It's time to take the position that if the ad or the box has better art than the game does, it's false advertising. There's no excuse today for bad in-game art, and games now generate HDTV resolution output, so if the box or ad has better art, it's willfully deceptive.
Now if that scene of the white girl giving the black girl a hard time had been in the game, the picture would have been fine. It would fit well into, say, the next generation of GTA.
(This got me thinking. Very few games today allow players to touch. We don't have good wrestling games, or martial arts throws, or football pileups. You can hit other players, but can't shake their hand. Or hand them something. Or cooperate in carrying something. Yet collision detection and motion planning technology is good enough to do that now. Something to work on.)
The business end of a scanning tunneling microscope is often a one-atom tip. Those are made by cutting a wire of some suitable metal (tungsten, or platinum/iridium), hoping to get a sharp tip. Such tips look like this. As you can see, sometimes the break gives you a very sharp one-atom point, but the area around it is ragged.
Electrochemical etching is used to make better-formed STM tips. Electrochemical etching with STM feedback to determine when the best form has been reached does even better.
Alexa says that the top five sites today are, in order, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Myspace, and eBay. Of those, only Myspace is owned by an "old media" company, and only Myspace is growing significantly.
This may be the first time that a top Internet site was owned by an "old media" company. (Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation). It makes sense; Myspace is to the Internet as tabloid journalism is to the newspaper industry. News Corp now has a leading position in both.
It's not Myspace. It's Microsoft. Why, for whatever reason, should Windows Media Player download and start an executable file from an unknown party?
Here's what Microsoft put in Media Player 10. See Windows Media Digital Rights Management (security). (Not your security; the content owner's security.)
To play a packaged digital media file, the consumer must first acquire a license key to unlock the file. The process of acquiring a license begins automatically when the consumer attempts to acquire the packaged digital media file, acquires a pre-delivered license, or plays the file for the first time. Windows Media Rights Manager either sends the consumer to a registration page where information is requested or payment is required, or "silently" retrieves a license from a clearing house.
That mechanism requires a Microsoft-approved license server, and apparently these attackers don't have one. So they use a related feature, which allows content to run a client-side script. This does show the user a popup; its not totally silent. But if the popup is answered, the script can download and install anything.
As soon as some attacker gets their hands on a Microsoft-approved license server, they can craft much better attacks. You don't even have to break into anything; there's a published SDK. Yes, there's code-signing and you have to sign an agreement. But if you can get past that, you 0wn anything that downloads your content. Even mobile devices.
This sounds more like some guys mouthing off rather than a real threat. The real players do not discuss their plans in chat rooms. It's like the group from Miami that was "trying to blow up the John Hancock Building". Turns out they're a bunch of small-time crooks and losers who ran into an FBI agent while blithering.
Al-queda used to have some competent people, and they might eventually get their act together for another big act of terrorism, but what we're seeing now are wannabee terrorists.
As a hobby, it's silly. As a part of something like "reorder.com", it would be useful. Show your webcam the barcode on any product you've got, and it finds someone who will sell you more of it, then adds it to a portable shopping cart. Grocery and drugstore sites should have had this by now.
"If you have 100 friends and 99 of them are on MySpace you can't just go over to another website and expect them all to follow."
If that's correct, there's only one winner in this business. On the other hand, that sounds like the early days of e-mail, when MCImail and GEnie didn't interconnect. Does Myspace do things to make external links hard?
This started with the Sandia spherical hopper. "A pre-programmed microprocessor inside the hopper reads an internal compass, and a gimbal mechanism rotates the offset-weighted internal workings so that the hopper rolls around until it is pointed in the desired direction. The combustion chamber fires, the piston punches the ground, and the hopper leaps." That was back in 1997. Now, it looks like it is approaching production.
Surprisingly, the profitability problem with arcades isn't the games. It's the food service. See this consultant's report: "Food Service and Location-Based Leisure Projects". "The only location-based entertainment (LBE) venues that will be profitable in the future are those that draw guests because of, not in spite of, the chow." Consider Chuck E Cheese, Nolan Bushnell's original pizza/arcade operation from 1977, which has 500 locations. They've stayed in business through three decades and all the generations of consoles. And they're profitable.
As the consultants put it,
A well-designed and managed food & beverage operation can generate a 40+% profit after deducting cost-of-goods-sold and labor.
Ban the words "snack bar" and "concession" from your vocabulary. Think café and restaurant instead.
They're probably right. That's something an arcade can deliver that you can't get at home.
