Imagine travelling with it:
"Oh jeez, Jimmy, you dropped the Holographic Disc! Now dad lost all his files."
Au contraire... One of the strange qualities of holograms is that if you break one, each piece contains all information -- just scaled down.
If you e.g. have a hologram showing a gallon-sized bottle and you break it into two equally sized pieces, then you have two pictures, each showing a half-gallon-sized bottle.
So Dad would have twice as many files, but he now needs a magnifying lens for masturbating over his pr0n collection:)
But apes are already reasonably intelegent I don't know how intelegent most lisards are but when comparing a lizard to say a rat I think the rat wins.
What you refer to as "lizards" today is only a shade of what "lizard" meant 65 million years ago. Just like "mammals" certainly were somewhat inferior species back then.
s/Christian/Catholic/
There are plenty of Christians who don't believe in the papal succession.
Which still leaves the point valid that there is no concept of a professional church within original Christianity. I am fully aware that there are several Christian branches, but all of them still feature some sort of church hierarchy with professional churches and therefore taint the original concept.
It really shows how much the Roman Catholic church has lied
The whole Christian church is based on a lie.
There never was any saying like "you're Petrus, the rock I'll found my church on" (or however the English lines are, I'm referring to "Du bist Petrus, der Fels, auf den ich meine Kirche baue").
What indeed was the radical new thought in Christianity was that there is no church, that there are no professional priests. Instead, every member of Christianity was able to fulfill tasks which were before attached to a professional priest, such as celebration, absolution, etc. The only restriction was that you can't perform these tasks with respect to yourself but only to others.
But, of course, that was an intolerable loss of power for certain people, so around 200AD this Petrus-the-rock line was introduced as a justification for instatiating a professional church (again). Once this step was fulfilled, the Catholic church slowly but surely went off-track and turned into the multi-billion Euro imperium it probably is since the medieval ages (change Euro into your favorite historical currency unit...); not that Jesus' intolerance towards bankers and racketeers was any reason to not introduce the "money-for-sin" program (commonly known as "selling of indulgences" / Ablaßhandel) and later became one of the biggest bank.
The last pope who wanted to turn the Roman Catholic church into a church again, only lasted for little more than 50 days before dying of still unknown causes. His name was Johannes Paul I.
the purge of 'witches' (six million deaths at least)
Interesting, how "6 million deaths at last" seems to be a universal constant...
But apart from that, I don't see the purge of witches as an effect of intolerance; it's one part sexually motivated, and one part cementing the church's power.
By the time the Series III came out, E-mu had released several samplers including the Emulator I and II (both 8 bit, although the II used companding A/D-D/A converters to give a higer signal to noise). The Series III lost the coloured magic of the Series II sound by using increasingly perfect 16-bit recording, and it wasn't long before companies like Akai started making $5000 16-bit samplers that put Fairlight out of business.
By the time Series III reached the market which was around 1987, Akai already was entering the 16-bit business. Casio already had a 16-bit machine out and running (FZ-1) for incredibly low money. No need for funky Page R and similar, since that was the domain of good old Atari those days.
In a sad way history is repeating these days and wiping out all hardware samplers which get replaced with PC-based software.
Personally, I still prefer "real" machines in my studio over virtuals -- heck, I even don't like expander modules, I want every machine to have a keyboard -- but OTOH I can see the huge benefits when doing an all-digital production.
See, I wouldn't object the fees in Germany if the quality of what ARD & ZDF (the two main public channels) produce would be anywhere near BBC quality. However, not only they spend most of the money for single expensive projects (like soccer rights, the entertainer Harald Schmidt, and the "Wetten dass" Show) and waste the remaining money for just inferior copying of utter crap they find on private television, they also don't buy quite good BBC documentaries -- which you'll mostly find on private televisions.
Speaking of being never afraid to critisize the government, I might object. Public television in Germany *does* reflect quite biased information: depending on which magazine you watch, it's either more conservative or left-wing. So you need to watch more than one magazine to average out the biased information and draw your own conclusions -- just like you need to do if you watch private TV magazines. Or if you read newspapers, for instance. Here we also don't have a public newspaper and still noone complains about biased information.
I know its better than old news, but are you aware that this is just one of many possible schemes, and that none of them are due to take effect before 2017.
Maybe in the UK, maybe where you live -- but in Germany such a "Computer Tax" will be introduced in 2007 as an extension of the current "broadcast reception fee" which every holder of a radio or TV has to pay.
