Rubbing alcohol is a strong solvent. It might dissolve some of the adhesive/lubricants/plastics used in your computers. While PCBs should be safe (think: degreaser), the power supply (especially the fan) and the drives may partially dissolve. If you go with the alcohol, you should probably remove the drives, the power supply, and the CPU fan, rendering the whole excersize useless, since that's where most of the smell probably has collected.
I'd volunteer for Carmack's enterprize -- it just seems so much cooler than the rest of them. Even though it's probably the most dangerous of these rides, and I don't think they have a plan about how to go about landing yet. There is something unbelievably cool about riding up into space on top of a $30,000 fiberglass tank full of peroxide. By comparison the $20M finely crafted rubber rocket just doesn't cut it. It's too expensive, and it doesn't have this garage-built sense to it that makes it all fun.
The notion of using humans for batteries was dumb... It's a flaw in the details The devil is in the details. The way I see it, these dummies couldn't even come up with a half decent excuse for the machines to keep the humans alive.
"humans are kept alive by the machines because they are useful for something" This is a plot idea. Details are what makes it into a plot. There was nothing in Matrix beyond this one-line plot idea that was not stupid, don't you think? The "take the red pill or the blue pill" line really made me laugh, though. This big black Morpheus guy with his nice black suit and his box of colored pills would make a nice addition to my local dance club.
Spiderman was popular amongst adults mostly for nostalga(sic) Exactly. Hollywood has to resort to playing on nostalgia for stupid comic books to make money. Way to go:-)
To most slashdotters, CGI means Common Gateway Interface... Speak for yourself -- not every computer geek is in IT. Computer Graphics is a topic in computer science. It includes many things, one of which is the hardware and algorithms that are used for making CGI. Referring to Computer Generated Imagery as CG is the same as referring to a calculator as a computer. Then, again, CGI does stand for both Common Gateway Interface and Computer Generated Imagery, and has to be disambiguated by context.
1. The Matrix did not have a good plot. Maybe a decent plot idea, but -- using humans for batteries????? Isn't it obvious, flies are a much better source of power for machines.
2. Spiderman was only a sequel/remake to a 100 feature movies and paper cartoons, originating from a cartoon. The plot was barely good enough for a cartoon, designed barely well enough to be barely enterntaining to retarded children. I don't see how an adult slashdot reader can find the plot of Spiderman satisfactory.
3. By CG you mean CGI - "computer generated imagery", no?
Movies with shitty plots and pretty SFX make good box office. This is the lesson of StarWars. Before StarWars was a hit, it was generally thought that good plot would produce a good box office. Then Lucas made StarWars and hit the jackpot with it. Every hollywood movie ever since has been designed around the SFX. Basically, they design the SFX first, according to currently available technical means and the available budget. Then they tailor the plot to fit aroung the SFX - no wonder the resulting product is barely watchable while heavily stoned. This kinda tells you that most moviegoers are retarded and/or stoned, but it doesn't leave any hope that Hollywood will ever make a good movie again. If you want a nice plot, go see an independent movie.
There was a Cronenberg flick, eXistanZ, out at about the same time as The Matrix. Similar "trapped in virtual reality" type plot. Much less box office intake. Much less SFX, better plot, and better screenplay. Most people had a strong preference to either one or the other movie, as you can deduce from reading the comments on IMDB. You can also see, from the same comments that most people who liked the Matrix over the eXistanZ couldn't spell. nuff said.
Not much better than a lake covered in shit-smelling flies... Nature just always seems to beat you to it, doesn't it? Fly catching robot - spider. Water walking robot - waterbug (or Jesus, if you prefer). Shit eating robot - my dog. Err, the last one's offtopic.
...in open systems. Any closed e-mail system has one significant drawback -- it does not allow you to receive e-mail from strangers. And most people need that. And any mailbox that allows e-mail from strangers will also get spam -- no matter what.
