The article mentions 3 billion bases in less than
2 hours. That comes to
(3/2) x 10e9 / (3.6 x 10e3) bases/sec
= 416667 bases/sec.
So you would need a sustained writing speed of
about 400 kilobytes/sec, or if you compress it
into 4 bases per byte, say 100 kilobytes/sec.
to write to about 3 GB (or 730MB compressed) of disk space.
You could fit it onto an IBM Microdrive attached to your Palm!
Whoa. A lot of people think the same thing!
<P>
Try <a href= "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&a mp;q=Revelations+13%3A17+buy+Microsoft">searchi ng</a> on
Google for 13:17 and Microsoft!
<P>
I like <a href="http://www.river.org/~buttrfly/vp54.html">this</a> quote the best, "One could say that MICROSOFT products are for people
who cannot make moral decisions."
<P>
And <a href="http://hometown.aol.com/discipledave/book/Be ast.html">this</a> page is over the top but talks
about how an implanted chip will be sold to the
masses by describing how much freedom they will have
to make purchases anywhere with unlimited credit.. If an MS Passport chip comes out call me and I'll scream.
Russia is well-known for highly poisonous rocket exhaust, especially from the PROTON rocket. I seem to remember this being used recently. Does anyone know if this is true and whether the launch vehicles Australia purchased might be using something similar?
Thanks for correcting me. I am not a VB programmer and this was last year, though it is just likely that my friend wasn't aware of the existence of the free components you mentioned.
This was for a Cold Fusion based website, and he was building a section which needed to grab headlines off a partner site to display in our news section. We didn't have Visual Basic, he had to buy it. Was this free MSXML kit available a year ago? Another thing is that while I offered to do it in Perl I think the programmer really wanted VB (he mainly does.asp pages and the company had already spent too much on Microsoft liscenses to purchase a good development environment.. some reason was needed to get them to pay for VB and I suppose ignoring the fact that Perl would handle it quickly and for free was the easiest way to do so.
I believe it was actually a component shipped free with VB but you needed VB itself to use it, hence the $2000.
This developer anyway was convinved there was no way to do it except pay the money. Me, I'm steeped in Perl's "There's More Than One Way To Do It" ideology and hate having to pay every time I turn around with Windows technology when I think it ought to be able to do more for the price. I doubt "of course it's free from MS" refers to any standard policy of Microsoft's. Anyway, thanks for the comment. I certainly would like tell him about MSXML.
McCloud's work is on target and probably the best
way to get more people thinking again about
how they would like to use micropayments and advocating testing of various models in the real world.
You can't downgrade someone's honest work because they are more successful, and if anything good comes out of this discussion guess what, Jerry and the other slammers will benefit too.
The tech is all there and that isn't news to anyone here. The point is that lots of attempts have been made, from 1st Virtual on up to e-Gold, and still we don't have anything in place that is going to get volumes of low-cost artistic product out to tens of thousands of people, using a system which matches the way the people want to be able to select and acquire such a product.
There are some experiments going on with prepaid cards that might work in limited geographical settings (thinking about something in downtown Tokyo recently). It also might work if the phone company or cable company offered you say 5 bucks a month that you could use in 500 content transactions to get at a large amount of stuff you want and couldn't get any other way (maybe McCloud makes a special comic for that purpose for example). Maybe Amazon.com would even want to get into that kind of business (you buy a $10 credit and they handle the micropayments), at least McCloud's reference to a single click for a small transaction certainly makes sense. Also I've seen floppies sold in little artsy shops, and perhaps you could store a few of McCloud's comics on a floppy for instance, though you still have to get it in a store and that is pretty low volume for a physical, atoms-not-bits product.
All these things are not purely technical problems, and we already have enough technology to
deal with it. I found McCloud's latest comic to be well done, thought provoking even for someone who has been considering micropayment systems to artists and acceptance of lossiness.
One data point I'd like to add. I showed a DJ friend of mine the article by Courtney Love from last year about the record industry and artists. I ran some ideas I had for a lossy payment system which seemed to match what she was talking about
(and happens to cover a number of points McCloud
covered too).
I was surprised that my friend was totally unsympathetic to her, his attitude being that she and other bands just signed stupid contracts. Now this guy has a day job and I don't think he has ever gone through the kinds of things Courtney Love was talking about, so this kind of response is kind of take-it-or-leave-it. But it struck a chord when I read about the attacks on McCloud; other artists would never be forced to use some payment system they didn't want, but they and everyone else (except record companies perhaps) would have lots to benefit by promoting an open and frank discussion about alternative systems that could allow a larger number of people to make a living off of creative pursuits.
I'm going to keep thinking about this but one thing that would help is to get more real-life data points to use in designing my system and also in convincing someone to fund it. The mention of $600 a month for a 30,000 visitor per month site is very valuable. More please!
I almost felt bad for Mundie when it seemed he was getting pushed into doublespeak to defend Microsoft's right to run a business.
But of course that quickly evaporated as he completely ignored most accusations of rapacious business practices. This is obviously more of the same, too bad he (Microsoft) cannot screw up the courage to just tell the truth, that they can make up any liscense they want and print it as long as they can get away with it.
But it was really a neat trick, to say the GPL sets up a wall when
Microsoft, through this liscense as well as through its entire business history, has done exactly that. They have intentionally made a liscense which is incompatible with the GPL and immobilizes users of both. But it really takes guts to be so blatant as to attempt the "cleansing" of free software from the development environment including tools which are just there to get the job done. If they want a holy war they can get one (spoken as a Perl Monk:).
