from calcultions I've done myself, neglecting air resistance after falling half way from shuttle orbit altitude an object is going only Mach 3. The catch? That's an object dropped from a dead standstill, not the Mach 25-30 or more of orbital velocity. But, given a proper retro rocket you achieve the dead stantstill drop and then use a few stages of small chutes to slow you down to subsonic speeds.
The first two summers I worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, first in sys admin, second coding, I made less than my friends at Pizza Hut. For my sys admin job I got 10 or 15 cents over minimum wage, because that's just what the government pays people still in High School. I got a $1.50/hr raise the next year though.
The third year I went back I was making about $9/hr. I could have gone back for a fourth year and goten $11, but I took an internship elsewhere and got $15. That's getting a more interesting job for more pay.
The pay scale continues straigt up through gradutate school students into regular employees. A PhD Physicist can do pretty well. Especially with regulare annual raises and promotions to semi-management or management.
Unfortunately, the IT workforce doesn't get PhDs (and shouldn't) so didn't qualify for the nicer parts of the pay scale.
OTOH, the actual pay looks low to me who is presently engrossed in pre-graduation job search.
So, imagine you're living on a planet with a hostile atmosphere. But, you've got a whole industry and R&D infrastructure on site and so you can make all the suits and equipment you need to get by.
Then, after establishing an existance you can reliably eeck out, you go about improving your world.
While your waiting the millenia for your engineered bacteria to reorganize the atmosphere, you build a few nice domed cities to walk around in. You've got no shortage of resources because the whole industrial machine of a dead world is at your disposal because there aren't any of the frivolous things the dead world used to have to waste those resources on.
A fully featured, User (newbie) friendly system. With QuickTime, a few thousand apps from ye olde MacOS. And without too much delay it will be able to pick up the major [Ff]ree software too. The porting effort is already well underway and that's only with Developer's Previews and Darwin floating around. Perhaps penatration of a hundred or so people who can do porting and thousands of users. When it goes prime time it will be a major force.
Nothing but full speed static RAM. Yum. Using what the rest of us would call L1 cache as main memory. Now THAT had some throughput. I think the research ought to go into making this more economical.
Sure, we won't get those quaint cracks from Ayn Rand anymore. And we will be truly lost without the timeless wisdom of the Cube. But still, Kosh is my favorite.
Well, I read through to the end of the quickies and what gives? They say it's insanely great but there isn't a bit of a mention about the Insanely Great Computer that ubiquitized the phrase 'insanely great'. sheesh.
CMU should get it. We've got CERT (a bunch of competent people) and a good crew of hackers in the student body. We've even got an assignment in one class that almost direcly applies itself to buffer overflow exploits. We'd give Carnivore quite a stress test.
The wheel hurts to use! When I first sat down at a windows machine set up with one of those things I thought it was kinda neat and I used it in IE, but at the end of the day my wheeling finger definately hurt. So, now all I use it for is middle click. Having gotten into SunOS as my first unix, I'm definately biased in favor of three button mice.
With a proper LCD touchscreen panel, is it feasable to create a virtual keyboard that you can type on?
Implications: A laptop that folds out to reveal two such screens and no keyboard. A pad device that while typing is reminicent of the old Tandy100, but otherwise is a really good tablet/writing/watever pad computer.
See also Paying Lip Service to Macintosh Support. From personal experience: I've gotten a Monopoly game that only worked under obsolete versions of MacOS but was still in stores being sold new, and a Logitech QuickCamPro USB that relies on 2 year old drivers that have several long standing known bugs/conflicts. Neither company is doing terribly much about these problems. I have been actively prodding Logitech in hopes that my QuickCam will be usable on MacOS X, even if I have to get specs and write a driver myself- but even that seems impossible.
Too bad nobody remembers C* (see star). It was a great parallelized C extension for the Connection Machine. You just declare an array specially, and all the operations on it become parallelized across all the processing nodes! Sure beats MPI for ease of use.
Correct. I've use this on my Mac and it works pretty well. The OCR probably misses 10-20 words per page, but is quite good about flagging them as unsure. It has a good interface for going back to do touch on those. It also has a fair interface for running a scanner, getting the data directly into itself, and doing this for successive pages. If you need this, go spend the $250 and support your non-free developers out there in the world.
Around here we have seemingly hundreds of computers with a "Donated by Intel" sticker on them. So many that recently we lost a cluster of 30 or so fine Macs to be displaced by PC's. And a couple years ago we lost about 120 Macs in one place to be bumped out by Intel donated machines.
