Come on... People have killed more in the name of religion, but that doesn't make the concept of religion a bad thing (or, to give an example, a cross is a perfectly fine symbol).
Do you have any references to back that up?
Yeah, a lot of people died during the crusades and such, but that cannot possibly rival the mass genocide perpetrated under ethnic cleansing (WWII) and governments that exterminate to protect themselves (USSR).
I'm not even an amateur astronomer, and I was able to easily find this comet and view it with my inexpensive 10x binoculars. Now that I know where to look I can see it out without the binoculars (kind of like a fuzzy star), but it was easier to first find it with them. With the binoculars I can clearly see the coma. It appears about as long as it is wide.
If you can find the Seven Sisters and Orion then you can easily find the comet relative to them.
It is simply difficult to keep a Windows based machine secure, no matter how diligently a person visits Windows Update.
Yesterday I updated DirectX on my w2k machine. So I went to Windows Update and first downloaded all the new critical updates. So now my machine is "secure" (as far as MS is concerned). So I proceed to have Windows Update install DirectX 9.1. So now I have a secure box with the latest DirectX, right? Nope. I just happened to go back to Windows Update searching for something else, and see a new critical update has appeared - to patch the DirectX I just installed! Doesn't MS have the resources to pre-patch something like DirectX?
If that's too much work for them then shouldn't they at least notify the user that the software they are installing has known security issues?
Now I can understand that security issues will be discovered after a product has been released, however to distribute software with known security problems, without at least warning the user, should open the door for some lawsuits.
This is one of these ideas dreamed up by someone outside of the healthcare industry. I've worked in EMS / Emergency Department for a decade, and can tell you this will not be utilized or be useful for a number of reasons.
Anyone remember the Emergency! TV show back in the 70s? The paramedics would always send telemetry back to the ED, where a physician (with nothing else better to do than to sit by the 'phone' waiting for someone out in the field to call in) would take a look at the ECG and tell the paramedic what to do. Well, fortunately we've gone far beyond that - those in the field are trained to identify dysrhythmia and treat it properly. Even a Cardiac Tech (here in Virginia), which is below a paramedic, can utilize every drug in the drug box. What is proposed in this story would be a complete step in the wrong direction, taking us back 3 decades.
Two other reasons - ED docs are plenty busy enough taking care of patients that are sitting right in front of them. They need to delegate caregiving to others. Often times we have brought patients into the ED and they were so busy that we (EMS) helped treat other patients in the ED!
Liability. No doctor would put their neck on the line and tell someone that is not certified to do something beyond their training. That is what this is all about, putting a virtual physician in the ambulance. Physicians cannot make decisions without lab work, 12 lead ECGs, radiology, etc.
About a year ago Slashdot carried a story about cars getting "black boxes" like the flight recorders on airplanes (can't find the story using Slashdot's search). The industry (ie insurance industry) claimed that would help physicians treat patients that had been in car wrecks. At the time I posted how absurd that was - patients are treated the same regardless of what may or may not have happened to them. The worst should always be assumed (spinal injuries, etc). We've seen people killing in minor (low-G) wrecks, and people walk away unscathed (after we cut them out of the car) from vehicles that were twisted into a pretzel. This sounds like another case of technology misapplied by an industry out of touch with the needs of those they are supposed to be helping.
I know I'm responding to nothing more than flame bait (or off topic, take your pick) but what does intelligence have to do with beliefs?
Also, do you really believe that the average person's mental aptitude peaks when they are 9 years old? You state that as if it were a fact. Do you have any references to that effect?
What type of PDA will this be? Something we're used to like a Pocket PC or Palm, or do they have their own breed of PDAs in Japan? The latter seems the most likely to me.
They should have included 2 more sentences in the story, and that would have been the entire content of this article. Rather short on details.
Now that Pocket PC has taken over the PDA market and has surpassed Palm in sales will Slashdot change its PDA icon? Of course we already know the answer to that one.:)
Why sell something like this on eBay and give them profit for practically nothing?
Obviously this would generate massive publicity, and anyone wanting to buy a piece of this asteroid would go to the project website first. In other words, the people buying these chunks would not be people randomly browsing eBay and looking for something to burn money on. In fact I bet most of them would have to sign up to eBay just to bid on these pieces.
