It is interesting that you mention this - there are engines now that no longer have camshafts - they have computer controlled, solenoid driven valves.
with this very cool tech, you can create an engine that can dynamically and very completely adjust its own timing, giving you mileage timing for long hauls, and power timing for when the pedal is to the metal. These engines can also hold open the exhaust valve on every other cylinder and go into uber-mileage mode, running on 4 cylinders instead of 8, or three instead of 6. And after a certain amount of cycles, it can alternate out the resting cylinders, so that no set of cylinders get more combustion wear than any other.
Engine tech is going to very cool places nowadays.
that's what concept cars are supposed to do - get you thinking in different directions. they're not (most of them) going to get made because they are just so freaking weird looking.
Notable exceptions are the Prowler, the new Thunderbird, and the new VW Bug.
Concept cars are to the auto industry what concept code is to us - it gets us thinking in new and creative ways so that we can keep on top of the competition.
i just downloaded and installed adobe's svg viewer. (why the hell doesn't it work in mozilla natively, or at least be made available as a plugin?) it doesn't work. click a link, tell it to open the SVG file, about three dialog boxes pop up giving me errors.
so i save the file to my desktop, and launch from there. same three error boxes coming up telling me to save it to disk and launch it from there.
so i look in the start menu for this mysterious program and use the open dialog from there. well there is no start menu item.
so for me, for now, and most likely forever, flash is how i will prefer to view my vector art, thank you.
maybe you should hammer out the most very basic usability problems until you decide to start promoting this technology. ok?
The best cartoons were never taken seriously because they are the cartoons of a violent nature. And I'm talking about silly violence, not realistic violence. Arguably there is no such thing as realistic violence in a cartoon (none that I know of anyway)
things like bugs bunny and yosemite sam blowing holes in each other's hats, then running from each other and bugs beating the crap out of sam through various dirty tricks.
the late 1950s was the end of the great cartoon era. They were written for an adult audience, and often shown before movies to get folks' attention on the screen. Movie trailers now do this.
[offtopic] I long for the days when there were still parts of one's life that were not saturated with advertisements. the only part of my life not saturated with ads is my dreams, and as soon as the technology exists to put ads in my dreams, they'll be there. I hope I'm dead. [/offtopic]
When cartoons were not taken seriously, and considered entertainment only, is when cartoons were great. Nowadays cartoons like Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls are good cartoons, but they'll never be as good as the WWII and babyboom era Warner Bros cartoons.
I saw an interview once with some animators from that era of Warner animation studios' life, and they all said that they wrote and drew the cartoons that *they* wanted to see, not what someone else wanted to see. Nowadays executives decide what is written and drawn, in an attempt to please the most people possible, and keep their ad revenue up. it is my belief that all bad decisions are based on the desire for more money, and this is yet another example of that form of decision making.
Anyway, ranting off. The cartoons will get great again when they study what psychology made the old warner bros cartoons great, and reproduce it. talking rabbits, ducks, dogs, roosters, squirrels, etc, with jokes and situations written for adults and silly fake violence written for children. then they'll be great again. I would love to see one cartoon character jump into a freaking burning coal stove on a train and find a huge party inside just one more time. I would also love to see a good old fashioned shootout in a dusty old frontier town, between a talking, wise-ass rabbit that walks on two legs and a stupid gun-happy gold miner just one more time. "i dare you to step across this line" said 4,000 times until sam is led into walking off of a cliff. doesn't get much better than that.
oh, the good old fashioned crazyness will never be repeated!
Keyboard, Video, Mouse. are you surprised that there is no audio?
get a mixer. there is probably little reason you'd want to play music on more than one computer at a time, so just get a mixer and put them all into the mixer and out the speakers right in front of you.
i just love this. people think the sun is more dangerous when there is an eclipse, when in fact its just that you're more likely to want to stare at the sun when there is an eclipse.
With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce.
Show me a 5 megapixel digital camera that you can get at a regular store that takes 5 megapixel full motion video..... yep, that's what i thought. there are none.
it takes A LOT of bandwidth to get all of that uncompressed video off of the sensor and through the processing circutry. taking a few still photographs per minute (or even per second), is a lot different than taking 30 5 megapixel images per second.
I said 'most', i wasn't speaking for all. I also know of many CS guys who are great at a lot of things. However, I know a lot of other CS guys that really don't know how to carry themselves in front of a woman, and it is these people that i was speaking of.
I'm quite happy to know that you are a woman in CS. I just don't see the point of going out of one's way to put women in a career that they would not have gone into naturally by themselves.
is there any reason why we want more women in our field? won't they come if they're interested?
i suspect that it is because we think we'll have a better chance of getting a girlfriend if we can talk on the same level. well, if that's the case for you, i say this: perhaps it is your unwillingness to talk about anything OTHER than computers that keeps women away.
