Just as mars asteroids have hit earth, the same applies for the debris from (massive) impacts that Earth has had in it's history. One would think that any organisms that were living here then would have been transported to mars, also, or am I missing something?
Good to see (any) public interest in mars missions tho!
Co2 emissions are the least of our worries as a species.. people whine about that when there's tens of thousands of nuclear and who knows how many chemical and biological stockpiles floating around. Anyhow, personal beefs aside, an engineer already figured this one out. You can indeed stimulate the growth of the real "lungs" of the earth as another poster has listed, with the benefit that regions of "dead" ocean come alive with fish and other species. Good stuff.
All the Windows CE and Palm handhelds are just toys. For people that really need a device which fits in your pocket, and still does everything your desktop can (short of watch videos) buy a Psion 5mx. Fully featured Word processor, agenda, database, spreadsheet, terminal, and tons of great freeware for astronomy, chemistry, xpdf, calculators, encryption, electronics and more. Save yourself some wasted money and frustration.
I'm trying to wean myself off slashdot posts, but I can't resist, here. The reason that I carry a palm and not a more fancy machine is that the palm is actually useful for what it's designed to do. It stores my appointments, phone numbers, things I have to do, the odd idea or program sketch, and it's handy to store GPS data on.
The reason it's NOT a toy is that it's the correct form factor so that it sits in my pocket or on my belt, and I never think about taking it with me. Anything bigger, I don't take with me all the time, which makes the device basically useless. I had a Palm Pro that I bought the week it came out, and I recently bought a IIIxe to replace it's worn out screen.
I had a Hewlett Packard 100LX before then, but it was a little big to take with me everywhere. The Psion has the same problem. My solution to this problem was to use the device that best suits my needs - a PDA in a palm-factor, without the bloat, is PERFECT if you take it everywhere with you. When I want to code, or write something, I'll take my Vaio, hopefully I'll be getting a Picturebook soon, which is even better. Use a device that's designed for the application. Jack-of-all-trade devices work, but they don't do everything well, and when they go, you lose everything. I'd hate to have a cell phone, mp3 player, PDA and GPS all in one. Break / outdate one, replace 'em all!
And if you're talking about great software, that's one of Palm's biggest strengths - that, and a supported developer community that has free tools that - get this - work in Linux AND Windows. That's the reason I'm betting on palm in the long run.
In other words... COLOR on a handheld is just another of the bells and whistles. Just like MP3 players, you have such a small ammount of storage and short battery life, it's completely useless.
Egad! Again, you're not using the device for what it was designed to do. My rio 500 is great, 128 meg is plenty - the solid state aspect means it works when you're skiing, etc, and won't skip. But it's not a friggin MP3 repository! I have some scripts that download stuff automatically in the AM to the Rio, and if I want to change the music, well, that's what the Vaio in my briefcase in the car is for. As far as short battery life, off a good energizer, a Rio will run for a whole DAY off a AA battery!
As far as color goes, it's nice in the dark for Navigation apps, which I write, but it does wash out in the day. I suspect you're not informed on the battery life, either. The new color palms still measure battery life in weeks, and the people on comp.sys.palmtops.pilot with m505's report less battery life, but weeks is still fine with me. (Although my IIIxe gets months..)
Set top boxes. Wait for another few months and you'll be able to buy a number of NFS or HD bootable boxes from Motorola, Nokia, and others. I develop software for these boxes for my day job, and they do what everyone wants - have enough CPU to decode mp3, nice mpeg codecs, some of them run linux, and they look really nice in your entertainment center.
Save your money, wait for some standardized platforms to come out (Keep your eyes on the Nokia STB) and start up some open source interactive content management software that looks good on a TV. That's all these things are!
Alternatively, get a PC with a TV out card and stick it by the television. That's what I did.:)
I mean, we're supposed to be technically inclined here!:)
This guy has it cold. The amiga was about the hardware - the people that dared to laugh when they saw what current state of the art was. I've been waiting for someone to do this for a long time, be it under the guise of Linux, of AmigaOS. The trick is getting someone who's willing to put out specs, drivers, and all the required hardware until the market catches up (As amiga did).
If you don't care about it looking good, cooling isn't too big a deal. It's easy, even. Either just totally take off the side of the case, or drill lots of holes (if you care about RF), and then blow a $15 super-quiet desk fan at it. I'm running a duron 600 @ 900mhz, plain ol heat sink & fan it came with, @ 47C w/28C ambient. Plus, it cools my overclocked TNT2 much better, and does a good job on my hard drives and power supply too. All for $15cdn..
