TomTom takes anonymized location information from mobile phone handsets in The Netherlands, and make traffic reports they call HD traffic.
The handsets are not (necessarily) equipped with GPS chips, but their location is triangulated by the GSM network itself. The mobile network (Vodafone NL) supplies the information to TomTom, who then process it into traffic reports.
They claim to cover 10 times more roadarea than conventional traffic detection that uses inductive loops embedded in the roads. (The conventional system is already quite extensive in The Netherlands, which is a small and densely populated country). I seem to recall TomTom also have some sort of patent.
I've used XSL:FO extensively, though with the commercial RenderX Xep formatter (which is a lot more compliant than fop, and less buggy; unfortunately my company rather paid licensing than fix the open source fop).
XSL:FO is fine for rendering business correspondence, even invoices with complex tables, etc.
But it doesn't provide LaTeX's advanced features for image placement, automatic numbering of sections and figures, and especially lacks in the department of footnotes and endnotes.
Crossreferences are hard to add and keep track of; this is usually solved in XSLT preprocessing, which is a bit kludgy and can be associated with bad performance (especially if you're not using xsl:key, and are stuck with XSLT 1.0).
Most renderers use fairly naive typesetting, comparable to word or a webbrowser. Xep at least has hyphenation down; in fact, they use TeX hyphenation resource files. Nevertheless, customers often complain about window/orphan control (or rather; "i just want to add some enters so it looks nicer" which doesn't really work that way with variable input)
XSL:FO on a feature basis is basically XHTML+CSS with some features (margins, headers and footers, pagenumbering) included that make sense if you know the output is paginated. Don't expect more out of it than that, and you'll be fine.
As this liliputing article points out, this is a rebrand of a common product (razorbook, elonex one, etc.). The linux distribution is, well, unknown, and the specs are less than impressive; basically it's a MIPS32 CPU, PDA rather than laptop range. Liliputing also has a $99 laptop on their homepage right now, with even less impressive specs.
American mortgages already are, for the most part, non-recourse loans. That means, if you mail the keys to the bank, your debt is settled. The phenomenon is known as 'jingle mail'. Only home line of equity loans and refinancing loans tend to be recourse loans. 'Walking away' does wreck your credit score, but that's not much of an issue for people who never had a great score to begin with - i.e. subprime lendees.
Even though the majority of mortgages is non-recourse, that didn't put the risk on the banks, as they sold off mortgage debts to investors. Those investors relied on ratings of default risk that were based on inaccurate historical data (there simply wasn't any historical data for huge loans made to people without verified income) and given by rating bureaus who weren't disinterested parties, but rather paid by the people selling on the debt. Still, the investors lapped it up, causing underwriting standards to lower and lower.
These investors end up holding the bag, as well as their creditors - which, ironically, brings us back to the banks, who didn't want this 'toxic waste' (as they called it) on their balance, but who did finance highly 'leveraged' investment funds.
The current crisis is a direct result of bad credit risk management, enabled by a complete lack of regulation. Sometimes the 'invisible hand' punches you right in the face, repeatedly.
You really notice the lack of noises when you're logged on to some system remotely using a GUI. Double click something, and if there's no immediate reaction (or hourglass..) the system seems unresponsive. If you were sitting at the machine, you'd hear buzzing and whirring as *something* happens in the background. If I were marketing nifty thinnish-client solutions, I'd make sure there's always some sort of activity indicator (CPU, disk,..) on the screen, so the system seems as responsive as a local client.
The Disk encryption theory article on wikipedia lists some modes of operation that are practical for disk encryption, most notably XTS, which is used by truecrypt. Wikipedia also lists different disk encryption apps, and the modes of operation they use.
The TomTom/Vodafone system doesn't use GPS coordinates being sent by mobiles, it only uses triangulation to work out where handsets are, and how fast they're moving. Highways are already equipped with detection loops every half mile or so, so this is mostly useful for smaller roads. It won't detect roads where cars are at a complete standstill though, if the phone isn't moving fast enough (e.g. less than, say, 4mph) it'll assume the phone's just in the pocket of someone who isn't in a car.
Can anyone give one legitimate reason why anyone would need to "trial" a domain? Is that to see how it looks in the browser's address bar?
The trial period isn't a convenience to the end user, it's for the registrar's convenience. If the registrar finds that the end user doesn't pay up, they get off the hook for paying the registry out of their own pocket, as long as they find out the customer is a deadbeat within the first 30 days.
