Concorde has certainly had a long and illustrious history, especially considering the way it was looking as a complete failure when they were first built and marketed... until they upgraded it from general air travel to exclusive/expensive air travel.
I remember a couple of years ago there were special offers advertised in the national papers where you could phone the BA hotlines and get tickets for about £10 !!! A lot of people didn't bother because they could believe it, whereas those who did became pleasantly surprised (until everyone else caught on, but they'd sold out by then).
I wonder what the future will be for supersonic air travel, it seems most of the new Boeing/Airbus planes try and cram more people on them... funnily enough I flew to the US 4 months ago on one of Virgins new A600 Airbuses and they take off like a bloody rocket! They also had personal entertainment systems in each seat with video on demand, except in our compartment the media stations kept crashing (it was nice to see a Mandrake Linux reboot rather than an M$ bodge job) so they only worked for about an hour in the entire flight.
How about the iBrator, would be a lot more "fun" having a Beowulf cluster of these little babies rather than a bunch of grills;) (unless the users are into S&M)
Although I don't know wether ThinkGeek would ever stock them (if they existed of course)!
I remember in the days of Windows 3, there was a dll icon file that was about 300KB... and scrolling through it on a 386 SX took about 10 minutes! Can't remember it's name though.
Red Dwarf fans?
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One cause of frustration for an AI could be subjective time perception
When I read that sentence, all I could think about was Holly, Red Dwarfs computer... and 3 million years of boredom, he wiped his own memory core so he could have fun relearning things again. Although going from an IQ of 6000 down to 6 was a tad excessive!
It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
I guess that pretty much describes MSN, Windows ME or any other dubious MS product (i.e. more dubious than the rest of their products that I can't be arsed to list here).
Oh, and where did the moose/blender term come from? I'm starting to get a little worried about the mental health of the Opera team.. I just hope they don't do a strategic alliance with Joe Cartoon, you know he likes blenders!
Shaving even 0.002 seconds off the back command is worthwhile because millions of button clicks worldwide will be a little more efficient, he says. "If we can save a tiny bit of frustration and confusion, that's the way to improve computer interfacing."
Well I'm glad they clarifyed that little detail, now I can sleep better at night knowing I've shaved a few clock cycles off my daily routine. I dread to think what the 'analysts' would say if they heard that, we'll be saving X amount of money per fiscal year by using this new back button... kinda straight out of Dilbert!
On a side note, (when I use Mozilla or Opera) the tabs come in handy... or if using IE, I tend to open most pages in new browser windows, so I have pages available at hand (still on dialup, so it does make a difference)... hehe maybe they're right about the 0.002 seconds!
I suppose it'll give a whole new meaning if the phone says "Time for a fsck"
Linux and Java archenemy, Microsoft, said Motorola's move doesn't change things much--it's just a new variation on the fight to lure programmers to Microsoft software rather than Java.
Nice to see MS still have their heads in the sand, lets just hope Sendo survive and win their lawsuit.
I started playing Deus Ex again this past week, and apart from it crashing constantly (either my 9500 Pro/Catalyst 3 drivers/DirectX 9) the other thing that struck me was how more real the game felt with all the political stuff going on now, just swop the Liberty statue with the Twin Towers, the extra laws being brought in to combat terrorism, et al.
in a bid to compensate musicians and song writers as more of their works become available online
Oh wow! They're expressing concern that the money goes to the artists... did I miss something here?
More like they want to be able to track exactly how much is due to them, while still screwing the artists concerned... funnily enough 'GRid' sounds like an Aussie way of telling the RIAA to go crawl back down into the hole they came from.
NTL is a merger of some many local cable companies, and half their departments don't even talk to each other (a friend works there so I've heard how disorganised they are).
This is so much so that someone else I know has managed to get away without having to pay for her cable internet for a while (don't know if it is still going on though). All because they initially bodged the installation and it worked periodically (where they gave her a month free because of this issue), but then it worked fine... so she phoned up each month to complain, and they gave another free month... add to that the account wasn't capped at all, instead of being the usual 512kbps downstream!!!
