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Microsoft Wins Patent on Web Standard

I can't seem to find any evidence that it's been discredited yet (Google keeps giving me the quack sites rather than trustable responses) but I did find this.
Since it was a news program, it can't be considered too credible. (Though, this might just be an American bias since we've had major news networks show "proof" of faith healing and the Apollo moon hoax) However, it seems to have been conducted by credible scientists along with Randi himself. As expected, it showed no statistical deviation.

Since 4 other studies seemed to support the orginal one, but no mention was made of how many contradicted it, I'm going to guess that all 5 studies supporting it were due to statistical or human error.

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While the idea of a 3D printer cheap enough for personal use /is/ going to revolutionize the world by making certain real items as cheap as software, the part about it being a von Neumann machine is overrated. The article just mentions it in passing and there is no evidence that he's actually figured out how to do that. That's been one of the holy grails of engineering since it was proposed. The article doesn't mention whether the materials used will be recyclable. Since everyone and their grandmother will start spitting out objects if they have this and since it would probably be cheaper to build a new object rather than repairing an old one, mass use of UCs will produce tons of waste. Imagine if you could never delete any file on your computer but could create more easily. You would run out of space very quickly.

BTW, for a good book on the social implications of cheap universal constructors, I suggest the Stephenson's book Diamond Age.

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There is a Wired article on this issue.

I bet that the porn industry goes for the HD-DVD because of it's backwards compatability....

I'd rather go for this tech though. Non moving parts would be great for power saving and have less chance of failure.

Data from independent product-testing organization Consumer Reports indicates that hybrid cars get less than 60 percent of EPA estimates while navigating city streets. In Consumer Reports' real-world driving test, the Civic Hybrid averaged 26 mpg in the city, while the Toyota Prius averaged 35 mpg, much less than their respective EPA estimates of 47 and 60 mpg. Hybrid cars performed much closer to EPA estimates in Consumer Reports' highway tests.

Well, there is enough solar energy if only there was a way to cheaply capture all the energy falling on uninhabited land. Do you know how big the desert Southwest or Australian Outback is? PVs won't do it. You might be able to do it with saltwater algae ponds or solar towers. Nuclear fusion is the holy grail, but I don't think we'll perfect that by the time we run out of cheap oil.

Link It should be noted that this isn't an atmosphere in the common sense. The air is continually created and lost due to internal sources and weak gravity.

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Hmm...I can still outrun that so I guess I don't have to welcome our new robotic overlords for a couple more months. We'll only have to start worrying if the robots can actually move fast enough to catch and enslave us.

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Solar, wind, hydro, and tidal are not viable options for complete replacement of oil. Do the math like they have here. Do you want to see windmills taking up entire states' full of land and killing millions of birds a year? Or how about solar panels on the roof of every building but still nowhere near enough for the whole electric grid. Let's throw in hydro and tidal and devastate more ecology. Why not try everything without knowing the full consequences of our actions?

Extreme environmentalists cry for all this stuff without thinking enough about it. Every "environmental" source such as these actually hurt the environment while not even solving the problem. The only reasons nuclear is frowned upon are political. Nuclear plants can be made extremely safe and far from most civilization. Fix political problems like what to do with spent cells. Don't waste effort on things that won't completely eliminate the need for oil.

You might not need the blinking LEDs. Remember Audiopad? It used plastic shapes that the computer could see somehow.

Slashdot Article

Wired News Article

The article says "Reynolds said... that Turion-powered systems could have up to one-third less battery life than laptops running on Intel's ultra low voltage products." That sounds like its just a comparison of the 27W to 35W specs of the processors. However, since both companies have their own systems to dynamically scale back power by slowing down the CPU like SpeedStep and PowerNow, could the power labels be inaccurate as a measure of battery life in this case? Just like how clock-vs-clock benchmarks are no longer valid, could the same now be true about Watt-vs-Watt measurements?

*shrugs* Then again, AMD might just be flat out decieving on the benchmarks because they are thinking of their shareholders rather than their customers.

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The goal: http://www.wired.com/news/images/full/nhsequence_f .jpg

The model: http://www.wired.com/news/images/full/642_f.jpg

The goal: http://www.wired.com/news/images/full/nhsequence_f .jpg

The model: http://www.wired.com/news/images/full/642_f.jpg

Links? It's really strange, all of the official web sites that I had that showed this stuff seem to have up and vanished.

