Ah, yes... and of course, once one joke has been made on a subject, nobody else is allowed to make any related jokes with different meanings.
On a thread poking fun at Microsoft and their *SODs, I guess mentioning the Xbox's Green SOD was completely inappropriate. And Linus' joke about the Mauve SOD has no relevance at all either.
No, the Green Screen Of Death was an innovation developed for the Xbox.
On the other hand, I remember hearing Linus Torvalds at a LinuxWorld Expo some years back discussing features under consideration for the then-upcoming kernel (not sure if it was 2.2 or 2.4) -- he mentioned that there'd been some talk of adding a "Mauve Screen Of Death", but that they'd scrapped it because "MS has too many patents in that area."
A theologen would be an agent, such as a deity or a prophet, that is capable of inducing or increasing the production (by other agents, such as theologians) of theology.
As for your comment on the movies declining post-Generations, go watch First Contact again. That is the best TNG film and only movie that comes close to Wrath of Khan in many peoples eyes, though I personally prefer Undiscovered Country myself.
Uh... you mean the one where they completely destroyed the entire concept of what the Borg are by introducing the "Borg Queen"? Sorry, but that one's gotta be pretty low on the list, even if it was relatively good cinematically. If anything, I'd say that was the point from which (inclusively) nothing decent has come out of the Trek universe. Or at least, it was through that act of dumbing-down that what had been one of the Trek universe's most interesting plot elements became one of its most lame.
As for all the other post-original-cast movies (i.e., Generations and all that followed), my biggest general complaint is that they all failed to do anything "grand" enough to warrant being motion pictures in the first place, as opposed to regular two-part episodes. It felt like we might as well be watching any of the season finale/premier two-parters, only on the big screen and with marginally better special-effects and no commercials. Even Generations wasn't really "special" in any way other than being the first motion picture with the TNG cast, and the insultingly dismissive Kirk cameo. And Insurrection? How original was that story?
I agree about The Undiscovered Country being, out of all the Trek movies, the next best after The Wrath of Khan, though.
Okay... and when does the alarm go off? When I'm in the optimal light-sleep phase, or when she is? (I thought that part of the question would have been obvious from my original post.)
I'm thinking the real solution would be to have small speakers mounted the headband itself, right near the wearer's ears, with the alarm only loud enough to wake up that person; then we could each have one and both benefit.
That's what it sounded like to me -- that you'd set it for a time range, long enough to be pretty confident of hitting a light-sleep phase. It sounds like a really great idea; something I think I'd love to have. I just have one question:
Who gets to wear the headband -- me or my girlfriend?
I was disappointed the article missed the cheese connection -- I thought they'd work in something about how the bacteria were actually turning the moon into cheese, making the old saying true after all.
Anyway, my favorite part was the 2001 reference -- a few years late, but it still works.
Thanks, that's nice to hear. [*1] But actually 360 started its invite-only Beta on Tuesday (3/29). It was open to Y! employees for a few days before that, so we'd be ready to seed it by sending invites to friends&family as soon as it went public. My girlfriend, for example, was on at midnight [*2], and by the time we went to bed at 12:40, she had her profile mostly built, and had invited ~30 of her friends, and 3 had already accepted and joined.
-- [1] I work for Yahoo!, but I'm not involved in 360 (except as a user). [2] she's sort of a "geek groupie", and tends to get even more excited about my work than I do.
Re:Myth Busters as well ...
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Myth Busters tried this one too to duplicate something Pythagoras (I think) was supposed to have done.
Archimedes. You're talking about using mirrors to set fire to the sails of attacking ships, right?
A few years ago I was playing around with a Perl forkbomb. I wanted to make one that would actually do something useful. Well, for a sufficiently lax value of "useful" -- let's say "interesting" instead. Anyway, I set it up to use the child processes like function calls, using the exit status as a return value, and had it compute Fibbonacci numbers (the tree-recursive way).
Then I came up with the variation that I call a "pipebomb" -- does the same thing but using pipes instead of fork calls to start the child processes and read their output. Something like:
The interesting thing was experimenting with re-ordering the statements to make the children more or less parallel and seeing how the effects changed. The above code is the naughty version, because it tries to create both children together, and can kill an OS that's not smart enough to handle it. But this version is much better behaved:
because it doesn't start the second child until the first completes. As I recall, it was actually able to run successfully with n up in the high teens, or even low twenties, without even impacting the performance of the machine very much. It just took a really long time -- it was still creating a ridiculous number of processes, just doing it serially so it didn't overload the system.
Sometimes, I have the vision for 2020-2030 of some grey-haired FLOSS developers drinking tea together and being nostalgic about the wild times where software development wasn't illegal and fundamental rights were still respected.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that by posting this, you're violating Richard Stallman's Intellectual Property -- he expressed a very similar idea in his story The Right to Read.
