About BTG
BTG creates value by investing in intellectual property and technology development, and in early stage ventures. We realize value through technology licensing, patent assertion and sale of equity investments. Through a multidisciplinary approach, we apply intellectual property and commercial expertise, together with specialist skills in science and technology, to create major product opportunities in the health and high tech sectors. BTG has commercialized important innovations, including Magnetic Resonance Imaging, working closely with Professor Sir Peter Mansfield, who was jointly awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Medicine, and others who made contributory inventions to MRI. BTG has also commercialized Multilevel Cell Memory, Campath(R) (alemtuzumab), the first monoclonal antibody treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and recombinant Factor IX blood clotting protein. BTG operates through wholly owned subsidiaries BTG International Ltd. and BTG International Inc. in the UK and USA, respectively.
It seems you haven't experience the joy of playing on a 42" HDTV using progressive scan from the console. You can keep your puny 21" Monitor:) The big advantage of high refresh rates and high resolution on a PC comes from the fact that PC gamers tend to be very close to their display.
I'm about 8 feet away from my TV. Sitting on a comfy couch. And, I can actually game with more than one person in the room without having to rent an industrial air conditioner.
I think you'd find that the big advantage of FPS on a PC is not the display, but the controls. At least, that's the only reason I still game on my PC.
"So, Id's had 6 major releases in the past 11 years and in the time that 3D Realms has been working on ONE Duke Nukem Forever, Id has had 4 whole games come out."
Well let's see here... There have been around 13 releases of various Duke Nukem games since 1991 right up until 2004, not counting DNF.
Not to mention all of the other games that 3D Realms put out (Shadow Warrior, Wolfenstein 3D, Raptor, BioMenace, Max Payne 1/2 etc.). So no, they've been working on far more than just Duke Nukem Forever for 8 years.
Oh, I'm not sure where you got the modified DOOM II engine idea, pays to do a little trivial research though...
" When DOOM was released, Ken decided to have another go at a 3D engine. From this came BUILD, Ken's ever-evolving engine used in many, many games
since, including Blood, Redneck Rampage, Shadow Warrior, and of course, Duke Nukem 3D. Not true "3D" but actually "2 1/2"D, the BUILD engine was one of the two most popular engines of its time, holding ground with Quake, id software's masterpiece."
"Console manufacturers are too reticent to try something like this, but that'd be a true innovation over the current generation, without a loss on graphic capabilities."
To be fair, what you're suggesting (with the 3D monitor) while intriguing, would probably be as successful as the Virtual Boy was. For a couple of reasons.
Not everyone is a 3D gamer.
Very very few people own a 3D monitor, or they won't own one for a very long time.
Besides, what you're suggesting is to remove the console from the living room, which is where everyone wants their console in the first place. Part of the attraction of the device is that it connects to an appliance that the vast majority of people own. Take that away, and you've lost a huge market.
If you can't parallel park, you shouldn't be licensed to drive.
But I can see a practical application of this device : Device determins if driver is an incompetent moron who should never have been issued a license, and if that is the case, automatically pull over, park and cut power to the engine.
Imagine the look on the asshole tailgater's face when upon pulling up within inches of your bumper, is denied control of his car, and pulls over to the side of the road (perfectly parked of course.)
Or the moron who is in such a rush that he thinks red lights are optional.
Or my personal pet peeve, the idiots who think signals are optional, and that everyone should just guess what their next move will be...
yup, I think I'd enjoy having the road to myself:)
Can we let the community get this thing to a 1.0 release before you push it on average end users? Think a little before you push software. End users don't necessarily want to be beta testers.
The point you should be making at any rate is "How hard is it to download one of these other browsers?" give them the list, free or not! Tell them about Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox, Chimera, lynx, telnet to port 80.
Why stick someone who doesn't know any better about browsers or the internet with YOUR browser preference. One of the great things our community brings to the table is choice, let's pass that on, and not act like $BROWSER is the only true browser.
They IP address, in the end, is a number pinpointing the exact location of a physical circuit.
No not really.I think I know where you're going with this, but the IP address does not pinpoint the exact physical location, the MAC address does.
