Our brains are remarkably adept at recognizing faces, something AI researchers have found enourmously hard. We are wired to recognize similarities, and even more so to pick out things which resemble ourselves (or mother, or father). Hence Elvis in taco shells, Virgin Mary sightings in water stained walls, and now a Jack-o-lantern in space.
It is interesting that www.thinkgeek.com (another andover.net property) just proudly gave away three of these heavily Macromediaized Panasonic Showstoppers, as well as featuring it proudly on the front of their most recent mailing.
You would think they would be promoting and selling Tivo's since they run Linux, and are much more hacker friendly.
Eh, a foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds... or so says Ralph Waldo Emerson.
What I was trying to say was that oversampling has been used for years in high end digital audio as a smoothing technique, removing some of the harshness of the sound by making transitions less abrupt.
Why wouldn't the same thing work in the case of visual representations?
They are changed their source encryption to ASCII encoding, triple ROT-26 under the provisions of the DMCA which just went into effect.
Also, you are allowed to view the source, but comprehension of it is a violation of the terms of use statement you agreed to when you first became aware of the term Tripwire. Failure to not comprehend the source is punishable by, but not limited to, confiscation of any or all of the following:
It's always interesting to see a new product launch, and then hear everybody else yell... "Just wait for our new WaterBago 2000, not only will it do 30million more polys per second, but it will leave your breath minty fresh!"
I am so sick of hearing about this majestic tetris hack, espescially since IT NEVER HAPPENED. The closest anyone can prove is a building VU meter, which was used for "one diminsional" tetris. Neat hack, but nowhere close to being really tetris played on a building.
This keeps showing up on slashdot, and it keeps getting shot down. See
this story and search for tetris to read about the enormous difficulties of "building tetris" (I would provide a direct link to the appropriate comments, but they have been archived, and I don't want to just plagerize them).
Please, please, please, unless you can back something up with evidence (a link to pictures would be a start), quit spreading urban legends. We as geeks are supposed to be more skeptical than the general populous.
There are lots of "minor heros" in the Linux community. Rather than dribbling more sycophantic adoration upon the ESR's and the RMS's, go out and find someone who is lesser known.
Contact your local ISP's and find out who there is big into Linux. I am in a town of about 50,000 people, and we have several people who are active in the Linux community. We have one guy at one of the ISP's who is an active Debian maintainer. We have another guy who works on XFree86 drivers. Those would be interesting talks.
Or, contact your nearest University and find out what some of the PhDed professors of computer science disciplines are. Just because it's a LUG doesn't mean people aren't interested in natural language processing or robotics. Broaden your horizons. Ooohh... even better, contact the philosophy department and find out which philosophy professor is big into the net, and have them give a talk.
Finally, pick a generally used package which nobody gives much thought to, and invite it's maintainer/author to come. The less glamourous the better... something like lsof (Vic Abell)or dump (Stelian Pop). You might hear something interesting from someone you never would have thought of, and this lesser known hero will be thrilled to receive a little recognition.
Americans generally speak only one language largely because of our geography. We live in a vast country with a single common language. Compare this to Europe, where countries are smaller, and cross border commerce and relationships are common.
Imagine how different it would be if people in Georgia spoke Georianiese and people in Florida spoke Flordonian. We would, out of neccessity learn each others languages. European countries are by and large the size of our states here, and there is a diversity of official languages for each of those countries.
So, it isn't laziness or arrogance that lends us to knowing only one language, any more than it is a sense of noble good will that Europeans know multiple languages. Both are products of need and circumstance.
Make sure you are not trying to run showkey under X (your X server grabs the console) or it won't work. My Logitech cordless pro keyboard's little blue keys all show up under showkey as long as I'm not in X.
I've been way too busy to get very deep into it, but I suspect you can get the keys working in the console by following the instructions in the Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO. It includes information on how to set up custom keyboards, how X uses it's own keymap, etc.
The last KDE beta had some weird filesystem traffic going on. My home directory lives on an nfs export on a central fileserver, and kde was trolling through the.kde subdirectory often enough to be generating about 500 nfs packets a second. It's an annoyance rather than a real critical issue, so I haven't bothered to do any more research to see what program is causing it, but I suspect kicker.
Has anyone noticed this behaviour, and does anyone know if it is fixed/reduced in the final version?
