When the imac 2 (flatscreen, hemisphere base) first came out, the number of swivel specs interested me enormously - I thought you could rotate the screen, ie change from landscape to portrait, which would be great for editing A4 pages in photoshop, reading long documents, etc etc... this software brings back that interest, though I appreciate that the weight of the base might be a physical setup issue.
Ooh. Screw the base upside down into a shelf above; the screen is upside down, use the software to turn it right way up. No cds and dvds, but clears a bundle of desk space.
It's refreshing to see that the attitude to an underpowered course is "I want to be able to do this better" rather than "hey, this is easy". Though I guess that could be as much people being frustrated with a pointless course (is it at all useful? Preceding comments don't seem to think so), or even that it's only the proactive ones that are/.ers.
I'll stick to the first idea, and hope that students really are trying these days. At least, a few of them:)
With the point of nanotechnology being to make things smaller, a nanokingdom would, as stated, trump Micronesia.
Parallel graphics processing
on
SLI Primer
·
· Score: 3, Funny
So now we have the addition of parallel graphics cards on top of the already parallel CPUs; we've had parallel keyboards and mice ability for a long time, and parallel fans kinda vaguely came along too. Parallel HDs exist with extra drives, I'm not sure how RAM extensions are accessed but they're probably classable as parallel too.
Technology over the past 15 years: pushing an entire computer lab into a single computer.
Considering that we'll have computer labs with these computers in...
It's unfortunate that the reports are so mass-ignored. The summary of conclusions of the report on the report tends to be what gets out to the public (and presumably not far off what most of Parliament think the topic is about), by which time it's so much mush.
Unless, of course, it's a problematic/slightly dangerous scenario, in which case the papers take it, and distort ("DOOM!") a different summary of conclusion of report, and shout it about for about a day until we get back to who's done what else scandalous.
I read an article somewhere reputable (no idea where, it was about 7 or 8 years ago now) about computer gamers and enhanced skills. The factors involved were
Coordination - better than average fine motor control skills (small-scale precision), but average large motor control (eg swinging the entire arm to a point on the wall) Tracking - gamers can track on average around 8 items in their field of view simultaneously, more than the general average of 5-6 Concentration - staying focused on a task without distraction for (sometimes significantly) longer times than average.
The study had worked with brain scans to test alpha and beta brain activity levels - alpha waves are indicative of more automatic control, beta waves are more complex. A link had been found with the skills listed above being seen in computer gamers; the gamers were far faster than average at settling from beta to alpha waves when introduced to an activity.
The article finished off by mentioning the groups most likely to display alpha patterns - Transcendent aspirants (eg Buddhist zen masters), Sportspeople who get to The Zone (intense physical activity, all pain is completely suppressed - very useful), and high-activity computer gamers.
Of course it's software piracy. We have software (tiger) that costs money ($500 now, less later - free with new computers from its time of release, but still costs for those who upgrade their systems from panther) which is being pirated (bittorrent).
Just because it's not one of the "biggest" income streams for Apple doesn't mean that it's legal to take that income stream away.
Apple put money in to develop this program, and free distribution of the program means their profits are reduced. That's piracy.
The problem with the advertising business - as seen with the complaints about TV recording utilities that automatically detect advert breaks, with the widespread use of popup blockers, and the large number of people who completely ignore ads:
Most people don't like adverts.
The companies that pay for the adverts are hoping to get extra custom want more ways to get to the client, and this will likely go forward because of the technology push - BUT the problem with a fixed bar of adverts is that after a few logons you ignore most of what happens in that part of the screen.
Yes, there are people who do find the ads interesting, and will click on them. I currently find TV ads more interesting than most TV, since the advertisers are stretching further and further to catch our attention in zany and wacky ways that make us impressed enough to even think about buying their product; but I don't think that's the norm. People with an agenda will miss the ads, for the greater part; the tie-in with cheaper broadband may be good enough timing that this will work - cost per profit - but I'll be surprised.
