What woldn't be boring, I think, is accurate protrayal of computers. How hard would it be to have a computer that didn't have animations and beeping noises for every task?
Although, IIRC Jurassic Park did better than most movies. It was funny to see a supposedly realtime video with a bar at the bottom showing the progress of playing the video file.
It occurs to me that there are significant uses for VoIP that don't require interoperability with the current telephone network. A company could use VoIP over a fast network for dirt cheap phone service inside the company. You could link several of these VoIP networks together, Internet2 could get in on the act, then we have services that use the internet to allow cheaper long distance calls by interoperating with the telephone network (like Net2Phone), and we'd have something truly worthwhile. The point of this is, I think, is that letting the US government get their grubby bribed would be a bad thing.
I could also be way off here, but I think that the point of this was to be able to compile programs in a high level language to actual hardware so that it would be faster and take less electricity and stuff. They added parallel computing to the mix, and now they have something really neat---if they can pull it off. For consumer electronics you use microcontrollers that you can program. They're basically little dinky computers that cost a few bucks apiece. But if you manage to have very parallel programs running on a bunch of FPGAs, that would be as if you had created the whole program using special-purpose hardware. Now if only more people were working on this, I'd get very excited.
Are these politicians really our "representatives" if they are only elected by the small number of people who aren't so depressed by politics that they go and vote? I'm actually pondering whether it would be better to have lawmakers who don't represent us but who control us anyway, or to have lawmakers that don't control us and don't make any new laws.
All this is really only half on the point. The idea of this article is that computerized voting systems would be more convenient (I won't dispute that) and that the need for accuracy is crucial, which I would dispute in the mood I'm in right now. Maybe it would be better to have the president selected by a random number generator, and then we would switch between radical third parties and sometimes the main two. We'd have Nader for a while, then switch to the Libertarians, then the Democrats, then some crazy little part that nobody has ever even heard of, and politics would be interesting! The politicians would be so busy undoing the deeds of the previous administration that they wouldn't have time to pester the actual people much. The DMCA wouldn't last very long, since all it would take is a little whim of the Random Number God to turn the tables upside-down. Fun!
That would be difficult, but not (as long as your only way of getting to BoA Online is through the spoofer, in which case you could try different ways and compare them, I believe) impossible. So in the end it all comes down to whom you trust, and trusting as few people as possible where your credit card is involved. If you get, from someone you trust, the public SSL key of the bank, then you can (using authentication) be pretty safe from these sorts of attacks unless the man in the middle has the banks's private key, in which case wireless networking is going to be the least of your worries. The problem is how you get the public key that you can trust. Not through the hypothetical man in the middle; it would have to be through some other way. Perhaps you get a floppy disk from the bank with the key. Perhaps (and this is what I think you will end up doing) you will get they banks key from a major Certificate Authority, and I believe that the keys for those are preinstalled on most computers that support SSL.
In simpler terms, don't sweat it. The miracles of public key encryption have it taken care of already. Enjoy yourself.
That makes about 11000 hypothetical people who start using the tube thanks to congestion charges. That doesn't seem like a lot when you look at it beside 1.1 million people. I wonder about how much money the government is hoping to make from these charges? If they just want a way that sounds good to get more taxes (if you're conspiratorially inclined, you might like this theory), then this would be an excellent way. I hope that the money from this would go to something relevant, like improving public transportation.
It would be like DivX---the original was a copy-protection and restriction scheme that failed because people didn't want crippled DVDs. Soon, it was replaced by a video compression scheme that made sharing DVDs a lot easier. Some nice irony.
There are more people reading this than just the person who asked the question. Personally, I think it would be great if people did something like that.
The thing with deals like this is that right alongside the software they're offering as a demo, is a full download of the entire thing. This is rather distracting for people who want to get the demo, since they keep thinking, "for a little bit more download time, I could have the full thing, for free!"
Let's say that the compromise were this: copyright terms go back to the original (I'm wholeheartedly in favor of this), but then the/..AA/ get extremely draconian laws even worse than the DMCA, so restrictive that it becomes next to impossible to circumvent them without going to jail. Would you accept this? I don't think you would, and I know that I wouldn't. What would happen is that once the new laws go into effect, legislation would quickly be passed extending copyright terms, some congress members would be further bribed, and in a few years it would no longer vaguely resemble a compromise.
Sure, Java is a decent language, and it's very easy to learn for someone who started out with C++ (me), and SWING is supposed to be a fairly nice API for GUIs, and I'm not "disparaging" Java. I'm just spoiled by Python, so a whole bunch of other languages look unpleasant and large from my viewpoint. I like being able to do things less verbosely than Java makes you do them, while still being understandable. Perl, well written, can do this, but I just sort of gravitate toward Python for things like that.
C is nice, too; A fairly non-bloated language that's good for fast things. But Java just seems like another mediocre language.
But language-specific processors have always been losers and this was always a stupid idea.
