This price is actually pretty good for science books (although it seems to be a matter of opinion if it belongs in that category). Textbooks and other books in specialized fields quickly go over $100. I usually don't get reluctant to buy a good text until it is over $150. I would guess that this book is almost selling at a loss at that price.
I wasn't planning on buying the book at that price since I didn't think the content was worth that much. But I did buy a damaged, but perfectly readable copy at a good discount (It looks like it literally was used to hold a door open at one point, seems like that is all it is good for anyways).
Wolfram didn't exactly have the best relations with Caltech. A bit after he received his Ph.D., there were intellectual property disputes between him and Caltech over SMP, a predecessor to Mathematica. This caused him to leave Caltech for Princeton.
Unfortunately, I don't have too much information on it since the story varies for source to source. As I have heard it from some professors that were around during the incident, he tried to sell (or otherwise make money from) SMP without asking Caltech's permission first. Although it was technically Caltech's property since it was developed while working a paid job, I've heard some say he could have made money off of it without any problems if he had bothered to simply ask permission first.
(Most Ph.D. students at Caltech and other American institutes don't take classes. They may sit in on one or two classes to pick up a subject they missed. But there are no classes set up for just Ph.D. candidates nor are there any required courses for the degree.)
I read that little comment and lost all respect for the guy and anything else he had to say.
Doesn't this demonstrate one of the needs for privacy? Whether he stole a book or not should not affect the validity of his point. Although some may need such information, such as an employer who could be putting themselves at risk, others have no real use for it.
I guess that just goes along with my answer to those that say "Only those with something to hide want privacy." Maybe I do have something to hide. It doesn't have to be something wrong, just something other people may misuses or have prejudice against, e.g. somebody's beliefs.
A while back I played Asheron's Call and they did find a few ways to rebalance things. I don't remember all of the details since it has been a while, but they did have various economy problems. Some were just slight design mistakes, like being able to buy something at a beginner's town cheap and sell it at a profit in a far away town which became quite serious when money was made weightless (a friend filled almost his entire inventory with money in a short time). Changing prices fixed this. At one point the game raised the prices of spell components, which I imagine even a small increase would result in a huge change in outward cash flow of players (and a bunch of complaints). The last fix I heard was to open "casinos" creating a huge drain on money that seemed to stabilize things. This was around the time I left, so I don't know the long term effects of that.
It would seem any balancing could be done by small changes in the prices of the consumables (seems to apply only to magic stuff in most games), the amount of money dropped by critters, or an increase in the rate things wear out (probably affects fighters more). Since some of this stuff is involves such large volumes, only small changes would be needed, and it can be done on higher quality stuff in order to not screw over newer players.
How much the game is balanced depends on what the designers want. A very well balanced economy would mean that most players would not have much spare money since they spend what they make, which may or may not be a good thing. This would probably make the exchange of game money for real money a lot more difficult.
I think that is taken a little out of context since in general I agree that it doesn't mean squat, but it seems to have some meaning when you are talking about something that is, based on other reasons, expected to work better than other options. Science has made plenty of mistakes in the past, but then what do you do if you are not going to pick what you believe to be the best option? Taken to the extreme, such arguments would basically lead to more of a random choice than of one based on reason. It is one thing to look back and say "We tried what we could and it didn't work" since we would not have known the correct choice, but it is much worse to look back and say "We knew we should have done this, why didn't we do it?" (and by trying something, doing nothing is an option, I am not saying we have "do" something, but doing nothing won't help as far as we currently know). I guess beyond that it comes down to personal philosophy, but I always do what I think is the best choice with my current knowledge.
I guess it is kind of like betting on die. If you see six come up a few times, it might be chance. But if it starts coming up a lot (say 30%) over dozens of roles, then you might as well bet on the six thinking it is a loaded die, otherwise your pick would have been random anyways not making a difference if your "theory" is not correct. As far as you can tell you just increased your chances.
Of course the situation with global warming is much more complex, but we are forced into such a bet since the do nothing (i.e. continue doing things as we do now) is just one side of the die. Whether you think the costs of reducing pollution is too much for its benefits, I guess that is a matter of opinion, but from what we know now, pollution isn't helping the situation.
I agree that the sky is not falling and it should not be viewed that way. But I guess if you want anything done in politics, the environmentalists exaggerate some things to get the politicians to notice.
