My folks just got me a video ipod. I think I can feel the hard drive trying to precess when I play video while walking. It scares me. Also very dangerous, as it messes with your peripheral vision.
The "this" link was slartibartifast. Here it is. plastic wire research. Anyway I don't know why the PR has to say phones will survive being dropped.. just put rubber in them! Jeez.
There has been plenty of news about one researcher who has done a lot of work on evolving organic circuits. The evolved circuit is sometimes far more efficient that what a human designer would make but extremely hard to figure out (they are trying to figure them out for clues to better human design).
Very often these evolved circuits exhibit mysterious activity that seems to take advantage of electromagnetic field effects generated in parts of the circuit. Also they sometimes exhibit temperature dependence (only working in a narrow temperature range).
Also the "anything can be done in software" people are both wrong and right. Theoretically yeah, but you'd need to simulate all of physics first. The whole point of this is to discover new circuit designs. On the other hand, such sensitive "tricks" as mentioned above might not be desirable in a circuit that has to be robust in many environments. So it might be goodf to do this in software too. Actually the below article also mentions this (two modes, one virtual and one in FTPAs).
I don't have time to find the link now but one that is probably related is below, 2004 from NASA about using programmable transistor arrays in evolved hardware. They mention temperature dependence and another neat idea I didn't know which is hidden processing.
Considering what you see in all the phone stores in Japan, music players go well with phones. 1. move from ordinary ring tones (melody only) to full mp3 style ringtones (full song) 2. latest DoCoMo phones include "Portable Napster" with "2 million songs" 3. High speed HDSPA (sic?) phones with >1 mbps download speed focus on how songs can be downloaded in 11 seconds instead of 1.5 minutes. 4. New designs emphasize music player controls, for example the newest DoCoMo phone I saw on sale today has 3 nice triangular lights that light up depending on "tape" direction and gradate from blue to violet for display of the current volume level.
So if iTunes is on the iPhone that would be good. The thing is, normal rates would cause the cost of a song to double at least I'd expect. The ISP has to be involved in the sale for it to be economical for the user.. you don't pay packet rates at home do you.
Also as with the new high speed mentioned above, you do pay normal rates outside of the provider's network (though it seems anyway that they may have changed to an upper limit of about 50 bucks/month).
Considering the state of networks in the U.S. I'd say Apple must be doing some making some serious waves (as suggested in recent rumor) in the cell phone network industry. Of course the other option is to dock (maybe magnetically?) with your computer and sync to that. But that will then make you lose the impulse buys on the train, not good. Probably easiest to think of iPhone as including an ipod inside it but enabling purchases anywhere, this will probably be a win for Apple that will just make the iPod brand more powerful. Better for iPod. But most people will not have an iPhone so no it won't kill the iPod.
SL seems it should be useful though the best I've seen has been billboards to teach SL prim building, and an outdoor class on fountain making which was chaotic but neat somewhat. The teacher can pull out models from his or her inventory to show. I do have a serious problem with all the skankiness in SL (I avoid it all but it fills up the search dialog). There are beautiful places however, so a private island seems the answer there.
There are other systems perhaps. I have not used it but Squeak (language) has an online moo type graphic system with hyperportals, avatars, animation, joint editing of a document, simulations, etc. and it is aimed at education from young children and on up. I do not know how easy it is to build things. It would seem that a custom SL client might also be a very attractive way to use SL, but I don't know if I could trust a course to it if you can't run your own server. But yes I can say that I have learned useful things in those two examples in SL above, the online book and the live class.
If anybody knows other real alternatives post here.. I have had an off and on idea of building something for this kind of situation myself (custom software) but perhaps there is something out there. Of course for test taking there is, so it would seem the OP wants an interactive class. So long as everyone is sitting, no craziness is going on and people aren't chatting in class it might be useful. I also believe you can stream from a website now.. I'd be interested in seeing a tool that lets you do this from your own computer, not just prepackaged streams. I was wondering if a SHOUTcast stream could get through to SL and then I found this link, the answer is yes. It would definitely be cool if you could get each participant a similar voice stream and mix them on the server.. anybody?
Anyone know of other richer virtual worlds for education? I know mainly of experimental things, like a gardening simultion for children in a CAVE environment.
I see, thanks. I was told this info by the Japanese at RIKEN, that Stanford had closed a similar facility. And that Japan could only afford it because it was on the political agenda. I remember a 300 million dollar number but don't know if that is yearly or what it cost to build.
I meant better for anticancer. TFA states 4 times better IIRC.
As for elephants, a RIKEN page in which it collaborates with another lab (I don't remember if it is Brookhaven or what) calls itself experiements with particles that weigh as much as bulls, with a logo of two bulls slamming into each other horn to horn.
