I worked for Pacific Press Service in Tokyo developing photo copyright and library tech until 94. I first saw a photograph search engine developed by Fujitsu around 92-93 I believe. It required the user to draw the type of image composition very roughly with a mouse and paintbox. So you would draw a horizon line, fill the bottom with blue and draw a yellow circle above if you wanted photos of the sea and sun. No wavelets at that time.
I then corresponded briefly with Ingrid Daubechies of AT&T who brought wavelets to the U.S., and was kind enough to send some of her papers. Wavelets are neat because it is like getting a paintbox full of different waveforms, localized as another poster mentions not just a fourier of the entire image. Anyway they are much better known now, so you can find it on the net.
This is not really the same as Barnsley's fractal compression one startup worked on around that time IIRC. They basically had a library of fractals which would be matched to image features, and once you had covered the entire image with them you would be able to zoom into it infinitely, since fractals are self-similar. You wouldn't necessarily get new detail but it would fool you into thinking you were. (I wonder if they liscensed it to anyone). They claimed 400:1 compression, etc. I don't know if they were the basis of LivePicture or if that was wavelet based.
These technologies all have two things in common, which is selecting an algorithmic strategy for talking about images, and storing it so efficiently that the data can be found quickly. The old Fujitsu system ran on a NEWS workstation IIRC, and it was blisteringly fast compared to any system I have ever seen. Only problem is doodles all look pretty much the same unless you are talented and patient.
It seems PNI (Picture Network Interactive)'s natural language recognition text searching for photos was the best, it was just text but used software supposedly developed for the White House. Only thing was they wanted to take over the entire industry with online contracts (this was around 1993) so everyone hated them. Nice tech though.
Not to be facetious, I have long wanted to see more realistic gems (gemstones) and in fact did some modelling work on them a long time ago. Gemstones are fascinating and particularly with more lifelike video displays coming, realistic calculation of what happens to light in gemstones is perhaps a good area to look at.
One problem of course is that when you look at a diamond, or a baccarat chandelier for that matter, each eye sees a different path, though perhaps this could be rendered on those new multi-angle LCDs.
So my suggestion would be to look at code for realistically rendering types of crystal and gemstones, and to do it right so you can see the "fire" they say is in a diamond, identify levels of quality and so on.
A scratch on the surface (sorry) of fast high quality crystal rendering would be great for games, education (geology? art?), all kinds of things. And it is one place that a fast rendering unit that doesn't cut corners ought to stand out above the rest.
If it is the same basic design Negroponte has been selling, then powered machines create a mesh by automatic ad hoc networking with other laptops. Though I have not heard of details, if I were designing it I'd provide free software that would turn any wired pc into a hub for this too. Power from hand cranking if necessary (perhaps if you are on a trip or in the boonies), also gives a kid the ability to be portable and take it as a book with him or her. Don't know if networking would be powered on all the time if you are in crank mode though. Maybe someone at the media lab could provide some info on battery lifetime, resolution, software specs. These are intended for non-U.S. places and mainly for kids. That said, your note about militias is valid and the only hope is that the military dictator also cares about his kids and tells his underlings so. However I am a little bit worried that the networking element would make kids trackable and possibly targets. In Cambodia I heard that radios would become military targets (this is in the 90s). On the other hand if you make enough pcs, the military can have one each too if they must. Maybe they will start blogging!
This is utterly stupid, blockheaded, yep. D-Dumb! But if they want to have their cake... then surely one would have to offset the light received for the light return from the user to the ISPs. And I think we need to call some experts on PPPoE protocol but does a higher downstream actually have to do with more light coming thisaway than thataway? And it's not a lot of light to be sure, that's very expensive light. Could users not shine some light back? Can users get a tax break if they do a lot of uploading? Someone has got to help these guys. With any luck it will begin to resemble trying to measure the length of a shoreline at progressively higher resolutions.
I was just wondering.. I understand bittorrent engages a high-bandwidth conversation with a dynamic swarm of IPs. Has anyone worked on a tunnel over bittorrent? Would seem like the next escalation..
I remember a TV show called stupid pet tricks. Then there was one I believe called stupid human tricks. I think we now have enough material for a whole season of stupid microsoft tricks.
On the heels of the latest revelation (how high are we up to now on the halloween documents?) of Microsoft's involvement in supressing superior technology (mainly superior for not being opaque), now this.
Being sceptical has made me consistently right about Microsoft as the latest Baystar news surfaces. My bullshit detector is screaming out loud that the current story is a Microsoft PR Plant based on fiction, the only real fact visible requires one to read between the lines, which is that Vista sucks and will be buggy. This story is simply a moronic attempt to say how hard they looked for bugs, so that anybody who in the future has a bad experience on Vista (crashes, etc.) will be marginalized and a large percentage of the blame can be moved onto their application or hardware vendors. I have been trying to decide whether to get a top of the line PC or a top of the line Mac and this has got me 90% decided. Not that I haven't been screwed by Apple before, or that I am going to happy with the performance of Windows apps under Parallels (which is apparently "good enough" but 2-3 times slower than a quick pc), but I am just tired of it. The other day I was worried about a vulnerability I heard about, and not having read about a workaround I installed genuine advantage on a pc at work.. which Microsoft seemed to require in order to do any other updates (another lie). Recently I have heard from 3 users that their PCs just seem to get slower and slower, despite tests for viruses etc, and though I got a close to free PC, display and printer out of it this is just the end.
When I used to write windows software I had to reinstall 98 a number of times I remember too. I told one person they should wipe everything. There are just too many bad things about Microsoft that anything comes up, I end up being so cynical I expect it is an intentional performance drop before I even open up the lid.
