What I would prefer is movies that have subtitles in two languages simultaneously, my own and that of the speaker. I have much more difficulty understanding spoken Spanish, for example, than printed Spanish because my ear is not well tuned to the spoken words. Once I know what words are being spoken I often understand what is being said. And if I don't, the English translation will help with that.
Saturday Night Live had a brilliant sketch back in the 70's or 80's that perfectly illustrated why the large-brained tend to go extinct. The sketch had a small band of caveman hunters gathered around the campfire at night after the hunt. Brutus, the leader of the band was a muscular and stupid jock who kept walking through the fire and burning his feet while boasting of his hunting prowess. One of the others, a proto-nerd played by Bill Murray, decided it would be a good time to bring up an idea he had about how they could catch more game if, rather than just chase after their prey, they could surround it and close in on it from all directions, making it harder for it to escape. The other cave men seemed to begin to grasp the concept until Brutus walked around behind the Murray character and dropped a boulder on his head. It remains my all-time favorite SNL sketch.
You can't take it in all at once on your puny computer, but there is a single full resolution image file somewhere that could conceivably be printed at 100% if there were a printer in existence that could print 30 meter wide rolls (or whatever it would take) or a monitor with enough pixels to display it. So, lacking those means of displaying the image, the next best thing is a zoomable image such as shown here.
Windows search indexer turned out to be the cause of horrendous performance on my system. You can turn it off by running Services (find it at Start>Programs>Admiistrative Tools>Services). Right-click Windows Search service and select Properties. In Startup type, choose Manual.
This made a huge difference in my case.
A lot of parsing was done at runtime, rather than at entry time or program startup time.
Such as???
The Commie 64 tokenized every statement at input time. You can find the complete list of C-64 tokens here.
Very few high-level constructs.
Compared to what? Look at the token list. It has many high level functions. Can you give some examples of competing computers at the time that had more? Apple II? TRS-80? Atari 400 or Atari 800? TI-99?
Most BASICs at the time would at least tokenize at entry time, and many even converted programs to P-code for execution.
As I said, C-64 tokenized too. Can you name one computer in that time that did more than the C-64 regards tokenizing or P-code? And how would you differentiate between C-64 tokens and P-code? Aren't they are basically the same thing?
I would disagree. I wrote a commercially successful program for the VIC-20, which had the same BASIC as the C-64, and I found that I could not port it to the Atari 400 or TI-99 because their BASIC interpreters were too restrictive. The C-64 interpreter, which was written by a nerdy guy named Bill Gates, allowed a lot of space-saving tricks that made my program possible. Using all these tricks made the code nearly impossible to read, but who cares? Sacrificing readability for functionality is a no-brainer.
This page" contains the code for one of the two programs that made up my product. It is the only Assembler ever written for such a small program space (3583 bytes), making it the smallest assembler ever written.
I have always considered it my best hack and there is a little more about it here.
What parsing was done at runtime that other interpreters do at input time? All the BASIC commands were tokenized at input time.
You can find the complete set here And as you can see, there are several high level functions.
This question examines how you would handle a national disaster of such magnitude and scope that there is no precedent on which to rely. This question tests many important qualities of a leader, including the ability to make difficult choices of great consequence and how to rapidly organize a large scale response to a problem.
For this theoretical question, let us assume that bird flu, which currently has a 65% mortality rate, suddenly acquires the ability to transmit efficiently among humans. Let us further assume that it is extremely contagious, as new strains of human influenza invariably are, capable of circulating through entire communities within a few days of the first incident of infection.
In the hypothetical situation, some normally reliable sources report a rapidly spreading disease tearing through a remote region of China, with accounts of huge numbers of people becoming sick and dying. The director of CDC calls you and warns that the worst fears about bird flu may be coming true. Without totally sealing off our borders, the disease is expected to arrive in the United States within days, if it hasn't in fact already arrived on a transcontinental flight.
