Is anyone else annoyed by these posts that ask a question "Should we have A OR should we have B?" as if either one is superior in all respects to the other. Then, of course, there is an example of where A and B are blended. WOW! Imagine that neither choice is the obviously superior and that they can be combined! So what was the point of the original question of choosing between them?
I especially like how the poster cites the author first saying "open-ended titles work a better for him" and immediately cites Grand Theft Auto III as the perfect combination and is thus not a totally open-ended game.
I can't see a lot of people "pirating" books that are in the public domain and available on numerous sites around the web, most notably the Gutenberg Project. Purchasing free books in a text format doesn't seem very smart. They could easily download them from Gutenburg in pure text and convert them to the desired format such as PDF or RTF. I'm sure such converted format books are available on the web too.
Robert Heinlein made a comment about the patent process in one of his books, perhaps The Door Into Summer.
He said: "You try to claim the whole wide world in your patent and the examiners try to chisel you down."
Very apt about the claiming the whole wide world, but obviously patent examiners today don't chisel anything down. Maybe it used to be different before all these software and business method patents. The system is swamped and has started handing out patents like toilet paper. The patent office should be scrutinizing patent applications. If it is stupid, reject it. If it's valid but too broad, nail them down to a very specific non-obvious innovation and let the patent apply to that. So many patents these days are nonsense.
They already have an Ebola vaccine that works in monkeys. It isn't convenient enough to use large-scale however. It takes multiple shots spread over months and it takes 8 months to build up real immunity to Ebola.
It will be good if one of these research teams succeed in making a fast-acting single-shot vaccine. They talked about this on NPR this morning on Morning Edition I think. www.npr.org
At the engineering firm where I work all the engineers have HP calculators and regret their purchase. They all used to have Ti89s in their college days but bought HP 48's at some point because of their supposed superiority. Now they can't work as fast because the soft keys on the HP's don't press as quickly and accurately as the TI's and they are slower than the TI's except for 3D graphing. Just my experience.
I saw this with the gerbils I had for years. One would run endlessly on the treadwheel. The other would jump (gerbils can really jump!) and cling to the mesh top of the cage and chew at it. Eventually he actually managed to escape that way and run amok through the house for a bit. We put some stronger wire mesh on and that kept him inside. But I've definitely seen this with my gerbils and have a vague recollection of seeing it at a pet shop once.
It wouldn't surprise me if the mice are insane from lack of stimulation. People get the same way when they're cooped up and take up all sorts of repetitive psychotic behaviors. It's a self-protection method for the brain I believe, keeping itself occupied in some endless task rather than concentrating on its continuously uninteresting environment and going crazy.
I guess that would mean the mice are showing (possibly) insane behavior because the behavior is a a symptom of a deteriorating mind in a last-ditch effort to save itself.
I don't understand the point of this. If you are having to program a goggle interface complex enough to recognize the screws from any nearby position and have it mark every last step, why not just put a robot arm on it instead of putting a person there? If you are mechaniziing the decision making and visual recognition, the only thing left - arm movement, is cake.
I think Qbasic by Example was the best I ever used. It's a large book and was fairly expensive for a young boy at the time, but it had tons of examples in it and was a lot of fun to play with. A very good reference book.
There is something to the people who will say "QBasic is old, learn java (or python or C++ or whatever)" because there are a lot of really nice scripting languages out now. I myself have fallen in love with Python after coming from QBasic and disliking C and C++. I'm still glad I learned on QBasic, despite the disparaging and snobby comments by people about it. You could put together neat programs quickly and easily with few bugs. Python and Ruby are like that today but infinitely faster, more powerful, and up to date.
Have fun with QB if you decide to go that way and then move onto something more modern. Definitely get Qbasic by Example
At the website for Space Policy Digest (now defunct) there are archived articles on the Chinese space programs. The site is here: http://spacepolicy.org/page_archive.html
One of the most interesting is:
"Let's Challenge China to a Space Race"
http://spacepolicy.org/page_mw0100.html
But there are a ton of others, all very well written on many aspects of the space program's flaws, successes, interaction with congress, other countries' programs, etc.
Actually Eisenhower held the line on military spending, constantly battling Army officials who demanded more money. defense spending stayed almost level throughout his entire administration. Unfortunately a side effect of this was building huge numbers of nuclear weapons. When Eisenhower took office there were a few thousand. When he left there were 18000. This was because nukes are cheaper to maintain than troops and weapons of the same effect.
Anyway, he did mostly hold the line on military spending. He was probably the only one who could have done so, being the most-respected military man of WWII.
