'Through 2012, more than 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes) of human-to-computer information input will remain keyboard- and mouse-based.'
By volume in gigabytes? Call me a contrarian, but I'll bet videocameras will exceed keyboard input by that standard. Wanna test that notion, Gartner? Point your text editor at a file, and I'll fire up my webcam recorder. Ready? GO!
CAPTCHAs have several applications for practical security, including (but not limited to):
Online Polls. In November 1999, http://www.slashdot.com released an online poll asking which was the best graduate school in computer science (a dangerous question to ask over the web!). As is the case with most online polls, IP addresses of voters were recorded in order to prevent single users from voting more than once. However, students at Carnegie Mellon found a way to stuff the ballots using programs that voted for CMU thousands of times. CMU's score started growing rapidly. The next day, students at MIT wrote their own program and the poll became a contest between voting "bots". MIT finished with 21,156 votes, Carnegie Mellon with 21,032 and every other school with less than 1,000. Can the result of any online poll be trusted? Not unless the poll requires that only humans can vote.
Telecom wouldn't be the first to go through such a boom-and-bust cycle. During the railroad boom of the late 1880s, so much money was invested building so many parallel tracks -- or tracks to places that would never support profitable service -- that the entire industry went bankrupt. Much the same story is told of the airline industry, which because of so many losing years has yet to turn a net profit.
"Gateway has 272 Gateway Country stores. With 7,800 floor model PCs,..."
1. Install distributed computing client on first PC.
2. Install distributed computing client on second PC.
3. Install distributed computing client on third PC.
4....
...
...
7801. Profit!
I have a suggestion for Gateway's CTO: Calculate the money you've made running SETI@Home and the cancer project on your desktop for the last year, and multiply that by 7,800. That's what you can expect.
But not everyone embraces the idea. "They will prevent some people from coming to the hospital, where we might discover more serious problems," said Dr. Samuel Asiedu, general secretary of the Ghana Optometrists Association. Dr. Ababio-Danso, the ophthalmologist in Agogo, also notes that many Ghanaians are unfamiliar with glasses and do not know how to care for them or clean them.
Also, I was dumbfounded by this quote:
Nor is it clear how durable the glasses will be, or how long they will retain their prescriptive power, since the oils or the shape may deteriorate over time.
Reading from the company's website: "The company was founded by Oxford physics professor Joshua Silver in 1996 and is based in Oxford and London. The company has developed prototype adaptive spectacles that can correct both far-sighted and near-sighted people, and these spectacles have been trialled in several countries in Africa and Asia."
In six years of operation, and after testing in several countries, how would they still be unsure of their products' durability or focus-holding ability?
I forgot to include my list of bogus Slashdot particles:
Modon - elementary particle of moderation, classified as one of several flavors based on its mass and spin.
Karmon/Antikarmon - elementary particles of karma, created in the energetic collision of a modon with its target.
Submiton - elementary particle of story submission. An editor bogon struck by an energetic submiton will occasionally release a facton.
Facton - one of a class of particles of information, consisting of origons and dupons. A story is a macroscopic mass of factons.
Origon - elementary particle of originality. As the Slashdot universe expands, the total mass of origons remains constant.
Anti-origon (Dupon) - elementary particle of nonoriginality. Origons and dupons cannot exist in close proximity. Observed increases in dupon frequency indicate that Slashdot's core is far more dense than previously thought, and may cause the Slashdot universe to eventually collapse rather than expand indefinitely.
Penguon - elementary particle of Linux. Very stable.
Redmon - elementary particle of Windows. Unstable, but incredibly massive.
[very common; by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless
reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's `Vogons'; see the
Bibliography
in Appendix C and note that Arthur Dent actually mispronounces `Vogons' as
`Bogons' at one point] 1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see quantum
bogodynamics). For instance, "the Ethernet is emitting bogons again"
means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or bogus fashion. 2. A query
packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root server, having the reply bit
set instead of the query bit. 3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed packet sent on
a network. 4. By synecdoche, used to refer to any bogus thing, as in "I'd like
to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff bogon". 5. A
person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was historically the original
usage, but has been overtaken by its derivative senses 1-4. See also bogosity,
bogus;
compare psyton,
fat
electrons, magic
smoke.