So you have to wonder why they're in so much debt (at least they have a good infrastructure though).
Plus they know you're British if you complain about it raining, complain about returning to Britain... or in my case (before the EU relaxed the borders) when my Mum and I returned from Les Mans 24 hour race weekend without a passport, but with French road signs half covered up with blankets in the car (our friends got drunk on the last night armed with screwdrivers and saws, it was bizarre getting out of our tent to find yourself staring at a 'Neuvy-En-Champagne 2km' sign!)... UK immigration/customs just laughed and lets us straight through!
The biggest problem with the Visa Waiver program is that when you leave the US (i.e. checking in for your flight) the Airlines (AFAIK) don't bother returning the waiver forms back to the immigration services.
I visited Canada a couple of weeks before my return home, on a maxxed out visit to the US (i.e. 88 days out of the 90 day max)... and talk about a breaking of balls exercise (i.e. they wanted to deport me thinking I'd broken the terms of my waiver when in fact I hadn't), it was not fun. I know it seems US immigration officers seem to have a personality bypass in general... but this was worse (they also give their own people shit when returning, must be the rush of authority). I think I also bore the brunt of the fact that 5 people with British passports came through the same border a week or two before (although I was being hunted by the FBI and pointed the finger at the others to try and avoid any interest in him).
The crux of it is, is that I ain't visiting the US for a year or two until I can get something a little more flexible than the Visa waiver... and I don't know what data they were putting in their computers when I got the 20 questions (in 30 seconds), you can never tell. Oh well, at least it is a big warmer back in Blighty than the east coast has been.
Windows Sound Driver? I don't really remember that, but I do remember Links (the Golf Game) and it's simulated the sounds through the pc speaker, I especially remember the random tweating of birds that sounded so grainy and annoying.
So rather than 'beep beep beep' sounds (no not Ellen Fleiss related) it tried a more realistic sounding way (i.e. beeps that lasted milliseconds to make up the overall sound). It still sounded like crap though, until I got a Soundblaster 2.0 that is.
I think the Romulans knew about Picard in advance because of the existance of Sela, even though the Picard that sent Yar back was from another reality, it might have just been enough to have peaked the Romulans interest.
Plus, I can't remember if Logan initially tried to bring Sela back, but it didn't pan out (I may be completely wrong there), and with what happened in Unification she would either have been executed or imprisoned.
Funny thing about Nemesis being the first Trek film to really feature the Romulans, but it was more about the Remans instead... so much for building on existing foundations. I left the movie theater completely blown away... from the complete lack of imagination and continuity discrepancies that turned a possible good Trek movie into a mild yawn.
As for Enterprise, I watched most of the first season, got through a 1/3rd of Shockwave II and it really dawned on me that the current Star Trek offering is complete shit (along the lines of Andromeda) and changed the channel... the writing is soooooo terrible, as well as the continuity fuckups that get sugar coated up as part of the 'temporal cold war', I haven't watched an episode since. I'm probably too being spoiled by other good Sci Fi shows like Farscape and Stargate (where interesting stuff actually happens), I guess the only Trek stuff I'll be buying in future will be DS9 DVD seasons 4-7.
One more thing about Enterprise, knowing The Powers That Be(tm) are trying to milk the franchise for all it's worth, and their attempts to sex things up... they might slap two huge prosthetic breasts on the Enterprise hull and call them 'boob armor'. Sex works in certain circustances, but with Enterprise there are supposed to be bigger issues at stake. When I wrote that last sentance, the idea of sex in a series that works (because there is something underneath, i.e. a plot) is Sex In The City, plus I've get the scene in my mind with Kim Cattrall having fun on an indoor 'swing'.
Well this post was just to try answer your question, but I've turned it into a rant... sorry about that, but then again it was good to get that off my chest (so to speak, and no not the 'boob armor';-P ).
