There is also no reason to believe that given an infinite universe, we would find an earth without Barney. No matter how many times I roll two dice, I will never roll a 13, and it may be that no matter how many planets there are, you never get one that has intelligent life but no Barney. Barney may be an inevitable product of intelligent life. With a sample size of 1, you just can't tell.
Damn, I guess I'll have to keep working on my time machine so that I can go back in time and smite Barney's creator!
All we can hope for is that eventually they'll come across a planet in a solar system similar to ours somewhere out there in the infinate reaches of the universe that is identical in every way to ours, except that there'd be no Hitler, no Stalan, and no Barney.
If the universe truly is infinite, then it's only a matter of finite time before something like this is found. And without the need for parallel universes!
My question is this...How much money is Senator Fritz "Disney" Hollings going to make off of introducing legislation requiring whatever "Open Standard" this group comes up with?
I'd always wondered how long it would be before the companies that produce software like Mathematica and Maple would port their software to PDAs. When I went to college at Rose-Hulman IT we were all issued notebooks which ran Maple and CAD software. We used Maple in all of our Calc classes and were able to use it on tests once we proved our ability to do that particular type of problem by hand first. The CAD software could have easily been on higher power workstations. If Maple had been on our PDAs it would have lowered the cost of going to the college by a few thousand dollars (high end notebooks were really expensive back in '95, and sometimes still are)
The main problem is that PDAs were nearly non-existant at that time, but today I can see PDAs like the iPaq doing a grand job of running some of this higher end math software.
Of course cheating would run pretty rampant with wireless transmitting of email and text, not to mention the ability to store files with crib sheets on them. I'm still not sure how our profs back in the day thought they were ensuring that we didn't cheat on our calc exams back then. I think it was more of a matter of honor than anything.
Unfortunately, the trees were never properly pruned when they were younger, so many of them fork and branch at very low heights before reaching their total height. Most of them are quite adequate for building tree forts in, however.
I don't think I ever would allow them to be harvested though, not unless I was about to sell the house and property. I love big trees that provide lots of shade. Luckily there are enough squirrels in my area to carry off and eat all the walnuts that drop to the ground so that I don't need to rake them up.
You haven't seen my yard or neighborhood. I'm not talking about a few trees here. My yard is more like a forest in the amount and height of mature trees. Most of the trees are well over 50' tall, and those that aren't that tall provide foliage that provides an even better horizontal wall. Add to that the hedge of lilac bushes around the perimeter of the yard, and the large amount of trees in the neighbor's yards and you have not only a large amount of very nice shade and pretty decent privacy, but also a veritable fortress when it comes to getting any form of line of site.
A 30' tall would do little to no good since the trees range in height from 6' tall (lilacs), to 20' (smaller maples), to 50' (largest maples and walnuts). The foliage from all of these trees creates a pretty good area of blockage on both the horizontal and vertical planes.
If I put the antenna up in a high up limb of one of my trees, then the neighbor's trees would do an equally adequate job of blocking the LOS. Also of note is that I don't live in a large city where lots are only marginally larger than the house itself. To reach the edge of my property with antenna cabling to reach an antenna would require a cable that would loose enough dB of signal strength such that the antenna would have to have a pretty high gain on it in order to counteract this. The only other option would be to actually put the access point itself up in the tree, but then I run into the issue of powering the unit, which I suppose is possible via PoE, but generally tends towards being a higher cost of ownership, not to mention digging up my yard to run cable up a tree, which generally defeats the purpose of being 'wireless' in the first place.
My house is encircled and enshrouded by a dense cover of mature mapple and walnut trees, such that I'm unable to mooch off my company's wireless internet because there is no line of sight and the trees degrade the connection so badly that it's not even worth trying if there were.
Once this comes down in price(I'm guessing it's still semi-expensive since it's newer technology) it will be great for all the rural areas out here in the sticks.
A friend that owns an ISP in this area already has plans in the works to create a 802.11x grid in the areas surrounding my town in order to provide high-speed access to the farmers and very small towns(less than 50 people) that don't have any form of cable or dsl. So far the only hang-up has been the construction of towers in the void areas where there are no grain bins or elevators tall enough out in the areas where an access point and repeater is needed. Judging by the information provided in this article he may be able to skip out on some of these towers due to the greater distance provided by the NLOS technology.
