Actually, the tags in tires include the tire type, date of manufacture and the car that they were first mounted to. But that's a very specialized application, and we were talking about the general consumer scenario--John Doe checking out of Best Buy, Sears, Gap, XYZ Grocery, etc.
I doubt that you'll find any RFID tags with a memory size of 65,536 bits! And if you do, they certainly aren't the ones that we were talking about--disposable, cheap passive tags to be used by merchants at the point of sale.
Sure they could be used in intrusive fashions, in the same way that UPC codes were going to be the mark of the beast when they debuted in the '80s, and The Net was going to wreck all our lives and put us under control of nefarious orgzanizations.
But these RFID tags are going to be used for checkout purposes, and any merchant that doesn't disable them at the POS isn't going to be faced with a tricky problem down the road. For example, if a customer walks back into your store (Walmart) wearing a watch, pair of shoes, t-shirt and some candy he purchased there last week, how are you going to know whether the goods were already purchased or not?! Remember, these are read-only tags, not read/write tags. It's therefore to the merchant's advantage to disable the tags once the item has been purchased.
At the same time, the unique coding of items is fairly useless until you get into large-ticket items that may need to be repaired or serviced. Knowing that you sold Aiwa stereo #12345 is not better than knowing that you sold an Aiwa stereo model ABC. And when a 60" TV comes back in for repair, being able to scan the RFID emitter for its serial number takes only a few seconds off reading it off of the back of the unit and typing it in.
There are a host of applications for the technology, and I've only covered a slice of them. Anti-theft and non-line of sight ID'ing of products are two of the most beneficial, and in my opinion they far outweight the insidious uses of various organizations that paranoid people like to think up.
At first glance this article reads like a Your Rights Online rant from Timothy!
I work in the packaging industry and have seen firsthand some of the RFID application processes on folder gluers. First of all, the defect rate hovers around 10%, which makes relying on this technology a dubious proposition.
I doubt that the practical size is approaching "half a grain of sand," which would make application a nightmare to try to control. And most importantly, RFID tags are like UPC barcodes: they're coded to a single frequency and product, not to each instance of the product! If an RFID tag is enabled on your North Face jacket and you walk in a store, they may be able to tell that you're wearing the jacket, but that doesn't tell them who you are.
So if I've helped reduce the paranoia level a little bit, I'll now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
In a momentous surge of self-denial, Timothy was able to restrain himself for a full 20 days before posting a repeat story about The Two Towers. Slashdot readers, rejoice!
If I'm thinking of the same book, I was at a conference given by the data display pundit, Edward Tufte (great graph paper on that site, by the way). As part of his speech he had a First Edition copy of this book, which he carefully showed us.
What's very interesting about this book is that the printers of the day decided to take Newton's nice illustrations and print them on a new embossing press. However, the pages had to ben run through the plain type press first, then the embosser. Four hundred years ago, this was the bleeding edge of technology and his illustrations wouldn't line up with the text.
So instead they printed the first 80 pages or so of pure text with footnotes, and at the end of the book added a section of large fold-out pages for the embossed diagrams. In addition to having to learn calculus while reading the book, looking up each diagram in an appendix must've made for some maddening reading material!
Mr. Tufte's point was that people who create data displays shouldn't let anyone screw with it. If they did it to Newton, they'll do it to anyone.
By the way, the colophon includes the printer's name in color (the only place color is used in the book), but doesn't even have Newton's name on it!
Anyway, that's a little info about the book.
That *little something* still missing
on
New DOOM III Shots
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Somewhere along the FPS industry's quest to make the photorealistic game, there are still two items in the 3D world that have never looked better than the old side-scrolling, sprite-based games:
Hard polygonal edges
Interactions between models and structures
Hard Polygonal Edges It doesn't matter if the fingers are as round as a triangle or as round as a dodecahedron: it still doesn't look round. What the industry doesn't seem to realize is that the brain is much better at interpolating the details of a fuzzy image than Nvidia is at displaying a kazillion pixels at a gajillion frames per second. The cell structure of animals, humans and whatever twisted monsters come out of the minds of modelers these days should not look like they were drawn on graph paper, from point to point. Whether a face is displayed using 30 polygons or 3,000, there's still the awkward-looking, jagged edges and connections that the use of polygons dictate.