I've known far too many CS men that practically smother female new hires with gazillions of questions like "i have a beowulf at home, do you?" and "how many computers do you have, i have four." blah blah blah, well that just makes women want to be waitresses, dudes.
the real problem is that most CS guys know little else. They want some women to come to their level so they can communicate, when it is they who need to branch out and explore other areas of society.
I have been a network administrator, multimedia developer, system administrator, a cashier, a race car driver, a pig poo shoveler, a mechanic, a missile maintenance technician, and a cameraman, and i can tell you that there are no women in CS because the CS guys foam at the mouth and surround them as soon as they enter the room.
Besides, who wants a partner that knows what you know? isn't part of a fun, healthy relationship learning new things about something entirely different to yourself and what you know?
Maybe there's another reason that you want more women in CS, but i can't think of it. If they'll do just as good of a job as you do (you know they do, guys) then it can only be because you're in search of an easy way into a relationship.
mod me down if you want, but i have a point here and you know it.
they're not THAT expensive, and its probably not worth the effort at all to try and duplicate all that functionality.
I suppose its one thing if you want to do this for the purposes of learning how to do it, but if you're going to build it to try and save money, just buy a tivo. you're going to wind up spending as much or more money and a LOT of time fine-tuning everything to your preference, and working out little bugs with a self-built solution.
so, unless this is a project that's more about the journey than the destination, get a tivo.
why do they use one moving set of heads when several stationary (or less movable) heads would be much, much faster?
i remember a very old 10 meg disk i had that had an 18 inch platter on it, and about 200 or so STATIONARY heads. the seek time was determined by the platter spin rate, and it wrote and read data as fast as the disk spun under the heads.
it couldn't be that hard to build a small (10gig) prototype drive with one platter, and many, many stationary heads. you could probably format the thing in under.1 seconds, and if you had a better bus than IDE or SCSI, like PCI or something, you could REALLY speed up the disk access rates.
I'm not in the hard-drive paradigm, I don't know the ins and outs of harddrive operation, but this seems like something to think about.
the cop says: "I want body armor the size of a handkerchief that can stop a howitzer."
the fireman says: "i want a firehose that weighs less than a pound that can fight fires 250 feet away."
the scuba diver says: "i want an oxygen tank that holds 10 hours of air, and fits in my back pocket - those backpack tanks are HEAVY!"
the hot rodder says: "i want a car that goes from 0-60 in 1 second with a top speed of 400mph in the quarter mile and i don't want to spend over $500."
the alwsn says: "i want to make some electronic equipment i own do something it was never intended to do without opening the case, changing anything, and i want it to work flawlessly every time."
they can certainly ask. the editors don't ask because they don't give a flying crap about a site they link to. if they cared, they'd ask, and put something like this in the story: "original story [here], mirrors [here, here, here, here]. enjoy" its NOT THAT HARD.
if the site says no, then editors put in "[site] declined our request to mirror their page. smash 'em,/."
if slashdot mirrors a site with ads, iframes can keep ad-revenue where it belongs. the original site can host the contents of an iframe, (a lot use iframes for ads anyway), so the views and impressions go where they need to go, and the money goes where it needs to go.
the slashdot editors get PAID for this. this is their JOB. if I did so little improvement over 5 years of my employment somewhere (my estimate of the life of slashdot), i would have lost that job about 4 years ago. revolution is in order.
you people who say that mirroring is illegal don't know what you're talking about - if you get permission, its legal - PERIOD. all material is automatically copywritten by the person or company writing it and/or publishing it. mirroring without permission is illegal, but mirroring with permission is ENCOURAGED!
bottom line: slashdot doesn't mirror because they don't give a rats ass. the proof is in the pudding: to this day they still fsck sites up the ass, and don't even have the common courtesy to give them a reach around.
right, and it was that page that let you express your love for the OGG format, which is the only reason i filled out the page. i don't give a poo if i get to trial it, i just want them to know that i dig OGG and it is important to me.
if you haven't seen or read 'The Stand', by Stephen King, you should. Superflu wipes the world out, except for about 500 people who wind up being naturally immune. Great story, widely regarded as King's best work.
"If there is any race on the planet that needs some thinning out, its us." - Stephen King.
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting that you mention this - there are engines now that no longer have camshafts - they have computer controlled, solenoid driven valves.
with this very cool tech, you can create an engine that can dynamically and very completely adjust its own timing, giving you mileage timing for long hauls, and power timing for when the pedal is to the metal. These engines can also hold open the exhaust valve on every other cylinder and go into uber-mileage mode, running on 4 cylinders instead of 8, or three instead of 6. And after a certain amount of cycles, it can alternate out the resting cylinders, so that no set of cylinders get more combustion wear than any other.
