Regardless of content your comment is really hard to read. How about next time getting your message through by splitting the comment into nice paragraphs of few sentences.
Addison-Wesleys website, and probably databases too, seems to have been hit with a y2k bug that is still most visible.
The cseng-sections Just Published and Coming soon -listings are suffering from a timewarp back to the beginning of the century when no books had been published and everything is coming soon... Listings start from 1976.
Umm.. Hello? China, Russia? Lawsuits? Loss of plane is a problem, sure, but then again there's always a certain risk with flying..
I wouldn't be surprised at all if they(china,russia,s.america,india,africa,etc..) skip some routine checks that normally come out negative anyway. I mean it's a waste of time right? Something that 99.99% of the time is okay is not going to brake down right now.. Maintenance cycles might be longer, some minor problems might be ignored for a while. Nothing big, no showstoppers.. But a slight increase with the chance for kabooms..
These kind of things do get checked regularly in w.europe and n.america and fixed right away. What about somewhere where getting the replacement part would take few weeks to arrive? Are they going to keep the airplane off ground just because of something that most likely is not going to be a major problem. I really doubt. And if they did, that would be highly unprofitable.. But where there is regulation they don't have a choice!(or they get their asses sued even if nothing happened!)
Yes, but how do you value the service that the web site is providing to its users. I don't mean direct revenue but technical support, product announcements, general information. Companies can pretty much put their own pricetags to these services and then complain when the site goes down that we we're just unable to provide $18 million worth of service because of some punk with a script.
This is partly true too. Imagine the additional cost if everyone using the microsoft(okay, a lame choice) site for technical support and information would have to call them instead of just few clicks in the browser. In that case even the slightes disruption would result in huge 'damage'. And in cases like yahoo the revenues just from advertisement are probably astronomical.
It is the same way that the federal government can put a pricetag to it's "valuable" public service websites. It's like disabling library doors so that nobody can get in..
Re:Interesting . .from the interview:
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 1
Like someone else already noted: If you mirror it you are in violation with copyright laws(in most cases anyway). To my understanding this doesn't affect caches(otherwise proxys etc. would be illegal - just think about squid). And think about it, how much overhead is the text of say 15 links/day? Maybe 80K / link and you get 1.2M / day of cacheing, which for all practical purposes can be deleted the next day. As a comparison an average page of comments loads easily 100-200K..
Re:Interesting . .from the interview:
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 1
The most obvious approach goes exponential or super-exponential. What algorithm are you thinking of that doesn't force us into a 2**n or worse performance hit? (And yes, n is large.)
Since we're not searching raw data matches out of raw data it is possible to optimize that quite a bit. For instance, it could only take into account full sentences (or words in groups of n words) and look for those in the links.
Make a table out of the sentences in the comment and then when doing ONE PASS through the text in link simultaneously compare these to it. If there are enough matches the comment gets moderated down.
Since comments are generally fairly short the overhead of going through the links(maybe locally cached copies) before making a comment part of the page is not going to be that great.
Re:Interesting . .from the interview:
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 1
On a more serious note. Maybe there should be a script that automatically moderates down comments that consist by more than 40% (or some other reasonable percentage) of sentences copied from the links presented in the original post. This shouldn't be too hard to implement.
Re:Interesting . .from the interview:
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 1
Hmm.. My sarcasm-alert couldn't take the heavy load and disintegrated. Actually I think that slashdot should have a script that automatically copies roughly 30% of the articles linked to so that we can fill the empty comments-part below the post.
Re:Interesting . .from the interview:
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 1
Uh.. Slashdot LINKS to the article so that we can all read it. Thus, it is unnecessary to copy two paragraphs of it on the basis that they are interesting. The whole article is rather interesting but for obvious reasons it would make no sense to copy/paste it into a comment.
I tried first looking at my monitor documentation and figuring out the capabilities and adjusting the configuration file accordingly. In the end it didn't work too well and I just ended up choosing the preconfigured option of "High Freguency SVGA 1024x768 @70hz"/w h 31.5-57 v 50-70. Didn't need to know much else about the monitor brand or type etc. Works great and seems to be one of the settings my monitor is actually calibrated for(It could do higher but not calibrated and that wouldn't look so nice).
I think it goes as follows: You have 400 encryption/decryption keys/keypairs. You have one key you use to encode the movie with. After this you encode this key with all of the 400 encryption keys and write it on to the disk 400 times. Now, when a player wants to play the movie it uses its decoding key to get the key that decodes the movie and can then start playing.
