Yep. I went through security in Argentina a few months back. There was a metal detector and an x-ray. If you failed the metal detector, the guard would just pat you down for a pistol. That was it. I laughed when I saw it. Course, you know how many airliners from argentina have been hijacked or destroyed by terrorism? As far as I know, zilch.
Dunno. Alumnium + iron powder...the security teams are looking for things that look like bombs on x-ray, or they have a scanner that sniffs for nitrates like found in explosives. Thermite does not have any nitrates. (though the stuff to ignite thermite may)
On the bright side, a hole in the plane isn't going to cause it to crash. Well, probably not...if it melted a hole through a key control linkage or into a fuel tank, that would be bad.
The sad thing is, these pathetic incompetent terrorists are going to be responsible for causing billions of dollars to spent on extra airport security and many, many lifetimes of time will be wasted in stupid delays.
Some incompetent terrorists tries to blow up the plane, but can't build a proper electronic detonator that a 10th grader could solder together? Now we all have to be humiliated by taking our shoes off.
Some incompetent wanna-be terrorists think about a liquid bomb because they saw it in the movie Die Hard 3? Now millions of Americans have to buy overpriced beverages and/or die of thirst. Not to mention that the world's best chemists don't know a reasonable way to make a liquid bomb actually freakin work.
And now, some useless waste of space terrorist doesn't build a proper bomb using over the counter ingredients like fertilizer/diesel fuel or tannerite. (both are so easy to get that a 10th grader could order either of those explosives). No, the idiot tries to blow up an airliner with what sounds like a gunpowder bomb. And despite only managing to burn his own pants off, undoubtedly some new round of draconian security measures will kill many lifetimes of wasted time at security checkpoints.
Fact is, the United States has killed far more of it's citizens through reacting to the actions of terrorists than terrorists have ever harmed.
Conjecture. Also, did you use a smartphone before the release of the iphone? Most of them were incredibly slow, could overheat, and would frequently crash while being used. It takes a massive amount of resources to create and support a new platform. Those hole in the wall medical tablet supply companies don't have those kinds of resources.
That bit about EMR standards and Federal law...that isn't a drug induced fantasy...I don't think....hard to see what's on CNN with all these LSD unicorns frolicking in my visual field. Man, this is gooooooooood shit. Good thing for legalized marijuana, eh?
Did you see the idea of push downloading? You could configure it so that all your assigned patients, or even all patients for a particular area of the hospital would get automatically sent to your device. The network software would also need a priority scheme : if a user made an actual request for data, that should get priority over automatic push updates.
Go use an iphone. Notice how it doesn't have the problems you are describing?
Kind of like the smartphone market before the iphone.
None of those vendors have the resources to make a fully integrated product like the iphone, with a smooth as glass UI, a full toolchain, a large third party market for software, and some of the best hardware available. (sure, in raw specs the iphone isn't the best, but for its form factor it is unsurpassed)
As I puff out a cloud of marijuana smoke laced with LSD, I think of a world where medical EMR software was require by federal law to store it's data in an open format that could be read by multiple vendors....
Then, you could use your slick apple tablet running some high quality EMR software, bought right through the app store in a competitive market, that would be able to read and write to the records stored on the hospital's clunky back-end servers running last century's EMR app...
Look at FairTrade's reliability data. Apple is one of the manufacturers of the most reliable laptop computers. Sure, they aren't ruggedized laptops : but toughbooks are an extremely expensive niche device. For the overwhelming majority of applications and users, it's cheaper to buy the extended warranty against accidental damage than to buy a ruggedized laptop.
The only problem you list that is legitimate is the battery sucking color screen. Somehow, through tricks and LED backlights or an OLED screen, they have to get that battery life to an acceptable level. For the intended buyers of this device (people with real jobs and real money) the other things you list are not a problem. It won't require Itunes : this tablet will be able to download it's own updates. It might only access an app store...with hundreds of thousands of applications and lots of well paid developers. During the warranty life, if the battery dies you send it back to apple. Once the AppleCare warranty expires, it's time to pony up for a new one. Or get an unauthorized third party battery replacement kit off of ebay.
