It's the same here in the Denver area -- no coverage at the airport or in certain key corridors (like the Boulder Turnpike). Although speeds seem quite good the few times when I can get a strong signal. The WiMAX signal just happens to be excellent here at my home, the one place where I don't need it.;)
I looked into this recently. It seems there are plenty of methods in XMPP for sending files in our modern mess of NATs. However, IM clients haven't necessarily kept up with the XMPP standards. The libpurple based clients (Pidgin, Adium, etc.) in particular seem to be stuck with the XMPP of several years ago. I've had better luck sending files with Psi, but that client is kind of clunky. Anyway, I suspect that file transfer is considered to be a solved problem from the point of view of the XMPP standard itself.
Personally, I don't think it would matter much. Networks have had 15 years to roll out IPv6. A few more months will just buy us a few months of additional procrastination, and then we'll be back in the same situation. I think it's better to go ahead and get it over with.
This is an excellent question. I'd love to see this happen, but I think the obstacles boil down to the following:
People don't care.
People aren't going to do extra work or incur any additional inconvenience for extra security. (Unless they get burned, at which point they become true believers...)
Mail User Agent (MUA) vendors target the 98% of people who don't need security, don't want security, are oblivious to risks and think their mail is already secure, or think that governments and criminals will always magically be able to hack the encryption (thanks to Hollywood).
Effective use of encrypted mail for day-to-day use requires a network of enabled participants. Getting all your recipients to agree to use encrypted mail would be just as challenging as trying to get all your friends to switch to your preferred instant messaging service.
Providing real security is hard, and encouraging the use of encrypted mail without considering the considerable challenges of securing endpoints may provide a false sense of security. Until common operating systems become sufficiently secure, it's a hassle to find a safe place to store your keys, or a safe terminal from which to enter your passphrase.
These are not insurmountable challenges. I think over time we could could make this happen. It won't be easy or happen quickly, though.
Yes... The dollars/hour metric seems to be for people who are trying to solve the problem of having too many spare hours on their hands which need filling with something or another. I can't say I have that problem. I like your formula a lot better.
Yeah, from what I can tell, this is a completely benign move to make a public-private partnership operate more effectively, and doesn't affect anyone except the volunteers.
I'm as suspicious of the government as any of us, and I can see how the wording leads some people to think "Oh noes! Nightwatch!". If the FBI started asking InfraGard members to inform on their co-workers or used InfraGard to establish some sort of hiring favoritism, then we'd have reason to be worried. People working together to achieve a common goal is nothing to worry about, though. Let's save our energy for when the government is actually screwing us.
The problem is, with all the bureaucracy and legal requirements for proposing such information collection, it's hard for these government types to not come across as sounding vaguely sinister.
I'm actually offended by the notion that a mental process could be considered cheating in a game that is supposed to have at least some element of skill. It seems that most of the engineer-centric Slashdot crowd agrees. However, I have had people try to tell me that counting cards in your head is indeed cheating. I suspect that to much of the world outside of Slashdot, such mental exercises seem like mystical voodoo.
I lived in Birmingham back in '96. It always seemed to me that there were some forms of nature that were actually *more* dense in the big city than in the smaller rural towns -- like roaches. At least, in the corner of Southside that I lived in. It's sad to hear that downtown still becomes a ghost town after 5pm.
I got a kick out of your colorful description of nature constantly encroaching on man. I felt the same way when I was growing up in the South. Feel free to visit Colorado sometime; I've found it to be radically different. Being outside is actually enjoyable here.
My first computer was also an MC-10! (You, me, and maybe ten others, heh...) My realization came when I was typing in a text adventure game from the back of a book, and got the dreaded "out of memory" error.:)
I hear you about needing a new computer... the 5GB of memory in this Mac Pro starts feeling tight after running a few Firefox, Eclipse, and VMWare processes...
Yeah, I've noticed that, too. B2B relationships between large companies with a lot at stake can be surprisingly and refreshingly honest. It's the companies selling products and services to end users that you have to watch out for, heh.
I've lived in a lot of places (although not New York or Texas), and I think every place certainly has its pros and cons. Many times, I think that places could learn a lot from each other and whittle down the cons while boosting the pros. However, if I suggested that my previous city had an idea that my current city could benefit from, I imagine people would think I'm just suffering from this "the old grass was greener" mindset, even if I'm not at all suggesting any sort of overall superiority.
So, I'm wondering how cross-pollination of ideas between cities can happen without sounding like an ass.
I saw a demonstration of Basil earlier this month at the event mentioned in the article, and the Gundersons explained some of the technology and what they are trying to accomplish.
