Anyone who still fails to understand should read the Megatokyo online strip. Preferably give yourself a night and a day with beer, start at the beginning and read to the end. You can also buy most as a book I believe! This will teach you w00t!, teh, j00 and other 133tsp34k and relieve you of all stress and extraneous heartbeats. Oh, and feh is Yiddish.
I would expect that a chicken in orbit or cruising at 35,000 feet would most likely be frozen but the time it hit the plane, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they tested it.
Well I'm not sure exactly what "keeping fit" means for your brain, though maintaining flexibility as you age, or increasing mental skills, might be part of it. Also biochemical balance to I'd think.
The brain runs on glucose mainly. While I believe you need protein for energy, and this also has an effect on your brain too, but I don't know the exact connections. You might like to know a couple of factoid anecdotes I've heard and tend to believe.
1. A banana or two in the morning may be the best way to get your brain up to speed quickly and maintain that until lunchtime. This is because bananas contain three different kinds of sugars that are digested at different rates, so that as the first one peaks and starts to lose concentration in your blood stream the next one peaks, etc.
2. A soft-boiled egg is the fastest way to get protein into your bloodstream. (Told to me by my Dad a doctor).
3. Pasta better than rice as far as lasting longer in the blood which means it doesn't spike and then crash like chocolate. (Which by the way is good for you too).
4. Though not taught in school, you definitely can develop new mental skills. For example, take when I was learning Japanese characters (kanji). First, it is totally doable to power down 25 per day at a steady rate if you use a low-tech system where you write them down many times by hand and focus on hard ones, then keep testing yourself. I developed a "scratchpad" in my head that I could store a kanji in that I saw on a sign but wanted to look up later (now I lost that skill). If you work at it you can scan and get meaning in a gestalt - in kanji it means you can read a newspaper article without sounding out the words in your head but just as if you were a video camera sweeping across the article (used to be able to do that, when I was wide awake). In English, you can "scan" for keywords and "skim" for summary information parts of books very quickly. I learned this in a special class in middle school, which is around 25 years ago, but it still strikes me as extremely useful and not widely taught. Also the use of a ruler to measure page heights, things like that are interesting tricks.
You can teach yourself mnemonic techniques which are extremely effective. For example one famous Greek (socrates? dunno) would attach parts of his speech to a mental image of bits of his house, and then as he spoke mentally walk through the house, picking up topics. I am no expert on this stuff but I can tell you one that works, maybe someone can post a link to a good site for this kind of stuff
You build a chain of mental images linking visual and audible cues, using humor, immediate association of images, linking to a bodily sense or to your home. I've used it to remember arbitrary sequences and also to remember people's faces to names (which I'm pretty bad at). A single word is remembered by thinking of a mental image that rhymes, forexample if you want to remember "supermarket" maybe an image of superman would be good. When you go to the supermarket you think superman, or maybe you have made a strong mental picture of superman standing in the supermarket door so when you get to the supermarket, you "see" superman there. The next word, what you have to buy at the supermarket, is say milk. Now imagine an image that strongly associates/mashes together superman and milk. Maybe it is superman with a pitcher of milk over his head, or maybe he's carrying jugs of milk. You could imagine milk bottles sticking out from his nipples, whatever. Then you make an image that links milk to then next item, say it is jam. You could imagine a traffic jam where the cars are all milk bottles, caused by the focus of the jam, an accident with two milk bottles crashed into each other, glass everywhere. Anyway you keep going like this, maybe you hang the number five all over the milk bottle to remember five and people looking like the number five are rubbernecking at the accident, then think five is like a hive, then you have a beehive sitting in a pot because pot i
I've got a few keymaps in my head but you know this will be hell if you have to switch ever. For example French keyboards swap numbers for symbols, and move a few letters around! I had hell trying to get Japanese, French and English together. Unfortunately I couldn't get some modifiers to work in French.
Anyway, I use
xkeycaps
to show sort of what the keymap ought to be (but the author stopped adding maps after a hundred or so were submitted! And none match my Dell Inspiron 7.5K). And a windowmaker applet I can't find now that shows 9 flags for I think 18 or 27 countries. Maybe
wmkeyboard might be useful too. Anyway my Mom's Mac OS X handles other languages fantastically without even noticing how hard it is elsewhere (maybe XP is the same?) but for linux I think if you deal with more than one language this will drive you insane.
Like everyone else I've been wondering where the UFOs and encyclopediae galactae are to be found if SETI hasn't found them yet. Hoping it is a matter of discovering real soon now a quicker mode of communication, or just finding out that life is much less common (needing moon, few supernovae, etc.).
