Well besides the potential criminal charges the school administrators should face, but won't, perhaps Facebook could step in.
The administrators and others present likely violated Facebook's TOS, section 5. Under such, I think Facebook could disable any accounts for any administrative personnel involved, as well as give them legal notice that they may not ever again open a Facebook account. Might be a slap on the wrist, even comical to some, but it's probably the best which could be hoped for. Facebook could choose also not to disable the girl in question's account pursuant their investigation.
Doesn't this researcher know all the materials science industry cares about right now is what you can do with carbon nanotubes? Spider silk is so 90's.
In the case of many services, you are getting something free (Gmail) in exchange for a certain amount of data about yourself. I'm not quite sure what all the FUD about lost privacy is.
If you want privacy, you are free within the market to pay the going price for a secure POP3, IMAP, or Exchange e-mail account and the various rates are reasonable dependent on your need for the service.
I would agree that people give up a lot of privacy, voluntarily and stupidly, namely on Facebook. This is not because of the degree to which Facebook data mines the shiat out of one's information, but rather the stupidity with which they blurt out anything on their mind and day to day ramblings. I use Facebook a decent, but smaller amount than my peers, but I always consider and censor my speech relatively appropriate to things I would be comfortable talking with other people on the street or at a coffee shop about in front of others. Lacking that consideration, yes a lot of people are just plain dumb in the amount of information they give up to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etcetera...
Also, consider older, or less technologically advanced civilizations. Ones where generations of family live in the long house. Sexual education is a matter of waking up in the middle of the night and seeing your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etcetera going at it. All of your personal business is constantly before the tribe. Every disease you have had, every sexual encounter, every relationship, economic success and failure, work ethic, social skills -- they are all there for the tribe to see constantly. Those societies have little fear of lost privacy. If one desires an action or time of privacy, they simply leave the village into the wilderness for a time until they are prepared to return. Such as it is with Facebook, Gmail, the whole of the internet. You are always welcome to leave the long house of cable and the village of the internet, and engage on private pursuits, well privately.
Yet we keep hearing all this whining about lost privacy. We have a plethora of tools at our disposal to even game the system and insure our privacy when using tools designed to profit from our disclosure. Cookie blocking, encryption, stenography, ad blocks, the list goes on. Unlike the great tribal village, you can leave the internet and come back at your leisure with no potential harm from leaving to your dependents, family or the community.
At least in our modern era, the data amount is so great, that sure, many networks of computers know a great deal about what I was last browsing at NewEgg or Amazon, but ultimately, no human has the time or interest in actually looking at my or any other person's individual information (unless I do something to draw law enforcements' interest). It is just like the Network Admin work I do, I don't have time or interest in reading all much less a single of several hundred business e-mail accounts to which I potentially have access. It would just be a waste of my time.
Secondly, for all of our collective annoyance and hate of marketing, billboards, commercials, etcetera, at least with the Gmail and Facebook examples, we are being granted a service for free, for which we would normally pay a significant amount. Ultimately, if you consider the constraints, a reasoning individual must weigh the opportunity cost against the downsides of the exchange. Those unable to comprehend the trade-offs may pay more in the end, but this has always been the case when purchasing any good or service, caveat emptor.
I'm in favor of this Steam box, assuming they can work deals with vendors and actually get the price of a gaming PC box lower or equal to the build your own crowd.
The Steam box idea also allows better tiering of game quality for high quality on the "Steam box" platform or similar specs, and the option for ultra-high quality to still be available to bleeding edge gamers. At the current developmental cycle and proposed specs, the only part you would need to upgrade in the 2-3 years would be the video card, maybe RAM.
Also, please note how much Valve's early efforts at profiling gaming PC platforms with the first Steam surveys produced Half-Life 2 with excellent graphics, yet playable on a wide variety of hardware. This is a perfect example of Data Mining actually benefiting the consumer.
The fact that such a box will likely have a living room friendly form factor and cooling is certainly nice. Most mATX cases still leave a lot to be desired for a living room box.
Another vector I would like to see though would be some of the network media player box makers (Roku, WD, Slingbox, Blu-Ray players, etc.) Include an RDP client with bandwidth and screen quality optimizations to let you stream games over the network, in a manner similar, but vastly superior to OnLive (due to latency and bandwidth obviously). Off the shelf tech could be licensed from Citrix easily as an example. Another project for Raspberry Pi? XBMC?
N-Computing sells overpriced dumb terminals for use in small business and homes with a similar setup with a productivity oriented slant. You install their RDP server
Include the server side software for Windows / *nix / OSX to provide the optimized RDP service and UI, especially with the ability to allow usage of the computer by 2 or more users. Clearly, you might not be able to game at both ends simultaneously, but setting up notifications and optional per-user / per-session performance splitting would work on beffier PCs.
An i7 with 8-16 GB RAM would easily have enough power for 2-3 AAA titles at 1080P if the consumer just added a second top tier video card and had a appropriate RDP service and client for the usage model.
Similarly, Valve / Steam box could work with developers on multiplayer split-screen and multi-monitor (HDTV) variations, which the PC platform has severely lacked.
Actually, music itself would likely benefit greatly, just not the labels. As piracy has already demonstrated, free access to studio recordings has made the consumer perception of the value of live concerts greater. That is why ticket prices keep outpacing inflation.
Anecdotally, I've personally noted a pretty good number of once free venues switching to cover charges for better known (locally) acts which are remain unsigned by major labels. At least on my personal scale, this demonstrates positive force towards greater valuation of live music.
