There, I have to agree with you. If they bring back the music, I'm seeing the movie. I don't care if it stars Paul Rubens and the special effects are done on a Apple IIe, I'm seeing it if it's got the soundtrack.
Okay, I've heard this too many times and I'm just starting to get sick of it. It's not the computers that are killing your quest for digital immortality; it's just the way that history works.
You're complaining that these hard drives won't run forever and you're right. Neither will CD's. However, I would also like to point out that the vast majority of ancient egyptian papyrus isn't around today. Also, don't start goign off on using clay or stone tablets, because they break (even the Rosetta stone is broken).
Honestly, computers are still far superior to what we were using before. It's not like we've got Homer's original version of the Illiad sitting in a museum somewhere; we just have many duplicated copies that have been reproduced over the years. You're right that hard drives fail and CDs break, but we can keep updating onto new media. Besides, when a monk drops an iota when transcribing the Bible, Jesus goes from being God to godlike. When a computer adds an iota, the checkbit fails and the data is resent.
Somebody is also going to point out that, as systems change, data can become unreadable. Heck, I had a professor who couldn't update his lab instructions because the software that read the lab printouts wouldn't run on new machines and the fileformat wasn't understood by any other software. So, want to stop our data from becoming unreadable? Well, let's just do what the Etruscans did! Of course, we don't have a clue what they did because nobody can read Etruscan. For a more familiar example, think of heiroglyphics before the Rosetta stone. It's pretty common for data to become lost and unreadable. Also, this bring us back to the solution. Along with the data, include the source code for the software that can read it. If you really want to be anal, you could even include the source to an emulator for the machien it was designed to run on.
Still, you might point out, 400 years from now, we'll still lose 99% of that do to failures of whatever nature. Once again, you would be be right. However, do you honestly believe that we have 1% of all the data that was collected in 1604? Hell, most of the people couldn't even right, so we don't know ANYTHING about their lives. I'm sorry that we can't digitally preserve our wonderous society for all of eternity, but it's completely blind to believe that this makes us in ANY way different to any other culture. Read Percy Shelley's Ozymandias before complaining about how people in the future won't know what our lives were like.
Throughout school, I was fascinated with computers, scrawny, late into puberty, and athletically hopefess. Yet, in high school I was also pretty popular and could have had a girlfriend (I was such a &%^$ geek that I didn't realize that girls were hitting on me).
I will admit that I did go through the stereotype stuff early in elementary school, but that ended pretty quickly, once I realized the secret. Yeah, I was getting picked on and everything, but I was bringing it on myself. The smart kids don't get picked on in school because they're smart, they get picked on because the vast majority of them are flamming assholes. I basically had to realize that, yes, I was smart, but no one cared and it didn't entitle me to anything. Most of the smart ones the had trouble had enormous egos and thought that everyone should bow down before their massive intellects. Read some of the tales of woe that always appear on Slashdot and pay attention to how there are no "normal" human being, only "nerds" and "idiots".
It also helps not to be a one hit wonder. A lot of these people that preached their own greatness to anyone who would listen were actually doing terribly in a lot of their classes. They might be good at math, but they were flunking English just like the guy that was shoving them into a locker. Now, they'll immediately point out that English is a BS course and that doesn't really count; only math and science really matter. Of course, the guy stomping on the nerd's ribs will point out that math and science are also bullshit and that Gym is the only course that matters. The nerd will then get offended because his personal views aren't taken as gospel and his enormous ego has been wounded.
So, yes, I enjoyed math and science, but I made darn sure I found other things to enjoy, too. I read books (not just scifi, classic literature). I tried to educate myself in the areas that I wasn't good at. More importantly, though, I also took the time to learn a little about the culture around me. I never learned the intricasies of modern fashion or even had much of a working knowledge of popular music, but I did try and watch some network TV (PBS doesn't count; try NBC or ABC). Of course, most nerds would balk and talk about how Television is brain killing tripe. In small doses, though, you can build up an immunity and have the tools you need to communicate with normal people. Yeah, I think the jokes might not be that funny, but if I can get the guy with the baseball bat to stop threatening me and start laughing simply by uttering "Is that your final answer?", I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Better to spend a half hour watching TV than to spend it eating asphalt.