The Atari Jaguar, that brings back memories. Such a good console system... 2 processors one for graphics AFAIK and the other for everything else. Just a pity that there weren't any major game releases/support for it.
How to *really* become a programmer...
on
How to be a Programmer
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...Is to use this site as your programming bible:-P
It is a *must* read for any budding or experienced programmer! (You might split your sides from laughing too much).
There was a very interesting (and well balanced) program about you I saw in England a while ago, and in it it mentioned that you were put into solitary confinement (AFAIK) for 6 months, and weren't allowed to use (let alone go near) a telephone under the misaligned fear that you could "blow up the country with one call".
My question is: How does it make you feel when there are such ignorant and misinformed people who are in a position of authority (i.e. judges, police, government) and are there any ways in which you can use your experience to change these attitudes/problems for the good?
I suppose this device would be useful when hiring out from any US Car rental company, I don't know exactly which ones use the tracking though. Let's see how the "speeding" charges will be applied;-)
Although I wonder how big the unit would have to be to be effective enough.. i.e. if it is as big as those old mobile phones (before the brick sized ones, more like a briefcase) then I doubt the average traveller would be bothered, but I suppose anyone who has come across any GPS tracking fines then they might like this quite a bit.
Until the language becomes more popular and depending on the stability, etc.. it should be C/=0 !!
But then again, it could have been called E, but that letter on it's own might have evoked images of a certain little pill... remember Intel upheld it's PC (political correctness, not personal computer) brigade when they decided to "re-number" the 666Mhz P3 chip as being 667Mhz (AFAIK) so you can never tell with companies these days.
Oh well, at least *nix creators had a sense of humour when creating commands so that you could "finger user";-)
Slashdot Mirror
Concorde has certainly had a long and illustrious history, especially considering the way it was looking as a complete failure when they were first built and marketed... until they upgraded it from general air travel to exclusive/expensive air travel.
I remember a couple of years ago there were special offers advertised in the national papers where you could phone the BA hotlines and get tickets for about £10 !!! A lot of people didn't bother because they could believe it, whereas those who did became pleasantly surprised (until everyone else caught on, but they'd sold out by then).
I wonder what the future will be for supersonic air travel, it seems most of the new Boeing/Airbus planes try and cram more people on them... funnily enough I flew to the US 4 months ago on one of Virgins new A600 Airbuses and they take off like a bloody rocket! They also had personal entertainment systems in each seat with video on demand, except in our compartment the media stations kept crashing (it was nice to see a Mandrake Linux reboot rather than an M$ bodge job) so they only worked for about an hour in the entire flight.
How about the iBrator, would be a lot more "fun" having a Beowulf cluster of these little babies rather than a bunch of grills ;) (unless the users are into S&M)
Although I don't know wether ThinkGeek would ever stock them (if they existed of course)!
I remember in the days of Windows 3, there was a dll icon file that was about 300KB ... and scrolling through it on a 386 SX took about 10 minutes! Can't remember it's name though.
One cause of frustration for an AI could be subjective time perception
When I read that sentence, all I could think about was Holly, Red Dwarfs computer... and 3 million years of boredom, he wiped his own memory core so he could have fun relearning things again. Although going from an IQ of 6000 down to 6 was a tad excessive!
It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
I guess that pretty much describes MSN, Windows ME or any other dubious MS product (i.e. more dubious than the rest of their products that I can't be arsed to list here).
Oh, and where did the moose/blender term come from? I'm starting to get a little worried about the mental health of the Opera team.. I just hope they don't do a strategic alliance with Joe Cartoon, you know he likes blenders!
Shaving even 0.002 seconds off the back command is worthwhile because millions of button clicks worldwide will be a little more efficient, he says. "If we can save a tiny bit of frustration and confusion, that's the way to improve computer interfacing."
Well I'm glad they clarifyed that little detail, now I can sleep better at night knowing I've shaved a few clock cycles off my daily routine. I dread to think what the 'analysts' would say if they heard that, we'll be saving X amount of money per fiscal year by using this new back button... kinda straight out of Dilbert!
