As a matter of fact, yes it does. One of the output plugins, Disk Writer, has been included with Winamp for many versions now. Basically it takes the wave data it would've sent to your sound card and sends it instead to a file on the hard disk. This allows you to convert pretty much any format Winamp recognizes (MIDI, CD, etc.) to a.wav file.
As far as CD burning goes, no out-of-the-box support for that, but I would be surprised if there wasn't a plugin for it somewhere!
There are other similar, less abstract arguments to that effect.
For example, there's been some question recently regarding the evolution of the human eye. Classic evolution theory dictates that evolution happens because mutations occur in the gene pool and beneficial mutations survive while harmful mutations die out. But you have certain specific cases of evolution (ie. the human eyeball) that deny this hypothesis.
The human eye is an ENORMOUSLY complicated device. It could not function without every part of the eye being exactly how it is. The lens, the fluid, the rods and cones, the optic nerve -- it all has to work together perfectly for us to be able to see. If only one of these (say, an optic nerve) mutated in, it would not survive because ONLY an optic nerve doesn't help anybody. And the chances of an entire eyeball just 'appearing' out of a mutation is enormously small.
So we're still left with the question of whether or not there is a higher being responsible for these "coincidences." I for one strongly believe in a God, because there are many examples like these that show how a purely deterministic world is just plain unlikely (nearly impossible).
So you're telling me that if we were to gather up all the nuclear weapons posessed by all the countries in the world, and systematically nuked the entire world a few times over, we wouldn't "meddle in Mother Earth's affairs?"
Humans certainly CAN meddle in Mother Earth's affairs. She may recover, providing life in a new form or allowing certain organisms to somehow survive, but have no doubt, humans will not. Our caution (which you describe as "arrogance") is simply an instinct for self-preservation which is posessed my nearly every creature on this planet.
I think the image zooms in and out towards the ends of the animation, making it look like the segment lengths change. I'm pretty sure the lengths remain fixed relative to each other (as this is the sense of the problem.)
The article mentioned the proof was announced last June. Has it just now been verified or announced to the public, or are we late getting the news?
Claims:
1. A method of allowing a user to cause to be displayed and stored textual representations of thoughts and comments using dynamically generated online document serving technology, and to allow said user to cause to be displayed textual representations of thoughts and comments previously caused to be stored by other users,
2. A method of allowing a superuser to cause to be maintained a mathematically formulated and documented rating system, consisting of a process assigning to each textual representation of thougts and comments a numeric integer value between -1 and 5 inclusive, indicating an ideally objective value of the thought or comment to other users of the afforementioned process (see Claim 1),
3. A method by which a user may increase or cause to be increased the afforementioned rating by storing textual representations of redundant or otherwise nonuseful information such as hypertext links into stories or articles located on a remote document serving system posted on the message board listed in (1) for the purpose of illiciting the creation and storage of textual representations of thoughts and comments.
In short: the/. messaging system and karma whoring!
The article mentioned that the software rendering systems used for this display were proprietary. Why doesn't the company use an already-available rendering system like OpenGL?
OpenGL is already widely used in the scientific visualization community, and it has the advantage of hardware adaptability -- for example, SGI's Cave, mentioned before on Slashdot, uses a library derived from, and directly compatible with, OpenGL. If you have a program already written to use OpenGL it's trivial (as in, adding only a few lines of code) to get the software to work in the Cave.
Having to rewrite major portions of software to support their 'proprietary system' will be a pain (read: expensive). However, having to add only a few lines to your existing OpenGL code to get it to work would make it EXTREMELY desirable for many scientific and even home users.
The article mentioned that the software rendering systems used for this display were proprietary. Why doesn't the company use an already-available rendering system like OpenGL?
OpenGL is already widely used in the scientific visualization community, and it has the advantage of hardware adaptability -- for example, SGI's Cave, mentioned before on Slashdot, uses a library derived from, and directly compatible with, OpenGL. If you have a program already written to use OpenGL, it's trivial (as in, adding only a few lines of code) to get the software to work in the Cave.
Having to rewrite major portions of software to support their 'proprietary system' will be a pain (read: expensive). However, having to add only a few lines to your existing OpenGL code to get it to work would make it EXTREMELY desirable for many scientific and even home users.
... someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't Lynx (the best browser!) had this support since well before 1995?
Even if not, how on Earth is this not an obvious "invention?" Making programs easier to use (which is exactly what this is doing -- allowing the software to add in the http:// or ftp:// for you) has been a common theme of software design since the personal computer was born.