If you immediately cancel all international flights and bar all ships from entering our harbors, the economy will undergo massive shock and thousands of citizens will be stranded outside of the country. But if you don't, you risk seeing at least half the population of the United States become deathly ill and probably die in short order.
What do you do and how long do you wait to be certain that the reports are true before doing it, keeping in mind that even a short delay could result in the disease reaching US soil?
Finally, if isolation fails or is initiated too late, what do you as president do once it is discovered that an infected traveler has arrived in a major metropolitan area and now a dozen of his family and friends have come down the disease?
One of the oddest aspects of this case is the way that Ivins supposedly chose to commit suicide. Tylenol typically causes a horrible, drawn-out death that takes two to three weeks. The impression given by the media is that he tossed down a bottle of Tylenol, grabbed his throat and keeled over. But that just isn't the way it happens, and Ivins would have known that.
This article provides an excellent discussion of the time line of deterioration and eventual death that results comes from Tylenol poisoning.
There are many fishy things about Ivins death but perhaps the fishiest is the way he reportedly chose to commit suicide.
Ivins was an expert toxicologist but he supposedly decided to commit suicide by a method that takes days, even weeks, and is extremely unpleasant. The following is from eMedicine from WebMD.
Patients with acetaminophen-induced hepatotoxicity present in 4 clinical phases.
Phase 1 (0-24 h)
The first phase lasts up to 24 hours.
Patients have anorexia, nausea, vomiting, malaise, and diaphoresis. Because these clinical signs are nonspecific, patients might inadvertently be given additional doses of an acetaminophen-containing product for treatment.
Some patients remain asymptomatic, but they can still develop clinically significant toxicity.
Neurologic, respiratory, and cardiac symptoms are rare in phase 1.
Subclinical elevation of serum liver transaminases (alanine aminotransferase [ALT], aspartate aminotransferase [AST]) occurs about 12 hours after ingestion.
Phase 2 (24-72 h)
The second phase begins 24 hours after ingestion and lasts for another 48 hours.
Phase 1 symptoms become less evident than before and/or resolve.
Patients present with pain and tenderness in the right upper quadrant. Liver enlargement (hepatomegaly) can be present. Some patients report having decreased urinary output.
Serum studies reveal elevated ALT and AST levels, prothrombin times (PTs), and bilirubin values.
Phase 3 (72-120 h)
Phase 3 develops 3-5 days after ingestion.
The symptoms seen in phase 1 (eg, anorexia, nausea, vomiting, malaise) may reappear.
Patients have symptoms of hepatic failure with jaundice, hypoglycemia, bleeding, or encephalopathy. Renal failure and cardiomyopathy may also occur.
Hepatic centrilobular necrosis is evident on liver biopsy. Almost 4% of patients who develop this degree of hepatotoxicity progress to fulminant hepatic failure.
Death may occur because of cerebral edema, sepsis, or multiorgan failure.
Phase 4 (5-14 d)
Phase 4 occurs 5-14 days after ingestion. This phase can last as long as 21 days.
Patients either have a complete recovery of liver function or they die.
Physical
Physical findings vary and depend primarily on the phase of hepatotoxicity.
Phase 1 (0-1 d)
Physical findings are nonspecific.
Pallor, diaphoresis, and compromised hydration status due to repeated emesis and increased insensible losses may be present.
Malaise and fatigue are reported.
Phase 2 (1-3 d)
Abdominal examination reveals tenderness in the right upper quadrant and hepatomegaly.
Vital signs show tachycardia and hypotension as indicators of ongoing volume losses.
Phase 3 (3-5 d)
Physical findings reflect clinically significant hepatic injury, such as abdominal pain, jaundice, and GI bleeding due to coagulopathy.
Encephalopathy due to severe hepatic injury occurs.
Phase 4 (5-21 d): Physical findings resolve or death occurs.
Well, as I said in my earlier post, it is next to impossible to do this without a robot if you are using a long lens to take a large array of photographs that are closely spaced.
