for about 5 months in junior highschool i carried a not only a towel, but a fully loaded satchle, among other things containing all 5 books in the series, a cricket corkie, a t-82 graphing calculator with "don't panic" airbrushed on the cover, and a star atlas.
A TI-82 graphing calculator? Why, you must be a young 'un -- it was nothing but TI-59s in my H2G2 days. Can we let you into the H2G2 club?
If the entreprenuer is struggling to the point where he cannot afford $75 for one month access to Delpion, he isn't going to make it anyway.
I'm not talking about VC money here. And I'm not talking about mommy-still-makes-the-bed. If you have an extra $900/year laying around, I have an address to give you.
Yes, www.uspto.gov allows patent searching. But Delphion has forward and backward citation hyperlinks, and has a "New!" database of pending legal actions. All for the low, low price of $75 month, but only $50/month during the introductory period!
Folks, this is for corporate legal offices, and does not bode well for the struggling entrepreneur or the academic researcher. The speed and versatility of Delphion is like giving the lumber corporations bulldozers and chainsaws while the natives still just have spears. Delphion raises the bar of information availability, but is priced out of the range of those who are most likely to invent the compelling inventions rather than the incremental turf-protecting legal instruments.
Why don't you assholes mind your own business? Not everyone shares your refined esthetics.
New Urbanism is currently outlawed in most suburban counties. So you are saying that
Everyone should be forced to live as you wish to live (in Conventional Suburban Development), and
To enforce that, the laws should be kept away behind an $800 door.
Does that about sum it up?
You busybodies have this elitist attitude, that if you can't afford a leafy country estate, you belong in a crackerbox apartment downtown.
Townhomes in Georgetown (DC), Old Town Alexandria (VA), and Bethesda (MD) cost 2x to 4x the price of detached homes in suburban Fairfax County, Virginia. I can't afford to live in a walkable area due to an artificial shortage created by war-era zoning laws.
The developers are just giving him what he wants.
In actuality, developers are chomping at the bit to develop something different. A special law in Fairfax County had to be written to accommodate this development near the Huntington Metrorail station.
The developer juggernaut has been cranking out tracts of cookie-cutter houses that many don't like, but have to live in because there's nothing else. New Urbanism seeks an alternative that provides for the pedestrian and bicycle. A major way New Urbanists advance their agenda is by promoting "smart codes" to replace existing but antiquated war-era developer codes. Without access to existing codes, there would be no way to loosen ourselves from the death-grip of ugly suburban development.
UCAV is old news -- a 40-year-old dream finally being realized. Now Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) are a more recent and much more interesting dream that is also being realized.
Satellite radio is eagerly awaited by at least one exurb-to-exurb commuter that regularly posts to dc.driving. He commutes between Dahlgren and Fredricksburg -- both are exurbs about 50 miles from DC, but are only about 30 miles apart from each other. He looks forward to not only selection, but being able to listen to a single station during the entire trip.
They had hippies in 1949, when Pacifica was founded?
I personally find that Pacifica is in line with the social teachings of the Catholic Church, except, unfortunately, on the issue of abortion. In particular, Pacifica reflects the anti-government anti-corporate anti-globalism attitude shared by many Slashdotters. The slogan for their flagship program Democracy Now! is "the exception to the rulers."
Washington, DC Metrorail stations have video cameras. And we all know of red light cameras, but some locations now have red light full-motion video cameras. Neither are officially tied in to the DEA yet, though (AFAIK).
The idea that one must lose privacy when one steps outside one's home is absurd. (Or even in one's home if one is renting, or even in the case of owning the home, there is still infrared sensing).
Studying the ancient formation of computers is unfortunately the typical approach of studying the "history of computing". It's about as fun and informative as studying that butterfly in China that causes the hurricane in Charleston. Without studying all the intermediate steps, and without then taking a meta step backwards, it's meaningless facts to be regurgitated on an exam with no application to real life, no generalized understanding of society, humanity, and technology, and no imparting of the ability to predict the future (one of the popular reasons given to study history).
In my opinion, what is needed in this history class, as with all history classes, is to begin with a complete graphical timeline, and then to selectively "drill down" to key inflection points, and relate those points as effects of what came before and causes of what comes later.
