The advantage to systems like Ricochet is that they are designed expressly for the purpose of wide-area deployment - unlike 802.11 solutions, which seem better suited to system-system connections. Wireless networks using WiFi solutions are kind of like using a ton of bandaids to cover an area - where Ricochet seems more like a large roll of gauze.
That's the beauty of open source - you can reinvent the wheel as many times as you want. Yo leave it up to the end use to pick the wheel that rolls the best.
All this video did (besides impress me to the point of breathlessness) is reinforce the need for a cheap, reuseable launch vehicle. Watching 80% of the rocket fall away in stages - all those millions of dollars in raw materials - just goes to show how wasteful our current launch systems are. Even the shuttle sheds a large part of itself soon after launch - not to mention the fact that the shuttles are aging, inefficient behemoths that deserve a proper rest. We need to develop a fully reusable, inexpensive, efficient launch vehicle. No, there isn't any oil in space, and yes, it is terribly expensive to retrieve raw materials from off our planet, but the value of such a craft cannot be measured in dollars or tons - its value instead is found in the history books of the future, proclaiming it the first step in bringing the stars to our doorstep.
Let's further fragment and complicate the internet in the name of our children's safety!!
Christ - the problem of protecting children from offensive or adult content lies with the parents, not one some new-fangled US legislation. Educate your children, monitor their internet usage, but for goodness sakes, do NOT lock them into a pisspoor subset of the internet - a new domain suffix is NOT a suitable substitute for responsible adult supervision.
Christ... by my rough calculations, you could hold 8,000-10,000 full albums on that sucker, if we assume that you have about 14 tracks on an album, with each track being about 4 megs. That's an ungodly amount of music - sometimes these little "comments" people add to their stories just irritate me. They seem to exist solely for the wannabe geek factor... I can almost see the submitter thinking, "Hey, what additional comments can I add that will *impress* people? I'm a geek too, right?"
Re:Cost not MPG is what people use.
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2
That's very true, even here on the west coast of Canada, its the same thing (I get 500 kms with $30 of gas). But what if the price of gas doubles tomorrow? And how do I compare with you, for example? I know that fuel is terribly expensive in Europe, so your £25 buys considerably less than my CDN$50 (approximate exchange). On the other hand, a litre is always a litre, a kilometre always a kilometre, a mile is a mile, etc.
It can be wirelessly connected to your home Internet connection, has a built-in camera...
So anyone with a bit of knowhow (or the right script) could potentially hijack this device to watch ladies change, or to observe someone punching in an alarm code, or whatever else their devious little minds might come up with? I really like the idea of Canadian robots, and having connected devices is pretty neat as well - but the internet is inherently insecure, and I just don't know if I'd feel comfortable with a little camera running around watching me all day when the possibility exists that someone could access it.
In that case, I'd like to assert my own patent on 'a physical system for selecting and obtaining a variety of goods and services' and 'a electronically assisted, human-run data-processing system for processing business and financial transactions between entities at a physical location.'"
It never ceases to amaze me that amateur science enthusiasts are building stuff like that - from the home-made tesla coil of a few weeks ago, to home-built rockets capable of low orbit... it just blows me away. Granted, the devices they build are generally years, if not decades behind the "cutting edge", but the fact that average people can take a sound scientific principle and turn it into something physical for a handful of bills is wonderful. It is people like these that foster innovation and growth in the sciences - not multi-billion dollar research conglomerates. These DIY tinkerers are what science is all about - it is science for the sake of science, and by extension, for the sake of the world! They do it because they are passionate about what they are doing - not for the fame, or the fortune. It was politics and economics that made the decision to put a man on the moon - it is people like this that got us there.
Of course the financial community is starting to "get" open source software. It makes perfect sense that a group of people who are experts in money would opt for a system that is just as good, at a fraction of the cost. These people know money - and financially, it just makes sense for them to go open source for at least some of their applications.
Do you think George W. Bush cares about the deaths of those Taliban soldiers? They were just fighting for what they believed in - they have families and mothers and cousins and pets as well. Here's a concept for you: EVERYTHING DIES. I loved my dad, but he's dead. I can joke about it because it makes me feel better. I know damn well he wants people to joke about his death, because it makes *them* feel better as well. After all - often times your only legacy lives on in the memories of those you love, and who loved you. I'd rather people felt good - laughed - about me and my life, and even my manner of death, than have people feel down every time my memory crosses thier mind. Don't be an idiot - I'll take happy memories over sad any day. Every death is not a tragedy - every death is a perfectly natural piece of the life cycle. You cry when someone dies because you miss the person, not because their body doesn't move any more - those tears are the exact same tears one sheds when moving away from friends, never to see them again.
