Biometric eye-scanners are notoriously bad at recognising people, and very inaccurate. This article (about a trial of fingerprint-, iris- and face- scanning technology) quotes such figures as 47% accuracy!
The system struggled to identify people if there were wearing spectacles, if the lighting was wrong or if they moved their heads too much.
Apparently, people could fool face-scanning systems (yes, I know they're different) with photos or video images. It doesn't actually say how to fool iris-scanners - but suggests that the trial wasn't convinced of their greatness.
Still, at least they're not going to use fingerprint scanners at the airport as they think they're too easily fooled - the BBC article reckons you can fool those by breathing on them.
I'm not sure whether this kind of security is best placed in an airport - fine for lower-risk security such as getting into your office block, or maybe even for your home burglar alarm - but at an airport with (potentially) massive numbers of subscribers to the system - sounds like a poor idea.
The Australian IT reported on deep scepticism among corporate decision makers about Microsoft's Licensing 6.0, which took effect at the beginning of the month
OK, sounds reasonable. However, when asked about this, M$ came up with (also from the Australian IT article):
Microsoft product marketing manager Danny Beck said organisations had accepted the new licensing model and Windows server sales had enjoyed double-digit growth since 1999.
This doesn't seem to tally. Perhaps he meant the middle finger on each hand?
From my experience, Tomcat 4.x is faster than Apache and JServ.
Don't know how it compares to other servers (at least, from experience I don't), for example IIS, Resin, JRun etc.
Tomcat 3.x WAS very slow - for example, who had to combine Apache and Tomcat to get anything reasonable - using Tomcat for JSP and servlets, and Apache for static pages. This was in itself a bit of a nightmare. Tomcat 4 is miles better.
Comparing JRun to Tomcat for performance, see here.
Compared to Orion and Resin, Tomcat also lost comprehensively.
The arguments raged for a while over performance (for example)- but not many about whether it "did what it said on the tin".
A more serious point here is that your bosses care more about the name and image than the quality. I'd think about trying to convince them that this is Not A Good Idea.
For someone who IS using Tomcat in production, just do a google search; you'll get quite a few, for example.
Seriously though - I wonder how much research Cray are doing into the realms of quantum computing? Couldn't find anything about it on the cray website...
The practice of flooding the system with bad files is far more sinister than most of us realise.
This is actually the next step in the Taliban's fight against capitalism. They are continuing their religious war, attempting to reduce our morale by preventing us listening to music, except in short frustrating bursts of the same 10 seconds.
Their aim is to reduce us, to bring us down from within by sabotaging our right to Good Music In MP3 Format.
Browsers are the complement of servers because the more people using browsers, the more people on the net, looking at websites. People want to make money from web sites - but they need a server to host them. Servers cost a lot of money - at least, big deplotments with lots of bandwidth do at any rate.
And then apache comes along and makes (probably) the best server - and it's free. Bummer. But it takes a lot more than Apache on a single box to make a solid, no downtime webserver.
look no further than here. Note - you may find some of the content to be of the flame-causing variety (self implosion because of either protaganist is not unlikely).
The secret here (I believe), is that if you are involved in a group effort where you have to read (and correct) other people's code, you have to have a two-fold practice.
Develop a set of rules (coding standards), setting out not only comment style but variable naming conventions (e.g. capitals for constants, mixed for locals etc.). Ban things which make the source code several characters shorter but otherwise have no benefit. Make the rules as rigid and as specific as possible, and update them regularly. Then enforce them.
Develop a development cycle - design, code, review, test. The only one that really needs expanding on here is review - ensure that the code meets the coding standards and that it should work. Apart from appearance and conformance with the design, check for things like tight-looping, etc. Don't bother compiling and testing it (the coder should have made sure it compiles and done preliminary testing to make sure it doesn't crash straight away). Just eyeball it. DO NOT BE AFRAID TO BE AS PEDANTIC AS HELL. Whatever grief you'll be giving them they'll give back - as you should review each other's code in the same team (this also makes life easier when it comes to you, the reviewer, fixing a bug in the code at a later date).
With 50 people all writing code for the same project going through this process, you shouldn't be able to tell who wrote which bit.
The disadvantages to this are that it makes coding a bit robot-like - but hell, all the work was done is design anyway. People might also say that typing comments takes too long - but so does having to work out what the code does every time you look at it - instead of it staring you in the face.