Here are some second-source things:
Apple's letters to VfW devopers:
http://www.pa.msu.edu/~hamlin/facts/1stltr.html
http://www.pa.msu.edu/~hamlin/facts/2ndltr.html

A tiny snippet that tells how the case actually came out, courtesy of the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/19970206203623/http://w ww.macworld.com/pages/may.95/News.705.html (Scroll down some)

The only reference I can find to the rumor about this issue forcing the investment in Apple and the patent swap and the agreement to keep developing Mac software is from here:
http://www.mackido.com/History/History_VfW.html
However, I saw quite a few references to that rumor in the circles I was traveling in at time, and I know for a fact that there was still a lawsuit that was settled and disappeared without a trace right around that time, so...

Another one where Apple won one:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,16141, 00.html

As for why QuickTime works so badly now, I can only surmise that one of the following is true:
- Apple has stopped really trying.
- Microsoft succeeded in making it impossible to do within QT's budget.
- Microsoft has gotten a lot better at what they do, and thus make the QT group look worse.

Given how often MS has been convicted of sabotaging rivals, I'd have to say that the second sounds like the most likely. Real has mentioned in a lot of interviews that if they didn't rely on undocumented Windows calls that they reverse-engineered, they wouldn't be able to get their product working acceptably.

Ah, Microsoft... to know you is to know just how much I'm being known by you.

In the biblical sense, of course.

-fred

Actually thats not how they evaluate it.

For instance, Amish are trying out cell phones. They are picky, but the criteria they use is 'will the tech bring us closer together or drive us further apart?'

For instance, they tried land phones...and apparently the lines got crossed, and someone heard a neighbor badmouthing her...

They also felt it was rude to leave the people that were in your house to talk to someone who's 'not there.'

For those reasons, they didn't adpot telephones.

But they are using computers (powered by their own generators).

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/amish.html

In order to clear up the confusion about performance, the FPGA company involved here has decided to drop the 90MHz from ads and just call the FPGA 75000 ultra-uber-extreme edition.

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They're still Not Good Enough. FPGAs are faster than running software on a normal CPU, but they're still not as fast as running on pure hardware. While modern GPUs are programmable, they're still dependent on extreme hardware which is basically tons of simple circuits doing the same few operations. FPGAs are used when the system has to be more flexible than just 1) get vertex 2) transform 3) paint. Places like ATI do use FPGA systems when they are designing the hardware since it has faster turnaround time from design->test->debug than real hardware. However, these FPGA implementations of GPUs tend to be 1-2 orders of magnitude slower than the final hardware.

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Yes, because no one ever makes legitimate calls from overseas.

You must work for Verizon.

Maybe OCD maybe not, but probably a little Aspergerish. Many (maybe most?) of the geniuses in CS and mathematics are.

This reminds me of the DepthX submarine which was described in a recent issue of Wired. The probe would drop down, melt through the ice, and then autonomously search for hydrothermal activity on the sea floor.

The group working on it is currently putting together a version to explore and search for life in a rather hostile water-filled cave in Mexico. They've got a progress report here, with many details and pictures.

Some other links related to a Europa probe:

http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/archive/design/europa/
http://www.cosmographica.com/gallery/portfolio/por tfolio351/pages/352-EuropaProbe.htm (neat painting)
http://www.cascadia.ctc.edu/facultyweb/instructors /jvanleer/astro%20sum01/astro101/missions_to_europ a.htm
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20021102/fob3r ef.asp

Scientific articles:

The Challenge of Landing on Europa
Possible ecosystems and the search for life on Europa
others

Yahoo spent $339 on research vs. Google's $139 (where it all went is a mystery though)

Yahoo has 5,500 employees vs. Google's 1,907

Each user spent 4.8 hours on Yahoo per month vs. Google's 0.6

Yahoo gets 119 million unique visitors per month vs. Google's 72 million.

(Data represents four quarters ending Sept. 2004).

Although Yahoo may not be as geek friendly (and therefore Slashdot friendly I guess) as Google, it has a lot of customers and is the starting point for a large part of the web-surfing population.

To me, this seems like very good leverage to squeeze into Google's main revenue source, targeded ads.

Anyone remember that PR nightmare a couple years back when people found out that using the IR (marketed as a nightvision) system on a certain Sony handheld cam would allow people to see through thin layers of clothing? A Google search for Sony x ray should give the results for anyone who is interested. And on the topic of cheap IR gear, http://www.amasci.com/amateur/irgoggl.html. It's effectively the same thing as this story but it's about what happens if you just stick the filter on a pair of goggles and use them during bright sunlight.

