In Japan, I used to rent CDs as a palatable method of evaluating music before I bought it. However, here in the good 'ol US of A, the RIAA in their infinite wisdom got legislation passed which prevents this. Thanks to them, I'm basically forced to buy it or "steal" it.
A lot of countries have realized there is a difference between copying a CD (copyright infringement) and a real criminal act, like fraud or theft. Canada is one of those countries - by viture of a levy on blank media, any music copied by my person is legal so long as no fee or charge was levied.
Why does the RIAA see the need to freak out so badly in the US?
www.amazing1.com - they'll sell you anything you need, if you think you know better. If you're intelligent though, any math done beforehand will tell you you're not going to compete with 1/2mv^2.
This is a money pit for the government. The problem is the energy.. there's just no way to have that much energy mobile in any form other than chemical (explosive) as it is now. Nuclear would work, but they don't make those in standard NATO cartridges. Yet. I played around with building devices like these, but they didn't make it off the table because of the energy requirements.
The only effective laser rifles are those designed to burn out the retinas of enemy troops, and are easily defended against by regular forces. Nevermind that they're against the geneva convention, but that doesn't stop anyone these days, haha.
Incredible benefits would be in-building healthcare clinics, a childcare center, a credit union and maybe a post office or mailing center, a decent cafeteria, along with generous time-off and flex-time (I'm sure they have this kind of arrangement already). These are the kinds of resources adults need but have a hard time getting access to due to operating hours and work hours not always meshing.
Not to sound harsh.. but those benefits suck. Pay me more and I can afford all the health insurance I want, it's cheap, and if you can't afford kids or can't afford to look after them properly, don't have them. I certainly don't want to pay for them. You certainly don't -have- to have kids.
How about a company store, while we're at it?
The ultimate benefit - pay me more and I can do with that money what I want. Most benefits, IMHO, are bullshit. Cut me a cheque, or stock, or profit sharing. Those are real benefits.
Re:First, human self-knowledge
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AI in Sci-Fi
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· Score: 1
What's missing in all the sci-fi scenarios is the necessity, before an AI can be built, that humans first understand themselves.
This assumes AI can be engineered or built. I have my doubts if this is feasabile or possible within my lifetime. Another school of thought on the issue, and one that I subscribe to, is that AI will be "discovered", or evolved independant of humans.
Reasearchers use humans as the metric for artificial intelligence and self-awareness. This is a mistake. I have no doubts in my mind that any number of creatures on this planet are self aware while being much, much less complicated than a human being. Even lowly insects show many signs of being self-aware, and have relatively simple nervous systems in comparison.
Perhaps we need to learn how to crawl, before we learn how to walk.
I read a good book on this a long time ago, Tapping the ZPE by Moray B. King. The idea is that there are a set of circumstances that can cause a random system to move toward order. The work was based on the 1977 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, who discovered the circumstances that can cause that to happen. This was done without violating the second law of thermodynamics, and is probably why the guy got the Nobel Prize. I don't know his name.
If I remember right, the circumstances were that the system had to be non-linear, far from equilibrium, and energy had to be expended to maintain that state.
The question is if you can build some sort of device to make the ZPE less random and extract energy from, literally, nothing. Just to say that "that's impossible" discounts the fact that we realy do not have a unified theory of everything, and there is likely a long way to go before we do have a GUT. I would perfer to keep an open mind about these things, and look for results. It is especially difficult to attempt to apply science - engineer a device - when the science is a great unknown to even the best minds on the planet now. Nothing is impossible, and everything in the universe came from nothingness originally!
One problem of any device like that is the energy density of the ZPE is absolutely insane. You could make a very deadly weapon from it. Nikola Tesla, one of the oldschool proponents of ether theories oft noted that unlimited energy would not be a good thing for mankind. He was probably right.
We don't need a free energy device anyhow. There's a huge ball of free energy 93 million miles away. We just need to engineer better ways to use that "free energy", first.
I am ashamed for selling my HP100LX, but at the time I needed the money.. anyhow, look up one of these devices and get yourself an old DOS copy of Borland Turbo C++ and put it on a PCMCIA drive. I did this for a number of years in high school and the early part of my university days.. I literally used that machine until it's beautiful keyboard started to get sticky. You can actually manage a decent speed with it. Perhaps you can find one on Ebay? Cheap?
There was no backlight, but the screen was very, very very good. You could make a little LED light no problem.
There has never been a replacement. A Jornada (?) clamshell might be close, though.
Problem solved.
Alternatively, you could get a tiny scale or powerPC industrial board from a company like Arcom or Embedded Planet, and run a serial terminal off it to a palm device for a screen. I've thought about building something like that, but I don't really have a need any more. As other people have posted, I can always use paper. Forget about getting anything you make yourself on a plane, anyhow.
