It seems to me this is just another excuse to enable <cough/> your car <cough/> to be able to "phone home" to its real masters.
First there was OnStar - "Oh look at all nifty things we can do for (to) you: we can lock and unlock your car, kill the engine (but only if the cops ask nicely we pinky swear!), and tell you when you need to pay our dealership for service!"
People like me said "No, thank you - DO NOT WANT! Remove it. No, not 'disable it' - REMOVE IT. I want to see the hole where the module used to be."
So now they are upping the ante: "Oh lookie! We built a phone and hotspot in your car (not that you couldn't have BOUGHT a hotspot module from your phone company cheaper), so you can have your toys while you drive (ignore the fact this gives us a great way to phone home on you, AND we don't even have to admit we are doing it by giving you a button you press that reminds you that you may be paying for the car, but we still control it)".
Again: no thanks. If I want a mobile hotspot, I can buy a module from my phone company and put it in my glove box. I can ALSO take that hotspot out of the car and use it elsewhere when I want. I can also upgrade it to the latest tech (talk to all the folks with Gen 1 Onstar and how wonderful it is now that AMPS is dead). I can also switch carriers, even to folks that aren't GSM/Edge.
Consider a company that has filed for chapter 11 reorganization. Said company is consistently MONTHS late with their theoretically mandated-by-the-SEC filings. A large number of people publicly call attention to this fact, over and over again, stating that according to the SEC rules said company should not be allowed to trade stock - not on the pink sheets, not on the major exchanges, NOT AT ALL. Yet, the company continues to trade.
I would assert this demonstrates that crowdsourcing has already been tried, and the SEC's (lack of) actions in this matter demonstrate it won't work.
The Novel isn't much better than what people are saying about the Kmart device. The "Android" that it has is locked down to the point that you can buy books from Barnes and Nobel, read the books from B&N, sort-of surf the net (with a very limited version of Safari that doesn't support enough Javascript to run Google Maps, doesn't do Flash, doesn't play videos other than MP4, won't stream ANY media (it can only download to local storage, then play from there). The media player can play media in the internal memory, or on SD card - there is no support for uPnP devices. It does NOT multitask, in any way - if you are running the browser and want to check your mail, the browser will be shut down, and whatever you are doing is lost. There is no application store - what you got is all you get.
There are hacks to put a more complete Android desktop on there, but the application market won't download apps.
The sad thing is that the Novel has more RAM, more internal flash, a faster processor, and a higher pixel count screen than my N800, which manages to multitask, run a real copy of Firefox, can play media from uPnP servers, and has a real applications library behind it.
If there were a way to put a build of Maemo on the Novel then I would heartily recommend it, but as it is....
Oh, I don't disagree with your analysis of the content of the NYT article - indeed, see my Journal Entry on the subject for more.
But the fact that Slashdot did not even see fit to post the story, and allow discussion of the issues raised - that they weren't even willing to take the risk that people like you would find fault with the story - THAT is what is the real "tell" on what is going on.
(oh, BTW mods - I really don't give a shit about karma anymore - that's how big a "joke" Slashdot has become. Prove me right about this place swirling the drain....)
"Well, do you want your pacemaker to have intuitive manageability through Group Policies, or not?"
No, just a good SNMP MIB and traps.
I was joking with an ex-sys-admin friend of mine who just underwent open heart valve replacement, and commenting on the idea that the wireless ECG gear needed SNMP to alert when it detected a loose lead. She laughed - not good when you were doing a good impression of an Aztec sacrifice just a couple of days previously.
You might want to duck - I wouldn't want your self-righteous glow punctured by the point whizzing over your head.
I was criticizing the story submitter specifically, and more generally those who cannot differentiate POWER from ENERGY, with the first part of my statements.
They are trying to say the phones have to have a label about how much energy they radiate? What, are the stores supposed to have some magical ability to integrate over all time including the future the amount of POWER the phone puts out?
