Are you going to ask a lot of questions if a new customer comes along and starts providing you with millions of dollars worth of orders? Would you be inclided to view their decision to order all these drugs from your manufacturing plant as "suspicious" or "lucky"?
Do you have any ethics at all? Because if so, the answer to both these questions is 'yes'.
These days 'I was just following orders' does not cut it. Either military orders or manufacturing ones.
...quite frankly, the
whole _point_ of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with
people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any
random topic, whether they know anything about it or not.
...and, once again, gets it spot on!
(I'm just wondering whether this gets modded 'Funny', 'Insightful', or 'Flamebait'...)
I remember hearing... I don't know when... that once when there was a band, heavily into synth, who were doing a concert and Robert Moog happened to be around. During the interval they were talking backstage, and the band members managed to persuade him to come on stage at the beginning of the second half.
The audience went absolutely apeshit. Everyone there knew about him, about the instruments, and to say they were glad to see him was an understatement --- the way it was reported to me he got more applause than the band did.
Does anyone remember this story? Can anyone provide references?
True, but since this agent doesn't kill or harm crocodiles there's a decent chance it'll be safe for humans.
Mammals and reptiles are quite different; to use a computing metaphor, they're based on different hardware architectures.
One of the major differences is that mammals have a controlled body temperature. This is more important than you might think; enzymes tend to only work at a particular range of temperatures, which means that where a reptile will have to produce a whole range of different enzymes to perform one task, a mammal will only need to produce one. This allows mammals to be considerably more efficient at the expense of a higher metabolic rate.
That's not to say this isn't interesting --- it's extremely interesting --- but it may not be immediately useful.
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind.
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Read some of his essays. He genuinely believes that all evidence clearly shows that the earth cannot possibly be more than 10,000 years old.
This may be the case; however, that doesn't invalidate his work on spam. Remember, Sir Isaac Newton was a firm believer in the more exotic aspects of mystical alchemy, and the vast bulk of his 'research' was complete gibberish. That doesn't make his work on gravity any less valuable.
Tie Fighter and the opening to Day of the Tentacle stand out as excellent game music.
Oooh --- iMuse!
It's worth getting a copy of Monkey Island II just so you can wander around the village at the beginning of the game and listen to the soundtrack. It's masterful. Each location has its own distinct style and theme which reflects the overall village theme. As you move from location to location, the music seamlessly segues to the new version in a way that's musically appropriate. I've never heard any other game do it quite as well. (Tie Fighter's shifts are just a little jarring, and I was never terribly keen on Day Of The Tentacle's soundtrack --- apart from the opening, which as you say is great.)
Michael Lands, who did most of the Monkey Island music, is most underrated; both as a composer and a programmer... I'm still trying to find any solo projects of his.
Unfortunately the article has no picture of the satellite so we cant see the antenna in question. But surely a the purpose of a dish antenna of that sort of size is to increase the gain by narrowing the beam width, isnt it?
The impression I'm getting is that the primary purpose of the dish is to receive weak signals --- there could well be a seperate, smaller antenna for transmitting.
...how can you possibly talk about arranged video game music and not mention OverClocked ReMix? Game music, rewritten and reimagined by fans (and in some cases, by the original composers), all at a consistently high level of quality.
Oh, yeah. There's also the differently good --- one author did, for a joke, A Boy And His Blob using samples constructed from the game data itself. Damn, that's freaky...
You can never have too many compilers, is my motto. Kudos to the author for making it open source.
<PLUG>
If you want to try something altogether larger, more powerful and more flexible, then check out the ACK --- this is a compiler toolchain written by Andy Tanenbaum and Ceriel Jacobs that was released under a BSD license a few years ago. It supports K&R C, ANSI C, Pascal, Modula 2, Occam, Basic and Fortran, and supports a whole bunch of (slightly elderly) architectures. A subset of the compiler comes with Minix, if you've ever used that. Ever wanted to run Occam programs on your Apple I? Yep, you can do that.
It's way, way smaller than gcc, astonishingly faster, much easier to port new architectures for, and produces adequate if not brilliant code.
</PLUG>
Re:Whatever happened to single-stage-to-orbit?
on
NASA's Shuttle Plans
·
· Score: 1
As long as we're no longer trying to send up cargo along with personnel, now might be a good time to revisit single-stage-to-orbit designs such as the Delta Clipper and the Roton.
