Well, they did this for the matrix high-end special effects work -- captured the real world data instead of modelling it from scratch.
The issues with gaming data are things like, you know, complexity of the meshes, the insane size of the texture data (since every poly's texture data would be unique if it was captured) -- or, conversely, if you just created the mesh and had people texture it after the fact, your modellers might just rise up and kill you, because that makes their job a lot harder (in games, good modelling is done with texturing specifically in mind). Also, going from captured texture data introduces issues like the fact that the lighting data is already baked in . ..
But the biggest issue that I see, again, is that the meshes wouldn't be optimized for texturing.
Well, the stated purpose of this thing says nothing about it being used outdoors or to model large-scale terrain features. I mean, that's implicit in its design. This thing is designed to reproduce controlled environments.
And I don't know why you would think that is limiting! Maybe if you're thinking from the standpoint of a modeller/animator. Or maybe you just read the headline, and said 'omg it si small it cannot model WORLD omgomgomg'.
I see a couple of truly kickass uses for this thing. The first is adding texturing ability (you'd probably have to get dozens and dozens of scans, and have some good algorithms, to come up with good and relatively complete texturing, but I gotta' think that would be trivial compared to the sorts of problems they've already solved in making this thing -- and you wouldn't have to recreate the mesh each time, just sync up the coordinates with the one already created.
Ok, the use I see:
Crime scenes.
Bring in, hell, let's say 20 of these. Maybe some of them would be able to raise themselves up (heh, little accordioning platform for the recording mechanism, right out of the cartoons). They would roll around, sense out the room, figure out optimal placements, and then they would all scan the room, creating a near-perfect model of the room, perhaps mere hours of minutes after a crime has taken place. The cops would seal off the room, and the recorders would laboriusly record and texture everything about the room, down to the finest details.
Sure, it wouldn't catch a fingerprint or a peice of hair, and the plane/shape detection that is done actually removes some of the captured information (also removes some 'noise', but the forensic work they'd probably prefer a little noise to averaging out potentially important information) -- but the bottom line is, there wouldn't be a need for crime scene 'reconstruction', from photographs and little sketches and things that come after the fact. This would be absolutely accurate, more accurate than subjective information relayed secondhand from paid expert testimony. "How close would you say they were probably standing, from this photograph of bloodstains?"
So just in forensics alone, I see massive potential.
A lot of that has to do with the particular game, as well as the design of the prediction in that game.
For instance, in Starsiege:Tribes, since the rendering engine has been successfully hacked, people have been able to write some clever and EXTREMELY extensive cheats -- you can customize the visibility of the terrain, of individual objects (like buildings -- make them partially transparent to see people around corners), remove fog from maps, have pointers to the person with the flag, and most infamously, change the model for the flag into a twenty-story-tall red and green stick figure with a gigantic smiley face. This cheat is known as 'Happy Flag', and it makes it pretty much impossible to confuse the enemy team as to the location of your flag.
Now, in any other game, with the graphics engine compromised to that extent, the game would be over. It would be trivial to write auto-aim functionality that centers your view on a particular model type and fires the weapon.
But thanks both to the use of actual projectiles instead of instant (or 'hitscan') weapons, as well as a server-client model that DOES NOT TRUST CLIENT EVENTS (which you might think would make the game much more apparently laggy, but which in reality makes the game much less stuttery and much smoother for those on slower connctions; you just have to predict your shots more. But, since you have to do that anyways by design . ..).
The stability of this system is such that even with one of the most rabid fanbases in gaming, the only cheats available are primarily informational in nature. A cheater can see mines better, can know where the flag is, can see people clearly that would be mostly obscured by fog otherwise.
But this gives him very little actual advantage. The only hitscan weapon in the game is not a one-hit kill even on the lightest armor, and it needs to recharge, and the method used in both Tribes 1 and the Torque engine of the server not trusting the player for jack shit is actually EASIER on the server, since it processes client actions essentially as it receives them. Moreover, thanks to 'skiing' and the jetpacks and the visibility of laser rifle attacks, any advantage is quickly whittled down to a simple nuisance.
