Anything that tries to trivialize natural phenomena with common sense immediately sets of alarms in my head, ie. like:
How could space not be infinite? Is there a sign somewhere saying "Space Ends Here--Mind the Gap"?
And what about Olber's paradox which asks the question that why is the sky dark? If universe is infinite and reasonably uniformly distributed with matter, we should see a star at every point in the sky. The article seems to cover this by making up some mind-boggling distances between the universes so that our light cones do not overlap. However, having "universes" distributed uniformly in same infinite space would mean that there are infinite amount of universes, too. And this would mean that the probability of not having another universe (in fact, infinite other universes) close enough to see approaches zero.
In other words, glancing upwards and noting the, well, space between stars is enough to undermine the foundations of the article, thus reducing it to a load of crap.
Yet another april fools. The pictures taken from this article. Yesterday was completely ludicruous, and it seems that today will be only marginally better. *sigh*
Maybe it's just me, but the dark spot in the center of the animation looks very artificial. It's clearly six-sided until the very end of the animation. Maybe the poor astronomer was bored and just wanted to have some material published for a change, you know, have his fifteen minutes of fame.
Or it's the aliens. Always the aliens, dammit.
The consumer FAQ says that the actual payment is consumer-initiated through the PepperPanel, so that invalidates my cheating scheme described in the parent.
However, I'm sceptical of how popular this can be if it requires the user to install external software to handle the payments with.
1. Customer comes to the merchant's site and clicks the "purchase" button.
2. Merchant creates a new peppercoin transaction
3. Merchant sends the transaction info to Peppercoin and receives a coin.
4. Merchant concludes the transaction with Peppercoin
5. Merchant checks if the received coin was worthless, and if it was, goto 2, ie. make it look like the same consumer actually purchased more of the same product.
So in other words, what prevents the merchant to try the Peppercoin transaction again and again until the peppercoin is not worthless? This would mean that the merchant would receive $10 for each 50 cent sale.
This cheat would be obvious only if Peppercoin gets to match the merchant's product delivery records against the redeemed peppercoin records. This can be made even harder to notice by retrying the peppercoin only some random amount of times and giving up even if no valid peppercoin is received with those retries.
So this could be a problem if the peppercoin transaction is merchant-initiated and the merchant gets to know if the coin is worthless or not.
Keep in mind that the company open sourced their core product. Would you rather read about closed source products, of which there is no lack in/. anyway?
That's because there is no way to make a profit out of them. Most people, myself included, are just to cheap to pay per-minute/hour charges for nonessential communication.
Well, I don't know about that, especially if they don't price it too high (which they probably will, but...). Say they use a scheme where you can get a password to a certain hot spot by sending the company a text message with their cell phone, containing the code for the hot spot. Sending this message would cost you a few dollars, and in return you would receive a code you can use to connect to the hotspot, that is valid for, say, 30 minutes. I know I'd gladly pay a couple of bucks to check my email or just plain surf if I got spare time at that location and have my laptop with me.
I don't know if the text message approach in the US, but here in northern Europe virtually everyone has a cell phone, and indeed the telcos here help companies to set up services which rely on text messages.
You're thinking palm and pocketpc-like software here, right? Well, if you try to run several complex pieces of software at one time, it's easy to deplete the system's resources.
For example, there was this guy at my previous workplace who commonly complained to everyone that his machine was very slow. People would go see it and immediately point to him that he should close some applications, as he would at any given time have open a few Visual Studio's, several MS Office apps, a couple IE's pointed to various web pages, and outlook, of course. This being the era when 128M was a huge amount of memory, it's no surprise his machine was swapped to the third tier of hell.
However, he usually did have justification for most those programs. Writing code on one project, examining specs on word and excel formats, surfing in MSDN etc. Having his machine automatically "garbage collect" those apps would've meant that he'd been wasting half of his time waiting for those big project files load(WAY more than 5 seconds, no matter what the author of the article claims), or try to re-find the helpful web page he had had open five minutes ago.
Automatically saving the state of a program and then transparently restoring it on demand works only if the apps and their state are small enough, but unfortunately this rarely applies if you are using big apps.
As it turned out, our managers agreed with the guy I mentioned, and it resulted our department usually having the most powerful workstations in the building.
Or ICMP, actually. Some time ago when I needed a relatively small amount (a megabyte or so) of random numbers I thought to check how random the time between sending and receiving a ICMP echo request was. Liking to tinker with this kind of things I wrote a quick-and-dirty program to collect the data.
Turned out that if the destination host was distant enough (at least a couple of hops) and only a few most insignificant bits of the number of microseconds elapsed between the request and reply was used, the method would yield a fairly random sequence of bits. In fact, I tested the randomness of the sequence with a couple different methods and got positive results from all of them.
Of course, the technique is completely impractical for generating any significant amount of random numbers, and there probably are ways to embed order into the results if you are part of the network used to relay the requests, but nonetheless I successfully used the sequence in a (one-time) commercial application.
