This is pretty neat. Low IR interference would be great. There is so much heating/cooling from exposure/shadow cycling as satellites orbit the earth that I'd guess it have cyclic noise.
They never really mentioned how high it would orbit.
120 feet of rail is a lot. I wonder how prone it'll be to damage?
The other telescope mentioned in the article seemed more interesting. Even though it's 1/4 the length, it had interferometers on board, and would probably be more useful for spectroscopic purposes.
I wouldn't complain too hard about the confusion in the details. They couldn't even spell 'rendering' right on their own site (4 color randering???).
It also discusses 'physicail' pixels. I dunno about that.
They seem to have created smaller pixels, which are spatially located across a different area than normal.
They then need fewer wires to connect the given number of pixels. Meaning a higher resolution with fewer interconnects. Maybe I'm completely wrong in this 1 minutes evaluation.
The neat thing is the overlap of their 'logical' pixel arrangements. It would seem they are using traditional dithering with a complicated arrangement of pixels. This should do exactly what they state. Ther weird thing is that their sub-pixel seems to have the wrong number of color sub-elements.
One would expect a ratio of 2:1:1 for green:red:blue emitters. They have 4:2:1. Maybe their red emitters are much brighter than the blue, which would make sense.
They mention replacing some rows with white pixels, but their diagrams don't show anything. Maybe the media-relations people just don't know how the technology works, and are making stuff up until someone corrects them.
Stupid people should be protected. Lynch all smart people.
Microsoft sucks. Because they do. (wouldn't be a/. post without this...)
Let's all find a bandwagon to hop onto. Not enough bonfires and lynchings.
What I did say: publicity of potential problems is good. Now people will know to check to see if the google desktop is running in the taskbar of public computers.
Are we supposed to tell the media not to report this kind of thing? I'm happy when I see an article on the dangers of spyware, because it's one less thing I have to explain in painstaking detail to friends and family.
What's not good about letting people know of a potential invasion of privacy?
We already allocate money to parties/candidates by allocating budgets based on vote support.
Why not get a chance of getting some money for voting.
If you think of all the people who don't vote, their money is being used to support the candidates anyways. Why not use some of it to help bolster voter turnout?
Even a $30 million prize would be quite significant and only cost around $0.10 per US citizen...
To me, it's not about the person who is installing the program in the first place, but rather side-effects that will occur when other people come along and either have to use a compromised computer, or have no clue that a computer is compromised.
It really should be the OS's job to maintain security like that. But in cases like libraries, internet cafes and school computing resources, it's frequently not a reasonable burden for admins to bear creating accounts for every single user that walks by.
Locking a system down isn't really a good option either, because it incites being broken into (for reasonable uses), and leaves other users less able to determine what is resident in the system.
These are issues that google has largely avoided by putting little disclaimers that only the person installing the software will ever get to see. The disclaimers won't help to protect people who are going to be at risk.
Gmail is also in beta. A lot of people are using it.
Just because it's beta doesn't mean that they should temporarily ignore serious privacy issues. They have partly addressed security concerns by allowing the service to be turned off, but I'd bet that in order to protect ones-self, system caches would need to be wiped before re-enabling the desktop search.
I think it's good to let the 'million eyeballs' know what the implications of using it are.
I agree with the replies to my comment. Google isn't doing anything worse than what is already available.
Does that mean that they should releaase a tool that has some serious privacy-invasion concerns?
The fact that they are hugely popular, and that people might otherwise never realize the inherent privacy risk is exactly why I think it's good that this extra attention is being paid to google.
... and yes, I think IE vulnerabilities are terrible. I think people should switch to more secure browsers. But I'm not discussing browsers right now...
Isn't it time that media start to put up opposition to services that compromise privacy in fundamental ways? I think this bandwagon is one that isn't so bad to have going on.
Google does great things, but without such opposition, they might not keep all issues in proper perspective. The things they mention are very important.
I think the entire article is avoiding the main cause for people deleting MP3's.
It also says nothing about MP3 dying!?! The main post is really badly formulated. I think it's a troll, along with the original article.
They're not deleting MP3's because they shun the format. Most people wouldn't care if music was encoded into high-quality midi. They just want the music.
More likely, people are:
Deleting the crap they don't like to listen to.
Deleting from HDD the MP3's they have ARCHIVED onto CD or DVD.
Most people I know are using MP3 more than ever before. Most don't know about, and don't want to know about WMA, AAC, OGG or PCM. I know this, because I talk to people about DRM, and they don't know *anything* about how their music is encoded, other than it is 'the mp3 thing'.
