I think I have one of the printers in question. Does this allow me to do anything useful or interesting? Where can I find more information on playing with it?
The issue with the verb form is not how to handle adding suffixes to an upper-case initialism, the issue is that people would thing do verb that noun in the first place. While I've heard lots of people talk about GIFs, I would get all GIFed if I actually heard someone verb "GIF." That's just GIFing stupid.
While I agree that this doesn't make much sense for most people--the cost of the electricity to keep them charged isn't worth having a few hours coverage in blackouts for most people, this is quite useful for people with off-grid homes in remote locations. I had friends building in a remote location, and running the power lines to the house would cost as much as a solar array with batteries to last through the night. With used electric car batteries, the cost of such a system would drop significantly.
The idea isn't to have electric car owners make use of their worn-out batteries, but to create a market for them to sell them.
It would be nice to have someone with a degree of credibility look at this legislation and report on how useful it really is. That's exactly the sort of thing that the EFF should be doing. Have they reviewed it?
One cool thing about starting a new network is that they can skip all the legacy G2/G3 stuff and create a pure LTE-only network. That should reduce the amount of spectrum required. Getting the spectrum is the tricky part. We all remember when they lost the 700MHz bid, but fortunately got the open access provisions included. What is available for them?
My understanding is that the Common Cold is based on six virus families, so a similar approach for each family could create a set of vaccines to eliminate colds.
Current phones do just fine with HD video and multitasking. Sure, some may glitch occasionally, but more due to software design than lack of CPU. This will do little to nothing for the things we use our phones for today.
What it will enable is new classes of features, such as real-time video and voice processing. With that sort of CPU power, you can do voice recognition without sending the audio over the network for analysis. Who knows what people will think of doing for video analysis?
Though for the most part, the added cores will be powered down, doing nothing but putting a good bragging number on the spec sheet.
While there may be no provision for outside organizations, in many states there are provisions for campaigns to designate authorized observers. I've done that in Massachusetts (I was marking off the names of the voters who voted on my own list so that we would not call them in the afternoon get-out-the-vote campaign). Assuming there are similar rules in Texas, it just takes one candidate to designate the observers as official representatives.
I think the idea was to put submarine-class nuclear reactors at bases in places like Afghanistan, at least according to an article about the request for proposals. Though you're correct that it would be valuable at sea, too. It would be great if an aircraft carrier could produce its own jet fuel. Again, it would cut down on the logistics dependencies for operations.
I seem to recall that DARPA was looking for a way to do just this. The idea is to put a small nuclear reactor at a forward operating base (such as in Afghanistan), and use the excess electricity to provide for the fuel needs. One of the most expensive and dangerous parts of operations is trucking in the fuel, so making it on-site, even if the efficiency is bad, can still be a huge win.
An article on the request for proposals mentioned that nuclear reactors don't adjust quickly to demand, so there's lots of excess power in places like France, so there's interest in something like this to use the excess power. Of course, now you're getting into a situation where efficiency matters, as you can sell the electricity outside the country at a loss or use other methods of storing it for later.
I can certainly understand why the cable companies want this. They have too many Internet-only customers who are getting local TV access without paying for it, and they don't want to have to send out trucks to install and remove filters. This is a perfect solution for them.
As a consumer, I don't terribly mind, as long as I can decrypt the signals. (Yes, it's a bit frustrating that my QAM tuners are now junk.) I don't want to pay a monthly fee for a cable card, along with expensive tuners that accept them. What would be much more reasonable is a software-only cable card, and there's no reason we can't have that. This would allow any QAM tuner to still be useful. The FCC should require cable companies to support this, and toss out any copy restrictions--if we are paying for it, we should get the raw digital stream to record as we see fit.
Yes, it's much better than IP over SMS. It depends on the DNS server, but you can sometimes get most of the 1500 bytes available, minus the encapsulation overhead. You have to set up your own domain and DNS server, and it's most efficient if you can send DNS directly to your own server, but that's not required.
Iodine doesn't have encryption or compression, so it's recommended to open an ssh connection and tunnel everything through that. Of course, it's pretty obvious what you're doing if anyone looks at the DNS traffic.
I've played with IP over DNS, and it works surprisingly well. It can break through most firewalls. I think there was something like a 50% performance hit, but considering how convoluted it is, that's pretty good.
It shouldn't be difficult to port it to Android if you install a kernel with tun/tap support.