Here's what I want a high quality, fast and truly usable tablet for : medical care. It should be possible to walk into a patient's room carrying a clipboard sized device that resembled a giant iphone. You should be able to call up medical records, imagery, and the rest with no detectable latency. (because the tablet should use push downloading : each tablet is assigned to a particular doctor or nurse. The table would cache all medical records for each patient assigned to that doctor or nurse, and if a new report comes out for one of those patients, the tablet should automatically download it over the hospital's wireless network)
It should use a glass topped display, like the iphone, so that you could use caustic chemicals to sterilize the surface. The medical industry has enough money that if this product cost $1500 it would barely be noticed as an expense. (especially if it could boost efficiency)
Apple has as good a chance to make this happen as anyone. Medical users would be running custom software for this tablet, so there's no need for it to be windows compatible. While displaying large 2D images like X-rays will require some CPU horsepower, it's still entirely possible for a low power CPU to do the job. And apple's superior user interfaces and integration with hardware mean that it will be cheaper and easier to train doctors and nurses to use this device.
The biggest technical problems I foresee are back end problems, problems with the EMR software, and battery life.(hospital IT departments tend to fuck things up. If they bought a bunch of apple tablets, they probably wouldn't build and maintain the back end servers and wireless AP correctly)
Also, such a tablet will probably be quite fragile, and fairly heavy.
Remember, YOU (the typical slashdotter running Linux with a windows box for games on desktop machines) are not the intended users for this tablet. YOU probably sit at a desk all day. You have enough technical expertise that tinkering is fun for you, and you don't mind the idea of a tablet on kludgey, cheap hardware that is running open source software.
Fact is, this publishing of names like this is a form of punishment for the crime.
Fact is, the Constitutions of the United States AND the Constitution of Texas both say you cannot be deprived of privileges or property without due process. Due process means a conviction/guilty plea in a court of law.
Fact is, people beat DUI charges all the time. They hire good lawyers at their own expense that know how to work the system. Those people are never found guilty of the crime, yet this twitter feed essentially punishes the innocent as determined by a court of law. It's unconstitutional, but it will cost time and money to fight this criminal act on the part of the police department.
What if it was one of those bullshit cases where you were taking a nap in the back of your own car and the keys were in the ignition? (to run the AC/heat or the stereo)
What if you failed the field sobriety test, but demanded a blood test, which came back clean. (but the prosecutor decided to charge you anyway...that's perfectly legal in Texas)
Heck, in Texas, you can be charged with a crime when exculpatory evidence proving that you did not commit the crime exists. The prosecutor does not have any legal obligation to mention this evidence in the paperwork used to formally charge a person.
The market has decided that the all of ARM is only worth 3.5 bil, including the IP.
Now, that measures the ability of ARM to extract wealth from it's intellectual property. This does NOT mean that ARM's true worth to society as a whole is really 33 times less than Intel. I think that's what you are getting at. And of course "the market" is not really the omniscient entity that economists like to model it as, but more like an unruly mob of sheeple. Still, investors do try to put their money where they think money is to be made, and those investors evidently don't have as much confidence in ARM.
ARM itself has a market cap of 3.5 billion. Intel is worth, according to the market, 108 billion. Relatively speaking, ARM is a failure and doesn't make much money compared to Intel.
What's the profit margin on those ARM CPUs? How much does each individual chip sell for? Oh, right, there's very little profits and the chips are dirt cheap...
Well, as for my last comment, I wasn't thinking current applications. I'm just observing that in general, software gets more and more bloated as times goes on. In 4 years from today, might it require 4-8 gigs of RAM to make internet explorer 9 and Word 2012 happy?
Over time, and you DO plan on using this machine for a few years, programs inevitably get more and more bloated. You can complain, or you can put in more RAM. I prefer the latter solution, because RAM has historically been pretty cheap.
