It's time for the '60s and 70s's SF shows to die. Enough of Star [Trek|Wars], Dr. Who, Battlestar Galactica, Astro Boy, etc. We need to move forward.
(Also, enough with the "Chosen One" movies. You know, the "Teenage boy discovers he has an Inherent Magical Power which gives him a Destiny to Do Great Things" genre. This year alone, that concept has been beaten to death in "The Last Airbender", "Sorcerer's Apprentice", and "Percy Jackson and The Olympians".)
As someone who just recently ordered their custom tailored Star Trek uniform...
Uh oh.
We already have hyposprays. They're called jet injectors. They actually predate star trek (they were invented in 1960) and have been used for decades for vaccinations...
The US used to have mass inoculation campaigns using those things. The U.S. Army used them for decades. Worked fine. The latest generation of the technology is small, battery-powered, and uses reusable cartridges. The problem is that either the whole thing has to be disposable, which gets expensive, or it has to be re-sterilized, which requires support equipment and careful handling.
Beyond 1Mb/s or so, "broadband" is mostly a video delivery system. Why should the Government promote higher bandwidth? Few people need it for any non-entertainment use. We need net neutrality so that the duopoly for the "last mile" doesn't get to crank up prices on the content they don't sell, and some incentives may be needed for "rural America", but beyond that, why should the Government get involved?
(Quit whining that you can't pirate stuff fast enough.)
It sounds like a newer version of the testing facilities we were using at HP 15 years ago.
Right. Those are common in the RF community. I used to work in a facility that made military RF gear, and they had some, including one big enough to hold a satellite.
The other alternative, incidentally, is to test outdoors in an RF-quiet area. Testing for FCC Part 15 RF noise output compliance is often done in a flat, open field, with the device sitting on a wooden turntable. The test gear is stationary, and the device is rotated to check if it's emitting something it shouldn't. For cell phone gear you have to test somewhere that doesn't have anything emitting on cell phnone frequencies, so you either have to test in an anechoic chamber or somewhere remote with no cell phone coverage.
It's not clear how high a salt concentration these potatoes tolerate. Probably lower than sea water. The article indicates that they're trying to make potatoes tolerant of salt water incursions into ground water. In areas with low-lying coastlines, groundwater becomes increasingly salty nearer to the ocean. This makes near-coastal land more useful.
A few crops, like "salt hay", will grow in seawater, even on tidal flats. Historically, though, the crops that will grow in those conditions are of marginal value.
This is a major First Amendment issue. Where's the court order? I don't care what they were doing, there's no excuse for doing this without legal process. Judges are available 24/7 for emergencies.
Also, it doesn't help the Government that they got BurstNet to do their dirty work. Anything the U.S. Government is constitutionally prohibited from doing directly, they cannot do through a private party.
PHP/MySQL web programming is a low-end job. So you want second-rate people who aren't totally incompetent. That stuff isn't rocket science.
You may be better off finding some people who will fit in well with your organization and have some interest in the business, and have done a little web development. They can learn PHP/MySQL in a month or two. They're likely to come up with something that makes business sense.
If your data center is running stochastic tests, trying scenarios on derivative securities, it's a big win. If it's serving pages with PHP, zero win.
There are many useful ways to use a GPU. Machine learning. Computer vision. Finite element analysis. Audio processing. But those aren't things most people are doing. If your problem can be expressed well in MATLAB, a GPU can probably accelerate it. MATLAB connections to GPUs are becoming popular. They're badly needed; MATLAB is widely used in engineering and scientific work, but it's not as fast as it should be.
Someone suggested that insurance companies might direct their customers to call center doctors in third-world countries. That's already happening. This is the real world of "telemedicine". This is a real ad:
This sounds like the dumbest attack vector since FireWire came out with physical DMA support.
Yes. As I once pointed out on the Linux kernel mailing list, the FireWire driver enabled external access to physical memory by default, via an un-commented line of code. Only for the first 4GB, though; nobody had updated that backdoor for 64-bit. (There are hardware registers which control the address range for which that feature works. The Linux defaults were to allow 0..4GB-1)
When you buy a domain, you should be mailed a letter with an activation code, sent to the registrant address. No valid mailing address, no domain activation.