About copying dvd-discs.. It is currently not possible to make copies of dvd-video discs. The only thing you can do with it (now) is extract the video information (decrypted) and place it on a different media. After this incident, i doubt that the future dvd-writers will support writing dvd-video discs(and why would they anyway - due to the proprietary format and the encryption algorithm). Only way I could imagine making a copy is a raw copy of all of the data but i'm pretty sure they have thought of this before deploing any dvd-video products. And what would you do with a decrypted movie written to a dvd? Watch it on your computer at the most (sure you could deprive your local movie rental place of few bucks like this, but you can already with normal vhs). Regular dvd-players will expect all the data on a disc to be encrypted anyway.
I think that the biggest concern with the encryption was to prevent unauthorized distribution via internet. Yes, those are big movies but still feasible to transfer anywhere in the world(thus btw. circumventing the area restrictions) where people can then, for instance, make regular vhs-copies of very high quality very easily. Of course there is the issue of different tv-standards (still, even with fully digital media!!!) but that is considerably easier to deal with than the encryption.
Every different brand/make, as long as they are used for the same standard(pal/secam/ntsc) actually have exactly same synchronization rates. Only exceptions I'm aware of are the 100hz tv's, which tend to redraw their picture twice as many times per second as regular pal, and those new widescreen tv's(although these probably when used in the 'compatibility'-mode will have standard synchronization rates). For every computer monitor the synchronization rates do differ but even in that case you could probably somehow extract the information from the graphics card.
Reason for this is the way video signals are encoded. There are synchronization signals inserted into the picture information to keep the picture from "running" - horizontal and vertical (line and frame). The hardware that generates the video signals has to insert the correct sync signals so that the device used to display the information can do it correctly. Now, when the tv-set starts to decode the signal sent to it it has to use this synchronization signals to lock on to the picture and it is restricted to the synchronization rates that it is provided with - which for obvious reasons have to be standardized (for a certain set of standardized synchronization rates you get a tv-standard, such as ntsc or pal - of course there is other stuff involved too).
Several years ago, when amiga 500 was a new computer and C64's where still widely used, I recall reading from a computer hardware magazine instructions on how to make your own gun. It worked by tracking the electron beam and it did so very easily. I recall that it was for C64 and used very few lines of code to determine the position it was pointed at.
If you start to think about nintendos. There have been guns from the very beginning of the original nintendo. When that thing came out about 99.999% of the tv's used were regular cathode ray tube tv's. Now the percentage of regular tv's may have shrinked to 99.9% but that is still certainly enough to keep the good old way of doing things still adequate. Most likely this feature is hardcoded into the actual console so that the game makers don't have to worry about different tv-standards. Console itself knows which standard it is displaying on and can read the correct values accordingly.
Yes this thing doesn't work on lcd's or projectors or (maybe) on widescreens, but how big a percentage of the people using nintendos would actually use an lcd or projector to play their shoot them up games? Probably not big enough to worry about. Maybe someone has one of these and a nintendo with a gun at their disposal and could actually check whether or not it works. It'd also be interesting to know what'll happen if you point at a different tv-set than the one you're playing the game with. I don't have my playstation anymore(used to have a gun for that thing).
I recall reading that all of the tv-based video game guns work essentially according to the same principles. You have a highly focused light detector attached to the end of the gun. It will track sudden changes in light intensity and report them back to the computer.
In a normal tv-screen there is an electron beam sweeping the screen starting from the top left corner progressing to the right and after reaching the end of the line moving down to the next one. On a normal tv-screen this is done for every line on the screen exactly 50 times / second(60 if you live in us).
Now, when the electron beam hits the phosphorous coating on the screen it flashes briefly. Having this done 50(60) times per second creates an illusion of a continuosly lighted surface.
It is these brief flashes that your gun tracks and dutifully reports to the computer. Computer, responsible for drawing the picture, is always aware of the pixel it is currently drawing(at least most of the video game hardware is built with this feature) and can extract the location the electron beam is pointing when it receives a signal from the gun. And if you happen to be pressing the trigger then maybe something should happen at that location.
This technology is rather limited though. For instance, it doesn't work on lcd's (maybe by varying the intensity of pixels thus simulating the effect of the electron beam lighting up individual pixels, don't know of anyone actually trying this though). I can also imagine this thing having a hard time with 100hz tv's that are getting more popular in europe. Then again, how many of us actually use a cheapo game console on a tv that doesn't comply to the normal requirements.
