RFID is evil in this way that it can be read anytime by anyone without the person carrying it ever knowing. It's also very vulnerable to EMP, quite easy to damage, jam, fake...
Why not something that is just as simple but requires simplest of actions from the owner. iButton. Just touch the small metal can (immune to mostly all "environmental challenges") to a reader, and the contents are being read. Or a Java program (embedded in the chip non-virtual java machine,) is being executed. Or the data will be accessed only after answering to a proper cryptographich challenge Or, or... So if you want to pass through the customs, just touch the iButton with a jpeg of your face to the reader. If somebody wants to steal data from your iButton, they must mug you or trick you into placing your iButton against their reader (and providing proper passphrase which normally sits in governmental database)
1s. Minimal human decision time. Light travels 3e8m 1e-1s. Minimal human reaction time. 1e-2s. Minimal human recognition (sensory reaction) time. 1e-3s (1ms). Sensible task switching time. 1e-4s. in-task high level function time. 1e-5s. in-task medium level function time. 1e-6s (1us). Single microcontroller instruction; in-task low-level function time. 1e-7s Single high-speed microcontroller instruction. 1e-8s Single low-end CPU or DSP instruction time. Light travels 3m. 1e-9s (1ns) Single modern CPU time, light travels 0.3m 1e-10s A single modern CPU gate reaction time. Light travels 3cm, just above 1 inch.
Using standard $8 24bit ADC you can get down to the 3cm level with a $3 1MHZ microcontroller. Using 1Gbit interface, your bits moving at light speed are 30cm away from each other. A 300m LAN won't allow ping roundtrip shorter than 2 microseconds. A 3000km (global network games) line WILL introduce perceptible delay. A CPU of 3 GHZ just has to have its cache built in. Memory placed 3cm away causes 1 cycle long request-response roundtrip.
Every script kiddie will call himself "IT professional". A real pro knows how much knowledge is ahead of him and how little they posess, so they don't dare to say "I know it all"...
1) I've gained good week of my time to get the order through accounting, get the purchase made, license registered in the documentation for financial purposes and all that stuff. 2) I've gained some good look in the eyes of my boss. An employee who doesn't whinny for purchasing this, purchasing that because he can't get his work done. 3) I've gained a piece of software that's virus-free and virus-safe. 4) I've saved some money for the company. In our case it's not "the license was already bought". Every purchase is scrupulously examined, nothing is bought unnecessarily. On my position office isn't a necessity - if I want to read office files read, I can load them on a floppy and go to the accounting or design and request some time on their "low priority" computers to read it, It's quite possible my request for MS Office would be denied. 5) I show people it's there, it works and it's not inferior. People start understanding there are cheaper alternatives.
I've traded a license AND a couple of additional headaches for software that does exactly what I need. So far no additional headaches, it did all I wanted flawlessly.
DRM requires network. Otherwise it loses all its strength (if it can be done just by local hardware, it can be done by local (my) software.)
Does it mean all DVD players, home cinemas, tape recorders, walkmans, discmans, pocket MP3 players and all that is supposed to be networked? And what about computers, say I pay for modem, do I have to pay for 1.5h long distance call if I want to view 1.5h DVD movie?
I installed OOo at work and it works okay for all what I have to do. Boss is happy because he doesn;t need to purchase another MS license, people are happy because we still can interchange documents, I'm happy because I don't need to suffer the Microsoft crap. (well, except of NT, but hidden behind Cygwin, Mozilla, Gimp and several other layers of indirection it doesn't stink as much as it does raw and sore.)
Sorry but "Export as PDF" screwed up all the native characters. It may work fine for you, Americans but there are people out there who use a charset different from your and OOo-produced PDF is broken in this domain.
Yeah, all them responsible for the fact you can't get less than x4 AGP 3D-accelerated gfx card nowadays (non-3D? What's that?). And of course 3GHZ CPU required for your spreadsheet and word processor to run smoothly. What about the huge memory-consuming 1-gigabyte memos to your boss requiring even more faster RAM? And maybe you really need 5+1 surround audio card for "new mail" beeps? And maybe you need broadband to watch stock quotes?
There are domains where all that stuff finds application: Professional music industry(audio cards), 3D gfx (CPU and gfx cards), 2D gfx/DTP (CPU&mem), heavy number crunching (CPU,mem,LAN net), ISP (mem,hdd,net) - but they all are a margin and manufacturers hardly ever give a shit about them. Want a good gaming computer? Get the best gfx card, 1G fastest RAM, fastest 200G HDD, 5+1 audio, 3GHZ CPU and whatever else the best available. Want a good productivity computer? Get 1/4 of the above.
