I knew I should've patented my concept for a large concave screen back when we were talking about monitor technology back in '98. Well, it says in the Bible that a prophet is without honor in his own time.:o)
Being monocular (blind in rt eye) and all, this is a nice alternative to true stereo displays. Now I can finally have that 16,000 x 12,000 TrueColor desktop I've craved.
O Queen (I think that's the proper form of address for female royalty of first rank):
I answer your question with a question of my own: Worth what?
Remember how Stalin once said, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic"? Well, "breeding a race of 'moderately contented' worker bees" -- like so many livestock -- is something no rational parent would aspire to. But I'm sure I speak for lots of us mommies and daddies when I say that creating a new life, nurturing it for eighteen or so years, and cherishing it forever is a highly prized lifetime goal in its own right. Certainly that's why Mrs. alumshubby and I adopted Joshua.Of course, there are those 'parents' out there for whom children are, at best, pets, and at worst, a venereal disease: For them, children will be at best an impediment to their aspirations. As for yourself, I wonder how you will answer for yourself the question you've raised here when you first hear that tiny cry.
Geez, there sure are a lot of anti-management threads going here. What everybody forgets is that managers are people too. They desperately want to succeed. And while striving to, they may not stop to consider that whether they make good decisions or bad ones, they're succeeding on the backs of their people. What's to be done? Maybe the only legitimate management candidates should come from "battlefield commissions" rather than from the ranks of business schools. It's a little like the military: The officers who are former enlisted pukes and noncoms are more likely to make decisions circumspectly and empathetically than the "zeroes" who've never been there and done that.
Another thought, and then I've used up my quota:Reading posts like this one makes me wonder if I need to work as a freelance technical writer rather than as a "livery stable" contractor or a "captive" employee. If I got involved with projects as a hired gun, I think I could negotiate -- somewhat -- the deliverable requirements and dates, or at least go into each job with my eyes wide open if I don't decide to decline the work. And if I self-manage, I think I'll have a boss I can negotiate with more easily and whose point of view I can see more readily.:o)
...Dad used to say, "Opinions are like @$$holes; they all stink.":o)I think it looks pretty cool -- I wouldn't mind pulling something like that out of my ditty bag when I'm at a client site. After the usual impossible-to-distinguish-among anonymous black monoliths, what's wrong with Sony deciding to put on a little style?But then, hey, my four-year-old and I liked Jar Jar Binks, and I'm envious of a friend's iBook. Maybe Mrs. alumshubby is right: My taste is all in my mouth.
The only food-service jobs I held (working dishwashing line in cafeteria, pot scrubber, fast-food grill cook) were WAY more stressful than technical writing at its worst.
...the phrase 'pet robot' just hits me all wrong.I like my pets to be living, behaving things, even if I have to clean up messes, feed and tend constantly, or discourage undesirable behaviors. The complexities of the emotional relationship between pet and "owner" are probably best expressed by a poster I saw in veterinarian's waiting area: "Family members come in all species." Toy robots, yes; any self-respecting geek would concede those are very cool, but pets connotes something a little more biologically and emotionally based. I haven't known too many adults, even hard-core geeks, who've connected strongly with what are, frankly, nonliving playthings. (Apropos of nothing, we're the only species to have pets; remember Koko the ASL-signing gorilla who had a pet kitten he "named" All Ball?)
The soap opera drama that is Slashdot is what keeps people here. And the beauty of Slashdot is that, by setting your threshold to 2, you can ignore the soap opera and get on to the thoughtful stuff.
Aw, nuts!!!Having read Signal 11's rant, I guess we're going to miss some intelligent commentary, but the trade-off is that we won't have to endure any more of his obsessing about moderation.If he really cared about quality of content, couldn't he just ignore trolls and flames? Getting all hung up over moderation seems grossly irrelevant to me.
I hope he reconsiders and comes back (even if under another name), though.
a structure that could drop thousands of tons of material across a large swath of the planet if it failed
Do you realize that the description you've just given also applies to Hoover Dam? The only distinction is how rapidly the material gets (re)distributed.
I think within 50 years we'll get to where we can trust macroengineering if materials science gives us a reason to.