There is nothing special about the sonar -- it's just a simple low-bitrate input scheme. The Gundersons are focusing on solving the problems of environment perception by focusing on a cognitive model instead of throwing horsepower at interpreting the input in fine detail, as computer vision or perhaps some sort of advanced sonar would. The robot manages an internal model of its environment, and compares the input to its expectations instead of continually trying to reconstruct a scene. Perhaps it distinguishes a chair from a person with clues (a chair doesn't move on its own, for instance).
Man, all this time I thought "Python 3000" was just a fictional, futuristic-sounding version of Python that Charles Stross made up for his book Halting State. In Stross's world set in 2018, Python 3000 is one of the dominant languages used for distributed peer-to-peer networks running on cellphone nodes. (FWIW, I blogged about this briefly here.)
People go on and on about how Android is Linux based and Open Source, but it's not.
Well actually, it is. You can browse, download and make changes to the source. It is also clearly Linux based.
I can browse, download, and make changes to the Android source? Where? Certainly not at the code.google.com/android site. As far as I can tell, Android is not open-source yet. It may become open-source in the near future, but I'll believe it when I see it.
If I'm wrong and the Android source is available somewhere, please post the URL. I'm anxious in experimenting with porting it to some of my own embedded projects.
Wow. It's good to know that I'm not the only one who tries to use the "push all registers to the stack" technique when a non-maskable interrupt is raised! It's also useful when I'm too tired to continue coding and have to go into "suspend" for the night...
At one place I worked, we joked about our MTTI -- mean time to interrupt. But then people thought it was cute to swing by the cube saying, "Hey, I'm afraid I'm going to have to lower your MTTI..."
Corner Bakery has free wi-fi now? Sweet! I'm going to have to check that out.
By the way, if it works anything like Panera Bread's system, web browsing can be made a LOT faster by tunneling to your own proxy at home instead of using theirs.
I'm not sure why this problem occurs for me and not for you. I'm attempting to run NetBeans 6.1 with Sun's JDK 1.6.0_06 (64-bit) on an Ubuntu 8.04 box (amd64) and displaying it on an Ubuntu 7.04 box (also amd64). It turns out that Netbeans was not hung, it was just REALLY slow. Slow as in "takes a minute and a half to draw the screen" slow. I tried your suggestion about the cache directory, but it didn't help. I did get curious, though, and looked into the matter a little further.
I performed some X Protocol analysis on the X11 connection using xmon, and discovered that there was a horrendous amount of activity between the client and the server due to the client trying to update the display a few pixels at a time. As if that wasn't bad enough, it was reading (!!!) those few pixels from the display before updating them and writing them back, which means the loop had to do an XSync() of some sort, so the loop was twiddling its thumbs while waiting for a synchronous round-trip response every few pixels! I took a look at the source code for OpenJDK and NetBeans, and after learning more than I ever wanted to know about the Java Swing -> Java 2D -> X11 graphics pipeline, I found out I could fix the problem by setting the "sun.java2d.pmoffscreen" property to "false" in netbeans.conf.
One drawback with both remote X and DirectDraw is that neither antialiasing nor alpha-blending can be accelerated. In fact, antialiasing and alpha blending operations on remote X are usually much slower compared to version 1.3 because the image must be copied to the X client to perform one of these operations and then the new image must be copied back to the server....Since most Swing applications do not use alpha blending or antialiasing anyway, this problem should not cause serious concern for developers using Swing.
...
Starting with the Beta 3 release of the SDK, version 1.4, Java 2D stores images in pixmaps by default when DGA is not available, whether you are working in a local or remote display environment. You can override this behavior with the pmoffscreen flag:
-Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=true/false
If you set this flag to true, offscreen pixmap support is enabled even if DGA is available. If you set this flag to false, offscreen pixmap support is disabled. Disabling offscreen pixmap support can solve some rendering problems.
I suppose they didn't have NetBeans in mind when they wrote "most Swing applications do not use alpha blending or antialiasing anyway." Unfortunately, disabling offscreen pixmap support also disables antialiasing, so the fonts don't look nice and pretty like in Eclipse, which manages to support antialiasing on remote X displays somehow via its SWT/GTK+/X11 stack.
Now that I have NetBeans working somewhat tolerably, I guess I can begin evaluating it now. But not until I get some sleep.:)
I tried NetBeans the other day. Unfortunately, when I tried to run NetBeans on one machine and display it on another machine, it just showed up as a big, empty gray box.:(
I found a few bug reports related to Swing applications (such as NetBeans) having this behavior in certain situations, but Sun doesn't seem very interested in fixing the problem. It's frustrating because every other X application (including Eclipse, which is not based on Swing) works just fine and dandy over the network.