Now, at the other end of the spectrum is Red Faction.:D I'm not much of a cheater normally, but the most fun I have ever had was back in the day before everyone was cheating, when the careful task was to cleverly design cheats that are almost undetectable -- like a specially powerful jump to get you out of difficult situations, etc. The most fun I had was giving my player ninjalike abilities by modifying the scripts myself, and reducing my fall damage, and limiting myself to the pistol. It's all about the mobility, baby!
But unfortunately, the fact is that sending an unmanned probe to the moon IS more economical! *It* can be built this cheap. Unmanned missions can be optimized to pieces, since they have such flexible requirements. Hell, you could even make the majority of unmanned probes distributed, using multiple smaller ones for redundancy and linking them together.
There's a certain point beyond which manned missions can't be optimized. Not that there isn't room for improvement in the shuttle system -- personally, I'd like to see some kind of electromagnetic accelerator that smoothly whisks space planes to extreme speed, from the ground; cut the cord with multistage launching altogether.
But this comparison -- it's apples to oranges. It is fucking EXPENSIVE to put people in orbit, in a vehicle that provides the cargo space and utility that the space shuttle does. And so far, unfortunately, no one has really improved on it for what it does.
Not to stereotype, but if a coder is staying up all night in front of the computer, there's a fifty-fifty chance that he does NOT want a camera crew bursting in to film him.
So I was at this red light in a van with a bunch of friends. There was a yuppie-looking cool dude in front of us, on a motorcycle. He had a booth tan and spiky hair, and a booth-tanned halter-topped girlfriend sitting on the back.
Hey, that's ok. That's great for him, in fact! Motorcycles are good, they're fun! But his license plate said:
"IAMFLY"
as in "I'm fly, baby", "I'm phat", "look at me, I am the stuff".
On a motorcycle license plate??? I mean, you're so incredibly at the mercy of other motorists when you're on a motorcycle, you'd think he'd try to be a little less cocky, maybe with a license plate like "HITHERE" or "NICECAR" or "PLZ!RUNOVERME".
So I rolled down the window, leaned out, and screamed at the top of my voice -- from a Ford Windstar minivan, at a crowded intersection, wearing a suit -- "I AM WINDSHIELD!!!!"
He looked back, all confused -- and then the light turned green, and his girlfriend poked him, and he turned around and sped off.
Anyways, the scanner glass and your story made me think of bugs and windshields and stuff.
Only the British would *admit* to inventing Viagra.
Here, in the US, we have commercials for it, but nobody *needs* to use it, because we have enormous turgid 12-cylinder American penises that get 3mpg and are not in compliance with the Kyoto accord.
That's true, but there are still things to be considered.
Firstly, games like Quake 3 are processor-limited -- graphics cards are so fast nowadays that the processor is the limiter on the fps. But that's less important, because we're talking pretty much unnoticable improvements.
More important are the areas of AI and physics.
Running complex physical simulations (ragdoll effects, rigid body dynamics, cloth and hair simulation) absolutely punishes the CPU's of today's computers -- and those are all effects that really, really connect you to the game you're playing, really anchor you in the 'reality' of the game moment. The more complex those get, the more immersion you can have. Can you imagine if that field of grass in your friggin mmorpg wasn't just a bunch of sprites with random 'sway' characteristics, but were individual strands using 'hair' physics, and responding to generated wind dynamics?
And probably most immediately, AI.
This hasn't shown up -- yet. But games like Half-Life, and ESPECIALLY the new Deus Ex 2 and (hell yes!) Thief 3 games that will be coming out in a year or so. The ai in those games need to be scanning the area with their field of vision, doing visibility checks (on a PER AI basis), many times per second, in order to be realistic. Moreover, that cone of vision should be moving (ideally synched with his eyes -- dynamic animation = more processing requirements). And the visibility checks for smart AI in the future (possibly within a couple years) will include things like pattern recognition, where the AI's vision is actually crudely 'rendered' to memory many times per second, with pattern-recognition applied. ('Wait, did that chunk of shadow just move? I should be the only one here . ..').
This is all coming, it's all conjecture -- but I'm just saying, faster processors are going to be a serious advantage in the days when GPU speeds start to slow their fantastic rate of growth, or the complexity and difficulty of creating games with more futuristic graphics limits the rate of graphical growth in the same way.
And even if games aren't multithreaded -- it's floating-point performance that's the most important for these kinds of calculations, so if a processor is better at that, that is a good thing.
