What we're talking about is a mechanical device to induce vibrations in a medium that another mechanical device can detect. While it's an interesting thought, it is not meaningfully different than an RF code with an RF receiver attached to the lock, and it's invariably going to be less reliable and more subject to wear and tear because of the effort to move the larger mechanical parts.
I'd have to label this one "interesting, but ultimately pointless".
I want to start by saying that I agree that the idea that "video games are a negative influence" is horribly flawed. People have been making that conjecture about any activity that they don't like for all of recorded history. Dungeons and Dragons is a good example and, before that, cards and dice in general.
However, there is something to the addictive nature of games. There are three forms of addiction. The first is a physiological addiction where your body is used to something and craves it. This kind of addiciton is well understood and pretty easy to deal with. The second kind is psychological and/or social, where people feel that doing such a thing will make them happy. Often they are right, but they don't consider the future consequences of such actions (i.e. rampant consumerism gives you cool toys, but results in being poor).
The third kind of addiction is something that's only been recognized in the past ten years or so, and it's neurochemical in nature. The short version is that endorphins cause the release of chemicals that mark recently fired neurons to tell the mind that the behaviors associated with those neurons are the "good" behaviors. This is how our body teaches us that things like exercise, sex, and food are the good things to do. This worked fine a few thousand years ago, but technology has caused a few glitches in the system.
Specifically, chemicals like heroin imitate endorphin and teach us that taking heroin is a good activity. This is the primary basis of heroin addiction. Alcoholism is similar because alcohol triggers the release of endorphins. (surprise, it isn't just poor self control!) Similarly, television, video games, spectator sports, gambling, and consumerism all tend to release endorphins into our system, resulting in a neurochemical addiction.
They've actually discovered a cure for this addiction called pharmacological extinction. Again, the simple version is that (activity + endorphine = addiction), whereas (activity + !(endorphin) = extinction). Extinction means the neurochemical addiction goes away. They're treating gamblers like that right now by blocking the endorphin receptors with naltrexone and having them do their usual gambling. The gamblers lose interest over time and get control of their habits. In Finland they're using this to very effectively treat alcoholics, over a three month period the treatment turns hard core drunks into people who can drink socially.
This bit of science is in its infancy, but it's likely that it can be used to treat compulsive spenders, bulimics, anorexics and overeaters, drug addicts of all kinds (except nicotine - still haven't found an appropriate chemical for that), and, yes, even video game addicts.
One of the most aggregiously missing skills in the tech community is a notable inability to type. It's amazing the number of WPM that a master hunt-and-pecker can achieve, but my ability to crank out 105wpm has been one of my greatest assets as a programmer. It's always a good idea to reduce the noise to signal ratio, and pulling down the biggest UI obstacle out there will speed up the adoption of any technology, especially those computer related.
Also, teach 'em to count to 31 on one hand. Get poker chips of the values 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128, and 256 and teach your kids to play poker where no bank is allowed to have more than one chip of any type in it. We're not used to using it, but binary math is extremely useful once you get up to speed.
And then teach them basic logic, which can be learned at about age 4. That's not just technology you'll be teaching them, but life skills.
Oh, and while your at it, teach them to tell the difference between information and that garbage they feed us in the news and commercials.
Ok, back in from the deep end. Typing...yea...typing.
Google is allowing people to use their servers as a temporary holding pen for information so that you can transfer it from one machine to another. People are complaining about privacy because, um, why? Because the data isn't just on their computer any more? How does this differ from an FTP server or services like Dropload? I'm betting that Google's 30 day policy is a nuisance number designed to protect them from litigation in case the auto-wiping fails. This way they can re-image their hard drives every 30 days to protect themselves.
To be honest, I think that they should be commended for making the full disclosure. If privacy advocates are concerned, then privacy advocates should avoid using the service.
But you don't go to jail in the US for being of a certain political view, or religion....
Because the government tries to stop people from drugging themselves to death?
