Well, in the past, it has, in fact, proved a pretty poor idea to make political decisions and implement policies based solely on military intelligence....
Let them make what they can of the data. If they can't come up with any substantial, then it validates the data and your theory. If they come up with something you can't counter, then they've found a serious problem with your theory or your methodology which needs to be addressed.
Definitely, let them keep at it. But it's already been a few decades and very little evidence seems to be falling on their side. We can't and shouldn't wait until every single one of them is convinced. 97% of people actively researching in this area are convinced humans are causing global warming*. How certain do we have to be before start to act?
* From wikipedia:
A 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciences) reviewed publication and citation data for 1,372 climate researchers and drew the following two conclusions:
(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers
I found Hansen's book to contain a good explanation of the science and data telling us that CO/2 is warming us up. Much easier to read than the studies themselves, but still much more detailed than what you get from any journalist. And plenty of pointers to studies if you want to look those up.
Re:Google is evil. RMS was right.
on
OK Go Goes HTML5
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· Score: 1
The thing is labeled as a "Chrome Experiment". It was the New York Times and Slashdot submitter that decided to advertise it as an HTML5 demo. Yes it uses some HTML5, but the name "experiment" implies it's an attempt to see what can be done with bleeding edge web technologies that may or may not be supported by all browsers just yet.
There's a big difference between the two: a PNG or WebM library may contain exploitable bugs, but they are difficult to exploit because these formats are fundamentally data. GLSL is not, it is executable code which not only has to be run, it has to be run as fast as possible. This means that it's compiled to native code (if you're on an open source OS and not using blob drivers, odds are that it's compiled using code that I worked on). It takes very little in terms of bugs for this to be exploitable, and that's not helped by the fact that the target - the GPU - is typically a horrible design from a security standpoint. This is why 3D was one of the last things for VMs to support, and why they still recommended that you don't enable enable it if you care about security.
News flash for you -- modern javascript engines also go to great pains to make javascript code run fast. Including things like compiling it down to native code. I could see exploiting bugs to crash people's systems, but beyond that I don't see how javascript code issuing WebGL commands is going to be able to do much.
Just as with any native code (like a DirectX game, for instance) there is no way to ensure "safety"...although I'd think almost any other attack vector would be easier than WebGL.
I do wonder.
Of course it would mean targetting specific GPU vendors, and perhaps specific driver versions as well. But imagine what you could do if you were able to play with DMA... bye bye to any OS security.
This is NOT native code we're talking about here! This is a javascript API that lets you send shader programs written in a high level language to the GPU! Both the javascript code and the shaders are jit compiled (in a modern browser) before being run. The javascript WebGL api has no way for you to get anywhere near a DMA handle. They GPU may use DMA under the hood, but big whoop, GPU accelerated 2D canvases like IE9 has now do the same thing. You can't get any closer to getting your hands on a DMA handle with WebGL than you can with the 2d canvas context API.
Put another way -- saying "Oh noes! It lets you run shader code DIRECTLY ON THE GPU!!" is not much different from saying "Oh noes! It lets you run javascript DIRECTLY ON THE CPU!!!". In neither case is anything actually running "directly" on the metal. Both go through layers of interpretation before getting to their respective processors. And there are no GPU instructions that have any way to do anything to files on your machine, just like there are no javascript functions that do.
I'm not a security guy, but I think the access that shaders give you to the "bare metal" is a lot less than you seem to believe. The code you write is not some kind of assembly instructions executed directly on the GPU. Even what they call shader assembly code is actually just a low-ish-level language that is first processed by the video card driver.
DOS attacks are the main worry, and they're being addressed by ARB_robustness.
Nobody's saying PCs will go away any time soon (well, except maybe that sensationalist headline). But you have to ask yourself how many people have that same need you do, versus the number that, say, need to play Angry Birds? And even people who do need to write a lot, what is the balance of time spent in that activity vs more casual comsumption activities? If the aggregate demand for casual experiences outstrips that for serious productivity experiences, then it stands to reason devices that cater to the former will eventually outnumber those that target the latter.
Maybe because Slashdot's system for posting sucks and is stuck in the 1990's?
Why is there no way to log in *when* you post something?
If you've written a nice long informative post then realize you weren't logged in, logging in at that point totally loses your context: the story you were looking at, the post you were responding to, and the response you'd already written. I don't see why Slashdot still makes this such a pain.
