November's Scientic American has an article about two competing technologies for electronic displays on paper (in addition to the UoA stuff cited here).
Rather than illumination, they use electrified pigments or rotaing, embedded spheres to change the color of a sheet of plastic. One difference with the technology at UoA is that charge is only needed to change the image, not maintain it. One of the developers described it as "paper that prints itself," which gives you an idea of what kind of applications it could be used for (e.g. hourly updated price signs=good. Monitor to watch a live video stream=bad).
Glad you liked it. If you go embeded, though, make sure you stay flexible. I know a number of guys who bet on the wrong embedded OS and have seen their status (and contract rates) as experts go out the window. I guess the same can be said for any technology, but it seems to hit hard in this neck of the woods.
Good luck, though. There's nothing cooler (IMHO) than seeing that little red "I'm alive" LED flash on a piece of hardware that you've wired together the first time. Kinda makes you feel like Frankenstein.:)
I'm glad they pointed out that most thefts are perpetrated by insiders (at banks or other companies) due to the other (physical) security measures. I can only hope that other media outlets don't drop the ball on this and start shouting "hackers can steal your cash" on the 6PM news.
Then again... I guess you'd only need to be an insider at the phone company (or whatever company might be leasing a cable to a phone company) to exploit ATM transfers. You wouldn't need to be a bank employee (who undergo background checks, etc).
Re:problem with large storage mp3 players
on
80 Gig MP3 Player
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· Score: 1
This may already be done somewhere in MP3-land, but...
What if, instead of merely swapping MP3's, you swapped playlists, too? The trick to navigating a big mass of music is programming it in interesting ways. I know that I usually wind up just playing the same CDs over and over out of laziness and only cycle in new stuff when I get bored. To avoid the equivilent with this player (hitting the same hot buttons or menu sequences or whatever), you would upload a playlist that someone else found interesting (Hendix followed by the stuff he influenced, Miles Davis followed by Kobain, etc). Essentially, you'd be doing the job a radio station programmer does, but at an amateur level.
Seems like a good idea - that's why I gotta think some of the MP3 sites aleady do this.
How long until RIAA makes a statement about this?
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80 Gig MP3 Player
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
If this device takes off, I'm sure one will follow.
Of course, if M$ were to do it and somehow tie Pa$$port into it, I'm sure RIAA would fall all over it.
After reading the article, I got completely creeped out. The notion of one creature being controled by another creature makes me wonder about this concept we call "Free Will." I mean, it was really me who chose to eat that enchilada at lunch, right?
Philosophy aside, this could have some real applications. By manipulating basic, instinctual behavior of animals with a chemical application, you could all sorts of things.
For example, in California we have a well known problem with fruit fly infestations. There are two basic ways to deal with them: poison the buggers en masse, or sterilize a batch of males with radiation and release them (apparently, the females will mate only once, so they hook up with the guys shooting blanks and never reproduce - thus eliminating two of the creatures for the price of one). If a chemical could be developed that causes male fruit flies to somehow interrupt their mating behavior (say, do the courtship dance but never consumate the deed) you've essentially combined both techniques. Instead of releasing a few thousand sterile males (an expensive process), you wind up esentially sterilizing any male you expose - potentially many millions.
I just hope Madison Avenue never finds the equivilent formula for human buying behavior. (*GRIN*)
I once knew a fundementalist who used to talk about "The End Times" a lot. His church'es interpretation of the Book of Revalations included something exactly like this (mark of Cain as a national ID).
Now, as much as I personally would like to see this particular individual holed up in a bunker, far away from yours truely, I have an inkling that the whole tattoo thing might be a bad idea to implement (and that's without the Nazi, THX-1138(?), cattle, etc. baggage taken into account).
"Not one national ID card that we force everybody to have," but multiple, voluntary cards that could improve the efficiency of activities, Clarke added."
As much as my inner civil libertarian likes the White House backing away from a national ID card, I really have to wonder at that last comment. Specifically, if you have some way to correlate data between multiple cards (DMV databases, social security, etc), isn't it the same thing as having a national ID? Mine just happens to say "California Driver's Liscence" on the front while yours says "M.I.T. Student ID." It just takes one giant database record merge to put the whole mess together.
