Some of these are on display on out-of-the-way doors in the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco. It looked like some of the staff members had printed them out and posted them there for their own personal satisfaction, but a lot of the visitors were finding themselves distracted from the bigger attractions to stare at these.
It was trippy to have the spinning snakes one as my wallpaper for some time, but at six by four feet, it really does begin to make you a little dizzy.
X-10 hardware and X10.com are not the same thing. The former is hardware based on a protocol that was invented in the early 70s. The latter is a company that just happens to make technology based on the protocol.
One doesn't necessarily have to come from the other, and it's a shame that the vendor has ruined a perfectly useful technology, even shaming it doubly by making poor-quality electronics.
This project describes the most interesting part of this hack... converting the IR into a waveform in the first place. That Griffin gadget is fascinating.
The article talks about how you read off the IR codes in the first place, and convert them into usable waveforms. It uses C# targetted for PocketPC. I found the underpinnings of this hack far more interesting than the hack itself.
I know plenty of people who might be interested in switching away from IE if the full ramifications of these security problems actually reached them, rather than being too technical, or not on the evening news, or wherever they might be lucky enough to see them.
How about someone writes a virus that injects code that redirects to... the Firefox installer? If people don't notice or care when their home pages and computers get hijacked, they probably won't care if their browser suddenly changes either.
I'm not serious, but sometimes I wonder what would happen if people who didn't patch their IE were switched to Firefox by force.
The test was converted to C++ in 1999. This means that C++ was the language of the test for a full five years, not just the one mentioned in the posting.
Netflix actually maintains a survey that they send from another domain if you are an AOL user who accidentally reports one of their business e-mails as spam.
It asks you whether you remember clicking on the link, and if you do, whether you meant to or not. Seems like a decent way to compile a list of replies from disgruntled AOL users who are no longer receiving shipping or billing notifications because they accidentally filed them as spam.
This would be perfect for Slashdot. It's also a place where multiple readings of the same exact news story appear many times each day. This way, each time a link is submitted, the paraphraser could dupe it automatically and queue it up to go out every few days.
Re:Spidering Google Illegal?
on
Spidering Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This book requires that you submit to Google for a key to search with and use their API. In the hacks that require Google access, it'll just say something like
idkey = "insert your key here!"
AFAIK, this is standard practice for most sites with API access. (If you're interested, do it yourself at google.com/apis.) If you try to pull Google info down with an HTTP object programatically, Google will just return a 403 and tell you to read its terms of service. (Unless you spoof the header, but that requires doing it from scratch, and it will also get you in trouble if you try to use it commercially.)
Don't know if anyone's pointed it out, but there are some sample links up on the web site. Some really great stuff, just from what I saw. Made me want to buy the book. (Guess that's the point.)
The download is available, to try it with a mouse, so I just downloaded it and gave it a try.
It's -- hard to explain how easy it is to type with it. You get into a zone where your hand moves the mouse at the right letters, and they just flow onto the screen. If you make a mistake, you track the mouse back to the left, and the letters flow off your screen and back into the mess.
When you start to create a full word, it will line up groups of letters, not just one at a time, so you can complete a word easily. For instance, once I completed "fa", I saw "vor" line up in order right next to each other, and when I linked "vor", the two primary candidates were "ite" and a space.
What's weird is that you can forget what you're doing, and the program will just complete words based on the most likely ordering. Oddly enough, I got a sentence like, "What is the physical energy of a botanist" -- just by moving my mouse up and down randomly.
Think of it as a system primed to form sentences *for* you, and you just get to tweak it so that those sentences actually reflect the meaning of what you're trying to say.
Anyway, it's so fluid and predictive that it's scary. More like a ouija board than T9.
Position is already filled
on
Haiku vs Spam
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· Score: 1
I don't get this post I use some Bayesian trees Also, whitelisting
A.L.I.C.E., a heavyweight at 11 kilos, takes on SmarterChild, sponsored by ActiveBuddy, Inc. The prize? Utter destruction by licensing fees!