Interactions between models and structures I'm tired of watching models claw their way across the ground with their feet sliding as if they were a hooved animal walking on butter in a country with a gravity coefficient of 0.5. I've not yet seen a game that shows REALISTIC movement of 3D models. At least in Doom, when the imps were clawing the walls, they were obscured enough that my mind could make up for the lack of detail. But the basic problem of "interacting" things that move vs. things that don't has never been solved very well.
It's the details that really count. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the great architect, when told by a frustrated subordinate, "The Devil's in the details!" cooly responded, "No. God is in the details." Details make or break the project. The last 10% of a project--the details part--usually takes as much effort as the first 90%. Perfection is impossible to attain, but to me it's perfectly obvious that a great game is complete when the details are properly completed.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for a realistic-looking lifeform that doesn't slide across the room.
Unfortunately, it's not just the employees and customers of Website Results that suffer. It's the thousands upon thousands of frustrated computer users around the world that have their browsers behave in inexplicable and maddening ways. It ruins the browsing experience for them, drives them away from buying over the web, and lessens the value and inherent public trust of all of our jobs as a result.
"There are a lot of institutions that don't have these offices, and frankly, they have the mistaken notion that they don't have a need for it," says Harvey S. Axlerod
This is just another example of setting up an agency or department to deal with the symptom, not the problem. The real problem is a lack or morals and ethics in general, compared with a generation or two ago. (For you non-US readers, I'm referring to the US in particular, although it might apply to your country as well.) It was socially unthinkable in my parents and grandparents childhood environments for men to stalk and harass teenage girls, for children to kill their fellow-classmates with guns at school, and the like. (Insert your own typical news headline here.)
I'm not trying to get on a morality soapbox, but this is a classic example of setting up another social program to deal with the end-result of a root cause, not the cause itself. When our (programmers) code breaks down, we don't look for the code that causes the breakdown and build a Cherynobyl-style sarcophagus around it to determine when an error occurs and clean up after it. Instead, we logically find the cause of the error and fix the errant code that caused it! This should be painfully obvious; unfortunately, we seem to always set up a new program to deal with the aftermath of the issue, not the issue that caused it.
So, to people working in offices mentioned in the article, good luck. Not that you'll need it--you're assured of a job from her till eternity because you're not really fixing the problem.
[...] anyone who has used a fast connection knows it changes the online experience forever from one of frustration and drudge to zippiness and fun.
Aha! I've been happy with my cable service. I just didn't know I could be that happy!
"Trifecta" not what it used to mean
on
Amazon.Heartbreak
·
· Score: 2
... it squats like an art deco toad over the city of Seattle, its insides all scooped out and replaced with IKEA and geek central -- a trifecta of Batcave, Fortress of Solitude, and supervillain lair."
This might be slightly off-topic, but when I first saw the word "trifecta" a few years ago I looked it up in a dictionary. The official meaning then (and still) is "a system of betting in which the bettor must pick the first three winners in the correct sequence." I think it's extremely interesting that since then I've seen the meaning change in public perception from that to "a triplet of any three items," and everyone seems to still know what it means.
Okay, we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.;-)
if the gvmnt didnt want them sold they should have kept hold of them in the first place,
Ah yes, another gem of a post from someone who forgot to take their logic pills this morning. By the same flawgic, if you didn't want your wallet taken you shouldn't have left it in the theater in the first place, right?
I have a 15" CRT display at home and the viewable area is noticeably larger on the iMac's 15" LCD display.
On the contrary, 15" CRT monitors are measured diagonally from corner to corner of the enclosure, which was the subject of a major class action lawsuit a few years back and the reason why magazines say things like "15" (13.8" viewable) monitor" these days.
LCD monitors, on the other hand, are measured by the actual screen size: a 15" monitor is really 15" from one corner of the screen to the other. Your 15" CRT that is "noticeably larger" is probably an optical illusion; the viewable area is certainly less.
Read on for the dramatic conclusion? Sheesh!
on
The Venture Cafe
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Read on for the dramatic conclusion!
