So I told him to goto openoffice.org, and get the free office suite. He asked me what that was, I took him to my desktop, and showed it to him. 20 minutes later he was making a power point in open office.
Now, come on. Your story was plausible up to then, but you blew it. 20 minutes isn't even enough to open OpenOffice, never mind download and install it...
Reading numerous stories about people who are exceptionally experienced having installed linux and having to 'recompile the kernal' pretty much tells me that you need to be a C programmer to use Linux.
t3h n4ni?
Can't remember the last time I had to compile a kernel... oh, wait, I do. It was the last time I installed Gentoo. Slackware never required me to recompile a kernel, neither did SuSE, neither did Ubuntu or Mandriva.
And when I did compile kernels, I don't ever recall having to know a single bit of C. You pick from a menu what you want in the kernel, then compile it, then copy it to/boot. No programming on your part involved anywhere.
If i was microsoft i would say "ok...well see you later Europe."
* ring ring. ring ring *
Ah yes, hello. Can I speak to my broker, please? Thank you. Hello. Yes, I'd like to buy as much stock as possible in Apple, please. Yes. And SuSE, too. Yes. Lots. I've reason to believe a rather large market might be opening up for them in the near future.
Oh, and unload that Microsoft stock, too. Yeah. Getting into a trade war with Brussels. Yeah. I don't know what they were thinking either. OK. Thanks. Bye now.
If he was stopped from saying "nonsense" out on the street, then there would be something to complain about.Maya Evans went to the main war memorial in central London and began reading aloud the names of British soldiers killed to date in Iraq. She was arrested under a new law, the Serious Organised Crime Act, which among other things forbids any unlicenced protests within a mile of Parliament. That clause was put in to remove a single protestor, Brian Haw, who has been camped outside Parliament for some four years now protesting against the various misdeeds of government. Amusingly, he's still there; the courts held that his protest began four years ago and has continued ever since, and so wasn't covered, because the act wasn't retrospective;-)
Another victim of the new tyranny, John Catt, was subjected to a stop-and-search by police, who recorded the purpose of the search as 'terrorism' and grounds for their intervention as 'carrying plackard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info'. There you go, then: an anti-Blair slogan on your T-shirt is grounds for suspicion of terrorism, even if you're 80 years old.
So does that mean that the devices to used encode MPEG video used to author DVDs will be illegal? Hollywood may have just fucked themselves.
No, no, no.
Hollywood, the MPAA members, the RIAA members, and other large corporate interests will be licenced to own and operate this technology. Nobody else will. That way, they can digitise their content and we can't use the analogue hole to copy it.
Better yet, we can't digitise our own content. Remember, a system in which anyone can set up and compete with the established companies is unfair and un-american and helps terrorists and it's called COMMUNISM. The American Way involves a government-backed monopoly or cartel controlling all the means of production. Remember how that was what the whole Cold War was all about?
HBO works that way. It's $11/month on top of what we pay for cable and for that there's about 10 feeds, 1 high def. The programs and movies run uncut and without commercial interruption.
Interesting. Is it just a coincidence that all the best American TV I've been seeing in the last couple of years has been branded HBO? They've been producing some really excellent material lately.
Perhaps it comes of the different business model. An ad-funded channel's customers are the advertisers, their products are viewers' eyeballs, and programming is just a means to bring the one to the other. A subscription-funded channel's customers are the viewers, and the programming is their product: is this then conducive to higher quality?
So...do you folks suggest that the ending be glossed over as well? After all, an entire planet of beings is destroyed, and surely you don't want the kids to see a genocide if you're going to pretend the homicide didn't happen. I don't want that kind of compromise.
George Lucas showed us all the complete destruction of a populated planet in 1977. Alderaan was full of innocents - it had nothing whatever to do with the Rebel Alliance - but it was destroyed nonetheless.
Were we traumatised? No. We don't see the faces of anyone on Alderaan, we don't see them dying, we see no pain for anybody at all except Leia's as she watches, and Obi-Wan's as he feels a great disturbance in the Force.
