> At this point, the familiar principle of > 32 feet per second squared takes over.
Actually, I think his velocity instantaneously increases to some fixed 'terminal' velocity.
I also like the way that large magnets work in Cartoon Physics. A tiny mouse holding such a magnet can easily pull an entire car to him without the laws of equal and opposite reaction being applied...probably something to do with the little yellow lightning bolts that cartoon magnets emit when you point them at something metallic.
Don't get me started on the way that landing on a bouncy surface after a long fall will cause you to ascend to a height GREATER than you fell from...that's got to be something to do with gravity not being as strong when you are going upwards.
If the aim is to provide 'secure' communications to professionals - then $300 is no deterrent at all to any kind of con man - in fact, the opposite is true - the mere idea that a '.pro' suffix implies some degree of professional competency is well worth $300 to a con artist.
OTOH, I can't think of any other way to administer this TLD - if you started demanding some specific set of qualifications then you'd run into all manner of problems with herbalists, acupuncturists and other fringe medical types.
I don't think anyone should *ever* rely on the TLD suffix to say *anything* about the nature of the site you are visiting.
Seems like this is the same idea as a device that's been used in Britain for maybe 30 years.
In UK, about half of TV broadcasting is paid for by the purchase of Television receiver licenses.
Unlicensed TV's are therefore illegal and vehicles equipped with Television detectors drive around trying to nail offenders.
They work (IIRC) by picking up stray signals emitted by the intermediate frequency generator inside the TV. They can even detect which channel a TV is tuned to and which room it's in.
>...he has managed to get 2 government buildings > and a telemarketing center in the downtown. > Government buildings may look nice but they > are basically a resource drain because they > don't pay any taxes.
But if the town has high unemployment (as several previous posters have suggested), then getting more jobs into the town - even government jobs - is going to bring money in in some form or another.
OTOH, turning a bunch of innocent people into telemarketers should be a serious crime!:-)
> Unless they've having to enter a/shitload/ of > information on each and every person, they > should be able to manage at least twice that.
You are assuming that these people do nothing else for 8 hours a day. These are presumably existing employees who also have to do whatever it was they did before AS WELL.
Bringing in temps to do several thousand hours of work would certainly cost more than replacing the AS400 - so you *know* they aren't gonna do that.
The problem is that in order to save $10k by not typing in those records, you'd have to fire all the people doing the typing.
That's not such an easy thing to do if they are doing this in spare moments between answering the phone, entering new data - or whatever it was they did before this almighty screwup.
A better argument may be that they'll (for sure) screw up the next round of tax collection - and THAT will cost them $10k.
What suprises me is that they couldn't find another organization with an aging IBM mainframe who'd suck the data off their most recent backup tapes and onto a pile of floppies or something. *ANYTHING* rather than type it all in again.
I just feel sorry for the people in the town who are going to have all those typo's in their tax data next year!
Re:PLIB isn't that good
on
Whither OpenAL?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
PLIB's sound is definitely it's worst feature -
and even I (as original author of PLIB) would
recommend you use OpenAL or something. However,
(in case people read this comment out of context),
I presume the "OH MY GOD, it was BAD" part only
refers to the audio - which is a very small fraction of what PLIB does.
Also, the 3-sounds-at-once limit has been fixed
for many months.
Re:Books about Graphic Software...
on
The Blender Book
·
· Score: 1
>...the only real way to learn *any* Graphic app,
> be it Photoshop, Maya, or Blender, is to sit
> down and play with the thing.
Normally, I'd agree with you - but Blender's
interface is *extremely* arcane...to the point
where probably half the people who try it give
up in disgust having failed to figure out
ANYTHING.
OTOH, people who *do* 'grok' the interface seem
to *love* it and are very vocal in saying so.
I'm sceptical that this book will help and I
*really* wish the effort that has evidently gone
into creating it had been spent on improving the
interface such that the book would have been
unnecessary.
Yeah - I *love* The Planiverse - some of the gadgets in the many illustrations are fascinating.
The major deviation from Flatland is that it's
easier to think of Flatland as a 'top down'
view of a 3D world - where Planiverse is a
side view.