IMO, eBay is simply comprised of an infrastructure to handle auctions (which implementation-wise isn't that much of a task), and a pool of sellers and buyers. The latter is where eBay dominates and is the sole reason they are successful. However when it comes to something like selling these asteroid pieces, having a large seller / bidder user base is a moot point. In fact it is a detriment because it hurts the signal to noise ratio of legitimate bidders.
So here we have an RFID implementation in a controlled environment - one in which everyone is babying the system along and trying to make things work.
If the system is this unreliable in the warehouses then imagine it in the consumer world (ie checking out a whole buggy of products at a time), where the complexity, volume, and general misuse will be amplified. Throw into that mix people actively trying to circumvent or sabotage the system, and things look pretty dismal.
We lived near (as in 30 minutes or so away) from a large Amish community in Ohio.
While I'm certainly no expert on their beliefs, one thing that was clear is that technology was tolerable for work (or to increase productivity) but not pleasure.
Many Amish had power in their barns; for example to run lights so they could work longer hours. Some would use tractors, but not drive cars. It would not surprise me at all that Amish would use phones or cellular phones if it were related to business and selling goods to non-Amish.
I can remember specifically looking to see which homes and barns had power (very obvious from the powerline running to the side of the house). Also Amish homes can be easily identified by the way they pull back their curtains - instead of splitting them in the middle they pull the whole thing over to one side. Most did not have power, but some did.
You're using the term panic rather loosely (let alone a large scale panic). I think most US citizens would be more likely to panic if a certain other satellite system were disabled (aka DirecTV).
On a serious note, I would say more than 99% of the population would never even notice if all the GPS satellites suddenly fell from the sky in unison.
Teams, as in one classmate writes a piece of OSS full of holes, and the other classmate finds them. Since its open source it shouldn't be too hard to find the weaknesses to exploit.
TinyP2P requires you specify the server address and port. Um, how is this different then FTPing to a server? Or sending a file over some IM service? Or copying a file over a network share?
I thought the real point of p2p, as in file sharing, was the ability to search many hosts for something, even though you do not know what hosts exist, ideally without even requiring a central server the hosts must register with.
Apropos of nothing, I saw a movie in the theaters a few days ago. At the official start time, the lights dimmed. Then there were 14 minutes of commercials (Pepsi, hair mousse, cologne, etc.) followed by 13 minutes of movie trailers (which are also advertising, of course), followed by a few minutes of junk, followed by a 100-minute movie.
How many of you remember MTV, Nickelodeon, and other cable-only channels were originally commercial-free back in the early 80's?
Just because these media conglomerates are making money off of you directly doesn't mean they won't try to make it indirectly as well.
It hinders spam indirectly. The purpose of spam is to direct someone to something. In this case the something is the websites that are now down because of the Lycos screensaver. These "businesses" will start to think twice about paying spammers to spam when all it does is result in high bandwidth bills and websites that are no longer available. This is a double wammy on the businesses that finance spam, because it costs them money directly as well as reducing their income (because actual customers cannot reach their website).
It would also be very interesting to see how effective a similar system would be that makes calls to the 1-800 numbers of these businesses. Usually the 1-800 numbers are billed per call, so it could really hit them hard if this could be done via VOIP or simply by modems dialing the numbers directly. That would also swamp their switches and tie up all the operators, effectively making it impossible to get through, in addition to costing them money.
Maybe I'm not looking at this deep enough, but what does a piece of hardware for playing MP3s have to do with personal computers? How different is this from, say, people switching from Mac to a Sony Notebook because they like their Sony DVD player?
One of the rules of gift giving is to never give a pet as a gift. It requires a level of responsibility and commitment that cannot be forced upon a person.
I get the feeling that trying to switch someone to another OS somehow falls under the same etiquette.
And here's an in-game photo. Sorry the only 2 PS2 games I have are both called Grand Theft Auto something, so it kind of limits the pictures I can take.
The one person on the face of the planet with a PS2 portable appears to be the least likely to use it!
The graphics are *amazing*. I've been playing the demo version of Metroid. The DS is somewhere between the N64 and GC in graphics quality.
