An even worse situation was with process monitoring systems, where the color coding scheme was: green meant normal, flashing green meant returning to normal, red meant fault, and flashing red meant about to fail.
For the want of a set of RGB color values, that job was unavailable to someone with red/green color blindness. Until that is, a technician figured out you could swap the green/blue cables on the monitor.
The statement that green is good, red is bad, is not really true. Red is an attention getter, Green is an easy, inobtrusive color (relaxing, generally).
But for someone who is color blind, it isn't going to make any difference anyway. Who's to say what the visual abilities of the person reading your report are going to be.
The recommended alternative was to use Red and Blue instead.
That would be true - you don't get to know the true latencies of a console system unless you are using the actual hardware. These would be different between the embedded system and PC due to the different cache memory sizes, bus architectures and CD speed.
There was a slashdot article (lost in the depths of time) which announced that Hollywood movie makers/cartoon story writers had derived the ten crucial elements of a hit movie. These included the hero, the hero's mentor, his nemesis, his woman of desire, his sidekicks, the quest, the first failure/turning back, the final fight, the victory and the happy ending.
Top Gun, Superman, Star Wars are examples of such movies.
Many of the video games don't really have these elements, so even with the best special effects/actors they wouldn't work. And if you do try and add these elements, they would alienate the fans of the original game.
If you were to try and convert 'nethack' into a movie, you already have the hero (the player), the sidekick (pet cat/dog), the nemesis (Wizard of Yendor), the mentor (the quest level), first failure (not having enough experience levels). The victory is a bit tricky since the Wizard of Yendor can keep coming back, and you would need a princess level for the "woman of desire" part, and I'm not sure how exactly you could compress exploring 20 levels of mazes and killing thousands of wild creatures into a 90 minute movie, apart from just using the distinctive levels (Asmodeus, Jubilex, the abandoned shops, and the elemental/spiritual planes). But the happy ending would be offering the Amulet of Yendor at the correct location.
That's what I really meant - IBM wasn't willing to customize the G5 with a higher clock speed and lower power consumption.
Apple wouldn't find it easy to sell a workstation that was outperformed by a console system, but they would have more to gain from having a workstation that could be used as a development platform for next generation console systems (SGI briefly gained from being the development platform for the Ultra64).
That's what it seems to me. Apple was happy when they were the only desktop computer manufacturers using the PowerPC processor, Being "different" gave them a sense of superiority over Intel based workstations.
Sony puts these CPU's in their PS3 console, and Apple gets all queeny ("I'm the only PowerPC product in the store") because they are no longer "different". And since IBM isn't interested in creating a differentiated version of the CPU just for Apple to be different from everyone else, Apple has to look around for a new CPU maker.
'The Beast' is actually the invention of Christian fiction writer Joe Musser, who included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse in 1970. In the book a gigantic three-storey computer is located in the administrative headquarters of the then Common Market.
Said machine was supposed to track all world trade through monitoring the buying and selling of every citizen on the planet. The self-programming 'Beast' would use unique digital numbers given to every human being and invisibly tattooed by laser on the forehead. These could be seen by infrared scanners at "special verification counters" - or cash tills, to you and us.
So just how did this obscure 1970s sci-fi vision of the future turn into a long-standing urban myth constantly peddled as the truth? Well silicon.com tracked down Joe Musser and asked him that very question.
He told us that the book was turned into a film, called The Rapture, which is apparently still available through GF Communications.
... can be found here. Probably the most unhuman looking robot is the ACM-R5, which is basically a snake design with a camera for the head. Just add some poison darts/fangs, and WestWorld will become reality.
It's a game of probability, where the designer tries to minimize the damage from random dust particles.
VLSI chips spend about 30% of their real-estate on the clock and power wires. So, a single particle of dust acts like a meteorite knocking out a whole suburb of a city. The damage caused by a broken power or clock wire is far more substantial as it can knock out other areas not immediately covered by the unwanted object.
If you have redundancy (like texture pipelines on a GPU), you can increase your yield rate, but if you were to duplicate everything twice, then you might as well just make two chips instead. Doubling any functional unit increases the overall size of the chip, and consequently increases the chances of the chip being contaminated by a particle of dust, and may actual lower the yield rate.
Reducing the size of the chip, reduces the likelyhood of being contaminated by dust, but means the damage would be far more substantial. But if a single particle of dust makes a chip completely useless, then you might as well just make everything as small as possible.
They would probably consider one IP address as a single sale.
