They'll outsource that work to India - to make sure the people they have hired to read outgoing emails don't disclose anything that their local competitors will find useful.
Every person has about 7 major genetic defects in their DNA, which only become apparent when two parents with the same defective gene have children.
Dealing with genetic diseases relies on three stages:
1. Identify which genes cause the problem and how they are passed on through the generations; whether they are dominant or submissive.
2. Create a test which determines which genes each parent has. From this information, it is possible to determine whether the disease will be passed on to their children.
If there is a risk, then they can undergo further genetic screening to prevent the gene from being passed onto their children.
The laptop cool factor is there for sure. Is there a cheap laptop that can plug into USB on my main machine and show up as another drive?
Look for a laptop which has the hard drive removable in the same way as the battery and CD-ROM drive. Then you can use an USB 2.5" pocket hard disk drive enclosure to connect the hard-drive directly to your desktop.
If you use a spare hard disk drive in the enclosure by itself, you can carry 60 - 100 Gigabytes of portable data storage around with you (15+ DVD movies), without the risk of losing a laptop.
Even worse, a Linux laptop won't shutdown if it becomes too hot - I lost a hard-drive this way. Normally, the laptop was used with the screen up, so there weren't any heat problems, but one time the screen was folded down for 36+ hours. Some time during this time, there was a grinding noise and the hard drive packed in.
Service life of the drive is approximately 5 years or 20,000 power on hours, which comes first, under the following assumptions:
Less than 333 power on hours per month.
Seeking/Writing/Reading operation is less than 20% of power on hours.
Intel optimised the performance of Just-In-Time compiling for Java straight to x86 assembly language. And at the same time, Intel also designed the Pentium processors to convert x86 instructions into internal processor instructions. What if Java were compiled directly into internal processor instructions?
(It's a fake webcam which plays precaptured frames of some guy dressed up as a chicken according to the command you type in. At least I think they are precaptured frames.)
There are numerous stories in the UK about people buying second hand laptops and finding military and local government data on them.
I personally found a couple of PC cases being thrown out on a skip. Everything had been stripped down and removed except for the hard disk drives, which were held in place by star shaped screws. If disk drives were designed to be installed/removed in a more modular fashion, then it would be a lot easier to reuse them rather than throw them out.
It's 12.5cm radius, or 25cm diameter. About the same with as a 16" LCD screen. From images of high resolution radar screens and displays, they would probably have to double the size of the screen.
But would an air traffic controller want to have to walk around such a display, or would he/she get disorientated, if it could spin around?
The UK did try using identity cards in the past; just before World War II. Unfortunately, some police officers used the inability to produce ID as an excuse for arresting people.
From: www.statewatch.org Three main reasons were put forward by the government for passing the law in September 1939. The first was the major dislocation of the population caused by mobilisation and mass evacuation and also the wartime need for complete manpower control and planning in order to maximise the efficiency of the war economy. It may or may not have been necessary - that is a matter of dispute but it was seen as emergency, temporary legislation to cope with special circumstances.
The second main reason why the Act was passed was the likelihood of rationing. It was felt that the imminence of rationing (introduced from January 1940 onwards) entailed the need for an up-to-date system of standardised registration, so that rationing could be introduced as easily as possible.
The third main reason was that the Government needed recent statistics about the population. As the last census had been held in 1931 and the next was not due until 1941, there was little accurate data on which to base vital planning decisions. The National Register was in fact an instant census. Indeed, the National Registration Act bears a close resemblance to the 1920 Census Act in many respects.
Introducing the new law to Parliament, Health Minister Walter Elliot explained that the whole process of registration would be carried through in about three weeks and that it would form the basis for proper wartime planning.
In short, none of the three major reasons put forward for the 1939 Act could be put forward today as a reason for introducing identity cards. There is no emergency on a remotely comparable scale to that of war; there is no immediate prospect of wholesale rationing; and there is no shortage of detailed census and survey data. Equally it is worth noting that none of the reasons nowadays advanced in favour of the introduction of identity cards notably the need for control and identification of undesirables - was put forward in 1939....
