The US already has an excellent uranium 'recycling' program that consists of making bullets out of uranium and shooting them all over stinky foreign countries. Probably this whole "War in Iraq" thing is really just a cover for the program.
At one point in the article states that the researchers spend time thinking about how to make "money for Microsoft in the future". No they don't. I worked there for a couple of years and making money is not a priority for Microsoft research. Its pretty obvious when you look at the list of ridiculous stuff they talk about in the article; most of this stuff is completely disconnected from reality.
All the bad stuff you hear about Microsoft research being a black hole from which people are never heard from again is true: the researcher get paid very well and are (imho) motivated by the structure of the organization to never actually do anything worthwhile. Fat and happy doesnt innovate. MS research is a "prestige" organization only. It was designed to make a certain group of people a lot of money and it did its job, but that group of people are not the stockholders.
This is basically what I do for my programmers as a manager: I work with them to get very specific schedules that keep them on top of their progress. We review progress regularly. Very few people understand this process and think of it as a waste of time and complete BS. However, it is extremely effective at keeping people and projects on time.
Even as the reviewer points out, he is still a complete newbie. He hasnt see anything in the game. I think he forgest what the first month of EQ was like. You killed the same stupid snake over and over and over. The graphics were bad even for those days. A mage would spend 75% of his time watching his mana bar on a blank screen.
The first couple of days of SWG is a better experence than any other MMPORG ever made. Fewer bugs. Less confusion. No gimping. You get into the game and are doing interesting stuff with interesting graphics right away.
As for more varied interesting stuff, it is there, he just hasnt seen it yet. The Tusken lair for example is quite a thrill to conquer.
I'm always telling people I dont watch TV as if that was some sort superior quality or something. But the truth is, I dont' watch TV because it's like breathing through a straw. I am completely addicted to information and the TV can't meet my dosage requirements.
Happily, age and information overload is taking its toll, and am now able to go camping (for example) with no source of information for days and not start sweating about what I'm missing. I think one day I will disconnect and never look back.
This idea is so ignorant of the reality of flying it I doubt you will find any pilot who agrees with it.
Pilots are specifically trained to deal with all sorts of navigation and mechanical failure. This system would effectively add a device to the aircraft who's malfuction could cause a crash the pilot would not be able to override it.
Just like computers, airplane systems like autopilots fail pretty often.
Anyway, terrorists will now have an easier time using a private plane than a commercial plane. They are everywhere and most of them have no ignition lock system! Of course, you can buy an old plane for cheap, so if the terrorists have any financing at all they can just buy their own.
If you get sued, whatever happens, admit nothing. Proving that a person is sharing particular copyrighted files would be quite difficult, especially with a good lawyer questioning their methods and sources at every turn. Get a few expert witnesses talking about how hackers can spoof addresses and bsing about where the data actually comes from an goes to and you have good chance. But if you admit you did it, you automatically lose and they don't have to prove anything.
This whole life on Mars things is a red herring
on
Might Mars Contain Life?
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Space popularists have been harping about life on Mars way way too much. It has reached a sort of cult-like status as the primary reason to go into space. While it might be interesting to know, the answer is really quite irrelevant.
Exploration is not about finding answers to pre-formulated questions. It is much more open ended than than, its about expanding horizons and finding new unexpected opportunities.
Another problem with the life-as-a-reason to explore mentality is that at some point the jig is gonna be up: there is very little chance of finding life on Mars and once the answer is concluded positively no, will the people turn away from space exploration?
Scientific American's article is a confused mess of ideas in an attempt to take a lot of speculation in unrelated areas of theory and make it look like science. The magazine has gone down hill in credibility in the last few years, and this article is the crowning achievement so far; Scientific American is the new OMNI.
"There is no matrix, there is only what is real." -- Laurence Fishburne in response to Matrix-inspired hysteria.
