1) The body modification crowd - the carbon units running around with bolts/pins/rings through every body part they can pierce. In the extreme, there are folks like the snake man and the cat man, who are getting surgery to look like, well, a snake-man and a cat-man (dude)!
2) The furry crowd - folks who fantasize about being anthropomorphic animals.
Now enter GM. Given a sufficent level of understanding of genetics, what is to prevent somebody from modifying themselves to be an antropomorphic wolf or whatnot?
Now consider the other side of the coin - there will be folks who tweak their pets - at first to cure things like hip displascia, but also to make the animal a better companion (we've been doing this for millenia - consider recent studies that show that dogs are better at reading human body language than wolves, even when the wolf was raised from a puppy by humans).
Now consider some of the ludicrous laws that used to exist in places like South Africa - determining who is "white" and who is "black" by ancestry.
We might very well end up with a situation in which two individuals, indistinguishable by inspection, are accorded different rights, because one is a anthropomorphic wolf (a wolf made to look human) and one is a lupopomorphic man (a man made to look like a wolf).
In part, that is exactly why folks like the book - because in real life, sometimes you DON'T find out what is going on, you just get a glimpse of it.
Also, there was the world that Clarke created - the idea of this long-term spacecraft and how Clarke described it.
Then there was the way in which it was explored - these guys weren't walking around waving their tricorders at everything and beaming out whenever one of them had to use the bathroom - these guys were limited in the equipment they had, and were making do.
That is also why the sequels were so bad - Clarke had built up all this expectation, then the sequels destroyed it.
I just hope they aren't jerks about it like Lucas was for StarWars.
The Imax Theater near me couldn't show Star Wars because to show SW, you had to show ONLY SW - and they could not accept that - they wanted to show their other films as well.
That said, I just wonder how they deal with a 2 hour movie, given the size of the reel for a 40 minute movie....
(I cannot wait until DLPs are beefy enough to use them to feed Imax/Omnimax screens - Imax at 60 Hz would be quite nice.)
OK, there are the obvious biggies: Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama (but definitely NOT any of the so-called sequels), Have Spacesuit Will Travel and so on.
But here's an interesting story that would be pretty damn cool as a movie:
Basically, just as Flatland used geometry to explore social mores, Redshift Rendezvous uses general relativity to set up a pretty good whodunit. The basic postulate of the story is that there are hyperspacial universes that are accessible to us that have 2 interesting properties - they are smaller than this universe (but map point-for-point onto this universe), and they have a slower speed of light. However, as you go "up" in hyperspacial layers, the rate at which the universe gets smaller is much larger than the rate at which the speed of light slows. So that in hyperspace layer 10, the speed of light is 10 meters per second, but traveling at 10 meters per second in that universe is equivilent to traveling 1024 times the speed of light in this universe. However, with the speed of light so low, you experience relativistic effects just walking around.
Making this story as a movie would be pretty hard, and probably wouldn't make lots of money given that the norms would be "cornfuzed" by it, but it would be pretty cool.
Maybe in a few years some indie will make it on his desktop 8-way 10GHz machine....
Yes, bending is a form of stretching. However, since the article is/. right now, what I wanted to know was what the modulus of this material was - how much force does it take to bend it per unit cross-sectional area?
You can bend a noodle, but a noodle makes a lousy bow.
All the data that I can get to just tells me it can stretch to 2.5 times its length. Great, but what is the spring coeff?
The HalfLife engine was a heavily modified QuakeII engine - and as I understand it many of the modifications Valve made were done in such a fashion to make them very tied to the Windows API.
As a result, there was no native port of the HalfLife client. However, due to much demand Valve eventually did release a native HalfLife server.
Now, did Valve learn from this, and if so, what did they learn? Did they make the server code portable, so that there will be a native Linux server (most probably)? Did they make the client code portable (less likely, but who knows?)?
I don't know about anybody else, but I would pay a premium price (e.g. US$20 more) for a native Linux version than for a Windows version.
No matter. When HL2 comes out, I will in all probability buy it. However, when I send in my registration card (and send it in I shall), I will scratch out all the Windows 9x, Windows 2000, and such options and write in WINE & Linux.
It may not make a difference, but it most certainly won't make a difference if I don't do it.
Well, hopefully even if Valve does not release a Linux client, the Windows client will run under Wine - that's how I played through both OpFor and Blueshift.
However, all I can say is, "Let Our Voices Be Heard" - contact Valve.