The media is part of the problem too. By making it look so bad and blaming everything on it, it is becomes like the boy who called wolf story. People just don't trust any of the stuff about global warming and thing that it is some generic excuse with absolutely no evidence. Although almost everyone sees pollution as a bad thing, I have gotten into quite a few arguments with people that do say we should do nothing. They think the cost of inconveniences to people and industry is more than what the damage being done is, so hence there should not be any more regulations related to pollution. I don't agree with this and think that we have the technology to clean things up a lot, it is only a matter of getting the price down.
The parent is at least correct in saying that we don't know how much humans have contributed to the warming, but something is definitely happening. A lot of people seem to complain that we shouldn't do anything since we don't know what the problem is. But what if we find out after it is too late? We don't even know what too late is since small changes on a global scale can throw things way out of whack, possibly in ways we don't even know about.
The analogy I have used in the past is what do you do if you notice that you are starting to gain weight? You never know for sure where that weight comes from. You could just note that a few of ancestors were fat, so it is probably genetic so there is no sense in doing anything. Or you could take a few measures like starting to go to the gym, switching to diet soda, cut back on junk food. There is no doubt that these would help, only a question of how much.
We are pretty sure that greenhouse gases cause the planet to get warmer. So we are contributing to the problem, we just do not know to what degree. So we might as well do what we can in case humans are a significant factor to the problem instead of looking back saying we could have done more. Unfortunately fixing the environment fix after a problem is probably not as easy as it is to loose that bit of extra weight.
My high school teacher calculus teacher did not let us use any calculator. We moaned and complained, but in the end I got really quick with the math which still helps me today. The first test she gave was on finding the trig functions of a bunch of numbers, which required knowing angle addition formulas and such. Now days, I'll be half way through a problem while someone I am working with is still digging through a book or calculator to look up the trig identity in order to start the problem.
But I know that is not for every one since not everyone will need calculus. But I like the idea of not using calculators until the top level class, so that you learn the math first, then how to use the calculator (which is what the calculus teacher did, finally letting us use calculators towards the end of the second year). Otherwise you will get situations that I have seen before. For example I was grading some chemistry homework to find that some students hand wrote numbers exactly as "4e9" or "6e-10". I asked them why they didn't write it in normal scientific notation, they said that they didn't even know what it meant, only copying what came from the calculator (I can't say much for the teacher of that class anyways).
As far as PDA's, they are probably the way to go since I have Maple for a WinCE PDA (got free for something, I wouldn't have bought it on my own) which did way more than the TI-89 and even had a nice interface with buttons on half the screen making it quick to type stuff. But whenever I do math that can't be done on paper now, I am usually within 10 feet of a computer and will use that instead. If my P4 takes an hour to solve something, I doubt the PDA has the battery life to even try.
Tiff's are really flexible and seem to be geared to being really platform independent, like when using different coloring schemes and supporting both Intel and Motorola byte ordering (one less thing the would have to worry about converting...). I have seen, from at least the astronomy part of NASA, that they often use some odd picture formats as they need lossless compression so that they get all that they can from the image. They probably don't want to make a big discovery and later find it was an artifact from the jpeg compression.
I think that was the point I wanted to make. That there are people exposed to levels way beyond what comes from household/office equipment, and the damage is still minor. Like claiming hitting people with toothpicks causes cancer, then observing that hitting someone with a baseball bat will do some direct damage, but still does not seem to cause cancer.
Seriously, this is the one thing that makes me think about these claims of the danger of EM radiation in this energy range. There are large numbers of network people that are around this equipment for long periods of time. The techonology might not have been used long enough to see the effects, but the damage can't be too large. Even more so I think of physicists who are probably exposed to much stronger sources of this stuff, and it seems like they don't have too many problems with it. Even nuclear physicsists who work with real radiation seem to do ok without significant increases in health problems (excluding those overexposed due to accidents, etc, like Curie). Some of the equipment I work on must put out a lot more power then wireless access points or power lines, so I guess I will find out years from now whether I get cancer or not...
If any of this stuff does contribute to cancer, it would probably be a small effect that would be hard to see above the background from other sources and normal cancer rates. I remember a statistician friend showing that looking at the number of people with brain cancer and use cell phones was actually lower than the what is expected from normal cancer rates. I haven't looked much into it, so I don't have any solid sources on the topic.