Put another way, think DHCP for a minute. IP address that was yours yesterday might be down the street today. We all know there is technically much more to it than that, but, in a layman's eye, if the IP address can move around, why can't he take it with him?
Other posters have pointed out that 98.6F is core temperature. But I can think of at least three perfectly normal and understandable reasons why a person's finger temperature would be hotter / colder than normal:
-the user was holding a coffee, or a can of soft drink before trying to gain admittance.
-Or it's winter and they just took off their gloves.
-User went to washroom, and cleaned their hands, with water that is colder or warmer than their skin temperature, or dried them with friction or blown heat.
-They are ill even!
You're on the right track though... fingerprints alone cannot be trusted. Finger temperature is not the way to go though.
's/TNG/DS9' for me, so I guess it depended on which characters you preferred. Might be just that I disliked more of the TNG characters than I liked, but I found the interwoven relashionships in DS9 refreshing, and the deversity of the characters interesting.
I share your sentiment about the success of the flight, but I'm puzzled by the comparison. There have been many historic events, both in the US and abroad, that are at least in the same topic from which to draw comparison...
How about STS-107 - more recent, very historic. And although it was tragic, at least in the end good has come of it.
Or how about all of the Mars exploration? Or mankinds unified and rekindled interest in space? All more recent, more relevant and equally as historic. Not to mention, more positive!
From personal observation, cannot be solved with megapixels. 9 out of 10 times, people have their camera on low - mediums quality settings "so they can take more pictures." Of course, they get more pictures that have no prayer of being printed because of compression artifacts, bit it's useless explaining that. To most people, looks good on screen means it will print well.
My father asked about a digital camera today. He was thinking in the 4-6MP range , mostly because I recently bought a D-Rebel and rave about it. (That's because I love RAW format, and the extra breathing room for tight crops more than anything. It does feel "crippled" compared to my ELAN 7 though.)
My suggestion to him : Buy a good, comfortable 3MP camera with a GOOD LENSE on it and a flexible feature set and spend the money you saved on a decent amount of storage. Set the camera to it's highest quality setting, and leave it there. A 3 megapixel image will produce a decent 4x6 to 8x10s without a problem, IF you use a proper quality setting.
Remember folks, you CAN'T go back to take the picture again. Make sure you have the best quality you can the first time around!
Well, it IS working! I respect the time and effort you put into your study, however I have an Inbox and Junk folder that tend to disagree with your findings and conclusions.
Like I said, step 1 is checking headers. You can find alot of spam just by looking there. Also keep in mind that I said pipe to a shell script, not to aspell. I do alot of massaging before passing the body on to aspell.
I question the values you have for 'ham'. I can think of no one that I correspond with that has spelling as atrocious as your samples would indicate. Not even Slashdot is that poor at spelling as a whole. I often deal with people who use English as a second language. And while the grammar might be off, the spelling is usually passable.
Anyways I suspect that there might be text being processed by your script that isn't part of the sender's message (for example HTML, although a quick look at your PERL shows that you are looking for tags.)
It would be nice to see the emails that scored poorly on your test, to see if there is some other culprit skewing your results.
FWIW, this post contains 7 errors out of 235 words, 5 of which would have been in my custom dictionary. Giving either a 2.9% or 0.9% error rate.
The largest image I saw was a) a GIF and b) only 2444x1595 px. I wouldn't count on printing a high quality poster. You'd only get about 12"x8" at 200dpi from it, which isn't all that pretty.
"...who believe that Windows and the GUI used by Windows are one and the same?"
Microsoft does! Heck, they even testified that IE cannot be removed from Windows, not the GUI, but Windows. It ships on all of their home and server products. And since they say it cannot be removed, I presume the GUI can't either by association. In short : If they make no distinction why should we?
All kidding aside, Windows is as pervasive as it is because of it's UI, not it's quality engineering. Without it, it has no advantage over any of the myriad proven OSes on the market, in fact there isn't much reason to use it at all. In a server room that is. Basically, the same situation we find ourselved in today.