Lower prices and increased distribution of copyright material increases the overall quality of published works. A great example is the textbook versus subject oriented paperback categories. Textbooks exist in an overpriced, price fixed copyright vacuum. Their quality continues to remain virtually unchanged for 30+ years, making occasional incremental improvements and frequent vast drops in quality. On the other hand, books written for the layman about various sciences and arts continue to improve, drop in inflation adjusted price, and increase in availability. The very pressure of reduced prices and increased availability forces authors to review their peer / competition work and produce something better.
Is there any chance this will reduce the number of older MBA's on Wall St. from gambling with other people's money and blowing their salary on hookers?
Alas, I fear even few of them use BlackBerries anymore...
That brings me back. Yes Windows CE PDAs were way more responsive than current era smart phone OSes. In fact, after my first smart phone purchase of a used G1, followed by a Galaxy S (Vibrant) I could never understand why they were less responsive than my father's ~2002 Toshiba e740. I just kept thinking to myself, the resolution is doubled, but the only additional processes are for Bluetooth and cellular radios which have their own processor. But yeah, when CE took a dump, you lost it all. Also, there were not effective means of backing up the current running OS, you always lost some of it during a hard reset.
For those bringing up the "bad programming" argument regarding the Gallery in Android. I agree wholeheartedly, but these issues are part of the Android framework, to not make developers write their own data queues and be able to trust the running OS. This works the vast majority of the time, but when it breaks, it breaks hard.
I do agree that developer reliance on SQLITE in Android is an issue. But in my fantasy world the whole smartphone OS, applications and everything between would be written in C with heavy compiler optimizations in assembly for each given CPU. Maybe the API framework in C++ with a lean widget framework (Qt?), but hey I believe in hardcore optimization and programming. This would fly in the face of the smart phone programming paradigm of cheap, RAD models where programmers do the very minimum to get their programs running, so they can produce a few programs a month at $0.99 per license and fix a few bugs. Yes in my fantasy smart phone world, you would buy 2-3 suites for $15-50 which would do everything except games you could possibly want, and never be looking at buying a dozen $1-3 apps to each do some small part of what you need your smart phone to do. Yes, in real life, I get along better with the C89 / C99 and Fortran guys a lot better than the Java and Python guys, it's just my style.
It is nice to see that there is an actual effort to make an empirical test, but I think most techies had this figured out long ago. The simple test is boot time on the devices. A relatively small OS which typically takes 2+ minutes to cold boot, yeah sounds like a storage issue.
Fixing the issue with some form of data striping would be attractive, but chews battery for each additional chip. Some kind of balloon-able RAM buffer configuration would work nicely, where the buffer RAM was turned off when the device was not in active use or where individual modules could be brought online as needed.
Frankly, Microsoft pointed at flash as being a speed culprit early on with their requirements for WP7 phones for add-on, non-removable storage expansion micro SD cards. Sure there were a lot of people all gruff and bemoaning the double price premium for Microsoft certified micro SD cards, but it was mostly just a lack of understanding of the needs for device performance. If I recall correctly, Microsoft had somewhere around 10-12 MiB/S read and write and I/O per S requirements which put most cheap commodity flash modules out of the running. I would also guess that WP7 stripes data between the on board and add-on SD card or otherwise uses some kind of secondary caching algorithm since the micro SD cards get married to the device.
In the Android world, plenty of RAM cache hacks have been implemented, most notably some in Cyanogen and similar. Consider the technical implications of this post at XDA forums regarding I/O schedulers: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=22134559&postcount=4
As an anecdote, the most frequent crashy app on my Android device is the Gallery. It tends to have all kinds of issues with the scheduler as it is reading images and creating thumbnails, likely due to flash access speeds.
This reminds me a bit of the early days of spyware and malware when anti-virus companies were behind the curve and tried to write off that since malware was typically installed with user consent, they weren't responsible for scanning, detecting, and removing it. Apple is doing the same, but without even saying it's not their responsibility. Instead, they keep giving consumers the false belief in the safety of the walled / curated garden. An oddity to be noted as well is that the Apple store has actually moved mainstream consumers farther into the reliance on the vendor for repairs. While most telcos will tell users to backup their data as best they can and perform a wipe on Android, most iPhone users I have supported have told me stories about waiting as much as a couple hours to get an Apple Geek to wipe their phone.
This is a nice companion piece from Forbes to the article on iOS crash rates versus Android.
On a sideways note, most/.ers realized long ago that as OSX continues to increase in market share, they will become the target for virus writers. I sincerely doubt Apple's sandbox for apps will do much to stop them. If anything, the sandbox makes it harder to find a well concieved malicious program.
Dell is well known for having done this for several years. I did a call simulation and testing routine when interviewing with them about 7 years ago. The Microsoft brain teasers were legendary when they became common knowledge 12 or so years ago. Both are methods of accomplishing a variety of different hiring criteria.
First, every company hiring for some form of technical position has a legitimate business need for assessing both a potential employee's current intellect and their learning curve, but testing these things directly will run one afoul of the law. Second, simulations of real world job situations not only give you a baseline of their ability to perform the job, but completion times and such demonstrate how trainable, motivated, and focused someone can be when given monotonous but business critical tasks. You put 30 people in a room (as Dell did) and have them do a series of tests which concludes with a vocational simulation, would you really want to hire the guys who finished last versus first given equivalent execution scores.
