It's an important movie, I'm sure you will agree? It should exist in some form? It doesn't, due to solely to Lucas. The new movies -- love them or leave them. But it's a travesty that such a monumental work has been destroyed.
FTA:
In the original 1977 version Han shoots Greedo without the bounty hunter ever firing a shot. But in the 1997 remake Greedo shoots first, before Han responds in kind.
Are you saying changes like that are equivalent to burning every copy of the story and cleaning Humanity's mind of Star Wars altogether?
I wish people would watch live performances, IN PERSON more often. A live concert of Beethoven's 7th symphony is going to have about 80-95% of the same sounds as any other performance. But, all the little human (and situational) touches of the performance add up to the actual, live performance - from things you're doing (how you're sitting, your emotional state, what instruments or sets of instruments you choose to focus on, where you're sitting, who's sitting near you, etc) to things the performers and hall are 'doing' (the physical configuration of the hall, how the conductor has timed things, and how the individual performers (possibly randomly) 'decide' to play their parts). No two live performances of any classical piece are congruent, and that's just the nature of performing art (i.e. not just music).
Story telling goes back as far (or further? idk) as music into our history. Story tellers routinely make changes to the story they tell, as they tell it. Some of that is artistic license, but before writing was invented it was a simple factor of life. How many books can you recite, word for word without any minor 'inaccuracies'?
So the story teller has changed his story. So. What? Art isn't an engineering problem and entirely lives in the realm of ideas - YOUR ideas. If you don't like a certain performance (i.e. recording) of something then continue to enjoy whatever performance you do like. Life's really that simple.
Corollary: You might ultimately learn to enjoy the minor differences.
I brought up Foundation because it and the Empire side of the series are 'sort of like' the Star Wars line...but one's had plenty of movies made and the other's had none. Hollywood's just been rehashing the same old stories now, over and over, so something genuinely new (but familiar-ish) might do well.
You're in luck. I'm not sure if Roland Emmerich is the right man for this job, though.
Yeah, not sure how I feel about an "Independence Day"-esque Foundation series. I'm guessing that the trader stories will fare well with that style.
Wow, yeah. I grew up in #40. I'm sure there's all sorts of corroborating issues, but I doubt many kindergarten schools where I'm from have ipods/pads/anything like them for kids/etc.
Yeah, yeah, and I got taught how to run a TI-83 in my algebra II/trig class. Oh wait, they REQUIRED I buy a TI-83 for that class. duh duh duh!
Complaining about schools teaching kids Office and instilling a basic computer literacy is like complaining about a wood working class teaching how to use a band saw, lathe, drill press, etc etc. Pick up a newspaper classified ads section sometime and count the number of postings requiring Office experience. I'd rather work with an excel jockey on a data project than someone who thinks a computer is best used for 'youtube'.
Yes, Office is one product from one vendor and it's therefore always and forever acting like the bully in the room. But, do you expect a high school to file an anti-trust case against Microsoft and force Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to be minted by 3 separate companies? LoL! I think they're better off just ponying up $100/machine for software at the school.
Is dumbing down a hidden agenda? Not just in the USA but in the western world? I live in NZ, and believe it is so. the 20ish year olds I come into contact with seem to know almost nothing that I learned 20 years ago. They also question nothing and just accept things. Dumber people are easier to control so maybe it is policy some where.
It's easier to be ignorant when you're already pretty well off. But, there are very definite societal issues involved. Here in the US, there's a rampant bullying problem in the schools that reinforces a negative view toward education, in general. AFAIK the bully culture's been here for decades, so I don't know if that says anything.
My judgment is that frequently Mainers are a bunch of rubes, and surprisingly easy prey for slick business salespeople in this regard.
I wondered if they were just overly well-off:
School officials say they are the first public school district in the country to give every kindergartener an iPad
Must be nice having schools so well funded that even the kindergarten kids get ipads. I remember we had a fake, ROTARY phone at my kindergarten. That was our 'technology'.
Yeah, I don't know. They're measuring wobbliness and changes in brightness (I think). Just off that, it'd seem like all they could do is measure the total mass of the planetary system and (maybe) estimate a lower bound for the number of planets. (i.e. How many times does it flicker, by how intense, and the wobbliness.) It's impressive, really.
I had the same question. What I'm curious to know is how random their sample of sun-like stars is. If they cherry picked them, their results can't be used for estimating Drake parameters. (But who could blame them their first couple times out?)