You could try spoofing false IP addresses, but they would probably be smart enough to have a three stage handshake to make sure the IP address actually existed. Not forgetting checksums to ensure that the whole package was installed. They would probably have this happen every time the machine was switched on/off, in order to know which systems were available for use. And they would probably wait a whole week until they were certain the malware was installed successfully.
You can do that with almost any action movie that you haven't seen before. Start watching the movie from somewhere in the middle, then watch the movie from the start again (I did this when "On Deadly Ground" came out and I was staying in a hotel paid for by company expenses. Since I didn't want to add additional charges to the bill I could only watch the movie from the free 30 minutes allowed each day). Since I didn't see the first half of the movie, the character played by Steven Segal seemed to be the bad guy, since there was not justification for him blowing up the oil rig and shooting all the workers. It's only after seeing the start of the movie that the motivation was explained.
What is RED security clearance and how do I get it?
You need the red security key - You can find it in the basement carpark - go to the North-East corner - shoot up the wooden boxes to reveal the secret entrance, go through the tunnel, turn left, sneak past the guard, pick up the health pack, then turn around, and you should see the red key on the ledge above you. Climb up the boxes, and the red security key is yours.
Well, the number didn't need to the same same - could have been six, seven, nine or whatever. They could have used 60+ Lithium coin batteries and still remained within the package size and price.
At discount prices, the individual cells cost around $5 each, giving you $40 for a battery with eight cells, while the manufacturers charge around $200 for a packaged laptop battery, but only $50 for a digital camcorder.
Heat is simply the infra-red range of the electromagnetic spectrum. As the atoms under pressure collide, individual electrons collide, and give out the occasional photon. Eventually, the energy in the system would be lost at the surface through black body radiation and evaporation (unless it is a closed system).
Most volcanoes on Earth are powered by gas pressure contained by rock. Wouldn't the same thing happen on Titan with ice rather than rock?
The force of gravity pulling the moon together causes pressure at the core (See Pascal's law) This pressure (thousands if not millions times Earth's atmospheric pressure), gets converted into heat, which then causes convection and volcanoes. Some heat is also generated by the moon rotating within Saturn's gravitational field.
Because the laptop we use (Sony) only have an recovery/installation disk that installs Windows XP as two partitions. No Windows XP custom installation.
That depends on where the university is located. In the UK, most universities are located several blocks away from the city centre. However, there are universities which are located out on the edge of the city (Edinburgh University) if not out in the countryside (Bath University, Heriot-Watt University).
Daytime and evening bus services to undergraduate student neighborhoods are regular, but night-time services to more up-market are infrequent (hourly service evenings, last bus at 9pm, no service on weekends). A taxi will probably cost on the order of 10 to 20 pounds. So If you use work evenings regularly and use the car to go down to the supermarket, then it is more cost-effective to use a car. A bus pass will cost you 36 pounds for a whole month, for unlimited number of journeys or 2 pounds for a single day pass. At current rates, a car costs around 6000 pounds to run each year.
And that doesn't take into account, the latest UK policy to have all workplace car-parks to charge commercial rates for parking (hospitals, universities).
To install Fedora Core 3 onto my PC, I do the following:
1. Install Windows XP 2. Remove windows swap space (uses space at very end of partition) 3. Defragment drive 4. Run Knoppix CD and use qtparted to resize NTFS partition 5. Reboot PC with Windows XP - NTFS realizes it has been lobotimized and validates partition 6. Reinstall Windows swap space (768 MB) 6. Install Linux using whatever version you want. 7. Reboot PC
Going by the number of design failings I've seen in office buildings, I've always wondered whether architects should be required to work as janitors first. In that way, they could learn from the mistakes made by previous architects.
Examples that I have seen:
1. Access roads that are too narrow for more than one car at a time. A single parked car then blocks a fire engine or ambulance.
2. The architect decides that the hill in front of the building should be reshaped into steps leading to the street. A disabled access ramp is provided on one side. However, every Spring, the steps are taped out of bounds, as the cold weather causes water to turn to ice and consequently work the bricks loose from the cement, but the disabled ramp remains solid as the water runs off. If the architect had built everything as a slope, there wouldn't be any problem with frost damage.
3. The architect has the really bright idea that there shouldn't be any outside trash cans, but instead the flat owners have a little square alcove where they can leave a small bag of rubbish before 7am each day. However, some residents leave after this time, giving time for discarded spicy meals to burn through the plastic bags and stain the paintwork.
