In the case of comparing Sweden to the US, I think this is fair, at least as far as comments about watching the watchers goes.
The Swedish constitution (also seen as a basic civil right here e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenon_Panoussis ) requires that all government paperwork be publicly accessible (and this includes e-mails, etc) - all you have to do is ask for it. Of course, that presumes that you *know* about it - but a heck of a lot better than in most other countries. This is how the IPRED watching site can exist - any activity carried out under the IPRED law must be reported and thus becomes immediately publicly available.
A similar product that I think is far more interesting is this one: http://www.textflow.com/ - does away with the idea of a single central document that everyone has to connect to to work on and the inevitable locking and/or conflict avoidance that insues, and instead works on managing the merging of multiple versions of documents, which are pretty much inevitable no matter what app you use. Think MS Word's track changes on steroids.
Actually, all you need to do is ensure that the.SWF file gets unloaded - i.e. go to another page. While I haven't pried into the demo in any details, you can be fairly sure that all the Flash code is doing is repeatedly setting the clipboard to the same URL as often as it can: probably 30hz or so, which is quick enough for you not to be able to copy and paste something else without it getting there and screwing up the clipboard first.
Well, if it is anything like Sharp's stereo LCD screens, then you will get reduced resolution - one third of the normal horizontal resolution in fact. This is kinda obvious really if you stop to think about it - what they are doing is redirecting alternating columns of pixels in different directions. If you put your head to the left of the screen, you are only going to see 1/3rd of the columns, since the other 2/3rds go to the center and right images.
I think a better proposal would be reading book on your mobile phone? The latest WM 2005 smartphones (HTC / QTek/etc) cost as much as the Sony reader, and have decent sized screens at a pretty good resolution for reading ordinary books on. I'm much happier now that I can cut everything down to one device - my phone can play movies (ala iPod video), MP3 (ok, no iTunes, but still..) and read books. Only one device to to keep track of, always with me and always charged.
Screen not big enough? Definately not when it comes to reading arbitrary HTML or PDF documents, but if you are reading a novel then you'd be surprised how easy it is to read when all you can see are just a few lines at a time - as soon as you get into the book a little bit you forget that you are reading on a small screen.
As everyone else is saying, the real problem here isn't the reader - it's content. Someone needs to do an iTMS for books. Better yet, as Amazon suggested, when you buy a book you should get the ebook included for free. Best of both worlds.
The framerate won't be half - you wrap the entire left eye rendering inside a GL display list and use the cache to render the right eye. In practice the framerate doesn't drop all that much.
There are also techniques for achieving 'fake' stereo rendering by using the depth buffer to extract a stereo pair. The result isn't as good obviously, but it works with existing games.
From the The Official Gravis Ultrasound Programmer's Encyclopedia:
My god, the sheer embarassment. That would be me you are quoting there, from something like 15 years ago, and yes - more than just a little ink on my hands..
I think the thing to remember is how different the Gravis card was compared to the SoundBlaster. The GUS was the first cheap card to perform multi-channel hardware mixing on a chip (the GF-1) which meant that writing a MOD / screamtracker player was trivial - just upload the samples to the cards memory and tell it which samples to play and when. So with all mixing and "upsampling" done at the hardware level it was definately faster, but as for quality... it *sounded* better.. honest.. but that was most likely because the SoundBlaster at the time only did 22Khz sound which would be an issue when mixing 8 tracks. Despite that, there weren't many games that took advantage of it - most of the time we were forced to run a SoundBlaster / Adlib emulator on it to get any sound out of it - and i'm sure the emulator sounded better than the real SoundBlaster!;)
Right - buy a Mac Mini for 500 bucks and you get XCode included for free. Buy a PC and you have to shell out a thousand more just for a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio. That makes a Mac FAR cheaper for me, as a C++ developer.
Err, hang on, does your Dell weigh 1.5kg? Is it small enough to carry around with you when you travel, say, between home and the office? How much noise does your Dell make?
One cost that people often seem to ignore with the old Mac vs Windows comparisons is for developers: xCode is a very advanced IDE for development and comes free with the OS. Microsoft Visual Studio, on the other hand, costs around $1,000.
Experienced users achieve writing speeds of about 34 words per minute, compared with typical ten-finger keyboard typing of 40-60 words per minute.
Experienced dasher users can peak at 34 wpm.. experienced typists can often peak at more than twice that on a qwerty (not to mention a Dvorak layout). And imagine using Dasher for coding - Dasher works well for writing words, but fails totally with the symbols and syntax used in programming.
Some users might be able to work without a keyboard, but I can't see a future where nobody will want a keyboard...