I've heard stories of sailors using microwave based radar as a heat source when on cold trips. They would stand around the radar unit and get warmed slightly by it. The greatest danager was not really being cooked, but was damage to the eyes as they are suppose to have inefficient internal cooling, so heat easily builds up. I'm not sure how true this is, but heard it from a coast guard officer as a warning for installing radar on boats.
As far as games, it seems that my two monitors have had minimal help. They are great for work, but not really for games. I have a Radeon 9800 Pro which has two outputs on it.
Since most games use one monitor, I leave ICQ or any other program I want to view on the second monitor. But Alt-Tabing to a program on the second monitor still minimizes the game, so I can only view, not use the second monitor with the game. Also a lot of games, especially older ones, generate scrambled graphics on the main monitor unless the second one is deactivated. Other programs have interesting effects to, for example I like having a video going on the second monitor while I do some work on the main one, but the Divx player only works on the main monitor.
There is also the issue of frame rates. With the 9800 I still usually get decent frame rates with two monitors on (sometimes a small drop), but the problems is that some games become jerky, with a burst of fast frames and then it kind of stops for a split second. This is worse than a low frame rate as the skips are much more noticeable. It probably has something to do with how the 9800 does time-distribution of the processing for the monitors.
A lot of this may depend on the graphics card, the fact that I am using one graphics card and not two separate ones, or that I am using Windows XP (at least when gaming). I am still happy when I have two monitors for work, but when gaming it sometimes becomes an annoyance to have to turn the second one on and off.
Depending on how you want to define calculator, I have a PDA like device that runs Maple (which I prefer to Mathematica) by Casio running WinCE (eh...). I got free as some promo and would use it more if I didn't do most of my work in front of a computer. It does have a QWERTY keyboard, so it fails the most common definition of calculator, but easily fits in my pocket. But it was much more powerful than my TI-89 especially since it did more powerful 3d graphing, solving of differential equations, and a more intelligent symbolic manipulation. This version of Maple was not as good as the full computer version, since it gave up easier on some complex solving/integrating. It is not RPN either, but when working with that type of math, I don't think RPN would help much.
That was several years ago and I am not even sure if that model was released to the market. But I would guess there are other PDA's that can run some version Mathematica/Maple/MATLAB.
It seems bad enough to be a postdoc, but I guess being a postdoc in plasma physics is even worse. That combines both #10 postdoc and #18 fusion researcher into a single job.
I can't imagining this costing too much. Unless the mixture has to be perfect and pure, various alcohols are pretty cheap. I can get a gallon of methonal for a few bucks and that should be quite a few refills when diluted and put in a lighter sized cell.
Having dedicated save places, or just saving at the end of a level, etc. is a real pain for someone who wants to stop playing. I remember when I was younger and would have my mother trying to get me to turn off a game while I was trying to find a save point. In similar games now days, it might take a long time to get to the next save point, and I will be tired the next day at work as a result. Being allowed to save at any point is the only solution I can see to this (unless someone more creative can come up with something). The system I liked best was where you were given a limited number of saves to be used anywhere like a quicksave. The only game I played like this was one of the Delta Force games. Although I thought they gave a few too many, the idea worked well. Times I might have quicksaved in other games I had to stop and think if it was worth using one of my remaining saves. This system allows me to leave when I want to (the missions were short enough that I don't use all of the save points up just to leave for something else) and I could use one if I wanted to experiment (there is always a point you wonder "What if I just shoot/blow up this?" but dont want to actually play the whole game with the results). I would like to see more games use this system, possibly with the number of allowed saves controlled by the difficulty level.
I was helping a friend to fix his Dell computer which had some problems with the DVD drive. It would locked up after use, almost certainly a hardware problem. After calling tech support, they said that since we upgraded from the original Windows ME (worst software ever) to Win2k, that we would need to show it was not a software problem. The tech support also said something about Win2k being an OS for professionals and it is not meant for people like us playing games and watching DVD's.
The result was that we installed a WinME partition (it is really hard to downgrade windows) and got them to replace half the computer including the drive. The odd thing was that he could have gotten the computer with win2k by paying a little more and checking a different box when he purchased it, so its not like the computer was not win2k compatable.
We also knew better than to tell them about the Linux partition.
I think this warning is because there is a reasonably large group of adults who take children's medicine due to being too sensitive to take the stronger adult versions.
