"Flexible plastic monitors and TVs"!!! Do you know what I would do with a flexible plastic monitor? Here's my top ten list:
Roll it up like a newspaper and hit you upside the head with it! Endless fun for the whole family.
Attempt to tack it to my wall, because the damn thing keeps draping over itself. The result is mild electrocution, and a non-working flexible plastic TV / monitor.
Jury-rig a make-shift laptop by rubber cementing the flexible plastic monitor to a folded cardboard box, gluing a small-form keyboard to the other folded half. The monitor and keyboard lines recede into a large briefcase I carry with me.
Laminate several flexible plastic TVs into one large tablecloth. Tired of the same old design? Downloadable "themes" allow for endless variety in your dining experience!
Rig my pirate ship with flexible plastic TVs instead of pirate flags -- then, I can change to "friendly" colors (for the purposes of dupement) without having to re-rig. Added bonus: the looks on people's faces is even more astounding when all our flags suddenly "morph" into that scary-looking pirate thing than it is usually, after we board and hand out business cards.
Affix flexible plastic monitors back-to-back, fold the whole mess over itself to creat four pages (two physical pages), and bind a bunch of these monstrosities, with some smart software, into the next Killer Application. Peddle outside cafes and bookshops.
Because flexible plastic monitors are light-weight, and because, like LCD's, they're "always-on", as opposed to each pixel being on only for an instant, you can create a row of flexible plastic monitors along the diameter of a "huge spinning thing" (details proprietary), and, with creative software and timing, get your effective screen size increaesd by a factor of pi, impressing geeks everywhere in the process. (Also, there's money in it, if you set up the web site you make about it to go into "banner-mode" whenever the slashdotting starts to rev up.)
Get an MIT scientist with too much time on her hands or his to design for you a saddle-shaped form factor such that when your flexible plastic monitor is pressed into the shape, it creates an area directly in front of the opening (occupied by the horse on an actual horse saddle) from which each eye sees a disjoint set of pixels on the screen. (Some pixels on the "other" side will be visible, but from an angle in which they don't really emit light.) Design clever software, or find an overeager MIT grad student to design for you clever software, to take advantage of this unique form to create breathtaking 3D effects. Extra points for eye-tracking and on-the-fly adjustment to the precise location of your head, so that you can view the 3D worlds within the saddle from a range of angles. Make millions. (That's step 3; step 2 is a patent-pending business plan, currently trade secret.)
After mastering origami, astound the world by solving NP-hard problems in topology in linear time. Disappoint the world again by telling them that you can't actually see the answer, but it's in there. (Astound them again by telling them that there is, however, free ice cream for everyone! etc[1])
Be a travelling slashbot, regaling slashdotters the world over with your wit and humor. Accrue mod points for fun and profit. Then, spend it all on flexible plastic monitors or TVs, plastering a spare room with them until you have your very own holodeck! (special glasses required; no other objects may be present.)
And remember -- the suggestions above are just the beginning -- with your own flexible plastic monitor or TV the possibilities are endless!
Enjoy responsibly!!!
[1] but the ice cream is poisoned (that's bad). But it comes with your choice of free toppings! (that's good) the toppings are also poisoned. (that's bad.)
I suppose you could use one time passwords and such... You could NOT use one-time passwords, unless you can do bitwise XORing in your head and remember as many bits as you'll ever type. If you can do both those, then you can do RSA in your head too. (Okay, that's a lie, but for our purposes...) Except when we read "password" as "session key", meaning that text following the password is not sent in the clear, but always changed by a function involving the session key, there's no such thing as a one-time password. Since AIM doesn't have anything that includes that "function", you can only use a session key by doing the operations in your head. So, no-go.
The AIM protocol is not end-to-end secure. If you are willing to use an unsecure transport layer, I have the net:AIM module running on my server, sandboxed with access only to ssh. (It's just for me and a few friends, when we have to be at a public computer and want to log in to do something quickly. A web interface might be easier, but this was just a few pipes). To log in, query
AIM: jkpsmdto5fny with "HLO". You will receive instructions on supplying a server to connect to and username / password (again, this will be sent over the AIM network in the clear). Obviously, this is textmode ssh, so there are some limitations, but you should be able to do most of what you want to get done. (Excluding using some programs like vi, obviously).
