You could make it bigger and adapt it to a car, the car vibrates as it goes down the road, in turn powering the device that allows it to go down the road...Perpetual motion automobile...I'd like my Nobel Prize now please...
Well, good thing that Nobel prizes are not given by those who modded you interesting, but I get the joke.
The only(?) perpetual motion machines that can be built on a small scale are coriolis machines. Way back in the 19th and early 20th centuries is was a fad to build perpetual clocks with horizontally rotating pendulums that stole energy from the earth's rotation to power themselves. The amount of power extracted is very small though and requires careful leveling of the clock. Also, they won't work in the tropics or at the poles. They only work in intermediate latitudes.
A small side effect of those is: use enough of them and Earth will literally stop spinning. Of course that'd be really a LOT of them.. but something to consider.
Wasn't there a Slashdot story recently proclaiming the CD to be obsolete?
Even though digital music sales are up, for many people, the CD is still the way you carry and purchase music.
Bad reasoning. There are still many people using VHS, but that's pretty obsolete as well. For CD usage there's just one thing known: a steep trend downwards. It's inevitable. And since we always like to talk about things as if they happened now and not an year or two from now, well, CD is obsolete.
They had to release it 20 minutes ago (6pm ET), but they swiftly changed the message to say "Due to technical difficulties we will now be live from London on the 5th July."
What does that even mean..?
Jokers.
If they have technical difficulties it doesn't take a lot of effort to post a photo on flickr or the video on youtube, for Christ's sakes. The photo spread earlier is fake, and claimed to not be Orbo.
Over 8 million british pounds were invested in this company, and it's apparently all a giant scam, or joke.O
There's some really strong evidence that God isn't real.
What do you mean. Where's that evidence. The only evidence we have is that most religious books like the Bible and the Koran are childish, naive and wrong.
We don't know if there's no intelligence somewhere up the chain that caused what's down the chain. We're not even quite sure about what the bing bang is (start of time? how come it started. anything before it? or was it the beginning, or end and beginning is the same thing? and so on)
I should sponsor these guys with the FREE MILLION DOLLARS I just won browsing around the web just a few min ago (currently just paid the advance fee and waiting for confirmation).
Man, I'm so excited. Free money and energy on the same day, I mean, what are the friggin odds??
Yep, I had that very problem some years ago when I was cleaning my room and found several 5 1/4 disquettes which contained the.pw extension. No way to find the program.
You're suggesting the National Archives have the resources and intelligence (as in, research and know-how) of a single guy who found several 5 1/4 disks while cleaning his room.
The BBC is reporting that the UK National Archive is warning of old formats being a 'ticking time-bomb' where data is going to be lost because of incompatibility in newer versions of software, and software not existing at all. More surprisingly, Microsoft has offered a solution via the OOXML format.
There are so many idiots in this state of the affairs:
1. the idiots which decided to build huge archive with undocumented proprietary format 2. idiots which believe they can't find even a single copy of the software they need 3. idiots who didn't store a single copy of the software that reads the format, together with the archive (not very far from obvious, is it). 4. idiots who want to convince other idiots that OOXML is an open format (versus straight XML serialization of the whatever binary DOC was in the source code base at the time in MS)
"Effects like these would be impossible 2 years ago". "It took us hundreds of people to make". "One frame renders in a week on a supercomputer". "Each robot is made out of a milliard of unique polygons and pixels". "It was very hard for actors to talk to nothing".
But actually we know all this. Yes it was complex. Maybe this is why they took something like 100 million dollars for it. I prefer to enjoy the work they did, versus read the same retired "look at how complex it was" tirade they publish every time.
That's a major problem in a lot of recent movies. It's like some idiot in Hollywood is teaching that "if 95% of the screen moves, people will think it is more actionny."
The camera is only a part of the problem. I can't figure out why movie robots always need to have so many spinning and twirling parts. these guys alway had some 10-20 appendages twirling about when they transform or try to cause impact upon something.
Maybe it's somewhere in the backstory that they evolved from household blender robots but I've missed this one.
One would think that to be successful fighting to save (or destroy) the universe against an army of huge robots, you'd try to be as efficient and fast as possible, so you'd cut the twirling and dancing part to a minimum and get to business.
But maybe it's some sort of ritual, as with some animals, where they avoid causing unnecessary damage by just threatening the opponent with how fast they can spin their weapons around, in the hope he gives up.
He still hasn't learned from Pearl Harbor that not every movie needs a love story, but I think that it was still a very good movie.
