AT&T used to mean something besides money grubbing it seems.
Personally I use the local time voice service often, whenever my cellphone stops working. It is 117 on my NTT DoCoMo phone, just like 113 is for emergency repair, and 110 is for police.
Once the U.S. starts getting more advanced phone networks you will wish you had it, you'd be surprised how quickly your phone can get turned off for a lapsed $250 3G bill. And just last week at a big fireworks show all the phones stopped working (you could get through once in about 50 calls) due too not enough virtual circuits being available for the crowds. With time, you can tell if you are really on the network or if your phone is broken.
I wonder whose time these services use in the U.S. (I'll be buying the new 905i when it comes out in October/November since it will be their most advanved model that can be used in the U.S....most WorldWing models seem to work everywhere except the U.S.).
You shouldn't say "We should use Ubuntu Feisty Fawn" since that is just a point release. You should say "We should use Ubuntu starting with release x.x codenamed Feisty Fawn". If they say "Whaddayamean, Feisty Fawn?!" you could say they have a smart versioning system that lets you know how old a release is, and they name each point release alphabetically so even if you don't memorize the version number you can know that "F" (Feisty) is two point releases later than "D" (Dapper) which is a darned good idea.
One nice thing is the famous librarian who made that video about installing Ubuntu really liked the name. I remember very well her saying something like, "I just love saying the name Ubuntu! Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu..." So people who enjoy these names also may contribute enthusiasm. And, Ubuntu's meaning is cool too.
What she was mentioning could also be interpreted as a layman's impression of some kind of a high dynamic range setup. Like this camera for "photo-realistic lighting of CG characters" (a still camera). And look at this example of HDR motion blur, which would make a lot of sense in speed racer, as it would let them put more detail and brighter, more vivid color into the blur, which they could use to blur landscapes they are racing through, or CGI cars that are racing by the camera.
They could be combining HDR and multiple zplanes/lenses to capture the entire light field, perhaps capturing the same scene in layers for automated effects similar to bluescreen (think layers in photoshop or the gimp) and bringing parts into focus as they like in post (by calculating the image from synthetic aperture data perhaps). The description does not mention multiple light beams or multiple camera lenses though so it seems HDR and setting up shots laboriously, from z=infinity to closeup, which would explain why the actress had to wait so long just to shoot a short part. The description of brilliant backgrounds and "all the colors that were not in matrix" also points to a hyperrealistic style which makes the backgrounds much brighter and sharper, like in HDR photography.
Ah hah. So you are right. Except.. that he is still narcissitic and still not cool for not telling everyone about how to do carbonite at home. But not evil, okay. Thanks.
Having started an ISP with famous investors too dumb to put their money where their mouth is I can tell you why I worry about these guys. Certainly, if you are on Comcast and can move to them, go for it. The problem is, you know that $200 Billion people are talking about? The 200 gigabucks that went up in smoke? Look this isn't Cheech and Chong. Money doesn't fly away. What if the big boys actually did invest in fiber and equipment, but they just don't want to roll it out unless they are dragged out and screaming? That's a lot of money. The big boys are waiting to see how far they can push it, and when something starts to look interesting, if they can they will smash it. Welcome to the ISP business.
Now if these guys are going to try and tie in last mile people with great service and maybe value added (how about 2 free locally served movies a month, etc.) then they might have a future. Or if they could spam access to people wirelessly with some amazingly cheap technology, maybe. Maybe they could also have a chance if they are spinning off the hardware to someone else and they just have to sell "virtual" service. And maybe if they build a nationwide grassroots league (a federated little league if you will) peering with similar companies, they could even offer higher speeds and lower latency possibly. Or maybe if they could get some nice deals with municipalities or academia. Well maybe. I'd go with them if I was unhappy with my U.S. provider, though I'm not in the U.S. now, but long term? Their website says how it will be good for the long term. Personally, I've seen costs drop every 3 months, if it makes sense in the short term and you are getting really hassled with your ISP fine. But I think the only way to get good service is to legislate it. There are too many maybes, and too many big boys with big bank accounts who are just playing a cynical game until you show up on their radar.
Reread these snippets (pasted below). The logic is indeed flawed. Spam is not bad because of a social calculation. It is bad because it ruins the usefulness of information channels paid for and used by individuals, and because it wastes the valuable time of individuals.
It is stealing resources and TFA thinks he or some nebulous social calculation are worthy of deciding on degradation of the information channels and time/investment of a multitude of people. The poster and anyone who believes him, frankly is the enemy.
Any agreement to spam makes a slippery slope that will allow too much.
Finally he is wrong about China being a special case. The above is true in China and anywhere else in the universe. For example I subscribed to a digest of a developers mailing list to reduce mail, and reduce the chance of missing mail due to spam (I have a lot of spam to delete every day like you probably do.) It was lower quality communication and I recently knuckled under and switched to a per-message format. If I had no spam it would not be a problem. You can subscribe to these mailing lists in India and China. QED.
