So we little green aliens go to all the trouble to put the transmitter far away from any other radio sources (like stars and galaxies) - we shift the frequency to compensate for the orbit of your planet around your sun - we listen to your transmissions and send ours back on channels we know you must be listening to - and we get modded down for all of those things? Damn!
So what DO we have to do to get more Karma at Seti?
LOTR has been a big-time money maker - that usually focusses Hollywood's minds. Perhaps they'll finally realise that being true to the original book is a good idea.
That also worked well for Harry Potter.
It makes for long movies though. The page count of the Foundation Trilogy must be about the same as LOTR - so they'd have to sign up for three hefty movies.
The US military are looking at the precise technology that Q's invisible car is supposed to use.
I don't think it would ever be as effective as the invisible car in Bond - but as more of a cameleon-like camoflage that takes on the general colouration of the background, it might work. Heck, it works for cameleons.
> I just received the happy news that my wife is two weeks > pregnant. I will be a father for the first time, and I have > 8.5 months to prepare for it.
Congratulations! You'll enjoy it - it's a blast!
You may not have as much time to prepare as you think.
When my kid was about 8 months old, I wrote a "game" for him on my old AtariST.
The screen was full of balloons (well, brightly coloured circles) of various sizes and the system was set up to increase the size of the balloons whenever you hit *any* key or wiggled the mouse. When the balloons reached a certain size, they would POP! loudly - and shower little sprinkles in all directions.
A new (tiny) balloon is created for each one that pops and it took about 5 smashes of tiny hands on keyboard to blow up a new balloon.
The point of this?
Well, very tiny kids don't realise that the screen isn't a TV set - and that the (detached) keyboard is a part of the computer at all. It comes as something of a revelation to discover that bashing at random on THIS THING causes THAT THING to do something. In fact the entire idea of being able to do something to change what happens "on TV" is rather novel and interesting.
Anyway - that's the longest lived and most loved game we've ever owned.
My 11yr old son has never used Windoze at home (I stopped using M$ products back in the era of Win 3.0.)
Executive Summary:
* CD-ROM Games - forget it. There are home-grown games
but they are rarely of commercial quality. WINE doesn't
do DirectX - so unless you are prepared to pay for WINE-X
you can't play Windoze games - period. Even Wine-X won't
play more than a handful of Windoze games well.
* Online Games/Flash/Shockwave - no problem. Use Mozilla.
* For *everything* else - Linux is better than Windoze..and
it happens to be free.
Conclusion:
Buy them a GameCube for games - keep the PC for serious stuff. I don't think that's a bad idea anyway - while they are doing homework, there is no temptation to take time out for a game - and that's "A Good Thing".
Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa...
on
Fun With Wine
·
· Score: 2
His instructions seem to require you to check out WineX from CVS - but his instructions suggest there is anonymous checkout available without a password.
When I tried it just now, it definitely needed a password.
I have a friend who is something of a religious fanatic - he does missionary work in Mexico, etc, etc.
He refused to read Harry Potter to his children and decries it as something that glorifies Wickken and deviltry.
However, he told me he's read Lord of the Rings to his kids many times...
Go figure.
What has it got in it's nassty pocketsses?
on
Go Go Gadget Minisaw
·
· Score: 5, Funny
My father used to work for the airlines doing Radio and Radar repair. He carried a little kiddies pencil case containing a Swiss Army Knife and an expensive Fountain Pen. The case was labelled "747 Repair Kit" and he swore those were the only tools he ever used. He also remarked that he used the fountain pen more than the knife.
My Swiss Army knife (a top-of-the-range one) includes a small ballpoint pen - so I don't need the fountain pen...but I have a tiny LED flashlight. That's the software guy's PC repair kit.
What's worrying about this is the repeated references to the system dropping out of hardware accelleration.
It's not a problem for simple 2D renderings - browsers, Xterms, etc - but if you are running 3D applications like games and it kicks you out of hardware accel, you're dead.
Not only that, but OpenGL programs will have registered a "rendering context" which will define what extensions to the OpenGL API are available to it. Once the program is using those extensions, you can't just take them away and drop down to a software rendering context. The program will crash for sure.
It's all very well to say "Well - don't do that then" - but naive users will assume that all of this will work smoothly (as it should) and that having programs crash when you resize the screen is a BUG.
Dunno - maybe they've thought through all the implications - but it doesn't look like it from a quick read of the RandR page.
