You are making the faulty assumption that Prequels and Sequels are a subset of Natural Numbers (I, II, III) when they are in fact a subset of Real Numbers. I Refer you to Lion King 1 1/2. This could mean that we'll be forced to endure a perpetual (infinite) series of Star Wars sequels and prequels. Imagine it now... Star Wars PI: Circle of Hatred. Oh, the horror, the horror. Jar Jar wages war upon the Ewoks to capture their stockpiles of collectible trading cards and plush dolls. Stop the madness!
Maybe his cubicle's a stall in the 3rd floor bathroom. IT jobs just don't have as many perks as they did before the bubble burst, you know. If your job stinks, there's not much you can do about it. Outsourcing's possibly to blame for the lack of jobs. Let's get our workforce out of the bathrooms and into the real world. Fight outsourcing with tooth and nail.
According to the article, a day's food supply weighs three and a half kilograms (roughly 7.5 pounds), and this dried food technology can reduce that weight to 0.4 kilograms (0.9 pounds). My question is of where soldiers are going to find a whopping 6.6 pounds of urine per day in the middle of a desert. I admittedly don't know how many pounds of urine I produce daily, but I certainly don't think that even our highly trained fighting forces can produce more than a pound each per day. These P-meals (The P stands for "pouch") don't seem to be well thought through.
Someone mod this one as informative. The specially modified plane has some impressive features that'd make even the most hard-core of modders cry. Some of the notables include:
Liquid or gaseous nitrogen available
Vent/vacuum system to dump fluids overboard (I think this is how they earned the name "Vomit Comet")
Breathing air available (What ride's complete without on-board oxygen?)
Actually, SFU is also the abbreviation for Simon Fraser University, located in British Columbia, Canada. SFU is the home of at least two episodes of Stargate, as well as occasional episodes of Outer Limits (The Cold Fusion episode), The Fly 2, an Anime convention, and the V-chip of South Park fame.
On the topic of 3D modelling programs, a few of the major players are warming up to the fact that they can get a bigger pool of beta testers and end users by simply giving away nearly fully functional copies of their software. Among the foremost of these is Side Effects Software. Through their Apprentice program, they allow absolutely anyone to use the latest version of Houdini - a 3D suite that's made its way into some very big movies, like Spider Man, X-Men, Final Fantasy X, and so forth. They have both a Linux and a Windows version. More importantly, they have a sane approach to watermarking. Unlike the Maya PLE, which has so-called "unobtrusive" watermarks that actually make it rediculously difficult to work, or view renders, or even export any files, Houdini Apprentice has a small logo in the bottom-right of renders, and some tiny text in the bottom-right of viewports.
Aside from the watermarking issues, Houdini Apprentice is limited to 640x480 renders, which seems reasonable. These guys have their heads on straight. They offer a solution that benefits potential learners without making pirates of them all, as well as themselves without hemorrhaging insane amounts of cash.
Along the same lines, Oracle, mySQL and Trolltech's QT use a licence that allows free personal use, but require purchase for business use, right? I'd say that's a very good business model for any of the major software companies with multi-thousand-dollar software packages aimed at enterprise-level customers. Why keep trying to sue the pants off of the small fry when you can turn so-called piracy into free publicity (the positive kind) and advertising?
In case you hadn't noticed, most browsers handle the https protocol transparently, unless the site's SSL certificate is invalid. Encryption is no guarantee of purposeful viewing.
If you think that's bad, just wait until they make it illegal to hack off other people's fingers in order to steal their music collection? Or is that why the article emphasises the [emphasis added] "customer's live fingerprint scan," in case ripped off thumbs begin to make it out into the wild. On the bright side, I suppose that they can rest easily knowing that illegal songs can only outnumber legal songs by a mere 10:1 (Give or take a few for the superpolydigital and digitless among us).
