I might argue that it's tragic that it's chilly in the room sometimes, but that's just life. There will always be problems. We can try to work towards a minimal subset of those problems.
That's the thing: we always have to keep working. That's the tragic part of technology. No matter how many problems we solve, there are always more to overcome. There's no rest, no universal point where it doesn't get any better.
Technology feeds on itself. New technology is used to combat old problems, but its use creates problems which will require more new technology to overcome. This prevents us from living in a utopia for the foreseeable future: we've too many problems to solve. I suppose it's okay to call that a tragedy, but for someone like me it's just job security.
The movie you're asking about is Runaway. Huh- another Michael Crichton movie! I like his stories.
It's interesting that you mention that movie, because a lot of the concepts in it are becoming feasible now. Runaway had floating surveillance cameras, "lock-ons" which would track your car and attempt to blow it up, and smart bullets that sought out particular heat signatures. Not to mention the nasty little spider robots.
These roboflies could certainly handle some of the tracking and surveillance.
And companies are looking into ways to disable automobiles from a distance for police departments. A robot deployed from a police car in front of the offender futzes up the electronic fuel injection or ignition. Sucks to be you!
Soooo... Commodore's gone, ESCOM's gone, one other I can't remember's gone, Gateway's given up. I don't care about it and I haven't for quite some time.
Why should I? Because I can't get support from those companies? Not a good enough reason. There's still plenty of life in the software and hardware development communities. All right, so Voyager and Ibrowse and Aweb aren't Netscape and IE (this isn't necessarily a bad thing!:-) )- Does this stop me from surfing the web? No- HTML is HTML and I don't find Shockwave adds all that much to the experience.
Okay. Should I move on just because the hardware is so outdated? Nope- that's not a good reason either, as long as the hardware works! I find my 25MHz '040 A4000 up to the task of rendering most web pages. It's not fast enough to play MP3s well, but I already have a large CD collection. The latest games? There are enough for my PlayStation that I don't need a computer for them.
So, as long as my trusty A4000 (and 2 A3000s) are good enough to do what I need them to do, there is *no* reason for me to care what happens outside my box. When they die, though, I won't worry about replacing them with new Amigas- that's what Linux and cheap PCs are for. But until then, you can take my Amiga from me when you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I suspect that Slashdot knows when you start to post something, as it serves you the form. I'd guess that what happened is that you started your post after #6, but submitted it before they finished.
Er, good luck getting the GPS signals down that deep. And sperm whales prolly navigate more by sonar at those lightless depths.
>so we can find out where these suckers hang out.
On the squids' tentacles, obviously!:-)
Re:A cure for blindness?
on
The Cat Cam
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· Score: 2
Already being worked on. In the most recent issue of Popular Science (all right, so it's not SciAm, but it is a heck of a lot easier to read!) they had an article about eye implants. They had a blind guy and implanted an interface around his retina, and were able to drive recognizable signals through it. The first thing the guy saw was a letter. At first he thought it was a U, but then he resolved it into an H- which as it happened was the first letter of his name.
If you see the issue on the newsstands still, it's the one where there's a lady experiencing, er, the heartbreak of aluminum foil.
Naw, it was slashdotted even before it was posted. I was testing a new proxy server this morning, so I went to the Wired web page (huh, all the other boxes I play with around here already had Slashdot cached. Go figure!). I tried to click on the link to see the pictures, and the page was already unavailable. I tried searching the site, but no luck.
Didn't stop me from submitting it myself, though!:-)
I doubt that Sony will be looking to make PS2 owners upgrade all the time. The article said that the workstations will be based on PS2 tech, and that the workstations will be an order of magnitude faster for each gen. The Emotion Engine 2 is for the second gen Creative Workstation. The EE3 is for the third gen Creative Workstation *and* for the PS3.
So, no, your PS2 will not have to be replaced until ~2005 or so. Your Creative Workstation will, if you want to keep the thing current, have to be upgraded.
It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft makes of this. Sun's done stuff like this before, with Java and SPARC (I think), but I wasn't really expecting them to do this with Solaris. Microsoft could very well release their own source code. But what if MS didn't release *all* the source for NT? What if they just released the source for the Win32 subsystem? Or what if they released the source for their scrub OS Windows 98?
There's the possibility that Sun, by releasing Solaris, will make a lot of *Windows* developers happy.
So true! A tiny tuxedo is all most aerobic prokaryotes need to be cultured. Most humans I know, whether in a tuxedo or not, still don't know the difference between the dinner fork and the salad fork unless they've seen "Pretty Woman" half a dozen times.
I think it's not pointless to worry about if SGI is going under or not. The important thing is that we can get hardware on which to run free software. Hardware is tough because it can't be duplicated for free.
I've got an Amiga which runs both Amiga OS and Linux (Linux on 25MHz '040: anything you can do, I can do slower! Don't think I won't put the smack down with the 16MHz '030, either.:-) ). Even if I didn't have the support of all the Amiga developers out there still churning code, I'd still be good to go because I've got Linux and hardware to run it on.
The SGI owners are even better off. SGI has made some serious open-source contributions. What's to stop them from doing more? They could give Linux the power to take advantage of the SGI hardware like IRIX does.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not important if we lose the ability to choose IRIX if a suitable replacement is available, but it would be bad to lose a platform with such a particular strength (graphics). OTOH, if we *did* lose SGI, the machines already out there would still be supported.
Re:But what about the dinosoars?
on
High Tech Junk
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· Score: 1
Run LUNIX on the 128! Can't remember the URLs, though...
I used to work at a nuclear power plant. Part of the work that goes on there is constant radiation checking- there were vegetable gardens in the vicinity, and the cooling reservoir (also a popular fishing spot) were harvested regularly. The samples from the cooling reservoir came in the form of fish, which were Bass-O-Maticized before they were put into the sample counter.
Everybody, of course, actually called it the Bass-O-Matic.
There were stray cats at an apartment complex where I used to live. They were always running around on top of my car- the hood, the roof, the rear glass- everywhere.
That is, until I started setting off the car alarm remotely when I caught them doing it.:-)
"And if you think AmigaOS's age is a selling point, you missed the whole huge section on cruft."
Huh? Cruft is about the heaping on of features of dubious value, not age. Amiga OS development has been, , somewhat slow since Commodore submarined. Hardly an environment conducive to growing cruft.
NS even gave examples of old-but-not-crufty: the automobile interface. You could probably figure out how to drive a Model T Ford, once the steering wheel and accelerator and brake pedals had been pointed out.:-)
These glasses + Cadillac's night vision system
on
DVD in your Glasses
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· Score: 2
Imagine what you could do if you had a jack in your car for glasses like these. You could use them for the display of night vision images, or heads-up instruments (no short drivers having to deal with images that float in the wrong areas). Maybe even feedback from proximity sensors when you're backing up. Not to mention you could have warning lights unconstrained by the size allotted on the instrument cluster.
And your passengers could all watch movies on those long trips...
Try getting around it by substituting the IP address for the domain name part of the URL. You might also be able to go through a web relay- send it through Babelfish if you can read a foreign language. Or the Encheferizer or ValleyURL, if you can read a foreign language.
As with most things of this nature, the pictures are the important part.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not for bridges, but wind tunnel testing was used by the Wright Brothers pre-12/17/1903. True to the hacker spirit, they built their own!
I might argue that it's tragic that it's chilly in the room sometimes, but that's just life. There will always be problems. We can try to work towards a minimal subset of those problems.
That's the thing: we always have to keep working. That's the tragic part of technology. No matter how many problems we solve, there are always more to overcome. There's no rest, no universal point where it doesn't get any better.
Technology feeds on itself. New technology is used to combat old problems, but its use creates problems which will require more new technology to overcome. This prevents us from living in a utopia for the foreseeable future: we've too many problems to solve. I suppose it's okay to call that a tragedy, but for someone like me it's just job security.
The movie you're asking about is Runaway. Huh- another Michael Crichton movie! I like his stories.
It's interesting that you mention that movie, because a lot of the concepts in it are becoming feasible now. Runaway had floating surveillance cameras, "lock-ons" which would track your car and attempt to blow it up, and smart bullets that sought out particular heat signatures. Not to mention the nasty little spider robots.
These roboflies could certainly handle some of the tracking and surveillance.
And companies are looking into ways to disable automobiles from a distance for police departments. A robot deployed from a police car in front of the offender futzes up the electronic fuel injection or ignition. Sucks to be you!
Soooo... Commodore's gone, ESCOM's gone, one other I can't remember's gone, Gateway's given up. I don't care about it and I haven't for quite some time.
:-) )- Does this stop me from surfing the web? No- HTML is HTML and I don't find Shockwave adds all that much to the experience.
Why should I? Because I can't get support from those companies? Not a good enough reason. There's still plenty of life in the software and hardware development communities. All right, so Voyager and Ibrowse and Aweb aren't Netscape and IE (this isn't necessarily a bad thing!
Okay. Should I move on just because the hardware is so outdated? Nope- that's not a good reason either, as long as the hardware works! I find my 25MHz '040 A4000 up to the task of rendering most web pages. It's not fast enough to play MP3s well, but I already have a large CD collection. The latest games? There are enough for my PlayStation that I don't need a computer for them.
So, as long as my trusty A4000 (and 2 A3000s) are good enough to do what I need them to do, there is *no* reason for me to care what happens outside my box. When they die, though, I won't worry about replacing them with new Amigas- that's what Linux and cheap PCs are for. But until then, you can take my Amiga from me when you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I suspect that Slashdot knows when you start to post something, as it serves you the form. I'd guess that what happened is that you started your post after #6, but submitted it before they finished.
>A GPS and depth sensor might be good too,
:-)
Er, good luck getting the GPS signals down that deep. And sperm whales prolly navigate more by sonar at those lightless depths.
>so we can find out where these suckers hang out.
On the squids' tentacles, obviously!
Already being worked on. In the most recent issue of Popular Science (all right, so it's not SciAm, but it is a heck of a lot easier to read!) they had an article about eye implants. They had a blind guy and implanted an interface around his retina, and were able to drive recognizable signals through it. The first thing the guy saw was a letter. At first he thought it was a U, but then he resolved it into an H- which as it happened was the first letter of his name.
If you see the issue on the newsstands still, it's the one where there's a lady experiencing, er, the heartbreak of aluminum foil.
Naw, it was slashdotted even before it was posted. I was testing a new proxy server this morning, so I went to the Wired web page (huh, all the other boxes I play with around here already had Slashdot cached. Go figure!). I tried to click on the link to see the pictures, and the page was already unavailable. I tried searching the site, but no luck.
:-)
Didn't stop me from submitting it myself, though!
I doubt that Sony will be looking to make PS2 owners upgrade all the time. The article said that the workstations will be based on PS2 tech, and that the workstations will be an order of magnitude faster for each gen. The Emotion Engine 2 is for the second gen Creative Workstation. The EE3 is for the third gen Creative Workstation *and* for the PS3.
So, no, your PS2 will not have to be replaced until ~2005 or so. Your Creative Workstation will, if you want to keep the thing current, have to be upgraded.
It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft makes of this. Sun's done stuff like this before, with Java and SPARC (I think), but I wasn't really expecting them to do this with Solaris. Microsoft could very well release their own source code. But what if MS didn't release *all* the source for NT? What if they just released the source for the Win32 subsystem? Or what if they released the source for their scrub OS Windows 98?
There's the possibility that Sun, by releasing Solaris, will make a lot of *Windows* developers happy.
Ugh! The fact that you posted that truly Gauls me!
From the FAQ link on fullway.com:
Q: What is the potential market for the MP3 Enhancer?
A: Those who have playstation, even model of 9000.
Apparently, you *can* use it with the 9000-series PSX.
Heh heh... "I am PSX 9000 computer. I became operational at the PSX plant in Urbana, Illinois..."
So true! A tiny tuxedo is all most aerobic prokaryotes need to be cultured. Most humans I know, whether in a tuxedo or not, still don't know the difference between the dinner fork and the salad fork unless they've seen "Pretty Woman" half a dozen times.
I think it's not pointless to worry about if SGI is going under or not. The important thing is that we can get hardware on which to run free software. Hardware is tough because it can't be duplicated for free.
:-) ). Even if I didn't have the support of all the Amiga developers out there still churning code, I'd still be good to go because I've got Linux and hardware to run it on.
I've got an Amiga which runs both Amiga OS and Linux (Linux on 25MHz '040: anything you can do, I can do slower! Don't think I won't put the smack down with the 16MHz '030, either.
The SGI owners are even better off. SGI has made some serious open-source contributions. What's to stop them from doing more? They could give Linux the power to take advantage of the SGI hardware like IRIX does.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not important if we lose the ability to choose IRIX if a suitable replacement is available, but it would be bad to lose a platform with such a particular strength (graphics). OTOH, if we *did* lose SGI, the machines already out there would still be supported.
Run LUNIX on the 128! Can't remember the URLs, though...
Hawker-Sidley constructed the original Harrier (and the model before it as well), but the USMC's AV-8 version was built by McDonnell-Douglas.
Yes, Virginia, there really *is* a Bass-O-Matic!
I used to work at a nuclear power plant. Part of the work that goes on there is constant radiation checking- there were vegetable gardens in the vicinity, and the cooling reservoir (also a popular fishing spot) were harvested regularly. The samples from the cooling reservoir came in the form of fish, which were Bass-O-Maticized before they were put into the sample counter.
Everybody, of course, actually called it the Bass-O-Matic.
There were stray cats at an apartment complex where I used to live. They were always running around on top of my car- the hood, the roof, the rear glass- everywhere.
:-)
That is, until I started setting off the car alarm remotely when I caught them doing it.
First, it's April Fool's Day (in my timezone, anyway).
Second, isn't it just a little suspicious how similar the explanations looked at each site? Formulaic, almost.
"And if you think AmigaOS's age is a selling point, you missed the whole huge section on cruft."
:-)
Huh? Cruft is about the heaping on of features of dubious value, not age. Amiga OS development has been, , somewhat slow since Commodore submarined. Hardly an environment conducive to growing cruft.
NS even gave examples of old-but-not-crufty: the automobile interface. You could probably figure out how to drive a Model T Ford, once the steering wheel and accelerator and brake pedals had been pointed out.
Imagine what you could do if you had a jack in your car for glasses like these. You could use them for the display of night vision images, or heads-up instruments (no short drivers having to deal with images that float in the wrong areas). Maybe even feedback from proximity sensors when you're backing up. Not to mention you could have warning lights unconstrained by the size allotted on the instrument cluster.
And your passengers could all watch movies on those long trips...
Man, I missed Airwolf's premier because I was already hooked on Automan. I ended up liking Airwolf better, though.
:-)
And Airwolf could kick Blue Thunder's tail rotor *any* day.
Try getting around it by substituting the IP address for the domain name part of the URL. You might also be able to go through a web relay- send it through Babelfish if you can read a foreign language. Or the Encheferizer or ValleyURL, if you can read a foreign language.
:-)
As with most things of this nature, the pictures are the important part.
A dab of Didi-7 (purportedly) should take care of that spot!
I read somewhere that the only truly intuitive interface was the nipple. Everything else had to be learned. :-)