No idea about the situation in the UK, but in Germany public broadcasting stations are installed by law and have to provide a so-called "basic supply". It used to work prior to the dual TV system, i.e. public and private stations, but since then the public stations just badly clone successful formats of the private stations while sucking an enormous amount of money, both from broadcast fee (which is no tax) plus advertising an product placement, which is why the private TV stations called for EU regulaton as the above construct gives (fees plus ad money) the public stations an unfair advantage.
They also discovered the internet and do some fair amount of crossfinancing to run their web sites which they now use as a justification to force people to pay for unwanted "basic supply" also via internet. The EU currently has another sharp eye on them because of that.
Kinda sad when your video card has more ram than first/second/third computer had disk space (combined). Your processor has more cache than your first comp had ram. And I'm waiting for the day that a processor has more cache than my first comp had disk space.
You must be young...
The first computer I owned with a *disk* drive was the C64 offering a whopping 170kB per disk side. That's less than a tenth of what current architectures offer as on-chip L2 cache.
Actual state-of-the-art L2 caches hit 8MB which is even bigger than the first hard drive I tinkered with, a Commodore 5MB hard drive for the old CBM8000 series.
Not only Basicode... The Elektor (Elektuur) also had the Elektor Software Service back in the 70s and early 80s where they distributed software for their SC/MP system on vinyl.
But if a US-American company tells something like "first ever", "world's best", and "world famous" this usually limits to the world inside the borders of continental USA:)
You, of course, are aware that there's a difference between radiation and radioactive contamination.
I am. It was the parent poster who liked to compare the side effects of a dirty bomb with a sunny day in Denver, not me.
As to these places in Germany, what was the conamination level?
I don't have any numbers at hand, so my answer would be identical with what Google could deliver you. The most affected place probably was the Bavarian Forest.
I can't remember any expected death rates, but I recall that there was big fuzz about not letting your kids play outside for a longer time, and if they come back in, clean them thoroughly -- almost
a Dr. No kind of scenario.
Hysteria? Maybe. But I still object the comparison of a radioactive cloud with a sunny day in Denver.
You are also aware, of course, that it is the exposure that counts, not the source.
Erm, yes, but you don't seem to be aware of that.
Your sunny Denver day doesn't create a radioactive environment. The Chernobyl cloud did. Kids playing outside were not only "roasted", but also inhaled/swallowed the stuff. Same happens when eating those mushrooms and deers.
But the hysteria it produced was off the scale. People in Italy, thousands of miles away were in a panic because a radioactive cloud about as powerful as solar radiation in Denver on a sunny day was heading for them.
You, of course, are aware that there's a difference between solar radiation and radioactive material which settles down and takes decades to decay.
After the cloud arrived, there were areas in Germany (esp. Bavaria) where you shouldn't eat (wild) mushrooms and venison anymore because of the radiation. And even today, almost 19 years after, it is not wise to eat too much of certain mushroom types. The joys of half-life.
If that's what you call hysteria, I'd like to get your definition of severity.
As much as we love to bash Microsoft and hope Linux will be the saviour, too many of us still log onto slashdot from our Windows machines, to bash Microsoft. We've only paid hard cash to Microsoft.
Actually, I don't.
First of all, cause I hardly ever used a Microsoft OS, which of course doesn't mean, that I never used any Microsoft product: the C64 BASIC interpreter was IIRC originally designed by Microsoft but then rewritten by Commodore. It can be crashed by a nonsense PRINT command. However, it didn't affect normal operation. That very command was well constructed and couldn't be even typed in by accident or error.
On the Amiga there (again) was Microsoft BASIC, which failed on machines with an address space bigger than 2^24 cause Microsoft decided to use the upper 8 bits of the 32-bit address for something else. But I don't blame them for this, rather I thought it was a nice tweak to make best use of present resources. It was different times back in the 80s where we had to use all resources at best, not as today just cry for Intel and the next generation of GHz bolides.
However, I never grew fond of MSDOS. It was backwards and rudimentary -- and at times where my Amiga offered nice autoconfig and a decent GUI PC users were telling me nightmare stories about tuning their CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT... Uh, yes.
So the time came when I had to chose a new system. PC or Mac, I went for PC and got Windows 95 (for which I paid an undocumented "Windows tax", but since the "all inclusive" offer was cheaper than a home-brew system made up from single components, who cares...) and had to write one single (but bigger) document with Word 6.0...
