I really think that scaleable icons are gonna be THE killer application of tomorrows operating systems.
Seriously, why not go all the way and question the whole concept of icons?
They could be allowed more degrees of freedom in their representation of a complex data object. Consider a 3D spinning folder icon, which somehow gives you an idea of how much data/what type of data is contained in the folder.
Now THAT would be neat.
Well it would be about as difficult as patching a complex software system which probably has up to a thousand types of different incarnations world-wide due to different patches etc., and doing this in assembler.
Chances are the "patch-worm" would work for 10% of the hosts and break the rest, and in the process generate as much network traffic as the original worm.
public class TheUltimateUnitTestingFramework {
public static void assert(boolean b) throws Exception {
if(!b)
throw new Exception("assertion failed");
}
}
I give it to you for free.
Documentation isn't done yet, but I'm planning
to spend the next year developing it.
...of a machine at my university:
"The Stochastic Bartender"
Basically, it's a modified slotmachine, where instead of the three cherries, bananas and apples, there is a type of hard liquor, one liqueur and one mixer.
Drinks from The Stochastic Bartender cost half, on one condition - you only get to pull that lever once.
I'm telling you - that devil piece of machinery can come up with some truly repulsive shit:
4cl Bäska Droppar ("Bitter Drops", Swedish vodka spiced with wormwood, this stuff makes you feel like a man)
Blue Curacao
Grapefruite juice
...winning through peaceful means? What crack are you smoking?
This just proves the age-old wisdom: The first rocks, the sequel is downhill, and on the third they go ahead and FUBAR the concept.
...because there is just NO WAY to replicate the scene with the giant teddybears and the japanese background chorus short of handing out acid in the theater entrance.
Besides, Hollywood doesn't have a sufficient amount of actors with severe facial muscle tissue dysfunction to bring about that correct "aaahheEhHAA"-anime-style acting.
... in Opera were a pretty nice feature.
Really, it sucks moving your mouse all the way
to the top of the screen just to press back/forward,
which is exactly what you spend 90% of inputtime on when using your browser.
Then, I got the Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 mouse with a forward/back button on the side. And I gotta tell you: Mouse gestures suck when all you have to do is push a button:)
... Physics Experiments Of All time would have to have Millikan's oil-drop test at a secure #1.
Here's a brief synopsis in pseudocode for you to try out at home:
LOOP:
An electron. Yep. Still discrete.
Another. Yep. Still discrete.
Two electrons. Yep. Still discrete.
WHILE nrTries LESS_THAN 5543 GOTO LOOP
"Tilley's device is an "on board" technology that keeps the battery bank in a state of full charge..... even after establishing a new distance record the meters will show the batteries to be full ! "
So, the "on board technology" is a chewing gum stuck in the meter?
Man, if I had a clever idea like that, I would also name it after myself.
I'm currently in the process of designing a opensource Peer-to-Peer network which will take care of some of these issues.
The network will be a semi-server-centered with a design similar to the NeoModus Direct Connect network.
The basic new idea is to reward users who share information by giving them more access to the network.
Hopefully this will make the network somewhat self-moderating since users sharing undesirable content will not rise in network status.
...but I'm still a bit amazed at how lightly people take issues like this.
Your sitting in a metal crate with two giant combustion engines delivering an insane amount of power to get you off ground.
A plane consists of several thousand electronic, mechanical, and electromechanical systems, a zillion bolts and hundreds of tonnes of lightweight metal. And any single part of this giant system might fail at any time.
The fact that accidents don't happen more often than they actually do must be considered an engineering miracle.
So, you can't smoke and sip a gin&tonic while writing some shitty design document nobody cares about and which you might as well write when you get there?
Boo-fucking-hooo
...this stuff about using an inordinate amount of term-dropping in your text is old, and moreso, it makes for a boring read.
The use of advanc3d codewords in his writing just barely covers up the pretty thin plot, and most importantly it doesn't build up atmosphere, which should be the primary use of this trick.
Gibson used it with success in most of his books (although, at Mona Lisa Overdrive, it did start to bore me) because he had Th3 F33l for it.
