True, but how about some good old black&white then when the original color isn't know?
Then you'd have to look at three times as many pictures to get the same amount of information, and none of them would be as pleasing to the human eye. The convention that NASA seems to use is that they map the lowest-frequency channel to red, the middle to green, and the highest to blue. That's about as consistent as you can get when dealing with multispectral imagery. If you really want black and white, just use the GIMP or Photoshop to extract one of the colour channels and save it as a greyscale image.
Anybody can render up a cool-looking-but-impossible-or-impractical-to-produce CG image. One of the first things I ever modelled in a 3D app was a fusion-powered coffeemaker. That doesn't mean it should have been treated as a serious design.
Using this port to display a key map onto an essentially transparent keyboard would do the same.
You could also just put a single LCD panel behind the keys, and create the keys from something like ulexite that makes the image from the LCD appear as if it is on the surface of the key. That would avoid the need for any lenses or mirrors related to the projection. It would be a little tricky to hide the springs, but I'm sure a couple at the edges could replace the single spring in the center on a standard keyboard. I believe the Optimus team was already working on something kind of like that anyway. The last time I looked at their site, they had what was basically and LCD touch screen with a plastic frame over it to divide the surface into a grid of "buttons". No tactile response with that though.
A lot of older Office file formats (and MS file formats in general, at least in my experience) are basically partial memory dumps. So yes, I can imagine it would be pretty hard to even come close to guaranteeing that opening all of the decrepit old files stored in those formats would be safe.
I think 30% of US households have an HDTV now, and it's increasing pretty rapidly.
Do you have a cite for that? I'm not trying to nitpick, I'm honestly curious. 30% seems insanely large to me based on my circle of friends and acquaintances. I know 2 people who have what I would consider a "genuine" HDTV (1080i or 1080p). Another 2-3 have those Panasonic 42" plasma monitors that are 1024x768 (which I guess is considered a subclass of 720p, but is missing something like 1/3 of the horizontal resolution of true 720p).
While that is true, I think it's unfair to use a proper title like "judge" when describing the WTO (even in a comparison). A "judge" should be an agent of the government - accountable to the people in some way. The WTO is basically a star chamber run by multinational corporations, and not accountable to anyone else.
Again, I fail to see what the problem is, provided that overseas operators are also allowed to conduct betting on horse/dog races.
For me, it's a question of scope. It seems obvious to me (like others have mentioned) that the reason horse and dog races were exempt was because the government wanted to play favourites with local businesses. So if we go with your interpretation where limiting the specific type of gambling is acceptable (even if it's clearly only done to favour local interests), what *is* the cutoff point? Would it be acceptable in your mind to ban online gambling except for horse and dog racing that was conducted during daylight hours somewhere in the continental US, in order to lock out online horse and dog racing in Europe and Asia? What is the logic behind a particular cutoff point? I would argue that gambling on recreational events in which you are not yourself participating is one class of gambling. Some others would be gambling on recreational events in which you are yourself participating (like poker, blackjack, or roulette), gambling on the outcome of random chance (like the lottery), gambling on non-recreational but benign events (the stock market), gambling on non-recreational and non-benign events (the outcome of a war, someone surviving chemotherapy). There are clear reasons in my mind why one or more of these categories might be legitimately banned for ethical reasons but others would not. I can't say the same for allowing poker but not blackjack, or investing in the NYSE but not the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Well actually the router device that uses the algorithm to route the packets would be patentable, not the algorithm itself. Just like you would seek a patent on the mechanical device that controlled fuel flow, not its internal parts.
That doesn't make sense to me. There is nothing intrinsic about a router that is related to the particular hypothetical algorithm I am describing. It's just a specialized computer executing the algorithm of the program. The algorithm (not the router) is the equivalent of the mechanical device, because the algorithm is what is acting based on a set of inputs. But even setting that aside, here's a more clear-cut example. Let's say I have a low-pass filter algorithm. If I implement it in software, it should not be patentable according to the type of argument I was responding to. If I implement the exact same logical algorithm using digital circuitry, you are saying that that should be patentable? What's the difference? The exact same thing is happening: an analogue waveform comes in, is converted to digital and processed, and converted back to analogue for output. What about if I implement the algorithm on a FPGA? Is that software, because it's programmable? What about if I implement it all in hardware, but the hardware has a CPU which is reading code from a ROM? What about the same scenario but the code is on a PROM? An EEPROM? What if I implement the algorithm on a mass-produced DSP chip? What about if I write a physical modeling simulation environment for electronic parts and create an exact replica of the physical design there but never using actual physical electronics? What about if I implement that environment on a specialized hardware emulator platform? Should I now be able to copy anyone's hardware designs because mine are "software"? IMO there is no difference. It's all just electrons whizzing around. The logic that controls them is what is innovative or not. Just like the analogue logic performed by a mechanical part is what's innovative or not.