If this isn't what you want to hear, then try simply having a block comment for every code block, and a header at the top of every source code file. You should this way have as many lines of comments as lines of actual code. This is not, despite what others may say, a bad thing.
Calling it a concrete rocket is a bit misleading however IMHO - if it is like the boat, it's got a very thin layer of concrete ( < half an inch) over the top of a structure made from another material.
What is more interesting is the concrete - waterproof, high tensile strength, etc. etc.
The amount of AI in computer games must be quite low - or at least, of the VERY artifical variety. Most games will attempt to give the NPCs (non player characters) the appearance of AI, without actually having any. Two main methods go here, I reckon.
(a) "bots" like those in quake, half-life etc. - have a knowledge of where the player is, make the bot face the player and shoot etc. Characterised by them having little or no weapon selection - all of the opponents have only one weapon which they use exclusively. Some have varying tactics, but these usually fall back on range - i.e. shoot from far away, claw at face at point blank. There are small variants to this rule - the marines in half-life for example, throw grenades if you run round corners away from them.
(b) Mass tactics. Games like Dune, starcraft, etc. Build units in the right order, building placements and building rates pre-conceived by the designer at the level- or engine- design stage. Attack in the same way, defend in the same way. No variety, don't deal well with players switching tactics.
There is very little intelligence here - compare with chess games which actually think about the consequences of their actions at "run-time".
Along the lines of several people's causality type arguments, maybe we should have some research on why people get more or less sleep - 'cos if sleep or lack of it is a symptom, then we shouldn't just poo-poo the study. For example:
"In a study of lifestyles and health of the adult population of some Oxfordshire villages, data were collected upon the usual sleep duration and quality, smoking and drinking habits of 725 men and 759 women. A strong negative association has been found between cigarette smoking and sleep duration on both sexes, and between alcohol consumption and sleep duration in men" [Palmer et. al., 1980, from Ann. Hum. Biol.]
Note that the article also found that people who smoked and drank didnt complain of poor quality sleep etc., suggesting that the negative association was down to the fact that they drank and smoked rather than all smokers being antsy, or whatever.
if amor stands for Amusing Misuse Of Resources, what does MD2 stand for?
Must Do 2? Magic Dust 2? or "Mate? Excuse me? Can you think of a good anacronym for our Desktop application? It's the sequel by the way..."
Re:Feeding the trolls but... IT WAS A JOKE
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 1
I don't really care about karma, but I'm offended to be called a troll.
You fucking idiots, for God's sake are you ALL American?
I was joking! Of course my fucking uncle doesn't have a nuclear reactor in his yard! Of course he doesn't! How can he have had a nuclear reactor in his background for years?
You know, sometimes I wonder about you folk. You really ARE dumb aren't you. Still, reminds me to stay in England, where sarcasm isn't just a word in a dictionary.
Last week I found marijuana plants growing in my garden. When I got home a few days later, the swiftly maturing plants had moved into my greenhouse with my other fragile plants under a high power lamp, and were beginning to bear buds.
Is it my fault? I didn't buy them, they just happened to be there. Officer.
I read the article - at least, the first half of it. I didn't get much of it - it's written in scientific biology lingo, which is not my field.
However, and to quote
Although the cytochrome c/Apaf1/caspase-9 apoptosome is essential for several PCD pathways, cells deficient in these molecules can still die. Indeed, cytochrome c, apaf1 and caspase-9 knockout mouse embryos undergo normal, albeit delayed, morphogenesis. Moreover, cell lines derived from these mutant mice are not uniformly resistant to death stimuli, but instead undergo PCD in a manner specific to both cell type and death signal.... Thus, a death effector system other than cytochrome c/Apaf1/caspase-9 must be able to induce PCD.
Josa, Susin et. al. Nature 410, 549
It says quite clearly that this isn't the only way for cells to die. They just do it in a different way that isn't as good. This isn't a wonder chemical/pathway/whatever, it's just an advance in understanding the intricacies of biological systems. This development alone is not going to improve your life at all. Yes, it's interesting, if you're a biologist, but that's all.