Not saying that this is what happened in your situation, the tech seemed rather ignorant. But having worked tech support both front line and 3rd level, I can tell you that in my situation, if a replacement is being requested, certain steps *have* to be followed, or the RMA will be rejected. Regardless of how cluefull the user is on the other end of the phone. Or how evident the problem is.
The more proof you offered that a device was defective, the quicker the part would be dispatched. If you provided nothing, the RMA would be rejected.
Moral of the story : at least in our case, you were better off following the seemingly moronic TS steps first time around, or you would have to do them later, AFTER your part was rejected.
Mind you, I made a point of explaining to the customer something to the effect of "I believe exactly what your saying and have no doubt [x] is defective, however, if we don't do some basic troubleshooting, the replacement will be rejected. I will keep this as brief as possible..." EUs were usually happy to follow the steps at that point...
Actually, once I got down to his plotline... it introduces holes all on it's own. Biggest of which : Why the hell would Obi Wan INSTRUCT Luke to seek Yoda in ESB. Not bright if you were trying to hide him from yoda in the first place. There are so many more than I'd like to list, but let's just say it would cause as many problems as it fixed.
And BTW, his conclusion does not allude to an evil Yoda, only that Vader and Kenobi conspired to hide Luke from the emperor and yoda.
I read through this site after seeing the link and it is great. And I actually noticed something that didn't really stick (mostly because of the time between the movies I think.)
"But then ROTJ and TPM went much farther, spreading an outright lie that tipped over into madness, claiming the following... that the mere act of getting angry AT evil will TURN you evil! David Brin.
What i realised was : Luke beat Vader in Jedi, after he got angry that Vader mentioned Leia. AND, Obi-Wan only beat Darth Maul, after he got angry about Qui-Gon (you can see it in his face, and his agression during the fight.)
So while Lucas professes the anger leads down the path to the dark side : his heros end up using this tool to fulfill their good deeds...
Slashdot Mirror
About BTG
BTG creates value by investing in intellectual property and technology development, and in early stage ventures. We realize value through technology licensing, patent assertion and sale of equity investments. Through a multidisciplinary approach, we apply intellectual property and commercial expertise, together with specialist skills in science and technology, to create major product opportunities in the health and high tech sectors. BTG has commercialized important innovations, including Magnetic Resonance Imaging, working closely with Professor Sir Peter Mansfield, who was jointly awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Medicine, and others who made contributory inventions to MRI. BTG has also commercialized Multilevel Cell Memory, Campath(R) (alemtuzumab), the first monoclonal antibody treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and recombinant Factor IX blood clotting protein. BTG operates through wholly owned subsidiaries BTG International Ltd. and BTG International Inc. in the UK and USA, respectively.
Or, to summarise, they do nothing.
It seems you haven't experience the joy of playing on a 42" HDTV using progressive scan from the console. You can keep your puny 21" Monitor :) The big advantage of high refresh rates and high resolution on a PC comes from the fact that PC gamers tend to be very close to their display.
I'm about 8 feet away from my TV. Sitting on a comfy couch. And, I can actually game with more than one person in the room without having to rent an industrial air conditioner.
I think you'd find that the big advantage of FPS on a PC is not the display, but the controls. At least, that's the only reason I still game on my PC.
Not so, after all, he moved from one piece of carrion to another. BSD is, after all, dying you know! :P
"How is our standard of living lower? "
They get to see Stargate : Atlantis tonight and we don't.
Well let's see here... There have been around 13 releases of various Duke Nukem games since 1991 right up until 2004, not counting DNF.
Not to mention all of the other games that 3D Realms put out (Shadow Warrior, Wolfenstein 3D, Raptor, BioMenace, Max Payne 1/2 etc.). So no, they've been working on far more than just Duke Nukem Forever for 8 years.
Oh, I'm not sure where you got the modified DOOM II engine idea, pays to do a little trivial research though...
" When DOOM was released, Ken decided to have another go at a 3D engine. From this came BUILD, Ken's ever-evolving engine used in many, many games since, including Blood, Redneck Rampage, Shadow Warrior, and of course, Duke Nukem 3D. Not true "3D" but actually "2 1/2"D, the BUILD engine was one of the two most popular engines of its time, holding ground with Quake, id software's masterpiece."
Nice Troll, though.
