Discovery channel in the 1990's ran a series of worst-case disasters like mega-earthquakes, mega-volcanoes, mega-tornadoes, mega-whatever... One of the episodes was a what-if scenario of a hurricane landing on New Orleans. Even then it was just brushed off as a one in two hundred years event.
People were willing to pay to get copies of the personal medical records of celebrities. What would they be willing to pay to get the scanner images of those individuals?
Nearly all the department stores did that back in the 1950's/1960's . There were no electronic cash registers, and checkout staff weren't allowed to handle money. So the customer would place their payment along with a receipt signed by the checkout clerk into a capsule. This would be sent upstairs to be processed by an accountant who would send the change back down to the checkout clerk. Just like in the movie "Brazil".
Probably the engineer who played in a rock band in his/her spare time and realized that a one bad note in a tune would be more discernible to somebody working late shift, than something like "The appendectomy/tonsillectomy/lumpectomy biopsy results have just arrived." . Those tunes would probably be as memorable to staff as the chord played in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Total Recall had a giant screen that did an X-ray to just the bones of the person plus metal objects. The latest volume visualization techniques will map all the muscles and major blood vessels, as well as synovial joints.
A great application would be for medical ultra-sound visualisation. The latest scanners can generate 3D surfaces which can be viewed on a monitor. There was some experimentation with combining LCD screens with mirrors so that a cross-section view from the sensor could be superimposed on top of the location of the actual sensor.
Imagine if a doctor could slide this screen around a patient and motion sensors could pick up the location of the screen and transform the data from a MRI/CAT scan into a matching projection, all in real-time.
Happened to the Chinese guy in our research group - got an invitation as a research associate in a prestigious Chinese university. Next thing he knows, he is supervising nine other PhD students.
Over the years (from 1996 to present), DirectX was marketed as having an advantage over OpenGL because DirectX would have all the latest features before OpenGL would have them added as extensions. Microsoft's official policy was that OpenGL was for supporting the CAD market, while DirectX was for everyone else.
The ARB was always blamed for causing the delay in having a single agreed standard across all the vendors (Cg vs. GLSL vs. DirectX HLSL). The only other advantage that I see is that DirectX offers higher level data structures for rendering (triangle, quad, and general meshes).
There are open source equivalents to the audio such as OpenAL, and there are plenty of books and demos to teach programming techniques.
Thanks for that link - I'm amazed that the energy demand for all of that is only 50 watts, compared to the 300 watts required in the past for other cards. You could have a cluster of those and still use a standard electric socket.
Embedded systems may only be using a screen resolution of 640x480 or 800x600 rather than dual monitor 2048x1536. That's one energy/time saving. Then there won't be 900+ stream processors like the high-end gaming cards, there might just be 128 or 256. There's another saving. Anti-aliasing will be disabled as well, so that saves some processing time and power as well.
You will still have texture mapping, shadowing effects using fragment shaders, but just not as many triangles as the current gaming engines will all the effects turned on.
If it is possible to create a high-resolution endoscope imaging system using a single oscillating fibre-optic thread, a high-frequency crystal/mirror, would it not be possible to do the same with a simple infra-red thermometer sensor?
Wikipedia has a better explanation of the genetic code. It's probably better to understand that in just about every species, groups of three letters form a codon, which defines a particular amino acid, of which there are 30 or so, but most species only seem to use around 24, along with a STOP command.
Some funky stuff goes on, with some DNA being used in reverse, or offset by one or two letters, so that you get six possible sequences from the same set of letters.
Then the security checkpoint would be moved to the front of the airport, and queues would form there, which would then be another target for the terrorists.
Many 3D chip companies like 3Dfx followed the Mini-GL approach simply because running Quake was the benchmark test of the time used by the game magazines - it wouldn't matter if your card supported 4, 8, 16 or 32 multi-texture units, the important thing was the frame-rate of Quake. A similar thing happened in the CAD market, with the benchmarks being based on Pro/E, SolidWorks and other packages.
3Dfx became tangled in a legal lawsuit with Nvidia which lasted for several years and ended up with the liquidation of 3Dfx and a transfer of assets to Nvidia. The last time I checked, Direct3D is similar to OpenGL in that every gl prefix is replaced with d3d, but with more C++ objects to support triangle lists/strips.
Different areas of the brain handle different tasks - the back of the brain is where the visual center is, while the sides are where the audio recognition/speech centers are (as determined from individuals who have lost parts of their brains from surgery, accidents or diseases).
The insular cortex seems to have been the most recent part of the brain to have evolved.
It isn't so much brain size alone, as the ratio of brain size to body size that seems to be a measure of intelligence. There seems to be a minimum amount of brain volume required to manage the metabolism and immune system of body of a certain mass, so any excess about that amount has some other purpose like cognitive thinking, memory, recognition.
The problem is getting land rights from every county boundary. California proposed a high-speed shuttle train from San Francisco to Los Angeles via Sacremento that would take less than 90 minutes. The mayors of all three cities were extremely happy about this. Unfortunately, the mayors of all the cities in between also wanted a stop at their city. For every city that had a stop, that would add another 5 minutes to the train journey, and at least 20 other cities were wanting stations in their towns.