"They" can already track you with video cameras and credit card transaction lists. Why do people have a problem with this but no problem with having an IMEI number on their mobile phone?
You can choose to not use mobile phones or credit cards, and wear a hat and sunglasses or some other quasi-disguise around video cameras. You effectively cannot choose to not have a national ID card of the kind that authoritarians campaign for.
They're not yet planning to put up pictures of recently released criminals. They're not yet planning to put up pictures of sex offenders in your neighborhood.
There, fixed that for you. Of course, I am only joking. When did any government ever introduce a fairly useful technology on a limited basis only to dramatically broaden the scope over time until it was used oppressively?
Is (for example) a software algorithm for controlling packet routing really that different than a mechanical device which controls fuel flow in an internal combustion engine? They're both just making logical decisions, even though one is more analogue than the other.
you are essentially doing (weak) [aerobic] exercise.
More people should play the way my friends and I do when we get together at the house of a friend with a Wii. That is, jumping madly all over the place, swinging the Wiimote as if it were the handle of an axe, and accidentally smashing our hands into wooden furniture in order to win at Wii Sports Tennis. But yes, it's still obviously no match for e.g. 30-60 minutes of running. The same friends of mine and I were actually discussing this last week and definitely lumped the "Wii is exercise!" people in with the "I am awesome at Guitar Hero, as soon as I pick up a real guitar I will be Steve Vai!" crowd.
Highly unlikely since it was complete rubbish and nobody watched it.
Have you watched it recently? I thought it stood up pretty well to the test of time. A lot of the predictions about the authoritarian society/terrorists-as-the-new-bogeyman and the growing popularity of the Scientology-esque cult were eerily accurate.
They're cheaper RIGHT NOW. They cost more INITIALLY but you save more than the price difference in energy and replacement costs over the life of the bulb.
No, they're not. Not if they burn out in half the time (or less) of incandescents like they do for a non-trivial number of people. I've bought 14 CFLs in the last 6-8 months. 6 or 7 of them have stopped working during that time. As I mentioned in a post above, I have never had any trouble with other electrical or electronic devices, and this is in a reasonably new apartment building. Have I saved $60-$70 ($5 per bulb, counted twice since I would not have had to replace incandescents at all during a period that long) on electricity during that time? No. The reason people aren't buying CFLs en masse isn't that they are lazy or shortsighted. It's that the technology is just not as good as incandescents (yet?), and costs considerably more.
I have a 32W full spectrum CF light in a lamp by my computer
Fluorescents by their nature are not full-spectrum. They have tall, narrow spikes right in the middle of where our eyes are sensitive to red, green, and blue, and virtually no output anywhere else in the spectrum. It's enough to fool human eyes, and not much else. I wouldn't be surprised if pets had trouble seeing by fluorescent light.
I have yet to have a bulb last more than 6 months.
That's better than my results (except for very small values of less than six months). I love the colour spectrum of the GE 6500K CFLs, and bought the 100-watt-equivalent type to replace all of the overhead lighting in my apartment (10 sockets). Most of them have lasted somewhere between 1 and 4 months. This is a relatively new building, and in three years of living there I've never had a problem with any other electrical or electronic device. Incandescent bulbs tend to last me about a year. My only theory is that it has something to do with the fixtures, but IMO if CFLs are so fragile that they can't operate correctly in a fixture designed for incandescents that put out considerably more heat, they are not ready for prime time. Since CFLs are (AFAIK) the only replacement bulb type that's at all economical, their lack of reliability should prevent any consideration of phasing out incandescents in favour of them.
It's a shame the desktop computer hasn't evolved into something that's rack mountable, or alternatively, something that resembles audio equipment.
It's certainly possible to get rack-mount cases for desktop PC hardware. New Egg, for example, has a number of them that I'm looking at. I imagine the reason that it's necessary to go out of your way to get one is because most people don't have racks at home.
The transistors main contribution was the fact that it was 'solid state'
I would argue that one of the main contributions of the transistor was that they are not expected to wear out during normal usage. Tubes are not reliable enough to build complicated circuits (e.g. computers) for the mass market out of. Think "one tube failing every two days" like ENIAC, except repeated across millions of desktop PCs.
Why is an IIS log size just as large as a firewall log ?
