I wonder if that means that life is only possible near the outer arms of the galaxy? If you assume that gamma rays are a point source in the middle of our galaxy, what sort of radiation levels are you going to see closer to the center?
Think about scientific instruments that gather gigabytes of data per second. They hold on to that for as long as they have to, pulling out interesting data, summarizing it, and throwing out the rest. I track all the web hits for our corporate Intranet. The volume is so huge that the SQL administrators come and have a little heart-to-heart chat with me if I let it build up over a few months. I don't really care about the raw information past a month or so. Instead, I want to see running counts of which pages are being viewed, which people are big utilizers of our network, and so on.
A good analogy is the human brain. We gather in huge amounts of information per second via touch, sight, and so on, but throw out the vast majority of the information. The key is to have good filtering systems so that things that are interesting and relevant are held onto.
Lots of systems "break" when the incentive for folks is to behave a certain way. In many cases, it's unexpected and unpleasant.
For example, one could argue that lawyers have an incentive to not settle and to draw out a case as long as possible, assuming their client has the means to pay. Since they're paid by the hour, they want to "milk" their client as long as possible. Going to court is the way to do that.
Another is doctors, who get paid per procedure they do, regardless of how necessary it is. There was a movement years ago with HMOs trying to manage this excess, but patients kept clamoring for the latest treatments and newest drugs, even if the evidence of effectiveness was minimal. Now I have my dentist wanting to fill every tiny groove in my teeth, even though I've had perfect teeth my entire life (my dad was a dentist).
On the other hand, there's typically counters to that incentive. Going to court is unpleasant, which is why my mom would always try to settle (she made her money with high-volume, low-cost council). Once my last dentist started going bonkers with procedures, I quit and switched to someone else. I'm not sure what it is for the patent system, though. It's pretty bad these days.
Gamasutra had a good article on this recently. The thing that caught my eye was that the patent office is supported by fees collected for each patent application. They had a signed framed that read Our Patent Mission: To Help Our Customers Get Patents.
To me, that speaks volumes. Any system with an incentive to do crazy things, tends to do crazy things over time. In this case, the goal is to get as many patents issued as possible, so that more people patent odd things and more money flows into the patent office. Break that incentive and people might start behaving rationally again.
Imagine a series of database transactions, with each step getting queued up and waiting for the system to finish processing it. The actual DOW number reflects fully completed transactions, but not pending transactions that might impact the outcome. This is probably a good thing, as a transaction might end up being rejected, so you only want to show the outcome of completed transactions. Once the backup system came online, the transactions quickly finished being completed, resulting in the dramatic drop.
The amazing thing to me is that the system is robust enough that transactions can survive the loss of their main computer system and bringing up a secondary one. That's database, networking, and coding voodoo, all wrapped into something pretty awe-inspiring.
From the article:
As an example, they argued: "Companies routinely include in their Web pages hyperlinks that enable persons to navigate easily to other sites throughout the Web by use of browser software. Indeed, the Web is a collection of hyperlinks. Even though the use of hyperlinks makes content located elsewhere available to a Web user, it does not constitute a distribution of that content under section 106(3)." This would imply that Google "makes available" all sorts of things via a search engine. If it's illegal to make copyright content available, Google could be held liable for linking to the vast quantities of content available on the web. This could also mean things like reading a book in public where others could see the words, or listening to music in public where others could hear.
I realize the RIAA is focused on people "making available" copyright works via P2P networks, but the legal implications are pretty profound.
Pinging marsbase.com [1.55.123.1] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 1.55.123.1: bytes=32 time=1199990ms TTL=1200000 Reply from 1.55.123.1: bytes=32 time=1199997ms TTL=1200000 Reply from 1.55.123.1: bytes=32 time=1200030ms TTL=1200000 Reply from 1.55.123.1: bytes=32 time=1200017ms TTL=1200000
Ping statistics for 1.55.123.1: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 1199990ms, Maximum = 1200030ms, Average = 1200016ms
It may be time for me to make this choice soon.
on
From Bess to Worse
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
My son is eight years old. We have six or so web-enabled devices throughout the house (the Wii, a laptop, and four normal PCs). It's getting to the point where I need to decide if buying one of these "net nanny" pieces of software is worthwhile. Currently I'm leaning towards no, but he'll occasionally do things that make me wonder. For example, he's always entering in random addresses and seeing where it goes. The other day, he entered ".com" into the browser at school, and the helpful search engine displayed Girls Gone Wild as a top hit. Needless to say, the school's filter blocked it.
With porn, violent videos, and other mature content in easy reach around the web, I'm thinking he's going to find it sooner rather than later. Perhaps the best approach is to have lots of talks with him about what's out there, how to deal with it, and so on.
