I usually have a bit of reservation for retinal display... If we forget to set the screensaver, the electron beam may burn a few pixels on the monitor... If the MEMS control unit got stuck, guess which part of your eyes will get burned...
For MEMS based projection monitor, it is conceptually similar to an old fashion CRT. Both scan the {laser,electron} beam line-by-line to create image. The 8lb of lead required for CRT is to protect us again the electron beam. The scanning circuit itself is not that bulky.
If we can project colored TV image with laser safely and economically today, we do not really need to have MEMS yet. The problem is whether it is technically feasible. In my country, the allowable power for laser pointer is 1mW. Assume the max intensity of any pixel of the "laser TV" is 0.01 mW, a 800x600 resolution require a 4.8W laser. It is a pretty scary stuff...
University student will get drunk, stoned, arrested etc. A good dog tag can save the medics, police etc a lot of time and can potentially save some young soul...
When I read the title, I think NOAA is going to release penguins to North Pole again. I was a little bit disappeared, it is penguin the sofware, rather than the bird...
IIRC, there was an attempt to release penguins to Sweden (or may be another Scandinavian countries) just before WW2. About 40 birds were released to somewhere near an arctic fishing village. All of them were killed within 60 days: penguins did not know polar bear would attack, fisherman did not know what it was...
The fate of the last bird was like this: A fisherman's wife hacked the last penguin to death,then taken the bird to a pub and said something like "What's wrong with that fat, stupid bird? It can't fly!!"
From "Penguins", John A. Love;London : Whittet, 1994.
They are the little blue penguins. According to previous estimation, there are about 10000 of those in New Zealand. Yellow-eye penguin is the rarer (rarest?) species. Tourists can meet them in a reserve in Dunedin.
Penguins are quite cute and can potentially cause "big damage". When I was travelling in a eco-tour somewhere in the South Island of New Zealand, I met a retired professor. She told me that she visited Fiordland to watch glacier on a sightseeing boat the day before. Her boat was tilted severely when every tourists suddenly rushed to one side of the boad to watch a swimming penguin. The captain yelled at the tourists to come back to their seat in panic...
My local ISP in New Zealand uses this type of land based system for more than 3 years.
It is a good solution for sparsely populated country. In cities, they set up land based stations. For rural area, users point their disk to the satellite...
But, it has its own catches. First of all, it is unidierctional. You still need to use your dialup modem for upload. They claimed that they were testing the bidirectional option 2 years ago. But, there is no progress since then... Second, dependent on the terrain, reception of the signal can be tricky... The land based tower should remain line-of-sight for the user. Hard to manage for hilly terrain or cities with lots of high-rise bldg...
p2p web content pirater is really not that difficult to write, maybe a modified proxy server can work reasonably well for a fairly large group of user.
However, there are catches. The p2p pirater need to remove personal info from the pages. Otherwise, the publisher can nail the subscriber fairly hard. Basic info (eg subscriber name, ID etc) are easy to mask, but trackerID is not.
My friend, who is a keen boy racer, subscribes to one of the pay-sites. I discover all the htm/pdf he downloaded are doped with unique trackerID- like numbers.
This is a real pity, I suspect many PC Gamers, like me, don't have credit cards(or cash), Unlike poor slashdot reader like me, aren't keen gamers are supposed to have some cash to spare?
You can read the latest slashdot news in a snail speed 386... Probably, you can't play the latest game with my Celeron...
Two to three years ago, a team mounted a spinning blade in front of the robot. The ball bounced like a bullet whenver got in touch with the spinning blade. It upset many people. Not only because that is of little skill, but also may damage other people's robot... At the end, the design was banded for further matches.
True story from a lecturer that I know, who is a veteran robocup participant.
Re:Once again, the moderators are on crack
on
VoIP at $15 a Pop
·
· Score: 1
Mind you, a lot of people do not know how to tap a telephone. I have just chatted with some mates (recent EEE grads). They seem to forget the analog nature of the phone system and was a bit shocked to learned that you only need a piece of wire to tap a phone.... (well, of course that depends on how serious you are).