Your view of the drug war is a little flawed. Public safety has absolutely nothing to do with why the drug war is persued, except for being a safe excuse when people ask you why. By limiting information feeds it actually makes drugs more dangerous instead of less dangerous. Since only 1 user in 50 ever gets legally harassed, much less arrested, for drug charges, it has almost no effect on the actual availability.
In fact, the idea that legal drugs are in some way, shape or form safer than the illegal ones comes down to a matter of personal philosophy. Personal philosophy is what religion is all about. Maybe not strictly religious oppression, then, but certainly philosophical oppression.
I thought that the tag line said that George Romero was creating a new MMOG. Now THAT would be cool! Especially if they could get Burton to help design the sets, and maybe Geiger to design some monsters.
I can just see it now. Aliens came and conquored mankind, destroyed all of civilization, and then died of bird flu. The corpses of the dead roam the world, animated as killing machines to help clean up the remaining humans. Even though the aliens are wiped out, the planet is still heavily infested with their deadly flora and fauna. Only a few small enclaves of man remain in existence, subsiding off of scavanged materials and parts gotten from dangerous trips into the nearby critter infested cities.
Oooo, I like it! Now all I need is a few million and some good developers.
FYI, even Microsquash says that Teredo should only be used as a last-ditch effort to get connectivity. It requires a central server to act as a traffic cop, as such, isn't stateless, and requires a heaping pile of configuration. Well above what tunnels or even NAT-PT require.
While your idea is, in theory, entirely feasible, it's not very practical when you take an important reality into account. IPv6 isn't cracker-hardened yet. A quick, wholesale shift to IPv6 would result in a cracker wonderland, with a nearly unlimited set of targets. For most people, the good answer will be to wait for the government to make its shift, let it be the big target, then shift over after the dust settles.
Re:Private networks and the business case.
on
IPv6 Readiness Report
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This needs to be qualified. IPv6 has no current business case in the US. Everywhere else, they're running out of IP space pretty quickly. Mobile phones have already switched over. Japan is in full distribution. Korea's IPv4 allocation is so screwy that business were having to figure out how to build encrypted connections through multiple levels of NAT. The US Government is switching over and, if you want to do business with them, you had darn well better think about it yourself.
As for real use cases, let's talk about swarming transfer protocols like BitTorrent. That's an excellent technology that is currently just plain broke by widespread use of NAT. Let's talk about built in quality of service so you don't loose your game of Unreal Tournament because your sister gets a Skype call. Let's talk about simplified mobile computing, where you can carry your lap top from one end of the building to the other without having to suspend downloading that patch.
With these factors, it really won't be long before the value exceeds the cost. So I'd advice you to sit on your hands until until the value exceeds the cost and then get caught in the turnstyle with the eight million other people who think like you.
Someone is working extra hard to try and catch Google breaking its own rules. Are we all so offended that someone might actually be a goodguy that we have to pry under every rock for corruption, and maybe paint a little in when we don't find it?
Google's primary job is to help people find things. They're DAMN good at it, and it's extremely helpful to a lot of people. If they snub their nose at China, then they lose the opportunity to help people in China find things.
This isn't just about getting themselves into a market, this is about giving themselves the opportunity to help the Chinese as much as they can. The Chinese government is limiting how much they can help them, but it's far better than not at all.
All information is empowering to people, not just the dissident kind. Providing the people with access to more information, more efficiently is a net good even if the government blocks them from providing other information.
Well, ok, I give up on this point. When it comes down to it, art is whatever people think it is. A reasonable case can be made that art is anything that people do that doesn't have any other point. Some people will stare at it mystified and call it art, while others will consider it pointless and dismiss it as such.
[i]So then what about art which is intended to be ugly, or disturbing, or shocking? What about A Clockwork Orange? What about art that really is not beautiful at all, just visually interesting, like much abstract postmodern art? Are you saying none of these are art, because none of them are beautiful?[/i]
Hmmm, food for thought. No, I'm not suggesting that they aren't art, and I am suggesting that they do invoke our sense of beauty.
