Back on topic, meanwhile, on a quick run to the Wawa, I found myself thinking: with all these large-scale-logos things going on (Firefox crop circle, KFC advert, corporate logos list Mickey, Target, Mattel, and Maxim covers), why not at least engineer a really visible project?
Figure a way to paint the moon with a monochrome Firefox logo.
I've only done head work so far, but here it is:
We would need a very large number of lightweight darts, that upon impact on the moon, would spread out, covering a very large area with dark. I'm figuring on making the darts out of about two inches of steel, with essentially an umbrella trailing behind.
They would be fired off, in LEO, via a linear accelerator (hence the steel). A ballistic orbit would be calculated for each dart that would place them, within certain tolerances, in a grid formation based on the logo specs. The orbit should calculate for a landing thatis normal to the moon's surface.
The math's going to be a bitch, of course, and so is timing. Anyways, I'm going to sit down and do it, probably building a two body model to figure how each dart will be affected by the last of the drag from LEO, the gravities of earth and moon, the initial speed and positions of LEO launch (my guess is that I'll not be scanning; instead, I'll figure the optimal windows for each launch and 'fire off' the darts as the windows come in).
Anyways, should be a fun engineering project. I'll get back to y'all when it's ready.
I wouldn't go that far; it's not gourmet, but it's pretty tasty for a couple bucks - that, of course being its market anyways. Still, I can't say I've had it in years; almost any KFC I see anymore is attached to a Taco Hell, which I find more appealing, so far as "I'm hungry, and this is the only thing close" food goes.
Personally, I prefer my own fried chicken. I use seasoned panko and a fryer at 400 degs F with coconut oil (keeps the smoke point high enough to prevent the formation of burnt-oil carcinogens). That way I avoid the greasiness associated with fried food; keep it hot enough and cook it for the right amount of time, and very little oil is retained in the food.
Shit, I been watching too much Good Eats. It's gourmet for geeks, doncha know?
FYI. I downloaded all five seasons for two reasons: 1) it gave me the freedom to check out anything I was suggested. 2) Some asshat had the torrent wrapped around a RAR file. Why do people do that shit on BT? Especially on video; you get no extra compression.
Sorry, but if it was good, I'd have hardly stuck with the VCR transcodes I was able to find. I had worse copies of Lexx, but at least I bought the DVDs after realizing, 'yeah, this is funny'.
As for "try 'cos I'm too cheap to buy", without downloading the whole five seasons, I wouldn't have been able to sample the show across its lifetime, picking from episodes others thought were good. The three I watched sucked hard, and they were the 'good' ones.
Meanwhile, I would submit that your attitude's disgraceful of itself. What if I were too strapped to buy? What if it were something for which DVDs aren't available? Should I defer my enjoyment until I can afford it? Shall I wait with bated breath for the studios to release DVDs?
I'll bet you consider my weekly download of the latest episode of "Torchwood" theft, even though I can't otherwise watch it here in the states. I suppose you'd suggest I wait for Sci Fi to pick it up (hardly guaranteed), or wait for the DVDs.
Yeah. No. There's no technical reason for me to wait. When the DVDs come out, I'll buy them (as I did with Dr. Who 2005, and will with '06). In the meanwhile, I'm getting my 'try' on.
I'll say one thing, though; Babylon 5 is the best argument for BitTorrent as a 'try before you buy' there ever was. Downloaded five seasons. Got three episodes in before my eyes and ears started to bleed. Deleted the whole crop. Try returning DVDs like that.
I'm actually curious to see what happens when you send a semiconductive wire (ie: buckytubes) from ground to Van Allen (-). Would it cause a current dump?
Feh. It's a good idea, but the simplest thing they could do is dilute / liquefy the sewage and pump it through a FOX reactor. That's what I do, and a day's worth of poo provides enough heat energy to reduce my heating costs by about $150 / year. Not much, mind you, but it was dead-easy to build. If I buried the system, it would be more efficient. It's largeish; if I had a blended human available to me, I'd be able to toss him in.