Well, I've had an epiphany. Anything you do with Microsoft, you will get screwed, and the closer you get to them the worse it gets. They aren't even that good at fucking people over, since they keep getting caught, but they are great about neutralizing any attempts to do anything about it. What HP did is *nothing* compared to what Bill Gates has done repeatedly, it's just he does it on such a scale that it boggles the mind. That said, I do not for a minute believe half a million tested Vista. It is crap and I don't need to see it to know it now, it just smells so bad from here. I will do my utter best NEVER to buy Vista.
I was thinking, "and this coming from the guy who said he could do a blockbuster in $40m using digital filmmaking." But I looked for a source, and found a couple of interesting bits see below. Personally I'm involved in both software and film and noted that some smaller films in Japan are being released first on DVD and then only in theaters if they sell well. Seems supported by Lucas.
I think part of it is having gotten Star Wars out of his system he's doing something different.
But mostly I'm interested in seeing long interesting universes being built over many episodes, I hate it how great books/series that if rendered directly to film would require days on end of projection, tend to get mashed down into a couple hours. Maybe he can fund lots of creative people to make cool stuff and get them started on their own careers. Anything besides redoing Star Wars over and over again for new generations and media formats! Only good can come of it. Recently I looked into digital distribution.. I heard there are about 20 theaters in Japan and 60 in korea (I may have forgotten the numbers exactly) with high def, you deliver prints by inserting a hard disk and turning a key. More theaters like that will be cool. Um, that and waiting for led displays on the other walls and ceiling, pretty please George?:)
From last November. Lucas explains how theater divisions haven't made money for several years, it is a loss leader for DVD. And DVD will be replaced by an iTunes like app.
Article
Lucas notes it costs 1/6 to make a digital print.. and for big movies a non-digital print is $20-30m.
Article
I'm curious if slashdotters would pay for a streaming or downloadable movie as opposed to a DVD and what would be reasonable to them in terms of payment method and price. I'm considering releasing some video and movies in U.S. and elsewhere and am curious about whether there is a market.
I'd just like to mention this is my post, had login trouble. If you are interested in contacting me I am willing to discuss the event with you. You can get a lot of mileage out of a small amount of network functionality, so I'd be interested to hear more about your project and see what would fit into your event. Do you even have network connectivity? Can you stream video out or do you have lots of students who could type at high speed to summarize what's going on? Etc. Good luck!
Phenomenon 1. 'That's one small step for *** man, One giant leap for mankind.'" 2. Everyone has blamed him for flubbing his lines since then 3. Neil Armstrong says he did say "a man", backed up by analysis today
I don't think anyone has yet mentioned that this whole issue would be perfectly logical if one allows: Hypothesis 1. With the word "a" deleted, "man" means earth-based humanity as we know it and "mankind" means anything like humanity, i.e. all sentient beings including aliens who have been presumed to be distant (or by a small segment, to be hiding) until now. 2. Interference could easily be generated from the moon, earth or its vicinity 3. Occam's Razor may say to take the simplest proposition, however:
a. The odds are low that interference would hit just that word because:
i. When I say the phrase it takes 8 seconds and the word "a" is less than 1 second.
ii. Deleting other words would render the sentence much less intelligible, while just the "a" is subtle enough to allow a controversy and blame to last 39 years.
iii. The existence of sentient civilizations besides ours is not generally thought to be in question. The Drake equation says just how many there are likely to be. There would have to be a very nasty physical law in fact to make the proposition of the existence of aliens false.
iv. Lately we are finding a lot of things in physics that we just don't know what the hell they mean.
vi. Proof of the existence of narrowmindedness of humankind is evident in both the "man-centric" prejudice as opposed to "human-centric" conceptualization as noted by above poster, not to mention fundamentalist terrorism and draconian implementation of "feel-good" measures at the beginning of the millenium.
The above exercise is intended to provide an alternate explanation for reasonable consideration has the requirement that the person opens their mind widely enough to encompass a cosmic viewpoint, which is of course the entire point of Neil Armstrong's phrase.
Less open minds will instead of thinking about other possibilities, instead attempt to calculate randomness of interference and balance that as "odds" against the existence of alien life.
Personal notes: Personally I find this incident the best and most positive item so far since the WOW incident lending weight to the existence of friendly non-human intelligent life in our vicinity, and to note that they have a sense of humor in allowing subtle hints to build up while we work out our own problems.
My Dad says "I don't want to get in contact with alien bugs!" probably influenced by Heinlein's Starship Troopers, but it seems to me we will get much farther along in our development if we try more to embrace a cosmic viewpoint, which necessarily entails minimizing differences among earth-bound players, and to devote more of the global GNP to eliminating disease, poverty, minds not connected to the Internet, and at the same time investing more in space. At the very least it will be nice if we can do higher energy experimentation a little farther away from our only home, the planet Earth.
You're right, if I could wash my keyboard it would be great. Shold be easy - just make the keys able to be lifted out, and no crevices, with a drain on the side. mix some soapy water and pour in and wipe! Is this something nobody has thought of until just this second? Hard to believe.
Meanwhile that silver stuff really probably is a selector for the stronger bugs, whereas the titanium stuff IIRC is doing some surface chemistry making ozone that kills things but is also a cancer hazard.
The latest news is a new air conditioner from a Japanese manufacturer that uses electricity to turn ordinary tap water, which contains chlorine, into something called hypochlorous acid. It is released as a fine mist or air is passed through a waterfall of it, and it kills viruses and organisms on contact everywhere in the room (the "antivirus air conditioner" they call it. What does this stuff do to your eyes and plants I wonder? And last I heard water contains other stuff too.. and one guy uses a carbon arc in water to make some kind of hydrocarbon fuel (aqua fuel I think) you get all kinds of stuff getting created there and it's mostly not good for you. They're going to have to have warnings on this stuff.