We don't consider the first group you suggested to be beautiful because the sense of beauty is overwhelmed by our distress. Clockwork Orange, very specifically, presents us with an image of a world that is horrific because its roots reside quite obviously in the world we live in. The self-contradiction of a beautiful horror is conceptually difficult for a lot of us, even if it is common.
Abstract postmodern art is very much beautiful, like a fractile or an elegent algorithm. In most cases they challenge our minds to find patterns in a chaos where no patterns were explicitly intended. Honestly, if I were to make art like that I'd ship it with fittings to hang in any orientation just to see how the art directors would interpret it.
I was wondering what all those new tiny lines were. I thought that you were just not expanding them into full posts unless they got a certain number of comments. Silly me. It looks good, although for my personal preference I'd like to see it tightened up a little so it takes up less screen realestate.
Art is anything which invokes a sense of beauty in the observer. Beauty comes in many forms, but at their core they all appeal to our sense of pattern matching. True art appeals to that sense in a way that appeals to an individuals particular set of patterns somewhere between where the patterns get complex, and where they become chaotic and incomprehensible. It's the examination of those patterns that we find so fascinating.
Many video games aren't art any more than your typical coffee cup is art. They're utilitarian devices designed to serve a purpose and little else. Others reflect or even extend a genre in a way that sets our imagination going, trying to spot the pattern in the plotline, attempting to identify where it's leading. Still more are fascinating for the bizarre and interesting creatures that they present, which are most definitely a form of virtual sculpture and, thus, undeniably a form of art.
While games aren't necessarily art, they are definitely a medium in which art can be performed.
We were once willing to go nuclear to avoid secret prisons, torture, and indefinite detention. What happened?
Somewhere America lost "more free" as one of its goals and replaced it with "more safe". I realized this when the DEA accused Canada of being too loose with its laws and spending too little on police. At that point we lost the title "Land of the Free", to be replaced with "Land of the Not Quite As Free As Those In Canada".
Yea, yea, it's off topic. I didn't write this for the benefit of the moderators.
Looking at the list of Florinert compounds, I noticed that some of them have a boiling point that's above room temperature, but below the temperature that a lot of processors run these days. Unless I'm missing something, if you could seal these in a case (with some kind of heat exchangers) it would result in a maximum temperature that the parts would get to. When the fluid exceeded that temperature it would turn to a gas and bubble to the top, being cooled off as it passes through the rest of the fluid. Instant convection without anything mechanical to move it around.
This would also be way cool to watch, especially with proper backlighting. The major flaw with this thought is that your entire computer case could readily explode on a warm day. Oops!
The specific glasses that you're talking about are for CRT monitors only. Using a TFT monitor makes them completely unnecessary. They claim that they work because a CRT has to have slightly blurry pixels in order for you to see the correct colors, but this results in the viewer shifting his focus between a little in front of the glass to a little behind the glass several times per second, resulting in significant eye strain.
I'm with everyone else. Get more sleep and you'll be much more functional with the rest of your hours.
This is interesting, but the links seem to leave out a lot of very important specifications. Things like approximated air speed, load limitations for the various proposed sizes, fuel efficiency, takeoff and landing airstrip length and whatnot. It would be great if they could be used to get a lot of our trucks off the road, but if the fuel efficiency is worse per pound of freight then it won't make sense. I doubt it'll ever match railroad efficiency, but it should have more flexibility.
I would be particularly curious to see if you could combine it with thin-film photovoltics to create a self-powering electric
This application has some potential well beyond what most people seem to think. It can turn Firefox into the first bittorrent-based web browser, and make it a bittorrent web server in addition. Having bittorrent based web pages would be more practical for the typical person who wants to create a few static pages to let his family and friends know what he's doing, store photos, that kind of thing. It would allow a person with a modest connection to avoid getting slashdotted when he posts his killer case mod/robotics project/lego furniture.
The primary problem with this, of course, is that more and more of us are hiding behind NAT walls, and bittorrent functions poorly if it can't create a server connection. If it became a truly "killer app" it might start the cascade avalanche towards IPv6.