The simplest reason is the users have found something else in the mean time. It is particularly true if your product is mainstream (eg virus scanner, compression program, image viewer and the like).
Say, they are looking for jp2 viewer, they will go for shareware first, then evaluation ware. If nothing is found, go for evaluation ware that need registration. As long as they find something okay, they will stop searching. (Of course, if your software is unique, and some customers really need that, then they will wait.... Maybe more common in some sector of the research community. Not so in the commerical world.)
The better approach is to allow the user to download first. When they want to evaluate more advanced function of the software, pop up a window to lure them to register. If you really want to validate their email address in advance, please use automatic mail reply and ensure the avg time taken in within 5 mins rather than a few hours...
This gives you a 128kb connection, (in theory) unlimited traffic. Strictly speaking, it is not true. Most service around NZ has a string attached to it (something like capped the max data transfer to 10GB per month).
The reason why Telecom rants again is probably because they want to reduce the cap further, ie break their promise once again. IHug in New Zealand, which provides broadband by satellite/microwave, has reduced their cap to 2GB per month already.... I can expect Telecom will take such excuse and follow suit later.
It is much easier, and less counterproductive, to do that with good, well-supervised tests, rather than try to ban cooperation on homework. Before we start bashing (which has already begun for a long time) the writer of this article, I would like to know whether he can write code.
For example, I have difficulties design a test question that will let me to know whether a student can use a debugger. Similarly, it is no way to test their ability to write program of decent size in a test.
Due to some dept politics, my EEE dept need to substitute homework-based to largely test-based assessment for the 101 programming paper. The results is shocking. The lecturers and tutors suffer a lot in the following semesters as many student cannot actually code afterwards...
Put that the other way round, US has a population of abut 250 million, she will need to replant about 1.125 times the land size of the entire US (China and US are of very similar size). After fully developed, China will need 4+ times of its own area for forest.... Basically, we need a "spare" earth for reforestation.
An averge citizen in developed world generates 12 ton of CO2 per year. Each hectare of forest can hold 200 ton of carbon in its life time. Assume the avg human life is 75 yrs, we need 4.5 hectare (45000 m2) of forest per person. Again assume the total population of the developed world will be 1 billion, we need to plant 45,000,000 km2 of forest, 4.5 times the size of China. Even if we can find enough land, the task is just gigiantic.
(Well, I understand the ocean can absorb a lot of CO2, we also know there are natual forest. But, they are in equilibrium before Industrial Revolution. If our final target is to become "carbon netural", we need to fix all the carbon that we released from fossil fuel.)
It seems obvious to me that cutting back the generation of CO2 is a must no matter what we are going to do next.
In general, US's fighter technology is much better than the Russian. But, in terms of dogfight missile system, I am afraid it is just a catch up here.
A missle capable of making a reletively tight 180 degree turn.... I think there is a misinterpretation here. The so call "look over his shoulder" is usually refering to the front hemisphere, not the back. In order to hit something at the back, the missile need to make a U-turn. The max air speed of F15 is Mach 2.5+. Unfortunately, the max speed of the AIM-9 series is only about the same. The AA is left with no kinetic energy after U-turn. Also, very high off-bore missiles are not really that hard to manufacture per se. How to avoid hitting yourself is the tough part. (You also have an IR signature, but you are closer...)
2. The reasons that surplus food does not make it to the hungry of the world are almost always political (and often exacerbated by the physical difficulties of distribution). Exactly due to this reason, scientists need to work on this area. Poor farmer needs to produce something from *their* small and bad (may be infertile or dry) piece of farm land. They want to and need to stand on their own feet. That's how better rice strains come to a help. That was a largely unseen green revolution in developing world during the 60-70's. Using hybrid technique, the yield was increased by around 20 %. But, we need something even better. (BTW, the indica rice being sequenced is actually one of the best rice strain developed by a famous rice expert Rongping Yuan in China back in the 70's. The strain has been widely cultivated in Southern China and part of SE Asian since then)
6. Even if we could 'safely' increase yield with genetically engineered rice, the likelihood is that this would just lead to faster consumption What if we can do that without GM the rice? From one of the deeper BBC link: beta-carotene pathway is already in rice.... One could make a non-GM vitamin-A rice simply by studying those genes. Without the code, the hybrid exercises are just a little bit better than random guessing.
