Anything that starts with "C"
CFML?
Cobol?
CHILL?
CMS-2?
Common Lisp?
Coral 66?
CSP?
cT?
Curry?
and last but certainly not least: csh!?
Be careful what you post!
For those interested in the general subject of underwater autonomous vehicles:
http://www.gavia.is/
Gavia is a "modular" underwater vehicle. It has modules that can be put together according to ones needs. The site has some interesting reading material (if you click on the "Products" link) about the software architecture (basically the software is set up as a "virtual crew" with a "captain agent" a "navigator agent" and so on.
Maybe I'm pulling BS out of my ear here but does anybody know if this kind of personalization is being used to "sort" search results to personalize them as well?
I mean, Google (or MSN, Yahoo or whoever does this sort of thing) should be able to find out some "personal preferences" of people depending on how they sort their news website, what they filter out and so on.
Even worse, are they using this to personalize Google Ads?
Man... some of you guys are going to have to take a vacation... in Iceland.
First to reply to the grandparent post:
Iceland may not have a huge population, that's true. But my guess would be that we're more technologically and economically advanced than most of the 1200 cities you mention. The average Icelandic family owns two cars and we have a myriad of aluminum, iron and all sorts of plants that need cheap electricity. My guess would be that Iceland is a much better (and larger at that) start than some third world country with millions of inhabitants.
Now for the reply to the parent post:
Iceland is dispersed... if you take the 300.000 people and divide that by the 103.000 square kilometers of land space we have! However, around 100.000 of those people live in the capital (Reykjavik) and the rest lives only on the coast-line, the center of Iceland is uninhabited. It's not like each and every one of us lives in the middle of our "government issued" 1/3 of a square kilometer. The hydrogen bus project is only in Reykjavik. Hopefully that will change in the future though.
First of all... your link for "Hydrogen Fuel Cells" points to Amazon.com... some game callde "Cubivore". Sounds fun but has nothing to do with "Hydrogen Fuel Cells".
The buses in Iceland are actually hydro-electric. Hydrogen is not used to power a combustion engine, it's used to produce electricity that in turn is used to power the bus. This is done by means of chemical reaction and if anyone is interested, you can find directions of how to create such a chemical-electric-generator here.
Well, I don't think that's gonna be a problem here.
We have a lot of ice and snow on the streets already and the way we get rid of it... salt! Big trucks with salt drive around and spread it all over the streets. This melts the snow and ice but does a terrible job on your car! I for one am refusing to wash my new car until spring when they stop putting salt on the streets. This is done in Reykjavik at least... most other towns don't do this and just accept that the road may get slippery.
But as the article stated, scientists do worry about another problem. The fact that this vapor comes from the exhaust, once all cars have this it might become a problem that the air humidity might rise and block sunlight. Whether that's something that really deserves worries I'll leave up to the scientists.
I looooves my Skype! I had exactly the same experience with it as the author of the article. It just so happened that I was planning a trip to see relatives in the US and I used Skype to coordinate things (and I still have more than 9 euros in my account... anybody need a friend to talk to? I'll call!).
Somebody here mentioned that this idea would be useful on the internet, for example in online shopping. This is already done. In my trip planning I ran into problems when I was trying to purchase airline tickes within the US. I was trying to buy from Continental and they have a VoIP help desk that you can call directly from their web page. It's not Skype, it's Windows only:-( but it worked like a charm (on Windows of course).
The other pointers I have consern the Skype application itself. In the article it says:
"There is one huge drawback: Skype works best from a fully connected computer,..."
I don't quite get that. First of all, the Skype website posts the following hardware requirements:
400 MHz CPU
33.6 Kbps modem
(It also requires a computer running Windows which is odd since you can download both a Linux and a Mac OS version in addition to their Windows version)
Secondly, these hardware requirements are not bogus! Me and my friend tried to use Skype and manually reduced the network speed. We managed to get a quite decent conversation on a 22Kbps connection so a 28.8 Kbps modem should even work (these old modems never quite get the speed they have on the label but getting a 22Kbps from a 28.8 modem isn't too far fetched I think).
The last two points I have are a bit on the downside.
First, I have a gripe with the way contact lists are stored. They're stored locally. This is the same "mistake" ICQ made. It sucks to have to redo your contact lists if you set up Skype on two different computers.
Lastly, in the settings panel in Skype the user can check the option "Use ports 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections". As most/.ers should know ports 80 and 443 are the HTTP and HTTPS ports. This is just not playing nice! One of the rules I was tought when getting my B.Sc. in computer science was that you do not use reserved ports for anything else than the protocols that they're reserved for! Granted, they do provide the option of turning this off but still.