Soon after I wiped the drive and installed some early SuSE Linux and never returned to Windows. Since then I've changed jobs a number of times and every time I was offered a Windows machine -- which I declined and installed Linux instead which raised eyebrows more than once. In case I had to use some company application which was not present under Linux and didn't play well with wine or was otherwise replaceable with an OSS product, I let them pay for VMware and installed Windows inside the virtual machine.
Now I'm M$ free for over 10 years. Am I missing something? Since I'm no gamer and don't require any Windows-specific dedicated software refusing to work with wine, the answer is: no.
It's a nice thing that they decided that the voting should be made against the EU software patent directive -- but in the end, this might mean nothing at all. How about deciding that they must vote against it?
In Germany there's also broad consensus about voting should be made against that directive, however, certain people in power vote for what they've been paid for instead of what they should vote for.
Or look at Poland: first voted for it, then decided to be against it, and now in a status of "oh, in case we're the only ones against we'd also vote for it".
I know what you are getting at, but I think that increased complexity means increased "fuck ups".
That's why I put the CDC6600 comparison in my last posting... That machine and its OS weren't that less complex compared to a modern Wintel PC.
But because computing time (and user time, cause those were highly paid experts back in the day) was expensive back then, stuff just had to be right from the beginning (release). Not the current "let it ripe at the customer" banana-ware strategy.
People have always had the impression that computers aren't "reliable and stable".
This is just not true. There was a time, when "garbage in, garbage out" was the mantra, but this addressed the problem between chair and keyboard.
It is Microsoft's merit that everyone not only believes that computers aren't reliable and stable, no, they know for sure that they are unreliable and unstable machines.
This makes me quite sad cause I remember times when computers where stable and a crash was either caused by hardware failure or because a programmer fucked up something.
But today there's no programmer fault anymore, instead the raised complexity of modern OSes and software is blamed. While I agree that there's a significant difference between a ZX81's ROM and a Windows PC, I wouldn't make a difference in complexity between e.g. a CDC6600 and a Windows PC. The CDC was for sure bigger, yes, but hardly less complex.
Comparing Earth exploration to Space exploration? Explorers on earth knew that no matter where they went there would be oxygen, water, wildlife, and plants. Space exploration is a whole different animal. The only contants are sunlight, cold, and NOTHING.
Water, wildlife and plants? For sure. That's why so many explorers died on the sea and in deserts... But even worse:
The early explorers had to fear that they fall off the border of the earth plate.
The early explorers had to fear that they run out of drinking water (and eventually food -- no bait, no fish) when going on a sea trip.
They also had to fear to run out of fire. No wood, no fire.
When finding new territory they still had no idea if they will find significant food supplies or either die from starvation, being parched, or poisoning cause what looked quite edible turned out to be deadly poisonous.
In fact, modern space explorers are even better suited than early earth explorers, cause they now *ahead* how long the trip will take, what they have to expect at arrival, and how much supplies they need.
Space explorers also have sunlight and solar panels, i.e. with the right battery technology they have unlimited supply of heat. In fact, space stations need quite some energy to *get rid* of heat rather than heating.
You have a too 20th/21st century-centric view when it comes to exploration... There was a time when people didn't die in the desert because of the Paris-Dakar rallye. There was a time when crossing the oceans was not a some-hour flight or some-day entertainment boat trip. There was a time when explorers died because of hunger and thirst. And there was a time when exploration meant having no idea how long the trip will take and/or if there will be the possibility of a safe (and alive) return.
Yes, there's almost none oxygen on Mars (go to Titan, then, plenty of oxygen to extract from present chemicals), but there's also no drinking water on the ocean. You need to carry it with you -- and Oxygen can be far better compressed than water. It even can be re-created from CO2. Doesn't need to be trees but something more easily transportable (and usable) like moss and algae.
So, yes, I'm comparing earth and space exploration. And I'd say the space explorers are far better off compared to early earth explorers who didn't know what to expect, how long it takes and therefore how many supplies are needed.
Slashdot Mirror
If you e.g. have a hologram showing a gallon-sized bottle and you break it into two equally sized pieces, then you have two pictures, each showing a half-gallon-sized bottle.