But I've had a sneaky ugly worry (founded by far too little knowledge of anything resembling necessary science) that it could conceivably be a quantum phenomenon, in other words no other species could exist within our light cone (or galaxy? farther?) due to some universal law that makes it impossible. Though anthropomorphic law aside, that would make it really, really unlikely that we exist, statistically speaking. Anyway, much as I would really like to see some FTL, and assuming the quantum worry I have is unfounded, there are two good things that could come out of this opinion that wormholes are unstable. For one thing, as much as I try to explain SETI etc. to my Dad, he says "I don't want to have any bug eyed monsters coming here" and of course, if they are like those in Starship Troopers then he's right. We're safely far away for a while maybe. Other thing is, no wormholes might mean that there is a chance of life existing outside our "light cone", i.e. the farthest we could ever go in the universe at light speed, I suppose. Those reasons both make me feel a little better. Any physicists out there?
Those companies already exist, at least in Japan. Much of the economy in fact is made of "part timers" who work as much as ordinary employees, except they do not involve themselves emotionally with the company and can quickly skip around to others. Large firms like Manpower, Temp Staff, etc. hire these kinds of people out.
Works okay for basic stuff, receptionists up to system engineers. Don't wait for anyone in that company to save the world or invent anything interesting, train themselves, grow or anything funky like that. Oh, and there are an awful lot of 45-50 year olds getting fired from once-stable jobs so these young shits can take over with less pay, less experience and less responsiblity. Those old fogies (though they will live for another 30 years still easily) commit suicide a lot these days too. It is no longer reported as front page news when a drunk falls into the train tracks to his death (or were they pushed?) The young people taking their places think they are innately deserving, that what they see is all there is too life and are remarkably selfish. Nobody takes chances, merit is not rewarded, if anyone asks (pleads) for questions or ideas, nobody will raise their hands. Cynicism is standard equipment.
However I have been meeting some very energetic guys in their thirties who have left companies to start out on their own and they have a gleam in their eyes. And I've met some 40s venture ceos who are taking on the world and seem to be getting somewhere. It is not a matter of night and day, it is just a different dimension of discourse to compare these two kinds of attitudes, and populations.
Your suggestion is a recipe for neutering society and tearing its heart out, to be blunt. It has been happening right around me. Which is why despite the shit of running a venture (and I know first hand believe me) we need more of them (and better support for them), not less. Make no mistake, the temporary staff companies themselves make tons, but god forbid any of those "temps" imagine they are real employees with rights and dreams of their own. They weren't hired for that purpose and they are the first to get kicked.
Samsung has also been working on this. I saw a presentation on nanotube flat panel display development some months ago, and this past month again they made a related presentation. (in Tokyo).
Who wants to make a bet on which company takes over nanotube FPD development commercially? If you're Sony, say "Samsung".
I'm just someone not involved in language development, and so I'm sorry if I'm out of line.
Most developers in language X just sit back in admiration at the olypmian efforts of language, compiler, vm or kernel designers.
But I would like to humbly suggest that Harmony people talk with the
parrot people. Parrot already has a java bytecode converter proof of concept, initial code,
will run on tons of platforms, and has perl and python
people too. It is GPL compatible and licensable under the Perl Artistic License.
The reason I suggest this is that it would appear that the main purpose of the Harmony
project is to create a vibrant, inclusive community. In that case, the open source
world, Harmony, and Parrot, plus users of java, perl, python, ruby and tcl (for starters)
can all benefit by combining two disparate groups of all-star
programmers working in potentially complementary areas.
If any parts of the Harmony project can use parts being developed for Parrot,
much time would be saved and the quality of both projects could increase. In addition,
it would likely be easier for the Harmony project to meet its stated goals of collaboration
and sharing of runtime components, etc. to do so with parrot. The Parrot FAQ also talks a bit about VM
development, including working with a JVM, it sure sounds like there is some overlap with Harmony.
Perhaps the Parrot people don't need any help (I doubt they would say so though) and maybe the Harmony VM people can't stand the idea of not building from ground zero, or using only the Apache license and nothing else. If any of these three maybes are true then it is a sad story.
Also, I may be out of line but it sounds like parrot will enable sharing of code from different languages at runtime. If so that will just magnify what Harmony is trying to do in terms of bringing people together.
So humbly I would like to say that the ideas of creating a specification and reference implementation, and promoting collaboration and sharing of modular code sounds wonderful, and focusing on these and not wasting time reinventing the wheel could be a great move for Harmony, and contribute to refocusing the brainpower of the free software world, in the spirit of the Harmony and Parrot projects.