And as to viewing gigapixel images, there are numerous ways to do it. You can use zoomify, as in this image:
http://www.donfrenchphotography.com/Zoomify/HalfDome2D.htm
where you can zoom in close enough to see people standing on top of Half Dome. Or go to the gigapan site (http:\\www.gigapan.org) to see many examples of gigapixel images.
Richard Feynman never said anything about software engineering, to the best of my knowledge. Did you read TFA? But should Feynman have commented on software engineering, I for one would have read his comments with the utmost interest. Feynman had extraordinary intelligence and perception and used both in whatever interested him. And his interests were exceptionally varied. Whatever the topic, Feynman's comments are almost always insightful, interesting, and original. Would your same close-minded attitude stop you from reading anything Feynman had to say about Mayan hieroglyphs, for example? What would a physicist know about that? Or molecular biology. Or cryptology. Yet Feynman made significant contributions in all those areas. I suggest you read some of his semi-autobiographical books, such as "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?". I think that you might change your opinion as to whether you would deign to consider and value the ideas and opinions of Richard Feynman on topics outside his formal academic area.
Fault lines are not linear and one-dimensional, as shown in the image. The line in the image runs down the center of, but does not define the width of the San Andreas fault zone. An earthquake with an epicenter anywhere near the SLAC could easily cause a break smack in the middle of the accelerator. And even if it doesn't break the accelerator the way the fence in Pt. Reyes broke, have no doubt that earth waves 1 meter in amplitude would completely destroy the unit, not to mention what waves 5 meters in amplitude, such as occurred in the earthquake that caused the great tsunami of 2004, would do.
Every time I drive by SLAC on 280, I am reminded that the facility sits almost on top of one of the world's most violent and active fault systems. SLAC is only 3000 feet away from the San Andreas fault at its closest point and about 7000 feet at its farthest. If you go to this site, you can zoom in where Sand Hill Road intersects 280 and plainly see both SLAC and the fault line.
To see what happened to another linear structure as a result of an earthquake on the San Andreas, go here.
So, when SLAC becomes SNLAC, will there be collateral damage beyond losing a gazillion dollar investment and shutting down indefinitely numerous research projects and in-progress dissertations? Will there also be an environmental impact as the coolant lines break and containers of who-knows-what exotic materials spill their contents?
I wonder whose bright idea was it to build a huge linear accelerator almost on top of a known fault system in the first place?
And I once wrote a full-featured symbolic assembler in 1579 bytes. Besides symbolic labels, it supported address expressions with +=/* and logical AND/OR, hex and text strings, and a lot more. To the best of my knowledge it is the smallest symbolic assembler ever written. I published and sold it as The Assembler for the VIC-20.
You can get a 2G thumb drive today for $25, or $12.50 per Gig. A 1T thumb drive at $1.25 a G would therefore cost $1,250. That is a pretty expensive gadget to hang off the side of your laptop. What is more, I bet that they aren't using the $12.50 a Gig price when they say it is a tenth the price of current flash technology. It wouldn't surprise me to see a Tb introduced at something closer to $2,500. But prices will come down with time, and it is certainly a good start.
Applause! I am glad to see that at least one person has thought this through.
The other ridiculous thing I see all the time is the suggestion to businesses that they tell their employees to stay home during a pandemic if they are feeling ill. That is absurd on several levels. First, they need to tell their employees to stay home period. No human contact will be safe. People are contagious before they start to feel ill. Second, avian flu, when it starts to present symptoms, is extremely unpleasant and no one will need to be told to stay home. Third, they won't need to tell their employees anything at all after the first week or so when it finally dawns on even the thickest employees that the half the people in the city are infected with a highly contagious disease and most of them are now dying.
Well said. I hear the argument that bird flu is a government plot to distract us, a corporate scam to raise the value of Dick Cheney's stocks, and a media plot to sell papers. The problem with all of those theories is that the people speaking the most urgently about the threat of a pandemic are not in the government, the corporations, or the media. They are the most respected scientists in the world of virology and epidemiology. And they are from all over the world. People are free to ignore the warnings if they want, but they do so at their own risk. And if the warnings scare people, all the better because it is a very scary threat and if people aren't scared, they will not take actions to assure their own survival.