Yea, you can't blame the guy: he had just something like around $200 million to make this movie. With such a scarce budget, last thing you wanna do is think about whether there should be a love story in it or not. Love stories are cheap and don't involve CGI, so that's good to thrown in, just in case.
I'm sure if they keep giving him movies, few billion later he'll eventually learn. I can't wait to see the kind of movie Bay would do on a budget of 500 million. He may even hire screenwriters.
---
Regarding special effects: what's with Hollywood complaining about how complex it was for them to pull off the effects? I mean, guys: you cast it upon yourselves.
Is transformers complex to do in CGI? I mean, look at them - they're just a bunch of colored boxes. But that's not good enough for ya, right? Naaah!
They have to actually take the original designs, and make them look as if someone mounted a bomb in them, and it exploded right before the movie shooting began.
With so many parts randomly sticking out, a real-world robot like this would constantly find himself hitching all sorts of garbage laying around that gets stuck in most inconvenient places.
Also it wouldn't hurt they they consider how fast a huge metal robot could move and transform, so to look real (yea, it's about of robots turning cars from outer space, but in a live movie, it HAS to look realistic).
I don't blame the CGI crew for this last one though. Apparently they pitches realistic physics to Bay, but he was convinced that huge metal robots from outer space would move fast and smooth like "ninjas". Yea, like ninjas.
The result is you get a mix of realistic physics (on impact with buildings) and the rest of the time, the Transformers look like paper models that could get carried away if you blow a household fan at them.
In order to justify his name he should do Blue Ray and HD DVD stuff.
Totally agreed. And he better do it quick, I'm on the phone talking with the head of the Name Giving Commission, and they're seriously considering taking his name back.
He earned his name long ago. He has no need to 'justify' himself to anyone, and he certainly doesn't owe us anything. He can do whatever he damned well pleases, and you should be thankful for anything that happens to help you, instead of disrespecting him for the stuff that doesn't.
Showing your gratitude means you're weak. You gotta hate things. Hate Windows, hate Oracle, hate IBM, hate Intel, hate RIAA, hate Exxon. Hate the government, hate DVD Jon. Hate some guy who made a million by selling pixels on his home page and so on.
It's a survival technique. Now, of course, I kinda like Linux. I contributed a brightness adjustment to the "paste" icon in the KDE file manager, so by extension this puts me in the same group with the guys who created the Linux kernel.
But I'm not gonna tell you I like Linux. I'll just instead tell you you're an idiot for not using Linux, otherwise it means I'm weak.
Yes, for production environments of course, but for development it does not really matter that your webserver is scalable/fast/modular/supported/whatever so webrick or mongrel are better choices.
It doesn't hurt either. Especially since you're supposed to use as close environment to production as possible. I run Apache on my winbox for dev and I'm perfectly happy with it (next step is moving to a linux box.. but not yet).
And not the vastly superior PostgreSQL? I really like FKs in my relational data. And I know that MySQL does support them, but not with myISAM tables. This is really not meant to be a flame, but pgsql is really better than mysql, so why not include the better one? Or am I wrong?
Why MySQL? But of course, so there's something to whine about.
If you used RoR you'll figure out all advanced features of a database are left unused, so why bother.
Well experience will teach us that there's no such as perfect policy model for all areas of service and business in a country. People get hung up on the latest ideals and keep asking "but that's left party, isn't this action right?", or "is this action left, or right? are they going out of their way".
This is so naive. Well, normalization will occur so the best technique is applied where it's best suited.
We're seeing similar shifts occur int he IT all the time. New technology Y appears and everyone talks of it replacing X. Then few years later, turns out X isn't that bad for some things, and Y is good for other things.
Too bad that what happens in 3 years in IT, took couple of hundred years in politics.
Slashdot Mirror
They tu`k eer jeeebs!!!
Regards, the Microsoft R&D team
Vendor benchmarks are always considered untrustworthy, so I don't see what the big deal is.
Hm, what a nice example of self-fulfilling prophecy.
I prefer another one though: accept Intel and AMD's benchmarks should be accurate to utmost detail, and put up a riot every time we see they aren't.
inches i = 10;
// 1.453^10 volts
kilograms j = 40;
dollars k = 70;
print(i+j+k);
You could make it bigger and adapt it to a car, the car vibrates as it goes down the road, in turn powering the device that allows it to go down the road...Perpetual motion automobile...I'd like my Nobel Prize now please...
