Jaron Lanier (who some credit with inventing the phrase "virtual reality"), whimsically suggests that, in exchange for being granted U.S. copyright protection, commercial software publishers should have to pay users $1 every time their product screws up.
And I whimsically suggest that the plaintiff bar will institute a class-action suit for this very thing within the next few years. Did Word crash and take out your work? You're entitled to damages! Did Photoshop mangle your images? Sue!
Remembering the hoo-ha about the Apple Cube photos, and how Mac Junkie thought they were a fraud, I don't get too worked-up about arguments over photographic 'evidence' anymore.
Mr. Fusion writes "I'm sure this might affect the actor's union one day, but News.com is reporting that Lucas is going to have an animated lead CGI character in the next Star Wars movie.
Any technology tht has the potential to put Alec Balwdwin out of a job has my vote.
One thing I notice is that there's considerably less glare with an LCD screen. Possibly because, unlike a rounded CRT tube, I can find a position for the LCD which doesn't reflect the ambient light. Whatever the reason, it helps my eyes considerably.
Having seen stories about robot mowers in the past, I revisited them to see how they accomplish this. This one uses a perimeter wire to tell the mower it's hit the boundary, plus onboard sensors to sense obstacles. Same for this one. I did a number of google searches for robot position sensing and didn't come up with anything that would represent a drop-in solution. Some folks are experimenting with visual clues, others with mathematical means to 'estimate' position (I don't know about you, but no mower of mine is going to figure out where it is by 'estimating'), while others are experimenting with sonar. I suspect that you aren't going to find a commercial product that will allow the accurate positioning you're after, at least not at the price goal you've set. Looks like you'll have to be a pioneer. Good luck.
So if people start posting kiddie porn to rec.pets.cats, are they going to have to not carry that group too? What's next, the RIAA suing ISPs who carry alt.binaries.sounds.mp3? The ISP has no control over who posts what, so I can see where every newsgroup could ultimately be made off-limits.
As someone who runs a government web site in an underfunded agency, with far too few people to run things properly (for obvious reasons I'm not going to state which agency)
Of course you're not. Because every government agency on earth is "underfunded." When was the last time you heard a bureaucrat say "man, are we sitting pretty"? You could quadruple a government agency's budget and mission creep and bloat would absorb it like a sponge, and they'd still bitch about how they're strapped. I spent 10 years as a federal employee, and my experiences there are why I begrudge every dollar I send to Uncle Sam.
This would make a WONDERFUL way to secure a notebook - an 8 MB key!!! More than gratuitous, but it could hold keys for other computers as well.
I actually saw a mockup of such a device that a company we deal with is developing. It's a weensy crypto device about the size of my thumb that hooks to the USB port and without which the hard disk contents are unreadable. I bet Qualcomm's Irwin Jacobs wishes he'd had one of those.
The term of art you want is 'ruggedized'. Enter this into search engines along with the type of equipment you're looking for to find leads. Be warned, however: it won't be cheap, and it won't be state-of-the-art. Manufacturers of ruggedized gear are usually a generation behind, and, depending on the degree of ruggedization, can raise the cost by a factor of 2 or more.
So. If people do bad things to you it is basically your fault, because you didn't shoot them when they started doing those bad things?
If you're being attacked, the first thing you're supposed to try is to get away. Only when that's not possible does the law permit you to use force. In this case, if your employer is treating you badly, you don't get your AK-47, you get another job.
I'm still wondering why the guy who started this sub-thread can't simply tell his employer that he's not going to work 12-hour days, 7 days a week. The worst that can happen is that he's fired from a job he considers crap anyway.
Once you have a family and a mortgage, cars and educations to pay for, the whole "you can get another job" thing isn't quite as simple.