It seems the civil liberty issue is not the use of a single card (as symbolic as that might be) but the sharing of the information already out there. The "record merge" can already be done under limited circumstances (e.g. manually by a detective with warrants to search records at all the instituions). The real problem here would be the wholesale sharing of that information, especially electronically for any bureaucrat with too much free time to peruse.
Viewed from that point, I don't know whether to relax about a national ID card (since the thing essentially already exists) or freak out in panic (for the same reasons).
Agreed - dryer lint would be enough to make me want to reprogram it with a ball peen hammer. But that's a user interface design issue.
What I was thinking of was you press a recessed button and the pizeo speaker says: "On board timer - OK. Internal fuse check - OK. Motor check - intermittant failures. Possible intermitant short in motor housing or windings. Please contact your Maytag repair professional at (800)555-5555 and please indicate failure code 247."
General rule: It'd be more specific if only a technician could reach it, less specific (code and phone number) if it was intended for a consumer to self test. Again, user interface issues.
Ultimately, technology managers don't want to hear about the operating system, Robinson
believes. "All you care about is wanting a stable, scalable platform for applications to run on."
(*SIGH*) The big advantage that M$ has always had over LINUX is that it controls spin on its image very well - at least where it counts. Grunts in the trenches can scream as much as we want, but executives don't see many Blue Screens of Death. Therefore, the perceptions of the different options differ between top and bottom of the management pyramid.
The other perception problem is that decision makers are (quite correctly) rooted in the here and now. They are not interested in hearing about security holes or bugs that present potentional problems, even if the potential consequences are catastrophic. Let's face it - most of the night terrors that techies have with M$ products have to do with the exceptional scenarios (hack attacks, cascading failures, etc) that might occur rather than the merely horrific ones we do face. I mean, the "house of cards" dread I get in my stomach when dealing with these things always seem to outweigh specific, documented incidents I can point out to a manager.
As other posters have pointed out, all this has been done before. I really don't see existing applications (EMAIL, etc) as benefiting from this.
The real potential of this thing is its low power and (presumably) price. Sure, a PDA with this might have a certain "cool" factor, but the inovation would be in other, traditionally "dumb" products:
Embed this with a cheap GPS unit in a walkman to give directions while running or biking (or a soldier navigating through the woods).
UPS/FedEx tracking tags that can be interrogated without needing a scanner.
Tie into a cellphone and timer to do audio data dumps for personal products - your doctor can query your insulin pump.
Diagnostics in almost any product - washing machine, furnace, stereo - could be done without adding the cost or space of a visual display.
Can't help remembering the original (128K & 512K) Macs. No fan. I worked at a third party shop in high school and we did a land office business replacing blown flyback transformers in the Summer - dang things had a manufacturing flaw and dropped like flies. Inveitably, I was able to sell the customer a fan, either a pizeoelectric, completlely internal "butterfly" one or the traditional "hole in the case" one.
The irony, of course, was that the new flybacks didn't have the flaw and, although its always good to have a frosty CPU, the fan's value was questionable.
Actually, on our older system several years ago we used a variation on that theme. Basically, we used a Super Nintendo as the core video engine. Worked very closely with them. They turned around and filed a patent claiming that they invented the entire concept of in seat, airline video - a claim that even we have no right to make. The thing that really sticks in our craws is that they used some of the diagrams we drew in our documents and placed them directly into the patent!!
Also, to meet the vibration, reliability (99.9+% up time), power consumption, and EM radiation standards for running inside an aircraft we had to modify the hardware substantially. When that happened, most of the "off the shelf" savings went out the window.
On a software front, though, the difficulty with a game engine is that these seats are expected to have a life of at least five years, but most airlines wind up pushing them as long as possible - there's a lot of equipment running out there 20 years old. Finding new games throughout the lifespan of the product is bad enough, but finding developers to maintain the system is even tougher (would you be interested in maintaining our Super NES code? Thought not - can't blame ya'!).