You need to learn about exponential curves, sonny. Production has been increasing since its discovery, yes, but so has demand. Both have been increasing roughly exponentially. But one of those curves is about to start going down, while the other will continue to try to go up.
A video you should probably watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
Lots of things conduct besides fingers. Could be the paper was treated with dots of some conductive ink. You could use the relative locations of a pattern of conductive dots (which the iPad would interpret as multiple "fingers") to encode a bit of information that tells you what a particular object is. I haven't seen the actual video, but within limits, certainly seems feasible to me that you could do Surface-like things on an iPad. One main limitation will be the maximum number of contacts that the iPad tracks. A lot of multitouch systems max out at 4 touches, some at 10 touches. Not sure what the max is on the iPad.
Re:Basically rehash of MS's LaserTouch
on
The Mouse Vanishes
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· Score: 1
Is computing geodesic distances any sort of bottleneck for anyone? I find it hard to believe that it would be. If that's the case, then you may have a hard time getting it published. Amdahl's law and all, a 10x speedup in something that represents only 1% of the total time of an algorithm gives you less than a 1% speedup of the overall system. The other point I haven't seen anyone make, is that if it's a common problem, then chances are the math for the proper solution is already known (especially if you really are just talking about finding the shortest distance between two points on a sphere). It's very unlikely that you've invented a new way of doing something as common as computing distance between two points on a sphere. You should talk with some people who do geology or geostatistics or oceanography or the like to check if what you've done is really novel.
It doesn't sound to me like Apple wants people to jailbreak their devices. Apparently it says you are a criminal if you do so.
Anyway, you are being pedantic. Clearly there are risks and inconveniences associated with running a jailbroken phone. I'm guessing once you restore your device to the factory defaults you will no longer be able to run all those great jailbreak-only apps you bought, and you'll have to go reinstall them again later after you re-install the jailbreak patch. If Apple hasn't figured out a way to disable jailbreaking altogether, that is. Hardly a level playing field with apps from iTunes.
Thinking about it, part of the reason it annoys me is because Microsoft was declared a monopolist simply for including a browser with their operating system. This basically hurt no one except other browser makers. So if you're going to call that anti-competitive then you've got to call Apple's cornering the market on the sale of all types of apps to be anti-competitive too. But I honestly don't really think Microsoft deserved to be penalized for trying to give their users a better experience than they would have with a browser-less OS. Like the Apple apologists here are saying, if the market didn't like what Microsoft was doing, they could have bought Macs or used Linux instead.
In one sense Apple is doing much the same thing as HP only allowing you to buy ink from HP, or Gillette only allowing you to buy blades from Gillette, or Nesspresso only letting you use Nesspresso pods in their coffee machines. I'm not really wild about those monopolies either. But to me this feels more like Panasonic not letting you buy food for your Panasonic microwave from anyone but them. It just seems wrong. At least for the microwave example I would hope people would have the sense to complain and not buy such a product.
Anyone know if Android apps be gotten from anywhere you like? And anyone know what Windows Phone 7 will do about apps?
I may have this wrong -- I'm not an iPhone owner -- but I was under the impression that the only way to get apps (real apps, not browser-based apps) on the iPhone was to get them from iTunes. Only if you jailbreak your phone (which Apple says is illegal) can you get apps from other sources. Is that not correct? I looked at saurik.com but it does not look like software aimed at normal users (it mentions in the FAQ that most of the software there is commandline tools or development libraries).
They are like a grocer who has a monopoly on where you can buy your food. I would be perfectly happy with Apple being as autocratic as they like with their app store if it weren't the *only* source for apps for their platforms. It seems blatantly anticompetitive to me. Consider if Microsoft decided you could only buy Windows apps through them. It would never be allowed. Apple is seriously strolling right down the path toward a massive DOJ action against them.
You just track more than one pair of eyes. I believe the device is capable of displaying more than 2 views. There's sure to be some limit, though. Probably won't ever be able to have the whole extended family crowded around the screen with tech like this. But 4 or 6 eyes shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in the past, it has, in fact, proved a pretty poor idea to make political decisions and implement policies based solely on military intelligence....
Let them make what they can of the data. If they can't come up with any substantial, then it validates the data and your theory. If they come up with something you can't counter, then they've found a serious problem with your theory or your methodology which needs to be addressed.
