I think the grandparent is referring to the story about an MS article reviewing MSN Search which features a screenshot of MSN Search in the Firefox browser. Microsoft, being Microsoft, denied it completely, even though we all had the evidence on many websites. Of course I may be wrong.
I gotta say my favourite Einstein quote, and no doubt in my top 10, which you haven't posted, is "The only thing that inteferes with my learning is my education". So true, it really sucks being too smart for what your supposed to be at your age and school/college justs slows you down, but hey.
Yeah, this is the first and only book I've bought on the subject of astro-physics theories, before I knew anything about them at all, and it was amazing. Tought me a hell of a lot, well laid out with little subsections within bigger sections, and it tries to explain things in such a way that you can skip to a part that sounds the most interesting and understand it almost completely externally of any other stuff, although clearly that cannot be done all the time. Some parts are hellish hard to get your head around, but thats due to the way quantum physics works rather than how its written, most of the content is very helpful and explains things in many ways as to make it clear. Great book.
Kind of OT, but yeah. Both me and my gf's brother can recite pi to over 100 digits. The world record is held by some japanese guy called Hirouki Goto, iirc, which was 42195 digits, took him over 9 hours to recite it lol. Since I'm on the topic of memory, the Clark's Nutcracker (a bird), stores up to 30,000 nuts in around 1,000 different places and then after its done hibernating, it comes back and remembers each one of them. And goldfish do not have a short term memory of 3 seconds, or whatever the myth is. Derren Brown, the magic/hypnotist/mind reader guy has a pretty amazing memory too, there are plenty of books on it. I can't remmeber the name of it, but the disorder that makes people see colours and taste words and stuff can also be a great aid in memory feats, as well as pseudowhatever, remembering stuff using words or stories. I assume since it's a story that it would be easy to remember lots of it, but one hour is indeed pretty damn impressive.
Enough posts like this, it's just the way the summary has been written that's confusing people into thinking it implies the parent's point.
Let's break it up, shall we?
"You thought those green laser pointers sold by ThinkGeek and others were pretty cool, didn't you? Well, think again." - This is in italics, probably meaning its what the poster wrote. Clearly, all it says is that the powerful laser is cooler than the ThinkGeek one.
"It seems obligatory to point out that even laser pointers, and certainly anything more powerful than those, are capable of causing real damage." - This is not in italics, just to show the end of the article and a little bit of extra information, or possibly even a lil message from an editor. This part says that pointing lasers, as well as ones that are more powerful than it, are dangerous.
As the article says, 32 items per second were sold on average during the day. So that would mean a store with, say, 16 tills, would all need to be processing more than two items per second every second.. I find that a little hard to believe.
For other Natural Language Processor being researched and/or developed by IBM, check out their NLP Research page. They have quite a few different technologies in this feild, which I wasn't aware of. I for one, welcome our new semantic web overlords! It's really great to hear that something based on semantic technologies is finally breaking through. This could be the dawn of a new era:) I know this is very optimistic, but how long do you think it will be before we'll have something like this combined with something like Google. The amount of knowledge readily available will be mind boggling huge. Imagine having a text service on your mobile, you text off a question to something and get an answer immediately back. All knowledge available everywhere, any time, that would be a great thing. Heck, it's even quite scary to think about it.
I can remember the BBC program about Titan, or some TV show about it anyway. It was pretty fascinating stuff really, especially how rain on Titan will appear. Because the atmosphere is more methane/ethane, when the rain falls, it will be like normal rain at first because higher up in the air it will be colder and the methane/ethane will be liquid, but as it gets closer to the surface, it will turn into a gas as it warms up, so the rain will turn from liquid into a gas before it reaches the surface, and will then rise upwards. Hellish cool if you ask me. Especially if its green, I think it was on the TV show, although clearly thats just a mock up. And seas of methane and ethane will also be cool, if theyre green.. probably wont be, but hey. Bring on the rain!
Well.. you could have done, but some australian laywer has beaten you to it.
Don't worry, there's no doubt in my mind that it's not too long before the whole patent system, or at least patents covering software technologies, will soon collapse, they're just getting far too ridiculous.