Supposedly someone who purchased software with this liscense would be agreeing with their MS operating system and MS applications spying on them for the presence of gcc or Mozilla on network drives.
As for the suggestion that the existence of free software is dangerous to business, this also is clearly refuted. Sleepy Cat and Reiser which are both referenced offer commercial liscenses. And other (BSD, MIT) liscenses can be used if the author just wants his or her software to be as widely used as possible. The other thing is why
I like Perl for example, or any of the other tools
in GNU/Linux. They work. I can get the job done, and get into a wide development community of leading edge technologists with minimum investment. I also don't have to pay MS money every time I need to do something, just remembering someone I know who had to pay $2000 for VB to get a little component that would let him download a web page. I know a bunch of ways to that with Perl/GNU/Linux. So I respect the desire of a company to make a profit but not if the only company allowed to be successful is Microsoft.
If Microsoft spins the liscense they are analyzing into more of its software I and lots of other people will transform into vengeful consultants who will do everything possible to remove Microsoft's products (now viral due to their new liscense) from our places of work and those of our clients. I was about to spend time getting an open source system of mine to work well on an NT box. Well, can I even do so? If someone installs this Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit on their
system, it sounds like they no longer can install
a Windows port of Mysql, Perl, or any other piece of open source software including my own. I can only imagine this will be ignored by users but will remain as a gotcha which MS could use at whim. Microsoft doesn't just sound like the monopoly run by the richest man in the world, it's beginning to sound like an enemy. They'd better backpedal fast.. There are still more of us than them.
Our team built an Internet Fridge with Sharp
in Japan. After all was said and done, it got
a Netscape browser in a color LCD screen inset in the freezer area at head height, a camera (this got removed later), a ups (as long as the fridge is plugged in..), and a cellphone antenna (so you could call it from outside.. also nixed). It didn't sell amazingly at the time. Might do better if it included a router for your home network now that I think about it since those things sell like hotcakes.
The interesting thing was that a friend at Intel
told me there was a group some years ago that
thought about doing the same thing with a
garage freezer in the U.S., since the "deep freeze" American houses seem to have must be
a good place to stick a server, and there's space in the garage.
Personally I wouldn't mind having a terabite in
the freezer.. ouch just to save a week of TV
and not worry about which channel when.
We don't have monochrome displays now because the resolution is too low. Just wait, when we get over 300dpi then greyscale will be more interesting (as halftone), and at higher resolutions you won't be worrying about the gradations of even rgb pixels, just how many you turn on next to each other. Think about the resolution of 150 line-per-inch magazine glossies.
The other reason they don't sell now is no demand, and not enough volume for the reduction in margins which the price point we want necessitates. Used mac b/w laptops are still sitting in the 2nd hand
stores..
Iridium has had/promised this data service for years. Isn't this beating a dead horse?
I researched this 9600 bps option for Cambodian
community infrastructure.. but even with two of the Iridium investors being close to the leader of
this project we still didn't buy into it.
They've been saying the same thing about how this fills a need for a long time, but other companies have also provided satellite data services for a long time.
You need a purchase case for a mobile phone or terminal. Doesn't compute unless maybe you're in the military.. or they have dropped prices from orbit.
The video shows web browsing with the data glove,
probably not the best use of it, but when the glove supposedly types keywords into the search
form only gibberish comes out. I can only assume
that this is an actual video of glove use and that
using it for keyboard input is impossible.. unless
there is an absolute spatial positioning device in
the glove. It just looks like it pans a mouse
horizontally and you can't actually type on a keyboard that is bigger than the glove.
The piano demonstration is also useless, since it
only shows the glove accurately hitting keys within the width of the glove. Now if they had a glove on each hand (amazing idea it is) and were actually playing a piano with sound coming out realistically I'd be impressed.
The 3d modelling demo which looks kind of neat,
unfortunately is hard to follow since the most interesting part (modelling the shapes of the body and head parts) is completely obscured by the opaque glove, which doesn't seem to be doing a lot of work. One wonders if the parts were not mostly pre-created. (Though the tail creation segment is interesting). I would be more interested in the glove being able to accurately direct a modeling or music playing session than in requiring full haptic feedback (which probably would be too expensive for this product I expect). That is probably going to be reserved for phantom-like systems which can handle one or two fingers of full force feedback I'd guess.
Finally The AXE is demoed. I know the guys who did it, and it is really cool software. But you don't finger a trumpet's keys to play the trumpet (and it looks more like a clarinet but anyway..) Their system uses mouse, joystick, keyboard, or any kind of MIDI input, they even made a gesture sensor which was apparently pretty cool. The idea with their system is that you cannot make a misstep because all kinds of agents make sure your input is constrained to something which matches the melody; it is the ultimate air guitar and so a silly way to try and demonstrate a glove, which in this case is just being used as a mouse.
Where's the beef? Well, looks like they spent a little bit of money on the video sequences. Not a ton, but some. I'd like to know for example how accurate the thing is at pointing at discreet locations in three space from a given point, or if there are any actual applications for which the glove would be satisfactory and superior to a mouse or joystick. Something which uses gestures like the open hand to scroll down a page, but for music creation, might be fun.
Perhaps most readers are familiar with the
Doomsday Clock.
I was thinking that if all the weapons plutonium were gathered it would be appropriate to create
a clock set back to a minute after twelve o'clock
to symbolize the beginning of a new era of hope.
Maybe it would be nice to have something like that
some day.
