Probably, a better HD-replacement solution would be based on MRAM, which is being steadily developed and is going to become available quite soon (the article linked mentions late 2004).
The real problem is defining and describing context. Most people won't carefully and meaningfully tag their files, etc, because it's a time-consuming and brain-straining task. That's where AI could shine, if it would only be able to divine such descriptions from context -- with tolerable (near zero) error rate. Maybe in 10-20 years...:-)
I work for a big multinational company (based half in US, half in Europe). I live in Russia and develop software for it (nothing too fancy, though). My immediate business supervisors are in Ireland, many of my colleagues I closely work with are in France and UK. A thick enough intranet link, instant messaging, email and ocassional IP phone calls work very well to keep us in touch with one another. Commuting from my home to Moscow office takes 20 to 40 mins.
We do have local managers that take care about workplaces, office, etc, and local sysadmins -- but my project's head is 3000km away and it's no problem. Higher-level managers show up in different sites several times a year to meet people face to face.
If moving most of development and support to this scheme is any indication, this approach works:)
I would not like to work directly from home as much, because of more distractions -- I tried this for several months.
The original post says:
I am attempting to find out the following: what international agreements govern spectrum management; what international agreements govern licensing of WiFi or 802.11; and finally, are there any Slashdot readers out there who live in countries where 802.11 technology is also licensed or heavily regulated?
That's where people from places other than St. Lucia (including, but not limited to readers from US) could help. Possibly, such people would share some advice on how well did they fare in similar circumstances. That is, not help with interpretation of St. Lucia law (which can hardly be expected), but with ways of approaching local authorities, info about relevant international treaties, etc.
To defeat terrorists through their IT infrastructure, do the following.
1) Encourage them to pirate closed-source software; make them as dependent on it as possible. Make them despise open source software.
2) Deny them any tech support for the software, on the grounds of it being pirated; via other channels, persuade them that they do not actually need thech support, because modern GUIs do not require experienced administrators.
3) Watch their plots spectacularly crash because of software glitches.
Let's take a 'half-dead' project whose members reject your code. Assume that the project allows a reasonable open fork to be made (GPL allows this). Well, take their code, mention them in credits, and set up your own project, add your valuable code, submit it to freshmeat.net. Voila, we have one more improved project. And then -- don't forget to accept patches from other people:-) Understand them, include them in code you know and like, make them work, etc -- it's not easy, but that's what it takes to be a project leader.
AFAIK, wind turbines generate considerable low-frequency noise. Unless this problem is seriously addressed, such a building would be somehow uncomfortable.
Though, wind flowing through a thight agglomeration of skyscrapers generates noise anyway %-)
There are several games where you write code in some language to control a robot that fights another robot, programmed is the same language.
Now, imagine a beow... ooops, a game where you first choose the language for the control program. Fight java-controlled bot with perl-controlled bot, lisp-controlled bot, python-controlled bot, etc. By this, the ultimate winners of language holy wars can be determined in most apparent way:)
The bots should be equipped with a flamethrower, of course:)
If phones had decent and available SDKs, as Palms do, we would have some useful user-written software for them, as we do for Palms. Alas, cell phone designs change much faster (or it seems so). Also, producers use same hardware for several models, enabling and disabling features in software. So, having an SDK or just decent specs may lead to conversion of cheap model to its more expensive and able brother just by upgrading software. (Remember the USR Sportster to Courier thing?)
Let's hope that using embedded java will lead us to some standard for phone software. Anyway, by the time when all phones will have java onboard, most of them will be PDAs anyway.
Most people don't work just to feel the sheer excitement from using bleeding edge, most-powerful-ever-created tools. They have a task in hand and need it done with reasonable convenience. And get paid. If they can save a lot of money, or even a bit of money, by using Free (or just free) software, it's what they need and appreciate. Now GPL'd applications (it's application that matters) achieved a level of usability comparable to pricey commercial analogs. So, financially constrained users (and gov't is always financially constrained) naturally ponder if they can switch.
Of course, openness, peer-review, co-development, etc are also nice and important, but do not underestimate the money factor. If getting the source costed extra money (as it was back in 70's), most people would anyway accept the cheaper solution.
What we have seen 10 yrs ago? Last-generation hardware being used for servers. Now we see newer and better software running on older hardware designs (e. g. S/390). Do the math. Next generation of even more powerful software will run on even older (yet refurbished) hardware designs: expect Linux 4.x run on 8192 processor UNIVAC, with 5.0 kernel for 50GHz ENIAC in the works.