Dell could take the initiative and be the first to sell OOo with their computers including Dell-sponsored value added.
They should get their in-house designer or hire a few on the outside to make a bunch of templates and really useful things to use with OOo. I've tried all the invoices etc. and I did find one out of all the chaos and websites, but for ages I have been searching for templates. It's like when you buy a Mac and make your own DVD and then you realize they have these amazing automatic animated DVD templates you can just drop video and photos and music into, but there's only like 1 or 2 decent templates and they are way too hard to make yourself. I can just see everyone using the same darned template over and over (the white mirror one I guess).
They could even make some good PR and offer the OOo community a Dell sponsored folder of templates and other art. And how about something that uses the database for something useful? OOo has tons of potential and someone like Dell could turn it into an empowering center that ties together your whole computer even. Anyway I'd pay money if they provided some good business templates like fax, invoice, letterhead, impress backgrounds, photo frames, and other art. Maybe hire a good coder and make some cool apps to go along with it!
Else who would invent SkyNet? Really. Not only is there Computer Science as described above, there is artificial intelligence, robotic systems, quantum computing, all the kinds of things mentioned in the proceedings of the ACM like computer enabled synthetic apertures and light field analysis, we need intelligent people to build Perl 7, and hopefully some engineering genius will, empowered by new computer science, develop a modicum of automated intelligence so that programmers can spend their time being creative and not worrying about carpal tunnel. Sounds like the issue is more a matter of whether you can get a quality CS education anywhere, and can you make a living at it. Now if you want to talk about the future of website administration that's a different story.. maybe need to get a design degree or move to India with Halliburton.
I visited RIKEN's accelerator in Wako City, Saitama Prefecture, Japan last year and was told they were one of only three facilities in the world manufacturing proton beams for medical purposes. The other two were in Germany and at Stanford, but I was told that Stanford had closed its facility so now there are only two.
Perhaps antimatter is better than proton beam, I don't know. Sounded like it is extremely expensive to run.. anybody know? I saw how RIKEN uses CAD to design thick IIRC bronze beam masks. It is underground and the whole building is built like a ship apparently, separate from the surrounding earth, which presumably helps it stably ride out earthquakes. They opened in Dec. 2006 the most powerful radioisotope accelerator, accelerating aluminum to 70% c.
I am not a physicist nor do I work there but am curious about these aspects concerning the place mentioned in the article.
IANA Astronomer but would like to know if this chain of logic is possible, given the theory that galaxies that are brighter spin faster.
Measure spin (average speed of local streaming) Get confirmation of our galactic shape (should be barred spiral) from that Get brightness based on spin Calculate total galactic output based on that Calculate brightness map of Milky Way seen from Earth Estimate how much matter is obscuring our view (make a dust map)
And finally if it is possible to estimate average output for specific frequencies, to use that as a floor in optical wavelength SETI search.
Intriguing, but considering the amount of time they had to work on software while building the console, I'm a bit disappointed.
This is of course the same company that made the movie JM (Johnny Mnemonic), based on William Gibson's book... this is one of the original places where the idea of the matrix was visualized. (Okay it also kinda sucked and wasn't any Snow Crash either but.)
I've always expected the PS3 would be the forerunner of the "cyberspace deck" but this announcement while theoretically a step in that direction shows very little creativity and smothers everything in marketing.
I'm still intrigued, considering I've been visiting 2nd life because I'm interested in programming services for it or something better (with less porn and lag).
Here is what I'd like to see. - Sony should spend significant money to build a very detailed development kit that allows game publishers to make a business of creating new games. It has become so expensive to make games that publishers have gone out of business or merged. Physics is maybe part of that but just part. I'd like to see them enable small teams/individuals to make games, possibly even without having to be a professional who makes games and nothing else. They say "community" but have already emasculated their own developer community as far as I can tell just by making it so hard to develop for it. - Sony should sponsor development of a community standard for matrix visualization and services. Heck, 2nd life is just now rewriting things to enable distribution of load. Sony can afford to help guide this so that everyone doesn't have to reinvent the wheel, but future development can still be very differed. SL blog talks about decoupled services using URLs although chattiness over HTTP could be a problem. - No mention of an open ecosystem in-game either. I'd be more impressed if this world could interact with SL and say PayPal or whatever. Maybe they should work with Google to sell the server side appliance that a company would need to address people visiting/using its services from the PS3. - No in-game advertisement. We already paid for it! - "Apartment"? Bullshit. Why not my own house, woodland manor, continent, world? They want to make money selling virtual electronic products? - Basically they seem to have done a lot of work but currently it sounds like a dead end and copycat response, rather than using the PS3 to its maximum. A typical Sony problem, I'd be surprised if the developers even knew JM was by Sony. They have the hardware but lack the vision perhaps. Or do they just need money so bad?