...that no home is complete without the talking Beauty Toilet (pronounced "BJUUUTI TOILEEET"), which provides you with a completely automated, FuzzyLogic(tm) bathroom experience.
...who's actually paying these people to come up with this kind of useless crap.
Not that I'm blaming them for it - hell, if someone would pay me to drink coffee all day and come up with useless analogies I'd be as happy as a goldfish in a keg.
This kind of reminds me of a quote from Ghostbusters... "I've been in the real world Peter. They actually want RESULTS."
"The ones that think on their feet are the ones that use their own credit card to renew their company's $70 domain reg before millions of users of their free web-email service get locked out due to no resolvable DNS record."
I would never pay my companys $70 domain reg out of my own pocket. Is this because I'm an unloyal good-for-nothing-punk?
Partly, yes, but mostly because I don't see my company paying my phonebill when it's about to get overdue.
Loyalty goes both ways.
"..The bounding hyperplanes can be extended infinitely so that they criss-cross through each other, chopping up hyperspace into many 4-dimensional 'chunks.' Again the inner chunks are finite, and they are distributed in shells around the core polytope." ...must the best BOFH "Plausible Excuse" ever!
Just a little side note here... There is an ongoing project in Sweden (swedish), and also one in the U.S.A dedicated to preserving the type of information which would earlier typically have been printed. Which I guess is the information we really want to preserve; the 1.2 million geocities homepages are probably not going to be of particularly large relevance to people in the year 2200.
Slashdot Mirror
Because now my cubicle neighbours toupé will fly up
and stick to the roof every time Windows does the Plong! thing on me
Simple logic:
1. the beer bottle is the teat
2. you suckle it
3. suckling teats invokes hiccups
4. 1&2&3 -> you get hiccups
I really think that scaleable icons are gonna be THE killer application of tomorrows operating systems.
Seriously, why not go all the way and question the whole concept of icons?
They could be allowed more degrees of freedom in their representation of a complex data object. Consider a 3D spinning folder icon, which somehow gives you an idea of how much data/what type of data is contained in the folder.
Now THAT would be neat.
Well it would be about as difficult as patching a complex software system which probably has up to a thousand types of different incarnations world-wide due to different patches etc., and doing this in assembler.
Chances are the "patch-worm" would work for 10% of the hosts and break the rest, and in the process generate as much network traffic as the original worm.
public class TheUltimateUnitTestingFramework {
public static void assert(boolean b) throws Exception {
if(!b)
throw new Exception("assertion failed");
}
}
I give it to you for free.
Documentation isn't done yet, but I'm planning to spend the next year developing it.
...of a machine at my university:
"The Stochastic Bartender"
Basically, it's a modified slotmachine, where instead of the three cherries, bananas and apples, there is a type of hard liquor, one liqueur and one mixer.
Drinks from The Stochastic Bartender cost half, on one condition - you only get to pull that lever once.
I'm telling you - that devil piece of machinery can come up with some truly repulsive shit:
4cl Bäska Droppar ("Bitter Drops", Swedish vodka spiced with wormwood, this stuff makes you feel like a man)
Blue Curacao
Grapefruite juice
...winning through peaceful means? What crack are you smoking?
This just proves the age-old wisdom:
The first rocks, the sequel is downhill, and on the third they go ahead and FUBAR the concept.
See the supercomputer top500.
I think that a year ago or so, the Japanese supercomputer for earthquake simulations had more power than the other top 499 supercomputers combined.
Sure, they'll be able to build a large, loose network of computers, but the access-speed will hardly compare to a single-site computer.
...because there is just NO WAY to replicate the scene with the giant teddybears and the japanese background chorus short of handing out acid in the theater entrance.
Besides, Hollywood doesn't have a sufficient amount of actors with severe facial muscle tissue dysfunction to bring about that correct "aaahheEhHAA"-anime-style acting.
... in Opera were a pretty nice feature. ,
:)
Really, it sucks moving your mouse all the way
to the top of the screen just to press back/forward
which is exactly what you spend 90% of inputtime on when using your browser.
Then, I got the Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 mouse with a forward/back button on the side.