If you think about it, it's no surprise that human clones are prone to 'genetic' disorders - cancer etc. (not to suggest that cancer is genetic but that certain factors are); cloning of humans involves DNA, as opposed to RNA - the step from RNA to DNA is still quite recent (in science advances terms), and we have a long way to go, so the fact that the clones are imperfect because of the difficulties of the cloning technique should not be surprising.
However, we are still a few years short of the deadline set by the sci-fi media (e.g. Heinlein for a writer who was big on cloning and its applications to rejuvenation), so I wouldn't be surprised if the currently exponential rate of advance continues and we get better and better very swiftly.
Not that I am expecting nor advocating cloning myself to grow myself a new pair of testicles in the next 50 years:-)
They are already banned from broadcasting sports games live over the internet, for example the BBC in the UK cannot broadcast football games live over the internet, even if it is simply a simultaneous broadcast of their on-air radio coverage over the internet. This is just an extension of it. I can't see it becoming a problem really - maybe I'm wrong.
Don't worry, as soon as robots get intelligent enough, then they'll steal human's jobs until they then become bright enough to realise that they aren't getting paid enough.
(More Oil! We want more Oil! We demand a minimum wage of 4 pints/hour!)
Seing as us humans are happy with money (made from paper), the robots will be delegated to rust shops all over the world, as it is too expensive. The economy will never allow them to become dominant for long.
I will say this: Black holes are not a theoretical phenomenon. They are an OBSERVED phenomenon. You can SEE them.
They are called black holes because light cannot escape once it has fallen in (in lay terms. Light takes forever to fall in. Matter doesn't). Whatever the technicalities, once it has fallen past the horizon, nothing, not even light, is going to escape. Hence the blackness. Hence black hole.
We can observe them (i.e. SEE) them by (a) their actions on other massive objects, e.g. in binary star systems etc. where the other member appears to orbit nothing, and (b) by the radiation the matter in orbit AROUND (not WITHIN the horizon, i.e. the black bit, but orbiting outside it), because as matter falls in, it emits radiation - in the most efficient process known. Makes fusion look like a candle to the sun in comparison. This radiation is redshifted by the mass of the black hole. So it has a kind of halo (in X-ray frequencies, not visible light).
Also, the maths works, i.e. you can work out it's mass from it's effect on everything else e.g. gravitational lensing, then work out it's radius by looking at the radius of the 'halo', and these figures agree with those predicted by the Schwarzschild (non spinning) and Kerr (spinning) metrics of general relativity.
You people saying they don't exist, crikey, you'd think the earth was round or something! Read things, take it in, and don't act like Prince Charles (non UK residents - acted like a fool ranting about man/science recently, without knowing what he was talking about).
Any physicists reading this please bear in mind that I am trying to explain something complicated to people with no background in this subject...
All the forces in the universe (excepting, for the moment, gravity) can be considered as waves or particles according to quantum theory.
The Higgs boson is the manifestation of Gravity.
In contrast to what someone said about the Higgs boson NOT being responsible for the mass (saying someone else is wrong) then THEY are wrong... (see Er... thread) the gluons are manifestations of the strong force, which holds nuclei together, and as such contribute to the energy (you could say the rest mass energy, the ubiquitous E=mc2), but not strictly, in terms of definitions, the gravitational mass (maybe not the inertial mass, these may be different, but in terms of gravity, it is the gravitational mass that matters).
Now what gets me (an astrophysicist, not a particles buff. I hate particles), is that Einstein (and others) went on at length about the SEP, or the Strong Equivalence Principle. You know when you are in free fall, everything falling with you in your frame goes at the same speed etc. and behaves like there is no gravity? Well this is application of the SEP. So what happens to the Higgs in this case? Does it disappear? But you can't just annihilate particles simply because you are travelling at some different speed - they should still exist in any frame! Surely? I have been puzzling about this for ages - can someone help?
[Prepared to sacrifice karma by going slightly off topic for an answer]
The problem with Netscape is that people are ashamed of using it, in contrast to those using Internet Explorer. When I'm in my local internet cafe, you can always identify those that are using it by their vocal cries of IEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! (as Internet Explorer crashes and reboots the PC).
All Netscape needs is a proper advertising strategy so that everyone can be proud of using it. If version 6.0 goes ahead as planned, then they will be taking a step in the right direction.
