Hah, I like your "more tigers = fewer jackasses" concept. Except...
First, they leapt for the jackasses; I feared not for I was not a jackasss.
Next, they leapt for the lame and wounded; I feared not for I was not hurt.
Next, they leapt for the young and tender; I feared not...
the 12-footx30-foot distance is supposed to remind you that this cat means business
Except, apparently, the Zoo knew that the 12 foot wall was four feet short of recommended guidelines for containing a healthy man-eating tiger in the presence of the general public. Also, the Zoo should quite rationally be fully aware that in any sample of the general public, there will be jackasses who would like to taunt said cats, and also vulnerable people who are completely innocent nearby, should the tiger still be hungry after eating said jackass.
That's not a map, that's a schematic. You don't think all the distinct fiber from NYC to London are spread out over a thousand mile ribbon of sea, do you? Or that all the countries in Africa send a cable out to sea by a consistent distance of a few hundred miles, down the coast, and back to shore, do you? It's like those airline "maps" - the line on the paper might go over St. Louis but you actually fly over Bismarck, ND. They drew the line wherever they drew the line, solely to be clear about what endpoints are connected.
My first thought was not for the infrastructure (the Access Points in a hundred conference rooms and spaced over all the cubicle farms). It was for the laptops. Not having one of the newest sexy 11n devices in my laptop, I wondered if MacOSX or Windows managed to drop the speed for battery operation vs tethered DC power operation.
But the article IS about the corporate fixed infrastructure, right? Are we talking 5% increase of power for something that is already only 1% of the facility power costs? Wow, going up to 1.05% of the facility power costs is gonna blow the budget and turn Antarctica into a tropic paradise. I bet most of the energy is in the form of heat from the individual DC converters plugged in to long extension cords laid along the drop ceiling to the nearest electric column.
Whoever put on the "netcraftconfirmsit" tag, 1999 called, they want their meme back! Pulverize it into hot grits and tell Natalie Portman to get off my lawn!
Okay, say someone's site is served by an ISP. The ISP gives the site owner a shell account and manages the LAMP infrastructure. The shell account is likely a virtualized instance, meant to limit the damage that each little site can do to the hosted infrastructure, not to limit the damage that the host does to little sites or their visitors. How can the site owner "check their own site" in such a case? Virtualization itself is a sort of rootkit conceptually, so how can the virtualized account check for malicious rootkits in its own instance or in the greater infrastructure?
My daughter has preferred to watch me play games (and kibbitz) over actually playing on her own. She's taking the reins more and more, though, and I'm not trying to dictate what is better... when it comes to learning, I feel that what she finds fun is better for her.
When my kid was 5, I started letting her watch AND try navigating in 3D games like Ty the Tiger. She understood what she was watching but wasn't able to navigate with confidence. "Can you get me to the bridge again?"
When she was 7, she liked the first island of Zelda: Windwaker and could free-play that for half an hour and have fun. For the longest time she had absolutely no ambition to try the first "scary" area herself, even the really cartoony goofy villains you have there.
She's 8 now, and can navigate Mario Galaxy with confidence, is trying Lego Star Wars games alone, and even finds some shortcuts or features I had missed. I'm impressed with the navigation controls (and usually the camera features) on modern 3D games, they just get better and better.
I know there are kids a LOT younger than her who are playing much more intricately visual and spatial games. Great. She was also reading the text of Final Fantasy II (US) when she was 4, so I have no worry that she's exactly where she should be in her own development curve. Every kid is different.
Eagles have nothing to do with this.
Is "egalitarian" the Slashdot word of the day today?
Are you some kind of eaglist? Or is an egalitarian like an eagle-eating vegetarian? What does eagle taste like, anyway? I've heard of legal eagles, but what about illegal eagles? Are those ill? Will eating an ill eagle make you ill?
Maybe the word 'sommelier' is actually more commonly used in Tokyo than it is in Dullard, USA. They have the word in EDICT as a borrowed word, a common dictionary for English speakers studying Japanese language, anyway. Tokyo and Paris vie for top position in culinary arts, and there's a lot of Fine European dining available there too.