Kind of reminds me of those cheesy kung fu movies you see at the video store with a description like:
Don't miss the exciting last half hour, in which it is revealed that the brotherhood of Purple Shaolins was actually founded by Tsao Houxi!
Make sure to watch the dramatic martial arts conclusion as Red Daggers Li at the last second defeats Black Dragon Xu!
Or my personal chrisd favorite:
Hey folks, "she" is actually a he!!!
I mean, okay, okay. It's hard to start a new company. But with a book like this, at least you know that you're not the only one going through hard times.
And this "dramatic conclusion" ends with a Joe Pesci line--okay okay okay--that I would've recognized as terrible writing when I was nine. Hey Slashdot, since you're posting book review stories by the uneducated, can my little brother write one?
But there weren't any calls to 911 that we know about. There were several calls to wives and loved ones, and a call to a GTE operator on an AirFone. See this page (about halfway down) for more details. So the fact remains that somehow a U.S. Senator was pretty sure of himself in stating that they would find out what was said on those calls, even though they were placed on private cell phones and a private airplane satellite phone.
I'm kicking myself for not having written down the name of the station, the time and the Senator being interviewed, but I'll post from what I do remember.
The evening of Sept. 11 I was watching the news--ABC, probably--and some senator from such and such intelligence committee was on for a few minutes. The anchor was asking him about the plane crash in Pennsylvania, which we all knew very little about at the time.
The anchor said, "There are reports that some phone calls were made on mobile phones from the airplane shortly before it went down. Do you have any more information about this?"
Senator XYZ [matter-of-factly]: "Well there were several calls made and I can't comment on that right now, but we should't have any problem getting the recordings on those."
The anchor moved on to the next question without realizing the impact of what had just been said. But if that wasn't an admission of clandestine listening of routine telephone traffic in the U.S., I don't know what is.
The reason Ctrl + Tab is a "vain attempt" is because it only solves half the problem. When one or two child windows are open, Ctrl + Tab works great. But when the number increases, there is an increasing need to switch between windows that aren't next to each other in the document list.
For example, if I want to get from window #2 to #7 (assume there are 10 windows open), it takes a lot of time to cycle through #s 3, 4, 5 and 6 first. So a better way is to present the user with a list that the desired window can be easily chosen from. (Apparently this is how Opera v6 works; I was using v5 at the time of my post.)
And while keyboard shortcuts 1 and 2 might work "properly" for Opera, for other programs where numeric keys are input keys this doesn't work at all.
I've been using and programming MDI interfaces ever since Word 2.0 et al made them popular in Win3.1. I've slowly grown to realize that what was great UI back then isn't so good anymore.
I've made two changes to my Windows UI that makes the flaws apparent. First, I moved my taskbar up to the top of the screen. Second, I doubled its width. (And I got rid of that silly Quick Launch toolbar, too.) The net effect is that I can more easily see which applications are open and fit twice as many items in the taskbar before they become unreadable.
Now I'm not trying to start a Win vs. Mac war and say that the top or bottom is correct, but from a bottom-taskbar-user switching to a top-taskbar-user I find it more intuitive to keep the taskbar on top.
On to the problems with the MDI interface:
Most programs handle the MDI interface poorly. MS Word is one of them. Having to cycle through open documents with Ctrl + F6 or using the Window...[# of document] menu isn't an easy way to do it. Illustrator is another example of terrible document switching--AFAIK there's not even a keyboard shortcut.
Other programs, like MS Excel, UltraEdit and Opera do this well, listing a strip at the top or bottom of the screen with open documents. However, they still fail in two important aspects:
There isn't a way to quickly switch from one document to another that aren't next to each other in the document list. With applications, Windows allows quick switching with Alt + Tab. There is no MDI equivalent. (Ctrl + Tab, Ctrl + PgUp/Dn, Ctrl + F6 are all vain attempts.)
Most document list strips are very small, disobeying Fitt's Law, and are thus painful to try to use quickly.
So even though Documents are listed in a strip a la the taskbar, there are still problems moving between documents. Listing a document as an instance of an application, on the other hand, places an icon on the taskbar that can be more easily manipulated.