From what I understand, the boxes that they suggest are often the boxes that they already have on their desk. I've built at least eight systems from five different Ars Technica specifications. I'll sometimes build a frankestein between the Hot Rod and the Budget Box because that gives me the price point that I'm looking for. I have yet to build a system to their specifications that hasn't worked flawlessly.
A few tips on how to vary from their specs. Pick a processor between the Hotrod or Budgetbox, and then get the motherboard to match. Shifting processor speeds is pretty easy, but always check the motherboard specs before cranking that up or down. If they don't put the latest and greatest processor in their Hotrod, there's generally a good reason. If you want a different memory configuration, visit a few of the memory vendor's sites and find out what THEY suggest for that specific motherboard. Incompatible memory sticks are pretty common.
Beyond that it's pretty tough to get something that's incompatible. Video cards have changed a lot, so make sure your motherboard has the right slots. Don't buy a raid-rated hard drive if you're only going to have one of them. That kind of thing.
And, most importantly, remember to assemble everything with the proper static protection. I've watched friends waste thousands trying to assemble a system, and regularly frying the whole thing because of the rug in their assembly room.
It's still displayed wrong in your post. There should be two spaces between the type and the variable if there is no pointer or reference indicator (* or &). This keeps first characters aligned for alphabetic identification. Also, your int is aligned with the beginning of the void on the second line instead of the end, like longobjectname is.
Thanks for the tip about the period as the first line. That'll be helpful in the future.
I'm still not sure why I dislike it. Maybe just because it's a pain to type.
I can't disagree that this is a drawback. My philosophy, though, is that I type something once, but wind up reviewing it several times thereafter. Typing it correctly doesn't cost me nearly as much time as having to sort through mis-aligned variables looking for the one I need to adjust.
Ok, so the subject is misleading. As a C++ contractor with about 15 years of experience in a broad variety of shops, I've been exposed to quite a lot of different coding standards, from severely strict where they told me where and when I can use the spacebar, to the completely non-existent. Of all of them, I have found the GNU coding standards to be the best balance between the flexible and the legible.
A few other details that I'd like to add. K&R braces were invented, not by K&R but by the guys who typeset their book. It is a severe roadbump to try and read code where the braces are at the end of an if statement instead of vertically alligned.
Try spinal alignment for variables. Most people align their variables like this:
int something; void somethingelse; longobjectname theThirdThing;
Those with more of a clue align them so that you can find the variable name easily in a mess of them: int something; void *somethingelse; longobjectname theThirdThing;
This puts some major space in some cases between names and short type declarations. Try aligning them like this:
The problem with this technique is that, if you ever post your code on Slashdot, you'll have to replace spaces with dots and spend fifteen minutes trying to get it to render correctly because SD doesn't support a simple PRE tag.
Other tidbits that have helped. camelNotation rules. Don't use hungarian notation, it doesn't work in a severely object oriented enviornment. Instead, preceed your variables with a single letter that tells you where it's declared. l for local, m for member (of a class or struct), g for global, that kind of thing. I've seen "my" used for member and "the" used for static very effectively, also, but stick to one.
Most of all, good luck. Remember that a lot of people's beliefs in this matter have no foundation except for what they've been doing for years. I have faith in my standards simply because I've seen what happens when you don't follow them, and that's mostly confusion.
You realize IPv6 has more IP's then there are atoms in the universe, right?
No, but there are enough IP addresses in it to allocate 245 million complete IPv4 address spaces to every cell in every human body on the planet. That kind of sounds like enough.
I have to agree with the above poster. On Intellectual Icebergs we do an indepth treatment of technological subjects, and it takes several weeks just to do the research. In order to accomplish this and still hold down a job, we only put out one podcast a month. Having also researched scientific topics I can say with authority that it's no different.
You have to be a serious expert to talk intelligently on any subject off the top of your head. A person can only be an expert on so many subjects. It's possible to do a regular show that consists of interviews with experts, but lining up experts is almost as time intensive as doing the research yourself, and you still have to know the topic well enough to ask intelligent questions. As a result, unless you have some infrastructure in place to do this kind of work you either have to limit your quality or your quantity.