Note 3 of the article: "the planets found by HARPS are around stars close to the Sun. This makes them better targets for many kinds of additional follow-up observations"
Note 8 is also relevant: "With large numbers of measurements, the detection sensitivity of HARPS is close to 100% for super-Earths of ten Earth-masses with orbital periods of up to one year, and even when considering planets of three Earth masses with a one-year orbit, the probability of detection remains close to 20%."
So, 'back of the envelope' guestimating, their results may only apply to stars close to the sun and represent a lower bound to whatever frequencies they calculate. I don't think anyone knows, yet, whether stars near earth are atypical of the galaxy at large or not.
"HARPS is the ESO facility for the measurement of radial velocities with the highest accuracy currently available. It is fibre-fed by the Cassegrain focus of the 3.6m telescope in La Silla. The instrument is built to obtain very high long term radial velocity accuracy (on the order of 1 m/s). To achieve this goal, HARPS is designed as an echelle spectrograph fed by a pair of fibres and optimised for mechanical stability. It is contained in a vacuum vessel to avoid spectral drift due to temperature and air pressure variations. One of the two fibres collects the star light, while the second is used to either record simultaneously a Th-Ar reference spectrum or the background sky. The two HARPS fibres (object + sky or Th-Ar) have an aperture on the sky of 1"; this produces a resolving power of 115,000 in the spectrograph. Both fibres are equipped with an image scrambler to provide a uniform spectrograph pupil illumination, independent of pointing decentering."
1.) It's an optical telescope. 2.) It's on the face of the earth (I find this amazing.)
I got the impression from Frank Drake's book that astronomy was 'best done' by satellite radio telescope.
Yeah, though Linux, BSD, and Solaris (?) play their cards on the server end. I wish another company would add a good GUI to FreeBSD and package together a modern day unix workstation. (Think like the Macintosh, with the hardware all fully functional, but also not a Mac.)
Yeah, I hear that. I haven't ran windows as my main OS for over a decade now. But, this is/. You'll hear any news involving OS/2, BeOS, linux, *bsd, Windows, and any other OS here.
Last I checked, they've got all sorts of contracts with every PC vendor out there (name brand). When Microsoft releases a new OS all their 'vendors' immediately update.
Granted, this is/. where the average user probably builds their own. But, the 'roll your own crowd' is not the majority.
If I had the bandwidth, I'd just use some combination of freebsd, ZFS, rsync, scp, and/or FreeBSD's "gmirror" facility. (zfs send over an ssh tunnel, for instance.)
Not everyone is a geek, not everyone keeps/needs a server at home.
a.) You don't have to be "a geek" to setup, use, and 'need' a fileserver. You only need to have a PC (Mac-inclusive). b.) If you're not backing up your files to somewhere, you will some day lose them. P ( hard drive failure, t -> 5-10 yrs ) = 1 c.) There's Apple's "TimeMachine" boxes, there's HP's at home file servers, and so on and so forth. I'm pretty sure an average user could set up either of those first two options. e.) You might have heard of "dropbox". 60 minutes a couple nights ago ran a piece on dropbox having a pretty large market cap. I'd say there's a substantial enough need for personal file servers.
FTA: "So we’re stuck at a point where a gigabit — or even 100 Mbps – sounds awesome, but it’s not exactly worth the prices most companies want (or need to charge). This is why Google’s and Sonic.Net’s plans to expand moderately priced 100 Mbps and gigabit networks will be so important."
The summary to this article is misleading. It led me to write a mini-rant about the usefulness of gigabit LANs. In fact, the article's talking about gigabit WAN connections at the home. Their denouncement has the tinge of that old Microsoft exec quote about the internet being a fad and no one needing very much ram.
FTA: “If every consumer has 100 Mbps, we’d have some better applications,” Jasper said. ” At 100 Mbps, high-def video conferencing becomes a reality and you don’t need local storage anymore. You don’t even need local computing.”
You went from talking about gigabit WANs (at the corporate level), to the use of fast ethernet WAN at home. Somehow, there's a use-case at the home that isn't there at the corporation.
And this made/. frontpage, why? Can I get a +5 comment simply by using the words "100 mbps, gigabit, ethernet, 802.11[n-z], important, high-def, local, storage, computing" ?
Store it in the form of steam! STEAM, BABY, STEAM!!!