My guess is that Harmony has some really smart people and they are also well aware of the Parrot effort. Maybe some are already involved for all I know. Any comments one way or the other?
Still sounds like a neat project but they need someone with both a technical and a business mind to help a lot I think.
As I understand it, the project is for hobbyists' fun (which is fine!) but does not make obvious economic sense (a problem with hardware projects it seems).
I'd like to suggest they consider morphing the project to make it more interesting (depth) and applicable (breadth).
For one thing I have noted in a past thread on this a number of things that would make me buy the card, maybe they should look at old threads again. Personally I am not a target of this project, yet, since I would want one of the new high-end cards for my work. But cost is a factor and I would buy one also if it provided additional support for multiple projectors, outputs, video switching matrices, synchronization with cameras or other sources, and other things. In fact I'd be most interested if it worked ALONG WITH a well known high end graphics card, to provide additional functions not already on the one I have. How many people are actually going to buy only this open video card and NOT buy a full-fledged one too?
I also would buy a card if it was multipurpose, not just for video. For example if it provided special audio functionality (possibly provided by software not even on the card) I could imagine recommending it for art projects.
Personally I would definitely buy a card that allowed me to run perl at C++ speed. Maybe this is something to laugh about but there must be a lot of people who wish there was an open source system (fpga + software) to accelerate whatever they do. Some people might seriously welcome it if you could port the latest perl regex engine onto an fpga. Or how about running the perl 6 emulator on it?
Perhaps it would be interesting if a version was sold that included common pattern matching algorithms (like BLAST for genomics, or maybe geometry or facial extraction from video feeds?). Is there nothing that could be added to help the home PVR market?
And what about adding some real cutting edge science stuff to the card? Is there a good reason why this kind of a project must seek as its goal to achieve the worst example in the field? (Yes I know "but it's free".) For example how about something that models neurons? Maybe it could be done much more easily with just a little more hardware support in addition to the fpga. And there was a recent thread about the cell chip, sure you probably won't get to use it (though it sure would be nice!) but there was also a mention about the COSA Operating System and synchronous reactive programming in general. These seem like very cool things! It doesn't sound so crazy to imagine being able to get funding (maybe even DARPA, who knows) if a well known university got behind COSA et al and the hardware project. And universities themselves might be very interested in investing financial and other resources in developing a continually growing hardware platform. Some schools even have fabs you know!
Well I am definitely not a hardware engineer but it does not seem too crazy to imagine some very nifty things coming out of developing such a platform (specifically a COSA-style platform in an FPGA card). Why not ask the COSA guy what he would need? You might want to consider that some cool things the Cell processor of Sony's is supposed to be able to do might also be achievable with a radically designed free hardware/free software platform, including media processing, and also in new kinds of programming.
Is it crazy to imagine a card that you would buy as the base and then purchase additional functional modules you could snap in? Could it be the size of a motherboard instead? (Note how luckily my lack of knowledge allows me to be silly or hopefully provocative.)
If you are involved with enough research projects, each one could provide a portion of the amount needed to produc
What would be the target market for this kind of thing? Genomics and biochemistry? Engineering workstations for the department? Rendering? How about to run a company's desktops? Seems like it might be useful for CAVE-like environments and videoconferencing throughout a distributed office.. also maybe for a service provider offering virtual linux pcs?
Now might be a good time to review what scouting is about according to this site showing the Eagle Scout ceremony. Sounds a lot like some stuff I've read at gnu.org about being thrifty, loyal to family and friends, helpful, well just about all of them.
Maybe it would be a good time to make a Knoppix CD for scouts? Help them get the computing merit badge and maybe a few others? I loved scouting until I dropped out because of a shitty group and gave up my hopes for an Eagle, but you could do worse than use free software to help more geeks get merit badges and get Eagle Scout free software evangelists. Actually it would seem to be natural to use free software if you are going to limit copying to that which can be done legally.
A Scout is TRUSTWORTHY: A Scout tells the truth. He keeps his promises. Honesty is a part of his code of conduct. People can always depend on him.
LOYAL: A Scout is true to his family, friends, Scout leaders, school, nation, and world community.
HELPFUL: A Scout is concerned about other people. He willingly volunteers to help others without expecting payment or reward.
FRIENDLY: A Scout is a friend to all. He is a brother to other Scouts. He seeks to understand others. He respects those with ideas and customs that are different from his own.
COURTEOUS: A Scout is polite to everyone regardless of age or position. He knows that good manners make it easier for people to get along.