You know, I often wonder who gets employed at the patent office. How does their hiring process work, and what kinds of people do they recruit? They obviously don't have any computer-literate employees, which seems odd since they need knowledgeable people to review the growing surge of computer- and Internet-related patents. If they are hiring computer-literate people, they must not be hiring them from the right place -- maybe they should start going to job fairs at Universities. I, for one, would be happy to have a well-paid opportunity to put a stop to some of this madness.
A few comments on the first problem you mentioned. First of all, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle really doesn't have much to do with the effects that the STM might have on the surfaces. Heisenberg's only says that the more accurately you know the position of a particle, the less accurately you can know its velocity. You're thinking of other postulates in quantum theory.
Anyway, you're right -- of course the reaction wouldn't happen without the STM. The article mentioned the environment was kept at 20 K -- this is far too cold for this reaction to occur naturally. The point of the article is that the did it USING the STM -- meaning they can cause chemical reactions to occur by pushing molecules around. (For those who don't know, using STM tips is a very common method of pushing atoms around on surfaces. The STM is used to actually DO the moving, not just to image it.) This could be a big breakthrough for nanotechnology -- having the ability to very precisely 'engineer' molecules.
For several reasons. First of all, on smaller aircraft, standard altimeters require constant attention from the pilot. The altimeter gets its data from comparing the pressure of the air outside the plane to the pressure of the air on the ground, and then doing some math to figure out the altitude. The problem is that the altimeter has to know what the pressure on the ground is. This is achieved through a small dial on the side of the altimeter that the pilot has to adjust every 15 minutes or so to keep it accurate. As you can imagine, this is prone to error, and added workload for the pilot.
Secondly, standard altimeters have a tendency to break. I've only been flying for a few years and have already run across several dead or dying altimeters that have required me to change my flight plans.
So I think GPS-based altitude (and this GPS system in general) is a long-needed treat for the aviation community. There are a few hurdles that need to be crossed, such as avoiding abuse of the system (I believe someone else already posted about this) and redundancy. But if they can get the flaws worked out of the system on the ground, I for one will be happy to fly with it in the air.
Quantum tunneling isn't a factor in lithographic fabrication, because it doesn't produce features anywhere near small enough to succomb to quantum effects. That's only a concern in quantum computers, and there are researchers who believe quantum tunneling can even be used to our advantage.
Noise and decay can also be fought by standard techniques, but I do suspect that before long we're either going to run into a size barrier using current methods, or at least technology advance will slow to a crawl. The question isn't whether our current fabrication methods will change, but what will take their place...
We have (or rather, had) the same problem here at UIUC. Before the networking guys imposed a 500MB/day transfer limit on each computer in the dorms, a frighteningly large percentage of the campus bandwidth was being used for MP3s. (If I remember correctly the statistic was somewhere around 10%!)
Also amusing is the fact that computers in the dorms here regularly show up higher on the bandwidth usage than ANY of the other machines on campus, including research computers and machines at on-campus organizations such as the NCSA, which does HUGE amounts of data transfer for their computational simulations.
Check out the by-day bandwidth usage statistics here.
I'm not sure if AOL's protocol implements this, but many protocols guard against 'replay attacks' by having the server send some sort of code to the client. The client then performs some "secret" action to the code and sends it back to the server to authenticate that it's a valid client.
Of course, then the problem simply becomes to figure out what the "secret code" is and how to trick the server into thinking you're a valid client... given AOL's security reputation, this probably isn't nearly as difficult as it should be.
Well, the problem is not that the companies are keeping records of credit card numbers. In fact, you're supposed to keep the credit card numbers as part of your transaction records. That way you know who ordered what, for how much, and on what credit card from you in case those records are ever needed.
The problem is that the companies are keeping these records online. Most companies that keep credit card records keep them either on paper (rarely anymore) or on a special computer system not accessible to the outside world. This is what people should be doing, and I can only hope that this Western Union business will set an example for other companies that they need to take their security much more seriously.
When I think of someone being 'snubbed,' I think of some renegade bookie being killed by John Gotti or a murder witness being hunted by the mafia. Fired, not hired -- is this really the word you wanted to use for this story?
Blowing up mars would be quite a feat. Even the most powerful nuclear weapons to date are only big enough to knock chunks of it off.
(And sorry, but designing a device to drill to the core of the planet and detonate the weapons there is orders of magnitude less feasible than Hollywood seems to think it is.)
Better yet, why don't we just engineer car speakers to aim their audio into the car compartment only? That way they can listen to their annoying Busta Rhymes as loud as they want without disturbing those of us with good musical taste.