We all remember what a huge success that was! :)
"Console manufacturers are too reticent to try something like this, but that'd be a true innovation over the current generation, without a loss on graphic capabilities."
To be fair, what you're suggesting (with the 3D monitor) while intriguing, would probably be as successful as the Virtual Boy was. For a couple of reasons.
Besides, what you're suggesting is to remove the console from the living room, which is where everyone wants their console in the first place. Part of the attraction of the device is that it connects to an appliance that the vast majority of people own. Take that away, and you've lost a huge market.
Sucker, he could have installed $DISTRO and used the extra 4.5 hours saved to get the XP Tour and SP1 running in Wine! :)
If you can't parallel park, you shouldn't be licensed to drive.
:)
But I can see a practical application of this device : Device determins if driver is an incompetent moron who should never have been issued a license, and if that is the case, automatically pull over, park and cut power to the engine.
Imagine the look on the asshole tailgater's face when upon pulling up within inches of your bumper, is denied control of his car, and pulls over to the side of the road (perfectly parked of course.)
Or the moron who is in such a rush that he thinks red lights are optional.
Or my personal pet peeve, the idiots who think signals are optional, and that everyone should just guess what their next move will be...
yup, I think I'd enjoy having the road to myself
Can we let the community get this thing to a 1.0 release before you push it on average end users? Think a little before you push software. End users don't necessarily want to be beta testers.
The point you should be making at any rate is "How hard is it to download one of these other browsers?" give them the list, free or not! Tell them about Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox, Chimera, lynx, telnet to port 80.
Why stick someone who doesn't know any better about browsers or the internet with YOUR browser preference. One of the great things our community brings to the table is choice, let's pass that on, and not act like $BROWSER is the only true browser.
No not really.I think I know where you're going with this, but the IP address does not pinpoint the exact physical location, the MAC address does.
Put another way, think DHCP for a minute. IP address that was yours yesterday might be down the street today. We all know there is technically much more to it than that, but, in a layman's eye, if the IP address can move around, why can't he take it with him?
Hehe, maybe they should have called Firefox Mozooky instead!
Other posters have pointed out that 98.6F is core temperature. But I can think of at least three perfectly normal and understandable reasons why a person's finger temperature would be hotter / colder than normal :
-the user was holding a coffee, or a can of soft drink before trying to gain admittance.
-Or it's winter and they just took off their gloves.
-User went to washroom, and cleaned their hands, with water that is colder or warmer than their skin temperature, or dried them with friction or blown heat.
-They are ill even!
You're on the right track though... fingerprints alone cannot be trusted. Finger temperature is not the way to go though.
10% of PS2 owners is Xbox's entire market share!
's/TNG/DS9' for me, so I guess it depended on which characters you preferred. Might be just that I disliked more of the TNG characters than I liked, but I found the interwoven relashionships in DS9 refreshing, and the deversity of the characters interesting.
"IMO the most historic event since 9/11."
I share your sentiment about the success of the flight, but I'm puzzled by the comparison. There have been many historic events, both in the US and abroad, that are at least in the same topic from which to draw comparison...
How about STS-107 - more recent, very historic. And although it was tragic, at least in the end good has come of it.
Or how about all of the Mars exploration? Or mankinds unified and rekindled interest in space? All more recent, more relevant and equally as historic. Not to mention, more positive!
From personal observation, cannot be solved with megapixels. 9 out of 10 times, people have their camera on low - mediums quality settings "so they can take more pictures." Of course, they get more pictures that have no prayer of being printed because of compression artifacts, bit it's useless explaining that. To most people, looks good on screen means it will print well.
My father asked about a digital camera today. He was thinking in the 4-6MP range , mostly because I recently bought a D-Rebel and rave about it. (That's because I love RAW format, and the extra breathing room for tight crops more than anything. It does feel "crippled" compared to my ELAN 7 though.)
My suggestion to him : Buy a good, comfortable 3MP camera with a GOOD LENSE on it and a flexible feature set and spend the money you saved on a decent amount of storage. Set the camera to it's highest quality setting, and leave it there. A 3 megapixel image will produce a decent 4x6 to 8x10s without a problem, IF you use a proper quality setting.
