OK, that makes sense. Take my karma down a couple of notches for being incorrect. At least I *sound* like I know what I'm talking about.:)
I was just incorrect on the implementation of how you'd use something like this. I can see how using this to generate and "send" OTPs makes it uncrackable. My bad.
The application refers to its use in quantum cryptography. It doesn't render the encryption process uncrackable, but makes it able to detect that someone is eavesdropping and/or has broken the encryption. With current methods, you can't tell if someone has broken your key and read your message. Using quantum cryptography, you can tell when someone has read your message.
(It all goes along the lines of you can't observe something without changing it. If someone along the way intercepts the message and observes it, they will change the message and you can detect THAT on the other end.)
Sounds great and all... but why not donate some of the revenues from the films (which we already pay a hell of a lot of money to go see anyways) to these charities... why auction off only one or two things which can only be attained by the rich?
So you would like to donate to charities, and you'd rather have the burden placed on the general populace rather than a rich elite few? I take it that you're not in support of graduated income tax brackets either, are you?
So a few rich people grab up the uber-cool light saber. Big deal. At least that money is going to be used for some good, rather than sitting in their bank account. Or at the very least, these are the kinds of people who might pay millions for a baseball or something - you might as well use their money, and it's obvious that they're more than happy giving it away this way.
This sounds like a fun device for those plane rides. I would think that the GameCube and the LCD screen don't put out enough RF to really interfere with the plane. I could get three hours of Rogue Squadron or Super Smash Brothers lovin'! That would make the ride THAT much more bearable. Of course, you'd also have about a dozen little kids clamoring all over your seat trying to play. You could then charge admission or something and make back your plane fare.:)
It seems to me that the next extension of this is to have laser cannon mounted vehicles. It sounds like they'll be able to get these devices cheap enough to mount on a vehicle, and then you'd get to put the temperature of the sun on infantry or wherever. Plus, you could wave it back and forth like a magic light saber of death - you wouldn't miss as much as you would with a projectile weapon. You get automatic tracing fire, but it also allows the enemy to pinpoint YOUR location pretty easily, too. But there probably isn't alot of armor that could stand up to it right now.
There's already voice tags on alot of cell phones already out there. It's more along the lines of you saying the same phrase several times and it'll remember that, rather than being able to remember 1,000's of words and able to decipher your speech and use its own vocabulary. With the added RAM from the PDA side of it, I can see voice tags being easy to implement in such a device. They're already in a bunch of phones.
How many people have phones now that you can add voice tags to people's numbers? This should actually be rather easy to implement in the Treo, I'd imagine. (I didn't see it explicitly stated in the review.) Imagine just saying someone's name, and their business card comes up and it asks you if you want to dial their number. Sounds like a winning deal to me.
Other than that, add some Bluetooth or 802.11b capability in there. Then I can use this as an uplink for my laptop. Or I can beam business cards with RF instead of IR. Or imagine being able to zap someone your business card through SMS. That's another cool feature.
These devices are ALMOST there. We're almost to convergence, and I think I'll wait a generation or two and take another serious look at it.
The bulk of the cost in cable pulls is from the labor rather than the cable; it's no big deal to pull 4 wires instead of 1.
Agreed. But some companies will charge you for pulling four cables even when it's not really any harder than pulling a single cable along the same path.
It's actually a four-port switch. But in today's world, switches are rather ubiquitous, so it's no big deal.
There would be substantial cost savings when you have to pull cable. Rather than pulling four cables along, you pull just one. Also, at your floor drop, you only have one cable there and you will only be using one port. In your situation, your 4 Cat5 ports at the cubicle are using 4 Cat5 ports at your drop.
Call me crazy, but if you were going to be setting up a new area, this would be a pretty nifty item to have. You just pull one cable. Power over Ethernet (PoE) is not THAT expensive. You're talking in the ball park of $100 or so.
I see this product as something for new installations, not to replace what you've already got. If what's already there works, why change it? Going with these network jacks adds all kinds of room to grow. You get PoE and VoIP, as well as a four-port switch in every cubicle. That sounds pretty tasty, doesn't it?