There are examples of this idea that are poorly implemented, like MS Project. It correctly places a button on the taskbar for each open document, but incorrectly (and frustratingly) adds an unnecessary icon to the Alt + Tab list. And there are other problems with this approach, like too many icons cluttering the taskbar.
But I believe that this is the better way to work with documents and applications. If the Windows taskbar can't handle N icons it's not the fault of the model, but the fault of the taskbar. Perhaps a scaling taskbar a la OS X is a better solution. But in my opinion either solution is a better solution than MDI.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the tags in tires include the tire type, date of manufacture and the car that they were first mounted to. But that's a very specialized application, and we were talking about the general consumer scenario--John Doe checking out of Best Buy, Sears, Gap, XYZ Grocery, etc.
I doubt that you'll find any RFID tags with a memory size of 65,536 bits! And if you do, they certainly aren't the ones that we were talking about--disposable, cheap passive tags to be used by merchants at the point of sale. Sure they could be used in intrusive fashions, in the same way that UPC codes were going to be the mark of the beast when they debuted in the '80s, and The Net was going to wreck all our lives and put us under control of nefarious orgzanizations.
But these RFID tags are going to be used for checkout purposes, and any merchant that doesn't disable them at the POS isn't going to be faced with a tricky problem down the road. For example, if a customer walks back into your store (Walmart) wearing a watch, pair of shoes, t-shirt and some candy he purchased there last week, how are you going to know whether the goods were already purchased or not?! Remember, these are read-only tags, not read/write tags. It's therefore to the merchant's advantage to disable the tags once the item has been purchased.
At the same time, the unique coding of items is fairly useless until you get into large-ticket items that may need to be repaired or serviced. Knowing that you sold Aiwa stereo #12345 is not better than knowing that you sold an Aiwa stereo model ABC. And when a 60" TV comes back in for repair, being able to scan the RFID emitter for its serial number takes only a few seconds off reading it off of the back of the unit and typing it in.
There are a host of applications for the technology, and I've only covered a slice of them. Anti-theft and non-line of sight ID'ing of products are two of the most beneficial, and in my opinion they far outweight the insidious uses of various organizations that paranoid people like to think up.
They can. See this article (New Direct-to-Textile Washable Tag) from the RFID Journal magazine.
I work in the packaging industry and have seen firsthand some of the RFID application processes on folder gluers. First of all, the defect rate hovers around 10%, which makes relying on this technology a dubious proposition.
I doubt that the practical size is approaching "half a grain of sand," which would make application a nightmare to try to control. And most importantly, RFID tags are like UPC barcodes: they're coded to a single frequency and product, not to each instance of the product! If an RFID tag is enabled on your North Face jacket and you walk in a store, they may be able to tell that you're wearing the jacket, but that doesn't tell them who you are.
So if I've helped reduce the paranoia level a little bit, I'll now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
In a momentous surge of self-denial, Timothy was able to restrain himself for a full 20 days before posting a repeat story about The Two Towers. Slashdot readers, rejoice!
What's very interesting about this book is that the printers of the day decided to take Newton's nice illustrations and print them on a new embossing press. However, the pages had to ben run through the plain type press first, then the embosser. Four hundred years ago, this was the bleeding edge of technology and his illustrations wouldn't line up with the text.
So instead they printed the first 80 pages or so of pure text with footnotes, and at the end of the book added a section of large fold-out pages for the embossed diagrams. In addition to having to learn calculus while reading the book, looking up each diagram in an appendix must've made for some maddening reading material!
Mr. Tufte's point was that people who create data displays shouldn't let anyone screw with it. If they did it to Newton, they'll do it to anyone.
By the way, the colophon includes the printer's name in color (the only place color is used in the book), but doesn't even have Newton's name on it!
Anyway, that's a little info about the book.
