You could creatively overcome these limitations... - To generate "random" numbers, you could have 10 "links" to each page spaced closely together - (for example every letter of the words "go north" leads to a different outcome). The user would pick one. This is defeatable, of course, but if the result is delayed a bit (you die in the room after the next), it would be hard to track. The links could also be shuffled every time you resync.
- you can encode inventory with lots of copies of each page. For example, file "Room001-0010" means you have object 2, while "Room001-0110" means you've got objects 2 and 4 (couting in binary here). Sure, it's wasteful, but if you've got 40 freakin' gigs, it's possible. Also, different stages of the game could use different objects, and you could have the user trade them in when they reach a certain stage. Once you've killed the dragon, your sword gets stuck in his gut.
Just give it time, and someone will write a script to port Zork;-)
I thought of an electric-charger like your friends fan- it would be cool because you could maximize boost at low rpms without overboosting at high rpms. Plus, it would be simple to install. But then I found out that typical superchargers require a few hp to run... up to 20% of the engine's power.
Even just 1 HP = ~750W = 60 Amps of current at 12V. That would require a special alternator and/or extra batteries, so I gave up on the idea.
When I was in high school, I rewired a string of christmas tree lights from series to parallel so that I could run them off of some D-cell batteries. A little switch turned them on automatically when I opened my locker. It was about a decade before you could buy this sort of thing in stores.
Re:Heisenbugs...
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
that's funny... I just tracked one of these down that existed in our software - the optimized version ran differently than the non-optimized version. It turns out the bounds checker is in the non-optimized version, and a couple of places in the code used x[rand()]=y... the bounds-checker (implemented as a macro which had side effects) *caused* the heisenbug!
With a headline of "Visual Autopsy Of An ATM Card Skimmer", I was expecting more. Don't get me wrong - the electronics are neat - but a dead body would have been cooler. I'd be curious if they could locate the thief's spine.
good idea, but I'll bet most cameras will record some sort of rudimentary audio, so the loud beeps will inidicate the correct presses. To verify this claim, I just researched the U50 and found it doesn't record sound... but I know eventually the small cameras will. Even the chip in the $11 Ritz Dakota disposable records sound (but it's not bonded out on the package they use).
Car door openers operate on a number of frequencies in (I suspect) a few bands. The interfering signal could be cover one or more of these signals, and depending on what frequency your car used, you could be out of luck.
Even if two openers use the same frequency, there could still be difference in vulnerability. Typically, radios mix an intermediate frequency to get the signal of interest down to a low-frequency the microcontroller can check -- this type of radio can be suspectable at another image frequency that isn't the one of interest. Typically, filters are in place to reject that other frequency, but the filters of one model car may be better or worse than another. Since the antenna is also part of the circuit, differences in manufacturing, and even what kind of trinkets you have on your back window (where my antenna is located) could also affect recievers.
There are two types of colored contact lenses - opaque and non-opaque.
I've got the non-opaque ones, which is basically a colored transparent circle in the middle of the lens. It does tint my vision a little, but the brain gets used to it. I don't use them for photography. This type does not lighten dark eyes. I'm pretty sure you could easily get an iris print through these.
The opaque kind has a printed fake iris-like pattern on them, and are clear in the middle (and they don't tint your vision) I didn't like this kind because they use a half-tone dot pattern that I noticed very easily and looked especially fake. I doubt you could get an actual iris print with these. These are newer and are being pushed harder (example: the non-opaque kind are not available for astigmatic lenses). Manufacturers claim they look better, but for light-colored eyes, I disagree. For dark colored eyes, they are the only solution.
I love the picture of the "typical user" in the article. She's got a nice portable laptop, plus this huge aroma thing that looks like it's too bulky to fit in any laptop bag. Did she bring the laptop and connect the device in case she got a smelly email? Or did she have to go and get the device when she realized she had gotten a smelly email?
Plus, she's eating - her taste/smell senses are already being used. So, now she's eating musk-perfume-flavored stawberries, and we're expected to believe that this is enjoyable? Pretty picture, yes. But poor marketing.
