There have been plenty of times where the google camera-car has driven past high-schools at end of the schoolday and captured students waiting at the bus stops on the main high street. Interesting to think that if an individual were to take pictures, they would be questioned by the police, but if Google takes high-resolution pictures from a car, that is not a problem.
Some garden items seem to be particularly desirable for the stolen-on-demand market. These include hand carved garden ornaments of animals such as lions.
I guess that is true - back then, a server was really seen as a workstation without the graphics card and some additional space for a large hard disk drive.
There was always this perception of SGI being the high-end visualization company. All the UNIX vendors took great pride in being the chosen supplier for a particular Pixar/Disney movie or new visualization center. You went to Cray for the supercomputer, storage and high speed networking, and SGI for the visualization and the server (Visualization as in CAD/image processing/GIS/volume visualization/animation/flight simulation/virtual reality - anything where Gigabytes of texture data and geometry were being shuffled about).
PC's were considered suitable for just business computing (spreadsheets, word processing, labelling and presentations) and the occasional freeware game like Wolfenenstein or Doom. PC's were basically hobbled until they got rid of the 64K segmented memory architecture and started having 32-bit colour, high-resolution video and audio as well as virtual memory as standard.
Consequently, university research departments wouldn't go near PC's - trying to do image processing with any image larger than 128x128 usually required rewriting the algorithm to work off files directly.
SGI bought out part of Cray, the supercomputing/interconnect part. Sun bought out the other part of Cray, the storage systems part. Even if a company is in debt and has no sales, the patent portfolio is worth something even if it is for counter-litigation purposes.
The question is why do empires fall? Usually because they run out of lands to conquer. Or they lose their strategic advantage in technology (transportation, resources).
SGI was cool at the time, but their executive had a fatal flaw - they believed that the marketplace would always be willing to pay premium prices simply for the cool silver SGI badge on the monitor and desktop unit. Back then, anything that connected to a UNIX system would have a UNIX markup price; a UNIX RS232 or monitor cable would cost two or three times as much as a regular PC cable. Just to make sure no-one attempted to use a regular PC cable, an additional pair of pins would be used simply as a loop-back. Other vendors charged site licences by the maximum number of user accounts, the amount of memory, or the number of CPU's in the system.
Even though their engineers could see that PC's were catching up to workstation standards of CPU performance, SGI's executive board refused to develop for the PC platform, as they feared that they would have one half of the company attempting to undercut the profit margins of the other half.
By 1995, Microsoft had brought out Windows NT and other 3D vendors were providing professional graphics accelerator boards supporting texture mapping, SGI's engineers had left to form Nvidia. Then SGI sold all their graphics patents to Microsoft. SGI also bought out part of Cray in an effort to remain in the high-end visualisation market, but as PC clusters keep creeping upwards in performance that didn't work.
If SGI had been willing to provide 3D graphics technology to every possible marketplace, they would have probably been able to retain control rather than Microsoft to dominate.
When the more senior relatives in my family first tried to navigate the satellite-TV menu's, they kept moving to the night time section of the TV schedule and tried to watch the late-night news roundup.
Maybe there is a purpose to their large size. Microscope animations of blood traveling through capillaries showed that the red blood cells were just small enough to travel through a single capillary in single file. Perhaps they need to be this size in order for blood pressure to keep them moving, otherwise if they were considerably smaller than a capillary, then the water in the blood stream would just stream past them.
For a blood transfusion, the platelets (for clotting) white blood cells (fighting infections) and plasma (also for clotting) are separated from the red blood cells. Only the red blood cells carry hemoglobin, which carries Fe2+ iron ions.
Just by creating a synthetic red blood cell would eliminate the need for many blood transfusions.
Most TV adverts will just have "Brand X" as their competitor, they won't bash the competition like adverts in the USA. Magazine reviews will complement the good features, but will say things like "the user interface could do with more polish" or "processing time would benefit from one or two additional CPU's".
Data-flow programming and feed-back systems would be the closest analogy - different parts of the brain have different purposes, each area generally has a source of input and an output (receptor nerves received real-world stimuli), other nerve relay responses (spindle neurons), motor-neuron cells control muscles.
