Man, imagine all the free time the ladies would have out there to chase jocks if that question were answered. Actually, if we got a good designer working on that robot, the balance of power could swing our way! "Flowers? Pff. Dinner? Ha!"
You got metal fever, boy! Metal fever!
My God! You never saw the propaganda film.
It's just lucky I keep a copy in the VCR at all times.
[He presses a button and a film title appears on the screen: I Dated A Robot!. In the movie a couple sit in a café and stare into each other's eyes. A narrator walks into the scene.]
Narrator: Ordinary human dating. It's enjoyable and it serves an important purpose. [He turns the table over and a crying baby appears. He turns it back again.] But when a human dates an artificial mate, there is no purpose. Only enjoyment. And that leads to...tragedy.
[The woman behind him turns into a blank robot and the man downloads a celebrity onto it.]
Billy: Neato! A Marylin Monroebot!
Monroebot: Ooo! You're a real dreamboat (mechanical voice) Billy Everyteen!
Narrator: Harmless fun? Let's see what happens next!
[The scene cuts to Billy's bedroom. He is kissing the Monroebot. Enter his mother.]
Billy's Mom: Billy, do you want to walk your dog?
Billy: No thank Mom, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot.
[Enter his dad.]
Billy's Dad: Billy, do want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?
Billy: No thanks dad, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot.
[Enter his girlfriend, Mavis, from the café.]
Mavis: Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can make out together.
Billy: Gee Mavis, your house is across the street, that's an awfully long way to go for making out.
Narrator: Did you notice what went wrong in that scene? Ordinarily Billy would work hard to make money from his paper route then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning the slim chance of performing the reproductive act. But in a world where teens can date robots why should he bother? Why should anyone bother? Let's take a look at Billy's planet a year later. [The scene changes and a foam hand rolls across an empty American football field] Where are all the football stars? [The foam hand continues to drift across an empty laboratory.] And where are the biochemists? [The scene changes to a split screen of a pair of human and robots making out on beds.] They are trapped - trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips. All civilisation was just an effort to impress the opposite sex. And sometimes the same sex. Now, let's skip forward 80 years into the future. Where is Billy?
[The scene changes to a post-apocalyptic world. Billy is an aged man but he is still with his Monroebot and still making out with her.]
Billy: Farewell!
[He dies.]
Narrator: The next day Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. [In the movie a fleet of flying saucers destroy buildings with a quick laser shot.] Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth. Don't Date Robots!
[A caption appears on the screen with the same words on it and the movie ends. The space pope is displayed on the screen with Crocodylus Pontiflex written around him in English and alien.]
Announcer [voice-over]: Brought to you by the space pope!
Neither have most of us here--at least not as often as we'd like to.
I think you should introduce your robot to Slashdot.
He would fit here perfectly well.
You know... I considered adding a joke to my post about that. I decided against it because it would detract from what I was saying, and because I didn't want people to think I was dirty.
But apparently, everyone is already thinking the same thing!
There is an old slavic proverb:
"A hungry man has bread on his mind."
Apparently the Slashdot community,
myself included,
seems to be literally starving...
Actually, this is sad, if not outright pathetic.
Please excuse me my poor humour.
After reading all of the above comments with sincere interestedness, I inevitably came to the following conclusion: we need to get laid. All of us. Otherwise the entire robotics industry might soon become nothing more but a robofetishistic sex shop for sick perverted deviants. Seriously.
This is the first time
that i see word "sex" on slashdot. For a second i thought that we geeks are finally getting lives:) But only for a second - then i read the entire subject.
This is nothing...
I read it first as
"What Sex is [Best With] Your Robot?"
and have even started to write quite an interesting essay on the subject, entitled "Robosexualism and Technofetishism in Modern Academia," only to have it deleted later in utter embarrassment, after one of my coworkers has read what I was just writing...
I don't know which part of
"No, it is not my diary, for God's sake! It is a scientific anallysis for Slashdot community!" he doesn't understand...
A robot shall not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
A robot must make moronic remarks full of infantile Freudian connotations if it is male, or otherwise take offense thereto,
as long as such remarks do not conflict with foolish stereotypes, unbelievably bad taste and especially low intelligence in the range between cretin and imbecile.
I ask you, is this really a world we want our robots to live in?!
The Sasser worm, which exploits a flaw in Microsoft's Windows software, disrupted work at the Marine and Coastguard Agency, forcing staff to use pencil and paper to find ships and locate distress calls on maps. [...]
