Well, reading TFA, it would seem that video on demand from cable is in this race, and looks to be the odds on winner...
Comcast being better than a rental company sounds oxymoronic, but its possible. I somehow think there will be more wrinkles in the plot before this falls out to a two horse race.
Is it just me that wonders why science can run along happily trying to create in reality what science fiction has been creating decades before it, yet seemingly blatantly ignoring all the lessons that were there to be learned in the science fiction stories?
Seems like there is some conspiracy, but something tells me that its just stupid human tricks to do things to see if they can, then stand back and wonder why it all went wrong?
Yes, it would be good to have programmed virii that might devour an oil spill then die harmlessly, or bacteria that can be injected into a chemical spill to clean it up, or down an oil well to preprocess the crude to make it easily recoverd from the ground....
Its just that no one seems to be working on figuring out the dangers at the same time as people are working on the possibilities...
Yes, and if the govt. et al require 911 service of VOIP providers, then get ready for static IP's and IP V6 requirements, and all sorts of nonsensical BS about the Internet and regulations.
Trust me, once they get even one regulation passed regarding the use or configuration of the Internet, it WILL snowball...
Hold on a minute... I think we're missing the point. If Goooooogle or anyone else happens to overtake the public libraries in popularity or usefulness, it is quite likely that the information available will suddenly become subject to what advertisers will pay for, and will turn in to a "top 40" of public information rather than a collected works of all public information.
If public libraries use their funds to assist each other in digitally making available all public information without regard to what is possible, then we have a GREAT thing, but when the sum total of that body of knowledge and history is governed by someone trying to make money, we, as a society, WILL lose in the end.
Its NOT about how you get the information or how it is stored... its about WHO is in charge of that information and what their motives are...
Training is the best security measure that can be taken; training user's to not do stupid things, to use secure passwords, to not share information they shouldn't.
If you start your kids off learning to use computers securely, with good self protection habits, then the likelihood that they will become victims of identity theft or other phishing is greatly reduced.
When it comes to security, there is no such thing as paranoid... they really are out to get your password, your ID, your SSN and everything else that will help them get your money...
As soon as you can no longer get support from M$ because you are not using the 'black box' crash creation application, they will start blaming Linux and Apache for the crashes... quickly creating a patch to prevent users from going to sites that are 'bad' for their Internet experience... thus protecting the world from all sorts of evil... spam, spim, worms, joy, information, and other evils like that
Judging from the posts, I'd say most/.-ers don't really have a clue of what it takes to build a robot from LEGO or any other materials. What the teams of FIRST and every other autonomous robotics competition accomplish is a great deal more than you would expect.
First there is the physical construction, some projects being as complex in nature as many real world projects.
Second there is the programming, and while there may be discussion about whether LEGO uses 'real' programming techniques, it IS programming, and it is real world interaction programming. One mistake and the robot runs into walls or fails in any of a thousand other ways. Any team that completes the tasks is a winner in my book, whether they win a prize or not. Its definitely NOT as easy as it might seem.
Third, there is an entire swath of systems programming that has to be dealt with. Redesigning hardware to match newly found software restrictions and so forth.
Yeah, but then the constitutional ammendment that prohibited alcohol might have been prevented if open source was used for input on its implementation. Laws are never implemented in a 'finished' state, they simply are good enough to accomplish the goal at the time. There are many laws on the books that are absolutely bizare, http://www.lawguru.com/weird/.
The open source method might be just what is required to clean up some of the bizareness of the legal world? Not only that, but it should be more than lawyers and lobbyists that have direct access to influencing things like patent laws.
...a super-secret, multimillion-dollar weapons program that may be ready to launch bloodless cyberwar against enemy networks -- from electric grids to telephone nets.
I agree that the math is a weak point. I also admit to not knowing the exact formulae for calculating it either. It just seems to make sense that a pentium handling one bit of processing at 100% capacity times 12 is going to be faster than a single processor 12 times as fast as the pentium because of task switching and other OS overheads.
Does anyone know of any good sites that talk about the math of clustering vs. single processor systems?
A real use for this (if it is possible) is to configure a lot of older hardware into a cluster for cheap cluster computing.
I've thought of this a couple of times, and besides the power issues, and the fact that using old obsolete hardware has its own obstacles, if you have the hardware, its perhaps possible to create a couple of racks of clustered computers.