The graphics are not that good. They are slightly better than PS1 - more specifically the DS uses per-pixel perspective correction, where the PS1 only corrects every 8th texel.
As a software 3D engine developer for Pocket PC, I took an extremely close look at the rendering quality of the DS, and determined that is about the same quality / capability as the Quake 2 software engine (although I did not notice the use of precalculated lightmaps in Metroid).
The reason the quality looks so good is simple - the screen is tiny, and has a higher pixel density than most LCD panels. Even though there is no filtering (not even bilinear), the small pixel size tends to blend things together, so the texels are not as visible as they would be on say a 15" panel. The touchscreen layer adds a slight milky hue to the display, which again serves to help blur the texels together. Sort of an optical filter if you will.:)
I've worked with ATI's new Imageon 2300 mobile GPU, and the rendering quality, as well as the amount of polys it can push, is vastly beyond the capability of the Nintendo DS.
No member of the Reagan or Bush administrations ever admitted or revealed publicly any knowledge of Polyus. The US Navy has made no statements about any attempts to investigate the wreckage of Polyus, which lies on the floor of the South Pacific.
For some reason the phrase "been there, done that" comes to mind.
Considering the amount of money spent on SDI, I can't imagine the US not going to great lengths to try to salvage the wreck in order to see what countermeasures the USSR was working on.
This is somewhat anecdotal, but an optometrist told me that reflective and transflective screens are best for the eyes, because they reflect light instead of emit it, and reflected light is more 'natural'.
The only devices I know of with those types of displays are Pocket PCs.
I've always assumed that regular LCDs still were better than CRT because at least you don't have an electron gun deluging your face with radiation.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on... People have killed more in the name of religion, but that doesn't make the concept of religion a bad thing (or, to give an example, a cross is a perfectly fine symbol).
Do you have any references to back that up?
Yeah, a lot of people died during the crusades and such, but that cannot possibly rival the mass genocide perpetrated under ethnic cleansing (WWII) and governments that exterminate to protect themselves (USSR).
Dan East
For some reason I don't think I'll be porting this one to Pocket PC anytime soon (can't find the slashdot story for the Q2 port).
:)
OTOH, Pocket PCs are already on the market with hardware acceleration, so who knows?
Dan East
I'm not even an amateur astronomer, and I was able to easily find this comet and view it with my inexpensive 10x binoculars. Now that I know where to look I can see it out without the binoculars (kind of like a fuzzy star), but it was easier to first find it with them. With the binoculars I can clearly see the coma. It appears about as long as it is wide.
If you can find the Seven Sisters and Orion then you can easily find the comet relative to them.
Dan East
It is simply difficult to keep a Windows based machine secure, no matter how diligently a person visits Windows Update.
Yesterday I updated DirectX on my w2k machine. So I went to Windows Update and first downloaded all the new critical updates. So now my machine is "secure" (as far as MS is concerned). So I proceed to have Windows Update install DirectX 9.1. So now I have a secure box with the latest DirectX, right? Nope. I just happened to go back to Windows Update searching for something else, and see a new critical update has appeared - to patch the DirectX I just installed! Doesn't MS have the resources to pre-patch something like DirectX?
If that's too much work for them then shouldn't they at least notify the user that the software they are installing has known security issues?
Now I can understand that security issues will be discovered after a product has been released, however to distribute software with known security problems, without at least warning the user, should open the door for some lawsuits.
Dan East
This is one of these ideas dreamed up by someone outside of the healthcare industry. I've worked in EMS / Emergency Department for a decade, and can tell you this will not be utilized or be useful for a number of reasons.
Anyone remember the Emergency! TV show back in the 70s? The paramedics would always send telemetry back to the ED, where a physician (with nothing else better to do than to sit by the 'phone' waiting for someone out in the field to call in) would take a look at the ECG and tell the paramedic what to do. Well, fortunately we've gone far beyond that - those in the field are trained to identify dysrhythmia and treat it properly. Even a Cardiac Tech (here in Virginia), which is below a paramedic, can utilize every drug in the drug box. What is proposed in this story would be a complete step in the wrong direction, taking us back 3 decades.
