My understanding is that what they want to do is require or ISPs to monitor all users and give all information to the goverment.
Isnt this basically impossible? First off, the bandwidth requirements alone would make the process unfeasable. The whole reason the internet is a called a network and not a bus is that the information is distributed. This distribution is what makes the internet possible. Funneling all the information into centralized locations would violate the network topology.
Next, many ISPs are not registered or licenced to be ISPs. What defines an ISP? Does my wi-fi count? Policing this would a complete farce, especially with freedom advocates taking every opportunity to bypass and befuddle the law.
Next, any terrorists/criminal would start using (if they are not already using) at least simple encryption which would not generally be detectible by monitoring bots. The amount of effort to avoid even the most sophisticated monitoring would be quite small.
Also, if all this data were stored up in some central location, wouldnt that be the best place for hackers to crack to get vast amounts of info? Has anyone ever made an uncrackable system connected to the public networks?
1)Write a book and call it "Moon landings for Idiot's". 2)Discuss the pro's and con's of the whether or not the moon landing happened. Need about 1/4 inch of text. Clarity and logic not necessary. 3)Profit!!
There are 3 sources bases which can plausibly be called the windows source. The original source based which started with DOS and windows 1 and went on up to windows 95 and Windows Millenium. The 'portable windows' CE which is its own code base. And the NT code base which is the one people would want.
It might make a lot of sense for MS to give out the source to the windows 95 codebase, as it is old and decrepit and would cost more to understand than to reimplement.
Windows CE has a very small market and giving out the source base might be its last gasp.
Having been above the top tax bracket many years running, i must inform you that taxes for the very wealthy are different from the norm in that all loopholes are closed. You dont even get the same deductions others get.
No my friend, the rich pay more than their fair of taxes. Is it just to hard to accept?
I worked on dictation and dialogue on a PDA prototype at MS several years ago. It was called MiPad and was pretty cool. Well except that it really had to use a wireless network to a computer to get the recognition done.
There are a couple of reasons why this hasn't hit the market yet: 1) the PDAs really are not powerful enough to do decent recognition. Mainly, they don't have good enough audio input systems for reasonable speech quality. Also not enough disk space for dictionary storage. And the cpus are slow and the RAM is too low.
2) at least at MS it is not a top priority to make speech work for disabled users. Outrageous you say? Not so! Turns out when the speech guys approached the accessability guys on the subject, they learned that speech recognition is not workable in most cases where accessability is needed; that is to say, the market for disabled people who cannot use the keyboard but who CAN use speech input is actually quite small. Most people who don't have the motor function to type (or use some sort of keyed input like Stephen Hawking has) dont have the motor function to speak clearly enough for speech recognition to work. Bottom line: other solutions work better.
The whole idea of comparing a computer to a brain has too many assumptions. This is because we dont really have a clue about how the brain works. Is the brain turing complete? Does it even operate on information? Is the relationship between computation and what the brain does only superficial? When the answer is a sound "don't know", how can you start pulling numbers out of your orifices to compare them?
Bobby Fischer's wild paranoid anti-semitic rants really make him come across as a total asshole. Some time after he was locked out of the USA by the state department, he would go onto foreign radio shows and say the most outrageous things.
In his own opinion, he did more for the image of the US during the cold war than any other individual. Indeed.
And they fucked his family and him over. Instead of respect he got suspicion and hounding.
So perhaps in his own opinion, he can do more to damage the image of the USA by spouting off. Retracting and degrading everything he did for the US image.
Did I mention I worked there? Seems somewhat convincing doesnt it? See, MSR's only goal is to convince MS execs (=balmer) that they are relevant so they keep their paychecks.
So I may appear that what they are doing is relevent, because they spend most of the little time they do spend working pasting together a story.
But is IS a sham. The real technology is actually bought off small companies and then rubber stamped by MSR.
I worked in Windows and NT for many years, and then MSR for a couple after that. MSR provides nothing to the Windows internals. What a ridiculous statement.
MSR is a prestige organization only, and MS pays huge for that 'prestige'. Every so often you will hear about something from MSR getting into a product, but let me assure you its all hype. Most things that actually do get into a product were built by people from the product team who changed orgs to MSR after the idea was already proven. And those are very rare too.
No, MSR is a worthless academic sideshow that will be cut off the day MS profits are unable to hide its wasteful useless bloat.
As a former employee, I think they are doomed too. Linux is only a minor problem though, the real issue is the maturity of the market and thier inability to add value to their current products. Their products will simply become a commodity.
Of course, they way MS is doomed is most companies dream: they can coast along with their current products (and sizable cash and investements) for about 20 years before they see the train at the end of the tunnel.