I also don't know what you're talking about as far as using cable testing equipment and downtime. When's the last time you had a cable go bad? Or a switch? If all four of your devices go out - it's either the uplink from that jack (one cable) or the jack itself. Consider if you have four lines and one of those goes out. Is it the cable to the panel? Is it the cable from the panel to floor drop?
Another point to consider is that with the X-Box and GameCube coming out now that alot of people may be turning in their Dreamcasts for store credit. Guess what they'll be doing with their software? They'll either be turning those in too or selling them on eBay or something. So you win/win! You can get the console for cheap and pick up all those games for cheap too!
Sakura Taisen DOES rock, by the way. Part Four comes out on Dreamcast in 2002! w00t!
Yes, it's a PDA, but it a PDA with that wonderful extended range in the IR department so you can go over to your friend's house and goof around with his AV setup and say, "What's wrong with your system, man?"
It's also in COLOR. It's also available only in Japan right now. 16-bit color at 320x320 running PalmOS 4.1. 40,000 Yen ~= $325, so it's not even that crazy of a gift. Read more about it here.
We'll give it a go, given my tyro's grasp of 802.11
It's backwards compatible in that both 802.11b and 802.11g operate on the 2.4 GHz bandwidth. 802.11a will opereate on the 5 GHz bandwidth. Please keep in mind that 802.11g is not really there yet, so I don't know how b will affect on g's network. I would imagine that there'd be minimal impact.
802.11g should have similar range to 802.11b. I think alot of the advantages from g come from their use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). This provides the resistance to interference that g will enjoy.
AFAIK, WEP is an extension of 802.11b. Even if it's in there, we all know it sucks, and we also know the steps necessary to ensure that your wireless LAN stays relatively secure.
I'm sure that everyone who reads/. knows someone who has or has had carpal tunnel syndrome. With this, you could literally type with your hands anywhere, so it should be relatively easy to find an ergonomic position.
In fact, couple this new input method with a dvorak keyboard, and you'd be rocking. They could even throw in a few additional chordal "sequences" to really get some additional functionality out of it. This is some neat stuff from a user-input side. Free your mind, folks!
To me, the Tick was always a satire of his genre. You made fun of Batman, Wonder Woman, Galactus, etc., etc. My question would be: With the series moving to live-action TV, would you be satiring other things? Making fun of Galactus would go over the heads of most your audience. However, targetting Friends or Survivor would surely hit the spot. (Survivor especially, given your current time slot.) Where is the comedy and the storyline going to come from?
Proof that over the years NASA has not "cut corners" but, has over spent on their projects. If a group of undergraduates can make a space survivable craft then what has NASA been doing for the last 40 years. Although I am bashing their budgeting practices I do give them credit for some of their overspending. They did pratically invent space travel and more then likely they were responsible for putting the Radio Shack advertisment in space anyway.....
It costs an awful lot to blaze trails, and alot less than that to follow the lead.
NASA may have spent quite a bit more money than these folks, but R&D is expensive. Plus, they're about the only people who are actually in the space business right now. Before people get on NASA for overspending, think about it. What would happen if NASA does reduce spending and the growth of the frontier of space travel becomes stunted accordingly?
People like these are worthy of praise because they're helping make space accessible to the more common folk. That can only be a good thing. As more and more people get involved in bridging the gap between where we are now and where NASA is, it will make space that much more accessible.
As one of my friends in college used to say, "I may not be smart enough to be at the boundary of science, but I can help fill in the gap." These people are filling in the gap, but NASA is at the boundary.
Re:Rampant Problems, non-exclusive games, DOA3
on
Crashing Xbox Kiosks
·
· Score: 1
DOA works on the throw-hold-blow system. If someone is punching away at you, you counter them. If someone is sitting back and countering everything, you run up and throw them. If someone is just trying to throw you all the time, you punch them in the face.
You set up your opponent one thinking you're going to do one thing, when really you're setting them up for something else. It's not gambling. You're working on screwing with your opponent's mind. If you know how to counter and when to counter, you can counter your opponent. But if your opponent knows you're going to sit in counter animation, he'll just throw you and make you look stupid.
Re:Rampant Problems, non-exclusive games, DOA3
on
Crashing Xbox Kiosks
·
· Score: 1
DOA gameplay is shallow? OK, I'm sorry. You've obviously never played it that much before. And to say that Tekken is as deep as Virtua Fighter merely seems to reinforce the fact that you really don't know alot about fighters.