Well, he got a degree from Notre Dame in 1981. Granted, he was born in India, but he's been here long enough that by any reasonable standards he's an American.
Not that it would matter if he came over from India yesterday. He's a smart man, he's very qualified, and he holds a position of great authority that commands great respect. This isn't a case of a mildly trained person who will work for peanuts being brought in to lay off a highly trained technician that wants an honest wage. Positions like the one he holds are earned purely on the basis of merit.
I am actually, to some extent, inspired by that article. Corporate BS policies aside, whatever you think of Intel or AMD or any other company as a company, as a political entity, or as a producer or consumer goods, you still have to feel good that there are people like that, people that just GET the overriding vision of advancing technology, and are actively working to advance it.
I don't have time advance technology much in my current job. I don't have the mind or the skills or the time for boundary-pushing endeavors. Some at/. do, and contribute all their mind and skills and time to furthering open-source and other efforts, and that is very commendable.
But as we often lament, it sometimes seems like the Big Boys don't have the same spark. Let's not forget that somewhere within the pudge of even the fattest multinational technology company, there are brilliant, passionate minds working to further everything we hold dear. These are people who aren't just brilliant scientists or passionate geeks -- they're both. And they're on our side.:)
Well, I'm not questioning them. I'm encouraging them. The tagline they put after this latest SCO story was pretty great -- 'SCO is simply lying'. *POW!*
More like *that*, man! More like THAT! For a news source as widely read as/. is, that's some pretty plain talkin'.;)
But what the fudge does this have to do with trustworthy computing? It's just another email worm, and it relies heavily on user stupidity, much moreso than the msblaster worm.
Let's be honest: Microsoft is an evil company, that forces an evil product on people, and some of us are going to cheer when Microsoft gets hurt and people get nudged towards other operating systems -- whether it's Microsoft's fault, or not.
Could you just have written "Hey, anything that discourages Windows use!" after the story? I mean, christ, that's exactly what probably a good 90% of people here are thinking when they read these stories.
The public school system can be as fascist as the educators wish and the administration will allow.
That is why this would be a great thing.
I actually took the extreme step of bringing a tape recorder to class in 8th grade, to document the laziness, stupidity, outright incompetence, churlish and childish attitude, and inappropriate language of one of my teachers. (
Or, rather, those were the things that it documented. I only brought it in to prove to my counselor, who had accused me of not "challenging myself", that I was in fact not being challenged by the class, and that the principal *should* approve my request to be skipped to the 11th grade, so I could enter college (post-secondary). In particular, the teacher's claim that you absolutely *had* to be moving at approximately 170,000 miles per hour, or a similarly ridiculous speed, to escape the pull of earth's gravity -- in a ROCKET. (confusing rocketry with ballistics). This was a science teacher.
I refused to agree with her -- simply refused, VERY politely, even resisting my normal urge to be smarmy, just told her that I thought she was wrong, but I respected her opinion, and left it at that.
For that, she sent me to The Office. And I had it all on tape.
Guess what? It's against school policy to admit any form of student record of an account except their own memory. They wouldn't even listen to the tape, even though I had thoughtfully fast-forwarded it to the pertinent section of tape, where we disagreed. 'They' being the counselor, the vice principal, or the principal. Since being sent to the office resulted in detention time from the vice-principal, and since the science teacher could give me a 0 for the day both in attendance and participation, it had very real consequences for me.
The point of this story?
If *they* were doing the recording, and were using it for purposes of review and resolving incidents between teachers and students, they could not avoid reviewing it. They couldn't just wish it away if they were making a policy of using the audiovideo. I mean, it's not that the principal or vice-principal were real assholes -- THEY would have removed any detention time and removed it from my record. If they would have been able to listen to the tape. But they couldn't -- the teachers evidently demanded this, either informally or via union, I don't know.
I mean, it seems like a small thing. But that kind of thing is happening to my little brother all over again, and the kind of frustration that causes -- on top of all of the OTHER things that schools do to screw you up -- can really make kids stop trying in school.
I find these cameras more welcome in a public school than I do in football stadiums or airports. As you so rightly pointed out, in school, we KNOW our rights are limited.
I would mod you Insightful if I had the mod points.