Check out the 2D steam engine - it's quite amazing.
The observations in Planiverse are much more thought-provoking than Flatland...just simple
things like the fact that you can't build things
using nails and screws in 2D, that wheels can't
work, that wars in the Planiverse tend to focus
on the ability of heroic individuals because the
opposition can't just walk around the lone hero.
It certainly makes you think much harder than
Flatland does.
Indrema promised TiVo-like functionality with the standard game console - but as a software add-on to be released after the initial console launch.
However, for a company that would have had to sell their hardware at a loss - making profits on software licensing - it's quite dangerous to make the console *too* useful for things other than playing games. Suppose 10,000 people bought Indremas' just as a cheap video time-shifter and then proceeded not to buy any games. Indrema could
easily have flushed a million bucks down the drain as a result!
Similar concerns were raised about people buying Playstation-2 as DVD/MP3/CD players.
The bizarre concept of selling hardware at a loss that is the core of the game console business results in many 'obviously good' ideas for the product turning out to be disasterous.
Sure at any given point in time, Linux games cost
more than the Windoze equivelent - but that's a
function of what Mark is saying.
Since the Windoze game has already been on the
shelves for six to nine months by the time the
Linux version appears, it's being cut in price
to get rid of them. Sure Q3Arena for Windoze
is $29.99 *now* wasn't it $45 when it first came
out?
If the Linux versions came out on the same day
as the Windoze versions, the prices would be
the same.
The Agenda runs on two AAA's and seems to work
fine with NiCd, NiMH and rechargable Alkaline
batteries as well as regular disposable batteries.
With the latest kernels, I'm seeing about 20 hours
of actual continuous *use* - or about a month of
just sitting there in 'hibernate' mode. I'm
using NiMH's - I don't think it goes as long
on NiCd's.
When you wake the beast up from hibernate mode,
it starts up instantly with all your applications
still running exactly as they were when you
turned it off...so putting it into hibernation
when you don't need it (even for a few minutes)
will greatly increase the battery life.
Syncing with your PC drains the batteries pretty
fast though - something to do with the way the
serial port is powered. There is currently a
bug (we think) that causes the batteries to drain
quickly if you leave it in the 'cradle' - even
in 'hibernate'...there is hope that this will
be fixed "Real Soon Now".
I use rechargable NiMH batteries - so the *cost*
of batteries isn't really a significant issue.
One downside is that there is no AC adaptor,
no 12 volt car adaptor and no battery charger
input.
The Agenda is not vaporware. I have one in my
hands right now - no vapor in sight. You can't
buy them in stores yet - but if you go to their
web site you can buy one *today*.
The software isn't *finished* but what Linux
software ever is?
It does most basic stuff reasonably well, I
think the handwriting recognition has a way
to go yet...but heck it runs X and you can
port most reasonably small applications to
it without problems.
Whilst I'm sure that every reasonable project could reconstruct it's CVS (or at least the released copies and current versions) of their software, there could very well be a serious problem with things like the bug trackers and mailing lists.
I certainly don't have a list of the people on the various mailing lists associated with my projects - so the immediate effect would be that
team members would find it hard to tell everyone where the new web site/server is and how to get
back together again to continue working.
I guess we could always make an announcement on Slashdot...oh...wait...
Re:another one with a free compiler
on
Cheap Linux PDAs
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm - interesting link.
The Franklin machine doesn't run Linux though.
A "proprietary" Franklin OS running on a
"proprietary" RISC CPU...which means that it's
going to be a pain to port things onto it.
The Agenda runs a fairly standard Linux setup
with Xfree on a MIPS CPU - which is well supported
by the GNU utilities. People are compiling
regular Linux utilities for it on a
several-per-day basis without too many reported
problems.
The Franklin's developer version is also quite
a bit more costly than the Agenda...although
you may get more bang for your buck in terms
of hardware...it's hard to tell.
It's DEFINITELY not vaporware. I bought one
just after Xmas - and I have it in front of
me right now - I've been happily writing
programs for it for several weeks. It runs
Linux and Xfree - as advertised - for real.
You can run PPP on it - so you can telnet into it
or out of it, use NFS with your PC and it's little
flash memory 'disk drive', etc, etc.