Two other reasons - ED docs are plenty busy enough taking care of patients that are sitting right in front of them. They need to delegate caregiving to others. Often times we have brought patients into the ED and they were so busy that we (EMS) helped treat other patients in the ED!
Liability. No doctor would put their neck on the line and tell someone that is not certified to do something beyond their training. That is what this is all about, putting a virtual physician in the ambulance. Physicians cannot make decisions without lab work, 12 lead ECGs, radiology, etc.
About a year ago Slashdot carried a story about cars getting "black boxes" like the flight recorders on airplanes (can't find the story using Slashdot's search). The industry (ie insurance industry) claimed that would help physicians treat patients that had been in car wrecks. At the time I posted how absurd that was - patients are treated the same regardless of what may or may not have happened to them. The worst should always be assumed (spinal injuries, etc). We've seen people killing in minor (low-G) wrecks, and people walk away unscathed (after we cut them out of the car) from vehicles that were twisted into a pretzel. This sounds like another case of technology misapplied by an industry out of touch with the needs of those they are supposed to be helping.
Dan East
Relativity : The Special and the General Theory
Dan East
I know I'm responding to nothing more than flame bait (or off topic, take your pick) but what does intelligence have to do with beliefs?
Also, do you really believe that the average person's mental aptitude peaks when they are 9 years old? You state that as if it were a fact. Do you have any references to that effect?
Dan East
What type of PDA will this be? Something we're used to like a Pocket PC or Palm, or do they have their own breed of PDAs in Japan? The latter seems the most likely to me.
:)
They should have included 2 more sentences in the story, and that would have been the entire content of this article. Rather short on details.
Now that Pocket PC has taken over the PDA market and has surpassed Palm in sales will Slashdot change its PDA icon? Of course we already know the answer to that one.
Dan East
Why sell something like this on eBay and give them profit for practically nothing?
Obviously this would generate massive publicity, and anyone wanting to buy a piece of this asteroid would go to the project website first. In other words, the people buying these chunks would not be people randomly browsing eBay and looking for something to burn money on. In fact I bet most of them would have to sign up to eBay just to bid on these pieces.
IMO, eBay is simply comprised of an infrastructure to handle auctions (which implementation-wise isn't that much of a task), and a pool of sellers and buyers. The latter is where eBay dominates and is the sole reason they are successful. However when it comes to something like selling these asteroid pieces, having a large seller / bidder user base is a moot point. In fact it is a detriment because it hurts the signal to noise ratio of legitimate bidders.
Dan East
Spam that originates from the "fringes" of the internet clogs my inbox the same as spam sent from any other machine.
Dan East
So here we have an RFID implementation in a controlled environment - one in which everyone is babying the system along and trying to make things work.
If the system is this unreliable in the warehouses then imagine it in the consumer world (ie checking out a whole buggy of products at a time), where the complexity, volume, and general misuse will be amplified. Throw into that mix people actively trying to circumvent or sabotage the system, and things look pretty dismal.
Dan East
We lived near (as in 30 minutes or so away) from a large Amish community in Ohio.
While I'm certainly no expert on their beliefs, one thing that was clear is that technology was tolerable for work (or to increase productivity) but not pleasure.
Many Amish had power in their barns; for example to run lights so they could work longer hours. Some would use tractors, but not drive cars. It would not surprise me at all that Amish would use phones or cellular phones if it were related to business and selling goods to non-Amish.
I can remember specifically looking to see which homes and barns had power (very obvious from the powerline running to the side of the house). Also Amish homes can be easily identified by the way they pull back their curtains - instead of splitting them in the middle they pull the whole thing over to one side. Most did not have power, but some did.
Dan East
You're using the term panic rather loosely (let alone a large scale panic). I think most US citizens would be more likely to panic if a certain other satellite system were disabled (aka DirecTV).
On a serious note, I would say more than 99% of the population would never even notice if all the GPS satellites suddenly fell from the sky in unison.
Dan East
Teams, as in one classmate writes a piece of OSS full of holes, and the other classmate finds them. Since its open source it shouldn't be too hard to find the weaknesses to exploit.
Dan East
TinyP2P requires you specify the server address and port. Um, how is this different then FTPing to a server? Or sending a file over some IM service? Or copying a file over a network share?