However, what if instead of showing the Death Star blowing away Alderaan, we'd seen Vader slapping Leia about the cell, trying to physically brutalise her into telling him the location of the Rebel base? Suppose we'd heard a THX-enhanced crunch as the Sith Lord's black-gloved metal fist smashed the Princess's pretty nose to splinters? THAT would have upset us. That would have earned Star Wars a pretty high rating.
One-on-one physical violence upsets people. The bloodless eradication of millions that we don't have to face does not. It's why Hitler switched from SS firing squads to gas chambers - it upset his troops less that way. Same here. Nobody will mind the destruction of the bugger homeworld, but they may well object to Ender's habit of barehanded manslaughter.
The betrayal of Ender's trust is a shocking revelation at the conclusion of the final battle and its genocide. The first read of the book, come on - admit it, this surprised most of us.
I'd half-suspected what was going on for a while, but was still shocked when it happened. Had sudden flashbacks to what I once did to a bunch of kzinti rip-offs with a cloaked Excalibur fighter and a temblor bomb, and felt enormously guilty about it:)
It's the shift of perspective that's shocking, especially to our generation. How many alien worlds have we all blown away? How great does it feel to cut right through all the defences, knock out the core and win the game? Amazing, right? But then suddenly you find it was real all along and you've just murdered billions...
As I remember, Ender did not want to kill bonzo. In fact, Ender didn't even know that he had.
He didn't intend to kill per se, he intended to hurt Bonzo sufficiently that he would never again be a threat. He intended to leave no possibility that Bonzo would go away, lick his wounds and come back for another go. So, he didn't actually intend murder, but he certainly intended to use far more force than was necessary merely for immediate self-defence.
Whether dead, incapacitated, or just terrified to ever go near Ender again, Bonzo would have been destroyed as a threat. That was Ender's goal in every conflict with such people.
If Ender's Game were to be made as an anime, would Ender turn out looking a lot like Ikari Shinji?
Shinji, we recall, has been manipulated by his parents, by the government, by the Marduk Institute and by NERV, all in the cause of a vast secret project. He attends a school full of kids who are in the same position as he; all of them have been similarly manipulated, all are on Marduk's list, all are candidates for Evangelion pilots. Shinji has great difficulty relating meaningfully to any of them. He fights, reluctantly, causes enormous damage through little or no fault of his own, hospitalises one classmate, kills another, and gets some severe psychological problems as a result. Finally, some extremely weird shit goes down and an entire species turns into yellow goo.
I'm quite sure that Shinji, Asuka and Rei would fit right in in Ender's world.
If Warner had their way, I would have to guess that they would like to see it cut out entirely, or have Ender not kill them. But I doubt that Orson Scott Card will let that happen. One of the reasons that Ender is ultimately chosen is that when he has to, he strikes without mercy and utterly destroys his opponent. There is no way to portray the character of Ender properly by having him pull a half assed beating on Bonzo, or that first bully, that lets them live.
They can't cut that without destroying the whole point of the story. Ender's a nice kid, very smart, and more or less wants to be left alone. But he's been manipulated from the day he was born by a government that wants to train him to personally command the extermination of an entire sentient species. You've got to show that not only is he being driven to react this way against threats, but that the authorities who are watching will never help him, and actually approve of his retaliation with lethal force.
If Ender just turns out to be surprisingly tough, but lets the bullies live... you've negated the character. Ender doesn't do mercy. If there's a serious threat to his safety, he destroys it totally by any means necessary. That's what they wanted. That's what they built.
2. How are they going to film the Battle Room scenes? It's a 3d fight, so there really isn't a good way of doing it. I think the best way would almost be a first person view directly from Ender, so the battle flows as he sees it, but this would lead to problems in the final battle.
That will be difficult. Probably CG. Everything else is these days... Someone else suggested that this film would work best as anime, which I can't help but think is perhaps the right idea.
3. The Computer Game at the end (i can't remember it's name). That is going to be an extremely difficult thing to replicate, and build tension with. The build up of hopelessness at the very end will be crucial (more so than in the book) and will be hard to pull of with blips of light.