Yank the damn network cable out of your box, and use it all you want. People are just so used to the network, they just kinda forget that COMPUTER != INTERNET. Then, again, they had viruses before the internet (SneakerNet worms?).
It's a nice NUMERIC method. There are other numeric methods that do the same exact thing. This one is nice. It may be better to implement, and/or easier to use than other common numeric root finders. This method is, therefore, not only valid, but perhaps very useful science. The next time I need to write a root finder, I will definitely give this a close look. BUT THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ABEL'S THEOREM!!!
Abel's theorem proves that no exact root finder is possible. It has nothing to do with numeric root finders, except for making them a little more interesting for practical applications.
What I mean is, even if exact root algorithm were possible, numeric root finders would still be useful. For many problems where an exact solution does exist, a numeric solution is more useful. An good example would be Gaussian elimination (for solving systems of linear equations).
Gaussian elimination gives an exact solution. If you try to use it in practice, with coefficients given as floating numbers, you realize that for many matrices the rounding errors kill the precision of the result. A common cure for this is to run a few iterations of a numeric approximation method on the output of the Gaussian elimination, which improves the precision.
Now, back to root finders. An exact solution is not possible for polynomials of degree higher than 5. It is possible for polynomials of degrees 1, 2, 3, and 4. However, the formulas for degree 4 get rather long. So long a numeric method would quite possibly be more accurate. It would not write the roots out in radicals, but the floating point representation (that's what you want anyways, right?) would be more precise.
The point of this essay - when you need numeric results, numeric methods are often more useful than precise formulas, even where precise formulas exist. If Abel's theorem were wrong, you'd probably still use numeric root finders in most practical cases.
Someone wrote on the blackboard in the PC lab at my school once (long time ago:-):
TO SAVE YOUR WORK, TYPE FORMAT C:
There were 15 computers in the lab. 7 got wiped. Who would've imagined: after all the thing asks for confirmation, you know:-) Of course, these days the moron's life has been made easier - all they have to do is click on a funny link in an e-mail.
There was this guy on TV heating his house by burning junk mail. Paper mail, not e-mail, of course:-) Not too far from power from files. Paper files, that is, not computer files. Err, hm..
Yes, they park the heads whenever the accelerometer shows freefall or what not. The drive is a regular drive; the accelerometer is built in to the computer. Look up any new ThinkPad (like the X31) on http://ibm.com. The more expensive models would have this.
The way I see it, floppies were ever only useful if your files are up to 100KB in size. Anything bigger has a good chance of catching a bad sector in the middle of it even if the file is only stored for a few days.
Back when, we did 30-floppy backups using FastBack, which was notorious for failing to restore a backup if even one sector in one of the disks was bad. These backups turned out to have had a half-life of about two hours. And floppy drives have not gotten any more reliable in the past 20 years; they only got cheaper.
Fairly recently, I've seen floppies used for students to pass homework, but lately most teachers are replacing this with e-mail submission.
And the classical irreplaceable use of floppies, to boot the box with an unbootable HD, is no longer relevant, as all more or less modern boxes can boot from CD.
So, between my 5 computers there are 3 floppy drives, and none of them work. The last one broke about 2 years ago, and I've not missed it since.
P.S. In the car-horse analogy, this would be like still having several horses, all of which are dead.
Suppose he's talking about speed as time per event. By "50% faster" he means "time 50% shorter", which is really "twice as fast".
Here, all of a sudden, we start defining speed as "events per time unit". Then, "twice as fast" means "twice as many events per time unit", i.e. 100% faster.
Now, if you think about it, "50% shorter time per event" really does mean "100% more events per time unit", so my argument is correct and complete. I've just proven that "50% faster" is the same as "100% faster":-)
When's the last time you chose a toaster based on its technical specs? Bet you went for the kewl chrome/curvy/ retro look one...