Anyone with an infected machine should visit Microsoft's website to download a software "patch" to fix their system.
No!
Anyone with an infected machine should
stop visiting Microsoft's website
and never use Windows in such a critical environment as
the Marine and Coastguard Agency for God's sake!
"It is kind of funny, I'll admit, but this is not the time for these kinds of games," says Keck.
Am I the only one who thinks that
it is "kind of funny" that the name of
Detective Lt. John Keck is Keck, the same as one
of old nicknames of Kevin Mitnick,
an abbreviation of his name,
Kevin Mitnick,
the first and last two letters of his name, i.e. Keck?
Is this really a coincidence?
Is there anyone here who can prove that he
personally knows this supposed "Detective"?
I do not want to be paranoid,
but I find it certainly intriguing.
Did anybody else immediately think "now why did they name it something so close to 'anus'?"...
I assume
it was named Janus by an analogy to the
analog hole
and the closing thereof,
assuring the existance of
entirely safe canals of encrypted data,
literally impossible to bypass.
The obvious Freudian connotations
are so sick that in my opinion
such a name should be illegal, but IANAL.
On the second thought, it is a pretty good name
for a poor-ass attempt to screw the consumers over...
As a sidenote I might add that
I read some ancient Romans manuscript once,
which said that Janus had something to do with
an orifice and two cheeks or something...
In any event, this name is
hardly banal
by any stretch of imagination and is in fact
very Interesting,
at least as Interesting as the actual crypto behing Janus.
Going back on topic,
I think Janus will be a strong weapon in the
content providers harassment arsenal
if only massively deployed,
but I wonder how said Janus cryptography algorithms
will resist future cryptanalysis, though.
Only the time will tell ass. I mean, time will tell us.
*sigh*
"But the new digital rights management tools also include features that would protect content that is streamed around a home network, or even block data pathways potentially deemed "unsafe," such as the traditional analog outputs
and cathode ray tube
on a high-definition TV set. That's a feature that has been sought by movie studios in advance of the move to digital television."
I think the above might work as advertised.
Anything less than that is a total farce, but we all know it
already.
After all, keyword blacklisting worked for
"hierbal v!aggra"
and "peenes emlargermint"
so it should work for
terrorists and drug dealers as well...
Seriously though,
the fact that keyword blacklisting is totally useless
should be obvious to anyone who ever watched
a gangster movie.
The question is which keywords do you blacklist?
Should there be words like
"bomb" or "heroine"?
No, because gangsters don't use them.
Does it mean we should blacklist
"object" and "good shit"? No?
So I ask you, which exactly keywords should we blacklist?
Only then,
when we have this question answered,
we can discuss whether blacklisting
or censorship is a good idea.
Because I, for one, don't want
Project Gutenberg be foolishly forced
by some fucking illiterate imbeciles
to remove the literature
of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka!
Could those routers be substituted, at least temporarily, with clusters of cheap PCs running NetBSD? It could be not only cheaper but also
faster.
The only downside would be the administration and power usage. I think that this is a very interesting idea.
Yeah, i agree. LucasArts is one of those companies that really didnt get the transition to 3d right....
Indeed. In my opinion they got it totally wrong.
But i think the main reason for them being fucked up is the new star wars trilogy. Someone (or everyone) in their managment seems to concentrate all resources to "movie franchise" somewhere in the end of the 90s, and then only crap came forth...
You're right.
I never understood this whole Star Wars hype,
but I guess that
the despotism apotheosis propagating agenda
is more important for Lucas than giving us good games
(or movies, for that matter).
But on the other hand: Noone says you CANT make a good game with good grafix. I would sell my sister for a Ultima underworld with doom3 engine graphic...
I would kill for even a regular Ultima 8 (or even 7)
with Doom 2 (or even 1) engine.
I believe such a game might totally kick arse,
mightn't it?
If he was trying to get you to download and install a Trojan horse, why would he tell you to backup your system?
You haven't read
The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
by Kevin D. Mitnick, have you?
Why would he have a disclaimer with dire warnings about 'no warranty' and "damages" rather than a statement that the software is "r33ly L33t" and that you need it now?
"If he was trying to get you to download and install a Trojan horse,"
which I suppose he isn't,
he should in fact do exactly that.
You need to take the aluminum foil off of your head.
Probably, but just not for the reasons you describe.