The most interesting benchmark in the article is the effect that the Ion GPU has. There's another netbook review that is linked in the article to an $800 machine with a beefier CPU, the ASUS CLUV. That machine is unable to play 1080p video clips without stuttering.
Yet this beast of a netbook can do it easily, using no more than 50% CPU in windows media player. That ION GPU must be doing a heck of a lot of the calculations in order to make this possible.
Only problem : not all video codecs are accelerated this well. Do any players/codecs out there let you watch the usual x264 video clips that pirates put up on the net with Ion GPU acceleration? Historically, Windows Media Player generally doesn't natively play anything but WMV and old codec files.
Those 1080p movie trailers that Apple likes to release will play just fine, however.
The biggest problem with the machine is that it still uses a mechanical hard drive. It would be a heck of a lot faster and more responsive if it had a clean bare-bones install of Win 7 and an SSD. (no, not Linux...Linux might boot and run faster but it takes more time to tinker with it and fight to get things to run than you save, unless you are a Linux expert)
Problem is, you gotta pay for the cost of that useless 5400 rpm drive when you buy this thing. Maybe you could pick up an external enclosure off newegg along with an SSD, and put the mechanical drive to use as a backup disk. Put in an OCZ vertex SSD, and make this machine scream.
The 2GB ram limitation is also a problem, though...For long term use, you really want at least 4-8 GB....
Well, I suppose if the female in this couple liked to lie there like a dead fish, an inflatable doll just might allow for an adequate facsimile for calibration purposes. Suppose if this were a catholic couple...
You know what I meant. The only way to be sure your sex detector works would be to test it. Try different things on the bed with the connected equipment and record the data to use it to fine tune your code. That would mean, among other things, you'd want to have 2 partners who are similar in mass to the actual couple actually have sex on the bed in different positions. Most slashdotters would of course want to get their hands dirty with this part and would just need a female partner...which the meme around here is...
So how does the device work? For instance, how are these weight measurements being made? If you just put a load cell under the middle of the bed, it isn't going to measure the total mass. You'd need to use 4 load cells - one at each corner of the mattress. And the Mattress has to have a frame, like a box spring. Or you could use 1 load cell, but you'd have to build a special framework under the bed for it.
The next part is how do you translate these weight and vibration readings into a "sex detector". Where do you set the threshold, such that if someone just rolls over or even flops on the bed it doesn't set it off? Lots of ordinary acts, from scratching an itch to sitting up might create vibrations in the system that would fool a simple script into detecting "sex".
Plus, some sex acts create a lot more vibration that others. Position also matters quite a bit.
This is an interesting problem. I think it's solvable, to a reasonable level of accuracy. But you'd have to calibrate the system, which would require something that most slashdotters don't have access to....
Re:Did the same thing with just a single camera
on
The DIY Book Scanner
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When you OCR the resulting PDFs from using a scanner, you use a mode that includes data from the original scan. For instance, I just use Adobe Acrobat's "clear scan" OCR mode. What it does is it OCRs the text, and uses the OCR data to sharpen the scan of the letters in the PDF document. It then downsamples all the image data to a resolution that you specify. Basically, the resulting PDF is a hybrid between an OCRed file and the original image data that was scanned in. You can easily read all of the text, even letters that were not recognized properly by the OCR. The only problem this creates it that the text is not fully searchable : sometimes, a word that wasn't OCRed right will not be found in a text search, even though it's perfectly readable in the text. What you do then is do it old school : scroll to the bottom of the PDF of the book and look at the actual index. Then type the page number into the box at the top, and acrobat will jump right to that page.
Problems : Acrobat is kind of slow on most computers. I think once I get a quad core with an SSD it'll be instantly fast, though. The second problem is that these hybrid PDF files are huge. A textbook takes up about a gigabyte at the quality level I scan them at. Not a problem at all though if you are reading the files on a beefy desktop PC with huge high resolution displays, though. (and such a PC would ironically cost less than a semester or two worth of textbooks...the PC would cost roughly $1500-$2000)
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. I went through security in Argentina a few months back. There was a metal detector and an x-ray. If you failed the metal detector, the guard would just pat you down for a pistol. That was it. I laughed when I saw it. Course, you know how many airliners from argentina have been hijacked or destroyed by terrorism? As far as I know, zilch.
