It's difficult to overstate the importance of the ESP8266. It was marred a bit in the first place with the $5 modules that only had a serial interface and a firmware that spoke in AT-commands. This is paradoxically how these stupid AVR+ESP8266 boards work. They're worthless. The AT/serial firmware is buggy and unreliable and a complete waste of time.
The thing that made the ESP8266 lift off is the breakout boards with USB serial onboard allowing direct programming of the device. For about $10 you can get one of these from China and then flash the NodeMCU firmware and write Lua on the thing. NodeMCU isn't universally loved, largely because it kind of sucked until more recent versions, but just imagine a scripting language with low-level hardware GPIO, I2C, SPI and of course WiFi. Proper IoT shit for $10 and they draw about 30mA when running flat out and sleep at much less. It's amazing.
If Lua doesn't cut it, there's a really nice port of Arduino so you upload C code directly to the board with shitloads (but not all) of the Arduino support libraries you might want. For me, there's really only one usage case for 8-bit AVRs. That's the ATtiny85s run for about $3 on a board with USB (digisparks).
This really is a load of crap. Extract a bunch of fairly obvious stratagems from a received text, an English translation of generally dubious worth, and apply it to cyber warfare.... unsurprisingly it fails to stack up particularly well. Sunzi was almost exclusively fixed on the idea that armies were controlled by single entities and that virtually all actions under taken by them had cost, and thus could be factored in a set of trade-offs, or expert application of game theory, before game theory was a thing. It was insightful at the time, to say the least, it can still be useful to state the more obvious strategems of any conflict but to claim relevance today where the agents existiing in dramatically different contexts is weak sauce indeed. Sunzi, in particular, would be horrified that any engagement would essentially exist in perpetuity, if the sunzi bingfa (art of war) was indeed written by one person, then he would be horrified by the layout of modern cyber warfare, and would certainly be quite unable to add anything to the idea that one may have to defend against any number of actors, each of which potentially using different strategies at virtually no cost..
Would have expected this to be already extensively studied. C'mon humanities there must be already some linguistic research on this?
Holy cow batman. I guess I wouldn't expect slashdot to be up on anything to do with the filthy humanities but this is really quite something. There is a vast amount of research on this. The general idea is called linguistic relativism and has been a hotly debated topic since Wharf first started pondering the issues in the 1930s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
It's easily tested and has been often demonstrated, that speakers of languages with certain obligatory features, like say tense and plural in English, will be more observant about those facts that speakers of languages where such features are optional. Then there's a vast array of work that has discussed perception, particularly colours where languages vary in terms of how many names for colours there are, and hence the form of distinctions that need to be made when observing colours. I was always rather more partial to Dan Slobin's description of 'thinking for speaking' where our cognition shapes what we observe and what cognitive paradigm to use based upon the demands of the language we intend to speak in.
The whole Sapir-Wharf hypothesis and linguistic relativity has been flogged to death. The TFA paper is building on that with an interesting experiment designed to discover something rather more nuanced than suggested by the headline here. They used an interesting experimental technique that involved employing interference from another language by making them perform a task using that language. They seem to have demonstrated that this interference does indeed shift the way the participants viewed the task based on the differences between languages. It's certainly not a surprising finding for those linguists like me, that hold to a usage based theory of language (functionalism) based on general cognition. However it's a great example of the fascinating things you can discover with clever experiment design.
From what I've heard the Chinese have been using Roman letters to help their students learn their own language for years now, and especially use roman letters to make it easier to enter Chinese text into a computer.
Indeed! Other input systems based on radicals or even handwriting have fallen out of favor compared to pinyin (that's what Mandarin romanisation is called) schemes. Helpful because increasingly English words or acronyms (often acronyms of Chinese words!) are becoming popular among young Chinese.
If you want to see pinyin, use Google translate and hit the phonetic symbol underneath the Chinese characters. It's the A with the two dots above it. The diacritics are the tone marks. Many of the roman letters sound somewhat like English but several aren't like x, c and q. The x sound is particularly amusing given the current Chinese leader's surname is Xi. I get a kick out of hearing newsreaders mispronounce it. Childish I know but when you've spent this many years learning a language and often still not understood by native Chinese it's nice to feel superior once in awhile.
As a weird combination of techie, linguist and Sinophile, I was pleasantly surprised to see this post up on Slashdot. Sadly there's a lot of misconceptions.
Romanization systems don't work because there are too many homophones to worry about.
Bzzt! Aside from anything else, there is a standard romanisation sytem called Pinyin (), this is perfectly adequate to represent tones. It's used to teach Chinese both to kids and foreign speakers of Chinese. It's in dictionaries to tell Chinese people how to pronounce new words (since the Chinese orthography only gives you clues to pronunciation and of course no information about tones). Other tonal languages with greater tonal inventories than Mandarin such as Vietnamese have adopted similar schemes as their official orthography. There was even a substantial movement in the PRC to shift towards a roman alphabet at one point. This stemmed from the same political movement that simplified China's orthography from the traditional full form characters. Most of the arguments made about losing information in dumping Chinese characters can also be made about what has already occurred in the shift to simplified.
Even this argument premise betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about language. If you jump on a massively multiplayer game you'll find Chinese happily chatting away in pinyin without even writing the tones (you can do it in ascii by using numbers eg. ni3 hao3. That's because the act of parsing language is deeply rooted in context. Only certain words make sense in a given context or in a given syntactic position.
What most speakers of Western languages don't understand is quite how far along the explicit spectrum European languages are. An example is the English fetish on needing to specify a subject leading to bizarre constructions like "It is raining". Speakers of Chinese are much happier and skilled with the art of disambiguating not just lexical words but pragmatic intention from utterances that don't convey the full meaning in their semantic evaluation.
The high frequency of homophones is no barrier to a romanisation. I also fail to understand why anyone would think radicals are essential. They're very useful in reducing the task of memorising the character set, particularly since they have pronunciation and semantic clues that make it easier to remember how to read (and more importantly write) various words. They are actually quite a lot better at this task for the original full form () orthography because the full radicals often remain where as in the current simplified orthography of China, much has been reduced to arbitrary squiggles discarding semantic and pronunciation information in the process.
