Now the Virtual I/O iGlasses true stereoscopic in that they had two distinct displays, one for each eye, and each display could be run separately to show the correct offset for stereo vision. They were fairly lightweight, and it had a few design features that made them very nice. First was that they used have silvered prisms to display the image to the eye from the LCD displays. This meant that it could be used not just for VR type games, which is what the place I worked at used it for, but for augmented reality. This was before GPS was generally available, but with a head tracker, plus a GPS, you could have had a full augmented reality that was transparent, and didn't need you to hold your tablet in front of you! No need for cameras either....since you could easily see through the half silvered prisms. The other feature that I really liked about the iGlasses was that you could wear corrective glasses using them.
Ah...those days...it's definitely Nostalgia Day on Slashdot! What with this, and the first Linus posting about Linux....I've loved this space, and I was one of the earlier adopters...and used to brag about the site to others saying that tomorrow's tech stories that matter have already shown up today on Slashdot!
Thank you for your insanity in starting this thing!
Wow, such memories...I was playing with Minix back then, and I didn't really start playing around with Linux until kernel v0.12...I would take the boot and root disks to people's places with a 386, and then boot it and type "ls"...and the list of files would show up, and everyone who was in the know would go "Wow....". Now, I have made a living using Linux, an I am typing this message on my main workstation, a Linux box using Salix (Slackware variant). Thanks to Linus, RMS, ESR and everyone from Multics on for some wonderful and fun technology over the years!
For many video cards on desktops, yes, but for 386 systems about half the video cards used in Laptops it took a Adept of xorg.conf to get it to work at it's full resolution and colour depth.
Donald Sutherland, Keifer Sutherland (Donald's son, and grandson of the guy who brought universal medical care to Canada), Jim Carry, Cirque du Soleil, UN Peace Keepers (created by Nobel Laureate The Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson, past Prime Minister of Canada), Shania Twain, Norman Jewison, Long Distance Telephony (The first long distance transmission was made in August 1876, between Brantford and Paris Ontario.), Wayne Gretzky, The Light Bulb (Edison bought the patent from the two Canadian inventors), Joni Mitchell, The Guess Who/Bachman-Turner-Overdrive (BTO), Superman, William Shatner, James Doohan (Scotty!), Insulin (Frederick Banting), and Basketball.
So, yes, that's all you need to know about Canada...
I used to use a 386sx system as my firewall for my home network back in the 90s. It also was hooked up to my US Robotics Courier modem that I had from my days of running a BBS on Fidonet and PODSnet.
Now, if he got it to run X, I might consider that a reasonable hack...but just running Linux...lame.
There are many place where you can sign up to do "reviews" and/or run blogs that are actually supported by various companies. A person I know makes a living doing this. Similarly, publishers and authors use promo companies that will go and write good reviews for their books on Amazon, and bad reviews of their competitors...
These people are definitely better informed about the internals of the operating systems in question. Too many security "experts" simply know now to read books and articles written by other security "experts", and a number of them are paid shrills for various operating system owners. If someone can Pwn your system, then go and tell you both how and why they were able to do it, I would trust their opinion more than someone who is a talking head at some Magazine, Website or TV program!
I don't care how many pieces of malware are created aimed at Windows, Linux, MacOS or other flavours of Unix...the result that speaks for itself is that every year that they have had a hacker competition to see who can compromise and root a system where they compared Windows, Linux and MacOS, each of which has been secured by native experts...Windows has *always* been compromised, and I think it was always the *first* one compromised. MacOS, when it was compromised was second, and Linux was either the last compromised, but most of the time it stood up to all the punishment and remained secure.
So numbers really don't matter, it's how well it can survive in the wild that counts!
I mean, we built the legs for the Lunar Module, and that lead to us designing and building the robotic arms used on the Shuttle and the ISS. And many of the top people in the Gemini, and Apollo program were Canadians, hired by NASA after the AVRO Arrow CF-105 was cancelled in the late 1950s.
Most users are reasonably intelligent and can follow basic rules and procedures... if they are simple and have meaning to the person. Yes, you will always have some major *ssholes and clueless wonders too, but that is just life. We need to stop assuming that all users are totally clueless and can never learn a new thing.
The Pandigital "Novel" is a nice little Android tablet that is marketed as an ebook reader. It's only $160 (cdn), at Futureshop & Best Buy (Canada). It's also on sale in the US, but with a more crippled version of Android.
It's really just a numbers game. There is a maximum payload that can be launched with technology "x", where x could be any country's launch platform. You can only put so much fuel on to a rocket even assuming that you have a very small payload, say a small nuke and a guidance package. It is easy then to calculate the amount of delta v, or the change of direction available on x. As it takes the better part of 3 days to go from Earth launch to the Moon, this gives you a group of windows that the attack has to go through.
