Ah, now Elysium seems to be showing some promise judging by the trailers.
So far the only "visual media" science fiction "products" in this Millenium where I have said "wow, that was great, I want to watch that again" after watching them (and actually watched them 2-3 times) were "Firefly" and "Planetes".
If their goal was a "fresh universe" and a "brand new story line", why the hell did they make it a "Star Trek" movie at all? Why not do something REALLY fresh and REALLY new?
But it seems "really new" things are moving from Hollywood to TV, too. And perhaps to the Internet after that.
My first suggestion: Every developer should be forced to spend at least one day doing front-line support, so that they will begin to have some idea of what is actually broken.
I do development of software that is used mostly only inside our own company, and we have something that I first was somewhat sceptical about, but what turned out to be quite a good approach to keep "users in check" AND give developers an idea what can be improved:
Each branch office can request a "developer-on-site" for a day or two each year that actually works with the people that use the programs he wrote. It basically reduced the "unthoughtful feature request filtering through multiple management layers" and repetitive "something is broken/working funny" by about 90%, and it I always come back with some *mayor* ideas for improvements to more closely fit the software to the workflow or vice versa.
For example "date entry". Just having watched people crane their backs to the calendar at the wall to see what date last Thursday was, or needing multiple clicks to use the calendar popup, resulted in a improvement that took ~5 minutes to code and was hailed as the "best improvement in the new version": Being able to enter positive / negative numbers in date fields to "enter X days in the past / future".
Of course that is possible in our organization, where we have ~3000 employees and 3 coders. I don't know how well it would scale up.
Exactly. If "the schema" would fall under AGPL, then "the data" they put in the DB would probably also fall under the AGPL.
In the same vein, any novel written in a GLP text editor would have to be GPL, and any song recorded with a GPL recording software would have to be GPL. There still is a difference between "modifying the software" and "putting data into the software the way you are supposed to"
Of course, then what's even the point of "landing" on something that has almost no gravity?
I would describe that more as some sort of "docking" instead of "landing".
You could fly your vessel up to 1-2 meters distance and extend a sampling arm, or do you EV mission from there without even touching the asteroid with your spacecraft. It feels a little lie "Oh, noes! We can't land on objects where it makes absolutely no sense to try to land on anyway!"
The next thing that would even make "auto"stereoscopy without glasses not work for my (and a lot of other people I guess) living room movie/tv experience is that I don't "sit upright", (and thus have a left/right eye). I lie on the couch 80% of the time, and therefore have a upper/lower eye.
That's think that one of the reasons that "2D" art (Painting, Photography, Movies) has millenniums of fine examples, and "3D" (Sculptures, Live Artists) art also has millenniums of fine examples is that people are always free to look at them in different ways. You can walk around a Sculpture, you can focus on any part of a 2D image you like, etc.... but with stereoscopy you have to look in the exact way the director wanted you to look, or the effect doesn't work.
Yes, you can. "waive" does not mean that you give a right up it up forever, just that you decide not to exercise it at a specific moment under specific circumstances.
You have the right of "freedom to movement". But you don't HAVE to move all the time. You have to right to keep silent, but you don't HAVE to keep silent.
Definetely. The supply of lots of deep see trash, combined with the demand to kill all humans, will make the slowly evolving deep see monsters use it to build weapons of mass destruction to get rid of us.;-p
Lines on top at the moment in my case in Firefox 12, set up to look as much as Firefox 4 as possible: - OS title bar in one line - Menu bar in one line - Button / URL field / Search field in one line
At the bottom: - Status Bar (I needed an extension to get THAT one back)
Since the 16:9 movement (allthough I still managed to get a big 16:10 for my Main PC) by the monitor manufactures, coupled with my needs of keeping a few dozen tabs open quite often I have always installed a vertical tab bar extension (Tree Style Tab at the moment) to have the tabs on the side. And in almost every update I had to search for a NEW one that works. Now I can have dozens of tabs open (even on my small Asus netbook), and still have a vertical web page real estate like in the good old days of 4:3 computer monitors.
