the heavy-lift Falcon 5, designed to carry more than 6 tons to low-Earth orbit, is a commercial space firm in Las Vegas owned by hotel operator Robert Bigelow. He wants to launch a prototype inflatable space hotel into orbit. Launch is targeted for late next year.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read Souls in the Great Machine, and its sequels, The Miocene Arrow and Eyes of the Calculor, and I thought they were all three really good. If you have ever read Dune, Butlerian Jihad (approved by the estate of Frank Herbert), you will find some other interesting human-powered computation. Also, The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling is a great book about mechanical steam powered computing. (i.e. if Mr. Babbage had successfully built the Analytical Engine, the industrial revolution and the information revoultion could have occured at the same time.)
As far as infrastructure is concerned. Consider that just about every airplane I've been on has Airfones in the backs of the seats. Those must be getting some kind of signal. I'm not sure if it is terrestrial or satellite based though. Also, I've got a friend who is a commercial pilot on small to medium sized jets, and he told me that he gets pretty good cell phone signal in the air.
The US Postal Service has thousands of SGI O200 and 1100 computers in use as backend processors for image recognition. Any time you send a letter, an image of the mail piece is sent to a system with racks of them, to be recognized on custom software from Lockheed-Martin. The O200s are actually not bad computers, they have a lot of ram and fast scsi drives, and quad Mips processors running between 200 and 400 Mhz, although parts for them are fantastically expensive. Of course they are running IRIX. The 1100s are just 1U rackmount dual proc Pentium IIIs running linux. One of the main reasons IRIX was used was the availability of an OSI networking stack, which is used to communicate to some of the ancient-but-still-working-well sorting machines. The strange thing about all this is that I am usually the first one to evangelize the networking abilities of Linux, but I've never seen an OSI stack for it.
My work blocks coral cache because it could be used to "anonymize" or try to bypass the firewall to get unapproved content. Sigh.
I was sorting a bunch of donated computers for a non-profit org. one time, and some of the computers were complete junk, the mobos and cases were all corroded, etc. There was one that had about half an inch of orange dust all over everything. At first, I thought it was rust, but then I noticed a srong aromatic smell. It turned out that the computer had been in a tea factory, and the orange powder was tea dust. The computer still worked fine (well, except for the fact that it was a 286).
I remember thinking that this sounded quite familiar (apart from Dune of course), and of course this was the story I was thinking about. Oddly The current article seems to think they have the corner on the market, what with the patents and all.
I wonder if any of the dendrite donors is named J. D. Shapely.
Technical Information:
Rnav2003.exe does not remove the following items:
* The files or registry keys for the virus definitions
* Subscription information
* Entries in the Task Scheduler
* Other shared files
I have tried to remove NAV / SAV manually. I removed all the files I could find, every registry key matching SAV, NAV, cc, norton, sym, etc. and still wound up with an un-installable and un-uninstallable setup of the software. This has happened to me on several machines.
I was always puzzled by the idea of installing gentoo by following the step by step directions in the manual. Since they have step by step instructions already, why don't they use those same steps automatically. I mean, instead of saying, if you want to use stage one, type the following commands, say, which stage would you like to use, present a choice, user inputs something, and the script runs the same sequence of commands. Hopefully this installer would do that. It is not that I don't like getting to know the internals, it is just that the whole point of using computers is that they can automate tasks. I can follow the instructions in the manual pretty well, but I might make a mistake. The shell, or perl, python, whatever, on the other hand, when given the same sequence of instructions will always follow the steps exactly. On the gripping hand, I understand about corner cases, what do do when something goes wrong, etc. that a script might not be able to handle.
yeah, and while we're at it, don't forget the Godfather trilogy
Ah, that would be sensible. How many shows that I like have gotten canceled. And if they don't cancel it, they shuffle it all around. I would occasionally buy a show if it was current and I missed an episode, for instance.
I am sure this is becomming a standard slashdot comment now, but instead of posting torrents (although for large files, they should), they should use coral cache (append .nyud.net:8090 to the host name)
actually, I think there is even a bookmaklet to do this automatically. *googles* Yep, here it is:
Coral Cache Bookmarklet
Actually, even most solar plants use steam. They use an array of mirrors to focus sunlight on a tower that has water in it that boils to steam, which powers a turbine. A more interesting exception is gas-generating coal and fossil fuel plants. Instead of burning coal to produce steam, they chemically react it to produce gas which directly powers the turbines. Some of the reactions are exothermic, so steam can still be used in the process.
The parent has a good point though. Yes, it is on company-owned serverers. However, in the case of searching employee lockers, the locker is owned by the company as well.
I am not a Punctuation Nazi, although the use of apostrophes in plurals really bugs me. I think that proper punctuation is an aid to written communication, in much the same way that RFCs are an aid to electronic communication. When I see intentionally (or unintentionally) bad punctuation, it is the same feeling as when I visit a website that only works in MSIE.
Yes, I realize your post is being humorous, but I think the punctuation guys may be higher on the pecking order, but consider how many millions of copies Eats, Shoots, and Leaves has sold, both in the UK and US markets.
You are right that foir a lot of things like menus, flash has largely replaced java applets. However, there are still lots of sites using java applets. For instance a few that I use are pogo.com (a gaming site that I play spades and backgammon on), yahoo games, hushmail.com (an end-to-end encrypted free webmail that uses applets to do OpenPGP email), and lots of educational sites. On the other hand, many sites like neopets and other games sites are using flash in much the same way.
I was just talking with a guy the other day whose company uses an SQL database for some things (it is MS SQL server) but most of their data is not in the database. Instead they have freaking huge servers, running java software that just keeps about half a terabyte of instantiated java classes in core. He said it works really well too! I was rather taken aback, but he said that it works pretty well.
That sounds specific and reproducible enough that you should report it to valve. Valve Contact Information I don't know how good they are at listening to bug reports, but chances are, something specific like that could be fixed pretty easily.
The focus of the parent comment is not "Vincent", which both Wikipedia and Brittanica agree upon, it was "Frank" versus "Francis". The parent asserts that "Francis", which Brittanica has, is incorrect, and that Mr. Zappa was originally named, or christened "Frank", and was never named "Francis"
NEXT YEAR!!!!! Wow.