I was just about to comment that
having been using free software exclusively
for many years, I almost forgot that having the
ability to get unofficial patches is indeed unusual,
but until I read your comment
I did not even considered that said patches could be
anything else than "diff -u" output
ready to be fed to patch(1) by Larry Wall.
You people must live in a serious paranoia:
Unofficial binary-only patches
written by pirates,
to proprietary software
written by the most evil software company
and the richest man on Earth,
who has the record of distributing bundled
and inseparable EULAs patches.
Who can you trust more? Who, indeed...
Fortunately, being a saint in the Church of Emacs,
I have no such problems.
Which is not to say that I don't live in a serious paranoia nonetheless,
however it has little to do with my software and patches, fortunately.
LucasArts engineer Nick Porcino has an article detailing what to expect from graphics in the next generation of game systems including the "influence of cinematic realtime rendering, the promise of advanced lighting techniques and high-dynamic range images, the uses of the rendering pipeline, and the future of multiprocessor-based rendering and advanced geometry."
Funny.
That is exactly the same what gaming technology engineers were talking about when the first consumer GPUs were hitting the market in the nineties. Meanwhile, the best games ever made by LucasArts are successfully emulated by
ScummVM on 486.
Cinematic realtime rendering, advanced lighting techniques and high-dynamic range images and multiprocessor-based rendering and advanced geometry my arse.
A decent JPEG encoder just adds a slight amount of noise (rarely more than 2 values in either direction..) to the image, and cameras aren't exactly crystal clear to begin with. Re-encoding can cause these effects to multiply. The simple answer is to save the JPEG as a lossless image (like.PNG) if you're going to modify/remodify it. Then save it as JPEG again when you're ready for the final output. Okay, that's two JPEG saves instead of just one, but again it's not noticable degradation. If the image needs to be resaved after that, call up the lossless version earlier and work from that. That's how a lot of us artists work, anyway.
Given that we're still getting wireless (i.e. celllular, not wifi) off the ground and that PDAs only have so much storage, hopping over to.PNG is not going to do anything but hurt that situation.
Comparing JPG to MP3 is not really fair. Granted, some sites do compress their jpegs down so far that the artifacts are quite noticable. However,for stuff like showing digital photos on the web, you just can't see the artifacts unless somebody was just a bad pilot with the software they were using. I know this because I've run a difference filter on various images compressed with JPEG. The difference is so subtle. It's not like MP3 which is compressed enough that you can hear the degradation in it. It'd be more like comparing Mp3 at 500kbits to Flac. At that point, man it'd be hard (not impossible, I suppose) to see the difference.
JPEG is quite useful, even with today's broadband availability.
A decent MP3 encoder just adds a slight amount of noise (rarely more than 2 values in either direction..) to the sample, and
microphones aren't exactly crystal clear to begin with.
Re-encoding can cause these effects to multiply.
The simple answer is to save the MP3 as a lossless sound format (like FLAC) if you're going to modify/remodify it. Then save it as MP3 again when you're ready for the final output. Okay, that's two MP3 saves instead of just one, but again it's not noticable degradation. If the sample needs to be resaved after that, call up the lossless version earlier and work from that. That's how a lot of us artists work, anyway.
Given that we're still getting wireless (i.e. celllular, not wifi) off the ground and that PDAs only have so much storage, hopping over to FLAC is not going to do anything but hurt that situation.
Comparing MP3 to JPG is not really fair. Granted, some sites do compress their MP3s
down so far that the artifacts are quite noticable.
However, for stuff like presenting digital music on the web,
you just can't hear the artifacts unless somebody was just a bad pilot with the software they were using.
I know this because I've run a difference filter on various
samples
compressed with MP3. The difference is so subtle.
It's not like JPG which is compressed enough that you can see the degradation in it. It'd be more like comparing
JPG at 99 quality to PNG.
At that point, man it'd be hard (not impossible, I suppose) to see the difference.
MP3 is quite useful, even with today's broadband availability.
In Other News:
Photoshop from the Eyes of a Gimp User
"Many in the Windows
community are raving about Photoshop,
however pros who have actually used Gimp
think differently:
This Linux professional designer goes through the steps of getting Photoshop up and running on his Linux box,
only to get baffled by the chaotic interface in general and its non-standard UI compared to other Linux apps,
its slowness to open large files and to apply filters,
the unintuitive tools that accompany it and its very visible bad quality of text and lines/shapes.