There is also a strong suggestion that vast increases in the rates of asthma are probably linked to kids spending more time breathing indoor (filtered) air instead of playing outside. Excessive cleanliness in ages 1 through maybe 10 could account for a lot of problems. We're evolved to deal with all those bugs out there - but how much of that natural immunity is genetic - and how much is 'learned' by our immune systems in the early years of life.
> Evolution lets you adapt to your environment. Considering > an autistic individual needs lots of supervision, this is > probably not the case.
If you believe this is an evolutionary change (and I do not) then you'd have to conclude as follows:
These children probably get lots of supervision - could be that's part of the environment that they are adapting to? Biology isn't picky about the distinction between a 'natural' environment and one that we've created - or about the distinction between a sustainable environment and an unsustainable one. When a large proportion of the population is severely autistic and can no longer provide that supervision for their offspring - evolution must either step in again - or if it can't react fast enough, there will be a population crash.
If you do believe this is an evolved adaptation then you'd have to conclude that Geeks should not be marrying other Geeks.
Personally, I'd suspect some side-effect of pollution...or a statistical error of some kind. I doubt evolution could react to a change in the environment as fast as one generation - which is as long as the geek population has surged in California.
Refusing to sell windows would probably be a credible threat. It would put a pretty severe short-term kink in your economy if every company had to transition for Linux (or whatever) overnight. Refusing to sell a third rate video console has minimal negative impact...it might even be a positive benefit to society.
I recall a story from high school (although it may be apochryphal) that a chemistry teacher at my school had been demonstrating the reactivity of various metals and had a number of small chunks of said metals arrayed along his bench in various jars.
As usual the sodium was kept in mineral oil - and in the story I heard, one of the other (presumably less reactive) metals was kept under water.
When the most trusted kid in the class was left to clean up at the end, they claimed that he'd inadvertantly placed the lump of sodium back into the jar containing water - but that it had not exploded because it was still coated with oil.
The story goes that some hours later, the oil was finally displaced by the water in the jar and the small chunk of sodium then exploded - shattering the entire row of glass jars and spreading exotic and highly reactive metal chunks all over the room resulting in hundreds of small explosions and fires.
I kinda suspect that this may not be a true story though because I can't find a reasonable candidate for the metal that would have to have been kept under water in order for this to be true. However, there was some kind of an explosion/fire in the lab because I remember chemistry classes being cancelled for about three weeks afterwards.
Chemistry classes back in the mid-1960's were much more dangerous than kids are exposed to these days. I clearly recall being given small amounts of metallic mercury to *play* with!! These days, if you so much as crack a mercury thermometer they evacuate the city for three blocks in every direction.:-)
It's a shame, mercury is incredibly good fun to play with - until the vapours poison your brain of course! It's hard to come to terms with something so heavy that's "just" a liquid - and it's amazing how the droplets 'shatter' when you hit them with the end of a ruler.
The problem is that graphics accellerators undergo a major increase in performance about every 6 months - they increase in speed FAR faster than Moores law would lead you to expect. (There are several good reasons for this that I won't go into here).
Hence, it's almost certain that you'll want to upgrade your graphics card before your CPU, memory or motherboard which are all plodding along at Moore's law rates (or slower in the case of memory).
Worse still, the integrated chipsets are always at least one or two years behind the cutting edge of graphics technology - and often share RAM with the CPU which slows everything down still further.
So - would you buy a motherboard where the CPU and RAM couldn't be upgraded?
No?
Then WTF would you want an integrated graphics chip?
The ONLY reason to do this is to get a cheaper PC in the first place - but if you buy one of these ultra-cheap boxes, remember that it's graphics are a year or two out of date on the day you bought it.
Fortunately, it's usually possible to plug a real graphics adaptor into these motherboards and have it automatically override the built-in chipset - but since you nearly always want to do that, the extra expense of the built-in chipset is a waste.
It all depends on how they make their watermark. If they do it in the time domain and forget to test for reversal then this could work - but if they do it in the frequency domain, it might not. I imagine the guys working on watermarking have thought of this kind of trick.
You are talking about modern FORTRAN though - the legacy FORTRAN that we have is all >30 years old. I could be wrong - but I don't think all the fancy features you refer to existed back then.
I've been emailing the guy who did this - he hadn't even *heard* of Palladium or the ridiculous laws proposed to close the analog hole. So all of his bold assertions about this stuff ALWAYS and FOREVER being ways to circumvent copy-protection are just so much ill-informed nonsense.
