Last I heard in IEEE journal a year ago, this kind of 1-fiber line to your house is more of what Ameritech and Comcast are going to use to thwack the telephone companies, and not vice versa.
After all, it's the cable companies that are already laying digital fiber lines to houses. They probably have some regulatory hurdles to overcome to offer POTS through the lines instead of having to go through the phone monopolies' networks, but with the backing of TW/AOL/etc. this no longer seems insurmountable.
The phone monopolies have limited deployment of digital lines to some prototype high-income (like, millionaire) communities, but even then, I don't think those lines carry TV signals. So the cable companies should be much closer to making this a reality.
I for one wouldn't mind cable taking over my communications, but I'm pretty sure that's just because I had good experiences with TWCNY's Road Runner service and pretty goddamn awful experiences with Verizon.
The internet is a community, and residents are responsible for keeping their computers in line. This includes keeping their computers secure from virus attacks and putting them down with antiviruses or firewalls if they go out and attack other people.
With so many people on broadband nowadays, it seems like we don't have much other choice.
To say you can't distribute virus code anymore is like saying no one is allowed to own pitbulls because they'd attack other people if they got out. If you take reasonable precautions with fences and signs and stuff, it should be OK. Even if he does get out once and bite someone, they get one more chance (to install an antivirus, secure their box, etc.) before getting put down (fines, DSL connection yanked, etc.). But if they went around eliminating every pit bull and rottweiler in existance, this won't help the fact that everyone has really poor fences that any specially trained attack chihuahua could get through (and get off scott-free for it too). Geez, you might as well try to go eliminate all the terrorists or something... oh wait...
We should have a server that sends the appropriate file type depending on the client request. So if Apache gets a request from an old version of Netscape, it'll send the picture compressed as.jpg/gif, if it gets a newer Mozilla, it'll send.jp2/png, if it gets a PDA, it'll send a 16-color greyscale, etc.
The server is probably a good place to do this (maybe with some mod_rewrite hack), since it could be responsible for caching heavily-requested conversions.
Anything like this exist? Similarly, I've always wanted to find some nice way to keep my photo-album online in the highest quality, but only send scaled-down images to casual visitors (as well as thumbnails). http://ids.sourceforge.net/ looks like it comes the closest to this kind of thing, but looks a bit too server-heavy (doesn't seem to support caching).
Yes! On the official screenshots page, they have CmdrTaco's Hamster Havoc animation as a mozilla video plugin demo! Now he's ready for prime time! His liberal arts education has finally paid off!
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover/sc re enshots.php
Well, as promised here's some more info, now that I'm home from work.
It's made by Epoch and officially called the "Indoor Racer RC 1/43 SPEC-1. The car has a URL on the rear spoiler that points to e-kuruma.com , but that seems to be a car auction site.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a web page on it, so I guess I'll have to make my own... I threw a bunch of pictures and movies up at my webserver
Sorry for the shoddy Quicktime anims, it's kinda hard to drive while holding a camera:P
Post if you can find any info on it!
Fully digitally-proportional cars available too
on
Smallest RC Cars?
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· Score: 1
I just bought a different brand from a duty-free shop at Tokyo/Narita airport a few months ago. It was a bit larger (about 10cm long) but it had fully digitally proportional steering and throttle with a pistol-style controller, which really comes in handy when you're trying to do tricky maneuvers. It was $45 US and came with 4 spare tires (?!). The transmitter took a 9V battery, and the charging station took 6AA's, so you wouldn't have to get an extra 120V A/C adapter. It's pretty fast, can probably keep up with a jogger. The car's battery lasts about 5 minutes, depending on your lead foot (or finger). My only complaint is that the radio range is only about 10-15 meters:( . But they have at least 4 cars that supposedly run on different frequencies so you can play with friends. I'll try to post a link when I get home tonight.
I remember reading about R/C cars this size in magazines about 8 years ago, they were $100 - $200 then, and I'd always wanted one. I'm glad the price came down enough for me to convince my wife to spend money on a toy:) . At least my in-laws seemed to enjoy it a lot, trying to parallel-park between two saltshakers...