No. I went for the one that makes a good toast:-). And no, not all of them do. You need one with spring-loaded holding grills on both sides of the slice, otherwise it will not toast evenly.
I tend to disagree. The encoders strip out "unimportant" portions of the spectrum. It should be possible to transcode a file so that the output file has stripped out the same portions of the spectrum that were removed in the first encoding. Restoring to WAV and re-encoding may not do the right thing, since the spectral information is lost in WAV. But it should be possible to make a decent transcoder. It would have to know about both the input and the output formats, though.
Swiss army knives traditionally used out in the wild on camouts, hiking, fishing trips, etc.
I'm yet to see an unbroken swiss army knife "out in the wild":-). If you like gadgets and camping, bring a letherman-type tool instead. Or, if you don't like gadgets, bring just a decent hunting knife.
From your post it sounds like you are not actually in China, but rather someplace like the US. If US is the case, it might be easier/cheaper for you to get a phone and activate it here, then flash the language firmware. I've done this with a t610 on t-mobile. The t610 was free after rebates.
At&t and cingular also have GSM phones, but they use the stupid 850 MHz band, and most of their "world" phones are actually versions of the normal 900/1800/1900 phones with 900 replaced by 850, so they don't work at 900. t-mobile, on the other hand, doesn't use 850, so you can get a real 900/1800/1900 phone from them that will be useful abroad.
The language pack on my t610 is independent from the main phone firmware, and can be flashed separately. The asian language pack supports Kanji, Japanese, and Korean, in addition to English.
Slashdot Mirror
So when the next hurricane/tornado comes, the only things left in the house will be my family and my servers. :)
Mak that "...the only thing left OF the house...":-)
Rubbing alcohol is a strong solvent. It might dissolve some of the adhesive/lubricants/plastics used in your computers. While PCBs should be safe (think: degreaser), the power supply (especially the fan) and the drives may partially dissolve. If you go with the alcohol, you should probably remove the drives, the power supply, and the CPU fan, rendering the whole excersize useless, since that's where most of the smell probably has collected.
I'd volunteer for Carmack's enterprize -- it just seems so much cooler than the rest of them. Even though it's probably the most dangerous of these rides, and I don't think they have a plan about how to go about landing yet. There is something unbelievably cool about riding up into space on top of a $30,000 fiberglass tank full of peroxide. By comparison the $20M finely crafted rubber rocket just doesn't cut it. It's too expensive, and it doesn't have this garage-built sense to it that makes it all fun.
The notion of using humans for batteries was dumb... It's a flaw in the details
The devil is in the details. The way I see it, these dummies couldn't even come up with a half decent excuse for the machines to keep the humans alive.
"humans are kept alive by the machines because they are useful for something"
This is a plot idea. Details are what makes it into a plot. There was nothing in Matrix beyond this one-line plot idea that was not stupid, don't you think? The "take the red pill or the blue pill" line really made me laugh, though. This big black Morpheus guy with his nice black suit and his box of colored pills would make a nice addition to my local dance club.
Spiderman was popular amongst adults mostly for nostalga(sic)
Exactly. Hollywood has to resort to playing on nostalgia for stupid comic books to make money. Way to go:-)
To most slashdotters, CGI means Common Gateway Interface...
Speak for yourself -- not every computer geek is in IT. Computer Graphics is a topic in computer science. It includes many things, one of which is the hardware and algorithms that are used for making CGI. Referring to Computer Generated Imagery as CG is the same as referring to a calculator as a computer. Then, again, CGI does stand for both Common Gateway Interface and Computer Generated Imagery, and has to be disambiguated by context.
-1 offtopic for the abbreviation nazy spiel.
1. The Matrix did not have a good plot. Maybe a decent plot idea, but -- using humans for batteries????? Isn't it obvious, flies are a much better source of power for machines.
2. Spiderman was only a sequel/remake to a 100 feature movies and paper cartoons, originating from a cartoon. The plot was barely good enough for a cartoon, designed barely well enough to be barely enterntaining to retarded children. I don't see how an adult slashdot reader can find the plot of Spiderman satisfactory.
