This brings back memories for me, too. I got my start before IBM came out with their first PC. My dad owned an early PC, and I used PC-DOS and MS-DOS versions up through the whole bleeding history. I used Windows 1.0 on those lovely old monochrome monitors, and was working on a GUI for a data collection circuit in college. Then 2.0/286/etc. with the proportional fonts and an untiled desktop. I beta-tested for 3.0, and joined Microsoft in time to be a part of the Windows 3.1 development team. Those were the fun days; most of those who hated Microsoft just preferred the technologies in other products from Lotus, Borland, or various Unix providers. And that was really just fine with everyone. Everyone but Microsoft management, of course. Managers steered the ship ever more steadily to the dark side, building on their success with monopoly-abusing deals and secret contracts with the OEMs. Ship a CPU, pay for Windows whether you use it or not. I left the company (for unrelated reasons) around the time when "Windows 95" was still code-named "Chicago," and that code name had just replaced the earlier code name: "Windows 93."
By the way, if anyone has an unmodified copy of Win3.10 (not 3.11) USER.EXE, shoot me an email. I've lost some of my ancient archives and would like to snag some of the resources in that file.
The only thing I don't like about the agreement (as summarized here) is that the agreement itself cannot be disclosed. That level of secrecy is not necessary. I'm just surprised that nobody else has gotten a copy of this legal document, decided not to sign it, and gave it to WikiLeaks already. Why does it take a Freedom of Information Act just to learn what kinds of terms you're going to face if you think about entering the development program?
My opinion: if you can achieve over 80 wpm with your version of hunt and peck, you're not making many errors, and you don't need to look at the keyboard to keep up with live (typed) chat conversations, then that's really all you need. Higher speeds is just going to stress the tendons. If you are truly held back in pouring your ideas into the computer at this speed, then you should have employees.
Re:The area of space immediately around the globe
on
Space Junk Getting Worse
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A couple of thousand objects floating around (OK with their own intrinsic velocity) in such a ginormous area, isn't going to cause *that* many problems.
The odds of guessing your birthday correctly is roughly 1:365. That's dismal odds. The odds of picking the birthday of somebody in your household is slightly higher, because everyone in your family probably has a different day for their birthday; however, it's really really unlikely (barring twins) for there to be a COLLISION where two people share the same birthday. If you go to the pub or classroom, however, the chances of SOME PAIR of people with the same birthday skyrockets. In fact, you should bet that there WILL be such a collision in a group of only 24 people. If you played the game "are there two people here with the same birthday" in a few different classrooms, you'd easily win more than you lost.
Collisions of space junk is very similar, except (1) all the birthdays are continuously moving on the calendar as the pieces orbit, so it's like you're playing the birthday game over and over again, many times per second for decades, (2) you only need to win the birthday game once, and (3) you're playing with billion dollar satellites and astronauts' lives, not beer money. Do you really want to leave it to such odds anymore?
I realized I hadn't seen any photos of the new bay so I hit Google News for a search. I know the likes of AOL and USA Today are derided for their superficial news coverage, but the first story had what I wanted: a photo of the new bay.
As it turns out, the image was taken AFTER the windows were already opened. First thought: stale stories on Slashdot, no surprise there. Second thought: where is the Emperor's chair? I know George Lucas is having fun with the design on that new bay window.
So, are you trying to ban etrade.com and "flipping houses"? Or is risk taking in general ok, and you just want to impose your peculiar morality about playing cards on others?
This is a tempting philosophical generalization, but there is a critical difference between gambling and your other examples of risk-taking. Trading securities has an element of supporting the work of the company involved: you are supporting constructive industry, whether you end up with a gain or a loss on your "bet" in the market. Flipping houses has an element of physical maintenance on the property: it's hard to earn any profit without at least trimming the bushes, and many flippers put significantly more elbow grease into the property so it will command a higher price. In the case of betting on whether you get three Queens in a random selection of cards, there is no constructive aspect. It is for this reason that many of the ancient religions forbid the activity, and as we all know, ancient religions still hold particular sway over the majority of mankind.
You might be able to tell that I'm not keen on the hocus-pocus of the church. Hey, I sell a bumper sticker that says "if electricity comes from electrons, what does morality come from?" Yet at times, I do think that some of the shamans, some of the time, actually were trying to keep most of their flock's creative urges aimed at constructive endeavors instead of destructive and wasteful ones.