The thing is, with all this sniffing of whois queries going on, you can't wait for a transaction to clear before registering the domain, because by that time, some hijacker will have registered the domain. So solving one problem makes the other worse, making the original problem more acute, etc.
From what I've heard around the county I live in, shoes on the powerlines indicates that there are drug dealers on whatever street they are hanging over.
Actually, it's the drug users that throw the shoes up there. Drug pushers are for some reason (a mystery to medical science) compulsively driven to powerlines with shoes hanging from them. Obviously this is seen as a big problem for the drug dealing community, which is trying to enter the 21st century, leveraging such fast-paced technologies as 'two-way pagers' and 'cellular telephones'. They find themselves involuntarily skulking around power lines in every sort of weather, knowing full well they could be successful drug deals in the back of the local chuck-e-cheese, but find themselves incapable of breaking the spell of such a powerful lure.
Or maybe it's some sort of urban legend or something, and it's just, like, kids with nothing better to do throwing up some shoes. Dunno.
Challenges abound, though. Zac Richardson, a power-line engineer with National Grid in the UK, warns that if the MAV contacts an 11-kilovolt local power line, it could short circuit two conductors, causing an automatic disconnection of the very power the plane seeks.
Why do they assume the UAV would be conductive? Wouldn't your best bet for tapping energy off power lines be to simply use induction? You don't even need to land on the lines themselves; a fluorescent tube light will light up at yards from the power line.
Do National Grid power-line engineers not know of this?
average users require fewer resources than even today's cheapest PCs have
If I had a dime for everytime someone complained about their lowend PC being "too slow!" and then finding out it only has 512MB of RAM, I'd.. well, I would've earned a couple of bucks anyway..
Selling a PC with less than a gig (or 2, if it comes with Vista preinstalled) is downright criminal.
Sure, average moes won't stress the CPU or play high end video games, but visiting a few Jpop-video rich myspace pages, while skype'ing and IM'ing at the same time does kinda require RAM.
The funny thing is, even high school dropouts in the Netherlands are likely to speak English, French, and German quite well (though they often hold back on speaking German for, uh, cultural reasons). They are a stone's throw from countries speaking those languages, and unlike many other places, when they import television shows, they keep the original languages and add the subtitles in Dutch.
Plus the Dutch language is not deep in terms of dimensional vocabulary. While the Eskimos may have 70 words for snow, Dutch probably has one. I remember watching a movie and the English line was something like "the pain doesn't hurt" and the Dutch translation was "Pijn is nicht pijn" - Pain is not pain.
Probably "De pijn doet geen pijn". I'm not sure what you mean by dimensional vocabulary. Dutch doesn't have as many words as English (in part because English is so widely spoken, words from many sources are incorporated), but "hurt" as well as "pain" can be both verbs as well as nouns in English too.. ("the hurt doesn't pain me"). So, I'm not sure what you mean by dimensional vocabulary, or how it would aid Dutch people in speaking other languages.
As a Dutchman, I'd have to say I'm not at all confident in my ability to speak French or German, and am quite embarrassed by my countrymen's attempts at English on occasion..
If you've ever tried WHOIS'ing a domain in the process of being registered, transferred or dropped it should be quite obvious WHOIS isn't used.
Besides, the availability database doesn't contain (nor does it need to) registrant's (private) information. In the case of com/net/org, that information is kept at the registrar, rather than at the registry. Some newfangled registries do keep those details centrally, but an API for checking availability wouldn't need to return it.
As another site usually puts it "the real WTF is..." that they don't use 128 bit identifiers.
If only if there was some sort of, I don't know, scheme for identifiers that has approximately 2^122 possible values, fits in 128 bits, has a standard notation and is supported by major databases as an 'auto increment' field.. With that many values, you could almost assume that using some sort of randomized value is bound to be unique - perhaps even universally unique. You could call it Globally Unique IDentifier (GUID) or UUID, I guess.
Read the thread. This isn't a developer admitting to spying on users. This is debate over a new feature written to help you keep from getting your blog haxored. They are collecting server and plugin data to help you to keep your software up to date.
What you say? A centralized database that stores information on thousands of websites plugins and versionnumbers for the express purpose of identifying easy to exploit websites?
Surely such a list would be of no interest whatsoever to, say, hackers.
