i think actually it's performance compared to tbirds/durons... not other XP's... if it was actually comparing to other XP's it would be a bit of a paradox..
Video phones exist and are actually reasonably common, especially in business circumstances. The reason most home users don't see them though is that for the most part the quality is sorely lacking, and they're often way too expensive...
don't get me wrong, i'm all for prereleasing albums on the internet, but, looking from a completely neutral standpoint, can the success of the album be attributed to it being released on the internet? How many of the 55,573 copies were purchased by people who had heard about the album on slashdot and wanted to try to 'help the cause.' If another band were to release an album on the internet first, but didn't get mainstream (as mainstream as slashdot can be, at least) attention, would it have as much success?
I hope the military remembers to disable quicksave/load on all these games... it wouldn't do to confuse a hoard of fresh recruits into thinking that the military had invented some sort of real-life undo button! Games are a lot harder when you have to go through the entire thing without being hit...
I'm not 100% certain about this, but I'm pretty sure that there is an 'exception' where an 18 year old can have relations with a 17 year old and it's not illegal, but anything below 17 is illegal for that 18 year old, and for a 19 year old the exception doesnt exist anymore
If anyone knows anything about this, please let me know.. I don't want to go spreading inaccurate information...
A compression algorithm makes a smaller number of bytes "equal" to a larger number of bytes.
However, there are less smaller strings of bytes then there are larger strings of bytes.
Consequently, Not all larger strings of bytes can be represented by smaller strings of bytes.
Therefore, while it is possible to reduce MANY larger strings of bytes into extremely small strings of bytes (ie most data can compress very well), there are, logically and obviously, strings of bytes that cannot[in the realm of any given compression algorithm] which simply cannot ever be represented with a unique smaller series of bytes (some data compresses like crap.. ie already compressed data)..
simple concept, i hope, it just takes a little bit of writing to explain
the result of this is, then, exactly what you say: You can never get get a constant compression factor if you want it lossless!
I hope this helps clear up any compression mysteries...
i agree, there are plenty of critical problems that we meed to work on, and which could benifit from significant quantities of money... cancer research, AIDS research, developing better ways of dealing with the leftovers of nuclear power, world hunger, world debt, alternative energy sources, etc etc etc.
a clean billion given to ANY of these issues would go a long way towards helping them..
but.. the thing is.... where is the money? Surely there is plenty of money in the United States and in other countries to help fund these programs, but with a few exceptions you never GET these big cash outlays...
Why is it that humanity can't get it through its collective skull that if you help people, everyone benifits? Everyone is talking about the fact that pouring money into asteroid searches at this point in technology is not worth it (a sentiment i heartily agree with), but the response 'the money can do better in other places', while true, is also distressingly idealistic; the money is there, but it isnt GOING to any of the issues...
depressing, isn't it?
and of course, if a giant rock *did* wipe out a country, the world economy would probably collapse anyway so there wouldn't BE any money left to develop a new defense system.
if you've read the book, then yes, i suppose it could be seen as a parody because it twists the book so far. but, to someone who hasn't read the book (those who i was appealing to in my first post), they might never realize this, and they'd miss out on the original (and far better) material.
preemptive strike
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 3, Informative
hmmm.. the comparison with starship troopers is fraught with peril... so... i'll launch a pre-emptive strike against possible lameness:
Do NOT judge Starship Troopers the book by Starship Troopers the movie! They are almost completely different from each other! The movie takes about 10 pages from the book and twists them almost to breaking. The result is that a movie that lost all of the really INTERESTING stuff that the book had; from political debate, full-body battle armor, to vicious bipedal aliens..
so yeah.. this goes out to anyone who decides to flame based on what they thought of starship troopers the movie.
(hmm.. i sense an offtopic coming. but i felt it was necessary to say this in order to protect two good books from a movie butchery)
what happens when one of the hdd's crashes? "woops.. half my data is gone and something in the machine is making a funny noise.."... Unless you integrate RAID or something similar. But then you have to explain to the user that even though they installed two hard drives, they only increase their space by the capacity of one of the drives. I cannot forsee very many money-conscious individuals being happy about this arragement. Plus, could you seriously expect a user who can't understand or comprehend the 'drive letter' interface to understand about hard drive crashes and the need to redundantly backup their data?