The fact that NASA is "boosting" AI does not mean that they're going to be doing rovers that can evaluate themselves whether a dark spot on the ground is a hole or a shadow! I doubt most people realize how conservative NASA is when it comes to AI.
I went to a lecture held by one of NASA's AI team leaders who was talking about the AI of the current rovers... there is virtually none! He said that the most complex AI is actually on earth to help scientists create a "mission plan" that they send to the rovers once every 24hrs. These mission plans are on the form: "move forward 2 meters, turn left 22 degrees, take picture of ground, move forward 1 meter" (very simplified).
I talked to this guy after the lecture and asked him if they really had no AI on the robots themselves and specifically asked about such things as correctional AI for the rover movement. To clarify this, imagine that you instruct the rover to "move forward 1 meter", all it will do is turn all wheels equally so that the rover would move forward one meter if it were on perfectly even ground. This is of course not the case on Mars and you'll have rovers turning when they should move forward and not turning enough and so on. So when I asked him about the correctional AI (to have AI on board correct these environmental issues, for example take pictures of the environment and calculate the "offset" to find out if it's drifting) he said there was no such thing. The only AI on the rover is something that actually makes it panic! That is, it evaluates if there are any deviations from what the guys down on earth told it to do and expect and basically shuts down if there are.
So AI to make sure that the rover moves in a straight line when the scientists instructed it to do so would be incredably beneficial and IMHO would even increase the level of security by making sure that the rover actually does what it's told to do! I asked him if this was something that NASA was considering to add to future rovers and he said they were in the process of convincing "upper management" that this would actually pay off. These are multi-million dollar scientific tools, not toys, so any addition to them needs to go through strict approval processes.
But according to this article it seems that approval for such things as the "movement correctional AI" has been granted, but as I said, I think people should not be fooled into thinking that this is some sort of an "I, Robot" type of AI!
Wouldn't the appropriate "punishment" for them be to sentence them to do "campus work"? That is, fix the security holes in the network or maybe rather write a HOWTO for the IT guys on the subject.
Just because your post got modded as "Interesting":
Sound waves are the displacement of air and the universe probably doesn't have enough of it to produce sound. So my guess is that the universe probably doesn't have a resonant frequency.
What they're suggesting is that we use this thing in libraries and museums to kill fire.
But with water, the reason you can mop it up is because it gets the mop wet... but this thing??? How the hell are you supposed to get rid of this thing after its been sprayed all over the place??? I don't suppose you can mop it up since the mops will probably not absorb it any better than the books?!?! I guess your best bet would be a vacum cleaner?
That site looks like it got slashdotted before anyone got to read it... did anyone actually see it?
I have a funny feeling there was never anything there and the poster just had Slashdot readers "surf" the first of April.
Good one (if I'm right).
I heard from someone who works for a company that files for many patents that the company intentionally files for patents that they know they're not going to pursue. They do this to protect themselves from other companies filing for that patent because a previous patent application constitutes prior art. Maybe that's what M$ is doing? Maybe they knew that there is not a snowballs chance in hell that they're gonna get this one but decided to file for it anyway just in case? Does any/. reader have experience with this patent filing for the sake of disabling competitors from getting that patent? Even so, I am absolutely baffled why on earth they are using the Gnome taskbar... I mean, it's not even a screenshot!!! Someone actually went through a considerable amount of trouble sketching up that foot!?!??!
The phone company in Iceland has been offering services based on this technology for about a year or so.
There is also an Icelandic company that specializes in location based mobile phone applications (www.landmat.is). Some of their applications include a location based dating service, a gizmo that enables the user to locate services in his current location (restaurants, museums and so on), some sort of a parental watch service has also been launched somewhere in the UK I think although that is not mentioned on their website and many more. They've launched some of these services with partners such as AT&T and T-Mobile UK.
We here in Iceland have two major providers that are comparable in prices.
Examples:
512Kb/s to and 256Kb/s from, 100Mb foreign download (domestic download is unlimited and included in the price) Price: USD$ 53 per month.
512Kb/s to and 256Kb/s from, 1Gb foreign download Price: USD$ 81 per month.
These offers usually include a free ADSL modem and often even a wireless ADSL router if you agree to a 12 month commitment.
This thing about the domestic downloads being free may baffle some of you... I don't know if this is general practice in other places but I doubt it, but this is the case in Iceland. You only have to pay for downloads from outside of Iceland.
They were without a doubt my favorite games. Made you think and, of course, were a great way for a 10 year old to learn English.
