...but not for their intended purpose. I loved the original CueCat and audio cable because the cable was great for audio capture, and the cuecat - well! Taking that sucker apart for spare parts (wires primarily) was a very nice way to spend an afternoon. I wouldn't want to pay for these things, but if Cue wants to give me cheesy electronic gadgets to take apart or do something useful with, more power to them.
Idea for Cue: Why not give away CueCams, digital video cameras that connect to your computer and send your browser to any URL they see on any visual media? I promise I would not use it as a webcam. Honest.
While we may not be able to truly follow Moore's law (cpu speeds double every 18 months) with silicon dioxide cpus, the fact that silicon-based processors are contually getting smaller, cheaper, and drawing less power suggests that when we finally "hit the wall" in terms of silicon cpu performance, it will be practical in terms of space, cost, and power to increase processing power simply by using multiple CPUs. There is no basic, fundamental reason that a motherboard couldn't be released with support for, say, 5 Pentium X processors running at 15 gigahertz, or whatever Intel will have on the market in 2007. And remember, two cpus running in parellel enjor a greater performance boost (on some tasks) then a single processor with twice the speed of either of the dual processors. While the speed of processors may slow its increase, I think we'll find ourselves simple using more processors in each computer, so your PC will still be obsolete within minutes after purchase:-).
Think about this a second. A litle kid get suspended for making a "gun" gesture, goes home, and watche survivor or x-files or some ultraviolent TV show or movie. Talk about mized messages...
Then how come we (USA) put such stringent embargoes on food imports to Iraq? They don't affect the high command - heck no - but they starve the citizens on the streets. If this is "right", what's wrong with attacking a power grid? And if it isn't right, why are we doing it?
"Slashdot's forums reward those who leap before they look"
Very true, and there's an easy fix. Make it so that no message posted a certain amount of time after a news item is posted can be upmoded, and limit the number of posts that can be upmoded within a longer span of time after a news item is posted. With luck, this would encourage people to look before they lept, since anything posted in, say, the first 15 minutes would never be upmodded.
If I want to evaluate a game, I'll download the demo. If I decide I like it, then I want it on a nice shiny CD I can reinstall with as many times as I like. Why would I want to download game data over and over again to play the full game for more than a few days? And if I just want to evaluate, why would I want to download the full game, even streaming, when I could grab a demo in a half hour via cable access?
Now the RIAA is going to go after each and every web site streaming ogg or any other non-MP3 files, on the grounds that they are obviously trying to avoid the royalties for distributing copywritten works. A pox on the man who invented the copyright, and may Richard Stallman's death be delayed a thousand years!
I don't know if this is what happened in this case, but a lot of computers in my school that have "mission-critical information" (gradebooks, student records) do not need to be on the Internet for any reason, but are on the same network as computers that are. The reason for this is simple: We have only a limited number of hubs, and there simple aren't enough to maintain two entirely seperare networks. Since the gradebook boxes do have to talk to each other, that means they have to share hubs with Internet machines. Could that be what happened in California?
One of several servers through which the attack was routed was located in China. Big deal. They could have routed through a server in Zaire or Sweden or any country you care to name, ping permitting. The geographical location of a server does NOT imply the complicity of any particular government. You might as well say we should investigate the possibility of a chinese conspiracy because the crud sound system you bought was built in china.
Just wanted to make sure no/.ers nuked Beijing as "retaliation". You never know who has a/. account, after all...
Man, I love these things. When I was a kid (well, a younger kid), I used to dream of piloting a giant airship. Come to think of it, I still do. There's something magical about a machine that moves through the air gracefully and silently, and looks as big as a mountain. Airplanes are cool, but they don't have that magical feel - it's very obvious that they are in the air through brute force, that the sky given the chance would hurl them to the ground. Airships just seem to belong among the clouds. Am I making any sense?
This may be a bit too advanced for your students, but Mindrover:The Europa Project (www.mindrover.com) allows the player to create autonomous AIs without any real coding. These AIs then pilot robots that try to kiil each other. (Kids love robots and violence). The game look very nice as well.
Another option - although this is also sort of advanced - might be for you to have the students make game levels. If this is too advanced, you could make a level yourself, and have the students change it. (Can you change this tile? What can you make the tank do?) Likewise, you could make the robots for them in Mindrover, and just have them tweak them. Neither of these ideas provides real job skills, but they could build a love of computers.