On a side note, (when I use Mozilla or Opera) the tabs come in handy... or if using IE, I tend to open most pages in new browser windows, so I have pages available at hand (still on dialup, so it does make a difference)... hehe maybe they're right about the 0.002 seconds!
I suppose it'll give a whole new meaning if the phone says "Time for a fsck"
Linux and Java archenemy, Microsoft, said Motorola's move doesn't change things much--it's just a new variation on the fight to lure programmers to Microsoft software rather than Java.
Nice to see MS still have their heads in the sand, lets just hope Sendo survive and win their lawsuit.
...HOLY SHIT!
Which I suppose is what people would have been saying if a major exploit was ever created/and spread to their machine.
I started playing Deus Ex again this past week, and apart from it crashing constantly (either my 9500 Pro/Catalyst 3 drivers/DirectX 9) the other thing that struck me was how more real the game felt with all the political stuff going on now, just swop the Liberty statue with the Twin Towers, the extra laws being brought in to combat terrorism, et al.
Very scary indeed :(
in a bid to compensate musicians and song writers as more of their works become available online
Oh wow! They're expressing concern that the money goes to the artists... did I miss something here?
More like they want to be able to track exactly how much is due to them, while still screwing the artists concerned... funnily enough 'GRid' sounds like an Aussie way of telling the RIAA to go crawl back down into the hole they came from.
NTL is a merger of some many local cable companies, and half their departments don't even talk to each other (a friend works there so I've heard how disorganised they are).
This is so much so that someone else I know has managed to get away without having to pay for her cable internet for a while (don't know if it is still going on though). All because they initially bodged the installation and it worked periodically (where they gave her a month free because of this issue), but then it worked fine... so she phoned up each month to complain, and they gave another free month... add to that the account wasn't capped at all, instead of being the usual 512kbps downstream!!!
So you have to wonder why they're in so much debt (at least they have a good infrastructure though).
Plus they know you're British if you complain about it raining, complain about returning to Britain... or in my case (before the EU relaxed the borders) when my Mum and I returned from Les Mans 24 hour race weekend without a passport, but with French road signs half covered up with blankets in the car (our friends got drunk on the last night armed with screwdrivers and saws, it was bizarre getting out of our tent to find yourself staring at a 'Neuvy-En-Champagne 2km' sign!)... UK immigration/customs just laughed and lets us straight through!
The biggest problem with the Visa Waiver program is that when you leave the US (i.e. checking in for your flight) the Airlines (AFAIK) don't bother returning the waiver forms back to the immigration services.
I visited Canada a couple of weeks before my return home, on a maxxed out visit to the US (i.e. 88 days out of the 90 day max)... and talk about a breaking of balls exercise (i.e. they wanted to deport me thinking I'd broken the terms of my waiver when in fact I hadn't), it was not fun. I know it seems US immigration officers seem to have a personality bypass in general... but this was worse (they also give their own people shit when returning, must be the rush of authority). I think I also bore the brunt of the fact that 5 people with British passports came through the same border a week or two before (although I was being hunted by the FBI and pointed the finger at the others to try and avoid any interest in him).
The crux of it is, is that I ain't visiting the US for a year or two until I can get something a little more flexible than the Visa waiver... and I don't know what data they were putting in their computers when I got the 20 questions (in 30 seconds), you can never tell. Oh well, at least it is a big warmer back in Blighty than the east coast has been.
Windows Sound Driver? I don't really remember that, but I do remember Links (the Golf Game) and it's simulated the sounds through the pc speaker, I especially remember the random tweating of birds that sounded so grainy and annoying.
So rather than 'beep beep beep' sounds (no not Ellen Fleiss related) it tried a more realistic sounding way (i.e. beeps that lasted milliseconds to make up the overall sound). It still sounded like crap though, until I got a Soundblaster 2.0 that is.
This sounds way too fishy to me ;-)
It had to be said I'm afraid :-P
I think the Romulans knew about Picard in advance because of the existance of Sela, even though the Picard that sent Yar back was from another reality, it might have just been enough to have peaked the Romulans interest.