I *like* linux, in a lot of ways. I like the fact that it has a goofy command line, because I spend the most productive time on computers writing programs, viz. computer simulations and stuff to do with my course (physics, NOT computer science). But if I'm not doing this, and am just 'playing', I wouldn't necessarily use linux.
If I wanted to play Quake for example, I'd want a beefy pentium machine with massive accelerator cards and stuff and all the floating point in the world. Likewise if I wanted to browse the web, or do graphics I'd want to use Windows.
My own platform is RISC OS (yes, you've never heard of it). The processor is out of date, it has no floating point etc. etc. so it is slow as hell when you ask it to do something like Quake or turn WAV data into an MP3 (about an hour per minute of CD track). But the GUI running on top of this is innovative, simple, good-looking and is what I am used to. It's old, but the WP is the best I have ever seen in terms of type-setting equations etc. - like LaTeX in a GUI.
Linux has it's advantages, Windows has it's advantages, and so does RISC OS. I'd never use LaTeX, it's too faffy, just use my old crappy machine, type it all up in next to no time, save as PostScript and go print it on a PC in the college computer centre.
And as for stability, well; I've installed Linux, and it works fine. But it's a very basic installation - I don't even have X on it, because that's not what I want it for! If I wanted to get X working, I'm sure that it wouldn't be all that easy, even with debian...
Windows isn't that stable either - if you install it badly. They (the people responsible for this in college, absolute muppets) recently changed all the computers over to Windows 2000 from NT. Only, they've buggered it quite badly and nothing works all that well except for the essentials like IE and Putty (an ssh client, which is handy). Still, I don't need it for much else.
IMHO, Linux will never be a market leader, because people basically want point-and-click everything, with as little typing as possible. Linux doesn't fit with this idea. Don't go on to me about how good the GUI is, if you don't type, you're not using it to it's full potential.
My two pence worth (about 2 quid, looking back at it...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, people could fool face-scanning systems (yes, I know they're different) with photos or video images. It doesn't actually say how to fool iris-scanners - but suggests that the trial wasn't convinced of their greatness.
Still, at least they're not going to use fingerprint scanners at the airport as they think they're too easily fooled - the BBC article reckons you can fool those by breathing on them.
I'm not sure whether this kind of security is best placed in an airport - fine for lower-risk security such as getting into your office block, or maybe even for your home burglar alarm - but at an airport with (potentially) massive numbers of subscribers to the system - sounds like a poor idea.
From the article from Australian IT:
OK, sounds reasonable. However, when asked about this, M$ came up with (also from the Australian IT article):
This doesn't seem to tally. Perhaps he meant the middle finger on each hand?
From my experience, Tomcat 4.x is faster than Apache and JServ.
Don't know how it compares to other servers (at least, from experience I don't), for example IIS, Resin, JRun etc.
Tomcat 3.x WAS very slow - for example, who had to combine Apache and Tomcat to get anything reasonable - using Tomcat for JSP and servlets, and Apache for static pages. This was in itself a bit of a nightmare. Tomcat 4 is miles better.
Comparing JRun to Tomcat for performance, see here.
Compared to Orion and Resin, Tomcat also lost comprehensively. The arguments raged for a while over performance (for example)- but not many about whether it "did what it said on the tin".
A more serious point here is that your bosses care more about the name and image than the quality. I'd think about trying to convince them that this is Not A Good Idea. For someone who IS using Tomcat in production, just do a google search; you'll get quite a few, for example.
Who is responsible for this? I ask you, slashdot just never seems to have any decent stories anymore, just keeps recycling stuff over and over... ;-)
Seriously though - I wonder how much research Cray are doing into the realms of quantum computing? Couldn't find anything about it on the cray website...
The practice of flooding the system with bad files is far more sinister than most of us realise.
This is actually the next step in the Taliban's fight against capitalism. They are continuing their religious war, attempting to reduce our morale by preventing us listening to music, except in short frustrating bursts of the same 10 seconds.
Their aim is to reduce us, to bring us down from within by sabotaging our right to Good Music In MP3 Format.
We Will NOT give in.
Uh, wait. Why did they start with 'No Doubt'?
Browsers are the complement of servers because the more people using browsers, the more people on the net, looking at websites. People want to make money from web sites - but they need a server to host them. Servers cost a lot of money - at least, big deplotments with lots of bandwidth do at any rate.
