This makes me curios. What relation, if any, does FRAM have to the ferrite magnetic cores used as the internal memory if the 2nd generation computers like the IBM 7090?
Well, I haven't (fortunately) seen Tomb Raider, but I remember that originally, it was supposed to have Sandra Bullock as Lara Croft, and she was supposed to play this doubleplusgood adventurer who donates all the loot to an orphanage... Angelina Jolie told them to stuff themselves with this script.
I'm not familiar with the original manga, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'll take the challenge.
The Villain: Arnoid (can't even spell his name right... At first I thought of Mike Myers looking like Dr Evil, but this would have been better than your variant.)
Dr Whasname: Silvester Stallone (sorry, but thinking of doctors I automatically picture a middle-aged fat guy...)
Alita: Sandra Bullock (Soundtrack by Britney S)
Alita's Wimpy Boyfriend: Erm, Adam Sandler? (Leonardo can actually act, you know)
Alita's Butch Boyfriend: Will Smith (Also makes the song that plays when they roll the titles after "The End")
I just did a test to find out if I can tell the difference between an mp3 and a CD. On my CD-mp3 player with $10 Philips headphones, I could still hear the difference between a CD and a 128kbps mp3 ("I of the Mourning" by Smashing Pumpkins). So you don't need an expensive surround-sound stereo system for this - at least if you're familiar with the song you're listening. If I've heard only the mp3 of a song, I can't on most cases tell if it's lower quality.
Re: 2) BS
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh and by the way, why wouldn't there be a carrier to return to?
Maybe because the fighter was running out of fuel, having flown to the target from a carrier that was far enough from the target so that enemy fighters and bombers couldn't reach it safely?
They US Air Force did this kind of trick when bombing Japan for the first time in WW II - the mission known as The Dolittle raid. The B-25 bombers, having taken of from a carrier and not having enough fuel to return there (landing would have caused trouble, too), were supposed to land in China - which none of them succeeded to do due to bad weather. Only one crew was unfortunate to bail out/crash land over Japanese territory, other 15 made it to friendlier territories. They may as well not have been that lucky.
Marshall McLuhan talks a lot about the differences between oral and visual cultures. The Western culture is visual, having long ago accustomed to written word and phonetic alphabet. For Western people, in the beginning there was the word and it was written. Then there are oral cultures, which rely more on spoken word. Chinese culture is oral, even though they have a way of writing (it's not an alphabet) - the hieroglyph is just a picture of the word. They tried to shift to Latin(?) alphabet in China, but as far as I know, it didn't work.
We're not visual because of movies - in this sense, the Chinese would be more visual than us - we were visual long before them. The tribal man was not visual, because he commmunicated mostly through spoken word, all his knowledge was stored using it. The literary Western people are accustomed to seeing things written down, trusting what's written more than what's spoken.
I would agree that thinking is "linguistic", or semiotic - we think in signs, communicate using signs (language being just one sign system) and perceive the world as signs. In this sense, the written word can carry a lot more meaning than a diagram or a pie chart - if you know how to use it. But compared to the real world, even language is a comic...
The wise old man, the apparition (or anima) and all the other things is what Jung calls archetypes - ideas that have been around for thousands of years, ideas that we carry in our genes, if you may. Jung talks about collective unconcious, which consists of these archetypes we all use as a structure of the world.
Matrix has a lot of archetypes and mythology in it, so does, for example, LOTR and even Harry Potter. I don't think it's a coincidence, that they are so popular - people like them, because they recognize in them what they have carried in them all the time. None of these three mentioned movies/books have (arguably) much of a story, but they are so full of symbols that you don't even notice it...
...some of the small number of geniuses available can probably design some visualization methods/tools/whatever that will allow the rest of us to make a little more sense of vast amounts of data without having to understand it in depth.
I already mentioned
John Engelbart's idea of knowledge containers in another thread, but this one is at a bit different angle. In the transcript (linked to the article), he talks about aircraft industry, where no single person actually knows, how to build, let's say, a 747. He talks about a system which would let a group of people act as if they were actually one person, something like a superbrain where people would be the braincells (I hope I got that part correctly, I am unable at the moment to RTFA, so you may mod me as a troll, if I got it wrong). Nothing to do with having a machine think for us (no, churning lots of numbers isn't thinking in my opinion).
Military intelligence has everything to with gatherering information and passing it on to those who are supposed to figure out how to use it.
