They are in the position of being creative, to design for recycling, and turn it into a return on investment instead of just a cost. The problem of recycling exists mostly because of shortsighted, disposable design. "Disposable" in general should be an outlawed concept in the first-world countries. Almost anything can be made to have a much longer service life, and to be re-usable for other purposes even after its original use becomes irrelevant or inadequate. For example, old desktop computers make fine routers, thin clients, etc. (And on the other hand, you could argue that the excessive electricity they consume and heat that they produce does more damage to the environment than throwing them out and using new low-power chips.) Stuff which is really useless when it becomes obsolete (circuit boards for example) could be designed to be biodegradable or recyclable, but the goal should be re-use as much as possible. Give the manufacturers the incentive, and some of them may find a way.
They could alternatively put "my" in front of every file and every icon on the whole system. My Pr0n, My Natalie Portman.jpg, My Paris Hilton.xls, My ILoveYou.vbs and so on.;-)
If having the user write down passwords is good, why can't the "lookup" be automated to save all that typing...That way logging in could require none of the user's memory at all, and be much more secure, because the card could use a rolling code or hash-algorithm scheme, so that the data being passed back and forth between the card and the system is never the same, and the card contains all the secrets, and will not release them under any circumstances. Ultra-paranoid sysadmins might want to require a password or at least a username along with the card, but as long as users are taught never to leave the card unattended, I think it's not really necessary. This username/password crap is so insecure and outdated. My Dell laptop at work has a smart-card reader built in, and Windows already has support for this kind of authentication. My company hasn't tried to deploy it though.
Sounds to me like they already specified that it's acceptable to require the customer to update his current location on a web site, when traveling. So all the providers really have to do is figure out how to do 911 routing nationwide, and the onus is on the customer to keep them informed about which city to call.
Still though, it will be a hardship for some of these companies. I wonder if there is a loophole for the "wholesale" services, which provide only some services but aren't so end-user focused like Vonage et al. I was looking forward to getting my Asterisk tied in with one of those, and paying a low rate by the minute instead of one of those more expensive all-you-can-talk services.
Anyway even if you don't pay for a phone line, but you also don't have it removed, it's required to function for 911 calls, right? So Asterisk can be configured to route 911 calls to the landline and everything else via your favorite VOIP provider. I just hope all the cheap ones aren't forced out of business because of this damned government meddling. Really, anybody with a brain ought to know better than to expect 911 over VOIP anyway, and have a backup, like a land line or a cell phone or a nearby pay phone. Again, even cell phones without service being paid for, are still required to work for 911, and so there are those charities that collect old cell phones and give them to poor people.
I mean they could keep going, and require that every amateur radio repeater have an autopatch that must work for 911, without any kind of password. And if you have OnStar in your car, even if you quit paying for it you still have to be able to get through to 911 via that method. And if you dial 911 on a 2-way pager, or send to 911 on any instant messaging system, or email 911@yourisp.com, they have to message you back "what is the nature of your emergency?" And an Iridium phone must always be able to dial 911, regardless whether satellites are available or not, and even if you are calling from Zimbabwe. Heck every telephone pole could be required to have an emergency phone installed, with a little blue light to show you the way.
Trust? on what basis?
on
Revamping Freenet
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think the "members-only" thing is a good idea. For one thing, it excludes too many potential users, who would never bother going through the hoops to get an invitation, but would do some casual browsing if it wasn't such a hassle. And, the fewer users there are, the easier it is for governments to put them all in the same bucket of being assumed guilty because they are on a network that is being used only by those who need it the most (who are doing something illegal). I think it must be assumed that a breach is still possible. The best agents/goons are those who can build up the trust of the other members of whatever they are trying to infiltrate, so requiring trust is not a total barrier. Am I missing something here?
You know those cheese slicers that have a wire stretched across a frame, and a roller to keep the thickness of cheese uniform? They have a tendency to break a lot. Maybe carbon nanotubes would be really good for that.
I've also tried a lot of methods. My mom used to make it in a Club aluminum pan, and it does not ruin the pan. They are very thick (about 3/16" maybe) and last forever. I have those pans now, and have made popcorn that way too.