Well, good thing that Nobel prizes are not given by those who modded you interesting, but I get the joke.
The only(?) perpetual motion machines that can be built on a small scale are coriolis machines. Way back in the 19th and early 20th centuries is was a fad to build perpetual clocks with horizontally rotating pendulums that stole energy from the earth's rotation to power themselves. The amount of power extracted is very small though and requires careful leveling of the clock. Also, they won't work in the tropics or at the poles. They only work in intermediate latitudes.
A small side effect of those is: use enough of them and Earth will literally stop spinning. Of course that'd be really a LOT of them.. but something to consider.
Wasn't there a Slashdot story recently proclaiming the CD to be obsolete?
Even though digital music sales are up, for many people, the CD is still the way you carry and purchase music.
Bad reasoning. There are still many people using VHS, but that's pretty obsolete as well.
For CD usage there's just one thing known: a steep trend downwards. It's inevitable. And since we always like to talk about things as if they happened now and not an year or two from now, well, CD is obsolete.
"having a (first) life should be made mandatory."
But then what would become of Slashdot?
A dating site.
They had to release it 20 minutes ago (6pm ET), but they swiftly changed the message to say "Due to technical difficulties we will now be live from London on the 5th July."
What does that even mean..?
Jokers.
If they have technical difficulties it doesn't take a lot of effort to post a photo on flickr or the video on youtube, for Christ's sakes. The photo spread earlier is fake, and claimed to not be Orbo.
Over 8 million british pounds were invested in this company, and it's apparently all a giant scam, or joke.O
"career selling virtual cyber sex toys in the virtual world of Second Life"
Honestly, you can't read that summary and not completely agree with me: having a (first) life should be made mandatory.
There's some really strong evidence that God isn't real.
What do you mean. Where's that evidence. The only evidence we have is that most religious books like the Bible and the Koran are childish, naive and wrong.
We don't know if there's no intelligence somewhere up the chain that caused what's down the chain. We're not even quite sure about what the bing bang is (start of time? how come it started. anything before it? or was it the beginning, or end and beginning is the same thing? and so on)
There's a sucker born every minute.
That's nothing. With my free energy and you minute, I can make a sucker be born every SECOND.
Top that!
I wanna see the 5 min Transformers movie version, with all the robots edited out! Man, that would ROCK.
Wow, FREE ENERGY.
I should sponsor these guys with the FREE MILLION DOLLARS I just won browsing around the web just a few min ago (currently just paid the advance fee and waiting for confirmation).
Man, I'm so excited. Free money and energy on the same day, I mean, what are the friggin odds??
Yep, I had that very problem some years ago when I was cleaning my room and found several 5 1/4 disquettes which contained the .pw extension. No way to find the program.
You're suggesting the National Archives have the resources and intelligence (as in, research and know-how) of a single guy who found several 5 1/4 disks while cleaning his room.
Well, thanks. I laughed a lot.
The BBC is reporting that the UK National Archive is warning of old formats being a 'ticking time-bomb' where data is going to be lost because of incompatibility in newer versions of software, and software not existing at all. More surprisingly, Microsoft has offered a solution via the OOXML format.
There are so many idiots in this state of the affairs:
1. the idiots which decided to build huge archive with undocumented proprietary format
2. idiots which believe they can't find even a single copy of the software they need
3. idiots who didn't store a single copy of the software that reads the format, together with the archive (not very far from obvious, is it).
4. idiots who want to convince other idiots that OOXML is an open format (versus straight XML serialization of the whatever binary DOC was in the source code base at the time in MS)
It happens after every big fx movie.
"Effects like these would be impossible 2 years ago".
"It took us hundreds of people to make".
"One frame renders in a week on a supercomputer".
"Each robot is made out of a milliard of unique polygons and pixels".
"It was very hard for actors to talk to nothing".
But actually we know all this. Yes it was complex. Maybe this is why they took something like 100 million dollars for it.
I prefer to enjoy the work they did, versus read the same retired "look at how complex it was" tirade they publish every time.
That's a major problem in a lot of recent movies. It's like some idiot in Hollywood is teaching that "if 95% of the screen moves, people will think it is more actionny."
The camera is only a part of the problem. I can't figure out why movie robots always need to have so many spinning and twirling parts. these guys alway had some 10-20 appendages twirling about when they transform or try to cause impact upon something.
Maybe it's somewhere in the backstory that they evolved from household blender robots but I've missed this one.