Also, what about those who can proudly say "I don't have any FINGERS you insensitive clod!" Fingerless people have a right to listen to music too, you know. I've seen a percussionist who doesn't even have any arms! Should he be denied the right to hear his own music because he can't satisfy the requirements of some hare-brained DRM scheme? Well, I suppose he could always give semen - oh wait! No arms! Well, I guess that means giving blood. Whoops, kinda hard to stab yourself without fingers, isn't it?
So, there's only one solution. Hit them in the wallet. Make this technology as unprofitable as possible. Distribute your fingers to as many friends and colleagues as you can find, and SHARE THE MUSIC!
I'd imagine that the iron being ripped from your haemoglobin by the ubermagnets would probably gum up the inner workings as the shards of the camera hurtled through the soft flesh of the owner. It worked for Magneto in X-Men, didn't it? That'd stop the piracy...and it'd create new jobs for those who have to clean up the resulting mess.
now, IANAL, but I think that this Dissection of a magic 8-ball may be a violation of the DMCA. The information within has clearly been used to illegally modify the magic 8-ball to serve a new sinister purpose, which is a clear violation of the Patriot Act (they may be used to carry hidden subversive messages for terrorists). Please turn yourself in to the relevant authorities at once.
It's not a movie, but a show geared towards adult audiences. Tripping the Rift is CG featuring adult-oriented content. No actual sex or nudity so far, but lots of adult humour. A few choice quotes from the show would be:
"Just once when I moan 'Oh God...Oh, God!', I really want to mean it."
"Well, you know what they say: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't get over how big its genitals are."
"How'd you like to take a free ride on a girl with four gams and no gag reflex?"
If you want to tax networks, there are several other things that you've got to start taxing as well. First off, by setting up a pair of tin cans with some string between them, I have in fact created a local point-to-point communication medium. It's a two-node network, isn't it? I guess that my tin cans should be taxed.
Now that we've broadened our horizons a bit, let's look at the other networking equipment around the office...ah, Pigeons. The little buggers are RFC 1149 capable, and thereby capable of carrying network packets. Therefore, 9.17% of the pigeons on and near the office must be reported as taxable hardware. The same goes for Sparrows.
Beyond the simple networking hardware, we have to factor in social networking. The low-delay, high-loss mesh network used to communicate rumors through an office building is a highly complex device that is very expensive to maintain. The nodes in this network recieve pay at regular intervals (AKA "Salary") in order to remain part of the network. Therefore, another 9.17% (or more, if you're part of several social networks, or are a social hub) of your salary should be taxed away, you network node, you. You can dodge this one if you don't talk to any real people though. Keep your relationships virtual, and you'll be able to categorize your communications as part of the existing wired infrastructure. No point in being double-billed, is there?
You mean that by observing the state of my quantum-encoded music, it will collapse states and become unreadable? What's the advantage over regular DRM?
It looks like Intel might be pulling the same trick as MS did on Java. By not implementing two instructions (LAHF and SAHF) might be trying to break compatibility ever so slightly. The question is whether they'll be able to fragment the market as well as Microsoft did.
I suspect that they won't be able to, as compatibility and optimization lies a mere recompile away. However, if they were going to be 100% binary compatible, the results would be most interesting. Just imagine the carnage from head-to-head competition between Intel and AMD. While they have competed in the past, they have always had slightly different offerings. Their different feature sets were needed by different people. If these were identical, then AMD and Intel would be on the same battleground with the same featureset.
It would be an interesting battle indeed. AMD's low cost and efficiency (and overclockability) versus Intel's brute-force and high-speed (and marketing). I suppose we'll have to wait for the next round for anything along those lines though.
Gator has 43 million users in the same way that 43 million people actively have the common cold. They have no control over how they got it, can't do anything about it, and don't notice that it's been gestating until they start sneezing bright flashy ads. It's that sort of misrepresentation that makes me want to work in the department of Statistics and Information Synthesis.
At any rate, how can someone "use" Gator/Claria? Their "users" are simply presented with ads and such. Are you a "user" of the ads you see on Television? No. You are an audience member, and a very passive one at that. Amazing. Simply amazing.