This is going to be a game of 'who can run over the pedestrian first'... gonna have all the "That was my pedestrian!! OMG" arguments we see in hacknslashes at the moment;)
'Rewind' and 'fast-forward' already do this? "Time-continuous media" is odd in that it implies something like a stream, yet if the media has to be prepared first, it has to be a complete file. If I could reach the article (seems/. hosed their bandwidth?) I'd check up on this, but:
The only implication here is that you could skip past part of a stream that exists as a preprepared complete file at the other end (as opposed to radio, which is incomplete and not browsable); but I bet the prepped file is significantly bigger, and the time saved skipping over a boring section would be replaced by the time required to download the extra data.
Quicktime.mov files also play while still downloading, and work in more browsers than just Firefox;.mov has been around for a while, is already prepped, is easy to convert to with existing programs (free to download) and has various things like crossplatform compatibility.
You first comment is odd - the milky way the galaxy.
If you want to measure acceleration, you have to be able to check the speed accurately at two different times. Considering they just found this, and they'd have to find a measurable difference over a long enough time to detect acceleration at this considerable fraction of lightspeed, you might have to wait a while.
Miles are used because NASA still likes 'em. Miles (Vorkosigan) is used because he can get out of anywherefast.
The ergosphere around a black hole is full of matter that's orbiting the black hole at a speed that's not enough to get back out again - as a fast body comes through, it slingshots through the buzz of energy provided and comes out faster than it went in. This is above the point of no return, but there's still a lot of energy flying around there.
It'll be measured relative to the galactic hub - measuring the speed relative to the earth is irrelevant, since you don't look out of your car and think that cars coming the other way are going at twice the speed limit, instead it's relative to the frame of reference of the ground {hub}.
Then again, with a speed that high, the speed of the earth/sun becomes insignificant anyway (8.5 miles/s and 155 miles/s respectively)
Meteorites: 10ish miles per second, depending (yukon = 9.3)
Earth through space: 18.5 miles per second
Sun through space: around 155 miles per second
This thing is moving really quite scarily fast. The energy in that thing must be huge, since it's already 3 times the size of the sun.
Questions: what would the effects of the speed be? Would the galaxial dust clouds be dense enough to 'fan the flames'? How does something that gets accelerated to that speed stay together - or, how big was it before it shed all the mass that couldn't stay together!
There was a monty python song about this... *hums*
I remember an article from a few years (?) back that showed a robot that could play tetris - not an automatic tetris player, but a robot that used a camera to look at the screen, attempt to match the falling shape to memory, and play according to what it thought was falling. I can't find the link on google (too many locations trying to get me to download tetris), but if someone with more time on their hands had a look I bet you could find the camera they were using. It'd have to be fast enough to detect the piece before it reached the bottom, and good enough quality to recognise what shape the piece was and in which orientation it was, and act appropriately.
OTOH, the project seems slightly frivolous, so the cost may have been slightly more than shoestring.
The vomit comet was called such for a reason. I used to be an RAF cadet, so I occasionally got to fly in little two-seater propeller-driven aircraft, and there were usually several people on any day who were nauseated or ill from some aspect of the flight, whether it was a bit of turbulence, flying upside-down, and so on. The body just isn't used to the varying Gs - which is why astronauts have to go through the whole spinning machine thing, being tumbled in all directions - either they can deal with it, they become able to deal with it, or they're out of the system. Globs of vom in zero-G are icky, and I bet the motion of vomiting isn't helped by not knowing which way is up.
Paying thousands of dollars for a zero-G flight is all very well, but if you were going to do it, you'd better make sure you've been on a fair few rollercoasters and built up some resistance, because spending thousands of dollars to be sick in a novel way doesn't seem particularly appealing!
A useful little thing that was in beta for a while (and seems to have gone mainstream very quietly) is at Apple's GUI scripting page - As might be expected, it's a bit unweildy (check out the lovely example on page 3) and a bit pitfally to write, but when it's done right it works like a dream. You can script Powerpoint actions, for once. Hooray!
Slashdot Mirror
When the imac 2 (flatscreen, hemisphere base) first came out, the number of swivel specs interested me enormously - I thought you could rotate the screen, ie change from landscape to portrait, which would be great for editing A4 pages in photoshop, reading long documents, etc etc... this software brings back that interest, though I appreciate that the weight of the base might be a physical setup issue. Ooh. Screw the base upside down into a shelf above; the screen is upside down, use the software to turn it right way up. No cds and dvds, but clears a bundle of desk space.