If you are sitting on the moon with a linear accelerator (linacc) based technology, meaning it's pretty much free to use, as long as you have electricity. And what is your anti-missile payload? Kinetic Weapons...dirt and rocks, which the Moon has an abundance of. Travelling at the escape velocity of the Moon, against attack travelling at the escape velocity from the Earth, even a ping-pong ball can do a lot of damage. If you keep on lobbing things at the incoming attack, it is forced to use up delta v. As delta v is used up, the incoming windows become smaller and smaller, which means your defence gets more and more accurate.
Alternately, If you attack the Moon Base with a Kinetic Weapon, you might have a better chance. If you used, say, a payload of ball bearings, depending on when you separated the payload from the launch vehicle, it might be very hard to totally remove the threat to the Moon Base. Launch enough of these weapons, and you can saturate the defences of the Moon. Again, even a small mass can do a lot of damage, as it would have to travel at less than the escape velocity of the moon. This makes the Moon Base very vulnerable to attack.
So it's not all that simple to say if the Moon is a good spot for a military base. And you can evolve this scenario by positing a sublunarian base, but this would limit the windows that the linacc can sight...and so on, and so on...It might be a fun article to write, but I don't have the time, and no one is offering me money to do this...that's it for me for now.
Sorry, that doesn't work. Bell, Telus and Rogers wholesale bandwidth to most of the other ISPs, who are forced to up their prices as well. There is a virtual monopoly here in Canada, owned by only 3 companies.
The real reason behind the rate increases is to preserve their monopoly. You see, Bell and Rogers are the largest Sat TV and Cable vendors in Canada, respectively. By capping everyone at 60 Gig, it means that you *cannot* replace their Sat TV or Cable services, since it is ridiculously easy to use that up...for example, the average 720p TV show runs about 700 Megs without commercials. A DVD or better resolution movie, that is, 720p or 1080p can run you easily a couple of Gig in size. The average family watches something like 4 hours of TV a night. So if you watch two TV shows, that is 1.4 Gig, watch three, that's 2.1 Gig. Now imagine you also watch a movie once a week...so that would run you anywhere from 2-5 Gig.
Working with those numbers, we take the 60 Gig cap, and divide it over 30 days, which gives you around 2 Gig a day, enough to watch 3 shows a night...but if you watch a movie approx. once a week, that adds, assuming at least 4 weeks (4weeks*3.5 Gig=14 Gig a month). You can easily go over your cap, and if any software you use needs patches, or you download a new version of Linux, or World of Warcraft unleashes a huge patch...suddenly your bill could be massive! Imagine if you are coming up on the end of the month, and watch that 4 hours a night of TV via the internet....and on the 23rd of the month, your favourate MMORPG releases a huge patch...you may have to wait until *next month* before you can patch up to run the game, if it's a mandatory patch.
Bandwidth is cheap. But when you have a monopoly, money is everything.:-(
Personally, I think not only the caps lock key is a redundant artifact of a typewriter heritage, but it's also displaced the proper position of the control key! I *always* remap my keyboard so that the control key is beside the "a" key...works better on the command line, and in WordStar-like editors, eg. "Joe".
If it is where the control key is on keyboard, there would be a lot less accidental shouting on the net!
I, too, used Fract386, which became Fractint....I worked at a computer store in Toronto, and we used to sell so many NEC Multi-Sync monitors with ATI's VGA Wonder card based upon showing Fractint on it!
Through someone on I met on LJ, I was able to get a "autographed mandelbrot", basically a color print out of part of the Mandelbrot set, autographed by the now, late, great Benoit Mandelbrot. Although I never got to meet him, he discovery has given much beauty to my life.
Actually, the problem is across all computer manufactures....It's the "Race to the Bottom" price wise, with the stupidity of quarterly profits having to always go up that means that too many corners are cut in design, manufacturing & support, and we get crap quality at a low price. If they went back to a tiered model, with cheap, but reasonable quality products all the way up to Cadillac quality with all the bells and whistles...and a certainly OS developer didn't give you the impression that a Dual Xeon quad core systems will run MS Office better than a single core AMD 64, things would be a lot saner in the computer world.
I just finished recording a pilot for a radio series using Audacity. It's easy to use, and being under the GPL2, I know what the license contains, and thus won't be blindsided by some obscure clause in a non-opensource license.
Slashdot Mirror
Now the Virtual I/O iGlasses true stereoscopic in that they had two distinct displays, one for each eye, and each display could be run separately to show the correct offset for stereo vision. They were fairly lightweight, and it had a few design features that made them very nice. First was that they used have silvered prisms to display the image to the eye from the LCD displays. This meant that it could be used not just for VR type games, which is what the place I worked at used it for, but for augmented reality. This was before GPS was generally available, but with a head tracker, plus a GPS, you could have had a full augmented reality that was transparent, and didn't need you to hold your tablet in front of you! No need for cameras either....since you could easily see through the half silvered prisms. The other feature that I really liked about the iGlasses was that you could wear corrective glasses using them.
ttyl
Farrell
Ah...those days...it's definitely Nostalgia Day on Slashdot! What with this, and the first Linus posting about Linux....I've loved this space, and I was one of the earlier adopters...and used to brag about the site to others saying that tomorrow's tech stories that matter have already shown up today on Slashdot!
