Presumably the six degrees of freedom required for arbitrary position and orientation in space. You use three numbers to specify your position in space along the x, y, and z coordinate axes. Then you use three numbers to specify how much you have rotated around each of the axes. You can think of all six of these numbers as positions on six axes in six dimensional space. Why would you want to do that? So that you can have a cool palindromic name for your controller like SIXAXIS.
Cassandra was a Trojan chick who for some reason was cursed by some god with the ability to see the future, however to have her predictions never ever be believed. She foresaw the fall of troy and told everybody but the Trojans ignored her. Contrast Cassandra, who is prophesying doom correctly, with Chicken Little who is freaked out over nothing. Thus endeth my picking of the nit.
Actually, according to Richard Feynman, light does have the ability to go faster than the speed of light. I'm not sure about the specifics, but for at least some events, there is a an established probability that light will travel between two points in less time than it would take to travel at c. However, at macro scale distances, small variations in the speed of light all cancel out. I read this in Feynman's book QED, which stands for quantum electrodynamics. I highly recommend QED to any non-physicist/non-math-major who wants to gain a better intuitive understanding of the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.
why, after millions of years of evolution, are we so bad at finding it? We should be experts!
Humans have not been around for millions of years. According to this our subspecies popped up around 200 thousand years ago. I'm betting that whatever made Homo habilis happy is different enough that their methods of achieving it won't apply to us. I would assume that we haven't nailed happiness down yet because we keep evolving away from what used to make us happy. As we evolve we get more complex. We've developed culture far more complex than any other species, as far as I know (somebody please correct me if they know otherwise). My completely non-formally-researched understanding is that some cultures have at least a few differences in what makes people happy. Humans of different eras are culturally distinct from each other. We change too fast to learn how to be happy. This makes me wonder, do australian aboriginees ever even ask themselves about happiness? Or at least, did they before the British came along? As far as I know their culture is supposed to be relatively unchanged for some extremely long period of time. Actually, that movie The Gods Must Be Crazy is all about how the African bushmen were so happy until they came in contact with the modern world. So... there you go, we can't all be happy because we've entered a period in history where most cultures change so fast that old strategies don't work. Instinct's not cutting it anymore. Now everybody has to figure it out for themselves within their lifetime. When some wisdom starts to get passed down, suddenly culture changes and it's no good anymore. It will be a long while before humanity all together as a species figures out how to keep from being mentally drawn and quartered by our different conflicting drives. Please pardon the dramatic oversimplifications.
I agree, "all possible validated webpages" is overstating it. Regardless, the status of theoretically being able to correctly render any validated webpage should still fundamentally be the definition of a hypothetical fully compliant browser. The testing of the browser should just be as thorough as is practically possible. There are test suites for the different standards available on the W3C site. A rough compatibility rating could be defined as the percentage of test cases a given browser gets right.
Don't worry, no mocking tones detected, nor will any slappage be required.
But that Kelson dude... boy is he gonna get it.
T.B-L.
Ok, I'm not actually Tim Berners-Lee, in the strictest possible sense, as it were.
Someday I AM going to be cool and famous like that though,
any day now I'm sure,
so some slapping may be necessary. I'll get back to you.
hehe, just kiddin
As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status.
You haven't read many arguments over ActiveX, have you?
Far too many, actually, but you have a good point. I can see why that would make somebody want to insist that an extra feature breaks compliancy. Even so, such a person would still be missing the point of standards, in my opinion. I did stipulate that an extra feature should only be included in a standards compliant browser if it does not interfere with any of the specifications of the standard. If you want the standard to force browsers to not include ActiveX support in order to maintain compliancy, you should write security level requirements into the standard. That way ActiveX would be excluded explicitly rather than implicitly.
By only allowing a standard to explicitly state what qualities would require a feature to be excluded, you get to have both your security and your freedom to innovate beyond what the W3C can think up.
Of course, if your goal is to totally lock down the browser feature set and prevent innovation, then you would define the purpose of standards differently than I do.
I would define a W3C compliant browser as a broswer that correctly displays all webpages that pass the W3C validator. If any possible compliant page does not correctly display in the browser, the browser is not 100% compliant. Any broswer that can't correctly display any possible compliant page should only be called partially compliant. Why should it be more complicated than that?
That probably means that no broswer will ever be 100% compliant, but so what? Just call the browsers what they are so nobody gets misled into thinking they are gauranteed to always see a page correctly if that page passes the validator.
