Gibson has great themes but he has a hard time to write in a manner that won't become obsolete. In Neuromancer, the hero is to make a little fortune by selling a few stolen RAM dimms. Why did Gibson think that is was a good idea to specify that they totaled 5 Mb?
I'm reading Rendez-vous with Rama at the moment and even though the action if way further into the future, I don't think that it will become obsolete anytime soon. Clarke puts the focus on character interactions, not on endless descriptions techno-gadgets. Gibson is, in a sense, the Tolkien of science fiction.
I'm glad that he did put forward the cyber-punk genre but I don't enjoy it through him. If, like me, you like the Gibson's universe but not his prose, watch Ghost in the Shell, you'll be delighted.
Well, the queen only mate once and the male dies long before she lays her first eggs. Bees, ants and a few others have a sperm keeping organ that they fill once and tap into the rest of their life. So some dead bees do reproduce. Ain't evolution a wonderful thing?
But, bees are not native to America, they were brought by Europeans. So, more cellphone calls is a good thing for the First Nations because it restores the land as it was back then. They should pay us so we make more calls.
The relation between Starcraft and Starship Troopers might not be direct but you have to admit that Warhammer 40k is heavily inspired by Heinlein's universe. I never played Warhammer 40k, is the government structure also modeled on Starship Troopers?
Why didn't they call the game Starship Troopers? I read the novel recently and in light of the official Starcraft 2 trailer, it seems clear that those marines are as close to Mobile Infantry as you can get. That and the fact that Zergs are without doubts modeled on the Bugs. Are Protos the Skinnies? Hard to tell. Starcraft has a rich universe and when you play the game, you just want to know more about it. Basing it on an existing story would definitely add to the in-game folklore. I guess they wanted to save a few bucks on royalties. It's kind of sad because Starship Troopers should be in the public domain by now and Disney proved that re-telling and old (public domain) story with a new medium gives it a new life. I still recommend Starship Trooper to all Starcraft players. You will really feel the universe expanding with a rich social critic and the emotional challenges of a trooper in the Bugs War.
Probably the only game that is simple enough to be taugth it in 5 minutes and still take a lifetime to master. Even better, the handicap system is trivial, just give the weakest player a few extra stones to begin with. With handicap, almost anyone can have fun and be challenged when they play together. In fact, to master Go, you probably need to isolate yourself on a desert island for a few years.
GPG is used daily to sign releases and histories and patches on several revision control systems. I guess you mean signing for runtime loading like in ACS. When patches signing with GPG was implemented in GNU Arch, I remember someone said on the mailing list: "I'd rather have a key signed by Manoj than one signed by the pope". I think that this represent well how decentralized trust (GPG, PGP) compares with centralized trust (SSL). Centralized trust works if you trust the CA. But, being the CA gives you enough power to get corrupted. So we end up with Verisign on top of all the CAs and we don't really trust anything. I really like how signing is implemented in GIT.
I usually keep a few torrent seeds up just to be sure that I use all those excess electrons. Why upload boring emails when you can upload pr0n^W ubuntu isos?
Cloning machines has several advantages. With a set of a few images you can ensure that each month you start with clean boxen. People will learn really fast that important stuff should be on the network drive. Usually, the people who really need to customize their system themselves can be trusted with the updates so you just skip the cloning for those. OK, I admit that doesn't do so well in a Windows network. A major annoyance is that it won't update the machine id after the cloning. On GNU/Linux you can fix that kind of stuff in rc.local but I don't know how to do it with Windows. Ghost might be a smart investment.
Indeed, Stoner played a key role in the M16 development. When I wrote "anonymous panel", I really meant "faceless panel". Stoner's design went thought the bureaucratic process and was revised by others. His key contribution was dug up later by enthusiasts but the M16 was never branded as the work of a great man as the AK47 was. I do not pretend that M16 was designed by bozos, what I claim is that linking the AK47 to Mikhail Kalashnikov greatly contributed to its legendary status. I'm sorry if my sloppy writing shocked your the national pride of anyone.