OR, can the phone sellers say the phone emits zero energy, arguing that at the time the sticker was applied, the phone was off and thus integrating over the time to apply the sticker the phone emitted no RF.
And are they defining the bandwidth over which this is being reported, or do they expect the sellers to compute blackbody radiation at some standard temperature.
I'd like to see somebody set up the demo that I saw once at the Very Large Array, where they had a sensitive receiver hooked up to an antenna, measuring the amount of 400MHz your body put out as blackbody radiation - can you imagine the sorts of morons that get excited about this stuff freaking out when they see they themselves are "radioactive"!
Actually, that would be my guess: Microsoft wants to make an ARM chip that implements the Common Language Runtime in the microarchitecture, just as some ARM chips now implement the Java runtime in the microarchitecture. They may also want to add instructions to bring even more Trusted Platform Computing Model down into the ARM core.
They may also want to make an ARM core that implements a graphics accelerator more friendly to the Direct3D model (and less friendly to OpenGL ES) than is currently available.
And right on schedule, the slashbot army of moderators leaps into action to stifle the free speech of somebody who dares point out their hypocrisy.
Since I no longer care about Karma, and have been opted-out of moderation by the Slashcrew, and as a result have opted out of the whole metamodertion circlejerk, be my guest and waste your irrelevant mod points.
US: Excuse us, but this guy broke into our servers and stole stuff. That's against the law, both here and there. Would you be so kind as to send him over so we can try him? EU_slashbots: WAAAAAA! You stupid doodie meenyheads can't enforce your laws here! We don wanna send him over!
EU_courts: Your person said something in the US that we don't like - we tried him over here and found him guilty, so you grab his money and send it over. US: Well, he said that IN THE US, and it did not violate our laws - indeed, it is protected under one of our highest laws, so we CANNOT legally do that. EU_slashbots: WAAAAA! You stupid doodie meenyheads won't enforce our laws in your country! WAAAA! NO FAIR!
(NOTE: I am clearly differentiating between the EU in general (and the EU government and courts specifically), the general EU residents, the EU residents who post on Slashdot, and the subset of EU residents who post on Slashdot who are also inconsistent in their views.
You are correct about the quarter wave plate - I was trying to keep my post as simple as possible while getting the bulk of the point across (you may notice I didn't say specifically HOW you implemented an LCD with circular polarization).
As to the screens moving over: Well, I've had to evaluate a large number of LCD screens for a product I am on the design team for, and I have seen that, however, I was evaluating mostly displays intended for telematics use, where the user wearing polarized sunglasses is a significant use case. In the field of larger displays such as laptop and desktop they may be lagging a bit.
"LCDs are already polarized light -- that's how they are able to turn pixels on and off. "
True so far, but...
"Two polarizations 90 deg out of phase = no light transmission."
Not completely true. There are 2 ways light can be polarized: planar or circular. In planar polarized light (which is what you are speaking of) the electric field will move in one fixed plane, and the magnetic field in a plane at 90 degrees. In circular polarized light, the E and H fields corkscrew through space in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.
Either form of polarization can be used to implement an LCD. Polarized sunglasses are vertical planar polarized, because the bulk of the reflections you get off things like roads and water are horizontally planar polarized. Looking at an LCD that uses either form of circular polarization with planar polarized glasses does NOT reduce the light transmission to zero at any angle (it does reduce it by a fixed amount, just as it reduces the amount of light transmission from a non-polarized source.)
LCDs are moving to the circular polarization form for that reason.
(BTW and semi-OT: the glasses used in movie theaters showing 3D movies use circular polarization (clockwise for one eye, counterclockwise for the other) for the same reason: with the old planar polarized lenses, if you tilted your head, you began to lose the separation of the views. You don't get that with circular polarization.)
Re:Something Alta Vista had Google does not...
on
Google Acquires Metaweb
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not quite the same. The Alta Vista approach grouped the tags - it would have grouped "tasting" with "red" and "white", while grouping "OLE" and "DirectX" in a separate grouping. Moreover, it was smart enough to use that grouping to allow you to select the whole group.
