Ah, but it doesn't have the same capability of the vcr. With a VCR, I simply say 'record' and it'll record my tv show without fanfare. This box will not record certian shows.
How will consumers react when they can't do something they are now able to do?
All of the newest copy protection schemes seem to revolve around the concept that joe consumer will give up certain abilities for higher quality or more bells and whistles. The new SACD, for instance, or HDTV with its record flags. They learned a lesson from macrovision - you have to put the hardware in the player, so you have to own the rights to anything that can play it (like every VCR has some royalties to, IIRC, RCA, but they require every manufacturer to put in a circuit which enables macrovision to work as a copy protection scheme). Thus, create a new format, create a new player (MiniDisc), own certian necessary patents (HDTV, MP3) and require everyone to buy into your copyright protection.
Which, in reality, I don't have a problem with. If I miss a show, movie, etc, I haven't really lost anything - if anything I've gained time. But fair use is still worth fighting for, it impacts much more than just being able to watch a show when/where/how it's convenient to me.
I think the problem here is that you won't be able to do anything with it. No command line, no x term, etc.
They would have to do that because if the box has signal decoding/decyphering capabilities then anyone with more than 'record', 'change channel', and 'volume' is going to either gain valuable info about how a particular station is encoded, or be able to have it decode all stations without paying for full service.
The tricky thing is - how does the GPL fit into this? Are they going to require cable companies to distribute a CD with every installed box and say, "You'll never need this, but by law we are required to give you the source code for this box, except the proprietary (useful) bits that are seperate binaries..."
I was loving it right up to the point where they explain that these will be available through the cable companies and enhanced tv providers. This means that it will be rented by and owned by companies that control what shows can be recorded, and can prosecute anyone caught 'tampering' with the device in any way.
If I could simply buy the hardware, great! But they know that they will make a more steady stream of money offering essentially a tivo like cable box to cable companies who can rent them to customers for $20/mo or more, who will gladly pay for them rather than $400 or more for a Tivo.
It's a great business idea, and I see them putting Tivo out of business in the larger markets. Tivo (and other pvr companies) will have to maneuver furiously to maintain their current customer base, nevermind a growing base.
But all is not so happy in geek land. You won't be able to record shows, or even pause shows, that providers don't want you to - and eventually that'll be most movies, lots of first run shows, etc. Skipping commercials may be disallowed at the providers descretion.
It's essentially a bid to take back TV, while providing customers with a facade of extra functionality. I bet they'll win, since eventually service providers will be required to use such devices if they want to carry certian premium channels - though that's a while away, it's coming.
After I was laid off (which wasn't that bad - one month's notice, no need to do work after notice. Could've been because I was expecting my second kid, and they were only laying people off to lower their costs so they could be bought out by another company) my supervisor attempted to perform some work on our old novell 4.1 server. The server stopped responding completely after a reboot, and they called me a day after when he finally decided he couldn't recover it.
By then I was consulting for another company at $25/hr, so I simply said I'd charge them that rate. He agreed, I came at 8pm and finished rebuilding the server, restoring data and users about 4am. Sent them a $200 bill, and got the check shortly thereafter.
He called a few times after for info about the isdn internet connection and other miscellaneous stuff, but didn't request that I come and fix things, and the calls were generally fairly short. Since they were nice in allowing me to later get on the router and download the configuration for another job later, I didn't think it was a big deal.
The key is that they need to learn the connection between a smoothly working network and the cost of maintaining one. You, by not asking for payment up front, are reinforcing their idea that networks are free, and the maintenance is free. It's the same reason people don't back up until they've had their first data loss and find out that it'll cost 10x as much to recover some of their data. Same with virus protection, etc. Quality costs, and she needs to know it.
You notice those squigly lines on your motherboard? They're not just to look pretty, they actually slow the signal down so that the 8, 16, 32, 64, etc parallel bits all arrive at their destination at the exact moment before the clock signal latches in the data.
Parallel solutions on flexible cable will not be viable anywhere near the average front side bus speed, nevermind faster interfaces. Sorry.
A not too recent slashdot article pointed out a unique way to manage large data transfers among clusters though:
As a simple example, each computer has N 100Mb interfaces. There are a total of J computers. you use K hubs (or, ideally, switches), and connect them together such that one computer has direct hub access to a portion (or all) of the cluster. You can hook the hubs together using a managed switch or router if you want to enable them to contact all the computers in under two hops, without routing through other computers. This is very flexible - you could have it set up so each computer has more than one line going to other computers. Using managed switches you could even reconfigure it on the fly, though your latency goes up.
The idea here is that each computer has a possible bandwidth of multiple times the network card speed. Furthermore, collisions are down, and latency is down. Throughput can reach higher than the practical 80% of ethernet bandwidth.
The real problem with ethernet is latency and collisions. The reason it's used is because it's dirt cheap. Dirt Cheap. Commit that to memory. It's often better to buy a lot of slow devices than one expensive really fast device. You can overcome most of the limitations of the slow devices with other tricks.