It is also a question of attitude. Kalashnikov was a war hero who designed a weapon he would have liked to have when he was out there. The M16 was designed by an anonymous panel of engineers, most of whom probably never went under fire. When a Red Army soldier wielded his weapon, he had this feeling of triumph of the individuals when collectivism gave them the opportunity to express their talent. Kalashnikov himself had a lot of attitude, someone you can relate too. He even have his own brand of vodka. The AK47 was a usable device of propaganda. I think that the complaints against the current high-tech gears is exactly the alienation of faceless industrial product that Marx warned about. Isn't it ironic that it is the US who end up producing bland stuff without attitude? The free market in the US has a lot of attitude but it seems that this vital force that gives products their identity decided to completely avoid anything related to bureaucracy.
I simply can't find a rational explanation to the great satisfaction that we get from waiting till the very last hour. Why is that? It must be something hardwired in our DNA because it is wide spread in the population. It happens all the time: if we can postpone, we do. Why didn't we find a miracle cure to this chronic procrastination? Why individuals without the chronic procrastination syndrome didn't outperm all the others in the gene pool? What kind of evolutionary benefit do we get from procrastination? I imagine a remote ancestor talking to a fellow neanderthal: why hurry for this dangerous mammoth hunt when we can sit back and enjoy procreation?
You highlight the value of vinyl here: performance. I first want to mention that even though some high price CD players with pitch control and scratch pad probably offer all what you need, there is no standard interface to access those features yet. What is a DJ to do? Carry all his equipment with him? Some do but if you can handle a turntable you can expect to find all what you need already plugged wherever you go. A vinyl also has the advantage of displaying the waveform (scroll down a bit). Some digital players do, most don't.
But the true value of vinyl is performance. After all, if there is a DJ instead of a pre-mixed recording it's probably because people want a show. There is something stimulating in seeing the vinyls doing backflips and the DJs clamping the headset with his shoulder. He could do all his stuff with a laptop and a mouse but that would not look as good. With the demanding live performance of the DJ, the dancers feel that someone is working hard just for them, they feel some kind of exclusivity. Early electronic band understood the importance of performance a long time ago. Both signers of Front 242 could just press play and jump around on the stage. Yet, they prefer to hire musicians for shows. Others like Wumpscut prefer not to do live performance because they feel that it would be be way too close to a karaoke. Drum machines did not replace drummers and you will see DJs flipping vinyls in raves and top dance clubs for the years to come. Any technical argument is completely missing the point.
Have you seen and heard a DJ with vinyls? I mean, a real DJ, someone who mixes. I was peacefully sipping some malt liquor at a random electro industrial bar on a slow day. It was probably in the middle of the week; I recall that we were no more than five in the place. An electro industrial bar is not a place where you expect a skillful DJ. You expect a DJ knowledgable in the latest trends with a huge collection of obscure music that he had from download^W import from Germany or something like that. Songs go one after the other and there is some effort to keep that BPM constant and to make the transition beat-into-beat. I thought that this was the essence of mixing. Then, out of nowhere, came this rave DJ. He was actually a former electro industrial DJ who was visiting his former workplace. And he made a set.
I don't know how to describe the experience. He started a hard song on the CD player (Funker Vogt I think) then he attacked the turntable. He started with a Depeche Mode vinyls, and I hear you scream at the idea of eletro pop being mixed with Funker Vogt, but what he did was brilliant. He jumped on the EQ and isolated the good baseline so typical of Depeche Mode and gently blended it into the hard stuff, just the baseline. A moment later the vinyl was doing backflips over his head; he wanted to plug in voice sample that was on the other side. It was almost instantaneous, he waved his hand over the EQ, the voice sample played, the vinyl flipped again and we were back with the baseline. We assume that vinyls have poor seek time but, in the hand of an expert, a vinyl will seeks much faster than a CD. The DJ continued his dance, mixing in some elements of trance and goa, building an elecro industrial song out of other songs from a wide repertoire of electronic music. When he left, he was not the resident DJ after all, nothing was the same anymore.
I had discover that mixing was in fact a form of composition but it was all gone. I now pay attention to the work of the DJ. The DJ is an artist an his medium is extremely expressive. A good DJ will keep the dancefloor full but only a greet DJ will coerce people into dehydration and renal failure. When I see a DJ lifting the dusty cover of the turntable, I know that I'm in for a good show. I keep the ear open and I enjoy this rare skill that the CD almost killed.
