In addition to the same so-so Intel 945 graphics found on other netbooks, the N10 also has a discrete nVidia GeForce 9300M graphics chipset - enabled with the flick of a switch (and a reboot)
Very strange feature, definitely the first I've heard of this. You would really think that they could be able to power down enough of the 9300M to compare with the 945. But I guess they did the math and it makes sense to include two separate graphics controllers?
Seems like a pain to have to reboot to play games... but I guess I already do that between Debian/Windows.:-/
The site says they've got $10 million sitting ready to implement these ideas.... but the idea submitter gets zero (or even any involvement in the process). So they're basically crowdsourcing the brainstorming step, and then will do a normal quote/bid process beyond that. So they've already made a disconnect -- people with truly great ideas are going to want to 1) have something to do with seeing them happen, and 2) want to benefit personally. (Even non-profits pay good salaries!) So I don't think this model provides adequate benefit to the idea owner to relinquish control of their intellectual property. Will the really good ideas come out?
There's a lot going on here and it sounds like a neat project, but I just hope that beginners aren't misled. This is a complicated project and there's a lot of separate skills which would all have to be learned at once: masking/etching PCBs, fine-pitch SMT soldering, lots of pieces of code that all have to play together right.
Just hoping that newbies will realize that there are simpler electronics projects (relevant shameless plug) with much more instructional guidance they should start with before taking on something like this.
The purpose of the operating system is to act between the hardware, system abstractions, and the algorithms. But now that virtualization is taking over, the hardware responsibility of OSes is being minimized -- or centralized. Therefore, the advantages of one hardware platform can be more easily decoupled from those of an OS.
In my opinion, Sun was always known for rock-solid hardware, and this move toward hardware-agnostic computing means that Solaris gets just a bit less relevant today. Especially since cost is still a factor, and the hardware-specific advantages are disappearing...
It doesn't have to be a photo you posted... but someone else could have posted it and tagged you! You essentially have to start assuming that any digital photo taken of you will end up online with your name. Quite scary. Would be nice if there sere some sort of consent-based tagging, requiring your approval, but that's probably too complicated for Facebook to think about.
Nobody wants to run ethernet cable to their toaster... so I really think that making cheap Wi-fi chipsets is the answer here. Unfortunately it still costs at a very minimum $5+ to add wireless to something, so it's going to take a little while for a $2 light switch to get these.
Why not take on a bigger challenge, and focus on teaching? Run small mini-classes on various topics, teach programming at all kinds of different levels, how to solve engineering problems numerically, etc. Since it is an engineering/design school, you can provide some kind of (real-life or online) forum helping people use technology to solve problems. I suppose this will somewhat depend on how your college's schedule works, but you will find that students will make time for you if you're providing a useful service. You've got the hardware -- now you just need to find a niche to add the value.
I think it's really oppressive when governments do things like telling a company that they'd have to do something like this (which the government did *not* do)... But it's almost scarier that they're doing it on their own initiative as a company. It's like one of those many situations in which someone will self-regulate to a stronger degree than is necessary just to present the appearance that outside regulation is not necessary. I certainly believe that Google/YouTube has the right to do this, but not necessarily that they should. So is it better that this came from within rather than from external forces?
So, while we know that the Internet is designed to provide routing protocols that can handle damaged nodes and take them out of the loop, are we still building systems in place that depend on the Internet being able to move packets from A to B, in the midst of any sort of prolonged crisis?
Currently, real "main street" business already suffer when their net goes down even for half an hour, but that's usually when the last link between them and the ISP goes down.
But in a serious or prolonged emergency situation, I'd be more concerned about links in the middle going down.
So are people building safety systems (healthcare records, utility company systems, etc) that depend on the Internet working in order to do business? Just think of what happens when the phones go down and companies can't process credit cards... but much worse. How are these ISPs and Telcos even supposed to allow their network admins to work from home... if the net is down?
So, yes, this is silly, but ultimately this is just one example of a bigger phenomenon: people filing stupid lawsuits, where simply the burden of defending oneself is overwhelming / not worth it. This happens for many reasons: lawyers are expensive, court simply takes time, etc.
Is there some way we can modify the legal system so that these kinds of frivolous suits die quickly and cheaply? Like an online peer review thing, where there's an anonymous, rotating committee of reviewers who can triage filings and vote to reject them? This has its own problems too, of course -- the rule of the mob emerges.
So I'm not sure what the solution is, but it seems like we have to think about how to make it about two orders of magnitude cheaper/easier to defend oneself in court against frivolous suits.
