There was a newspaper article today in Sweden announcing that next years tax returns could be submitted via the internet. To secure the connection, the three tax related government bodies would require a special identity certificate... that can only be provided (and verified) by your bank.
The bottom line was: since a lot of people here in Sweden use internet banking, and we all hope it is really secure, then your internet bank account would be one safe way of identifying you. So why not make banks account the basis of a net passport? Rather that than make Microsoft the key to my bank account!
Until it becomes possible to get ANY song on this type of service, no matter how cheap, I'll continue to use my free p2p client of choice.
The problem as I see it is that using p2p clients doesn't exactly give you a broad range of music to select from. Trying to find something slightly obscure is frustrating, and usually fruitless.
Then again - if record labels make all of their CDs available via a service like this, then it only takes one member of the service to re-encode them as MP3s and make them available via p2p. Then i'll finally get my "slightly obscure" mp3s;)
MPEG-4 was never meant to be a simple video compression format. It also supports a variety of extra features such as streaming 3D geometry, text-to-speech, etc. Check out MPEG-4, why use it? to see some details about the extra features it offers.
MPEG-4 has also had a huge number of research groups and commercial organisations working together on the standards.
I'm not saying that these features are necessary, but this Nancy shouldn't really be able to kill MPEG-4 off if it only competes on one out of the many aspects of MPEG-4.
What will happen when GPRS becomes more common? Many of the services that Locust offer via SMS seem much more naturally suited to GPRS. It may be that Locust will run out of users in the long-run anyway as these services become more common place as part of a GPRS subscription.
I've been lucky enough to spend a bit of time playing with the new Ericsson T-68 (colour, blue-tooth, GPRS phone) which is basically a 2.5G system that can be used through some providers here in Sweden. Adding a blue-tooth enabled IPaq to the picture and you have a fairly snappy portable web browser. But, really, that is about all. The speed is somewhat faster than a modem, but still a long way from live video feed (and don't give me that "who wants to watch live video on their phone" crap -- think sports.. think about not missing part of the the world cup finals as you commute to work).
There is no doubt that 2.5 and 3G systems will supersede the never-quite-there WAP, but as I see it the real break will come when people can download Java (or whatever) programs to their phone.
I'd add to that the fact that people are drowning in well-advertised products and content. I think the average American has become lazy when it comes to finding interesting products, because it has become so easy to just select whatever has been advertised the most.
It is the little fellow who can't afford to brand his site that is losing out in our modern brand-driven society. People need to get off their buts and find things that interest them, rather than allowing advertising to choose for them!
Can anyone really say that computing as a field or science was designed? What we have today is the result of a form of evolution and a result of a market economy. Nobody knew where we were going, we just started going someplace.
The company I work for has spent the past 4 years slowly evolving a fairly complex graphics and haptic (see: Intelligent Scalpels Through Touch Technology for more about haptics) API. At the start we had only a vague idea of what it should be like. We knew from our experiences in graphics that it should be scene-graph based -- so we borrowed the VRML design. We knew that we wanted to be able to do a few things with it. This gave us the basic framework to start with, much like Linus had with Linux.
Then we basically evolved the product. Every time we worked on a project that used the API, we learnt more about what it was good at and what it lacked. We modified it, fixed things, extended it with new features. After 4 years we have something far better than we could ever have dreamed of designing.
The most important reason for using this approach was not because we believed in an evolutionary approach to software engineering (I don't think that Linus' advice should be taken too literally). It was because we were dealing with making an API out of cutting-edge research - much of which hadn't been done when we started. We simply couldn't have designed it.
Security through obscurity?
on
Hacker U.
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· Score: 1
Surely, if we can overlook the obvious sillines of the whole thing (and lets remember that people read slashdot and laugh at *us* too), this is something that can only help to improve security in the long run?
Nobody denies that security through obscurity is a flawed concept.. so surely the more kids out there who know how to stress test a computers security, the more we are going to see systems made more secure.