I don't think MS went into XBox so much to steal market share from the game consoles, but more to keep the game consoles from taking their market. Most MS decision makers are all business and do not understand games at all, only when the argument that the consoles could concievably take users away from the desktop forever (a la thin internet clients) surfaced did seem like a good way to cover the bases.
Most employees at MS think that the project they work on is successful. Even the ones that are total losers. This is because the orgs are always mixed up so that everyone works in profitable division, and exact profits from each product are never given out. Just praise.
It was always embarrassing to here people talk about how great their product was doing according the the VPs. Anyone who'd been there long enough knows the truth, but dont rub it in peoples faces. Bad for moral.
I use Windows and encourage others to use windows because I am co-author of the system. I own stock in Microsoft and it makes me money.
Unlike the linux heads here, I spend a lot of time in the other camp listening to what they have to say.
I actually do have a Mandrake install on my second computer. I find no compelling reason to use that system for anything in particular however. My web server runs on an NT box running a hand coded server which uses IO completion ports which are not present on linux. My games dont run on linux. The mozilla browser is pretty good, but does not run certain activex controls like the Zone.
I am personally aware that one of the largest internet traffic servers there is (top 10 or so) was written in C++ by a programmer with no training who might rate as an intermediate coder.
That system, despite being a big name, has never been compromised. Ever. [I wont name them so as to not encourage hackers to prove me wrong]
The reason for this is security through obscurity. The code is proprietary, and the code is completely custom. Hackers totally fail because they have no information about how the system works.
The system is immune to worms too, again because it is totally non-standard. Any system built with any turnkey system is going to be vulnerable.
Thus I know of a case that roundly contradicts the author's idea that C++ in the hands of beginners is dangerous.
Apparently you never had a liberal arts education. A large part of its function is to teach you to baffle with bullshit and debate based on form and not substance.
That is to say, engineers are not in any way similar to liberal arts majors, as you can't fool mother nature.
I am using a tablet pc in compusa right now. cool wireless internet access not compelling enough to compensate for nightmareish pen input interface. Getting this text entered correctly has taken more than 5 minutes...finally had to swith to soft keyboard.which sux to. novelty at best
Let me recommend "Spirited Away" to everyone. This is not your typical jerky graphics, guns blazing loud obnoxious Anime film. The graphics are great. But more important is the story line and the pacing. Its slow and methodical and completely enthralling. Groundbreaking even.
Great movie even for people who don't appreciate Anime.
Have you tried Poser? I mentioned it because it so much better than say Character studio. It so easy to use you can spend more time doing animation and less time messing around with the interface. And its cheap too. Maybe "anybody who is anybody" just hasn't tried it out yet?
I have 3D studio max and it is very powerful. However, it is also very expensive and very very difficult to learn. I don't recommend it for the weak of heart.
I also have Poser to do human and animal posing, and this program is great. It is easy to use and intuitive. For doing animation of 3d human models it is perfect.
Just as it is with a post to slashdot, being right isnt enough. If a physics paper cannot be understood by physicists, and does not provide insight into anything meaningful or testable then the paper is rightly called gibberish.
I just got a new Hitachi CP-SX5500W. It is a bright projection LCD that does better than 1280x1024. I am using it for my main computer display. I now have a 72+ inch display. Woohoo! No CRT strain here!
The article and the author, and apparently the readers here are substantially misguided in their understanding of what a hologram is. A hologram is not defined by 3D stereopsis! The technologies listed in the article are not holograms.
A hologram does not use 3D glasses or LCD displays. Holograms are film recordings of a 3D wavefronts of an object. This is very important, as with a hologram, you can look behind objects by moving your viewing position.
Thus, holograms are not illusions of 3D, they are actually 3D--they have true depth and your eyes can focus on different planes of depth.
The technologies listed here (as all other 3D technologies except holography) simply trick your eyes into seeing different images which create an illusion of 3D stereopsis. They do not however allow your eye to focus on different points in 3D space, look behind objects, or change your perspective. They are thus inferior to holograms by a significant amount.
Why dont we have Holographics displays then? Well it has been done, but it takes too much memory to capture the full 3D wavefront of an object, so its not practical yet. Moores law will fix that soon I hope.
Slashdot Mirror
The internet was created by the United States Department of Defense. So trying to tell them what it was created for is a little bit silly.
What it has become in recent years is certainly quite different from what the inventors intended.
My understanding is that what they want to do is require or ISPs to monitor all users and give all information to the goverment.