Thank you for your insanity in starting this thing!
ttyl
Farrellj,
user #563
Wow, such memories...I was playing with Minix back then, and I didn't really start playing around with Linux until kernel v0.12...I would take the boot and root disks to people's places with a 386, and then boot it and type "ls"...and the list of files would show up, and everyone who was in the know would go "Wow....". Now, I have made a living using Linux, an I am typing this message on my main workstation, a Linux box using Salix (Slackware variant). Thanks to Linus, RMS, ESR and everyone from Multics on for some wonderful and fun technology over the years!
ttyl
Farrell
Now a Twister-Based Hedge Fund would be a lot more fun than a Twitter-Based one...
ttyl
Farrell
Hear! Hear!
ttyl
Farrell
For many video cards on desktops, yes, but for 386 systems about half the video cards used in Laptops it took a Adept of xorg.conf to get it to work at it's full resolution and colour depth.
ttyl
Farrell
What has Canada given the world?
Donald Sutherland, Keifer Sutherland (Donald's son, and grandson of the guy who brought universal medical care to Canada), Jim Carry, Cirque du Soleil, UN Peace Keepers (created by Nobel Laureate The Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson, past Prime Minister of Canada), Shania Twain, Norman Jewison, Long Distance Telephony (The first long distance transmission was made in August 1876, between Brantford and Paris Ontario.), Wayne Gretzky, The Light Bulb (Edison bought the patent from the two Canadian inventors), Joni Mitchell, The Guess Who/Bachman-Turner-Overdrive (BTO), Superman, William Shatner, James Doohan (Scotty!), Insulin (Frederick Banting), and Basketball.
So, yes, that's all you need to know about Canada...
ttyl
Farrell
You said it!
I used to use a 386sx system as my firewall for my home network back in the 90s. It also was hooked up to my US Robotics Courier modem that I had from my days of running a BBS on Fidonet and PODSnet.
Now, if he got it to run X, I might consider that a reasonable hack...but just running Linux...lame.
ttyl
Farrell
There are many place where you can sign up to do "reviews" and/or run blogs that are actually supported by various companies. A person I know makes a living doing this. Similarly, publishers and authors use promo companies that will go and write good reviews for their books on Amazon, and bad reviews of their competitors...
ttyl
Farrell
Let me know when they replace Javascript with Forth! :-) ....I'm not holding my breath! :-)
ttyl
Farrell
These people are definitely better informed about the internals of the operating systems in question. Too many security "experts" simply know now to read books and articles written by other security "experts", and a number of them are paid shrills for various operating system owners. If someone can Pwn your system, then go and tell you both how and why they were able to do it, I would trust their opinion more than someone who is a talking head at some Magazine, Website or TV program!
One correction...one year, the Mac was compromised first.
I don't care how many pieces of malware are created aimed at Windows, Linux, MacOS or other flavours of Unix...the result that speaks for itself is that every year that they have had a hacker competition to see who can compromise and root a system where they compared Windows, Linux and MacOS, each of which has been secured by native experts...Windows has *always* been compromised, and I think it was always the *first* one compromised. MacOS, when it was compromised was second, and Linux was either the last compromised, but most of the time it stood up to all the punishment and remained secure.
So numbers really don't matter, it's how well it can survive in the wild that counts!
ttyl
Farrell
Yeah Canada, again!
Canada certainly does punch above it's weight in many areas...
But this is a really interesting experiment! It really does turn the classic double slit experiment on it's ear!
Yeah Canada!
I mean, we built the legs for the Lunar Module, and that lead to us designing and building the robotic arms used on the Shuttle and the ISS. And many of the top people in the Gemini, and Apollo program were Canadians, hired by NASA after the AVRO Arrow CF-105 was cancelled in the late 1950s.
ttyl
Farrell
WRONG!
Most users are reasonably intelligent and can follow basic rules and procedures... if they are simple and have meaning to the person. Yes, you will always have some major *ssholes and clueless wonders too, but that is just life. We need to stop assuming that all users are totally clueless and can never learn a new thing.
ttyl
Farrell
The Pandigital "Novel" is a nice little Android tablet that is marketed as an ebook reader. It's only $160 (cdn), at Futureshop & Best Buy (Canada). It's also on sale in the US, but with a more crippled version of Android.
But it's a "high ground" at the bottom of a gravity well...and that makes you very vulnerable to kinetic weapons.