The bogon has become the type case for a whole bestiary of nonce particle
names, including the `clutron' or `cluon' (indivisible particle of cluefulness,
obviously the antiparticle of the bogon) and the futon (elementary particle of
randomness,
or sometimes of lameness). These are not so much live usages in themselves as
examples of a live meta-usage: that is, it has become a standard joke or
linguistic maneuver to "explain" otherwise mysterious circumstances by inventing
nonce particle names. And these imply nonce particle theories, with all their
dignity or lack thereof (we might note parenthetically that this is a
generalization from "(bogus particle) theories" to "bogus (particle
theories)"!). Perhaps such particles are the modern-day equivalents of trolls
and wood-nymphs as standard starting-points around which to construct
explanatory myths. Of course, playing on an existing word (as in the `futon')
yields additional flavor. Compare magic
smoke.
Note: This is a static quote from The Jargon File version 4.3.3, which is lovingly maintained by our ownEric S. Raymond. If you are reading this post long after its freshness date, please refer to the original entry.
Another hate-filled, bigoted book about our kind!
on
Prey
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The ants in Them.
The rats in Willard.
The bees in The Swarm.
The Borg in Star Trek.
And now the nanites in Prey.
As a Slashdotter, I am grossly offended by hive-minds being consistently portrayed as the bad guys. I hereby call subliminally to all my fellow/.'ers to avoid this book like the Plagu^H^H^H^H^H trash that it is. A civilized society has no place for hivophobia!
I thought the whole point of mating was to do it before you croak.
All kidding aside, wouldn't it be interesting to
put these frogs in a set of tuned pipes and let them find their pitch?
Find a (humane) way to stimulate them to call on command, and you'd have the
world's first amphibious pipe organ.
"If you were in San Francisco and there was a quarter lying on the ground in New York and someone moved the coin an inch, we'd be able to tell," said George Benedict, an astronomer with the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas in Austin, who is among an international team of scientists using the Hubble Space for astrometry research.
Seems like an odd use of the telescope, but not as scary as this one:
"You can't hide massive companions from the Hubble Space Telescope," said Barbara McArthur...
What if we don't go out, and just hang out at her place and watch pay-per-view?
Now we get to one of my pet peeves. Why doesn't any of the major, or minor for that matter, fridge manufactures make a chest style fridge.
I don't understand your question. All refrigerators are chest style; they only set them on one end in the store so they'll occupy less space. Oh, wait--you aren't one of those idiots that installed it that way when you got it home, are you? Hahahahaha!!! How stupid can you get? I'll bet you put CD's in your PC's cupholder slot too, don't you?
This appears to be a well-thought-out and practical approach to dealing with security problems in a responsible fashion. Kudos to ISS for the new policy, and for their recent successful docking with the Space Shuttle. Great job, guys!
Wouldn't this be a cool add-on for Tivo, though? Include a headset that functions as a mind-operated remote control, and grabs all the marketroid data in the background. Oh, and look for telltales of anti-social behavior while you're at it. If the subject appears to be too anti-social, just send a command from TivoJusticeCentral to send a high-voltage current across the temples. Bang! A better society is just a programming choice away.
I talk to people all the time who can't believe that mainframes are still essential to our info infrastructure. I'm going to start sending them to this site. Any other suggestions for good primers, especially ones this short and sweet?
I really liked this line in the section about modern IBM mainframe reliability:
Each CPU die contains two complete execution pipelines that execute each instruction simultaneously. If the results of the two pipelines are not identical, the CPU state is regressed, and the instruction retried. If the retry again fails, the original CPU state is saved, and a spare CPU is activated and loaded with the saved state data. This CPU now resumes the work that was being performed by the failed chip.
This feature is unique to Ogg Vorbis...Bitrate peeling is not actually implemented yet.
Sounds more like it would be unique to OV, if they implemented it.
