Except that night vision devices aren't restricted to a single wavelength. Night goggles only amplify the light in the whole spectrum. The whole thing, not a single wavelength. The output is converted to monochrome to stimulate the more sensitive rod cells. By limiting color output the pupil stays more dilated and can gather more light. Its the same thing with astronomical telescopes. You read your maps with a red light and you get eyes pieces with exit pupil matching your night time pupil diameter.
Think of it like sliced bread. Suppose that 95% of the general public is happy with sliced bread. Will a chef decide that his restaurent should now have sliced bread in the basket before a meal? Of course not. The chef will look for bread that the people who are critical to bread like. Go in a CS research lab in a university and notice how few people use Windows. Thats what Graham means: some people whose taste is critical to the industry don't want your sliced bread anymore, they want Italian bread with olive oil.
The first people to arrive were probably the ones who posted the con post. When you do something suspicious, always have a good reason to be where you are, before things start to get be border line. Even people from your group are queried individually, they all tell the same story.
On a personal workstation I rsync/home and apt-get stuff when I need it. On a server I pre-install all the stuff the former server had (dpkg --[gs]et-selections) and hand-tweak/etc (diff -r is your friend). But if this is just yet another box for the lab I simply clone it with udpcast. If all the non-distro stuff is installed in the right place you can just rsync/opt and restore a few symlinks in/usr/local/bin. It might be a good idea to build the new box by restoring your backups, that way you know the restoration will work. You can put a lot of stuff rc.local/bootmisc.sh to make a single image work with many different setups. I really don't know how I would do that on Windows.
UFO sightings are not on the rise. If you have the opportunity to hang around the right circles, you'll notice that a _lot_ of persons believe they saw UFOs, ghosts and things like that. Sometimes they just want attention but often they really believe it. What has changed is that major news agencies repport those sighting. I think they figured that their credibility is not a stake anymore.
How about a new TCP instead of a new IP? If we crank the port fields to 64 bits we can make almost infinite NAT. The only routing equipments that will need to be changed are the ones between the ISP and the end user. We can still keep the least significant 16 bits where they are and put the rest at the end of the header. That way we are almost backward compatible. I'm ignoring a lot of realevent details but could a new TCP postpone IPv6 adoption for another decade?
How many gigawatts are wasted on SETI@home? They pretend that computation is free and anything that looks like a funny pattern, they search for it. Most of the patterns don't make sense at all. People crank-up their energy bill just to have their name on some nonsense top-100. Distributed computing is a good thing and giving away your spare cycle is nice but don't think that those cycles are free. If you decide to give your cycles away, please choose a project that does more than just massaging data. SETI is like Hummers, it offers an opportunity to boost your ego by wasting energy.
What do you suggest? A distribution is nothing more than a set software repackaged so that they will work together. Most packages are nothing more than the compiled binaries and a machine parsable list of dependencies. But, many packages are hacked by the distro maintainers to ensure that they will work according to the distro guidelines. The job of the developper is to code, the job of the maintainer is to integrate and this is good.
Distros are different because they have different target markets and different priorities. There are distros made to fit on a floppy, distros made for desktops, distros for server and there are several niche markets well served by their own distros. If a developper want to ensure that his code works well on all those environment, he will have to run them all. He shouldn't. He may well try a few popular systems and you can be sure that on his target market the README in his tarball will be accurate. Yes, that's not easy for the average user, thats the price that we pay for the flexibility of being able to make all those distros.
I don't know how to solve the installation problem. So far, relying on distribution maintainers to do the integration is what works the best. There could be some sort of source package for a typical distro; in fact, there are a few of those. The problem, I think, is to define what is typical distro is.
I don't mean to be existential about this but why?
You are perfectly right. We've had a hard time with the economy lately and there is a big mess of misunderstanding going on in the Middle-East. If we are to spend money somewhere, it should be to teach those Ottomans that the spice must flow. Damn this Columbus and his foolish dreams of explorations.
We could send gigantic space telescopes. As soon as we detect a gas giant there, we know it will get some place for a stable orbit. After that it may of may not detect a telluric body (Earth-like planet) but once there it will help us a lot. It won't be far enough to see stuff that local space scopes won't see but it will be far enough to use parallax and find accurate distances of the stuff outhere.
They should smash it against a comet. There is nothing to bring back anyway. Why now use it to extract useful spectrum data instead? Especially if they are out of fuel, there will be less noise the organics lines, assuming the standard hydrazine propellant. We already know that ion engines work, what are they trying to show? On the other hand, we know that there are organics in comets but we don't know much more than that. Beside, smashing stuff is always fun.