First comes love, then comes marriage, then your wife throws away all of your old computer junk and you're left in an empty room. Oh, that's just the "Zen" decor.
Oh well, good luck... it had to happen sometime or other...;>
OK, maybe this is more 22nd century, but probably worth looking at just for the "wow" factor. VSOC We went on a demo of it with my company a few weeks ago. They'll make a slick 3D model of your compound, with the fov cones of all your security cameras overlaid on it. Then you can zoom around your compound with full degrees of freedom with their slick OpenGL engine. Clicking on the fov cones gives you the live MPEG stream from that camera. Microwave motion sensors with each camera can also automatically activate the display/zoom. It really delivers some heightened situational awareness... if not maybe a bit of a God complex. Unfortunately, it doesn't represent "live" objects in the 3D model just yet, but I'd imagine that wouldn't be too far off... Looks like they already have the ST:TNG interface, though.
Disclaimer: I'm somewhat affiliated with that company since they're a wholly-owned subsidiary of my parent company, but that's about it. And I speak for myself not on behalf of any of these companies:P .
Re:Is the monkey's name Rupert?
on
Think And Click
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· Score: 1
One of the biggest components are the power supplies. They also fail a lot, with a MTBF of 10^5 hours compared to 10^6+ for most other components. What I would like to see is a UPS that somehow goes behind the wall (like that switchplate hub that was on slashdot a while back) that would output DC power to your chassis and peripherals. It would have some kind of fault tolerance and hot-swap whenever one of the AC converters in the array would die. This alone should eliminate much of the heat and noise from your PC chassis.
... or should I say "orientational awareness irrespective of observer augmentation"... sheesh. They say that your syllable-per-word average in sentences goes up as your vocabulary improves, but after a certain point it just makes your writing a pain to read. Then you spend four years in college with an _Elements_of_Style_ text learning how to write elegantly. Meanwhile, your grades suck. Not that I'm bitter...
Anyway, I for one would find this indispensible... As a recent father-to-be I just got to see the first ultrasounds of our fetus last week ("Peanut", we've been calling it). But I couldn't make heads or tails of the image. The nurse was telling us "well, it's sort of upside-down", but despite all my preparation with those educational TV birthstravaganzas, it didn't make any sense at all. I'd love to be able to see the ultrasound image overlaid over my wife's stomach.
But maybe if they just let me play with the ultrasound probe a bit, I'd figure it out... next time...:/
I just got a multimeter from RSR electronics for about $50 . It works great as a multimeter, but I have yet to actually hook it up to my computer. It only comes with Windoze 9x software, of course, but I don't imagine it would be too hard to write a Linux driver for it if one doesn't already exist. I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend...
Anyone know how to speed up filesystem access under cygwin? It's dog slow (reportedly 10 times slower than the native windows driver), and it shows. I shudder to think of how cygwin/dpkg is going to fare accessing/var/lib/dpkg/available/info with thousands of files in it....
Weren't the experimental prototypes of the F-16 fighter known as yard darts due to their propensity to end up in someone's back yard in the middle of the Colorado testing area? Looks like these scramjets are going to give them some good competition...
The Register had a pretty comprehensive article on it a few days ago, including a survey of which browsers were and were not affected. I just thought/. didn't run the story because no one here would be interested in MSN:>.
It doesn't look like anything nefarious on MSN's part, just sloppy browser-specific web coding, as sites like Disney, Time Warner, and the USDOE FAFSA have done in the past.
I normally don't troll about spelling, esp. on reasonably confusing words, but given the subject matter I guess it's necessary. This text added to countermeasure the anti-lameness countermeasure.
Are you cheering on the planet? If Odyssey and Mars were to collide, I'd put my money on the planet too. Or maybe that's a vacation slogan?
Ah, I remember the long nights of SimEarth, working to terraform Mars into a habitable environment with carbon dioxide and water vapor generators... then getting bored and flinging a couple of ice comets at it -- accompanied by the terrible Sound Blaster MIDI sound FX -- and then finally overdoing it and creating a planetwide ocean. I wonder what approach NASA is planning to take?