This system should allow the simulation of simple nervous systems like snails (10000 to 1 million neurons), as in many species a single neuron is known to be dedicated to a single purpose (a central pattern generator for controlling the ripples of contraction and expansion of the foot muscles). Is the purpose of a neuron determined simply by its location and connections to other neurons. If so, this system will work.
Where else are they going to get their political donations from? Having decided to offshore every other form of manufacturing, the only "manufacturing" industry left in the UK is the generation and analysis of personal data. Any company can use the "it will help in the fight against terrorism and child porn" justification for getting access to collect the information in the first place; the data; web browsing, car journeys, public transport journeys, supermarket purchases, mobile phone communications.
Then once they have access to that information, they can then sell it on to anyone else who wants it. The more random and disconnected data, the more funding the company will get to find "relevant data".
My high school use to have the daily announcement sheet - it was read out at around 11am, put up on the main noticeboards and again at 2pm. Anything from "the school nurse will not be here, so don't plan on being sick", half day announcements, weekend trips and congratulations to the school sports and debating teams were all read out.
I'd say it was more the atmosphere of the school that these people went to. If they became so depressed that they had to be put on medication, there is more likely to be something seriously wrong with that environment. Do the schools give everyone a chance to feel that they are good at something, or is it entirely only sports? Are there spelling bee competitions, science fairs, mathematics challenges, robotics, electronics clubs, or other activities? Does the school only congratulate the sports teams during daily class announcements, or do they congratulate students on external competitions?
The advantage is when you are using an applications like image processing, 3D rendering, video decompression, downloading where tasks can be run in the background. Scripts and macros that apply on multiple sets of data can be run in the background. Auto-save functionality has always been desirable, but annoying when the entire application freezes because it is single-threaded.
I don't know what this means: my house is about 20 years old - is that new enough?
It probably means anywhere where underground ducting/conduiting has been installed, particularly on business parks. Other locations would required digging up the pavements to make space for the new cabling.
Several years ago, I bought a second hand GPRS PCMCIA modem card for about 10 pounds, along with a free PAYG SIM card. After topping up the SIM card, I was able to get around four 30-minute internet sessions from abroad. It wasn't cheap, but it was impressive to my family to surf the internet completely wirelessly - no power, telephone or ethernet cables. The only limitation was the speed - around 56K baud.
Fortunately, there are now USB 3G dongles that plug into a USB port and do the same thing, so you can avoid the expense of an iPhone.
For some reason, I keep thinking of that episode of "Highway to Heaven", where the special needs coach bends his finger into a fish-hook shape and puts in his mouth.. "A Special Love" or "The Squeaky Wheel".
In the past 10 years, the most notable patent lawsuits were:
SCO vs. Linux - After hundreds of millions of dollars were blown away in lawyers legal fees, the judge rules that Linux didn't infringe on SCO's intellectual property. Best site for news here is Groklaw
Rambus vs. Hynix vs Micron Technology vs. Infineon Technologies vs. Siemens AG. vs. Samsung
Rambus seemed to be suing just about everyone, and everyone else was countersuing Rambus and each other. Legal letters seem to be flying around like chairs in a Saturday night bar fight.
From all of comments about the charges mobile phone operators charge, it would seem to make more sense to connect your phone to the internet using your computer as a data modem.
What gets me about that is that Indian Engineers like managers who aren't *also* engineers- a completely different mindset.
Probably because if they work for a manager who has an engineering background, they know they can't B******t them with excuses. I knew one Indian guy who had copied some sample code from a 3rd party development kit, along with the bugs in it, and them claimed they were "features", especially the one where configuration/log file directories would be created recursively inside each other instead of in the same parent folder.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been plenty of times where the google camera-car has driven past high-schools at end of the schoolday and captured students waiting at the bus stops on the main high street. Interesting to think that if an individual were to take pictures, they would be questioned by the police, but if Google takes high-resolution pictures from a car, that is not a problem.
Some garden items seem to be particularly desirable for the stolen-on-demand market. These include hand carved garden ornaments of animals such as lions.
SGIs could do more than 3D graphics.
I guess that is true - back then, a server was really seen as a workstation without the graphics card and some additional space for a large hard disk drive.