But I think considering the important comment about the Warning Function, this clock should be set to the time the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock when the center is built. The front cover of the current Bulletin says, "PLUTONIUM - WHO WANTS IT ?" Consider the symbol used for dangerous biological components, it is a much scarier looking version of the trefoil used for atomic energy. I would put the two hands of the doomsday clock, with a great brilliantly glowing crystal at the twelve o'clock digits mark above, at the entrance to this facility. From far away one would see only this brilliant light suspended in the air, and on approach one would see the dark clock hands, supported from a point on the ground that would be the center of the clock. One hand, the hour hand, rises vertically from that point and supports this crystal beacon. Branching off from the main clock hand pillar is the minute hand, set perhaps to nine minutes to midnight as the current clock reads.
Warning? Perhaps the light would warn off a plane coming in for a crash landing.. but more importantly, warn future generations about how close we came, why we sequestered plutonium, about the seduction of energy, and the hidden threat that anybody with Plutonium power can go nuclear in a short amount of time. Like Japan, which is a classic example of irresponsible leadership and a committment to the plutonium breeding cycle.
Perhaps heads of state could be required to visit this vault and shrine before taking their oaths of national security so that they personally understand the responsibility they have for forging and maintaining peace. Someone who "wants" Plutonium should have to walk through that door first.
I am not anti-energy. I am anti-horror.
If we could link this sort of thing to the net and hyper-equipped locations around the world it would be nice. But we need a commanding icon which will send a message to everyone who sees it in person or in facsimile. Like the Doomsday Clock, or the rays of the nuclear half-life ticking away the centuries, the millenia.
jserver is part of it, but it is not the whole
ball of wax. RedHat Japanese comes with a bunch
of liscensed software which you pay for in the
purchase price, including an IME by Omron. You
also get a lot of things in Japanese plus fonts,
etc. It is pretty involved, there is a liscense
server, kanji databases, fonts, AI grammar engines, links to emacs, Japanese docs, partial
localization into Japanese of interfaces for
programs like Gimp, etc.
I'm running Suse (English) on this machine, but a box of RedHat Linux 6.2J on my desk says on it "Available only in Japanese", and it says it includes Just System's ATOK12. This is the best kanji front end processor around, so you want it. It also comes
with HancomWord which is a word processor that can handle chinese, japanese, hangul (korean), and english.
A free but apparently less powerful version is
available of the Omron IME (Wnn6) as well.
I think some of these are probably conflicting so you can't run all at once, but I just used this on a machine I bought in Japan which had it preinstalled. It is neat because you can type
kanji into emacs and even vi. You need a properly equipped terminal program for that. I can type hiragana into emacs and display kanji even now in plain vanilla emacs as installed with SuSE (a couple of versions ago). But you may run into differences between emacs and XEmacs setup, available fonts, and so on.
Laser5 Linux has a lot of Japanese centric things
in its distro as well.
There is also something called PJE (which I have had a huge amount of trouble installing in the past) which supposedly is a full Japanese localized suite of tools and support files. It probably would install automatically on a RedHat kind of box but would be far inferior to what you get with RedHat Linux Japanese. Check out www.rehat.com/jp/ and maybe you can get a manifest and build and environment of your own out of the free components, based on noncommercial Wnn.(v4 I believe). But it is probably worth trying to get the ATOK12 package since it will not let you make as many errors in kanji. For example the kanji engine SuSE has hooked up to emacs in suse 6.1 is completely clueless and so you get a ton of characters to sift through all the time.
Regarding comments about webservers on YOPY,
If the YOPY stays on all the time, your batteries will run down fast. Until the YOPY gets one of those miniature gas turbine jobbies. Like there is a webserver for the palm but nobody is using it apparently.
But aside from that, why wirelessly? cool, but maybe easier with wires? Would be useful for serving that video up to an online server that wouldn't mind getting slashdotted, on a dedicated line that would be nice. USB would be nice too if not available.
Re previous comment on infrared at conference table, if Palm is anything to go by you will only have one person connecting at a time, so wireless might be better there.
Would like to hear more about stats as far as how many connections per second and how fast a frame rate could theoretically be pushed through a YOPY. Seems with Linux there would be a lot better spec than the Palm software-wise. The problem if any is going to be with cheap tiny hardware I think.
One note about serial interface - I've spent some time hacking a Palm (Clie) connection through hotsync cradle to different platforms. It seems a serial cable has a different pin layout which makes it tricky.. ordinary serial cradle is cua0 on my box while a serial cable worked on stty. Windows 2000 RAS seemed not to want to let the Palm out of its vicinity while pppd with proxyarp worked great to give the palm its own ip address (oooh scary on a YOPY maybe).
You can telnet to your box from the YOPY shell probably, but I don't understand why you have to use a serial cable to see it, shouldn't you be able to have a shell in X? Finally MochaPPP is a windows ppp server that might work with the YOPY, but it is tough to debug and is only meant for win95/98. It does not seem to work (for me anyway) on NT, and it took ages to discover that it did not work on a Sony Vaio. The Vaio has wierd conflicts. Maybe possible for a Vaio guru, nuff said. If anyone has an idea about doing an ip bridge so you can surf from YOPY (or Palm) through Windows2000 to the net, please post.
I should think P2P would take on a new meaning with a wireless enabled YOPY. You might even conceivable make a string of pppd connections so a whole mess of them could be online through proxyarp ip bridges! Whoooeeee! (Oh so that's what Bluetooth was made for..) Hey, hook your car engine or washing machine up to the net by wireless from net to YOPY and serial cable connection from YOPY to appliance! Yikes! Hmmmm.
