Wars are like a natural wildfire. They devaste, but make room for new growth without hinderance on the past.
Much of Europe and large parts of England were obliterated during WW2. The eletrical infrastructre was all but removed totally. They got the chance to rebuild from the ground up, having the knowledge of what didn't work out so well before.
Contrast this with America, we have lots and lots of very old power systems in place. Yeah, one day maybe we'll get lucky and lose 80% of it, but until then were stuck incrementally upgrading it, and patching it when it's not cost effective to outright replace.
Ahh the downside of not having a war on our soil... I can live with it.
Paranoia Check...
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
So let me get this straight.
You're chaining yourself to a Tree because we're considering sending 5kg of 'radioactive' isotypes to a watery grave inside a frozen planet's 60 mile think liquid shell whose volume is greater than all the earths oceans combined.
Hello bucket? This is water drop, make some room i'm coming in...
christ do you people sit around all day _LOOKING_ for ways to complain and be outraged?
The first goal of most games is to be 'playable' over broadband with moderate latency. In order to accomplish this certain tradeoffs must be made. These are not bugs.
The 'long' jump in Quake is hardly a 'cheat' that PunkBuster is designed for. PunkBuster purpose is to remove client mods that give you auto-aim, radar/enemy position info, and enemy texture/highlighting type cheats. All of these involve modifying the client.
Yes, the client knows where all the players are. Yes that is a weakness. No it can't be fixed easily, because we have to deal with 60ms-200ms one way latency. That requires some think ahead, which means giving the client more info than they should have. If this was any other type of software than a FPS game we could suffer performance for security.
Programs like Punkbuster use arms-race philosphy to try and stay ahead of the cheat makers. Far less time goes into defeating a specific cheat, then it does to build that cheat. One small change to the pb client and away goes 2weeks coding work of a cheat-maker. PB tries to guarantee the client environment, including memory, and what they see on screen. The pb screen captuing util is the best defeense for an admin.
Having said all that, it's logically impossible for them to do this 100% effectively. You can not control and audit access the the system memory and devices on modern day motherboards. Anything you have running to check this can be modified.
It will take technology such as Pallidum to make true 'anti-cheat' and balanced playing environments. I welcome the day game programmers can trust the client and leverage caching techniques that require pervasive knowledge of the game world. It will make games faster and more enjoyable for a broader range of peple in geographically disparate areas.
Re:"Co-opt Java"
on
How C# Was Made
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Those are side issues -- its role as a tool is secondary
Your comment is a fascinating insight into a fanatical mind. You may not yet be as bad as the guy that lives on the corner of my block, with the foil under his NY Yankees basball cap, but the distinction is small.
You've esentially said C# and.Net may be a great language and framework, may make a developers life easier, may generate better application for our clients (internal and external)... but you don't like Bill Gates and therefore any and all points are moot.
Wonderfull logic.
Your prison/Gates metaphor-pun is wonderfully melodramatic as well.
The primary point of this virus is to compromise the machine, and enslave it. It works by preying on the less intelligent desktop users. They must run the executable.
Now, lets look at your 'write a Linux virus' challenge. What's the point?
First, the number of Linux desktops is 1% of the MS install base. So right off the back were looking at less chance of success purely for mathematical reasons.
Two, people that use Linux are required to be more knowledgeable in operating systems then people who simply take a default install of windows ME from WalMart. So, we shrunk the applicable set yet again by a large margin.
In the end, it's a number game, and the numbers don't make sense for virii/Trojan writers to target Linux desktops.
Now, you can say it's more difficult to social engineer someone running a Linux desktop environment to 'run' an executable, and I will agree with you. Currently you would have to save the file, give it executable permission, and then run it. Well, their are also tricks we could play with shell files. As long as the file contains a magic number at the top, Unix variants will process it like a shell script (#!/bin/sh). So essentially, a user would have to examine the inside of the file to know what it is, or how dangerous it is. That's leaves a vector to exploit via social engineering, a users weak understanding of an operating system. The carrot of course, is the user is trying to 'run' ParisAndNickyDoubleTeamShannonDogherty file that was sent to them.