Hard Polygonal Edges
It doesn't matter if the fingers are as round as a triangle or as round as a dodecahedron: it still doesn't look round. What the industry doesn't seem to realize is that the brain is much better at interpolating the details of a fuzzy image than Nvidia is at displaying a kazillion pixels at a gajillion frames per second. The cell structure of animals, humans and whatever twisted monsters come out of the minds of modelers these days should not look like they were drawn on graph paper, from point to point. Whether a face is displayed using 30 polygons or 3,000, there's still the awkward-looking, jagged edges and connections that the use of polygons dictate.
Interactions between models and structures
I'm tired of watching models claw their way across the ground with their feet sliding as if they were a hooved animal walking on butter in a country with a gravity coefficient of 0.5. I've not yet seen a game that shows REALISTIC movement of 3D models. At least in Doom, when the imps were clawing the walls, they were obscured enough that my mind could make up for the lack of detail. But the basic problem of "interacting" things that move vs. things that don't has never been solved very well.
It's the details that really count. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the great architect, when told by a frustrated subordinate, "The Devil's in the details!" cooly responded, "No. God is in the details." Details make or break the project. The last 10% of a project--the details part--usually takes as much effort as the first 90%. Perfection is impossible to attain, but to me it's perfectly obvious that a great game is complete when the details are properly completed.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for a realistic-looking lifeform that doesn't slide across the room.
Boy oh boy! Katz will do anything to get around the thousands of Slashdot posters who've filtered him out of the story authors.
Is Katz writing under a pseudonym these days?
Unfortunately, it's not just the employees and customers of Website Results that suffer. It's the thousands upon thousands of frustrated computer users around the world that have their browsers behave in inexplicable and maddening ways. It ruins the browsing experience for them, drives them away from buying over the web, and lessens the value and inherent public trust of all of our jobs as a result.
Send Slashdot headlines to Timothy's cell phone so he can find out when his stories are repeats from yesterday.
I have also discovered that you can can tell when there's a big crowd in Japan by opening your eyes and looking! *gasp!*
This is just another example of setting up an agency or department to deal with the symptom, not the problem. The real problem is a lack or morals and ethics in general, compared with a generation or two ago. (For you non-US readers, I'm referring to the US in particular, although it might apply to your country as well.) It was socially unthinkable in my parents and grandparents childhood environments for men to stalk and harass teenage girls, for children to kill their fellow-classmates with guns at school, and the like. (Insert your own typical news headline here.)
I'm not trying to get on a morality soapbox, but this is a classic example of setting up another social program to deal with the end-result of a root cause, not the cause itself. When our (programmers) code breaks down, we don't look for the code that causes the breakdown and build a Cherynobyl-style sarcophagus around it to determine when an error occurs and clean up after it. Instead, we logically find the cause of the error and fix the errant code that caused it! This should be painfully obvious; unfortunately, we seem to always set up a new program to deal with the aftermath of the issue, not the issue that caused it.
So, to people working in offices mentioned in the article, good luck. Not that you'll need it--you're assured of a job from her till eternity because you're not really fixing the problem.
Aha! I've been happy with my cable service. I just didn't know I could be that happy!
This might be slightly off-topic, but when I first saw the word "trifecta" a few years ago I looked it up in a dictionary. The official meaning then (and still) is "a system of betting in which the bettor must pick the first three winners in the correct sequence." I think it's extremely interesting that since then I've seen the meaning change in public perception from that to "a triplet of any three items," and everyone seems to still know what it means.
Okay, we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. ;-)
Yes, but it much funner to point out when Taco does it. Sorry about that. I'll try to read more carefully next time. ;-)
Ah yes, another gem of a post from someone who forgot to take their logic pills this morning. By the same flawgic, if you didn't want your wallet taken you shouldn't have left it in the theater in the first place, right?
On the contrary, 15" CRT monitors are measured diagonally from corner to corner of the enclosure, which was the subject of a major class action lawsuit a few years back and the reason why magazines say things like "15" (13.8" viewable) monitor" these days.
LCD monitors, on the other hand, are measured by the actual screen size: a 15" monitor is really 15" from one corner of the screen to the other. Your 15" CRT that is "noticeably larger" is probably an optical illusion; the viewable area is certainly less.
Kind of reminds me of those cheesy kung fu movies you see at the video store with a description like:
- Don't miss the exciting last half hour, in which it is revealed that the brotherhood of Purple Shaolins was actually founded by Tsao Houxi!