I don't think the RFI is data related - rather I think it is clock related, as the hash starts the second the driver is loaded.
It may very well be like the old TRS-80 Model 1 - it was SO noisy that you couldn't eavesdrop on the screen via Van Eck monitoring - the main system hashed it out!
But you can see why I've been planning a little project for a while now to shield the system...
I'd like to hear the other side
on
No Abiword For Mac?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Some folks here have positted that the man may have been fired as part of a reduction in force, and the "incompetence" arguement was a smokescreen.
That seems unlikely to me - usually it is the reverse, and incompetent moron being fired with some made-up RIF so as to avoid problems.
Here in the US, If you lay somebody off as part of an RIF there's very little they can do about it - unless they can somehow show that you were not reducing force in his area at the time of the RIF there's little legal ground to file a wrongful termination suit.
However, if you terminate somebody for incompetence, they can bring suit for wrongful termination, and insist that you prove they are incompetent. Since they will challenge everything you say, and your case will be heard by twelve people too incompetent to get out of jury duty, you are very likely to win.
I know - for years I had to deal with an engineer who didn't know an FFT from a HITG(*) and management was unwilling to do anything about it because of their fears of a suit.
Well, I cannot say for you, of course, but I am an amateur radio operator, and I get pretty disgusted watching my radio go from S10 (no signal being recieved) to S9+4 (equivalent to a transmitter 2 miles away) whenever I use my Firewire interface.
AND that is using the best, double shielded cables I can.
Thankfully, I can rmmod the ohci1394 driver when I am done and shut it up.
What I would do is build a box that the computer goes inside of.
Make a box that is about 4x3x3 feet out of good looking wood (dimensions subject to change based upon what you will be putting into it). Use metal cabinet hinges to attach the door, so that the system closes fairly tightly. Cover the inside with copper flashing, like what is used for roofing. At the corners, leave a tab of copper from both sides, then fold the tabs over each other so you end up with several layers of copper from each side. This gives you a good Faraday cage, reducing EMI.
Next, cut holes for wires and ventilation. I would put an outlet strip on the inside so you run 1 power line in, then plug the computer and what ever else lives in the box in to that power strip. Connect the ground on the power strip to the copper shield.
On the ventilation holes: use LARGE slow fans - a couple of 12 inch fans would be best. Put the fans on the INSIDE of the box, mounted on rubber pads (e.g. rubber washers), blowing inward. Leave a couple of holes for air to escape - the best pattern is for the fans to be low, and the escape holes to be high. Put either chicken wire or metallic window screen (preferred, as it helps keep hair out) over the holes to maintain the EMI shielding (the wire goes between the fan and the inside of the box. On the OUTSIDE of the intake holes (the ones with the fans) put a furnace air filter. The idea here is LOTS of surface area to filter, to reduce the restriction of the airflow.
Now, on the inside, glue foam - plain old "foam rubber" works, but acoustic foam (the kind cut with ribs on it) is best. On the bottom, put in another board mounted on either rubber pieces or a slab of foam. This isolates the computer from the case and absorbes the noise inside the box.
You now have a box that is very quite, both electrically and acousically, and keeps the dust and pet hair out. (do remember to check the filter once a month.)
With such a system, you may even be able to move the machines back toward the living area (if you make the box out of a good looking wood and do a good job of it, and either paint or stain it so it looks like furnature, not a piece of junk.)
IF you are in a reasonably stable place, where you think you might be around for a while, then buying a house makes sense.
You get 3 "bangs for your buck":
You get a place to live
You build equity (a house is a savings plan you live in).
You build up your credit rating
NOTE that I didn't say a house was a tax break. True, you get to shave money of what you pay to Uncle Sugar, but look at it like this: if you are giving US$10K to the bank in interest payments to avoid giving US$3K to Uncle Sam, are you really coming out ahead?
Also note: If you aren't in a stable place (i.e. you think you may have to relocate in a couple of years) then buying a house is NOT a good idea - selling it and buying another costs you.
Just keep in mind the difference between "good debt" and "bad debt":
If the thing you went into debt to get will still have value after the debt is retired, that is good debt.
If the thing you went into debt to get will be worthless after the debt is paid off, that is bad debt.
Houses are good debt. Generally, cars and computers are bad debt.
Incur good debt as needed. Avoid incurring bad debt.
The/. headline is misleading - the scientists did not predict the supernova. They predicted that the detection of gamma ray burst from the supernova would preceed the detection of the visible light from the supernova.