Also: "Telewest says its "scent dome" could cost around 250 and would only work with a high-speed, broadband connection." -- WTF? The device produces only 60 smells - so is 6 bits now too big to send over a slow modem?
In other news, people are discovering that centrino-based laptops can be thrown at police/fire/etc and hit them in the face with higher force than is presently legal. Also, stalkers have been able to use the WiFi portion of the centrino chipset to send messages annonymously from open hotspots. And con artists have been taking advantage of centrino's processor to do their taxes.
And all this is with the current windows drivers... just imagine what would happen if they open them up!
question (and I know I'm asking this on slashdot, so I won't take it as gospel): without probable cause, they can't have a k9 search, can they? You were just being nice (in a time-consuming manner that got your point across), right?
Ok, here's the story of the night I pulled over a cop in the suburbs of D.C.:
I was driving home from work late one night (~12pm) and it's about a 15 minute drive. For some reason, I see a lot of cop cars and they are all pass me at high speed and take different exits (they weren't all going to the same place). Two of them have lights on and I happily get out of their way. Three of them don't have their flashers and I gasp to myself - "oh my god a drunk is going to rear-end me". It was this last one w/o lights that pushed me over the edge.
I'm about three blocks from my house (speed limit 35 on a six-lane road, and rightfully so because it's hilly and people can't see you when they are pulling out of their driveways), and I look in my rear-view and see one of these high-speed cars. I was all alone in the inner lane, but I don't have enough time to get out of his way. He passes me, and as soon as I see he's a cop, I start flashing my high beams - mostly in protest, but also to warn innocent motorists ahead. After a few of my flashes, he lets off the gas and coasts to a stop (again, no blue lights) - coincidently across the street from my house. It took quite a while for me going 35 mph to reach him; I'd guess he was almost double my speed -- conservatively 60+.
I pull into my parking space and he flips on the blue lights and pulls up behind me. After running my plates, he comes to the window. I calmly explain that I live at the house, how it's a dangerous place to speed, that I see it all the time there, and seeing it that many times that night just pushed me over the edge. I asked him to please use his blue lights when going fast.
He said he couldn't do that because he might give a heads-up to the evildoers (my word) at the scene he's rushing to. No convincing him, even with the driveway/poor-visibilty argument. Never mind that all the other two light-less officers I saw that night turned off onto other major roads and could clearly have used their lights for a good portion of their trips. I don't know exactly where my officer was going, but obviously it wasn't as important as some law-abiding citizen flashing his lights.
He was nice and let me go. Hopefully my message sank in and he didn't want to admit it to me, but I'm not sure.
Part of my sensitation to speeders in front of my house is that, before my office moved, I used to walk to work across all six lanes.
Sure, C is fine for the run-of-the-mill CEO, but if you want to be a fortune 500 CEO, you're going to have to return value in assembly language. Or do it in hardware & it'll be even more effective.
EE Times is also reporting that Intel may be pushing a new kind of RAM interface to compete with existing DDR and RDRAM. At 2 Gbit/sec per wire, this is about twice the speed of current RDRAM and four times the speed of DDR SDRAM. But, more interestingly, this is a point-to-point architecture - unlike the traditional bus architecture, when you add more memory modules you can get more bandwidth. Also notable is that simultaneous bi-directional communications happens over a single wire. Infineon and Samsung have made test chips, and results are to be released at the International Solid State Circuits Conference today.
I wonder how this figures into their processor/chipset roadmap...
Kapton tape, which is essentially used as space duct tape, erodes in the presence of atomic oxygen. Atomic oxygen (just a single O, not the usual stable O2) is quite reactive, and will eat away many materials on the leading edge of spacecraft. Atomic oxygen is found more in the lower orbits (i.e. ISS and space shuttle) rather than the higer orbits (geosynchronous). Here are some pictures from the experiment.
Maybe I should ammend what I said. When I search for "litigious bastards", I don't get sco first. Since their database is distributed, you might be getting an old copy that still has sco ranked first. Or, I could be getting an old copy, but I doubt it because SCO has been up there a while.
sco fell in "litigious bastard" search.
on
Google's Bigger Index
·
· Score: 2, Informative
When you search for "litigious bastards", you now get a website promoting the googlebomb technique listed first. The sco group was listed first, but now it's ranked about 47. I'm not sure if they are reducing the relevance of the link-text, or if the ranking has been lowered because the sco group probably doesn't point back at any of the blogs that link to it.
Good points, but I do have to object to point number 5. The screenshot they show says (and it contradicts itself) "DVD Error / TheTV Out port of your display is not working properly. / This copy protected disc can not be ploayed when the TV out function is enabled." So, I fear that it is a DRM issue that won't be fixed.
But, like you pointed out, we can't really tell what's going on yet - from the exact situation that's causing the problem, to what the actual product will do.
I was reading the review and digging it, until I got to the "known issues" page:
The second issue comes with the macrovision encoding that the HDTV does via the SiS301C video bridge. If you have that form of video out enabled, programs like PowerDVD and the DVD play within Home Theater crashes. The easiest way to avoid this is just to disable video out and set the primary display to your monitor (CRT or LCD mode).
You can't play DVDs on a TV with this machine, and neither ASUS nor the reviewer didn't consider that a serious problem? The big deal about this computer is that it is designed for the living room to be connected to a TV (it has a TV tuner built in!). Bringing this box to my computer room, or bringing my 21" computer monitor out to the living room isn't going to cut it as a solution.
I'm surprised that with that restriction, ASUS even tried to make this box. Wow, companies really are as dumb and easily bullied as the DVDCCA thinks!
I had a little trouble doing the window trick (it didn't seem to take the return character), so here's another method:
1. type "sleep 1; killall Dock" without the return 2. Hover the mouse over the minimize button 3. hit return 4. You have up to a second to shift-click the minimize button. (for more time, use "sleep 2" or 3)
tell that to the bald guy in the airplane seat ahead of you while you project Quake on the back of his head. Oh wait, you're right -- it is ten times the fun!
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't really judging determinism -- it was just the lack of the ability to use it if, if a designer chooses, that I thought was a limitation.
You could creatively overcome these limitations...
;-)
- To generate "random" numbers, you could have 10 "links" to each page spaced closely together - (for example every letter of the words "go north" leads to a different outcome). The user would pick one. This is defeatable, of course, but if the result is delayed a bit (you die in the room after the next), it would be hard to track. The links could also be shuffled every time you resync.
- you can encode inventory with lots of copies of each page. For example, file "Room001-0010" means you have object 2, while "Room001-0110" means you've got objects 2 and 4 (couting in binary here). Sure, it's wasteful, but if you've got 40 freakin' gigs, it's possible. Also, different stages of the game could use different objects, and you could have the user trade them in when they reach a certain stage. Once you've killed the dragon, your sword gets stuck in his gut.
Just give it time, and someone will write a script to port Zork
Get the whole tech specs for the notes format here. You can link to music, so this adventure could be quite entertaining.
I thought of an electric-charger like your friends fan- it would be cool because you could maximize boost at low rpms without overboosting at high rpms. Plus, it would be simple to install. But then I found out that typical superchargers require a few hp to run... up to 20% of the engine's power.
Even just 1 HP = ~750W = 60 Amps of current at 12V. That would require a special alternator and/or extra batteries, so I gave up on the idea.
When I was in high school, I rewired a string of christmas tree lights from series to parallel so that I could run them off of some D-cell batteries. A little switch turned them on automatically when I opened my locker. It was about a decade before you could buy this sort of thing in stores.
that's funny... I just tracked one of these down that existed in our software - the optimized version ran differently than the non-optimized version. It turns out the bounds checker is in the non-optimized version, and a couple of places in the code used x[rand()]=y ... the bounds-checker (implemented as a macro which had side effects) *caused* the heisenbug!
With a headline of "Visual Autopsy Of An ATM Card Skimmer", I was expecting more. Don't get me wrong - the electronics are neat - but a dead body would have been cooler. I'd be curious if they could locate the thief's spine.
good idea, but I'll bet most cameras will record some sort of rudimentary audio, so the loud beeps will inidicate the correct presses. To verify this claim, I just researched the U50 and found it doesn't record sound... but I know eventually the small cameras will. Even the chip in the $11 Ritz Dakota disposable records sound (but it's not bonded out on the package they use).
Their pre-order page says "Estimated retail cost on a "bare bones" platform should fall between $599 to $699."
Car door openers operate on a number of frequencies in (I suspect) a few bands. The interfering signal could be cover one or more of these signals, and depending on what frequency your car used, you could be out of luck.
Even if two openers use the same frequency, there could still be difference in vulnerability. Typically, radios mix an intermediate frequency to get the signal of interest down to a low-frequency the microcontroller can check -- this type of radio can be suspectable at another image frequency that isn't the one of interest. Typically, filters are in place to reject that other frequency, but the filters of one model car may be better or worse than another. Since the antenna is also part of the circuit, differences in manufacturing, and even what kind of trinkets you have on your back window (where my antenna is located) could also affect recievers.
There are two types of colored contact lenses - opaque and non-opaque.
I've got the non-opaque ones, which is basically a colored transparent circle in the middle of the lens. It does tint my vision a little, but the brain gets used to it. I don't use them for photography. This type does not lighten dark eyes. I'm pretty sure you could easily get an iris print through these.
The opaque kind has a printed fake iris-like pattern on them, and are clear in the middle (and they don't tint your vision) I didn't like this kind because they use a half-tone dot pattern that I noticed very easily and looked especially fake. I doubt you could get an actual iris print with these. These are newer and are being pushed harder (example: the non-opaque kind are not available for astigmatic lenses). Manufacturers claim they look better, but for light-colored eyes, I disagree. For dark colored eyes, they are the only solution.
I love the picture of the "typical user" in the article. She's got a nice portable laptop, plus this huge aroma thing that looks like it's too bulky to fit in any laptop bag. Did she bring the laptop and connect the device in case she got a smelly email? Or did she have to go and get the device when she realized she had gotten a smelly email?
Plus, she's eating - her taste/smell senses are already being used. So, now she's eating musk-perfume-flavored stawberries, and we're expected to believe that this is enjoyable? Pretty picture, yes. But poor marketing.
Also: "Telewest says its "scent dome" could cost around 250 and would only work with a high-speed, broadband connection." -- WTF? The device produces only 60 smells - so is 6 bits now too big to send over a slow modem?
In other news, people are discovering that centrino-based laptops can be thrown at police/fire/etc and hit them in the face with higher force than is presently legal. Also, stalkers have been able to use the WiFi portion of the centrino chipset to send messages annonymously from open hotspots. And con artists have been taking advantage of centrino's processor to do their taxes.
And all this is with the current windows drivers... just imagine what would happen if they open them up!
question (and I know I'm asking this on slashdot, so I won't take it as gospel): without probable cause, they can't have a k9 search, can they? You were just being nice (in a time-consuming manner that got your point across), right?
Ok, here's the story of the night I pulled over a cop in the suburbs of D.C.:
I was driving home from work late one night (~12pm) and it's about a 15 minute drive. For some reason, I see a lot of cop cars and they are all pass me at high speed and take different exits (they weren't all going to the same place). Two of them have lights on and I happily get out of their way. Three of them don't have their flashers and I gasp to myself - "oh my god a drunk is going to rear-end me". It was this last one w/o lights that pushed me over the edge.
I'm about three blocks from my house (speed limit 35 on a six-lane road, and rightfully so because it's hilly and people can't see you when they are pulling out of their driveways), and I look in my rear-view and see one of these high-speed cars. I was all alone in the inner lane, but I don't have enough time to get out of his way. He passes me, and as soon as I see he's a cop, I start flashing my high beams - mostly in protest, but also to warn innocent motorists ahead. After a few of my flashes, he lets off the gas and coasts to a stop (again, no blue lights) - coincidently across the street from my house. It took quite a while for me going 35 mph to reach him; I'd guess he was almost double my speed -- conservatively 60+.
I pull into my parking space and he flips on the blue lights and pulls up behind me. After running my plates, he comes to the window. I calmly explain that I live at the house, how it's a dangerous place to speed, that I see it all the time there, and seeing it that many times that night just pushed me over the edge. I asked him to please use his blue lights when going fast.
He said he couldn't do that because he might give a heads-up to the evildoers (my word) at the scene he's rushing to. No convincing him, even with the driveway/poor-visibilty argument. Never mind that all the other two light-less officers I saw that night turned off onto other major roads and could clearly have used their lights for a good portion of their trips. I don't know exactly where my officer was going, but obviously it wasn't as important as some law-abiding citizen flashing his lights.
He was nice and let me go. Hopefully my message sank in and he didn't want to admit it to me, but I'm not sure.
Part of my sensitation to speeders in front of my house is that, before my office moved, I used to walk to work across all six lanes.
Don't mess with Microsoft, they have the money and the power to track you down
if this is true, then why haven't I gotten my $245 from Bill yet? I forwarded that email to a zillion friends, waited two weeks, and still no check.
here's a link to prototypes of this, in headwear.
Sure, C is fine for the run-of-the-mill CEO, but if you want to be a fortune 500 CEO, you're going to have to return value in assembly language. Or do it in hardware & it'll be even more effective.
EE Times is also reporting that Intel may be pushing a new kind of RAM interface to compete with existing DDR and RDRAM. At 2 Gbit/sec per wire, this is about twice the speed of current RDRAM and four times the speed of DDR SDRAM. But, more interestingly, this is a point-to-point architecture - unlike the traditional bus architecture, when you add more memory modules you can get more bandwidth. Also notable is that simultaneous bi-directional communications happens over a single wire. Infineon and Samsung have made test chips, and results are to be released at the International Solid State Circuits Conference today.
I wonder how this figures into their processor/chipset roadmap...
Kapton tape, which is essentially used as space duct tape, erodes in the presence of atomic oxygen. Atomic oxygen (just a single O, not the usual stable O2) is quite reactive, and will eat away many materials on the leading edge of spacecraft. Atomic oxygen is found more in the lower orbits (i.e. ISS and space shuttle) rather than the higer orbits (geosynchronous). Here are some pictures from the experiment.
(yep, I'm a former rocket scientist)
Maybe I should ammend what I said. When I search for "litigious bastards", I don't get sco first. Since their database is distributed, you might be getting an old copy that still has sco ranked first. Or, I could be getting an old copy, but I doubt it because SCO has been up there a while.
When you search for "litigious bastards", you now get a website promoting the googlebomb technique listed first. The sco group was listed first, but now it's ranked about 47. I'm not sure if they are reducing the relevance of the link-text, or if the ranking has been lowered because the sco group probably doesn't point back at any of the blogs that link to it.
The Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP, aka PPCP) was released many many years ago, but it hasn't really taken off. IBM did sell some of these systems, and the modern pegasos platform offers G3 & G4 processors.
Here's some more technical info.
p.s. mac sleeping is perfect - sleep and wake are quick, and network connectivity (even when roaming) is very fast.
Good points, but I do have to object to point number 5. The screenshot they show says (and it contradicts itself) "DVD Error / TheTV Out port of your display is not working properly. / This copy protected disc can not be ploayed when the TV out function is enabled." So, I fear that it is a DRM issue that won't be fixed.
But, like you pointed out, we can't really tell what's going on yet - from the exact situation that's causing the problem, to what the actual product will do.
I'm surprised that with that restriction, ASUS even tried to make this box. Wow, companies really are as dumb and easily bullied as the DVDCCA thinks!
I had a little trouble doing the window trick (it didn't seem to take the return character), so here's another method:
1. type "sleep 1; killall Dock" without the return
2. Hover the mouse over the minimize button
3. hit return
4. You have up to a second to shift-click the minimize button. (for more time, use "sleep 2" or 3)
tell that to the bald guy in the airplane seat ahead of you while you project Quake on the back of his head. Oh wait, you're right -- it is ten times the fun!