Oh yes.. I recall when i was "16 and 17" living in "a european country" that had the age requirement for "obtaining a drivers licence" as "18 years" that we(me and my friends) would strongly criticize this stupid age requirement.
There was once discussion in lowering the age limit in the parliament and we were very enthusiastic. After turning "eighteen" we suddenly turned out to be the strongest opponents of any kind of changes in this fair convention.
Shows how the human nature really is. If I couldn't have it when I was at that age why should someone else. Now in my twenties i think that they should let the guy in.
p.s. substitute the stuff in quotes for your favourite age restricted activity.
European stuff is, in general, more efficient than the stuff in US. Cars are definetly more efficient due to the price of gasoline(over 3$/gallon) and, anyway, at least I like the european practical thinking better. In US everything has to be bigger and faster and better than the stuff that came before it whereas in europe it generally is smaller, more efficient and more practical. We don't need to show off the neighbours by getting a pickup or an suv with 5.6 liter v8 that is used for commuting and drinks that 91 octane PREMIUM gasoline like a dry sponge. Gee.. at least from where i come from the gasoline octane STARTS at 95 and goes up to 98 lead free.. used to have leaded 99. Enables car makers to make more efficient engines etc..
And don't even get me started with those top loading washers. I had one of those ruin a perfectly fine t-shirt because i didn't turn it inside out and the pole(more of a screw) that sticks out in the middle of the washer basically ripped the not-so-well attached picture of the front of the t-shirt. I'm scared(living now in US) to put stuff in those archaic remainders that are supposed to wash clothes(without destroing them). How about a nice steel drum with now poles loadable from the side thank you..
And the toilets.. do you really need to put a gallon of water just sitting in the bowl? How about making the bowl look less like a wide cup and more like a shallow glass. That thing just wastes water so enormously.
Showers.. uhh.. never seen a decent way to control the water in showers in US. Sometimes there is one turn-knob that controls both the temperature and the pressure of the water. You pull the thing out(basically on and off only) or, worse, have to turn it to make the water flow. How about separating the temperature controller(totally) from the pressure control. Wouldn't necessarily have to use full pressure to take a shower but rather something milder AND still be able to control the temperature well.
And the 110v electricity. With all the plugs POLARISED. Yes.. they are specifically marked for for the hot and cold wires thus letting the people designing the stuff that is connected to them take advantage of this(a BIG no-no when designing anything connected to the power grid). And then people travel to europe and use a plug-converter (maybe with a transformer if they're smart) and get electricuted because of the bad design. All of the stuff that i have in my apartment right now only plugs in to the outlet ONE way. And what about the power losses with residential power transfer.. P=I^2*R && P=UI.. Thus to deliver the same amount of power to the appliances one has to double the current which means quadrupleing the power loss of transfering the electricity.
You could probably be saving much more than 25l waters weekly by just having a decent washer, shower and a toilet. Americans are less than 4% of the worlds population but yet they consume over 30% of its resources. I wonder if it could be the lavish way of life and the archaich designs that waste some much resources that cause this?
Regardles of the previous things I kind of like it in US. Everything is cheaper, not necessarily of terribly high quality(unless it's imported) but still okay. It costs less to buy a big mac meal than it costs to buy just the burger in most european countries. Computers are cheaper(about the only technological thing in which US. really is the leader in the world) internet is fairly cheap and widely in use. If only they'd stop being so naive about the rest of the world and open their eyes for all the improvements they could get from us. And stop talking about money all the time..
Yup.. that 10hz sure makes a big difference doesn't it? But.. what about that extra 20% of scan lines that we europeans have. And those 100hz tvs that are easily produced by just doubling the refreshing frequency? And would you seriously want to do that for the ntsc? I mean.. 525 lines with 120hz? Just isn't worth the money.. 50hz is fine from a distance where you can appreciate the better resolution of the tv anyway.
Just a lame copy protection trick.. Copying raw data would effectively bypass it. Some cds also have several files that are much larger than the available space(thus theoretically overlapping each other) making it impossible to just copy onto hd.
Actually you could treat earth as the center of the universe. All the calculations involved with tracking planetary objects would be complicated enormously but it is possible certainly.
yes.. if it runs the decryption algorithm once in 12 microseconds, it will have cracked the code. Quantum computing == solve all the possibilites at the same time. Now since the details of this are rather nonexistent and it is being reported by sunday times of uk i'd wait for little longer before stopping my internet transactions..