The trouble with SSTOs is that while they're just about feasible, they're only just about feasible... which means that they're not economic if you actually want to lift something cheaply.
What they could be good for, though, are situations where you don't care about economics. Man-rated vehicles, for example. You'd launch the cargo on a big dumb rocket, and if it made it up without exploding, you'd launch the humans on something expensive and reliable.
(You've still got a long way to go before you can beat Soyuz on both reliability and price, though. The Russians have pretty much nailed that one. I'm still not entirely sure why NASA wants a new man-rated launcher so badly, given there's a perfectly adequate (and cheap) solution already. Is it just politics, or is there a real reason?)
From watching the video, it looks like the presenter doesn't actually know what the word 'stereoscopic' means. A stereoscopic view presents each eye with a different image in order for your brain to extract depth information.
What these guys seem to be doing is to track the location of the viewpoint and alter the image to take into account for where the viewer is. A very cool trick, but quite an old one --- it's been in use in CAVEs for some time now. But you'll still just see a flat image; you'll only get a 3D effect while your head is moving.
Much cooler is the surface compensation system to allow you to project an arbitrary image onto a coloured, contoured surface and have it look right...
This is the only game I've ever played that I considered "literature". It had a central theme that flowed throughout the story and gave the player lots to think about. Tremendously well written with passages I think about to this day.
When Mort's backstory opened up, I spent about an hour sitting in front of my computer, just working through the dialogues, completely engrossed. There's some good writing in there.
Admittedly, there's also some bad writing --- the Godsmen subplot is clumsy and doesn't work well. But on the whole, it's a fantastic game...
(I haven't actually finished it. One problem with it is that it's too easy to power through the main plot without levelling up enough, which means that you when you reach the endgame you're too underpowered to be able to survive. I need to backtrack and spend some time power levelling.)
The quoted text in TFA wasn't from the BBC. It was Congressman Fred Upton of Michigan, who was being quoted by the BBC. There is a difference, you know.
/me wanders off, muttering darkly about journalistic standards. Meh. Who am I kidding? This is Slashdot.
...is, right now, playing live downlink audio while the video is showing replays of all the engineering camera footage.
All the engineering camera footage. While I've been watching they've gone from cameras 150 to 171, one after the other; all the grainy, low-quality video recorded by every single diagnostic camera all over the launch site.
So -- the Planetary Society is still saying "dusty old tapes -- have you gotten them in touch with each other?
I actually turned out to have my wires crossed. The Planetary Society aren't interested in the actual data; they're analysing the signal for Doppler shifts, to get a more accurate picture of the spacecraft's motion. Which means the MO disks aren't any use to them, because they just contain the sanitised digital telemetry.
(He's actually making progress converting the MO disks, on his own time as there isn't any money to fund him; the Pioneer 10 data is done, and he's reached 1976 for Pioneer 11. It makes me feel awfully young --- I was born in 1975!)
The data used to be stored on magnetic tape. When the tape started deteriorating, all the data was archived off onto then state-of-the-art MO disks.
The machine used was a MicroVAX with a DEC RWZ21 SCSI MO drive, which is apparently quite rare. The disks are 128MB each.
For Pioneer 10, there are 155 disks, making 19840 MB of data.
For Pioneer 11, there are 217 disks, making 27776 MB of data.
Each disk takes about 10 minutes to read to the MicroVAX, and then more time to move across onto a real computer, of course.
I would have happily volunteered to spend a couple of days swapping disks in order to salvage all this lot, but alas, I'm the wrong side of the Atlantic. The guy in charge has recently been made redundant, and he was desperate to find someone to hand off all this to... but there's incredible beaurocracy. (I gather all the data was actually supposed to have been destroyed some years ago, but through some 'oversight' hadn't been.)
Alas, I don't have permission to publish his address, but I'll put him in touch with the Planetary Society on the off chance he doesn't know about this.
Interestingly, for years he ran the Pioneer spacecraft off a Mac Quadra 950! Check out the screen shots...
Alas, ant requires Java, which immediately disqualifies it for my purposes. (Maven, too. scons uses Python so it's not as bad, but it's still a fairly weighty extra requirement that I'd rather avoid if I can.)