Not to deny the amazing properties of spider silk, but the article mentions, "In fact, such self-sacrificing by a unit is highly unusual among natural materials, Buehler notes."
I find this highly inconsistent with biology in general. In the human body, one such system we call skin. As a specific example, callouses are groupings of skin cells which die and harden to protect areas of the hands and feet frequently engaged by stresses, such as shoes and using hand tools (normally skin sloughs off). Continuing just with skin, note the way that even when cleaved, skin puts significant friction against the object cleaving (watch a piercing in slow motion some time). To overcome this, physicians are taught to cut along skin grains, which also reduces scarring.
Other sacrificial organic materials, well tree bark is frequently harder than the material inside. Hair on various animals prevents predators from getting a firm grip. Salamander tails come off once a tension threshold is crossed. Cell membranes flex, usually right up to the point contents would be damaged by the intrusion anyway. Cell walls work like bricks, giving plants firm structure, and making them difficult if not impossible to slice up for electron microscopy (not sure if that barrier has been crossed). Trees and plants lose branches in the wind and tumbleweed completely detaches from its roots. Fruit has skins just strong enough to prevent spoiling several days before being eaten by animals, thus spreading seeds. Seeds and nuts have cleavage lines to make them strong, but allow the bud to break out.
There are many other examples, but functional, purpose built tissues and substances in organic materials are very common.
Most places in the U.S. have no caps or metering. The places which do generally have caps, usually generous for internet browsing, not so much for frequent ISO grabs. It is not uncommon in much of Europe to pay by the MB, which associates a cost with each significant file downloaded, even if a DVD ISO only costs a.25 Euro, there is still a cerebral cost invoked.
Mobile internet is a completely different animal here. We pay 2-4x per month for similar plans and have just plain silly data caps. I have a 100 MB cap before I get throttled on an "unlimited" plan right now, which I do just because I have WiFi available at home and university which takes care of 95% of my mobile data. Exchange and Gmail accounts still manage to shave that cap thin with push traffic (push is crap btw, who came up with that f***tarded model).
Off topic, email and instant messaging on mobiles should go to a non-query / no keep-alive model. The server should be event driven and send a notification to the handset when it has new information. If the handset is not available to acknowledge after a time out of say 60 seconds, the server puts the notification(s) into a queue with expiry of say 8 hours. The handset should only query when the email application is opened or the radio system transitions between network connection types (WiFi vs 3/4G) or it has lost network connection for a specified time, say greater than the event driven server push time out of 60 seconds or so. This would massively reduce both server overhead and cellular network overhead. Keep alive signals should only go between the handset and the current tower otherwise, and never for data type connections. The 1-5 minute query / acknowledge model for push messaging is no better than Outlook doing automated send/receive cycles. Push is a severe misnomer.
This may be the response to the emergence of web journalism (now about 15 years in). U.S. magazines decided to invest less in good authors and experts as they feared their circulation would drop, and it did because they in fact did not attract the best staff.
Newspapers certainly completely threw in the towel in the U.S. following the advent of the WWW, RSS, portals, etcetera.
Perhaps in Europe, journalistic entities instead maintained standards, kept hiring good writers and experts, and started looking for real methods to retain customers. The CD/DVDs you mention are a great example. In the U.S. we have decided quite clearly to disenfranchise those without high speed, persistent internet access. In Europe, it is much more widely acknowledged that internet access is not ubiquitous among the people due to cost, despite many regions having vastly better coverage, lower cost, and higher speeds than offered in the U.S. Add to this the frequency of metered internet service in Europe, and a DVD of media obtains tangible value added as a replacement for downloads.
Based upon the ruling and its basis, I should immediately start copyrighting all the notes I make in university classes. Can I then accuse other students of mimicking my intent and execution with their notes and require they pay me royalties to keep their notes when exam time comes?
Yes, the defendant's firm should have been found guilty for their prior infringing use, but the subsequent replacement with their own image should have been perfectly legal.
Someone needs to send this judge a collection of Getty DVDs. Clearly he understands nothing about commercial photography.
Frames are frequently sold one at a time from a shoot where 100s of pictures of the same subject, same setting, same composition are snapped. The original photographer still retains copyright on the distinct images he does not sell or license, and likewise his buyer has the same on their portion they purchase.
I have a feeling unless the printing was done braided, the skin effect would still be an issue in the analog world. On the other hand, you might be able to get Litz windings incredibly cheap compared to the current methods. Too bad the marketing folks will hear Litz and increase the cost 10x anyways.
With a drill added, I can have my dream of a home chassis built into the side of a hill. The limited exterior and full interior I can take care of myself.
For the curious, my dream is two fold. First, I think houses carved into the side of a hill look amazing when done correctly. Second, they are unbeatable in most climates for energy efficient climate control. It's actually amazing how few alternate construction styles they allow for in Texas given the need for better insulation here.
The NSA would like to know if with a single bug with this technology, how much farther into a building could you hear than their current implementations. Also with two or more instances of the nanophone in a single chassis, how well can we use doppler, selective signal cancellation and room modeling algorithms to choose which room we listen.
Seriously, as much scientific use as this has, usage by security services will be very interesting. A significant part of bug planting is frequently getting the bugs into low security areas, such as the lobbies of embassies, with the hope of being able to filter and get phone calls and keystrokes from adjacent higher security wings. Listening on this scale might extend to extrapolating fingerprints from the roll your finger over type scanners as an example.
Also, this form of listening should extend past sound into other frequency ranges fairly easily (radio, light, etcetera). Consider the sensitivity increase for a CCD device where the filtering and threshold apparatuses could be suspended instead of fixed.