I'm curious when the first GPS tracking watches/braclets for kids are out with a web tool that easily lets parents know where their kids have been/are. That'll sell.
That would be so trivial to defeat that I don't see the point. You just stash the watch in the place where you are supposed to be and you are free. You think about bio-monitoring? Just elect a watch nanny who will put on the watches for the others while they go out. Each person in the gang take its turn as the watch nanny.
They should put the Gimp and Blender. The only way to get the interface of those programs is to start using them really early. There is no hope left for us but please think of the children and don't spoil their only chance!
Don't leave the light on for 24h, you'll get better grow rate with 18h/6h of light/sleep. Even plants need some sleep. I kid you not, just try it out. As for the 12h induced flowering, you'd be surprised by the impact of cutting the light to 12h. The flowering starts only a few days after you cut to 12h. You'll never spend 8 weeks on the flowering cycle; at most 14 days and you can harvest. The response is just amazing. I'm of course talking about tomatoes...
This can work in a corporate environment but you'll have a hard time to enforce it in a school, for example. And remember that the good old bash bomb (:(){:|:& };:) don't leave much trace. With fat clients, when you fork bomb your machine, you are the only one affected. But, I can understand why someone would like to see if it works on the big server too. There are so many ways to kill a system when it thinks you are safe.
Scale down the picture, choose cubic interpolation and you're done. You can't fix the original, the information is scrambled already, but you can use the information of the larger image to average the pixels of the small image to get something clean. When you read X mega-pixels, you should know that this is a scam. There are no camera out there that will give you an image usable at X resolution but you can still have pretty pictures at X/2 (which is roughly 3/4 of the side on the original).
Well if the topic is weight loss, one major problem is that we never adapted to more efficient storage for energy. It might have made sense to eat three meals a day not too long ago but we now have food that pack a lot more energy per pound. The food being greasy isn't a problem at all. It is not taking that into account that is a problem. If you switch to one fat meal a day, you won't get fat and you won't lack energy. It's not rocket science to compute that one large poutine is worth three meals, at least. OK how about vitamins and stuff like that? Well, they sell pills filled with those which is convenient enough. Now, you save a lot of cooking time and you can re-invest it in one extra, tasty, healthy, long-to-cook meal in you week. This meal will feel a lot better because thats the one meal you creatively make and you have time to elaborate it. The first few days you feel gastric irritation at the time you used to eat but in less than a week you are fully adapted and you have no second thought about not eating. In fact you can skip eating a few days in a row without any problems. You only feel hungry for about an hour at meal time. Any hardcore gamer knows that...
I didn't visit many cities but I find striking how Montreal and San Francisco are pedestrian friendly. Yeah both have massive outer sprawl but the core cities have this distinct quality that makes you far better off in them without a car. In both case the geography kept the whole thing compact; both are pretty much surrounded by water. You propose to simulate artificially the effect of geography. This might work but I still have doubts. Montreal and San Francisco got compact before mass transit. In fact, I live in Montreal and I don't own a car and I don't use the mass transit: I walk all the time. In Montreal mass transit contributes to sprawling. People in the sprawl drive to a train station and take the train to get into the core city. When they open a new train station, the region around it turns into a sprawl.
I will add that there are no tolls in Montreal. We have three main bridges and one tunnel, all extra crowded. People use mass transit to avoid them naturally, no artificial incentive is required. Mass transit is good and we should promote it but if I look at the current pedestrian friendly cities, mass transit is not what makes them good to live it. There is something else, some kind of magic that developed a long time ago. I suspect the effect of harbor and downtown ports. In other word you don't want to find a way to move people around more efficiently, you want to create a strong economic focal point right in the middle of the core city. People will move there naturally.
If you are right then two terms for the same thing is already too many and we don't need something as silly as "FOSS". You can disagree about the dichotomy but only a stroustrupian philosopher will dodge the issue with concatenation of all the options.
Don't say "FOSS". If you mean free software, write free software; if you mean open source, write open source, write open source; if you don't know the difference, look it up because there is one and it does matter. By using an empty term like "FOSS" you alienate both worlds by you lack of commitment. I bet some people even pronounce it like "fuss". This is removing all the meaning that was left from the term.
I didn't look at the site (/. effect) but the Shootout sounds like a good place to get a list of tasks implemented in several languages. You even get arbitrary, but still usefull, metrics like the line-of-code count, run time and memory usage. If someone has time to waste coding trivial tasks in his favorite language, he should contribute to the shootout. I did and I must admit I got a kick when a few well placed suggestions cranked the performance of my entry. Today Common Lisp is faster than Pascal and OCaml, tomorrow we beat Fortran and C++!