Too bad that game didn't have an option to make sentient rocks...
In news today, a small chunk of Austin TX vaporized when an engineer tripped over a Thermaltake vortex containment field, causing an experimental single-chip SMP AMD processor to go critical in its 1024 pin socket...
Anyone think of creating a system to do security surveillance voluntarily? That's the only way I can think of to give the feds what they want without letting go of our liberty. If we can put one in place ourselves, then hopefully we can do it right and not put ourselves at the mercy of the NSA's Echelon and key escrow.
Help me design such a system... I'm envisioning a community project, somewhat like a neighborhood watch. ISPs can attach it to their networks to collect and monitor plaintext traffic. The keywords that investigators are interested in will flip through the system (somewhat like freenet's searches) so 1) messages that match their search profile will bubble up to the top of their searches, and 2) the community can monitor what they're currently searching for and perhaps have some way to vote into how much info we return during their witchhunts.
As far as strong encryption goes, it's here to stay no matter what, but at least we can devise a tracking system based on the information we DO know (senders and recipients, sources and destinations, and causes and results of such transmissions) and perform statistical analyses to infer if something is about to go down (I'm most of the way through _Cryptonomicon_, if you haven't guessed).
At it develops, we might be able to spread it out into people's houses... How many of you people with webcams wanted to set up a home security system that would page you if it detects something suspicious? We could have our computer networks watching over our property, scan our parking lots and streets for vehicles reported stolen, and the best part is, if we can keep it open, we can control exactly how much it sees and how much of our lives we want to keep to ourselves.
This stuff is coming (it's already here in some parts of the world). I think it's up to us to make it our system, a friendly community neighboorhood watch program, and not The Man's.
Oh, and Netscape changed my email account to "RAndruscavage" when they merged with geocities way back when. So don't bother rwa2@netscape.net about it.
I'm not seeing it on any of the news sites yet, but the Pentagon also got hit by a plane around 9:30, we can see it from our building. Thick smoke is billowing around it, coming out of the central courtyard. Most of the offices in the area are leaving work early. Air traffic has been shut down, and air force jets are patrolling the skies now.
Yay for Neal Stephenson stuff coming to life...
on
Virtual Skydive
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· Score: 1
Heh, after I watched through it once, I found myself grabbing the seek control and pretending I was navigating around at will, like those big satellite-reconstructed virtual Earths in Snow Crash. I can't wait until someone releases a database/browser capable of that!
Slashdot Mirror
So if they get the diving board to move a filter that switches between the two wavelengths, they can make the nanospring flex cyclically?
Boingy boingy boingy
and and it even filters out extraneous conjunctions!
Brought to you by the Associated Federation of Organizations.
Last I heard in IEEE journal a year ago, this kind of 1-fiber line to your house is more of what Ameritech and Comcast are going to use to thwack the telephone companies, and not vice versa.
After all, it's the cable companies that are already laying digital fiber lines to houses. They probably have some regulatory hurdles to overcome to offer POTS through the lines instead of having to go through the phone monopolies' networks, but with the backing of TW/AOL/etc. this no longer seems insurmountable.
The phone monopolies have limited deployment of digital lines to some prototype high-income (like, millionaire) communities, but even then, I don't think those lines carry TV signals. So the cable companies should be much closer to making this a reality.
I for one wouldn't mind cable taking over my communications, but I'm pretty sure that's just because I had good experiences with TWCNY's Road Runner service and pretty goddamn awful experiences with Verizon.
The internet is a community, and residents are responsible for keeping their computers in line. This includes keeping their computers secure from virus attacks and putting them down with antiviruses or firewalls if they go out and attack other people.
With so many people on broadband nowadays, it seems like we don't have much other choice.
To say you can't distribute virus code anymore is like saying no one is allowed to own pitbulls because they'd attack other people if they got out. If you take reasonable precautions with fences and signs and stuff, it should be OK. Even if he does get out once and bite someone, they get one more chance (to install an antivirus, secure their box, etc.) before getting put down (fines, DSL connection yanked, etc.). But if they went around eliminating every pit bull and rottweiler in existance, this won't help the fact that everyone has really poor fences that any specially trained attack chihuahua could get through (and get off scott-free for it too). Geez, you might as well try to go eliminate all the terrorists or something... oh wait...