Same setup would work really well with a dual configuration, and it's whisper quiet, too. Could always do it with ductwork, I guess, but this works great, and it's $15cdn. Can't beat that. Heat concerns amuse me when they have to put a 1lb heatsink on the P4, and that's to act more as a heat transfer buffer than an effective sink, imho.
From the CDR Faq: Because of the media tax imposed by the Canadian government (see section (7-13)), you are allowed to copy any music for your own personal use. This means that you can go over to a friend's house and copy any number of discs you like, so long as they are for your own use. You are not allowed to make copies of music and then give them to others.
You can check the law yourself. The recording industry kinda skipped over this one. At least you get something for yet another miserable tax, er, levy. After all, just because a corporation doesn't LIKE something, doesn't make it ILLEGAL. What is illegal after all? The government is supposed to reflect the will of the people and the best interest of society, not the short term gain of the RIAA. (Especially if you're not IN America). That's why copyright is supposed to expire; why you have the right to parody and fair use; etc.
Now, does this apply to file sharing software? It hasn't been argued in court that I'm aware of, but perhaps it should be. After all, it's legal for me to copy cds that a friend has - why not their mp3 equivilants? Keeping mind of course, for personal use implies that there is no financial gain, which kinda hurts napster-like models. This might give some canadian users some power if they get hassled by their ISP for whatever.
I used to have a little leather bound notebook back-in-tha-day, for storing all sorts of little infos I had stumbled across. Then, one day, my little notebook met mr. mud puddle. Stupid of me, yes, and a PDA would suffer the same fate..
But it's a lot frickin' easier to backup a palm than it is to photocopy paper notes!
That's the main reason I use & love my PDA. And there's the jack-of-all-trades, master of none problem, too - and when the magic all-in-one device (inevitably) breaks, you're left without everything. I've got a mp3 player, a palm, a cell phone, and a leatherman, and I wouldn't want any of them crossbreeding. (yet). Might want the mp3 player to do voice record though. My batman factor is kinda high though:).
As for the notebook.. I'll sing in the streets when someone (perferably the manufacturer) releases the specs to the HP 720 so I can have a machine to read usenet and code on. Gotta run a real OS though:). There's a market for subnotes out there that is being axe murderered by WinCE ineptness.
Re:Valley startup syndrome. My life in a bucket.
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Coder on the Cross
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And when you do leave, at the exit interview, make sure they know why, it's the sweetest revenge.
Why let them know? Wouldn't there be a better long-term "revenge" aspect from leaving for "personal reasons", and let the horrible downward spiral continue?
Usenet was great in the early 90's - it was like Fidonet or somesuch, except on crack. The quality of converstation was quite high, as the only people with meaningful net access were probably in university or involved in research activities. Once the boom started, there was a period of 1-2 years (or maybe a year or two more) where Usenet degraded into a spam-filled hell.
Now, it seems most of the kiddies have gone to troll slashdot and it's kin, and left usenet alone - or at least the groups that I frequent. This has caused a slightly higher SnR... imagine getting useful information from Usenet again!
Usenet is the ultimate for loading onto a palmpilot or handheld computer and wasting time-o-plenty, and at the same time, maybe learning something. The Usenet group FAQ's are an incredible repositiory of otherwise hard or impossible to locate information - I cite the rec.food.coffee FAQ as an example:).
A slashcode to NNTP gateway would be da shit though.:)
Anyone else see the signifigance of this? A killer OS, combined with state of the art engineering for multimedia hardware. Complete right down to the low level information to program the fancy-pants features. Last time I saw that was in the near-mythical box of yore, the Amiga.. *dreamy sighs* I hope this makes it to North America. I can't believe sony did it either.. aye karumba!
Just think, a standardized, high-power linux graphics computing platform targeted solely at games, but with the capability to do other stuff, too. Maybe I'll spend my GF3 fund on something like that and keep my PC for coding. Heh.
Of course, the output quality will suck... these are PC components, not HiFi, and a PC box is a very noisy place.
Yup, I listen to my crappy mp3s and watch my crummy divx movies all day. I guess I've been fooled by the loss of fidelity, bah. Good enough for me. You wanna drop $3000 on a stereo, fine! I'll drop that into the motor for my car. To each their own, in this case, ignorance is bliss.
So was I.. the ATI TV-Wonder PCI Tuner works 100% in linux now (as of the current kernel revision, how many before, I know not). The card uses the BT878 chipset and is well supported and has good quality, in my uneducated opinion. You need to insmod the tuner with a couple parameters though.
No idea about all-in-wonder cards. I stay the hell away from all-in-anything.:)
I always record to mpeg-1 with the ATI TV-Wonder, have never dropped a frame, and always get stellar quality. Your definition of crap quality might be the reason though - I'll be happy with "looks good in a window" and "good enough on my TV". Fwiw, that's on a $80cdn duron 600 running at 900mhz.