So Dad would have twice as many files, but he now needs a magnifying lens for masturbating over his pr0n collection :)
What you refer to as "lizards" today is only a shade of what "lizard" meant 65 million years ago. Just like "mammals" certainly were somewhat inferior species back then.
How long did it take Homo Sapiens to evolve from its earliest ancestors -- like 1.5 million years.
Dinosaurs were around for a much longer period of time... Plenty of time to evolve, develop civilization and technology.
But maybe I just read too much Harry Harrison...
There never was any saying like "you're Petrus, the rock I'll found my church on" (or however the English lines are, I'm referring to "Du bist Petrus, der Fels, auf den ich meine Kirche baue").
What indeed was the radical new thought in Christianity was that there is no church, that there are no professional priests. Instead, every member of Christianity was able to fulfill tasks which were before attached to a professional priest, such as celebration, absolution, etc. The only restriction was that you can't perform these tasks with respect to yourself but only to others.
But, of course, that was an intolerable loss of power for certain people, so around 200AD this Petrus-the-rock line was introduced as a justification for instatiating a professional church (again). Once this step was fulfilled, the Catholic church slowly but surely went off-track and turned into the multi-billion Euro imperium it probably is since the medieval ages (change Euro into your favorite historical currency unit...); not that Jesus' intolerance towards bankers and racketeers was any reason to not introduce the "money-for-sin" program (commonly known as "selling of indulgences" / Ablaßhandel) and later became one of the biggest bank.
The last pope who wanted to turn the Roman Catholic church into a church again, only lasted for little more than 50 days before dying of still unknown causes. His name was Johannes Paul I.
Interesting, how "6 million deaths at last" seems to be a universal constant...But apart from that, I don't see the purge of witches as an effect of intolerance; it's one part sexually motivated, and one part cementing the church's power.
In a sad way history is repeating these days and wiping out all hardware samplers which get replaced with PC-based software.
Personally, I still prefer "real" machines in my studio over virtuals -- heck, I even don't like expander modules, I want every machine to have a keyboard -- but OTOH I can see the huge benefits when doing an all-digital production.
Speaking of being never afraid to critisize the government, I might object. Public television in Germany *does* reflect quite biased information: depending on which magazine you watch, it's either more conservative or left-wing. So you need to watch more than one magazine to average out the biased information and draw your own conclusions -- just like you need to do if you watch private TV magazines. Or if you read newspapers, for instance. Here we also don't have a public newspaper and still noone complains about biased information.
They also discovered the internet and do some fair amount of crossfinancing to run their web sites which they now use as a justification to force people to pay for unwanted "basic supply" also via internet. The EU currently has another sharp eye on them because of that.
So why is it the seconds are leaving out certain numbers? The last time I checked, the metric system didn't have any holes in it.
The first computer I owned with a *disk* drive was the C64 offering a whopping 170kB per disk side. That's less than a tenth of what current architectures offer as on-chip L2 cache.
Actual state-of-the-art L2 caches hit 8MB which is even bigger than the first hard drive I tinkered with, a Commodore 5MB hard drive for the old CBM8000 series.
A black hole (especially of that size) whould create a gravitational lens which could be spotted in the visible spectrum as well.
Actually...yes.
1x: 0% more
2x: 100% more
3x: 100%+100%=200% more
And that one even got rated "informative", sheesh.
Await ad campaigns to also include "all claims made to our best knowledge" to avoid any problems arising from false advertising :)
But if a US-American company tells something like "first ever", "world's best", and "world famous" this usually limits to the world inside the borders of continental USA :)
After all, "they" (whoever "they" are) want to be the "United States of Europe", so this should also be reflected by the flag.
I can't remember any expected death rates, but I recall that there was big fuzz about not letting your kids play outside for a longer time, and if they come back in, clean them thoroughly -- almost a Dr. No kind of scenario.
Hysteria? Maybe. But I still object the comparison of a radioactive cloud with a sunny day in Denver.
Your sunny Denver day doesn't create a radioactive environment. The Chernobyl cloud did. Kids playing outside were not only "roasted", but also inhaled/swallowed the stuff. Same happens when eating those mushrooms and deers.
Spot the difference?
After the cloud arrived, there were areas in Germany (esp. Bavaria) where you shouldn't eat (wild) mushrooms and venison anymore because of the radiation. And even today, almost 19 years after, it is not wise to eat too much of certain mushroom types. The joys of half-life.
If that's what you call hysteria, I'd like to get your definition of severity.