Now suppose that this is real.. and suppose that someone in israel has managed to put together quantum logic gates enough to crack 512bit encryption(last time I heard someone had a single nand-gate somewhat operational).. now the question being: why reveal it to the world?!? This is worth a lot of money as such.. Someone just leaked it out of the institute? Surely they understand the value of this. Why not sell it to nsa etc(or maybe they have it). They could decrypt most public key encryption at their will and now they go and announce it in SUNDAY TIMES of UK?
Kids nowadays have it way too easy. When I was 9 I got my first computer, an Amiga 500. There was no cd-rom, no hard drive, no windows(thank god!) and 512Kb of ram. It had a brand new kickstart 1.2 rom and workbench 1.2 to go with that.
I even learned to program with that thing. First with basic and then with c that I got from an older friend of mine. This was when i was about 12-13 or so. Sure the programs didn't do much but ask for your name and then print a greeting, but it still was pretty cool.
It originally came bundled only with Basic. I had to learn to copy all the games from my friends(this was tough with only one floppy drive so i soon got a second fd). I think at one point I had over 200 floppys - half of which were broken.
PCs were a joke back then for gaming and the biggest competition came from Atari ST, which was used more for music because it came with a midi-port. And man, those digital joysticks..
It was a big thrill when I got a memory expansion card for the thing, abt. 90usd for 512kb more, and could finally play my pirated Pirates.
Hotwheels would have probably been much cooler, but would i have learned so much about computers by just using windows 98.. I doubt.
Well my cousin, when she was five, was capable of using a computer to some extend. She could turn it on, start solitare and play it. She also had some of those kiddie-programs and was quite capable of entertaining herself for an hour or so without much supervision. And this wasn't just random clicking and banging the mouse on table while screaming "the mouse doesn't want to come out". You are seriously underestimating the capabilities of small kids when it comes to computers. Her little sister, also when she was five, started using the same computer with now the 7-year-old big sister teaching her how. I'm sure they would have liked the barbie-computer much better than their dads laptop-computer with a docking station.
I don't claim to know the standards and their implementations but to me it seems absurd that an analog tv could as such receive digital signal thus making the standard backwards compatible. analog != digital. Maybe they left some room for old frequencies but who in usa uses airwave reception anymore anyway?
Basic cable service is really cheap and available almost anywhere whereas picture quality and the number of channels available without cable or satellite is pathetic. Where I live they're introducing digital cable right now and digital satellite's been around for many years. These are all compatible with the existing tv's through the use of set top boxes. Why not get one of those for your old analog tv if you so dearly whish to stick to it.
And why is it that everytime when europe(or rest of the world) creates something technically or practically superior americans can't accept it. This is what happened with digital mobile phones and now its happening with digital tv. I mean look at yourselves, there are more digital mobile phones in china than in usa.
The only reasonable application of airwave reception in such a cable oriented country as usa is mobile reception. If your standard doesn't allow it then what good is it?
..when connecting that thing to the net? Maybe it contacts some wierd addresses too. And then the men in black suits monitoring these broadcasts can telnet back to your console and check if you have any pirated software etc.. or maybe download the history file(or cache index) from your web browser.. or maybe take over your irc sessions.. or maybe i'm just a little too paranoid. - Juha
How about a mobile phone acting as a HERF gun? Sure it's not going to be as powerful as the one described in the article, but the basic effect is the same. New digital phones emit high frequency bursts which can affect your computer. Just put one next to your monitor while you're calling someone and watch the screen start to bounce up and down. I can sure understand the concern of people with pacemakers when they get near a mobile phone. Imagine what would happen when someone with a pacemaker got near the thing described in this article. It could kill the person.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of content your comment is really hard to read. How about next time getting your message through by splitting the comment into nice paragraphs of few sentences.
The cseng-sections Just Published and Coming soon -listings are suffering from a timewarp back to the beginning of the century when no books had been published and everything is coming soon... Listings start from 1976.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if they(china,russia,s.america,india,africa,etc..) skip some routine checks that normally come out negative anyway. I mean it's a waste of time right? Something that 99.99% of the time is okay is not going to brake down right now.. Maintenance cycles might be longer, some minor problems might be ignored for a while. Nothing big, no showstoppers.. But a slight increase with the chance for kabooms..
