Reminds me of a comment by the CEO of one of the Indian outsourcing companies (Tata Consultancy?), "If India is going to continue to be successful in attracting outsourced work from the USA, the US must put more effort in attracting graduates into management roles".
Traveling is fine for conferences and holidays - but I would rather be spending my daily life coding with just a short commute, and choosing the stuff I eat from the fridge every day rather than having to take what's left from the hotel kitchen - assuming that it is still open or that there even is one.
There is nothing worse than having an evening flight in to a hotel, taking the courtesy bus there and finding out that the last orders were taken less than thirty minutes ago - which was the amount of time you spent waiting for the transport. And the nearest pizza/takeaway/supermarket is on the other side of the freeway - less than 100 metres away from where you are located, but the access road is 1 mile south and back again.
Doing Linux updates is far less painful that doing Windows updates. Any Windows website will probably require a registered account, requiring a wait for a confirmation E-mail, then there will probably be another wait while the download is queued.
Though, manual Linux updates do have their problems. The most annoying recent "innovation" is when you try and search for a rpm file, find a webpage with the download link to the rpm file; a hyperlink with the text "module.rpm", you download the linked file, and find out that you just downloaded some php or asp script rather than the actually rpm file.
I do too, although arguably street view is a lot more useful for that. You're not going to be looking at where you're going from 200 miles up when you get there, so why do you need to see it from that angle if the purpose is to get an idea of what it will look like from the ground?
I use the pictures for finding my way to conferences/hotels/visits. It helps to know where exactly a building is in a campus or business park. The colors of the roofs/walls/pavements help too. There's nothing worse than guiding a taxi driver to the wrong entrance of a business park because some dufus in Ordinance Survey decided to flip round the orientation of a building just to confound copyright violators.
I bought my first PC around 1989 (3000 pounds for 20MHz 386 Dell System 310 with 20 Megabyte hard drive). Got a second 40 Megabyte hard disk drive two years later. Added several new graphics cards until Intel introduced the VESA bus to kill off graphics accelerators. Mid 1990's the PC's were 486 PC's with 100+ Megabytes hard disk drives, but modems were still 14.4K.
There were 1 Gigabyte drives and larger for servers, but those were in the order of tens of thousands of dollars/pounds. In 1991, a Sun 3/180 or a mainframe would have a couple of Gigabytes, but for a desktop system (Dell 310 era), a 1 gigabyte drive would cost more than the PC itself.
That's how just about all ray-tracers work. The problem is when you want to avoid aliasing effects. The easiest solution is to use multi-sampling, but having a nice square grid of primary rays per pixel still creates some aliasing effect. Randomizing the directions of these rays using a statistical distribution is one way of improving things. But then, at every reflection and refraction the secondary rays converge and diverge even further, so they will not all hit the same triangle/object/texture which causes all sorts of texture caching problems.
This company seems to have found a solution with their "incoherent ray" solution.
Back in the mid-1990's, the most economical internet connection for small companies was a 64Kb ISDN link billed by the kilobyte, with a local university as the ISP. As most conference announcements were broadcast by USENET, the store-and-forward service was so slow, it was fairly common to have the conference, then receive the invitation three days later. If you wanted to download a file, ftp was likely to fail due to ISDN congestion that you would be forced to use a uuencode-by-email service. You E-mailed a message with the ftp path you wanted to download to the server, then it would download the file, chop it up and uuencode it back to you in lots of little pieces.
Otherwise, home users had the choice of a 14.4 kilobaud modem - some ISP's like Demon Internet built their own DOS window based application to manage E-mail/USENET postings. You could download the headers first, then pick out which full postings you wanted to download. Even then with a PC, you were still cramped for space with 40/80 Megabyte hard disk drives. One high resolution image from SGI could take up more disk space than you had on your PC.
A strong enough magnetic field might be enough to warp the metal stuff into an orbit that burns up in the atmosphere. Or maybe it could be designed to collect the fragments into large blocks that could be sent down individually.
The problems were caused by Market Value Assessments. Retirees bought a small house, paid their property taxes, no problem. The next door neighbor decides he wants to cut down all the trees, and turn the back lot into into rental units to make money. OK, they can live with that. At the next MVA, their property tax quadruples because the city figures out that if their neighbors property is now bringing in sixteen times as much property tax as it used to, so should theirs (MVA just averages the property tax of the house and the local neighbors).
And they were even madder when someone built a multi-story condo unit right next door, blocking off their sunlight, invading their privacy and rocketing up their property tax just for the privilege. Plus they were getting pissed off about other people spending all their pension earnings on education programmes.
The encryption will be done transparently - it will be pipelined so there will be no noticable delay between the time a CPU core sends a write request to the drive, to the time the data is written onto the platter.
Some of the online stores are already selling "encrypted hard disk drives". The firmware stores an encryption key that is used to process all data as it goes on and comes off the disk drive platters, so the data is encrypted at all times. When you want to erase the drive, you just change/erase the encryption key.
It sounds like a good idea, but can the encryption key be recovered. Is it really erased, or just shuffled to an alternative backup array encryption keys? Or does the manufacturer keep a list of serial numbers/original encryption keys just in case.