The BBC made a television series of the HHGTTG which featured all the flashbacks, history lessons, excerpts from the guide, etc... It wasn't exactly the same as the book, and it wasn't even exactly the same as the radio version that the BBC made, but it was great.. It went to about halfway through Restaurant at the End of the Universe.. It was far too long to ever make into a "feature length" movie though.
doesn't mean that thye're all going to disappear overnight...
I'm sure there will be plenty of them leftover (hp is continuing support for another 5 years anyway, according to the article) so the work that's gone into porting things to it surely hasn't gone to waste.
is combine this with that robot that digests sugars [slashdot.org], and wire the 'output' up to the..ahem... rear.., program it to find the nearest corner when the need arises, and *poof* we have an AIBO that's even more realistic!
house training would simply be a matter of punting it into the proper corner when it starts getting that funny walk
hmm that would be a good idea, but you'd have to have EXTREMELY high-accuracy position tracking, otherwise the minor errors would quickly add up and you'd be left with a 3d model that looked absolutely nothing at all like the piece of clay. This is the same as when a beginner writes a 3d program which uses the standard SIN/COS rotation formula on the verticies that have already been rotated; everything looks ok to begin with, but soon the model loses all touch.
so, the 3d scanning method, or the completely virtual clay methods are the only ones that are at all feasable unless the detection accuracy of the gloves is insanely high.
I once bought a device that was encased in a solid piece of aluminium, for "strength"... I had it sitting on a pillow on my bed, and i accidentally dropped a book (a reasonably light one) on it, and BAM- huge dent in the aluminium, and it doesn't close properly now. How durable is this device going to be? How resistant to impact will it be?
I wouldn't want to have one, and then have the lcd shatter or the casing bend because i dropped it by accident....41" thick certainly can't leave much room for padding
Is anyone aware of the fact that more British nationals died in the WTC than have in most, if not all, the IRA bombings in London (or the rest of the UK), ever?
Tons of non-americans died in the WTC, a fact that i haven't heard mentioned on the news at all..
Broken windows, bits of plane and building embedded in walls, cracked paint, broken light bulbs, dented bits.. all of that counts as damage, structural or otherwise.. it might be trivial, but it's still damage and it'll still need to be fixed at some point..
stuff like that happens all the time... Within about fifty miles of where i used to live there was a rocket fuel manufacturing plant (among other things...). Every so often you'd hear about how all of a sudden all the workers in one of the buildings would collectively go "OH SH!T" and evacuate the building in a high speed run, and then the whole building would just sorta get vaporized as a reaction went bad.. When you're playing with fertilzer and other explosives, you're bound to have a few accidents from time to time.. The company would just launch a little inquiry to find out what happened, and then they'd rebuild the building and continue working with the other ones... simple... quiet...
It's more than that now... at least 6 people in california, and more in other places have been killed for 'looking' arabic..
At an elementary school in eastern us a group of 5 year olds beat the living crap out of another group of 5 year olds who happened to be of Muslim descent... No one at all has heard about it on the media (because it makes americans look bad), but one of my professors is friends with one of the teachers at that school, so the news travelled through them..
on the news yesterday i heard one of the reporters say "Americans are becoming more friendly." I've never heard more bullsh!t shoved into a smaller sentence before (with the exception of maybe nixon's famous comment)
America isn't the lovey-dovey united states of friendship and peace that the media portrays it as...
the courts have CIRCUMVENTED the jurisdiction requirements of the law which PREVENT ACCESS to the 'CRIMINAL' Material (who happen to be Free), Breaking the DMCA in order to Combat another break of the DMCA!!!!
so... what... security by obscurity? I think we ALL know how well THAT works.
just hiding the source code from people won't stop anything. It might delay the inevitable, but it won't stop anybody from producing another one; it's been done once, it can, nay, WILL be done again.
*Especially* because people will know that it's
possible..
Slashdot Mirror
i think actually it's performance compared to tbirds/durons ... not other XP's... if it was actually comparing to other XP's it would be a bit of a paradox ..