Probably because 99+% of the entries would be functionally identical, or present on the firewall but not the web server? - Putting firewalls in front of a dedicated web server farm is going to mean your logs are going to contain nearly the same number of entries. The firewall will log an incoming connection, then the web server will log that same connection if it's allowed. The firewall will end up with *more* entries because of the connection attempts that it is blocking. - The logging configuration for the web server and the firewall are going to be pretty similar. You are going to want to see source IP, source DNS name, date/time, source port. On the firewall you'll want things like destination IP and port and the rule that blocked/allowed the traffic. On the web server you'll want the requested URL and HTTP status. It's all going to end up in a database anyway, because running grep or whatever repeatedly against 4.5TB of text files just to analyze last week's traffic would get old pretty quickly. So minor differences in size of data are probably going to be nullified by having to use relatively wide varchar fields for things like the source DNS name.
Let's hope their corporate policy allows something a little more robust than "Event Viewer".
I imagine they have IIS configured to log to a database, and then just use whatever query and reporting tools they want to. But 650GB a day is still a lot to deal with.
Btw what's with all these obsessing about sources (at least with topics such as these)
Because otherwise you end up with people spreading misinformation that is generally believed to be true, like the old urban legend about how if you cover your entire body in paint, you will suffocate because your skin can't "breathe".
I drove through Michigan last year and I thought the "Michigan Left" was a pretty clever idea. I absolutely loathe when people make left turns outside of designated left-turn-only lanes, because it completely screws up traffic for quite a distance behind them if there's any significant amount of traffic. I use the three rights technique myself, but the Michigan Left seemed like a more intuitive way to get other people out of the habit of blocking traffic.
How else would you like people to make clickable text that executes a JavaScript method, and how would it be better than that approach?
" s are better than tables for layout"
Uh, DIVs are better than tables for layout. They let the designer create more elaborate layouts more efficiently than tables, but they also make even simple layouts much more consistent and easy to implement.
I wonder if there is any evidence that a viral infection can have significant impact on the host's DNA.
I've seen a plant which was infected with a (naturally-occurring) virus which caused it to grow buds all over the tops of its leaves instead of just on its branches, so I would imagine the answer is "yes".
Slashdot Mirror
True, but how about some good old black&white then when the original color isn't know?
Then you'd have to look at three times as many pictures to get the same amount of information, and none of them would be as pleasing to the human eye.
The convention that NASA seems to use is that they map the lowest-frequency channel to red, the middle to green, and the highest to blue. That's about as consistent as you can get when dealing with multispectral imagery.
If you really want black and white, just use the GIMP or Photoshop to extract one of the colour channels and save it as a greyscale image.
Anybody can render up a cool-looking-but-impossible-or-impractical-to-produce CG image. One of the first things I ever modelled in a 3D app was a fusion-powered coffeemaker. That doesn't mean it should have been treated as a serious design.
Using this port to display a key map onto an essentially transparent keyboard would do the same.
You could also just put a single LCD panel behind the keys, and create the keys from something like ulexite that makes the image from the LCD appear as if it is on the surface of the key. That would avoid the need for any lenses or mirrors related to the projection. It would be a little tricky to hide the springs, but I'm sure a couple at the edges could replace the single spring in the center on a standard keyboard.
I believe the Optimus team was already working on something kind of like that anyway. The last time I looked at their site, they had what was basically and LCD touch screen with a plastic frame over it to divide the surface into a grid of "buttons". No tactile response with that though.
It's not even executable data, for pete's sake!
A lot of older Office file formats (and MS file formats in general, at least in my experience) are basically partial memory dumps. So yes, I can imagine it would be pretty hard to even come close to guaranteeing that opening all of the decrepit old files stored in those formats would be safe.
I think 30% of US households have an HDTV now, and it's increasing pretty rapidly.
Do you have a cite for that? I'm not trying to nitpick, I'm honestly curious. 30% seems insanely large to me based on my circle of friends and acquaintances. I know 2 people who have what I would consider a "genuine" HDTV (1080i or 1080p). Another 2-3 have those Panasonic 42" plasma monitors that are 1024x768 (which I guess is considered a subclass of 720p, but is missing something like 1/3 of the horizontal resolution of true 720p).
While that is true, I think it's unfair to use a proper title like "judge" when describing the WTO (even in a comparison). A "judge" should be an agent of the government - accountable to the people in some way. The WTO is basically a star chamber run by multinational corporations, and not accountable to anyone else.
Again, I fail to see what the problem is, provided that overseas operators are also allowed to conduct betting on horse/dog races.