The crucial point is to avoid the project being hijacked by some evil multinational companies. Put that under some kind of UN development program will benefit everyone.
encoding, and sharing) are going to listen to Celine Dion? I was under the impression that most P2P users were somewhere in the age bracket of 15-30, and male..I may be mistaken, but that's my understanding from following all this.. Yeah, right! Sony needs your help to promote that music around P2P networks. I am sure my friends will search for the ripped titles tonight as part of the social "responisiblity":-)
Despite pressure from the U.S. gov't, I don't see China or the Russian Federation going to great lengths to enforce U.S. copyright laws for the benefit of the RIAA. Yes and no. While you can probably find open bazaars of burned music CD/VCD easily in these countries, "exporting" the content back to US is a completely different matter. RIAA knows that they cannot extract much profit from these non-developed countries. But, if you are setting an internet radio for oversea subscription, they will view this as a much serious threat (terrorist act???).
Every single country with internet connection to US fears the trade sanctions imposed by US (IIRC, it is the Resolution 301 stuff). They all buckle under the official pressure...
I feel reasonably happy as long as they make OpenOffice available for every club member. Put that this way, you will have to provide some extra service to attract higher fee (or even a fee). Many people in the industry may agree with me. Sometimes, you do really want your boss to support open sourced stuff with real $$$ but you cannot find an excuse. Consider bloody ridiculous crappy software in Windows can cost thousands and thousands of dollar, I think it is still a fair deal.
For example, I have heard my sysadmin is trying to persuade the dept to buy a membership from Mandrake (as we may have some spare budget this year). The availablity of StarOffice 6 will make our suggestion a much much stronger case for the PHBs...
Man-in-the-middle attack is the only phrase that flash across my mind... I have no way to check the identity of the "referer".
You can call me a paranoid. Each time when I need to buy stuff online using credit card. I will reboot to a cleaner "environment" -- a clean copy of OpenBSD or something similar. God knows who the hell the various windows plugins are doing..
Next magazine (next.atnext.com) has an article regarding to the technology of these ID cards. Unfortunately, it is a subscription only and therefore I cannot provide a direct link into it. I attempt to translate some key points into English. The technical terms may not be too accurate. Since Next Magazine is a popular tabloid type of magazine some of their explanations may be in accurate in the first place....
The card has adopted a number of tamper-proof technologies. For example, the key information including the name of the card holder, the date of birth and the ID card number are marked on the card by laser lithography. Hologram will also be printed as the background pattern of the card. The card is made up with very tough plastic which will not break even fold into half....
In terms of the embedded OS used, they picked Multos against the rival Java based systems. Multos was developed by Maosco in UK in early 90s, which was mainly used for credit card and is regarded as a reasonably secure system.
However, the selection of multos against Java has sparked a little debate. Since only one bidder promotes the use of Multos whereas the rest four promotes Java, critics argue that the hk govt may be in bias with the PCCW group controlled by a local tycoon and multos may not work with the proposed e-commerce infrastruture.... (I really don't think multos is such a bad system tecnhically....)
In order to minimise the damage upon card loss, sensitive personal information, e.g. bank transactions, medical records, etc, will be encryp\ted and stored only in the main servers. Only a small number of personnels will grant permissions for accessing the information.
Slashdot Mirror
I usually have a bit of reservation for retinal display... If we forget to set the screensaver, the electron beam may burn a few pixels on the monitor... If the MEMS control unit got stuck, guess which part of your eyes will get burned...