The point is, nobody does it now. Perhaps this is because there's really no need for it. Consider the list of "very sexy applications:"
In a streaming situation, the server would store only one high quality stream, and dynamically peel it down to the client's bandwidth. Not useful. If you instead stored a hundred separate files, each optimized for its bitrate, with each being half the bitrate of the previous one, you'd still have a set of files less than twice the size of the largest file. Plus, you'd have no bit-peeling overhead. If you're streaming 100GB audio files, maybe there's a benefit, but if you're doing that, you can probably afford a second 100GB file for all the smaller files.
You could store high quality Ogg Vorbis files on your PC for your Audiophile home theater setup, and peel them down to "good enough for lousy headphones on a noisy train" portable files. You can do that now, without this high-tech. Such low-quality files could be easily made from the original OV high-quality files, without much extra artifacting due to the re-encoding. And again, how low a quality are you willing to accept, if you're going this far anyway? Wouldn't you just buy a higher-cap memory card?
Download a low quality preview version of a song, and if you are interested, download the missing bits to make it a high quality version. Another non-benefit. Suppose the full file is 10 meg, and you download a 1 meg sample. Are you really going to opt to download the 9 meg "patch" file, rather than the 10 meg complete version?
A clever idea, and it sounds cool on the outset, but it seems to me that this is a solution seeking a problem.
Nobody's flown solo into space since the Mercury program. Could this make it feasible?
The Falcon LV will be able to orbit 473 kg, or a little over half a ton. The Mercury spacecraft, built with 1960 materials and technology, weighed about two tons. What would it weigh today, with judicious use of kevlar, Demron and other high-tech lightweight materials? Seems to me that it might be feasible to loft a passenger in his own spacecraft for $20 million, and let him orbit for as long as his supplies (and psyche) allow.
And here's one more thought, useless as it might seem--how about using it as a one-man ground-to-ISS transfer vehicle? You could even send it up unmanned to provide for evacuating a single injured or ill crewmember from the station.
You're advertising this on Slashdot as a Palm OS app, but admit that it only runs currently on the Tungsten T. Your website only has one page, with no detail as to whether your product is open source or not. I can't find info about you or your application anywhere, even at your personal site, where you host your "free ogeLib Palm OS library". Who are you, is this for real, and how did you get it posted on the main page of Slashdot?
As for my fellow readers, has anyone actually downloaded and run this app?
See, the thing is, if you made it out of those parabolic dish-thingies, it'd be really, really tough to modify the deflector dish to interface with the sensor array, and emit a neutrino pulse into the heart of the anomaly.
This is only a short-term benefit--the new Enterprise version (NCC-1701F) will be DRM-enabled, and such modifications will be prohibited under the DMCA. Resistance is futile, so do what you can with impedance.
In another vein, I seem to recall that Marina Sirtis wore a reproduction of the Heart of the Anomaly (Le Coeur de l'Anomalie) to last year's Oscars, and it looked quite tachyon her.
Name one episode where using the deflector dish actually helped the crisis. I can't recall any.
You've obviously forgotten the episode "Protocols." Data modified the deflector dish to support Subspace TCP/IP (RFC #31,415,926) and ran an IRC server through it until Picard booted him off and changed the root password.
The best moment was during the final court martial scene, when Riker uttered the immortal words, "Data wants to be free."
Actually, people have been wasting time since prehistory. What purpose was served by the cave paintings at Lascaux? I'd assume that those folk were generally preoccupied with the question of continued survival.
Look at it this way--any time spent creating the spacecraft was not spent in procreation, though that may not have been entirely due to a proactive decision on his part. Consider the long-term resource savings!
And that makes all the difference in the world. Dorkle, the popular dork engine, is not affected by self-references of dorkdom. Only dorklinks from other dorks count toward a higher DorkRank, and the more the better.
Your post was hilarious, by the way. I laughed so hard that my pocket-protector fell out. I tried to come up with a joke about the existence of "dork matter" or maybe going over to the "dork side," but I'll have to leave that to cleverer dorks than me.
Before any rabid Trekkers reading this story decide to email him, let me point out that he's already been informed of this: "Within hours of posting, someone named Medic e-mailed me with the dimensions: 'Enterprise-D is a Galaxy Class Starship, which are supposed to be 2,103 feet long by 1,542 wide by 476 tall.' Which means, ratio-wise, my model is a little taller than it should be. I think I can live with that."