Free ISPs burn money like it was kindling, as we all know. Passive advertising doesn't make up the loss, and requiring your users to "donate" CPU cycles is problematic at best, and can stretch an already faltering infrastructure. As seti@home demonstrates, it's also insecure.
I can think of a couple ways that United Online might become profitable, however. Browser hijacking is one possibility - periodically force the user, kicking and screaming, to visit a sponsor's web site. Another idea I just had is, ironically enough, a way to use United Online for secure communication.
Basically, a company using the secure communication service sends their email to United Online. The message is broken into tiny ( less than a kilobyte) segments, and each segment is encryted further. The segments are then distributed randomly to UO users, along with the (encrypted) email address of the recipient. When the user recieves the encrypted segment, it is encoded into his or her next email message using stengography, and CC'd to the intended recipient (the one using the encrypted message). Random emails not containing the enrypted data are also sent to the recipient as "decoys". The result is that the recipient recieves a LOT of email, but can sort through it to find the encrypted data. Of course, there are practical problems, and this is a horrible breach of privacy,but it might be a viable business model. I know this is vague, please don't flame me.
Senior Citizen Email Boxes
on
PS2 As PC
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· Score: 3
"Linux can be scaled down and implemented with a simple GUI that hides the guts of the system completely."
In fact, I'm teaching spending July trying to teach senior citizens how to use the Internet, and I hope to find a cache of old 486 machines I could load Linux on and give to them as "email machines". I'm hoping to configue them to boot right into a web browser or email client, depending on user needs. Speaking of which, can anyone recommend a really easy to use web browser or email client for Linux? I know it sort of defeats the purpose of the OS but if I can't make it easy, I'll have to use freedos (freedos.org). If you have any thoughts, you know how to email me...
I think that Alex Chiu is a very dangerous man. He's stumbled on some sort of quackery that some people, for whatever reason, truly believe. He's trying to convince people to believe, not in the real benfits given by science, but by magical magnetic fields. In addition, he seems to have a rather cavalier attitude towards human rights. He poo-poos Chinese human rights violations, but he was born in the United States. He is either a hypocrite or - downmod this as you will - a nut of the worst sort, because he seems sincere. For slashdot, a site dedicated to technology developed through scientific principles, to embrace this chicanery - it's absurd and sad.
These big corporations are getting way too much power. AOL is the most popular ISP in the nation, and Time-Warner - well, they own everything Disney doesn't. If AOL-Time-Warner starts refusing to allow competitors to advertise, how long will it be before they realize they can also refuse to air any news they don't like? OR ads for politicians they don't like? And what will keep AOL from banning its users from accessing the sites of competitors? Remember, Bush is a very good friend of big business. He'd probably let them get away with this.
This is very disturbing stuff. We have protection against government censorship, but what protection fo we have from corporate censorship?
"Maybe the mozilla developers can implement something like this into their project."
Isn't Mozilla already instable enough? (Not a flamebait, just an attempt to point out a practical problem. If there are bugs in the existing featureset, adding newer features before fixing essential ones seems unwise.)
It sounds great on paper for the Internet to be more integrated with an OS desktop - anything that lets you get your data more quickly is a good thing, although the fact that MS will only use their tech for sites that pay them is troublesome.
My real concern, however, is the security of Smart Tags. M$ says they just download static data, and I believe them - but I still worry about the limited power these tags will have. For example, will these tags be able to take control of your browser like conventional HTML? If so, it would be easy for them to send you to a site with, say, a Java applet or ActiveX control that really could breach system security. For that matter, could these tags "redirect" your word processor?
My other concern is that even if the smart tags are little more than text files, with no ability to directly control a computer, clueless users may be fooled by data presented by a tag. It a tag advised them, for example, to buy a certain product or visit a certain website, they might do it thinking it was some sort of "official" advice from Microsoft, and therefor good. In other words, I worry about the same sort of mentality that makes users open email attachments without thinking even though they're told again and again and again not to do that, because the attachment either seems to be from someone they know, or a picture of a hot tennis player.
