Except that these neodymium magnets are very brittle, and after having flung yourself at a passing bus and having been stuck on, you'd have lots of magnets scraps left over, either falling off and getting run over by the bus' wheels, or being run over by a passing truck.
Put it on end and you have a vertical windtunnel, a great "ride". It's a little difficult to learn to stay stable, but its a lot of fun. Skydivers use vertical windtunnels a lot to train their maneuvers. But also people who don't wanna jump out of an airplane but do wanna know what it feels like to float on air, the vertical windtunnel is the answer.
This sucks... I don't want to compile the damn thing myself if I want to use Xft antialiased fonts. Are there any builds that have this enabled by default available for download?
I think I'll just wait until it is available as a Debian package, complete with Xft. The Debian unstable mozilla package does everything I want it to, including xft fonts.
Planetquake is slashdotted. Bittorrent is maxing out my ADSL line. I've capped upload at 8KB/sec (max is about 11) to make sure ACK packets can go out. Download is also maxing out on my ADSL connection (80 KB/sec).
Haskell is definately the worst language I have ever come accross. Maybe its the way its being shoved down our throats at my uni, but for me it just sucks (pretty much all the students here hate it, the teachers love it, which is why it is taught). Its way too hard to program in, hard to read code, and debugging it sucks, cause of the lame way too generic error messages. Its strongly typed such that it seems excessively paranoid. Most compilation errors occur because of its typing requirements.
Bah! I hate it so much.
Re:Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
I think a lot of research has already been done in this direction (stupid system that becomes clever through learning), but was either fruitless or too difficult. People have gone on to things that do provide results and have useful applications in the real world (such as tinkering/soldering with robots). Granted, the Aibo isn't an especially useful product, but things like automated lawnmowers and automated vacuum cleaners are definately offspring of laboratory tinkering.
I haven't read the long and dense article, but this sounds like managerspeak, PHB-talk. The concepts described are all very high level, requiring a whole plethora of yet unwritten code to roll back changes in a large system. This will require a lot of work, including rebuilding a lot of those large systems from the ground up.
I don't think anybody (any company) is willing to undertake such an enterprise, having to re-architect/redesign whole systems from ground up. Systems that work these days, but aren't 100% reliable.
Will it be worth it? For those systems to have a smaller boot up time after failure? I don't think so, but ymmv.
Yep, XS4ALL, a techie friendly ISP here in the Netherlands (a major ISP, too, btw) is a IPv6 brokering service. They assign you some block of IP addresses, you do some configging, install radvd and suddenly your whole internal network can talk IPv6. I've set it up here at home such that clients which are NAT'd in IPv4 space have their own IPv6 address which gets assigned to them dynamically. Its not that hard.
Anyways, its all nice but there's not much to do with it. There are very few IPv6 enabled sites on the net. Has kind of the 'old days of the net' feel to it. Just a few pages here and there. A small directory service like when Yahoo! started off. Its true, we need a killer app, something very useful which IPv6 offers that IPv4/NAT doesn't.
Surfnet, the education backbone here in the Netherlands (linking pretty much all universities and gov't research facilities), has been very busy making sure all their routers can speak IPv6. They are basically ready to do IPv6. I have no idea when they're actually rolling it out. I just see all their change tickets.
What I mean to say is, this doesn't require much downtime (only a reboot of the router), so this shouldn't be a big issue in switching to IPv6.
I really think you've hit the nail on the head here. Even though traditional software like applications and operating systems will become more mature and not require much programming work, the embedded systems will need all the more programmers.
There are quite a lot of devices with embedded systems in them, but this development is in its infancy. Devices getting smaller, their room for batteries becoming less, you need to write more efficient code, which will use less cpu cycles and thus less batteries. It will last longer that way. So all your sitting through algorithm classes will have paid off if you know how to implement an efficient sort, know how hashes work and are able to make an efficient datatype for your system.
I think the embedded systems is an area where there still is a lot of work to be done, so still plenty of jobs for programmers.
It seems logical to me that the next boom will be biotech, although this may be slower, as it is an extremely complex subject matter.
Given a geometry of a room you can calculate how many cameras you need and where to place them. There's a geometric algorithm which will determine this for you. Its commonly referred to as the guarding an art gallery problem. Pretty cool stuff.:-)
Yep, Doom and Doom II for me too. I remember playing it and being completely immersed in it, forgetting the real world. Being really creeped out by hearing imps or demons (monsters right and left in the link of parent post, or see here for a Doom monster inventory) as they snuck around the building. As you got closer, the sounds they made got louder, while you finally rounded a corner and a demon suddenly started chewing your face off making horrible noises. It scared the crap out of me.
And after marathon sessions of Doom, dreaming feverishly about it at night...