I have all of those things and neither am I young. I saw my father nearly wiped out by a bad business decision and a sudden shift in the economy. He buckled down and got back on his feet. For a while, we went to one car, my mother cut my hair, we got our clothing from thrift stores, and my dad worked two jobs. It was tough, but he prevailed and later prospered. It's tough to let go of what we've achieved and have to start over, but it's possible. And it's an available choice. I'd rather do that than count on a union to rescue me.
My point is, you're not a 'victim'. People arrive here every day with scarcely the clothing on their backs and thrive. Are you saying that with all you've got going for you it's not within your capabilities to find another job?
Looking at the chart they have on the site showing meteor frequency, it seems as if all of the ground stations would have to constantly broadcast to catch the next meteor.
That, in fact, is exactly how we did it. We had beacon transmitters set up at each site what wanted to communicate, and as soon as a station heard a beacon from another station that it wanted to contact, it would quickly burst its data to it. The paths were generally symmetric (i.e. if A could hear B, generally B could hear A). Worked surprisingly well
Here's my support for Tech Unions and organizing. What does the industry have to fear, if everything is really A-OK already?
Let's see, featherbedding, work rules, strikes, unreasonable demands, an adversarial relationship with its labor force, an inability to lay off the incompetent, corruption, shakedowns, worker dues used to lobby for legislation that goes against company interests.
By the way, since you have nothing to hide, I'm sure, I'd like to come over and search your house.
How do you compensate someone who is totally lost to their family because they're stuck in the office 7 days a week?
This is the same sort of argument that drives me nuts when police and firefighters bitch about how dangerous their work is. If you don't like the job or the pay or the hours, quit. If you have any talent whatsoever, you can have a new job by turning into a different driveway tomorrow morning. If you work at a company that's abusing you, it isn't their fault for doing it, it's your fault for letting them.
Well, not really. Back in the olden days when I was a lad, long before commsats and optical fibers, we used to use High Frequency radio for long-distance communications. The signals bounce off of the ionosphere. Meteor Burst is essentially the same thing, except that you're waiting for that momentary ionization trail created by a descending meteor to bounce the signal. I worked on a military project that was using MB. The trail lasts a brief time and is random, but there are so many meteors hitting the atmosphere in a day, that it was seldom more than a few minutes before we got an open path to burst our data. The challenge was, we were doing this at the dawn of the microprocessor age and it was quite the software triumph to set up our little beacon/burster program in 2048 bytes.
From the article: with hopes of making the next PlayStation 1,000 times as powerful as the PlayStation 2
The present PS2 can process 20 million polygons per second. One article I read said that to get complete realism (i.e. indistinguishable from film of real live things) you need 2.4 billlion polygons/sec. This would seem to imply that PS3 woud be capable of rendering scenes that were as good as film (actually, almost ten times better. Can a scene be 'better than live'? Interesting question...). This says to me that the PS3 would have the potential of showing what would amount to movies that were completely artificially generated. Even more, completely interactive, since they'd be created on the fly. This would open up completely new areas of entertainment. Imagine telling your PS3 to replay that scene, but remove Sandra Bullock's clothing this time. Or... well, you can imagine the possibilities.
Speaking of remote controls, I saw a very interesting product at the Consumer Electronic show. It's intended to let a remote control work anywhere in the house via RF. The clever thing about it is that the transmitter is contained in a special AA- or AAA-sized battery that fits into an existing remote. It's also supposed to work up to 50 meters (I love those 'up-to' words. Usually means "if you stand on the roof and have a 10-foot yagi antenna attached"). Supposedly available in March. Man, do I want one of these things bad.
I wonder if this could be used against ground targets, or is it only good against the relatively fragile missiles? I can imagine that it would be handy to be able to be waaay far away and zap your enemy without risk. Even if all you could do is blind the troops, that might be nearly as good as blowing up their stuff.