These kind of things do get checked regularly in w.europe and n.america and fixed right away. What about somewhere where getting the replacement part would take few weeks to arrive? Are they going to keep the airplane off ground just because of something that most likely is not going to be a major problem. I really doubt. And if they did, that would be highly unprofitable.. But where there is regulation they don't have a choice!(or they get their asses sued even if nothing happened!)
This is partly true too. Imagine the additional cost if everyone using the microsoft(okay, a lame choice) site for technical support and information would have to call them instead of just few clicks in the browser. In that case even the slightes disruption would result in huge 'damage'. And in cases like yahoo the revenues just from advertisement are probably astronomical.
It is the same way that the federal government can put a pricetag to it's "valuable" public service websites. It's like disabling library doors so that nobody can get in..
Like someone else already noted: If you mirror it you are in violation with copyright laws(in most cases anyway). To my understanding this doesn't affect caches(otherwise proxys etc. would be illegal - just think about squid). And think about it, how much overhead is the text of say 15 links/day? Maybe 80K / link and you get 1.2M / day of cacheing, which for all practical purposes can be deleted the next day. As a comparison an average page of comments loads easily 100-200K..
Since we're not searching raw data matches out of raw data it is possible to optimize that quite a bit. For instance, it could only take into account full sentences (or words in groups of n words) and look for those in the links.
Make a table out of the sentences in the comment and then when doing ONE PASS through the text in link simultaneously compare these to it. If there are enough matches the comment gets moderated down.
Since comments are generally fairly short the overhead of going through the links(maybe locally cached copies) before making a comment part of the page is not going to be that great.
On a more serious note. Maybe there should be a script that automatically moderates down comments that consist by more than 40% (or some other reasonable percentage) of sentences copied from the links presented in the original post. This shouldn't be too hard to implement.
Hmm.. My sarcasm-alert couldn't take the heavy load and disintegrated. Actually I think that slashdot should have a script that automatically copies roughly 30% of the articles linked to so that we can fill the empty comments-part below the post.
Uh.. Slashdot LINKS to the article so that we can all read it. Thus, it is unnecessary to copy two paragraphs of it on the basis that they are interesting. The whole article is rather interesting but for obvious reasons it would make no sense to copy/paste it into a comment.
I tried first looking at my monitor documentation and figuring out the capabilities and adjusting the configuration file accordingly. In the end it didn't work too well and I just ended up choosing the preconfigured option of "High Freguency SVGA 1024x768 @70hz" /w h 31.5-57 v 50-70. Didn't need to know much else about the monitor brand or type etc. Works great and seems to be one of the settings my monitor is actually calibrated for(It could do higher but not calibrated and that wouldn't look so nice).
About copying dvd-discs.. It is currently not possible to make copies of dvd-video discs. The only thing you can do with it (now) is extract the video information (decrypted) and place it on a different media. After this incident, i doubt that the future dvd-writers will support writing dvd-video discs(and why would they anyway - due to the proprietary format and the encryption algorithm). Only way I could imagine making a copy is a raw copy of all of the data but i'm pretty sure they have thought of this before deploing any dvd-video products. And what would you do with a decrypted movie written to a dvd? Watch it on your computer at the most (sure you could deprive your local movie rental place of few bucks like this, but you can already with normal vhs). Regular dvd-players will expect all the data on a disc to be encrypted anyway.
I think that the biggest concern with the encryption was to prevent unauthorized distribution via internet. Yes, those are big movies but still feasible to transfer anywhere in the world(thus btw. circumventing the area restrictions) where people can then, for instance, make regular vhs-copies of very high quality very easily. Of course there is the issue of different tv-standards (still, even with fully digital media!!!) but that is considerably easier to deal with than the encryption.
Reason for this is the way video signals are encoded. There are synchronization signals inserted into the picture information to keep the picture from "running" - horizontal and vertical (line and frame). The hardware that generates the video signals has to insert the correct sync signals so that the device used to display the information can do it correctly. Now, when the tv-set starts to decode the signal sent to it it has to use this synchronization signals to lock on to the picture and it is restricted to the synchronization rates that it is provided with - which for obvious reasons have to be standardized (for a certain set of standardized synchronization rates you get a tv-standard, such as ntsc or pal - of course there is other stuff involved too).