Which brings me back to the central point, yes, windows is more vulnerable because it has more numbers, but even more so because it has large numbers of users with less understanding of operating systems. Early version of mail clients absolutely should not have allowed executable attachments to be directly run from the mail message itself, but we've since seen, that even after you force the user to save it (while warning them) and then run it, a percentage still do (ask any help desk support personnel).
If Linux had the clientele win sysadmins had, your grass wouldn't be that vibrant verde it appears to be now.
Re:Lets hope that the result is progress
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I did use IE 1.0 and 2.0. And I enjoyed that they loaded faster. And yes, they did so because they shared so much in common with the windows shell (explorer.exe, specifically). In my mind, as a developer, it was a good use of code reuse.
But, 1.0, and 2.0 were still basically rehashes and recompiles of Mosaic. When IE 3.0 came out which was built on new code, the competition truly gave use better technology. IE 4 was simply icing on the cake.
As for your rant about the free market, the real market is far from free, and deliberately kept that way. Your (US) government used to think the same way you do back in the 20s, and that's what led to the first Wall Street crash and the Great Depression.
That's simply not true. The monopolies of the early 1900s were government subsidized. They were not free-market based. The gov't, through land grants, created a false economy for Rail Road companies (as just one industry example). I've yet to see a truly free economy, mainly because liberals seem preprogrammed at birth to screw it up, and put their hand into the system.
I don't think the US is a perfect model by any degree of a hands-off economy. Look at the steel tariffs we used when we were getting our asses handed to us in steel production (production was cheaper, _and_ the steel had to be shipped to the US, that's cheap).
Monopolies are _bad_. But the only Monopolies I've seen recently are government supported(Original AT&T), or occurred due to collusion among disparate companies (Music CD Prices).
Microsoft's very success in it's operating system line has laid the groundwork for it's position to eventually be overtaken. Their is such a value in having the 'Next Windows OS' replacement that venture funding will always roll the dice. The potential profit drives companies to constantly assail what some think as 'monopolistic' positions held by MS. If anything, Linux and the spread of it should show once and for all that Microsoft is _not_ a monopoly, and they do not exclusively control the operating system market.
Have MS collude with AMD or Intel, and a hard drive manufacture, and then come to me and say you believe they are part of a monopoly. Come to me when you buy a PC and can't put any other operating system on it (and that is _not_ palladium, so don't go there).
Until then, you simply feel you know better than everyone else that purchases MS software. You say Microsoft ground out their competition, but you hold it in such an ugly light because you fail to realize how much personel intrest you've put into anything not Microsoft. Microsoft can never fairly beat a competitor in your eyes. You will always rationalize that even a (in your eyes) superior product that fails to dislodge Microsoft fails not on the grounds it didn't fit the market, but instead on the grounds that MS somehow manipulated the market. Or you fall back on the position long held in the slashdot crowd, that the 'buyers' of the software are stupid, and simply don't know any better. And that is the key to why new software often fails to beat out MS software. MS doesnt think the business user is stupid. They simply think they are different, and market towards it. As long as they have that evolutionary trait, their products will continue to win out.
What can you bring to the game? Can you beat the current evolutionary alpha-male? What is their weakness? What is yours....
-malakai
Re:Lets hope that the result is progress
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Lets beat-up on Japanese import cars because they function better and are cheaper than our domestic breed. Lets hold rallies where we use basball bats on Toyotas. Lets boycott them, tax them, tariff them, and do whatever it takes to make sure our incumbent manufactures have the upper hand.
Yeah, that'll work. That'll get us what we want.
Thank god you people are a minority. If MS wants to build a rival search engine, and hook it up to _THEIR_ operating system, good for them. If they both delivered the same quality of searches, and had the same ease of use, then the market will simply kill the one that is less efficent in meeting those metrics. This is how we evolve.
You think Netscape died because of MS properietary hooks and IE/win9x/win2k pre-installed? Hell no, their code sucked. Their app sucked. IE came along early on and was orders of magnitude faster. I remember those early days, when the first IE browser came out, it simply 'felt' more professional. The Netscape client felt hackish and slow. Programming for both had it's in's and outs, but Netscape quirks were the most annoying. IE4 was a major milestone, NS4 was simply broke.