This is cool - dedicated chips can process monstrous amounts of data and much faster than a general purpose CPU. So it's a good idea to let this card do the heavy lifting of compression. Of course the use extends to many types of data analysis: encryption, scientific number crunching, graphics compression.
The best idea would be to make the chip an FPGA not a specially-designed processor. Then you could load in different chip designs for whatever was currently needed. Need to do RSA encryption? The board reconfigures the FPGA for it. Same goes for Divx compression, gzip, SETI@Home, etc. FPGAs take a few milliseconds to reconfigure but when they operate as a dedicated signal processor they can leave a general purpose processor in the dust - leaving the main CPU to run the other apps, the desktop, etc.
Check out the IEEE archives and journals, searching for "adaptive computing" or "reconfigurable computing".
Here at the University of Alabama Huntsville we had a major leak here in an odd way. A student in my OS class turned in his homework on scratch paper, on the back of which was listed names and social security numbers of hundreds of students and faculty, including that particular teacher. He didn't think anything of it - he had been given the "scrap" paper by someone on his on-campus job. The prof refused to give the paper back because of the sensitive info on the back and he's currently working on tracing who gave the student those papers containing all that information.
kind of scary that just anybody can find all this info by getting some scrap paper from the recycle bins or wherever around campus. I do that a lot but most of it's junk. But if you work in on campus I'm sure you can find lots of confidential info in the recycle bins and such that should NEVER be released.
Has anybody patented the modulation of a stream of air as a communication device? It works like this: a bellows directs air to pass over several strong membranes to cause frequency changes in the stream of air in coded format which can be deciphered in real time by another person or recorded or transmitted through other medium.
I will call is "talking" I think. Anyone know if this has been patented yet?
There is a lot of work being done with adaptive computing involving a combination of a general CPU and an FPGA. The CPU takes care of normal work, but processing-intensive repetitive tasks can be pushed onto the FPGA. The FPGA is basically reconfigured as needed into a dedicated signal processor which can churn through a set of complex instructions in a single step rather than a few dozen clock cycles on a general purpose CPU.
The way it works then is that a board is made with a normal CPU and an FPGA next to it. At program compile time a special compiler determines which algorithms would bog down the processor and develops a single-cycle hardware solution for the FPGA. That information then becomes part of the program binary so at load time the FPGA is so configured and when necessary it processes all that information leaving the CPU free. The FPGA can of course be reconfigured several times during the program, the point being to adapt as necessary. The time to reconfigure the FPGA is unimportant when running a long program doing scientific calculations and such.
It's a pretty nifty system. Some researches have working compilers and they have found 6-50x speedup with many operations. The program won't speed up that much of course, but it leaves the main CPU more free when running repetitive scientific and graphics programs.
You can find information in the IEEE archives or search google for 'adaptive computing'. It's a neat area with a lot of promise.
Someone should write a plugin that intercepts the user's click on Attach File or gives another button for it then lets the user select the file, etc. Behind the scenes the plugin uploads the file to the company intranet or ftp site and slips a link to it in the email. At the far end when the user clicks Download Attachment or whatever the plugin grabs the file off the ftp server. Make it easy for a sysadmin to configure and distribute remotely or with a self-installing file he can send to users. No more huge email attachments.
Wasn't there a time in the dim past when colleges taught theory, fundamentals, and basic skills that could be applied in almost any field. College was about learning how to learn and use information, not about teaching specific careers and such. I hate to see all these resources being spent to accomodate a few students who want to start companies. I think economics and communication skills classes would be better investments in their futures.
Greg Egan, one of the best hard SF authors, has written some great books with this idea. The best IMHO is Diaspora, mostly about the future of mankind after it splits into 3 mutually distrustful groups - the fleshers (of traditional form and all types of wild genetically altered variants), gleisner robots (artificial bodies, but still living in the physical world), and the polises (software entities). An awesome book dealing with huge ideas and very well written, I heartily recommend it. It develops the idea of migrating minds to software very deeply.
You just have to love that the homepage lists the subjects of new forum messages, including "Robert Novak ate my baby!". Clearly the few Slashdot readers that get through the massive Slashdotting have gone on the offensive. To the forum lads! Trash Novak and protect beloved Google and other innocent sites!
with hoards of overseers, db admins, hardware and software developers....and in the end it is still slower, less reliable, and less trustworthy than simply marking your vote with a pen on a sheet of paper. Need verification? Put a thumbprint on it - more secure than SS number, not immediately attributable to a single person, but always verifiable if need be by simply running it through existing databases. That's a sure-fire KISS [keep it simple, stupid] strategy.
