So the real question is can we engineer these bacteria to be more productive and then, rather than pumping oil out of the ground, we can run our cars off hydrogen out of the ground. It may not be totally green but at least we can keep the genetically engineered, radioactive slime a couple of miles underground (that is, until it learns to crawl:-)
Colour analysis is interesting but it's well known that an artist's colour usage changes over time (a famous example being Claude Monet and his eye cataracts). Brush stroke patterns, on the other hand, seem to change less. There was an interesting paper in 2004 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on using wavelet analysis of brush stroke marks to separate originals from imitations and to detect areas of paintings that had been reworked.
Of course these are all just tools that add evidence either way, not proof of originality or forgery. I suspect that using both colour and brush stroke analysis would do a better job than just one or the other.
The main competition to this sony reader seems to be the Iliad from I-Rex. I think it is a much nicer reader for a couple reasons.
It has a nice page turn interface, it has a proper paperback A5 sized screen, and runs linux. There has already been quite a bit of hacking on it. Can code your own readers for various formats etc.
The Sony Reader runs Linux too. The manual says it runs MonteVista® Linux® professional edition and gives a link for download of the GPL bits.
There was an excellent paper at the Workshop on Economics and Information Security a few weeks ago which showed that stock pump-and-dump spam works. It was also shown that as more people are discovering this fact they are riding the band-waggon, thereby making it work even better. If you can spot the scam, perpetrated by others, early in the cycle then you can trade the stock yourself and make a profit and not actually be breaking any securities laws, since you're not the one promoting the stock.
OK, so you have a signed letter from the loss adjuster at the insurance company saying that any car that goes missing that has an RFID in the ignition was not stolen. In that case there's only one thing to do: spend $500 on a private eye, find out where they live and what car they drive, and then take it. After all, you have a signed letter from the owner saying that it wasn't theft!
Really, it was presumptuous of you to try to foist your server load problems off onto your clients. Yeh, Ajax has "buzz" and all, but to most people it's just damned stupid.
This indicates a complete lack of understanding of why developers are turning to AJAX. The point is not that they want to foist their server load problems on the client. The point is that they are trying to give their users a more responsive experience. Reducing the burden on the server is one effective way to do this.
When we were all on the far end of 14K4 modems, a few seconds of latency at the server went more or less unnoticed. Now that most of us have broadband, people complain if the information does not at least appear to arrive instantly. AJAX, when used properly (and I concede that it is not always used properly) is about having web sites that only move the change information back and forth, without moving all of every page when little has changed. This reduces the traffic between the client and server in both directions and can improve responsiveness as a result. Google Maps is a classic example of this; by moving the map tiles around locally in JavaScript and only asking the server for the missing tiles as they are needed makes for a much more interactive experience. The fact that the map tiles are all static content is a bonus, but it's not the end goal.
There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix.
There is a third method that has been used on an industrial scale, which is to essentially build a huge mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometers are usually used to separate atoms into their isotopes for analysis but Ernest O. Lawrence proposed this for the Manhattan Project and the Y-12 separator at Oak Ridge, TN, built in 1941, yielded some useful results before being superseded by gaseous diffusion at the K-25 facility and later the S-50 thermal diffusion plant. Indeed the first 200 grams of fissile material delivered to Los Alamos came from the electromagnetic separator, more than a year before the diffusion separator started operation (the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima used about 64Kg)
I think it's most important achievement is bringing Tesla's idea of alternating current to the consumer.
Absolutely. Westinghouse build the first A/C power station out in Telluride, Colorado in 1891, with design help from Tesla and $100,000 from L.L. Nunn. While we're on the subject, this July 9th will be Telsa's 150th birthday, so light up those Tesla Coils to celebrate; we'll be doing up here so in Telluride!
he article notes that OpenSSL has achieved level 1, "the lowest of four possible validation levels". It should be noted, however, that level 1 is also the only level achievable by a software implementation. Level 2 requires physical "tamper evidence"
This is not the case. There are several software implementations that have achieved FIPS 140 level 2 validation, more notably the Netscape Security Services (NSS) library which is now maintained by the Mozilla team: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/f ips/
....that there is some way in which you can run OpenSSL in FIPS compliant mode then? Or is it a special FIPS distribution of OpenSSL?
