For those that are facing something such as loss of their vision (for many others, I'm assuming that reading slashdot might be a bit of a chore), what would you risk to get it back?
Not being able to see properly would suck, but not being alive or possibly fritzing my brain in some other way would suck more. I've considered getting laser-eye-surgery to correct my vision, but it's not bad enough that I'd really run with the risks. Maybe if my vision were worse, I would
But even given the possibility of malfunction with laser-eye-surgery... it's like a whole lot more tested/used than this. It must be one heck of a scary thing to have people hooking weird shit up in your head. Is anyone here vision impaired or facing vision impairment, and would you risk being a candidate to test this procedure?
There have been demonstratable projects which involved restoring the vision of a blind individual through electronic apparati. The big problems seem to have been that multiple components are used, which are big, bulky, and inconvenient. Well, that and the resolution is about on par with a cheap webcam.
However, these experiments (and I believe ones for hearing restoration as well) only worked on individuals who were either very young, or had lost vision/hearing at some point. For those who couldn't hear/see, even if all the rest of the "wiring" was there... they brain just couldn't interpret the data. Seems there is some point in youth where our brain learns to sort out those various signals. If you are 20-something and never had the ability, chances are your brain would have about as much chance of learning to use the data as it would a third arm.
Maybe one day science will be able to help our brains *learn* to use these enhancements though, it might be cool if we all had bluetooth-style transmitters wired into our neural network.
I've had some very nice meetings which were definately an improvement to moral. Adding donuts is a nice touch, or the semi-informal lunch meetings (paid for, good food, and discussion) were never approached with the type of dread that a large blank tables, and complaint-filled boardroom meeting tended to present.
How hard would it be for a provider to fight back:
Maybe good could put up a script...
if ($dom_addr contains $bs_domain or $ip_addr in $bs_networks)
{
echo "Bell South has recently begun blackmailing internet service providers (such as google) with decreased service unless we pay them fees";
echo "Until Bell South recants this practice, connections to our service will be currently blocked or limited to 50 concurrent users";
exit;
So something of the order of magnitude of 2.1 million computers have been infected by this rogue code.
I hate to play devil's advocate, but 2.1 million CD's doesn't equate to 2.1 million CD's used in (and thus infecting) computers. Many CD's may just be used in personal CD players etc.
Doesn't make it any more right, but no sense in pulling a Sony and skewing the stats as well:-)
So long as Sony is the one paying for them. I'll happily represent myself, in a local court (in my case, Canada), and if Sony wants to pay the costs of sending lawyers back and forth from here and a couple-thousand other users who care to sue them... well all the better. Heck, I'll even settle for $25 after we've run it through court a bit.
At this point, I don't care so much that lawyers are making money, so long as they're costing Sony lots of money for this idiocy.
Everyone who chooses to blast sound at me seems to manage to make their sound files much louder than what I was trying to listen to
In other words, he listens to music at a reasonable volume, and then disruptive flash ads pop up with blaringly-loud noises/voices/etc. So unplugging the speakers is not a reasonable answer.
Personally, unplugging speakers would never be an answer. All OS's tend to have a "mute" option on audio out... so why would you reach around for speaker wires. Moreover, a better solution would be to disable/block the source of the annoyance, mainly the ads or perhaps flash in general. The flashblock plugins are useful... I remember there was one that showed a placeholder until you actually chose to click and therefore load the flash. Saves on bandwidth, saves on annoyance.
If it were me doing it, I'd throw out lots of data, but all of it pretty much bunk. Makes things seem more realistic, while in reality making them useless.
There are cases where solo inventors or smaller companies come up with great ideas, but lack the funds to implement. In this case, they sell off to a larger company that pays them for the concept, and may have the funds for the actual implementation.
Perhaps your concept would work in the case of unimplemented ideas. Inventors could also try selling unpatented ideas but that would make it much easier for the larger corps to rip them off since there could be no patent violation counterclaim.
As they become more widespread, dampening for such things could be included. Right now there's not much space for it. While it might take more juice to frag a hard-drive, I have seen IDE disks get zipped just as nicely. With the controller card gone, you have a disk full of wonderful data that you... can't use (unless you have a disk for the same chipboard to transplant).