If you actually want to have some security (including running your own server instead of using mine) you should ditch the AIM network entirely, and your best bet would probably be to spin your own quick web interface -- if whatever you're using to access (cell phone, etc), has AIM support, it can probably connect to an https site as well -- and that's real security. An SSL license runs you something like $100.
y'know, anything "for public or commercial viewing" is much more expensive -- unless you live in a country where the FCC is generally disregarded. (As opposed to the US, where we fear for our personal liberty when doing so much as talking in a public forum about using content outside of the letter of its license, or regarding changes we might make to the devices accompanying this license, though we pay for them and use them in the privacy of our homes).
But if you're not in a Free-as-in-to-get-extorted-by-the-media-cartels country, then I guess that's not a consideration.
In the US, a DVD for private viewing an indefinite number of times costs well under twenty bucks, but " Screening a film outside of the home requires a license from the film studio or a distributor. Licences range from $125 - $1000 depending on the film. " Source Note that this is from a small, independant film club! And even they're playing strictly by the rules of extortion, because they're afraid not to.
Of course, chances are that in Bolivia you have more personal liberty than you would in the US, and do not have to pay protection fees to agencies of extortion sanctioned by the very Federal Government. [1]
Anyway, good luck with everything.
Also: I believe that Microsoft must be annihilated.
~Robert.
ps. Once more, just to make me shudder: Of course, chances are that in Bolivia you have more personal liberty than you would in the US.
[1] (A run-down of extortion: We make it so that for what you want, you need to pay more than is reasonable, because we have distribution locked down. If you do not agree to pay our price, you must fear for your personal safety. [As in today's Federal prisons, with whose conditions we are all familiar.])
but one thing I rememer hearing much about karpov, back when kasparov was beaten, was that he, though not world champion, would have made a more interesting match against computerland, because of the fact that he focuses less on tactics (trying to out-think the computer by looking at combinations into more moves ahead) and more on abstract, pattern-based (such as in go) strategy, at which computers suck. Kasparov proved (insofar as you believe playing conditions were fair) that computers can out tacticate people, but perhaps a person whose style leans more toward abstract strategizing ("I want to keep this column open, because I feel it will be very important later" versus "I want to force the computer to lose that pawn, because I think I can pull off a combination in 43 moves")
i do need to go, but here are some things for children of this post to do: o Look up some original reference (I saw many, many) that talked about how Kasparov's playing style is perhaps less suited to showcasing humanity's superiority to computers than Karpov's was) o Look up whether Kramnik most resembles Karpov's or Kasparov's style.
One last thing. Is it still true that in Go, computers play with a 14-move advantage and still lose to people who aren't even world-champion? Go is a game in which, because at each point in the game, it is unclear what groups of stones are alive and what are dead, pattern-based thinking is much more important. Would Karpov (and perhaps Kramnik) have made a better Go player than chess player?
When I come back, I'll add more to the thread, to anyone who wishes to discuss it.
Remember dongles of a by-gone era? (They were hardware that would "activate" your game by returning the proper answer to challenges given through the serial/parallel/etc. port). Well, why don't gaming industries today make dongles that have/lots/ of the game logic in the hardware? Besides fancy graphics, etc, I bet you could basically/cripple/ a game by having the basic maps/character stats/whatever be controlled by secure hardware attached on a USB slot. Since this solution would cost far less than the $49.95 for which a next-generation game retails today, why don't we see more "cheating isn't possible" solutions based on having lots of the "easy" (low-computing power) solutions based on a dongle attached via USB?