If the movie's quality is anywhere near Episode I, no kind of screen is going to save it. In that case I'm just going to rent the VHS tape when it comes out.
Imagine all the uses if we had a modular pattern recognition framework that can analyze pictures taken with this thing. One would only need to write a module that recognizes a specific thing to be able to have that information usable in any application.
For example, if I had the ability to extract all facial images captured by the camera I could feed them to something like this.
Of course there are big issues about privacy and whatnot with that kind of application, but I'm not going to touch that here. There are plenty of other, non-privacy intruding uses for an automated image analyzation system.
It's funny how these kind of "news" pop up all the time. The big execs out there are not really even trying to understand the technology or what it could offer, instead they try to stomp down on any new thing that they perceive as a threat - which pretty much includes anything related to the 'net nowadays.
To accomplish what they want they would need to control the whole technology chain that's used to transport the content. This means that they need to have control starting from the distribution mechanism down to the playback unit used to (dis)play the content. If they do not, there will always be someone, somewhere with access to the raw, unprotected content who will copy and release it over the 'net. Of course, they are trying to fight this on the other fronts than the technology front, too - the "someone, somewhere" is labeled as a pirate, and new legislation is written in an attempt to stop him/her. But humans do not work that way. There will always be one "someone", and with the 'net, it's only one it takes.
Sound systems like this allow one to add high-quality sound support for custom systems that do not have a conventional form factor that allows for a PCI-capable motherboard, for example, apps that are built around PC/104. Nice stuff.
Its natural to belive that they dont have developed a technique to compress 100 bytes to 1 byte. But if they have managed to compress a movie in avi of 6gb to 600M thats not a 'whoawhoawhao' thingy since divx already does this
Um, no. DivX is not lossless, nor is any other of the MPEG-line codecs. Their idea is based on losing only the data you won't notice when you're watching the compressed movie.
If they have discovered a way to compress the 6GB movie(or any arbitrary 6GB file) to a 60MB file which can be restored by decompression to the original 6GB file, then they have discovered something great indeed.
Even though allowing for their term of 'random data', this still sounds too good to be true, which means it probably is.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything that tries to trivialize natural phenomena with common sense immediately sets of alarms in my head, ie. like:
How could space not be infinite? Is there a sign somewhere saying "Space Ends Here--Mind the Gap"?
And what about Olber's paradox which asks the question that why is the sky dark? If universe is infinite and reasonably uniformly distributed with matter, we should see a star at every point in the sky. The article seems to cover this by making up some mind-boggling distances between the universes so that our light cones do not overlap. However, having "universes" distributed uniformly in same infinite space would mean that there are infinite amount of universes, too. And this would mean that the probability of not having another universe (in fact, infinite other universes) close enough to see approaches zero.
In other words, glancing upwards and noting the, well, space between stars is enough to undermine the foundations of the article, thus reducing it to a load of crap.
Yet another april fools. The pictures taken from this article. Yesterday was completely ludicruous, and it seems that today will be only marginally better. *sigh*
Maybe it's just me, but the dark spot in the center of the animation looks very artificial. It's clearly six-sided until the very end of the animation. Maybe the poor astronomer was bored and just wanted to have some material published for a change, you know, have his fifteen minutes of fame. Or it's the aliens. Always the aliens, dammit.
The consumer FAQ says that the actual payment is consumer-initiated through the PepperPanel, so that invalidates my cheating scheme described in the parent.
However, I'm sceptical of how popular this can be if it requires the user to install external software to handle the payments with.
Yes, but what about this way to abuse the system:
1. Customer comes to the merchant's site and clicks the "purchase" button.
2. Merchant creates a new peppercoin transaction
3. Merchant sends the transaction info to Peppercoin and receives a coin.
4. Merchant concludes the transaction with Peppercoin
5. Merchant checks if the received coin was worthless, and if it was, goto 2, ie. make it look like the same consumer actually purchased more of the same product.
So in other words, what prevents the merchant to try the Peppercoin transaction again and again until the peppercoin is not worthless? This would mean that the merchant would receive $10 for each 50 cent sale.
This cheat would be obvious only if Peppercoin gets to match the merchant's product delivery records against the redeemed peppercoin records. This can be made even harder to notice by retrying the peppercoin only some random amount of times and giving up even if no valid peppercoin is received with those retries.
So this could be a problem if the peppercoin transaction is merchant-initiated and the merchant gets to know if the coin is worthless or not.
I enjoy working with Swing
;)
And I almost took this guy seriously
Nah seriously, a great article with many insightful points. We need more of these and less those thinly veiled advertisements for blinkenlights.
Houston, we have a duplicate.
Keep in mind that the company open sourced their core product. Would you rather read about closed source products, of which there is no lack in /. anyway?
You know, not all Millstones are not bad. For example, there is the Official Beverage of IT Mill ltd., which is quite good :)
Note: The Millstone-the-UI-library lives in http://www.millstone.org, millstone.com is about something completely different.
