Most 3d board vendors will give developers and reviewers demo boards before they hit the shelves. Meaning - you couldn't buy them if you wanted to. A magazine usually has to have a 1-3 month lead time to finish the next issue before it goes off to the presses. After all, it has to be printed, bound, and mailed.
And with technology related items, people are much more interested in new stuff. Magazines that reviewed only products that were on the shelves would have a hard time competing with magazines that review stuff that will be out next week.
Getting free hardware doesn't usually make for a better experience anyway. You often get beta drivers that have all sorts of conflicts with other drivers. I still have all sorts of 3d boards that I can't use anymore because they use beta drivers that don't exsist anymore and I didn't have the mind to save them. --
Actually spoofed packets are useful in not-so-evil manners. I'm working on an anonymous file transfer protocol that depends on the ability to hide the return address. That is you, can send a file to someone without them knowing where it came from or trace it back to you. There are two levels of anonymity :
1. You send packets directly to the target host using UDP with a spoofed return IP address of 0.0.0.0. This method can work to receive packets from behind a firewall with a SOCKS 5 server. Since this doesn't use ICMP it's not effected by itrace.
2. You send packets inside of an ICMP message to a random host on the net. The ICMP return address contains your target host. This is the most secure method, but you could end up pissing off some unwilling participants. You can reduce this by spreading the packets across a lot of host.
The astute reader will note that both methods use lossy transmission (UDP and ICMP). So a communication channel must be setup where the target can report lost/missing packets. Since this protocol is specific to file transfer, lost packets don't need to be reported individually and so they are clumped together and passed around a chain of computers (ala a gnutella-like network). The sender eventually gets the updates and resends the remaining packets.
Itrace could possibly effect method #2 making it more easy to trace a packet back to the source. But it really cannot isolate the sender to more than a subnet unless it is installed everywhere. There is too much equipment out there now that will never be replace to make this a reality.
I think someone should make a persistent world game designed for programmers. Instead of having them focus their energy destroying the experience for other players, why not make a game that encourages programming/hacking - in fact it requires it.
That is, all the entities in the game are controlled by computer programs, which are written by the players. The programs can run remotely on their machines and make request over the network (with some human guidance) or they can run 24hrs a day on a Java Servlet on the server.
The idea of programmers writing robots for a game isn't all that new. A long time ago there was C Robots. About 8 years ago Dave Taylor and I got our start in the gaming world by running the National Programming Contest for IEEE. This contest had a fresh new game every year that was played by client programs and run on the IBM AIX platform (they gave us free machines). Our contest were simple because contestants only had one weekend to make a client, but I can imagine a much more complex and interesting world for clients to play in.
What is kind of new here is the idea of a persistent world. As players get more advanced they can have their characters spawn new ones. A computer program can control 10 people almost as easily as 1. And computer programs can play 24 hrs a day, but human players have to sleep. And for someone looking to make money - you could charge for "hosting" the client program.
There are people who mess with SS7 at home in there spare time. That is my latest hobby even though I don't work in the telco industry. Also there have a number of books on the subject surfacing over the last few years, indicating it's growing in popularity (or telco engineers are getting bored). Not everyone wants to be a carrier and there are many other places of interest for hobbiest like cell phones, VOIP interfaces, etc.
Re:Spam legislation won't stop the problem
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
·
· Score: 1
Point 2: Headers must not be masked. I think this is a great first step, but won't it be hard to enforce? Point 3: Won't all this simply move the problem offshore?
I think this is kind of ironic. If they are masking their headers, how can they prove it came from offshore? On the other side of the coin, what's to stop them sending spam from US servers and faking headers to look like it came from offshore?
I think that US companies would get in trouble either way. If you are a US citizen and you hire a Frenchman to kill another american, you are just as guilty as if you hired an American. I worry a little bit about someone faking spam from a rival company with forged headers in order to get them in trouble.
If you want the cheapest go with CDROM, but you've got to swap out 100 cds. I do this for small backups (640MB). DVD just losses when you compare to IDE, it's more expensive (I didn't count the drive either!) and it's a lot less convenient. Plus with CDs/DVDs you waste a good deal of space because you will almost never fill a disk up to it's full potentional.
I went by the IBM software research labs here in San Jose and got see some neat demo of exactly this (attention sensitive UI).
The nice thing about this is that eye tracking is very cheap. The eye reflects IR very well so all you need is an IR strobe and a cheap IR CCD. An end product could cost less than $50.