Nope, seems perfectly reasonably to have your software send information about your (potential) vulnerabilities to such a list, especially if it's automatic and switching it off requires some sort of plugin.
let's say pin 1 is connected to pin 5, and 4 and 8 are never connected. Or maybe 8 isn't even connected to anything. The other end can simply test if there's a connection between 1 and 5; if not, the plug was flipped. Worst case you waste 1.5 pins.
Same concept could apply to a circular plug that has pins arranged along its circumference; no way to plug it in wrong.
All inventions are ideas and hence all patents cover ideas.
But not all ideas are inventions.
"It would be neat to have some sort of miniaturized labrador dog that is trained to attack cancer cells" is an idea.
"Here's a 23 step program to train labrador dogs to attack cancer cells once they're miniturized" and "Here's how to build a miniturization ray machine" are inventions. And the latter is patentable even though the idea of a miniturization ray machine is obvious to anyone who's seen "Honey, I shrunk the kids" - the way to do it isn't, since it hasn't been invented yet.
Why is there credit card information on your workstations? Seriously wondering; I'd expect transactions to only hit some web and database servers (which should have logging, firewalls etc.); if people are looking at lists of transactions, the last 4 numbers of cards should suffice to read out to customers, that's the sort of thing I'd expect to happen on workstations.
One of NT4's design goals was Military security ratings. I liked the feature where you could tell the system to only run 9 different preset executables.
Hmm, the policy I've seen to restrict the use of executables only looked at the filename. Rename some file netscape.exe and you were in. Windows server 2003 has the much nicer policy (if XP clients are used) to check executables SHA-1 digest (which breaks when an update is applied), or certificate (but then, you might not want updated binaries to automatically be allowed to run).
The iPhone reduces my need to open my laptop by about 60%.
And this would not, could not have happened, if instead of an iPhone, you would have purchased a blackberry or windows-mobile based phone? Which have been available now for years?
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TomTom takes anonymized location information from mobile phone handsets in The Netherlands, and make traffic reports they call HD traffic.
The handsets are not (necessarily) equipped with GPS chips, but their location is triangulated by the GSM network itself. The mobile network (Vodafone NL) supplies the information to TomTom, who then process it into traffic reports.
They claim to cover 10 times more roadarea than conventional traffic detection that uses inductive loops embedded in the roads. (The conventional system is already quite extensive in The Netherlands, which is a small and densely populated country). I seem to recall TomTom also have some sort of patent.
Long term option? Not at all. The oil in Alaska and offshore doesn't last forever. It is a mid term solution at best.
Snakes on the other hand can simply be bred, making snakeoil a renewable and CO2 neutral resource.
I've used XSL:FO extensively, though with the commercial RenderX Xep formatter (which is a lot more compliant than fop, and less buggy; unfortunately my company rather paid licensing than fix the open source fop).
XSL:FO is fine for rendering business correspondence, even invoices with complex tables, etc.
But it doesn't provide LaTeX's advanced features for image placement, automatic numbering of sections and figures, and especially lacks in the department of footnotes and endnotes.
Crossreferences are hard to add and keep track of; this is usually solved in XSLT preprocessing, which is a bit kludgy and can be associated with bad performance (especially if you're not using xsl:key, and are stuck with XSLT 1.0).
Most renderers use fairly naive typesetting, comparable to word or a webbrowser. Xep at least has hyphenation down; in fact, they use TeX hyphenation resource files. Nevertheless, customers often complain about window/orphan control (or rather; "i just want to add some enters so it looks nicer" which doesn't really work that way with variable input)
XSL:FO on a feature basis is basically XHTML+CSS with some features (margins, headers and footers, pagenumbering) included that make sense if you know the output is paginated. Don't expect more out of it than that, and you'll be fine.
LaTeX however provides a lot more functionality.
As this liliputing article points out, this is a rebrand of a common product (razorbook, elonex one, etc.).
The linux distribution is, well, unknown, and the specs are less than impressive; basically it's a MIPS32 CPU, PDA rather than laptop range. Liliputing also has a $99 laptop on their homepage right now, with even less impressive specs.
American mortgages already are, for the most part, non-recourse loans. That means, if you mail the keys to the bank, your debt is settled. The phenomenon is known as 'jingle mail'. Only home line of equity loans and refinancing loans tend to be recourse loans. 'Walking away' does wreck your credit score, but that's not much of an issue for people who never had a great score to begin with - i.e. subprime lendees.
