GAIM has an encryption plugin that is a little quirky but pretty easy to use. I don't think it's completely bulletproof (there is some "man in the middle" attack it is vunerable to) but overall I've been very happy knowing my conversations are encrypted.
I bet this is just what the GMail Machine wanted.. thousands of/. readers hitting refresh over and over and over. You'd think they would at least put some ads on the page to get some revenue from it..
Any extra invites out there, you friendly/.ers? I got my wife a gmail account from gmail swap when they were going for good stuff.. but now I want one!
This stinks of a future where you can't easily control which system your device is connected to? I have already had trouble with keyboards in neighboring areas fighting occasionally and getting some very strange behavior when batteries get too low.
I can't imagine (!!) how much harder it would be to setup your stereo with no wires.. i.e. does the video from the cablemodem go to the TiVO, VCR, Stereo, or TV first? The tv audio wants to automatically be grabbed by the stereo input, but dammit I want the TiVO to go to the stereo and the TV to go to the TiVO! It could be insane.. will we have to tweak 10 different bios interfaces to get this all connected right? Do I have to push buttons on the corresponding devices (like the wireless mouse) every time the house power surges?
I don't think this will solve the worlds problems, or even the ones you propose it will solve.
It doesn't make the larger radio stations evil directly, they ended up that way because they are under control of a very few companies. (Basically 2 to my knowledge).
They are trying to gain some audience so they can change the way the FCC operations, the fact that significant resources beyond the technical gear is required to communicate over the airwaves could be interpreted as limiting freedom of speech.
I'm not saying it should be wide open to anyone, it certainly needs some regulation. I'm saying the existing restrictions on frequency use have gone beyond just protecting the frequences and moved into the realm of monopoly-like power over a critical resource.
If you haven't heard of UIUC for computing you probably haven't been around computing or academic circles very long. They have a very strong reputation in the field.
It seems like it is hard to find factual reviews of mp3 players.
This might be useful to some of you, check out the playerblog site which has postings of mp3 player reviews.
Be careful though, some of this plastic wood works very well but the expansion/contraction in cold/warm weather is significantly stronger than regular wood. My father-in-law had a large boardwalk developed out of this stuff in upstate NY and the first winter pretty close to destroyed the better part of it.
That said is petroleum a better material to make wood out of? Maybe if it's recycled plastic products, but otherwise I'd just prefer normal wood.
But robotic underwater lumberjacks is a great idea. Maybe I'll build one next. Really.
FYI, It is possible to have chips that are transparent. It depends on the material you make them with. They are not yet common, but likely to be considered for newer display technology. Granted it is unlikely to use something inside a bill to escape detection.
Yes, it seems to be consistently true. They must understand that fewer customers that reach the live support personnel the better. They are also the ones that disable the "0" when you're in their system.
So I'm an idiot because I don't know the latest slogan for Sprint wireless? I'd prefer to stay an idiot, thanks. I just don't watch TV (cause most of it sucks and I don't have a TiVO yet).
So sprint sucks too huh? Are there any cell phone companies that aren't money grubbing bastards?
You must be talking about AT&T wireless. I had an incredibly bad experience with them - billing problems, absolutely incompetent customer service at best and infuriating at worst. I spent 6-8 hours on the phone with those bastards to resolve inappropriate charges, I've never dealt with an insurance company that bad! And if you buy your phone through the web those handy stores near you won't help you!
Fortunately all that happened in the first 30 days so I didn't get screwed on the early termination fee. Down with AT&T wireless.
Yeah, I've got an Apacer Audio Steno I got for $88 shipped. It's not fancy, but it does what I need quite well. Even does recording with semi-resonable quality considering how small it is. I did record a concert with it and somehow obliterate the files before I could download them though, but it was the first day I had it so I'll chalk that one up to inexperience not a defect.
And it has no "DRM" crapola or any restriction on files being put on or off, so far it's great!
My wife asked me to marry her, so I didn't have to even worry about this topic. What a surprise! She gave me a necklace she designed that is really nice, it has a peacock obsedian stone in a neat white gold fixture. It's appropriate for me, seeing as I used to wear various necklaces for a long time.
But really, we had talked about the engagement ring years beforehand at some point when it came up in a random conversation. We had agreed that I would take her on some kind of a fancy trip instead of giving her an engagement ring, which is perfect because she really loves to travel. I have yet to follow-through on that because I'm having trouble finding jobs after graduating, but will some day (soon hopefully) when I have a few $$ set aside.
I'd say screw tradition and make your own tradition, unless she really wants one and tells you so. It means so much more to us to have our own symbols of our commitment to eachother. The wedding bands were custom designed by a friend, and really suit us well.
Just my $0.02, seeing as I was married this past July 6th..