The rapid pace of computer technology and knowledge means that a large portion of the progress came from the youth, and so to study the "culture of computing" means to study the youth of computing, e.g. Steve Jobs rebelling at Atari, the Atari 800 and Commodore 64 training the computer programmers of the 1990s, and of course the creation of Linux. Each generation, of course, also had its "old guard", and the interplay between the old and new guards are interesting. Inventions by the "old guard" include the transistor, microprocessor, and UNIX/C. These were quickly adopted by the youth and rapidly advanced, until these youth grew up and became their own "old guard", etc.
From analyzing a few of these scenarios, it should be possible to abstract (meta) out some "patterns" (and I am using this word in the "patterns of organizations of people" sense). From these patterns, it would be an interesting exercise to apply them to the present day in order to predict the future -- come up with some different scenarios. Archive the predictions, then rate yourself in a few years in the same sort of class, and refine the process. This refining of the process represents another meta step outward.
Then you'll be at CMM-3. Right now the class sounds like CMM-0 -- perhaps some good raw material, but not very effective.
I almost didn't buy a new TV in 1985 because I was going to wait for HDTV which was "just around the corner." 16 years later we're still waiting, and the holdup has been settling on a terrestial broadcast standard. Who cares about terrestial broadcast? If someone is willing to spend thousands of dollars on equipment just to get a more defined picture, are they really going to care about free programming?
No, of course not. The priority should have been LaserDisc (or variant, such as DVD) and (when it took off in the mid-90's) Internet delivery of programming. The delay in HDTV has saddled us with low-res DVDs instead of HDTV DVDs.
I "live" in a Windows environment, on my laptop, by choice. I also don't have a Linux partition since hard drive space is precious on a laptop. But I do a lot of Linux development, usually by telnetting into a Linux box. LINE would allow me to do Linux development when I'm not hooked up to the Internet or otherwise don't have access to a Linux box.
What Hollywood is actually doing, according to the article, is a bit more than the Slashdot headline portrays:
According to the source, Warner has balked at the plan and is reportedly undertaking legal research to see if Idealab can even launch this effort.
This Idealab concept is a perefectly valid direction for the Internet, a somewhat creative idea (not completely original, but I doubt most people of heard of the earlier competitors), and a legitimate business for legitimate purposes. And Hollywood is trying to stop it with lawyers.
At first, I thought that perhaps (ironically) Microsoft's own Windows 95 Plus Pack! would have been prior art (the patent filing date is May 8, 1998. But then I read the patent. The only thing remotely novel I see is that a theme can be hard-coded rather than data-driven. In that case, I would think that Sun's Java JDK, with its Pluggable Look And Feel (PLAF) would suffice as prior art.
He's right -- the last time the videogame industry blindly tried to follow the movie industry was with Dragon's Lair. That (along with Warner mismanagement of Atari, the then main supplier of videogames) killed videogames until Nintendo resurrected it with Zelda.
Games are about real-time object/constraint puzzles visualized in 2-D or 3-D plus time. Graphics and sound are the candy to make it go down easier. Too much sugar makes a good buzz (and good profit for the dealer), but also an upset stomach and long-term aversion.
Management has to be completely on board. Management often evaluates individual rather than team performance, and monthly rather than decade-long performance. Currently, potential mentors often get in trouble for mentoring.
With job changes about every year or two, it becomes more difficult for employers to measure and reward the effectiveness of mentoring (unless some royalty or residual renumeration were set up).
Finally, three women can't make a baby in three months. Saying "mentoring programming" is like saying "mentoring algebra". It takes time and practice on the part of the student to grok. Yes, it goes several times faster with a mentor, but there is an "aha!" that takes a while to acquire.
Without addressing these obstacles, the suggestion is merely just a start of an idea (and one that frequently comes up anyway in researched software engineering "process" and "culture" literature).
This idiocy was exactly what I was referring to in my recent Slasdot comment Algorithms More Important. Processor cycle rate wars are on the same par as Slashdot "first posts" -- pointless childish battles fought independently of the real battles, real work, real discourse, and real progress.