AndyP wrote two months ago that he'd been arrested for vandalism after one Halloween mischief night when he was sixteen. An online tracking agency dug up the arrest -- even though it was a misdeanor offense, was supposed to be kept sealed, and had happened a decade earlier. "I was turned down because my company was working on a government project and we all needed a moderate security clearance. I never got it sorted out, because it was technically true. But jeez, it was a spray-painting incident. I guess in certain quarters, I'm unemployable for the rest of my life."
Either Andy isn't telling the whole story, or the company didn't understand government security rules. Having an arrest on one's record, particularly as a juvenile, doesn't necessarily disqualify you for a clearance. I personally know of people who've received extremely high clearances who have arrest records. What the government wants to avoid is having anything that can be used to blackmail you. There was one case where a guy with a high clearance was having an affair and the goverment security people found out about it. They offered to let him keep the clearance if he'd tell his wife about it in their presence. He took the offer. Security clearances take a long time to process (up to a year) and the employee is typically given a provisional low-level clearance after a quick investigation so that they can start working. Perhaps turning up this minor crime in the run-thru made this impossible, in which case Andy'd have been sitting around for a year while they did the full investigation and final determination.
I agree that having derogatory information in a database for all eternity is a problem. Perhaps we ought to expunge everything after 10 years as is done with credit records.
The MAC address of your NIC is trasmitted with your PID when you register. That's ALL. If you try to install the software with the same PID on another machine, and the MAC address doesn't match up, you're denied.
In which case, I predict great popularity for NICs whose MAC addresses can be changed programmatically. And wouldn't it be fun to know your enemy's MAC and start registering lots of fun things to him?
I think the usefulness - or lack thereof - of OOP depends a lot on one's personal learning/working style. Sort of like some people are perfectly fine with abstract mathematics, while others need to relate math to the physical world in order to understand what's going on. Personally, I find it helpful to create objects that possess properties and accessors to get at them. It not only makes what I'm creating more 'real', but it divides the application into nice self-contained chunks that can be dealth with separately.
Speaking of image compression, particularly of video, the beta of Microsoft Media Player is achieving some phenomenal results. They're managing to get what they call 'near-DVD' quality in 750kbps. I took a look and it has a few just-barely-noticeable pauses (which could be my computer and not the compression for all I know). The image quality is truely amazing. They're also getting some watchable video (quality isn't any worse than my EP VHS playback) in a 250kbps stream. Encoding with these would mean an hour of near-DVD would fit in 338 MB, and the VHS-quality would cram an hour into a third of that. I can see why Hollywood is petrified that people are going to start trading movies like MP3s. There are some demos here.
"ColorMax, who makes colour-blindness-compensatory lenses, has acquired a "patent for the human genes responsible for common, hereditary, red-green colorblindness".
Can I sue these guys for my condition? Do they realize what misery is being created by their 'invention'? Drawing on the 'Racism at Microsoft' example, I think 5 billion (each) might cover it.
How can you complete shooting of a movie a week ago and get the thing edited, copies made, and distribute it all for a theatrical release in a matter of days? This does not compute.
Slashdot Mirror
And I whimsically suggest that the plaintiff bar will institute a class-action suit for this very thing within the next few years. Did Word crash and take out your work? You're entitled to damages! Did Photoshop mangle your images? Sue!
Mark my words, this is coming.
Remembering the hoo-ha about the Apple Cube photos, and how Mac Junkie thought they were a fraud, I don't get too worked-up about arguments over photographic 'evidence' anymore.
Any technology tht has the potential to put Alec Balwdwin out of a job has my vote.
One thing I notice is that there's considerably less glare with an LCD screen. Possibly because, unlike a rounded CRT tube, I can find a position for the LCD which doesn't reflect the ambient light. Whatever the reason, it helps my eyes considerably.
