Remember, these ratings are used by advertisers to determine on which site to put their ads. From that angle, google etc will care what rating they get because it will affect how much they can charge for ads.
There are several roads near me that have cats-eyes that light up by themselves (ie not reflective, actually emitting light). I think its done with that glow-in-the-dark material which they shape into various things to go into cereal packets.
Anyway, long story short; you wouldn't believe the number of people I've got into a conversation with which runs along the lines of: "Hey, have you driven down that road at night with your lights off yet?!"
"Yet more proof that the BBC license fee is an unmitigated Good Thing(TM)."
Yes, a good thing for all the Americans etc. that get access to all these online services without paying the license fee (currently Real Video feeds, BBC news etc). Its perfectly feasible to block access using country to IP mapping, look at the Apple music store (and thats another thing that makes my blood boil..), but will they do it? Will they my eye; even though I can't see a reason why not. Is this what I'm paying my every increasing license fee for? Where is Mary Whitehouse when you need her?
I live in Norfolk which has some cool wind turbines going. Like this bad boy in Swaffham. They're going to build another even bigger one there soon. They are building the UK's biggest wind farm on the sand bank just off the coast here. They are even talking about converting some of the old wind mills/pumps that used to drain the marshes here to generate electricity which I think would be really good if it means more of them are preserved and serving a useful purpose.
Theres nothing there which isnt present in PDAs in the shops today. ARM is a much more sensible platform for battery life etc. Only Sharp have seriously tried to use Linux as a PDA platform, no one else is going to pick this up cos Wince doesnt run on it and theres no apps.
Sound like a dubious research project they've thrown a bit of money at in the hope of making some extra out of powerpc. (Shrug)
That is unless Apple picks it up and makes a PDA (cough)
- sterilise everything with gusto (or sterilising power) - after about a weeks fermentation (when its stopped bubbling) syphon it into a barrel and leave it there for at least a month. it will taste much better than the 2 weeks it usually says on the tin. - a couple of days before you crack it open make sure its where it needs to be for the drinking thereof and let some of the gas out (unless you are brewing lager - yuck). This preparation ensures the sediment has settled after transit from the shed (and the gas expulsion), and it hasnt got a head the size of Belgium.
I also make wine.
'But wine is less macho.' 'Aha, but its completely free.' 'Free, you say? Explain.'
Well, at the moment im brewing a blended wine of blackberry and elderberry (the British grape). I picked them from the side of the road over a warm summers weekend during a pleasant bike ride. It has cost me a packet of yeast (40p) and a bag of sugar (69p). I reckon ive got about 8 bottles (i got tired of picking).
Hurray for alcohol, bringer of blissfull inattention
not another good book ruined by hollywood. Books like this will not benefit from this:
(Fat man in suit sits at a desk. Looks at his digital watch at the time. Opens up his expensive PDA, trys to turn it on, gives up and uses a pen and paper. In barely legible writing he lays down)
- spend money on fight scenes - spend money on special effects - spend money on big name actors - spend money on advertising
'ok that looks like it.. hmmm cant help thinking i've forgot something.. oh yes.'
- write a script
Hmm 'Terry!?' (tea boy look up from linking paperclips together) 'Got a little job for you, shouldnt take you more than half a day'
----
Hes not being 'taken seriously after his death' as you say, but since hes dead they dont have to take him seriously anymore since the people that will give them the rights will be lawyers who you can appease with money rather than a good film. The radio version of HHGG was great, thats because Adams wrote the script.
We cant even hope for an amazing tea boy since the script would then be vetoed. Oh God I'm so depressed.
ive been tinkering with this for a little while. Its a great machine.
Heres what works:
- infrared, just like a serial infrared on your desktop! (irattach and away you go).
- serial (connect it to your desktop with pppd)
- framebuffer console (640x240 4bpp)
- power on and off (deep sleeps the psion)
- backlight
- install a full debain-arm distro! (basically anything console that works on your desktop will work on the psion at the moment)
- great for running your favourite editor, irc, lynx etc.
Heres what dont work:
- X works but without keyboard or touchpanel support yet.
- sound (apparently it should be easy to write a driver but noone has got round to it yet)
- contrast controls
- uses more power than EPOC (even when 'off') but probably not huge difference in battery life.