Imagine the possibilities? Yes. Absolutely... Think instant qualification for a Darwin Award. When thinking of combining a high potential oxidizer with a "high heat of oxidation" fuel one should consider the results of the experiments of lighting charcoal with LOX (Liquid Oxygen).
Nitrous Oxide, unlike LOX, is perfectly safe at STP. It's not flammable, not explosive, other than the pressurized tank. Thousands of people use nitrous oxide systems every day, it's a cheap, easily removable, easily installed way to make lots of horsepower cheap.
It works because when compressed, it decomposes into 2N2O -> 2N2 + O2. That extra O2 is a lot more O2 than is available in air by weight (around 20%, I think, but my memory isn't the best). More O2 means you can burn more fuel in a given space, and thus, release more heat and energy in the process. The process whereby the N2O goes from a liquid to gas makes it very cold - expanding volume & dropping pressure - something that increases the resistance to detonation and density of the ambient air charge as well - more O2 again. The presence of additional N2 in the cylinder acts as a buffer against detonation once more.
Injecting liquid oxygen into your engine would be very stupid. The odds of igniting the metal in the block would be very good, me thinks.
This is true. But at the same time, the atmosphere in America (at least from where I'm sitting) is getting so passive that the thought of sitting down and actually doing something is really getting foreign to us.
I'm not an American, so my experience would be different. Provided the resources are there, I have no problem doing things. I know many other people who have no problem doing things. Do I do things for free? Not unless they make me happy. Mmm, utility. Much of the apathy you notice in the USA seems to have more to do with questionable leadership and lack of a national objective than it does with individuals. Hell, the USA is about to decimate a rogue state in the middle east with a flotilla of firepower exceeding that of most nations on earth.
Somehow, I doubt this society has any problem getting things done that geniunely need doing. Feh.
All that said, if you spend all day being "productive" I understand if you don't want to do it at night. But in my experience, we put a little too much faith in the power of money to make us happy. It shouldn't be about that.
Indeed, that's the point of the capitalistic society we live in. I play by the rules and have gotten reasonably adept at being "productive" to fund my hobbies and interests. If there was no scarcity, that's different.. but there is. I take the proceeds of my skilled labour and fund things I enjoy, and they don't have to be productive for diddly squat other than making me happy.
If I didn't have to sell myself, or goods I produce to make a living, the world would indeed be different, but it ain't. So anyone who tries to chastise me for enjoying pointless hours in front of C&C Generals, or wasting my vacation time on a racetrack, or staying up - got forbid - researching engines for no point or objective other than it makes ME happy can bugger off.
Why do you think the person who plays EQ in their spare time is any better than one who writes or plays guitar? If it makes them happy, and it doesn't harm anyone, all the power to them. Why would you assume that would make someone "feel better about themselves"? If I want to feel better, I fire up GTA3 and dispense some senseless carnage and destruction. It makes me feel a lot better than writing, especially here. Ha!
In the long run, everything is pointless, and you're going to die. Enjoy yourself while you're here. Don't make it a worse place to live. Better it? What's better. Or worse, for that matter.
Capitalism is nice that way. It makes me work towards the best interests of society - whatever that is. I'll enjoy the party while it lasts. I underestimate the power of a lot of things, but I do not underestimate the power of money to make me happy.
That people might do it.. just because it's -fun-? I'd be quite happy if I did nothing but play computer games, talk to my friends, golf, race cars, and play around with my other hobbies.
There's nothing wrong with doing things for no other reason than fun. If people like Everquest, and they have fun doing it - more power to them. The point of it is that it isn't productive at all.
In a world where goods move much, much more freely than people (skilled labour), is it any wonder that if companies in the US can't bring people here to work - and consume US goods, and contribute to the US economy locally - that the companies will instead move research and production facilities to where (static) labour is cheap, and move the finished product or even better, the information much more fluidly between borders?
Something to think about whenever the IEEE comes out with H1B bashing articles. Open immigration - the kind where you become a citizen, not a indentured servant ala H1B - is a good thing. Canada has much more open immigration policies and for the most part, is much stronger because of it.
It doesn't matter right now anyway - as there are no jobs available for when you graduate.
First, you don't need MS -anything- to program. I question the intelligence of anyone expending effort to join a commoditized programming community. Those easy tools mean you are expendible in a big way. Programming has nothing to do with a particular environment. Learn to solve problems. This is the largest problem I see when working with new people. Programming is implmenting a specific set of instructions to accomplish a task. No more, no less. The task and the instructions vary.
Second, if there's too much competition in a field, then move laterally to avoid much heartache.
