If it really is DV-quality, then you're going to need about 20GB of storage for an hour of footage. An hour of footage is $4 of DV tape. Call me when 20GB of CF is $4, or hell, call me when 20GB of CF plus a camera is less than a decent cheap DV camera plus a tape.
cg/readme.polite: "One of NewTek's requirements in releasing the complete source code for the Toaster and Flyer was that any rude or potentially offensive language in the original text based material be politely modified or removed." What the heck?!
Well gosh, I sure don't see a problem with that....
That's a great plan. Instead of competing with Microsoft in an area where Microsoft is completely incompetent (internet search), let's compete with Microsoft in an area where Microsoft has totally eliminated all traces of competition (web browsers). Always attack the enemy at his strongest point!
For example, prior to 1942 no one knew that the sun was a source of radio noise. This fact now affects the design of a great deal of equipment. Astronomy has a bearing on electronics? How amazing.
Another good one is that it would be impossible to build an accurate GPS system without knowing General Relativity.
Considering it is imposssible to create macrobots that can reproduce themselves, the prospect of microbots that can do it is practically inconceivable to me.
I'm sorry, what? You are a self-replicating macrobot. (Well, ok, you are self-replicating given a fertile member of the opposite sex.) Nature is full of self-replicating machines of all sizes. By example, we know that it is physically possible to construct self-replicating machines at least as small as the smallest bacteria and at least as large as a blue whale.
Nature has done a really excellent job of building a large variety of self-replicating nanomachines. The way I see it, if none of them have managed to turn the world into gray goo or kill off all the grass or make an explosive precipitate at the bottom of any available lake, then it's probably harder than it sounds. Any human-designed nanomachine will be ripped apart by the fierce natural nanotechnological competition if it ever escapes into the wild.
Yeah, because, you know, it's perfectly natural for a human being to spend 30% of his childhood in a room with 30 other human beings who are nearly exactly his same age. It's totally unnatural to spend childhood learning from one's parents. I guess everybody who grew up before the advent of modern compulsory education was horribly lacking in social skills and became seriously deprived.
Unless I'm badly mistaken, there is no limit (in the US) to the number of personal copies you can make of any work. You can wallpaper your house with burned copies of the latest Metallica and it's perfectly legal. It's only when it comes to putting copies of the work into the possession of others (handing out copies of Metallica to your friends) where things get sticky.
That whole "you are allowed to make one backup copy" thing from 80s software licenses is either a bunch of BS or a feel-good here's-some-permission thing, depending on how you look at it.
Yes, all it would take is one costal factory dumping some unknown magical substance that somehow can kill all of the phytoplankton on the entire planet.
Also, if a group of space-traveling fairies decided to take off with our sun, things could get pretty bad.
What substance, exactly, did you have in mind which could do such a thing?
At the moment, I connect to certain members of my family using Yahoo! Messenger and its webcam feature. What a pile of crap. The program crashes on exit every time, crashes in the middle half the time, sucks CPU, and all you get in exchange is a postage stamp at 0.5fps.
If I can access my windows-using family using iChat, I say bring it on! At least I can use something that doesn't suck.
iChat does better than phone quality audio with 30kbps. It does pretty reasonable video quality (obviously not broadcast quality or anything, but still very nice) with a 400MHz G4 and an extra 100kbps on top of that.
Maybe it's just Netmeeting that sucks. Or maybe businesses have higher standards. I've been using iChat AV for about a month and it's wonderful. The audio quality calling transatlantic is superior to a reasonable cheap calling card, and it basically never drops (both ends have broadband). The delay is noticeable but not great, maybe half a second on average. The kicker is, it's actually easier to use iChat than it is to use the phone! You have to dial this long, unwieldy string of digits to make a call, but you just click the little phone icon next to the other guy's name in iChat and you're connected.
I'd be very interested to know how using iChat with AIM compares to using iChat with iChat.
Somebody do the math, but it doesn't look to be that secure. Brute-forcing this would not take long.
Assuming a 5 'letter' password, you have (2^16 - 1024)^5 possible passwords, which is 1.1 X 10^24. Assuming both the server and the attacker are on fat pipes and the server is implemented in a dumb way so that it doesn't recognize brute-force attempts, you could pull off perhaps 100 attempts per second. So it would take you about 10^22 seconds, or 350 trillion years.
In security, I think this technique is comparable to a reasonably strong plaintext password. It can be sniffed, but it can't really be brute-forced.
Today's show was brought to you by Google Calculator.
There should certainly be a less-subtle threat somewhere before permanent cancellation. It is utter bullshit if somebody pulls a stunt where they call you, say "we found some problem, can you reset your equipment?" with the hope that you will get the message, then cancel your service just because you thought your experiment and the phone call weren't related.