So, while your idea has some merit, the reality is much different than the ideality.:-)
With all the amazing advances we have seen in real-time graphics, shouldn't speech synthesis have come much, much further than what is, seemingly, available today?
We haven't had that many amazing advances in graphics. Natural speech is to advanced raytracing what current text to speech is to current graphics. We still cannot raytrace in a single system in real time at the resolution of our eyes, and we still cannot produce natural speech in a single system in real time at the resolution of our ears.
Furthermore, we know less about the math of speech than we know about the math of light. Go visit your local university that has a good CS program, and browse the bookstore for the books used to teach speech recognition. In that book you will find that the average sound a human makes goes from production of complex, multitonal sound from the vocal cords through as many as five complex natural filters (body cavities between the vocal cords and lips) before it reaches the ears of the recipient.
Modeling these filters for one sound is hard enough. Each letter in our alphabet, except simple vowels, changes the filters throughout the letter. Furthermore the filters for a given letter may also change depending on the previous and next letter.
A system to create speech, therefore, must generate hundreds (perhaps thousands) of different filtered 'noises' just to reproduce the english language. Other languages can be much more complex.
Current common technology is to simply record the hundreds of 'simple' sounds and add them together. Really good programs use hundreds of hours of speech by voice actors to get several hundred sounds.
The penultimate is to mathematically recreate every part of the human vocal system from the lungs to the lips. This has obviously not occured. The computers may well be powerful enough, but the understanding of the vocal tract is extremely limited.
In other words, wait 5-10 years. There still isn't a killer application for text to speech, but with devices getting smaller and smaller, there will be soon enough.
Now we're going to start seeing ads in the upcoming issues of "Evil Genius Monthly":
You have your evil lair, an arch enemy, and an earth destructo ray. You've even got your space platform and trained monkey contingent to help you escape to it in peril - but where are your minions? You need evil minions to do your bidding. Introducing our latest product for your overlording pleasure: Ferminions(TM). More evil than evil itself, our Ferminions(TM) are developed in secret underground lairs using a secret process so secret that we don't even know it (patent pending). Buy a pack* today!
- Adam
* Ferminions only available in Evil-Purple jumpsuits. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. No user-servicable parts inside. Bosons not included.
Why does this bother you so much? You've turned off your referrer, right? My site treats you like you appeared out of the blue sky, and you have access to everything that any other surfer does, without any "annoying", "stupid", "broken" fluff.
Do you honestly think that Yahoo is going to extort you based on a referrer log? You've got some pretty far fetched ideas there. Do you also use an anonymizer service? If not, then I've gained a ton more information about you than I could with the referrer log. All the referrer log tells me is that another web site has a link to my site, and that you clicked on it. Monster.com has no links to my site, except to my full resume - and it's fun, though not particularily useful, to see that there are people going to my resume page from monster. It saves me the trouble of creating several different links so I can track where people come from.
In other words, you are really stretching the point you're trying to make. Yes, it's technically possible that the referrer could be used in a way that makes your life less private. YOU have control over that, though, since you can turn it off. Saying that it should be off by default without providing some real, tangible benefit is shortsighted.
I'm sorry that 'webmasters' piss you off. I don't have a welcome page, the most I do is provide an extra line of text at the top of the page giving additional info to those who go there from specific sites and links. Instead of blocking my images I've decided to simply get rid of them - they don't really add anything to the content except where the content is the image, and I've lowered their size as much as possible. Speed of serving is more important than annoying the few idiots who do refer directly to the images on my site.
In short, like "rm", it's a tool. It can be used for good and bad. You either visit sites you don't trust frequently, or you are paranoid enough to leave it off all the time. I can understand that, and I agree that it's probably the best thing for you to do.
It is not a tool of pure evil though, and I'm afraid you've become somewhat like the RIAA in your argument. You assume that either (1) it can only be used for evil/bad/annoying/stupid purposes or (2) most people use it that way, and the few that use it for good can be as effective at delivering useful content without it.
It's nice, as a site operator, to know where your guests are coming from. A good portion of my visitors come from Google and other search engines. The referrer log lets me know what they were searching for, and in nearly 95% of the cases they were looking for a specific topic on my site. I can send them directly there, give them a specific welcome message if they haven't been to my site before, etc.
Furthermore I can restrict traffic for some areas of my site (like some sites that block links from slashdot) for particular reasons or uses. "You just came from the page of an associate and are able to receive a discount." "This page is restricted to users of xyz.com. Please go there first."
Lastly, it protects my image content. My images are not stellar, and yet other sites continue to use them on their pages. I can use the referrer to limit the damage done by only allowing the images to be referred by pages from my own site.
Referrer information may be annoying to you, but it's an extrememly useful tool. If taken away one restricts opportunities for the site operator to personalize and protect content on their site. Not a huge loss, but it isn't really as great a privacy issue as you seem to believe.