> 1....Spam is bad because the costs to society are greater than the benefits... > 3....not true in China... >...Perhaps this logic is flawed...
Unfortunately he completely destroyed the piece's value as a collectible, if indeed this was the original.
Thinking he'd become famous, he's become infamous. He got his 15 minutes and maybe the most attention-worthy thing he does his whole life is to destroy an icon of movie-lovers everywhere. A trufan does not destroy unique artifacts. This guy is an egomanical poser. Funny how your personality comes out through the things you do.
Now if he had told everyone how to do the carbonite process at home he could have become loved by all subscribers and idolators of Make Magazine, and he'd be a cool craft nerd. But he isn't. He is a narcissist and nobody cares except to mutter "oh, no." Quite disappointing.
Did anyone notice this in tiny print? Usually NASA mentions satellite transponders but now (at least first time I noticed) they are mentioning Pathfire.
Pathfire was bought out by DG Fast Channel in June. It seems they sell servers maybe and services too. It looks like what people call video press releases.
Anyway is this a commercial service only open to news agencies? Anybody know? It doesn't make any sense, NASA should just dump it all onto a torrent so it can be watched with one of the new torrent film players that advertise open video, like Zudeo or Miro. I spent so much time once upon a time with CU-SeeMe to see NASA live video, and more recently saw interesting science discussions, but they really have very high quality television broadcast quality film they sell. Maybe HD too.
Wouldn't it make more sense, in terms of saving money and making it more accessible, to just host a torrent? Certainly this DG feed is a hose into TV stations where they can patch in some shots if they want some filler, but to degrade NASA into that kind of video press release is just so bizarre! If anyone knows how to get this high quality video I'd like to see it. NASA needs to get with the times.
Note to TV reporters: Broadcast quality video file (animation, images and sound bites) to accompany this story are available through the Pathfire distribution service.
Interesting, thank you. However I am not sure that this applies if Microsoft sues instead using some flip rationalization. That is explicit in their agreement is it not? IANAL but Microsoft might not be bound by estoppel because they have to the contrary already threatened lawsuits against linux users.
Somebody at Novell probably believes that. But somebody else is looking at the bottom line and is still thinking their sellout to Microsoft was good business sense.
Novell need not sue because Microsoft will sue twice as hard. Meanwhile Microsoft need not distribute GPL2 because that's Novell's bag. Both indemnify each other and their customers over patents, only loser being the general open source community. The community (or some of it) launches back with GPL3, but this only covers future software which is not covered by those indemnifications anyway. The end result is that Novell and Microsoft are still enjoying their partnership, which is mainly based on old/forked software and vague threats. If Novell meant what they said they would not distribute under public domain as someone said. They would distribute under GPL3. Saying they will not sue does not mean anything unless there is a contract that says so, including a penalty clause for lying. Until that day, everything Novell says can be discounted as Microsoft PR by Proxy (tm). I for one am massively disappointed with Novell and it has been a major factor in my purchasing decisions and recommendations to colleagues and clients. I see the upside as being very vague while the business risk magnifying on a weekly basis.
It seems most journalists are just mouthing the press releases over again. "Security Protected" is a talk-down-to-you phrase, "protected" means "secure" anyway, and it intentionally doesn't tell you anything about how it really is protected. The company with the break-in obviously wasn't using security sufficient to deter people targeting them - for a security analysis company not to use more expensive security commensurate with the value of their clients' info is not even mentioned. Something silly about outsourcing is mentioned in TFA but in not the press release of course because it was stolen from their premises. Impossible perhaps to deter a truly obsessed insider, but for TFA not even to talk about what that incredible "security protected" technology stuff is, is just dumb.
I think it would be in the company's best interest to say everything was encrypted with unbreakable algorithms, but perhaps they have rules about not disclosing anything and maybe they don't want to spread the idea that people should encrypt things, that would certainly put a damper on their business, wouldn't it. I'd understand if they don't want to say they have a cell phone tracker or phone home device in it, but as for trusting them when they say nothing is important on that server they stole sounds very strange. More likely someone knew what they were going for it sounds.
I've been agonizing over a new hosting company having had a terrible VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider. Based on online reviews, chat/mail with ISPs and review site owners, and threads in the Perl Catalyst mailing list, I've decided the best solution is to pick up a shared account at HostGator.com just for cheap storage and my family's sites (they seem to have very good reviews on webhostingunleashed too), plus a separate VPS at a fanatical company - I'm choosing between two but I don't want to mention them here, if you must know join the list.
