Slashdot is a blog, created in the context of a news site, which we all come to and bitch about things we want out of technology, think is/are cool, and/or hate and want everyone to know why.
That being said, Google (along with other large search engines) have already taken stances on blogging, and are actively pursuing their individual stances. For most, this is creating their own blog service, and doing some shifting in their code to make sure blogs don't come out on top. But this isn't an absolute truth.
If you want these things, and Google doesn't offer them, make your own search engine, and do it better. No, seriously, don't look at me like I'm crazy; there have been over a dozen "major" search engines created after Google, some are only in serious use by geeky populations (AlltheWeb, as far as I can tell, fits this), some by the trendy, some by the "I hate Google"ites, etc. etc. It's as simple as that.
One reason I think Google's strayed from taking such a hardline on blogs is simply out of ease of use. Google doesn't want to complicate life with a million more search options, especially ones you can deal with yourself by subtracting out the majorly offensive sites (-livejournal -blogger -blogspot, etc).
Umm, don't normal nuclear reactors require the waste be stored somewhere?
If we used fusion reactors, this wouldn't be such a problem, but all attempts as of yet have failed to make fusion an energy-profittable system.
For fission to work right, we really need to use the fuel up. Current laws say that you're tapped out once you've fissed just a tiny fraction of the energy available. This means more mining for more uranium, which means even more environmental damage.
Windmills are closer to being non-environmentally harmful... more birds will die due to loss of living realestate than due to running into a fan blade.
Better yet, solar panels (or even heatpipe-driven systems) are infinitely profitable. Build them once (huge cost, I know.. but isn't any energy facility?) and they'll suck down power for as long as you want them to. Most are constructed ruggedly enough to take just about any kind of abuse; they've gotta sit under the sun 10 hours a day!!
With a heatpipe system, it'd be like running a geothermal system in reverse. Not sure at the feasability of this for power creation, but we should definitely investigate it out west, in the desert where most of the sun's energy is going to waste anyways.
This planet is powered by sunlight, as around 95% of the organisms require it to make food, regulate sleeping patterns, etc.
Personally I think the ring's a dumb idea as well for mostly the same reason, even though a ring would still permit a great deal of light around it.
Besides, I know I'm not the only one who will miss looking up into the sky and seeing the infinite brightness. I'd say the whole world would have to agree on something like this, and I know I'm not the only one who'd contest.
Well, I would agree with you, but there are a few problems with your conclusions.
Cells work with vectors and floating point numbers. While this is great normally for video games and such, this is kinda horrible for control/branch operations. Human minds are MIMD, not SIMD or MISD, therefore we don't transfer into machines well.
I like the idea of implementing a learning system based on the electrical activity in our minds, I just don't think it'll work. We issue instructions on the neuron-to-neuron basis, much like a CPU issues micro-ops on a logic unit-to-logic unit basis. We don't really have the ability to read the data with that kind of resolution.
I'd call the POWER processor closer to a human brain cell. At least each of its onboard CPUs has an independent unit for control, integer and float math.
Pfft. Here at my school, we have an Internet2 connection. And what do we use it for? Well, besides the legitimate uses, there is some closet filetrading that occurs.. full lenght movies at the speed of life.
We're lucky to have our bandwidth, but I wouldn't exactly call it "much needed". More like "much wanted". I personally am surprised there aren't Internet2 connections (and IPv6, for all of my random computing things) to the home yet.
Sounds to me that Factiva would make a great subsidiary of either Yahoo or Google, along with all of the other companies you've mentioned.
Google's large enough now to start doing what Yahoo did back when it first went public; mass acquisition. There are hundreds of smaller companies that have a lot to offer Google now, and I'm sure Google's got their eyes open.
Heh, you could always program a macro so you actually would HAVE a key that does ctrl+alt+del. That would be bad ass..
Re:Bad solution to a problem which is already solv
on
New Keyboard Technology
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That claw doesn't look to comfortable to me...
I have CTS (Carpal Tunnel) and my wrist bones have been fused in both hands since birth. I can't use any funky gadget like that one.
However.. having a keyboard where I could put the keys anywhere I want is a rediculously great trade up for me, and it'll help speed up my typing even more. One of the problems I have with English are the letters like Q and X. I'd much rather have a button like "Qu" and "Ch", or how about "Ea" and "ou", or any other super common letter combination. With the built in macro recorder, I could have my buttons exactly as I want them.