Engine tech is going to very cool places nowadays.
that's what concept cars are supposed to do - get you thinking in different directions. they're not (most of them) going to get made because they are just so freaking weird looking.
Notable exceptions are the Prowler, the new Thunderbird, and the new VW Bug.
Concept cars are to the auto industry what concept code is to us - it gets us thinking in new and creative ways so that we can keep on top of the competition.
i guess we may have stumbled upon a universal truth.
... until it works with mozilla.
i just downloaded and installed adobe's svg viewer. (why the hell doesn't it work in mozilla natively, or at least be made available as a plugin?) it doesn't work. click a link, tell it to open the SVG file, about three dialog boxes pop up giving me errors.
so i save the file to my desktop, and launch from there. same three error boxes coming up telling me to save it to disk and launch it from there.
so i look in the start menu for this mysterious program and use the open dialog from there. well there is no start menu item.
so for me, for now, and most likely forever, flash is how i will prefer to view my vector art, thank you.
maybe you should hammer out the most very basic usability problems until you decide to start promoting this technology. ok?
The best cartoons were never taken seriously because they are the cartoons of a violent nature. And I'm talking about silly violence, not realistic violence. Arguably there is no such thing as realistic violence in a cartoon (none that I know of anyway)
things like bugs bunny and yosemite sam blowing holes in each other's hats, then running from each other and bugs beating the crap out of sam through various dirty tricks.
the late 1950s was the end of the great cartoon era. They were written for an adult audience, and often shown before movies to get folks' attention on the screen. Movie trailers now do this.
[offtopic]
I long for the days when there were still parts of one's life that were not saturated with advertisements. the only part of my life not saturated with ads is my dreams, and as soon as the technology exists to put ads in my dreams, they'll be there. I hope I'm dead.
[/offtopic]
When cartoons were not taken seriously, and considered entertainment only, is when cartoons were great. Nowadays cartoons like Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls are good cartoons, but they'll never be as good as the WWII and babyboom era Warner Bros cartoons.
I saw an interview once with some animators from that era of Warner animation studios' life, and they all said that they wrote and drew the cartoons that *they* wanted to see, not what someone else wanted to see. Nowadays executives decide what is written and drawn, in an attempt to please the most people possible, and keep their ad revenue up. it is my belief that all bad decisions are based on the desire for more money, and this is yet another example of that form of decision making.
Anyway, ranting off. The cartoons will get great again when they study what psychology made the old warner bros cartoons great, and reproduce it. talking rabbits, ducks, dogs, roosters, squirrels, etc, with jokes and situations written for adults and silly fake violence written for children. then they'll be great again. I would love to see one cartoon character jump into a freaking burning coal stove on a train and find a huge party inside just one more time. I would also love to see a good old fashioned shootout in a dusty old frontier town, between a talking, wise-ass rabbit that walks on two legs and a stupid gun-happy gold miner just one more time. "i dare you to step across this line" said 4,000 times until sam is led into walking off of a cliff. doesn't get much better than that.
oh, the good old fashioned crazyness will never be repeated!
Keyboard, Video, Mouse. are you surprised that there is no audio?
get a mixer. there is probably little reason you'd want to play music on more than one computer at a time, so just get a mixer and put them all into the mixer and out the speakers right in front of you.
i just love this. people think the sun is more dangerous when there is an eclipse, when in fact its just that you're more likely to want to stare at the sun when there is an eclipse.
why can't our teachers be smarter?
yep. that was a great comment.
they used their eyes, fruitcake
Uhh, no. The USSR has fallen. 1/5 of the world is still communist. China, and Cuba.
so no, communism has not fallen.
With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce.
Show me a 5 megapixel digital camera that you can get at a regular store that takes 5 megapixel full motion video..... yep, that's what i thought. there are none.
it takes A LOT of bandwidth to get all of that uncompressed video off of the sensor and through the processing circutry. taking a few still photographs per minute (or even per second), is a lot different than taking 30 5 megapixel images per second.
so no. it doesn't make you wonder.
I said 'most', i wasn't speaking for all. I also know of many CS guys who are great at a lot of things. However, I know a lot of other CS guys that really don't know how to carry themselves in front of a woman, and it is these people that i was speaking of.
I'm quite happy to know that you are a woman in CS. I just don't see the point of going out of one's way to put women in a career that they would not have gone into naturally by themselves.
is there any reason why we want more women in our field? won't they come if they're interested?
i suspect that it is because we think we'll have a better chance of getting a girlfriend if we can talk on the same level. well, if that's the case for you, i say this: perhaps it is your unwillingness to talk about anything OTHER than computers that keeps women away.