Isnt this basically impossible? First off, the bandwidth requirements alone would make the process unfeasable. The whole reason the internet is a called a network and not a bus is that the information is distributed. This distribution is what makes the internet possible. Funneling all the information into centralized locations would violate the network topology.
Next, many ISPs are not registered or licenced to be ISPs. What defines an ISP? Does my wi-fi count? Policing this would a complete farce, especially with freedom advocates taking every opportunity to bypass and befuddle the law.
Next, any terrorists/criminal would start using (if they are not already using) at least simple encryption which would not generally be detectible by monitoring bots. The amount of effort to avoid even the most sophisticated monitoring would be quite small.
Also, if all this data were stored up in some central location, wouldnt that be the best place for hackers to crack to get vast amounts of info? Has anyone ever made an uncrackable system connected to the public networks?
I studied physics in college. Went on to join this little company called Microsoft. Worked at that for 13 years and now I am happily retired.
Seems like the same people who bitch about Microsoft are the same people who bitch about losing their jobs.
I just want to say thank you very much Bill Gates for letting me participate in your dream.
1)Write a book and call it "Moon landings for Idiot's".
2)Discuss the pro's and con's of the whether or not the moon landing happened. Need about 1/4 inch of text. Clarity and logic not necessary.
3)Profit!!
There are 3 sources bases which can plausibly be called the windows source. The original source based which started with DOS and windows 1 and went on up to windows 95 and Windows Millenium. The 'portable windows' CE which is its own code base. And the NT code base which is the one people would want.
It might make a lot of sense for MS to give out the source to the windows 95 codebase, as it is old and decrepit and would cost more to understand than to reimplement.
Windows CE has a very small market and giving out the source base might be its last gasp.
Having been above the top tax bracket many years running, i must inform you that taxes for the very wealthy are different from the norm in that all loopholes are closed. You dont even get the same deductions others get.
No my friend, the rich pay more than their fair of taxes. Is it just to hard to accept?
Whatever this guy calls piracy, its still stealing and its still illegal. The 'fat cat bastards' are already being taxed progressively by the IRS.
It is simply not ethical to explain away one's criminal activity by claiming its fair because it hurts the rich and helps the poor.
I worked on dictation and dialogue on a PDA prototype at MS several years ago. It was called MiPad and was pretty cool. Well except that it really had to use a wireless network to a computer to get the recognition done.
There are a couple of reasons why this hasn't hit the market yet:
1) the PDAs really are not powerful enough to do decent recognition. Mainly, they don't have good enough audio input systems for reasonable speech quality. Also not enough disk space for dictionary storage. And the cpus are slow and the RAM is too low.
2) at least at MS it is not a top priority to make speech work for disabled users. Outrageous you say? Not so! Turns out when the speech guys approached the accessability guys on the subject, they learned that speech recognition is not workable in most cases where accessability is needed; that is to say, the market for disabled people who cannot use the keyboard but who CAN use speech input is actually quite small. Most people who don't have the motor function to type (or use some sort of keyed input like Stephen Hawking has) dont have the motor function to speak clearly enough for speech recognition to work. Bottom line: other solutions work better.
The whole idea of comparing a computer to a brain has too many assumptions. This is because we dont really have a clue about how the brain works. Is the brain turing complete? Does it even operate on information? Is the relationship between computation and what the brain does only superficial?
When the answer is a sound "don't know", how can you start pulling numbers out of your orifices to compare them?
Bobby Fischer's wild paranoid anti-semitic rants really make him come across as a total asshole.
Some time after he was locked out of the USA by the state department, he would go onto foreign radio shows and say the most outrageous things.
In his own opinion, he did more for the image of the US during the cold war than any other individual. Indeed.
And they fucked his family and him over. Instead of respect he got suspicion and hounding.
So perhaps in his own opinion, he can do more to damage the image of the USA by spouting off. Retracting and degrading everything he did for the US image.
Trying to take back what he gave them.
Did I mention I worked there? Seems somewhat convincing doesnt it? See, MSR's only goal is to convince MS execs (=balmer) that they are relevant so they keep their paychecks.
So I may appear that what they are doing is relevent, because they spend most of the little time they do spend working pasting together a story.
But is IS a sham. The real technology is actually bought off small companies and then rubber stamped by MSR.
I worked in Windows and NT for many years, and then MSR for a couple after that.
MSR provides nothing to the Windows internals. What a ridiculous statement.
MSR is a prestige organization only, and MS pays huge for that 'prestige'. Every so often you will hear about something from MSR getting into a product, but let me assure you its all hype. Most things that actually do get into a product were built by people from the product team who changed orgs to MSR after the idea was already proven. And those are very rare too.