It is only apropos that it is the actor who plays Morpheus who has to set us straight on what is and what is not real. Martin Rees is perhaps an expert on astrophysics, but Fishburne is an expert on appearance and illusion.
Did it every occur to anybody..
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Did it every occur to anybody that maybe Microsoft really wants people to hack X-box? They want it to become hip-to-hack. This is the sort of grassroots cool they really hunger for. Basically, the hackers create a hip new market and what the heck can MS do but jump on the bandwagon? After all their goal all along is not to make a game platform, but to build a more ubiquitous computer platform.
I really don't care how hard you work as my employee. All I care about is results. If I need a project working flawlessly by next week, and its done, I don't care if you spent half the time playing Quake. As a programmer myself, I know that code often gets done in spurts, and that a break (especially a nap!) can improve productivity quite a bit.
The problem is there are some people who can do it, and some that cant. If you aren't the type that can do it, you really can't fake it. The people you work for and work with all know what needs to get done. They won't be fooled by late night emails. When the due date arrives and you arent done, they will know you weren't up to snuff.
Perhaps the editor's did take a little licence when they decribe this as a handheld killer. This particular device? Probably not.
This particular paradigm? Hey maybe.
PDAs and laptops suffer from the "kitchen sink" problem. In order to please a sufficently large number of people, all sorts of features have to be included, and in turn, compromises made. Some people want color, others want audio, some keyboards some need a touch pen. In order to compete buttons are placed in random places on pdas so they can work like a dictaphone. All sorts of weird things that I don't want just to please some niche.
And adding all those features raises the cost of the device.
This idea of modularizing components wirelessly might be a really great idea. With this paradigm, I don't have to fit the CPU and hardrive into an ergonomic shape suitable for pen input. Also, your hand is relieved of the extra weight of those components. So just like desktops, you might buy your "monitor" from a totally different manufacturer than the cpu. You like Sony's egonomics but compaq's performance? Why can't you have both? Also, with this model, you don't need all the extra proprietary gobblygook to interface to your desktop.
If I leave one image sitting on my LCD projector too long, yes, it will burn in a bit. But the burn in goes away after other images are shown. Typical desktop use gets no burn-in, while long bouts of Shadowbane will leave little yellow pock-marks when the fixed menus are. This goes away after browsing the web a while.
The problem with DLP projectors like the one my roomate bought is the "screendoor" effect that makes it look like you are viewing the image through a screendoor: little black boxes around every single pixel. This is an effect that is there from day-one and never goes away!
Will my LCD eventually get permanent burn-in? Perhaps. Still it's better than the screendoor.
So computers crash. And you know what? Cars crash everyday to. Few software bugs end up killing people, but crashing cars is one of the top killers! Why don't they make cars that can't crash? It could be done!
Get some perspective here people. Computers aren't made perfectly reliable because the free market says they don't have to be. And they don't. The cost of making bug-free software is much higher than the value of bug-free software. If you are going to argue the point, please take that energy and go save some lives by fighting for safer cars.
You got it backwards really. Science works by observation first, then theory. The only reason our fancy quantum formulas "predict" water boiling at 100 celsius is that the math was modelled on observation of that fact (and others). Thus, science is mostly "curve-fitting"; start with data, force the function.
This is not just a trivial distinction either; misunderstanding this philosophy of science has lead to all sorts of confusion about science with people making foolish statements about the 'laws of nature' or saying evolution is 'just a theory'.
I wrote my own MMPORG a couple of years ago. I learned a lesson. I built my own 3d engine and network code. And it was glorious; fast, lots of fancy effect, and beautiful lag tolerant lurping. I was very proud.
It was ready to do the 'easy stuff': content. Thats when things got bogged down. Turns out that games have huge lists of people on their credits because there is a huge unavoidable time sync in doing content. This article says 2-3 years and I say they are being very aggressive with that estimate.
So my lesson was this: you will need a lot of skilled 3D artists, musicians and content designers in order to finish the job. Do not take this part lightly!