One demo allowed you to speed up mouse click on things by automatically moving the mouse to an approximate location on the screen where you are looking.
They had one demo that would track your eye and blur the screen except for where the eye was focused. Everyone else sees a blurry screen, but you (the person being tracked) can't see a difference. Could be very cool in 3d games if the game could render the areas of the screen you were looking at in more detail and those you weren't in less detail. The military has been experimenting with this on high-end flight sims that do this with good success. But if your playing on a 13" monitor then pretty much everything is in focus.:)
Checkout their project page for a little for info.
Also, we don't necessarily want to spend the $250,000 to $1,000,000 that the console mfctrs. are asking for development rights.
Nobody asks for that kind of money. You can get a top of the line PS2 development station (TOOL) for $20k. These things are ethernet based so your artist can share them pretty easily. I would say most teams need 5 or less. Older systems were even more affordable - I've done PS1 and Sega work with less than $10k invested in hardware. I don't know about the dreamcast.
I've never heard of any big console requiring up front money like that. They do want to make sure you have that kind of money in the bank so you can finish the game and help market it - otherwise you are wasting their time. You can't make a hit commercial console game on $50 no matter how good and multi-talented you are. The x-box is no exception.
the Dreamcast is the most obvious target for emulation on the X-Box, as it is WinCE/COM based code already. Right?
WinCE/COM has almost nothing to do with emulation. You emulate the hardware, not the OS. VMWare may have a few special cases for NT versus Linux, but it's almost all the same code.
If you truely are a Dreamcast developer then you cannot legally make an emulator anyway. You signed an NDA that strictly forbids this.
"In 1986, Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act ("ECPA"),[13] which protects electronic communications from interception and disclosure to third parties.[14] This act was passed ostensibly because the common law protections for individual privacy were deemed insufficient. The problem in our context occurs because is it unclear whether e-mail is covered at all by this act. The hearings concerning the act showed that the House and Senate acknowledged the existence of e-mail, but did not address those technologies in the wording of the act. Regardless of whether e-mail was implied to be covered by the act, the exceptions tend to create large loopholes for employers to find relief in. Thus, although the ECPA would seem to protect workers from e-mail interceptions, it is not explicit when it comes to the workplace, and the exceptions contained may exclude employee protection.[15] These exceptions may limit the protection of employee e-mail, and include interstate systems, prior consent, and business use.
First, the ECPA only protects messages sent over public networks, because the definition under the act specifies only such communication that affects interstate or foreign commerce.[16] Thus, an inner-company e-mail system would not be covered, although a company voice mail would. This ambiguity will only require court interpretation, but under the statute itself, it appears that the exception would shelter the employer. Thus, an employer who provides an inner-company e-mail system could read and disclose employee's e-mail messages freely. Yet an employer who merely provides standard e-mail service from an outside provider does not appear to be protected by the provider exemption. Legislative history suggests the rational for the exemption was to allow providers access to the contents of stored electronic communications to back up messages as protection for system failure.[17]
Second, the ECPA allows interception and monitoring where one of the parties has given consent. Although an employee may not give explicit consent to the employer to read specific message "A," some prior aspect of the employer/employee relationship, such as signing an employee agreement which gives consent, or accepting an employee handbook, may defeat this claim. Courts have found that consent may be inferred from circumstances indicating that the party agreed to the surveillance.[18] However, in Watkins v. L.M. Berry & Co., the court noted that mere knowledge of the capability of monitoring does not imply consent.[19]
Third, the business use exception is the broadest exception of all, and allows the company the right to make interceptions under the ordinary course of business. Analyzing this exception courts usually take one of two approaches. The first approach is based on context and the second on content. Under the context approach the key to limiting employer liability is employee notice and a legitimate business purpose for the monitoring.[20] For example, the employer can probably successfully argue that in order to maintain productivity, decrease fraud, etc., they must intermittently monitor employee e-mails. It would be very difficult for the employee to argue successfully against this exception. "
There are a number of companies that now sell cell phone jamming devices. I've seen some models that a very compact and fit into a small area of your briefcase.
Of course, these devices are only sold outside of the US and are completely illegal to operate in the US.
The first commercial one that I'm aware of was developed in 1998, here is an article about it.
