Unless they are going to stream the pre-rendered video/audio directly from the server to the client, I think they have to trust the client. Even if they sent all the game data to the client encrypted, the client still has to be able to decrypt and process it, at which point it's wide open for cheat programs. I suppose Palladium will potentially make the client much more trustworthy, though. Even though gamers everywhere would despise it, I'm sure they would use it if the latest games required a Palladium-enabled client.
The sun is increasing output just to keep up with our solar power demands. Soon the oceans will start rising from our wave-power harvesting generators, and the earth is already spinning slower due to wind powered turbines! People of the earth unite: stop using these dangerous alternative fuels! Petroleum-based fuel sources are the only way to keep our planet safe for our cihldren and their SUVs!
People aren't really "taking back" anything with Tivo (or any PVR) when they use it to skip comercials. They are using it to circumvent part of the revenue stream that networks and broadcasters use to make TV/cable more affordable. Once PVRs make commercials an invalid form of generating revenue, I would expect most standard channels to become more like premium channels...no commercials, but they cost more. Granted, PVRs also enable viewers to watch shows on their own schedule...that's just an issue of infrastructure and scalability. Until recently, "video on demand" hasn't really been feasible for networks, and it still has all sorts of scalability issues that Tivo solves nicely. So I don't think it's valid to have a "taking back our God-given TV rights" attitude about PVRs, but that doesn't make PVR's bad.
Oops, you're right. I don't think I started in on Quake until '96. '95 was mostly wasted on learning HTML, dl'ing mp3s, and playing C&C...ah, I still remember the sounds of Tiberium being collected. At night when everyone else was out taking tests, studying, or partying, you could hear that sound eminating from several open doorways on each dorm floor, Geeks audibly marking their territory...
Despite the headline, one can't really call it a "laptop", since using it on one's lap would create safety (and fertility) issues. Dell's official term is "notebook", but I believe "mobile computer", "traytop", and "portable space heater" are also acceptable. I challenge anyone to actually sit through a two-hour HD movie with this on their lap.
They sent out a DVD-ROM game you could play, which was basically a Macromedia choose-your-own-path game with Quicktime movies. Highest three scores would win an Escalade, powerboat, or motorcycle. They tried to make you play it while you were online, the idea being that only your first reported score mattered. That was easy to circumvent though (thank to plaintext registry keys), so you could play as many times as you wanted to find the optimal solution (skill was not a factor, though finding the highest valid score was a tiny bit tricky). Needless to say, my friend and I both got into the final round (along with 100 or so other fellow cheate...I mean, very lucky players), from which the winner was selected by a lame 50 word essay. We tried to "hack" that too by making a funny video presentation and web site, and including the urls in our essays. But we didn't win...some lame limmerick and word play essays were the winners...bastards! But if the lotto game was anything like that, you can bet their first winner will be mere hours after they release the game. It's probably linked to a ticket number, though, like someone else said. That's the easiest way for them to render hacking attempts useless.
The college kids have lots of free time and no homework. Some of them were even already bent over their practice locks honing their MIT lockpicking skills. I do believe it just became much less advisable to own a laptop in a university dorm!
You don't need to focus that close. Intelligent use of the displays allows them to create a "virtual image" that is coherent when focusing at a natural distance. Eyeglass-type displays are very possible.
Spam only cost-ineffective with ISP-level filters
on
Plan for Spam, Version 2
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Spam filters are great, but it seems that only the Net-savvy are using them. Savvy users aren't the people spammers are making all their money from--they are making money off the naive and inexperienced users. These users aren't going to go out and install the latest Bayesian filters on their system, and the major email readers won't (and probably shouldn't) come with them automatically activated.
To make spam cost-ineffective for the spammers, we've got to stop it (or flag it) before it gets to the end-user. It would obviously be a mistake to allow ISP's to automatically delete all email that fails their spam filters, but I think it would be appropriate for them to include something in the headers flagging such email as probable spam. Then future email readers could detect this header and handle it gracefully, like moving it to a "spam" folder on the user's machine. Once this happens and Grandpa no longer gets email asking him to test the latest Viagra alternative, spam may become a thing of the past.