We will still need passwords even if we have biometrics. Fingers can be cut off (ok, new ones are supposed to detect if there's blood circulating), or you could leave your fingerprint on something, then someone comes along and takes it, wouldn't be too hard to make fake fingertips which you could use. Your retina 'metrics' would be harder to steal, maybe contact lenses, I dunno. But whatever technology we can come up with, crackers can find a way to break or exploit it. Biometrics by themselves are probably far more dangerous than having just passwords, imo at least. But.. a mix of things; something you are (biometrics), something you have (dongle), something you know (password) would be a much safer combination.
Re:Is it any coincidence
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Haha. What's also cool is 'f' gives 'Firefox' as the first suggestion, it must be making a big impact.
Yea, it must be good. After all, you can combine CE technology, ME technology and NT technology, and you have Windows CEMENT, the toughest Windows of them all.
I can remember a previously story pretty much the same as this one, the device contained a few scented oils, but as somebody pointed out in the comments, smells, like taste, cannot be mixed together to produce a unique smell/taste in the same way that light (colours) can. IIRC, smells and taste are dependant upon the shape of the molecules, and mixing different shaped molecules together doesn't create a molecule which has a new shape. IANAP, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work. So it wouldnt be able to be hacked for any smell.. but give it time, with technology increasing exponentially it won't be long before we're in the nano-tech era, or smaller, and we can probably shape the molecules ourselves.
Heh, there's a few sentences in the first paragraph of that page that made me laugh, I think he must be new here: "But after a while, I got used to it and I started enjoying it. Now, it feels natural to have my mouse vibrating when I'm working in Windows or playing a game."
Anyway, yea, computers can control your mouse, of course they can. There's a few Win32 APIs which you can set the mouse position with, right/left click, drag, etc. Kinda OT, but I once made a program which blocked the user input (keybd && mouse), then began moving the mouse around, opened up notepad and began typing. Looked pretty much like a human was doing it.. then sent it to a mate, heh. I was thinking about re-making a prog like that today actually, except in a virus-ish form, and send it out to a few mates in disguise as a friendly prog and wait till one day for it to trigger, crimbo/birthdays or something, then wait for them all come into college and say their comp got taken over and started telling them to do stuff.
Well.. I assume this is very similar to the building mentioned in a previous slashdot story, which has a comment containing the following:
"The building has been treated for both water, and fire, and strength.
The strength tests they used were the following: (1) The strongest man in Great Britain took a sledge hammer to one of the tubes. It was only slightly dented. I'd imagine Lumber acts the same way when he takes a sledge hammer to it. (2) They built a test bridge out of the material, and drove a 1 ton van onto it, which did not dent at all.
The fire test involved taking a flame thrower to untreated and treated cardboard. The untreated burned pretty good, but the treated charred, but remained physically mostly in tact (similar to lumber). Don't expect it to survive burning jet fuel, but it should do okay.
The water test involved the local fire department hosing the place down with fire hoses. The inside remained dry, with no leaks or damp spots.
However, its life is only expected to be 20 years. Which really isn't that bad, for a recycable building."
Seems pretty damn durable for a cardboard building. Cheap, relatively long lasting (for the material), environmentally friendly, these things would be cool to live in, although I can almost guarantee they won't take off.
Either way, I wonder how helpful this will really be, and what does 'aging' include? I mean, will we still get senile, or is it just our bodies that stay young, and how many bodily 'disfunctions' (for lack of a better word) are caused by the brain deteriating (sp?)? Still.. Wow. This is a damn cool story, and I for one welcome our new millenia-old-people. Oh, and one more thing.. Population disaster; rising ocean levels, increasing population.. where are we all going to fit? Personally, I recommend we spend a great deal of money guiling giant plexiglass movable undersea bubbles that we can all live in, some with their own seas and inslands inside them.. but that's another story..
I have my thoughts about it being a flunk too.. This is the thing geeks would love to have, unfortunately, I very much doubt it would work in basements, and normal people would just buy a digital watch, cos they think they're still pretty neat.