As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status. The purpose of a standard is to help maintain interoperability between two independently managed operations. To accomplish this, all a standard has to do is specify a feature set that assures the minimum amount of functionality needed for correct interoperability. Assuming that additional features do not conflict with the specified design parameters of the standard, there is no way that including the extra features would prevent the browser from successfully displaying a validated page. With browser/page interoperability gauranteed, the standard has served its stated purpose, thus additional restrictions would accomplish nothing.
Anybody see standards as having a different purpose? Why would anybody (aside from the developer trying to make a product seem better than it is) want to call a browser compliant if it only correctly displays a subset of all possible validated pages? Why would anybody insist on the noncompliant label for a browser that implemented extra features that had no effect on a validated page?
Either you haven't read books in the ringworld series or you haven't played halo. Indeed, both the books and the game feature a giant ring-shaped object in space, the inner surfaces of which contain whole ecosystems. That's about where the similarities end, however. The actual story plots and universes have few if any elements in common. Whoever modded you +4 insightful must have just modded something up that sounded intuitively like it was accurate.
Are there any frequencies of light that aren't scattered by clouds? How difficult would it be to use materials that fluoresce for those frequencies as the basis for a sundial that works on overcast days? But maybe no material fluoresces brightly enough to be visible through the cloud-diffused sunlight. In that case, with the digital sundial, you could enclose the time-displaying side of the sundial in a shade box with a viewing aperture.
Anybody know why you couldn't redesign the digital sundial to work for UV or X rays? I bet you could even get more accurate time readings that way.
"That light comes off as a continuum, similar to what you see when the sun shines after a thunderstorm and you get the rainbow effect," said scientist Jeff Cutler of Canadian Light Source. "Same kind of idea here except we generate infrared, we generate visible, and we generate soft and hard X-rays."
wait... don't rainstorm-rainbows separate out the other frequencies also (except for the frequences that water absorms)? If we could see infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, etc., our rainbows would be wider and have more bands, right?
I have no idea who said this and I'm probably misquoting them, but, "I apologize for the lengthiness of my letter. I would have written a shorter one had I had more time." seems like a relevant concept in this situation.
Upcoming space tourism is all well and good. The lucky bastards dropping 200 grand a pop are gonna experience what we've all longed for since we first knew what space was. All I really care about though is that this is a reminder that some day, you, me, that dude over there, WE are going to go into space. The price will come down eventually, and we will get to be astronauts. Ten years ago, I still wasn't sure I personally would ever get to go into space. When I was a little kid, I was sure it would remain a dream for my whole life. Somewhen during the last ten years, I don't remember when, it slowly began dawning on me that it would really happen. Can you believe it? Can you BELIEVE IT?
One of the reasons google is the internet search god is precisely because they offer so much truely useful functionality for free to the user. If they charged for this, yes, they would make money off of it. Will it ever become a killer cellphone app if they do charge for it? No, I don't believe so. The true value of providing this service is to drive the word google that much deeper into the minds of the users. Providing so many awesome services to people for free also builds customer loyalty, something they will desperately need when microsoft really starts playing dirty (well, more like extra super more than usual dirty) to steal google's market share.
Yes, what if all that vibration causes so much proton/proton friction that it speeds up decay and brings the proton's life way down below the lifespan of the universe?
What if we start producing a bunch of worn out protons? Quintillions of them? Decillions even maybe? They could start migrating into our food supply. No doubt we'll all be fine, but maybe a thousand years from now all those severely frictionally pock-marked protons might start crapping out.
To witness what the picture is doing to your brain even more directly than cutting/pasting squares or looking at color hex values or blocking off with windows, physically use a piece of paper with small holes cut in it held against the screen.
Now arrange the holes so that one hole shows only the B square color (no edges, no letter B). Then slowly slide the other hole from showing no A square edge to the A square edge dividing the hole in half. If you do it right, it looks like the colors are actually darkening and lightening as you slide the paper and the ratio of area of A square/adjacent square changes within the hole.
Bear witness to the mechanisms of visual perception in real time! Small patches of color constitute a sizable percentage of your consciousness! This is a small peek behind the scenes of existence. You might call this picture an "optical illusion" but this picture is merely an extreme contrived example that calls attention to the kind of perceptual interpretation that your visual cortex is performing on a moment-to-moment basis.
