When did laptop hard drives get that big and what are bank PHBs doing with those DBs at home anyway?
The information was being used for marketing purposes (according to Sky News. Presumably, this list of names and addresses was going to be used to send out mail shots. At 11 million records, that covers well over 10% of the entire UK population.
Last time I checked, laptops aren't exactly being sold with 20GB of HD space.
The latest models of laptops have not one but two slots for the 2.5" hard disk drives, which are accessible from a side panel (rather than being mounted deep inside the system). And 20 GB is at the lower end of the memory capacity for this size of drive, with 100GB at the high end. So it's easy for a laptop to have 200GB of storage if you really wanted to. For design engineers having a workstation that they can take into meetings or onto the shop floor is becoming an attractive option.
Looking at any internet latop retailer- you will see a whole range of laptops with varying hard disk drive capacities in this range.
Or you could choose to set up your company, as all the veteran programmers from the home computer days in the UK have done (and many of the new graduates are doing as well), and avoid all the crazy politics such as directors giving the interesting works to their mates, rather than to the most experienced staff.
And those employers then compalain that they can't find qualified candidates...
How difficult would it have been to create a basic "lottery" system where everyone who was at your store 15 minutes before it opened up could enter;
You would still have queues of people outside the store.
The most civilised method I know of would been to have Sony set up a website for people to pre-order a PS3 and choose which store to collect it from? That was the way the early 3D accelerator boards were distributed.
A lot of that I'm sure is safe, but I can't imagine that somewhere in there and among Microsoft's untold zillions of software patents that there isn't a (legally) reasonable case that could be made against something OSS that people would care about.
A good many GUI's existing before MS-Windows. Just as there are timelines which document how OS kernel's have evolved, there are also timelines which document how GUI's have evolved. This site documents the evolution of each and every GUI, along with every icon that each GUI has used. This is particularly important for commercial application developers who wish to avoid any lawsuits caused by using someone elses "trademarked" icon.
As an example, here is the components page, which documents the evolution of the most commonly used icons.
As long as the Linux community can prove that any feature in an application has prior art in earlier GUI's that haven't been patented or copyrighted by Microsoft, then it is pure Microsoft FUD. If MS want to sue Linux, then they will have to sue the other OS vendors as well.
I've seen this happen to my posts if I get interrupted while writing a reply. Perhaps the index allocated to your comment is timed out and given away to someone else. Then you're reply gets shuffled onto a completely different article.
"Aye hen, if it weren't for the cigarettes and the horses, we wouldn't be able to afford to stay on social security".
Recently, Scotland passed legislation to ban smoking from inside public places. The side effect was that the bingo halls started closing down, as the players who normally spent all their winnings on the slot machines now rushed outside for a smoke, then decided to go home rather than back inside.
We could open a IPoST (IP over spacetime) daemon on jan 1 2009, and be able to receive messages from the future from that date on.
Being spammed from the present is bad enough, but being spammed from the future....
Imagine making payments - it would be like Douglas Adams's "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" - Just open a bank account under our name with a minimum deposit, and rest assured, your visit will have been fully paid from the accumulated interest over several billion years.
But some wily bugger will find a way to make a buck out of it
Look at all the open-source utility programs that are in use. While the actual code is open source, other people (who are not the original authors) will make money simply by writing books on these tools. And some books (particularly the pocket books) will be composed of nothing more than the page of the home web-site reformatted to fit onto a page, a chapter on where to download, and the system manuals printed out in the appendices.
Sounds like a cool feature for nethack. If you pour magic oil into a lamp, it become a magic lamp. If you are lucky you get three wishes. If you are unlucky, an oil daemon come out and chase you around the level.
During the oil refinery blockades back in the UK in 2000, a taxi driver stored 230 litres of petrol in beer barrels and a wheelie bin. The petrol had started to leak from the wheelie bin due to the plastic becoming brittle from a chemical reaction with the fuel.