3. By CG you mean CGI - "computer generated imagery", no?
Movies with shitty plots and pretty SFX make good box office. This is the lesson of StarWars. Before StarWars was a hit, it was generally thought that good plot would produce a good box office. Then Lucas made StarWars and hit the jackpot with it. Every hollywood movie ever since has been designed around the SFX. Basically, they design the SFX first, according to currently available technical means and the available budget. Then they tailor the plot to fit aroung the SFX - no wonder the resulting product is barely watchable while heavily stoned. This kinda tells you that most moviegoers are retarded and/or stoned, but it doesn't leave any hope that Hollywood will ever make a good movie again. If you want a nice plot, go see an independent movie.
There was a Cronenberg flick, eXistanZ, out at about the same time as The Matrix. Similar "trapped in virtual reality" type plot. Much less box office intake. Much less SFX, better plot, and better screenplay. Most people had a strong preference to either one or the other movie, as you can deduce from reading the comments on IMDB. You can also see, from the same comments that most people who liked the Matrix over the eXistanZ couldn't spell. nuff said.
A good rule for realistic estimates:
1. ask the developer;
2. go to next time unit, then multiply by two.
Thus if your developer tells you it'll take 2 weeks, you can safely bet it'll really take 4 months.
Plain old tungsten.
Not much better than a lake covered in shit-smelling flies... Nature just always seems to beat you to it, doesn't it? Fly catching robot - spider. Water walking robot - waterbug (or Jesus, if you prefer). Shit eating robot - my dog. Err, the last one's offtopic.
...in open systems. Any closed e-mail system has one significant drawback -- it does not allow you to receive e-mail from strangers. And most people need that. And any mailbox that allows e-mail from strangers will also get spam -- no matter what.
By not using computers
Yank the damn network cable out of your box, and use it all you want. People are just so used to the network, they just kinda forget that COMPUTER != INTERNET. Then, again, they had viruses before the internet (SneakerNet worms?).
It's a nice NUMERIC method. There are other numeric methods that do the same exact thing. This one is nice. It may be better to implement, and/or easier to use than other common numeric root finders. This method is, therefore, not only valid, but perhaps very useful science. The next time I need to write a root finder, I will definitely give this a close look. BUT THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ABEL'S THEOREM!!!
Abel's theorem proves that no exact root finder is possible. It has nothing to do with numeric root finders, except for making them a little more interesting for practical applications.
What I mean is, even if exact root algorithm were possible, numeric root finders would still be useful. For many problems where an exact solution does exist, a numeric solution is more useful. An good example would be Gaussian elimination (for solving systems of linear equations).
Gaussian elimination gives an exact solution. If you try to use it in practice, with coefficients given as floating numbers, you realize that for many matrices the rounding errors kill the precision of the result. A common cure for this is to run a few iterations of a numeric approximation method on the output of the Gaussian elimination, which improves the precision.
Now, back to root finders. An exact solution is not possible for polynomials of degree higher than 5. It is possible for polynomials of degrees 1, 2, 3, and 4. However, the formulas for degree 4 get rather long. So long a numeric method would quite possibly be more accurate. It would not write the roots out in radicals, but the floating point representation (that's what you want anyways, right?) would be more precise.
The point of this essay - when you need numeric results, numeric methods are often more useful than precise formulas, even where precise formulas exist. If Abel's theorem were wrong, you'd probably still use numeric root finders in most practical cases.
Someone wrote on the blackboard in the PC lab at my school once (long time ago:-):
TO SAVE YOUR WORK, TYPE FORMAT C:
There were 15 computers in the lab. 7 got wiped. Who would've imagined: after all the thing asks for confirmation, you know:-) Of course, these days the moron's life has been made easier - all they have to do is click on a funny link in an e-mail.