Most PC/Linux programs can be compiled to run
on it - although the 160x240 monochrome screen
is going to be a bit limiting and most GUI-based
programs need some UI tweaking to make them
usable.
You can even run 'bash' on it's little screen.
**BUT** the software is still pretty raw...this
is good hardware - but the community needs to
help out with getting the software together.
The handwriting recognition really sucks - but
it has a 'soft keyboard' that's moderately usable.
Re:Be Aware of the powerdrain !!!
on
Cheap Linux PDAs
·
· Score: 2
The powerdrain has gotten MUCH better with
more recent versions of the system software.
Two AAA's now last about two weeks with the
machine in 'hibernation' mode - and 6 hours
or so if you leave it fully turned on.
For the usage most people have for PDA's, that's
not *too* bad.
Note that the version that's out now is for
developers - it is NOT the final consumer version.
This version has more memory and more flash than
the consumer unit will have/need - and that may
have an impact on the battery life too.
If they respond, they'll (presumably) realise
that we'll receive their reply hundreds of years
after we sent our message.
If they understood the message we sent then
they know that humans only live for less than
100 years (I think that was in there somewhere)
so they should guess that we may have forgotten
that we sent it - or what it was that we sent.
It follows that intelligent aliens would define
their terms in the same way we did - I think
if I were them, I'd prefix my reply with a duplicate of the original message on the grounds
that this would be the format that humans would
be most likely to be able to detect and decode.
Hydrogen * Pi _might_ make sense - but anything
that's an interesting number of GigaHertz would
only be meaningful to critters with 10 fingers,
positional numbering schemes and the same
definition of a second as us.
If they use (for example) Roman numerals, they
are gonna have a hard enough time decoding the
message as it is!
Seriously though - I wonder whether the diagrams
would come across as anything meaningful. The
various arrows and graphing conventions seem
very human-centered.
I was concerned that we sent them the value
of Pi without a trailing '...' symbol. It
kinda implies that we think it ends after
the 51 billionth place or so. I guess aliens
who actually bother to search through their
100 billion places for those last digits would
realise that we know that though. Still - it
would have been nice to be more rigerous.
The whole base-10 arithmetic thing was silly
though. They should have studied the size of
the character set they needed for the message
and picked the highest power-of-two base possible
within the limits of the transmission technology.
(Probably hex - but certainly octal).
In the first page, I'd have taken more space
and put the numbers one to a line to make it
clearer and more certain.
In a sense, there is no problem with this - it did the job well when it was a brand shiney new computer - and it's still (presumably) doing the job well right now.
The concern I have is what they do as these machines start to fail? Do they have a fallback plan? It seems that someone should be porting this key chunk of software to (say) a 386:-) or at least getting *real* familiar with Atari emulators!
So often, people wait until it's too late to do that port.
I once worked in a company that used a BASIC program on 8088-based PC's to do a key realtime control operation in one of their products. When 8088's became unobtainable, they simply moved the code onto a 286 and discovered to their horror that it didn't work. Because this software had been written many years ago - and had never needed to be updated, they didn't even have a software engineer in that part of the organization (I worked in another division). They struggled on for a while buying up old 8088's second-hand and refurbishing them - but in the end, they called me in to rewrite the code.
It turned out that the code had done all it's timing using empty 'FOR' loops (Ick!) - which of course ran faster on the 286's. That was a hard problem to fix because by the time they had me on board, they'd sold the very last 8088 they could lay their hands on and I had no way to figure out the lengths of those delays loops. In the end, I had to chuck out the entire program and develop a new one from scratch in C (using hardware timers
and not empty 'for' loops of course).
Slashdot Mirror
> At this point, the familiar principle of
> 32 feet per second squared takes over.
Actually, I think his velocity instantaneously
increases to some fixed 'terminal' velocity.
I also like the way that large magnets work
in Cartoon Physics. A tiny mouse holding
such a magnet can easily pull an entire car
to him without the laws of equal and opposite
reaction being applied...probably something
to do with the little yellow lightning bolts
that cartoon magnets emit when you point them
at something metallic.