IANAJ(apanese), but I'm pretty sure that the characters aren't letters, like most modern day written languages consist of, which mean they wouldn't need spaces anyway. The characters are more like words, for example, one character means "sun" for example, or "origin", and then other words can be made up of several symbols, for example the two characters for "sun" and "origin" would give you "japan", because the word japan means country which originates from the sun, or something along those lines, IIRC (hence the flag). Also the word "japanese" is actually the three characters for "sun", "origin" and "person". I assume this is much like hyrogliphics and the like, which is why they were also written without spaces. I guess it may be confusing when you want to write about the sun originating from something, since you may end up with "japan" in there, but I'm also pretty sure you could figure it out from it's context, just like we can figure out which word we mean when we use a word which has multiple meanings.
I have pretty high confidence that MS would probably get it too, I mean.. just because it has prior art, it's already been patenteded, and it's clearly obvious to everybody except the patent office doesn't normally stop Microsoft, right?
Yes, literally hundreds of M$ patents probably have prior art, does the patent office know/care? No. Does Microsoft care? No. Should anyone else care? No. If you are ever threatened over it, refuse to pay for the right to do whatever it is (or pay, if you feel it isn't worth the hassle), and if you get taken to court over it, go ahead, prove prior art (and complete absurdity.. come on, patenting feedback / double-click / to-do-list / tab to swap between hyperlinks in a brwoser, etc... Piss off MS) and their patent gets revoked, plus they lose a chunk of their (never-ending) money, since the prosecutor pays the court fees.
Yeah, they sound great and everything, but what's with the 100k minimum order?
It's not really a good "personal computer", if you need to buy 100,000 of them before you can use just one. It's also not really very cheap either, since you have to spend at least $10,000,000 before you can have a "$100" computer in your possesion.
I breifly skimmed TFA... will companies like Dell, Tiny, Time etc. be able to buy and re-sell these, or not?
Sometimes I really don't understand business techniques, surely they would make more money selling them individually than waiting for someone/company to buy 100,000?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the grandparent is referring to the story about an MS article reviewing MSN Search which features a screenshot of MSN Search in the Firefox browser. Microsoft, being Microsoft, denied it completely, even though we all had the evidence on many websites.
Of course I may be wrong.
Quite.
And I, for one, find it ironic that the word for the fear of long words is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.
I gotta say my favourite Einstein quote, and no doubt in my top 10, which you haven't posted, is "The only thing that inteferes with my learning is my education". So true, it really sucks being too smart for what your supposed to be at your age and school/college justs slows you down, but hey.
Yeah, this is the first and only book I've bought on the subject of astro-physics theories, before I knew anything about them at all, and it was amazing. Tought me a hell of a lot, well laid out with little subsections within bigger sections, and it tries to explain things in such a way that you can skip to a part that sounds the most interesting and understand it almost completely externally of any other stuff, although clearly that cannot be done all the time. Some parts are hellish hard to get your head around, but thats due to the way quantum physics works rather than how its written, most of the content is very helpful and explains things in many ways as to make it clear. Great book.
Kind of OT, but yeah. Both me and my gf's brother can recite pi to over 100 digits. The world record is held by some japanese guy called Hirouki Goto, iirc, which was 42195 digits, took him over 9 hours to recite it lol. Since I'm on the topic of memory, the Clark's Nutcracker (a bird), stores up to 30,000 nuts in around 1,000 different places and then after its done hibernating, it comes back and remembers each one of them. And goldfish do not have a short term memory of 3 seconds, or whatever the myth is. Derren Brown, the magic/hypnotist/mind reader guy has a pretty amazing memory too, there are plenty of books on it. I can't remmeber the name of it, but the disorder that makes people see colours and taste words and stuff can also be a great aid in memory feats, as well as pseudowhatever, remembering stuff using words or stories. I assume since it's a story that it would be easy to remember lots of it, but one hour is indeed pretty damn impressive.
Enough posts like this, it's just the way the summary has been written that's confusing people into thinking it implies the parent's point.
Let's break it up, shall we?
"You thought those green laser pointers sold by ThinkGeek and others were pretty cool, didn't you? Well, think again." - This is in italics, probably meaning its what the poster wrote. Clearly, all it says is that the powerful laser is cooler than the ThinkGeek one.