DOA uses a counter system to stop button mashers. If someone is hitting you with punches all the time, guess what? You can easily counter them and cause THEM damage. That's about one of the first things you learn when you play DOA.
I am just really tired of people talking about how shallow DOA is. It's not as deep as VF2, but what is? Just because I don't have to memorize ten-hit combos like Tekken? Come on. Next time, how about you actually play the game for longer than an hour or so?
And if you think Tekken 4 belongs in the same phrase as Virtua Fighter 4 and Soul Calibur 2, ummm... OK. Whatever. I've already noted how much I think of your fighting game knowledge. Let's also not forget the fact that Soul Calibur 2 is coming out on ALL the next-generation platforms - GameCube, PS2, and X-Box.
Cute. Isn't that the screen from the XDK (X-Box Developer's Kit)? Couldn't that error message be from something like a program bug that the programmer made, or a bad copy of a disc or something? Gee, you know, if I were a developer working on a development kit, I think I'd like to see some sort of error message to help me debug it. Call me crazy.
Oh wait, it's Microsoft, right? So surely if they screw up with ANYTHING, it's got to be good news for everyone!
Re:Please enact a spell checker!
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sorry, couldn't resist. I don't believe that even enact is properly used.
But hey, a spell check WOULD be useful, and would it really be that difficult to pipe it through something? OK, yeah, extra computing power and extra expense. But hey, that'd be one of these k3wl extras!
Seriously though, I have no problem with subscription, as long as it's done right. Being able to turn off ads if I pay for it sounds like a decent idea. Actually, if I could target ads to myself through the preferences, that may not be a bad plan either, and I'm sure the marketing folks would eat it up.
What makes this not a "real one"? It has a better resolution than the IIIc. It also has a similar form factor to the m500s. There's also the far reaching IR port. To me, this is a STELLAR improvement. This may be the PDA that will make me trade in my plain V and get a new one.
Yes, some mad scientist decided to combine the all-encompassing game creation powers of Sid Meier with those people who make the Sims to create an utterly dominating force which will rule the gaming market.
Who runs the central database? What kind of interface would it use? If the terminals are standardized, it may not be too difficult to reverse-engineer one.
Consider this scenario: These terminals are probably set up at each airport gate. They're connected via ethernet, let's say. What's to stop someone from putting their own terminal in place of the original one? It's hard, I'll grant you that, but it's possible. Or consider the fact of - who's doing the checking? If you've got an inside person doing the actual checking, who cares if Bozo the Clown's picture comes up when you're looking at me, if you're going to let me pass, anyway?
It's not too bad of an idea because I can see some validity to these uses. IF they can get it going and linked to a central criminal database (NCIC), you could use this to control access to planes, as well as to firearms. (can of worms there) It's not too bad, as long as it stays within its limits. It's a TERRIBLE idea if people (read: the government and/or the Joe Public) try to make it do more than it really should. It'll be hard to stop once the ball gets rolling.
It doesn't sound like too bad of an idea. The problem would come from the limitations of the system. Or more precisely, what it would limit people from doing. It may be voluntary to have such an ID card, but if it's too inconveniencing NOT to have one, it's essentially mandatory.
If it's simply for ID purposes in high-risk areas, then that's fine. If I want to get on board a plane filled with tons of jet fuel and with hundreds of other people, it's okay to check and see that I'm not "dangerous." (Who defines "dangerous" here, also?)
But if I'm going to go buy some liquor, cigarettes, pr0n, or _Catcher in the Rye_, I don't want to have to use my ID. I could care less about who knows I'm buying what, but do you REALLY need to know?
The other interesting point I'd like to bring up is: Fakes. How hard would these things be to fake? No matter how hard you try, someone with enough time and money will find a way to make a fake. I mean, there's high school kids with fake drivers licenses now.
Hmmm... interesting points. So maybe the helium wouldn't raise the pitch? Maybe just the sound would go through slower, and that's about it?
The vocal cords (chords?) open and close selectively. I think it's like when you are releasing air from a balloon and you squeeze the end where the sound is coming out. (That's the first analogy I could think of.) You can alter pitch by altering the width of the opening that the sound (air) is coming through.