I'd agree with that - C was an improvement over assembly language in that your code would be cross-platform, assuming you didn't use any platform-dependent API's, and was a vast improvement over BASIC in that it supported recursion. Pascal had that benefit as well, but you ended up having to figure out how to unroll localized functions if you ever wanted to port algorithms to C or C++.
To make any code reusable in C, you are going to have to learn abstract data types (the predecessor of object-orientated programming), but when you want to port C ADT's to C++, you would end up spending a lot of time shuffling around object pointers.
Python and Perl seem to be the most popular object-oriented scripting languages used in industry, with the options of writing C++ and C++ extensions later on.
Delivery costs for any book delivered from an online retailer are at least 10 pounds in the UK by courier for delivery within a wekk. Even more if you want next day delivery. Books from the local bookstore are about the same as the online retailer - though this depends on the location. I found that ordering books from the campus bookstore was more expensive that the downtown store, along with writing pads and pens. Both have to pay for commercial leases, but you have to handle the delivery to your home yourself, either by paying a public transport fare or driving your car.
Anthropologists compared the lifespan of native jungle inhabitants who live in places like the Amazonian forest and have not had contact with our lifestyle. From their research, village elders are lucky to reach 40. Though the causes of death could be down to accidents with poisonous creatures, injury from falling objects, or change of diet due to dental decay.
But with all the antibiotics put into animals and household products along with UV and heating methods for sterilization, that is going to have some effect on the need for species like macrophages that feed off bacteria directly.
We once stayed in a house with one of those. For backup, there were two giant propane tanks with a crossbar valve arrangement of copper piping leading towards the burner/heater which in turn was in the center of the basement. There seemed to be some copper piping arranged in a coil around the collector for the heat. Whenever the burner went on, it really sounded like as if the whole house was going to be launched into space.
Usually they just wanted the cheapest person going (ie. an entry level graduate who did a final year project based on similar technology) and thought they were onto a bargain. Then the guy realizes that he can earn more elsewhere and sods off. Annoyingly, this leaves a vacancy that needs someone to clean up the mess.
There are flying cars for around $120,000... but the gotcha is that you need a pilot's license and still need permission to "take off" from an airport as well as submit a flight plan to the FAA.
Slashdot Mirror
And in other news ... sales of memory sticks, external USB drives and blank DVD's have suddenly skyrocketed along with the use of 'secure-ftp'.
Discovery channel in the 1990's ran a series of worst-case disasters like mega-earthquakes, mega-volcanoes, mega-tornadoes, mega-whatever... One of the episodes was a what-if scenario of a hurricane landing on New Orleans. Even then it was just brushed off as a one in two hundred years event.
People were willing to pay to get copies of the personal medical records of celebrities. What would they be willing to pay to get the scanner images of those individuals?
Former UCLA hospital worker who sold records of celebrities dies before sentencing
Nearly all the department stores did that back in the 1950's/1960's . There were no electronic cash registers, and checkout staff weren't allowed to handle money. So the customer would place their payment along with a receipt signed by the checkout clerk into a capsule. This would be sent upstairs to be processed by an accountant who would send the change back down to the checkout clerk. Just like in the movie "Brazil".
Probably the engineer who played in a rock band in his/her spare time and realized that a one bad note in a tune would be more discernible to somebody working late shift, than something like "The appendectomy/tonsillectomy/lumpectomy biopsy results have just arrived." . Those tunes would probably be as memorable to staff as the chord played in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Some research with VR googles was done eight years ago:
Ultrasound augmented realityWired had an article just last year
Total Recall had a giant screen that did an X-ray to just the bones of the person plus metal objects. The latest volume visualization techniques will map all the muscles and major blood vessels, as well as synovial joints.
A great application would be for medical ultra-sound visualisation. The latest scanners can generate 3D surfaces which can be viewed on a monitor. There was some experimentation with combining LCD screens with mirrors so that a cross-section view from the sensor could be superimposed on top of the location of the actual sensor.
Imagine if a doctor could slide this screen around a patient and motion sensors could pick up the location of the screen and transform the data from a MRI/CAT scan into a matching projection, all in real-time.
Not sure, but their competitors will use Meh...
If they were planning to ramp up their military infrastructure, they would be building the high-speed train lines underground and not on the surface.
Happened to the Chinese guy in our research group - got an invitation as a research associate in a prestigious Chinese university. Next thing he knows, he is supervising nine other PhD students.
Over the years (from 1996 to present), DirectX was marketed as having an advantage over OpenGL because DirectX would have all the latest features before OpenGL would have them added
as extensions. Microsoft's official policy was that OpenGL was for supporting the CAD market, while DirectX was for everyone else.
The ARB was always blamed for causing the delay in having a single agreed standard across all the vendors (Cg vs. GLSL vs. DirectX HLSL). The only other advantage that I see is that DirectX offers higher level data structures for rendering (triangle, quad, and general meshes).
There are open source equivalents to the audio such as OpenAL, and there are plenty of books and demos to teach programming techniques.
