I know you are joking, but I actually use PulseAudio's features. The PulseAudio Volume Control app is awesome. I have USB headphones as well as normal speakers. I can route sound for any application to either the headphones or the speakers on the fly, and mute at the application level as well. There is no way to do this easily without PulseAudio.
Why would you need a robot that can squeeze through cracks? Just make a robot that is smaller than the cracks. I guess one can imagine a scenario where a robot or its components need to be larger than a certain size to complete certain tasks, but has to get through a crack first, but that scenario is not coming to mind right now.
I've read in several places that the main problem with PulseAudio is not its design and implementation, but its instantiation. Many distributions apparently do not properly set up PulseAudio, causing it to behave unexpectedly. I found this to be the case with Ubuntu 9.04. PulseAudio worked like crap until I followed the following directions to get it set up. It's been working like a dream ever since:
I just give it a "cool and fun, but not really useful"
I beg to differ. If the usage of this tool reaches high enough numbers, you will have a system in place for tagging a massive number of images with meta-data (both textual and symbolic), making image search MUCH more powerful. This system would get better with time, and would enhance other systems, if the collected data is utilized appropriately.
I made the mistake of buying their KWGR614 "open source" router a couple years ago, and boy did it suck. The firmware delivered with it basically did not work. It would drop connections after 15 minutes of being on and then stop working. Everyone else who purchased one of these lumps of shit corroborated this behavior. Their employees denied it on the message boards, and in the end said "it's open source, fix it". Which is weak, because I bought the thing hoping to play with it when I got a chance, not in order to use it at all. Anyway I found a french language site that described how to build the this device's firmware, then I replaced it's broken DHCP and DNS capability with dnsmasq and was able to get it to work to some degree, though it had to be rebooted once or twice to be (more) stable. It still needed a reboot here an there.
I think Netgear just called this an "open source" router because they didn't want to fix the junk themselves. I decided never to buy Netgear products again after that.
I'm looking at the patent now, and while it's not rocket science, it's nowhere near as simple as "associating a piece of data with multiple categories". In fact, that quote is from the article, not the patent. The patent mentions nothing of the sort. The patent seems to be about maintaining metadata across multiple application contexts and updating the context appropriately. It seems pretty wishy-washy, and I think it is too broad for a patent. But it's nothing like the mirage that has got everyone here foaming at the mouth. It's NOT a patent for associating a piece of data with multiple categories. It's more like a patent for a web application API framework, if I understand the gobbledy gook at all... LS
Guys who are able to maintain their cool and not lose themselves when around hot girls are the ones that can actually land them. If you can figure out how to do this you put yourself on top and demonstrate to women that you are something special, selecting yourself out from the crowd. I highly recommend it.
Do you have some information or links to back this up? Are you sure there's a new instance of the engine for each element on the page? Even so, do you have some idea of the design of the engine and the overhead introduced by each instance? Also, how does it compare to DOM elements in performance? We are talking about Flash on IE here - I'm aware of Flash's poor performance on Linux.
Is there something inherently bad about having dozens of little flash applets all over the page? That's how HTML layout works, but in this case just happens to be rendered by an external component. Unless there is some known inefficiency caused by having multiple flash elements on a page then what's with the implied negativity?
Quit assuming you know everything there is to know about pi. I'm not suggesting that an algorithm would work exactly like private/public key encryption. I'm suggesting that there could be some other as of yet undiscovered property of pi that could utilize digits in pi much further out than 50 digits in things such as encryption or other endeavors.
Be content with the silly universal circle argument if you wish.
I'm with you actually. The science fiction that I like is that sheds light on the human condition. But the thing is, that is not what separates science fiction from other genres. You will find countless of stories about "our reaction to irrefutable evidence of a higher power" in non-science fiction. What defines the genre is its use of science both known and speculative in service of the story.
The article isn't really that informative. It takes things too literally, using the known size of the universe to determine the largest possible physical circle and the smallest possible length (planck length) to determine the maximum precision and he comes up with 50 digits. But it wouldn't be too hard to come up with an application that uses more than 50 digits of pi. A new encryption algorithm could use sequences in pi, but this has nothing to do with physical circles. Math is abstraction, and there are fields in math that are so abstract that you can't even correlate them with a physical measure. It's very silly to say that knowing pi to more that 50 digits is useless.
You have no constitutional right of free speech on Flickr.
I would agree with you in theory, but corporations control the US government, and they control the majority of the media, so platforms for free speech are limited. Check out the board of directors for the major media conglomerates and you will find quite a few are politicians. In face politicians are on the boards of a large percentage of major American corporations.
Regardless of theory, speech is controlled on flick, youtube, and all other major media outlets not only to appease soccer moms but to control certain ideas. An example of this is how Youtube censors all copyrighted material, violent material, pornographic material, and other offensive material. But they let the video of the women (Neda) who was shot in Iran stay without blocking it, because it suited their political interests. Are there other videos on Youtube of bloody violence? No. This kind of thing happens all the time.