I couldn't help but notice the display was a single color.
That bothered me, too, but when I clicked on the link to download a high-rez version of the picture, I noticed another picture available whose caption described a technique for achieving color displays.
The possibilities of a flexible display are intriguing: Imagine a large-form-factor display, say 4' by 3', that you could unroll like a windowshade or a portable film projection screen. And if this stuff is orders of magnitude cheaper than LCD, maybe I'll be able to have a really huge desktop (1.6 m x 1.2 m) that's really my desktop!:o)
Thanks for the refresher on Constitutional law -- that part you cite is one of the duties of Congress, among regulating interstate commerce, maintaining an army and navy, etc. It's been a long, long time since high-school civics class."The limited time" cited jogs my memory: Wasn't there a recent instance wherein a publisher or other entity sought and won a significant copyright extension on published works? I seem to remember that this apparently dashes any hope of seeing Project Gutenberg make available The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in our lifetimes.
In particular, the Constitution intends a published work to become part of the public commons after a certain time.
I'm certainly no Constitutional scholar, but I recall the Constitution deals mainly with the tripartite structure of the US federal government, function of each of the three branches, and relations between the several states and the federal government. But I don't recall any details therein about published works coming into the public domain. Not trying to be a smart@$$, but where precisely in the Constitution is this explained?
Network news. Let's see: Approximately a dozen stories, of varying length, served up in twenty-seven minutes' time. That works out to such a short span of time that it's hard to perceive, let alone consider, the "slant" of each story and wonder what details you didn't hear about. "Newsmagazine" formats like 60 Minutes are marginally better at providing detail, at the cost of even steeper slant to hold the viewer's interest.
The best format I've seen is where a telejournalism entity like PBS' Frontline can devote an entire hour -- or even a week, as in the case of CBS' nineteen-eighty-mumble weeklong series The Defense of America to provide enough content to be more than superficially interesting.
I think Matt Drudge is just the first of many "news you can use" one-stop shopping outlets for information that will supplant TV news.
Making my *fingers* vibrate isn't much of a come-on. But if they develop a doohickey that will do things to my limbic system, as the famous metal sphereoid did in Woody Allen's science-fiction sendup Sleeper, well, I'll whip out that drastic plastic faster than you can say "Linda Lovelace does LinuxWorld."
...combat and peacetime alike: Some of us prefer nth-degree realism, even if it means the sim costs upward of $40 per and it's a cast-iron unforgiving bitch to learn how to operate properly.The trade-off, though, is that the sim better be well documented and thoroughly debugged. I snuck a look at the resource page for Falcon 4.0, and from there I went to Reviews. One of the knocks on F4.0 was that the air-campaign module was buggy. A misbehaving feature-laden sim is less enjoyable than a bulletproof if relatively unsophisticated one.
ndpatel touches on two aspects of why I ditched AOL after six years of (mostly) satisfied membership. AOL shows no signs of going to an ad-supported service in the States even though AOL Europe stopped charging subscription. Considering the ad saturation they achieve -- it seems like every window and dialog box has a banner in it -- and the competition from ad-based free ISPs, I'm surprised AOL hasn't taken the plunge and gone free.Also, I still chat with people I know on AOL, but I detest having ICQ *and* AIM on my box. It just seems like overkill. (And worse yet, I've been thinking about mIRC too...stop me before I kill again...)
Correct my ignorance, but please don't do so flamingly.
Is Netscape open source, or is that Mozilla I'm thinking of? I've never been clear on the relationship between the two.
Also, if Netscape is open-source, how can this be happening? Is it because all the code was built onto the Mosaic engine? If so, can similar complaints be leveled at MSIEx.y for the same reason?
Smaller? Hell no, I already had trouble when I tried using a friend's normally sized Palm -- I'd like a larger display so I can more easily write. (I guess I just have trouble moving the stylus accurately on a small area.) Maybe when something close to a letter- or A4-sized sheet of paper becomes conveniently priced, I'll try this. The pocket-sized form factor just doesn't do it for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew I should've patented my concept for a large concave screen back when we were talking about monitor technology back in '98. Well, it says in the Bible that a prophet is without honor in his own time. :o)
Being monocular (blind in rt eye) and all, this is a nice alternative to true stereo displays. Now I can finally have that 16,000 x 12,000 TrueColor desktop I've craved.