It is unlikely that the identity card system would have been abandoned had it not been for the test case of Willcock v Muckle (1951,49 LGR 584). In this case a driver was stopped in connection with a motoring offence and asked to produce his card. On his refusal to do so, either then or subsequently, lie was charged with an offence under Section 6(4). When the case reached appeal in the King's Bench Division, Lord Chief Justice Goddard delivered a ferocious attack upon police practice:
"Because the police have powers, it does not follow that they ought to exercise them on all occasions as a matter of routine. From what we have been told it is obvious that the police now, as a matter of routine, demand the production of a National Registration Card whenever they stop or interrogate a motorist for whatever cause... This Act was passed for security purposes: it was never intended for the purposes for which it is now being used"
On 7 December 1950, the 54 year old businessman was stopped while driving in London by a police officer who demanded that he present his Identity Card at a police station within 48 hours. He refused, was prosecuted and convicted.
Willcock appealed, in the case Willcock vs Muckle. Although he lost the appeal, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Goddard spoke out against the continued use of compulsory Identity Cards and commented that they "tend to make people resentful of the acts of the police".
Goddard's comments are thought to have influenced Winston Churchill's decision to scrap compulsory national Identity Cards in 1952.
Even buying a new PC with a pre-installed virus checker, you still have to connect to the Internet to download the latest virus definition files (now around 60+ Megabytes). And this is plenty of time for any one of millions of broadband punters worldwide to infect your machine.
At this rate, the amount of space allocated to virus definition files will exceed that of the OS and device drivers. A hard drive will become like human DNA with more junk data than active genes.
How ironic that a cost-saving method such as a "ram-disk" should now be considered a terrorist weapon.
10 years ago, having a RAM-disk on your PC was considered a good way of extending the life of your hard disk drive.
Our library was desperate to prevent the spread of boot viruses, and managed to find a way of making the hard-drives of publicly accessible PC's read only, and all user data downloaded from 'ftp' or 'gopher' could only be downloaded onto the ramdisk or floppy drive. As soon as the user went back to the applications menu, the ramdisk would be reinitialised.
Like the earphone piece Lt. Uhura wore in Star Trek, but with a microphone. If you could get voice recognition to work with such a small system, you could probably eliminate the need for buttons and SMS messaging. Perhaps the voice recognition could be done at the base station.
Very true - if nothing else, they could at least go down to the local electronics store and get a home network firewall.
One network company I worked for, used to do reliability tests on their customers sites. They would get a network analyzer and just blast away random data packets of random lengths with random addresses for a good couple of hours. All sites except one stood up to this test.
There was a discussion on slashot some time ago -research scientists don't really like firewalls on remote sites, because a well locked down network will always prevent them from doing whatever task they need to reset a crashed machine.
2. The vendor of the CAT scanner should provide a software update that stops such a critical piece of equipment from being so fragile and/or be sued for not fixing defective equipment.
It depends on how the TCP/IP stack was implemented
Just about all embedded systems use a BSD derived TCP/IP stack.
And for efficiency some network hardware drivers simply have function pointer arrays indexed by a 'type' fields with no bounds checking. So a packet with a data length one more bytes shorter than the size expected for that type would crash the system, as the data field simply contains garbage from cache memory.
And the funeral parlours also recover artificial joints, and any metal plates/bolts/screws that may have been implanted, as the health service may want them back for reuse.
If you couldn't make a game based on a certain set of ideas, wouldn't you be forced to create an original game?
Innovation in the early period of the games industry was done by programmers looking at each others work, copying some ideas, and adding some new ideas.
For patents that apply to video graphics, there are only so many ways of presenting information:
Symbolically 2D - Chess, nethack, Backgammon Symbolically 3D - 3D Tic-Tac-Toe
Third-person view/(fixed camera) - Falconseye
2D-Platform games - Donkey Kong 2D-Shooters (scrolling) - Defender/Xenon Third-person view - (roving camera) - Super-mario First-person view - Quake/Doom/Half-Life
Interactive-movies
And there are only so many concepts of actions that you can do in a game:
collect objects, avoid objects, move/control objects, place objects together, drop onjects, explore, time-limits, teleportation, kill/hit objects, create/evolve objects punish/reward objects.
Imagine if all of these concepts were patented by one or more companies? You would first have to find out whether you infringed a patent or not, who owned the patent, and how much they were expecting in license fees (an up-front one-off payment and/or royalties?). No small company would have time to do all that.
2. "No bulk downloading JPEGS". I *guess* maybe they are saying they don't want you to download pr0n with their service, but I can think of legitimate reasons for wanting to do that, such as mirroring web sites for personal use. (terraserver anyone?;)
Just use a proxy server that converts all JPG's into uncompressed true-color TIFF's - that should solve the problem.
