one suggestion I saw for nanotech was for a wireless network. The idea was to dust the area you wish to cover with a shedload of particle sized transcievers. They then figure out the topology themselves, and you got yourself a network.
That's a good point. However there are a couple of points that you may have missed. Firstly laptops are harder to install than desktops due to preset hardware etc. Even experienced Linux users have trouble getting certain things working (random example: Tony Robinson at Cambridge University has a site up about linux on IBM TP600s. he knows what he is on about). Even knowlegable users can have trouble sometimes, and have to call support, whereas the MS dominance ensures that EVERYRTHING works with Windows.(ish)
secondly (and less convincing) Dell may be forward thinking, and have set the pricepoint on the grounds that some of the companies that use Linux lapdogs may _not_ be experienced users. This may be the case in the near future, especially as many are already familiar with X. Another random example: I spent time with a company as an intern, and one of my tasks was to get Linux working on their lapdogs as they already knew X, and wanted portability. They already had the hardware. I'm sure that even my meager wage would have been more than getting 3rd party support (and 3rd party wouldn't have spent 2 months figuring out what the fsuck was going on)
how much do you think Dell pays for a windows licence? less than $40 right?
how much will the tech support from Linuxcare and the extra training and engineers at Dell cost per unit? Something comparable.
The fact is that by its nature Linux is more easy to screw up than windows, and so there will be more support needed. Add to this the fact that OEM windows doesn't come with support, and the fact that Dell had to make an investment is staff to get these things running properly, and Dell aren't making an extra penny out of this.
Clearly it is quite a feat to break an industry's standard encryption, and you deserve congratulations (with the other members of MoRE) for this technical feat, but what do you intend to do now? Are you going to continue with school and then University, or work on OSS or perhaps take up a lucrative job offer (or even a combination of the above)?
where I am they have masses of bandwidth, but they charge students £17 (about $25) to use the ethernet. It is still regulated, and they do complain if you start serving up huge amounts of data or use the connection to break the law or scan etc. I think thais is reasonable as the national infrastructure that they hook onto is meant for ACADEMIC use which hardly includes building a huge MP3 collection.
I go to university in the UK where there is a very high bandwidth national university network. many students have access to this through college ethernets. They have not killed napster usage at the routers yet, but I doubt it'll be long.
A friend of mine got a very polite email from his college sysadmin asking what he was doing with 5Gb of bandwidth to unusual ports, and a request to stop it.
I think this is perfectly reasonable as the network is not there for collecting MP3s.
If someone gets a restraining order handed down to them to prevent them from stalking, what it does is it says "you are not allowed to stalk that person". It does not ban you from talking to anyone at all and force you to hide in a room on your own.
The Mitnik order is ridiculous because it predates the modern age of ubiquitous computers, and assumes that all the things that a person can do on a computer are bad. Clearly this is not the case. A much more sensible order would be to ban him from using telnet, or from attempting remote access to a machine by any method other than a web browser. (this is just an example - it would need to be phrased properly in legalese. I know bad thhings are possible with a web browser.)
Although I'd agree that the recent spate of patents on business models and "obvious" inventions (that haven't been weeded out by the obviousness requirement in US law) do suggest that the patent laws need updating to cope with the most recent inventions, I think that your comment is unreasonable.
The patent system was introduced as a kind of incentive for development and research. It ensures that if you spend a lot of time and effort developing something new, then you have the right to benefit from your work. In this, and most other , instances the money is fed back into more research, and the invention benefits people. If the user attempts to abuse the patent by pricing it too high, the economic market will reject it, and the incentive will induce other researchers to better the patent or provide an alternative technology.
All in all most scientific breakthroughs are already "patented like this" - it's not a new phenomonon - and it doesn't cause harm.
They are working on getting Lotus Notes and domino working on Linux (both server and client)and the Viavoice teams are committed to Linux and have released a speech SDK for linux ( here
This guy has a page on getting Debian working on a 600. He's also a bit of a speech reco guru, and has the smae name as a brit TV presenter and commedian (Blackadder anyone?).