I think that it's important to draw a distinction between the Java language and the Java bytecode. The language, IMHO, isn't very good; I much prefer Python, or if I'm developing for the Java platform, Jython. But Java is a form of bytecode that can be compiled to from all sorts of languages, so programs compiled for picoJava cold also be run transparently on many other OSes. Although I think that JIT compilers and Hotswap optimization have made this less important, it still might be nice to have a processor that could run Java bytecode natively.
I guess the average 300 pound (about a zillion kg)/.er would need one.
I won't comment on the fact that you are a pathetic troll who needs to get a life; there are plenty of creatures that I could say that about. But not only are you an immature jerk, which isn't much of a distinction, you obviously have no idea how to do metric conversions!
Hammer this into your head: a kilogram weighs more than a pound. A 300 pound person would weigh 136.4 kilograms, not "about a zillion kg".
And don't start a new paragraph every line. It, like you, grows annoying quickly.
I'm sure that if it's really that important, Bush can get someone to train him. Anyway, I think that Prometheus is a great name, hearkening back to the names like Apollo back before we started using boring uninspiring names like "International Space Station".
That's why you need to test code before use. Anyway, this is warning code, not code that has any control over the vehicle, so it wouldn't be too serious if it malfunctioned during testing, and I doubt if anyone is going to use code that hasn't been repeatedly shown to be stable in a car, where it could kill people.
Seriously, I think that your post's parent's poster really has something -- that would be very cool if you could control a car with a high level language. I imagine a bunch of projects starting up, being improved, perhaps even an auto-pilot program for certain instances. Once they become stable, they can come into wider use.
Of course, you'd need to have the low-level parts of the car very stable, so they wouldn't crash (computer crash, not car crash) no matter what crazy input you give to them. Unlike WinCE.
Agreed. But I don't think it would take 20 petabytes to store the lists of all MP3s on everybody's computers, at least not if you gzipped the lists or something. Last I checked, KaZaA said that about 2 petabytes were being shared on thir network. That would still take a damn big warehouse, but it would be more manageable than 20 pb.
But no, I'm not worried. Lack of usefulness aside, I doubt that anyone could come up with a virus that could do all that stuff. Just ridiculous.
Agreed; and what would have happened if the site hadn't been defaced? Then the security hole that was used wouldn't be found and presumably closed, and people might have their credit card numbers stolen.
It's still nicer to just, say, leave a thousand identical files saying "w3 |-|axz0r3d j00" on/root, but defacing the web site is stil much nicer than using the security hole to steal customer information.
In circumstances like these, I like to think of a link as saying this: "There is a web page at www.whatever.com/deep/linking/directories.html, and if you click on this text your web browser will automatically take you there". This is just giving out information on how to perfectly legally get a resource that is posted in a public place (a page on a web server available anonymously to anyone). If I am forbidden from saying that, then I'd say that there's something wrong about the law in question.
And if you want to avoid being drained of expensive bandwidth by a slashdotting, put a bandwidth cap on your server. Don't count on the law to keep you out of the poorhouse on that one.
Perhaps if they want to have another project to parallel this one (if one project messes up the other one is always there), they could take the Yellow Star processor and go from there. There is also a project from the same guy to make an asynchronous version of the same thing, called Red Star.
These two chips use the MIPS instruction set. Does anybody know what instruction set this Dragon CPU uses? The article wasn't exactly forthcoming with the technical details.
Perhaps you should try to cram all the quality you can in 1024 kbps OGG files. Then you could hold massive amounts of music (imagine all the popular music from a few decades...) and still have great quality.
Amen. The Proxomitron is great software, good for flexible filtering of nasty bits of pages like banner ads, and simple enough that you can set it up for people who only know enough about computers to use the web and a few ofice programs, without hearing complaints about bugs. Mostly I've heard only joyous thanks from people I've installed that for. If you still use IE or some other browser that doesn't do the sensible thing with advertising schemes like this, or want more features, I have only these words for you: IF YOU VALUE YOUR SANITY, THEN PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE INSTALL PROXOMITRON NOW!
Slashdot Mirror
Although, IIRC Jurassic Park did better than most movies. It was funny to see a supposedly realtime video with a bar at the bottom showing the progress of playing the video file.
It occurs to me that there are significant uses for VoIP that don't require interoperability with the current telephone network. A company could use VoIP over a fast network for dirt cheap phone service inside the company. You could link several of these VoIP networks together, Internet2 could get in on the act, then we have services that use the internet to allow cheaper long distance calls by interoperating with the telephone network (like Net2Phone), and we'd have something truly worthwhile. The point of this is, I think, is that letting the US government get their grubby bribed would be a bad thing.
I could also be way off here, but I think that the point of this was to be able to compile programs in a high level language to actual hardware so that it would be faster and take less electricity and stuff. They added parallel computing to the mix, and now they have something really neat---if they can pull it off. For consumer electronics you use microcontrollers that you can program. They're basically little dinky computers that cost a few bucks apiece. But if you manage to have very parallel programs running on a bunch of FPGAs, that would be as if you had created the whole program using special-purpose hardware. Now if only more people were working on this, I'd get very excited.