There was always this perception of SGI being the high-end visualization company. All the UNIX vendors took great pride in being the chosen supplier for a particular Pixar/Disney movie or new visualization center. You went to Cray for the supercomputer, storage and high speed networking, and SGI for the visualization and the server (Visualization as in CAD/image processing/GIS/volume visualization/animation/flight simulation/virtual reality - anything where Gigabytes of texture data and geometry were being shuffled about).
PC's were considered suitable for just business computing (spreadsheets, word processing, labelling and presentations) and the occasional freeware game like Wolfenenstein or Doom. PC's were basically hobbled until they got rid of the 64K segmented memory architecture and started having 32-bit colour, high-resolution video and audio as well as virtual memory as standard.
Consequently, university research departments wouldn't go near PC's - trying to do image processing with any image larger than 128x128 usually required rewriting the algorithm to work
off files directly.
SGI bought out part of Cray, the supercomputing/interconnect part. Sun bought out the other part of Cray, the storage systems part. Even if a company is in debt and has no sales, the patent portfolio is worth something even if it is for counter-litigation purposes.
The question is why do empires fall? Usually because they run out of lands to conquer. Or they lose their strategic advantage in technology (transportation, resources).
SGI was cool at the time, but their executive had a fatal flaw - they believed that the marketplace would always be willing to pay premium prices simply for the cool silver SGI badge on the monitor and desktop unit. Back then, anything that connected to a UNIX system would have a UNIX markup price; a UNIX RS232 or monitor cable would cost two or three times as much as a regular PC cable. Just to make sure no-one attempted to use a regular PC cable, an additional pair of pins would be used simply as a loop-back. Other vendors charged site licences by the maximum number of user accounts, the amount of memory, or the number of CPU's in the system.
Even though their engineers could see that PC's were catching up to workstation standards of CPU performance, SGI's executive board refused to develop for the PC platform, as they feared that they would have one half of the company attempting to undercut the profit margins of the other half.
By 1995, Microsoft had brought out Windows NT and other 3D vendors were providing professional graphics accelerator boards supporting texture mapping, SGI's engineers had left to form Nvidia. Then SGI sold all their graphics patents to Microsoft. SGI also bought out part of Cray in an effort to remain in the high-end visualisation market, but as PC clusters keep creeping upwards in performance that didn't work.
If SGI had been willing to provide 3D graphics technology to every possible marketplace, they would have probably been able to retain control rather than Microsoft to dominate.
When the more senior relatives in my family first tried to navigate the satellite-TV menu's, they kept moving to the night time section of the TV schedule and tried to watch the late-night news roundup.
A brain implant for a DVD player that interfaces directly to the visual cortex along with storage for up to 1000 DVDs'?
Maybe there is a purpose to their large size. Microscope animations of blood traveling through capillaries showed that the red blood cells were just small enough to travel through a single capillary in single file.
Perhaps they need to be this size in order for blood pressure to keep them moving, otherwise if they were considerably smaller than a capillary, then the water in the blood stream would just stream past them.
For a blood transfusion, the platelets (for clotting) white blood cells (fighting infections) and plasma (also for clotting) are separated from the red blood cells. Only the red blood cells carry hemoglobin, which carries Fe2+ iron ions.
Just by creating a synthetic red blood cell would eliminate the need for many blood transfusions.
Most TV adverts will just have "Brand X" as their competitor, they won't bash the competition like adverts in the USA. Magazine reviews will complement the good features, but will say things like "the user interface could do with more polish" or "processing time would benefit from one or two additional CPU's".
Most virus scanners also have a habit of scanning through memory for resident viruses. Having 192 GB is going to be fun ....
Data-flow programming and feed-back systems would be the closest analogy - different parts of the brain have different purposes, each area generally has a source of input and an output (receptor nerves received real-world stimuli), other nerve relay responses (spindle neurons), motor-neuron cells control muscles.
This system should allow the simulation of simple nervous systems like snails (10000 to 1 million neurons), as in many species a single neuron is known to be dedicated to a single purpose (a central pattern generator for controlling the ripples of contraction and expansion of the foot muscles). Is the purpose of a neuron determined simply by its location and connections to other neurons. If so, this system will work.