Given how much free information is available on the web anyway, and how easy it is to get involved in those "elite" hacking groups, this "school" isn't doing anything more than making it a little bit easier for the lads whilst taking some of the load off their wallets.
Actually.. isn't this why we have dictionaries?
Consulting a US dictionary gives us:
"hacked, hacking, hacks
v. tr. ...
3. b. To gain access to (a computer file or network) illegally or without authorization: hacked the firm's personnel database. "
(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
It is about time people give up what they think is right usage and give in to popular usage.
For the more logic inclined mathematicians, as well as anyone interested in structured proofs, theorem proving, etc, the HOL theorem prover is a very powerful engine. On the down side - it can be tricky to learn, but there is a large quantit of documentation and a big user base to help get people started.
It's good to see that this EU funded project isn't wasting precious money on things like website design. We can't have people getting past
the first page and actually joining in on the project now can we!
Has anyone actually seen an IT related EU project that achieved something? The company I work for has been involved in two EU project proposals so far, and nothing came of either of them -- though they both consumed a large ammount of resources from universities to get through the three failed applications each.
Re:Hoopla indeed.
on
XBox Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Microsoft is acting like a) their entire future is riding on this thing
But it is essentially.. at least, according to Cringley, it's the expansion into new areas like gaming consoles that Microsoft desperately needs in order to keep growing at the necessary rate to avoid going bankrupt.
Look at it from a positive consumer viewpoint -- as previous slashdoters have mentioned, Microsoft are essentially selling a half-decent PC at below cost. Get yerself an X-Box, get Linux running on it, and have a good laugh at them.
The biggest hurdle for haptics in surgery in the past has been getting FDA approval. Most US companies researching in this field typically go to the EU for their trials where people aren't so concerned about the idea of a robot interfering with surgery. I agree with the FDA -- i'd rather trust a trained doctor to not cut my artery than a software program written by a fellow compsci grad!
Our company works with haptics in surgical *training*, and I must say that this is both more effective and involves fewer regulation issues. Using haptics to simulate a surgical procedure means that surgeons can train to be better - and then they don't need a computer to stop them from killing me. Heck, it even saves pigs.
Keep in mind that NT's posix libraries used to perform an order of magnitude worse than Win32 calls, e.g. select() vs WaitForMultipleObjects(). It's been a while since I've worked on Win32, but keep it in mind.
This is still true, actually - and something I forgot when writing the earlier posting. We always use Win32 calls such as CreateThread() and WaitForSingleObject() calls for our "real-time" device drivers because of this fact. But then, we only have two "real-time" objects anyway, so it wasn't a big deal when maintaining dual-platform support. But for the more common "not-quite-so-important-time" threads we stick to posix methods.
Why not embed python in your application? Python has already addressed the majority of platform differences for serial I/O, network I/O, threading, etc. That way you can use your own C code and Python C functions for all of the time-critical operations, and parsed Python for the less time-critical ones.
Python can also speed up application development, letting you prototype stuff without recompiling. You can compile fragments of Python code straight into your C code when you have got it working. You can make use of Python's httpd module, xml parsing module, etc, etc, etc. There is a lot on offer there.
And.. best of all, Python doesn't suffer from any form of restrictive licensing either! We use Python extensively in our commercial applications and it does make a difference to development time.
We have our own API that we used to support on both unix and NT. It was originally developed on IRIX, and we made extensive use of the C++ Standard Template Library which made things a bit easier when porting to NT.
I realise that the STL isn't on the same level of cross-platform libraries that you were referring to, but it does aleviate some problems - and it's damn efficient too. Stream's, the way the STL uses them, can be quite an effective way of abstracting I/O.
The biggest two problems we had was threading, and serial I/O. Threading, thanks to NT's posix libraries, wasn't that much of a pain - but we did need to write our own thread interface classes, one NT specific and one unix specific.
Serial I/O was a little more tricky, but both came down to the same basic approach of treating the serial ports as files.