I know that there is another company that has long made a Roomba-like lawn mower. It uses buried wires, much like the invisible fence many pet owners use. It would be awesome to have one that eliminates the wires by using GPS and other location technologies to let you map out the area to be mowed.
Yup. The Roomba has lots of issues. I think the newer ones at least have a larger dust container, so they don't fill up instantly with dog hair like our did.
Mine had a NiCd battery pack that had a horribly short life span. They should at least use NiMH, if not Li-ion. It should be rated at 1000 cycles to last for three years of daily use.
They could make it a lot smarter. In addition to the exploration algorithm, they should be able to memorize the layout of the walls (possibly with a Wi-Fi web-based API). That would eliminate the need for the infrared "electronic wall" that they use.
So we understand how somewhere on the order of 20% of the DNA works. It encodes proteins. What we don't understand is how things like body structure and aging work. Clearly those are part of the DNA, so it seems obvious that there's some sort of switching process going on using at least some of that other 80%.
Once we figure out how the chemistry of that programming works, we can start to decode the fractal patterns that define body structure.
Of course, we will find that there is true junk DNA--think of code blocks that can't be reached. How much evolutionary dead code is left in there may be an interesting academic question.
There's a big difference between healthy foods and nutritious foods. People don't buy organic for nutrition. That's what people buy vitamins for. People buy organic food for what it *doesn't* have, namely pesticides (and hormones for meat and dairy).
This study looks like one that is clearly designed to support industrial farming by distracting consumers. "Hey, you were buying organics for reason A, but it makes no sense to buy organics for reason B, so you should stop."
Has anyone analyzed the protocol that they use for advertising? How hard would it be to use a bogus DNS and serve your own ads, or to simply block them? Could a business with free public wi-fi set it up to serve ads for their business? Can I serve up ads for rooting your Kindle on my home network for any friends that visit?
Clearly, this is a case where the lawyers are out to get their fees, with no regard for their clients' interests. The judge should make it clear that if the lawyers propose or accept a settlement that is not clearly within their clients' interests, then legal fees will not be included.
Yes, I heard that there was some sort of solution for my ThinkPad, but I gave up trying to get it to work. I run the nVidia graphics all the time, which cuts down on the battery life, but makes everything simpler.
I also find it frustrating that the firmware doesn't have graphics modes for the native screen resolution or standard 1080p screens, making it difficult to set up the correct console modes and boot screen (using grub2, at least).
Maybe now that Apple is using hybrid graphics, there will be more attention paid to it in the Linux community, which is a good thing. Of course, much of the problem is that we're dealing with binary driver blobs that don't always play well with each other.
The key areas for math in general computer science are algebra and statistics. Even if you are not actively using algebra, the thought processes in programming are very similar. Statistics are critical for analyses of system behavior. Linear algebra is useful occasionally, but mostly it's just something that is nice to have been exposed to.
I never use calculus, but it was in taking a calculus class that my algebra skills solidified, so the coursework was not wasted. In general, you should always progress one step further in coursework than you expect to actually need.
Also, there's a big difference between knowing enough to get an entry-level programming position, and knowing enough to have a career where you end up designing major projects.
Yup, and some places are pretty stable and have cheap power, which is why, for example, The Dalles, Oregon, has become popular for datacenters. The only real risk there is if Mount Hood decides to follow Mount St. Hellens example.
If I were evaluating locations for a datacenter, I would consider Boise, Idaho. Yes, you would want to do some extra securing of the racks in case of earthquake (rarer than California, but not unheard of), but besides that, there's not much to worry about.
This is something Microsoft should have undertaken immediately after acquiring Hotmail. Microsoft has a strong brand with Outlook, and it makes total sense to be using that brand for their webmail offering.
Doing it at this time also makes sense. They're making a big push for a new user interface ("metro"), and this is one more place where they can integrate that interface, making it consistent across their offerings.
Of course, the devil is in the details. If they do it wrong, it will weaken their Outlook brand and push existing customers towards competitors. On the other hand, they're getting a ton of free publicity, so they have a chance to capitalize on the moment and steal market share.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, they don't have a good history of execution on things like this--most likely the new platform will be horrible, but they'll keep at it, and after a few generations, it will be a decent competitor, but that's three to five years out.
On the other hand, it might be an interesting experiment to find as many free online storage sites as possible, put something up on each of them, and then see how long they really last.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I have one of the printers in question. Does this allow me to do anything useful or interesting? Where can I find more information on playing with it?