On the other hand, I'd never take a month of vacation time just to live like a hermit and maybe win $10k - they really need to up the ante if they want people to do this for real.
You wouldn't necessarily have to drop off the grid or be a hermit, but going to Japan would knock off about 98% of your pursuers and be a lot of fun at the same time. Sure, some English-speaking network experts also speak or read Japanese (especially American otaku) but the group gets much smaller and at the same time the search work does get harder. Going to a less-popular-but-still-wired-and-weird locale like Korea would be even better. If you didn't win, you still had fun. And if you did win, they just paid for your vacation/sabbatical.
Of course they can capture and store images. They probably capture and store the past couple days' worth of images as it is. If an airplane goes down, they will study the tapes. I can say with certainty that CNN will have a copy of the offender's scans within six hours of an incident. And somehow, nobody at that point will mind that their images were stored, they will beg the government to require rectal examinations of every passenger from that day forward.
I wrote a simple little search-and-replace proxy that I call typoxy. Browse many forums through this, and about 1000 common typos and grammatical errors are fixed invisibly. It can't try to figure out complicated grammar errors, but it does find fragments including "would of" or "your the" and replaces suitable English. The HTML highlighting of errors is configurable.
Implementing something like this might be useful to extend the "wavy underscore" corrections in Firefox/Chrome, which a lot of people depend on for their corrections. MS Word uses a wavy green for grammar, and wavy red for spelling, but I don't think that the two must be distinguished for most users.
There's no such thing as "intuitive" computer interfaces. Instead, you want your interfaces to be "discoverable" and to build on other trained discoveries in a consistent way.
From that example of the new YouTube buttons, I agree they're bizarre. Pretty much any button that JUST shows an arrow is useless for discoverability. Does the arrow mean 'move' or 'grow' or 'next' or some other action? By "discover," we don't mean to literally experiment with invoking the button to see what it does-- many people are too timid to press anything they don't already understand. Instead, discovery involves finding that there IS a button that PROBABLY does what you already intend to do. For example, follow the mental conversation: "this window is too small, I want to make it bigger, there's got to be a button around here somewhere for making it bigger, oh aha! that one looks like a dark box getting bigger, so let me try that, yep, that's better."
If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers.
I think the 10% figure is completely and totally made up, pulled from the aether, with very little to back it up. However, I was floored to see that this concept was even addressed at all in the "loss" estimation process. You know that MPAA and RIAA don't acknowledge the phenomenon that if someone finds something on the sidewalk, they're more likely to pick it up than if they find the same thing for sale, even if the price is just a nickel. I hope that with repeated exposure to the concept, the whole industry will finally concede this point, but let's just say I'm not holding my breath.
How about Apple use some of that pocket change they have laying around and do a little hostile takeover of Kodak.
Do you really want Apple to own a patent on photo previewing, and a thousand others? I'm sure they'll be kind and let RIM and Samsung and HTC and Motorola use those technologies at a very reasonable cost. Be careful what you ask for.
Maybe you missed the part where authors' groups hollered that text-to-speech means an audio "performance," and thus goes against publishing contracts. Therefore, blind users can't use kindles. http://www.google.com/search?q=blind%20kindle%20speech%20authors
As for "how is this worse than a book", I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that they'd want to be using the Kindle for a lot more than the few books they happen to have in wood form (or braille form) at each individual school.
Re:Where it matters most.
on
Framerates Matter
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In many embedded apps, like coin-op arcade games, the "model" is indeed tied to the frame rate. The main loop assumes a fixed dt, and pipelines the input, update, render tasks. Often this is done without threading, just while (!dead) { do_input(); do_update(); do_render(); } in the main function. Even with threads or co-processors, they often tie the rates 1:1:1. Some have no room for adjustment, and some will at least update their dt if the render took too long.
Also, if you're putting a robot on a sand planet, wouldn't it kind of make sense to have some fans to blow off the sand from the solar panels?
Remember, the mission was intended to last at least 90 days, not multiple Mars seasons. They looked at brushes, cling-film, sliding-film, fans, and anti-static methods. The weight-to-benefit ratio, and the complexity of any of the approaches, ruled them out for this mission.