Because under FIPS, the only allowable algorithms are 3DES-CBC for encryption and SHA1 for HMAC.
If you allow anything else to be used, it is not "FIPS compliant".
Two issues. Firstly, AES is acceptable these days for the symmetric cipher and that is supported in TLS. Secondly, the strict requirements about what ciphers are available does not, as far as I know, apply if it's just a FIPS 140-2 level 1 validation which is basically a validation that the FIPS certified ciphers in the library function as required. If they have gone for FIPS 140-2 level 2 then then any key management functionality (such as key wrapping) must use FIPS certified ciphers but one can usually still allow users to use other ciphers. This is important since SSL requires both MD5 and SHA-1 for some of it's obscure MAC functions.
Having read the patent through (and boy is it a chore getting those images of the USPTO server) I am fairly confident that my brother and I built something that did exactly this in about 1978. The problem that we had as this; we had a couple of electric motors in our Lego box that tended to run at different speeds and we didn't have any speed controllers, just on/off switches. We wanted more power for a model car than we could get from one motor so we hooked them together through a differential. Since you could switch the motors on and off independently you could run the output at different speeds. So we had a drive system with two inputs, at least one of which was an electric motor, which could run at varying speeds and which mechanically is identical to what they describe in their patent, more than a decade before it was filed.
I guess I should call Toyota and swear an affidavit for them! Not only is it prior art, but if an 11 year old and a 13 year old can invent it it's arguably obvious too.
The Prius does not reduce emmisions. It reduces emmisions at the tailpipe compared to a conventional system.
When you consider the emmisions cost of the entire system, production, energy production/transmission and disposal, the current commercially available hybrids are unmitigated environmental disasters hidden by ignorance, smoke and mirrors. ...
But the claims surrounding the current crop of hybrids are faith based, not engineering based.
So that we do not have to take your assertion that "current commercially available hybrids are unmitigated environmental disasters" simply on faith, would you care to provide some backup? Having looked fairly closely at the components inside Toyota's hybrid technology the design is remarkably simple and the only components that are unusual compared to regular drivetrains are the batteries and a big-ass stack of power transistors. Yes, we also have extra planetary gear systems, extra wound motor/generators and a computer but is the cost of those gears or winding those motors really so high, as a fraction of the energy used to make the car in the first place or to run it for its lifetime? These days the environmental impact of the creation and recycling of Nickel Metal Hydride batteries is not really that energy consumptive or polluting. As for the power transistors I have to confess some ignorance as to the energy cost of manufacture but in the light of the fact that the EPA lets people make these things in densely populated parts of California it seems likely that the toxic emissions are pretty low.
You are absolutely right that de-tuned motors can be made much more efficient than ones tuned for performance. This is in fact one of the two key features of a hybrid system (the other being not wasting all your kinetic energy in break heat). The mere fact that one can make a car more efficient by giving it unacceptable performance is not very useful; a hybrid system's utility stems from it's ability to make a de-tuned engine acceptable.
So, would you care to provide some evidence as to why these things are supposed to be such disasters?
This is absolutely correct. Any experiment (thought or practical) is broken if you have differences on several variables but do not take all of those differences into account. In this case the original author compares the ongoing cost of running some old car without a loan on it against the cost of buying a brand new hybrid on a loan. That's not comparing apples with apples and that is bad science.
The only thing that stopped the Mac Mini from being the perfect living room machine was that it didn't have digital audio out. It already has full screen DVD playback through DVI; with the addition of digital audio out people could have a Mac Mini instead of a DVD player and not need to make any compromises and not have to mess around with third party solutions. It's a great pity that Apple have not rectified this glaring omission.
Having said that, close inspection of the new machines reveals that they don't seem to have changed the main board at all; it's the same processors and same video RAM as before. Still, it would be very nice if they would add the digital audio some day.
This sounds like one catfish you wouldn't want to go noodling for! In the US people catch catfish up to 100lb or so by hand but I think 646lb fish might be a little much!