Bet it's the tallest one in four counties, though!
Slashdot Mirror
'Through 2012, more than 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes) of human-to-computer information input will remain keyboard- and mouse-based.'
By volume in gigabytes? Call me a contrarian, but I'll bet videocameras will exceed keyboard input by that standard. Wanna test that notion, Gartner? Point your text editor at a file, and I'll fire up my webcam recorder. Ready? GO!
...can't they compensate with pitch and yaw?
CAPTCHAs have several applications for practical security, including (but not limited to): Cool, eh?
..."Fiber-Optic Overdose Racks Up Casualties" back in May of this year. One quote:
Telecom wouldn't be the first to go through such a boom-and-bust cycle. During the railroad boom of the late 1880s, so much money was invested building so many parallel tracks -- or tracks to places that would never support profitable service -- that the entire industry went bankrupt. Much the same story is told of the airline industry, which because of so many losing years has yet to turn a net profit.
Interesting stuff--go read!
Wedding was held at the Excalibur Hotel, which was nice.
Those familiar with Arthurian legend will get a special chuckle out of that juxtaposition.
Congratulations, Rob!
"Gateway has 272 Gateway Country stores. With 7,800 floor model PCs, ..."
...
1. Install distributed computing client on first PC.
2. Install distributed computing client on second PC.
3. Install distributed computing client on third PC.
4.
...
...
7801. Profit!
I have a suggestion for Gateway's CTO: Calculate the money you've made running SETI@Home and the cancer project on your desktop for the last year, and multiply that by 7,800. That's what you can expect.
I agree with these gentlemen:
But not everyone embraces the idea. "They will prevent some people from coming to the hospital, where we might discover more serious problems," said Dr. Samuel Asiedu, general secretary of the Ghana Optometrists Association. Dr. Ababio-Danso, the ophthalmologist in Agogo, also notes that many Ghanaians are unfamiliar with glasses and do not know how to care for them or clean them.
Also, I was dumbfounded by this quote:
Nor is it clear how durable the glasses will be, or how long they will retain their prescriptive power, since the oils or the shape may deteriorate over time.
Reading from the company's website: "The company was founded by Oxford physics professor Joshua Silver in 1996 and is based in Oxford and London. The company has developed prototype adaptive spectacles that can correct both far-sighted and near-sighted people, and these spectacles have been trialled in several countries in Africa and Asia."
In six years of operation, and after testing in several countries, how would they still be unsure of their products' durability or focus-holding ability?
- Modon - elementary particle of moderation, classified as one of several flavors based on its mass and spin.
- Karmon/Antikarmon - elementary particles of karma, created in the energetic collision of a modon with its target.
- Submiton - elementary particle of story submission. An editor bogon struck by an energetic submiton will occasionally release a facton.
- Facton - one of a class of particles of information, consisting of origons and dupons. A story is a macroscopic mass of factons.
- Origon - elementary particle of originality. As the Slashdot universe expands, the total mass of origons remains constant.
- Anti-origon (Dupon) - elementary particle of nonoriginality. Origons and dupons cannot exist in close proximity. Observed increases in dupon frequency indicate that Slashdot's core is far more dense than previously thought, and may cause the Slashdot universe to eventually collapse rather than expand indefinitely.
- Penguon - elementary particle of Linux. Very stable.
- Redmon - elementary particle of Windows. Unstable, but incredibly massive.
Any others?From The Jargon File:
bogon /boh'gon/ n.
[very common; by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's `Vogons'; see the Bibliography in Appendix C and note that Arthur Dent actually mispronounces `Vogons' as `Bogons' at one point] 1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see quantum bogodynamics ). For instance, "the Ethernet is emitting bogons again" means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or bogus fashion. 2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit. 3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed packet sent on a network. 4. By synecdoche, used to refer to any bogus thing, as in "I'd like to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff bogon". 5. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was historically the original usage, but has been overtaken by its derivative senses 1-4. See also bogosity , bogus ; compare psyton , fat electrons , magic smoke .