Slashdot Mirror
What we're talking about is a mechanical device to induce vibrations in a medium that another mechanical device can detect. While it's an interesting thought, it is not meaningfully different than an RF code with an RF receiver attached to the lock, and it's invariably going to be less reliable and more subject to wear and tear because of the effort to move the larger mechanical parts.
I'd have to label this one "interesting, but ultimately pointless".
I want to start by saying that I agree that the idea that "video games are a negative influence" is horribly flawed. People have been making that conjecture about any activity that they don't like for all of recorded history. Dungeons and Dragons is a good example and, before that, cards and dice in general.
However, there is something to the addictive nature of games. There are three forms of addiction. The first is a physiological addiction where your body is used to something and craves it. This kind of addiciton is well understood and pretty easy to deal with. The second kind is psychological and/or social, where people feel that doing such a thing will make them happy. Often they are right, but they don't consider the future consequences of such actions (i.e. rampant consumerism gives you cool toys, but results in being poor).
The third kind of addiction is something that's only been recognized in the past ten years or so, and it's neurochemical in nature. The short version is that endorphins cause the release of chemicals that mark recently fired neurons to tell the mind that the behaviors associated with those neurons are the "good" behaviors. This is how our body teaches us that things like exercise, sex, and food are the good things to do. This worked fine a few thousand years ago, but technology has caused a few glitches in the system.
Specifically, chemicals like heroin imitate endorphin and teach us that taking heroin is a good activity. This is the primary basis of heroin addiction. Alcoholism is similar because alcohol triggers the release of endorphins. (surprise, it isn't just poor self control!) Similarly, television, video games, spectator sports, gambling, and consumerism all tend to release endorphins into our system, resulting in a neurochemical addiction.
They've actually discovered a cure for this addiction called pharmacological extinction. Again, the simple version is that (activity + endorphine = addiction), whereas (activity + !(endorphin) = extinction). Extinction means the neurochemical addiction goes away. They're treating gamblers like that right now by blocking the endorphin receptors with naltrexone and having them do their usual gambling. The gamblers lose interest over time and get control of their habits. In Finland they're using this to very effectively treat alcoholics, over a three month period the treatment turns hard core drunks into people who can drink socially.
This bit of science is in its infancy, but it's likely that it can be used to treat compulsive spenders, bulimics, anorexics and overeaters, drug addicts of all kinds (except nicotine - still haven't found an appropriate chemical for that), and, yes, even video game addicts.
One of the most aggregiously missing skills in the tech community is a notable inability to type. It's amazing the number of WPM that a master hunt-and-pecker can achieve, but my ability to crank out 105wpm has been one of my greatest assets as a programmer. It's always a good idea to reduce the noise to signal ratio, and pulling down the biggest UI obstacle out there will speed up the adoption of any technology, especially those computer related.
Also, teach 'em to count to 31 on one hand. Get poker chips of the values 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128, and 256 and teach your kids to play poker where no bank is allowed to have more than one chip of any type in it. We're not used to using it, but binary math is extremely useful once you get up to speed.
And then teach them basic logic, which can be learned at about age 4. That's not just technology you'll be teaching them, but life skills.
Oh, and while your at it, teach them to tell the difference between information and that garbage they feed us in the news and commercials.
Ok, back in from the deep end. Typing...yea...typing.
Google is allowing people to use their servers as a temporary holding pen for information so that you can transfer it from one machine to another. People are complaining about privacy because, um, why? Because the data isn't just on their computer any more? How does this differ from an FTP server or services like Dropload? I'm betting that Google's 30 day policy is a nuisance number designed to protect them from litigation in case the auto-wiping fails. This way they can re-image their hard drives every 30 days to protect themselves.
To be honest, I think that they should be commended for making the full disclosure. If privacy advocates are concerned, then privacy advocates should avoid using the service.
But you don't go to jail in the US for being of a certain political view, or religion....
Because the government tries to stop people from drugging themselves to death?