Things like this really bother me. It'd be one thing if this guy had a valid and real concern about this so-called patent infringement - in which case, he should have approached ebay early on so as to prevent any conflict. Rather, it seems to me at least, that this man has waited until ebay is a multi-billion dollar organization - likely in the hopes of getting some sort of hefty settlement. I see things like this all the time, and frankly, it sickens me - both the patent process, and this culture of frivolous lawsuits that has swept across America in the past couple of decades.
On second thought, perhaps I should just consider suing Microsoft for infringing on my US Patent #173087007: A Plan and Method for basing a multinational technology corporation in the state of Seattle.
But is 95k worth of video enough to be useful? I mean, even at really low quality, and acknowledging the small resolution of these phones, that still leaves you with quite a short message. On the other hand, the cost of sending that 95k of data to another phone must be high - hell, it costs me a fortune to download a few thousand bytes onto my phone through my web connection.
Remember that astronomers once said Mars was covered with a complex network of irrigation ditches, which implied the presence of life. Take this with a grain of salt - we know so little about our own solar system that we must treat all discoveries as hypotheses - nothing more, nothing less.
The neat thing is, the price of this can only come down. I can't see it being cheap enough to be covered by health care (in countries that have such a beast), but imagine being able to plonk down $5000 or so to have your genome mapped - you could then know what to expect not only in your life, but what to expect for your children, especially when both you and your spouse have the same test done. I firmly believe that pre-emptive medical scanning - that is, determining and eliminating the possibility of a given illness before it occurs - will be one of the major scientific breakthroughs of our time.
It's kind of exciting that, with the modern time-scale, we can actually trace things like this to their originator. It's the like that age old question: "All I want to know is who the man is that looked at a cow and said 'I think I drink from whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them.'" I always sort of assumed that the smiley would become much like the milk - of amorphous origins, but part of our culture nonetheless.
The real question: Are there any affordable ways to make science interesting and fun for students? Webcams on the ISS are one thing, but not every school can afford such endeavours. The sad fact is that many school districts in Canada, especially in the West, are doing without many necessities for their science programs - the money just isn't there. How can science be brought into the classroom in a fun way that doesn't cost an arm and a leg? These are public schools, after all - and untimately, we're the ones who pay them. Lets make the most out of what we can afford.
Re:With that last question I ask another
on
Upcoming Cyberwars
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You misunderstand - if you read the article, you'd see that those 15% believe that US foreign policy led to the attacks. Rather, had US foreign policy been handled differently, the attacks would have never happened. That's not to defend those 15%, I personally believe that it takes two to tango, but hey, everyone is entitled to their opinion. My point isn't to defend those 15%, or 69%, for that matter. It's just to say that if a closely allied country can find blame in the US, how do people in other countries feel?
Re:With that last question I ask another
on
Upcoming Cyberwars
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Why is it that non-Americans hate the US so much, yet it is always the United States cleaning up everyone else's spilled milk, as so to speak?
I think perhaps you have it backwards - could it be that non-Americans hate the US so much because the United States is always cleaning up spilled milk?
For example, according to an Ipsos-Reid poll last week, 69 per cent of Canadians said the U.S. shares some of the responsibility for the attacks, while 15 per cent said all of the responsibility sits on American shoulders.
If we Canadians feel that way, how does the rest of the world feel? You are bound to get stung when you stick your hand in the hornets' nest looking for honey.
I can see other uses for lower power consumption computer devices. The fact of the matter is that computers and their associated equipment suck up a lot of power - people or groups interested in limiting their power usage could utilize these to great benefit. Public schools are always interested in lowering their costs - our local high school, for example, has hundreds of computers running at any given time. The electricity costs to the district as a whole must be astronomical. For basic websurfing and word processing, which is the primary function of most school computers, these would be ideal, and I can imagine that the cost savings in terms of the power bill would quickly pay off the initial investment. *shrug* Just a thought.
Most of the comments I've seen so far have been along the lines of "They should just give the extra money to..." or "Invest it in...!". Incorrect - the fact of the matter is that many, many businesses have been, and still are in the exact same position. The only way to *keep* shareholders is to show you have enough money to still give them a return on their investment even if the company goes belly up. There are three trains of thought on this: 1) make up fake revenues, a la Enron, WorldCom, etc. 2) go flat broke up forget about the people who trusted you to make then richer, or 3) ensure that the people with a vested interest in your company has a reason to stay on board. Liquid Audio (for all their faults) should be commended for their commitment to the stakeholders, even at a loss to the company - its seems to be such a rare thing with all the business improprieties on CNN. Money is the name of the game, and whether you like it or not, making investors happy is the nature of the beast.