KIND: A Scout understands there is strength in being gentle. He treats others as he wants to be treated. He does not harm or kill anything without reason.
OBEDIENT: A Scout follows the rules of his family, school and troop. He obeys the laws of his community and country. If he thinks these rules and laws are unfair, he tries to have them changed in an orderly manner rather than disobey them.
CHEERFUL: A Scout looks for the bright side of life. He cheerfully does tasks that come his way. He tries to make others happy.
THRIFTY: A Scout works to pay his way and to help others. He saves for the future. He protects and conserves natural resources. He carefully uses time and property.
BRAVE: A Scout can face danger even if he is afraid. He has the courage to stand for what he thinks is right even if others laugh at or threaten him.
CLEAN: A Scout keeps his body and mind fit and clean. He goes around with those who believe in living by these same ideals. He helps keep his home and community clean.
REVERENT: A Scout is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties. He respects the beliefs of others.
Apparently the point is to look for patterns beyond the point where digits are no longer significant enough to have any possible bearing on the physical universe. Though I can't vouch for the 100 millionth digit and thereabouts, it seems like they should have used the arbitrary digit formula and compared randomness with respect to distance from zero, power of power of.. of pi, or somesuch. So where is that point, and would perfect randomness in pi produce anything visibly obvious in our universe?
I was quite disconcerted to see that in fact the computer is not run entirely on the Perl Object Environment (POE). It would be the next step after the perl window manager somebody built. Blerg.
I was wondering if there might be a way to improve resolution of image by scanning across the lens periodically as our planet and solar system move in spacetime, similarly to the way you can get higher resolution by composing many frames of video into a single high resolution (or at least high contrast) print.
Well that seems to be relatively obvious and maybe insignificant compared to what can be done just by improving the receiving setup.
So I thought, if we increase our telescope resolution to the point where we can get a very high resolution image of the 11 bn ly galaxy, and find a perfect Einstein ring in that, might it not be then possible to find an even farther (say 20 bn ly galaxy) that might by fabulous luck be lined up with it, and thereby (luck again) piggy back all the way up to the end of visible space?
So question 1) If we had a 1 AU wide telescope and enough Einstein rings, just how far do you think we could really see?
This sounds similar to the idea of pointing a big telescope at the edge of a black hole to view the entire universe (since light can orbit many times before leaving, at least according to a neat story called the Planck Dive). So 2) assuming the black holes or something close enough to them really exist in our galaxy, what could such a large telescope reveal by focusing on the edge of such a black hole, and 3) is there any way possible to use one possibly in conjunction with piggy backed Einstein rings to see light beyond what is the "visible universe" i.e. the point at which expanding space has expanded beyond our light cone.
It would seem that an image that had been captured by a black hole before much expansion had occurred could conceivably be accessible now (if black holes truly can be "read" that way not just in fiction) even though the space being imaged has long expanded far beyond the edge of the visible universe. IANA astronomer but interested in where fact and fiction separate and neat ways to use computer graphic techniques and telescopes. Can anybody experienced answer some of these questions?
if it is meant seriously or not. Of course the thing the/. poster caught about toilets is 1% of the total. It has some interesting ideas like lighting a bottle of wood stain so you can see the color and making spray from a spray can look like rainbows. But of course 99% silly and obvious, if LEDs and processors were cheap.. on the other hand if you are talking about lighting your house with such a processor and aimable leds or projectors (and I've been interested in the projector side for a while) then it is either a silly extension to prior art, or possibly even dangerous. As for toilets, it might be useful if you had a power outage but the toilet lit up the room. Also for checking urine color for medical data input, diabetic feedback, ketone check for dieting etc., of course this is already done, as is the cleansing function.. IIRC Japanese toilet bowls (some) have UV or other cleansing mechanisms, certainly they have LEDs in the armrest next to the toilet seat but nobody ever I think expressed that much interest in looking clearly into a toilet bowl in a dark room. I suppose the only useful purpose for which I could imagine wanting to use it is if someone got up in the middle of the night (I suppose more likely for females) and didn't turn on the bathroom light because it hurts the eyes, but then needs for sanitary reasons to be able to see what one is doing after finishing with business. A very low level light (LED) would be sufficient in that case, though it should come from overhead or the side (that "shelf" they mention?), not from inside the toilet bowl. Anyway this is a ridiculously broad patent and I don't see any actual invention, or reason why a processor or led is needed.