Yeah, SP2 to XP is to include real multisessioning to Windows! Not just "switch user", one works, one waits, but true "two users at once"! Just like in original UNIX in on PDP-11! Well, almost. The catch word is "two".
There's not enough high-quality games for Linux. The ones present are usually backported "hits" from Windows. Some of the ports are very buggy and usually only "dedicated server" executables work really well on Linux.
(personally I must say, Unreal Tournament's (the orig.) textures suck.)
And guess what is the main motor of progress in computer industry?
Just use such a card as Knoppix home directory, work on it intensively for a month or two. You'll exceed write cycle limit of the flash memory and it will die without a squeak. That's how I busted my Nokia 5510 flash memory. First sectors are corrupted and unwritable.
SCO goes down the drain... the copyright to the name of UNIX gets auctioned... IBM buys the copyright. IBM certifies Linux as UNIX. Nobody wants or needs to pay anything, but IBM gets more customers now as Linux has been officially certified...
I'd like to know what formats can Blender export its files? I mean especially the 3D models. Is dxf/dwg on the list? What other 3D data file formats are supported?
been doing this, until the asshole of the provider changed the WWW->SMS gateway to require "read text from image, type into box" real user authentication, rendering a week of coding useless:P I still can send emails, but can't script the reply. And even if I could, the asshole provider stuffs half of the message with commercial spam.
Some script kiddie kept taking over the polish Star Trek fan channel on IRC. Admins ignored complains. ISP ignored complains. Police ignored complains. So guys tracked down his IP, found his home address, paid him a visit, broke a few bones and left. Police ignored complains.
I'm not sure if you're conscious of the hype and level of progress gere. The german V-2 rockets produced during IIWW could travel at mach 5. Is mach 7 well over 50 years later really such a great gain?
So good Morrowind was so "open sourcish" with its TES editor and access to all the "high level" engine structures - there were quite a few patches in form of mods released. I didn't find any to fix the problem with that guy though, so I did it myself. It was an ugly hack (as result the dialogue was wrong) but it worked.
Other problems of this class I didn't meet myself were about Caius instead of pointing you to Corprusarium, getting mad at you showing up with corprus and telling you to leave (effectively breaking main quest), some problems with some ashlander wise woman (don't remember exactly but it was breakage of main quest too), Dagoth Ur falling off the bridge (fixable through levitation), and numerous smaler bugs in subquests - like, I broke into a middle of some quest I had never found before, as a guy started answering my questions about Dark Brotherhood despite my lack of any contact with them before, the witch never showing up in Mages Guild in Caldera (was to be there in 3 days), breakage of character model if you became a were-vampire (disabled later by patch), inability for Argonians to finish the Puzzle Canal quest and many many more.
The problem that Morrowind was crashing from time to time or that you fell through the floor sometimes wasn't that much of a problem - a save game often enough solved it. But broken quests, unsolvable puzzles, missing topics... There were situations when you wouldn't be able to finish the main quest. In one case I had to patch the Tribunal myself - find the character using TES, edit the script and install the patch as a "plugin" because the character before death was generating a flood of replies never letting me quit the dialogue and killing that character was essential to the plot. If not overall bugginess I'd say Morrowind was the best game -ever-. But there were too many small bugs, inconsistencies, problems with the world interaction... You get Ordinator Armour as a prize for solving a quest for the chief of ordinators, and then when you wear it, Ordinators attack you on sight. You secretly unlock valut doors, but once they are unlocked, you are free to open them and enter and nobody will tell you a word about this. And of course you buy some ash yam and netch leather, make 300 Fortify Intelligence potions, drink them all and start making other potions, and in no time you have potions that give you +20000 strength (out of 100 max), same dexterity, skill etc. You kill Dagoth Ur with one punch. And of course essential extension "peaceful healthy wildlife" if you don't want to fight cliff racers every 5 seconds... ah, I loathe cliff racers!
Slashdot Mirror
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=119034&cid=100 56917
What about Zorra.
RFID is evil in this way that it can be read anytime by anyone without the person carrying it ever knowing. It's also very vulnerable to EMP, quite easy to damage, jam, fake...
Why not something that is just as simple but requires simplest of actions from the owner. iButton. Just touch the small metal can (immune to mostly all "environmental challenges") to a reader, and the contents are being read. Or a Java program (embedded in the chip non-virtual java machine,) is being executed. Or the data will be accessed only after answering to a proper cryptographich challenge Or, or... So if you want to pass through the customs, just touch the iButton with a jpeg of your face to the reader. If somebody wants to steal data from your iButton, they must mug you or trick you into placing your iButton against their reader (and providing proper passphrase which normally sits in governmental database)
...to full-body suits... ...with full touch feedback... ...with fully-immersive VR feedback...