Oh and as a reply to my own comments, you can get all the ABS you want on a Saturday hanging around a charity run recycling center (not a commercial one obviously). 50-100 kgs should be no problem to haul in for 8 hours of volunteering on the weekend.
Lots more if you get a similar machine that can work with LDPE / HDPE (milk jugs, soda bottles, etc.).
Hopefully the next generation machines will have an integrated hopper that grinds and melts down the refuse for recycling. Like Mr. Fusion.
Kinko's. That is to say, once the technology is sufficient, it will show up at Kinko's, shortly followed by engineering firms investing in their own machines, followed by consumerization. I'm referring to photocopying and laser printing of course. Really we're in the middle of this right now. The "good" machines that can prototype large parts at high precision are at specialty shops and larger engineering firms. Give the technology some time to mature, it will make it to consumer hands soon enough. I'd say 3-5 years for better "pro-sumer" models, i.e. something you could make replacement car parts with at reasonable size and cost (~500mm in each direction at.1mm precision) and another 3-5 years after that for stuff at the MakerBot grade to mainstream $300 with form factors of 300mm with.2mm precision.
Also as far as raw supplies go, I would suggest making your own raw spool from cheap abundant ABS. The process would be much cheaper than buying at $40/kg. Salvage ABS from a variety of sources and grind it into little bits (I would imagine a used commercial grade snow cone maker or meat grinder works great). Get a toaster oven and modify it for better precision control or build a low temp kiln (~105 deg C). Build a press to extrude it and pour cooling water over the surface as it comes out of a nozzle or die and roll your own. Compared to the price of the MakerBot and supplies, producing your own ABS even with the trial and error involved is much more cost effective.
I would also suspect Chinese suppliers of ABS spools will start to show up on eBay soon enough at 1/10-1/5 the cost of MakerBot soon enough.
I'm surprised at the amount of need for IPv6 upgrades at the application level. Really I would hope more OSes would allow IPv6 only with an internal IPv4 fake NAT approach to translate IPv6 information (local and remote targets) to fake internal IPv4 addresses. Remote targets would also need some form of IPv4 to IPv6 resolution. Perhaps add a notification from the OS that the application in question is not IPv6 capable and running in a compatibility mode with degraded performance.
And yes, I know part of the reason for IPv6 is to eliminate NAT, but I am just considering all the legacy application issues sure to arise without strong OS level support for bassackwards compatibility. Application level support should mostly be confined to various master server schemes, like IM clients, where the master server gives peers IPv4 addresses from clients for features like video chat. Still, some kind of DNS-like system for servers to aid in resolving IPv4 addresses to IPv6 would act as a patch during migration for legacy programs.
Yahoo definitely needs to clean up the main landing page. They should talk to the mail design and UI people.
I've never been a Yahoo fan, but it's nearly getting under my skin how good the UI for Yahoo mail has gotten in the past year or so. It sucks just a bit because my Yahoo account is the one I use for anywhere I think my address will be spidered, sold or spammed. Seriously, the UI is gorgeous and extremely functional. It kills Gmail and OWA and even Thunderbird and Outlook in ease of use. Too bad it gets nearly as much spam as my retired hotmail account once did.
Just to keep M$ and Google competitive, I hope they develop more towards competing with Google Docs and Office 365 and try to go after more lucrative small and medium business hosting contracts.
Certain model Fords from the late 90's had the alarm (PATS) system in a separate module in the trunk. If you could jimmy the trunk open, all you needed to do was disconnect one harness.
This eliminated the need for the transponder key and disabled the alarm completely. Hot wiring the car from there is rather conventional and trivial.
Wasn't till the 2000s that they at least had the thought to add a bit in the ECU ROM or a bit switch (don't recall which) that told the ECU to require the security module.
A few other car makers had similar easy to defeat modular systems, but I'm not sure about years and makes from that time.
Locally produced only applies to a very narrow range of products, mostly vegetables and some fruit.
You're more than a tad naive here. Even as someone who telecommutes, there is no reason to punish the plebes on their commutes for the sins of Detroit.
There are plenty of people demonstrating significantly higher mileage with just marginally better vehicle software (google megasquirt). The reality is that higher mileage and durability of vehicles can increase at no consumer expense at the will of automakers. As an example, I used to work at a parts store, and it was amazing to see the failure rates of Bosch electrical parts (alternators, starters and fuel pumps) in Dodge vehicles, while you rarely see Bosch failures in the various Japanese and European makes using the same brand of parts (we always joked Dodge got the factory seconds from the Germans after Audi, VW and Nissan took all the good parts).
But really, much of the American economy is based on the cheap delivery of goods. Look at NewEgg and Amazon. Look at eBay where I just bought >$400 in textbooks from New Delhi and Malaysia for $95. Are you saying it would have been better to spend $400 (used) on textbooks to get them sourced locally?
I like the "locally produced" moniker, but more and more I am seeing it as just a scam to grift more money out of pockets. One time at a farmer's market, I was early before they really opened up and saw one family peeling "Dole" labels off of fruit before putting it out.
In closing, take five minutes to look at a multi-year graph of the Dow Jones against Crude Oil. Here, I'll give you one:
http://www.marketthoughts.com/z20041006.html Now you can stop the ignorant spouting off.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the internet is for porn...
Well besides the potential criminal charges the school administrators should face, but won't, perhaps Facebook could step in.