I'm researching ways to reduce the cost of subtitling low budget movies and this might be a great tool. Does anyone know if it or other software can do automatic removal of subtitles with inpainting? It doesn't have to be ultra-perfect but should make a reasonable background so subtitle from a different language can be added in place. Horizontal, but also vertical subtitle removal would be useful... I wonder how automatic it is.
Otherwise, very cool, I'll try this on removing the noise from the otherwise great pictures my new Fuji Finepix took of a live concert, practically in the dark with no flash.
Also to follow up the mention of thermal noise profiles, I wonder if you could take a black (lens cap on) photo and use that to train the algorithm. I believe that is used often to subtract noise in astrophotography...
I'd be amazed if they do not already have this capability. It is the one featured in a couple of 007 movies (one in Afghanistan and one in Mexico IIRC, you know they always "put it on the big screen"). Move a satellite (or a space shuttle) into position over a battlefield or terrorist take-down. Relay real-time video. The idea that nobody is recording that video stream is just dumb.
Perhaps if I read the article I would have a better idea of what other domestic or military applications they are talking about. I'm definitely against it domestically of course, then there'd be no more freedom just one big amorphous "radar trap". You could certainly do very interesting project capturing a lightfield over time using synthetic apertures from hundreds of lightweight flying (urban or not) battlefield drones. They fly into place and find somewhere to sit in the shadow, or float in a line between the sun and the battlefield. Stereo views is nothing, you could have views from above and behind too, allowing you to build navigable 3d models that you can roll back and forth in time.
Incidentally the tech is not so hard. They just need to get high res cameras and delivery cheap enough (maybe it already is) and they need to make sure it transmits upwards and not scattering towards the enemy.
Incidentally Muse 2000, visualization software used for oil and aerospace data mining (I did marketing for them at one time) was able to do navigation through multidimensional data, putting you into a "ufo" with data on the walls and go into orbit around a planet for example, even had voice control and this was 10 years ago. Maybe they want the money so they can drop cheap sensors from planes? Better than cluster bombs anyway and ought to save lives.
P.S. by on a smaller scale I mean with the agents/weapons becoming progressively smaller in size. (Perhaps smaller agents in the air or on the ground will make them cheaper to deploy in quantity while evading detection better.) Which would imply that a given size (say pigeon size) will be escalated to faster speeds, and higher yields, at the same size, until a new smaller size weapon is realized in this race. Shades of Philip K. Dick.
How horrible and obvious to everyone now. Should have been obvious for a long time considering the work done on remote control of cockroaches. My first thought was C4 to office windows, another poster mentioned.
There was a story a few days ago about light winged army bots that are useful in Iraq. If the other side adds pigeons we may need to have a large number of armed bots to secure a periphery around troops distant enough to keep them safe. This reminds me of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (sounding less like fiction every day) in which cities are ringed by clouds of tiny winged bots (aerostats) that act as an immune system against invading bots.
It is interesting to consider that even without a traditional war, the combination of diffusion of low-cost high tech before cultural polarizations are wiped out (personally I expected that "wiping out" long before the Gulf War) could drive a decentralized arms race on a progressively smaller scale.
It also seems likely that attacks will be made by robotic or live drones before any realistic defense, active or passive, is implemented. Surely the idea of a secured zone breaks down in a skyscraper jungle with broad access from above, and one could never be safe unless the defensive periphery could be shrunk and mobilized to follow you.
This is just another step toward that scary future when the people who got bullied might still want revenge and they get the means to do it. If I wanted to protect my troops I'd start working on a cheap laser or phalanx style miniaturized robotic defense to take out anything small flying nearby.
I read a post by a colorblind user above and looked it up here.
I thought it was only red/green though in fact it can cover a whole bunch of colors, and apparently at least 1% of the population has color blindness of some type.
It strikes me that Vista's use of green, red, orange, gray, etc. are totally underminded by colorblindness which can confuse colors, dim them or render them conceptually meaningless if I understand the article correctly. Seems like the dialogs should include a mode name too.
A repost of a comment I just made but somehow as an AC...
This is a little long but my hypothesis is that a change of architecture with a system aware of its own constitution and history of change could eliminate deps hell, improve portability and safety of system configurations and user data, and beneficially blur distros together.
I've often run into deps problems though force or compiling things solved them.. with RH9 (okay shoot me) though I haven't installed an rpm for a while. Also managed servers tend to run things like RH7.1, this is a major hosting company I use (global servers) and I wsa told recently they also have a Fedora Core 4 snapshot but that's it. (I wanted to install the latest drupal on the custom rh7 system they use and it wasn't doable).
So we have situations where disk space, security or other considerations make it very difficult to add new apps based on new libraries. And maybe yes you do install things that interfere with a system otherwise build from a pristine repository.. in some markets maybe. Personally I have not yet seen a repository that included all the apps/libs/code I needed.