I personally think that Apple is a great company, one of the only major technology companies that really, honestly has a tradition of quality at every point in the user's experience, from Support to the design of their system to basic usability.
But, on the other hand, this is the kind of information and opposing viewpoint that NEEDS to be modded up, because it raises *legitimate* points, points that are likely important to a lot of people on slashdot, and that you (unfortunately) do not often hear mentioned.
Personally, I think that Apple *has* to take this stance in order to keep their hardware sales from becoming absolutely destroyed by beige box companies that would use the Mac OS. Apple is a top-to-bottom design company, and that is what made it great, why the majority of its customers are so loyal, and why it manages to survive financially -- transitioning into purely an OS and accessories company would doom it.
Nonetheless, I would like to hear an intelligent discussion of how Apple could maintain their core business model -- bloated hardware prices and all -- and still allow program portability. And unfortunately, those discussions tend to get drowned immediately by people with mod points and dogmatic opinions.
Re:I have nothing to contribute to this discussion
on
Mac OS X Power Tools
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Ok, most of us don't give a shit one way or the other, so I am going to go off on a mildly relevant tangent.
I think that using an analogy to "Power Tools" -- and doing so in the context of a book about a Mac -- is kind of stupid. I mean, "Power Tools" does not go with the image that I have of Macs as these clean-running, quiet, beautifully usable machines. The image I have of my power tools is one of grease, dirt, and bugs that need to be patched.
Mostly, it's an image thing. Until Apple comes out with an iBandsaw, iDrill, and iLathe, 'Power Tools' is just a stupid name for this book. It's like "Power Tools for the Boeing 747" or "Power Tools for The Barbecue" -- it's not a good metaphor, and it doesn't make sense.
I mean, you do heavy work with Power Tools, things you can't do without them. These sort of books are more "Tips and Tricks" for tools you already own -- like "How To Get The Most Out Of Your Belt Sander", or "Did You Know That The Drill That You're Holding Can Function As A Small Hammer Drill, If You Twist The Head And Use This Bit?"
I must be having a sandy vagina day or something. Little things like this are making me want to go firebomb an orphanage.
gps in phones doesn't seem to be the biggest issue to me. As you mention, GPS capability is dependent on your phone having a certain set of properties -- which can be changed/hacked/smashed.
What seems the bigger issue is the triangulation by cel tower, because that is possible entirely independent of any hacking you may do to the phone. It would only reveal your location when you use it, true. But the problem is, there is nothing you could do to prevent it, and you have only the good word of the company (or our government) that it won't be used on you -- and that it isn't, right . . . . NOW!
This thing is probably just a tad slower than a cruise missile. In fact, several tads.
I mean, this is just a friggin' airplane. You scale it up to carry a 2000lb warhead, and you're gonna start needing a much larger and sturdier body, wings, fuel tank, and engine . ..
'Scaling' this would still just be giving you a vehicle with the capability of a personal airplane. It's going to be pretty slow, very expensive (given that even gutless airplanes generally cost around $500k), and it will show up on radar unless you make it even more expensive -- meaning that the army would have plenty of time to shoot it down if they were so inclined.
It still has potential, but the longer the range, the more speed becomes an issue (can be targetted, blown up). I don't see it being very practical or widely applicable -- it might undercut cruise missiles on cost, but it would be so very ineffective militarily that I don't see this being all that important. I see it being more applicable to things like unmanned air cargo planes.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they did this for the matrix high-end special effects work -- captured the real world data instead of modelling it from scratch.
.
The issues with gaming data are things like, you know, complexity of the meshes, the insane size of the texture data (since every poly's texture data would be unique if it was captured) -- or, conversely, if you just created the mesh and had people texture it after the fact, your modellers might just rise up and kill you, because that makes their job a lot harder (in games, good modelling is done with texturing specifically in mind). Also, going from captured texture data introduces issues like the fact that the lighting data is already baked in . .
But the biggest issue that I see, again, is that the meshes wouldn't be optimized for texturing.
Err.
Well, the stated purpose of this thing says nothing about it being used outdoors or to model large-scale terrain features. I mean, that's implicit in its design. This thing is designed to reproduce controlled environments.
And I don't know why you would think that is limiting! Maybe if you're thinking from the standpoint of a modeller/animator. Or maybe you just read the headline, and said 'omg it si small it cannot model WORLD omgomgomg'.