One would think that to be successful fighting to save (or destroy) the universe against an army of huge robots, you'd try to be as efficient and fast as possible, so you'd cut the twirling and dancing part to a minimum and get to business.
But maybe it's some sort of ritual, as with some animals, where they avoid causing unnecessary damage by just threatening the opponent with how fast they can spin their weapons around, in the hope he gives up.
He still hasn't learned from Pearl Harbor that not every movie needs a love story, but I think that it was still a very good movie.
Yea, you can't blame the guy: he had just something like around $200 million to make this movie. With such a scarce budget, last thing you wanna do is think about whether there should be a love story in it or not. Love stories are cheap and don't involve CGI, so that's good to thrown in, just in case.
I'm sure if they keep giving him movies, few billion later he'll eventually learn. I can't wait to see the kind of movie Bay would do on a budget of 500 million. He may even hire screenwriters.
---
Regarding special effects: what's with Hollywood complaining about how complex it was for them to pull off the effects? I mean, guys: you cast it upon yourselves.
Is transformers complex to do in CGI? I mean, look at them - they're just a bunch of colored boxes. But that's not good enough for ya, right? Naaah!
They have to actually take the original designs, and make them look as if someone mounted a bomb in them, and it exploded right before the movie shooting began.
With so many parts randomly sticking out, a real-world robot like this would constantly find himself hitching all sorts of garbage laying around that gets stuck in most inconvenient places.
Also it wouldn't hurt they they consider how fast a huge metal robot could move and transform, so to look real (yea, it's about of robots turning cars from outer space, but in a live movie, it HAS to look realistic).
I don't blame the CGI crew for this last one though. Apparently they pitches realistic physics to Bay, but he was convinced that huge metal robots from outer space would move fast and smooth like "ninjas". Yea, like ninjas.
The result is you get a mix of realistic physics (on impact with buildings) and the rest of the time, the Transformers look like paper models that could get carried away if you blow a household fan at them.
Great job.
In order to justify his name he should do Blue Ray and HD DVD stuff.
Totally agreed. And he better do it quick, I'm on the phone talking with the head of the Name Giving Commission, and they're seriously considering taking his name back.
He earned his name long ago. He has no need to 'justify' himself to anyone, and he certainly doesn't owe us anything. He can do whatever he damned well pleases, and you should be thankful for anything that happens to help you, instead of disrespecting him for the stuff that doesn't.
Showing your gratitude means you're weak. You gotta hate things. Hate Windows, hate Oracle, hate IBM, hate Intel, hate RIAA, hate Exxon. Hate the government, hate DVD Jon. Hate some guy who made a million by selling pixels on his home page and so on.
It's a survival technique. Now, of course, I kinda like Linux. I contributed a brightness adjustment to the "paste" icon in the KDE file manager, so by extension this puts me in the same group with the guys who created the Linux kernel.
But I'm not gonna tell you I like Linux. I'll just instead tell you you're an idiot for not using Linux, otherwise it means I'm weak.
Yes, for production environments of course, but for development it does not really matter that your webserver is scalable/fast/modular/supported/whatever so webrick or mongrel are better choices.
It doesn't hurt either. Especially since you're supposed to use as close environment to production as possible. I run Apache on my winbox for dev and I'm perfectly happy with it (next step is moving to a linux box.. but not yet).
The iPhone doesn't use SIM cards. You have to "activate it" via iTunes.
It has a sim card, but it's a weird one.
So "unbricking" the iPhone means losing cell phone ability. What kind of unbricking this is?
How about a guide how to free my PC from Internet security vulnerabilities. By blowing up my modem with a hand grenade.
And not the vastly superior PostgreSQL? I really like FKs in my relational data. And I know that MySQL does support them, but not with myISAM tables.
This is really not meant to be a flame, but pgsql is really better than mysql, so why not include the better one? Or am I wrong?
Why MySQL? But of course, so there's something to whine about.
If you used RoR you'll figure out all advanced features of a database are left unused, so why bother.
Well experience will teach us that there's no such as perfect policy model for all areas of service and business in a country. People get hung up on the latest ideals and keep asking "but that's left party, isn't this action right?", or "is this action left, or right? are they going out of their way".
This is so naive. Well, normalization will occur so the best technique is applied where it's best suited.
We're seeing similar shifts occur int he IT all the time. New technology Y appears and everyone talks of it replacing X. Then few years later, turns out X isn't that bad for some things, and Y is good for other things.
Too bad that what happens in 3 years in IT, took couple of hundred years in politics.