I think what kept me going when I started learning Pascal when I was in the 3rd grade was getting visual feedback from my programs. My dad showed my the function call to fill a rectangle on the screen and so I wrote bigs lists of that. Then I learned some flow control and smeared rectangles all over the screen into lines and other shapes.
So, I got a lot out of Lightspeed Pascal on that old MacPlus. I think the best environment to do the same now might be Java, with java.awt.Graphics for the drawing calls. Set the kid up with a tiny program shell that brings up the window and draws one thing. Then let them edit and learn.
Evironment? Can't go wrong with Metrowerks. And I think they have deals for Java-only tools.
My gripe with blizzard is that they had a vaporware Mac port of Starcraft for about half a year. It was listed in catalogs in time for cristmas and didn't show up unitl after it was irrelevant because all my Windoze using friends had allready gotten bored of it. And the primary attraction of such a game is the network play, sooo....
That's my Blizzard bitterness. Don't buy it until it's IN STOCK. And not from them, ever again.
Sorry if you think this is a troll or something, it had to be said.
The problem with the current state of autonomous robots is that we don't trust them. The researchers who build them are really watching them every second with a finger on the kill switch.
You may remember Xavier the CMU robot with the web interface anyone could command. It showed live pictures from the robot's perspective of the halls it was wandering. What it didn't show was the grad student walking behind it every step of the way ready to kick the bumpers if Xavier got wiely.
One of the big supposed features of Nomad is that it has "Safeguarded Teleoperation" whereby you tell it to go somewhere and it goes there by a safe route -i.e. a route that doesn't have any obstructions or slopes too steep. But, in testing just a couple months ago Nomad nearly fell into the river when it rolled down a slope that was too steep.
There's your little update on the state of robotics. In large part it comes down to a general problem of software reliability in unpredictible circumstances. Robotics hasn't yet found what Operating Systems have found in their UNIX-mind-state of what should and shouldn't be and gereral purpose tools and solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
from calcultions I've done myself, neglecting air resistance after falling half way from shuttle orbit altitude an object is going only Mach 3. The catch? That's an object dropped from a dead standstill, not the Mach 25-30 or more of orbital velocity. But, given a proper retro rocket you achieve the dead stantstill drop and then use a few stages of small chutes to slow you down to subsonic speeds.
but with people. this is just www.amihotornot.com for craters.
The first two summers I worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, first in sys admin, second coding, I made less than my friends at Pizza Hut. For my sys admin job I got 10 or 15 cents over minimum wage, because that's just what the government pays people still in High School. I got a $1.50/hr raise the next year though.
The third year I went back I was making about $9/hr. I could have gone back for a fourth year and goten $11, but I took an internship elsewhere and got $15. That's getting a more interesting job for more pay.
The pay scale continues straigt up through gradutate school students into regular employees. A PhD Physicist can do pretty well. Especially with regulare annual raises and promotions to semi-management or management.
Unfortunately, the IT workforce doesn't get PhDs (and shouldn't) so didn't qualify for the nicer parts of the pay scale.
OTOH, the actual pay looks low to me who is presently engrossed in pre-graduation job search.
So, imagine you're living on a planet with a hostile atmosphere. But, you've got a whole industry and R&D infrastructure on site and so you can make all the suits and equipment you need to get by.
Then, after establishing an existance you can reliably eeck out, you go about improving your world.
While your waiting the millenia for your engineered bacteria to reorganize the atmosphere, you build a few nice domed cities to walk around in. You've got no shortage of resources because the whole industrial machine of a dead world is at your disposal because there aren't any of the frivolous things the dead world used to have to waste those resources on.
/ramble
-NS
A fully featured, User (newbie) friendly system. With QuickTime, a few thousand apps from ye olde MacOS. And without too much delay it will be able to pick up the major [Ff]ree software too. The porting effort is already well underway and that's only with Developer's Previews and Darwin floating around. Perhaps penatration of a hundred or so people who can do porting and thousands of users. When it goes prime time it will be a major force.
Nothing but full speed static RAM. Yum. Using what the rest of us would call L1 cache as main memory. Now THAT had some throughput. I think the research ought to go into making this more economical.
Sure, we won't get those quaint cracks from Ayn Rand anymore. And we will be truly lost without the timeless wisdom of the Cube. But still, Kosh is my favorite.
And do read the Hall of Fame before it goes away.
Well, I read through to the end of the quickies and what gives? They say it's insanely great but there isn't a bit of a mention about the Insanely Great Computer that ubiquitized the phrase 'insanely great'. sheesh.