GOOD music - at least an underworld fan like yourself would think so. Speed garage (also known as UK garage) emerged almost entirely from the UK underground radio and club scene. most of the stations I listen to play drum and bass or euphoric house/trance.
Not only are you unaware of the technology, but you seem to have grasped the wrong end of the stick as to its use. Pirate radio in the UK is almost exclusively dance music, rather than anti-government messages. This is to the extent that I have never heard a non-dance music station, and i live in London where there are a lot of pirate stations. RDS is, in fact, very useful though mainly because it gives the name of the station on the readout instead of the frequency, and because it enables stations to give alternative frequencies to allow automatic retuning if the signal fades.
Easy answer to why they don't develop countermeasures for listeners: there are maybe a few thousand commercial licenced transmitters to fix, or 10s of millions of recievers to fix. Which is going to be cheaper?
there is an off button on the radio in my car, and most of the time the traffic news feature is indeed turned off. The only time I turn it on is when I am in London.
Given the fact that pirate stations play music that is a lot closer to the stuff that I listen to this could actully be a good feature for finding better music that the crap on "melody FM" or some such. Shame I have never encountered pirate stations doing this.
The potential applications for this kind of technology are not really in the domain of the business user. A much more likely scenario is that they could be used in an industrial situation to present technical information to the employees as they work. I remember reading a while ago that British Aerospace (or maybe one of the American Aerospace companies) are using a similar system to help their workers fit out the wiring looms in passenger jets. As you can imagine, these are quite complicated, so a wearable machine gives the worker constant access to the diagrams, and this increases productivity.
An advantage of using speech reco in these circumstances as that you could build a small vovabulary system, since full dictation is not required, and that would then be very accurate.
with reference to the lip-reading idea, video to vector mapping would impose a huge overhead, since a video channel is much wider than an audio channel, and the software that does video analysis is not that good. Secondly, lip-readers rely a lot on non-lip cues, and context. The context could be added using an n-gram language model like speech reco systems. Anyhow, as I mentioned, These types of systems will only be used in special circumstances, where privacy is not necessary.
IBM and Olympus are already partners in marketing a digital dictafone, that is sold with ViaVoice, a PCMCIA card, and some kind of interface software; with the idea being that you can dictate and then edit as text. Does this partnership suggest that Speech Recognition might be the motivating reason behind the development?
Viavoice SDK is available for Linux, and IBM have announced that it is porting the engine and the task factories etc. check out the IBM ViaVoice site for more details.
It would appear that they have more of a committment than you might think.
1) I was pointing out to the poster above that AIX cna be run on systems that supass Sun E10000s. I wasn't claiming that RS/6000s have a better architecture than S/390s.
2) RS/6000s often use SSA adapters as I mentioned, and you can use a fibre optic version of the IBM implementation to put up to 10 km between adapter and host. So you can fill whole rooms with drive boxes.
3) If you had read the article that was referenced, you would have noticed that it was talking about IBMers working on this, not the guys you mentioned in your link. The rumour that is being discussed in this story is that IBM *ARE* putting dollars into this, and that as they haven't announced this yet, they can't take any credit for it at all.
well donr on your tehnical knowledge of the S/390, but please read the posts first next time.
RS/6000s (which run AIX) can have up to 128 nodes of up to 8 SMP processors per node. The 7133 SSA serial disc system can handle up to 3.5 Tb per adapter, at 160 Mb per second throughput. Of course, multiple adapters can be used to scale this, and each of these can have fast caching.
I think these kick just about everything else out of the water for scalability and ceiling height.
The Amiga brand and technology was (I seem to remember) bought by a British high street PC retailer who then went bust. After that I think the brand and tech hopped around a bit before being bought by Gateway.
Commodore basically screwed what was a very good system for its day. The technology was well ahead of its time. Remember that the Video Toaster was the amongst the first "cheap" video editing systems, and that the original graphics for Babylon 5 were done on Amigas because they were so much cheaper than the competition.