The movie has to QUICKLY sell the idea to the audience that Marvin has a big brain. But if he says it, and his head is normal sized, does that even work?
But some plot elements are supposed to be subtle. A bigger-than-normal-sized head is still nowhere near "the size of a planet", which makes Marvin's claim sound like incredibly dramatic exaggeration.
But he keeps saying it, doesn't he? Does he maybe mean that he's actually connected via some sort of Sub-Etha link to a computer that really is, literally, "the size of a planet"? Then at some point maybe the reader notices: "Hey, isn't there another planet-sized computer in the story? Hmmm... Naahhhh..." Then there's the little scene where he claims to know The Ultimate Question (and of course, nobody pays any attention (okay, they get distracted and forget about it, but it amounts to the same thing)). Are these hints that Marvin's brain actually is the Earth? (Or conversely, that his body is its I/O terminal?)
I haven't been on the H2G2 discussion boards or anything, and I don't know if Fandom has an answer (official or otherwise), but I've always assumed Adams' intent was to drop those vague hints, but leave it ambiguous, so we'd just have to keep wondering.
Doh! Yes, "Ridge" -- I knew the quote but was only 95% sure of the origin, so I did a search, and copy/pasted the whole thing, including the attribution, including the pyto.
(Gotta post something somewhere to undo an accidental moderation -- CURSE YOU, ARROW KEYS! CURSE YOU!!!)
That would be nice, I guess, but it's kind of hard to see what grounds there'd be. Do you mean their selling of those licenses would constitute "fraud", just because they were telling people they needed them?
Slashdot Mirror
For other languages there is -Wall -Werror.
We're talking about Perl here -- what has Wall got to do with it?
Ah, yes... and of course, once one joke has been made on a subject, nobody else is allowed to make any related jokes with different meanings.
On a thread poking fun at Microsoft and their *SODs, I guess mentioning the Xbox's Green SOD was completely inappropriate. And Linus' joke about the Mauve SOD has no relevance at all either.
Sorry, my bad.
No, the Green Screen Of Death was an innovation developed for the Xbox.
On the other hand, I remember hearing Linus Torvalds at a LinuxWorld Expo some years back discussing features under consideration for the then-upcoming kernel (not sure if it was 2.2 or 2.4) -- he mentioned that there'd been some talk of adding a "Mauve Screen Of Death", but that they'd scrapped it because "MS has too many patents in that area."
No one can correctly be called a theologen.
A theologen would be an agent, such as a deity or a prophet, that is capable of inducing or increasing the production (by other agents, such as theologians) of theology.
Heh, you want to see something get modded as a troll? I'm sometimes tempted to change my sig to:
FreeBSD -- It's like Linux, but for grownups!
As for your comment on the movies declining post-Generations, go watch First Contact again. That is the best TNG film and only movie that comes close to Wrath of Khan in many peoples eyes, though I personally prefer Undiscovered Country myself.
Uh... you mean the one where they completely destroyed the entire concept of what the Borg are by introducing the "Borg Queen"? Sorry, but that one's gotta be pretty low on the list, even if it was relatively good cinematically. If anything, I'd say that was the point from which (inclusively) nothing decent has come out of the Trek universe. Or at least, it was through that act of dumbing-down that what had been one of the Trek universe's most interesting plot elements became one of its most lame.
As for all the other post-original-cast movies (i.e., Generations and all that followed), my biggest general complaint is that they all failed to do anything "grand" enough to warrant being motion pictures in the first place, as opposed to regular two-part episodes. It felt like we might as well be watching any of the season finale/premier two-parters, only on the big screen and with marginally better special-effects and no commercials. Even Generations wasn't really "special" in any way other than being the first motion picture with the TNG cast, and the insultingly dismissive Kirk cameo. And Insurrection? How original was that story?
I agree about The Undiscovered Country being, out of all the Trek movies, the next best after The Wrath of Khan, though.
Khaaan
Okay... and when does the alarm go off? When I'm in the optimal light-sleep phase, or when she is? (I thought that part of the question would have been obvious from my original post.)
I'm thinking the real solution would be to have small speakers mounted the headband itself, right near the wearer's ears, with the alarm only loud enough to wake up that person; then we could each have one and both benefit.
I'm more curious to see the part of the Constitution that defines contributing money to a political party/candidate as an act of "speech".
That's what it sounded like to me -- that you'd set it for a time range, long enough to be pretty confident of hitting a light-sleep phase. It sounds like a really great idea; something I think I'd love to have. I just have one question:
Who gets to wear the headband -- me or my girlfriend?
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
I hear it blows.
I was disappointed the article missed the cheese connection -- I thought they'd work in something about how the bacteria were actually turning the moon into cheese, making the old saying true after all.
Anyway, my favorite part was the 2001 reference -- a few years late, but it still works.