As far as I can tell, there are only 3 such racks on display: one in the Googleplex lobby, one in the Computer History Museum and one that is shipped to expositions here and there. Our balance is still off by several hundred racks... Where did the other ones go?
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Except that night vision devices aren't restricted to a single wavelength. Night goggles only amplify the light in the whole spectrum. The whole thing, not a single wavelength. The output is converted to monochrome to stimulate the more sensitive rod cells. By limiting color output the pupil stays more dilated and can gather more light. Its the same thing with astronomical telescopes. You read your maps with a red light and you get eyes pieces with exit pupil matching your night time pupil diameter.
Think of it like sliced bread. Suppose that 95% of the general public is happy with sliced bread. Will a chef decide that his restaurent should now have sliced bread in the basket before a meal? Of course not. The chef will look for bread that the people who are critical to bread like. Go in a CS research lab in a university and notice how few people use Windows. Thats what Graham means: some people whose taste is critical to the industry don't want your sliced bread anymore, they want Italian bread with olive oil.
The first people to arrive were probably the ones who posted the con post. When you do something suspicious, always have a good reason to be where you are, before things start to get be border line. Even people from your group are queried individually, they all tell the same story.
On a personal workstation I rsync /home and apt-get stuff when I need it. On a server I pre-install all the stuff the former server had (dpkg --[gs]et-selections) and hand-tweak /etc (diff -r is your friend). But if this is just yet another box for the lab I simply clone it with udpcast. If all the non-distro stuff is installed in the right place you can just rsync /opt and restore a few symlinks in /usr/local/bin. It might be a good idea to build the new box by restoring your backups, that way you know the restoration will work. You can put a lot of stuff rc.local/bootmisc.sh to make a single image work with many different setups. I really don't know how I would do that on Windows.
UFO sightings are not on the rise. If you have the opportunity to hang around the right circles, you'll notice that a _lot_ of persons believe they saw UFOs, ghosts and things like that. Sometimes they just want attention but often they really believe it. What has changed is that major news agencies repport those sighting. I think they figured that their credibility is not a stake anymore.
How about a new TCP instead of a new IP? If we crank the port fields to 64 bits we can make almost infinite NAT. The only routing equipments that will need to be changed are the ones between the ISP and the end user. We can still keep the least significant 16 bits where they are and put the rest at the end of the header. That way we are almost backward compatible. I'm ignoring a lot of realevent details but could a new TCP postpone IPv6 adoption for another decade?
How many gigawatts are wasted on SETI@home? They pretend that computation is free and anything that looks like a funny pattern, they search for it. Most of the patterns don't make sense at all. People crank-up their energy bill just to have their name on some nonsense top-100. Distributed computing is a good thing and giving away your spare cycle is nice but don't think that those cycles are free. If you decide to give your cycles away, please choose a project that does more than just massaging data. SETI is like Hummers, it offers an opportunity to boost your ego by wasting energy.
What do you suggest? A distribution is nothing more than a set software repackaged so that they will work together. Most packages are nothing more than the compiled binaries and a machine parsable list of dependencies. But, many packages are hacked by the distro maintainers to ensure that they will work according to the distro guidelines. The job of the developper is to code, the job of the maintainer is to integrate and this is good.
Distros are different because they have different target markets and different priorities. There are distros made to fit on a floppy, distros made for desktops, distros for server and there are several niche markets well served by their own distros. If a developper want to ensure that his code works well on all those environment, he will have to run them all. He shouldn't. He may well try a few popular systems and you can be sure that on his target market the README in his tarball will be accurate. Yes, that's not easy for the average user, thats the price that we pay for the flexibility of being able to make all those distros.
I don't know how to solve the installation problem. So far, relying on distribution maintainers to do the integration is what works the best. There could be some sort of source package for a typical distro; in fact, there are a few of those. The problem, I think, is to define what is typical distro is.
We could send gigantic space telescopes. As soon as we detect a gas giant there, we know it will get some place for a stable orbit. After that it may of may not detect a telluric body (Earth-like planet) but once there it will help us a lot. It won't be far enough to see stuff that local space scopes won't see but it will be far enough to use parallax and find accurate distances of the stuff outhere.
They should smash it against a comet. There is nothing to bring back anyway. Why now use it to extract useful spectrum data instead? Especially if they are out of fuel, there will be less noise the organics lines, assuming the standard hydrazine propellant. We already know that ion engines work, what are they trying to show? On the other hand, we know that there are organics in comets but we don't know much more than that. Beside, smashing stuff is always fun.