I'm surprised OpenID is using DSA though - AFAIK RSA (now that it's patent free) is a superior, more trusted and flexible algorithm.
As a professional cryptographer I certainly don't think that DSA is in any way inferior for the task in hand. It is however superior in one significant way: if you use a 1024 bit key then the RSA signature is 1024 bits, which takes 171 bytes to base64 code, while the DSA signature only takes up 54 bytes.
While the article does state that they plan to have the device lay pipes, wires and ducts as well as cement walls it is my experience that these are not where the cost of construction lies.
I'm currently nine months through an 11 month project to build a house and frankly the time spent raising walls and laying pipes has been small in comparison to the laying of the foundations and the huge number of "finishing" jobs. Without these the output of these robots may be functional but is doomed to look rather industrial.
These days the framing for a wooden house is designed on a CAD system, cut by robot, shipped in segments and can be erected in a day on a well laid foundation. Hanging internal doors takes nearly as long as putting the frame up!
Perhaps robots like this will catch on for rebuilding in disaster areas but until they can construct aesthetically pleasing cabinets and fix the architrave around a doorway I don't think they will have much utility in the mainstream construction business. For the jobs that it does this robot only replaces relatively cheap labour and getting in a bunch of guys with hammers has a significantly lower capital cost and is much more flexible.
If you can find a good way to store the compressed gas this is an excellent idea. Expansion engines like this air engine (and steam engines) produce maximum torque at zero RPM, which is perfect for pulling away from a standstill without the complexity of a clutch and a gearbox, whereas internal combustion engines (and turbines) need to be turning quite a bit before they produce and torque.
The hardware manual linked off the web site says that the Power Over Ethernet lines are passed through to the main connector and they even have a reference design for showing how to loop the PoE lines back to power the device. So yes, you can easily power this off of the ethernet cable.
While at the individual level the question of "what is art?" is hard to answer, at the generic level I think a reasonable definition is that art is any act that intends to convey emotion from some "artist" to a beholder of the art. "Good" art is that which is effective at this even if you don't like it and "bad" art is ineffective at this.
If you accept this definition then computer generated "art" might well be art, but the artist is the programmer rather than the computer, since it is from the programmer that the intent comes.
Call me cynical but where's the proof?
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
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· Score: 5, Insightful
None of the pictures on the page show the PC mobo going into the case. The picture called fit.jpg shows the mobo sticking out at the bottom left. The last couple of shots show no indication that the case has anything in it other than a normal Mac Mini.
I'm not saying that these guys haven't done what they said they've done but it would have been good to have some pictures of the back of the machine with the ports or perhaps some re-assembly shows so we could see just how tight the fit is.
unfortunately there is... no information with regards to running servers/static IP's.
When the UK Online service was first announced back in November I contacted them about static IP addresses and running of server. They don't support static IP and the helpful man at their support email told me: "Unfortunately all ports are blocked that allow mail/web servers to run on the line and also proxy servers. Providing you can get round without using these ports we can provide the service."
So I'll be waiting until some of the other ISPs start offering 8MB service in the UK, which is supposed to start in the Spring.
It's expected that head set support will make it's way in too.
Headset support is already there. It will only show up if you have up-to-date Bluetooth adaptor firmware (see Apple's bluetooth page for the updater). The Bluetooth set-up assistant will then offer the chance to set up headsets and configure them as one audio input and one audio output. I use iChatAV with a Sony Ericsson HBH-60 headset and it works very well.
At this time they seem to have messed up the UK pricing completely. While the disc upgrade price looks fine at £30 the WiFI+Bluetooth package has gone up to £152.88 (despite the individual modules remaining unchanged at £49 and £35 respectively) and the price of the 1GB upgrade has risen to a staggering £561.53. These compared to $99 for wireless and $325 for the RAM. Curiously, if you take £99, subtract the VAT and convert to dollars you end up close to $153 and if you take £325, subtract the VAT you end up 10% under $561. I wonder if someone at Apple UK typed the numbers into the wrong side of some currency converter...