It's only natural that if they are made underwater that they be cooled underwater. From what I see, there are only three things that are preventing widespread adoption:
1) Cost 2) Difficulty of setup 3) Public knowledge
Cost will naturally come down as usage increases. Setup, on the other hand, is still a rather difficult process involving thermal paste, clamps, and lots of water. Most people won't accept it until there's a big funnel marked "ADD WATER HERE" - compounding the problem of non-acceptance is tha fact that nobody knows the cooling we've seen. Nobody's even thought about it. Simply, it's a rare event for a stock PC to spontaneously overheat. The major PC manufacturers tend to prevent that from happening, and can't sell PC's that aren't just "plug and play" in the hopes that customers won't be driven away by complexity of setup.
So, common watercooling will be a fair ways away, as it still needs to be perfected. I suspect that one of the first major barriers will be modding a case to heat a tank of tropical fish. Overclockers may want to use this technique to simulate conditions outside a geothermal vent and run their own curious creature farms.
I'd say the problem isn't really the NAT/Firewalls - it's just the NAT that's a hindrance to bidirectional communication. It's simply impossible to create a connection to something behind a NAT box when you only have one IP to work with.
The best analogy to work with would be calling a large department store, wanting to talk to the clothing department, but being confronted by a receptionist or an automated machine telling you to "Enter the extension of the department you would like to dial." This is sadly impossible in the context of VoIP without having a server on the NAT box, or a hack in the NAT's rules that is capable of inquiring which "extension" to forward the call to. While this is plausible, it also raises the problem of exactly how to standardize the process. Too many people have an interest in VoIP for any sort of final standard to be released.
The only practical solution, in this case, (at least from a networking standpoint) is to eliminate NAT altogether. Fortunately, such a solution already exists. Its name is IPv6. If everyone can have their own globally routable IP address (and thus a globally unique iPhone#), then there would be no compelling need for NAT outside of obscure load-balancing setups.
Sadly, the switch to IPv6 brings its own set of problems. Namely, the Telcos and government, who have been fighting for the taxation of the internet and internet telephony services, or at least their providers. IPv6 + VoIP will eat into the profits of Telcos once they start becoming widespread. Why pay a perfectly reasonable 10 cents a minute for long distance, when you can pay $30/month (or however much internet access costs you) for unlimited calls to anywhere in the world.
As for roaming, there's no real problem in having a bit of software on your VoIP box that forwards your calls to a VoIP mobile phone sitting on some wireless network out at the office, as long as there's a way to let the VoIP box know the correct IP to transparently route calls to. Think of it as call forwarding for networks.
So, there's no real problem with the replacement of PSTN, aside from the IPv6 transition, whose problems have already been beaten to death on Slashdot in the past. If only we could get corporations to just shut up and die when they become obsolete for the greater public good, life would be so much easier, wouldn't it?
DISCLAIMER: The author will not be held responsible for any negative aftereffects that may or may not result from the usage of this opinion as fact.
I hope they haven't tried patenting this. I'm pretty sure that there's some prior art dealing with shitting bricks. In fact, I'd preemptively like to call this machine "The Brick-Shitter" in honour of the manner in which it extrudes cement.
With all due respect, though, this machine seriously does look like it could become an interesting tool for building developers. It's like a Rapid Prototyping machine on a grand scale. If it were made faster and more portable, it could be useable on large-scale structures. How feasable would it be to extrude a skyscraper?
While it is true that Windows 2000 is less than 5 years old, it is still possible to complete a 5-year test run in the alotted time. By simply overclocking the test machines, the computers are able to do the equivalent of more hours of computer work per hour. Therefore, with sufficient overclocking and cooling, the tests have been completed in three real years with five years of computer time.
That's rather strange. I run a small Jabber server, and I have no troubles connecting to MSN through its gateway. It's worth noting that I'm the only one who uses this server, which may explain things. Is Microsoft blocking major jabber servers on an IP-by-IP basis then?