Look for a simpler answer... maybe it's just not ready yet? Sure, everyone can guess and make up bad stuff, but ultimately it's going to get presented and read and voted on. Not that we're necessarily going to like it, but keep your pants on!
Nobody has to agree to the GPL to use a GPL'ed piece of software -- only to gain additional rights like redistribution. All Mozilla really needs to do is to look at the Trolltech / Qt situation, and then look around and see real alternatives to their product (Opera / WebKit / etc), and they'll wake up and smell the coffee. There isn't enough justification for the EULA hassle just to "explain the license", and that will be worked around by developers and distributions.
Yes, this is crazy, but from reading the comments I think there are two things that need to be separated.
1) This is bad because there is massive prior art, OR 2) This is bad because it is a patent on a software concept.
Which one is it? Number one seems to indicate legitimacy of the current patent system, and number two does not -- very different ideas, but I think slashdotters are conflating the two at the moment.
For the last decade or so, it seems like the rendering side was abstracted away into either DirectX or OpenGL, but if the author is correct, those abstractions are no longer going to be a requirement.
While I don't know a lot more about the various other rendering techniques that the article mentions, it seems like there might be an opportunity emerging to develop those engines and license them to the game companies.
I suspect that game companies won't want to get into the graphics rendering engine design field themselves, but there's real possibility for a whole new set of companies to emerge to compete in providing new frameworks for 3D graphics.
But here, for patentable material, it's clear that that is not the case. The theory goes that since the taxpayer paid for it, the taxpayer should get the rights to it. It's essentially always the case that the inventors will "assign" the work to the organization... but should NASA really be able to hold a competitive IP position when we're all forced to pay for its work?
Think of the private spaceflight organizations, for example, who might want to enter similar fields. They're already being forced to pay for NASA's research (via taxes), but they're being excluded from the result, while the opposite (NASA forced to pay for private company XYZ's research without a return of IP) is not happening.
In any negotiation, it's important to think about one's alternatives. At least in the open source case, there's a good alternative -- recompiling without the restrictive / undesirable parts. Sure, branding power will suffer, but this community in particular will understand.
The nice thing is that the titanium acts as a catalyst, so ideally it isn't consumed in the reaction.
The bad thing is that this requires UV light (below 385nm), which is really only present from "ordinary fluorescent lights" because they have bad phosphor coatings. All fluorescent lights really generate tons of UV, which is downconverted to visible via that white phosphor coating on the glass. But some UV escapes, and that's the stuff that triggers this anti-bacterial reaction. So good for anti-bacterial, but bad for skin cancer.
In any case, maybe this is the kind of thing where some dedicated UV lights could turn on when no people were in a given room, and that would make for the best of both worlds?
Everyone makes it much easier than matching IP addresses... As the article discusses, many people use Google logins for e-mail and other services. This is a much more reliable way to track all of your information.
What I'd like to see is some significant differentiation between logged-in and logged-out states and the level of anonymity that is provided in each case.
But really, if you're voluntarily storing your stuff on someone else's server with the known understanding that they're parsing it for ad matching, what kind of privacy expectations do you really have?
If the tech community makes enough buzz about this, it's likely that we can put the pin back in this grenade. Nobody is going to want to support violating the sanctity of The Internet in an important U.S. election year!
There already exists a process for getting a name from an I.P. address, and that process thankfully requires court action / subpoena of ISP. Let's keep them in the loop, and make this tracing a relatively hard thing to get, with lots of human approvals needed.
Hopefully, this proposed short-circuiting of the judicial branch will just help the United Nations -- totally overstepping its proper bounds -- slide into further irrelevance. Even if the U.N. does serve a proper function in today's world, this certainly is way beyond its domain.
Complacency and self-fulfilling IT growth
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
IT managers are supposed to do more than direct management of people and projects. They're supposed to have a grasp of overall organizational goals, and to fairly assess how IT can be used to make the organization more efficient or effective.
Of course, as with so many things in life, people are generally interested in protecting themselves. So it can become a policy to protect ones own budget, and to (artificially?) propose new projects as reason to grow or at to at least maintain a department's size. Diminishing returns, anyone?
Still, managers are supposed to add value by seeing the bigger organizational picture. Ask yourself if the front-line IT workers can handle that themselves.
It may seem a bit "retro" to be using a character LCD for information display, but from a user interface perspective, there's lots of data that is still textual (e-mail subjects, news, etc) that is nice to have outside of the main work area of our primary monitor displays. Even as resolutions have increased particularly for desktop monitors, the idea that there's a separate device dedicated for a separate stream of information can be a useful notion because it's a "zero-click" way of getting to that knowledge, without dedicating primary monitor real estate there or making annoying popups.