It looks extremely cool which may be enough for some people. But for me it has a fatal flaw, which is that has you can see in one of the pictures, you are going to gradually get the creeps looking at it until you are so paranoid it will roll off onto the floor that you end up pseudo-nonchalantly placing things next to it so it can't roll away. It needs a semi-undecahedronal cradle and a big "this side up" arrow on the front. When you put it down somewhere you are going to spend twenty seconds parsing its dvd drive and connectors' attitude to be sure you are not setting it down on the wrong face or, god forbid, upside down (which I guess would bake it or are those open vents on the sides?). Also in an earthquake prone place like Japan (or California, one day maybe), if there is ever even a minor quake and you are out of the house, you are going to wonder if it hasn't rolled off the table due to tremors. Unless you use bookends or maybe a hook. How about suspending it like a hammock? Then you could make it into flexible segments and make it move with neat looking gel through its interstices by convection. Personally I think they should rotate this design through the 4th dimension a little bit so the case has foot-like projections that will make it absolutely clear that 1) it is not going to roll anywhere, and 2) that however it is entirely likely that the machine may be rotated along an entirely different axis so Stand Back!
So are they catching up to linux or far ahead? I found an announcement from april 12 here (google cache as html) about IBM's new linux based OpenPower series that can handle 64GB of memory, is ubuntu-64 or other distro already able to do what xp-64 can as far as the accessible memory/disk?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who still fails to understand should read the Megatokyo online strip. Preferably give yourself a night and a day with beer, start at the beginning and read to the end. You can also buy most as a book I believe! This will teach you w00t!, teh, j00 and other 133tsp34k and relieve you of all stress and extraneous heartbeats. Oh, and feh is Yiddish.
I would expect that a chicken in orbit or cruising at 35,000 feet would most likely be frozen but the time it hit the plane, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they tested it.
do people discover such wonderful things as the Bistromathic Drive?
The brain runs on glucose mainly. While I believe you need protein for energy, and this also has an effect on your brain too, but I don't know the exact connections. You might like to know a couple of factoid anecdotes I've heard and tend to believe.
1. A banana or two in the morning may be the best way to get your brain up to speed quickly and maintain that until lunchtime. This is because bananas contain three different kinds of sugars that are digested at different rates, so that as the first one peaks and starts to lose concentration in your blood stream the next one peaks, etc. 2. A soft-boiled egg is the fastest way to get protein into your bloodstream. (Told to me by my Dad a doctor). 3. Pasta better than rice as far as lasting longer in the blood which means it doesn't spike and then crash like chocolate. (Which by the way is good for you too). 4. Though not taught in school, you definitely can develop new mental skills. For example, take when I was learning Japanese characters (kanji). First, it is totally doable to power down 25 per day at a steady rate if you use a low-tech system where you write them down many times by hand and focus on hard ones, then keep testing yourself. I developed a "scratchpad" in my head that I could store a kanji in that I saw on a sign but wanted to look up later (now I lost that skill). If you work at it you can scan and get meaning in a gestalt - in kanji it means you can read a newspaper article without sounding out the words in your head but just as if you were a video camera sweeping across the article (used to be able to do that, when I was wide awake). In English, you can "scan" for keywords and "skim" for summary information parts of books very quickly. I learned this in a special class in middle school, which is around 25 years ago, but it still strikes me as extremely useful and not widely taught. Also the use of a ruler to measure page heights, things like that are interesting tricks.
You can teach yourself mnemonic techniques which are extremely effective. For example one famous Greek (socrates? dunno) would attach parts of his speech to a mental image of bits of his house, and then as he spoke mentally walk through the house, picking up topics. I am no expert on this stuff but I can tell you one that works, maybe someone can post a link to a good site for this kind of stuff
You build a chain of mental images linking visual and audible cues, using humor, immediate association of images, linking to a bodily sense or to your home. I've used it to remember arbitrary sequences and also to remember people's faces to names (which I'm pretty bad at). A single word is remembered by thinking of a mental image that rhymes, forexample if you want to remember "supermarket" maybe an image of superman would be good. When you go to the supermarket you think superman, or maybe you have made a strong mental picture of superman standing in the supermarket door so when you get to the supermarket, you "see" superman there. The next word, what you have to buy at the supermarket, is say milk. Now imagine an image that strongly associates/mashes together superman and milk. Maybe it is superman with a pitcher of milk over his head, or maybe he's carrying jugs of milk. You could imagine milk bottles sticking out from his nipples, whatever. Then you make an image that links milk to then next item, say it is jam. You could imagine a traffic jam where the cars are all milk bottles, caused by the focus of the jam, an accident with two milk bottles crashed into each other, glass everywhere. Anyway you keep going like this, maybe you hang the number five all over the milk bottle to remember five and people looking like the number five are rubbernecking at the accident, then think five is like a hive, then you have a beehive sitting in a pot because pot i
Anyway, I use xkeycaps to show sort of what the keymap ought to be (but the author stopped adding maps after a hundred or so were submitted! And none match my Dell Inspiron 7.5K). And a windowmaker applet I can't find now that shows 9 flags for I think 18 or 27 countries. Maybe wmkeyboard might be useful too. Anyway my Mom's Mac OS X handles other languages fantastically without even noticing how hard it is elsewhere (maybe XP is the same?) but for linux I think if you deal with more than one language this will drive you insane.