This is essentially a glorified 2D barcode reader. The camera captures enough information in the little dots to know where it is with good precision in the 60 thousand killometer 2 dimensional barcode.
They couldn't use an optical mouse mechanism because it can't tell where on the page it is. They have a 60 thousand kilometer space so if you go back to the same page you wrote on a week ago and make changes then it'll show up on the correct page.
They could simplify it, though, by allowing generic pads to be made where each page in a pad is unique, but if you want to change to a different pad you have to scan the top bound ridge first so it knows you're on a different pad. The pads are currently expensive because each sheet has to be printed individually. Make it simpler with the suggestion above and you can at least make the pads duplicates of 90 different printed sheets.
I suspect it'll flop. People will only buy the special pads for the pen, but they won't always have a special pad available when they want to write something down.
I think a simpler technology could suffice here with the parts of an optical mouse. It only needs to know which words are continous, and you can reformat their actual layout later, if needed, on the computer. Add a cheap accelerometer and it'll have a good idea of where things are in relation to each other. Add some powerfull post-processing software and it'll be able to eat drawings as well, matching up areas where the camera saw previously drawn lines.
In the end, this is a hardware solution to a problem begging for a software solution.
-Adam
Re:"Your system date is set to year 8192.
on
Gnarly Error Messages
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· Score: 3, Funny
This version of Winzip does not work after year 2099.
Ahhhhhh!
So that's why I'm not getting a response to my zipped messages to the future. I'll try bzip instead...
-Adam
Re:Good God, are you Clueless?
on
WiFi Triangulation
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Last time I checked, airsnort and other wireless crackers needed on the order of millions of packets in order to determine the key for a weak key.
Maybe you generate that many packets in 30 minutes (NOT), but the researchers said that it would take about a day to get the key from a network of active office users, and a few hours if the network is maxxed out.
Your average home user won't generate that many packets in a week (except, perhaps, those playing quake) and only their neighbors will have the patience and opportunity to grab keys for a week without being caught.
You should change your WEP as often as you change your passwords. Doing these things will keep freeloaders and those who are looking for an easy to break into network out. If someone is determined enough to break into your network, it won't matter what you do, they'll manage a way in. Even you know that if your life depended on getting access to someones home network, even with ssh, ipsec, etc, you could do it through other means.
This sort of posts comes up pretty much every time somebody does something creative, funny and totally useless.
I'm glad that you can classify my post - it must give you a warm fuzzy feeling knowing exactly where my opinions can go.:-)
However, they are trying to make a point to AOL, and I was simply demonstrating that the point they are trying to make can be made more cheaply and expressively through other means. Furthermore, they can deal a real blow to AOL if they support public internet access.
It does meet all the criteria as an 'artsy' concept, though. It's expensive, it's 'loud', and it will make very little real difference in the long run.
I realize that. However, if one million people did this the USPS would be none too pleased, and may require AOL to either pay for the additional trash, or use a different rate. It will cost the post office time, money, and space, and they will pass that back to AOL.
Either way, it would be more trouble and more costly to AOL than delivering a million CDs on convenient string spindles to their doorstep. Chances are they'd mount them somewhere as a tribute to their fans who'd go to so much trouble.
Now, if they were going to make art out of this then I'd understand, but I still think the same objectives could be accomplished more efficiently and more pointedly through other means.
Look, they are asking 1 million people to spend upwards of 40 cents each to send a useless CD to them, then they are going to spend how much to deliver the truckload to AOL?
Think about it, that's at least $400,000 dollars down the drain! Why not ask people to contribute $0.40 towards infrastructure costs in their area for public 802.11b hotspots. Tell them to mark any and all AOL mail "RETURN TO SENDER" and AOL will bear even greater costs, at no cost to the consumer.
Egad, people, use your brains.
Besides, AOL is going down the toilet anyway. Their shiny discs aren't going to be very useful to them after a few years as dialup dwindles, especially since broadband doesn't net them nearly as much profit as dialup once did. They're going to change their business model significantly over the next few years - it'll be interesting.
But seriously, put your effort into providing free net access for everyone.
This is just a placeholder to remind me to read this story later, when the site isn't so slashdotted (I've read it all, just no pictures). Mod down if it matters to you...
PCMCIA or PC CARD is not the same as CARDBUS. Cardbus is a 32 bit high speed bus very similar to PCI. PCMCIA (Which is now commonly referred to as pc card, since People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms) is very similar to 16 bit ISA.
Cardbus is backwards compatible with pc card, so you can put your slow speed devices into the cardbus without issue. Newer fast devices need the width and speed of cardbus (such as USB 2.0, Firewire, and high performance networking cards).
I've always wanted to do a few things in this respect. Unfortunately, I bet the vast majority of those kidnappings are by relatives of the kid. The basic response here is "You can only do so much." Those who would take your child would know of protections you might have in place beforehand, such as GPS watches/locater radios, etc.