Having seen stories about robot mowers in the past, I revisited them to see how they accomplish this. This one uses a perimeter wire to tell the mower it's hit the boundary, plus onboard sensors to sense obstacles. Same for this one. I did a number of google searches for robot position sensing and didn't come up with anything that would represent a drop-in solution. Some folks are experimenting with visual clues, others with mathematical means to 'estimate' position (I don't know about you, but no mower of mine is going to figure out where it is by 'estimating'), while others are experimenting with sonar. I suspect that you aren't going to find a commercial product that will allow the accurate positioning you're after, at least not at the price goal you've set. Looks like you'll have to be a pioneer. Good luck.
So if people start posting kiddie porn to rec.pets.cats, are they going to have to not carry that group too? What's next, the RIAA suing ISPs who carry alt.binaries.sounds.mp3? The ISP has no control over who posts what, so I can see where every newsgroup could ultimately be made off-limits.
Of course you're not. Because every government agency on earth is "underfunded." When was the last time you heard a bureaucrat say "man, are we sitting pretty"? You could quadruple a government agency's budget and mission creep and bloat would absorb it like a sponge, and they'd still bitch about how they're strapped. I spent 10 years as a federal employee, and my experiences there are why I begrudge every dollar I send to Uncle Sam.
(Ahhh, nothing like that first rant of the day.)
I actually saw a mockup of such a device that a company we deal with is developing. It's a weensy crypto device about the size of my thumb that hooks to the USB port and without which the hard disk contents are unreadable. I bet Qualcomm's Irwin Jacobs wishes he'd had one of those.
The term of art you want is 'ruggedized'. Enter this into search engines along with the type of equipment you're looking for to find leads. Be warned, however: it won't be cheap, and it won't be state-of-the-art. Manufacturers of ruggedized gear are usually a generation behind, and, depending on the degree of ruggedization, can raise the cost by a factor of 2 or more.
If you're being attacked, the first thing you're supposed to try is to get away. Only when that's not possible does the law permit you to use force. In this case, if your employer is treating you badly, you don't get your AK-47, you get another job.
I'm still wondering why the guy who started this sub-thread can't simply tell his employer that he's not going to work 12-hour days, 7 days a week. The worst that can happen is that he's fired from a job he considers crap anyway.
I have all of those things and neither am I young. I saw my father nearly wiped out by a bad business decision and a sudden shift in the economy. He buckled down and got back on his feet. For a while, we went to one car, my mother cut my hair, we got our clothing from thrift stores, and my dad worked two jobs. It was tough, but he prevailed and later prospered. It's tough to let go of what we've achieved and have to start over, but it's possible. And it's an available choice. I'd rather do that than count on a union to rescue me.
My point is, you're not a 'victim'. People arrive here every day with scarcely the clothing on their backs and thrive. Are you saying that with all you've got going for you it's not within your capabilities to find another job?
That, in fact, is exactly how we did it. We had beacon transmitters set up at each site what wanted to communicate, and as soon as a station heard a beacon from another station that it wanted to contact, it would quickly burst its data to it. The paths were generally symmetric (i.e. if A could hear B, generally B could hear A). Worked surprisingly well
Let's see, featherbedding, work rules, strikes, unreasonable demands, an adversarial relationship with its labor force, an inability to lay off the incompetent, corruption, shakedowns, worker dues used to lobby for legislation that goes against company interests.
By the way, since you have nothing to hide, I'm sure, I'd like to come over and search your house.
This is the same sort of argument that drives me nuts when police and firefighters bitch about how dangerous their work is. If you don't like the job or the pay or the hours, quit. If you have any talent whatsoever, you can have a new job by turning into a different driveway tomorrow morning. If you work at a company that's abusing you, it isn't their fault for doing it, it's your fault for letting them.
Well, not really. Back in the olden days when I was a lad, long before commsats and optical fibers, we used to use High Frequency radio for long-distance communications. The signals bounce off of the ionosphere. Meteor Burst is essentially the same thing, except that you're waiting for that momentary ionization trail created by a descending meteor to bounce the signal. I worked on a military project that was using MB. The trail lasts a brief time and is random, but there are so many meteors hitting the atmosphere in a day, that it was seldom more than a few minutes before we got an open path to burst our data. The challenge was, we were doing this at the dawn of the microprocessor age and it was quite the software triumph to set up our little beacon/burster program in 2048 bytes.
