The rotating headlights on the Volvo safety concept car are hardly a new feature - they were present on the far more attractive Citroen DS, amongst many other features before its time.
Quantum encryption - in the only form I've heard about - needs special hardware, a continuous fibre optic cable between the two parties who want to exchange data.
AFAIK It is thought to be unbreakable at the moment, but it can't be used over existing data networks. It doesn't have a lot to do with quantum computing.
Nearly all multiplayer games have rules - a multiplayer system without rules is just a glorified chat server. We expect the server to implement those rules, because we cannot trust the clients. You cannot trust the clients, because they may not be running the code you sent them unmodified and you wil not be able to tell. I can modify any code running on my PC, which makes it very easy for me to cheat.
I wrote a paper on p2p multiplayer games for my Masters degree, and this was the major obstacle to p2p games I identified. There are ways around it, but competitive p2p games are a whole different world to cooperative p2p applications like file sharing.
And of course they rule out 90% of the best bot designers in the world by only allowing US teams to enter.
Anyhow I don't think a battlebot-style machine will win this. They said the terrain will be navigable by a pick-up truck, so my first idea would be... a modified pick-up truck.
I connect via JANET in the UK and haven't noticed any delays yet (17:55CET). Still, I wonder what will happen when all the dial-up users connect (the phone charges get cheaper at 6PM BST, 7PM CET).
I agree - and if they're triangulating the phone's position from the base stations, then the position data isn't being emitted by the cellphones at all. That data only appears at the base stations.
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers
on
ROX Desktop Update
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· Score: 2, Funny
One of the icons on the bottom of the screenshot looks supiciously like !Edit, as well...
All they need now is a 'Filecore in use' error every now and then.
'plan to?' Manchester University has had such a scheme for a year now. It takes up a quarter of the Windows background while you're using the PC and turns into a screen saver while you're not using the PC. Come over and have a look if you want.
I'm not too bothered about it; It generates us a bit of income so we can afford CD burners and I've become immune to adverts anyway.
I am not an electrican but as far as I know RS232 is a horrible standard to implement, requiring +15V and -15V signals - requiring voltage converter chips to run from a battery. In my limited experience some devices get away with using +/-10V, 0 and 10V and other levels. The problems here may be due to both the Palm and the motherboard using half-baked RS232 implementations - if the motherboard was expecting 0-10V and actually got +/-15V.
I'm sure someone more versed in electronic engineering could correct or confirm this. Then again, it may be a USB problem anyway.
Try holding your finger in front of your monitor and see if you can hold it there for more than a few minutes. Touch screens are more intuitive, but they're useless for larger amounts of GUI work.
Re:Has anyone actually measured the clock rate ofC
on
Clockless Computing?
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· Score: 1
I know 'certain chip manufacturers' put in extra pipeline stages which increase the clock rate of the chip but actually degrade performance.
Most people will use the clock rate as a measure of the chip's performance so if you're designing a chip for end users then it makes more marketing sense to make a chip with a higher clock rate than one with a better performance.
Nearly right; some of the Amulet processors are code-compatible with the ARM cores; the core itself is completely new. The ARM cores (ARM6-ARM10) themselves aren't asynchronous.
Asynchronous CPUs exist. Have a look here. It's a commercial 32-bit system-on-chip with an Amulet asynchronous core. Even that article's a year old.
Re:I think we'd have more important problems
on
Rebooting The World?
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· Score: 1
As well as writing ARM code, I can cook, brew beer and I know enough about gardening and setting traps to keep myself alive. I don't see any reason to believe that geeks are any worse at survival techniques than the vast majority of the western world.
Those who live in harsh environments now (Aborginals, Inuit, some Africans for example) will have a better chance to survive, and possibly those in the Army. Nobody else (IMHO) has any better chance of survival than anyone else.
The rate at which we develop new technology will depend on demand rather than technical ability, as it does now. If we loose all our tools, there will be a much greater initial demand for agricutural equipment. That said, I think the development of computers will take off quicker than it did in the 1940s because people will know just how important they'll be.
As a side note, some very simple but essential things turn out to be very difficult to manufacture from scratch. For example, it's very difficult to make a screw thread because the device which makes them (a lathe) requires a screw thread to operate.
The other side of the same argument is that you can use solar, wind energy et cetera to turn carbon dioxide, monoxide and water back into petrol (gas?), diesel or whatever. I don't know if effective processes exist to do it, but I know it's possible.