Definitely, let them keep at it. But it's already been a few decades and very little evidence seems to be falling on their side. We can't and shouldn't wait until every single one of them is convinced. 97% of people actively researching in this area are convinced humans are causing global warming*. How certain do we have to be before start to act?
* From wikipedia:
A 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciences) reviewed publication and citation data for 1,372 climate researchers and drew the following two conclusions:
(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers
I found Hansen's book to contain a good explanation of the science and data telling us that CO/2 is warming us up. Much easier to read than the studies themselves, but still much more detailed than what you get from any journalist. And plenty of pointers to studies if you want to look those up.
The thing is labeled as a "Chrome Experiment". It was the New York Times and Slashdot submitter that decided to advertise it as an HTML5 demo. Yes it uses some HTML5, but the name "experiment" implies it's an attempt to see what can be done with bleeding edge web technologies that may or may not be supported by all browsers just yet.
And neither do people who collect stamps scream at those who don't. The screaming aspect doesn't seem to be modeled by this particular analogy.
There's a big difference between the two: a PNG or WebM library may contain exploitable bugs, but they are difficult to exploit because these formats are fundamentally data. GLSL is not, it is executable code which not only has to be run, it has to be run as fast as possible. This means that it's compiled to native code (if you're on an open source OS and not using blob drivers, odds are that it's compiled using code that I worked on). It takes very little in terms of bugs for this to be exploitable, and that's not helped by the fact that the target - the GPU - is typically a horrible design from a security standpoint. This is why 3D was one of the last things for VMs to support, and why they still recommended that you don't enable enable it if you care about security.
News flash for you -- modern javascript engines also go to great pains to make javascript code run fast. Including things like compiling it down to native code. I could see exploiting bugs to crash people's systems, but beyond that I don't see how javascript code issuing WebGL commands is going to be able to do much.
Just as with any native code (like a DirectX game, for instance) there is no way to ensure "safety"...although I'd think almost any other attack vector would be easier than WebGL.
I do wonder. Of course it would mean targetting specific GPU vendors, and perhaps specific driver versions as well. But imagine what you could do if you were able to play with DMA... bye bye to any OS security.
This is NOT native code we're talking about here! This is a javascript API that lets you send shader programs written in a high level language to the GPU! Both the javascript code and the shaders are jit compiled (in a modern browser) before being run. The javascript WebGL api has no way for you to get anywhere near a DMA handle. They GPU may use DMA under the hood, but big whoop, GPU accelerated 2D canvases like IE9 has now do the same thing. You can't get any closer to getting your hands on a DMA handle with WebGL than you can with the 2d canvas context API.
Put another way -- saying "Oh noes! It lets you run shader code DIRECTLY ON THE GPU!!" is not much different from saying "Oh noes! It lets you run javascript DIRECTLY ON THE CPU!!!". In neither case is anything actually running "directly" on the metal. Both go through layers of interpretation before getting to their respective processors. And there are no GPU instructions that have any way to do anything to files on your machine, just like there are no javascript functions that do.
Well, WebCL is the thing that's going to be for that, really. Doing compute with WebGL would be like going back to the bad old days before CUDA.
I'm not a security guy, but I think the access that shaders give you to the "bare metal" is a lot less than you seem to believe. The code you write is not some kind of assembly instructions executed directly on the GPU. Even what they call shader assembly code is actually just a low-ish-level language that is first processed by the video card driver. DOS attacks are the main worry, and they're being addressed by ARB_robustness.
Hence AMD's attempt to rebrand GPUs as APUs. The GPU basically is becoming a SIMD co-processor.
Nobody's saying PCs will go away any time soon (well, except maybe that sensationalist headline). But you have to ask yourself how many people have that same need you do, versus the number that, say, need to play Angry Birds? And even people who do need to write a lot, what is the balance of time spent in that activity vs more casual comsumption activities? If the aggregate demand for casual experiences outstrips that for serious productivity experiences, then it stands to reason devices that cater to the former will eventually outnumber those that target the latter.
Maybe because Slashdot's system for posting sucks and is stuck in the 1990's? Why is there no way to log in *when* you post something? If you've written a nice long informative post then realize you weren't logged in, logging in at that point totally loses your context: the story you were looking at, the post you were responding to, and the response you'd already written. I don't see why Slashdot still makes this such a pain.