I see a couple of truly kickass uses for this thing. The first is adding texturing ability (you'd probably have to get dozens and dozens of scans, and have some good algorithms, to come up with good and relatively complete texturing, but I gotta' think that would be trivial compared to the sorts of problems they've already solved in making this thing -- and you wouldn't have to recreate the mesh each time, just sync up the coordinates with the one already created.
Ok, the use I see:
Crime scenes.
Bring in, hell, let's say 20 of these. Maybe some of them would be able to raise themselves up (heh, little accordioning platform for the recording mechanism, right out of the cartoons). They would roll around, sense out the room, figure out optimal placements, and then they would all scan the room, creating a near-perfect model of the room, perhaps mere hours of minutes after a crime has taken place. The cops would seal off the room, and the recorders would laboriusly record and texture everything about the room, down to the finest details.
Sure, it wouldn't catch a fingerprint or a peice of hair, and the plane/shape detection that is done actually removes some of the captured information (also removes some 'noise', but the forensic work they'd probably prefer a little noise to averaging out potentially important information) -- but the bottom line is, there wouldn't be a need for crime scene 'reconstruction', from photographs and little sketches and things that come after the fact. This would be absolutely accurate, more accurate than subjective information relayed secondhand from paid expert testimony. "How close would you say they were probably standing, from this photograph of bloodstains?"
So just in forensics alone, I see massive potential.
I tried to get Kurt3D to create a laser scan of the Hall of Mirrors in my glass house, and the resulting mesh was almost complete gibberish.
Also, I am now blind.
14 posts and already slashdotted.
Kurt3d scanning for webserver . . . none found.
Finding group of burly men to fuck content-hungry Slashdot readers in the ass . . . found.
Fucking . . .
A lot of that has to do with the particular game, as well as the design of the prediction in that game.
.).
:D I'm not much of a cheater normally, but the most fun I have ever had was back in the day before everyone was cheating, when the careful task was to cleverly design cheats that are almost undetectable -- like a specially powerful jump to get you out of difficult situations, etc. The most fun I had was giving my player ninjalike abilities by modifying the scripts myself, and reducing my fall damage, and limiting myself to the pistol. It's all about the mobility, baby!
For instance, in Starsiege:Tribes, since the rendering engine has been successfully hacked, people have been able to write some clever and EXTREMELY extensive cheats -- you can customize the visibility of the terrain, of individual objects (like buildings -- make them partially transparent to see people around corners), remove fog from maps, have pointers to the person with the flag, and most infamously, change the model for the flag into a twenty-story-tall red and green stick figure with a gigantic smiley face. This cheat is known as 'Happy Flag', and it makes it pretty much impossible to confuse the enemy team as to the location of your flag.
Now, in any other game, with the graphics engine compromised to that extent, the game would be over. It would be trivial to write auto-aim functionality that centers your view on a particular model type and fires the weapon.
But thanks both to the use of actual projectiles instead of instant (or 'hitscan') weapons, as well as a server-client model that DOES NOT TRUST CLIENT EVENTS (which you might think would make the game much more apparently laggy, but which in reality makes the game much less stuttery and much smoother for those on slower connctions; you just have to predict your shots more. But, since you have to do that anyways by design . .
The stability of this system is such that even with one of the most rabid fanbases in gaming, the only cheats available are primarily informational in nature. A cheater can see mines better, can know where the flag is, can see people clearly that would be mostly obscured by fog otherwise.
But this gives him very little actual advantage. The only hitscan weapon in the game is not a one-hit kill even on the lightest armor, and it needs to recharge, and the method used in both Tribes 1 and the Torque engine of the server not trusting the player for jack shit is actually EASIER on the server, since it processes client actions essentially as it receives them. Moreover, thanks to 'skiing' and the jetpacks and the visibility of laser rifle attacks, any advantage is quickly whittled down to a simple nuisance.
Now, at the other end of the spectrum is Red Faction.
I agree -- this shit is good shit.
But unfortunately, the fact is that sending an unmanned probe to the moon IS more economical! *It* can be built this cheap. Unmanned missions can be optimized to pieces, since they have such flexible requirements. Hell, you could even make the majority of unmanned probes distributed, using multiple smaller ones for redundancy and linking them together.