Also, the choice to not allow a running program in the root menu is annoying as well. I liked having a scrolly running in my root window telling me what song I was currently playing from my mp3 database. The new kdesktop thing in the betas had a maximum refresh rate of once every five minutes. Not often enough when an average song is 3.5 minutes long.
Buy at TI85. Like you said, it is what they are using in the book, which will definately simplify your life. Plus it is a very decent calculator. And, you can ZShell on it, and program in Zilog80 asm.
Of course, it's no TI92, what with it's symbolic integration, but you aren't going to need that for Algebra2. In fact, you aren't even going to need it for Calculus.
Well, I take that back. When you take Calculus, the TI92 is definately nice when doing homework, because you can use it to check your answers. Just don't come to use it as a crutch. I own both a TI85 and a TI82, and the 85 gets much much much more day to day use.
There are several digitized maps available from the US Census and US Geological Survey. Typically they aren't available for download, but you can order them on CD's (a complete vector based map of the US is around 3GB). Bruce Perens put the TIGER map database online on his site at http://www.perens.com/FreeSoftware
And if we go the methanol route, we can grow our own fuel stocks!
Actually, you're not quite accurate. While methanol can be made from biomass, it is more typically made from carbon-based feedstocks such as natural gas and coal. And, when it is made from biomass, it is usually done with wood which is not as renewable as some other resources.
Besides, if you've ever been in a garage with someone tuning a methanol powered race car, you know how noxious the fumes are. Unpleasant. One alcohol we can grow is ethanol, which is typically made from corn. However, there are better alternatives, such as hydrogen. Hydrogen, which is readily available, burns down to just water, but suffers an image problem due to its very volitile nature. But, there are technologies that will make this safe, like metallic hydrides. This is a very cool technology which empregnates a metallic substrate with hydrogen atoms, which are released in a controlled manner when heated. Very cool.
I'd imagine they lack one critical feature of real muscles, the ability to repair themselves.
It's neat and all, but life really is the ultimate engineering feat. Being adaptive, with the ability to modify our own behavioural routines, in a self contained, self sustaining unit, that's amazing.
And I thought writing self modifying code in my AI class was hard!
One problem the startup I am involved in now has is that our original goals were vague. This situation left the investors, management, and development all with different ideas about exactly what it was we were trying to bring to market. Now, we are attempting to address that by describing clearly what products we want to develop, but it's a mess, since everyone has their own baby.
It sounds trite, but unless you know exactly what your goal is, you will never know when you are doing the right things to bring it to fruition.
An example, don't say you are going to develop "Internet based software for the medical industry". That's way too vague, and a much bigger elephant than anyone can eat. Instead say you are going to develop "a physician continuing education portal where Doctors may take online classes for continuing education credits".
The last thing you want are those expensive developers sitting around twiddling their thumbs because they don't know what it is they are supposed to be creating. Marketing people tend to be sales based, and they will promise potential clients anything, regardless of if it has anything to do with what your original plan was. For example, we are developing internet based software, but our sales people have actually promised potential customers that we would write them Windows 98 apps that run on an Access database. We the developers have had to veto that kind of thing many times.
In other words, find your precise niche, and don't let yourself become distracted from it. The easiest way to miss your target is to not know what it is.
Sorry for the rant, living with this situation is making me bitter...;)
Please, don't take this the wrong way, but I think you are expecting the wrong things from school. It sounds trite, but you get from your education exactly as much as you are willing to put into it.
In other words, if you are interested in something, then learn about it on your own. When I graduated with my degree, I had real, professional experience in AIX and Solaris, as well as non-professional experience programming in several languages not taught at the school.
I did much more than what was required of me to get my degree. I went out and found a job as a sys admin for, of all things, a food distribution company. The pay was crap, but it was great experience for when I graduated. And I started reading source code, learning how things were done outside the narrow world of undergraduate studies.
I bought books about programming languages that interested me, and worked through them. I joined the local ACM, and got involved with programming contests. I started a student organization for people interested in artificial intelligence, and had a faculty advisor join us who's PhD was in neural networks. I arranged to take a self study course under that same professor researching algorithmic music composition.
I'm not bragging here. Nothing I did you cannot do as well. The key is to accept the limits of what your institution offers, and declare yourself responsable for anything else you want to learn. There is no shortage of information freely available on the internet and in your school library, if you are only willing to seek it out.