Not any form of expert here, but I maintained an interest in the area long after everyone else gave up on the technology, so here's my thoughts on why it died.
Mainly, VRML kept trying to position itself as an internet technology, as opposed to a simple, standardized file format. This lead to a couple of nasty effects. First was the fact that it was pretty well designed to look like HTML. This, in and of itself, isn't terrible; I've always been a big fan of the taxt based.obj file. However, it meant that they tended to take a very text based approach to a very graphical medium. You could create sphere, cones, and cubes with a couple of short lines of text, but creating complex shapes out of polygons was a pain in the ass without serious modelling software.
Also, since it was getting pushed as an internet tech, there always seemed to be more focus on what could be reasonably run on machines in real time, as opposed to what could be rendered over the course of several hours. Thus, anyone doing serious graphics work wasn't going to save their document as a VRML file since it wasn't going to support features that they needed, like Shaders, NURBS, or UV texture maps (in the early versions, anyway).
Finally, there's already plenty of 'standards' out there. Darn near anything will read a DXF or OBJ for simple geometries and most serious software will read 3ds files. Thus, if VRML wanted to be the true standard, it needed to offer something that no one else did. The great chance that they had for this is in Animation. To the best of my knowledge, there's no good way to transfer animated scenes between programs (if I'm wrong on this, PLEASE correct me). Well, one of the big pushes in VRML was to add animation very quickly. Unfortunately, they decided to do this by simply adding Javascript. While I'm all for scriptable text formats (ie Postscript and LaTeX), this is about the equivalent of the MPEG committee saying "Why don't we just add Javascript to JPEGs?" It's got it's niche uses, but it's never going to be the maintstream standard.
Thus VRML gave up just about any chance of being a real standard format for 3D. Then a lack of quality browser plugins and the fact that the giant file sizes didn't mesh well with the 28.8 modems of the era left VRML to die a slow death by starvation.
As they said, you pick you own encryption algorithm. Frankly, if you want perfect security, you aren't going to be using public key encryption.
As an example of something that COULDN'T be broken, let's say you are trying to send a simply 1K text message. Now, all you need is a random 1K string that the text can be XOR'ed against. Now, this may seem pretty insecure; after all, they just have to cycle through all the possible 1K keys that you could have made to find the message. The problem is, though, that cycling through every possible 1K key will produce every possible 1K message. They can't tell if the message was "Buy!" with a key of "Sell" or if it was "Sell" with the key being "Buy!". Then again, if could have been "Duck" with the key being "5A*q".
Of course, there are problems with this system. First, you have to use a new, random key each time you send a message. Furthermore, if you're sending a ten gig message, you need a ten gig key. Finally, and most importantly, you need a secure way of getting the key to the message recipient. The MagiQ is a secure way of sending that key. The problem of generating a truly random key can also be handled through quantum mechanics. All that's left is the issue of sending the giant keys, which is more of a timing issue than anything else.
Now, as opposed to having police officers deal with the problem of speeding, the government has decided to hand off that responsiblity to Charles Darwin. (What do you mean pseeding isn't genetic?)
Who said we aren't considering the consequences? The guys working on this project are probably driving themselves half insane about trying to ensure that there will be as little contamination as possible. They didn't just say "Boys, there's an ecosystem down there. The fastest shovel gets a free beer!" Just because you weren't in the room when they considered the consequences doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Also, you said that there had to be a way to gain the knowledge without harvesting it from the earth. Well, I hate to be rude, but there isn't. In order to learn about what is going on in there, SOMETHING has to go in and come back out, be it a probe, a sound wave, or a photon. What if the creatures in there a sensitive to the vibrations in sonar? What if our radar measurements just so happen to be at the exact resonance frequency of some molecule in their basic structure? Ultimately, any method we use to study the area has a chance of killing off the whole lake. However, the odds or any of these happening is slim. Furthermore, the data we would get from this probe would let us KNOW which measurement option are safe.