I keep less music on my HDD now than a few years ago. Why? I can pop a 4.7gig DVD into my home or work computer, and listen to the MP3's for hours/days. I don't want to tie up that HDD space with MP3's, when the storage media is that convenient and cheap.
The same way that I wouldn't keep my MP3's on hundreds of flash drives, or in RAM. It's economics, who wants to store MP3's on non-portable, expensive HDD, when the alternatives are cheap and easy?
I bet that once people have significant quantities of any media format on their HDD, they will look into ways of archiving/deleting it.
Regardless of whether they are using winXP, winCE or winCar, do we really need a full OS in a car? I'd think that consumers would far prefer individual devices like MP3 players, portable gaming consoles, GPS units and cell phones, that can simply be hooked together, over an OS based central computer in a car.
It seems to me that this would add significant cost to a vehicle, with little gain.
How about gamers who want to upgrade? Their machines are often 1 year old.
How about business people who upgrade desktops yearly? Their machines are often in really good shape. With office 2000, and winme, why shouldn't they be able to re-sell the product.
If a machine was a year old, I think many people would be interested in buying it. The fact that the software licenses don't cover the next buyer is a serious problem, especially in cases such as computers donated to schools.
I'd say that in such cases, old software is worth at least as much as the old hardware, if not more. The old hardware won't run most newer software. Losing the software license means the hardware is much less valuable.
I agree that an old 386-33 is of little interest to most people. But that's like offering someone a vacuum cleaner from the 60's. It's many generations out of date.
What about a 500MHz system? Something that is 4-5 years old can be VERY useful. Old hardware doesn't mean antiquated or obsolete, rather used, or second hand.
What about buying windows98 on such a system? Why shouldn't we be able to purchase an old computer as a whole, licenses and all?
If a software is WORTH purchasing in the first place, shouldn't it have some residual value after it is used (after all, it can be in EXACTLY the same condition as it was originally purchased in). Software isn't 'used up' by use. So why should software lose all its value in a short period of time?
I'm not sure if your post was an honest-but-shortsighted reply, or a simple troll...
Software has inherent value, but with the restrictive licenses that are being used, software has a much lower value than hardware.
Hardware can be bought, used and re-sold. We aren't crying over hardware prices as long as we feel we can reaasonably use it.
Because of the tendancy to make their old products worthless by forcing upgrades (via security holes and file-format juggling), the effective value of MS software is much lower than it should be. Mind you, I think the prices are already much higher than they should be.
By limiting the use of the software to a single computer, instead of per person or per household (meaning I could install on both laptop and desktop), the software is worth less.
Furthermore, because software doesn't have any resale value, it's worth even less.
By changing their pricing model, licensing terms, and business practices, they could probably curb piracy.
I guess they would probably make far less profit in the first world, and so it's not a viable alternative for them. Instead they can try to make hardware manufacturers lower their prices, and get governments to enforce their licensing rules.
Seems funny to me that they cry about spilt milk like piracy in developing nations; where few people are wealthy enough to purchase hardware, let alone software.
[begin silly] I don't know exactly what it'd take, but I'd think 50 8-bit operations might be able to handle most floating point operations.
That'd mean each SX could handle 1 MFLOP... so we only need a million of them. At 3$ each... with radio-shack proto-boards... it would only cost around $10 million including assembly. [end silly]
Note that they don't specify the bus width of the SX-8 system. Is it 32 or 64 bit? More?
The plans on that site are obviously garbage. I agree it'd be really dumb to take apart a microwave oven, and point the Magnetron into a parabolic dish and spray stuff.
These things can be built to avoid frequencies that living tissue absorbs. Hence, they can be 'relatively harmless' to innocent bystanders. They are extremely efficient at knocking out electronics though.
Lots of places sell kits and plans. Not that I'd trust them, or build them, without fear of being shocked to death, beaten on by all the people who realize I have destroyed their property, and lighting whatever I plug it into on fire (impedence matching anyone?).
They're patenting the creation of such a device (characteristic filters and design) for use as an explosives detector. This is reasonable. As much as patenting a light bulb or a new kind of car engine. A light bulb is just a fancy resistor in a clear vacuum case, right? New LED's are just chemicals stuck between electrode's, right?
This is pretty basic chemistry, and it is quite interesting. My lab does similar stuff in the biomedical/chemical sensing area. We avoid work that involve weapons and things that can become 'projects of the year' (funding that appears and dissapears suddenly).
