For as long as I remember some tech journalists predict that voice controlled computers and voice text input instead of keyboard and mouse is ``just around the corner''.
It seems it's pretty far away corner...
My bet is that correct voice input system needs to understand what the operator is talking about. In other words it needs quite complex AI.
Otherwise it's gonna make thousands of mistakes like right-write, they're-their, its-it's etc.
A group of Japanese researchers have proposed a Government plan to spend 50 billion yen per year (that's a quarter billion $US) for 30 years on developing a robot with capabilities of a 5-year-old. [..] Perhaps the U.S. Government should consider funding such a program over here?
It's not really possible in the US. I recently saw a documentary about the progress in the robotics and it contained one explanation why quasi-androids are being so expensivelly developed in Japan and not in the US.
Basically Japan is a closed country with its population getting older every day which makes the workforce very expensive there today and even more expensive in future.
US on the other hand is still a country open for immigrants with hordes of young people from all over the world willing to work for food. Or even cheaper. And if it's still too expensive US outsources the work to the third world countries.
I mean it. It's free, it's interoperable and it even allows you to access your buddies on different IM networks (like aim, msn, icq etc).
Go to Jabber Software Foundation and look for server that will work on your system. There are free servers for POSIX systems and I'm sure that there are at least several servers for Windows. As for clients, there are dozens clients for every major OS, and most of them have the feature to automatically popup messages on the screen. I'd suggest Psi and Miranda.
And a GeForce2 can be had for what, $20? Less than the price of the game. Please tell me who this is for.
For anyone who has video card, not the game card.
My matrox g450 has perfect picture quality in 1600x1200@70Hz, very good Backend Scaller for video and very poor performance in 3D. While it can't compete in 3d speed even with TNT2 it's got better picture quality than several times more expensive GF cards.
If you spend 10+ hrs a day in front of the monitor you do care more about picture quality than 3D speed.
Robert
PS. ATI has much better picture quality than nvidia, but still loses with Matrox.
My Logitech RF Optical mouse has both clickable scroll wheel and third button under the thumb. I couldn't live without the wheel once I got used to it, but I've found that third button under the thumb is much better than in its normal position.
And the clickable wheel requires so much pressure that I've never managed to click it by accident. In fact, I rarelly managed to press it without turning the wheel so I started to use side button (both wheel-click and side ``thumb'' button serve as third button).
I don't remember exact symbol of this product, but AFAIR it was the only RF Optical mouse made by Logitech.
Can you give me the source of your misinformation?
There are three GSM frequencies in use today. At least there were June 2002: 900, 1800 and 1900.
GSM1900 is used in Americas, and the rest of the world uses 900/1800. They are mostly used at the same time with 1800 being treated as urban area GSM and 900 as rural area GSM (has to do with maximum cell size at constant power -- the higher frequency the smaller max cell size). In my country all the operators have dual frequency networks with 900 covering all the country and 1800 covering large cities and communication lines (highways, railroads etc).
Most of today handsets sold in Europe and Asia is dualband 900+1800. My shitty el cheapo Siemens s40 is triple band 900+1800+1900. I bet that as soon as GSM400 will start to deploy in order to replace NMT networks there will be lots of the multiple bands handsets 400+900 and/or 400+900+1800. This is just the matter of transceiver, the underlying technology and chipsets are still the same.
I have no idea what is this African frequency you're talking about, so if you had any links to information I would gladly read it.
Who cares about refresh rates if the resolution is laughable. For about $250 I can buy here great 17" 95kHz flat screen CRT. This means 1600x1200 (at 75Hz) which is essential for me. I could sell arm and leg and both kidneys and still wouldn't buy LCD with these specs.
Robert
PS. Don't complain about ``tiny, unreadable text''. Use larger fonts as I do and you won't have to bother with AA fonts -- it's done in hardware;)
This is an interesting attempt not to make bigger programs, but tighter ones. [...] Imagine using the same mentality on a modern computer!
Actually this mentality is used on modern computers. To be precise, on game consoles. It's too easy for the PC game to require user to upgrade his memory or video card. For game consoles this is not possible. So the console games with time run faster, smoother on the same hardware.
I don't know if what mplayer does is pure X stuff or if it talks window manager into hiding mouse cursor. But when you move mouse cursor into mplayer video window it disapears after a while.
Just check the sources and see if you can implement the same in your menu program. But beware, mplayer is GPL so if you use this code directly you would have to license your program GPL too.
You can of course check what it is doing and reimplement it.
Do the statistical analysis on the encrypted data. In several ways. If all you get is seamingly random stream of data with equal distribution of all values then you've got raw stream encrypted by modern, quite strong cipher.
Polish Data Protection laws (which are modelled after EU DP laws -- it was one of the conditions for getting into EU) state otherwise.
