Saving lives
on
NYT on RFID
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Not so long ago, we had a story here in the Netherlands where a shop was able to locate people who bought a certain item, which was poluted by someone wanting to damage a company, because these people had used a bonus card, with a unique number identifying them, and because the shop did register who sold what. Some people had become seriously ill after eating the contaminated product. Luckily, they all recovered.
The real test will be whether the patent that already has been granted to Amazon by the European Patent Office (EPO) will be excluded. It is a patent about sending gifts through a web site, e.g., the possibility of sending an item to an other address than where the bill goes.
This is just one of the 30.000 software related patents that have been granted by the EPO but which are not enforced yet by any European law. If the new law is not going to invalidate some of those patents, then it is simply useless, because patents granted by the EPO would define the interpretation of the law.
My experience is that in some countries green power initiatives are promoted by special tax laws, which make it cheaper to run such alternative power plants. Although some energy source seem cheaper, it actually might not add much to conserving fossile fuels.
It is also not always the case that switching to a "freely" available, means that less fossile fuels are used. Often the energy density of these fuels is lower, and they may produce more polutants which have to be removed afterwards. Lower density means higher volume. Higher volume means more transportation. Transportation needs energy in both the usage and the construction. (Steel factories use a lot of energy!)
What worries me most is that most people don't realize our dependency on fossile fuels. People think we are wealthy because we are smart. No it is only because we have access to cheap energy. I fear that our era may once become known as "the golden age of oil", and that our decendants will look down on us, because we emptied all the cheap sources of oil in a very short time.
Good remark! I do not know what is the balance in with this power plant. For sure it is better to burn nutshells than oil, but one should also take in account that the nutshells need to be transported by trucks (which likely will run on fossile fuels), and that the ashes need to be dealt with as well. Only if one calculates the whole energy balance, one can determine the "greenness" of a power plant. And "construction", making brick, producing steel, requires a lot of energy. And the energy to produce the trucks should also be included. I once heard that an average car requires more energy for being constructed than it uses on fuel during its life time. (I once visited a steel factory, and I know about the huge amouths of energy that are used there.)
A problem with many "green" power plants is that they are constructed with materials that were produced burning fossile fuels. If this were not the case, "green" power would be cheaper than "fossile/dirty" power. It often comes down to the point that "green" power plants are just very expensive batteries, and it would not surprise me, if in many cases the are actually wasting energy.
What is meant is reduction from CO2 gasses produced by burning fossile fuels. Everytime when you burn something that comes from deep beneath the ground the CO2 (and also H20) is added to the biosphere (atmosphere, soil and oceans) of the earth. Plants, trees, and algea use C02 to grow. If you burn them, you do not add CO2 to the biosphere. It is assumed that the increase in CO2 in the biosphere will also lead to an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 is a green-house gas, which is believed to increase the temperature of the earth. Burning of fossile fuels should thus be reduced.
The real problem is that fossile fuels are very cheap compared to non-fossile fuels, such as solar, wind, and hydro energy. Although these are free, large installations are needed to harvest them. And to construct those installation you need energy. And most of the time this energy comes from fossile fuels. These kind of installations are often more like batteries than like clean sources of energy, because often it cost more energy to produce them than that they will produce during their lifetimes, otherwise alternative sources of energy would have been cheaper than fossile energies.
A perfect solution for when you want to write data to a disk is to use a Memory Mapped File. You can write data to a file and still keep it in memory. CG will just work correctly, although using CG with a Memory Mapped File mat cause the data to be read in again everytime a CG occurs.
I once wrote some classes to work with Memory Mapped Files (under Windows) in an almost transparent manner. It works great for making complex C++ object hierarchies persistant.
Although you argument seems to true, it is not. The real fact is that computers are still far too slow for what we want them to do. If computers were fast enough, languages like C and C++ would have gone a long time ago. There sole reason for existence is that they produce fast code.
All comes down to the fact that we still need hand-optimize code to get computers to do something reasonable. Nowadays, most software engineers are not aware of the memory piramide. At the top we have a little very fast memory and at the bottom we have a huge amouth of memory which is relatively slow. The differences are in the order of 10^9 (if you include the Internet).