But, if everyone is free to jump in with his own gun, how does the improvised sniper tell the improvised tactical ops from the real mad gunman? Real tactical ops have a really tight communication channel to minimize the probability of errors. I sure would not feel safe if my life was protected by a trigger happy random snipper. The world is much better without vigilantes. Didn't we learn since the lynchings?
Bees are the main pollinator for many crops but I doubt that humanity can't survive without bees. Bees were brought to America by the European settlers. Therefore I would expect that there is an efficient natural mechanism for beeless pollination of corn, potato, and red kidney bean, among others. Native Americans had decent agriculture without bees and we showed that their main crops can be cultivated on an industrial scale. Sure, live without honey would be insipid but please keep the apocalyptic scenario for asteroid impacts and the second coming of Black Death.
It has many applications in astronomy. During the winter, the only expedition to climb to the top of the Mauna Kea are to fill the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium tanks of those huge telescopes. We don't realize it but getting pretty picture in IR requires that you more of less shut down the black body radiation of your optics. With liquid helium they cool the CCDs to 4.5 Kelvin. They use so much of the stuff that they need to fill the tanks every other week. I admit that I have no idea how big is the said tank but laser cooling would open the way to mostly unattended (think orbital) telescopes for a much broader part of the spectrum. At the moment we send IR orbital scopes with big tanks of liquid helium which is dead lift weight that could be used for larger optics and we drop the scopes in the ocean when they run out of the stuff. Spitzer, unlike Hubble, will be useless soon and will not be able to perform observations even if all the mechanical and electronics are still in top condition. If you ever visit the Mauna Kea, notice the frost patches inside the observatory. It's kind of cold up there but the best experience is inside the observatory: it's freezing, everyone is dizzy after climbing the stair (the air is really thin) and you see all those big pipes with cryo-steam. It feels like the visit to the cryo chamber in Akira.
The hole is there for the pressure to be released when hot air expands. You are right, a HD needs air to float the heads. But, if the working temperature is stable, you don't need the tiny hole and the HD can be sealed with air or some inert gas inside.
The design with the Cray 2 was a bit excessive. They just had the heat reach fluorinert's boiling point and there was a vapor collector and a condensor tower. As you'll recall, the temperature of a liquid will not never exceed the boiling point until it all turned to vapor. That's why car are water cooled. If you have insufficient heat transfer from the radiator, the vapor pressure blows the cap and you have a really visual feedback that it's time to stop. You won't damage anything if you stop before you evaporate all your coolant. Fluorinert boiled at 56 C, a convenient temperature that makes it safe to work around the computer. Oil boils at 175 C. If you have a few boiling racks you will not want humans in your server room and you'll probably burn down your air cooled servers. Oil cooled system will not used the clever technique used by Cray: no pump or other circulatory system was needed and working temperature was ultra stable. Fluorinert and oil cooling are completely different things and I don't think you can compare them.
I recently made a 12h train trip and fortunately there wasn't too many people hooked to their phone. That probably wouldn't be a problem since you can walk away and sit somewhere else in the train. But, there indeed was a teen who talked non-stop between Philadelphia and Washinton DC. Was it a problem? Not really. You can always have music or ear plugs. The ambient noise on a plane is high enough to justify ear plugs anyway. I don't like cellphones but I think that banning them because you are in a public place is a bit far fetched. Should we ban live conversations too? Should we ban farts? You can aways stay home if you feel that others are a problem to your well being.
You describe an optic only amplifier while I had a CCD-base one in mind. But, as someone else posted, the color range limitation was essentially with the output and had little to do with the input. But I'm curious, did everyone moved to CCD or is the optic amplifier still used? What would be the adventage? Less parts that would break?
Serious applications don't use an emitter. When you shine a large spotlight on an area, IR or not, you tell everyone where you are. But even with an IR spotlight, you are not within a single wave length. An IR spotlight it little more than an incandescent light that shines its peak in IR, with possibly a filter to block the visible emission since you'll emit some if you want a reasonable output. You get the whole continuum. I have not idea how the technology could be used to block night vision and the article is short on details.
Slashdot Mirror
Gibson has great themes but he has a hard time to write in a manner that won't become obsolete. In Neuromancer, the hero is to make a little fortune by selling a few stolen RAM dimms. Why did Gibson think that is was a good idea to specify that they totaled 5 Mb?
