Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work
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It's unclear if he's talking about 2001 the novel, or 2001 the film, but this is another case of "I didn't actually bother to consume the media, but I'm going to go out of my way to post a question about it to random Internet people."
(Actually he says the third Monolith is around Saturn, which means he's talking about the novel-- in the movie it's Jupiter-- which means the question is even LESS forgivable because while it takes a little bit of independent thought in the movie where it's not spelled-out, it is spelled-out clearly in the novel.)
The high-pitched sound heard (in the movie version at least; I don't recall if the book has it) is due to the Monolith happening to, by pure chance, broadcast on some of the same frequencies the moon suit radios were using. It's unclear whether the signal the second Monolith sent was for the benefit of the progenitor aliens, or merely the signpost pointing to Saturn.
For the record, Bowman touches the third Monolith to get warped to the location where he becomes the Star Child. There is no fourth monolith, as the questioner seems to think there is.
EDIT: I suppose in the movie version, there's a "fourth Monolith", the one in the hotel room created from Bowman's memories while they were studying him. I don't think it was an actual physical item, however, just something in his mind.
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@blakeyrat When I read the title of this thread, I knew you'd made a terrible mistake. Then I read the post, which confirmed it. Like, what.
@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
he's talking about the novel
@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
There is no fourth monolith, as the questioner seems to think there is.
EDIT: I suppose in the movie version, there's a "fourth Monolith"I guess he's talking about both, then? 's all around on this one.
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Here's another favorite of the genre: asking literally everybody in the world except the one person who can actually answer the question.
If you want to know how much to touch-up the photos, ask the person who provided the photos. Duh?
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@Fox said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
I guess he's talking about both, then? 's all around on this one.
The first novel is a mutant, in that it was written solely to expand on the story (The Sentinel-- the title of which BTW is a good description of what the monolith on the moon was/did) enough to make a movie based on it. In that novel, the third Monolith is in orbit around Saturn.
In all other 2001-related things, including the later novels, the third Monolith is in orbit around Jupiter. Originally because Kubrick couldn't figure out how to realistically depict Saturn's rings with the special effects technology available to him. In fact, 2010 depends on the setting being Jupiter; that novel couldn't have been written for Saturn.
One of the later novels (2061? 3001? I can't remember, both kind of sucked) also explicitly states that they found the original monolith in Africa and put it in a museum or something. That always bugged me, since leaving it behind seems to defeat the purpose of the second Monolith. I always assumed the moon Monolith was the first Monolith, moved and buried. Or the first Monolith was destroyed in some way.
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@blakeyrat Ironically, the poster starts out with
The images were not professionally taken
Which basically means "These photos haven't already been touched up with no regard given to whether or not the person would be offended by having their wrinkles removed"
So why does this person care, if they clearly would rather have had someone else touch up the photos?
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@Groaner It's also really good for coming up with answers to questions you think up of on your commute to and from work.
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I'd suggest
QuaoarQuora as an alternative if you need one, since despite supposedly being more erudite and classy than SO, many of the questions are if anything even more pants-on-head-retarded that those are.OTOH, if you really want a laugh, we can always revive the "stupid things said on Yahoo! Answers" thread, which makes the circus freaks described on "Not Always Right" look like Oxford dons.
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@ScholRLEA Why are you people talking about this. Please stop. I don't want to have to cease doing another activity I find enjoyable because of morons going off-topic and being jerks in my thread.
The thread title is "Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work", not "Random Idiots Discuss Which Websites Might Be Fun To Read On The Bus I Guess".
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This guy also needs to watch his Star Trek.
When communicating with other ships, it's frequently audio-only for whatever reason. (Universal translator works better on audio? Perhaps?) Also Star Trek officers frequently send "letters" to and from home; which are sometimes portrayed as video messages, but other times are simply text. (The Voyager example is a special case, as they had limited bandwidth so they had to use text.)
BTW if they send video like an analog TV, in a way prone to radio distortion, it's possible a video message might be more understandable in less bandwidth than the equivalent text message. Sending text over a non-binary link is relatively difficult, and the text will drop characters like crazy when interfered with. You could see (kinda) and hear old analog TV transmissions with downright SHITTY signal.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
It's unclear whether the signal the second Monolith sent was for the benefit of the progenitor aliens, or merely the signpost pointing to Saturn.
Either way, it was clearly a notification/alarm to the progenitors.
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@ScholRLEA said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Quora
Has Quora stopped requiring you to login to even read the conversation?
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
BTW if they send video like an analog TV, in a way prone to radio distortion, it's possible a video message might be more understandable in less bandwidth than the equivalent text message.
No.
@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
The thread title is "Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work", not "Random Idiots Discuss Which Websites Might Be Fun To Read On The Bus I Guess".
