My glasses lenses flouresce dimly under UV light. I notice it most when (of all things) playing laser-tag, just because that's the way they typically decorate laser-tag arenas.
I would best describe it as though you were looking through a thin fog. Turn down the contrast and up the brightness on your monitor enough, and it's a similar effect. It's more annoying than it is hard to see through.
After all, the Constitution hasn't been made obsolete by technology
Maybe not obsolete, but certain issues which were once moot are now not. For instance, do we have any right to privacy? Well at the time the constitution was written, it wasn't really practical to do any serious invading of others' privacy. Even systematically snooping through all of their written correspondance was much more trouble than tapping a phone line, or sniffing packets.
Society is fundamentally changing as treatment intellectual property becomes far more important than physical assets. And our 225 year old constitution only hints at these issues rather than addressing them out right.
I do agree with you that much of the general framework of the constitution is still valid today, if often ignored.
As I'm sure many of you have noticed, the best way to play Oregon Trail was to forgo things like food at the start of the game, stocking up on ammo instead. Then, you cut a swath through the wildlife on the way out to Oregon to feed yourself.
No, the only way to guarantee a win is to buy large negative ammounts of food and ammo, and use the proceeds to buy several hundred oxen, which will carry you accross the country in one day of game time.
Some versions had some kind of weird bug that prevented this strategy from working, however.
I emphatically do not agree that two pairs are better at design and code construction time
I definately have had very different experiences than you, though not in terms of corporate coding (which is what I do during the day that keeps me from coding for fun all of the time).
All of the most successful hobby projects I've worked on (and some have been very successful)have been collaborative efforts between me and another coder. We've worked together productively on all parts of projects - from design (often in a coffee shop) to implementation (less often in a coffee shop) to debugging and optimizing (never in a coffee shop).
I don't know how often this kind of thing works, though. I certainly find myself talking over design issues with my co-workers (in both "my" modules and "theirs") but that's not as symmetric.
It would be foolish to argue that this always works, or that any two coders working together will compliment each other. I'm merely writing to anecdotally point out that it can happen.
While this may be true of the K6-2 3DNow! instruction set, the Athlon introduced some more 3DNow! instructions. The long and the short of is that Athlon 3DNow! and SSE are basically equivalent in terms of performance.
I believe that neither of these instruction sets are being rendered irrelevant due to lack of vendor support, the only other real issue.
Yeah, but it's so easy to recompile that it's for these purposes plenty modular. You can just pull support for all the things you don't need, and do a MUCH smaller build.
I would wager that their "organism" would not last long before a terminal mutation occurs.
Okay, so let's say that DNA replication works right as rarely as.9 of the time (In reality there are a lot more 9's, but I don't know how many). So, every time the organism would normally reproduce, it does. So each generation only outputs 1.8 times as many decendants as the previous one.. Since it's an exponential curve, yes this is a bunch slower, but.. still. One terminal mutation only kills that instance of the organism.
On the ohter hand, this is an organism that's unlikely to ever evolve any further (there's not a lot of junk in it to shuffle around)..
1. No pointers. It can't possibly be a programming language.
No, no pointers. Instead you use references to objects. What's the difference you ask? Really, none. You can't do math on them, I guess, but that's not important.
I've you've actually done any OO C++ programming and then some Java programming, I think you'll find that the two languages are fairly similar to write in, in many important aspects, although Java tries harder to disallow you doing Dumb things.
Strings being a class is great. there is also a string class in C++. It's great there too. I HATED having do mess around with allocating and freeing memory just to do simple string operations in C.. (I have a filename, but want to append an extension to it? Well, that's like 4 or 5 lines of C code! AUGH! With a string class it's easy!)
Java does not treat integers, floats, or chars as objects - these are special cases. I would say this is a flaw more than a feature - why SHOULD'T everything be an object? If no complicated logic is needed to manipulate that object, it won't contain complicated logic.
You're complaint seems to be Java is not C and I can't do things the way I do them in C, so it's bad! Sheesh.
JBuilder works on my Win98 box just fine. Except for the redraw issues with ATI drivers (only a problem with non-default mouse cursors & ATI cards, I think - even without changing video cards it's easy to work around by using default cursors).