The future of MySQL is iffy, too. All Oracle has to do is put the second team on maintaining it, and it will die. A database program has to be very reliable to be usable at all.
We've already
seen this with "MySQL Workbench". Since Oracle took over, all the MySQL GUI tools were wrapped into a central "MySQL Workbench" program. Which crashes frequently. (If you can install it at all.) If Oracle can bring MySQL down to the level of MySQL Workbench, nobody will be able to use it.
MySQL needs to be fully archived, including the revision history, outside of Oracle, just in case.
Maybe the way to cut energy consumption is to dump unnecessary "Web 2.0" junk. Serving static pages is very cheap. Is it really necessary to generate the pages on your site from some "content management system" which makes multiple database accesses just to display essentially the same page over and over?
I can't remember a firm being seriously damaged through the legal system so soon after establishing itself as a ubiquitous and accepted tool by the establishment.
Read more business history. Ones that come to mind immediately are Lehman Brothers, Barings, Enron, Lloyds of London, and Worldcom. Disputes over ownership and contracts happen all the time.
USENET is very resistant to censorship. The comment "The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" was actually made about USENET, not the Internet, in response to an incident at Stanford where the administration tried to censor "rec.humor.funny". As long as someone, somewhere on campus had a dialup USENET feed, the missing messages would be recovered and put back into on-campus servers.
There was something to be said for that, instead of a huge number of business-controlled forum systems.
The iPad does not require fonts in svg. Like other modern browsers it supports @font-face using standard OTF fonts.
Typophile, TypeKit and Fast Company all say the iPhone/iPad don't support TTF or WOFF downloadable fonts, just SVG. Also, selection doesn't work right for SVG fonts on the iPad, and loading multiple weights of the same font is said to crash the browser.
Please disable Jobs Reality Distortion Field before using.
Actually, that page is an excellent example of why you shouldn't use a display font for normal text.
With a system that does anti-aliasing of text (Windows 7, Vista(?), newer MacOS, newer Linux, etc.) it's not too bad. If your system doesn't, it looks awful. It looks terrible in Windows XP and earlier, even if you have a current browser. It's definitely not something ready for wide scale deployment given the current state of client platforms. I'm trying it for the amusement of the steampunk community.
Those are actual 19th century fonts, scanned in from a book of type styles circa 1900 and vectorized.
Micropayments never went anywhere on the web. There were plenty of micropayment schemes on the web, from Xanadu to CyberCoin, but they all went bust. Nobody talked about micropayments for years.
Micropayments are back.
Cell phones, and Apple's devices create a direct connection between your wallet and their bank account. Those devices can suck money out of your pocket. Content providers love this. That's the big change. As banks, cable companies, and phone companies have discovered since deregulation, consumers will tolerate a slow, steady increase in small fees. After a decade you're paying $100 a month for what used to cost $20.
(Read the "print" version of the article, instead of the "tiny blocks of text spread over many pages of ads" version.)
I have misgivings about HTML5. It gives the page more control, and the user less. That's been a trend in HTML for years, and it's getting worse.
I'm dreading "canvas". Ad blockers need to get smarter. Noticed that popups are winning over Firefox's popup blocking? We're also going to see pages that use 100% of the CPU just for display. We're going to need a browser option for "don't run canvas code for windows that aren't on top.
The "input type" mechanism for forms is lame. There are a number of standard types like "tel", but it's just text with no line breaks. They should have provided for either regular expressions or syntax like the COBOL Picture clause ("CREDIT_CARD_NUMBER PIC 9999-9999-9999-9999").
Dynamically-loaded fonts have been working for some time now in all the mainstream browsers. (IE6 and Firefox 3.5 were the last mainstream browsers not to have it.) We've been playing with that for our steampunk site. Downloadable fonts without anti-aliasing turn out to look ugly for small font sizes, because most of the display-type fonts have too much detail and not enough hinting for small font sizes. (In an annoying piece of Apple incompatibility, the iPad requires fonts in SVG, of all things. Everybody else, including Microsoft, is going to Web Open Font Format.) I'd recommend against using this feature much unless you have a good sense of typography. (Bad example: our steampunk search engine.)