They should put the Gimp and Blender. The only way to get the interface of those programs is to start using them really early. There is no hope left for us but please think of the children and don't spoil their only chance!
Don't leave the light on for 24h, you'll get better grow rate with 18h/6h of light/sleep. Even plants need some sleep. I kid you not, just try it out. As for the 12h induced flowering, you'd be surprised by the impact of cutting the light to 12h. The flowering starts only a few days after you cut to 12h. You'll never spend 8 weeks on the flowering cycle; at most 14 days and you can harvest. The response is just amazing. I'm of course talking about tomatoes...
This can work in a corporate environment but you'll have a hard time to enforce it in a school, for example. And remember that the good old bash bomb (:(){ :|:& };:) don't leave much trace. With fat clients, when you fork bomb your machine, you are the only one affected. But, I can understand why someone would like to see if it works on the big server too. There are so many ways to kill a system when it thinks you are safe.
Yet, all the servers are just a fork bomb away from death. How do you prevent something like that if you need to let the users run arbitrary commands?
Scale down the picture, choose cubic interpolation and you're done. You can't fix the original, the information is scrambled already, but you can use the information of the larger image to average the pixels of the small image to get something clean. When you read X mega-pixels, you should know that this is a scam. There are no camera out there that will give you an image usable at X resolution but you can still have pretty pictures at X/2 (which is roughly 3/4 of the side on the original).
You know you could just type whois in your favorite terminal right?
Well if the topic is weight loss, one major problem is that we never adapted to more efficient storage for energy. It might have made sense to eat three meals a day not too long ago but we now have food that pack a lot more energy per pound. The food being greasy isn't a problem at all. It is not taking that into account that is a problem. If you switch to one fat meal a day, you won't get fat and you won't lack energy. It's not rocket science to compute that one large poutine is worth three meals, at least. OK how about vitamins and stuff like that? Well, they sell pills filled with those which is convenient enough. Now, you save a lot of cooking time and you can re-invest it in one extra, tasty, healthy, long-to-cook meal in you week. This meal will feel a lot better because thats the one meal you creatively make and you have time to elaborate it. The first few days you feel gastric irritation at the time you used to eat but in less than a week you are fully adapted and you have no second thought about not eating. In fact you can skip eating a few days in a row without any problems. You only feel hungry for about an hour at meal time. Any hardcore gamer knows that...
I didn't visit many cities but I find striking how Montreal and San Francisco are pedestrian friendly. Yeah both have massive outer sprawl but the core cities have this distinct quality that makes you far better off in them without a car. In both case the geography kept the whole thing compact; both are pretty much surrounded by water. You propose to simulate artificially the effect of geography. This might work but I still have doubts. Montreal and San Francisco got compact before mass transit. In fact, I live in Montreal and I don't own a car and I don't use the mass transit: I walk all the time. In Montreal mass transit contributes to sprawling. People in the sprawl drive to a train station and take the train to get into the core city. When they open a new train station, the region around it turns into a sprawl.
I will add that there are no tolls in Montreal. We have three main bridges and one tunnel, all extra crowded. People use mass transit to avoid them naturally, no artificial incentive is required. Mass transit is good and we should promote it but if I look at the current pedestrian friendly cities, mass transit is not what makes them good to live it. There is something else, some kind of magic that developed a long time ago. I suspect the effect of harbor and downtown ports. In other word you don't want to find a way to move people around more efficiently, you want to create a strong economic focal point right in the middle of the core city. People will move there naturally.
If you are right then two terms for the same thing is already too many and we don't need something as silly as "FOSS". You can disagree about the dichotomy but only a stroustrupian philosopher will dodge the issue with concatenation of all the options.
Don't say "FOSS". If you mean free software, write free software; if you mean open source, write open source, write open source; if you don't know the difference, look it up because there is one and it does matter. By using an empty term like "FOSS" you alienate both worlds by you lack of commitment. I bet some people even pronounce it like "fuss". This is removing all the meaning that was left from the term.
I didn't look at the site (/. effect) but the Shootout sounds like a good place to get a list of tasks implemented in several languages. You even get arbitrary, but still usefull, metrics like the line-of-code count, run time and memory usage. If someone has time to waste coding trivial tasks in his favorite language, he should contribute to the shootout. I did and I must admit I got a kick when a few well placed suggestions cranked the performance of my entry. Today Common Lisp is faster than Pascal and OCaml, tomorrow we beat Fortran and C++!
As far as I can tell, there are only 3 such racks on display: one in the Googleplex lobby, one in the Computer History Museum and one that is shipped to expositions here and there. Our balance is still off by several hundred racks... Where did the other ones go?