That's a circular argument though. If a phonemic orthography was used, you wouldn't be relying on clues any more. It would be enough to hear a word to be able to write it down. You cannot currently do that in Chinese except by using pinyin. I do this all the time. I write down the pinyin and then later check in a dictionary for the hanzi.
"What are the odds you will make enough money so that the degree pays for itself?"
I'm a little loath to reply to this on the basis that the vast majority of posts from the Slashdot crowd on anything to do with university tend to view education as all about money. I suspect that's a heavy cultural bias from the US... anyway.
As someone who is a 40-something about to finish a degree this year, I have some experience of this but for me, at least, your question loads the dice. I was earning plenty of money doing what I was doing before, I just didn't like it. I'd be happy to earn a living, doing something I love and that is what, in my experience, most mature students are doing back at university.
Granted that might be a little skewed because useless public services like healthcare and universities cost more in the US than anywhere else in the world, and maybe you do feel some pressure to get a career result to pay back the debt. That said, there are cheap or even free ways to get educated if you're willing to move beyond the top-tier universities.
Finally, I'd add this: It's easy to make the decision to go to university to study something based on some sort of future goal. What universally happens is that by the end of the degree, you have a different idea about what that goal is. It's also quite hard to motivate yourself, do well, and even benefit particularly well from a degree if you aren't really interested in the subject.
So my advice is this: do a degree in something you're really interested in and when faced with choices, go for the flexible choices. There is every chance that you'll run into some niche off of something you're interested in which will turn out to be a gold mine. It happened to me. I found a field that blended my previous skills with what I was learning and it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
The engineering students will then go on to someday develop your next car, airplane, refrigerator, television, while you in 20 years will simply join your students on the quad for the sole purpose of perpetuating a useless major.
The observer bias regarding areas of education here on Slashdot is really something to behold. In general I've seen 'liberal arts' described as the study of comparative literature, shake spear, latin etc. Generally liberal arts are 'soft', do not lead to jobs, never invent anything or bring in university research. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter horseshit.
We shall for a moment accept the Slashdot definition of liberal arts as not including things like math and science (more accurately in academia it just means 'not vocational'), so if we just look at a 'school of arts' we have fields such as the study of all languages and linguistics (my areas), politics and international studies, criminology, design, economics, psychology, environmental and developmental studies, journalism, sociology just off the top of my head.
The amount of people studying the sorts of things which incense slashdotters so much, the Latin majors etc, is actually pretty low. Vitally, arts-type degree holders often go into jobs in the workforce which are not directly related to their degree. The idea that this made their degree useless is, well, quite depressing really. The fact is, these graduates didn't get a job in spite of their liberal arts degree, they very often get jobs because of it.
Yet there's also a very great deal of direct interest in a number of the arts fields. You may not believe it but every academic conference I go to, companies queue up to entice us to internships and employment. At a recent conference in my area, I was struck by the number of tech companies (I specifically recall Google and eBay) that had open ended invites for internships for anyone involved in the discipline, lamenting the fact there weren't more students in the field.
My field within 'arts' is extremely rich in research, practical applications, and yes, vocational opportunities. Yes, things you use on your web sites, on your phone, in your car. I was specifically drawn to it because it was apparent just how much further we had to go and how I might make a real difference. Believe it or not, modern technology doesn't just have 'science' bits under the hood, they have things that human beings control and that's where we come in.
It may bend your head to discover that a good number of people within 'liberal arts' also consider themselves scientists and very often work on issues imminently more practical than majors in mathematics. Yet despite that, you will generally not find people within the arts that are derisive about the studying the hard sciences.
Perhaps if more of you had a wider human-focused education then you would see that science does not live in a vacuum and university education does not have to be exclusively focused on the skills you need for your first job.
(The ex electronics engineer that went back to university to study 'liberal arts')
The solution is to artificially make top-level education available at the cost to provide that education
Quite so. This is in fact exactly how it's done in Australia. In fact the price I'm charged on my HECS student loan is different for each of the units I've taken, depending on the department that runs them.
There is another critical difference to US education, we have an extremely generous fully public student loan system which covers the entire cost of our university education and is only repayable when earning above a certain threshold of earnings, and it's interest free. While I would imagine such a thing would be called communist in the United States, it's a great way of insulating students from higher costs of studying sciences, medicine and what have you.
Arguably the higher costs of science is often not reflected by potential higher earnings. For reasons other than cost, just as in the US, science tends to be less popular. To encourage take up in some areas deemed to be in particular demand, the terms of cost of education is assisted with government funding. Making it cheaper still, but since we don't really care how much university costs (it's a fraction of what you pay in the US and we have those loans), the encouragement extends to outreach to high-schools, cost-of-living scholarships, lower entry requirements and so on.
I don't know what it's like in the US but in the UK and Australia, and presumably elsewhere too, there are a great many schemes that are aimed at encouraging take up of in-demand professions. Things like scholarships, grants, lower fees or even exempted fees for a portion of a course. Outreach programs to high school, ensuring that students with lower-than-expected results are aware of their opportunities to apply for the in-demand professions.
I worked for a major computer manufacturer within marketing and engaged in a number of co-marketing projects with Intel. I say co-marketing, they would essentially consist of us coming up with something and doing the leg work and just having the invoices for anything billable land with Intel. They needed to approve what you were doing but the process was very easy. The way it worked, and the way it still works to my knowledge, is like this:
You buy Intel product and a fraction of the cost of buying those products ends up in a war chest for marketing. You can spend these funds by doing things like co-marketing activities or putting a logo on an advert (they would pay x% of your advert cost then) and so on and so forth. This is more common than just Intel, Microsoft does just the same. That's why there's a Microsoft slogan on every print advert. By the time you do both, you end up paying less than half the actual cost of the advert.