O Queen (I think that's the proper form of address for female royalty of first rank): I answer your question with a question of my own: Worth what? Remember how Stalin once said, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic"? Well, "breeding a race of 'moderately contented' worker bees" -- like so many livestock -- is something no rational parent would aspire to. But I'm sure I speak for lots of us mommies and daddies when I say that creating a new life, nurturing it for eighteen or so years, and cherishing it forever is a highly prized lifetime goal in its own right. Certainly that's why Mrs. alumshubby and I adopted Joshua.Of course, there are those 'parents' out there for whom children are, at best, pets, and at worst, a venereal disease: For them, children will be at best an impediment to their aspirations. As for yourself, I wonder how you will answer for yourself the question you've raised here when you first hear that tiny cry.
Geez, there sure are a lot of anti-management threads going here. What everybody forgets is that managers are people too. They desperately want to succeed. And while striving to, they may not stop to consider that whether they make good decisions or bad ones, they're succeeding on the backs of their people. What's to be done? Maybe the only legitimate management candidates should come from "battlefield commissions" rather than from the ranks of business schools. It's a little like the military: The officers who are former enlisted pukes and noncoms are more likely to make decisions circumspectly and empathetically than the "zeroes" who've never been there and done that. Another thought, and then I've used up my quota:Reading posts like this one makes me wonder if I need to work as a freelance technical writer rather than as a "livery stable" contractor or a "captive" employee. If I got involved with projects as a hired gun, I think I could negotiate -- somewhat -- the deliverable requirements and dates, or at least go into each job with my eyes wide open if I don't decide to decline the work. And if I self-manage, I think I'll have a boss I can negotiate with more easily and whose point of view I can see more readily. :o)
...Dad used to say, "Opinions are like @$$holes; they all stink." :o)I think it looks pretty cool -- I wouldn't mind pulling something like that out of my ditty bag when I'm at a client site. After the usual impossible-to-distinguish-among anonymous black monoliths, what's wrong with Sony deciding to put on a little style?But then, hey, my four-year-old and I liked Jar Jar Binks, and I'm envious of a friend's iBook. Maybe Mrs. alumshubby is right: My taste is all in my mouth.
The only food-service jobs I held (working dishwashing line in cafeteria, pot scrubber, fast-food grill cook) were WAY more stressful than technical writing at its worst.
...the phrase 'pet robot' just hits me all wrong.I like my pets to be living, behaving things, even if I have to clean up messes, feed and tend constantly, or discourage undesirable behaviors. The complexities of the emotional relationship between pet and "owner" are probably best expressed by a poster I saw in veterinarian's waiting area: "Family members come in all species." Toy robots, yes; any self-respecting geek would concede those are very cool, but pets connotes something a little more biologically and emotionally based. I haven't known too many adults, even hard-core geeks, who've connected strongly with what are, frankly, nonliving playthings. (Apropos of nothing, we're the only species to have pets; remember Koko the ASL-signing gorilla who had a pet kitten he "named" All Ball?)
The soap opera drama that is Slashdot is what keeps people here. And the beauty of Slashdot is that, by setting your threshold to 2, you can ignore the soap opera and get on to the thoughtful stuff.
Aw, nuts!!!Having read Signal 11's rant, I guess we're going to miss some intelligent commentary, but the trade-off is that we won't have to endure any more of his obsessing about moderation.If he really cared about quality of content, couldn't he just ignore trolls and flames? Getting all hung up over moderation seems grossly irrelevant to me. I hope he reconsiders and comes back (even if under another name), though.
Man! Somebody needs some Prozac surreptitiously sprinkled on his/her corn flakes.
a structure that could drop thousands of tons of material across a large swath of the planet if it failed
Do you realize that the description you've just given also applies to Hoover Dam? The only distinction is how rapidly the material gets (re)distributed.
I think within 50 years we'll get to where we can trust macroengineering if materials science gives us a reason to.
Uh, exactly HOW MANY space station has there been? I count one.