That would be roughly equivelent to predicting a clap of thunder upon seeing a flash of lightning. Granted, if you didn't know lightning caused thunder this would be a great thing, but it is hardly the same as predicting the lightning in the first place.
Don't get me wrong - this is still good science. But the/. headline was a bit misleading.
There is a fundamental limitiation to modern graphics displays that limits the usefulness of translucent windows - the lack of different accommodation depths.
Consider driving along the road as it starts to rain. Normally, you are looking downrange - your eyes are focused on infinity (as far as your visual system is concerned). The rain drops on your windshield are forming an image on your retina, but it is out of focus, and so is easier for your visual system to ignore.
Should you want to look at the raindrops (to evaluate whether the rain is sufficient to require you to change your driving pattern), you shift the focus of your eyes. Now the raindrops are forming a clear image on your retina, but the road is not - now it is the road that the visual system can ignore.
So, to extend this to a computer display - at a minimum, you would want to employ some form of blurring on the windows in the background as well as reducing the contrast. For this, a 3D card with motion blur might work without too much added work.
But the second thing you need is a good, quick way to shift focus from window to window. If the back windows are fully obscured by the forward windows you cannot just click on them. You cannot just shift focus - the system has no feedback where your eye is focused. As a result, you have to minimize the forground window, or have a "send to back" button, or something like that, and you still get into the "nope. Nope. Not you. Nope. Nu-uh. Nyet. Aw, c'mon!" mode.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking about this once - consider:
1) The body modification crowd - the carbon units running around with bolts/pins/rings through every body part they can pierce. In the extreme, there are folks like the snake man and the cat man, who are getting surgery to look like, well, a snake-man and a cat-man (dude)!
2) The furry crowd - folks who fantasize about being anthropomorphic animals.
Now enter GM. Given a sufficent level of understanding of genetics, what is to prevent somebody from modifying themselves to be an antropomorphic wolf or whatnot?
Now consider the other side of the coin - there will be folks who tweak their pets - at first to cure things like hip displascia, but also to make the animal a better companion (we've been doing this for millenia - consider recent studies that show that dogs are better at reading human body language than wolves, even when the wolf was raised from a puppy by humans).
Now consider some of the ludicrous laws that used to exist in places like South Africa - determining who is "white" and who is "black" by ancestry.
We might very well end up with a situation in which two individuals, indistinguishable by inspection, are accorded different rights, because one is a anthropomorphic wolf (a wolf made to look human) and one is a lupopomorphic man (a man made to look like a wolf).
Imagine the legal mess that will be!
In part, that is exactly why folks like the book - because in real life, sometimes you DON'T find out what is going on, you just get a glimpse of it.
Also, there was the world that Clarke created - the idea of this long-term spacecraft and how Clarke described it.
Then there was the way in which it was explored - these guys weren't walking around waving their tricorders at everything and beaming out whenever one of them had to use the bathroom - these guys were limited in the equipment they had, and were making do.
That is also why the sequels were so bad - Clarke had built up all this expectation, then the sequels destroyed it.
I just hope they aren't jerks about it like Lucas was for StarWars.
The Imax Theater near me couldn't show Star Wars because to show SW, you had to show ONLY SW - and they could not accept that - they wanted to show their other films as well.
That said, I just wonder how they deal with a 2 hour movie, given the size of the reel for a 40 minute movie....
(I cannot wait until DLPs are beefy enough to use them to feed Imax/Omnimax screens - Imax at 60 Hz would be quite nice.)
Here's a crazy idea - could we get the SCO board of directors to join up with the spammers in Syria?
We could kill 3 sets of birds with 1 nuk^H^H^Hstone.
I'd almost think you'd have to go full CGI to make this one, so that you could properly factor in time-of-flight and Doppler to the audio.
To: High command
From: Special agent ngrrt
Re: Human launches toward our home
DAMMIT!
Do you have any IDEA how hard it is going to be for us to make that many launch failures look like accidents?
One or two we can make look like math errors, but this is going to strain even the human's credulity
Sincerely,
ngrrt
Netflix are spammers, they abuse their most frequent customers by not shipping them DVDs, and I can go down to Blockbuster and rent DVDs RIGHT NOW.
Remind me again, why would I do business with Netflix?
OK, there are the obvious biggies: Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama (but definitely NOT any of the so-called sequels), Have Spacesuit Will Travel and so on.
But here's an interesting story that would be pretty damn cool as a movie:
RedShift Rendezvous. Here's a brief excerpt.