On the other hand, perhaps those who ignore the warnings of an impending pandemic will turn out to be the biggest collective group of Darwin Award winners of all time, bestowed posthumously, of course. And so will the gene pool be cleaned.
The other thing I forgot to mention is that the trait of human lethality was developed in another species, one in which human lethality had no significance in the evolution of the virus. Once the virus becomes transmissibile in humans, the independently developed human lethality trait will come with it. There is a good chance that the degree of lethality will diminish with the mutation that makes the virus transmissible in humans, but it could and probably will remain very, very high. And at the time H5N1 goes H2H, given the incredible speed with which influenza spreads, there is not enough time for evolutionary forces to wipe out the lethal, transmissible virus before it wipes out a huge percentage of the population. So I, at least, am concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
What I would prefer is movies that have subtitles in two languages simultaneously, my own and that of the speaker. I have much more difficulty understanding spoken Spanish, for example, than printed Spanish because my ear is not well tuned to the spoken words. Once I know what words are being spoken I often understand what is being said. And if I don't, the English translation will help with that.
Saturday Night Live had a brilliant sketch back in the 70's or 80's that perfectly illustrated why the large-brained tend to go extinct. The sketch had a small band of caveman hunters gathered around the campfire at night after the hunt. Brutus, the leader of the band was a muscular and stupid jock who kept walking through the fire and burning his feet while boasting of his hunting prowess. One of the others, a proto-nerd played by Bill Murray, decided it would be a good time to bring up an idea he had about how they could catch more game if, rather than just chase after their prey, they could surround it and close in on it from all directions, making it harder for it to escape. The other cave men seemed to begin to grasp the concept until Brutus walked around behind the Murray character and dropped a boulder on his head. It remains my all-time favorite SNL sketch.
You can't take it in all at once on your puny computer, but there is a single full resolution image file somewhere that could conceivably be printed at 100% if there were a printer in existence that could print 30 meter wide rolls (or whatever it would take) or a monitor with enough pixels to display it. So, lacking those means of displaying the image, the next best thing is a zoomable image such as shown here.
Windows search indexer turned out to be the cause of horrendous performance on my system. You can turn it off by running Services (find it at Start>Programs>Admiistrative Tools>Services). Right-click Windows Search service and select Properties. In Startup type, choose Manual. This made a huge difference in my case.
But Englishman Thomas Harriot made the first drawing of the moon after looking through a telescope several months before Galileo, in July 1609. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090114-first-moon-map.html
A lot of parsing was done at runtime, rather than at entry time or program startup time.
Such as??? The Commie 64 tokenized every statement at input time. You can find the complete list of C-64 tokens here.
Very few high-level constructs.
Compared to what? Look at the token list. It has many high level functions. Can you give some examples of competing computers at the time that had more? Apple II? TRS-80? Atari 400 or Atari 800? TI-99?
Most BASICs at the time would at least tokenize at entry time, and many even converted programs to P-code for execution.
As I said, C-64 tokenized too. Can you name one computer in that time that did more than the C-64 regards tokenizing or P-code? And how would you differentiate between C-64 tokens and P-code? Aren't they are basically the same thing?
I would disagree. I wrote a commercially successful program for the VIC-20, which had the same BASIC as the C-64, and I found that I could not port it to the Atari 400 or TI-99 because their BASIC interpreters were too restrictive. The C-64 interpreter, which was written by a nerdy guy named Bill Gates, allowed a lot of space-saving tricks that made my program possible. Using all these tricks made the code nearly impossible to read, but who cares? Sacrificing readability for functionality is a no-brainer. This page" contains the code for one of the two programs that made up my product. It is the only Assembler ever written for such a small program space (3583 bytes), making it the smallest assembler ever written.