Still, knowing who the hell Muftak is can't be as utterly pointless as having written the official star wars bio of Muftak:
For years, Muftak had no knowledge of his heritage. Muftak's cocoon was accidentally loaded onto an Imperial freighter and deposited on Tatooine. He knew he was different and he never encountered a fellow Talz in his years growing up on the desert world.
Muftak grew up in the streets of Mos Eisley, becoming a friend to the regulars at Chalmun's cantina. His hulking size and incredible strength kept him alive in the often-violent port city, and his friendly disposition earned him many allies.
Muftak lived in the abandoned tunnels beneath Docking Bay 83 with fellow street urchin Kabe. Kabe became a ward of sorts to Muftak, as he felt compelled to watch over the little Chadra-Fan girl. Kabe also provided them with income, as her talents with thievery provided much-needed credits.
Muftak helped Kabe in her bold plan to rob Jabba the Hutt's Mos Eisley townhouse. That in turn led to doing a bit of espionage work for the Rebel Alliance, before Muftak and Kabe took off for Alzoc III to explore his past.
The two ventured to different worlds and experienced a number of adventures. Muftak, who was often regarded as simple on Tatooine, developed eloquence enough to tell his story in an autobiographical novel entitled Sands in the Winter.
This will NEVER be as cheap, or as realistic, as having the students practice on each other, like she did in medical school.
A complete solution, hardware and software, can be had for around $US 10,000. Place it in a VR training lab at the hospital where it can be used by all relevant staff at the hospital, and that makes it a very cheap training tool.
Being a simulator, it can simulate all sorts of different patients, young, old, children, etc, with all possible forms of copmlications. It can monitor exactly how you made the insertion, and give feedback and suggestions for improvement. Having another student to practice stabbing doesn't meet any of those criteria.
As for realism, it doesn't have to be perfect - just good enough to train effectively. Most people fall easily into the presumption that just because we can make it almost perfectly realistic that that is a good idea. One of the advantages of a fully computer simulated environment is that it doesn't have to be perfectly realistic - it just has to be a perfect environment in which ti train (not necessarily the same thing).
And finally, the hardware can be reused for simulating a number of other medical procedures drawing the already low cost down even further.
Right - so you fine the cinemas that aren't doing a good enough job in stopping piracy, forcing the cinemas to have to hire security guards to protect the films, forcing them to compensate for the increased costs by hiking up ticket prices even further.
End result: higher ticket prices will cause even more people to want to watch pirated films at home. Oh, and security firms gain a bit of extra business. Let us hope it doesn't go THAT far!
Banks in Sweden are currently running a new BankID system. You can use this to access several government facilities, including submiting claims for sick leave and possibly in (the future) voting, over the internet. The password protection? Your certificate must be unlocked with a password that is at least 12 but at most 16 characters, of which at least 3 must be digits, and 4 alphabetical characters. Oh, and you can't simply repeat a word two or three times - they check for that. The end result? A password so annoying difficult to remember that of course everyone has it written on a post-it note by their keyboard.
Now THAT gives me password-rage.
Re:terrible review, but the book is well worth rea
on
Decipher
·
· Score: 1
1) The first Thomas Covenenant (blecch!)
The first? Does this mean you did read the others?
I'm sure a lot of people hate Steven Donaldson, but I think that these novels are truly fantastic if you can just get past the first book. The series creates a wonderfully rich and detailed fantasy world. Though there are a lot of things you can complain about with his style of writing... But try the first book again - it might be worth it.
I think it mostly comes down to your definition of what Science Fiction is. Dick had a very different opinion of what SciFi is compared to the "let's have lots of funky technology" scifi.
It'd have the same "avoiding credit card fees" effect..
What most people seem to be missing in this article, is that this idea isn't isn't a way to avoid credit card fees.. credit card fees are used as an example of the costs involved in procesing a transaction: that there is a cost for every transaction, and that that cost makes up a large portion of the actual ammount of the transaction.
This solution doesn't have anything to do with credit cards - the problem it solves is not caused by credit cards, or credit card companies: it is caused by costs involved in processing every 50c transaction, when there are potentially millions of transactions for each customer of PepperCoin every month.
So we have *drum roll* another internet currency! Hoorah, the old ones did so well.
Yes, but the old ones had to process and account for every micropayment - this system is a little more clever.. now you just have to process every 20th or so micropayment.. thus cutting your costs down to just 5% (at least for that part of the transaction processing costs).
What about the retailer that doesn't do a heavy volume of business through PepperCoin?
Then they should probably re-think their business strategy.. we are talking micropayments here. Less than 500 micropayments a month isn't exactly big business..
you can probably find quite a few runs of 500 or more in a row.