The administrators and others present likely violated Facebook's TOS, section 5. Under such, I think Facebook could disable any accounts for any administrative personnel involved, as well as give them legal notice that they may not ever again open a Facebook account. Might be a slap on the wrist, even comical to some, but it's probably the best which could be hoped for. Facebook could choose also not to disable the girl in question's account pursuant their investigation.
Doesn't this researcher know all the materials science industry cares about right now is what you can do with carbon nanotubes? Spider silk is so 90's.
Man, I feel old.
(kidding, not trolling. except the old part)
In the case of many services, you are getting something free (Gmail) in exchange for a certain amount of data about yourself. I'm not quite sure what all the FUD about lost privacy is.
If you want privacy, you are free within the market to pay the going price for a secure POP3, IMAP, or Exchange e-mail account and the various rates are reasonable dependent on your need for the service.
I would agree that people give up a lot of privacy, voluntarily and stupidly, namely on Facebook. This is not because of the degree to which Facebook data mines the shiat out of one's information, but rather the stupidity with which they blurt out anything on their mind and day to day ramblings. I use Facebook a decent, but smaller amount than my peers, but I always consider and censor my speech relatively appropriate to things I would be comfortable talking with other people on the street or at a coffee shop about in front of others. Lacking that consideration, yes a lot of people are just plain dumb in the amount of information they give up to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etcetera...
Also, consider older, or less technologically advanced civilizations. Ones where generations of family live in the long house. Sexual education is a matter of waking up in the middle of the night and seeing your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etcetera going at it. All of your personal business is constantly before the tribe. Every disease you have had, every sexual encounter, every relationship, economic success and failure, work ethic, social skills -- they are all there for the tribe to see constantly. Those societies have little fear of lost privacy. If one desires an action or time of privacy, they simply leave the village into the wilderness for a time until they are prepared to return. Such as it is with Facebook, Gmail, the whole of the internet. You are always welcome to leave the long house of cable and the village of the internet, and engage on private pursuits, well privately.
Yet we keep hearing all this whining about lost privacy. We have a plethora of tools at our disposal to even game the system and insure our privacy when using tools designed to profit from our disclosure. Cookie blocking, encryption, stenography, ad blocks, the list goes on. Unlike the great tribal village, you can leave the internet and come back at your leisure with no potential harm from leaving to your dependents, family or the community.
At least in our modern era, the data amount is so great, that sure, many networks of computers know a great deal about what I was last browsing at NewEgg or Amazon, but ultimately, no human has the time or interest in actually looking at my or any other person's individual information (unless I do something to draw law enforcements' interest). It is just like the Network Admin work I do, I don't have time or interest in reading all much less a single of several hundred business e-mail accounts to which I potentially have access. It would just be a waste of my time.
Secondly, for all of our collective annoyance and hate of marketing, billboards, commercials, etcetera, at least with the Gmail and Facebook examples, we are being granted a service for free, for which we would normally pay a significant amount. Ultimately, if you consider the constraints, a reasoning individual must weigh the opportunity cost against the downsides of the exchange. Those unable to comprehend the trade-offs may pay more in the end, but this has always been the case when purchasing any good or service, caveat emptor.
I'm in favor of this Steam box, assuming they can work deals with vendors and actually get the price of a gaming PC box lower or equal to the build your own crowd.
The Steam box idea also allows better tiering of game quality for high quality on the "Steam box" platform or similar specs, and the option for ultra-high quality to still be available to bleeding edge gamers. At the current developmental cycle and proposed specs, the only part you would need to upgrade in the 2-3 years would be the video card, maybe RAM.
Also, please note how much Valve's early efforts at profiling gaming PC platforms with the first Steam surveys produced Half-Life 2 with excellent graphics, yet playable on a wide variety of hardware. This is a perfect example of Data Mining actually benefiting the consumer.
The fact that such a box will likely have a living room friendly form factor and cooling is certainly nice. Most mATX cases still leave a lot to be desired for a living room box.
Another vector I would like to see though would be some of the network media player box makers (Roku, WD, Slingbox, Blu-Ray players, etc.) Include an RDP client with bandwidth and screen quality optimizations to let you stream games over the network, in a manner similar, but vastly superior to OnLive (due to latency and bandwidth obviously). Off the shelf tech could be licensed from Citrix easily as an example. Another project for Raspberry Pi? XBMC?
N-Computing sells overpriced dumb terminals for use in small business and homes with a similar setup with a productivity oriented slant. You install their RDP server
Include the server side software for Windows / *nix / OSX to provide the optimized RDP service and UI, especially with the ability to allow usage of the computer by 2 or more users. Clearly, you might not be able to game at both ends simultaneously, but setting up notifications and optional per-user / per-session performance splitting would work on beffier PCs.
An i7 with 8-16 GB RAM would easily have enough power for 2-3 AAA titles at 1080P if the consumer just added a second top tier video card and had a appropriate RDP service and client for the usage model.
Similarly, Valve / Steam box could work with developers on multiplayer split-screen and multi-monitor (HDTV) variations, which the PC platform has severely lacked.
Actually, music itself would likely benefit greatly, just not the labels. As piracy has already demonstrated, free access to studio recordings has made the consumer perception of the value of live concerts greater. That is why ticket prices keep outpacing inflation.
Anecdotally, I've personally noted a pretty good number of once free venues switching to cover charges for better known (locally) acts which are remain unsigned by major labels. At least on my personal scale, this demonstrates positive force towards greater valuation of live music.