I have always considered it my best hack and there is a little more about it here.
What parsing was done at runtime that other interpreters do at input time? All the BASIC commands were tokenized at input time.
You can find the complete set here
And as you can see, there are several high level functions.
This question examines how you would handle a national disaster of such magnitude and scope that there is no precedent on which to rely. This question tests many important qualities of a leader, including the ability to make difficult choices of great consequence and how to rapidly organize a large scale response to a problem.
For this theoretical question, let us assume that bird flu, which currently has a 65% mortality rate, suddenly acquires the ability to transmit efficiently among humans. Let us further assume that it is extremely contagious, as new strains of human influenza invariably are, capable of circulating through entire communities within a few days of the first incident of infection.
In the hypothetical situation, some normally reliable sources report a rapidly spreading disease tearing through a remote region of China, with accounts of huge numbers of people becoming sick and dying. The director of CDC calls you and warns that the worst fears about bird flu may be coming true. Without totally sealing off our borders, the disease is expected to arrive in the United States within days, if it hasn't in fact already arrived on a transcontinental flight.
If you immediately cancel all international flights and bar all ships from entering our harbors, the economy will undergo massive shock and thousands of citizens will be stranded outside of the country. But if you don't, you risk seeing at least half the population of the United States become deathly ill and probably die in short order.
What do you do and how long do you wait to be certain that the reports are true before doing it, keeping in mind that even a short delay could result in the disease reaching US soil?
Finally, if isolation fails or is initiated too late, what do you as president do once it is discovered that an infected traveler has arrived in a major metropolitan area and now a dozen of his family and friends have come down the disease?
Thanks for the clarification! I guess it makes sense after all.
One of the oddest aspects of this case is the way that Ivins supposedly chose to commit suicide. Tylenol typically causes a horrible, drawn-out death that takes two to three weeks. The impression given by the media is that he tossed down a bottle of Tylenol, grabbed his throat and keeled over. But that just isn't the way it happens, and Ivins would have known that.
This article provides an excellent discussion of the time line of deterioration and eventual death that results comes from Tylenol poisoning.
Ivins was an expert toxicologist but he supposedly decided to commit suicide by a method that takes days, even weeks, and is extremely unpleasant. The following is from eMedicine from WebMD.
Patients with acetaminophen-induced hepatotoxicity present in 4 clinical phases.
Physical
Physical findings vary and depend primarily on the phase of hepatotoxicity.
"out flying a plane" is just urban legend. Go find some of Gary's intervies for the truth on the subject.
But i agree, there was a lot of luck involved, and a but of underhanded backroom deals.
Maybe, but I spoke with one of the IBM people who was stood up by Gary that day and he confirmed that Kildall basically blew them off.Well, as I said in my earlier post, it is next to impossible to do this without a robot if you are using a long lens to take a large array of photographs that are closely spaced. And as to viewing gigapixel images, there are numerous ways to do it. You can use zoomify, as in this image: http://www.donfrenchphotography.com/Zoomify/HalfDome2D.htm where you can zoom in close enough to see people standing on top of Half Dome. Or go to the gigapan site (http:\\www.gigapan.org) to see many examples of gigapixel images.
Richard Feynman never said anything about software engineering, to the best of my knowledge. Did you read TFA? But should Feynman have commented on software engineering, I for one would have read his comments with the utmost interest. Feynman had extraordinary intelligence and perception and used both in whatever interested him. And his interests were exceptionally varied. Whatever the topic, Feynman's comments are almost always insightful, interesting, and original. Would your same close-minded attitude stop you from reading anything Feynman had to say about Mayan hieroglyphs, for example? What would a physicist know about that? Or molecular biology. Or cryptology. Yet Feynman made significant contributions in all those areas. I suggest you read some of his semi-autobiographical books, such as "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?". I think that you might change your opinion as to whether you would deign to consider and value the ideas and opinions of Richard Feynman on topics outside his formal academic area.