Thus, Alta Vista was better able to detect that sometime "wine" means a beverage, and sometimes software, and that the two concepts are different.
Google still has trouble understanding that the fermented liquid and the software aren't the same thing - it just throws a bunch of other search terms at you.
Something Alta Vista had Google does not...
on
Google Acquires Metaweb
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
In a way, I miss Alta Vista, in that they had a few things that Google does not:
NEAR operator (require the phases occur close in the page, which helped to eliminate the "pile of unrelated stuff" pages)
proper Boolean operators in the search, with arbitrary complexity (e.g. "((pre-emergent OR preemergent) AND herbicide AND liquid) AND NOT gluten")
and the thing that makes this post on-topic: Alta Vista had a search mode where-in you could refine your search by it presenting a set of additional search terms that helped qualify the meaning of what you searched for.
Say you searched for "wine", and activated that mode. It would present you with some possible extra terms you could search on, such as "white", "red", "tannic", "windows", "microsoft", "emulator".
Were you to be searching for the fermented beverage, you could select "red", "white", "tannic" and so on. Were you searching for the ABI adapter package, you could select "windows", "Microsoft", and "emulator" (which yes, Wine is NOT...)
I'd love to see Google add that sort of refinement, ideally "learning" what sorts of terms go with what (Wine + tannic = beverage, wine + OLE = software).
"Make sure you have a strong Admin password on your router..."
Which does you no good if your browser remembers your router's admin name and password - or did you miss the bit in the article where part of this hack is subverting your browser to actually do the dirty work?
"...and don't surf p0rn/warez sites."
Because advertiser sites never get hacked, nor do normal sites. Only porn and warez sites ever serve malware.
Better to turn off scripting on your browser by default, and only enable it for sites you trust, and NEVER let your browser remember passwords.
"In a sense, the personal information was leased to company...."
In a sense, I am levitating on a force-field right now - of course, that "force field" is created by the atoms of the chair.
In a sense the data was leased; unfortunately that "sense" is not in the sense of the law, or the sense of GAAP, or any "sense" that is legally binding on the company or the bankruptcy court.
What is needed is for companies that collect your data to EXPLICITLY state, as a part of the contract you enter into prior to them collecting the data, "We don't own this data, you do - we are just holding it for you. We have a specific license to use that data in this specific ways, and we cannot change that license without your explicit consent - we must destroy the data if we cannot continue to abide by this contract." (and IANAL so I don't know if that wording would stand up in court).
Only something of that strength would prevent companies from "monetizing your data".
To help clarify some of the issues with that statement others have pointed out:
You need to keep in mind the idea of digits of precision. Were I to say "My swimming pool contains one thousand gallons of water" I have given you one digit of precision - you can legitimately say my pool contains four thousand liters of water, because you are still in one digit of precision. You CANNOT legitimately say my pool contains 3785 liters - you just pulled 3 more digits of precision out of the air.
If I say "there are millions of gallons of water in that tank" - that is less than a digit of precision, more likely an order of magnitude. So saying "there are four million liters" is wrong - you went from less than a digit of precision to one digit of precision.
Now, if I said "my pool contains 1000 gallons of water plus or minus.1 gallon" - OK, now you can get retentive and say 3785.4 liters plus or minus 0.4 liters" (since the error was only given to one digit of precision).
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, I'm really glad Google wants to provide a new API for managing security. We need somebody to do this for us - somebody who really knows security, somebody who may as well have security as their middle name, to come out with an API framework for Mandatory Access Controls, preferably built right into th operating system kernel of a major distribution.
Yes, I'm really glad Google took the initiative on this.
It seems to me this is just another excuse to enable <cough/> your car <cough/> to be able to "phone home" to its real masters.