I agree. The DVD medium "just works", much like CDs "work" for audio. High quality data on an easily portable format.
CDs have been around for a long time now, with nothing really endangering them; yeah, there's the whole p2p thing, but don't forget the MP3s/OGGs came from somewhere, namely, CDs. Listen on demand with micropayments isn't happening yet for audio. Putting audio on DVDs is possible, which makes the audiophiles happy, but Joe Blow doesn't need any higher quality music. CDs are good enough.
In the same way, DVDs will probably be around for a long time (as will CDs), because the format "just works". It does its job, and does it well.
The remote should be easy enough. There are lots of external IR devices available, which will connect to USB, serial, parallel, PS/2, etc. With the right software you can train them to listen to anything, like a universal remote or one you already have, so for 20 euros you could have yourself a remote control setup for this too.
If you're feeling really 'hackish' you could cut a small aperature in the front cover and place the IR eye there, so it would be part of the unit.
Hmmm.. maybe using Hauppage's PVR card (which has hardware MPEG encoding/decoding) would be an option in this case. Linux drivers for this card are still in pre-alpha stage, with only a few available features implemented, though. So that would have to wait And I don't have money to buy this stuff anyways. A man can dream, though.:-)
Well, when they implement searching or a decent indexing service (like ShareReactor for eDonkey), then I'll switch over. Until then, it's fairly useless.
This looks like the option to use for a homebrew PVR solution. The only thing missing is a TV card, but you can add that in the PCI slot that is available. It even has an MPEG2 hardware decoder. Would 933 MHz be fast enough for encoding, though?
Slashdot Mirror
What about the noise and vibration from the HD and fans etc... wouldn't it drive the fish crazy?
Seems inhumane to me too. Cleaning it will be a bitch.
Cheers,
Costyn.
Except that these neodymium magnets are very brittle, and after having flung yourself at a passing bus and having been stuck on, you'd have lots of magnets scraps left over, either falling off and getting run over by the bus' wheels, or being run over by a passing truck.
Sounds like you're describing a slug...
Put it on end and you have a vertical windtunnel, a great "ride". It's a little difficult to learn to stay stable, but its a lot of fun. Skydivers use vertical windtunnels a lot to train their maneuvers. But also people who don't wanna jump out of an airplane but do wanna know what it feels like to float on air, the vertical windtunnel is the answer.
Cheers,
Costyn.
This sucks... I don't want to compile the damn thing myself if I want to use Xft antialiased fonts. Are there any builds that have this enabled by default available for download?
I think I'll just wait until it is available as a Debian package, complete with Xft. The Debian unstable mozilla package does everything I want it to, including xft fonts.
Cheers,
Costyn.
Yup, definitely. Scott Adams has a whole book devoted to "having more fun at the office", of which a whole chapter is "reverse telecommuting", or doing personal stuff at the office: The Joy of Work: Dilbert's Guide to Finding Happiness at the Expense of Your Co-Workers
Cheers,
Costyn.
Planetquake is slashdotted. Bittorrent is maxing out my ADSL line. I've capped upload at 8KB/sec (max is about 11) to make sure ACK packets can go out. Download is also maxing out on my ADSL connection (80 KB/sec).
:-)
I like bittorrent.
Cheers,
Costyn.
Haskell is definately the worst language I have ever come accross. Maybe its the way its being shoved down our throats at my uni, but for me it just sucks (pretty much all the students here hate it, the teachers love it, which is why it is taught). Its way too hard to program in, hard to read code, and debugging it sucks, cause of the lame way too generic error messages. Its strongly typed such that it seems excessively paranoid. Most compilation errors occur because of its typing requirements.
Bah! I hate it so much.
I think a lot of research has already been done in this direction (stupid system that becomes clever through learning), but was either fruitless or too difficult. People have gone on to things that do provide results and have useful applications in the real world (such as tinkering/soldering with robots). Granted, the Aibo isn't an especially useful product, but things like automated lawnmowers and automated vacuum cleaners are definately offspring of laboratory tinkering.
I guess maybe Marvin wants too much, too soon.
Cheers,
Costyn.
Yeah, and artificial stupidity is gaining a lot of ground, too.
Pointy Haired Bosses. You should read Dilbert sometime. :-)
Cheers,
Costyn.
I haven't read the long and dense article, but this sounds like managerspeak, PHB-talk. The concepts described are all very high level, requiring a whole plethora of yet unwritten code to roll back changes in a large system. This will require a lot of work, including rebuilding a lot of those large systems from the ground up.
I don't think anybody (any company) is willing to undertake such an enterprise, having to re-architect/redesign whole systems from ground up. Systems that work these days, but aren't 100% reliable.
