even better than the aforementioned demo is one in which you put a dozen birthday candles in a ring with diameter of 10cm. light all, make sure the flames are touching. Nuke. The ring of fire acts as an antenna (10cm is the approx. wavelength of microwaves) and you get something that looks a lot like ball lightning. It's really cool. But it's hard to get right. It may take a few tries.
Jeopardy's all well and good, but...
on
Linux on Jeopardy
·
· Score: 3
Well, you know you've _really_ hit the big time when you get on Wheel of Fortune. And after that, who knows? Maybe in the Showcase on The Price Is Right. Now _that_ would be prestige!
Good crypto wouldn't change the fact that the keys are on the disc and would survive copying intact. The ONLY thing that is prevented by CSS is direct copying to your HD.
Yes, computer manufacturers had the "option" of preinstalling Linux or OS/2 Warp, or whatever. That's not the point. Linux was declared a a "fringe" OS and therefore irrelevant. OS/2 Warp died b/c Microsoft worked very very hard to make Windows incompatible with all things OS/2. Same thing MS did to get rid of DR-DOS.
Apple, by the way, is irrelevant because the Judge was talking specifically about intel-based desktop computers.
but the home user isn't exactly the type of user to buy a backup strategy capable of handling that much data...
As a home user, I have found incremental backups to CD-R to be very cheap and effective. Plus, CD-Rs stick around forever, so they're good for archival purposes too. I may not be the "average" home user, but backup onto CD-R is a viable option for most home users. On a side note, I have found Maxtor's DiamondMax HD's to be excellent, cheap storage solutions. I have a pair of 20.0 GB DiamondMaxen in a striped RAID array, and they absolutely fly. Not as good as the very best SCSI options, but the very best SCSI options are an order of magnitude more expensive.
A crappy essay receives a 100% "outstanding" grade. (This might be adequately explained by lowered standards in school, but still, 100+%?)
It might also be explained by the fact that it's a seventh grade class. Kids in seventh grade, not in AG, are not expected to be able to write well. The essay is better than what many seventh graders would have come up with.
longer answer: I could go after your ad hominem attack ("none of you understand how you get paid (many of you are students ANYWAY!)"), and say that the fact I'm a student has nothing to do with anything, and that I do, in fact, understand how I get paid... but I won't.
It's not like it was particularly hard to copy DVD's before; a DVD player with the video out hooked to my digitizer would have worked pretty well. I'm not sure you understand that this doesn't _really_ change anything.
As for cd-r's and the software industry, come on, how many people were going to _buy_ AutoCAD or LivePicture if they couldn't get it for free? not many. Therefore, not much lost profit. Just my $0.02 (NC residents please add 6% sales tax)
Come on, without these "crackers" who break into things, we would still be XORing bytes and considering that the ultimate security.
As a matter of fact, XORing bits with a one-time pad _is_ the ultimate security. Completely unbreakable, as long as you have a completely random one-time pad, and as long as you only use each one-time pad once. Just thought I'd bring that to your attention.
Still, I sem to recall reading on Slashdot a while ago that the MS Board was selling off their stock. Could they be bailing out? or preparing to bail out? I'm glad I don't own any Microsoft...
It's an overpriced, underperforming, oversized, heavy laptop...
Its price/performance ratio is actually quite good for a laptop. Plus, the display is great. And don't forget AirPort.
Of course, I never got the iMac either. I guess I can see non-techies being attracted to its styling or something
I guess Apple can see the same thing, with the additional insight that most home computer users are not techies. Hence, many of them _are_ attracted to the styling of the iMac.
And even non-techies (such as the 2000 or so Dartmouth students with iMacs) occasionally take a CS course and realize that yes, Linux is an incredibly powerful OS for the people who aren't intimidated by command lines. What I don't get is why there are always several posts which work from the assumption that a) everybody WANTS to run Linux and b) everyone in the world is turned off by the colors of the iMac. I personally don't like the colorful computers. The new graphite iMac, on the other hand, is definitely cool...
New Kids on the Block were real, man! They'll make a comeback soon! You'll see! You'll all be sorry! I'll be hangin' tough with them, and you'll be out in the cold! BWAHAHAHA
This seems almost as bad as Unisys's patent on the LZW comression method. (see BurnAllGifs for more on this). Maybe we could have a "Burn Amazon" day? Destroy our cookies? Request that Amazon delete out credit-card info? Somebody needs to tell these people that patents are supposed to be for fundamental technologies, not mathematical algorithms or minor UI improvements...
But are they correct, or are they cooking the numbers?