Once I record the stuff, I post-process to mpeg4 for archiving.
Go buy a cheapass PC like a duron. Add the following:
128M RAM
DVD-ROM Drive (Plays CD's, too)
Hardware DVD card if you want quality++
ATI TV-Wonder PCI Tuner (Linux compatible, even)
TV out video card - ATI, or a TNT2.. cheap.. Geforce2MX, cheap.
Sound card. I use a cheap ass soundblaster.
Wireless keyboard and mouse (logitech)
A huge-ass HD (Nx80gb+, $300xN). Or NFS mount your linux server.
Think lusty thoughts about a wireless USB hub
Now, mix in the following software:
MAME. Enough said.
DVD software (Creative DXR kit works in linux)
Some TV recording software (lots out there)
Game-of-the-week (NFS looks nice on a quality TV)
What computer DOESN'T pay MP3s or CDs..
Now put it by your TV.
There you go, more convergence than you can shake a bloody stick at. Perhaps you meant a nice, unitied, all in one interface? Well, there's a great project for the open source community to pick up on, heavens knows I'd use it, don't have time to write it now. I work all day with Motorola set-top boxes, and one of those would also make a great platform for this, although the tools aren't free (IIRC). A PC works fine, and it's CHEAP.
Hell, one of the nifty things I've done is time-shift DVD rentals - rip it uncompressed and then play it back on the weekend (when you KNOW it won't be there.. heh). It doesn't look pretty, but it definately works, and IMHO smokes the hell out of anything available now. A hacked Xbox might change that though.
Go buy a cheapass PC like a duron. Add the following:
128M RAM
DVD-ROM Drive (Plays CD's, too)
Hardware DVD card if you want quality++
ATI TV-Wonder PCI Tuner (Linux compatible, even)
TV out video card - ATI, or a TNT2.. cheap.. Geforce2MX, cheap.
Sound card. I use a cheap ass soundblaster.
Wireless keyboard and mouse (logitech)
A huge-ass HD (Nx80gb+, $300xN). Or NFS mount your linux server.
Think lusty thoughts about a wireless USB hub
Now, mix in the following software:
MAME. Enough said.
DVD software (Creative DXR kit works in linux)
Some TV recording software (lots out there)
Game-of-the-week (NFS looks nice on a quality TV)
What computer DOESN'T pay MP3s or CDs..
Now put it by your TV.
There you go, more convergence than you can shake a bloody stick at. Perhaps you meant a nice, unitied, all in one interface? Well, there's a great project for the open source community to pick up on, heavens knows I'd use it, don't have time to write it now. I work all day with Motorola set-top boxes, and one of those would also make a great platform for this, although the tools aren't free (IIRC). A PC works fine, and it's CHEAP.
Hell, one of the nifty things I've done is time-shift DVD rentals - rip it uncompressed and then play it back on the weekend (when you KNOW it won't be there.. heh). It doesn't look pretty, but it definately works, and IMHO smokes the hell out of anything available now. A hacked Xbox might change that though.
Except you don't get independant third review if the guy publishing the paper is the guy who owns the web site, right.. that's the problem with the 10001 science sites out there. Lack of a third party review system.
Has anyone thought about adapting one of the napster clones - like OpenNAP - for use with scientific publications? That would be an incredibly useful resource. Another system that would work, or possibly even better, would be to take something like SlashCode or Zope (or any of the other weblog engines) and publish papers by category just like we do articles now. This would allow for moderated in depth peer review, and eliminate the lack of access to scientific research that IS hurting the comunity.
Some examples: When I was in university, I had access to research on astrophysics research papers. One example of this was using plasmas as an RF antenna - a pretty nifty idea that I never would have been exposed to otherwise, and that I'm experimenting with now. There's a lot of REALLY good info not available to the Open Source (could there be open research, too?) community as a result of the stratospheric fees charged. The rational for the fees is that they have to pay for peer review, but my counter would be that it's not that difficult to rate (moderate) someone's credentials and past work on a forum like slashdot.
To flip things around the other way, there are a lot of lay people who might have good ideas and even research that they can't get peer reviewed at all. I've seen some really good ideas for antennas and other RF devices that might be odd at first, but will never get in depth review or analysis because there's no access to that community.
Here's to the scientists.. maybe some journal will take the initiative and get a open system running for publication. If it's done well, and people start using it, then it doesn't matter what the "established" journals say - good science is good science, if it's here or in Russia, or India, or China. Hell, THAT'S another good point - how many ideas have to be reinvented because of poor or nonexistance international communications in the research field?
