If you really want to spite the RIAA, involve yourself in open piracy for no profit. Send the artists money directly or go see them in concert (which they get a larger take from, anyhow). That's what I do, personally. Look at free alternatives like Emusic.com - but don't give them another penny.
Canadian law says that the RIAA give up the right to procecute you for piracy done for personal use by your own hand. Make full use of that. The current levy hike they propose is insane, but since the government has decided to transistion music into a public good, you're stupid not to take advantage of it. I know I'll be trumpeting this little factoid at the top of my lungs to anyone who will listen if the price of an iPod goes up by over $100 or $150 because of this!
However, maybe this will give emusic.com and others the ability to break the RIAA stranglehold on music. That's what they're really afraid of.
And for those of you interested in a cool slashdot article, how about someone with a little money and time go out and get one of these copy protected CDs. Then do an analog sample with a nice quality headphone adapter cable into a reasonably standard sound card and then do some comparisons online (although, I'm not even sure if you could put samples up as fair use anymore!). Show them the futility of this first hand.
That the article posted before this one is the most outrageous vendor lie ever told? *grin*
"Write once, run anywhere (maybe)"
Steve
Religious closed-mindedness, wow...
on
Build Your Own UFO
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Of all places, I would have expected their to be some more objective people here on slashdot. Largely, what I've seen is a bunch of people with little or no scientific training calling this guy names and making light of his experiments. There was another time people did that, in the middle ages. Luckly, this thing called the Enlightenment happened and the scientific method allowed for the discovery of most of the luxuries the ignorant masses (of which I see nicely represented here) take for granted. There have already been lots of references to powered flight, but others, like electricity, AC vs. DC power, the automobile, etc all have examples through history.
I could justify you and I could stomach this crap if he was asking for investors or money. He's not. He has a genuinely interesting effect, he has indicated that here's how you do an INDEPENDANT VERIFICATION, and he has also proposed a number of experiments that can be done to see if there is something interesting here. Nowhere does he claim anything other than a interest in the science and experimentation with high voltage effects. Like you people do when you experiment with the kernel - after all, you're just a bunch of fools when there's tried-and-true existing kernels on the market, right? That's sarcasm, for the challenged.
I have actually built one of these things on a different design years ago. This is a well known ion-engine concept. The problem is the power suuplies needed to make it work in any kind of practical application. The effect I designed for was a air turbulence effect that used the high voltage to ionize air molecules and accllerate them downward. That is why I suspect that the devices have problems in humid situations. BUT YOU COULD EXPERIMENT AND PROPOSE THIS. There is an experiment that rules out an external field, the faraday cage one. You could try to reduce the air pressure and see if the effect drops linearly, or blow compressed air at it to try and reduce lift, or even put it in a vacuum chamber. BUT THOSE ARE EXPERIMENTS!
Calling this guy a crackpot without any attempt to verify his well laid out experiments is a disgrace. If you see a problem with his experiments or apparatus, tell us. Or if you care that much, replicate his experiment. If it fails, post your results. I might get bored and try some of this sometime. But the information is all there!
Kudos to this guy for showing the spirit of backyard experimentation, and shame on you mods for promoting the kind of crap that's in the parent.
Tesla was Hungarian. He was a brilliant student. Read some books on his life. You have to remember electricity was not understood the way it is now in Tesla's day - he visualized in his head what the waves did, how the electric and magnetic fields interacted. There WAS no formal training in electricity! People thought that an AC motor was impossible - Tesla INVENTED that. The man was a brilliant genius, and largely understood. He is amoung the few engineers to have a unit named after him, the Tesla (Magnetic Field Intensity, equal to 10k Gauss IIRC).
Unlike Edison, Tesla actually had a clue about the physics of what he was doing. He was also doing some experiments on the MegaWatt (IIRC) level in New York at that point in time. For you "pull energy out of air" people, that's what a radio does. He is also on record as saying that a free source of energy would probably be a very, very bad thing for the future of man. I forget the exact quote.
Excellent comment and I agree completely. OS/2, like MacOS X, has that polished, finished, and well thought out feel to it that I was missing in a OS for a long time. Lack of applications and hardware support is what killed off OS/2, but with the pile of open source applications being rapidly ported to Cocoa/Carbon on OSX, and apple's excellent hardware compatibility - e.g. what's there, works - will help it to overcome the historic stumbling blocks of a new OS.
I laugh whenever I hear about decentralized computing, because it assumes the people running the decentrialized systems are competent and above board and would NEVER screw anyone over or scrimp here and there to save a few bucks. How did this get modded up so high? There will be a huge market in providing these services in a complimentary fashion, however.. but, since you asked:
Why is there a hard disk in my workstation?
Where, exactly, will you store all your pr0n? Are you going to accept huge latencies to move data around? Are you going to trust that the provider of space-of-the-week isn't going to get a court order from the RIAA/MPAA to get rid of your goodies, or serve you with a summons? How about playing your games? Are you going to trust whatever encryption they offer?
Why is there a CPU capable of immense processing power in my workstation that will run idle for most of its life?
Because it costs $100 bucks, and will be $50 bucks in a year? CPU power is cheap, and we're nowheres near what's required for the next generation of applications. Will you trust your provider of CPU cycles to always have what you want on demand, and never scrimp to save money? The real question here should be "why do I only have one CPU in my machine" or "why aren't rack mount home basement clusters more popular". My definition of "immense processing power" and yours are likely quite different. Call me when I can get real-time photorealistic 3D pr0n, then, maybe, we can talk about there being enough CPU power in my box.
Why is there anything in my PC other than the input and output devices that I require?
Ummmmmm.. that's what's in your PC now. There's no reason to control the data in a central spot, you're right. Anyone who assumes users will mindlessly buy into service models when stuff is cheap is fooling themselves. Does anyone remember Divx, and how hard that flopped? Think about it. That's why most of us have home servers.
Why do I have to bother with that room at all and couldn't it be a service that I subsribe to?
Anyone stupid enough to buy into this gets what they deserve.
Another Linux Deskop User Convert to OSX
on
Penguin2Apple
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm not sure why I'm writing this, since it will undoubtedly get flamed. I've run desktop linux since about 1998? Or so.. Back then, linux was a toy and I used NT for work. Linux was moving so fast, I had lots of time to develop and tweak code then - in university - and life was good. I was lucky in that when I graduated, I could run linux desktops at work for the most part, and I enjoyed it. I still use linux daily for compiling applications and in server roles. Solaris is another work companion, running high-end design tools for analog electronics. I also use Win2k daily as many of the prototyping boards I use for FPGA work are win-only, along with other embedded tools.
However, 8 months ago, one of the guys I worked with got a new toy - a Apple Titanium Powerbook. This thing is the sexiest piece of hardware I've ever seen. Hell, real live women have complimented me on it. Imagine that. I needed to get a notebook, looked around, and got a Tibook myself. At the time, I had every intention of blowing linux away and installing Yellow Dog linux. Honest! However, I decided I'd give OSX a fair shake, and I wanted to learn the OS anyhow. Learnign new things is never a bad thing from techie perspective, anyhow. I give it the quick test - is there a terminal? I'll be damned. "Hey, this thing is based on BSD", I think to myself. So I type in the magic two letter command that's inspired more flame wars than Bill Gates and Osama Bin Laden put together: "vi". F*ck me. It's there.