No, MSR is a worthless academic sideshow that will be cut off the day MS profits are unable to hide its wasteful useless bloat.
As a former employee, I think they are doomed too. Linux is only a minor problem though, the real issue is the maturity of the market and thier inability to add value to their current products. Their products will simply become a commodity.
Of course, they way MS is doomed is most companies dream: they can coast along with their current products (and sizable cash and investements) for about 20 years before they see the train at the end of the tunnel.
I don't think MS went into XBox so much to steal market share from the game consoles, but more to keep the game consoles from taking their market. Most MS decision makers are all business and do not understand games at all, only when the argument that the consoles could concievably take users away from the desktop forever (a la thin internet clients) surfaced did seem like a good way to cover the bases.
Most employees at MS think that the project they work on is successful. Even the ones that are total losers. This is because the orgs are always mixed up so that everyone works in profitable division, and exact profits from each product are never given out. Just praise.
It was always embarrassing to here people talk about how great their product was doing according the the VPs. Anyone who'd been there long enough knows the truth, but dont rub it in peoples faces. Bad for moral.
I use Windows and encourage others to use windows because I am co-author of the system. I own stock in Microsoft and it makes me money.
Unlike the linux heads here, I spend a lot of time in the other camp listening to what they have to say.
I actually do have a Mandrake install on my second computer. I find no compelling reason to use that system for anything in particular however. My web server runs on an NT box running a hand coded server which uses IO completion ports which are not present on linux. My games dont run on linux. The mozilla browser is pretty good, but does not run certain activex controls like the Zone.
I am personally aware that one of the largest internet traffic servers there is (top 10 or so) was written in C++ by a programmer with no training who might rate as an intermediate coder.
That system, despite being a big name, has never been compromised. Ever. [I wont name them so as to not encourage hackers to prove me wrong]
The reason for this is security through obscurity. The code is proprietary, and the code is completely custom. Hackers totally fail because they have no information about how the system works.
The system is immune to worms too, again because it is totally non-standard. Any system built with any turnkey system is going to be vulnerable.
Thus I know of a case that roundly contradicts the author's idea that C++ in the hands of beginners is dangerous.
Apparently you never had a liberal arts education. A large part of its function is to teach you to baffle with bullshit and debate based on form and not substance.
That is to say, engineers are not in any way similar to liberal arts majors, as you can't fool mother nature.
I am using a tablet pc in compusa right now. cool wireless internet access not compelling enough to compensate for nightmareish pen input interface. Getting this text entered correctly has taken more than 5 minutes...finally had to swith to soft keyboard.which sux to.
novelty at best
Let me recommend "Spirited Away" to everyone. This is not your typical jerky graphics, guns blazing loud obnoxious Anime film. The graphics are great. But more important is the story line and the pacing. Its slow and methodical and completely enthralling. Groundbreaking even.
Great movie even for people who don't appreciate Anime.
Have you tried Poser?
I mentioned it because it so much better than say Character studio. It so easy to use you can spend more time doing animation and less time messing around with the interface.
And its cheap too.
Maybe "anybody who is anybody" just hasn't tried it out yet?
I have 3D studio max and it is very powerful. However, it is also very expensive and very very difficult to learn. I don't recommend it for the weak of heart.
I also have Poser to do human and animal posing, and this program is great. It is easy to use and intuitive. For doing animation of 3d human models it is perfect.
Just as it is with a post to slashdot, being right isnt enough. If a physics paper cannot be understood by physicists, and does not provide insight into anything meaningful or testable then the paper is rightly called gibberish.
I just got a new Hitachi CP-SX5500W. It is a bright projection LCD that does better than 1280x1024. I am using it for my main computer display. I now have a 72+ inch display. Woohoo! No CRT strain here!
The article and the author, and apparently the readers here are substantially misguided in their understanding of what a hologram is. A hologram is not defined by 3D stereopsis! The technologies listed in the article are not holograms .
A hologram does not use 3D glasses or LCD displays. Holograms are film recordings of a 3D wavefronts of an object. This is very important, as with a hologram, you can look behind objects by moving your viewing position.
Thus, holograms are not illusions of 3D, they are actually 3D--they have true depth and your eyes can focus on different planes of depth.
The technologies listed here (as all other 3D technologies except holography) simply trick your eyes into seeing different images which create an illusion of 3D stereopsis. They do not however allow your eye to focus on different points in 3D space, look behind objects, or change your perspective. They are thus inferior to holograms by a significant amount.
Why dont we have Holographics displays then? Well it has been done, but it takes too much memory to capture the full 3D wavefront of an object, so its not practical yet. Moores law will fix that soon I hope.