Basically, just as Flatland used geometry to explore social mores, Redshift Rendezvous uses general relativity to set up a pretty good whodunit. The basic postulate of the story is that there are hyperspacial universes that are accessible to us that have 2 interesting properties - they are smaller than this universe (but map point-for-point onto this universe), and they have a slower speed of light. However, as you go "up" in hyperspacial layers, the rate at which the universe gets smaller is much larger than the rate at which the speed of light slows. So that in hyperspace layer 10, the speed of light is 10 meters per second, but traveling at 10 meters per second in that universe is equivilent to traveling 1024 times the speed of light in this universe. However, with the speed of light so low, you experience relativistic effects just walking around.
Making this story as a movie would be pretty hard, and probably wouldn't make lots of money given that the norms would be "cornfuzed" by it, but it would be pretty cool.
Maybe in a few years some indie will make it on his desktop 8-way 10GHz machine....
Yes, bending is a form of stretching. However, since the article is /. right now, what I wanted to know was what the modulus of this material was - how much force does it take to bend it per unit cross-sectional area?
You can bend a noodle, but a noodle makes a lousy bow.
All the data that I can get to just tells me it can stretch to 2.5 times its length. Great, but what is the spring coeff?
And that's just a couple of things off the top of my head.
Got a link?
OK, so I too was misled by the common misconception that HL was based on Q2.
And my error in what way invalidates the rest of my points?
And my error require such vitriol why?
A polite correction would have been far more effective. You probably would be moderated up more often were you to practice politeness.
The HalfLife engine was a heavily modified QuakeII engine - and as I understand it many of the modifications Valve made were done in such a fashion to make them very tied to the Windows API.
As a result, there was no native port of the HalfLife client. However, due to much demand Valve eventually did release a native HalfLife server.
Now, did Valve learn from this, and if so, what did they learn? Did they make the server code portable, so that there will be a native Linux server (most probably)? Did they make the client code portable (less likely, but who knows?)?
I don't know about anybody else, but I would pay a premium price (e.g. US$20 more) for a native Linux version than for a Windows version.
No matter. When HL2 comes out, I will in all probability buy it. However, when I send in my registration card (and send it in I shall), I will scratch out all the Windows 9x, Windows 2000, and such options and write in WINE & Linux.
It may not make a difference, but it most certainly won't make a difference if I don't do it.
Well, hopefully even if Valve does not release a Linux client, the Windows client will run under Wine - that's how I played through both OpFor and Blueshift.
However, all I can say is, "Let Our Voices Be Heard" - contact Valve.
(of course, I expect this to work about as well as previous efforts at software advocacy have worked)
I don't think the RFI is data related - rather I think it is clock related, as the hash starts the second the driver is loaded.
It may very well be like the old TRS-80 Model 1 - it was SO noisy that you couldn't eavesdrop on the screen via Van Eck monitoring - the main system hashed it out!
But you can see why I've been planning a little project for a while now to shield the system...
Some folks here have positted that the man may have been fired as part of a reduction in force, and the "incompetence" arguement was a smokescreen.
That seems unlikely to me - usually it is the reverse, and incompetent moron being fired with some made-up RIF so as to avoid problems.
Here in the US, If you lay somebody off as part of an RIF there's very little they can do about it - unless they can somehow show that you were not reducing force in his area at the time of the RIF there's little legal ground to file a wrongful termination suit.
However, if you terminate somebody for incompetence, they can bring suit for wrongful termination, and insist that you prove they are incompetent. Since they will challenge everything you say, and your case will be heard by twelve people too incompetent to get out of jury duty, you are very likely to win.
I know - for years I had to deal with an engineer who didn't know an FFT from a HITG(*) and management was unwilling to do anything about it because of their fears of a suit.
(*)hole in the ground
Well, I cannot say for you, of course, but I am an amateur radio operator, and I get pretty disgusted watching my radio go from S10 (no signal being recieved) to S9+4 (equivalent to a transmitter 2 miles away) whenever I use my Firewire interface.
AND that is using the best, double shielded cables I can.
Thankfully, I can rmmod the ohci1394 driver when I am done and shut it up.
(hmmmmm. rmmod troll - nope, didn't work).
Why, when I read this story, did I get an image of Blue Man Group using this to fire things out into the audience?
What I would do is build a box that the computer goes inside of.