Therefore the best defense is a very deep knowledge of your family, friends, associates, etc, that your child is liable to be alone with for any length of time. As the child grows up it is imperative to teach safety. Not just the usual "Don't talk to strangers." but how to call for help in various situations. Memorize the phone number, address, etc. It's a thin line, though, you don't want to scare the kid.
Prevention, however, doesn't help you now. If you have no idea where they might be, then you have to spend your time targetting the entire world, which is probably out of your reach. If you can even narrow it down to a state then you have a much better chance. But the reality is that a person can make money, rent a place, and go to the store infrequently without ever using any technology that is traceable. SS numbers can be faked (are sometimes never checked since there is a fee involved for the employer and small town bank), checks can be cashed and drawn on small-time banks.
As has been said here again and again, it is extrememly unlikely that your ex broke all ties with everyone they ever knew that you know about.
I wish you the best of luck. Things will turn out ok.
The problem with these is not so much the physical incarnation (while difficult, it is feasible), but the data rate going to it.
Say you want a low frame rate of 60 total updates per second, and you want an effective resolution of 50dpi (very low resolution, very slow update) and let's make it easier by using only 8bpp coloring, in a 10"x10"x10" cube - again for simplicity.
500x500x500pixels = 125 million pixels, or roughly 120MB of data per screen update. Multiply by 60 updates per second and viola! About 7.2GB per second of data. Current video cards (even high end) can't even handle this low resolution, slow, low color display. And the scale is exponential n^3. Your video card barely has 128MB of memory.
A 15" display, 100dpi, 75Hz update and 32bpp is going to consume just short of one terrabyte of information per second.
Eventually the display will contain the 3d processing hardware and its own memory, and the computer will send it directx 12 commands (or opengl, or cg, or whatever).
But for situations where the data only needs to be viewed by a single user, these displays are wicked overkill. You've only got two eyeballs, take the 200dpi displays from IBM, sony's technique, and you've got a significantly better image at lower cost.
I bet your school is NOT using packet shaper - which analyzes the packets, not just the ports. They are likely using switch management to limit port usage.
Believe me, an HTTP packet does not look like a kazaa, morpheououoeos, etc packet.
It never will be scsi at ata prices. Serial ATA will reduce pin count on chipsets (lower cost), reduce cable clutter and cooling issues (lower cost) and is still significantly faster than any physical hard drive out there right now anyway.
It isn't meant to replace scsi, it's meant to replace parallel ATA.
The upcoming serial ATA standard will give you better performance at a lower cost. A firewire drive is large, expensive, and consumes slightly more power. All you gain over current IDE technology is hot swap, and that will be solved with serial ATA.
But what you are really after are the tools to manage such a beast. The physical implementation shouldn't matter to the developers - all the software needs to know is that storage exists that the user needs to use, and how to read from and write to said storage. It shouldn't matter whether it's an IDE drive, a friewire, a usb, a scsi, a 1000 tape library, or any combination of storage devices which, IMHO, will be a great differentiating feature from commercial packages.
Yes, the free SAN package handles your old room size tape robot as well as this rack of serial ATA drives, and will treat them accordingly - near line storage in the tapes (semi archive), on line storage in the HD, and off line (off site) over the WAN link to the storage cluster at your other shop. If you need an extra terabyte just go to officemax and plug in a firewire drive until the tech comes out and adds more serial ata devices to your drive chain.
Of course, you could buy the SAN package available from x, or y, but you'll pay dearly for it, and you can't add storage to it yourself. Oh, and it only works with their hardware.
"An operating system, as we use the term, means a collection of programs that are sufficient to use the computer to do a wide variety of jobs. A general purpose operating system, to be complete, ought to handle all the jobs that many users may want to do."
MS is actually going the hard route by saying they cannot remove IE without damaging the 'operating system', however Bruce is telling us (and MS) that they don't even need to claim that. They simply need to define an 'operating system' as all the programs a user typically uses.
Bruce, I'm really sorry that someone took your tools and made a great monument without telling everyone that it wouldn't be possible without your tools. I'm sorry that everyone is less educated than you are about free software and open source and the vastly huge gulf between the two. I'm sorry that I don't 'get it'.
The question I keep asking myself is, "Who does Bruce think he is, anyway?" You talk as though you are diety's gift to free software, and that what you say is automatically correct. I understand you feel that only by pulling as hard as you can will people move to middle ground, but your tactics roll off the masses like water off a duck's back. But that's who you are, and no one expects you to change. Please realise, though, that your concepts are not going to gain any significant gound until you hire new PR, or there's a serious changing of the guard.
Slashdot Mirror
Well DUH. Read the headline, this is a wrist device.
Sheesh. Talk about not reading the article, now they're not reading the headline before posting!