I'm reading Rendez-vous with Rama at the moment and even though the action if way further into the future, I don't think that it will become obsolete anytime soon. Clarke puts the focus on character interactions, not on endless descriptions techno-gadgets. Gibson is, in a sense, the Tolkien of science fiction.
I'm glad that he did put forward the cyber-punk genre but I don't enjoy it through him. If, like me, you like the Gibson's universe but not his prose, watch Ghost in the Shell, you'll be delighted.
Well, the queen only mate once and the male dies long before she lays her first eggs. Bees, ants and a few others have a sperm keeping organ that they fill once and tap into the rest of their life. So some dead bees do reproduce. Ain't evolution a wonderful thing?
But, bees are not native to America, they were brought by Europeans. So, more cellphone calls is a good thing for the First Nations because it restores the land as it was back then. They should pay us so we make more calls.
I was referring to Heinlein's novel. Verhoeven's film is really far from the book. In fact, he admitted that he didn't even bother to read it.
The relation between Starcraft and Starship Troopers might not be direct but you have to admit that Warhammer 40k is heavily inspired by Heinlein's universe. I never played Warhammer 40k, is the government structure also modeled on Starship Troopers?
Why didn't they call the game Starship Troopers? I read the novel recently and in light of the official Starcraft 2 trailer, it seems clear that those marines are as close to Mobile Infantry as you can get. That and the fact that Zergs are without doubts modeled on the Bugs. Are Protos the Skinnies? Hard to tell. Starcraft has a rich universe and when you play the game, you just want to know more about it. Basing it on an existing story would definitely add to the in-game folklore. I guess they wanted to save a few bucks on royalties. It's kind of sad because Starship Troopers should be in the public domain by now and Disney proved that re-telling and old (public domain) story with a new medium gives it a new life. I still recommend Starship Trooper to all Starcraft players. You will really feel the universe expanding with a rich social critic and the emotional challenges of a trooper in the Bugs War.
Probably the only game that is simple enough to be taugth it in 5 minutes and still take a lifetime to master. Even better, the handicap system is trivial, just give the weakest player a few extra stones to begin with. With handicap, almost anyone can have fun and be challenged when they play together. In fact, to master Go, you probably need to isolate yourself on a desert island for a few years.
I takes a bit of work to invert only one part and stay grammatically correct but Sécurité en Terme de Formats Indésirables would work.
GPG is used daily to sign releases and histories and patches on several revision control systems. I guess you mean signing for runtime loading like in ACS. When patches signing with GPG was implemented in GNU Arch, I remember someone said on the mailing list: "I'd rather have a key signed by Manoj than one signed by the pope". I think that this represent well how decentralized trust (GPG, PGP) compares with centralized trust (SSL). Centralized trust works if you trust the CA. But, being the CA gives you enough power to get corrupted. So we end up with Verisign on top of all the CAs and we don't really trust anything. I really like how signing is implemented in GIT.
I usually keep a few torrent seeds up just to be sure that I use all those excess electrons. Why upload boring emails when you can upload pr0n^W ubuntu isos?
... but it's rarely worth the effort. Just repport to your favorite real time block list and we'll thank you.
Cloning machines has several advantages. With a set of a few images you can ensure that each month you start with clean boxen. People will learn really fast that important stuff should be on the network drive. Usually, the people who really need to customize their system themselves can be trusted with the updates so you just skip the cloning for those. OK, I admit that doesn't do so well in a Windows network. A major annoyance is that it won't update the machine id after the cloning. On GNU/Linux you can fix that kind of stuff in rc.local but I don't know how to do it with Windows. Ghost might be a smart investment.
Indeed, Stoner played a key role in the M16 development. When I wrote "anonymous panel", I really meant "faceless panel". Stoner's design went thought the bureaucratic process and was revised by others. His key contribution was dug up later by enthusiasts but the M16 was never branded as the work of a great man as the AK47 was. I do not pretend that M16 was designed by bozos, what I claim is that linking the AK47 to Mikhail Kalashnikov greatly contributed to its legendary status. I'm sorry if my sloppy writing shocked your the national pride of anyone.
