If the OS with the program driving the robot "crashes", the robot will certainly turn itself off. (It is unimaginable that such a product would be designed otherwise.) So nothing dangerous will happen, the operation will just be delayed by a minute until the computer is re-booted.
Having said that, one might go a different route and produce all the software needed (including the driver itself) using formal methods, if you want 100.00% safety (minus epsilon for human errors in the formal requirement descriptions).
Editors, please correct grammar and spelling errors submitted. In this story, those are even above the/. average ("ammount", "it's", "privilage"). I would like to see this average going down rather than up.
Since the toolset is Windows only, this seems to be the obvious way to go. Reverse engineer the file format(s), write an editor, use that editor to create the mods. I am sure this is eventually going to happen anyway, bad EULA or not.
Sorry, but the output is still totally ridiculous. The translation program fails to recognize idioms and spouts things such as "the stone of impact".
I agree, though, that the translator allows you to skim through the text and see what it is about. However, it will still take many years until a computer can give a high-quality translation...
If you read the press release carefully, they claim to be able to compress practically random data, such as pictures of green grass, 100 : 1. They never claim to be able to do the same with true random data, since this is impossible.
There may be something about that. However, there are also many points that make me sceptical, but maybe the press release has not been reviewed carefully enough.
This new algorithm does not break Shannon's limit, which is impossible, so the phrase about the "historical limitations" is a hoax...
The KDE slogan "Conquer your desktop"...
on
KDE 3.0 Screenshots
·
· Score: 1
Attention! E-Mail coming in! It has an evil attachment; keep your eyes away from it! Don't open it, lest civilization as we know it ends forever!
Now try to find the delete key... press it... done. Ah, life can go on now.
It is always odd how little the "official" top speed of vehicles (in this case, tanks) is compared to the actual one. On the data sheet linked to in the story, the top speed of that brand new tank is supposed to be 42 mph. Come on... these babies certainly make 60+ mph when needed.
Some other cool fact was that they take almost any fuel for their engines, it just has to burn:-)
Earlier today we saw a more advanced article about XP, a book review which explains how to put XP into practice. Sadly, the editor of the article did not understand what XP was in the first place, so his comments for the review were rather inappropriate.
Now we see an introductory story about XP. Although this article, standing alone, would be OK, it is rather redundant in the context. While this time, the editor had a grasp of the topic, he seemed to have forgotten to check the current articles on/.
Of course such things happened before, but in the "old times" where/. had no banner ads and no comment accounts, such occurrences were rare at worst.
I've heard of these boots before, but have not seen them available for sale. Prototypes existed and were demonstrated in Berlin last year IIRC.
The boots are so expensive because only the latest composite materials are strong enough to withstand the great strain on the material. Makes me wonder what strain your bones and joints have to withstand if you use those boots;^)
My audio CD drive is pretty old and crappy, so I have not used it for years. It's just so much more convenient to use the CD-ROM drive in the PC, too. I have a radio tuner card in my PC, so the stereo only serves as an amplifier in these days.
I am sure many people have similar setups. Considering this and laptop users, I don't give those CDs much of a chance in the open market.
A friend of mine is at a technical college where most people have a laptop, since there are Ethernet plugs everywhere in the lecture rooms.
While there are advantages to this, most students only use the permanent Internet connection for extended ICQ chats during lectures, and for trading MP3s.
The advantage of being able to try out example applications "life" (i. e. during the lecture) does not outweigh all the distractions that a laptop offers...
It says
/sbin/service rhnsd stop /sinb/chkconfig --level 345 rhnsd off.
But of course it should be
/sbin/service rhnsd stop /sbin/chkconfig --level 345 rhnsd off.
This doesn't exactly help improving the impression of their.0 releases...
The only thing that an e-signature confirms (cryptographically) is that the person who signed the document is the same person who owns the secret key. The word "owns" is a source of a plethora of problems: what happens if a key becomes corrupted (gets lost or stolen)? How is the connection made between the key owner (a user account on a computer) and the real person behind it?
The latter problem can be solved in two ways - with a web of trust (PGP approach) or via certification authorities. The first approach has the advantage that it does not need a central authority and that it is decentralized. However, if someone has to relocate, he/she first has to build up such a "web of trust" again, which is clearly impractical for many people.
With CAs (certification authorities), the problem is that there exist too many right now, and there is no standard procedure to establish the authenticity of the keys. In order to make this technology really accessible, public authorities would have to give out certicates as well. E. g. you go to the city hall and get a certificate for your public key in the same way you obtain a passport.
The cryptographical problems have been solved (at least for now, unless new algorithms are detected), but the "real world problem" of authenticity will always remain. It is important to establish good practices to cope with that.
I am sure that if someone bids $8 million, they will change their name again to something like now-this-is-our-final-name.org or closed-source-is-evil.org or even may-the-source-be-with-you.org.
As long as the old bookmarks will keep working, no one will care;-)
Since you can assume that your own Eord documents are under control (unless yet another virus has modified them in such a way that it includes those "web bugs"), you only have to despise other's documents.