-Adam
Ah, but it doesn't have the same capability of the vcr. With a VCR, I simply say 'record' and it'll record my tv show without fanfare. This box will not record certian shows.
How will consumers react when they can't do something they are now able to do?
All of the newest copy protection schemes seem to revolve around the concept that joe consumer will give up certain abilities for higher quality or more bells and whistles. The new SACD, for instance, or HDTV with its record flags. They learned a lesson from macrovision - you have to put the hardware in the player, so you have to own the rights to anything that can play it (like every VCR has some royalties to, IIRC, RCA, but they require every manufacturer to put in a circuit which enables macrovision to work as a copy protection scheme). Thus, create a new format, create a new player (MiniDisc), own certian necessary patents (HDTV, MP3) and require everyone to buy into your copyright protection.
Which, in reality, I don't have a problem with. If I miss a show, movie, etc, I haven't really lost anything - if anything I've gained time. But fair use is still worth fighting for, it impacts much more than just being able to watch a show when/where/how it's convenient to me.
-Adam
I think the problem here is that you won't be able to do anything with it. No command line, no x term, etc.
They would have to do that because if the box has signal decoding/decyphering capabilities then anyone with more than 'record', 'change channel', and 'volume' is going to either gain valuable info about how a particular station is encoded, or be able to have it decode all stations without paying for full service.
The tricky thing is - how does the GPL fit into this? Are they going to require cable companies to distribute a CD with every installed box and say, "You'll never need this, but by law we are required to give you the source code for this box, except the proprietary (useful) bits that are seperate binaries..."
-Adam
I was loving it right up to the point where they explain that these will be available through the cable companies and enhanced tv providers. This means that it will be rented by and owned by companies that control what shows can be recorded, and can prosecute anyone caught 'tampering' with the device in any way.
If I could simply buy the hardware, great! But they know that they will make a more steady stream of money offering essentially a tivo like cable box to cable companies who can rent them to customers for $20/mo or more, who will gladly pay for them rather than $400 or more for a Tivo.
It's a great business idea, and I see them putting Tivo out of business in the larger markets. Tivo (and other pvr companies) will have to maneuver furiously to maintain their current customer base, nevermind a growing base.
But all is not so happy in geek land. You won't be able to record shows, or even pause shows, that providers don't want you to - and eventually that'll be most movies, lots of first run shows, etc. Skipping commercials may be disallowed at the providers descretion.
It's essentially a bid to take back TV, while providing customers with a facade of extra functionality. I bet they'll win, since eventually service providers will be required to use such devices if they want to carry certian premium channels - though that's a while away, it's coming.
-Adam
After I was laid off (which wasn't that bad - one month's notice, no need to do work after notice. Could've been because I was expecting my second kid, and they were only laying people off to lower their costs so they could be bought out by another company) my supervisor attempted to perform some work on our old novell 4.1 server. The server stopped responding completely after a reboot, and they called me a day after when he finally decided he couldn't recover it.
By then I was consulting for another company at $25/hr, so I simply said I'd charge them that rate. He agreed, I came at 8pm and finished rebuilding the server, restoring data and users about 4am. Sent them a $200 bill, and got the check shortly thereafter.
He called a few times after for info about the isdn internet connection and other miscellaneous stuff, but didn't request that I come and fix things, and the calls were generally fairly short. Since they were nice in allowing me to later get on the router and download the configuration for another job later, I didn't think it was a big deal.
The key is that they need to learn the connection between a smoothly working network and the cost of maintaining one. You, by not asking for payment up front, are reinforcing their idea that networks are free, and the maintenance is free. It's the same reason people don't back up until they've had their first data loss and find out that it'll cost 10x as much to recover some of their data. Same with virus protection, etc. Quality costs, and she needs to know it.
-Adam
You notice those squigly lines on your motherboard? They're not just to look pretty, they actually slow the signal down so that the 8, 16, 32, 64, etc parallel bits all arrive at their destination at the exact moment before the clock signal latches in the data.
:-)
Parallel solutions on flexible cable will not be viable anywhere near the average front side bus speed, nevermind faster interfaces. Sorry.
A not too recent slashdot article pointed out a unique way to manage large data transfers among clusters though:
As a simple example, each computer has N 100Mb interfaces. There are a total of J computers. you use K hubs (or, ideally, switches), and connect them together such that one computer has direct hub access to a portion (or all) of the cluster. You can hook the hubs together using a managed switch or router if you want to enable them to contact all the computers in under two hops, without routing through other computers. This is very flexible - you could have it set up so each computer has more than one line going to other computers. Using managed switches you could even reconfigure it on the fly, though your latency goes up.
The idea here is that each computer has a possible bandwidth of multiple times the network card speed. Furthermore, collisions are down, and latency is down. Throughput can reach higher than the practical 80% of ethernet bandwidth.