The way we got into this mess is that in early versions of UNIX, tab stops were set to 8 spaces in the TTY handler. This was not because tab stops were intended as indentation. It was because an ASR-33 teletype could tab that far in one character time. It was for optimizing output time. (Back in those days, TTY output processing had to have time delays to handle the mechanical lag in printers. "How many nulls were required after each carriage return" was an issue, and better systems kept track of the printing column position and adjusted the delay accordingly. Peripherals used to be really dumb.)
If some reasonable indentation value like 4 or 5 had been chosen, everything would have been fine.
Maybe move it to Wikipedia
on
Freedb.org Ending
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Wikipedia is busily replicating GraceNote and IMDB, by hand, and not too well. They're using a wiki to do the job of a database. Some music types from Wikipedia should take this database and the data in Wikipedia and make something useful out of it.
Personally, I think that Wikipedia needs something like "Wikipedia Music and Movies", to which all content associated with music, movies, TV, and the people involved in the industry would be moved. More structured than Wikipedia Encyclopedia, Music and Movies would have standard database formats and slots for music and movies, indexed so that you could see all movies by some director or all songs by some musician. Wikipedia can't do that, but IMDB can.
Then Wikipedia needs "Wikipedia Atlas", a map-based system, for all those "State Route 93" entries. Wikipedia isn't spatial, and space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. An atlas system would be able to handle an endless number of "my favorite restaurant" articles. Wikipedia Travel already has something like this.
With that out of the way, Wikipedia would become more like an encyclopedia. Right now, it's drowning under the incoming cruft.
It's Roland the Plogger again, writing about something called EA-Pap. That's so Roland.
Piezoelectric films are not new. PVDF films like Kynar are peizoelectric, and they've been used for hydrophones, speakers, and pressure sensors for years.
Actually, the big recent advance in pizeoelectric actuators is subminiature rotary motors like this Squiggle device. Now, very tiny motors can be made for applications like camera lens autofocus. The initial application looks to be cramming autofocus machinery into cell phone cameras.
I ran one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot. I'm not sure there really are "careers in robotics". Of our best young people, one is now running a hedge fund, and the other is working for a financial derivatives firm in New York. Neither of them could find anything in robotics with a big payoff.
With 12 million illegal immigrants, the US doesn't need robots. Japan, though...
That's about right. The USSR's shuttle, Buran, made its test flight and landing unmanned.
Buran is a sad story. It worked fine; the USSR just couldn't afford operating it. One was finished and four were under construction when the Soviet Union collapsed. It's not, by the way, a duplicate of the US shuttle. Buran had no big engines and was launched on top of an expendable Energia booster. This made for a simpler system than the US's external tank feeding engines on the Shuttle, plus solid rocket boosters. There's less reusability, but as it turned out, the Shuttle needs so much work after each flight that the reusability wasn't that much of an economy.
The big advantage Buran had was that its thermal protection system was tougher than the Shuttle's. The Soviets learned from the US experience, developed tougher thermal protection tiles, and used more titanium. Remember, the US shuttle was designed in the 1960s.
The web page is kind of confusing. If you download "QNX Neutrino RTOS x86 host", you get an.ISO image of a bootable CD-ROM for installing QNX. There's a 30-day trial key, and when the trial runs out, you can't use some of the development tools, primarily the Eclipse IDE. But you still have GCC and all the usual command-line tools. If you download it and install it onto a PC, you get a desktop PC running QNX, with web browsers and the usual stuff. There's Firefox and Thunderbird, although they're not the latest versions.
The other versions are for cross-development from Windows, Solaris, or Linux, typically onto small targets like ARM CPUs.
Unfortunately, actually buying QNX is quite expensive per seat, in high four figures, plus more for extra features. However, if you do buy a development license, you can make as many embedded target systems as you like, each running QNX.
You're asking Windows to create, write, and close maybe 500 files per second. Windows file creation isn't that fast. What's the file system format on the destination side?
Try transferring a 1GB file and report how long that takes.
But then, an advanced civilization might assume that anybody worth talking to continuously monitors all RF coming into their solar system and is able to figure out anything that isn't truly random noise. In another fifty years, we ought to be able to do that; we could probably do it in ten years if we had to.
Slashdot Mirror
It's time to take the position that if the ad or the box has better art than the game does, it's false advertising. There's no excuse today for bad in-game art, and games now generate HDTV resolution output, so if the box or ad has better art, it's willfully deceptive.
Now if that scene of the white girl giving the black girl a hard time had been in the game, the picture would have been fine. It would fit well into, say, the next generation of GTA.