The limited scope of a contest tells you very little about either the proficiency of the programmer or the quality of the programming language.
Only a task that's gonna take years and consume a few hundred thousand lines of code will really show which programmers can stand the pace over the long term, write *maintainable* code, document it well - and so on. Similarly, a program that's developed in a short period of time by a small team tells you nothing about how readable the programming language is. Some languages are easy to write in - but a bugger to understand a year later.
Still, contests are fun - and that's enough to justify their existance.
The insane law that attempts to defeat this would have the thing that your microphone is connected to check for hidden watermarks in the analog audio and refuse to record it.
> Not only would these be illegal to distribute (or maybe even possess!), > but once people have to go and purchase something like this, rather than > download some software, it's that much more likely they'd just pay for > the music.
You forget that it's only the person doing the copying who needs all this specialised (and perhaps eventually, illegal) hardware - once the music/video/ebook has been captured in an unencoded form, anyone can snarf a copy and play it.
I work in the flight sim business. I can assure you that every one of the 2 million plus lines of code written by my team over the last ten years was in C++ and for the ten years before that it was in C or Ada.
30 year old code will probably be in FORTRAN.
We do still have legacy code in Fortran. Mostly stuff we inherited from other simulators - and mostly in the area of simulating the actual flight dynamics. That stuff is hard to rewrite accurately and is a *tiny* fraction of a typical multi-million-lines-of-code simulator.
HOWEVER (dragging this screaming and kicking back on-topic) there is absolutely no need to invent FORTRAN 2000 just so we can run legacy code. If it's legacy code, that's because we can't/won't rewrite it - so why would we need a new revision of the language?
All that the world needs is a good way to call FORTRAN functions from within C++ - and we already have that.
Slashdot Mirror
So we little green aliens go to all the trouble to put the
transmitter far away from any other radio sources (like stars
and galaxies) - we shift the frequency to compensate for the
orbit of your planet around your sun - we listen to your
transmissions and send ours back on channels we know you
must be listening to - and we get modded down for all of
those things? Damn!
So what DO we have to do to get more Karma at Seti?
LOTR has been a big-time money maker - that usually focusses Hollywood's
minds. Perhaps they'll finally realise that being true to the original
book is a good idea.
That also worked well for Harry Potter.
It makes for long movies though. The page count of the Foundation
Trilogy must be about the same as LOTR - so they'd have to sign up
for three hefty movies.
The movie looked good - but it had far to little plot.
You could have compressed it down to 20 minutes and lost nothing of
the story.
How the heck this was ever a two-and-three-quarter hour movie beats
me.
So - yes, it was good Sci-Fi, yes it made you think and yes it
was nicely acted and visually interesting - but Y-A-W-N.
Plan 9 from Outer Space.
I thought *everyone* knew that!
The US military are looking at the precise technology that Q's
invisible car is supposed to use.
I don't think it would ever be as effective as the invisible car in Bond -
but as more of a cameleon-like camoflage that takes on the general
colouration of the background, it might work. Heck, it works for
cameleons.
> I just received the happy news that my wife is two weeks
> pregnant. I will be a father for the first time, and I have
> 8.5 months to prepare for it.
Congratulations! You'll enjoy it - it's a blast!
You may not have as much time to prepare as you think.
When my kid was about 8 months old, I wrote a "game" for him on my old AtariST.
The screen was full of balloons (well, brightly coloured circles) of various
sizes and the system was set up to increase the size of the balloons whenever
you hit *any* key or wiggled the mouse. When the balloons reached a certain
size, they would POP! loudly - and shower little sprinkles in all directions.
A new (tiny) balloon is created for each one that pops and it took about 5
smashes of tiny hands on keyboard to blow up a new balloon.
The point of this?
Well, very tiny kids don't realise that the screen isn't a TV set - and that
the (detached) keyboard is a part of the computer at all. It comes as
something of a revelation to discover that bashing at random on THIS THING
causes THAT THING to do something. In fact the entire idea of being able
to do something to change what happens "on TV" is rather novel and
interesting.
Anyway - that's the longest lived and most loved game we've ever owned.
Oh - yeah - get a drool-proof keyboard too!
My 11yr old son has never used Windoze at home (I stopped using M$ products
back in the era of Win 3.0.)