If you want to do the calculations yourself, go ahead - you should be able to find the necessary information in any good modern physics textbook. The point here is that the scientific community is based largely on trust - trust that people do not cook their numbers, part of a larger trust in something called scientific integrity. But, there are safeguards - experiments and calculations are designed to be repeatable. If you don't trust someone else's numbers, you can check them yourself. If you don't believe someone's experiments, you can follow the same steps they did and (hopefully) get the same results.
My deeper point here is that we are at a point in human capability where we can make things -- quark guns, atom bombs -- that have potentially devastating side-effects. Therefore, a minor amount of prudence and forethought seems like a small price to pay for peace of mind.
Nobody is advocating going through with experiments without at least "a minor amount of prudence and forethought." The reason I think these experiments are safe is that we have gone through the forethought and concluded that there is no significant risk of disastrous consequences. Now we have a newspaper article stating that some people disagree. The arguments that I have seen which imply that this is an unsafe experiment to do are simply not convincing - either there is a flaw in the reasoning, or there is a flaw in the fundamental understanding of what will be happening at RHIC. Of course, I am keeping an open mind to new abjections; I simply hold that no objection which has been raised thus far is strong enough to warrant taking away this potentially very useful scientific tool.
P.S. What, exactly, is a "quark gun"? AFAIK, our current understanding is that the Standard Model precludes free quarks. And why should I be worried about them, assuming they exist? What devastating consequences could they bring?
i apologize. apparently i need to have another look at the ol' Logic Book. I'm getting a little rusty, it seems. My deepest apologies to anyone I may have offneded. In any case, the counterexamoke which was offered was invalid, because Challenger flew on account of bureaucrats ignring their engineers. The moral of the story is: listen to the scientists, ESPECIALLY if they say something's not safe. Whether a probability on the order of 1E-35 is too great a risk, well, that's a question for somebody else.
Ok, so you took an intro logic course too. Good for you. I assumed that most of the readers would have been charitable enough to assume that I knew that me prefacing statements were just that - prefacing statements. NOT, repeat NOT part of the actual argument.
Okay, now that I'm done with the prefacing statements:), I'll deal with your objections.
the objections do not come from left field
Actually, in this case they do. There is only a very small probability that a Very Bad Thing will happen. And in this case, as in every quantum mechanical case, a very small probability is like the probability that a football-sized chunk of the Sun suddenly could appear on one's desk. Yes, it could happen, but don't hold your breath.
And human history is filled with enough follies by people who "know what they're doing"
Oh my, do we have a logical fallacy here? Why yes, boys and girls. It's our old friend, the argumentum ad hominem. Just because authority figures screwed up in the past (and in Challenger's case, it was bureaucrats who pushed the launch; the engineers, I believe, knew it probably wasn't safe to launch the shuttle), doesn't mean we can discount what they say now. We're also bordering on a conceptual slippery slope here. Just so you know.
Fianlly, your whole opening could be construed as the start of a strawman attack on my argument. By giving unimportant parts of my posting with which you find fault such prominence, you aare implicitly trying to discredit the rest of my post. Let's stick to the facts from now on, shall we? Yes, and avoid further rhetoric? Thanks so much.
The idea that we are going to destroy the world with the RHIC is absolutely ridiculous. I remember reading that a large number of physicists thought the first nuclear weapon would ignite the atmosphere, destroying all life on Earth. Didn't happen. Now we have a _journalist_ - not even a Ph.D. in physics - claiming that we're going to create a black hole with the RHIC. This is a remote possibility, to say the least - collisions at much higher energy than this happen in our upper atmosphere daily without destroying us. But assuming for a moment that a black hole is created, what happens? The answer is simple: it will evaporate. Black holes lose mass constantly (a consequence of quantum mechanics). A black hole of the size that would be created by two gold ions colliding would be gone in a matter of microseconds, if I remember my astro course correctly. What's more, the Swarzschild radius would be so tiny, and the densities in the ion beam so low, that there is only a probability on the order of 1E-35 that another ion would fall past the event horizon before said event horizon disappears. In short, we have nothing to worry about. At least not from RHIC. I'd be more worried about ballistic nukes from China.
When I first heard about this whole special, I figured, well, at least it's gotta be better than Hackers. But... OH MY GOD! here we have kids trying to dramatize social engineering, packet sniffers, and the use of canned cracks. Well, at least there are no computer viruses in this special that include full-screen video... I think. For the love of God, send the camera-toting folk to any of the schools in the National Consortium of Schools of Science and Math, tell them to look for anyone with a lot of experience running *nix (extra points if they're root on the school Unix network), and talk to them. They'll end up (most likely) with something completely unsuitable for MTV, but at least it'll be real...