A developed enough technology is indistinguishable from magic. As Blizzard technology achieved this level recently, it worked like magic. All items magically disappeared. Nobody promised that a mature technology works like good magic;-)
There are several questions to be answered before I use something like such bacteria.
Would not these bacteria proliferate too much?:-) That is, I'd dislike my shirt to become visibly spotted with a bacterial colony in the place of a sweat stain. With bacterial attitude to multiply exponentially, this can be an issue. Also, when such 'on-the-spot' colonies then die out to 'normal' concentration, they should not leave something wrong. Happily, AFAIK, most bacteria 'corpses' decay without smell or hazardous proteins.
How will the bacteria survive washing, esp. with those 'bio' detergents, and ironing? Surely, bacteria population will be severely oppressed by this, if not killed completely. So, clothes owner will either feed the bacteria somehow (sprinkle sugar solution over a freshly-washed shirt, anyone?) or wait some time before bacteria restore normal concentration and start to work, or maybe even apply them to the clothes again. Also, if bacteria died out on some spot of your clothes (where your iron was occasionally stopped for a moment), how long will it take for them to get there again? How mobile should they be, then?
If bacteria are noticeably mobile, would not they eventually populate your other clothes? (This can be seen as a positive effect, though.)
And, of course, how is it guaranteed that the bacteria will produce odourless (and non-hazardous) products only, as intended? Small genetic deviations are inevitable, as thousands of generations of bacteria evolve. JFYI, sweat itself is near odourless, it is microbial organisms that live in armpits that produce smelly substances out of it. And, to make one feel an odour, it takes very small quantity of molecules; to destroy the odour, near all these molecules are to be caught and destroyed. That is, it takes significantly less effort (and bacteria) to produce an odour than to destroy it.
Where such bacteria could make real sense is one-time non-fabric underwear and such -- I heard that in Japan it is a usual thing.
A spray that contain these bacteria in inactive state, that can be used on any clothes (or a car seat, or whatever) could be much more practical.
A genetic mechanism that forces the bacteria to die after, say, 1e+5 generations, can be seen as a reasonable safety measure, too.
Oracle gives free trial DB software that does not moan about it being trial version, leave alone refusing to work after evaluation period ends. Once I had trial version of Oracle7.1 to work for 3 or so years flawlessly %-)) I don't know if release 9i follows the suit, but 8i certainly does. So you can try and test it all you want; be sure to do it. It runs nice on Linux/x86, especially if you tune it right (see Red Hat Enterprise Edition for an example -- it makes Oracle fly, believe me). On Sun hardware under Solaris, it runs particularily good.
Oracle DB has great performance. But to gain it, one should spend some time reading, thinking and poking -- and things start to work *many times* faster. So, consider a DBA position for your site. Anyway, to run a large and complex distributed DB it *takes* to hire a DBA, which is expensive.
Let's have just 5 buttons for all fingers of one hand. It gives 31 "chords" to produce 31 characters (32-th all-off chord should not generate a symbol). Add 6th button for mode switch (akin of num lock) and you have 62 characters -- enough for Latin alphabet (upcase only), 10 digits, punctuation and things like cursor movement.
Such an array on 6 buttons could be perfect for one-hand use and small devices, just the size to conveniently fit in a hand. Text entry speed can be quite high, provided that chords are designed carefully and logically. This does not take unusual hardware, too. Of course, learning curve for such a thing is much steeper that for conventional keyboard, because there is no visual clue what chord would produce which character.
I heard of such a thing being successfully used in military aircraft -- arguably, a fighter jet pilot cannot sacrifice both hands for rapid data entry and would hate to move hands too much at several g's. If it may prove useful in consumer electronics, is more doubtful:-)
If that man was not completely mad (an arguable point, I see), he must have been paid a bit more than what he has been getting on cash prizes, but this extra money to be put on his bank account, not accessible during the show.
Or would anyone like to willingly try to survive such a way without a fat reward afterwards? 'Publicity' does not count -- being seen naked and hungry amongst piles of papers on TV is a doubtful addition to a resume, imho.
The really sad part of the whole story is that the show had enough audience to last for a year.
The effects of 'nuclear winter' after massive nuclear warfare may kill much more than just mankind, since most forests will die in few years without a summer and then ocean life will collapse, too. This leaves virtually no room for highly-organized life as we know it, because oxygen concentration in the air drops dramatically without green plants, and low temperatures make most of now-flourishing regions deserts. Anaerobic forms of life still have good chances to survive, but all of those are very primitive.