While I was latelly checking this law, it was clearly mentioned that it doesn't matter where the data resides. What does matter is that entity that administrates this data has legal presence in Poland and the data is about Polish citizens.
The point is when does intelectual property become a rediculous concept, or is it a rediculous concept from the very begining?
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
The concept is very noble and sound. It's the implementation that's been screwed.
The US Constitution clearly states that IP Laws have to serve particular purpose, whereas today IP Laws implementation treats them almost as property laws without regard of the delicate balance between the rights of said Authors and the society.
(other countries have less clear and thoght out basis for IP Laws and yet they manage to deliver better ``deal'')
If/when a particular mutation has some features that allow it to dominate gene pool it is positive. If the mutation causes premature death, sterility etc the faulty genes do not enter the gene pool. This is negative.
This statement is almost always correct but in the last couple of years I've become aware of a counterexample. [...] Although the gene for MEN2 is dominantly inherited and almost invariably fatal, it continues in the gene pool because some sufferers live long enough to reproduce.
That's probably one of the things that made me think that evolution of human has ended. I mean, what chance would the man carrying this gene have to reproduce if it wasn't for today's medicine?
Of course he (or his genes;) wouldn't be in problem if the gene was activated only after he is mature and with numerous offsprings.
But then again, we weren't made to live a hundred years. We were made (by evolution) to create lots of offspring by 21 and die from tuberculosis at 25. What happens after 25 is bonus anyway;)
There ain't no such thing as human evolution (anymore).
The evolution is a trials and errors process. During the duplication of DNA sometimes something goes wrong and the result isn't a perfect copy of the original.
This is called a mutation.
As a result some function of the organism is different. The change may be beneficial for the organism or it may render it handicaped. For every positive mutation there are houndreds of thousands negative mutations.
Who's to tell which mutations are positive and which are negative?
Natural selection.
If/when a particular mutation has some features that allow it to dominate gene pool it is positive. If the mutation causes premature death, sterility etc the faulty genes do not enter the gene pool. This is negative.
In order for humans to evolve we would have allow natural selection to work. We don't do this. It is not the survival of the fittest for a long time.
Given.NET's intended domain (which is Windows software running on Windows), it is very well done.
Am I the only one who considers this funny? Going to such lengths as installing new, (at least now) poorly supported virtual machine with its set of strange libraries and bindings only to run Windows software on Windows?
What's wrong with running Windows software on Windows without any intermediary vm?
So a GPL copyright violation also robs Linux of a portion of its' users goodwill to develop.
Actually it is not a good will that someone gets robbed of.
Contributions to GPL code are donations and as every donation they have some monetary value (although difficult to evaluate). Thing is that if someone other than intended recipient uses this donation, he receives those equivalent benefits w/o agreement of the donor.
Porn sites, Ebay auctions, games such as Everquest and services such as Apple's dot-mac are online services that subscribers happily pay for because more than anything, they are quality products(well, some of the porn is). If the company's revenue is coming from its users, they would be a lot less concerned about how the information is being distributed.
Not likely. Think DeCSS. Or any content producer (music, movies, books).
The issue isn't the access method. The issue is control. Total control means huge profit margins (like Microsoft). Luckily, besides the biggest monopolies, total control is impossible to achieve.
There's no law stating that we have to look at ads.
What about 17 USC 106, which states that barring fair use, etc., the copyright owner has the right to prevent others from creating derivative works of a web page?
Does he have the right to prevent the end user from creating such derivative works for his own personal use?
I think a lot of this has to do with the elitist mindset of a lot IT workers. They see themselves as the masters, the ones who ought to be in charge because so much of the work is done through systems they built. But really, they should think of themselves as servants, trying to build the best system they can to support the end-users.
If users are made to understand that the system administrator's job is to make the computers run, and not to make users happy, they can, in fact, be made happy most of the time. (Paul Evans)
This ain't no master and servant, whichever way you want to look at it.
There seems to be some industry rule, that anything that works must be improved til it doesn't work any more!
There is one problem with this statement: it doesn't apply to floppy disks. The quality of the floppies dropped so low, that the new floppies (out of the box) written today won't be readable in a week.
I started to write copies of important document on several floppies if I have to use them. Most of the time I am right. Failure rate is way above 50%.
And the price... 3.5" floppy disk already costs me more than 700M CDR in bulk (FD is something like $0.40 and CDR $0.25 where I buy them).
Yes, removing FDD altogether will cause some problems, but I for sure won't miss them.
Robert
PS. I would love to have some CF or MMC/SD reader as a standard in all new computers, preferably MMC/SD. But the problem is that the fuckers try to push for ``their standard'' so it won't happen soon.
PPS. How many portable/removable FLASH standards are there? CF, MMC/SD, SD, XM, MS/MG.
PPPS. Memory Stick (and propably Magic Gate too) are another sad story of screwed consumer, since there are two incompatible products sold under the same name...
Slashdot Mirror
For as long as I remember some tech journalists predict that voice controlled computers and voice text input instead of keyboard and mouse is ``just around the corner''.
It seems it's pretty far away corner...
My bet is that correct voice input system needs to understand what the operator is talking about. In other words it needs quite complex AI.
Otherwise it's gonna make thousands of mistakes like right-write, they're-their, its-it's etc.
Robert
It's not really possible in the US. I recently saw a documentary about the progress in the robotics and it contained one explanation why quasi-androids are being so expensivelly developed in Japan and not in the US.
Basically Japan is a closed country with its population getting older every day which makes the workforce very expensive there today and even more expensive in future.
US on the other hand is still a country open for immigrants with hordes of young people from all over the world willing to work for food. Or even cheaper. And if it's still too expensive US outsources the work to the third world countries.
There's no place for robots in US economy.
rrw
I mean it. It's free, it's interoperable and it even allows you to access your buddies on different IM networks (like aim, msn, icq etc).
Go to Jabber Software Foundation and look for server that will work on your system. There are free servers for POSIX systems and I'm sure that there are at least several servers for Windows. As for clients, there are dozens clients for every major OS, and most of them have the feature to automatically popup messages on the screen. I'd suggest Psi and Miranda.
Robert
Aahh... You mean La Manche Channel... You should have said so.
Robert
The press release claims that they're producing circuits that run 30% faster than any other published benchmarks
But the question is: are these real %% or is it 30+ performance marking?
Robert
And a GeForce2 can be had for what, $20? Less than the price of the game. Please tell me who this is for.
For anyone who has video card, not the game card.
My matrox g450 has perfect picture quality in 1600x1200@70Hz, very good Backend Scaller for video and very poor performance in 3D. While it can't compete in 3d speed even with TNT2 it's got better picture quality than several times more expensive GF cards.
If you spend 10+ hrs a day in front of the monitor you do care more about picture quality than 3D speed.
Robert
PS. ATI has much better picture quality than nvidia, but still loses with Matrox.
My Logitech RF Optical mouse has both clickable scroll wheel and third button under the thumb. I couldn't live without the wheel once I got used to it, but I've found that third button under the thumb is much better than in its normal position.
And the clickable wheel requires so much pressure that I've never managed to click it by accident. In fact, I rarelly managed to press it without turning the wheel so I started to use side button (both wheel-click and side ``thumb'' button serve as third button).
I don't remember exact symbol of this product, but AFAIR it was the only RF Optical mouse made by Logitech.
Robert
Can you give me the source of your misinformation?
There are three GSM frequencies in use today. At least there were June 2002: 900, 1800 and 1900.
GSM1900 is used in Americas, and the rest of the world uses 900/1800. They are mostly used at the same time with 1800 being treated as urban area GSM and 900 as rural area GSM (has to do with maximum cell size at constant power -- the higher frequency the smaller max cell size). In my country all the operators have dual frequency networks with 900 covering all the country and 1800 covering large cities and communication lines (highways, railroads etc).
Lately there has been standardised additional frequency for the use in very low population areas.
Most of today handsets sold in Europe and Asia is dualband 900+1800. My shitty el cheapo Siemens s40 is triple band 900+1800+1900. I bet that as soon as GSM400 will start to deploy in order to replace NMT networks there will be lots of the multiple bands handsets 400+900 and/or 400+900+1800. This is just the matter of transceiver, the underlying technology and chipsets are still the same.
I have no idea what is this African frequency you're talking about, so if you had any links to information I would gladly read it.
Robert
Who cares about refresh rates if the resolution is laughable. For about $250 I can buy here great 17" 95kHz flat screen CRT. This means 1600x1200 (at 75Hz) which is essential for me. I could sell arm and leg and both kidneys and still wouldn't buy LCD with these specs.
;)
Robert
PS. Don't complain about ``tiny, unreadable text''. Use larger fonts as I do and you won't have to bother with AA fonts -- it's done in hardware
This is an interesting attempt not to make bigger programs, but tighter ones. [...] Imagine using the same mentality on a modern computer!
Actually this mentality is used on modern computers. To be precise, on game consoles. It's too easy for the PC game to require user to upgrade his memory or video card. For game consoles this is not possible. So the console games with time run faster, smoother on the same hardware.
Robert
Just check the mplayer sources.
I don't know if what mplayer does is pure X stuff or if it talks window manager into hiding mouse cursor. But when you move mouse cursor into mplayer video window it disapears after a while.
Just check the sources and see if you can implement the same in your menu program. But beware, mplayer is GPL so if you use this code directly you would have to license your program GPL too.
You can of course check what it is doing and reimplement it.
Robert
Do the statistical analysis on the encrypted data. In several ways. If all you get is seamingly random stream of data with equal distribution of all values then you've got raw stream encrypted by modern, quite strong cipher.
;)
Good luck
I wouldn't bet on it.
Polish Data Protection laws (which are modelled after EU DP laws -- it was one of the conditions for getting into EU) state otherwise.
While I was latelly checking this law, it was clearly mentioned that it doesn't matter where the data resides. What does matter is that entity that administrates this data has legal presence in Poland and the data is about Polish citizens.
Robert
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
The concept is very noble and sound. It's the implementation that's been screwed.
The US Constitution clearly states that IP Laws have to serve particular purpose, whereas today IP Laws implementation treats them almost as property laws without regard of the delicate balance between the rights of said Authors and the society.
(other countries have less clear and thoght out basis for IP Laws and yet they manage to deliver better ``deal'')
Robert
Do you honestly believe that legless girls with three noses get laid as much as the more conventional folk?
There is this Polish saying: ``kazda potwora znajdzie swego amatora''. Loosely translated it means ``every monster's gonna find itself a mate''.
And I've seen several times, that they really do find a mate and often produce lots and lots of offspring.
Robert
That's probably one of the things that made me think that evolution of human has ended. I mean, what chance would the man carrying this gene have to reproduce if it wasn't for today's medicine?
Of course he (or his genes
But then again, we weren't made to live a hundred years. We were made (by evolution) to create lots of offspring by 21 and die from tuberculosis at 25. What happens after 25 is bonus anyway
Robert
Is global warming also affecting human evolution?
There ain't no such thing as human evolution (anymore).
The evolution is a trials and errors process. During the duplication of DNA sometimes something goes wrong and the result isn't a perfect copy of the original.
This is called a mutation.
As a result some function of the organism is different. The change may be beneficial for the organism or it may render it handicaped. For every positive mutation there are houndreds of thousands negative mutations.
Who's to tell which mutations are positive and which are negative?
Natural selection.
If/when a particular mutation has some features that allow it to dominate gene pool it is positive. If the mutation causes premature death, sterility etc the faulty genes do not enter the gene pool. This is negative.
In order for humans to evolve we would have allow natural selection to work. We don't do this. It is not the survival of the fittest for a long time.
Robert
Given .NET's intended domain (which is Windows software running on Windows), it is very well done.
Am I the only one who considers this funny? Going to such lengths as installing new, (at least now) poorly supported virtual machine with its set of strange libraries and bindings only to run Windows software on Windows?
What's wrong with running Windows software on Windows without any intermediary vm?
Robert
Perheaps it is because those BSD codebases aren't that good after all...
Robert
So a GPL copyright violation also robs Linux of a portion of its' users goodwill to develop.
Actually it is not a good will that someone gets robbed of.
Contributions to GPL code are donations and as every donation they have some monetary value (although difficult to evaluate). Thing is that if someone other than intended recipient uses this donation, he receives those equivalent benefits w/o agreement of the donor.
Robert
Porn sites, Ebay auctions, games such as Everquest and services such as Apple's dot-mac are online services that subscribers happily pay for because more than anything, they are quality products(well, some of the porn is). If the company's revenue is coming from its users, they would be a lot less concerned about how the information is being distributed.
Not likely. Think DeCSS. Or any content producer (music, movies, books).
The issue isn't the access method. The issue is control. Total control means huge profit margins (like Microsoft). Luckily, besides the biggest monopolies, total control is impossible to achieve.
...your neighbour too ;)
Robert
Does he have the right to prevent the end user from creating such derivative works for his own personal use?
Robert
I think a lot of this has to do with the elitist mindset of a lot IT workers. They see themselves as the masters, the ones who ought to be in charge because so much of the work is done through systems they built. But really, they should think of themselves as servants, trying to build the best system they can to support the end-users.
If users are made to understand that the system administrator's job is to make the computers run, and not to make users happy, they can, in fact, be made happy most of the time. (Paul Evans)
This ain't no master and servant, whichever way you want to look at it.
Robert
There is one problem with this statement: it doesn't apply to floppy disks. The quality of the floppies dropped so low, that the new floppies (out of the box) written today won't be readable in a week.
I started to write copies of important document on several floppies if I have to use them. Most of the time I am right. Failure rate is way above 50%.
And the price... 3.5" floppy disk already costs me more than 700M CDR in bulk (FD is something like $0.40 and CDR $0.25 where I buy them).
Yes, removing FDD altogether will cause some problems, but I for sure won't miss them.
Robert
PS. I would love to have some CF or MMC/SD reader as a standard in all new computers, preferably MMC/SD. But the problem is that the fuckers try to push for ``their standard'' so it won't happen soon.
PPS. How many portable/removable FLASH standards are there? CF, MMC/SD, SD, XM, MS/MG.
PPPS. Memory Stick (and propably Magic Gate too) are another sad story of screwed consumer, since there are two incompatible products sold under the same name...