first off, i would like to say FUCK BI-COLOR LEDs. I'm colorblind and there's no good way to tell what color they are. At home, i have a relatively new sony monitor with a bicolor LED, and the only real change i can see is the intensity. At school i have a old-ass sony monitor with two LEDs side by side, so i know exactly what it's trying to indicate. (This would be more useful if w2k could correctly put the monitor to sleep when im not using it.) But anyways, how friggin hard would it be for palm to put a green LED and a red one right next to each other? Geeze.
And another thing: did anyone else click on "3D Model (doesnt require plugin)" and get a box that said "click here to get plugin"?
Or you can bind them together into a solar collector. Mine is only like 6 CDs across right now but it'll get bigger next time i'm really bored.
Or, i've heard of a science project using an AOL CD as an AM radio tuner. You apparently cut a strip of the aluminum out (across a diameter) leaving 2 slightly less than half circles (well, rainbows) of metal in the more-or-less intact plastic disk. Then you put it in the sleeve with aluminum foil on one face. The foil is in two triangles, seperated by a strip across the diagonal. Connect to the foil on the sleve, and you have a variable capacitor. When the strips are lined up, the capactiance is low, but if you rotate the cd the metal parts overlap and you get capacitance. Neat.
Think about it. Why wouldn't it be a good thing for everyone in the US to get a CD with the AOLinux distro on it every month or so? I just popped in a CD off my spindle of AOL CDs, and it had like 200 megs of blank space on it. They could leave the windoze (and macintosh?) clients intact, and use the other 200 Megs for a compact linux distro. There's no reason they need to use redhat- people like my mom just want to be able to email, surf, write letters, and print. Throw in an MP3/CD burning suite, and you've got just about everything covered. (If AOL wanted to, they could even make DVD playing software that the MPAA, and thus the average consumer, is happy with). I'm sure AOL could fund their own team to put together a little distro which is reliable and secure and targeted to towards people with compaq, dell, hp, or gateway systems that they got off the shelf at frys or compusa (think of it like a PC-to-internet appliance conversion). Ignoring, for now, the implications of having AOL in charge of your operating system (what, like that'd be any worse than M$?), it could be beneficial to the average luser to have a single monolithic system installed on their machine in which all the applications they want are designed to work directly with the OS. From AOL's point of view, it could be nice to have control over the OS that their client is runnig on, and not having to worry about what little component of the system microsoft botched this week. And from the/. perspective, it could be good to expand the linux user base to some signifigant fraction of AOL's. Plus, once you get a bunch of family PCs out there with linux, their 13 year old kids can start using linux to run more than just the AOL client.
Just a question.
Well, they also said "Linux uses an "open source" model, where companies also have the right to install as many copies of the operating system as they wish,", which seems to me like they're missing the point of open source (maybe that's just the financial interpretation). Of course, they also said "the two companies are not near an acquisition deal, nor have they discussed one," (-1, Redundant), and quoted some guy as saying "The applications in the U.S. tend to be apart from servers tend to be OEM set-top boxes," which doesn't seem to me like a well formed sentence. My point is, the author, and imho the news media in general, is not as sharp as they could be.
I can't find any links directly to banner ads either. Perhaps the page which was supposed to come up just loaded it's ad banner and then stalled out, leaving a blank page with just a scantily clad woman and a suggestion that you can use the camera for 'all kinds of things'?
I wonder if some of them may decide to start their own artist run label.
You mean like Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe Records? I'm not too sure about the background but as far as i know she didn't feel like getting screwed by a major record label and, being one of those pro-active folk singer types, started her own. Someone posted a letter she wrote to Ms. Magazine complaining about people looking at is a financial success rather than just not wanting to deal with a record company.
Cool, now i can just print out the list of member artists, cross-reference it to my list of people to buy presents for, and figure out what to buy in a matter of minutes without the guilt of blindly supporting the RIAA. True, depending on the label some money may make its way to their hired thu^M^M^M^M^M legal dept, but at least some other fraction of my money is going to fight said legal dept.