Good luck to you, I mean it. But, in the end, it is you alone who is responsible for what you get out of your education. Be willing to do above and beyond what is expected of you, be willing to work while in school for less than you are worth just for the experience, and be flexable in when and where you find learning opportunities. Those things will push you farther and faster towards your goals than banging your head against the wall wishing for the system to change.
The argument i've heard is that "that kind of thing is for tech schools." Fine. Then what the hell should I learn in CS at a university? Windows is important in our world now, and it shouldn't be overlooked.
Whoa, calm down.
You simply do not understand how the American higher education system is set up. Universities do not exist to train you a specific set of skills, they prepare you for you future by teaching you how to learn. In a CS program, it is done using some arbitrary programming language and computer platform because those skills are just that, arbitrary.
Imagine being in school 10 years ago, when DOS was hot, and they taught you all about memory segmentation, specific DOS system calls, how to program the CGI card, etc. You would be in the situation of having to learn an entire new skill set now anyway.
That's why you have to take those physics classes, and calculus, etc, when you are in a university, because those classes teach you how to solve problems in the general case, and how to learn how to solve new ones you haven't been specifically taught how to solve.
You want to know about Cisco routers and the Windows API, huh? That's fine. Personally, I want to be the person who obsoletes those technologies. As Dennis Ritchie said in the August, 1984 issue of the CACM,
"The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance . . . [C]ommercial pressure . . . will divert the attention of the best thinkers from real innovation to exploitation of the current fad, from prospecting to mining a known lode"
So, you are right. Tech schools are there to train you, while universities exist to educate you. If it's training you want, which is what it sounds like, either enroll in your local tech school or community college.
Slashdot Mirror
Our brains are remarkably adept at recognizing faces, something AI researchers have found enourmously hard. We are wired to recognize similarities, and even more so to pick out things which resemble ourselves (or mother, or father). Hence Elvis in taco shells, Virgin Mary sightings in water stained walls, and now a Jack-o-lantern in space.
Something else for the UFO obsessed to point at. First, a face on Mars, now this!
There's a big difference between Macromedia and Macrovision.
Good golly, your right! Thanks for pointing that out. I hate when a paper bag blunder messes up an otherwise perfectly decent post! ;)
It is interesting that www.thinkgeek.com (another andover.net property) just proudly gave away three of these heavily Macromediaized Panasonic Showstoppers, as well as featuring it proudly on the front of their most recent mailing.
You would think they would be promoting and selling Tivo's since they run Linux, and are much more hacker friendly. Eh, a foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds... or so says Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I wish I could type with that....
Yeah, but the rsi is a bear.
You just thought carpal tunnel was bad!
The following affordable linux games are known to work perfectly under all the tested cards.
In fact, almost every game in the bsd-games package is well suited to these "value" cards, with the exception of maybe "fish".
What I was trying to say was that oversampling has been used for years in high end digital audio as a smoothing technique, removing some of the harshness of the sound by making transitions less abrupt.
Why wouldn't the same thing work in the case of visual representations?
Why wouldn't the same thing apply visually?
Mom? Is that you?
They are changed their source encryption to ASCII encoding, triple ROT-26 under the provisions of the DMCA which just went into effect.
Also, you are allowed to view the source, but comprehension of it is a violation of the terms of use statement you agreed to when you first became aware of the term Tripwire. Failure to not comprehend the source is punishable by, but not limited to, confiscation of any or all of the following:
When I first read the headline, I thought it was a story abount a discount radio station.
It's always interesting to see a new product launch, and then hear everybody else yell... "Just wait for our new WaterBago 2000, not only will it do 30million more polys per second, but it will leave your breath minty fresh!"
C'mon. It's the big "U" in FUD...
I was wrong. All I wanted was proof.
I am so sick of hearing about this majestic tetris hack, espescially since IT NEVER HAPPENED. The closest anyone can prove is a building VU meter, which was used for "one diminsional" tetris. Neat hack, but nowhere close to being really tetris played on a building.
This keeps showing up on slashdot, and it keeps getting shot down. See this story and search for tetris to read about the enormous difficulties of "building tetris" (I would provide a direct link to the appropriate comments, but they have been archived, and I don't want to just plagerize them).