The best comprehensive but easy to read physics primer I've read was written by Isaac Asimov. Asimov was known for clear, understandable writing, and this book demonstrates his mastery.
It is in 3 volumes (sections is a better term than volumes): Mechanics, Optics, and Modern (relativity, quantam mechanics). Very easy to read, and he makes the material very easy to grasp, providing some historical notes and plenty of easy-to-visualize thought experiments. Even for a pretty educated fellow (in physics at least) this is a fun and educational read, because it brings a lot of information together without bogging down.
It can be picked up for about 7 bucks used at Amazon if you search for Asimov: Understanding Physics. Definitely grab a copy.
Will this work with vinyl too? Seriously, yesterday we ripped into Prince for his 733t-speak, accusing him of continuing the degradation of the English language. Today we post more articles with atrocious misspellings. I can forgive an occasional mistake, but misspelling vinyl as vinile strikes me as more than a minor mistake.
electrons in the copper cable barely move at all - about 1 centimeter per second I've heard. What moves is the electromagnetic pulses. doesn't matter how fast the electrons might move
Slashdot Mirror
I especially like how the poster cites the author first saying "open-ended titles work a better for him" and immediately cites Grand Theft Auto III as the perfect combination and is thus not a totally open-ended game.
---
I can't see a lot of people "pirating" books that are in the public domain and available on numerous sites around the web, most notably the Gutenberg Project. Purchasing free books in a text format doesn't seem very smart. They could easily download them from Gutenburg in pure text and convert them to the desired format such as PDF or RTF. I'm sure such converted format books are available on the web too.
Robert Heinlein made a comment about the patent process in one of his books, perhaps The Door Into Summer.
He said: "You try to claim the whole wide world in your patent and the examiners try to chisel you down."
Very apt about the claiming the whole wide world, but obviously patent examiners today don't chisel anything down. Maybe it used to be different before all these software and business method patents. The system is swamped and has started handing out patents like toilet paper. The patent office should be scrutinizing patent applications. If it is stupid, reject it. If it's valid but too broad, nail them down to a very specific non-obvious innovation and let the patent apply to that. So many patents these days are nonsense.
They already have an Ebola vaccine that works in monkeys. It isn't convenient enough to use large-scale however. It takes multiple shots spread over months and it takes 8 months to build up real immunity to Ebola.
It will be good if one of these research teams succeed in making a fast-acting single-shot vaccine. They talked about this on NPR this morning on Morning Edition I think. www.npr.org
At the engineering firm where I work all the engineers have HP calculators and regret their purchase. They all used to have Ti89s in their college days but bought HP 48's at some point because of their supposed superiority. Now they can't work as fast because the soft keys on the HP's don't press as quickly and accurately as the TI's and they are slower than the TI's except for 3D graphing. Just my experience.
"Microsoft TV - we know what you're watching today"
It wouldn't surprise me if the mice are insane from lack of stimulation. People get the same way when they're cooped up and take up all sorts of repetitive psychotic behaviors. It's a self-protection method for the brain I believe, keeping itself occupied in some endless task rather than concentrating on its continuously uninteresting environment and going crazy.
I guess that would mean the mice are showing (possibly) insane behavior because the behavior is a a symptom of a deteriorating mind in a last-ditch effort to save itself.
I don't understand the point of this. If you are having to program a goggle interface complex enough to recognize the screws from any nearby position and have it mark every last step, why not just put a robot arm on it instead of putting a person there? If you are mechaniziing the decision making and visual recognition, the only thing left - arm movement, is cake.
There is something to the people who will say "QBasic is old, learn java (or python or C++ or whatever)" because there are a lot of really nice scripting languages out now. I myself have fallen in love with Python after coming from QBasic and disliking C and C++. I'm still glad I learned on QBasic, despite the disparaging and snobby comments by people about it. You could put together neat programs quickly and easily with few bugs. Python and Ruby are like that today but infinitely faster, more powerful, and up to date.
Have fun with QB if you decide to go that way and then move onto something more modern. Definitely get Qbasic by Example
One of the most interesting is: "Let's Challenge China to a Space Race"
http://spacepolicy.org/page_mw0100.html
But there are a ton of others, all very well written on many aspects of the space program's flaws, successes, interaction with congress, other countries' programs, etc.
Anyway, he did mostly hold the line on military spending. He was probably the only one who could have done so, being the most-respected military man of WWII.