For those confused, a FOX reactor is simple: Essentially, you're pumping organics and oxygen through a well-heated carbon filter. The carbon grabs onto the organic molecules and they quickly oxidize. Essentially, it's a good catalytic heater. The output is CO2, near-pure water, and heat.
There is energy input, in the liquefier (continuous-flow blender, looks like a paint stirrer in a wide pipe), the pump, the air compressor, and the initial heating of the reactor. The output outweighs this, however, as I capture it in two ways: a turbine (generating electricity; my household heat is off the electrically-heated hot water line), and by using the waste heat as a pre-heater for my hot water line.
Hm. Maybe/. should have a user option to filter out tags. I'd get rid of 'itsatrap', 'fud', and 'notfud', which all seem to get tagged onto everything.
It's called an update. Most likely, legacy ECMAScript (the 'JavaScript' you've been using since 1999, per ECMA-262) will work just as it always has. My guess is that Tamarin is going to have speed and syntax optimizations.
Honestly. You're probably one of the guys who claim that "Javascript isn't programming". Eh. Maybe I shouldn't assume things.
Still, the point is that the ECMA spec for inline browser c-like scripting has been updated at least three times since its standardization in 1999. Did you know that you can do Javascript in an object-oriented manner? Did you know that Flash's ActionScript is just ECMAScript with additional bindings (so is ColdFusions cfScript language)? How about the fact that you can pass inline functions as arguments? Have you ever used the "with" statement? Do you know DOM level 1? XMLHttpRequest? The 'in' clause in 'for'? Prototyped classes?
No, seriously, there's a lot more to Javascript than there used to be, and if you figure out the more advanced features (and how to properly separate behavior, presentation and content), it's actually a pleasant language to work in. I for one welcome the updates and additions to the language that can give 2008's webpages the kick they deserve.
No, they'd have 1-2 glitches every day; ie: losing the system for 0.864 seconds (the remainder of five nines in the space of a day) isn't enough time for the plane (or shuttle) to crash.
Meanwhile, when the uptime / downtime is more granular (say it takes a full minute to start the control systems), but you can still claim five nines, you have more of a problem with an actual failure, but it becomes far less likely to occur (1 catastrophic error every 70 or so days).
The question is: how long does a control system need to be down to cause a catastrophic failure, and how can we decentralize things like power, logical systems, etc, and make redundant systems to ensure no nines of uptime (ie: 100%)?
It's not like this shit is either expensive or difficult these days, especially when you have a very specific design scope.
At the very least, to reduce its payload. I can't imagine that the old proto-computers on that thing are lightweight.
And no, *my* Java implementation wouldn't be bug free. A well-paid development team's would be, though.
Meanwhile, isn't the standard target for reliability for production code in the server industry five 9's? I know it's the target where I work (actually, it just a one and two zeroes; we haven't gone down yet - sure, it's only been 1 year, but hey).
Hehe. Still, even a perfect test can be skewed by a population that isn't as balanced as the test is. It helps if the population being tested is honest - and average.
Meanwhile, now I know why the IQ tests I took as a child had spelling errors. Seriously, you kiss your mom with that spell check?
Uh, not to be nit picky, but average IQ can't increase. The IQ score is always relative to a bell curve, with 'average' alwaysbeing smack-dab at the 50th percentile (the mean). 200==100th percentile, and 0==0th percentile (both more or less immeasurable).
Now, you could say that the bell-curve's getting humpy at the high end (which it is), and you could say that an IQ of 100 is smarter than it used to be (also true, though most people with higher intelligence but less education never notice), but the 'average IQ' is always 100.
The real question is why theyhaven't reimplemented the electronics in the space shuttle. I mean, seriously. A furby's more complex. You could replace all the logic systemson that thing with a single gumstix, and have enough spare processing power to run it all on Java.
Oh, yeah. Reliability. 'Cos 30 year old electronics can be considered 'reliable'. It sounds mean, but I can't wait until every piece of equipmenton that thing fails utterly - on the ground, hopefully.
