While they are at it, they might as well add that "glow in the dark" gene they put in fish.
An excellent idea. Trying to find my way across our basement in order to reset the cutout switch during a thunderstorm is like trying to walk across a minefield of highly mobile furry landmines. Put a foot on the wrong place and there is a sudden load noise followed by a sharp pain in your leg.
I've always wondered whether DNA has some form of checksum capability built in. We know that there are genes that can repair DNA and that there are genes that can prevent uncontrolled division of cells, but we barely know how they interact, let alone how they work.
Firefox doesn't deserve to be expected to fill every niche that some random jackass dreams up... Unless, of course, they develop an extension to do it, and don't bother the rest of us.
That's the way it should be - everything should be an optional plugin that can be removed/added through a simple dialog.
as soon a browser reach a bit of popularity, everybody seem to try to have it substitute his OS. why can't it just be a browser???
Because in the corporate environment, system administrators are completely fed up of the constant battle with spyware, adware, trojans, email spam, viruses and popups that users inadvertently download while using web based applications (E-mail, web browsing). Since at least one of these applications is web-based, having a secure browser is manna from heaven. And as the other applications (calendar/diary, group conferencing/whiteboard, voicemail) need network access anyway, there is no reason why these shouldn't be accessed through the same browser. If all of this is possible, then it eliminates the need for all the applications to be stored/run on a PC, thereby eliminating the need to buy licenses for the "professional" release of a certain OS whose vendor maintained a web browser is a basic part of the OS.
Re:teh living computer
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I believe the Australians have already have run simulations of heavily armed rebel kangaroos in the outback.
About kangaroos and bazookas.
It seems that an american company, which shall remain nameless because some friends of mine were working there at the time, was trying to sell a battlefield simulation program to the Australian military. The intent was to integrate it with some flight-simulators so that the Aussie pilots could have a realistic battlefield with simulations of some of the semi-random events that surround and confuse real battles to fly through.
In order to try to put on a more effective sales presentation, the orders came down to customize it -- which meant building some distinctly australian things into the system in order to impress upon the militarish folk reviewing the system that (A) the system could be quickly and easily reconfigured or altered, and (B), the company was *REALLY* serious about making this sale.
So, Australian fauna was coded in -- in particular, kangaroos. The 'roos represented a real concern for possibly confusing pilots, because they have an upright posture, they're about man-sized, and they move *fast*. If you're not paying attention, or if you're looking mainly at IR traces in a night-fight, it could be pretty easy to confuse them with soldiers.
The shop used Object-Oriented programming - a technique in which each 'object type' is a subtype of some more fundamental type. This saves work because you can 'inherit' behaviors and constraints from the more fundamental type, and write new code only for the stuff that's actually different. In the case of the kangaroos, they 'inherited' from ground troopers (the base type for most of the non-aircraft in the simulation), and put in different data for returning an image, to make them look like kangaroos. They put in different parameters for movement, to make them faster than humans (a lot faster). They used the "not under orders/cut off from c-cubed-i" methods for troopers as the primary methods for the 'roos, to simulate that they didn't have objectives or strategies, and they set their morale to 'low' because mobs of kangaroos don't hang together or fight panic the way platoons of human soldiers do.
They got orders to include kangaroos about forty-eight hours before the scheduled demo, and did it in one night. They figured they were all set.
So, cut past the sales presentation and into the demo. Some pretty high-up officer from the Aussie air force is seated in the flight simulator, flying over this simulated battlefield in his simulated aircraft, and admiring all the simulated details.
And he spots a mob of kangaroos.
So, just to see how they'll react, he buzzes the 'roos. They scatter, of course, bounding away at a realistic kangaroo top-speed in a dozen different directions. The officer laughs, turns his airplane around to get a good look at how that's working, and then gets a nasty surprise. It seems that some of the kangaroos had regrouped, ducked around a nearby ridge and set up an ambush for him using surface-to-air missiles. He didn't see them, so around the ridge he went looking for them - and then he gets a shriek on his missile-detecting radar and the next second his simulated plane turns into a great big simulated fireball.