But I've had a sneaky ugly worry (founded by far too little knowledge of anything resembling necessary science) that it could conceivably be a quantum phenomenon, in other words no other species could exist within our light cone (or galaxy? farther?) due to some universal law that makes it impossible. Though anthropomorphic law aside, that would make it really, really unlikely that we exist, statistically speaking. Anyway, much as I would really like to see some FTL, and assuming the quantum worry I have is unfounded, there are two good things that could come out of this opinion that wormholes are unstable. For one thing, as much as I try to explain SETI etc. to my Dad, he says "I don't want to have any bug eyed monsters coming here" and of course, if they are like those in Starship Troopers then he's right. We're safely far away for a while maybe. Other thing is, no wormholes might mean that there is a chance of life existing outside our "light cone", i.e. the farthest we could ever go in the universe at light speed, I suppose. Those reasons both make me feel a little better. Any physicists out there?
Those companies already exist, at least in Japan. Much of the economy in fact is made of "part timers" who work as much as ordinary employees, except they do not involve themselves emotionally with the company and can quickly skip around to others. Large firms like Manpower, Temp Staff, etc. hire these kinds of people out.
Works okay for basic stuff, receptionists up to system engineers. Don't wait for anyone in that company to save the world or invent anything interesting, train themselves, grow or anything funky like that. Oh, and there are an awful lot of 45-50 year olds getting fired from once-stable jobs so these young shits can take over with less pay, less experience and less responsiblity. Those old fogies (though they will live for another 30 years still easily) commit suicide a lot these days too. It is no longer reported as front page news when a drunk falls into the train tracks to his death (or were they pushed?) The young people taking their places think they are innately deserving, that what they see is all there is too life and are remarkably selfish. Nobody takes chances, merit is not rewarded, if anyone asks (pleads) for questions or ideas, nobody will raise their hands. Cynicism is standard equipment.
However I have been meeting some very energetic guys in their thirties who have left companies to start out on their own and they have a gleam in their eyes. And I've met some 40s venture ceos who are taking on the world and seem to be getting somewhere. It is not a matter of night and day, it is just a different dimension of discourse to compare these two kinds of attitudes, and populations.
Your suggestion is a recipe for neutering society and tearing its heart out, to be blunt. It has been happening right around me. Which is why despite the shit of running a venture (and I know first hand believe me) we need more of them (and better support for them), not less. Make no mistake, the temporary staff companies themselves make tons, but god forbid any of those "temps" imagine they are real employees with rights and dreams of their own. They weren't hired for that purpose and they are the first to get kicked.
Samsung has also been working on this. I saw a presentation on nanotube flat panel display development some months ago, and this past month again they made a related presentation. (in Tokyo).
Who wants to make a bet on which company takes over nanotube FPD development commercially? If you're Sony, say "Samsung".
Could an X scale solar flare tear it or perhaps accelerate it beyond orbit before degradation?
The reason I suggest this is that it would appear that the main purpose of the Harmony project is to create a vibrant, inclusive community. In that case, the open source world, Harmony, and Parrot, plus users of java, perl, python, ruby and tcl (for starters) can all benefit by combining two disparate groups of all-star programmers working in potentially complementary areas.
If any parts of the Harmony project can use parts being developed for Parrot, much time would be saved and the quality of both projects could increase. In addition, it would likely be easier for the Harmony project to meet its stated goals of collaboration and sharing of runtime components, etc. to do so with parrot. The Parrot FAQ also talks a bit about VM development, including working with a JVM, it sure sounds like there is some overlap with Harmony.
Perhaps the Parrot people don't need any help (I doubt they would say so though) and maybe the Harmony VM people can't stand the idea of not building from ground zero, or using only the Apache license and nothing else. If any of these three maybes are true then it is a sad story.
