Um, I'm seeing a lot of things in that future prediction that were dead on. Making purchases with cell phones? Right around the corner. SMS like texting on a small PDA device? Bingo. Roku-like video on demand, controlled by a standard remote and a simple menu system? Exact match. Stylish, flat-panel LCD monitors? Yep. The kid was pretty much doing his assignment straight from Wikipedia (with a more simplistic and stylized interface). At one point the kid and his mom went into an art store to shop. That was wrong in the sense that they wouldn't have gone into an actual brick and mortar store and talked to a saleperson who showed them things on a screen - they simply would've done it from home (eBay, Amazon, etc). Tablet computers - check, but they got the interface all wrong - it had external controls, like a trackball with buttons. Obnoxious PowerPoint presentation? Yep, that's pretty realistic. They went overboard with the amount of Facetime-like video. Takes too much time, too engaging, doesn't allow multitasking, etc. SMS came to rule the communication mode that Sci-fi movies and predictions figured would all be video chatting. The other thing is a lot of the style and design shown in this flick were never brought to the market by MS or the companies embedding their OSes, but from Apple. Now THAT is ironic. Whoever did the prop work on this video should've been hired by MS.
Comon now, let's think for a second here. Google owns Google+. Google also "owns" Android, which is the single largest Mobile OS. Google should leverage (I hate that frigging market-speak word) its Android market to increase Google+ adoption. That means making full, unadulterated, high-performance (IE NOT HTML5 or Flash) versions of Google+ games that natively support Android - full blown apps. If they REALLY want to make an impact then they should target iOS too. Now THAT would rake in some serious users if the games are good. People would be joining Google+ just because they found a free Google+ game on the Android Marketplace that caught their attention.
What resource is of a high enough value to warrant the extreme costs of mining it in space and returning it to earth? The article just says "mining". Rare earth metals are about the only thing I can think of. Even something like diamonds (assuming they even exist in asteroids) wouldn't be worthwhile, because if you brought back a huge load of them then the value of diamonds as a global market will decrease because of the massive supply.
According to wikipedia (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents), 277 Americans have flown in space, compared to 96 for USSR/Russia. 14 Americans have been killed in spaceflight (technically 13, because one was Israeli), and 4 Soviets were killed. That's a death rate of 5% for USA and 4.2% for Russia.
This is a move on desperation on MS's part. I don't see it as a smart move, because it will be ineffective. First, I doubt there were many "dedicated" WebOS developers, especially for a platform with such a small market. For example, I develop games for iOS and Android jointly, I'm not "dedicated" to any platform. Second, any outfit that is looking to start over from scratch will look at the big, profitable markets. Free hardware is a drop in the bucket. Selling software is what matters, and the WP7 market is pathetic compared to iOS and Android. Finally, everything would have to be rewritten in C#, which is a dead-end as far reaching out to additional (non-MS) platforms. With both Android and iOS developers can use C / C++. 99.99% of my code is shared between Android and iOS. There are literally a hundred or so lines of java and Objective-C for each platform, so I'm very pleased to have one codebase that reaches such a massive amount of mobile users. THAT is what matters.
So to sum it up, hardware, technical support, etc, is not what matters at all here. It's about writing software for large, profitable markets. We're talking about developers for one tiny, insignificant, stagnant platform being lured to another tiny, insignificant, stagnant platform (and I'm referring to hardware market share, growth, etc, not how much money the parent company has to throw around). It's really not even much of a story in the first place in that light.
Good. Even though the product is made in China, there is still a large profit margin that will stream some money the other way, reducing the USA's trade deficit a bit. Essentially any money coming OUT of China is a good thing at this point.
I don't believe that one bit. First off, we can assume that the FBI has more than one surveillance van, in which they can't all have the same SSID. They would include some sort of vehicle ID, etc. Second, this kid was living in some delusional word trying to make himself out to be a lot more than he was. I think he was hinting to his friends on FB and trying to sound like a badass of some sort. He was obviously running his mouth about his plans, which is how he was caught - someone turned him in. Perhaps that was his way of reaching out for help before he actually acted. Regardless, just because he posted it on FB doesn't mean that his friend really saw that wireless SSID.