And while i'm at the record store, i can buy some scratched up used CDs which still, in theory, include liscence to enjoy the content originally pressed into those disks, so i can go home and download songs without pirating anything, while not paying full price;-)
While i have to say that Intel's OpenCV library rocks (for a number of reasons), stereoscopic vision is nothing new. The cnn article is more or less crap ("Until today, computer vision applications has been restricted to two dimensions
"? nice try...) It's mishmash of reporter hype and stock text which describes computer vision in general ("Over the next 5 to 10 years, Intel Corp. expects computer vision to play a significant role in simplifying the interaction between users and computers"). The Sussex Computer Vision Teach Files page has a reasonable description of stereoscopic vision from 1994. Lip reading is not really a 3D problem, so stereoscopic capabilites aren't going to help much. Many of the other uses- 3D environment modeling, object modeling and recognition, etc, are being worked on (again, the algorithms aren't new, this is just a new open source implentation) but they're not easy.
I don't mean to sound pessimistic, though. OpenCV is really cool, both as a corporate contribution to open source, and as a programming library even if you never look at the code. And the Matlab interface means fewer MSVC++ sessions which end with me feeling homicidal;-) The inclusion of stereo vision will be cool for people trying to write vision applications, but it's not advancing the state of the art.
Flynnhustler writes "Our upstart videogame culture site, Robot Street Gang, has just...
Ok, so maybe the next time you submit a story on your own site to/. you should tell the guys at the data center or at least link to a very small frontpage with a list of mirrors? It's not like you got slashdotted without warning....
Members of Warez includes corporate executives, computer-network administrators and students at major universities...
Hey, I'm a student at a major university. Can I join "Warez?" How do I sign up? Is there a membership fee? Why didn't someone tell me they'd organized it into an actual group?
And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the proper conjugation "Members of Warez include corporate execs blah blah blah?" Mr Stout there obviously doesn't know shit about computers, the least he could do is use correct English. (I admit my English may not be perfect but then I'm not wrting for the Times...)
I like this. I think there should be a link at the top of the/. homepage to "the latest well recognized website that just switched to MS IIS and should have known better." Then everybody will go try to look at the site, it gets slashdotted, the admin sees the errors of their ways, and hopefully switches back before the server has time to catch the worm-of-the-week.
From the article, "And built-in synchronization keeps Ximian Evolution users' calendars, contacts and tasks up-to-date with their Palm handheld devices," which i'd consider a must before switching, but does anyone know if it supports irda sync? My palm3e synced to an old-skewl imac 2 years ago (still think it sucks that apple axed the ir port), and ir recently started working in windows, so i'd rather not go back to lugging the cradle around with my laptop if i can help it.
Written in 1881, predicted streaming music over telephone lines. It's online, do a 'find in page' on chapter 11 for the word telephone. (Hmmm. chapter 11 (bankruptcy), streaming media, riaa, theres some irony in here somewhere. i can feel it.)
Don't forget the robot bank tellers, or the mechanical hound attacking some random guy because the televised manhunt was for the sake of everyone out there in tv land, not for justice.
And of course, the whole book-eradication thing...
Two to three layers of this could be made into the inside lining of a bulky jacket/overcoat.
Some of the other problems with this:
If it's built into the lining of the jacket, you can't really wash it. A lot of the wearable systems involve components distributed around a vest or attached to a belt batman style. If the vest or belt needs to be washed you can remove the hardware.
It would only be useful where its cold and dry. I seldom wear a bulky jacket in san diego, and when i do it's because it's raining outside.
It seems that it would really only be useful for small, flexible, probably disposable applications. Having already ripped on the idea of using it for luggage tracking, i will say that one possible use is parking permits. A hangtag with a solar cell, battery, and small readout could display up to the minute information on where you can park, when a shuttle is coming, etc. With printable display technology it might not be much more expensive than the plastic hangtags we use now (and if you thought the little hologram made them hard to duplicate...), and either way would pale in comparison to the $$ we fork over. The downside is that the permit could figure out if it was parked in the wrong spot and turn on the Parking Gestapo Beacon.
Power Paper even envisions that its flexible battery designs can be used to help secure airports and passengers. Luggage tags and airline tickets could be printed with tiny radio antennas and circuitry -- powered by the company's battery -- to contain passenger data.
Great. Please make sure you seatbacks and traytables are in their full upright and locked positions, all you carryon items have been safely stowed in an overhead bin or under the seat in front of you, and all cellular phones, portable electronics, and luggage tags have been turned off prior to departure.