I stopped playing them when they started giving the player suggestions on what the characters should say... the coolest thing about them was that the computer would actually understand what you wrote (of course that could be a problem when it decided not to understand something and you had to try all versions of a sentence in order to get it to understand you).
Slashdot Mirror
Anything that starts with "C" CFML? Cobol? CHILL? CMS-2? Common Lisp? Coral 66? CSP? cT? Curry? and last but certainly not least: csh!? Be careful what you post!
Ummm... wouldn't the turntable actually turning be a dead givaway???
For those interested in the general subject of underwater autonomous vehicles: http://www.gavia.is/ Gavia is a "modular" underwater vehicle. It has modules that can be put together according to ones needs. The site has some interesting reading material (if you click on the "Products" link) about the software architecture (basically the software is set up as a "virtual crew" with a "captain agent" a "navigator agent" and so on.
They should have considered using their 512 node cluster to run the damn website after it finished calculating how the universe came to be!
The site is dead slow!
It's free as in:
You get a "free" beer if you buy a glass of vodka!
Maybe I'm pulling BS out of my ear here but does anybody know if this kind of personalization is being used to "sort" search results to personalize them as well?
I mean, Google (or MSN, Yahoo or whoever does this sort of thing) should be able to find out some "personal preferences" of people depending on how they sort their news website, what they filter out and so on.
Even worse, are they using this to personalize Google Ads?
First to reply to the grandparent post:
Iceland may not have a huge population, that's true. But my guess would be that we're more technologically and economically advanced than most of the 1200 cities you mention. The average Icelandic family owns two cars and we have a myriad of aluminum, iron and all sorts of plants that need cheap electricity. My guess would be that Iceland is a much better (and larger at that) start than some third world country with millions of inhabitants.
Now for the reply to the parent post:
Iceland is dispersed... if you take the 300.000 people and divide that by the 103.000 square kilometers of land space we have! However, around 100.000 of those people live in the capital (Reykjavik) and the rest lives only on the coast-line, the center of Iceland is uninhabited. It's not like each and every one of us lives in the middle of our "government issued" 1/3 of a square kilometer. The hydrogen bus project is only in Reykjavik. Hopefully that will change in the future though.
The buses in Iceland are actually hydro-electric. Hydrogen is not used to power a combustion engine, it's used to produce electricity that in turn is used to power the bus. This is done by means of chemical reaction and if anyone is interested, you can find directions of how to create such a chemical-electric-generator here.
Minor problem though... it's in Icelandic.
We have a lot of ice and snow on the streets already and the way we get rid of it... salt! Big trucks with salt drive around and spread it all over the streets. This melts the snow and ice but does a terrible job on your car! I for one am refusing to wash my new car until spring when they stop putting salt on the streets. This is done in Reykjavik at least... most other towns don't do this and just accept that the road may get slippery.
But as the article stated, scientists do worry about another problem. The fact that this vapor comes from the exhaust, once all cars have this it might become a problem that the air humidity might rise and block sunlight. Whether that's something that really deserves worries I'll leave up to the scientists.
... so now we'll have spam blog entries!
Somebody here mentioned that this idea would be useful on the internet, for example in online shopping. This is already done. In my trip planning I ran into problems when I was trying to purchase airline tickes within the US. I was trying to buy from Continental and they have a VoIP help desk that you can call directly from their web page. It's not Skype, it's Windows only :-( but it worked like a charm (on Windows of course).
The other pointers I have consern the Skype application itself. In the article it says:
I don't quite get that. First of all, the Skype website posts the following hardware requirements: 400 MHz CPU 33.6 Kbps modem (It also requires a computer running Windows which is odd since you can download both a Linux and a Mac OS version in addition to their Windows version) Secondly, these hardware requirements are not bogus! Me and my friend tried to use Skype and manually reduced the network speed. We managed to get a quite decent conversation on a 22Kbps connection so a 28.8 Kbps modem should even work (these old modems never quite get the speed they have on the label but getting a 22Kbps from a 28.8 modem isn't too far fetched I think).The last two points I have are a bit on the downside. /.ers should know ports 80 and 443 are the HTTP and HTTPS ports. This is just not playing nice! One of the rules I was tought when getting my B.Sc. in computer science was that you do not use reserved ports for anything else than the protocols that they're reserved for! Granted, they do provide the option of turning this off but still.
First, I have a gripe with the way contact lists are stored. They're stored locally. This is the same "mistake" ICQ made. It sucks to have to redo your contact lists if you set up Skype on two different computers.
Lastly, in the settings panel in Skype the user can check the option "Use ports 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections". As most
The fact that NASA is "boosting" AI does not mean that they're going to be doing rovers that can evaluate themselves whether a dark spot on the ground is a hole or a shadow! I doubt most people realize how conservative NASA is when it comes to AI.
