Re:Use this as a launch vehicle???
on
Ballooning into Space
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· Score: 3, Interesting
the amount of hydrogen in the ballon is very little when compared to the amount of hydrogen stored in liquid form in a rocket normally. Though you're higher, I can't heplp but feel that you wouldn't have enough fuel - maybe as a tiny supplement, but it still seems like it'd be like a drop in the ocean.
we don't seem to have any of these logos being put on any of the free-to-air stations - our major channels. Occasionally some of our regional stations put the translucent logo on the corner of the screen.
Curiously the channels that I've noticed always having a logo on them are the ones on pay-TV (cable, satellite, etc). I guess logo's must be good, since you only get em when you pay.
The parents/plantiffs shall be given presumption, if the case involves graphic images, and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child
whats going on with the land of the free? we're always told about the fact that in the US you're innocent until proven guilty.
maybe in the economic downturn we can't afford to wait before you're guilty.
I must be missing something, because without proof of harm, the kids wouldn't even need to see it! make money via surfing the web, I guess the offers were true...
So far nobody has gushed over the fact that the E-200 can act as USB host or client. Sure, they can all plug in to a USB port to synchronise, but up till now the only way you could connect peripherals was via serial port, or use one of precious few Compact Flash devices.
Imagine with proper USB connectivity, plug it into a USB hub and use a dozen things.
USB scanners, webcams, printers, USB-to-Ethernet, USB whatevers.
Advantech has just released a line of webpads which use StrongARM CPU's, they might not have quite the punch that the Crusoe does, but they also use a LOT less power.
Unfortunately the current screens aren't reflective, so they wash out in bright light, but the next line will be sunlight readable.
Judging from specs of the current crop of Crusoe single board computers, the Crusoe was only giving a power saving relative to same clock rate x86 CPU's. My 200MHz SBC uses 8W, whereas the 500MHz Crusoe SBC's all use about 8-10W. Sure I get more cycles, but in a mobile computer you want maximum uptime, not sitting around tethered to a power cord.
Everyone around here beats the "Palm is better because it lasts longer" drum, why not do the same over webpads?
OK, they should have to pay for the licenses to the software they 'stole'. Yes, its one of those things that just about everybody has done, but now they're caught they should cop it sweet. Maybe they should investigate alternative options, as the article suggests.
The article seems to be about much more than just some computer teacher down on his luck, but with the way in which MS and BSA are 'infiltrating' organisations and collecting information before demanding big $$$ in compensation.
In cases of non-profit piracy, especially with respect to non-profit organisations, shouldn't they just be charged for the licensing costs?...
Actually in an organisation shouldn't they do some homework and get something that won't get them in trouble - buy licenses to the software, or get cheaper (possibly free) software.
Try to keep the plugin architecture very cross-platform
I'd suggest not using XML specs, but including some interpreter for byte compiled code - such as a small Python interpreter. This way all the logic is inside the plugin, and the application using taht plugin can be dumb, it doesn't have to read through a defined spec, build an engine to understand it and then talk that protocol.
It would probably be more of a bear to do this and write the XML plugin spec, than it would be to write a module for an interpreter.
Bytecode compiled modules are platform independant, so the same code piece will run on Mac, Win32, UNIX, QNX, whatever... no need for a recompile.
I suggest python over java since its already ported to more platforms and a minimal interpreter is probably going to be smaller than the Java interpreter - and Guido isn't going to beat you over the head with language spec conformance issues like Sun might.
IMHO, the intention of emacs wasn't to create the leanest meanest console editor, thats vi. Emacs is an environment.
Emacs is awesome as an environment, for general usage you can almost never leave it, turn off X, run emacs, you may get a surprise. Doing that simple thing saves me a hefty amount of my wearables battery power, and it just flies along even on a slower CPU than what I'd normally use.
I've beena happy user of Python on the WinCE platform for over a year, except we got a full interpreter/byte compiler (floating point, compiled code and all the other goodies), but I digress.
To the people who've said 'whats the point - I can do native code on this/that compiler' the point is, that you don't need to have a compiler, its kinda like Java, its CPU and (relatively) platform independant.
I can go up to my buddy, and beam my python script across from my MIPS based WinCE palmtop, to his Palm, and he can run it, no recompile, just run it. Pity about them removing the compiler, less memory is good, but fast startup once the code is written is important too.