I guess what I'm saying is that integrating the internet is all well and good, but I don't trust people who might try to pull pranks with smart tags, and I don't trust the average user. I've seem my high school lan go down too many times because of user cluelessness with email viruses that only work because an MS email client has such control of the OS.
wouldn't it be more practical to use power grid?
on
Duct Tape
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· Score: 2
You should reallly just use the reactor to send power through the rail lines, instead of a reactor on each train. Cheaper/safer.
Why not build a case-squared?
on
Hardwoodware
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· Score: 2
I had a thought: Instead of going to all trouble of building a complete custom case with mounting brackets etc., why not just do this:
1. Build your computer in a regular, ugly case.
2. Build a wood (or stone or plastic or lead crystal, whatever:-)) "case" big enough for the real case to fit it. The front should have gaps for the drives and buttons, and the rear should be mostly open, for cooling. Just put smaller (say 3-inch) wood flaps attached to locking hinges on the back so that you can put the real case inside and its secure, but you can remove it if you wish.
3. The end result is a wood "case" that covers everything but most of the back of the real computer case, where most of the cooling happens, as well as all the ports. Quicker, more efficient than a real pc case made of wood, and much easier. Thoughts?
These electrodes may not be painful, but experiencing a muscle spasm severe enough to make you drop a controller certainly sounds uncomfortable. I for one would prefer not to suffer discomfort (other than carpal-tunnel syndrome, perhaps) when fragging some newbie after a long school day.
You know, I've seen so much staffer bashing on Slashdot (especially of reviews) that it's getting irritating. People, Katz, Taco, et al have their opinions, and you have yours. In case you hadn't guessed, that's why Slashdot exists - so that people can actually discuss new articles. But saying a staffer is stupid or gay or whatever is childish, and disrespectful. These articles - especially the reviews - require a good deal of time and effort. Slashdot is a free service, and the people who run it (even though they are paid) deserve our respect, or at least courtesy.
I have a question. Since atomic weapons are a sorce of considerable potential military power, and power is an aphrodisiac, can I become more attractive to women by building a nuclear device? If so, how powerful does the device have to be to gain the maximum amount of increased sexiness? Is there a constant in the factor of increased sexiness per kiloton, or is it a variable dependent on other factors? Finally, are pure fission weapons old enough technology that the increase in sexiness they provide is negligable?
Slashdot Mirror
...it would seem to be the benefits are limited. You'd have to burn every progra, you want to run.
...but not for their intended purpose. I loved the original CueCat and audio cable because the cable was great for audio capture, and the cuecat - well! Taking that sucker apart for spare parts (wires primarily) was a very nice way to spend an afternoon. I wouldn't want to pay for these things, but if Cue wants to give me cheesy electronic gadgets to take apart or do something useful with, more power to them.
Idea for Cue: Why not give away CueCams, digital video cameras that connect to your computer and send your browser to any URL they see on any visual media? I promise I would not use it as a webcam. Honest.
While we may not be able to truly follow Moore's law (cpu speeds double every 18 months) with silicon dioxide cpus, the fact that silicon-based processors are contually getting smaller, cheaper, and drawing less power suggests that when we finally "hit the wall" in terms of silicon cpu performance, it will be practical in terms of space, cost, and power to increase processing power simply by using multiple CPUs. There is no basic, fundamental reason that a motherboard couldn't be released with support for, say, 5 Pentium X processors running at 15 gigahertz, or whatever Intel will have on the market in 2007. And remember, two cpus running in parellel enjor a greater performance boost (on some tasks) then a single processor with twice the speed of either of the dual processors. While the speed of processors may slow its increase, I think we'll find ourselves simple using more processors in each computer, so your PC will still be obsolete within minutes after purchase :-).
Think about this a second. A litle kid get suspended for making a "gun" gesture, goes home, and watche survivor or x-files or some ultraviolent TV show or movie. Talk about mized messages...
Then how come we (USA) put such stringent embargoes on food imports to Iraq? They don't affect the high command - heck no - but they starve the citizens on the streets. If this is "right", what's wrong with attacking a power grid? And if it isn't right, why are we doing it?
"Slashdot's forums reward those who leap before they look"
Very true, and there's an easy fix. Make it so that no message posted a certain amount of time after a news item is posted can be upmoded, and limit the number of posts that can be upmoded within a longer span of time after a news item is posted. With luck, this would encourage people to look before they lept, since anything posted in, say, the first 15 minutes would never be upmodded.