I went to a lecture held by one of NASA's AI team leaders who was talking about the AI of the current rovers... there is virtually none! He said that the most complex AI is actually on earth to help scientists create a "mission plan" that they send to the rovers once every 24hrs. These mission plans are on the form: "move forward 2 meters, turn left 22 degrees, take picture of ground, move forward 1 meter" (very simplified).
I talked to this guy after the lecture and asked him if they really had no AI on the robots themselves and specifically asked about such things as correctional AI for the rover movement. To clarify this, imagine that you instruct the rover to "move forward 1 meter", all it will do is turn all wheels equally so that the rover would move forward one meter if it were on perfectly even ground. This is of course not the case on Mars and you'll have rovers turning when they should move forward and not turning enough and so on. So when I asked him about the correctional AI (to have AI on board correct these environmental issues, for example take pictures of the environment and calculate the "offset" to find out if it's drifting) he said there was no such thing. The only AI on the rover is something that actually makes it panic! That is, it evaluates if there are any deviations from what the guys down on earth told it to do and expect and basically shuts down if there are.
So AI to make sure that the rover moves in a straight line when the scientists instructed it to do so would be incredably beneficial and IMHO would even increase the level of security by making sure that the rover actually does what it's told to do! I asked him if this was something that NASA was considering to add to future rovers and he said they were in the process of convincing "upper management" that this would actually pay off. These are multi-million dollar scientific tools, not toys, so any addition to them needs to go through strict approval processes.
But according to this article it seems that approval for such things as the "movement correctional AI" has been granted, but as I said, I think people should not be fooled into thinking that this is some sort of an "I, Robot" type of AI!
Wouldn't the appropriate "punishment" for them be to sentence them to do "campus work"? That is, fix the security holes in the network or maybe rather write a HOWTO for the IT guys on the subject.
Just because your post got modded as "Interesting":
Sound waves are the displacement of air and the universe probably doesn't have enough of it to produce sound. So my guess is that the universe probably doesn't have a resonant frequency.
I could be wrong.
Ok... just bear with me.
What they're suggesting is that we use this thing in libraries and museums to kill fire.
But with water, the reason you can mop it up is because it gets the mop wet... but this thing??? How the hell are you supposed to get rid of this thing after its been sprayed all over the place??? I don't suppose you can mop it up since the mops will probably not absorb it any better than the books?!?! I guess your best bet would be a vacum cleaner?
"The web server behind http://www.osvdb.org doesn't handle high traffic well enough".
That site looks like it got slashdotted before anyone got to read it... did anyone actually see it? I have a funny feeling there was never anything there and the poster just had Slashdot readers "surf" the first of April. Good one (if I'm right).
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/programs/linear.html isn't working for me...
I heard from someone who works for a company that files for many patents that the company intentionally files for patents that they know they're not going to pursue. They do this to protect themselves from other companies filing for that patent because a previous patent application constitutes prior art. /. reader have experience with this patent filing for the sake of disabling competitors from getting that patent?
Maybe that's what M$ is doing? Maybe they knew that there is not a snowballs chance in hell that they're gonna get this one but decided to file for it anyway just in case? Does any
Even so, I am absolutely baffled why on earth they are using the Gnome taskbar... I mean, it's not even a screenshot!!! Someone actually went through a considerable amount of trouble sketching up that foot!?!??!
There is also an Icelandic company that specializes in location based mobile phone applications (www.landmat.is). Some of their applications include a location based dating service, a gizmo that enables the user to locate services in his current location (restaurants, museums and so on), some sort of a parental watch service has also been launched somewhere in the UK I think although that is not mentioned on their website and many more. They've launched some of these services with partners such as AT&T and T-Mobile UK.
Examples:
Price: USD$ 53 per month.
Price: USD$ 81 per month.
These offers usually include a free ADSL modem and often even a wireless ADSL router if you agree to a 12 month commitment.
This thing about the domestic downloads being free may baffle some of you... I don't know if this is general practice in other places but I doubt it, but this is the case in Iceland. You only have to pay for downloads from outside of Iceland.
... and European swallow wire of course.
It seems to have data for Europe and S-N-Atlantic but is lacking for other areas.
Their animated charts are cool (animated as gifs so there are no browser issues).
I stopped playing them when they started giving the player suggestions on what the characters should say... the coolest thing about them was that the computer would actually understand what you wrote (of course that could be a problem when it decided not to understand something and you had to try all versions of a sentence in order to get it to understand you).