Slashdot Mirror
You are making the faulty assumption that Prequels and Sequels are a subset of Natural Numbers (I, II, III) when they are in fact a subset of Real Numbers. I Refer you to Lion King 1 1/2. This could mean that we'll be forced to endure a perpetual (infinite) series of Star Wars sequels and prequels. Imagine it now... Star Wars PI: Circle of Hatred. Oh, the horror, the horror. Jar Jar wages war upon the Ewoks to capture their stockpiles of collectible trading cards and plush dolls. Stop the madness!
Maybe his cubicle's a stall in the 3rd floor bathroom. IT jobs just don't have as many perks as they did before the bubble burst, you know. If your job stinks, there's not much you can do about it. Outsourcing's possibly to blame for the lack of jobs. Let's get our workforce out of the bathrooms and into the real world. Fight outsourcing with tooth and nail.
According to the article, a day's food supply weighs three and a half kilograms (roughly 7.5 pounds), and this dried food technology can reduce that weight to 0.4 kilograms (0.9 pounds). My question is of where soldiers are going to find a whopping 6.6 pounds of urine per day in the middle of a desert. I admittedly don't know how many pounds of urine I produce daily, but I certainly don't think that even our highly trained fighting forces can produce more than a pound each per day. These P-meals (The P stands for "pouch") don't seem to be well thought through.
Someone mod this one as informative. The specially modified plane has some impressive features that'd make even the most hard-core of modders cry. Some of the notables include:
Is this the same system tested on the homeless earlier this year? If so, have they unset the evil bit for this implementation?
Actually, SFU is also the abbreviation for Simon Fraser University, located in British Columbia, Canada. SFU is the home of at least two episodes of Stargate, as well as occasional episodes of Outer Limits (The Cold Fusion episode), The Fly 2, an Anime convention, and the V-chip of South Park fame.
On the topic of 3D modelling programs, a few of the major players are warming up to the fact that they can get a bigger pool of beta testers and end users by simply giving away nearly fully functional copies of their software. Among the foremost of these is Side Effects Software. Through their Apprentice program, they allow absolutely anyone to use the latest version of Houdini - a 3D suite that's made its way into some very big movies, like Spider Man, X-Men, Final Fantasy X, and so forth. They have both a Linux and a Windows version. More importantly, they have a sane approach to watermarking. Unlike the Maya PLE, which has so-called "unobtrusive" watermarks that actually make it rediculously difficult to work, or view renders, or even export any files, Houdini Apprentice has a small logo in the bottom-right of renders, and some tiny text in the bottom-right of viewports.
Aside from the watermarking issues, Houdini Apprentice is limited to 640x480 renders, which seems reasonable. These guys have their heads on straight. They offer a solution that benefits potential learners without making pirates of them all, as well as themselves without hemorrhaging insane amounts of cash.
Along the same lines, Oracle, mySQL and Trolltech's QT use a licence that allows free personal use, but require purchase for business use, right? I'd say that's a very good business model for any of the major software companies with multi-thousand-dollar software packages aimed at enterprise-level customers. Why keep trying to sue the pants off of the small fry when you can turn so-called piracy into free publicity (the positive kind) and advertising?
In case you hadn't noticed, most browsers handle the https protocol transparently, unless the site's SSL certificate is invalid. Encryption is no guarantee of purposeful viewing.
If you think that's bad, just wait until they make it illegal to hack off other people's fingers in order to steal their music collection? Or is that why the article emphasises the [emphasis added] "customer's live fingerprint scan," in case ripped off thumbs begin to make it out into the wild. On the bright side, I suppose that they can rest easily knowing that illegal songs can only outnumber legal songs by a mere 10:1 (Give or take a few for the superpolydigital and digitless among us).
Also, what about those who can proudly say "I don't have any FINGERS you insensitive clod!" Fingerless people have a right to listen to music too, you know. I've seen a percussionist who doesn't even have any arms! Should he be denied the right to hear his own music because he can't satisfy the requirements of some hare-brained DRM scheme? Well, I suppose he could always give semen - oh wait! No arms! Well, I guess that means giving blood. Whoops, kinda hard to stab yourself without fingers, isn't it?
