If there were hydrocarbon deposits, then that would be indicative that there was once life on Mars. Hydrocarbons (ie. oil reserves and coal) are formed from compressed fossilized forests.
I clicked on the hyperlink and saw the old trailer. The new trailer looks much better - having thousands of vogon ships all acting together is much better.
All I saw was an exploding planet with no explanation.
They could have at least put in a Vogon spaceship, have it hover over the planet, then do the destruction thing. Some irony could have been added as well, add a marketing slogan on the side of the ship; "Vogon Intergalactic Highway Construction - building a better future for everyone".
Now, if there were transcripts of a converstion between two executives that were good friends, and not rivals in any way, completely trusted each other, and were slightly drunk, they would be interesting transcripts.
Personally, I'd prefer to see a company director admit that the true state of affairs, and propose action to remedy the situation, rather than remain in a state of denial, only to be forcibly evicted six months later.
Original stills were set up in places it was difficult to get to - read that as places the revenue collectors couldn't get to. The original stills mostly being illegal and all.
Stills had to be set up where there was access to water (river, canal, sea), and also required access to combustible materials like coal, peat, wood) to get the fermentation process going and evaporate/condense the alcohol/water. Plus, there was the requirement of being able to transport the final product. For long distances this required having access to a harbour (clipper ships could take advantage of the tides and weather and do 500 miles in a single day - motorways weren't introduced into the UK until the 1960's).
So the location of a brewery is constrained to be on the coast, next to the river or ocean and be within a short distance of a city or harbour.
There's an article in New Scientist which reports that Dutch military suppliers have finally solved the problem of using colour-mapping to convert the monochrome images of nightvision systems into colour. Previous attempts to use fake colour mappings had been a failure due to the creation of "psychadelic experiences". Some images of the new system
The reason I believe this is because electronics in peoples homes are growing at a faster rate than "green technology" (like solar power) is improving. The amount of solar panels required to power the 3 computers, 4 TV's, 2 PlayStations, DVRs, cordless phones, etc. in my house in cloudy/rainy NY would be crushing.
It's not your home computer equipment that sucking up all those kilowatts, it's the electrical appliances you take for granted. We once stayed in a rural cottage with a 5 kilowatt trip switch - any time the energy demands exceeded this limit, the main fuse would cut off.
Our morning would begin with putting the laundry into the washing machine(3 kW/h), switching on the kettle (2kW/h). By lunchtime, the cooker would be on (3kW/h), and the washing machine would now be in spin mode (2kW/h). Not forgetting the television (300 watts), refrigerator (500 watts), and a computer (120 watts), and maybe a couple of light bulbs (100 watts x 2).
Needless to say, our power supply was tripping out more often than hippies at a summer festival. A short term measure was that we had to switch off all lights and appliances whenever the cooker or washing machine was on. The long term solution was that the trip switch was upgraded to 9 kilowatts.
For 3 computers, 4 TV's, 2 playstations, DVR, the power demand would be an additional:
3 x computer ..= 3 x 200 watts = 600 4 x TV . . . ..= 4 x 80 watts = 320 2 x playstation = 2 x 80 watts = 160 2 x DVR. . . ..= 2 x 120 watts = 240 3 x cordless phones = 3 x 5 watts = 15 Total = 600 + 320 + 160 + 240 + 15 = 1335 kilowatts
Put me in this category. I use both Windows and Linux and would love to partially rewrite some of my best selling apps so that they run under Linux. But I'm not sure whether it's worth the effort.
I've been through this phase. As an experiment, I ported one of our in-house tools from MFC to Qt. The stages are quite straightforward:
(1) Split your MFC application into shared libraries and the MFC event handlers. Your shared libraries should be independent of all MFC constructs (CString etc...). The MFC event handlers shouldn't do anything more than make API calls to your the objects defined by the core libraries, and change the state of other MFC widgets.
(2) Port your shared libraries over to Linux. You'll probably end up shuttling the libraries back and forth to ensure any changes made haven't broken anything on the other platform. Both GCC and the MFC compilers pick up different errors, so if your code can compile without warnings or errors on both platforms, it should be fairly reliable.
You can use 'automake' to automatically create the Makefiles for you.
And you can also create command line versions for script file testing.
(3) Port the MFC interface over to Qt using 'designer'. For an application with six dialog windows and one main window, this took me a week working part-time. This will also include icons and any custom widgets you might need (eg. Combo boxes, List boxes). You'll probably want to look at using the 'configure/make install' framework to allow you to clean and automatically rebuild your application.