First there was OnStar - "Oh look at all nifty things we can do for (to) you: we can lock and unlock your car, kill the engine (but only if the cops ask nicely we pinky swear!), and tell you when you need to pay our dealership for service!"
People like me said "No, thank you - DO NOT WANT! Remove it. No, not 'disable it' - REMOVE IT. I want to see the hole where the module used to be."
So now they are upping the ante: "Oh lookie! We built a phone and hotspot in your car (not that you couldn't have BOUGHT a hotspot module from your phone company cheaper), so you can have your toys while you drive (ignore the fact this gives us a great way to phone home on you, AND we don't even have to admit we are doing it by giving you a button you press that reminds you that you may be paying for the car, but we still control it)".
Again: no thanks. If I want a mobile hotspot, I can buy a module from my phone company and put it in my glove box. I can ALSO take that hotspot out of the car and use it elsewhere when I want. I can also upgrade it to the latest tech (talk to all the folks with Gen 1 Onstar and how wonderful it is now that AMPS is dead). I can also switch carriers, even to folks that aren't GSM/Edge.
Consider a company that has filed for chapter 11 reorganization. Said company is consistently MONTHS late with their theoretically mandated-by-the-SEC filings. A large number of people publicly call attention to this fact, over and over again, stating that according to the SEC rules said company should not be allowed to trade stock - not on the pink sheets, not on the major exchanges, NOT AT ALL. Yet, the company continues to trade.
I would assert this demonstrates that crowdsourcing has already been tried, and the SEC's (lack of) actions in this matter demonstrate it won't work.
The Novel isn't much better than what people are saying about the Kmart device. The "Android" that it has is locked down to the point that you can buy books from Barnes and Nobel, read the books from B&N, sort-of surf the net (with a very limited version of Safari that doesn't support enough Javascript to run Google Maps, doesn't do Flash, doesn't play videos other than MP4, won't stream ANY media (it can only download to local storage, then play from there). The media player can play media in the internal memory, or on SD card - there is no support for uPnP devices. It does NOT multitask, in any way - if you are running the browser and want to check your mail, the browser will be shut down, and whatever you are doing is lost. There is no application store - what you got is all you get.
There are hacks to put a more complete Android desktop on there, but the application market won't download apps.
The sad thing is that the Novel has more RAM, more internal flash, a faster processor, and a higher pixel count screen than my N800, which manages to multitask, run a real copy of Firefox, can play media from uPnP servers, and has a real applications library behind it.
If there were a way to put a build of Maemo on the Novel then I would heartily recommend it, but as it is....
"What is so unclear about the constitution?"
How to get around the bits that prevent the government from doing whatever it is I want it to do, in spite of those pesky "rights of the people".
What, no mention of how Modern Safety Vehicles will impact drivers? No mention of Red Barchetta or A Nice Morning's Drive?
You'll have jackasses in these Volvos running anybody else off the road, just because they can.
Oh, I don't disagree with your analysis of the content of the NYT article - indeed, see my Journal Entry on the subject for more.
But the fact that Slashdot did not even see fit to post the story, and allow discussion of the issues raised - that they weren't even willing to take the risk that people like you would find fault with the story - THAT is what is the real "tell" on what is going on.
Considering that Slashdot didn't even bother to report on this New York Times story about Slashdot (even though it appeared in the Firehose twice (at least), but they DID report on The Science of Caddyshack (in Idle), are you surprised?
(oh, BTW mods - I really don't give a shit about karma anymore - that's how big a "joke" Slashdot has become. Prove me right about this place swirling the drain....)
"Well, do you want your pacemaker to have intuitive manageability through Group Policies, or not?"
No, just a good SNMP MIB and traps.
I was joking with an ex-sys-admin friend of mine who just underwent open heart valve replacement, and commenting on the idea that the wireless ECG gear needed SNMP to alert when it detected a loose lead. She laughed - not good when you were doing a good impression of an Aztec sacrifice just a couple of days previously.
You might want to duck - I wouldn't want your self-righteous glow punctured by the point whizzing over your head.