I've seen earlier a good argument that these scramjets are just as capable of producing noxides as your car is, so it seems hydrogen isn't any worse or better at polluting than other fuels; just more suitable for some purposes.
Absolutely. Forget invasion of privacy, rights to free speech: the most worrying thing I saw in this article was the idea that justice is dependent on wealth.
As much as I like England, I feel ashamed and worried that I live in the same country which allows this man to continue working.
doesn't mean it isn't art. I think computer hardware and software can be as expressive a medium as oil paint, sculpture or poetry but I think a lot of people regard it as purely functional because it is so useful.
Imagine two news stories: both communicate the same information about an event, but one is well written and one isn't. Functionally, they're equivalent, but one is more artistic (by my definition of artistic, anyway). Both are examples of the same medium, but I don't know of any newspaper reporters who are as well respected as poets.
From my own experience the parts of computer programming that are most artistic are those without an obvious purpose - INTERCAL and wmDiscoTux (XMMS plugin) spring to mind. Artistic programmers stop being artistic when their employers tell them just to produce functionally correct code; then they're programming to get a paycheck, not for the sake of programming.
Another problem is visibility, of course - if no-one's going to inspect your source code to notice that you shaved 4ms off a loop using some of the most elegant, cunning self-modifying code, then the motivation for doing it falls away.
BTW I don't mean to imply that other forms of art aren't useful, just (IMHO) less so.
businesses can still communicate securely, but criminals will be stopped since the government has their information.
I agree with your motives but when the government or some other 'authority' attempts to put restrictions on everyone to stop criminals from operating - in this case, privacy on the net - it's nearly always the criminals who find a way around it while legitimate businesses and citizens have to put up with the restriction. I get the feeling of Big Brother reading my emails, while the terrorists get completely secure communication.
If you try to suppress this encryption system, you can bet criminals will discover it and start using it while the general public aren't aware it even exists - and before the police are aware as well, knowing the standard of police in my country. Surely it's better to give everyone the technology so the balance can't be tipped in crimnal's favour?
Slashdot Mirror
The rotating headlights on the Volvo safety concept car are hardly a new feature - they were present on the far more attractive Citroen DS, amongst many other features before its time.
this heat has cooled to minus 270 degrees
Funny, I've always thought going from -272 degrees to -270 degress is called heating.
Vinegar is mostly water. The reason your vinaigrette dresssing separates is the same reason oil doesn't mix with water.
In my opinion vinaigrette shouldn't be emulsified, so I don't see how this 'discovery' adds anything to salad dressings.
Quantum encryption - in the only form I've heard about - needs special hardware, a continuous fibre optic cable between the two parties who want to exchange data.
AFAIK It is thought to be unbreakable at the moment, but it can't be used over existing data networks. It doesn't have a lot to do with quantum computing.
Nearly all multiplayer games have rules - a multiplayer system without rules is just a glorified chat server. We expect the server to implement those rules, because we cannot trust the clients. You cannot trust the clients, because they may not be running the code you sent them unmodified and you wil not be able to tell. I can modify any code running on my PC, which makes it very easy for me to cheat.
I wrote a paper on p2p multiplayer games for my Masters degree, and this was the major obstacle to p2p games I identified. There are ways around it, but competitive p2p games are a whole different world to cooperative p2p applications like file sharing.
I did that for a demonstration once - I only realised afterwards that what I'd been asking people to sniff was mostly benzene...
Credit to TV Go Home for that one
And of course they rule out 90% of the best bot designers in the world by only allowing US teams to enter.
Anyhow I don't think a battlebot-style machine will win this. They said the terrain will be navigable by a pick-up truck, so my first idea would be... a modified pick-up truck.
A less extreme way is to dissolve as much salt as you possibly can in a pint of milk - you can't detect it by smell.
I connect via JANET in the UK and haven't noticed any delays yet (17:55CET). Still, I wonder what will happen when all the dial-up users connect (the phone charges get cheaper at 6PM BST, 7PM CET).
I agree - and if they're triangulating the phone's position from the base stations, then the position data isn't being emitted by the cellphones at all. That data only appears at the base stations.
One of the icons on the bottom of the screenshot looks supiciously like !Edit, as well...
All they need now is a 'Filecore in use' error every now and then.
'plan to?' Manchester University has had such a scheme for a year now. It takes up a quarter of the Windows background while you're using the PC and turns into a screen saver while you're not using the PC. Come over and have a look if you want.