Your view of the drug war is a little flawed. Public safety has absolutely nothing to do with why the drug war is persued, except for being a safe excuse when people ask you why. By limiting information feeds it actually makes drugs more dangerous instead of less dangerous. Since only 1 user in 50 ever gets legally harassed, much less arrested, for drug charges, it has almost no effect on the actual availability.
In fact, the idea that legal drugs are in some way, shape or form safer than the illegal ones comes down to a matter of personal philosophy. Personal philosophy is what religion is all about. Maybe not strictly religious oppression, then, but certainly philosophical oppression.
I thought that the tag line said that George Romero was creating a new MMOG. Now THAT would be cool! Especially if they could get Burton to help design the sets, and maybe Geiger to design some monsters.
I can just see it now. Aliens came and conquored mankind, destroyed all of civilization, and then died of bird flu. The corpses of the dead roam the world, animated as killing machines to help clean up the remaining humans. Even though the aliens are wiped out, the planet is still heavily infested with their deadly flora and fauna. Only a few small enclaves of man remain in existence, subsiding off of scavanged materials and parts gotten from dangerous trips into the nearby critter infested cities.
Oooo, I like it! Now all I need is a few million and some good developers.
FYI, even Microsquash says that Teredo should only be used as a last-ditch effort to get connectivity. It requires a central server to act as a traffic cop, as such, isn't stateless, and requires a heaping pile of configuration. Well above what tunnels or even NAT-PT require.
While your idea is, in theory, entirely feasible, it's not very practical when you take an important reality into account. IPv6 isn't cracker-hardened yet. A quick, wholesale shift to IPv6 would result in a cracker wonderland, with a nearly unlimited set of targets. For most people, the good answer will be to wait for the government to make its shift, let it be the big target, then shift over after the dust settles.
This needs to be qualified. IPv6 has no current business case in the US. Everywhere else, they're running out of IP space pretty quickly. Mobile phones have already switched over. Japan is in full distribution. Korea's IPv4 allocation is so screwy that business were having to figure out how to build encrypted connections through multiple levels of NAT. The US Government is switching over and, if you want to do business with them, you had darn well better think about it yourself.
As for real use cases, let's talk about swarming transfer protocols like BitTorrent. That's an excellent technology that is currently just plain broke by widespread use of NAT. Let's talk about built in quality of service so you don't loose your game of Unreal Tournament because your sister gets a Skype call. Let's talk about simplified mobile computing, where you can carry your lap top from one end of the building to the other without having to suspend downloading that patch.
With these factors, it really won't be long before the value exceeds the cost. So I'd advice you to sit on your hands until until the value exceeds the cost and then get caught in the turnstyle with the eight million other people who think like you.
Someone is working extra hard to try and catch Google breaking its own rules. Are we all so offended that someone might actually be a goodguy that we have to pry under every rock for corruption, and maybe paint a little in when we don't find it?
Google's primary job is to help people find things. They're DAMN good at it, and it's extremely helpful to a lot of people. If they snub their nose at China, then they lose the opportunity to help people in China find things.
This isn't just about getting themselves into a market, this is about giving themselves the opportunity to help the Chinese as much as they can. The Chinese government is limiting how much they can help them, but it's far better than not at all.
All information is empowering to people, not just the dissident kind. Providing the people with access to more information, more efficiently is a net good even if the government blocks them from providing other information.
Well, ok, I give up on this point. When it comes down to it, art is whatever people think it is. A reasonable case can be made that art is anything that people do that doesn't have any other point. Some people will stare at it mystified and call it art, while others will consider it pointless and dismiss it as such.
I guess there's no accounting for taste.
[i]So then what about art which is intended to be ugly, or disturbing, or shocking? What about A Clockwork Orange? What about art that really is not beautiful at all, just visually interesting, like much abstract postmodern art? Are you saying none of these are art, because none of them are beautiful?[/i]
Hmmm, food for thought. No, I'm not suggesting that they aren't art, and I am suggesting that they do invoke our sense of beauty.
We don't consider the first group you suggested to be beautiful because the sense of beauty is overwhelmed by our distress. Clockwork Orange, very specifically, presents us with an image of a world that is horrific because its roots reside quite obviously in the world we live in. The self-contradiction of a beautiful horror is conceptually difficult for a lot of us, even if it is common.