Well my Dad had a Mercedes-Benz 300D (D for Diesel) maybe 15 years ago or so, in New Jersey.
It was great, except for one huge problem. Diesel turns to jelly in the winter! Even plugging the thing in overnight didn't always work. You need a garage for the car, and maybe want to pour boiling water over the block.
Same problem with new diesel tech? Sorry didn't read the article...
What a waste to spend resources on opening an S/390 considering what they could be used for.
What about taking 10% of that BILLION and earmarking it to support open source developers??
Where were they when Eazel tanked? What about the folks at SourceXchange? Are they doing anything more than thinking about marketing, pr facetime, and beating their own products to death?
I'd much rather see some of that money go to supporting hookup of an IBM microdrive to the Agenda, or a zillion other things, than this.
IBM should earmark 0.05% of their budget (that's still half a million bucks right?) to - guess what - pay great open source based developers and designers to build a site that would try to get feedback from the Linux community, including developers, users, and purchasers, as to what sort of things we'd like to see. It might even save them some marketing money. IBM's done some good things but this is not the top priority if they are serious about spending that money on open source.
If they believe Linux gives them value for the money, then they ought to be willing to put money down to get high quality engineering and design talent to work on projects which IBM could share with the open source community and continue to improve Linux.
One really cool thing they could do is endow a chair (or 10 or 20) like the year off from school which Perl mage Damian Conway received from the community.
So this is the latest "unbreakable" huh? I'm sure nobody at the NSA, CIA, or KGB wants to know what's in those networks too. Cute.
How do you know this isn't just opening a big fat vpn tunnel right into your company so other people can look at your network? Cuts both ways.
Oh, check out www.invicta.com -- Looks like they haven't bothered to buy up their domain for a whole year. That's confidence I suppose.. Guess there's no site to have taken down.
I haven't seen anything except untechnical fluff articles and only a couple over a year. The idea of a Russian guy calling his system Latin for "Unconquered" isn't slick, it's dumb. You just need someone at their physical location, something he should know about. What idiot will trust him to install the thing?
Would be nice to get rid of my heavy-feeling
widgets and gain a feeling of space with a sketchy
desktop! Maybe be not so far fetched if using Berlin or the like??
Might be nice to show projected on the wall, or on an easel.. no, the pun's not funny but it might look quite nice all the same.
An acquaintance of mine some years ago in Japan showed me a printout from a system he made to
produce seemingly hand-drawn mechanical drawings
based automatically in postscript. I remember
seeing a printout from the system in which a
bicycle wheel was done in crosshatching and shadowed.
I am intrigued/scadalized/cooled out by the article and (therefore) don't have the background to dispute it.
But what about:
-energy required to set up initial values so that the answer is all zeroes
-energy required for cooling or otherwise insulating/maintaining computer during the time it will be computing and simultaneously off
-who's going to police those qubits and tell them not to cannabilize energy from that environment (and presumably return it.. oops don't want to go there)
-would you need a reservoir of energy attached to the thing so that it would be theoretically possible for the system to go up the energy hump if calculation (in other universe required it)?..or is this based on probability of some kind of tunneling right under the potential energy hill from start point to endpoint in a finite amount of time? (And is there such a "hill" in quantum computing, forgot to ask that too).
-do you ever even turn a quantum computer on anyway? seems a delicate enough computer could get by without humans intentionally putting power to it
-(back to the question of energy required to set up the computer): is there not a law which requires energy to create or change information, or is this a silly misconception. If so, are they not just taking care of energy expenditures before getting to the calculation stage, leaving a lot of the actual energy goings on in the unfathomable, unaccountable finite time span of computation? Or is there something else going on?
** It seems there is something more interesting going on, but there is neither mathematical meat for the professional nor a real explanation for the layman. The Royal Society Proceedings are too briefly abstracted to get anywhere. Could someone paraphrase or post the text of those proceedings or is this going to be an exercise in frustration?
In particular what exactly are the limits to the kind of probing you can accomplish which was mentioned in that abstract?
You might want to check out Muse, a synthetic environment which allows collaboration, video conferencing, and multidimensional data mining from a UFO deck. Used by oil researchers, nasa (the ISS) and boeing among others.
I'm guessing that while Terra does mean Earth, the creators got the word from the Microsoft satellite imagery site, which stole that from ART+COM's Terra project, which did it much earlier. Or maybe they all just had the same great idea.
So if you like this you should check out their site at Art+Com (see this page too).
There also used to be on the web (same people I think) a site which would take their imagery database and build a movie for you of a zoom down onto any point on earth (though I think it usually ended up being Germany).
Another quite impressive version of this I've seen was a demo for the Silicon Graphics Infinite Reality workstation / supercomputer. You could zoom from outerspace down to the Matterhorn but that's not all.. the 2-D image which is already gorgeous in ultra-high resolution (must have been 1920 pixels across) is then dissolved and rotated into an amazing texture-mapped, realistic 3-D mdoel of the mountain. I believe this was taken later and changed so you can keep on zooming through the matterhorn into a MIPS processor inside a Nintendo 64. Anyway it was cool because the resolution was about the same as your eye can handle or better, and more detail kept coming up to the surface. Also the images had been processed and had beautiful color and contrast.
Lastly, there is also Tom Van Sant's own project, GeoSphere. The cloudless earth he assembled painstakingly from Nasa imagery became the best selling photo in Japan and was the basis for his large globe models.