I'm not sure which handles better against magnets, etc, too (is flash succeptible?)
a) Low-medium power consumption
b) Noise
c) Heat
d) Varying reliability, but at most I'd say medium as I never trust something important to just one disk
e) High capacity
f) Medium-High speed
h) Medium-Large size (dimensions)
i) Good price/unit storage, reliability (RAID, etc) or increased speed at to this, though
Flash Drive:
a) Minimal-lower power consumption
b) No noise. Zilch
c) Minimum heat if any
d) Some brands have excellent reliability, depending on how you watch your write cycles
e) Low comparative capacity
f) Speed varies by operation (quite fast read, less so for write, dependng on random vs seq operation)
h) Small size but this could be parallel to capacity
i) Currently higher price/unit storage
So the biggest obvious advantages of flash are really in the size, power use, and noise. Anything where you want one of the three to be low, you might go flash unless you're more concerned about capacity or # writes (say for swap).
Well, I know the storage media go higher than this. For work I have a Sandisk Cruzer 4GB. However, I'm guessing if I looked inside there might be a severak individual chips (say 4, 8-gigabit/1GB chips). If they could store 16gigabit/2GB on each chip, that's half the chips one would need and either 2x storage for the same size or less size needed.
That's another notch off the old power meter as well. I'm fairly sure flash-based media uses a lot less than the spinning of drive heads etc on a standard hard-disk.
With all the advancements in computing that tend to require more power, that's a nice change. Especially since my mini-ITX system currently uses around max 35-40W already, including drives... this would likely be less if I used flash drives (an quieter).
An ITPS will help by adding some protection to your DC power against overload. As a bonus, it will also connect to the "soft on/off" connector on your motherboard, allowing for the PC to do a safe shutdown when the ignition is turned off, and to prevent massive power stutters when turning the ignition on.
I work in schools, and I have had complaints from various staff who receive explicit emails ranging in topic from enlarging various body parts to men/woman copulating with animals. If staff can get such emails, I'm sure students could too. And try and have Mrs Crabapple explain to little Jill what that lady on the email is doing to the pretty horsie.
Adding school domain names to a global blocklist doesn't sound like a bad legislation to me. It's easier to check than a DNE (Do-not-email) registry and not send to school domains. Heck, and even easier way would be to slowly transition all school domains to.edu, and simply have sending explicit-content spam to such domains barred.
Legislation isn't always the best solution, and not the only one either, but it's not always a bad idea. This sounds more useful than a DNC-style registry to me.
It's amazing how many people misinterpret technology and/or the lessons they are given about automobiles. At one point I had to pick up my sister and her boyfriend from a city 4h away. On the return trip, a heavy snowstorm struck, trapping me in a traffic pocket behind the snowplows on an uphill climb. Unfortunately this was mid April, an unusual time for snow, and I had just recently transferred off my winter tires for standard all-seasons (they wear less easily, but also grip less).
Well, as bad luck would have it one of the vehicles ahead lost control and went into a bit of a fishtail. The truck ahead braked hard and I braked but my car happily slid straight forward and popped itself a nice hold in the bumper (FYI, plastic bumpers break open nicely when cold).
Anyhow, to the point... my sister's dipshit boyfriend harranged me the whole time that if I had "pumped" the brakes I would have easily stopped in time (no ABS, just a little good old-fashioned threshold braking). My sister insisted "he had taken a driving course" and of course his two years of experience was then obviously more than my decade.
Well, I managed to not kill him, but the point is that he absolutely believed that pumping the brakes would stop the car faster. However, that particular method works more like ABS. Pump, and you won't lock the brakes and therefore spin/swerve the car in a long stop. The car does not stop sooner and depending on the pumping down can actually stop later. It's this type of miseducation that makes me want to throttle know-it-all drivers who think that they are pros on the road (and for the record, despite not pumping I did not swerve either... short stop and a little e-brake to help things).
With an OLED keyboard, you could have animations or live alterations too. Playing a game where your weapons slowly charge... suddenly instead of a "null" icon in the corner you have a big bad bomb icon. Really it could make various interactive tasks a bit more interactive, even in business/etc programs - depending on what you are doing.
I wonder how this will affect the values of non-digital cameras. As they become more scarce, won't they increase in value as well (in particular the rarer/higher-end ones)
The problem is, I do like the articles. The originals, not the scraped-up-POS that is served up by link-whores. The big issue is that they are taking somebody else's article and posting a link to their own site with a crap overview of it.
Now, if somebody else comes along and posts the same story without the crappy linkarounds in front of it, it will either be rejected or it will be a dupe. It's not a problem with the stories being bad, it's that the summaries are often lame compared to the original article, and/or they take credit away from the original article site as well. How many links/banners/etc are the various science/tech sites losing out that they might otherwise have earned by having a good story posted up on slashdot? How many more good articles could they have posted if they had gotten the possible revenue generated from such traffic instead of having it leeched off by the link-parasites that rip their stories?