Stuff like per-pixel shading and transparent water effects won't change the gameplay one bit. Quake will still be Quake, only instead of being able to play on your old P100, you now need a much more powerful machine and graphics accelerator. Games don't improve because the graphics are updated - in fact, part of the appeal of games like Quake is that we can look back at the game and marvel at what they could do with what they had at the time. It's a sad state of affairs when a fantastic game that still looks great today has to have its graphics improved to sate the appetites of those with a sweet tooth for eye candy.
This isn't terribly surprising, as it was already known that the different formats have different frequency responses. More specifically, the way they compress the music dictates what frequencies are cut out. MP3s, for example, are notorious for removing high and low frequencies from music - not a big deal for casual listeners, but those with high-end stereo systems will definitely notice the lack of high overtones, and the "flat" low end bass response. WMA sort of sounds like certain frequencies are cut from the raw audio, leaving the rest to fill in as sort of an approximation of the original full sound - it sounds hollow and "chime-y". Ogg has its defining sound characteristics as well. Thus, it isn't surprising that different styles of music sound better encoded in different formats, as different styles take advantage of different frequencies. Rock music has high frequency cymbals and low frequency bass drums and guitars, as well as a very full mid-range, so a well-rounded encoding system works well. Classical is somewhat more compressed, as a result of the physical limitations in terms of sound reproduction of the instruments, so to the undiscerning ear, a format with especially good mids will suffice. The examples go on and on, but the point is that different tools are needed for different jobs - if nothing else, this study shows that having having a number of encoding tools on hand is actually a good thing. When you look in your tool box, you've got more than a couple Phillips-head screwdrivers - you should have enough tools to deal adequately with any job. The same applies to music.
2.18 gigabytes a second. Jesus - does anyone else see why this is wierd to me? I mean, I understand the need for faster hardware, but can't software producers just make their software more efficient? I mean, any game I'm playing that requires 2.18gb of data to be passed through my video card each second is going to require a better, faster computer than I've got now. I'm tired of always being forced into upgrading just to play the latest and greatest games - and then being told that I'm breaking the law when I want to play old ones that I can't buy anymore! It's absurd, and it makes perfect sense - too many software companies have a vested interest in hardware - the more advanced the game, the more hardware that sells. What we really need is another Mario Bros. or Tetris to come along to give us all a kick in the face - great games don't need outstanding graphics to be great fun.
Slashdot Mirror
The world isn't designed for Slashdot readers. Fool.
The advantage to systems like Ricochet is that they are designed expressly for the purpose of wide-area deployment - unlike 802.11 solutions, which seem better suited to system-system connections. Wireless networks using WiFi solutions are kind of like using a ton of bandaids to cover an area - where Ricochet seems more like a large roll of gauze.
That's the beauty of open source - you can reinvent the wheel as many times as you want. Yo leave it up to the end use to pick the wheel that rolls the best.
All this video did (besides impress me to the point of breathlessness) is reinforce the need for a cheap, reuseable launch vehicle. Watching 80% of the rocket fall away in stages - all those millions of dollars in raw materials - just goes to show how wasteful our current launch systems are. Even the shuttle sheds a large part of itself soon after launch - not to mention the fact that the shuttles are aging, inefficient behemoths that deserve a proper rest. We need to develop a fully reusable, inexpensive, efficient launch vehicle. No, there isn't any oil in space, and yes, it is terribly expensive to retrieve raw materials from off our planet, but the value of such a craft cannot be measured in dollars or tons - its value instead is found in the history books of the future, proclaiming it the first step in bringing the stars to our doorstep.
Christ - the problem of protecting children from offensive or adult content lies with the parents, not one some new-fangled US legislation. Educate your children, monitor their internet usage, but for goodness sakes, do NOT lock them into a pisspoor subset of the internet - a new domain suffix is NOT a suitable substitute for responsible adult supervision.
Christ... by my rough calculations, you could hold 8,000-10,000 full albums on that sucker, if we assume that you have about 14 tracks on an album, with each track being about 4 megs. That's an ungodly amount of music - sometimes these little "comments" people add to their stories just irritate me. They seem to exist solely for the wannabe geek factor... I can almost see the submitter thinking, "Hey, what additional comments can I add that will *impress* people? I'm a geek too, right?"