Interesting possibilities...
on
Focusing Audio
·
· Score: 1
Let's say the president of a corporation is giving a speech at a banquet. A disgruntled employee decides to have some fun -- so he brings along his Audio Spotlight and aims it at the president, playing his favorite Hitler speech, while at the same time using another Audio Spotlight aimed at the audience to cancel out the president's actual voice, so that the audience hears nothing but Adolf at his best...
I honestly don't see how this project could possibly succeed. In order to be completely compatible with Windows, they would have to write their own implementation of the Windows Application Programming Interface (API), the set of functions Windows programmers use to interface with Windows' system functions. Microsoft would no doubt sue the pants off anyone trying to rewrite these.
And I don't see how they can get around using the APIs -- how would programs that use Windows API calls operate in this system? Even renaming the function names would require major modifications to all existing source code, and that's still a copyright violation.
So I think this is another case where we will see that Microsoft's claim that they "encourage innovation" is just a load of bunk -- Big Gates will never let anyone "innovate" him out of his prized operating system.
IANAD, but I wouldn't be so quick to blame those effects on stereoscopic imagery in general. I work for a research group at the University of Illinois that does some work with the Cave at the NCSA. The Cave is a virtual reality system that uses stereoscopic imaging on four projection screens that surround the user to create a VR effect. I've never heard of this problem from anyone that's used the system (although some people do get slightly nauseous or feel other side effects after prolonged usage).
I would imagine the side effects you mentioned are HIGHLY dependent on the specific hardware and on the person (just like pretty much anything VR-related).
... I mean, for one thing, selective availability did not introduce *that* big an error margin. But more importantly, for a long time people have been able to reomve selective availability themselves. Many GPS receivers supported a "correction signal" which told the receiver exactly what the current error value was. This signal was available from places like the coast guard and other sites that broadcast it. By catching this signal and feeding it to your GPS, you could get non-SA-accuracy GPS.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Winamp rip CDs ... now?
.wav file.
:-)
As a matter of fact, yes it does. One of the output plugins, Disk Writer, has been included with Winamp for many versions now. Basically it takes the wave data it would've sent to your sound card and sends it instead to a file on the hard disk. This allows you to convert pretty much any format Winamp recognizes (MIDI, CD, etc.) to a
As far as CD burning goes, no out-of-the-box support for that, but I would be surprised if there wasn't a plugin for it somewhere!
Either way, I'll stick with xmms
There are other similar, less abstract arguments to that effect.
For example, there's been some question recently regarding the evolution of the human eye. Classic evolution theory dictates that evolution happens because mutations occur in the gene pool and beneficial mutations survive while harmful mutations die out. But you have certain specific cases of evolution (ie. the human eyeball) that deny this hypothesis.
The human eye is an ENORMOUSLY complicated device. It could not function without every part of the eye being exactly how it is. The lens, the fluid, the rods and cones, the optic nerve -- it all has to work together perfectly for us to be able to see. If only one of these (say, an optic nerve) mutated in, it would not survive because ONLY an optic nerve doesn't help anybody. And the chances of an entire eyeball just 'appearing' out of a mutation is enormously small.
So we're still left with the question of whether or not there is a higher being responsible for these "coincidences." I for one strongly believe in a God, because there are many examples like these that show how a purely deterministic world is just plain unlikely (nearly impossible).
So you're telling me that if we were to gather up all the nuclear weapons posessed by all the countries in the world, and systematically nuked the entire world a few times over, we wouldn't "meddle in Mother Earth's affairs?"
Humans certainly CAN meddle in Mother Earth's affairs. She may recover, providing life in a new form or allowing certain organisms to somehow survive, but have no doubt, humans will not. Our caution (which you describe as "arrogance") is simply an instinct for self-preservation which is posessed my nearly every creature on this planet.
What's more natural than that?
I think the image zooms in and out towards the ends of the animation, making it look like the segment lengths change. I'm pretty sure the lengths remain fixed relative to each other (as this is the sense of the problem.)
The article mentioned the proof was announced last June. Has it just now been verified or announced to the public, or are we late getting the news?
Claims:
/. messaging system and karma whoring!