Not to get offtopic, but I think a lot of the dialog in Canada about bullying has arisen from a number of teen suicides that directly resulted from bullying. The number of suicides in teens far outnumbers the number of kids who go to school and try to shoot their classmates.
IIRC, Suicide is the #1 cause of death (or #2?) amoung people that are under 18, in Canada -AND- the United States.. and teen suicide isn't talked about seriously in the USA either, except in the context of "avoiding depression", and feeding the kiddies antidepressants..
Nobody has ever published (that I know of) any statistics on the number of people killed as a direct result of WoD enforcement (Cops, Dealers, your mistaken guy on the freeway, the bad raids, etc), and indirectly (the pothead that gets stabbed doing his time) relative to the actual number of people that die because of drug consumption. The way the WoD goes on, drugs are a huge scourge on the face of humanity, but the last time I looked, even the most evil of drugs (crack) killed only a few thousand people in the entire USA (Pop ~ 300e6). (Pot has killed nobody, ever) (Deaths from driving under the influence excluded, alcohol IS legal, so this is indirectly condoned by the state). Cigarette deaths number in the hundreds of thousands.
My point is this: Why is this such a international incident when I suspect this is a much more common occurance than you might expect?
Freedom isn't without responisbility. That means responsibility for your own actions - in a truely free society, you should be allowed to destroy your own life just as you should be allowed to better it. If you want the state to run your life, then be up front with it rather than beating around the bush like the USA is doing - I'm sure you could more efficiently manage a prison or police state if you're up front about it.
(for the sarcasm impared, you should have on your peril-sensitive sunglasses)
These people bringing the lawsuit are on the right track, they mailed John Carmack personally to demand that he personally prohibit any person under 17 from playing his game. He is a genius coder, he must be able to figure out a way to do it. Senseless auto-killing brainwashing ought only be reserved for those over 18
I have a personal pet theory of why school administrators and (some) parents are going apeshit about Columbine, getting kids booted for even mentioning guns, etc - That theory is that these parents / teachers / adminstrators know FULL WELL the kind of things that drive kids to shoot randomly, they know how bad it is, and they're scared shitless that their kid might get shot. (or hell, why stop with your classmates, might as well go for the office..)
That's why they want to crack down so hard, because it's something they can fix. The underlying issues are much harder. School shootings in Canada (on a smaller scale) have provoked national debates (on TV, even) about the nature of school bullying and what adminstrators can do about it. I saw no such coverage on CNN; the focus was on evil kids and black hearts.
Yeah, moz, video conferencing are all well and good, but two things drive the demand for consumer (computing) electronics - games and pr0n. What will make people get the GF3's and the Athlon DDR 1.5Ghz systems will be hardcore, 3D, interactive, good AI, 1GB of RAM suckin, 1280x1024, 120fps hardcore Pr0n. If I had the time and resources (I did a lot of 3D development), I'd be working on this right now, believe you me. The capabilities of a top-end system in 3 months graphic-wise are going to be previously unimagined in the consumer world.
I'm not talking about Virtual-Valerie cheezy sleaze. I'm talking about a virtual chick you can interact with and, uh, experiment in lots of innovative (and probably criminal, heh) ways. People are animals, and they love their pr0n. This I've been waiting for for years, and I think the technology is there to make it happen:).
And hey, you got bucks, I got a sick mind and OpenGL sk1llz:)
The amount of available nuclear bombs is still large enough to destroy the Earth ~10,000 times. A single H-Bomb can destroy whole countries and make them uninhabitable for years.
H-Bombs are evil, but this is FUD. Nuclear weapons can make areas of land inhabitable, and will dramatically affect the land for years - but the odds of a nuclear conflict that actually reduced the earth to ashes are completely improbable. Cities are the only targets that nuclear weapons effectively destroy - that, and perhaps large dams (think three gorges and the hoover dam). There's some doubt there too. There's little military strategic value in blowing up land nobody lives on, after you've wiped out all the cities.
Contrast this with a large asteroid. The resulting firestorm would burn everything on the planet that -could- burn. Humans just wouldn't be extincted, but probably everything more complicated than inscects and small rodents. There's no radiation of course (unless the asteroid was a block of uranium, which I find unlikely). Even then.
Then there's biological and chemical weapons. A genetically engineered virus, with the right incubation time, could kill us all in a couple of weeks.