Lower prices and increased distribution of copyright material increases the overall quality of published works. A great example is the textbook versus subject oriented paperback categories. Textbooks exist in an overpriced, price fixed copyright vacuum. Their quality continues to remain virtually unchanged for 30+ years, making occasional incremental improvements and frequent vast drops in quality. On the other hand, books written for the layman about various sciences and arts continue to improve, drop in inflation adjusted price, and increase in availability. The very pressure of reduced prices and increased availability forces authors to review their peer / competition work and produce something better.
Is there any chance this will reduce the number of older MBA's on Wall St. from gambling with other people's money and blowing their salary on hookers?
Alas, I fear even few of them use BlackBerries anymore...
That brings me back. Yes Windows CE PDAs were way more responsive than current era smart phone OSes. In fact, after my first smart phone purchase of a used G1, followed by a Galaxy S (Vibrant) I could never understand why they were less responsive than my father's ~2002 Toshiba e740. I just kept thinking to myself, the resolution is doubled, but the only additional processes are for Bluetooth and cellular radios which have their own processor. But yeah, when CE took a dump, you lost it all. Also, there were not effective means of backing up the current running OS, you always lost some of it during a hard reset.
For those bringing up the "bad programming" argument regarding the Gallery in Android. I agree wholeheartedly, but these issues are part of the Android framework, to not make developers write their own data queues and be able to trust the running OS. This works the vast majority of the time, but when it breaks, it breaks hard.
I do agree that developer reliance on SQLITE in Android is an issue. But in my fantasy world the whole smartphone OS, applications and everything between would be written in C with heavy compiler optimizations in assembly for each given CPU. Maybe the API framework in C++ with a lean widget framework (Qt?), but hey I believe in hardcore optimization and programming. This would fly in the face of the smart phone programming paradigm of cheap, RAD models where programmers do the very minimum to get their programs running, so they can produce a few programs a month at $0.99 per license and fix a few bugs. Yes in my fantasy smart phone world, you would buy 2-3 suites for $15-50 which would do everything except games you could possibly want, and never be looking at buying a dozen $1-3 apps to each do some small part of what you need your smart phone to do. Yes, in real life, I get along better with the C89 / C99 and Fortran guys a lot better than the Java and Python guys, it's just my style.
It is nice to see that there is an actual effort to make an empirical test, but I think most techies had this figured out long ago. The simple test is boot time on the devices. A relatively small OS which typically takes 2+ minutes to cold boot, yeah sounds like a storage issue.
Fixing the issue with some form of data striping would be attractive, but chews battery for each additional chip. Some kind of balloon-able RAM buffer configuration would work nicely, where the buffer RAM was turned off when the device was not in active use or where individual modules could be brought online as needed.
Frankly, Microsoft pointed at flash as being a speed culprit early on with their requirements for WP7 phones for add-on, non-removable storage expansion micro SD cards. Sure there were a lot of people all gruff and bemoaning the double price premium for Microsoft certified micro SD cards, but it was mostly just a lack of understanding of the needs for device performance. If I recall correctly, Microsoft had somewhere around 10-12 MiB/S read and write and I/O per S requirements which put most cheap commodity flash modules out of the running. I would also guess that WP7 stripes data between the on board and add-on SD card or otherwise uses some kind of secondary caching algorithm since the micro SD cards get married to the device.
In the Android world, plenty of RAM cache hacks have been implemented, most notably some in Cyanogen and similar. Consider the technical implications of this post at XDA forums regarding I/O schedulers: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=22134559&postcount=4
As an anecdote, the most frequent crashy app on my Android device is the Gallery. It tends to have all kinds of issues with the scheduler as it is reading images and creating thumbnails, likely due to flash access speeds.
This reminds me a bit of the early days of spyware and malware when anti-virus companies were behind the curve and tried to write off that since malware was typically installed with user consent, they weren't responsible for scanning, detecting, and removing it. Apple is doing the same, but without even saying it's not their responsibility. Instead, they keep giving consumers the false belief in the safety of the walled / curated garden. An oddity to be noted as well is that the Apple store has actually moved mainstream consumers farther into the reliance on the vendor for repairs. While most telcos will tell users to backup their data as best they can and perform a wipe on Android, most iPhone users I have supported have told me stories about waiting as much as a couple hours to get an Apple Geek to wipe their phone.
This is a nice companion piece from Forbes to the article on iOS crash rates versus Android.
On a sideways note, most /.ers realized long ago that as OSX continues to increase in market share, they will become the target for virus writers. I sincerely doubt Apple's sandbox for apps will do much to stop them. If anything, the sandbox makes it harder to find a well concieved malicious program.
Dell is well known for having done this for several years. I did a call simulation and testing routine when interviewing with them about 7 years ago. The Microsoft brain teasers were legendary when they became common knowledge 12 or so years ago. Both are methods of accomplishing a variety of different hiring criteria.
First, every company hiring for some form of technical position has a legitimate business need for assessing both a potential employee's current intellect and their learning curve, but testing these things directly will run one afoul of the law. Second, simulations of real world job situations not only give you a baseline of their ability to perform the job, but completion times and such demonstrate how trainable, motivated, and focused someone can be when given monotonous but business critical tasks. You put 30 people in a room (as Dell did) and have them do a series of tests which concludes with a vocational simulation, would you really want to hire the guys who finished last versus first given equivalent execution scores.
Not to deny the amazing properties of spider silk, but the article mentions, "In fact, such self-sacrificing by a unit is highly unusual among natural materials, Buehler notes."