The real problem with ethernet is latency and collisions. The reason it's used is because it's dirt cheap. Dirt Cheap. Commit that to memory. It's often better to buy a lot of slow devices than one expensive really fast device. You can overcome most of the limitations of the slow devices with other tricks.
So, while your idea has some merit, the reality is much different than the ideality.
-Adam
With all the amazing advances we have seen in real-time graphics, shouldn't speech synthesis have come much, much further than what is, seemingly, available today?
We haven't had that many amazing advances in graphics. Natural speech is to advanced raytracing what current text to speech is to current graphics. We still cannot raytrace in a single system in real time at the resolution of our eyes, and we still cannot produce natural speech in a single system in real time at the resolution of our ears.
Furthermore, we know less about the math of speech than we know about the math of light. Go visit your local university that has a good CS program, and browse the bookstore for the books used to teach speech recognition. In that book you will find that the average sound a human makes goes from production of complex, multitonal sound from the vocal cords through as many as five complex natural filters (body cavities between the vocal cords and lips) before it reaches the ears of the recipient.
Modeling these filters for one sound is hard enough. Each letter in our alphabet, except simple vowels, changes the filters throughout the letter. Furthermore the filters for a given letter may also change depending on the previous and next letter.
A system to create speech, therefore, must generate hundreds (perhaps thousands) of different filtered 'noises' just to reproduce the english language. Other languages can be much more complex.
Current common technology is to simply record the hundreds of 'simple' sounds and add them together. Really good programs use hundreds of hours of speech by voice actors to get several hundred sounds.
The penultimate is to mathematically recreate every part of the human vocal system from the lungs to the lips. This has obviously not occured. The computers may well be powerful enough, but the understanding of the vocal tract is extremely limited.
In other words, wait 5-10 years. There still isn't a killer application for text to speech, but with devices getting smaller and smaller, there will be soon enough.
-Adam
Now we're going to start seeing ads in the upcoming issues of "Evil Genius Monthly":
You have your evil lair, an arch enemy, and an earth destructo ray. You've even got your space platform and trained monkey contingent to help you escape to it in peril - but where are your minions? You need evil minions to do your bidding.
Introducing our latest product for your overlording pleasure: Ferminions(TM). More evil than evil itself, our Ferminions(TM) are developed in secret underground lairs using a secret process so secret that we don't even know it (patent pending). Buy a pack* today!
- Adam
* Ferminions only available in Evil-Purple jumpsuits. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. No user-servicable parts inside. Bosons not included.
Someone needs to get you a proper map. Left is obviously east. Duh!
-Adam
Why does this bother you so much? You've turned off your referrer, right? My site treats you like you appeared out of the blue sky, and you have access to everything that any other surfer does, without any "annoying", "stupid", "broken" fluff.
Do you honestly think that Yahoo is going to extort you based on a referrer log? You've got some pretty far fetched ideas there. Do you also use an anonymizer service? If not, then I've gained a ton more information about you than I could with the referrer log. All the referrer log tells me is that another web site has a link to my site, and that you clicked on it. Monster.com has no links to my site, except to my full resume - and it's fun, though not particularily useful, to see that there are people going to my resume page from monster. It saves me the trouble of creating several different links so I can track where people come from.
In other words, you are really stretching the point you're trying to make. Yes, it's technically possible that the referrer could be used in a way that makes your life less private. YOU have control over that, though, since you can turn it off. Saying that it should be off by default without providing some real, tangible benefit is shortsighted.
I'm sorry that 'webmasters' piss you off. I don't have a welcome page, the most I do is provide an extra line of text at the top of the page giving additional info to those who go there from specific sites and links. Instead of blocking my images I've decided to simply get rid of them - they don't really add anything to the content except where the content is the image, and I've lowered their size as much as possible. Speed of serving is more important than annoying the few idiots who do refer directly to the images on my site.
In short, like "rm", it's a tool. It can be used for good and bad. You either visit sites you don't trust frequently, or you are paranoid enough to leave it off all the time. I can understand that, and I agree that it's probably the best thing for you to do.
It is not a tool of pure evil though, and I'm afraid you've become somewhat like the RIAA in your argument. You assume that either (1) it can only be used for evil/bad/annoying/stupid purposes or (2) most people use it that way, and the few that use it for good can be as effective at delivering useful content without it.
-Adam
It's nice, as a site operator, to know where your guests are coming from. A good portion of my visitors come from Google and other search engines. The referrer log lets me know what they were searching for, and in nearly 95% of the cases they were looking for a specific topic on my site. I can send them directly there, give them a specific welcome message if they haven't been to my site before, etc.
Furthermore I can restrict traffic for some areas of my site (like some sites that block links from slashdot) for particular reasons or uses. "You just came from the page of an associate and are able to receive a discount." "This page is restricted to users of xyz.com. Please go there first."
Lastly, it protects my image content. My images are not stellar, and yet other sites continue to use them on their pages. I can use the referrer to limit the damage done by only allowing the images to be referred by pages from my own site.