Again, FUD. Biological and Chemical weapons are a particular pet peeve of mine, and my government (Canada) is no exception to the rule here - it absolutely disgusts me that people would invest time and (MY) tax dollars in developing stockpiles of nerve gas and biological weapons that serve NO defensive purpose - they're only offensive. Chemical and biological weapons are possibly some of the worst, more horrible ways to die that we've come up with, but even then, they're not going to kill us all. They'll just kill everyone in cities and urban areas, with developed nations the hardest hit.
Contrast with Mr. Asteroid - a good impact will, in one fell swoop, probably take out a continent! A whole continent! Unimaginable energies!
Ah well.. the only thing that will wake people up is a small asteroid taking out a major center (preferably American, because that's the only country with the resources to do anything).:)
Slashdot Mirror
Just as mars asteroids have hit earth, the same applies for the debris from (massive) impacts that Earth has had in it's history. One would think that any organisms that were living here then would have been transported to mars, also, or am I missing something?
Good to see (any) public interest in mars missions tho!
Co2 emissions are the least of our worries as a species.. people whine about that when there's tens of thousands of nuclear and who knows how many chemical and biological stockpiles floating around. Anyhow, personal beefs aside, an engineer already figured this one out. You can indeed stimulate the growth of the real "lungs" of the earth as another poster has listed, with the benefit that regions of "dead" ocean come alive with fish and other species. Good stuff.
Wired had a good piece on fertilizing the oceans with something as simple as soluable iron. When there exists a problem, technology will be developed to deal with it. Trying to change human nature is much more futile.. and I'd rather see the greenpeace crazies protesting to reduce nuclear stockpiles.
All the Windows CE and Palm handhelds are just toys. For people that really need a device which fits in your pocket, and still does everything your desktop can (short of watch videos) buy a Psion 5mx. Fully featured Word processor, agenda, database, spreadsheet, terminal, and tons of great freeware for astronomy, chemistry, xpdf, calculators, encryption, electronics and more. Save yourself some wasted money and frustration.
I'm trying to wean myself off slashdot posts, but I can't resist, here. The reason that I carry a palm and not a more fancy machine is that the palm is actually useful for what it's designed to do. It stores my appointments, phone numbers, things I have to do, the odd idea or program sketch, and it's handy to store GPS data on.
The reason it's NOT a toy is that it's the correct form factor so that it sits in my pocket or on my belt, and I never think about taking it with me. Anything bigger, I don't take with me all the time, which makes the device basically useless. I had a Palm Pro that I bought the week it came out, and I recently bought a IIIxe to replace it's worn out screen.
I had a Hewlett Packard 100LX before then, but it was a little big to take with me everywhere. The Psion has the same problem. My solution to this problem was to use the device that best suits my needs - a PDA in a palm-factor, without the bloat, is PERFECT if you take it everywhere with you. When I want to code, or write something, I'll take my Vaio, hopefully I'll be getting a Picturebook soon, which is even better. Use a device that's designed for the application. Jack-of-all-trade devices work, but they don't do everything well, and when they go, you lose everything. I'd hate to have a cell phone, mp3 player, PDA and GPS all in one. Break / outdate one, replace 'em all!
And if you're talking about great software, that's one of Palm's biggest strengths - that, and a supported developer community that has free tools that - get this - work in Linux AND Windows. That's the reason I'm betting on palm in the long run.
In other words... COLOR on a handheld is just another of the bells and whistles. Just like MP3 players, you have such a small ammount of storage and short battery life, it's completely useless.
Egad! Again, you're not using the device for what it was designed to do. My rio 500 is great, 128 meg is plenty - the solid state aspect means it works when you're skiing, etc, and won't skip. But it's not a friggin MP3 repository! I have some scripts that download stuff automatically in the AM to the Rio, and if I want to change the music, well, that's what the Vaio in my briefcase in the car is for. As far as short battery life, off a good energizer, a Rio will run for a whole DAY off a AA battery!
As far as color goes, it's nice in the dark for Navigation apps, which I write, but it does wash out in the day. I suspect you're not informed on the battery life, either. The new color palms still measure battery life in weeks, and the people on comp.sys.palmtops.pilot with m505's report less battery life, but weeks is still fine with me. (Although my IIIxe gets months..)
Set top boxes. Wait for another few months and you'll be able to buy a number of NFS or HD bootable boxes from Motorola, Nokia, and others. I develop software for these boxes for my day job, and they do what everyone wants - have enough CPU to decode mp3, nice mpeg codecs, some of them run linux, and they look really nice in your entertainment center.
Save your money, wait for some standardized platforms to come out (Keep your eyes on the Nokia STB) and start up some open source interactive content management software that looks good on a TV. That's all these things are!