There's really just a lot of information streams that don't deserve sexy RGB pixels on one's display, and the mental association of looking at a specific gadget to get a specific stream of information is a strong one. Until we have ultra-cheap projectors everywhere and make better use of display surfaces, this is a step in that direction.
I know everyone's going to make comments about OOXML being not a truly open/free/libre format, but there's something bigger going on...
Just to get access to published standards themselves on http://www.iso.org/iso/store.htm costs easily $50 to $150 each! Can someone please tell me how that makes any sense at all? How can we have global standards if people can't afford to even read them? Am I the only one who thinks this might be a bit hypocritical?
This is how economics is supposed to work!
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Not via regulation or per-category taxes that artificially manipulate, but by consumers adjusting their buying habits as costs change. If SUVs are too expensive to own, people will stop buying them and trade to more fuel-efficient vehicles. Is that really too crazy to ask?
Also interesting to see whether the trend of people sensing safety while in those large vehicles will continue... Not so easy to go back to sedans while there are so many dangerous SUVs (tanks) out there on the roads, eh?
In any big bueracracy, specifically government, there's really little incentive to be more efficient (or even more correct). Particularly with government, like the TSA, this is an example of people trying to secure jobs for themselves and their department.
This can happen in the corporate world, too: feeling the need to spend one's entire budget just so that it won't get cut in the following year. But at least there's likely to be someone who might find and correct that inefficiency. In government, there's incentive to keep it growing all the way up to the top.
So the next time you see some policy that doesn't make sense, think about who just got to keep their job because of its existence.
They talk about trouble with communications while underwater, but the Skin effect describes how in a conductive media (say, seawater), various frequencies of electromagnetic waves are attenuated with distance. In short, high frequencies travel less distance into the material than lower frequencies. This is why the requirements for shielding of different electronics can be very different -- higher operating frequency implies thinner shielding. And of course it's also why submarines use very low frequencies to communicate. (See also LORAN positioning system.)
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA:
In addition to the same so-so Intel 945 graphics found on other netbooks, the N10 also has a discrete nVidia GeForce 9300M graphics chipset - enabled with the flick of a switch (and a reboot)
Very strange feature, definitely the first I've heard of this. You would really think that they could be able to power down enough of the 9300M to compare with the 945. But I guess they did the math and it makes sense to include two separate graphics controllers?
Seems like a pain to have to reboot to play games... but I guess I already do that between Debian/Windows. :-/
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
The site says they've got $10 million sitting ready to implement these ideas.... but the idea submitter gets zero (or even any involvement in the process). So they're basically crowdsourcing the brainstorming step, and then will do a normal quote/bid process beyond that. So they've already made a disconnect -- people with truly great ideas are going to want to 1) have something to do with seeing them happen, and 2) want to benefit personally. (Even non-profits pay good salaries!) So I don't think this model provides adequate benefit to the idea owner to relinquish control of their intellectual property. Will the really good ideas come out?
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
There's a lot going on here and it sounds like a neat project, but I just hope that beginners aren't misled. This is a complicated project and there's a lot of separate skills which would all have to be learned at once: masking/etching PCBs, fine-pitch SMT soldering, lots of pieces of code that all have to play together right.
Just hoping that newbies will realize that there are simpler electronics projects (relevant shameless plug) with much more instructional guidance they should start with before taking on something like this.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
The purpose of the operating system is to act between the hardware, system abstractions, and the algorithms. But now that virtualization is taking over, the hardware responsibility of OSes is being minimized -- or centralized. Therefore, the advantages of one hardware platform can be more easily decoupled from those of an OS.
In my opinion, Sun was always known for rock-solid hardware, and this move toward hardware-agnostic computing means that Solaris gets just a bit less relevant today. Especially since cost is still a factor, and the hardware-specific advantages are disappearing...
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
It doesn't have to be a photo you posted... but someone else could have posted it and tagged you! You essentially have to start assuming that any digital photo taken of you will end up online with your name. Quite scary. Would be nice if there sere some sort of consent-based tagging, requiring your approval, but that's probably too complicated for Facebook to think about.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Nobody wants to run ethernet cable to their toaster... so I really think that making cheap Wi-fi chipsets is the answer here. Unfortunately it still costs at a very minimum $5+ to add wireless to something, so it's going to take a little while for a $2 light switch to get these.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Why not take on a bigger challenge, and focus on teaching? Run small mini-classes on various topics, teach programming at all kinds of different levels, how to solve engineering problems numerically, etc. Since it is an engineering/design school, you can provide some kind of (real-life or online) forum helping people use technology to solve problems. I suppose this will somewhat depend on how your college's schedule works, but you will find that students will make time for you if you're providing a useful service. You've got the hardware -- now you just need to find a niche to add the value.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
You know, I'm a bit torn here.