My favorite was a suite of FORTRAN programs written by X-Ray Crystallography lab chemists, sometime in the 70s I imagine, which were given descriptive names like CASTLE, FRODO and DRAGON. The code was laid in columns 1-71, and the FORTRAN compiler ignored anything after column 72 as a comment (a holdover from narrow punchcards). Thus, the authors wrote an epic fantasy story into the rightmost columns of 132-character lines. Every line of code had a bit of dialogue, action or other Tolkien-esque prose married to it. Folks in the lab in the late 80s hated changing anything in the code, bugs or no, because it would require fixing, reflowing, or stripping out the story column.
This is an excellent idea, to continually point out what we're losing out in the reneged Copyright bargain. The next step, for those with far less imagination than our own, is to point out the kinds of successful artistic endeavors can stand on the shoulders of the culture that has entered public domain. Point out that if powerful Copyright had prevailed earlier, then without heirs' approval, we would not have such works as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The West Side Story (adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette), and many adaptations of The Raven including The Simpsons. What kind of legal pain happens when protected works stifle creative adaptation? Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was retold from the slaves' point of view in The Wind Done Gone, long after Mitchell died; the heirs sued over its publication and finally took a payoff to allow an 'unauthorized parody' label on it (which is ironic, as 'parody' is one of the four valid branches of copyright infringement defense).
I was hoping a meme would catch on, to call it "binge," but that never happened. Maybe they should just add the E themselves, to avoid the trademark dispute. (Yeah, I know, the trademark claim is incredibly weak, but I can dream.)
In addition, if your higher bitrate is clogging the net and stalling every few seconds, and the lower bitrate actually allows the audio and/or to be played in real time, then many people would say that is an improvement in quality although not necessarily on a frame-by-frame basis.
Some of it is chemistry, and some of it is brand name inflation.
Lithium batteries have a range of formulations. The lowest-cost formulations are suitable for low-amperage discharge, while better formulations can be discharged at a much higher current and still maintain a cool temperature and good recharge longevity. Heat is the real enemy here, so cramped cooling-starved long-running applications like laptops also demand better batteries than a weed-whacker that runs occasionally and has a chance of good airflow.
In the radio-controlled hobby, there is a huge range of prices for essentially commodity batteries. These are usually Lithium-Polymer, a step above the usual laptop Li-Ion, but the same economics are in play. There are some "well known names" that are sold in all of the domestic R/C retailers. There are some generics sold in Hong Kong that sell for 1/3 to 1/5 the price, and some are even higher quality in longevity testing. Lithium is lithium, so unless there's an amazing return/warranty policy, it's usually not worth the brand name price.
Slashdot Mirror
This brings back memories for me, too. I got my start before IBM came out with their first PC. My dad owned an early PC, and I used PC-DOS and MS-DOS versions up through the whole bleeding history. I used Windows 1.0 on those lovely old monochrome monitors, and was working on a GUI for a data collection circuit in college. Then 2.0/286/etc. with the proportional fonts and an untiled desktop. I beta-tested for 3.0, and joined Microsoft in time to be a part of the Windows 3.1 development team. Those were the fun days; most of those who hated Microsoft just preferred the technologies in other products from Lotus, Borland, or various Unix providers. And that was really just fine with everyone. Everyone but Microsoft management, of course. Managers steered the ship ever more steadily to the dark side, building on their success with monopoly-abusing deals and secret contracts with the OEMs. Ship a CPU, pay for Windows whether you use it or not. I left the company (for unrelated reasons) around the time when "Windows 95" was still code-named "Chicago," and that code name had just replaced the earlier code name: "Windows 93."
By the way, if anyone has an unmodified copy of Win3.10 (not 3.11) USER.EXE, shoot me an email. I've lost some of my ancient archives and would like to snag some of the resources in that file.
The only thing I don't like about the agreement (as summarized here) is that the agreement itself cannot be disclosed. That level of secrecy is not necessary. I'm just surprised that nobody else has gotten a copy of this legal document, decided not to sign it, and gave it to WikiLeaks already. Why does it take a Freedom of Information Act just to learn what kinds of terms you're going to face if you think about entering the development program?
My opinion: if you can achieve over 80 wpm with your version of hunt and peck, you're not making many errors, and you don't need to look at the keyboard to keep up with live (typed) chat conversations, then that's really all you need. Higher speeds is just going to stress the tendons. If you are truly held back in pouring your ideas into the computer at this speed, then you should have employees.