Emergency services evacuated up to 20 homes in Derby after almost 230 litres of petrol, stockpiled because of the fuel crisis, began to leak.
Firefighters went to the home of a city taxi driver after a strong smell of petrol was reported. They found the fuel was illegally stored in beer barrels and a wheelie bin.
How many games can't be played by a computer one some level?
Perhaps only those games that are pure chance and virtual - eg. a virtual roulette wheel, digital slot machines. There was a way of beating real-world roulette wheels using a laser scanner to estimate the velocity of the ball.
Although some countries/states have laws which regulate the amount of money that must be returned to the punter (based on a statistical average). Some punters claim to be able to force a slot machine to give a high payout by deliberately making bad choices that caused them to lose money first.
AI won't help you with those TV cash quiz games where you have to dial in, and get to make a guess (if you are lucky) - something like "Movies with the letter E in the title", then the bonus is "Guess the next day on the calendar".
Both board games and skill-based computer games can be beaten using AI, as long as you can represent the current game state as a data structure. You can improve your chances of winning a game like Scrabble if you have a program to generate a list of possible words based on the letters that you already have. And a Google search could help you win a quiz show.
Even with online cash prize cable TV games, if the entire game state is present on the screen, you can use AI to give yourself an advantage. Play the game once to get a copy of the game level (webcam/TV card), then convert the image for use with your AI solver, and use that to determine the optimum path, then play the game with that knowledge. Two games were particularly suited to this (Tactiles) and The Big Brother Chicken Task (a nethack like game, where the dangers were falling blocks, potholes and lasers - and the only weapons were eggs which could be thrown at the lasers, and blocks which could be pushed into potholes).
Perhaps arcade games could be beaten in a similar way - design a vision system/robotic system be made to play Galaxian or Space Invaders. There were competitions where robots were designed to play Table Tennis, so that should be possible.
I've always wondered if the old penny arcade games could be beaten in this way - the game where there is a bar that moves backwards and forwards, and you try and drop small change coins in, so that it would start a chain reaction where the bar would push other coins out (if you were lucky). Usually there was a number of nails between the slot and the base level to stop this from happening.
I have heard tales of malware that can grab a screen capture in the vicinity of the cursor at any mouse-click. Does anyone know if such a threat actually exists?
It's definitely possible to write a screen capture program that can copy a region, window or even the entire screen. There are numerous shareware programs which will allow you to do this. Some even allow you to perform screen-grabs across the network. Even the MSDN developers CD proved an example program to do this. Other programs demonstrate how to intercept the main keyboard event handler, so you can implement hot-key applications. So combining the two is theoretically possible.
But why bother grabbing the screen - most passwords just show up as *******'s anyway, so all a malware writer has to do is log keyboard events.
Perhaps the CPU manufacturers are desperately competing against the GPU manufacturers for developers of scientific applications? Nvidia just announced their 8800 series GPU's with support for BLAS, a foundation library for intensive engineering calculations.
All the engineering, digital content creation, and gaming use similar algorithms to model/visualize water, fire and smoke. However, engineering does require high precision (64-bit floats) while animation and gaming can get away with lower precision (16-bit floats).
It's really going to be overkill to use a quad-core CPU with 64-bit precision floating-point units to run a single-threaded game engine that does all the animations effects on the GPU. It might still be overkill even if a game engine had separate threads for handling player input, game server communication, physics and rendering.
Tell that to the University of Pittsburgh - not me - their web page link classifies this document as "medieval".
I agree with you though, according to the most dictionaries, in a historical context "medieval" is equivalent to saying "The Dark Ages" (up to 1500 at the latest). This map was written in 1593.
Re:Medieval London here I come!
on
Google Earth In 4D
·
· Score: 3, Informative
They may not have had satellite imagery, but many artists and painters were hired to draw maps and paintings of the city to precise scale in perspective view.