That designer even bought a 'supported' version of
Linux Photoshop
by an Adobe company but he never heard back for his support requests.
I think that's one of the best-written articles I've ever read about the reality of most
proprietary software
profit-driven projects vs their equivelant professional/free software
ones..."
Coming Up Next:
Linux from the Eyes of a Windows User:
"I got baffled by the chaotic interface in general and its non-standard UI," said Windows user asked about Linux. Film at 11.
It seems like a natural progress of artificial life
and as such reminds me more about
Tierra
than Blade Runner's replicants.
If you don't know Tierra, there is
an interesting description on Wikipedia:
Tierra is a computer simulation developed by ecologist Thomas S. Ray in the early 1990s in which computer programs compete for central processor unit (CPU) time and access to main memory. The computer programs in Tierra are evolvable and can mutate, self-replicate and recombine. Tierra is a frequently cited example of an artificial life model; in the metaphor of the Tierra, the evolvable computer programs can be considered as digital organisms which compete for energy (CPU time) and resources (main memory).
The basic Tierra model has been used to experimentally explore in silico, the basic processes of evolutionary and ecological dynamics. Processes such as the dynamics of punctuated equilibrium, host-parasite co-evolution and density dependent natural selection are amenable to investigation within the Tierra framework. A notable difference to more conventional models of evolutionary computation, such as genetic algorithms is that there is no explicit, or exogenous fitness function built into the model. Often in such models there is the notion of a function being "optimized"; in the case of Tierra, the fitness function is endogenous: there is simply survival and death. According to Ray and others this may allow for more "open-ended" evolution, in which the dynamics of the feedback between evolutionary and ecological processes can itself change over time (see evolvability).
While the dynamics of Tierra are highly suggestive, the significance of the dynamics for real ecological and evolutionary behavior are still a subject of debate within the scientific community. Tierra is an abstract model, but any quantitative model is still subject to the same validation and verification techniques applied to more traditional mathematical models, and as such, has no special status. More detailed models in which more realistic dynamics of biological systems and organisms are incorporated is now an active research field (see systems biology).
It is very important to remember that given sufficient
space and complexity, the difference between
carbon-based form of life as we know it and
any "artificial" form thereof is only that of a medium.
Very interesting read. I hope it will go much further
during the next few years and we will see
some unimaginable implications of this new idea.
If you think this is Informative,
then I should quote
Biometrics: Truths and Fictions
from August 1998
issue of Crypto-Gram Newsletter by Bruce Schneier:
Biometrics are seductive: you are your key. Your voiceprint unlocks the
door of your house. Your retinal scan lets you in the corporate offices.
Your thumbprint logs you on to your computer. Unfortunately, the reality
of biometrics isn't that simple.
Biometrics are the oldest form of identification. Dogs have distinctive
barks. Cats spray. Humans recognise each other's faces. On the
telephone, your voice identifies you as the person on the line. On a paper
contract, your signature identifies you as the person who signed it. Your
photograph identifies you as the person who owns a particular passport.
What makes biometrics useful for many of these applications is that they
can be stored in a database. Alice's voice only works as a biometric
identification on the telephone if you already know who she is; if she is a
stranger, it doesn't help. It's the same with Alice's handwriting; you can
recognize it only if you already know it. To solve this problem, banks
keep signature cards on file. Alice signs her name on a card, and it is
stored in the bank (the bank needs to maintain its secure perimeter in
order for this to work right). When Alice signs a check, the bank verifies
Alice's signature against the stored signature to ensure that the check is
valid.
There are a bunch of different biometrics. I've mentioned handwriting,
voiceprints, and face recognition. There are also hand geometry,
fingerprints, retinal scans, DNA, typing patterns, signature geometry (not
just the look of the signature, but the pen pressure, signature speed,
etc.), and others. The technologies behind some of them are more reliable
than others, and they'll all improve.
"Improve" means two different things. First, it means that
the system will not incorrectly identify an impostor as Alice. The whole
point of the biometric is to prove that Alice is Alice, so if an
impostor can successfully fool the system it isn't working very well. This
is called a false positive. Second, "improve" means that the system will
not incorrectly identify Alice as an impostor. Again, the point of the
biometric is to prove that Alice is Alice, and if Alice can't convince the
system that she is her then it's not working very well, either. This is
called a false negative. In general, you can tune a biometric system to
err on the side of a false positive or a false negative.
