"Mars is our sister planet. It's small, cold and no liquid on the surface... however, we do see water in its frozen form," Smith reported.
and...
Touching down inside the arctic circle, just before summer on Mars and at the end of spring, ice will have retreated from the area. "We're going to land on dry soil. We can start digging immediately," Smith said.
If the ice is retreating in spring/summer then it's melting, right? Where's the liquid water going?
I think you'll find that the comms blimps you're remembering are flying somewhat higher than the cloud base (ie: the stratosphere) so their flight wouldn't be affected by the storm.
Comms, on the other hand, would likely be disrupted by all the static electricity and lightning until a storm passed by. No worse than terrestrial cellular towers, though.
As reported by ZDNet Australia on Tuesday, Linux Australia Inc has secured Linus Torvald's support to register the word "Linux" as a trademark with Australia's intellectual property regulator. The move is designed to prevent local companies attempting to claim the word as their own, but it will also throw open the possibility that local Linux vendors will start paying royalties to trade on the term for the first time.
It's an upgraded Applied Engineering RamKeeper GS!
Shame on me for mentioning 1986 hardware for an Apple.:)
Seriously, though, I'd love to play with one of these if it could be made to run with the full 8GB. What a shame it doesn't support SATA 2.0 with its increased bandwidth.
Reading the article indicates that a UPS is still required at the switch.
What concerns me is if the FCC makes a ruling to the effect of "all VoIP solutions must continue to operate (to provide emergency services) during a power outage."
Will this force all of the moms-and-pops who are running VoIP on their home computer to buy and install a UPS before they'll be allowed to connect to a VoIP service provider?
There's plenty of GPS solutions out there for PDA's and notebooks using CF cards, PCMCIA cards or Bluetooth.
Why don't you find something you can stick in your notebook, then you only need to worry about charging your notebook? Most notebooks these days come with an auto-switching power supply and you can even use cigarette-lighter chargers in the car. Plus, you can do all of your waypoints and mapping on the notebook in realtime and not have to muck about with pencil and paper or waypoint memories in a handheld GPS unit.
Maybe I wasn't being perfectly clear: Safe-T-Cam is completely automated. The only time a human operator is involved is if there is a dispute, which is comparatively rare. I should have mentioned that Safe-T-Cam also checks driving patterns as we have regulations here about heavy vehicle drivers not exceeding X hours in a sitting and having at least X hour breaks between sittings.
If you're still using Photoshop-type apps to manually enhance, crop and read licence plates can I offer you some very expensive software engineers?:)
A vehicle could have under-engine/cockpit RFID transponder that would be read by road sensors...
Why go to such an expensive system?
We have a system here in Australia called Safe-T-Cam, which for the moment applies only to heavy vehicles like trucks (and maybe buses). Digital camera systems are placed at various points along major highways to photograph licence plates as vehicles pass and feed them to a central system where they are timestamped. Since the positions of the cameras (and hence the distance between them) is known, the average speed of a vehicle can be calculated by examining photos from two locations along the highway - if it's too high then the driver gets an automatic ticket.
It's cheap. It doesn't require retrofitting technology to existing vehicles. It ensures privacy because it can't be used to track vehicles (in the sense that you can't say "687-NWR is at this specific lattitude and longitude"). And it wouldn't be difficult to expand such a system to main roads in addition to highways.
There's nothing wrong with an employer implementing biometrics, if it's an at-will company. It's up to the employee as to whether that proposition is acceptable.
Geez, what company do you work for? Ours always come to us with An Idea they want us implement - something which we tell them is really dumb, painful and generally bad. They go "uh-huh" and force it through anyways. Then they come back to us afterwards whinging and whining about how dumb, painful and generally bad The Idea is, but by that time it can't be undone and so we have to waste our time and energy having to maintain it.
Besides if you are talking about its monopoly in the PC OS market, this move hardly affects it one way or another.
If anything this will have a negative effect on the security of Windows systems. There are few problems with viruses on *nix systems, the majority of anti-virus profiles being used to strip out Windoze viruses (eg: passing through *nix mail servers) before they hit the Windoze platforms.