Yeah, I wonder what the response of the speakers would be. Hmmm... what started out as a joke has now become an (almost) serious discussion!
Slashdot Mirror
OK, that makes sense. Take my karma down a couple of notches for being incorrect. At least I *sound* like I know what I'm talking about. :)
I was just incorrect on the implementation of how you'd use something like this. I can see how using this to generate and "send" OTPs makes it uncrackable. My bad.
The application refers to its use in quantum cryptography. It doesn't render the encryption process uncrackable, but makes it able to detect that someone is eavesdropping and/or has broken the encryption. With current methods, you can't tell if someone has broken your key and read your message. Using quantum cryptography, you can tell when someone has read your message.
(It all goes along the lines of you can't observe something without changing it. If someone along the way intercepts the message and observes it, they will change the message and you can detect THAT on the other end.)
Sounds great and all... but why not donate some of the revenues from the films (which we already pay a hell of a lot of money to go see anyways) to these charities... why auction off only one or two things which can only be attained by the rich?
So you would like to donate to charities, and you'd rather have the burden placed on the general populace rather than a rich elite few? I take it that you're not in support of graduated income tax brackets either, are you?
So a few rich people grab up the uber-cool light saber. Big deal. At least that money is going to be used for some good, rather than sitting in their bank account. Or at the very least, these are the kinds of people who might pay millions for a baseball or something - you might as well use their money, and it's obvious that they're more than happy giving it away this way.
This sounds like a fun device for those plane rides. I would think that the GameCube and the LCD screen don't put out enough RF to really interfere with the plane. I could get three hours of Rogue Squadron or Super Smash Brothers lovin'! That would make the ride THAT much more bearable. Of course, you'd also have about a dozen little kids clamoring all over your seat trying to play. You could then charge admission or something and make back your plane fare. :)
It seems to me that the next extension of this is to have laser cannon mounted vehicles. It sounds like they'll be able to get these devices cheap enough to mount on a vehicle, and then you'd get to put the temperature of the sun on infantry or wherever. Plus, you could wave it back and forth like a magic light saber of death - you wouldn't miss as much as you would with a projectile weapon. You get automatic tracing fire, but it also allows the enemy to pinpoint YOUR location pretty easily, too. But there probably isn't alot of armor that could stand up to it right now.
There's already voice tags on alot of cell phones already out there. It's more along the lines of you saying the same phrase several times and it'll remember that, rather than being able to remember 1,000's of words and able to decipher your speech and use its own vocabulary. With the added RAM from the PDA side of it, I can see voice tags being easy to implement in such a device. They're already in a bunch of phones.
Note to Handspring (and whomever else):
Add voice recognition capability!
How many people have phones now that you can add voice tags to people's numbers? This should actually be rather easy to implement in the Treo, I'd imagine. (I didn't see it explicitly stated in the review.) Imagine just saying someone's name, and their business card comes up and it asks you if you want to dial their number. Sounds like a winning deal to me.
Other than that, add some Bluetooth or 802.11b capability in there. Then I can use this as an uplink for my laptop. Or I can beam business cards with RF instead of IR. Or imagine being able to zap someone your business card through SMS. That's another cool feature.
These devices are ALMOST there. We're almost to convergence, and I think I'll wait a generation or two and take another serious look at it.
The bulk of the cost in cable pulls is from the labor rather than the cable; it's no big deal to pull 4 wires instead of 1.
Agreed. But some companies will charge you for pulling four cables even when it's not really any harder than pulling a single cable along the same path.
It's actually a four-port switch. But in today's world, switches are rather ubiquitous, so it's no big deal.
There would be substantial cost savings when you have to pull cable. Rather than pulling four cables along, you pull just one. Also, at your floor drop, you only have one cable there and you will only be using one port. In your situation, your 4 Cat5 ports at the cubicle are using 4 Cat5 ports at your drop.
Call me crazy, but if you were going to be setting up a new area, this would be a pretty nifty item to have. You just pull one cable. Power over Ethernet (PoE) is not THAT expensive. You're talking in the ball park of $100 or so.
I see this product as something for new installations, not to replace what you've already got. If what's already there works, why change it? Going with these network jacks adds all kinds of room to grow. You get PoE and VoIP, as well as a four-port switch in every cubicle. That sounds pretty tasty, doesn't it?