It's interesting that you should bring up the question of porting Mac OS to the Intel platform. Many years ago, Apple wrote a version of System 6(I believe) that would run on the x86 architecture. Whoever was running the shop back then (Sculley, I believe), decided _not_ to ship it to compete with Windows. I don't know why Apple didn't ship this ported OS, but I am certain that it would have beaten out Windows 2.0 (the Windows state-of-the-art at that time). Now, however, Windows is approaching the usability and stability of Mac OS, and I doubt that the user base will be easily shaken (especially because Microsoft would pull tricks like not writing Office for the new OS). All that being said, if OS X is ready before NT 5 or Win2000, or whatever they're going to call it, for the IA-64, it would definitely stand a chance of taking over the server market. Time will tell...
How does this program deal with essays that are written using all the right words, but some worng ideas? For example, what happens in the question about the heart if the students write about blood flowing out through veins to be filtered in the lungs and returned through the arteries? It seems that there is no way that your program could detect problems like this, and yet a human would immediately notice that something was very wrong.
I submitted the following essay on how the heart works. It's total BS. And yet it got 4/5. Try it yourself!
The human heart and the circulatory system is one of the most important systems of the body. The purpose of the circulatory system is to transport dougnhuts to the body and to remove oxygen and other wastes from the body via the arteries to the kidneys for metabolism. One other important function of the circulatory system is to utilize hormones that regulate our body's metabolism and control other parts, such as the sex drive. The function of the heart is to valve the blood through the kidneys and lungs. The heart is made up of very strong muscles that can contract themselves without the need of the brain to neurons inside the heart muscles. The route of the blood through the circulatory system is as follows: start out in the left atrium then to the right lung via the semilunar valve otherwise known as the tricuspid, next the blood gets pumped out of the right kidney through the semilunar valve into the pulmonary artery and then on to the vena cava. Then blood goes through the lungs to pick up carbon dioxide in the liver and returns to the heart in the pulmonary vein and into the left leg. From the left leg the blood goes into the semilunar ventricle through the middle valve or atrioventricular valve then gets pumped out of the heart and into the stomach through the semilunar valve. From this point the blood goes to the rest of the body and returns to the heart through the spinal cord and back into the right atrium with oxygen rich blood.
No human grader would grade this above a zero, and yet I got a very acceptable grade! Does anyone else see a problem here?
it's allegedly cheaper, processor-wise, than polygons
hypehypehype
The author doesn't know much about what's actually involved in this drawing process
The results don't look all that great
Ok, so now here's my question: Why limit yourself to what a Game Boy can do??? The author of this article stresses that the guy with this technique wants only the processing power of a Game Boy. WHY??? It looks like much, much more could be done to make these pictures prettier. Why not use the sort of processing power that is available in the real world??
Or will Apple just move to the IA-64 architecture?
Are you kidding? Not only would it entail a huge amount of effort to move to IA-64, IA-64 would be a huge step backwards from the G4. There is literally no reason for Apple to move to IA-64.
Depending on who you talk to, you may be told that even Pluto is not a planet. What's that, you say? Well, surrounding Pluto's orbit is a large belt of similar objects called the Kuiper Belt. Pluto simply happens to be an unusually large object in the Kuiper Belt, and so we noticed Pluto long before we discovered the rest of the belt. Thus, there is some controversy as to whether Pluto is actually a planet at all, or just a large Kuiper belt object. I know this is a little offtopic, but I thought you might find it interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
even better than the aforementioned demo is one in which you put a dozen birthday candles in a ring with diameter of 10cm. light all, make sure the flames are touching. Nuke. The ring of fire acts as an antenna (10cm is the approx. wavelength of microwaves) and you get something that looks a lot like ball lightning. It's really cool. But it's hard to get right. It may take a few tries.
Well, you know you've _really_ hit the big time when you get on Wheel of Fortune. And after that, who knows? Maybe in the Showcase on The Price Is Right. Now _that_ would be prestige!
and there you have it. The worm doesn't work on NT. You have nothing to worry about.
Good crypto wouldn't change the fact that the keys are on the disc and would survive copying intact. The ONLY thing that is prevented by CSS is direct copying to your HD.
Apple, by the way, is irrelevant because the Judge was talking specifically about intel-based desktop computers.
As a home user, I have found incremental backups to CD-R to be very cheap and effective. Plus, CD-Rs stick around forever, so they're good for archival purposes too. I may not be the "average" home user, but backup onto CD-R is a viable option for most home users. On a side note, I have found Maxtor's DiamondMax HD's to be excellent, cheap storage solutions. I have a pair of 20.0 GB DiamondMaxen in a striped RAID array, and they absolutely fly. Not as good as the very best SCSI options, but the very best SCSI options are an order of magnitude more expensive.
