A lot of people seem to belief that having cars on the roads instead of bikes will actually worsen the congestion problems in India. However, I think it may actually improve it, and also reduce traffic violations.
I think the mobility of a motorbike might actually be a double-edged sword. When you feel mobile, you are more likely to dart across lanes and perhaps even run a red light. With a car, you're much larger, and you're not as agile and less likely to make risky moves, and bumping into someone would mean denting or scratching your car. Bumping into someone when you're on these moped-like bikes at slower speeds is not a big deal, so there's not much of an incentive to be extra cautious.
I'd also like to think that these cars may be more fuel efficient than a typical two stroke motorbike engine, and could presumably seat 4 (albeit cramped) instead of at most two adults safely on a bike.
I think it's also interesting how some people cry outrage when the use of fossil fuels may increase when a few minutes later they hop into their SUV. Apparently it's OK for the first world nations to have big cars, but when the Indians want to have a few small ones, it's a bad thing?
most of these shooters would be considered pretty good...in 1996.
I think that's a little unfair to say when most retail games have multi-million dollar budgets and these games are made by volunteers.
I can't guess as to whether you went to college or not, but most colleges have a competitive formula SAE team. The team is made up entirely of volunteers, and some of the primary goals for being in such a project is to learn more about what goes into building a functional vehicle and for sheer fun -- it's hobbyist work. Notably, these cars aren't too technologically advanced, and Ferrari with their massive F1 budget could make a mockery out of these SAE cars with one of their F1 cars. But, we all know that comparing an Formula SAE racer to an F1 car would be unfair. But we also know that the Formula SAE teams are breeding grounds for some of the best automotive engineers for tomorrow, and most car companies know this and try to peg their interest by sponsoring these teams.
It's the same case with these open source shooters. They don't have the financial backing to hire skilled artists that are willing to work full days, however I would say that say that a lot of these projects are breeding grounds for tomorrow's John Carmack's and like the SAE teams, companies like id try to do their part in supporting the community.
mean honestly, how different is this to dialing ahead with your order from a cell phone?
Umm, I have a few:
1. I'd rather order through a readable UI with touch screen than having to repeat myself several times over the phone due to poor signal or noise where I am. I always order pizza from my computer, ordering through similar means on something mobile would be more convenient.
2. The store would need to hire someone on the phone to take the order. Having a person actually there helps when ordering in person for ambiance, but when you're ordering over the phone, it's annoying... and don't get me started with those voice activated systems. I'd rather be able to select what I want through a digital menu.
3. If this system is tied into a billing system like how.Mac is, then this saves me another hassle of having to say my credit card information over the phone or have to whip it out and slide at the counter.
Maybe it's just bad music in general? With wonderful hits from "Soulja Boy" and other songs like "Hey Bay bay" with such diverse lyrical content, is it a surprise that the music industry in the US at least is taking a downturn?
Sure Warp drive and all the fun stuff we hear about in Sci-Fi is still a pipe dream, but what about expanding our space exploration?
I would like to hope that within 15 or so years, we would have developed ways to send long-term exploration missions to other planets like Mars. Sure, we've sent Rovers there and the like, but I'm sure there is much more research that can be done when there are actual people present.
Another interesting possibility regarding space exploration is the possibility of finding very basic living life on another planet. I thought it would also be interesting if we were to try introducing very simple life (something along the lines of single-cell life found near extreme climates here) to certain planets to see if it can sustain itself.
I have some background in Quantum Physics, but the way I would theorize (i.e guess) how this might work in terms of parallel universes is to imagine the set of universes being represented by an infinite state machine, with transitions being driven by observations.
I'm curious what kind of practical applications this would have. As another poster mentioned, the robot flips every time it takes a step. This would probably make it difficult to have the power source in the central module connecting the legs as it would be too heavy (unless it was perfectly balanced, which might be a bigger issue).
Umm, a bunch of ARP Requests by a few mobile devices shouldn't be knocking out a Cisco router. These AP's are supposed to be able to withstand much worse than a few of these things.
I call bullshit. I say it's their IT/Computing Department is blaming their poor infrastructure on iPhone.