I think the conclusion we came to was that it was a good idea to highlight the major differences first, and create your own wrapper classes around the OS specific methods. This way your main program is platform independant, and porting is kept to the wrapper classes.
And of course, if you use the Cygwin environment, you shouldn't have any problems at all porting to another GCC platform.
Only one warning: watch out for tricky C++ template uses, not all compilers support all features (e.g. Visual C++ lacks partial template specialisation amongst other useful features).
Yes, thankyou for clarifying that. There I was thinking that "shortest path" meant the path between two nodes that is defined as being the shortest by some function based on weighted paths between nodes.
Or could it be that I was merely poking fun at the tendency to use "no shortest path" to mean "a path does exist, but it isn't short enough for us to call it a shortest path, therefore the two nodes are not connected"?
We're not on crack here, nor are we "paying 1/3 of [our] salary in taxes" to provide subsidized internet access.
Canada (and Sweden, Finland et-al) are more wired than the USA..
As a resident in Sweden, I can tell you that we aren't paying 1/2 of our salary for a better school system or public health care. The Swedish government sees it as its duty to provide broadband to everyone, no matter how far away from a city they live. And the crazy thing is - paying 1/2 of your salary to the government is the right thing to do as a socialist, so nobody questions it.
Long winters, my arse! I wouldn't pay for broadband if it wasn't for the fact that it is cheap here...
"...continuously gathering and analyzing core routing tables for three years. In the end, they found that for much of the Internet, the shortest path between two points doesn't exist."
But the longest path does exist? Do we blame the journalist, or the researchers who got paid for three years to conclude this amazingly useful fact?
Slashdot Mirror
The bottom line was: since a lot of people here in Sweden use internet banking, and we all hope it is really secure, then your internet bank account would be one safe way of identifying you. So why not make banks account the basis of a net passport? Rather that than make Microsoft the key to my bank account!
The problem as I see it is that using p2p clients doesn't exactly give you a broad range of music to select from. Trying to find something slightly obscure is frustrating, and usually fruitless.
Then again - if record labels make all of their CDs available via a service like this, then it only takes one member of the service to re-encode them as MP3s and make them available via p2p. Then i'll finally get my "slightly obscure" mp3s ;)
MPEG-4 has also had a huge number of research groups and commercial organisations working together on the standards.
I'm not saying that these features are necessary, but this Nancy shouldn't really be able to kill MPEG-4 off if it only competes on one out of the many aspects of MPEG-4.
What will happen when GPRS becomes more common? Many of the services that Locust offer via SMS seem much more naturally suited to GPRS. It may be that Locust will run out of users in the long-run anyway as these services become more common place as part of a GPRS subscription.
There is no doubt that 2.5 and 3G systems will supersede the never-quite-there WAP, but as I see it the real break will come when people can download Java (or whatever) programs to their phone.
It is the little fellow who can't afford to brand his site that is losing out in our modern brand-driven society. People need to get off their buts and find things that interest them, rather than allowing advertising to choose for them!
Can anyone really say that computing as a field or science was designed? What we have today is the result of a form of evolution and a result of a market economy. Nobody knew where we were going, we just started going someplace.
The company I work for has spent the past 4 years slowly evolving a fairly complex graphics and haptic (see: Intelligent Scalpels Through Touch Technology for more about haptics) API. At the start we had only a vague idea of what it should be like. We knew from our experiences in graphics that it should be scene-graph based -- so we borrowed the VRML design. We knew that we wanted to be able to do a few things with it. This gave us the basic framework to start with, much like Linus had with Linux.
Then we basically evolved the product. Every time we worked on a project that used the API, we learnt more about what it was good at and what it lacked. We modified it, fixed things, extended it with new features. After 4 years we have something far better than we could ever have dreamed of designing.
The most important reason for using this approach was not because we believed in an evolutionary approach to software engineering (I don't think that Linus' advice should be taken too literally). It was because we were dealing with making an API out of cutting-edge research - much of which hadn't been done when we started. We simply couldn't have designed it.