For MEMS based projection monitor, it is conceptually similar to an old fashion CRT. Both scan the {laser,electron} beam line-by-line to create image. The 8lb of lead required for CRT is to protect us again the electron beam. The scanning circuit itself is not that bulky.
If we can project colored TV image with laser safely and economically today, we do not really need to have MEMS yet. The problem is whether it is technically feasible. In my country, the allowable power for laser pointer is 1mW. Assume the max intensity of any pixel of the "laser TV" is 0.01 mW, a 800x600 resolution require a 4.8W laser. It is a pretty scary stuff...
University student will get drunk, stoned, arrested etc. A good dog tag can save the medics, police etc a lot of time and can potentially save some young soul...
:->
It is a must for your friend's daughter.
When I read the title, I think NOAA is going to release penguins to North Pole again. I was a little bit disappeared, it is penguin the sofware, rather than the bird...
,then taken the bird to a pub and said something like "What's wrong with that fat, stupid bird? It can't fly!!"
;London : Whittet, 1994.
IIRC, there was an attempt to release penguins to Sweden (or may be another Scandinavian countries) just before WW2. About 40 birds were released to somewhere near an arctic fishing village. All of them were killed within 60 days: penguins did not know polar bear would attack, fisherman did not know what it was...
The fate of the last bird was like this: A fisherman's wife hacked the last penguin to death
From "Penguins", John A. Love
They are the little blue penguins. According to previous estimation, there are about 10000 of those in New Zealand. Yellow-eye penguin is the rarer (rarest?) species. Tourists can meet them in a reserve in Dunedin.
Penguins are quite cute and can potentially cause "big damage". When I was travelling in a eco-tour somewhere in the South Island of New Zealand, I met a retired professor. She told me that she visited Fiordland to watch glacier on a sightseeing boat the day before. Her boat was tilted severely when every tourists suddenly rushed to one side of the boad to watch a swimming penguin. The captain yelled at the tourists to come back to their seat in panic...
My local ISP in New Zealand uses this type of land based system for more than 3 years.
It is a good solution for sparsely populated country. In cities, they set up land based stations. For rural area, users point their disk to the satellite...
But, it has its own catches. First of all, it is unidierctional. You still need to use your dialup modem for upload. They claimed that they were testing the bidirectional option 2 years ago. But, there is no progress since then... Second, dependent on the terrain, reception of the signal can be tricky... The land based tower should remain line-of-sight for the user. Hard to manage for hilly terrain or cities with lots of high-rise bldg...
p2p web content pirater is really not that difficult to write, maybe a modified proxy server can work reasonably well for a fairly large group of user.
However, there are catches. The p2p pirater need to remove personal info from the pages. Otherwise, the publisher can nail the subscriber fairly hard. Basic info (eg subscriber name, ID etc) are easy to mask, but trackerID is not.
My friend, who is a keen boy racer, subscribes to one of the pay-sites. I discover all the htm/pdf he downloaded are doped with unique trackerID- like numbers.
This is a real pity, I suspect many PC Gamers, like me, don't have credit cards(or cash),
Unlike poor slashdot reader like me, aren't keen gamers are supposed to have some cash to spare?
You can read the latest slashdot news in a snail speed 386... Probably, you can't play the latest game with my Celeron...
Virtual-university awards virtual degree, which in turn purchased by virtual "success people" to create virtual qualification.
:-P
My email box is half flood of these.
Two to three years ago, a team mounted a spinning blade in front of the robot. The ball bounced like a bullet whenver got in touch with the spinning blade. It upset many people. Not only because that is of little skill, but also may damage other people's robot... At the end, the design was banded for further matches.
True story from a lecturer that I know, who is a veteran robocup participant.
Mind you, a lot of people do not know how to tap a telephone. I have just chatted with some mates (recent EEE grads). They seem to forget the analog nature of the phone system and was a bit shocked to learned that you only need a piece of wire to tap a phone.... (well, of course that depends on how serious you are).