Having tried TiO2 surfaces and silver particle wear I can say they are quite nice. Especially the TiO2 in ceramic. It feels nice and clean. The silver stuff is, meh. Both technologies are big in Japan now, and TiO2 seems most versatile being both human friendly and nice for building exteriors but the silver stuff is a bit oversold.
I believe the British military first designed silver particle embedded antibacterial clothing, and I don't want to wear anything that has really nanosized particles of anything in it but this is not really nano. This summer in Japan everything had silver (and it would have been worse without it, since the sun seldom shone in Tokyo). I have silver particle deodorant spray, it doesn't do much except one really nasty thing: if you spray it at yourself while wearing a dress shirt you better wash it before going outside, or your will get little black dots just like a photograph with silver based film. You have to spray before wearing the clothes. Also I don't think it really has that strong an action. A little bit maybe but I also have a few silver particle embedded handkerchiefs (supposed to not get funky after you wipe off sweat with them) but an experiment showed that they do get funky and possibly part of it is discoloration due to the embedded silver. You can't just keep using it for days. So I don't think this silver stuff is that great, just wash the darned (hah) stuff.
One thing I can tell you is that while I am definitely not a neat freak, on the other hand I am very allergic to the mold or maybe acid from ink/paper deterioration (?) you get in old paper. Even just papers left in an office environment for a week will itch, and I can read a morning paper but will itch from one left in a bag or purchased in the afternoon. So I am sensitive to bacteria levels and even if they are not itchy am generally aware about it.
Okay so what do we really need? We need TiO2 building coverings and in bathrooms and desks because it feels great and works. I *think* it is really safe but don't quote me. We really need self-disinfecting TiO2 coated handholds/straps in subways and public places. A disinfecting (alcohol based?) deodorant that has been sold in some places works extremely well.. that is why people smell. So disinfecting is good in some places. We really need disinfecting keyboards with some way so that crumbs, dust, and whatever does not get stuck inside your keyboard forever. That is apparently a really dirty place. As for this mouse? Well when I go to an Internet manga cafe they provide wipes (usually disinfecting) and I do wipe the keyboard and mouse, they get really grubby just from ordinary use. But it is probably better to just wipe it with a wipe. Use a human friendly one, some industrial wipes they sell with something like rubbing alcohol are bad. The idea that you can disinfect your desk with your mouse is totally dumb. But if there was a keyboard with a TiO2 surface INSIDE it I would be thinking pretty hard about it.
Wow this is great. By coincidence I typed a memo into my mobile phone, a napkin-back spec for a device that has what this one does, and a week later it appears all finished on slashfot! Well, they are perhaps missing one component but I am not going to post it here. I think I'm going to try it again.
Thanks for the tough love. I replied elsewhere in this thread. I knew about Parallels and yes, Leopard. If I can use Leopard on a new 17" then that would be useful.
Thank you very much for extremely good information.
Yes, my brother is using Parallels. And I meant Leopard.
I think I'll need to know Leopard is going to work on any Apple I buy. That might require waiting for what I would expect is a partial version of it in the upcoming announcement.
The idea of losing my Mac partition to a windows virus is a very scary idea indeed, wow. As for batteries I suppose any new mac will have that resolved, I guess.. I guess I am no longer moving away from the Mac but will have to think about it a bit more. If Parallels is really that good then I guess there is no reason not to.
I think my brother has both Parallels plus a windows partition just "to keep it pure" if he needs it maybe. Though that sounds like more of a drawback due to virus danger. I think being virtually free from viruses is the best reason so far, that and being able to develop for both win and osx platforms on one machine. The 17" sounds nice! I'm not a gamer or ipodder but since I drool every time I use a mac these days I think you've helped me a lot.
Unfortunately it is harder and harder for me to move back home. I live overseas and it breaks my heart to see what a piece of shit the U.S. is turning into. I don't understand it and wonder if I would have understood it better if I lived full time in the U.S. This really gives me a pain in the stomach. It is so transparent what they are doing. Could someone ask twenty people in the office what they think about this news story and post what they say?
I am about to buy the best laptop I can find, or maybe a desktop plus a very light laptop. I really want to buy a Mac but am moving away from it!
I always was an Apple person and I have a bunch of old macs in my closet. But I've used linux as my main computer for some years.
I hate using linux as a desktop at least on this laptop, which ran Win2K fine but was dying on RH9 and finally I am on blackbox now. I used linux because I'm a developer and also because I hate Microsoft.
I want a Mac because it is cool and mostly virus free compared to MS.
The opposing side is I need WinXP for business. My brother who has a Mac book pro and uses windows in an emulator recommended it ito me but I heard it is slow. I heard Bootcamp is not totally there yet or needs an unsupported hack to be usable. I am waiting now because I heard about battery fires, macs not being allowed to be used on planes, and an upcoming announcement from Jobs. I want a Jaguar mac with the time machine bad but I'm waiting.
I think there must be a lot of people like me, enough to make that minus 0.02 go positive. People who know all the issues and still want a mac but it is killing them to make that decision. And they are in fact moving away from the mac like me right now.
For me to buy a Mac Book Pro, Apple must provide - a supported way to run WinXP natively on another partition and be able to access that data from OS X. - ironclad assurance about the batteries - info about whether Jaguar is available now and what is this announcement in October we are supposed to wait for? - Finally, I love macs but I have been screwed by Apple lots of times, starting way back with the Apple III (I had an Apple II Integer Plus too, FWIW. And a fat mac, a quadra, a powerbook, and oh heck with it). I am willing to buy the best system they have so it will not go obsolete right away but I do NOT want them to take my money and then screw me over again. I want the XP side to work like an ordinary windows machine, not a slow machine. It should be a screaming fast machine.
