That system is quite common in Sweden too (not all banks use it, but most). Also, the "calculator" is normally being protected by a PIN code, adding an extra layer of security. At least at my bank, you even have a third code to login to the online banking service. The "calculator" only is for making non-preapproved transfers (ie ones to accounts that aren't yours). Ie you can check your account balance without bringing it, but you can't transfer money.
In Germany (doing an exchange year here), it seems to be different though. Most banks seems to use a system with one-time (paper) codes. Less security indeed - the one time codes don't have password protection on them...
No, it doesn't. Graphics Card: Intel 855GME. I specifically asked for a separate hardware graphics, with its own memory. Not an integrated Intel craptastic one.
Thanks for the job, I don't accept it though. When I said 12" I wanted a 12". That was the important feature. Nothing else. And you skimp it.
15" inch PC laptops are a lot more common (I know where to find really great deals for just a little more money than the iBook in the 15" PC segment myself). They aren't interesting for the segment of the market considering the 12" iBook though. With PC laptops, "less is more" holds. The smaller they are, the more they cost, typically. 12" PC laptops easily go for more than $2000...
Choosing a 15" means you are going to lose a lot of portability - the smaller it is, the lighter it will also be (no jokes about me don't having any muscles please - you want room for 2-3+ heavy coursebooks and lecture notes in that rucksack too).
My second concern: That is a P4 laptop. The P4 isn't really usable for laptop systems. It's far too power hungry - giving bad battery times, noisy and heavy cooling construction. Most P4 laptops are more luggables than portables. Compare that with a 2.3 kg iBook, which at normal workload is passively cooled - only giving away sounds from the harddrive... BTW - shouldn't we nerds be using cool (pun partly intended) Pentium M systems nowadays if using a PC???:)
I do agree with you. The laptops are a lot more price competitive than the desktops, ie the grandgrandparent's suggestion of the iMac was IMHO a little bit unfortunate - I don't see it as an interesting platform. A PowerMac would be - but even more so a dual Opteron monster machine - and that's in about the same price range...
That IS indeed a violation of both the GPL and most copyright laws.
It's a violation of the GPL because it doesn't allow you replacing copyright notices so as to make the program look made by someone else.
For reference, GPL 2c:
c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
perhaps they could just have a BitTorrent client that is more likely to pick slices of a file to share that aren't widely shared yet, this would seem to be much more effective and less processor intensive.
As far as I know, that is already standard procedure with standard protocol implementing clients...
If you want to have a hooting good time, make addition inconsistent for someone. A certain high-level scientific interpreted language that I shall not name has the ability for users to overload standard mathematical functions. I.e., you can write a "plus" function that includes a random number, so that every time a user executes "a+b" your function will be handed "a" and "b" and the return from your function will be used in the next operation. I suggest if you do this that you do it only on a small fraction of the calculations, and you return an integer result, since this language uses "plus" for calculating array indices and is very unhappy when you try to access the 1.23'rd element of the array.
You don't even have to go to programming for this. There are certain algebras, who redefine addition as well as multiplication. The most well known would probably be the boolean one... Vector and matrix algebra actually change it too, but that could more be seen as "adding" (no pun intended, I think) to the old definition.
Hundreds of different ways to move large quantities of money from point A to point B for corporations providing services of questionable benefit to mankind. Just thinking of developing one of these suckers makes me want to kill myself with joy.
Only if you get to move large amount of money from A to B, except a small amount going to C (your account).
If not, I'll happily keep my embedded system projects, thank you.
The same situation of course applies to shared components too, not just web browsers.
I also gave some typical examples for "monolithic" packages that just don't work. Would you want three installations of apache+mysql+php just because you installed Gallery, phpmyadmin and a content management system? I guess not, and there are lots of other examples with more "traditional" examples. Basically, the Unix philosophy doesn't work that way...
Actually, that's not really the problem, it would actually be wanted sometimes (eg a web developer having both FF1.0 and FF1.1 installed for compability checks).
The problem is, when you have none of them installed, stuff won't work anymore. And there are cases where packing absolutely everything together in one executable is just silly (gallery, phpmyadmin, content management systems, which all have dependancies to mysql, apache, mod_php, lots of other stuff).