Fault lines are not linear and one-dimensional, as shown in the image. The line in the image runs down the center of, but does not define the width of the San Andreas fault zone. An earthquake with an epicenter anywhere near the SLAC could easily cause a break smack in the middle of the accelerator. And even if it doesn't break the accelerator the way the fence in Pt. Reyes broke, have no doubt that earth waves 1 meter in amplitude would completely destroy the unit, not to mention what waves 5 meters in amplitude, such as occurred in the earthquake that caused the great tsunami of 2004, would do.
Every time I drive by SLAC on 280, I am reminded that the facility sits almost on top of one of the world's most violent and active fault systems. SLAC is only 3000 feet away from the San Andreas fault at its closest point and about 7000 feet at its farthest. If you go to this site, you can zoom in where Sand Hill Road intersects 280 and plainly see both SLAC and the fault line.
To see what happened to another linear structure as a result of an earthquake on the San Andreas, go here.
So, when SLAC becomes SNLAC, will there be collateral damage beyond losing a gazillion dollar investment and shutting down indefinitely numerous research projects and in-progress dissertations? Will there also be an environmental impact as the coolant lines break and containers of who-knows-what exotic materials spill their contents?
I wonder whose bright idea was it to build a huge linear accelerator almost on top of a known fault system in the first place?
There is more about it (and me) here.
Umm. Thanks. I guess.
And I once wrote a full-featured symbolic assembler in 1579 bytes. Besides symbolic labels, it supported address expressions with +=/* and logical AND/OR, hex and text strings, and a lot more. To the best of my knowledge it is the smallest symbolic assembler ever written. I published and sold it as The Assembler for the VIC-20.
That too. But that was the suggestion of the author of TFA, not me.
You can get a 2G thumb drive today for $25, or $12.50 per Gig. A 1T thumb drive at $1.25 a G would therefore cost $1,250. That is a pretty expensive gadget to hang off the side of your laptop. What is more, I bet that they aren't using the $12.50 a Gig price when they say it is a tenth the price of current flash technology. It wouldn't surprise me to see a Tb introduced at something closer to $2,500. But prices will come down with time, and it is certainly a good start.
Applause! I am glad to see that at least one person has thought this through. The other ridiculous thing I see all the time is the suggestion to businesses that they tell their employees to stay home during a pandemic if they are feeling ill. That is absurd on several levels. First, they need to tell their employees to stay home period. No human contact will be safe. People are contagious before they start to feel ill. Second, avian flu, when it starts to present symptoms, is extremely unpleasant and no one will need to be told to stay home. Third, they won't need to tell their employees anything at all after the first week or so when it finally dawns on even the thickest employees that the half the people in the city are infected with a highly contagious disease and most of them are now dying.
Well said. I hear the argument that bird flu is a government plot to distract us, a corporate scam to raise the value of Dick Cheney's stocks, and a media plot to sell papers. The problem with all of those theories is that the people speaking the most urgently about the threat of a pandemic are not in the government, the corporations, or the media. They are the most respected scientists in the world of virology and epidemiology. And they are from all over the world. People are free to ignore the warnings if they want, but they do so at their own risk. And if the warnings scare people, all the better because it is a very scary threat and if people aren't scared, they will not take actions to assure their own survival. On the other hand, perhaps those who ignore the warnings of an impending pandemic will turn out to be the biggest collective group of Darwin Award winners of all time, bestowed posthumously, of course. And so will the gene pool be cleaned.
The other thing I forgot to mention is that the trait of human lethality was developed in another species, one in which human lethality had no significance in the evolution of the virus. Once the virus becomes transmissibile in humans, the independently developed human lethality trait will come with it. There is a good chance that the degree of lethality will diminish with the mutation that makes the virus transmissible in humans, but it could and probably will remain very, very high. And at the time H5N1 goes H2H, given the incredible speed with which influenza spreads, there is not enough time for evolutionary forces to wipe out the lethal, transmissible virus before it wipes out a huge percentage of the population. So I, at least, am concerned.