Anyway, the summary says "Google $250/yr for 100GB of storage" and this actually compares with HostGator, which has two packages comparable to (actually a little cheaper than) Google. Their Baby package is 100GB disk, 1TB bandwidth, and $9.95/month. Well at $10 that would be $120 but the first month is free with a coupon (several are listed at webhostingunleashed) so even if they don't give a yearly discount (maybe they do?) it's $110/year. AND you get a shared web account, unlimited domains, etc.. Now I don't know if they have RAID, or guarantee anything particularly, but I think Google is WAY off course with this. It might be worth it if they absolutely guarantee your data and connectivity. But I just can't see it if Google is charging double for just a hard disk.
Incidentally I just bought a HostGator account last night to quickly move data off a dying server and later spend time setting up a VPS linux server where I have root.
Now if Google would give me a lifetime VPS corral where I can put VPS images with guaranteed connectivity, RAID, and everything a managed provider would give me, I would move to them in a heartbeat. I know they have that sort of thing for their in-house servers, it's possible. But whether they can do it for the price some small VPS companies are managing to do it at, that's a good question. I'd rather see them federate with those guys than putting them out of business, anyway the node and slice guys if you know who they are seem to put a lot of energy into interfaces and service. Google doesn't have a ton of service reps, and developers are running fast away from rotten ISPs that say they are giving one thing but have maybe 1 guy per shift with any competency at all. What Google should do is make a way for U.S. sysadmins to get good jobs and provide high quality service. It's a no-brainer, they just need to apply their knowhow and not hire people in India or if they do, hire the ones who are professionally trained and in touch with the U.S. side 24x7 so that you don't end up getting shuttled around. That (I know from their top admin) is what killed my last ISP.
This sounds like awful news for anyone in or near any of those galaxies. We just had news that scientists had good reason to believe the Earth's own biodiversity is severely affected by nearby galaxies' radiation when we pop up over the plane of the galaxy and lose our shielding. When you add the beams of radiation from central black holes and other sources, and four times as many novas and supernovas in the same volume as usual, it sounds very inhospitable to life. And then think about an Earth like ours with maybe people like us (or some kind of people), safe on a perfect world that met all the requirements for intelligent life, that had its biodiversity nicely culled and grown through oscillation just like ours, just the right radius from the center and never hit by an asteroid except so far back it doesn't matter. Probably their star's path is getting perturbed, sure probably slowly enough they can notice it and maybe do something about it in the 100,000 or million years they have to get somewhere else.. if there is anywhere else safe within 1000 parsecs. If you ever think life sucks, imagine being on a spaceship Earth in a galaxy going to utter hell. Perhaps no life is even being formed in what might (IANAP) be a radiation hell, hope not. Because if there is life there, I feel sorry - no sorry is not the word, horror is more like it - for whomever it is that is getting snuffed. If we ever have a SETI project powerful enough, and telescopes that can make out more than just blobs, maybe we should aim it over there.
Look, if it's just light (and maybe also sound as someone noted) it's going to be really, really easy for people to make these things. Heck I myself can attest to starting to feel sick after using a screen for maybe 8 hours, to the point of getting nauseated, though I think it is more from information overload than flickering lights. The action of this device can be reverse engineered, or even captured on high speed recording device one could imagine. At any rate, you might as well expect the specs for the thing to show up on the Internet quite quickly. At that point you will have everybody from kids to terrorists making the things, making malware that produces it, creating broadly effective weapons that can be used on whole neighborhoods, etc. The good that can come out of this will be quickly negated on the whole. And it is breathtakingly irresponsible for it to be reported that there is an "evil color", just the fact of its existence, if true, will now cause everyone even curious scientists to search for it. One thing to note, the Army apparently used to experiment with low frequency sound but it was impossible to shield against it, whereas this might be more focused and presumably the officers wielding it will be safe from reflection by sunglasses. So the method of defending oneself from it will also quickly be discovered.
Incidentally I could imagine a big problem if this is used on a big crowd.. you will get a percentage of epileptics and people in serious physical distress, but it will be impossible to get to them or help them. And of course if the crowd is also armed then more trouble.
It seems clear that a craft that can remain on or near a target asteroid would be more efficient in detecting its actual path and gradually steering it into a safe trajectory. I am wondering now if it might also be possible for such a craft to improve the effects of a nuke by for example generating a gaseous envelope around the asteroid that could capture horizontally directed energy, if it is icy, or creating a column of pulverized bits of rocky or metallic asteroid directly beneath the nuke's standoff target, creating essentially a directed energy weapon or line of plasma bullets aimed right down the column. It would seem that there are a number of ways to soften a target in advance. Of course if the lander is sophisticated enough and arrives early enough, it should be able to create a mass driver that would nudge the asteroid away, although this would pollute space with a spray of rocks which might however be useful for their raw materials or momentum if captured later. Anyway these thoughts came to me when considering the difference between space-based and terrestrial nuclear explosions, not that I'm an expert or anything, and thinking that the column of rising gas that makes the stem of a mushroom cloud might provide thrust possibly (although if so, filling space with hot radioactive gas).