Well, to pick nits, the original purpose of the corporation was to dilute/distribute the financial responsibility of running a business. I agree that a side effect has been the dilution of moral responsibility.
Visual C++ is a product, not a language. It's a compiler for a nearly standard implementation of C++. For reference, that is how I would describe g++ (GNU's C++ compiler) as well.
They do supply proprietary APIs and stuff and encourage their use, but being aware of that, I've actually had an easier time porting [the non directdraw portions of] my VC++ code to other platforms than [the non-svgalib parts of] my G++ code.
This is technology that Adobe licensed from Digimarc.. One of Digimarc's services they offer is you pay them some money and they report any use of your image they found on the web. By keeping an eye on my logs, I've noticed their crawlers perusing my server several times. Though all of the images on my site are mine (MINE MINE MINE!), I still don't like this idea.
I wonder what sorts of transformations these technologys are impervious to.. Since they're looking for on the web for watermarked graphics, presumably colour reduction (gif) and/or jpeg compression artifacts don't disrupt things. Will a slight blur or rotation? Can you embed an extractable watermark on white noise?
The funny thing is, this isn't a dead issue today. There IS a dilemma regarding the dispensation of antibiotics and antiseptics. They aren't unilaterally good. The overuse of antibiotics has generated drug resistant microorganisms that would never have existed otherwise.
That's not such a big deal. It's like saying hammers are bad because if you hit too many things with them, your hammer will break and then you won't be able to use your hammer.
Why have an idiosyncratic or rebellious offspring when you can choose a cheerful and pliant one?
It's also worth noting that a idiosyncratic or rebellions offspring is more likely to achieve greatness - many of the men history considers 'great' were total nutcases.
Really, I just can't get that worried about all this. Not everyone can be a full-time entertainer. So long as orders of magnitude more people want to than can be, all but the most successfull will get sour deals.
I think MP3 technology allows people more leeway. You don't HAVE to sign over the rights to anything to get your music out to a lot of people. You CAN still, as this article proves, but.. there are other options, now that distribution is so mindnumbingly cheap.
Another impact it seems to have is that the people previously making a quick buck off of someone else's work are now making a quick $0.08.
In the electronic music world, it's not uncommon to chose weird nonsense words to name compositions. I say this is for the same reason that nonsense words are getting chosen for technology corporations and their high-tech product lines.
The reason these kinds of weird names are chosen is that in both the case of electronic music and technology firms, the product is extremely abstract. Most normal language deals with relatively specific concrete terms and concepts.
These companies don't have one concrete or specific mission. Technology's moving fast, and people realize this.No company wants to name itself after a specific technology or product which could be obsolete in 5 or 10 or 20 years. So you pick names that have meanings unrelated to what you currently do or produce. AT&T doesn't see a whole bunch of business in telegraphy any more.
This leaves several options.
* Pick a word that conveys something good unrelated to your technology. Zenith. Sun. Saturn. Problems: How many appropriate words are there? Don't want to violate any trademarks..
* Use a family name. Who's family? I think a lot of technology companies NEVER were a family business, due to the ammount of capital required to get started.
* Make up some word that linguistically hints at other meanings, but has no explicit meaning of its own. Novell (novelty?) Lucent (Light?) Itanium (Titanium?) Problems: Some people say they're dumb.
* Use some acronym, ignore the original meaning.. AT&T does this now.
The electronic music names tend to evoke notions of Science, space, chemistry, & technology in general. The technology industry tries to evoke speed, dependability, luminence, and innovation. And vowels. They want you to think of vowels.
But it's the same game - Picking a word for an abstract concept which has none.
Um. When you say to your video card "Do 32 bit colour" it doesn't really use more colours. It's just 24 bits with padding or alpha (Depending on your application.)
I think you'll find that many of the laws "of biology" tend to really be much more general, and are instead general laws of diverse complicated systems. Biology happens to be an interesting and easy to study niche in this larger field.
Survival of the fittest?
You have a cardboard box with a bunch of things made out of legos in it. Shake the whole box a lot. The ones that doesn't break are what's left over. If that stuff can get reproduced somehow (by itself, or by anything else), "natural" selection happens.
