I've been on this soapbox before, and I'll be on it again. We need cars that drive themselves. We need legislation that limits manufacturer liability so we can get autodriving cars out on the road. We as geeks need to solve the problem of inattentive drivers technologically, not socially.
I've known about id Quantique for a while, and have no relationship with them other than I think they rock. One of the more interesting things they sell is Quantum Random Number Generators. These babies work by sending a stream of photons at a half-silvered mirror. Each photon will be either transmitted or reflected, though it is impossible to tell which beforehand. A single photon detector on the other side of the mirror turns the reflection/transmission event into a bit. This bit is PURELY RANDOM. This is one of the *few* ways to get purely random numbers.
If you encrypt a message with a purely random OTP, it is *impossible* to decipher without that pad. As opposed to mixing functions based on entrpic randomness which are merely insanely complicated to decipher. Freaking cool. Here's a url. http://www.idquantique.com/qrng.html
A brief google search shows that in 1997 you recieved the Italian Air Force's Long Service Medal. Did this have anything to do with training for space flight, and can you explain how you recieved this honor? Most importantly, do you have any plans to return to space, and when?
At work, I have a setup to die for. At my far left, I have my laptop, docked. At my far right, I have an HP 1825 18" LCD, which displays at 1280x1024. This I use intermittently as a console to various linux machines. Center-left and Center are a pair of HP 2025 20" LCDs at 1600x1200. These are hooked up to an HP Itanium 2 Workstation through some kind of dual head ATI card. It runs Debian and it my primary work machine. Center-right is an HP 2035 20" LCD display connected to an HP xw8000 workstation running Windows and various proprietary apps.
This setup pretty much takes up my entire horizontal field of view, plus a bit. I usually have the entire surface tiled with various apps and terminals and rarely have anything minimized or hidden behind something else. I have about 6 terminal windows open to a shared GNU screen session. Mozilla runs in the upper-left. Irssi's extra-wide terminal runs below it. Evolution runs on the left half of the right monitor. The rest is all terminals.
All of this is hooked together with synergy2, though I don't leave it on all the time.
The next evolution of this setup will be to run all of the displays from one linux box and use rdesktop to remote an 800x600 windows display.
As many have mentioned, LCDs are easier on the eyes than CRTS. They also take up less desk space and are decreasing rapidly in price. Drawbacks include poor contrast ratios, limited resolution, and price. Still being a developer I wouldn't go back to manual context switching. If you have any questions about this setup, please feel free to ask. I'd be happy to post, for example, my XF86Config file.
I could be wrong, but I believe hydrogen powered cars also produce NO2. NO2 is produces when oxygen and nitrogen react at high temperatures. The primary benefit of Hydrogen is that it does not produce CO2 or leave unburned hydrocarbons and sulfuric compounds when burned. I think NO2 can be reduced by the use of catalytic converters.
I've got all the normal stuff... currency, drivers' license, various cards, reciepts, coupons, etc. I also have 2 128mb PQI Intelligent Stick USB drives. They come with a little carrier that fits in a card sized pocket it your wallet.
That's not why it's a misleading title. What the article doesn't say is that one can purchase wind power for an additional $.01/kWh. That's on top of whatever you're already paying for electricity. See this Fort Collins Utilities page.
Standard-based IM is all well and good for us, the technical elite. We don't want to run multiple IM clients to communicate with all of our friends. It's a nuisance, frankly. Have any of you used Yahoo Instant Messenger lately? They have a lot of new features that make it fun to use. IMvironments are cute little chat applets that allow for different, fun, styles of communication. So also does the ever expanding list of emoticons, translated to icons of course. Audibles are fun to play with, in a cartoonish way. Where is jabber? Still doing IRC-style communication in a window. Plain-jane, ho-hum, boring, boring, boring. Suitable for business, and I use it for that. I don't have the other instant messengers because nobody I care about uses them. No doubt there is a similar bells and whistles arms race going on on them. But where are the bells and whistles in jabber? My wife complains that I can't load an imvironment in GAIM.
There's something to be said for changing the protocol and client at your whim to add fun and interesting modes of communication.