Please, please, please, unless you can back something up with evidence (a link to pictures would be a start), quit spreading urban legends. We as geeks are supposed to be more skeptical than the general populous.
</rant>
There are lots of "minor heros" in the Linux community. Rather than dribbling more sycophantic adoration upon the ESR's and the RMS's, go out and find someone who is lesser known.
Contact your local ISP's and find out who there is big into Linux. I am in a town of about 50,000 people, and we have several people who are active in the Linux community. We have one guy at one of the ISP's who is an active Debian maintainer. We have another guy who works on XFree86 drivers. Those would be interesting talks.
Or, contact your nearest University and find out what some of the PhDed professors of computer science disciplines are. Just because it's a LUG doesn't mean people aren't interested in natural language processing or robotics. Broaden your horizons. Ooohh... even better, contact the philosophy department and find out which philosophy professor is big into the net, and have them give a talk.
Finally, pick a generally used package which nobody gives much thought to, and invite it's maintainer/author to come. The less glamourous the better... something like lsof (Vic Abell)or dump (Stelian Pop). You might hear something interesting from someone you never would have thought of, and this lesser known hero will be thrilled to receive a little recognition.
Americans generally speak only one language largely because of our geography. We live in a vast country with a single common language. Compare this to Europe, where countries are smaller, and cross border commerce and relationships are common.
Imagine how different it would be if people in Georgia spoke Georianiese and people in Florida spoke Flordonian. We would, out of neccessity learn each others languages. European countries are by and large the size of our states here, and there is a diversity of official languages for each of those countries.
So, it isn't laziness or arrogance that lends us to knowing only one language, any more than it is a sense of noble good will that Europeans know multiple languages. Both are products of need and circumstance.
Make sure you are not trying to run showkey under X (your X server grabs the console) or it won't work. My Logitech cordless pro keyboard's little blue keys all show up under showkey as long as I'm not in X.
I've been way too busy to get very deep into it, but I suspect you can get the keys working in the console by following the instructions in the Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO. It includes information on how to set up custom keyboards, how X uses it's own keymap, etc.
Good luck!
The last KDE beta had some weird filesystem traffic going on. My home directory lives on an nfs export on a central fileserver, and kde was trolling through the .kde subdirectory often enough to be generating about 500 nfs packets a second. It's an annoyance rather than a real critical issue, so I haven't bothered to do any more research to see what program is causing it, but I suspect kicker.
Has anyone noticed this behaviour, and does anyone know if it is fixed/reduced in the final version?
Also, the choice to not allow a running program in the root menu is annoying as well. I liked having a scrolly running in my root window telling me what song I was currently playing from my mp3 database. The new kdesktop thing in the betas had a maximum refresh rate of once every five minutes. Not often enough when an average song is 3.5 minutes long.
Buy at TI85. Like you said, it is what they are using in the book, which will definately simplify your life. Plus it is a very decent calculator. And, you can ZShell on it, and program in Zilog80 asm.
Of course, it's no TI92, what with it's symbolic integration, but you aren't going to need that for Algebra2. In fact, you aren't even going to need it for Calculus.
Well, I take that back. When you take Calculus, the TI92 is definately nice when doing homework, because you can use it to check your answers. Just don't come to use it as a crutch. I own both a TI85 and a TI82, and the 85 gets much much much more day to day use.
Some guy named Chris
There are several digitized maps available from the US Census and US Geological Survey. Typically they aren't available for download, but you can order them on CD's (a complete vector based map of the US is around 3GB). Bruce Perens put the TIGER map database online on his site at http://www.perens.com/FreeSoftware
So, it does exist. You just have to look.
Some guy named Chris
And if we go the methanol route, we can grow our own fuel stocks!
Actually, you're not quite accurate. While methanol can be made from biomass, it is more typically made from carbon-based feedstocks such as natural gas and coal. And, when it is made from biomass, it is usually done with wood which is not as renewable as some other resources.
Besides, if you've ever been in a garage with someone tuning a methanol powered race car, you know how noxious the fumes are. Unpleasant. One alcohol we can grow is ethanol, which is typically made from corn. However, there are better alternatives, such as hydrogen. Hydrogen, which is readily available, burns down to just water, but suffers an image problem due to its very volitile nature. But, there are technologies that will make this safe, like metallic hydrides. This is a very cool technology which empregnates a metallic substrate with hydrogen atoms, which are released in a controlled manner when heated. Very cool.