Two, I believe, if you count Skylab. You may not be old enough to remember it very well; I was in high school then.
I couldn't help but notice the display was a single color.
That bothered me, too, but when I clicked on the link to download a high-rez version of the picture, I noticed another picture available whose caption described a technique for achieving color displays.
The possibilities of a flexible display are intriguing: Imagine a large-form-factor display, say 4' by 3', that you could unroll like a windowshade or a portable film projection screen. And if this stuff is orders of magnitude cheaper than LCD, maybe I'll be able to have a really huge desktop (1.6 m x 1.2 m) that's really my desktop! :o)
Thanks for the refresher on Constitutional law -- that part you cite is one of the duties of Congress, among regulating interstate commerce, maintaining an army and navy, etc. It's been a long, long time since high-school civics class."The limited time" cited jogs my memory: Wasn't there a recent instance wherein a publisher or other entity sought and won a significant copyright extension on published works? I seem to remember that this apparently dashes any hope of seeing Project Gutenberg make available The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in our lifetimes.
In particular, the Constitution intends a published work to become part of the public commons after a certain time.
I'm certainly no Constitutional scholar, but I recall the Constitution deals mainly with the tripartite structure of the US federal government, function of each of the three branches, and relations between the several states and the federal government. But I don't recall any details therein about published works coming into the public domain. Not trying to be a smart@$$, but where precisely in the Constitution is this explained?The best format I've seen is where a telejournalism entity like PBS' Frontline can devote an entire hour -- or even a week, as in the case of CBS' nineteen-eighty-mumble weeklong series The Defense of America to provide enough content to be more than superficially interesting.
I think Matt Drudge is just the first of many "news you can use" one-stop shopping outlets for information that will supplant TV news.um, no, it's not. Sorry. :o)
The Batman: Beyond series has been animated from its inception.
Making my *fingers* vibrate isn't much of a come-on. But if they develop a doohickey that will do things to my limbic system, as the famous metal sphereoid did in Woody Allen's science-fiction sendup Sleeper, well, I'll whip out that drastic plastic faster than you can say "Linda Lovelace does LinuxWorld."
Wow, even when she was a kid, she was cute -- see the cast photo for Misfits of Science Nice wheels, Court. :o)
...combat and peacetime alike: Some of us prefer nth-degree realism, even if it means the sim costs upward of $40 per and it's a cast-iron unforgiving bitch to learn how to operate properly.The trade-off, though, is that the sim better be well documented and thoroughly debugged. I snuck a look at the resource page for Falcon 4.0, and from there I went to Reviews. One of the knocks on F4.0 was that the air-campaign module was buggy. A misbehaving feature-laden sim is less enjoyable than a bulletproof if relatively unsophisticated one.
Visual Basic for Linux? (shudder)
'Scuse me -- don't you mean Ben Franklin?
ndpatel touches on two aspects of why I ditched AOL after six years of (mostly) satisfied membership. AOL shows no signs of going to an ad-supported service in the States even though AOL Europe stopped charging subscription. Considering the ad saturation they achieve -- it seems like every window and dialog box has a banner in it -- and the competition from ad-based free ISPs, I'm surprised AOL hasn't taken the plunge and gone free.Also, I still chat with people I know on AOL, but I detest having ICQ *and* AIM on my box. It just seems like overkill. (And worse yet, I've been thinking about mIRC too...stop me before I kill again...)
...was that, with the technology described in this novel, we'd finally find out for sure who assassinated John F. Kennedy.
Correct my ignorance, but please don't do so flamingly.
Is Netscape open source, or is that Mozilla I'm thinking of? I've never been clear on the relationship between the two.
Also, if Netscape is open-source, how can this be happening? Is it because all the code was built onto the Mosaic engine? If so, can similar complaints be leveled at MSIEx.y for the same reason?
Remember, points for decorum and tact.
Smaller? Hell no, I already had trouble when I tried using a friend's normally sized Palm -- I'd like a larger display so I can more easily write. (I guess I just have trouble moving the stylus accurately on a small area.) Maybe when something close to a letter- or A4-sized sheet of paper becomes conveniently priced, I'll try this. The pocket-sized form factor just doesn't do it for me.