Make a box that is about 4x3x3 feet out of good looking wood (dimensions subject to change based upon what you will be putting into it). Use metal cabinet hinges to attach the door, so that the system closes fairly tightly. Cover the inside with copper flashing, like what is used for roofing. At the corners, leave a tab of copper from both sides, then fold the tabs over each other so you end up with several layers of copper from each side. This gives you a good Faraday cage, reducing EMI.
Next, cut holes for wires and ventilation. I would put an outlet strip on the inside so you run 1 power line in, then plug the computer and what ever else lives in the box in to that power strip. Connect the ground on the power strip to the copper shield.
On the ventilation holes: use LARGE slow fans - a couple of 12 inch fans would be best. Put the fans on the INSIDE of the box, mounted on rubber pads (e.g. rubber washers), blowing inward. Leave a couple of holes for air to escape - the best pattern is for the fans to be low, and the escape holes to be high. Put either chicken wire or metallic window screen (preferred, as it helps keep hair out) over the holes to maintain the EMI shielding (the wire goes between the fan and the inside of the box. On the OUTSIDE of the intake holes (the ones with the fans) put a furnace air filter. The idea here is LOTS of surface area to filter, to reduce the restriction of the airflow.
Now, on the inside, glue foam - plain old "foam rubber" works, but acoustic foam (the kind cut with ribs on it) is best. On the bottom, put in another board mounted on either rubber pieces or a slab of foam. This isolates the computer from the case and absorbes the noise inside the box.
You now have a box that is very quite, both electrically and acousically, and keeps the dust and pet hair out. (do remember to check the filter once a month.)
With such a system, you may even be able to move the machines back toward the living area (if you make the box out of a good looking wood and do a good job of it, and either paint or stain it so it looks like furnature, not a piece of junk.)
Curiously enough, these are much the same set of reasons that a rebate is bad for the consumer.
There is one other bad thing about rebates from a consumer's point of view: you pay sales tax on the non-discounted price of the item.
What if one of the windows in the stack wants to grab the middle mouse wheel events? For example the very window into which I am typing right now.
You get 3 "bangs for your buck":
NOTE that I didn't say a house was a tax break. True, you get to shave money of what you pay to Uncle Sugar, but look at it like this: if you are giving US$10K to the bank in interest payments to avoid giving US$3K to Uncle Sam, are you really coming out ahead?
Also note: If you aren't in a stable place (i.e. you think you may have to relocate in a couple of years) then buying a house is NOT a good idea - selling it and buying another costs you.
Just keep in mind the difference between "good debt" and "bad debt":
If the thing you went into debt to get will still have value after the debt is retired, that is good debt.
If the thing you went into debt to get will be worthless after the debt is paid off, that is bad debt.
Houses are good debt. Generally, cars and computers are bad debt.
Incur good debt as needed. Avoid incurring bad debt.
And make sure you can pay off your debts.
The /. headline is misleading - the scientists did not predict the supernova. They predicted that the detection of gamma ray burst from the supernova would preceed the detection of the visible light from the supernova.
/. headline was a bit misleading.
That would be roughly equivelent to predicting a clap of thunder upon seeing a flash of lightning. Granted, if you didn't know lightning caused thunder this would be a great thing, but it is hardly the same as predicting the lightning in the first place.
Don't get me wrong - this is still good science. But the
The problem is sits that use tables in such a fashion that the view cannot use a local user-content.css file to override them.
The site isn't using CSS, the user is.
There is a fundamental limitiation to modern graphics displays that limits the usefulness of translucent windows - the lack of different accommodation depths.
Consider driving along the road as it starts to rain. Normally, you are looking downrange - your eyes are focused on infinity (as far as your visual system is concerned). The rain drops on your windshield are forming an image on your retina, but it is out of focus, and so is easier for your visual system to ignore.
Should you want to look at the raindrops (to evaluate whether the rain is sufficient to require you to change your driving pattern), you shift the focus of your eyes. Now the raindrops are forming a clear image on your retina, but the road is not - now it is the road that the visual system can ignore.
So, to extend this to a computer display - at a minimum, you would want to employ some form of blurring on the windows in the background as well as reducing the contrast. For this, a 3D card with motion blur might work without too much added work.
But the second thing you need is a good, quick way to shift focus from window to window. If the back windows are fully obscured by the forward windows you cannot just click on them. You cannot just shift focus - the system has no feedback where your eye is focused. As a result, you have to minimize the forground window, or have a "send to back" button, or something like that, and you still get into the "nope. Nope. Not you. Nope. Nu-uh. Nyet. Aw, c'mon!" mode.