Another thing driving the processor/platform choice is web browsing, specifically the use of IE (which, let's face it, is the best choice to expose a non-tech savvy flying public to). That drove us to either CE or embedded NT (embedded XP wasn't on the radar yet) and we picked the cheaper choice and were able to budget in 64M of socketed RAM (again, a pitance, but the hardware guys originally wanted 8M soldered - killing any hope of upgrade).
I'm afraid you're right. You're talking about only business and first class for flights over, say, six hours (anything shorter and you can only really justify the cost of an overhead projection system rather than dedicated video at every seat). Even at our peak sales, the numbers run optimistically to 10K - a pitance. To do that, you have to subsidize the liscening and that gets real expensive per seat.
...gaming as an afterthought...
Er, yes and no. Gaming is always a hard requirement for IFE systems and the airlines always demand more than we can give. Nevertheless, video has priority, as much because the liscencing is more straight forward (you don't have to pay to port Erin Brockovich) and it's easier to find a movie with a wide appeal across gender/religion/culture than a video game that does that.
I hope we see some good game development. I'm working on my employer's next generation in flight entertainment system and we need better games for the passengers to play. It's depressing that all the serious development of late has been for higher end systems - we're running a 266MHz embedded x86 at the seat under Win CE and there's little to choose from out there.
Although I'd like to rejoice at this news, I fear it won't help us much. With M$ pouring resources into XP and Xbox, I fear that CE (with its very reasonable liscencing terms) will become yet another orphaned child from Redmond.
What's the best way to get a list of local companies that do the kind of work you;d be interested in? Years ago, you'd go to the Chamber of Commerce. I was thinking the modern equivilant would be to look up an internet directory for regional businesses.
I remember hearing that California, if it were an independent country, would have the 6th largest economy in the world. Maybe it could work...
As to a military, you'd have the National Guard and CHP. Also, when I did contract teching for Cal State University, I had to sign a loyalty oath to "Defend the State of California from all enemies, foreign and domestic." Does that mean they could call me up to repell an invasion from Oregon?
On the other hand, I don't know if I'm up for another Republic of California (the original lasted a couple of weeks during the Mexican American War). It's bad enough getting searched by the Dept. of Agriculture cops for fruit fly laden produce when I cross the border on the way to Las Vegas. I don't want to imagine what it'd be like if those guys were full fledged customs officials.
Remember in high school, when they explained the concept of States Rights and how the states were reserved certain rights and the Feds others? It always got me how many dull things these addressed - water rights, highway funding, etc. The only thing I could recall where it intersected in really relevant issues was Civil Rights back in the '60s (and then, several of the states were wearing the Black Hats).
So, it's kind of neat to see Federalism jump back, with individual states acting as a check on the authority of the Federal govt (at least in areas where their rights and responsibilities overlap). Regardless of which way you think the rulings should go, it's kind of cool to see this somewhat bizarre feature of our government in action.
Man, it kind of makes me wish I had an EMAIL of my old Civics teacher...
Thanks for the response, everyone. I'm used to using TFTP in an embedded environment (no surprise, given my handle). I'd assumed the full standard supported accounts/passwords and we just ran it with 'em off - I should've thought it through. I guess the "Tivial" in TFTP is well earned.
I was wondering if you could block the port on TFTP, thus locking it out entirely, so I dug out my copy of Stevens, Volume I and skimmed the chapter on TFTP. The thing is, I see no mention of a port at all in this chapter. Am I just missing it or are ports a TCP concept (while TFTP runs UDP/IP)? Regardless of that, though, how do you defend against the use of TFTP in this manner?
On first glance, this looks like a really nice piece of work, especially given the caveat (paraphrased) "this is not completely inclusive..." for the author.
I do have a question for my fellow slashdotters: Why does the author single out TFTP but not FTP? Does TFTP have inherrent weaknesses that would make it the file transfer protocol of choice for an attacker?
Powers was specifically citing the stuff in Galaxy Magazine, but I do see your point in that Forever War is a Vietnam metphor and yet will (IMHO) be read and reread for a long, long time.
Ironically, that book touched a very specific nerve for me in High School. Reagan was sabre rattling about Central America and I was absolutely convinced I was going to wind up a terrified draftee slogging through the jungles of Guatamala as sniper bait. I guess that helps prove the timelessness of Forever War: we think of it as a Vietnam metaphor when in reality (unintentionally?) it's a story about fighting a dirty, unpopular war under any circumstances.