(This got me thinking. Very few games today allow players to touch. We don't have good wrestling games, or martial arts throws, or football pileups. You can hit other players, but can't shake their hand. Or hand them something. Or cooperate in carrying something. Yet collision detection and motion planning technology is good enough to do that now. Something to work on.)
The business end of a scanning tunneling microscope is often a one-atom tip. Those are made by cutting a wire of some suitable metal (tungsten, or platinum/iridium), hoping to get a sharp tip. Such tips look like this. As you can see, sometimes the break gives you a very sharp one-atom point, but the area around it is ragged.
The technology for making these tips is embarassingly simple.
Electrochemical etching is used to make better-formed STM tips. Electrochemical etching with STM feedback to determine when the best form has been reached does even better.
Alexa says that the top five sites today are, in order, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Myspace, and eBay. Of those, only Myspace is owned by an "old media" company, and only Myspace is growing significantly. This may be the first time that a top Internet site was owned by an "old media" company. (Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation). It makes sense; Myspace is to the Internet as tabloid journalism is to the newspaper industry. News Corp now has a leading position in both.
It's not Myspace. It's Microsoft. Why, for whatever reason, should Windows Media Player download and start an executable file from an unknown party?
Here's what Microsoft put in Media Player 10. See Windows Media Digital Rights Management (security). (Not your security; the content owner's security.) To play a packaged digital media file, the consumer must first acquire a license key to unlock the file. The process of acquiring a license begins automatically when the consumer attempts to acquire the packaged digital media file, acquires a pre-delivered license, or plays the file for the first time. Windows Media Rights Manager either sends the consumer to a registration page where information is requested or payment is required, or "silently" retrieves a license from a clearing house.
That mechanism requires a Microsoft-approved license server, and apparently these attackers don't have one. So they use a related feature, which allows content to run a client-side script. This does show the user a popup; its not totally silent. But if the popup is answered, the script can download and install anything.
As soon as some attacker gets their hands on a Microsoft-approved license server, they can craft much better attacks. You don't even have to break into anything; there's a published SDK. Yes, there's code-signing and you have to sign an agreement. But if you can get past that, you 0wn anything that downloads your content. Even mobile devices.
There's no technical obstacle, but with live players in control, the play will look like a game of pickup football, not the NFL.
The combination of late to market, higher price, and harder to develop for is a killer combo.
I'll wait for the "school shootings" upgrade pack for Bully, where the goths and nerds get some firepower and take the bully down hard.
This sounds more like some guys mouthing off rather than a real threat. The real players do not discuss their plans in chat rooms. It's like the group from Miami that was "trying to blow up the John Hancock Building". Turns out they're a bunch of small-time crooks and losers who ran into an FBI agent while blithering.
Al-queda used to have some competent people, and they might eventually get their act together for another big act of terrorism, but what we're seeing now are wannabee terrorists.
As a hobby, it's silly. As a part of something like "reorder.com", it would be useful. Show your webcam the barcode on any product you've got, and it finds someone who will sell you more of it, then adds it to a portable shopping cart. Grocery and drugstore sites should have had this by now.
Nah, that's too much of a conspiracy theory.
Now China will have to build a really, really big stateful firewall. Probably something like AOL's cacheing server.
"If you have 100 friends and 99 of them are on MySpace you can't just go over to another website and expect them all to follow."
If that's correct, there's only one winner in this business. On the other hand, that sounds like the early days of e-mail, when MCImail and GEnie didn't interconnect. Does Myspace do things to make external links hard?
This started with the Sandia spherical hopper. "A pre-programmed microprocessor inside the hopper reads an internal compass, and a gimbal mechanism rotates the offset-weighted internal workings so that the hopper rolls around until it is pointed in the desired direction. The combustion chamber fires, the piston punches the ground, and the hopper leaps." That was back in 1997. Now, it looks like it is approaching production.
America's army of killer robots is coming. Soon.
Surprisingly, the profitability problem with arcades isn't the games. It's the food service. See this consultant's report: "Food Service and Location-Based Leisure Projects". "The only location-based entertainment (LBE) venues that will be profitable in the future are those that draw guests because of, not in spite of, the chow." Consider Chuck E Cheese, Nolan Bushnell's original pizza/arcade operation from 1977, which has 500 locations. They've stayed in business through three decades and all the generations of consoles. And they're profitable.
As the consultants put it, A well-designed and managed food & beverage operation can generate a 40+% profit after deducting cost-of-goods-sold and labor. Ban the words "snack bar" and "concession" from your vocabulary. Think café and restaurant instead.