Don't get me started on the way that landing
on a bouncy surface after a long fall will
cause you to ascend to a height GREATER than
you fell from...that's got to be something
to do with gravity not being as strong when
you are going upwards.
If the aim is to provide 'secure' communications
to professionals - then $300 is no deterrent at
all to any kind of con man - in fact, the opposite
is true - the mere idea that a '.pro' suffix
implies some degree of professional competency
is well worth $300 to a con artist.
OTOH, I can't think of any other way to administer
this TLD - if you started demanding some specific
set of qualifications then you'd run into all
manner of problems with herbalists, acupuncturists
and other fringe medical types.
I don't think anyone should *ever* rely on the
TLD suffix to say *anything* about the nature of
the site you are visiting.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128>> ; ; *O):10)&&main(2+O);}
.sig dude.
??You have a syntax error in your
Seems like this is the same idea as a device
that's been used in Britain for maybe 30 years.
In UK, about half of TV broadcasting is paid for
by the purchase of Television receiver licenses.
Unlicensed TV's are therefore illegal and vehicles
equipped with Television detectors drive around
trying to nail offenders.
They work (IIRC) by picking up stray signals
emitted by the intermediate frequency generator
inside the TV. They can even detect which
channel a TV is tuned to and which room it's in.
> ...he has managed to get 2 government buildings
:-)
> and a telemarketing center in the downtown.
> Government buildings may look nice but they
> are basically a resource drain because they
> don't pay any taxes.
But if the town has high unemployment (as several
previous posters have suggested), then getting
more jobs into the town - even government jobs -
is going to bring money in in some form or
another.
OTOH, turning a bunch of innocent people into
telemarketers should be a serious crime!
> Unless they've having to enter a /shitload/ of
> information on each and every person, they
> should be able to manage at least twice that.
You are assuming that these people do nothing
else for 8 hours a day. These are presumably
existing employees who also have to do whatever
it was they did before AS WELL.
Bringing in temps to do several thousand hours
of work would certainly cost more than replacing
the AS400 - so you *know* they aren't gonna do
that.
The problem is that in order to save $10k
by not typing in those records, you'd have
to fire all the people doing the typing.
That's not such an easy thing to do if they
are doing this in spare moments between answering
the phone, entering new data - or whatever it
was they did before this almighty screwup.
A better argument may be that they'll (for sure)
screw up the next round of tax collection - and
THAT will cost them $10k.
What suprises me is that they couldn't find
another organization with an aging IBM mainframe
who'd suck the data off their most recent
backup tapes and onto a pile of floppies or
something. *ANYTHING* rather than type it all
in again.
I just feel sorry for the people in the town
who are going to have all those typo's in their
tax data next year!
PLIB's sound is definitely it's worst feature -
and even I (as original author of PLIB) would
recommend you use OpenAL or something. However,
(in case people read this comment out of context),
I presume the "OH MY GOD, it was BAD" part only
refers to the audio - which is a very small fraction of what PLIB does.
Also, the 3-sounds-at-once limit has been fixed
for many months.
Yeah - the correct expression is:
'free' as in 'free beer'
> ...the only real way to learn *any* Graphic app,
> be it Photoshop, Maya, or Blender, is to sit
> down and play with the thing.
Normally, I'd agree with you - but Blender's
interface is *extremely* arcane...to the point
where probably half the people who try it give
up in disgust having failed to figure out
ANYTHING.
OTOH, people who *do* 'grok' the interface seem
to *love* it and are very vocal in saying so.
I'm sceptical that this book will help and I
*really* wish the effort that has evidently gone
into creating it had been spent on improving the
interface such that the book would have been
unnecessary.
Blender is free - but *NOT* Free...that's a pain.
Yeah - I *love* The Planiverse - some of the gadgets in the many illustrations are fascinating.
The major deviation from Flatland is that it's
easier to think of Flatland as a 'top down'
view of a 3D world - where Planiverse is a
side view.
Check out the 2D steam engine - it's quite amazing.
The observations in Planiverse are much more thought-provoking than Flatland...just simple
things like the fact that you can't build things
using nails and screws in 2D, that wheels can't
work, that wars in the Planiverse tend to focus
on the ability of heroic individuals because the
opposition can't just walk around the lone hero.