Err.. no. Not really. 2 raised to the power of 500. That's pretty darn unlikely. Actually 1 in 3.2734*10^150 unlikely.
Having actually seen the robocoaster in action at a technical exhibition recently, I have only one observation to make: these are not intended to be a profitable toy, merely a cool attraction at an exhibition. At least that was the thought at this exhibition.. perhaps some crazy management type has bigger plans..?
Actually, another observation is that the thing was so jerky that it looked like it could break someones neck - definately not the most comfortable looking theme-park ride!
Slashdot Mirror
Alternatively, from The Local, an English language Swedish paper:
Pirate Bay Lawyer calls for retrial
Though it might be worth pointing out that the "call" for a retrial isn't actually official yet, just what the lawyer has said to journalists.
In the case of comparing Sweden to the US, I think this is fair, at least as far as comments about watching the watchers goes.
The Swedish constitution (also seen as a basic civil right here e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenon_Panoussis ) requires that all government paperwork be publicly accessible (and this includes e-mails, etc) - all you have to do is ask for it. Of course, that presumes that you *know* about it - but a heck of a lot better than in most other countries. This is how the IPRED watching site can exist - any activity carried out under the IPRED law must be reported and thus becomes immediately publicly available.
Odd, even USAID are actively helping other countries use DDT. The WHO list DDT as an approved insecticide. I can give references to support this: USAID: http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/global_health/id/malaria/techareas/irs.html WHO: http://www.who.int/malaria/docs/FAQonDDT.pdf Can you provide a reference for your accusation that "they" cut funding to "you" if you use DDT? (wondering who "they" and "you" are - are we talking individuals or states here..?)
If you want tracking of deletions (and even moves), check out TextFlow (http://www.textflow.com/), another Flash app for collaborative writing.
A similar product that I think is far more interesting is this one: http://www.textflow.com/ - does away with the idea of a single central document that everyone has to connect to to work on and the inevitable locking and/or conflict avoidance that insues, and instead works on managing the merging of multiple versions of documents, which are pretty much inevitable no matter what app you use. Think MS Word's track changes on steroids.
Actually, all you need to do is ensure that the .SWF file gets unloaded - i.e. go to another page. While I haven't pried into the demo in any details, you can be fairly sure that all the Flash code is doing is repeatedly setting the clipboard to the same URL as often as it can: probably 30hz or so, which is quick enough for you not to be able to copy and paste something else without it getting there and screwing up the clipboard first.
Well, if it is anything like Sharp's stereo LCD screens, then you will get reduced resolution - one third of the normal horizontal resolution in fact. This is kinda obvious really if you stop to think about it - what they are doing is redirecting alternating columns of pixels in different directions. If you put your head to the left of the screen, you are only going to see 1/3rd of the columns, since the other 2/3rds go to the center and right images.
Screen not big enough? Definately not when it comes to reading arbitrary HTML or PDF documents, but if you are reading a novel then you'd be surprised how easy it is to read when all you can see are just a few lines at a time - as soon as you get into the book a little bit you forget that you are reading on a small screen.
As everyone else is saying, the real problem here isn't the reader - it's content. Someone needs to do an iTMS for books. Better yet, as Amazon suggested, when you buy a book you should get the ebook included for free. Best of both worlds.
There are also techniques for achieving 'fake' stereo rendering by using the depth buffer to extract a stereo pair. The result isn't as good obviously, but it works with existing games.
My god, the sheer embarassment. That would be me you are quoting there, from something like 15 years ago, and yes - more than just a little ink on my hands..
I think the thing to remember is how different the Gravis card was compared to the SoundBlaster. The GUS was the first cheap card to perform multi-channel hardware mixing on a chip (the GF-1) which meant that writing a MOD / screamtracker player was trivial - just upload the samples to the cards memory and tell it which samples to play and when. So with all mixing and "upsampling" done at the hardware level it was definately faster, but as for quality... it *sounded* better.. honest.. but that was most likely because the SoundBlaster at the time only did 22Khz sound which would be an issue when mixing 8 tracks. Despite that, there weren't many games that took advantage of it - most of the time we were forced to run a SoundBlaster / Adlib emulator on it to get any sound out of it - and i'm sure the emulator sounded better than the real SoundBlaster! ;)
Right - buy a Mac Mini for 500 bucks and you get XCode included for free. Buy a PC and you have to shell out a thousand more just for a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio. That makes a Mac FAR cheaper for me, as a C++ developer.
Err, hang on, does your Dell weigh 1.5kg? Is it small enough to carry around with you when you travel, say, between home and the office? How much noise does your Dell make?