If not, how would data recovery service be able to recover the data off a disk drive in a clean-room environment without the dedicated firmware?
If they can extend it to the size of A4 and A1 sheets of paper, that could replace the need for printing glossy posters for poster presentations sessions at conferences and in office corridors. These are relatively costly to print, and become out of date (E-mail addresses tend to change).
Taking an A1 sized poster to a conference usually requires taking a rocket launcher sized tube through airports and train stations, along with the laptop containing a powerpoint presentation.
Imagine if all that was required was to take a USB memory stick and download an image to a generic E-ink display at the conference.
The problem would be creating a whole set of random images within the timeframe of decryption. One solution would be to create random fractal images. But these would have to be written to the same sectors of the original image.
The sysadmin of one place I worked in the 1980's had the idea of putting Maplin lock switches on the power lines of the floppy disk drives - the idea was that no-one could copy stuff off or onto the PC's without the permission of a technician. Fortunately the technician insisted that he didn't want to go around with a large bunch of keys on his belt, so they just fitted the same key/lock combination to every PC and everyone just bought a key from Maplin.
Aren't modified flu viruses used to perform "gene therapy" with some rare genetic disorders. What if someone did get the perfect "universal flu vaccine", then found out they had a genetic disorder that could only be fixed using gene therapy?
I always wondered whether viruses were deliberately created by the cells in all sorts of creatures as a way of spreading beneficial modifications - the only disadvantage being it sometimes ends up reaching the wrong species.
'hoodies' are jackets with hoods. Popular with teenagers from low income estates (of all ethnic groups) who like to wear one of these combined with baseball caps.
To avoid discriminating against teenagers, the police were also applying the same legislation against pensioners.
Worse than that - people are banned from wearing "obstructive headwear".
Flat-caps as traditionally worn by the most senior members of the community are banned.
There was a case where a women suffering from alopecia was denied entry unless she removed her hat.
The real problem is with "hoodies", but the Police can't be seen to be discriminating against a single ethnic group so they target the easy to pick on groups instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of a comment by the CEO of one of the Indian outsourcing companies (Tata Consultancy?), "If India is going to continue to be successful in attracting outsourced work from the USA, the US must put more effort in attracting graduates into management roles".
Traveling is fine for conferences and holidays - but I would rather be spending my daily life coding with just a short commute, and choosing the stuff I eat from the fridge every day rather than having to take what's left from the hotel kitchen - assuming that it is still open or that there even is one.
There is nothing worse than having an evening flight in to a hotel, taking the courtesy bus there and finding out that the last orders were taken less than thirty minutes ago - which was the amount of time you spent waiting for the transport. And the nearest pizza/takeaway/supermarket is on the other side of the freeway - less than 100 metres away from where you are located, but the access road is 1 mile south and back again.
Doing Linux updates is far less painful that doing Windows updates. Any Windows website will probably require a registered account, requiring a wait for a confirmation E-mail, then there will probably be another wait while the download is queued.
Though, manual Linux updates do have their problems. The most annoying recent "innovation" is when you try and search for a rpm file, find a webpage with the download link to the rpm file; a hyperlink with the text "module.rpm", you download the linked file, and find out that you just downloaded some php or asp script rather than the actually rpm file.
Thank goodness for command line update utilities.
I do too, although arguably street view is a lot more useful for that. You're not going to be looking at where you're going from 200 miles up when you get there, so why do you need to see it from that angle if the purpose is to get an idea of what it will look like from the ground?
I use the pictures for finding my way to conferences/hotels/visits. It helps to know where exactly a building is in a campus or business park. The colors of the roofs/walls/pavements help too. There's nothing worse than guiding a taxi driver to the wrong entrance of a business park because some dufus in Ordinance Survey decided to flip round the orientation of a building just to confound copyright violators.
I bought my first PC around 1989 (3000 pounds for 20MHz 386 Dell System 310 with 20 Megabyte hard drive). Got a second 40 Megabyte hard disk drive two years later. Added several new graphics cards until Intel introduced the VESA bus to kill off graphics accelerators. Mid 1990's the PC's were 486 PC's with 100+ Megabytes hard disk drives, but modems were still 14.4K.
There were 1 Gigabyte drives and larger for servers, but those were in the order of tens of thousands of dollars/pounds. In 1991, a Sun 3/180 or a mainframe would have a couple of Gigabytes, but for a desktop system (Dell 310 era), a 1 gigabyte drive would cost more than the PC itself.
That's how just about all ray-tracers work. The problem is when you want to avoid aliasing effects. The easiest solution is to use multi-sampling, but having a nice square grid of primary rays per pixel still creates some aliasing effect. Randomizing the directions of these rays using a statistical distribution is one way of improving things. But then, at every reflection and refraction the secondary rays converge and diverge even further, so they will not all hit the same triangle/object/texture which causes all sorts of texture caching problems.
This company seems to have found a solution with their "incoherent ray" solution.