"Michael Quanlu Wang of Argonne National Laboratory used a computer simulatation to compare the use of electric and gasoline cars in four large U.S. cities. The results showed that electric vehicles would reduce hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide by 98%. (Hydrocarbons create ground-level ozone, which causes cardiac and respiratory disease.) Emissions of nitrous oxides, another cause of ozone and acid rain, also fell.
But Wang found that emissions of sulfur oxide (a key cause of acid rain), and particulates would actually increase. (The health effects of these ultra-fine soot particles are now under increasing suspicion.)
The story for carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that's taking heat for causing global warming, was more complex. At slow speeds, electric vehicles greatly reduced carbon dioxide; the effect was less dependable at higher speeds. And as you read them, remember that all calculations of pollution trade-offs will depend on the age and pollution controls of the gasoline autos and the electric-generating plants in question.
Clean? That depends on where you live... (Sound Familiar?) To urbanites, electric vehicles truly produce"zero-emissions," Wang says, since they move all pollution to the power plant. Overall, he suggests, electric vehicles would benefit the environment by reducing hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions, and thus ground-level ozone. And while more particulates would be produced (particularly if the electricity came from coal), Wang observes that most electric generators are "away from populated areas, so there would be less population exposure."
Electric vehicles also offer a way to use "green electricity" (from solar, wind and geothermal sources), as clean transportation power.
Finally, electric cars may be less energy-intensive: A recent study by Ford Motor researchers found that electric vehicles with experimental sodium-sulfur batteries would use 24 percent less energy over their life cycle compared to similar gasoline cars."
Computers aren't programmable. Not anymore. They used to come with BASIC interpreters. Now you just get Windows on the home PC, or a Mac. Kids can't learn as they play.
what about html and javascript? I see more kids learning javascript and making silly web-page tricks than *ever* dared to run gwbasic.
John Q. Doe, personally spent 12.2 minutes at a girl-on-girl fetish page
How can a webbug track your time? I've seen that 30% of people or more only look at one page on a site and then go away. So you can measure the time between clicks? Also, people might click on Page 1 then Page 2 and then use the back button to read Page 1 more.
One way I can see of tracking time is to use an IMG tag to load an image on a remote server. Instead of sending the data to the client the server "stalls" the connection feeding just enough data so that it doesn't time out. When the client goes to another page, the browser will close the connection and you can record the time. The problem there is the borwser will never report the page has been loaded (i.e. the spinny thingy keeps going). Plus, I don't know if the browser will try to reload the image when the client comes to that page again.
An approach I've been playing with is to use a tiny Java app. The start() function records the time and the stop() sends a message to the server with the clients time. This works perfectly, but a good number of people have Java turned off (including myself). Plus if the user doesn't have a JVM loaded then your page can look like it is very slow to load.
Anyhow, I admit it's a bit on the devious side - but I'm only using it on my personal website to find out what types of information people are interested in - so I can focus my attention in a productive manner. A page hit doesn't really tell you that kind of information, and very few people take the time to provide feedback.
In the last 2 days, people have spent an average of 97 seconds per page on my web site (of those running Java). However, people who don't stick around long enough for the java app to be loaded aren't counted. If you want to see the applet in action click on my sig.
The idea is not to save power but to get a phone with excellant reception with high reliability at very low cost. My cell phone has a broadcast life of 8 hours and a standby life of 30hrs. I've seen some that have more. Digital transmission requires a lot less power than analog. I think rebroadcast over 1sq mile is feasable - most radios have a 2-mile range.
And yes it's complex to figure out how to route calls. It's sort of like the internet except the nodes move all the time. It would be an interesting problem to work on...
I don't buy that. You can buy hand-held radios that are smaller than cell phones and are able to transmit two ways over a distance of a mile or more. Your argument doesn't make sense. It doesn't require more power to detect a signal and obviously a cell phone has enough power to get to a repeater.
I was thinking a while back, why not use cell phones as repeaters themselves? That is, your cell phone acts to relay cell phone calls from other distant callers. This could drastically reduce the cost of deployment. The biggest argument next to how to figure who does the relaying, is the reduction of battery life. But if you have enough users then your phone would not have to relay most of the time.
Users are very flaky and can instantly turn off their phone, so you would have to select a few repeaters to ensure a consistant signal. On long stretches of highway or in urban areas this wouldn't work but in a big city it would be perfect. You could concievably start your own cell phone company with one or two actual repeaters per city.