In what way is this bothersome? The reliability, or the brevity? We aren't exactly part of the command and control or decision making process you know. I'm sure there will be detailed releases forthcoming, but little bits of accurate information sooner is better than nothing.
My guess is that when he entered strings like this into his wordprocessor 52.068.4.309plusf24:KWimfhh436383717863
That it interpreted the numbers as IPv4 addresses and prepended http:/// onto it. If someone can verify then that part of the "mystery" is solved. It has nothing to do with URLs.
Furthermore, if they chose a one-byte length, as the article so casually suggests as the correct solution (like Pascal), it would have had the insane limit of 255-byte strings, with no compatible way to have a string any longer.
A pretty significant correction to your post. The article says "Using an address + length format would cost one more byte of overhead than an address + magic_marker format". If it costs one byte more, and the magic-marker is no longer used, then that means there are TWO bytes available for the length, which would allow strings of 65636 characters.
Then one could reserve the length value of 0xffff to indicate a 32 bit length value, allowing strings of 2^32 length.
If it was a single-byte length then it would require exactly the same storage requirements as the NULL terminated method. So the design choice was A) limiting strings to 255 bytes, B) using a NULL terminated string, or C) using an extra byte for 65636 character strings. The article says it was a choice between B and C, and they chose B. Option A which is what you refute, wasn't even an option at all, which is why it wasn't discussed.
Your argument is flawed, and I'm not sure why you are bringing religion into this either. Since all viruses are mutations of past ones, then why are some so much more deadly than others? Apparently you believe that since our immune system can fend off a virus, it can fend off any virus, because they share some common ancestry. That is absurd. Whether they had a common ancestry or not is moot. The longer a virus has to mutate within a specific species, there more different it will be from the point at which it "forked". Evolution is a two way street. When the virus jumps to a new species, that new species is seeing a virus that it did not have the opportunity to gradually evolve defenses against over time. Such an event CAN be catastrophic to a species. I didn't say the human race would go extinct, but that it is conceivable that the bulk of our species could die because of such an event. I didn't even say likely, but you cannot ignore that fact that it is a possibility.
The "new" viruses you refer to are mutations of existing human viruses - they are more the same than they are different. When a virus jumps species the risk is that it is different enough to not be efficiently recognized by the immune system. Our immune systems are already "pre-primed" with antibodies to viruses we have already encountered, and that gives us a significant advantage in fighting off the "new" viruses you refer to, which are generally minor mutations.
The upside: the virus may one day be harnessed as a tool for gene therapy.
Oh, I feel so much better now knowing there is an upside! And here I was worried that a virus totally new and thus unrecognized by the human immune system might wipe out the bulk of the human race. Silly me.
But this in itself could make things worse by triggering an evolutionary arms race that selects genes most capable of beating the safeguards.
Why is the word "evolutionary" used here? We're talking about static data that is not "executed" - it does not reproduce, it is only copied verbatim. Invalid data that bypasses filters ("antivirus software") is simply that - corrupt, invalid data that does not belong, but at least there will be less of it after filtering. That doesn't make the data somehow more powerful or adaptive - the filter merely missed it. The key fact is the data does not get to modify itself in an iterative fashion in order to survive or improve.
Damn right. I'm convinced Eps 4-6 were only made good by accident. The chances of George Lucas accidentally making something that is not utter shit again are quite slim.
No, it wasn't accident, and what prompts me to say that are the number of other good movies and entire series that he fostered. I think there are a number of factors. One is that the technology available during his best years (Star Wars 4-6, Indiana Jones Trilogy, American Graffiti, etc) was such that it limited him and kept him more focused on other aspects of movie making that he is good at. When he would say "Let's show this doing that in this way" and the FX people would say "No way that's simply impossible, but we can try doing something different this way - we'll figure it out and get back to you" then that made other parts of the movie matter more to Lucus that he could actually control. When it came to Episodes 1-3, and Lucas described a CGI alien clown, the FX people said - "yeah, we like a good challenge and there's nothing we can't do visually in this day and age, so let's make JarJar!"