Several years ago, when amiga 500 was a new computer and C64's where still widely used, I recall reading from a computer hardware magazine instructions on how to make your own gun. It worked by tracking the electron beam and it did so very easily. I recall that it was for C64 and used very few lines of code to determine the position it was pointed at.
If you start to think about nintendos. There have been guns from the very beginning of the original nintendo. When that thing came out about 99.999% of the tv's used were regular cathode ray tube tv's. Now the percentage of regular tv's may have shrinked to 99.9% but that is still certainly enough to keep the good old way of doing things still adequate. Most likely this feature is hardcoded into the actual console so that the game makers don't have to worry about different tv-standards. Console itself knows which standard it is displaying on and can read the correct values accordingly.
Yes this thing doesn't work on lcd's or projectors or (maybe) on widescreens, but how big a percentage of the people using nintendos would actually use an lcd or projector to play their shoot them up games? Probably not big enough to worry about. Maybe someone has one of these and a nintendo with a gun at their disposal and could actually check whether or not it works. It'd also be interesting to know what'll happen if you point at a different tv-set than the one you're playing the game with. I don't have my playstation anymore(used to have a gun for that thing).
In a normal tv-screen there is an electron beam sweeping the screen starting from the top left corner progressing to the right and after reaching the end of the line moving down to the next one. On a normal tv-screen this is done for every line on the screen exactly 50 times / second(60 if you live in us).
Now, when the electron beam hits the phosphorous coating on the screen it flashes briefly. Having this done 50(60) times per second creates an illusion of a continuosly lighted surface.
It is these brief flashes that your gun tracks and dutifully reports to the computer. Computer, responsible for drawing the picture, is always aware of the pixel it is currently drawing(at least most of the video game hardware is built with this feature) and can extract the location the electron beam is pointing when it receives a signal from the gun. And if you happen to be pressing the trigger then maybe something should happen at that location.
This technology is rather limited though. For instance, it doesn't work on lcd's (maybe by varying the intensity of pixels thus simulating the effect of the electron beam lighting up individual pixels, don't know of anyone actually trying this though). I can also imagine this thing having a hard time with 100hz tv's that are getting more popular in europe. Then again, how many of us actually use a cheapo game console on a tv that doesn't comply to the normal requirements.
There was once discussion in lowering the age limit in the parliament and we were very enthusiastic. After turning "eighteen" we suddenly turned out to be the strongest opponents of any kind of changes in this fair convention.
Shows how the human nature really is. If I couldn't have it when I was at that age why should someone else. Now in my twenties i think that they should let the guy in.
p.s. substitute the stuff in quotes for your favourite age restricted activity.
And don't even get me started with those top loading washers. I had one of those ruin a perfectly fine t-shirt because i didn't turn it inside out and the pole(more of a screw) that sticks out in the middle of the washer basically ripped the not-so-well attached picture of the front of the t-shirt. I'm scared(living now in US) to put stuff in those archaic remainders that are supposed to wash clothes(without destroing them). How about a nice steel drum with now poles loadable from the side thank you..
And the toilets.. do you really need to put a gallon of water just sitting in the bowl? How about making the bowl look less like a wide cup and more like a shallow glass. That thing just wastes water so enormously.
Showers.. uhh.. never seen a decent way to control the water in showers in US. Sometimes there is one turn-knob that controls both the temperature and the pressure of the water. You pull the thing out(basically on and off only) or, worse, have to turn it to make the water flow. How about separating the temperature controller(totally) from the pressure control. Wouldn't necessarily have to use full pressure to take a shower but rather something milder AND still be able to control the temperature well.
And the 110v electricity. With all the plugs POLARISED. Yes.. they are specifically marked for for the hot and cold wires thus letting the people designing the stuff that is connected to them take advantage of this(a BIG no-no when designing anything connected to the power grid). And then people travel to europe and use a plug-converter (maybe with a transformer if they're smart) and get electricuted because of the bad design. All of the stuff that i have in my apartment right now only plugs in to the outlet ONE way. And what about the power losses with residential power transfer.. P=I^2*R && P=UI.. Thus to deliver the same amount of power to the appliances one has to double the current which means quadrupleing the power loss of transfering the electricity.
You could probably be saving much more than 25l waters weekly by just having a decent washer, shower and a toilet. Americans are less than 4% of the worlds population but yet they consume over 30% of its resources. I wonder if it could be the lavish way of life and the archaich designs that waste some much resources that cause this?