Blips of light? An artefact of the time when the book was written. It's the end of 2005 now, and the story is supposedly even further in the future. I think Command School's budget can stretch to an Alienware box for the combat simulator, don't you? Cue lovingly rendered starships all over the shop, projected in semi-transparent holographic form all around Ender.
The important thing with the combat simulator is that (a) we should think, along with Ender, that it is a sim and that the final battle is the result of Mazer being grossly unfair, and that (b) the battle, like all the 'training' battles before it, should be visibly similar in the way it is fought to the earlier combats in the Battle Room.
4. Will they even cover Peter Wiggin? It will be hard to do that as well, especially his rise to power on the nets...
I never really liked that subplot. Taking over the world by blogging? Just didn't seem plausible, even for a couple of supergenius prodigies.
The part of the film I think will be most difficult, however, will be the Fantasy Game: the weird RPG they use as a psych test. How the devil do you do that and not look absurd? I'm thinking that making this as anime is looking like a better and better idea...
Well, I don't know, but I heard on irc last night that they aren't going to make it - they're dropping Apple support completely! I've been thinking maybe I should submit an article about it to/.?
I wonder how much different life would be today if the HMS Beagle had shipwrecked in the Galapagos and Origin of the Species had never been published.
KANSAS MODE: ON
Pretty much the same. Satan would have found someone else to publish his deceits. However, Darwin himself would probably have been rescued by a bloody great fish and become a holy prophet for the LORD, so we might not be in such an appalling moral state today.
Of course. It's pure maths, done for its own sake. You think these people care for the practical usefulness of their work?
I have never done anything "useful". No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. I have helped train mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind as myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as I have helped them to it, as useless as my own.
Aha 10 million digits may be easy to store, but deviding that number by other number lower than half that number to prove it is actually a prime number isn't really that easy.
When you're brute-forcing your way to a test for primality of n, you needn't go all the way to n / 2, only up to sqrt(n). If xy = n, and x > sqrt(n), then you should have found the factor y already.
I think there are also more efficient tests that can determine whether a number is prime to arbitrary probability without trying every possible divisor; not my field of expertise, though. Inquire of Google for isprime algorithms.
So I'm not being sarcastic here, my genuine questions is : why should I spend my free computing power on calculating prime numbers instead of research to cure cancer?
Because you like numbers and think big primes are cool.
Seriously.
This is pure mathematics, it's number theory. Don't expect practical applications; if they turn up, they're a nice bonus, but they're not why you do mathematics.
There may actually be a practical result of this research eventually; the number theory surrounding primes is closely related to the security of the RSA cipher that most of the internet's commerce relies on. It's conceivable that this kind of work might eventually lead to a breakthrough in cryptanalysis. But I wouldn't count on it.
Their computers can calculate a prime number with 10,000,000 digits, but they can't even serve a webpage?
Ah, but... a number of ten million digits? That has to take up ~ 10MB of disk space. And now the link's been posted to/., where every lunatic is now clicking on it and thinking that by some bizarre geek savant superpower they're going to somehow look at it and go 'yup, that's prime all right' or something...
Good luck with finding a date who appreciates your 4 arms.
Do you have any idea of the possibilities afforded by an extra pair of hands? Stroke here, pinch here, prod here and scratch here, all at once... She'll love you forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Your song sounds subversive. Your name has been added to the aviation watch list. Have a nice day, citizen.
Now, come on. Your story was plausible up to then, but you blew it. 20 minutes isn't even enough to open OpenOffice, never mind download and install it...
t3h n4ni?
Can't remember the last time I had to compile a kernel... oh, wait, I do. It was the last time I installed Gentoo. Slackware never required me to recompile a kernel, neither did SuSE, neither did Ubuntu or Mandriva.
And when I did compile kernels, I don't ever recall having to know a single bit of C. You pick from a menu what you want in the kernel, then compile it, then copy it to /boot. No programming on your part involved anywhere.
* ring ring. ring ring *
Ah yes, hello. Can I speak to my broker, please? Thank you. Hello. Yes, I'd like to buy as much stock as possible in Apple, please. Yes. And SuSE, too. Yes. Lots. I've reason to believe a rather large market might be opening up for them in the near future.