Okay. I think everyone knows what the heck dependency hell is. Why isn't it possible to make it impossible to have dependency hell by changing the architecture a little (or a lot)? I'm not saying do virtualization of the whole system. Think about being able to roll back state and branching like in a CVS. Just keep track of packages, installed files, config files. Maybe being able to choose per user or based on an environment variable what combination of libraries is in effect. I expect this sort of thing has already been invented before, but it hasn't trickled down to the desktop. So what I'm saying is that the rpm system and the way libraries are installed in specific folders makes rpm hell possible and makes the probability approach infinity as time goes on that cruft will build, even though some people think it is supposed to make dll hell go away.
For me, it started ever since I wanted to use RH's automatic updater on http and then I started worrying about whether it would erase my settings and self compiled auth libs, etc. And if you ever let it go for a while then things get way too scary to ever update an old box. Then the RH auto updater service died. Then more years with lots of things being installed. Most recently unfortunately I moved all but the least important apps to external storage which of course is half dead now.
So the question is, why not allow multiple versions to exist on the same disk, and call different combinations into life at an arbitrary time? It wouldn't necessarily require more disk space (although WinME IIRC had an extra gig for system state recovery), and would add a much-needed degree of resilience. It might even make it easier to remember where all those files went when you built things over the past several years, so that you can even move to a new machine with some of your past environment intact. My ideal system would allow all these neat things to be used as they appear on the world stage, and remember all the system installations you've been doing so that you have a real chance at system portability into the future. I want to back up my data and the way my system worked at a specific time too! These things are all possible if we had a system that gave users more intelligent support in terms of keeping things sane and safe. Also I think such a system would blur the edges between distros since of course they would just become system personalities (I can even imagine SuSE being in there.. maybe). 2nd tier mediator services might even spring up that could help you get different split personalities to work together and merge toward a single one in the future.
So my hypothesis is that systems are currently unstable or even insane and that they are highly unlikely to remain as sane as they putatively were when they were originally installed, despite that we are not talking about windows here, and that we need a more resilient archit
I dunno. I work in an office where they have big containers for dumping in used paper, to be discarded securely. But the info is still probably on the paper when it gets picked up, and anyway are sure it is completely gone? And what about cold temperatures, maybe it lasts longer etc. It seems like a pain in the butt, why not just recycle paper is what people will think. We may have a bunch of printers all around but there will inevitably be people who hav accidents with paper that fades inappropriately, in fact I've seen this with faxes (fading in 6 months and it has been a big problem in once office I was at).
Besides which, I am quite allergic to the mold (could be ink but I think not) of aging paper. For example a newspaper bought in the evening on a rainy day is itchy, I get itchy when I go into stacks in some libraries, and some people in the office seem to have reservoirs of itchiness around their desks. I usually copy things to make new copies but this way I won't be able to do so. I always ask for digital copies instead but people for some reason always print things out.
I for one won't be buying this and I can't even see recommending it, having had experience with disappearing business documents. Just for safety you won't want to have a magically disappearing variety. Now maybe if it was a different color, worked thousands of times, and had some other useful functionality I might change my mind. For example, how about using it to simultaenously print a dot pattern like Anoto's. The pattern fading away would just delink it from online systems, but you could still print the page with ink. You could even designate sensitive information only to be printed without ink. But you're going to have to prove then that it really is gone even invisible to a hires scanner.
1.5 billion USD is exactly the size of Fraunhofer's entire annual research budget, according to their site.
(Assuming 1,2 Mrd euros means 1.2 milliard, or 1.2 billion, and xe.com says that is $1.57 bn)
Does anyone think someone's lost their sense of scale here? It doesn't answer my initial question though of whether MS could just buy Fraunhofer, with its 12,500 employees.
FWIW there was a similar answers thing on The Source IIRC which was the forerunner of niftyserve etc. That failed too. Google or Amazon would do far better to leave answering to the experts and take a cut from introducing a consulting firm, prof or author who knows his/her stuff. Put it this way, if there is something you need to know and it is worth paying money for it, wouldn't you go to an expert? Nothing Amazon or Google say indicates they can do more than search the web like you (unless you want to know about online selling or computational linguistics maybe). If google indexes businesses and human resources the way it does websites they might have something though.
Slashdot Mirror
My folks just got me a video ipod. I think I can feel the hard drive trying to precess when I play video while walking. It scares me. Also very dangerous, as it messes with your peripheral vision.
The "this" link was slartibartifast. Here it is. plastic wire research. Anyway I don't know why the PR has to say phones will survive being dropped.. just put rubber in them! Jeez.
Waging the good fight against dumbed-down science and research by press release, your masked hero finds.. this.
Mobile phones can soon survive being dropped
Good because you cannot get a patent after publication? Or bad because.. oh phooey. This might be by the same person.
* In unrelated news is anyone going to be at ETC2007? Neal Stephenson talk and a new hires cave called C6 by Iowa State! Someone video the thing!
I call BS. They may have done some neat work but they are not the first. This is just PR for a prototype to get funding.
This genetic hardware evolution link is from 1998.
There has been plenty of news about one researcher who has done a lot of work on evolving organic circuits. The evolved circuit is sometimes far more efficient that what a human designer would make but extremely hard to figure out (they are trying to figure them out for clues to better human design).
Very often these evolved circuits exhibit mysterious activity that seems to take advantage of electromagnetic field effects generated in parts of the circuit. Also they sometimes exhibit temperature dependence (only working in a narrow temperature range).
Also the "anything can be done in software" people are both wrong and right. Theoretically yeah, but you'd need to simulate all of physics first. The whole point of this is to discover new circuit designs. On the other hand, such sensitive "tricks" as mentioned above might not be desirable in a circuit that has to be robust in many environments. So it might be goodf to do this in software too. Actually the below article also mentions this (two modes, one virtual and one in FTPAs).
I don't have time to find the link now but one that is probably related is below, 2004 from NASA about using programmable transistor arrays in evolved hardware. They mention temperature dependence and another neat idea I didn't know which is hidden processing.
NASA link
See if hexagon remains after April Fool's Day?
Considering what you see in all the phone stores in Japan, music players go well with phones.
1. move from ordinary ring tones (melody only) to full mp3 style ringtones (full song)
2. latest DoCoMo phones include "Portable Napster" with "2 million songs"
3. High speed HDSPA (sic?) phones with >1 mbps download speed focus on how songs can be downloaded in 11 seconds instead of 1.5 minutes.
4. New designs emphasize music player controls, for example the newest DoCoMo phone I saw on sale today has 3 nice triangular lights that light up depending on "tape" direction and gradate from blue to violet for display of the current volume level.
So if iTunes is on the iPhone that would be good.
The thing is, normal rates would cause the cost of a song to double at least I'd expect. The ISP has to be involved in the sale for it to be economical for the user.. you don't pay packet rates at home do you.
Also as with the new high speed mentioned above, you do pay normal rates outside of the provider's network (though it seems anyway that they may have changed to an upper limit of about 50 bucks/month).
Considering the state of networks in the U.S. I'd say Apple must be doing some making some serious waves (as suggested in recent rumor) in the cell phone network industry. Of course the other option is to dock (maybe magnetically?) with your computer and sync to that. But that will then make you lose the impulse buys on the train, not good. Probably easiest to think of iPhone as including an ipod inside it but enabling purchases anywhere, this will probably be a win for Apple that will just make the iPod brand more powerful. Better for iPod. But most people will not have an iPhone so no it won't kill the iPod.
The only computers I ever saw that were remotely green were the OLPC, and that runs Linux. So yes, linux is greener.
SL seems it should be useful though the best I've seen has been billboards to teach SL prim building, and an outdoor class on fountain making which was chaotic but neat somewhat. The teacher can pull out models from his or her inventory to show. I do have a serious problem with all the skankiness in SL (I avoid it all but it fills up the search dialog). There are beautiful places however, so a private island seems the answer there.
There are other systems perhaps. I have not used it but Squeak (language) has an online moo type graphic system with hyperportals, avatars, animation, joint editing of a document, simulations, etc. and it is aimed at education from young children and on up. I do not know how easy it is to build things. It would seem that a custom SL client might also be a very attractive way to use SL, but I don't know if I could trust a course to it if you can't run your own server. But yes I can say that I have learned useful things in those two examples in SL above, the online book and the live class.
If anybody knows other real alternatives post here.. I have had an off and on idea of building something for this kind of situation myself (custom software) but perhaps there is something out there. Of course for test taking there is, so it would seem the OP wants an interactive class. So long as everyone is sitting, no craziness is going on and people aren't chatting in class it might be useful. I also believe you can stream from a website now.. I'd be interested in seeing a tool that lets you do this from your own computer, not just prepackaged streams. I was wondering if a SHOUTcast stream could get through to SL and then I found this link, the answer is yes. It would definitely be cool if you could get each participant a similar voice stream and mix them on the server.. anybody?
Anyone know of other richer virtual worlds for education? I know mainly of experimental things, like a gardening simultion for children in a CAVE environment.
Don't announce next paradigm-breaking product just before April Fool's Day.
Sounds nice but I'll believe it when I see it. How about a print sample blowup?
I see, thanks. I was told this info by the Japanese at RIKEN, that Stanford had closed a similar facility. And that Japan could only afford it because it was on the political agenda. I remember a 300 million dollar number but don't know if that is yearly or what it cost to build.