Regardles of the previous things I kind of like it in US. Everything is cheaper, not necessarily of terribly high quality(unless it's imported) but still okay. It costs less to buy a big mac meal than it costs to buy just the burger in most european countries. Computers are cheaper(about the only technological thing in which US. really is the leader in the world) internet is fairly cheap and widely in use. If only they'd stop being so naive about the rest of the world and open their eyes for all the improvements they could get from us. And stop talking about money all the time..
Yup.. that 10hz sure makes a big difference doesn't it? But.. what about that extra 20% of scan lines that we europeans have. And those 100hz tvs that are easily produced by just doubling the refreshing frequency? And would you seriously want to do that for the ntsc? I mean.. 525 lines with 120hz? Just isn't worth the money.. 50hz is fine from a distance where you can appreciate the better resolution of the tv anyway.
Just a lame copy protection trick.. Copying raw data would effectively bypass it. Some cds also have several files that are much larger than the available space(thus theoretically overlapping each other) making it impossible to just copy onto hd.
Guess I can't have that USS Enterprise then, huh?
yes.. if it runs the decryption algorithm once in 12 microseconds, it will have cracked the code. Quantum computing == solve all the possibilites at the same time. Now since the details of this are rather nonexistent and it is being reported by sunday times of uk i'd wait for little longer before stopping my internet transactions..
Now suppose that this is real.. and suppose that someone in israel has managed to put together quantum logic gates enough to crack 512bit encryption(last time I heard someone had a single nand-gate somewhat operational).. now the question being: why reveal it to the world?!? This is worth a lot of money as such.. Someone just leaked it out of the institute? Surely they understand the value of this. Why not sell it to nsa etc(or maybe they have it). They could decrypt most public key encryption at their will and now they go and announce it in SUNDAY TIMES of UK?
I even learned to program with that thing. First with basic and then with c that I got from an older friend of mine. This was when i was about 12-13 or so. Sure the programs didn't do much but ask for your name and then print a greeting, but it still was pretty cool.
It originally came bundled only with Basic. I had to learn to copy all the games from my friends(this was tough with only one floppy drive so i soon got a second fd). I think at one point I had over 200 floppys - half of which were broken.
PCs were a joke back then for gaming and the biggest competition came from Atari ST, which was used more for music because it came with a midi-port. And man, those digital joysticks..
It was a big thrill when I got a memory expansion card for the thing, abt. 90usd for 512kb more, and could finally play my pirated Pirates.
Hotwheels would have probably been much cooler, but would i have learned so much about computers by just using windows 98.. I doubt.
Well my cousin, when she was five, was capable of using a computer to some extend. She could turn it on, start solitare and play it. She also had some of those kiddie-programs and was quite capable of entertaining herself for an hour or so without much supervision. And this wasn't just random clicking and banging the mouse on table while screaming "the mouse doesn't want to come out". You are seriously underestimating the capabilities of small kids when it comes to computers. Her little sister, also when she was five, started using the same computer with now the 7-year-old big sister teaching her how. I'm sure they would have liked the barbie-computer much better than their dads laptop-computer with a docking station.
Basic cable service is really cheap and available almost anywhere whereas picture quality and the number of channels available without cable or satellite is pathetic. Where I live they're introducing digital cable right now and digital satellite's been around for many years. These are all compatible with the existing tv's through the use of set top boxes. Why not get one of those for your old analog tv if you so dearly whish to stick to it.
And why is it that everytime when europe(or rest of the world) creates something technically or practically superior americans can't accept it. This is what happened with digital mobile phones and now its happening with digital tv. I mean look at yourselves, there are more digital mobile phones in china than in usa.
The only reasonable application of airwave reception in such a cable oriented country as usa is mobile reception. If your standard doesn't allow it then what good is it?
..when connecting that thing to the net? Maybe it contacts some wierd addresses too. And then the men in black suits monitoring these broadcasts can telnet back to your console and check if you have any pirated software etc.. or maybe download the history file(or cache index) from your web browser.. or maybe take over your irc sessions.. or maybe i'm just a little too paranoid. - Juha
How about a mobile phone acting as a HERF gun? Sure it's not going to be as powerful as the one described in the article, but the basic effect is the same. New digital phones emit high frequency bursts which can affect your computer. Just put one next to your monitor while you're calling someone and watch the screen start to bounce up and down. I can sure understand the concern of people with pacemakers when they get near a mobile phone. Imagine what would happen when someone with a pacemaker got near the thing described in this article. It could kill the person.