I think that being able to use two or more old motherboards per power supply would help make it more realistic.
It is indeed interesting to think that in garages across the world, there could be some serious clusters built on cheap hardware. Serious, in this case, does not mean that they will ever be in contention with deepblue, but it would perhaps speak volumes to the people at SETI?
Seriously, if you could do this with 12 old pentiums, would it not pave the way to do it with higher processors but keep the OS overheads very low?
Verizon, Comcast, and all the other entrenched communications carriers will have to fight the same battle that LA la land is fighting. The digital age means that things are done differently, and consequently the business model has to change. None of them will get anywhere with the public at large if they refuse to roll with the punches and innovate.
Any company that refuses to innovate deserves to die a long and miserable death, and they probably will.
Exactly! So long as you have the ability to monitor the decrypting, and know what the result is supposed to be, encryption is a delaying tactic at best... it helps keep honest people honest, kind of like the locks on your car doors.
Despite the lack of paragraphs, this guy has an extremely good point. Theft and violating copyright law are two different things. In many cases, if not all of them, here in the US, copyright litigation seems to be based on the principles of theft, where the plaintiff pleads that the copyright violation has 'stolen' their profits... or will steal their profits.
This is nearly the same as say: If a drunk kills someone with a car, the family of that person sues the drunk driver not only for the wrongful death of one person, but the expected wages, family (sons and daughters) and other things that the family is now deprived of because of the death of one person in their family, even though there is no way to quantify or verify that these things were lost to the family, or that the family has been deprived of them.
I think we can all agree that this is not quite the right way to think of things, but this is how copyright litigation works. Sharing out copyrighted information does not involve creating wealth for the violator in the case of sharing movies and music files. There is also no precedent that the people who download those copyrighted works would actually have paid money for them if they were not available for download. Nor is there any solid evidence that the sharing of music and video files has reduced the copyright owners profits in any significant way. (If anyone knows of such proof of loss, please tell me where it is)
Additionally, because the value of the perceived theft is intangible, and can not be quantified, there is no basis for assigning punitive damages based on the number of files shared or any other such measure.
Copyright litigation coming out of LA la land is monstrous, and a blight on both the legal profession and those instigating the litigation.
People with morals would find a better way to ensure their profits than try to effect law to prevent anyone from sharing what they have paid for, or trying to prevent anyone from using technology that 'MIGHT' let them share those files with others.
Sure, copyright violators are wrong, but the current fight against them is bogus, and dangerous in respect of how it bends the intent of both copyright and the law in general. Preventing people from profiting from your work is a good thing, a positive for all of us. Allowing anyone to run rampant and twist the law to punish people just because they might violate copyright law at some time in the future is insane.
If you violate copyright law, and reap financial reward from the violation, then clearly, this is theft as well as copyright violation.
The parent is right, its time that we start looking at this issue for what it is.
Does anyone see the uncanny link between the Movie Brazil and the F/OSS - M$ Battle? I find it most prophetic that one of M$ bending points is in Brazil!
"What BRAZIL is really about is that the system isn't great leaders, great machinating people
controlling it all. It's each person performing their job as one little cog in this thing and Sam chooses to stay a little cog and ultimately he
pays the price for that."
Sounds like the difference between M$ and F/OSS to me?
This server based rule does work, and well. It is used in several areas where I have some knowledge. When virus emails are running rampant, the servers are very effective at keeping lists of repetative email subject/content/sender and just pounding them into the round file.
In a business, an e-mail arriving from outside the company domain and going to many inside recipients with questionable content, just kill it, all of 'it'.
This can be done by ISP mail servers. And the parent is right here, if ISP's and e-mail client vendors simply worked together, it could be a totally opt-in service where questionable e-mails never make it out of the bulk-mail folder on the client. It doesn't require any major change other than ISP mail server/service changes and client software that can use the bulkmail flag/listing provided by the ISP or mail service provider.
I would suggest that the F/OSS community can come up with an anti-spam usage for P2P networking with this... build a spam block list, share it out, the world starts getting less spam??????