Here is a supersized scan of a medieval map of London from the 1600's. Using some projective texture mapping/morphing, it should be possible to place this map on top of the Google maps of London.
The e-waste is a bit misleading. Basically, they are talking about hardware that is no longer compatible - stuff like non plug'play accessories (14.4K modems), RS-232 mice, CRT monitors (all that lead and coppper) and old-fashioned word processors.
The very earliest word processors were electric typewriters with a LCD display that could store one line of text. You could type in a line of text, make corrections, and when you pressed return, that line was printed. These are still being manufactured (finding this picture surprised me). Later, the LCD display was replaced with a monochrome 80 column monitor, and the documents could be saved/loaded from a floppy disc. Some versions supported a separate spreadsheet application accessible from a main menu. All software was stored on ROM so upgrading was more or less impossible. For home users, a personal home computer was a cheaper solution (and more entertaining), while the IBM PC clone became popular for offices.
For a time between the 1960's and 1990's, their country had high unemployment, crime and bad housing. So they embarked on an education and technology modernisation programme.
It's a fear of going back to those days which allows the government to keep such a strict regime. Plus there's also the knowledge that in a single city nation, when problems start, they can escalate extremely fast.
The techniques are called "texture analysis" and "texture synthesis". Before the advent of framebuffers in the late 1960's, psychologists tried to understand the human perception of texture. After this time, many researchers have tried to find ways of synthesizing new textures from existing textures, particularly from aerial imagery. These have included quilting methods (copying and pasting small bits of texture from one image to another larger image). Other methods include using the FFT to convert an image into its equivalent sum of sine waves. Wavelets try and break down an image into a frequency distributing of a particular shape (a lunar surface could be reduced down to a crater shaped heightmap and a frequency distribution). However, on some occasions you want to preserve repetitiveness (brickwork), while on others you don't want such an effect (terrain, oceans). A good way to avoid this, is through the use of Wang tiling which allows short range repetition, but prevents long range repetition. Basically, you want a texture function that gives you the same colour/normal/height for the same texture coordinate each time. The most practical ways so far are the use of Perlin noise functions. There are also advanced lighting models which factor in the direction of the light source, the viewpoint, and even subsurface scattering.
With the progress of multi-core CPU's, especially looking at the AMD / ATI deal, PC's are moving towards a single 'super chip' that will do everything while phasing out the use of a truly separate graphics system.
Not really...
PC's run multiple processes that have unpredictable branching - like network protocol stacks, device drivers and word processors and plug'n'play devices. More CPU cores help to spread the load. For the desktop windows system, 3D functionality was simply a bolt-on to the windows system through a separate API, now it is integral to the windows system. However, the new multi-core CPU's will still have the graphics processing logic.
In the past, supercomputers were either built from custom ASIC's or simply from a large number of CPU's networked together into a particular topology .
GPU's now support both floating-point textures and downloadable shading programs that are executed in parallel, Combining these two features together, gives the GPU all the functionality of a supercomputer. Although up until now, the GPU has only supported 16-bit floating point precision rather than the 32-bit or 64-bit precision that traditional supercomputing applications such as FFT or computational fluid dynamics have required.
And since these applications are purely mathematical equations with no conditional branching within the innermost loops, these are well suited to being ported onto the GPU. The only limitation has been that GPU's couldn't form scalable architectures - at least until SLI came along. So, you've basically got supercomputing performance on a board. This fits into the scalable architecture of a supercomputer .
Slashdot Mirror
When did laptop hard drives get that big and what are bank PHBs doing with those DBs at home anyway?
The information was being used for marketing purposes (according to Sky News. Presumably, this list of names and addresses was going to be used to send out mail shots. At 11 million records, that covers well over 10% of the entire UK population.
Last time I checked, laptops aren't exactly being sold with 20GB of HD space.