James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) says that higher frame rates are more valuable than higher resolution. He wanted to do Avatar at 48FPS, but the technology wasn't there yet. The sequel probably will be at a higher frame rate.
Cameron points out that 4K resolution is worthless beyond the first few rows of the theater, but frame rate benefits all viewers.
It's a real issue for Cameron, who, as a director, likes sweeping panoramas with high detail. If you pan slowly over a high-resolution scene at 24FPS, there are visible artifacts. This precludes certain shots which look great and ought to be in the movie. It's necessary to defocus slightly or add motion blur for certain shots.
So YouTube should work on getting their frame rates up, not their resolutions. Let's see some IMAX movies at 48FPS on YouTube.
There's a real question as to whether the US still has working nuclear weapons. Much of the production capability was shut down years ago. For over a decade, the US had lost the capacity to make nuclear "pits". They used to be made at Rocky Flats, which shut down in 1993. Los Alamos now has a limited production capability for new nuclear pits, but no pit made there has been tested in an actual detonation. The complete ban on nuclear testing, even underground, means there's some doubt about whether new physics packages actually work. Current practice is to build duplicates of designs from the 1970s.
One of the non-radioactive materials for H-bombs is out of production, and attempts to make more of it have not been successful.
There's also a tritium shortage. Tritium, with its short half-life, has to be replaced periodically. That's getting to be a problem.
The second team is building these things today. Early atomic bombs were designed by Nobel prizewinners. Today, the people involved are far less qualified and not very motivated. Almost everybody who ever designed a bomb that went off has retired. There's a proposal to design a "dumber bomb" with a very long shelf life, but without testing, nobody really has confidence that would work.
Slashdot Mirror
It's time for the '60s and 70s's SF shows to die. Enough of Star [Trek|Wars], Dr. Who, Battlestar Galactica, Astro Boy, etc. We need to move forward.
(Also, enough with the "Chosen One" movies. You know, the "Teenage boy discovers he has an Inherent Magical Power which gives him a Destiny to Do Great Things" genre. This year alone, that concept has been beaten to death in "The Last Airbender", "Sorcerer's Apprentice", and "Percy Jackson and The Olympians".)
As someone who just recently ordered their custom tailored Star Trek uniform...
Uh oh.
We already have hyposprays. They're called jet injectors. They actually predate star trek (they were invented in 1960) and have been used for decades for vaccinations...
The US used to have mass inoculation campaigns using those things. The U.S. Army used them for decades. Worked fine. The latest generation of the technology is small, battery-powered, and uses reusable cartridges. The problem is that either the whole thing has to be disposable, which gets expensive, or it has to be re-sterilized, which requires support equipment and careful handling.
Beyond 1Mb/s or so, "broadband" is mostly a video delivery system. Why should the Government promote higher bandwidth? Few people need it for any non-entertainment use. We need net neutrality so that the duopoly for the "last mile" doesn't get to crank up prices on the content they don't sell, and some incentives may be needed for "rural America", but beyond that, why should the Government get involved?
(Quit whining that you can't pirate stuff fast enough.)
It sounds like a newer version of the testing facilities we were using at HP 15 years ago.
Right. Those are common in the RF community. I used to work in a facility that made military RF gear, and they had some, including one big enough to hold a satellite.
The other alternative, incidentally, is to test outdoors in an RF-quiet area. Testing for FCC Part 15 RF noise output compliance is often done in a flat, open field, with the device sitting on a wooden turntable. The test gear is stationary, and the device is rotated to check if it's emitting something it shouldn't. For cell phone gear you have to test somewhere that doesn't have anything emitting on cell phnone frequencies, so you either have to test in an anechoic chamber or somewhere remote with no cell phone coverage.
It's not clear how high a salt concentration these potatoes tolerate. Probably lower than sea water. The article indicates that they're trying to make potatoes tolerant of salt water incursions into ground water. In areas with low-lying coastlines, groundwater becomes increasingly salty nearer to the ocean. This makes near-coastal land more useful.
A few crops, like "salt hay", will grow in seawater, even on tidal flats. Historically, though, the crops that will grow in those conditions are of marginal value.