Abstract postmodern art is very much beautiful, like a fractile or an elegent algorithm. In most cases they challenge our minds to find patterns in a chaos where no patterns were explicitly intended. Honestly, if I were to make art like that I'd ship it with fittings to hang in any orientation just to see how the art directors would interpret it.
I was wondering what all those new tiny lines were. I thought that you were just not expanding them into full posts unless they got a certain number of comments. Silly me. It looks good, although for my personal preference I'd like to see it tightened up a little so it takes up less screen realestate.
Art is anything which invokes a sense of beauty in the observer. Beauty comes in many forms, but at their core they all appeal to our sense of pattern matching. True art appeals to that sense in a way that appeals to an individuals particular set of patterns somewhere between where the patterns get complex, and where they become chaotic and incomprehensible. It's the examination of those patterns that we find so fascinating.
Many video games aren't art any more than your typical coffee cup is art. They're utilitarian devices designed to serve a purpose and little else. Others reflect or even extend a genre in a way that sets our imagination going, trying to spot the pattern in the plotline, attempting to identify where it's leading. Still more are fascinating for the bizarre and interesting creatures that they present, which are most definitely a form of virtual sculpture and, thus, undeniably a form of art.
While games aren't necessarily art, they are definitely a medium in which art can be performed.
Intellectual Icebergs - a good poke in the brain.
We were once willing to go nuclear to avoid secret prisons, torture, and indefinite detention. What happened?
Somewhere America lost "more free" as one of its goals and replaced it with "more safe". I realized this when the DEA accused Canada of being too loose with its laws and spending too little on police. At that point we lost the title "Land of the Free", to be replaced with "Land of the Not Quite As Free As Those In Canada".
Yea, yea, it's off topic. I didn't write this for the benefit of the moderators.
Looking at the list of Florinert compounds, I noticed that some of them have a boiling point that's above room temperature, but below the temperature that a lot of processors run these days. Unless I'm missing something, if you could seal these in a case (with some kind of heat exchangers) it would result in a maximum temperature that the parts would get to. When the fluid exceeded that temperature it would turn to a gas and bubble to the top, being cooled off as it passes through the rest of the fluid. Instant convection without anything mechanical to move it around.
This would also be way cool to watch, especially with proper backlighting. The major flaw with this thought is that your entire computer case could readily explode on a warm day. Oops!
The specific glasses that you're talking about are for CRT monitors only. Using a TFT monitor makes them completely unnecessary. They claim that they work because a CRT has to have slightly blurry pixels in order for you to see the correct colors, but this results in the viewer shifting his focus between a little in front of the glass to a little behind the glass several times per second, resulting in significant eye strain.
I'm with everyone else. Get more sleep and you'll be much more functional with the rest of your hours.
This is interesting, but the links seem to leave out a lot of very important specifications. Things like approximated air speed, load limitations for the various proposed sizes, fuel efficiency, takeoff and landing airstrip length and whatnot. It would be great if they could be used to get a lot of our trucks off the road, but if the fuel efficiency is worse per pound of freight then it won't make sense. I doubt it'll ever match railroad efficiency, but it should have more flexibility.
I would be particularly curious to see if you could combine it with thin-film photovoltics to create a self-powering electric
This application has some potential well beyond what most people seem to think. It can turn Firefox into the first bittorrent-based web browser, and make it a bittorrent web server in addition. Having bittorrent based web pages would be more practical for the typical person who wants to create a few static pages to let his family and friends know what he's doing, store photos, that kind of thing. It would allow a person with a modest connection to avoid getting slashdotted when he posts his killer case mod/robotics project/lego furniture.
The primary problem with this, of course, is that more and more of us are hiding behind NAT walls, and bittorrent functions poorly if it can't create a server connection. If it became a truly "killer app" it might start the cascade avalanche towards IPv6.