Thanks, that's nice to hear. [*1] But actually 360 started its invite-only Beta on Tuesday (3/29). It was open to Y! employees for a few days before that, so we'd be ready to seed it by sending invites to friends&family as soon as it went public. My girlfriend, for example, was on at midnight [*2], and by the time we went to bed at 12:40, she had her profile mostly built, and had invited ~30 of her friends, and 3 had already accepted and joined.
--
[1] I work for Yahoo!, but I'm not involved in 360 (except as a user).
[2] she's sort of a "geek groupie", and tends to get even more excited about my work than I do.
Myth Busters tried this one too to duplicate something Pythagoras (I think) was supposed to have done.
Archimedes. You're talking about using mirrors to set fire to the sails of attacking ships, right?
A few years ago I was playing around with a Perl forkbomb. I wanted to make one that would actually do something useful. Well, for a sufficiently lax value of "useful" -- let's say "interesting" instead. Anyway, I set it up to use the child processes like function calls, using the exit status as a return value, and had it compute Fibbonacci numbers (the tree-recursive way).
Then I came up with the variation that I call a "pipebomb" -- does the same thing but using pipes instead of fork calls to start the child processes and read their output. Something like:
$n = shift(@ARGV);
if($n < 2) {print "1\n"; exit}
$n--;
open(CHILD1, "pipebomb.pl $n |");
$n--;
open(CHILD2, "pipebomb.pl $n |");
$f = <CHILD1>;
$f += <CHILD2>;
close(CHILD1);
close(CHILD2);
print "$f\n";
The interesting thing was experimenting with re-ordering the statements to make the children more or less parallel and seeing how the effects changed. The above code is the naughty version, because it tries to create both children together, and can kill an OS that's not smart enough to handle it. But this version is much better behaved:
$n = shift(@ARGV);
if($n < 2) {print "1\n"; exit}
$n--;
open(CHILD1, "pipebomb.pl $n |");
$f = <CHILD1>;
close(CHILD1);
$n--;
open(CHILD2, "pipebomb.pl $n |");
$f += <CHILD2>;
close(CHILD2);
print "$f\n";
because it doesn't start the second child until the first completes. As I recall, it was actually able to run successfully with n up in the high teens, or even low twenties, without even impacting the performance of the machine very much. It just took a really long time -- it was still creating a ridiculous number of processes, just doing it serially so it didn't overload the system.
Moderation is the only thing that has prevented Slashdot from completely going to hell
!
Sorry, but I had to re-read that several times to be sure I wasn't mis-reading it. Now I'll just walk away, shaking my head and muttering.
It came out solid black.
Sometimes, I have the vision for 2020-2030 of some grey-haired FLOSS developers drinking tea together and being nostalgic about the wild times where software development wasn't illegal and fundamental rights were still respected.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that by posting this, you're violating Richard Stallman's Intellectual Property -- he expressed a very similar idea in his story The Right to Read.
If anyone else said this before me, I'm not aware of it, and I take credit for it as "dgould's First Law":
Ah, but here in Sunnyvale, down the street from Yahoo, it's a nice 58F.
Heh. I was going to say exactly the same thing, except beginning with "Here at Yahoo!, in Sunnyvale, CA,
Come on, guys! I can't be the first to notice... Okay, I'll spell it out for you -- the correct first reaction to this story is:
(Have none of you kids ever heard of The Philadelphia Experiment ?)
The movie has to QUICKLY sell the idea to the audience that Marvin has a big brain. But if he says it, and his head is normal sized, does that even work?
But some plot elements are supposed to be subtle. A bigger-than-normal-sized head is still nowhere near "the size of a planet", which makes Marvin's claim sound like incredibly dramatic exaggeration.
But he keeps saying it, doesn't he? Does he maybe mean that he's actually connected via some sort of Sub-Etha link to a computer that really is, literally, "the size of a planet"? Then at some point maybe the reader notices: "Hey, isn't there another planet-sized computer in the story? Hmmm... Naahhhh..." Then there's the little scene where he claims to know The Ultimate Question (and of course, nobody pays any attention (okay, they get distracted and forget about it, but it amounts to the same thing)). Are these hints that Marvin's brain actually is the Earth? (Or conversely, that his body is its I/O terminal?)
I haven't been on the H2G2 discussion boards or anything, and I don't know if Fandom has an answer (official or otherwise), but I've always assumed Adams' intent was to drop those vague hints, but leave it ambiguous, so we'd just have to keep wondering.
Doh! Yes, "Ridge" -- I knew the quote but was only 95% sure of the origin, so I did a search, and copy/pasted the whole thing, including the attribution, including the pyto.
Good -- because, as we all know...
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance"
-Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Bridge National Laboratory
(Gotta post something somewhere to undo an accidental moderation -- CURSE YOU, ARROW KEYS! CURSE YOU!!!)
That would be nice, I guess, but it's kind of hard to see what grounds there'd be. Do you mean their selling of those licenses would constitute "fraud", just because they were telling people they needed them?