You know reading this I'm thinking, why do you want a Mac? It's all cool but really you need a PC for business. And I'm still moving away from the mac. It's insane. I guess I have to wait for Jobs again?
As it happens, I discovered that this happened before. I typed into the very cool and soon to take over the world intelligent search engine Hakia "Is it legal for a lobbyist to run DHS?" and Hakia showed me that in January 2006 Bush nominated a lobbyist (Nicole Nason) to take over the NHTSA. As head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, she would apparently be in the position of implementing measures that she had opposed as a lobbyist for DOT. In delicious coincidence, Nason would be taking over from Dr. Jeffrey Runge, a physician who as of January was the chief medical officer of the Department of Homeland Security.
To regurgitate more of TFA, 'Ralph Nader has criticized the automobile safety agency as nothing more than a lap dog for the auto industry. The consumer advocate said NHTSA "is now a consulting agency to Detroit and federal regulation is essentially dead.'
Old news, maybe. At least Hakia is cool. I was thinking I'd rather have someone with experience in the area to run DHS but on the other hand, lobbyists can probably kick ass too, and it's probably safer in the end to have them busy making money instead of of busy handing out parking tickets.
Is it legal for a lobbyist to run the DHS?"
I reported in my article "Boxing in the LLRing", which covered a recent 300 developer gathering at a Tokyo boxing ring, a presentation by the creator of Ruby in which he announced that he would retire from Ruby to work on YARV only, and that the next major version would in fact be a fork of Ruby, generally but possibly not completely compatible to allow for freedom of creativity.
In this 4500 word article, which includes in addition to fun and hijinks detailed language updates for Ruby, Python, Squeak, Perl, Java, Javascript and 20 other languages and frameworks, a panel on functional programming and comparison between Ruby and Java.
Since I went to the trouble to write the English article I'd like to let people know about it since it is on an unknown site. So far just people in Japan and perlmonks.org people know about it. Considering that Ruby, Python, Java and Squeak are all mentioned in the article (and Ruby/Java generation is a big topic in Japan too) I can't figure out why such a relevant post gets backseated to Piquepaille and endless RIAA and voting machine stories. Anyway, if you are interested check out the article. As far as I know, this is the first breaking news coverage in the world of a fork in Ruby and retirement of its creator from work on the language (or so he says, hope not!).
FWIW the magazine in my hands right now, probably the best selling magazine in Japan in this space this month has the cover story that Ruby helps you solve problems fast. Also including articles on Java and a nice Perl Catalyst story.
Yes, that is why China kills its most corrupt mayors. Unfortunately people are people. And due to the Peter Principle (and other principles on that page) it is likely that incompetent people will rise to a managerial role, which means that a screw-up is a screw-up regardless of how much money he is screwing up. Beyond a certain amount it's just numbers anyway. If you want to punish someone who is incompetent, punish the guy who hired them.
White collar crime however stems from imperfect people, full of characteristics that enabled them to get to the top, being either malicious, or else walking the grey line so close to the edge that they inevitably step over it. It is like the saying that you get the kind of leaders you ask for.
Either way, it seems to me that such characters will do so for the maximum amount of money they can access and think is safe, so it does not make sense to keep upping the ante the more powerful a person is; the psychology does not change. It probably won't have much of an effect, they just have to catch more people is all, and also change the psychological requirements of people being hired.
If a trader in a securities firm loses a billion dollars, the firm has to pay it. Such insurance fund does not exist in the case of an Enron and maybe they need to start buying some. In the case of HP, it may be illegal in terms of corporate spying but it is not on a par with say rape or murder.
If congress just said pretexting is illegal (which it looks like they may do) then maybe only criminals will do it, but certainly it won't be ordered by the head of the corporation. You want to add a prison sentence to catch people lower down, not the people on top, hence your argument is actually upside-down. Or do you think just the president should go to prison, and not the people who actually did it professionally?
I noted in my article Boxing in the LLRing, which despite positive responses Slashdot rejected in favor of Roland Piquepaille's daily column and various political commentary, that Squeak has an amazing debugger (I am not going to call it a full-blown analyzer) that allows you to debug applications as they are running on the very interesting Seaside application server.
As described in this paper (pdf), Seaside provides multiple control flows and a high level of abstraction that is very useful to web app developers.
The 4500 word article is coverage of a 300 developer "Lightweight Languages" all-day seminar held in a real boxing ring in Tokyo, covering 30 languages and frameworks including Perl, Python, Ruby, Haskell, OCaml, Squeak, and many others.
Fortuny clearly is a narccisistic sadist. Since he posted an ad to out sadists inhabiting what he interprets as an environment intersecting or congruent to his own territory, effectively he has removed or "demoted" his "competition", in a twisted simian or serial killer like sense.
He imagines that this feat proves his superiority and that it will net him rewards, so he can "get the girl" or be showered with praise etc. Though it would make more sense if he is seeking a male masochist, since he could just wait for the guys he outed to contact him for a date. Since Fortuny seem to be spectacularly oblivious to consequences I could believe that, which is why I expect him to get a severe physical beating from someone real soon now.
Looking forward to hearing the follow up on whether he gets sued, "demoted" or otherwise fried for this since the last thing we need is copycats. I thought programmers were kind of altruistic but I can't tell if this is an evil one or just that the bar has gotten lowered so far that it attracts nasty pieces of work like Fortuny. (somehow I find it hard to imagine that is his real name).
I'm putting dibs on it showing up in a James Bond movie first but what others would be possible? X-Men 4? Just imagining being dumped from a conveyor and falling into a cupola in which arm-thick lightning bolts are crazily zapping back and forth is scary. I thought gassification in Japan was using supercritical water though, could be wrong. I know at the Aichi World Expo they had a state of the art cogeneration facility. Curious why this new one is "a better way" according to TFA's quote.