Since I end up running the IDE over the network from another machine, I guess I'll have to continue using Eclipse for now.:/
Re:Music in teaser not cogent
on
Iron Sky Trailer
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Not only was the music track in the teaser desperately dull, it had nothing to do with the visuals. Lame.
I like a good space Nazis communal movie as well as anyone else but don't forget to tell a story! Maybe if you play The Dark Side of the Moon while watching the movie, the music and the visuals will mysteriously match up.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's the same here in the Denver area -- no coverage at the airport or in certain key corridors (like the Boulder Turnpike). Although speeds seem quite good the few times when I can get a strong signal. The WiMAX signal just happens to be excellent here at my home, the one place where I don't need it. ;)
I looked into this recently. It seems there are plenty of methods in XMPP for sending files in our modern mess of NATs. However, IM clients haven't necessarily kept up with the XMPP standards. The libpurple based clients (Pidgin, Adium, etc.) in particular seem to be stuck with the XMPP of several years ago. I've had better luck sending files with Psi, but that client is kind of clunky. Anyway, I suspect that file transfer is considered to be a solved problem from the point of view of the XMPP standard itself.
Personally, I don't think it would matter much. Networks have had 15 years to roll out IPv6. A few more months will just buy us a few months of additional procrastination, and then we'll be back in the same situation. I think it's better to go ahead and get it over with.
The original story seems to be from the New York Times. Fox News and the other news sites all seem to be referencing the NYT article.
This is an excellent question. I'd love to see this happen, but I think the obstacles boil down to the following:
These are not insurmountable challenges. I think over time we could could make this happen. It won't be easy or happen quickly, though.
I recently listened to an excellent Software Engineering Radio podcast on this very subject: Episode 148: Software Archaeology with Dave Thomas
This guy has a lot of good pointers. (No pun intended. ;)
Yes... The dollars/hour metric seems to be for people who are trying to solve the problem of having too many spare hours on their hands which need filling with something or another. I can't say I have that problem. I like your formula a lot better.
Yeah, from what I can tell, this is a completely benign move to make a public-private partnership operate more effectively, and doesn't affect anyone except the volunteers. I'm as suspicious of the government as any of us, and I can see how the wording leads some people to think "Oh noes! Nightwatch!". If the FBI started asking InfraGard members to inform on their co-workers or used InfraGard to establish some sort of hiring favoritism, then we'd have reason to be worried. People working together to achieve a common goal is nothing to worry about, though. Let's save our energy for when the government is actually screwing us.
The problem is, with all the bureaucracy and legal requirements for proposing such information collection, it's hard for these government types to not come across as sounding vaguely sinister.
Microcode is slow and useless. I only arrange logic gates by hand. (Check out my fancy new word processor, coming in January 2490!)
I agree.
I'm actually offended by the notion that a mental process could be considered cheating in a game that is supposed to have at least some element of skill. It seems that most of the engineer-centric Slashdot crowd agrees. However, I have had people try to tell me that counting cards in your head is indeed cheating. I suspect that to much of the world outside of Slashdot, such mental exercises seem like mystical voodoo.
I lived in Birmingham back in '96. It always seemed to me that there were some forms of nature that were actually *more* dense in the big city than in the smaller rural towns -- like roaches. At least, in the corner of Southside that I lived in. It's sad to hear that downtown still becomes a ghost town after 5pm.
I got a kick out of your colorful description of nature constantly encroaching on man. I felt the same way when I was growing up in the South. Feel free to visit Colorado sometime; I've found it to be radically different. Being outside is actually enjoyable here.
My first computer was also an MC-10! (You, me, and maybe ten others, heh...) My realization came when I was typing in a text adventure game from the back of a book, and got the dreaded "out of memory" error. :)
I hear you about needing a new computer... the 5GB of memory in this Mac Pro starts feeling tight after running a few Firefox, Eclipse, and VMWare processes...
Sounds like that wolf crying again...
Seriously, I've been hearing that long distance bandwidth is plentiful, it's just the last mile that is the limiting factor.
Yeah, I've noticed that, too. B2B relationships between large companies with a lot at stake can be surprisingly and refreshingly honest. It's the companies selling products and services to end users that you have to watch out for, heh.
I've lived in a lot of places (although not New York or Texas), and I think every place certainly has its pros and cons. Many times, I think that places could learn a lot from each other and whittle down the cons while boosting the pros. However, if I suggested that my previous city had an idea that my current city could benefit from, I imagine people would think I'm just suffering from this "the old grass was greener" mindset, even if I'm not at all suggesting any sort of overall superiority.