The issue with the verb form is not how to handle adding suffixes to an upper-case initialism, the issue is that people would thing do verb that noun in the first place. While I've heard lots of people talk about GIFs, I would get all GIFed if I actually heard someone verb "GIF." That's just GIFing stupid.
Seriously, does anyone do that?
While I agree that this doesn't make much sense for most people--the cost of the electricity to keep them charged isn't worth having a few hours coverage in blackouts for most people, this is quite useful for people with off-grid homes in remote locations. I had friends building in a remote location, and running the power lines to the house would cost as much as a solar array with batteries to last through the night. With used electric car batteries, the cost of such a system would drop significantly.
The idea isn't to have electric car owners make use of their worn-out batteries, but to create a market for them to sell them.
It would be nice to have someone with a degree of credibility look at this legislation and report on how useful it really is. That's exactly the sort of thing that the EFF should be doing. Have they reviewed it?
One cool thing about starting a new network is that they can skip all the legacy G2/G3 stuff and create a pure LTE-only network. That should reduce the amount of spectrum required. Getting the spectrum is the tricky part. We all remember when they lost the 700MHz bid, but fortunately got the open access provisions included. What is available for them?
My understanding is that the Common Cold is based on six virus families, so a similar approach for each family could create a set of vaccines to eliminate colds.
Current phones do just fine with HD video and multitasking. Sure, some may glitch occasionally, but more due to software design than lack of CPU. This will do little to nothing for the things we use our phones for today.
What it will enable is new classes of features, such as real-time video and voice processing. With that sort of CPU power, you can do voice recognition without sending the audio over the network for analysis. Who knows what people will think of doing for video analysis?
Though for the most part, the added cores will be powered down, doing nothing but putting a good bragging number on the spec sheet.
While there may be no provision for outside organizations, in many states there are provisions for campaigns to designate authorized observers. I've done that in Massachusetts (I was marking off the names of the voters who voted on my own list so that we would not call them in the afternoon get-out-the-vote campaign). Assuming there are similar rules in Texas, it just takes one candidate to designate the observers as official representatives.
I think the idea was to put submarine-class nuclear reactors at bases in places like Afghanistan, at least according to an article about the request for proposals. Though you're correct that it would be valuable at sea, too. It would be great if an aircraft carrier could produce its own jet fuel. Again, it would cut down on the logistics dependencies for operations.
I seem to recall that DARPA was looking for a way to do just this. The idea is to put a small nuclear reactor at a forward operating base (such as in Afghanistan), and use the excess electricity to provide for the fuel needs. One of the most expensive and dangerous parts of operations is trucking in the fuel, so making it on-site, even if the efficiency is bad, can still be a huge win.
An article on the request for proposals mentioned that nuclear reactors don't adjust quickly to demand, so there's lots of excess power in places like France, so there's interest in something like this to use the excess power. Of course, now you're getting into a situation where efficiency matters, as you can sell the electricity outside the country at a loss or use other methods of storing it for later.
I can certainly understand why the cable companies want this. They have too many Internet-only customers who are getting local TV access without paying for it, and they don't want to have to send out trucks to install and remove filters. This is a perfect solution for them.
As a consumer, I don't terribly mind, as long as I can decrypt the signals. (Yes, it's a bit frustrating that my QAM tuners are now junk.) I don't want to pay a monthly fee for a cable card, along with expensive tuners that accept them. What would be much more reasonable is a software-only cable card, and there's no reason we can't have that. This would allow any QAM tuner to still be useful. The FCC should require cable companies to support this, and toss out any copy restrictions--if we are paying for it, we should get the raw digital stream to record as we see fit.
Yes, it's much better than IP over SMS. It depends on the DNS server, but you can sometimes get most of the 1500 bytes available, minus the encapsulation overhead. You have to set up your own domain and DNS server, and it's most efficient if you can send DNS directly to your own server, but that's not required.
Iodine doesn't have encryption or compression, so it's recommended to open an ssh connection and tunnel everything through that. Of course, it's pretty obvious what you're doing if anyone looks at the DNS traffic.
http://code.kryo.se/iodine/
I've played with IP over DNS, and it works surprisingly well. It can break through most firewalls. I think there was something like a 50% performance hit, but considering how convoluted it is, that's pretty good.
It shouldn't be difficult to port it to Android if you install a kernel with tun/tap support.
