Agreed, really really small devices can be extremely hard to use. How many people still have a wrist-watch calculator?
I've seen the remote-control on a watch thing (a guy in the office has one) - and it's a good idea because it has so few buttons.
In the absence of an un-slashdotted web-page I'll have to assume it's not fully voice activated (you go girl, if it is). Web-browsing may also be a little - small:)
Still, I'll be waiting until they get the 21" screen version:)
Iraq is HOPELESSLY outclassed by the American military, the physical outcome is a foregone conclusion. "Shock and awe" is accurate, I'd hate to be an Iraqi soldier right now.
"Shock and Awe" is not going to be the outcome of the "new regime" and "friendly democracy" that will be put in place after the war (if the political side does not collapse) - more like same old same old. You can't impose American free market orthodoxy on a country in this stage of development (look at all the discussions on patents and trade abuse).
Afghanistan is now perilously close to the position it was in that led to the taliban takeover - warlords and chaos.
3 billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines.
The more configurable ones (and I haven't had to configure one in years - a cisco I believe), can be telnetted into and, reconfigured.
However, the article talks about weaknesses in the protocol as well as configuration problems.
However, a misconfigured router, or one that has been compromised by an online intruder, can cause chaos by advertising itself as the best path to an unrelated network
The problem is caused by the BGP protocol and the fact that the routers trust each other for information. Insert "trusted" script kiddie here. - chaos ensues.
The company is working with major labels in both the US and the UK and expects to play a major role in reversing the downward music sales trend.
Definitely not, it has been suggested (tentatively perhaps) - that it just might be the culture of mass-produced bands that is killing sales.
If this does not reduce the downward sales they'll make a stronger case for anti-piracy measures. Mathematically, the music is perfect, obviously they are being subverted by terrorists.
Seems the only way out is to live through music/human rights hell for a few years until the whole beast collapses under its own weight? Economic downturn - billions lost... yeuch. So avoidable, just like global warming.
Be careful how you refer to "accidental" inventions... the Newton apple story is considered definitely apocryphal
There are quite a lot of "eureka!" stories about greek philosophers, again with no way of verifying whether they are true or not. It is likely that Newton arrived at his theories after some diligent thinking while at his relatives farm.
In googles case, accidental application of a well-designed system is NOT the same as accidentally writing good code:)
1: Notoriously hard to debug (I don't know anybody who can write a few hundred lines of asm code without making a mistake)
2: Slow:).... remember there's a code cache, if you write to code, it'll flush it (unless you have a chipset that supports non-write-through cache such as PS2 (I've tried it))... and it'll have to flush it at some stage anyway. It's not a magic bullet.
3: We forgot it for a reason: Intel have branch prediction, which is a GODSEND - modify your code and you lose it for all those conditional jumps
I wrote some self modifying assembly code for a robot controller back in university CS - it was a bastard to debug because I hadn't meant to write self modifying code in the first place:)) - want to write to register 9 on an old motorolla chip?
Sure everything we do is a slippery slope, but it seems like the ACLU are bringing up the fact that we're on one now with broader implications than just this matter.
Let's not forget though, that for horrible endings, you can't get much worse than the military - we MUST not end up with the military being involved in ANY aspect of civilian life. The military are a part of the state, and their only function should be in the defence of that state (pre-emptive strikes are a different discussion).
In most modern democracies there are three "organs" to government - with surprisingly little variation (though the states has a wierdly powerful president): the lawmakers, the judiciary and the law enforcers. They keep a check on each other (judges don't make laws, politicians don't decide when they get applied, and neither arrest culprits). It's an absolutely brilliant system, worked on by great minds (i.e. voltaire et al)... if you mess with it you can bring disaster of an unimaginable magnitude on your head.
I've never seen the film, but I've read the series (so I haven't seen the shout sequence!)
The story was HUGE, and there was a lot left to the reader to figure out (much like a david lynch film). On my first reading, there was a lot of stuff that made little sense to me, and there's (seemingly) a huge amount less in the animated film?
Now think about stephen spielberg and Minority Report - American Moviemakers need to make millions back on blockbusters so CONFUSION IS BAD - they have to explain EVERY single damn thing to the audience as if we were morons (gggrrrr!!!!)