Gathering information is always the easiest part, processing and interpreting is what causes the most trouble - and that is the mysterious thing right before "3. profit" (sorry, couldn't resist using it). And visualising is not interpreting.
Military intelligence can be a lethal weapon, if used correctly. I remember what a friend of mine, a history student told me about the Suess conflict between Israel and Egypt: The Egyptians had placed their planes on an airfield so, that in the place of every second aircraft there was actually a replica made of plywood. When the Israeli bombers attacked the airfield, they destroyed only the real airplanes, not dropping a single bomb on the replicas.
The main problem today in intelligence is, that there simply aren't enough people who could interpret the data they gather - a problem which hit the Americans real hard in 2001. There is/will be the same problem in business intelligence. Sure, you can collect tons of information about your competitors and customers, but there's not much use of it, if all you make out of it is some pie charts. Graphs representing some kind of relations are better, but still will not show you the complete picture (though may show enough).
The real future of business intelligence could probably be a dark-side-of-the-force-version of Doug Engelbart's knowledge containers, which, if I remember corretly from the little I could parse at that moment, were (I can't remember just how, and am unable to check it out) in his opinion the way to manage the information overload. And, if Engelbart is right and his idea works, it would lead to the extinction of hierarchic organizations (ie management)...
People worry, because they have finally understood how important information is these days. Knowledge is power, it has been so for ages. Now, it seems like new natural resources were discovered (Marshall McLuhan predicted this already in the beginning of 1960's) and everybody wants to have some. There are large amounts of it on the Internet, and new sources are discovered every day. The dotbomb came, because nobody understood the natur of the new resources, the understanding is just beginning to form. And Google has the biggest piece of the pie. Of course people are worried.They don't seem too worried about monopolies controlling all the real natural resources, though.
The only thing that right now bothers me about Google is the way they filter their searches - if I, for instance, look for some song lyrics, I get two pages of sites in the tune of www.g3turl33tlyricsh3r3.com, and only after the third page of results I get something useful. But this is more the case of flock mentality than indexing or advertising, I guess...
quite recently, there was a scandal in russia about a movie called "the brigade". the movie was about some teenagers (i think), who beat up people for fun - teachers, random people in discoes etc. the movie was a success, the actors became youth idols - teenagers started beating up random people, too. now, the actors are having a hard time explaining that violence is bad and you shouldn't beat up people just because you're bored...
[as a side note, a long time ago in soviet russia, it happened that those actors who played germans in a world war two movie, were thought of as nazis after this by the majority of people. they never got any parts in movies again...]
i wonder if something like this could happen in some other country. what influence did the "clockwork orange" have other than that delinguants started listening to beethoven?
..would be, that more children have ended up hurting themselves or others after watching non-violent films. i've heard quite a few stories about kids trying to (and failing miserably to) fly after watcing superman, or dropping bricks on other people's heads after watcing "home alone".
anyway, you can always find something/someone else to blame but you. i've read that in 1930's, comic books were blamed for causing agressive behaviour. in 1960's, this was already forgotten. in 10 or 20 years, we will probably have a new scapegoat. and if everything else fails - if you happen to live in the usa (i don't), you can always blame canada...
this kinda reminds me of Karel Capek's book "the making of a movie" - a part of this book goes something like this:
a writer writes a film script called "the great waltz". then the studio boss calls him and says "great stuff, only it should have more chinese people", and when the writer asks why, the studio boss says "hey, if it's called 'the great wall', it oughta have some chinese". so the writer puts in some chinese, the studio boss is happy, some other person "reads" the script and says "great script, only where's the walking part, if it's called 'the great walk'?"
and the script goes on another round and so on ad infinitum.
Indeed. If such a device is created, in the future, people will actually think:
"In order to solve this problem I'm going to need a Big Mac and a Coke!"
Or, using this, you can have a voice in your head say "a big mac and a coke will make it better" in the near future...
In 1876, two Frenchmen, Alphonse Penaud and Paul Gauchot came out with a plan for an airplane quite similar to modern ones and very different from the Wright biplane. Penaud's plane was a monoplane, it had retractable landing gear, windshield and a single control for pitch and directional control - way ahead of time... This ahead-of-time idea is not the thing he's remembered for, though - Penaud's most famous invention was a rubber-band propelled airplane model, which inspired many a men attempt building a flying machine, including the Wright brothers...