Actually, lots of the reason Windows and Mac OS X get away without using package management is that both of them have a culture with a lot more of monolithic executables, with lot less updates to them. Basically, there haven't been any big need.
Ah, coder? Do you have good knowledge of math too? Then YOU could possibly make the breakthrough in 3D Computer Vision.
I'm studying a course in 3D Computer Vision right now, at TUHH. It's part of the Erasmus exchange program I'm having here - the eigth and last semester (excluding the thesiswork) of my master of engineering in automation and mechatronics at Chalmers in Gothenburg. I can easily say this course is the most difficult one of all I've been taking for all of my study time, hopefully the three weeks I have between that exam and the last of my others, will be enough to learn what doesn't stay in my head during the lectures...
In fact, I have the course book right beside me. To begin, the description of it would be more or less along the lines "an orgy in linear algebra, mathematical statistics, with some flavouring of image processing, geometry, optimization and algorithms". Basically, it's 30-40% mathematical formulas, 650 pages, some containing things not even all MSc even learn like tensor notations etc. Not something I'm even sure is a good thing to recommend to very many slashdotters, even. You'll get its name though - "Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision", by Hartley & Zisserman. ISBN 0-521-54051-8.
What I see as problems in the book, is that almost everything is working on corner detection. This is great, if you want to make 3D-models of houses or other man-made objects (at least half of the examples in the book are architectural, I would say). It's not so great if you want to image bushes, rocks and other things with not so obvious corners on them. Also, the process involves quite heavy processing - both image processing, finding all those corners, statistical processing (to sort out outliers, which there will be), and optimization to find the best fitting backprojection of the image planes). I don't have a sure grip on the needed processing power but I doubt, when considering realtime demands in a car, that it'll hardly be easy to get it working.
Also, it's still to a big deal itself an area under research. The situation with using 5+ images (from different cameras och just consecutive images from the same, moved camera), isn't very well known. Using more images, of course would mean a bigger chance to get a decent 3D model of the scene...
And still, you would at least need two cameras to do anything useful. You can't reconstruct 3D space without having at least two images of the object to reconstruct. And probably you will need more - you would probably want to reconstruct all the way around (ie more cameras on the sides and backwards), and add extra sensors like radar etc for extra checks.
And then you really haven't solved the problem of driving the car. You have only built a decent mapping of the 3D surroundings of it. You have to add AI/some kind of steering logic, which only in itself is a demanding task. Just look at all FPS games out there - if it would be easy to construct good AI, with a known 3D-world, tailormade for the figures, would we really be seeing that many games with crap-AI? I'm happy I ain't taking an AI course too, for sure!
I would much rather see a dual dualcore Opteron. Or even a single dualcore A64. That would surely beat the crap out of the Xeons - which still are singlecore...
Even if it's hardware level, the emulating chips can't do magic. For example, the PPC has more registers than at least 32-bit x86.
Making obvious extrapolations that are too far-fetching - no matter what, you won't be able to emulate a G5 with one Pentium Pro, no matter what you do.
In normal english, "emulation". What makes their product so much better than all other emulators on the market? Like PearPC, or VirtualPC. Heck, I even sometimes have skimps etc when running RockNES!
Basically, I'm dismissing that as marketroidish bullshit lies, until proven wrong.
I also thought about this afterwards - but even though they do - there's still a quite big loophole. Case studies are in general made with a statistical sample of the population. There's no way to use statistics to proof something about the whole population (that's actually the purpose of statistics - to get some knowledge about the probable (but not sure) fact, when the population is inpractically big, or even infinite.
Imagine the defence claims, that of whatever reason, their client is different (ie atypical, and thereby not covered by the statistical sample in a good way). Imagine the defence claiming taking some weird unusual medication tripping of the meter. That would basically mean the manufacturer of the device had to do special case studies for each and every defendant trying the defence out, under the special conditions that apply to them. Of course, it they do want to do that, no problem with me.
On none at all actually, I just suppose they are working properly. And also, I think there would be a pretty big number of "speeders" wanting attention of the public, if most of the radar guns were making really faulty measurements.