There's no right to free speech on private outlets, but out of mere principle I suggest that we don't use these sites until they stop their censorship.
This is the same "qi" as Taichi's 'chi'. The life energy
Sorry to confuse things even more, but you are incorrect. Taichi is an old romanization. Using modern pinyin it's actually Taiji. The ji means "utmost" or "extreme". People only pronounce it "tie-chee" (in Mandarin) because they are mis-reading the old romanization, but it's actually pronounced "tie-jee", and while Qi (pronounced chee) is something that is definitely studied in the practice of Taiji, it is not the same as the "chi" in "Taichi". I've studied Taiji for 4 1/2 years in Beijing, so not just being pedantic.
BTW you are SO right about Slashdot needing to move out of the stone age....
Are we talking about Science Fiction movies? Or Science Fantasy?
The distinction is dubious. You can find inaccuracies in pretty much every science fiction movie. The difference is to the degree of which the science is inaccurate. It's a gradient and not two separate genres as you are posing it. Besides the accuracy of the known science in the film, most science fiction doesn't only play with known science, but creates future science which could be classified as nothing other than fantasy, despite many of these types of stories being called "hard" sci-fi. For instance, many would consider 2001 to be hard sci-fi. But there's the sentient computer and aliens that live in some sort of ether beyond our material dimension. Sounds like fantasy to me.
So is there an analogous situation with web links? I understand that linking binary components is not the same technically as a link from one website to another, but ontologically they are the same, especially when you consider SOS apps built off of several public websites. Can you legally force anyone who links to your site to adopt your license? How is this different from binary linking?
I agree that the segway is perhaps a solution looking for a problem but maybe the tech itself is still very valuable. The first exposure most people have to a self-balancing two wheel system is Rosie from the Jetsons. Oh wait, doing a search for images it appears I have false-memory syndrome. She was not on self-balancing wheels. But wouldn't robotics be a great application for this? Cities are flat, robotic walking devices are crude and complicated. A robot on two self-balancing wheels would be great for autonomous work around a city...
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you so special that you are less easily creeped out than the rest of the population? LOL
<!DOCTYPE thread_killing_meta_post
<!ELEMENT Summary of the preceding proposition>
<!ELEMENT less sophisticated alternative>
]>
Line 1, Column 1: <Summary of the preceding proposition>
error: no shit sherlock
Line 1, Column 105: <less sophisticated alternative>
error: thanks for killing the thread
I know you are joking, but I actually use PulseAudio's features. The PulseAudio Volume Control app is awesome. I have USB headphones as well as normal speakers. I can route sound for any application to either the headphones or the speakers on the fly, and mute at the application level as well. There is no way to do this easily without PulseAudio.
Ellis
Why would you need a robot that can squeeze through cracks? Just make a robot that is smaller than the cracks. I guess one can imagine a scenario where a robot or its components need to be larger than a certain size to complete certain tasks, but has to get through a crack first, but that scenario is not coming to mind right now.
LS
I've read in several places that the main problem with PulseAudio is not its design and implementation, but its instantiation. Many distributions apparently do not properly set up PulseAudio, causing it to behave unexpectedly. I found this to be the case with Ubuntu 9.04. PulseAudio worked like crap until I followed the following directions to get it set up. It's been working like a dream ever since:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578
LS
I just give it a "cool and fun, but not really useful"
I beg to differ. If the usage of this tool reaches high enough numbers, you will have a system in place for tagging a massive number of images with meta-data (both textual and symbolic), making image search MUCH more powerful. This system would get better with time, and would enhance other systems, if the collected data is utilized appropriately.
LS
I made the mistake of buying their KWGR614 "open source" router a couple years ago, and boy did it suck. The firmware delivered with it basically did not work. It would drop connections after 15 minutes of being on and then stop working. Everyone else who purchased one of these lumps of shit corroborated this behavior. Their employees denied it on the message boards, and in the end said "it's open source, fix it". Which is weak, because I bought the thing hoping to play with it when I got a chance, not in order to use it at all. Anyway I found a french language site that described how to build the this device's firmware, then I replaced it's broken DHCP and DNS capability with dnsmasq and was able to get it to work to some degree, though it had to be rebooted once or twice to be (more) stable. It still needed a reboot here an there.
I think Netgear just called this an "open source" router because they didn't want to fix the junk themselves. I decided never to buy Netgear products again after that.
LS
This is exactly the situation this word was invented for.
What happened to the adventurous?
we run other operating systems now
I'm looking at the patent now, and while it's not rocket science, it's nowhere near as simple as "associating a piece of data with multiple categories". In fact, that quote is from the article, not the patent. The patent mentions nothing of the sort. The patent seems to be about maintaining metadata across multiple application contexts and updating the context appropriately. It seems pretty wishy-washy, and I think it is too broad for a patent. But it's nothing like the mirage that has got everyone here foaming at the mouth. It's NOT a patent for associating a piece of data with multiple categories. It's more like a patent for a web application API framework, if I understand the gobbledy gook at all...