Then I got an air popper at a yard sale. When I was a kid we had one that didn't work well (which is why mom went back to the pan method), but the key is to find one that really blows. If it doesn't blow enough air the kernels just sit in there and burn. The one I have now is a Wearever Popcorn Pumper and it blows adequately. I only use it to cut the calories, and agree that pan-popped corn is better.
But, I don't like it without any oil at all, because how do you make the salt stick then? I read the ingredients on a can of Pam and was pleasantly surprised that it contains only vegetable oil and alcohol. So, I have begun spraying the popcorn occasionally as it comes out of the air popper. I wait for one good layer in the bottom of the bowl, then spray it thoroughly; then wait until it's all done and spray again on the top, and then sprinkle the salt. The alcohol evaporates quickly of course and the oil is much more evenly distributed than if you just dump butter on it. There is so little that you don't taste it much; it's just enough to hold a little salt. Popcorn salt is essential; if it's too coarse it will definitely fall off.
So I'm surprised theater poppers don't have a method of atomizing the butter over the popcorn. It would be better if it was real butter, but getting a good fine mist seems like a good idea to me.
I also like to put onion powder on my popcorn sometimes, along with the salt. But it is also too coarse and doesn't stick as well.
While at times I've been firmly in the "There needs to be an X with less crap in it" camp, I've learned to really appreciate the network transparency.
Network transparency is part of the fundamental design. You can create a windowing system from scratch that is much simpler because it isn't designed for network transparency. But ripping it out of X doesn't change much, because the APIs for programming will still be just as complex.
I finally got one of my TuxScreens running Linux last night. (Yes I know... I'm very slow getting around to some projects. This I should have done about 3 or 4 years ago.) I was impressed that it can run tinyX with only 16 megs of RAM, it's reasonably quick, and because there is no security, I can export my DISPLAY variable on my desktop machine and run any X program and have it display there. I really thought it would be harder than that, having gotten accustomed to it getting harder with newer distros, because the security people keep interfering with useability. I have yet to figure out how to do this at all with Gentoo.
However, it's much slower to display a full-screen image with xv than it is to run something simple like xclock or xterm. And modern themeable toolkits make applications much worse for network transparency. At my last job we had some old NCD Xterms and it was kindof slow to run something like Mozilla or KDE on them, while the old stuff was still as snappy as it ever was. I'm a big believer in vector rendering rather than the "pixmaps galore" approach that's currently in vogue for theming. Many programmers are not designing for network transparency anymore.
So when you say X has too much crap I'm thinking more of the "cool" modern features (and obsolete features that were cool once). At least, most of those are X extensions, and bloating of the toolkit libs. Network transparency though is indispensible IMO, and to get rid of it you might as well start over rather than use X at all. It still amazes me that X is so old, and so advanced and so up-to-date and useful at the same time.
...of this. Unfortunately, those guys have probably patented some of the basic ideas. I worry that it may be very hard to build an open-source PDA that works that way. They seem to have some very cool, original ideas though. At least, I assume it's original for Jackito.
If the government were remade from the ground up, it would probably be much more socialistic and would not protect our basic freedoms as well as the current one does. IMO America is what it is primarily due to being a fresh young country without a lot of baggage, and because the founders had the joltingly uncluttered perspective of having themselves fought in the revolution, and remembered very well what they wanted to be free from. Nowadays the majority thinks that a good job and cheap gas and social security and health insurance are all basic rights.
What we need is to somehow toss out the bureacracies, and pare the corpus of laws down to the essentials, the way they once were simple, without changing the fundamental structure; but that is not very easy.
The title is misleading and this is quite likely illegal in the US.
I got to thinking though, what kind of cross-town networks can people really build for themselves? Some kind of old-fashioned 2-way pager network perhaps? Of course wifi with pringles cans but the power there is too low to go omnidirectional, so that is only practical for fixed links. Likewise a lot of other technologies can be pressed into that kind of service but aren't really good enough to replace your phone or pager. I sure am sick of paying $80 a month for a few minutes per month of voice usage on cell phones for me and my wife. (We just don't use them that much, but she's giving me a lot of flak when I threaten to just get rid of them.) Something like a city-wide instant messaging system using portable devices would be ideal. It has to be unobtrusive when you aren't using it, not like a walkie-talkie that you have to listen to all the time in order to know when somebody is calling you.