Redmond _does_ innovate. research.microsoft.com is full of innovation. You can bitch that they 'stole' all their scientist from other research groups, or universities, but whats the point? If MS pays them more money and they enjoy the MS Research environment moreso than their previous environments, then MS is doing all of us a favor. They are encourging and supporting bright minds to make our life and our work easier.
I'd like to see them really take a shot at searching. Both on the collection side, the analysis side, and the User Interface side. All aspects of the process can benefit from cuttin-edge technology floating around the MS Research centers.
Who in their right mind other than a luddite would not want to see new innovation vieing for market share in something as essential as Search services? Are you saying your simply happy with the status quo of Google? Well good thing Sergey, Larry, and Craig didn't think that when they were getting donated machines and cash from Intel, DEC, SUN, NSF, NASA and DARPA to create their searching technology.
We need innovation, and if you want it to come at it's optimum and most efficent pace, you must have competition driving it.
Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.
- Ayn Rand "For The New Intellectual," For The New Intellectual
Not only is it speculation, whoever wrote it doesn't even have enough of a clue to ignore wildy inaccurate data points....
The machine also will have about 256 megabytes of dynamic random access memory. But Microsoft will upgrade that to
512 gigabytes if Sony puts in more. The previous Xbox had 64 megabytes.
emphasis mine
<sarcasm>Atleast with 64bit processors the virtual address space can access all the memmory</sarcasm>
But what I'm really looking forward to is a Physics specific processor that sits alongside the graphics processor, and is resposible for collisions detection.
The last few SIGGRAPHS had numerous approaches using GPU's to detect collisions, in real-time, betwen complex volumes using only the GPU. With some minor tweaking, graphics manufacturers can make this 100x more efficent and easier to implement.
With the 'shader' languages being able to create and modify meshesh now, procedurally, this is the best place to detect collisions (beaking back the mesh data to your motherboard so that your local CPU can figure out what collided, is not efficent).
We have RDS in the states, you just need a tuner that can handle the piggy-backed data. RDS runs over existing FM frequencies, and requires the Radio stations to buy devices which allow them to put RDS data in their signals.
This systems is a completely different band. It's Out of Band in regards to any existing broadcast system. The concept near as I can tell, is a municipalty would install some sort of sensor(s) at a high-risk area (like the intersection mentioned) that would allow directed broadcast to a vehicle or vehicles in a specific area (100 yard limit) in order to warn or inform them.
The vehicles would be equipped with the capability to receive and relay the broadcast to the occupants (or later, possibly directly fed to some sort of software control system which could then do a visual warning instead of a audio one).
So no, this isn't anything like RDS, but thanks for being a typical slashdot noobie and not reading the article.
As seen in Nuts & Volts Magazine
Monitor and log digital temperature data from 1 or 2 sensors (one DS18B20 sensor included with purchase of board) USB 1.1 Compliant 12F629 microcontroller can be reprogrammed with user code (requires programmer) Rev 2 silicon from FTDI No in-depth knowledge of USB required Call or email DLP Design for volume pricing
They provide C++ and VB Code examples. Pretty simple stuff, apparently this will show up as a COM port. The VB code is funny, it has all the c++ code in it commented out and you can see their porting thought process.
Think of giving away the position of your air-craft carrier by playing an opponent in some game that allows group-map functions, and you plot a waypoint at your exact location.
Then you wink and say into the mike "know what i mean? know what i mean?, nudge nudge, nod nod, say no more, say no more".
Course, the uselessness of that info is astronomical.
I think a single decade is all that is required to begin rolling out semiautomonous and full automonus aircraft, and ceasing development on new manned air-craft. After that point, we'll see the planes we know and love today be retired (and their pilots).
What's really lacking is a full redundant, mesh based communication infrastructue that can be quickly deployed. Where every node in the mesh, be it an aircraft or a satellite, or a autonomous drone, can relay and respond.
A top-down approach would put these nodes closer and closer to the action, until they meet ground based nodes (humvees, portable station deployed on sand dunes...etc).
I say 20 years though for fuly functional bi-ped soldiers that can be controlled remotely and have enough autonomy to respond/react quickly to environment and beat speed of light latency in their control systems. Such that a controller at 'home' can move the unit (WASD config of course) but the unit can make choices on how to move (i see a rock, i'm going to step over it, i'm not going to wait 250ms for my controller to hold my hand and walk me over the rock).