"It seems obligatory to point out that even laser pointers, and certainly anything more powerful than those, are capable of causing real damage." - This is not in italics, just to show the end of the article and a little bit of extra information, or possibly even a lil message from an editor. This part says that pointing lasers, as well as ones that are more powerful than it, are dangerous.
As the article says, 32 items per second were sold on average during the day. So that would mean a store with, say, 16 tills, would all need to be processing more than two items per second every second.. I find that a little hard to believe.
Yep, a little digging shows that it does indeed use CYC technology, or at least, according to this site (google's HTML of a PDF).
For other Natural Language Processor being researched and/or developed by IBM, check out their NLP Research page. They have quite a few different technologies in this feild, which I wasn't aware of. :)
I for one, welcome our new semantic web overlords! It's really great to hear that something based on semantic technologies is finally breaking through. This could be the dawn of a new era
I know this is very optimistic, but how long do you think it will be before we'll have something like this combined with something like Google. The amount of knowledge readily available will be mind boggling huge. Imagine having a text service on your mobile, you text off a question to something and get an answer immediately back. All knowledge available everywhere, any time, that would be a great thing. Heck, it's even quite scary to think about it.
Cool. I'll go google it, I hope I can find a video of it. Thanks :)
I can remember the BBC program about Titan, or some TV show about it anyway. It was pretty fascinating stuff really, especially how rain on Titan will appear. Because the atmosphere is more methane/ethane, when the rain falls, it will be like normal rain at first because higher up in the air it will be colder and the methane/ethane will be liquid, but as it gets closer to the surface, it will turn into a gas as it warms up, so the rain will turn from liquid into a gas before it reaches the surface, and will then rise upwards. Hellish cool if you ask me. Especially if its green, I think it was on the TV show, although clearly thats just a mock up. And seas of methane and ethane will also be cool, if theyre green.. probably wont be, but hey.
Bring on the rain!
Well.. you could have done, but some australian laywer has beaten you to it.
Don't worry, there's no doubt in my mind that it's not too long before the whole patent system, or at least patents covering software technologies, will soon collapse, they're just getting far too ridiculous.
We will still need passwords even if we have biometrics.
Fingers can be cut off (ok, new ones are supposed to detect if there's blood circulating), or you could leave your fingerprint on something, then someone comes along and takes it, wouldn't be too hard to make fake fingertips which you could use. Your retina 'metrics' would be harder to steal, maybe contact lenses, I dunno. But whatever technology we can come up with, crackers can find a way to break or exploit it. Biometrics by themselves are probably far more dangerous than having just passwords, imo at least.
But.. a mix of things;
something you are (biometrics),
something you have (dongle),
something you know (password)
would be a much safer combination.
Haha. What's also cool is 'f' gives 'Firefox' as the first suggestion, it must be making a big impact.
Yea, it must be good. After all, you can combine CE technology, ME technology and NT technology, and you have Windows CEMENT, the toughest Windows of them all.
I can remember a previously story pretty much the same as this one, the device contained a few scented oils, but as somebody pointed out in the comments, smells, like taste, cannot be mixed together to produce a unique smell/taste in the same way that light (colours) can. IIRC, smells and taste are dependant upon the shape of the molecules, and mixing different shaped molecules together doesn't create a molecule which has a new shape. IANAP, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work. So it wouldnt be able to be hacked for any smell.. but give it time, with technology increasing exponentially it won't be long before we're in the nano-tech era, or smaller, and we can probably shape the molecules ourselves.
Heh, there's a few sentences in the first paragraph of that page that made me laugh, I think he must be new here:
"But after a while, I got used to it and I started enjoying it. Now, it feels natural to have my mouse vibrating when I'm working in Windows or playing a game."
Anyway, yea, computers can control your mouse, of course they can. There's a few Win32 APIs which you can set the mouse position with, right/left click, drag, etc. Kinda OT, but I once made a program which blocked the user input (keybd && mouse), then began moving the mouse around, opened up notepad and began typing. Looked pretty much like a human was doing it.. then sent it to a mate, heh. I was thinking about re-making a prog like that today actually, except in a virus-ish form, and send it out to a few mates in disguise as a friendly prog and wait till one day for it to trigger, crimbo/birthdays or something, then wait for them all come into college and say their comp got taken over and started telling them to do stuff.
heheh, a round of applause to you sir.