Another thing is it is easy to start from scratch and just make things up, which is what he did with Star Wars. Did he honestly give any real thought to a backstory and how everything tied in together with the very first movie? Nah. He wasn't even looking at sequels, let alone prequels, when he invented the Star Wars universe. Star Wars was a single stand-alone movie all unto itself. Period. It did not need to be anything more than that. Empire Strikes Back was merely the same cast of characters in the same universe doing a whole new set of things that really had nothing to do with the first movie at all as far as plot lines and story arcs go. With the first 3 movies he had to go back and follow FACTS he had already created. He had to shoehorn a plot to fit who was where in first Star Wars and how they got there. That is a WHOLE lot harder than just making something up and leaving lots of pre-story elements simply up to the viewer's imagination. And speaking of that imagination, everyone already had at least some degree of preconceived notion as to what happened before Star Wars, and that is NEVER going to exactly match what Lucas himself imagined when he started writing the prequels. Thus some degree of disappointment was built in.
I think Lucas is (was) best at fostering entirely new projects from scratch, then more or less providing resources, bringing in good screenplay authors and directors, and then letting others run with those ideas (Indiana Jones, for example). I think his problem is when he micromanages things, and tries to get into lots of details with really complex plot lines which is best left to others more gifted in those areas.
I know you're being facetious, but ironically in this case you're probably indirectly right. Windows Phone 7 has such a small market share that it's not worth bothering with from a malware author's perspective, while iOS and Linux (Android) are huge targets. Funny how the table's turned.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously the moon had something to do with this:
http://www.space.com/12981-nasa-photo-shows-moon-soyuz-space-capsule-landing.html
Um, I'm seeing a lot of things in that future prediction that were dead on. Making purchases with cell phones? Right around the corner. SMS like texting on a small PDA device? Bingo. Roku-like video on demand, controlled by a standard remote and a simple menu system? Exact match. Stylish, flat-panel LCD monitors? Yep. The kid was pretty much doing his assignment straight from Wikipedia (with a more simplistic and stylized interface). At one point the kid and his mom went into an art store to shop. That was wrong in the sense that they wouldn't have gone into an actual brick and mortar store and talked to a saleperson who showed them things on a screen - they simply would've done it from home (eBay, Amazon, etc). Tablet computers - check, but they got the interface all wrong - it had external controls, like a trackball with buttons. Obnoxious PowerPoint presentation? Yep, that's pretty realistic. They went overboard with the amount of Facetime-like video. Takes too much time, too engaging, doesn't allow multitasking, etc. SMS came to rule the communication mode that Sci-fi movies and predictions figured would all be video chatting. The other thing is a lot of the style and design shown in this flick were never brought to the market by MS or the companies embedding their OSes, but from Apple. Now THAT is ironic. Whoever did the prop work on this video should've been hired by MS.
I don't see where you get that sheet-fed scanners are expensive. There are dozens of all-in-one scanners / printers / copiers for under $100.
Comon now, let's think for a second here. Google owns Google+. Google also "owns" Android, which is the single largest Mobile OS. Google should leverage (I hate that frigging market-speak word) its Android market to increase Google+ adoption. That means making full, unadulterated, high-performance (IE NOT HTML5 or Flash) versions of Google+ games that natively support Android - full blown apps. If they REALLY want to make an impact then they should target iOS too. Now THAT would rake in some serious users if the games are good. People would be joining Google+ just because they found a free Google+ game on the Android Marketplace that caught their attention.
What resource is of a high enough value to warrant the extreme costs of mining it in space and returning it to earth? The article just says "mining". Rare earth metals are about the only thing I can think of. Even something like diamonds (assuming they even exist in asteroids) wouldn't be worthwhile, because if you brought back a huge load of them then the value of diamonds as a global market will decrease because of the massive supply.
Here are more accurate statistics:
http://space.kursknet.ru/cosmos/english/other/stat_kk.sht
Russia / USSR launched 282 man-flights into space. USA launched 881 man-flights. Thus the fatality rate for Russia is 1.4%, and for USA 1.6%.
China has launched 6 man-flights on 3 launches with a 0% fatality rate.