It's refreshing to see that the attitude to an underpowered course is "I want to be able to do this better" rather than "hey, this is easy". Though I guess that could be as much people being frustrated with a pointless course (is it at all useful? Preceding comments don't seem to think so), or even that it's only the proactive ones that are /.ers.
:)
I'll stick to the first idea, and hope that students really are trying these days. At least, a few of them
With the point of nanotechnology being to make things smaller, a nanokingdom would, as stated, trump Micronesia.
So now we have the addition of parallel graphics cards on top of the already parallel CPUs; we've had parallel keyboards and mice ability for a long time, and parallel fans kinda vaguely came along too. Parallel HDs exist with extra drives, I'm not sure how RAM extensions are accessed but they're probably classable as parallel too. Technology over the past 15 years: pushing an entire computer lab into a single computer. Considering that we'll have computer labs with these computers in...
It's unfortunate that the reports are so mass-ignored. The summary of conclusions of the report on the report tends to be what gets out to the public (and presumably not far off what most of Parliament think the topic is about), by which time it's so much mush.
Unless, of course, it's a problematic/slightly dangerous scenario, in which case the papers take it, and distort ("DOOM!") a different summary of conclusion of report, and shout it about for about a day until we get back to who's done what else scandalous.
But Nanokingdom makes it sound either like the country is tiny, or the king (queen) is tiny. It'd trump micronesia though.
I read an article somewhere reputable (no idea where, it was about 7 or 8 years ago now) about computer gamers and enhanced skills. The factors involved were
Coordination - better than average fine motor control skills (small-scale precision), but average large motor control (eg swinging the entire arm to a point on the wall)
Tracking - gamers can track on average around 8 items in their field of view simultaneously, more than the general average of 5-6
Concentration - staying focused on a task without distraction for (sometimes significantly) longer times than average.
The study had worked with brain scans to test alpha and beta brain activity levels - alpha waves are indicative of more automatic control, beta waves are more complex. A link had been found with the skills listed above being seen in computer gamers; the gamers were far faster than average at settling from beta to alpha waves when introduced to an activity.
The article finished off by mentioning the groups most likely to display alpha patterns - Transcendent aspirants (eg Buddhist zen masters), Sportspeople who get to The Zone (intense physical activity, all pain is completely suppressed - very useful), and high-activity computer gamers.
I think the number of acronyms per slashdot article might be an indication of its geek-tech depth...
If this was software piracy
Of course it's software piracy. We have software (tiger) that costs money ($500 now, less later - free with new computers from its time of release, but still costs for those who upgrade their systems from panther) which is being pirated (bittorrent).
Just because it's not one of the "biggest" income streams for Apple doesn't mean that it's legal to take that income stream away.
Apple put money in to develop this program, and free distribution of the program means their profits are reduced. That's piracy.
Because the companies can't advertise on a phone line while someone's making a call, and when they stop calling there's no-one there to advertise to.
The problem with the advertising business - as seen with the complaints about TV recording utilities that automatically detect advert breaks, with the widespread use of popup blockers, and the large number of people who completely ignore ads:
Most people don't like adverts.
The companies that pay for the adverts are hoping to get extra custom want more ways to get to the client, and this will likely go forward because of the technology push - BUT the problem with a fixed bar of adverts is that after a few logons you ignore most of what happens in that part of the screen.
Yes, there are people who do find the ads interesting, and will click on them. I currently find TV ads more interesting than most TV, since the advertisers are stretching further and further to catch our attention in zany and wacky ways that make us impressed enough to even think about buying their product; but I don't think that's the norm. People with an agenda will miss the ads, for the greater part; the tie-in with cheaper broadband may be good enough timing that this will work - cost per profit - but I'll be surprised.
Not that I'd complain.
This is going to be a game of 'who can run over the pedestrian first'... gonna have all the "That was my pedestrian!! OMG" arguments we see in hacknslashes at the moment ;)
'Rewind' and 'fast-forward' already do this? "Time-continuous media" is odd in that it implies something like a stream, yet if the media has to be prepared first, it has to be a complete file. If I could reach the article (seems /. hosed their bandwidth?) I'd check up on this, but:
.mov files also play while still downloading, and work in more browsers than just Firefox; .mov has been around for a while, is already prepped, is easy to convert to with existing programs (free to download) and has various things like crossplatform compatibility.