Alternatively, get a PC with a TV out card and stick it by the television. That's what I did. :)
I mean, we're supposed to be technically inclined here! :)
This guy has it cold. The amiga was about the hardware - the people that dared to laugh when they saw what current state of the art was. I've been waiting for someone to do this for a long time, be it under the guise of Linux, of AmigaOS. The trick is getting someone who's willing to put out specs, drivers, and all the required hardware until the market catches up (As amiga did).
If you don't care about it looking good, cooling isn't too big a deal. It's easy, even. Either just totally take off the side of the case, or drill lots of holes (if you care about RF), and then blow a $15 super-quiet desk fan at it. I'm running a duron 600 @ 900mhz, plain ol heat sink & fan it came with, @ 47C w/28C ambient. Plus, it cools my overclocked TNT2 much better, and does a good job on my hard drives and power supply too. All for $15cdn..
Same setup would work really well with a dual configuration, and it's whisper quiet, too. Could always do it with ductwork, I guess, but this works great, and it's $15cdn. Can't beat that. Heat concerns amuse me when they have to put a 1lb heatsink on the P4, and that's to act more as a heat transfer buffer than an effective sink, imho.
From the CDR Faq: Because of the media tax imposed by the Canadian government (see section (7-13)), you are allowed to copy any music for your own personal use. This means that you can go over to a friend's house and copy any number of discs you like, so long as they are for your own use. You are not allowed to make copies of music and then give them to others.
You can check the law yourself. The recording industry kinda skipped over this one. At least you get something for yet another miserable tax, er, levy. After all, just because a corporation doesn't LIKE something, doesn't make it ILLEGAL. What is illegal after all? The government is supposed to reflect the will of the people and the best interest of society, not the short term gain of the RIAA. (Especially if you're not IN America). That's why copyright is supposed to expire; why you have the right to parody and fair use; etc.
Now, does this apply to file sharing software? It hasn't been argued in court that I'm aware of, but perhaps it should be. After all, it's legal for me to copy cds that a friend has - why not their mp3 equivilants? Keeping mind of course, for personal use implies that there is no financial gain, which kinda hurts napster-like models. This might give some canadian users some power if they get hassled by their ISP for whatever.
I used to have a little leather bound notebook back-in-tha-day, for storing all sorts of little infos I had stumbled across. Then, one day, my little notebook met mr. mud puddle. Stupid of me, yes, and a PDA would suffer the same fate..
But it's a lot frickin' easier to backup a palm than it is to photocopy paper notes!
That's the main reason I use & love my PDA. And there's the jack-of-all-trades, master of none problem, too - and when the magic all-in-one device (inevitably) breaks, you're left without everything. I've got a mp3 player, a palm, a cell phone, and a leatherman, and I wouldn't want any of them crossbreeding. (yet). Might want the mp3 player to do voice record though. My batman factor is kinda high though :).
As for the notebook.. I'll sing in the streets when someone (perferably the manufacturer) releases the specs to the HP 720 so I can have a machine to read usenet and code on. Gotta run a real OS though :). There's a market for subnotes out there that is being axe murderered by WinCE ineptness.
And when you do leave, at the exit interview, make sure they know why, it's the sweetest revenge.
Why let them know? Wouldn't there be a better long-term "revenge" aspect from leaving for "personal reasons", and let the horrible downward spiral continue?
Usenet was great in the early 90's - it was like Fidonet or somesuch, except on crack. The quality of converstation was quite high, as the only people with meaningful net access were probably in university or involved in research activities. Once the boom started, there was a period of 1-2 years (or maybe a year or two more) where Usenet degraded into a spam-filled hell.
Now, it seems most of the kiddies have gone to troll slashdot and it's kin, and left usenet alone - or at least the groups that I frequent. This has caused a slightly higher SnR... imagine getting useful information from Usenet again! Usenet is the ultimate for loading onto a palmpilot or handheld computer and wasting time-o-plenty, and at the same time, maybe learning something. The Usenet group FAQ's are an incredible repositiory of otherwise hard or impossible to locate information - I cite the rec.food.coffee FAQ as an example :).
A slashcode to NNTP gateway would be da shit though. :)
Anyone else see the signifigance of this? A killer OS, combined with state of the art engineering for multimedia hardware. Complete right down to the low level information to program the fancy-pants features. Last time I saw that was in the near-mythical box of yore, the Amiga.. *dreamy sighs* I hope this makes it to North America. I can't believe sony did it either.. aye karumba!
Just think, a standardized, high-power linux graphics computing platform targeted solely at games, but with the capability to do other stuff, too. Maybe I'll spend my GF3 fund on something like that and keep my PC for coding. Heh.
Hope it's not a hoax..
That's divx-old style. That was crap. The new OpenDivx stuff you can't tell from DVD.