Yup.... the guys never quite managed to override that 'response to attack' method. Just forgot, I guess. And didn't see it in testing because they never actually *buzzed* the mob of 'roos and then got back into missile range.
The unexpected thing? The officer was delighted. He'd been looking for a way to get his pilots trained to leave the damn mobs of kangaroos alone. He forbade the americans to fix the 'error'. And the Australians actually bought that system, complete with bazooka-packing kangaroos.
There used to be small mail-order companies who adapted standard keyboards for the ZX81. They used to advertise in the small columns of Personal Computer World. If I remember correctly, the keyboard was black, and fitted over/around the ZX81 (not unlike the Dell keyboards 20 years later!) with the exact ZX81 keyboard lettering on the keyboard.
There was guy in my class who lived out in the countryside. Short power outages occurred frequently due to snow on the powerlines. Their solution was to get a diesel generator and an AC/DC power trip switch/convertor.
Yes, but there is a subtle difference in the types of technology. The manned submarines that reached the deepest part of the ocean were thick skinned vessels with no manipulators or propulsion. Alvin was submersible with a large glass window, manipulators, and self-propelled, allowing the ability to examine specimens.You can see how the technology has evolved; lighting and propulsion migrate to the sides to maintain a hydrodynamic shape. The visual field expands to 180 degrees at each end.
It is useful for a lot of research. Even though it is not as good as a new one, why not keep in it action?
Undersea exploration is like space travel. You can get more capabilities by eliminating the human factor; the space/energy requirements for manned submersibles can be reused for retrieved scientific samples, more powerful propulsion, longer exploration times, or greater depth (longer tethers). You can now get little itty-bitty ROV vehicles that can go down to 300 etres (1000 feet).
These can be scaled up in order to go down to greater depths; manned submersibles are limited to 6000 metres. Remotely Operated Vehicles can go down to 7500 metres and beyond.
There have been several times that IBM couldn't come up with the binaries for some of their fixpack levels of some of their products., let alone the source code. The developers were like . . . uh . . . we don't have that code any more.
Oh yeah? Where did it go?
Simple. The archival policy is to maintain the last three releases of the binaries. Beyond that, it becomes tedious to retrofit bug fixes into every past release. Most active customers will update as the releases come out. But there are always some stragglers who don't keep up to date.
Large corporations are more like a loosely organised collective of 1000+ small technology companies all sharing the same accounting and legal departments. Each division/group has their own data backup/archival policy for software projects. Legacy projects usually end up backed up onto the oldest/slowest servers, until these machines are deemed to take up too much space/energy or make too much noise. Then they are sent to the corporate knackers yard to be "recycled" for spare parts. Then as part of corporate security, the disk drives are thoroughly wiped. So it's very easy for data to "disappear" forever.
Re:Doppler shifting radio waves?
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 1
I viewed the web page; this is some amazing research - to be able to measure the doppler shift due to gravitational acceleration.
Re:Doppler shifting radio waves?
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The amount of doppler shift is proportional to frequency and velocity. But it wasn't the change in signal frequency alone, it was the change in length of data timing as well.
The general equation is:
fdoppler = (frest * velocity )/ c
where: fdop = frequency after doppler shift frest = frequency before doppler shift velocity = speed of object relative to oberver c = speed of light
Although radio waves have a longer wavelength (kilohertz/megahertz) than light (terahertz+), the effect is less noticable, but still significant.
According to the article, the doppler shift was +/-38 Kilohertz. Given the fact that data was being transmitted on an 8/16 Kilohertz carrier wave, that's a rather significant change.
This is enough difference to allow police speed radar traps to work, and for researchers to measure the wind speeds inside tornado's.
Re:interesting but it's not really true
on
Murphy's Law Rules NASA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Just like the case in which the airport crew assigned to clean an aeroplane put some masking tape over the air pressure sensors, but forget to remove it. Or rather, as the airport was badly lit and the masking tape wasn't noticably different from the skin of the aircraft, nobody noticed this small defect. Until the pilots came in to land the aeroplane that is, then it became a large problem.
Why do the current video card vendors feel the need to have their own custom hardware interface anyway?