Executive Summary:
* CD-ROM Games - forget it. There are home-grown games
but they are rarely of commercial quality. WINE doesn't
do DirectX - so unless you are prepared to pay for WINE-X
you can't play Windoze games - period. Even Wine-X won't
play more than a handful of Windoze games well.
* Online Games/Flash/Shockwave - no problem. Use Mozilla.
* For *everything* else - Linux is better than Windoze..and
it happens to be free.
Conclusion:
Buy them a GameCube for games - keep the PC for serious
stuff. I don't think that's a bad idea anyway - while they
are doing homework, there is no temptation to take time out
for a game - and that's "A Good Thing".
His instructions seem to require you to check out WineX from CVS - but
his instructions suggest there is anonymous checkout available without
a password.
When I tried it just now, it definitely needed a password.
I have a friend who is something of a religious fanatic - he does missionary
work in Mexico, etc, etc.
He refused to read Harry Potter to his children and decries it as something
that glorifies Wickken and deviltry.
However, he told me he's read Lord of the Rings to his kids many times...
Go figure.
My father used to work for the airlines doing Radio and Radar repair. He carried a little kiddies pencil case containing a Swiss Army Knife and an expensive Fountain Pen. The case was labelled "747 Repair Kit" and he swore those were the only tools he ever used. He also remarked that he used the fountain pen more than the knife.
...
My Swiss Army knife (a top-of-the-range one) includes a small ballpoint pen - so I don't need the fountain pen...but I have a tiny LED flashlight. That's the software guy's PC repair kit.
Then of course there is my mother's handbag
Rotation is especially good for PDA's. The (sadly gone) Agenda
PDA ran X and had screen rotation hacked in at some low level.
It was very useful with limited screen resources because some
applications work best in landscape and others best in portrait.
What's worrying about this is the repeated references to the
system dropping out of hardware accelleration.
It's not a problem for simple 2D renderings - browsers, Xterms,
etc - but if you are running 3D applications like games and it
kicks you out of hardware accel, you're dead.
Not only that, but OpenGL programs will have registered a "rendering
context" which will define what extensions to the OpenGL API are
available to it. Once the program is using those extensions,
you can't just take them away and drop down to a software rendering
context. The program will crash for sure.
It's all very well to say "Well - don't do that then" - but naive
users will assume that all of this will work smoothly (as it should)
and that having programs crash when you resize the screen is a BUG.
Dunno - maybe they've thought through all the implications - but it
doesn't look like it from a quick read of the RandR page.
The word react was used correctly and with care. If you add acid to
alkali, they "react" - there is a speed to that reaction.
Neither have brains or central nervous system.
Being a pedant is a dangerous activity.
There is also a strong suggestion that vast increases in the rates of asthma are probably linked to kids spending more time breathing indoor (filtered) air instead of playing outside. Excessive cleanliness in ages 1 through maybe 10 could account for a lot of problems. We're evolved to deal with all those bugs out there - but how much of that natural immunity is genetic - and how much is 'learned' by our immune systems in the early years of life.
> Evolution lets you adapt to your environment. Considering
> an autistic individual needs lots of supervision, this is
> probably not the case.
If you believe this is an evolutionary change (and I do not) then you'd have to conclude as follows:
These children probably get lots of supervision - could be that's part of the environment that they are adapting to? Biology isn't picky about the distinction between a 'natural' environment and one that we've created - or about the distinction between a sustainable environment and an unsustainable one. When a large proportion of the population is severely autistic and can no longer provide that supervision for their offspring - evolution must either step in again - or if it can't react fast enough, there will be a population crash.
If you do believe this is an evolved adaptation then you'd have to conclude that Geeks should not be marrying other Geeks.
Personally, I'd suspect some side-effect of pollution...or a statistical error of some kind. I doubt evolution could react to a change in the environment as fast as one generation - which is as long as the geek population has surged in California.
Refusing to sell windows would probably be a credible threat. It would
put a pretty severe short-term kink in your economy if every company had
to transition for Linux (or whatever) overnight. Refusing to sell a third
rate video console has minimal negative impact...it might even be a positive
benefit to society.
I recall a story from high school (although it may be apochryphal) that a chemistry teacher at my school had been demonstrating the reactivity of various metals and had a number of small chunks of said metals arrayed along his bench in various jars.
:-)
As usual the sodium was kept in mineral oil - and in the story I heard, one of the other (presumably less reactive) metals was kept under water.
When the most trusted kid in the class was left to clean up at the end, they claimed that he'd inadvertantly placed the lump of sodium back into the jar containing water - but that it had not exploded because it was still coated with oil.