This happens with wholes (organisms & web sites) as well as parts (genes & memes/paradigms) - if the part causes the whole to break, that part won't be very common. We don't see a lot of humans with the "dead" gene.
Nothing comes free, even existence. That's what makes this whole thing work. (in other words, your website is in a cardboard box getting banged against legos)
For internet entities, the cost of existence is bandwidth & server space. Human interest is what it costs to cover these needs. Whether people are interested enough to pay the internet bill because the entity is neat or useful or lucrative is irrelevant.
Existence for humans is normal activity, as well as healing wounds - general metabolism. This cost is paid by an influx of chemical energy (food).
Biological things expend energy getting food, Internet things expend energy getting people interested. If either one of those entities's costs of existance exceeds it's resources, the data pipe will be shut down, so to speak.
Reproduction?
Q: What's the best way to learn HTML? A: View->Source
In biological systems the notion of parenthood is pretty clear-cut. In memetic systems, however, it can be very difficult to see where ideas come from. But don't tell me that everybody who's implemented a web-based shopping cart thought of the idea themselves.
There are differences, sure. Darwinian vs. Lemarkian evolution.. One or two parents vs dozens or hundreds of 'parents'.
But what's important is that the environment has only limited resources (food, eyeballs), there is some kind of non-exact reproduction (cells divide, ideas get solen), combined with a non-zero cost for existance. Given those constraints, you're pretty much guaranteed to get an ecosystem, or something similar to it.
Is it (the internet) life? I don't care. If it is, great. If it's not, make a new word that means the same thing as "life" without requiring the processes be biological in nature. Good luck getting people to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
My glasses lenses flouresce dimly under UV light. I notice it most when (of all things) playing laser-tag, just because that's the way they typically decorate laser-tag arenas.
I would best describe it as though you were looking through a thin fog. Turn down the contrast and up the brightness on your monitor enough, and it's a similar effect. It's more annoying than it is hard to see through.
Ah, My mistake. I thought you were still expanding on the original post which claimed that the PCI bus was what was the biggest bottleneck.
Um, that's your frontside bus, not your PCI bus. These are not the same. Your PCI cards do NOT run at 100 MHz.
After all, the Constitution hasn't been made obsolete by technology
Maybe not obsolete, but certain issues which were once moot are now not. For instance, do we have any right to privacy? Well at the time the constitution was written, it wasn't really practical to do any serious invading of others' privacy. Even systematically snooping through all of their written correspondance was much more trouble than tapping a phone line, or sniffing packets.
Society is fundamentally changing as treatment intellectual property becomes far more important than physical assets. And our 225 year old constitution only hints at these issues rather than addressing them out right.
I do agree with you that much of the general framework of the constitution is still valid today, if often ignored.
Yeah, what is it with spam for discount dentistry? I've gotten a few of those too.
This seems like the kind of deal they employ in the film Total Recall. The only trick is making it look as cool.
As I'm sure many of you have noticed, the best way to play Oregon Trail was to forgo things like food at the start of the game, stocking up on ammo instead. Then, you cut a swath through the wildlife on the way out to Oregon to feed yourself.
No, the only way to guarantee a win is to buy large negative ammounts of food and ammo, and use the proceeds to buy several hundred oxen, which will carry you accross the country in one day of game time.
Some versions had some kind of weird bug that prevented this strategy from working, however.
I emphatically do not agree that two pairs are better at design and code construction time
I definately have had very different experiences than you, though not in terms of corporate coding (which is what I do during the day that keeps me from coding for fun all of the time).
All of the most successful hobby projects I've worked on (and some have been very successful)have been collaborative efforts between me and another coder. We've worked together productively on all parts of projects - from design (often in a coffee shop) to implementation (less often in a coffee shop) to debugging and optimizing (never in a coffee shop).
I don't know how often this kind of thing works, though. I certainly find myself talking over design issues with my co-workers (in both "my" modules and "theirs") but that's not as symmetric.
It would be foolish to argue that this always works, or that any two coders working together will compliment each other. I'm merely writing to anecdotally point out that it can happen.
SSE - makes 3dNow improvements irrelevant.