Finally, I suspect that someone is going to attack with the claim that, since ANY observation could result in destruction (regardless of how small those odds might be), we should simply not study it at all. Well, there's a couple of problems there. First, what do we do when some natural disaster threatens this ecosystem (ie earthquake). Without this research would wouldn't have knowledge on how to help restore the balance. All we could do is just sit back and watch them die. Also, just as there is a small but non-zero chance that any observation will destroy the system, there is also a small, but non-zero chance, that there will be startling new discoveries in there. I'm not saying it's going to cure cancer, but the knowledge of the balances of that ecosystem might help us in trying to find balance in other ecosystems that have been damaged. You say that it is our greed for knowledge that is destroying the earth, but do you honestly think the earth can be restored without knowledge?
The PDA you requested. Since it's got the Wifi, I don't think you'll really miss the bluetooth. However, you can also get a Bluetooth memory stick for it, just in case.
While this would be a neat deathmath, it could be a GREAT variation on capture the flag. Each player would host her own machine and there would be one main room that linked between each player's root directories. You would go around and try to kill your opponents' machines, but you would still need to defend your own. People playing as root could get an extra weapon bonus since they are also opening up more processes to the threat of death. The winner is the last person still playing the game.
The downside is that, since every player's machine has to allow the killing of processes, you couldn't do it as client-server, but would have to do peer to peer. I understand that this can be a bitch on bandwidth, but it might be possible in a LAN setting.
Hypocrisy occurs when someone's touted beliefs do not match their actions.
Touted Belief: Rich people should pay heavier taxes than poor people.
Action: Attempts to become rich.
These aren't necessarily contradictory. They never said that they were against people being rich; they simply said that those who are should pay higher taxes. To be hypocrites, they must be rich and then attempt to pay less in taxes. Now, if you've got evidence of them doing this, I will completely agree with you. However, trying to become rich does not, by itself, make them hypocrites.
Oh, and you're right about them peaking in '92.
Re:Can someone with some experience in these progr
on
Two-Fisted Computing
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· Score: 2, Informative
Just to clear up about the Renderman, it's not just a plugin for Maya. Rather, it's a protocol for rendering engines. Now, Pixar's Photo Realistic Renderman program is probably the best/most famous implementation, but there are others, such as 3Delight and the late Blue Moon Rendering Tools.
It produces better looking renders for a couple of reasons. First, they support just about every rendering gizmo under the sun (ie it was designed from the beginning with support for motion blur). Next, the textures and lighting are handled by an extremely scriptable shading engine (actually, scripting may not even be the right word here since you actually compile your shaders). Finally, since it is scriptable, it seems like a lot of academics in the graphics section of computer science use Renderman as the test bed for their ideas, resulting in Renderman usually being the first place to pull off a new technique (ie subsurface scattering).
Unless, as a nervous habit, you randomly click and drag the mouse while you read webpages. Then mouse gestures become a flamming pain in the ass.
Luckily, it's an optional feature. Also, the UI is so well designed that I have taken to not using the mouse at all and browsing entirely with the keyboard. Perhaps this will break then dragging habit and I'll get to give the gestures another shot.
Actually, I have to disagree with you. I am condescending and arrogant regardless of who I am talking to. It's just that the guys never figure out that I'm talking down to them, so they never get insulted by the whole thing.
Okay, I feel kinda dirty saying this, but have you checked out iTunes. Besides the fact that it loads a little slowly (what do you expect from ported software?), it's actually a decent little program. I also found it's streaming music interface far superior to that on WinAmp.
(Please don't tell my roommate that I recommended an Apple product; he enjoys gloating just a bit too much)
Not necessarily. The screw driver magnetically clamped onto the the object that the screw was being added to or removed from, then there wouldn't be an issue. We don't have to stop the screwdriver from applying torque; we just have to stop it from applying it to the astronaut.
You're probably right that I am an idiot. I tend to miss that which is right in front of me. However, I have posted a more complete explanation of my thoughts in this post responding to the idea of just using an electric screwdriver. So, if I'm still the idiot that you think I am (I'd say there's an 93% chance that I am), then I'd be much obliged if you would tell me exactly which blatantly obvious fact that I am missing.