If you want to remain employed forever, learn to do embedded programming and be willing to move around. If you can do the following, you can find work. Move the hell out of big cities. How much money do you have left after you pay for rent and transportation, parking, etc? I can buy a HOUSE with LAND (hint: Land != Lot) for $70,000cdn. If I just want a house, I can get a nice one for $40k cdn. I sure as hootin don't live in Toronto.
Know how to work an oscilloscope and a logic analyser, know what a function generator is used for, pick up a half dozen embedded architectures.. no, hell, even two - and learn what control systems do. Or even what a PID loop does.
You can program until you're blue in the face then. For money.
By that time we'll probably see >= 4GHz Intel and AMD chips
You know what, a year ago I would have agreed with you but now I'm not so sure. The prices for the top end chips are very high. I'm not so sure that AMD and Intel are currently going to continue their breakneck R&D budgets into the next year. I suspect you will see a dip or a flat spot in the new PC tech for the next 12 months to let them recoup some of the bazillions that have been invested into fabs and development. In that time frame prices will drop on the higher speeds - but the introduction of even faster chips will slow until new architectures become viable/microsoft gets their head out of their ass. Wouldn't it be ironic if Intel got screwed because Microsoft couldn't get Windows XP stable on a new architecture? The reverse situtation happening to apple, now?
PC speed has become less important.. less important to me than my video card. I have a PC at home pretty much just for gaming, and that's the only upgrade I've done since DDR memory and motherboards were available - a long time ago. I don't think Apple is in any trouble, so long as this chip makes it out the door by this time next year.
*shrug* I have a Apple Powerbook 1Ghz that I use for everything except games. It's fine, zippy, etc. Games I use my PC for. I don't know of any hardcore apple gamers. Apple's focus on notebooks is partially because of this - their powermacs are suffering, but there isn't anything they can do about that right now. In much the same vein, I have a openBSD box, two linux boxes, and a QNX box all running 3-4 year old motherboards and processors fine.
I don't think Apple needs to get involved. The extra time spent making their software better NOW will make it even faster when the new machines come out.
Pick the right tool for the job, duh. Mac isn't the right tool for a FPS or flight sim game monster. It kicks some serious ass as a unixy workstation-to-go, though. Their developer tools are excellent, and free. etcetcetc.
Lots of mac users depend on this software to run a variety of OSs.. I don't use it for windows, becuase it's uselessly slow for almost everything, but it's been great for testing linux configurations and the like. I had hoped to get some RTOS work on it as well, as it's easy to take a bunch of installations with me on my powerbook, even if they are slow.
If this program were open source, one company couldn't come along and buy it up and lock it away, or just plain not support it anymore. You can betcha that those cheap versions of this product with PC-DOS shipping are going to end in a hurry. I've actually USED that OS on VirtualPC, and it was snappy enough to be useful. The program isn't open source, so everyone is SOL. All the WORSE that the buying party is Microsoft - and they have enough cash to do this to whatever company that makes whatever killer app you like. Scarey, huh?
Even if this product continues to be developed, I will have to take a much harder look at where it's going on the mac platform in the future. That's a shame.
Perhaps this will help entrench the mac developers and users firmly in the open source world.
The earth is spinning. At ~100miles, it's moving very, very, very fast. The centriptal force created by that motion will hold it out. I don't know the specific speeds and forces offhand, and I'm too lazy to get my physics text off the bookshelf.
To give you an idea, get a weight and tie a rope to it. Spin in a circle. Notice the weight pulls away from you and stays steady? Now, you could build a little robot to move up and down that rope (while you are spinning it). That's how it works. The forces are astronomical though, and the materials science problem is why it hasn't been attempted before.
What I did to maximize space.. let's see.. two monitors, a 15" flat panel, an apple cinema display, a notebook, three towers, and room left over. What you want is table surface and LOTS OF IT.
All you need is a few sheets of 3/4" plywood, a way to cut it, a drill and some screws, and some industrial table legs. You can finish it however you want, I didn't bother. I just sanded it down. I might get fancy and laminate it or whatever, but that strikes me as one more thing to cause a problem.
I looked at the room I had - about 10' x 4' on one side of the L in the corner, 5' x 4' on the other side of the L. I cut out the plywood to match the shape I wanted. Then I doubled it up by screwing the two sheets of 3/4" plywood together into a good, very, very solid 1.5" sheet. A few minutes with a sander will take off the rough edges. Then just screw/clamp on the table legs you bought, or pile up some cinderblocks. I recommend the legs, though. When you move, just throw away the plywood and keep the legs. Plywood is very cheap here, no more than $100 or so for two very large sheets.
This allows you a solid surface to bolt things to without worries you're destroying an expensive desk. I'm waiting to get one of those floating arms to put a 15" LCD panel on to move around to whatever machine needs more screen space.