On my God!
At the end of the day, many of us would like to check the laptop for "linux compliance" before actually purchasing the machine.
I found these 2 site quite useful:
Linux on a laptop
UniX with Mobile Computers
Time wind back for 18 years. We are now at "1984". ;-)
The simplest reason is the users have found something else in the mean time. It is particularly true if your product is mainstream (eg virus scanner, compression program, image viewer and the like).
Say, they are looking for jp2 viewer, they will go for shareware first, then evaluation ware. If nothing is found, go for evaluation ware that need registration. As long as they find something okay, they will stop searching. (Of course, if your software is unique, and some customers really need that, then they will wait.... Maybe more common in some sector of the research community. Not so in the commerical world.)
The better approach is to allow the user to download first. When they want to evaluate more advanced function of the software, pop up a window to lure them to register. If you really want to validate their email address in advance, please use automatic mail reply and ensure the avg time taken in within 5 mins rather than a few hours...
This gives you a 128kb connection, (in theory) unlimited traffic.
Strictly speaking, it is not true. Most service around NZ has a string attached to it (something like capped the max data transfer to 10GB per month).
The reason why Telecom rants again is probably because they want to reduce the cap further, ie break their promise once again. IHug in New Zealand, which provides broadband by satellite/microwave, has reduced their cap to 2GB per month already.... I can expect Telecom will take such excuse and follow suit later.
It is much easier, and less counterproductive, to do that with good, well-supervised tests, rather than try to ban cooperation on homework.
Before we start bashing (which has already begun for a long time) the writer of this article, I would like to know whether he can write code.
For example, I have difficulties design a test question that will let me to know whether a student can use a debugger. Similarly, it is no way to test their ability to write program of decent size in a test.
Due to some dept politics, my EEE dept need to substitute homework-based to largely test-based assessment for the 101 programming paper. The results is shocking. The lecturers and tutors suffer a lot in the following semesters as many student cannot actually code afterwards...
Put that the other way round, US has a population of abut 250 million, she will need to replant about 1.125 times the land size of the entire US (China and US are of very similar size). After fully developed, China will need 4+ times of its own area for forest.... Basically, we need a "spare" earth for reforestation.
An averge citizen in developed world generates 12 ton of CO2 per year. Each hectare of forest can hold 200 ton of carbon in its life time. Assume the avg human life is 75 yrs, we need 4.5 hectare (45000 m2) of forest per person. Again assume the total population of the developed world will be 1 billion, we need to plant 45,000,000 km2 of forest, 4.5 times the size of China. Even if we can find enough land, the task is just gigiantic.
(Well, I understand the ocean can absorb a lot of CO2, we also know there are natual forest. But, they are in equilibrium before Industrial Revolution. If our final target is to become "carbon netural", we need to fix all the carbon that we released from fossil fuel.)
It seems obvious to me that cutting back the generation of CO2 is a must no matter what we are going to do next.
In general, US's fighter technology is much better than the Russian. But, in terms of dogfight missile system, I am afraid it is just a catch up here.
A missle capable of making a reletively tight 180 degree turn....
I think there is a misinterpretation here. The so call "look over his shoulder" is usually refering to the front hemisphere, not the back. In order to hit something at the back, the missile need to make a U-turn. The max air speed of F15 is Mach 2.5+. Unfortunately, the max speed of the AIM-9 series is only about the same. The AA is left with no kinetic energy after U-turn. Also, very high off-bore missiles are not really that hard to manufacture per se. How to avoid hitting yourself is the tough part. (You also have an IR signature, but you are closer...)
2. The reasons that surplus food does not make it to the hungry of the world are almost always political (and often exacerbated by the physical difficulties of distribution).
.... One could make a non-GM vitamin-A rice simply by studying those genes. Without the code, the hybrid exercises are just a little bit better than random guessing.
Exactly due to this reason, scientists need to work on this area. Poor farmer needs to produce something from *their* small and bad (may be infertile or dry) piece of farm land. They want to and need to stand on their own feet. That's how better rice strains come to a help. That was a largely unseen green revolution in developing world during the 60-70's. Using hybrid technique, the yield was increased by around 20 %. But, we need something even better. (BTW, the indica rice being sequenced is actually one of the best rice strain developed by a famous rice expert Rongping Yuan in China back in the 70's. The strain has been widely cultivated in Southern China and part of SE Asian since then)
6. Even if we could 'safely' increase yield with genetically engineered rice, the likelihood is that this would just lead to faster consumption
What if we can do that without GM the rice?
From one of the deeper BBC link: beta-carotene pathway is already in rice
The crucial point is to avoid the project being hijacked by some evil multinational companies. Put that under some kind of UN development program will benefit everyone.
encoding, and sharing) are going to listen to Celine Dion? I was under the impression that most P2P users were somewhere in the age bracket of 15-30, and male..I may be mistaken, but that's my understanding from following all this.. :-)
Yeah, right! Sony needs your help to promote that music around P2P networks. I am sure my friends will search for the ripped titles tonight as part of the social "responisiblity"
Despite pressure from the U.S. gov't, I don't see China or the Russian Federation going to great lengths to enforce U.S. copyright laws for the benefit of the RIAA. /VCD easily in these countries, "exporting" the content back to US is a completely different matter. RIAA knows that they cannot extract much profit from these non-developed countries. But, if you are setting an internet radio for oversea subscription, they will view this as a much serious threat (terrorist act???).
Yes and no. While you can probably find open bazaars of burned music CD
Every single country with internet connection to US fears the trade sanctions imposed by US (IIRC, it is the Resolution 301 stuff). They all buckle under the official pressure...
I feel reasonably happy as long as they make OpenOffice available for every club member. Put that this way, you will have to provide some extra service to attract higher fee (or even a fee). Many people in the industry may agree with me. Sometimes, you do really want your boss to support open sourced stuff with real $$$ but you cannot find an excuse. Consider bloody ridiculous crappy software in Windows can cost thousands and thousands of dollar, I think it is still a fair deal.
For example, I have heard my sysadmin is trying to persuade the dept to buy a membership from Mandrake (as we may have some spare budget this year). The availablity of StarOffice 6 will make our suggestion a much much stronger case for the PHBs...
Man-in-the-middle attack is the only phrase that flash across my mind... I have no way to check the identity of the "referer".
You can call me a paranoid. Each time when I need to buy stuff online using credit card. I will reboot to a cleaner "environment" -- a clean copy of OpenBSD or something similar. God knows who the hell the various windows plugins are doing..
Next magazine (next.atnext.com) has an article regarding to the technology of these ID cards. Unfortunately, it is a subscription only and therefore I cannot provide a direct link into it. I attempt to translate some key points into English. The technical terms may not be too accurate. Since Next Magazine is a popular tabloid type of magazine some of their explanations may be in accurate in the first place....
The card has adopted a number of tamper-proof technologies. For example, the key information including the name of the card holder, the date of birth and the ID card number are marked on the card by laser lithography. Hologram will also be printed as the background pattern of the card. The card is made up with very tough plastic which will not break even fold into half....
In terms of the embedded OS used, they picked Multos against the rival Java based systems. Multos was developed by Maosco in UK in early 90s, which was mainly used for credit card and is regarded as a reasonably secure system.
However, the selection of multos against Java has sparked a little debate. Since only one bidder promotes the use of Multos whereas the rest four promotes Java, critics argue that the hk govt may be in bias with the PCCW group controlled by a local tycoon and multos may not work with the proposed e-commerce infrastruture.... (I really don't think multos is such a bad system tecnhically....)
In order to minimise the damage upon card loss, sensitive personal information, e.g. bank transactions, medical records, etc, will be encryp\ted and stored only in the main servers. Only a small number of personnels will grant permissions for accessing the information.