Dunno. Alumnium + iron powder...the security teams are looking for things that look like bombs on x-ray, or they have a scanner that sniffs for nitrates like found in explosives. Thermite does not have any nitrates. (though the stuff to ignite thermite may)
On the bright side, a hole in the plane isn't going to cause it to crash. Well, probably not...if it melted a hole through a key control linkage or into a fuel tank, that would be bad.
So would gasoline.
The sad thing is, these pathetic incompetent terrorists are going to be responsible for causing billions of dollars to spent on extra airport security and many, many lifetimes of time will be wasted in stupid delays.
Some incompetent terrorists tries to blow up the plane, but can't build a proper electronic detonator that a 10th grader could solder together? Now we all have to be humiliated by taking our shoes off.
Some incompetent wanna-be terrorists think about a liquid bomb because they saw it in the movie Die Hard 3? Now millions of Americans have to buy overpriced beverages and/or die of thirst. Not to mention that the world's best chemists don't know a reasonable way to make a liquid bomb actually freakin work.
And now, some useless waste of space terrorist doesn't build a proper bomb using over the counter ingredients like fertilizer/diesel fuel or tannerite. (both are so easy to get that a 10th grader could order either of those explosives). No, the idiot tries to blow up an airliner with what sounds like a gunpowder bomb. And despite only managing to burn his own pants off, undoubtedly some new round of draconian security measures will kill many lifetimes of wasted time at security checkpoints.
Fact is, the United States has killed far more of it's citizens through reacting to the actions of terrorists than terrorists have ever harmed.
Conjecture. Also, did you use a smartphone before the release of the iphone? Most of them were incredibly slow, could overheat, and would frequently crash while being used. It takes a massive amount of resources to create and support a new platform. Those hole in the wall medical tablet supply companies don't have those kinds of resources.
That bit about EMR standards and Federal law...that isn't a drug induced fantasy...I don't think....hard to see what's on CNN with all these LSD unicorns frolicking in my visual field. Man, this is gooooooooood shit. Good thing for legalized marijuana, eh?
Did you see the idea of push downloading? You could configure it so that all your assigned patients, or even all patients for a particular area of the hospital would get automatically sent to your device. The network software would also need a priority scheme : if a user made an actual request for data, that should get priority over automatic push updates. Go use an iphone. Notice how it doesn't have the problems you are describing?
Kind of like the smartphone market before the iphone. None of those vendors have the resources to make a fully integrated product like the iphone, with a smooth as glass UI, a full toolchain, a large third party market for software, and some of the best hardware available. (sure, in raw specs the iphone isn't the best, but for its form factor it is unsurpassed)
As I puff out a cloud of marijuana smoke laced with LSD, I think of a world where medical EMR software was require by federal law to store it's data in an open format that could be read by multiple vendors....
Then, you could use your slick apple tablet running some high quality EMR software, bought right through the app store in a competitive market, that would be able to read and write to the records stored on the hospital's clunky back-end servers running last century's EMR app...
Look at FairTrade's reliability data. Apple is one of the manufacturers of the most reliable laptop computers. Sure, they aren't ruggedized laptops : but toughbooks are an extremely expensive niche device. For the overwhelming majority of applications and users, it's cheaper to buy the extended warranty against accidental damage than to buy a ruggedized laptop.
The only problem you list that is legitimate is the battery sucking color screen. Somehow, through tricks and LED backlights or an OLED screen, they have to get that battery life to an acceptable level. For the intended buyers of this device (people with real jobs and real money) the other things you list are not a problem. It won't require Itunes : this tablet will be able to download it's own updates. It might only access an app store...with hundreds of thousands of applications and lots of well paid developers. During the warranty life, if the battery dies you send it back to apple. Once the AppleCare warranty expires, it's time to pony up for a new one. Or get an unauthorized third party battery replacement kit off of ebay.