Nobody denies that security through obscurity is a flawed concept.. so surely the more kids out there who know how to stress test a computers security, the more we are going to see systems made more secure.
Given how much free information is available on the web anyway, and how easy it is to get involved in those "elite" hacking groups, this "school" isn't doing anything more than making it a little bit easier for the lads whilst taking some of the load off their wallets.
Actually.. isn't this why we have dictionaries? Consulting a US dictionary gives us:
"hacked, hacking, hacks
...
v. tr.
3. b. To gain access to (a computer file or network) illegally or without authorization: hacked the firm's personnel database. " (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
It is about time people give up what they think is right usage and give in to popular usage.
See: http://archive.comlab.ox.ac.uk/formal-methods/hol. html amongst other pages.
Has anyone actually seen an IT related EU project that achieved something? The company I work for has been involved in two EU project proposals so far, and nothing came of either of them -- though they both consumed a large ammount of resources from universities to get through the three failed applications each.
But it is essentially.. at least, according to Cringley, it's the expansion into new areas like gaming consoles that Microsoft desperately needs in order to keep growing at the necessary rate to avoid going bankrupt.
Look at it from a positive consumer viewpoint -- as previous slashdoters have mentioned, Microsoft are essentially selling a half-decent PC at below cost. Get yerself an X-Box, get Linux running on it, and have a good laugh at them.
Our company works with haptics in surgical *training*, and I must say that this is both more effective and involves fewer regulation issues. Using haptics to simulate a surgical procedure means that surgeons can train to be better - and then they don't need a computer to stop them from killing me. Heck, it even saves pigs.
This is still true, actually - and something I forgot when writing the earlier posting. We always use Win32 calls such as CreateThread() and WaitForSingleObject() calls for our "real-time" device drivers because of this fact. But then, we only have two "real-time" objects anyway, so it wasn't a big deal when maintaining dual-platform support. But for the more common "not-quite-so-important-time" threads we stick to posix methods.
Python can also speed up application development, letting you prototype stuff without recompiling. You can compile fragments of Python code straight into your C code when you have got it working. You can make use of Python's httpd module, xml parsing module, etc, etc, etc. There is a lot on offer there.
And.. best of all, Python doesn't suffer from any form of restrictive licensing either! We use Python extensively in our commercial applications and it does make a difference to development time.
I realise that the STL isn't on the same level of cross-platform libraries that you were referring to, but it does aleviate some problems - and it's damn efficient too. Stream's, the way the STL uses them, can be quite an effective way of abstracting I/O.
The biggest two problems we had was threading, and serial I/O. Threading, thanks to NT's posix libraries, wasn't that much of a pain - but we did need to write our own thread interface classes, one NT specific and one unix specific. Serial I/O was a little more tricky, but both came down to the same basic approach of treating the serial ports as files.
I think the conclusion we came to was that it was a good idea to highlight the major differences first, and create your own wrapper classes around the OS specific methods. This way your main program is platform independant, and porting is kept to the wrapper classes.
And of course, if you use the Cygwin environment, you shouldn't have any problems at all porting to another GCC platform.
Only one warning: watch out for tricky C++ template uses, not all compilers support all features (e.g. Visual C++ lacks partial template specialisation amongst other useful features).
Or could it be that I was merely poking fun at the tendency to use "no shortest path" to mean "a path does exist, but it isn't short enough for us to call it a shortest path, therefore the two nodes are not connected"?
Canada (and Sweden, Finland et-al) are more wired than the USA..
As a resident in Sweden, I can tell you that we aren't paying 1/2 of our salary for a better school system or public health care. The Swedish government sees it as its duty to provide broadband to everyone, no matter how far away from a city they live. And the crazy thing is - paying 1/2 of your salary to the government is the right thing to do as a socialist, so nobody questions it.
Long winters, my arse! I wouldn't pay for broadband if it wasn't for the fact that it is cheap here...
But the longest path does exist? Do we blame the journalist, or the researchers who got paid for three years to conclude this amazingly useful fact?