Although the performance audit showed that IBM researchers were churning out code at a steady rate, Lehman found the level of debugging activity per individual software module to be decreasing at an equal rate; in other words, programmers were spending less and less time fixing problems in the code. Unless IBM programmers had suddenly figured out a way to write error-free code -- an unlikely assumption -- Lehman made a dire prediction: OS/360 was heading over a cliff. IBM, in stressing growth over source-code maintenance, would soon be in need of a successor operating system. Except that the "[dire] need of a successor operating system" isn't so dire at all: the world's richest man didn't get where he got by writing code that didn't need to be replaced by a successor operating system, did he? The whole premise is to produce something that works now, and when it stops working later, you sell a later version. Heck, just a couple of months ago, Billy announced that 92.3% of the calendar year would focus on new code, leaving the rest for the old. What's smarter, coding the Microsoft way, or coding a server that's been up since before Windows NT was released, without a patch in 7 years, handling half a megabit of data both upstream and down, every second of every day forever. Where's the revenue?
~r~
Note: the 92.3% figure might only be for the year 2002, with later years being still closer to 100%.
Re:Overcomplication
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You said (emphasis here and below is mine):
The Tobor system would cause more problems than it solves by throwing a very complex solution at a very simple problem. Better to pay a trained human to do the running or introduce it as part of a Medical degree.
I just about wet myself reading this, as it is an almost thought-for-thought transcription of this anecdote regarding John von Neumann (I trust you've heard of him):
In the 1950's von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM to review proposed and ongoing advanced technology projects. One day a week, von Neumann "held court" at 590 Madison Avenue, New York. On one of these occasions in 1954 he was confronted with the FORTRAN concept; John Backus remembered von Neumann being unimpressed and that he asked "why would you want more than machine language?" Frank Beckman, who was also present, recalled that von Neumann dismissed the whole development as "but an application of the idea of Turing's `short code'." Donald Gillies, one of von Neumann's students at Princeton, and later a faculty member at the University of Illinois, recalled in the mid-1970's that the graduates students were being "used" to hand assemble programs into binary for their early machine (probably the IAS machine). He took time out to build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about he was very angry, saying (paraphrased), "It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work."
What's wrong with RTF? It looks nice, and it works in almost everything.
awhile ago there was a comment by an office worker who simply could not find anything better than ms word to keep versioning, and a consistent presentation. To the point that she used filters to modify word files as word files, even though she was working on linux. Honestly, the reason you'll see some things online only in 1) post-script 2) pdf, is because nothing else "guarantees" the look you want. I wouldn't be surprised if the same rtf file paginates to whole pages more or less than the "original", depending on your client, printer driver, etc. Basically, from what I understand, RTF isn't much better than HTML. Sure, my resume is in HTML: but I don't care if the text looks different on my potential-employer's computer from my own. This would be a different story if I were preparing a complex item to present (think complex interaction of columns, headings, inserted pictures with captions, everything only looking "just right" after major tweaking of 0.5 font points in order to fine-tune the/exact/ result: major disaster if your client has a different idea of how the document "should" look, based on the RTF "description".)
One last thing: this is also why people who research the question further than the woman I quoted above/always/ end up biting the bullet and learning LaTeX (or however the capitalization goes.) It separates content from presentation, and guarantees you presentation. Basically, it's like "post-script" above, only human-editable : it was designed as a type-setting language (for equations and such) but has grown to be the only open, not-subject-to-change, not licensed (unlike PDF, from what I understand) standard, besides post-script, that people use to fix an exact "look" without having to result to a screen-capture of print preview.
I haven't looked at all this in detail, however, and could be wrong.
This is an important question though, so anyone who knows more than I do, please post your thoughts!
anyone know why people would normally pay cyberdrive for 20 megs of web storage, when yahoo gives you 30 megs for free?
Oh, and Point 1: "Connect to Briefcase from your Windows desktop with the Yahoo! Drive Client. Drag and drop or save files directly to Briefcase from any application." (same page).
Point 2: on Linux you'd get the same functionality without running a foreign exe to modify your OS [!], but rather by mounting a ten-line Perl script of your own design, to proxy the http connection as though it were your web browser.
Point 3: This, incidentally, is why people use Windows.
...sounds great...until you mention GPL. Quote RMS: That's part of the freedom. You can make copies and sell it. Everyone has the freedom to do that. Except that in addition to selling it, you have to offer it for free, too. (minus assembly, heh). Hmmmm, commerce through ignorance? That must be Rad Hat's plan. Sell shiny boxes for $70, don't let on that you can get it for free if you ask. (The gurus know anyway). Yeah, great idea! ---- New sig: free as in "shipping on orders of $99 or more of merchandise, excluding gift-wrap charges and taxes" or free as in "-fall"?