Just because a company has bought a hyped-up idea, it doesn't nessecarily mean that they will shoot a film of it. I remember a guy who worked as a trainee in Hollywood talking in a newspaper about what he did there. He was one of those hapless people who had to read the freshly-written scripts and then give an evaluation of how good they were. This guy said that only a small number of scripts actually make it to production, the others are trash. He also said, though, that these rules don't count for big stars - if a script is good enough for Arnoid, it's good enough for his fans, too... This was about three years ago, so things may have changed over the time.
(Or maybe I just underestimate the stupidity of people)
These are Soviet WWII tanks (not too common, though). It would be interesting to have those models fighting against Shermans etc...
The T-35: a heavy but quite slow tank with five(!) turrets - a challenge for fire control The BT-7: a light tank, but a fast one - max speed 86 km/h (on road, tracks off - no, I'm not kidding). A real winner in a race, and not exactly easy to hit (but if you hit it, it's down...)
Another fun thing would be rc planes with guns similar to those on these tanks. Imagine a fighter duel between a P-58 Mustang and a Zero, or an Me bf 109 and a Spitfire... (avoiding crashes could be a bit hard, though)
This reminds me of the ancient city of Babylon, where the authorities also collected information (to govern better...). What happened was, that at some point they couldn't handle it anymore. The information they collected was out-dated already after the request was issued. In the end, their bureaucracy dealed mostly with collecting and storing information, not governing. Oh yeah, and they wrote it all on clay plates, which they kept in large storehouses. When the city fell and was burned down, the storehouses were burned, too - effectively preserving the clay plates for thousands of years (they were discovered in the 20th century - real datamining;).
what?! where do you get this information from?! think oil?! you actually think the money made from oil goes to iraqi citizens and not to Saddam's weapons programs? if Iraqi people made so much money, then home come the UN had to set up a food for oil program?
Just to inform you: after the Gulf War, Iraq was not allowed to export oil (their government declined the offer to sell oil in limited quantity to meet the peoples' needs - you can blame Saddam for it), until in 1995 the oil for food program was established. According to the UN, 72% of the profits went to the humanitarian program. (food, medicine, etc).
And, before everyone slams me for being an elitist, how many successful open source projects can you name which weren't created by someone with real training in computer science (not some six month seminar)?
Erm... fetchmail, perhaps? ESR has never taken any courses in CS:P
Slashdot Mirror
...but easter is cancelled
This makes me curios. What relation, if any, does FRAM have to the ferrite magnetic cores used as the internal memory if the 2nd generation computers like the IBM 7090?
Well, I haven't (fortunately) seen Tomb Raider, but I remember that originally, it was supposed to have Sandra Bullock as Lara Croft, and she was supposed to play this doubleplusgood adventurer who donates all the loot to an orphanage... Angelina Jolie told them to stuff themselves with this script.
I'm not familiar with the original manga, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'll take the challenge.
The Villain: Arnoid (can't even spell his name right... At first I thought of Mike Myers looking like Dr Evil, but this would have been better than your variant.)
Dr Whasname: Silvester Stallone (sorry, but thinking of doctors I automatically picture a middle-aged fat guy...)
Alita: Sandra Bullock (Soundtrack by Britney S)
Alita's Wimpy Boyfriend: Erm, Adam Sandler? (Leonardo can actually act, you know)
Alita's Butch Boyfriend: Will Smith (Also makes the song that plays when they roll the titles after "The End")
I just did a test to find out if I can tell the difference between an mp3 and a CD. On my CD-mp3 player with $10 Philips headphones, I could still hear the difference between a CD and a 128kbps mp3 ("I of the Mourning" by Smashing Pumpkins). So you don't need an expensive surround-sound stereo system for this - at least if you're familiar with the song you're listening. If I've heard only the mp3 of a song, I can't on most cases tell if it's lower quality.
Maybe because the fighter was running out of fuel, having flown to the target from a carrier that was far enough from the target so that enemy fighters and bombers couldn't reach it safely?
They US Air Force did this kind of trick when bombing Japan for the first time in WW II - the mission known as The Dolittle raid. The B-25 bombers, having taken of from a carrier and not having enough fuel to return there (landing would have caused trouble, too), were supposed to land in China - which none of them succeeded to do due to bad weather. Only one crew was unfortunate to bail out/crash land over Japanese territory, other 15 made it to friendlier territories. They may as well not have been that lucky.