According to wikipedia (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents), 277 Americans have flown in space, compared to 96 for USSR/Russia. 14 Americans have been killed in spaceflight (technically 13, because one was Israeli), and 4 Soviets were killed. That's a death rate of 5% for USA and 4.2% for Russia.
This is a move on desperation on MS's part. I don't see it as a smart move, because it will be ineffective. First, I doubt there were many "dedicated" WebOS developers, especially for a platform with such a small market. For example, I develop games for iOS and Android jointly, I'm not "dedicated" to any platform. Second, any outfit that is looking to start over from scratch will look at the big, profitable markets. Free hardware is a drop in the bucket. Selling software is what matters, and the WP7 market is pathetic compared to iOS and Android. Finally, everything would have to be rewritten in C#, which is a dead-end as far reaching out to additional (non-MS) platforms. With both Android and iOS developers can use C / C++. 99.99% of my code is shared between Android and iOS. There are literally a hundred or so lines of java and Objective-C for each platform, so I'm very pleased to have one codebase that reaches such a massive amount of mobile users. THAT is what matters.
So to sum it up, hardware, technical support, etc, is not what matters at all here. It's about writing software for large, profitable markets. We're talking about developers for one tiny, insignificant, stagnant platform being lured to another tiny, insignificant, stagnant platform (and I'm referring to hardware market share, growth, etc, not how much money the parent company has to throw around). It's really not even much of a story in the first place in that light.
Good. Even though the product is made in China, there is still a large profit margin that will stream some money the other way, reducing the USA's trade deficit a bit. Essentially any money coming OUT of China is a good thing at this point.
I don't believe that one bit. First off, we can assume that the FBI has more than one surveillance van, in which they can't all have the same SSID. They would include some sort of vehicle ID, etc. Second, this kid was living in some delusional word trying to make himself out to be a lot more than he was. I think he was hinting to his friends on FB and trying to sound like a badass of some sort. He was obviously running his mouth about his plans, which is how he was caught - someone turned him in. Perhaps that was his way of reaching out for help before he actually acted. Regardless, just because he posted it on FB doesn't mean that his friend really saw that wireless SSID.
In what way is this bothersome? The reliability, or the brevity? We aren't exactly part of the command and control or decision making process you know. I'm sure there will be detailed releases forthcoming, but little bits of accurate information sooner is better than nothing.
My guess is that when he entered strings like this into his wordprocessor
52.068.4.309plusf24:KWimfhh436383717863
That it interpreted the numbers as IPv4 addresses and prepended http:/// onto it. If someone can verify then that part of the "mystery" is solved. It has nothing to do with URLs.
Sheesh, don't bother going to the trouble. You've got the killer, just try a little waterboarding and save the time and money.
Mod parent up. The best possible stewardship of a NON-RENEWABLE resource is to not consume it at all.
The panel giving the briefing includes:
Geophysicist, geologist, planetary geologist and a biogeochemist.
Well at least we know they didn't find traces of alien civilization, unnatural structures, etc.
Well that sucks. I swear my intelligence increased the instant I switched to IE with Chrome Frame and Camino. Damn placebo effect.
Furthermore, if they chose a one-byte length, as the article so casually suggests as the correct solution (like Pascal), it would have had the insane limit of 255-byte strings, with no compatible way to have a string any longer.
A pretty significant correction to your post. The article says "Using an address + length format would cost one more byte of overhead than an address + magic_marker format". If it costs one byte more, and the magic-marker is no longer used, then that means there are TWO bytes available for the length, which would allow strings of 65636 characters.
Then one could reserve the length value of 0xffff to indicate a 32 bit length value, allowing strings of 2^32 length.
If it was a single-byte length then it would require exactly the same storage requirements as the NULL terminated method. So the design choice was A) limiting strings to 255 bytes, B) using a NULL terminated string, or C) using an extra byte for 65636 character strings. The article says it was a choice between B and C, and they chose B. Option A which is what you refute, wasn't even an option at all, which is why it wasn't discussed.