The bogon has become the type case for a whole bestiary of nonce particle names, including the `clutron' or `cluon' (indivisible particle of cluefulness, obviously the antiparticle of the bogon) and the futon (elementary particle of randomness , or sometimes of lameness). These are not so much live usages in themselves as examples of a live meta-usage: that is, it has become a standard joke or linguistic maneuver to "explain" otherwise mysterious circumstances by inventing nonce particle names. And these imply nonce particle theories, with all their dignity or lack thereof (we might note parenthetically that this is a generalization from "(bogus particle) theories" to "bogus (particle theories)"!). Perhaps such particles are the modern-day equivalents of trolls and wood-nymphs as standard starting-points around which to construct explanatory myths. Of course, playing on an existing word (as in the `futon') yields additional flavor. Compare magic smoke .
Note: This is a static quote from The Jargon File version 4.3.3, which is lovingly maintained by our own Eric S. Raymond. If you are reading this post long after its freshness date, please refer to the original entry.
The ants in Them.
The rats in Willard.
The bees in The Swarm.
The Borg in Star Trek.
And now the nanites in Prey.
As a Slashdotter, I am grossly offended by hive-minds being consistently portrayed as the bad guys. I hereby call subliminally to all my fellow
Respectfully,
536185 of 630000
I thought the whole point of mating was to do it before you croak.
All kidding aside, wouldn't it be interesting to put these frogs in a set of tuned pipes and let them find their pitch? Find a (humane) way to stimulate them to call on command, and you'd have the world's first amphibious pipe organ.
"If you were in San Francisco and there was a quarter lying on the ground in New York and someone moved the coin an inch, we'd be able to tell," said George Benedict, an astronomer with the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas in Austin, who is among an international team of scientists using the Hubble Space for astrometry research.
Seems like an odd use of the telescope, but not as scary as this one:
"You can't hide massive companions from the Hubble Space Telescope," said Barbara McArthur...
What if we don't go out, and just hang out at her place and watch pay-per-view?
Now we get to one of my pet peeves. Why doesn't any of the major, or minor for that matter, fridge manufactures make a chest style fridge.
I don't understand your question. All refrigerators are chest style; they only set them on one end in the store so they'll occupy less space. Oh, wait--you aren't one of those idiots that installed it that way when you got it home, are you? Hahahahaha!!! How stupid can you get? I'll bet you put CD's in your PC's cupholder slot too, don't you?
What a moron!
This appears to be a well-thought-out and practical approach to dealing with security problems in a responsible fashion. Kudos to ISS for the new policy, and for their recent successful docking with the Space Shuttle. Great job, guys!
Oops, mark that Redundant.
Wouldn't this be a cool add-on for Tivo, though? Include a headset that functions as a mind-operated remote control, and grabs all the marketroid data in the background. Oh, and look for telltales of anti-social behavior while you're at it. If the subject appears to be too anti-social, just send a command from TivoJusticeCentral to send a high-voltage current across the temples. Bang! A better society is just a programming choice away.
I talk to people all the time who can't believe that mainframes are still essential to our info infrastructure. I'm going to start sending them to this site. Any other suggestions for good primers, especially ones this short and sweet?
I really liked this line in the section about modern IBM mainframe reliability:
Each CPU die contains two complete execution pipelines that execute each instruction simultaneously. If the results of the two pipelines are not identical, the CPU state is regressed, and the instruction retried. If the retry again fails, the original CPU state is saved, and a spare CPU is activated and loaded with the saved state data. This CPU now resumes the work that was being performed by the failed chip.
Try that with your dual-Xeon server!
Sounds more like it would be unique to OV, if they implemented it.
The point is, nobody does it now. Perhaps this is because there's really no need for it. Consider the list of "very sexy applications:"
- In a streaming situation, the server would store only one high quality stream, and dynamically peel it down to the client's bandwidth. Not useful. If you instead stored a hundred separate files, each optimized for its bitrate, with each being half the bitrate of the previous one, you'd still have a set of files less than twice the size of the largest file. Plus, you'd have no bit-peeling overhead. If you're streaming 100GB audio files, maybe there's a benefit, but if you're doing that, you can probably afford a second 100GB file for all the smaller files.