Now this is on one hand a reasonable system. Just like manufacturers have chucked in cash to co-fund ads with distributors since the beginning of time... On the other hand, that war chest is only there if you're buying their products. This makes the business case of buying stuff from the other guy all the more difficult. It means really you're advertising Intel stuff because, honestly, AMD isn't going to write any cheques. The fact that Intel's business is larger than just the CPU itself means you get economies of scale here too.
Is this anti competetive. Well, I think some aspect of it is. However most of it is just a symptom of the fact that it becomes easier to work with the really big guy. It has always been more pleasant to work with them than AMD. You get samples of stuff when you ask, you get marketing help, they run cool events, they actively assign a dude to look after your account who is a genuinely helpful human being. You get precisely none of that with AMD. In fact AMD, as a point of order, probably has the worst marketing set up I have ever encountered in my career. It was amusing when they bought ATI because they were probably the 2nd worst...
What's the solution here? It feels like it's a business that is having trouble with scale. AMD isn't big enough to 'compete' just because they make a CPU. They aren't anything near big enough. They need to consolidate into solutions (buying ATI was part of that obviously) and be able to offer manufacturers the same sort of product range and attractive business proposition as Intel does. It's not anti competetive, it just makes doing business with you more attractive.
What all of this really boils down to, and why I wont shed a tear for a huge fine such as the EU fine, is that the reason Intel is in the position is because of distinctly anti-competetive behavior in the past. I never experienced that myself but if you've become the dominent player through dirty tricks then cleaning your act up in recent times isn't realy good enough is it? Unfortunately even a billion euros is kind of shutting the door after the horse is bolted.
...and the other two points. Sure, those are true but they didn't just magically happen either. It wasn't just because these countries are 'small' - much as Americans are so very fond of thinking of Europe (while they themselves tend to move very small distances from where they were born, as a statistic) - it's because the governments of Europe imposed tax penalties on fuel.
This was done to hit demand and create a market for fuel efficient vehicles and other practises that curb demand. It's worked too, oil burned per capita of people in Europe is a fraction of what Americans use and the CO2 output per capita is even more stark.
America retained the love of huge fuel inefficient cars, SUVs etc while the lobby-driven politics ensured it was political suicide for anyone to grow a spin and impose fuel taxation or indeed any other significant measures to break the American love affair with burning oil.
Most cars people drive in Europe are smaller, designed primarily for running costs and not the sound that a large capacity engine makes (you've got to listen to the round-tabel panel on Ward's Top Ten engines for a clue as to just how important they believe this junk to be), but instead the engines are more expensive and technically advanced to improve economy.
So baring this in mind, it's pretty unfair to suggest that Europe just got handed all of these advantages. They were hard fought and hard won. We've been paying decades of tax on fuel.
While you're whining about $4 a gallon, we're paying $5 a gallon JUST IN TAX. We're already driving around fuel efficient vehicles and paying through the nose with road/green taxes, CO2-based taxes, expensive emissions standards driving up costs of vehicles and servicing costs and have been for YEARS. So you'll have to excuse us if we don't have vast amounts of sympathy for the complaints coming from the other side of the Atlantic right now.
As another posted has said, the reason they did it was to want a larger slice of the overall industry pie. Being able to offer a larger preportion of technologies opens some doors, particularly when you look at the volume business on the laptop side.
However the real tragedy here is that the ATI aquisition essentially made one company made up of the PR and marketing teams from the two companies in the industry with the worst PR and marketing. Maybe they considered this was an issue of compatible corporate cultures. At any rate despite having years to turn it around AMD show absolutely no sign of learning from Intel and Nvidia's success.
I liked AMD but it's really hard to see how they can come back from this now. Core2 is embarassingly better than Phenom. Nvidia 8800-series is slightly better than AMD's brand new 3800xx series but Nvidia is going to launch the next-generation series this year. There's just nothing they have which is competitive. Nothing on the roadmap (that I've seen) that looks like it'll be competitive. It's looking grim for them.
"I think the problem with the current system is that it scales horribly."
On the contrary, it scales very well actually. You can simply use more pixel pipelines to do things in parallel to do less passes (which is what you see in most graphics hardware including the current consoles), or you can render alternate lines, or chunks of the display etc for multiple entire chunks of hardware such as SLI/Crossfire on the PC.
The problem you describe is essentially that any complicated visual processing in very high resolutions requires a massive amount of processing power and that's expensive to implement. It's possible, it's just expensive. There's just no way in hell the massively massively more computationally expensive technique of raytracing is going to improve upon things. I game on a PC in 1920x1200 predominently with a very high graphics part with large amounts of dedicated memory. That costs a lot more than the hardware that's in a console but it's actually the same type of graphics part that's in the 360/PS3, it's just a higher spec part with more parallel bits etc.
There's also a bit of light at the end of the tunnel for the first time with this stuff. A really good PC graphics card (the 8800GT) is now available for money which people would actually consider spending. Sadly this is a bit too little too late for the PC as a gaming platform but it does show the march of technology quite well.
By the next console cycle they'll be pitched at whatever NVIDIA releases fall of 2009 most likely. With current performance increases I'd say a ballpark is being able to render in 1920x1200 comfortably with AA and with less performance concerns than the current generation in terms of on-screen content. No it wont be 33MP displays but honestly early-adopters aside it's still going to be a long time before 1920x1200 displays can be considered the norm for the living room.
And I think you're into diminishing returns after that sort of resolution anyway. Better to remove some on-screen limitations due to console architectures (of which there is quite a lot, mostly due to lack of memory and bandwidth) rather than arms race the resolution issue alone.
I guess one has to state the obvious in that by moving to a process which is not implemented in silicon, as with current graphics cards, the work must necessarily be done in software. That means it runs on CPUs and that's something Intel is involved in where as when you look at the computational share of bringing a game to your senses right now, NVIDIA and ATI/AMD are far more likely to be providing the horsepower than Intel.