Remember folks, you CAN'T go back to take the picture again. Make sure you have the best quality you can the first time around!
"That isn't going to work..."
Well, it IS working! I respect the time and effort you put into your study, however I have an Inbox and Junk folder that tend to disagree with your findings and conclusions.
Like I said, step 1 is checking headers. You can find alot of spam just by looking there. Also keep in mind that I said pipe to a shell script, not to aspell. I do alot of massaging before passing the body on to aspell.
I question the values you have for 'ham'. I can think of no one that I correspond with that has spelling as atrocious as your samples would indicate. Not even Slashdot is that poor at spelling as a whole. I often deal with people who use English as a second language. And while the grammar might be off, the spelling is usually passable.
Anyways I suspect that there might be text being processed by your script that isn't part of the sender's message (for example HTML, although a quick look at your PERL shows that you are looking for tags.)
It would be nice to see the emails that scored poorly on your test, to see if there is some other culprit skewing your results.
FWIW, this post contains 7 errors out of 235 words, 5 of which would have been in my custom dictionary. Giving either a 2.9% or 0.9% error rate.
That's exacly why I usually only need two steps in my handy spam finding recipe :
1) Check the header for the usual.
2) Pipe the subject and body to a shell script that returns the number of spelling errors (via aspell etc.).
Too big a number from #2 means spam, l33t, very poor spelling or an email that is not english at all. None of which I care to read anyways!
The largest image I saw was a) a GIF and b) only 2444x1595 px. I wouldn't count on printing a high quality poster. You'd only get about 12"x8" at 200dpi from it, which isn't all that pretty.
Microsoft does! Heck, they even testified that IE cannot be removed from Windows, not the GUI, but Windows. It ships on all of their home and server products. And since they say it cannot be removed, I presume the GUI can't either by association. In short : If they make no distinction why should we?
All kidding aside, Windows is as pervasive as it is because of it's UI, not it's quality engineering. Without it, it has no advantage over any of the myriad proven OSes on the market, in fact there isn't much reason to use it at all. In a server room that is. Basically, the same situation we find ourselved in today.
Not saying that this is what happened in your situation, the tech seemed rather ignorant. But having worked tech support both front line and 3rd level, I can tell you that in my situation, if a replacement is being requested, certain steps *have* to be followed, or the RMA will be rejected. Regardless of how cluefull the user is on the other end of the phone. Or how evident the problem is.
The more proof you offered that a device was defective, the quicker the part would be dispatched. If you provided nothing, the RMA would be rejected.
Moral of the story : at least in our case, you were better off following the seemingly moronic TS steps first time around, or you would have to do them later, AFTER your part was rejected.
Mind you, I made a point of explaining to the customer something to the effect of "I believe exactly what your saying and have no doubt [x] is defective, however, if we don't do some basic troubleshooting, the replacement will be rejected. I will keep this as brief as possible..." EUs were usually happy to follow the steps at that point...
Don't tell us how it ends!
Actually, once I got down to his plotline... it introduces holes all on it's own. Biggest of which : Why the hell would Obi Wan INSTRUCT Luke to seek Yoda in ESB. Not bright if you were trying to hide him from yoda in the first place. There are so many more than I'd like to list, but let's just say it would cause as many problems as it fixed.
And BTW, his conclusion does not allude to an evil Yoda, only that Vader and Kenobi conspired to hide Luke from the emperor and yoda.
So no, not even Brin can save Ep. 3.
I read through this site after seeing the link and it is great. And I actually noticed something that didn't really stick (mostly because of the time between the movies I think.)
"But then ROTJ and TPM went much farther, spreading an outright lie that tipped over into madness, claiming the following... that the mere act of getting angry AT evil will TURN you evil! David Brin.What i realised was : Luke beat Vader in Jedi, after he got angry that Vader mentioned Leia. AND, Obi-Wan only beat Darth Maul, after he got angry about Qui-Gon (you can see it in his face, and his agression during the fight.)
So while Lucas professes the anger leads down the path to the dark side : his heros end up using this tool to fulfill their good deeds...
There is no lack of sith... there were always only two.