Because that was the traditional bottleneck for 3D rendering. In the early days, not all 3D cards did the transformation, lighting and clipping stages (TLC) in hardware. 3Dfx first came out with a card that did the rasterisation in hardware, but all the TLC processing was done by the Intel/AMD CPU. So there was a bottleneck caused by the number of vertices that the CPU could process. Once this could be done by the card, the next bottleneck was transferring texture and pixelmap data to and from the card (SGI tried the NUMA approach). Having display lists helped to reduce this problem. And sometimes having a CPU data cache can makes things worse by trying to batch write requests to memory. This may not work as expected if you are wanting to write data to vertex input registers/buffers. Have a look at the OpenGL registry - you'll see many NVida/ATI extensions related to the optimisation for the AGP bus.
we used both Pascal and C for our undergraduate courses. The editors (once in 43/50 line mode) were just as good as Microsoft Visual Studio (especially since they had the [alt]-[C] rectangular region copy/cut/paste option).
The problem with Pascal, was that it wasn't cross platform with other operating systems (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, whatever...). And it didn't have access to the windowing/networking libraries that C programs had on UNIX (It wasn't until 1993 that Microsoft starting including TCP/IP with PC's). Accessing any other libraries on the PC required 'C' bindings to be defined anyway, which of course required pointers to be handled).
Any Pascal programs for the PC were also hobbled by the 16-bit memory segment boundary limit, which caused many problems for applications with large amounts of data.
Slashdot Mirror
While they are at it, they might as well add that "glow in the dark" gene they put in fish.
An excellent idea. Trying to find my way across our basement in order to reset the cutout switch during a thunderstorm is like trying to walk across a minefield of highly mobile furry landmines. Put a foot on the wrong place and there is a sudden load noise followed by a sharp pain in your leg.
...They definitely need a strobing set of red lights that goes from side to side at the front of the car.
According to various DVD mail order companies, there is also going to be several animated adventures to be released as well.
Star Wars Ewok Adventures: Caravan of Courage / The Battle for Endor
Star Wars Animated Adventures: Droids
Star Wars Animated Adventures: Ewoks
I've always wondered whether DNA has some form of checksum capability built in. We know that there are genes that can repair DNA and that there are genes that can prevent uncontrolled division of cells, but we barely know how they interact, let alone how they work.
How long will my fillings tingle after I pull my head out of the microwave?
Only for as long as you keep your tooth capped with tinfoil.
In face the gas giant outer planets Uranus and Neptune have large amounts of methane in their atmospheres. (IANAAstronomer)
Danger! Flammable gases - Please switch off your engine before entering the atmosphere.
Firefox doesn't deserve to be expected to fill every niche that some random jackass dreams up... Unless, of course, they develop an extension to do it, and don't bother the rest of us.
That's the way it should be - everything should be an optional plugin that can be removed/added through a simple dialog.
as soon a browser reach a bit of popularity, everybody seem to try to have it substitute his OS. why can't it just be a browser???
Because in the corporate environment, system administrators are completely fed up of the constant battle with spyware, adware, trojans, email spam, viruses and popups that users inadvertently download while using web based applications (E-mail, web browsing). Since at least one of these applications is web-based, having a secure browser is manna from heaven. And as the other applications (calendar/diary, group conferencing/whiteboard, voicemail) need network access anyway, there is no reason why these shouldn't be accessed through the same browser. If all of this is possible, then it eliminates the need for all the applications to be stored/run on a PC, thereby eliminating the need to buy licenses for the "professional" release of a certain OS whose vendor maintained a web browser is a basic part of the OS.
Not forgetting that an Apple G5 "Tetrahedron" wouldn't leave anywhere to put your Star Wars action figures.
And an Apple G5 "Great Dirhombicosidodecahedron" would just confuse the users.
I believe the Australians have already have run simulations of heavily armed rebel kangaroos in the outback.
About kangaroos and bazookas.
It seems that an american company, which shall remain nameless because some friends of mine were working there at the time, was trying to sell a battlefield simulation program to the Australian military. The intent was to integrate it with some flight-simulators so that the Aussie pilots could have a realistic battlefield with simulations of some of the semi-random events that surround and confuse real battles to fly through.