They're probably right. That's something an arcade can deliver that you can't get at home.
The way we got into this mess is that in early versions of UNIX, tab stops were set to 8 spaces in the TTY handler. This was not because tab stops were intended as indentation. It was because an ASR-33 teletype could tab that far in one character time. It was for optimizing output time. (Back in those days, TTY output processing had to have time delays to handle the mechanical lag in printers. "How many nulls were required after each carriage return" was an issue, and better systems kept track of the printing column position and adjusted the delay accordingly. Peripherals used to be really dumb.)
If some reasonable indentation value like 4 or 5 had been chosen, everything would have been fine.
Wikipedia is busily replicating GraceNote and IMDB, by hand, and not too well. They're using a wiki to do the job of a database. Some music types from Wikipedia should take this database and the data in Wikipedia and make something useful out of it.
Personally, I think that Wikipedia needs something like "Wikipedia Music and Movies", to which all content associated with music, movies, TV, and the people involved in the industry would be moved. More structured than Wikipedia Encyclopedia, Music and Movies would have standard database formats and slots for music and movies, indexed so that you could see all movies by some director or all songs by some musician. Wikipedia can't do that, but IMDB can.
Then Wikipedia needs "Wikipedia Atlas", a map-based system, for all those "State Route 93" entries. Wikipedia isn't spatial, and space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. An atlas system would be able to handle an endless number of "my favorite restaurant" articles. Wikipedia Travel already has something like this.
With that out of the way, Wikipedia would become more like an encyclopedia. Right now, it's drowning under the incoming cruft.
Actually, we had that in 1997. See Demo 97, where all that was implemented in a live freeway lane in San Diego. Then funding was cut.
It's Roland the Plogger again, writing about something called EA-Pap. That's so Roland.
Piezoelectric films are not new. PVDF films like Kynar are peizoelectric, and they've been used for hydrophones, speakers, and pressure sensors for years.
Actually, the big recent advance in pizeoelectric actuators is subminiature rotary motors like this Squiggle device. Now, very tiny motors can be made for applications like camera lens autofocus. The initial application looks to be cramming autofocus machinery into cell phone cameras.
No, they're not launching at 3AM; they slipped all the way to Sunday afternoon.
I ran one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot. I'm not sure there really are "careers in robotics". Of our best young people, one is now running a hedge fund, and the other is working for a financial derivatives firm in New York. Neither of them could find anything in robotics with a big payoff.
With 12 million illegal immigrants, the US doesn't need robots. Japan, though...
That's about right. The USSR's shuttle, Buran, made its test flight and landing unmanned.
Buran is a sad story. It worked fine; the USSR just couldn't afford operating it. One was finished and four were under construction when the Soviet Union collapsed. It's not, by the way, a duplicate of the US shuttle. Buran had no big engines and was launched on top of an expendable Energia booster. This made for a simpler system than the US's external tank feeding engines on the Shuttle, plus solid rocket boosters. There's less reusability, but as it turned out, the Shuttle needs so much work after each flight that the reusability wasn't that much of an economy.
The big advantage Buran had was that its thermal protection system was tougher than the Shuttle's. The Soviets learned from the US experience, developed tougher thermal protection tiles, and used more titanium. Remember, the US shuttle was designed in the 1960s.
Yes, you can still get QNX from here.
The web page is kind of confusing. If you download "QNX Neutrino RTOS x86 host", you get an .ISO image of a bootable CD-ROM for installing QNX. There's a 30-day trial key, and when the trial runs out, you can't use some of the development tools, primarily the Eclipse IDE. But you still have GCC and all the usual command-line tools. If you download it and install it onto a PC, you get a desktop PC running QNX, with web browsers and the usual stuff. There's Firefox and Thunderbird, although they're not the latest versions.
The other versions are for cross-development from Windows, Solaris, or Linux, typically onto small targets like ARM CPUs.
Unfortunately, actually buying QNX is quite expensive per seat, in high four figures, plus more for extra features. However, if you do buy a development license, you can make as many embedded target systems as you like, each running QNX.
You're asking Windows to create, write, and close maybe 500 files per second. Windows file creation isn't that fast. What's the file system format on the destination side?
Try transferring a 1GB file and report how long that takes.
But then, an advanced civilization might assume that anybody worth talking to continuously monitors all RF coming into their solar system and is able to figure out anything that isn't truly random noise. In another fifty years, we ought to be able to do that; we could probably do it in ten years if we had to.