People immediately wonder "why" they would do something like this. As far as has been reported, there won't even be an attempt to track the actual landing, and as we could expect, it would even be difficult to pinpoint which continent (if any) would receive the landing.
The point isn't what happens to the plane in ACTUAL freefall, the point is to do the materials and aerodynamics studies on the ground. Why not use foil? Because they have already tested foil in space and know quite a bit about it. Whether foil would work or not is not what this particular group wants to study. They haven't tested this kind of treated paper. Maybe there are some surprising benefits in heat-treated papers that could change the way we do satellites.
Of course, the final "experiment" is more like playing golf on the moon, if they even bother to do it at all. It's just a part of joie de vivre, which I think is sorely lacking in western society today. Stop griping needlessly. They won't spend a billion dollars to take a piece of scrap paper to space and chuck it into the big blue swirly spherical rubbish heap. However, thanks to this outlandish conversation-starter concept, they might be allowed to spend a significantly smaller budget on traditional material and aerodynamic science.
If one of your neighbors is disappointed in your lawn care or your dog's poops, there are positive ways of stating the disagreement, and there are negative ways. Certainly, if they spraypainted their message in 2ft high letters on the exterior of your house, you'd be understandably less interested in the actual message than in cleaning the graffiti and contacting the constabulary. Likewise, defacing the website with a thoughtful "open letter" isn't likely to actually communicate anything.
I'm just a clueless American, but as the blurb says "£24bn", I would guess reads "24 billion pounds". Is that billion as in "million million" or billion as in "thousand million"? I always wondered how that verbal discrepancy got started, seems that accountants on either side would get a bit huffy about a potential 1:1000 error.
And yet, would it be funded by Congress if it didn't get an easy-to-remember name? Would the USAPATRIOT act have been voted up to the White House if it was simply voted on as HR3162 or "Ashcroft's Wet Dream Panopticon Act of 2001"? Sometimes it takes a bit of focus testing and a shiny veneer of shinola to get approval from those who have the power but not the understanding.
I had to do this sort of "unfamiliar code analysis" with an ancient FORTRAN application written by non-software guys in the 1980s. It was some of the worst spaghetti I'd seen in some time.
To make any sense of it, I asked the compiler for a call tree report, and then I fed this through Perl to make a GraphViz "dot" file of it. After a few shuffles, I could start to determine some architecturally related areas and refactor slightly to decouple them into a more clear arrangement of modules. It was still crap, but it was at least something that I could understand to the point of making unit tests and coverage tests.
Raytracing the shiny first-intersection makes a lot of sense, even if it doesn't sell more CPUs. Sure, some day we will all have stunning holistic scene graphs that fit entirely within the pipeline cache of the processor, but it's not yet time for that.
Every change in developing a game engine requires changes in the entire toolset to deal with how to produce assets, how to fit within render time limit budgets, and how to model the scene graph and the logic graphs so that both are easily traversed and managed.
In the meantime, we have a pretty nice raster system right now, with a development strategy that provides for all those needs. You might not think that fullscale raytracing would upset this curve, but I'm not convinced. What do you do when a frame suddenly is taking more than 1/30sec to render, because the player is near a crystalline object and the ray depth is too high? How do you degrade the scene gracefully if your whole engine is built on raytracing? We've all played games where things like this were not handled well.
I contend that game AI is sometimes more advanced than academic AI because game developers are results-oriented and cut corners ruthlessly to achieve something that works well enough for a niche application. The same goes for game graphics: 33 milliseconds isn't enough to render complex scene graphs in an academically perfect and general way, it will require the same results-oriented corner-cutting to nudge the graphics beyond what anyone thought possible in 33ms. If that means using raytracing for a few key elements and ray-casting/z-buffering/fragment-shading the rest of the frame, game developers will do it.
Choose your moderation. Alternate quote emphasis:
Everyone gets a coupon worth $1 off the latest (DRM laden) Britney Spears CD. But if they lose, why do we get punished?
In the real watermarking scheme, every single byte is changed. Basically the entire thing is covered with a huge watermark that is noise, with randomly and sparsely distributed blocks of the actual watermark. So finding identical bytes does not work.