No. I am a deterministic idiot.
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@FrostCat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Either way, it was clearly a notification/alarm to the progenitors.
By 2001, it's not even clear the progenitors even exist. They're never mentioned in the books IIRC; the Monoliths are all robots that run unsupervised.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
By 2001, it's not even clear the progenitors even exist. They're never mentioned in the books IIRC; the Monoliths are all robots that run unsupervised.
It's been 20 or 30 years since I read the first book, but I definitely remember aliens setting up the Monoliths and then waiting for the Monoliths to phone home.
I'm not sure but I don't think I ever read The Sentinel.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
BTW if they send video like an analog TV, in a way prone to radio distortion, it's possible a video message might be more understandable in less bandwidth than the equivalent text message. Sending text over a non-binary link is relatively difficult, and the text will drop characters like crazy when interfered with. You could see (kinda) and hear old analog TV transmissions with downright SHITTY signal.
Text is better. We've got some crazy-good error correction algorithms, but they're currently only used on deep space missions because the bandwidth to and from the outer solar system is so awful. For anything up to lunar orbit (maybe even as far as Mars) we can more easily compensate by just cranking the power up. The space agencies know lots about this area.
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@dkf said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Text is better
A picture is worth a thousand words. You have the option of using a 31x31 avatar (RGBA), or 35 tweets. On a amd64 machine you may use a CDN for 44x44 avatars.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
The first novel is a mutant, in that it was written solely to expand on the story (The Sentinel-- the title of which BTW is a good description of what the monolith on the moon was/did) enough to make a movie based on it. In that novel, the third Monolith is in orbit around Saturn.
In all other 2001-related things, including the later novels, the third Monolith is in orbit around Jupiter. Originally because Kubrick couldn't figure out how to realistically depict Saturn's rings with the special effects technology available to him.Ok, that explains my confusion, been ages since I read the books but I remember Saturn being mentioned in 2001 while I know it had to be Jupiter in the latter ones.
I remember both 2001 and 2010 being pretty interesting, 2010 especially. Too bad the movie was pretty meh, but yeah, no budget will do that...
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@Onyx said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Too bad the movie was pretty meh, but yeah, no budget will do that...
I dunno. It's not Kubrick, but I think it holds-up pretty well.
And they would have had a lot more money to work with if Kubrick hadn't purposefully destroyed all the Discovery sets-- they had to rebuild the whole thing from photos. That was a huge money sink.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
I dunno. It's not Kubrick, but I think it holds-up pretty well.
Dunno, maybe I just had too high expectations. It wasn't bad by any means.
@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
And they would have had a lot more money to work with if Kubrick hadn't purposefully destroyed all the Discovery sets-- they had to rebuild the whole thing from photos.
Ouch! Well, that explains a lot I guess.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
but this is another case of "I didn't actually bother to consume the media, but I'm going to go out of my way to post a question about it to random Internet people."
I get the vague feeling that this particular genre of dumb question is people taking film and lit courses with sniff test assignments to make sure you actually viewed/read the media.
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@Onyx said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Dunno, maybe I just had too high expectations. It wasn't bad by any means.
I liked it WAY better than 2001, especially as a kid. But boy, that whole Soviet Union vs US peace message didn't age well.
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@cartman82 It was even worse in the book, IIRC. In the book the Russians kick them off Leonov, even though they're the only humans for millions of miles and the Discovery is in awful shape after being abandoned for like 12 years. And they have a little mini-Cold War between the Leonov and the Discovery.
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569 gifs.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Kubrick [...] purposefully destroyed all the Discovery sets
I'd never heard that. Why?
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@FrostCat Kubrick did a lot of things.
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@FrostCat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Kubrick [...] purposefully destroyed all the Discovery sets
I'd never heard that. Why?
He feared people reusing and exploitation of his material. Kubrick was crazy, but talented. Hence why the moon-landings look so good.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
@FrostCat Kubrick did a lot of things.
Not really. He only directed 16 films, and only 13 of them feature length.
Compare that to a prolific director like Tyler Perry:
40 directorial credits, not even including TV shows. Stage, TV, film-- writer, director, ACTOR, producer AND he's produced and performed multiple songs on soundtracks.
"a lot of things". Please.
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@Lorne-Kates I don't know why I post here.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
@Lorne-Kates I don't know why I post here.
For my wit.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
I don't know why I post here.
Self-abuse is my guess.
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@blakeyrat I don't know why either but I'm grateful that you do.
It just wouldn't be the same.
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@FrostCat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Self-abuse is my guess.
Onan thread is
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
@Jaloopa Are you Blakeyrat? Get out of here with that shit.