I wonder if a Russian translation would have sold well to Afganistan vets in the 1980's USSR (inherent censorship/propganda issues aside)?
I mentioned Tom Clancy, above ("Good vs. timeless writers") and that his subject material (politics and nuts & bolts technology) make him very dated.
With that in mind, who do you think might be a good (or at least sucessful) author who will be forgotten not because of the quality of his/her work but because of the choice of subject amtter?
I was at a class recently run by Tim Powers (Anubis Gates, Earthquake Weather, Declare, and others) and he emphasized his bias against "Message" SF. Specifically, he cited Stuff in Galaxy in the 70's: wonderfully written but everything was a metaphor for Vietnam, LSD, or hippies.
In that vein, look at some of the authors people cited as timeless on these posts:
Dr. Seuss - All his stuff was written in the 40's-70's, yet his messages ring true, even the political ones. (If you've never seen his collection of anti-Nazi cartoons, run out and get it).
Larry Niven - Some of his technology is dated (mainframe computing) but his stories are still fantastic. The fact that Known Space takes place in the far, far future helps.
On the other hand, Tom Clancy will not (IMHO) "stand the test of time," and not because of the quality of his writting (although some might criticize him for that). No, what I mean is that his stuff becomes dated so dang quickly. Look at his subject matter: politics and technological nuts & bolts details. You'd be hard pressed to find two subjects that have changed more radically in the last ten years. I mean, try to reread Red Storm Rising as anything other than "What may have been" and you bust a gut laughing (On the other hand, The Hunt for Red October works great as historical fiction).
Of course, don't weep for poor old Tom: he's laughing all the way to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than illumination, they use electrified pigments or rotaing, embedded spheres to change the color of a sheet of plastic. One difference with the technology at UoA is that charge is only needed to change the image, not maintain it. One of the developers described it as "paper that prints itself," which gives you an idea of what kind of applications it could be used for (e.g. hourly updated price signs=good. Monitor to watch a live video stream=bad).
Good luck, though. There's nothing cooler (IMHO) than seeing that little red "I'm alive" LED flash on a piece of hardware that you've wired together the first time. Kinda makes you feel like Frankenstein. :)
Then again... I guess you'd only need to be an insider at the phone company (or whatever company might be leasing a cable to a phone company) to exploit ATM transfers. You wouldn't need to be a bank employee (who undergo background checks, etc).
What if, instead of merely swapping MP3's, you swapped playlists, too? The trick to navigating a big mass of music is programming it in interesting ways. I know that I usually wind up just playing the same CDs over and over out of laziness and only cycle in new stuff when I get bored. To avoid the equivilent with this player (hitting the same hot buttons or menu sequences or whatever), you would upload a playlist that someone else found interesting (Hendix followed by the stuff he influenced, Miles Davis followed by Kobain, etc). Essentially, you'd be doing the job a radio station programmer does, but at an amateur level.
Seems like a good idea - that's why I gotta think some of the MP3 sites aleady do this.
Of course, if M$ were to do it and somehow tie Pa$$port into it, I'm sure RIAA would fall all over it.
Philosophy aside, this could have some real applications. By manipulating basic, instinctual behavior of animals with a chemical application, you could all sorts of things.
For example, in California we have a well known problem with fruit fly infestations. There are two basic ways to deal with them: poison the buggers en masse, or sterilize a batch of males with radiation and release them (apparently, the females will mate only once, so they hook up with the guys shooting blanks and never reproduce - thus eliminating two of the creatures for the price of one). If a chemical could be developed that causes male fruit flies to somehow interrupt their mating behavior (say, do the courtship dance but never consumate the deed) you've essentially combined both techniques. Instead of releasing a few thousand sterile males (an expensive process), you wind up esentially sterilizing any male you expose - potentially many millions.
I just hope Madison Avenue never finds the equivilent formula for human buying behavior. (*GRIN*)
Now, as much as I personally would like to see this particular individual holed up in a bunker, far away from yours truely, I have an inkling that the whole tattoo thing might be a bad idea to implement (and that's without the Nazi, THX-1138(?), cattle, etc. baggage taken into account).