There's a certain point beyond which manned missions can't be optimized. Not that there isn't room for improvement in the shuttle system -- personally, I'd like to see some kind of electromagnetic accelerator that smoothly whisks space planes to extreme speed, from the ground; cut the cord with multistage launching altogether.
But this comparison -- it's apples to oranges. It is fucking EXPENSIVE to put people in orbit, in a vehicle that provides the cargo space and utility that the space shuttle does. And so far, unfortunately, no one has really improved on it for what it does.
Not to stereotype, but if a coder is staying up all night in front of the computer, there's a fifty-fifty chance that he does NOT want a camera crew bursting in to film him.
So I was at this red light in a van with a bunch of friends. There was a yuppie-looking cool dude in front of us, on a motorcycle. He had a booth tan and spiky hair, and a booth-tanned halter-topped girlfriend sitting on the back.
Hey, that's ok. That's great for him, in fact! Motorcycles are good, they're fun! But his license plate said:
"IAMFLY"
as in "I'm fly, baby", "I'm phat", "look at me, I am the stuff".
On a motorcycle license plate??? I mean, you're so incredibly at the mercy of other motorists when you're on a motorcycle, you'd think he'd try to be a little less cocky, maybe with a license plate like "HITHERE" or "NICECAR" or "PLZ!RUNOVERME".
So I rolled down the window, leaned out, and screamed at the top of my voice -- from a Ford Windstar minivan, at a crowded intersection, wearing a suit -- "I AM WINDSHIELD!!!!"
He looked back, all confused -- and then the light turned green, and his girlfriend poked him, and he turned around and sped off.
Anyways, the scanner glass and your story made me think of bugs and windshields and stuff.
Only the British would *admit* to inventing Viagra.
Here, in the US, we have commercials for it, but nobody *needs* to use it, because we have enormous turgid 12-cylinder American penises that get 3mpg and are not in compliance with the Kyoto accord.
That's true, but there are still things to be considered.
.').
Firstly, games like Quake 3 are processor-limited -- graphics cards are so fast nowadays that the processor is the limiter on the fps. But that's less important, because we're talking pretty much unnoticable improvements.
More important are the areas of AI and physics.
Running complex physical simulations (ragdoll effects, rigid body dynamics, cloth and hair simulation) absolutely punishes the CPU's of today's computers -- and those are all effects that really, really connect you to the game you're playing, really anchor you in the 'reality' of the game moment. The more complex those get, the more immersion you can have. Can you imagine if that field of grass in your friggin mmorpg wasn't just a bunch of sprites with random 'sway' characteristics, but were individual strands using 'hair' physics, and responding to generated wind dynamics?
And probably most immediately, AI.
This hasn't shown up -- yet. But games like Half-Life, and ESPECIALLY the new Deus Ex 2 and (hell yes!) Thief 3 games that will be coming out in a year or so. The ai in those games need to be scanning the area with their field of vision, doing visibility checks (on a PER AI basis), many times per second, in order to be realistic. Moreover, that cone of vision should be moving (ideally synched with his eyes -- dynamic animation = more processing requirements). And the visibility checks for smart AI in the future (possibly within a couple years) will include things like pattern recognition, where the AI's vision is actually crudely 'rendered' to memory many times per second, with pattern-recognition applied. ('Wait, did that chunk of shadow just move? I should be the only one here . .
This is all coming, it's all conjecture -- but I'm just saying, faster processors are going to be a serious advantage in the days when GPU speeds start to slow their fantastic rate of growth, or the complexity and difficulty of creating games with more futuristic graphics limits the rate of graphical growth in the same way.
And even if games aren't multithreaded -- it's floating-point performance that's the most important for these kinds of calculations, so if a processor is better at that, that is a good thing.
Well, he got a degree from Notre Dame in 1981. Granted, he was born in India, but he's been here long enough that by any reasonable standards he's an American.
Not that it would matter if he came over from India yesterday. He's a smart man, he's very qualified, and he holds a position of great authority that commands great respect. This isn't a case of a mildly trained person who will work for peanuts being brought in to lay off a highly trained technician that wants an honest wage. Positions like the one he holds are earned purely on the basis of merit.