Why not to try to write a tool for automated tranlation of HTML or Info to (less rich) troff format? Surely this process is less obvious than the reverse. For HTML, it may take following hyperlinks and aggregating several html files together if they are too small to make separate man entry. Index man page (a la perl's) may be needed for bigger document sets.
While the goal seems achievable, I wonder if anybody would care to actually write appropriate code %-)
Let server stir some known info into the unprocessed data chunk before it goes to the client. Say, 0.1% of 'checked' data and 99.9% of real, 'unchecked' data. The client must be unable to distinguish checked and unchecked data. The server side knows how processed checked data should look, by having processed it before sending. After the client's results are received, server compares checked data, and if it looks right, the whole processed chunk is accepted.
Of course, this approach is only useful when data chunks can be 'sliced' thinly enough to add checked data at random positions, and makes server to process checked data. Even with happy 1/1000 ratio of checked/unchecked data, it takes considerable amount of computing power on the server to run it (20x as powerful as an average client for 2e+4 clients). This approach tends to make chunks bigger, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry to spoil poster's joy, but aren't these and
these folks already selling such devices for many months, if not years?
Probably, a better HD-replacement solution would be based on MRAM, which is being steadily developed and is going to become available quite soon (the article linked mentions late 2004).
How come that a typical 4-diode rectifier bridge is not used there? It accepts AC on both half-waves.
>after watching your favorite sitcoms
:)
read '...instead of watching...'.
With this, the device becomes truly useful
The real problem is defining and describing context. Most people won't carefully and meaningfully tag their files, etc, because it's a time-consuming and brain-straining task. That's where AI could shine, if it would only be able to divine such descriptions from context -- with tolerable (near zero) error rate. Maybe in 10-20 years... :-)
I work for a big multinational company (based half in US, half in Europe). I live in Russia and develop software for it (nothing too fancy, though). My immediate business supervisors are in Ireland, many of my colleagues I closely work with are in France and UK. A thick enough intranet link, instant messaging, email and ocassional IP phone calls work very well to keep us in touch with one another. Commuting from my home to Moscow office takes 20 to 40 mins.
:)
We do have local managers that take care about workplaces, office, etc, and local sysadmins -- but my project's head is 3000km away and it's no problem. Higher-level managers show up in different sites several times a year to meet people face to face.
If moving most of development and support to this scheme is any indication, this approach works
I would not like to work directly from home as much, because of more distractions -- I tried this for several months.
The original post says:
I am attempting to find out the following: what international agreements govern spectrum management; what international agreements govern licensing of WiFi or 802.11; and finally, are there any Slashdot readers out there who live in countries where 802.11 technology is also licensed or heavily regulated?
That's where people from places other than St. Lucia (including, but not limited to readers from US) could help. Possibly, such people would share some advice on how well did they fare in similar circumstances. That is, not help with interpretation of St. Lucia law (which can hardly be expected), but with ways of approaching local authorities, info about relevant international treaties, etc.
To defeat terrorists through their IT infrastructure, do the following.
1) Encourage them to pirate closed-source software; make them as dependent on it as possible. Make them despise open source software.
2) Deny them any tech support for the software, on the grounds of it being pirated; via other channels, persuade them that they do not actually need thech support, because modern GUIs do not require experienced administrators.
3) Watch their plots spectacularly crash because of software glitches.
64 kbps can be useful for internet broadcasting, etc. Not the most important use now, agreed.
As for me, at 160 and 192 kbps ogg is better than mp3, and it does not take a sound expert to hear the difference: it is not negligible.
While CORBA may be a necessary evil, Swing is a hog even on an average over-powered desktop PC, and using it on a handheld would be just crazy.
Let's take a 'half-dead' project whose members reject your code. Assume that the project allows a reasonable open fork to be made (GPL allows this). Well, take their code, mention them in credits, and set up your own project, add your valuable code, submit it to freshmeat.net. Voila, we have one more improved project. And then -- don't forget to accept patches from other people :-) Understand them, include them in code you know and like, make them work, etc -- it's not easy, but that's what it takes to be a project leader.
AFAIK, wind turbines generate considerable low-frequency noise. Unless this problem is seriously addressed, such a building would be somehow uncomfortable.
Though, wind flowing through a thight agglomeration of skyscrapers generates noise anyway %-)
There are several games where you write code in some language to control a robot that fights another robot, programmed is the same language.
:)
:)
Now, imagine a beow... ooops, a game where you first choose the language for the control program. Fight java-controlled bot with perl-controlled bot, lisp-controlled bot, python-controlled bot, etc. By this, the ultimate winners of language holy wars can be determined in most apparent way
The bots should be equipped with a flamethrower, of course
If phones had decent and available SDKs, as Palms do, we would have some useful user-written software for them, as we do for Palms. Alas, cell phone designs change much faster (or it seems so). Also, producers use same hardware for several models, enabling and disabling features in software. So, having an SDK or just decent specs may lead to conversion of cheap model to its more expensive and able brother just by upgrading software. (Remember the USR Sportster to Courier thing?)
Let's hope that using embedded java will lead us to some standard for phone software. Anyway, by the time when all phones will have java onboard, most of them will be PDAs anyway.
Most people don't work just to feel the sheer excitement from using bleeding edge, most-powerful-ever-created tools. They have a task in hand and need it done with reasonable convenience. And get paid. If they can save a lot of money, or even a bit of money, by using Free (or just free) software, it's what they need and appreciate. Now GPL'd applications (it's application that matters) achieved a level of usability comparable to pricey commercial analogs. So, financially constrained users (and gov't is always financially constrained) naturally ponder if they can switch.
Of course, openness, peer-review, co-development, etc are also nice and important, but do not underestimate the money factor. If getting the source costed extra money (as it was back in 70's), most people would anyway accept the cheaper solution.
What we have seen 10 yrs ago? Last-generation hardware being used for servers. Now we see newer and better software running on older hardware designs (e. g. S/390). Do the math. Next generation of even more powerful software will run on even older (yet refurbished) hardware designs: expect Linux 4.x run on 8192 processor UNIVAC, with 5.0 kernel for 50GHz ENIAC in the works.
A developed enough technology is indistinguishable from magic. As Blizzard technology achieved this level recently, it worked like magic. All items magically disappeared. Nobody promised that a mature technology works like good magic ;-)
Where such bacteria could make real sense is one-time non-fabric underwear and such -- I heard that in Japan it is a usual thing.
A spray that contain these bacteria in inactive state, that can be used on any clothes (or a car seat, or whatever) could be much more practical.
A genetic mechanism that forces the bacteria to die after, say, 1e+5 generations, can be seen as a reasonable safety measure, too.
Oracle DB has great performance. But to gain it, one should spend some time reading, thinking and poking -- and things start to work *many times* faster. So, consider a DBA position for your site. Anyway, to run a large and complex distributed DB it *takes* to hire a DBA, which is expensive.
Though, very same things may apply to DB2 :-)
If police already fines speeders that rent a car, why Acme should fine them? If police don't, Acme just has to re-word the contract :-)
Anyway, using GPS in cars is nice. Much nicer than enforce non-speeding by remotely controlling car engine, as was proposed in the UK.
(just trying to make a fp worthy ;-)
Such an array on 6 buttons could be perfect for one-hand use and small devices, just the size to conveniently fit in a hand. Text entry speed can be quite high, provided that chords are designed carefully and logically. This does not take unusual hardware, too. Of course, learning curve for such a thing is much steeper that for conventional keyboard, because there is no visual clue what chord would produce which character.
I heard of such a thing being successfully used in military aircraft -- arguably, a fighter jet pilot cannot sacrifice both hands for rapid data entry and would hate to move hands too much at several g's. If it may prove useful in consumer electronics, is more doubtful :-)
Or would anyone like to willingly try to survive such a way without a fat reward afterwards? 'Publicity' does not count -- being seen naked and hungry amongst piles of papers on TV is a doubtful addition to a resume, imho.
The really sad part of the whole story is that the show had enough audience to last for a year.
The effects of 'nuclear winter' after massive nuclear warfare may kill much more than just mankind, since most forests will die in few years without a summer and then ocean life will collapse, too. This leaves virtually no room for highly-organized life as we know it, because oxygen concentration in the air drops dramatically without green plants, and low temperatures make most of now-flourishing regions deserts. Anaerobic forms of life still have good chances to survive, but all of those are very primitive.
Why not to try to write a tool for automated tranlation of HTML or Info to (less rich) troff format? Surely this process is less obvious than the reverse. For HTML, it may take following hyperlinks and aggregating several html files together if they are too small to make separate man entry. Index man page (a la perl's) may be needed for bigger document sets. While the goal seems achievable, I wonder if anybody would care to actually write appropriate code %-)
Of course, this approach is only useful when data chunks can be 'sliced' thinly enough to add checked data at random positions, and makes server to process checked data. Even with happy 1/1000 ratio of checked/unchecked data, it takes considerable amount of computing power on the server to run it (20x as powerful as an average client for 2e+4 clients). This approach tends to make chunks bigger, too.