Having worked professionally in real-time visualization, signal processing, and compression for over ten years, I stopped using assembler about 1995, except for porting and maintaining my older code. The speedup possible with changes in algorithm (10x to 200x) is much greater than the speedup possible with assembler (2x to 4x). Once one section or piece of software is sped up by 10x to 200x, the economics dictate that you speed up another section or piece of software by 10x to 200x rather than speeding up the first piece by another 2x to 4x. Each type of speedup -- algorithm improvement or conversion to assembly -- takes about the same amount of time. The worst part these days is that the optimization rules change drastically every year -- MMX, SSE, SSE2, P-IV, IA-64 -- making a commercial investment in assembly code a high expense for short-lived results.
I'm sure assembler still makes sense for mass-distributed desktop video and mega-production videogames, but the uses for it are getting more limited. A good algorithm, data alignment strategy, caching strategy, and pre-calculation strategy can be expressed well enough in C/C++.
And as a side note, even for my modern rare uses of assembly I try to use the in-line assembler since assemblers are no longer the staple tool that every developer has installed.
And as another side note, I laugh at people who try to get their processor faster by another 10%, 50%, or 100%. If these people would learn to optimize code, they could speed up by 20,000%.
Slashdot Mirror
A TI-82 graphing calculator? Why, you must be a young 'un -- it was nothing but TI-59s in my H2G2 days. Can we let you into the H2G2 club?
I'm not talking about VC money here. And I'm not talking about mommy-still-makes-the-bed. If you have an extra $900/year laying around, I have an address to give you.
Folks, this is for corporate legal offices, and does not bode well for the struggling entrepreneur or the academic researcher. The speed and versatility of Delphion is like giving the lumber corporations bulldozers and chainsaws while the natives still just have spears. Delphion raises the bar of information availability, but is priced out of the range of those who are most likely to invent the compelling inventions rather than the incremental turf-protecting legal instruments.
New Urbanism is currently outlawed in most suburban counties. So you are saying that
- Everyone should be forced to live as you wish to live (in Conventional Suburban Development), and
- To enforce that, the laws should be kept away behind an $800 door.
Does that about sum it up?You busybodies have this elitist attitude, that if you can't afford a leafy country estate, you belong in a crackerbox apartment downtown.
Townhomes in Georgetown (DC), Old Town Alexandria (VA), and Bethesda (MD) cost 2x to 4x the price of detached homes in suburban Fairfax County, Virginia. I can't afford to live in a walkable area due to an artificial shortage created by war-era zoning laws.
The developers are just giving him what he wants.
In actuality, developers are chomping at the bit to develop something different. A special law in Fairfax County had to be written to accommodate this development near the Huntington Metrorail station.
The developer juggernaut has been cranking out tracts of cookie-cutter houses that many don't like, but have to live in because there's nothing else. New Urbanism seeks an alternative that provides for the pedestrian and bicycle. A major way New Urbanists advance their agenda is by promoting "smart codes" to replace existing but antiquated war-era developer codes. Without access to existing codes, there would be no way to loosen ourselves from the death-grip of ugly suburban development.
UCAV is old news -- a 40-year-old dream finally being realized. Now Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) are a more recent and much more interesting dream that is also being realized.
Satellite radio is eagerly awaited by at least one exurb-to-exurb commuter that regularly posts to dc.driving. He commutes between Dahlgren and Fredricksburg -- both are exurbs about 50 miles from DC, but are only about 30 miles apart from each other. He looks forward to not only selection, but being able to listen to a single station during the entire trip.
They had hippies in 1949, when Pacifica was founded?
I personally find that Pacifica is in line with the social teachings of the Catholic Church, except, unfortunately, on the issue of abortion. In particular, Pacifica reflects the anti-government anti-corporate anti-globalism attitude shared by many Slashdotters. The slogan for their flagship program Democracy Now! is "the exception to the rulers."
You must not live in an area that has a Pacifica station, which is better than NPR. But even Pacifica is being infiltrated now.
The idea that one must lose privacy when one steps outside one's home is absurd. (Or even in one's home if one is renting, or even in the case of owning the home, there is still infrared sensing).
So I guess that's negative nine times the weight of current batteries.
Slashdot noted the press release in this Slashdot story. I wouldn't be surprised if CNN found out about the story from Slashdot.