The lack of drawers lets you put machines and cables underneath at will without problems. You can stretch your legs out and not worry about smashing your knees. I store my extra stuff in large plastic toolboxes that cost me about $10 and are really handy for hauling stuff around in. The cheap metal storage shelves you find (or slightly more expensive wooden ones) are all you need for books and whatnot.
If you don't have access to woodworking tools, then do what I did when I had my apartment - go to Sears et. al and get the biggest, cheapest, thickest kitchen table you can find. Use that for your desk. It's all about massive surface area. It's also a lot cheaper than a useless "Executive" style desk with no room for monitors.
Hope that helps. Works for me. Doesn't look real good, but it is very functional.
Perhaps most terrifying of all these is Nerve Gas.. the Nazis discovered the base of all nerve toxins (IIRC, I'm an engineer, not a biochemist, Jim) in the 40's - Vx. That was over 60 years ago boys and girls, and science has come a long way since then. The world is a very scarey place now. Playing dumb and sticking our collective heads in the sand isn't the way to go. A dumb populace might be easy to control - but who's going to be in control? I think I read a story about that once. Something about a time machine?
Hiding science does nobody any good, and prevents people from having access to information. Those people who you are preventing from having access might be the people who have the insight to develop a new treatment, cure, or neuralizing agent for these evil compounds.
Last time I checked, all our engineering and universities were still open. Are we now going to ban biochemistry? Or maybe electrical engineering, becuase you might learn how to make a precision timer for a nuclear bomb? Or hell, ban mechanical engineering - you learn how to manufacture equipment to insane tolerances. The only people who might want to do that are TERRORISTS!
Yeah, I'm laying it on pretty thick up there, but this self-censorship crap smacks back to the 50's, and I don't like where it's going. How effective has the DEA been against people learning how to make amphetamines and other drugs in their backyards? Or when compounds are effectively removed from the public, discovering alternative, exotic synthesises? Not very.
Security through obscurity -NEVER- works. The only defense is to be well prepared, and in that case, that means educated.
The 12" is really just a hopped up iBook. It doesn't have DVI, making it incompatible with all of Apple's displays.. including the Cinema display. I don't know why Apple did this.
Lots of people have bitched about the scaled back memory too. There probably isn't a technical reason why it was limited to 640Meg, and there's no L3 cache onboard. Those issues wouldn't have bothered me as much as the lack of DVI.. I mean, apple themselves have sold it pretty heavily.
Anyhow, my TiSD should be here soon.. I won't even get into the mystery shipping on the 17". 17" makes a great desktop replacement, but if you're going to multihead it with a very large display it's kinda moot.
First off, if you know anyone who's been raided, it's quite likely the first indication you have that it's all going down is the power shuts off, THEN the agents kick in the door. Or, they just walk up on you in the street while you're eating dinner. If you don't have a UPS, or some secure means of signalling your PC quickly, you're probably not gong to be doing much of anything.
If you don't run a crypto FS and are that paranoid, then you're pretty much SOL. You might have enough time to scramble things enough that it's not worth their while to get you, or delete the keys, or somesuch. That's assuming they don't throw you in jail to rot for hindering procecution though. That doesn't happen very often.
Basically if you're in posession of a geniune rason to be THAT paranoid, and you're not using a cyrptographic filesystem combined with offsite/distributed storage, then you get what you deserve.
Get the 21" E500-series. I have a older E400 I paid a LOT of money for back in the day. It's bright enough to hurt to look at if cranked up all way. It'll be the last CRT I buy though, I stare at the screen all day, and the reduction in eyestrain is worth every penny. I pretty much just use my home system for games anyhow.
Sony makes really nice 21" CRTs including widescreen CRTs for what you paid for that 19" a year or so ago. So don't sweat it. I'll be replacing this monitor with a cinema display from Apple when it goes (I use one at work). Put a CRT next to a LCD and try to multihead.. it's painful.
From what songwriter would you license a song for producing a recording? If from yourself, how will you verify that in writing the song, you haven't unconsciously copied somebody else's song?
Since the point is to avoid a tax, I don't think me singing a personal tribute to international music piracy is going to have much to worry about on the disc.
Hell, you could kill two birds with one stone.. sing songs about how to make legitimate, personal backups of protected CDs and DVDs.
It's an interesting concept. I don't think it'll fly though - unlike cassetes, that have a cheezy tab you can put a piece of tape over 5.25" style to bypass the copy protect, mass-pressed CDs are not writable. In Canada, anyhow, the levy is very specific to include media that can be written by the end user.
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In Japan, I used to rent CDs as a palatable method of evaluating music before I bought it. However, here in the good 'ol US of A, the RIAA in their infinite wisdom got legislation passed which prevents this. Thanks to them, I'm basically forced to buy it or "steal" it.