One other way to think of it is as a shell, for when the GUI just can't do something, script it, quick easy, and half your PC's modules will just import straight in - well, thats been my experience with Python on a palmtop.
High cost n wonderful? or cheap n cheerful?
on
Wearable Displays?
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· Score: 2
I'f you can afford it, the M2 from tekgear.ca it looks great - though VERY expensive US$3.5k . Full VGA, maybe SVGA and with a look-through/translucent option.
If you can't stretch to the M2 then the least obtrusive of any display is from MicroOptical Corp who make either tiny clip-on's which do QVGA (compress a 640x480 down to 320x240) and are VERY small, the other model is the integrated eyeglass - it looks just like prescription glasses. These are available now.
The inviso eShades that have had stories run on here are likely to hit market at around US$1000, the advertise in their press releases that it will be about 400-500, but after recent inquiries the price keeps rising, last I heard it was upto 800+. Don't hold your breath.
For displays NOW, unless you can build your own driver electronics - FPGA use is what people are looking at for n=building the driver logic from.
I'd go with an M1, fairly cheap (As far as HMD's go) and well tested and known amongst the borg community. They can be hacked to fir into sunglasses with a lil bit of effort. For colour, most people go the hacked glasstron route.
for arm based architecture I'd imagine you'd checked out the LART pages, but there is also an ARM based effor at MIT, its called mithril I believe, and the PLEB effort in Australia.
Hope that helps
inconvenient + subscription fees?
on
New Crypto-OS
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· Score: 3
while I don't want people to be able to pry on my files if I don't want them too, I also don't want to need to be on a network 24/7 just so I can access my files.
They say that they'll pay for data havens from a small purchase price. That's usually unworkable, since you need to keep on getting new buyers all the time, meaning more storage-> more cost->more buyers->more storage->ad infinitum.
So, for a sustainable service you either need to pay a data haven(s) yourself, or pay a subscription fee to m-o-o-t.
On top of that you'll need a pretty quick connection, since (if I understand correctly) all your user files will be on the network somewhere (data haven). Costs are gonna get pretty high, pretty quick.
How could you not get active sync to work? It's the easiest sync program I've ever used.
I think the author meant using ActiveSync with something other than Windows. AFAIK nobody has been able to figure out how activesync works, and nobody has written a client or library to use it on a non-windows machine.
Re:documents on reserve - totally different Situat
on
Metallica Vs. Harvard
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· Score: 1
DISCLAIMER: I support Napster as a tool for mp3 distribution, I don't support the people who say that breaking copyright should be OK because e.g. "information wants to be free, d00d"
the key points were "make photocopies of the pages they needed to read","rare", and the context - using the books/copies of portions of those books for purely academic purposes.
This is indeed fair use, but its in a completely context to (most) Napster use. Napster is legitimate for trading music that isn't copyrighted, or where the artist(s) have given permission to freely exchange that music.
If you copied portions of a song, then the matter would be a little grey - do club DJ's pay royalties if they sample from songs? probably.
Be honest, even if a book is "extremely expensive" we all know that copying the whole thing would be in violation of copyright, maybe for "academic purposes" its fine and dandy in the US, but likening this to commercial sales would be like saying that its OK to distribute copies of Maya, or M$ Office - we all know its not. Same thing.
Maybe people need o stop thinking of it in terms of "music" and as a "commercial product"
Comparing copying text portions for academic purposes and commercial products for your own are like comparing apples and oranges - they're not the same thing.
IANAL but I'd say you are wrong about this, your program would only be interacting with the GPL'd program, not incorporating it. i.e. your automation program is not a derivative work.
he and another guy made fridges with no moving parts - just mercury, and an electromagnetic force. Smilar to this story (though using magnesium tetra.... instead of mercury)
So, basically this story was about a researcher who is doing something with a high gee whiz factor, but that has been done before - many times - heck, the magnetized a frog in the Netherlands and suspended it years ago.
the reason is that you get a sort of moire pattern thing happening. Kinda like when you see computer monitors on TV/video, because of the differing refresh rates and all that, you can see the flickering, but not notice it when you're looking at the real thing. TH fuzziness is because the screen has been 'pixelated' twice, if you get what I mean.
If you kept your CPU boards in liquid bath it would be pretty cool (pun intended).