Still, I really do like the DNA crosscheck idea.
As much as my inner civil libertarian likes the White House backing away from a national ID card, I really have to wonder at that last comment. Specifically, if you have some way to correlate data between multiple cards (DMV databases, social security, etc), isn't it the same thing as having a national ID? Mine just happens to say "California Driver's Liscence" on the front while yours says "M.I.T. Student ID." It just takes one giant database record merge to put the whole mess together.
It seems the civil liberty issue is not the use of a single card (as symbolic as that might be) but the sharing of the information already out there. The "record merge" can already be done under limited circumstances (e.g. manually by a detective with warrants to search records at all the instituions). The real problem here would be the wholesale sharing of that information, especially electronically for any bureaucrat with too much free time to peruse.
Viewed from that point, I don't know whether to relax about a national ID card (since the thing essentially already exists) or freak out in panic (for the same reasons).
Of course, the problem with Napster was that the stuff got too freely distributed, cutting out the whole "pay the artist for thier work" step.
What I was thinking of was you press a recessed button and the pizeo speaker says: "On board timer - OK. Internal fuse check - OK. Motor check - intermittant failures. Possible intermitant short in motor housing or windings. Please contact your Maytag repair professional at (800)555-5555 and please indicate failure code 247."
General rule: It'd be more specific if only a technician could reach it, less specific (code and phone number) if it was intended for a consumer to self test. Again, user interface issues.
(*SIGH*) The big advantage that M$ has always had over LINUX is that it controls spin on its image very well - at least where it counts. Grunts in the trenches can scream as much as we want, but executives don't see many Blue Screens of Death. Therefore, the perceptions of the different options differ between top and bottom of the management pyramid.
The other perception problem is that decision makers are (quite correctly) rooted in the here and now. They are not interested in hearing about security holes or bugs that present potentional problems, even if the potential consequences are catastrophic. Let's face it - most of the night terrors that techies have with M$ products have to do with the exceptional scenarios (hack attacks, cascading failures, etc) that might occur rather than the merely horrific ones we do face. I mean, the "house of cards" dread I get in my stomach when dealing with these things always seem to outweigh specific, documented incidents I can point out to a manager.
The real potential of this thing is its low power and (presumably) price. Sure, a PDA with this might have a certain "cool" factor, but the inovation would be in other, traditionally "dumb" products:
Surely, other people have suggestions to add...
Can't help remembering the original (128K & 512K) Macs. No fan. I worked at a third party shop in high school and we did a land office business replacing blown flyback transformers in the Summer - dang things had a manufacturing flaw and dropped like flies. Inveitably, I was able to sell the customer a fan, either a pizeoelectric, completlely internal "butterfly" one or the traditional "hole in the case" one.
The irony, of course, was that the new flybacks didn't have the flaw and, although its always good to have a frosty CPU, the fan's value was questionable.
END(Old Codger)
Also, to meet the vibration, reliability (99.9+% up time), power consumption, and EM radiation standards for running inside an aircraft we had to modify the hardware substantially. When that happened, most of the "off the shelf" savings went out the window.
On a software front, though, the difficulty with a game engine is that these seats are expected to have a life of at least five years, but most airlines wind up pushing them as long as possible - there's a lot of equipment running out there 20 years old. Finding new games throughout the lifespan of the product is bad enough, but finding developers to maintain the system is even tougher (would you be interested in maintaining our Super NES code? Thought not - can't blame ya'!).
Another thing driving the processor/platform choice is web browsing, specifically the use of IE (which, let's face it, is the best choice to expose a non-tech savvy flying public to). That drove us to either CE or embedded NT (embedded XP wasn't on the radar yet) and we picked the cheaper choice and were able to budget in 64M of socketed RAM (again, a pitance, but the hardware guys originally wanted 8M soldered - killing any hope of upgrade).
I'm afraid you're right. You're talking about only business and first class for flights over, say, six hours (anything shorter and you can only really justify the cost of an overhead projection system rather than dedicated video at every seat). Even at our peak sales, the numbers run optimistically to 10K - a pitance. To do that, you have to subsidize the liscening and that gets real expensive per seat.