In short, no it doesn't work because you'll be possibly nuking good stories along with bad submitters.
My understanding is the opposite. Drives are written by 'pitting' the dye in such a way to represent data. If the disk is moving faster, there is less time for the laser to write an individual pit, and then it might lack depth. By writing a deeper pit, it would be less likely to get obscured/altered/etc in the future and thus should be more readable.
Maybe not the best explanation, but that's how I heard it and it somewhat makes sense to me.
My question would be if anyone knows of other companies that make similar devices, but not Sony and not DRM'ed. Personally I'd be looking for something that reads a flash card with perhaps XML formatted or rich-text files. Bold schemas should handle most documents (except for maybe images?) and should also be fairly standard so they'd be easy to convert from other formats/applications.
However, as this current product is Sony branded, even if it did feature what I wanted I'd not by it due to the fact that the brand/company leaves a very ugly taste in my mouth overall.
A lot of the jobs I've been looking at are pretty blase in their requirements. They seem to want degrees and a decade of experience for jobs that really don't require so much. For myself, I'm a Canadian with a background in system administration (Linux/Windows networks) and general IT support (hardware, networking, etc). Employers ask for the kitchen sink, and there are plenty out there who will jump up shouting about experience they don't have - making it hard for me to find my own in. Again, I'm not an Austrlian so it's more difficult for me to get my foot in, but I'd imagine that with the drones of locals, foreigners and others who are willing to greatly overrate themselves there's a lot of good wood hidden amoungst the deadwood.
There are existing laws against harassment, uttering threats, etc. Calling somebody continuously at 3am or to threaten their life really shouldn't be any different on a phone than in a public place - so really it shouldn't need special laws. Part of this is intent though, so online it would be a different scenario when I threaten to rip out your beating heart after you camp-spawn me for the 10th time...
Slashdot Mirror
For those that are facing something such as loss of their vision (for many others, I'm assuming that reading slashdot might be a bit of a chore), what would you risk to get it back?
Not being able to see properly would suck, but not being alive or possibly fritzing my brain in some other way would suck more. I've considered getting laser-eye-surgery to correct my vision, but it's not bad enough that I'd really run with the risks. Maybe if my vision were worse, I would
But even given the possibility of malfunction with laser-eye-surgery... it's like a whole lot more tested/used than this. It must be one heck of a scary thing to have people hooking weird shit up in your head. Is anyone here vision impaired or facing vision impairment, and would you risk being a candidate to test this procedure?
There have been demonstratable projects which involved restoring the vision of a blind individual through electronic apparati. The big problems seem to have been that multiple components are used, which are big, bulky, and inconvenient. Well, that and the resolution is about on par with a cheap webcam.
However, these experiments (and I believe ones for hearing restoration as well) only worked on individuals who were either very young, or had lost vision/hearing at some point. For those who couldn't hear/see, even if all the rest of the "wiring" was there... they brain just couldn't interpret the data. Seems there is some point in youth where our brain learns to sort out those various signals. If you are 20-something and never had the ability, chances are your brain would have about as much chance of learning to use the data as it would a third arm.
Maybe one day science will be able to help our brains *learn* to use these enhancements though, it might be cool if we all had bluetooth-style transmitters wired into our neural network.
I've had some very nice meetings which were definately an improvement to moral. Adding donuts is a nice touch, or the semi-informal lunch meetings (paid for, good food, and discussion) were never approached with the type of dread that a large blank tables, and complaint-filled boardroom meeting tended to present.
How hard would it be for a provider to fight back:
Maybe good could put up a script...
if ($dom_addr contains $bs_domain or $ip_addr in $bs_networks)
{
echo "Bell South has recently begun blackmailing internet service providers (such as google) with decreased service unless we pay them fees";
echo "Until Bell South recants this practice, connections to our service will be currently blocked or limited to 50 concurrent users"; exit;
}
So something of the order of magnitude of 2.1 million computers have been infected by this rogue code.
:-)
I hate to play devil's advocate, but 2.1 million CD's doesn't equate to 2.1 million CD's used in (and thus infecting) computers. Many CD's may just be used in personal CD players etc.
Doesn't make it any more right, but no sense in pulling a Sony and skewing the stats as well
So long as Sony is the one paying for them. I'll happily represent myself, in a local court (in my case, Canada), and if Sony wants to pay the costs of sending lawyers back and forth from here and a couple-thousand other users who care to sue them... well all the better. Heck, I'll even settle for $25 after we've run it through court a bit.
At this point, I don't care so much that lawyers are making money, so long as they're costing Sony lots of money for this idiocy.
Everyone who chooses to blast sound at me seems to manage to make their sound files much louder than what I was trying to listen to
In other words, he listens to music at a reasonable volume, and then disruptive flash ads pop up with blaringly-loud noises/voices/etc. So unplugging the speakers is not a reasonable answer.
Personally, unplugging speakers would never be an answer. All OS's tend to have a "mute" option on audio out... so why would you reach around for speaker wires. Moreover, a better solution would be to disable/block the source of the annoyance, mainly the ads or perhaps flash in general. The flashblock plugins are useful... I remember there was one that showed a placeholder until you actually chose to click and therefore load the flash. Saves on bandwidth, saves on annoyance.
If it were me doing it, I'd throw out lots of data, but all of it pretty much bunk. Makes things seem more realistic, while in reality making them useless.
Word will read WMF files, and a large number of machines running MS Operating Systems have also tended to have word.
I can't test it offhand, but is there perhaps a way to embed a WMF for display from a webpage as well (no IE here to test that).
There are cases where solo inventors or smaller companies come up with great ideas, but lack the funds to implement. In this case, they sell off to a larger company that pays them for the concept, and may have the funds for the actual implementation.
Perhaps your concept would work in the case of unimplemented ideas. Inventors could also try selling unpatented ideas but that would make it much easier for the larger corps to rip them off since there could be no patent violation counterclaim.
As they become more widespread, dampening for such things could be included. Right now there's not much space for it. While it might take more juice to frag a hard-drive, I have seen IDE disks get zipped just as nicely. With the controller card gone, you have a disk full of wonderful data that you... can't use (unless you have a disk for the same chipboard to transplant).
I'm not sure which handles better against magnets, etc, too (is flash succeptible?)
ATA hard disk:
/unit storage, reliability (RAID, etc) or increased speed at to this, though
/unit storage
a) Low-medium power consumption
b) Noise
c) Heat
d) Varying reliability, but at most I'd say medium as I never trust something important to just one disk
e) High capacity
f) Medium-High speed
h) Medium-Large size (dimensions)
i) Good price
Flash Drive:
a) Minimal-lower power consumption
b) No noise. Zilch
c) Minimum heat if any
d) Some brands have excellent reliability, depending on how you watch your write cycles
e) Low comparative capacity
f) Speed varies by operation (quite fast read, less so for write, dependng on random vs seq operation)
h) Small size but this could be parallel to capacity
i) Currently higher price
So the biggest obvious advantages of flash are really in the size, power use, and noise. Anything where you want one of the three to be low, you might go flash unless you're more concerned about capacity or # writes (say for swap).
Well, I know the storage media go higher than this. For work I have a Sandisk Cruzer 4GB. However, I'm guessing if I looked inside there might be a severak individual chips (say 4, 8-gigabit/1GB chips). If they could store 16gigabit/2GB on each chip, that's half the chips one would need and either 2x storage for the same size or less size needed.
That's another notch off the old power meter as well. I'm fairly sure flash-based media uses a lot less than the spinning of drive heads etc on a standard hard-disk.
With all the advancements in computing that tend to require more power, that's a nice change. Especially since my mini-ITX system currently uses around max 35-40W already, including drives... this would likely be less if I used flash drives (an quieter).
An ITPS will help by adding some protection to your DC power against overload. As a bonus, it will also connect to the "soft on/off" connector on your motherboard, allowing for the PC to do a safe shutdown when the ignition is turned off, and to prevent massive power stutters when turning the ignition on.
I work in schools, and I have had complaints from various staff who receive explicit emails ranging in topic from enlarging various body parts to men/woman copulating with animals. If staff can get such emails, I'm sure students could too. And try and have Mrs Crabapple explain to little Jill what that lady on the email is doing to the pretty horsie.
.edu, and simply have sending explicit-content spam to such domains barred.
Adding school domain names to a global blocklist doesn't sound like a bad legislation to me. It's easier to check than a DNE (Do-not-email) registry and not send to school domains. Heck, and even easier way would be to slowly transition all school domains to
Legislation isn't always the best solution, and not the only one either, but it's not always a bad idea. This sounds more useful than a DNC-style registry to me.
It's amazing how many people misinterpret technology and/or the lessons they are given about automobiles. At one point I had to pick up my sister and her boyfriend from a city 4h away. On the return trip, a heavy snowstorm struck, trapping me in a traffic pocket behind the snowplows on an uphill climb. Unfortunately this was mid April, an unusual time for snow, and I had just recently transferred off my winter tires for standard all-seasons (they wear less easily, but also grip less).
Well, as bad luck would have it one of the vehicles ahead lost control and went into a bit of a fishtail. The truck ahead braked hard and I braked but my car happily slid straight forward and popped itself a nice hold in the bumper (FYI, plastic bumpers break open nicely when cold).
Anyhow, to the point... my sister's dipshit boyfriend harranged me the whole time that if I had "pumped" the brakes I would have easily stopped in time (no ABS, just a little good old-fashioned threshold braking). My sister insisted "he had taken a driving course" and of course his two years of experience was then obviously more than my decade.
Well, I managed to not kill him, but the point is that he absolutely believed that pumping the brakes would stop the car faster. However, that particular method works more like ABS. Pump, and you won't lock the brakes and therefore spin/swerve the car in a long stop. The car does not stop sooner and depending on the pumping down can actually stop later. It's this type of miseducation that makes me want to throttle know-it-all drivers who think that they are pros on the road (and for the record, despite not pumping I did not swerve either... short stop and a little e-brake to help things).
With an OLED keyboard, you could have animations or live alterations too. Playing a game where your weapons slowly charge... suddenly instead of a "null" icon in the corner you have a big bad bomb icon. Really it could make various interactive tasks a bit more interactive, even in business/etc programs - depending on what you are doing.
I wonder how this will affect the values of non-digital cameras. As they become more scarce, won't they increase in value as well (in particular the rarer/higher-end ones)
A large number of non-digital camera still have batteries. Either for winding the film, powering the flash capacitors, or both...
:-)
Whichever you use, bring extra batteries
The problem is, I do like the articles. The originals, not the scraped-up-POS that is served up by link-whores. The big issue is that they are taking somebody else's article and posting a link to their own site with a crap overview of it.
Now, if somebody else comes along and posts the same story without the crappy linkarounds in front of it, it will either be rejected or it will be a dupe. It's not a problem with the stories being bad, it's that the summaries are often lame compared to the original article, and/or they take credit away from the original article site as well. How many links/banners/etc are the various science/tech sites losing out that they might otherwise have earned by having a good story posted up on slashdot? How many more good articles could they have posted if they had gotten the possible revenue generated from such traffic instead of having it leeched off by the link-parasites that rip their stories?
In short, no it doesn't work because you'll be possibly nuking good stories along with bad submitters.
My understanding is the opposite. Drives are written by 'pitting' the dye in such a way to represent data. If the disk is moving faster, there is less time for the laser to write an individual pit, and then it might lack depth. By writing a deeper pit, it would be less likely to get obscured/altered/etc in the future and thus should be more readable.
Maybe not the best explanation, but that's how I heard it and it somewhat makes sense to me.
My question would be if anyone knows of other companies that make similar devices, but not Sony and not DRM'ed. Personally I'd be looking for something that reads a flash card with perhaps XML formatted or rich-text files. Bold schemas should handle most documents (except for maybe images?) and should also be fairly standard so they'd be easy to convert from other formats/applications.
However, as this current product is Sony branded, even if it did feature what I wanted I'd not by it due to the fact that the brand/company leaves a very ugly taste in my mouth overall.
A lot of the jobs I've been looking at are pretty blase in their requirements. They seem to want degrees and a decade of experience for jobs that really don't require so much. For myself, I'm a Canadian with a background in system administration (Linux/Windows networks) and general IT support (hardware, networking, etc). Employers ask for the kitchen sink, and there are plenty out there who will jump up shouting about experience they don't have - making it hard for me to find my own in. Again, I'm not an Austrlian so it's more difficult for me to get my foot in, but I'd imagine that with the drones of locals, foreigners and others who are willing to greatly overrate themselves there's a lot of good wood hidden amoungst the deadwood.
There are existing laws against harassment, uttering threats, etc. Calling somebody continuously at 3am or to threaten their life really shouldn't be any different on a phone than in a public place - so really it shouldn't need special laws. Part of this is intent though, so online it would be a different scenario when I threaten to rip out your beating heart after you camp-spawn me for the 10th time...