The odds of guessing your birthday correctly is roughly 1:365. That's dismal odds. The odds of picking the birthday of somebody in your household is slightly higher, because everyone in your family probably has a different day for their birthday; however, it's really really unlikely (barring twins) for there to be a COLLISION where two people share the same birthday. If you go to the pub or classroom, however, the chances of SOME PAIR of people with the same birthday skyrockets. In fact, you should bet that there WILL be such a collision in a group of only 24 people. If you played the game "are there two people here with the same birthday" in a few different classrooms, you'd easily win more than you lost.
Collisions of space junk is very similar, except (1) all the birthdays are continuously moving on the calendar as the pieces orbit, so it's like you're playing the birthday game over and over again, many times per second for decades, (2) you only need to win the birthday game once, and (3) you're playing with billion dollar satellites and astronauts' lives, not beer money. Do you really want to leave it to such odds anymore?
Does the history show the abuses of the Adobe corporation, like the Dmitri Sklyarov incident?
I realized I hadn't seen any photos of the new bay so I hit Google News for a search. I know the likes of AOL and USA Today are derided for their superficial news coverage, but the first story had what I wanted: a photo of the new bay.
AOL News on Tranquility Bay Window
As it turns out, the image was taken AFTER the windows were already opened. First thought: stale stories on Slashdot, no surprise there. Second thought: where is the Emperor's chair? I know George Lucas is having fun with the design on that new bay window.
This is a tempting philosophical generalization, but there is a critical difference between gambling and your other examples of risk-taking. Trading securities has an element of supporting the work of the company involved: you are supporting constructive industry, whether you end up with a gain or a loss on your "bet" in the market. Flipping houses has an element of physical maintenance on the property: it's hard to earn any profit without at least trimming the bushes, and many flippers put significantly more elbow grease into the property so it will command a higher price. In the case of betting on whether you get three Queens in a random selection of cards, there is no constructive aspect. It is for this reason that many of the ancient religions forbid the activity, and as we all know, ancient religions still hold particular sway over the majority of mankind.
You might be able to tell that I'm not keen on the hocus-pocus of the church. Hey, I sell a bumper sticker that says "if electricity comes from electrons, what does morality come from?" Yet at times, I do think that some of the shamans, some of the time, actually were trying to keep most of their flock's creative urges aimed at constructive endeavors instead of destructive and wasteful ones.
You wouldn't necessarily have to drop off the grid or be a hermit, but going to Japan would knock off about 98% of your pursuers and be a lot of fun at the same time. Sure, some English-speaking network experts also speak or read Japanese (especially American otaku) but the group gets much smaller and at the same time the search work does get harder. Going to a less-popular-but-still-wired-and-weird locale like Korea would be even better. If you didn't win, you still had fun. And if you did win, they just paid for your vacation/sabbatical.
Of course they can capture and store images. They probably capture and store the past couple days' worth of images as it is. If an airplane goes down, they will study the tapes. I can say with certainty that CNN will have a copy of the offender's scans within six hours of an incident. And somehow, nobody at that point will mind that their images were stored, they will beg the government to require rectal examinations of every passenger from that day forward.
Of course some women will become hornier if you show more leg. Dangling your participles is fun and occasionally profitable.
I wrote a simple little search-and-replace proxy that I call typoxy. Browse many forums through this, and about 1000 common typos and grammatical errors are fixed invisibly. It can't try to figure out complicated grammar errors, but it does find fragments including "would of" or "your the" and replaces suitable English. The HTML highlighting of errors is configurable.
screenshot: http://halley.cc/typoxy.png - code: http://halley.cc/typoxy.txt - typo file (save as ~/.typo): http://halley.cc/dot-typo
Implementing something like this might be useful to extend the "wavy underscore" corrections in Firefox/Chrome, which a lot of people depend on for their corrections. MS Word uses a wavy green for grammar, and wavy red for spelling, but I don't think that the two must be distinguished for most users.
There's no such thing as "intuitive" computer interfaces. Instead, you want your interfaces to be "discoverable" and to build on other trained discoveries in a consistent way.
From that example of the new YouTube buttons, I agree they're bizarre. Pretty much any button that JUST shows an arrow is useless for discoverability. Does the arrow mean 'move' or 'grow' or 'next' or some other action? By "discover," we don't mean to literally experiment with invoking the button to see what it does-- many people are too timid to press anything they don't already understand. Instead, discovery involves finding that there IS a button that PROBABLY does what you already intend to do. For example, follow the mental conversation: "this window is too small, I want to make it bigger, there's got to be a button around here somewhere for making it bigger, oh aha! that one looks like a dark box getting bigger, so let me try that, yep, that's better."