You don't need to erase the watermark. You need to break it, or produce plausible deniability. If you take ten copies of a 3min song, and concatenate chunks from each in 18sec blocks, then either the watermark will be unparsable, or it will implicate ten different people for small portions instead of one person for the whole song.
Okay, so who can imagine this car parked in front of a black background, slightly steaming, with Robin Williams popping out of it in a garish 1970s striped shirt? He can rant about oddities of the human condition, and close with an odd hand-gesture saying Nano, Nano.
Yes, I watched too much television as a youth. I liked that show until I saw Jonathan Winters in a diaper. Oy!
Apparently PC manufacturers have figured out the keyboard, given that the newest keyboard on this list is the #1 ranked IBM PCjr debuting in 1984.
What I find odd is that Apple's newest keyboard is just a modern rehash of the IBM PCjr chicklet design, and yet nobody I've talked to has made big complaints about it. Honestly, the thing is worse than a rollup USB pocket keyboard, worse than those little laser-on-the-table keyboards, worse than typing through one of those plastic grease-shield membranes on a cash register, and yet, because it's done by Apple, it's gotten a free ticket to reinvent the chicklet without an uproar.
First off, let me say that I love both Perl 5 and Python 2.x and have used each of them on a wide diversity of projects. I've implemented my own OO system on top of each, I've used each for CGI, I've used each for AI, natural language processing, and game programming. Both languages have their idiosyncratic idioms and it's really annoying when you see a lot of C-ish code in either Perl or Python projects. It's also very possible to write ugly "write once" code in either one, don't be misled by the whitespace arguments: ugly code is about how you express (or fail to express) a problem and a solution.
However, I have to say, pick the tool for the job. There are things that are more naturally expressed in Perl idioms than in Python idioms. There are things that are much more clear and direct about Python code for outsiders to read and understand. If I were doing a ton of regex text scanning work, Perl incorporates it into the language directly, whereas it's a bolt-on for most other languages. If I were doing a ton of object management, I like the compactness of Python's syntax over that of Perl's. Both have great extensibility but the available extensions and support can shape your choice for a given project. I wish Python had true equivalents to Perlmonks and CPAN; conversely I wish CPAN modules were more crisp and consistent, attributes I think I find in the community-written Python modules I've used.
If the Christian God were to show up in Times Square tomorrow and give an irrefutable demonstration of who he is, then it would be proven. If this comes to pass, there will be no agnostics as they will Know, and there will be no athiests as they can no longer honestly Deny. Of course, a central tenet of this particular faith is that "without faith I am nothing," and such a god will remain unprovable. If Revelation comes, I expect it will resemble the biblical account only in broad strokes, just as much of Genesis fits only in the macroscopic sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Next, they leapt for the lame and wounded; I feared not for I was not hurt.
Next, they leapt for the young and tender; I feared not...
Except, apparently, the Zoo knew that the 12 foot wall was four feet short of recommended guidelines for containing a healthy man-eating tiger in the presence of the general public. Also, the Zoo should quite rationally be fully aware that in any sample of the general public, there will be jackasses who would like to taunt said cats, and also vulnerable people who are completely innocent nearby, should the tiger still be hungry after eating said jackass.
That's not a map, that's a schematic. You don't think all the distinct fiber from NYC to London are spread out over a thousand mile ribbon of sea, do you? Or that all the countries in Africa send a cable out to sea by a consistent distance of a few hundred miles, down the coast, and back to shore, do you? It's like those airline "maps" - the line on the paper might go over St. Louis but you actually fly over Bismarck, ND. They drew the line wherever they drew the line, solely to be clear about what endpoints are connected.
My first thought was not for the infrastructure (the Access Points in a hundred conference rooms and spaced over all the cubicle farms). It was for the laptops. Not having one of the newest sexy 11n devices in my laptop, I wondered if MacOSX or Windows managed to drop the speed for battery operation vs tethered DC power operation.
But the article IS about the corporate fixed infrastructure, right? Are we talking 5% increase of power for something that is already only 1% of the facility power costs? Wow, going up to 1.05% of the facility power costs is gonna blow the budget and turn Antarctica into a tropic paradise. I bet most of the energy is in the form of heat from the individual DC converters plugged in to long extension cords laid along the drop ceiling to the nearest electric column.