So, I'm wondering how cross-pollination of ideas between cities can happen without sounding like an ass.
I saw a demonstration of Basil earlier this month at the event mentioned in the article, and the Gundersons explained some of the technology and what they are trying to accomplish.
There is nothing special about the sonar -- it's just a simple low-bitrate input scheme. The Gundersons are focusing on solving the problems of environment perception by focusing on a cognitive model instead of throwing horsepower at interpreting the input in fine detail, as computer vision or perhaps some sort of advanced sonar would. The robot manages an internal model of its environment, and compares the input to its expectations instead of continually trying to reconstruct a scene. Perhaps it distinguishes a chair from a person with clues (a chair doesn't move on its own, for instance).
Man, all this time I thought "Python 3000" was just a fictional, futuristic-sounding version of Python that Charles Stross made up for his book Halting State. In Stross's world set in 2018, Python 3000 is one of the dominant languages used for distributed peer-to-peer networks running on cellphone nodes. (FWIW, I blogged about this briefly here.)
Unfortunately, that page does not contain the Android source code -- only developer tools, WebKit source, and the linux kernel source.
People go on and on about how Android is Linux based and Open Source, but it's not.
Well actually, it is. You can browse, download and make changes to the source. It is also clearly Linux based.
I can browse, download, and make changes to the Android source? Where? Certainly not at the code.google.com/android site. As far as I can tell, Android is not open-source yet. It may become open-source in the near future, but I'll believe it when I see it.
If I'm wrong and the Android source is available somewhere, please post the URL. I'm anxious in experimenting with porting it to some of my own embedded projects.
Wow. It's good to know that I'm not the only one who tries to use the "push all registers to the stack" technique when a non-maskable interrupt is raised! It's also useful when I'm too tired to continue coding and have to go into "suspend" for the night...
At one place I worked, we joked about our MTTI -- mean time to interrupt. But then people thought it was cute to swing by the cube saying, "Hey, I'm afraid I'm going to have to lower your MTTI..."
Corner Bakery has free wi-fi now? Sweet! I'm going to have to check that out.
By the way, if it works anything like Panera Bread's system, web browsing can be made a LOT faster by tunneling to your own proxy at home instead of using theirs.
I'm not sure why this problem occurs for me and not for you. I'm attempting to run NetBeans 6.1 with Sun's JDK 1.6.0_06 (64-bit) on an Ubuntu 8.04 box (amd64) and displaying it on an Ubuntu 7.04 box (also amd64). It turns out that Netbeans was not hung, it was just REALLY slow. Slow as in "takes a minute and a half to draw the screen" slow. I tried your suggestion about the cache directory, but it didn't help. I did get curious, though, and looked into the matter a little further.
I performed some X Protocol analysis on the X11 connection using xmon, and discovered that there was a horrendous amount of activity between the client and the server due to the client trying to update the display a few pixels at a time. As if that wasn't bad enough, it was reading (!!!) those few pixels from the display before updating them and writing them back, which means the loop had to do an XSync() of some sort, so the loop was twiddling its thumbs while waiting for a synchronous round-trip response every few pixels! I took a look at the source code for OpenJDK and NetBeans, and after learning more than I ever wanted to know about the Java Swing -> Java 2D -> X11 graphics pipeline, I found out I could fix the problem by setting the "sun.java2d.pmoffscreen" property to "false" in netbeans.conf.
The key ideas are in Sun's white paper Graphics Performance Improvements :
I suppose they didn't have NetBeans in mind when they wrote "most Swing applications do not use alpha blending or antialiasing anyway." Unfortunately, disabling offscreen pixmap support also disables antialiasing, so the fonts don't look nice and pretty like in Eclipse, which manages to support antialiasing on remote X displays somehow via its SWT/GTK+/X11 stack.
Now that I have NetBeans working somewhat tolerably, I guess I can begin evaluating it now. But not until I get some sleep. :)
I tried NetBeans the other day. Unfortunately, when I tried to run NetBeans on one machine and display it on another machine, it just showed up as a big, empty gray box. :(
I found a few bug reports related to Swing applications (such as NetBeans) having this behavior in certain situations, but Sun doesn't seem very interested in fixing the problem. It's frustrating because every other X application (including Eclipse, which is not based on Swing) works just fine and dandy over the network.
Since I end up running the IDE over the network from another machine, I guess I'll have to continue using Eclipse for now. :/