The act of being, the act of existing for a conscious entity, it is the act of unconsciously reinterpreting our perceptions so we can make sense of them, and we usually don't get to see the first drafts.
Insert further life-is-an-illusion observations here for those of you who are more buddhistically inclined.
The Gecko God of Mozilla and Open Source is a jerk. A complete kneebiter. Thanks for your time. Now I'm off to see Gentoo. Later.
Somebody please mod this up to Score:5, Funny because it's really damn fuckin funny and I'm out of mod points, damnit. And remind me which Hitchhiker's Guide book this is from?
For me, typing will always be the preferred input method, no matter what advances in handwriting and voice recognition come about. I can type much faster than I can handwrite or speak. I can think faster than I can write or speak. Typing lets me input text at a rate much closer to the rate at which my thoughts are actually occuring in my head. This means that I don't have to modulate my thoughts with the expression of those thoughts.
Maybe I just have atrophied/undeveloped writing skills, but when writing out a lot of thoughts, my brain has to wait for my hand to catch up sometimes before it can move on to more ideas.
Some have commented that 60+ wpm typing speeds are not beneficial to a typist over the long run because one does not type constantly. Possibly the interuptions needed for thinking and other activities mitigate productivity gains due to fast typing. For me though, being able to "flush my output buffer" sooner rather than later lets me think more fluidly and effectively. Naturally I assume that other people's mental pattern differences result in different typing benefits.
In terms of interface design, comparison of stylus input to keyboard input bears little fruit because they are generally used in different situations. For voice recogniton, assuming a high quality natural language interpreter, I would still rather type than speak my commands. For me it is faster, and I wouldn't have to sound like an idiot. Speaking "delete last word" is a lot slower than hitting ctrl-shift, <- , backspace. If instead there was a verbal shorthand, that could be fast, but that would be another skill to learn and could sound moronic. Imagine a computer lab full of people uttering strange sequences of syllables to their computers.
Ultimately, for those who use computers often enough and have the right brain for it, almost all input can be done with the keyboard. If you can memorize all the hotkeys, they are much more efficient than button hunting with the mouse. Most people, I gather, dot not make good hotkey sponges. The keyboards potential, though, guarantees that it will never go extinct. At least, not until a long time from now when the world's computing environment evolves beyond recognition.
For people who don't need the computer that much, perhaps it's true that the time would be better spent learning concepts rather than typing skills. On the other hand, the easier it is to use the computer, the more you will use it. The more you use it, the more you pick up and internalize the concepts employed in its design. So I would say that time should be devoted to both typing and understanding. To really determine the best balance to the mixture though, you'd need to do a lot of trials and see how average students do.
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably the six degrees of freedom required for arbitrary position and orientation in space. You use three numbers to specify your position in space along the x, y, and z coordinate axes. Then you use three numbers to specify how much you have rotated around each of the axes. You can think of all six of these numbers as positions on six axes in six dimensional space. Why would you want to do that? So that you can have a cool palindromic name for your controller like SIXAXIS.
Cassandra was a Trojan chick who for some reason was cursed by some god with the ability to see the future, however to have her predictions never ever be believed. She foresaw the fall of troy and told everybody but the Trojans ignored her. Contrast Cassandra, who is prophesying doom correctly, with Chicken Little who is freaked out over nothing. Thus endeth my picking of the nit.
Actually, according to Richard Feynman, light does have the ability to go faster than the speed of light. I'm not sure about the specifics, but for at least some events, there is a an established probability that light will travel between two points in less time than it would take to travel at c. However, at macro scale distances, small variations in the speed of light all cancel out. I read this in Feynman's book QED, which stands for quantum electrodynamics. I highly recommend QED to any non-physicist/non-math-major who wants to gain a better intuitive understanding of the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.
Humans have not been around for millions of years. According to this our subspecies popped up around 200 thousand years ago. I'm betting that whatever made Homo habilis happy is different enough that their methods of achieving it won't apply to us. I would assume that we haven't nailed happiness down yet because we keep evolving away from what used to make us happy. As we evolve we get more complex. We've developed culture far more complex than any other species, as far as I know (somebody please correct me if they know otherwise). My completely non-formally-researched understanding is that some cultures have at least a few differences in what makes people happy. Humans of different eras are culturally distinct from each other. We change too fast to learn how to be happy. This makes me wonder, do australian aboriginees ever even ask themselves about happiness? Or at least, did they before the British came along? As far as I know their culture is supposed to be relatively unchanged for some extremely long period of time. Actually, that movie The Gods Must Be Crazy is all about how the African bushmen were so happy until they came in contact with the modern world. So... there you go, we can't all be happy because we've entered a period in history where most cultures change so fast that old strategies don't work. Instinct's not cutting it anymore. Now everybody has to figure it out for themselves within their lifetime. When some wisdom starts to get passed down, suddenly culture changes and it's no good anymore. It will be a long while before humanity all together as a species figures out how to keep from being mentally drawn and quartered by our different conflicting drives. Please pardon the dramatic oversimplifications.