Let's go behind the ring for exclusive one-on-one interviews with the contenders.
SmarterChild, what's your take on the situation? SC: I don't know, I just do! How do you feel about this whole prior art thing? SC: Listings for Prior Art, KS... Austin Powers, playing at 12:30, 2:30, 3:30...
All right... moving on... A.L.I.C.E., how do you feel about this upcoming match? ALICE: I will ask my botmaster for the answer. Will you wrest control of the patent? ALICE: I have no answer for that. NYU and Berkeley suck!
What do you think of people who attempt to build up a consciousness of intelligence from a top-down approach? It seems that your approach is more bottom-up, in other words, let's keep asking it questions, and when the responses diverge significantly from expected, we'll add new clarifiers.
This seems to me a little like growing ivy up a wall and putting stakes in it every time it strays from the path you intend. It works, but it requires event-to-event correction for a long time before it becomes stable.
Do you think that real artificial intelligence will come from this process, starting with a running dummy and stub methods, or from careful design and planning, so that in the end we can flip the switch and have a working prototype? Is ALICE a reflection of your beliefs or just an experiment?
Music Construction Set had two file extensions, *.MCD and *.MCS. Though it had its own little DOS-like shell, I don't remember that it ever made standalones. It was one of those funky-boot disks where you could never do a DIR.
Pianoman, on the other hand, was a shareware program that made standalone files if you had the right version. It worked with a regular one-bit speaker by playing lots of sixty-fourth notes. It had trouble with more than three voices, obviously, because you could start to hear the distortion.
But Music Construction Set worked on my PCjr with all three voices wonderfully! Those were the days....
Is Linux Dead? and other useless questions
on
Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 1
I can't understand why Slashdot articles engage in the same mindless obfuscation as their Microsoft counterparts. If we love Linux so much, why do we need to play Penguin Scare every time someone random says something that isn't even as bad as we'd like to think?
The first sentence of the article is "Linux hasn't gone away." So if the one-sentence *MSNBC* answer to the question "Is Linux dead?" is "Linux hasn't gone away," why are we even bothering to ask?
What a waste of time. Let's raise our hackles about something useful for a change, instead of mindlessly defending Linux from articles that aren't even attacking it, just because the letters MS appear. At least, let's laugh at the FUD implied in quotes like "adopters of Linux still face hurdles living in a Microsoft world." It's only a Microsoft world in their minds, folks. We know better.
Looks like some news editors at CNN read Slashdot and decided to post a retraction just this once... maybe so we can all get free Thinkgeek t-shirts. That's okay, I don't want one, just put the cost in a fund to find a source of zero-point energy.
"Is this story a hoax?
Since publication of this story, CNN and other media have been criticized for falling for a clear hoax. According to popular technical web site slashdot.org the story is full of holes.
"Three 100 Watt light bulbs created a drain of 4500 Watts", - it should be 300 Watts. The inventor comments that perpetual motion is impossible, but then says what he's created is a "self-sustaining unit" that generates surplus energy, surely just another name for the same thing?
Slashdot points out that this inventor's claim contravenes the second law of thermodynamics which states that in a closed system, any real physical process ends with less useful energy than it started with, some is always wasted.
In other words, a perpetual motion machine is impossible. "
Slashdot Mirror
Amazingly, you were the only one to think of that joke.
How about a link to the actual blog? It's still up...
Some of these are on display on out-of-the-way doors in the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco. It looked like some of the staff members had printed them out and posted them there for their own personal satisfaction, but a lot of the visitors were finding themselves distracted from the bigger attractions to stare at these.
It was trippy to have the spinning snakes one as my wallpaper for some time, but at six by four feet, it really does begin to make you a little dizzy.
X-10 hardware and X10.com are not the same thing. The former is hardware based on a protocol that was invented in the early 70s. The latter is a company that just happens to make technology based on the protocol.