Er, yes and no. Gaming is always a hard requirement for IFE systems and the airlines always demand more than we can give. Nevertheless, video has priority, as much because the liscencing is more straight forward (you don't have to pay to port Erin Brockovich) and it's easier to find a movie with a wide appeal across gender/religion/culture than a video game that does that.
Although I'd like to rejoice at this news, I fear it won't help us much. With M$ pouring resources into XP and Xbox, I fear that CE (with its very reasonable liscencing terms) will become yet another orphaned child from Redmond.
Other suggestions?
If I'd been in Future Farmers of America instead of playing with my Radio Shack electronics kit, I probably would've found water rights fascinating.
It just goes to show you that boredom, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
As to a military, you'd have the National Guard and CHP. Also, when I did contract teching for Cal State University, I had to sign a loyalty oath to "Defend the State of California from all enemies, foreign and domestic." Does that mean they could call me up to repell an invasion from Oregon?
On the other hand, I don't know if I'm up for another Republic of California (the original lasted a couple of weeks during the Mexican American War). It's bad enough getting searched by the Dept. of Agriculture cops for fruit fly laden produce when I cross the border on the way to Las Vegas. I don't want to imagine what it'd be like if those guys were full fledged customs officials.
Remember in high school, when they explained the concept of States Rights and how the states were reserved certain rights and the Feds others? It always got me how many dull things these addressed - water rights, highway funding, etc. The only thing I could recall where it intersected in really relevant issues was Civil Rights back in the '60s (and then, several of the states were wearing the Black Hats).
So, it's kind of neat to see Federalism jump back, with individual states acting as a check on the authority of the Federal govt (at least in areas where their rights and responsibilities overlap). Regardless of which way you think the rulings should go, it's kind of cool to see this somewhat bizarre feature of our government in action.
Man, it kind of makes me wish I had an EMAIL of my old Civics teacher...
I was wondering if you could block the port on TFTP, thus locking it out entirely, so I dug out my copy of Stevens, Volume I and skimmed the chapter on TFTP. The thing is, I see no mention of a port at all in this chapter. Am I just missing it or are ports a TCP concept (while TFTP runs UDP/IP)? Regardless of that, though, how do you defend against the use of TFTP in this manner?
Thanks again.
I do have a question for my fellow slashdotters: Why does the author single out TFTP but not FTP? Does TFTP have inherrent weaknesses that would make it the file transfer protocol of choice for an attacker?
Ironically, that book touched a very specific nerve for me in High School. Reagan was sabre rattling about Central America and I was absolutely convinced I was going to wind up a terrified draftee slogging through the jungles of Guatamala as sniper bait. I guess that helps prove the timelessness of Forever War: we think of it as a Vietnam metaphor when in reality (unintentionally?) it's a story about fighting a dirty, unpopular war under any circumstances.
I wonder if a Russian translation would have sold well to Afganistan vets in the 1980's USSR (inherent censorship/propganda issues aside)?
With that in mind, who do you think might be a good (or at least sucessful) author who will be forgotten not because of the quality of his/her work but because of the choice of subject amtter?
In that vein, look at some of the authors people cited as timeless on these posts:
- Dr. Seuss - All his stuff was written in the 40's-70's, yet his messages ring true, even the political ones. (If you've never seen his collection of anti-Nazi cartoons, run out and get it).
- Larry Niven - Some of his technology is dated (mainframe computing) but his stories are still fantastic. The fact that Known Space takes place in the far, far future helps.
On the other hand, Tom Clancy will not (IMHO) "stand the test of time," and not because of the quality of his writting (although some might criticize him for that). No, what I mean is that his stuff becomes dated so dang quickly. Look at his subject matter: politics and technological nuts & bolts details. You'd be hard pressed to find two subjects that have changed more radically in the last ten years. I mean, try to reread Red Storm Rising as anything other than "What may have been" and you bust a gut laughing (On the other hand, The Hunt for Red October works great as historical fiction).Of course, don't weep for poor old Tom: he's laughing all the way to the bank.