We should have a server that sends the appropriate file type depending on the client request. So if Apache gets a request from an old version of Netscape, it'll send the picture compressed as .jpg/gif, if it gets a newer Mozilla, it'll send .jp2/png, if it gets a PDA, it'll send a 16-color greyscale, etc.
The server is probably a good place to do this (maybe with some mod_rewrite hack), since it could be responsible for caching heavily-requested conversions.
Anything like this exist? Similarly, I've always wanted to find some nice way to keep my photo-album online in the highest quality, but only send scaled-down images to casual visitors (as well as thumbnails). http://ids.sourceforge.net/ looks like it comes the closest to this kind of thing, but looks a bit too server-heavy (doesn't seem to support caching).
Yes! On the official screenshots page, they have CmdrTaco's Hamster Havoc animation as a mozilla video plugin demo! Now he's ready for prime time! His liberal arts education has finally paid off!
c re enshots.php
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover/s
It's made by Epoch and officially called the "Indoor Racer RC 1/43 SPEC-1. The car has a URL on the rear spoiler that points to e-kuruma.com , but that seems to be a car auction site.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a web page on it, so I guess I'll have to make my own... I threw a bunch of pictures and movies up at my webserver
Sorry for the shoddy Quicktime anims, it's kinda hard to drive while holding a camera :P
Post if you can find any info on it!
I just bought a different brand from a duty-free shop at Tokyo/Narita airport a few months ago. It was a bit larger (about 10cm long) but it had fully digitally proportional steering and throttle with a pistol-style controller, which really comes in handy when you're trying to do tricky maneuvers. It was $45 US and came with 4 spare tires (?!). The transmitter took a 9V battery, and the charging station took 6AA's, so you wouldn't have to get an extra 120V A/C adapter. It's pretty fast, can probably keep up with a jogger. The car's battery lasts about 5 minutes, depending on your lead foot (or finger). My only complaint is that the radio range is only about 10-15 meters :( . But they have at least 4 cars that supposedly run on different frequencies so you can play with friends. I'll try to post a link when I get home tonight.
:) . At least my in-laws seemed to enjoy it a lot, trying to parallel-park between two saltshakers...
I remember reading about R/C cars this size in magazines about 8 years ago, they were $100 - $200 then, and I'd always wanted one. I'm glad the price came down enough for me to convince my wife to spend money on a toy
First comes love, then comes marriage, then your wife throws away all of your old computer junk and you're left in an empty room. Oh, that's just the "Zen" decor.
;>
Oh well, good luck... it had to happen sometime or other...
Disclaimer: I'm somewhat affiliated with that company since they're a wholly-owned subsidiary of my parent company, but that's about it. And I speak for myself not on behalf of any of these companies :P .
Oh yeah, here's the link
Reference to the MS April Fool's press release a few years ago.
One of the biggest components are the power supplies. They also fail a lot, with a MTBF of 10^5 hours compared to 10^6+ for most other components. What I would like to see is a UPS that somehow goes behind the wall (like that switchplate hub that was on slashdot a while back) that would output DC power to your chassis and peripherals. It would have some kind of fault tolerance and hot-swap whenever one of the AC converters in the array would die. This alone should eliminate much of the heat and noise from your PC chassis.
... or should I say "orientational awareness irrespective of observer augmentation"... sheesh. They say that your syllable-per-word average in sentences goes up as your vocabulary improves, but after a certain point it just makes your writing a pain to read. Then you spend four years in college with an _Elements_of_Style_ text learning how to write elegantly. Meanwhile, your grades suck. Not that I'm bitter...
:/
Anyway, I for one would find this indispensible... As a recent father-to-be I just got to see the first ultrasounds of our fetus last week ("Peanut", we've been calling it). But I couldn't make heads or tails of the image. The nurse was telling us "well, it's sort of upside-down", but despite all my preparation with those educational TV birthstravaganzas, it didn't make any sense at all. I'd love to be able to see the ultrasound image overlaid over my wife's stomach.