Of course, the output quality will suck... these are PC components, not HiFi, and a PC box is a very noisy place.
Yup, I listen to my crappy mp3s and watch my crummy divx movies all day. I guess I've been fooled by the loss of fidelity, bah. Good enough for me. You wanna drop $3000 on a stereo, fine! I'll drop that into the motor for my car. To each their own, in this case, ignorance is bliss.
So was I.. the ATI TV-Wonder PCI Tuner works 100% in linux now (as of the current kernel revision, how many before, I know not). The card uses the BT878 chipset and is well supported and has good quality, in my uneducated opinion. You need to insmod the tuner with a couple parameters though.
No idea about all-in-wonder cards. I stay the hell away from all-in-anything. :)
*drool* thanks for the links.. next bonus I get I'll be doing some shopping, looks like!
I always record to mpeg-1 with the ATI TV-Wonder, have never dropped a frame, and always get stellar quality. Your definition of crap quality might be the reason though - I'll be happy with "looks good in a window" and "good enough on my TV". Fwiw, that's on a $80cdn duron 600 running at 900mhz.
Once I record the stuff, I post-process to mpeg4 for archiving.
Go buy a cheapass PC like a duron. Add the following:
Now, mix in the following software:
Now put it by your TV.
There you go, more convergence than you can shake a bloody stick at. Perhaps you meant a nice, unitied, all in one interface? Well, there's a great project for the open source community to pick up on, heavens knows I'd use it, don't have time to write it now. I work all day with Motorola set-top boxes, and one of those would also make a great platform for this, although the tools aren't free (IIRC). A PC works fine, and it's CHEAP.
Hell, one of the nifty things I've done is time-shift DVD rentals - rip it uncompressed and then play it back on the weekend (when you KNOW it won't be there .. heh). It doesn't look pretty, but it definately works, and IMHO smokes the hell out of anything available now. A hacked Xbox might change that though.
Go buy a cheapass PC like a duron. Add the following:
Now, mix in the following software:
Now put it by your TV.
There you go, more convergence than you can shake a bloody stick at. Perhaps you meant a nice, unitied, all in one interface? Well, there's a great project for the open source community to pick up on, heavens knows I'd use it, don't have time to write it now. I work all day with Motorola set-top boxes, and one of those would also make a great platform for this, although the tools aren't free (IIRC). A PC works fine, and it's CHEAP.
Hell, one of the nifty things I've done is time-shift DVD rentals - rip it uncompressed and then play it back on the weekend (when you KNOW it won't be there .. heh). It doesn't look pretty, but it definately works, and IMHO smokes the hell out of anything available now. A hacked Xbox might change that though.
Except you don't get independant third review if the guy publishing the paper is the guy who owns the web site, right.. that's the problem with the 10001 science sites out there. Lack of a third party review system.
Has anyone thought about adapting one of the napster clones - like OpenNAP - for use with scientific publications? That would be an incredibly useful resource. Another system that would work, or possibly even better, would be to take something like SlashCode or Zope (or any of the other weblog engines) and publish papers by category just like we do articles now. This would allow for moderated in depth peer review, and eliminate the lack of access to scientific research that IS hurting the comunity.
Some examples: When I was in university, I had access to research on astrophysics research papers. One example of this was using plasmas as an RF antenna - a pretty nifty idea that I never would have been exposed to otherwise, and that I'm experimenting with now. There's a lot of REALLY good info not available to the Open Source (could there be open research, too?) community as a result of the stratospheric fees charged. The rational for the fees is that they have to pay for peer review, but my counter would be that it's not that difficult to rate (moderate) someone's credentials and past work on a forum like slashdot.
To flip things around the other way, there are a lot of lay people who might have good ideas and even research that they can't get peer reviewed at all. I've seen some really good ideas for antennas and other RF devices that might be odd at first, but will never get in depth review or analysis because there's no access to that community.
Here's to the scientists.. maybe some journal will take the initiative and get a open system running for publication. If it's done well, and people start using it, then it doesn't matter what the "established" journals say - good science is good science, if it's here or in Russia, or India, or China. Hell, THAT'S another good point - how many ideas have to be reinvented because of poor or nonexistance international communications in the research field?
Just some thoughts..
Not to get offtopic, but I think a lot of the dialog in Canada about bullying has arisen from a number of teen suicides that directly resulted from bullying. The number of suicides in teens far outnumbers the number of kids who go to school and try to shoot their classmates.
IIRC, Suicide is the #1 cause of death (or #2?) amoung people that are under 18, in Canada -AND- the United States.. and teen suicide isn't talked about seriously in the USA either, except in the context of "avoiding depression", and feeding the kiddies antidepressants..