A lot of countries have realized there is a difference between copying a CD (copyright infringement) and a real criminal act, like fraud or theft. Canada is one of those countries - by viture of a levy on blank media, any music copied by my person is legal so long as no fee or charge was levied.
Why does the RIAA see the need to freak out so badly in the US?
www.amazing1.com - they'll sell you anything you need, if you think you know better. If you're intelligent though, any math done beforehand will tell you you're not going to compete with 1/2mv^2.
This is a money pit for the government. The problem is the energy.. there's just no way to have that much energy mobile in any form other than chemical (explosive) as it is now. Nuclear would work, but they don't make those in standard NATO cartridges. Yet. I played around with building devices like these, but they didn't make it off the table because of the energy requirements.
The only effective laser rifles are those designed to burn out the retinas of enemy troops, and are easily defended against by regular forces. Nevermind that they're against the geneva convention, but that doesn't stop anyone these days, haha.
Hard to beat plain 'ol hot inertia at mach 5.
Incredible benefits would be in-building healthcare clinics, a childcare center, a credit union and maybe a post office or mailing center, a decent cafeteria, along with generous time-off and flex-time (I'm sure they have this kind of arrangement already). These are the kinds of resources adults need but have a hard time getting access to due to operating hours and work hours not always meshing.
Not to sound harsh.. but those benefits suck. Pay me more and I can afford all the health insurance I want, it's cheap, and if you can't afford kids or can't afford to look after them properly, don't have them. I certainly don't want to pay for them. You certainly don't -have- to have kids.
How about a company store, while we're at it?
The ultimate benefit - pay me more and I can do with that money what I want. Most benefits, IMHO, are bullshit. Cut me a cheque, or stock, or profit sharing. Those are real benefits.
What's missing in all the sci-fi scenarios is the necessity, before an AI can be built, that humans first understand themselves.
This assumes AI can be engineered or built. I have my doubts if this is feasabile or possible within my lifetime. Another school of thought on the issue, and one that I subscribe to, is that AI will be "discovered", or evolved independant of humans.
Reasearchers use humans as the metric for artificial intelligence and self-awareness. This is a mistake. I have no doubts in my mind that any number of creatures on this planet are self aware while being much, much less complicated than a human being. Even lowly insects show many signs of being self-aware, and have relatively simple nervous systems in comparison.
Perhaps we need to learn how to crawl, before we learn how to walk.
I read a good book on this a long time ago, Tapping the ZPE by Moray B. King. The idea is that there are a set of circumstances that can cause a random system to move toward order. The work was based on the 1977 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, who discovered the circumstances that can cause that to happen. This was done without violating the second law of thermodynamics, and is probably why the guy got the Nobel Prize. I don't know his name.
If I remember right, the circumstances were that the system had to be non-linear, far from equilibrium, and energy had to be expended to maintain that state.
The question is if you can build some sort of device to make the ZPE less random and extract energy from, literally, nothing. Just to say that "that's impossible" discounts the fact that we realy do not have a unified theory of everything, and there is likely a long way to go before we do have a GUT. I would perfer to keep an open mind about these things, and look for results. It is especially difficult to attempt to apply science - engineer a device - when the science is a great unknown to even the best minds on the planet now. Nothing is impossible, and everything in the universe came from nothingness originally!
One problem of any device like that is the energy density of the ZPE is absolutely insane. You could make a very deadly weapon from it. Nikola Tesla, one of the oldschool proponents of ether theories oft noted that unlimited energy would not be a good thing for mankind. He was probably right.
We don't need a free energy device anyhow. There's a huge ball of free energy 93 million miles away. We just need to engineer better ways to use that "free energy", first.
Hehe, load"$",8 .. ah, memories.
Yeah, if 4/8bpp 320x200 turns your crank :).
I am ashamed for selling my HP100LX, but at the time I needed the money.. anyhow, look up one of these devices and get yourself an old DOS copy of Borland Turbo C++ and put it on a PCMCIA drive. I did this for a number of years in high school and the early part of my university days.. I literally used that machine until it's beautiful keyboard started to get sticky. You can actually manage a decent speed with it. Perhaps you can find one on Ebay? Cheap?
There was no backlight, but the screen was very, very very good. You could make a little LED light no problem.
There has never been a replacement. A Jornada (?) clamshell might be close, though.
Problem solved.
Alternatively, you could get a tiny scale or powerPC industrial board from a company like Arcom or Embedded Planet, and run a serial terminal off it to a palm device for a screen. I've thought about building something like that, but I don't really have a need any more. As other people have posted, I can always use paper. Forget about getting anything you make yourself on a plane, anyhow.