One of the most practical applications for a wireless web-browser would be to be able to view a detailed map of the area you are currently in.
I'll agree with the first part - 1 bit processors wasn't very practical for commercial applications. But such an architecture was useful for encryption algorithms and circuit simulation and basic image processing. But that was replaced by early graphics accelerators, then Intel's local bus.
At any rate, the parallel supercomputer market has always been a niche, and putting a parallel supercomputer on a consumer grade chip isn't necessarily going to provide a huge benefit to the average user over what they have today other than some cost reductions.
Workstation vendors have moved to dual and quad core systems. This improves the performance of multithreaded CAD/CAM/animation applications by having one CPU handle OS tasks, and another handle application user input, and a third handle application background processing and yet. This is about the best way to assign tasks as the time spent by any CPU on communication between processors increases exponentially as the number of processors increases.
For the consumer market, the PS2 supports three/four independently executing processors, and the PS3 will support eight. Game developers were demanding that next generation consoles provide 1000x the performance of the PS2. The idea of the Cell processor is that a system can be built from any number of processors.
And this processing isn't just graphics, it's also physics, collision detection and AI.
Yeah, sure. We've heard that one before. If highly parallel operations were some kind of silver bullet, then Thinking Machines wouldn't have gone out of business a decade ago.
Thinking Machines didn't die because there was no demand for parallel processing, they died becausethey didn't look for business world applications for their systems, which IBM, Intel, and all the other supercomputer vendors were doing. Instead they relied exclusively on DARPA funding.
Do it Yourself. This is the keystone for future business success.
If its hard, all the more reason to do it in-house..
One of the goals of any business is to keep their operating costs and critical resources to a minimum. If you have an in-house application designed and maintained exclusively by a single engineer and he leaves to another company, you're going to take several months to get the replacement up to speed. If you have an off-the-shelf and/or an open-source solution, it will be much easier to find a replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll outsource that work to India - to make sure the people they have hired to read outgoing emails don't disclose anything that their local competitors will find useful.
Every person has about 7 major genetic defects in their DNA, which only become apparent when two parents with the same defective gene have children.
Dealing with genetic diseases relies on three stages:
1. Identify which genes cause the problem and how they are passed on through the generations; whether they are dominant or submissive.
2. Create a test which determines which genes each parent has. From this information, it is possible to determine whether the disease will be passed on to their children.
If there is a risk, then they can undergo further genetic screening to prevent the gene from being passed onto their children.
And Human Resources would be organising "group hug" days every week.
If you type in "hit the deck", chicken-person goes up to the screen and gives you a telling off - at least that happened once.
The laptop cool factor is there for sure. Is there a cheap laptop that can plug into USB on my main machine and show up as another drive?
Look for a laptop which has the hard drive removable in the same way as the battery and CD-ROM drive. Then you can use an USB 2.5" pocket hard disk drive enclosure to connect the hard-drive directly to your desktop.
If you use a spare hard disk drive in the enclosure by itself, you can carry 60 - 100 Gigabytes of portable data storage around with you (15+ DVD movies), without the risk of losing a laptop.
Even worse, a Linux laptop won't shutdown if it becomes too hot - I lost a hard-drive this way. Normally, the laptop was used with the screen up, so there weren't any heat problems, but one time the screen was folded down for 36+ hours. Some time during this time, there was a grinding noise and the hard drive packed in.
According to a typical hard drive specification
Service life of the drive is approximately 5 years or 20,000 power on hours, which comes first, under the following
assumptions:
Less than 333 power on hours per month.
Seeking/Writing/Reading operation is less than 20% of power on hours.
It's an interesting thought ...
Intel optimised the performance of Just-In-Time compiling for Java straight to x86 assembly language. And at the same time, Intel also designed the Pentium processors to convert x86 instructions into internal processor instructions. What if Java were compiled directly into internal processor instructions?
If it easy to develop, publishers won't invest $10 million to develop something any home programmer could write on their own PC
There is at least one Flash game:
Curiously Strong All Night Long
And there is Hapland, but that is probably more of a puzzle game.
Not as creepy as the Subservient Chicken.
(It's a fake webcam which plays precaptured frames of some guy dressed up as a chicken according to the command you type in. At least I think they are precaptured frames.)
There are numerous stories in the UK about people buying second hand laptops and finding military and local government data on them.