Whoever put on the "netcraftconfirmsit" tag, 1999 called, they want their meme back! Pulverize it into hot grits and tell Natalie Portman to get off my lawn!
Why did I imagine this dialogue delivered on a plain white backdrop by two hip post-modern casual dudes (and the occasional guest character)?
Okay, say someone's site is served by an ISP. The ISP gives the site owner a shell account and manages the LAMP infrastructure. The shell account is likely a virtualized instance, meant to limit the damage that each little site can do to the hosted infrastructure, not to limit the damage that the host does to little sites or their visitors. How can the site owner "check their own site" in such a case? Virtualization itself is a sort of rootkit conceptually, so how can the virtualized account check for malicious rootkits in its own instance or in the greater infrastructure?
My daughter has preferred to watch me play games (and kibbitz) over actually playing on her own. She's taking the reins more and more, though, and I'm not trying to dictate what is better... when it comes to learning, I feel that what she finds fun is better for her.
When my kid was 5, I started letting her watch AND try navigating in 3D games like Ty the Tiger. She understood what she was watching but wasn't able to navigate with confidence. "Can you get me to the bridge again?"
When she was 7, she liked the first island of Zelda: Windwaker and could free-play that for half an hour and have fun. For the longest time she had absolutely no ambition to try the first "scary" area herself, even the really cartoony goofy villains you have there.
She's 8 now, and can navigate Mario Galaxy with confidence, is trying Lego Star Wars games alone, and even finds some shortcuts or features I had missed. I'm impressed with the navigation controls (and usually the camera features) on modern 3D games, they just get better and better.
I know there are kids a LOT younger than her who are playing much more intricately visual and spatial games. Great. She was also reading the text of Final Fantasy II (US) when she was 4, so I have no worry that she's exactly where she should be in her own development curve. Every kid is different.
Is "egalitarian" the Slashdot word of the day today?
Are you some kind of eaglist? Or is an egalitarian like an eagle-eating vegetarian? What does eagle taste like, anyway? I've heard of legal eagles, but what about illegal eagles? Are those ill? Will eating an ill eagle make you ill?
Maybe the word 'sommelier' is actually more commonly used in Tokyo than it is in Dullard, USA. They have the word in EDICT as a borrowed word, a common dictionary for English speakers studying Japanese language, anyway. Tokyo and Paris vie for top position in culinary arts, and there's a lot of Fine European dining available there too.
The point isn't what happens to the plane in ACTUAL freefall, the point is to do the materials and aerodynamics studies on the ground. Why not use foil? Because they have already tested foil in space and know quite a bit about it. Whether foil would work or not is not what this particular group wants to study. They haven't tested this kind of treated paper. Maybe there are some surprising benefits in heat-treated papers that could change the way we do satellites.
Of course, the final "experiment" is more like playing golf on the moon, if they even bother to do it at all. It's just a part of joie de vivre, which I think is sorely lacking in western society today. Stop griping needlessly. They won't spend a billion dollars to take a piece of scrap paper to space and chuck it into the big blue swirly spherical rubbish heap. However, thanks to this outlandish conversation-starter concept, they might be allowed to spend a significantly smaller budget on traditional material and aerodynamic science.
If one of your neighbors is disappointed in your lawn care or your dog's poops, there are positive ways of stating the disagreement, and there are negative ways. Certainly, if they spraypainted their message in 2ft high letters on the exterior of your house, you'd be understandably less interested in the actual message than in cleaning the graffiti and contacting the constabulary. Likewise, defacing the website with a thoughtful "open letter" isn't likely to actually communicate anything.
I'm just a clueless American, but as the blurb says "£24bn", I would guess reads "24 billion pounds". Is that billion as in "million million" or billion as in "thousand million"? I always wondered how that verbal discrepancy got started, seems that accountants on either side would get a bit huffy about a potential 1:1000 error.
And yet, would it be funded by Congress if it didn't get an easy-to-remember name? Would the USAPATRIOT act have been voted up to the White House if it was simply voted on as HR3162 or "Ashcroft's Wet Dream Panopticon Act of 2001"? Sometimes it takes a bit of focus testing and a shiny veneer of shinola to get approval from those who have the power but not the understanding.