You need to learn about exponential curves, sonny. Production has been increasing since its discovery, yes, but so has demand. Both have been increasing roughly exponentially. But one of those curves is about to start going down, while the other will continue to try to go up. A video you should probably watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
Lots of things conduct besides fingers. Could be the paper was treated with dots of some conductive ink. You could use the relative locations of a pattern of conductive dots (which the iPad would interpret as multiple "fingers") to encode a bit of information that tells you what a particular object is. I haven't seen the actual video, but within limits, certainly seems feasible to me that you could do Surface-like things on an iPad. One main limitation will be the maximum number of contacts that the iPad tracks. A lot of multitouch systems max out at 4 touches, some at 10 touches. Not sure what the max is on the iPad.
Better link about LaserTouch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne_QgTKjnMg
This basically appears to be a mobile version of "LaserTouch" that was done at Microsoft Research in 2008. I wonder if he's added anything to that? http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/23/microsofts-lasertouch-prototype-brings-hand-control-to-any-disp/
Is computing geodesic distances any sort of bottleneck for anyone? I find it hard to believe that it would be. If that's the case, then you may have a hard time getting it published. Amdahl's law and all, a 10x speedup in something that represents only 1% of the total time of an algorithm gives you less than a 1% speedup of the overall system. The other point I haven't seen anyone make, is that if it's a common problem, then chances are the math for the proper solution is already known (especially if you really are just talking about finding the shortest distance between two points on a sphere). It's very unlikely that you've invented a new way of doing something as common as computing distance between two points on a sphere. You should talk with some people who do geology or geostatistics or oceanography or the like to check if what you've done is really novel.
Anyway, you are being pedantic. Clearly there are risks and inconveniences associated with running a jailbroken phone. I'm guessing once you restore your device to the factory defaults you will no longer be able to run all those great jailbreak-only apps you bought, and you'll have to go reinstall them again later after you re-install the jailbreak patch. If Apple hasn't figured out a way to disable jailbreaking altogether, that is. Hardly a level playing field with apps from iTunes.
Thinking about it, part of the reason it annoys me is because Microsoft was declared a monopolist simply for including a browser with their operating system. This basically hurt no one except other browser makers. So if you're going to call that anti-competitive then you've got to call Apple's cornering the market on the sale of all types of apps to be anti-competitive too. But I honestly don't really think Microsoft deserved to be penalized for trying to give their users a better experience than they would have with a browser-less OS. Like the Apple apologists here are saying, if the market didn't like what Microsoft was doing, they could have bought Macs or used Linux instead.
In one sense Apple is doing much the same thing as HP only allowing you to buy ink from HP, or Gillette only allowing you to buy blades from Gillette, or Nesspresso only letting you use Nesspresso pods in their coffee machines. I'm not really wild about those monopolies either. But to me this feels more like Panasonic not letting you buy food for your Panasonic microwave from anyone but them. It just seems wrong. At least for the microwave example I would hope people would have the sense to complain and not buy such a product. Anyone know if Android apps be gotten from anywhere you like? And anyone know what Windows Phone 7 will do about apps?
I may have this wrong -- I'm not an iPhone owner -- but I was under the impression that the only way to get apps (real apps, not browser-based apps) on the iPhone was to get them from iTunes. Only if you jailbreak your phone (which Apple says is illegal) can you get apps from other sources. Is that not correct? I looked at saurik.com but it does not look like software aimed at normal users (it mentions in the FAQ that most of the software there is commandline tools or development libraries).
so why aren't people complaining about Whole Foods' limited selection and arbitrary standards?
Gee, maybe it's because there are other stores where we can buy food?
They are like a grocer who has a monopoly on where you can buy your food. I would be perfectly happy with Apple being as autocratic as they like with their app store if it weren't the *only* source for apps for their platforms. It seems blatantly anticompetitive to me. Consider if Microsoft decided you could only buy Windows apps through them. It would never be allowed. Apple is seriously strolling right down the path toward a massive DOJ action against them.
Found this presentation about the tech behind this: http://www.sidchapters.org/pacificnorthwest/meetings/apr01_09_presentation.pdf
You just track more than one pair of eyes. I believe the device is capable of displaying more than 2 views. There's sure to be some limit, though. Probably won't ever be able to have the whole extended family crowded around the screen with tech like this. But 4 or 6 eyes shouldn't be too much of a problem.