The most humor I have seen in a C compiler (I had never used an the above one) was in the help files for Turbo C++ 3.0. If you look up the sound() function, the sample code included a story about how 6 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull and how it killed a bunch of chickens next to some factory (no, their heads did not explode).
I am not a big overclocked, but from what I have heard that even though this is within the operating specs (less than 85C), it's best to keep the processor below 50C. My computer is currently runs a little hot. It is at 45 when idle and jumps to 50-55 when gaming or number crunching. I am currently waiting on another case fan to come in the mail.
I do seem some instability at this temperature, but that may be due to my videocard which runs really hot even with a PCI slot fan under it.
It looks like this guy did what I was thinking. I don't have much moeny to invest in my computer, especially since I just upgraded (first time in 4 years), so it would seem water cooling is out of the question. But after talking with some friends, we thought that it could be quite cheap since we have access to machining equipment. With a milling machine it should be pretty simple to make the water blocks from scrap blocks of copper. As a result, all I would need to purchase is a pump and possibly some fans. I wonder how many people have built their own water blocks (I could look it up if I wasn't lazy).
The big advantage I see in water cooling is not the noise reduction or overclocking, but that the radiator could be put anywhere you want as long as you have a long enough hose. I would think that having the radiator mounted outside or by a window with a fan would better than sitting next to a 400 W space heater.
I'm curious how people are getting their high scores, like how high it can go without using a bug. I got a high score of 76,409 by placing the ramps very close together, but with a gap between them. The result is that the guy gets wedged there and the truck also gets stuck and keeps damaging him trying to get over the ramp. The score would have gone higher had it not timed out. I'll post the scores file if someone is interested.
If there were an option for a seatbelt, this might be considered educational software, since it would be a good demo of the difference between using one and not using one. Then again, every one would turn it off to get a higher score and we wouldn't want our entertainment to be educational.
I believe the post was referring to the jump made by US Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger who jumped from roughly 30 km and nearly broke the sound barrier in 1960. His maximum speed was 614 mph, which is about mach 0.91. He probably could have gone faster than sound had he jumped a little higher and/or opened his chute later. Google his name and you will find more info.
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This price is actually pretty good for science books (although it seems to be a matter of opinion if it belongs in that category). Textbooks and other books in specialized fields quickly go over $100. I usually don't get reluctant to buy a good text until it is over $150. I would guess that this book is almost selling at a loss at that price.
I wasn't planning on buying the book at that price since I didn't think the content was worth that much. But I did buy a damaged, but perfectly readable copy at a good discount (It looks like it literally was used to hold a door open at one point, seems like that is all it is good for anyways).
Wolfram didn't exactly have the best relations with Caltech. A bit after he received his Ph.D., there were intellectual property disputes between him and Caltech over SMP, a predecessor to Mathematica. This caused him to leave Caltech for Princeton.
Unfortunately, I don't have too much information on it since the story varies for source to source. As I have heard it from some professors that were around during the incident, he tried to sell (or otherwise make money from) SMP without asking Caltech's permission first. Although it was technically Caltech's property since it was developed while working a paid job, I've heard some say he could have made money off of it without any problems if he had bothered to simply ask permission first.
(Most Ph.D. students at Caltech and other American institutes don't take classes. They may sit in on one or two classes to pick up a subject they missed. But there are no classes set up for just Ph.D. candidates nor are there any required courses for the degree.)
Doesn't this demonstrate one of the needs for privacy? Whether he stole a book or not should not affect the validity of his point. Although some may need such information, such as an employer who could be putting themselves at risk, others have no real use for it.
I guess that just goes along with my answer to those that say "Only those with something to hide want privacy." Maybe I do have something to hide. It doesn't have to be something wrong, just something other people may misuses or have prejudice against, e.g. somebody's beliefs.
A while back I played Asheron's Call and they did find a few ways to rebalance things. I don't remember all of the details since it has been a while, but they did have various economy problems. Some were just slight design mistakes, like being able to buy something at a beginner's town cheap and sell it at a profit in a far away town which became quite serious when money was made weightless (a friend filled almost his entire inventory with money in a short time). Changing prices fixed this. At one point the game raised the prices of spell components, which I imagine even a small increase would result in a huge change in outward cash flow of players (and a bunch of complaints). The last fix I heard was to open "casinos" creating a huge drain on money that seemed to stabilize things. This was around the time I left, so I don't know the long term effects of that.