We're not visual because of movies - in this sense, the Chinese would be more visual than us - we were visual long before them. The tribal man was not visual, because he commmunicated mostly through spoken word, all his knowledge was stored using it. The literary Western people are accustomed to seeing things written down, trusting what's written more than what's spoken.
I would agree that thinking is "linguistic", or semiotic - we think in signs, communicate using signs (language being just one sign system) and perceive the world as signs. In this sense, the written word can carry a lot more meaning than a diagram or a pie chart - if you know how to use it. But compared to the real world, even language is a comic...
Matrix has a lot of archetypes and mythology in it, so does, for example, LOTR and even Harry Potter. I don't think it's a coincidence, that they are so popular - people like them, because they recognize in them what they have carried in them all the time. None of these three mentioned movies/books have (arguably) much of a story, but they are so full of symbols that you don't even notice it...
I already mentioned John Engelbart's idea of knowledge containers in another thread, but this one is at a bit different angle. In the transcript (linked to the article), he talks about aircraft industry, where no single person actually knows, how to build, let's say, a 747. He talks about a system which would let a group of people act as if they were actually one person, something like a superbrain where people would be the braincells (I hope I got that part correctly, I am unable at the moment to RTFA, so you may mod me as a troll, if I got it wrong). Nothing to do with having a machine think for us (no, churning lots of numbers isn't thinking in my opinion).
Gathering information is always the easiest part, processing and interpreting is what causes the most trouble - and that is the mysterious thing right before "3. profit" (sorry, couldn't resist using it). And visualising is not interpreting.
Military intelligence can be a lethal weapon, if used correctly. I remember what a friend of mine, a history student told me about the Suess conflict between Israel and Egypt: The Egyptians had placed their planes on an airfield so, that in the place of every second aircraft there was actually a replica made of plywood. When the Israeli bombers attacked the airfield, they destroyed only the real airplanes, not dropping a single bomb on the replicas.
The main problem today in intelligence is, that there simply aren't enough people who could interpret the data they gather - a problem which hit the Americans real hard in 2001. There is/will be the same problem in business intelligence. Sure, you can collect tons of information about your competitors and customers, but there's not much use of it, if all you make out of it is some pie charts. Graphs representing some kind of relations are better, but still will not show you the complete picture (though may show enough).
The real future of business intelligence could probably be a dark-side-of-the-force-version of Doug Engelbart's knowledge containers, which, if I remember corretly from the little I could parse at that moment, were (I can't remember just how, and am unable to check it out) in his opinion the way to manage the information overload. And, if Engelbart is right and his idea works, it would lead to the extinction of hierarchic organizations (ie management)...
Kind of offtopic, but this reminds me of this old joke (from Stalinist era, I think):
Today, in preparation of Lenin's forthcoming 70th jubilee, a contest for anecdotes about Lenin was announced. The prizes are:
Third place - 10 years in places of importance in the life of Lenin (Siberia)
Second place - 25 years in places of importance in the life of Lenin plus 5 years in places where other revolutionary heroes have dwelled
First place - an opportunity to meet the great leader in person
No, there is more than one shuttle in the fleet. Endeavour and Atlantis are two that pop into my mind.
If you have a pile of stones and you start removing them one by one, then at what point can't you call it a pile anymore?
And I thought I was onto something :( Oh well, I guess I'll just have to start working on my non-alcoholic vodka again...
dehydrated water!
People worry, because they have finally understood how important information is these days. Knowledge is power, it has been so for ages. Now, it seems like new natural resources were discovered (Marshall McLuhan predicted this already in the beginning of 1960's) and everybody wants to have some. There are large amounts of it on the Internet, and new sources are discovered every day. The dotbomb came, because nobody understood the natur of the new resources, the understanding is just beginning to form. And Google has the biggest piece of the pie. Of course people are worried.They don't seem too worried about monopolies controlling all the real natural resources, though.
The only thing that right now bothers me about Google is the way they filter their searches - if I, for instance, look for some song lyrics, I get two pages of sites in the tune of www.g3turl33tlyricsh3r3.com, and only after the third page of results I get something useful. But this is more the case of flock mentality than indexing or advertising, I guess...
quite recently, there was a scandal in russia about a movie called "the brigade". the movie was about some teenagers (i think), who beat up people for fun - teachers, random people in discoes etc. the movie was a success, the actors became youth idols - teenagers started beating up random people, too. now, the actors are having a hard time explaining that violence is bad and you shouldn't beat up people just because you're bored...