Not to mention it's a stupid idea anyway. The tages the airlines put on your bag already have barcodes- if getting them to point in the right direction for the laser scanner is just too difficult, they can easily use RFID (who says they don't already?). There's no reason to have the tag carry a battery unless it's going to display and update information in realtime.
We can't stop terrorists directly with threats or direct actions, but if the threat of suffering and death makes the people around them take action and prevent their actions, then so be it. Good for us for having the ability to do that.
Can i just clarify the absurdity of expecting the citizens to just rise up and overthrow a tyranical government while at the same time denying them the use of secure internet communications (which to my thinking would be rather useful in mounting an insurrection)?
(as a side note, this was quoted out of Re:Wrong because i couldn't find the original fucking post. Each post should have a little link at the bottom which links to a page containing the post being replied to, as well as all replys.)
This isn't a war. It's a media circus. Blood was spilt, revenge has to be extracted, or the populace will be unhappy (which seldom gets you re-elected). Nevermind that the people who attacked the WTC and pentagon are already dead, because they were willing to die for the opportunity to do that.
After (when/if) the pressure sets in on Somolia, it will be because we haven't found a scapegoat yet and we need to punish someone else to feel better.
As for all the anti-Americanism, why do you think people do things like fly planes into our buildings and kill lots of people? Do think it's because we're nice? Because we're friendly and help out the rest of the world? No, we support international terrorism as much as anybody else. We funded bin Laden. Oh, did you miss that? Let me say it two more times, so maybe you'll pick it up. We funded bin Laden. WE FUNDED BIN LADEN. We station nuclear arms outside our borders, we use heavy handed tactics to maintain world dominance, we exploit everything we can for the financial gain of a few rich americans, and you wonder why anyone could possibly harbor any anti-American sentiment?
OTOH, congrats on a very successful troll. Nothing seems to motivate/.ers to wax philosophical like the opportunity to enclue the clueless.
I fully support shutting down organizations and companies that are funding terrorist activities...
Well, I'm not sure i support shutting down the entire US government, but if we could shut down the sub-sections which are more directly responsible for terrorism, that might help reduce the deep-seated hatred which make people willing to die for the chance to get back at us.
We're not going anywhere until we stop the hypocrisy.
The xbox acts as a cooker itself! no need to buy a microwave to warm up that pizza, just put it on the xbox!
Seriously, would anyone go for a combination development machine/coffee warmer? I've been thinking of making a gigantic heatsink with a space cut out for a coffee mug, or pouring my coffee into one of those Koolance cases and leaving the fan off. (I actually have put leftover chineese food on the 1U dual gigs. It got lukewarm, but i think by opening the case and attaching directly to the heatsink this could actually work.)
Ok. I have a solution to all this. I call it FacistNet(tm). It will be under the strict control of a committee of representatives from concerned interests who are unhappy with all the nasty freedom that the Internet provides. Users will not be allowed to post, send, say, think, or otherwise express anything that might offend, damage, cost, inconvenience, or otherwise do anything to make anyone sad. Membership will be open to anyone willing to submit to constant scrutiny and investigation, just to make sure that no bad people can use FacistNet(tm). Everything that goes onto FacistNet(tm) will have to be approved by the ApprovalsBoard(tm) to make sure that it doesn't violate any of the Terms Of Lets All Be Nice Conformist Citizens And Do What The Nice People Tell Us(tm).
Then maybe the rest of us can use the internet to send information to each other.
Am I just insane? Was there some time in the past where clicking the Parent link after a post would bring up a new page displaying the post which was being replied to (regardless of moderation), and all the other replies to that post? If that used to work, why the hell doesn't it work now? I regularly read posts which reply to a previous post, where you need to read the previous post to get the context for the post in question, and where the previous post has not been modded up. Changing my threshold just loads all posts at that thershold and the ones i'm trying to read get collapsed to their titles.
you know, i probably am just insane. but i still want a simple way to get context for out of context replies. owell
"A better solution would be to screen on the spot. And technology to do this is now available. It uses a test strip, costing $20, that looks like a pregnancy-detection kit."
May be useful it you (or your employer) regularly do(es) things to piss people off so much that they'd want to kill you....