"Recycling numbers might become an issue someday, but not any time soon -- statisticians say that the nine-digit SSN allows for approximately one billion possible combinations. "
I went to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry last year with some engineer friends of mine. We are all recent college grads, and found everything way too ordinary and "dumbed-down" to be interesting or educational. It's not their fault...it's a museum, and there's only so much they can display, only so much detail they can go into. But that's a problem I've had with almost any exhibit I've gone to see...the exhibitors don't have the time, money, or liability insurance to interactively display anything that's really interesting. Thus, the only interesting things I've really found have been participatory engineering organizations, like Formula SAE when I was in college and FIRST after I graduated. There are many of these types of engineering organizations out there to choose from. That's probably getting offtopic though...
Don't get me wrong, I think distributed computing projects are great, especially those focused on legitimately useful research. However, running a distributed computing client on a machine at work will likely cause it to consume more electricity. A Pentium 4 has a maximum power consumption in the range of 65W, no? So every computer you install this on is like leaving a 60W lightbulb on 24-7, year-round. If you do this with many computers, I think that may add up to a nontrivial expense that you're essentially stealing from the company, no? Just playing devil's advocate...
I've done research into buying similar ramdrives. The main purpose in buying one is usually not to increase bandwidth, it's to minimize the time per random-access IO operation. Even the fastest SCSI hard disks have about 4-5ms random access times. These RAM disks have random access times measures in microseconds, and are typically 2-3 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE faster on random IO than even a SCSI RAID array.
So what do you need random IO for? Databases. Ebay and Amazon already use RAM disks heavily, and I'd be surprised if Slashdot couldn't benefit from using them too, if they already aren't.
Here's another second of thought...does anyone really think they'd announce a display technology that limits the user to a few femtometers of movement? Good lord...
Some things I learned about displays in Psych 342 at Cornell: Display quality can be primarily measured by luminence, resolution, refresh rate, color gamut, and contrast ratio. While it is relatively easy to produce the necessary refresh rate to fool the human eye and display resolution is improving (also depends on how far from display you are), the rest are hard. DLP probably does the best job of current displays, and it maxes out at about 1000:1 contrast ratio, but it doesn't really count since it operates by reflecting light, and this thread is about flat-panel displays. I forget the exact values for daylight-level luminence and contrast ratio, but they are at least two orders of magnitude larger than what is currently available in CRTs or LCDs.
Maybe this could be used to remove the wires from a home theater setup? To communicate between devices within a computer? A wireless connection between portable devices and a computer? All this stuff has been mentioned before on./...
When I bought components for my powerful home computer, I made sure to check the manufacturer-specified dB levels on everything, since my computer would be 5 feet from my bed. I had built a computer the year before that I hardly ever used, primarily because it was too damn loud to leave on all the time. I was able to find a "whisper-soft" 431W Enermax power supply, some "silent" case fans, the relatively quiet Volcano 6Cu+ HSF, and you can bet I'm not displeased with the four 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV's I bought (they are almost too quiet to be audible on their own, and definitely quieter than the HSF and case fans, which drown them out anyway). Plus they are fast as heck. So for me, noise was actually a big concern (not as much as price/performance, but definitely a factor).
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, sell a web-operated telerobot kit! That's be awesome to freak out my roommate's cat while at work. I'd buy one.
Unless they are going to stream the pre-rendered video/audio directly from the server to the client, I think they have to trust the client. Even if they sent all the game data to the client encrypted, the client still has to be able to decrypt and process it, at which point it's wide open for cheat programs. I suppose Palladium will potentially make the client much more trustworthy, though. Even though gamers everywhere would despise it, I'm sure they would use it if the latest games required a Palladium-enabled client.
