That's over 11 million a year. That's still pretty expensive for an operation which needs an office, computers, internet access and people; no special equipment or extraordinary expenses (sure, airfare costs, but not that much). If I do it real ballpark expensive, it's a million for realestate; a million, lets say two, for equipment; about the same combined for personel (2.5m). That's 5 million combined, so all you need now is your travel, bribe and other miscelanious expenses. That's 6 million...I know people who could start very succesfull companies from a sixth of that.
Sure, they're.bomb, but when the bubble burst they must've come across the notion of making a company profiatble after three years, or at the most 5?
Micropayments are most definitely usefull in the wired world. It makes me wonder why VISA or Mastercard don't start up an online service...either only accesible to cardholders (bad idea, but at least it gives a certain guaranteed payment) or to subscribers through their own creditcard, with a $5 yearly cost for using the service.
There's certainly a market for it for the credible company who makes it there first.
You never needed much highly enriched plutonium (or any other isotope) to make a big bang; you still get comperable results no matter what the yield when you have an arial detonation.
"expect that they would all follow the trajectory of the original object, though modified slightly due to the explosion."
There's a saying, goes: 'close only counts in horseshoes and thermonuclear weapons'. I think slight definitely should not be used in a sentence concerning nukes.
"Also, this doesn't need to be an exact science really. if it misses us by 1000 miles, or a million miles it won't make a huge difference, as long as it misses"
It will make a huge difference if we miss by 1000 miles. And somehow I would still like to view rocketscience as an exact science.
"Also, we could withstand the impact of a dozen or so Tunguska sized impacts, they would suck, no doubt, but if we could just get the vast majority of the mass of the object to miss us it would save lots of lives."
If a dozen Tunguska's did hit the earth (and actually hit it, as in impacted) it's not the blast so much we might worry about...the resulting earthquakes (from a couple of multiple impacts in a short time frame) would absolutely destabalise the earth's crust.
"Though I still would agree with the article, it would be nice, if we had enough warning, to use a non-nuclear approch. I'm thinking more of the short term warning."
Yeah...it's a comforting thought we sometimes still spot asteroids which are near-earth-missers...days after they passed by.
So we now know that putting a nuke deep in the ground pulverises a huge elypsoidal volume. The ground is pulverised, then most of it falls back due to gravity.
So when you try this trick on an asteroid, you stop having one big thing hurtling to earth (that blast is going to pulverise the asteroid, gravity or no), and create lots of smaller things, hurtling towards the earth. I'll even put the mass of those smaller things at one thirds of the object (seeing as that blast will have most definitely 'adjusted' the velocity of quite a few of those smaller bits); that's still a lot of smaller bits. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this:)
Yup: lots of small bits of asteroid still flying towards the earth. And I have an idea that some will make it through...by which time you'll of been think about how life was so much simpler when you where dealing with changing the course of just one large object.
That being said, it's still pretty sad that at the moment we sometimes discover near-earth hits by asteroids and meteorites...days after they happen. So I guess that a six month long preparation time doesn't really matter.
BMI Europe (Bertelsman I believe) has just announced that ALL it's cd's will be copyprotected from now on. Search Slashdot for the article, I'm too lazy:)
Unlikely, if not an impossible suggestion. To create sound, something allways has to fibrate (even if you use some kind of hypothetical electromagnetic wave to create energy focussed enough to compress and widen the air density in a travceling waveform). To get something to vibrate, you'll need current. No matter what DRM type you use, someone can ALLWAYS tap the wire before it reaches the actual vibrating system; maybe even at the system itself.
Actually, the same case can be made for monitors: there's allways the termination point of the computing system to the actual display mechanism. Even if somehow the DRM is built into the monitor, there's always that connection point to 'listen in' on.
Jesus, bunch of wakers! Didn't you even RTFArticle!? It said this had been known for weeks, and had been put up on some sites already. So wtf are you idiots on about whith your 'since november, oh my god it could have just been posted today!'? Read the article, or even just the other posts, and you'd know what timespan we're talking about. Fsckin' idiots. Only slam someone when you know they're wrong.
BTW, if 'they' are modded down by the time you read this, check the replies to parent post.
Or try this: a totally GNU/GPL PC-to-PC voice program. Compression and cryptography (if&when needed), answering system, party-lines (multiple people on channel), photoID (if&when again):
http://www.speakfreely.org/
Looks neat, doesn't it:)
Re:Does not work like that
on
Fun With Wine
·
· Score: 2
Carefull...they pretty much did that with windows 3.11-->win95. Plus their last statement about security (we'll break your programs to fix our problem) gives 'em carte blanche.
Re:Believe it or not...
on
Fun With Wine
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As Max Planck once said: basic research is when I don't know what I'm doing.
Three engineer are in a car which breaks down, smoke streaming out of the front. They all get out, look at it and start discussing the problem.
The mechanical engineer says: "it's the engine, we'll have to look at that!"
The electrical engineer says: "No, no, no; it's the wiring! Either that or the sparkplugs!"
The MSCE chimes in: "What's the problem? We'll just get back in, close all the windows, restart the engine and we'll be off again!".
And then there's the ancient art of maximizing efficiency:
We have all been to those meetings where someone wants over 100%. How about achieving 103%? Here's a little math that might prove helpful. What makes life 100%?
If: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Your absolutely right in the reference, but calling "referring the the UI as an abstraction" an interesting idea is kinda...um....well, the thing is, it's a bit of a DUH!
I'll put it to you like this: not only is it self evident that the UI is an abstraction (I mean, come on...a file is an abstraction of 1's and 0's) and something that was known since XEROX-PARC worked out the desktop metaphor, but it's not yet abstract enough. The UI as it is is nothing more than an inefficient way of working with files. The proof of this is that the current UI is incapable of being used in a human way. The UI must be further abstracted (in other words: must have more definitions, functions and capabilities of being operated on tagged onto it) in order for it to be used in the rudimentary way of human interaction as in a "Computer, what's next?" question making the computer say, based on your schedule and the task you're doing at the moment, either "go to this meeting" or "you can code for 10 more minutes before you have to get ready to leave".
I know I've kinda messed up the meaning ('s late, too much wine, bleh), but I hope you get what I mean...Neal Stephenson, while being a great writer, isn't spot on in "In the Beginning was the Command Line"..."Snow Crash" works better in the metaphor needed.
Now this is absolutely true...and the cool thing is, the analogy between (mechanical) engineering and software holds true. In a mechanical system, you NEVER, I repeat NEVER get an absolute sdescription; a good engineer knows to what level he can simplify (ie detail the mechanical efficiency, do some thermal calculations, then leave out the air friction because the effect is minimal and can be left out [in this case...in another situation it could well be the ayor factor] without dramatically changing the final strenght/elasticity calculations).
A slightly less proficient engineer will calculate the system, together with the next layer of the system (ie he will calculate the air friction), then discard it [or incorporate since he did the work anyway] because he found out the effect is not significant.
It seems the same thing goes with software development; you abstract to the propper level...but you need to know what level you can safely stop at.
So explain to me how those people on the Manhatten project died? They where working with plutonium, too. Also, why in hell's bells would you then need to handle your plutonium remotely (as in it's in another room while you handle it via a remote robot interface) when building your own nuclear basement (I'm referring to the articles in Scientific American and other publications which went over the steps neccessary to build your own nuke)?
As an aside: when modelin, NEVER create anything in the 3d view...it'll never end up in the right spot and it will never be the right size. Always create in the orthogonal side/top views. Preferably adjust there too, but doing that in the 3d view isn't that much of a sin.
This might well be true, but it's surpassed by SoftImage's character animation routines. There's a reason the big boys use multiple packages; when they can afford it, it's Maya for modeling, SoftImage for animation, Houdini for the particle effects, Renderman for rending and Shake or Combustion for compositing.
You should have a look at IronCAD. Very easy to use (their drag and drop part system is so easy to use it puts other CAD programs to shame), quite powerfull, excelent 2d working environment too (unusually intuitive snaps). Native 3d working environment which converts seamlessly to 2d construction schematics. Oh, I almost forgot the great piping system they've got going. And the part scaling is great aswell.
I don't work for IronCAD, but after having had to use AutoCAD and pro/E for my studies as a mechanical engineer, using IronCAD is bliss. Check it out.
True...but the cool thing is when that happens, we just figure out what does correlate:) For relativistc speeds, Einstein provided the groundwork...and now the race is on to provide that for the quantum world (and much work has been done already). Next step will be to combine the two...and then what's left? We'll have described all of (easily observed) reality.
No doubt we'll find something else after that which doesn't fit (more dimensions, multiple universes, the place lost socks go to, whatever) but we'll create new models which approximate reality to a finer and finer degree, until finer approximation gives no real benefit and/or understanding (or until we need a model the size of the universe [scale 1:1] to understand the universe:) ).
But here's the rub: using a spectrometer does give you objectivity and fuzzy logic!
The frequency lines it shows are the same every time they're displayed. The only problem is defining a colour...but you do that the way these things go: if the mayority say that that colour is black...then screw the people who say it's white, it's black! And from that day forth, that combination of lines in the spectrum will be known as black. It's repeatable and objectively defineable.
Sure, this kind of thing doesn't work for everything; but the thing about hard science is that much more often than not, one can use machine detected (and thus objective and defineable) output. And this works even when something is put in terms of fuzzy logic; if a certain outcome is 0.7, if it doesn't change it will be 0.7 when you let your machine observe it again. Surrounding culture might have a different name for 0.7 by then, but it's 0.7 nonetheless.
As I said, this aproach can't be used for all cases. Beauty is always subjective, as it can't be measured (somewould like to differ, but here the litmus test is that when re-measuring, the outcome is different because the criteria have changed). But in science, there is most always some objective datum which can be verified.
Slashdot Mirror
That's over 11 million a year. That's still pretty expensive for an operation which needs an office, computers, internet access and people; no special equipment or extraordinary expenses (sure, airfare costs, but not that much). If I do it real ballpark expensive, it's a million for realestate; a million, lets say two, for equipment; about the same combined for personel (2.5m). That's 5 million combined, so all you need now is your travel, bribe and other miscelanious expenses. That's 6 million...I know people who could start very succesfull companies from a sixth of that.
.bomb, but when the bubble burst they must've come across the notion of making a company profiatble after three years, or at the most 5?
Sure, they're
Micropayments are most definitely usefull in the wired world. It makes me wonder why VISA or Mastercard don't start up an online service...either only accesible to cardholders (bad idea, but at least it gives a certain guaranteed payment) or to subscribers through their own creditcard, with a $5 yearly cost for using the service.
There's certainly a market for it for the credible company who makes it there first.
You never needed much highly enriched plutonium (or any other isotope) to make a big bang; you still get comperable results no matter what the yield when you have an arial detonation.
"expect that they would all follow the trajectory of the original object, though modified slightly due to the explosion."
There's a saying, goes: 'close only counts in horseshoes and thermonuclear weapons'. I think slight definitely should not be used in a sentence concerning nukes.
"Also, this doesn't need to be an exact science really. if it misses us by 1000 miles, or a million miles it won't make a huge difference, as long as it misses"
It will make a huge difference if we miss by 1000 miles. And somehow I would still like to view rocketscience as an exact science.
"Also, we could withstand the impact of a dozen or so Tunguska sized impacts, they would suck, no doubt, but if we could just get the vast majority of the mass of the object to miss us it would save lots of lives."
If a dozen Tunguska's did hit the earth (and actually hit it, as in impacted) it's not the blast so much we might worry about...the resulting earthquakes (from a couple of multiple impacts in a short time frame) would absolutely destabalise the earth's crust.
"Though I still would agree with the article, it would be nice, if we had enough warning, to use a non-nuclear approch. I'm thinking more of the short term warning."
Yeah...it's a comforting thought we sometimes still spot asteroids which are near-earth-missers...days after they passed by.
So we now know that putting a nuke deep in the ground pulverises a huge elypsoidal volume. The ground is pulverised, then most of it falls back due to gravity.
:)
So when you try this trick on an asteroid, you stop having one big thing hurtling to earth (that blast is going to pulverise the asteroid, gravity or no), and create lots of smaller things, hurtling towards the earth. I'll even put the mass of those smaller things at one thirds of the object (seeing as that blast will have most definitely 'adjusted' the velocity of quite a few of those smaller bits); that's still a lot of smaller bits. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this
Yup: lots of small bits of asteroid still flying towards the earth. And I have an idea that some will make it through...by which time you'll of been think about how life was so much simpler when you where dealing with changing the course of just one large object.
That being said, it's still pretty sad that at the moment we sometimes discover near-earth hits by asteroids and meteorites...days after they happen.
So I guess that a six month long preparation time doesn't really matter.
BMI Europe (Bertelsman I believe) has just announced that ALL it's cd's will be copyprotected from now on. Search Slashdot for the article, I'm too lazy :)
Unlikely, if not an impossible suggestion. To create sound, something allways has to fibrate (even if you use some kind of hypothetical electromagnetic wave to create energy focussed enough to compress and widen the air density in a travceling waveform). To get something to vibrate, you'll need current. No matter what DRM type you use, someone can ALLWAYS tap the wire before it reaches the actual vibrating system; maybe even at the system itself.
Actually, the same case can be made for monitors: there's allways the termination point of the computing system to the actual display mechanism. Even if somehow the DRM is built into the monitor, there's always that connection point to 'listen in' on.
No, he said "mmmmm, Austin Martin". That it's a british car is just an added bonus.
Jesus, bunch of wakers! Didn't you even RTFArticle!? It said this had been known for weeks, and had been put up on some sites already. So wtf are you idiots on about whith your 'since november, oh my god it could have just been posted today!'? Read the article, or even just the other posts, and you'd know what timespan we're talking about. Fsckin' idiots. Only slam someone when you know they're wrong.
BTW, if 'they' are modded down by the time you read this, check the replies to parent post.
Or try this: a totally GNU/GPL PC-to-PC voice program. Compression and cryptography (if&when needed), answering system, party-lines (multiple people on channel), photoID (if&when again):
:)
http://www.speakfreely.org/
Looks neat, doesn't it
Carefull...they pretty much did that with windows 3.11-->win95. Plus their last statement about security (we'll break your programs to fix our problem) gives 'em carte blanche.
As Max Planck once said: basic research is when I don't know what I'm doing.
Three engineer are in a car which breaks down, smoke streaming out of the front. They all get out, look at it and start discussing the problem.
The mechanical engineer says: "it's the engine, we'll have to look at that!"
The electrical engineer says: "No, no, no; it's the wiring! Either that or the sparkplugs!"
The MSCE chimes in: "What's the problem? We'll just get back in, close all the windows, restart the engine and we'll be off again!".
And then there's the ancient art of maximizing efficiency:
We have all been to those meetings where someone wants over 100%. How about
achieving 103%? Here's a little math that might prove helpful.
What makes life 100%?
If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.
Then:
H A R D W O R K
8 1 18 4 23 15 18 11 = 98%
K N O W L E D G E
11 14 15 23 12 5 4 7 5 = 96%
But,
A T T I T U D E
1 20 20 9 20 21 4 5 = 100%
And,
B U L L S H I T
2 21 12 12 19 8 9 20 = 103%
So, it stands to reason that hard work and knowledge will get you close,
attitude will get you there, and bullshit will put you over the top.
But, look how far ass kissing will take you.
A S S K I S S I N G
1 19 19 11 9 19 19 9 14 7 = 118%
Your absolutely right in the reference, but calling "referring the the UI as an abstraction" an interesting idea is kinda ...um....well, the thing is, it's a bit of a DUH!
I'll put it to you like this: not only is it self evident that the UI is an abstraction (I mean, come on...a file is an abstraction of 1's and 0's) and something that was known since XEROX-PARC worked out the desktop metaphor, but it's not yet abstract enough. The UI as it is is nothing more than an inefficient way of working with files. The proof of this is that the current UI is incapable of being used in a human way. The UI must be further abstracted (in other words: must have more definitions, functions and capabilities of being operated on tagged onto it) in order for it to be used in the rudimentary way of human interaction as in a "Computer, what's next?" question making the computer say, based on your schedule and the task you're doing at the moment, either "go to this meeting" or "you can code for 10 more minutes before you have to get ready to leave".
I know I've kinda messed up the meaning ('s late, too much wine, bleh), but I hope you get what I mean...Neal Stephenson, while being a great writer, isn't spot on in "In the Beginning was the Command Line"..."Snow Crash" works better in the metaphor needed.
Now this is absolutely true...and the cool thing is, the analogy between (mechanical) engineering and software holds true. In a mechanical system, you NEVER, I repeat NEVER get an absolute sdescription; a good engineer knows to what level he can simplify (ie detail the mechanical efficiency, do some thermal calculations, then leave out the air friction because the effect is minimal and can be left out [in this case...in another situation it could well be the ayor factor] without dramatically changing the final strenght/elasticity calculations).
A slightly less proficient engineer will calculate the system, together with the next layer of the system (ie he will calculate the air friction), then discard it [or incorporate since he did the work anyway] because he found out the effect is not significant.
It seems the same thing goes with software development; you abstract to the propper level...but you need to know what level you can safely stop at.
site's burnt already...looks like that's what you get for staring into the sun.
No, sorry...she's already in use as the Geiger counter [bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep].
So explain to me how those people on the Manhatten project died? They where working with plutonium, too. Also, why in hell's bells would you then need to handle your plutonium remotely (as in it's in another room while you handle it via a remote robot interface) when building your own nuclear basement (I'm referring to the articles in Scientific American and other publications which went over the steps neccessary to build your own nuke)?
As an aside: when modelin, NEVER create anything in the 3d view...it'll never end up in the right spot and it will never be the right size. Always create in the orthogonal side/top views. Preferably adjust there too, but doing that in the 3d view isn't that much of a sin.
"Maya's animation features are unparalleled"
This might well be true, but it's surpassed by SoftImage's character animation routines. There's a reason the big boys use multiple packages; when they can afford it, it's Maya for modeling, SoftImage for animation, Houdini for the particle effects, Renderman for rending and Shake or Combustion for compositing.
You should have a look at IronCAD. Very easy to use (their drag and drop part system is so easy to use it puts other CAD programs to shame), quite powerfull, excelent 2d working environment too (unusually intuitive snaps). Native 3d working environment which converts seamlessly to 2d construction schematics. Oh, I almost forgot the great piping system they've got going. And the part scaling is great aswell.
I don't work for IronCAD, but after having had to use AutoCAD and pro/E for my studies as a mechanical engineer, using IronCAD is bliss. Check it out.
True...but the cool thing is when that happens, we just figure out what does correlate :) For relativistc speeds, Einstein provided the groundwork...and now the race is on to provide that for the quantum world (and much work has been done already). Next step will be to combine the two...and then what's left? We'll have described all of (easily observed) reality.
:) ).
:)
No doubt we'll find something else after that which doesn't fit (more dimensions, multiple universes, the place lost socks go to, whatever) but we'll create new models which approximate reality to a finer and finer degree, until finer approximation gives no real benefit and/or understanding (or until we need a model the size of the universe [scale 1:1] to understand the universe
Hey, at least it keeps us off the streets
But here's the rub: using a spectrometer does give you objectivity and fuzzy logic!
The frequency lines it shows are the same every time they're displayed. The only problem is defining a colour...but you do that the way these things go: if the mayority say that that colour is black...then screw the people who say it's white, it's black! And from that day forth, that combination of lines in the spectrum will be known as black. It's repeatable and objectively defineable.
Sure, this kind of thing doesn't work for everything; but the thing about hard science is that much more often than not, one can use machine detected (and thus objective and defineable) output. And this works even when something is put in terms of fuzzy logic; if a certain outcome is 0.7, if it doesn't change it will be 0.7 when you let your machine observe it again. Surrounding culture might have a different name for 0.7 by then, but it's 0.7 nonetheless.
As I said, this aproach can't be used for all cases. Beauty is always subjective, as it can't be measured (somewould like to differ, but here the litmus test is that when re-measuring, the outcome is different because the criteria have changed). But in science, there is most always some objective datum which can be verified.
Man, software has enabled us to do some crazy thing. Crazy either way too, of course.
And of course, what's to stop the FBI/CIA/NSA/Homeland security from wondering in and demanding certain data?
Yes: how's it feel to be in the minority of honourable /.-ers? ;)