Even though the majority of mortgages is non-recourse, that didn't put the risk on the banks, as they sold off mortgage debts to investors. Those investors relied on ratings of default risk that were based on inaccurate historical data (there simply wasn't any historical data for huge loans made to people without verified income) and given by rating bureaus who weren't disinterested parties, but rather paid by the people selling on the debt. Still, the investors lapped it up, causing underwriting standards to lower and lower.
These investors end up holding the bag, as well as their creditors - which, ironically, brings us back to the banks, who didn't want this 'toxic waste' (as they called it) on their balance, but who did finance highly 'leveraged' investment funds.
The current crisis is a direct result of bad credit risk management, enabled by a complete lack of regulation. Sometimes the 'invisible hand' punches you right in the face, repeatedly.
You really notice the lack of noises when you're logged on to some system remotely using a GUI. Double click something, and if there's no immediate reaction (or hourglass..) the system seems unresponsive. If you were sitting at the machine, you'd hear buzzing and whirring as *something* happens in the background. If I were marketing nifty thinnish-client solutions, I'd make sure there's always some sort of activity indicator (CPU, disk, ..) on the screen, so the system seems as responsive as a local client.
The Disk encryption theory article on wikipedia lists some modes of operation that are practical for disk encryption, most notably XTS, which is used by truecrypt. Wikipedia also lists different disk encryption apps, and the modes of operation they use.
(Nobel Prize Winner) F.A. Hayek
Note that this is the "Nobel Prize" in economics, which is kind of like the special olympics.
The TomTom/Vodafone system doesn't use GPS coordinates being sent by mobiles, it only uses triangulation to work out where handsets are, and how fast they're moving. Highways are already equipped with detection loops every half mile or so, so this is mostly useful for smaller roads. It won't detect roads where cars are at a complete standstill though, if the phone isn't moving fast enough (e.g. less than, say, 4mph) it'll assume the phone's just in the pocket of someone who isn't in a car.
Can anyone give one legitimate reason why anyone would need to "trial" a domain? Is that to see how it looks in the browser's address bar?
The trial period isn't a convenience to the end user, it's for the registrar's convenience. If the registrar finds that the end user doesn't pay up, they get off the hook for paying the registry out of their own pocket, as long as they find out the customer is a deadbeat within the first 30 days.
The thing is, with all this sniffing of whois queries going on, you can't wait for a transaction to clear before registering the domain, because by that time, some hijacker will have registered the domain. So solving one problem makes the other worse, making the original problem more acute, etc.
From what I've heard around the county I live in, shoes on the powerlines indicates that there are drug dealers on whatever street they are hanging over.
Actually, it's the drug users that throw the shoes up there. Drug pushers are for some reason (a mystery to medical science) compulsively driven to powerlines with shoes hanging from them. Obviously this is seen as a big problem for the drug dealing community, which is trying to enter the 21st century, leveraging such fast-paced technologies as 'two-way pagers' and 'cellular telephones'. They find themselves involuntarily skulking around power lines in every sort of weather, knowing full well they could be successful drug deals in the back of the local chuck-e-cheese, but find themselves incapable of breaking the spell of such a powerful lure.
Or maybe it's some sort of urban legend or something, and it's just, like, kids with nothing better to do throwing up some shoes. Dunno.
Challenges abound, though. Zac Richardson, a power-line engineer with National Grid in the UK, warns that if the MAV contacts an 11-kilovolt local power line, it could short circuit two conductors, causing an automatic disconnection of the very power the plane seeks.
Why do they assume the UAV would be conductive? Wouldn't your best bet for tapping energy off power lines be to simply use induction? You don't even need to land on the lines themselves; a fluorescent tube light will light up at yards from the power line.
Do National Grid power-line engineers not know of this?
average users require fewer resources than even today's cheapest PCs have
If I had a dime for everytime someone complained about their lowend PC being "too slow!" and then finding out it only has 512MB of RAM, I'd.. well, I would've earned a couple of bucks anyway..
Selling a PC with less than a gig (or 2, if it comes with Vista preinstalled) is downright criminal.
Sure, average moes won't stress the CPU or play high end video games, but visiting a few Jpop-video rich myspace pages, while skype'ing and IM'ing at the same time does kinda require RAM.
Apart from the organs, it sounds suspiciously like the score to the SHO series Dexter. (Not the music on the website, the main title music..)
The one about that serial killer?
Almost every automated system has the equivalent of a voice expert or a speech scientist whose job is to do things like this.