If you are still interested, check out the World Processor by Ingo Gunther. Beautiful globes used to describe the world to earthlings. Oh and another very nice artwork by another friend named Eto-san who used peltier devices to make a realistic temperature scale across a live satellite map in BeWare. Not visual zooming but another sensory dimension for sure. I guess everyone depends on NASA for the real goods!
Slashdot Mirror
The article mentions 3 billion bases in less than 2 hours. That comes to
(3/2) x 10e9 / (3.6 x 10e3) bases/sec
= 416667 bases/sec.
So you would need a sustained writing speed of about 400 kilobytes/sec, or if you compress it into 4 bases per byte, say 100 kilobytes/sec. to write to about 3 GB (or 730MB compressed) of disk space.
You could fit it onto an IBM Microdrive attached to your Palm!
Whoa. A lot of people think the same thing!t ;this</a> quote the best, "One could say that MICROSOFT products are for people
e ast.html">this</a> page is over the top but talks
<P>
Try <a href= "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&a mp;q=Revelations+13%3A17+buy+Microsoft">searchi ng</a> on
Google for 13:17 and Microsoft!
<P>
I like <a href="http://www.river.org/~buttrfly/vp54.html"&g
who cannot make moral decisions."
<P>
And <a href="http://hometown.aol.com/discipledave/book/B
about how an implanted chip will be sold to the
masses by describing how much freedom they will have
to make purchases anywhere with unlimited credit.. If an MS Passport chip comes out call me and I'll scream.
Russia is well-known for highly poisonous rocket exhaust, especially from the PROTON rocket. I seem to remember this being used recently. Does anyone know if this is true and whether the launch vehicles Australia purchased might be using something similar?
This was for a Cold Fusion based website, and he was building a section which needed to grab headlines off a partner site to display in our news section. We didn't have Visual Basic, he had to buy it. Was this free MSXML kit available a year ago? Another thing is that while I offered to do it in Perl I think the programmer really wanted VB (he mainly does .asp pages and the company had already spent too much on Microsoft liscenses to purchase a good development environment.. some reason was needed to get them to pay for VB and I suppose ignoring the fact that Perl would handle it quickly and for free was the easiest way to do so.
I believe it was actually a component shipped free with VB but you needed VB itself to use it, hence the $2000.
This developer anyway was convinved there was no way to do it except pay the money. Me, I'm steeped in Perl's "There's More Than One Way To Do It" ideology and hate having to pay every time I turn around with Windows technology when I think it ought to be able to do more for the price. I doubt "of course it's free from MS" refers to any standard policy of Microsoft's. Anyway, thanks for the comment. I certainly would like tell him about MSXML.
You can't downgrade someone's honest work because they are more successful, and if anything good comes out of this discussion guess what, Jerry and the other slammers will benefit too.
The tech is all there and that isn't news to anyone here. The point is that lots of attempts have been made, from 1st Virtual on up to e-Gold, and still we don't have anything in place that is going to get volumes of low-cost artistic product out to tens of thousands of people, using a system which matches the way the people want to be able to select and acquire such a product.
There are some experiments going on with prepaid cards that might work in limited geographical settings (thinking about something in downtown Tokyo recently). It also might work if the phone company or cable company offered you say 5 bucks a month that you could use in 500 content transactions to get at a large amount of stuff you want and couldn't get any other way (maybe McCloud makes a special comic for that purpose for example). Maybe Amazon.com would even want to get into that kind of business (you buy a $10 credit and they handle the micropayments), at least McCloud's reference to a single click for a small transaction certainly makes sense. Also I've seen floppies sold in little artsy shops, and perhaps you could store a few of McCloud's comics on a floppy for instance, though you still have to get it in a store and that is pretty low volume for a physical, atoms-not-bits product.
All these things are not purely technical problems, and we already have enough technology to deal with it. I found McCloud's latest comic to be well done, thought provoking even for someone who has been considering micropayment systems to artists and acceptance of lossiness.
One data point I'd like to add. I showed a DJ friend of mine the article by Courtney Love from last year about the record industry and artists. I ran some ideas I had for a lossy payment system which seemed to match what she was talking about (and happens to cover a number of points McCloud covered too).
I was surprised that my friend was totally unsympathetic to her, his attitude being that she and other bands just signed stupid contracts. Now this guy has a day job and I don't think he has ever gone through the kinds of things Courtney Love was talking about, so this kind of response is kind of take-it-or-leave-it. But it struck a chord when I read about the attacks on McCloud; other artists would never be forced to use some payment system they didn't want, but they and everyone else (except record companies perhaps) would have lots to benefit by promoting an open and frank discussion about alternative systems that could allow a larger number of people to make a living off of creative pursuits.
I'm going to keep thinking about this but one thing that would help is to get more real-life data points to use in designing my system and also in convincing someone to fund it. The mention of $600 a month for a 30,000 visitor per month site is very valuable. More please!
But of course that quickly evaporated as he completely ignored most accusations of rapacious business practices. This is obviously more of the same, too bad he (Microsoft) cannot screw up the courage to just tell the truth, that they can make up any liscense they want and print it as long as they can get away with it.
But it was really a neat trick, to say the GPL sets up a wall when Microsoft, through this liscense as well as through its entire business history, has done exactly that. They have intentionally made a liscense which is incompatible with the GPL and immobilizes users of both. But it really takes guts to be so blatant as to attempt the "cleansing" of free software from the development environment including tools which are just there to get the job done. If they want a holy war they can get one (spoken as a Perl Monk :).
Supposedly someone who purchased software with this liscense would be agreeing with their MS operating system and MS applications spying on them for the presence of gcc or Mozilla on network drives.