I think it's really oppressive when governments do things like telling a company that they'd have to do something like this (which the government did *not* do)... But it's almost scarier that they're doing it on their own initiative as a company. It's like one of those many situations in which someone will self-regulate to a stronger degree than is necessary just to present the appearance that outside regulation is not necessary. I certainly believe that Google/YouTube has the right to do this, but not necessarily that they should. So is it better that this came from within rather than from external forces?
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
So, while we know that the Internet is designed to provide routing protocols that can handle damaged nodes and take them out of the loop, are we still building systems in place that depend on the Internet being able to move packets from A to B, in the midst of any sort of prolonged crisis?
Currently, real "main street" business already suffer when their net goes down even for half an hour, but that's usually when the last link between them and the ISP goes down.
But in a serious or prolonged emergency situation, I'd be more concerned about links in the middle going down.
So are people building safety systems (healthcare records, utility company systems, etc) that depend on the Internet working in order to do business? Just think of what happens when the phones go down and companies can't process credit cards... but much worse. How are these ISPs and Telcos even supposed to allow their network admins to work from home... if the net is down?
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation! Free videos.
So, yes, this is silly, but ultimately this is just one example of a bigger phenomenon: people filing stupid lawsuits, where simply the burden of defending oneself is overwhelming / not worth it. This happens for many reasons: lawyers are expensive, court simply takes time, etc.
Is there some way we can modify the legal system so that these kinds of frivolous suits die quickly and cheaply? Like an online peer review thing, where there's an anonymous, rotating committee of reviewers who can triage filings and vote to reject them? This has its own problems too, of course -- the rule of the mob emerges.
So I'm not sure what the solution is, but it seems like we have to think about how to make it about two orders of magnitude cheaper/easier to defend oneself in court against frivolous suits.
--
Get started with electronics: Microcontroller kit for Linux/Mac/Windows. Do it with your kids!
Look for a simpler answer... maybe it's just not ready yet? Sure, everyone can guess and make up bad stuff, but ultimately it's going to get presented and read and voted on. Not that we're necessarily going to like it, but keep your pants on!
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation! Free electronics videos.
Nobody has to agree to the GPL to use a GPL'ed piece of software -- only to gain additional rights like redistribution. All Mozilla really needs to do is to look at the Trolltech / Qt situation, and then look around and see real alternatives to their product (Opera / WebKit / etc), and they'll wake up and smell the coffee. There isn't enough justification for the EULA hassle just to "explain the license", and that will be worked around by developers and distributions.
Looks like they missed the point.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Yes, this is crazy, but from reading the comments I think there are two things that need to be separated.
1) This is bad because there is massive prior art,
OR
2) This is bad because it is a patent on a software concept.
Which one is it? Number one seems to indicate legitimacy of the current patent system, and number two does not -- very different ideas, but I think slashdotters are conflating the two at the moment.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
For the last decade or so, it seems like the rendering side was abstracted away into either DirectX or OpenGL, but if the author is correct, those abstractions are no longer going to be a requirement.
While I don't know a lot more about the various other rendering techniques that the article mentions, it seems like there might be an opportunity emerging to develop those engines and license them to the game companies.
I suspect that game companies won't want to get into the graphics rendering engine design field themselves, but there's real possibility for a whole new set of companies to emerge to compete in providing new frameworks for 3D graphics.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
For copyrightable material, "Works created by an agency of the United States government are public domain at the moment of creation."
But here, for patentable material, it's clear that that is not the case. The theory goes that since the taxpayer paid for it, the taxpayer should get the rights to it. It's essentially always the case that the inventors will "assign" the work to the organization... but should NASA really be able to hold a competitive IP position when we're all forced to pay for its work?
Think of the private spaceflight organizations, for example, who might want to enter similar fields. They're already being forced to pay for NASA's research (via taxes), but they're being excluded from the result, while the opposite (NASA forced to pay for private company XYZ's research without a return of IP) is not happening.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
In any negotiation, it's important to think about one's alternatives. At least in the open source case, there's a good alternative -- recompiling without the restrictive / undesirable parts. Sure, branding power will suffer, but this community in particular will understand.
Ever heard of BATNA?
--
Hey code monkey, learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
I found an article that has much more information about the actual mechanism of the TiO2 anti-bacterial effect.
The nice thing is that the titanium acts as a catalyst, so ideally it isn't consumed in the reaction.