IronPython, and new Ruby VM! In my pending article
on
IronPython 1.0 is Born
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· Score: 1
I just submitted an article, Boxing in the LLRing I wrote about the Lightweight Languages Ring, a gathering of 300 developers at a boxing ring a week ago in Tokyo. For one thing Ruby's inventor is working on Yet Another Ruby VM and also the Python Language Update mentions IronPython.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked for Pacific Press Service in Tokyo developing photo copyright and library tech until 94. I first saw a photograph search engine developed by Fujitsu around 92-93 I believe. It required the user to draw the type of image composition very roughly with a mouse and paintbox. So you would draw a horizon line, fill the bottom with blue and draw a yellow circle above if you wanted photos of the sea and sun. No wavelets at that time.
I then corresponded briefly with Ingrid Daubechies of AT&T who brought wavelets to the U.S., and was kind enough to send some of her papers. Wavelets are neat because it is like getting a paintbox full of different waveforms, localized as another poster mentions not just a fourier of the entire image. Anyway they are much better known now, so you can find it on the net.
This is not really the same as Barnsley's fractal compression one startup worked on around that time IIRC. They basically had a library of fractals which would be matched to image features, and once you had covered the entire image with them you would be able to zoom into it infinitely, since fractals are self-similar. You wouldn't necessarily get new detail but it would fool you into thinking you were. (I wonder if they liscensed it to anyone). They claimed 400:1 compression, etc. I don't know if they were the basis of LivePicture or if that was wavelet based.
These technologies all have two things in common, which is selecting an algorithmic strategy for talking about images, and storing it so efficiently that the data can be found quickly. The old Fujitsu system ran on a NEWS workstation IIRC, and it was blisteringly fast compared to any system I have ever seen. Only problem is doodles all look pretty much the same unless you are talented and patient.
It seems PNI (Picture Network Interactive)'s natural language recognition text searching for photos was the best, it was just text but used software supposedly developed for the White House. Only thing was they wanted to take over the entire industry with online contracts (this was around 1993) so everyone hated them. Nice tech though.
Anyway, wavelets may not be the entire solution but certainly they are a very useful way to describe data (not just a photo) and undoubtedly have lots of potential applications that just haven't materialized yet. Here's some tidbits Lancaster's links ImgSeek
Perl Haar decomposition and seeking
Blitzwave lib
wvlt
wvlt #2
Wavelet.org
WSQ used for FBI fingerprinting
Not to be facetious, I have long wanted to see more realistic gems (gemstones) and in fact did some modelling work on them a long time ago. Gemstones are fascinating and particularly with more lifelike video displays coming, realistic calculation of what happens to light in gemstones is perhaps a good area to look at.
One problem of course is that when you look at a diamond, or a baccarat chandelier for that matter, each eye sees a different path, though perhaps this could be rendered on those new multi-angle LCDs.
So my suggestion would be to look at code for realistically rendering types of crystal and gemstones, and to do it right so you can see the "fire" they say is in a diamond, identify levels of quality and so on.
A scratch on the surface (sorry) of fast high quality crystal rendering would be great for games, education (geology? art?), all kinds of things. And it is one place that a fast rendering unit that doesn't cut corners ought to stand out above the rest.
If it is the same basic design Negroponte has been selling, then powered machines create a mesh by automatic ad hoc networking with other laptops. Though I have not heard of details, if I were designing it I'd provide free software that would turn any wired pc into a hub for this too. Power from hand cranking if necessary (perhaps if you are on a trip or in the boonies), also gives a kid the ability to be portable and take it as a book with him or her. Don't know if networking would be powered on all the time if you are in crank mode though. Maybe someone at the media lab could provide some info on battery lifetime, resolution, software specs. These are intended for non-U.S. places and mainly for kids. That said, your note about militias is valid and the only hope is that the military dictator also cares about his kids and tells his underlings so. However I am a little bit worried that the networking element would make kids trackable and possibly targets. In Cambodia I heard that radios would become military targets (this is in the 90s). On the other hand if you make enough pcs, the military can have one each too if they must. Maybe they will start blogging!
This is utterly stupid, blockheaded, yep. D-Dumb! But if they want to have their cake... then surely one would have to offset the light received for the light return from the user to the ISPs. And I think we need to call some experts on PPPoE protocol but does a higher downstream actually have to do with more light coming thisaway than thataway? And it's not a lot of light to be sure, that's very expensive light. Could users not shine some light back? Can users get a tax break if they do a lot of uploading? Someone has got to help these guys. With any luck it will begin to resemble trying to measure the length of a shoreline at progressively higher resolutions.
Yes! Could usher in a new artform of rapidly accelerating discourse! :)
I was just wondering.. I understand bittorrent engages a high-bandwidth conversation with a dynamic swarm of IPs. Has anyone worked on a tunnel over bittorrent? Would seem like the next escalation..
hacker: 100kg
sd card: US$124 / 2 grams ($61/g)
hacker's weight in ram chips: $610,000
On the heels of the latest revelation (how high are we up to now on the halloween documents?) of Microsoft's involvement in supressing superior technology (mainly superior for not being opaque), now this.
Being sceptical has made me consistently right about Microsoft as the latest Baystar news surfaces. My bullshit detector is screaming out loud that the current story is a Microsoft PR Plant based on fiction, the only real fact visible requires one to read between the lines, which is that Vista sucks and will be buggy. This story is simply a moronic attempt to say how hard they looked for bugs, so that anybody who in the future has a bad experience on Vista (crashes, etc.) will be marginalized and a large percentage of the blame can be moved onto their application or hardware vendors. I have been trying to decide whether to get a top of the line PC or a top of the line Mac and this has got me 90% decided. Not that I haven't been screwed by Apple before, or that I am going to happy with the performance of Windows apps under Parallels (which is apparently "good enough" but 2-3 times slower than a quick pc), but I am just tired of it. The other day I was worried about a vulnerability I heard about, and not having read about a workaround I installed genuine advantage on a pc at work.. which Microsoft seemed to require in order to do any other updates (another lie). Recently I have heard from 3 users that their PCs just seem to get slower and slower, despite tests for viruses etc, and though I got a close to free PC, display and printer out of it this is just the end.
When I used to write windows software I had to reinstall 98 a number of times I remember too. I told one person they should wipe everything. There are just too many bad things about Microsoft that anything comes up, I end up being so cynical I expect it is an intentional performance drop before I even open up the lid.
Well, I've had an epiphany. Anything you do with Microsoft, you will get screwed, and the closer you get to them the worse it gets. They aren't even that good at fucking people over, since they keep getting caught, but they are great about neutralizing any attempts to do anything about it. What HP did is *nothing* compared to what Bill Gates has done repeatedly, it's just he does it on such a scale that it boggles the mind. That said, I do not for a minute believe half a million tested Vista. It is crap and I don't need to see it to know it now, it just smells so bad from here. I will do my utter best NEVER to buy Vista.
But mostly I'm interested in seeing long interesting universes being built over many episodes, I hate it how great books/series that if rendered directly to film would require days on end of projection, tend to get mashed down into a couple hours. Maybe he can fund lots of creative people to make cool stuff and get them started on their own careers. Anything besides redoing Star Wars over and over again for new generations and media formats! Only good can come of it. Recently I looked into digital distribution.. I heard there are about 20 theaters in Japan and 60 in korea (I may have forgotten the numbers exactly) with high def, you deliver prints by inserting a hard disk and turning a key. More theaters like that will be cool. Um, that and waiting for led displays on the other walls and ceiling, pretty please George? :)
From last November. Lucas explains how theater divisions haven't made money for several years, it is a loss leader for DVD. And DVD will be replaced by an iTunes like app. Article
Lucas notes it costs 1/6 to make a digital print.. and for big movies a non-digital print is $20-30m. Article
I'm curious if slashdotters would pay for a streaming or downloadable movie as opposed to a DVD and what would be reasonable to them in terms of payment method and price. I'm considering releasing some video and movies in U.S. and elsewhere and am curious about whether there is a market.
I'd just like to mention this is my post, had login trouble. If you are interested in contacting me I am willing to discuss the event with you. You can get a lot of mileage out of a small amount of network functionality, so I'd be interested to hear more about your project and see what would fit into your event. Do you even have network connectivity? Can you stream video out or do you have lots of students who could type at high speed to summarize what's going on? Etc. Good luck!
Matt
Phenomenon
1. 'That's one small step for *** man, One giant leap for mankind.'"
2. Everyone has blamed him for flubbing his lines since then
3. Neil Armstrong says he did say "a man", backed up by analysis today
I don't think anyone has yet mentioned that this whole issue would be perfectly logical if one allows:
Hypothesis
1. With the word "a" deleted, "man" means earth-based humanity as we know it and "mankind" means anything like humanity, i.e. all sentient beings including aliens who have been presumed to be distant (or by a small segment, to be hiding) until now.
2. Interference could easily be generated from the moon, earth or its vicinity
3. Occam's Razor may say to take the simplest proposition, however:
a. The odds are low that interference would hit just that word because:
i. When I say the phrase it takes 8 seconds and the word "a" is less than 1 second.
ii. Deleting other words would render the sentence much less intelligible, while just the "a" is subtle enough to allow a controversy and blame to last 39 years.
iii. The existence of sentient civilizations besides ours is not generally thought to be in question. The Drake equation says just how many there are likely to be. There would have to be a very nasty physical law in fact to make the proposition of the existence of aliens false.
iv. Lately we are finding a lot of things in physics that we just don't know what the hell they mean.
vi. Proof of the existence of narrowmindedness of humankind is evident in both the "man-centric" prejudice as opposed to "human-centric" conceptualization as noted by above poster, not to mention fundamentalist terrorism and draconian implementation of "feel-good" measures at the beginning of the millenium.
The above exercise is intended to provide an alternate explanation for reasonable consideration has the requirement that the person opens their mind widely enough to encompass a cosmic viewpoint, which is of course the entire point of Neil Armstrong's phrase.
Less open minds will instead of thinking about other possibilities, instead attempt to calculate randomness of interference and balance that as "odds" against the existence of alien life.
Personal notes: Personally I find this incident the best and most positive item so far since the WOW incident lending weight to the existence of friendly non-human intelligent life in our vicinity, and to note that they have a sense of humor in allowing subtle hints to build up while we work out our own problems.
My Dad says "I don't want to get in contact with alien bugs!" probably influenced by Heinlein's Starship Troopers, but it seems to me we will get much farther along in our development if we try more to embrace a cosmic viewpoint, which necessarily entails minimizing differences among earth-bound players, and to devote more of the global GNP to eliminating disease, poverty, minds not connected to the Internet, and at the same time investing more in space. At the very least it will be nice if we can do higher energy experimentation a little farther away from our only home, the planet Earth.
You're right, if I could wash my keyboard it would be great. Shold be easy - just make the keys able to be lifted out, and no crevices, with a drain on the side. mix some soapy water and pour in and wipe! Is this something nobody has thought of until just this second? Hard to believe.
Meanwhile that silver stuff really probably is a selector for the stronger bugs, whereas the titanium stuff IIRC is doing some surface chemistry making ozone that kills things but is also a cancer hazard.