The sun is increasing output just to keep up with our solar power demands. Soon the oceans will start rising from our wave-power harvesting generators, and the earth is already spinning slower due to wind powered turbines! People of the earth unite: stop using these dangerous alternative fuels! Petroleum-based fuel sources are the only way to keep our planet safe for our cihldren and their SUVs!
Space is a toroid with finite size? Augh, I must be trapped in a static warp bubble! CleverNickName, this is all your fault!
People aren't really "taking back" anything with Tivo (or any PVR) when they use it to skip comercials. They are using it to circumvent part of the revenue stream that networks and broadcasters use to make TV/cable more affordable. Once PVRs make commercials an invalid form of generating revenue, I would expect most standard channels to become more like premium channels...no commercials, but they cost more. Granted, PVRs also enable viewers to watch shows on their own schedule...that's just an issue of infrastructure and scalability. Until recently, "video on demand" hasn't really been feasible for networks, and it still has all sorts of scalability issues that Tivo solves nicely. So I don't think it's valid to have a "taking back our God-given TV rights" attitude about PVRs, but that doesn't make PVR's bad.
Oops, you're right. I don't think I started in on Quake until '96. '95 was mostly wasted on learning HTML, dl'ing mp3s, and playing C&C...ah, I still remember the sounds of Tiberium being collected. At night when everyone else was out taking tests, studying, or partying, you could hear that sound eminating from several open doorways on each dorm floor, Geeks audibly marking their territory...
Despite the headline, one can't really call it a "laptop", since using it on one's lap would create safety (and fertility) issues. Dell's official term is "notebook", but I believe "mobile computer", "traytop", and "portable space heater" are also acceptable. I challenge anyone to actually sit through a two-hour HD movie with this on their lap.
They sent out a DVD-ROM game you could play, which was basically a Macromedia choose-your-own-path game with Quicktime movies. Highest three scores would win an Escalade, powerboat, or motorcycle. They tried to make you play it while you were online, the idea being that only your first reported score mattered. That was easy to circumvent though (thank to plaintext registry keys), so you could play as many times as you wanted to find the optimal solution (skill was not a factor, though finding the highest valid score was a tiny bit tricky). Needless to say, my friend and I both got into the final round (along with 100 or so other fellow cheate...I mean, very lucky players), from which the winner was selected by a lame 50 word essay. We tried to "hack" that too by making a funny video presentation and web site, and including the urls in our essays. But we didn't win...some lame limmerick and word play essays were the winners...bastards! But if the lotto game was anything like that, you can bet their first winner will be mere hours after they release the game. It's probably linked to a ticket number, though, like someone else said. That's the easiest way for them to render hacking attempts useless.
Check out http://www.chillingeffects.org.
I had trouble getting the paper to have its intended effect, so I ran in through my grammar debugger and found the reason:
Page 10, Line 30, Character 51: 'r' should be an 'f'
The college kids have lots of free time and no homework. Some of them were even already bent over their practice locks honing their MIT lockpicking skills. I do believe it just became much less advisable to own a laptop in a university dorm!
You don't need to focus that close. Intelligent use of the displays allows them to create a "virtual image" that is coherent when focusing at a natural distance. Eyeglass-type displays are very possible.
Spam filters are great, but it seems that only the Net-savvy are using them. Savvy users aren't the people spammers are making all their money from--they are making money off the naive and inexperienced users. These users aren't going to go out and install the latest Bayesian filters on their system, and the major email readers won't (and probably shouldn't) come with them automatically activated.
To make spam cost-ineffective for the spammers, we've got to stop it (or flag it) before it gets to the end-user. It would obviously be a mistake to allow ISP's to automatically delete all email that fails their spam filters, but I think it would be appropriate for them to include something in the headers flagging such email as probable spam. Then future email readers could detect this header and handle it gracefully, like moving it to a "spam" folder on the user's machine. Once this happens and Grandpa no longer gets email asking him to test the latest Viagra alternative, spam may become a thing of the past.