...all embedded and/or otherwise non-interacting technology: you plug it in, you get the storage. Who cares what OS is on? As long as it doesn't crash.
Which is the key criterion: doesn't crash. I'd rather be locked in than locked out.
Sarah, I don't have time to talk about the issue at length, but the short version is that I agree with you rather than the person your parent was replying to.
The reason I'm replying is to ask about your low uid. Will you tell me about some of your professional qualifications? Maybe it would be easiest if you emailed me a resume. (see my user info), with your personal information stripped if you like.
If you answer, I'll have some questions to ask you about the role of women in the IT industry (on slashdot this is most apparent when anonymous posters are automatically referred to as "he", and from the fact that a much lower percentage of female posters sign their name than of male, perhaps because it's easier to be taken seriously / not get harrassed that way.)
Anyway, if you're not interested in this discussion, you can tell me that, also.
incidentally, did you ever come up with any interesting ways to make it more difficult to decompile your code?
I'm thinking java probably doesn't compile variable names or anything into packages, and any systematic munging you do to the structure (reversing if statements or whatever) can just as easily be systematically unmunged...what is there that's easily obscurable?
Slashdot Mirror
No.
Then you can't bloody well read it, can you?
I have a clock that by definition is more accurate.
It consists of a cesium atom.
Do you know what I would do with a flexible plastic monitor? Here's my top ten list:
And remember -- the suggestions above are just the beginning -- with your own flexible plastic monitor or TV the possibilities are endless!
Enjoy responsibly!!!
[1] but the ice cream is poisoned (that's bad). But it comes with your choice of free toppings! (that's good) the toppings are also poisoned. (that's bad.)
insert something about holst.
I suppose you could use one time passwords and such...
You could NOT use one-time passwords, unless you can do bitwise XORing in your head and remember as many bits as you'll ever type. If you can do both those, then you can do RSA in your head too. (Okay, that's a lie, but for our purposes...)
Except when we read "password" as "session key", meaning that text following the password is not sent in the clear, but always changed by a function involving the session key, there's no such thing as a one-time password. Since AIM doesn't have anything that includes that "function", you can only use a session key by doing the operations in your head.
So, no-go.
If you are willing to use an unsecure transport layer, I have the net:AIM module running on my server, sandboxed with access only to ssh. (It's just for me and a few friends, when we have to be at a public computer and want to log in to do something quickly. A web interface might be easier, but this was just a few pipes).
To log in, query
AIM: jkpsmdto5fny
with "HLO". You will receive instructions on supplying a server to connect to and username / password (again, this will be sent over the AIM network in the clear). Obviously, this is textmode ssh, so there are some limitations, but you should be able to do most of what you want to get done. (Excluding using some programs like vi, obviously).
and your best bet would probably be to spin your own quick web interface -- if whatever you're using to access (cell phone, etc), has AIM support, it can probably connect to an https site as well -- and that's real security.
An SSL license runs you something like $100.
Also: I believe that Microsoft must be destroyed.
y'know, anything "for public or commercial viewing" is much more expensive -- unless you live in a country where the FCC is generally disregarded. (As opposed to the US, where we fear for our personal liberty when doing so much as talking in a public forum about using content outside of the letter of its license, or regarding changes we might make to the devices accompanying this license, though we pay for them and use them in the privacy of our homes).
But if you're not in a Free-as-in-to-get-extorted-by-the-media-cartels country, then I guess that's not a consideration.
In the US, a DVD for private viewing an indefinite number of times costs well under twenty bucks, but
"
Screening a film outside of the home requires a license from the film studio or a distributor. Licences range from $125 - $1000 depending on the film.
"
Source
Note that this is from a small, independant film club! And even they're playing strictly by the rules of extortion, because they're afraid not to.
Of course, chances are that in Bolivia you have more personal liberty than you would in the US, and do not have to pay protection fees to agencies of extortion sanctioned by the very Federal Government. [1]
Anyway, good luck with everything.
Also: I believe that Microsoft must be annihilated.
~Robert.
ps. Once more, just to make me shudder:
Of course, chances are that in Bolivia you have more personal liberty than you would in the US.
[1]
(A run-down of extortion: We make it so that for what you want, you need to pay more than is reasonable, because we have distribution locked down. If you do not agree to pay our price, you must fear for your personal safety. [As in today's Federal prisons, with whose conditions we are all familiar.])
Protein folding distributed analysis by IBM...folded. I heard something about cycles for cancer, but I can't find a link.
RIGHT NOW, what can I use my spare cycles for, besides SETI?
Sure, "more hardware is available for less dough", but you get what you pay for...
Sorry, I'm not very up on my Mac development...Does this mean TK apps will magically be sourcelevel cocoa-fied?
will buy Apple, and one third of the slashbots of the world will have a collective heart attack.
(and don't think it can't happen - $40 billion is nothing to sneeze at disdainfully)
but one thing I rememer hearing much about karpov, back when kasparov was beaten, was that he, though not world champion, would have made a more interesting match against computerland, because of the fact that he focuses less on tactics (trying to out-think the computer by looking at combinations into more moves ahead) and more on abstract, pattern-based (such as in go) strategy, at which computers suck. Kasparov proved (insofar as you believe playing conditions were fair) that computers can out tacticate people, but perhaps a person whose style leans more toward abstract strategizing ("I want to keep this column open, because I feel it will be very important later" versus "I want to force the computer to lose that pawn, because I think I can pull off a combination in 43 moves")
i do need to go, but here are some things for children of this post to do:
o Look up some original reference (I saw many, many) that talked about how Kasparov's playing style is perhaps less suited to showcasing humanity's superiority to computers than Karpov's was)
o Look up whether Kramnik most resembles Karpov's or Kasparov's style.
One last thing.
Is it still true that in Go, computers play with a 14-move advantage and still lose to people who aren't even world-champion? Go is a game in which, because at each point in the game, it is unclear what groups of stones are alive and what are dead, pattern-based thinking is much more important. Would Karpov (and perhaps Kramnik) have made a better Go player than chess player?
When I come back, I'll add more to the thread, to anyone who wishes to discuss it.
It's been done.
Remember dongles of a by-gone era? (They were hardware that would "activate" your game by returning the proper answer to challenges given through the serial/parallel/etc. port). /lots/ of the game logic in the hardware? Besides fancy graphics, etc, I bet you could basically /cripple/ a game by having the basic maps/character stats/whatever be controlled by secure hardware attached on a USB slot. Since this solution would cost far less than the $49.95 for which a next-generation game retails today, why don't we see more "cheating isn't possible" solutions based on having lots of the "easy" (low-computing power) solutions based on a dongle attached via USB?
Well, why don't gaming industries today make dongles that have
(don't mind the yellow)
Although the performance audit showed that IBM researchers were churning out code at a steady rate, Lehman found the level of debugging activity per individual software module to be decreasing at an equal rate; in other words, programmers were spending less and less time fixing problems in the code. Unless IBM programmers had suddenly figured out a way to write error-free code -- an unlikely assumption -- Lehman made a dire prediction: OS/360 was heading over a cliff. IBM, in stressing growth over source-code maintenance, would soon be in need of a successor operating system.
Except that the "[dire] need of a successor operating system" isn't so dire at all: the world's richest man didn't get where he got by writing code that didn't need to be replaced by a successor operating system, did he? The whole premise is to produce something that works now, and when it stops working later, you sell a later version. Heck, just a couple of months ago, Billy announced that 92.3% of the calendar year would focus on new code, leaving the rest for the old.
What's smarter, coding the Microsoft way, or coding a server that's been up since before Windows NT was released, without a patch in 7 years, handling half a megabit of data both upstream and down, every second of every day forever. Where's the revenue?
~r~
Note: the 92.3% figure might only be for the year 2002, with later years being still closer to 100%.
I just about wet myself reading this, as it is an almost thought-for-thought transcription of this anecdote regarding John von Neumann (I trust you've heard of him):
source
Now think ahead 20 years.