I remember in an industrial tooling shop I was in, they had to make something in a nonconductive bath - which if memory serves me right, was kerosene.....
which would be pretty good looking, (maybe combine it with that email security from earlier - aerate it and give it a spark......
the last patent seems to detail simply sticking a text-to-speach/speach-to-text module into an email client.
So
cat/dev/microphone | speach-to-text | email_client someone@somewhere.com
gets you a patent?
surely there would be plenty of prior art of being read your email - isn't that what email clients for the blind do? and dictation isn't a new idea either, don't the ads for it mention dictating email?
Slashdot Mirror
the amount of hydrogen in the ballon is very little when compared to the amount of hydrogen stored in liquid form in a rocket normally. Though you're higher, I can't heplp but feel that you wouldn't have enough fuel - maybe as a tiny supplement, but it still seems like it'd be like a drop in the ocean.
Curiously the channels that I've noticed always having a logo on them are the ones on pay-TV (cable, satellite, etc). I guess logo's must be good, since you only get em when you pay.
you know Katz will stand the test of time, when old and grey /.ers will still be whinging about him
whats going on with the land of the free? we're always told about the fact that in the US you're innocent until proven guilty.
maybe in the economic downturn we can't afford to wait before you're guilty.
I must be missing something, because without proof of harm, the kids wouldn't even need to see it! make money via surfing the web, I guess the offers were true...
so people are just going to register for .us domains and the country becomes unified and stronger?
or will pepolpe be registering .us because they're patriotic and this is a nice way to profit from that?
even more portable than before?!
thank the idea to have smells associated with webpages never took off...
So far nobody has gushed over the fact that the E-200 can act as USB host or client. Sure, they can all plug in to a USB port to synchronise, but up till now the only way you could connect peripherals was via serial port, or use one of precious few Compact Flash devices.
Imagine with proper USB connectivity, plug it into a USB hub and use a dozen things.
USB scanners, webcams, printers, USB-to-Ethernet, USB whatevers.
If only the release date was known....
when Palm test their devices, do they just leave the device on for a week? PocketPC battery life in hours is for continuous use in most cases.
Unfortunately the current screens aren't reflective, so they wash out in bright light, but the next line will be sunlight readable.
Judging from specs of the current crop of Crusoe single board computers, the Crusoe was only giving a power saving relative to same clock rate x86 CPU's. My 200MHz SBC uses 8W, whereas the 500MHz Crusoe SBC's all use about 8-10W. Sure I get more cycles, but in a mobile computer you want maximum uptime, not sitting around tethered to a power cord.
Everyone around here beats the "Palm is better because it lasts longer" drum, why not do the same over webpads?
The article seems to be about much more than just some computer teacher down on his luck, but with the way in which MS and BSA are 'infiltrating' organisations and collecting information before demanding big $$$ in compensation.
In cases of non-profit piracy, especially with respect to non-profit organisations, shouldn't they just be charged for the licensing costs?...
Actually in an organisation shouldn't they do some homework and get something that won't get them in trouble - buy licenses to the software, or get cheaper (possibly free) software.
"they don't call me the Colonel cause I'm some dumb-ass army guy"
I'd suggest not using XML specs, but including some interpreter for byte compiled code - such as a small Python interpreter. This way all the logic is inside the plugin, and the application using taht plugin can be dumb, it doesn't have to read through a defined spec, build an engine to understand it and then talk that protocol.
It would probably be more of a bear to do this and write the XML plugin spec, than it would be to write a module for an interpreter.
Bytecode compiled modules are platform independant, so the same code piece will run on Mac, Win32, UNIX, QNX, whatever... no need for a recompile.
I suggest python over java since its already ported to more platforms and a minimal interpreter is probably going to be smaller than the Java interpreter - and Guido isn't going to beat you over the head with language spec conformance issues like Sun might.
Eight Megs Always Constantly Swapping
now that doesn't sound to fast to me *s*
IMHO, the intention of emacs wasn't to create the leanest meanest console editor, thats vi. Emacs is an environment.
Emacs is awesome as an environment, for general usage you can almost never leave it, turn off X, run emacs, you may get a surprise. Doing that simple thing saves me a hefty amount of my wearables battery power, and it just flies along even on a slower CPU than what I'd normally use.
To the people who've said 'whats the point - I can do native code on this/that compiler' the point is, that you don't need to have a compiler, its kinda like Java, its CPU and (relatively) platform independant.