I wonder why more techno-savvy people don't get this point. A computer doesn't have to have only one network address/interface, why should people?
I think the 10% figure is completely and totally made up, pulled from the aether, with very little to back it up. However, I was floored to see that this concept was even addressed at all in the "loss" estimation process. You know that MPAA and RIAA don't acknowledge the phenomenon that if someone finds something on the sidewalk, they're more likely to pick it up than if they find the same thing for sale, even if the price is just a nickel. I hope that with repeated exposure to the concept, the whole industry will finally concede this point, but let's just say I'm not holding my breath.
Do you really want Apple to own a patent on photo previewing, and a thousand others? I'm sure they'll be kind and let RIM and Samsung and HTC and Motorola use those technologies at a very reasonable cost. Be careful what you ask for.
Maybe you missed the part where authors' groups hollered that text-to-speech means an audio "performance," and thus goes against publishing contracts. Therefore, blind users can't use kindles. http://www.google.com/search?q=blind%20kindle%20speech%20authors
As for "how is this worse than a book", I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that they'd want to be using the Kindle for a lot more than the few books they happen to have in wood form (or braille form) at each individual school.
To be fair, sending C-130s with payloads of nothing but dollar bills didn't do more for success in Iraq, either.
In many embedded apps, like coin-op arcade games, the "model" is indeed tied to the frame rate. The main loop assumes a fixed dt, and pipelines the input, update, render tasks. Often this is done without threading, just while (!dead) { do_input(); do_update(); do_render(); } in the main function. Even with threads or co-processors, they often tie the rates 1:1:1. Some have no room for adjustment, and some will at least update their dt if the render took too long.
My favorite was a suite of FORTRAN programs written by X-Ray Crystallography lab chemists, sometime in the 70s I imagine, which were given descriptive names like CASTLE, FRODO and DRAGON. The code was laid in columns 1-71, and the FORTRAN compiler ignored anything after column 72 as a comment (a holdover from narrow punchcards). Thus, the authors wrote an epic fantasy story into the rightmost columns of 132-character lines. Every line of code had a bit of dialogue, action or other Tolkien-esque prose married to it. Folks in the lab in the late 80s hated changing anything in the code, bugs or no, because it would require fixing, reflowing, or stripping out the story column.
This is an excellent idea, to continually point out what we're losing out in the reneged Copyright bargain. The next step, for those with far less imagination than our own, is to point out the kinds of successful artistic endeavors can stand on the shoulders of the culture that has entered public domain. Point out that if powerful Copyright had prevailed earlier, then without heirs' approval, we would not have such works as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The West Side Story (adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette), and many adaptations of The Raven including The Simpsons. What kind of legal pain happens when protected works stifle creative adaptation? Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was retold from the slaves' point of view in The Wind Done Gone, long after Mitchell died; the heirs sued over its publication and finally took a payoff to allow an 'unauthorized parody' label on it (which is ironic, as 'parody' is one of the four valid branches of copyright infringement defense).
I was hoping a meme would catch on, to call it "binge," but that never happened. Maybe they should just add the E themselves, to avoid the trademark dispute. (Yeah, I know, the trademark claim is incredibly weak, but I can dream.)
Lots of people commenting on the Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard thing, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned Luke-Vader-Emperor.
Luke beats Vader.
Emperor beats Luke.
Vader beats Emperor.
In addition, if your higher bitrate is clogging the net and stalling every few seconds, and the lower bitrate actually allows the audio and/or to be played in real time, then many people would say that is an improvement in quality although not necessarily on a frame-by-frame basis.
Some of it is chemistry, and some of it is brand name inflation. Lithium batteries have a range of formulations. The lowest-cost formulations are suitable for low-amperage discharge, while better formulations can be discharged at a much higher current and still maintain a cool temperature and good recharge longevity. Heat is the real enemy here, so cramped cooling-starved long-running applications like laptops also demand better batteries than a weed-whacker that runs occasionally and has a chance of good airflow. In the radio-controlled hobby, there is a huge range of prices for essentially commodity batteries. These are usually Lithium-Polymer, a step above the usual laptop Li-Ion, but the same economics are in play. There are some "well known names" that are sold in all of the domestic R/C retailers. There are some generics sold in Hong Kong that sell for 1/3 to 1/5 the price, and some are even higher quality in longevity testing. Lithium is lithium, so unless there's an amazing return/warranty policy, it's usually not worth the brand name price.