As for the suggestion that the existence of free software is dangerous to business, this also is clearly refuted. Sleepy Cat and Reiser which are both referenced offer commercial liscenses. And other (BSD, MIT) liscenses can be used if the author just wants his or her software to be as widely used as possible. The other thing is why I like Perl for example, or any of the other tools in GNU/Linux. They work. I can get the job done, and get into a wide development community of leading edge technologists with minimum investment. I also don't have to pay MS money every time I need to do something, just remembering someone I know who had to pay $2000 for VB to get a little component that would let him download a web page. I know a bunch of ways to that with Perl/GNU/Linux. So I respect the desire of a company to make a profit but not if the only company allowed to be successful is Microsoft.
If Microsoft spins the liscense they are analyzing into more of its software I and lots of other people will transform into vengeful consultants who will do everything possible to remove Microsoft's products (now viral due to their new liscense) from our places of work and those of our clients. I was about to spend time getting an open source system of mine to work well on an NT box. Well, can I even do so? If someone installs this Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit on their system, it sounds like they no longer can install a Windows port of Mysql, Perl, or any other piece of open source software including my own. I can only imagine this will be ignored by users but will remain as a gotcha which MS could use at whim. Microsoft doesn't just sound like the monopoly run by the richest man in the world, it's beginning to sound like an enemy. They'd better backpedal fast.. There are still more of us than them.
The interesting thing was that a friend at Intel told me there was a group some years ago that thought about doing the same thing with a garage freezer in the U.S., since the "deep freeze" American houses seem to have must be a good place to stick a server, and there's space in the garage.
Personally I wouldn't mind having a terabite in the freezer.. ouch just to save a week of TV and not worry about which channel when.
We don't have monochrome displays now because the resolution is too low. Just wait, when we get over 300dpi then greyscale will be more interesting (as halftone), and at higher resolutions you won't be worrying about the gradations of even rgb pixels, just how many you turn on next to each other. Think about the resolution of 150 line-per-inch magazine glossies.
The other reason they don't sell now is no demand, and not enough volume for the reduction in margins which the price point we want necessitates. Used mac b/w laptops are still sitting in the 2nd hand
stores..
I researched this 9600 bps option for Cambodian community infrastructure.. but even with two of the Iridium investors being close to the leader of this project we still didn't buy into it.
They've been saying the same thing about how this fills a need for a long time, but other companies have also provided satellite data services for a long time.
You need a purchase case for a mobile phone or terminal. Doesn't compute unless maybe you're in the military.. or they have dropped prices from orbit.
The video shows web browsing with the data glove,
probably not the best use of it, but when the glove supposedly types keywords into the search
form only gibberish comes out. I can only assume
that this is an actual video of glove use and that
using it for keyboard input is impossible.. unless
there is an absolute spatial positioning device in
the glove. It just looks like it pans a mouse
horizontally and you can't actually type on a keyboard that is bigger than the glove.
The piano demonstration is also useless, since it
only shows the glove accurately hitting keys within the width of the glove. Now if they had a glove on each hand (amazing idea it is) and were actually playing a piano with sound coming out realistically I'd be impressed.
The 3d modelling demo which looks kind of neat,
unfortunately is hard to follow since the most interesting part (modelling the shapes of the body and head parts) is completely obscured by the opaque glove, which doesn't seem to be doing a lot of work. One wonders if the parts were not mostly pre-created. (Though the tail creation segment is interesting). I would be more interested in the glove being able to accurately direct a modeling or music playing session than in requiring full haptic feedback (which probably would be too expensive for this product I expect). That is probably going to be reserved for phantom-like systems which can handle one or two fingers of full force feedback I'd guess.
Finally The AXE is demoed. I know the guys who did it, and it is really cool software. But you don't finger a trumpet's keys to play the trumpet (and it looks more like a clarinet but anyway..) Their system uses mouse, joystick, keyboard, or any kind of MIDI input, they even made a gesture sensor which was apparently pretty cool. The idea with their system is that you cannot make a misstep because all kinds of agents make sure your input is constrained to something which matches the melody; it is the ultimate air guitar and so a silly way to try and demonstrate a glove, which in this case is just being used as a mouse.
Where's the beef? Well, looks like they spent a little bit of money on the video sequences. Not a ton, but some. I'd like to know for example how accurate the thing is at pointing at discreet locations in three space from a given point, or if there are any actual applications for which the glove would be satisfactory and superior to a mouse or joystick. Something which uses gestures like the open hand to scroll down a page, but for music creation, might be fun.
The first link in the summary gives a
page not found error.
<P>
If you happened to snap a picture of the
page could you please post somewhere.
I was thinking that if all the weapons plutonium were gathered it would be appropriate to create a clock set back to a minute after twelve o'clock to symbolize the beginning of a new era of hope.
Maybe it would be nice to have something like that some day.
But I think considering the important comment about the Warning Function, this clock should be set to the time the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock when the center is built. The front cover of the current Bulletin says, "PLUTONIUM - WHO WANTS IT ?" Consider the symbol used for dangerous biological components, it is a much scarier looking version of the trefoil used for atomic energy. I would put the two hands of the doomsday clock, with a great brilliantly glowing crystal at the twelve o'clock digits mark above, at the entrance to this facility. From far away one would see only this brilliant light suspended in the air, and on approach one would see the dark clock hands, supported from a point on the ground that would be the center of the clock. One hand, the hour hand, rises vertically from that point and supports this crystal beacon. Branching off from the main clock hand pillar is the minute hand, set perhaps to nine minutes to midnight as the current clock reads.