And then apache comes along and makes (probably) the best server - and it's free. Bummer. But it takes a lot more than Apache on a single box to make a solid, no downtime webserver.
The connection is there however.
look no further than here. Note - you may find some of the content to be of the flame-causing variety (self implosion because of either protaganist is not unlikely).
With 50 people all writing code for the same project going through this process, you shouldn't be able to tell who wrote which bit.
The disadvantages to this are that it makes coding a bit robot-like - but hell, all the work was done is design anyway. People might also say that typing comments takes too long - but so does having to work out what the code does every time you look at it - instead of it staring you in the face. If this isn't what you want to hear, then try simply having a block comment for every code block, and a header at the top of every source code file. You should this way have as many lines of comments as lines of actual code. This is not, despite what others may say, a bad thing.
Calling it a concrete rocket is a bit misleading however IMHO - if it is like the boat, it's got a very thin layer of concrete ( < half an inch) over the top of a structure made from another material.
What is more interesting is the concrete - waterproof, high tensile strength, etc. etc.
The amount of AI in computer games must be quite low - or at least, of the VERY artifical variety. Most games will attempt to give the NPCs (non player characters) the appearance of AI, without actually having any. Two main methods go here, I reckon.
(a) "bots" like those in quake, half-life etc. - have a knowledge of where the player is, make the bot face the player and shoot etc. Characterised by them having little or no weapon selection - all of the opponents have only one weapon which they use exclusively. Some have varying tactics, but these usually fall back on range - i.e. shoot from far away, claw at face at point blank. There are small variants to this rule - the marines in half-life for example, throw grenades if you run round corners away from them.
(b) Mass tactics. Games like Dune, starcraft, etc. Build units in the right order, building placements and building rates pre-conceived by the designer at the level- or engine- design stage. Attack in the same way, defend in the same way. No variety, don't deal well with players switching tactics.
There is very little intelligence here - compare with chess games which actually think about the consequences of their actions at "run-time".
Note that the article also found that people who smoked and drank didnt complain of poor quality sleep etc., suggesting that the negative association was down to the fact that they drank and smoked rather than all smokers being antsy, or whatever.
Link here: abstract.
Must Do 2? Magic Dust 2? or "Mate? Excuse me? Can you think of a good anacronym for our Desktop application? It's the sequel by the way..."
You fucking idiots, for God's sake are you ALL American?
I was joking! Of course my fucking uncle doesn't have a nuclear reactor in his yard! Of course he doesn't! How can he have had a nuclear reactor in his background for years?
You know, sometimes I wonder about you folk. You really ARE dumb aren't you. Still, reminds me to stay in England, where sarcasm isn't just a word in a dictionary.
Is it my fault? I didn't buy them, they just happened to be there. Officer.
However, and to quote
Josa, Susin et. al. Nature 410, 549It says quite clearly that this isn't the only way for cells to die. They just do it in a different way that isn't as good. This isn't a wonder chemical/pathway/whatever, it's just an advance in understanding the intricacies of biological systems. This development alone is not going to improve your life at all. Yes, it's interesting, if you're a biologist, but that's all.
However, we are still a few years short of the deadline set by the sci-fi media (e.g. Heinlein for a writer who was big on cloning and its applications to rejuvenation), so I wouldn't be surprised if the currently exponential rate of advance continues and we get better and better very swiftly.
Not that I am expecting nor advocating cloning myself to grow myself a new pair of testicles in the next 50 years :-)
They are already banned from broadcasting sports games live over the internet, for example the BBC in the UK cannot broadcast football games live over the internet, even if it is simply a simultaneous broadcast of their on-air radio coverage over the internet. This is just an extension of it. I can't see it becoming a problem really - maybe I'm wrong.
with robots. Then program them to never want to work for another country.
(More Oil! We want more Oil! We demand a minimum wage of 4 pints/hour!)
Seing as us humans are happy with money (made from paper), the robots will be delegated to rust shops all over the world, as it is too expensive. The economy will never allow them to become dominant for long.
They are called black holes because light cannot escape once it has fallen in (in lay terms. Light takes forever to fall in. Matter doesn't). Whatever the technicalities, once it has fallen past the horizon, nothing, not even light, is going to escape. Hence the blackness. Hence black hole.