Aah, a bit of nostalgia. I may have to get the old A500 (upgraded to 2 Mb, and AmigaDos 1.2) out of the loft. Speedball 2 rocked, and AREXX was fantastic.
Slashdot Mirror
secondly (and less convincing) Dell may be forward thinking, and have set the pricepoint on the grounds that some of the companies that use Linux lapdogs may _not_ be experienced users. This may be the case in the near future, especially as many are already familiar with X. Another random example: I spent time with a company as an intern, and one of my tasks was to get Linux working on their lapdogs as they already knew X, and wanted portability. They already had the hardware. I'm sure that even my meager wage would have been more than getting 3rd party support (and 3rd party wouldn't have spent 2 months figuring out what the fsuck was going on)
how much will the tech support from Linuxcare and the extra training and engineers at Dell cost per unit? Something comparable.
The fact is that by its nature Linux is more easy to screw up than windows, and so there will be more support needed. Add to this the fact that OEM windows doesn't come with support, and the fact that Dell had to make an investment is staff to get these things running properly, and Dell aren't making an extra penny out of this.
good effort
A friend of mine got a very polite email from his college sysadmin asking what he was doing with 5Gb of bandwidth to unusual ports, and a request to stop it.
I think this is perfectly reasonable as the network is not there for collecting MP3s.
The Mitnik order is ridiculous because it predates the modern age of ubiquitous computers, and assumes that all the things that a person can do on a computer are bad. Clearly this is not the case. A much more sensible order would be to ban him from using telnet, or from attempting remote access to a machine by any method other than a web browser. (this is just an example - it would need to be phrased properly in legalese. I know bad thhings are possible with a web browser.)
The patent system was introduced as a kind of incentive for development and research. It ensures that if you spend a lot of time and effort developing something new, then you have the right to benefit from your work. In this, and most other , instances the money is fed back into more research, and the invention benefits people. If the user attempts to abuse the patent by pricing it too high, the economic market will reject it, and the incentive will induce other researchers to better the patent or provide an alternative technology.
All in all most scientific breakthroughs are already "patented like this" - it's not a new phenomonon - and it doesn't cause harm.
beats the commercial stuff any day
Given the fact that pirate stations play music that is a lot closer to the stuff that I listen to this could actully be a good feature for finding better music that the crap on "melody FM" or some such. Shame I have never encountered pirate stations doing this.
An advantage of using speech reco in these circumstances as that you could build a small vovabulary system, since full dictation is not required, and that would then be very accurate.
with reference to the lip-reading idea, video to vector mapping would impose a huge overhead, since a video channel is much wider than an audio channel, and the software that does video analysis is not that good. Secondly, lip-readers rely a lot on non-lip cues, and context. The context could be added using an n-gram language model like speech reco systems. Anyhow, as I mentioned, These types of systems will only be used in special circumstances, where privacy is not necessary.
It would appear that they have more of a committment than you might think.
'nuff said. ViaVoice embedded in portable devices is clearly the direction that they are heading with the deal with Nokia.
2) RS/6000s often use SSA adapters as I mentioned, and you can use a fibre optic version of the IBM implementation to put up to 10 km between adapter and host. So you can fill whole rooms with drive boxes.
3) If you had read the article that was referenced, you would have noticed that it was talking about IBMers working on this, not the guys you mentioned in your link. The rumour that is being discussed in this story is that IBM *ARE* putting dollars into this, and that as they haven't announced this yet, they can't take any credit for it at all.
well donr on your tehnical knowledge of the S/390, but please read the posts first next time.
I think these kick just about everything else out of the water for scalability and ceiling height.
Lysistrata
haven't done any classics since I was 16, so can't say how good the translation is.
Commodore basically screwed what was a very good system for its day. The technology was well ahead of its time. Remember that the Video Toaster was the amongst the first "cheap" video editing systems, and that the original graphics for Babylon 5 were done on Amigas because they were so much cheaper than the competition.
Aah, a bit of nostalgia. I may have to get the old A500 (upgraded to 2 Mb, and AmigaDos 1.2) out of the loft. Speedball 2 rocked, and AREXX was fantastic.