First of all, cause I hardly ever used a Microsoft OS, which of course doesn't mean, that I never used any Microsoft product: the C64 BASIC interpreter was IIRC originally designed by Microsoft but then rewritten by Commodore. It can be crashed by a nonsense PRINT command. However, it didn't affect normal operation. That very command was well constructed and couldn't be even typed in by accident or error.
On the Amiga there (again) was Microsoft BASIC, which failed on machines with an address space bigger than 2^24 cause Microsoft decided to use the upper 8 bits of the 32-bit address for something else. But I don't blame them for this, rather I thought it was a nice tweak to make best use of present resources. It was different times back in the 80s where we had to use all resources at best, not as today just cry for Intel and the next generation of GHz bolides.
However, I never grew fond of MSDOS. It was backwards and rudimentary -- and at times where my Amiga offered nice autoconfig and a decent GUI PC users were telling me nightmare stories about tuning their CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT ... Uh, yes.
So the time came when I had to chose a new system. PC or Mac, I went for PC and got Windows 95 (for which I paid an undocumented "Windows tax", but since the "all inclusive" offer was cheaper than a home-brew system made up from single components, who cares...) and had to write one single (but bigger) document with Word 6.0 ...
Soon after I wiped the drive and installed some early SuSE Linux and never returned to Windows. Since then I've changed jobs a number of times and every time I was offered a Windows machine -- which I declined and installed Linux instead which raised eyebrows more than once. In case I had to use some company application which was not present under Linux and didn't play well with wine or was otherwise replaceable with an OSS product, I let them pay for VMware and installed Windows inside the virtual machine.
Now I'm M$ free for over 10 years. Am I missing something? Since I'm no gamer and don't require any Windows-specific dedicated software refusing to work with wine, the answer is: no.
In Germany there's also broad consensus about voting should be made against that directive, however, certain people in power vote for what they've been paid for instead of what they should vote for.
Or look at Poland: first voted for it, then decided to be against it, and now in a status of "oh, in case we're the only ones against we'd also vote for it".
But because computing time (and user time, cause those were highly paid experts back in the day) was expensive back then, stuff just had to be right from the beginning (release). Not the current "let it ripe at the customer" banana-ware strategy.
It is Microsoft's merit that everyone not only believes that computers aren't reliable and stable, no, they know for sure that they are unreliable and unstable machines.
This makes me quite sad cause I remember times when computers where stable and a crash was either caused by hardware failure or because a programmer fucked up something.
But today there's no programmer fault anymore, instead the raised complexity of modern OSes and software is blamed. While I agree that there's a significant difference between a ZX81's ROM and a Windows PC, I wouldn't make a difference in complexity between e.g. a CDC6600 and a Windows PC. The CDC was for sure bigger, yes, but hardly less complex.
The early explorers had to fear that they fall off the border of the earth plate.
The early explorers had to fear that they run out of drinking water (and eventually food -- no bait, no fish) when going on a sea trip.
They also had to fear to run out of fire. No wood, no fire.
When finding new territory they still had no idea if they will find significant food supplies or either die from starvation, being parched, or poisoning cause what looked quite edible turned out to be deadly poisonous.
In fact, modern space explorers are even better suited than early earth explorers, cause they now *ahead* how long the trip will take, what they have to expect at arrival, and how much supplies they need.
Space explorers also have sunlight and solar panels, i.e. with the right battery technology they have unlimited supply of heat. In fact, space stations need quite some energy to *get rid* of heat rather than heating.
You have a too 20th/21st century-centric view when it comes to exploration... There was a time when people didn't die in the desert because of the Paris-Dakar rallye. There was a time when crossing the oceans was not a some-hour flight or some-day entertainment boat trip. There was a time when explorers died because of hunger and thirst. And there was a time when exploration meant having no idea how long the trip will take and/or if there will be the possibility of a safe (and alive) return.
Yes, there's almost none oxygen on Mars (go to Titan, then, plenty of oxygen to extract from present chemicals), but there's also no drinking water on the ocean. You need to carry it with you -- and Oxygen can be far better compressed than water. It even can be re-created from CO2. Doesn't need to be trees but something more easily transportable (and usable) like moss and algae.
So, yes, I'm comparing earth and space exploration. And I'd say the space explorers are far better off compared to early earth explorers who didn't know what to expect, how long it takes and therefore how many supplies are needed.