One cost that people often seem to ignore with the old Mac vs Windows comparisons is for developers: xCode is a very advanced IDE for development and comes free with the OS. Microsoft Visual Studio, on the other hand, costs around $1,000.
Experienced users achieve writing speeds of about 34 words per minute, compared with typical ten-finger keyboard typing of 40-60 words per minute.
Experienced dasher users can peak at 34 wpm.. experienced typists can often peak at more than twice that on a qwerty (not to mention a Dvorak layout). And imagine using Dasher for coding - Dasher works well for writing words, but fails totally with the symbols and syntax used in programming.
Some users might be able to work without a keyboard, but I can't see a future where nobody will want a keyboard...
For years, Muftak had no knowledge of his heritage. Muftak's cocoon was accidentally loaded onto an Imperial freighter and deposited on Tatooine. He knew he was different and he never encountered a fellow Talz in his years growing up on the desert world.
Muftak grew up in the streets of Mos Eisley, becoming a friend to the regulars at Chalmun's cantina. His hulking size and incredible strength kept him alive in the often-violent port city, and his friendly disposition earned him many allies.
Muftak lived in the abandoned tunnels beneath Docking Bay 83 with fellow street urchin Kabe. Kabe became a ward of sorts to Muftak, as he felt compelled to watch over the little Chadra-Fan girl. Kabe also provided them with income, as her talents with thievery provided much-needed credits.
Muftak helped Kabe in her bold plan to rob Jabba the Hutt's Mos Eisley townhouse. That in turn led to doing a bit of espionage work for the Rebel Alliance, before Muftak and Kabe took off for Alzoc III to explore his past.
The two ventured to different worlds and experienced a number of adventures. Muftak, who was often regarded as simple on Tatooine, developed eloquence enough to tell his story in an autobiographical novel entitled Sands in the Winter.
Now THAT is depraved.
(Taken from http://www.starwars.com/databank/character/muftak/ ?id=eu)
A complete solution, hardware and software, can be had for around $US 10,000. Place it in a VR training lab at the hospital where it can be used by all relevant staff at the hospital, and that makes it a very cheap training tool.
Being a simulator, it can simulate all sorts of different patients, young, old, children, etc, with all possible forms of copmlications. It can monitor exactly how you made the insertion, and give feedback and suggestions for improvement. Having another student to practice stabbing doesn't meet any of those criteria.
As for realism, it doesn't have to be perfect - just good enough to train effectively. Most people fall easily into the presumption that just because we can make it almost perfectly realistic that that is a good idea. One of the advantages of a fully computer simulated environment is that it doesn't have to be perfectly realistic - it just has to be a perfect environment in which ti train (not necessarily the same thing).
And finally, the hardware can be reused for simulating a number of other medical procedures drawing the already low cost down even further.
Right - so you fine the cinemas that aren't doing a good enough job in stopping piracy, forcing the cinemas to have to hire security guards to protect the films, forcing them to compensate for the increased costs by hiking up ticket prices even further.
End result: higher ticket prices will cause even more people to want to watch pirated films at home. Oh, and security firms gain a bit of extra business. Let us hope it doesn't go THAT far!
Now THAT gives me password-rage.
The first? Does this mean you did read the others?
I'm sure a lot of people hate Steven Donaldson, but I think that these novels are truly fantastic if you can just get past the first book. The series creates a wonderfully rich and detailed fantasy world. Though there are a lot of things you can complain about with his style of writing... But try the first book again - it might be worth it.
http://www.philipkdick.com/frank/sf-letter.htm
Then again, I think I would be hard pressed to call something like "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" SciFi ;)
V.B.
What most people seem to be missing in this article, is that this idea isn't isn't a way to avoid credit card fees.. credit card fees are used as an example of the costs involved in procesing a transaction: that there is a cost for every transaction, and that that cost makes up a large portion of the actual ammount of the transaction.
This solution doesn't have anything to do with credit cards - the problem it solves is not caused by credit cards, or credit card companies: it is caused by costs involved in processing every 50c transaction, when there are potentially millions of transactions for each customer of PepperCoin every month.
Yes, but the old ones had to process and account for every micropayment - this system is a little more clever.. now you just have to process every 20th or so micropayment.. thus cutting your costs down to just 5% (at least for that part of the transaction processing costs).
Then they should probably re-think their business strategy.. we are talking micropayments here. Less than 500 micropayments a month isn't exactly big business..
you can probably find quite a few runs of 500 or more in a row.
Err.. no. Not really. 2 raised to the power of 500. That's pretty darn unlikely. Actually 1 in 3.2734*10^150 unlikely.
Actually, another observation is that the thing was so jerky that it looked like it could break someones neck - definately not the most comfortable looking theme-park ride!