There is a company called Point Grey Research (http://www.ptgrey.com/) that has external binocular and trinocular stereo units for sale that use firewire. They don't do the processing on the unit, but have algorithms that run on standard PCs to process the data for you. Pretty interesting little guys, the computer vision lab where I got my degree (http://cvrr.ucsd.edu) had 3 of the triclops camera systems. They have a new one called the bumblebee that looks to be cheaper and maybe do processing onboard?
There are linux SDKs available also. Note my version of Mozilla (version 1.0) doesn't load their page correctly, maybe some IE messy code?
I'm a mobile robotics person. That report sounds fishy to me. Sure the robotics people (Activmedia and MIT) are going to hype robotics as being the big thing in 5 years, they have a vested interest in that happening. I think they have been saying very similar things for at least 10 years, and as of yet there are very few mobile robotic household equipment. Sure, the solar lawnmower and indoor vaccum cleaner robots are around but I've never met anyone who was seriously interested in something like this. Sony has some of the new "entertainment" robots that are the closest thing, but they are still way expensive and not very useful.
I mean really, listen to the tone of this quote: " In the next three to five years, intelligent networked mobile platforms and manipulators will permeate the fabric of our society just as computers do today."
Be wary of anyone advertising to know the future, especially when they predict enormous growth in their own sector of buisness.
That said, I do think there is a good future in mobile robotics in general, but if you're looking for "hot" jobs right now it's ridiculous to look for opportunities in that industry. I've yet to hear of a company aside from military robotics, Activmedia, or iRobot that needs genuine mobile robotics people. Sure there are AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) for factories and such, but that technology is so large that I don't think it stands a chance in the home market. (Maybe their software would be helpful though?).
Well, thanks for the clarification. It seems like the article might have made that fact more clear, or maybe it was there and I didn't pick out the distinction. So nVidia's Cg is only for the vertex and pixel shaders? I suppose it doesn't provide a high-level api for the rest of the graphics process as I originally thought. Doh.
Too much marketing-speak in the article I guess. Or I'm just dumb.
Yes, you are technically correct. What I meant was that I like cards that use nVidia chips. Since it's the core of the graphics system it's more akin to describing a computer as a "Pentium" which isn't correct but is certainly is a common usage.
And Linux is technically a kernel not an OS, but 95% of the time I hear the word it's referred to as an OS.
I'm with you on the mistrust, I'm worried about nVidia using conventional MS practices or being dominated by their "partner" Microsoft. I do like nVidia, and love their graphics cards but this plants a little seed of doubt for the future. Hmm.
I wish I could tell you that wouldn't happen, but it seems to me that it is somewhat likely down the road.
Well if this has been posted before I missed it and am glad I had a chance to read it. Sorry to all you others who are annoyed by the duplication.
The technology seems like a necessary step for the industry. I do graphics programming, although I'm not elite enough to do it in raw assembly.. I have used OpenGL a few times. From the article it does sound like it will be much easier to develop visualization code that is more standard - this would have made working on my Thesis much easier! Oh well, better late than never I guess...
Also the article heavily focused on examples of characters from game environments, it would be nice to see graphics examples of other types of applications besides gaming. For example scientific visualization and similar areas, that is what I'm more interested in that gaming development.
However I am concerned that NVidia won't stay compliant with standards across video cards and things may get ugly in the future. To pull a Microsoft, as it were. I hope not because it sounds like an interesting product that could quickly become dominant if they continue to do things right.
I enjoyed the article. It makes an interesting point very clear, that nanotech is showing up first in rather technologically boring places. Converse to all the visions I've heard of self-assembling machines and the like it is a real technology that is being used for real applications.
I've heard increasingly frequent use of nanoscale devices in the Bio arena and for medical purposes, but far from the "submarine" concept. One of the more interesting ones was in a Scientific American or Science News article recently (can't find the article) talking about a small square chip that makes thorough and useful chemical tests doable in one step instead of hundreds of seperate ones. Imaging the chip using a basic camera provides a detailed readout on the exposure of many thousands of tests. Another interesting application involves carbon nanotubes, a much touted revolution in circuit building and such.
It seems that many people (geeks included) have been spouting the broader, long term vision of building complex nano machines that invade our bodies or self replicate, it's refreshing to hear a realistic perspective on nano technology.
Although I do admittedly get tired of the constantly pro-tech mindset that occurs in these articles, how about someone mentioning the detriments of these technologies occasionally? (grey goo theory anyone)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm getting redirected to mozilla.org with those links.
-1 for calling attention to your low user ID.
GAIM has an encryption plugin that is a little quirky but pretty easy to use. I don't think it's completely bulletproof (there is some "man in the middle" attack it is vunerable to) but overall I've been very happy knowing my conversations are encrypted.
You don't have a sig, just thought you should know.
I bet this is just what the GMail Machine wanted.. thousands of /. readers hitting refresh over and over and over. You'd think they would at least put some ads on the page to get some revenue from it..
/.ers? I got my wife a gmail account from gmail swap when they were going for good stuff.. but now I want one!
Any extra invites out there, you friendly
I'll bite, I've been on /. for awhile and could use a gmail account.
This stinks of a future where you can't easily control which system your device is connected to? I have already had trouble with keyboards in neighboring areas fighting occasionally and getting some very strange behavior when batteries get too low.
I can't imagine (!!) how much harder it would be to setup your stereo with no wires.. i.e. does the video from the cablemodem go to the TiVO, VCR, Stereo, or TV first? The tv audio wants to automatically be grabbed by the stereo input, but dammit I want the TiVO to go to the stereo and the TV to go to the TiVO! It could be insane.. will we have to tweak 10 different bios interfaces to get this all connected right? Do I have to push buttons on the corresponding devices (like the wireless mouse) every time the house power surges?
I don't think this will solve the worlds problems, or even the ones you propose it will solve.
It doesn't make the larger radio stations evil directly, they ended up that way because they are under control of a very few companies. (Basically 2 to my knowledge).
They are trying to gain some audience so they can change the way the FCC operations, the fact that significant resources beyond the technical gear is required to communicate over the airwaves could be interpreted as limiting freedom of speech.
I'm not saying it should be wide open to anyone, it certainly needs some regulation. I'm saying the existing restrictions on frequency use have gone beyond just protecting the frequences and moved into the realm of monopoly-like power over a critical resource.
If you haven't heard of UIUC for computing you probably haven't been around computing or academic circles very long. They have a very strong reputation in the field.
It seems like it is hard to find factual reviews of mp3 players. This might be useful to some of you, check out the playerblog site which has postings of mp3 player reviews.
Be careful though, some of this plastic wood works very well but the expansion/contraction in cold/warm weather is significantly stronger than regular wood. My father-in-law had a large boardwalk developed out of this stuff in upstate NY and the first winter pretty close to destroyed the better part of it.
That said is petroleum a better material to make wood out of? Maybe if it's recycled plastic products, but otherwise I'd just prefer normal wood.
But robotic underwater lumberjacks is a great idea. Maybe I'll build one next. Really.
FYI, It is possible to have chips that are transparent. It depends on the material you make them with. They are not yet common, but likely to be considered for newer display technology. Granted it is unlikely to use something inside a bill to escape detection.
Yes, it seems to be consistently true. They must understand that fewer customers that reach the live support personnel the better. They are also the ones that disable the "0" when you're in their system.
So I'm an idiot because I don't know the latest slogan for Sprint wireless? I'd prefer to stay an idiot, thanks. I just don't watch TV (cause most of it sucks and I don't have a TiVO yet).
So sprint sucks too huh? Are there any cell phone companies that aren't money grubbing bastards?
You must be talking about AT&T wireless. I had an incredibly bad experience with them - billing problems, absolutely incompetent customer service at best and infuriating at worst. I spent 6-8 hours on the phone with those bastards to resolve inappropriate charges, I've never dealt with an insurance company that bad! And if you buy your phone through the web those handy stores near you won't help you!
Fortunately all that happened in the first 30 days so I didn't get screwed on the early termination fee. Down with AT&T wireless.
Yeah, I've got an Apacer Audio Steno I got for $88 shipped. It's not fancy, but it does what I need quite well. Even does recording with semi-resonable quality considering how small it is. I did record a concert with it and somehow obliterate the files before I could download them though, but it was the first day I had it so I'll chalk that one up to inexperience not a defect.
And it has no "DRM" crapola or any restriction on files being put on or off, so far it's great!
My wife asked me to marry her, so I didn't have to even worry about this topic. What a surprise! She gave me a necklace she designed that is really nice, it has a peacock obsedian stone in a neat white gold fixture. It's appropriate for me, seeing as I used to wear various necklaces for a long time.
But really, we had talked about the engagement ring years beforehand at some point when it came up in a random conversation. We had agreed that I would take her on some kind of a fancy trip instead of giving her an engagement ring, which is perfect because she really loves to travel. I have yet to follow-through on that because I'm having trouble finding jobs after graduating, but will some day (soon hopefully) when I have a few $$ set aside.
I'd say screw tradition and make your own tradition, unless she really wants one and tells you so. It means so much more to us to have our own symbols of our commitment to eachother. The wedding bands were custom designed by a friend, and really suit us well.
Just my $0.02, seeing as I was married this past July 6th..