I also don't know what you're talking about as far as using cable testing equipment and downtime. When's the last time you had a cable go bad? Or a switch? If all four of your devices go out - it's either the uplink from that jack (one cable) or the jack itself. Consider if you have four lines and one of those goes out. Is it the cable to the panel? Is it the cable from the panel to floor drop?
Another point to consider is that with the X-Box and GameCube coming out now that alot of people may be turning in their Dreamcasts for store credit. Guess what they'll be doing with their software? They'll either be turning those in too or selling them on eBay or something. So you win/win! You can get the console for cheap and pick up all those games for cheap too!
Sakura Taisen DOES rock, by the way. Part Four comes out on Dreamcast in 2002! w00t!
Yes, it's a PDA, but it a PDA with that wonderful extended range in the IR department so you can go over to your friend's house and goof around with his AV setup and say, "What's wrong with your system, man?"
It's also in COLOR. It's also available only in Japan right now. 16-bit color at 320x320 running PalmOS 4.1. 40,000 Yen ~= $325, so it's not even that crazy of a gift. Read more about it here.
We'll give it a go, given my tyro's grasp of 802.11
It's backwards compatible in that both 802.11b and 802.11g operate on the 2.4 GHz bandwidth. 802.11a will opereate on the 5 GHz bandwidth. Please keep in mind that 802.11g is not really there yet, so I don't know how b will affect on g's network. I would imagine that there'd be minimal impact.
802.11g should have similar range to 802.11b. I think alot of the advantages from g come from their use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). This provides the resistance to interference that g will enjoy.
AFAIK, WEP is an extension of 802.11b. Even if it's in there, we all know it sucks, and we also know the steps necessary to ensure that your wireless LAN stays relatively secure.
I'm sure that everyone who reads /. knows someone who has or has had carpal tunnel syndrome. With this, you could literally type with your hands anywhere, so it should be relatively easy to find an ergonomic position.
In fact, couple this new input method with a dvorak keyboard, and you'd be rocking. They could even throw in a few additional chordal "sequences" to really get some additional functionality out of it. This is some neat stuff from a user-input side. Free your mind, folks!
To me, the Tick was always a satire of his genre. You made fun of Batman, Wonder Woman, Galactus, etc., etc. My question would be: With the series moving to live-action TV, would you be satiring other things? Making fun of Galactus would go over the heads of most your audience. However, targetting Friends or Survivor would surely hit the spot. (Survivor especially, given your current time slot.) Where is the comedy and the storyline going to come from?
Proof that over the years NASA has not "cut corners" but, has over spent on their projects. If a group of undergraduates can make a space survivable craft then what has NASA been doing for the last 40 years. Although I am bashing their budgeting practices I do give them credit for some of their overspending. They did pratically invent space travel and more then likely they were responsible for putting the Radio Shack advertisment in space anyway.....
It costs an awful lot to blaze trails, and alot less than that to follow the lead.
NASA may have spent quite a bit more money than these folks, but R&D is expensive. Plus, they're about the only people who are actually in the space business right now. Before people get on NASA for overspending, think about it. What would happen if NASA does reduce spending and the growth of the frontier of space travel becomes stunted accordingly?
People like these are worthy of praise because they're helping make space accessible to the more common folk. That can only be a good thing. As more and more people get involved in bridging the gap between where we are now and where NASA is, it will make space that much more accessible.
As one of my friends in college used to say, "I may not be smart enough to be at the boundary of science, but I can help fill in the gap." These people are filling in the gap, but NASA is at the boundary.
DOA works on the throw-hold-blow system. If someone is punching away at you, you counter them. If someone is sitting back and countering everything, you run up and throw them. If someone is just trying to throw you all the time, you punch them in the face.
You set up your opponent one thinking you're going to do one thing, when really you're setting them up for something else. It's not gambling. You're working on screwing with your opponent's mind. If you know how to counter and when to counter, you can counter your opponent. But if your opponent knows you're going to sit in counter animation, he'll just throw you and make you look stupid.
DOA gameplay is shallow? OK, I'm sorry. You've obviously never played it that much before. And to say that Tekken is as deep as Virtua Fighter merely seems to reinforce the fact that you really don't know alot about fighters.