[as a side note, a long time ago in soviet russia, it happened that those actors who played germans in a world war two movie, were thought of as nazis after this by the majority of people. they never got any parts in movies again...]
i wonder if something like this could happen in some other country. what influence did the "clockwork orange" have other than that delinguants started listening to beethoven?
..would be, that more children have ended up hurting themselves or others after watching non-violent films. i've heard quite a few stories about kids trying to (and failing miserably to) fly after watcing superman, or dropping bricks on other people's heads after watcing "home alone".
anyway, you can always find something/someone else to blame but you. i've read that in 1930's, comic books were blamed for causing agressive behaviour. in 1960's, this was already forgotten. in 10 or 20 years, we will probably have a new scapegoat. and if everything else fails - if you happen to live in the usa (i don't), you can always blame canada...
this kinda reminds me of Karel Capek's book "the making of a movie" - a part of this book goes something like this:
a writer writes a film script called "the great waltz". then the studio boss calls him and says "great stuff, only it should have more chinese people", and when the writer asks why, the studio boss says "hey, if it's called 'the great wall', it oughta have some chinese". so the writer puts in some chinese, the studio boss is happy, some other person "reads" the script and says "great script, only where's the walking part, if it's called 'the great walk'?"
and the script goes on another round and so on ad infinitum.
Indeed. If such a device is created, in the future, people will actually think:
"In order to solve this problem I'm going to need a Big Mac and a Coke!"
Or, using this, you can have a voice in your head say "a big mac and a coke will make it better" in the near future...
In 1876, two Frenchmen, Alphonse Penaud and Paul Gauchot came out with a plan for an airplane quite similar to modern ones and very different from the Wright biplane. Penaud's plane was a monoplane, it had retractable landing gear, windshield and a single control for pitch and directional control - way ahead of time... This ahead-of-time idea is not the thing he's remembered for, though - Penaud's most famous invention was a rubber-band propelled airplane model, which inspired many a men attempt building a flying machine, including the Wright brothers...
Just because a company has bought a hyped-up idea, it doesn't nessecarily mean that they will shoot a film of it. I remember a guy who worked as a trainee in Hollywood talking in a newspaper about what he did there. He was one of those hapless people who had to read the freshly-written scripts and then give an evaluation of how good they were. This guy said that only a small number of scripts actually make it to production, the others are trash. He also said, though, that these rules don't count for big stars - if a script is good enough for Arnoid, it's good enough for his fans, too... This was about three years ago, so things may have changed over the time.
(Or maybe I just underestimate the stupidity of people)
These are Soviet WWII tanks (not too common, though). It would be interesting to have those models fighting against Shermans etc...
The T-35: a heavy but quite slow tank with five(!) turrets - a challenge for fire control
The BT-7: a light tank, but a fast one - max speed 86 km/h (on road, tracks off - no, I'm not kidding). A real winner in a race, and not exactly easy to hit (but if you hit it, it's down...)
Another fun thing would be rc planes with guns similar to those on these tanks. Imagine a fighter duel between a P-58 Mustang and a Zero, or an Me bf 109 and a Spitfire... (avoiding crashes could be a bit hard, though)
This reminds me of the ancient city of Babylon, where the authorities also collected information (to govern better...). What happened was, that at some point they couldn't handle it anymore. The information they collected was out-dated already after the request was issued. In the end, their bureaucracy dealed mostly with collecting and storing information, not governing. Oh yeah, and they wrote it all on clay plates, which they kept in large storehouses. When the city fell and was burned down, the storehouses were burned, too - effectively preserving the clay plates for thousands of years (they were discovered in the 20th century - real datamining ;).
what?! where do you get this information from?! think oil?! you actually think the money made from oil goes to iraqi citizens and not to Saddam's weapons programs? if Iraqi people made so much money, then home come the UN had to set up a food for oil program?
Just to inform you: after the Gulf War, Iraq was not allowed to export oil (their government declined the offer to sell oil in limited quantity to meet the peoples' needs - you can blame Saddam for it), until in 1995 the oil for food program was established. According to the UN, 72% of the profits went to the humanitarian program. (food, medicine, etc).
And, before everyone slams me for being an elitist, how many successful open source projects can you name which weren't created by someone with real training in computer science (not some six month seminar)?
:P
Erm... fetchmail, perhaps? ESR has never taken any courses in CS