I wonder if they would have gotten more viewers if the show were on a "major" network as opposed to the SciFi Channel. I guess the problem with a major network is that the show could not be as edgy as it is. I guess its best asset is that it flies under the radar. Unfortunately, it's also its downfall.
I don't think the show being on a major network would have made any significant difference. The problem is that a lot of people who don't watch BSG will refuse to watch it on the grounds thinking that it is too nerdy or even mistaking it for Star Wars or Star Trek.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is any way to attract these viewers as they're pretty much ignorant. ST:Enterprise tried by showing more T&A in their episodes and we all know how that went...
And yet CDs, which are DRM free, have the highest quality audio and will cost about the same, offer a physical medium, and packaging as opposed to what will be available online.
Right, but how often do you listen to every single song on a CD? Often, I only like at most 2-3 songs on a CD, and I don't see it being worth $9.99 for three songs, and older CD's are priced higher. In the event you do like the entire album, iTunes also has the new deal now where you can buy the entire album for a discount if you've already purchased songs on it.
Buying electronically is also buy-on-demand, there's no need to go to the video store (if it's open), and shuffle through the aisles looking for the CD.
Airplanes are able to fly higher and faster than any bird without flapping their wings
While it is true that we have been able to reach much higher upper bounds, the key is efficiency.
Take a model plane for example, those can only run for a few minutes whereas geese and other flying animals have been able to go for hours (or perhaps days) without a "refuel". I understand that part of this is fuel storage but it seems like the winged propulsion using muscles is very efficient. There are probably gliders that can do very similar feats, but those weigh a fraction of a similar sized goose
The same applies to Neuroscience. For example, a cockroach has very few neurons, I've forgotten how many but I remember reading somewhere that the average computer in 2002 had more processing power than one. Yet we don't see little man-made bugs scurrying around.
Car manufacturers keep advertising more power, size etc (10% more power than last year's model, 5% more space...). How is it that they never advertise reduced consumption (well they might, but only if it does not compromise power, size etc)..
to the amount that these can increase. You do have a point, every wear we see bigger displacement, more power, more space. Models are just going to keep getting bigger until they're full-size. The interesting thing is, what do the do when someone wants a small car with a small engine? They simply release a new model with a new name so there isn't the consumer image that they've "scaled down". The Toyota corolla is a good example, the car kept growing in size, so they introduced new models to fill in the lower gap such as the Tercel, Echo and Yaris.
I can only think of one car company that has scaled down the size of their cars (albeit slightly), and that is Honda with their Civic (6th-7th gen) and the Acura TL and RL
Because of the nature of Vista (Graphics Hardware acceleration being one), it's unlikely for us to see a lot of OEM/Upgrade copies of Vista. I think most people wanting to try Vista will either already have a powerful computer (a minority among most people), or will have Vista packaged in with a new PC.
I'm a Mac guy, and personally don't see anything compelling about Vista at the moment and am happy with dual booting into XP, but I think it's too early for people to claim that Vista is a failure.
Sure, entrepreneurs are the ones that think up of the new ideas and lead the innovations, but nothing would get done without talented developers. It just happens that skilled developers tend to migrate toward the Bay Area because of the high density of good companies. This in return, encourages more startups and we start seeing even more talented developers flocking to the Bay Area. It's kind of self-renewing and I don't see it going away any time soon (save some catastrophic earthquake...).
The reason why Apple doesn't have the worlds music on iTunes is probably because it takes a lot of work to get Record Companies to sign on and whatnot and the time taken to accomplish that might be better utilized on some other things for now at least.
However, I think it would be very beneficial for iTunes to start offering things from Bollywood (movies and music, priced to compete with local stores). I think India is one of the few places where the movie industry isn't going (relatively) downhill.
That's probably the best thing you can do to get practical. Scrounge up an old Arm-based dev board, you might be able to get one cheap from eBay or get a friend who works for an embedded company to get an old one from his/her workplace.
And with that, start writing your own Mini-OS. Build on newer parts as you have time, you'll learn a lot and make lots of mistakes. However, someone once told me that as a new programmer, you have to make all the normal mistakes when you start, so that you don't them later on.