Nobody has ever published (that I know of) any statistics on the number of people killed as a direct result of WoD enforcement (Cops, Dealers, your mistaken guy on the freeway, the bad raids, etc), and indirectly (the pothead that gets stabbed doing his time) relative to the actual number of people that die because of drug consumption. The way the WoD goes on, drugs are a huge scourge on the face of humanity, but the last time I looked, even the most evil of drugs (crack) killed only a few thousand people in the entire USA (Pop ~ 300e6). (Pot has killed nobody, ever) (Deaths from driving under the influence excluded, alcohol IS legal, so this is indirectly condoned by the state). Cigarette deaths number in the hundreds of thousands.
My point is this: Why is this such a international incident when I suspect this is a much more common occurance than you might expect?
Freedom isn't without responisbility. That means responsibility for your own actions - in a truely free society, you should be allowed to destroy your own life just as you should be allowed to better it. If you want the state to run your life, then be up front with it rather than beating around the bush like the USA is doing - I'm sure you could more efficiently manage a prison or police state if you're up front about it.
(for the sarcasm impared, you should have on your peril-sensitive sunglasses)
These people bringing the lawsuit are on the right track, they mailed John Carmack personally to demand that he personally prohibit any person under 17 from playing his game. He is a genius coder, he must be able to figure out a way to do it. Senseless auto-killing brainwashing ought only be reserved for those over 18
I have a personal pet theory of why school administrators and (some) parents are going apeshit about Columbine, getting kids booted for even mentioning guns, etc - That theory is that these parents / teachers / adminstrators know FULL WELL the kind of things that drive kids to shoot randomly, they know how bad it is, and they're scared shitless that their kid might get shot. (or hell, why stop with your classmates, might as well go for the office..)
That's why they want to crack down so hard, because it's something they can fix. The underlying issues are much harder. School shootings in Canada (on a smaller scale) have provoked national debates (on TV, even) about the nature of school bullying and what adminstrators can do about it. I saw no such coverage on CNN; the focus was on evil kids and black hearts.
Yeah, moz, video conferencing are all well and good, but two things drive the demand for consumer (computing) electronics - games and pr0n. What will make people get the GF3's and the Athlon DDR 1.5Ghz systems will be hardcore, 3D, interactive, good AI, 1GB of RAM suckin, 1280x1024, 120fps hardcore Pr0n. If I had the time and resources (I did a lot of 3D development), I'd be working on this right now, believe you me. The capabilities of a top-end system in 3 months graphic-wise are going to be previously unimagined in the consumer world.
I'm not talking about Virtual-Valerie cheezy sleaze. I'm talking about a virtual chick you can interact with and, uh, experiment in lots of innovative (and probably criminal, heh) ways. People are animals, and they love their pr0n. This I've been waiting for for years, and I think the technology is there to make it happen :).
And hey, you got bucks, I got a sick mind and OpenGL sk1llz :)
The amount of available nuclear bombs is still large enough to destroy the Earth ~10,000 times. A single H-Bomb can destroy whole countries and make them uninhabitable for years.
H-Bombs are evil, but this is FUD. Nuclear weapons can make areas of land inhabitable, and will dramatically affect the land for years - but the odds of a nuclear conflict that actually reduced the earth to ashes are completely improbable. Cities are the only targets that nuclear weapons effectively destroy - that, and perhaps large dams (think three gorges and the hoover dam). There's some doubt there too. There's little military strategic value in blowing up land nobody lives on, after you've wiped out all the cities.
Contrast this with a large asteroid. The resulting firestorm would burn everything on the planet that -could- burn. Humans just wouldn't be extincted, but probably everything more complicated than inscects and small rodents. There's no radiation of course (unless the asteroid was a block of uranium, which I find unlikely). Even then.
Then there's biological and chemical weapons. A genetically engineered virus, with the right incubation time, could kill us all in a couple of weeks.
Again, FUD. Biological and Chemical weapons are a particular pet peeve of mine, and my government (Canada) is no exception to the rule here - it absolutely disgusts me that people would invest time and (MY) tax dollars in developing stockpiles of nerve gas and biological weapons that serve NO defensive purpose - they're only offensive. Chemical and biological weapons are possibly some of the worst, more horrible ways to die that we've come up with, but even then, they're not going to kill us all. They'll just kill everyone in cities and urban areas, with developed nations the hardest hit.
Contrast with Mr. Asteroid - a good impact will, in one fell swoop, probably take out a continent! A whole continent! Unimaginable energies!
Ah well.. the only thing that will wake people up is a small asteroid taking out a major center (preferably American, because that's the only country with the resources to do anything). :)