Do we need to move this to the Look at Me category?
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@boomzilla said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Do we need to move this to the Look at Me category?
Go for it. I'm so illiterate I thought it was already there, but I'm also insane so who knows.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
If you want to know how much to touch-up the photos, ask the person who provided the photos. Duh?
Yes. Best you phrase that question: "Hey, you're really exceptionally ugly... how much photoshop am I allowed to use on this?"
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If I went a year without beef, I'd kill myself. Fuck the trees.
I like how there's three different answers coming from different angles, all calling that "factoid" utter bullshit.
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How about using a better language that actually has specifications, instead of shitty C or C++?
But oh wait, even in C there are number types which specify their range. So fucking use them.
... I guess to answer the question literally: yes ban "long", unless you're using C# where "long" has a firm definition that won't randomly change as you move computers.
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@blakeyrat Yes,
long
sucks. If OS makers could have just agreed on what it meant across different architectures it would be a lot better, though still kind of awful.MS's
LongPtr
is perhaps the best illustration oflong
's shittiness.Now...this is surprising:
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@boomzilla I see it as C's problem, not the OS maker's. Especially since some of the affected OSes (for example: Mac Classic, or Xerox Parc) were not C-based at all, but still suffered from painful porting of C code.
StackOverflow is really boring today.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
I see it as C's problem, not the OS maker's.
It's both, though. I mean, yeah, C left it open, but the OS makers making stuff different made stuff worse.
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@boomzilla LongPtr. Long Pointer. It's an integer that's the same length as a pointer on whatever platform you're on.
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@boomzilla said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
It's both, though. I mean, yeah, C left it open, but the OS makers making stuff different made stuff worse.
you mean the compiler makers, right?
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@fbmac said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
you mean the compiler makers, right?
No.
Many 64-bit platforms today use an LP64 model (including Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, OS X, BSD, and IBM z/OS). Microsoft Windows uses an LLP64 model.
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@fbmac said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
@ blakeygoat personality said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work
we're all blakeyrat. you're the one that didn't figureweyou have multiple personality disorder.FTFY
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@boomzilla quited Wikipedia in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
Microsoft Windows uses an LLP64 model.
Yet .NET uses LP64
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@boomzilla said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
It's both, though. I mean, yeah, C left it open, but the OS makers making stuff different made stuff worse.
Apple used a 16-bit int because the CPU it was on (the 68000) was a 16-bit CPU. They didn't fudge it to support C, because it was originally designed in PASCAL. And they weren't magical faeries who could see the future and predict the increasing popularity of C when they designed all this.
I mean... duh.
There's no way this is Apple's fault. It's all C. And also why I say it's bullshit when people say C was designed to be portable. It might have accidentally ended-up being the most portable language, but it certainly wasn't designed that way.
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@boomzilla that doesn't mean shit. it's the compiler choice how it interprets the keyword "long".
gcc opted for the idioticy of changing it's meaning from the 32 to it's 64bit version.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
There's no way this is Apple's fault. It's all C.
That wasn't what I was referring to, but I agree with you there.
@fbmac said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
that doesn't mean shit. it's the compiler choice how it interprets the keyword "long".
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
most portable language
The modern replacement for C should be LLVM, all the types explicit.
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@blakeyrat said in Blakeyrat Reads StackOverflow While Bored At Work:
If I went a year without beef, I'd kill myself. Fuck the trees.
I like how there's three different answers coming from different angles, all calling that "factoid" utter bullshit.I love these "will save X amount of Y" bullshits. Because they always ALWAYS ignore the amount of X that will be incurred to replace Y with Z.
We all stop eating beef. Great. But that won't reduce the overall caloric intake the population will need. You have to replace that food with something.
So we switch to chickens. Which also need to be raised on farmland. Which will require clearcutting forest. Probably domestic forest, because chickens don't get shipped from overseas. And guess what, we don't have that much room since there's fucking corn everywhere. You still end up plowing ~X worth of shit.
Fine, let's all go vegan! We replace beef with soy. Soy is "healthy" and "natural" and blah blah blah. Oops, looks like it's also difficult to grow, especially if most of the land is already dedicated to corn. So maybe we increase our overseas purchase-- from china-- who doesn't give two rat's shits what gets plowed under to make that sweet sweet USD. Oh, plus man cannot live on soy alone, so we'll also need lots of farmland for growing other lentils and suppliments to make up the nutritional difference between beef and soy. OH AND AS A BONUS, because of the increase in over-seas shipping, you've now increased your carbon footprint. Without adding any additional trees.
Maybe instead we can just murder everyone who says "will save X amount of Y", which will reduce the overall population, which will reduce the carbon footprint and caloric requirements of the human race.