4. Failing to anticipate that apartment residents might own more than one car, leading to parking wars.
So if some young inventor creates something and some other company swipes it, it is a race to the patent office. I am guessing that a big company's lawyers know a shortcut or two.
A large company will constantly keep a stream of general and vague patents in the application pipeline process - whenever something comes up to challenges their position in the market, they update their patent to cover that new invention. By this method, they will always have been the first to file the patent.
You should read "The Exploding Metropolis" by the editors of Fortune Magazine in the 1950's, just before the suburbs started forming. My favourite quote:
"If married couples weren't so determined to spend such a large proportion of their salaries on refrigerators, they could afford to shop at the local stores much more frequently".
And the quote about trains:
All this talk of passenger trains moving at forty miles an hour is sheer hogwash! At that speed, the air in a passenger compartment would all be forced against the back wall. People in the front of the car would suffocate, and people at the back would die because in such concentrated air, they wouldn't be able to expel a breath.
Not forgetting the Earth's rotation: People like Galileo and Copernicus who say the earth is rotating must be crazy. We know the earth can't be moving. Why, if the earth was really turning once every day, then our whole city would have to be moving hundreds of leagues in an hour. That's impossible! Buildings would shake on their foundations. Gale-force winds would knock us over. Trees would fall down. The Mediterranean would come sweeping across the east coasts of Spain and Italy. And furthermore, what force would be making the world turn.
The issue with the camera makers isn't the file format being used - it's the fact that the raw data would give their competitors an insight into how they postprocess the raw CCD/CMOS sensor data into a balanced color image acceptable for photography.
Each CCD colour channel has it's own frequency response curve, which is more complex than a simple cubic or exponential curve. A considerable amount of calibration has to go into developing these equations for all light conditions.
If a new competitor were able to have access to both the raw and processed image data, they would be able to deduce the conversion process. The raw data format may also include other factors like average light intensity, shutter speed, target distance, which are all taken into account.
Any electronics company can make a camera case, license a lens system, flashbulb and memory card holder. It's the capabilities of the CCD that really justify the high price of a professional camera.
Slashdot Mirror
An even worse situation was with process monitoring systems, where the color coding scheme was: green meant normal, flashing green meant returning to normal, red meant fault, and flashing red meant about to fail. For the want of a set of RGB color values, that job was unavailable to someone with red/green color blindness. Until that is, a technician figured out you could swap the green/blue cables on the monitor.
The statement that green is good, red is bad, is not really true. Red is an attention getter, Green is an easy, inobtrusive color (relaxing, generally).
But for someone who is color blind, it isn't going to make any difference anyway. Who's to say what the visual abilities of the person reading your report are going to be.
The recommended alternative was to use Red and Blue instead.
That would be true - you don't get to know the true latencies of a console system unless you are using the actual hardware. These would be different between the embedded system and PC due to the different cache memory sizes, bus architectures and CD speed.
There was a slashdot article (lost in the depths of time) which announced that Hollywood movie makers/cartoon story writers had derived the ten crucial elements of a hit movie. These included the hero, the hero's mentor, his nemesis, his woman of desire, his sidekicks, the quest, the first failure/turning back, the final fight, the victory and the happy ending.
Top Gun, Superman, Star Wars are examples of such movies.
Many of the video games don't really have these elements, so even with the best special effects/actors they wouldn't work. And if you do try and add these elements, they would alienate the fans of the original game.
If you were to try and convert 'nethack' into a movie, you already have the hero (the player), the sidekick (pet cat/dog), the nemesis (Wizard of Yendor), the mentor (the quest level), first failure (not having enough experience levels).
The victory is a bit tricky since the Wizard of Yendor can keep coming back, and you would need a princess level for the "woman of desire" part, and I'm not sure how exactly you could compress exploring 20 levels of mazes and killing thousands of wild creatures into a 90 minute movie, apart from just using the distinctive levels (Asmodeus, Jubilex, the abandoned shops, and the elemental/spiritual planes). But the happy ending would be offering the Amulet of Yendor at the correct location.
That's what I really meant - IBM wasn't willing to customize the G5 with a higher clock speed and lower power consumption.
Apple wouldn't find it easy to sell a workstation that was outperformed by a console system, but they would have more to gain from having a workstation that could be used as a development platform for next generation console systems (SGI briefly gained from being the development platform for the Ultra64).
That's what it seems to me. Apple was happy when they were the only desktop computer manufacturers using the PowerPC processor, Being "different" gave them a sense of superiority over Intel based workstations.