Warning? Perhaps the light would warn off a plane coming in for a crash landing.. but more importantly, warn future generations about how close we came, why we sequestered plutonium, about the seduction of energy, and the hidden threat that anybody with Plutonium power can go nuclear in a short amount of time. Like Japan, which is a classic example of irresponsible leadership and a committment to the plutonium breeding cycle.
Perhaps heads of state could be required to visit this vault and shrine before taking their oaths of national security so that they personally understand the responsibility they have for forging and maintaining peace. Someone who "wants" Plutonium should have to walk through that door first.
I am not anti-energy. I am anti-horror. If we could link this sort of thing to the net and hyper-equipped locations around the world it would be nice. But we need a commanding icon which will send a message to everyone who sees it in person or in facsimile. Like the Doomsday Clock, or the rays of the nuclear half-life ticking away the centuries, the millenia.
I'm thinking this might be a good submission.
ball of wax. RedHat Japanese comes with a bunch
of liscensed software which you pay for in the
purchase price, including an IME by Omron. You
also get a lot of things in Japanese plus fonts,
etc. It is pretty involved, there is a liscense
server, kanji databases, fonts, AI grammar engines, links to emacs, Japanese docs, partial
localization into Japanese of interfaces for
programs like Gimp, etc.
I'm running Suse (English) on this machine, but a box of RedHat Linux 6.2J on my desk says on it "Available only in Japanese", and it says it includes Just System's ATOK12. This is the best kanji front end processor around, so you want it. It also comes
with HancomWord which is a word processor that can handle chinese, japanese, hangul (korean), and english.
A free but apparently less powerful version is
available of the Omron IME (Wnn6) as well.
I think some of these are probably conflicting so you can't run all at once, but I just used this on a machine I bought in Japan which had it preinstalled. It is neat because you can type
kanji into emacs and even vi. You need a properly equipped terminal program for that. I can type hiragana into emacs and display kanji even now in plain vanilla emacs as installed with SuSE (a couple of versions ago). But you may run into differences between emacs and XEmacs setup, available fonts, and so on.
Laser5 Linux has a lot of Japanese centric things
in its distro as well.
There is also something called PJE (which I have had a huge amount of trouble installing in the past) which supposedly is a full Japanese localized suite of tools and support files. It probably would install automatically on a RedHat kind of box but would be far inferior to what you get with RedHat Linux Japanese. Check out www.rehat.com/jp/ and maybe you can get a manifest and build and environment of your own out of the free components, based on noncommercial Wnn.(v4 I believe). But it is probably worth trying to get the ATOK12 package since it will not let you make as many errors in kanji. For example the kanji engine SuSE has hooked up to emacs in suse 6.1 is completely clueless and so you get a ton of characters to sift through all the time.
Huh, seems it opened May 28.
Is this going to be a massive translation?
It's not like there aren't any places for techies to talk online..
Saw Marvin not too long ago after a talk he gave, he is actually quite exciting to talk to.
Also I don't know if he had a direct hand in it but I got email from NASA JPL that AI will be used in a fleet of autonomous spaceprobes.
Regarding comments about webservers on YOPY,
If the YOPY stays on all the time, your batteries will run down fast. Until the YOPY gets one of those miniature gas turbine jobbies. Like there is a webserver for the palm but nobody is using it apparently.
But aside from that, why wirelessly? cool, but maybe easier with wires? Would be useful for serving that video up to an online server that wouldn't mind getting slashdotted, on a dedicated line that would be nice. USB would be nice too if not available.
Re previous comment on infrared at conference table, if Palm is anything to go by you will only have one person connecting at a time, so wireless might be better there.
Would like to hear more about stats as far as how many connections per second and how fast a frame rate could theoretically be pushed through a YOPY. Seems with Linux there would be a lot better spec than the Palm software-wise. The problem if any is going to be with cheap tiny hardware I think.
One note about serial interface - I've spent some time hacking a Palm (Clie) connection through hotsync cradle to different platforms. It seems a serial cable has a different pin layout which makes it tricky.. ordinary serial cradle is cua0 on my box while a serial cable worked on stty. Windows 2000 RAS seemed not to want to let the Palm out of its vicinity while pppd with proxyarp worked great to give the palm its own ip address (oooh scary on a YOPY maybe).
You can telnet to your box from the YOPY shell probably, but I don't understand why you have to use a serial cable to see it, shouldn't you be able to have a shell in X? Finally MochaPPP is a windows ppp server that might work with the YOPY, but it is tough to debug and is only meant for win95/98. It does not seem to work (for me anyway) on NT, and it took ages to discover that it did not work on a Sony Vaio. The Vaio has wierd conflicts. Maybe possible for a Vaio guru, nuff said. If anyone has an idea about doing an ip bridge so you can surf from YOPY (or Palm) through Windows2000 to the net, please post.
I should think P2P would take on a new meaning with a wireless enabled YOPY. You might even conceivable make a string of pppd connections so a whole mess of them could be online through proxyarp ip bridges! Whoooeeee! (Oh so that's what Bluetooth was made for..) Hey, hook your car engine or washing machine up to the net by wireless from net to YOPY and serial cable connection from YOPY to appliance! Yikes! Hmmmm.
Well my Dad had a Mercedes-Benz 300D (D for Diesel) maybe 15 years ago or so, in New Jersey.
It was great, except for one huge problem. Diesel turns to jelly in the winter! Even plugging the thing in overnight didn't always work. You need a garage for the car, and maybe want to pour boiling water over the block.
