>The tip of the smallest soldering iron is orders of magnitude larger than the traces within a chip.
I suspect that the original point was not that it you needed to break out the soldering iron, but rather that anything electronic can be hacked. I certainly don't need to solder anything when holding down the shift key works.
Novel - Childhood's End
Hard to believe this was written in 1953. I give this one the nod for excellent writing as well as political content that is still current. Fahrenheit 451 is a close second; also relevant today. Of the other three, Mission of Gravity is my favorite. Excellent hard-sf writing from a guy who really knows his physics combined with memorable characters. Gotta love those Mesklinites.
Novelette - The Wall Around the World
Well written with a mathematical twist.
Short Story - The Nine Billion Names of God Another strong category like the novel. My choice here is one of my all time favorite short stories, with the added benefit of the computer consultant factor.
Dramatic Presentation - It Came From Outer Space Good early SF movie and runs counter to the xenophobia of the 50's.
The nice thing is that anything still being considered fifty years later is pretty good stuff. You can't go wrong reading any of these.
I am sure that Tou Doua's Quality Discount Software and Authorized Microsoft Refurbishing Agency will be able to provide an easy upgrade to Windows XP Professional for the equivalent of $2.98 US and will include Office 2003 for an additional $1.50.
People in Northen California (sales tax 7.25% and up) have for years driven to Oregon (sales tax 0.0%) to make large purchases. Naturally, we all voluntarily include the sales tax on our state income tax forms, so it'll be easy to just add in for internet purchases.
>Care to elucidate on where you're hearing the rest?
I am extremely fortunate to live in range of one of the last, good, independent AOR stations in the known universe, KHUM (home of the "Little Feat Radio Hour") You can listen to KHUM online, and they have a new release show where they play most or all of new cd releases. These guys and gals are right out of Petty's "Last DJ." Give a listen.
This is not really new news. My father wore one of these things for a couple of 24 hour periods both before and after pacemaker implant. It was a fancy new one that measured more than just EKG data; tracked all kinds of stuff. His pacemaker also stores data about itself and my father. It is downloaded to a laptop through an induction interface.
I'm sure someone is working on an implanted thought recorder that reports back to Homeland Security every time you have a disloyal thought about Bush.
>However, if Alice and Bob are both spammers, and use the Windows worm du jour as their open spam relay, and each spam a few million email addresses, it's much harder to see that Alice and Bob are in fact conversing let alone find the actual message.
I have always thought that applying a similar method to Usenet would be effective. Posting a MMF message to a bunch of high traffic newsgroups with your real message hidden in the spew would certainly keep at least one end of the trail hidden. This has the advantage of allowing the recipient to access the message from any computer; libraries, internet cafes, etc. You could also use a more traditionaly steganography technique with jpeg pR0n posted to a tasteful alt.binaries group.
Hmmm.. I wonder if anyone has thought of using those no-longer-fashionable Echelon-buster sigs as message carriers.
>Hmm.. they seem to have missed "boring bands, unoriginal music and inflated CD prices."
To which I wouold add "non-compliant formating of media." If it's copy protected, it's not a CD, and I won't buy it. All of my MP3 files are from cd or vinyl albums that I personally own.
>Shrink-wrapping dog shit does not create a market for shrink-wrapped dog shit.
To borrow and extend the metaphor a bit, copy protecting some of this stuff is like chaining dog shit to a Harley, so no one will steal the dog shit.
Taking a page from windows...
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 1
>Additional problems include;
Staggering bloat.
I once paid for a full version of Real Player, so long ago that I can't remember the version. It worked fine, and was a decent value for the upgrade from the free version. No longer. "Staggering bloat" is a good description of what has happened to this program. Huge overhead, nags, etc.
>An unwelcome background process that insists on reinstalling itself (on windows.) Amateur and petty. It makes me sick.
It's supposedly spyware. I don't know if this is the case, but there are rumors.
The folowing are loaded with real player: realevent.exe, rnathchk.exe, and realsched.exe. When you close real player, they remain open or are re-opened. Are they spyware or only auto-update "features"? I really don't need three background processes from a program I closed, regardless.
>It appears that Mandrake is a great distro for newbies (I know, I started with it myself) who then do not stick around (yep, me again).
This got me thinking in the context of the current article on migration to Linux and the Ask Slashdot on installing packages vs. compiling source. While many of us love to tweak and play with the OS, most computer users are just that: users. They want to boot the sucker, load a program or two and use it to do work, communicate, and/or play games.