The only disappointment really is that this isn't a tap screen. I've been wanting a touchpad keyboard for some time that allowed for reconfigurable letter definitions.. Perhaps I'll get around to building it one of these days.
RAID is a means to an end. I never said it was a backup medium; the hard drive is the medium in which RAID operates.
RAID controllers are a great way of mirroring data on a drive, without having to run a program to do it. If you're worried about accidental file deletion, you've got a LOT more to be worried about, especially with digital media. If you've ever worked with it, you know that there's almost never a reason to delete anything. I know people who still have video clips from work they did in the early 90's on their macs. In fact, I know a lot of people who simply use hard drives as "write only" memory, with absolutely no intent on going back to the information in the next year.
As for the linux-HA guys who say not to buy the same disk drives, that's their personal preference. Linux people tend to like older, more strange hardware, and that's good for them. But to us in the business who need things to work, we like to buy in bulk, a lot of the same drive. That way when one or two do go defective, you can get them replaced in an array with an identical match. And you can bet once you up the hard drive count above 5 that at least one of them will be defective.
Lastly, timestamps are unreliable. You never know when a machine will have a bad system clock, or won't sync correctly with a time server. MD5's are (AFAIK) still reliable (Yes, I have heard of some people who've broken it, but I don't believe they've done it for trivial cases yet). But it's still one more piece of information you have to keep up with..
The problem with data retention is simply that it's messy and expensive, and there's a hundred million ways you could never think of that something could go wrong (ever heard of the moths that ate old tapes? That'd really suck. How about a freak event like a solar storm to wipe a few bits here and there from a drive? These things are crazy, but they do happen.. (well.. maybe not that last one, but it gives you something to think about..:).
Sorry if I seemed trollish.. but you just went into a lot of application specific detail that I didn't want to go into myself.. It's a lot of work designing those backup systems and failsafes.
Yeah, but in three weeks if your system dies, you can completely recover with RAID; with tape it can be done, but it takes much longer to restore, and check for data integrity. With RAID, the integrity is built in.
People trying to argue RAID isn't a backup medium obviously don't understand backup. RAID is just a means of getting two copies of the same data on different hard disks. *You* are the one responsible for making sure that data is safe past that (which goes to my suggestion of storing the set of parity drives in a firesafe location).
Quality hard drives are built to last. Especially if they sit around, not moving, in a static free environment. Sure, they have more failure points, but that's not what I'm arguing, and that's not what backing up to harddrive is for. And for the last time, RAID is a means to an end.
The thing about a Game competition is, that it allows for so many different strategies, that anyone can come up with one, code it, bring it to life, and have a chance to win. Therefore, games make really good contests.
Of course any game competiton will run many different iterations due to the fact that so many things either have to be randomly generated, and the bots my behave differently in different environments.
The thing is, if this was a program to do database sorting, nobody would care (or anything else randomly that can pop off your head; let's face facts that most programming tasks suck. That's why we're writing the damned program in the first place, so that someone doesn't have to do it by hand!!!). So really, it is best practices to make a competition a gaming competition.
These particular rule sets, I'm not very happy with, but that's personal reasoning. And any game theorist will tell you that anyone's got a fair shot at this; the search space is so great that nobody will have any marvolous breakthroughs, and it's more of a game of chance. And everyone knows contests of chance are more fun (Texas Holdem anyone?):-D
While RAID was originally meant for data security, availability, and consistancy, it has a lot of other applications that weren't in it's original design.
First of all, disks are *so cheap* these days, hard drives are a more than acceptable backup medium. As disks tend to be identical in size and construction if you buy in batches, disk-to-disk backup is quite the good system, just as long as you don't always keep the disks in the same location (aka, not even on the same controller! *gasp*)
Secondly, you went into a lot of specifics that I didn't care to; a lot of backup systems are custom tailored to the situation.. so while this kind of system might work great for you, I doubt if it would work so well in this case, especially. Digital media tends to be very non-compressible, very volatile media. That being said, operations like MD5 are very crucial to insure the data from one location matches another, which means even more precautious MD5 storing measures. You're also dealing with larger files which means rdiff is almost entirely out of the question.. I could go on and on about different, application specific schemes, but I feel I did good enough with suggesting three different mediums and to have at least two copies of two of them, preferably in 4 different locations.