Biometrics are great because they are really hard to forge: it's hard to
put a false fingerprint on your finger, or make your retina look like
someone else's. Some people can mimic others' voices, and Hollywood can
make people's faces look like someone else, but these are specialized or
expensive skills. When you see someone sign his name, you generally know
it is him and not someone else.
Biometrics are lousy because they are so easy to forge: it's easy to
steal a biometric after the measurement is taken. In all of the
applications discussed above, the verifier needs to verify not only that the
biometric is accurate but that it has been input correctly. Imagine a
remote system that uses face recognition as a biometric. "In order to gain
authorization, take a Polaroid picture of yourself and mail it in. We'll
compare the picture with the one we have in file." What are the
attacks here?
Easy. To masquerade as Alice, take a Polaroid picture of her when she's
not looking. Then, at some later date, use it to fool the system. This
attack works because while it is hard to make your face look like Alice's,
it's easy to get a picture of Alice's face. And since the system does not
verify that the picture is of your face, only that it matches the picture
of Alice's face on file, we can fool it.
Similarly, we can fool a signature biometric using a photocopier or a
fax machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Using GPUs For General-Purpose Computing
I'm glad that finally they started to use the General-Purpose Unit. What took them so long?
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords!
You got metal fever, boy! Metal fever! My God! You never saw the propaganda film. It's just lucky I keep a copy in the VCR at all times.
[He presses a button and a film title appears on the screen: I Dated A Robot!. In the movie a couple sit in a café and stare into each other's eyes. A narrator walks into the scene.]
Narrator: Ordinary human dating. It's enjoyable and it serves an important purpose. [He turns the table over and a crying baby appears. He turns it back again.] But when a human dates an artificial mate, there is no purpose. Only enjoyment. And that leads to...tragedy.
[The woman behind him turns into a blank robot and the man downloads a celebrity onto it.]
Billy: Neato! A Marylin Monroebot!
Monroebot: Ooo! You're a real dreamboat (mechanical voice) Billy Everyteen!
Narrator: Harmless fun? Let's see what happens next!
[The scene cuts to Billy's bedroom. He is kissing the Monroebot. Enter his mother.]
Billy's Mom: Billy, do you want to walk your dog?
Billy: No thank Mom, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot.
[Enter his dad.]
Billy's Dad: Billy, do want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?
Billy: No thanks dad, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot.
[Enter his girlfriend, Mavis, from the café.]
Mavis: Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can make out together.
Billy: Gee Mavis, your house is across the street, that's an awfully long way to go for making out.
Narrator: Did you notice what went wrong in that scene? Ordinarily Billy would work hard to make money from his paper route then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning the slim chance of performing the reproductive act. But in a world where teens can date robots why should he bother? Why should anyone bother? Let's take a look at Billy's planet a year later. [The scene changes and a foam hand rolls across an empty American football field] Where are all the football stars? [The foam hand continues to drift across an empty laboratory.] And where are the biochemists? [The scene changes to a split screen of a pair of human and robots making out on beds.] They are trapped - trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips. All civilisation was just an effort to impress the opposite sex. And sometimes the same sex. Now, let's skip forward 80 years into the future. Where is Billy?
[The scene changes to a post-apocalyptic world. Billy is an aged man but he is still with his Monroebot and still making out with her.]
Billy: Farewell!
[He dies.]
Narrator: The next day Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. [In the movie a fleet of flying saucers destroy buildings with a quick laser shot.] Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth. Don't Date Robots!
[A caption appears on the screen with the same words on it and the movie ends. The space pope is displayed on the screen with Crocodylus Pontiflex written around him in English and alien.]
Announcer [voice-over]: Brought to you by the space pope!
[3ACV15]
Neither have most of us here--at least not as often as we'd like to. I think you should introduce your robot to Slashdot. He would fit here perfectly well.
There is an old slavic proverb: "A hungry man has bread on his mind." Apparently the Slashdot community, myself included, seems to be literally starving... Actually, this is sad, if not outright pathetic. Please excuse me my poor humour.
After reading all of the above comments with sincere interestedness, I inevitably came to the following conclusion: we need to get laid. All of us. Otherwise the entire robotics industry might soon become nothing more but a robofetishistic sex shop for sick perverted deviants. Seriously.
I'm sorry but I stopped reading right here, for I am not quite sure whether I want to read about it...
When I drink too much coffee, some people call me a "sex robot." Is that what you mean?