While this may be true of the K6-2 3DNow! instruction set, the Athlon introduced some more 3DNow! instructions. The long and the short of is that Athlon 3DNow! and SSE are basically equivalent in terms of performance.
I believe that neither of these instruction sets are being rendered irrelevant due to lack of vendor support, the only other real issue.
Yeah, but it's so easy to recompile that it's for these purposes plenty modular. You can just pull support for all the things you don't need, and do a MUCH smaller build.
I would wager that their "organism" would not last long before a terminal mutation occurs.
.9 of the time (In reality there are a lot more 9's, but I don't know how many). So, every time the organism would normally reproduce, it does. So each generation only outputs 1.8 times as many decendants as the previous one.. Since it's an exponential curve, yes this is a bunch slower, but .. still. One terminal mutation only kills that instance of the organism.
Okay, so let's say that DNA replication works right as rarely as
On the ohter hand, this is an organism that's unlikely to ever evolve any further (there's not a lot of junk in it to shuffle around)..
1. No pointers. It can't possibly be a programming language.
No, no pointers. Instead you use references to objects. What's the difference you ask? Really, none. You can't do math on them, I guess, but that's not important.
I've you've actually done any OO C++ programming and then some Java programming, I think you'll find that the two languages are fairly similar to write in, in many important aspects, although Java tries harder to disallow you doing Dumb things.
Strings being a class is great. there is also a string class in C++. It's great there too. I HATED having do mess around with allocating and freeing memory just to do simple string operations in C.. (I have a filename, but want to append an extension to it? Well, that's like 4 or 5 lines of C code! AUGH! With a string class it's easy!)
Java does not treat integers, floats, or chars as objects - these are special cases. I would say this is a flaw more than a feature - why SHOULD'T everything be an object? If no complicated logic is needed to manipulate that object, it won't contain complicated logic.
You're complaint seems to be Java is not C and I can't do things the way I do them in C, so it's bad! Sheesh.
JBuilder works on my Win98 box just fine. Except for the redraw issues with ATI drivers (only a problem with non-default mouse cursors & ATI cards, I think - even without changing video cards it's easy to work around by using default cursors).
Well, to pick nits, the original purpose of the corporation was to dilute/distribute the financial responsibility of running a business. I agree that a side effect has been the dilution of moral responsibility.
Visual C++ is a product, not a language. It's a compiler for a nearly standard implementation of C++. For reference, that is how I would describe g++ (GNU's C++ compiler) as well.
They do supply proprietary APIs and stuff and encourage their use, but being aware of that, I've actually had an easier time porting [the non directdraw portions of] my VC++ code to other platforms than [the non-svgalib parts of] my G++ code.
This is technology that Adobe licensed from Digimarc.. One of Digimarc's services they offer is you pay them some money and they report any use of your image they found on the web. By keeping an eye on my logs, I've noticed their crawlers perusing my server several times. Though all of the images on my site are mine (MINE MINE MINE!), I still don't like this idea.
I wonder what sorts of transformations these technologys are impervious to.. Since they're looking for on the web for watermarked graphics, presumably colour reduction (gif) and/or jpeg compression artifacts don't disrupt things. Will a slight blur or rotation? Can you embed an extractable watermark on white noise?
The funny thing is, this isn't a dead issue today. There IS a dilemma regarding the dispensation of antibiotics and antiseptics. They aren't unilaterally good. The overuse of antibiotics has generated drug resistant microorganisms that would never have existed otherwise.
That's not such a big deal. It's like saying hammers are bad because if you hit too many things with them, your hammer will break and then you won't be able to use your hammer.
Why have an idiosyncratic or rebellious offspring when you can choose a cheerful and pliant one?
It's also worth noting that a idiosyncratic or rebellions offspring is more likely to achieve greatness - many of the men history considers 'great' were total nutcases.
Really, I just can't get that worried about all this. Not everyone can be a full-time entertainer. So long as orders of magnitude more people want to than can be, all but the most successfull will get sour deals.
.. there are other options, now that distribution is so mindnumbingly cheap.
I think MP3 technology allows people more leeway. You don't HAVE to sign over the rights to anything to get your music out to a lot of people. You CAN still, as this article proves, but
Another impact it seems to have is that the people previously making a quick buck off of someone else's work are now making a quick $0.08.