Once this stage is complete, you will have an empty application shell ready to be linked with your shared libraries.
(4) The final stage is to stitch together the Qt GUI interface with your shared libraries. This is probably the most time-consuming part.
All of this took around me around three months working part-time while learning Qt for the first time.
The benefits are:
1. Your source code is more modular. 2. Your source code has been tested with more than one compiler. 3. Your source code is now platform independent. 4. Trolltech can only place distribution rights on the GUI of your application.
How is getting a 800 ghz computer with 500 gigs or ram and a 40 gig video card going to change things?
Such a computer would allow doctors and surgeons to take complete body scans of people at sub-millimetre resolutions and visualize them in real-time. Quite useful if you are trying to tell if someone has cancer, and if so, how far it has spread. Such a computer would also allow you to model complex protein-folding in real-time, thus helping identify which genes and chemicals could kill off the viruses/diseased cells. Plus it could also do the CAD and engineering required to design such a new spacecraft.
As for those in university accomodation, my university provides network connections on the wall rather than having some useless 3rd party come in to sell us "broadband" that runs at 128kbps for £20pm with no choice to us.
British universities are under political pressure to demonstrate that they can create "spin-off companies". So the first thing that they do is to transfer ownership of the student accomodation telephone system to a company jointly set up by the administration and a handful of almuni graduates from the MBA course. These people then start to reduce network access speeds, increase charges, and lo and behold!, the university has created a profitable spin-off company.
Until of course, the students switch over to mobiles, Skype, and create their own Ethernet networks by hanging CAT-5 cable from window to window. Then once the company is no longer able to make a profit, the directors sell the now worthless company back to the university and leave with a golden parachute and valuable work experience.
... maybe they will just be booths where you could have a CD/DVD/whatever burnt with the tracks of your choice and label printed out there and then. It would certainly reduce the problems with shoplifting. Although you could do the same with a home PC if you had the bandwidth and a color printer.
One of the main obstacles to better security is that people are fundamentally lazy. Typing 30 or 40 characters is difficult to do, and it takes time, so people won't do it. Or if forced to do it, they will whine about it -- a lot.
Don't remind me - our company informed all users that they were not to leave their passwords on post-it notes on the computer monitors. So some smartass programmed the keyboard function keys to store the passwords, and kept the list of the function-key assignments on a post-it note stuck to the monitor.
What unneeded rendering capacity? I'm working with these cards just now, and there's not a single feature I haven't found useful. Although, I could gripe about the constant need to upgrade every six months just to get an extra 'C' language keyword in the shading languages, or the fact that on a dual boot system, the Linux device driver release supports OpenGL Shading language, but the Windows driver doesn't.
Sega is a major player in independant development, particularly for mobile phones.
That seems to be fate for every 3D graphics chip vendor who didn't keep up to speed with the latest offerings from Nvidia and ATI. They just seem to end up in low-power mobile computing, whether mobile phones, set top boxes, in-car technology or laptops.
Other recent filings include attempting to patent the "y-axis", the "IS NOT" operator in Basic, interactive test feedback, and reading ahead 20 records at a time in a database, when the user clicks the Previous or Next buttons.
I'm surprised they haven't already patented the use of the Q-dimension to predict future technology developments.
I have fish, turtles, snakes, (and dogs and cats of course)
How would I go about getting an octopus? Are they expensive?
While octopii do have strong arms and an extremely intelligent and curious minds, this invariable leads to their doom in captivity. Whenever they are bored or see something interesting, they try and explore their environment. Usually this involves pushing open the lid of the fishtank and climbing out. Unfortunately, they are not too good at climbing back in. This happened in the marine research laboratory my Dad worked for. No matter what size of the tank, the octopus would either attach its arms to one side of the tank and the lid and attempt to push the two apart. Or failing that, move into a corner of the tank, and attempt to prise two sides of the tank apart.
The definition of "obvious" or "non-obvious" is not clear. I can easily imagine the baffled patent examiner, considering the XOR drawing algorithm. "Wow! This guy knows about bits, and logic gates, and,... other complicated stuff. Hot damn, that can't be obvious. We gotta do something about this... We gotta... Make sure nobody else does this for 20 years!
At the time (1978), true-color framebuffers were expensive and consisted of an large board of RAM chips and several RAMDAC's. The only people to have access to such hardware were research departments in universities and corporations. Home computers were just coming onto the market, but still used block character graphics as the display system. The novelty for this patent was applying an arithmetic operation to framebuffer data in hardware. This was very much the same technological state as biological/genetic research is in now.