This is nothing... I read it first as "What Sex is [Best With] Your Robot?" and have even started to write quite an interesting essay on the subject, entitled "Robosexualism and Technofetishism in Modern Academia," only to have it deleted later in utter embarrassment, after one of my coworkers has read what I was just writing... I don't know which part of "No, it is not my diary, for God's sake! It is a scientific anallysis for Slashdot community!" he doesn't understand...
Great idea! Let us intruduce sexism to robots!
I ask you, is this really a world we want our robots to live in?!
From the article:
No! Anyone with an infected machine should stop visiting Microsoft's website and never use Windows in such a critical environment as the Marine and Coastguard Agency for God's sake!
Am I the only one who thinks that it is "kind of funny" that the name of Detective Lt. John Keck is Keck, the same as one of old nicknames of Kevin Mitnick, an abbreviation of his name, Kevin Mitnick, the first and last two letters of his name, i.e. Keck? Is this really a coincidence? Is there anyone here who can prove that he personally knows this supposed "Detective"? I do not want to be paranoid, but I find it certainly intriguing.
I assume it was named Janus by an analogy to the analog hole and the closing thereof, assuring the existance of entirely safe canals of encrypted data, literally impossible to bypass. The obvious Freudian connotations are so sick that in my opinion such a name should be illegal, but IANAL. On the second thought, it is a pretty good name for a poor-ass attempt to screw the consumers over... As a sidenote I might add that I read some ancient Romans manuscript once, which said that Janus had something to do with an orifice and two cheeks or something... In any event, this name is hardly banal by any stretch of imagination and is in fact very Interesting, at least as Interesting as the actual crypto behing Janus. Going back on topic, I think Janus will be a strong weapon in the content providers harassment arsenal if only massively deployed, but I wonder how said Janus cryptography algorithms will resist future cryptanalysis, though. Only the time will tell ass. I mean, time will tell us. *sigh*
"But the new digital rights management tools also include features that would protect content that is streamed around a home network, or even block data pathways potentially deemed "unsafe," such as the traditional analog outputs and cathode ray tube on a high-definition TV set. That's a feature that has been sought by movie studios in advance of the move to digital television."
I think the above might work as advertised. Anything less than that is a total farce, but we all know it already.
After all, keyword blacklisting worked for "hierbal v!aggra" and "peenes emlargermint" so it should work for terrorists and drug dealers as well... Seriously though, the fact that keyword blacklisting is totally useless should be obvious to anyone who ever watched a gangster movie. The question is which keywords do you blacklist? Should there be words like "bomb" or "heroine"? No, because gangsters don't use them. Does it mean we should blacklist "object" and "good shit"? No? So I ask you, which exactly keywords should we blacklist? Only then, when we have this question answered, we can discuss whether blacklisting or censorship is a good idea. Because I, for one, don't want Project Gutenberg be foolishly forced by some fucking illiterate imbeciles to remove the literature of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka!
Could those routers be substituted, at least temporarily, with clusters of cheap PCs running NetBSD? It could be not only cheaper but also faster. The only downside would be the administration and power usage. I think that this is a very interesting idea.
Very impressive. I have few questions, though: how does it compare to quantum units? Could NetBSD be used as a basis for cheap routers in New York?
Indeed. In my opinion they got it totally wrong.
You're right. I never understood this whole Star Wars hype, but I guess that the despotism apotheosis propagating agenda is more important for Lucas than giving us good games (or movies, for that matter).
I would kill for even a regular Ultima 8 (or even 7) with Doom 2 (or even 1) engine. I believe such a game might totally kick arse, mightn't it?
You haven't read The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security by Kevin D. Mitnick, have you?
"If he was trying to get you to download and install a Trojan horse," which I suppose he isn't, he should in fact do exactly that.
Probably, but just not for the reasons you describe.
I was just about to comment that having been using free software exclusively for many years, I almost forgot that having the ability to get unofficial patches is indeed unusual, but until I read your comment I did not even considered that said patches could be anything else than "diff -u" output ready to be fed to patch(1) by Larry Wall. You people must live in a serious paranoia: Unofficial binary-only patches written by pirates, to proprietary software written by the most evil software company and the richest man on Earth, who has the record of distributing bundled and inseparable EULAs patches. Who can you trust more? Who, indeed... Fortunately, being a saint in the Church of Emacs, I have no such problems. Which is not to say that I don't live in a serious paranoia nonetheless, however it has little to do with my software and patches, fortunately.