Your argument is flawed, and I'm not sure why you are bringing religion into this either. Since all viruses are mutations of past ones, then why are some so much more deadly than others? Apparently you believe that since our immune system can fend off a virus, it can fend off any virus, because they share some common ancestry. That is absurd. Whether they had a common ancestry or not is moot. The longer a virus has to mutate within a specific species, there more different it will be from the point at which it "forked". Evolution is a two way street. When the virus jumps to a new species, that new species is seeing a virus that it did not have the opportunity to gradually evolve defenses against over time. Such an event CAN be catastrophic to a species. I didn't say the human race would go extinct, but that it is conceivable that the bulk of our species could die because of such an event. I didn't even say likely, but you cannot ignore that fact that it is a possibility.
The "new" viruses you refer to are mutations of existing human viruses - they are more the same than they are different. When a virus jumps species the risk is that it is different enough to not be efficiently recognized by the immune system. Our immune systems are already "pre-primed" with antibodies to viruses we have already encountered, and that gives us a significant advantage in fighting off the "new" viruses you refer to, which are generally minor mutations.
The upside: the virus may one day be harnessed as a tool for gene therapy.
Oh, I feel so much better now knowing there is an upside! And here I was worried that a virus totally new and thus unrecognized by the human immune system might wipe out the bulk of the human race. Silly me.
You can download the second alpha of Ubuntu 11.10 today and give Thunderbird a whirl.
Wow, you have to download and install an entire OS distribution to try an email client.
But this in itself could make things worse by triggering an evolutionary arms race that selects genes most capable of beating the safeguards.
Why is the word "evolutionary" used here? We're talking about static data that is not "executed" - it does not reproduce, it is only copied verbatim. Invalid data that bypasses filters ("antivirus software") is simply that - corrupt, invalid data that does not belong, but at least there will be less of it after filtering. That doesn't make the data somehow more powerful or adaptive - the filter merely missed it. The key fact is the data does not get to modify itself in an iterative fashion in order to survive or improve.
Kind of makes me wonder why Google didn't buy Sun.
Damn right. I'm convinced Eps 4-6 were only made good by accident. The chances of George Lucas accidentally making something that is not utter shit again are quite slim.
No, it wasn't accident, and what prompts me to say that are the number of other good movies and entire series that he fostered. I think there are a number of factors. One is that the technology available during his best years (Star Wars 4-6, Indiana Jones Trilogy, American Graffiti, etc) was such that it limited him and kept him more focused on other aspects of movie making that he is good at. When he would say "Let's show this doing that in this way" and the FX people would say "No way that's simply impossible, but we can try doing something different this way - we'll figure it out and get back to you" then that made other parts of the movie matter more to Lucus that he could actually control. When it came to Episodes 1-3, and Lucas described a CGI alien clown, the FX people said - "yeah, we like a good challenge and there's nothing we can't do visually in this day and age, so let's make JarJar!"
Another thing is it is easy to start from scratch and just make things up, which is what he did with Star Wars. Did he honestly give any real thought to a backstory and how everything tied in together with the very first movie? Nah. He wasn't even looking at sequels, let alone prequels, when he invented the Star Wars universe. Star Wars was a single stand-alone movie all unto itself. Period. It did not need to be anything more than that. Empire Strikes Back was merely the same cast of characters in the same universe doing a whole new set of things that really had nothing to do with the first movie at all as far as plot lines and story arcs go. With the first 3 movies he had to go back and follow FACTS he had already created. He had to shoehorn a plot to fit who was where in first Star Wars and how they got there. That is a WHOLE lot harder than just making something up and leaving lots of pre-story elements simply up to the viewer's imagination. And speaking of that imagination, everyone already had at least some degree of preconceived notion as to what happened before Star Wars, and that is NEVER going to exactly match what Lucas himself imagined when he started writing the prequels. Thus some degree of disappointment was built in.
I think Lucas is (was) best at fostering entirely new projects from scratch, then more or less providing resources, bringing in good screenplay authors and directors, and then letting others run with those ideas (Indiana Jones, for example). I think his problem is when he micromanages things, and tries to get into lots of details with really complex plot lines which is best left to others more gifted in those areas.
I know you're being facetious, but ironically in this case you're probably indirectly right. Windows Phone 7 has such a small market share that it's not worth bothering with from a malware author's perspective, while iOS and Linux (Android) are huge targets. Funny how the table's turned.