The thing that's a little sad is that at eight, I've got to prepare him for the adult world. Swearing, hardcore sex, and bizarre YouTube slapping videos isn't really something I'd like to expose him to just yet. Innocence is a rarity in this day and age and I'd rather have him just be a kid for a few years longer.
Like most of you folks, I started a little blog to document my family and my life. It makes for a pretty darn good memory jogger. I sheepishly used it to remember my daughter's birthday, my wife's cell phone number, and all manner of timeline issues.
For the most part, I don't care about remembering everything. I want to remember the good stuff, the funny stuff, and the important stuff. The key to memory is having a good editor.
There was an interesting article where the main character had an ambiguous race. Players were welcome to decide if she was asian, black, or perhaps some humanoid alien of some kind. Personally I just thought she was smart, cute, and sassy, always a winning combination.
In my mind, option #4 is "Evolve humans so that interstellar travel is easy". That might mean long lives, smaller space-adapted bodies, or purely digital beings, transmitted via a series of relays placed by robotic probes.
So Crichton criticizes a large number of scientists, questioning their authority. When I do the same for him, it's not okay? Mmm . . . double-standards. Love 'em.
Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it.
By this logic, it's stupid to even try to predict the future. You'll be wrong, and thus, it's a pointless task. You're in good health now? Living comfortably? Why bother flossing your teeth and putting money in your 401K? You can't predict the future, after all.
I'm not sure I'm too keen on Michael Crichton after his comments about global warming. I don't think gene patents are a swell idea, but I'm not sure I'd hold up Crichton as an authority on scientific matters.
I remember when Gabe stated that HL2 would be coming out, right around the time the ATI deal was going on. I went out and bought a shiny new 9800 Pro, only to find out a few weeks later that HL2 was delayed a year. I wasn't too bitter, as my new card made a bunch of new games play quite nicely, and it lasted for quite awhile.
I do find that Valve's release estimates have been pretty consistently horrible. New game companies often make mistakes when estimating release dates. Valve's been around for awhile, though, so you'd think they'd be doing better. Personally I think it's a result of trying to release on multiple platforms and bundle lots of components into one package.
I'm not sure episodic content is really episodic if there's over a year delay between releases. It's starting to feel more like an expansion pack or something.
I've won several awards for my Neverwinter Nights modules. These were all coded and written almost completely by myself. In all honesty, both the writing and the coding are equally challenging for me, in different ways. I'm a long-time programmer, so I can whip up some code pretty easily, though debugging and understanding the inner mysteries of the game engine is often challenging. Being able to consistently write good dialog and maintain focus on key plot themes can also be quite difficult.
For me, it's great fun, as different parts of my brain get a good workout when making a module. For writing, I like to hang out in a coffee shop with a tattered notebook. When coding, it's tea in front of the computer. I guess the moral of the story is that everything is easy with enough caffeine.
For us gamers, the cool application is clearly fluids in games. Currently water is a flat plane with a bump map, or possibly an animated plane that is extremely simple. Modern game engines are trying to have some simple fluid dynamics, but it's extremely CPU intensive.
The article talks about breaking problems into smaller pieces, which means that it should work well with multi-core processors. Probably you'll first see "cosmetic" fluid dynamics, which don't affect gameplay, but still look pretty cool. Imagine characters splashing in water, setting off waves, creatures vaporizing into a puddle, and so on. Should be cool.
I figured that playing soccer was a pretty tame thing for a seven year-old to do. Of course, soccer with profane jerks wasn't quite what I was hoping for.
In general, though, Sam's pretty comfortable with FPS's in general. He doesn't get to play Doom 3 or similar games. He did play HL2, which I felt fine about.
I don't think I'd like him playing multiplayer games with people outside our family, though. That's a bit outside my comfort level.
I'd also have concerns about my son playing a game where live human opponents might jump in and interact with him. We were playing soccer in Garry's Mod and within minutes a griefer jumped on, stole the ball, and wouldn't let go of it. I explained to my son what a griefer was, turned off the server, and turned it on again with a password. Fortunately Sam couldn't read at the time, so he couldn't see the stream of obscenities showing up in the game.
An entire game that involves folks like that is going to make me steer clear of it. I suspect other parents may feel the same. Kudos to the company for trying something different, though.
The older and more health-conscious I get, the simpler my meals get. For breakfast most days, it's oatmeal with raisins and a side of tea. On weekends, we usually have a "hearty breakfast" of scrambled eggs or pancakes, along with espresso of some kind.
What's more interesting to me is what I eat throughout the day. I pack my own lunch, which really turns into a constant source of snacks while I code. Raisins and almonds, vegetables, fruit, and other nutritious stuff.