DOA uses a counter system to stop button mashers. If someone is hitting you with punches all the time, guess what? You can easily counter them and cause THEM damage. That's about one of the first things you learn when you play DOA.
I am just really tired of people talking about how shallow DOA is. It's not as deep as VF2, but what is? Just because I don't have to memorize ten-hit combos like Tekken? Come on. Next time, how about you actually play the game for longer than an hour or so?
And if you think Tekken 4 belongs in the same phrase as Virtua Fighter 4 and Soul Calibur 2, ummm... OK. Whatever. I've already noted how much I think of your fighting game knowledge. Let's also not forget the fact that Soul Calibur 2 is coming out on ALL the next-generation platforms - GameCube, PS2, and X-Box.
Cute. Isn't that the screen from the XDK (X-Box Developer's Kit)? Couldn't that error message be from something like a program bug that the programmer made, or a bad copy of a disc or something? Gee, you know, if I were a developer working on a development kit, I think I'd like to see some sort of error message to help me debug it. Call me crazy.
Oh wait, it's Microsoft, right? So surely if they screw up with ANYTHING, it's got to be good news for everyone!
Sorry, couldn't resist. I don't believe that even enact is properly used.
But hey, a spell check WOULD be useful, and would it really be that difficult to pipe it through something? OK, yeah, extra computing power and extra expense. But hey, that'd be one of these k3wl extras!
Seriously though, I have no problem with subscription, as long as it's done right. Being able to turn off ads if I pay for it sounds like a decent idea. Actually, if I could target ads to myself through the preferences, that may not be a bad plan either, and I'm sure the marketing folks would eat it up.
What makes this not a "real one"? It has a better resolution than the IIIc. It also has a similar form factor to the m500s. There's also the far reaching IR port. To me, this is a STELLAR improvement. This may be the PDA that will make me trade in my plain V and get a new one.
Something new? How about Sim Golf?
Yes, some mad scientist decided to combine the all-encompassing game creation powers of Sid Meier with those people who make the Sims to create an utterly dominating force which will rule the gaming market.
Who runs the central database? What kind of interface would it use? If the terminals are standardized, it may not be too difficult to reverse-engineer one.
Consider this scenario: These terminals are probably set up at each airport gate. They're connected via ethernet, let's say. What's to stop someone from putting their own terminal in place of the original one? It's hard, I'll grant you that, but it's possible. Or consider the fact of - who's doing the checking? If you've got an inside person doing the actual checking, who cares if Bozo the Clown's picture comes up when you're looking at me, if you're going to let me pass, anyway?
It's not too bad of an idea because I can see some validity to these uses. IF they can get it going and linked to a central criminal database (NCIC), you could use this to control access to planes, as well as to firearms. (can of worms there) It's not too bad, as long as it stays within its limits. It's a TERRIBLE idea if people (read: the government and/or the Joe Public) try to make it do more than it really should. It'll be hard to stop once the ball gets rolling.
It doesn't sound like too bad of an idea. The problem would come from the limitations of the system. Or more precisely, what it would limit people from doing. It may be voluntary to have such an ID card, but if it's too inconveniencing NOT to have one, it's essentially mandatory.
If it's simply for ID purposes in high-risk areas, then that's fine. If I want to get on board a plane filled with tons of jet fuel and with hundreds of other people, it's okay to check and see that I'm not "dangerous." (Who defines "dangerous" here, also?)
But if I'm going to go buy some liquor, cigarettes, pr0n, or _Catcher in the Rye_, I don't want to have to use my ID. I could care less about who knows I'm buying what, but do you REALLY need to know?
The other interesting point I'd like to bring up is: Fakes. How hard would these things be to fake? No matter how hard you try, someone with enough time and money will find a way to make a fake. I mean, there's high school kids with fake drivers licenses now.
Hmmm... interesting points. So maybe the helium wouldn't raise the pitch? Maybe just the sound would go through slower, and that's about it?
The vocal cords (chords?) open and close selectively. I think it's like when you are releasing air from a balloon and you squeeze the end where the sound is coming out. (That's the first analogy I could think of.) You can alter pitch by altering the width of the opening that the sound (air) is coming through.
Yeah, I wonder what the response of the speakers would be. Hmmm... what started out as a joke has now become an (almost) serious discussion!