I was criticizing the story submitter specifically, and more generally those who cannot differentiate POWER from ENERGY, with the first part of my statements.
They are trying to say the phones have to have a label about how much energy they radiate? What, are the stores supposed to have some magical ability to integrate over all time including the future the amount of POWER the phone puts out?
OR, can the phone sellers say the phone emits zero energy, arguing that at the time the sticker was applied, the phone was off and thus integrating over the time to apply the sticker the phone emitted no RF.
And are they defining the bandwidth over which this is being reported, or do they expect the sellers to compute blackbody radiation at some standard temperature.
I'd like to see somebody set up the demo that I saw once at the Very Large Array, where they had a sensitive receiver hooked up to an antenna, measuring the amount of 400MHz your body put out as blackbody radiation - can you imagine the sorts of morons that get excited about this stuff freaking out when they see they themselves are "radioactive"!
Folks, if RF scares you - DON'T USE A CELLPHONE!
"... ARMs supporting a CLR environment...."
Actually, that would be my guess: Microsoft wants to make an ARM chip that implements the Common Language Runtime in the microarchitecture, just as some ARM chips now implement the Java runtime in the microarchitecture. They may also want to add instructions to bring even more Trusted Platform Computing Model down into the ARM core.
They may also want to make an ARM core that implements a graphics accelerator more friendly to the Direct3D model (and less friendly to OpenGL ES) than is currently available.
And right on schedule, the slashbot army of moderators leaps into action to stifle the free speech of somebody who dares point out their hypocrisy.
Since I no longer care about Karma, and have been opted-out of moderation by the Slashcrew, and as a result have opted out of the whole metamodertion circlejerk, be my guest and waste your irrelevant mod points.
Ahh, bask in the inconsistency and hypocrisy:
US: Excuse us, but this guy broke into our servers and stole stuff. That's against the law, both here and there. Would you be so kind as to send him over so we can try him?
EU_slashbots: WAAAAAA! You stupid doodie meenyheads can't enforce your laws here! We don wanna send him over!
EU_courts: Your person said something in the US that we don't like - we tried him over here and found him guilty, so you grab his money and send it over.
US: Well, he said that IN THE US, and it did not violate our laws - indeed, it is protected under one of our highest laws, so we CANNOT legally do that.
EU_slashbots: WAAAAA! You stupid doodie meenyheads won't enforce our laws in your country! WAAAA! NO FAIR!
(NOTE: I am clearly differentiating between the EU in general (and the EU government and courts specifically), the general EU residents, the EU residents who post on Slashdot, and the subset of EU residents who post on Slashdot who are also inconsistent in their views.
You are correct about the quarter wave plate - I was trying to keep my post as simple as possible while getting the bulk of the point across (you may notice I didn't say specifically HOW you implemented an LCD with circular polarization).
As to the screens moving over: Well, I've had to evaluate a large number of LCD screens for a product I am on the design team for, and I have seen that, however, I was evaluating mostly displays intended for telematics use, where the user wearing polarized sunglasses is a significant use case. In the field of larger displays such as laptop and desktop they may be lagging a bit.
"LCDs are already polarized light -- that's how they are able to turn pixels on and off. "
True so far, but...
"Two polarizations 90 deg out of phase = no light transmission."
Not completely true. There are 2 ways light can be polarized: planar or circular. In planar polarized light (which is what you are speaking of) the electric field will move in one fixed plane, and the magnetic field in a plane at 90 degrees. In circular polarized light, the E and H fields corkscrew through space in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.
Either form of polarization can be used to implement an LCD. Polarized sunglasses are vertical planar polarized, because the bulk of the reflections you get off things like roads and water are horizontally planar polarized. Looking at an LCD that uses either form of circular polarization with planar polarized glasses does NOT reduce the light transmission to zero at any angle (it does reduce it by a fixed amount, just as it reduces the amount of light transmission from a non-polarized source.)