To your point, how ever, you're ticking off all the steps of the process. You can't prove either fundamental theorems of calculus until you've got the real numbers 'constructed'. You can, how ever, walk up to calculus by tackling the intermediary steps one at a time. Part of your statement seems to be that it's an all or nothing proposition. Either we've got the energy generation, storage, and use all figured out at once and all together - or nothing counts. That's the fool's way to solving a problem.
(Of course, a mathematician would simply assume the existence of a viable fusion reactor, and thereby derive all the necessary technological bits.)
"The laser fusion idea uses pellets of fuel made of isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. A number of lasers are fired at the pellets in order to compress the fuel to just hundredths of its starting size.
In the process, the hydrogen nuclei fuse to create helium and fast-moving subatomic particles called neutrons whose energy, in the form of heat, can be captured and used for the comparatively old-fashioned idea of driving a steam turbine."
That last line reads like the punchline of a (bad) joke. (It's also a testament to how useful water is.)
Anyway, there's huge potential revenues for solving this problem. I just hope a US company gets a share of the eventual windfall.
What makes this news worthy?
"We've done fusion at fairly high levels already. Even on Sunday night, we did the highest fusion yield that has ever been done."
"Dr Moses said that a single shot from the Nif's laser - the largest in the world - released a million billion neutrons and produced for a tiny fraction of a second more power than the world was consuming."
It's written in C... But, it seems relatively small and does one job very well. It's also scientific and I think it's got a good sized userbase.
Anyway, you could always port it to C++. (i.e. basically write from scratch an object-orientated version of gnuplot, perhaps using some of the libraries gnuplot has for the real gritty stuff.)
Or, you could program some kind of C++ based GUI for gnuplot. Think like matlab or excel, only kept simple, stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an important movie, I'm sure you will agree? It should exist in some form? It doesn't, due to solely to Lucas. The new movies -- love them or leave them. But it's a travesty that such a monumental work has been destroyed.
FTA:
In the original 1977 version Han shoots Greedo without the bounty hunter ever firing a shot. But in the 1997 remake Greedo shoots first, before Han responds in kind.
Are you saying changes like that are equivalent to burning every copy of the story and cleaning Humanity's mind of Star Wars altogether?
I wish people would watch live performances, IN PERSON more often. A live concert of Beethoven's 7th symphony is going to have about 80-95% of the same sounds as any other performance. But, all the little human (and situational) touches of the performance add up to the actual, live performance - from things you're doing (how you're sitting, your emotional state, what instruments or sets of instruments you choose to focus on, where you're sitting, who's sitting near you, etc) to things the performers and hall are 'doing' (the physical configuration of the hall, how the conductor has timed things, and how the individual performers (possibly randomly) 'decide' to play their parts). No two live performances of any classical piece are congruent, and that's just the nature of performing art (i.e. not just music).
Story telling goes back as far (or further? idk) as music into our history. Story tellers routinely make changes to the story they tell, as they tell it. Some of that is artistic license, but before writing was invented it was a simple factor of life. How many books can you recite, word for word without any minor 'inaccuracies'?
So the story teller has changed his story. So. What? Art isn't an engineering problem and entirely lives in the realm of ideas - YOUR ideas. If you don't like a certain performance (i.e. recording) of something then continue to enjoy whatever performance you do like. Life's really that simple.
Corollary: You might ultimately learn to enjoy the minor differences.
I brought up Foundation because it and the Empire side of the series are 'sort of like' the Star Wars line...but one's had plenty of movies made and the other's had none. Hollywood's just been rehashing the same old stories now, over and over, so something genuinely new (but familiar-ish) might do well.
You're in luck. I'm not sure if Roland Emmerich is the right man for this job, though.
Yeah, not sure how I feel about an "Independence Day"-esque Foundation series. I'm guessing that the trader stories will fare well with that style.
I want a string of movies based off of Asimov's stories. "The Naked Sun" and "The End of Eternity" come to mind as candidates.
Wow, yeah. I grew up in #40. I'm sure there's all sorts of corroborating issues, but I doubt many kindergarten schools where I'm from have ipods/pads/anything like them for kids/etc.
Off topic, why aren't I living in Maryland?
Yeah, yeah, and I got taught how to run a TI-83 in my algebra II/trig class. Oh wait, they REQUIRED I buy a TI-83 for that class. duh duh duh!