We can observe them (i.e. SEE) them by (a) their actions on other massive objects, e.g. in binary star systems etc. where the other member appears to orbit nothing, and (b) by the radiation the matter in orbit AROUND (not WITHIN the horizon, i.e. the black bit, but orbiting outside it), because as matter falls in, it emits radiation - in the most efficient process known. Makes fusion look like a candle to the sun in comparison. This radiation is redshifted by the mass of the black hole. So it has a kind of halo (in X-ray frequencies, not visible light).
Also, the maths works, i.e. you can work out it's mass from it's effect on everything else e.g. gravitational lensing, then work out it's radius by looking at the radius of the 'halo', and these figures agree with those predicted by the Schwarzschild (non spinning) and Kerr (spinning) metrics of general relativity.
You people saying they don't exist, crikey, you'd think the earth was round or something! Read things, take it in, and don't act like Prince Charles (non UK residents - acted like a fool ranting about man/science recently, without knowing what he was talking about).
Any physicists reading this please bear in mind that I am trying to explain something complicated to people with no background in this subject...
The Higgs boson is the manifestation of Gravity.
In contrast to what someone said about the Higgs boson NOT being responsible for the mass (saying someone else is wrong) then THEY are wrong... (see Er... thread) the gluons are manifestations of the strong force, which holds nuclei together, and as such contribute to the energy (you could say the rest mass energy, the ubiquitous E=mc2), but not strictly, in terms of definitions, the gravitational mass (maybe not the inertial mass, these may be different, but in terms of gravity, it is the gravitational mass that matters).
Now what gets me (an astrophysicist, not a particles buff. I hate particles), is that Einstein (and others) went on at length about the SEP, or the Strong Equivalence Principle. You know when you are in free fall, everything falling with you in your frame goes at the same speed etc. and behaves like there is no gravity? Well this is application of the SEP. So what happens to the Higgs in this case? Does it disappear? But you can't just annihilate particles simply because you are travelling at some different speed - they should still exist in any frame! Surely? I have been puzzling about this for ages - can someone help?
[Prepared to sacrifice karma by going slightly off topic for an answer]
All Netscape needs is a proper advertising strategy so that everyone can be proud of using it. If version 6.0 goes ahead as planned, then they will be taking a step in the right direction.
I *like* linux, in a lot of ways. I like the fact that it has a goofy command line, because I spend the most productive time on computers writing programs, viz. computer simulations and stuff to do with my course (physics, NOT computer science). But if I'm not doing this, and am just 'playing', I wouldn't necessarily use linux.
If I wanted to play Quake for example, I'd want a beefy pentium machine with massive accelerator cards and stuff and all the floating point in the world. Likewise if I wanted to browse the web, or do graphics I'd want to use Windows.
My own platform is RISC OS (yes, you've never heard of it). The processor is out of date, it has no floating point etc. etc. so it is slow as hell when you ask it to do something like Quake or turn WAV data into an MP3 (about an hour per minute of CD track). But the GUI running on top of this is innovative, simple, good-looking and is what I am used to. It's old, but the WP is the best I have ever seen in terms of type-setting equations etc. - like LaTeX in a GUI.
Linux has it's advantages, Windows has it's advantages, and so does RISC OS. I'd never use LaTeX, it's too faffy, just use my old crappy machine, type it all up in next to no time, save as PostScript and go print it on a PC in the college computer centre.
And as for stability, well; I've installed Linux, and it works fine. But it's a very basic installation - I don't even have X on it, because that's not what I want it for! If I wanted to get X working, I'm sure that it wouldn't be all that easy, even with debian...
Windows isn't that stable either - if you install it badly. They (the people responsible for this in college, absolute muppets) recently changed all the computers over to Windows 2000 from NT. Only, they've buggered it quite badly and nothing works all that well except for the essentials like IE and Putty (an ssh client, which is handy). Still, I don't need it for much else.
IMHO, Linux will never be a market leader, because people basically want point-and-click everything, with as little typing as possible. Linux doesn't fit with this idea. Don't go on to me about how good the GUI is, if you don't type, you're not using it to it's full potential.
My two pence worth (about 2 quid, looking back at it...:-)
Surely modifying the search engine to change the order the links come out without tweaking is in contravention of the DMCA :-)