In order to try to put on a more effective sales presentation, the orders came down to customize it -- which meant building some distinctly australian things into the system in order to impress upon the militarish folk reviewing the system that (A) the system could be quickly and easily reconfigured or altered, and (B), the company was *REALLY* serious about making this sale.
So, Australian fauna was coded in -- in particular, kangaroos. The 'roos represented a real concern for possibly confusing pilots, because they have an upright posture, they're about man-sized, and they move *fast*. If you're not paying attention, or if you're looking mainly at IR traces in a night-fight, it could be pretty easy to confuse them with soldiers.
The shop used Object-Oriented programming - a technique in which each 'object type' is a subtype of some more fundamental type. This saves work because you can 'inherit' behaviors and constraints from the more fundamental type, and write new code only for the stuff that's actually different. In the case of the kangaroos, they 'inherited' from ground troopers (the base type for most of the non-aircraft in the simulation), and put in different data for returning an image, to make them look like kangaroos. They put in different parameters for movement, to make them faster than humans (a lot faster). They used the "not under orders/cut off from c-cubed-i" methods for troopers as the primary methods for the 'roos, to simulate that they didn't have objectives or strategies, and they set their morale to 'low' because mobs of kangaroos don't hang together or fight panic the way platoons of human soldiers do.
They got orders to include kangaroos about forty-eight hours before the scheduled demo, and did it in one night. They figured they were all set.
So, cut past the sales presentation and into the demo. Some pretty high-up officer from the Aussie air force is seated in the flight simulator, flying over this simulated battlefield in his simulated aircraft, and admiring all the simulated details.
And he spots a mob of kangaroos.
So, just to see how they'll react, he buzzes the 'roos. They scatter, of course, bounding away at a realistic kangaroo top-speed in a dozen different directions. The officer laughs, turns his airplane around to get a good look at how that's working, and then gets a nasty surprise. It seems that some of the kangaroos had regrouped, ducked around a nearby ridge and set up an ambush for him using surface-to-air missiles. He didn't see them, so around the ridge he went looking for them - and then he gets a shriek on his missile-detecting radar and the next second his simulated plane turns into a great big simulated fireball.
Yup.... the guys never quite managed to override that 'response to attack' method. Just forgot, I guess. And didn't see it in testing because they never actually *buzzed* the mob of 'roos and then got back into missile range.
The unexpected thing? The officer was delighted. He'd been looking for a way to get his pilots trained to leave the damn mobs of kangaroos alone. He forbade the americans to fix the 'error'. And the Australians actually bought that system, complete with bazooka-packing kangaroos.
The last thing I want is a rat flying in my brain.
There used to be small mail-order companies who adapted standard keyboards for the ZX81. They used to advertise in the small columns of Personal Computer World. If I remember correctly, the keyboard was black, and fitted over/around the ZX81 (not unlike the Dell keyboards 20 years later!) with the exact ZX81 keyboard lettering on the keyboard.
There was guy in my class who lived out in the countryside. Short power outages occurred frequently due to snow on the powerlines. Their solution was to get a diesel generator and an AC/DC power trip switch/convertor.
Apparently, a highly technical standard body is harder to snowjob than the usual clueless consumers.
Damn!
Here are some adverts from that era
Applications for games and applications.
It's amazing they managed to get a flight simulator (if a bit blocky) running.
The $149 computer
The $99.95 computer
Yes, but there is a subtle difference in the types of technology. The manned submarines that reached the deepest part of the ocean were thick skinned vessels with no manipulators or propulsion. Alvin was submersible with a large glass window, manipulators, and self-propelled, allowing the ability to examine specimens.You can see how the technology has evolved; lighting and propulsion migrate to the sides to maintain a hydrodynamic shape. The visual field expands to 180 degrees at each end.
It is useful for a lot of research. Even though it is not as good as a new one, why not keep in it action?