It would seem any balancing could be done by small changes in the prices of the consumables (seems to apply only to magic stuff in most games), the amount of money dropped by critters, or an increase in the rate things wear out (probably affects fighters more). Since some of this stuff is involves such large volumes, only small changes would be needed, and it can be done on higher quality stuff in order to not screw over newer players.
How much the game is balanced depends on what the designers want. A very well balanced economy would mean that most players would not have much spare money since they spend what they make, which may or may not be a good thing. This would probably make the exchange of game money for real money a lot more difficult.
I think that is taken a little out of context since in general I agree that it doesn't mean squat, but it seems to have some meaning when you are talking about something that is, based on other reasons, expected to work better than other options. Science has made plenty of mistakes in the past, but then what do you do if you are not going to pick what you believe to be the best option? Taken to the extreme, such arguments would basically lead to more of a random choice than of one based on reason. It is one thing to look back and say "We tried what we could and it didn't work" since we would not have known the correct choice, but it is much worse to look back and say "We knew we should have done this, why didn't we do it?" (and by trying something, doing nothing is an option, I am not saying we have "do" something, but doing nothing won't help as far as we currently know). I guess beyond that it comes down to personal philosophy, but I always do what I think is the best choice with my current knowledge.
I guess it is kind of like betting on die. If you see six come up a few times, it might be chance. But if it starts coming up a lot (say 30%) over dozens of roles, then you might as well bet on the six thinking it is a loaded die, otherwise your pick would have been random anyways not making a difference if your "theory" is not correct. As far as you can tell you just increased your chances.
Of course the situation with global warming is much more complex, but we are forced into such a bet since the do nothing (i.e. continue doing things as we do now) is just one side of the die. Whether you think the costs of reducing pollution is too much for its benefits, I guess that is a matter of opinion, but from what we know now, pollution isn't helping the situation.
I agree that the sky is not falling and it should not be viewed that way. But I guess if you want anything done in politics, the environmentalists exaggerate some things to get the politicians to notice.
The media is part of the problem too. By making it look so bad and blaming everything on it, it is becomes like the boy who called wolf story. People just don't trust any of the stuff about global warming and thing that it is some generic excuse with absolutely no evidence. Although almost everyone sees pollution as a bad thing, I have gotten into quite a few arguments with people that do say we should do nothing. They think the cost of inconveniences to people and industry is more than what the damage being done is, so hence there should not be any more regulations related to pollution. I don't agree with this and think that we have the technology to clean things up a lot, it is only a matter of getting the price down.
The parent is at least correct in saying that we don't know how much humans have contributed to the warming, but something is definitely happening. A lot of people seem to complain that we shouldn't do anything since we don't know what the problem is. But what if we find out after it is too late? We don't even know what too late is since small changes on a global scale can throw things way out of whack, possibly in ways we don't even know about.
The analogy I have used in the past is what do you do if you notice that you are starting to gain weight? You never know for sure where that weight comes from. You could just note that a few of ancestors were fat, so it is probably genetic so there is no sense in doing anything. Or you could take a few measures like starting to go to the gym, switching to diet soda, cut back on junk food. There is no doubt that these would help, only a question of how much.
We are pretty sure that greenhouse gases cause the planet to get warmer. So we are contributing to the problem, we just do not know to what degree. So we might as well do what we can in case humans are a significant factor to the problem instead of looking back saying we could have done more. Unfortunately fixing the environment fix after a problem is probably not as easy as it is to loose that bit of extra weight.
My high school teacher calculus teacher did not let us use any calculator. We moaned and complained, but in the end I got really quick with the math which still helps me today. The first test she gave was on finding the trig functions of a bunch of numbers, which required knowing angle addition formulas and such. Now days, I'll be half way through a problem while someone I am working with is still digging through a book or calculator to look up the trig identity in order to start the problem.
But I know that is not for every one since not everyone will need calculus. But I like the idea of not using calculators until the top level class, so that you learn the math first, then how to use the calculator (which is what the calculus teacher did, finally letting us use calculators towards the end of the second year). Otherwise you will get situations that I have seen before. For example I was grading some chemistry homework to find that some students hand wrote numbers exactly as "4e9" or "6e-10". I asked them why they didn't write it in normal scientific notation, they said that they didn't even know what it meant, only copying what came from the calculator (I can't say much for the teacher of that class anyways).