This is just more of the same old Fat People listening to Fat People. Low calorie diets do not work; this has been known since the beginning of the whole concept of dieting. Heresy you say? Look: no generally accepted study has ever found ANY diet to work without compulsion. NO KNOWN DIET WORKS for general populace.
What we have here, as usual, is an anecdotal story of one's mans (apparent) success at losing weight. The bookstore is littered with this sort of thing.
As it stands today, if you are fat and want to not be fat, the only scientifically proven method is a fat prison. A place where you are literally locked up and unable to eat.
Thus I say to you, eat what you will and be happy. Diets are often times worse than the effects of the fat.
Scenerio: computer with no working floppy drive (or cd or zip or network). How do you upload software to it? You use laplink over the serial port. Laplink is able to install over the serial port without having to install any software at all on the client. Amazing.
On some older computers with a dysfunctional floppy drive, the only way to get files onto the machine is to use Laplink (or a clone) with a cable and another computer; it is able to self-instally over the tty.
Pretty clear the videos on the site are fabricated
on
Fishing for Ideas
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Forgetting the smarmy PR department faux extemporaneous nature of all of the videos, the fact that most of the are holding the same microphone kinda gives it away.
I did read the paper. The problem is that the language they are building is neither necessary nor sufficient to describe quantum algorithms. It allows you to string together a handful of quantum operations with classical code. The problem of course is that those operations are not sufficient to do anything new; the interesting stuff (if there is any) is in that layer below the language, unreachable by the language.
As far as a general purposes quantum computer setup, I think it is naive to assume it can be done without some hints as to why it would be worthwhile. The algorithms invented so far are not general, and there is no indication that general algorithms will ever be possible. Indeed research is necessary, but it is well below the level of computer languages.
Slashdot Mirror
The US already has an excellent uranium 'recycling' program that consists of making bullets out of uranium and shooting them all over stinky foreign countries. Probably this whole "War in Iraq" thing is really just a cover for the program.
In Soviet Russia Dot-slash!
At one point in the article states that the researchers spend time thinking about how to make "money for Microsoft in the future". No they don't. I worked there for a couple of years and making money is not a priority for Microsoft research. Its pretty obvious when you look at the list of ridiculous stuff they talk about in the article; most of this stuff is completely disconnected from reality.
All the bad stuff you hear about Microsoft research being a black hole from which people are never heard from again is true: the researcher get paid very well and are (imho) motivated by the structure of the organization to never actually do anything worthwhile. Fat and happy doesnt innovate. MS research is a "prestige" organization only. It was designed to make a certain group of people a lot of money and it did its job, but that group of people are not the stockholders.
This is basically what I do for my programmers as a manager: I work with them to get very specific schedules that keep them on top of their progress. We review progress regularly. Very few people understand this process and think of it as a waste of time and complete BS. However, it is extremely effective at keeping people and projects on time.
Even as the reviewer points out, he is still a complete newbie. He hasnt see anything in the game. I think he forgest what the first month of EQ was like. You killed the same stupid snake over and over and over. The graphics were bad even for those days. A mage would spend 75% of his time watching his mana bar on a blank screen.
The first couple of days of SWG is a better experence than any other MMPORG ever made. Fewer bugs. Less confusion. No gimping. You get into the game and are doing interesting stuff with interesting graphics right away.
As for more varied interesting stuff, it is there, he just hasnt seen it yet. The Tusken lair for example is quite a thrill to conquer.
I'm always telling people I dont watch TV as if that was some sort superior quality or something. But the truth is, I dont' watch TV because it's like breathing through a straw. I am completely addicted to information and the TV can't meet my dosage requirements.
Happily, age and information overload is taking its toll, and am now able to go camping (for example) with no source of information for days and not start sweating about what I'm missing. I think one day I will disconnect and never look back.
Not today though.
This idea is so ignorant of the reality of flying it I doubt you will find any pilot who agrees with it.