Complaining about schools teaching kids Office and instilling a basic computer literacy is like complaining about a wood working class teaching how to use a band saw, lathe, drill press, etc etc. Pick up a newspaper classified ads section sometime and count the number of postings requiring Office experience. I'd rather work with an excel jockey on a data project than someone who thinks a computer is best used for 'youtube'.
Yes, Office is one product from one vendor and it's therefore always and forever acting like the bully in the room. But, do you expect a high school to file an anti-trust case against Microsoft and force Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to be minted by 3 separate companies? LoL! I think they're better off just ponying up $100/machine for software at the school.
Is dumbing down a hidden agenda? Not just in the USA but in the western world? I live in NZ, and believe it is so. the 20ish year olds I come into contact with seem to know almost nothing that I learned 20 years ago. They also question nothing and just accept things. Dumber people are easier to control so maybe it is policy some where.
It's easier to be ignorant when you're already pretty well off. But, there are very definite societal issues involved. Here in the US, there's a rampant bullying problem in the schools that reinforces a negative view toward education, in general. AFAIK the bully culture's been here for decades, so I don't know if that says anything.
My judgment is that frequently Mainers are a bunch of rubes, and surprisingly easy prey for slick business salespeople in this regard.
I wondered if they were just overly well-off:
School officials say they are the first public school district in the country to give every kindergartener an iPad
Must be nice having schools so well funded that even the kindergarten kids get ipads. I remember we had a fake, ROTARY phone at my kindergarten. That was our 'technology'.
Yeah, I don't know. They're measuring wobbliness and changes in brightness (I think). Just off that, it'd seem like all they could do is measure the total mass of the planetary system and (maybe) estimate a lower bound for the number of planets. (i.e. How many times does it flicker, by how intense, and the wobbliness.) It's impressive, really.
I had the same question. What I'm curious to know is how random their sample of sun-like stars is. If they cherry picked them, their results can't be used for estimating Drake parameters. (But who could blame them their first couple times out?)
Note 3 of the article:
"the planets found by HARPS are around stars close to the Sun. This makes them better targets for many kinds of additional follow-up observations"
Note 8 is also relevant:
"With large numbers of measurements, the detection sensitivity of HARPS is close to 100% for super-Earths of ten Earth-masses with orbital periods of up to one year, and even when considering planets of three Earth masses with a one-year orbit, the probability of detection remains close to 20%."
So, 'back of the envelope' guestimating, their results may only apply to stars close to the sun and represent a lower bound to whatever frequencies they calculate. I don't think anyone knows, yet, whether stars near earth are atypical of the galaxy at large or not.
Forgot the reference: http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/lasilla/instruments/harps/overview.html
Not a Metallica reference, an Asimov reference: http://asimov.wikia.com/wiki/Trantor
This is likely to be informative:
"HARPS is the ESO facility for the measurement of radial velocities with the highest accuracy currently available. It is fibre-fed by the Cassegrain focus of the 3.6m telescope in La Silla.
The instrument is built to obtain very high long term radial velocity accuracy (on the order of 1 m/s). To achieve this goal, HARPS is designed as an echelle spectrograph fed by a pair of fibres and optimised for mechanical stability. It is contained in a vacuum vessel to avoid spectral drift due to temperature and air pressure variations. One of the two fibres collects the star light, while the second is used to either record simultaneously a Th-Ar reference spectrum or the background sky. The two HARPS fibres (object + sky or Th-Ar) have an aperture on the sky of 1"; this produces a resolving power of 115,000 in the spectrograph. Both fibres are equipped with an image scrambler to provide a uniform spectrograph pupil illumination, independent of pointing decentering."
1.) It's an optical telescope.
2.) It's on the face of the earth (I find this amazing.)
I got the impression from Frank Drake's book that astronomy was 'best done' by satellite radio telescope.
Do any of them appear strangely, completely metallic?
Yeah, though Linux, BSD, and Solaris (?) play their cards on the server end. I wish another company would add a good GUI to FreeBSD and package together a modern day unix workstation. (Think like the Macintosh, with the hardware all fully functional, but also not a Mac.)
Same here. It always booted so fast and had a 'good polish'. There's always zeta OS (think that's the name)...or is it Haiku?
Yeah, I hear that. I haven't ran windows as my main OS for over a decade now. But, this is /. You'll hear any news involving OS/2, BeOS, linux, *bsd, Windows, and any other OS here.