Referrer information may be annoying to you, but it's an extrememly useful tool. If taken away one restricts opportunities for the site operator to personalize and protect content on their site. Not a huge loss, but it isn't really as great a privacy issue as you seem to believe.
-Adam
This is essentially a glorified 2D barcode reader. The camera captures enough information in the little dots to know where it is with good precision in the 60 thousand killometer 2 dimensional barcode.
They couldn't use an optical mouse mechanism because it can't tell where on the page it is. They have a 60 thousand kilometer space so if you go back to the same page you wrote on a week ago and make changes then it'll show up on the correct page.
They could simplify it, though, by allowing generic pads to be made where each page in a pad is unique, but if you want to change to a different pad you have to scan the top bound ridge first so it knows you're on a different pad. The pads are currently expensive because each sheet has to be printed individually. Make it simpler with the suggestion above and you can at least make the pads duplicates of 90 different printed sheets.
I suspect it'll flop. People will only buy the special pads for the pen, but they won't always have a special pad available when they want to write something down.
I think a simpler technology could suffice here with the parts of an optical mouse. It only needs to know which words are continous, and you can reformat their actual layout later, if needed, on the computer. Add a cheap accelerometer and it'll have a good idea of where things are in relation to each other. Add some powerfull post-processing software and it'll be able to eat drawings as well, matching up areas where the camera saw previously drawn lines.
In the end, this is a hardware solution to a problem begging for a software solution.
-Adam
This version of Winzip does not work after year 2099.
Ahhhhhh!
So that's why I'm not getting a response to my zipped messages to the future. I'll try bzip instead...
-Adam
Last time I checked, airsnort and other wireless crackers needed on the order of millions of packets in order to determine the key for a weak key.
Maybe you generate that many packets in 30 minutes (NOT), but the researchers said that it would take about a day to get the key from a network of active office users, and a few hours if the network is maxxed out.
Your average home user won't generate that many packets in a week (except, perhaps, those playing quake) and only their neighbors will have the patience and opportunity to grab keys for a week without being caught.
You should change your WEP as often as you change your passwords. Doing these things will keep freeloaders and those who are looking for an easy to break into network out. If someone is determined enough to break into your network, it won't matter what you do, they'll manage a way in. Even you know that if your life depended on getting access to someones home network, even with ssh, ipsec, etc, you could do it through other means.
-Adam
This sort of posts comes up pretty much every time somebody does something creative, funny and totally useless.
:-)
I'm glad that you can classify my post - it must give you a warm fuzzy feeling knowing exactly where my opinions can go.
However, they are trying to make a point to AOL, and I was simply demonstrating that the point they are trying to make can be made more cheaply and expressively through other means. Furthermore, they can deal a real blow to AOL if they support public internet access.
It does meet all the criteria as an 'artsy' concept, though. It's expensive, it's 'loud', and it will make very little real difference in the long run.
-Adam
I realize that. However, if one million people did this the USPS would be none too pleased, and may require AOL to either pay for the additional trash, or use a different rate. It will cost the post office time, money, and space, and they will pass that back to AOL.
Either way, it would be more trouble and more costly to AOL than delivering a million CDs on convenient string spindles to their doorstep. Chances are they'd mount them somewhere as a tribute to their fans who'd go to so much trouble.
Now, if they were going to make art out of this then I'd understand, but I still think the same objectives could be accomplished more efficiently and more pointedly through other means.
-Adam
Look, they are asking 1 million people to spend upwards of 40 cents each to send a useless CD to them, then they are going to spend how much to deliver the truckload to AOL?
Think about it, that's at least $400,000 dollars down the drain! Why not ask people to contribute $0.40 towards infrastructure costs in their area for public 802.11b hotspots. Tell them to mark any and all AOL mail "RETURN TO SENDER" and AOL will bear even greater costs, at no cost to the consumer.
Egad, people, use your brains.
Besides, AOL is going down the toilet anyway. Their shiny discs aren't going to be very useful to them after a few years as dialup dwindles, especially since broadband doesn't net them nearly as much profit as dialup once did. They're going to change their business model significantly over the next few years - it'll be interesting.
But seriously, put your effort into providing free net access for everyone.
-Adam
This is just a placeholder to remind me to read this story later, when the site isn't so slashdotted (I've read it all, just no pictures). Mod down if it matters to you...
-Adam
PCMCIA or PC CARD is not the same as CARDBUS. Cardbus is a 32 bit high speed bus very similar to PCI. PCMCIA (Which is now commonly referred to as pc card, since People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms) is very similar to 16 bit ISA.
Cardbus is backwards compatible with pc card, so you can put your slow speed devices into the cardbus without issue. Newer fast devices need the width and speed of cardbus (such as USB 2.0, Firewire, and high performance networking cards).