So, I start poking around on the Apple web site, and it's the best-organized thing I've ever seen. "why can't redhat do this", I ask myself. I click on developer, and gosh-be-damned, there's links to all this open source code I'm framiliar with - even a port of my ever-so-framilar BASH. So, I go looking for some developer tools and documentation, and get the shock of my life - not only are the APIs clearly documented, but there's example code for everying from Cocoa to Firewire right there - AND, there's a free IDE to tie all the development tools together. F*ck me. This jobs guy seems to be on to something, I think. 30 minutes after being exposed to this OS, I have OpenGL example programs compiling and running, hardware accellerated even. Wow.
Fast forward to six months later. I'm amazed every day at how well the mac works. It's has never crashed on me.. the GUI can be a little sluggish, but that doesn't bother me too much, as I'm a console monkey myself. Loads of developer support. I can plug in my perhiprials - digital camera, rio mp3 player, JVC DV camcorder - and not only do they work with NADA fiddling around, but I'm greeted by a well thought out application that is ready to talk to the device with no drama whatsoever. Here's to thoughtful GUI design. Microsoft Office for OSX was another surprise - I'm amazed they haven't killed it yet, because unlike it's windows cousin, it's uncluttered and efficient. Office X has, however, crashed on me a few times. No shocking revalations there.
However, what OS X made me do was assess how much work I was accomplishing relative to how much tinkering and configuring I was doing running linux on the desktop. As I get older, my time is more valuable, and I don't have a whole day to reconfigure things anymore. I don't have to reconfigure anything with OS X. It just works. Gnome and KDE have come a long way here, but they're not there yet. I imagine they will be in the future - but this is now. There is a sacrifice in terms of the hardware available, but what's available works very well. Games aren't there, but there are more than were there for Linux - including the Canary, Mac-only games. I solved that problem long ago with a games-only PC anyhow - apply the best tool to each task.
Sometimes, I think to myself - The motto for this OS should be "It Works". Because it does just that, with a minimum of drama. Something, after being involved with computers since I was 8, I find refreshingly new. Apple has done what Redhat should have done, take a solid open source core, make sure it's consistant and useable, put a reputation and corporation behind it's maintenance and support, AND do so without alienating the community of users that spawned it. Support from large projects like Mozilla have resulted in a great communications platform for OSX, and hopefully the upcoming OpenOffice will find it's way to OS X in a similar way as well.
Hats off to Apple, and I invite everyone here to try it. It's not all things to all people, but it's solved my general purpose computing needs in a way that nothing previous has, and brought back some of the excitement about a hardware platform that I felt in the Amiga days. The combination of an exciting OS with suprior hardware engineering is a real winner in my opinion. "To each, their own".
My primary work machine is a water cooled athlon. It runs pretty damn near ambient, and it runs cooler than it did with a heat sink even if I turn off the fan (e.g. silent running). This has been running 24/7 for about 4 months now with no problems whatsoever, so just go with that.. I have the chip overclocked as high as the motherboard multiplier will let me.
http://www.nyx.net/~smanley/watercool
That said, this has to be the most pointless ask slashdot I've ever seen. Why would you ask that? Niquid N2 is expensive and dangerous. Most motherboards and memory can't clock high enough to overheat a watercooled system. If you're going to spend 5 large on a N2 cooling system, why not just get a half dozen watercooled machines and cluster them?
My next box is a Powermac on OSX, and the linux box can move to the closet. Quiet, and clustering is as easy as 1-2-3.
I'm going to openly admit my willful ignorance of the subscription issue. I probably won't pay for the site, if there's ads, I'll just block them, and if I can't do that, I'll move elsewhere. The value-add to my day right now isn't that high - slashdot is an interesting way to fill boring spaces in work. I might pay for higher quality content, pictures of Jon Katz being forced to read war and peace 5000 times, etc - that would require real editors, producing real content, maybe some technial articles.
There's too many replacements now.. I can just read the EE times all day, too. And block their ads. Ha.
What I see happening here is Slashdot is going to fill up the compuserve model from the old days. For us old geezers (ha, I'm only 25 and feel old) who remember Quantum Link, those services were basically just BBS systems on crack. They had lots of files, lots of people, lots of topics - but they weren't personal. What happened was that small BBSes with people in the local community sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain. I can see the same thing happening if slashdot goes to a commercial model - there will be an untapped demand, and lots of tools to fill it.
Folks, anyone can run a weblog site now.. I just finished configuring a scoop site (nicer than slash IMHO) for work. It's no big deal to kick a old pentium under a desk and start up a little local community.. this is happening all over as we speak. Slashdot is unique in the sheer volume of people it brings to the table.. anything which impacts the number of contributing users decreases it's only competitive advantage other than brand recognition.
Think long and hard about the subscriptions, guys. There's lots of content that I would pay here, but let me tell you, you're going to need a better carrot than "pay me or look at crappy ads". Make the pitch to the value-added service for the subscription and I might bite though.. for tips, you could start at perhaps letting paying users vote on stories in the submission queue, getting some real stories from real writers in there, and paying SOMEONE to check the front page for errors and duped submissions..
"Phasers issued to police (laser/tazer hybrid)"? eh? how the heck do you integrate a light beam generating device (which still havent seen any significant improvement this decade, at least that I'm aware of) with a device that shoots a physical projectile carrying a current in an at all useful manner?"
This one isn't a leap, in fact, these have been demonstrated in labs for while now. Nikola Tesla might have even come across this idea (using UV light rather than a laser).
The idea is that you use a light beam - UV, or a pulsed laser - to ionize a path through the air. This path then acts like a wire that you can use to discharge high voltage down towards a potential target, as you can have a common ground plane in most situtations. If you're familiar with current tasers, they use a launched device connected by wires, which isn't really that effective and you limit your ability to fire successive rounds.
There's a lot of interesting stuff going down right now.. I couldn't have predicted the technologies I work with now 10 years ago (IC design). One very exciting field has to do with the implementation of neural networks in analog VLSI. IMHO that's where some of the AI technologies will come out of, not sequentially executing CPUs.
There's definately thought put into this.. 20 years ago, things were a lot different.
First, for the uninformed: The AI debate is something of the same class of ongoing flamefest that can only be produced by Vi vs. Emacs, Debian vs. Redhat, or maybe Linux vs. Sun.:) So take this stuff with a grain of salt, the posters here are right: Nobody really has a clue. **
Basic truth about AI: we don't have a clue
That's correct. The intesting thing is, we might not need one, either. Paradoxical? Maybe. It's possible that the design for a cognitive AI might come from our own DNA ultimately: Once the process whereby a human brain is built from the instructions in the DNA - a gross oversimplification - it should be possible to simulate the system. This, of course being an impossibly complicated computational task at this point in time. But there are starts; witness folding at home and other distributed projects. Given enough time, it will be doable. Would AI be possible with a synthetic implementation of our own brains? Interesting question.
Broad-front hill-climbing AI (which includes neural nets, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing) only works on a limited class of problems. Learning algorithms usually hit a maximum early and then stall. These techniques are useful tools, but they don't scale up; you can't build some huge neural net and train it to do language translation, for example
This is correct, but remember, this message is being brought to you by a horribly complicated and alcohol-fed (*grin*) neural network, too. The basic techniques for small-N layer neural networks are understood. We don't understand some of the effects and interactions that occur when N becomes obscenely big. Doesn't mean people aren't working on it, though. The very fact nature uses neural networks in all intelligent creatures - specifically, neurons, which behave much like transistors in that they can introduce gain to a system - indicates to me that the answer lies there.
Personally, I think we have to buckle down and work out lizard-level AI (move around, evaluate terrain, run, don't fall down, recognize prey, recognize threats, feed, run, hide, attack, defend, etc.) and work our way up. This means accepting that human-level AI is a long way off. Progress in this area is being made, but mostly within the video game industry, not academia, because those are the skills non-player characters need.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but there's a HUGE amount of interest in the applications and theory of neural networks and neuroscience right now. The problem, in my very, humbled, and unpublished opinion is that the platform most researchers are using - a analog simulation running on a digital computer of relatively low precision - is the wrong way to go about it. It's difficult to efficiently simulate huge networks. Worse, we don't understand what we're simulating! So we don't really know if the conversion to a digital simulation hurts whatever magic might happen on higher-level nets that makes us interesting.
What's even more interesting is how we would judge the intelligence of such a being: It needs to be connected to the environment - be it virtual or real - for there to be valid input for the system to gain information about it's own frame of reference. The implications here with the online bot communities are interesting.
We have to approach this as a very hard problem, not as one that will yield to a single insight, because the one-trick approach has flopped.
Hear, hear. The human brain has an estimated ~100 billion neurons connected in god knows how many ways. The level of complexity we understand really well is a pittance in comparison. The whole XOR debacle with perceptrons in the 50's and the upsurgence (but eventual stalling) of interest in the 80's is interesting for a variety of reasons. The complexity might be too hard for us ever to understand - but it might be possible to clone that complexity in another system that's been evolved rather than proven mathematically.
I'm not saying that AI is impossible. But we really don't know how to approach the problem at all.
AI is a horrible term. However, lots of people know how to approach the problem, it's just a matter of having the tools and resources to go about studying it. I don't think the answer is going to be found in a digital computer, but I have higher hopes for what might come out of a actual hardware implementation of research in silicon.
For anyone interested in this, I really recommend reading this (old, but still very good) book: Analog VLSI and Neural Systems by Carver Mead.
** of course, I'm biased, because I work in a vlsi lab and this is an active research interest of mine. I also have a very optimistic outlook for the future of these systems.
Just some comments from someone who works in a relevant arena (microelectronics) and is researching some of the issues with this theory.. I'm a little buzzed now too:).
The problem of robot mobility has largely been solved by the aptly named "Asimo" from Honda. They've demonstrated that the bipedal form of motion can be engineered effectively and sucessfully using the same techniques that we use - these robots "learn" to walk around. So, comparisions to robot wars and battlebots aren't really relevant. To think that a machine can't ultimately have the same physical senses as we do is the ultimate hubris.
Secondly, computers as we know them - sequential instruction processing machines - will probably never have ANY sort of real AI in them. Any attempt to model a "real" life system is only a crude approximation of the real physical process. However, we can implement real, massively parallel neural networks at the transistor level that behave just like their biological counterparts with the same technology. I've been actively researching implementing neural networks with current VLSI technology, and there are some VERY impressive results being obtained in this area currently. Have a look at some of Carver Mead's publications and papers - this field is just getting off the ground.
In my opinion, one of two things will happen: We will become obsoleted by machines, hopelessly dependant on technology we don't understand anymore, or we will become integrated with future technology. These aren't new ideas, and they aren't my ideas. As someone working with these technologies, however, most of the comments here miss the point. If I had the technology to map every neuron in your brain and build an equilivilant circuit on a future analog chip, would it be any less capable? I hope I'll be around to find out!
Read the articles and look around. There's lots of research in this arena, and for sure, some of the concerns are justified. But remember, humans are a part of nature, and it's my feeling that these are just natural progressions... there's nothing amoral about extinction, after all. We're around because a chunk of rock smacked into the earth a long time ago...
Re:Linux Ports != Linux Games
on
Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I hope I got people thinking about some possible reasons why Loki had a hard time. You don't learn anything from a failure if you don't know why..
Let me clarify a few points. Yeah, the looks on the Ti Book kick ass. But so does how the OS looks and acts - not to mention the good start projects like fink.sourceforge.net have. XDarwin is great. I needed a machine that'd run for four hours and be thin and light as well. Sony or Apple. Sony's tech support is HORRIBLE (in my opinion). So off to apple I go. I'm really, really glad I chose the Ti book - it introduced me to what some commerical providers can do with the open source communities good starts. Apple brought their best foot forward, and the OS community brought theirs. The results astound me.
But enough about that. I work developing ASICs and embedded systems for a variety of industries in a research lab. I run linux on my primary desktop right now - about as modern a system as you can get, a watercooled athlon, even. Ximian Gnome has come a long way - but it looks like it's going to be woven into the Solaris/SUN fold, and synergies will appear there the way they did with Apple and BSD, I'm sure. FWIW, the design packages I use (Cadence Family) all run on high end Sun workstations. Mentor Graphics has some limited native linux support. Doesn't matter as long as I have a X client.
Redhat does NOT currently offer developers anywhere NEAR the level of support and integration apple does through their developer tool releases and their documentation available through their web site - all gratis. The design of the OS is great, the tools are great, the look and feel is just right - one button be damned.
What Redhat SHOULD have done in my opinion - and to their credit, you're right, they are moving in this direction - is that they should have stepped up to the plate to make sure that common hardware - like, 3D accellerators - are all supported fully by the window manager and display system and are available to games in a user-friendly way. No XF86Config to edit, no nothing. Plug it in and it works. Apple did this with OpenGL. Redhat should have made sure that there is a way for people to watch movies and DVDs without going through 1001 semi-legal hoops, twitches, and jumps for a half working solution. Apple did this with their Quicktime player and iDVD. Apple controls their base motherboards, yes. They work closely with third parties like NVidia and ATI to make sure their cards are supported. Other companies like creative are coming around to provide support, as well - backed by Apple as the provider of corporate sanity and legal guarantees. One thing I'm learning as I get older is the world isn't black and white. Closed source and open source CAN play nice together.
Redhat should have played the role of Apple or Microsoft for the linux world. Yes, they don't control the hardware. They damn well could have worked a lot closer with third party hardware people like NVidia to get their things working right out of the box, so companies like Loki aren't left with 100 line README files on how to make a game work on a given platform. Trying to keep this rant on topic, Loki tried to fit itself in the middle when the installed base wasn't ready and their sales figures reflected that.
What is really troubling to me is that now I can see projects like XDarwin, Fink (fink.sourceforge.net) derailing the effort to get linux on the desktop. Efforts by Sun to intergrate the fruits of open source development - remember, open source users benefit when the installed base goes up - will also further hurt linux on the desktop. Gnome 2.0 with Ximian updates on Solaris is going to make my Sunblade machines a lot more attractive looking!
Apple has a real winner here, and I encourage more people to try OS X. The user experience is something I really missed - reliability and a solid application base.
I really, really, really hope someone at Redhat or any of the major commercial distros looks at what Apple (and Sun, to a lesser degree) are doing and come up with a similar strategy. I don't want there to be any more Loki style failures in the future.
What I saw of the 'linux gaming' movement, I wasn't too pleased with.. the idea was noble, but in reality, a) computers are cheap, so I have another machine to play games on besides my linux workstation and b) the ports were either a pain in the ass to get running, or my 3D card was a pain in the ass to get running, or xxx yyy was a PITA to get running. Sorry, no sale. It would have been nice to see a killer title emerge on the linux platform - but Tux Racer just isn't going to cut it *grin*. I think that's what linux gaming was going to need to get off the ground. Games rely too heavily on things that are very platform specific - e.g. controllers and game APIs, and 3D accelleration. Linux loses.
I'm not sure this is all Loki's fault though. Has anyone else here been introducted to OS X recently? I got a Ti Powerbook because I needed a machine that would work for 4 hours on a battery charge. No big deal on the OS, as long as it runs vim (and it does, through XDarwin, natively). OS X is flawlessly integrated. It reminds me of what my amiga was back in the day - a great platform, where everything worked. No, it isn't completely open source. But, "It works".
My beef: Aqua and OS X is what Redhat SHOULD have done when they released linux. Take the open source start, hire a team of developers to make everything work flawlessly and consistantly. Glue it together with GREAT developer tools and documentation. Make new hardware work without three kernel recompiles and a prayer to ye gods. Get solid APIs people can build applications from on a bulletproof kernel. Redhat missed out, and I think the failure of gaming to catch on is a symptom of this bigger problem.
There's sure a lot of successful games for OS X. Even native ones.
They overlooked something that might be life saving, and that's the installation of a GFCI outlet. It's very easy to do, I built one for my watercooled machine on a extension cord. Without one, a (rare) but possible failure of the pump could mean that current decides to return to ground through you. Ouch.
For what it's worth, I run a custom watercooled setup that I managed to get squeezed completely inside a standard PC case. It works great, no problems. I still need intake/exhaust fans, though, and until I put an intelligent controller in it isn't that much quiter than a normal setup in a good case. It works a lot better though:).
You could probably make something that'd be able to encode a 1200-2400 bps signal pretty easily. 9600 or higher is trickier. There are 99 44/100 ready solutions from Linx Technologies (www.linxtechnologies.com) and others make little modules that do exactly what you want.
For a 100% turnkey solution, last time I checked, Parallax (www.parallaxinc.com) sold a data in here - data out there set of modules that talked at 9600 baud up to 1/4 mile LOS.
I watercooled my work computer, runs great..
on
Power Water Cooling Kits
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· Score: 3, Interesting
For anyone who's interested in watercooling a work/production machine, I had great results and gained a LOT of stabilty. Just be sure to install a GFCI on the outlet! The importance of this isn't mentioned in a lot of the commercial kits and could be a life-saving precaution.
The URL to the install, where I got it, how I managed to make it all fit inside a standard mid-tower case along with 4 hard drives and 2 cdroms, etc, can be found at: www.nyx.net/~smanley/watercool
A quantifiable way to affect gravity (one of the fundamental forces of the universe) with the one most common to us, an electromagnetic force. Of course, your mileage may very as to how:). A good unified theory of life, the universe, and everything would do for gravity what E=MC^2 and quanutm physics did for nuclear physics and what Maxwell did for electricity - give us a way to possibly engineer it.
Of course, lots of other crazy things might be possible then, too. All of it comes from a way to unite the fundamental forces, though. It's too bad more articles (and comments!) don't make this clear.
What's to stop a terrorist from just going to school in the USA and learning all the particulars they want? Here in Canada, there are flyers all over the place on "Education in the USA". Engineering is the same no matter where you go, as well. All you need are textbooks, which, last time I checked, you didn't need ID and a security clearance to buy. If that happens, I'm going to get real worried.
The only defence against terrorists is an educated, thinking populace. Unfortunately, an educated, thinking populace doesn't knuckle under to government propaganda and control quite as easily as an ignorant, reflexive populace. The strengths of our countries (I'm Canadian) is that we are free to exhange information and ideas to -better- ourselves. It's the free discource of information that's given us the economoies we take for granted. I fear this has been forgotton by those who are too easily scared by sensationalist media, and too easily capitalized on my power-hungry politicians.
Too slow now. Make it faster. Hell, if it's possible to make a civic run a 1/4 mile in 13 seconds..:) Darpa's unmanned drones are cool, but they lack the flexibility of a replacement infantry troop. I'd like to see how advanced Honda takes this - bipedal motion is pretty effective for all-terrain use.
The UCAV prototypes and tanks you see on TLC don't freak me out like Asimo.. too much scifi, maybe. I find it interesting nobody has mentioned this already, though.
Anyone need a fearless ground force? Give this one a few years, lighten it up, armour it, add a rifle of choice, and you've got one hell of a infantry unit. Asimov's laws, whatever. This thing isn't going to be your secretary, it's going to be a great addition to some nations military. There is still substaintial work to be done on the concept, they've definately demonstrated that it's possible to develop a robot that is bipedal and flexible. I'm not sure a lot of people would have thought you could do what they're doing now.
Nowhere is this shockingly obvious application listed in any of Honda's sites or any popular articles on the topic.
While I haven't thought all this through for a problem yet (imagine that, heh), I believe there are a number of organizations that collect sites into a large group - like a cable network. I guess OSDN would be something like that for linux/open source sites. The pr0n people set up "verifier" services, serving the purpose to make sure you're > age of majority whereever you live, but I'd also hazard a guess they get $ based on the number of "logins" to that service that they generate per month/day/whatever.
Would that model work for Slashdot et al? $29.95 per year, you get a login good at all OSDN-affiliated sites, and then everyone's happy? Most small sites are run by people willing to absorb some cost or share cost, it's only when they become really big/popular that there's a problem.
Again, maybe there's something I missed. Forced micropayment at the ISP level is going to flop, and flop hard. I'm not going to manage 150 subscriptions to 150 different sites, either. I might be more inclined to handle one or two, however.
For what it's worth, SourceForge/Freshmeat and Google are about the only things on the net I'd pay money to use, though.:)
Slashdot Mirror
That's the point. Since the government wants music to be a public good (taxed), then treat it like a public good.
Steve
Hahaha, oh well. :) If you can't win and can only lose, don't play, I guess!
Steve
If you really want to spite the RIAA, involve yourself in open piracy for no profit. Send the artists money directly or go see them in concert (which they get a larger take from, anyhow). That's what I do, personally. Look at free alternatives like Emusic.com - but don't give them another penny.
Canadian law says that the RIAA give up the right to procecute you for piracy done for personal use by your own hand. Make full use of that. The current levy hike they propose is insane, but since the government has decided to transistion music into a public good, you're stupid not to take advantage of it. I know I'll be trumpeting this little factoid at the top of my lungs to anyone who will listen if the price of an iPod goes up by over $100 or $150 because of this!
However, maybe this will give emusic.com and others the ability to break the RIAA stranglehold on music. That's what they're really afraid of.
And for those of you interested in a cool slashdot article, how about someone with a little money and time go out and get one of these copy protected CDs. Then do an analog sample with a nice quality headphone adapter cable into a reasonably standard sound card and then do some comparisons online (although, I'm not even sure if you could put samples up as fair use anymore!). Show them the futility of this first hand.
What, are ADC chips going to get banned next?
That the article posted before this one is the most outrageous vendor lie ever told? *grin*
"Write once, run anywhere (maybe)"
Steve
Of all places, I would have expected their to be some more objective people here on slashdot. Largely, what I've seen is a bunch of people with little or no scientific training calling this guy names and making light of his experiments. There was another time people did that, in the middle ages. Luckly, this thing called the Enlightenment happened and the scientific method allowed for the discovery of most of the luxuries the ignorant masses (of which I see nicely represented here) take for granted. There have already been lots of references to powered flight, but others, like electricity, AC vs. DC power, the automobile, etc all have examples through history.
I could justify you and I could stomach this crap if he was asking for investors or money. He's not. He has a genuinely interesting effect, he has indicated that here's how you do an INDEPENDANT VERIFICATION, and he has also proposed a number of experiments that can be done to see if there is something interesting here. Nowhere does he claim anything other than a interest in the science and experimentation with high voltage effects. Like you people do when you experiment with the kernel - after all, you're just a bunch of fools when there's tried-and-true existing kernels on the market, right? That's sarcasm, for the challenged.
I have actually built one of these things on a different design years ago. This is a well known ion-engine concept. The problem is the power suuplies needed to make it work in any kind of practical application. The effect I designed for was a air turbulence effect that used the high voltage to ionize air molecules and accllerate them downward. That is why I suspect that the devices have problems in humid situations. BUT YOU COULD EXPERIMENT AND PROPOSE THIS. There is an experiment that rules out an external field, the faraday cage one. You could try to reduce the air pressure and see if the effect drops linearly, or blow compressed air at it to try and reduce lift, or even put it in a vacuum chamber. BUT THOSE ARE EXPERIMENTS!
Calling this guy a crackpot without any attempt to verify his well laid out experiments is a disgrace. If you see a problem with his experiments or apparatus, tell us. Or if you care that much, replicate his experiment. If it fails, post your results. I might get bored and try some of this sometime. But the information is all there!
Kudos to this guy for showing the spirit of backyard experimentation, and shame on you mods for promoting the kind of crap that's in the parent.
Tesla was Hungarian. He was a brilliant student. Read some books on his life. You have to remember electricity was not understood the way it is now in Tesla's day - he visualized in his head what the waves did, how the electric and magnetic fields interacted. There WAS no formal training in electricity! People thought that an AC motor was impossible - Tesla INVENTED that. The man was a brilliant genius, and largely understood. He is amoung the few engineers to have a unit named after him, the Tesla (Magnetic Field Intensity, equal to 10k Gauss IIRC).
Unlike Edison, Tesla actually had a clue about the physics of what he was doing. He was also doing some experiments on the MegaWatt (IIRC) level in New York at that point in time. For you "pull energy out of air" people, that's what a radio does. He is also on record as saying that a free source of energy would probably be a very, very bad thing for the future of man. I forget the exact quote.
Excellent comment and I agree completely. OS/2, like MacOS X, has that polished, finished, and well thought out feel to it that I was missing in a OS for a long time. Lack of applications and hardware support is what killed off OS/2, but with the pile of open source applications being rapidly ported to Cocoa/Carbon on OSX, and apple's excellent hardware compatibility - e.g. what's there, works - will help it to overcome the historic stumbling blocks of a new OS.
I laugh whenever I hear about decentralized computing, because it assumes the people running the decentrialized systems are competent and above board and would NEVER screw anyone over or scrimp here and there to save a few bucks. How did this get modded up so high? There will be a huge market in providing these services in a complimentary fashion, however.. but, since you asked:
Why is there a hard disk in my workstation?
Where, exactly, will you store all your pr0n? Are you going to accept huge latencies to move data around? Are you going to trust that the provider of space-of-the-week isn't going to get a court order from the RIAA/MPAA to get rid of your goodies, or serve you with a summons? How about playing your games? Are you going to trust whatever encryption they offer?
Why is there a CPU capable of immense processing power in my workstation that will run idle for most of its life?
Because it costs $100 bucks, and will be $50 bucks in a year? CPU power is cheap, and we're nowheres near what's required for the next generation of applications. Will you trust your provider of CPU cycles to always have what you want on demand, and never scrimp to save money? The real question here should be "why do I only have one CPU in my machine" or "why aren't rack mount home basement clusters more popular". My definition of "immense processing power" and yours are likely quite different. Call me when I can get real-time photorealistic 3D pr0n, then, maybe, we can talk about there being enough CPU power in my box.
Why is there anything in my PC other than the input and output devices that I require?
Ummmmmm.. that's what's in your PC now. There's no reason to control the data in a central spot, you're right. Anyone who assumes users will mindlessly buy into service models when stuff is cheap is fooling themselves. Does anyone remember Divx, and how hard that flopped? Think about it. That's why most of us have home servers.
Why do I have to bother with that room at all and couldn't it be a service that I subsribe to?
Anyone stupid enough to buy into this gets what they deserve.
I'm not sure why I'm writing this, since it will undoubtedly get flamed. I've run desktop linux since about 1998? Or so.. Back then, linux was a toy and I used NT for work. Linux was moving so fast, I had lots of time to develop and tweak code then - in university - and life was good. I was lucky in that when I graduated, I could run linux desktops at work for the most part, and I enjoyed it. I still use linux daily for compiling applications and in server roles. Solaris is another work companion, running high-end design tools for analog electronics. I also use Win2k daily as many of the prototyping boards I use for FPGA work are win-only, along with other embedded tools.
However, 8 months ago, one of the guys I worked with got a new toy - a Apple Titanium Powerbook. This thing is the sexiest piece of hardware I've ever seen. Hell, real live women have complimented me on it. Imagine that. I needed to get a notebook, looked around, and got a Tibook myself. At the time, I had every intention of blowing linux away and installing Yellow Dog linux. Honest! However, I decided I'd give OSX a fair shake, and I wanted to learn the OS anyhow. Learnign new things is never a bad thing from techie perspective, anyhow. I give it the quick test - is there a terminal? I'll be damned. "Hey, this thing is based on BSD", I think to myself. So I type in the magic two letter command that's inspired more flame wars than Bill Gates and Osama Bin Laden put together: "vi". F*ck me. It's there.
So, I start poking around on the Apple web site, and it's the best-organized thing I've ever seen. "why can't redhat do this", I ask myself. I click on developer, and gosh-be-damned, there's links to all this open source code I'm framiliar with - even a port of my ever-so-framilar BASH. So, I go looking for some developer tools and documentation, and get the shock of my life - not only are the APIs clearly documented, but there's example code for everying from Cocoa to Firewire right there - AND, there's a free IDE to tie all the development tools together. F*ck me. This jobs guy seems to be on to something, I think. 30 minutes after being exposed to this OS, I have OpenGL example programs compiling and running, hardware accellerated even. Wow.
Fast forward to six months later. I'm amazed every day at how well the mac works. It's has never crashed on me.. the GUI can be a little sluggish, but that doesn't bother me too much, as I'm a console monkey myself. Loads of developer support. I can plug in my perhiprials - digital camera, rio mp3 player, JVC DV camcorder - and not only do they work with NADA fiddling around, but I'm greeted by a well thought out application that is ready to talk to the device with no drama whatsoever. Here's to thoughtful GUI design. Microsoft Office for OSX was another surprise - I'm amazed they haven't killed it yet, because unlike it's windows cousin, it's uncluttered and efficient. Office X has, however, crashed on me a few times. No shocking revalations there.
However, what OS X made me do was assess how much work I was accomplishing relative to how much tinkering and configuring I was doing running linux on the desktop. As I get older, my time is more valuable, and I don't have a whole day to reconfigure things anymore. I don't have to reconfigure anything with OS X. It just works. Gnome and KDE have come a long way here, but they're not there yet. I imagine they will be in the future - but this is now. There is a sacrifice in terms of the hardware available, but what's available works very well. Games aren't there, but there are more than were there for Linux - including the Canary, Mac-only games. I solved that problem long ago with a games-only PC anyhow - apply the best tool to each task.
Sometimes, I think to myself - The motto for this OS should be "It Works". Because it does just that, with a minimum of drama. Something, after being involved with computers since I was 8, I find refreshingly new. Apple has done what Redhat should have done, take a solid open source core, make sure it's consistant and useable, put a reputation and corporation behind it's maintenance and support, AND do so without alienating the community of users that spawned it. Support from large projects like Mozilla have resulted in a great communications platform for OSX, and hopefully the upcoming OpenOffice will find it's way to OS X in a similar way as well.
Hats off to Apple, and I invite everyone here to try it. It's not all things to all people, but it's solved my general purpose computing needs in a way that nothing previous has, and brought back some of the excitement about a hardware platform that I felt in the Amiga days. The combination of an exciting OS with suprior hardware engineering is a real winner in my opinion. "To each, their own".
My primary work machine is a water cooled athlon. It runs pretty damn near ambient, and it runs cooler than it did with a heat sink even if I turn off the fan (e.g. silent running). This has been running 24/7 for about 4 months now with no problems whatsoever, so just go with that.. I have the chip overclocked as high as the motherboard multiplier will let me.
http://www.nyx.net/~smanley/watercool
That said, this has to be the most pointless ask slashdot I've ever seen. Why would you ask that? Niquid N2 is expensive and dangerous. Most motherboards and memory can't clock high enough to overheat a watercooled system. If you're going to spend 5 large on a N2 cooling system, why not just get a half dozen watercooled machines and cluster them?
My next box is a Powermac on OSX, and the linux box can move to the closet. Quiet, and clustering is as easy as 1-2-3.
I'm going to openly admit my willful ignorance of the subscription issue. I probably won't pay for the site, if there's ads, I'll just block them, and if I can't do that, I'll move elsewhere. The value-add to my day right now isn't that high - slashdot is an interesting way to fill boring spaces in work. I might pay for higher quality content, pictures of Jon Katz being forced to read war and peace 5000 times, etc - that would require real editors, producing real content, maybe some technial articles.
There's too many replacements now.. I can just read the EE times all day, too. And block their ads. Ha.
What I see happening here is Slashdot is going to fill up the compuserve model from the old days. For us old geezers (ha, I'm only 25 and feel old) who remember Quantum Link, those services were basically just BBS systems on crack. They had lots of files, lots of people, lots of topics - but they weren't personal. What happened was that small BBSes with people in the local community sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain. I can see the same thing happening if slashdot goes to a commercial model - there will be an untapped demand, and lots of tools to fill it.
Folks, anyone can run a weblog site now.. I just finished configuring a scoop site (nicer than slash IMHO) for work. It's no big deal to kick a old pentium under a desk and start up a little local community.. this is happening all over as we speak. Slashdot is unique in the sheer volume of people it brings to the table.. anything which impacts the number of contributing users decreases it's only competitive advantage other than brand recognition.
Think long and hard about the subscriptions, guys. There's lots of content that I would pay here, but let me tell you, you're going to need a better carrot than "pay me or look at crappy ads". Make the pitch to the value-added service for the subscription and I might bite though.. for tips, you could start at perhaps letting paying users vote on stories in the submission queue, getting some real stories from real writers in there, and paying SOMEONE to check the front page for errors and duped submissions..
"Phasers issued to police (laser/tazer hybrid)"? eh? how the heck do you integrate a light beam generating device (which still havent seen any significant improvement this decade, at least that I'm aware of) with a device that shoots a physical projectile carrying a current in an at all useful manner?"
This one isn't a leap, in fact, these have been demonstrated in labs for while now. Nikola Tesla might have even come across this idea (using UV light rather than a laser).
The idea is that you use a light beam - UV, or a pulsed laser - to ionize a path through the air. This path then acts like a wire that you can use to discharge high voltage down towards a potential target, as you can have a common ground plane in most situtations. If you're familiar with current tasers, they use a launched device connected by wires, which isn't really that effective and you limit your ability to fire successive rounds.
There's a lot of interesting stuff going down right now.. I couldn't have predicted the technologies I work with now 10 years ago (IC design). One very exciting field has to do with the implementation of neural networks in analog VLSI. IMHO that's where some of the AI technologies will come out of, not sequentially executing CPUs.
There's definately thought put into this.. 20 years ago, things were a lot different.
Steve
First, for the uninformed: The AI debate is something of the same class of ongoing flamefest that can only be produced by Vi vs. Emacs, Debian vs. Redhat, or maybe Linux vs. Sun. :) So take this stuff with a grain of salt, the posters here are right: Nobody really has a clue. **
Basic truth about AI: we don't have a clue
That's correct. The intesting thing is, we might not need one, either. Paradoxical? Maybe. It's possible that the design for a cognitive AI might come from our own DNA ultimately: Once the process whereby a human brain is built from the instructions in the DNA - a gross oversimplification - it should be possible to simulate the system. This, of course being an impossibly complicated computational task at this point in time. But there are starts; witness folding at home and other distributed projects. Given enough time, it will be doable. Would AI be possible with a synthetic implementation of our own brains? Interesting question.
Broad-front hill-climbing AI (which includes neural nets, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing) only works on a limited class of problems. Learning algorithms usually hit a maximum early and then stall. These techniques are useful tools, but they don't scale up; you can't build some huge neural net and train it to do language translation, for example
This is correct, but remember, this message is being brought to you by a horribly complicated and alcohol-fed (*grin*) neural network, too. The basic techniques for small-N layer neural networks are understood. We don't understand some of the effects and interactions that occur when N becomes obscenely big. Doesn't mean people aren't working on it, though. The very fact nature uses neural networks in all intelligent creatures - specifically, neurons, which behave much like transistors in that they can introduce gain to a system - indicates to me that the answer lies there.
Personally, I think we have to buckle down and work out lizard-level AI (move around, evaluate terrain, run, don't fall down, recognize prey, recognize threats, feed, run, hide, attack, defend, etc.) and work our way up. This means accepting that human-level AI is a long way off. Progress in this area is being made, but mostly within the video game industry, not academia, because those are the skills non-player characters need.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but there's a HUGE amount of interest in the applications and theory of neural networks and neuroscience right now. The problem, in my very, humbled, and unpublished opinion is that the platform most researchers are using - a analog simulation running on a digital computer of relatively low precision - is the wrong way to go about it. It's difficult to efficiently simulate huge networks. Worse, we don't understand what we're simulating! So we don't really know if the conversion to a digital simulation hurts whatever magic might happen on higher-level nets that makes us interesting.
What's even more interesting is how we would judge the intelligence of such a being: It needs to be connected to the environment - be it virtual or real - for there to be valid input for the system to gain information about it's own frame of reference. The implications here with the online bot communities are interesting.
We have to approach this as a very hard problem, not as one that will yield to a single insight, because the one-trick approach has flopped.
Hear, hear. The human brain has an estimated ~100 billion neurons connected in god knows how many ways. The level of complexity we understand really well is a pittance in comparison. The whole XOR debacle with perceptrons in the 50's and the upsurgence (but eventual stalling) of interest in the 80's is interesting for a variety of reasons. The complexity might be too hard for us ever to understand - but it might be possible to clone that complexity in another system that's been evolved rather than proven mathematically.
I'm not saying that AI is impossible. But we really don't know how to approach the problem at all.
AI is a horrible term. However, lots of people know how to approach the problem, it's just a matter of having the tools and resources to go about studying it. I don't think the answer is going to be found in a digital computer, but I have higher hopes for what might come out of a actual hardware implementation of research in silicon.
For anyone interested in this, I really recommend reading this (old, but still very good) book: Analog VLSI and Neural Systems by Carver Mead.
** of course, I'm biased, because I work in a vlsi lab and this is an active research interest of mine. I also have a very optimistic outlook for the future of these systems.
Just some comments from someone who works in a relevant arena (microelectronics) and is researching some of the issues with this theory.. I'm a little buzzed now too :).
The problem of robot mobility has largely been solved by the aptly named "Asimo" from Honda. They've demonstrated that the bipedal form of motion can be engineered effectively and sucessfully using the same techniques that we use - these robots "learn" to walk around. So, comparisions to robot wars and battlebots aren't really relevant. To think that a machine can't ultimately have the same physical senses as we do is the ultimate hubris.
Secondly, computers as we know them - sequential instruction processing machines - will probably never have ANY sort of real AI in them. Any attempt to model a "real" life system is only a crude approximation of the real physical process. However, we can implement real, massively parallel neural networks at the transistor level that behave just like their biological counterparts with the same technology. I've been actively researching implementing neural networks with current VLSI technology, and there are some VERY impressive results being obtained in this area currently. Have a look at some of Carver Mead's publications and papers - this field is just getting off the ground.
In my opinion, one of two things will happen: We will become obsoleted by machines, hopelessly dependant on technology we don't understand anymore, or we will become integrated with future technology. These aren't new ideas, and they aren't my ideas. As someone working with these technologies, however, most of the comments here miss the point. If I had the technology to map every neuron in your brain and build an equilivilant circuit on a future analog chip, would it be any less capable? I hope I'll be around to find out!
Read the articles and look around. There's lots of research in this arena, and for sure, some of the concerns are justified. But remember, humans are a part of nature, and it's my feeling that these are just natural progressions... there's nothing amoral about extinction, after all. We're around because a chunk of rock smacked into the earth a long time ago...
I hope I got people thinking about some possible reasons why Loki had a hard time. You don't learn anything from a failure if you don't know why..
Let me clarify a few points. Yeah, the looks on the Ti Book kick ass. But so does how the OS looks and acts - not to mention the good start projects like fink.sourceforge.net have. XDarwin is great. I needed a machine that'd run for four hours and be thin and light as well. Sony or Apple. Sony's tech support is HORRIBLE (in my opinion). So off to apple I go. I'm really, really glad I chose the Ti book - it introduced me to what some commerical providers can do with the open source communities good starts. Apple brought their best foot forward, and the OS community brought theirs. The results astound me.
But enough about that. I work developing ASICs and embedded systems for a variety of industries in a research lab. I run linux on my primary desktop right now - about as modern a system as you can get, a watercooled athlon, even. Ximian Gnome has come a long way - but it looks like it's going to be woven into the Solaris/SUN fold, and synergies will appear there the way they did with Apple and BSD, I'm sure. FWIW, the design packages I use (Cadence Family) all run on high end Sun workstations. Mentor Graphics has some limited native linux support. Doesn't matter as long as I have a X client.
Redhat does NOT currently offer developers anywhere NEAR the level of support and integration apple does through their developer tool releases and their documentation available through their web site - all gratis. The design of the OS is great, the tools are great, the look and feel is just right - one button be damned.
What Redhat SHOULD have done in my opinion - and to their credit, you're right, they are moving in this direction - is that they should have stepped up to the plate to make sure that common hardware - like, 3D accellerators - are all supported fully by the window manager and display system and are available to games in a user-friendly way. No XF86Config to edit, no nothing. Plug it in and it works. Apple did this with OpenGL. Redhat should have made sure that there is a way for people to watch movies and DVDs without going through 1001 semi-legal hoops, twitches, and jumps for a half working solution. Apple did this with their Quicktime player and iDVD. Apple controls their base motherboards, yes. They work closely with third parties like NVidia and ATI to make sure their cards are supported. Other companies like creative are coming around to provide support, as well - backed by Apple as the provider of corporate sanity and legal guarantees. One thing I'm learning as I get older is the world isn't black and white. Closed source and open source CAN play nice together.
Redhat should have played the role of Apple or Microsoft for the linux world. Yes, they don't control the hardware. They damn well could have worked a lot closer with third party hardware people like NVidia to get their things working right out of the box, so companies like Loki aren't left with 100 line README files on how to make a game work on a given platform. Trying to keep this rant on topic, Loki tried to fit itself in the middle when the installed base wasn't ready and their sales figures reflected that.
What is really troubling to me is that now I can see projects like XDarwin, Fink (fink.sourceforge.net) derailing the effort to get linux on the desktop. Efforts by Sun to intergrate the fruits of open source development - remember, open source users benefit when the installed base goes up - will also further hurt linux on the desktop. Gnome 2.0 with Ximian updates on Solaris is going to make my Sunblade machines a lot more attractive looking!
Apple has a real winner here, and I encourage more people to try OS X. The user experience is something I really missed - reliability and a solid application base.
I really, really, really hope someone at Redhat or any of the major commercial distros looks at what Apple (and Sun, to a lesser degree) are doing and come up with a similar strategy. I don't want there to be any more Loki style failures in the future.
Just my 0.02. cdn, even.
What I saw of the 'linux gaming' movement, I wasn't too pleased with.. the idea was noble, but in reality, a) computers are cheap, so I have another machine to play games on besides my linux workstation and b) the ports were either a pain in the ass to get running, or my 3D card was a pain in the ass to get running, or xxx yyy was a PITA to get running. Sorry, no sale. It would have been nice to see a killer title emerge on the linux platform - but Tux Racer just isn't going to cut it *grin*. I think that's what linux gaming was going to need to get off the ground. Games rely too heavily on things that are very platform specific - e.g. controllers and game APIs, and 3D accelleration. Linux loses.
I'm not sure this is all Loki's fault though. Has anyone else here been introducted to OS X recently? I got a Ti Powerbook because I needed a machine that would work for 4 hours on a battery charge. No big deal on the OS, as long as it runs vim (and it does, through XDarwin, natively). OS X is flawlessly integrated. It reminds me of what my amiga was back in the day - a great platform, where everything worked. No, it isn't completely open source. But, "It works".
My beef: Aqua and OS X is what Redhat SHOULD have done when they released linux. Take the open source start, hire a team of developers to make everything work flawlessly and consistantly. Glue it together with GREAT developer tools and documentation. Make new hardware work without three kernel recompiles and a prayer to ye gods. Get solid APIs people can build applications from on a bulletproof kernel. Redhat missed out, and I think the failure of gaming to catch on is a symptom of this bigger problem.
There's sure a lot of successful games for OS X. Even native ones.
They overlooked something that might be life saving, and that's the installation of a GFCI outlet. It's very easy to do, I built one for my watercooled machine on a extension cord. Without one, a (rare) but possible failure of the pump could mean that current decides to return to ground through you. Ouch.
For what it's worth, I run a custom watercooled setup that I managed to get squeezed completely inside a standard PC case. It works great, no problems. I still need intake/exhaust fans, though, and until I put an intelligent controller in it isn't that much quiter than a normal setup in a good case. It works a lot better though :).
Nice technological demonstration, here.. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/14/014620 4&mode=thread
You could probably make something that'd be able to encode a 1200-2400 bps signal pretty easily. 9600 or higher is trickier. There are 99 44/100 ready solutions from Linx Technologies (www.linxtechnologies.com) and others make little modules that do exactly what you want.
For a 100% turnkey solution, last time I checked, Parallax (www.parallaxinc.com) sold a data in here - data out there set of modules that talked at 9600 baud up to 1/4 mile LOS.
For anyone who's interested in watercooling a work/production machine, I had great results and gained a LOT of stabilty. Just be sure to install a GFCI on the outlet! The importance of this isn't mentioned in a lot of the commercial kits and could be a life-saving precaution.
The URL to the install, where I got it, how I managed to make it all fit inside a standard mid-tower case along with 4 hard drives and 2 cdroms, etc, can be found at: www.nyx.net/~smanley/watercool
Definately a great learning experience!
A quantifiable way to affect gravity (one of the fundamental forces of the universe) with the one most common to us, an electromagnetic force. Of course, your mileage may very as to how :). A good unified theory of life, the universe, and everything would do for gravity what E=MC^2 and quanutm physics did for nuclear physics and what Maxwell did for electricity - give us a way to possibly engineer it.
Of course, lots of other crazy things might be possible then, too. All of it comes from a way to unite the fundamental forces, though. It's too bad more articles (and comments!) don't make this clear.
What's to stop a terrorist from just going to school in the USA and learning all the particulars they want? Here in Canada, there are flyers all over the place on "Education in the USA". Engineering is the same no matter where you go, as well. All you need are textbooks, which, last time I checked, you didn't need ID and a security clearance to buy. If that happens, I'm going to get real worried.
The only defence against terrorists is an educated, thinking populace. Unfortunately, an educated, thinking populace doesn't knuckle under to government propaganda and control quite as easily as an ignorant, reflexive populace. The strengths of our countries (I'm Canadian) is that we are free to exhange information and ideas to -better- ourselves. It's the free discource of information that's given us the economoies we take for granted. I fear this has been forgotton by those who are too easily scared by sensationalist media, and too easily capitalized on my power-hungry politicians.
No need to make Asimo 'war ready' - it's to slow
Too slow now. Make it faster. Hell, if it's possible to make a civic run a 1/4 mile in 13 seconds.. :) Darpa's unmanned drones are cool, but they lack the flexibility of a replacement infantry troop. I'd like to see how advanced Honda takes this - bipedal motion is pretty effective for all-terrain use.
The UCAV prototypes and tanks you see on TLC don't freak me out like Asimo.. too much scifi, maybe. I find it interesting nobody has mentioned this already, though.
Anyone need a fearless ground force? Give this one a few years, lighten it up, armour it, add a rifle of choice, and you've got one hell of a infantry unit. Asimov's laws, whatever. This thing isn't going to be your secretary, it's going to be a great addition to some nations military. There is still substaintial work to be done on the concept, they've definately demonstrated that it's possible to develop a robot that is bipedal and flexible. I'm not sure a lot of people would have thought you could do what they're doing now.
Nowhere is this shockingly obvious application listed in any of Honda's sites or any popular articles on the topic.
While I haven't thought all this through for a problem yet (imagine that, heh), I believe there are a number of organizations that collect sites into a large group - like a cable network. I guess OSDN would be something like that for linux/open source sites. The pr0n people set up "verifier" services, serving the purpose to make sure you're > age of majority whereever you live, but I'd also hazard a guess they get $ based on the number of "logins" to that service that they generate per month/day/whatever.
Would that model work for Slashdot et al? $29.95 per year, you get a login good at all OSDN-affiliated sites, and then everyone's happy? Most small sites are run by people willing to absorb some cost or share cost, it's only when they become really big/popular that there's a problem.
Again, maybe there's something I missed. Forced micropayment at the ISP level is going to flop, and flop hard. I'm not going to manage 150 subscriptions to 150 different sites, either. I might be more inclined to handle one or two, however.
For what it's worth, SourceForge/Freshmeat and Google are about the only things on the net I'd pay money to use, though. :)