Actually the only way I used to be able to get to sleep before I had some sort of fan noise in my room was to "pound my head" which was an obsessive-compulsive slamming of my head into the pillow. Mom starting running a small fan in my room when I was about 8, and I stopped banging my head into the pillow to drive myself to sleep. Since then I've always had a fan or a computer on in my room.
I've found the noise from the Athlon 1800+ in my bedroom to be quite soothing in the amount of white noise it creates in the background.
I did a little somewhat unscientific case study on the white noise it generated a few months back. I started shutting the box down at night while I was in bed. It turned out after 1 week of shutting it down to get rid of the noise that I actually had a harder time getting to sleep, and often woke up in the middle of the night. Within a few nights of leaving it on all night and day again I was back to sleeping like a baby.
With a baby on the way I'm tempted to set up a computer in the baby's room, not only so I have something to do at 4AM in the morning between feeding/changing, but also as an introduction of white noise into the room. I guess I'll see how well this works, maybe it'll be as soothing his mother's voice.
Did they try 'password', the employee's dog's name, the signifigant other's name, the current month, or any other of these exceedingly hard to crack passwords that no hacker will ever be able to crack without a dictionary?
It's good to see a few companies in the memory market actually coming out with better and exciting products as opposed to Rambus who likes to litigate its way into the market.
I wonder how long it will be before the console game world realizes that a good solid keyboard and a small, comfortable mouse are the best controllers available.
Ask anyone who's really good at Q3 or any other FPS what they'd rather use, a kb/mouse combo or a gamepad, and I'm pretty sure the answer is kb/mouse.
I think it's only a matter of time before we see game consoles come standard with keyboards and perhaps mice as well. A nice optical mouse preferrably to avoid the nasty mouse pad problem in the living room.
But then if game consoles came with keyboards and mice, wouldn't they just be PCs with S-Video or Composite video outputs? Well, for all intenseive purposes they are for the most part. Look at Linux for Sony PS/2 and Sega Genesis and wonder how long it will be before someone cracks the X-box and ports Linux to it also.
Me personally, I guess I'll just keep my trusty PC with a GeForce3 w/ s-video output hooked up to my TV so that I can play PC games like NFS5 and Quake3 on the big screen, and remember the old days when games were good because of the game play, not the graphics with my MAME and NES emulators.
The fact that they(MS) admit there are issues with their currently closed-source model that involve flaws that are so bad that even stating which modules they are involved with is a potential compromise to National Security reinforces in me the fact that an open atmosphere is much better in that numerous persons and groups can review the code such that alarmingly fatal flaws such as these don't get released the to the public or the government in the first place.
If even a few outside of Microsoft's company had reviewed or had access to these modules, I think it would be only a matter of time before these bugs were squished, probably even before the software was released in the first place.
What better reasoning for the states to continue fighting for the disclosure of MS's cruddy source to the states, and certain other peoples than the hope that flaws such as these don't end up in a finished product that people actually pay money for in the first place.
If you're looking for a RPG with an expansive world, thousands of NPCs to interact with, thousands of quests, more items and equipment than you'll probably ever be able to find, and a fully customizable user interface that runs as well(if not better) on Linux as Windows or Mac then you only need try a MUD.
Sure it's text, but graphics are lame anyways. Command prompt and text is where it's at! Just compile Tintin++ or tinyfuge on your box and point your browser to http://www.mudconnector.com
There are thousands of MUDs to choose from, and the best part is, they don't cost you $40 for a colorful box with a CD in it--they're mostly free! Some of my favorites can be found at http://www.exilemud.com and http://www.sojourn3.org
The original Neverwinter Nights was an old AOL game. It was pretty fun, being something along the lines of one of the earliest Graphical MUDs. The new NWN is based somewhat upon this early AOL game from my understanding as far as content goes. Both games are of course based upon the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for AD&D by TSR.
Were it up to me entirely there'd be a HP DLT drive in there right now, but unfortunately the budget sometimes takes precedence over quality of parts. I hate budgets.
We've had quite a few of these both at our store and sold to end users. I've even had one of the 30GB IDE flavor myself.
Out of the 40-50 that we ever sold I can't think of one that is still out there and functioning properly. We went through 5 of the 50GB SCSI models in our store's server alone.
We finally realized why they were so cheap, because they are made cheaply.
We now use a 40GB Seagate DAT drive. It's still not perfect, but it sure is a lot more reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, I guess I'll have to keep working on my time machine so that I can go back in time and smite Barney's creator!