The bad thing is that this requires UV light (below 385nm), which is really only present from "ordinary fluorescent lights" because they have bad phosphor coatings. All fluorescent lights really generate tons of UV, which is downconverted to visible via that white phosphor coating on the glass. But some UV escapes, and that's the stuff that triggers this anti-bacterial reaction. So good for anti-bacterial, but bad for skin cancer.
In any case, maybe this is the kind of thing where some dedicated UV lights could turn on when no people were in a given room, and that would make for the best of both worlds?
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Everyone makes it much easier than matching IP addresses... As the article discusses, many people use Google logins for e-mail and other services. This is a much more reliable way to track all of your information.
What I'd like to see is some significant differentiation between logged-in and logged-out states and the level of anonymity that is provided in each case.
But really, if you're voluntarily storing your stuff on someone else's server with the known understanding that they're parsing it for ad matching, what kind of privacy expectations do you really have?
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
If the tech community makes enough buzz about this, it's likely that we can put the pin back in this grenade. Nobody is going to want to support violating the sanctity of The Internet in an important U.S. election year!
There already exists a process for getting a name from an I.P. address, and that process thankfully requires court action / subpoena of ISP. Let's keep them in the loop, and make this tracing a relatively hard thing to get, with lots of human approvals needed.
Hopefully, this proposed short-circuiting of the judicial branch will just help the United Nations -- totally overstepping its proper bounds -- slide into further irrelevance. Even if the U.N. does serve a proper function in today's world, this certainly is way beyond its domain.
--
Hey code monkey, learn electronics! Microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
IT managers are supposed to do more than direct management of people and projects. They're supposed to have a grasp of overall organizational goals, and to fairly assess how IT can be used to make the organization more efficient or effective.
Of course, as with so many things in life, people are generally interested in protecting themselves. So it can become a policy to protect ones own budget, and to (artificially?) propose new projects as reason to grow or at to at least maintain a department's size. Diminishing returns, anyone?
Still, managers are supposed to add value by seeing the bigger organizational picture. Ask yourself if the front-line IT workers can handle that themselves.
--
Hey code monkey, learn electronics! Microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
It may seem a bit "retro" to be using a character LCD for information display, but from a user interface perspective, there's lots of data that is still textual (e-mail subjects, news, etc) that is nice to have outside of the main work area of our primary monitor displays. Even as resolutions have increased particularly for desktop monitors, the idea that there's a separate device dedicated for a separate stream of information can be a useful notion because it's a "zero-click" way of getting to that knowledge, without dedicating primary monitor real estate there or making annoying popups.
There's really just a lot of information streams that don't deserve sexy RGB pixels on one's display, and the mental association of looking at a specific gadget to get a specific stream of information is a strong one. Until we have ultra-cheap projectors everywhere and make better use of display surfaces, this is a step in that direction.
--
Electronics kits for the digital generation! Microcontroller, LCD, gcc compiler, and more.
I know everyone's going to make comments about OOXML being not a truly open/free/libre format, but there's something bigger going on...
Just to get access to published standards themselves on http://www.iso.org/iso/store.htm costs easily $50 to $150 each! Can someone please tell me how that makes any sense at all? How can we have global standards if people can't afford to even read them? Am I the only one who thinks this might be a bit hypocritical?
--
Hey code monkey... learn digital electronics!
Not via regulation or per-category taxes that artificially manipulate, but by consumers adjusting their buying habits as costs change. If SUVs are too expensive to own, people will stop buying them and trade to more fuel-efficient vehicles. Is that really too crazy to ask?
Also interesting to see whether the trend of people sensing safety while in those large vehicles will continue... Not so easy to go back to sedans while there are so many dangerous SUVs (tanks) out there on the roads, eh?
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics!
In any big bueracracy, specifically government, there's really little incentive to be more efficient (or even more correct). Particularly with government, like the TSA, this is an example of people trying to secure jobs for themselves and their department.
This can happen in the corporate world, too: feeling the need to spend one's entire budget just so that it won't get cut in the following year. But at least there's likely to be someone who might find and correct that inefficiency. In government, there's incentive to keep it growing all the way up to the top.
So the next time you see some policy that doesn't make sense, think about who just got to keep their job because of its existence.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics!
They talk about trouble with communications while underwater, but the Skin effect describes how in a conductive media (say, seawater), various frequencies of electromagnetic waves are attenuated with distance. In short, high frequencies travel less distance into the material than lower frequencies. This is why the requirements for shielding of different electronics can be very different -- higher operating frequency implies thinner shielding. And of course it's also why submarines use very low frequencies to communicate. (See also LORAN positioning system.)
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics!