Yeah... that's what I almost did, but I decided to store the signature as a series of x/y coords. The nice thing about that is I can actually fake a higher resolution by smoothing the curves and antialiasing on the server side... neato.
But back to the point... why not sign your name? I mean, seriously. What would someone have to gain by faking your signature? And if you answer that question with 'money', please don't bother. You're only liable for $50 if your credit card is stolen... so what else could they do?
I wrote the software for my company's delivery handhelds that captures the signature of the person accepting the merchandise. I came up with a fairly novel way of storing the data so that each sig only uses ~1K... which makes it easy to send over a CDPD wireless connection to my server. At this point I have about 33000 sigs in a database.
The thing is... I really doubt this would be useful for 'stealing' an identity. Sure, when you're talking about credit card sigs, it might be slightly different, but really...
The reason I think technology like this will never be implemented is that everyone, depending on their current state of mind, can sign at two separate times and look like two different people. Once someone is turned away at a sale because they were too sleepy or had a couple beers, the whole point of this would be useless.
just as a consumer should know what horsepower is when buying an automobile
come off it - nobody NEEDS to know what a horsepower is to buy a car.
as your quote states... the consumer should know... he said nothing about 'needs' to know.
He makes a perfectly valid point. Just a Joe consumer doesn't need to know what horsepower is, he doesn't need to know what a gigabyte is... but if he wants to be able to compare two similar products, he should learn them. period. It has nothing to do with a geek making himself feel smarter, it's just common sense.
Unless, of course, you are a fan of the 'entire civilization degressed to morons' future.
Re:These are the same sorts of idiots that ban bik
on
Geocaching Crackdown?
·
· Score: 1
That's one neat thing about Riverside Park in Tulsa, OK. Driving beside it you would never guess that the trees hide a rather extensive moutain bike track. Complete with jumps, and a pseudo-halfpipe. You get the best of both worlds... the main park for those that just want to picnic, and a hidden area for those with more destructive hobbies.
ok, I'll heartily admit that the 5 titles you mentioned were all great movies. In fact, seeing the name "The Dark Crystal" brought back memories of wonderful times sitting in front of the screen, getting engrossed in the story. Of course, nowadays, if I find out about someone who hasn't seen one of those, I instantly go into this "It's awesome!" explanation with plenty of "the effects rock", etc.
Here's the thing though... those movies were released when I was the target demographic. When I watch one of those movies now (aside from maybe SW), I'm amazed at how many blanks my brain filled in. The Dark Crystal was one of my favorite movies, and now I can only wonder why I wasn't distracted by the muppettesque job done on all of the characters. Granted, my brain was forced to work, and who knows... that may be why I have an imagination today.:)
But now back to the topic at hand... to say that puppets are superior visual effects to cg seems a little short-sighted to me. Given that both are separate art forms, it seems like the applesoranges argument.
I personally believe the best mix is when full-size sets, miniature sets, and cg are combined. I loved seeing that Shrek's house was actually a miniature sculpture with Bonsai trees and moss. I loved that some LoTR frames used hundreds of layers to create the environments. And most of all, I love that technology is now being used to bring fantasy stories to life for adults rather than being relegated to 'stories for children'.
If someone on/. decides that the images aren't believable, it doesn't really matter to me. And while many films don't spend a lot on cg and get it horribly wrong (cough*2*fast*cough*2*furious*cough), many others bring the state of the technology farther. And that just means good things in the future.
I bought the owner of my company a Dell Inspiron 8200. Hardware-wise, it's awesome. Has the Nvidia chipset, 512M RAM, 40G, etc. It came with XP pre-installed... XP either locks, gives ambiguous errors, or loses network connection at least once a week. What's funny.. he was used to Win98, and he actually thinks XP is worse.
Sure, you could say it's a Dell problem... and you'd be right, seeing as they are the ones that installed it. But at the same time... OEM installs software on a system that's supposed to be designed for said software, and it doesn't work?
um... why sell the customer bandwidth that you don't want them to use?
I know, you could always say that the service isn't intended to run at high-bandwidth 24/7, but that doesn't really matter. If P2P traffic is going to annoy you, either filter it, cap their bandwidth, or upgrade your hardware.
The thing is, P2P is just internet traffic. Why leave all that room unused? The internet isn't an emergency communications medium, so using 95% of the available bandwidth isn't really anything bad. It just means that more fat pipes need to be added. But just because P2P is P2P isn't a good enough reason.
Blender is stable. There are certain things that some want it to have... hence, they are being added. In the mean time, other specific parts are being re-written/optimized.
Just because you say their priorities are 'out of whack' doesn't really mean anything, with all due respect.
I thought RFID tags had to be read at very close distances... something like inches, or less.
Then again, I'm sure a robber would love to carry around hardware capable of amplifying these signals (from >10 feet away to be feasible) to the point of actually being able to read this info. Yup, robbers also like to carry around sacks with dollar-signs on them.
My application server (the most active server in the company (serves ~450 records/second for Goldmine (contact mgmt sw), along with >100MB graphics files, and runs as primary domain controller) has been up 411 days as of today.
Anecdotal evidence, sure, but absolutely true. If you ask me, it speaks volumes.
When I was 15 we lost 7 trees within 15 minutes. The *estimated* 100 mph winds in our area. One of the trees was a 118 year-old wild cherry. I'm sure we wouldn't have been as happy if it hit our house, but it didn't... so all was well.
It's wierd... I grew up in Tulsa, and I moved to NYC when I was 19. I'm now back in the Tulsa area. Why? I missed the storms. Granted, I've made sure that the areas I live in have been geographically pre-disposed to not having tornadoes, and I don't like the idea of people being hurt... but being in a shelter as an enormous supercell passes overhead is a bit of a rush.
Seriously, I'm writing a GUI'd app right now in Python with wxWindows for our sales staff. Yes, it's about 5 times slower than it would be in C, but it's going together quite quickly.
And no bothering with memory calls, variable types, etc. And under windows it'll even compile into an.exe for the few 9x machines they're using. nifty.
in-house support is not free, but how many companies no you know of that don't already have in-house support?
There are those that want to put the blame for failure on a support-related company, and there are those that have someone in-house that can fix the problem in a fraction of the time of said support-related company.
The point is, if there is already in-house support in place for the windows machines, and if said support is able to handle Linux (yes, it will have to be something other than an MC$E), then there is no extra cost other than the initial time to do the switchover.
good question. In my opinion, to pay $70 for basically... well... knoppix, they better keep their own apt repository stocked with everything I could possibly want, and the latest builds. I want to apt-get the latest kernel within a day or two of release if I have to pay that much.
Otherwise, what possible motivation would I have to buy it? It doesn't really give me anything.
And don't think this is just the oss-won't-pay-for-anything mentality. Really... the screenshots look exactly like knoppix without the name. knoppix has the hardware detection, is based on debian, etc. So what logical reason would I have to pay for something that I can already get for free?
ok, Balmer says that Linux doesn't innovate, or that MS innovates more, or whatever.
Here's the thing, how many innovations really need to happen on the OS level?
Personally, I innovate. Almost 1 or 2 a month (if not week), if I may say so myself. But those innovations are directly related to my company and how it works. If I had to make sure the same innovations were also 'innovations' in another company, I wouldn't be able to. Innovations are specific in nature... they innovate, or vastly improve, something specific. No matter how much the word is thrown around, true innovation can't happen very often at all in an OS. Why? Because it's a generic system made to be used is many varied circumstances.
How do you vastly improve (innovate) a generic system? Generally, you don't... you make many small improvements that result in the generic system becoming an innovation in itself... but only if it is replacing a completely different system. (hope that makes sense)
'Innovation' should be a word saved for the end-user's creativity, not for such a generic thing as an operating system.
I prefer to get the best of both worlds. I have a sizeable server that just holds all of the data. At our current level, it can hold about 10 days of backups, sorted by date in their own directories. Each morning, I have a shell script that sends the latest backup to a tape, which is taken off-site for insurance purposes.
The nice thing about this setup is that to restore a backed up file takes about as much time as it does to copy across the network instead of going through the tape.
of course, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's done this. I sure thought it was original when I did it though.:)
I've read slashdot everyday for a few years, but for some reason never saw the original article. And given my interest in robotics, I'm very glad this was posted, repeat or not.
I don't understand the mentality of someone who feels the necessity to point out every mistake that slashdot moderators make. I mean, you could be a troll, or you could just be anal. In either case, you contributed nothing to anyone. You apparently think someone has hired you to act as a critic. Critics annoy me to, unless they happened to be named Homer Simpson... then I just laugh.
Of course, it could also be that the color quickcam's CCD isn't as good as the grayscale's.
This is actually the case. To be honest, I haven't touched my old quickcams since, oh, probably kernel 2.0.5... but one thing i did notice is how bad the color's images were compared to the b&w.
It was explained to me at the time that it had more to do with the hardware than the CCD. Since most used the parallel port, they were hampered by bandwidth. Of course, they were expected to give the same color framerate as the b&w cams, so the hardware sends out lower quality frames to compensate.
As an aside, I used my b&w cam with my celestron refractor to get some pretty neat shots of the moon and such. All of which have been lost... i'm sure their on one of the hd's, but who knows which one...
Not to mention, Anderson's character Jack is a Simpsons fan.:)
In the episode where they all had their memories wiped... one of the few things he remembered was a "bald guy in a t-shirt", "I think he was important to me", "I think his name was Homer".
And in the episode in Antarctica... He said to Teal'c, "D'oh! I forgot to record the Simpsons." Teal'c looked at him strangely. "It's very important to me."
They made Profit first, 100,000 of it, then they made Blender GPL... actually the original owners had it good..
um... no. In fact, the 100,000 was to buy the IP back from the investors in the company. When NaN went bankrupt, the investors had everything... the money got the sources back into the public instead of rotting away on some investment company's backup server.
There are those out there that hate any language that allows spaces to effect it's running...
But Python just rocks. Throw pySQL, wxPython and Twisted into the mix, and you can have a full blown server with gui front-end that is just as stable as any other. I have a server that I wrote for wireless devices performing a few hundred SQL queries/changes and file writes per hour, and the speed is surprisingly very good for a language most people refer to as a 'script'.
Not to mention, the tab requirement makes reading the code so easy. You just know where functions begin and end without having to deal with {'s and }'s.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice joke at the end... i'd mod you up if I could. :)
Yeah... that's what I almost did, but I decided to store the signature as a series of x/y coords. The nice thing about that is I can actually fake a higher resolution by smoothing the curves and antialiasing on the server side... neato.
But back to the point... why not sign your name? I mean, seriously. What would someone have to gain by faking your signature? And if you answer that question with 'money', please don't bother. You're only liable for $50 if your credit card is stolen... so what else could they do?
I wrote the software for my company's delivery handhelds that captures the signature of the person accepting the merchandise. I came up with a fairly novel way of storing the data so that each sig only uses ~1K... which makes it easy to send over a CDPD wireless connection to my server. At this point I have about 33000 sigs in a database.
The thing is... I really doubt this would be useful for 'stealing' an identity. Sure, when you're talking about credit card sigs, it might be slightly different, but really...
The reason I think technology like this will never be implemented is that everyone, depending on their current state of mind, can sign at two separate times and look like two different people. Once someone is turned away at a sale because they were too sleepy or had a couple beers, the whole point of this would be useless.
just as a consumer should know what horsepower is when buying an automobile
come off it - nobody NEEDS to know what a horsepower is to buy a car.
as your quote states... the consumer should know... he said nothing about 'needs' to know.
He makes a perfectly valid point. Just a Joe consumer doesn't need to know what horsepower is, he doesn't need to know what a gigabyte is... but if he wants to be able to compare two similar products, he should learn them. period. It has nothing to do with a geek making himself feel smarter, it's just common sense.
Unless, of course, you are a fan of the 'entire civilization degressed to morons' future.
That's one neat thing about Riverside Park in Tulsa, OK. Driving beside it you would never guess that the trees hide a rather extensive moutain bike track. Complete with jumps, and a pseudo-halfpipe. You get the best of both worlds... the main park for those that just want to picnic, and a hidden area for those with more destructive hobbies.
I'm sure there must be more like this?
ok, I'll heartily admit that the 5 titles you mentioned were all great movies. In fact, seeing the name "The Dark Crystal" brought back memories of wonderful times sitting in front of the screen, getting engrossed in the story. Of course, nowadays, if I find out about someone who hasn't seen one of those, I instantly go into this "It's awesome!" explanation with plenty of "the effects rock", etc.
:)
/. decides that the images aren't believable, it doesn't really matter to me. And while many films don't spend a lot on cg and get it horribly wrong (cough*2*fast*cough*2*furious*cough), many others bring the state of the technology farther. And that just means good things in the future.
Here's the thing though... those movies were released when I was the target demographic. When I watch one of those movies now (aside from maybe SW), I'm amazed at how many blanks my brain filled in. The Dark Crystal was one of my favorite movies, and now I can only wonder why I wasn't distracted by the muppettesque job done on all of the characters. Granted, my brain was forced to work, and who knows... that may be why I have an imagination today.
But now back to the topic at hand... to say that puppets are superior visual effects to cg seems a little short-sighted to me. Given that both are separate art forms, it seems like the applesoranges argument.
I personally believe the best mix is when full-size sets, miniature sets, and cg are combined. I loved seeing that Shrek's house was actually a miniature sculpture with Bonsai trees and moss. I loved that some LoTR frames used hundreds of layers to create the environments. And most of all, I love that technology is now being used to bring fantasy stories to life for adults rather than being relegated to 'stories for children'.
If someone on
well... how about this:
I bought the owner of my company a Dell Inspiron 8200. Hardware-wise, it's awesome. Has the Nvidia chipset, 512M RAM, 40G, etc. It came with XP pre-installed... XP either locks, gives ambiguous errors, or loses network connection at least once a week. What's funny.. he was used to Win98, and he actually thinks XP is worse.
Sure, you could say it's a Dell problem... and you'd be right, seeing as they are the ones that installed it. But at the same time... OEM installs software on a system that's supposed to be designed for said software, and it doesn't work?
um... why sell the customer bandwidth that you don't want them to use?
I know, you could always say that the service isn't intended to run at high-bandwidth 24/7, but that doesn't really matter. If P2P traffic is going to annoy you, either filter it, cap their bandwidth, or upgrade your hardware.
The thing is, P2P is just internet traffic. Why leave all that room unused? The internet isn't an emergency communications medium, so using 95% of the available bandwidth isn't really anything bad. It just means that more fat pipes need to be added. But just because P2P is P2P isn't a good enough reason.
i've always wanted to say this...
RTFM.
and just which priorities would those be?
Blender is stable. There are certain things that some want it to have... hence, they are being added. In the mean time, other specific parts are being re-written/optimized.
Just because you say their priorities are 'out of whack' doesn't really mean anything, with all due respect.
I thought RFID tags had to be read at very close distances... something like inches, or less.
Then again, I'm sure a robber would love to carry around hardware capable of amplifying these signals (from >10 feet away to be feasible) to the point of actually being able to read this info. Yup, robbers also like to carry around sacks with dollar-signs on them.
linux.
My application server (the most active server in the company (serves ~450 records/second for Goldmine (contact mgmt sw), along with >100MB graphics files, and runs as primary domain controller) has been up 411 days as of today.
Anecdotal evidence, sure, but absolutely true. If you ask me, it speaks volumes.
When I was 15 we lost 7 trees within 15 minutes. The *estimated* 100 mph winds in our area. One of the trees was a 118 year-old wild cherry. I'm sure we wouldn't have been as happy if it hit our house, but it didn't... so all was well.
There's a fine line between cool and tragic.
It's wierd... I grew up in Tulsa, and I moved to NYC when I was 19. I'm now back in the Tulsa area. Why? I missed the storms. Granted, I've made sure that the areas I live in have been geographically pre-disposed to not having tornadoes, and I don't like the idea of people being hurt... but being in a shelter as an enormous supercell passes overhead is a bit of a rush.
go fig.
Python, python, py-thon!
.exe for the few 9x machines they're using. nifty.
Seriously, I'm writing a GUI'd app right now in Python with wxWindows for our sales staff. Yes, it's about 5 times slower than it would be in C, but it's going together quite quickly.
And no bothering with memory calls, variable types, etc. And under windows it'll even compile into an
in-house support is not free, but how many companies no you know of that don't already have in-house support?
There are those that want to put the blame for failure on a support-related company, and there are those that have someone in-house that can fix the problem in a fraction of the time of said support-related company.
The point is, if there is already in-house support in place for the windows machines, and if said support is able to handle Linux (yes, it will have to be something other than an MC$E), then there is no extra cost other than the initial time to do the switchover.
Also do they maintain their own apt repository?
good question. In my opinion, to pay $70 for basically... well... knoppix, they better keep their own apt repository stocked with everything I could possibly want, and the latest builds. I want to apt-get the latest kernel within a day or two of release if I have to pay that much.
Otherwise, what possible motivation would I have to buy it? It doesn't really give me anything.
And don't think this is just the oss-won't-pay-for-anything mentality. Really... the screenshots look exactly like knoppix without the name. knoppix has the hardware detection, is based on debian, etc. So what logical reason would I have to pay for something that I can already get for free?
ok, Balmer says that Linux doesn't innovate, or that MS innovates more, or whatever.
Here's the thing, how many innovations really need to happen on the OS level?
Personally, I innovate. Almost 1 or 2 a month (if not week), if I may say so myself. But those innovations are directly related to my company and how it works. If I had to make sure the same innovations were also 'innovations' in another company, I wouldn't be able to. Innovations are specific in nature... they innovate, or vastly improve, something specific. No matter how much the word is thrown around, true innovation can't happen very often at all in an OS. Why? Because it's a generic system made to be used is many varied circumstances.
How do you vastly improve (innovate) a generic system? Generally, you don't... you make many small improvements that result in the generic system becoming an innovation in itself... but only if it is replacing a completely different system. (hope that makes sense)
'Innovation' should be a word saved for the end-user's creativity, not for such a generic thing as an operating system.
I prefer to get the best of both worlds. I have a sizeable server that just holds all of the data. At our current level, it can hold about 10 days of backups, sorted by date in their own directories. Each morning, I have a shell script that sends the latest backup to a tape, which is taken off-site for insurance purposes.
:)
The nice thing about this setup is that to restore a backed up file takes about as much time as it does to copy across the network instead of going through the tape.
of course, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's done this. I sure thought it was original when I did it though.
no doubt! While the whole "Bart to the Future" episode wasn't great, it had some FUNNY parts.
"Throw something treasured into the fire."
-Bart throws in a firecracker-
"Not a firecracker!"
"But I got it from a guy on the reservation."
"That's crazy-talk."
"No, really, he was just outside."
"No, that's my brother, Crazy Talk."
__
"Why did a vision of MY future include a story about Lisa and Homer?"
"Maybe the spirits thought the vision was a little thin."
Classic stuff.
I've read slashdot everyday for a few years, but for some reason never saw the original article. And given my interest in robotics, I'm very glad this was posted, repeat or not.
I don't understand the mentality of someone who feels the necessity to point out every mistake that slashdot moderators make. I mean, you could be a troll, or you could just be anal. In either case, you contributed nothing to anyone. You apparently think someone has hired you to act as a critic. Critics annoy me to, unless they happened to be named Homer Simpson... then I just laugh.
Of course, it could also be that the color quickcam's CCD isn't as good as the grayscale's.
This is actually the case. To be honest, I haven't touched my old quickcams since, oh, probably kernel 2.0.5... but one thing i did notice is how bad the color's images were compared to the b&w.
It was explained to me at the time that it had more to do with the hardware than the CCD. Since most used the parallel port, they were hampered by bandwidth. Of course, they were expected to give the same color framerate as the b&w cams, so the hardware sends out lower quality frames to compensate.
As an aside, I used my b&w cam with my celestron refractor to get some pretty neat shots of the moon and such. All of which have been lost... i'm sure their on one of the hd's, but who knows which one...
Not to mention, Anderson's character Jack is a Simpsons fan. :)
In the episode where they all had their memories wiped... one of the few things he remembered was a "bald guy in a t-shirt", "I think he was important to me", "I think his name was Homer".
And in the episode in Antarctica... He said to Teal'c, "D'oh! I forgot to record the Simpsons." Teal'c looked at him strangely. "It's very important to me."
They made Profit first, 100,000 of it, then they made Blender GPL... actually the original owners had it good..
um... no.
In fact, the 100,000 was to buy the IP back from the investors in the company. When NaN went bankrupt, the investors had everything... the money got the sources back into the public instead of rotting away on some investment company's backup server.
There are those out there that hate any language that allows spaces to effect it's running...
But Python just rocks. Throw pySQL, wxPython and Twisted into the mix, and you can have a full blown server with gui front-end that is just as stable as any other. I have a server that I wrote for wireless devices performing a few hundred SQL queries/changes and file writes per hour, and the speed is surprisingly very good for a language most people refer to as a 'script'.
Not to mention, the tab requirement makes reading the code so easy. You just know where functions begin and end without having to deal with {'s and }'s.