Indeed. Although this might mean that nanoscale machines designed naively by contemporary machinists might also work. Obviously nanoscale machines using organic molecules and the chemistry of aqueous solutions already work great.
I recall an argument between Drexler and Smalley in which the "fat fingers" and "sticky fingers" problems mean that molecular assemblers are impossible. My impression is that the Van der Waals force drives the sticky fingers problem in which a nanobot's finger will stick to an atom it is trying to manipulate. That seems to be quite an overreaching statement anyway, but considering that the "fat fingers" problem is on shaky ground according to Drexler, and now we have the possibility of nanoscale repulsion, it seems that the sticky fingers argument is also on shaky ground.
I am not aware of it being used for a real project. It wasn't perfect either. At the time I was researching digital tech for photo agencies in Japan and I was more interested in natural language English text searching by Picture Network International, we were told the same people made a database for the White House. But they wanted to take over the industry with online contracts and got booted. For real use a foxpro system on a 386 was more useful. But the reality is that professionals in a library with endless drawers of color slides (20 per plastic page IIRC) had trained their minds to be superior to this system. You would learn about the library and where things generally are, and then pull out armfulls of plastic sheets over to lightbox tables. Basically you could look at a page of 20 slides in a second or two and know if a composition you want is in it. So no, it seems to me that image composition algorithms are (especially if pushed) much faster than what you might expect, but their practicality in the real world is limited.
I wonder if this is like the Nintendo effect. Rapidly flashing red and blue colors apparently sicken, and also trigger epileptic attacks (in anime it is way faster than 3 per second which IIRC is epileptic trigger threshold too).
It doesn't sound so much like optical flow as mentioned by someone else, since it doesn't mention whirling lights. Also not sureif this is optical flow but the nauseating effect felt by viewers when someone clueless ran a highway driving sim in a planetarium here some years ago - making rushing graphics at the corner of your vision - would not work from a handheld device. So it may be the red/blue flashing of the Nintendo effect, also seen in film with very fast cuts.
This is why they say don't watch it in the dark before some of these. The new movie Babel also flopped in Japan due to people being sickened and leaving the theater because of very fast cuts. One anime company got in a lot of trouble IIRC for the same reason in Japan and broadcasts emphasized you must not watch the TV closeup or in the dark.
So my expectation is that this creates a quickly (perhaps 20 times/second) flashing of red and blue lights. Might include a full RGB set of 3 leds so that many colors can be created. It probably fans out to cover much of your field of vision. It seems highly likely that this will cause epileptic attacks in people who do not know they have epilepsy (those who do wouldn't be present I presume), nausea in the general public not wearing sunglasses, and possibly distress in people with bad hearts or close to heat prostration/dehydration. IANA doctor but the scary thing to me is that these things are probably so simple that they will probably become quite common, possibly like pepper spray or for use by homeowners. Could even be car mounted, by headlights or where police cars keep red and blue lights on top already. They probably also will not include photographic recording of their use like police guns do I think. Should be quite cost effective though I don't know that a cop would prefer it over a taser.
Some time between 1992 and 1994 IIRC when I was working at the photo/press agency Pacific Press Service in Tokyo, I saw a demo of a system created IIRC by NEC which searched 90,000 photos in under one second, based on a color freehand drawing you would draw on the screen of the EWS unix workstation on which it ran. Basically if you drew a horizontal blue mass at the bottom of the screen you would get a lake, etc. In other words you could search by rough photographic composition. I am less impressed that after over 10 years Hitachi was able to do something along the same lines.
If I interpret TFA and its references (which are more useful even just as abstracts) correctly, this is not at all the "rod logic" of Stephenson/Babbage fame. It is a single transistor, built out of two metal terminals (source and drain) and a tall, thin pillar standing between them which vibrates like a tuning fork (at 300MHz - 1GHz or so).
This pillar can be charged from the terminals and by transferring charge it can switch the current. This nano-electromechanical single electron transistor (NEMSET) was invented by other researchers, TFA mainly explores electronic properties of the NEMSET and how to put them together into circuits, create circuit elements, etc. but they didn't really do any of it yet.
Mainly it can run at high temperatures, is not as fast as ordinary transistors, but seems like it could offer multivalued logic not just binary, and as for power just about anything will do, including self-excitation, environmental vibration, etc.
So while this might be just the thing for making a laptop you can use without frying your gonads, it is not what one might think when hearing the words "nanomechanical computer".
Slashdot Mirror
AT&T used to mean something besides money grubbing it seems.
...most WorldWing models seem to work everywhere except the U.S.).