Last I checked, they've got all sorts of contracts with every PC vendor out there (name brand). When Microsoft releases a new OS all their 'vendors' immediately update.
Granted, this is /. where the average user probably builds their own. But, the 'roll your own crowd' is not the majority.
If I had the bandwidth, I'd just use some combination of freebsd, ZFS, rsync, scp, and/or FreeBSD's "gmirror" facility. (zfs send over an ssh tunnel, for instance.)
Yeah, I hear you. I'd love to be able to backup my files to my friend's house. Offsite backup on the cheap? Yes please!
(As for how safe an option his house is, well, I know where he lives.)
Not everyone is a geek, not everyone keeps/needs a server at home.
a.) You don't have to be "a geek" to setup, use, and 'need' a fileserver. You only need to have a PC (Mac-inclusive).
b.) If you're not backing up your files to somewhere, you will some day lose them. P ( hard drive failure, t -> 5-10 yrs ) = 1
c.) There's Apple's "TimeMachine" boxes, there's HP's at home file servers, and so on and so forth. I'm pretty sure an average user could set up either of those first two options.
e.) You might have heard of "dropbox". 60 minutes a couple nights ago ran a piece on dropbox having a pretty large market cap. I'd say there's a substantial enough need for personal file servers.
FTA:
"So we’re stuck at a point where a gigabit — or even 100 Mbps – sounds awesome, but it’s not exactly worth the prices most companies want (or need to charge). This is why Google’s and Sonic.Net’s plans to expand moderately priced 100 Mbps and gigabit networks will be so important."
The summary to this article is misleading. It led me to write a mini-rant about the usefulness of gigabit LANs. In fact, the article's talking about gigabit WAN connections at the home. Their denouncement has the tinge of that old Microsoft exec quote about the internet being a fad and no one needing very much ram.
FTA:
“If every consumer has 100 Mbps, we’d have some better applications,” Jasper said. ” At 100 Mbps, high-def video conferencing becomes a reality and you don’t need local storage anymore. You don’t even need local computing.”
You went from talking about gigabit WANs (at the corporate level), to the use of fast ethernet WAN at home. Somehow, there's a use-case at the home that isn't there at the corporation.
And this made /. frontpage, why? Can I get a +5 comment simply by using the words "100 mbps, gigabit, ethernet, 802.11[n-z], important, high-def, local, storage, computing" ?
Is that, last I checked, the relevant literature doesn't agree on a definition.
Store it in the form of steam! STEAM, BABY, STEAM!!!
To your point, how ever, you're ticking off all the steps of the process. You can't prove either fundamental theorems of calculus until you've got the real numbers 'constructed'. You can, how ever, walk up to calculus by tackling the intermediary steps one at a time. Part of your statement seems to be that it's an all or nothing proposition. Either we've got the energy generation, storage, and use all figured out at once and all together - or nothing counts. That's the fool's way to solving a problem.
(Of course, a mathematician would simply assume the existence of a viable fusion reactor, and thereby derive all the necessary technological bits.)
"The laser fusion idea uses pellets of fuel made of isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. A number of lasers are fired at the pellets in order to compress the fuel to just hundredths of its starting size.
In the process, the hydrogen nuclei fuse to create helium and fast-moving subatomic particles called neutrons whose energy, in the form of heat, can be captured and used for the comparatively old-fashioned idea of driving a steam turbine."
That last line reads like the punchline of a (bad) joke. (It's also a testament to how useful water is.)
Anyway, there's huge potential revenues for solving this problem. I just hope a US company gets a share of the eventual windfall.
What makes this news worthy?
"We've done fusion at fairly high levels already. Even on Sunday night, we did the highest fusion yield that has ever been done."
"Dr Moses said that a single shot from the Nif's laser - the largest in the world - released a million billion neutrons and produced for a tiny fraction of a second more power than the world was consuming."
Warning: I'm taking a wild stab in the dark.
It's written in C... But, it seems relatively small and does one job very well. It's also scientific and I think it's got a good sized userbase.
Anyway, you could always port it to C++. (i.e. basically write from scratch an object-orientated version of gnuplot, perhaps using some of the libraries gnuplot has for the real gritty stuff.)
Or, you could program some kind of C++ based GUI for gnuplot. Think like matlab or excel, only kept simple, stupid.