Some time ago, the King of a Middle Eastern company wanted to invest in Scotland. He fancied the idea of owning Princes Street in Edinburgh and approached the government.
The newspapers were used to politely explain that each of the retail units, shops and hotels were effectively owned by life insurance companies, private and public sector pension fund managers and the royal family. It was going to be extremely difficult in persuading these entities to hand over their investments to a foreign buyer.
The portfolio managers shift the poor performing shares and funds onto the pension funds, and keep the high performing funds for their company and themselves.
Bingo! The pension funds make a loss, and the fund managers get their bonuses.
That's what oil companies used to do (or might still do) - help desk wanted to keep hardware consistent with every department to reduce support costs. Developers always wanted the latest hardware. This led to monitors, 9-core, 25-core, coaxial cable, ribbon cable connectors, PC base units, disk drives, disks (5.25", 3.25"), CRT's, manuals (Novell Netware), all being dumped by the dozen. All perfectly working and functional. For the oil company it's old junk - for the computer geek, it was still beyond their budget.
Then my laptop hard disk drive (TravelStar) fried. Had to do the recommended trick of putting the disk drive in a freezer bag, chill it out, and give it a good whack on power-up. Managed to get one final incremental backup before it went up to the great server rack in the sky..
Whether a company outsources or keeps staff in-house really depends on whether it is cheaper to do so. For a small company, it's going to be cheaper to purchase office supplies from mail-order companies because there is competition between suppliers. For a large corporation or government department, it's going to be cheaper to have their own in-house supply group, because they can arrange bulk purchases direct from the wholesaler.
It's a bit like API modules - if you have two API's that have identical core/low-layer functionality, then it is probably better splitting and merging that functionality into a third API.
Perhaps they should have a top 100 of each decade, as well as a top 100 of short stories.
The early Asimov stories seem timeless, like the one about the kid who avoids the "transporters" that have replaced school buses, and prefers to walk home along the sidewalk and past robotically maintained gardens. Then his parents take him to a psychologist, who gives some common sense advice, and decides himself to walk home to see what it is like.
Different era's were framed by the different war and social situations. 1950's had the fear of overcrowding in cities (before urban sprawl and the suburbs), plus the cold war. Several short stories had the nightmare of people living until they were 300+ years old, allowing accidents between pedestrians and motorists to keep the population down, or families fighting each other to have more kids.
1960's had the space race and many stories then were based on humanity colonising the nearby stars. They projected the idea of biker gangs into space as trading companies.
1970's had the Space Shuttle, fear of pollution killing the Planet (Logan's Run), nuclear war (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), 1980's had space exploration (Rendezvous with Rama, V'Ger, ST:TNG)
Why not just put the atoms in a magnetic torus field or a circular track rather than a linear track? Seems they already use magnetic fields to sort out the atoms to get the ones in the correct phase.
Microsoft bought shares in Apple at the time that Apple wasn't doing so well. It looked good that Microsoft had a competitor at the time they had a monopoly over office E-mail systems and web browsing.
It was same for DOS games - you'd have to learn how to write keyboard, mouse and joystick drivers. Learn about pixelmaps, line drawing, clipping, block filling, pasting, transparency, palette maps, BIOS functions calls to do those, IPX, sound cards or speaker programming, MIDI files.
Written carefully, all of that code could be reused. Writing the GUI based map editor would be a sub-project in itself. Paint programs would allow the artist to draw sprites for players and creatures. You'd need a musician to do the music.
All of that is replaced by a handful of API's - OpenGL/DirectX, MIDIWAV/MP3 files and some pixelmap file formats.
My favorite one was adding a battery and real-time clock onto the cartridge so that the game could have specific times of the day when certain actions would be possible. Add a microcontroller and the cartridge would continue to play the game even when out of the console.
That used to be a problem with UK cities during the 1700's. Entire families used to live in single rooms to the extent that everyone suffered respiratory illnesses.
It was a problem with high-rise blocks in the 1970's. Residents had been used to living in draughty Victorian houses. Moving to airtight concrete homes, it became impossible to keep the windows close, and the heat, while at the same time boiling food and airing wet clothes to dry.
Voxel map images consist of a 3D grid of density values (eg. percentage of hydrogen atoms in each voxel cube). You can apply what is known as a transfer function to generate transparency and color for each level of density. Rendered in this way, bone can be made to appear white and solid, muscle red and solid, and skin semi-transparent.
Lighting calculations only need to be done for one viewpoint - the camera or a pair of stereoscopic glasses.
To do a hologram, you need to calculate the resulting lighting color of each voxel for every possible viewpoint. Maybe they sample it at a number of latitude/longitude directions like a BRDF equation.