Personally I use the local time voice service often, whenever my cellphone stops working. It is 117 on my NTT DoCoMo phone, just like 113 is for emergency repair, and 110 is for police.
Once the U.S. starts getting more advanced phone networks you will wish you had it, you'd be surprised how quickly your phone can get turned off for a lapsed $250 3G bill. And just last week at a big fireworks show all the phones stopped working (you could get through once in about 50 calls) due too not enough virtual circuits being available for the crowds. With time, you can tell if you are really on the network or if your phone is broken.
I wonder whose time these services use in the U.S. (I'll be buying the new 905i when it comes out in October/November since it will be their most advanved model that can be used in the U.S.
You shouldn't say "We should use Ubuntu Feisty Fawn" since that is just a point release. You should say "We should use Ubuntu starting with release x.x codenamed Feisty Fawn". If they say "Whaddayamean, Feisty Fawn?!" you could say they have a smart versioning system that lets you know how old a release is, and they name each point release alphabetically so even if you don't memorize the version number you can know that "F" (Feisty) is two point releases later than "D" (Dapper) which is a darned good idea.
One nice thing is the famous librarian who made that video about installing Ubuntu really liked the name. I remember very well her saying something like, "I just love saying the name Ubuntu! Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu..." So people who enjoy these names also may contribute enthusiasm. And, Ubuntu's meaning is cool too.
What she was mentioning could also be interpreted as a layman's impression of some kind of a high dynamic range setup. Like this camera for "photo-realistic lighting of CG characters" (a still camera). And look at this example of HDR motion blur, which would make a lot of sense in speed racer, as it would let them put more detail and brighter, more vivid color into the blur, which they could use to blur landscapes they are racing through, or CGI cars that are racing by the camera.
They could be combining HDR and multiple zplanes/lenses to capture the entire light field, perhaps capturing the same scene in layers for automated effects similar to bluescreen (think layers in photoshop or the gimp) and bringing parts into focus as they like in post (by calculating the image from synthetic aperture data perhaps). The description does not mention multiple light beams or multiple camera lenses though so it seems HDR and setting up shots laboriously, from z=infinity to closeup, which would explain why the actress had to wait so long just to shoot a short part. The description of brilliant backgrounds and "all the colors that were not in matrix" also points to a hyperrealistic style which makes the backgrounds much brighter and sharper, like in HDR photography.
16. The method of claim 1, wherein the simulation involves urban warfare.
Well that's a no-brainer, they're pissed off!
Seriously though this is BDE thing that novel that it can be patented? It seems like a useful algorithm, how come they can patent it?
Ah hah. So you are right. Except.. that he is still narcissitic and still not cool for not telling everyone about how to do carbonite at home. But not evil, okay. Thanks.
In the end of the video though the last object the robot picks up is a pistol. Anybody notice they don't make the robot pull the trigger?
Having started an ISP with famous investors too dumb to put their money where their mouth is I can tell you why I worry about these guys. Certainly, if you are on Comcast and can move to them, go for it. The problem is, you know that $200 Billion people are talking about? The 200 gigabucks that went up in smoke? Look this isn't Cheech and Chong. Money doesn't fly away. What if the big boys actually did invest in fiber and equipment, but they just don't want to roll it out unless they are dragged out and screaming? That's a lot of money. The big boys are waiting to see how far they can push it, and when something starts to look interesting, if they can they will smash it. Welcome to the ISP business.
Now if these guys are going to try and tie in last mile people with great service and maybe value added (how about 2 free locally served movies a month, etc.) then they might have a future. Or if they could spam access to people wirelessly with some amazingly cheap technology, maybe. Maybe they could also have a chance if they are spinning off the hardware to someone else and they just have to sell "virtual" service. And maybe if they build a nationwide grassroots league (a federated little league if you will) peering with similar companies, they could even offer higher speeds and lower latency possibly. Or maybe if they could get some nice deals with municipalities or academia. Well maybe. I'd go with them if I was unhappy with my U.S. provider, though I'm not in the U.S. now, but long term? Their website says how it will be good for the long term. Personally, I've seen costs drop every 3 months, if it makes sense in the short term and you are getting really hassled with your ISP fine. But I think the only way to get good service is to legislate it. There are too many maybes, and too many big boys with big bank accounts who are just playing a cynical game until you show up on their radar.
Reread these snippets (pasted below). The logic is indeed flawed.
...Spam is bad because the costs to society are greater than the benefits... ...not true in China... ...Perhaps this logic is flawed...
Spam is not bad because of a social calculation. It is bad because it ruins the usefulness of information channels paid for and used by individuals, and because it wastes the valuable time of individuals.
It is stealing resources and TFA thinks he or some nebulous social calculation are worthy of deciding on degradation of the information channels and time/investment of a multitude of people. The poster and anyone who believes him, frankly is the enemy.
Any agreement to spam makes a slippery slope that will allow too much.
Finally he is wrong about China being a special case. The above is true in China and anywhere else in the universe. For example I subscribed to a digest of a developers mailing list to reduce mail, and reduce the chance of missing mail due to spam (I have a lot of spam to delete every day like you probably do.) It was lower quality communication and I recently knuckled under and switched to a per-message format. If I had no spam it would not be a problem. You can subscribe to these mailing lists in India and China. QED.
> 1.
> 3.
>
Unfortunately he completely destroyed the piece's value as a collectible, if indeed this was the original.
Thinking he'd become famous, he's become infamous. He got his 15 minutes and maybe the most attention-worthy thing he does his whole life is to destroy an icon of movie-lovers everywhere. A trufan does not destroy unique artifacts. This guy is an egomanical poser. Funny how your personality comes out through the things you do.
Now if he had told everyone how to do the carbonite process at home he could have become loved by all subscribers and idolators of Make Magazine, and he'd be a cool craft nerd. But he isn't. He is a narcissist and nobody cares except to mutter "oh, no." Quite disappointing.
Pathfire was bought out by DG Fast Channel in June. It seems they sell servers maybe and services too. It looks like what people call video press releases.
Anyway is this a commercial service only open to news agencies? Anybody know?
It doesn't make any sense, NASA should just dump it all onto a torrent so it can be watched with one of the new torrent film players that advertise open video, like Zudeo or Miro. I spent so much time once upon a time with CU-SeeMe to see NASA live video, and more recently saw interesting science discussions, but they really have very high quality television broadcast quality film they sell. Maybe HD too.
Wouldn't it make more sense, in terms of saving money and making it more accessible, to just host a torrent? Certainly this DG feed is a hose into TV stations where they can patch in some shots if they want some filler, but to degrade NASA into that kind of video press release is just so bizarre! If anyone knows how to get this high quality video I'd like to see it. NASA needs to get with the times.
Interesting, thank you. However I am not sure that this applies if Microsoft sues instead using some flip rationalization. That is explicit in their agreement is it not? IANAL but Microsoft might not be bound by estoppel because they have to the contrary already threatened lawsuits against linux users.
Somebody at Novell probably believes that. But somebody else is looking at the bottom line and is still thinking their sellout to Microsoft was good business sense.
Novell need not sue because Microsoft will sue twice as hard.
Meanwhile Microsoft need not distribute GPL2 because that's Novell's bag.
Both indemnify each other and their customers over patents, only loser being the general open source community.
The community (or some of it) launches back with GPL3, but this only covers future software which is not covered by those indemnifications anyway.
The end result is that Novell and Microsoft are still enjoying their partnership, which is mainly based on old/forked software and vague threats.
If Novell meant what they said they would not distribute under public domain as someone said. They would distribute under GPL3. Saying they will not sue does not mean anything unless there is a contract that says so, including a penalty clause for lying.
Until that day, everything Novell says can be discounted as Microsoft PR by Proxy (tm). I for one am massively disappointed with Novell and it has been a major factor in my purchasing decisions and recommendations to colleagues and clients. I see the upside as being very vague while the business risk magnifying on a weekly basis.
It seems most journalists are just mouthing the press releases over again. "Security Protected" is a talk-down-to-you phrase, "protected" means "secure" anyway, and it intentionally doesn't tell you anything about how it really is protected. The company with the break-in obviously wasn't using security sufficient to deter people targeting them - for a security analysis company not to use more expensive security commensurate with the value of their clients' info is not even mentioned. Something silly about outsourcing is mentioned in TFA but in not the press release of course because it was stolen from their premises. Impossible perhaps to deter a truly obsessed insider, but for TFA not even to talk about what that incredible "security protected" technology stuff is, is just dumb.
I think it would be in the company's best interest to say everything was encrypted with unbreakable algorithms, but perhaps they have rules about not disclosing anything and maybe they don't want to spread the idea that people should encrypt things, that would certainly put a damper on their business, wouldn't it. I'd understand if they don't want to say they have a cell phone tracker or phone home device in it, but as for trusting them when they say nothing is important on that server they stole sounds very strange. More likely someone knew what they were going for it sounds.
I've been agonizing over a new hosting company having had a terrible VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider.
Based on online reviews, chat/mail with ISPs and review site owners, and threads in the Perl Catalyst mailing list, I've decided the best solution is to pick up a shared account at HostGator.com just for cheap storage and my family's sites (they seem to have very good reviews on webhostingunleashed too), plus a separate VPS at a fanatical company - I'm choosing between two but I don't want to mention them here, if you must know join the list.