In an equally unprecedented response, Slashdotters agreed to avoid seeking abuses of "fair use" to complain about.
The core of .NET is the .NET framework, which is somewhat analogous to the Java Virtual Machine. Both the framework and the .NET Framework SDK are free.
"Recycling numbers might become an issue someday, but not any time soon -- statisticians say that the nine-digit SSN allows for approximately one billion possible combinations. "
I went to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry last year with some engineer friends of mine. We are all recent college grads, and found everything way too ordinary and "dumbed-down" to be interesting or educational. It's not their fault...it's a museum, and there's only so much they can display, only so much detail they can go into. But that's a problem I've had with almost any exhibit I've gone to see...the exhibitors don't have the time, money, or liability insurance to interactively display anything that's really interesting. Thus, the only interesting things I've really found have been participatory engineering organizations, like Formula SAE when I was in college and FIRST after I graduated. There are many of these types of engineering organizations out there to choose from. That's probably getting offtopic though...
I don't think so. And yet this will still undoubtedly incite all the usual comments about censorship, pr0n, and beowulf clusters.
Perhaps more useful:
SIPA - Slashdot Internet Protection Act (protecting old web servers from being Slashdotted)
not to be confused with
SIPA - Slashdot Information Protection Act (protecting Slashdotters from trolls and redundant, uninteresting, or obvious posts, like this one.)
Don't get me wrong, I think distributed computing projects are great, especially those focused on legitimately useful research. However, running a distributed computing client on a machine at work will likely cause it to consume more electricity. A Pentium 4 has a maximum power consumption in the range of 65W, no? So every computer you install this on is like leaving a 60W lightbulb on 24-7, year-round. If you do this with many computers, I think that may add up to a nontrivial expense that you're essentially stealing from the company, no? Just playing devil's advocate...
I've done research into buying similar ramdrives. The main purpose in buying one is usually not to increase bandwidth, it's to minimize the time per random-access IO operation. Even the fastest SCSI hard disks have about 4-5ms random access times. These RAM disks have random access times measures in microseconds, and are typically 2-3 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE faster on random IO than even a SCSI RAID array. So what do you need random IO for? Databases. Ebay and Amazon already use RAM disks heavily, and I'd be surprised if Slashdot couldn't benefit from using them too, if they already aren't.
Here's another second of thought...does anyone really think they'd announce a display technology that limits the user to a few femtometers of movement? Good lord...
I will be much happier when the U.S. TV network censors would let something like Neon Genesis through their filters.
Some things I learned about displays in Psych 342 at Cornell: Display quality can be primarily measured by luminence, resolution, refresh rate, color gamut, and contrast ratio. While it is relatively easy to produce the necessary refresh rate to fool the human eye and display resolution is improving (also depends on how far from display you are), the rest are hard. DLP probably does the best job of current displays, and it maxes out at about 1000:1 contrast ratio, but it doesn't really count since it operates by reflecting light, and this thread is about flat-panel displays. I forget the exact values for daylight-level luminence and contrast ratio, but they are at least two orders of magnitude larger than what is currently available in CRTs or LCDs.
Maybe this could be used to remove the wires from a home theater setup? To communicate between devices within a computer? A wireless connection between portable devices and a computer? All this stuff has been mentioned before on ./ ...
When I bought components for my powerful home computer, I made sure to check the manufacturer-specified dB levels on everything, since my computer would be 5 feet from my bed. I had built a computer the year before that I hardly ever used, primarily because it was too damn loud to leave on all the time. I was able to find a "whisper-soft" 431W Enermax power supply, some "silent" case fans, the relatively quiet Volcano 6Cu+ HSF, and you can bet I'm not displeased with the four 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV's I bought (they are almost too quiet to be audible on their own, and definitely quieter than the HSF and case fans, which drown them out anyway). Plus they are fast as heck. So for me, noise was actually a big concern (not as much as price/performance, but definitely a factor).