Meanwhile, we're talking about using binary codecs, which MPlayer does without Wine's interference. The codec could easily cause havoc, but it really has no way of knowing it's under Linux, and would most likely fail to do whatever it attempts (the whole device infrastructure is different). Of course, one could be written specifically to be able to operate in linux, grabbing on to/dev/tty*, for example. You know, if it can even do an fopen.
Well, Apple could probably navigate around it entirely by founding a different company for each OSI layer they deal with, and having those companies do business with one another. Essentially dilute the company while maintaining the end-product.
Still, they couldn't get away with exclusive dealing like they presently do internally - you'd have Dell and HP making OS-X machines. And Macs with the option of having Windows preinstalled. You might even have iWork and iLife running in Linux.
The companies could coordinate their efforts, meanwhile, so that the User Experience remains consistent. That would last several years before the infighting starts.
It's what the OS secures itself against. Symantec and the like can't hook in at the system level for above-admin control of the system (the only level you can sit at and be certain a virus isn't going to rip your arsehole out).
Not that I like shit that sits there. I'd much rather browse like an intelligent human being and avoid getting virused altogether. Seriously. Anymore, if your system gets compromised, it's a PEBKAC error, not an issue with the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Back on topic, meanwhile, on a quick run to the Wawa, I found myself thinking: with all these large-scale-logos things going on (Firefox crop circle, KFC advert, corporate logos list Mickey, Target, Mattel, and Maxim covers), why not at least engineer a really visible project?
Figure a way to paint the moon with a monochrome Firefox logo.
I've only done head work so far, but here it is:
We would need a very large number of lightweight darts, that upon impact on the moon, would spread out, covering a very large area with dark. I'm figuring on making the darts out of about two inches of steel, with essentially an umbrella trailing behind.
They would be fired off, in LEO, via a linear accelerator (hence the steel). A ballistic orbit would be calculated for each dart that would place them, within certain tolerances, in a grid formation based on the logo specs. The orbit should calculate for a landing thatis normal to the moon's surface.
The math's going to be a bitch, of course, and so is timing. Anyways, I'm going to sit down and do it, probably building a two body model to figure how each dart will be affected by the last of the drag from LEO, the gravities of earth and moon, the initial speed and positions of LEO launch (my guess is that I'll not be scanning; instead, I'll figure the optimal windows for each launch and 'fire off' the darts as the windows come in).
Anyways, should be a fun engineering project. I'll get back to y'all when it's ready.
I wouldn't go that far; it's not gourmet, but it's pretty tasty for a couple bucks - that, of course being its market anyways. Still, I can't say I've had it in years; almost any KFC I see anymore is attached to a Taco Hell, which I find more appealing, so far as "I'm hungry, and this is the only thing close" food goes.
Personally, I prefer my own fried chicken. I use seasoned panko and a fryer at 400 degs F with coconut oil (keeps the smoke point high enough to prevent the formation of burnt-oil carcinogens). That way I avoid the greasiness associated with fried food; keep it hot enough and cook it for the right amount of time, and very little oil is retained in the food.
Shit, I been watching too much Good Eats. It's gourmet for geeks, doncha know?
FYI. I downloaded all five seasons for two reasons: 1) it gave me the freedom to check out anything I was suggested. 2) Some asshat had the torrent wrapped around a RAR file. Why do people do that shit on BT? Especially on video; you get no extra compression.
Sorry, but if it was good, I'd have hardly stuck with the VCR transcodes I was able to find. I had worse copies of Lexx, but at least I bought the DVDs after realizing, 'yeah, this is funny'.
As for "try 'cos I'm too cheap to buy", without downloading the whole five seasons, I wouldn't have been able to sample the show across its lifetime, picking from episodes others thought were good. The three I watched sucked hard, and they were the 'good' ones.
Meanwhile, I would submit that your attitude's disgraceful of itself. What if I were too strapped to buy? What if it were something for which DVDs aren't available? Should I defer my enjoyment until I can afford it? Shall I wait with bated breath for the studios to release DVDs?