Some guy named Chris
more responsive than natural muscles
I'd imagine they lack one critical feature of real muscles, the ability to repair themselves.
It's neat and all, but life really is the ultimate engineering feat. Being adaptive, with the ability to modify our own behavioural routines, in a self contained, self sustaining unit, that's amazing.
And I thought writing self modifying code in my AI class was hard!
Some guy named Chris
One problem the startup I am involved in now has is that our original goals were vague. This situation left the investors, management, and development all with different ideas about exactly what it was we were trying to bring to market. Now, we are attempting to address that by describing clearly what products we want to develop, but it's a mess, since everyone has their own baby.
It sounds trite, but unless you know exactly what your goal is, you will never know when you are doing the right things to bring it to fruition.
An example, don't say you are going to develop "Internet based software for the medical industry". That's way too vague, and a much bigger elephant than anyone can eat. Instead say you are going to develop "a physician continuing education portal where Doctors may take online classes for continuing education credits".
The last thing you want are those expensive developers sitting around twiddling their thumbs because they don't know what it is they are supposed to be creating. Marketing people tend to be sales based, and they will promise potential clients anything, regardless of if it has anything to do with what your original plan was. For example, we are developing internet based software, but our sales people have actually promised potential customers that we would write them Windows 98 apps that run on an Access database. We the developers have had to veto that kind of thing many times.
In other words, find your precise niche, and don't let yourself become distracted from it. The easiest way to miss your target is to not know what it is.
Sorry for the rant, living with this situation is making me bitter... ;)
Some guy named Chris
Please, don't take this the wrong way, but I think you are expecting the wrong things from school. It sounds trite, but you get from your education exactly as much as you are willing to put into it.
In other words, if you are interested in something, then learn about it on your own. When I graduated with my degree, I had real, professional experience in AIX and Solaris, as well as non-professional experience programming in several languages not taught at the school.
I did much more than what was required of me to get my degree. I went out and found a job as a sys admin for, of all things, a food distribution company. The pay was crap, but it was great experience for when I graduated. And I started reading source code, learning how things were done outside the narrow world of undergraduate studies.
I bought books about programming languages that interested me, and worked through them. I joined the local ACM, and got involved with programming contests. I started a student organization for people interested in artificial intelligence, and had a faculty advisor join us who's PhD was in neural networks. I arranged to take a self study course under that same professor researching algorithmic music composition.
I'm not bragging here. Nothing I did you cannot do as well. The key is to accept the limits of what your institution offers, and declare yourself responsable for anything else you want to learn. There is no shortage of information freely available on the internet and in your school library, if you are only willing to seek it out.
Good luck to you, I mean it. But, in the end, it is you alone who is responsible for what you get out of your education. Be willing to do above and beyond what is expected of you, be willing to work while in school for less than you are worth just for the experience, and be flexable in when and where you find learning opportunities. Those things will push you farther and faster towards your goals than banging your head against the wall wishing for the system to change.
Some guy named Chris
The argument i've heard is that "that kind of thing is for tech schools." Fine. Then what the hell should I learn in CS at a university? Windows is important in our world now, and it shouldn't be overlooked.
Whoa, calm down.
You simply do not understand how the American higher education system is set up. Universities do not exist to train you a specific set of skills, they prepare you for you future by teaching you how to learn. In a CS program, it is done using some arbitrary programming language and computer platform because those skills are just that, arbitrary.
Imagine being in school 10 years ago, when DOS was hot, and they taught you all about memory segmentation, specific DOS system calls, how to program the CGI card, etc. You would be in the situation of having to learn an entire new skill set now anyway.
That's why you have to take those physics classes, and calculus, etc, when you are in a university, because those classes teach you how to solve problems in the general case, and how to learn how to solve new ones you haven't been specifically taught how to solve.
You want to know about Cisco routers and the Windows API, huh? That's fine. Personally, I want to be the person who obsoletes those technologies. As Dennis Ritchie said in the August, 1984 issue of the CACM,
So, you are right. Tech schools are there to train you, while universities exist to educate you. If it's training you want, which is what it sounds like, either enroll in your local tech school or community college.
Some guy named Chris