I wonder though, if MS has to offer access to the voice chats to security personel for the appropriate armed forces.
I know mail and e-mail is screened, as well as phone calls (espcially on big targets like aircraft carriers). I wonder if MS had to put in code on the server to allow the voice streams to be tapped.
Cool none the less. I wouldn't mind playing Ghost Recon against some troop clans.
you would see that Dr. Drexler does indeed show homage to Feynman...
From the above linked article:
These spring from Richard Feynman's famous 1959 talk, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," which envisioned using productive machinery--factories--to build smaller factories, leading ultimately to nanomachines building atomically precise products.
Does "...can save..." mean WordML will be the default file format in those Office versions?
Becasue if it isn't, then MS is obvisouly not serious about WordML (despite all the development they put in to it). And if it _IS_ the default file-save, then MS is obviously trying to force people of older Office versions to upgrade.
Let's cut the semanatics, and hear you just say it, "MS is a bastard either way. I hate MS, and I don't like Word, and I'll never use this product" rather than deal with your FUD.
They work under viaducts, in tunnels, and behind large buildings about as often as slashdot readers _READ_ the article.
The satellite signal remains strong as long as the antenna is within the line of sight of the orbiting satellites, which are in the southern part of the sky. As with any satellite signal, tall buildings, mountains, trees or even luggage on the roof rack can block that signal and disrupt the video.
Car Company A produces shotty car. Car company A sells shotty car. Car from Company A kills family C. Family C relatives sue Car Company A. Car companies A sales go down as do their profits.
Evolution occurs
Car Company B decides to make a safe car, but ends up costing too much. They do however move the price-point up that some families are willing to spend, for safety (cough cough, VOLVO, cough cough) but still most people are using less safe (cheaper) cars of Company A. But they _know_ their cars are not as safe. They become market pressure to refine the engineering process and have Company _C_ make a safer car at a price point between Company A (cheap) and Company B (safe but expensive).
The industry Evolves.
This cycle works. It's been proven to work. The only time it doesn't work is when this BIG ASS HAND OF GOD... er government.. gets into the mix and gives companies 'protection', or tries to 'regulate' things.
There are exceptions, like when you're dealing with a natural resource (in that case it could be argued the nation owns the resource, and the business model can play from there).
It's not that complicated, read some Ayn Rand to see where we fucked it all up in the 60's and 70s.
And yes, for this model to work, some people will have to initially die. That is, bounds will be reached before the market pulls in the ends closer to our mark. The same happens todays. The government generally waits until mistakes are made to come up with recommedations (look at the gas pipeline industry).
It worked for nature, it can work for us. Let companies evolve, keep them in check with law-suits and your bottom dollar.
Slashdot Mirror
Cause the sheilds were not Earth technology. Was Asgard, Thor put'm in.
Good'ol thor.
... WHO THE FUCK CARES ...
Wars are like a natural wildfire. They devaste, but make room for new growth without hinderance on the past.
Much of Europe and large parts of England were obliterated during WW2. The eletrical infrastructre was all but removed totally. They got the chance to rebuild from the ground up, having the knowledge of what didn't work out so well before.
Contrast this with America, we have lots and lots of very old power systems in place. Yeah, one day maybe we'll get lucky and lose 80% of it, but until then were stuck incrementally upgrading it, and patching it when it's not cost effective to outright replace.
Ahh the downside of not having a war on our soil...
I can live with it.
So let me get this straight.
You're chaining yourself to a Tree because we're considering sending 5kg of 'radioactive' isotypes to a watery grave inside a frozen planet's 60 mile think liquid shell whose volume is greater than all the earths oceans combined.
Hello bucket? This is water drop, make some room i'm coming in...
christ do you people sit around all day _LOOKING_ for ways to complain and be outraged?
The first goal of most games is to be 'playable' over broadband with moderate latency. In order to accomplish this certain tradeoffs must be made. These are not bugs.