I personally found a couple of PC cases being thrown out on a skip. Everything had been stripped down and removed except for the hard disk drives, which were held in place by star shaped screws. If disk drives were designed to be installed/removed in a more modular fashion, then it would be a lot easier to reuse them rather than throw them out.
It's 12.5cm radius, or 25cm diameter. About the same with as a 16" LCD screen. From images of high resolution radar screens and displays, they would probably have to double the size of the screen.
But would an air traffic controller want to have to walk around such a display, or would he/she get disorientated, if it could spin around?
The UK did try using identity cards in the past; just before World War II. Unfortunately, some police officers used the inability to produce ID as an excuse for arresting people.
...
... This Act was passed for security purposes: it was never intended for the purposes for which it is now being used"
From: www.statewatch.org
Three main reasons were put forward by the government for passing the law in September 1939. The first was the major dislocation of the population caused by mobilisation and mass evacuation and also the wartime need for complete manpower control and planning in order to maximise the efficiency of the war economy. It may or may not have been necessary - that is a matter of dispute but it was seen as emergency, temporary legislation to cope with special circumstances.
The second main reason why the Act was passed was the likelihood of rationing. It was felt that the imminence of rationing (introduced from January 1940 onwards) entailed the need for an up-to-date system of standardised registration, so that rationing could be introduced as easily as possible.
The third main reason was that the Government needed recent statistics about the population. As the last census had been held in 1931 and the next was not due until 1941, there was little accurate data on which to base vital planning decisions. The National Register was in fact an instant census. Indeed, the National Registration Act bears a close resemblance to the 1920 Census Act in many respects.
Introducing the new law to Parliament, Health Minister Walter Elliot explained that the whole process of registration would be carried through in about three weeks and that it would form the basis for proper wartime planning.
In short, none of the three major reasons put forward for the 1939 Act could be put forward today as a reason for introducing identity cards. There is no emergency on a remotely comparable scale to that of war; there is no immediate prospect of wholesale rationing; and there is no shortage of detailed census and survey data. Equally it is worth noting that none of the reasons nowadays advanced in favour of the introduction of identity cards notably the need for control and identification of undesirables - was put forward in 1939.
It is unlikely that the identity card system would have been abandoned had it not been for the test case of Willcock v Muckle (1951,49 LGR 584). In this case a driver was stopped in connection with a motoring offence and asked to produce his card. On his refusal to do so, either then or subsequently,
lie was charged with an offence under Section 6(4). When the case reached appeal in the King's Bench Division, Lord Chief Justice Goddard delivered a ferocious attack upon police practice:
"Because the police have powers, it does not follow that they ought to exercise them on all occasions as a matter of routine. From what we have been told it is obvious that the police now, as a matter of routine, demand the production of a National Registration Card whenever they stop or interrogate a motorist for whatever cause
The case of Clarence Henry Willock is described at wikipedia.
On 7 December 1950, the 54 year old businessman was stopped while driving in London by a police officer who demanded that he present his Identity Card at a police station within 48 hours. He refused, was prosecuted and convicted.
Willcock appealed, in the case Willcock vs Muckle. Although he lost the appeal, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Goddard spoke out against the continued use of compulsory Identity Cards and commented that they "tend to make people resentful of the acts of the police".
Goddard's comments are thought to have influenced Winston Churchill's decision to scrap compulsory national Identity Cards in 1952.
A more detailed explanation can be found here
Even buying a new PC with a pre-installed virus checker, you still have to connect to the Internet to download the latest virus definition files (now around 60+ Megabytes). And this is plenty of time for any one of millions of broadband punters worldwide to infect your machine.
At this rate, the amount of space allocated to virus definition files will exceed that of the OS and device drivers. A hard drive will become like human DNA with more junk data than active genes.
How ironic that a cost-saving method such as a "ram-disk" should now be considered a terrorist weapon.
10 years ago, having a RAM-disk on your PC was considered a good way of extending the life of your hard disk drive.
Our library was desperate to prevent the spread of boot viruses, and managed to find a way of making the hard-drives of publicly accessible PC's read only, and all user data downloaded from 'ftp' or 'gopher' could only be downloaded onto the ramdisk or floppy drive. As soon as the user went back to the applications menu, the ramdisk would be reinitialised.
Like the earphone piece Lt. Uhura wore in Star Trek, but with a microphone. If you could get voice recognition to work with such a small system, you could probably eliminate the need for buttons and SMS messaging. Perhaps the voice recognition could be done at the base station.