Privacy issues exsist, but I'm assuming the data would be encrypted. I'm sure this idea has occured to all cell phone engineers - yet it hasn't appeared. Anyone want to explain why this doesn't work? Too small of a coverage map, too much latency, ???
Re:Full screen video over the Internet. not likely
on
The Great Internet Con
·
· Score: 1
You are talking about "live" 2-way video. 1-way video can compensate for internet problems through buffering. You can always have larger and larger buffers. At some point you are prebuffering the whole thing and are guarenteed not to have any problems.
1-way transmission of full screen video over the internet happens every day. I haven't turned on my TV in 3 months now because I watch everything off of the internet now. Sure a T1 is a heck of a lot more expensive than cable, but it has many other uses.:)
This is especially true with bzip2 which uses very large dictionaries. But the sample above only tried to compress the first 1MB of data - which is probably the kernel. I expect that user data is much more compressable - being that it would contain a number of zeros, spaces, and text. Of course this all depends on the data. If you have mostly JPG porn images loaded into ram you aren't going to get any compression.
This is a good point, but MSVC can produce Makefiles from your project file with a click of a button. Plus their project file format is text and pretty easy to parse yourself. I've written Makefile ->.dsp convertors because the MS ide is so nice.
Males are preferred much in the same way as males have always been preferred in all poor agricultural environments, not that ALL of China is like that mind you, but ALOT of it is
I considered this, however the process of selecting male sperm from female sperm is not something that comes cheaply to a poor farmer. For this reason, it only occurs in middle/upper class families - and thus not for the reasons you suggested. Not to say that lower class families don't abort or leave female children to die. But that is a different story.
Redhat makes plenty of money, as they have for the past couple of years. This quarter alone they had over $16 million in revenue. Sure they had a $2.5 mil loss, but that is due to growing pains. I'm not saying Redhat is worth 300/share but it's not going to turn into a penny stock any time soon like some of these other.com stocks.
Slashdot Mirror
Most 3d board vendors will give developers and reviewers demo boards before they hit the shelves. Meaning - you couldn't buy them if you wanted to. A magazine usually has to have a 1-3 month lead time to finish the next issue before it goes off to the presses. After all, it has to be printed, bound, and mailed.
And with technology related items, people are much more interested in new stuff. Magazines that reviewed only products that were on the shelves would have a hard time competing with magazines that review stuff that will be out next week.
Getting free hardware doesn't usually make for a better experience anyway. You often get beta drivers that have all sorts of conflicts with other drivers. I still have all sorts of 3d boards that I can't use anymore because they use beta drivers that don't exsist anymore and I didn't have the mind to save them.
--
Actually spoofed packets are useful in not-so-evil manners. I'm working on an anonymous file transfer protocol that depends on the ability to hide the return address. That is you, can send a file to someone without them knowing where it came from or trace it back to you. There are two levels of anonymity :
1. You send packets directly to the target host using UDP with a spoofed return IP address of 0.0.0.0. This method can work to receive packets from behind a firewall with a SOCKS 5 server. Since this doesn't use ICMP it's not effected by itrace.
2. You send packets inside of an ICMP message to a random host on the net. The ICMP return address contains your target host. This is the most secure method, but you could end up pissing off some unwilling participants. You can reduce this by spreading the packets across a lot of host.
The astute reader will note that both methods use lossy transmission (UDP and ICMP). So a communication channel must be setup where the target can report lost/missing packets. Since this protocol is specific to file transfer, lost packets don't need to be reported individually and so they are clumped together and passed around a chain of computers (ala a gnutella-like network). The sender eventually gets the updates and resends the remaining packets.
Itrace could possibly effect method #2 making it more easy to trace a packet back to the source. But it really cannot isolate the sender to more than a subnet unless it is installed everywhere. There is too much equipment out there now that will never be replace to make this a reality.
I think someone should make a persistent world game designed for programmers. Instead of having them focus their energy destroying the experience for other players, why not make a game that encourages programming/hacking - in fact it requires it.
That is, all the entities in the game are controlled by computer programs, which are written by the players. The programs can run remotely on their machines and make request over the network (with some human guidance) or they can run 24hrs a day on a Java Servlet on the server.
The idea of programmers writing robots for a game isn't all that new. A long time ago there was C Robots. About 8 years ago Dave Taylor and I got our start in the gaming world by running the National Programming Contest for IEEE. This contest had a fresh new game every year that was played by client programs and run on the IBM AIX platform (they gave us free machines). Our contest were simple because contestants only had one weekend to make a client, but I can imagine a much more complex and interesting world for clients to play in.