The story goes that some hours later, the oil was finally displaced by the water in the jar and the small chunk of sodium then exploded - shattering the entire row of glass jars and spreading exotic and highly reactive metal chunks all over the room resulting in hundreds of small explosions and fires.
I kinda suspect that this may not be a true story though because I can't find a reasonable candidate for the metal that would have to have been kept under water in order for this to be true. However, there was some kind of an explosion/fire in the lab because I remember chemistry classes being cancelled for about three weeks afterwards.
Chemistry classes back in the mid-1960's were much more dangerous than kids are exposed to these days. I clearly recall being given small amounts of metallic mercury to *play* with!! These days, if you so much as crack a mercury thermometer they evacuate the city for three blocks in every direction.
It's a shame, mercury is incredibly good fun to play with - until the vapours poison your brain of course! It's hard to come to terms with something so heavy that's "just" a liquid - and it's amazing how the droplets 'shatter' when you hit them with the end of a ruler.
The problem is that graphics accellerators undergo a major increase in performance about every 6 months - they increase in speed FAR faster than Moores law would lead you to expect. (There are several good reasons for this that I won't go into here).
Hence, it's almost certain that you'll want to upgrade your graphics card before your CPU, memory or motherboard which are all plodding along at Moore's law rates (or slower in the case of memory).
Worse still, the integrated chipsets are always at least one or two years behind the cutting edge of graphics technology - and often share RAM with the CPU which slows everything down still further.
So - would you buy a motherboard where the CPU and RAM couldn't be upgraded?
No?
Then WTF would you want an integrated graphics chip?
The ONLY reason to do this is to get a cheaper PC in the first place - but if you buy one of these ultra-cheap boxes, remember that it's graphics are a year or two out of date on the day you bought it.
Fortunately, it's usually possible to plug a real graphics adaptor into these motherboards and have it automatically override the built-in chipset - but since you nearly always want to do that, the extra expense of the built-in chipset is a waste.
It all depends on how they make their watermark. If they do it in the time domain and forget to test for reversal then this could work - but if they do it in the frequency domain, it might not. I imagine the guys working on watermarking have thought of this kind of trick.
You are talking about modern FORTRAN though - the legacy FORTRAN that we have is all >30 years old. I could be wrong - but I don't think all the fancy features you refer to existed back then.
I've been emailing the guy who did this - he hadn't even *heard* of Palladium or the ridiculous laws proposed to close the analog hole. So all of his bold assertions about this stuff ALWAYS and FOREVER being ways to circumvent copy-protection are just so much ill-informed nonsense.
The limited scope of a contest tells you very little about either the proficiency of the programmer or the quality of the programming language.
Only a task that's gonna take years and consume a few hundred thousand lines of code will really show which programmers can stand the pace over the long term, write *maintainable* code, document it well - and so on. Similarly, a program that's developed in a short period of time by a small team tells you nothing about how readable the programming language is. Some languages are easy to write in - but a bugger to understand a year later.
Still, contests are fun - and that's enough to justify their existance.
The insane law that attempts to defeat this would have the thing that your microphone is connected to check for hidden watermarks in the analog audio and refuse to record it.
Yes, this is insanity - but it's *possible*.
> Not only would these be illegal to distribute (or maybe even possess!),
> but once people have to go and purchase something like this, rather than
> download some software, it's that much more likely they'd just pay for
> the music.
You forget that it's only the person doing the copying who needs all this specialised (and perhaps eventually, illegal) hardware - once the music/video/ebook has been captured in an unencoded form, anyone can snarf a copy and play it.
I work in the flight sim business. I can assure you that every one of the 2 million plus lines of code written by my team over the last ten years was in C++ and for the ten years before that it was in C or Ada.
30 year old code will probably be in FORTRAN.
We do still have legacy code in Fortran. Mostly stuff we inherited from other simulators - and mostly in the area of simulating the actual flight dynamics. That stuff is hard to rewrite accurately and is a *tiny* fraction of a typical multi-million-lines-of-code simulator.
HOWEVER (dragging this screaming and kicking back on-topic) there is absolutely no need to invent FORTRAN 2000 just so we can run legacy code. If it's legacy code, that's because we can't/won't rewrite it - so why would we need a new revision of the language?
All that the world needs is a good way to call FORTRAN functions from within C++ - and we already have that.
FORTRAN should just be left to die peacefully.