I had to do this sort of "unfamiliar code analysis" with an ancient FORTRAN application written by non-software guys in the 1980s. It was some of the worst spaghetti I'd seen in some time.
To make any sense of it, I asked the compiler for a call tree report, and then I fed this through Perl to make a GraphViz "dot" file of it. After a few shuffles, I could start to determine some architecturally related areas and refactor slightly to decouple them into a more clear arrangement of modules. It was still crap, but it was at least something that I could understand to the point of making unit tests and coverage tests.
There, fixed that for you.
Raytracing the shiny first-intersection makes a lot of sense, even if it doesn't sell more CPUs. Sure, some day we will all have stunning holistic scene graphs that fit entirely within the pipeline cache of the processor, but it's not yet time for that.
Every change in developing a game engine requires changes in the entire toolset to deal with how to produce assets, how to fit within render time limit budgets, and how to model the scene graph and the logic graphs so that both are easily traversed and managed.
In the meantime, we have a pretty nice raster system right now, with a development strategy that provides for all those needs. You might not think that fullscale raytracing would upset this curve, but I'm not convinced. What do you do when a frame suddenly is taking more than 1/30sec to render, because the player is near a crystalline object and the ray depth is too high? How do you degrade the scene gracefully if your whole engine is built on raytracing? We've all played games where things like this were not handled well.
I contend that game AI is sometimes more advanced than academic AI because game developers are results-oriented and cut corners ruthlessly to achieve something that works well enough for a niche application. The same goes for game graphics: 33 milliseconds isn't enough to render complex scene graphs in an academically perfect and general way, it will require the same results-oriented corner-cutting to nudge the graphics beyond what anyone thought possible in 33ms. If that means using raytracing for a few key elements and ray-casting/z-buffering/fragment-shading the rest of the frame, game developers will do it.
But if they lose, why do we get punished?
This is just passive wavelength filtering. The amber filters are exactly like the "Blue Blocker" driving sunglasses in the 1970s. Yawn.
You don't need to erase the watermark. You need to break it, or produce plausible deniability. If you take ten copies of a 3min song, and concatenate chunks from each in 18sec blocks, then either the watermark will be unparsable, or it will implicate ten different people for small portions instead of one person for the whole song.
Okay, so who can imagine this car parked in front of a black background, slightly steaming, with Robin Williams popping out of it in a garish 1970s striped shirt? He can rant about oddities of the human condition, and close with an odd hand-gesture saying Nano, Nano.
Yes, I watched too much television as a youth. I liked that show until I saw Jonathan Winters in a diaper. Oy!
What I find odd is that Apple's newest keyboard is just a modern rehash of the IBM PCjr chicklet design, and yet nobody I've talked to has made big complaints about it. Honestly, the thing is worse than a rollup USB pocket keyboard, worse than those little laser-on-the-table keyboards, worse than typing through one of those plastic grease-shield membranes on a cash register, and yet, because it's done by Apple, it's gotten a free ticket to reinvent the chicklet without an uproar.
First off, let me say that I love both Perl 5 and Python 2.x and have used each of them on a wide diversity of projects. I've implemented my own OO system on top of each, I've used each for CGI, I've used each for AI, natural language processing, and game programming. Both languages have their idiosyncratic idioms and it's really annoying when you see a lot of C-ish code in either Perl or Python projects. It's also very possible to write ugly "write once" code in either one, don't be misled by the whitespace arguments: ugly code is about how you express (or fail to express) a problem and a solution.
However, I have to say, pick the tool for the job. There are things that are more naturally expressed in Perl idioms than in Python idioms. There are things that are much more clear and direct about Python code for outsiders to read and understand. If I were doing a ton of regex text scanning work, Perl incorporates it into the language directly, whereas it's a bolt-on for most other languages. If I were doing a ton of object management, I like the compactness of Python's syntax over that of Perl's. Both have great extensibility but the available extensions and support can shape your choice for a given project. I wish Python had true equivalents to Perlmonks and CPAN; conversely I wish CPAN modules were more crisp and consistent, attributes I think I find in the community-written Python modules I've used.