What is kind of new here is the idea of a persistent world. As players get more advanced they can have their characters spawn new ones. A computer program can control 10 people almost as easily as 1. And computer programs can play 24 hrs a day, but human players have to sleep. And for someone looking to make money - you could charge for "hosting" the client program.
You obviously haven't been having much fun. I suggest you quickly get to your phone and dail one or all of these numbers.
Spammer 800/888 phone numbers
--
I love your sig. :)
There are people who mess with SS7 at home in there spare time. That is my latest hobby even though I don't work in the telco industry. Also there have a number of books on the subject surfacing over the last few years, indicating it's growing in popularity (or telco engineers are getting bored). Not everyone wants to be a carrier and there are many other places of interest for hobbiest like cell phones, VOIP interfaces, etc.
Point 2: Headers must not be masked. I think this is a great first step, but won't it be hard to enforce?
Point 3: Won't all this simply move the problem offshore?
I think this is kind of ironic. If they are masking their headers, how can they prove it came from offshore? On the other side of the coin, what's to stop them sending spam from US servers and faking headers to look like it came from offshore?
I think that US companies would get in trouble either way. If you are a US citizen and you hire a Frenchman to kill another american, you are just as guilty as if you hired an American. I worry a little bit about someone faking spam from a rival company with forged headers in order to get them in trouble.
opps! That's what I get for trying to divide right before going to bed. :)
Consider the price per Gig (from pricewatch.com)
DVD - 5.2G/$19 = 27 cents (1 DVD)
IDE - 61G/$238 = 26 cents (1 61G drive)
CDR - 6.4G/$38 = 16 cents (100 cds)
If you want the cheapest go with CDROM, but you've got to swap out 100 cds. I do this for small backups (640MB). DVD just losses when you compare to IDE, it's more expensive (I didn't count the drive either!) and it's a lot less convenient. Plus with CDs/DVDs you waste a good deal of space because you will almost never fill a disk up to it's full potentional.
You can buy double sided DVD rewritables for $19.
I went by the IBM software research labs here in San Jose and got see some neat demo of exactly this (attention sensitive UI).
:)
The nice thing about this is that eye tracking is very cheap. The eye reflects IR very well so all you need is an IR strobe and a cheap IR CCD. An end product could cost less than $50.
One demo allowed you to speed up mouse click on things by automatically moving the mouse to an approximate location on the screen where you are looking.
They had one demo that would track your eye and blur the screen except for where the eye was focused. Everyone else sees a blurry screen, but you (the person being tracked) can't see a difference. Could be very cool in 3d games if the game could render the areas of the screen you were looking at in more detail and those you weren't in less detail. The military has been experimenting with this on high-end flight sims that do this with good success. But if your playing on a 13" monitor then pretty much everything is in focus.
Checkout their project page for a little for info.
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/blueeyes/
--
Also, we don't necessarily want to spend the $250,000 to $1,000,000 that the console mfctrs. are asking for development rights.
Nobody asks for that kind of money. You can get a top of the line PS2 development station (TOOL) for $20k. These things are ethernet based so your artist can share them pretty easily. I would say most teams need 5 or less. Older systems were even more affordable - I've done PS1 and Sega work with less than $10k invested in hardware. I don't know about the dreamcast.
I've never heard of any big console requiring up front money like that. They do want to make sure you have that kind of money in the bank so you can finish the game and help market it - otherwise you are wasting their time. You can't make a hit commercial console game on $50 no matter how good and multi-talented you are. The x-box is no exception.
the Dreamcast is the most obvious target for emulation on the X-Box, as it is WinCE/COM based code already. Right?
WinCE/COM has almost nothing to do with emulation. You emulate the hardware, not the OS. VMWare may have a few special cases for NT versus Linux, but it's almost all the same code.
If you truely are a Dreamcast developer then you cannot legally make an emulator anyway. You signed an NDA that strictly forbids this.
clipped from here:
"In 1986, Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act ("ECPA"),[13] which protects electronic communications from interception and disclosure to third parties.[14] This act was passed ostensibly because the common law protections for individual privacy were deemed insufficient. The problem in our context occurs because is it unclear whether e-mail is covered at all by this act. The hearings concerning the act showed that the House and Senate acknowledged the existence of e-mail, but did not address those technologies in the wording of the act. Regardless of whether e-mail was implied to be covered by the act, the exceptions tend to create large loopholes for employers to find relief in. Thus, although the ECPA would seem to protect workers from e-mail interceptions, it is not explicit when it comes to the workplace, and the exceptions contained may exclude employee protection.[15] These exceptions may limit the protection of employee e-mail, and include interstate systems, prior consent, and business use.