Back in the mid-1990's, the most economical internet connection for small companies was a 64Kb ISDN link billed by the kilobyte, with a local university as the ISP. As most conference announcements were broadcast by USENET, the store-and-forward service was so slow, it was fairly common to have the conference, then receive the invitation three days later. If you wanted to download a file, ftp was likely to fail due to ISDN congestion that you would be forced to use a uuencode-by-email service. You E-mailed a message with the ftp path you wanted to download to the server, then it would download the file, chop it up and uuencode it back to you in lots of little pieces.
Otherwise, home users had the choice of a 14.4 kilobaud modem - some ISP's like Demon Internet built their own DOS window based application to manage E-mail/USENET postings. You could download the headers first, then pick out which full postings you wanted to download. Even then with a PC, you were still cramped for space with 40/80 Megabyte hard disk drives. One high resolution image from SGI could take up more disk space than you had on your PC.
A strong enough magnetic field might be enough to warp the metal stuff into an orbit that burns up in the atmosphere. Or maybe it could be designed to collect the fragments into large blocks that could be sent down individually.
http://e-city.ca/events/event_details.php?id=143
Retired homeowners see their assessments skyrocketing because others are buying and selling, putting their ability to age in place at risk.
The problems were caused by Market Value Assessments. Retirees bought a small house, paid their property taxes, no problem. The next door neighbor decides he wants to cut down all the trees, and turn the back lot into into rental units to make money. OK, they can live with that. At the next MVA, their property tax quadruples because the city figures out that if their neighbors property is now bringing in sixteen times as much property tax as it used to, so should theirs (MVA just averages the property tax of the house and the local neighbors).
And they were even madder when someone built a multi-story condo unit right next door, blocking off their sunlight, invading their privacy and rocketing up their property tax just for the privilege.
Plus they were getting pissed off about other people spending all their pension earnings on education programmes.
The encryption will be done transparently - it will be pipelined so there will be no noticable delay between the time a CPU core sends a write request to the drive, to the time the data is written onto the platter.
Some of the online stores are already selling "encrypted hard disk drives". The firmware stores an encryption key that is used to process all data as it goes on and comes off the disk drive platters, so the data is encrypted at all times. When you want to erase the drive, you just change/erase the encryption key.
It sounds like a good idea, but can the encryption key be recovered. Is it really erased, or just shuffled to an alternative backup array encryption keys? Or does the manufacturer keep a list of serial numbers/original encryption keys just in case.
If not, how would data recovery service be able to recover the data off a disk drive in a clean-room environment without the dedicated firmware?
Digital cameras have auto-focus - so that shouldn't be so difficult to implement in a small eyeball cam.
Jakar heavy tube Teletube - extends to double length and available from any art store - Might make a good wi-fi signal booster if lined with aluminum foil on the inside.
Rocket launcher
I have a closed cardboard box with a large cat that may or may not be alive...
If they can extend it to the size of A4 and A1 sheets of paper, that could replace the need for printing glossy posters for poster presentations sessions at conferences and in office corridors. These are relatively costly to print, and become out of date (E-mail addresses tend to change).
Taking an A1 sized poster to a conference usually requires taking a rocket launcher sized tube through airports and train stations, along with the laptop containing a powerpoint presentation.
Imagine if all that was required was to take a USB memory stick and download an image to a generic E-ink display at the conference.
Here is the latest article about this company:
Phorm unleashes legal attack on critics
The problem would be creating a whole set of random images within the timeframe of decryption. One solution would be to create random fractal images. But these would have to be written to the same sectors of the original image.
Some people transfer across codecs from the windows system to support Linux media players.
Wine uses implementations of notepad.exe and services.exe
These aren't with embedded systems, but it is something I'm sure Microsoft could claim against.
The sysadmin of one place I worked in the 1980's had the idea of putting Maplin lock switches on the power lines of the floppy disk drives - the idea was that no-one could copy stuff off or onto the PC's without the permission of a technician. Fortunately the technician insisted that he didn't want to go around with a large bunch of keys on his belt, so they just fitted the same key/lock combination to every PC and everyone just bought a key from Maplin.
They were able how to program the autopilot; how to set the altitude and heading, and how to switch it off and on.
Haven't the autopilots being changed so the pilots just have to type in a route number instead of all the beacon points?
Aren't modified flu viruses used to perform "gene therapy" with some rare genetic disorders. What if someone did get the perfect "universal flu vaccine", then found out they had a genetic disorder that could only be fixed using gene therapy?
I always wondered whether viruses were deliberately created by the cells in all sorts of creatures as a way of spreading beneficial modifications - the only disadvantage being it sometimes ends up reaching the wrong species.
'hoodies' are jackets with hoods. Popular with teenagers from low income estates (of all ethnic groups) who like to wear one of these combined with baseball caps.
To avoid discriminating against teenagers, the police were also applying the same legislation against pensioners.
Worse than that - people are banned from wearing "obstructive headwear".
Flat-caps as traditionally worn by the most senior members of the community are banned.
There was a case where a women suffering from alopecia was denied entry unless she removed her hat.
The real problem is with "hoodies", but the Police can't be seen to be discriminating against a single ethnic group so they target the easy to pick on groups instead.
And they wonder why people are voting BNP?