Imagine the possibilities? Yes. Absolutely... Think instant qualification for a Darwin Award. When thinking of combining a high potential oxidizer with a "high heat of oxidation" fuel one should consider the results of the experiments of lighting charcoal with LOX (Liquid Oxygen).
Nitrous Oxide, unlike LOX, is perfectly safe at STP. It's not flammable, not explosive, other than the pressurized tank. Thousands of people use nitrous oxide systems every day, it's a cheap, easily removable, easily installed way to make lots of horsepower cheap.
It works because when compressed, it decomposes into 2N2O -> 2N2 + O2. That extra O2 is a lot more O2 than is available in air by weight (around 20%, I think, but my memory isn't the best). More O2 means you can burn more fuel in a given space, and thus, release more heat and energy in the process. The process whereby the N2O goes from a liquid to gas makes it very cold - expanding volume & dropping pressure - something that increases the resistance to detonation and density of the ambient air charge as well - more O2 again. The presence of additional N2 in the cylinder acts as a buffer against detonation once more.
Injecting liquid oxygen into your engine would be very stupid. The odds of igniting the metal in the block would be very good, me thinks.
This is true. But at the same time, the atmosphere in America (at least from where I'm sitting) is getting so passive that the thought of sitting down and actually doing something is really getting foreign to us.
I'm not an American, so my experience would be different. Provided the resources are there, I have no problem doing things. I know many other people who have no problem doing things. Do I do things for free? Not unless they make me happy. Mmm, utility. Much of the apathy you notice in the USA seems to have more to do with questionable leadership and lack of a national objective than it does with individuals. Hell, the USA is about to decimate a rogue state in the middle east with a flotilla of firepower exceeding that of most nations on earth.
Somehow, I doubt this society has any problem getting things done that geniunely need doing. Feh.
All that said, if you spend all day being "productive" I understand if you don't want to do it at night. But in my experience, we put a little too much faith in the power of money to make us happy. It shouldn't be about that.
Indeed, that's the point of the capitalistic society we live in. I play by the rules and have gotten reasonably adept at being "productive" to fund my hobbies and interests. If there was no scarcity, that's different.. but there is. I take the proceeds of my skilled labour and fund things I enjoy, and they don't have to be productive for diddly squat other than making me happy.
If I didn't have to sell myself, or goods I produce to make a living, the world would indeed be different, but it ain't. So anyone who tries to chastise me for enjoying pointless hours in front of C&C Generals, or wasting my vacation time on a racetrack, or staying up - got forbid - researching engines for no point or objective other than it makes ME happy can bugger off.
Why do you think the person who plays EQ in their spare time is any better than one who writes or plays guitar? If it makes them happy, and it doesn't harm anyone, all the power to them. Why would you assume that would make someone "feel better about themselves"? If I want to feel better, I fire up GTA3 and dispense some senseless carnage and destruction. It makes me feel a lot better than writing, especially here. Ha!
In the long run, everything is pointless, and you're going to die. Enjoy yourself while you're here. Don't make it a worse place to live. Better it? What's better. Or worse, for that matter.
Capitalism is nice that way. It makes me work towards the best interests of society - whatever that is. I'll enjoy the party while it lasts. I underestimate the power of a lot of things, but I do not underestimate the power of money to make me happy.
That people might do it.. just because it's -fun-? I'd be quite happy if I did nothing but play computer games, talk to my friends, golf, race cars, and play around with my other hobbies.
There's nothing wrong with doing things for no other reason than fun. If people like Everquest, and they have fun doing it - more power to them. The point of it is that it isn't productive at all.
In a world where goods move much, much more freely than people (skilled labour), is it any wonder that if companies in the US can't bring people here to work - and consume US goods, and contribute to the US economy locally - that the companies will instead move research and production facilities to where (static) labour is cheap, and move the finished product or even better, the information much more fluidly between borders?
Something to think about whenever the IEEE comes out with H1B bashing articles. Open immigration - the kind where you become a citizen, not a indentured servant ala H1B - is a good thing. Canada has much more open immigration policies and for the most part, is much stronger because of it.
Is there any improvements to processor useage, or adaptability for embedded environments in this release (over 4.2)?
It doesn't matter right now anyway - as there are no jobs available for when you graduate.
First, you don't need MS -anything- to program. I question the intelligence of anyone expending effort to join a commoditized programming community. Those easy tools mean you are expendible in a big way. Programming has nothing to do with a particular environment. Learn to solve problems. This is the largest problem I see when working with new people. Programming is implmenting a specific set of instructions to accomplish a task. No more, no less. The task and the instructions vary.
Second, if there's too much competition in a field, then move laterally to avoid much heartache.