Slashdot Mirror
So the real question is can we engineer these bacteria to be more productive and then, rather than pumping oil out of the ground, we can run our cars off hydrogen out of the ground. It may not be totally green but at least we can keep the genetically engineered, radioactive slime a couple of miles underground (that is, until it learns to crawl :-)
Colour analysis is interesting but it's well known that an artist's colour usage changes over time (a famous example being Claude Monet and his eye cataracts). Brush stroke patterns, on the other hand, seem to change less. There was an interesting paper in 2004 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on using wavelet analysis of brush stroke marks to separate originals from imitations and to detect areas of paintings that had been reworked.
Of course these are all just tools that add evidence either way, not proof of originality or forgery. I suspect that using both colour and brush stroke analysis would do a better job than just one or the other.
The main competition to this sony reader seems to be the Iliad from I-Rex. I think it is a much nicer reader for a couple reasons.
It has a nice page turn interface, it has a proper paperback A5 sized screen, and runs linux. There has already been quite a bit of hacking on it. Can code your own readers for various formats etc.
The Sony Reader runs Linux too. The manual says it runs MonteVista® Linux® professional edition and gives a link for download of the GPL bits.
There was an excellent paper at the Workshop on Economics and Information Security a few weeks ago which showed that stock pump-and-dump spam works. It was also shown that as more people are discovering this fact they are riding the band-waggon, thereby making it work even better. If you can spot the scam, perpetrated by others, early in the cycle then you can trade the stock yourself and make a profit and not actually be breaking any securities laws, since you're not the one promoting the stock.
OK, so you have a signed letter from the loss adjuster at the insurance company saying that any car that goes missing that has an RFID in the ignition was not stolen. In that case there's only one thing to do: spend $500 on a private eye, find out where they live and what car they drive, and then take it. After all, you have a signed letter from the owner saying that it wasn't theft!
Really, it was presumptuous of you to try to foist your server load problems off onto your clients. Yeh, Ajax has "buzz" and all, but to most people it's just damned stupid.
This indicates a complete lack of understanding of why developers are turning to AJAX. The point is not that they want to foist their server load problems on the client. The point is that they are trying to give their users a more responsive experience. Reducing the burden on the server is one effective way to do this.
When we were all on the far end of 14K4 modems, a few seconds of latency at the server went more or less unnoticed. Now that most of us have broadband, people complain if the information does not at least appear to arrive instantly. AJAX, when used properly (and I concede that it is not always used properly) is about having web sites that only move the change information back and forth, without moving all of every page when little has changed. This reduces the traffic between the client and server in both directions and can improve responsiveness as a result. Google Maps is a classic example of this; by moving the map tiles around locally in JavaScript and only asking the server for the missing tiles as they are needed makes for a much more interactive experience. The fact that the map tiles are all static content is a bonus, but it's not the end goal.
There is a third method that has been used on an industrial scale, which is to essentially build a huge mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometers are usually used to separate atoms into their isotopes for analysis but Ernest O. Lawrence proposed this for the Manhattan Project and the Y-12 separator at Oak Ridge, TN, built in 1941, yielded some useful results before being superseded by gaseous diffusion at the K-25 facility and later the S-50 thermal diffusion plant. Indeed the first 200 grams of fissile material delivered to Los Alamos came from the electromagnetic separator, more than a year before the diffusion separator started operation (the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima used about 64Kg)
I think it's most important achievement is bringing Tesla's idea of alternating current to the consumer.
Absolutely. Westinghouse build the first A/C power station out in Telluride, Colorado in 1891, with design help from Tesla and $100,000 from L.L. Nunn. While we're on the subject, this July 9th will be Telsa's 150th birthday, so light up those Tesla Coils to celebrate; we'll be doing up here so in Telluride!
he article notes that OpenSSL has achieved level 1, "the lowest of four possible validation levels". It should be noted, however, that level 1 is also the only level achievable by a software implementation. Level 2 requires physical "tamper evidence"
f ips/
This is not the case. There are several software implementations that have achieved FIPS 140 level 2 validation, more notably the Netscape Security Services (NSS) library which is now maintained by the Mozilla team: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/
....that there is some way in which you can run OpenSSL in FIPS compliant mode then? Or is it a special FIPS distribution of OpenSSL?
Because under FIPS, the only allowable algorithms are 3DES-CBC for encryption and SHA1 for HMAC.
If you allow anything else to be used, it is not "FIPS compliant".
Two issues. Firstly, AES is acceptable these days for the symmetric cipher and that is supported in TLS. Secondly, the strict requirements about what ciphers are available does not, as far as I know, apply if it's just a FIPS 140-2 level 1 validation which is basically a validation that the FIPS certified ciphers in the library function as required. If they have gone for FIPS 140-2 level 2 then then any key management functionality (such as key wrapping) must use FIPS certified ciphers but one can usually still allow users to use other ciphers. This is important since SSL requires both MD5 and SHA-1 for some of it's obscure MAC functions.
Having read the patent through (and boy is it a chore getting those images of the USPTO server) I am fairly confident that my brother and I built something that did exactly this in about 1978. The problem that we had as this; we had a couple of electric motors in our Lego box that tended to run at different speeds and we didn't have any speed controllers, just on/off switches. We wanted more power for a model car than we could get from one motor so we hooked them together through a differential. Since you could switch the motors on and off independently you could run the output at different speeds. So we had a drive system with two inputs, at least one of which was an electric motor, which could run at varying speeds and which mechanically is identical to what they describe in their patent, more than a decade before it was filed.
I guess I should call Toyota and swear an affidavit for them! Not only is it prior art, but if an 11 year old and a 13 year old can invent it it's arguably obvious too.
The Prius does not reduce emmisions. It reduces emmisions at the tailpipe compared to a conventional system.
...
When you consider the emmisions cost of the entire system, production, energy production/transmission and disposal, the current commercially available hybrids are unmitigated environmental disasters hidden by ignorance, smoke and mirrors.
But the claims surrounding the current crop of hybrids are faith based, not engineering based.
So that we do not have to take your assertion that "current commercially available hybrids are unmitigated environmental disasters" simply on faith, would you care to provide some backup? Having looked fairly closely at the components inside Toyota's hybrid technology the design is remarkably simple and the only components that are unusual compared to regular drivetrains are the batteries and a big-ass stack of power transistors. Yes, we also have extra planetary gear systems, extra wound motor/generators and a computer but is the cost of those gears or winding those motors really so high, as a fraction of the energy used to make the car in the first place or to run it for its lifetime? These days the environmental impact of the creation and recycling of Nickel Metal Hydride batteries is not really that energy consumptive or polluting. As for the power transistors I have to confess some ignorance as to the energy cost of manufacture but in the light of the fact that the EPA lets people make these things in densely populated parts of California it seems likely that the toxic emissions are pretty low.
You are absolutely right that de-tuned motors can be made much more efficient than ones tuned for performance. This is in fact one of the two key features of a hybrid system (the other being not wasting all your kinetic energy in break heat). The mere fact that one can make a car more efficient by giving it unacceptable performance is not very useful; a hybrid system's utility stems from it's ability to make a de-tuned engine acceptable.
So, would you care to provide some evidence as to why these things are supposed to be such disasters?
This is absolutely correct. Any experiment (thought or practical) is broken if you have differences on several variables but do not take all of those differences into account. In this case the original author compares the ongoing cost of running some old car without a loan on it against the cost of buying a brand new hybrid on a loan. That's not comparing apples with apples and that is bad science.
The only thing that stopped the Mac Mini from being the perfect living room machine was that it didn't have digital audio out. It already has full screen DVD playback through DVI; with the addition of digital audio out people could have a Mac Mini instead of a DVD player and not need to make any compromises and not have to mess around with third party solutions. It's a great pity that Apple have not rectified this glaring omission.
Having said that, close inspection of the new machines reveals that they don't seem to have changed the main board at all; it's the same processors and same video RAM as before. Still, it would be very nice if they would add the digital audio some day.
This sounds like one catfish you wouldn't want to go noodling for! In the US people catch catfish up to 100lb or so by hand but I think 646lb fish might be a little much!