. . . SIT DOWN.
:)
Carmack is cool, but he ain't an astronaut . . . yet.
Listen to that guy. He just GETS it.
/. do, and contribute all their mind and skills and time to furthering open-source and other efforts, and that is very commendable.
:)
I am actually, to some extent, inspired by that article. Corporate BS policies aside, whatever you think of Intel or AMD or any other company as a company, as a political entity, or as a producer or consumer goods, you still have to feel good that there are people like that, people that just GET the overriding vision of advancing technology, and are actively working to advance it.
I don't have time advance technology much in my current job. I don't have the mind or the skills or the time for boundary-pushing endeavors. Some at
But as we often lament, it sometimes seems like the Big Boys don't have the same spark. Let's not forget that somewhere within the pudge of even the fattest multinational technology company, there are brilliant, passionate minds working to further everything we hold dear. These are people who aren't just brilliant scientists or passionate geeks -- they're both. And they're on our side.
Hmmm.
.
From this we can gather that:
Davis-Besse has a bad history with mission-critical systems being vulnerable to viruses.
Davis-Besse may be the source of the massive power outage, which occurred . .
Within a few days of a massive, pretty much omnipresent RPC exploit hitting the net.
Hmmmm . . . maybe we can blame the Big Dark on Microsoft? That would kick ass!
Well, I'm not questioning them. I'm encouraging them. The tagline they put after this latest SCO story was pretty great -- 'SCO is simply lying'. *POW!*
/. is, that's some pretty plain talkin'. ;)
More like *that*, man! More like THAT! For a news source as widely read as
How does a virus with the name "SoBig" spread???
;)
Maybe I have a dirty mind, but I gotta think that most Spam filters would catch that one.
Look. I hate Microsoft, too.
But what the fudge does this have to do with trustworthy computing? It's just another email worm, and it relies heavily on user stupidity, much moreso than the msblaster worm.
Let's be honest: Microsoft is an evil company, that forces an evil product on people, and some of us are going to cheer when Microsoft gets hurt and people get nudged towards other operating systems -- whether it's Microsoft's fault, or not.
Could you just have written "Hey, anything that discourages Windows use!" after the story? I mean, christ, that's exactly what probably a good 90% of people here are thinking when they read these stories.
Oh, I agree.
The public school system can be as fascist as the educators wish and the administration will allow.
That is why this would be a great thing.
I actually took the extreme step of bringing a tape recorder to class in 8th grade, to document the laziness, stupidity, outright incompetence, churlish and childish attitude, and inappropriate language of one of my teachers. (
Or, rather, those were the things that it documented. I only brought it in to prove to my counselor, who had accused me of not "challenging myself", that I was in fact not being challenged by the class, and that the principal *should* approve my request to be skipped to the 11th grade, so I could enter college (post-secondary). In particular, the teacher's claim that you absolutely *had* to be moving at approximately 170,000 miles per hour, or a similarly ridiculous speed, to escape the pull of earth's gravity -- in a ROCKET. (confusing rocketry with ballistics). This was a science teacher.
I refused to agree with her -- simply refused, VERY politely, even resisting my normal urge to be smarmy, just told her that I thought she was wrong, but I respected her opinion, and left it at that.
For that, she sent me to The Office. And I had it all on tape.
Guess what? It's against school policy to admit any form of student record of an account except their own memory. They wouldn't even listen to the tape, even though I had thoughtfully fast-forwarded it to the pertinent section of tape, where we disagreed. 'They' being the counselor, the vice principal, or the principal. Since being sent to the office resulted in detention time from the vice-principal, and since the science teacher could give me a 0 for the day both in attendance and participation, it had very real consequences for me.
The point of this story?
If *they* were doing the recording, and were using it for purposes of review and resolving incidents between teachers and students, they could not avoid reviewing it. They couldn't just wish it away if they were making a policy of using the audiovideo. I mean, it's not that the principal or vice-principal were real assholes -- THEY would have removed any detention time and removed it from my record. If they would have been able to listen to the tape. But they couldn't -- the teachers evidently demanded this, either informally or via union, I don't know.
I mean, it seems like a small thing. But that kind of thing is happening to my little brother all over again, and the kind of frustration that causes -- on top of all of the OTHER things that schools do to screw you up -- can really make kids stop trying in school.