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Virtual museums are overrated. When VRML became The Next Big thing about 10 years ago, I looked into creating virtual museums, and we're still not at the tech level that we can pull them off. 2D objects look bad when they're distorted into a 3d projection on such a small screen. The best way to view virtual paintings is just as a normal bitmap on a large enough screen. 3D objects like vases and small sculptures do work well in VRML since you can rotate them and view them from any angle. Large (with respect to the virtual user) sculptures and architecture tend to look boring on a screen compared to the real thing and aren't worth it unless viewed in 3D googles to get a sense of the depth involved.

And the whole walking part in a virtual museum is completely worthless unless the museum's architecture is artistic by itself since walking is slower than the "teleportation" available with normal hyperlinks.

BTW, this technology doesn't really compare with QTVR since QTVR is an output system and this technology is an input system to generate 3D models. You would still need a 3D renderer with texture support to view the data produced from this system.

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From one of the links: The SIFT algorithm is restricted by patents in the United States and hence this software is not completely free to use. For details see the LICENSE file included in the distribution, before you start to use this software.

Hopefully, they're liberal about the patent and will let noncommercial nonresearch applications use the algorithm. Otherwise, we would have to wait for the really interesting software to come out.

A C# implementation with support for Mono is available to play with for anyone who is interested: http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/libsift/
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Since slashdot will probably burn out the web server hosting images: http://www.mdrobotics.ca.nyud.net:8090/ism/behind. htm

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You might be mistaking commercial software with selling software, which indirectly implies that only propriatery software can be sold.
This is of course nonsense. The business model might be sligtly different since the software itself isn't always sold like individual slices of pizza, but a lot of those companies out there are making software which they use to either support their infrastucture and/or sell support for it to their customers. Just because it isn't being shipped in boxes to a store doesn't mean that the software used isn't commercial. And by the way, you contradicted yourself when you said:

Claiming that GPL-style "Free" software can't be commercial is about as accurate as saying that human beings can't have 11 fingers.

and at the end you said:

The standard business model for 99.999% of today's commercial software CANNOT work with the GPL.

Those two lines are obviously contradictory as the former is in accordance with my conclusion (that commercial Free software is widespread and in increasingly heavy use in the industry) while the latter is the exact opposite. I therefore take it that you are in complete agreement with my conclusion since the evidence is so overwhelmingly obvious.

There is also a misconception that software can only be a product from one company but Free software is often developed by many individuals and companies who all see the benefit in spending their resources on it.
Claiming that Free software can't be commercial is about as accurate as saying that most human beings don't have 10 fingers.

Kryeziu said he's happy to supply the PearPC developers with the source code so they can see for themselves, and will do so when the first public release is ready, which will likely be in a few days.
"If it's based on PearPC, the PearPC developers will figure it out," he said. "I will provide the source code so they can compare it. I will give it to them to clear up the trash talk."

Yeah, he seems trustworthy.

The problem with that metric is that SETI@home has such as high lag time between nodes (data gets sent every few hours or so) that you can't really compare it with a supercomputer for most tasks. It would be better to say SETI@home is running at N*X where N is the average user count and X is the FLOPS/user. Other companies are already selling distributed computing time.

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I read an interesting article about the South American drug trade couple months back (link) Apparently with the U.S. sponsered herbicide spraying farmers aren't able to grow legitimate crops. As a result the farmers had to switch to herbicide resistant cocaine.

He was also part of the Strategic Defense Initiative in the 80s

Given how much of a waste of money the SDI program was (or should I say is), I hope his work at NASA is better. Otherwise, we might end up with an planetary defense system on the moon to protect us from Martian terrorists.

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Apparently the VirtualPC code is on tap for use in XB-Next. I think that MS is basically trying to out-Playstation Sony while publicly belittling Nintendo (hey, just my opinion). Having backwards-compatability is a must.

From the article: "If someone discovered the combination of your bike lock, should they be able to publish it? I think the making it public part is the real sticking point."

I would agree that no, the shouldn't be allowed to publish your bike lock combination. However, if someone discovered that the bike lock can be opened by sticking a pen in it, I should have a right to know that the lock I bought has a serious vulnerability. And the way for me to find out about it is that this information has been published.

If it does stop, here is the mirrordot link.

That said, what impresses me is that they pulled it off with an A64 3200.

