It's good to see that manufacturers are finally shipping higher resolution stand-alone LCD displays - until now, most high res displays were limited to laptops. For example, my roommate's Dell laptop had a 16:9 screen (something else you won't see in desktop monitors) and a ridiculously sharp screen, something on the order of 1400 horizontal pixels on a 17" screen.
What I'm really wondering, though, is what the refresh rate on these monitors is. I've seen some massive LCD screens before, but they all seemed to suffer from a low refresh rate, which made playing any kind of video or other motion graphics on the screen hard or impossible to do due to ghosting.
With resolutions that high, I think this monitor will primarily be geared toward medical imaging applications rather than for video display or gaming. I can't even imagine a modern video card that could drive that kind of resolution (NVidia's new dual DVI card?), much less a game that would support resolutions that high. Oh well, I can dream...
I guess it's a good thing to see someone hiring a lot of PhDs these days. Most people with PhDs in technical fields (especially the sciences) these days have a lot of trouble finding any kind of employment, because once someone sees that "PhD" on your resume and you're not applying for, say, thermodynamic research at GE or machine translation research at Google, they just toss it in a wastebasket.
This is what is known as "being over-qualified", and it's a killer. You wouldn't think that, after all that hard work in getting through school and finally getting a doctorate in a hard science or engineering, you'd have trouble finding work, but you do. Ever see a PhD working a helpdesk? Not a tech PhD, that's for sure.
Also, the amount of free time provided to PhDs at Google to do their own thing seems like it would be pretty standard - after all, they've hired the best and the brightest, how else do they expect to retain them? Isn't this standard at other companies, too?
Just look at some of the stuff gAIM has done if you want to see a common example of open source innovation.
Actually, GAIM is pretty retro, at least on Windows. Crashing 8 times a day for no visible reason, crashing on attempting to recieve a file, no file send capability. All in the pursuit to emulate a current product from AOL. Yeah, there's some real innovation.
Linux is too bloated to work effectively on small, embedded platforms like PDAs (X-Windows, I'm looking at you). Try Microsoft Windows XP Embedded, it runs in a small memory space, has a good GUI and won't randomly crash while starving your other applications of memory like a certain window manager I'm thinking of *cough*X*cough*.
I was hoping for an uglier, more business-hostile name for it to complement the Gimp, like "Tard" or something. Just picture giving advice to your co-worker at a graphics design firm:
"It's easy to remember - use Gimp for bitmaps and Tard for vector graphics."
If it's revolutionary to do this by measuring noise at the source rather than from the center of the goddamn room, well, I guess they should've looked at the noise-cancelling-headphones industry, which have been doing this for years. What kind of dumbass measures the noise away from the source and then tries to compensate for all the reflections and distortions that could occur in the path between the source and the reciever?
Agreed. Big Business has been exploiting us ever since the dot-bomb crash back in 1999. It's time to take out the trash and organize, use our collective bargaining power to get us a little job security and better wages. If autoworkers can do it, then we can do it, too!
While I'm sure it sounds well and good to a legislator in the EU when they hear about supposedly "unbreakable" quantum cryptography, this sounds like another case of someone mistaking it for some kind of panacea for eavesdropping. The real truth of the matter is that, of course, quantum crypto is only effective at the line level, i.e. as soon as it leaves the medium it was transmitted on, the cryptographic effect is lost. So it's entirely impractical for anything but a point to point connection.
Also, I don't think people realize how strong cryptography is today. There are cryptographic methods available to the public at large (such as RC5 and PGP) that are proven to require more computing power than is theoretically possible in the universe. Not just more computing power than is possible with current hardware, but the theoretical limits of computation given the entire resources of the universe. So really, it seems that a lot of ignorance is at play here, and I would hope someone clueful in the EU informs their EU government before they go off and waste a whole lot of taxpayer money on such a foolish project.
Paying hush money to security researchers to keep their discoveries secret is hardly a new idea, and I'd be pretty surprised if M$ weren't already paying people off to keep security holes in IE and other examples of their crappy software secret.