Computers spend most their energy in moving data in an efficient way between different forms of memory, and managing available memory. This has lead to incredibly complex systems, beyond the comprehension of a single individual.
Re:shameless reply - Even Google understands
on
Echolocation for Humans
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It seems even Google understands it, because the search results started with: "Do you mean: According research".
I understand that the resolution will be halved in one direction when using the 3D display mode.
That might make it rather useless for normal use. Or can the 3D-effect also be switched on for certain regions of the display?
The Z-buffer is used to determine which object is before which from a single point of view. For a 3D images you need to generate two separate images from two points of view (each with their own Z-buffer). I imagine that some of the 3D engines in graphic chipset could do this without additional programming effort.
This is really lame. It is only giving you an animation of switching between desktops, not a real 3D desktop. This has been done (much better) a long time ago by SGI, where they would have such an animation everytime you opened a folder. Makes your eyes dizzy after a while. These kind of animations don't add anything useful, just a gadget to show of to your friend. I bet that you could do the same in Windows.
The image at the bottom of the screen seems to suggest that it will actually show images larger than the screen size!!! This is not just 3D it holographic floating in the air.
Yes, and along the borders, which are not guarded witin the EC, you simply drive to the other side, if it is cheaper there. Usually, this leads to a pattern where the gas stations on side where the taxes are higher reduce their price, depending how far they are from the border. I live close to the German borders, and when my parents, who lived in the mid visited us, they would always hop over the border to get some cheap gas.
I recently discovered that you can create a good telescope with some standard camera lens and a webcam. Just take of its lens (was easy with mine) and place it behind the lens at the proper distance and you get some magnification. It gives you some extra magnification compared to a 35 mm film because the sensor is much smaller. With a 500 mm lens, the moon was too big to fit on the computer screen! I also tried to photograph some ants in the back garden from the kitchen table, but the little animals didn't want to stand quiet.
I totally agree with the poster. C++ (and most other programming languages) are implementation languages. Most programmers are not aware of the fact that the main reason why we use implementation languages lies in the fact that we have to produce highly optimized code to make computers perform. Specification languages are hardly used, because we lack the proper tools to transform (formal) specification into implementation code. The reason behind this is that much of the engineering in "software engineering" lies in choosing the right implementation, e.g. it is not (yet) possible to automatically convert high-level specifications into executable code. I think it is really sad that after more than twenty years of software engineering, we are still working like craftsman, and not like engineers. In this sense software engineering hardly can be called an engineering science.
For some more ideas, read The Art of Programming.
It seems to me that all the stars look kind of triangle shaped. Because starts are not triangles, it looks like the error is from the optics or the detector slid. I hope it is not some kind of systematic error such as the Hubble telescope had.
Many security problems are caused by once clever design design to let stacks grow down. The reason why buffer-overruns are dangeroes, lies in the fact that it allows you to overwrite the return address of the calling procedure. If stacks would have grown up, this would never have been possible.
When these first processors (8088) were designed, nobody was aware of the possible implications with respect to security. And that is still the problem with many software/hardware engineering issues.
The article is not about developing secure software, it merely talks about security issues to consider when developing software, but it doesn't give any actual answers about how to do it. It only helps identifying the problem, not providing an answer for it.
IP addresses are used to route messages between computers. If they would change all the time, it would be impossible to have any meaningful communication. How would you feel, if you had to look up a phone number everytime you want to give someone a call, only to discover that the number of the information service has changed as well.
Of course, you could select an new IP address everytime when you connect to the internet, but the IP addresses of ISP have to remain the same. But the more IP addresses are used, the more pollution occurs in with respect to which IP addresses are valid and which are not.
It seems that most people don't understand the issue that Karl Auerbach is addressing. Most posters talk about spam, usenet, and www polution. But the problem that Karl is talking about is at a far more lower level. It has to do with the packets on which the TCP/IP protocol is build on. He is talking about how the still growing collection of inter-connected (internetted!) computers is going to contain more and more cruft for all kinds of reasons, producing more and more junk packets traveling around using up bandwidth. In the end this will slow down the whole internet more and more. And adding more computers to solve the problem, could only make it worse.
(The issue is not about use of address space (the number of available addresses) but about bandwidth space!!!)