If he recorded on MiniDV, then GREAT, there's never a reason to tape over the master copy of anything!!
But most of the time, it's a digital camera, where it's flash ram it's recording to. For digital video, it's most likely in need of some editing which is the whole reason to bring it into the computer anyways, which is when you need to start the backup proceedure.
I concurr. For digital media, I would definitely do two of at least two different back up strategies.
First that comes to mind is Tape backup. They store huge about of data, and are very cheap these days, and have been proven to last for a while. Keep a good backup schedule, and keep one copy of the tapes offsite.
Secondly, I'd do optical. Optical's cheaper, but it's also not as long lasting, and takes longer to make the actual back up.
Thirdly, I'd do RAID. Mirror all the files onto a second set of hard drives. If you really want to get paranoid, mirror onto two sets of drives, and once a week swap out a copy of mirrored drives from a fireproof location.
If your data is truely irreplacable, then this is a good regiment. But it's also very expensive.. so you'll have to make up your mind.
Actually, I would expect them to have an animated game transcript. Last time I programmed in a challenge like this (GNU Robots in PHP basically), I built an ASCII library for all of the graphics processing.. of course this was pre-AJAX, so it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been..
And yes, the game is actually too hard. That's the whole point; it's a fair game. Nobody's going to have any chance better than anyone else unless they design their algorithms correctly. That takes all of the guesswork out of the game, and ensures the playing field is fair. It also adds a lot of variability to the game, allowing for a huge amount of possible attacks at the game.
It's often best practices to make a contest be a game programming contest; people like games. People like to code interesting projects. Luckily this puts them together.
Before you pass it off as "too simplistic" or not "deeper", that game probably has well over 10^30 different possible configurations, easily defeating similar games like Chess, and on par with games like Go.
These are the kinds of things that really bring out the talented coders.. people who can design the algorithms, people who can figure out the internals of the game, and not just the coders who write code for a living. I can't wait to see the results; I'd work on it myself if I could.
I can't believe nobody has seen this yet. One of the constant user annoyances is that your machine won't boot/shut down fast enough. Well with Suspend to Flash Ram, you are able to close your laptop, take out your battery, and leave it in the closet for two months, come back, put the battery back (assuming it's charged), open it up and be **exactly** where you were before you shut down.
It's been something I've wanted for years. Flash is now cheap enough to use as a secondary storage/boot drive. So why not?
The problem is, you made an assertion, where another person doesn't make the same assertion.
Certainly, raster bitmaps (as they are in images) can also be represented as vector bitmaps (as they are in text; think linear storage matrix), or as Fourier matricies, or as (...). While the human eye can look at such a pattern and quickly grep a certain meaning, another organism's eye may look at the same pattern and grep an entire different meaning.
The quickest example I can think of is a colored bitmap. What colorspace are you using? RGB, we'll assume. So what order are the colors in the image? Red Blue Green? Perhaps Blue Green Red. And what if they made a different assertion about the color space? Perhaps another being uses CMYK natively, and a 3 byte colorspace then becomes an aliased 4 byte colorspace, distorting the image to noise.
The problem is assertion. We can't make broad assertions when making translations, especially when we are dealing with assertions to something as significant or insignificant as a bit. (something we'd have to assert as two values;)
If you want to think about it further, all data we generate inside of a computer is a "bitmap". A certain number of "bits" will "map" to a certain object. Thus, your entire argument really doesn't make much sense, and still reveals the former problem, "how do you read something without knowing how to read it?". Your bitmaps could be interpreted in 16, 28, 64, 13, any number of different combinations of bits, and technically be just as correct any other logical implementation, even if it doesn't produce the same conclusion.
The problem is, we need to pass the "map" portion of the "bitmap" on. Aliens won't be able to read our bitmaps simply because they won't understand what maps to what bits. If we can convey that message to them, then we have conveyed the message. We first need to pass the concepts of "bits", then the concept that a pattern of "bits", "map" to something. Then we need to pass the information of what exactly they map to. Then, and only then, can they perform the last step of the translation from bitmap to image.
The problem is not a simple one, and there is no right answer yet, simply because we haven't ran into any "aliens", or people in which we have absolutely no cultural, physical, or logical common ground to. Even with nations as dissimilar as Japan and England, for example, we have common objects in which we can use to pass meaning. With an alien race, we might not be so lucky. Eventually we will find a way to overcome the problem, but only when the problem is actually occuring; there's no way to "prepare" for an alien species other than to be ready to have an open mind and some lucky would be handy.