Where else are they going to get their political donations from? Having decided to offshore every other form of manufacturing, the only "manufacturing" industry left in the UK is the generation and analysis of personal data. Any company can use the "it will help in the fight against terrorism and child porn" justification for getting access to collect the information in the first place; the data; web browsing, car journeys, public transport journeys, supermarket purchases, mobile phone communications.
Then once they have access to that information, they can then sell it on to anyone else who wants it. The more random and disconnected data, the more funding the company will get to find "relevant data".
I went to a school as you described, but have seen what the schools in the upmarket areas of the USA and Canada are like.
My high school use to have the daily announcement sheet - it was read out at around 11am, put up on the main noticeboards and again at 2pm. Anything from "the school nurse will not be here, so don't plan on being sick", half day announcements, weekend trips and congratulations to the school sports and debating teams were all read out.
I'd say it was more the atmosphere of the school that these people went to. If they became so depressed that they had to be put on medication, there is more likely to be something seriously wrong with that environment. Do the
schools give everyone a chance to feel that they are good at something, or is it entirely only sports? Are there spelling bee competitions, science fairs, mathematics challenges, robotics, electronics clubs, or other activities?
Does the school only congratulate the sports teams during daily class announcements, or do they congratulate students on external competitions?
Virgin Media are already offering speeds "up to 50MB/second" in Cabled areas - at a cost of 35 pounds.month (XXL broadband).
The advantage is when you are using an applications like image processing, 3D rendering, video decompression, downloading where tasks can be run in the background. Scripts and macros that apply on multiple sets of data can be run in the background. Auto-save functionality has always been desirable, but annoying when the entire application freezes because it is single-threaded.
I don't know what this means: my house is about 20 years old - is that new enough?
It probably means anywhere where underground ducting/conduiting has been installed, particularly on business parks. Other locations would required digging up the pavements to make space for the new cabling.
Several years ago, I bought a second hand GPRS PCMCIA modem card for about 10 pounds, along with a free PAYG SIM card. After topping up the SIM card, I was able to get around four 30-minute internet sessions from abroad. It wasn't cheap, but it was impressive to my family to surf the internet completely wirelessly - no power, telephone or ethernet cables. The only limitation was the speed - around 56K baud.
Fortunately, there are now USB 3G dongles that plug into a USB port and do the same thing, so you can avoid the expense of an iPhone.
Robin: Holy bat boxes Batman, I think the Joker has placed bombs in the bat box.
Batman: Your right, we can't take the chance, we must inform the mayor and the bomb squad immediately.
Bat defences pierced by bomb panic
For some reason, I keep thinking of that episode of "Highway to Heaven", where the special needs coach bends his finger into a fish-hook shape and puts in his mouth..
"A Special Love" or "The Squeaky Wheel".
In the past 10 years, the most notable patent lawsuits were:
SCO vs. Linux - After hundreds of millions of dollars were blown away in lawyers legal fees, the judge rules that Linux didn't infringe on SCO's intellectual property. Best site for news here is Groklaw
3Dfx vs. Nvidia - 3dfx lost and merged into Nvidia
Rambus vs. Hynix vs Micron Technology vs. Infineon Technologies vs. Siemens AG. vs. Samsung
Rambus seemed to be suing just about everyone, and everyone else was countersuing Rambus and each other. Legal letters seem to be flying around like chairs in a Saturday night bar fight.
Hynix to pay Rambus $379 million in patent dispute
A complete list of legal updates provided by Rambus
Micron vs. Rambus
Although it does seem better to settle all patent disputes with cross-licensing as soon as possible, rather than slogging it out into bankruptcy
Rambus and Infineon settle patent dispute
From all of comments about the charges mobile phone operators charge, it would seem to make more sense to connect your phone to the internet using your computer as a data modem.
What gets me about that is that Indian Engineers like managers who aren't *also* engineers- a completely different mindset.
Probably because if they work for a manager who has an engineering background, they know they can't B******t them with excuses. I knew one Indian guy who had copied some sample code from a 3rd party development kit, along with the bugs in it, and them claimed they were "features", especially the one where configuration/log file directories would be created recursively inside each other instead of in the same parent folder.