Heres some problems with it:
- cant use IBM microdrives, only compact flash
- only 16meg memory, and swap on a flash card isnt a good idea (flash has a limited number of write cycles)
- a bit slow (36Mhz, emulated FPU)
- no specific distro for it yet (ie nothing like familiar for the ipaq, although most of familiar will run on it cos they are both ARM machines).
Wouldnt it be great if someone managed to buy the rights to build these machines again running linux instead of EPOC? I recommend snapping up a cheap second hand one while your still can.
No offense to Alan and the rest of you but i think its amazing that a 3 line quip giving a personal opinion generates so much discussion!
I hope (and expect) he takes all this with a pinch of salt cos if not he'll never fit his head through the door.
I imagine everyone here disagrees with AOL/Time Warners legal shinanigans (im assuming his main exception is taken against their stance with DCMA, Gnutella and such). The fact that a main proponent of open source should hold the same view is hardly news!
Its admirable that he would go so far as to leave his job, but I dont think many people expect this buyout to happen anyway.
yeah but compare that keyboard to the keyboard on the psion. You can touch type on the psion, you can only clumsily stab with your thumbs on the Zaurus.
It runs linux, although its not particularly complete yet. There has been major development on the 5mx recently though and hopefully it should get to a good state soon.
OK maybe not the size of thing you want but its 36Mhz ARM, 16Mb RAM, compact flash disk, backlit greyscale 640x240 screen, goes 8 hours on 2 AAs and you can carry it in your pocket (just about).
The machines are cheap second hand now since psion have gone tits up but you better be quick before they disappear. Get a big CF disk and you can have a full debian-arm distribution on it.
If these worms are illegal because they gain unauthorised entry then of course making a 'friendly' virus is illegal because it is doing the same thing.
Having good intentions is nice but consider this (fictional) scenario: A local cat keeps trying to have 'relations' with my cat and I dont know who the owner is, plus the owner is unaware of their cat's activity. I catch the cat and get it 'fixed' without the owner knowing. When the owner finds out I doubt they or the police would be too pleased about it. Swap 'cat' for 'web server' and you have this code red situation.
Yes the internet is unpoliced but I dont think the 'Do-Gooder' virus is a very good answer. Internet policing is an interesting new subject but traditional security ideas still apply - the owner of the house is the one responsible for making sure the door is locked. People need to be taught this applies to the internet too.
(And no jokes about unauthorised entries thank you very much)
their case for public good is quite a strong one:
protecting the livings of musicians. I know the musicians get a unfairly small slice of the pie but thats a different issue. The fact is that if everyone could get music for free the musicians dont get any money, so they dont make music. No music != public good.
Now if someone can show P2P operating with the orginators of the music getting money then this case goes away. Napster hasnt done that (saying 'oh.. err, well how about if we add subscriptions?' doesnt seem to have cut it) and thats why napster is dead.
I think is scandelous that all P2P has been labelled 'MP3 based piracy', but lets face it, 90% of it is.
A point to make here is that CDRs werent banned when people started copying CDs with them. Why should it be easier to ban a non-physical medium which.could. be used for piracy?
I worked for a bit as a CO-OP student in this area last summer, which is not to say I know anything about this, but..:]
While distributed computing would probably benifti the HGP, there are a couple of points to take into consideration.
1) How secure is distributed computing? SETI and RC5 arent really all that concerned with the the integrity of the data they are getting back. They can just re-check a data block if it is a sure sign of ET or whatever. Here there will need to be a guarantee that data has not been tampered with.
As for the patent stuff... bah!. Let the lawyers mess around with that, everyone else can concentrate on the advancement of the human race.. or something like that.
Re:Engineering achievment or espionage?
on
China Enters Space
·
· Score: 2
I think the article and previous ones on this subject seem to suggest that a lot of the technology was bought from Russia rather than the US.. I doubt either China or the US would want to do any dealing with each other on this, as it is speculated that the reasons for this program are entirely political, ie China are demonstating themselves as being a promanent super power. The rumours about China starting its own manned space program were fueled by the fact that several chinese astronauts were sent for training in Russian space training camps.