I find this highly inconsistent with biology in general. In the human body, one such system we call skin. As a specific example, callouses are groupings of skin cells which die and harden to protect areas of the hands and feet frequently engaged by stresses, such as shoes and using hand tools (normally skin sloughs off). Continuing just with skin, note the way that even when cleaved, skin puts significant friction against the object cleaving (watch a piercing in slow motion some time). To overcome this, physicians are taught to cut along skin grains, which also reduces scarring.
Other sacrificial organic materials, well tree bark is frequently harder than the material inside. Hair on various animals prevents predators from getting a firm grip. Salamander tails come off once a tension threshold is crossed. Cell membranes flex, usually right up to the point contents would be damaged by the intrusion anyway. Cell walls work like bricks, giving plants firm structure, and making them difficult if not impossible to slice up for electron microscopy (not sure if that barrier has been crossed). Trees and plants lose branches in the wind and tumbleweed completely detaches from its roots. Fruit has skins just strong enough to prevent spoiling several days before being eaten by animals, thus spreading seeds. Seeds and nuts have cleavage lines to make them strong, but allow the bud to break out.
There are many other examples, but functional, purpose built tissues and substances in organic materials are very common.
Most places in the U.S. have no caps or metering. The places which do generally have caps, usually generous for internet browsing, not so much for frequent ISO grabs. It is not uncommon in much of Europe to pay by the MB, which associates a cost with each significant file downloaded, even if a DVD ISO only costs a .25 Euro, there is still a cerebral cost invoked.
Mobile internet is a completely different animal here. We pay 2-4x per month for similar plans and have just plain silly data caps. I have a 100 MB cap before I get throttled on an "unlimited" plan right now, which I do just because I have WiFi available at home and university which takes care of 95% of my mobile data. Exchange and Gmail accounts still manage to shave that cap thin with push traffic (push is crap btw, who came up with that f***tarded model).
Off topic, email and instant messaging on mobiles should go to a non-query / no keep-alive model. The server should be event driven and send a notification to the handset when it has new information. If the handset is not available to acknowledge after a time out of say 60 seconds, the server puts the notification(s) into a queue with expiry of say 8 hours. The handset should only query when the email application is opened or the radio system transitions between network connection types (WiFi vs 3/4G) or it has lost network connection for a specified time, say greater than the event driven server push time out of 60 seconds or so. This would massively reduce both server overhead and cellular network overhead. Keep alive signals should only go between the handset and the current tower otherwise, and never for data type connections. The 1-5 minute query / acknowledge model for push messaging is no better than Outlook doing automated send/receive cycles. Push is a severe misnomer.
This may be the response to the emergence of web journalism (now about 15 years in). U.S. magazines decided to invest less in good authors and experts as they feared their circulation would drop, and it did because they in fact did not attract the best staff.
Newspapers certainly completely threw in the towel in the U.S. following the advent of the WWW, RSS, portals, etcetera.
Perhaps in Europe, journalistic entities instead maintained standards, kept hiring good writers and experts, and started looking for real methods to retain customers. The CD/DVDs you mention are a great example. In the U.S. we have decided quite clearly to disenfranchise those without high speed, persistent internet access. In Europe, it is much more widely acknowledged that internet access is not ubiquitous among the people due to cost, despite many regions having vastly better coverage, lower cost, and higher speeds than offered in the U.S. Add to this the frequency of metered internet service in Europe, and a DVD of media obtains tangible value added as a replacement for downloads.
Based upon the ruling and its basis, I should immediately start copyrighting all the notes I make in university classes. Can I then accuse other students of mimicking my intent and execution with their notes and require they pay me royalties to keep their notes when exam time comes?
Yes, the defendant's firm should have been found guilty for their prior infringing use, but the subsequent replacement with their own image should have been perfectly legal.
Someone needs to send this judge a collection of Getty DVDs. Clearly he understands nothing about commercial photography.
Frames are frequently sold one at a time from a shoot where 100s of pictures of the same subject, same setting, same composition are snapped. The original photographer still retains copyright on the distinct images he does not sell or license, and likewise his buyer has the same on their portion they purchase.
I have a feeling unless the printing was done braided, the skin effect would still be an issue in the analog world. On the other hand, you might be able to get Litz windings incredibly cheap compared to the current methods. Too bad the marketing folks will hear Litz and increase the cost 10x anyways.
With a drill added, I can have my dream of a home chassis built into the side of a hill. The limited exterior and full interior I can take care of myself.
For the curious, my dream is two fold. First, I think houses carved into the side of a hill look amazing when done correctly. Second, they are unbeatable in most climates for energy efficient climate control. It's actually amazing how few alternate construction styles they allow for in Texas given the need for better insulation here.
The NSA would like to know if with a single bug with this technology, how much farther into a building could you hear than their current implementations. Also with two or more instances of the nanophone in a single chassis, how well can we use doppler, selective signal cancellation and room modeling algorithms to choose which room we listen.
Seriously, as much scientific use as this has, usage by security services will be very interesting. A significant part of bug planting is frequently getting the bugs into low security areas, such as the lobbies of embassies, with the hope of being able to filter and get phone calls and keystrokes from adjacent higher security wings. Listening on this scale might extend to extrapolating fingerprints from the roll your finger over type scanners as an example.
Also, this form of listening should extend past sound into other frequency ranges fairly easily (radio, light, etcetera). Consider the sensitivity increase for a CCD device where the filtering and threshold apparatuses could be suspended instead of fixed.