$5 million seems like a pittance, though, when you consider the market capitalization of a company like Micro$oft. If I were a security researcher who'd just discovered the next devastating remote hole in M$ software, I'd hold them hostage for millions, considering that I need the money and they do nothing but spread FUD about Linux and fund SCO. I'd punish them hard, then donate the proceeds to the FSF to keep Linux Free. I guess M$ will have to expand their payoff budget pretty soon, considering how terrible their security is.
Could you stop stalking me now? Christ, that was posted over a year and a half ago. The last thing I need is some dweeb with a Slashdot subscription following me around online.
Look, working a varied career is the best thing that's ever happened to me. Variety is the spice of life! I pity someone like you who must have been wrapped up in the same corporate hellhole for the past 20 years. Have fun sucking up to middle management!
Good to see them in headlines again
on
Groklaw Turns One
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Groklaw are good people. Actually, the place where I work (I work for a large, high-traffic porn site) was recently served with a legal threat in the form of a letter from SCO's lawyers, and we were able to seek legal advice from them and generally keep up with goings-on in the whole ordeal.
I'm glad that I can still use Linux, as it's the best operating system for serving up obscene volumes of multimedia content over the web. If SCO had been able to make good on their threats (and I'm sure now that if it hadn't been for Groklaw, nobody would've ever heard about this), our operating costs would've gone through the roof and we would've ultimately had to shutdown. Cheers, Groklaw! And let us hope you have another 1 year of existence ahead of you!
Re:Clean Sheet Commercial Application
on
XVID 1.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
Towards the storage-heavy end of the cpu/storage spectrum, you could check out HuffYUV, a lossless video codec. It is especially handy if you have little CPU power and absolutely need a lossless codec, since it seems to compress to a higher ratio and at a faster rate than any other lossless codec available. Also, it's free, so have fun with it.
Already in use
on
Hardened PHP
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I do some development and site administration work for a high traffic porn site, and I can tell you that we've been using Hardened PHP since before the project announcement (I'm friends with one of the developers). It works OK so far, but the server starts to get worn out after a while, after being particularly abused by a day's peak traffic.
It'll probably help to put one up before the site is slashdotted.
Did they really end up catching this guy as he opened up the package? I was reading the PDF yesterday (got the link off of MeFi and the story ended as they were waiting for it to get delivered.
Personally, I think it's pretty horrible to defraud someone in this manner. While I'm sure this guy in the UK is not totally without blame, it seems pretty goddamn stupid to send someone a fraudulent package with a ring binder instead of a laptop and make them pay ~$300 in VAT and then post all about your international mail fraud exploits on the Internet.
I'm afraid your reading comprehension skills are below-average even for a Slashdotter. What I wrote just two sentences later was the justification for my reasoning, two terms I'm sure lacking in your vocabulary.
To recap: eDonkey clients are up longer because people are more likely to make multiple downloads with eDonkey while Bittorrent users usually close the application window after their (one! always one!) download is finished.
Bittorrent seems like an odd way to distribute files for any extended length of time. It wholly depends on how many people are downloading it at any specific moment, so when you come back maybe 3 days later, the download speeds drop to a trickle because you're the only one downloading the file now. And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.
Why not put it on a P2P network like eDonkey? People will probably have other downloads moving at the same time, so the particular file will have much more sources for a much longer period of time than with Bittorrent.
Really, Bittorrent seems like a poor solution to a problem better solved by real P2P software.
I hope their doing broadband jamming - it's not as if cellphones are the only means for wireless communication.
Other than that, this is just yet another textbook example of the Bush Administration stomping all over the constitutional rights of its citizenry (but he hasn't really been very supportive of free speech from the get-go anyhow, so you shouldn't be surprised.) When are people going to get pissed off enough at this outrageous behavior and finally vote him out of office? He still seems to be ahead in the polls. Get it together, Americans!