My high school pulled stunts like this, revoking my account whenever I violated rules which they never told me about, without so much as a warning beforehand. It's not a tactic worthy of a profit-making business.
Re:Battery life & short range makes it impract
on
The Trouble with RFID
·
· Score: 1
RFID tags don't have batteries, they draw their power from the radio waves used to query them.
Use netcat to connect to an arbitrary port to see what talks back to you. Use ssh to get a shell on a remote machine. Use telnet to connect to/from machines that are too old to have something modern.
What makes a Hubble-like project depend on a Shuttle-like vehicle?
Mind you, I don't mean Hubble itself. Of course Hubble depends on the Shuttle. But there's no reason it has to be that way. For the amount of money spent on Hubble and its associated repair missions, we could have put up several non-reparable space telescopes. Some of them may have failed, but some of them would have worked, and we'd have more capacity today, not less. There's no point in repairing any automated satellite in orbit when the cost of the mission is half a billion dollars; for nearly any such satellite, it's cheaper to just build and launch two of them.
Unless I'm gravely mistaken, Daedalus is a rather futuristic concept, even if it is a small extrapolation. We couldn't build one with current technology.
The cool thing about Orion is that we have everything we need to make one right now! We had it in the 60s. All you need is an airtight container, some reaction jets, a really thick steel plate, a bunch of nuclear bombs, and an immense shock absorber. The research is done. If there were a compelling reason to build one, it could be done in short order.
Keep dreaming. This is far from the first console to use the same processor as a personal computer, and nothing even vaguely resembling that kind of computer/console crossover has ever happened. I recall the Apple IIGS community being full of almost exactly the same speculation when it was announced that the then-upcoming Super Nintendo would use the same processor as the GS.
This was already discussed in the "Help, please give us money to buy better servers!" slashdot article about Wikipedia. In short, Wikipedia's traffic is comparable to slashdot's traffic. A bit of spillover from slashdot will probably not hurt them very much.
I didn't consciously take it from anywhere, I just made it up. But it's entirely possible that I'm subconsciously copying something I don't know about.
Slashdot Mirror
If it really is DV-quality, then you're going to need about 20GB of storage for an hour of footage. An hour of footage is $4 of DV tape. Call me when 20GB of CF is $4, or hell, call me when 20GB of CF plus a camera is less than a decent cheap DV camera plus a tape.
Of course, some of us actually have used Windows post-2000 and still think it's a buggy pile of trash....
cg/readme.polite: "One of NewTek's requirements in releasing the complete source code for the Toaster and Flyer was that any rude or potentially offensive language in the original text based material be politely modified or removed." What the heck?!
Well gosh, I sure don't see a problem with that....
That's a great plan. Instead of competing with Microsoft in an area where Microsoft is completely incompetent (internet search), let's compete with Microsoft in an area where Microsoft has totally eliminated all traces of competition (web browsers). Always attack the enemy at his strongest point!
For example, prior to 1942 no one knew that the sun was a source of radio noise. This fact now affects the design of a great deal of equipment. Astronomy has a bearing on electronics? How amazing.
Another good one is that it would be impossible to build an accurate GPS system without knowing General Relativity.
Sorry, no.
49% of eligible American voters stayed home
Of those who actually got off their asses to visit the polls, 49% voted for Vice President Al Gore.
Therefore, 25% of eligible American voters voted for Gore.
Considering it is imposssible to create macrobots that can reproduce themselves, the prospect of microbots that can do it is practically inconceivable to me.
I'm sorry, what? You are a self-replicating macrobot. (Well, ok, you are self-replicating given a fertile member of the opposite sex.) Nature is full of self-replicating machines of all sizes. By example, we know that it is physically possible to construct self-replicating machines at least as small as the smallest bacteria and at least as large as a blue whale.
Nature has done a really excellent job of building a large variety of self-replicating nanomachines. The way I see it, if none of them have managed to turn the world into gray goo or kill off all the grass or make an explosive precipitate at the bottom of any available lake, then it's probably harder than it sounds. Any human-designed nanomachine will be ripped apart by the fierce natural nanotechnological competition if it ever escapes into the wild.
Yeah, because, you know, it's perfectly natural for a human being to spend 30% of his childhood in a room with 30 other human beings who are nearly exactly his same age. It's totally unnatural to spend childhood learning from one's parents. I guess everybody who grew up before the advent of modern compulsory education was horribly lacking in social skills and became seriously deprived.
Unless I'm badly mistaken, there is no limit (in the US) to the number of personal copies you can make of any work. You can wallpaper your house with burned copies of the latest Metallica and it's perfectly legal. It's only when it comes to putting copies of the work into the possession of others (handing out copies of Metallica to your friends) where things get sticky.