1. A method of allowing a user to cause to be displayed and stored textual representations of thoughts and comments using dynamically generated online document serving technology, and to allow said user to cause to be displayed textual representations of thoughts and comments previously caused to be stored by other users,
2. A method of allowing a superuser to cause to be maintained a mathematically formulated and documented rating system, consisting of a process assigning to each textual representation of thougts and comments a numeric integer value between -1 and 5 inclusive, indicating an ideally objective value of the thought or comment to other users of the afforementioned process (see Claim 1),
3. A method by which a user may increase or cause to be increased the afforementioned rating by storing textual representations of redundant or otherwise nonuseful information such as hypertext links into stories or articles located on a remote document serving system posted on the message board listed in (1) for the purpose of illiciting the creation and storage of textual representations of thoughts and comments.
In short: the
The article mentioned that the software rendering systems used for this display were proprietary. Why doesn't the company use an already-available rendering system like OpenGL?
OpenGL is already widely used in the scientific visualization community, and it has the advantage of hardware adaptability -- for example, SGI's Cave, mentioned before on Slashdot, uses a library derived from, and directly compatible with, OpenGL. If you have a program already written to use OpenGL it's trivial (as in, adding only a few lines of code) to get the software to work in the Cave.
Having to rewrite major portions of software to support their 'proprietary system' will be a pain (read: expensive). However, having to add only a few lines to your existing OpenGL code to get it to work would make it EXTREMELY desirable for many scientific and even home users.
Looks like I replied to the wrong article! This should have gone on the 'volumetric display' article. Sorry 'bout that!
The article mentioned that the software rendering systems used for this display were proprietary. Why doesn't the company use an already-available rendering system like OpenGL?
OpenGL is already widely used in the scientific visualization community, and it has the advantage of hardware adaptability -- for example, SGI's Cave, mentioned before on Slashdot, uses a library derived from, and directly compatible with, OpenGL. If you have a program already written to use OpenGL, it's trivial (as in, adding only a few lines of code) to get the software to work in the Cave.
Having to rewrite major portions of software to support their 'proprietary system' will be a pain (read: expensive). However, having to add only a few lines to your existing OpenGL code to get it to work would make it EXTREMELY desirable for many scientific and even home users.
... someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't Lynx (the best browser!) had this support since well before 1995?
Even if not, how on Earth is this not an obvious "invention?" Making programs easier to use (which is exactly what this is doing -- allowing the software to add in the http:// or ftp:// for you) has been a common theme of software design since the personal computer was born.
You know, I often wonder who gets employed at the patent office. How does their hiring process work, and what kinds of people do they recruit? They obviously don't have any computer-literate employees, which seems odd since they need knowledgeable people to review the growing surge of computer- and Internet-related patents. If they are hiring computer-literate people, they must not be hiring them from the right place -- maybe they should start going to job fairs at Universities. I, for one, would be happy to have a well-paid opportunity to put a stop to some of this madness.
Just my 2 cents worth...
A few comments on the first problem you mentioned. First of all, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle really doesn't have much to do with the effects that the STM might have on the surfaces. Heisenberg's only says that the more accurately you know the position of a particle, the less accurately you can know its velocity. You're thinking of other postulates in quantum theory.
Anyway, you're right -- of course the reaction wouldn't happen without the STM. The article mentioned the environment was kept at 20 K -- this is far too cold for this reaction to occur naturally. The point of the article is that the did it USING the STM -- meaning they can cause chemical reactions to occur by pushing molecules around. (For those who don't know, using STM tips is a very common method of pushing atoms around on surfaces. The STM is used to actually DO the moving, not just to image it.) This could be a big breakthrough for nanotechnology -- having the ability to very precisely 'engineer' molecules.
For several reasons. First of all, on smaller aircraft, standard altimeters require constant attention from the pilot. The altimeter gets its data from comparing the pressure of the air outside the plane to the pressure of the air on the ground, and then doing some math to figure out the altitude. The problem is that the altimeter has to know what the pressure on the ground is. This is achieved through a small dial on the side of the altimeter that the pilot has to adjust every 15 minutes or so to keep it accurate. As you can imagine, this is prone to error, and added workload for the pilot.
Secondly, standard altimeters have a tendency to break. I've only been flying for a few years and have already run across several dead or dying altimeters that have required me to change my flight plans.
So I think GPS-based altitude (and this GPS system in general) is a long-needed treat for the aviation community. There are a few hurdles that need to be crossed, such as avoiding abuse of the system (I believe someone else already posted about this) and redundancy. But if they can get the flaws worked out of the system on the ground, I for one will be happy to fly with it in the air.
Quantum tunneling isn't a factor in lithographic fabrication, because it doesn't produce features anywhere near small enough to succomb to quantum effects. That's only a concern in quantum computers, and there are researchers who believe quantum tunneling can even be used to our advantage.