Here's what I want a high quality, fast and truly usable tablet for : medical care. It should be possible to walk into a patient's room carrying a clipboard sized device that resembled a giant iphone. You should be able to call up medical records, imagery, and the rest with no detectable latency. (because the tablet should use push downloading : each tablet is assigned to a particular doctor or nurse. The table would cache all medical records for each patient assigned to that doctor or nurse, and if a new report comes out for one of those patients, the tablet should automatically download it over the hospital's wireless network)
It should use a glass topped display, like the iphone, so that you could use caustic chemicals to sterilize the surface. The medical industry has enough money that if this product cost $1500 it would barely be noticed as an expense. (especially if it could boost efficiency)
Apple has as good a chance to make this happen as anyone. Medical users would be running custom software for this tablet, so there's no need for it to be windows compatible. While displaying large 2D images like X-rays will require some CPU horsepower, it's still entirely possible for a low power CPU to do the job. And apple's superior user interfaces and integration with hardware mean that it will be cheaper and easier to train doctors and nurses to use this device.
The biggest technical problems I foresee are back end problems, problems with the EMR software, and battery life.(hospital IT departments tend to fuck things up. If they bought a bunch of apple tablets, they probably wouldn't build and maintain the back end servers and wireless AP correctly)
Also, such a tablet will probably be quite fragile, and fairly heavy.
Remember, YOU (the typical slashdotter running Linux with a windows box for games on desktop machines) are not the intended users for this tablet. YOU probably sit at a desk all day. You have enough technical expertise that tinkering is fun for you, and you don't mind the idea of a tablet on kludgey, cheap hardware that is running open source software.
Fact is, this publishing of names like this is a form of punishment for the crime.
Fact is, the Constitutions of the United States AND the Constitution of Texas both say you cannot be deprived of privileges or property without due process. Due process means a conviction/guilty plea in a court of law.
Fact is, people beat DUI charges all the time. They hire good lawyers at their own expense that know how to work the system. Those people are never found guilty of the crime, yet this twitter feed essentially punishes the innocent as determined by a court of law. It's unconstitutional, but it will cost time and money to fight this criminal act on the part of the police department.
What if it was one of those bullshit cases where you were taking a nap in the back of your own car and the keys were in the ignition? (to run the AC/heat or the stereo)
What if you failed the field sobriety test, but demanded a blood test, which came back clean. (but the prosecutor decided to charge you anyway...that's perfectly legal in Texas)
Heck, in Texas, you can be charged with a crime when exculpatory evidence proving that you did not commit the crime exists. The prosecutor does not have any legal obligation to mention this evidence in the paperwork used to formally charge a person.
The market has decided that the all of ARM is only worth 3.5 bil, including the IP. Now, that measures the ability of ARM to extract wealth from it's intellectual property. This does NOT mean that ARM's true worth to society as a whole is really 33 times less than Intel. I think that's what you are getting at. And of course "the market" is not really the omniscient entity that economists like to model it as, but more like an unruly mob of sheeple. Still, investors do try to put their money where they think money is to be made, and those investors evidently don't have as much confidence in ARM.
It is a reasonable definition. According to those numbers, Intel could purchase all of ARM from petty cash.
ARM itself has a market cap of 3.5 billion. Intel is worth, according to the market, 108 billion. Relatively speaking, ARM is a failure and doesn't make much money compared to Intel.
What's the profit margin on those ARM CPUs? How much does each individual chip sell for? Oh, right, there's very little profits and the chips are dirt cheap...
Well, as for my last comment, I wasn't thinking current applications. I'm just observing that in general, software gets more and more bloated as times goes on. In 4 years from today, might it require 4-8 gigs of RAM to make internet explorer 9 and Word 2012 happy?
Over time, and you DO plan on using this machine for a few years, programs inevitably get more and more bloated. You can complain, or you can put in more RAM. I prefer the latter solution, because RAM has historically been pretty cheap.