The 'long' jump in Quake is hardly a 'cheat' that PunkBuster is designed for. PunkBuster purpose is to remove client mods that give you auto-aim, radar/enemy position info, and enemy texture/highlighting type cheats. All of these involve modifying the client.
Yes, the client knows where all the players are. Yes that is a weakness. No it can't be fixed easily, because we have to deal with 60ms-200ms one way latency. That requires some think ahead, which means giving the client more info than they should have. If this was any other type of software than a FPS game we could suffer performance for security.
Programs like Punkbuster use arms-race philosphy to try and stay ahead of the cheat makers. Far less time goes into defeating a specific cheat, then it does to build that cheat. One small change to the pb client and away goes 2weeks coding work of a cheat-maker. PB tries to guarantee the client environment, including memory, and what they see on screen. The pb screen captuing util is the best defeense for an admin.
Having said all that, it's logically impossible for them to do this 100% effectively. You can not control and audit access the the system memory and devices on modern day motherboards. Anything you have running to check this can be modified.
It will take technology such as Pallidum to make true 'anti-cheat' and balanced playing environments. I welcome the day game programmers can trust the client and leverage caching techniques that require pervasive knowledge of the game world. It will make games faster and more enjoyable for a broader range of peple in geographically disparate areas.
think about it.
Your comment is a fascinating insight into a fanatical mind. You may not yet be as bad as the guy that lives on the corner of my block, with the foil under his NY Yankees basball cap, but the distinction is small.
You've esentially said C# and
Wonderfull logic.
Your prison/Gates metaphor-pun is wonderfully melodramatic as well.
Thanks for play,
The primary point of this virus is to compromise the machine, and enslave it. It works by preying on the less intelligent desktop users. They must run the executable.
Now, lets look at your 'write a Linux virus' challenge. What's the point?
First, the number of Linux desktops is 1% of the MS install base. So right off the back were looking at less chance of success purely for mathematical reasons.
Two, people that use Linux are required to be more knowledgeable in operating systems then people who simply take a default install of windows ME from WalMart. So, we shrunk the applicable set yet again by a large margin.
In the end, it's a number game, and the numbers don't make sense for virii/Trojan writers to target Linux desktops.
Now, you can say it's more difficult to social engineer someone running a Linux desktop environment to 'run' an executable, and I will agree with you. Currently you would have to save the file, give it executable permission, and then run it. Well, their are also tricks we could play with shell files. As long as the file contains a magic number at the top, Unix variants will process it like a shell script (#!/bin/sh). So essentially, a user would have to examine the inside of the file to know what it is, or how dangerous it is. That's leaves a vector to exploit via social engineering, a users weak understanding of an operating system. The carrot of course, is the user is trying to 'run' ParisAndNickyDoubleTeamShannonDogherty file that was sent to them.
Which brings me back to the central point, yes, windows is more vulnerable because it has more numbers, but even more so because it has large numbers of users with less understanding of operating systems. Early version of mail clients absolutely should not have allowed executable attachments to be directly run from the mail message itself, but we've since seen, that even after you force the user to save it (while warning them) and then run it, a percentage still do (ask any help desk support personnel).
If Linux had the clientele win sysadmins had, your grass wouldn't be that vibrant verde it appears to be now.
... until our replicators wipe out the Asgards.
Poor little guys.
But, 1.0, and 2.0 were still basically rehashes and recompiles of Mosaic. When IE 3.0 came out which was built on new code, the competition truly gave use better technology. IE 4 was simply icing on the cake.
That's simply not true. The monopolies of the early 1900s were government subsidized. They were not free-market based. The gov't, through land grants, created a false economy for Rail Road companies (as just one industry example). I've yet to see a truly free economy, mainly because liberals seem preprogrammed at birth to screw it up, and put their hand into the system.
I don't think the US is a perfect model by any degree of a hands-off economy. Look at the steel tariffs we used when we were getting our asses handed to us in steel production (production was cheaper, _and_ the steel had to be shipped to the US, that's cheap).
Monopolies are _bad_. But the only Monopolies I've seen recently are government supported(Original AT&T), or occurred due to collusion among disparate companies (Music CD Prices).