The latest news is a new air conditioner from a Japanese manufacturer that uses electricity to turn ordinary tap water, which contains chlorine, into something called hypochlorous acid. It is released as a fine mist or air is passed through a waterfall of it, and it kills viruses and organisms on contact everywhere in the room (the "antivirus air conditioner" they call it. What does this stuff do to your eyes and plants I wonder? And last I heard water contains other stuff too.. and one guy uses a carbon arc in water to make some kind of hydrocarbon fuel (aqua fuel I think) you get all kinds of stuff getting created there and it's mostly not good for you. They're going to have to have warnings on this stuff.
Having tried TiO2 surfaces and silver particle wear I can say they are quite nice. Especially the TiO2 in ceramic. It feels nice and clean. The silver stuff is, meh. Both technologies are big in Japan now, and TiO2 seems most versatile being both human friendly and nice for building exteriors but the silver stuff is a bit oversold.
I believe the British military first designed silver particle embedded antibacterial clothing, and I don't want to wear anything that has really nanosized particles of anything in it but this is not really nano. This summer in Japan everything had silver (and it would have been worse without it, since the sun seldom shone in Tokyo). I have silver particle deodorant spray, it doesn't do much except one really nasty thing: if you spray it at yourself while wearing a dress shirt you better wash it before going outside, or your will get little black dots just like a photograph with silver based film. You have to spray before wearing the clothes. Also I don't think it really has that strong an action. A little bit maybe but I also have a few silver particle embedded handkerchiefs (supposed to not get funky after you wipe off sweat with them) but an experiment showed that they do get funky and possibly part of it is discoloration due to the embedded silver. You can't just keep using it for days. So I don't think this silver stuff is that great, just wash the darned (hah) stuff.
One thing I can tell you is that while I am definitely not a neat freak, on the other hand I am very allergic to the mold or maybe acid from ink/paper deterioration (?) you get in old paper. Even just papers left in an office environment for a week will itch, and I can read a morning paper but will itch from one left in a bag or purchased in the afternoon. So I am sensitive to bacteria levels and even if they are not itchy am generally aware about it.
Okay so what do we really need? We need TiO2 building coverings and in bathrooms and desks because it feels great and works. I *think* it is really safe but don't quote me. We really need self-disinfecting TiO2 coated handholds/straps in subways and public places. A disinfecting (alcohol based?) deodorant that has been sold in some places works extremely well.. that is why people smell. So disinfecting is good in some places. We really need disinfecting keyboards with some way so that crumbs, dust, and whatever does not get stuck inside your keyboard forever. That is apparently a really dirty place. As for this mouse? Well when I go to an Internet manga cafe they provide wipes (usually disinfecting) and I do wipe the keyboard and mouse, they get really grubby just from ordinary use. But it is probably better to just wipe it with a wipe. Use a human friendly one, some industrial wipes they sell with something like rubbing alcohol are bad. The idea that you can disinfect your desk with your mouse is totally dumb. But if there was a keyboard with a TiO2 surface INSIDE it I would be thinking pretty hard about it.
Wow this is great. By coincidence I typed a memo into my mobile phone, a napkin-back spec for a device that has what this one does, and a week later it appears all finished on slashfot! Well, they are perhaps missing one component but I am not going to post it here. I think I'm going to try it again.
Hi,
Thanks for the tough love. I replied elsewhere in this thread. I knew about Parallels and yes, Leopard. If I can use Leopard on a new 17" then that would be useful.
Matt
Hi!
Thank you very much for extremely good information.
Yes, my brother is using Parallels. And I meant Leopard.
I think I'll need to know Leopard is going to work on any Apple I buy. That might require waiting for what I would expect is a partial version of it in the upcoming announcement.
The idea of losing my Mac partition to a windows virus is a very scary idea indeed, wow. As for batteries I suppose any new mac will have that resolved, I guess.. I guess I am no longer moving away from the Mac but will have to think about it a bit more. If Parallels is really that good then I guess there is no reason not to.
I think my brother has both Parallels plus a windows partition just "to keep it pure" if he needs it maybe. Though that sounds like more of a drawback due to virus danger. I think being virtually free from viruses is the best reason so far, that and being able to develop for both win and osx platforms on one machine. The 17" sounds nice! I'm not a gamer or ipodder but since I drool every time I use a mac these days I think you've helped me a lot.
Thanks.
Matt
Unfortunately it is harder and harder for me to move back home. I live overseas and it breaks my heart to see what a piece of shit the U.S. is turning into. I don't understand it and wonder if I would have understood it better if I lived full time in the U.S. This really gives me a pain in the stomach. It is so transparent what they are doing. Could someone ask twenty people in the office what they think about this news story and post what they say?
I am about to buy the best laptop I can find, or maybe a desktop plus a very light laptop. I really want to buy a Mac but am moving away from it!
I always was an Apple person and I have a bunch of old macs in my closet. But I've used linux as my main computer for some years.
I hate using linux as a desktop at least on this laptop, which ran Win2K fine but was dying on RH9 and finally I am on blackbox now.
I used linux because I'm a developer and also because I hate Microsoft.
I want a Mac because it is cool and mostly virus free compared to MS.
The opposing side is I need WinXP for business. My brother who has a Mac book pro and uses windows in an emulator recommended it ito me but I heard it is slow. I heard Bootcamp is not totally there yet or needs an unsupported hack to be usable. I am waiting now because I heard about battery fires, macs not being allowed to be used on planes, and an upcoming announcement from Jobs. I want a Jaguar mac with the time machine bad but I'm waiting.
I think there must be a lot of people like me, enough to make that minus 0.02 go positive. People who know all the issues and still want a mac but it is killing them to make that decision. And they are in fact moving away from the mac like me right now.
For me to buy a Mac Book Pro, Apple must provide
- a supported way to run WinXP natively on another partition and be able to access that data from OS X.