Don't worry, no mocking tones detected, nor will any slappage be required.
But that Kelson dude... boy is he gonna get it.
T.B-L.
Ok, I'm not actually Tim Berners-Lee, in the strictest possible sense, as it were.
Someday I AM going to be cool and famous like that though,
any day now I'm sure,
so some slapping may be necessary. I'll get back to you.
hehe, just kiddin
By only allowing a standard to explicitly state what qualities would require a feature to be excluded, you get to have both your security and your freedom to innovate beyond what the W3C can think up.
Of course, if your goal is to totally lock down the browser feature set and prevent innovation, then you would define the purpose of standards differently than I do.
I would define a W3C compliant browser as a broswer that correctly displays all webpages that pass the W3C validator. If any possible compliant page does not correctly display in the browser, the browser is not 100% compliant. Any broswer that can't correctly display any possible compliant page should only be called partially compliant. Why should it be more complicated than that?
That probably means that no broswer will ever be 100% compliant, but so what? Just call the browsers what they are so nobody gets misled into thinking they are gauranteed to always see a page correctly if that page passes the validator.
As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status. The purpose of a standard is to help maintain interoperability between two independently managed operations. To accomplish this, all a standard has to do is specify a feature set that assures the minimum amount of functionality needed for correct interoperability. Assuming that additional features do not conflict with the specified design parameters of the standard, there is no way that including the extra features would prevent the browser from successfully displaying a validated page. With browser/page interoperability gauranteed, the standard has served its stated purpose, thus additional restrictions would accomplish nothing.
Anybody see standards as having a different purpose?
Why would anybody (aside from the developer trying to make a product seem better than it is) want to call a browser compliant if it only correctly displays a subset of all possible validated pages?
Why would anybody insist on the noncompliant label for a browser that implemented extra features that had no effect on a validated page?
aldeng -
Either you haven't read books in the ringworld series or you haven't played halo. Indeed, both the books and the game feature a giant ring-shaped object in space, the inner surfaces of which contain whole ecosystems. That's about where the similarities end, however. The actual story plots and universes have few if any elements in common. Whoever modded you +4 insightful must have just modded something up that sounded intuitively like it was accurate.
Are there any frequencies of light that aren't scattered by clouds? How difficult would it be to use materials that fluoresce for those frequencies as the basis for a sundial that works on overcast days? But maybe no material fluoresces brightly enough to be visible through the cloud-diffused sunlight. In that case, with the digital sundial, you could enclose the time-displaying side of the sundial in a shade box with a viewing aperture.
Anybody know why you couldn't redesign the digital sundial to work for UV or X rays? I bet you could even get more accurate time readings that way.
"That light comes off as a continuum, similar to what you see when the sun shines after a thunderstorm and you get the rainbow effect," said scientist Jeff Cutler of Canadian Light Source. "Same kind of idea here except we generate infrared, we generate visible, and we generate soft and hard X-rays."
wait... don't rainstorm-rainbows separate out the other frequencies also (except for the frequences that water absorms)? If we could see infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, etc., our rainbows would be wider and have more bands, right?
I have no idea who said this and I'm probably misquoting them, but, "I apologize for the lengthiness of my letter. I would have written a shorter one had I had more time." seems like a relevant concept in this situation.
Doesn't that pretty much include the entirety of human history?
Upcoming space tourism is all well and good. The lucky bastards dropping 200 grand a pop are gonna experience what we've all longed for since we first knew what space was. All I really care about though is that this is a reminder that some day, you, me, that dude over there, WE are going to go into space. The price will come down eventually, and we will get to be astronauts. Ten years ago, I still wasn't sure I personally would ever get to go into space. When I was a little kid, I was sure it would remain a dream for my whole life. Somewhen during the last ten years, I don't remember when, it slowly began dawning on me that it would really happen. Can you believe it? Can you BELIEVE IT?