You're right. We could easily fund FIRE and ITER at this stage. In the future it will get more expensive, and we'd probably have to pick one basket for our eggs. That would be even more of a political mess. Better to commit to ITER now and stop playing with FIRE.
Reading through the Gentoo forums linked to, what stands out to me is the lack of any comment from Transgaming! Has anyone seen a comment from an actual Transgaming rep on the purpose and intent of this tiny variation in the.tgz file?
When cars drive themselves we will no longer have thousands of teens die driving every year, nor drunk drivers, nor sleeping drivers, nor cell phone yakking drivers. We will have a low accident rate which will be paid for by a flat tax on new cars. Robotic taxis will be availabe cheaply, so most people will not even own cars.
People will commute farther, get to their destination faster, and work less. Truck drivers will be out of work. Road construction and maintenence will boom. Energy consumption and pollution will skyrocket. Mail and other deliveries will be delivered several times per day by robots, allowing the return and success oof a Webvan-like grocer service.
I want debian preinstalled and supported! <HP> No problem, we'll just sign up Debian Corp to do a support contract in case our customers have problems with the OS which we can't resolve. Oh, wait, there is no Debian Corp. Guess we'll go with SuSE then. <Narrator> And that is why no hardware vendor supports Debian.
At a school I once attended, art students were issued ART-NNN accounts, where NNN is a three-digit number. These accounts came prepassworded with dictionary words, which the instructor would communicate to you. Unfortunately, an instructor threw away a printout of the spreadsheet correlating accounts with passwords, which I retrieved from the lab wastebasket.
This school also used to have passwordless novell shares with sensetive data on them.
Parent plagarised article without distinguishing his thoughts from those of Paul Graham. While those thoughts are insightful, they are not those of the comment poster, and he should be modded down to -1. Thank you.
My trusty old Mac G4 400 was struck by lgihtning a few years back. My brother who was there at the time said there were blue sparks coming out of the outlet in his room. My family had plugged the Mac in without a power strip !!! after moving the furniture around. Needless to say, I was not amused when I returned home. I thought it was completely gone. The monitor was blown out, and I could not type on the keyboard, but the computer still powered on. I had to buy a USB card and network card (after searching high and low for a 10/100 PCI card with Mac OS X drivers), but the computer is still running! True it is missing internal USB, Modem, and Network, but it still survives.
If the industry types did as you suggest and sold music cds for $2-3 in poor countries, some enterprising entrepreneur would import them into the rich countries. Technologies such as region coding and DRM alienate your prime clientele. Better to abandon developing markets to copyright infringers than to flood your high margin markets with cheap imports.
I forwarded my email frrom my usual forwarder to gmail. I have gotten two false positives from commercial email that I subscribe to, and several spams have slipped into my inbox. All the missed spams are very similar, having a random dollar amount in the subject line, offering to refinance my house, then wrapping up with a few lines of madlib-like text.
I have to say, some of these madlib-like phrases are quite amusing. "Japanese requester non-proprietary doesn't" anyone?
I found out there was a class action lawsuit regarding just the problem you experienced. I can't seem to find many details, but apparently the terms of the settlement are that HP will upgrade you to a 200i for free if you were misled. Link
> It would help if they built quality products that weren't designed to be replaced every 6-12 months.
They do, in their business line of printers. Consumers don't really want stuff that will last forever, they want to have the latest and greatest of almost everything, not just computer hardware. Businesses want reliability and ROI.
> HP's screwed us before with their DVD writers and other products...
I was curious about this so I checked to see if you can use open source tools to write to HP dvd writers. Turns out you can. So if you don't mind, please elaborate on the alleged screwing that took place.
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Good point, and if I had any mod points, I'd give them to you.
I've been on this soapbox before, and I'll be on it again. We need cars that drive themselves. We need legislation that limits manufacturer liability so we can get autodriving cars out on the road. We as geeks need to solve the problem of inattentive drivers technologically, not socially.