Trying to argue that consoles are better that PCs on features alone is pointless. You can.always. get a better gaming system on a PC than any console if you throw enough money at it.
consoles are better in terms of price/performance. Quality of games available might be another argument.
scratchy sound? We must be really weird to listen to all the near CD quality mp3's everyone here has on cheap speakers. You plug your PC into your stereo.
Im personally not bothered about a few fps difference in speed between windows/linux if it means i dont have to keep booting into windows to run games. As long as the speed difference is not too big then im happy.
looking at unreal tournament and quake3, 'cross platform games, more of your please' is all i can say.
I remember seeing someone from the uni im at now demonstrating a prototype of a mouse that actually give the user a differing strength of electric shock as they moved the mouse accross a map.
It was meant to show another element of the map (population density or something i think) that if represented on the screen would make it too cluttered.
When he asked if anyone wanted to try it out, people were not too keen for some reason..
He also had a vibrating mouse based on the same idea.
...predictable in their responses to a comedy wind up about 'how to get women'
but thats by-the-by... The sad part is that a lot of lonely men reading slashdot are... ... seriously taking notes from this article, probably on their palm pilots, with intent to put them into practice, probably more out of intrigue that something could be more satisfying than a dual celeron workstation than anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, these ratings are used by advertisers to determine on which site to put their ads. From that angle, google etc will care what rating they get because it will affect how much they can charge for ads.
anyone remember the computer game page on channel 4 teletext called digitiser? That was some weird stuff..
l
http://www.lynn3686.freeserve.co.uk/digitiser.htm
http://www.mrbiffo.com/biffodigitiser.htm
'The Man' and his column and all that 'press reveal' only to uncover a weird swan or something with flashing red eyes.
I always wondered who was paying the wages of those crazy guys
There are several roads near me that have cats-eyes that light up by themselves (ie not reflective, actually emitting light). I think its done with that glow-in-the-dark material which they shape into various things to go into cereal packets.
Anyway, long story short; you wouldn't believe the number of people I've got into a conversation with which runs along the lines of: "Hey, have you driven down that road at night with your lights off yet?!"
So much for added safety
"Yet more proof that the BBC license fee is an unmitigated Good Thing(TM)."
Yes, a good thing for all the Americans etc. that get access to all these online services without paying the license fee (currently Real Video feeds, BBC news etc). Its perfectly feasible to block access using country to IP mapping, look at the Apple music store (and thats another thing that makes my blood boil..), but will they do it? Will they my eye; even though I can't see a reason why not. Is this what I'm paying my every increasing license fee for? Where is Mary Whitehouse when you need her?
take the cheap case you have now, put it in the cupboard/spare room/loft/cellar and get some long monitor,mouse and keyboard cables.
I live in Norfolk which has some cool wind turbines going. Like this bad boy in Swaffham. They're going to build another even bigger one there soon. They are building the UK's biggest wind farm on the sand bank just off the coast here. They are even talking about converting some of the old wind mills/pumps that used to drain the marshes here to generate electricity which I think would be really good if it means more of them are preserved and serving a useful purpose.
This sounds pants.
Theres nothing there which isnt present in PDAs in the shops today. ARM is a much more sensible platform for battery life etc. Only Sharp have seriously tried to use Linux as a PDA platform, no one else is going to pick this up cos Wince doesnt run on it and theres no apps.
Sound like a dubious research project they've thrown a bit of money at in the hope of making some extra out of powerpc. (Shrug)
That is unless Apple picks it up and makes a PDA (cough)
OK, this is probably a stupid idea but..
Anyone know what kind of speed a powerpc emulator running on a x86 would get?
If this OSX apps on BSD/PowerPC jazz works, what would you get if you coupled it to a powerpc to x86 emulator and had OSX running on a x86?
Even if it ran at half the speed you might end up getting a cheaper 'mac' because x86 hardware is cheaper?
Yep i brew beer my top tips would be:
- sterilise everything with gusto (or sterilising power)
- after about a weeks fermentation (when its stopped bubbling) syphon it into a barrel and leave it there for at least a month. it will taste much better than the 2 weeks it usually says on the tin.
- a couple of days before you crack it open make sure its where it needs to be for the drinking thereof and let some of the gas out (unless you are brewing lager - yuck). This preparation ensures the sediment has settled after transit from the shed (and the gas expulsion), and it hasnt got a head the size of Belgium.
I also make wine.