LCDs are moving to the circular polarization form for that reason.
(BTW and semi-OT: the glasses used in movie theaters showing 3D movies use circular polarization (clockwise for one eye, counterclockwise for the other) for the same reason: with the old planar polarized lenses, if you tilted your head, you began to lose the separation of the views. You don't get that with circular polarization.)
It's not quite the same. The Alta Vista approach grouped the tags - it would have grouped "tasting" with "red" and "white", while grouping "OLE" and "DirectX" in a separate grouping. Moreover, it was smart enough to use that grouping to allow you to select the whole group.
Thus, Alta Vista was better able to detect that sometime "wine" means a beverage, and sometimes software, and that the two concepts are different.
Google still has trouble understanding that the fermented liquid and the software aren't the same thing - it just throws a bunch of other search terms at you.
In a way, I miss Alta Vista, in that they had a few things that Google does not:
Say you searched for "wine", and activated that mode. It would present you with some possible extra terms you could search on, such as "white", "red", "tannic", "windows", "microsoft", "emulator".
Were you to be searching for the fermented beverage, you could select "red", "white", "tannic" and so on.
Were you searching for the ABI adapter package, you could select "windows", "Microsoft", and "emulator" (which yes, Wine is NOT...)
I'd love to see Google add that sort of refinement, ideally "learning" what sorts of terms go with what (Wine + tannic = beverage, wine + OLE = software).
Obviously, this was an attempt by the Chela at Optical SETI.
It's not their fault we have a different definition of "optical"....
Kids these days....
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076008/
Think they're the first with everything.
grumble.
Git off ma lawn!
"Make sure you have a strong Admin password on your router..."
Which does you no good if your browser remembers your router's admin name and password - or did you miss the bit in the article where part of this hack is subverting your browser to actually do the dirty work?
"...and don't surf p0rn/warez sites."
Because advertiser sites never get hacked, nor do normal sites. Only porn and warez sites ever serve malware.
Better to turn off scripting on your browser by default, and only enable it for sites you trust, and NEVER let your browser remember passwords.
Thankfully, the Japanese have given us a solution - namely, 1 watt blue laser diodes.
And Wicked Lasers has made them portable.
Burn out all cameras
For Great Justice!
"In a sense, the personal information was leased to company...."
In a sense, I am levitating on a force-field right now - of course, that "force field" is created by the atoms of the chair.
In a sense the data was leased; unfortunately that "sense" is not in the sense of the law, or the sense of GAAP, or any "sense" that is legally binding on the company or the bankruptcy court.
What is needed is for companies that collect your data to EXPLICITLY state, as a part of the contract you enter into prior to them collecting the data, "We don't own this data, you do - we are just holding it for you. We have a specific license to use that data in this specific ways, and we cannot change that license without your explicit consent - we must destroy the data if we cannot continue to abide by this contract." (and IANAL so I don't know if that wording would stand up in court).
Only something of that strength would prevent companies from "monetizing your data".
They should publish this to the Web - there are lots of looky-lous that would happily traipse from site to site, waiting for a show.
If they charged for access, they could even raise some money for repairs.
They could raise even more by requiring a cut from any video taken of the events.
To help clarify some of the issues with that statement others have pointed out:
You need to keep in mind the idea of digits of precision. Were I to say "My swimming pool contains one thousand gallons of water" I have given you one digit of precision - you can legitimately say my pool contains four thousand liters of water, because you are still in one digit of precision. You CANNOT legitimately say my pool contains 3785 liters - you just pulled 3 more digits of precision out of the air.
If I say "there are millions of gallons of water in that tank" - that is less than a digit of precision, more likely an order of magnitude. So saying "there are four million liters" is wrong - you went from less than a digit of precision to one digit of precision.
Now, if I said "my pool contains 1000 gallons of water plus or minus .1 gallon" - OK, now you can get retentive and say 3785.4 liters plus or minus 0.4 liters" (since the error was only given to one digit of precision).