Anyway, the summary says "Google $250/yr for 100GB of storage" and this actually compares with HostGator, which has two packages comparable to (actually a little cheaper than) Google. Their Baby package is 100GB disk, 1TB bandwidth, and $9.95/month. Well at $10 that would be $120 but the first month is free with a coupon (several are listed at webhostingunleashed) so even if they don't give a yearly discount (maybe they do?) it's $110/year. AND you get a shared web account, unlimited domains, etc.. Now I don't know if they have RAID, or guarantee anything particularly, but I think Google is WAY off course with this. It might be worth it if they absolutely guarantee your data and connectivity. But I just can't see it if Google is charging double for just a hard disk.
Incidentally I just bought a HostGator account last night to quickly move data off a dying server and later spend time setting up a VPS linux server where I have root.
Now if Google would give me a lifetime VPS corral where I can put VPS images with guaranteed connectivity, RAID, and everything a managed provider would give me, I would move to them in a heartbeat. I know they have that sort of thing for their in-house servers, it's possible. But whether they can do it for the price some small VPS companies are managing to do it at, that's a good question. I'd rather see them federate with those guys than putting them out of business, anyway the node and slice guys if you know who they are seem to put a lot of energy into interfaces and service. Google doesn't have a ton of service reps, and developers are running fast away from rotten ISPs that say they are giving one thing but have maybe 1 guy per shift with any competency at all. What Google should do is make a way for U.S. sysadmins to get good jobs and provide high quality service. It's a no-brainer, they just need to apply their knowhow and not hire people in India or if they do, hire the ones who are professionally trained and in touch with the U.S. side 24x7 so that you don't end up getting shuttled around. That (I know from their top admin) is what killed my last ISP.
This sounds like awful news for anyone in or near any of those galaxies. We just had news that scientists had good reason to believe the Earth's own biodiversity is severely affected by nearby galaxies' radiation when we pop up over the plane of the galaxy and lose our shielding. When you add the beams of radiation from central black holes and other sources, and four times as many novas and supernovas in the same volume as usual, it sounds very inhospitable to life. And then think about an Earth like ours with maybe people like us (or some kind of people), safe on a perfect world that met all the requirements for intelligent life, that had its biodiversity nicely culled and grown through oscillation just like ours, just the right radius from the center and never hit by an asteroid except so far back it doesn't matter. Probably their star's path is getting perturbed, sure probably slowly enough they can notice it and maybe do something about it in the 100,000 or million years they have to get somewhere else.. if there is anywhere else safe within 1000 parsecs. If you ever think life sucks, imagine being on a spaceship Earth in a galaxy going to utter hell. Perhaps no life is even being formed in what might (IANAP) be a radiation hell, hope not. Because if there is life there, I feel sorry - no sorry is not the word, horror is more like it - for whomever it is that is getting snuffed. If we ever have a SETI project powerful enough, and telescopes that can make out more than just blobs, maybe we should aim it over there.
Look, if it's just light (and maybe also sound as someone noted) it's going to be really, really easy for people to make these things. Heck I myself can attest to starting to feel sick after using a screen for maybe 8 hours, to the point of getting nauseated, though I think it is more from information overload than flickering lights. The action of this device can be reverse engineered, or even captured on high speed recording device one could imagine. At any rate, you might as well expect the specs for the thing to show up on the Internet quite quickly. At that point you will have everybody from kids to terrorists making the things, making malware that produces it, creating broadly effective weapons that can be used on whole neighborhoods, etc. The good that can come out of this will be quickly negated on the whole. And it is breathtakingly irresponsible for it to be reported that there is an "evil color", just the fact of its existence, if true, will now cause everyone even curious scientists to search for it. One thing to note, the Army apparently used to experiment with low frequency sound but it was impossible to shield against it, whereas this might be more focused and presumably the officers wielding it will be safe from reflection by sunglasses. So the method of defending oneself from it will also quickly be discovered.
Incidentally I could imagine a big problem if this is used on a big crowd.. you will get a percentage of epileptics and people in serious physical distress, but it will be impossible to get to them or help them. And of course if the crowd is also armed then more trouble.
It seems clear that a craft that can remain on or near a target asteroid would be more efficient in detecting its actual path and gradually steering it into a safe trajectory. I am wondering now if it might also be possible for such a craft to improve the effects of a nuke by for example generating a gaseous envelope around the asteroid that could capture horizontally directed energy, if it is icy, or creating a column of pulverized bits of rocky or metallic asteroid directly beneath the nuke's standoff target, creating essentially a directed energy weapon or line of plasma bullets aimed right down the column. It would seem that there are a number of ways to soften a target in advance. Of course if the lander is sophisticated enough and arrives early enough, it should be able to create a mass driver that would nudge the asteroid away, although this would pollute space with a spray of rocks which might however be useful for their raw materials or momentum if captured later. Anyway these thoughts came to me when considering the difference between space-based and terrestrial nuclear explosions, not that I'm an expert or anything, and thinking that the column of rising gas that makes the stem of a mushroom cloud might provide thrust possibly (although if so, filling space with hot radioactive gas).