I'm surprised OpenID is using DSA though - AFAIK RSA (now that it's patent free) is a superior, more trusted and flexible algorithm.
As a professional cryptographer I certainly don't think that DSA is in any way inferior for the task in hand. It is however superior in one significant way: if you use a 1024 bit key then the RSA signature is 1024 bits, which takes 171 bytes to base64 code, while the DSA signature only takes up 54 bytes.
While the article does state that they plan to have the device lay pipes, wires and ducts as well as cement walls it is my experience that these are not where the cost of construction lies.
I'm currently nine months through an 11 month project to build a house and frankly the time spent raising walls and laying pipes has been small in comparison to the laying of the foundations and the huge number of "finishing" jobs. Without these the output of these robots may be functional but is doomed to look rather industrial.
These days the framing for a wooden house is designed on a CAD system, cut by robot, shipped in segments and can be erected in a day on a well laid foundation. Hanging internal doors takes nearly as long as putting the frame up!
Perhaps robots like this will catch on for rebuilding in disaster areas but until they can construct aesthetically pleasing cabinets and fix the architrave around a doorway I don't think they will have much utility in the mainstream construction business. For the jobs that it does this robot only replaces relatively cheap labour and getting in a bunch of guys with hammers has a significantly lower capital cost and is much more flexible.
If you can find a good way to store the compressed gas this is an excellent idea. Expansion engines like this air engine (and steam engines) produce maximum torque at zero RPM, which is perfect for pulling away from a standstill without the complexity of a clutch and a gearbox, whereas internal combustion engines (and turbines) need to be turning quite a bit before they produce and torque.
The hardware manual linked off the web site says that the Power Over Ethernet lines are passed through to the main connector and they even have a reference design for showing how to loop the PoE lines back to power the device. So yes, you can easily power this off of the ethernet cable.
It's odd that they think that this is news considering that Advanced Rendering Technology were building 3D ray tracing hardware a decade ago.
While at the individual level the question of "what is art?" is hard to answer, at the generic level I think a reasonable definition is that art is any act that intends to convey emotion from some "artist" to a beholder of the art. "Good" art is that which is effective at this even if you don't like it and "bad" art is ineffective at this.
If you accept this definition then computer generated "art" might well be art, but the artist is the programmer rather than the computer, since it is from the programmer that the intent comes.
None of the pictures on the page show the PC mobo going into the case. The picture called fit.jpg shows the mobo sticking out at the bottom left. The last couple of shots show no indication that the case has anything in it other than a normal Mac Mini.
I'm not saying that these guys haven't done what they said they've done but it would have been good to have some pictures of the back of the machine with the ports or perhaps some re-assembly shows so we could see just how tight the fit is.
unfortunately there is ... no information with regards to running servers/static IP's.
When the UK Online service was first announced back in November I contacted them about static IP addresses and running of server. They don't support static IP and the helpful man at their support email told me: "Unfortunately all ports are blocked that allow mail/web servers to run on the line and also proxy servers. Providing you can get round without using these ports we can provide the service."
So I'll be waiting until some of the other ISPs start offering 8MB service in the UK, which is supposed to start in the Spring.
It's expected that head set support will make it's way in too.
Headset support is already there. It will only show up if you have up-to-date Bluetooth adaptor firmware (see Apple's bluetooth page for the updater). The Bluetooth set-up assistant will then offer the chance to set up headsets and configure them as one audio input and one audio output. I use iChatAV with a Sony Ericsson HBH-60 headset and it works very well.
At this time they seem to have messed up the UK pricing completely. While the disc upgrade price looks fine at £30 the WiFI+Bluetooth package has gone up to £152.88 (despite the individual modules remaining unchanged at £49 and £35 respectively) and the price of the 1GB upgrade has risen to a staggering £561.53. These compared to $99 for wireless and $325 for the RAM. Curiously, if you take £99, subtract the VAT and convert to dollars you end up close to $153 and if you take £325, subtract the VAT you end up 10% under $561. I wonder if someone at Apple UK typed the numbers into the wrong side of some currency converter...