But maybe if they just let me play with the ultrasound probe a bit, I'd figure it out... next time...
I just got a multimeter from RSR electronics for about $50 . It works great as a multimeter, but I have yet to actually hook it up to my computer. It only comes with Windoze 9x software, of course, but I don't imagine it would be too hard to write a Linux driver for it if one doesn't already exist. I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend...
Anyone know how to speed up filesystem access under cygwin? It's dog slow (reportedly 10 times slower than the native windows driver), and it shows. I shudder to think of how cygwin/dpkg is going to fare accessing /var/lib/dpkg/available/info with thousands of files in it....
Weren't the experimental prototypes of the F-16 fighter known as yard darts due to their propensity to end up in someone's back yard in the middle of the Colorado testing area? Looks like these scramjets are going to give them some good competition...
It doesn't look like anything nefarious on MSN's part, just sloppy browser-specific web coding, as sites like Disney, Time Warner, and the USDOE FAFSA have done in the past.
...and some of us have (or are planning to have) geeky children
I normally don't troll about spelling, esp. on reasonably confusing words, but given the subject matter I guess it's necessary. This text added to countermeasure the anti-lameness countermeasure.
Are you cheering on the planet? If Odyssey and Mars were to collide, I'd put my money on the planet too. Or maybe that's a vacation slogan?
Ah, I remember the long nights of SimEarth, working to terraform Mars into a habitable environment with carbon dioxide and water vapor generators... then getting bored and flinging a couple of ice comets at it -- accompanied by the terrible Sound Blaster MIDI sound FX -- and then finally overdoing it and creating a planetwide ocean. I wonder what approach NASA is planning to take?
Too bad that game didn't have an option to make sentient rocks...
In news today, a small chunk of Austin TX vaporized when an engineer tripped over a Thermaltake vortex containment field, causing an experimental single-chip SMP AMD processor to go critical in its 1024 pin socket...
Anyone think of creating a system to do security surveillance voluntarily? That's the only way I can think of to give the feds what they want without letting go of our liberty. If we can put one in place ourselves, then hopefully we can do it right and not put ourselves at the mercy of the NSA's Echelon and key escrow.
Help me design such a system... I'm envisioning a community project, somewhat like a neighborhood watch. ISPs can attach it to their networks to collect and monitor plaintext traffic. The keywords that investigators are interested in will flip through the system (somewhat like freenet's searches) so 1) messages that match their search profile will bubble up to the top of their searches, and 2) the community can monitor what they're currently searching for and perhaps have some way to vote into how much info we return during their witchhunts.
As far as strong encryption goes, it's here to stay no matter what, but at least we can devise a tracking system based on the information we DO know (senders and recipients, sources and destinations, and causes and results of such transmissions) and perform statistical analyses to infer if something is about to go down (I'm most of the way through _Cryptonomicon_, if you haven't guessed).
At it develops, we might be able to spread it out into people's houses... How many of you people with webcams wanted to set up a home security system that would page you if it detects something suspicious? We could have our computer networks watching over our property, scan our parking lots and streets for vehicles reported stolen, and the best part is, if we can keep it open, we can control exactly how much it sees and how much of our lives we want to keep to ourselves.
This stuff is coming (it's already here in some parts of the world). I think it's up to us to make it our system, a friendly community neighboorhood watch program, and not The Man's.
Oh, and Netscape changed my email account to "RAndruscavage" when they merged with geocities way back when. So don't bother rwa2@netscape.net about it.
I'm not seeing it on any of the news sites yet, but the Pentagon also got hit by a plane around 9:30, we can see it from our building. Thick smoke is billowing around it, coming out of the central courtyard. Most of the offices in the area are leaving work early. Air traffic has been shut down, and air force jets are patrolling the skies now.
Heh, after I watched through it once, I found myself grabbing the seek control and pretending I was navigating around at will, like those big satellite-reconstructed virtual Earths in Snow Crash. I can't wait until someone releases a database/browser capable of that!