That's very true, even here on the west coast of Canada, its the same thing (I get 500 kms with $30 of gas). But what if the price of gas doubles tomorrow? And how do I compare with you, for example? I know that fuel is terribly expensive in Europe, so your £25 buys considerably less than my CDN$50 (approximate exchange). On the other hand, a litre is always a litre, a kilometre always a kilometre, a mile is a mile, etc.
So anyone with a bit of knowhow (or the right script) could potentially hijack this device to watch ladies change, or to observe someone punching in an alarm code, or whatever else their devious little minds might come up with? I really like the idea of Canadian robots, and having connected devices is pretty neat as well - but the internet is inherently insecure, and I just don't know if I'd feel comfortable with a little camera running around watching me all day when the possibility exists that someone could access it.
Namely - any store or business with a cashier.
It never ceases to amaze me that amateur science enthusiasts are building stuff like that - from the home-made tesla coil of a few weeks ago, to home-built rockets capable of low orbit... it just blows me away. Granted, the devices they build are generally years, if not decades behind the "cutting edge", but the fact that average people can take a sound scientific principle and turn it into something physical for a handful of bills is wonderful. It is people like these that foster innovation and growth in the sciences - not multi-billion dollar research conglomerates. These DIY tinkerers are what science is all about - it is science for the sake of science, and by extension, for the sake of the world! They do it because they are passionate about what they are doing - not for the fame, or the fortune. It was politics and economics that made the decision to put a man on the moon - it is people like this that got us there.
Of course the financial community is starting to "get" open source software. It makes perfect sense that a group of people who are experts in money would opt for a system that is just as good, at a fraction of the cost. These people know money - and financially, it just makes sense for them to go open source for at least some of their applications.
Do you think George W. Bush cares about the deaths of those Taliban soldiers? They were just fighting for what they believed in - they have families and mothers and cousins and pets as well. Here's a concept for you: EVERYTHING DIES. I loved my dad, but he's dead. I can joke about it because it makes me feel better. I know damn well he wants people to joke about his death, because it makes *them* feel better as well. After all - often times your only legacy lives on in the memories of those you love, and who loved you. I'd rather people felt good - laughed - about me and my life, and even my manner of death, than have people feel down every time my memory crosses thier mind. Don't be an idiot - I'll take happy memories over sad any day. Every death is not a tragedy - every death is a perfectly natural piece of the life cycle. You cry when someone dies because you miss the person, not because their body doesn't move any more - those tears are the exact same tears one sheds when moving away from friends, never to see them again.
On second thought, perhaps I should just consider suing Microsoft for infringing on my US Patent #173087007: A Plan and Method for basing a multinational technology corporation in the state of Seattle.
But is 95k worth of video enough to be useful? I mean, even at really low quality, and acknowledging the small resolution of these phones, that still leaves you with quite a short message. On the other hand, the cost of sending that 95k of data to another phone must be high - hell, it costs me a fortune to download a few thousand bytes onto my phone through my web connection.
Remember that astronomers once said Mars was covered with a complex network of irrigation ditches, which implied the presence of life. Take this with a grain of salt - we know so little about our own solar system that we must treat all discoveries as hypotheses - nothing more, nothing less.
The neat thing is, the price of this can only come down. I can't see it being cheap enough to be covered by health care (in countries that have such a beast), but imagine being able to plonk down $5000 or so to have your genome mapped - you could then know what to expect not only in your life, but what to expect for your children, especially when both you and your spouse have the same test done. I firmly believe that pre-emptive medical scanning - that is, determining and eliminating the possibility of a given illness before it occurs - will be one of the major scientific breakthroughs of our time.
It's kind of exciting that, with the modern time-scale, we can actually trace things like this to their originator. It's the like that age old question: "All I want to know is who the man is that looked at a cow and said 'I think I drink from whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them.'" I always sort of assumed that the smiley would become much like the milk - of amorphous origins, but part of our culture nonetheless.
The real question: Are there any affordable ways to make science interesting and fun for students? Webcams on the ISS are one thing, but not every school can afford such endeavours. The sad fact is that many school districts in Canada, especially in the West, are doing without many necessities for their science programs - the money just isn't there. How can science be brought into the classroom in a fun way that doesn't cost an arm and a leg? These are public schools, after all - and untimately, we're the ones who pay them. Lets make the most out of what we can afford.