One doesn't necessarily have to come from the other, and it's a shame that the vendor has ruined a perfectly useful technology, even shaming it doubly by making poor-quality electronics.
This project describes the most interesting part of this hack... converting the IR into a waveform in the first place. That Griffin gadget is fascinating.
The article talks about how you read off the IR codes in the first place, and convert them into usable waveforms. It uses C# targetted for PocketPC. I found the underpinnings of this hack far more interesting than the hack itself.
I know plenty of people who might be interested in switching away from IE if the full ramifications of these security problems actually reached them, rather than being too technical, or not on the evening news, or wherever they might be lucky enough to see them.
How about someone writes a virus that injects code that redirects to... the Firefox installer? If people don't notice or care when their home pages and computers get hijacked, they probably won't care if their browser suddenly changes either.
I'm not serious, but sometimes I wonder what would happen if people who didn't patch their IE were switched to Firefox by force.
It is definitely more obvious what sort of web site addresses I am typing in by the sounds I make, rather than the sounds the keyboard makes...
The test was converted to C++ in 1999. This means that C++ was the language of the test for a full five years, not just the one mentioned in the posting.
Netflix actually maintains a survey that they send from another domain if you are an AOL user who accidentally reports one of their business e-mails as spam.
It asks you whether you remember clicking on the link, and if you do, whether you meant to or not. Seems like a decent way to compile a list of replies from disgruntled AOL users who are no longer receiving shipping or billing notifications because they accidentally filed them as spam.
For those of you with short memories, Slashdot covered the gravastar theory when it was announced last year.
See these articles:
Black Holes Disputed, 1/19/2002
Doubting the Existence of Black Holes, 3/26/2002
There must be black holes. That's how articles in the editors' database mysteriously disappear so they can be duped later.
This would be perfect for Slashdot. It's also a place where multiple readings of the same exact news story appear many times each day. This way, each time a link is submitted, the paraphraser could dupe it automatically and queue it up to go out every few days.
This book requires that you submit to Google for a key to search with and use their API. In the hacks that require Google access, it'll just say something like
idkey = "insert your key here!"
AFAIK, this is standard practice for most sites with API access. (If you're interested, do it yourself at google.com/apis.) If you try to pull Google info down with an HTTP object programatically, Google will just return a 403 and tell you to read its terms of service. (Unless you spoof the header, but that requires doing it from scratch, and it will also get you in trouble if you try to use it commercially.)
Don't know if anyone's pointed it out, but there are some sample links up on the web site. Some really great stuff, just from what I saw. Made me want to buy the book. (Guess that's the point.)
These must be the geeks you were looking for, then.
The download is available, to try it with a mouse, so I just downloaded it and gave it a try.
It's -- hard to explain how easy it is to type with it. You get into a zone where your hand moves the mouse at the right letters, and they just flow onto the screen. If you make a mistake, you track the mouse back to the left, and the letters flow off your screen and back into the mess.
When you start to create a full word, it will line up groups of letters, not just one at a time, so you can complete a word easily. For instance, once I completed "fa", I saw "vor" line up in order right next to each other, and when I linked "vor", the two primary candidates were "ite" and a space.
What's weird is that you can forget what you're doing, and the program will just complete words based on the most likely ordering. Oddly enough, I got a sentence like, "What is the physical energy of a botanist" -- just by moving my mouse up and down randomly.
Think of it as a system primed to form sentences *for* you, and you just get to tweak it so that those sentences actually reflect the meaning of what you're trying to say.
Anyway, it's so fluid and predictive that it's scary. More like a ouija board than T9.
I don't get this post
I use some Bayesian trees
Also, whitelisting
The article clearly explains why this is not a problem at all.
The point is that each person's inbox would be uniquely filtered based on the general content of emails they receive.
So.... your filter's usefulness would be inversely proportional to 1. That's also 1. I'll take a filter that's 100% useful, thanks.
Celebrity BotMatch...!
A.L.I.C.E., a heavyweight at 11 kilos, takes on SmarterChild, sponsored by ActiveBuddy, Inc. The prize? Utter destruction by licensing fees!
Let's go behind the ring for exclusive one-on-one interviews with the contenders.
SmarterChild, what's your take on the situation?
SC: I don't know, I just do!
How do you feel about this whole prior art thing?
SC: Listings for Prior Art, KS... Austin Powers, playing at 12:30, 2:30, 3:30...
All right... moving on... A.L.I.C.E., how do you feel about this upcoming match?
ALICE: I will ask my botmaster for the answer.
Will you wrest control of the patent?
ALICE: I have no answer for that. NYU and Berkeley suck!
"This is the kind of book you don't want..."
If I don't want it, why is your review so enthusiastic?
This link seems to show pretty conclusively that little has changed in the past five years...
http://www.anusha.com/times-go.htm
It's an article originally from the New York Times, more or less about the same thing.
What do you think of people who attempt to build up a consciousness of intelligence from a top-down approach? It seems that your approach is more bottom-up, in other words, let's keep asking it questions, and when the responses diverge significantly from expected, we'll add new clarifiers.
This seems to me a little like growing ivy up a wall and putting stakes in it every time it strays from the path you intend. It works, but it requires event-to-event correction for a long time before it becomes stable.
Do you think that real artificial intelligence will come from this process, starting with a running dummy and stub methods, or from careful design and planning, so that in the end we can flip the switch and have a working prototype? Is ALICE a reflection of your beliefs or just an experiment?
Music Construction Set had two file extensions, *.MCD and *.MCS. Though it had its own little DOS-like shell, I don't remember that it ever made standalones. It was one of those funky-boot disks where you could never do a DIR.
Pianoman, on the other hand, was a shareware program that made standalone files if you had the right version. It worked with a regular one-bit speaker by playing lots of sixty-fourth notes. It had trouble with more than three voices, obviously, because you could start to hear the distortion.
But Music Construction Set worked on my PCjr with all three voices wonderfully! Those were the days....
I can't understand why Slashdot articles engage in the same mindless obfuscation as their Microsoft counterparts. If we love Linux so much, why do we need to play Penguin Scare every time someone random says something that isn't even as bad as we'd like to think?
The first sentence of the article is "Linux hasn't gone away." So if the one-sentence *MSNBC* answer to the question "Is Linux dead?" is "Linux hasn't gone away," why are we even bothering to ask?
What a waste of time. Let's raise our hackles about something useful for a change, instead of mindlessly defending Linux from articles that aren't even attacking it, just because the letters MS appear. At least, let's laugh at the FUD implied in quotes like "adopters of Linux still face hurdles living in a Microsoft world." It's only a Microsoft world in their minds, folks. We know better.
"low-power light blubs"
Good old Webster's defines the verb blub to mean "to puff out, as with weeping."
Hm. I'm using my imagination here, and I still can't think of a way that a lot of sniffling and minor lamenting would interfere with Wi-Fi usage.
I guess... if you went war driving, but then you got stuck behind a funeral procession and couldn't go anywhere...?
Looks like some news editors at CNN read Slashdot and decided to post a retraction just this once... maybe so we can all get free Thinkgeek t-shirts. That's okay, I don't want one, just put the cost in a fund to find a source of zero-point energy.
"Is this story a hoax?
Since publication of this story, CNN and other media have been criticized for falling for a clear hoax. According to popular technical web site slashdot.org the story is full of holes.
"Three 100 Watt light bulbs created a drain of 4500 Watts", - it should be 300 Watts. The inventor comments that perpetual motion is impossible, but then says what he's created is a "self-sustaining unit" that generates surplus energy, surely just another name for the same thing?
Slashdot points out that this inventor's claim contravenes the second law of thermodynamics which states that in a closed system, any real physical process ends with less useful energy than it started with, some is always wasted.
In other words, a perpetual motion machine is impossible. "