However, I would be interested to know how to use Ant with the CDT for other purposes --- it's got to be better than Make, particularly if Eclipse will automate it. Do you have any references?
I want to build generic programs. Java, C, Pascal, Occam, COBOL, shell scripts. This is because the applications I need to build tend to be a mixture of various different paradigms: little tools that are built to produce data massagers that convert offline data into compilable data; metacompilers like yacc and bison; XML preprocessors like xslt; traditional C or C++; documentation builders like Javadoc or WEB... I can't find anything that will handle all this cleanly.
Is there anything out there that is (a) easily deployable (nothing turns off a prospective user than being told to download and install a complicated build system that depends on $LANGUAGE_OF_THE_MOMENT), (b) suitably flexible that I can customise it to work with all my little build tools, and (c) sufficiently elegant that I won't want to vomit looking at my build scripts six months later?
So far, the only thing I've found that works at all is traditional make. Which, I'm afraid, sucks. Makefiles scale very badly (recursive make. Eeeaah), don't handle disparate rulesets well (I want to build these C files with this rule and these with this other rule... oh, wait, I can't), and the dependency handling is practically nonexistent (you can fake to a certain extent with.d files, but that all falls apart as soon as you need to depend on dynamically made files).
A case in point: I maintain the ACK, a portable compiler toolchain that's about 20 years old. The build system is an intricate network is shell scripts and recursive makefiles. It works, but it's largely incomprehensible, very slow, doesn't handle incremental rebuilds, and is going to be a maintenance nightmare should we ever need to do any major revamps. I'd love to replace it; I've gone out actively looking for something better --- and I've failed.
Any suggestions?
This has been a public service rant by a stressed build technician.
I've thought of that, too. When the fleet is retired, why NOT just send at least one shuttle up there, as just another permanent part of the ISS? Just modify it for long-term space use and you have a very large addition to the station at a fraction of what it would cost to build a portion of the same size from scratch. Plus, it could double as a lifeboat should something go wrong with the attached Soyuz lifeboat.
The shuttles have a very limited on-orbit lifespan; they quickly run out of fuel for the fuel cells, coolant, etc. They make lousy space stations. The average shuttle mission is ten days, and the maximum is 18 with the Extended Duration Orbiter upgrade.
If you docked one with the ISS, I'd expect it to very quickly die --- and once dead, I doubt very much whether doing an in-orbit renovation to get it into a sufficient state even to land it on autopilot would be feasible. (If there is and autopilot.)
Given the sheer mass of a shuttle and how much stress it'd put on the ISS' station-keeping facilities, I strongly suspect that in the event of an on-orbit failure, the crew would be evacuated and then it'd be given the heave-ho into the Pacific...
Frankly, I really dont want your critique of my grammar and spelling skills. If the post is intelligible or the error changes the meaning of the post significantly, then there's your time to jump in with your corrections.
Your text is your voice. It doesn't convey information about what you said, it conveys information about you --- it's the equivalent of your accent. If you write sloppily, you'll sound as if you're speaking sloppily, which means that people will associate what you said with sloppiness, which is probably not what you want if you want to be taken seriously...
I know it shouldn't happen, but it does, in just the same way that people associated educated accents with intelligence and working-class accents with stupidity.
Personally, I don't think you have a problem --- you come across coherently and precisely and you're not slurring at all. However, uh... I think in that last sentence you might have meant 'unintelligable'...
Slashdot Mirror
God's irrelevant to whether ID is true or not --- it's whether ID is falsifiable or not that's important.
Which, AFAICT, it isn't, so it's still not science. But let's at least be precise when slagging them off...
Do you have any ethics at all? Because if so, the answer to both these questions is 'yes'.
These days 'I was just following orders' does not cut it. Either military orders or manufacturing ones.
...and, once again, gets it spot on!
(I'm just wondering whether this gets modded 'Funny', 'Insightful', or 'Flamebait'...)
The audience went absolutely apeshit. Everyone there knew about him, about the instruments, and to say they were glad to see him was an understatement --- the way it was reported to me he got more applause than the band did.
Does anyone remember this story? Can anyone provide references?
Mammals and reptiles are quite different; to use a computing metaphor, they're based on different hardware architectures.