I find these cameras more welcome in a public school than I do in football stadiums or airports. As you so rightly pointed out, in school, we KNOW our rights are limited.
And the poorer gadget geeks that are willing to trade sexual favors for one of these would be . . .
Karma Whores
And if it arrived broken, we would have Bad Karma. And soon people will have witty, ironic sigs saying things like
"Karma: $399.99" or
"Karma: a fine product" or
"Karma: Poor, mostly due to purchasing a Karma" or
"Karma: 20GB, networkable!" or
"Karma: Broken (under warranty)".
^^ I claim prior art on those.
Slashdot review...
Karma: Excellent
Thank you.
I would mod you Insightful if I had the mod points.
I personally think that Apple is a great company, one of the only major technology companies that really, honestly has a tradition of quality at every point in the user's experience, from Support to the design of their system to basic usability.
But, on the other hand, this is the kind of information and opposing viewpoint that NEEDS to be modded up, because it raises *legitimate* points, points that are likely important to a lot of people on slashdot, and that you (unfortunately) do not often hear mentioned.
Personally, I think that Apple *has* to take this stance in order to keep their hardware sales from becoming absolutely destroyed by beige box companies that would use the Mac OS. Apple is a top-to-bottom design company, and that is what made it great, why the majority of its customers are so loyal, and why it manages to survive financially -- transitioning into purely an OS and accessories company would doom it.
Nonetheless, I would like to hear an intelligent discussion of how Apple could maintain their core business model -- bloated hardware prices and all -- and still allow program portability. And unfortunately, those discussions tend to get drowned immediately by people with mod points and dogmatic opinions.
Ok, most of us don't give a shit one way or the other, so I am going to go off on a mildly relevant tangent.
I think that using an analogy to "Power Tools" -- and doing so in the context of a book about a Mac -- is kind of stupid. I mean, "Power Tools" does not go with the image that I have of Macs as these clean-running, quiet, beautifully usable machines. The image I have of my power tools is one of grease, dirt, and bugs that need to be patched.
Mostly, it's an image thing. Until Apple comes out with an iBandsaw, iDrill, and iLathe, 'Power Tools' is just a stupid name for this book. It's like "Power Tools for the Boeing 747" or "Power Tools for The Barbecue" -- it's not a good metaphor, and it doesn't make sense.
I mean, you do heavy work with Power Tools, things you can't do without them. These sort of books are more "Tips and Tricks" for tools you already own -- like "How To Get The Most Out Of Your Belt Sander", or "Did You Know That The Drill That You're Holding Can Function As A Small Hammer Drill, If You Twist The Head And Use This Bit?"
I must be having a sandy vagina day or something. Little things like this are making me want to go firebomb an orphanage.
NO.
.
FUCKING.
WAY.
. .
See, I stopped following B5 news when it was apparent that it was dead. So I didn't hear about this.
THAT IS SO FRIGGIN LEET.
gps in phones doesn't seem to be the biggest issue to me. As you mention, GPS capability is dependent on your phone having a certain set of properties -- which can be changed/hacked/smashed.
What seems the bigger issue is the triangulation by cel tower, because that is possible entirely independent of any hacking you may do to the phone. It would only reveal your location when you use it, true. But the problem is, there is nothing you could do to prevent it, and you have only the good word of the company (or our government) that it won't be used on you -- and that it isn't, right . . . . NOW!
Peekaboo, I see you!
This thing is probably just a tad slower than a cruise missile. In fact, several tads.
.
I mean, this is just a friggin' airplane. You scale it up to carry a 2000lb warhead, and you're gonna start needing a much larger and sturdier body, wings, fuel tank, and engine . .
'Scaling' this would still just be giving you a vehicle with the capability of a personal airplane. It's going to be pretty slow, very expensive (given that even gutless airplanes generally cost around $500k), and it will show up on radar unless you make it even more expensive -- meaning that the army would have plenty of time to shoot it down if they were so inclined.
It still has potential, but the longer the range, the more speed becomes an issue (can be targetted, blown up). I don't see it being very practical or widely applicable -- it might undercut cruise missiles on cost, but it would be so very ineffective militarily that I don't see this being all that important. I see it being more applicable to things like unmanned air cargo planes.