:)
But they will all be rendered obsolete by neural connectors evetually
1s. Minimal human decision time. Light travels 3e8m
1e-1s. Minimal human reaction time.
1e-2s. Minimal human recognition (sensory reaction) time.
1e-3s (1ms). Sensible task switching time.
1e-4s. in-task high level function time.
1e-5s. in-task medium level function time.
1e-6s (1us). Single microcontroller instruction; in-task low-level function time.
1e-7s Single high-speed microcontroller instruction.
1e-8s Single low-end CPU or DSP instruction time. Light travels 3m.
1e-9s (1ns) Single modern CPU time, light travels 0.3m
1e-10s A single modern CPU gate reaction time. Light travels 3cm, just above 1 inch.
Using standard $8 24bit ADC you can get down to the 3cm level with a $3 1MHZ microcontroller.
Using 1Gbit interface, your bits moving at light speed are 30cm away from each other.
A 300m LAN won't allow ping roundtrip shorter than 2 microseconds.
A 3000km (global network games) line WILL introduce perceptible delay.
A CPU of 3 GHZ just has to have its cache built in. Memory placed 3cm away causes 1 cycle long request-response roundtrip.
Every script kiddie will call himself "IT professional". A real pro knows how much knowledge is ahead of him and how little they posess, so they don't dare to say "I know it all"...
1) I've gained good week of my time to get the order through accounting, get the purchase made, license registered in the documentation for financial purposes and all that stuff.
2) I've gained some good look in the eyes of my boss. An employee who doesn't whinny for purchasing this, purchasing that because he can't get his work done.
3) I've gained a piece of software that's virus-free and virus-safe.
4) I've saved some money for the company. In our case it's not "the license was already bought". Every purchase is scrupulously examined, nothing is bought unnecessarily. On my position office isn't a necessity - if I want to read office files read, I can load them on a floppy and go to the accounting or design and request some time on their "low priority" computers to read it, It's quite possible my request for MS Office would be denied.
5) I show people it's there, it works and it's not inferior. People start understanding there are cheaper alternatives.
I've traded a license AND a couple of additional headaches for software that does exactly what I need. So far no additional headaches, it did all I wanted flawlessly.
DRM requires network. Otherwise it loses all its strength (if it can be done just by local hardware, it can be done by local (my) software.)
Does it mean all DVD players, home cinemas, tape recorders, walkmans, discmans, pocket MP3 players and all that is supposed to be networked? And what about computers, say I pay for modem, do I have to pay for 1.5h long distance call if I want to view 1.5h DVD movie?
Either they are very stupid or VERY greedy.
I installed OOo at work and it works okay for all what I have to do. Boss is happy because he doesn;t need to purchase another MS license, people are happy because we still can interchange documents, I'm happy because I don't need to suffer the Microsoft crap. (well, except of NT, but hidden behind Cygwin, Mozilla, Gimp and several other layers of indirection it doesn't stink as much as it does raw and sore.)
Sorry but "Export as PDF" screwed up all the native characters. It may work fine for you, Americans but there are people out there who use a charset different from your and OOo-produced PDF is broken in this domain.
Yeah, all them responsible for the fact you can't get less than x4 AGP 3D-accelerated gfx card nowadays (non-3D? What's that?). And of course 3GHZ CPU required for your spreadsheet and word processor to run smoothly. What about the huge memory-consuming 1-gigabyte memos to your boss requiring even more faster RAM? And maybe you really need 5+1 surround audio card for "new mail" beeps? And maybe you need broadband to watch stock quotes?
There are domains where all that stuff finds application: Professional music industry(audio cards), 3D gfx (CPU and gfx cards), 2D gfx/DTP (CPU&mem), heavy number crunching (CPU,mem,LAN net), ISP (mem,hdd,net) - but they all are a margin and manufacturers hardly ever give a shit about them. Want a good gaming computer? Get the best gfx card, 1G fastest RAM, fastest 200G HDD, 5+1 audio, 3GHZ CPU and whatever else the best available. Want a good productivity computer? Get 1/4 of the above.
Yeah, SP2 to XP is to include real multisessioning to Windows! Not just "switch user", one works, one waits, but true "two users at once"! Just like in original UNIX in on PDP-11!
Well, almost. The catch word is "two".
There's not enough high-quality games for Linux. The ones present are usually backported "hits" from Windows. Some of the ports are very buggy and usually only "dedicated server" executables work really well on Linux.