Your problem is not one alone; it's a very common problem. How do you read anything without the direct knowledge of the language?
The answer is a common translator table, which you hinted to in your own post. If not for the Rosetta stone, we would have no translation for heiroglyphs, and that written language would be entirely lost to us.
It really wouldn't matter if you left something written in english emblazed on a wall, in stone, or on an old floppy disk inside of an old floppy drive. A person in 1000 years couldn't read it, regardless, because (hopefully) in a thousand years, nobody will speak our version of English.
What matters is our persistance in open standards. The more people who know how to read it, the more people will pass the knowledge on. That's all that matters in this case.
By the way, G.E.B's an awesome book. Make sure you keep a copy on your shelf.
The belief that one can use a weapon as a deterrence is what leads to arms races. We may be one of the few nations with nuclear arms, but I bet with the option, I know hundreds of little countries that wouldn't mind having nuclear weapons, of course, only for "deterrence" use.
Besides, isn't it a bit cowardly to fling stuff at people from long distances? Why not flaunt our skills at training personel instead of our skills as engineers on who can build the better mouse trap?
I see no peacetime use for a ballistics missile. Besides, I have a personal disfavor to using missiles to launch satellites; while they may be cheap, they also waste a great deal of their mass in doing so.
Besides the reasons "because two's better than one" and "two proves it wasn't a fluke attack", the two bombs were of different designs, "Little boy" and "Fat man".
Outside of using it to stop war, we also used it as a weapons test, among other things. We hadn't set off too many of these massively powerful devices yet, and we wanted to know which would be the better war-time design.
Now, we know a lot more about the weapons; enough to know that either design wasn't so good, and that newer weapons are massively more powerful in different configurations.
I would probably respond to this as Germany (if you hadn't said WW1), with the invention of the modern missile. Aerodynamic, indescriminate, capable of delivering hundreds and thousands of lbs of explosives while not being in range of a counter attack.
Aircraft are a valid answer, but aircraft also have peacetime value. I can't honestly think of any peace time value of a missile.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is a blog, created in the context of a news site, which we all come to and bitch about things we want out of technology, think is/are cool, and/or hate and want everyone to know why.
That being said, Google (along with other large search engines) have already taken stances on blogging, and are actively pursuing their individual stances. For most, this is creating their own blog service, and doing some shifting in their code to make sure blogs don't come out on top. But this isn't an absolute truth.
If you want these things, and Google doesn't offer them, make your own search engine, and do it better. No, seriously, don't look at me like I'm crazy; there have been over a dozen "major" search engines created after Google, some are only in serious use by geeky populations (AlltheWeb, as far as I can tell, fits this), some by the trendy, some by the "I hate Google"ites, etc. etc. It's as simple as that.
One reason I think Google's strayed from taking such a hardline on blogs is simply out of ease of use. Google doesn't want to complicate life with a million more search options, especially ones you can deal with yourself by subtracting out the majorly offensive sites (-livejournal -blogger -blogspot, etc).
Umm, don't normal nuclear reactors require the waste be stored somewhere?
If we used fusion reactors, this wouldn't be such a problem, but all attempts as of yet have failed to make fusion an energy-profittable system.
For fission to work right, we really need to use the fuel up. Current laws say that you're tapped out once you've fissed just a tiny fraction of the energy available. This means more mining for more uranium, which means even more environmental damage.
Windmills are closer to being non-environmentally harmful... more birds will die due to loss of living realestate than due to running into a fan blade.
Better yet, solar panels (or even heatpipe-driven systems) are infinitely profitable. Build them once (huge cost, I know.. but isn't any energy facility?) and they'll suck down power for as long as you want them to. Most are constructed ruggedly enough to take just about any kind of abuse; they've gotta sit under the sun 10 hours a day!!
With a heatpipe system, it'd be like running a geothermal system in reverse. Not sure at the feasability of this for power creation, but we should definitely investigate it out west, in the desert where most of the sun's energy is going to waste anyways.
we still need sunlight to live.
This planet is powered by sunlight, as around 95% of the organisms require it to make food, regulate sleeping patterns, etc.
Personally I think the ring's a dumb idea as well for mostly the same reason, even though a ring would still permit a great deal of light around it.