I've got one of those, too. Of course, even when I use it, I can feel the torque back on my hand. Of course, this isn't a problem as my little plam driver doesn't have nearly enough torque to lift me off the ground.
Take away that gravitational field and that torque which I feel on my hand has nothing fighting against it and I start (very slowly) spinning around on the axis of the screwdriver. Now, if there's a simple handle to hold onto on the satellite, then this is all negated and the torque goes into the screw instead of me. So, no, using a cordless screw driver doesn't fix the problem.
Now, if there's a cordless screwdriver that doesn't deliver torque back onto the wielder, this is the solution.
Except, on the space station, you might actually need a $10,000 screwdriver. After all, you don't have the ground to leverage yourself against, so it's quite possible with a simple screwdriver to rotate there in space while the damn screw doesn't move at all. I remember that NASA found a way around this and that it wasn't cheap (though I don't think it was ten grand).
Because its really so hard to walk ten feet and try on new clothes
Remember this post also talked about how hard it is to fit into a changing room. If you're so large that you can't do that, those ten feet might very well be a challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
There, I have to agree with you. If they bring back the music, I'm seeing the movie. I don't care if it stars Paul Rubens and the special effects are done on a Apple IIe, I'm seeing it if it's got the soundtrack.
You're complaining that these hard drives won't run forever and you're right. Neither will CD's. However, I would also like to point out that the vast majority of ancient egyptian papyrus isn't around today. Also, don't start goign off on using clay or stone tablets, because they break (even the Rosetta stone is broken).
Honestly, computers are still far superior to what we were using before. It's not like we've got Homer's original version of the Illiad sitting in a museum somewhere; we just have many duplicated copies that have been reproduced over the years. You're right that hard drives fail and CDs break, but we can keep updating onto new media. Besides, when a monk drops an iota when transcribing the Bible, Jesus goes from being God to godlike. When a computer adds an iota, the checkbit fails and the data is resent.
Somebody is also going to point out that, as systems change, data can become unreadable. Heck, I had a professor who couldn't update his lab instructions because the software that read the lab printouts wouldn't run on new machines and the fileformat wasn't understood by any other software. So, want to stop our data from becoming unreadable? Well, let's just do what the Etruscans did! Of course, we don't have a clue what they did because nobody can read Etruscan. For a more familiar example, think of heiroglyphics before the Rosetta stone. It's pretty common for data to become lost and unreadable. Also, this bring us back to the solution. Along with the data, include the source code for the software that can read it. If you really want to be anal, you could even include the source to an emulator for the machien it was designed to run on.
Still, you might point out, 400 years from now, we'll still lose 99% of that do to failures of whatever nature. Once again, you would be be right. However, do you honestly believe that we have 1% of all the data that was collected in 1604? Hell, most of the people couldn't even right, so we don't know ANYTHING about their lives. I'm sorry that we can't digitally preserve our wonderous society for all of eternity, but it's completely blind to believe that this makes us in ANY way different to any other culture. Read Percy Shelley's Ozymandias before complaining about how people in the future won't know what our lives were like.
I will admit that I did go through the stereotype stuff early in elementary school, but that ended pretty quickly, once I realized the secret. Yeah, I was getting picked on and everything, but I was bringing it on myself. The smart kids don't get picked on in school because they're smart, they get picked on because the vast majority of them are flamming assholes. I basically had to realize that, yes, I was smart, but no one cared and it didn't entitle me to anything. Most of the smart ones the had trouble had enormous egos and thought that everyone should bow down before their massive intellects. Read some of the tales of woe that always appear on Slashdot and pay attention to how there are no "normal" human being, only "nerds" and "idiots".
It also helps not to be a one hit wonder. A lot of these people that preached their own greatness to anyone who would listen were actually doing terribly in a lot of their classes. They might be good at math, but they were flunking English just like the guy that was shoving them into a locker. Now, they'll immediately point out that English is a BS course and that doesn't really count; only math and science really matter. Of course, the guy stomping on the nerd's ribs will point out that math and science are also bullshit and that Gym is the only course that matters. The nerd will then get offended because his personal views aren't taken as gospel and his enormous ego has been wounded.