For me, it's a question of scope. It seems obvious to me (like others have mentioned) that the reason horse and dog races were exempt was because the government wanted to play favourites with local businesses. So if we go with your interpretation where limiting the specific type of gambling is acceptable (even if it's clearly only done to favour local interests), what *is* the cutoff point? Would it be acceptable in your mind to ban online gambling except for horse and dog racing that was conducted during daylight hours somewhere in the continental US, in order to lock out online horse and dog racing in Europe and Asia? What is the logic behind a particular cutoff point?
I would argue that gambling on recreational events in which you are not yourself participating is one class of gambling. Some others would be gambling on recreational events in which you are yourself participating (like poker, blackjack, or roulette), gambling on the outcome of random chance (like the lottery), gambling on non-recreational but benign events (the stock market), gambling on non-recreational and non-benign events (the outcome of a war, someone surviving chemotherapy). There are clear reasons in my mind why one or more of these categories might be legitimately banned for ethical reasons but others would not. I can't say the same for allowing poker but not blackjack, or investing in the NYSE but not the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Well actually the router device that uses the algorithm to route the packets would be patentable, not the algorithm itself. Just like you would seek a patent on the mechanical device that controlled fuel flow, not its internal parts.
That doesn't make sense to me. There is nothing intrinsic about a router that is related to the particular hypothetical algorithm I am describing. It's just a specialized computer executing the algorithm of the program. The algorithm (not the router) is the equivalent of the mechanical device, because the algorithm is what is acting based on a set of inputs.
But even setting that aside, here's a more clear-cut example. Let's say I have a low-pass filter algorithm. If I implement it in software, it should not be patentable according to the type of argument I was responding to. If I implement the exact same logical algorithm using digital circuitry, you are saying that that should be patentable? What's the difference? The exact same thing is happening: an analogue waveform comes in, is converted to digital and processed, and converted back to analogue for output. What about if I implement the algorithm on a FPGA? Is that software, because it's programmable? What about if I implement it all in hardware, but the hardware has a CPU which is reading code from a ROM? What about the same scenario but the code is on a PROM? An EEPROM? What if I implement the algorithm on a mass-produced DSP chip? What about if I write a physical modeling simulation environment for electronic parts and create an exact replica of the physical design there but never using actual physical electronics? What about if I implement that environment on a specialized hardware emulator platform? Should I now be able to copy anyone's hardware designs because mine are "software"?
IMO there is no difference. It's all just electrons whizzing around. The logic that controls them is what is innovative or not. Just like the analogue logic performed by a mechanical part is what's innovative or not.
"They" can already track you with video cameras and credit card transaction lists. Why do people have a problem with this but no problem with having an IMEI number on their mobile phone?
You can choose to not use mobile phones or credit cards, and wear a hat and sunglasses or some other quasi-disguise around video cameras. You effectively cannot choose to not have a national ID card of the kind that authoritarians campaign for.
They're not yet planning to put up pictures of recently released criminals. They're not yet planning to put up pictures of sex offenders in your neighborhood.
There, fixed that for you. Of course, I am only joking. When did any government ever introduce a fairly useful technology on a limited basis only to dramatically broaden the scope over time until it was used oppressively?
If it isn't physical, it shouldn't be patented
Is (for example) a software algorithm for controlling packet routing really that different than a mechanical device which controls fuel flow in an internal combustion engine? They're both just making logical decisions, even though one is more analogue than the other.
you are essentially doing (weak) [aerobic] exercise.
More people should play the way my friends and I do when we get together at the house of a friend with a Wii. That is, jumping madly all over the place, swinging the Wiimote as if it were the handle of an axe, and accidentally smashing our hands into wooden furniture in order to win at Wii Sports Tennis.
But yes, it's still obviously no match for e.g. 30-60 minutes of running. The same friends of mine and I were actually discussing this last week and definitely lumped the "Wii is exercise!" people in with the "I am awesome at Guitar Hero, as soon as I pick up a real guitar I will be Steve Vai!" crowd.
Highly unlikely since it was complete rubbish and nobody watched it.
Have you watched it recently? I thought it stood up pretty well to the test of time. A lot of the predictions about the authoritarian society/terrorists-as-the-new-bogeyman and the growing popularity of the Scientology-esque cult were eerily accurate.
They're cheaper RIGHT NOW. They cost more INITIALLY but you save more than the price difference in energy and replacement costs over the life of the bulb.
No, they're not. Not if they burn out in half the time (or less) of incandescents like they do for a non-trivial number of people.
I've bought 14 CFLs in the last 6-8 months. 6 or 7 of them have stopped working during that time. As I mentioned in a post above, I have never had any trouble with other electrical or electronic devices, and this is in a reasonably new apartment building. Have I saved $60-$70 ($5 per bulb, counted twice since I would not have had to replace incandescents at all during a period that long) on electricity during that time? No.
The reason people aren't buying CFLs en masse isn't that they are lazy or shortsighted. It's that the technology is just not as good as incandescents (yet?), and costs considerably more.
I have a 32W full spectrum CF light in a lamp by my computer
Fluorescents by their nature are not full-spectrum. They have tall, narrow spikes right in the middle of where our eyes are sensitive to red, green, and blue, and virtually no output anywhere else in the spectrum.
It's enough to fool human eyes, and not much else. I wouldn't be surprised if pets had trouble seeing by fluorescent light.
I have yet to have a bulb last more than 6 months.
That's better than my results (except for very small values of less than six months). I love the colour spectrum of the GE 6500K CFLs, and bought the 100-watt-equivalent type to replace all of the overhead lighting in my apartment (10 sockets). Most of them have lasted somewhere between 1 and 4 months.
This is a relatively new building, and in three years of living there I've never had a problem with any other electrical or electronic device. Incandescent bulbs tend to last me about a year. My only theory is that it has something to do with the fixtures, but IMO if CFLs are so fragile that they can't operate correctly in a fixture designed for incandescents that put out considerably more heat, they are not ready for prime time.
Since CFLs are (AFAIK) the only replacement bulb type that's at all economical, their lack of reliability should prevent any consideration of phasing out incandescents in favour of them.
It's a shame the desktop computer hasn't evolved into something that's rack mountable, or alternatively, something that resembles audio equipment.
It's certainly possible to get rack-mount cases for desktop PC hardware. New Egg, for example, has a number of them that I'm looking at. I imagine the reason that it's necessary to go out of your way to get one is because most people don't have racks at home.
The transistors main contribution was the fact that it was 'solid state'
I would argue that one of the main contributions of the transistor was that they are not expected to wear out during normal usage. Tubes are not reliable enough to build complicated circuits (e.g. computers) for the mass market out of. Think "one tube failing every two days" like ENIAC, except repeated across millions of desktop PCs.
Saberhagen's Berserker series? Bear's The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars? What is this The Killing Star that you speak of?
Why is an IIS log size just as large as a firewall log ?
Probably because 99+% of the entries would be functionally identical, or present on the firewall but not the web server?
- Putting firewalls in front of a dedicated web server farm is going to mean your logs are going to contain nearly the same number of entries. The firewall will log an incoming connection, then the web server will log that same connection if it's allowed. The firewall will end up with *more* entries because of the connection attempts that it is blocking.
- The logging configuration for the web server and the firewall are going to be pretty similar. You are going to want to see source IP, source DNS name, date/time, source port. On the firewall you'll want things like destination IP and port and the rule that blocked/allowed the traffic. On the web server you'll want the requested URL and HTTP status.
It's all going to end up in a database anyway, because running grep or whatever repeatedly against 4.5TB of text files just to analyze last week's traffic would get old pretty quickly. So minor differences in size of data are probably going to be nullified by having to use relatively wide varchar fields for things like the source DNS name.
Let's hope their corporate policy allows something a little more robust than "Event Viewer".
I imagine they have IIS configured to log to a database, and then just use whatever query and reporting tools they want to. But 650GB a day is still a lot to deal with.
Btw what's with all these obsessing about sources (at least with topics such as these)
Because otherwise you end up with people spreading misinformation that is generally believed to be true, like the old urban legend about how if you cover your entire body in paint, you will suffocate because your skin can't "breathe".
I drove through Michigan last year and I thought the "Michigan Left" was a pretty clever idea. I absolutely loathe when people make left turns outside of designated left-turn-only lanes, because it completely screws up traffic for quite a distance behind them if there's any significant amount of traffic. I use the three rights technique myself, but the Michigan Left seemed like a more intuitive way to get other people out of the habit of blocking traffic.
I still see href="javascript:",
How else would you like people to make clickable text that executes a JavaScript method, and how would it be better than that approach?
" s are better than tables for layout"
Uh, DIVs are better than tables for layout. They let the designer create more elaborate layouts more efficiently than tables, but they also make even simple layouts much more consistent and easy to implement.
I wonder if there is any evidence that a viral infection can have significant impact on the host's DNA.
I've seen a plant which was infected with a (naturally-occurring) virus which caused it to grow buds all over the tops of its leaves instead of just on its branches, so I would imagine the answer is "yes".