-Adam
I've always wanted to do a few things in this respect. Unfortunately, I bet the vast majority of those kidnappings are by relatives of the kid. The basic response here is "You can only do so much." Those who would take your child would know of protections you might have in place beforehand, such as GPS watches/locater radios, etc.
Therefore the best defense is a very deep knowledge of your family, friends, associates, etc, that your child is liable to be alone with for any length of time. As the child grows up it is imperative to teach safety. Not just the usual "Don't talk to strangers." but how to call for help in various situations. Memorize the phone number, address, etc. It's a thin line, though, you don't want to scare the kid.
Prevention, however, doesn't help you now. If you have no idea where they might be, then you have to spend your time targetting the entire world, which is probably out of your reach. If you can even narrow it down to a state then you have a much better chance. But the reality is that a person can make money, rent a place, and go to the store infrequently without ever using any technology that is traceable. SS numbers can be faked (are sometimes never checked since there is a fee involved for the employer and small town bank), checks can be cashed and drawn on small-time banks.
As has been said here again and again, it is extrememly unlikely that your ex broke all ties with everyone they ever knew that you know about.
I wish you the best of luck. Things will turn out ok.
-Adam
The problem with these is not so much the physical incarnation (while difficult, it is feasible), but the data rate going to it.
Say you want a low frame rate of 60 total updates per second, and you want an effective resolution of 50dpi (very low resolution, very slow update) and let's make it easier by using only 8bpp coloring, in a 10"x10"x10" cube - again for simplicity.
500x500x500pixels = 125 million pixels, or roughly 120MB of data per screen update. Multiply by 60 updates per second and viola! About 7.2GB per second of data. Current video cards (even high end) can't even handle this low resolution, slow, low color display. And the scale is exponential n^3. Your video card barely has 128MB of memory.
A 15" display, 100dpi, 75Hz update and 32bpp is going to consume just short of one terrabyte of information per second.
Eventually the display will contain the 3d processing hardware and its own memory, and the computer will send it directx 12 commands (or opengl, or cg, or whatever).
But for situations where the data only needs to be viewed by a single user, these displays are wicked overkill. You've only got two eyeballs, take the 200dpi displays from IBM, sony's technique, and you've got a significantly better image at lower cost.
-Adam
I bet your school is NOT using packet shaper - which analyzes the packets, not just the ports. They are likely using switch management to limit port usage.
Believe me, an HTTP packet does not look like a kazaa, morpheououoeos, etc packet.
Sounds like a bunch of incompetant admins to me.
-Adam
It never will be scsi at ata prices. Serial ATA will reduce pin count on chipsets (lower cost), reduce cable clutter and cooling issues (lower cost) and is still significantly faster than any physical hard drive out there right now anyway.
It isn't meant to replace scsi, it's meant to replace parallel ATA.
-Adam
The upcoming serial ATA standard will give you better performance at a lower cost. A firewire drive is large, expensive, and consumes slightly more power. All you gain over current IDE technology is hot swap, and that will be solved with serial ATA.
But what you are really after are the tools to manage such a beast. The physical implementation shouldn't matter to the developers - all the software needs to know is that storage exists that the user needs to use, and how to read from and write to said storage. It shouldn't matter whether it's an IDE drive, a friewire, a usb, a scsi, a 1000 tape library, or any combination of storage devices which, IMHO, will be a great differentiating feature from commercial packages.
Yes, the free SAN package handles your old room size tape robot as well as this rack of serial ATA drives, and will treat them accordingly - near line storage in the tapes (semi archive), on line storage in the HD, and off line (off site) over the WAN link to the storage cluster at your other shop. If you need an extra terabyte just go to officemax and plug in a firewire drive until the tech comes out and adds more serial ata devices to your drive chain.
Of course, you could buy the SAN package available from x, or y, but you'll pay dearly for it, and you can't add storage to it yourself. Oh, and it only works with their hardware.
-Adam
"An operating system, as we use the term, means a collection of programs that are sufficient to use the computer to do a wide variety of jobs. A general purpose operating system, to be complete, ought to handle all the jobs that many users may want to do."
MS is actually going the hard route by saying they cannot remove IE without damaging the 'operating system', however Bruce is telling us (and MS) that they don't even need to claim that. They simply need to define an 'operating system' as all the programs a user typically uses.
Bruce, I'm really sorry that someone took your tools and made a great monument without telling everyone that it wouldn't be possible without your tools. I'm sorry that everyone is less educated than you are about free software and open source and the vastly huge gulf between the two. I'm sorry that I don't 'get it'.
The question I keep asking myself is, "Who does Bruce think he is, anyway?" You talk as though you are diety's gift to free software, and that what you say is automatically correct. I understand you feel that only by pulling as hard as you can will people move to middle ground, but your tactics roll off the masses like water off a duck's back. But that's who you are, and no one expects you to change. Please realise, though, that your concepts are not going to gain any significant gound until you hire new PR, or there's a serious changing of the guard.
-Adam