All we can hope for is that eventually they'll come across a planet in a solar system similar to ours somewhere out there in the infinate reaches of the universe that is identical in every way to ours, except that there'd be no Hitler, no Stalan, and no Barney.
If the universe truly is infinite, then it's only a matter of finite time before something like this is found. And without the need for parallel universes!
My question is this...How much money is Senator Fritz "Disney" Hollings going to make off of introducing legislation requiring whatever "Open Standard" this group comes up with?
My guess is quite a lot of pork!
I'd always wondered how long it would be before the companies that produce software like Mathematica and Maple would port their software to PDAs. When I went to college at Rose-Hulman IT we were all issued notebooks which ran Maple and CAD software. We used Maple in all of our Calc classes and were able to use it on tests once we proved our ability to do that particular type of problem by hand first. The CAD software could have easily been on higher power workstations. If Maple had been on our PDAs it would have lowered the cost of going to the college by a few thousand dollars (high end notebooks were really expensive back in '95, and sometimes still are)
The main problem is that PDAs were nearly non-existant at that time, but today I can see PDAs like the iPaq doing a grand job of running some of this higher end math software.
Of course cheating would run pretty rampant with wireless transmitting of email and text, not to mention the ability to store files with crib sheets on them. I'm still not sure how our profs back in the day thought they were ensuring that we didn't cheat on our calc exams back then. I think it was more of a matter of honor than anything.
Unfortunately, the trees were never properly pruned when they were younger, so many of them fork and branch at very low heights before reaching their total height. Most of them are quite adequate for building tree forts in, however.
I don't think I ever would allow them to be harvested though, not unless I was about to sell the house and property. I love big trees that provide lots of shade. Luckily there are enough squirrels in my area to carry off and eat all the walnuts that drop to the ground so that I don't need to rake them up.
You haven't seen my yard or neighborhood. I'm not talking about a few trees here. My yard is more like a forest in the amount and height of mature trees. Most of the trees are well over 50' tall, and those that aren't that tall provide foliage that provides an even better horizontal wall. Add to that the hedge of lilac bushes around the perimeter of the yard, and the large amount of trees in the neighbor's yards and you have not only a large amount of very nice shade and pretty decent privacy, but also a veritable fortress when it comes to getting any form of line of site.
A 30' tall would do little to no good since the trees range in height from 6' tall (lilacs), to 20' (smaller maples), to 50' (largest maples and walnuts). The foliage from all of these trees creates a pretty good area of blockage on both the horizontal and vertical planes.
If I put the antenna up in a high up limb of one of my trees, then the neighbor's trees would do an equally adequate job of blocking the LOS. Also of note is that I don't live in a large city where lots are only marginally larger than the house itself. To reach the edge of my property with antenna cabling to reach an antenna would require a cable that would loose enough dB of signal strength such that the antenna would have to have a pretty high gain on it in order to counteract this. The only other option would be to actually put the access point itself up in the tree, but then I run into the issue of powering the unit, which I suppose is possible via PoE, but generally tends towards being a higher cost of ownership, not to mention digging up my yard to run cable up a tree, which generally defeats the purpose of being 'wireless' in the first place.
Yes, I like to call it "Security through shrubery"
You want into my network? NIT!
My house is encircled and enshrouded by a dense cover of mature mapple and walnut trees, such that I'm unable to mooch off my company's wireless internet because there is no line of sight and the trees degrade the connection so badly that it's not even worth trying if there were.
Once this comes down in price(I'm guessing it's still semi-expensive since it's newer technology) it will be great for all the rural areas out here in the sticks.
A friend that owns an ISP in this area already has plans in the works to create a 802.11x grid in the areas surrounding my town in order to provide high-speed access to the farmers and very small towns(less than 50 people) that don't have any form of cable or dsl. So far the only hang-up has been the construction of towers in the void areas where there are no grain bins or elevators tall enough out in the areas where an access point and repeater is needed. Judging by the information provided in this article he may be able to skip out on some of these towers due to the greater distance provided by the NLOS technology.
Actually the only way I used to be able to get to sleep before I had some sort of fan noise in my room was to "pound my head" which was an obsessive-compulsive slamming of my head into the pillow. Mom starting running a small fan in my room when I was about 8, and I stopped banging my head into the pillow to drive myself to sleep. Since then I've always had a fan or a computer on in my room.
I've found the noise from the Athlon 1800+ in my bedroom to be quite soothing in the amount of white noise it creates in the background.