So, yes, I enjoyed math and science, but I made darn sure I found other things to enjoy, too. I read books (not just scifi, classic literature). I tried to educate myself in the areas that I wasn't good at. More importantly, though, I also took the time to learn a little about the culture around me. I never learned the intricasies of modern fashion or even had much of a working knowledge of popular music, but I did try and watch some network TV (PBS doesn't count; try NBC or ABC). Of course, most nerds would balk and talk about how Television is brain killing tripe. In small doses, though, you can build up an immunity and have the tools you need to communicate with normal people. Yeah, I think the jokes might not be that funny, but if I can get the guy with the baseball bat to stop threatening me and start laughing simply by uttering "Is that your final answer?", I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Better to spend a half hour watching TV than to spend it eating asphalt.
The are FOUR LIGHTS!
Mainly, VRML kept trying to position itself as an internet technology, as opposed to a simple, standardized file format. This lead to a couple of nasty effects. First was the fact that it was pretty well designed to look like HTML. This, in and of itself, isn't terrible; I've always been a big fan of the taxt based .obj file. However, it meant that they tended to take a very text based approach to a very graphical medium. You could create sphere, cones, and cubes with a couple of short lines of text, but creating complex shapes out of polygons was a pain in the ass without serious modelling software.
Also, since it was getting pushed as an internet tech, there always seemed to be more focus on what could be reasonably run on machines in real time, as opposed to what could be rendered over the course of several hours. Thus, anyone doing serious graphics work wasn't going to save their document as a VRML file since it wasn't going to support features that they needed, like Shaders, NURBS, or UV texture maps (in the early versions, anyway).
Finally, there's already plenty of 'standards' out there. Darn near anything will read a DXF or OBJ for simple geometries and most serious software will read 3ds files. Thus, if VRML wanted to be the true standard, it needed to offer something that no one else did. The great chance that they had for this is in Animation. To the best of my knowledge, there's no good way to transfer animated scenes between programs (if I'm wrong on this, PLEASE correct me). Well, one of the big pushes in VRML was to add animation very quickly. Unfortunately, they decided to do this by simply adding Javascript. While I'm all for scriptable text formats (ie Postscript and LaTeX), this is about the equivalent of the MPEG committee saying "Why don't we just add Javascript to JPEGs?" It's got it's niche uses, but it's never going to be the maintstream standard.
Thus VRML gave up just about any chance of being a real standard format for 3D. Then a lack of quality browser plugins and the fact that the giant file sizes didn't mesh well with the 28.8 modems of the era left VRML to die a slow death by starvation.
As an example of something that COULDN'T be broken, let's say you are trying to send a simply 1K text message. Now, all you need is a random 1K string that the text can be XOR'ed against. Now, this may seem pretty insecure; after all, they just have to cycle through all the possible 1K keys that you could have made to find the message. The problem is, though, that cycling through every possible 1K key will produce every possible 1K message. They can't tell if the message was "Buy!" with a key of "Sell" or if it was "Sell" with the key being "Buy!". Then again, if could have been "Duck" with the key being "5A*q".
Of course, there are problems with this system. First, you have to use a new, random key each time you send a message. Furthermore, if you're sending a ten gig message, you need a ten gig key. Finally, and most importantly, you need a secure way of getting the key to the message recipient. The MagiQ is a secure way of sending that key. The problem of generating a truly random key can also be handled through quantum mechanics. All that's left is the issue of sending the giant keys, which is more of a timing issue than anything else.
Now, as opposed to having police officers deal with the problem of speeding, the government has decided to hand off that responsiblity to Charles Darwin. (What do you mean pseeding isn't genetic?)
- Fact: Isaac Newton never had sex.
- Fact: 9/11 wouldn't have happened if we didn't have gravity.