Pilots are specifically trained to deal with all sorts of navigation and mechanical failure. This system would effectively add a device to the aircraft who's malfuction could cause a crash the pilot would not be able to override it.
Just like computers, airplane systems like autopilots fail pretty often.
Anyway, terrorists will now have an easier time using a private plane than a commercial plane. They are everywhere and most of them have no ignition lock system! Of course, you can buy an old plane for cheap, so if the terrorists have any financing at all they can just buy their own.
If you get sued, whatever happens, admit nothing. Proving that a person is sharing particular copyrighted files would be quite difficult, especially with a good lawyer questioning their methods and sources at every turn. Get a few expert witnesses talking about how hackers can spoof addresses and bsing about where the data actually comes from an goes to and you have good chance. But if you admit you did it, you automatically lose and they don't have to prove anything.
Space popularists have been harping about life on Mars way way too much. It has reached a sort of cult-like status as the primary reason to go into space. While it might be interesting to know, the answer is really quite irrelevant.
Exploration is not about finding answers to pre-formulated questions. It is much more open ended than than, its about expanding horizons and finding new unexpected opportunities.
Another problem with the life-as-a-reason to explore mentality is that at some point the jig is gonna be up: there is very little chance of finding life on Mars and once the answer is concluded positively no, will the people turn away from space exploration?
Scientific American's article is a confused mess of ideas in an attempt to take a lot of speculation in unrelated areas of theory and make it look like science. The magazine has gone down hill in credibility in the last few years, and this article is the crowning achievement so far; Scientific American is the new OMNI.
"There is no matrix, there is only what is real." -- Laurence Fishburne in response to Matrix-inspired hysteria.
It is only apropos that it is the actor who plays Morpheus who has to set us straight on what is and what is not real.
Martin Rees is perhaps an expert on astrophysics, but Fishburne is an expert on appearance and illusion.
Did it every occur to anybody that maybe Microsoft really wants people to hack X-box? They want it to become hip-to-hack. This is the sort of grassroots cool they really hunger for. Basically, the hackers create a hip new market and what the heck can MS do but jump on the bandwagon? After all their goal all along is not to make a game platform, but to build a more ubiquitous computer platform.
I really don't care how hard you work as my employee. All I care about is results. If I need a project working flawlessly by next week, and its done, I don't care if you spent half the time playing Quake.
As a programmer myself, I know that code often gets done in spurts, and that a break (especially a nap!) can improve productivity quite a bit.
The problem is there are some people who can do it, and some that cant. If you aren't the type that can do it, you really can't fake it. The people you work for and work with all know what needs to get done. They won't be fooled by late night emails. When the due date arrives and you arent done, they will know you weren't up to snuff.
Perhaps the editor's did take a little licence when they decribe this as a handheld killer. This particular device? Probably not.
This particular paradigm? Hey maybe.
PDAs and laptops suffer from the "kitchen sink" problem. In order to please a sufficently large number of people, all sorts of features have to be included, and in turn, compromises made. Some people want color, others want audio, some keyboards some need a touch pen. In order to compete buttons are placed in random places on pdas so they can work like a dictaphone. All sorts of weird things that I don't want just to please some niche.
And adding all those features raises the cost of the device.
This idea of modularizing components wirelessly might be a really great idea. With this paradigm, I don't have to fit the CPU and hardrive into an ergonomic shape suitable for pen input. Also, your hand is relieved of the extra weight of those components.
So just like desktops, you might buy your "monitor" from a totally different manufacturer than the cpu. You like Sony's egonomics but compaq's performance? Why can't you have both?
Also, with this model, you don't need all the extra proprietary gobblygook to interface to your desktop.
Sounds like a good deal to me.
If I leave one image sitting on my LCD projector too long, yes, it will burn in a bit. But the burn in goes away after other images are shown. Typical desktop use gets no burn-in, while long bouts of Shadowbane will leave little yellow pock-marks when the fixed menus are. This goes away after browsing the web a while.