It is an interesting question. How DO the public know, eg in court, if evidence gathered by using widgets, really is accurate, if not getting access to the knowledge of how the widget works? The radar gun might have construction flaws etc. There have also been several cases of red light cameras taking photos on green etc (because of erratic setup). Or the cases where a speeding camera claimed a garbage van driving at 120 km/h. Specificated top speed was 90 or something like that...
There should be a possibility to check evidence in court (conspiracy theories go here - red light camera manufacturers doing image processing and shooting your car every time it passes based on the plates), even where containing theories of possible in the technology used for evidence gathering, yet still there is a problem with any speeddriving idiot claiming "we don't know how the radar gun work - your evidence doesn't count". Certainly, most of the radar guns are working totally correctly...
Size? Than you're speaking about bigscreens et al?
"Widescreen" only has to do with the width/height-ratio - a widescreen is a screen that is significantly wider than it's high.
Slashdot Mirror
In Germany (doing an exchange year here), it seems to be different though. Most banks seems to use a system with one-time (paper) codes. Less security indeed - the one time codes don't have password protection on them...
Especially when you post links to it on Slashdot... *laughs evilly*
No, it doesn't. Graphics Card: Intel 855GME. I specifically asked for a separate hardware graphics, with its own memory. Not an integrated Intel craptastic one.
15" inch PC laptops are a lot more common (I know where to find really great deals for just a little more money than the iBook in the 15" PC segment myself). They aren't interesting for the segment of the market considering the 12" iBook though. With PC laptops, "less is more" holds. The smaller they are, the more they cost, typically. 12" PC laptops easily go for more than $2000...
Choosing a 15" means you are going to lose a lot of portability - the smaller it is, the lighter it will also be (no jokes about me don't having any muscles please - you want room for 2-3+ heavy coursebooks and lecture notes in that rucksack too).
My second concern: That is a P4 laptop. The P4 isn't really usable for laptop systems. It's far too power hungry - giving bad battery times, noisy and heavy cooling construction. Most P4 laptops are more luggables than portables. Compare that with a 2.3 kg iBook, which at normal workload is passively cooled - only giving away sounds from the harddrive... BTW - shouldn't we nerds be using cool (pun partly intended) Pentium M systems nowadays if using a PC??? :)
I do agree with you. The laptops are a lot more price competitive than the desktops, ie the grandgrandparent's suggestion of the iMac was IMHO a little bit unfortunate - I don't see it as an interesting platform. A PowerMac would be - but even more so a dual Opteron monster machine - and that's in about the same price range...
Actually, try to find me a 12" PC laptop, with a competitive price compared to the iBook. And a separate graphics chip with own memory is a demand.
c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
Happens in Sweden too. A "free-style" is what in english is known as a walkman. (Though they're aren't very popular anymore, /. says...)
As far as I know, that is already standard procedure with standard protocol implementing clients...
Even if they don't mind AMD using them, what about all other companies?
You don't even have to go to programming for this. There are certain algebras, who redefine addition as well as multiplication. The most well known would probably be the boolean one... Vector and matrix algebra actually change it too, but that could more be seen as "adding" (no pun intended, I think) to the old definition.
Only if you get to move large amount of money from A to B, except a small amount going to C (your account).
If not, I'll happily keep my embedded system projects, thank you.
Actually, I would prefer a big nice Wacom tablet (expensive one) for doing graphics. Right tool for the job...
I also gave some typical examples for "monolithic" packages that just don't work. Would you want three installations of apache+mysql+php just because you installed Gallery, phpmyadmin and a content management system? I guess not, and there are lots of other examples with more "traditional" examples. Basically, the Unix philosophy doesn't work that way...
Actually, that's not really the problem, it would actually be wanted sometimes (eg a web developer having both FF1.0 and FF1.1 installed for compability checks).
The problem is, when you have none of them installed, stuff won't work anymore. And there are cases where packing absolutely everything together in one executable is just silly (gallery, phpmyadmin, content management systems, which all have dependancies to mysql, apache, mod_php, lots of other stuff).
Actually, lots of the reason Windows and Mac OS X get away without using package management is that both of them have a culture with a lot more of monolithic executables, with lot less updates to them. Basically, there haven't been any big need.
I'm studying a course in 3D Computer Vision right now, at TUHH. It's part of the Erasmus exchange program I'm having here - the eigth and last semester (excluding the thesiswork) of my master of engineering in automation and mechatronics at Chalmers in Gothenburg. I can easily say this course is the most difficult one of all I've been taking for all of my study time, hopefully the three weeks I have between that exam and the last of my others, will be enough to learn what doesn't stay in my head during the lectures...
In fact, I have the course book right beside me. To begin, the description of it would be more or less along the lines "an orgy in linear algebra, mathematical statistics, with some flavouring of image processing, geometry, optimization and algorithms". Basically, it's 30-40% mathematical formulas, 650 pages, some containing things not even all MSc even learn like tensor notations etc. Not something I'm even sure is a good thing to recommend to very many slashdotters, even. You'll get its name though - "Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision", by Hartley & Zisserman. ISBN 0-521-54051-8.
What I see as problems in the book, is that almost everything is working on corner detection. This is great, if you want to make 3D-models of houses or other man-made objects (at least half of the examples in the book are architectural, I would say). It's not so great if you want to image bushes, rocks and other things with not so obvious corners on them. Also, the process involves quite heavy processing - both image processing, finding all those corners, statistical processing (to sort out outliers, which there will be), and optimization to find the best fitting backprojection of the image planes). I don't have a sure grip on the needed processing power but I doubt, when considering realtime demands in a car, that it'll hardly be easy to get it working.
Also, it's still to a big deal itself an area under research. The situation with using 5+ images (from different cameras och just consecutive images from the same, moved camera), isn't very well known. Using more images, of course would mean a bigger chance to get a decent 3D model of the scene...
And still, you would at least need two cameras to do anything useful. You can't reconstruct 3D space without having at least two images of the object to reconstruct. And probably you will need more - you would probably want to reconstruct all the way around (ie more cameras on the sides and backwards), and add extra sensors like radar etc for extra checks.
And then you really haven't solved the problem of driving the car. You have only built a decent mapping of the 3D surroundings of it. You have to add AI/some kind of steering logic, which only in itself is a demanding task. Just look at all FPS games out there - if it would be easy to construct good AI, with a known 3D-world, tailormade for the figures, would we really be seeing that many games with crap-AI? I'm happy I ain't taking an AI course too, for sure!
I would much rather see a dual dualcore Opteron. Or even a single dualcore A64. That would surely beat the crap out of the Xeons - which still are singlecore...
Making obvious extrapolations that are too far-fetching - no matter what, you won't be able to emulate a G5 with one Pentium Pro, no matter what you do.
Basically, I'm dismissing that as marketroidish bullshit lies, until proven wrong.
Imagine the defence claims, that of whatever reason, their client is different (ie atypical, and thereby not covered by the statistical sample in a good way). Imagine the defence claiming taking some weird unusual medication tripping of the meter. That would basically mean the manufacturer of the device had to do special case studies for each and every defendant trying the defence out, under the special conditions that apply to them. Of course, it they do want to do that, no problem with me.
On none at all actually, I just suppose they are working properly. And also, I think there would be a pretty big number of "speeders" wanting attention of the public, if most of the radar guns were making really faulty measurements.
There should be a possibility to check evidence in court (conspiracy theories go here - red light camera manufacturers doing image processing and shooting your car every time it passes based on the plates), even where containing theories of possible in the technology used for evidence gathering, yet still there is a problem with any speeddriving idiot claiming "we don't know how the radar gun work - your evidence doesn't count". Certainly, most of the radar guns are working totally correctly...
Size? Than you're speaking about bigscreens et al? "Widescreen" only has to do with the width/height-ratio - a widescreen is a screen that is significantly wider than it's high.
Seems like they're skimping on (320-234)*480 = 86*480 = 41280 pixels then.
Unless, accidentally, 480 / 234 ~= 2.something...
Not unless IKEA starts manufacturing them too? :)