One of the major differences is that mammals have a controlled body temperature. This is more important than you might think; enzymes tend to only work at a particular range of temperatures, which means that where a reptile will have to produce a whole range of different enzymes to perform one task, a mammal will only need to produce one. This allows mammals to be considerably more efficient at the expense of a higher metabolic rate.
That's not to say this isn't interesting --- it's extremely interesting --- but it may not be immediately useful.
This may be the case; however, that doesn't invalidate his work on spam. Remember, Sir Isaac Newton was a firm believer in the more exotic aspects of mystical alchemy, and the vast bulk of his 'research' was complete gibberish. That doesn't make his work on gravity any less valuable.
Whenever I play Windows I keep crashing...
Oooh --- iMuse!
It's worth getting a copy of Monkey Island II just so you can wander around the village at the beginning of the game and listen to the soundtrack. It's masterful. Each location has its own distinct style and theme which reflects the overall village theme. As you move from location to location, the music seamlessly segues to the new version in a way that's musically appropriate. I've never heard any other game do it quite as well. (Tie Fighter's shifts are just a little jarring, and I was never terribly keen on Day Of The Tentacle's soundtrack --- apart from the opening, which as you say is great.)
Michael Lands, who did most of the Monkey Island music, is most underrated; both as a composer and a programmer... I'm still trying to find any solo projects of his.
The impression I'm getting is that the primary purpose of the dish is to receive weak signals --- there could well be a seperate, smaller antenna for transmitting.
But IANARS (or SS).
And no, it's not all repetitive electronica. Check out this beautiful (and live) piano arrangement of Chrono Trigger's Kingdom Trial , or this quiet and contemplative, and brilliant, adaptation of Final Fantasy 6's Terra .
Or, for a change of pace, try this version of Metroid Prime's Phendrana theme. Or for sheer old-school energy, this powerful adaptation of Raiden's theme --- nothing subtle there, but god, it wakes you up.
Oh, yeah. There's also the differently good --- one author did, for a joke, A Boy And His Blob using samples constructed from the game data itself. Damn, that's freaky...
<PLUG>
If you want to try something altogether larger, more powerful and more flexible, then check out the ACK --- this is a compiler toolchain written by Andy Tanenbaum and Ceriel Jacobs that was released under a BSD license a few years ago. It supports K&R C, ANSI C, Pascal, Modula 2, Occam, Basic and Fortran, and supports a whole bunch of (slightly elderly) architectures. A subset of the compiler comes with Minix, if you've ever used that. Ever wanted to run Occam programs on your Apple I? Yep, you can do that.
It's way, way smaller than gcc, astonishingly faster, much easier to port new architectures for, and produces adequate if not brilliant code.
</PLUG>
The trouble with SSTOs is that while they're just about feasible, they're only just about feasible... which means that they're not economic if you actually want to lift something cheaply.
What they could be good for, though, are situations where you don't care about economics. Man-rated vehicles, for example. You'd launch the cargo on a big dumb rocket, and if it made it up without exploding, you'd launch the humans on something expensive and reliable.
(You've still got a long way to go before you can beat Soyuz on both reliability and price, though. The Russians have pretty much nailed that one. I'm still not entirely sure why NASA wants a new man-rated launcher so badly, given there's a perfectly adequate (and cheap) solution already. Is it just politics, or is there a real reason?)
What these guys seem to be doing is to track the location of the viewpoint and alter the image to take into account for where the viewer is. A very cool trick, but quite an old one --- it's been in use in CAVEs for some time now. But you'll still just see a flat image; you'll only get a 3D effect while your head is moving.
Much cooler is the surface compensation system to allow you to project an arbitrary image onto a coloured, contoured surface and have it look right...
When Mort's backstory opened up, I spent about an hour sitting in front of my computer, just working through the dialogues, completely engrossed. There's some good writing in there.
Admittedly, there's also some bad writing --- the Godsmen subplot is clumsy and doesn't work well. But on the whole, it's a fantastic game...
(I haven't actually finished it. One problem with it is that it's too easy to power through the main plot without levelling up enough, which means that you when you reach the endgame you're too underpowered to be able to survive. I need to backtrack and spend some time power levelling.)