Oh, and unload that Microsoft stock, too. Yeah. Getting into a trade war with Brussels. Yeah. I don't know what they were thinking either. OK. Thanks. Bye now.
* click *
Another victim of the new tyranny, John Catt, was subjected to a stop-and-search by police, who recorded the purpose of the search as 'terrorism' and grounds for their intervention as 'carrying plackard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info'. There you go, then: an anti-Blair slogan on your T-shirt is grounds for suspicion of terrorism, even if you're 80 years old.
No, no, no.
Hollywood, the MPAA members, the RIAA members, and other large corporate interests will be licenced to own and operate this technology. Nobody else will. That way, they can digitise their content and we can't use the analogue hole to copy it.
Better yet, we can't digitise our own content. Remember, a system in which anyone can set up and compete with the established companies is unfair and un-american and helps terrorists and it's called COMMUNISM. The American Way involves a government-backed monopoly or cartel controlling all the means of production. Remember how that was what the whole Cold War was all about?
Interesting. Is it just a coincidence that all the best American TV I've been seeing in the last couple of years has been branded HBO? They've been producing some really excellent material lately.
Perhaps it comes of the different business model. An ad-funded channel's customers are the advertisers, their products are viewers' eyeballs, and programming is just a means to bring the one to the other. A subscription-funded channel's customers are the viewers, and the programming is their product: is this then conducive to higher quality?
George Lucas showed us all the complete destruction of a populated planet in 1977. Alderaan was full of innocents - it had nothing whatever to do with the Rebel Alliance - but it was destroyed nonetheless.
Were we traumatised? No. We don't see the faces of anyone on Alderaan, we don't see them dying, we see no pain for anybody at all except Leia's as she watches, and Obi-Wan's as he feels a great disturbance in the Force.
However, what if instead of showing the Death Star blowing away Alderaan, we'd seen Vader slapping Leia about the cell, trying to physically brutalise her into telling him the location of the Rebel base? Suppose we'd heard a THX-enhanced crunch as the Sith Lord's black-gloved metal fist smashed the Princess's pretty nose to splinters? THAT would have upset us. That would have earned Star Wars a pretty high rating.
One-on-one physical violence upsets people. The bloodless eradication of millions that we don't have to face does not. It's why Hitler switched from SS firing squads to gas chambers - it upset his troops less that way. Same here. Nobody will mind the destruction of the bugger homeworld, but they may well object to Ender's habit of barehanded manslaughter.
Um. Pretty much everyone, circa 1999... I never did quite catch 'em all.
I'd half-suspected what was going on for a while, but was still shocked when it happened. Had sudden flashbacks to what I once did to a bunch of kzinti rip-offs with a cloaked Excalibur fighter and a temblor bomb, and felt enormously guilty about it :)
It's the shift of perspective that's shocking, especially to our generation. How many alien worlds have we all blown away? How great does it feel to cut right through all the defences, knock out the core and win the game? Amazing, right? But then suddenly you find it was real all along and you've just murdered billions...
He didn't intend to kill per se, he intended to hurt Bonzo sufficiently that he would never again be a threat. He intended to leave no possibility that Bonzo would go away, lick his wounds and come back for another go. So, he didn't actually intend murder, but he certainly intended to use far more force than was necessary merely for immediate self-defence.
Whether dead, incapacitated, or just terrified to ever go near Ender again, Bonzo would have been destroyed as a threat. That was Ender's goal in every conflict with such people.
... Mods, please look up the story of Carl Sagan, the Butthead Astronomer, and get back to us. Thanks.
Shinji, we recall, has been manipulated by his parents, by the government, by the Marduk Institute and by NERV, all in the cause of a vast secret project. He attends a school full of kids who are in the same position as he; all of them have been similarly manipulated, all are on Marduk's list, all are candidates for Evangelion pilots. Shinji has great difficulty relating meaningfully to any of them. He fights, reluctantly, causes enormous damage through little or no fault of his own, hospitalises one classmate, kills another, and gets some severe psychological problems as a result. Finally, some extremely weird shit goes down and an entire species turns into yellow goo.