Yeah, I agree, 9 years is a long time... lets tell everyone his name, leave him wandering around in the public view so that everyone that gets angry with email can look him up and give him a drive-by thank you.
because if Sony, or anyone can patent the methods of interaction with the human body in anyway, it could become illegal for people to eat patented grains without a license? Perhaps the litigation crazed patent lawyers might find a way to patent how we watch TV, or listen to the radio.
Those might seem extreme or bad examples, but the act of patenting the process and method of interacting with the human brain is very dangerous territory IMHO.
It might seem that they are trying to patent a machine that can interact, but in doing so they patent the process of the interaction. While it seems novel, simply discovering how to interact with the brain does not merit patent rights. That is like trying to patent the act of flying in an airplane. You can patent a type of airplane, but not the act of flying in one. You can patent a particular method of creating light shows, but not the process of watching them (movies tv etc.)
Then again, perhaps I missed the point and am talking out of my @ ?
Ok, perhaps the servos are not truly ordinary, in as much as they have position feedback built in, but that is still not something that is impossible to achieve in other ways. In truth, to get a standard servo in a place where it has not or cannot move to the position commanded by PWM is not very easy at all. Digital servos have a good deal of muscle, and a robot in the toy size range is seldom, if ever, going to push the servo that hard. Its an application where absolute position information is not required to achieve the goal.
The Robotis servo type systems are apparently made by hand with maxon motors in them. When such devices are mass produced (read made cheaper) they you just might see all kinds of robots. If I could afford the 450-500 dollars for digital servos, I'd have already added an articulated arm to my robot. That has nothing to do with the creations from Korea or anywhere else.
Octoped robots use as many as 24 servos that are synchronized to allow the arachnid like robot to walk, run etc. The only difference is that a humanoid robot just has a higher coolness factor.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, reading TFA, it would seem that video on demand from cable is in this race, and looks to be the odds on winner...
Comcast being better than a rental company sounds oxymoronic, but its possible. I somehow think there will be more wrinkles in the plot before this falls out to a two horse race.
Perhaps, to get your e coli computer to run faster, try exlax rather than penicillin?
Now, THAT is funny.... and should be in a science fiction novel starring Jon Stewart!
Is it just me that wonders why science can run along happily trying to create in reality what science fiction has been creating decades before it, yet seemingly blatantly ignoring all the lessons that were there to be learned in the science fiction stories?
Seems like there is some conspiracy, but something tells me that its just stupid human tricks to do things to see if they can, then stand back and wonder why it all went wrong?
Yes, it would be good to have programmed virii that might devour an oil spill then die harmlessly, or bacteria that can be injected into a chemical spill to clean it up, or down an oil well to preprocess the crude to make it easily recoverd from the ground....
Its just that no one seems to be working on figuring out the dangers at the same time as people are working on the possibilities...
I hope that they prosecute them for fraudulent business practices... nothing else really.
If they are prosecuted for frustrating users, and causing machines to perform poorly, woe be unto the poor programmers of the world...
hey.. wait a min, if they did that, then Gill Bates if phuqued!!!
Yes, and if the govt. et al require 911 service of VOIP providers, then get ready for static IP's and IP V6 requirements, and all sorts of nonsensical BS about the Internet and regulations.
Trust me, once they get even one regulation passed regarding the use or configuration of the Internet, it WILL snowball...
Hold on a minute... I think we're missing the point. If Goooooogle or anyone else happens to overtake the public libraries in popularity or usefulness, it is quite likely that the information available will suddenly become subject to what advertisers will pay for, and will turn in to a "top 40" of public information rather than a collected works of all public information.
If public libraries use their funds to assist each other in digitally making available all public information without regard to what is possible, then we have a GREAT thing, but when the sum total of that body of knowledge and history is governed by someone trying to make money, we, as a society, WILL lose in the end.
Its NOT about how you get the information or how it is stored... its about WHO is in charge of that information and what their motives are...
Sadly, capitalism is not good for everything...
Training is the best security measure that can be taken; training user's to not do stupid things, to use secure passwords, to not share information they shouldn't.
If you start your kids off learning to use computers securely, with good self protection habits, then the likelihood that they will become victims of identity theft or other phishing is greatly reduced.
When it comes to security, there is no such thing as paranoid... they really are out to get your password, your ID, your SSN and everything else that will help them get your money...