Same problem with new diesel tech? Sorry didn't read the article...
What a waste to spend resources on opening an S/390 considering what they could be used for.
What about taking 10% of that BILLION and earmarking it to support open source developers??
Where were they when Eazel tanked? What about the folks at SourceXchange? Are they doing anything more than thinking about marketing, pr facetime, and beating their own products to death?
I'd much rather see some of that money go to supporting hookup of an IBM microdrive to the Agenda, or a zillion other things, than this.
IBM should earmark 0.05% of their budget (that's still half a million bucks right?) to - guess what - pay great open source based developers and designers to build a site that would try to get feedback from the Linux community, including developers, users, and purchasers, as to what sort of things we'd like to see. It might even save them some marketing money. IBM's done some good things but this is not the top priority if they are serious about spending that money on open source.
If they believe Linux gives them value for the money, then they ought to be willing to put money down to get high quality engineering and design talent to work on projects which IBM could share with the open source community and continue to improve Linux.
One really cool thing they could do is endow a chair (or 10 or 20) like the year off from school which Perl mage Damian Conway received from the community.
Sounds like a neat idea if it works but..
Closed source network hardware + Promiscuity between security layers = Lower security
So this is the latest "unbreakable" huh? I'm sure nobody at the NSA, CIA, or KGB wants to know what's in those networks too. Cute.
How do you know this isn't just opening a big fat vpn tunnel right into your company so other people can look at your network? Cuts both ways.
Oh, check out www.invicta.com -- Looks like they haven't bothered to buy up their domain for a whole year. That's confidence I suppose.. Guess there's no site to have taken down.
Another story from a year ago here.
I haven't seen anything except untechnical fluff articles and only a couple over a year. The idea of a Russian guy calling his system Latin for "Unconquered" isn't slick, it's dumb. You just need someone at their physical location, something he should know about. What idiot will trust him to install the thing?
Would be nice to get rid of my heavy-feeling
widgets and gain a feeling of space with a sketchy
desktop! Maybe be not so far fetched if using Berlin or the like??
Might be nice to show projected on the wall, or on an easel.. no, the pun's not funny but it might look quite nice all the same.
An acquaintance of mine some years ago in Japan showed me a printout from a system he made to
produce seemingly hand-drawn mechanical drawings
based automatically in postscript. I remember
seeing a printout from the system in which a
bicycle wheel was done in crosshatching and shadowed.
I am intrigued/scadalized/cooled out by the article and (therefore) don't have the background to dispute it.
..or is this based on probability of some kind of tunneling right under the potential energy hill from start point to endpoint in a finite amount of time? (And is there such a "hill" in quantum computing, forgot to ask that too).
But what about:
-energy required to set up initial values so that the answer is all zeroes
-energy required for cooling or otherwise insulating/maintaining computer during the time it will be computing and simultaneously off
-who's going to police those qubits and tell them not to cannabilize energy from that environment (and presumably return it.. oops don't want to go there)
-would you need a reservoir of energy attached to the thing so that it would be theoretically possible for the system to go up the energy hump if calculation (in other universe required it)?
-do you ever even turn a quantum computer on anyway? seems a delicate enough computer could get by without humans intentionally putting power to it
-(back to the question of energy required to set up the computer): is there not a law which requires energy to create or change information, or is this a silly misconception. If so, are they not just taking care of energy expenditures before getting to the calculation stage, leaving a lot of the actual energy goings on in the unfathomable, unaccountable finite time span of computation? Or is there something else going on?
** It seems there is something more interesting going on, but there is neither mathematical meat for the professional nor a real explanation for the layman. The Royal Society Proceedings are too briefly abstracted to get anywhere. Could someone paraphrase or post the text of those proceedings or is this going to be an exercise in frustration?
In particular what exactly are the limits to the kind of probing you can accomplish which was mentioned in that abstract?
You might want to check out Muse, a synthetic environment which allows collaboration, video conferencing, and multidimensional data mining from a UFO deck. Used by oil researchers, nasa (the ISS) and boeing among others.
You're right, though it seemed to me some of the smoothness (and it was smooth) cam from lack of detail or desaturation. Kinda muddy.
But very cool that it is all satellite. Nice if it was all on a local disk..
So if you like this you should check out their site at Art+Com (see this page too).
There also used to be on the web (same people I think) a site which would take their imagery database and build a movie for you of a zoom down onto any point on earth (though I think it usually ended up being Germany).
Another quite impressive version of this I've seen was a demo for the Silicon Graphics Infinite Reality workstation / supercomputer. You could zoom from outerspace down to the Matterhorn but that's not all.. the 2-D image which is already gorgeous in ultra-high resolution (must have been 1920 pixels across) is then dissolved and rotated into an amazing texture-mapped, realistic 3-D mdoel of the mountain. I believe this was taken later and changed so you can keep on zooming through the matterhorn into a MIPS processor inside a Nintendo 64. Anyway it was cool because the resolution was about the same as your eye can handle or better, and more detail kept coming up to the surface. Also the images had been processed and had beautiful color and contrast.
Lastly, there is also Tom Van Sant's own project, GeoSphere. The cloudless earth he assembled painstakingly from Nasa imagery became the best selling photo in Japan and was the basis for his large globe models.
If you are still interested, check out the World Processor by Ingo Gunther. Beautiful globes used to describe the world to earthlings. Oh and another very nice artwork by another friend named Eto-san who used peltier devices to make a realistic temperature scale across a live satellite map in BeWare. Not visual zooming but another sensory dimension for sure. I guess everyone depends on NASA for the real goods!