That whole "you are allowed to make one backup copy" thing from 80s software licenses is either a bunch of BS or a feel-good here's-some-permission thing, depending on how you look at it.
The world according to slashdot:
If I break it, it's an accident.
If you break it, you're a moron.
If a corporation breaks it, it's a conspiracy.
Nice handwave.
Yes, all it would take is one costal factory dumping some unknown magical substance that somehow can kill all of the phytoplankton on the entire planet.
Also, if a group of space-traveling fairies decided to take off with our sun, things could get pretty bad.
What substance, exactly, did you have in mind which could do such a thing?
Consider the alternative.
At the moment, I connect to certain members of my family using Yahoo! Messenger and its webcam feature. What a pile of crap. The program crashes on exit every time, crashes in the middle half the time, sucks CPU, and all you get in exchange is a postage stamp at 0.5fps.
If I can access my windows-using family using iChat, I say bring it on! At least I can use something that doesn't suck.
Is today soon enough? It works. Try harder. Read the help. Cameras are totally optional.
iChat does better than phone quality audio with 30kbps. It does pretty reasonable video quality (obviously not broadcast quality or anything, but still very nice) with a 400MHz G4 and an extra 100kbps on top of that.
Maybe it's just Netmeeting that sucks. Or maybe businesses have higher standards. I've been using iChat AV for about a month and it's wonderful. The audio quality calling transatlantic is superior to a reasonable cheap calling card, and it basically never drops (both ends have broadband). The delay is noticeable but not great, maybe half a second on average. The kicker is, it's actually easier to use iChat than it is to use the phone! You have to dial this long, unwieldy string of digits to make a call, but you just click the little phone icon next to the other guy's name in iChat and you're connected.
I'd be very interested to know how using iChat with AIM compares to using iChat with iChat.
Somebody do the math, but it doesn't look to be that secure. Brute-forcing this would not take long.
Assuming a 5 'letter' password, you have (2^16 - 1024)^5 possible passwords, which is 1.1 X 10^24. Assuming both the server and the attacker are on fat pipes and the server is implemented in a dumb way so that it doesn't recognize brute-force attempts, you could pull off perhaps 100 attempts per second. So it would take you about 10^22 seconds, or 350 trillion years.
In security, I think this technique is comparable to a reasonably strong plaintext password. It can be sniffed, but it can't really be brute-forced.
Today's show was brought to you by Google Calculator.
There should certainly be a less-subtle threat somewhere before permanent cancellation. It is utter bullshit if somebody pulls a stunt where they call you, say "we found some problem, can you reset your equipment?" with the hope that you will get the message, then cancel your service just because you thought your experiment and the phone call weren't related.
My high school pulled stunts like this, revoking my account whenever I violated rules which they never told me about, without so much as a warning beforehand. It's not a tactic worthy of a profit-making business.
RFID tags don't have batteries, they draw their power from the radio waves used to query them.
Use netcat to connect to an arbitrary port to see what talks back to you. Use ssh to get a shell on a remote machine. Use telnet to connect to/from machines that are too old to have something modern.
What makes a Hubble-like project depend on a Shuttle-like vehicle?
Mind you, I don't mean Hubble itself. Of course Hubble depends on the Shuttle. But there's no reason it has to be that way. For the amount of money spent on Hubble and its associated repair missions, we could have put up several non-reparable space telescopes. Some of them may have failed, but some of them would have worked, and we'd have more capacity today, not less. There's no point in repairing any automated satellite in orbit when the cost of the mission is half a billion dollars; for nearly any such satellite, it's cheaper to just build and launch two of them.
Unless I'm gravely mistaken, Daedalus is a rather futuristic concept, even if it is a small extrapolation. We couldn't build one with current technology.
The cool thing about Orion is that we have everything we need to make one right now! We had it in the 60s. All you need is an airtight container, some reaction jets, a really thick steel plate, a bunch of nuclear bombs, and an immense shock absorber. The research is done. If there were a compelling reason to build one, it could be done in short order.
Keep dreaming. This is far from the first console to use the same processor as a personal computer, and nothing even vaguely resembling that kind of computer/console crossover has ever happened. I recall the Apple IIGS community being full of almost exactly the same speculation when it was announced that the then-upcoming Super Nintendo would use the same processor as the GS.
This was already discussed in the "Help, please give us money to buy better servers!" slashdot article about Wikipedia. In short, Wikipedia's traffic is comparable to slashdot's traffic. A bit of spillover from slashdot will probably not hurt them very much.
I didn't consciously take it from anywhere, I just made it up. But it's entirely possible that I'm subconsciously copying something I don't know about.