And I gotta tell you: Mouse gestures suck when all you have to do is push a button
... Physics Experiments Of All time would have to have Millikan's oil-drop test at a secure #1.
Here's a brief synopsis in pseudocode for you to try out at home:
LOOP:
An electron. Yep. Still discrete.
Another. Yep. Still discrete.
Two electrons. Yep. Still discrete.
WHILE nrTries LESS_THAN 5543 GOTO LOOP
isn't interesting and it isn't fun. Deal with it.
"Tilley's device is an "on board" technology that keeps the battery bank in a state of full charge..... even after establishing a new distance record the meters will show the batteries to be full ! "
So, the "on board technology" is a chewing gum stuck in the meter?
Man, if I had a clever idea like that, I would also name it after myself.
I do it BOFH-style. /dev/null
1.2 seconds, no hassle with tapes:
backup * >
I don't know if I would consider 50% efficiency to be bad.
The numbers look considerably worse for a combustion engine.
I'm currently in the process of designing a opensource Peer-to-Peer network which will take care of some of these issues.
The network will be a semi-server-centered with a design similar to the NeoModus Direct Connect network.
The basic new idea is to reward users who share information by giving them more access to the network.
Hopefully this will make the network somewhat self-moderating since users sharing undesirable content will not rise in network status.
As I said, the project is still in the design-phase with a preliminary protocol spec just finished.
If you would like more details or contribute to the project, visit:
Bitpeddler project page
or
Bitpeddler homepage (with design/protocol spec)
...but I'm still a bit amazed at how lightly people take issues like this.
Your sitting in a metal crate with two giant combustion engines delivering an insane amount of power to get you off ground.
A plane consists of several thousand electronic, mechanical, and electromechanical systems, a zillion bolts and hundreds of tonnes of lightweight metal. And any single part of this giant system might fail at any time.
The fact that accidents don't happen more often than they actually do must be considered an engineering miracle.
So, you can't smoke and sip a gin&tonic while writing some shitty design document nobody cares about and which you might as well write when you get there?
Boo-fucking-hooo
Read a book.
...this stuff about using an inordinate amount of term-dropping in your text is old, and moreso, it makes for a boring read.
The use of advanc3d codewords in his writing just barely covers up the pretty thin plot,
and most importantly it doesn't build up atmosphere, which should be the primary use of this trick.
Gibson used it with success in most of his books (although, at Mona Lisa Overdrive, it did start to bore me) because he had Th3 F33l for it.
...I don't even need liquid nitrogen to overclock my CPU.
I just give it The Fonzie and it runs like hellfire.
...that no home is complete without the talking Beauty Toilet (pronounced "BJUUUTI TOILEEET"),
which provides you with a completely automated, FuzzyLogic(tm) bathroom experience.
...who's actually paying these people to come up with this kind of useless crap.
Not that I'm blaming them for it - hell, if someone would pay me to drink coffee all day and come up with useless analogies I'd be as happy as a goldfish in a keg.
This kind of reminds me of a quote from Ghostbusters... "I've been in the real world Peter. They actually want RESULTS."
"The ones that think on their feet are the ones that use their own credit card to renew their company's $70 domain reg before millions of users of their free web-email service get locked out due to no resolvable DNS record."
I would never pay my companys $70 domain reg out of my own pocket. Is this because I'm an unloyal good-for-nothing-punk?
Partly, yes, but mostly because I don't see my company paying my phonebill when it's about to get overdue.
Loyalty goes both ways.
"..The bounding hyperplanes can be extended infinitely so that they criss-cross through each other, chopping up hyperspace into many 4-dimensional 'chunks.' Again the inner chunks are finite, and they are distributed in shells around the core polytope."
...must the best BOFH "Plausible Excuse" ever!
... all well and good. But the question remains; why would you want to play an ukulele?
Bah!
Just a little side note here...
There is an ongoing project in Sweden (swedish), and also one in the U.S.A dedicated to preserving the type of information which would earlier typically have been printed.
Which I guess is the information we really want to preserve; the 1.2 million geocities homepages are probably not going to be of particularly large relevance to people in the year 2200.