The best idea would be to make the chip an FPGA not a specially-designed processor. Then you could load in different chip designs for whatever was currently needed. Need to do RSA encryption? The board reconfigures the FPGA for it. Same goes for Divx compression, gzip, SETI@Home, etc. FPGAs take a few milliseconds to reconfigure but when they operate as a dedicated signal processor they can leave a general purpose processor in the dust - leaving the main CPU to run the other apps, the desktop, etc.
Check out the IEEE archives and journals, searching for "adaptive computing" or "reconfigurable computing".
KingPrad
kind of scary that just anybody can find all this info by getting some scrap paper from the recycle bins or wherever around campus. I do that a lot but most of it's junk. But if you work in on campus I'm sure you can find lots of confidential info in the recycle bins and such that should NEVER be released.
I will call is "talking" I think. Anyone know if this has been patented yet?
The way it works then is that a board is made with a normal CPU and an FPGA next to it. At program compile time a special compiler determines which algorithms would bog down the processor and develops a single-cycle hardware solution for the FPGA. That information then becomes part of the program binary so at load time the FPGA is so configured and when necessary it processes all that information leaving the CPU free. The FPGA can of course be reconfigured several times during the program, the point being to adapt as necessary. The time to reconfigure the FPGA is unimportant when running a long program doing scientific calculations and such.
It's a pretty nifty system. Some researches have working compilers and they have found 6-50x speedup with many operations. The program won't speed up that much of course, but it leaves the main CPU more free when running repetitive scientific and graphics programs.
You can find information in the IEEE archives or search google for 'adaptive computing'. It's a neat area with a lot of promise.
Rama
Rama II (Rendezous with Rama I think)
Garden of Rama
Rama Revealed.
I think that's the order...
Someone should write a plugin that intercepts the user's click on Attach File or gives another button for it then lets the user select the file, etc. Behind the scenes the plugin uploads the file to the company intranet or ftp site and slips a link to it in the email. At the far end when the user clicks Download Attachment or whatever the plugin grabs the file off the ftp server. Make it easy for a sysadmin to configure and distribute remotely or with a self-installing file he can send to users. No more huge email attachments.
Hope they salvaged some of those MSN butterfly stickers/posters. Those will be real handy when they release this product!
Wasn't there a time in the dim past when colleges taught theory, fundamentals, and basic skills that could be applied in almost any field. College was about learning how to learn and use information, not about teaching specific careers and such. I hate to see all these resources being spent to accomodate a few students who want to start companies. I think economics and communication skills classes would be better investments in their futures.
Greg Egan, one of the best hard SF authors, has written some great books with this idea. The best IMHO is Diaspora, mostly about the future of mankind after it splits into 3 mutually distrustful groups - the fleshers (of traditional form and all types of wild genetically altered variants), gleisner robots (artificial bodies, but still living in the physical world), and the polises (software entities). An awesome book dealing with huge ideas and very well written, I heartily recommend it. It develops the idea of migrating minds to software very deeply.
You just have to love that the homepage lists the subjects of new forum messages, including "Robert Novak ate my baby!". Clearly the few Slashdot readers that get through the massive Slashdotting have gone on the offensive. To the forum lads! Trash Novak and protect beloved Google and other innocent sites!
with hoards of overseers, db admins, hardware and software developers....and in the end it is still slower, less reliable, and less trustworthy than simply marking your vote with a pen on a sheet of paper. Need verification? Put a thumbprint on it - more secure than SS number, not immediately attributable to a single person, but always verifiable if need be by simply running it through existing databases. That's a sure-fire KISS [keep it simple, stupid] strategy.
It is in 3 volumes (sections is a better term than volumes): Mechanics, Optics, and Modern (relativity, quantam mechanics). Very easy to read, and he makes the material very easy to grasp, providing some historical notes and plenty of easy-to-visualize thought experiments. Even for a pretty educated fellow (in physics at least) this is a fun and educational read, because it brings a lot of information together without bogging down.
It can be picked up for about 7 bucks used at Amazon if you search for Asimov: Understanding Physics. Definitely grab a copy.
Will this work with vinyl too? Seriously, yesterday we ripped into Prince for his 733t-speak, accusing him of continuing the degradation of the English language. Today we post more articles with atrocious misspellings. I can forgive an occasional mistake, but misspelling vinyl as vinile strikes me as more than a minor mistake.
electrons in the copper cable barely move at all - about 1 centimeter per second I've heard. What moves is the electromagnetic pulses. doesn't matter how fast the electrons might move