In my opinion, what is needed in this history class, as with all history classes, is to begin with a complete graphical timeline, and then to selectively "drill down" to key inflection points, and relate those points as effects of what came before and causes of what comes later.
The rapid pace of computer technology and knowledge means that a large portion of the progress came from the youth, and so to study the "culture of computing" means to study the youth of computing, e.g. Steve Jobs rebelling at Atari, the Atari 800 and Commodore 64 training the computer programmers of the 1990s, and of course the creation of Linux. Each generation, of course, also had its "old guard", and the interplay between the old and new guards are interesting. Inventions by the "old guard" include the transistor, microprocessor, and UNIX/C. These were quickly adopted by the youth and rapidly advanced, until these youth grew up and became their own "old guard", etc.
From analyzing a few of these scenarios, it should be possible to abstract (meta) out some "patterns" (and I am using this word in the "patterns of organizations of people" sense). From these patterns, it would be an interesting exercise to apply them to the present day in order to predict the future -- come up with some different scenarios. Archive the predictions, then rate yourself in a few years in the same sort of class, and refine the process. This refining of the process represents another meta step outward.
Then you'll be at CMM-3. Right now the class sounds like CMM-0 -- perhaps some good raw material, but not very effective.
I guess the Illuminati now has a two-year window in which to announce the New World Order and reveal the anti-Christ.
I have no sympathy for anyone who would sue a UseNet provider. The responsibility lies almost entirely with the individual poster.
Actually, most DVD's are in the high-definition catagory
Yes, DVDs are higher-res than NTSC, but not as high as HDTV.
No, of course not. The priority should have been LaserDisc (or variant, such as DVD) and (when it took off in the mid-90's) Internet delivery of programming. The delay in HDTV has saddled us with low-res DVDs instead of HDTV DVDs.
HDTV has been fumbled for 20+ years.
I "live" in a Windows environment, on my laptop, by choice. I also don't have a Linux partition since hard drive space is precious on a laptop. But I do a lot of Linux development, usually by telnetting into a Linux box. LINE would allow me to do Linux development when I'm not hooked up to the Internet or otherwise don't have access to a Linux box.
At first, I thought that perhaps (ironically) Microsoft's own Windows 95 Plus Pack! would have been prior art (the patent filing date is May 8, 1998. But then I read the patent. The only thing remotely novel I see is that a theme can be hard-coded rather than data-driven. In that case, I would think that Sun's Java JDK, with its Pluggable Look And Feel (PLAF) would suffice as prior art.
Games are about real-time object/constraint puzzles visualized in 2-D or 3-D plus time. Graphics and sound are the candy to make it go down easier. Too much sugar makes a good buzz (and good profit for the dealer), but also an upset stomach and long-term aversion.
- Management has to be completely on board. Management often evaluates individual rather than team performance, and monthly rather than decade-long performance. Currently, potential mentors often get in trouble for mentoring.
- With job changes about every year or two, it becomes more difficult for employers to measure and reward the effectiveness of mentoring (unless some royalty or residual renumeration were set up).
- Finally, three women can't make a baby in three months. Saying "mentoring programming" is like saying "mentoring algebra". It takes time and practice on the part of the student to grok. Yes, it goes several times faster with a mentor, but there is an "aha!" that takes a while to acquire.
Without addressing these obstacles, the suggestion is merely just a start of an idea (and one that frequently comes up anyway in researched software engineering "process" and "culture" literature).This idiocy was exactly what I was referring to in my recent Slasdot comment Algorithms More Important. Processor cycle rate wars are on the same par as Slashdot "first posts" -- pointless childish battles fought independently of the real battles, real work, real discourse, and real progress.
I'm sure assembler still makes sense for mass-distributed desktop video and mega-production videogames, but the uses for it are getting more limited. A good algorithm, data alignment strategy, caching strategy, and pre-calculation strategy can be expressed well enough in C/C++.
And as a side note, even for my modern rare uses of assembly I try to use the in-line assembler since assemblers are no longer the staple tool that every developer has installed.
And as another side note, I laugh at people who try to get their processor faster by another 10%, 50%, or 100%. If these people would learn to optimize code, they could speed up by 20,000%.
Haven't tires been doing this for 20 years?