The latest models of laptops have not one but two slots for the 2.5" hard disk drives, which are accessible from a side panel (rather than being mounted deep inside the system). And 20 GB is at the lower end of the memory capacity for this size of drive, with 100GB at the high end. So it's easy for a laptop to have 200GB of storage if you really wanted to. For design engineers having a workstation that they can take into meetings or onto the shop floor is becoming an attractive option.
Looking at any internet latop retailer- you will see a whole range of laptops with varying hard disk drive capacities in this range.
Or you could choose to set up your company, as all the veteran programmers from the home computer days in the UK have done (and many of the new graduates are doing as well), and avoid all the crazy politics such as directors giving the interesting works to their mates, rather than to the most experienced staff.
And those employers then compalain that they can't find qualified candidates...
I should be able to see a politician's daily calendar, who they met with, and potentially what they said (technology permitting).
That falls under rule no. 3 National security- Don't want the "Bad People" to hear our battle plans.
How difficult would it have been to create a basic "lottery" system where everyone who was at your store 15 minutes before it opened up could enter;
You would still have queues of people outside the store.
The most civilised method I know of would been to have Sony set up a website for people to pre-order a PS3 and choose which store to collect it from? That was the way the early 3D accelerator boards were distributed.
Seems too much like Takeshi's Castle to me.
A lot of that I'm sure is safe, but I can't imagine that somewhere in there and among Microsoft's untold zillions of software patents that there isn't a (legally) reasonable case that could be made against something OSS that people would care about.
A good many GUI's existing before MS-Windows. Just as there are timelines which document how OS kernel's have evolved, there are also timelines which document how GUI's have evolved. This site documents the evolution of each and every GUI, along with every icon that each GUI has used. This is particularly important for commercial application developers who wish to avoid any lawsuits caused by using someone elses "trademarked" icon.
As an example, here is the components page, which documents the evolution of the most commonly used icons.
As long as the Linux community can prove that any feature in an application has prior art in earlier GUI's that haven't been patented or copyrighted by Microsoft, then it is pure Microsoft FUD. If MS want to sue Linux, then they will have to sue the other OS vendors as well.
I've seen this happen to my posts if I get interrupted while writing a reply. Perhaps the index allocated to your comment is timed out and given away to someone else. Then you're reply gets shuffled onto a completely different article.
This was a joke in a Scottish newspaper:
"Aye hen, if it weren't for the cigarettes and the horses, we wouldn't be able to afford to stay on social security".
Recently, Scotland passed legislation to ban smoking from inside public places. The side effect was that the bingo halls started closing down, as the players who normally spent all their winnings on the slot machines now rushed outside for a smoke, then decided to go home rather than back inside.
We could open a IPoST (IP over spacetime) daemon on jan 1 2009, and be able to receive messages from the future from that date on.
Being spammed from the present is bad enough, but being spammed from the future....
Imagine making payments - it would be like Douglas Adams's "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" - Just open a bank account under our name with a minimum deposit, and rest assured, your visit will have been fully paid from the accumulated interest over several billion years.
There's quite a few Charlie Chaplin adverts:
Introduction
Tall desk chair made from office documents
New home computer
Even a postcard.
But some wily bugger will find a way to make a buck out of it
Look at all the open-source utility programs that are in use. While the actual code is open source, other people (who are not the original authors) will make money simply by writing books on these tools. And some books (particularly the pocket books) will be composed of nothing more than the page of the home web-site reformatted to fit onto a page, a chapter on where to download, and the system manuals printed out in the appendices.
Sounds like a cool feature for nethack. If you pour magic oil into a lamp, it become a magic lamp. If you are lucky you get three wishes. If you are unlucky, an oil daemon come out and chase you around the level.
Better to use beer barrels...
During the oil refinery blockades back in the UK in 2000, a taxi driver stored 230 litres of petrol in beer barrels and a wheelie bin. The petrol had started to leak from the wheelie bin due to the plastic becoming brittle from a chemical reaction with the fuel.