Sony puts these CPU's in their PS3 console, and Apple gets all queeny ("I'm the only PowerPC product in the store") because they are no longer "different". And since IBM isn't interested in creating a differentiated version of the CPU just for Apple to be different from everyone else, Apple has to look around for a new CPU maker.
From IT Myths: Does the 'Beast of Brussels' know everything about us?
'The Beast' is actually the invention of Christian fiction writer Joe Musser, who included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse in 1970. In the book a gigantic three-storey computer is located in the administrative headquarters of the then Common Market.
Said machine was supposed to track all world trade through monitoring the buying and selling of every citizen on the planet. The self-programming 'Beast' would use unique digital numbers given to every human being and invisibly tattooed by laser on the forehead. These could be seen by infrared scanners at "special verification counters" - or cash tills, to you and us.
So just how did this obscure 1970s sci-fi vision of the future turn into a long-standing urban myth constantly peddled as the truth? Well silicon.com tracked down Joe Musser and asked him that very question.
He told us that the book was turned into a film, called The Rapture, which is apparently still available through GF Communications.
... can be found here.
Probably the most unhuman looking robot is the ACM-R5, which is basically a snake design with a camera for the head. Just add some poison darts/fangs, and WestWorld will become reality.
It's a game of probability, where the designer tries to minimize the damage from random dust particles.
VLSI chips spend about 30% of their real-estate on the clock and power wires. So, a single particle of dust acts like a meteorite knocking out a whole suburb of a city. The damage caused by a broken power or clock wire is far more substantial as it can knock out other areas not immediately covered by the unwanted object.
If you have redundancy (like texture pipelines on a GPU), you can increase your yield rate, but if you were to duplicate everything twice, then you might as well just make two chips instead. Doubling any functional unit increases the overall size of the chip, and consequently increases the chances of the chip being contaminated by a particle of dust, and may actual lower the yield rate.
Reducing the size of the chip, reduces the likelyhood of being contaminated by dust, but means the damage would be far more substantial.
But if a single particle of dust makes a chip completely useless, then you might as well just make everything as small as possible.
... Are they designing a nova bomb?
They would probably consider one IP address as a single sale.
You could try spoofing false IP addresses, but they would probably be smart enough to have a three stage handshake to make sure the IP address actually existed. Not forgetting checksums to ensure that the whole package was installed. They would probably have this happen every time the machine was switched on/off, in order to know which systems were available for use. And they would probably wait a whole week until they were certain the malware was installed successfully.
That would have been Gambit starring Michael Caine. A more detailed description here
A different perspective added a lot.
You can do that with almost any action movie that you haven't seen before. Start watching the movie from somewhere in the middle, then watch the movie from the start again (I did this when "On Deadly Ground" came out and I was staying in a hotel paid for by company expenses. Since I didn't want to add additional charges to the bill I could only watch the movie from the free 30 minutes allowed each day). Since I didn't see the first half of the movie, the character played by Steven Segal seemed to be the bad guy, since there was not justification for him blowing up the oil rig and shooting all the workers. It's only after seeing the start of the movie that the motivation was explained.
Sounds like Paranoia, the RPG.
This requires RED security clearance.
What is RED security clearance and how do I get it?
You need the red security key - You can find it in the basement carpark - go to the North-East corner - shoot up the wooden boxes to reveal the secret entrance, go through the tunnel, turn left, sneak past the guard, pick up the health pack, then turn around, and you should see the red key on the ledge above you. Climb up the boxes, and the red security key is yours.
Well, the number didn't need to the same same - could have been six, seven, nine or whatever.
They could have used 60+ Lithium coin batteries and still remained within the package size and price.
At discount prices, the individual cells cost around $5 each, giving you $40 for a battery with eight cells, while the manufacturers charge around $200 for a packaged laptop battery, but only $50 for a digital camcorder.
Heat is simply the infra-red range of the electromagnetic spectrum. As the atoms under pressure collide, individual electrons collide, and give out the occasional photon. Eventually, the energy in the system would be lost at the surface through black body radiation and evaporation (unless it is a closed system).
Most volcanoes on Earth are powered by gas pressure contained by rock. Wouldn't the same thing happen on Titan with ice rather than rock?
Look at the X-ray photographs of laptops. Another one here.
You can clearly see that each "single" battery, is a serial arrangement of eight smaller cells.
The force of gravity pulling the moon together causes pressure at the core (See Pascal's law) This pressure (thousands if not millions times Earth's atmospheric pressure), gets converted into heat, which then causes convection and volcanoes. Some heat is also generated by the moon rotating within Saturn's gravitational field.
Because the laptop we use (Sony) only have an recovery/installation disk that installs Windows XP as two partitions. No Windows XP custom installation.
That depends on where the university is located. In the UK, most universities are located several blocks away from the city centre. However, there are universities which are located out on the edge of the city (Edinburgh University) if not out in the countryside (Bath University, Heriot-Watt University).
Daytime and evening bus services to undergraduate student neighborhoods are regular, but night-time services to more up-market are infrequent (hourly service evenings, last bus at 9pm, no service on weekends). A taxi will probably cost on the order of 10 to 20 pounds. So If you use work evenings regularly and use the car to go down to the supermarket, then it is more cost-effective to use a car. A bus pass will cost you 36 pounds for a whole month, for unlimited number of journeys or 2 pounds for a single day pass. At current rates, a car costs around 6000 pounds to run each year.
And that doesn't take into account, the latest UK policy to have all workplace car-parks to charge commercial rates for parking (hospitals, universities).
Which Linux distribution did you use?
To install Fedora Core 3 onto my PC, I do the following:
1. Install Windows XP
2. Remove windows swap space (uses space at very end of partition)
3. Defragment drive
4. Run Knoppix CD and use qtparted to resize NTFS partition
5. Reboot PC with Windows XP - NTFS realizes it has been lobotimized and validates partition
6. Reinstall Windows swap space (768 MB)
6. Install Linux using whatever version you want.
7. Reboot PC
Finished - one dual boot PC ready for use.
Going by the number of design failings I've seen in office buildings, I've always wondered whether architects should be required to work as janitors first. In that way, they could learn from the mistakes made by previous architects.
Examples that I have seen:
1. Access roads that are too narrow for more than one car at a time. A single parked car then blocks a fire engine or ambulance.
2. The architect decides that the hill in front of the building should be reshaped into steps leading to the street. A disabled access ramp is provided on one side. However, every Spring, the steps are taped out of bounds, as the cold weather causes water to turn to ice and consequently work the bricks loose from the cement, but the disabled ramp remains solid as the water runs off. If the architect had built everything as a slope, there wouldn't be any problem with frost damage.
3. The architect has the really bright idea that there shouldn't be any outside trash cans, but instead the flat owners have a little square alcove where they can leave a small bag of rubbish before 7am each day. However, some residents leave after this time, giving time for discarded spicy meals to burn through the plastic bags and stain the paintwork.
4. Failing to anticipate that apartment residents might own more than one car, leading to parking wars.
So if some young inventor creates something and some other company swipes it, it is a race to the patent office. I am guessing that a big company's lawyers know a shortcut or two.
A large company will constantly keep a stream of general and vague patents in the application pipeline process - whenever something comes up to challenges their position in the market, they update their patent to cover that new invention. By this method, they will always have been the first to file the patent.
You should read "The Exploding Metropolis" by the editors of Fortune Magazine in the 1950's, just before the suburbs started forming. My favourite quote:
"If married couples weren't so determined to spend such a large proportion of their salaries on refrigerators, they could afford to shop at the local stores much more frequently".
And the quote about trains:
All this talk of passenger trains moving at forty miles an hour is sheer hogwash! At that speed, the air in a passenger compartment would all be forced against the back wall. People in the front of the car would suffocate, and people at the back would die because in such concentrated air, they wouldn't be able to expel a breath.
Not forgetting the Earth's rotation:
People like Galileo and Copernicus who say the earth is rotating must be crazy. We know the earth can't be moving. Why, if the earth was really turning once every day, then our whole city would have to be moving hundreds of leagues in an hour. That's impossible! Buildings would shake on their foundations. Gale-force winds would knock us over. Trees would fall down. The Mediterranean would come sweeping across the east coasts of Spain and Italy. And furthermore, what force would be making the world turn.
The issue with the camera makers isn't the file format being used - it's the fact that the raw data would give their competitors an insight into how they postprocess the raw CCD/CMOS sensor data into a balanced color image acceptable for photography.
Each CCD colour channel has it's own frequency response curve, which is more complex than a simple cubic or exponential curve. A considerable amount of calibration has to go into developing these equations for all light conditions.
If a new competitor were able to have access to both the raw and processed image data, they would be able to deduce the conversion process.
The raw data format may also include other factors like average light intensity, shutter speed, target distance, which are all taken into account.
Any electronics company can make a camera case, license a lens system, flashbulb and memory card holder. It's the capabilities of the CCD that really justify the high price of a professional camera.