Video phones exist and are actually reasonably common, especially in business circumstances. The reason most home users don't see them though is that for the most part the quality is sorely lacking, and they're often way too expensive...
a quick search on google netted me this:
a home videophone...
another home video phone...
and, for what appears to be the prevailing standard: h.232
molecular manufacturing is a bit of a different story, but:
a group devoted to molecular manufacturing
some interesting stuff on it
and, last but not least:
IBM does some cool stuff sometimes
hope this helps dispel your mistrust of tech previews (Although i'll admit that at least a grain or two of salt is warranted in many occasions)
wait wait wait .. this is slashdot... what's this "Friend" thing to which you refer? I thought we were all reclusive nerds here ...
oh well.. theres nothing like a bad joke to cheer you up in the morning...
don't get me wrong, i'm all for prereleasing albums on the internet, but, looking from a completely neutral standpoint, can the success of the album be attributed to it being released on the internet? How many of the 55,573 copies were purchased by people who had heard about the album on slashdot and wanted to try to 'help the cause.' If another band were to release an album on the internet first, but didn't get mainstream (as mainstream as slashdot can be, at least) attention, would it have as much success?
...
just an opposing viewpoint to think about
I hope the military remembers to disable quicksave/load on all these games ... it wouldn't do to confuse a hoard of fresh recruits into thinking that the military had invented some sort of real-life undo button! Games are a lot harder when you have to go through the entire thing without being hit...
:)
I'm not 100% certain about this, but I'm pretty sure that there is an 'exception' where an 18 year old can have relations with a 17 year old and it's not illegal, but anything below 17 is illegal for that 18 year old, and for a 19 year old the exception doesnt exist anymore
.. I don't want to go spreading inaccurate information...
If anyone knows anything about this, please let me know
A simple way of thinking about it is this:
A compression algorithm makes a smaller number of bytes "equal" to a larger number of bytes.
However, there are less smaller strings of bytes then there are larger strings of bytes.
Consequently, Not all larger strings of bytes can be represented by smaller strings of bytes.
Therefore, while it is possible to reduce MANY larger strings of bytes into extremely small strings of bytes (ie most data can compress very well), there are, logically and obviously, strings of bytes that cannot[in the realm of any given compression algorithm] which simply cannot ever be represented with a unique smaller series of bytes (some data compresses like crap.. ie already compressed data)..
simple concept, i hope, it just takes a little bit of writing to explain
the result of this is, then, exactly what you say: You can never get get a constant compression factor if you want it lossless!
I hope this helps clear up any compression mysteries...
i agree, there are plenty of critical problems that we meed to work on, and which could benifit from significant quantities of money... cancer research, AIDS research, developing better ways of dealing with the leftovers of nuclear power, world hunger, world debt, alternative energy sources, etc etc etc.
... where is the money? Surely there is plenty of money in the United States and in other countries to help fund these programs, but with a few exceptions you never GET these big cash outlays...
a clean billion given to ANY of these issues would go a long way towards helping them..
but.. the thing is.
Why is it that humanity can't get it through its collective skull that if you help people, everyone benifits? Everyone is talking about the fact that pouring money into asteroid searches at this point in technology is not worth it (a sentiment i heartily agree with), but the response 'the money can do better in other places', while true, is also distressingly idealistic; the money is there, but it isnt GOING to any of the issues...
depressing, isn't it?
and of course, if a giant rock *did* wipe out a country, the world economy would probably collapse anyway so there wouldn't BE any money left to develop a new defense system.
if you've read the book, then yes, i suppose it could be seen as a parody because it twists the book so far. but, to someone who hasn't read the book (those who i was appealing to in my first post), they might never realize this, and they'd miss out on the original (and far better) material.
hmmm.. the comparison with starship troopers is fraught with peril... so... i'll launch a pre-emptive strike against possible lameness:
Do NOT judge Starship Troopers the book by Starship Troopers the movie! They are almost completely different from each other! The movie takes about 10 pages from the book and twists them almost to breaking. The result is that a movie that lost all of the really INTERESTING stuff that the book had; from political debate, full-body battle armor, to vicious bipedal aliens..
so yeah.. this goes out to anyone who decides to flame based on what they thought of starship troopers the movie.
(hmm.. i sense an offtopic coming. but i felt it was necessary to say this in order to protect two good books from a movie butchery)
what happens when one of the hdd's crashes? "woops.. half my data is gone and something in the machine is making a funny noise.."... Unless you integrate RAID or something similar. But then you have to explain to the user that even though they installed two hard drives, they only increase their space by the capacity of one of the drives. I cannot forsee very many money-conscious individuals being happy about this arragement. Plus, could you seriously expect a user who can't understand or comprehend the 'drive letter' interface to understand about hard drive crashes and the need to redundantly backup their data?
The BBC made a television series of the HHGTTG which featured all the flashbacks, history lessons, excerpts from the guide, etc... It wasn't exactly the same as the book, and it wasn't even exactly the same as the radio version that the BBC made, but it was great.. It went to about halfway through Restaurant at the End of the Universe.. It was far too long to ever make into a "feature length" movie though.
doesn't mean that thye're all going to disappear overnight ...
I'm sure there will be plenty of them leftover (hp is continuing support for another 5 years anyway, according to the article) so the work that's gone into porting things to it surely hasn't gone to waste.
oh well.....
is combine this with that robot that digests sugars [slashdot.org], and wire the 'output' up to the..ahem... rear.., program it to find the nearest corner when the need arises, and *poof* we have an AIBO that's even more realistic!
house training would simply be a matter of punting it into the proper corner when it starts getting that funny walk
hmm that would be a good idea, but you'd have to have EXTREMELY high-accuracy position tracking, otherwise the minor errors would quickly add up and you'd be left with a 3d model that looked absolutely nothing at all like the piece of clay. This is the same as when a beginner writes a 3d program which uses the standard SIN/COS rotation formula on the verticies that have already been rotated; everything looks ok to begin with, but soon the model loses all touch.
so, the 3d scanning method, or the completely virtual clay methods are the only ones that are at all feasable unless the detection accuracy of the gloves is insanely high.
one day....
if i tried to register i-hate-the.us would i have mailbombs sent to me by hoards of kneejerk patriots who decided that its bad to speak your mind?
i wouldn't be surprised...It's a perfectly legitimate statement, but when did that ever stop anyone?
I once bought a device that was encased in a solid piece of aluminium, for "strength"... I had it sitting on a pillow on my bed, and i accidentally dropped a book (a reasonably light one) on it, and BAM- huge dent in the aluminium, and it doesn't close properly now. How durable is this device going to be? How resistant to impact will it be?
... .41" thick certainly can't leave much room for padding
I wouldn't want to have one, and then have the lcd shatter or the casing bend because i dropped it by accident
er...
coolness is just a lack of heat; there is no "cool" energy; just a lesser amount of heat energy..
soo... it would transfer heat away from the inside, thus cooling the interior..
...except that Data doesn't use contractions...
:) :)
:)
Is anyone aware of the fact that more British nationals died in the WTC than have in most, if not all, the IRA bombings in London (or the rest of the UK), ever?
Tons of non-americans died in the WTC, a fact that i haven't heard mentioned on the news at all..
Broken windows, bits of plane and building embedded in walls, cracked paint, broken light bulbs, dented bits.. all of that counts as damage, structural or otherwise.. it might be trivial, but it's still damage and it'll still need to be fixed at some point..
stuff like that happens all the time... Within about fifty miles of where i used to live there was a rocket fuel manufacturing plant (among other things...). Every so often you'd hear about how all of a sudden all the workers in one of the buildings would collectively go "OH SH!T" and evacuate the building in a high speed run, and then the whole building would just sorta get vaporized as a reaction went bad.. When you're playing with fertilzer and other explosives, you're bound to have a few accidents from time to time.. The company would just launch a little inquiry to find out what happened, and then they'd rebuild the building and continue working with the other ones... simple ... quiet...
It's more than that now... at least 6 people in california, and more in other places have been killed for 'looking' arabic..
At an elementary school in eastern us a group of 5 year olds beat the living crap out of another group of 5 year olds who happened to be of Muslim descent... No one at all has heard about it on the media (because it makes americans look bad), but one of my professors is friends with one of the teachers at that school, so the news travelled through them..
on the news yesterday i heard one of the reporters say "Americans are becoming more friendly." I've never heard more bullsh!t shoved into a smaller sentence before (with the exception of maybe nixon's famous comment)
America isn't the lovey-dovey united states of friendship and peace that the media portrays it as...
!!!GASP!!!
we have a DMCA violation here!!!
the courts have CIRCUMVENTED the jurisdiction requirements of the law which PREVENT ACCESS to the 'CRIMINAL' Material (who happen to be Free), Breaking the DMCA in order to Combat another break of the DMCA!!!!
Whatever shall be done!!!?!
so... what... security by obscurity? I think we ALL know how well THAT works.
just hiding the source code from people won't stop anything. It might delay the inevitable, but it won't stop anybody from producing another one; it's been done once, it can, nay, WILL be done again.
*Especially* because people will know that it's
possible..