They help indirectly: In cases of a viral infection, antibiotics are prescribed to wipe out bacteria that keep the immune system tied up and busy. While those bacteria were not strong enough to make you sick, antibiotics are a defense on that front, allowing your immune system to focus on viruses.
Of course, antibiotics also kill useful bacteria (e.g. those that help you to digest milk and salad), so antibiotics are not really a good idea against a common cold.
In Japan, there is a similar project studying whether eye tracking can be used to see how well people follow a virtual reality presentation. The idea is that if your gaze wanders off, then you lost track, and the presentation backtracks a bit to gain your attention again.
The tool needed extensive calibration and only works reliably for people who do not wear glasses. So I think the technology is still a bit away from everyday commercial use.
Even when not wearing glasses, the tool is not very precise. The demo had a male and female speaker. When I tried it, the male presenter complained that I was distracted by looking at the window next to the girl. Of course I was not distracted by the view of the landscape, but by the girl;-)
I work at a research institute in Japan, where there are quite a few Ph.D. students that got a bit bored in industry and came back to science. Usually, they keep their industry job and spend 50 - 60 % of their time in research. Many Japanese companies support this.
As a foreigner, you could therefore also get a Ph.D. position in Japan, but you either have to have a lab sponsor you, get a scholarship, or work in a Japanese company that allows you to transfer to Japan.
For a scholarship, you need someone who has experience in writing grant proposals. Essentially you write a two-page summary that sounds as if the project could be done right now, you just need the money.
In order to have a lab sponsor you, you need contacts. If you know someone from a certain research lab, he can talk to someone there who knows the head of a group where you may fit in. Positions in Japan are often acquired through connections. It is not easy to convince someone with the right connections that you're qualified, but once you have a "champion", he or she will do everything possible to represent you.
If you have 16 years of work experience, you should contact a headhunter (job agency). They should not have difficulties finding interesting positions for you. Of course some companies only hire directly. However, for all the others, a good headhunter saves you the time of going through countless web sites, only to find job descriptions that are outdated (about positions that are no longer open, even though the web page does not say that). A headhunter won't necessarily find your dream job, but an application at a headhunter costs about as much time as a real application, and can cover dozens of companies at once. This should greatly improve your odds.
Certainly nobody will buy this castle for making a profit. Do the math: 40 million pounds have to be spent. People pay 2.40 per entry. Thus you need 16.7 million entries to cover the acquisition costs (assuming the 450,000 visitors a year are all adults, a bit optimistic). Using this figure, it takes 37 years to pay off the initial investment - ignoring costs for running the castle, such as ongoing repairs, staff, etc.
Still, it would be cool to have that castle and enjoy eternal night life...
Up to now, one could run as many copies of the OS in virtual machines as one wanted, hardware permitting. Now the limit has been increased from infinity to four, not unlike the chocolate rations in "1984". And the author of the summary does not realize that any more than Winston can avoid his fate...
"The rootkit is designed to not be detected, and that is the scary part."
You can often judge the quality of the articles linked to by/. by their summaries. Check the definition of root kit before writing such a summary. One would hope that at least story submitters are more competent than the average journalist - but then again, this is/.:-)
I think you may have converted units wrongly. 20 minutes per mile is an easy walking pace, on flat ground. Everybody who is not disabled or injured can do that, without any training. Of course without training you will not be able to walk for many hours at this pace, but it is not hard.
10 minutes per mile = less than 10 kilometers per hour. This is more than 6 minutes per kilometer. A reasonably fit person can hold this pace for half an hour when rested before. A regular runner can hold this pace for many hours.
I did not run regularly five years ago, and could still easily do 10 minutes per mile for two or three miles. In the meantime, I have been training regularly (six times a week). This allowed me to run a marathon (42.195 km) at an average speed of less than 8 minutes per mile. Even at that speed, I was still *far* behind the elite runners, who run at about five minutes per mile. Sending a person to space who cannot even run *two* miles (rather than 26) at a much slower pace sounds pathetic to me.
By overstating broadband availability and portraying anti-competitive policies as good for consumers, the FCC is trying to erect a façade of success. But if the president's goal of universal, affordable high-speed Internet access by 2007 is to be achieved, policymakers in Washington must change course.
Translation: By strengthening this façade, the FCC will portray its achievement as a success and continue to follow its current strategy.
I found it kind of odd that Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, is only visible after zooming in quite a lot. Instead it is shadowed by Dunfermline, an unimportant small town shown in huge script. Someone must have badly screwed up the name placement algorithm and/or the map data. What makes this blunder worse is that no one noticed even though it appears on the front page, and zooming in just a little does not even fix it yet.
There are all sorts of scientific applications where you need as much RAM as possible. One where the amount of RAM is almost the only limiting factor is model checking. It refers to a systematic exploration of an entire system. Even though a lot of techniques have been invented to reduce the complexity of the problem, the problem itself is exponentially complex in the size of a system. A 16-bit counter has 65536 states. Just imagine how many states a simple ALU or an entire CPU can have. This shown you that there is no limit to the amount of RAM one can use for this. All major players in the CPU industry use this technology, so I am sure AMD has some systems like that in their design labs... Model checking is also used in some software projects where the complexity of the system is "manageable", such as for device drivers or embedded systems.
Other scientific uses needing a lot of RAM are simulations. The level of detail simulations can manage is mostly limited by the amount of RAM (and of course also CPU speed). Again, the sky is the limit for how much RAM one could use if it was available... so you see it is not problem to fill 32 GB of RAM in a couple of seconds with such simulations.
I find it sad that we have come to the point where we have to alter the content of our pages (or comments, in this case) to combat spam.
From an engineering point of view, there is nothing less satisfying than adapting the entire content of the WWW to help one specific algorithm with a big, nasty problem that will not go away even if we have a remedy for that aspect.
Funny that "desparetely" and "disfunctional" went unnoticed compard to the glaringly misspelled "Barock":-) Maybe those two are already in the/. dictionary;-)
Today things are different. Today's stock is less inflated. Investors play with the de Luxe edition of Monopoly! Which means you can buy little fake wooden hotels, which are clearly worth more than plastic ones.
Never post your link on slashdot!
on
Photon Soup Update
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
P.S.: Never post your URL on slashdot! I got 900 hits per second! Ouch!
This is already done in practice to optimize individual *parts* of a car. Certain desired/required parameters are given (dimensions as far as prescribed by regulations, necessary stiffness to survive race distance etc.). Others are variable (detailed geometry of individual parts). However, 70 parameters are just enough to model a single part, such as the shape of the nose.
The insight of the design at large still has to come from an engineer. Genetic algorithms are then used to fine-tune that design. Applying the algorithm is still hard because it requires a lot of knowledge of the physics involved. Once you have this, you can be quite successful because everyone is craving to optimize a few percent.
You won't see anything: cryptographic protocols...
on
Rendering Shrek@Home?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
will deal with that. You may seen a generic screensaver, but I doubt that a company would risk leaking their movie. However, it is possible to perform certain calculations (such as addition and multiplication) in a way such that the clients in this scenario would work on encrypted values.
The calculations are done in encrypted values and returned as such. The host can then decrypt the result.
This sounds pretty amazing but consider addition as a starter: The host uses a one-time-pad for each number and XORs them. The client adds the encrypted numbers. When you add the numbers, the host only needs to XOR all the keys on the result and gets the true result! The client, though, knows NOTHING about the true values (the protocol is information theoretically secure), as the XOR turns them into "signal noise".
I imagine, though, that the effort of implementing this probably outweighs the benefits for a project like rendering a movie. But for truly mission-critical data, it may be worth it...
This already exists in several countries in Europe. One or two cars in an entire long-distance train is usually marked as a quiet car. The only thing that is needed to enforce silence is a sticker saying that cell phones, radios, and any other noise is not allowed. People usually follow these rules - so there is no need for a jammer!
Keep in mind that whatever sport you practice, try to do so only every other day. In the days in between, do something different (e.g. swimming, biking, roller blading) in order to recover from the strain put on your muscles and tendons. Different sports will use different parts of your muscles and enhance your ability in other disciplines. Also, have at least one rest day per week! Even pushing just once beyond this will have you tired and lacking energy, a signal that your body needs to run its "weekly cron jobs":-)
My knee was jerking furiously until I read your excellent post. I can rest easy now knowing that there's two sides to this story and we have another sensationalized/. article.
Keep in mind that this is just a casy study, where a prototype is built. The goal is to check whether such a technology is feasible, and robust enough to be used in a battlefield.
I find $2.25 million to be quite a reasonable amount for this, even if the result turns out to be that such a robot cannot be built in the next ten years, because stronger materials, more powerful actuators, longer-lasting batteries etc. are needed.
High-end CD players and car CD players likely will not be able to handle it. Car CD players use a shock buffer which requires a true "random access" for reading ahead fast. The "encryption" usually consists of faulty bits on the CD, which results in read errors. Car CD players and high-end players try to correct for this, which does not work because there is no "true" faulty bit (which may be readable in some of the passes), but the CD is intentionally made as a faulty product!
The best thing you can do is to return the CD unopened. This way, the recall figures in the sales will go up, and even 60-year-old executives with business plans from the fifties will learn.
The virus needs user interaction to propagate. Hence it is an e-mail virus. Only programs that propagate automatically are worms. One cannot necessarily expect the Washington Post to get such technicalities right. However, it would be nice if at least/. used proper terminology.
Then again, if it did, it wouldn't be the/. we known anymore, would it...
Slashdot Mirror
They help indirectly: In cases of a viral infection, antibiotics are prescribed to wipe out bacteria that keep the immune system tied up and busy. While those bacteria were not strong enough to make you sick, antibiotics are a defense on that front, allowing your immune system to focus on viruses.
Of course, antibiotics also kill useful bacteria (e.g. those that help you to digest milk and salad), so antibiotics are not really a good idea against a common cold.
In Japan, there is a similar project studying whether eye tracking can be used to see how well people follow a virtual reality presentation. The idea is that if your gaze wanders off, then you lost track, and the presentation backtracks a bit to gain your attention again.
;-)
The tool needed extensive calibration and only works reliably for people who do not wear glasses. So I think the technology is still a bit away from everyday commercial use.
Even when not wearing glasses, the tool is not very precise. The demo had a male and female speaker. When I tried it, the male presenter complained that I was distracted by looking at the window next to the girl. Of course I was not distracted by the view of the landscape, but by the girl
I work at a research institute in Japan, where there are quite a few Ph.D. students that got a bit bored in industry and came back to science. Usually, they keep their industry job and spend 50 - 60 % of their time in research. Many Japanese companies support this.
As a foreigner, you could therefore also get a Ph.D. position in Japan, but you either have to have a lab sponsor you, get a scholarship, or work in a Japanese company that allows you to transfer to Japan.
For a scholarship, you need someone who has experience in writing grant proposals. Essentially you write a two-page summary that sounds as if the project could be done right now, you just need the money.
In order to have a lab sponsor you, you need contacts. If you know someone from a certain research lab, he can talk to someone there who knows the head of a group where you may fit in. Positions in Japan are often acquired through connections. It is not easy to convince someone with the right connections that you're qualified, but once you have a "champion", he or she will do everything possible to represent you.
If you have 16 years of work experience, you should contact a headhunter (job agency). They should not have difficulties finding interesting positions for you. Of course some companies only hire directly. However, for all the others, a good headhunter saves you the time of going through countless web sites, only to find job descriptions that are outdated (about positions that are no longer open, even though the web page does not say that). A headhunter won't necessarily find your dream job, but an application at a headhunter costs about as much time as a real application, and can cover dozens of companies at once. This should greatly improve your odds.
Certainly nobody will buy this castle for making a profit. Do the math: 40 million pounds have to be spent. People pay 2.40 per entry. Thus you need 16.7 million entries to cover the acquisition costs (assuming the 450,000 visitors a year are all adults, a bit optimistic). Using this figure, it takes 37 years to pay off the initial investment - ignoring costs for running the castle, such as ongoing repairs, staff, etc.
Still, it would be cool to have that castle and enjoy eternal night life...
Up to now, one could run as many copies of the OS in virtual machines as one wanted, hardware permitting. Now the limit has been increased from infinity to four, not unlike the chocolate rations in "1984". And the author of the summary does not realize that any more than Winston can avoid his fate...
"The rootkit is designed to not be detected, and that is the scary part."
/. by their summaries. Check the definition of root kit before writing such a summary. One would hope that at least story submitters are more competent than the average journalist - but then again, this is /. :-)
You can often judge the quality of the articles linked to by
I think you may have converted units wrongly. 20 minutes per mile is an easy walking pace, on flat ground. Everybody who is not disabled or injured can do that, without any training. Of course without training you will not be able to walk for many hours at this pace, but it is not hard.
10 minutes per mile = less than 10 kilometers per hour. This is more than 6 minutes per kilometer. A reasonably fit person can hold this pace for half an hour when rested before. A regular runner can hold this pace for many hours.
I did not run regularly five years ago, and could still easily do 10 minutes per mile for two or three miles. In the meantime, I have been training regularly (six times a week). This allowed me to run a marathon (42.195 km) at an average speed of less than 8 minutes per mile. Even at that speed, I was still *far* behind the elite runners, who run at about five minutes per mile. Sending a person to space who cannot even run *two* miles (rather than 26) at a much slower pace sounds pathetic to me.
I found it kind of odd that Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, is only visible after zooming in quite a lot. Instead it is shadowed by Dunfermline, an unimportant small town shown in huge script. Someone must have badly screwed up the name placement algorithm and/or the map data. What makes this blunder worse is that no one noticed even though it appears on the front page, and zooming in just a little does not even fix it yet.
There are all sorts of scientific applications where you need as much RAM as possible. One where the amount of RAM is almost the only limiting factor is model checking. It refers to a systematic exploration of an entire system. Even though a lot of techniques have been invented to reduce the complexity of the problem, the problem itself is exponentially complex in the size of a system. A 16-bit counter has 65536 states. Just imagine how many states a simple ALU or an entire CPU can have. This shown you that there is no limit to the amount of RAM one can use for this.
All major players in the CPU industry use this technology, so I am sure AMD has some systems like that in their design labs...
Model checking is also used in some software projects where the complexity of the system is "manageable", such as for device drivers or embedded systems.
Other scientific uses needing a lot of RAM are simulations. The level of detail simulations can manage is mostly limited by the amount of RAM (and of course also CPU speed). Again, the sky is the limit for how much RAM one could use if it was available... so you see it is not problem to fill 32 GB of RAM in a couple of seconds with such simulations.
I find it sad that we have come to the point where we have to alter the content of our pages (or comments, in this case) to combat spam.
From an engineering point of view, there is nothing less satisfying than adapting the entire content of the WWW to help one specific algorithm with a big, nasty problem that will not go away even if we have a remedy for that aspect.
Funny that "desparetely" and "disfunctional" went unnoticed compard to the glaringly misspelled "Barock" :-) Maybe those two are already in the /. dictionary ;-)
Today things are different. Today's stock is less inflated. Investors play with the de Luxe edition of Monopoly! Which means you can buy little fake wooden hotels, which are clearly worth more than plastic ones.
P.S.: Never post your URL on slashdot! I got 900 hits per second! Ouch!
This is already done in practice to optimize individual *parts* of a car. Certain desired/required parameters are given (dimensions as far as prescribed by regulations, necessary stiffness to survive race distance etc.). Others are variable (detailed geometry of individual parts). However, 70 parameters are just enough to model a single part, such as the shape of the nose.
The insight of the design at large still has to come from an engineer. Genetic algorithms are then used to fine-tune that design. Applying the algorithm is still hard because it requires a lot of knowledge of the physics involved. Once you have this, you can be quite successful because everyone is craving to optimize a few percent.
will deal with that. You may seen a generic screensaver, but I doubt that a company would risk leaking their movie. However, it is possible to perform certain calculations (such as addition and multiplication) in a way such that the clients in this scenario would work on encrypted values.
The calculations are done in encrypted values and returned as such. The host can then decrypt the result.
This sounds pretty amazing but consider addition as a starter: The host uses a one-time-pad for each number and XORs them. The client adds the encrypted numbers. When you add the numbers, the host only needs to XOR all the keys on the result and gets the true result! The client, though, knows NOTHING about the true values (the protocol is information theoretically secure), as the XOR turns them into "signal noise".
I imagine, though, that the effort of implementing this probably outweighs the benefits for a project like rendering a movie. But for truly mission-critical data, it may be worth it...
This already exists in several countries in Europe.
One or two cars in an entire long-distance train is usually marked as a quiet car.
The only thing that is needed to enforce silence is a sticker saying that cell phones, radios, and any other noise is not allowed. People usually follow these rules - so there is no need for a jammer!
Keep in mind that whatever sport you practice, try to do so only every other day. In the days in between, do something different (e.g. swimming, biking, roller blading) in order to recover from the strain put on your muscles and tendons. :-)
Different sports will use different parts of your muscles and enhance your ability in other disciplines. Also, have at least one rest day per week! Even pushing just once beyond this will have you tired and lacking energy, a signal that your body needs to run its "weekly cron jobs"
In other words,
Keep in mind that this is just a casy study, where a prototype is built. The goal is to check whether such a technology is feasible, and robust enough to be used in a battlefield.
I find $2.25 million to be quite a reasonable amount for this, even if the result turns out to be that such a robot cannot be built in the next ten years, because stronger materials, more powerful actuators, longer-lasting batteries etc. are needed.
Your reasoning does not apply to Windows NT4, as DirectX allows application to intercept any key combination, including the three-finger salute.
The same goes for remote desktop applications such as "PC anywhere" etc.
So it really is a major annoyance and serves no purpose.
High-end CD players and car CD players likely will not be able to handle it. Car CD players use a shock buffer which requires a true "random access" for reading ahead fast. The "encryption" usually consists of faulty bits on the CD, which results in read errors. Car CD players and high-end players try to correct for this, which does not work because there is no "true" faulty bit (which may be readable in some of the passes), but the CD is intentionally made as a faulty product!
The best thing you can do is to return the CD unopened. This way, the recall figures in the sales will go up, and even 60-year-old executives with business plans from the fifties will learn.
I don't know whether I trust cryogenics yet. I have yet to see any positive report on the cryogenics-users mailing list ;-)
The virus needs user interaction to propagate. Hence it is an e-mail virus. Only programs that propagate automatically are worms. One cannot necessarily expect the Washington Post to get such technicalities right. However, it would be nice if at least /. used proper terminology.
/. we known anymore, would it...
Then again, if it did, it wouldn't be the