This is a major First Amendment issue. Where's the court order? I don't care what they were doing, there's no excuse for doing this without legal process. Judges are available 24/7 for emergencies.
Also, it doesn't help the Government that they got BurstNet to do their dirty work. Anything the U.S. Government is constitutionally prohibited from doing directly, they cannot do through a private party.
PHP/MySQL web programming is a low-end job. So you want second-rate people who aren't totally incompetent. That stuff isn't rocket science.
You may be better off finding some people who will fit in well with your organization and have some interest in the business, and have done a little web development. They can learn PHP/MySQL in a month or two. They're likely to come up with something that makes business sense.
If your data center is running stochastic tests, trying scenarios on derivative securities, it's a big win. If it's serving pages with PHP, zero win.
There are many useful ways to use a GPU. Machine learning. Computer vision. Finite element analysis. Audio processing. But those aren't things most people are doing. If your problem can be expressed well in MATLAB, a GPU can probably accelerate it. MATLAB connections to GPUs are becoming popular. They're badly needed; MATLAB is widely used in engineering and scientific work, but it's not as fast as it should be.
Someone suggested that insurance companies might direct their customers to call center doctors in third-world countries. That's already happening. This is the real world of "telemedicine". This is a real ad:
Doctors needed for a Call Center Jobs in Pakistan
MBBS Doctors needed to work in our Call Center
Contact: Mr. Aftab Ibrahim (aftab@catcos.com)
Mr. Wasif Balouch Ashrafi (wasif@catcos.com)
Or Call on 021-34549291 - 021-34529748
This sounds like the dumbest attack vector since FireWire came out with physical DMA support.
Yes. As I once pointed out on the Linux kernel mailing list, the FireWire driver enabled external access to physical memory by default, via an un-commented line of code. Only for the first 4GB, though; nobody had updated that backdoor for 64-bit. (There are hardware registers which control the address range for which that feature works. The Linux defaults were to allow 0..4GB-1)
When you buy a domain, you should be mailed a letter with an activation code, sent to the registrant address. No valid mailing address, no domain activation.
The future of MySQL is iffy, too. All Oracle has to do is put the second team on maintaining it, and it will die. A database program has to be very reliable to be usable at all.
We've already seen this with "MySQL Workbench". Since Oracle took over, all the MySQL GUI tools were wrapped into a central "MySQL Workbench" program. Which crashes frequently. (If you can install it at all.) If Oracle can bring MySQL down to the level of MySQL Workbench, nobody will be able to use it.
MySQL needs to be fully archived, including the revision history, outside of Oracle, just in case.
Maybe the way to cut energy consumption is to dump unnecessary "Web 2.0" junk. Serving static pages is very cheap. Is it really necessary to generate the pages on your site from some "content management system" which makes multiple database accesses just to display essentially the same page over and over?
"Own your own stuff" - Joan Jett
Jett had, and has, her own record label. Worked out very well.
Also notable: Mick Jagger, London School of Economics '63.
I can't remember a firm being seriously damaged through the legal system so soon after establishing itself as a ubiquitous and accepted tool by the establishment.
Read more business history. Ones that come to mind immediately are Lehman Brothers, Barings, Enron, Lloyds of London, and Worldcom. Disputes over ownership and contracts happen all the time.
For more details on the background, see this CNET story.
USENET is very resistant to censorship. The comment "The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" was actually made about USENET, not the Internet, in response to an incident at Stanford where the administration tried to censor "rec.humor.funny". As long as someone, somewhere on campus had a dialup USENET feed, the missing messages would be recovered and put back into on-campus servers.
There was something to be said for that, instead of a huge number of business-controlled forum systems.
The iPad does not require fonts in svg. Like other modern browsers it supports @font-face using standard OTF fonts.
Typophile, TypeKit and Fast Company all say the iPhone/iPad don't support TTF or WOFF downloadable fonts, just SVG. Also, selection doesn't work right for SVG fonts on the iPad, and loading multiple weights of the same font is said to crash the browser.
Please disable Jobs Reality Distortion Field before using.
Actually, that page is an excellent example of why you shouldn't use a display font for normal text.