Microsoft's very success in it's operating system line has laid the groundwork for it's position to eventually be overtaken. Their is such a value in having the 'Next Windows OS' replacement that venture funding will always roll the dice. The potential profit drives companies to constantly assail what some think as 'monopolistic' positions held by MS. If anything, Linux and the spread of it should show once and for all that Microsoft is _not_ a monopoly, and they do not exclusively control the operating system market.
Have MS collude with AMD or Intel, and a hard drive manufacture, and then come to me and say you believe they are part of a monopoly. Come to me when you buy a PC and can't put any other operating system on it (and that is _not_ palladium, so don't go there).
Until then, you simply feel you know better than everyone else that purchases MS software. You say Microsoft ground out their competition, but you hold it in such an ugly light because you fail to realize how much personel intrest you've put into anything not Microsoft. Microsoft can never fairly beat a competitor in your eyes. You will always rationalize that even a (in your eyes) superior product that fails to dislodge Microsoft fails not on the grounds it didn't fit the market, but instead on the grounds that MS somehow manipulated the market. Or you fall back on the position long held in the slashdot crowd, that the 'buyers' of the software are stupid, and simply don't know any better. And that is the key to why new software often fails to beat out MS software. MS doesnt think the business user is stupid. They simply think they are different, and market towards it. As long as they have that evolutionary trait, their products will continue to win out.
What can you bring to the game? Can you beat the current evolutionary alpha-male? What is their weakness? What is yours....
-malakai
Yeah, that'll work. That'll get us what we want.
Thank god you people are a minority. If MS wants to build a rival search engine, and hook it up to _THEIR_ operating system, good for them. If they both delivered the same quality of searches, and had the same ease of use, then the market will simply kill the one that is less efficent in meeting those metrics. This is how we evolve.
You think Netscape died because of MS properietary hooks and IE/win9x/win2k pre-installed? Hell no, their code sucked. Their app sucked. IE came along early on and was orders of magnitude faster. I remember those early days, when the first IE browser came out, it simply 'felt' more professional. The Netscape client felt hackish and slow. Programming for both had it's in's and outs, but Netscape quirks were the most annoying. IE4 was a major milestone, NS4 was simply broke.
Redmond _does_ innovate. research.microsoft.com is full of innovation. You can bitch that they 'stole' all their scientist from other research groups, or universities, but whats the point? If MS pays them more money and they enjoy the MS Research environment moreso than their previous environments, then MS is doing all of us a favor. They are encourging and supporting bright minds to make our life and our work easier.
I'd like to see them really take a shot at searching. Both on the collection side, the analysis side, and the User Interface side. All aspects of the process can benefit from cuttin-edge technology floating around the MS Research centers.
Who in their right mind other than a luddite would not want to see new innovation vieing for market share in something as essential as Search services? Are you saying your simply happy with the status quo of Google? Well good thing Sergey, Larry, and Craig didn't think that when they were getting donated machines and cash from Intel, DEC, SUN, NSF, NASA and DARPA to create their searching technology.
We need innovation, and if you want it to come at it's optimum and most efficent pace, you must have competition driving it.
emphasis mine
<sarcasm>Atleast with 64bit processors the virtual address space can access all the memmory</sarcasm>
But what I'm really looking forward to is a Physics specific processor that sits alongside the graphics processor, and is resposible for collisions detection.
The last few SIGGRAPHS had numerous approaches using GPU's to detect collisions, in real-time, betwen complex volumes using only the GPU. With some minor tweaking, graphics manufacturers can make this 100x more efficent and easier to implement.
With the 'shader' languages being able to create and modify meshesh now, procedurally, this is the best place to detect collisions (beaking back the mesh data to your motherboard so that your local CPU can figure out what collided, is not efficent).
We have RDS in the states, you just need a tuner that can handle the piggy-backed data. RDS runs over existing FM frequencies, and requires the Radio stations to buy devices which allow them to put RDS data in their signals.
This systems is a completely different band. It's Out of Band in regards to any existing broadcast system. The concept near as I can tell, is a municipalty would install some sort of sensor(s) at a high-risk area (like the intersection mentioned) that would allow directed broadcast to a vehicle or vehicles in a specific area (100 yard limit) in order to warn or inform them.
The vehicles would be equipped with the capability to receive and relay the broadcast to the occupants (or later, possibly directly fed to some sort of software control system which could then do a visual warning instead of a audio one).