You can please some of the people some of the time... but this should just about please everyone :)
As soon as you can no longer get support from M$ because you are not using the 'black box' crash creation application, they will start blaming Linux and Apache for the crashes... quickly creating a patch to prevent users from going to sites that are 'bad' for their Internet experience... thus protecting the world from all sorts of evil... spam, spim, worms, joy, information, and other evils like that
Judging from the posts, I'd say most /.-ers don't really have a clue of what it takes to build a robot from LEGO or any other materials. What the teams of FIRST and every other autonomous robotics competition accomplish is a great deal more than you would expect.
First there is the physical construction, some projects being as complex in nature as many real world projects.
Second there is the programming, and while there may be discussion about whether LEGO uses 'real' programming techniques, it IS programming, and it is real world interaction programming. One mistake and the robot runs into walls or fails in any of a thousand other ways. Any team that completes the tasks is a winner in my book, whether they win a prize or not. Its definitely NOT as easy as it might seem.
Third, there is an entire swath of systems programming that has to be dealt with. Redesigning hardware to match newly found software restrictions and so forth.
Just two cents worth
Yeah, but then the constitutional ammendment that prohibited alcohol might have been prevented if open source was used for input on its implementation. Laws are never implemented in a 'finished' state, they simply are good enough to accomplish the goal at the time. There are many laws on the books that are absolutely bizare, http://www.lawguru.com/weird/.
The open source method might be just what is required to clean up some of the bizareness of the legal world? Not only that, but it should be more than lawyers and lobbyists that have direct access to influencing things like patent laws.
...a super-secret, multimillion-dollar weapons program that may be ready to launch bloodless cyberwar against enemy networks -- from electric grids to telephone nets.
Not anymore
I agree that the math is a weak point. I also admit to not knowing the exact formulae for calculating it either. It just seems to make sense that a pentium handling one bit of processing at 100% capacity times 12 is going to be faster than a single processor 12 times as fast as the pentium because of task switching and other OS overheads.
Does anyone know of any good sites that talk about the math of clustering vs. single processor systems?
A real use for this (if it is possible) is to configure a lot of older hardware into a cluster for cheap cluster computing. I've thought of this a couple of times, and besides the power issues, and the fact that using old obsolete hardware has its own obstacles, if you have the hardware, its perhaps possible to create a couple of racks of clustered computers. I think that being able to use two or more old motherboards per power supply would help make it more realistic. It is indeed interesting to think that in garages across the world, there could be some serious clusters built on cheap hardware. Serious, in this case, does not mean that they will ever be in contention with deepblue, but it would perhaps speak volumes to the people at SETI? Seriously, if you could do this with 12 old pentiums, would it not pave the way to do it with higher processors but keep the OS overheads very low?
Verizon, Comcast, and all the other entrenched communications carriers will have to fight the same battle that LA la land is fighting. The digital age means that things are done differently, and consequently the business model has to change. None of them will get anywhere with the public at large if they refuse to roll with the punches and innovate.
Any company that refuses to innovate deserves to die a long and miserable death, and they probably will.
Exactly! So long as you have the ability to monitor the decrypting, and know what the result is supposed to be, encryption is a delaying tactic at best... it helps keep honest people honest, kind of like the locks on your car doors.
Despite the lack of paragraphs, this guy has an extremely good point. Theft and violating copyright law are two different things. In many cases, if not all of them, here in the US, copyright litigation seems to be based on the principles of theft, where the plaintiff pleads that the copyright violation has 'stolen' their profits... or will steal their profits.
This is nearly the same as say:
If a drunk kills someone with a car, the family of that person sues the drunk driver not only for the wrongful death of one person, but the expected wages, family (sons and daughters) and other things that the family is now deprived of because of the death of one person in their family, even though there is no way to quantify or verify that these things were lost to the family, or that the family has been deprived of them.
I think we can all agree that this is not quite the right way to think of things, but this is how copyright litigation works. Sharing out copyrighted information does not involve creating wealth for the violator in the case of sharing movies and music files. There is also no precedent that the people who download those copyrighted works would actually have paid money for them if they were not available for download. Nor is there any solid evidence that the sharing of music and video files has reduced the copyright owners profits in any significant way.
(If anyone knows of such proof of loss, please tell me where it is)
Additionally, because the value of the perceived theft is intangible, and can not be quantified, there is no basis for assigning punitive damages based on the number of files shared or any other such measure.