Also, I may be out of line but it sounds like parrot will enable sharing of code from different languages at runtime. If so that will just magnify what Harmony is trying to do in terms of bringing people together.
So humbly I would like to say that the ideas of creating a specification and reference implementation, and promoting collaboration and sharing of modular code sounds wonderful, and focusing on these and not wasting time reinventing the wheel could be a great move for Harmony, and contribute to refocusing the brainpower of the free software world, in the spirit of the Harmony and Parrot projects.
My guess is that Harmony has some really smart people and they are also well aware of the Parrot effort. Maybe some are already involved for all I know. Any comments one way or the other?
Thanks for the reply, that's interesting and will take another look at it.
Matt
Still sounds like a neat project but they need someone with both a technical and a business mind to help a lot I think.
As I understand it, the project is for hobbyists' fun (which is fine!) but does not make obvious economic sense (a problem with hardware projects it seems).
I'd like to suggest they consider morphing the project to make it more interesting (depth) and applicable (breadth).
For one thing I have noted in a past thread on this a number of things that would make me buy the card, maybe they should look at old threads again. Personally I am not a target of this project, yet, since I would want one of the new high-end cards for my work. But cost is a factor and I would buy one also if it provided additional support for multiple projectors, outputs, video switching matrices, synchronization with cameras or other sources, and other things. In fact I'd be most interested if it worked ALONG WITH a well known high end graphics card, to provide additional functions not already on the one I have. How many people are actually going to buy only this open video card and NOT buy a full-fledged one too?
I also would buy a card if it was multipurpose, not just for video. For example if it provided special audio functionality (possibly provided by software not even on the card) I could imagine recommending it for art projects.
Personally I would definitely buy a card that allowed me to run perl at C++ speed. Maybe this is something to laugh about but there must be a lot of people who wish there was an open source system (fpga + software) to accelerate whatever they do. Some people might seriously welcome it if you could port the latest perl regex engine onto an fpga. Or how about running the perl 6 emulator on it?
Perhaps it would be interesting if a version was sold that included common pattern matching algorithms (like BLAST for genomics, or maybe geometry or facial extraction from video feeds?). Is there nothing that could be added to help the home PVR market?
And what about adding some real cutting edge science stuff to the card? Is there a good reason why this kind of a project must seek as its goal to achieve the worst example in the field? (Yes I know "but it's free".) For example how about something that models neurons? Maybe it could be done much more easily with just a little more hardware support in addition to the fpga. And there was a recent thread about the cell chip, sure you probably won't get to use it (though it sure would be nice!) but there was also a mention about the COSA Operating System and
synchronous reactive programming in general. These seem like very cool things! It doesn't sound so crazy to imagine being able to get funding (maybe even DARPA, who knows) if a well known university got behind COSA et al and the hardware project. And universities themselves might be very interested in investing financial and other resources in developing a continually growing hardware platform. Some schools even have fabs you know!
Well I am definitely not a hardware engineer but it does not seem too crazy to imagine some very nifty things coming out of developing such a platform (specifically a COSA-style platform in an FPGA card). Why not ask the COSA guy what he would need? You might want to consider that some cool things the Cell processor of Sony's is supposed to be able to do might also be achievable with a radically designed free hardware/free software platform, including media processing, and also in new kinds of programming.
Is it crazy to imagine a card that you would buy as the base and then purchase additional functional modules you could snap in? Could it be the size of a motherboard instead? (Note how luckily my lack of knowledge allows me to be silly or hopefully provocative.)
If you are involved with enough research projects, each one could provide a portion of the amount needed to produc
What would be the target market for this kind of thing? Genomics and biochemistry? Engineering workstations for the department? Rendering? How about to run a company's desktops? Seems like it might be useful for CAVE-like environments and videoconferencing throughout a distributed office.. also maybe for a service provider offering virtual linux pcs?
Maybe it would be a good time to make a Knoppix CD for scouts? Help them get the computing merit badge and maybe a few others? I loved scouting until I dropped out because of a shitty group and gave up my hopes for an Eagle, but you could do worse than use free software to help more geeks get merit badges and get Eagle Scout free software evangelists. Actually it would seem to be natural to use free software if you are going to limit copying to that which can be done legally.
Good luck, i had 1.4 and stopped working
You MUST install java 1.5 on linux.
Apparently the point is to look for patterns beyond the point where digits are no longer significant enough to have any possible bearing on the physical universe. Though I can't vouch for the 100 millionth digit and thereabouts, it seems like they should have used the arbitrary digit formula and compared randomness with respect to distance from zero, power of power of .. of pi, or somesuch. So where is that point, and would perfect randomness in pi produce anything visibly obvious in our universe?