Nobody really anticipated that high-end workstation technology (as this was at the time) would eventually migrate down to consumer devices.
... Microsoft announce that they are partnering with Pfizer to produce their own generic brand name of Viagra.
Critics point out that the first version of any product from Microsoft never stays up for long, and that users should wait for the second release, unless they are willing to accept permanent loss of data assets.
It's also illegal to import DVD's from the USA into France. TUESDAY DECEMBER 19 2000 French ban on American DVDs
FROM ADAM SAGE IN PARIS
FRENCH authorities have made another attempt to roll back the tide of cultural globalization by banning Digital Video Discs (DVDs) imported from North America.
Specialists say that the Government is facing certain defeat, with fans able to order DVDs of American films via the Internet.
Catherine Tasca, the Culture Minister, has signed a decree making it illegal to import and sell DVDs from the USA or Canada for the six-month period that precedes their release on the French cinema circuit. Supporters of the ban say it will protect French movie houses threatened by the rising number of film-lovers who stay at home to watch the high quality recordings.
They point out that under the present law, DVD versions of American films often go on sale in shops in France before they reach the big screen.
DVDs are selling faster in France than in any other European country, with the total set to reach 13 million this year. Many are imported directly from America before they are officially distributed.
In an editorial yesterday, the newspaper Libération said that fans could order DVDs from the Internet and receive them by post. Soon they would be able to download DVDs directly from the Web, it said. "It is vain to think, as Mme Tasca does, that we can put up regulatory Maginot lines to cut up an increasingly global market."
From what I see happening on my web-browser, no matter when I try and access google.com, I immediately get relocated to google.co.uk (Thank you Google, if I wanted google.co.uk I would type google.co.uk, and not google.com).
Presumably, anyone in France typing in google.com, will get google.fr, thus allowing Google to implement regional policies.
Slashdot Mirror
or that there are giant hydrocarbon deposits
If there were hydrocarbon deposits, then that would be indicative that there was once life on Mars. Hydrocarbons (ie. oil reserves and coal) are formed from compressed fossilized forests.
I clicked on the hyperlink and saw the old trailer. The new trailer looks much better - having thousands of vogon ships all acting together is much better.
All I saw was an exploding planet with no explanation.
They could have at least put in a Vogon spaceship, have it hover over the planet, then do the destruction thing. Some irony could have been added as well, add a marketing slogan on the side of the ship; "Vogon Intergalactic Highway Construction - building a better future for everyone".
Now, if there were transcripts of a converstion between two executives that were good friends, and not rivals in any way, completely trusted each other, and were slightly drunk, they would be interesting transcripts.
That's why executives play golf.
Personally, I'd prefer to see a company director admit that the true state of affairs, and propose action to remedy the situation, rather than remain in a state of denial, only to be forcibly evicted six months later.
Yes, I meant both. I consider the sound system on my PC powerful, but not that powerful.
Original stills were set up in places it was difficult to get to - read that as places the revenue collectors couldn't get to. The original stills mostly being illegal and all.
Stills had to be set up where there was access to water (river, canal, sea), and also required access to combustible materials like coal, peat, wood) to get the fermentation process going and evaporate/condense the alcohol/water. Plus, there was the requirement of being able to transport the final product. For long distances this required having access to a harbour (clipper ships could take advantage of the tides and weather and do 500 miles in a single day - motorways weren't introduced into the UK until the 1960's).
So the location of a brewery is constrained to be on the coast, next to the river or ocean and be within a short distance of a city or harbour.
There's an article in New Scientist which reports that Dutch military suppliers have finally solved the problem of using colour-mapping to convert the monochrome images of nightvision systems into colour. Previous attempts to use fake colour mappings had been a failure due to the creation of "psychadelic experiences". Some images of the new system
The reason I believe this is because electronics in peoples homes are growing at a faster rate than "green technology" (like solar power) is improving.
.= 3 x 200 watts = 600 .= 4 x 80 watts = 320 .= 2 x 120 watts = 240
The amount of solar panels required to power the 3 computers, 4 TV's, 2 PlayStations, DVRs, cordless phones, etc. in my house in cloudy/rainy NY would be crushing.
It's not your home computer equipment that sucking up all those kilowatts, it's the electrical appliances you take for granted. We once stayed in a rural cottage with a 5 kilowatt trip switch - any time the energy demands exceeded this limit, the main fuse would cut off.