- Make sure to watch the dramatic martial arts conclusion as Red Daggers Li at the last second defeats Black Dragon Xu!
Or my personal chrisd favorite:I mean, okay, okay. It's hard to start a new company. But with a book like this, at least you know that you're not the only one going through hard times.
And this "dramatic conclusion" ends with a Joe Pesci line--okay okay okay--that I would've recognized as terrible writing when I was nine. Hey Slashdot, since you're posting book review stories by the uneducated, can my little brother write one?
Woah, I read "RMS" and "condoms" and didn't want to read any more about that!
*rumble, rumble* What's that sound? Here come the statistics majors...
But there weren't any calls to 911 that we know about. There were several calls to wives and loved ones, and a call to a GTE operator on an AirFone. See this page (about halfway down) for more details. So the fact remains that somehow a U.S. Senator was pretty sure of himself in stating that they would find out what was said on those calls, even though they were placed on private cell phones and a private airplane satellite phone.
The evening of Sept. 11 I was watching the news--ABC, probably--and some senator from such and such intelligence committee was on for a few minutes. The anchor was asking him about the plane crash in Pennsylvania, which we all knew very little about at the time.
The anchor said, "There are reports that some phone calls were made on mobile phones from the airplane shortly before it went down. Do you have any more information about this?"
Senator XYZ [matter-of-factly]: "Well there were several calls made and I can't comment on that right now, but we should't have any problem getting the recordings on those."
The anchor moved on to the next question without realizing the impact of what had just been said. But if that wasn't an admission of clandestine listening of routine telephone traffic in the U.S., I don't know what is.
For example, if I want to get from window #2 to #7 (assume there are 10 windows open), it takes a lot of time to cycle through #s 3, 4, 5 and 6 first. So a better way is to present the user with a list that the desired window can be easily chosen from. (Apparently this is how Opera v6 works; I was using v5 at the time of my post.)
And while keyboard shortcuts 1 and 2 might work "properly" for Opera, for other programs where numeric keys are input keys this doesn't work at all.
I've made two changes to my Windows UI that makes the flaws apparent. First, I moved my taskbar up to the top of the screen. Second, I doubled its width. (And I got rid of that silly Quick Launch toolbar, too.) The net effect is that I can more easily see which applications are open and fit twice as many items in the taskbar before they become unreadable.
Now I'm not trying to start a Win vs. Mac war and say that the top or bottom is correct, but from a bottom-taskbar-user switching to a top-taskbar-user I find it more intuitive to keep the taskbar on top.
On to the problems with the MDI interface:
Most programs handle the MDI interface poorly. MS Word is one of them. Having to cycle through open documents with Ctrl + F6 or using the Window...[# of document] menu isn't an easy way to do it. Illustrator is another example of terrible document switching--AFAIK there's not even a keyboard shortcut.
Other programs, like MS Excel, UltraEdit and Opera do this well, listing a strip at the top or bottom of the screen with open documents. However, they still fail in two important aspects:
- There isn't a way to quickly switch from one document to another that aren't next to each other in the document list. With applications, Windows allows quick switching with Alt + Tab. There is no MDI equivalent. (Ctrl + Tab, Ctrl + PgUp/Dn, Ctrl + F6 are all vain attempts.)
- Most document list strips are very small, disobeying Fitt's Law, and are thus painful to try to use quickly.
So even though Documents are listed in a strip a la the taskbar, there are still problems moving between documents. Listing a document as an instance of an application, on the other hand, places an icon on the taskbar that can be more easily manipulated.There are examples of this idea that are poorly implemented, like MS Project. It correctly places a button on the taskbar for each open document, but incorrectly (and frustratingly) adds an unnecessary icon to the Alt + Tab list. And there are other problems with this approach, like too many icons cluttering the taskbar.
But I believe that this is the better way to work with documents and applications. If the Windows taskbar can't handle N icons it's not the fault of the model, but the fault of the taskbar. Perhaps a scaling taskbar a la OS X is a better solution. But in my opinion either solution is a better solution than MDI.
He's got so many degrees he's got a fever!