People are always concerned about writing out gobs and gobs of code that isn't properly thought out. That's the problem with a lot of software development these days (namely OSS). I've been digging through a rather large and prominent OSS project and found that its code looks like it's been hacked together.
People need to start focusing on code density. By code density, I mean how much thought goes into each line you write. High code density will almost always give you a good result, take Google for example, I've found that almost everything they have has been well thought-out, and not hacked together in a rush.
If MS has told the developers to slow down and think through everything, I think everyone (who will use Visa) will benefit in the end. I'd rather have a late OS that works than one that is early and feels rushed. Now before I get flamed and labelled as a Windows fanboy, I should mention that I use OSX as my native desktop OS and Linux (Gentoo) for my personal servers.
Seriously... People act as if they will suffer emotional damages if Apple doesn't release something great every few months. I think this link sums it all up:
Back in my day, the Sony Walkman was going to deafen us all. Frankly, I would imagine people today are just as capable of operating the damned volume control as we were then.
Yeah, but back then, a lot of people took responsiblity for their own stupidity. Now, it seems like it's the company's fault.
I've been taking notes with my laptop for over a year now, and it's worked out well for me. All I use are some macros and a laptop mouse to help with doing diagrams. I think laptops have advantages for these reasons:
1) It's easier to bring along one laptop instead of several binders full of dog-eared papers to take notes.
2) I use Perforce to keep what's on my laptop in sync with what's on my desktop, so there isn't much of a fear of suddenly losing my notes.
3) There's no shuffling around binders and pages of notes to find the note you're looking for with a laptop, everything is organized directories and I can search through them.
4) I can easily refer to supporting material during the lecture. Profs often have the class slides posted online, and sometimes we're stuck with a horrible projector that won't focus, I can simply download the notes and follow along on my own screen without having to sit at the front of the class.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people seem to belief that having cars on the roads instead of bikes will actually worsen the congestion problems in India. However, I think it may actually improve it, and also reduce traffic violations.
I think the mobility of a motorbike might actually be a double-edged sword. When you feel mobile, you are more likely to dart across lanes and perhaps even run a red light. With a car, you're much larger, and you're not as agile and less likely to make risky moves, and bumping into someone would mean denting or scratching your car. Bumping into someone when you're on these moped-like bikes at slower speeds is not a big deal, so there's not much of an incentive to be extra cautious.
I'd also like to think that these cars may be more fuel efficient than a typical two stroke motorbike engine, and could presumably seat 4 (albeit cramped) instead of at most two adults safely on a bike.
I think it's also interesting how some people cry outrage when the use of fossil fuels may increase when a few minutes later they hop into their SUV. Apparently it's OK for the first world nations to have big cars, but when the Indians want to have a few small ones, it's a bad thing?
most of these shooters would be considered pretty good...in 1996.
I think that's a little unfair to say when most retail games have multi-million dollar budgets and these games are made by volunteers.
I can't guess as to whether you went to college or not, but most colleges have a competitive formula SAE team. The team is made up entirely of volunteers, and some of the primary goals for being in such a project is to learn more about what goes into building a functional vehicle and for sheer fun -- it's hobbyist work. Notably, these cars aren't too technologically advanced, and Ferrari with their massive F1 budget could make a mockery out of these SAE cars with one of their F1 cars. But, we all know that comparing an Formula SAE racer to an F1 car would be unfair. But we also know that the Formula SAE teams are breeding grounds for some of the best automotive engineers for tomorrow, and most car companies know this and try to peg their interest by sponsoring these teams.
It's the same case with these open source shooters. They don't have the financial backing to hire skilled artists that are willing to work full days, however I would say that say that a lot of these projects are breeding grounds for tomorrow's John Carmack's and like the SAE teams, companies like id try to do their part in supporting the community.
mean honestly, how different is this to dialing ahead with your order from a cell phone?
.Mac is, then this saves me another hassle of having to say my credit card information over the phone or have to whip it out and slide at the counter.
Umm, I have a few:
1. I'd rather order through a readable UI with touch screen than having to repeat myself several times over the phone due to poor signal or noise where I am. I always order pizza from my computer, ordering through similar means on something mobile would be more convenient.