Thank you for replying! It certainly would be interesting to see extrasolar planets in detail!
I was quite disconcerted to see that in fact the computer is not run entirely on the Perl Object Environment (POE). It would be the next step after the perl window manager somebody built. Blerg.
Well that seems to be relatively obvious and maybe insignificant compared to what can be done just by improving the receiving setup.
So I thought, if we increase our telescope resolution to the point where we can get a very high resolution image of the 11 bn ly galaxy, and find a perfect Einstein ring in that, might it not be then possible to find an even farther (say 20 bn ly galaxy) that might by fabulous luck be lined up with it, and thereby (luck again) piggy back all the way up to the end of visible space?
So question 1) If we had a 1 AU wide telescope and enough Einstein rings, just how far do you think we could really see?
This sounds similar to the idea of pointing a big telescope at the edge of a black hole to view the entire universe (since light can orbit many times before leaving, at least according to a neat story called the Planck Dive). So 2) assuming the black holes or something close enough to them really exist in our galaxy, what could such a large telescope reveal by focusing on the edge of such a black hole, and 3) is there any way possible to use one possibly in conjunction with piggy backed Einstein rings to see light beyond what is the "visible universe" i.e. the point at which expanding space has expanded beyond our light cone.
It would seem that an image that had been captured by a black hole before much expansion had occurred could conceivably be accessible now (if black holes truly can be "read" that way not just in fiction) even though the space being imaged has long expanded far beyond the edge of the visible universe. IANA astronomer but interested in where fact and fiction separate and neat ways to use computer graphic techniques and telescopes. Can anybody experienced answer some of these questions?
of the stylus = ?
Cry if you see tire treads on your sheets in the morning. (ick!)
if it is meant seriously or not. Of course the thing the /. poster caught about toilets is 1% of the total. It has some interesting ideas like lighting a bottle of wood stain so you can see the color and making spray from a spray can look like rainbows. But of course 99% silly and obvious, if LEDs and processors were cheap.. on the other hand if you are talking about lighting your house with such a processor and aimable leds or projectors (and I've been interested in the projector side for a while) then it is either a silly extension to prior art, or possibly even dangerous. As for toilets, it might be useful if you had a power outage but the toilet lit up the room. Also for checking urine color for medical data input, diabetic feedback, ketone check for dieting etc., of course this is already done, as is the cleansing function.. IIRC Japanese toilet bowls (some) have UV or other cleansing mechanisms, certainly they have LEDs in the armrest next to the toilet seat but nobody ever I think expressed that much interest in looking clearly into a toilet bowl in a dark room. I suppose the only useful purpose for which I could imagine wanting to use it is if someone got up in the middle of the night (I suppose more likely for females) and didn't turn on the bathroom light because it hurts the eyes, but then needs for sanitary reasons to be able to see what one is doing after finishing with business. A very low level light (LED) would be sufficient in that case, though it should come from overhead or the side (that "shelf" they mention?), not from inside the toilet bowl. Anyway this is a ridiculously broad patent and I don't see any actual invention, or reason why a processor or led is needed.
It looks extremely cool which may be enough for some people. But for me it has a fatal flaw, which is that has you can see in one of the pictures, you are going to gradually get the creeps looking at it until you are so paranoid it will roll off onto the floor that you end up pseudo-nonchalantly placing things next to it so it can't roll away. It needs a semi-undecahedronal cradle and a big "this side up" arrow on the front. When you put it down somewhere you are going to spend twenty seconds parsing its dvd drive and connectors' attitude to be sure you are not setting it down on the wrong face or, god forbid, upside down (which I guess would bake it or are those open vents on the sides?). Also in an earthquake prone place like Japan (or California, one day maybe), if there is ever even a minor quake and you are out of the house, you are going to wonder if it hasn't rolled off the table due to tremors. Unless you use bookends or maybe a hook. How about suspending it like a hammock? Then you could make it into flexible segments and make it move with neat looking gel through its interstices by convection. Personally I think they should rotate this design through the 4th dimension a little bit so the case has foot-like projections that will make it absolutely clear that 1) it is not going to roll anywhere, and 2) that however it is entirely likely that the machine may be rotated along an entirely different axis so Stand Back!
So are they catching up to linux or far ahead? I found an announcement from april 12
here (google cache as html) about IBM's new linux based OpenPower series that can handle 64GB of memory, is ubuntu-64 or other distro already able to do what xp-64 can as far as the accessible memory/disk?
Not that we'll ever need it (hah hah).