I did a little somewhat unscientific case study on the white noise it generated a few months back. I started shutting the box down at night while I was in bed. It turned out after 1 week of shutting it down to get rid of the noise that I actually had a harder time getting to sleep, and often woke up in the middle of the night. Within a few nights of leaving it on all night and day again I was back to sleeping like a baby.
With a baby on the way I'm tempted to set up a computer in the baby's room, not only so I have something to do at 4AM in the morning between feeding/changing, but also as an introduction of white noise into the room. I guess I'll see how well this works, maybe it'll be as soothing his mother's voice.
Did they try 'password', the employee's dog's name, the signifigant other's name, the current month, or any other of these exceedingly hard to crack passwords that no hacker will ever be able to crack without a dictionary?
Check out Thinkgeek's fine selection of wares.
Caffiene is always good to have around -
This thing looks cool as a low-cost portable solution to the stereo system -
And don't forget the general gadgets -
I'd like to try this out and combine some of the information in this book with my two 15 gallon tubs full of Legos from my childhood.
If when my boy is old enough I could only choose one toy for him to play with, it would undoubtedly be Legos.
It's good to see a few companies in the memory market actually coming out with better and exciting products as opposed to Rambus who likes to litigate its way into the market.
I wonder how long it will be before the console game world realizes that a good solid keyboard and a small, comfortable mouse are the best controllers available.
Ask anyone who's really good at Q3 or any other FPS what they'd rather use, a kb/mouse combo or a gamepad, and I'm pretty sure the answer is kb/mouse.
I think it's only a matter of time before we see game consoles come standard with keyboards and perhaps mice as well. A nice optical mouse preferrably to avoid the nasty mouse pad problem in the living room.
But then if game consoles came with keyboards and mice, wouldn't they just be PCs with S-Video or Composite video outputs? Well, for all intenseive purposes they are for the most part. Look at Linux for Sony PS/2 and Sega Genesis and wonder how long it will be before someone cracks the X-box and ports Linux to it also.
Me personally, I guess I'll just keep my trusty PC with a GeForce3 w/ s-video output hooked up to my TV so that I can play PC games like NFS5 and Quake3 on the big screen, and remember the old days when games were good because of the game play, not the graphics with my MAME and NES emulators.
The fact that they(MS) admit there are issues with their currently closed-source model that involve flaws that are so bad that even stating which modules they are involved with is a potential compromise to National Security reinforces in me the fact that an open atmosphere is much better in that numerous persons and groups can review the code such that alarmingly fatal flaws such as these don't get released the to the public or the government in the first place. If even a few outside of Microsoft's company had reviewed or had access to these modules, I think it would be only a matter of time before these bugs were squished, probably even before the software was released in the first place. What better reasoning for the states to continue fighting for the disclosure of MS's cruddy source to the states, and certain other peoples than the hope that flaws such as these don't end up in a finished product that people actually pay money for in the first place.
If you're looking for a RPG with an expansive world, thousands of NPCs to interact with, thousands of quests, more items and equipment than you'll probably ever be able to find, and a fully customizable user interface that runs as well(if not better) on Linux as Windows or Mac then you only need try a MUD.
Sure it's text, but graphics are lame anyways. Command prompt and text is where it's at! Just compile Tintin++ or tinyfuge on your box and point your browser to http://www.mudconnector.com
There are thousands of MUDs to choose from, and the best part is, they don't cost you $40 for a colorful box with a CD in it--they're mostly free! Some of my favorites can be found at http://www.exilemud.com and http://www.sojourn3.org
The original Neverwinter Nights was an old AOL game. It was pretty fun, being something along the lines of one of the earliest Graphical MUDs. The new NWN is based somewhat upon this early AOL game from my understanding as far as content goes. Both games are of course based upon the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for AD&D by TSR.
Were it up to me entirely there'd be a HP DLT drive in there right now, but unfortunately the budget sometimes takes precedence over quality of parts. I hate budgets.
We've had quite a few of these both at our store and sold to end users. I've even had one of the 30GB IDE flavor myself.
Out of the 40-50 that we ever sold I can't think of one that is still out there and functioning properly. We went through 5 of the 50GB SCSI models in our store's server alone.
We finally realized why they were so cheap, because they are made cheaply.
We now use a 40GB Seagate DAT drive. It's still not perfect, but it sure is a lot more reliable.