I can go up to my buddy, and beam my python script across from my MIPS based WinCE palmtop, to his Palm, and he can run it, no recompile, just run it. Pity about them removing the compiler, less memory is good, but fast startup once the code is written is important too.
One other way to think of it is as a shell, for when the GUI just can't do something, script it, quick easy, and half your PC's modules will just import straight in - well, thats been my experience with Python on a palmtop.
If you can't stretch to the M2 then the least obtrusive of any display is from MicroOptical Corp who make either tiny clip-on's which do QVGA (compress a 640x480 down to 320x240) and are VERY small, the other model is the integrated eyeglass - it looks just like prescription glasses. These are available now.
The inviso eShades that have had stories run on here are likely to hit market at around US$1000, the advertise in their press releases that it will be about 400-500, but after recent inquiries the price keeps rising, last I heard it was upto 800+. Don't hold your breath.
For displays NOW, unless you can build your own driver electronics - FPGA use is what people are looking at for n=building the driver logic from.
I'd go with an M1, fairly cheap (As far as HMD's go) and well tested and known amongst the borg community. They can be hacked to fir into sunglasses with a lil bit of effort. For colour, most people go the hacked glasstron route.
see wearables.los-gatos.net for a comprehensive listing of most things wearable.
for arm based architecture I'd imagine you'd checked out the LART pages, but there is also an ARM based effor at MIT, its called mithril I believe, and the PLEB effort in Australia.
Hope that helps
while I don't want people to be able to pry on my files if I don't want them too, I also don't want to need to be on a network 24/7 just so I can access my files.
They say that they'll pay for data havens from a small purchase price. That's usually unworkable, since you need to keep on getting new buyers all the time, meaning more storage-> more cost->more buyers->more storage->ad infinitum.
So, for a sustainable service you either need to pay a data haven(s) yourself, or pay a subscription fee to m-o-o-t.
On top of that you'll need a pretty quick connection, since (if I understand correctly) all your user files will be on the network somewhere (data haven). Costs are gonna get pretty high, pretty quick.
I think the author meant using ActiveSync with something other than Windows. AFAIK nobody has been able to figure out how activesync works, and nobody has written a client or library to use it on a non-windows machine.
the key points were "make photocopies of the pages they needed to read","rare", and the context - using the books/copies of portions of those books for purely academic purposes.
This is indeed fair use, but its in a completely context to (most) Napster use. Napster is legitimate for trading music that isn't copyrighted, or where the artist(s) have given permission to freely exchange that music.
If you copied portions of a song, then the matter would be a little grey - do club DJ's pay royalties if they sample from songs? probably.
Be honest, even if a book is "extremely expensive" we all know that copying the whole thing would be in violation of copyright, maybe for "academic purposes" its fine and dandy in the US, but likening this to commercial sales would be like saying that its OK to distribute copies of Maya, or M$ Office - we all know its not. Same thing.
Maybe people need o stop thinking of it in terms of "music" and as a "commercial product"
Comparing copying text portions for academic purposes and commercial products for your own are like comparing apples and oranges - they're not the same thing.
IANAL but I'd say you are wrong about this, your program would only be interacting with the GPL'd program, not incorporating it.
i.e. your automation program is not a derivative work.
So, basically this story was about a researcher who is doing something with a high gee whiz factor, but that has been done before - many times - heck, the magnetized a frog in the Netherlands and suspended it years ago.
Still, it looks cool :)
I'll be curious to see how long till other @Home associated companies do this as well - Optus@Home in my area
the reason is that you get a sort of moire pattern thing happening. Kinda like when you see computer monitors on TV/video, because of the differing refresh rates and all that, you can see the flickering, but not notice it when you're looking at the real thing. TH fuzziness is because the screen has been 'pixelated' twice, if you get what I mean.
I remember in an industrial tooling shop I was in, they had to make something in a nonconductive bath - which if memory serves me right, was kerosene.....
which would be pretty good looking, (maybe combine it with that email security from earlier - aerate it and give it a spark......
So /dev/microphone | speach-to-text | email_client someone@somewhere.com
cat
gets you a patent? surely there would be plenty of prior art of being read your email - isn't that what email clients for the blind do? and dictation isn't a new idea either, don't the ads for it mention dictating email?
it doesn't sound very novel to me.
the other patents don't sound to great either...