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Comment Re:Music, comedy and something else of interest (Score 1) 165

What I would prefer is movies that have subtitles in two languages simultaneously, my own and that of the speaker. I have much more difficulty understanding spoken Spanish, for example, than printed Spanish because my ear is not well tuned to the spoken words. Once I know what words are being spoken I often understand what is being said. And if I don't, the English translation will help with that.

Comment SNL already figured it out (Score 1) 568

Saturday Night Live had a brilliant sketch back in the 70's or 80's that perfectly illustrated why the large-brained tend to go extinct. The sketch had a small band of caveman hunters gathered around the campfire at night after the hunt. Brutus, the leader of the band was a muscular and stupid jock who kept walking through the fire and burning his feet while boasting of his hunting prowess. One of the others, a proto-nerd played by Bill Murray, decided it would be a good time to bring up an idea he had about how they could catch more game if, rather than just chase after their prey, they could surround it and close in on it from all directions, making it harder for it to escape. The other cave men seemed to begin to grasp the concept until Brutus walked around behind the Murray character and dropped a boulder on his head. It remains my all-time favorite SNL sketch.
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Music By Natural Selection 164

maccallr writes "The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum 'genome size' and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change."

Comment Re:Woop de freakin do (Score 1) 139

You can't take it in all at once on your puny computer, but there is a single full resolution image file somewhere that could conceivably be printed at 100% if there were a printer in existence that could print 30 meter wide rolls (or whatever it would take) or a monitor with enough pixels to display it. So, lacking those means of displaying the image, the next best thing is a zoomable image such as shown here.

Submission + - 26 Gigapixel photo sets new world's record (google.com) 2

FrenchSilk writes: The largest gigapixel photograph ever created with a DSLR camera was made by A.F.B. Media GmbH in Dresden, Germany. 1655 images, each 21.6 megapixels in size, were taken with a Canon 5D Mark II and a 400 mm lens over a period of 176 minutes. The images were stitched on a 16 processor system with 48 G of main memory, taking 94 hours to create the final result. The interactive view can be found here: http://www.dresden-26-gigapixels.com/dresden26GP.

Comment Try turning off the Windows Search Indexer (Score 1) 835

Windows search indexer turned out to be the cause of horrendous performance on my system. You can turn it off by running Services (find it at Start>Programs>Admiistrative Tools>Services). Right-click Windows Search service and select Properties. In Startup type, choose Manual. This made a huge difference in my case.

Comment Re:Commodore BASIC (Score 1) 213

A lot of parsing was done at runtime, rather than at entry time or program startup time.

Such as??? The Commie 64 tokenized every statement at input time. You can find the complete list of C-64 tokens here.

Very few high-level constructs.

Compared to what? Look at the token list. It has many high level functions. Can you give some examples of competing computers at the time that had more? Apple II? TRS-80? Atari 400 or Atari 800? TI-99?

Most BASICs at the time would at least tokenize at entry time, and many even converted programs to P-code for execution.

As I said, C-64 tokenized too. Can you name one computer in that time that did more than the C-64 regards tokenizing or P-code? And how would you differentiate between C-64 tokens and P-code? Aren't they are basically the same thing?

Comment Re:Commodore BASIC (Score 1) 213

I would disagree. I wrote a commercially successful program for the VIC-20, which had the same BASIC as the C-64, and I found that I could not port it to the Atari 400 or TI-99 because their BASIC interpreters were too restrictive. The C-64 interpreter, which was written by a nerdy guy named Bill Gates, allowed a lot of space-saving tricks that made my program possible. Using all these tricks made the code nearly impossible to read, but who cares? Sacrificing readability for functionality is a no-brainer. This page" contains the code for one of the two programs that made up my product. It is the only Assembler ever written for such a small program space (3583 bytes), making it the smallest assembler ever written.

I have always considered it my best hack and there is a little more about it here.

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