Besides, I know I'm not the only one who will miss looking up into the sky and seeing the infinite brightness. I'd say the whole world would have to agree on something like this, and I know I'm not the only one who'd contest.
Well, I would agree with you, but there are a few problems with your conclusions.
Cells work with vectors and floating point numbers. While this is great normally for video games and such, this is kinda horrible for control/branch operations. Human minds are MIMD, not SIMD or MISD, therefore we don't transfer into machines well.
I like the idea of implementing a learning system based on the electrical activity in our minds, I just don't think it'll work. We issue instructions on the neuron-to-neuron basis, much like a CPU issues micro-ops on a logic unit-to-logic unit basis. We don't really have the ability to read the data with that kind of resolution.
I'd call the POWER processor closer to a human brain cell. At least each of its onboard CPUs has an independent unit for control, integer and float math.
Pfft. Here at my school, we have an Internet2 connection. And what do we use it for? Well, besides the legitimate uses, there is some closet filetrading that occurs.. full lenght movies at the speed of life.
We're lucky to have our bandwidth, but I wouldn't exactly call it "much needed". More like "much wanted". I personally am surprised there aren't Internet2 connections (and IPv6, for all of my random computing things) to the home yet.
Sounds to me that Factiva would make a great subsidiary of either Yahoo or Google, along with all of the other companies you've mentioned.
Google's large enough now to start doing what Yahoo did back when it first went public; mass acquisition. There are hundreds of smaller companies that have a lot to offer Google now, and I'm sure Google's got their eyes open.
Heh, you could always program a macro so you actually would HAVE a key that does ctrl+alt+del. That would be bad ass..
That claw doesn't look to comfortable to me...
I have CTS (Carpal Tunnel) and my wrist bones have been fused in both hands since birth. I can't use any funky gadget like that one.
However.. having a keyboard where I could put the keys anywhere I want is a rediculously great trade up for me, and it'll help speed up my typing even more. One of the problems I have with English are the letters like Q and X. I'd much rather have a button like "Qu" and "Ch", or how about "Ea" and "ou", or any other super common letter combination. With the built in macro recorder, I could have my buttons exactly as I want them.
The only disappointment really is that this isn't a tap screen. I've been wanting a touchpad keyboard for some time that allowed for reconfigurable letter definitions.. Perhaps I'll get around to building it one of these days.
RAID is a means to an end. I never said it was a backup medium; the hard drive is the medium in which RAID operates.
:).
RAID controllers are a great way of mirroring data on a drive, without having to run a program to do it. If you're worried about accidental file deletion, you've got a LOT more to be worried about, especially with digital media. If you've ever worked with it, you know that there's almost never a reason to delete anything. I know people who still have video clips from work they did in the early 90's on their macs. In fact, I know a lot of people who simply use hard drives as "write only" memory, with absolutely no intent on going back to the information in the next year.
As for the linux-HA guys who say not to buy the same disk drives, that's their personal preference. Linux people tend to like older, more strange hardware, and that's good for them. But to us in the business who need things to work, we like to buy in bulk, a lot of the same drive. That way when one or two do go defective, you can get them replaced in an array with an identical match. And you can bet once you up the hard drive count above 5 that at least one of them will be defective.
Lastly, timestamps are unreliable. You never know when a machine will have a bad system clock, or won't sync correctly with a time server. MD5's are (AFAIK) still reliable (Yes, I have heard of some people who've broken it, but I don't believe they've done it for trivial cases yet). But it's still one more piece of information you have to keep up with..
The problem with data retention is simply that it's messy and expensive, and there's a hundred million ways you could never think of that something could go wrong (ever heard of the moths that ate old tapes? That'd really suck. How about a freak event like a solar storm to wipe a few bits here and there from a drive? These things are crazy, but they do happen.. (well.. maybe not that last one, but it gives you something to think about..
Sorry if I seemed trollish.. but you just went into a lot of application specific detail that I didn't want to go into myself.. It's a lot of work designing those backup systems and failsafes.
Yeah, but in three weeks if your system dies, you can completely recover with RAID; with tape it can be done, but it takes much longer to restore, and check for data integrity. With RAID, the integrity is built in.
People trying to argue RAID isn't a backup medium obviously don't understand backup. RAID is just a means of getting two copies of the same data on different hard disks. *You* are the one responsible for making sure that data is safe past that (which goes to my suggestion of storing the set of parity drives in a firesafe location).