But really, even if this wasn't a vested interest case (and it may not be, no harm exploring it after all) - the fact remains that we don't actually need this for games. Graphics hardware has gone down an entirely different route whereby you write little shader programs which create surface visual effects on top of the bread and butter polygons and textures. This is a well established system by now and has a naturally compressive effect. It's like making all your visual effects procedural in nature rather than giving objects simple real-world textures and then doing a load of crazy maths to simulate reality. It works very well. Rememeber a lot of the time you want things to look fantastical and not ultra-realistic so lighting is some of the challenge.
Games aren't having a problem looking great. They're having a problem looking great and doing it fast enough and game developers are having a problem creating the content to fill these luscious realistic-looking worlds. That's actually what's more useful, really. Ways to aid game developers create content in parallel rather than throwing out the current rendering strategy adopted world wide by the games industry.
Decent little article. I decided to go on a similar drive and make our home (which serves as home office for myself and my wife) a little more efficient. I targetted a number of things including DC plug packs being left in idle, devices in stand by etc. What I did was measure the household electrical current draw by timing meter revolutions (old spinning type meters in near universal usage in the UK) before and after, and work out what was worth doing.
I detailed my thoughts in this blog along with details of how to calculate power drain from the electrical meter in your home.
Well, this is good because it means that the US has the opportunity to move straight to the latest and safest state of the art nuclear power plant technology.
Yes, in some respects this is a benefit for the US but perhaps not why you'd think. Other countries that have had a more comprehensive nuclear programmes have a lot of aging power plants due to be decomissioned. The sheer cost of this ends up sharpening the mind with regards to the actual running costs of nuclear, which is really quite substantial.
Also, and here's a vital point not covered in other comments I've seen, a good many countries are having exactly the same debate. It's happening in the UK right now at the time when about half of our nuclear power plants are offline for repairs. The UK is massively reliant on natural gas. It's piped to virtually every home for heating and a great deal of the power plants are gas fired. The cost of gas is going through the roof and the UK unfortunately sits on the end of the long trans-Europe pipelines from Russia, along which the price goes up and up the further you go due to market forces, and the reliability of future supply deminishes also.
So the UK really needs nuclear. Enough for the government to stand up to this point, despite largely public disagreement. It's frustrating to look just across the channel and see how the French are sitting pretty generating 80% of their power with nuclear. The UK at it's peak was 26% nuclear but now is dropping way below 20% with aging/closing nuclear power stations.
One of the problems with a new nuclear build programme is that there simply aren't a whole hell of a lot of companies out there which can build nuclear power stations. There's not the expertise and manpower out there for some huge build of hundreds (in our case) to thousands (in the US case) to provide the bulk of electricity from nuclear. Sure the industry will scale up but as plants take virtually a decade to build, even the new nuclear designs are going to take a long long time to get off the ground and most builds will be done by people who have just started in the industry anyway. Taking longer, more expensive, just like previous generations then. And that has safety implications also.
And in the end all this does is tackle the electrical CO2 impact on the world. It does nothing about cars, and little about home heating/cooking (in Europe anyway).
When it comes to the US, what you guys need is not just new nuclear but you need to reduce your electricity consumption (which is vastly higher per capita than anywhere else in the world) and invest in losing less of it. 110V mains? That contribution to loss of efficiency alone is really quite stunning. Particularly when dealing with high current applications such as heating, cooking (served by natural gas in Europe generally) and air conditioning.
Dropping DRM and basically opening up the album to the masses is something we all want to see. That said my initial enthusiasm stemmed from being surprised by another Radiohead album rather than being told about it many months before it shows up as normal.
More relevantly for this discussion, the really cool digital distribution mechanism has been marred somewhat by the patchy way the whole thing has been delivered. 160kbps CBR MP3 rip (well below par quality wise) is causing expected waves but, in my view, worse still is the amateurish mastering of the album itself.
I've come to the conclusion that to some degree the lo-fi approach is by design but I've also concluded that it appears in so many places, rampant master-level clipping on overlayed sections, that it's really not something I find pleasurable. Then there's also the brutally inept stereo imaging too. I applaud Radiohead for the approach, don't get me wrong, but in some sense it does strike me as a bit self indulgent. They really COULD have benefitted from a real studio and a professional audio engineer. The shame is that record companies will hold this up as an example why that approach is better, when in fact this is just an error on behalf of Radiohead's where they came to believe they could do that stuff themselves too. They can clearly afford to hire out the appropriate resources.
You could try The Bat. It's the most advanced old-school full featured mail client around really.
I use it for work email because I need to be able to tailor ways I write email according to folders (internal/external mail etc). That said, I do my personal mail on gmail because I need to read it on any machines and because I use it as a sort of knowledge database. Searching email in a real client always takes years where as in Gmail it keeps everything, ever, and takes a fraction of a second to search it. That's a killer feature right there.
This is wrong, I don't think you understand the issues.
You can't forge the client state because the game world simulation runs on the server. If a client does something that's out of bounds of what can be done, it's basically culled.
You CAN still do some sorts of cheating, by acting within the limits of the game such as using aim bots. But that's it, no giving yourself health or running super fast.
Seriously, various mechanisms for game servers to operate have been properly research and beta tested in oh so many ways for a very long time now. There *are* some lame game protocols out there but equally, one shouldn't be so quick to jump up with your arm chair criticism as if you understand all that's involved.
But once again we see how wanting to keep things secret and hush hush this is proprietary stuff just slows down progress.
No. We don't see that at all.
The application in question, which clearly almost none of the Slashdot posters here have even the slightest clue about given the repeated mantras of Linux evangelism, isn't a required aspect to support the device at all. You plug it into USB. It appears as a mass storage device. The large buttons on screen guide extremely inexpert users as to how to obtain various bits of third-party add ons and copy them to the right places on the device.
If you're a Linux user, you almost certainly would prefer NOT to run this kind of application at all. You'd simply read the readme, figure out where to copy the files and be happy. So it's not even that they didn't bother to make a Linux version, it would be absurd to even bother. And if you really DID that, you could make a duplicate application in a heart beat because all the damn thing does is copy files to a USB mass storage device. Or do you consider that proprietary?
As an Australia that's lived the last ten years in the UK, I can categorically tell you that Australians whinge more and about more trivial things than the Poms do. In fact I find it quite remarkable what aussies can whinge about.