$ host ebayupdates.com
Host ebayupdates.com not found: 2(SERVFAIL)
I get the whois record just fine, though.
That's because there is no way to make a profit out of them. Most people, myself included, are just to cheap to pay per-minute/hour charges for nonessential communication.
Well, I don't know about that, especially if they don't price it too high (which they probably will, but...). Say they use a scheme where you can get a password to a certain hot spot by sending the company a text message with their cell phone, containing the code for the hot spot. Sending this message would cost you a few dollars, and in return you would receive a code you can use to connect to the hotspot, that is valid for, say, 30 minutes. I know I'd gladly pay a couple of bucks to check my email or just plain surf if I got spare time at that location and have my laptop with me.
I don't know if the text message approach in the US, but here in northern Europe virtually everyone has a cell phone, and indeed the telcos here help companies to set up services which rely on text messages.
You're thinking palm and pocketpc-like software here, right? Well, if you try to run several complex pieces of software at one time, it's easy to deplete the system's resources.
For example, there was this guy at my previous workplace who commonly complained to everyone that his machine was very slow. People would go see it and immediately point to him that he should close some applications, as he would at any given time have open a few Visual Studio's, several MS Office apps, a couple IE's pointed to various web pages, and outlook, of course. This being the era when 128M was a huge amount of memory, it's no surprise his machine was swapped to the third tier of hell.
However, he usually did have justification for most those programs. Writing code on one project, examining specs on word and excel formats, surfing in MSDN etc. Having his machine automatically "garbage collect" those apps would've meant that he'd been wasting half of his time waiting for those big project files load(WAY more than 5 seconds, no matter what the author of the article claims), or try to re-find the helpful web page he had had open five minutes ago.
Automatically saving the state of a program and then transparently restoring it on demand works only if the apps and their state are small enough, but unfortunately this rarely applies if you are using big apps.
As it turned out, our managers agreed with the guy I mentioned, and it resulted our department usually having the most powerful workstations in the building.
You have ten seconds to comply. 9... 8... 7...
I bet you could really excercise your cat with that one, and do it over the internet, too!
Or ICMP, actually. Some time ago when I needed a relatively small amount (a megabyte or so) of random numbers I thought to check how random the time between sending and receiving a ICMP echo request was. Liking to tinker with this kind of things I wrote a quick-and-dirty program to collect the data.
Turned out that if the destination host was distant enough (at least a couple of hops) and only a few most insignificant bits of the number of microseconds elapsed between the request and reply was used, the method would yield a fairly random sequence of bits. In fact, I tested the randomness of the sequence with a couple different methods and got positive results from all of them.
Of course, the technique is completely impractical for generating any significant amount of random numbers, and there probably are ways to embed order into the results if you are part of the network used to relay the requests, but nonetheless I successfully used the sequence in a (one-time) commercial application.
So does this mean that programs that usleep() rather than sleep() have longer lifecycles?
If the movie's quality is anywhere near Episode I, no kind of screen is going to save it. In that case I'm just going to rent the VHS tape when it comes out.
Imagine all the uses if we had a modular pattern recognition framework that can analyze pictures taken with this thing. One would only need to write a module that recognizes a specific thing to be able to have that information usable in any application.
For example, if I had the ability to extract all facial images captured by the camera I could feed them to something like this.
Of course there are big issues about privacy and whatnot with that kind of application, but I'm not going to touch that here. There are plenty of other, non-privacy intruding uses for an automated image analyzation system.
And what about an another more computer-related company called Cray?
It's funny how these kind of "news" pop up all the time. The big execs out there are not really even trying to understand the technology or what it could offer, instead they try to stomp down on any new thing that they perceive as a threat - which pretty much includes anything related to the 'net nowadays.
To accomplish what they want they would need to control the whole technology chain that's used to transport the content. This means that they need to have control starting from the distribution mechanism down to the playback unit used to (dis)play the content. If they do not, there will always be someone, somewhere with access to the raw, unprotected content who will copy and release it over the 'net. Of course, they are trying to fight this on the other fronts than the technology front, too - the "someone, somewhere" is labeled as a pirate, and new legislation is written in an attempt to stop him/her. But humans do not work that way. There will always be one "someone", and with the 'net, it's only one it takes.
Sound systems like this allow one to add high-quality sound support for custom systems that do not have a conventional form factor that allows for a PCI-capable motherboard, for example, apps that are built around PC/104. Nice stuff.
Its natural to belive that they dont have developed a technique to compress 100 bytes to 1 byte. But if they have managed to compress a movie in avi of 6gb to 600M thats not a 'whoawhoawhao' thingy since divx already does this
Um, no. DivX is not lossless, nor is any other of the MPEG-line codecs. Their idea is based on losing only the data you won't notice when you're watching the compressed movie.
If they have discovered a way to compress the 6GB movie(or any arbitrary 6GB file) to a 60MB file which can be restored by decompression to the original 6GB file, then they have discovered something great indeed. Even though allowing for their term of 'random data', this still sounds too good to be true, which means it probably is.