Folks might think my diet odd, but I'm one of the most in-shape coders of all the folks I work with.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm dying to know what the laws will be for Sybian-style robots.
I wonder if that means that life is only possible near the outer arms of the galaxy? If you assume that gamma rays are a point source in the middle of our galaxy, what sort of radiation levels are you going to see closer to the center?
Think about scientific instruments that gather gigabytes of data per second. They hold on to that for as long as they have to, pulling out interesting data, summarizing it, and throwing out the rest. I track all the web hits for our corporate Intranet. The volume is so huge that the SQL administrators come and have a little heart-to-heart chat with me if I let it build up over a few months. I don't really care about the raw information past a month or so. Instead, I want to see running counts of which pages are being viewed, which people are big utilizers of our network, and so on.
A good analogy is the human brain. We gather in huge amounts of information per second via touch, sight, and so on, but throw out the vast majority of the information. The key is to have good filtering systems so that things that are interesting and relevant are held onto.
We wouldn't want the wind blowing them over, after all. :)
It's easy! Just use your AI to listen to it for you and then give you a nice summary with bulleted lists and charts.
Lots of systems "break" when the incentive for folks is to behave a certain way. In many cases, it's unexpected and unpleasant.
For example, one could argue that lawyers have an incentive to not settle and to draw out a case as long as possible, assuming their client has the means to pay. Since they're paid by the hour, they want to "milk" their client as long as possible. Going to court is the way to do that.
Another is doctors, who get paid per procedure they do, regardless of how necessary it is. There was a movement years ago with HMOs trying to manage this excess, but patients kept clamoring for the latest treatments and newest drugs, even if the evidence of effectiveness was minimal. Now I have my dentist wanting to fill every tiny groove in my teeth, even though I've had perfect teeth my entire life (my dad was a dentist).
On the other hand, there's typically counters to that incentive. Going to court is unpleasant, which is why my mom would always try to settle (she made her money with high-volume, low-cost council). Once my last dentist started going bonkers with procedures, I quit and switched to someone else. I'm not sure what it is for the patent system, though. It's pretty bad these days.
Gamasutra had a good article on this recently. The thing that caught my eye was that the patent office is supported by fees collected for each patent application. They had a signed framed that read Our Patent Mission: To Help Our Customers Get Patents.
To me, that speaks volumes. Any system with an incentive to do crazy things, tends to do crazy things over time. In this case, the goal is to get as many patents issued as possible, so that more people patent odd things and more money flows into the patent office. Break that incentive and people might start behaving rationally again.
Yep - that sounds just about right.
Imagine a series of database transactions, with each step getting queued up and waiting for the system to finish processing it. The actual DOW number reflects fully completed transactions, but not pending transactions that might impact the outcome. This is probably a good thing, as a transaction might end up being rejected, so you only want to show the outcome of completed transactions. Once the backup system came online, the transactions quickly finished being completed, resulting in the dramatic drop.
The amazing thing to me is that the system is robust enough that transactions can survive the loss of their main computer system and bringing up a secondary one. That's database, networking, and coding voodoo, all wrapped into something pretty awe-inspiring.
I realize the RIAA is focused on people "making available" copyright works via P2P networks, but the legal implications are pretty profound.
Let me be the first to say that this so-called "An anonymous reader" is a nobody and a has-been.
My son is eight years old. We have six or so web-enabled devices throughout the house (the Wii, a laptop, and four normal PCs). It's getting to the point where I need to decide if buying one of these "net nanny" pieces of software is worthwhile. Currently I'm leaning towards no, but he'll occasionally do things that make me wonder. For example, he's always entering in random addresses and seeing where it goes. The other day, he entered ".com" into the browser at school, and the helpful search engine displayed Girls Gone Wild as a top hit. Needless to say, the school's filter blocked it.
With porn, violent videos, and other mature content in easy reach around the web, I'm thinking he's going to find it sooner rather than later. Perhaps the best approach is to have lots of talks with him about what's out there, how to deal with it, and so on.
The thing that's a little sad is that at eight, I've got to prepare him for the adult world. Swearing, hardcore sex, and bizarre YouTube slapping videos isn't really something I'd like to expose him to just yet. Innocence is a rarity in this day and age and I'd rather have him just be a kid for a few years longer.
Ah, well. That's parenting for you.
Like most of you folks, I started a little blog to document my family and my life. It makes for a pretty darn good memory jogger. I sheepishly used it to remember my daughter's birthday, my wife's cell phone number, and all manner of timeline issues.
For the most part, I don't care about remembering everything. I want to remember the good stuff, the funny stuff, and the important stuff. The key to memory is having a good editor.
There was an interesting article where the main character had an ambiguous race. Players were welcome to decide if she was asian, black, or perhaps some humanoid alien of some kind. Personally I just thought she was smart, cute, and sassy, always a winning combination.
In my mind, option #4 is "Evolve humans so that interstellar travel is easy". That might mean long lives, smaller space-adapted bodies, or purely digital beings, transmitted via a series of relays placed by robotic probes.
So Crichton criticizes a large number of scientists, questioning their authority. When I do the same for him, it's not okay? Mmm . . . double-standards. Love 'em.
His Aliens Cause Global Warming speech is great reading. I love the part here:
Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it.
By this logic, it's stupid to even try to predict the future. You'll be wrong, and thus, it's a pointless task. You're in good health now? Living comfortably? Why bother flossing your teeth and putting money in your 401K? You can't predict the future, after all.
I'm not sure I'm too keen on Michael Crichton after his comments about global warming. I don't think gene patents are a swell idea, but I'm not sure I'd hold up Crichton as an authority on scientific matters.
I remember when Gabe stated that HL2 would be coming out, right around the time the ATI deal was going on. I went out and bought a shiny new 9800 Pro, only to find out a few weeks later that HL2 was delayed a year. I wasn't too bitter, as my new card made a bunch of new games play quite nicely, and it lasted for quite awhile.
I do find that Valve's release estimates have been pretty consistently horrible. New game companies often make mistakes when estimating release dates. Valve's been around for awhile, though, so you'd think they'd be doing better. Personally I think it's a result of trying to release on multiple platforms and bundle lots of components into one package.
I'm not sure episodic content is really episodic if there's over a year delay between releases. It's starting to feel more like an expansion pack or something.
I think we're seeing Cowboy Neal's Demon, a software utility that moves links about on a page to create infinite money for the developer.
Of course, such a thing can never happen in real life, so it's all theoretical.
I've won several awards for my Neverwinter Nights modules. These were all coded and written almost completely by myself. In all honesty, both the writing and the coding are equally challenging for me, in different ways. I'm a long-time programmer, so I can whip up some code pretty easily, though debugging and understanding the inner mysteries of the game engine is often challenging. Being able to consistently write good dialog and maintain focus on key plot themes can also be quite difficult.
For me, it's great fun, as different parts of my brain get a good workout when making a module. For writing, I like to hang out in a coffee shop with a tattered notebook. When coding, it's tea in front of the computer. I guess the moral of the story is that everything is easy with enough caffeine.
For us gamers, the cool application is clearly fluids in games. Currently water is a flat plane with a bump map, or possibly an animated plane that is extremely simple. Modern game engines are trying to have some simple fluid dynamics, but it's extremely CPU intensive.
The article talks about breaking problems into smaller pieces, which means that it should work well with multi-core processors. Probably you'll first see "cosmetic" fluid dynamics, which don't affect gameplay, but still look pretty cool. Imagine characters splashing in water, setting off waves, creatures vaporizing into a puddle, and so on. Should be cool.
I figured that playing soccer was a pretty tame thing for a seven year-old to do. Of course, soccer with profane jerks wasn't quite what I was hoping for.
In general, though, Sam's pretty comfortable with FPS's in general. He doesn't get to play Doom 3 or similar games. He did play HL2, which I felt fine about.
I don't think I'd like him playing multiplayer games with people outside our family, though. That's a bit outside my comfort level.
I'd also have concerns about my son playing a game where live human opponents might jump in and interact with him. We were playing soccer in Garry's Mod and within minutes a griefer jumped on, stole the ball, and wouldn't let go of it. I explained to my son what a griefer was, turned off the server, and turned it on again with a password. Fortunately Sam couldn't read at the time, so he couldn't see the stream of obscenities showing up in the game.
An entire game that involves folks like that is going to make me steer clear of it. I suspect other parents may feel the same. Kudos to the company for trying something different, though.
The older and more health-conscious I get, the simpler my meals get. For breakfast most days, it's oatmeal with raisins and a side of tea. On weekends, we usually have a "hearty breakfast" of scrambled eggs or pancakes, along with espresso of some kind.
What's more interesting to me is what I eat throughout the day. I pack my own lunch, which really turns into a constant source of snacks while I code. Raisins and almonds, vegetables, fruit, and other nutritious stuff.
Folks might think my diet odd, but I'm one of the most in-shape coders of all the folks I work with.
More likely, the time it takes for a species to self-evolve beyond comprehension is much less than developing interstellar travel.
Why would super-intelligent quarks need to physically move themselves to another part of the galaxy? Better view?