It sounds familiar because it's a mechanism for success. However Skype is very different from Microsoft.
Equally what I could say sounds familiar is the idea that everything should be open source, open standards, difficult to use and so on. The idea of what is technically better or meets your personal mindset of technical politics is very often completely at odds with what needs to be done so people can actually use the technology in question.
Slashdot Mirror
It's difficult to overstate the importance of the ESP8266. It was marred a bit in the first place with the $5 modules that only had a serial interface and a firmware that spoke in AT-commands. This is paradoxically how these stupid AVR+ESP8266 boards work. They're worthless. The AT/serial firmware is buggy and unreliable and a complete waste of time.
The thing that made the ESP8266 lift off is the breakout boards with USB serial onboard allowing direct programming of the device. For about $10 you can get one of these from China and then flash the NodeMCU firmware and write Lua on the thing. NodeMCU isn't universally loved, largely because it kind of sucked until more recent versions, but just imagine a scripting language with low-level hardware GPIO, I2C, SPI and of course WiFi. Proper IoT shit for $10 and they draw about 30mA when running flat out and sleep at much less. It's amazing.
If Lua doesn't cut it, there's a really nice port of Arduino so you upload C code directly to the board with shitloads (but not all) of the Arduino support libraries you might want. For me, there's really only one usage case for 8-bit AVRs. That's the ATtiny85s run for about $3 on a board with USB (digisparks).
This really is a load of crap. Extract a bunch of fairly obvious stratagems from a received text, an English translation of generally dubious worth, and apply it to cyber warfare.... unsurprisingly it fails to stack up particularly well. Sunzi was almost exclusively fixed on the idea that armies were controlled by single entities and that virtually all actions under taken by them had cost, and thus could be factored in a set of trade-offs, or expert application of game theory, before game theory was a thing. It was insightful at the time, to say the least, it can still be useful to state the more obvious strategems of any conflict but to claim relevance today where the agents existiing in dramatically different contexts is weak sauce indeed. Sunzi, in particular, would be horrified that any engagement would essentially exist in perpetuity, if the sunzi bingfa (art of war) was indeed written by one person, then he would be horrified by the layout of modern cyber warfare, and would certainly be quite unable to add anything to the idea that one may have to defend against any number of actors, each of which potentially using different strategies at virtually no cost..
Would have expected this to be already extensively studied. C'mon humanities there must be already some linguistic research on this?
Holy cow batman. I guess I wouldn't expect slashdot to be up on anything to do with the filthy humanities but this is really quite something. There is a vast amount of research on this. The general idea is called linguistic relativism and has been a hotly debated topic since Wharf first started pondering the issues in the 1930s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
It's easily tested and has been often demonstrated, that speakers of languages with certain obligatory features, like say tense and plural in English, will be more observant about those facts that speakers of languages where such features are optional. Then there's a vast array of work that has discussed perception, particularly colours where languages vary in terms of how many names for colours there are, and hence the form of distinctions that need to be made when observing colours. I was always rather more partial to Dan Slobin's description of 'thinking for speaking' where our cognition shapes what we observe and what cognitive paradigm to use based upon the demands of the language we intend to speak in.
The whole Sapir-Wharf hypothesis and linguistic relativity has been flogged to death. The TFA paper is building on that with an interesting experiment designed to discover something rather more nuanced than suggested by the headline here. They used an interesting experimental technique that involved employing interference from another language by making them perform a task using that language. They seem to have demonstrated that this interference does indeed shift the way the participants viewed the task based on the differences between languages. It's certainly not a surprising finding for those linguists like me, that hold to a usage based theory of language (functionalism) based on general cognition. However it's a great example of the fascinating things you can discover with clever experiment design.
"Because it costs $1500"
This should not have been down voted. It's an honest and informative post about the reality of publishing with Elsevier.
From what I've heard the Chinese have been using Roman letters to help their students learn their own language for years now, and especially use roman letters to make it easier to enter Chinese text into a computer.
Indeed! Other input systems based on radicals or even handwriting have fallen out of favor compared to pinyin (that's what Mandarin romanisation is called) schemes. Helpful because increasingly English words or acronyms (often acronyms of Chinese words!) are becoming popular among young Chinese.
If you want to see pinyin, use Google translate and hit the phonetic symbol underneath the Chinese characters. It's the A with the two dots above it. The diacritics are the tone marks. Many of the roman letters sound somewhat like English but several aren't like x, c and q. The x sound is particularly amusing given the current Chinese leader's surname is Xi. I get a kick out of hearing newsreaders mispronounce it. Childish I know but when you've spent this many years learning a language and often still not understood by native Chinese it's nice to feel superior once in awhile.
Romanization systems don't work because there are too many homophones to worry about.
Bzzt! Aside from anything else, there is a standard romanisation sytem called Pinyin (), this is perfectly adequate to represent tones. It's used to teach Chinese both to kids and foreign speakers of Chinese. It's in dictionaries to tell Chinese people how to pronounce new words (since the Chinese orthography only gives you clues to pronunciation and of course no information about tones). Other tonal languages with greater tonal inventories than Mandarin such as Vietnamese have adopted similar schemes as their official orthography. There was even a substantial movement in the PRC to shift towards a roman alphabet at one point. This stemmed from the same political movement that simplified China's orthography from the traditional full form characters. Most of the arguments made about losing information in dumping Chinese characters can also be made about what has already occurred in the shift to simplified.
Even this argument premise betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about language. If you jump on a massively multiplayer game you'll find Chinese happily chatting away in pinyin without even writing the tones (you can do it in ascii by using numbers eg. ni3 hao3. That's because the act of parsing language is deeply rooted in context. Only certain words make sense in a given context or in a given syntactic position.
What most speakers of Western languages don't understand is quite how far along the explicit spectrum European languages are. An example is the English fetish on needing to specify a subject leading to bizarre constructions like "It is raining". Speakers of Chinese are much happier and skilled with the art of disambiguating not just lexical words but pragmatic intention from utterances that don't convey the full meaning in their semantic evaluation.