2. The store would need to hire someone on the phone to take the order. Having a person actually there helps when ordering in person for ambiance, but when you're ordering over the phone, it's annoying... and don't get me started with those voice activated systems. I'd rather be able to select what I want through a digital menu.
3. If this system is tied into a billing system like how
Maybe it's just bad music in general? With wonderful hits from "Soulja Boy" and other songs like "Hey Bay bay" with such diverse lyrical content, is it a surprise that the music industry in the US at least is taking a downturn?
Sure Warp drive and all the fun stuff we hear about in Sci-Fi is still a pipe dream, but what about expanding our space exploration?
I would like to hope that within 15 or so years, we would have developed ways to send long-term exploration missions to other planets like Mars. Sure, we've sent Rovers there and the like, but I'm sure there is much more research that can be done when there are actual people present.
Another interesting possibility regarding space exploration is the possibility of finding very basic living life on another planet. I thought it would also be interesting if we were to try introducing very simple life (something along the lines of single-cell life found near extreme climates here) to certain planets to see if it can sustain itself.
I have some background in Quantum Physics, but the way I would theorize (i.e guess) how this might work in terms of parallel universes is to imagine the set of universes being represented by an infinite state machine, with transitions being driven by observations.
I'm curious what kind of practical applications this would have. As another poster mentioned, the robot flips every time it takes a step. This would probably make it difficult to have the power source in the central module connecting the legs as it would be too heavy (unless it was perfectly balanced, which might be a bigger issue).
Umm, a bunch of ARP Requests by a few mobile devices shouldn't be knocking out a Cisco router. These AP's are supposed to be able to withstand much worse than a few of these things.
I call bullshit. I say it's their IT/Computing Department is blaming their poor infrastructure on iPhone.
I wonder if they would have gotten more viewers if the show were on a "major" network as opposed to the SciFi Channel. I guess the problem with a major network is that the show could not be as edgy as it is. I guess its best asset is that it flies under the radar. Unfortunately, it's also its downfall.
I don't think the show being on a major network would have made any significant difference. The problem is that a lot of people who don't watch BSG will refuse to watch it on the grounds thinking that it is too nerdy or even mistaking it for Star Wars or Star Trek.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is any way to attract these viewers as they're pretty much ignorant. ST:Enterprise tried by showing more T&A in their episodes and we all know how that went...
And yet CDs, which are DRM free, have the highest quality audio and will cost about the same, offer a physical medium, and packaging as opposed to what will be available online.
Right, but how often do you listen to every single song on a CD? Often, I only like at most 2-3 songs on a CD, and I don't see it being worth $9.99 for three songs, and older CD's are priced higher. In the event you do like the entire album, iTunes also has the new deal now where you can buy the entire album for a discount if you've already purchased songs on it.
Buying electronically is also buy-on-demand, there's no need to go to the video store (if it's open), and shuffle through the aisles looking for the CD.
Airplanes are able to fly higher and faster than any bird without flapping their wings
While it is true that we have been able to reach much higher upper bounds, the key is efficiency. Take a model plane for example, those can only run for a few minutes whereas geese and other flying animals have been able to go for hours (or perhaps days) without a "refuel". I understand that part of this is fuel storage but it seems like the winged propulsion using muscles is very efficient. There are probably gliders that can do very similar feats, but those weigh a fraction of a similar sized goose
The same applies to Neuroscience. For example, a cockroach has very few neurons, I've forgotten how many but I remember reading somewhere that the average computer in 2002 had more processing power than one. Yet we don't see little man-made bugs scurrying around.
Car manufacturers keep advertising more power, size etc (10% more power than last year's model, 5% more space...). How is it that they never advertise reduced consumption (well they might, but only if it does not compromise power, size etc)..
to the amount that these can increase. You do have a point, every wear we see bigger displacement, more power, more space. Models are just going to keep getting bigger until they're full-size. The interesting thing is, what do the do when someone wants a small car with a small engine? They simply release a new model with a new name so there isn't the consumer image that they've "scaled down". The Toyota corolla is a good example, the car kept growing in size, so they introduced new models to fill in the lower gap such as the Tercel, Echo and Yaris.