'But wine is less macho.'
'Aha, but its completely free.'
'Free, you say? Explain.'
Well, at the moment im brewing a blended wine of blackberry and elderberry (the British grape). I picked them from the side of the road over a warm summers weekend during a pleasant bike ride. It has cost me a packet of yeast (40p) and a bag of sugar (69p). I reckon ive got about 8 bottles (i got tired of picking).
Hurray for alcohol, bringer of blissfull inattention
My god he's onto something.
The old coot (empiror) is mr burns and the guy in black (leather) could be smithers. bart and lisa as luke and lea? grandpa as obi wan?
not another good book ruined by hollywood. Books like this will not benefit from this:
(Fat man in suit sits at a desk. Looks at his digital watch at the time. Opens up his expensive PDA, trys to turn it on, gives up and uses a pen and paper. In barely legible writing he lays down)
- spend money on fight scenes
- spend money on special effects
- spend money on big name actors
- spend money on advertising
'ok that looks like it.. hmmm cant help thinking i've forgot something.. oh yes.'
- write a script
Hmm 'Terry!?' (tea boy look up from linking paperclips together) 'Got a little job for you, shouldnt take you more than half a day'
----
Hes not being 'taken seriously after his death' as you say, but since hes dead they dont have to take him seriously anymore since the people that will give them the rights will be lawyers who you can appease with money rather than a good film. The radio version of HHGG was great, thats because Adams wrote the script.
We cant even hope for an amazing tea boy since the script would then be vetoed. Oh God I'm so depressed.
ive been tinkering with this for a little while. Its a great machine.
Heres what works:
- infrared, just like a serial infrared on your desktop! (irattach and away you go).
- serial (connect it to your desktop with pppd)
- framebuffer console (640x240 4bpp)
- power on and off (deep sleeps the psion)
- backlight
- install a full debain-arm distro! (basically anything console that works on your desktop will work on the psion at the moment)
- great for running your favourite editor, irc, lynx etc.
Heres what dont work:
- X works but without keyboard or touchpanel support yet.
- sound (apparently it should be easy to write a driver but noone has got round to it yet)
- contrast controls
- uses more power than EPOC (even when 'off') but probably not huge difference in battery life.
Heres some problems with it:
- cant use IBM microdrives, only compact flash
- only 16meg memory, and swap on a flash card isnt a good idea (flash has a limited number of write cycles)
- a bit slow (36Mhz, emulated FPU)
- no specific distro for it yet (ie nothing like familiar for the ipaq, although most of familiar will run on it cos they are both ARM machines).
Wouldnt it be great if someone managed to buy the rights to build these machines again running linux instead of EPOC? I recommend snapping up a cheap second hand one while your still can.
No offense to Alan and the rest of you but i think its amazing that a 3 line quip giving a personal opinion generates so much discussion!
I hope (and expect) he takes all this with a pinch of salt cos if not he'll never fit his head through the door.
I imagine everyone here disagrees with AOL/Time Warners legal shinanigans (im assuming his main exception is taken against their stance with DCMA, Gnutella and such). The fact that a main proponent of open source should hold the same view is hardly news!
Its admirable that he would go so far as to leave his job, but I dont think many people expect this buyout to happen anyway.
yeah but compare that keyboard to the keyboard on the psion. You can touch type on the psion, you can only clumsily stab with your thumbs on the Zaurus.
.. a Psion 5mx.
It runs linux, although its not particularly complete yet. There has been major development on the 5mx recently though and hopefully it should get to a good state soon.
OK maybe not the size of thing you want but its 36Mhz ARM, 16Mb RAM, compact flash disk, backlit greyscale 640x240 screen, goes 8 hours on 2 AAs and you can carry it in your pocket (just about).
The machines are cheap second hand now since psion have gone tits up but you better be quick before they disappear. Get a big CF disk and you can have a full debian-arm distribution on it.
look here for the linux on psion files
If you want something bigger, how about the netbook? 32Mb, 206Mhz ARM etc. This runs linux too but im not sure at what level of completeness.
Its a shame psion have stopped making these machines, as technically theyre very nice.
If these worms are illegal because they gain unauthorised entry then of course making a 'friendly' virus is illegal because it is doing the same thing.