Thanks for that link - I'm amazed that the energy demand for all of that is only 50 watts, compared to the 300 watts required in the past for other cards. You could have a cluster of those and still use a standard electric socket.
Embedded systems may only be using a screen resolution of 640x480 or 800x600 rather than dual monitor 2048x1536. That's one energy/time saving. Then there won't be 900+ stream processors like the high-end gaming cards, there might just be 128 or 256. There's another saving. Anti-aliasing will be disabled as well, so that saves some processing time and power as well.
You will still have texture mapping, shadowing effects using fragment shaders, but just not as many triangles as the current gaming engines will all the effects turned on.
If it is possible to create a high-resolution endoscope imaging system using a single oscillating fibre-optic thread, a high-frequency crystal/mirror, would it not be possible to do the same with a simple infra-red thermometer sensor?
Wikipedia has a better explanation of the genetic code. It's probably better to understand that
in just about every species, groups of three letters form a codon, which defines a particular amino acid, of which there are 30 or so, but most species only seem to use around 24, along with a STOP command.
Some funky stuff goes on, with some DNA being used in reverse, or offset by one or two letters, so that you get six possible sequences from the same set of letters.
Then the security checkpoint would be moved to the front of the airport, and queues would form there, which would then be another target for the terrorists.
Many 3D chip companies like 3Dfx followed the Mini-GL approach simply because running Quake was the benchmark test of the time used by the game magazines - it wouldn't matter if your card supported 4, 8, 16 or 32 multi-texture units, the important thing was the frame-rate of Quake. A similar thing happened in the CAD market, with the benchmarks being based on Pro/E, SolidWorks and other packages.
3Dfx became tangled in a legal lawsuit with Nvidia which lasted for several years and ended up with the liquidation of 3Dfx and a transfer of assets to Nvidia. The last time I checked, Direct3D is similar to OpenGL in that every gl prefix is replaced with d3d, but with more C++ objects to support triangle lists/strips.
Different areas of the brain handle different tasks - the back of the brain is where the visual center is, while the sides are where the audio recognition/speech centers are (as determined from individuals who have lost parts of their brains from surgery, accidents or diseases).
The insular cortex seems to have been the most recent part of the brain to have evolved.
It isn't so much brain size alone, as the ratio of brain size to body size that seems to be a measure of intelligence. There seems to be a minimum amount of brain volume required to manage the metabolism and immune system of body of a certain mass, so any excess about that amount has some other purpose like cognitive thinking, memory, recognition.
These can be placed in a graph:
Graph #1
Graph #2
The problem is getting land rights from every county boundary. California proposed a high-speed shuttle train from San Francisco to Los Angeles via Sacremento that would take less than 90 minutes. The mayors of all three cities were extremely happy about this. Unfortunately, the mayors of all the cities in between also wanted a stop at their city. For every city that had a stop, that would add another 5 minutes to the train journey, and at least 20 other cities were wanting stations in their towns.
I'd agree with that - C was an improvement over assembly language in that your code would be cross-platform, assuming you didn't use any platform-dependent API's, and was a vast improvement over BASIC in that it supported recursion. Pascal had that benefit as well, but you ended up having to figure out how to unroll localized functions if you ever wanted to port algorithms to C or C++.
To make any code reusable in C, you are going to have to learn abstract data types (the predecessor of object-orientated programming), but when you want to port C ADT's to C++, you would end up spending a lot of time shuffling around object pointers.
Python and Perl seem to be the most popular object-oriented scripting languages used in industry, with the options of writing C++ and C++ extensions later on.
Delivery costs for any book delivered from an online retailer are at least 10 pounds in the UK by courier for delivery within a wekk. Even more if you want next day delivery. Books from the local bookstore are about the same as the online retailer - though this depends on the location. I found that ordering books from the campus bookstore was more expensive that the downtown store, along with writing pads and pens. Both have to pay for commercial leases, but you have to handle the delivery to your home yourself, either by paying a public transport fare or driving your car.
Anthropologists compared the lifespan of native jungle inhabitants who live in places like the Amazonian forest and have not had contact with our lifestyle. From their research, village elders are lucky to reach 40. Though the causes of death could be down to accidents with poisonous creatures, injury from falling objects, or change of diet due to dental decay.
But with all the antibiotics put into animals and household products along with UV and heating methods for sterilization, that is going to have some effect on the need for species like macrophages that feed off bacteria directly.
We once stayed in a house with one of those. For backup, there were two giant propane tanks with a crossbar valve arrangement of copper piping leading towards the burner/heater which in turn was in the center of the basement. There seemed to be some copper piping arranged in a coil around the collector for the heat. Whenever the burner went on, it really sounded like as if the whole house was going to be launched into space.
Usually they just wanted the cheapest person going (ie. an entry level graduate who did a final year project based on similar technology) and thought they were onto a bargain. Then the guy realizes that he can earn more elsewhere and sods off. Annoyingly, this leaves a vacancy that needs someone to clean up the mess.
There are flying cars for around $120,000 ... but the gotcha is that you need a pilot's license and still need permission to "take off" from an airport as well as submit a flight plan to the FAA.