Cutting off their nose to spite their face mayhaps?
While it would be nice if they supported the optional features, it's actually the developers who continue to use alpha channel transparency PNG that are deviating from the W3C recommendation.
By "Developers" I'm assuming you mean "Web Developers." "Software Developers" (implementors) of the PNG stream format are generating non-compliant crud if they can't read/write the "optional" alpha channel.
It seems that you have incorrectly interpreted the Abstract of the specification. I might direct you to the actual specification itself where in 15.2.3 Conformance of PNG Decoders it says:
e. All types of PNG images (indexed-colour, truecolour, greyscale, truecolour with alpha, and greyscale with alpha) are processed. For example, decoders which are part of viewers running on indexed-colour display hardware shall reduce truecolour images to indexed format for viewing.
So yes, it is optional for an alpha channel to appear in a PNG data stream (a graphic artist may not want to use an alpha channel on his latest piece of "art") but if there is one present in the stream then it *must* be handled by the software reading it. It's optional as to whether that software actually does anything meaningful with it (a given display device may not support it), but a best-effort is expected.
Re:Who are the people in that picture?
on
Zeta Goes Gold
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If this thing is actually based on BeOS then by looking at the support for Xircom PCMCIA cards I'd say it was an early version 5.0 source:
The Through the city at the speed of light demo is all very lens-effect-y, but there's no account of colour-shift. As you get faster the approaching wavelengths will shorten (Blue Shift) until you get fast enough that all (normally) visible light shifts up and out of our acuity.
Everything you'd see would be sub-infrared shifted into your spectrum, and this doesn't seem to take that into account.
This one's using a Tuned Electromagnetic Resonator Collar (TERC) which relies on capactive changes due muscle and tissue moving about.
It is, apparently, otherwise based on the electromyographic sensor technology which NASA developed to have subvocalized speech drive a web browser: Your link, sans space char.
Open source != Linux. There's more involved here than a few nasty proprietary protocols people want to port to Linux.
For instance: - On the Windows platform itself, there's a number of open source apps which can't do everything MS apps can because the MS apps are using undocumented API's. - non-Windows media players can't make use of extensions to AVI/WMA and DRM because of closed MS specifications.
It would be a big win for open source if MS just released full documentation of all of their API's - it would certainly level the playing field somewhat.
A "sponsor program" to allow patents or core algorithms to be used in a royalty-free fashion would be another big win, but I doubt that would ever happen.
Manufacturing development of LightFoil(TM) based on the laboratory benchmark is currently underway with a specific power target that will exceed 1000 W/kg. Engineering samples should be available in 2Q 2005.
Cool! Now I can put a 1/2 kg panel on my electric glider and stay up all day!
Microsoft now has the chance to redeem itself with regard to Web interoperability. All it needs to do is make sure IE7 passes the Acid2 test before shipping.
I might point out that the majority of users are obviously *NOT* concerned with interoperability or they wouldn't be using MS-IE in the first place.
Whilst I think interoperability is good (and I don't use MS-IE, except for that danged Add/Remove Programs applet) people need to realize that it's the Web Developers who are making the most noise about interoperability, and unfortunately, the Web Developers are in the community minority.
One could argue that MS isn't likely to pay attention to the minority purely from a Business/Economics point of view. (ie: it costs them money to satisfy "developer whims" on a free/bundled product.) Perhaps they'll start to pay attention once their marketshare gets eroded by Firefox and other browsers.:)
"We surf peer-to-peer music networks," Jonathan Lamy of the RIAA communications office says. "We look for people who are offering songs, and if they have a substantial number of songs, we take note of all the songs they are offering for distribution and their IP addresses."
and:
... the court ordered her to pay damages of $750 for each of 30 songs she was found to have downloaded illegally,... but it is worth pointing out that damages of $750 per infringement is the minimum the RIAA could have received.
OK, so RIAA is admitting they know exactly which songs each person they are suing has and that they are getting a minimum $750 each for them (via the court proceedings). That's way more than they could ever hope to get through conventional retail sales or download sales: but are any artists seeing any benefit from this?