Plus, I can't remember if Logan initially tried to bring Sela back, but it didn't pan out (I may be completely wrong there), and with what happened in Unification she would either have been executed or imprisoned.
Funny thing about Nemesis being the first Trek film to really feature the Romulans, but it was more about the Remans instead... so much for building on existing foundations. I left the movie theater completely blown away... from the complete lack of imagination and continuity discrepancies that turned a possible good Trek movie into a mild yawn.
As for Enterprise, I watched most of the first season, got through a 1/3rd of Shockwave II and it really dawned on me that the current Star Trek offering is complete shit (along the lines of Andromeda) and changed the channel... the writing is soooooo terrible, as well as the continuity fuckups that get sugar coated up as part of the 'temporal cold war', I haven't watched an episode since. I'm probably too being spoiled by other good Sci Fi shows like Farscape and Stargate (where interesting stuff actually happens), I guess the only Trek stuff I'll be buying in future will be DS9 DVD seasons 4-7.
One more thing about Enterprise, knowing The Powers That Be(tm) are trying to milk the franchise for all it's worth, and their attempts to sex things up... they might slap two huge prosthetic breasts on the Enterprise hull and call them 'boob armor'. Sex works in certain circustances, but with Enterprise there are supposed to be bigger issues at stake. When I wrote that last sentance, the idea of sex in a series that works (because there is something underneath, i.e. a plot) is Sex In The City, plus I've get the scene in my mind with Kim Cattrall having fun on an indoor 'swing'.
Well this post was just to try answer your question, but I've turned it into a rant... sorry about that, but then again it was good to get that off my chest (so to speak, and no not the 'boob armor' ;-P ).
I suppose that idea also works with the time diminishing Hard Drive warranties we seem to be getting now.
The Atari Jaguar, that brings back memories. Such a good console system... 2 processors one for graphics AFAIK and the other for everything else. Just a pity that there weren't any major game releases/support for it.
...Is to use this site as your programming bible :-P
It is a *must* read for any budding or experienced programmer! (You might split your sides from laughing too much).
...They'd probably call it art ;-)
[/end_joke]
There was a very interesting (and well balanced) program about you I saw in England a while ago, and in it it mentioned that you were put into solitary confinement (AFAIK) for 6 months, and weren't allowed to use (let alone go near) a telephone under the misaligned fear that you could "blow up the country with one call".
My question is: How does it make you feel when there are such ignorant and misinformed people who are in a position of authority (i.e. judges, police, government) and are there any ways in which you can use your experience to change these attitudes/problems for the good?
I suppose this device would be useful when hiring out from any US Car rental company, I don't know exactly which ones use the tracking though. Let's see how the "speeding" charges will be applied ;-)
Although I wonder how big the unit would have to be to be effective enough.. i.e. if it is as big as those old mobile phones (before the brick sized ones, more like a briefcase) then I doubt the average traveller would be bothered, but I suppose anyone who has come across any GPS tracking fines then they might like this quite a bit.
Just my $0.02
Nooooooo!
Until the language becomes more popular and depending on the stability, etc.. it should be C/=0 !!
But then again, it could have been called E, but that letter on it's own might have evoked images of a certain little pill... remember Intel upheld it's PC (political correctness, not personal computer) brigade when they decided to "re-number" the 666Mhz P3 chip as being 667Mhz (AFAIK) so you can never tell with companies these days.
Oh well, at least *nix creators had a sense of humour when creating commands so that you could "finger user" ;-)
Currently has 30 registered user accounts, with expected rapid growth as people cease being broke.
This part is also right before the CounterCentral number of 860... there is certainly going to be rapid growth in traffic as well as interest.
Oh, and are there enough people out there who will "cease being broke"... the inverse of which now also happens to be the state of their site!
If it doesn't pan out, and gets a little "hot" from all the hype... it evaporates into vaporware ;-)
I just couldn't resist saying that!