Conclusion: We must ban gravity.Also, you said that there had to be a way to gain the knowledge without harvesting it from the earth. Well, I hate to be rude, but there isn't. In order to learn about what is going on in there, SOMETHING has to go in and come back out, be it a probe, a sound wave, or a photon. What if the creatures in there a sensitive to the vibrations in sonar? What if our radar measurements just so happen to be at the exact resonance frequency of some molecule in their basic structure? Ultimately, any method we use to study the area has a chance of killing off the whole lake. However, the odds or any of these happening is slim. Furthermore, the data we would get from this probe would let us KNOW which measurement option are safe.
Finally, I suspect that someone is going to attack with the claim that, since ANY observation could result in destruction (regardless of how small those odds might be), we should simply not study it at all. Well, there's a couple of problems there. First, what do we do when some natural disaster threatens this ecosystem (ie earthquake). Without this research would wouldn't have knowledge on how to help restore the balance. All we could do is just sit back and watch them die. Also, just as there is a small but non-zero chance that any observation will destroy the system, there is also a small, but non-zero chance, that there will be startling new discoveries in there. I'm not saying it's going to cure cancer, but the knowledge of the balances of that ecosystem might help us in trying to find balance in other ecosystems that have been damaged. You say that it is our greed for knowledge that is destroying the earth, but do you honestly think the earth can be restored without knowledge?
The PDA you requested. Since it's got the Wifi, I don't think you'll really miss the bluetooth. However, you can also get a Bluetooth memory stick for it, just in case.
The downside is that, since every player's machine has to allow the killing of processes, you couldn't do it as client-server, but would have to do peer to peer. I understand that this can be a bitch on bandwidth, but it might be possible in a LAN setting.
Touted Belief: Rich people should pay heavier taxes than poor people.
Action: Attempts to become rich.
These aren't necessarily contradictory. They never said that they were against people being rich; they simply said that those who are should pay higher taxes. To be hypocrites, they must be rich and then attempt to pay less in taxes. Now, if you've got evidence of them doing this, I will completely agree with you. However, trying to become rich does not, by itself, make them hypocrites.
Oh, and you're right about them peaking in '92.
It produces better looking renders for a couple of reasons. First, they support just about every rendering gizmo under the sun (ie it was designed from the beginning with support for motion blur). Next, the textures and lighting are handled by an extremely scriptable shading engine (actually, scripting may not even be the right word here since you actually compile your shaders). Finally, since it is scriptable, it seems like a lot of academics in the graphics section of computer science use Renderman as the test bed for their ideas, resulting in Renderman usually being the first place to pull off a new technique (ie subsurface scattering).
Hey, the article did say that it went through Windows.
Luckily, it's an optional feature. Also, the UI is so well designed that I have taken to not using the mouse at all and browsing entirely with the keyboard. Perhaps this will break then dragging habit and I'll get to give the gestures another shot.
Actually, I have to disagree with you. I am condescending and arrogant regardless of who I am talking to. It's just that the guys never figure out that I'm talking down to them, so they never get insulted by the whole thing.
(Please don't tell my roommate that I recommended an Apple product; he enjoys gloating just a bit too much)
Not necessarily. The screw driver magnetically clamped onto the the object that the screw was being added to or removed from, then there wouldn't be an issue. We don't have to stop the screwdriver from applying torque; we just have to stop it from applying it to the astronaut.
You're probably right that I am an idiot. I tend to miss that which is right in front of me. However, I have posted a more complete explanation of my thoughts in this post responding to the idea of just using an electric screwdriver. So, if I'm still the idiot that you think I am (I'd say there's an 93% chance that I am), then I'd be much obliged if you would tell me exactly which blatantly obvious fact that I am missing.
Take away that gravitational field and that torque which I feel on my hand has nothing fighting against it and I start (very slowly) spinning around on the axis of the screwdriver. Now, if there's a simple handle to hold onto on the satellite, then this is all negated and the torque goes into the screw instead of me. So, no, using a cordless screw driver doesn't fix the problem.
Now, if there's a cordless screwdriver that doesn't deliver torque back onto the wielder, this is the solution.
Except, on the space station, you might actually need a $10,000 screwdriver. After all, you don't have the ground to leverage yourself against, so it's quite possible with a simple screwdriver to rotate there in space while the damn screw doesn't move at all. I remember that NASA found a way around this and that it wasn't cheap (though I don't think it was ten grand).