To me, it sounds like RIAA has just opened-up a new revenue stream and like it so much because they get way more income for less expenditure (ie: no royalties, manufacturing nor distribution costs).
Are there any recording artists reading slashdot? If you get a statement breaking-down your royalties, is anything attributed to P2P litigation?
Granted, the review article is of poor clarity and contradicts itself often.
There's more information about the device at the company's own web site, www.jackito-pda.com. Addressing some of your issues by using the Jakito at a glance guide [PDF, 275kb]:
Yes, it does run on a single AA (double-A, not triple-A). They quote battery life as ranging from "a few hours to a few months."
The screen is 4.5 inches, 320x240 (QVGA). It is available in black-and-white LCD (hence "a few weeks" battery life), 16-bit colour TFT LCD (giving "a few hours"), or bistable black-and-white (sounds like e-Ink/e-Paper tech, giving "a few months")
Considering what it does and its incompatability with either Palm or PocketPC, I don't think I'd be paying $600 (B&W) or $738 (colour) for it either.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
and...
If the ice is retreating in spring/summer then it's melting, right? Where's the liquid water going?
I think you'll find that the comms blimps you're remembering are flying somewhat higher than the cloud base (ie: the stratosphere) so their flight wouldn't be affected by the storm.
Comms, on the other hand, would likely be disrupted by all the static electricity and lightning until a storm passed by. No worse than terrestrial cellular towers, though.
This isn't exactly the latest news. From ZDNet Australia, 13-August-2004:
Still not particularly good news, though.
It's an upgraded Applied Engineering RamKeeper GS!
:)
Shame on me for mentioning 1986 hardware for an Apple.
Seriously, though, I'd love to play with one of these if it could be made to run with the full 8GB. What a shame it doesn't support SATA 2.0 with its increased bandwidth.
Reading the article indicates that a UPS is still required at the switch.
What concerns me is if the FCC makes a ruling to the effect of "all VoIP solutions must continue to operate (to provide emergency services) during a power outage."
Will this force all of the moms-and-pops who are running VoIP on their home computer to buy and install a UPS before they'll be allowed to connect to a VoIP service provider?
There's plenty of GPS solutions out there for PDA's and notebooks using CF cards, PCMCIA cards or Bluetooth.
Why don't you find something you can stick in your notebook, then you only need to worry about charging your notebook? Most notebooks these days come with an auto-switching power supply and you can even use cigarette-lighter chargers in the car. Plus, you can do all of your waypoints and mapping on the notebook in realtime and not have to muck about with pencil and paper or waypoint memories in a handheld GPS unit.
Maybe I wasn't being perfectly clear: Safe-T-Cam is completely automated. The only time a human operator is involved is if there is a dispute, which is comparatively rare. I should have mentioned that Safe-T-Cam also checks driving patterns as we have regulations here about heavy vehicle drivers not exceeding X hours in a sitting and having at least X hour breaks between sittings.
If you're still using Photoshop-type apps to manually enhance, crop and read licence plates can I offer you some very expensive software engineers? :)
Here is some more information about the initiative if you're interested:
Safe-T-Cam overview
Safe-T-Cam brochure (PDF via HTML)
Why go to such an expensive system?
We have a system here in Australia called Safe-T-Cam, which for the moment applies only to heavy vehicles like trucks (and maybe buses). Digital camera systems are placed at various points along major highways to photograph licence plates as vehicles pass and feed them to a central system where they are timestamped. Since the positions of the cameras (and hence the distance between them) is known, the average speed of a vehicle can be calculated by examining photos from two locations along the highway - if it's too high then the driver gets an automatic ticket.
It's cheap. It doesn't require retrofitting technology to existing vehicles. It ensures privacy because it can't be used to track vehicles (in the sense that you can't say "687-NWR is at this specific lattitude and longitude"). And it wouldn't be difficult to expand such a system to main roads in addition to highways.
Geez, what company do you work for? Ours always come to us with An Idea they want us implement - something which we tell them is really dumb, painful and generally bad. They go "uh-huh" and force it through anyways. Then they come back to us afterwards whinging and whining about how dumb, painful and generally bad The Idea is, but by that time it can't be undone and so we have to waste our time and energy having to maintain it.
Highlander II, Shield Corp
If anything this will have a negative effect on the security of Windows systems. There are few problems with viruses on *nix systems, the majority of anti-virus profiles being used to strip out Windoze viruses (eg: passing through *nix mail servers) before they hit the Windoze platforms.
Cutting off their nose to spite their face mayhaps?
By "Developers" I'm assuming you mean "Web Developers." "Software Developers" (implementors) of the PNG stream format are generating non-compliant crud if they can't read/write the "optional" alpha channel.
It seems that you have incorrectly interpreted the Abstract of the specification. I might direct you to the actual specification itself where in 15.2.3 Conformance of PNG Decoders it says:
So yes, it is optional for an alpha channel to appear in a PNG data stream (a graphic artist may not want to use an alpha channel on his latest piece of "art") but if there is one present in the stream then it *must* be handled by the software reading it. It's optional as to whether that software actually does anything meaningful with it (a given display device may not support it), but a best-effort is expected.
If this thing is actually based on BeOS then by looking at the support for Xircom PCMCIA cards I'd say it was an early version 5.0 source:
PCMCIA Communication Cards
Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see a single 32-bit CardBus adapater in there.
Are you still running CPM or something? dir's been shell-integrated for as long as I can remember.
OK, read the article.
The Through the city at the speed of light demo is all very lens-effect-y, but there's no account of colour-shift. As you get faster the approaching wavelengths will shorten (Blue Shift) until you get fast enough that all (normally) visible light shifts up and out of our acuity.
Everything you'd see would be sub-infrared shifted into your spectrum, and this doesn't seem to take that into account.
It only took a month from the Nano Tube '05 Conference for this to hit the regular press, but Motorola announced this technology back in 2003.
This one's using a Tuned Electromagnetic Resonator Collar (TERC) which relies on capactive changes due muscle and tissue moving about.
It is, apparently, otherwise based on the electromyographic sensor technology which NASA developed to have subvocalized speech drive a web browser: Your link, sans space char.
Open source != Linux. There's more involved here than a few nasty proprietary protocols people want to port to Linux.
For instance:
- On the Windows platform itself, there's a number of open source apps which can't do everything MS apps can because the MS apps are using undocumented API's.
- non-Windows media players can't make use of extensions to AVI/WMA and DRM because of closed MS specifications.
It would be a big win for open source if MS just released full documentation of all of their API's - it would certainly level the playing field somewhat.
A "sponsor program" to allow patents or core algorithms to be used in a royalty-free fashion would be another big win, but I doubt that would ever happen.
For those who are curious...e rs/ants.html
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/roboticexplor
I might point out that the majority of users are obviously *NOT* concerned with interoperability or they wouldn't be using MS-IE in the first place.
Whilst I think interoperability is good (and I don't use MS-IE, except for that danged Add/Remove Programs applet) people need to realize that it's the Web Developers who are making the most noise about interoperability, and unfortunately, the Web Developers are in the community minority.
One could argue that MS isn't likely to pay attention to the minority purely from a Business/Economics point of view. (ie: it costs them money to satisfy "developer whims" on a free/bundled product.) Perhaps they'll start to pay attention once their marketshare gets eroded by Firefox and other browsers. :)
*crosses fingers*
OK, so RIAA is admitting they know exactly which songs each person they are suing has and that they are getting a minimum $750 each for them (via the court proceedings). That's way more than they could ever hope to get through conventional retail sales or download sales: but are any artists seeing any benefit from this?
To me, it sounds like RIAA has just opened-up a new revenue stream and like it so much because they get way more income for less expenditure (ie: no royalties, manufacturing nor distribution costs).
Are there any recording artists reading slashdot? If you get a statement breaking-down your royalties, is anything attributed to P2P litigation?
Granted, the review article is of poor clarity and contradicts itself often.
There's more information about the device at the company's own web site, www.jackito-pda.com. Addressing some of your issues by using the Jakito at a glance guide [PDF, 275kb]:
Considering what it does and its incompatability with either Palm or PocketPC, I don't think I'd be paying $600 (B&W) or $738 (colour) for it either.