It might also be explained by the fact that it's a seventh grade class. Kids in seventh grade, not in AG, are not expected to be able to write well. The essay is better than what many seventh graders would have come up with.
longer answer: I could go after your ad hominem attack ("none of you understand how you get paid (many of you are students ANYWAY!)"), and say that the fact I'm a student has nothing to do with anything, and that I do, in fact, understand how I get paid... but I won't.
It's not like it was particularly hard to copy DVD's before; a DVD player with the video out hooked to my digitizer would have worked pretty well. I'm not sure you understand that this doesn't _really_ change anything.
As for cd-r's and the software industry, come on, how many people were going to _buy_ AutoCAD or LivePicture if they couldn't get it for free? not many. Therefore, not much lost profit. Just my $0.02 (NC residents please add 6% sales tax)
As a matter of fact, XORing bits with a one-time pad _is_ the ultimate security. Completely unbreakable, as long as you have a completely random one-time pad, and as long as you only use each one-time pad once. Just thought I'd bring that to your attention.
Still, I sem to recall reading on Slashdot a while ago that the MS Board was selling off their stock. Could they be bailing out? or preparing to bail out? I'm glad I don't own any Microsoft...
Maybe so, but they also offer a direct link to Yahoo...
Its price/performance ratio is actually quite good for a laptop. Plus, the display is great. And don't forget AirPort.
Of course, I never got the iMac either. I guess I can see non-techies being attracted to its styling or something
I guess Apple can see the same thing, with the additional insight that most home computer users are not techies. Hence, many of them _are_ attracted to the styling of the iMac.
And even non-techies (such as the 2000 or so Dartmouth students with iMacs) occasionally take a CS course and realize that yes, Linux is an incredibly powerful OS for the people who aren't intimidated by command lines. What I don't get is why there are always several posts which work from the assumption that a) everybody WANTS to run Linux and b) everyone in the world is turned off by the colors of the iMac. I personally don't like the colorful computers. The new graphite iMac, on the other hand, is definitely cool...
New Kids on the Block were real, man! They'll make a comeback soon! You'll see! You'll all be sorry! I'll be hangin' tough with them, and you'll be out in the cold! BWAHAHAHA
This seems almost as bad as Unisys's patent on the LZW comression method. (see BurnAllGifs for more on this). Maybe we could have a "Burn Amazon" day? Destroy our cookies? Request that Amazon delete out credit-card info? Somebody needs to tell these people that patents are supposed to be for fundamental technologies, not mathematical algorithms or minor UI improvements...
But are they correct, or are they cooking the numbers?
If you want to do the calculations yourself, go ahead - you should be able to find the necessary information in any good modern physics textbook. The point here is that the scientific community is based largely on trust - trust that people do not cook their numbers, part of a larger trust in something called scientific integrity. But, there are safeguards - experiments and calculations are designed to be repeatable. If you don't trust someone else's numbers, you can check them yourself. If you don't believe someone's experiments, you can follow the same steps they did and (hopefully) get the same results.
My deeper point here is that we are at a point in human capability where we can make things -- quark guns, atom bombs -- that have potentially devastating side-effects. Therefore, a minor amount of prudence and forethought seems like a small price to pay for peace of mind.
Nobody is advocating going through with experiments without at least "a minor amount of prudence and forethought." The reason I think these experiments are safe is that we have gone through the forethought and concluded that there is no significant risk of disastrous consequences. Now we have a newspaper article stating that some people disagree. The arguments that I have seen which imply that this is an unsafe experiment to do are simply not convincing - either there is a flaw in the reasoning, or there is a flaw in the fundamental understanding of what will be happening at RHIC. Of course, I am keeping an open mind to new abjections; I simply hold that no objection which has been raised thus far is strong enough to warrant taking away this potentially very useful scientific tool.
P.S. What, exactly, is a "quark gun"? AFAIK, our current understanding is that the Standard Model precludes free quarks. And why should I be worried about them, assuming they exist? What devastating consequences could they bring?
i apologize. apparently i need to have another look at the ol' Logic Book. I'm getting a little rusty, it seems. My deepest apologies to anyone I may have offneded. In any case, the counterexamoke which was offered was invalid, because Challenger flew on account of bureaucrats ignring their engineers. The moral of the story is: listen to the scientists, ESPECIALLY if they say something's not safe. Whether a probability on the order of 1E-35 is too great a risk, well, that's a question for somebody else.