If I want to evaluate a game, I'll download the demo. If I decide I like it, then I want it on a nice shiny CD I can reinstall with as many times as I like. Why would I want to download game data over and over again to play the full game for more than a few days? And if I just want to evaluate, why would I want to download the full game, even streaming, when I could grab a demo in a half hour via cable access?
Now the RIAA is going to go after each and every web site streaming ogg or any other non-MP3 files, on the grounds that they are obviously trying to avoid the royalties for distributing copywritten works. A pox on the man who invented the copyright, and may Richard Stallman's death be delayed a thousand years!
I don't know if this is what happened in this case, but a lot of computers in my school that have "mission-critical information" (gradebooks, student records) do not need to be on the Internet for any reason, but are on the same network as computers that are. The reason for this is simple: We have only a limited number of hubs, and there simple aren't enough to maintain two entirely seperare networks. Since the gradebook boxes do have to talk to each other, that means they have to share hubs with Internet machines. Could that be what happened in California?
One of several servers through which the attack was routed was located in China. Big deal. They could have routed through a server in Zaire or Sweden or any country you care to name, ping permitting. The geographical location of a server does NOT imply the complicity of any particular government. You might as well say we should investigate the possibility of a chinese conspiracy because the crud sound system you bought was built in china.
/.ers nuked Beijing as "retaliation". You never know who has a /. account, after all...
Just wanted to make sure no
Man, I love these things. When I was a kid (well, a younger kid), I used to dream of piloting a giant airship. Come to think of it, I still do. There's something magical about a machine that moves through the air gracefully and silently, and looks as big as a mountain. Airplanes are cool, but they don't have that magical feel - it's very obvious that they are in the air through brute force, that the sky given the chance would hurl them to the ground. Airships just seem to belong among the clouds. Am I making any sense?
This may be a bit too advanced for your students, but Mindrover:The Europa Project (www.mindrover.com) allows the player to create autonomous AIs without any real coding. These AIs then pilot robots that try to kiil each other. (Kids love robots and violence). The game look very nice as well.
Another option - although this is also sort of advanced - might be for you to have the students make game levels. If this is too advanced, you could make a level yourself, and have the students change it. (Can you change this tile? What can you make the tank do?) Likewise, you could make the robots for them in Mindrover, and just have them tweak them. Neither of these ideas provides real job skills, but they could build a love of computers.
much appreciated
Free ISPs burn money like it was kindling, as we all know. Passive advertising doesn't make up the loss, and requiring your users to "donate" CPU cycles is problematic at best, and can stretch an already faltering infrastructure. As seti@home demonstrates, it's also insecure.
I can think of a couple ways that United Online might become profitable, however. Browser hijacking is one possibility - periodically force the user, kicking and screaming, to visit a sponsor's web site. Another idea I just had is, ironically enough, a way to use United Online for secure communication.
Basically, a company using the secure communication service sends their email to United Online. The message is broken into tiny ( less than a kilobyte) segments, and each segment is encryted further. The segments are then distributed randomly to UO users, along with the (encrypted) email address of the recipient. When the user recieves the encrypted segment, it is encoded into his or her next email message using stengography, and CC'd to the intended recipient (the one using the encrypted message). Random emails not containing the enrypted data are also sent to the recipient as "decoys". The result is that the recipient recieves a LOT of email, but can sort through it to find the encrypted data. Of course, there are practical problems, and this is a horrible breach of privacy,but it might be a viable business model. I know this is vague, please don't flame me.
"Linux can be scaled down and implemented with a simple GUI that hides the guts of the system completely."
In fact, I'm teaching spending July trying to teach senior citizens how to use the Internet, and I hope to find a cache of old 486 machines I could load Linux on and give to them as "email machines". I'm hoping to configue them to boot right into a web browser or email client, depending on user needs. Speaking of which, can anyone recommend a really easy to use web browser or email client for Linux? I know it sort of defeats the purpose of the OS but if I can't make it easy, I'll have to use freedos (freedos.org). If you have any thoughts, you know how to email me...