I'm not too bothered about it; It generates us a bit of income so we can afford CD burners and I've become immune to adverts anyway.
I am not an electrican but as far as I know RS232 is a horrible standard to implement, requiring +15V and -15V signals - requiring voltage converter chips to run from a battery. In my limited experience some devices get away with using +/-10V, 0 and 10V and other levels. The problems here may be due to both the Palm and the motherboard using half-baked RS232 implementations - if the motherboard was expecting 0-10V and actually got +/-15V.
I'm sure someone more versed in electronic engineering could correct or confirm this. Then again, it may be a USB problem anyway.
By Robert M Pirsig. Our computer hardware lecturer made it one of his course texts.
Try holding your finger in front of your monitor and see if you can hold it there for more than a few minutes. Touch screens are more intuitive, but they're useless for larger amounts of GUI work.
I know 'certain chip manufacturers' put in extra pipeline stages which increase the clock rate of the chip but actually degrade performance.
Most people will use the clock rate as a measure of the chip's performance so if you're designing a chip for end users then it makes more marketing sense to make a chip with a higher clock rate than one with a better performance.
Nearly right; some of the Amulet processors are code-compatible with the ARM cores; the core itself is completely new. The ARM cores (ARM6-ARM10) themselves aren't asynchronous.
Asynchronous CPUs exist. Have a look here. It's a commercial 32-bit system-on-chip with an Amulet asynchronous core. Even that article's a year old.
As well as writing ARM code, I can cook, brew beer and I know enough about gardening and setting traps to keep myself alive. I don't see any reason to believe that geeks are any worse at survival techniques than the vast majority of the western world.
Those who live in harsh environments now (Aborginals, Inuit, some Africans for example) will have a better chance to survive, and possibly those in the Army. Nobody else (IMHO) has any better chance of survival than anyone else.
The rate at which we develop new technology will depend on demand rather than technical ability, as it does now. If we loose all our tools, there will be a much greater initial demand for agricutural equipment. That said, I think the development of computers will take off quicker than it did in the 1940s because people will know just how important they'll be.
As a side note, some very simple but essential things turn out to be very difficult to manufacture from scratch. For example, it's very difficult to make a screw thread because the device which makes them (a lathe) requires a screw thread to operate.
The other side of the same argument is that you can use solar, wind energy et cetera to turn carbon dioxide, monoxide and water back into petrol (gas?), diesel or whatever. I don't know if effective processes exist to do it, but I know it's possible.
I've seen earlier a good argument that these scramjets are just as capable of producing noxides as your car is, so it seems hydrogen isn't any worse or better at polluting than other fuels; just more suitable for some purposes.
Absolutely. Forget invasion of privacy, rights to free speech: the most worrying thing I saw in this article was the idea that justice is dependent on wealth.
As much as I like England, I feel ashamed and worried that I live in the same country which allows this man to continue working.
doesn't mean it isn't art. I think computer hardware and software can be as expressive a medium as oil paint, sculpture or poetry but I think a lot of people regard it as purely functional because it is so useful.
Imagine two news stories: both communicate the same information about an event, but one is well written and one isn't. Functionally, they're equivalent, but one is more artistic (by my definition of artistic, anyway). Both are examples of the same medium, but I don't know of any newspaper reporters who are as well respected as poets.
From my own experience the parts of computer programming that are most artistic are those without an obvious purpose - INTERCAL and wmDiscoTux (XMMS plugin) spring to mind. Artistic programmers stop being artistic when their employers tell them just to produce functionally correct code; then they're programming to get a paycheck, not for the sake of programming.
Another problem is visibility, of course - if no-one's going to inspect your source code to notice that you shaved 4ms off a loop using some of the most elegant, cunning self-modifying code, then the motivation for doing it falls away.
BTW I don't mean to imply that other forms of art aren't useful, just (IMHO) less so.
businesses can still communicate securely, but criminals will be stopped since the government has their information.
I agree with your motives but when the government or some other 'authority' attempts to put restrictions on everyone to stop criminals from operating - in this case, privacy on the net - it's nearly always the criminals who find a way around it while legitimate businesses and citizens have to put up with the restriction. I get the feeling of Big Brother reading my emails, while the terrorists get completely secure communication.
If you try to suppress this encryption system, you can bet criminals will discover it and start using it while the general public aren't aware it even exists - and before the police are aware as well, knowing the standard of police in my country. Surely it's better to give everyone the technology so the balance can't be tipped in crimnal's favour?