- ironclad assurance about the batteries
- info about whether Jaguar is available now and what is this announcement in October we are supposed to wait for?
- Finally, I love macs but I have been screwed by Apple lots of times, starting way back with the Apple III (I had an Apple II Integer Plus too, FWIW. And a fat mac, a quadra, a powerbook, and oh heck with it). I am willing to buy the best system they have so it will not go obsolete right away but I do NOT want them to take my money and then screw me over again. I want the XP side to work like an ordinary windows machine, not a slow machine. It should be a screaming fast machine.
You know reading this I'm thinking, why do you want a Mac? It's all cool but really you need a PC for business. And I'm still moving away from the mac. It's insane. I guess I have to wait for Jobs again?
To regurgitate more of TFA, 'Ralph Nader has criticized the automobile safety agency as nothing more than a lap dog for the auto industry. The consumer advocate said NHTSA "is now a consulting agency to Detroit and federal regulation is essentially dead.'
Old news, maybe. At least Hakia is cool. I was thinking I'd rather have someone with experience in the area to run DHS but on the other hand, lobbyists can probably kick ass too, and it's probably safer in the end to have them busy making money instead of of busy handing out parking tickets. Is it legal for a lobbyist to run the DHS?"
In this 4500 word article, which includes in addition to fun and hijinks detailed language updates for Ruby, Python, Squeak, Perl, Java, Javascript and 20 other languages and frameworks, a panel on functional programming and comparison between Ruby and Java.
Since I went to the trouble to write the English article I'd like to let people know about it since it is on an unknown site. So far just people in Japan and perlmonks.org people know about it. Considering that Ruby, Python, Java and Squeak are all mentioned in the article (and Ruby/Java generation is a big topic in Japan too) I can't figure out why such a relevant post gets backseated to Piquepaille and endless RIAA and voting machine stories. Anyway, if you are interested check out the article. As far as I know, this is the first breaking news coverage in the world of a fork in Ruby and retirement of its creator from work on the language (or so he says, hope not!).
FWIW the magazine in my hands right now, probably the best selling magazine in Japan in this space this month has the cover story that Ruby helps you solve problems fast. Also including articles on Java and a nice Perl Catalyst story.
Yes, that is why China kills its most corrupt mayors. Unfortunately people are people. And due to the Peter Principle (and other principles on that page) it is likely that incompetent people will rise to a managerial role, which means that a screw-up is a screw-up regardless of how much money he is screwing up. Beyond a certain amount it's just numbers anyway. If you want to punish someone who is incompetent, punish the guy who hired them.
White collar crime however stems from imperfect people, full of characteristics that enabled them to get to the top, being either malicious, or else walking the grey line so close to the edge that they inevitably step over it. It is like the saying that you get the kind of leaders you ask for.
Either way, it seems to me that such characters will do so for the maximum amount of money they can access and think is safe, so it does not make sense to keep upping the ante the more powerful a person is; the psychology does not change. It probably won't have much of an effect, they just have to catch more people is all, and also change the psychological requirements of people being hired.
If a trader in a securities firm loses a billion dollars, the firm has to pay it. Such insurance fund does not exist in the case of an Enron and maybe they need to start buying some. In the case of HP, it may be illegal in terms of corporate spying but it is not on a par with say rape or murder.
If congress just said pretexting is illegal (which it looks like they may do) then maybe only criminals will do it, but certainly it won't be ordered by the head of the corporation. You want to add a prison sentence to catch people lower down, not the people on top, hence your argument is actually upside-down. Or do you think just the president should go to prison, and not the people who actually did it professionally?
I noted in my article Boxing in the LLRing, which despite positive responses Slashdot rejected in favor of Roland Piquepaille's daily column and various political commentary, that Squeak has an amazing debugger (I am not going to call it a full-blown analyzer) that allows you to debug applications as they are running on the very interesting Seaside application server.
As described in this paper (pdf), Seaside provides multiple control flows and a high level of abstraction that is very useful to web app developers.
The 4500 word article is coverage of a 300 developer "Lightweight Languages" all-day seminar held in a real boxing ring in Tokyo, covering 30 languages and frameworks including Perl, Python, Ruby, Haskell, OCaml, Squeak, and many others.
Fortuny clearly is a narccisistic sadist. Since he posted an ad to out sadists inhabiting what he interprets as an environment intersecting or congruent to his own territory, effectively he has removed or "demoted" his "competition", in a twisted simian or serial killer like sense.
He imagines that this feat proves his superiority and that it will net him rewards, so he can "get the girl" or be showered with praise etc. Though it would make more sense if he is seeking a male masochist, since he could just wait for the guys he outed to contact him for a date. Since Fortuny seem to be spectacularly oblivious to consequences I could believe that, which is why I expect him to get a severe physical beating from someone real soon now.
Looking forward to hearing the follow up on whether he gets sued, "demoted" or otherwise fried for this since the last thing we need is copycats. I thought programmers were kind of altruistic but I can't tell if this is an evil one or just that the bar has gotten lowered so far that it attracts nasty pieces of work like Fortuny. (somehow I find it hard to imagine that is his real name).
I'm putting dibs on it showing up in a James Bond movie first but what others would be possible? X-Men 4? Just imagining being dumped from a conveyor and falling into a cupola in which arm-thick lightning bolts are crazily zapping back and forth is scary. I thought gassification in Japan was using supercritical water though, could be wrong. I know at the Aichi World Expo they had a state of the art cogeneration facility. Curious why this new one is "a better way" according to TFA's quote.
I just submitted an article, Boxing in the LLRing I wrote about the Lightweight Languages Ring, a gathering of 300 developers at a boxing ring a week ago in Tokyo. For one thing Ruby's inventor is working on Yet Another Ruby VM and also the Python Language Update mentions IronPython.