The high frequency of homophones is no barrier to a romanisation. I also fail to understand why anyone would think radicals are essential. They're very useful in reducing the task of memorising the character set, particularly since they have pronunciation and semantic clues that make it easier to remember how to read (and more importantly write) various words. They are actually quite a lot better at this task for the original full form () orthography because the full radicals often remain where as in the current simplified orthography of China, much has been reduced to arbitrary squiggles discarding semantic and pronunciation information in the process.
That's a circular argument though. If a phonemic orthography was used, you wouldn't be relying on clues any more. It would be enough to hear a word to be able to write it down. You cannot currently do that in Chinese except by using pinyin. I do this all the time. I write down the pinyin and then later check in a dictionary for the hanzi.
I'm a little loath to reply to this on the basis that the vast majority of posts from the Slashdot crowd on anything to do with university tend to view education as all about money. I suspect that's a heavy cultural bias from the US... anyway.
As someone who is a 40-something about to finish a degree this year, I have some experience of this but for me, at least, your question loads the dice. I was earning plenty of money doing what I was doing before, I just didn't like it. I'd be happy to earn a living, doing something I love and that is what, in my experience, most mature students are doing back at university.
Granted that might be a little skewed because useless public services like healthcare and universities cost more in the US than anywhere else in the world, and maybe you do feel some pressure to get a career result to pay back the debt. That said, there are cheap or even free ways to get educated if you're willing to move beyond the top-tier universities.
Finally, I'd add this: It's easy to make the decision to go to university to study something based on some sort of future goal. What universally happens is that by the end of the degree, you have a different idea about what that goal is. It's also quite hard to motivate yourself, do well, and even benefit particularly well from a degree if you aren't really interested in the subject.
So my advice is this: do a degree in something you're really interested in and when faced with choices, go for the flexible choices. There is every chance that you'll run into some niche off of something you're interested in which will turn out to be a gold mine. It happened to me. I found a field that blended my previous skills with what I was learning and it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
The engineering students will then go on to someday develop your next car, airplane, refrigerator, television, while you in 20 years will simply join your students on the quad for the sole purpose of perpetuating a useless major.
The observer bias regarding areas of education here on Slashdot is really something to behold. In general I've seen 'liberal arts' described as the study of comparative literature, shake spear, latin etc. Generally liberal arts are 'soft', do not lead to jobs, never invent anything or bring in university research. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter horseshit.
We shall for a moment accept the Slashdot definition of liberal arts as not including things like math and science (more accurately in academia it just means 'not vocational'), so if we just look at a 'school of arts' we have fields such as the study of all languages and linguistics (my areas), politics and international studies, criminology, design, economics, psychology, environmental and developmental studies, journalism, sociology just off the top of my head.
The amount of people studying the sorts of things which incense slashdotters so much, the Latin majors etc, is actually pretty low. Vitally, arts-type degree holders often go into jobs in the workforce which are not directly related to their degree. The idea that this made their degree useless is, well, quite depressing really. The fact is, these graduates didn't get a job in spite of their liberal arts degree, they very often get jobs because of it.
Yet there's also a very great deal of direct interest in a number of the arts fields. You may not believe it but every academic conference I go to, companies queue up to entice us to internships and employment. At a recent conference in my area, I was struck by the number of tech companies (I specifically recall Google and eBay) that had open ended invites for internships for anyone involved in the discipline, lamenting the fact there weren't more students in the field.
My field within 'arts' is extremely rich in research, practical applications, and yes, vocational opportunities. Yes, things you use on your web sites, on your phone, in your car. I was specifically drawn to it because it was apparent just how much further we had to go and how I might make a real difference. Believe it or not, modern technology doesn't just have 'science' bits under the hood, they have things that human beings control and that's where we come in.
It may bend your head to discover that a good number of people within 'liberal arts' also consider themselves scientists and very often work on issues imminently more practical than majors in mathematics. Yet despite that, you will generally not find people within the arts that are derisive about the studying the hard sciences.
Perhaps if more of you had a wider human-focused education then you would see that science does not live in a vacuum and university education does not have to be exclusively focused on the skills you need for your first job.
(The ex electronics engineer that went back to university to study 'liberal arts')
Quite so. This is in fact exactly how it's done in Australia. In fact the price I'm charged on my HECS student loan is different for each of the units I've taken, depending on the department that runs them.
There is another critical difference to US education, we have an extremely generous fully public student loan system which covers the entire cost of our university education and is only repayable when earning above a certain threshold of earnings, and it's interest free. While I would imagine such a thing would be called communist in the United States, it's a great way of insulating students from higher costs of studying sciences, medicine and what have you.
Arguably the higher costs of science is often not reflected by potential higher earnings. For reasons other than cost, just as in the US, science tends to be less popular. To encourage take up in some areas deemed to be in particular demand, the terms of cost of education is assisted with government funding. Making it cheaper still, but since we don't really care how much university costs (it's a fraction of what you pay in the US and we have those loans), the encouragement extends to outreach to high-schools, cost-of-living scholarships, lower entry requirements and so on.
I don't know what it's like in the US but in the UK and Australia, and presumably elsewhere too, there are a great many schemes that are aimed at encouraging take up of in-demand professions. Things like scholarships, grants, lower fees or even exempted fees for a portion of a course. Outreach programs to high school, ensuring that students with lower-than-expected results are aware of their opportunities to apply for the in-demand professions.
You buy Intel product and a fraction of the cost of buying those products ends up in a war chest for marketing. You can spend these funds by doing things like co-marketing activities or putting a logo on an advert (they would pay x% of your advert cost then) and so on and so forth. This is more common than just Intel, Microsoft does just the same. That's why there's a Microsoft slogan on every print advert. By the time you do both, you end up paying less than half the actual cost of the advert.
Now this is on one hand a reasonable system. Just like manufacturers have chucked in cash to co-fund ads with distributors since the beginning of time... On the other hand, that war chest is only there if you're buying their products. This makes the business case of buying stuff from the other guy all the more difficult. It means really you're advertising Intel stuff because, honestly, AMD isn't going to write any cheques. The fact that Intel's business is larger than just the CPU itself means you get economies of scale here too.