For a company, a simple fix is: don't use Word documents from outside - only accept Postscript or PDF.
Which would be a good thing for us Lyx, LaTeX or (insert non-MS office product here) users.
The game "Monopoly", that is. No one has a monopoly anymore on domain name registrations (thanks ICANN for that). Now, in the game "Monopoly", doesn't it state that if a player is not willing to buy a new estate, it will be auctioned and sold to the highest bidder? Looks like Internic is still addicted to "Monopoly", be it for real or a game;)
Today,/. announced a new way of improving their memory by adding a layer of caffeine to each synapse in their brains. This is supposed to increase memory efficiency by 20 to 30%, making it possible to remember stories that have been posted one page further down. This should eliminate having the same story, or nearly the same one, posted twice in the future;)
We have an article about the inefficiency of user databases that requires registration in order to be read...;)
The problem with Rambus compared to SDRAM...
on
Will Rambus Go Bust?
·
· Score: 4
is a higher latency. This means the CPU has to wait longer until the memory is read, but can read memory faster from then on. The consequence of this is that compilers would have to be optimized for that kind of memory access - i. e. accessing a few pages is expensive (and slow) under Rambus, slower than under SDRAM. Accessing many pages is more effective. The question is, why did Intel chose this kind of tradeoff? Was there no alternative that did not increase the latency by the factor of 10 (according to the link to Tom's hardware)?
This is the first water-cooled technology to be introduced into laptop computers, a product that industry analysts expect to only get hotter as wattage requirement rise to 20 watts by the end of the year.
I don't think so. I hope more companies will see the light and produce StrongARM and Crusoe based Laptops. Those chips use much less power and run Linux, so what more do you need?
Incidentally, it would be rather strange if the laptop was not sealed well anymore after a couple of years of use. One would have to go to tech support and say, "Sir, my laptop is sweating! I am sure it has fever!";)
It is not so hard to estimate how far current and future technologies will have developed within 5 to 10 years. After all, most of them exist in a prototype stage, so it is only a matter of production technology to turn this into a product. It is quite hard to estimate how technologies will actually be used. Take the Internet as an example - it started in 1969 with four universities being connected to it. Nobody thought about e-mail, which originated from a hack (someone deployed a file on some other workstation which was then read by the recipient when he logged in). Before e-mail, the 'net did not really take off, and it really started to rise like a comet when the WWW was born with the creation of the first browser. Even back then, nobody could have estimated the impact of the *uses* of these technologies on society. Guesses about that will always be quite far from what will happen. However, it is *vital* that we think about possible implications now, lest we are rolled over by new technologies before we know what effects they have.
Slashdot Mirror
If the OS with the program driving the robot "crashes", the robot will certainly turn itself off. (It is unimaginable that such a product would be designed otherwise.) So nothing dangerous will happen, the operation will just be delayed by a minute until the computer is re-booted.
Having said that, one might go a different route and produce all the software needed (including the driver itself) using formal methods, if you want 100.00% safety (minus epsilon for human errors in the formal requirement descriptions).
Editors, please correct grammar and spelling errors submitted. In this story, those are even above the /. average ("ammount", "it's", "privilage"). I would like to see this average going down rather than up.
Since the toolset is Windows only, this seems to be the obvious way to go. Reverse engineer the file format(s), write an editor, use that editor to create the mods.
I am sure this is eventually going to happen anyway, bad EULA or not.
Sorry, but the output is still totally ridiculous. The translation program fails to recognize idioms and spouts things such as "the stone of impact".
I agree, though, that the translator allows you to skim through the text and see what it is about. However, it will still take many years until a computer can give a high-quality translation...
If you read the press release carefully, they claim to be able to compress practically random data, such as pictures of green grass, 100 : 1. They never claim to be able to do the same with true random data, since this is impossible.
There may be something about that. However, there are also many points that make me sceptical, but maybe the press release has not been reviewed carefully enough.
This new algorithm does not break Shannon's limit, which is impossible, so the phrase about the "historical limitations" is a hoax...
Shouldn't that be Konquer your desktop? ;)
I just couldn't help misreading their ad slogan :^)
Attention! E-Mail coming in! It has an evil attachment; keep your eyes away from it! Don't open it, lest civilization as we know it ends forever!
Now try to find the delete key... press it... done. Ah, life can go on now.
It is always odd how little the "official" top speed of vehicles (in this case, tanks) is compared to the actual one. On the data sheet linked to in the story, the top speed of that brand new tank is supposed to be 42 mph. Come on... these babies certainly make 60+ mph when needed. :-)
Some other cool fact was that they take almost any fuel for their engines, it just has to burn
Earlier today we saw a more advanced article about XP, a book review which explains how to put XP into practice. Sadly, the editor of the article did not understand what XP was in the first place, so his comments for the review were rather inappropriate. /.
/. had no banner ads and no comment accounts, such occurrences were rare at worst.