What's wrong with RTF? It looks nice, and it works in almost everything.
/exact/ result: major disaster if your client has a different idea of how the document "should" look, based on the RTF "description".)
/always/ end up biting the bullet and learning LaTeX (or however the capitalization goes.) It separates content from presentation, and guarantees you presentation. Basically, it's like "post-script" above, only human-editable : it was designed as a type-setting language (for equations and such) but has grown to be the only open, not-subject-to-change, not licensed (unlike PDF, from what I understand) standard, besides post-script, that people use to fix an exact "look" without having to result to a screen-capture of print preview.
awhile ago there was a comment by an office worker who simply could not find anything better than ms word to keep versioning, and a consistent presentation. To the point that she used filters to modify word files as word files, even though she was working on linux.
Honestly, the reason you'll see some things online only in 1) post-script 2) pdf, is because nothing else "guarantees" the look you want. I wouldn't be surprised if the same rtf file paginates to whole pages more or less than the "original", depending on your client, printer driver, etc.
Basically, from what I understand, RTF isn't much better than HTML. Sure, my resume is in HTML: but I don't care if the text looks different on my potential-employer's computer from my own. This would be a different story if I were preparing a complex item to present (think complex interaction of columns, headings, inserted pictures with captions, everything only looking "just right" after major tweaking of 0.5 font points in order to fine-tune the
One last thing: this is also why people who research the question further than the woman I quoted above
I haven't looked at all this in detail, however, and could be wrong.
This is an important question though, so anyone who knows more than I do, please post your thoughts!
anyone know why people would normally pay cyberdrive for 20 megs of web storage, when yahoo gives you 30 megs for free?
Oh, and
Point 1: "Connect to Briefcase from your Windows desktop with the Yahoo! Drive Client. Drag and drop or save files directly to Briefcase from any application." (same page).
Point 2: on Linux you'd get the same functionality without running a foreign exe to modify your OS [!], but rather by mounting a ten-line Perl script of your own design, to proxy the http connection as though it were your web browser.
Point 3: This, incidentally, is why people use Windows.
"Marks noted that contrary to Hodge's assertion, 50 percent of royalties generated by webcasting would go directly to recording artists."
I'd look up the word "royalties" right about now. I'd look at that definition long and hard.
...sounds great...until you mention GPL.
Quote RMS:
That's part of the freedom. You can make copies and sell it. Everyone has the freedom to do that.
Except that in addition to selling it, you have to offer it for free, too. (minus assembly, heh). Hmmmm, commerce through ignorance? That must be Rad Hat's plan. Sell shiny boxes for $70, don't let on that you can get it for free if you ask. (The gurus know anyway).
Yeah, great idea!
----
New sig:
free as in "shipping on orders of $99 or more of merchandise, excluding gift-wrap charges and taxes" or free as in "-fall"?
...all embedded and/or otherwise non-interacting technology: you plug it in, you get the storage. Who cares what OS is on? As long as it doesn't crash.
Which is the key criterion: doesn't crash.
I'd rather be locked in than locked out.
Sarah,
I don't have time to talk about the issue at length, but the short version is that I agree with you rather than the person your parent was replying to.
The reason I'm replying is to ask about your low uid. Will you tell me about some of your professional qualifications? Maybe it would be easiest if you emailed me a resume. (see my user info), with your personal information stripped if you like.
If you answer, I'll have some questions to ask you about the role of women in the IT industry (on slashdot this is most apparent when anonymous posters are automatically referred to as "he", and from the fact that a much lower percentage of female posters sign their name than of male, perhaps because it's easier to be taken seriously / not get harrassed that way.)
Anyway, if you're not interested in this discussion, you can tell me that, also.
Robert.
incidentally, did you ever come up with any interesting ways to make it more difficult to decompile your code?
I'm thinking java probably doesn't compile variable names or anything into packages, and any systematic munging you do to the structure (reversing if statements or whatever) can just as easily be systematically unmunged...what is there that's easily obscurable?
and you went to -1 from 2 in the time it took me to post that... (literally)