I can only think of one car company that has scaled down the size of their cars (albeit slightly), and that is Honda with their Civic (6th-7th gen) and the Acura TL and RL
Everyone knows the origins of it is "Pawned", as in checkmate, with pawns, PAWNED!!11!!One
Because of the nature of Vista (Graphics Hardware acceleration being one), it's unlikely for us to see a lot of OEM/Upgrade copies of Vista. I think most people wanting to try Vista will either already have a powerful computer (a minority among most people), or will have Vista packaged in with a new PC.
I'm a Mac guy, and personally don't see anything compelling about Vista at the moment and am happy with dual booting into XP, but I think it's too early for people to claim that Vista is a failure.
Sure, entrepreneurs are the ones that think up of the new ideas and lead the innovations, but nothing would get done without talented developers. It just happens that skilled developers tend to migrate toward the Bay Area because of the high density of good companies. This in return, encourages more startups and we start seeing even more talented developers flocking to the Bay Area. It's kind of self-renewing and I don't see it going away any time soon (save some catastrophic earthquake...).
The reason why Apple doesn't have the worlds music on iTunes is probably because it takes a lot of work to get Record Companies to sign on and whatnot and the time taken to accomplish that might be better utilized on some other things for now at least.
However, I think it would be very beneficial for iTunes to start offering things from Bollywood (movies and music, priced to compete with local stores). I think India is one of the few places where the movie industry isn't going (relatively) downhill.
That's probably the best thing you can do to get practical. Scrounge up an old Arm-based dev board, you might be able to get one cheap from eBay or get a friend who works for an embedded company to get an old one from his/her workplace.
And with that, start writing your own Mini-OS. Build on newer parts as you have time, you'll learn a lot and make lots of mistakes. However, someone once told me that as a new programmer, you have to make all the normal mistakes when you start, so that you don't them later on.
Actually, regarding choosing Quantum Physics, you can be both right and wrong.
I mean, think about it... this will change the face of Science Fiction forever...
I can just imagine it:
In Star Trek: Cows in Space -- "We've lost anti-manure containment... Ahhhh!!!"
People are always concerned about writing out gobs and gobs of code that isn't properly thought out. That's the problem with a lot of software development these days (namely OSS). I've been digging through a rather large and prominent OSS project and found that its code looks like it's been hacked together.
People need to start focusing on code density. By code density, I mean how much thought goes into each line you write. High code density will almost always give you a good result, take Google for example, I've found that almost everything they have has been well thought-out, and not hacked together in a rush.
If MS has told the developers to slow down and think through everything, I think everyone (who will use Visa) will benefit in the end. I'd rather have a late OS that works than one that is early and feels rushed. Now before I get flamed and labelled as a Windows fanboy, I should mention that I use OSX as my native desktop OS and Linux (Gentoo) for my personal servers.
My guess is that these servers along with Babylon 4 went back in time to aid the Vorlons and Minbari in the first Shadow war.
I think the Slashdot editors took the term "Fruitful" a little too literally.
Seriously... People act as if they will suffer emotional damages if Apple doesn't release something great every few months. I think this link sums it all up:
Reaction to Feb. Announcement.
Back in my day, the Sony Walkman was going to deafen us all. Frankly, I would imagine people today are just as capable of operating the damned volume control as we were then.
Yeah, but back then, a lot of people took responsiblity for their own stupidity. Now, it seems like it's the company's fault.
I've been taking notes with my laptop for over a year now, and it's worked out well for me. All I use are some macros and a laptop mouse to help with doing diagrams. I think laptops have advantages for these reasons:
1) It's easier to bring along one laptop instead of several binders full of dog-eared papers to take notes.
2) I use Perforce to keep what's on my laptop in sync with what's on my desktop, so there isn't much of a fear of suddenly losing my notes.
3) There's no shuffling around binders and pages of notes to find the note you're looking for with a laptop, everything is organized directories and I can search through them.
4) I can easily refer to supporting material during the lecture. Profs often have the class slides posted online, and sometimes we're stuck with a horrible projector that won't focus, I can simply download the notes and follow along on my own screen without having to sit at the front of the class.