I've known about id Quantique for a while, and have no relationship with them other than I think they rock. One of the more interesting things they sell is Quantum Random Number Generators. These babies work by sending a stream of photons at a half-silvered mirror. Each photon will be either transmitted or reflected, though it is impossible to tell which beforehand. A single photon detector on the other side of the mirror turns the reflection/transmission event into a bit. This bit is PURELY RANDOM. This is one of the *few* ways to get purely random numbers.
If you encrypt a message with a purely random OTP, it is *impossible* to decipher without that pad. As opposed to mixing functions based on entrpic randomness which are merely insanely complicated to decipher. Freaking cool. Here's a url. http://www.idquantique.com/qrng.html
Well you certainly got that! Wow. This is a great story!
Mark,
A brief google search shows that in 1997 you recieved the Italian Air Force's Long Service Medal. Did this have anything to do with training for space flight, and can you explain how you recieved this honor? Most importantly, do you have any plans to return to space, and when?
Your Fan,
Wise Dragon
At work, I have a setup to die for. At my far left, I have my laptop, docked. At my far right, I have an HP 1825 18" LCD, which displays at 1280x1024. This I use intermittently as a console to various linux machines. Center-left and Center are a pair of HP 2025 20" LCDs at 1600x1200. These are hooked up to an HP Itanium 2 Workstation through some kind of dual head ATI card. It runs Debian and it my primary work machine. Center-right is an HP 2035 20" LCD display connected to an HP xw8000 workstation running Windows and various proprietary apps.
This setup pretty much takes up my entire horizontal field of view, plus a bit. I usually have the entire surface tiled with various apps and terminals and rarely have anything minimized or hidden behind something else. I have about 6 terminal windows open to a shared GNU screen session. Mozilla runs in the upper-left. Irssi's extra-wide terminal runs below it. Evolution runs on the left half of the right monitor. The rest is all terminals.
All of this is hooked together with synergy2, though I don't leave it on all the time.
The next evolution of this setup will be to run all of the displays from one linux box and use rdesktop to remote an 800x600 windows display.
As many have mentioned, LCDs are easier on the eyes than CRTS. They also take up less desk space and are decreasing rapidly in price. Drawbacks include poor contrast ratios, limited resolution, and price. Still being a developer I wouldn't go back to manual context switching. If you have any questions about this setup, please feel free to ask. I'd be happy to post, for example, my XF86Config file.
I could be wrong, but I believe hydrogen powered cars also produce NO2. NO2 is produces when oxygen and nitrogen react at high temperatures. The primary benefit of Hydrogen is that it does not produce CO2 or leave unburned hydrocarbons and sulfuric compounds when burned. I think NO2 can be reduced by the use of catalytic converters.
I've got all the normal stuff... currency, drivers' license, various cards, reciepts, coupons, etc. I also have 2 128mb PQI Intelligent Stick USB drives. They come with a little carrier that fits in a card sized pocket it your wallet.
That's not why it's a misleading title. What the article doesn't say is that one can purchase wind power for an additional $.01/kWh. That's on top of whatever you're already paying for electricity. See this Fort Collins Utilities page.
Standard-based IM is all well and good for us, the technical elite. We don't want to run multiple IM clients to communicate with all of our friends. It's a nuisance, frankly. Have any of you used Yahoo Instant Messenger lately? They have a lot of new features that make it fun to use. IMvironments are cute little chat applets that allow for different, fun, styles of communication. So also does the ever expanding list of emoticons, translated to icons of course. Audibles are fun to play with, in a cartoonish way. Where is jabber? Still doing IRC-style communication in a window. Plain-jane, ho-hum, boring, boring, boring. Suitable for business, and I use it for that. I don't have the other instant messengers because nobody I care about uses them. No doubt there is a similar bells and whistles arms race going on on them. But where are the bells and whistles in jabber? My wife complains that I can't load an imvironment in GAIM.
There's something to be said for changing the protocol and client at your whim to add fun and interesting modes of communication.
You're right. We could easily fund FIRE and ITER at this stage. In the future it will get more expensive, and we'd probably have to pick one basket for our eggs. That would be even more of a political mess. Better to commit to ITER now and stop playing with FIRE.
Reading through the Gentoo forums linked to, what stands out to me is the lack of any comment from Transgaming! Has anyone seen a comment from an actual Transgaming rep on the purpose and intent of this tiny variation in the .tgz file?
When cars drive themselves we will no longer have thousands of teens die driving every year, nor drunk drivers, nor sleeping drivers, nor cell phone yakking drivers. We will have a low accident rate which will be paid for by a flat tax on new cars. Robotic taxis will be availabe cheaply, so most people will not even own cars.
People will commute farther, get to their destination faster, and work less. Truck drivers will be out of work. Road construction and maintenence will boom. Energy consumption and pollution will skyrocket. Mail and other deliveries will be delivered several times per day by robots, allowing the return and success oof a Webvan-like grocer service.
Why fight progress? Track your car now!
I want debian preinstalled and supported!
<HP> No problem, we'll just sign up Debian Corp to do a support contract in case our customers have problems with the OS which we can't resolve. Oh, wait, there is no Debian Corp. Guess we'll go with SuSE then.
<Narrator> And that is why no hardware vendor supports Debian.
At a school I once attended, art students were issued ART-NNN accounts, where NNN is a three-digit number. These accounts came prepassworded with dictionary words, which the instructor would communicate to you. Unfortunately, an instructor threw away a printout of the spreadsheet correlating accounts with passwords, which I retrieved from the lab wastebasket.
This school also used to have passwordless novell shares with sensetive data on them.
Parent plagarised article without distinguishing his thoughts from those of Paul Graham. While those thoughts are insightful, they are not those of the comment poster, and he should be modded down to -1. Thank you.
My trusty old Mac G4 400 was struck by lgihtning a few years back. My brother who was there at the time said there were blue sparks coming out of the outlet in his room. My family had plugged the Mac in without a power strip !!! after moving the furniture around. Needless to say, I was not amused when I returned home. I thought it was completely gone. The monitor was blown out, and I could not type on the keyboard, but the computer still powered on. I had to buy a USB card and network card (after searching high and low for a 10/100 PCI card with Mac OS X drivers), but the computer is still running! True it is missing internal USB, Modem, and Network, but it still survives.
If the industry types did as you suggest and sold music cds for $2-3 in poor countries, some enterprising entrepreneur would import them into the rich countries. Technologies such as region coding and DRM alienate your prime clientele. Better to abandon developing markets to copyright infringers than to flood your high margin markets with cheap imports.
I forwarded my email frrom my usual forwarder to gmail. I have gotten two false positives from commercial email that I subscribe to, and several spams have slipped into my inbox. All the missed spams are very similar, having a random dollar amount in the subject line, offering to refinance my house, then wrapping up with a few lines of madlib-like text.
I have to say, some of these madlib-like phrases are quite amusing. "Japanese requester non-proprietary doesn't" anyone?
I also got a casino offer signed:
Best regards,
Jamie Zawinsky
Oh the irony.
Thanks!
Would someone mind sending me an invite? Remove the dashes from my current email: m-p-a-r-r-i-s-h@e-m-a-i-l.com
Thanks!
-WiseDragon (Slashdot user 71071)
That's something I've wanted too. I'd also like to see a terminal that could do tabs that were actually 'screen' screens. With titles.
root# apt-cache search putty
pterm - PuTTY terminal emulator
putty - Telnet/SSH client for X
putty-tools - command-line tools for SSH, SCP, and SFTP
(Putty had become cross platform since last you looked)
I found out there was a class action lawsuit regarding just the problem you experienced. I can't seem to find many details, but apparently the terms of the settlement are that HP will upgrade you to a 200i for free if you were misled. Link
They do, in their business line of printers. Consumers don't really want stuff that will last forever, they want to have the latest and greatest of almost everything, not just computer hardware. Businesses want reliability and ROI.
> HP's screwed us before with their DVD writers and other products...
I was curious about this so I checked to see if you can use open source tools to write to HP dvd writers. Turns out you can. So if you don't mind, please elaborate on the alleged screwing that took place.