First, the ECPA only protects messages sent over public networks, because the definition under the act specifies only such communication that affects interstate or foreign commerce.[16] Thus, an inner-company e-mail system would not be covered, although a company voice mail would. This ambiguity will only require court interpretation, but under the statute itself, it appears that the exception would shelter the employer. Thus, an employer who provides an inner-company e-mail system could read and disclose employee's e-mail messages freely. Yet an employer who merely provides standard e-mail service from an outside provider does not appear to be protected by the provider exemption. Legislative history suggests the rational for the exemption was to allow providers access to the contents of stored electronic communications to back up messages as protection for system failure.[17]
Second, the ECPA allows interception and monitoring where one of the parties has given consent. Although an employee may not give explicit consent to the employer to read specific message "A," some prior aspect of the employer/employee relationship, such as signing an employee agreement which gives consent, or accepting an employee handbook, may defeat this claim. Courts have found that consent may be inferred from circumstances indicating that the party agreed to the surveillance.[18] However, in Watkins v. L.M. Berry & Co., the court noted that mere knowledge of the capability of monitoring does not imply consent.[19]
Third, the business use exception is the broadest exception of all, and allows the company the right to make interceptions under the ordinary course of business. Analyzing this exception courts usually take one of two approaches. The first approach is based on context and the second on content. Under the context approach the key to limiting employer liability is employee notice and a legitimate business purpose for the monitoring.[20] For example, the employer can probably successfully argue that in order to maintain productivity, decrease fraud, etc., they must intermittently monitor employee e-mails. It would be very difficult for the employee to argue successfully against this exception. "
3. typing. Almost mandatory since the 30's. Learning time: 2 yrs
hehe. I can just see someone hitting the letter 'a' continously for an entire week. (2 years * 356 days / 101 keys = 7 days/key).
There are a number of companies that now sell cell phone jamming devices. I've seen some models that a very compact and fit into a small area of your briefcase.
Of course, these devices are only sold outside of the US and are completely illegal to operate in the US.
The first commercial one that I'm aware of was developed in 1998, here is an article about it.
"Michael Quanlu Wang of Argonne National Laboratory used a computer simulatation to compare the use of electric and gasoline cars in four large U.S. cities. The results showed that electric vehicles would reduce hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide by 98%. (Hydrocarbons create ground-level ozone, which causes cardiac and respiratory disease.) Emissions of nitrous oxides, another cause of ozone and acid rain, also fell.
But Wang found that emissions of sulfur oxide (a key cause of acid rain), and particulates would actually increase. (The health effects of these ultra-fine soot particles are now under increasing suspicion.)
The story for carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that's taking heat for causing global warming, was more complex. At slow speeds, electric vehicles greatly reduced carbon dioxide; the effect was less dependable at higher speeds. And as you read them, remember that all calculations of pollution trade-offs will depend on the age and pollution controls of the gasoline autos and the electric-generating plants in question.
Clean? That depends on where you live... (Sound Familiar?)
To urbanites, electric vehicles truly produce"zero-emissions," Wang says, since they move all pollution to the power plant. Overall, he suggests, electric vehicles would benefit the environment by reducing hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions, and thus ground-level ozone. And while more particulates would be produced (particularly if the electricity came from coal), Wang observes that most electric generators are "away from populated areas, so there would be less population exposure."
Electric vehicles also offer a way to use "green electricity" (from solar, wind and geothermal sources), as clean transportation power.
Finally, electric cars may be less energy-intensive: A recent study by Ford Motor researchers found that electric vehicles with experimental sodium-sulfur batteries would use 24 percent less energy over their life cycle compared to similar gasoline cars."
information source
Computers aren't programmable. Not anymore. They used to come with BASIC interpreters. Now you just get Windows on the home PC, or a Mac. Kids can't learn as they play.
what about html and javascript? I see more kids learning javascript and making silly web-page tricks than *ever* dared to run gwbasic.