Quality hard drives are built to last. Especially if they sit around, not moving, in a static free environment. Sure, they have more failure points, but that's not what I'm arguing, and that's not what backing up to harddrive is for. And for the last time, RAID is a means to an end.
The thing about a Game competition is, that it allows for so many different strategies, that anyone can come up with one, code it, bring it to life, and have a chance to win. Therefore, games make really good contests.
:-D
Of course any game competiton will run many different iterations due to the fact that so many things either have to be randomly generated, and the bots my behave differently in different environments.
The thing is, if this was a program to do database sorting, nobody would care (or anything else randomly that can pop off your head; let's face facts that most programming tasks suck. That's why we're writing the damned program in the first place, so that someone doesn't have to do it by hand!!!). So really, it is best practices to make a competition a gaming competition.
These particular rule sets, I'm not very happy with, but that's personal reasoning. And any game theorist will tell you that anyone's got a fair shot at this; the search space is so great that nobody will have any marvolous breakthroughs, and it's more of a game of chance. And everyone knows contests of chance are more fun (Texas Holdem anyone?)
While RAID was originally meant for data security, availability, and consistancy, it has a lot of other applications that weren't in it's original design.
First of all, disks are *so cheap* these days, hard drives are a more than acceptable backup medium. As disks tend to be identical in size and construction if you buy in batches, disk-to-disk backup is quite the good system, just as long as you don't always keep the disks in the same location (aka, not even on the same controller! *gasp*)
Secondly, you went into a lot of specifics that I didn't care to; a lot of backup systems are custom tailored to the situation.. so while this kind of system might work great for you, I doubt if it would work so well in this case, especially. Digital media tends to be very non-compressible, very volatile media. That being said, operations like MD5 are very crucial to insure the data from one location matches another, which means even more precautious MD5 storing measures. You're also dealing with larger files which means rdiff is almost entirely out of the question.. I could go on and on about different, application specific schemes, but I feel I did good enough with suggesting three different mediums and to have at least two copies of two of them, preferably in 4 different locations.
If he recorded on MiniDV, then GREAT, there's never a reason to tape over the master copy of anything!!
But most of the time, it's a digital camera, where it's flash ram it's recording to. For digital video, it's most likely in need of some editing which is the whole reason to bring it into the computer anyways, which is when you need to start the backup proceedure.
I concurr. For digital media, I would definitely do two of at least two different back up strategies.
First that comes to mind is Tape backup. They store huge about of data, and are very cheap these days, and have been proven to last for a while. Keep a good backup schedule, and keep one copy of the tapes offsite.
Secondly, I'd do optical. Optical's cheaper, but it's also not as long lasting, and takes longer to make the actual back up.
Thirdly, I'd do RAID. Mirror all the files onto a second set of hard drives. If you really want to get paranoid, mirror onto two sets of drives, and once a week swap out a copy of mirrored drives from a fireproof location.
If your data is truely irreplacable, then this is a good regiment. But it's also very expensive.. so you'll have to make up your mind.
Actually, I would expect them to have an animated game transcript. Last time I programmed in a challenge like this (GNU Robots in PHP basically), I built an ASCII library for all of the graphics processing.. of course this was pre-AJAX, so it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been..
And yes, the game is actually too hard. That's the whole point; it's a fair game. Nobody's going to have any chance better than anyone else unless they design their algorithms correctly. That takes all of the guesswork out of the game, and ensures the playing field is fair. It also adds a lot of variability to the game, allowing for a huge amount of possible attacks at the game.
Artifical Intellengence.
It's often best practices to make a contest be a game programming contest; people like games. People like to code interesting projects. Luckily this puts them together.
Before you pass it off as "too simplistic" or not "deeper", that game probably has well over 10^30 different possible configurations, easily defeating similar games like Chess, and on par with games like Go.
These are the kinds of things that really bring out the talented coders.. people who can design the algorithms, people who can figure out the internals of the game, and not just the coders who write code for a living. I can't wait to see the results; I'd work on it myself if I could.
News moves at such a slow rate on this site, that it's often aliased against other sites, losing details..
Still a good site for discussion, however.
I can't believe nobody has seen this yet. One of the constant user annoyances is that your machine won't boot/shut down fast enough. Well with Suspend to Flash Ram, you are able to close your laptop, take out your battery, and leave it in the closet for two months, come back, put the battery back (assuming it's charged), open it up and be **exactly** where you were before you shut down.