It is also nice to be able to publish your work, instead of having it classified. I have heard that some people who get into industrially or militarily classified research projects can't publish their work after (I don't know how many people this affects?). This can hamper their prospects for graduation, and means they can't use it as experience for getting other jobs.
I was recently given a TV by a friend, who had upgraded hers.
I very rarely watch tv, as I find few shows are a reasonable quality. When I do watch TV, the new tv occasionally crashes. When it crashes, it simply switches off, and won't restart for long periods of time (even after unplugging for several minutes). I wonder if it's a software thing?
Are TV's really this prone to poor programming practices?
It sure would be interesting to know why the TV in the article was emitting that frequency... an extra solder bridge? Poor programming? Malfunctioning display?
I guess the picture was still fine, or the owner would have returned it earlier, right?
How many other domestic devices that are FCC compliant, with the little 'rf safe' type stickers generate stong RF like this? I've often wondered about mice and motherboards, because I have occasionally run across a computer where the speakers pick up the digital signal from the encoders in the mice. So when the mouse is moved, you can hear a clicking sound from the speakers.
It is either a typo or an insult. Whichever the case, after 24 hours of being posted, it becomes obvious that it is no longer an overlooked typo.
Please fix such blatent misspellings. Canada is not spelled 'Cananda'. I'm sure that a significant number of readers, moderators and editors know this. Which leads me to wonder why it wasn't fixed.
Please don't ressurect the Oakley Thump 'Ugly' glasses topic... I'd bet that most of the people who buy them get home, look in the mirror and never wear them again.
I think the approach you are outlining is a very good idea.
I'd like to see it implemented.
I'm not sure it would work well for process interaction though... Would the *NIX posix interface need to have a complex security overhaul? Would pipes become subject to a series of security flags determined by a database of sub-user priviledges?
Group priviledges in such an implementation might be very hard to follow...
Slashdot Mirror
This is pretty neat. Low IR interference would be great. There is so much heating/cooling from exposure/shadow cycling as satellites orbit the earth that I'd guess it have cyclic noise.
They never really mentioned how high it would orbit.
120 feet of rail is a lot. I wonder how prone it'll be to damage?
The other telescope mentioned in the article seemed more interesting. Even though it's 1/4 the length, it had interferometers on board, and would probably be more useful for spectroscopic purposes.
Why mod my comment down?
How is it a troll? The link is dangerous, no?
A google redirect to a loud autoplaying sound is both invasive and annoying.
How does letting mods know about dangerous content qualify as a troll?
Here is a link to the Samsung website about the technology: http://www.samsung.com/Products/TFTLCD/Technology/ 4colorrandering.htm
I wouldn't complain too hard about the confusion in the details. They couldn't even spell 'rendering' right on their own site (4 color randering???).
It also discusses 'physicail' pixels. I dunno about that.
They seem to have created smaller pixels, which are spatially located across a different area than normal.
They then need fewer wires to connect the given number of pixels. Meaning a higher resolution with fewer interconnects. Maybe I'm completely wrong in this 1 minutes evaluation.
The neat thing is the overlap of their 'logical' pixel arrangements. It would seem they are using traditional dithering with a complicated arrangement of pixels. This should do exactly what they state. Ther weird thing is that their sub-pixel seems to have the wrong number of color sub-elements.
One would expect a ratio of 2:1:1 for green:red:blue emitters. They have 4:2:1. Maybe their red emitters are much brighter than the blue, which would make sense.
They mention replacing some rows with white pixels, but their diagrams don't show anything. Maybe the media-relations people just don't know how the technology works, and are making stuff up until someone corrects them.
thanks.
Things I didn't say:
What I did say: publicity of potential problems is good. Now people will know to check to see if the google desktop is running in the taskbar of public computers.
Are we supposed to tell the media not to report this kind of thing? I'm happy when I see an article on the dangers of spyware, because it's one less thing I have to explain in painstaking detail to friends and family.
What's not good about letting people know of a potential invasion of privacy?
We already allocate money to parties/candidates by allocating budgets based on vote support.
Why not get a chance of getting some money for voting.
If you think of all the people who don't vote, their money is being used to support the candidates anyways. Why not use some of it to help bolster voter turnout?
Even a $30 million prize would be quite significant and only cost around $0.10 per US citizen...
True.
The problem should also be exposed.
Too bad there doesn't seem to be a middle ground.
To me, it's not about the person who is installing the program in the first place, but rather side-effects that will occur when other people come along and either have to use a compromised computer, or have no clue that a computer is compromised.