/me wanders off, muttering darkly about journalistic standards. Meh. Who am I kidding? This is Slashdot.
All the engineering camera footage. While I've been watching they've gone from cameras 150 to 171, one after the other; all the grainy, low-quality video recorded by every single diagnostic camera all over the launch site.
NASA TV is so wonderfully geeky --- I love it...
That's not a video, that's a crappy flash animation with an even crappier advert on the front.
Does anyone know where I can get a downloadable, detailed video with some decent coverage (and on-board camera footage)?
I actually turned out to have my wires crossed. The Planetary Society aren't interested in the actual data; they're analysing the signal for Doppler shifts, to get a more accurate picture of the spacecraft's motion. Which means the MO disks aren't any use to them, because they just contain the sanitised digital telemetry.
(He's actually making progress converting the MO disks, on his own time as there isn't any money to fund him; the Pioneer 10 data is done, and he's reached 1976 for Pioneer 11. It makes me feel awfully young --- I was born in 1975!)
I would have happily volunteered to spend a couple of days swapping disks in order to salvage all this lot, but alas, I'm the wrong side of the Atlantic. The guy in charge has recently been made redundant, and he was desperate to find someone to hand off all this to... but there's incredible beaurocracy. (I gather all the data was actually supposed to have been destroyed some years ago, but through some 'oversight' hadn't been.)
Alas, I don't have permission to publish his address, but I'll put him in touch with the Planetary Society on the off chance he doesn't know about this.
Interestingly, for years he ran the Pioneer spacecraft off a Mac Quadra 950! Check out the screen shots...
However, I would be interested to know how to use Ant with the CDT for other purposes --- it's got to be better than Make, particularly if Eclipse will automate it. Do you have any references?
Is there anything out there that is (a) easily deployable (nothing turns off a prospective user than being told to download and install a complicated build system that depends on $LANGUAGE_OF_THE_MOMENT), (b) suitably flexible that I can customise it to work with all my little build tools, and (c) sufficiently elegant that I won't want to vomit looking at my build scripts six months later?
So far, the only thing I've found that works at all is traditional make. Which, I'm afraid, sucks. Makefiles scale very badly (recursive make. Eeeaah), don't handle disparate rulesets well (I want to build these C files with this rule and these with this other rule... oh, wait, I can't), and the dependency handling is practically nonexistent (you can fake to a certain extent with .d files, but that all falls apart as soon as you need to depend on dynamically made files).
A case in point: I maintain the ACK, a portable compiler toolchain that's about 20 years old. The build system is an intricate network is shell scripts and recursive makefiles. It works, but it's largely incomprehensible, very slow, doesn't handle incremental rebuilds, and is going to be a maintenance nightmare should we ever need to do any major revamps. I'd love to replace it; I've gone out actively looking for something better --- and I've failed.
Any suggestions?
This has been a public service rant by a stressed build technician.
You know, after hearing it said many times, it's only just now when seeing it written that I've realised that there's a really foul pun in that line.
Dear me. Dear deary me...
I feel so sorry for this guy's coworkers.
The shuttles have a very limited on-orbit lifespan; they quickly run out of fuel for the fuel cells, coolant, etc. They make lousy space stations. The average shuttle mission is ten days, and the maximum is 18 with the Extended Duration Orbiter upgrade.
If you docked one with the ISS, I'd expect it to very quickly die --- and once dead, I doubt very much whether doing an in-orbit renovation to get it into a sufficient state even to land it on autopilot would be feasible. (If there is and autopilot.)
Given the sheer mass of a shuttle and how much stress it'd put on the ISS' station-keeping facilities, I strongly suspect that in the event of an on-orbit failure, the crew would be evacuated and then it'd be given the heave-ho into the Pacific...
Your text is your voice. It doesn't convey information about what you said, it conveys information about you --- it's the equivalent of your accent. If you write sloppily, you'll sound as if you're speaking sloppily, which means that people will associate what you said with sloppiness, which is probably not what you want if you want to be taken seriously...
I know it shouldn't happen, but it does, in just the same way that people associated educated accents with intelligence and working-class accents with stupidity.
Personally, I don't think you have a problem --- you come across coherently and precisely and you're not slurring at all. However, uh... I think in that last sentence you might have meant 'unintelligable'...