To say that Mandrake is a great distro for newbies, may be saying it has a bright future. The vast majority of computer users are lifelong newbies, and that's OK. If you want to make money selling a computer OS, that's one of your markets, whether you like it or not.
I started off with Storm Linux and Red Hat. I am now a Mandrake customer, because it works great for what I do. With my first Mandrake version, I had to recompile the kernel to get pcmcia support on my laptop. Trust me, my wife is not up to that.
> Wearable computing is a technology that simply hasn't come to maturity yet. Things need to get smaller.
Things aren't mature for sure, but definitely developing. Looking around SFO (airport) I see people talking to the air with both hands free, people listening to music with both hands free (me), and people listening to ambient sounds through digital augmentation devices (hearing aids).
Same goes for more visual stuff, although that now requires hands on. I see kids with portable DVD players, adults with laptops, incouding many logged in to the internet through wireless, PDAs, etc. In addition there are lots of folks using old-school devices to improve their vison; mine have weightless polycarbonate lenses.
Seems to me that integration of all of this into a body mounted central unit with some sort of HUD and audio should be fairly doable. Need more audio gain on the ambient sound or need to filter out the background noise to better hear the SO, just twiddle a virtual setting or two.
>Nonetheless, in 10 years you'll probably see it integrating into the lining of a designer series of jackets, sunglasses, and hats worn by every trendy highschool and college kid in the country.
Ten years ago, none of this with the exception of glasses and analoog hearing aids was common, now it's everywhere. Ten years from now, it'll be more than just school kids and trendoids.
>I think that merging the two would stiffle features in the long run.
I really can't imagine them totally merged. More likely, we would wind up with more deesktops rather than fewer: KDE, Gnome, and KDG or GnoDE or, god help us, both of those.
In this case nobody died and several lessons were learned, including something about fault-tolerance in actuators. I think two of the most valuable space flights from this point of view were Apollo 13 and the Mir mission that caught fire.
Things will go wrong. Learning how to cope when the evil wind blows is critical. In this case, we now know that the thing can be flown with one actuator in upside down. If the bottom one malfs, swap it out in orbit with the top one, and you still might get home. People are going to get killed doing this. People got killed learning to sail the Mediterranean. It's still worth doing.
Re:Can we moderate the submission itself
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
>Why? It doesn't seem to me that life elsewhere should necessarily be incompatible with religious beliefs.
There is a segment of the Christian community in the US that adheres to a belief in Biblical Litteralism. They are found in both the fundamentalist and evangelical movements. For them, young-earth creationism is a fundamental doctrine. In their view, if you do not believe that the Earth was created de novo et ex dei 6,000 years ago, you are doomed to eternal damnation.
These folks have managed to rationalise away all evidence to the contrary from geology, biology, cosmology, physics, etc. It seems to me that unambiguous evidence of truly Wierd Alien Life from Europa or Titan might force at least some of them to open their eyes or minds. The only reason I care is that they are spending a lot of time trying to force their narrow, religious view into the science classrooms in my country.
This isn't meant to be flamebait. I think that it is a legitimate aspect of the whole topic of space travelo and cosmology. All of us interested in technology and science need to be aware of the new Luddites among us.
Re:Can we moderate the submission itself
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
How about instead, we have a decent discussion on the relative merits and costs of going to Europa and drilling in it to find Life.
That's a good point. Personally, I think it's worth doing. Given that Mars does't look real hospitable at present, although perhaps it once was, some of the moons of the outer planets look like the bewst bet for finding extraterrestrail life in our solar system. Europa is certainly one, and Titan looks interesting.
Whether the global economy can afford it or not is debatable. I think the potential benefits are worth the cost. It would be a profound moment to know that utterly alien life exists. A lot of religious beliefs would need to be reexamined.
>I generally love anything new and techie...but, I really miss the days of simpler cars. I miss minimal computer control....large engines with tons of horsepower. Where if something went wrong..it was mostly mechanical...and you could work on many things yourself.
My current pickup truck has electronic ignition and electronic fuel injection. If it breaks, I'm screwed. The good thing is it never breaks, and it never needs a tuneup. It goes from sea level to 10,000 feet and never misses a beat. My old truck with its old-school carb needed two stops for screwdriver tweaking of the fuel mixture or it started running like a pig.