One of the reasons google is the internet search god is precisely because they offer so much truely useful functionality for free to the user. If they charged for this, yes, they would make money off of it. Will it ever become a killer cellphone app if they do charge for it? No, I don't believe so. The true value of providing this service is to drive the word google that much deeper into the minds of the users. Providing so many awesome services to people for free also builds customer loyalty, something they will desperately need when microsoft really starts playing dirty (well, more like extra super more than usual dirty) to steal google's market share.
and a mascuwatt? what is that?
Yes, what if all that vibration causes so much proton/proton friction that it speeds up decay and brings the proton's life way down below the lifespan of the universe?
What if we start producing a bunch of worn out protons? Quintillions of them? Decillions even maybe? They could start migrating into our food supply. No doubt we'll all be fine, but maybe a thousand years from now all those severely frictionally pock-marked protons might start crapping out.
Ever think of that, huh? Well did ya???
To witness what the picture is doing to your brain even more directly than cutting/pasting squares or looking at color hex values or blocking off with windows, physically use a piece of paper with small holes cut in it held against the screen.
Now arrange the holes so that one hole shows only the B square color (no edges, no letter B). Then slowly slide the other hole from showing no A square edge to the A square edge dividing the hole in half. If you do it right, it looks like the colors are actually darkening and lightening as you slide the paper and the ratio of area of A square/adjacent square changes within the hole.
Bear witness to the mechanisms of visual perception in real time! Small patches of color constitute a sizable percentage of your consciousness! This is a small peek behind the scenes of existence. You might call this picture an "optical illusion" but this picture is merely an extreme contrived example that calls attention to the kind of perceptual interpretation that your visual cortex is performing on a moment-to-moment basis.
The act of being, the act of existing for a conscious entity, it is the act of unconsciously reinterpreting our perceptions so we can make sense of them, and we usually don't get to see the first drafts.
Insert further life-is-an-illusion observations here for those of you who are more buddhistically inclined.
The Gecko God of Mozilla and Open Source is a jerk. A complete kneebiter. Thanks for your time. Now I'm off to see Gentoo. Later.
Somebody please mod this up to Score:5, Funny because it's really damn fuckin funny and I'm out of mod points, damnit. And remind me which Hitchhiker's Guide book this is from?
For me, typing will always be the preferred input method, no matter what advances in handwriting and voice recognition come about. I can type much faster than I can handwrite or speak. I can think faster than I can write or speak. Typing lets me input text at a rate much closer to the rate at which my thoughts are actually occuring in my head. This means that I don't have to modulate my thoughts with the expression of those thoughts.
Maybe I just have atrophied/undeveloped writing skills, but when writing out a lot of thoughts, my brain has to wait for my hand to catch up sometimes before it can move on to more ideas.
Some have commented that 60+ wpm typing speeds are not beneficial to a typist over the long run because one does not type constantly. Possibly the interuptions needed for thinking and other activities mitigate productivity gains due to fast typing. For me though, being able to "flush my output buffer" sooner rather than later lets me think more fluidly and effectively. Naturally I assume that other people's mental pattern differences result in different typing benefits.
In terms of interface design, comparison of stylus input to keyboard input bears little fruit because they are generally used in different situations. For voice recogniton, assuming a high quality natural language interpreter, I would still rather type than speak my commands. For me it is faster, and I wouldn't have to sound like an idiot. Speaking "delete last word" is a lot slower than hitting ctrl-shift, <- , backspace. If instead there was a verbal shorthand, that could be fast, but that would be another skill to learn and could sound moronic. Imagine a computer lab full of people uttering strange sequences of syllables to their computers.
Ultimately, for those who use computers often enough and have the right brain for it, almost all input can be done with the keyboard. If you can memorize all the hotkeys, they are much more efficient than button hunting with the mouse. Most people, I gather, dot not make good hotkey sponges. The keyboards potential, though, guarantees that it will never go extinct. At least, not until a long time from now when the world's computing environment evolves beyond recognition.
For people who don't need the computer that much, perhaps it's true that the time would be better spent learning concepts rather than typing skills. On the other hand, the easier it is to use the computer, the more you will use it. The more you use it, the more you pick up and internalize the concepts employed in its design. So I would say that time should be devoted to both typing and understanding. To really determine the best balance to the mixture though, you'd need to do a lot of trials and see how average students do.