It is also a question of attitude. Kalashnikov was a war hero who designed a weapon he would have liked to have when he was out there. The M16 was designed by an anonymous panel of engineers, most of whom probably never went under fire. When a Red Army soldier wielded his weapon, he had this feeling of triumph of the individuals when collectivism gave them the opportunity to express their talent. Kalashnikov himself had a lot of attitude, someone you can relate too. He even have his own brand of vodka. The AK47 was a usable device of propaganda. I think that the complaints against the current high-tech gears is exactly the alienation of faceless industrial product that Marx warned about. Isn't it ironic that it is the US who end up producing bland stuff without attitude? The free market in the US has a lot of attitude but it seems that this vital force that gives products their identity decided to completely avoid anything related to bureaucracy.
I simply can't find a rational explanation to the great satisfaction that we get from waiting till the very last hour. Why is that? It must be something hardwired in our DNA because it is wide spread in the population. It happens all the time: if we can postpone, we do. Why didn't we find a miracle cure to this chronic procrastination? Why individuals without the chronic procrastination syndrome didn't outperm all the others in the gene pool? What kind of evolutionary benefit do we get from procrastination? I imagine a remote ancestor talking to a fellow neanderthal: why hurry for this dangerous mammoth hunt when we can sit back and enjoy procreation?
You highlight the value of vinyl here: performance. I first want to mention that even though some high price CD players with pitch control and scratch pad probably offer all what you need, there is no standard interface to access those features yet. What is a DJ to do? Carry all his equipment with him? Some do but if you can handle a turntable you can expect to find all what you need already plugged wherever you go. A vinyl also has the advantage of displaying the waveform (scroll down a bit). Some digital players do, most don't.
But the true value of vinyl is performance. After all, if there is a DJ instead of a pre-mixed recording it's probably because people want a show. There is something stimulating in seeing the vinyls doing backflips and the DJs clamping the headset with his shoulder. He could do all his stuff with a laptop and a mouse but that would not look as good. With the demanding live performance of the DJ, the dancers feel that someone is working hard just for them, they feel some kind of exclusivity. Early electronic band understood the importance of performance a long time ago. Both signers of Front 242 could just press play and jump around on the stage. Yet, they prefer to hire musicians for shows. Others like Wumpscut prefer not to do live performance because they feel that it would be be way too close to a karaoke. Drum machines did not replace drummers and you will see DJs flipping vinyls in raves and top dance clubs for the years to come. Any technical argument is completely missing the point.
Have you seen and heard a DJ with vinyls? I mean, a real DJ, someone who mixes. I was peacefully sipping some malt liquor at a random electro industrial bar on a slow day. It was probably in the middle of the week; I recall that we were no more than five in the place. An electro industrial bar is not a place where you expect a skillful DJ. You expect a DJ knowledgable in the latest trends with a huge collection of obscure music that he had from download^W import from Germany or something like that. Songs go one after the other and there is some effort to keep that BPM constant and to make the transition beat-into-beat. I thought that this was the essence of mixing. Then, out of nowhere, came this rave DJ. He was actually a former electro industrial DJ who was visiting his former workplace. And he made a set.
I don't know how to describe the experience. He started a hard song on the CD player (Funker Vogt I think) then he attacked the turntable. He started with a Depeche Mode vinyls, and I hear you scream at the idea of eletro pop being mixed with Funker Vogt, but what he did was brilliant. He jumped on the EQ and isolated the good baseline so typical of Depeche Mode and gently blended it into the hard stuff, just the baseline. A moment later the vinyl was doing backflips over his head; he wanted to plug in voice sample that was on the other side. It was almost instantaneous, he waved his hand over the EQ, the voice sample played, the vinyl flipped again and we were back with the baseline. We assume that vinyls have poor seek time but, in the hand of an expert, a vinyl will seeks much faster than a CD. The DJ continued his dance, mixing in some elements of trance and goa, building an elecro industrial song out of other songs from a wide repertoire of electronic music. When he left, he was not the resident DJ after all, nothing was the same anymore.
I had discover that mixing was in fact a form of composition but it was all gone. I now pay attention to the work of the DJ. The DJ is an artist an his medium is extremely expressive. A good DJ will keep the dancefloor full but only a greet DJ will coerce people into dehydration and renal failure. When I see a DJ lifting the dusty cover of the turntable, I know that I'm in for a good show. I keep the ear open and I enjoy this rare skill that the CD almost killed.