You misunderstand - if you read the article, you'd see that those 15% believe that US foreign policy led to the attacks. Rather, had US foreign policy been handled differently, the attacks would have never happened. That's not to defend those 15%, I personally believe that it takes two to tango, but hey, everyone is entitled to their opinion. My point isn't to defend those 15%, or 69%, for that matter. It's just to say that if a closely allied country can find blame in the US, how do people in other countries feel?
I think perhaps you have it backwards - could it be that non-Americans hate the US so much because the United States is always cleaning up spilled milk?
For example, according to an Ipsos-Reid poll last week, 69 per cent of Canadians said the U.S. shares some of the responsibility for the attacks, while 15 per cent said all of the responsibility sits on American shoulders.
If we Canadians feel that way, how does the rest of the world feel? You are bound to get stung when you stick your hand in the hornets' nest looking for honey.
I can see other uses for lower power consumption computer devices. The fact of the matter is that computers and their associated equipment suck up a lot of power - people or groups interested in limiting their power usage could utilize these to great benefit. Public schools are always interested in lowering their costs - our local high school, for example, has hundreds of computers running at any given time. The electricity costs to the district as a whole must be astronomical. For basic websurfing and word processing, which is the primary function of most school computers, these would be ideal, and I can imagine that the cost savings in terms of the power bill would quickly pay off the initial investment. *shrug* Just a thought.
Most of the comments I've seen so far have been along the lines of "They should just give the extra money to ..." or "Invest it in...!". Incorrect - the fact of the matter is that many, many businesses have been, and still are in the exact same position. The only way to *keep* shareholders is to show you have enough money to still give them a return on their investment even if the company goes belly up. There are three trains of thought on this: 1) make up fake revenues, a la Enron, WorldCom, etc. 2) go flat broke up forget about the people who trusted you to make then richer, or 3) ensure that the people with a vested interest in your company has a reason to stay on board. Liquid Audio (for all their faults) should be commended for their commitment to the stakeholders, even at a loss to the company - its seems to be such a rare thing with all the business improprieties on CNN. Money is the name of the game, and whether you like it or not, making investors happy is the nature of the beast.
Stuff like per-pixel shading and transparent water effects won't change the gameplay one bit. Quake will still be Quake, only instead of being able to play on your old P100, you now need a much more powerful machine and graphics accelerator. Games don't improve because the graphics are updated - in fact, part of the appeal of games like Quake is that we can look back at the game and marvel at what they could do with what they had at the time. It's a sad state of affairs when a fantastic game that still looks great today has to have its graphics improved to sate the appetites of those with a sweet tooth for eye candy.
This isn't terribly surprising, as it was already known that the different formats have different frequency responses. More specifically, the way they compress the music dictates what frequencies are cut out. MP3s, for example, are notorious for removing high and low frequencies from music - not a big deal for casual listeners, but those with high-end stereo systems will definitely notice the lack of high overtones, and the "flat" low end bass response. WMA sort of sounds like certain frequencies are cut from the raw audio, leaving the rest to fill in as sort of an approximation of the original full sound - it sounds hollow and "chime-y". Ogg has its defining sound characteristics as well. Thus, it isn't surprising that different styles of music sound better encoded in different formats, as different styles take advantage of different frequencies. Rock music has high frequency cymbals and low frequency bass drums and guitars, as well as a very full mid-range, so a well-rounded encoding system works well. Classical is somewhat more compressed, as a result of the physical limitations in terms of sound reproduction of the instruments, so to the undiscerning ear, a format with especially good mids will suffice. The examples go on and on, but the point is that different tools are needed for different jobs - if nothing else, this study shows that having having a number of encoding tools on hand is actually a good thing. When you look in your tool box, you've got more than a couple Phillips-head screwdrivers - you should have enough tools to deal adequately with any job. The same applies to music.
2.18 gigabytes a second. Jesus - does anyone else see why this is wierd to me? I mean, I understand the need for faster hardware, but can't software producers just make their software more efficient? I mean, any game I'm playing that requires 2.18gb of data to be passed through my video card each second is going to require a better, faster computer than I've got now. I'm tired of always being forced into upgrading just to play the latest and greatest games - and then being told that I'm breaking the law when I want to play old ones that I can't buy anymore! It's absurd, and it makes perfect sense - too many software companies have a vested interest in hardware - the more advanced the game, the more hardware that sells. What we really need is another Mario Bros. or Tetris to come along to give us all a kick in the face - great games don't need outstanding graphics to be great fun.