It certainly makes you think much harder than
Flatland does.
Indrema promised TiVo-like functionality with the standard game console - but as a software add-on to be released after the initial console launch.
However, for a company that would have had to sell their hardware at a loss - making profits on software licensing - it's quite dangerous to make the console *too* useful for things other than playing games. Suppose 10,000 people bought Indremas' just as a cheap video time-shifter and then proceeded not to buy any games. Indrema could
easily have flushed a million bucks down the drain as a result!
Similar concerns were raised about people buying Playstation-2 as DVD/MP3/CD players.
The bizarre concept of selling hardware at a loss that is the core of the game console business results in many 'obviously good' ideas for the product turning out to be disasterous.
TuxKart has 100% more penguins and 133% more herrings than TuxRacer. :-)
Semi-relevent trivia:
There are at least 41 versions of Tetris for Linux.
Blocks CXHextris Columns CrystalSpace Tetris Demo Ct Cybercube Fscktris Gktetcolor GTetris Gno3dtet IFRAc IntelligentTETRIS JTetris Jetris Just Another GTK Tetris Just Another Tetris Ltris nct Petris ptris pytris Quadra seatris sphertis Stax Teamtris Tetri Tetrinet TwinTRIS VGA Tetris VRtris XBlockout XJefris XJewel XTrojka Xemeraldia Xinsane Xpuyopuyo Xtetris Xtet42 Xtris
Sure at any given point in time, Linux games cost
more than the Windoze equivelent - but that's a
function of what Mark is saying.
Since the Windoze game has already been on the
shelves for six to nine months by the time the
Linux version appears, it's being cut in price
to get rid of them. Sure Q3Arena for Windoze
is $29.99 *now* wasn't it $45 when it first came
out?
If the Linux versions came out on the same day
as the Windoze versions, the prices would be
the same.
The Agenda runs on two AAA's and seems to work
fine with NiCd, NiMH and rechargable Alkaline
batteries as well as regular disposable batteries.
With the latest kernels, I'm seeing about 20 hours
of actual continuous *use* - or about a month of
just sitting there in 'hibernate' mode. I'm
using NiMH's - I don't think it goes as long
on NiCd's.
When you wake the beast up from hibernate mode,
it starts up instantly with all your applications
still running exactly as they were when you
turned it off...so putting it into hibernation
when you don't need it (even for a few minutes)
will greatly increase the battery life.
Syncing with your PC drains the batteries pretty
fast though - something to do with the way the
serial port is powered. There is currently a
bug (we think) that causes the batteries to drain
quickly if you leave it in the 'cradle' - even
in 'hibernate'...there is hope that this will
be fixed "Real Soon Now".
I use rechargable NiMH batteries - so the *cost*
of batteries isn't really a significant issue.
One downside is that there is no AC adaptor,
no 12 volt car adaptor and no battery charger
input.
The Agenda is not vaporware. I have one in my
hands right now - no vapor in sight. You can't
buy them in stores yet - but if you go to their
web site you can buy one *today*.
The software isn't *finished* but what Linux
software ever is?
It does most basic stuff reasonably well, I
think the handwriting recognition has a way
to go yet...but heck it runs X and you can
port most reasonably small applications to
it without problems.
There is a great developer community too.
Whilst I'm sure that every reasonable project could reconstruct it's CVS (or at least the released copies and current versions) of their software, there could very well be a serious problem with things like the bug trackers and mailing lists.
I certainly don't have a list of the people on the various mailing lists associated with my projects - so the immediate effect would be that
team members would find it hard to tell everyone where the new web site/server is and how to get
back together again to continue working.
I guess we could always make an announcement on Slashdot...oh...wait...
Hmmm - interesting link.
The Franklin machine doesn't run Linux though.
A "proprietary" Franklin OS running on a
"proprietary" RISC CPU...which means that it's
going to be a pain to port things onto it.
The Agenda runs a fairly standard Linux setup
with Xfree on a MIPS CPU - which is well supported
by the GNU utilities. People are compiling
regular Linux utilities for it on a
several-per-day basis without too many reported
problems.