Having good intentions is nice but consider this (fictional) scenario: A local cat keeps trying to have 'relations' with my cat and I dont know who the owner is, plus the owner is unaware of their cat's activity. I catch the cat and get it 'fixed' without the owner knowing. When the owner finds out I doubt they or the police would be too pleased about it. Swap 'cat' for 'web server' and you have this code red situation.
Yes the internet is unpoliced but I dont think the 'Do-Gooder' virus is a very good answer. Internet policing is an interesting new subject but traditional security ideas still apply - the owner of the house is the one responsible for making sure the door is locked. People need to be taught this applies to the internet too.
(And no jokes about unauthorised entries thank you very much)
their case for public good is quite a strong one:
.could. be used for piracy?
protecting the livings of musicians. I know the musicians get a unfairly small slice of the pie but thats a different issue. The fact is that if everyone could get music for free the musicians dont get any money, so they dont make music. No music != public good.
Now if someone can show P2P operating with the orginators of the music getting money then this case goes away. Napster hasnt done that (saying 'oh.. err, well how about if we add subscriptions?' doesnt seem to have cut it) and thats why napster is dead.
I think is scandelous that all P2P has been labelled 'MP3 based piracy', but lets face it, 90% of it is.
A point to make here is that CDRs werent banned when people started copying CDs with them. Why should it be easier to ban a non-physical medium which
just a couple of questions that have niggled at me for a while..
Why do some people call a pile of LEGO bricks, LEGO and others say LEGOs? What is the correct terminology?
Does LEGO stand for anything?
ok so its not facts vital to mankind but this is the kind of stuff i think about when i have insomnia....
not really.. more like calling a car with dunlop tires dunlop powered
I worked for a bit as a CO-OP student in this area last summer, which is not to say I know anything about this, but.. :]
While distributed computing would probably benifti the HGP, there are a couple of points to take into consideration.
1) How secure is distributed computing? SETI and RC5 arent really all that concerned with the the integrity of the data they are getting back. They can just re-check a data block if it is a sure sign of ET or whatever. Here there will need to be a guarantee that data has not been tampered with.
2) It seemed to me that some of the tools used could do with some open source style improvement by the hacking(coding) community before throwing lots of computing power at them.
As for the patent stuff... bah!. Let the lawyers mess around with that, everyone else can concentrate on the advancement of the human race.. or something like that.
links:
Genome database
The Sanger Centre
The NCBI
I think the article and previous ones on this subject seem to suggest that a lot of the technology was bought from Russia rather than the US.. I doubt either China or the US would want to do any dealing with each other on this, as it is speculated that the reasons for this program are entirely political, ie China are demonstating themselves as being a promanent super power. The rumours about China starting its own manned space program were fueled by the fact that several chinese astronauts were sent for training in Russian space training camps.
Trying to argue that consoles are better that PCs on features alone is pointless. You can .always. get a better gaming system on a PC than any console if you throw enough money at it.
consoles are better in terms of price/performance.
Quality of games available might be another argument.
scratchy sound? We must be really weird to listen to all the near CD quality mp3's everyone here has on cheap speakers. You plug your PC into your stereo.
Im personally not bothered about a few fps difference in speed between windows/linux if it means i dont have to keep booting into windows to run games. As long as the speed difference is not too big then im happy.
looking at unreal tournament and quake3, 'cross platform games, more of your please' is all i can say.
Check out the latest news posting on the q3arena site about linux quake3... not a pretty sight.
Is this how we want linux gamers to be portrayed?
If I were very paranoid id say this was sent by someone from microsoft or similar but I dont want to be making excuses for this type of thing.
I remember seeing someone from the uni im at now demonstrating a prototype of a mouse that actually give the user a differing strength of electric shock as they moved the mouse accross a map.
It was meant to show another element of the map (population density or something i think) that if represented on the screen would make it too cluttered.
When he asked if anyone wanted to try it out, people were not too keen for some reason..
He also had a vibrating mouse based on the same idea.
...predictable in their responses to a comedy wind up about 'how to get women'
but thats by-the-by... The sad part is that a lot of lonely men reading slashdot are...
... seriously taking notes from this article, probably on their palm pilots, with intent to put them into practice, probably more out of intrigue that something could be more satisfying than a dual celeron workstation than anything else.