Moving into THAT direction with the main Firefox branch might have gotten them something that other browsers don't have and people want. It's ridiculous that I now basically have 7 of my 10 extensions installed just to keep the look and feel of the Firefox that I once loved, and that I want to keep.
In the comparison with ls and cat, a unified search/url input in the same GUI element you would basically have to type something like "http://xxxxx" to go to an url ans something like "search://xxxxx" to do a search, wo work like the CLI. There is a huge difference between "ls 30_gig_file" or "cat 30_gig_file" or even "rm 30_gig_file". You have to tell the software somehow to do WHAT action with WHICH object when you want to be sure about the result.
So far in the browser there where two fields for the two different actions ( directly navigate somewhere / search for something. ) The problem is when the software tries to "guess" what you want to do. Either the guessing algorithm is dumb, and annoys the user, or it is really sophisticated, in which case it took probably away a huge amount of developer manpower to implement in a way that pleases both the "I want to shop for something vague" vague user and the "Shit, the system is down, we are losing $100,000 a minute, and this shitty browser is trying to do a search, which he can't do since the connection to the internet is down, and locks up while waiting for the time-out, instead of just going to the web fronted for the NAS!!".
As a person doing ~20 years of admin, develpment and tech support I say *when* something goes pear-shaped in your Windows session *at that moment* the only thing that can be done to quickly fix it *at that moment* is a reboot. (Or, in case of a terminal server, often only a re-login is sufficient)
Only when you have pinpointed 2-3 recurring instances of a specific thing going reproducibly wrong under specific circumstances does an admin or help-desk even have the chance of figuring something out the technical root cause. Even now, where I am in the "help-desk heaven" situation of doing in-house second level support support where I can connect to every user session pull up event-logs, see user processes, see all client and server log files of all applications, etc... (so can get a much clearer picture of "what is going on" than a person who only can talk to the user on the phone) when a user calls with a "Windows Mystery"* the decision has to be made by the user if he needs to work with his Windows session again in 5-15 minutes (reboot/relogin) or if he has the time to "leave his windows session open for us to investigate possible root causes", which takes about at least 2-3 hours most of the time.
Of course first level support is mostly about making the problem go away for now, not about fixing the root cause. To fix the root cause you will definitely need to reach some higher level in support, best with a reproducible test case of the problem happening.
*Our current "Windows Mystery" at work: sometimes (1-2 times a week with ~1500 users working each day) the "Cursor up" key in Outlook stops working. Restarting Outlook doesn't fix it, re-login does.
On the other hand, for a porn and/or downloadable weapon site I would be VERY suspicious if they even *ask* for my postal mail address. Or to put it another way: Any "physical" mail order still definitely has the unencrypted back-door of an delivery person that sees your parcel and brings it to your address. And these days the sender / recipient is also stored in possible multiple parcel tracking system. So it is 100% impossible to have physical deliveries from one party to another "not known by others", unless yo go pick it up yourself, in which case it also makes no sense to even input your address.
The way I read it the "long, thing crystals" go around in circles so they somewhat resemble an analogue watch, so you could possibly use them to build timepieces for the super-rich that don't know on what else to spend their money on.
I think I will register "Smog" as the next IT buzzword.
It's the next big thing, so believably cool that not even I know what it is. But whenever something goes wrong, from now on I will always advise that we can correct the problem by transferring the process into the Smog.
One other comparison, directly to the "prime energy fountain" in our Solar System.
The sun puts out 3.8×10^26 J per second. The sun emits ~1.367 kW per square meter. So if you want to accelerate 40 tons to 0.1c ( where you need the ~1.316 × 10^14 kWh ) over, let's say, the course of one year ( ~ 8 765 hours ), you would need ~1.5 * 10^10 kW, which would be the energy output of 11 549 431 square kilometres of the sun's surface.