But really, doesn't this sound the least bit disturbing? I was an accounting intern at NASA a few summers ago when I was still in college, back when the Enron thing was going on, and I ran into almost universal disgust at how a large organization's accounting arm could be so unprofessional and dishonest. It's a shame that the exact same kind of behaviors like book cooking are now turning up at NASA. I guess things change over the years.
On the up side, Bush's mandate that they devote their entire budget to the Mars program pretty much guarantees their demise as a government agency, so we should be seeing this type of corruption and taxpayer theft going on for much longer. Not at NASA, at least.
Did they do anything to improve/add replication support? That seems to be the only real thing that was holding it back from replacing Oracle, as far as I can tell. I know several projects for such a thing were in the works, but they appeared to be very beta.
I'm glad that the movie industry and distributers are finally embracing the Internet as a distribution medium, instead of fighting it. This sounds a lot better than having to drive all the way to the video store and back, as long as you have broadband. And no late fees! Sounds pretty reasonable to me, and I can watch the movies with a clear conscience.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you should view your monitor for farther away than 3 inches.
It's good to see that manufacturers are finally shipping higher resolution stand-alone LCD displays - until now, most high res displays were limited to laptops. For example, my roommate's Dell laptop had a 16:9 screen (something else you won't see in desktop monitors) and a ridiculously sharp screen, something on the order of 1400 horizontal pixels on a 17" screen.
What I'm really wondering, though, is what the refresh rate on these monitors is. I've seen some massive LCD screens before, but they all seemed to suffer from a low refresh rate, which made playing any kind of video or other motion graphics on the screen hard or impossible to do due to ghosting.
With resolutions that high, I think this monitor will primarily be geared toward medical imaging applications rather than for video display or gaming. I can't even imagine a modern video card that could drive that kind of resolution (NVidia's new dual DVI card?), much less a game that would support resolutions that high. Oh well, I can dream...
Haven't you ever heard of "crumple zones"?
This is what is known as "being over-qualified", and it's a killer. You wouldn't think that, after all that hard work in getting through school and finally getting a doctorate in a hard science or engineering, you'd have trouble finding work, but you do. Ever see a PhD working a helpdesk? Not a tech PhD, that's for sure.
Also, the amount of free time provided to PhDs at Google to do their own thing seems like it would be pretty standard - after all, they've hired the best and the brightest, how else do they expect to retain them? Isn't this standard at other companies, too?
Actually, GAIM is pretty retro, at least on Windows. Crashing 8 times a day for no visible reason, crashing on attempting to recieve a file, no file send capability. All in the pursuit to emulate a current product from AOL. Yeah, there's some real innovation.
Linux is too bloated to work effectively on small, embedded platforms like PDAs (X-Windows, I'm looking at you). Try Microsoft Windows XP Embedded, it runs in a small memory space, has a good GUI and won't randomly crash while starving your other applications of memory like a certain window manager I'm thinking of *cough*X*cough*.
"It's easy to remember - use Gimp for bitmaps and Tard for vector graphics."
I do believe that such non-Apple appliances are a major fashion faux-pas in the faggot community.
If it's revolutionary to do this by measuring noise at the source rather than from the center of the goddamn room, well, I guess they should've looked at the noise-cancelling-headphones industry, which have been doing this for years. What kind of dumbass measures the noise away from the source and then tries to compensate for all the reflections and distortions that could occur in the path between the source and the reciever?
Agreed. Big Business has been exploiting us ever since the dot-bomb crash back in 1999. It's time to take out the trash and organize, use our collective bargaining power to get us a little job security and better wages. If autoworkers can do it, then we can do it, too!
Also, I don't think people realize how strong cryptography is today. There are cryptographic methods available to the public at large (such as RC5 and PGP) that are proven to require more computing power than is theoretically possible in the universe. Not just more computing power than is possible with current hardware, but the theoretical limits of computation given the entire resources of the universe. So really, it seems that a lot of ignorance is at play here, and I would hope someone clueful in the EU informs their EU government before they go off and waste a whole lot of taxpayer money on such a foolish project.