The Franklin's developer version is also quite
a bit more costly than the Agenda...although
you may get more bang for your buck in terms
of hardware...it's hard to tell.
It's DEFINITELY not vaporware. I bought one
just after Xmas - and I have it in front of
me right now - I've been happily writing
programs for it for several weeks. It runs
Linux and Xfree - as advertised - for real.
You can run PPP on it - so you can telnet into it
or out of it, use NFS with your PC and it's little
flash memory 'disk drive', etc, etc.
Most PC/Linux programs can be compiled to run
on it - although the 160x240 monochrome screen
is going to be a bit limiting and most GUI-based
programs need some UI tweaking to make them
usable.
You can even run 'bash' on it's little screen.
**BUT** the software is still pretty raw...this
is good hardware - but the community needs to
help out with getting the software together.
The handwriting recognition really sucks - but
it has a 'soft keyboard' that's moderately usable.
The powerdrain has gotten MUCH better with
more recent versions of the system software.
Two AAA's now last about two weeks with the
machine in 'hibernation' mode - and 6 hours
or so if you leave it fully turned on.
For the usage most people have for PDA's, that's
not *too* bad.
Note that the version that's out now is for
developers - it is NOT the final consumer version.
This version has more memory and more flash than
the consumer unit will have/need - and that may
have an impact on the battery life too.
If they respond, they'll (presumably) realise
that we'll receive their reply hundreds of years
after we sent our message.
If they understood the message we sent then
they know that humans only live for less than
100 years (I think that was in there somewhere)
so they should guess that we may have forgotten
that we sent it - or what it was that we sent.
It follows that intelligent aliens would define
their terms in the same way we did - I think
if I were them, I'd prefix my reply with a duplicate of the original message on the grounds
that this would be the format that humans would
be most likely to be able to detect and decode.
Hydrogen * Pi _might_ make sense - but anything
that's an interesting number of GigaHertz would
only be meaningful to critters with 10 fingers,
positional numbering schemes and the same
definition of a second as us.
If they use (for example) Roman numerals, they
are gonna have a hard enough time decoding the
message as it is!
Thraag to Earth...Please retransmit page 00000.
Seriously though - I wonder whether the diagrams
would come across as anything meaningful. The
various arrows and graphing conventions seem
very human-centered.
I was concerned that we sent them the value
of Pi without a trailing '...' symbol. It
kinda implies that we think it ends after
the 51 billionth place or so. I guess aliens
who actually bother to search through their
100 billion places for those last digits would
realise that we know that though. Still - it
would have been nice to be more rigerous.
The whole base-10 arithmetic thing was silly
though. They should have studied the size of
the character set they needed for the message
and picked the highest power-of-two base possible
within the limits of the transmission technology.
(Probably hex - but certainly octal).
In the first page, I'd have taken more space
and put the numbers one to a line to make it
clearer and more certain.
Still, it's a good start.
In a sense, there is no problem with this - it did the job well when it was a brand shiney new computer - and it's still (presumably) doing the job well right now.
:-) or at least getting *real* familiar with Atari emulators!
The concern I have is what they do as these machines start to fail? Do they have a fallback plan? It seems that someone should be porting this key chunk of software to (say) a 386
So often, people wait until it's too late to do that port.
I once worked in a company that used a BASIC program on 8088-based PC's to do a key realtime control operation in one of their products. When 8088's became unobtainable, they simply moved the code onto a 286 and discovered to their horror that it didn't work. Because this software had been written many years ago - and had never needed to be updated, they didn't even have a software engineer in that part of the organization (I worked in another division). They struggled on for a while buying up old 8088's second-hand and refurbishing them - but in the end, they called me in to rewrite the code.
It turned out that the code had done all it's timing using empty 'FOR' loops (Ick!) - which of course ran faster on the 286's. That was a hard problem to fix because by the time they had me on board, they'd sold the very last 8088 they could lay their hands on and I had no way to figure out the lengths of those delays loops. In the end, I had to chuck out the entire program and develop a new one from scratch in C (using hardware timers
and not empty 'for' loops of course).