CMU should get it. We've got CERT (a bunch of competent people) and a good crew of hackers in the student body. We've even got an assignment in one class that almost direcly applies itself to buffer overflow exploits. We'd give Carnivore quite a stress test.
VxWorks: The cow jumped over the moon.
The wheel hurts to use! When I first sat down at a windows machine set up with one of those things I thought it was kinda neat and I used it in IE, but at the end of the day my wheeling finger definately hurt. So, now all I use it for is middle click. Having gotten into SunOS as my first unix, I'm definately biased in favor of three button mice.
With a proper LCD touchscreen panel, is it feasable to create a virtual keyboard that you can type on?
Implications: A laptop that folds out to reveal two such screens and no keyboard. A pad device that while typing is reminicent of the old Tandy100, but otherwise is a really good tablet/writing/watever pad computer.
Take the decor and appearance of the G4 cube, squash it down flat and now say it with me: VAIO Killer.
Yes, MacOS X was the most recent previous new platform for Maya, but wasn't it once upon a time very popular on SGI's unix- IRIX?
Aside from user interface porting and misc platform issues, the unix thing won't be that new for AliasWavefront.
See also Paying Lip Service to Macintosh Support. From personal experience: I've gotten a Monopoly game that only worked under obsolete versions of MacOS but was still in stores being sold new, and a Logitech QuickCamPro USB that relies on 2 year old drivers that have several long standing known bugs/conflicts. Neither company is doing terribly much about these problems. I have been actively prodding Logitech in hopes that my QuickCam will be usable on MacOS X, even if I have to get specs and write a driver myself- but even that seems impossible.
And that is why it is better.
I can leave a message for someone across the office and when they're not busy they check their email and can answer my non time critical question.
It often gets very hectic if there are always several people trying to vie for face time. Email allows for more efficient scheduling.
Also, I don't have a cell phone. I hardly ever give people my phone number if they want to contact me, I give them my email address.
We here in America are a culture unsuspecting with technology being foisted upon us.
There comes a time when we must no longer ask what could we do, but instead must consider what should we do.
Come now, how many other geeks out there will back me up and confirm that this was the phrase that Doc Brown was exclaiming about?
Too bad nobody remembers C* (see star). It was a great parallelized C extension for the Connection Machine. You just declare an array specially, and all the operations on it become parallelized across all the processing nodes! Sure beats MPI for ease of use.
Correct. I've use this on my Mac and it works pretty well. The OCR probably misses 10-20 words per page, but is quite good about flagging them as unsure. It has a good interface for going back to do touch on those. It also has a fair interface for running a scanner, getting the data directly into itself, and doing this for successive pages. If you need this, go spend the $250 and support your non-free developers out there in the world.
Around here we have seemingly hundreds of computers with a "Donated by Intel" sticker on them. So many that recently we lost a cluster of 30 or so fine Macs to be displaced by PC's. And a couple years ago we lost about 120 Macs in one place to be bumped out by Intel donated machines.
Just another note of what's going on.
It's stupid and it pisses me off.
I think what kept me going when I started learning Pascal when I was in the 3rd grade was getting visual feedback from my programs. My dad showed my the function call to fill a rectangle on the screen and so I wrote bigs lists of that. Then I learned some flow control and smeared rectangles all over the screen into lines and other shapes.
So, I got a lot out of Lightspeed Pascal on that old MacPlus. I think the best environment to do the same now might be Java, with java.awt.Graphics for the drawing calls. Set the kid up with a tiny program shell that brings up the window and draws one thing. Then let them edit and learn.
Evironment? Can't go wrong with Metrowerks. And I think they have deals for Java-only tools.
Given that many new major movies seem to have a website with a domain name of it's own 1,2, 3, etc. This one makes a lot of sense to me.
That's my Blizzard bitterness. Don't buy it until it's IN STOCK. And not from them, ever again.
Sorry if you think this is a troll or something, it had to be said.
You may remember Xavier the CMU robot with the web interface anyone could command. It showed live pictures from the robot's perspective of the halls it was wandering. What it didn't show was the grad student walking behind it every step of the way ready to kick the bumpers if Xavier got wiely.
One of the big supposed features of Nomad is that it has "Safeguarded Teleoperation" whereby you tell it to go somewhere and it goes there by a safe route -i.e. a route that doesn't have any obstructions or slopes too steep. But, in testing just a couple months ago Nomad nearly fell into the river when it rolled down a slope that was too steep.
There's your little update on the state of robotics. In large part it comes down to a general problem of software reliability in unpredictible circumstances. Robotics hasn't yet found what Operating Systems have found in their UNIX-mind-state of what should and shouldn't be and gereral purpose tools and solutions.