Is this anti competetive. Well, I think some aspect of it is. However most of it is just a symptom of the fact that it becomes easier to work with the really big guy. It has always been more pleasant to work with them than AMD. You get samples of stuff when you ask, you get marketing help, they run cool events, they actively assign a dude to look after your account who is a genuinely helpful human being. You get precisely none of that with AMD. In fact AMD, as a point of order, probably has the worst marketing set up I have ever encountered in my career. It was amusing when they bought ATI because they were probably the 2nd worst...
What's the solution here? It feels like it's a business that is having trouble with scale. AMD isn't big enough to 'compete' just because they make a CPU. They aren't anything near big enough. They need to consolidate into solutions (buying ATI was part of that obviously) and be able to offer manufacturers the same sort of product range and attractive business proposition as Intel does. It's not anti competetive, it just makes doing business with you more attractive.
What all of this really boils down to, and why I wont shed a tear for a huge fine such as the EU fine, is that the reason Intel is in the position is because of distinctly anti-competetive behavior in the past. I never experienced that myself but if you've become the dominent player through dirty tricks then cleaning your act up in recent times isn't realy good enough is it? Unfortunately even a billion euros is kind of shutting the door after the horse is bolted.
...and the other two points. Sure, those are true but they didn't just magically happen either. It wasn't just because these countries are 'small' - much as Americans are so very fond of thinking of Europe (while they themselves tend to move very small distances from where they were born, as a statistic) - it's because the governments of Europe imposed tax penalties on fuel.
This was done to hit demand and create a market for fuel efficient vehicles and other practises that curb demand. It's worked too, oil burned per capita of people in Europe is a fraction of what Americans use and the CO2 output per capita is even more stark.
America retained the love of huge fuel inefficient cars, SUVs etc while the lobby-driven politics ensured it was political suicide for anyone to grow a spin and impose fuel taxation or indeed any other significant measures to break the American love affair with burning oil.
Most cars people drive in Europe are smaller, designed primarily for running costs and not the sound that a large capacity engine makes (you've got to listen to the round-tabel panel on Ward's Top Ten engines for a clue as to just how important they believe this junk to be), but instead the engines are more expensive and technically advanced to improve economy.
So baring this in mind, it's pretty unfair to suggest that Europe just got handed all of these advantages. They were hard fought and hard won. We've been paying decades of tax on fuel.
While you're whining about $4 a gallon, we're paying $5 a gallon JUST IN TAX. We're already driving around fuel efficient vehicles and paying through the nose with road/green taxes, CO2-based taxes, expensive emissions standards driving up costs of vehicles and servicing costs and have been for YEARS. So you'll have to excuse us if we don't have vast amounts of sympathy for the complaints coming from the other side of the Atlantic right now.
However the real tragedy here is that the ATI aquisition essentially made one company made up of the PR and marketing teams from the two companies in the industry with the worst PR and marketing. Maybe they considered this was an issue of compatible corporate cultures. At any rate despite having years to turn it around AMD show absolutely no sign of learning from Intel and Nvidia's success.
I liked AMD but it's really hard to see how they can come back from this now. Core2 is embarassingly better than Phenom. Nvidia 8800-series is slightly better than AMD's brand new 3800xx series but Nvidia is going to launch the next-generation series this year. There's just nothing they have which is competitive. Nothing on the roadmap (that I've seen) that looks like it'll be competitive. It's looking grim for them.
"I think the problem with the current system is that it scales horribly."
On the contrary, it scales very well actually. You can simply use more pixel pipelines to do things in parallel to do less passes (which is what you see in most graphics hardware including the current consoles), or you can render alternate lines, or chunks of the display etc for multiple entire chunks of hardware such as SLI/Crossfire on the PC.
The problem you describe is essentially that any complicated visual processing in very high resolutions requires a massive amount of processing power and that's expensive to implement. It's possible, it's just expensive. There's just no way in hell the massively massively more computationally expensive technique of raytracing is going to improve upon things. I game on a PC in 1920x1200 predominently with a very high graphics part with large amounts of dedicated memory. That costs a lot more than the hardware that's in a console but it's actually the same type of graphics part that's in the 360/PS3, it's just a higher spec part with more parallel bits etc.
There's also a bit of light at the end of the tunnel for the first time with this stuff. A really good PC graphics card (the 8800GT) is now available for money which people would actually consider spending. Sadly this is a bit too little too late for the PC as a gaming platform but it does show the march of technology quite well.
By the next console cycle they'll be pitched at whatever NVIDIA releases fall of 2009 most likely. With current performance increases I'd say a ballpark is being able to render in 1920x1200 comfortably with AA and with less performance concerns than the current generation in terms of on-screen content. No it wont be 33MP displays but honestly early-adopters aside it's still going to be a long time before 1920x1200 displays can be considered the norm for the living room.
And I think you're into diminishing returns after that sort of resolution anyway. Better to remove some on-screen limitations due to console architectures (of which there is quite a lot, mostly due to lack of memory and bandwidth) rather than arms race the resolution issue alone.
I guess one has to state the obvious in that by moving to a process which is not implemented in silicon, as with current graphics cards, the work must necessarily be done in software. That means it runs on CPUs and that's something Intel is involved in where as when you look at the computational share of bringing a game to your senses right now, NVIDIA and ATI/AMD are far more likely to be providing the horsepower than Intel.
But really, even if this wasn't a vested interest case (and it may not be, no harm exploring it after all) - the fact remains that we don't actually need this for games. Graphics hardware has gone down an entirely different route whereby you write little shader programs which create surface visual effects on top of the bread and butter polygons and textures. This is a well established system by now and has a naturally compressive effect. It's like making all your visual effects procedural in nature rather than giving objects simple real-world textures and then doing a load of crazy maths to simulate reality. It works very well. Rememeber a lot of the time you want things to look fantastical and not ultra-realistic so lighting is some of the challenge.