I've known far too many CS men that practically smother female new hires with gazillions of questions like "i have a beowulf at home, do you?" and "how many computers do you have, i have four." blah blah blah, well that just makes women want to be waitresses, dudes.
the real problem is that most CS guys know little else. They want some women to come to their level so they can communicate, when it is they who need to branch out and explore other areas of society.
I have been a network administrator, multimedia developer, system administrator, a cashier, a race car driver, a pig poo shoveler, a mechanic, a missile maintenance technician, and a cameraman, and i can tell you that there are no women in CS because the CS guys foam at the mouth and surround them as soon as they enter the room.
Besides, who wants a partner that knows what you know? isn't part of a fun, healthy relationship learning new things about something entirely different to yourself and what you know?
Maybe there's another reason that you want more women in CS, but i can't think of it. If they'll do just as good of a job as you do (you know they do, guys) then it can only be because you're in search of an easy way into a relationship.
mod me down if you want, but i have a point here and you know it.
they're not THAT expensive, and its probably not worth the effort at all to try and duplicate all that functionality.
I suppose its one thing if you want to do this for the purposes of learning how to do it, but if you're going to build it to try and save money, just buy a tivo. you're going to wind up spending as much or more money and a LOT of time fine-tuning everything to your preference, and working out little bugs with a self-built solution.
so, unless this is a project that's more about the journey than the destination, get a tivo.
until it turns into a combo tv/dvd player/cd recorder/shaving kit/cb radio/sweater vest, i'm not buying one!
why do they use one moving set of heads when several stationary (or less movable) heads would be much, much faster?
.1 seconds, and if you had a better bus than IDE or SCSI, like PCI or something, you could REALLY speed up the disk access rates.
i remember a very old 10 meg disk i had that had an 18 inch platter on it, and about 200 or so STATIONARY heads. the seek time was determined by the platter spin rate, and it wrote and read data as fast as the disk spun under the heads.
it couldn't be that hard to build a small (10gig) prototype drive with one platter, and many, many stationary heads. you could probably format the thing in under
I'm not in the hard-drive paradigm, I don't know the ins and outs of harddrive operation, but this seems like something to think about.
ciao
the cop says: "I want body armor the size of a handkerchief that can stop a howitzer."
the fireman says: "i want a firehose that weighs less than a pound that can fight fires 250 feet away."
the scuba diver says: "i want an oxygen tank that holds 10 hours of air, and fits in my back pocket - those backpack tanks are HEAVY!"
the hot rodder says: "i want a car that goes from 0-60 in 1 second with a top speed of 400mph in the quarter mile and i don't want to spend over $500."
the alwsn says: "i want to make some electronic equipment i own do something it was never intended to do without opening the case, changing anything, and i want it to work flawlessly every time."
ALL RIDICULOUS.
they can certainly ask. the editors don't ask because they don't give a flying crap about a site they link to. if they cared, they'd ask, and put something like this in the story: "original story [here], mirrors [here, here, here, here]. enjoy" its NOT THAT HARD.
/."
if the site says no, then editors put in "[site] declined our request to mirror their page. smash 'em,
if slashdot mirrors a site with ads, iframes can keep ad-revenue where it belongs. the original site can host the contents of an iframe, (a lot use iframes for ads anyway), so the views and impressions go where they need to go, and the money goes where it needs to go.
the slashdot editors get PAID for this. this is their JOB. if I did so little improvement over 5 years of my employment somewhere (my estimate of the life of slashdot), i would have lost that job about 4 years ago. revolution is in order.
you people who say that mirroring is illegal don't know what you're talking about - if you get permission, its legal - PERIOD. all material is automatically copywritten by the person or company writing it and/or publishing it. mirroring without permission is illegal, but mirroring with permission is ENCOURAGED!
bottom line: slashdot doesn't mirror because they don't give a rats ass. the proof is in the pudding: to this day they still fsck sites up the ass, and don't even have the common courtesy to give them a reach around.
right, and it was that page that let you express your love for the OGG format, which is the only reason i filled out the page. i don't give a poo if i get to trial it, i just want them to know that i dig OGG and it is important to me.
i didn't read that far. ;)
of all the people ever born, 1/5 are still alive. 30 billion people have been born, and 6 are still around.
if you haven't seen or read 'The Stand', by Stephen King, you should. Superflu wipes the world out, except for about 500 people who wind up being naturally immune. Great story, widely regarded as King's best work.
"If there is any race on the planet that needs some thinning out, its us." - Stephen King.
not the point. if all the news is kept off of site, what point is there reading this site? none.
what is the bill's goal? who raised the bill? what will happen if the bill passes? fails?
come on, this is a freakin' news site. put some news in there. the story as-is means nothing.
[CTRL]+[PGUP] and [CTRL]+[PGDN] are easier to remember and easier to type.