Funny. That is exactly the same what gaming technology engineers were talking about when the first consumer GPUs were hitting the market in the nineties. Meanwhile, the best games ever made by LucasArts are successfully emulated by ScummVM on 486. Cinematic realtime rendering, advanced lighting techniques and high-dynamic range images and multiprocessor-based rendering and advanced geometry my arse.
A decent JPEG encoder just adds a slight amount of noise (rarely more than 2 values in either direction..) to the image, and cameras aren't exactly crystal clear to begin with. Re-encoding can cause these effects to multiply. The simple answer is to save the JPEG as a lossless image (like .PNG) if you're going to modify/remodify it. Then save it as JPEG again when you're ready for the final output. Okay, that's two JPEG saves instead of just one, but again it's not noticable degradation. If the image needs to be resaved after that, call up the lossless version earlier and work from that. That's how a lot of us artists work, anyway.
Given that we're still getting wireless (i.e. celllular, not wifi) off the ground and that PDAs only have so much storage, hopping over to .PNG is not going to do anything but hurt that situation.
Comparing JPG to MP3 is not really fair. Granted, some sites do compress their jpegs down so far that the artifacts are quite noticable. However,for stuff like showing digital photos on the web, you just can't see the artifacts unless somebody was just a bad pilot with the software they were using. I know this because I've run a difference filter on various images compressed with JPEG. The difference is so subtle. It's not like MP3 which is compressed enough that you can hear the degradation in it. It'd be more like comparing Mp3 at 500kbits to Flac. At that point, man it'd be hard (not impossible, I suppose) to see the difference.
JPEG is quite useful, even with today's broadband availability.
A decent MP3 encoder just adds a slight amount of noise (rarely more than 2 values in either direction..) to the sample, and microphones aren't exactly crystal clear to begin with. Re-encoding can cause these effects to multiply. The simple answer is to save the MP3 as a lossless sound format (like FLAC) if you're going to modify/remodify it. Then save it as MP3 again when you're ready for the final output. Okay, that's two MP3 saves instead of just one, but again it's not noticable degradation. If the sample needs to be resaved after that, call up the lossless version earlier and work from that. That's how a lot of us artists work, anyway.
Given that we're still getting wireless (i.e. celllular, not wifi) off the ground and that PDAs only have so much storage, hopping over to FLAC is not going to do anything but hurt that situation.
Comparing MP3 to JPG is not really fair. Granted, some sites do compress their MP3s down so far that the artifacts are quite noticable. However, for stuff like presenting digital music on the web, you just can't hear the artifacts unless somebody was just a bad pilot with the software they were using. I know this because I've run a difference filter on various samples compressed with MP3. The difference is so subtle. It's not like JPG which is compressed enough that you can see the degradation in it. It'd be more like comparing JPG at 99 quality to PNG. At that point, man it'd be hard (not impossible, I suppose) to see the difference.
MP3 is quite useful, even with today's broadband availability.
In Other News: Photoshop from the Eyes of a Gimp User
"Many in the Windows community are raving about Photoshop, however pros who have actually used Gimp think differently: This Linux professional designer goes through the steps of getting Photoshop up and running on his Linux box, only to get baffled by the chaotic interface in general and its non-standard UI compared to other Linux apps, its slowness to open large files and to apply filters, the unintuitive tools that accompany it and its very visible bad quality of text and lines/shapes. That designer even bought a 'supported' version of Linux Photoshop by an Adobe company but he never heard back for his support requests. I think that's one of the best-written articles I've ever read about the reality of most proprietary software profit-driven projects vs their equivelant professional/free software ones..."
Coming Up Next: Linux from the Eyes of a Windows User: "I got baffled by the chaotic interface in general and its non-standard UI," said Windows user asked about Linux. Film at 11.
It seems like a natural progress of artificial life and as such reminds me more about Tierra than Blade Runner's replicants. If you don't know Tierra, there is an interesting description on Wikipedia:
It is very important to remember that given sufficient space and complexity, the difference between carbon-based form of life as we know it and any "artificial" form thereof is only that of a medium. Very interesting read. I hope it will go much further during the next few years and we will see some unimaginable implications of this new idea.
If you think this is Informative, then I should quote Biometrics: Truths and Fictions from August 1998 issue of Crypto-Gram Newsletter by Bruce Schneier: