The strap in question goes around your chest, under your shirt, while you exercise. Mine is about 3 years old, gets worn for 2-3 running workouts per week, and gets washed about as often as my gym bag (i.e., hardly ever). Would YOU want to share one with 6 gym periods' worth of middle schoolers?
It's useful because you can glance at it as you run, rather than stopping and staring at your wrist for 30 seconds.
Also, it's a $100 wristwatch, not an EKG. I don't think it's going to detect much of anything, much less send wireless telemetry to the nefarious databases of the Mayo Clinic, Blue Cross, and the Obamarama Death Panel.
What kind of processing power do you need to analyze six million frames per second in real time? (Honest question, I don't know, but I'd imagine it's just as ridiculous as the storage requirement raised by GP.)
I suppose you could analyze every nth frame, but if you're looking for events that occur on the microsecond scale, you run the risk of missing it entirely.
That could have worked a couple of years ago, when pirates were simply preying on easy targets at choke points. Now they're ranging quite far afield -- numerous incidents have taken place off the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania, and even in the Seychelles. You'd have to have a lot of Marines stationed in a lot of ports to cover everyone.
Granted, I would take a ship through that area without a contingent of Blackwater mercenaries on my payroll, but a technological solution would also help safeguard ships in other pirate-prone areas. It's not just a Somalian problem; ships also get hijacked in areas like the Strait of Malacca, Nigeria, and Brazil.
Yep, no longer do you have to be "very wealthy" to afford a Tesla automobile. They're charitably reaching out to the under-served "rather wealthy" with their $50,000 Model S. Why, that's only about 5 years' rent for me -- a perfect starter car for the less-fortunate members of your country club.
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
It becomes the credit-card co's or ISP's problem, not yours. It's like any other $ transaction.
It's like any other transaction, including the ability to use stolen credit card and banking information. And how do they get that? From:
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
Maybe they would patch it if it cost them $.
No, they won't. When it comes to security, most people just don't get it. Really, it's mind-boggling, but a shocking amount of people think updates, non-admin users, virus scanners, etc. are "annoying" and won't use them, no matter how explicitly you explain the consequences.
The fact that a lot of Windows software is written by brain-damaged monkeys doesn't help, either. Wasn't that long ago that a lot of end-user software would croak and die if you ran it as a non-privileged user.
Well, IE the engine would be done playing catchup.
Plenty of IE users, on the other hand, are still banging around with IE 6. They weren't playing catch-up to begin with, because they're not even in the game.
Is speed really the issue here? My LAPTOP was a bargain-barrel purchase 3 years ago and it has no problem running OpenOffice + FireFox + other standard software on either Ubuntu or XP.
What I care about is, "Which one is least likely to crash and make me lose my work?" That's always been my big complaint with the Windows versions of free software (GIMP comes to mind), not speed.
No joke. $10 for airborne wifi doesn't sound so bad, until you think...
$10 for your 1-hour flight to Atlanta/Houston/wherever
$10+ for your 2-hour layover (most airports have wifi at $5+/hour these days)
$10 for your 2-hour flight to wherever
That's $30+ for your day's wifi. My monthly Internet bill isn't that much. I think I'll just bring a book...
Online petitions work on companies like Facebook because pleasing as many random people as possible is their business model. A Web 2.0 company's product is its users. Nobody pays for Facebook as an end user -- the people paying for Facebook are paying for your ad views, marketing data, etc.
IBM and Sun shareholders, on the other hand, couldn't give less of a hoot about your feelings. Companies buy software based on a number of factors, but these factors always tie back to the bottom line. Are you going to stop visiting your favorite website because it would be using "IBM Glassfish" instead of "Sun Glassfish"?
He basically used a method reminiscent of a technique used by amateur astronomers to take pictures of planets and asteroids: take a lot of frames using a cheap webcam and stack them together, weeding out the bad ones as you go.
The principle behind it is pretty simple. When it comes to seeing nearby planets (Pluto and friends are obviously exceptions), telescopes are limited less by magnification and more by atmospheric distortion. What's not clear from the article is if this is a single frame grab (which is pretty cool but not an incredible technical feat) or if he managed to track it precisely enough to stack a few frames.
It's not just about sticker price, and "FOSS beyond Linux servers" is pretty broad.
I'm a tech writer/UI designer/sometimes web guy at a small (~75 employees) ISV. Our company uses, and even prefers, FOSS when it suits us. Our two head IT guys are Linux nerds like me, which helps.
Basically, the F/OSS software we use falls into one of several categories (this only includes the software I use in my roles, and that I encountered during a stint in QA).
FOSS software that sees regular use.
Linux: It powers our web and mail servers. Our QA guys use Linux + VMWare to test our (Windows-based) server software. I've been offered a Linux workstation for a web-based project I'm working on, but XP+IIS may be the only solution.*
Audacity: We use this to record voice tracks for Captivate demos.
Notepad++: A few of us have this for editing raw HTML/CSS/XML/etc.
OpenOffice: Don't get excited, Office 2003 is still our bread and butter. This lives on my secondary workstation for simple one-off tasks.
OSS software that was tried but failed
GIMP: This was before I started at the company, and at the time it couldn't equal Paint Shop Pro (which is what we use now).
Scribus: We tried this before caving and purchasing FrameMaker 8. Scribus simply can't match the features or (more importantly) training resources of FrameMaker.
We also use Lotus Notes, which is based on Eclipse.
* I have 2 XP workstations so that I can run every product I might need to document, some of which must be run simultaneously on separate machines. Neither machine is up to spec for Xen or VMWare.
You'd be surprised. It's easy enough for someone with just a bit of knowledge to read an article that raves about custom firmware, download said firmware, and flash the router. Plus, DD-WRT is configured rather poorly by default (doesn't everyone want telnet?) and is vulnerable to a rather elementary XSS exploit.
The XSS exploit can be prevented by logging out of the router when you're done, but here's the catch -- DD-WRT provides no logout button/link/etc. I recall someone suggesting it on the mailing list, and it earned them a good-ol' fanboy flaming. The solution, of course, is to close your browser -- but again, there are plenty of users out there who don't know that.
Wasn't some spammer skewered by a certain slashdotter for posting some BS about "being one with the markets"? It's likely that he needed a way to get his get-rich-quick secrets onto slashdot, while still appearing to hate spam.
My point is, don't automatically jump to conclusions on this guy. Maybe he is a dunderhead, but a traitor? That's not quite our place to say.
While I sometimes find the positions of the ACLU to be a bit extreme, I agree with them 102% on issues such as this. My parents used to use
Cyber Patrol (on "maximum protection", of course... we wouldn't want the fragile little darlings to see anything provocative, would we?). The result? It really didn't shield me from the big bad corrupting influences (i.e. porn, hate groups), which I wasn't interested in anyway.
It did cause some problems with my world history report on the Celts, however ("Pagan religions? Not on my watch!"). And humor sites like The Onion? Forget it.
I'm sure the discovery of what constitutes (possibly) up to 90% of the known universe is totally inconsequential in itself, right?
OK, though I'm no expert in quantum mechanics, I'm sure there could be a way to harness these things for power (unless the "Weakly Interacting" part precludes it), though maybe not with current technology. Could a disturbance in this matter be made in to a sensor of some sort to detect movement or disturbances in magnetic fields? Who knows?
What exactly is a coronal mass ejection composed of? I'm aware that it's an ejection of plasma from the surface of the Sun (or some other star), but what is it? Hydrogen? Helium? Both? Neither?
I think the question isn't "could we?", but "should we?". Coolness (pun intended) factor aside, this sounds like a pretty bad idea to me. This wasn't an animal that was killed off by greedy industries polluting its habitat, or by villainous poachers killing it for it's gallbladder, etc., but an animal that died out naturally. I think we should leave it that way.
I'd like to see you say that when you've got a MIRV up your arse.
With the Cold War over and Russia in economic turmoil, there is a lot of Russian (and to a lesser extent, American) military surplus. Quite a bit of it is percolating down to pissy third-world countries with a two-bit despot just looking for trouble (i.e. North Korea, Iraq). Better safe than sorry, I say.
I personally see Sun's release (or impending release) of the SO source code as a Good Thing. They've released the code, and it's free, both of which would alone be leaps and bounds ahead of most companies.
As for the license, companies need some sort of control over their product. Otherwise it is not really their product anymore, and revenues might suffer. As a company, the purpose of their existence is to make $$$$$ off of their products, not to serve the people's every whim.
The real question those unhappy with the non-OS license is, "How can we create an open-source alternative that will knock the sh*t out of commercial office suites?"
I found the bit about: You acknowledge that the Software is not designed or intended for use in on-line control of aircraft, air traffic, aircraft navigation or aircraft communications... quite amusing;)
We need to tell N74C that he's straying from the pattern. Should I use Star Office or Lotus to do that?
Slashdot is not full of Linux bigots. Most of us (AFAIK) are extremely contented Linux users that use it because we (*gasp*) like it. Slashdot has a very few but extremely noisy Linux bigots.
Only you would be dumb enough to actually stick to strict syntax w/ a/. sig. I know a single char is an int (0x4d is the ASCII value for "M", which you apparently didn't know). I KNOW this won't really work. But you get the general idea. This is where that "imagination" (<- look! a string! this _would_ be a pointer) thing I spoke of comes into play. Unfortunately, spending too much time coding has killed yours.
Geez. A man is (apparently) dead, and we're arguing over which one of us is stupider. Get a life.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know who else tried to bring back aurochs?
That's right, Hitler!
The strap in question goes around your chest, under your shirt, while you exercise. Mine is about 3 years old, gets worn for 2-3 running workouts per week, and gets washed about as often as my gym bag (i.e., hardly ever). Would YOU want to share one with 6 gym periods' worth of middle schoolers?
It's useful because you can glance at it as you run, rather than stopping and staring at your wrist for 30 seconds.
Also, it's a $100 wristwatch, not an EKG. I don't think it's going to detect much of anything, much less send wireless telemetry to the nefarious databases of the Mayo Clinic, Blue Cross, and the Obamarama Death Panel.
What kind of processing power do you need to analyze six million frames per second in real time? (Honest question, I don't know, but I'd imagine it's just as ridiculous as the storage requirement raised by GP.)
I suppose you could analyze every nth frame, but if you're looking for events that occur on the microsecond scale, you run the risk of missing it entirely.
That could have worked a couple of years ago, when pirates were simply preying on easy targets at choke points. Now they're ranging quite far afield -- numerous incidents have taken place off the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania, and even in the Seychelles. You'd have to have a lot of Marines stationed in a lot of ports to cover everyone.
Granted, I would take a ship through that area without a contingent of Blackwater mercenaries on my payroll, but a technological solution would also help safeguard ships in other pirate-prone areas. It's not just a Somalian problem; ships also get hijacked in areas like the Strait of Malacca, Nigeria, and Brazil.
Yes, for the 33rd year running, the Antarctic universities were unfairly excluded from this competition.
Yep, no longer do you have to be "very wealthy" to afford a Tesla automobile. They're charitably reaching out to the under-served "rather wealthy" with their $50,000 Model S. Why, that's only about 5 years' rent for me -- a perfect starter car for the less-fortunate members of your country club.
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
It becomes the credit-card co's or ISP's problem, not yours. It's like any other $ transaction.
It's like any other transaction, including the ability to use stolen credit card and banking information. And how do they get that? From:
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
Maybe they would patch it if it cost them $.
No, they won't. When it comes to security, most people just don't get it. Really, it's mind-boggling, but a shocking amount of people think updates, non-admin users, virus scanners, etc. are "annoying" and won't use them, no matter how explicitly you explain the consequences.
The fact that a lot of Windows software is written by brain-damaged monkeys doesn't help, either. Wasn't that long ago that a lot of end-user software would croak and die if you ran it as a non-privileged user.
Well, IE the engine would be done playing catchup.
Plenty of IE users, on the other hand, are still banging around with IE 6. They weren't playing catch-up to begin with, because they're not even in the game.
Is speed really the issue here? My LAPTOP was a bargain-barrel purchase 3 years ago and it has no problem running OpenOffice + FireFox + other standard software on either Ubuntu or XP.
What I care about is, "Which one is least likely to crash and make me lose my work?" That's always been my big complaint with the Windows versions of free software (GIMP comes to mind), not speed.
No joke. $10 for airborne wifi doesn't sound so bad, until you think...
$10 for your 1-hour flight to Atlanta/Houston/wherever
$10+ for your 2-hour layover (most airports have wifi at $5+/hour these days)
$10 for your 2-hour flight to wherever
That's $30+ for your day's wifi. My monthly Internet bill isn't that much. I think I'll just bring a book...
Online petitions work on companies like Facebook because pleasing as many random people as possible is their business model. A Web 2.0 company's product is its users. Nobody pays for Facebook as an end user -- the people paying for Facebook are paying for your ad views, marketing data, etc.
IBM and Sun shareholders, on the other hand, couldn't give less of a hoot about your feelings. Companies buy software based on a number of factors, but these factors always tie back to the bottom line. Are you going to stop visiting your favorite website because it would be using "IBM Glassfish" instead of "Sun Glassfish"?
He basically used a method reminiscent of a technique used by amateur astronomers to take pictures of planets and asteroids: take a lot of frames using a cheap webcam and stack them together, weeding out the bad ones as you go.
The principle behind it is pretty simple. When it comes to seeing nearby planets (Pluto and friends are obviously exceptions), telescopes are limited less by magnification and more by atmospheric distortion. What's not clear from the article is if this is a single frame grab (which is pretty cool but not an incredible technical feat) or if he managed to track it precisely enough to stack a few frames.
It's not just about sticker price, and "FOSS beyond Linux servers" is pretty broad.
I'm a tech writer/UI designer/sometimes web guy at a small (~75 employees) ISV. Our company uses, and even prefers, FOSS when it suits us. Our two head IT guys are Linux nerds like me, which helps.
Basically, the F/OSS software we use falls into one of several categories (this only includes the software I use in my roles, and that I encountered during a stint in QA).
We also use Lotus Notes, which is based on Eclipse.
* I have 2 XP workstations so that I can run every product I might need to document, some of which must be run simultaneously on separate machines. Neither machine is up to spec for Xen or VMWare.
You'd be surprised. It's easy enough for someone with just a bit of knowledge to read an article that raves about custom firmware, download said firmware, and flash the router. Plus, DD-WRT is configured rather poorly by default (doesn't everyone want telnet?) and is vulnerable to a rather elementary XSS exploit.
The XSS exploit can be prevented by logging out of the router when you're done, but here's the catch -- DD-WRT provides no logout button/link/etc. I recall someone suggesting it on the mailing list, and it earned them a good-ol' fanboy flaming. The solution, of course, is to close your browser -- but again, there are plenty of users out there who don't know that.
Wasn't some spammer skewered by a certain slashdotter for posting some BS about "being one with the markets"? It's likely that he needed a way to get his get-rich-quick secrets onto slashdot, while still appearing to hate spam.
My point is, don't automatically jump to conclusions on this guy. Maybe he is a dunderhead, but a traitor? That's not quite our place to say.
Cyber Patrol (on "maximum protection", of course... we wouldn't want the fragile little darlings to see anything provocative, would we?). The result? It really didn't shield me from the big bad corrupting influences (i.e. porn, hate groups), which I wasn't interested in anyway.
It did cause some problems with my world history report on the Celts, however ("Pagan religions? Not on my watch!"). And humor sites like The Onion? Forget it.
I'm sure the discovery of what constitutes (possibly) up to 90% of the known universe is totally inconsequential in itself, right?
OK, though I'm no expert in quantum mechanics, I'm sure there could be a way to harness these things for power (unless the "Weakly Interacting" part precludes it), though maybe not with current technology. Could a disturbance in this matter be made in to a sensor of some sort to detect movement or disturbances in magnetic fields? Who knows?
What exactly is a coronal mass ejection composed of? I'm aware that it's an ejection of plasma from the surface of the Sun (or some other star), but what is it? Hydrogen? Helium? Both? Neither?
I think the question isn't "could we?", but "should we?". Coolness (pun intended) factor aside, this sounds like a pretty bad idea to me. This wasn't an animal that was killed off by greedy industries polluting its habitat, or by villainous poachers killing it for it's gallbladder, etc., but an animal that died out naturally. I think we should leave it that way.
It might be a tough choice, in the case of a nuke. Do you lose a city, or spread clicking-hot missle debris across an entire state?
I'd like to see you say that when you've got a MIRV up your arse.
With the Cold War over and Russia in economic turmoil, there is a lot of Russian (and to a lesser extent, American) military surplus. Quite a bit of it is percolating down to pissy third-world countries with a two-bit despot just looking for trouble (i.e. North Korea, Iraq). Better safe than sorry, I say.
Yay. /. ate my previous 2 attempts to post this.
I personally see Sun's release (or impending release) of the SO source code as a Good Thing. They've released the code, and it's free, both of which would alone be leaps and bounds ahead of most companies.
As for the license, companies need some sort of control over their product. Otherwise it is not really their product anymore, and revenues might suffer. As a company, the purpose of their existence is to make $$$$$ off of their products, not to serve the people's every whim.
The real question those unhappy with the non-OS license is, "How can we create an open-source alternative that will knock the sh*t out of commercial office suites?"
I found the bit about: ;)
You acknowledge that the Software is not designed or intended for use in on-line control of aircraft, air traffic, aircraft navigation or aircraft communications...
quite amusing
We need to tell N74C that he's straying from the pattern. Should I use Star Office or Lotus to do that?
Slashdot is not full of Linux bigots. Most of us (AFAIK) are extremely contented Linux users that use it because we (*gasp*) like it. Slashdot has a very few but extremely noisy Linux bigots.
Only you would be dumb enough to actually stick to strict syntax w/ a /. sig. I know a single char is an int (0x4d is the ASCII value for "M", which you apparently didn't know). I KNOW this won't really work. But you get the general idea. This is where that "imagination" (<- look! a string! this _would_ be a pointer) thing I spoke of comes into play. Unfortunately, spending too much time coding has killed yours.
Geez. A man is (apparently) dead, and we're arguing over which one of us is stupider. Get a life.