As for being able to work on old-style pickups, yes I could and did. On one memorable trip, I recall pulling my distributor out because the roll-pin holding the gear on the bottom of the shaft sheared off. I was able to fix it with the tools I had on hand, in the middle of winter up along the Skagit River, miles from anywhere with a parts house. Got it fixed, back in the engine, timed it by ear, and on the road. Yes, I fixed it, but that kind of stuff happened all the time. I like the new electronic components; they just work.
>Then my question is, for every person who claims they'd rather play Atari or any given classic system than a present day one, how many serious gamers who own both ACTUALLY spend more hours per week playing 1970s/1980s games than post 1990 ones over long periods.
Darn few would be my guess. I've often said that it is games that drive most system upgrades, not production requirements. I do not need the video card in this machine for anything remotely related to word processing or number crunching. It, and all that RAM, are there primarily for games.
That said, some games can be too complicated for the less than totally dedicated gamer. Age of Empires may be approaching that. I enjoy the game, but I don't have the time to master all of the subtlety in it. On the other hand, I was adicted to Xevious in my arcade days, and I still fire up MAME to play it occaisionally, but it is mostly for nostalgia and a quick fix. It doesn't keep my attention. If I want to fly around and shoot and bomb things, one of the combat flight sims is way better.
Scaling the complexity of games' details is a great way to get them to run on various machines. Someone mentioned that not everyone would be aware of or take advantage of that option. Too bad, it's still a good idea. Dialing stuff back until you get a decent frame rate is where a lot of people live. I'm just glad not to be one of them anymore.
What non-terrorists? The Bush administration has called the NEA a terrorist organization and referred to anyone opposed to Bush's Iraq policies as a terrorist supporter. Liberals are not seen as a legitimate alternative party; they are seen as evil by a president who see things in terms of Godly vs. Satanic.
Slashdot Mirror
The dudes on "Pimp My Ride" would have taken this way farther.
>The tip of the smallest soldering iron is orders of magnitude larger than the traces within a chip.
I suspect that the original point was not that it you needed to break out the soldering iron, but rather that anything electronic can be hacked. I certainly don't need to solder anything when holding down the shift key works.Novel - Childhood's End
Hard to believe this was written in 1953. I give this one the nod for excellent writing as well as political content that is still current. Fahrenheit 451 is a close second; also relevant today. Of the other three, Mission of Gravity is my favorite. Excellent hard-sf writing from a guy who really knows his physics combined with memorable characters. Gotta love those Mesklinites.
Novelette - The Wall Around the World
Well written with a mathematical twist.
Short Story - The Nine Billion Names of God
Another strong category like the novel. My choice here is one of my all time favorite short stories, with the added benefit of the computer consultant factor.
Dramatic Presentation - It Came From Outer Space
Good early SF movie and runs counter to the xenophobia of the 50's.
The nice thing is that anything still being considered fifty years later is pretty good stuff. You can't go wrong reading any of these.
I am sure that Tou Doua's Quality Discount Software and Authorized Microsoft Refurbishing Agency will be able to provide an easy upgrade to Windows XP Professional for the equivalent of $2.98 US and will include Office 2003 for an additional $1.50.
People in Northen California (sales tax 7.25% and up) have for years driven to Oregon (sales tax 0.0%) to make large purchases. Naturally, we all voluntarily include the sales tax on our state income tax forms, so it'll be easy to just add in for internet purchases.
>Care to elucidate on where you're hearing the rest?
I am extremely fortunate to live in range of one of the last, good, independent AOR stations in the known universe, KHUM (home of the "Little Feat Radio Hour") You can listen to KHUM online, and they have a new release show where they play most or all of new cd releases. These guys and gals are right out of Petty's "Last DJ." Give a listen.This is not really new news. My father wore one of these things for a couple of 24 hour periods both before and after pacemaker implant. It was a fancy new one that measured more than just EKG data; tracked all kinds of stuff. His pacemaker also stores data about itself and my father. It is downloaded to a laptop through an induction interface.
I'm sure someone is working on an implanted thought recorder that reports back to Homeland Security every time you have a disloyal thought about Bush.
>However, if Alice and Bob are both spammers, and use the Windows worm du jour as their open spam relay, and each spam a few million email addresses, it's much harder to see that Alice and Bob are in fact conversing let alone find the actual message.
I have always thought that applying a similar method to Usenet would be effective. Posting a MMF message to a bunch of high traffic newsgroups with your real message hidden in the spew would certainly keep at least one end of the trail hidden. This has the advantage of allowing the recipient to access the message from any computer; libraries, internet cafes, etc. You could also use a more traditionaly steganography technique with jpeg pR0n posted to a tasteful alt.binaries group.Hmmm.. I wonder if anyone has thought of using those no-longer-fashionable Echelon-buster sigs as message carriers.
>Hmm.. they seem to have missed "boring bands, unoriginal music and inflated CD prices."
To which I wouold add "non-compliant formating of media." If it's copy protected, it's not a CD, and I won't buy it. All of my MP3 files are from cd or vinyl albums that I personally own.>Shrink-wrapping dog shit does not create a market for shrink-wrapped dog shit.
To borrow and extend the metaphor a bit, copy protecting some of this stuff is like chaining dog shit to a Harley, so no one will steal the dog shit.- Prostitution
- Poverty
- Aids
- Terrorism
- Spam
- Wellfare fraud
- Corporate corruption
and all with the same level of success. And here I thought that the Bushites were all in favor of free-market capitalism. Silly me.- Lady Caroline Lamb
- Heaven's Gate
- Ishtar
- Gigli
But with fx...>Additional problems include; Staggering bloat.
I once paid for a full version of Real Player, so long ago that I can't remember the version. It worked fine, and was a decent value for the upgrade from the free version. No longer. "Staggering bloat" is a good description of what has happened to this program. Huge overhead, nags, etc.>An unwelcome background process that insists on reinstalling itself (on windows.) Amateur and petty. It makes me sick. It's supposedly spyware. I don't know if this is the case, but there are rumors.
The folowing are loaded with real player: realevent.exe, rnathchk.exe, and realsched.exe. When you close real player, they remain open or are re-opened. Are they spyware or only auto-update "features"? I really don't need three background processes from a program I closed, regardless.>the actual guts of these computers have actually improved with the times
God, yes. You hardly ever see iron-core memory anymore, and punch cards are being phased out right and left.That's why you don't ever see them stolen anymore.
>It appears that Mandrake is a great distro for newbies (I know, I started with it myself) who then do not stick around (yep, me again).
This got me thinking in the context of the current article on migration to Linux and the Ask Slashdot on installing packages vs. compiling source. While many of us love to tweak and play with the OS, most computer users are just that: users. They want to boot the sucker, load a program or two and use it to do work, communicate, and/or play games.To say that Mandrake is a great distro for newbies, may be saying it has a bright future. The vast majority of computer users are lifelong newbies, and that's OK. If you want to make money selling a computer OS, that's one of your markets, whether you like it or not.
I started off with Storm Linux and Red Hat. I am now a Mandrake customer, because it works great for what I do. With my first Mandrake version, I had to recompile the kernel to get pcmcia support on my laptop. Trust me, my wife is not up to that.
>If you install with the default
Shouldn't that be SeusSELINUX?SELinux will be the result
> Wearable computing is a technology that simply hasn't come to maturity yet. Things need to get smaller.
Things aren't mature for sure, but definitely developing. Looking around SFO (airport) I see people talking to the air with both hands free, people listening to music with both hands free (me), and people listening to ambient sounds through digital augmentation devices (hearing aids).Same goes for more visual stuff, although that now requires hands on. I see kids with portable DVD players, adults with laptops, incouding many logged in to the internet through wireless, PDAs, etc. In addition there are lots of folks using old-school devices to improve their vison; mine have weightless polycarbonate lenses.
Seems to me that integration of all of this into a body mounted central unit with some sort of HUD and audio should be fairly doable. Need more audio gain on the ambient sound or need to filter out the background noise to better hear the SO, just twiddle a virtual setting or two.
>Nonetheless, in 10 years you'll probably see it integrating into the lining of a designer series of jackets, sunglasses, and hats worn by every trendy highschool and college kid in the country.
Ten years ago, none of this with the exception of glasses and analoog hearing aids was common, now it's everywhere. Ten years from now, it'll be more than just school kids and trendoids.
>I think that merging the two would stiffle features in the long run.
I really can't imagine them totally merged. More likely, we would wind up with more deesktops rather than fewer: KDE, Gnome, and KDG or GnoDE or, god help us, both of those.In this case nobody died and several lessons were learned, including something about fault-tolerance in actuators. I think two of the most valuable space flights from this point of view were Apollo 13 and the Mir mission that caught fire.
Things will go wrong. Learning how to cope when the evil wind blows is critical. In this case, we now know that the thing can be flown with one actuator in upside down. If the bottom one malfs, swap it out in orbit with the top one, and you still might get home. People are going to get killed doing this. People got killed learning to sail the Mediterranean. It's still worth doing.
>Why? It doesn't seem to me that life elsewhere should necessarily be incompatible with religious beliefs.
There is a segment of the Christian community in the US that adheres to a belief in Biblical Litteralism. They are found in both the fundamentalist and evangelical movements. For them, young-earth creationism is a fundamental doctrine. In their view, if you do not believe that the Earth was created de novo et ex dei 6,000 years ago, you are doomed to eternal damnation.These folks have managed to rationalise away all evidence to the contrary from geology, biology, cosmology, physics, etc. It seems to me that unambiguous evidence of truly Wierd Alien Life from Europa or Titan might force at least some of them to open their eyes or minds. The only reason I care is that they are spending a lot of time trying to force their narrow, religious view into the science classrooms in my country.
This isn't meant to be flamebait. I think that it is a legitimate aspect of the whole topic of space travelo and cosmology. All of us interested in technology and science need to be aware of the new Luddites among us.
How about instead, we have a decent discussion on the relative merits and costs of going to Europa and drilling in it to find Life.
That's a good point. Personally, I think it's worth doing. Given that Mars does't look real hospitable at present, although perhaps it once was, some of the moons of the outer planets look like the bewst bet for finding extraterrestrail life in our solar system. Europa is certainly one, and Titan looks interesting.Whether the global economy can afford it or not is debatable. I think the potential benefits are worth the cost. It would be a profound moment to know that utterly alien life exists. A lot of religious beliefs would need to be reexamined.
Flamebait or humor? Only the moderator can say.
>I generally love anything new and techie...but, I really miss the days of simpler cars. I miss minimal computer control....large engines with tons of horsepower. Where if something went wrong..it was mostly mechanical...and you could work on many things yourself.
My current pickup truck has electronic ignition and electronic fuel injection. If it breaks, I'm screwed. The good thing is it never breaks, and it never needs a tuneup. It goes from sea level to 10,000 feet and never misses a beat. My old truck with its old-school carb needed two stops for screwdriver tweaking of the fuel mixture or it started running like a pig.As for being able to work on old-style pickups, yes I could and did. On one memorable trip, I recall pulling my distributor out because the roll-pin holding the gear on the bottom of the shaft sheared off. I was able to fix it with the tools I had on hand, in the middle of winter up along the Skagit River, miles from anywhere with a parts house. Got it fixed, back in the engine, timed it by ear, and on the road. Yes, I fixed it, but that kind of stuff happened all the time. I like the new electronic components; they just work.
>Then my question is, for every person who claims they'd rather play Atari or any given classic system than a present day one, how many serious gamers who own both ACTUALLY spend more hours per week playing 1970s/1980s games than post 1990 ones over long periods.
Darn few would be my guess. I've often said that it is games that drive most system upgrades, not production requirements. I do not need the video card in this machine for anything remotely related to word processing or number crunching. It, and all that RAM, are there primarily for games.That said, some games can be too complicated for the less than totally dedicated gamer. Age of Empires may be approaching that. I enjoy the game, but I don't have the time to master all of the subtlety in it. On the other hand, I was adicted to Xevious in my arcade days, and I still fire up MAME to play it occaisionally, but it is mostly for nostalgia and a quick fix. It doesn't keep my attention. If I want to fly around and shoot and bomb things, one of the combat flight sims is way better.
Scaling the complexity of games' details is a great way to get them to run on various machines. Someone mentioned that not everyone would be aware of or take advantage of that option. Too bad, it's still a good idea. Dialing stuff back until you get a decent frame rate is where a lot of people live. I'm just glad not to be one of them anymore.
How about a computer generated holographic Barbarella secretary?
What non-terrorists? The Bush administration has called the NEA a terrorist organization and referred to anyone opposed to Bush's Iraq policies as a terrorist supporter. Liberals are not seen as a legitimate alternative party; they are seen as evil by a president who see things in terms of Godly vs. Satanic.