It's really just a numbers game. There is a maximum payload that can be launched with technology "x", where x could be any country's launch platform. You can only put so much fuel on to a rocket even assuming that you have a very small payload, say a small nuke and a guidance package. It is easy then to calculate the amount of delta v, or the change of direction available on x. As it takes the better part of 3 days to go from Earth launch to the Moon, this gives you a group of windows that the attack has to go through.
If you are sitting on the moon with a linear accelerator (linacc) based technology, meaning it's pretty much free to use, as long as you have electricity. And what is your anti-missile payload? Kinetic Weapons...dirt and rocks, which the Moon has an abundance of. Travelling at the escape velocity of the Moon, against attack travelling at the escape velocity from the Earth, even a ping-pong ball can do a lot of damage. If you keep on lobbing things at the incoming attack, it is forced to use up delta v. As delta v is used up, the incoming windows become smaller and smaller, which means your defence gets more and more accurate.
Alternately, If you attack the Moon Base with a Kinetic Weapon, you might have a better chance. If you used, say, a payload of ball bearings, depending on when you separated the payload from the launch vehicle, it might be very hard to totally remove the threat to the Moon Base. Launch enough of these weapons, and you can saturate the defences of the Moon. Again, even a small mass can do a lot of damage, as it would have to travel at less than the escape velocity of the moon. This makes the Moon Base very vulnerable to attack.
So it's not all that simple to say if the Moon is a good spot for a military base. And you can evolve this scenario by positing a sublunarian base, but this would limit the windows that the linacc can sight...and so on, and so on...It might be a fun article to write, but I don't have the time, and no one is offering me money to do this...that's it for me for now.
ttyl
Farrell
Sorry, that doesn't work. Bell, Telus and Rogers wholesale bandwidth to most of the other ISPs, who are forced to up their prices as well. There is a virtual monopoly here in Canada, owned by only 3 companies.
The real reason behind the rate increases is to preserve their monopoly. You see, Bell and Rogers are the largest Sat TV and Cable vendors in Canada, respectively. By capping everyone at 60 Gig, it means that you *cannot* replace their Sat TV or Cable services, since it is ridiculously easy to use that up...for example, the average 720p TV show runs about 700 Megs without commercials. A DVD or better resolution movie, that is, 720p or 1080p can run you easily a couple of Gig in size. The average family watches something like 4 hours of TV a night. So if you watch two TV shows, that is 1.4 Gig, watch three, that's 2.1 Gig. Now imagine you also watch a movie once a week...so that would run you anywhere from 2-5 Gig.
Working with those numbers, we take the 60 Gig cap, and divide it over 30 days, which gives you around 2 Gig a day, enough to watch 3 shows a night...but if you watch a movie approx. once a week, that adds, assuming at least 4 weeks (4weeks*3.5 Gig=14 Gig a month). You can easily go over your cap, and if any software you use needs patches, or you download a new version of Linux, or World of Warcraft unleashes a huge patch...suddenly your bill could be massive! Imagine if you are coming up on the end of the month, and watch that 4 hours a night of TV via the internet....and on the 23rd of the month, your favourate MMORPG releases a huge patch...you may have to wait until *next month* before you can patch up to run the game, if it's a mandatory patch.
Bandwidth is cheap. But when you have a monopoly, money is everything. :-(
Personally, I think not only the caps lock key is a redundant artifact of a typewriter heritage, but it's also displaced the proper position of the control key! I *always* remap my keyboard so that the control key is beside the "a" key...works better on the command line, and in WordStar-like editors, eg. "Joe".
If it is where the control key is on keyboard, there would be a lot less accidental shouting on the net!
I, too, used Fract386, which became Fractint....I worked at a computer store in Toronto, and we used to sell so many NEC Multi-Sync monitors with ATI's VGA Wonder card based upon showing Fractint on it!
Through someone on I met on LJ, I was able to get a "autographed mandelbrot", basically a color print out of part of the Mandelbrot set, autographed by the now, late, great Benoit Mandelbrot. Although I never got to meet him, he discovery has given much beauty to my life.
ttyl
Farrell
Actually, the problem is across all computer manufactures....It's the "Race to the Bottom" price wise, with the stupidity of quarterly profits having to always go up that means that too many corners are cut in design, manufacturing & support, and we get crap quality at a low price. If they went back to a tiered model, with cheap, but reasonable quality products all the way up to Cadillac quality with all the bells and whistles...and a certainly OS developer didn't give you the impression that a Dual Xeon quad core systems will run MS Office better than a single core AMD 64, things would be a lot saner in the computer world.
I just finished recording a pilot for a radio series using Audacity. It's easy to use, and being under the GPL2, I know what the license contains, and thus won't be blindsided by some obscure clause in a non-opensource license.
Thank you for that interesting insight!
Maybe the 20th Century is the "singularity" that so many are predicting!
ttyl
Farrell