If you want to remain employed forever, learn to do embedded programming and be willing to move around. If you can do the following, you can find work. Move the hell out of big cities. How much money do you have left after you pay for rent and transportation, parking, etc? I can buy a HOUSE with LAND (hint: Land != Lot) for $70,000cdn. If I just want a house, I can get a nice one for $40k cdn. I sure as hootin don't live in Toronto.
Know how to work an oscilloscope and a logic analyser, know what a function generator is used for, pick up a half dozen embedded architectures.. no, hell, even two - and learn what control systems do. Or even what a PID loop does.
You can program until you're blue in the face then. For money.
By that time we'll probably see >= 4GHz Intel and AMD chips
.. less important to me than my video card. I have a PC at home pretty much just for gaming, and that's the only upgrade I've done since DDR memory and motherboards were available - a long time ago. I don't think Apple is in any trouble, so long as this chip makes it out the door by this time next year.
You know what, a year ago I would have agreed with you but now I'm not so sure. The prices for the top end chips are very high. I'm not so sure that AMD and Intel are currently going to continue their breakneck R&D budgets into the next year. I suspect you will see a dip or a flat spot in the new PC tech for the next 12 months to let them recoup some of the bazillions that have been invested into fabs and development. In that time frame prices will drop on the higher speeds - but the introduction of even faster chips will slow until new architectures become viable/microsoft gets their head out of their ass. Wouldn't it be ironic if Intel got screwed because Microsoft couldn't get Windows XP stable on a new architecture? The reverse situtation happening to apple, now?
PC speed has become less important
*shrug* I have a Apple Powerbook 1Ghz that I use for everything except games. It's fine, zippy, etc. Games I use my PC for. I don't know of any hardcore apple gamers. Apple's focus on notebooks is partially because of this - their powermacs are suffering, but there isn't anything they can do about that right now. In much the same vein, I have a openBSD box, two linux boxes, and a QNX box all running 3-4 year old motherboards and processors fine.
I don't think Apple needs to get involved. The extra time spent making their software better NOW will make it even faster when the new machines come out.
Pick the right tool for the job, duh. Mac isn't the right tool for a FPS or flight sim game monster. It kicks some serious ass as a unixy workstation-to-go, though. Their developer tools are excellent, and free. etcetcetc.
Lots of mac users depend on this software to run a variety of OSs.. I don't use it for windows, becuase it's uselessly slow for almost everything, but it's been great for testing linux configurations and the like. I had hoped to get some RTOS work on it as well, as it's easy to take a bunch of installations with me on my powerbook, even if they are slow.
If this program were open source, one company couldn't come along and buy it up and lock it away, or just plain not support it anymore. You can betcha that those cheap versions of this product with PC-DOS shipping are going to end in a hurry. I've actually USED that OS on VirtualPC, and it was snappy enough to be useful. The program isn't open source, so everyone is SOL. All the WORSE that the buying party is Microsoft - and they have enough cash to do this to whatever company that makes whatever killer app you like. Scarey, huh?
Even if this product continues to be developed, I will have to take a much harder look at where it's going on the mac platform in the future. That's a shame.
Perhaps this will help entrench the mac developers and users firmly in the open source world.
The earth is spinning. At ~100miles, it's moving very, very, very fast. The centriptal force created by that motion will hold it out. I don't know the specific speeds and forces offhand, and I'm too lazy to get my physics text off the bookshelf.
To give you an idea, get a weight and tie a rope to it. Spin in a circle. Notice the weight pulls away from you and stays steady? Now, you could build a little robot to move up and down that rope (while you are spinning it). That's how it works. The forces are astronomical though, and the materials science problem is why it hasn't been attempted before.
What I did to maximize space.. let's see.. two monitors, a 15" flat panel, an apple cinema display, a notebook, three towers, and room left over. What you want is table surface and LOTS OF IT.
All you need is a few sheets of 3/4" plywood, a way to cut it, a drill and some screws, and some industrial table legs. You can finish it however you want, I didn't bother. I just sanded it down. I might get fancy and laminate it or whatever, but that strikes me as one more thing to cause a problem.
I looked at the room I had - about 10' x 4' on one side of the L in the corner, 5' x 4' on the other side of the L. I cut out the plywood to match the shape I wanted. Then I doubled it up by screwing the two sheets of 3/4" plywood together into a good, very, very solid 1.5" sheet. A few minutes with a sander will take off the rough edges. Then just screw/clamp on the table legs you bought, or pile up some cinderblocks. I recommend the legs, though. When you move, just throw away the plywood and keep the legs. Plywood is very cheap here, no more than $100 or so for two very large sheets.
This allows you a solid surface to bolt things to without worries you're destroying an expensive desk. I'm waiting to get one of those floating arms to put a 15" LCD panel on to move around to whatever machine needs more screen space.