BBC had a really cool animation of all the galaxies orbiting each other in the known universe. Each spiral arm galaxy has the stars orbiting the central black hole. In turn all the centre of every galaxies are trying to move in straight lines, but end up colliding, merging as well as being deflected.
The research here measures the spin axis of each galaxy through doppler shift measurements. The side spinning towards the observer will have an opposite red-shift to the side-spinning away from the observer. From the shape of the galaxy on the camera plane, they can determine the tilt and rotation towards the camera.
What I don't understand is how they define the top and the bottom of the galaxy (or positive axis/negative axis), in order to determine clockwise/anti-clockwise rotation. Otherwise everything is going to be spinning in one direction or the other.
Much like the New Madrid earthquake, there was a report around those years on a couple of nights when the sky glowed red, and night-time became as hot and humid as day. There were some theories it was the Earth traveling through the tail-end of a comet,as it coincided with meteorite showers.
Yes, the gull-wings, plus the futuristic white with black speed-stripes, sports-car look with the large rear light indicators made it distinctive. At least from the estate-cars with the adhesive wood-panel veneer look, the three-wheeled Reliant robins, Rover Minis, and Volkeswagon Beetles (aka Herbie).
Hey, this is slashdot.org - anything is physiologically relevant if it has or has the potential to evolve tentacles, noodles, suckers and other spindly appendages.
Bit of a coincidence, but Krakatoa erupted in a series of massive explosions in August 26-27, 1883. These explosions were so loud that they were heard 3000 miles away, and turned an entire mountain completely into ash and smoke.
Slashdot Mirror
Some time ago, the King of a Middle Eastern company wanted to invest in Scotland. He fancied the idea of owning Princes Street in Edinburgh and approached the government.
The newspapers were used to politely explain that each of the retail units, shops and hotels were effectively owned by life insurance companies, private and public sector pension fund managers and the royal family. It was going to be extremely difficult in persuading these entities to hand over their investments to a foreign buyer.
Yes, it's a well known fact. Somebody did a relationship analysis between the references cited between papers using computer analysis.
There would be this cross-citing of each others papers.
They tend to form alliances - you will see specific research groups collaborate together and/or cite each others work.
A function call tree seems to be the most practical thing these days. Especially will all the different API layers that an application can have.
Given the complexity of most code these days, a flow-chart would only be able to document a single function.
Who says the pension fund program is failing?
The portfolio managers shift the poor performing shares and funds onto the pension funds, and keep the high performing funds for their company and themselves.
Bingo! The pension funds make a loss, and the fund managers get their bonuses.
That's what oil companies used to do (or might still do) - help desk wanted to keep hardware consistent with every department to reduce support costs. Developers always wanted the latest hardware. This led to monitors, 9-core, 25-core, coaxial cable, ribbon cable connectors, PC base units, disk drives, disks (5.25", 3.25"), CRT's, manuals (Novell Netware), all being dumped by the dozen. All perfectly working and functional. For the oil company it's old junk - for the computer geek, it was still beyond their budget.
Remember that - happened to my workstation.
Then my laptop hard disk drive (TravelStar) fried. Had to do the recommended trick of putting the disk drive in a freezer bag, chill it out, and give it a good whack on power-up. Managed to get one final incremental backup before it went up to the great server rack in the sky..
Whether a company outsources or keeps staff in-house really depends on whether it is cheaper to do so. For a small company, it's going to be cheaper to purchase office supplies from mail-order companies because there is competition between suppliers. For a large corporation or government department, it's going to be cheaper to have their own in-house supply group, because they can arrange bulk purchases direct from the wholesaler.
It's a bit like API modules - if you have two API's that have identical core/low-layer functionality, then it is probably better splitting and merging that functionality into a third API.
We did have MagLev trains - not super-conductors, but just ordinary copper coils.
Some airports (like Birmingham, UK) did have them but stopped using them due to to the rising cost of electricity and maintenance.
Some companies do have that age-discrimination mentality, "He/she is 40, but looks 25"...
Perhaps they should have a top 100 of each decade, as well as a top 100 of short stories.
The early Asimov stories seem timeless, like the one about the kid who avoids the "transporters" that have replaced school buses, and prefers to walk home along the sidewalk and past robotically maintained gardens. Then his parents take him to a psychologist, who gives some common sense advice, and decides himself to walk home to see what it is like.
Different era's were framed by the different war and social situations. 1950's had the fear of overcrowding in cities (before urban sprawl and the suburbs), plus the cold war. Several short stories had the nightmare of people living until they were 300+ years old, allowing accidents between pedestrians and motorists to keep the population down, or families fighting each other to have more kids.