Emergency services evacuated up to 20 homes in Derby after almost 230 litres of petrol, stockpiled because of the fuel crisis, began to leak.
Firefighters went to the home of a city taxi driver after a strong smell of petrol was reported. They found the fuel was illegally stored in beer barrels and a wheelie bin.
How many games can't be played by a computer one some level?
Perhaps only those games that are pure chance and virtual - eg. a virtual roulette wheel, digital slot machines.
There was a way of beating real-world roulette wheels using a laser scanner to estimate the velocity of the
ball.
Although some countries/states have laws which regulate the amount of money that must be returned to the punter (based on a statistical average). Some punters claim to be able to force a slot machine to give a high payout by deliberately making bad choices that caused them to lose money first.
AI won't help you with those TV cash quiz games where you have to dial in, and get to make a guess (if you are lucky) - something like "Movies with the letter E in the title", then the bonus is "Guess the next day on the calendar".
Both board games and skill-based computer games can be beaten using AI, as long as you can represent the
current game state as a data structure. You can improve your chances of winning a game like Scrabble if you have
a program to generate a list of possible words based on the letters that you already have. And a Google search could help you win a quiz show.
Even with online cash prize cable TV games, if the entire game state is present on the screen,
you can use AI to give yourself an advantage. Play the game once to get a copy of the game level (webcam/TV card), then convert the image for use with your AI solver, and use that to determine the optimum path, then play the game with that knowledge. Two games were particularly suited to this (Tactiles) and The Big Brother Chicken Task (a nethack like game, where the dangers were falling blocks, potholes and lasers - and the only weapons were eggs which could be thrown at the lasers, and blocks which could be pushed into potholes).
Perhaps arcade games could be beaten in a similar way - design a vision system/robotic system be made to play Galaxian or Space Invaders. There were competitions where robots were designed to play Table Tennis, so that should be possible.
I've always wondered if the old penny arcade games could be beaten in this way - the game where there is a bar that moves backwards and forwards, and you try and drop small change coins in, so that it would start a chain reaction where the bar would push other coins out (if you were lucky). Usually there was a number of nails between the slot and the base level to stop this from happening.
I have heard tales of malware that can grab a screen capture in the vicinity of the cursor at any mouse-click. Does anyone know if such a threat actually exists?
It's definitely possible to write a screen capture program that can copy a region, window or even the entire screen. There are numerous shareware programs which will allow you to do this. Some even allow you to perform screen-grabs across the network. Even the MSDN developers CD proved an example program to do this. Other programs
demonstrate how to intercept the main keyboard event handler, so you can implement hot-key applications.
So combining the two is theoretically possible.
But why bother grabbing the screen - most passwords just show up as *******'s anyway, so all a malware writer has
to do is log keyboard events.
Billy has 0x0000003 apples left
Perhaps the CPU manufacturers are desperately competing against the GPU manufacturers for developers of scientific applications? Nvidia just announced their 8800 series GPU's with support for BLAS, a foundation library for intensive engineering calculations.
All the engineering, digital content creation, and gaming use similar algorithms to model/visualize water, fire and smoke. However, engineering does require high precision (64-bit floats) while animation and gaming can get away with lower precision (16-bit floats).
It's really going to be overkill to use a quad-core CPU with 64-bit precision floating-point units to run a single-threaded game engine that does all the animations effects on the GPU. It might still be overkill even if a game engine had separate threads for handling player input, game server communication, physics and rendering.
Not only Northern Belgium, but France, Holland, Germany, and the UK as well:
Around 30 people each year are killed due to World War II ordanance (Digging for Battlefield Relics)
World War II Bomb Explodes on German Motorway
550 lb Aerial bomb disposed using controlled explosion
UK's undersea 'ticking timebombs'
Street evacuated in bomb scare
But then, battalions of RIAA lawyers would come running from all directions demanding royalties from the dolphins.