It really should be the OS's job to maintain security like that. But in cases like libraries, internet cafes and school computing resources, it's frequently not a reasonable burden for admins to bear creating accounts for every single user that walks by.
Locking a system down isn't really a good option either, because it incites being broken into (for reasonable uses), and leaves other users less able to determine what is resident in the system.
These are issues that google has largely avoided by putting little disclaimers that only the person installing the software will ever get to see. The disclaimers won't help to protect people who are going to be at risk.
Gmail is also in beta. A lot of people are using it.
Just because it's beta doesn't mean that they should temporarily ignore serious privacy issues. They have partly addressed security concerns by allowing the service to be turned off, but I'd bet that in order to protect ones-self, system caches would need to be wiped before re-enabling the desktop search.
I think it's good to let the 'million eyeballs' know what the implications of using it are.
I agree with the replies to my comment. Google isn't doing anything worse than what is already available.
Does that mean that they should releaase a tool that has some serious privacy-invasion concerns?
The fact that they are hugely popular, and that people might otherwise never realize the inherent privacy risk is exactly why I think it's good that this extra attention is being paid to google.
... and yes, I think IE vulnerabilities are terrible. I think people should switch to more secure browsers. But I'm not discussing browsers right now...
Isn't it time that media start to put up opposition to services that compromise privacy in fundamental ways? I think this bandwagon is one that isn't so bad to have going on.
Google does great things, but without such opposition, they might not keep all issues in proper perspective. The things they mention are very important.
You seem to have missed the point.
Now we hear: blah blah blah GODZILLA blah blah 'ZILLA blah blah blah GODZILLA blah blah ...
;)
I think the entire article is avoiding the main cause for people deleting MP3's.
It also says nothing about MP3 dying!?! The main post is really badly formulated. I think it's a troll, along with the original article.
They're not deleting MP3's because they shun the format. Most people wouldn't care if music was encoded into high-quality midi. They just want the music.
More likely, people are:
Most people I know are using MP3 more than ever before. Most don't know about, and don't want to know about WMA, AAC, OGG or PCM. I know this, because I talk to people about DRM, and they don't know *anything* about how their music is encoded, other than it is 'the mp3 thing'.
I keep less music on my HDD now than a few years ago. Why? I can pop a 4.7gig DVD into my home or work computer, and listen to the MP3's for hours/days. I don't want to tie up that HDD space with MP3's, when the storage media is that convenient and cheap.
The same way that I wouldn't keep my MP3's on hundreds of flash drives, or in RAM. It's economics, who wants to store MP3's on non-portable, expensive HDD, when the alternatives are cheap and easy?
I bet that once people have significant quantities of any media format on their HDD, they will look into ways of archiving/deleting it.
Regardless of whether they are using winXP, winCE or winCar, do we really need a full OS in a car? I'd think that consumers would far prefer individual devices like MP3 players, portable gaming consoles, GPS units and cell phones, that can simply be hooked together, over an OS based central computer in a car.
It seems to me that this would add significant cost to a vehicle, with little gain.
How about gamers who want to upgrade? Their machines are often 1 year old.
How about business people who upgrade desktops yearly? Their machines are often in really good shape. With office 2000, and winme, why shouldn't they be able to re-sell the product.
If a machine was a year old, I think many people would be interested in buying it. The fact that the software licenses don't cover the next buyer is a serious problem, especially in cases such as computers donated to schools.
I'd say that in such cases, old software is worth at least as much as the old hardware, if not more. The old hardware won't run most newer software. Losing the software license means the hardware is much less valuable.
I agree that an old 386-33 is of little interest to most people. But that's like offering someone a vacuum cleaner from the 60's. It's many generations out of date.
What about a 500MHz system? Something that is 4-5 years old can be VERY useful. Old hardware doesn't mean antiquated or obsolete, rather used, or second hand.
What about buying windows98 on such a system? Why shouldn't we be able to purchase an old computer as a whole, licenses and all?
If a software is WORTH purchasing in the first place, shouldn't it have some residual value after it is used (after all, it can be in EXACTLY the same condition as it was originally purchased in). Software isn't 'used up' by use. So why should software lose all its value in a short period of time?
I'm not sure if your post was an honest-but-shortsighted reply, or a simple troll...
In my lab it's often below 17C / 62F or above 27C / 80F.
No wonder it takes us so long to graduate...
Software has inherent value, but with the restrictive licenses that are being used, software has a much lower value than hardware.
Hardware can be bought, used and re-sold. We aren't crying over hardware prices as long as we feel we can reaasonably use it.