Slashdot Mirror
first off, i would like to say FUCK BI-COLOR LEDs. I'm colorblind and there's no good way to tell what color they are. At home, i have a relatively new sony monitor with a bicolor LED, and the only real change i can see is the intensity. At school i have a old-ass sony monitor with two LEDs side by side, so i know exactly what it's trying to indicate. (This would be more useful if w2k could correctly put the monitor to sleep when im not using it.) But anyways, how friggin hard would it be for palm to put a green LED and a red one right next to each other? Geeze.
And another thing: did anyone else click on "3D Model (doesnt require plugin)" and get a box that said "click here to get plugin"?
ok, enough ranting for now...
Or you can bind them together into a solar collector. Mine is only like 6 CDs across right now but it'll get bigger next time i'm really bored.
Or, i've heard of a science project using an AOL CD as an AM radio tuner. You apparently cut a strip of the aluminum out (across a diameter) leaving 2 slightly less than half circles (well, rainbows) of metal in the more-or-less intact plastic disk. Then you put it in the sleeve with aluminum foil on one face. The foil is in two triangles, seperated by a strip across the diagonal. Connect to the foil on the sleve, and you have a variable capacitor. When the strips are lined up, the capactiance is low, but if you rotate the cd the metal parts overlap and you get capacitance. Neat.
Think about it. Why wouldn't it be a good thing for everyone in the US to get a CD with the AOLinux distro on it every month or so? I just popped in a CD off my spindle of AOL CDs, and it had like 200 megs of blank space on it. They could leave the windoze (and macintosh?) clients intact, and use the other 200 Megs for a compact linux distro. There's no reason they need to use redhat- people like my mom just want to be able to email, surf, write letters, and print. Throw in an MP3/CD burning suite, and you've got just about everything covered. (If AOL wanted to, they could even make DVD playing software that the MPAA, and thus the average consumer, is happy with). I'm sure AOL could fund their own team to put together a little distro which is reliable and secure and targeted to towards people with compaq, dell, hp, or gateway systems that they got off the shelf at frys or compusa (think of it like a PC-to-internet appliance conversion). Ignoring, for now, the implications of having AOL in charge of your operating system (what, like that'd be any worse than M$?), it could be beneficial to the average luser to have a single monolithic system installed on their machine in which all the applications they want are designed to work directly with the OS. From AOL's point of view, it could be nice to have control over the OS that their client is runnig on, and not having to worry about what little component of the system microsoft botched this week. And from the /. perspective, it could be good to expand the linux user base to some signifigant fraction of AOL's. Plus, once you get a bunch of family PCs out there with linux, their 13 year old kids can start using linux to run more than just the AOL client.
Just a question.
Well, they also said "Linux uses an "open source" model, where companies also have the right to install as many copies of the operating system as they wish,", which seems to me like they're missing the point of open source (maybe that's just the financial interpretation). Of course, they also said "the two companies are not near an acquisition deal, nor have they discussed one," (-1, Redundant), and quoted some guy as saying "The applications in the U.S. tend to be apart from servers tend to be OEM set-top boxes," which doesn't seem to me like a well formed sentence. My point is, the author, and imho the news media in general, is not as sharp as they could be.
But that's just me....
I can't find any links directly to banner ads either. Perhaps the page which was supposed to come up just loaded it's ad banner and then stalled out, leaving a blank page with just a scantily clad woman and a suggestion that you can use the camera for 'all kinds of things'?
I wonder if some of them may decide to start their own artist run label.
You mean like Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe Records? I'm not too sure about the background but as far as i know she didn't feel like getting screwed by a major record label and, being one of those pro-active folk singer types, started her own. Someone posted a letter she wrote to Ms. Magazine complaining about people looking at is a financial success rather than just not wanting to deal with a record company.
Cool, now i can just print out the list of member artists, cross-reference it to my list of people to buy presents for, and figure out what to buy in a matter of minutes without the guilt of blindly supporting the RIAA. True, depending on the label some money may make its way to their hired thu^M^M^M^M^M legal dept, but at least some other fraction of my money is going to fight said legal dept.
