APL was awesome! I wrote more write-only code in APL when working for IBM than I have ever since. IBM machines had APL keyboards which worked just fine :). Seriously, APL is great for many mathematical/matrix related purposes.

That's exactly what I was thinking, Venus probes are notoriously hard to cool. Also, solar explorers, or anywhere else in the solar system where there is high heat, would be good targets for high temp electronics. With some improvement on temp and longevity this might be just what is needed. The current record for Venus is 107 minutes.

APNEWS has just posted an article saying Apple has reversed its decision on the censoring.

See: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20100615/D9GBTQFO3.html

Your hypothesis fails the falsification test. Basically no matter what Google does, people like you are going to say they did it for their direct advantage.

To make it a scientific opinion, you have to give an example of an action that Google will take that will convince you they were not evil. Sometime ago, slashdotters were saying that if Google open sources VP8, that would be proof enough. Apparently you want more. So tell us. What do you want?

And those are ridiculously easy once you get the trick. The first ones that were out, I remember, hit in the very early 90's in magazines like Popular Science. In those, you had two dots right above the picture, and the instructions were to visually split the dots and combine them in such a way there were now three. That achieved, look down at the picture.

Most, if not all of the later ones removed those instructions, and it became a game of "stare at this until you get it." For the really old-timers, we understood the real trick is to cross your eyes slightly and vary the degree until you hit the magic separation necessary to resolve the picture.

I'm not entirely convinced the effects are related to those used for 3D movies, since Magic Eye works through the transposition created by overlapping the two visual fields by crossing your eyes.

This is the case in Michigan. You may not enter an intersection unless you can also exit the intersection in a reasonable amount of time. Entering in the case of vehicles blocking your exit is considered blocking the intersection. It's not running a red, but cameras can't be the basis for tickets here either.

This is essentially how it is in Athens, GA. My wife (several times, unfortunately) got tagged by one of the 4 red light cams in Athens. The letter (no video, or link to video... just a Print Page from IE, completely with a URL at the bottom) showing 2 pictures of her van. The "ticket" was for me to pay the $75 fine, as the van is in my name. She forgot to pay it, and called the courthouse to see what would happen. The person there said "nothing will happen, wont go on your record, no warrants will ever be issued... you will just keep getting letters to pay".

They dont even report to credit agencies there, as there's no clear way to tell who's driving... so they'll just send you monthly letters saying "PAY ME Or or or.. I'll tell you to pay me again!"

its all about the encoders !

google can quite easily make reference but until there is High quality encoders then its pretty pointless

making decoder plugins for IE and mac is actually pretty easy in comparison

hardware reference designes need to be seeded also to the likes of TI and STMicroelectronics before it will even start to be useful after all where do all the camera's now do mp4 come from...

its all about the encoders !

regards

John Jones

I started programming in HP Basic around 1974. Line numbers, gosub, the whole bit. I taught myself how to program from the tutorial programs included with the language. TUT01, ....

As I learned how to program I learned what not to do if you want to maintain your code. I learned how to program in blocks, subroutines, etc. virtually while still using BASIC as the tool. If you didn't learn how to be systematic in your coding, you would never be able to build large programs in BASIC. By large programs I mean 1000's to 10's of thousands of lines of code. (I wrote two large programs during this time in BASIC, a chess program and a FORTRAN emulator to do arbitrary precision arithmetic, which I wrote to be able to solve diff eq's to do solar system modeling among other things).

If I had written spaghetti code I never would've been able to debug these monsters. If you are a good programmer you build your own style and mechanisms to manage the complexity. When I went to college, I learned PASCAL, and then I ported my chess program to it in just a few weeks. I loved the structure, but also felt it straightjacketed me with some of its limitations.

Now, my favorite language is LISP, but I program more in C++ as it is the language most of the students I work with know. Over the years I've programmed in more languages than I can recall.

In looking at all the languages, each has its uses. Knowing many languages lets you think in more metaphors, and styles, so you can choose the best one for the problem you encounter. You can program horribly in any language, and you can code elegantly in any language. Learning how to think about how to solve problems logically, efficiently, and elegantly is the key to being a good programmer, not the particular language you are currently using.

In high school in 1974 our district (8 schools) used an HP access timesharing system. It ran the BASIC language. I was able to write a very short program that would cause the system to crash. Having discovered this bug in the system, I was able to bring down the entire district's computers at will. I had discovered this capability while exploring a new feature of BASIC. Fortunately for them, I was ethical and informed my teacher who at first didn't believe the exploit until I demonstrated it in front of her. We then contacted HP, gave them the code, and they came up with a patch within a couple of months. I'm not sure if anyone at HP can confirm this at this point.

I am sure that there are probably earlier exploits as well.

And as a side note, I was also a PLATO author in 1975 and greatly enjoyed working on that system.

The problem has been fixed, it was interference by some bolts.

"Late Saturday, the space station's commander, Jeffrey Williams, reported that bolts seemed to be causing the interference. He removed all eight bolts, saying the clearance would be tight but that the cover likely would fit. It did, with some coaxing Sunday."

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20100214/D9DS3UOO1.html

Wouldn't that depend on what else you got with it? Perhaps a romantic getaway after you turn it on to clean while you are away?

I like gifts that go together to tell a story, or set a mood.

My wife (she's an engineer, not quite a nerd), loves our roomba. I work in robotics, but she is much more into the roomba than I am. I guess it depends on the person.

Perhaps I need to get an iPad to calculate this -- lol