There was this guy on TV heating his house by burning junk mail. Paper mail, not e-mail, of course:-) Not too far from power from files. Paper files, that is, not computer files. Err, hm..
The Boss you screw over today could be interviewing you in 5 years at some other company.
Then, again, the boss you screw over today could be shining your shoes in 5 years at some other company...
Yes, they park the heads whenever the accelerometer shows freefall or what not. The drive is a regular drive; the accelerometer is built in to the computer. Look up any new ThinkPad (like the X31) on http://ibm.com. The more expensive models would have this.
The way I see it, floppies were ever only useful if your files are up to 100KB in size. Anything bigger has a good chance of catching a bad sector in the middle of it even if the file is only stored for a few days.
Back when, we did 30-floppy backups using FastBack, which was notorious for failing to restore a backup if even one sector in one of the disks was bad. These backups turned out to have had a half-life of about two hours. And floppy drives have not gotten any more reliable in the past 20 years; they only got cheaper.
Fairly recently, I've seen floppies used for students to pass homework, but lately most teachers are replacing this with e-mail submission.
And the classical irreplaceable use of floppies, to boot the box with an unbootable HD, is no longer relevant, as all more or less modern boxes can boot from CD.
So, between my 5 computers there are 3 floppy drives, and none of them work. The last one broke about 2 years ago, and I've not missed it since.
P.S. In the car-horse analogy, this would be like still having several horses, all of which are dead.
stupid article says nothing about the technology. WTF is Dual Domain Bend?
It's the phosphoros that burns-in. In the LCD there is no phosphoros, thus no burnt-in images. But plasma displays do burn-in.
Suppose he's talking about speed as time per event. By "50% faster" he means "time 50% shorter", which is really "twice as fast".
:-)
Here, all of a sudden, we start defining speed as "events per time unit". Then, "twice as fast" means "twice as many events per time unit", i.e. 100% faster.
Now, if you think about it, "50% shorter time per event" really does mean "100% more events per time unit", so my argument is correct and complete. I've just proven that "50% faster" is the same as "100% faster"
When's the last time you chose a toaster based on its technical specs? Bet you went for the kewl chrome/curvy/ retro look one... No. I went for the one that makes a good toast:-). And no, not all of them do. You need one with spring-loaded holding grills on both sides of the slice, otherwise it will not toast evenly.
I tend to disagree. The encoders strip out "unimportant" portions of the spectrum. It should be possible to transcode a file so that the output file has stripped out the same portions of the spectrum that were removed in the first encoding. Restoring to WAV and re-encoding may not do the right thing, since the spectral information is lost in WAV. But it should be possible to make a decent transcoder. It would have to know about both the input and the output formats, though.
Swiss army knives traditionally used out in the wild on camouts, hiking, fishing trips, etc.
I'm yet to see an unbroken swiss army knife "out in the wild":-). If you like gadgets and camping, bring a letherman-type tool instead. Or, if you don't like gadgets, bring just a decent hunting knife.
Now the neighbor's kid can activate my credit cards he stole from my mailbox without breaking into my place to use my phone line.
From your post it sounds like you are not actually in China, but rather someplace like the US. If US is the case, it might be easier/cheaper for you to get a phone and activate it here, then flash the language firmware. I've done this with a t610 on t-mobile. The t610 was free after rebates. At&t and cingular also have GSM phones, but they use the stupid 850 MHz band, and most of their "world" phones are actually versions of the normal 900/1800/1900 phones with 900 replaced by 850, so they don't work at 900. t-mobile, on the other hand, doesn't use 850, so you can get a real 900/1800/1900 phone from them that will be useful abroad. The language pack on my t610 is independent from the main phone firmware, and can be flashed separately. The asian language pack supports Kanji, Japanese, and Korean, in addition to English.
One problem with Konghorn.. Donghorn. Not Konghorn. You misspelled it. Donghorn, OK?