1960's had the space race and many stories then were based on humanity colonising the nearby stars. They projected the idea of biker gangs into space as trading companies.
1970's had the Space Shuttle, fear of pollution killing the Planet (Logan's Run), nuclear war (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), 1980's had space exploration (Rendezvous with Rama, V'Ger, ST:TNG)
Why not just put the atoms in a magnetic torus field or a circular track rather than a linear track? Seems they already use magnetic fields to sort out the atoms to get the ones in the correct phase.
Microsoft bought shares in Apple at the time that Apple wasn't doing so well. It looked good that Microsoft had a competitor at the time they had a monopoly over office E-mail systems and web browsing.
It was same for DOS games - you'd have to learn how to write keyboard, mouse and joystick drivers. Learn about pixelmaps, line drawing, clipping, block filling, pasting, transparency, palette maps, BIOS functions calls to do those, IPX, sound cards or speaker programming, MIDI files.
Written carefully, all of that code could be reused. Writing the GUI based map editor would be a sub-project in itself. Paint programs would allow the artist to draw sprites for players and creatures. You'd need a musician to do the music.
All of that is replaced by a handful of API's - OpenGL/DirectX, MIDIWAV/MP3 files and some pixelmap file formats.
And if every universe has black holes, each black hole becomes a connection to a white-hole/smaller universe. So we end up with a fractal multiverse.
My favorite one was adding a battery and real-time clock onto the cartridge so that the game could have specific times of the day when certain actions would be possible. Add a microcontroller and the cartridge would continue to play the game even when out of the console.
Other Enhancement Chips
That used to be a problem with UK cities during the 1700's. Entire families used to live in single rooms to the extent that everyone suffered respiratory illnesses.
It was a problem with high-rise blocks in the 1970's. Residents had been used to living in draughty Victorian houses. Moving to airtight concrete homes, it became impossible to keep the windows close, and the heat, while at the same time boiling food and airing wet clothes to dry.
Voxel map images consist of a 3D grid of density values (eg. percentage of hydrogen atoms in each voxel cube). You can apply what is known as a transfer function to generate transparency and color for each level of density. Rendered in this way, bone can be made to appear white and solid, muscle red and solid, and skin semi-transparent.
Lighting calculations only need to be done for one viewpoint - the camera or a pair of stereoscopic glasses.
To do a hologram, you need to calculate the resulting lighting color of each voxel for every possible viewpoint. Maybe they sample it at a number of latitude/longitude directions like a BRDF equation.
BBC had a really cool animation of all the galaxies orbiting each other in the known universe. Each spiral arm galaxy has the stars orbiting the central black hole. In turn all the centre of every galaxies are trying to move in straight lines, but end up colliding, merging as well as being deflected.
The research here measures the spin axis of each galaxy through doppler shift measurements. The side spinning towards the observer will have an opposite red-shift to the side-spinning away from the observer. From the shape of the galaxy on the camera plane, they can determine the tilt and rotation towards the camera.
What I don't understand is how they define the top and the bottom of the galaxy (or positive axis/negative axis), in order to determine clockwise/anti-clockwise rotation. Otherwise everything is going to be spinning in one direction or the other.
Much like the New Madrid earthquake, there was a report around those years on a couple of nights when the sky glowed red, and night-time became as hot and humid as day. There were some theories it was the Earth traveling through the tail-end of a comet ,as it coincided with meteorite showers.
Good place to look is the "Modern Home" magazines and videos from the 1960's and 1970's.
The future as seen by The Sixties
They got the flat-screens right, internet shopping, maybe even the jog-wheel on a mouse, but just didn't see keyboard touchpad or mouse use.
Yes, the gull-wings, plus the futuristic white with black speed-stripes, sports-car look with the large rear light indicators made it distinctive. At least from the estate-cars with the adhesive wood-panel veneer look, the three-wheeled Reliant robins, Rover Minis, and Volkeswagon Beetles (aka Herbie).
Hey, this is slashdot.org - anything is physiologically relevant if it has or has the potential to evolve tentacles, noodles, suckers and other spindly appendages.
A survey of real-world and fictional sauces
Probably the same as the "Guatemalan Insanity Pepper". I'd imagine it must be around 2,500,000 units on the Scoville scale.
Bit of a coincidence, but Krakatoa erupted in a series of massive explosions in August 26-27, 1883. These explosions were so loud that they were heard 3000 miles away, and turned an entire mountain completely into ash and smoke.
Krakatoa explosion