Of course a ham radio license opens up a lot of opportunities, but it isn't universal enough. (I've got one but too few others do.)
Because the money and glamour has subsided. All in all it's a profession for people of a certain mindset and males are more likely to have that mindset. So without further motivation (big money and feeling good about what one is doing) the remaining rewards are not enough for a woman.
What they told us in music appreciation class is that the point of John Cage's piece is that the audience does not realize that they are the ones giving the performance. There are always some ambient noises, and this piece gives us a chance to stop what we are doing and pay attention to our environment.
So it is hard to claim copyright on a recording of ambient noise, which by its nature is a "public good" (if it can be said to be any kind of good at all).
No way is a 1 GHz Via Nehemiah going to be faster than a 1.25 GHz G4. The mini is already one of the fastest PCs (personal computer, this includes macs by the way) that has been fit into such a small space.
I have an Epia system; to me it feels pretty anemic for its clock speed in comparison to say a PII or better.
Yes it should have VGA, although if you know where to get a $100 palm with greater than QVGA resolution you should have posted a link...
I was thinking this is basically a Zaurus with a hard drive and video-in, but actually it is inferior due to the display. And the SL-6000's can be found for under $500 now, and were $700 new rather than $800. If it had the same marvelous screen as the 6000 it would perhaps be worth the price.
They should not have left out the camera either. Big, big mistake. I talked to the guy in the booth at the show, and he said they decided to leave cameras to the camera manufacturers. But even a lower-quality camera (one-megapixel with a tiny lens) like the high-end phones have now is better than nothing, and plenty good enough for basic video. But I suppose you could carry along a separate video camera, of the surveillance variety, and plug it in. Sigh.
They also left out a memory slot. I think it should have at least an SD slot, perhaps CF as well.
This I don't get, it's an insult to my fruitcake that I usually make every year to compare it with this so-called music.
You must've only tasted the store-bought stuff, and lame stuff at that. With real fruit and nuts and liberal application of brandy for a month or so, it's much better, believe me!
Re:I'm waiting for missing track #17 - Silent nigh
on
Automatic Christmas Music
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah I think you got it - these algorithms do not recognize what humans find attractive about music - such things as rhythm, and having mostly major-scale harmony and very little dissonance, especially in "happy music" like Christmas music.
And saying that it is statistically optimal feels Orwellian.
But I suspect the researchers don't actually like this stuff either, they're just curious to observe people's reactions.
I don't think it will affect most people who would hear it, other than making them curious for a brief second.
Dude did you actually listen to any of this? It sounds like a good soundtrack for a creepy movie. Actually it would be excellent to complete the trilogy that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey. For when they land on that moon of Jupiter.
Well Bluetooth has AVRCP. But it is a connected profile, not broadcast.
It bothers me too that there are so many standards on 2.4GHz, some of which just avoid each other and others interfere, but none of them inter-operate. I think the next generation of standards should all use the same spread-spectrum method (DSS vs. hopping, if that flamewar is ever resolved) and the same frequency-choosing algorithms, and use ultra-wide-band signalling, while still permitting inter-operation of devices at different power levels. The reason there are so many standards now is that to save power you have to cut speed; networking, short-range device communications, and low-speed sensor networks are really different animals. But in low-power devices, capacitors could accumulate power slowly and then transmit short bursts at high power levels, enabling the same speed/power tradeoff without changing the basic symbol rate. And the high-power pulses would achieve longer-distance comms for the same long-term power consumption. But probably all this has already been thought of.
The available spreading codes for the chosen algorithm could be partitioned into ranges for different power levels, perhaps.
Still zigbee may just be a worthwhile exception to this general principle, because the power levels are really, really low - like running for years on a single battery.
In the future though I think carrier-powered transponders (like RFID chips, but with sensors on them) will replace the zigbee sensors.
Slashdot Mirror
They are in the position of being creative, to design for recycling, and turn it into a return on investment instead of just a cost. The problem of recycling exists mostly because of shortsighted, disposable design. "Disposable" in general should be an outlawed concept in the first-world countries. Almost anything can be made to have a much longer service life, and to be re-usable for other purposes even after its original use becomes irrelevant or inadequate. For example, old desktop computers make fine routers, thin clients, etc. (And on the other hand, you could argue that the excessive electricity they consume and heat that they produce does more damage to the environment than throwing them out and using new low-power chips.) Stuff which is really useless when it becomes obsolete (circuit boards for example) could be designed to be biodegradable or recyclable, but the goal should be re-use as much as possible. Give the manufacturers the incentive, and some of them may find a way.
They could alternatively put "my" in front of every file and every icon on the whole system. My Pr0n, My Natalie Portman.jpg, My Paris Hilton.xls, My ILoveYou.vbs and so on. ;-)
That's what "my this" and "my that" always reminded me of. The icons might has well have looked like crayon sketches, too.
If having the user write down passwords is good, why can't the "lookup" be automated to save all that typing...That way logging in could require none of the user's memory at all, and be much more secure, because the card could use a rolling code or hash-algorithm scheme, so that the data being passed back and forth between the card and the system is never the same, and the card contains all the secrets, and will not release them under any circumstances. Ultra-paranoid sysadmins might want to require a password or at least a username along with the card, but as long as users are taught never to leave the card unattended, I think it's not really necessary. This username/password crap is so insecure and outdated. My Dell laptop at work has a smart-card reader built in, and Windows already has support for this kind of authentication. My company hasn't tried to deploy it though.
Sounds to me like they already specified that it's acceptable to require the customer to update his current location on a web site, when traveling. So all the providers really have to do is figure out how to do 911 routing nationwide, and the onus is on the customer to keep them informed about which city to call.
Still though, it will be a hardship for some of these companies. I wonder if there is a loophole for the "wholesale" services, which provide only some services but aren't so end-user focused like Vonage et al. I was looking forward to getting my Asterisk tied in with one of those, and paying a low rate by the minute instead of one of those more expensive all-you-can-talk services.
Anyway even if you don't pay for a phone line, but you also don't have it removed, it's required to function for 911 calls, right? So Asterisk can be configured to route 911 calls to the landline and everything else via your favorite VOIP provider. I just hope all the cheap ones aren't forced out of business because of this damned government meddling. Really, anybody with a brain ought to know better than to expect 911 over VOIP anyway, and have a backup, like a land line or a cell phone or a nearby pay phone. Again, even cell phones without service being paid for, are still required to work for 911, and so there are those charities that collect old cell phones and give them to poor people.
I mean they could keep going, and require that every amateur radio repeater have an autopatch that must work for 911, without any kind of password. And if you have OnStar in your car, even if you quit paying for it you still have to be able to get through to 911 via that method. And if you dial 911 on a 2-way pager, or send to 911 on any instant messaging system, or email 911@yourisp.com, they have to message you back "what is the nature of your emergency?" And an Iridium phone must always be able to dial 911, regardless whether satellites are available or not, and even if you are calling from Zimbabwe. Heck every telephone pole could be required to have an emergency phone installed, with a little blue light to show you the way.
Yeah I bet Familiar will get ported soon enough.
I don't think the "members-only" thing is a good idea. For one thing, it excludes too many potential users, who would never bother going through the hoops to get an invitation, but would do some casual browsing if it wasn't such a hassle. And, the fewer users there are, the easier it is for governments to put them all in the same bucket of being assumed guilty because they are on a network that is being used only by those who need it the most (who are doing something illegal). I think it must be assumed that a breach is still possible. The best agents/goons are those who can build up the trust of the other members of whatever they are trying to infiltrate, so requiring trust is not a total barrier. Am I missing something here?
So are there any SMP motherboards for these, for two dual-core CPUs? Who has the killer deal for my next system?
You know those cheese slicers that have a wire stretched across a frame, and a roller to keep the thickness of cheese uniform? They have a tendency to break a lot. Maybe carbon nanotubes would be really good for that.
I've also tried a lot of methods. My mom used to make it in a Club aluminum pan, and it does not ruin the pan. They are very thick (about 3/16" maybe) and last forever. I have those pans now, and have made popcorn that way too.
Then I got an air popper at a yard sale. When I was a kid we had one that didn't work well (which is why mom went back to the pan method), but the key is to find one that really blows. If it doesn't blow enough air the kernels just sit in there and burn. The one I have now is a Wearever Popcorn Pumper and it blows adequately. I only use it to cut the calories, and agree that pan-popped corn is better.
But, I don't like it without any oil at all, because how do you make the salt stick then? I read the ingredients on a can of Pam and was pleasantly surprised that it contains only vegetable oil and alcohol. So, I have begun spraying the popcorn occasionally as it comes out of the air popper. I wait for one good layer in the bottom of the bowl, then spray it thoroughly; then wait until it's all done and spray again on the top, and then sprinkle the salt. The alcohol evaporates quickly of course and the oil is much more evenly distributed than if you just dump butter on it. There is so little that you don't taste it much; it's just enough to hold a little salt. Popcorn salt is essential; if it's too coarse it will definitely fall off.
So I'm surprised theater poppers don't have a method of atomizing the butter over the popcorn. It would be better if it was real butter, but getting a good fine mist seems like a good idea to me.
I also like to put onion powder on my popcorn sometimes, along with the salt. But it is also too coarse and doesn't stick as well.
While at times I've been firmly in the "There needs to be an X with less crap in it" camp, I've learned to really appreciate the network transparency.
Network transparency is part of the fundamental design. You can create a windowing system from scratch that is much simpler because it isn't designed for network transparency. But ripping it out of X doesn't change much, because the APIs for programming will still be just as complex.
I finally got one of my TuxScreens running Linux last night. (Yes I know... I'm very slow getting around to some projects. This I should have done about 3 or 4 years ago.) I was impressed that it can run tinyX with only 16 megs of RAM, it's reasonably quick, and because there is no security, I can export my DISPLAY variable on my desktop machine and run any X program and have it display there. I really thought it would be harder than that, having gotten accustomed to it getting harder with newer distros, because the security people keep interfering with useability. I have yet to figure out how to do this at all with Gentoo.
However, it's much slower to display a full-screen image with xv than it is to run something simple like xclock or xterm. And modern themeable toolkits make applications much worse for network transparency. At my last job we had some old NCD Xterms and it was kindof slow to run something like Mozilla or KDE on them, while the old stuff was still as snappy as it ever was. I'm a big believer in vector rendering rather than the "pixmaps galore" approach that's currently in vogue for theming. Many programmers are not designing for network transparency anymore.
So when you say X has too much crap I'm thinking more of the "cool" modern features (and obsolete features that were cool once). At least, most of those are X extensions, and bloating of the toolkit libs. Network transparency though is indispensible IMO, and to get rid of it you might as well start over rather than use X at all. It still amazes me that X is so old, and so advanced and so up-to-date and useful at the same time.
...of this. Unfortunately, those guys have probably patented some of the basic ideas. I worry that it may be very hard to build an open-source PDA that works that way. They seem to have some very cool, original ideas though. At least, I assume it's original for Jackito.
If the government were remade from the ground up, it would probably be much more socialistic and would not protect our basic freedoms as well as the current one does. IMO America is what it is primarily due to being a fresh young country without a lot of baggage, and because the founders had the joltingly uncluttered perspective of having themselves fought in the revolution, and remembered very well what they wanted to be free from. Nowadays the majority thinks that a good job and cheap gas and social security and health insurance are all basic rights.
What we need is to somehow toss out the bureacracies, and pare the corpus of laws down to the essentials, the way they once were simple, without changing the fundamental structure; but that is not very easy.
The title is misleading and this is quite likely illegal in the US.
I got to thinking though, what kind of cross-town networks can people really build for themselves? Some kind of old-fashioned 2-way pager network perhaps? Of course wifi with pringles cans but the power there is too low to go omnidirectional, so that is only practical for fixed links. Likewise a lot of other technologies can be pressed into that kind of service but aren't really good enough to replace your phone or pager. I sure am sick of paying $80 a month for a few minutes per month of voice usage on cell phones for me and my wife. (We just don't use them that much, but she's giving me a lot of flak when I threaten to just get rid of them.) Something like a city-wide instant messaging system using portable devices would be ideal. It has to be unobtrusive when you aren't using it, not like a walkie-talkie that you have to listen to all the time in order to know when somebody is calling you.
Of course a ham radio license opens up a lot of opportunities, but it isn't universal enough. (I've got one but too few others do.)
Because the money and glamour has subsided. All in all it's a profession for people of a certain mindset and males are more likely to have that mindset. So without further motivation (big money and feeling good about what one is doing) the remaining rewards are not enough for a woman.
Well has anybody ripped and mirrored this yet?
What they told us in music appreciation class is that the point of John Cage's piece is that the audience does not realize that they are the ones giving the performance. There are always some ambient noises, and this piece gives us a chance to stop what we are doing and pay attention to our environment.
So it is hard to claim copyright on a recording of ambient noise, which by its nature is a "public good" (if it can be said to be any kind of good at all).
No way is a 1 GHz Via Nehemiah going to be faster than a 1.25 GHz G4. The mini is already one of the fastest PCs (personal computer, this includes macs by the way) that has been fit into such a small space.
I have an Epia system; to me it feels pretty anemic for its clock speed in comparison to say a PII or better.
Oh, so you are wanting some of Wallace & Gromit's remote-controlled pants.
Yes it should have VGA, although if you know where to get a $100 palm with greater than QVGA resolution you should have posted a link...
I was thinking this is basically a Zaurus with a hard drive and video-in, but actually it is inferior due to the display. And the SL-6000's can be found for under $500 now, and were $700 new rather than $800. If it had the same marvelous screen as the 6000 it would perhaps be worth the price.
They should not have left out the camera either. Big, big mistake. I talked to the guy in the booth at the show, and he said they decided to leave cameras to the camera manufacturers. But even a lower-quality camera (one-megapixel with a tiny lens) like the high-end phones have now is better than nothing, and plenty good enough for basic video. But I suppose you could carry along a separate video camera, of the surveillance variety, and plug it in. Sigh.
They also left out a memory slot. I think it should have at least an SD slot, perhaps CF as well.
whatever.
This I don't get, it's an insult to my fruitcake that I usually make every year to compare it with this so-called music.
You must've only tasted the store-bought stuff, and lame stuff at that. With real fruit and nuts and liberal application of brandy for a month or so, it's much better, believe me!
Yeah I think you got it - these algorithms do not recognize what humans find attractive about music - such things as rhythm, and having mostly major-scale harmony and very little dissonance, especially in "happy music" like Christmas music.
And saying that it is statistically optimal feels Orwellian.
But I suspect the researchers don't actually like this stuff either, they're just curious to observe people's reactions.
Dude did you actually listen to any of this? It sounds like a good soundtrack for a creepy movie. Actually it would be excellent to complete the trilogy that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey. For when they land on that moon of Jupiter.
Well Bluetooth has AVRCP. But it is a connected profile, not broadcast.
It bothers me too that there are so many standards on 2.4GHz, some of which just avoid each other and others interfere, but none of them inter-operate. I think the next generation of standards should all use the same spread-spectrum method (DSS vs. hopping, if that flamewar is ever resolved) and the same frequency-choosing algorithms, and use ultra-wide-band signalling, while still permitting inter-operation of devices at different power levels. The reason there are so many standards now is that to save power you have to cut speed; networking, short-range device communications, and low-speed sensor networks are really different animals. But in low-power devices, capacitors could accumulate power slowly and then transmit short bursts at high power levels, enabling the same speed/power tradeoff without changing the basic symbol rate. And the high-power pulses would achieve longer-distance comms for the same long-term power consumption. But probably all this has already been thought of.
The available spreading codes for the chosen algorithm could be partitioned into ranges for different power levels, perhaps.
Still zigbee may just be a worthwhile exception to this general principle, because the power levels are really, really low - like running for years on a single battery.
In the future though I think carrier-powered transponders (like RFID chips, but with sensors on them) will replace the zigbee sensors.