Very true - if nothing else, they could at least go down to the local electronics store and get a home network firewall.
One network company I worked for, used to do reliability tests on their customers sites. They would get a network analyzer and just blast away random data packets of random lengths with random addresses for a good couple of hours. All sites except one stood up to this test.
There was a discussion on slashot some time ago -research scientists don't really like firewalls on remote sites, because a well locked down network will always prevent them from doing whatever task they need to reset a crashed machine.
"...It's life Jim, but not as we know it..."
2. The vendor of the CAT scanner should provide a software update that stops such a critical piece of equipment from being so fragile and/or be sued for not fixing defective equipment.
It depends on how the TCP/IP stack was implemented
Just about all embedded systems use a BSD derived TCP/IP stack.
And for efficiency some network hardware drivers simply have function pointer arrays indexed by a 'type' fields with no bounds checking. So a packet with a data length one more bytes shorter than the size expected for that type would crash the system, as the data field simply contains garbage from cache memory.
And the funeral parlours also recover artificial joints, and any metal plates/bolts/screws that may have been implanted, as the health service may want them back for reuse.
If you couldn't make a game based on a certain set of ideas, wouldn't you be forced to create an original game?
Innovation in the early period of the games industry was done by programmers looking at each others work, copying some ideas, and adding some new ideas.
For patents that apply to video graphics, there are only so many ways of presenting information:
Symbolically 2D - Chess, nethack, Backgammon
Symbolically 3D - 3D Tic-Tac-Toe
Third-person view/(fixed camera) - Falconseye
2D-Platform games - Donkey Kong
2D-Shooters (scrolling) - Defender/Xenon
Third-person view - (roving camera) - Super-mario
First-person view - Quake/Doom/Half-Life
Interactive-movies
And there are only so many concepts of actions that you can do in a game:
collect objects, avoid objects, move/control objects, place objects together, drop onjects, explore, time-limits, teleportation, kill/hit objects, create/evolve objects
punish/reward objects.
Imagine if all of these concepts were patented by one or more companies? You would first have to find out whether you infringed a patent or not, who owned the patent, and how much they were expecting in license fees (an up-front one-off payment and/or royalties?). No small company would have time to do all that.
2. "No bulk downloading JPEGS". I *guess* maybe they are saying they don't want you to download pr0n with their service, but I can think of legitimate reasons for wanting to do that, such as mirroring web sites for personal use. (terraserver anyone? ;)
Just use a proxy server that converts all JPG's into uncompressed true-color TIFF's - that should solve the problem.
One of the most practical applications for a wireless web-browser would be to be able to view a detailed map of the area you are currently in.
I'll agree with the first part - 1 bit processors wasn't very practical for commercial applications. But such an architecture was useful for encryption algorithms and circuit simulation and basic image processing.
But that was replaced by early graphics accelerators, then Intel's local bus.
At any rate, the parallel supercomputer market has always been a niche, and putting a parallel supercomputer on a consumer grade chip isn't necessarily going to provide a huge benefit to the average user over what they have today other than some cost reductions.
Workstation vendors have moved to dual and quad core systems. This improves the performance of multithreaded CAD/CAM/animation applications by having one CPU handle OS tasks, and another handle application user input, and a third handle application background processing and yet. This is about the best way to assign tasks
as the time spent by any CPU on communication between processors increases exponentially as the number of processors increases.
For the consumer market, the PS2 supports three/four independently executing processors, and the PS3 will support eight. Game developers were demanding that next generation consoles provide 1000x the performance of the PS2. The idea of the Cell processor is that a system can be built from any number of processors.
And this processing isn't just graphics, it's also physics, collision detection and AI.
One World, One Government, One Operating System
Yeah, sure. We've heard that one before. If highly parallel operations were some kind of silver bullet, then Thinking Machines wouldn't have gone out of business a decade ago.
Thinking Machines didn't die because there was no demand for parallel processing, they died becausethey didn't look for business world applications for their systems, which IBM, Intel, and all the other supercomputer vendors were doing. Instead they relied exclusively on DARPA funding.
Do it Yourself. This is the keystone for future business success.
..
If its hard, all the more reason to do it in-house
One of the goals of any business is to keep their operating costs and critical resources to a minimum. If you have an in-house application designed and maintained exclusively by a single engineer and he leaves to another company, you're going to take several months to get the replacement up to speed. If you have an off-the-shelf and/or an open-source solution, it will be much easier to find a replacement.