Our morning would begin with putting the laundry into the washing machine(3 kW/h), switching on the kettle (2kW/h). By lunchtime, the cooker would be on (3kW/h), and the washing machine would now be in spin mode (2kW/h). Not forgetting the television (300 watts), refrigerator (500 watts), and a computer (120 watts), and maybe a couple of light bulbs (100 watts x 2).
Needless to say, our power supply was tripping out more often than hippies at a summer festival. A short term measure was that we had to switch off all lights and appliances whenever the cooker or washing machine was on. The long term solution was that the trip switch was upgraded to 9 kilowatts.
For 3 computers, 4 TV's, 2 playstations, DVR, the power demand would be an additional:
3 x computer .
4 x TV . . . .
2 x playstation = 2 x 80 watts = 160
2 x DVR. . . .
3 x cordless phones = 3 x 5 watts = 15
Total = 600 + 320 + 160 + 240 + 15 = 1335 kilowatts
Sources: Energy Efficiency Guide, Energy Whiz and Saving Electricity
Put me in this category. I use both Windows and Linux and would love to partially rewrite some of my best selling apps so that they run under Linux. But I'm not sure whether it's worth the effort.
I've been through this phase. As an experiment, I ported one of our in-house tools from MFC to Qt. The stages are quite straightforward:
(1) Split your MFC application into shared libraries and the MFC event handlers. Your shared libraries should be independent of all MFC constructs (CString etc...). The MFC event handlers shouldn't do anything more than make API calls to your the objects defined by the core libraries, and change the state of other MFC widgets.
(2) Port your shared libraries over to Linux. You'll probably end up shuttling the libraries back and forth to ensure any changes made haven't broken anything on the other platform. Both GCC and the MFC compilers pick up different errors, so if your code can compile without warnings or errors on both platforms, it should be fairly reliable.
You can use 'automake' to automatically create the Makefiles for you.
And you can also create command line versions for script file testing.
(3) Port the MFC interface over to Qt using 'designer'. For an application with six dialog windows and one main window, this took me a week working part-time. This will also include icons
and any custom widgets you might need (eg. Combo boxes, List boxes). You'll probably want to look at using the 'configure/make install' framework to allow you to clean and automatically rebuild your application.
Once this stage is complete, you will have an empty application shell ready to be linked
with your shared libraries.
(4) The final stage is to stitch together the Qt GUI interface with your shared libraries. This is probably the most time-consuming part.
All of this took around me around three months working part-time while learning Qt for the first time.
The benefits are:
1. Your source code is more modular.
2. Your source code has been tested with more than one compiler.
3. Your source code is now platform independent.
4. Trolltech can only place distribution rights on the GUI of your application.
Upon which time, the file-traders will be using wifi networks across apartment blocks, if not streets as well.
How is getting a 800 ghz computer with 500 gigs or ram and a 40 gig video card going to change things?
Such a computer would allow doctors and surgeons to take complete body scans of people at sub-millimetre resolutions and visualize them in real-time. Quite useful if you are trying to tell if someone has cancer, and if so, how far it has spread. Such a computer would also allow you to model complex protein-folding in real-time, thus helping identify which genes and chemicals could kill off the viruses/diseased cells. Plus it could also do the CAD and engineering required to design such a new spacecraft.
As for those in university accomodation, my university provides network connections on the wall rather than having some useless 3rd party come in to sell us "broadband" that runs at 128kbps for £20pm with no choice to us.
British universities are under political pressure to demonstrate that they can create "spin-off companies". So the first thing that they do is to transfer ownership of the student accomodation telephone system to a company jointly set up by the administration and a handful of almuni graduates from the MBA course. These people then start to reduce network access speeds, increase charges, and lo and behold!, the university has created a profitable spin-off company.
Until of course, the students switch over to mobiles, Skype, and create their own Ethernet networks by hanging CAT-5 cable from window to window. Then once the company is no longer able to make a profit, the directors sell the now worthless company back to the university and leave with a golden parachute and valuable work experience.
... maybe they will just be booths where you could have a CD/DVD/whatever burnt with the tracks of your choice and label printed out there and then.
It would certainly reduce the problems with shoplifting. Although you could do the same with a home PC if you had the bandwidth and a color printer.
For an extremely short period of time, luggable computers were popular, especially the Osborne
One of the main obstacles to better security is that people are fundamentally lazy. Typing 30 or 40 characters is difficult to do, and it takes time, so people won't do it. Or if forced to do it, they will whine about it -- a lot.
Don't remind me - our company informed all users that they were not to leave their passwords on post-it notes on the computer monitors. So some smartass programmed the keyboard function keys to store the passwords, and kept the list of the function-key assignments on a post-it note stuck to the monitor.
What unneeded rendering capacity? I'm working with these cards just now, and there's not a single feature I haven't found useful. Although, I could gripe about the constant need to upgrade every six months just to get an extra 'C' language keyword in the shading languages, or the fact that on a dual boot system, the Linux device driver release supports OpenGL Shading language, but the Windows driver doesn't.
There must be at least a dozen satellite and aerial photography companies who have photographed Chicago. Are they going to be billed as well?
If nothing else, I would be curious to see what reflected image you get from that viewing angle.
Sega is a major player in independant development, particularly for mobile phones.
That seems to be fate for every 3D graphics chip vendor who didn't keep up to speed with the latest offerings from Nvidia and ATI. They just seem to end up in low-power mobile computing, whether mobile phones, set top boxes, in-car technology or laptops.
Other recent filings include attempting to patent the "y-axis", the "IS NOT" operator in Basic, interactive test feedback, and reading ahead 20 records at a time in a database, when the user clicks the Previous or Next buttons.
I'm surprised they haven't already patented the use of the Q-dimension to predict future technology developments.
I have fish, turtles, snakes, (and dogs and cats of course) How would I go about getting an octopus? Are they expensive? While octopii do have strong arms and an extremely intelligent and curious minds, this invariable leads to their doom in captivity. Whenever they are bored or see something interesting, they try and explore their environment. Usually this involves pushing open the lid of the fishtank and climbing out. Unfortunately, they are not too good at climbing back in. This happened in the marine research laboratory my Dad worked for. No matter what size of the tank, the octopus would either attach its arms to one side of the tank and the lid and attempt to push the two apart. Or failing that, move into a corner of the tank, and attempt to prise two sides of the tank apart.
The definition of "obvious" or "non-obvious" is not clear. I can easily imagine the baffled patent examiner, considering the XOR drawing algorithm. "Wow! This guy knows about bits, and logic gates, and,... other complicated stuff. Hot damn, that can't be obvious. We gotta do something about this... We gotta... Make sure nobody else does this for 20 years!
At the time (1978), true-color framebuffers were expensive and consisted of an large board of RAM chips and several RAMDAC's. The only people to have access to such hardware were research departments in universities and corporations. Home computers were just coming onto the market, but still used block character graphics as the display system. The novelty for this patent was applying an arithmetic operation to framebuffer data in hardware. This was very much the same technological state as biological/genetic research is in now.
Nobody really anticipated that high-end workstation technology (as this was at the time) would eventually migrate down to consumer devices.
The text for the XOR patent was filed by NuGraphics and can be found by searching for patent no. 4197590
Quantel also filed for a similar patent covering the use of transparency/opacity/alpha blending to implement paint brush strokes (4,633,416).
Owning the XOR patent, simply stimulated companies to develop other more advanced methods of editing (overlays, underlays, transparency color).
... Microsoft announce that they are partnering with Pfizer to produce their own generic brand name of Viagra.
Critics point out that the first version of any product from Microsoft never stays up for long, and that users should wait for the second release, unless they are willing to accept permanent loss of data assets.
It's also illegal to import DVD's from the USA into France.
TUESDAY DECEMBER 19 2000
French ban on American DVDs
FROM ADAM SAGE IN PARIS
FRENCH authorities have made another attempt to roll back the tide of cultural globalization by banning Digital Video Discs (DVDs) imported from North America.
Specialists say that the Government is facing certain defeat, with fans able to order DVDs of American films via the Internet.
Catherine Tasca, the Culture Minister, has signed a decree making it illegal to import and sell DVDs from the USA or Canada for the six-month period that precedes their release on the French cinema circuit. Supporters of the ban say it will protect French movie houses threatened by the rising number of film-lovers who stay at home to watch the high quality recordings.
They point out that under the present law, DVD versions of American films often go on sale in shops in France before they reach the big screen.
DVDs are selling faster in France than in any other European country, with the total set to reach 13 million this year. Many are imported directly from America before they are officially distributed.
In an editorial yesterday, the newspaper Libération said that fans could order DVDs from the Internet and receive them by post. Soon they would be able to download DVDs directly from the Web, it said. "It is vain to think, as Mme Tasca does, that we can put up regulatory Maginot lines to cut up an increasingly global market."
From what I see happening on my web-browser, no matter when I try and access google.com, I immediately get relocated to google.co.uk (Thank you Google, if I wanted google.co.uk I would type google.co.uk, and not google.com).
Presumably, anyone in France typing in google.com, will get google.fr, thus allowing Google to implement regional policies.