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I was getting excited since I thought they had actually created a practical reversible computing hardware system. The idea behind true reversible computing is that information flow in computation is linked to the energy lost as heat during computing. Von Neumann showed that there was a hard limit on the amount of energy needed everytime a bit of information is lost dependent on Boltzmann's constant and temperature of the system. The ultimate goal is to have a computer that looks a lot like particle physics where the rules are completely time-symmetric. I.e. if I reverse the flow of time, the laws of physics will still run properly and allow me to reconstruct all the previous states from the present one. While the principle of quantum reversibility (sometimes called the "conservation of information law") you can't do the same with most binary operations since all the common ones except NOT take in 2 bits and output 1 bit. Thus, it is impossible to run the system in reverse and reconstruct those two bits from that one bit. This has the adverse effect of wasting energy as heat into the environment.

It's and interesting field that's going to take off as Moore's Law slows down due to wasted heat. A good starting page with links for the interested is here.

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I would guess it has something to do with personal information about him being illegally obtained by the RIAA which led directly to him losing thousands of dollars. Would you not complain? Guilt or innocence is moot when the police kick in your door without a warrant. Then again, I RTFA. I guess that's too much to expect of some folks though.

Calling downloading "civil disobedience" is an insult to those

Oh look, it's the thief who steals from the public domain. He's crying a river of crocodile tears... Copyright infringement can't be civil disobedience? What do you call this:

• Exhibit A
• Exhibit B

"One of the basic premises of the Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artist," Blackley said, which is why Xbox developers "are achieving a level of visual detail you really get in 'Toy Story.'

"Gates said the 3-D chips in the Xbox would be three times faster than anything on the market and offer nearly unlimited graphical visuals. "We're approaching the level of detail seen in Toy Story 2," he said, referring to the computer-generated kids film from Disney/Pixar. "Game developers will finally be able to develop games as they can visualize it in their minds, without having restrictions placed on them due to performance."

Help a poor college student get a Mac Mini! [macminis4free.com]
Wired Magazine Article [wired.com] Discussing Free Offers

I suppose money helps, but how much money did these guys need to start up? No fancy offices with Aeron chairs. In fact, no offices at all to start with.

Help a poor college student get a Mac Mini!
Wired Magazine Article Discussing Free Offers

If you do IT and have Linux machines, then you will need programs to access the machines remotely. As mentioned by many comments previously, you will need an ssh client. I would like to also suggest you install an NX client from NoMachine.com. You can remotely access the GUI desktop on your Linux desktop (you'll need to install Free NX in your Linux box). Or you can install a VNC client and just about control any OS remotely.

The problem with ebooks is still a matter of viewing technology rather than distribution technology. People don't like reading from the computer screen for long periods of time and e-paper has been Just Around the Corner for a while now. However, DVDs are displayed on the same media technology as MPEG4 (or whatever the top of the line is) but the problem has always been distribution since it is still expensive to download DVD quality video in terms of the bandwith needed. As bandwith increases, this problem disappears and downloaded media (via legal Bittorrent or whatever method) will be easier than physical media. The same will only be true for ebooks once epaper becomes efeasible.

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Shouldn't that be generalized to include other things like TV and radio? Radio is currently being replaced by webcasts for those who listen to it at work and home. If enough major metro areas implement WiFi access (which they will eventually) then people would be able to get radio that way too. The Internet and distributed communications technology in general will pretty much be the end of all classic media delivery systems once broadband really takes off and people can stream near realtime HDTV level video.

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True but ChoicePoint has had previous issues: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,49893,00. html

Ah, so the missing hard disks were for backing up the D&D characters :)

If Google continues to support Wikipedia or even acquire it, then they might increase the support for Wiktionary. However, the answers.com thing they have set up is pretty nice since it brings a bunch of dictionary and similar references together.

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If Google continues to support Wikipedia or even acquire it, then they might increase the support for Wiktionary. However, the answers.com thing they have set up is pretty nice since it brings a bunch of dictionary and similar references together.

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If they want to really open it up, they should combine their efforts with that of Wiktionary

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That lasted for about 6 months. Then December came, along with about a foot of snow. This covered up all the warchalking runes and made finding open networks a little harder.

Unfortunately, war-pissing never caught on, and war-chalking has become much less popular (see, e.g.: ) so I bought a little handheld wireless sniffer, and it's worked ok for those times I was desperate for an internet connection. But a municipal wireless network would be 100 times better. It would save a lot of time having to sniff around, and would have much more consistent and reliable coverage.

It is so obvious. He has had previous GPL violations. There was a page that listed them, but I can't find it anymore. He has made a lot of other software that was based off other software under the GPL. Then there is also the fact that he originally claimed to have written from scratch and then there's the time he claimed that he fired a co-programmer. WTF?! He said he had written it from scratch! Then what about the bogus explanation about variable and function names "sounding the same" because there are only "certain ways to do things". The man is a liar - plain and simple.