All this is really only half on the point. The idea of this article is that computerized voting systems would be more convenient (I won't dispute that) and that the need for accuracy is crucial, which I would dispute in the mood I'm in right now. Maybe it would be better to have the president selected by a random number generator, and then we would switch between radical third parties and sometimes the main two. We'd have Nader for a while, then switch to the Libertarians, then the Democrats, then some crazy little part that nobody has ever even heard of, and politics would be interesting! The politicians would be so busy undoing the deeds of the previous administration that they wouldn't have time to pester the actual people much. The DMCA wouldn't last very long, since all it would take is a little whim of the Random Number God to turn the tables upside-down. Fun!
I'd vote for it.
In simpler terms, don't sweat it. The miracles of public key encryption have it taken care of already. Enjoy yourself.
That makes about 11000 hypothetical people who start using the tube thanks to congestion charges. That doesn't seem like a lot when you look at it beside 1.1 million people. I wonder about how much money the government is hoping to make from these charges? If they just want a way that sounds good to get more taxes (if you're conspiratorially inclined, you might like this theory), then this would be an excellent way. I hope that the money from this would go to something relevant, like improving public transportation.
It would be like DivX---the original was a copy-protection and restriction scheme that failed because people didn't want crippled DVDs. Soon, it was replaced by a video compression scheme that made sharing DVDs a lot easier. Some nice irony.
Your URL, just in case it changes or someone has that information turned off, is http://www.teambg.com/
There are more people reading this than just the person who asked the question. Personally, I think it would be great if people did something like that.
The thing with deals like this is that right alongside the software they're offering as a demo, is a full download of the entire thing. This is rather distracting for people who want to get the demo, since they keep thinking, "for a little bit more download time, I could have the full thing, for free!"
Just say no.
C is nice, too; A fairly non-bloated language that's good for fast things. But Java just seems like another mediocre language.
I think that it's important to draw a distinction between the Java language and the Java bytecode. The language, IMHO, isn't very good; I much prefer Python, or if I'm developing for the Java platform, Jython. But Java is a form of bytecode that can be compiled to from all sorts of languages, so programs compiled for picoJava cold also be run transparently on many other OSes. Although I think that JIT compilers and Hotswap optimization have made this less important, it still might be nice to have a processor that could run Java bytecode natively.
Still, I'm not too enthusiastic about it.
I won't comment on the fact that you are a pathetic troll who needs to get a life; there are plenty of creatures that I could say that about. But not only are you an immature jerk, which isn't much of a distinction, you obviously have no idea how to do metric conversions!
Hammer this into your head: a kilogram weighs more than a pound. A 300 pound person would weigh 136.4 kilograms, not "about a zillion kg".
And don't start a new paragraph every line. It, like you, grows annoying quickly.
I'm sure that if it's really that important, Bush can get someone to train him. Anyway, I think that Prometheus is a great name, hearkening back to the names like Apollo back before we started using boring uninspiring names like "International Space Station".
Seriously, I think that your post's parent's poster really has something -- that would be very cool if you could control a car with a high level language. I imagine a bunch of projects starting up, being improved, perhaps even an auto-pilot program for certain instances. Once they become stable, they can come into wider use.
Of course, you'd need to have the low-level parts of the car very stable, so they wouldn't crash (computer crash, not car crash) no matter what crazy input you give to them. Unlike WinCE.
Don't worry. With DVD versions you can take your pick between subtitles or english voice actors, which is one of the nicer things about them.
But no, I'm not worried. Lack of usefulness aside, I doubt that anyone could come up with a virus that could do all that stuff. Just ridiculous.
It's still nicer to just, say, leave a thousand identical files saying "w3 |-|axz0r3d j00" on /root, but defacing the web site is stil much nicer than using the security hole to steal customer information.
And if you want to avoid being drained of expensive bandwidth by a slashdotting, put a bandwidth cap on your server. Don't count on the law to keep you out of the poorhouse on that one.
In that case, you're referring to the preferences toolbar from XulPlanet. Enjoy.
These two chips use the MIPS instruction set. Does anybody know what instruction set this Dragon CPU uses? The article wasn't exactly forthcoming with the technical details.
Perhaps you should try to cram all the quality you can in 1024 kbps OGG files. Then you could hold massive amounts of music (imagine all the popular music from a few decades...) and still have great quality.
Perhaps you are referring to QuickPrefs? Great button. I'd recommend installing it.
Amen. The Proxomitron is great software, good for flexible filtering of nasty bits of pages like banner ads, and simple enough that you can set it up for people who only know enough about computers to use the web and a few ofice programs, without hearing complaints about bugs. Mostly I've heard only joyous thanks from people I've installed that for. If you still use IE or some other browser that doesn't do the sensible thing with advertising schemes like this, or want more features, I have only these words for you: IF YOU VALUE YOUR SANITY, THEN PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE INSTALL PROXOMITRON NOW!