;-)
And while i'm at the record store, i can buy some scratched up used CDs which still, in theory, include liscence to enjoy the content originally pressed into those disks, so i can go home and download songs without pirating anything, while not paying full price
While i have to say that Intel's OpenCV library rocks (for a number of reasons), stereoscopic vision is nothing new. The cnn article is more or less crap ("Until today, computer vision applications has been restricted to two dimensions
;-) The inclusion of stereo vision will be cool for people trying to write vision applications, but it's not advancing the state of the art.
"? nice try...) It's mishmash of reporter hype and stock text which describes computer vision in general ("Over the next 5 to 10 years, Intel Corp. expects computer vision to play a significant role in simplifying the interaction between users and computers"). The Sussex Computer Vision Teach Files page has a reasonable description of stereoscopic vision from 1994. Lip reading is not really a 3D problem, so stereoscopic capabilites aren't going to help much. Many of the other uses- 3D environment modeling, object modeling and recognition, etc, are being worked on (again, the algorithms aren't new, this is just a new open source implentation) but they're not easy.
I don't mean to sound pessimistic, though. OpenCV is really cool, both as a corporate contribution to open source, and as a programming library even if you never look at the code. And the Matlab interface means fewer MSVC++ sessions which end with me feeling homicidal
Flynnhustler writes "Our upstart videogame culture site, Robot Street Gang, has just...
/. you should tell the guys at the data center or at least link to a very small frontpage with a list of mirrors? It's not like you got slashdotted without warning....
Ok, so maybe the next time you submit a story on your own site to
Good point. I was assuming I should be able to ignore "of Warez" and read "Members ... include corporate blah blah" as an actual sentence. Oh well.
Members of Warez includes corporate executives, computer-network administrators and students at major universities...
Hey, I'm a student at a major university. Can I join "Warez?" How do I sign up? Is there a membership fee? Why didn't someone tell me they'd organized it into an actual group?
And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the proper conjugation "Members of Warez include corporate execs blah blah blah?" Mr Stout there obviously doesn't know shit about computers, the least he could do is use correct English. (I admit my English may not be perfect but then I'm not wrting for the Times...)
I like this. I think there should be a link at the top of the /. homepage to "the latest well recognized website that just switched to MS IIS and should have known better." Then everybody will go try to look at the site, it gets slashdotted, the admin sees the errors of their ways, and hopefully switches back before the server has time to catch the worm-of-the-week.
From the article, "And built-in synchronization keeps Ximian Evolution users' calendars, contacts and tasks up-to-date with their Palm handheld devices," which i'd consider a must before switching, but does anyone know if it supports irda sync? My palm3e synced to an old-skewl imac 2 years ago (still think it sucks that apple axed the ir port), and ir recently started working in windows, so i'd rather not go back to lugging the cradle around with my laptop if i can help it.
Written in 1881, predicted streaming music over telephone lines. It's online, do a 'find in page' on chapter 11 for the word telephone. (Hmmm. chapter 11 (bankruptcy), streaming media, riaa, theres some irony in here somewhere. i can feel it.)
Don't forget the robot bank tellers, or the mechanical hound attacking some random guy because the televised manhunt was for the sake of everyone out there in tv land, not for justice.
And of course, the whole book-eradication thing...
Some of the other problems with this:
It seems that it would really only be useful for small, flexible, probably disposable applications. Having already ripped on the idea of using it for luggage tracking, i will say that one possible use is parking permits. A hangtag with a solar cell, battery, and small readout could display up to the minute information on where you can park, when a shuttle is coming, etc. With printable display technology it might not be much more expensive than the plastic hangtags we use now (and if you thought the little hologram made them hard to duplicate...), and either way would pale in comparison to the $$ we fork over. The downside is that the permit could figure out if it was parked in the wrong spot and turn on the Parking Gestapo Beacon.
Power Paper even envisions that its flexible battery designs can be used to help secure airports and passengers. Luggage tags and airline tickets could be printed with tiny radio antennas and circuitry -- powered by the company's battery -- to contain passenger data.
Great. Please make sure you seatbacks and traytables are in their full upright and locked positions, all you carryon items have been safely stowed in an overhead bin or under the seat in front of you, and all cellular phones, portable electronics, and luggage tags have been turned off prior to departure.