I know that there is another company that has long made a Roomba-like lawn mower. It uses buried wires, much like the invisible fence many pet owners use. It would be awesome to have one that eliminates the wires by using GPS and other location technologies to let you map out the area to be mowed.
Yup. The Roomba has lots of issues. I think the newer ones at least have a larger dust container, so they don't fill up instantly with dog hair like our did.
Mine had a NiCd battery pack that had a horribly short life span. They should at least use NiMH, if not Li-ion. It should be rated at 1000 cycles to last for three years of daily use.
They could make it a lot smarter. In addition to the exploration algorithm, they should be able to memorize the layout of the walls (possibly with a Wi-Fi web-based API). That would eliminate the need for the infrared "electronic wall" that they use.
So we understand how somewhere on the order of 20% of the DNA works. It encodes proteins. What we don't understand is how things like body structure and aging work. Clearly those are part of the DNA, so it seems obvious that there's some sort of switching process going on using at least some of that other 80%.
Once we figure out how the chemistry of that programming works, we can start to decode the fractal patterns that define body structure.
Of course, we will find that there is true junk DNA--think of code blocks that can't be reached. How much evolutionary dead code is left in there may be an interesting academic question.
There's a big difference between healthy foods and nutritious foods. People don't buy organic for nutrition. That's what people buy vitamins for. People buy organic food for what it *doesn't* have, namely pesticides (and hormones for meat and dairy).
This study looks like one that is clearly designed to support industrial farming by distracting consumers. "Hey, you were buying organics for reason A, but it makes no sense to buy organics for reason B, so you should stop."
Has anyone analyzed the protocol that they use for advertising? How hard would it be to use a bogus DNS and serve your own ads, or to simply block them? Could a business with free public wi-fi set it up to serve ads for their business? Can I serve up ads for rooting your Kindle on my home network for any friends that visit?
Clearly, this is a case where the lawyers are out to get their fees, with no regard for their clients' interests. The judge should make it clear that if the lawyers propose or accept a settlement that is not clearly within their clients' interests, then legal fees will not be included.
Yes, I heard that there was some sort of solution for my ThinkPad, but I gave up trying to get it to work. I run the nVidia graphics all the time, which cuts down on the battery life, but makes everything simpler.
I also find it frustrating that the firmware doesn't have graphics modes for the native screen resolution or standard 1080p screens, making it difficult to set up the correct console modes and boot screen (using grub2, at least).
Maybe now that Apple is using hybrid graphics, there will be more attention paid to it in the Linux community, which is a good thing. Of course, much of the problem is that we're dealing with binary driver blobs that don't always play well with each other.
The key areas for math in general computer science are algebra and statistics. Even if you are not actively using algebra, the thought processes in programming are very similar. Statistics are critical for analyses of system behavior. Linear algebra is useful occasionally, but mostly it's just something that is nice to have been exposed to.
I never use calculus, but it was in taking a calculus class that my algebra skills solidified, so the coursework was not wasted. In general, you should always progress one step further in coursework than you expect to actually need.
Also, there's a big difference between knowing enough to get an entry-level programming position, and knowing enough to have a career where you end up designing major projects.
Yup, and some places are pretty stable and have cheap power, which is why, for example, The Dalles, Oregon, has become popular for datacenters. The only real risk there is if Mount Hood decides to follow Mount St. Hellens example.
If I were evaluating locations for a datacenter, I would consider Boise, Idaho. Yes, you would want to do some extra securing of the racks in case of earthquake (rarer than California, but not unheard of), but besides that, there's not much to worry about.
And then they would have to adjust the timing for the false start detection to be based on when the sound reaches the athletes.
This is something Microsoft should have undertaken immediately after acquiring Hotmail. Microsoft has a strong brand with Outlook, and it makes total sense to be using that brand for their webmail offering.
Doing it at this time also makes sense. They're making a big push for a new user interface ("metro"), and this is one more place where they can integrate that interface, making it consistent across their offerings.
Of course, the devil is in the details. If they do it wrong, it will weaken their Outlook brand and push existing customers towards competitors. On the other hand, they're getting a ton of free publicity, so they have a chance to capitalize on the moment and steal market share.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, they don't have a good history of execution on things like this--most likely the new platform will be horrible, but they'll keep at it, and after a few generations, it will be a decent competitor, but that's three to five years out.
That's why I put the smiley after that one.
On the other hand, it might be an interesting experiment to find as many free online storage sites as possible, put something up on each of them, and then see how long they really last.