John Q. Doe, personally spent 12.2 minutes at a girl-on-girl fetish page
How can a webbug track your time? I've seen that 30% of people or more only look at one page on a site and then go away. So you can measure the time between clicks? Also, people might click on Page 1 then Page 2 and then use the back button to read Page 1 more.
One way I can see of tracking time is to use an IMG tag to load an image on a remote server. Instead of sending the data to the client the server "stalls" the connection feeding just enough data so that it doesn't time out. When the client goes to another page, the browser will close the connection and you can record the time.
The problem there is the borwser will never report the page has been loaded (i.e. the spinny thingy keeps going). Plus, I don't know if the browser will try to reload the image when the client comes to that page again.
An approach I've been playing with is to use a tiny Java app. The start() function records the time and the stop() sends a message to the server with the clients time. This works perfectly, but a good number of people have Java turned off (including myself). Plus if the user doesn't have a JVM loaded then your page can look like it is very slow to load.
Anyhow, I admit it's a bit on the devious side - but I'm only using it on my personal website to find out what types of information people are interested in - so I can focus my attention in a productive manner. A page hit doesn't really tell you that kind of information, and very few people take the time to provide feedback.
In the last 2 days, people have spent an average of 97 seconds per page on my web site (of those running Java). However, people who don't stick around long enough for the java app to be loaded aren't counted. If you want to see the applet in action click on my sig.
The idea is not to save power but to get a phone with excellant reception with high reliability at very low cost. My cell phone has a broadcast life of 8 hours and a standby life of 30hrs. I've seen some that have more. Digital transmission requires a lot less power than analog. I think rebroadcast over 1sq mile is feasable - most radios have a 2-mile range.
And yes it's complex to figure out how to route calls. It's sort of like the internet except the nodes move all the time. It would be an interesting problem to work on...
I don't buy that. You can buy hand-held radios that are smaller than cell phones and are able to transmit two ways over a distance of a mile or more. Your argument doesn't make sense. It doesn't require more power to detect a signal and obviously a cell phone has enough power to get to a repeater.
I was thinking a while back, why not use cell phones as repeaters themselves? That is, your cell phone acts to relay cell phone calls from other distant callers. This could drastically reduce the cost of deployment. The biggest argument next to how to figure who does the relaying, is the reduction of battery life. But if you have enough users then your phone would not have to relay most of the time.
Users are very flaky and can instantly turn off their phone, so you would have to select a few repeaters to ensure a consistant signal. On long stretches of highway or in urban areas this wouldn't work but in a big city it would be perfect. You could concievably start your own cell phone company with one or two actual repeaters per city.
Privacy issues exsist, but I'm assuming the data would be encrypted. I'm sure this idea has occured to all cell phone engineers - yet it hasn't appeared. Anyone want to explain why this doesn't work? Too small of a coverage map, too much latency, ???
You are talking about "live" 2-way video. 1-way video can compensate for internet problems through buffering. You can always have larger and larger buffers. At some point you are prebuffering the whole thing and are guarenteed not to have any problems.
:)
1-way transmission of full screen video over the internet happens every day. I haven't turned on my TV in 3 months now because I watch everything off of the internet now. Sure a T1 is a heck of a lot more expensive than cable, but it has many other uses.
This is especially true with bzip2 which uses very large dictionaries. But the sample above only tried to compress the first 1MB of data - which is probably the kernel. I expect that user data is much more compressable - being that it would contain a number of zeros, spaces, and text. Of course this all depends on the data. If you have mostly JPG porn images loaded into ram you aren't going to get any compression.
This is a good point, but MSVC can produce Makefiles from your project file with a click of a button. Plus their project file format is text and pretty easy to parse yourself. I've written Makefile -> .dsp convertors because the MS ide is so nice.
Males are preferred much in the same way as males have always been preferred in all poor agricultural environments, not that ALL of China is like that mind you, but ALOT of it is
I considered this, however the process of selecting male sperm from female sperm is not something that comes cheaply to a poor farmer. For this reason, it only occurs in middle/upper class families - and thus not for the reasons you suggested. Not to say that lower class families don't abort or leave female children to die. But that is a different story.
Redhat makes plenty of money, as they have for the past couple of years. This quarter alone they had over $16 million in revenue. Sure they had a $2.5 mil loss, but that is due to growing pains. I'm not saying Redhat is worth 300/share but it's not going to turn into a penny stock any time soon like some of these other .com stocks.