I thought the real point of p2p, as in file sharing, was the ability to search many hosts for something, even though you do not know what hosts exist, ideally without even requiring a central server the hosts must register with.
Dan East
Apropos of nothing, I saw a movie in the theaters a few days ago. At the official start time, the lights dimmed. Then there were 14 minutes of commercials (Pepsi, hair mousse, cologne, etc.) followed by 13 minutes of movie trailers (which are also advertising, of course), followed by a few minutes of junk, followed by a 100-minute movie.
How many of you remember MTV, Nickelodeon, and other cable-only channels were originally commercial-free back in the early 80's?
Just because these media conglomerates are making money off of you directly doesn't mean they won't try to make it indirectly as well.
Dan East
It hinders spam indirectly. The purpose of spam is to direct someone to something. In this case the something is the websites that are now down because of the Lycos screensaver. These "businesses" will start to think twice about paying spammers to spam when all it does is result in high bandwidth bills and websites that are no longer available. This is a double wammy on the businesses that finance spam, because it costs them money directly as well as reducing their income (because actual customers cannot reach their website).
It would also be very interesting to see how effective a similar system would be that makes calls to the 1-800 numbers of these businesses. Usually the 1-800 numbers are billed per call, so it could really hit them hard if this could be done via VOIP or simply by modems dialing the numbers directly. That would also swamp their switches and tie up all the operators, effectively making it impossible to get through, in addition to costing them money.
Dan East
Speaking of non-photorealistic and real-time, this reminds of me NPR Quake.
Dan East
has no lag at all since it uses RFID.
What is that supposed to mean? RFID uses radio waves that travel faster than the radio waves used by ordinary cordless mice?
Or perhaps this mouse is faster than a (fictional) mouse that uses sound to communicate with the PC?
Dan East
Maybe I'm not looking at this deep enough, but what does a piece of hardware for playing MP3s have to do with personal computers? How different is this from, say, people switching from Mac to a Sony Notebook because they like their Sony DVD player?
Dan East
One of the rules of gift giving is to never give a pet as a gift. It requires a level of responsibility and commitment that cannot be forced upon a person.
I get the feeling that trying to switch someone to another OS somehow falls under the same etiquette.
Dan East
And here's an in-game photo. Sorry the only 2 PS2 games I have are both called Grand Theft Auto something, so it kind of limits the pictures I can take.
The one person on the face of the planet with a PS2 portable appears to be the least likely to use it!
Dan East
The graphics are *amazing*. I've been playing the demo version of Metroid. The DS is somewhere between the N64 and GC in graphics quality.
:)
The graphics are not that good. They are slightly better than PS1 - more specifically the DS uses per-pixel perspective correction, where the PS1 only corrects every 8th texel.
As a software 3D engine developer for Pocket PC, I took an extremely close look at the rendering quality of the DS, and determined that is about the same quality / capability as the Quake 2 software engine (although I did not notice the use of precalculated lightmaps in Metroid).
The reason the quality looks so good is simple - the screen is tiny, and has a higher pixel density than most LCD panels. Even though there is no filtering (not even bilinear), the small pixel size tends to blend things together, so the texels are not as visible as they would be on say a 15" panel. The touchscreen layer adds a slight milky hue to the display, which again serves to help blur the texels together. Sort of an optical filter if you will.
I've worked with ATI's new Imageon 2300 mobile GPU, and the rendering quality, as well as the amount of polys it can push, is vastly beyond the capability of the Nintendo DS.
Dan East
No member of the Reagan or Bush administrations ever admitted or revealed publicly any knowledge of Polyus. The US Navy has made no statements about any attempts to investigate the wreckage of Polyus, which lies on the floor of the South Pacific.
For some reason the phrase "been there, done that" comes to mind.
Considering the amount of money spent on SDI, I can't imagine the US not going to great lengths to try to salvage the wreck in order to see what countermeasures the USSR was working on.
Dan East
This is somewhat anecdotal, but an optometrist told me that reflective and transflective screens are best for the eyes, because they reflect light instead of emit it, and reflected light is more 'natural'.
The only devices I know of with those types of displays are Pocket PCs.
I've always assumed that regular LCDs still were better than CRT because at least you don't have an electron gun deluging your face with radiation.
Dan East