The most interesting benchmark in the article is the effect that the Ion GPU has. There's another netbook review that is linked in the article to an $800 machine with a beefier CPU, the ASUS CLUV. That machine is unable to play 1080p video clips without stuttering.
Yet this beast of a netbook can do it easily, using no more than 50% CPU in windows media player. That ION GPU must be doing a heck of a lot of the calculations in order to make this possible.
Only problem : not all video codecs are accelerated this well. Do any players/codecs out there let you watch the usual x264 video clips that pirates put up on the net with Ion GPU acceleration? Historically, Windows Media Player generally doesn't natively play anything but WMV and old codec files.
Those 1080p movie trailers that Apple likes to release will play just fine, however.
The biggest problem with the machine is that it still uses a mechanical hard drive. It would be a heck of a lot faster and more responsive if it had a clean bare-bones install of Win 7 and an SSD. (no, not Linux...Linux might boot and run faster but it takes more time to tinker with it and fight to get things to run than you save, unless you are a Linux expert)
Problem is, you gotta pay for the cost of that useless 5400 rpm drive when you buy this thing. Maybe you could pick up an external enclosure off newegg along with an SSD, and put the mechanical drive to use as a backup disk. Put in an OCZ vertex SSD, and make this machine scream.
The 2GB ram limitation is also a problem, though...For long term use, you really want at least 4-8 GB....
Well, I suppose if the female in this couple liked to lie there like a dead fish, an inflatable doll just might allow for an adequate facsimile for calibration purposes. Suppose if this were a catholic couple...
You know what I meant. The only way to be sure your sex detector works would be to test it. Try different things on the bed with the connected equipment and record the data to use it to fine tune your code. That would mean, among other things, you'd want to have 2 partners who are similar in mass to the actual couple actually have sex on the bed in different positions. Most slashdotters would of course want to get their hands dirty with this part and would just need a female partner...which the meme around here is...
So how does the device work? For instance, how are these weight measurements being made? If you just put a load cell under the middle of the bed, it isn't going to measure the total mass. You'd need to use 4 load cells - one at each corner of the mattress. And the Mattress has to have a frame, like a box spring. Or you could use 1 load cell, but you'd have to build a special framework under the bed for it.
The next part is how do you translate these weight and vibration readings into a "sex detector". Where do you set the threshold, such that if someone just rolls over or even flops on the bed it doesn't set it off? Lots of ordinary acts, from scratching an itch to sitting up might create vibrations in the system that would fool a simple script into detecting "sex".
Plus, some sex acts create a lot more vibration that others. Position also matters quite a bit.
This is an interesting problem. I think it's solvable, to a reasonable level of accuracy. But you'd have to calibrate the system, which would require something that most slashdotters don't have access to....
When you OCR the resulting PDFs from using a scanner, you use a mode that includes data from the original scan. For instance, I just use Adobe Acrobat's "clear scan" OCR mode. What it does is it OCRs the text, and uses the OCR data to sharpen the scan of the letters in the PDF document. It then downsamples all the image data to a resolution that you specify. Basically, the resulting PDF is a hybrid between an OCRed file and the original image data that was scanned in. You can easily read all of the text, even letters that were not recognized properly by the OCR. The only problem this creates it that the text is not fully searchable : sometimes, a word that wasn't OCRed right will not be found in a text search, even though it's perfectly readable in the text. What you do then is do it old school : scroll to the bottom of the PDF of the book and look at the actual index. Then type the page number into the box at the top, and acrobat will jump right to that page.
Problems : Acrobat is kind of slow on most computers. I think once I get a quad core with an SSD it'll be instantly fast, though. The second problem is that these hybrid PDF files are huge. A textbook takes up about a gigabyte at the quality level I scan them at. Not a problem at all though if you are reading the files on a beefy desktop PC with huge high resolution displays, though. (and such a PC would ironically cost less than a semester or two worth of textbooks...the PC would cost roughly $1500-$2000)