The only implication here is that you could skip past part of a stream that exists as a preprepared complete file at the other end (as opposed to radio, which is incomplete and not browsable); but I bet the prepped file is significantly bigger, and the time saved skipping over a boring section would be replaced by the time required to download the extra data.
Quicktime
Hooray for google. Click on the caches.
First line should read "Your first comment is odd - the milky way is the galaxy.
*smacks back of own hand with ruler for bad grammar. Twice.*
You first comment is odd - the milky way the galaxy.
If you want to measure acceleration, you have to be able to check the speed accurately at two different times. Considering they just found this, and they'd have to find a measurable difference over a long enough time to detect acceleration at this considerable fraction of lightspeed, you might have to wait a while.
Miles are used because NASA still likes 'em. Miles (Vorkosigan) is used because he can get out of anywherefast.
Yes, this is why black holes get so massive. They suck stuff in, and they feed on the extra mass. Must. Refrain. From. Fat. People. Joke.
The ergosphere around a black hole is full of matter that's orbiting the black hole at a speed that's not enough to get back out again - as a fast body comes through, it slingshots through the buzz of energy provided and comes out faster than it went in. This is above the point of no return, but there's still a lot of energy flying around there.
It'll be measured relative to the galactic hub - measuring the speed relative to the earth is irrelevant, since you don't look out of your car and think that cars coming the other way are going at twice the speed limit, instead it's relative to the frame of reference of the ground {hub}.
Then again, with a speed that high, the speed of the earth/sun becomes insignificant anyway (8.5 miles/s and 155 miles/s respectively)
A bit of googling pulled up:
Meteorites: 10ish miles per second, depending (yukon = 9.3)
Earth through space: 18.5 miles per second
Sun through space: around 155 miles per second
This thing is moving really quite scarily fast. The energy in that thing must be huge, since it's already 3 times the size of the sun.
Questions: what would the effects of the speed be? Would the galaxial dust clouds be dense enough to 'fan the flames'? How does something that gets accelerated to that speed stay together - or, how big was it before it shed all the mass that couldn't stay together!
There was a monty python song about this... *hums*
A bundle of stars spinning round at high speed, flinging out another star to get extra speed!
...like the people who post comments on slashdot from work, with an intent to be Funny ;)
I remember an article from a few years (?) back that showed a robot that could play tetris - not an automatic tetris player, but a robot that used a camera to look at the screen, attempt to match the falling shape to memory, and play according to what it thought was falling. I can't find the link on google (too many locations trying to get me to download tetris), but if someone with more time on their hands had a look I bet you could find the camera they were using. It'd have to be fast enough to detect the piece before it reached the bottom, and good enough quality to recognise what shape the piece was and in which orientation it was, and act appropriately.
OTOH, the project seems slightly frivolous, so the cost may have been slightly more than shoestring.
The vomit comet was called such for a reason. I used to be an RAF cadet, so I occasionally got to fly in little two-seater propeller-driven aircraft, and there were usually several people on any day who were nauseated or ill from some aspect of the flight, whether it was a bit of turbulence, flying upside-down, and so on. The body just isn't used to the varying Gs - which is why astronauts have to go through the whole spinning machine thing, being tumbled in all directions - either they can deal with it, they become able to deal with it, or they're out of the system. Globs of vom in zero-G are icky, and I bet the motion of vomiting isn't helped by not knowing which way is up.
Paying thousands of dollars for a zero-G flight is all very well, but if you were going to do it, you'd better make sure you've been on a fair few rollercoasters and built up some resistance, because spending thousands of dollars to be sick in a novel way doesn't seem particularly appealing!
A useful little thing that was in beta for a while (and seems to have gone mainstream very quietly) is at Apple's GUI scripting page - As might be expected, it's a bit unweildy (check out the lovely example on page 3) and a bit pitfally to write, but when it's done right it works like a dream. You can script Powerpoint actions, for once. Hooray!