But, if everyone is free to jump in with his own gun, how does the improvised sniper tell the improvised tactical ops from the real mad gunman? Real tactical ops have a really tight communication channel to minimize the probability of errors. I sure would not feel safe if my life was protected by a trigger happy random snipper. The world is much better without vigilantes. Didn't we learn since the lynchings?
Bees are the main pollinator for many crops but I doubt that humanity can't survive without bees. Bees were brought to America by the European settlers. Therefore I would expect that there is an efficient natural mechanism for beeless pollination of corn, potato, and red kidney bean, among others. Native Americans had decent agriculture without bees and we showed that their main crops can be cultivated on an industrial scale. Sure, live without honey would be insipid but please keep the apocalyptic scenario for asteroid impacts and the second coming of Black Death.
It has many applications in astronomy. During the winter, the only expedition to climb to the top of the Mauna Kea are to fill the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium tanks of those huge telescopes. We don't realize it but getting pretty picture in IR requires that you more of less shut down the black body radiation of your optics. With liquid helium they cool the CCDs to 4.5 Kelvin. They use so much of the stuff that they need to fill the tanks every other week. I admit that I have no idea how big is the said tank but laser cooling would open the way to mostly unattended (think orbital) telescopes for a much broader part of the spectrum. At the moment we send IR orbital scopes with big tanks of liquid helium which is dead lift weight that could be used for larger optics and we drop the scopes in the ocean when they run out of the stuff. Spitzer, unlike Hubble, will be useless soon and will not be able to perform observations even if all the mechanical and electronics are still in top condition. If you ever visit the Mauna Kea, notice the frost patches inside the observatory. It's kind of cold up there but the best experience is inside the observatory: it's freezing, everyone is dizzy after climbing the stair (the air is really thin) and you see all those big pipes with cryo-steam. It feels like the visit to the cryo chamber in Akira.
The hole is there for the pressure to be released when hot air expands. You are right, a HD needs air to float the heads. But, if the working temperature is stable, you don't need the tiny hole and the HD can be sealed with air or some inert gas inside.
The design with the Cray 2 was a bit excessive. They just had the heat reach fluorinert's boiling point and there was a vapor collector and a condensor tower. As you'll recall, the temperature of a liquid will not never exceed the boiling point until it all turned to vapor. That's why car are water cooled. If you have insufficient heat transfer from the radiator, the vapor pressure blows the cap and you have a really visual feedback that it's time to stop. You won't damage anything if you stop before you evaporate all your coolant. Fluorinert boiled at 56 C, a convenient temperature that makes it safe to work around the computer. Oil boils at 175 C. If you have a few boiling racks you will not want humans in your server room and you'll probably burn down your air cooled servers. Oil cooled system will not used the clever technique used by Cray: no pump or other circulatory system was needed and working temperature was ultra stable. Fluorinert and oil cooling are completely different things and I don't think you can compare them.
I recently made a 12h train trip and fortunately there wasn't too many people hooked to their phone. That probably wouldn't be a problem since you can walk away and sit somewhere else in the train. But, there indeed was a teen who talked non-stop between Philadelphia and Washinton DC. Was it a problem? Not really. You can always have music or ear plugs. The ambient noise on a plane is high enough to justify ear plugs anyway. I don't like cellphones but I think that banning them because you are in a public place is a bit far fetched. Should we ban live conversations too? Should we ban farts? You can aways stay home if you feel that others are a problem to your well being.
You describe an optic only amplifier while I had a CCD-base one in mind. But, as someone else posted, the color range limitation was essentially with the output and had little to do with the input. But I'm curious, did everyone moved to CCD or is the optic amplifier still used? What would be the adventage? Less parts that would break?
Serious applications don't use an emitter. When you shine a large spotlight on an area, IR or not, you tell everyone where you are. But even with an IR spotlight, you are not within a single wave length. An IR spotlight it little more than an incandescent light that shines its peak in IR, with possibly a filter to block the visible emission since you'll emit some if you want a reasonable output. You get the whole continuum. I have not idea how the technology could be used to block night vision and the article is short on details.