Every time you call an IVR or reach an automated speech system, someone's worked at it to make it not just functional, but also usable and friendly.
Give it a rest. It's only the audio equivalent of an hourglass cursor.
The funny thing is, even high school dropouts in the Netherlands are likely to speak English, French, and German quite well (though they often hold back on speaking German for, uh, cultural reasons). They are a stone's throw from countries speaking those languages, and unlike many other places, when they import television shows, they keep the original languages and add the subtitles in Dutch.
Plus the Dutch language is not deep in terms of dimensional vocabulary. While the Eskimos may have 70 words for snow, Dutch probably has one. I remember watching a movie and the English line was something like "the pain doesn't hurt" and the Dutch translation was "Pijn is nicht pijn" - Pain is not pain.
Probably "De pijn doet geen pijn". I'm not sure what you mean by dimensional vocabulary. Dutch doesn't have as many words as English (in part because English is so widely spoken, words from many sources are incorporated), but "hurt" as well as "pain" can be both verbs as well as nouns in English too.. ("the hurt doesn't pain me"). So, I'm not sure what you mean by dimensional vocabulary, or how it would aid Dutch people in speaking other languages.
As a Dutchman, I'd have to say I'm not at all confident in my ability to speak French or German, and am quite embarrassed by my countrymen's attempts at English on occasion..
The SRS.
If you've ever tried WHOIS'ing a domain in the process of being registered, transferred or dropped it should be quite obvious WHOIS isn't used.
Besides, the availability database doesn't contain (nor does it need to) registrant's (private) information. In the case of com/net/org, that information is kept at the registrar, rather than at the registry. Some newfangled registries do keep those details centrally, but an API for checking availability wouldn't need to return it.
As another site usually puts it "the real WTF is..." that they don't use 128 bit identifiers.
If only if there was some sort of, I don't know, scheme for identifiers that has approximately 2^122 possible values, fits in 128 bits, has a standard notation and is supported by major databases as an 'auto increment' field.. With that many values, you could almost assume that using some sort of randomized value is bound to be unique - perhaps even universally unique. You could call it Globally Unique IDentifier (GUID) or UUID, I guess.
Or... you could just use a black square. Definately loses information.
Read the thread. This isn't a developer admitting to spying on users. This is debate over a new feature written to help you keep from getting your blog haxored. They are collecting server and plugin data to help you to keep your software up to date.
What you say? A centralized database that stores information on thousands of websites plugins and versionnumbers for the express purpose of identifying easy to exploit websites?
Surely such a list would be of no interest whatsoever to, say, hackers.
Nope, seems perfectly reasonably to have your software send information about your (potential) vulnerabilities to such a list, especially if it's automatic and switching it off requires some sort of plugin.
Great idea!
Let's say the pins are numbered as such:
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
let's say pin 1 is connected to pin 5, and 4 and 8 are never connected. Or maybe 8 isn't even connected to anything. The other end can simply test if there's a connection between 1 and 5; if not, the plug was flipped.
Worst case you waste 1.5 pins.
Same concept could apply to a circular plug that has pins arranged along its circumference; no way to plug it in wrong.
All inventions are ideas and hence all patents cover ideas.
But not all ideas are inventions.
"It would be neat to have some sort of miniaturized labrador dog that is trained to attack cancer cells" is an idea.
"Here's a 23 step program to train labrador dogs to attack cancer cells once they're miniturized" and "Here's how to build a miniturization ray machine" are inventions. And the latter is patentable even though the idea of a miniturization ray machine is obvious to anyone who's seen "Honey, I shrunk the kids" - the way to do it isn't, since it hasn't been invented yet.
Why is there credit card information on your workstations? Seriously wondering; I'd expect transactions to only hit some web and database servers (which should have logging, firewalls etc.); if people are looking at lists of transactions, the last 4 numbers of cards should suffice to read out to customers, that's the sort of thing I'd expect to happen on workstations.
Hmm, the policy I've seen to restrict the use of executables only looked at the filename. Rename some file netscape.exe and you were in. Windows server 2003 has the much nicer policy (if XP clients are used) to check executables SHA-1 digest (which breaks when an update is applied), or certificate (but then, you might not want updated binaries to automatically be allowed to run).
The iPhone reduces my need to open my laptop by about 60%.
And this would not, could not have happened, if instead of an iPhone, you would have purchased a blackberry or windows-mobile based phone? Which have been available now for years?