$5 million seems like a pittance, though, when you consider the market capitalization of a company like Micro$oft. If I were a security researcher who'd just discovered the next devastating remote hole in M$ software, I'd hold them hostage for millions, considering that I need the money and they do nothing but spread FUD about Linux and fund SCO. I'd punish them hard, then donate the proceeds to the FSF to keep Linux Free. I guess M$ will have to expand their payoff budget pretty soon, considering how terrible their security is.
Could you stop stalking me now? Christ, that was posted over a year and a half ago. The last thing I need is some dweeb with a Slashdot subscription following me around online.
Look, working a varied career is the best thing that's ever happened to me. Variety is the spice of life! I pity someone like you who must have been wrapped up in the same corporate hellhole for the past 20 years. Have fun sucking up to middle management!
I'm glad that I can still use Linux, as it's the best operating system for serving up obscene volumes of multimedia content over the web. If SCO had been able to make good on their threats (and I'm sure now that if it hadn't been for Groklaw, nobody would've ever heard about this), our operating costs would've gone through the roof and we would've ultimately had to shutdown. Cheers, Groklaw! And let us hope you have another 1 year of existence ahead of you!
Towards the storage-heavy end of the cpu/storage spectrum, you could check out HuffYUV, a lossless video codec. It is especially handy if you have little CPU power and absolutely need a lossless codec, since it seems to compress to a higher ratio and at a faster rate than any other lossless codec available. Also, it's free, so have fun with it.
I do some development and site administration work for a high traffic porn site, and I can tell you that we've been using Hardened PHP since before the project announcement (I'm friends with one of the developers). It works OK so far, but the server starts to get worn out after a while, after being particularly abused by a day's peak traffic.
Did they really end up catching this guy as he opened up the package? I was reading the PDF yesterday (got the link off of MeFi and the story ended as they were waiting for it to get delivered.
Personally, I think it's pretty horrible to defraud someone in this manner. While I'm sure this guy in the UK is not totally without blame, it seems pretty goddamn stupid to send someone a fraudulent package with a ring binder instead of a laptop and make them pay ~$300 in VAT and then post all about your international mail fraud exploits on the Internet.
To recap: eDonkey clients are up longer because people are more likely to make multiple downloads with eDonkey while Bittorrent users usually close the application window after their (one! always one!) download is finished.
Why not put it on a P2P network like eDonkey? People will probably have other downloads moving at the same time, so the particular file will have much more sources for a much longer period of time than with Bittorrent.
Really, Bittorrent seems like a poor solution to a problem better solved by real P2P software.
Other than that, this is just yet another textbook example of the Bush Administration stomping all over the constitutional rights of its citizenry (but he hasn't really been very supportive of free speech from the get-go anyhow, so you shouldn't be surprised.) When are people going to get pissed off enough at this outrageous behavior and finally vote him out of office? He still seems to be ahead in the polls. Get it together, Americans!
But really, doesn't this sound the least bit disturbing? I was an accounting intern at NASA a few summers ago when I was still in college, back when the Enron thing was going on, and I ran into almost universal disgust at how a large organization's accounting arm could be so unprofessional and dishonest. It's a shame that the exact same kind of behaviors like book cooking are now turning up at NASA. I guess things change over the years.
On the up side, Bush's mandate that they devote their entire budget to the Mars program pretty much guarantees their demise as a government agency, so we should be seeing this type of corruption and taxpayer theft going on for much longer. Not at NASA, at least.
Did they do anything to improve/add replication support? That seems to be the only real thing that was holding it back from replacing Oracle, as far as I can tell. I know several projects for such a thing were in the works, but they appeared to be very beta.
I'm glad that the movie industry and distributers are finally embracing the Internet as a distribution medium, instead of fighting it. This sounds a lot better than having to drive all the way to the video store and back, as long as you have broadband. And no late fees! Sounds pretty reasonable to me, and I can watch the movies with a clear conscience.