Now we see an introductory story about XP. Although this article, standing alone, would be OK, it is rather redundant in the context. While this time, the editor had a grasp of the topic, he seemed to have forgotten to check the current articles on
Of course such things happened before, but in the "old times" where
I've heard of these boots before, but have not seen them available for sale. Prototypes existed and were demonstrated in Berlin last year IIRC. ;^)
The boots are so expensive because only the latest composite materials are strong enough to withstand the great strain on the material. Makes me wonder what strain your bones and joints have to withstand if you use those boots
My audio CD drive is pretty old and crappy, so I have not used it for years. It's just so much more convenient to use the CD-ROM drive in the PC, too. I have a radio tuner card in my PC, so the stereo only serves as an amplifier in these days.
I am sure many people have similar setups. Considering this and laptop users, I don't give those CDs much of a chance in the open market.
Bill Gates survived the cream pie assault two years ago, so he'll survive everything ;-)
A friend of mine is at a technical college where most people have a laptop, since there are Ethernet plugs everywhere in the lecture rooms.
While there are advantages to this, most students only use the permanent Internet connection for extended ICQ chats during lectures, and for trading MP3s.
The advantage of being able to try out example applications "life" (i. e. during the lecture) does not outweigh all the distractions that a laptop offers...
It says
/sbin/service rhnsd stop
/sinb/chkconfig --level 345 rhnsd off .
/sbin/service rhnsd stop
/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 rhnsd off. .0 releases...
But of course it should be
This doesn't exactly help improving the impression of their
The only thing that an e-signature confirms (cryptographically) is that the person who signed the document is the same person who owns the secret key. The word "owns" is a source of a plethora of problems: what happens if a key becomes corrupted (gets lost or stolen)? How is the connection made between the key owner (a user account on a computer) and the real person behind it?
The latter problem can be solved in two ways - with a web of trust (PGP approach) or via certification authorities. The first approach has the advantage that it does not need a central authority and that it is decentralized. However, if someone has to relocate, he/she first has to build up such a "web of trust" again, which is clearly impractical for many people.
With CAs (certification authorities), the problem is that there exist too many right now, and there is no standard procedure to establish the authenticity of the keys. In order to make this technology really accessible, public authorities would have to give out certicates as well. E. g. you go to the city hall and get a certificate for your public key in the same way you obtain a passport.
The cryptographical problems have been solved (at least for now, unless new algorithms are detected), but the "real world problem" of authenticity will always remain. It is important to establish good practices to cope with that.
In this video, Doug Engelbart demonstrates cross references, which he even calls hyper links. Goodbye patent!
I am sure that if someone bids $8 million, they will change their name again to something like now-this-is-our-final-name.org or closed-source-is-evil.org or even may-the-source-be-with-you.org. ;-)
As long as the old bookmarks will keep working, no one will care
For a company, a simple fix is: don't use Word documents from outside - only accept Postscript or PDF.
Which would be a good thing for us Lyx, LaTeX or (insert non-MS office product here) users.
The game "Monopoly", that is. No one has a monopoly anymore on domain name registrations (thanks ICANN for that). ;)
Now, in the game "Monopoly", doesn't it state that if a player is not willing to buy a new estate, it will be auctioned and sold to the highest bidder?
Looks like Internic is still addicted to "Monopoly", be it for real or a game
Today, /. announced a new way of improving their memory by adding a layer of caffeine to each synapse in their brains. ;)
This is supposed to increase memory efficiency by 20 to 30%, making it possible to remember stories that have been posted one page further down.
This should eliminate having the same story, or nearly the same one, posted twice in the future
We have an article about the inefficiency of user databases that requires registration in order to be read... ;)
is a higher latency. This means the CPU has to wait longer until the memory is read, but can read memory faster from then on.
The consequence of this is that compilers would have to be optimized for that kind of memory access - i. e. accessing a few pages is expensive (and slow) under Rambus, slower than under SDRAM. Accessing many pages is more effective.
The question is, why did Intel chose this kind of tradeoff? Was there no alternative that did not increase the latency by the factor of 10 (according to the link to Tom's hardware)?
Incidentally, it would be rather strange if the laptop was not sealed well anymore after a couple of years of use. One would have to go to tech support and say, "Sir, my laptop is sweating! I am sure it has fever!" ;)
It is not so hard to estimate how far current and future technologies will have developed within 5 to 10 years. After all, most of them exist in a prototype stage, so it is only a matter of production technology to turn this into a product.
It is quite hard to estimate how technologies will actually be used. Take the Internet as an example - it started in 1969 with four universities being connected to it. Nobody thought about e-mail, which originated from a hack (someone deployed a file on some other workstation which was then read by the recipient when he logged in). Before e-mail, the 'net did not really take off, and it really started to rise like a comet when the WWW was born with the creation of the first browser.
Even back then, nobody could have estimated the impact of the *uses* of these technologies on society. Guesses about that will always be quite far from what will happen.
However, it is *vital* that we think about possible implications now, lest we are rolled over by new technologies before we know what effects they have.