The lack of drawers lets you put machines and cables underneath at will without problems. You can stretch your legs out and not worry about smashing your knees. I store my extra stuff in large plastic toolboxes that cost me about $10 and are really handy for hauling stuff around in. The cheap metal storage shelves you find (or slightly more expensive wooden ones) are all you need for books and whatnot.
If you don't have access to woodworking tools, then do what I did when I had my apartment - go to Sears et. al and get the biggest, cheapest, thickest kitchen table you can find. Use that for your desk. It's all about massive surface area. It's also a lot cheaper than a useless "Executive" style desk with no room for monitors.
Hope that helps. Works for me. Doesn't look real good, but it is very functional.
Perhaps most terrifying of all these is Nerve Gas.. the Nazis discovered the base of all nerve toxins (IIRC, I'm an engineer, not a biochemist, Jim) in the 40's - Vx. That was over 60 years ago boys and girls, and science has come a long way since then. The world is a very scarey place now. Playing dumb and sticking our collective heads in the sand isn't the way to go. A dumb populace might be easy to control - but who's going to be in control? I think I read a story about that once. Something about a time machine?
Hiding science does nobody any good, and prevents people from having access to information. Those people who you are preventing from having access might be the people who have the insight to develop a new treatment, cure, or neuralizing agent for these evil compounds.
Last time I checked, all our engineering and universities were still open. Are we now going to ban biochemistry? Or maybe electrical engineering, becuase you might learn how to make a precision timer for a nuclear bomb? Or hell, ban mechanical engineering - you learn how to manufacture equipment to insane tolerances. The only people who might want to do that are TERRORISTS!
Yeah, I'm laying it on pretty thick up there, but this self-censorship crap smacks back to the 50's, and I don't like where it's going. How effective has the DEA been against people learning how to make amphetamines and other drugs in their backyards? Or when compounds are effectively removed from the public, discovering alternative, exotic synthesises? Not very.
Security through obscurity -NEVER- works. The only defense is to be well prepared, and in that case, that means educated.
My via ITX board here has a TV-out on it.. so I suspect it's pretty straightforward.
The 12" is really just a hopped up iBook. It doesn't have DVI, making it incompatible with all of Apple's displays .. including the Cinema display. I don't know why Apple did this.
Lots of people have bitched about the scaled back memory too. There probably isn't a technical reason why it was limited to 640Meg, and there's no L3 cache onboard. Those issues wouldn't have bothered me as much as the lack of DVI.. I mean, apple themselves have sold it pretty heavily.
Anyhow, my TiSD should be here soon.. I won't even get into the mystery shipping on the 17". 17" makes a great desktop replacement, but if you're going to multihead it with a very large display it's kinda moot.
First off, if you know anyone who's been raided, it's quite likely the first indication you have that it's all going down is the power shuts off, THEN the agents kick in the door. Or, they just walk up on you in the street while you're eating dinner. If you don't have a UPS, or some secure means of signalling your PC quickly, you're probably not gong to be doing much of anything.
If you don't run a crypto FS and are that paranoid, then you're pretty much SOL. You might have enough time to scramble things enough that it's not worth their while to get you, or delete the keys, or somesuch. That's assuming they don't throw you in jail to rot for hindering procecution though. That doesn't happen very often.
Basically if you're in posession of a geniune rason to be THAT paranoid, and you're not using a cyrptographic filesystem combined with offsite/distributed storage, then you get what you deserve.
Get the 21" E500-series. I have a older E400 I paid a LOT of money for back in the day. It's bright enough to hurt to look at if cranked up all way. It'll be the last CRT I buy though, I stare at the screen all day, and the reduction in eyestrain is worth every penny. I pretty much just use my home system for games anyhow.
.. it's painful.
Sony makes really nice 21" CRTs including widescreen CRTs for what you paid for that 19" a year or so ago. So don't sweat it. I'll be replacing this monitor with a cinema display from Apple when it goes (I use one at work). Put a CRT next to a LCD and try to multihead
From what songwriter would you license a song for producing a recording? If from yourself, how will you verify that in writing the song, you haven't unconsciously copied somebody else's song?
Since the point is to avoid a tax, I don't think me singing a personal tribute to international music piracy is going to have much to worry about on the disc.
Hell, you could kill two birds with one stone.. sing songs about how to make legitimate, personal backups of protected CDs and DVDs.
It's an interesting concept. I don't think it'll fly though - unlike cassetes, that have a cheezy tab you can put a piece of tape over 5.25" style to bypass the copy protect, mass-pressed CDs are not writable. In Canada, anyhow, the levy is very specific to include media that can be written by the end user.