Well.. I assume this is very similar to the building mentioned in a previous slashdot story, which has a comment containing the following:
"The building has been treated for both water, and fire, and strength. The strength tests they used were the following: (1) The strongest man in Great Britain took a sledge hammer to one of the tubes. It was only slightly dented. I'd imagine Lumber acts the same way when he takes a sledge hammer to it. (2) They built a test bridge out of the material, and drove a 1 ton van onto it, which did not dent at all. The fire test involved taking a flame thrower to untreated and treated cardboard. The untreated burned pretty good, but the treated charred, but remained physically mostly in tact (similar to lumber). Don't expect it to survive burning jet fuel, but it should do okay. The water test involved the local fire department hosing the place down with fire hoses. The inside remained dry, with no leaks or damp spots. However, its life is only expected to be 20 years. Which really isn't that bad, for a recycable building."
Seems pretty damn durable for a cardboard building. Cheap, relatively long lasting (for the material), environmentally friendly, these things would be cool to live in, although I can almost guarantee they won't take off.
Either way, I wonder how helpful this will really be, and what does 'aging' include? I mean, will we still get senile, or is it just our bodies that stay young, and how many bodily 'disfunctions' (for lack of a better word) are caused by the brain deteriating (sp?)?
Still.. Wow. This is a damn cool story, and I for one welcome our new millenia-old-people.
Oh, and one more thing.. Population disaster; rising ocean levels, increasing population.. where are we all going to fit? Personally, I recommend we spend a great deal of money guiling giant plexiglass movable undersea bubbles that we can all live in, some with their own seas and inslands inside them.. but that's another story..
I have my thoughts about it being a flunk too.. This is the thing geeks would love to have, unfortunately, I very much doubt it would work in basements, and normal people would just buy a digital watch, cos they think they're still pretty neat.
IANAJ(apanese), but I'm pretty sure that the characters aren't letters, like most modern day written languages consist of, which mean they wouldn't need spaces anyway. The characters are more like words, for example, one character means "sun" for example, or "origin", and then other words can be made up of several symbols, for example the two characters for "sun" and "origin" would give you "japan", because the word japan means country which originates from the sun, or something along those lines, IIRC (hence the flag). Also the word "japanese" is actually the three characters for "sun", "origin" and "person". I assume this is much like hyrogliphics and the like, which is why they were also written without spaces. I guess it may be confusing when you want to write about the sun originating from something, since you may end up with "japan" in there, but I'm also pretty sure you could figure it out from it's context, just like we can figure out which word we mean when we use a word which has multiple meanings.
I have pretty high confidence that MS would probably get it too, I mean.. just because it has prior art, it's already been patenteded, and it's clearly obvious to everybody except the patent office doesn't normally stop Microsoft, right?
Yes, literally hundreds of M$ patents probably have prior art, does the patent office know/care? No.
Does Microsoft care? No.
Should anyone else care? No.
If you are ever threatened over it, refuse to pay for the right to do whatever it is (or pay, if you feel it isn't worth the hassle), and if you get taken to court over it, go ahead, prove prior art (and complete absurdity.. come on, patenting feedback / double-click / to-do-list / tab to swap between hyperlinks in a brwoser, etc... Piss off MS) and their patent gets revoked, plus they lose a chunk of their (never-ending) money, since the prosecutor pays the court fees.
No, IANAL.
Yeah, they sound great and everything, but what's with the 100k minimum order?
It's not really a good "personal computer", if you need to buy 100,000 of them before you can use just one.
It's also not really very cheap either, since you have to spend at least $10,000,000 before you can have a "$100" computer in your possesion.
I breifly skimmed TFA... will companies like Dell, Tiny, Time etc. be able to buy and re-sell these, or not?
Sometimes I really don't understand business techniques, surely they would make more money selling them individually than waiting for someone/company to buy 100,000?