(personally I must say, Unreal Tournament's (the orig.) textures suck.)
And guess what is the main motor of progress in computer industry?
Extreme ultraviolet? They SHOULD have used the X... After all it's called X-rays.
Texas Instruments released a new microcontroller based on the revolutionary TTL ( Transistor-Transistor Logic) technology!
Just use such a card as Knoppix home directory, work on it intensively for a month or two. You'll exceed write cycle limit of the flash memory and it will die without a squeak. That's how I busted my Nokia 5510 flash memory. First sectors are corrupted and unwritable.
SCO goes down the drain...
the copyright to the name of UNIX gets auctioned...
IBM buys the copyright.
IBM certifies Linux as UNIX. Nobody wants or needs to pay anything, but IBM gets more customers now as Linux has been officially certified...
I'd like to know what formats can Blender export its files? I mean especially the 3D models. Is dxf/dwg on the list? What other 3D data file formats are supported?
5 different ESD sparks, 5 different microcontroller ports burnt, over the course of some 3 months.
My ASM code had comments like this:
MOV P0,#0Fh
MOV P2,#3Ch ; Because P2.0 and P2.1 are fried
INC A ; Next ADC
CJNE A,#04,NOBURNT
SJMP NEXT ; ADC04 burnt
NOBURNT:
been doing this, until the asshole of the provider changed the WWW->SMS gateway to require "read text from image, type into box" real user authentication, rendering a week of coding useless :P I still can send emails, but can't script the reply. And even if I could, the asshole provider stuffs half of the message with commercial spam.
Some script kiddie kept taking over the polish Star Trek fan channel on IRC. Admins ignored complains. ISP ignored complains. Police ignored complains. So guys tracked down his IP, found his home address, paid him a visit, broke a few bones and left.
Police ignored complains.
I'm not sure if you're conscious of the hype and level of progress gere.
The german V-2 rockets produced during IIWW could travel at mach 5. Is mach 7 well over 50 years later really such a great gain?
I just KNEW I had something forgotten!
./source && cdrecord -dev=0,0,0 -v -multi image.iso && rm image.iso
mkisofs -C `cdrecord -dev=0,0,0 -msinfo` -M -dev=0,0,0 -J -r -o image.iso
Append some extra data to a CD...
./source && cdrecord -dev=0,0,0 -v image.iso && rm image.iso
mkisofs -C `cdrecord -dev=0,0,0 -msinfo` -M -dev=0,0,0 -J -r -o image.iso
So exceptionally intuitive...
yeppers.
So good Morrowind was so "open sourcish" with its TES editor and access to all the "high level" engine structures - there were quite a few patches in form of mods released. I didn't find any to fix the problem with that guy though, so I did it myself. It was an ugly hack (as result the dialogue was wrong) but it worked.
Other problems of this class I didn't meet myself were about Caius instead of pointing you to Corprusarium, getting mad at you showing up with corprus and telling you to leave (effectively breaking main quest), some problems with some ashlander wise woman (don't remember exactly but it was breakage of main quest too), Dagoth Ur falling off the bridge (fixable through levitation), and numerous smaler bugs in subquests - like, I broke into a middle of some quest I had never found before, as a guy started answering my questions about Dark Brotherhood despite my lack of any contact with them before, the witch never showing up in Mages Guild in Caldera (was to be there in 3 days), breakage of character model if you became a were-vampire (disabled later by patch), inability for Argonians to finish the Puzzle Canal quest and many many more.
The problem that Morrowind was crashing from time to time or that you fell through the floor sometimes wasn't that much of a problem - a save game often enough solved it. But broken quests, unsolvable puzzles, missing topics... There were situations when you wouldn't be able to finish the main quest. In one case I had to patch the Tribunal myself - find the character using TES, edit the script and install the patch as a "plugin" because the character before death was generating a flood of replies never letting me quit the dialogue and killing that character was essential to the plot.
If not overall bugginess I'd say Morrowind was the best game -ever-. But there were too many small bugs, inconsistencies, problems with the world interaction... You get Ordinator Armour as a prize for solving a quest for the chief of ordinators, and then when you wear it, Ordinators attack you on sight. You secretly unlock valut doors, but once they are unlocked, you are free to open them and enter and nobody will tell you a word about this. And of course you buy some ash yam and netch leather, make 300 Fortify Intelligence potions, drink them all and start making other potions, and in no time you have potions that give you +20000 strength (out of 100 max), same dexterity, skill etc. You kill Dagoth Ur with one punch.
And of course essential extension "peaceful healthy wildlife" if you don't want to fight cliff racers every 5 seconds... ah, I loathe cliff racers!