- You could store high quality Ogg Vorbis files on your PC for your Audiophile home theater setup, and peel them down to "good enough for lousy headphones on a noisy train" portable files. You can do that now, without this high-tech. Such low-quality files could be easily made from the original OV high-quality files, without much extra artifacting due to the re-encoding. And again, how low a quality are you willing to accept, if you're going this far anyway? Wouldn't you just buy a higher-cap memory card?
- Download a low quality preview version of a song, and if you are interested, download the missing bits to make it a high quality version. Another non-benefit. Suppose the full file is 10 meg, and you download a 1 meg sample. Are you really going to opt to download the 9 meg "patch" file, rather than the 10 meg complete version?
A clever idea, and it sounds cool on the outset, but it seems to me that this is a solution seeking a problem.Nobody's flown solo into space since the Mercury program. Could this make it feasible?
The Falcon LV will be able to orbit 473 kg, or a little over half a ton. The Mercury spacecraft, built with 1960 materials and technology, weighed about two tons. What would it weigh today, with judicious use of kevlar, Demron and other high-tech lightweight materials? Seems to me that it might be feasible to loft a passenger in his own spacecraft for $20 million, and let him orbit for as long as his supplies (and psyche) allow.
And here's one more thought, useless as it might seem--how about using it as a one-man ground-to-ISS transfer vehicle? You could even send it up unmanned to provide for evacuating a single injured or ill crewmember from the station.
You're advertising this on Slashdot as a Palm OS app, but admit that it only runs currently on the Tungsten T. Your website only has one page, with no detail as to whether your product is open source or not. I can't find info about you or your application anywhere, even at your personal site, where you host your "free ogeLib Palm OS library". Who are you, is this for real, and how did you get it posted on the main page of Slashdot?
As for my fellow readers, has anyone actually downloaded and run this app?
If the roof fell in there wouldn't be a single broken hearted sweetheart back home.
Au contraire! I'd wager that the wails of the bereaved would be heard all the way from Queynos to Freeport.
See, the thing is, if you made it out of those parabolic dish-thingies, it'd be really, really tough to modify the deflector dish to interface with the sensor array, and emit a neutrino pulse into the heart of the anomaly.
This is only a short-term benefit--the new Enterprise version (NCC-1701F) will be DRM-enabled, and such modifications will be prohibited under the DMCA. Resistance is futile, so do what you can with impedance.
In another vein, I seem to recall that Marina Sirtis wore a reproduction of the Heart of the Anomaly (Le Coeur de l'Anomalie) to last year's Oscars, and it looked quite tachyon her.
Name one episode where using the deflector dish actually helped the crisis. I can't recall any.
You've obviously forgotten the episode "Protocols." Data modified the deflector dish to support Subspace TCP/IP (RFC #31,415,926) and ran an IRC server through it until Picard booted him off and changed the root password.
The best moment was during the final court martial scene, when Riker uttered the immortal words, "Data wants to be free."
Actually, people have been wasting time since prehistory. What purpose was served by the cave paintings at Lascaux? I'd assume that those folk were generally preoccupied with the question of continued survival.
Look at it this way--any time spent creating the spacecraft was not spent in procreation, though that may not have been entirely due to a proactive decision on his part. Consider the long-term resource savings!
A self-proclaimed "dork"...
I also proclaim that you're a dork..
And that makes all the difference in the world. Dorkle, the popular dork engine, is not affected by self-references of dorkdom. Only dorklinks from other dorks count toward a higher DorkRank, and the more the better.
Your post was hilarious, by the way. I laughed so hard that my pocket-protector fell out. I tried to come up with a joke about the existence of "dork matter" or maybe going over to the "dork side," but I'll have to leave that to cleverer dorks than me.
Before any rabid Trekkers reading this story decide to email him, let me point out that he's already been informed of this: "Within hours of posting, someone named Medic e-mailed me with the dimensions: 'Enterprise-D is a Galaxy Class Starship, which are supposed to be 2,103 feet long by 1,542 wide by 476 tall.' Which means, ratio-wise, my model is a little taller than it should be. I think I can live with that."
Bet it's the tallest one in four counties, though!