With a system that does anti-aliasing of text (Windows 7, Vista(?), newer MacOS, newer Linux, etc.) it's not too bad. If your system doesn't, it looks awful. It looks terrible in Windows XP and earlier, even if you have a current browser. It's definitely not something ready for wide scale deployment given the current state of client platforms. I'm trying it for the amusement of the steampunk community.
Those are actual 19th century fonts, scanned in from a book of type styles circa 1900 and vectorized.
Micropayments never went anywhere on the web. There were plenty of micropayment schemes on the web, from Xanadu to CyberCoin, but they all went bust. Nobody talked about micropayments for years.
Micropayments are back. Cell phones, and Apple's devices create a direct connection between your wallet and their bank account. Those devices can suck money out of your pocket. Content providers love this. That's the big change. As banks, cable companies, and phone companies have discovered since deregulation, consumers will tolerate a slow, steady increase in small fees. After a decade you're paying $100 a month for what used to cost $20.
(Read the "print" version of the article, instead of the "tiny blocks of text spread over many pages of ads" version.)
I have misgivings about HTML5. It gives the page more control, and the user less. That's been a trend in HTML for years, and it's getting worse.
I'm dreading "canvas". Ad blockers need to get smarter. Noticed that popups are winning over Firefox's popup blocking? We're also going to see pages that use 100% of the CPU just for display. We're going to need a browser option for "don't run canvas code for windows that aren't on top.
The "input type" mechanism for forms is lame. There are a number of standard types like "tel", but it's just text with no line breaks. They should have provided for either regular expressions or syntax like the COBOL Picture clause ("CREDIT_CARD_NUMBER PIC 9999-9999-9999-9999").
Dynamically-loaded fonts have been working for some time now in all the mainstream browsers. (IE6 and Firefox 3.5 were the last mainstream browsers not to have it.) We've been playing with that for our steampunk site. Downloadable fonts without anti-aliasing turn out to look ugly for small font sizes, because most of the display-type fonts have too much detail and not enough hinting for small font sizes. (In an annoying piece of Apple incompatibility, the iPad requires fonts in SVG, of all things. Everybody else, including Microsoft, is going to Web Open Font Format.) I'd recommend against using this feature much unless you have a good sense of typography. (Bad example: our steampunk search engine.)
The scores should be checked against drug usage. Ritalin for the younger ones, street drugs for the older ones.
easy to make and edit by hand (it's xml!).
That is so 1970. Get a draw program.
Other than to distribute TV, what's all that bandwidth for?
Most slow-loading pages today are server-side problems. Usually some ad server is holding up page loads.
James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) says that higher frame rates are more valuable than higher resolution. He wanted to do Avatar at 48FPS, but the technology wasn't there yet. The sequel probably will be at a higher frame rate. Cameron points out that 4K resolution is worthless beyond the first few rows of the theater, but frame rate benefits all viewers.
It's a real issue for Cameron, who, as a director, likes sweeping panoramas with high detail. If you pan slowly over a high-resolution scene at 24FPS, there are visible artifacts. This precludes certain shots which look great and ought to be in the movie. It's necessary to defocus slightly or add motion blur for certain shots.
So YouTube should work on getting their frame rates up, not their resolutions. Let's see some IMAX movies at 48FPS on YouTube.
There's a real question as to whether the US still has working nuclear weapons. Much of the production capability was shut down years ago. For over a decade, the US had lost the capacity to make nuclear "pits". They used to be made at Rocky Flats, which shut down in 1993. Los Alamos now has a limited production capability for new nuclear pits, but no pit made there has been tested in an actual detonation. The complete ban on nuclear testing, even underground, means there's some doubt about whether new physics packages actually work. Current practice is to build duplicates of designs from the 1970s.
One of the non-radioactive materials for H-bombs is out of production, and attempts to make more of it have not been successful.
There's also a tritium shortage. Tritium, with its short half-life, has to be replaced periodically. That's getting to be a problem.
The second team is building these things today. Early atomic bombs were designed by Nobel prizewinners. Today, the people involved are far less qualified and not very motivated. Almost everybody who ever designed a bomb that went off has retired. There's a proposal to design a "dumber bomb" with a very long shelf life, but without testing, nobody really has confidence that would work.