Noise and decay can also be fought by standard techniques, but I do suspect that before long we're either going to run into a size barrier using current methods, or at least technology advance will slow to a crawl. The question isn't whether our current fabrication methods will change, but what will take their place...
We have (or rather, had) the same problem here at UIUC. Before the networking guys imposed a 500MB/day transfer limit on each computer in the dorms, a frighteningly large percentage of the campus bandwidth was being used for MP3s. (If I remember correctly the statistic was somewhere around 10%!)
Also amusing is the fact that computers in the dorms here regularly show up higher on the bandwidth usage than ANY of the other machines on campus, including research computers and machines at on-campus organizations such as the NCSA, which does HUGE amounts of data transfer for their computational simulations.
Check out the by-day bandwidth usage statistics here.
I'm not sure if AOL's protocol implements this, but many protocols guard against 'replay attacks' by having the server send some sort of code to the client. The client then performs some "secret" action to the code and sends it back to the server to authenticate that it's a valid client.
Of course, then the problem simply becomes to figure out what the "secret code" is and how to trick the server into thinking you're a valid client... given AOL's security reputation, this probably isn't nearly as difficult as it should be.
Well, the problem is not that the companies are keeping records of credit card numbers. In fact, you're supposed to keep the credit card numbers as part of your transaction records. That way you know who ordered what, for how much, and on what credit card from you in case those records are ever needed.
The problem is that the companies are keeping these records online. Most companies that keep credit card records keep them either on paper (rarely anymore) or on a special computer system not accessible to the outside world. This is what people should be doing, and I can only hope that this Western Union business will set an example for other companies that they need to take their security much more seriously.
When I think of someone being 'snubbed,' I think of some renegade bookie being killed by John Gotti or a murder witness being hunted by the mafia. Fired, not hired -- is this really the word you wanted to use for this story?
Blowing up mars would be quite a feat. Even the most powerful nuclear weapons to date are only big enough to knock chunks of it off.
(And sorry, but designing a device to drill to the core of the planet and detonate the weapons there is orders of magnitude less feasible than Hollywood seems to think it is.)
Better yet, why don't we just engineer car speakers to aim their audio into the car compartment only? That way they can listen to their annoying Busta Rhymes as loud as they want without disturbing those of us with good musical taste.
Let's say the president of a corporation is giving a speech at a banquet. A disgruntled employee decides to have some fun -- so he brings along his Audio Spotlight and aims it at the president, playing his favorite Hitler speech, while at the same time using another Audio Spotlight aimed at the audience to cancel out the president's actual voice, so that the audience hears nothing but Adolf at his best...
I the recent South Park episode (you remember, the one with Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld) said all that needs to be said regarding ritalin.
I honestly don't see how this project could possibly succeed. In order to be completely compatible with Windows, they would have to write their own implementation of the Windows Application Programming Interface (API), the set of functions Windows programmers use to interface with Windows' system functions. Microsoft would no doubt sue the pants off anyone trying to rewrite these.
And I don't see how they can get around using the APIs -- how would programs that use Windows API calls operate in this system? Even renaming the function names would require major modifications to all existing source code, and that's still a copyright violation.
So I think this is another case where we will see that Microsoft's claim that they "encourage innovation" is just a load of bunk -- Big Gates will never let anyone "innovate" him out of his prized operating system.
IANAD, but I wouldn't be so quick to blame those effects on stereoscopic imagery in general. I work for a research group at the University of Illinois that does some work with the Cave at the NCSA. The Cave is a virtual reality system that uses stereoscopic imaging on four projection screens that surround the user to create a VR effect. I've never heard of this problem from anyone that's used the system (although some people do get slightly nauseous or feel other side effects after prolonged usage).
I would imagine the side effects you mentioned are HIGHLY dependent on the specific hardware and on the person (just like pretty much anything VR-related).
... one step closer to a giant space-Big-Boy.
"It's frickin' freezing in here, Mr. Bigglesworth..."
... I mean, for one thing, selective availability did not introduce *that* big an error margin. But more importantly, for a long time people have been able to reomve selective availability themselves. Many GPS receivers supported a "correction signal" which told the receiver exactly what the current error value was. This signal was available from places like the coast guard and other sites that broadcast it. By catching this signal and feeding it to your GPS, you could get non-SA-accuracy GPS.
So have things really changed that much?
Come now, let's not be too hypocritical:
.
OS == Operating system.
NIC == Network interface card.
TCP == Transmission control protocol.
ARP == Address resolution protocol.
. .
"Why can't we just say those?"