So no, this isn't anything like RDS, but thanks for being a typical slashdot noobie and not reading the article.
DLP-TEMP 2-Channel Temperature Acquisition Board
They provide C++ and VB Code examples. Pretty simple stuff, apparently this will show up as a COM port. The VB code is funny, it has all the c++ code in it commented out and you can see their porting thought process.
good luck
Think of giving away the position of your air-craft carrier by playing an opponent in some game that allows group-map functions, and you plot a waypoint at your exact location.
Then you wink and say into the mike "know what i mean? know what i mean?, nudge nudge, nod nod, say no more, say no more".
Course, the uselessness of that info is astronomical.
hahah wtf?
where did that come from? Off topic _maybe_, but troll on perdicting autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles in future warfare?
Come on, what a waste of mod points.
I think a single decade is all that is required to begin rolling out semiautomonous and full automonus aircraft, and ceasing development on new manned air-craft.
After that point, we'll see the planes we know and love today be retired (and their pilots).
What's really lacking is a full redundant, mesh based communication infrastructue that can be quickly deployed. Where every node in the mesh, be it an aircraft or a satellite, or a autonomous drone, can relay and respond.
A top-down approach would put these nodes closer and closer to the action, until they meet ground based nodes (humvees, portable station deployed on sand dunes...etc).
I say 20 years though for fuly functional bi-ped soldiers that can be controlled remotely and have enough autonomy to respond/react quickly to environment and beat speed of light latency in their control systems. Such that a controller at 'home' can move the unit (WASD config of course) but the unit can make choices on how to move (i see a rock, i'm going to step over it, i'm not going to wait 250ms for my controller to hold my hand and walk me over the rock).
I think that's great for troops.
I wonder though, if MS has to offer access to the voice chats to security personel for the appropriate armed forces.
I know mail and e-mail is screened, as well as phone calls (espcially on big targets like aircraft carriers). I wonder if MS had to put in code on the server to allow the voice streams to be tapped.
Cool none the less. I wouldn't mind playing Ghost Recon against some troop clans.
"a friend of mine from India" + "US government job" = Gov will trust you about as far as they can throw you on Jupiter.
That's just common sense stereotyping.
They aren't so much keeping tabs on the people she is meeting with, but instead on her.
From the above linked article:
Becasue if it isn't, then MS is obvisouly not serious about WordML (despite all the development they put in to it). And if it _IS_ the default file-save, then MS is obviously trying to force people of older Office versions to upgrade.
Let's cut the semanatics, and hear you just say it, "MS is a bastard either way. I hate MS, and I don't like Word, and I'll never use this product" rather than deal with your FUD.
Car Company A produces shotty car. Car company A sells shotty car. Car from Company A kills family C. Family C relatives sue Car Company A. Car companies A sales go down as do their profits.
Evolution occurs
Car Company B decides to make a safe car, but ends up costing too much. They do however move the price-point up that some families are willing to spend, for safety (cough cough, VOLVO, cough cough) but still most people are using less safe (cheaper) cars of Company A. But they _know_ their cars are not as safe. They become market pressure to refine the engineering process and have Company _C_ make a safer car at a price point between Company A (cheap) and Company B (safe but expensive).
The industry Evolves.
This cycle works. It's been proven to work. The only time it doesn't work is when this BIG ASS HAND OF GOD... er government.. gets into the mix and gives companies 'protection', or tries to 'regulate' things.
There are exceptions, like when you're dealing with a natural resource (in that case it could be argued the nation owns the resource, and the business model can play from there).
It's not that complicated, read some Ayn Rand to see where we fucked it all up in the 60's and 70s.
And yes, for this model to work, some people will have to initially die. That is, bounds will be reached before the market pulls in the ends closer to our mark. The same happens todays. The government generally waits until mistakes are made to come up with recommedations (look at the gas pipeline industry).
It worked for nature, it can work for us. Let companies evolve, keep them in check with law-suits and your bottom dollar.
After reading the article, it appears the max power of the beam that reaches individual substations is 20% of noon-time sunlight.
I think the FUD slashdot users have built into this system can now safely be ignored.