It's been something I've wanted for years. Flash is now cheap enough to use as a secondary storage/boot drive. So why not?
The problem is, you made an assertion, where another person doesn't make the same assertion.
;)
Certainly, raster bitmaps (as they are in images) can also be represented as vector bitmaps (as they are in text; think linear storage matrix), or as Fourier matricies, or as (...). While the human eye can look at such a pattern and quickly grep a certain meaning, another organism's eye may look at the same pattern and grep an entire different meaning.
The quickest example I can think of is a colored bitmap. What colorspace are you using? RGB, we'll assume. So what order are the colors in the image? Red Blue Green? Perhaps Blue Green Red. And what if they made a different assertion about the color space? Perhaps another being uses CMYK natively, and a 3 byte colorspace then becomes an aliased 4 byte colorspace, distorting the image to noise.
The problem is assertion. We can't make broad assertions when making translations, especially when we are dealing with assertions to something as significant or insignificant as a bit. (something we'd have to assert as two values
If you want to think about it further, all data we generate inside of a computer is a "bitmap". A certain number of "bits" will "map" to a certain object. Thus, your entire argument really doesn't make much sense, and still reveals the former problem, "how do you read something without knowing how to read it?". Your bitmaps could be interpreted in 16, 28, 64, 13, any number of different combinations of bits, and technically be just as correct any other logical implementation, even if it doesn't produce the same conclusion.
The problem is, we need to pass the "map" portion of the "bitmap" on. Aliens won't be able to read our bitmaps simply because they won't understand what maps to what bits. If we can convey that message to them, then we have conveyed the message. We first need to pass the concepts of "bits", then the concept that a pattern of "bits", "map" to something. Then we need to pass the information of what exactly they map to. Then, and only then, can they perform the last step of the translation from bitmap to image.
The problem is not a simple one, and there is no right answer yet, simply because we haven't ran into any "aliens", or people in which we have absolutely no cultural, physical, or logical common ground to. Even with nations as dissimilar as Japan and England, for example, we have common objects in which we can use to pass meaning. With an alien race, we might not be so lucky. Eventually we will find a way to overcome the problem, but only when the problem is actually occuring; there's no way to "prepare" for an alien species other than to be ready to have an open mind and some lucky would be handy.
Your problem is not one alone; it's a very common problem. How do you read anything without the direct knowledge of the language?
The answer is a common translator table, which you hinted to in your own post. If not for the Rosetta stone, we would have no translation for heiroglyphs, and that written language would be entirely lost to us.
It really wouldn't matter if you left something written in english emblazed on a wall, in stone, or on an old floppy disk inside of an old floppy drive. A person in 1000 years couldn't read it, regardless, because (hopefully) in a thousand years, nobody will speak our version of English.
What matters is our persistance in open standards. The more people who know how to read it, the more people will pass the knowledge on. That's all that matters in this case.
By the way, G.E.B's an awesome book. Make sure you keep a copy on your shelf.
The belief that one can use a weapon as a deterrence is what leads to arms races. We may be one of the few nations with nuclear arms, but I bet with the option, I know hundreds of little countries that wouldn't mind having nuclear weapons, of course, only for "deterrence" use.
Besides, isn't it a bit cowardly to fling stuff at people from long distances? Why not flaunt our skills at training personel instead of our skills as engineers on who can build the better mouse trap?
Perhaps I should have made myself more clear.
I see no peacetime use for a ballistics missile. Besides, I have a personal disfavor to using missiles to launch satellites; while they may be cheap, they also waste a great deal of their mass in doing so.
Besides the reasons "because two's better than one" and "two proves it wasn't a fluke attack", the two bombs were of different designs, "Little boy" and "Fat man".
Outside of using it to stop war, we also used it as a weapons test, among other things. We hadn't set off too many of these massively powerful devices yet, and we wanted to know which would be the better war-time design.
Now, we know a lot more about the weapons; enough to know that either design wasn't so good, and that newer weapons are massively more powerful in different configurations.
I would probably respond to this as Germany (if you hadn't said WW1), with the invention of the modern missile. Aerodynamic, indescriminate, capable of delivering hundreds and thousands of lbs of explosives while not being in range of a counter attack.
Aircraft are a valid answer, but aircraft also have peacetime value. I can't honestly think of any peace time value of a missile.