I'll bet you consider my weekly download of the latest episode of "Torchwood" theft, even though I can't otherwise watch it here in the states. I suppose you'd suggest I wait for Sci Fi to pick it up (hardly guaranteed), or wait for the DVDs.
Yeah. No. There's no technical reason for me to wait. When the DVDs come out, I'll buy them (as I did with Dr. Who 2005, and will with '06). In the meanwhile, I'm getting my 'try' on.
Yeah. Coke's working on setting off supernovae, timed so that it lights up the night sky with "Coke Brings Life"
Sure, if your ruleset means Delicious == Sad.
No, I don't grieve for chickens. Too many humans to grieve for.
Nothing. Bad acting, worse writing.
I'll say one thing, though; Babylon 5 is the best argument for BitTorrent as a 'try before you buy' there ever was. Downloaded five seasons. Got three episodes in before my eyes and ears started to bleed. Deleted the whole crop. Try returning DVDs like that.
I'm actually curious to see what happens when you send a semiconductive wire (ie: buckytubes) from ground to Van Allen (-). Would it cause a current dump?
Feh. It's a good idea, but the simplest thing they could do is dilute / liquefy the sewage and pump it through a FOX reactor. That's what I do, and a day's worth of poo provides enough heat energy to reduce my heating costs by about $150 / year. Not much, mind you, but it was dead-easy to build. If I buried the system, it would be more efficient. It's largeish; if I had a blended human available to me, I'd be able to toss him in.
For those confused, a FOX reactor is simple: Essentially, you're pumping organics and oxygen through a well-heated carbon filter. The carbon grabs onto the organic molecules and they quickly oxidize. Essentially, it's a good catalytic heater. The output is CO2, near-pure water, and heat.
There is energy input, in the liquefier (continuous-flow blender, looks like a paint stirrer in a wide pipe), the pump, the air compressor, and the initial heating of the reactor. The output outweighs this, however, as I capture it in two ways: a turbine (generating electricity; my household heat is off the electrically-heated hot water line), and by using the waste heat as a pre-heater for my hot water line.
It seems to me that trolls are becoming the new Slashdotters.
Heh. That is a trap. He's looking for aliens to 'embrace and extend'
Hm. Maybe /. should have a user option to filter out tags. I'd get rid of 'itsatrap', 'fud', and 'notfud', which all seem to get tagged onto everything.
This is all well and good, but can someone please tell me who the paranoid is that keeps tagging everything with 'itsatrap'?
It's called an update. Most likely, legacy ECMAScript (the 'JavaScript' you've been using since 1999, per ECMA-262) will work just as it always has. My guess is that Tamarin is going to have speed and syntax optimizations.
Honestly. You're probably one of the guys who claim that "Javascript isn't programming". Eh. Maybe I shouldn't assume things.
Still, the point is that the ECMA spec for inline browser c-like scripting has been updated at least three times since its standardization in 1999. Did you know that you can do Javascript in an object-oriented manner? Did you know that Flash's ActionScript is just ECMAScript with additional bindings (so is ColdFusions cfScript language)? How about the fact that you can pass inline functions as arguments? Have you ever used the "with" statement? Do you know DOM level 1? XMLHttpRequest? The 'in' clause in 'for'? Prototyped classes?
No, seriously, there's a lot more to Javascript than there used to be, and if you figure out the more advanced features (and how to properly separate behavior, presentation and content), it's actually a pleasant language to work in. I for one welcome the updates and additions to the language that can give 2008's webpages the kick they deserve.
No, they'd have 1-2 glitches every day; ie: losing the system for 0.864 seconds (the remainder of five nines in the space of a day) isn't enough time for the plane (or shuttle) to crash.
Meanwhile, when the uptime / downtime is more granular (say it takes a full minute to start the control systems), but you can still claim five nines, you have more of a problem with an actual failure, but it becomes far less likely to occur (1 catastrophic error every 70 or so days).