Games aren't having a problem looking great. They're having a problem looking great and doing it fast enough and game developers are having a problem creating the content to fill these luscious realistic-looking worlds. That's actually what's more useful, really. Ways to aid game developers create content in parallel rather than throwing out the current rendering strategy adopted world wide by the games industry.
Decent little article. I decided to go on a similar drive and make our home (which serves as home office for myself and my wife) a little more efficient. I targetted a number of things including DC plug packs being left in idle, devices in stand by etc. What I did was measure the household electrical current draw by timing meter revolutions (old spinning type meters in near universal usage in the UK) before and after, and work out what was worth doing.
I detailed my thoughts in this blog along with details of how to calculate power drain from the electrical meter in your home.
Yes, in some respects this is a benefit for the US but perhaps not why you'd think. Other countries that have had a more comprehensive nuclear programmes have a lot of aging power plants due to be decomissioned. The sheer cost of this ends up sharpening the mind with regards to the actual running costs of nuclear, which is really quite substantial.
Also, and here's a vital point not covered in other comments I've seen, a good many countries are having exactly the same debate. It's happening in the UK right now at the time when about half of our nuclear power plants are offline for repairs. The UK is massively reliant on natural gas. It's piped to virtually every home for heating and a great deal of the power plants are gas fired. The cost of gas is going through the roof and the UK unfortunately sits on the end of the long trans-Europe pipelines from Russia, along which the price goes up and up the further you go due to market forces, and the reliability of future supply deminishes also.
So the UK really needs nuclear. Enough for the government to stand up to this point, despite largely public disagreement. It's frustrating to look just across the channel and see how the French are sitting pretty generating 80% of their power with nuclear. The UK at it's peak was 26% nuclear but now is dropping way below 20% with aging/closing nuclear power stations.
One of the problems with a new nuclear build programme is that there simply aren't a whole hell of a lot of companies out there which can build nuclear power stations. There's not the expertise and manpower out there for some huge build of hundreds (in our case) to thousands (in the US case) to provide the bulk of electricity from nuclear. Sure the industry will scale up but as plants take virtually a decade to build, even the new nuclear designs are going to take a long long time to get off the ground and most builds will be done by people who have just started in the industry anyway. Taking longer, more expensive, just like previous generations then. And that has safety implications also.
And in the end all this does is tackle the electrical CO2 impact on the world. It does nothing about cars, and little about home heating/cooking (in Europe anyway).
When it comes to the US, what you guys need is not just new nuclear but you need to reduce your electricity consumption (which is vastly higher per capita than anywhere else in the world) and invest in losing less of it. 110V mains? That contribution to loss of efficiency alone is really quite stunning. Particularly when dealing with high current applications such as heating, cooking (served by natural gas in Europe generally) and air conditioning.
I wonder if someone could clear it up for someone who isn't an American, what's a 'jock'?
Now I think we can look forward to the next Bioware games having unskippable corporate spinning logos for 5 minutes before the game starts up. Yay.
Dropping DRM and basically opening up the album to the masses is something we all want to see. That said my initial enthusiasm stemmed from being surprised by another Radiohead album rather than being told about it many months before it shows up as normal.
More relevantly for this discussion, the really cool digital distribution mechanism has been marred somewhat by the patchy way the whole thing has been delivered. 160kbps CBR MP3 rip (well below par quality wise) is causing expected waves but, in my view, worse still is the amateurish mastering of the album itself.
I've come to the conclusion that to some degree the lo-fi approach is by design but I've also concluded that it appears in so many places, rampant master-level clipping on overlayed sections, that it's really not something I find pleasurable. Then there's also the brutally inept stereo imaging too. I applaud Radiohead for the approach, don't get me wrong, but in some sense it does strike me as a bit self indulgent. They really COULD have benefitted from a real studio and a professional audio engineer. The shame is that record companies will hold this up as an example why that approach is better, when in fact this is just an error on behalf of Radiohead's where they came to believe they could do that stuff themselves too. They can clearly afford to hire out the appropriate resources.
Anyway, I've written a bit more about the whole thing here: http://www.electricdeath.com/blog/1200
I use it for work email because I need to be able to tailor ways I write email according to folders (internal/external mail etc). That said, I do my personal mail on gmail because I need to read it on any machines and because I use it as a sort of knowledge database. Searching email in a real client always takes years where as in Gmail it keeps everything, ever, and takes a fraction of a second to search it. That's a killer feature right there.
You can't forge the client state because the game world simulation runs on the server. If a client does something that's out of bounds of what can be done, it's basically culled.
You CAN still do some sorts of cheating, by acting within the limits of the game such as using aim bots. But that's it, no giving yourself health or running super fast.
Seriously, various mechanisms for game servers to operate have been properly research and beta tested in oh so many ways for a very long time now. There *are* some lame game protocols out there but equally, one shouldn't be so quick to jump up with your arm chair criticism as if you understand all that's involved.
No. We don't see that at all.
The application in question, which clearly almost none of the Slashdot posters here have even the slightest clue about given the repeated mantras of Linux evangelism, isn't a required aspect to support the device at all. You plug it into USB. It appears as a mass storage device. The large buttons on screen guide extremely inexpert users as to how to obtain various bits of third-party add ons and copy them to the right places on the device.
If you're a Linux user, you almost certainly would prefer NOT to run this kind of application at all. You'd simply read the readme, figure out where to copy the files and be happy. So it's not even that they didn't bother to make a Linux version, it would be absurd to even bother. And if you really DID that, you could make a duplicate application in a heart beat because all the damn thing does is copy files to a USB mass storage device. Or do you consider that proprietary?
As an Australia that's lived the last ten years in the UK, I can categorically tell you that Australians whinge more and about more trivial things than the Poms do. In fact I find it quite remarkable what aussies can whinge about.
Equally what I could say sounds familiar is the idea that everything should be open source, open standards, difficult to use and so on. The idea of what is technically better or meets your personal mindset of technical politics is very often completely at odds with what needs to be done so people can actually use the technology in question.