As far as PDA's, they are probably the way to go since I have Maple for a WinCE PDA (got free for something, I wouldn't have bought it on my own) which did way more than the TI-89 and even had a nice interface with buttons on half the screen making it quick to type stuff. But whenever I do math that can't be done on paper now, I am usually within 10 feet of a computer and will use that instead. If my P4 takes an hour to solve something, I doubt the PDA has the battery life to even try.
Tiff's are really flexible and seem to be geared to being really platform independent, like when using different coloring schemes and supporting both Intel and Motorola byte ordering (one less thing the would have to worry about converting...). I have seen, from at least the astronomy part of NASA, that they often use some odd picture formats as they need lossless compression so that they get all that they can from the image. They probably don't want to make a big discovery and later find it was an artifact from the jpeg compression.
I think that was the point I wanted to make. That there are people exposed to levels way beyond what comes from household/office equipment, and the damage is still minor. Like claiming hitting people with toothpicks causes cancer, then observing that hitting someone with a baseball bat will do some direct damage, but still does not seem to cause cancer.
Seriously, this is the one thing that makes me think about these claims of the danger of EM radiation in this energy range. There are large numbers of network people that are around this equipment for long periods of time. The techonology might not have been used long enough to see the effects, but the damage can't be too large. Even more so I think of physicists who are probably exposed to much stronger sources of this stuff, and it seems like they don't have too many problems with it. Even nuclear physicsists who work with real radiation seem to do ok without significant increases in health problems (excluding those overexposed due to accidents, etc, like Curie). Some of the equipment I work on must put out a lot more power then wireless access points or power lines, so I guess I will find out years from now whether I get cancer or not...
If any of this stuff does contribute to cancer, it would probably be a small effect that would be hard to see above the background from other sources and normal cancer rates. I remember a statistician friend showing that looking at the number of people with brain cancer and use cell phones was actually lower than the what is expected from normal cancer rates. I haven't looked much into it, so I don't have any solid sources on the topic.
I've heard stories of sailors using microwave based radar as a heat source when on cold trips. They would stand around the radar unit and get warmed slightly by it. The greatest danager was not really being cooked, but was damage to the eyes as they are suppose to have inefficient internal cooling, so heat easily builds up. I'm not sure how true this is, but heard it from a coast guard officer as a warning for installing radar on boats.
As far as games, it seems that my two monitors have had minimal help. They are great for work, but not really for games. I have a Radeon 9800 Pro which has two outputs on it.
Since most games use one monitor, I leave ICQ or any other program I want to view on the second monitor. But Alt-Tabing to a program on the second monitor still minimizes the game, so I can only view, not use the second monitor with the game. Also a lot of games, especially older ones, generate scrambled graphics on the main monitor unless the second one is deactivated. Other programs have interesting effects to, for example I like having a video going on the second monitor while I do some work on the main one, but the Divx player only works on the main monitor.
There is also the issue of frame rates. With the 9800 I still usually get decent frame rates with two monitors on (sometimes a small drop), but the problems is that some games become jerky, with a burst of fast frames and then it kind of stops for a split second. This is worse than a low frame rate as the skips are much more noticeable. It probably has something to do with how the 9800 does time-distribution of the processing for the monitors.
A lot of this may depend on the graphics card, the fact that I am using one graphics card and not two separate ones, or that I am using Windows XP (at least when gaming). I am still happy when I have two monitors for work, but when gaming it sometimes becomes an annoyance to have to turn the second one on and off.
Depending on how you want to define calculator, I have a PDA like device that runs Maple (which I prefer to Mathematica) by Casio running WinCE (eh...). I got free as some promo and would use it more if I didn't do most of my work in front of a computer. It does have a QWERTY keyboard, so it fails the most common definition of calculator, but easily fits in my pocket. But it was much more powerful than my TI-89 especially since it did more powerful 3d graphing, solving of differential equations, and a more intelligent symbolic manipulation. This version of Maple was not as good as the full computer version, since it gave up easier on some complex solving/integrating. It is not RPN either, but when working with that type of math, I don't think RPN would help much.
That was several years ago and I am not even sure if that model was released to the market. But I would guess there are other PDA's that can run some version Mathematica/Maple/MATLAB.
It seems bad enough to be a postdoc, but I guess being a postdoc in plasma physics is even worse. That combines both #10 postdoc and #18 fusion researcher into a single job.
I can't imagining this costing too much. Unless the mixture has to be perfect and pure, various alcohols are pretty cheap. I can get a gallon of methonal for a few bucks and that should be quite a few refills when diluted and put in a lighter sized cell.
Having dedicated save places, or just saving at the end of a level, etc. is a real pain for someone who wants to stop playing. I remember when I was younger and would have my mother trying to get me to turn off a game while I was trying to find a save point. In similar games now days, it might take a long time to get to the next save point, and I will be tired the next day at work as a result. Being allowed to save at any point is the only solution I can see to this (unless someone more creative can come up with something). The system I liked best was where you were given a limited number of saves to be used anywhere like a quicksave. The only game I played like this was one of the Delta Force games. Although I thought they gave a few too many, the idea worked well. Times I might have quicksaved in other games I had to stop and think if it was worth using one of my remaining saves. This system allows me to leave when I want to (the missions were short enough that I don't use all of the save points up just to leave for something else) and I could use one if I wanted to experiment (there is always a point you wonder "What if I just shoot/blow up this?" but dont want to actually play the whole game with the results). I would like to see more games use this system, possibly with the number of allowed saves controlled by the difficulty level.
I was helping a friend to fix his Dell computer which had some problems with the DVD drive. It would locked up after use, almost certainly a hardware problem. After calling tech support, they said that since we upgraded from the original Windows ME (worst software ever) to Win2k, that we would need to show it was not a software problem. The tech support also said something about Win2k being an OS for professionals and it is not meant for people like us playing games and watching DVD's.
The result was that we installed a WinME partition (it is really hard to downgrade windows) and got them to replace half the computer including the drive. The odd thing was that he could have gotten the computer with win2k by paying a little more and checking a different box when he purchased it, so its not like the computer was not win2k compatable.
We also knew better than to tell them about the Linux partition.
I think this warning is because there is a reasonably large group of adults who take children's medicine due to being too sensitive to take the stronger adult versions.
The most humor I have seen in a C compiler (I had never used an the above one) was in the help files for Turbo C++ 3.0. If you look up the sound() function, the sample code included a story about how 6 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull and how it killed a bunch of chickens next to some factory (no, their heads did not explode).
I am not a big overclocked, but from what I have heard that even though this is within the operating specs (less than 85C), it's best to keep the processor below 50C. My computer is currently runs a little hot. It is at 45 when idle and jumps to 50-55 when gaming or number crunching. I am currently waiting on another case fan to come in the mail.
I do seem some instability at this temperature, but that may be due to my videocard which runs really hot even with a PCI slot fan under it.
It looks like this guy did what I was thinking. I don't have much moeny to invest in my computer, especially since I just upgraded (first time in 4 years), so it would seem water cooling is out of the question. But after talking with some friends, we thought that it could be quite cheap since we have access to machining equipment. With a milling machine it should be pretty simple to make the water blocks from scrap blocks of copper. As a result, all I would need to purchase is a pump and possibly some fans. I wonder how many people have built their own water blocks (I could look it up if I wasn't lazy).
The big advantage I see in water cooling is not the noise reduction or overclocking, but that the radiator could be put anywhere you want as long as you have a long enough hose. I would think that having the radiator mounted outside or by a window with a fan would better than sitting next to a 400 W space heater.
I'm curious how people are getting their high scores, like how high it can go without using a bug. I got a high score of 76,409 by placing the ramps very close together, but with a gap between them. The result is that the guy gets wedged there and the truck also gets stuck and keeps damaging him trying to get over the ramp. The score would have gone higher had it not timed out. I'll post the scores file if someone is interested.
If there were an option for a seatbelt, this might be considered educational software, since it would be a good demo of the difference between using one and not using one. Then again, every one would turn it off to get a higher score and we wouldn't want our entertainment to be educational.
I believe the post was referring to the jump made by US Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger who jumped from roughly 30 km and nearly broke the sound barrier in 1960. His maximum speed was 614 mph, which is about mach 0.91. He probably could have gone faster than sound had he jumped a little higher and/or opened his chute later. Google his name and you will find more info.