Copyright litigation coming out of LA la land is monstrous, and a blight on both the legal profession and those instigating the litigation.
People with morals would find a better way to ensure their profits than try to effect law to prevent anyone from sharing what they have paid for, or trying to prevent anyone from using technology that 'MIGHT' let them share those files with others.
Sure, copyright violators are wrong, but the current fight against them is bogus, and dangerous in respect of how it bends the intent of both copyright and the law in general. Preventing people from profiting from your work is a good thing, a positive for all of us. Allowing anyone to run rampant and twist the law to punish people just because they might violate copyright law at some time in the future is insane.
If you violate copyright law, and reap financial reward from the violation, then clearly, this is theft as well as copyright violation.
The parent is right, its time that we start looking at this issue for what it is.
When is it going to stop being cliche' and just be fact... women are not as interested in technology as men, be it cars, home theater, or computers?
/.
This is almost stupid to post on
Does anyone see the uncanny link between the Movie Brazil and the F/OSS - M$ Battle? I find it most prophetic that one of M$ bending points is in Brazil!
A quote from T.Gilliam on the FAQ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/movies/brazil-faq/
"What BRAZIL is really about is that the system isn't great leaders, great machinating people controlling it all. It's each person performing their job as one little cog in this thing and Sam chooses to stay a little cog and ultimately he pays the price for that." Sounds like the difference between M$ and F/OSS to me?
This server based rule does work, and well. It is used in several areas where I have some knowledge. When virus emails are running rampant, the servers are very effective at keeping lists of repetative email subject/content/sender and just pounding them into the round file.
In a business, an e-mail arriving from outside the company domain and going to many inside recipients with questionable content, just kill it, all of 'it'.
This can be done by ISP mail servers. And the parent is right here, if ISP's and e-mail client vendors simply worked together, it could be a totally opt-in service where questionable e-mails never make it out of the bulk-mail folder on the client. It doesn't require any major change other than ISP mail server/service changes and client software that can use the bulkmail flag/listing provided by the ISP or mail service provider.
I would suggest that the F/OSS community can come up with an anti-spam usage for P2P networking with this... build a spam block list, share it out, the world starts getting less spam??????
Yeah, I agree, 9 years is a long time... lets tell everyone his name, leave him wandering around in the public view so that everyone that gets angry with email can look him up and give him a drive-by thank you.
Didn't that happen in the 60's?
"However useful sex may be now that we've got it, that doesn't tell us anything about how it got started"
Are they kidding? I'm sure it was a 'double dog dare' on a Tuesday afternoon in the garden of eden.
because if Sony, or anyone can patent the methods of interaction with the human body in anyway, it could become illegal for people to eat patented grains without a license? Perhaps the litigation crazed patent lawyers might find a way to patent how we watch TV, or listen to the radio.
Those might seem extreme or bad examples, but the act of patenting the process and method of interacting with the human brain is very dangerous territory IMHO.
It might seem that they are trying to patent a machine that can interact, but in doing so they patent the process of the interaction. While it seems novel, simply discovering how to interact with the brain does not merit patent rights. That is like trying to patent the act of flying in an airplane. You can patent a type of airplane, but not the act of flying in one. You can patent a particular method of creating light shows, but not the process of watching them (movies tv etc.)
Then again, perhaps I missed the point and am talking out of my @ ?
Danger Will Robinson, Danger!
Ok, perhaps the servos are not truly ordinary, in as much as they have position feedback built in, but that is still not something that is impossible to achieve in other ways. In truth, to get a standard servo in a place where it has not or cannot move to the position commanded by PWM is not very easy at all. Digital servos have a good deal of muscle, and a robot in the toy size range is seldom, if ever, going to push the servo that hard. Its an application where absolute position information is not required to achieve the goal.
The Robotis servo type systems are apparently made by hand with maxon motors in them. When such devices are mass produced (read made cheaper) they you just might see all kinds of robots. If I could afford the 450-500 dollars for digital servos, I'd have already added an articulated arm to my robot. That has nothing to do with the creations from Korea or anywhere else.
Octoped robots use as many as 24 servos that are synchronized to allow the arachnid like robot to walk, run etc. The only difference is that a humanoid robot just has a higher coolness factor.