This is the worst example of "rebranding" since Silicon Graphics changed to SGI. At least SGI kept consistent
Their page says that Silicon Graphics Inc owns the copyrights.. Everywhere else it says "SGI", tho.
In the electronic music world, it's not uncommon to chose weird nonsense words to name compositions. I say this is for the same reason that nonsense words are getting chosen for technology corporations and their high-tech product lines.
First some examples of electronic music names:
Names like:
Heliosphan (aphex twin)
zeiss contarex (autechre)
entresol (sun electric)
Versivo (bola)
The reason these kinds of weird names are chosen is that in both the case of electronic music and technology firms, the product is extremely abstract. Most normal language deals with relatively specific concrete terms and concepts.
These companies don't have one concrete or specific mission. Technology's moving fast, and people realize this.No company wants to name itself after a specific technology or product which could be obsolete in 5 or 10 or 20 years. So you pick names that have meanings unrelated to what you currently do or produce. AT&T doesn't see a whole bunch of business in telegraphy any more.
This leaves several options.
* Pick a word that conveys something good unrelated to your technology. Zenith. Sun. Saturn. Problems: How many appropriate words are there? Don't want to violate any trademarks..
* Use a family name. Who's family? I think a lot of technology companies NEVER were a family business, due to the ammount of capital required to get started.
* Make up some word that linguistically hints at other meanings, but has no explicit meaning of its own. Novell (novelty?) Lucent (Light?) Itanium (Titanium?) Problems: Some people say they're dumb.
* Use some acronym, ignore the original meaning.. AT&T does this now.
The electronic music names tend to evoke notions of Science, space, chemistry, & technology in general. The technology industry tries to evoke speed, dependability, luminence, and innovation. And vowels. They want you to think of vowels.
But it's the same game - Picking a word for an abstract concept which has none.
Er, in vc6
On a related note, also don't try including Windows.h if you have disabled "compiler extensions"...
embrace.. extend.. embrace.. extend..
Um. When you say to your video card "Do 32 bit colour" it doesn't really use more colours. It's just 24 bits with padding or alpha (Depending on your application.)
I think you'll find that many of the laws "of biology" tend to really be much more general, and are instead general laws of diverse complicated systems. Biology happens to be an interesting and easy to study niche in this larger field.
Survival of the fittest?
You have a cardboard box with a bunch of things made out of legos in it. Shake the whole box a lot. The ones that doesn't break are what's left over. If that stuff can get reproduced somehow (by itself, or by anything else), "natural" selection happens.
This happens with wholes (organisms & web sites) as well as parts (genes & memes/paradigms) - if the part causes the whole to break, that part won't be very common. We don't see a lot of humans with the "dead" gene.
Nothing comes free, even existence. That's what makes this whole thing work. (in other words, your website is in a cardboard box getting banged against legos)
For internet entities, the cost of existence is bandwidth & server space. Human interest is what it costs to cover these needs. Whether people are interested enough to pay the internet bill because the entity is neat or useful or lucrative is irrelevant.
Existence for humans is normal activity, as well as healing wounds - general metabolism. This cost is paid by an influx of chemical energy (food).
Biological things expend energy getting food, Internet things expend energy getting people interested. If either one of those entities's costs of existance exceeds it's resources, the data pipe will be shut down, so to speak.
Reproduction?
Q: What's the best way to learn HTML?
A: View->Source
In biological systems the notion of parenthood is pretty clear-cut. In memetic systems, however, it can be very difficult to see where ideas come from. But don't tell me that everybody who's implemented a web-based shopping cart thought of the idea themselves.
There are differences, sure. Darwinian vs. Lemarkian evolution.. One or two parents vs dozens or hundreds of 'parents'.
But what's important is that the environment has only limited resources (food, eyeballs), there is some kind of non-exact reproduction (cells divide, ideas get solen), combined with a non-zero cost for existance. Given those constraints, you're pretty much guaranteed to get an ecosystem, or something similar to it.
Is it (the internet) life? I don't care. If it is, great. If it's not, make a new word that means the same thing as "life" without requiring the processes be biological in nature. Good luck getting people to use it.