You can't stop the signal...
True, but you create a mold (mould?) with the MakerBot or equivalent then cast in something like silicon or another proper food safe plastic?
Like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M400dj19nUs
Oh and as a reply to my own comments, you can get all the ABS you want on a Saturday hanging around a charity run recycling center (not a commercial one obviously). 50-100 kgs should be no problem to haul in for 8 hours of volunteering on the weekend.
Lots more if you get a similar machine that can work with LDPE / HDPE (milk jugs, soda bottles, etc.).
Hopefully the next generation machines will have an integrated hopper that grinds and melts down the refuse for recycling. Like Mr. Fusion.
Kinko's. That is to say, once the technology is sufficient, it will show up at Kinko's, shortly followed by engineering firms investing in their own machines, followed by consumerization. I'm referring to photocopying and laser printing of course. Really we're in the middle of this right now. The "good" machines that can prototype large parts at high precision are at specialty shops and larger engineering firms. Give the technology some time to mature, it will make it to consumer hands soon enough. I'd say 3-5 years for better "pro-sumer" models, i.e. something you could make replacement car parts with at reasonable size and cost (~500mm in each direction at .1mm precision) and another 3-5 years after that for stuff at the MakerBot grade to mainstream $300 with form factors of 300mm with .2mm precision.
Also as far as raw supplies go, I would suggest making your own raw spool from cheap abundant ABS. The process would be much cheaper than buying at $40/kg. Salvage ABS from a variety of sources and grind it into little bits (I would imagine a used commercial grade snow cone maker or meat grinder works great). Get a toaster oven and modify it for better precision control or build a low temp kiln (~105 deg C). Build a press to extrude it and pour cooling water over the surface as it comes out of a nozzle or die and roll your own. Compared to the price of the MakerBot and supplies, producing your own ABS even with the trial and error involved is much more cost effective.
I would also suspect Chinese suppliers of ABS spools will start to show up on eBay soon enough at 1/10-1/5 the cost of MakerBot soon enough.
I'm surprised at the amount of need for IPv6 upgrades at the application level. Really I would hope more OSes would allow IPv6 only with an internal IPv4 fake NAT approach to translate IPv6 information (local and remote targets) to fake internal IPv4 addresses. Remote targets would also need some form of IPv4 to IPv6 resolution. Perhaps add a notification from the OS that the application in question is not IPv6 capable and running in a compatibility mode with degraded performance.
And yes, I know part of the reason for IPv6 is to eliminate NAT, but I am just considering all the legacy application issues sure to arise without strong OS level support for bassackwards compatibility. Application level support should mostly be confined to various master server schemes, like IM clients, where the master server gives peers IPv4 addresses from clients for features like video chat. Still, some kind of DNS-like system for servers to aid in resolving IPv4 addresses to IPv6 would act as a patch during migration for legacy programs.
Yahoo definitely needs to clean up the main landing page. They should talk to the mail design and UI people.
I've never been a Yahoo fan, but it's nearly getting under my skin how good the UI for Yahoo mail has gotten in the past year or so. It sucks just a bit because my Yahoo account is the one I use for anywhere I think my address will be spidered, sold or spammed. Seriously, the UI is gorgeous and extremely functional. It kills Gmail and OWA and even Thunderbird and Outlook in ease of use. Too bad it gets nearly as much spam as my retired hotmail account once did.
Just to keep M$ and Google competitive, I hope they develop more towards competing with Google Docs and Office 365 and try to go after more lucrative small and medium business hosting contracts.
Certain model Fords from the late 90's had the alarm (PATS) system in a separate module in the trunk. If you could jimmy the trunk open, all you needed to do was disconnect one harness.
This eliminated the need for the transponder key and disabled the alarm completely. Hot wiring the car from there is rather conventional and trivial.
Wasn't till the 2000s that they at least had the thought to add a bit in the ECU ROM or a bit switch (don't recall which) that told the ECU to require the security module.
A few other car makers had similar easy to defeat modular systems, but I'm not sure about years and makes from that time.
Locally produced only applies to a very narrow range of products, mostly vegetables and some fruit.
You're more than a tad naive here. Even as someone who telecommutes, there is no reason to punish the plebes on their commutes for the sins of Detroit.
There are plenty of people demonstrating significantly higher mileage with just marginally better vehicle software (google megasquirt). The reality is that higher mileage and durability of vehicles can increase at no consumer expense at the will of automakers. As an example, I used to work at a parts store, and it was amazing to see the failure rates of Bosch electrical parts (alternators, starters and fuel pumps) in Dodge vehicles, while you rarely see Bosch failures in the various Japanese and European makes using the same brand of parts (we always joked Dodge got the factory seconds from the Germans after Audi, VW and Nissan took all the good parts).
But really, much of the American economy is based on the cheap delivery of goods. Look at NewEgg and Amazon. Look at eBay where I just bought >$400 in textbooks from New Delhi and Malaysia for $95. Are you saying it would have been better to spend $400 (used) on textbooks to get them sourced locally?
I like the "locally produced" moniker, but more and more I am seeing it as just a scam to grift more money out of pockets. One time at a farmer's market, I was early before they really opened up and saw one family peeling "Dole" labels off of fruit before putting it out.
In closing, take five minutes to look at a multi-year graph of the Dow Jones against Crude Oil. Here, I'll give you one: http://www.marketthoughts.com/z20041006.html Now you can stop the ignorant spouting off.