The problem with DLP projectors like the one my roomate bought is the "screendoor" effect that makes it look like you are viewing the image through a screendoor: little black boxes around every single pixel. This is an effect that is there from day-one and never goes away!
Will my LCD eventually get permanent burn-in? Perhaps. Still it's better than the screendoor.
So computers crash. And you know what? Cars crash everyday to. Few software bugs end up killing people, but crashing cars is one of the top killers! Why don't they make cars that can't crash? It could be done!
Get some perspective here people. Computers aren't made perfectly reliable because the free market says they don't have to be. And they don't. The cost of making bug-free software is much higher than the value of bug-free software. If you are going to argue the point, please take that energy and go save some lives by fighting for safer cars.
You got it backwards really. Science works by observation first, then theory. The only reason our fancy quantum formulas "predict" water boiling at 100 celsius is that the math was modelled on observation of that fact (and others). Thus, science is mostly "curve-fitting"; start with data, force the function.
This is not just a trivial distinction either; misunderstanding this philosophy of science has lead to all sorts of confusion about science with people making foolish statements about the 'laws of nature' or saying evolution is 'just a theory'.
I wrote my own MMPORG a couple of years ago. I learned a lesson. I built my own 3d engine and network code. And it was glorious; fast, lots of fancy effect, and beautiful lag tolerant lurping. I was very proud.
It was ready to do the 'easy stuff': content. Thats when things got bogged down. Turns out that games have huge lists of people on their credits because there is a huge unavoidable time sync in doing content. This article says 2-3 years and I say they are being very aggressive with that estimate.
So my lesson was this: you will need a lot of skilled 3D artists, musicians and content designers in order to finish the job. Do not take this part lightly!
This is just more of the same old Fat People listening to Fat People. Low calorie diets do not work; this has been known since the beginning of the whole concept of dieting. Heresy you say? Look: no generally accepted study has ever found ANY diet to work without compulsion. NO KNOWN DIET WORKS for general populace.
What we have here, as usual, is an anecdotal story of one's mans (apparent) success at losing weight. The bookstore is littered with this sort of thing.
As it stands today, if you are fat and want to not be fat, the only scientifically proven method is a fat prison. A place where you are literally locked up and unable to eat.
Thus I say to you, eat what you will and be happy. Diets are often times worse than the effects of the fat.
A high resolution/high lumen projection LCD is so much better than any traditional monitor it will stun you.
My screen is 6' by 5' but only takes up the volume of a toaster and can be carried around with one finger.
This is not your old-fashioned dim projector either; I project on an off-color wall but the brightness is as high as a CRT.
Yes, it is more expensive; but this is not a minor quality difference--it's shock and awe.
What are role assignments and what kind of employee collusion are you trying to prevent? I am mystified.
Scenerio: computer with no working floppy drive (or cd or zip or network). How do you upload software to it? You use laplink over the serial port. Laplink is able to install over the serial port without having to install any software at all on the client. Amazing.
On some older computers with a dysfunctional floppy drive, the only way to get files onto the machine is to use Laplink (or a clone) with a cable and another computer; it is able to self-instally over the tty.
Forgetting the smarmy PR department faux extemporaneous nature of all of the videos, the fact that most of the are holding the same microphone kinda gives it away.
I did read the paper. The problem is that the language they are building is neither necessary nor sufficient to describe quantum algorithms. It allows you to string together a handful of quantum operations with classical code. The problem of course is that those operations are not sufficient to do anything new; the interesting stuff (if there is any) is in that layer below the language, unreachable by the language.
As far as a general purposes quantum computer setup, I think it is naive to assume it can be done without some hints as to why it would be worthwhile. The algorithms invented so far are not general, and there is no indication that general algorithms will ever be possible. Indeed research is necessary, but it is well below the level of computer languages.