I think that Alex Chiu is a very dangerous man. He's stumbled on some sort of quackery that some people, for whatever reason, truly believe. He's trying to convince people to believe, not in the real benfits given by science, but by magical magnetic fields. In addition, he seems to have a rather cavalier attitude towards human rights. He poo-poos Chinese human rights violations, but he was born in the United States. He is either a hypocrite or - downmod this as you will - a nut of the worst sort, because he seems sincere. For slashdot, a site dedicated to technology developed through scientific principles, to embrace this chicanery - it's absurd and sad.
These big corporations are getting way too much power. AOL is the most popular ISP in the nation, and Time-Warner - well, they own everything Disney doesn't. If AOL-Time-Warner starts refusing to allow competitors to advertise, how long will it be before they realize they can also refuse to air any news they don't like? OR ads for politicians they don't like? And what will keep AOL from banning its users from accessing the sites of competitors? Remember, Bush is a very good friend of big business. He'd probably let them get away with this.
This is very disturbing stuff. We have protection against government censorship, but what protection fo we have from corporate censorship?
"Maybe the mozilla developers can implement something like this into their project."
Isn't Mozilla already instable enough? (Not a flamebait, just an attempt to point out a practical problem. If there are bugs in the existing featureset, adding newer features before fixing essential ones seems unwise.)
It sounds great on paper for the Internet to be more integrated with an OS desktop - anything that lets you get your data more quickly is a good thing, although the fact that MS will only use their tech for sites that pay them is troublesome.
My real concern, however, is the security of Smart Tags. M$ says they just download static data, and I believe them - but I still worry about the limited power these tags will have. For example, will these tags be able to take control of your browser like conventional HTML? If so, it would be easy for them to send you to a site with, say, a Java applet or ActiveX control that really could breach system security. For that matter, could these tags "redirect" your word processor?
My other concern is that even if the smart tags are little more than text files, with no ability to directly control a computer, clueless users may be fooled by data presented by a tag. It a tag advised them, for example, to buy a certain product or visit a certain website, they might do it thinking it was some sort of "official" advice from Microsoft, and therefor good. In other words, I worry about the same sort of mentality that makes users open email attachments without thinking even though they're told again and again and again not to do that, because the attachment either seems to be from someone they know, or a picture of a hot tennis player.
I guess what I'm saying is that integrating the internet is all well and good, but I don't trust people who might try to pull pranks with smart tags, and I don't trust the average user. I've seem my high school lan go down too many times because of user cluelessness with email viruses that only work because an MS email client has such control of the OS.
You should reallly just use the reactor to send power through the rail lines, instead of a reactor on each train. Cheaper/safer.
I had a thought: Instead of going to all trouble of building a complete custom case with mounting brackets etc., why not just do this: :-)) "case" big enough for the real case to fit it. The front should have gaps for the drives and buttons, and the rear should be mostly open, for cooling. Just put smaller (say 3-inch) wood flaps attached to locking hinges on the back so that you can put the real case inside and its secure, but you can remove it if you wish.
1. Build your computer in a regular, ugly case. 2. Build a wood (or stone or plastic or lead crystal, whatever
3. The end result is a wood "case" that covers everything but most of the back of the real computer case, where most of the cooling happens, as well as all the ports. Quicker, more efficient than a real pc case made of wood, and much easier. Thoughts?
These electrodes may not be painful, but experiencing a muscle spasm severe enough to make you drop a controller certainly sounds uncomfortable. I for one would prefer not to suffer discomfort (other than carpal-tunnel syndrome, perhaps) when fragging some newbie after a long school day.
You know, I've seen so much staffer bashing on Slashdot (especially of reviews) that it's getting irritating. People, Katz, Taco, et al have their opinions, and you have yours. In case you hadn't guessed, that's why Slashdot exists - so that people can actually discuss new articles. But saying a staffer is stupid or gay or whatever is childish, and disrespectful. These articles - especially the reviews - require a good deal of time and effort. Slashdot is a free service, and the people who run it (even though they are paid) deserve our respect, or at least courtesy.
She's much hotter. (Sorry, but it's true, and that sort of thing does matter when selling movies.)
I have a question. Since atomic weapons are a sorce of considerable potential military power, and power is an aphrodisiac, can I become more attractive to women by building a nuclear device? If so, how powerful does the device have to be to gain the maximum amount of increased sexiness? Is there a constant in the factor of increased sexiness per kiloton, or is it a variable dependent on other factors? Finally, are pure fission weapons old enough technology that the increase in sexiness they provide is negligable?