There was a guy in our electronics class in high school bringing in the ZX79 (white case, blue letters) that he had just purchased, plugged it into a monitor and loaded in a factorial/factorisation program from cassette. With a fuzzy monchrome screen, the collective cry was "Awesome Dude!"
It completely blows me away - 10 years ago I bought a Dell PC (System 310) with 20 Megabytes disk space (wow!). Our university UNIX accounts were 'quota'ed to 1 Megabyte, 2 Megabytes if you were lucky. Two years later, I considered a 40 Megabyte hard disk drive hefty stuff.
Nowadays, you can buy a 128 Megabyte keychain memory card, and a digital camera can have a more than 4 Gigabytes, with consumer budget PC's coming with 400 Gigabytes just for one hard disk drive.
At this rate, in another 10 years, PC's will have 16 terabyte drives and laptops will have 1 Terabytes drives.
I've archived some of important documents onto clay tablets using Sanskrit, but I'm starting to run out of storage space. Even worse, the neighbours are starting to complain about the smoke from my kiln drifting across into their garden.
The question is about whether we really need a World Wide Web that looks like Wikipedia with links to every word and generally just a jumbled mess of blue and purple text. No matter how you cut it, the problem lies in having too much information immediately available.
You could always have your own private dictionary of words that you wanted hyperlinked whenever possible, and also an ignore list for the most popular words. But things would get tricky for movie titles which are wordplay on some other concept.
The issuance of stock options and/or warrants to the landlord by the tenant became a new means of paying security deposits and/or paying rent. The issuance of the stock options to the landlord in exchange for a security deposit or a reduction in rent means that the landlord, or its lender, has the opportunity to acquire, at a fixed price, an ownership position in the company. This ownership position may be worth far more than the amount of the security deposit or the amount by which the rent is reduced. This equity trade-off occurs when a landlord is particularly impressed with the prospects of a start-up company, usually one having an IPO on the horizon. Obviously, a landlord who is considering a mix of cash and equity must convince its lender or investors to allow such arrangement.
When job security is non-existant, you switch to career-security mode - avoid one company towns and move to cities large enough to have multiple job vacancies at any time, and where you are working with people you can learn from, and have enough spare cash for self-training (new hardware/software).
Because relocating is costly. You first have to give up your rented apartment (might break a lease or too), have the money to pay for deposit on a new home (security deposit - at least two months rent), transportation/storage costs for your belongings, temporary hotel stay for a couple of weeks while you find a new place. Then when you do find a place, there's property/council taxes, electricity/gas/telephone/cable/broadband installation charges. And you have to wait several months to get any of these deposits back from your old place.
And assuming you do get a job offer confirmed in writing, some corporate asshole might hear about your luck and decide that your job should be given to one of his mates after you arrive. And even if you do get the job and they don't switch you, there's no guarantee that it's going to last forever. The project might be completed, be abandoned, outsourced, or your position given over to one of the director's relatives as soon as term time ends.
Re:Next on slashdot: Da vinci code build in LEGO
on
The Real da Vinci Code
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's been done a long time ago - The Lego 8888 Idea Book came with instructions to build a robot crane programmed with 'gear racks'. A 6x20 flat plate contained six "channels" of gear racks. As this was pulled through the internals of the crane, it would force the small eight tooth gears to rotate - these controlled the rotation of the crane (clockwise/anti-clockwise) raising/lowering of the jib, and raising/lowering of the arm.
It's the same with other supercomputer sites. I was at a visit to Edinburgh University, and nobody was allowed to "see" the Connection Machine that they had at EPCC. The entire system was surrounded by eight foot high walls which were painted black. The irony was that Scientific American had a special edition that month which covered parallel processing, and had full page photographs of the CPU's, circuit boards and system design. EPCC claimed this was a requirement by the NSA.
Yes, going by the adverts produced by Honda (Can Hate Be Good?) and RailPower Technologies Corp. (Green Goat low emission locomotive), it would appear that stricter emission controls actually create jobs as researchers and companies develop products to match these requirements.
No, they just create new land using infilling. Create a concrete wall around the area you want, pump out the water, and fill the space with whatever you have available (garbage, dirt, sand, dredged up silt, blown up mountains). That gives you several levels of basements, plus land ready for the construction of airports, office blocks and shopping malls. And you solve coastal erosion at the same time.
The power consumption of the human brain is around 20 watts, while the power consumption of the human body is 100 watts. As there are 100 billion neurons in the brain, power consumption for a single neuron is around 0.5 - 4 nanoWatts. Compare this to the peak power output of a mobile phone, which is around 1-2 watts.
It's already possible to detect a heartbeat remotely using a electric sensor sensitive enough to detect a heartbeat from 1 metre away.
If this can work with the electric field contained within the heart, then perhaps it is also possible to detect the electric field caused by the neurons of the visual system, although you'd need some really complex signal processing.
Interestingly, most of the cases of "remote viewing" claimed by people close to death, always involve having the brain being cooled down to hypothermia levels. Perhaps this reduces the "thermal noise" and sensory noise in the brain.
You can do that with a long-exposure photograph. Take a regular photograph for your background. Then take the long exposure (30 to 90 seconds) to get all the lamps of the traffic lights lit up. Now composite the long exposure photograph of the lights onto the background.
Though you might want to avoid this traffic light and this set. Actually they're both the same set, but have different backgrounds.
They will plan to smash beagle3 into mars, leaving it inoperable.
No, the oxygen generating reactor is safely buried under several hundreds metres of martian rock. The only way in is through an underground tunnel, and an elevator.
It's nothing more complex than a C++ Camera class, comprising a centre point and radius, projection and rotation matrices.
This is covered in the first edition of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practise (the one with SunStone animation ) on the front cover. And that must have been back in 1978. Chris Crawford was writing 3D programming articles for the Atari home computer back in the early 1980's. Not forgetting all the different BYTE magazine articles.
Even earlier, and you have Evans and Sutherland doing the VR research in the 1960's.
Slashdot Mirror
That would have to be the ZX79/ZX80/ZX81?
There was a guy in our electronics class in high school bringing in the ZX79 (white case, blue letters) that he had just purchased, plugged it into a monitor and loaded in a factorial/factorisation program from cassette. With a fuzzy monchrome screen, the collective cry was "Awesome Dude!"
It completely blows me away - 10 years ago I bought a Dell PC (System 310) with 20 Megabytes disk space (wow!). Our university UNIX accounts were 'quota'ed to 1 Megabyte, 2 Megabytes if you were lucky. Two years later, I considered a 40 Megabyte hard disk drive hefty stuff.
Nowadays, you can buy a 128 Megabyte keychain memory card, and a digital camera can have a more than 4 Gigabytes, with consumer budget PC's coming with 400 Gigabytes just for one hard disk drive.
At this rate, in another 10 years, PC's will have 16 terabyte drives and laptops will have 1 Terabytes drives.
I've archived some of important documents onto clay tablets using Sanskrit, but I'm starting to run out of storage space. Even worse, the neighbours are starting to complain about the smoke from my kiln drifting across into their garden.
The question is about whether we really need a World Wide Web that looks like Wikipedia with links to every word and generally just a jumbled mess of blue and purple text. No matter how you cut it, the problem lies in having too much information immediately available.
You could always have your own private dictionary of words that you wanted hyperlinked whenever possible, and also an ignore list for the most popular words. But things would get tricky for movie titles which are wordplay on some other concept.
I did a keyword search - looks like it was targeted at companies, not individuals...
From Guidelines for Landlords
The issuance of stock options and/or warrants to the landlord by the tenant became a new means of paying security deposits and/or paying rent. The issuance of the stock options to the landlord in exchange for a security deposit or a reduction in rent means that the landlord, or its lender, has the opportunity to acquire, at a fixed price, an ownership position in the company. This ownership position may be worth far more than the amount of the security deposit or the amount by which the rent is reduced. This equity trade-off occurs when a landlord is particularly impressed with the prospects of a start-up company, usually one having an IPO on the horizon. Obviously, a landlord who is considering a mix of cash and equity must convince its lender or investors to allow such arrangement.
and Toughest Battle for Office Space in 40 years
... Four years ago I remember reading in TechWeek that landlords were demanding security deposits in dot com share options, rather than cash.
I wonder if they are still making such demands?
When job security is non-existant, you switch to career-security mode - avoid one company towns and move to cities large enough to have multiple job vacancies at any time, and where you are working with people you can learn from, and have enough spare cash for self-training (new hardware/software).
Because relocating is costly. You first have to give up your rented apartment (might break a lease or too), have the money to pay for deposit on a new home (security deposit - at least two months rent), transportation/storage costs for your belongings, temporary hotel stay for a couple of weeks while you find a new place. Then when you do find a place, there's property/council taxes, electricity/gas/telephone/cable/broadband installation charges. And you have to wait several months to get any of these deposits back from your old place.
And assuming you do get a job offer confirmed in writing, some corporate asshole might hear about your luck and decide that your job should be given to one of his mates after you arrive. And even if you do get the job and they don't switch you, there's no guarantee that it's going to last forever. The project might be completed, be abandoned, outsourced, or your position given over to one of the director's relatives as soon as term time ends.
That's been done a long time ago - The Lego 8888 Idea Book came with instructions to build a robot crane programmed with 'gear racks'. A 6x20 flat plate contained six "channels" of gear racks. As this was pulled through the internals of the crane, it would force the small eight tooth gears to rotate - these controlled the rotation of the crane (clockwise/anti-clockwise) raising/lowering of the jib, and raising/lowering of the arm.
Not bad for a publication back in the 1980's.
You could always get a Knoppix CD, boot up your PC using that, then try the programs.
It's the same with other supercomputer sites. I was at a visit to Edinburgh University, and nobody was allowed to "see" the Connection Machine that they had at EPCC. The entire system was surrounded by eight foot high walls which were painted black. The irony was that Scientific American had a special edition that month which covered parallel processing, and had full page photographs of the CPU's, circuit boards and system design. EPCC claimed this was a requirement by the NSA.
... now I need to update my p0rn collection...
Yes, going by the adverts produced by Honda (Can Hate Be Good?) and RailPower Technologies Corp. (Green Goat low emission locomotive), it would appear that stricter emission controls actually create jobs as researchers and companies develop products to match these requirements.
No, they just create new land using infilling. Create a concrete wall around the area you want, pump out the water, and fill the space with whatever you have available (garbage, dirt, sand, dredged up silt, blown up mountains). That gives you several levels of basements, plus land ready for the construction of airports, office blocks and shopping malls. And you solve coastal erosion at the same time.
... now, not only can I keep the floors in a country house clean, the robot can also eliminate the vermin problem in the neighbouring fields.
From an article I once read:
The power consumption of the human brain is around 20 watts, while the power consumption of the human body is 100 watts. As there are 100 billion neurons in the brain, power consumption for a single neuron is around 0.5 - 4 nanoWatts. Compare this to the peak power output of a mobile phone, which is around 1-2 watts.
It's already possible to detect a heartbeat remotely using a electric sensor sensitive enough to detect a heartbeat from 1 metre away.
If this can work with the electric field contained within the heart, then perhaps it is also possible to detect the electric field caused by the neurons of the visual system, although you'd need some really complex signal processing.
Interestingly, most of the cases of "remote viewing" claimed by people close to death, always involve having the brain being cooled down to hypothermia levels. Perhaps this reduces the "thermal noise" and sensory noise in the brain.
Better still ... a DNS attack by filing thousands of bogus patents... but that's already happening.
But what happens when the robot encounters a non-metal 1cm obstacle, such as plastic ducting for telephone wiring, power or network cables?
That has been done already. Hektor the Grafitti Output Device was covered by slashdot some time ago.
You can do that with a long-exposure photograph. Take a regular photograph for your background. Then take the long exposure (30 to 90 seconds) to get all the lamps of the traffic lights lit up. Now composite the long exposure photograph of the lights onto the background.
Though you might want to avoid this traffic light and this set. Actually they're both the same set, but have different backgrounds.
So this means they were wearing either army fatigues or a shirt with glasses.
If they'd been running around naked, the claim would have simply been changed to "dressed in the manner of a Counter Strike mod".
And if they were wearing cheap polyester off-the-shelf suits, they would have been characters from Leisure Suit Larry.
They will plan to smash beagle3 into mars, leaving it inoperable.
No, the oxygen generating reactor is safely buried under several hundreds metres of martian rock. The only way in is through an underground tunnel, and an elevator.
... what happens you post a link to an interesting article on slashdot.
Fascinating! Would you get fired for ordering and opening a Sears/Montgomery Ward catalogue to your work address?
It's nothing more complex than a C++ Camera class, comprising a centre point and radius, projection and rotation matrices.
This is covered in the first edition of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practise (the one with SunStone animation ) on the front cover. And that must have been back in 1978. Chris Crawford was writing 3D programming articles for the Atari home computer back in the early 1980's. Not forgetting all the different BYTE magazine articles.
Even earlier, and you have Evans and Sutherland doing the VR research in the 1960's.