Indeed. Although this might mean that nanoscale machines designed naively by contemporary machinists might also work. Obviously nanoscale machines using organic molecules and the chemistry of aqueous solutions already work great.
I recall an argument between Drexler and Smalley in which the "fat fingers" and "sticky fingers" problems mean that molecular assemblers are impossible. My impression is that the Van der Waals force drives the sticky fingers problem in which a nanobot's finger will stick to an atom it is trying to manipulate. That seems to be quite an overreaching statement anyway, but considering that the "fat fingers" problem is on shaky ground according to Drexler, and now we have the possibility of nanoscale repulsion, it seems that the sticky fingers argument is also on shaky ground.
Hi!
I am not aware of it being used for a real project. It wasn't perfect either. At the time I was researching digital tech for photo agencies in Japan and I was more interested in natural language English text searching by Picture Network International, we were told the same people made a database for the White House. But they wanted to take over the industry with online contracts and got booted. For real use a foxpro system on a 386 was more useful. But the reality is that professionals in a library with endless drawers of color slides (20 per plastic page IIRC) had trained their minds to be superior to this system. You would learn about the library and where things generally are, and then pull out armfulls of plastic sheets over to lightbox tables. Basically you could look at a page of 20 slides in a second or two and know if a composition you want is in it. So no, it seems to me that image composition algorithms are (especially if pushed) much faster than what you might expect, but their practicality in the real world is limited.
I wonder if this is like the Nintendo effect. Rapidly flashing red and blue colors apparently sicken, and also trigger epileptic attacks (in anime it is way faster than 3 per second which IIRC is epileptic trigger threshold too).
It doesn't sound so much like optical flow as mentioned by someone else, since it doesn't mention whirling lights. Also not sureif this is optical flow but the nauseating effect felt by viewers when someone clueless ran a highway driving sim in a planetarium here some years ago - making rushing graphics at the corner of your vision - would not work from a handheld device. So it may be the red/blue flashing of the Nintendo effect, also seen in film with very fast cuts.
This is why they say don't watch it in the dark before some of these. The new movie Babel also flopped in Japan due to people being sickened and leaving the theater because of very fast cuts. One anime company got in a lot of trouble IIRC for the same reason in Japan and broadcasts emphasized you must not watch the TV closeup or in the dark.
So my expectation is that this creates a quickly (perhaps 20 times/second) flashing of red and blue lights. Might include a full RGB set of 3 leds so that many colors can be created. It probably fans out to cover much of your field of vision. It seems highly likely that this will cause epileptic attacks in people who do not know they have epilepsy (those who do wouldn't be present I presume), nausea in the general public not wearing sunglasses, and possibly distress in people with bad hearts or close to heat prostration/dehydration. IANA doctor but the scary thing to me is that these things are probably so simple that they will probably become quite common, possibly like pepper spray or for use by homeowners. Could even be car mounted, by headlights or where police cars keep red and blue lights on top already. They probably also will not include photographic recording of their use like police guns do I think. Should be quite cost effective though I don't know that a cop would prefer it over a taser.
Some time between 1992 and 1994 IIRC when I was working at the photo/press agency Pacific Press Service in Tokyo, I saw a demo of a system created IIRC by NEC which searched 90,000 photos in under one second, based on a color freehand drawing you would draw on the screen of the EWS unix workstation on which it ran. Basically if you drew a horizontal blue mass at the bottom of the screen you would get a lake, etc. In other words you could search by rough photographic composition. I am less impressed that after over 10 years Hitachi was able to do something along the same lines.
If I interpret TFA and its references (which are more useful even just as abstracts) correctly, this is not at all the "rod logic" of Stephenson/Babbage fame. It is a single transistor, built out of two metal terminals (source and drain) and a tall, thin pillar standing between them which vibrates like a tuning fork (at 300MHz - 1GHz or so).
This pillar can be charged from the terminals and by transferring charge it can switch the current. This nano-electromechanical single electron transistor (NEMSET) was invented by other researchers, TFA mainly explores electronic properties of the NEMSET and how to put them together into circuits, create circuit elements, etc. but they didn't really do any of it yet.
Mainly it can run at high temperatures, is not as fast as ordinary transistors, but seems like it could offer multivalued logic not just binary, and as for power just about anything will do, including self-excitation, environmental vibration, etc.
So while this might be just the thing for making a laptop you can use without frying your gonads, it is not what one might think when hearing the words "nanomechanical computer".
Thank you very much for your comment.
That's really great info about the flour and history of diet. I'll keep your advice in mind!
Matt
Thank you very much for your comment.
I'll look for that book and keep your advice in mind!
Matt