Basically it all boils down to "Cheap Energy" Why do we have cars, trains, planes today that almost anyone can afford to use? Because ~150 years ago someone found out "hey, I can get the same energy that I would have to pay $100 to labourers, horse merchants, mill builders, etc.... for $0.10 by just using that black goo that we just found in abundance over there". That black goo is basically the way we now use up the solar energy that hit the earth over countless millennia.
When you look here how the "human energy consumption" multiplied in the last 200 years, I don't see why it couldn't exapand again to 20-30 or even hundreds times more IF a way is discovered to use a substantial amount of the suns "waste energy" directly.
Basically that is the "big if" in the question on whether we will go to other planets or even stars. 200years ago anyone suggesting that you do a "daily commute" of 100km would have been named a madman. But these days it's quite common, only due to cheap energy.
First the "silly point" to confuse people: "Since X only went only to version 11, I don't see how they could make a DirectX12 without making X12 first.";-)
Then the second more serious point:
I still remember the "Sound-card upgrade cycle" back in the 1990s, where gamers were also were after the newest developments there to get a better gaming experience. But for the last decade or so there were no basically no "new sound features" that were added to improve the sound, since sound is "good enough" for basically everything that needs sound.
At some time graphics cards will reach (or perhaps are reaching now) the point where that is true for graphics also.
Well, after reading all the "just blacklisting the IP addresses" I just want to point that the "other guys" are running the network he is connected to. They *know* that a box is on the network. If it doesn't reply to their security audit, they might "assume" it's compromised and blacklist it right back.
Slashdot Mirror
On the "Metro" thing the first thing that came to mind right now was the NetApp MetroCluster we just installed at work.
Now I find there is an IBM storage technology called MetroCluster and a NetApp storage technology called MetroCluster
I wonder how that will pan out.
... the whole process doesn't start with the Jab-Bot asking "Please state the nature of the medical emergency" in a snarky voice.
Ah, now Elysium seems to be showing some promise judging by the trailers.
So far the only "visual media" science fiction "products" in this Millenium where I have said "wow, that was great, I want to watch that again" after watching them (and actually watched them 2-3 times) were "Firefly" and "Planetes".
If their goal was a "fresh universe" and a "brand new story line", why the hell did they make it a "Star Trek" movie at all? Why not do something REALLY fresh and REALLY new?
But it seems "really new" things are moving from Hollywood to TV, too. And perhaps to the Internet after that.
Hey, they should just offload it to the content providers then.
If they put at "this-is-porn" directive in their robots.txt they have to block it, otherwise not.
My first suggestion: Every developer should be forced to spend at least one day doing front-line support, so that they will begin to have some idea of what is actually broken.
I do development of software that is used mostly only inside our own company, and we have something that I first was somewhat sceptical about, but what turned out to be quite a good approach to keep "users in check" AND give developers an idea what can be improved:
Each branch office can request a "developer-on-site" for a day or two each year that actually works with the people that use the programs he wrote. It basically reduced the "unthoughtful feature request filtering through multiple management layers" and repetitive "something is broken/working funny" by about 90%, and it I always come back with some *mayor* ideas for improvements to more closely fit the software to the workflow or vice versa.
For example "date entry". Just having watched people crane their backs to the calendar at the wall to see what date last Thursday was, or needing multiple clicks to use the calendar popup, resulted in a improvement that took ~5 minutes to code and was hailed as the "best improvement in the new version": Being able to enter positive / negative numbers in date fields to "enter X days in the past / future".
Of course that is possible in our organization, where we have ~3000 employees and 3 coders. I don't know how well it would scale up.
Exactly. If "the schema" would fall under AGPL, then "the data" they put in the DB would probably also fall under the AGPL.
In the same vein, any novel written in a GLP text editor would have to be GPL, and any song recorded with a GPL recording software would have to be GPL. There still is a difference between "modifying the software" and "putting data into the software the way you are supposed to"
Of course, then what's even the point of "landing" on something that has almost no gravity?
I would describe that more as some sort of "docking" instead of "landing".
You could fly your vessel up to 1-2 meters distance and extend a sampling arm, or do you EV mission from there without even touching the asteroid with your spacecraft. It feels a little lie "Oh, noes! We can't land on objects where it makes absolutely no sense to try to land on anyway!"
The next thing that would even make "auto"stereoscopy without glasses not work for my (and a lot of other people I guess) living room movie/tv experience is that I don't "sit upright", (and thus have a left/right eye). I lie on the couch 80% of the time, and therefore have a upper/lower eye.
That's think that one of the reasons that "2D" art (Painting, Photography, Movies) has millenniums of fine examples, and "3D" (Sculptures, Live Artists) art also has millenniums of fine examples is that people are always free to look at them in different ways. You can walk around a Sculpture, you can focus on any part of a 2D image you like, etc.... but with stereoscopy you have to look in the exact way the director wanted you to look, or the effect doesn't work.
Yeah. The name of choice for any icy, planet-y thing should of course have been Hoth.
Yes, you can. "waive" does not mean that you give a right up it up forever, just that you decide not to exercise it at a specific moment under specific circumstances.
You have the right of "freedom to movement". But you don't HAVE to move all the time. You have to right to keep silent, but you don't HAVE to keep silent.
I somewhat was more reminded of "Wayland is where Emperor Palpatine's secret toy-box was. All kinds of nasty dark side things on Wayland."
Definetely. The supply of lots of deep see trash, combined with the demand to kill all humans, will make the slowly evolving deep see monsters use it to build weapons of mass destruction to get rid of us. ;-p
Lines on top at the moment in my case in Firefox 12, set up to look as much as Firefox 4 as possible:
- OS title bar in one line
- Menu bar in one line
- Button / URL field / Search field in one line
At the bottom:
- Status Bar (I needed an extension to get THAT one back)
Since the 16:9 movement (allthough I still managed to get a big 16:10 for my Main PC) by the monitor manufactures, coupled with my needs of keeping a few dozen tabs open quite often I have always installed a vertical tab bar extension (Tree Style Tab at the moment) to have the tabs on the side. And in almost every update I had to search for a NEW one that works. Now I can have dozens of tabs open (even on my small Asus netbook), and still have a vertical web page real estate like in the good old days of 4:3 computer monitors.
Moving into THAT direction with the main Firefox branch might have gotten them something that other browsers don't have and people want. It's ridiculous that I now basically have 7 of my 10 extensions installed just to keep the look and feel of the Firefox that I once loved, and that I want to keep.
In the comparison with ls and cat, a unified search/url input in the same GUI element you would basically have to type something like "http://xxxxx" to go to an url ans something like "search://xxxxx" to do a search, wo work like the CLI. There is a huge difference between "ls 30_gig_file" or "cat 30_gig_file" or even "rm 30_gig_file". You have to tell the software somehow to do WHAT action with WHICH object when you want to be sure about the result.
So far in the browser there where two fields for the two different actions ( directly navigate somewhere / search for something. ) The problem is when the software tries to "guess" what you want to do. Either the guessing algorithm is dumb, and annoys the user, or it is really sophisticated, in which case it took probably away a huge amount of developer manpower to implement in a way that pleases both the "I want to shop for something vague" vague user and the "Shit, the system is down, we are losing $100,000 a minute, and this shitty browser is trying to do a search, which he can't do since the connection to the internet is down, and locks up while waiting for the time-out, instead of just going to the web fronted for the NAS!!".
As a person doing ~20 years of admin, develpment and tech support I say *when* something goes pear-shaped in your Windows session *at that moment* the only thing that can be done to quickly fix it *at that moment* is a reboot. (Or, in case of a terminal server, often only a re-login is sufficient)
Only when you have pinpointed 2-3 recurring instances of a specific thing going reproducibly wrong under specific circumstances does an admin or help-desk even have the chance of figuring something out the technical root cause. Even now, where I am in the "help-desk heaven" situation of doing in-house second level support support where I can connect to every user session pull up event-logs, see user processes, see all client and server log files of all applications, etc... (so can get a much clearer picture of "what is going on" than a person who only can talk to the user on the phone) when a user calls with a "Windows Mystery"* the decision has to be made by the user if he needs to work with his Windows session again in 5-15 minutes (reboot/relogin) or if he has the time to "leave his windows session open for us to investigate possible root causes", which takes about at least 2-3 hours most of the time.
Of course first level support is mostly about making the problem go away for now, not about fixing the root cause. To fix the root cause you will definitely need to reach some higher level in support, best with a reproducible test case of the problem happening.
*Our current "Windows Mystery" at work: sometimes (1-2 times a week with ~1500 users working each day) the "Cursor up" key in Outlook stops working. Restarting Outlook doesn't fix it, re-login does.
Err.... how about km/ms or seconds per kilometer :)
A car and/or a speed limit where you can go a few kilometres per millisecond? Shut up and take my money. ;-)
On the other hand, for a porn and/or downloadable weapon site I would be VERY suspicious if they even *ask* for my postal mail address. Or to put it another way: Any "physical" mail order still definitely has the unencrypted back-door of an delivery person that sees your parcel and brings it to your address. And these days the sender / recipient is also stored in possible multiple parcel tracking system. So it is 100% impossible to have physical deliveries from one party to another "not known by others", unless yo go pick it up yourself, in which case it also makes no sense to even input your address.
Other question: Hoe many electricians have become President versus plumbers. ;-)
( At least in countries that still have upward mobility, for hard-working folks, unlike the US)
The way I read it the "long, thing crystals" go around in circles so they somewhat resemble an analogue watch, so you could possibly use them to build timepieces for the super-rich that don't know on what else to spend their money on.
I think I will register "Smog" as the next IT buzzword.
It's the next big thing, so believably cool that not even I know what it is. But whenever something goes wrong, from now on I will always advise that we can correct the problem by transferring the process into the Smog.
One other comparison, directly to the "prime energy fountain" in our Solar System.
The sun puts out 3.8×10^26 J per second. The sun emits ~1.367 kW per square meter. So if you want to accelerate 40 tons to 0.1c ( where you need the ~1.316 × 10^14 kWh ) over, let's say, the course of one year ( ~ 8 765 hours ), you would need ~1.5 * 10^10 kW, which would be the energy output of 11 549 431 square kilometres of the sun's surface.
Basically it all boils down to "Cheap Energy" Why do we have cars, trains, planes today that almost anyone can afford to use? Because ~150 years ago someone found out "hey, I can get the same energy that I would have to pay $100 to labourers, horse merchants, mill builders, etc.... for $0.10 by just using that black goo that we just found in abundance over there". That black goo is basically the way we now use up the solar energy that hit the earth over countless millennia.
When you look here how the "human energy consumption" multiplied in the last 200 years, I don't see why it couldn't exapand again to 20-30 or even hundreds times more IF a way is discovered to use a substantial amount of the suns "waste energy" directly.
Basically that is the "big if" in the question on whether we will go to other planets or even stars. 200years ago anyone suggesting that you do a "daily commute" of 100km would have been named a madman. But these days it's quite common, only due to cheap energy.
That's never gonna win against the implementation of COBOL* that I am about to release shortly.
*CuteObjectBasedOnlineLolcode
First the "silly point" to confuse people: ;-)
"Since X only went only to version 11, I don't see how they could make a DirectX12 without making X12 first."
Then the second more serious point:
I still remember the "Sound-card upgrade cycle" back in the 1990s, where gamers were also were after the newest developments there to get a better gaming experience. But for the last decade or so there were no basically no "new sound features" that were added to improve the sound, since sound is "good enough" for basically everything that needs sound.
At some time graphics cards will reach (or perhaps are reaching now) the point where that is true for graphics also.
Well, after reading all the "just blacklisting the IP addresses" I just want to point that the "other guys" are running the network he is connected to. They *know* that a box is on the network. If it doesn't reply to their security audit, they might "assume" it's compromised and blacklist it right back.