Tell that to the University of Pittsburgh - not me - their web page link classifies this document as "medieval".
I agree with you though, according to the most dictionaries, in a historical context "medieval" is equivalent to saying "The Dark Ages" (up to 1500 at the latest). This map was written in 1593.
They may not have had satellite imagery, but many artists and painters were hired to draw maps and paintings of the city to precise scale in perspective view.
Here is a supersized scan of a medieval map of London from the 1600's. Using some projective texture mapping/morphing, it should be possible to place this map on top of the Google maps of London.
The e-waste is a bit misleading. Basically, they are talking about hardware that is no longer compatible - stuff like non plug'play accessories (14.4K modems), RS-232 mice, CRT monitors (all that lead and coppper) and old-fashioned word processors.
The very earliest word processors were electric typewriters with a LCD display that could store one line
of text. You could type in a line of text, make corrections, and when you pressed return, that line was
printed. These are still being manufactured (finding this picture surprised me).
Later, the LCD display was replaced with a monochrome 80 column monitor, and the documents could be saved/loaded from a floppy disc. Some versions supported a separate spreadsheet application accessible from a main menu. All software was stored on ROM so upgrading was more or less impossible. For home users, a personal home computer was a cheaper solution (and more entertaining), while the IBM PC clone became popular for offices.
Read up on the history of Singapore.
For a time between the 1960's and 1990's, their country had high unemployment, crime and bad housing.
So they embarked on an education and technology modernisation programme.
It's a fear of going back to those days which allows the government to keep such a strict regime.
Plus there's also the knowledge that in a single city nation, when problems start, they can escalate
extremely fast.
The techniques are called "texture analysis" and "texture synthesis". Before the advent of framebuffers in the late 1960's, psychologists tried to understand the human perception of texture. After this time, many researchers have tried to find ways
of synthesizing new textures from existing textures, particularly from aerial imagery. These have included quilting methods (copying and pasting small bits of texture from one image to another larger image). Other methods include using the FFT to convert an image into its equivalent sum of sine waves. Wavelets try and break down an image into a frequency distributing of a particular shape (a lunar surface could be reduced down to a crater shaped heightmap and a frequency distribution). However, on some occasions you want to preserve repetitiveness (brickwork), while on others you don't want such an effect (terrain, oceans). A good way to avoid this, is through the use of Wang tiling which allows short range repetition, but prevents long range repetition. Basically, you want a texture function that gives you the same colour/normal/height for the same texture coordinate each time. The most practical ways so far are the use of Perlin noise functions. There are also advanced lighting models which factor in the direction of the light source, the viewpoint, and even subsurface scattering.
With the progress of multi-core CPU's, especially looking at the AMD / ATI deal, PC's are moving towards a single 'super chip' that will do everything while phasing out the use of a truly separate graphics system.
Not really...
PC's run multiple processes that have unpredictable branching - like network protocol stacks, device drivers and word processors and plug'n'play devices. More CPU cores help to spread the load. For the desktop windows system, 3D functionality was simply a bolt-on to the windows system through a separate API, now it is integral to the windows system. However, the new multi-core CPU's will still have the graphics processing logic.
In the past, supercomputers were either built from custom ASIC's or simply from a large number of CPU's networked together into a particular topology .
GPU's now support both floating-point textures and downloadable shading programs that are executed in parallel, Combining these two features together, gives the GPU all the functionality of a supercomputer.
Although up until now, the GPU has only supported 16-bit floating point precision rather than the 32-bit or 64-bit precision that traditional supercomputing applications such as FFT or computational fluid dynamics have required.
And since these applications are purely mathematical equations with no conditional branching within the innermost loops, these are well suited to being ported onto the GPU. The only limitation has been that GPU's couldn't form scalable architectures - at least until SLI came along. So, you've basically got supercomputing performance on a board. This fits into the scalable architecture of a supercomputer .