LS
Guys who are able to maintain their cool and not lose themselves when around hot girls are the ones that can actually land them. If you can figure out how to do this you put yourself on top and demonstrate to women that you are something special, selecting yourself out from the crowd. I highly recommend it.
Now there is a concrete argument for gender segregation of boys and girls in school
No there isn't. You might as well say "Now there is a concrete argument for burkas in public"
And this differs from Silly Putty how?
Do you have some information or links to back this up? Are you sure there's a new instance of the engine for each element on the page? Even so, do you have some idea of the design of the engine and the overhead introduced by each instance? Also, how does it compare to DOM elements in performance? We are talking about Flash on IE here - I'm aware of Flash's poor performance on Linux.
LS
Is there something inherently bad about having dozens of little flash applets all over the page? That's how HTML layout works, but in this case just happens to be rendered by an external component. Unless there is some known inefficiency caused by having multiple flash elements on a page then what's with the implied negativity?
Quit assuming you know everything there is to know about pi. I'm not suggesting that an algorithm would work exactly like private/public key encryption. I'm suggesting that there could be some other as of yet undiscovered property of pi that could utilize digits in pi much further out than 50 digits in things such as encryption or other endeavors.
Be content with the silly universal circle argument if you wish.
Using a known sequence in an encryption algorithm seems kinda....useless.
Umm... The series of primes is a known sequence. And that's far from useles...
Ummmmmmm.... how exactly is my post a troll??
I'm with you actually. The science fiction that I like is that sheds light on the human condition. But the thing is, that is not what separates science fiction from other genres. You will find countless of stories about "our reaction to irrefutable evidence of a higher power" in non-science fiction. What defines the genre is its use of science both known and speculative in service of the story.
LS
The article isn't really that informative. It takes things too literally, using the known size of the universe to determine the largest possible physical circle and the smallest possible length (planck length) to determine the maximum precision and he comes up with 50 digits. But it wouldn't be too hard to come up with an application that uses more than 50 digits of pi. A new encryption algorithm could use sequences in pi, but this has nothing to do with physical circles. Math is abstraction, and there are fields in math that are so abstract that you can't even correlate them with a physical measure. It's very silly to say that knowing pi to more that 50 digits is useless.
LS
You have no constitutional right of free speech on Flickr.
I would agree with you in theory, but corporations control the US government, and they control the majority of the media, so platforms for free speech are limited. Check out the board of directors for the major media conglomerates and you will find quite a few are politicians. In face politicians are on the boards of a large percentage of major American corporations.
Regardless of theory, speech is controlled on flick, youtube, and all other major media outlets not only to appease soccer moms but to control certain ideas. An example of this is how Youtube censors all copyrighted material, violent material, pornographic material, and other offensive material. But they let the video of the women (Neda) who was shot in Iran stay without blocking it, because it suited their political interests. Are there other videos on Youtube of bloody violence? No. This kind of thing happens all the time.
There's no right to free speech on private outlets, but out of mere principle I suggest that we don't use these sites until they stop their censorship.
LS
This is the same "qi" as Taichi's 'chi'. The life energy
Sorry to confuse things even more, but you are incorrect. Taichi is an old romanization. Using modern pinyin it's actually Taiji. The ji means "utmost" or "extreme". People only pronounce it "tie-chee" (in Mandarin) because they are mis-reading the old romanization, but it's actually pronounced "tie-jee", and while Qi (pronounced chee) is something that is definitely studied in the practice of Taiji, it is not the same as the "chi" in "Taichi". I've studied Taiji for 4 1/2 years in Beijing, so not just being pedantic.
BTW you are SO right about Slashdot needing to move out of the stone age....
LS
Are we talking about Science Fiction movies? Or Science Fantasy?
The distinction is dubious. You can find inaccuracies in pretty much every science fiction movie. The difference is to the degree of which the science is inaccurate. It's a gradient and not two separate genres as you are posing it. Besides the accuracy of the known science in the film, most science fiction doesn't only play with known science, but creates future science which could be classified as nothing other than fantasy, despite many of these types of stories being called "hard" sci-fi. For instance, many would consider 2001 to be hard sci-fi. But there's the sentient computer and aliens that live in some sort of ether beyond our material dimension. Sounds like fantasy to me.
LS
So is there an analogous situation with web links? I understand that linking binary components is not the same technically as a link from one website to another, but ontologically they are the same, especially when you consider SOS apps built off of several public websites. Can you legally force anyone who links to your site to adopt your license? How is this different from binary linking?
LS
I agree that the segway is perhaps a solution looking for a problem but maybe the tech itself is still very valuable. The first exposure most people have to a self-balancing two wheel system is Rosie from the Jetsons. Oh wait, doing a search for images it appears I have false-memory syndrome. She was not on self-balancing wheels. But wouldn't robotics be a great application for this? Cities are flat, robotic walking devices are crude and complicated. A robot on two self-balancing wheels would be great for autonomous work around a city...
LS