Not to mention it's a stupid idea anyway. The tages the airlines put on your bag already have barcodes- if getting them to point in the right direction for the laser scanner is just too difficult, they can easily use RFID (who says they don't already?). There's no reason to have the tag carry a battery unless it's going to display and update information in realtime.
We can't stop terrorists directly with threats or direct actions, but if the threat of suffering and death makes the people around them take action and prevent their actions, then so be it. Good for us for having the ability to do that.
Can i just clarify the absurdity of expecting the citizens to just rise up and overthrow a tyranical government while at the same time denying them the use of secure internet communications (which to my thinking would be rather useful in mounting an insurrection)?
(as a side note, this was quoted out of Re:Wrong because i couldn't find the original fucking post. Each post should have a little link at the bottom which links to a page containing the post being replied to, as well as all replys.)
This isn't a war. It's a media circus. Blood was spilt, revenge has to be extracted, or the populace will be unhappy (which seldom gets you re-elected). Nevermind that the people who attacked the WTC and pentagon are already dead, because they were willing to die for the opportunity to do that.
/.ers to wax philosophical like the opportunity to enclue the clueless.
After (when/if) the pressure sets in on Somolia, it will be because we haven't found a scapegoat yet and we need to punish someone else to feel better.
As for all the anti-Americanism, why do you think people do things like fly planes into our buildings and kill lots of people? Do think it's because we're nice? Because we're friendly and help out the rest of the world? No, we support international terrorism as much as anybody else. We funded bin Laden. Oh, did you miss that? Let me say it two more times, so maybe you'll pick it up. We funded bin Laden. WE FUNDED BIN LADEN. We station nuclear arms outside our borders, we use heavy handed tactics to maintain world dominance, we exploit everything we can for the financial gain of a few rich americans, and you wonder why anyone could possibly harbor any anti-American sentiment?
OTOH, congrats on a very successful troll. Nothing seems to motivate
I fully support shutting down organizations and companies that are funding terrorist activities...
Well, I'm not sure i support shutting down the entire US government, but if we could shut down the sub-sections which are more directly responsible for terrorism, that might help reduce the deep-seated hatred which make people willing to die for the chance to get back at us.
We're not going anywhere until we stop the hypocrisy.
The xbox acts as a cooker itself! no need to buy a microwave to warm up that pizza, just put it on the xbox!
Seriously, would anyone go for a combination development machine/coffee warmer? I've been thinking of making a gigantic heatsink with a space cut out for a coffee mug, or pouring my coffee into one of those Koolance cases and leaving the fan off. (I actually have put leftover chineese food on the 1U dual gigs. It got lukewarm, but i think by opening the case and attaching directly to the heatsink this could actually work.)
someone explain to me why they had to choose that name.
As far as I can tell, one product named XP is one too many.
Ok. I have a solution to all this. I call it FacistNet(tm). It will be under the strict control of a committee of representatives from concerned interests who are unhappy with all the nasty freedom that the Internet provides. Users will not be allowed to post, send, say, think, or otherwise express anything that might offend, damage, cost, inconvenience, or otherwise do anything to make anyone sad. Membership will be open to anyone willing to submit to constant scrutiny and investigation, just to make sure that no bad people can use FacistNet(tm). Everything that goes onto FacistNet(tm) will have to be approved by the ApprovalsBoard(tm) to make sure that it doesn't violate any of the Terms Of Lets All Be Nice Conformist Citizens And Do What The Nice People Tell Us(tm).
Then maybe the rest of us can use the internet to send information to each other.
Geeze...
Am I just insane? Was there some time in the past where clicking the Parent link after a post would bring up a new page displaying the post which was being replied to (regardless of moderation), and all the other replies to that post? If that used to work, why the hell doesn't it work now? I regularly read posts which reply to a previous post, where you need to read the previous post to get the context for the post in question, and where the previous post has not been modded up. Changing my threshold just loads all posts at that thershold and the ones i'm trying to read get collapsed to their titles.
you know, i probably am just insane. but i still want a simple way to get context for out of context replies. owell
The economist is running an article about a anthrax detector at http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm? Story_ID=821937.
"A better solution would be to screen on the spot. And technology to do this is now available. It uses a test strip, costing $20, that looks like a pregnancy-detection kit."
May be useful it you (or your employer) regularly do(es) things to piss people off so much that they'd want to kill you....