I'm quite sure that Shinji, Asuka and Rei would fit right in in Ender's world.
They can't cut that without destroying the whole point of the story. Ender's a nice kid, very smart, and more or less wants to be left alone. But he's been manipulated from the day he was born by a government that wants to train him to personally command the extermination of an entire sentient species. You've got to show that not only is he being driven to react this way against threats, but that the authorities who are watching will never help him, and actually approve of his retaliation with lethal force.
If Ender just turns out to be surprisingly tough, but lets the bullies live... you've negated the character. Ender doesn't do mercy. If there's a serious threat to his safety, he destroys it totally by any means necessary. That's what they wanted. That's what they built.
That will be difficult. Probably CG. Everything else is these days... Someone else suggested that this film would work best as anime, which I can't help but think is perhaps the right idea.
3. The Computer Game at the end (i can't remember it's name). That is going to be an extremely difficult thing to replicate, and build tension with. The build up of hopelessness at the very end will be crucial (more so than in the book) and will be hard to pull of with blips of light.
Blips of light? An artefact of the time when the book was written. It's the end of 2005 now, and the story is supposedly even further in the future. I think Command School's budget can stretch to an Alienware box for the combat simulator, don't you? Cue lovingly rendered starships all over the shop, projected in semi-transparent holographic form all around Ender.
The important thing with the combat simulator is that (a) we should think, along with Ender, that it is a sim and that the final battle is the result of Mazer being grossly unfair, and that (b) the battle, like all the 'training' battles before it, should be visibly similar in the way it is fought to the earlier combats in the Battle Room.
4. Will they even cover Peter Wiggin? It will be hard to do that as well, especially his rise to power on the nets...
I never really liked that subplot. Taking over the world by blogging? Just didn't seem plausible, even for a couple of supergenius prodigies.
The part of the film I think will be most difficult, however, will be the Fantasy Game: the weird RPG they use as a psych test. How the devil do you do that and not look absurd? I'm thinking that making this as anime is looking like a better and better idea...
Well, I don't know, but I heard on irc last night that they aren't going to make it - they're dropping Apple support completely! I've been thinking maybe I should submit an article about it to /.?
KANSAS MODE: ON
Pretty much the same. Satan would have found someone else to publish his deceits. However, Darwin himself would probably have been rescued by a bloody great fish and become a holy prophet for the LORD, so we might not be in such an appalling moral state today.
Of course. It's pure maths, done for its own sake. You think these people care for the practical usefulness of their work?
I have never done anything "useful". No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. I have helped train mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind as myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as I have helped them to it, as useless as my own.
-- G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
When you're brute-forcing your way to a test for primality of n, you needn't go all the way to n / 2, only up to sqrt(n). If xy = n, and x > sqrt(n), then you should have found the factor y already.
I think there are also more efficient tests that can determine whether a number is prime to arbitrary probability without trying every possible divisor; not my field of expertise, though. Inquire of Google for isprime algorithms.
Because you like numbers and think big primes are cool.
Seriously.
This is pure mathematics, it's number theory. Don't expect practical applications; if they turn up, they're a nice bonus, but they're not why you do mathematics.
There may actually be a practical result of this research eventually; the number theory surrounding primes is closely related to the security of the RSA cipher that most of the internet's commerce relies on. It's conceivable that this kind of work might eventually lead to a breakthrough in cryptanalysis. But I wouldn't count on it.
42 million? How unimaginative. Personally, I'd like to see a huge prime with a prime number of digits...
Ah, but... a number of ten million digits? That has to take up ~ 10MB of disk space. And now the link's been posted to /., where every lunatic is now clicking on it and thinking that by some bizarre geek savant superpower they're going to somehow look at it and go 'yup, that's prime all right' or something...
No wonder the server's a smoking crater now :)
You want to store ghosts on computer chips? Hmm. Things could get really very interesting.
Aeria gloris, aeria gloris... :)
Couldn't everything?
Do you have any idea of the possibilities afforded by an extra pair of hands? Stroke here, pinch here, prod here and scratch here, all at once... She'll love you forever.