Will it be worth it? For those systems to have a smaller boot up time after failure? I don't think so, but ymmv.
Cheers,
Costyn.
Yep, XS4ALL, a techie friendly ISP here in the Netherlands (a major ISP, too, btw) is a IPv6 brokering service. They assign you some block of IP addresses, you do some configging, install radvd and suddenly your whole internal network can talk IPv6. I've set it up here at home such that clients which are NAT'd in IPv4 space have their own IPv6 address which gets assigned to them dynamically. Its not that hard.
Anyways, its all nice but there's not much to do with it. There are very few IPv6 enabled sites on the net. Has kind of the 'old days of the net' feel to it. Just a few pages here and there. A small directory service like when Yahoo! started off. Its true, we need a killer app, something very useful which IPv6 offers that IPv4/NAT doesn't.
Cheers,
Costyn.
Surfnet, the education backbone here in the Netherlands (linking pretty much all universities and gov't research facilities), has been very busy making sure all their routers can speak IPv6. They are basically ready to do IPv6. I have no idea when they're actually rolling it out. I just see all their change tickets.
What I mean to say is, this doesn't require much downtime (only a reboot of the router), so this shouldn't be a big issue in switching to IPv6.
Cheers,
Costyn.
I really think you've hit the nail on the head here. Even though traditional software like applications and operating systems will become more mature and not require much programming work, the embedded systems will need all the more programmers.
There are quite a lot of devices with embedded systems in them, but this development is in its infancy. Devices getting smaller, their room for batteries becoming less, you need to write more efficient code, which will use less cpu cycles and thus less batteries. It will last longer that way. So all your sitting through algorithm classes will have paid off if you know how to implement an efficient sort, know how hashes work and are able to make an efficient datatype for your system.
I think the embedded systems is an area where there still is a lot of work to be done, so still plenty of jobs for programmers.
It seems logical to me that the next boom will be biotech, although this may be slower, as it is an extremely complex subject matter.
My 0.02 Euro's.
Cheers,
Costyn.
Given a geometry of a room you can calculate how many cameras you need and where to place them. There's a geometric algorithm which will determine this for you. Its commonly referred to as the guarding an art gallery problem. Pretty cool stuff. :-)
Yep, Doom and Doom II for me too. I remember playing it and being completely immersed in it, forgetting the real world. Being really creeped out by hearing imps or demons (monsters right and left in the link of parent post, or see here for a Doom monster inventory) as they snuck around the building. As you got closer, the sounds they made got louder, while you finally rounded a corner and a demon suddenly started chewing your face off making horrible noises. It scared the crap out of me.
:-) Gotta play it again sometime.
And after marathon sessions of Doom, dreaming feverishly about it at night...
Awesome game.
Cheers!
Costyn.
Well, maybe there *was* a driver. There certainly is no longer a driver now, though. :-)
You can *program* this girl and tell her what you want her to do. :-)
Well, that you don't hear at all... you only hear the disk when its actually accessing. So I think you'd like it.
Cheers!
I agree. The DVD medium "just works", much like CDs "work" for audio. High quality data on an easily portable format.
CDs have been around for a long time now, with nothing really endangering them; yeah, there's the whole p2p thing, but don't forget the MP3s/OGGs came from somewhere, namely, CDs. Listen on demand with micropayments isn't happening yet for audio. Putting audio on DVDs is possible, which makes the audiophiles happy, but Joe Blow doesn't need any higher quality music. CDs are good enough.
In the same way, DVDs will probably be around for a long time (as will CDs), because the format "just works". It does its job, and does it well.
Cheers,
Costyn.
The remote should be easy enough. There are lots of external IR devices available, which will connect to USB, serial, parallel, PS/2, etc. With the right software you can train them to listen to anything, like a universal remote or one you already have, so for 20 euros you could have yourself a remote control setup for this too.
If you're feeling really 'hackish' you could cut a small aperature in the front cover and place the IR eye there, so it would be part of the unit.
Cheers,
Costyn.
Hmmm.. maybe using Hauppage's PVR card (which has hardware MPEG encoding/decoding) would be an option in this case. Linux drivers for this card are still in pre-alpha stage, with only a few available features implemented, though. So that would have to wait And I don't have money to buy this stuff anyways. A man can dream, though. :-)
Cheers!
Costyn.
Well, when they implement searching or a decent indexing service (like ShareReactor for eDonkey), then I'll switch over. Until then, it's fairly useless.
Cheers,
Costyn.
This looks like the option to use for a homebrew PVR solution. The only thing missing is a TV card, but you can add that in the PCI slot that is available. It even has an MPEG2 hardware decoder. Would 933 MHz be fast enough for encoding, though?
Cheers,
Costyn.