So, there's only one solution. Hit them in the wallet. Make this technology as unprofitable as possible. Distribute your fingers to as many friends and colleagues as you can find, and SHARE THE MUSIC!
I'd imagine that the iron being ripped from your haemoglobin by the ubermagnets would probably gum up the inner workings as the shards of the camera hurtled through the soft flesh of the owner. It worked for Magneto in X-Men, didn't it? That'd stop the piracy...and it'd create new jobs for those who have to clean up the resulting mess.
now, IANAL, but I think that this Dissection of a magic 8-ball may be a violation of the DMCA. The information within has clearly been used to illegally modify the magic 8-ball to serve a new sinister purpose, which is a clear violation of the Patriot Act (they may be used to carry hidden subversive messages for terrorists). Please turn yourself in to the relevant authorities at once.
Have a nice day
I'm still in hope that he's just spending a few years dead for tax reasons.
It's not a movie, but a show geared towards adult audiences. Tripping the Rift is CG featuring adult-oriented content. No actual sex or nudity so far, but lots of adult humour. A few choice quotes from the show would be:
"Just once when I moan 'Oh God...Oh, God!', I really want to mean it."
"Well, you know what they say: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't get over how big its genitals are."
"How'd you like to take a free ride on a girl with four gams and no gag reflex?"
It's coming to a television near you. Watch it.
they ask "Where do you want to go today?" when you boot (shoe?) up. This message has been brought to you by MicroShoe FooTware.
If you want to tax networks, there are several other things that you've got to start taxing as well. First off, by setting up a pair of tin cans with some string between them, I have in fact created a local point-to-point communication medium. It's a two-node network, isn't it? I guess that my tin cans should be taxed.
Now that we've broadened our horizons a bit, let's look at the other networking equipment around the office...ah, Pigeons. The little buggers are RFC 1149 capable, and thereby capable of carrying network packets. Therefore, 9.17% of the pigeons on and near the office must be reported as taxable hardware. The same goes for Sparrows.
Beyond the simple networking hardware, we have to factor in social networking. The low-delay, high-loss mesh network used to communicate rumors through an office building is a highly complex device that is very expensive to maintain. The nodes in this network recieve pay at regular intervals (AKA "Salary") in order to remain part of the network. Therefore, another 9.17% (or more, if you're part of several social networks, or are a social hub) of your salary should be taxed away, you network node, you. You can dodge this one if you don't talk to any real people though. Keep your relationships virtual, and you'll be able to categorize your communications as part of the existing wired infrastructure. No point in being double-billed, is there?
Let's just hope this tax blows over.
You mean that by observing the state of my quantum-encoded music, it will collapse states and become unreadable? What's the advantage over regular DRM?
It looks like Intel might be pulling the same trick as MS did on Java. By not implementing two instructions (LAHF and SAHF) might be trying to break compatibility ever so slightly. The question is whether they'll be able to fragment the market as well as Microsoft did.
I suspect that they won't be able to, as compatibility and optimization lies a mere recompile away. However, if they were going to be 100% binary compatible, the results would be most interesting. Just imagine the carnage from head-to-head competition between Intel and AMD. While they have competed in the past, they have always had slightly different offerings. Their different feature sets were needed by different people. If these were identical, then AMD and Intel would be on the same battleground with the same featureset.
It would be an interesting battle indeed. AMD's low cost and efficiency (and overclockability) versus Intel's brute-force and high-speed (and marketing). I suppose we'll have to wait for the next round for anything along those lines though.
Gator has 43 million users in the same way that 43 million people actively have the common cold. They have no control over how they got it, can't do anything about it, and don't notice that it's been gestating until they start sneezing bright flashy ads. It's that sort of misrepresentation that makes me want to work in the department of Statistics and Information Synthesis.
At any rate, how can someone "use" Gator/Claria? Their "users" are simply presented with ads and such. Are you a "user" of the ads you see on Television? No. You are an audience member, and a very passive one at that. Amazing. Simply amazing.
It's only natural that if they are made underwater that they be cooled underwater. From what I see, there are only three things that are preventing widespread adoption:
1) Cost
2) Difficulty of setup
3) Public knowledge
Cost will naturally come down as usage increases. Setup, on the other hand, is still a rather difficult process involving thermal paste, clamps, and lots of water. Most people won't accept it until there's a big funnel marked "ADD WATER HERE" - compounding the problem of non-acceptance is tha fact that nobody knows the cooling we've seen. Nobody's even thought about it. Simply, it's a rare event for a stock PC to spontaneously overheat. The major PC manufacturers tend to prevent that from happening, and can't sell PC's that aren't just "plug and play" in the hopes that customers won't be driven away by complexity of setup.
So, common watercooling will be a fair ways away, as it still needs to be perfected. I suspect that one of the first major barriers will be modding a case to heat a tank of tropical fish. Overclockers may want to use this technique to simulate conditions outside a geothermal vent and run their own curious creature farms.
I'd say the problem isn't really the NAT/Firewalls - it's just the NAT that's a hindrance to bidirectional communication. It's simply impossible to create a connection to something behind a NAT box when you only have one IP to work with.
The best analogy to work with would be calling a large department store, wanting to talk to the clothing department, but being confronted by a receptionist or an automated machine telling you to "Enter the extension of the department you would like to dial." This is sadly impossible in the context of VoIP without having a server on the NAT box, or a hack in the NAT's rules that is capable of inquiring which "extension" to forward the call to. While this is plausible, it also raises the problem of exactly how to standardize the process. Too many people have an interest in VoIP for any sort of final standard to be released.
The only practical solution, in this case, (at least from a networking standpoint) is to eliminate NAT altogether. Fortunately, such a solution already exists. Its name is IPv6. If everyone can have their own globally routable IP address (and thus a globally unique iPhone#), then there would be no compelling need for NAT outside of obscure load-balancing setups.
Sadly, the switch to IPv6 brings its own set of problems. Namely, the Telcos and government, who have been fighting for the taxation of the internet and internet telephony services, or at least their providers. IPv6 + VoIP will eat into the profits of Telcos once they start becoming widespread. Why pay a perfectly reasonable 10 cents a minute for long distance, when you can pay $30/month (or however much internet access costs you) for unlimited calls to anywhere in the world.
As for roaming, there's no real problem in having a bit of software on your VoIP box that forwards your calls to a VoIP mobile phone sitting on some wireless network out at the office, as long as there's a way to let the VoIP box know the correct IP to transparently route calls to. Think of it as call forwarding for networks.
So, there's no real problem with the replacement of PSTN, aside from the IPv6 transition, whose problems have already been beaten to death on Slashdot in the past. If only we could get corporations to just shut up and die when they become obsolete for the greater public good, life would be so much easier, wouldn't it?
DISCLAIMER: The author will not be held responsible for any negative aftereffects that may or may not result from the usage of this opinion as fact.
I hope they haven't tried patenting this. I'm pretty sure that there's some prior art dealing with shitting bricks. In fact, I'd preemptively like to call this machine "The Brick-Shitter" in honour of the manner in which it extrudes cement.
With all due respect, though, this machine seriously does look like it could become an interesting tool for building developers. It's like a Rapid Prototyping machine on a grand scale. If it were made faster and more portable, it could be useable on large-scale structures. How feasable would it be to extrude a skyscraper?
http://www.apple.com/jp/quicktime/trailers/applese ed_large.mov -Mind the space.
Shouldn't this be modded as "informative" instead?
While it is true that Windows 2000 is less than 5 years old, it is still possible to complete a 5-year test run in the alotted time. By simply overclocking the test machines, the computers are able to do the equivalent of more hours of computer work per hour. Therefore, with sufficient overclocking and cooling, the tests have been completed in three real years with five years of computer time.
For a lesson in RIAA math, refer to this article.
That's rather strange. I run a small Jabber server, and I have no troubles connecting to MSN through its gateway. It's worth noting that I'm the only one who uses this server, which may explain things. Is Microsoft blocking major jabber servers on an IP-by-IP basis then?