Combine gigantic story and over-explanation and what do you get? 1 of 3 things: a 7 film akira cycle (might be cool), a cut down version of easy-on-the-brain rubbish or film makers doing their best to get a film that compares favourably with the cartoon (I think that's the best we can hope for). my.02 Euro:)
Re:Nominee for next year - Shoe Size & ....
on
Ig Nobels Awarded
·
· Score: 1
"stretched" !!!????!?!???!!!
Whether this is done by the women of the world, or a scientific team, I'd prefer to bow out, and leave the "stretched" length of my penis as a mystery
hmmm... I had a look through the inventions that : "cannot or should not be reproduced."
For shame on giving an award to the under-ease (air-tight underpants that have a carbon filter to stop gas emmisions from smelling too bad)
Have a read of the web-pages, there are people with pretty embarrassingly horrible problems (80% of colon removed, crohns disease, spastic colon etc.) who cannot control their "emmissions"! It's kinda funny - but it shouldn't get a prize like this:)
messages are entirely secure? What happens when the 1 time key is lost/captured (I know it's currently impossible)? Then you have the same worry - the original message is not well hidden (no legwork) - so the 1 time key IS effectively the message
doing it over the air or over a fibre optic cable is uninteresting to the "unbreakable" nature of the encoding scheme. "unbreakable" suggests that we now know everything there is to know, and we can sit back with a huge grin knowing we are safe forever from crackers. I think that's a little premature:)
Absolutely, you'll always have problems with "soft" systems. This can solve a lot of those problems though, detecting if someone interfered with the message, the inviolability of the message in transit etc.
But that's just the problem, it doesn't keep it secure AFTER transmission, you have to go back to the old reliables (like PGP) - which may be broken by quantum computers:)) It looks like a message may only be safe in transit, and at no other time when we use quantum methods.
Excellent book for lay-people and crypto-beginners: Review Here
This has been a working theory for years (and the book suggests it had been done across a distance of several hundred meters back then!)
I hate it when people say "wow, we have an unbreakable code now". We find out new things and rubbish old theories about the universe and it's properties all the time, we may have violated the second law of thermodynamics, what's to say this is "unbreakable" - it's only secure so far;)
It is already taking years to process a years worth of data (millions of years of computer time), so this is going to take longer, but it NEVER happened in real time:)
Skin tones are hard to do because the visual cortex is wired to recognise humans and spots inconsistencies pretty quickly. I've been working with a friend who produces MMS applications for the Nokia 7650.
One of the applications was a slot machine, and it looked great! The colors are simple, and it came out fine. A lot of the content of the internet is still made up of text and icons, which don't have very stringent requirements on color.
We're still going to see a lot of money being put into palletizing for swapping photos of family and loved (in oh so many ways) ones.
"Submarine patenting" does not quite fit this story - this is a patent that was in existence some time ago. But it is not always the case that someone with a patent that affects an existing product will win, see:
Pavel v Sony Corporation and Others - The Times 22 March 1996
It's generally a case of "whoever has the biggest lawyer, has the strongest patent"
This particular case is not all that interesting in the "patenter vs. corporation" stakes because the patent was filed recently, and e-bay knew about it. They were obviously in the wrong.
What IS interesting is that this patent is ridiculously simplistic and obvious - so we're hoping for the big, evil corporation to beat the "little guy" inventor:) . I think we'd end up behind M$ if they had to protect themselves from this kind of idiocy, corporations come and go, but patents live for a long,long time. p.s It doesn't matter if the "little guy" is little or not, he's an individual against a corporation, and that's how it will be viewed
Middleware companies (I work for one) - produce solutions for game programmers in areas that are traditionally "hard". Few game developers nowadays produce their own graphics engine (opengl, directx, renderware are used). Physics middleware is establishing itself (havok and mathengine), and there is a feeling that AI middleware will be big when it comes.
Game developers think "why should I put 6 months programming into something that probably won't look as good as what the dedicated guys can do?"
Game players nowadays don't want "just" good graphics or AI or sound or physics, they want a completely immersive experience, and this is often impossible for a single team of developers to produce in any realistic time-frame
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, really really small devices can be extremely hard to use. How many people still have a wrist-watch calculator?
:)
:)
I've seen the remote-control on a watch thing (a guy in the office has one) - and it's a good idea because it has so few buttons.
In the absence of an un-slashdotted web-page I'll have to assume it's not fully voice activated (you go girl, if it is). Web-browsing may also be a little - small
Still, I'll be waiting until they get the 21" screen version
Seriously, this thing is waterproof.
Iraq is HOPELESSLY outclassed by the American military, the physical outcome is a foregone conclusion. "Shock and awe" is accurate, I'd hate to be an Iraqi soldier right now.
"Shock and Awe" is not going to be the outcome of the "new regime" and "friendly democracy" that will be put in place after the war (if the political side does not collapse) - more like same old same old. You can't impose American free market orthodoxy on a country in this stage of development (look at all the discussions on patents and trade abuse).
Afghanistan is now perilously close to the position it was in that led to the taliban takeover - warlords and chaos.
3 billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines.
the T800 is next
The more configurable ones (and I haven't had to configure one in years - a cisco I believe), can be telnetted into and, reconfigured.
However, the article talks about weaknesses in the protocol as well as configuration problems.
However, a misconfigured router, or one that has been compromised by an online intruder, can cause chaos by advertising itself as the best path to an unrelated network
The problem is caused by the BGP protocol and the fact that the routers trust each other for information. Insert "trusted" script kiddie here. - chaos ensues.
The company is working with major labels in both the US and the UK and expects to play a major role in reversing the downward music sales trend.
Definitely not, it has been suggested (tentatively perhaps) - that it just might be the culture of mass-produced bands that is killing sales.
If this does not reduce the downward sales they'll make a stronger case for anti-piracy measures. Mathematically, the music is perfect, obviously they are being subverted by terrorists.
Seems the only way out is to live through music/human rights hell for a few years until the whole beast collapses under its own weight? Economic downturn - billions lost... yeuch. So avoidable, just like global warming.
do not upgrade?
A lot of people use windows out there, A LOT. Open-source software et al. need to get their software to these users.
Go to the register and read many stories about just how hard it is to stay out of the upgrade-cycle-of-death that is windows software licensing
Be careful how you refer to "accidental" inventions... the Newton apple story is considered definitely apocryphal
:)
There are quite a lot of "eureka!" stories about greek philosophers, again with no way of verifying whether they are true or not. It is likely that Newton arrived at his theories after some diligent thinking while at his relatives farm.
In googles case, accidental application of a well-designed system is NOT the same as accidentally writing good code
cheap disposable booster pushing a reusable people capsule
cool! Reuseable people
Actually, Sony produced PS2gl, an open source port to the PS2. It's got some extensions in there to cope with the specialised hardware of the PS2.
It may not be as fast as some implementations - but it's indicative of the porting efforts going on.
3 problems with self modifying code:
:) .... remember there's a code cache, if you write to code, it'll flush it (unless you have a chipset that supports non-write-through cache such as PS2 (I've tried it))... and it'll have to flush it at some stage anyway. It's not a magic bullet.
:)) - want to write to register 9 on an old motorolla chip?
1: Notoriously hard to debug (I don't know anybody who can write a few hundred lines of asm code without making a mistake)
2: Slow
3: We forgot it for a reason: Intel have branch prediction, which is a GODSEND - modify your code and you lose it for all those conditional jumps
I wrote some self modifying assembly code for a robot controller back in university CS - it was a bastard to debug because I hadn't meant to write self modifying code in the first place
A Utopia!! I'm breathless with excitement - it'd be like that film "the beach", except we'd really succeed this time!!!!!
Count me in !!! We could make a beowulf cluster of them!!!!!!
Sure everything we do is a slippery slope, but it seems like the ACLU are bringing up the fact that we're on one now with broader implications than just this matter.
Let's not forget though, that for horrible endings, you can't get much worse than the military - we MUST not end up with the military being involved in ANY aspect of civilian life. The military are a part of the state, and their only function should be in the defence of that state (pre-emptive strikes are a different discussion).
In most modern democracies there are three "organs" to government - with surprisingly little variation (though the states has a wierdly powerful president): the lawmakers, the judiciary and the law enforcers. They keep a check on each other (judges don't make laws, politicians don't decide when they get applied, and neither arrest culprits). It's an absolutely brilliant system, worked on by great minds (i.e. voltaire et al)... if you mess with it you can bring disaster of an unimaginable magnitude on your head.
I've never seen the film, but I've read the series (so I haven't seen the shout sequence!)
.02 Euro :)
The story was HUGE, and there was a lot left to the reader to figure out (much like a david lynch film). On my first reading, there was a lot of stuff that made little sense to me, and there's (seemingly) a huge amount less in the animated film?
Now think about stephen spielberg and Minority Report - American Moviemakers need to make millions back on blockbusters so CONFUSION IS BAD - they have to explain EVERY single damn thing to the audience as if we were morons (gggrrrr!!!!)
Combine gigantic story and over-explanation and what do you get? 1 of 3 things: a 7 film akira cycle (might be cool), a cut down version of easy-on-the-brain rubbish or film makers doing their best to get a film that compares favourably with the cartoon (I think that's the best we can hope for).
my
"stretched" !!!????!?!???!!!
Whether this is done by the women of the world, or a scientific team, I'd prefer to bow out, and leave the "stretched" length of my penis as a mystery
hmmm... I had a look through the inventions that : "cannot or should not be reproduced."
:)
For shame on giving an award to the under-ease (air-tight underpants that have a carbon filter to stop gas emmisions from smelling too bad)
Have a read of the web-pages, there are people with pretty embarrassingly horrible problems (80% of colon removed, crohns disease, spastic colon etc.) who cannot control their "emmissions"! It's kinda funny - but it shouldn't get a prize like this
:))
messages are entirely secure? What happens when the 1 time key is lost/captured (I know it's currently impossible)? Then you have the same worry - the original message is not well hidden (no legwork) - so the 1 time key IS effectively the message
Wrong point,
:)
doing it over the air or over a fibre optic cable is uninteresting to the "unbreakable" nature of the encoding scheme. "unbreakable" suggests that we now know everything there is to know, and we can sit back with a huge grin knowing we are safe forever from crackers. I think that's a little premature
Absolutely, you'll always have problems with "soft" systems. This can solve a lot of those problems though, detecting if someone interfered with the message, the inviolability of the message in transit etc.
:)) It looks like a message may only be safe in transit, and at no other time when we use quantum methods.
But that's just the problem, it doesn't keep it secure AFTER transmission, you have to go back to the old reliables (like PGP) - which may be broken by quantum computers
Excellent book for lay-people and crypto-beginners: Review Here
;)
This has been a working theory for years (and the book suggests it had been done across a distance of several hundred meters back then!)
I hate it when people say "wow, we have an unbreakable code now". We find out new things and rubbish old theories about the universe and it's properties all the time, we may have violated the second law of thermodynamics, what's to say this is "unbreakable" - it's only secure so far
It is already taking years to process a years worth of data (millions of years of computer time), so this is going to take longer, but it NEVER happened in real time :)
Skin tones are hard to do because the visual cortex is wired to recognise humans and spots inconsistencies pretty quickly. I've been working with a friend who produces MMS applications for the Nokia 7650.
One of the applications was a slot machine, and it looked great! The colors are simple, and it came out fine. A lot of the content of the internet is still made up of text and icons, which don't have very stringent requirements on color.
We're still going to see a lot of money being put into palletizing for swapping photos of family and loved (in oh so many ways) ones.
"Submarine patenting" does not quite fit this story - this is a patent that was in existence some time ago. But it is not always the case that someone with a patent that affects an existing product will win, see:
:) . I think we'd end up behind M$ if they had to protect themselves from this kind of idiocy, corporations come and go, but patents live for a long,long time.
Pavel v Sony Corporation and Others - The Times 22 March 1996
It's generally a case of "whoever has the biggest lawyer, has the strongest patent"
This particular case is not all that interesting in the "patenter vs. corporation" stakes because the patent was filed recently, and e-bay knew about it. They were obviously in the wrong.
What IS interesting is that this patent is ridiculously simplistic and obvious - so we're hoping for the big, evil corporation to beat the "little guy" inventor
p.s It doesn't matter if the "little guy" is little or not, he's an individual against a corporation, and that's how it will be viewed
Middleware companies (I work for one) - produce solutions for game programmers in areas that are traditionally "hard". Few game developers nowadays produce their own graphics engine (opengl, directx, renderware are used). Physics middleware is establishing itself (havok and mathengine), and there is a feeling that AI middleware will be big when it comes.
Game developers think "why should I put 6 months programming into something that probably won't look as good as what the dedicated guys can do?" Game players nowadays don't want "just" good graphics or AI or sound or physics, they want a completely immersive experience, and this is often impossible for a single team of developers to produce in any realistic time-frame