Because of the tendancy to make their old products worthless by forcing upgrades (via security holes and file-format juggling), the effective value of MS software is much lower than it should be. Mind you, I think the prices are already much higher than they should be.
By limiting the use of the software to a single computer, instead of per person or per household (meaning I could install on both laptop and desktop), the software is worth less.
Furthermore, because software doesn't have any resale value, it's worth even less.
By changing their pricing model, licensing terms, and business practices, they could probably curb piracy.
I guess they would probably make far less profit in the first world, and so it's not a viable alternative for them. Instead they can try to make hardware manufacturers lower their prices, and get governments to enforce their licensing rules.
Seems funny to me that they cry about spilt milk like piracy in developing nations; where few people are wealthy enough to purchase hardware, let alone software.
I was picturing a massively parallel array of little PDIP Ubicom SX microcontrollers, all running at 50 MIPS. http://www.ubicom.com/processors/sx-family.htm
[begin silly] I don't know exactly what it'd take, but I'd think 50 8-bit operations might be able to handle most floating point operations.
That'd mean each SX could handle 1 MFLOP... so we only need a million of them. At 3$ each... with radio-shack proto-boards... it would only cost around $10 million including assembly. [end silly]
Note that they don't specify the bus width of the SX-8 system. Is it 32 or 64 bit? More?
The plans on that site are obviously garbage. I agree it'd be really dumb to take apart a microwave oven, and point the Magnetron into a parabolic dish and spray stuff.
These things can be built to avoid frequencies that living tissue absorbs. Hence, they can be 'relatively harmless' to innocent bystanders. They are extremely efficient at knocking out electronics though.
Lots of places sell kits and plans. Not that I'd trust them, or build them, without fear of being shocked to death, beaten on by all the people who realize I have destroyed their property, and lighting whatever I plug it into on fire (impedence matching anyone?).
Such as http://www.plans-kits.com/plans/plans.html
They're patenting the creation of such a device (characteristic filters and design) for use as an explosives detector. This is reasonable. As much as patenting a light bulb or a new kind of car engine. A light bulb is just a fancy resistor in a clear vacuum case, right? New LED's are just chemicals stuck between electrode's, right?
This is pretty basic chemistry, and it is quite interesting. My lab does similar stuff in the biomedical/chemical sensing area. We avoid work that involve weapons and things that can become 'projects of the year' (funding that appears and dissapears suddenly).
It is also nice to be able to publish your work, instead of having it classified. I have heard that some people who get into industrially or militarily classified research projects can't publish their work after (I don't know how many people this affects?). This can hamper their prospects for graduation, and means they can't use it as experience for getting other jobs.
I was recently given a TV by a friend, who had upgraded hers.
I very rarely watch tv, as I find few shows are a reasonable quality. When I do watch TV, the new tv occasionally crashes. When it crashes, it simply switches off, and won't restart for long periods of time (even after unplugging for several minutes). I wonder if it's a software thing?
Are TV's really this prone to poor programming practices?
It sure would be interesting to know why the TV in the article was emitting that frequency... an extra solder bridge? Poor programming? Malfunctioning display?
I guess the picture was still fine, or the owner would have returned it earlier, right?
How many other domestic devices that are FCC compliant, with the little 'rf safe' type stickers generate stong RF like this? I've often wondered about mice and motherboards, because I have occasionally run across a computer where the speakers pick up the digital signal from the encoders in the mice. So when the mouse is moved, you can hear a clicking sound from the speakers.
It is either a typo or an insult. Whichever the case, after 24 hours of being posted, it becomes obvious that it is no longer an overlooked typo.
Please fix such blatent misspellings. Canada is not spelled 'Cananda'. I'm sure that a significant number of readers, moderators and editors know this. Which leads me to wonder why it wasn't fixed.
Please don't ressurect the Oakley Thump 'Ugly' glasses topic... I'd bet that most of the people who buy them get home, look in the mirror and never wear them again.
Didn't we already talk about those extensively already? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/25/132422 9&tid=141&tid=126&tid=1
We should all chip in, buy a couple and send them to Iraq so W can find justification for the invasion.
Well, then again, it'd look a bit silly since he changed the reason so many times since.
I think the approach you are outlining is a very good idea.
I'd like to see it implemented.
I'm not sure it would work well for process interaction though... Would the *NIX posix interface need to have a complex security overhaul? Would pipes become subject to a series of security flags determined by a database of sub-user priviledges?
Group priviledges in such an implementation might be very hard to follow...