I meant better for anticancer. TFA states 4 times better IIRC.
As for elephants, a RIKEN page in which it collaborates with another lab (I don't remember if it is Brookhaven or what) calls itself experiements with particles that weigh as much as bulls, with a logo of two bulls slamming into each other horn to horn.
Dell could take the initiative and be the first to sell OOo with their computers including Dell-sponsored value added.
They should get their in-house designer or hire a few on the outside to make a bunch of templates and really useful things to use with OOo. I've tried all the invoices etc. and I did find one out of all the chaos and websites, but for ages I have been searching for templates. It's like when you buy a Mac and make your own DVD and then you realize they have these amazing automatic animated DVD templates you can just drop video and photos and music into, but there's only like 1 or 2 decent templates and they are way too hard to make yourself. I can just see everyone using the same darned template over and over (the white mirror one I guess).
They could even make some good PR and offer the OOo community a Dell sponsored folder of templates and other art. And how about something that uses the database for something useful? OOo has tons of potential and someone like Dell could turn it into an empowering center that ties together your whole computer even. Anyway I'd pay money if they provided some good business templates like fax, invoice, letterhead, impress backgrounds, photo frames, and other art. Maybe hire a good coder and make some cool apps to go along with it!
Else who would invent SkyNet? Really. Not only is there Computer Science as described above, there is artificial intelligence, robotic systems, quantum computing, all the kinds of things mentioned in the proceedings of the ACM like computer enabled synthetic apertures and light field analysis, we need intelligent people to build Perl 7, and hopefully some engineering genius will, empowered by new computer science, develop a modicum of automated intelligence so that programmers can spend their time being creative and not worrying about carpal tunnel. Sounds like the issue is more a matter of whether you can get a quality CS education anywhere, and can you make a living at it. Now if you want to talk about the future of website administration that's a different story.. maybe need to get a design degree or move to India with Halliburton.
I visited RIKEN's accelerator in Wako City, Saitama Prefecture, Japan last year and was told they were one of only three facilities in the world manufacturing proton beams for medical purposes. The other two were in Germany and at Stanford, but I was told that Stanford had closed its facility so now there are only two.
Perhaps antimatter is better than proton beam, I don't know. Sounded like it is extremely expensive to run.. anybody know? I saw how RIKEN uses CAD to design thick IIRC bronze beam masks. It is underground and the whole building is built like a ship apparently, separate from the surrounding earth, which presumably helps it stably ride out earthquakes. They opened in Dec. 2006 the most powerful radioisotope accelerator, accelerating aluminum to 70% c.
I am not a physicist nor do I work there but am curious about these aspects concerning the place mentioned in the article.
IANA Astronomer but would like to know if this chain of logic is possible, given the theory that galaxies that are brighter spin faster.
Measure spin (average speed of local streaming)
Get confirmation of our galactic shape (should be barred spiral) from that
Get brightness based on spin
Calculate total galactic output based on that
Calculate brightness map of Milky Way seen from Earth
Estimate how much matter is obscuring our view (make a dust map)
And finally if it is possible to estimate average output for specific frequencies, to use that as a floor in optical wavelength SETI search.
Intriguing, but considering the amount of time they had to work on software while building the console, I'm a bit disappointed.
This is of course the same company that made the movie JM (Johnny Mnemonic), based on William Gibson's book... this is one of the original places where the idea of the matrix was visualized. (Okay it also kinda sucked and wasn't any Snow Crash either but.)
I've always expected the PS3 would be the forerunner of the "cyberspace deck" but this announcement while theoretically a step in that direction shows very little creativity and smothers everything in marketing.
I'm still intrigued, considering I've been visiting 2nd life because I'm interested in programming services for it or something better (with less porn and lag).
Here is what I'd like to see.
- Sony should spend significant money to build a very detailed development kit that allows game publishers to make a business of creating new games. It has become so expensive to make games that publishers have gone out of business or merged. Physics is maybe part of that but just part. I'd like to see them enable small teams/individuals to make games, possibly even without having to be a professional who makes games and nothing else. They say "community" but have already emasculated their own developer community as far as I can tell just by making it so hard to develop for it.
- Sony should sponsor development of a community standard for matrix visualization and services. Heck, 2nd life is just now rewriting things to enable distribution of load. Sony can afford to help guide this so that everyone doesn't have to reinvent the wheel, but future development can still be very differed. SL blog talks about decoupled services using URLs although chattiness over HTTP could be a problem.
- No mention of an open ecosystem in-game either. I'd be more impressed if this world could interact with SL and say PayPal or whatever. Maybe they should work with Google to sell the server side appliance that a company would need to address people visiting/using its services from the PS3.
- No in-game advertisement. We already paid for it!
- "Apartment"? Bullshit. Why not my own house, woodland manor, continent, world? They want to make money selling virtual electronic products?
- Basically they seem to have done a lot of work but currently it sounds like a dead end and copycat response, rather than using the PS3 to its maximum. A typical Sony problem, I'd be surprised if the developers even knew JM was by Sony. They have the hardware but lack the vision perhaps. Or do they just need money so bad?
Great! Thanks.
I'm researching ways to reduce the cost of subtitling low budget movies and this might be a great tool. Does anyone know if it or other software can do automatic removal of subtitles with inpainting? It doesn't have to be ultra-perfect but should make a reasonable background so subtitle from a different language can be added in place. Horizontal, but also vertical subtitle removal would be useful... I wonder how automatic it is.
Otherwise, very cool, I'll try this on removing the noise from the otherwise great pictures my new Fuji Finepix took of a live concert, practically in the dark with no flash.
Also to follow up the mention of thermal noise profiles, I wonder if you could take a black (lens cap on) photo and use that to train the algorithm. I believe that is used often to subtract noise in astrophotography...
I'd be amazed if they do not already have this capability. It is the one featured in a couple of 007 movies (one in Afghanistan and one in Mexico IIRC, you know they always "put it on the big screen"). Move a satellite (or a space shuttle) into position over a battlefield or terrorist take-down. Relay real-time video. The idea that nobody is recording that video stream is just dumb.
Perhaps if I read the article I would have a better idea of what other domestic or military applications they are talking about. I'm definitely against it domestically of course, then there'd be no more freedom just one big amorphous "radar trap". You could certainly do very interesting project capturing a lightfield over time using synthetic apertures from hundreds of lightweight flying (urban or not) battlefield drones. They fly into place and find somewhere to sit in the shadow, or float in a line between the sun and the battlefield. Stereo views is nothing, you could have views from above and behind too, allowing you to build navigable 3d models that you can roll back and forth in time.
Incidentally the tech is not so hard. They just need to get high res cameras and delivery cheap enough (maybe it already is) and they need to make sure it transmits upwards and not scattering towards the enemy.
Incidentally Muse 2000, visualization software used for oil and aerospace data mining (I did marketing for them at one time) was able to do navigation through multidimensional data, putting you into a "ufo" with data on the walls and go into orbit around a planet for example, even had voice control and this was 10 years ago. Maybe they want the money so they can drop cheap sensors from planes? Better than cluster bombs anyway and ought to save lives.
P.S. by on a smaller scale I mean with the agents/weapons becoming progressively smaller in size. (Perhaps smaller agents in the air or on the ground will make them cheaper to deploy in quantity while evading detection better.) Which would imply that a given size (say pigeon size) will be escalated to faster speeds, and higher yields, at the same size, until a new smaller size weapon is realized in this race. Shades of Philip K. Dick.
How horrible and obvious to everyone now. Should have been obvious for a long time considering the work done on remote control of cockroaches. My first thought was C4 to office windows, another poster mentioned.
There was a story a few days ago about light winged army bots that are useful in Iraq. If the other side adds pigeons we may need to have a large number of armed bots to secure a periphery around troops distant enough to keep them safe. This reminds me of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (sounding less like fiction every day) in which cities are ringed by clouds of tiny winged bots (aerostats) that act as an immune system against invading bots.
It is interesting to consider that even without a traditional war, the combination of diffusion of low-cost high tech before cultural polarizations are wiped out (personally I expected that "wiping out" long before the Gulf War) could drive a decentralized arms race on a progressively smaller scale.
It also seems likely that attacks will be made by robotic or live drones before any realistic defense, active or passive, is implemented. Surely the idea of a secured zone breaks down in a skyscraper jungle with broad access from above, and one could never be safe unless the defensive periphery could be shrunk and mobilized to follow you.
This is just another step toward that scary future when the people who got bullied might still want revenge and they get the means to do it. If I wanted to protect my troops I'd start working on a cheap laser or phalanx style miniaturized robotic defense to take out anything small flying nearby.
I thought it was only red/green though in fact it can cover a whole bunch of colors, and apparently at least 1% of the population has color blindness of some type.
It strikes me that Vista's use of green, red, orange, gray, etc. are totally underminded by colorblindness which can confuse colors, dim them or render them conceptually meaningless if I understand the article correctly. Seems like the dialogs should include a mode name too.
A repost of a comment I just made but somehow as an AC...
This is a little long but my hypothesis is that a change of architecture with a system aware of its own constitution and history of change could eliminate deps hell, improve portability and safety of system configurations and user data, and beneficially blur distros together.
I've often run into deps problems though force or compiling things solved them.. with RH9 (okay shoot me) though I haven't installed an rpm for a while. Also managed servers tend to run things like RH7.1, this is a major hosting company I use (global servers) and I wsa told recently they also have a Fedora Core 4 snapshot but that's it. (I wanted to install the latest drupal on the custom rh7 system they use and it wasn't doable).
So we have situations where disk space, security or other considerations make it very difficult to add new apps based on new libraries. And maybe yes you do install things that interfere with a system otherwise build from a pristine repository.. in some markets maybe. Personally I have not yet seen a repository that included all the apps/libs/code I needed.
Okay. I think everyone knows what the heck dependency hell is. Why isn't it possible to make it impossible to have dependency hell by changing the architecture a little (or a lot)? I'm not saying do virtualization of the whole system. Think about being able to roll back state and branching like in a CVS. Just keep track of packages, installed files, config files. Maybe being able to choose per user or based on an environment variable what combination of libraries is in effect. I expect this sort of thing has already been invented before, but it hasn't trickled down to the desktop. So what I'm saying is that the rpm system and the way libraries are installed in specific folders makes rpm hell possible and makes the probability approach infinity as time goes on that cruft will build, even though some people think it is supposed to make dll hell go away.
For me, it started ever since I wanted to use RH's automatic updater on http and then I started worrying about whether it would erase my settings and self compiled auth libs, etc. And if you ever let it go for a while then things get way too scary to ever update an old box. Then the RH auto updater service died. Then more years with lots of things being installed. Most recently unfortunately I moved all but the least important apps to external storage which of course is half dead now.
So the question is, why not allow multiple versions to exist on the same disk, and call different combinations into life at an arbitrary time? It wouldn't necessarily require more disk space (although WinME IIRC had an extra gig for system state recovery), and would add a much-needed degree of resilience. It might even make it easier to remember where all those files went when you built things over the past several years, so that you can even move to a new machine with some of your past environment intact. My ideal system would allow all these neat things to be used as they appear on the world stage, and remember all the system installations you've been doing so that you have a real chance at system portability into the future. I want to back up my data and the way my system worked at a specific time too! These things are all possible if we had a system that gave users more intelligent support in terms of keeping things sane and safe. Also I think such a system would blur the edges between distros since of course they would just become system personalities (I can even imagine SuSE being in there.. maybe). 2nd tier mediator services might even spring up that could help you get different split personalities to work together and merge toward a single one in the future.
So my hypothesis is that systems are currently unstable or even insane and that they are highly unlikely to remain as sane as they putatively were when they were originally installed, despite that we are not talking about windows here, and that we need a more resilient archit
I dunno. I work in an office where they have big containers for dumping in used paper, to be discarded securely. But the info is still probably on the paper when it gets picked up, and anyway are sure it is completely gone? And what about cold temperatures, maybe it lasts longer etc. It seems like a pain in the butt, why not just recycle paper is what people will think. We may have a bunch of printers all around but there will inevitably be people who hav accidents with paper that fades inappropriately, in fact I've seen this with faxes (fading in 6 months and it has been a big problem in once office I was at).
Besides which, I am quite allergic to the mold (could be ink but I think not) of aging paper. For example a newspaper bought in the evening on a rainy day is itchy, I get itchy when I go into stacks in some libraries, and some people in the office seem to have reservoirs of itchiness around their desks. I usually copy things to make new copies but this way I won't be able to do so. I always ask for digital copies instead but people for some reason always print things out.
I for one won't be buying this and I can't even see recommending it, having had experience with disappearing business documents. Just for safety you won't want to have a magically disappearing variety. Now maybe if it was a different color, worked thousands of times, and had some other useful functionality I might change my mind. For example, how about using it to simultaenously print a dot pattern like Anoto's. The pattern fading away would just delink it from online systems, but you could still print the page with ink. You could even designate sensitive information only to be printed without ink. But you're going to have to prove then that it really is gone even invisible to a hires scanner.
1.5 billion USD is exactly the size of Fraunhofer's entire annual research budget, according to their site.
(Assuming 1,2 Mrd euros means 1.2 milliard, or 1.2 billion, and xe.com says that is $1.57 bn)
Does anyone think someone's lost their sense of scale here? It doesn't answer my initial question though of whether MS could just buy Fraunhofer, with its 12,500 employees.
FWIW there was a similar answers thing on The Source IIRC which was the forerunner of niftyserve etc. That failed too. Google or Amazon would do far better to leave answering to the experts and take a cut from introducing a consulting firm, prof or author who knows his/her stuff. Put it this way, if there is something you need to know and it is worth paying money for it, wouldn't you go to an expert? Nothing Amazon or Google say indicates they can do more than search the web like you (unless you want to know about online selling or computational linguistics maybe). If google indexes businesses and human resources the way it does websites they might have something though.