If it is ever going to run out of hand, I don't know. In a sense the problem is similar to the problem of space derbish. It has been suggested that space derbish in the future will make space travel impossible. At the moment collisions between pieces of space derbish are rare, but each collision is producing more pieces and thus increasing the change for a collision. It is predicted that there will be a time, that each space shuttle going up will be hit by a large enough particle to cause enough damage to let it brake up during reentry. We have seen how little material at a relatively low speed could cause so much damage to the Columbia.
A Dutch minister has suggested the idea to install a cruse control (with speed limit) in every car. Aside from this there have been experiments here in the Netherlands with such a cruse control that would limit the speed based on GPS data and a database.
It seems that the slashdot editors doesn't give a damn about what happens in Europe, nevertheless the fact that many of their readers are from outside the US, they clearly state that they are a US oriented site, and will remain like this.
The stuff the poster is talking about is called actually a kind of asphalt mixed with stones to make it very open. Another nice property is that it allows water to go through. This means that the roads do not get wet when it is raining, and there is no water being slashed by big trucks. The only problem is that the top layer freezes quicker when temperatures are low. And that it is more easily damaged by flat tires from trucks. Appearantly, most drives do not notice the flat tires, as sometimes the tracks run on for miles.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so long ago, we had a story here in the Netherlands where a shop was able to locate people who bought a certain item, which was poluted by someone wanting to damage a company, because these people had used a bonus card, with a unique number identifying them, and because the shop did register who sold what. Some people had become seriously ill after eating the contaminated product. Luckily, they all recovered.
This is just one of the 30.000 software related patents that have been granted by the EPO but which are not enforced yet by any European law. If the new law is not going to invalidate some of those patents, then it is simply useless, because patents granted by the EPO would define the interpretation of the law.
It is also not always the case that switching to a "freely" available, means that less fossile fuels are used. Often the energy density of these fuels is lower, and they may produce more polutants which have to be removed afterwards. Lower density means higher volume. Higher volume means more transportation. Transportation needs energy in both the usage and the construction. (Steel factories use a lot of energy!)
What worries me most is that most people don't realize our dependency on fossile fuels. People think we are wealthy because we are smart. No it is only because we have access to cheap energy. I fear that our era may once become known as "the golden age of oil", and that our decendants will look down on us, because we emptied all the cheap sources of oil in a very short time.
Good remark! I do not know what is the balance in with this power plant. For sure it is better to burn nutshells than oil, but one should also take in account that the nutshells need to be transported by trucks (which likely will run on fossile fuels), and that the ashes need to be dealt with as well. Only if one calculates the whole energy balance, one can determine the "greenness" of a power plant. And "construction", making brick, producing steel, requires a lot of energy. And the energy to produce the trucks should also be included. I once heard that an average car requires more energy for being constructed than it uses on fuel during its life time. (I once visited a steel factory, and I know about the huge amouths of energy that are used there.)
A problem with many "green" power plants is that they are constructed with materials that were produced burning fossile fuels. If this were not the case, "green" power would be cheaper than "fossile/dirty" power. It often comes down to the point that "green" power plants are just very expensive batteries, and it would not surprise me, if in many cases the are actually wasting energy.
The real problem is that fossile fuels are very cheap compared to non-fossile fuels, such as solar, wind, and hydro energy. Although these are free, large installations are needed to harvest them. And to construct those installation you need energy. And most of the time this energy comes from fossile fuels. These kind of installations are often more like batteries than like clean sources of energy, because often it cost more energy to produce them than that they will produce during their lifetimes, otherwise alternative sources of energy would have been cheaper than fossile energies.
I once wrote some classes to work with Memory Mapped Files (under Windows) in an almost transparent manner. It works great for making complex C++ object hierarchies persistant.
And it would not surprise me if some CPU's have a single instruction for doing this!
All comes down to the fact that we still need hand-optimize code to get computers to do something reasonable. Nowadays, most software engineers are not aware of the memory piramide. At the top we have a little very fast memory and at the bottom we have a huge amouth of memory which is relatively slow. The differences are in the order of 10^9 (if you include the Internet).
Computers spend most their energy in moving data in an efficient way between different forms of memory, and managing available memory. This has lead to incredibly complex systems, beyond the comprehension of a single individual.
It seems even Google understands it, because the search results started with: "Do you mean: According research".
I understand that the resolution will be halved in one direction when using the 3D display mode. That might make it rather useless for normal use. Or can the 3D-effect also be switched on for certain regions of the display?
The Z-buffer is used to determine which object is before which from a single point of view. For a 3D images you need to generate two separate images from two points of view (each with their own Z-buffer). I imagine that some of the 3D engines in graphic chipset could do this without additional programming effort.
This is really lame. It is only giving you an animation of switching between desktops, not a real 3D desktop. This has been done (much better) a long time ago by SGI, where they would have such an animation everytime you opened a folder. Makes your eyes dizzy after a while. These kind of animations don't add anything useful, just a gadget to show of to your friend. I bet that you could do the same in Windows.
The image at the bottom of the screen seems to suggest that it will actually show images larger than the screen size!!! This is not just 3D it holographic floating in the air.
Yes, and along the borders, which are not guarded witin the EC, you simply drive to the other side, if it is cheaper there. Usually, this leads to a pattern where the gas stations on side where the taxes are higher reduce their price, depending how far they are from the border. I live close to the German borders, and when my parents, who lived in the mid visited us, they would always hop over the border to get some cheap gas.
I recently discovered that you can create a good telescope with some standard camera lens and a webcam. Just take of its lens (was easy with mine) and place it behind the lens at the proper distance and you get some magnification. It gives you some extra magnification compared to a 35 mm film because the sensor is much smaller. With a 500 mm lens, the moon was too big to fit on the computer screen! I also tried to photograph some ants in the back garden from the kitchen table, but the little animals didn't want to stand quiet.
I totally agree with the poster. C++ (and most other programming languages) are implementation languages. Most programmers are not aware of the fact that the main reason why we use implementation languages lies in the fact that we have to produce highly optimized code to make computers perform. Specification languages are hardly used, because we lack the proper tools to transform (formal) specification into implementation code. The reason behind this is that much of the engineering in "software engineering" lies in choosing the right implementation, e.g. it is not (yet) possible to automatically convert high-level specifications into executable code. I think it is really sad that after more than twenty years of software engineering, we are still working like craftsman, and not like engineers. In this sense software engineering hardly can be called an engineering science. For some more ideas, read The Art of Programming.
It seems to me that all the stars look kind of triangle shaped. Because starts are not triangles, it looks like the error is from the optics or the detector slid. I hope it is not some kind of systematic error such as the Hubble telescope had.
When these first processors (8088) were designed, nobody was aware of the possible implications with respect to security. And that is still the problem with many software/hardware engineering issues.
The article is not about developing secure software, it merely talks about security issues to consider when developing software, but it doesn't give any actual answers about how to do it. It only helps identifying the problem, not providing an answer for it.
Of course, you could select an new IP address everytime when you connect to the internet, but the IP addresses of ISP have to remain the same. But the more IP addresses are used, the more pollution occurs in with respect to which IP addresses are valid and which are not.
(The issue is not about use of address space (the number of available addresses) but about bandwidth space!!!)
If it is ever going to run out of hand, I don't know. In a sense the problem is similar to the problem of space derbish. It has been suggested that space derbish in the future will make space travel impossible. At the moment collisions between pieces of space derbish are rare, but each collision is producing more pieces and thus increasing the change for a collision. It is predicted that there will be a time, that each space shuttle going up will be hit by a large enough particle to cause enough damage to let it brake up during reentry. We have seen how little material at a relatively low speed could cause so much damage to the Columbia.
A Dutch minister has suggested the idea to install a cruse control (with speed limit) in every car. Aside from this there have been experiments here in the Netherlands with such a cruse control that would limit the speed based on GPS data and a database.
It seems that the slashdot editors doesn't give a damn about what happens in Europe, nevertheless the fact that many of their readers are from outside the US, they clearly state that they are a US oriented site, and will remain like this.
The stuff the poster is talking about is called actually a kind of asphalt mixed with stones to make it very open. Another nice property is that it allows water to go through. This means that the roads do not get wet when it is raining, and there is no water being slashed by big trucks. The only problem is that the top layer freezes quicker when temperatures are low. And that it is more easily damaged by flat tires from trucks. Appearantly, most drives do not notice the flat tires, as sometimes the tracks run on for miles.