From what I understand, the boxes that they suggest are often the boxes that they already have on their desk. I've built at least eight systems from five different Ars Technica specifications. I'll sometimes build a frankestein between the Hot Rod and the Budget Box because that gives me the price point that I'm looking for. I have yet to build a system to their specifications that hasn't worked flawlessly.
A few tips on how to vary from their specs. Pick a processor between the Hotrod or Budgetbox, and then get the motherboard to match. Shifting processor speeds is pretty easy, but always check the motherboard specs before cranking that up or down. If they don't put the latest and greatest processor in their Hotrod, there's generally a good reason. If you want a different memory configuration, visit a few of the memory vendor's sites and find out what THEY suggest for that specific motherboard. Incompatible memory sticks are pretty common.
Beyond that it's pretty tough to get something that's incompatible. Video cards have changed a lot, so make sure your motherboard has the right slots. Don't buy a raid-rated hard drive if you're only going to have one of them. That kind of thing.
And, most importantly, remember to assemble everything with the proper static protection. I've watched friends waste thousands trying to assemble a system, and regularly frying the whole thing because of the rug in their assembly room.
It's still displayed wrong in your post. There should be two spaces between the type and the variable if there is no pointer or reference indicator (* or &). This keeps first characters aligned for alphabetic identification. Also, your int is aligned with the beginning of the void on the second line instead of the end, like longobjectname is.
Thanks for the tip about the period as the first line. That'll be helpful in the future.
I'm still not sure why I dislike it. Maybe just because it's a pain to type.
I can't disagree that this is a drawback. My philosophy, though, is that I type something once, but wind up reviewing it several times thereafter. Typing it correctly doesn't cost me nearly as much time as having to sort through mis-aligned variables looking for the one I need to adjust.
>> K&R braces were invented, not by K&R but by the guys who typeset their book.
Do you have a citation for the source of this statement?
Not on the web, unfortunately. That statement came from a periodical that has been lost to me for a while now.
id you intentionally give a nonexistent web url?
Which one? The one for the GNU coding standard? It works fine for me.
A few other details that I'd like to add. K&R braces were invented, not by K&R but by the guys who typeset their book. It is a severe roadbump to try and read code where the braces are at the end of an if statement instead of vertically alligned.
Try spinal alignment for variables. Most people align their variables like this:
int something;
void somethingelse;
longobjectname theThirdThing;
Those with more of a clue align them so that you can find the variable name easily in a mess of them:
int something;
void *somethingelse;
longobjectname theThirdThing;
This puts some major space in some cases between names and short type declarations. Try aligning them like this:
The problem with this technique is that, if you ever post your code on Slashdot, you'll have to replace spaces with dots and spend fifteen minutes trying to get it to render correctly because SD doesn't support a simple PRE tag.
Other tidbits that have helped. camelNotation rules. Don't use hungarian notation, it doesn't work in a severely object oriented enviornment. Instead, preceed your variables with a single letter that tells you where it's declared. l for local, m for member (of a class or struct), g for global, that kind of thing. I've seen "my" used for member and "the" used for static very effectively, also, but stick to one.
Most of all, good luck. Remember that a lot of people's beliefs in this matter have no foundation except for what they've been doing for years. I have faith in my standards simply because I've seen what happens when you don't follow them, and that's mostly confusion.
You realize IPv6 has more IP's then there are atoms in the universe, right?
No, but there are enough IP addresses in it to allocate 245 million complete IPv4 address spaces to every cell in every human body on the planet. That kind of sounds like enough.
I have to agree with the above poster. On Intellectual Icebergs we do an indepth treatment of technological subjects, and it takes several weeks just to do the research. In order to accomplish this and still hold down a job, we only put out one podcast a month. Having also researched scientific topics I can say with authority that it's no different.
You have to be a serious expert to talk intelligently on any subject off the top of your head. A person can only be an expert on so many subjects. It's possible to do a regular show that consists of interviews with experts, but lining up experts is almost as time intensive as doing the research yourself, and you still have to know the topic well enough to ask intelligent questions. As a result, unless you have some infrastructure in place to do this kind of work you either have to limit your quality or your quantity.