Undersea exploration is like space travel. You can get more capabilities by eliminating the human factor; the space/energy requirements for
manned submersibles can be reused for retrieved scientific samples, more powerful propulsion, longer exploration times, or greater depth (longer tethers).
You can now get little itty-bitty ROV vehicles that can go down to 300 etres (1000 feet).
These can be scaled up in order to go down to greater depths; manned submersibles are limited to 6000 metres.
Remotely Operated Vehicles can go down to 7500 metres and beyond.
There have been several times that IBM couldn't come up with the binaries for some of their fixpack levels of some of their products., let alone the source code. The developers were like . . . uh . . . we don't have that code any more.
Oh yeah? Where did it go?
Simple. The archival policy is to maintain the last three releases of the binaries. Beyond that, it becomes tedious to retrofit bug fixes into every past release. Most active customers will update as the releases come out. But there are always some stragglers who don't keep up to date.
Large corporations are more like a loosely organised collective of 1000+ small technology companies all sharing the same accounting and legal departments. Each division/group has their own data backup/archival policy for software projects. Legacy projects usually end up backed up onto the oldest/slowest servers, until these machines are deemed to take up too much space/energy or make too much noise. Then they are sent to the corporate knackers yard to be "recycled" for spare parts. Then as part of corporate security, the disk drives are thoroughly wiped. So it's very easy for data to "disappear" forever.
... doing a Google search?
And if that fails, a www.archive.org search?
I viewed the web page; this is some amazing research - to be able to measure the doppler shift due to gravitational acceleration.
The amount of doppler shift is proportional to frequency and velocity. But it wasn't the change in signal frequency alone, it was the change in length of data timing as well.
The general equation is:
fdoppler = (frest * velocity )/ c
where:
fdop = frequency after doppler shift
frest = frequency before doppler shift
velocity = speed of object relative to oberver
c = speed of light
Although radio waves have a longer wavelength (kilohertz/megahertz) than light (terahertz+), the
effect is less noticable, but still significant.
According to the article, the doppler shift was +/-38 Kilohertz. Given the fact that data was being transmitted on an 8/16 Kilohertz carrier wave, that's a rather significant change.
This is enough difference to allow police speed radar traps to work, and for researchers to measure the wind speeds inside tornado's.
Just like the case in which the airport crew assigned to clean an aeroplane put some masking tape over the air pressure sensors, but forget to remove it. Or rather, as the airport was badly lit and the masking tape wasn't noticably different from the skin of the aircraft, nobody noticed this small defect. Until the pilots came in to land the aeroplane that is, then it became a large problem.
Why do the current video card vendors feel the need to have their own custom hardware interface anyway?
Because that was the traditional bottleneck for 3D rendering. In the early days, not all 3D cards did the transformation, lighting and clipping stages (TLC) in hardware. 3Dfx first came out with a card that did the rasterisation in hardware, but all the TLC processing was done by the Intel/AMD CPU. So there was a bottleneck caused by the number of vertices that the CPU could process. Once this could be done by the card, the next bottleneck was transferring texture and pixelmap data to and from the card (SGI tried the NUMA approach). Having display lists helped to reduce this problem. And sometimes having a CPU data cache can makes things worse by trying to batch write requests to memory. This may not work as expected if you are wanting to write data to vertex input registers/buffers. Have a look at the OpenGL registry - you'll see many NVida/ATI extensions related to the optimisation for the AGP bus.
we used both Pascal and C for our undergraduate courses. The editors (once in 43/50 line mode) were just as good as Microsoft Visual Studio (especially since they had the [alt]-[C] rectangular region copy/cut/paste option).
The problem with Pascal, was that it wasn't cross platform with other operating systems (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, whatever...). And it didn't have access to the windowing/networking libraries that C programs had on UNIX (It wasn't until 1993 that Microsoft starting including TCP/IP with PC's).
Accessing any other libraries on the PC required 'C' bindings to be defined anyway, which of course required pointers to be handled).
Any Pascal programs for the PC were also hobbled by the 16-bit memory segment boundary limit, which
caused many problems for applications with large amounts of data.
I delete MP3s when they are riddled with ... beeps
Noooo.... Those are communications from an alien race...