The present PS2 can process 20 million polygons per second. One article I read said that to get complete realism (i.e. indistinguishable from film of real live things) you need 2.4 billlion polygons/sec. This would seem to imply that PS3 woud be capable of rendering scenes that were as good as film (actually, almost ten times better. Can a scene be 'better than live'? Interesting question ...). This says to me that the PS3 would have the potential of showing what would amount to movies that were completely artificially generated. Even more, completely interactive, since they'd be created on the fly. This would open up completely new areas of entertainment. Imagine telling your PS3 to replay that scene, but remove Sandra Bullock's clothing this time. Or ... well, you can imagine the possibilities.
Speaking of remote controls, I saw a very interesting product at the Consumer Electronic show. It's intended to let a remote control work anywhere in the house via RF. The clever thing about it is that the transmitter is contained in a special AA- or AAA-sized battery that fits into an existing remote. It's also supposed to work up to 50 meters (I love those 'up-to' words. Usually means "if you stand on the roof and have a 10-foot yagi antenna attached"). Supposedly available in March. Man, do I want one of these things bad.
I wonder if this could be used against ground targets, or is it only good against the relatively fragile missiles? I can imagine that it would be handy to be able to be waaay far away and zap your enemy without risk. Even if all you could do is blind the troops, that might be nearly as good as blowing up their stuff.
Either Andy isn't telling the whole story, or the company didn't understand government security rules. Having an arrest on one's record, particularly as a juvenile, doesn't necessarily disqualify you for a clearance. I personally know of people who've received extremely high clearances who have arrest records. What the government wants to avoid is having anything that can be used to blackmail you. There was one case where a guy with a high clearance was having an affair and the goverment security people found out about it. They offered to let him keep the clearance if he'd tell his wife about it in their presence. He took the offer. Security clearances take a long time to process (up to a year) and the employee is typically given a provisional low-level clearance after a quick investigation so that they can start working. Perhaps turning up this minor crime in the run-thru made this impossible, in which case Andy'd have been sitting around for a year while they did the full investigation and final determination.
I agree that having derogatory information in a database for all eternity is a problem. Perhaps we ought to expunge everything after 10 years as is done with credit records.
In which case, I predict great popularity for NICs whose MAC addresses can be changed programmatically. And wouldn't it be fun to know your enemy's MAC and start registering lots of fun things to him?
I think the usefulness - or lack thereof - of OOP depends a lot on one's personal learning/working style. Sort of like some people are perfectly fine with abstract mathematics, while others need to relate math to the physical world in order to understand what's going on. Personally, I find it helpful to create objects that possess properties and accessors to get at them. It not only makes what I'm creating more 'real', but it divides the application into nice self-contained chunks that can be dealth with separately.
Speaking of image compression, particularly of video, the beta of Microsoft Media Player is achieving some phenomenal results. They're managing to get what they call 'near-DVD' quality in 750kbps. I took a look and it has a few just-barely-noticeable pauses (which could be my computer and not the compression for all I know). The image quality is truely amazing. They're also getting some watchable video (quality isn't any worse than my EP VHS playback) in a 250kbps stream. Encoding with these would mean an hour of near-DVD would fit in 338 MB, and the VHS-quality would cram an hour into a third of that. I can see why Hollywood is petrified that people are going to start trading movies like MP3s. There are some demos here.
Can I sue these guys for my condition? Do they realize what misery is being created by their 'invention'? Drawing on the 'Racism at Microsoft' example, I think 5 billion (each) might cover it.
How can you complete shooting of a movie a week ago and get the thing edited, copies made, and distribute it all for a theatrical release in a matter of days? This does not compute.