The question is: how long does a control system need to be down to cause a catastrophic failure, and how can we decentralize things like power, logical systems, etc, and make redundant systems to ensure no nines of uptime (ie: 100%)?
It's not like this shit is either expensive or difficult these days, especially when you have a very specific design scope.
At the very least, to reduce its payload. I can't imagine that the old proto-computers on that thing are lightweight.
And no, *my* Java implementation wouldn't be bug free. A well-paid development team's would be, though.
Meanwhile, isn't the standard target for reliability for production code in the server industry five 9's? I know it's the target where I work (actually, it just a one and two zeroes; we haven't gone down yet - sure, it's only been 1 year, but hey).
Hehe. Still, even a perfect test can be skewed by a population that isn't as balanced as the test is. It helps if the population being tested is honest - and average.
Meanwhile, now I know why the IQ tests I took as a child had spelling errors. Seriously, you kiss your mom with that spell check?
"The average IQ has increased."
Uh, not to be nit picky, but average IQ can't increase. The IQ score is always relative to a bell curve, with 'average' alwaysbeing smack-dab at the 50th percentile (the mean). 200==100th percentile, and 0==0th percentile (both more or less immeasurable).
Now, you could say that the bell-curve's getting humpy at the high end (which it is), and you could say that an IQ of 100 is smarter than it used to be (also true, though most people with higher intelligence but less education never notice), but the 'average IQ' is always 100.
The real question is why theyhaven't reimplemented the electronics in the space shuttle. I mean, seriously. A furby's more complex. You could replace all the logic systemson that thing with a single gumstix, and have enough spare processing power to run it all on Java.
Oh, yeah. Reliability. 'Cos 30 year old electronics can be considered 'reliable'. It sounds mean, but I can't wait until every piece of equipmenton that thing fails utterly - on the ground, hopefully.
1. Please read the MPlayer documentation, or, at the very least build it for yourself at least once. It doesn't use winelib. Feel free to correct me if you can find it anywhere on
2. The dangerous part is the codec. No self-respecting linux user would run a random windows program as root, but they may not think twice about the codec (figuring that it's properly sandboxed by mplayer - which it is).
3. It may, but try, just once, to have an exe link to an elf library. Even if it found out, the codec couldn't even know how to link into libc6, at least not by any method I can think of.
4. True. But it's also not the only way to capture the keyboard. I was giving an example of a way to spy.
*poke* firefox already uses gtk. The reason it feels unnatural is that it SHOULD be using Qt.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't mind a windows native build.
Meanwhile, we're talking about using binary codecs, which MPlayer does without Wine's interference. The codec could easily cause havoc, but it really has no way of knowing it's under Linux, and would most likely fail to do whatever it attempts (the whole device infrastructure is different). Of course, one could be written specifically to be able to operate in linux, grabbing on to /dev/tty*, for example. You know, if it can even do an fopen.
I just don't bother executing that shit. Fact is, if you're after media, and you're asked to download a program, chances are you're being scammed.
Does this line of thinking apply to iTunes and Vongo? Well, for me it does. They're getting you to pay for DRM'd content. Sounds scammy to me.
Well, Apple could probably navigate around it entirely by founding a different company for each OSI layer they deal with, and having those companies do business with one another. Essentially dilute the company while maintaining the end-product.
Still, they couldn't get away with exclusive dealing like they presently do internally - you'd have Dell and HP making OS-X machines. And Macs with the option of having Windows preinstalled. You might even have iWork and iLife running in Linux.
The companies could coordinate their efforts, meanwhile, so that the User Experience remains consistent. That would last several years before the infighting starts.
It's what the OS secures itself against. Symantec and the like can't hook in at the system level for above-admin control of the system (the only level you can sit at and be certain a virus isn't going to rip your arsehole out).
Not that I like shit that sits there. I'd much rather browse like an intelligent human being and avoid getting virused altogether. Seriously. Anymore, if your system gets compromised, it's a PEBKAC error, not an issue with the OS.