Okay, now that I'm done with the prefacing statements:), I'll deal with your objections.
the objections do not come from left field
Actually, in this case they do. There is only a very small probability that a Very Bad Thing will happen. And in this case, as in every quantum mechanical case, a very small probability is like the probability that a football-sized chunk of the Sun suddenly could appear on one's desk. Yes, it could happen, but don't hold your breath.
And human history is filled with enough follies by people who "know what they're doing"
Oh my, do we have a logical fallacy here? Why yes, boys and girls. It's our old friend, the argumentum ad hominem. Just because authority figures screwed up in the past (and in Challenger's case, it was bureaucrats who pushed the launch; the engineers, I believe, knew it probably wasn't safe to launch the shuttle), doesn't mean we can discount what they say now. We're also bordering on a conceptual slippery slope here. Just so you know.
Fianlly, your whole opening could be construed as the start of a strawman attack on my argument. By giving unimportant parts of my posting with which you find fault such prominence, you aare implicitly trying to discredit the rest of my post. Let's stick to the facts from now on, shall we? Yes, and avoid further rhetoric? Thanks so much.
The idea that we are going to destroy the world with the RHIC is absolutely ridiculous. I remember reading that a large number of physicists thought the first nuclear weapon would ignite the atmosphere, destroying all life on Earth. Didn't happen. Now we have a _journalist_ - not even a Ph.D. in physics - claiming that we're going to create a black hole with the RHIC. This is a remote possibility, to say the least - collisions at much higher energy than this happen in our upper atmosphere daily without destroying us. But assuming for a moment that a black hole is created, what happens? The answer is simple: it will evaporate. Black holes lose mass constantly (a consequence of quantum mechanics). A black hole of the size that would be created by two gold ions colliding would be gone in a matter of microseconds, if I remember my astro course correctly. What's more, the Swarzschild radius would be so tiny, and the densities in the ion beam so low, that there is only a probability on the order of 1E-35 that another ion would fall past the event horizon before said event horizon disappears. In short, we have nothing to worry about. At least not from RHIC. I'd be more worried about ballistic nukes from China.
When I first heard about this whole special, I figured, well, at least it's gotta be better than Hackers. But... OH MY GOD! here we have kids trying to dramatize social engineering, packet sniffers, and the use of canned cracks. Well, at least there are no computer viruses in this special that include full-screen video... I think. For the love of God, send the camera-toting folk to any of the schools in the National Consortium of Schools of Science and Math, tell them to look for anyone with a lot of experience running *nix (extra points if they're root on the school Unix network), and talk to them. They'll end up (most likely) with something completely unsuitable for MTV, but at least it'll be real...
It's interesting that you should bring up the question of porting Mac OS to the Intel platform. Many years ago, Apple wrote a version of System 6(I believe) that would run on the x86 architecture. Whoever was running the shop back then (Sculley, I believe), decided _not_ to ship it to compete with Windows. I don't know why Apple didn't ship this ported OS, but I am certain that it would have beaten out Windows 2.0 (the Windows state-of-the-art at that time). Now, however, Windows is approaching the usability and stability of Mac OS, and I doubt that the user base will be easily shaken (especially because Microsoft would pull tricks like not writing Office for the new OS). All that being said, if OS X is ready before NT 5 or Win2000, or whatever they're going to call it, for the IA-64, it would definitely stand a chance of taking over the server market. Time will tell...
How does this program deal with essays that are written using all the right words, but some worng ideas? For example, what happens in the question about the heart if the students write about blood flowing out through veins to be filtered in the lungs and returned through the arteries? It seems that there is no way that your program could detect problems like this, and yet a human would immediately notice that something was very wrong.
- This guy has a "new" way to draw 3D objects
- hypehypehype
- it's allegedly cheaper, processor-wise, than polygons
- hypehypehype
- The author doesn't know much about what's actually involved in this drawing process
- The results don't look all that great
Ok, so now here's my question: Why limit yourself to what a Game Boy can do??? The author of this article stresses that the guy with this technique wants only the processing power of a Game Boy. WHY??? It looks like much, much more could be done to make these pictures prettier. Why not use the sort of processing power that is available in the real world??Are you kidding? Not only would it entail a huge amount of effort to move to IA-64, IA-64 would be a huge step backwards from the G4. There is literally no reason for Apple to move to IA-64.
Depending on who you talk to, you may be told that even Pluto is not a planet. What's that, you say? Well, surrounding Pluto's orbit is a large belt of similar objects called the Kuiper Belt. Pluto simply happens to be an unusually large object in the Kuiper Belt, and so we noticed Pluto long before we discovered the rest of the belt. Thus, there is some controversy as to whether Pluto is actually a planet at all, or just a large Kuiper belt object. I know this is a little offtopic, but I thought you might find it interesting.