There is a company called Point Grey Research
(http://www.ptgrey.com/) that has external binocular and trinocular stereo units for sale that use firewire. They don't do the processing on the unit, but have algorithms that run on standard PCs to process the data for you. Pretty interesting little guys, the computer vision lab where I got my degree (http://cvrr.ucsd.edu) had 3 of the triclops camera systems. They have a new one called the bumblebee that looks to be cheaper and maybe do processing onboard?
There are linux SDKs available also. Note my version of Mozilla (version 1.0) doesn't load their page correctly, maybe some IE messy code?
I'm a mobile robotics person. That report sounds fishy to me. Sure the robotics people (Activmedia and MIT) are going to hype robotics as being the big thing in 5 years, they have a vested interest in that happening. I think they have been saying very similar things for at least 10 years, and as of yet there are very few mobile robotic household equipment. Sure, the solar lawnmower and indoor vaccum cleaner robots are around but I've never met anyone who was seriously interested in something like this. Sony has some of the new "entertainment" robots that are the closest thing, but they are still way expensive and not very useful.
I mean really, listen to the tone of this quote:
" In the next three to five years, intelligent networked mobile platforms and manipulators will permeate the fabric of our society just as computers do today."
Be wary of anyone advertising to know the future, especially when they predict enormous growth in their own sector of buisness.
That said, I do think there is a good future in mobile robotics in general, but if you're looking for "hot" jobs right now it's ridiculous to look for opportunities in that industry. I've yet to hear of a company aside from military robotics, Activmedia, or iRobot that needs genuine mobile robotics people. Sure there are AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) for factories and such, but that technology is so large that I don't think it stands a chance in the home market. (Maybe their software would be helpful though?).
Well, my $.02.
Well, thanks for the clarification. It seems like the article might have made that fact more clear, or maybe it was there and I didn't pick out the distinction. So nVidia's Cg is only for the vertex and pixel shaders? I suppose it doesn't provide a high-level api for the rest of the graphics process as I originally thought. Doh.
Too much marketing-speak in the article I guess. Or I'm just dumb.
Yes, you are technically correct. What I meant was that I like cards that use nVidia chips. Since it's the core of the graphics system it's more akin to describing a computer as a "Pentium" which isn't correct but is certainly is a common usage.
And Linux is technically a kernel not an OS, but 95% of the time I hear the word it's referred to as an OS.
So what is your point?
I'm with you on the mistrust, I'm worried about nVidia using conventional MS practices or being dominated by their "partner" Microsoft. I do like nVidia, and love their graphics cards but this plants a little seed of doubt for the future. Hmm.
I wish I could tell you that wouldn't happen, but it seems to me that it is somewhat likely down the road.
or worse getting taken over by Microsoft.
Well if this has been posted before I missed it and am glad I had a chance to read it. Sorry to all you others who are annoyed by the duplication.
The technology seems like a necessary step for the industry. I do graphics programming, although I'm not elite enough to do it in raw assembly.. I have used OpenGL a few times. From the article it does sound like it will be much easier to develop visualization code that is more standard - this would have made working on my Thesis much easier! Oh well, better late than never I guess...
Also the article heavily focused on examples of characters from game environments, it would be nice to see graphics examples of other types of applications besides gaming. For example scientific visualization and similar areas, that is what I'm more interested in that gaming development.
However I am concerned that NVidia won't stay compliant with standards across video cards and things may get ugly in the future. To pull a Microsoft, as it were. I hope not because it sounds like an interesting product that could quickly become dominant if they continue to do things right.
I enjoyed the article. It makes an interesting point very clear, that nanotech is showing up first in rather technologically boring places. Converse to all the visions I've heard of self-assembling machines and the like it is a real technology that is being used for real applications.
I've heard increasingly frequent use of nanoscale devices in the Bio arena and for medical purposes, but far from the "submarine" concept. One of the more interesting ones was in a Scientific American or Science News article recently (can't find the article) talking about a small square chip that makes thorough and useful chemical tests doable in one step instead of hundreds of seperate ones. Imaging the chip using a basic camera provides a detailed readout on the exposure of many thousands of tests. Another interesting application involves carbon nanotubes, a much touted revolution in circuit building and such.
It seems that many people (geeks included) have been spouting the broader, long term vision of building complex nano machines that invade our bodies or self replicate, it's refreshing to hear a realistic perspective on nano technology.
Although I do admittedly get tired of the constantly pro-tech mindset that occurs in these articles, how about someone mentioning the detriments of these technologies occasionally? (grey goo theory anyone)
Seriously, I'm glad Slashdot isn't on there. In fact it would decrease the meaning of the award if it was voted on the "Very best of the web" list.
/. pretty often (too often?), but it isn't really in that category - it's a news site.
I mean I read