That's great news, but what about its commitment to the fans/consumer?
I don't know about the rest of you but games like Tie Fighter, The Dig & Dark Forces won me over long ago... only to disappoint me time and time again with bland console games and repackaged computer games in the new millennium.
They could seriously concentrate on their fans before worrying about which console they're going to choose to support.
You know, the best method I've used to come up with what you're looking for is to just use a search engine and either blow up what you find or post it as normal size or put it in a binder that's always available. You can find some nice PDFs here if you want to take that route or you can look all over the place and mix/match. I personally only print out those I find myself using over and over again.
If you absolutely just want high quality print and don't have time to do this yourself, just visit Learn & Thrive which, to my recollection, has some decent sized posters available. They don't have the very particular kinds of posters you're asking for but then again, I don't know anybody who would do Oracle 10 specifically.
My suggestion is to get a high quality PDF from those first two links and just blow it up and have it laminated at Kinkos. Cost? Probably a lot less then buying something online.
If you really really want to do it yourself, I would suggest using The Gimp (or your favorite image editor) to capture images and text and make your own 'cheat sheet' with everything specific to where you work that would be pertinent. Share it with everyone else if you do and make sure to export as a high quality file format. Have it printed and keep it updated and specific to your workplace. If it's worth that much for productivity, you can probably convince your boss that the ROI is there for your time and money to get them printed.
I use this to maintain loose connections with friends from highschool/college.
Honestly, you know how addictive this site is if someone posts a story about it going offline to Slashdot and it's accepted!
That site was making some crazy loads of cash. The advertising department was saying "we need web traffic!" and the developers were saying "oh, we'll get you web traffic!" and now the hardware department is saying "wtf?"
this could be real good if AMD's acquisition of ATI allows them to produce full chipsets in the same fashion Intel has with its Centrino line. let the competition begin!
Yeah, the part that really sweetens the deal for us end consumers is that ATI will now get to benefit from the research that AMD inherits from IBM for chipsets. Hopefully ATI can make some better video cards with all the research that the other two have benefited off of. I hope that the same chipmaking technologies AMD has been using can now be used to improve ATI's GPUs and chipsets.
Since (in my opinion) NVidia has taken the lead in GPUs, I hope that ATI will be boosted back into a competitive state and price wars ensue.
Again, to me this is nothing but great news for the end-consumer.
Ok ok, so I've only looked at this thing for five minutes in Textpad but there are some very interesting clips of readable text in the file. Early on they say:
ignoti et quasi occulti
Which I believe is a latin phrase for something like "unknown and partly hidden." It's also the motto for Societas Eruditorum in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon book.
The phrase "so dark the con of man" is actually a religious blog.
A funny thing about the first three phrases I picked out is that they are all blogs online if you google them. Is this a coincidence or are all of the phrases here blogs? They seem to refer to direct blog entries, perhaps the html or text from these blog entries can be used as a hash encryption for the "junk" binary loaded in between each of the entries.
Again, this is just speculation. MKULTRA refers to the CIA's mind control program in response to rumors of the Soviet, Chinese and North Korean programs of the smae nature... not sure how that would tie in.
Perhaps the purpose is to develop a blog scanning program that will accurately identify blogs and retrieve information and try to figure out a way to crack this document? It's very large so I am guessing automation would be necessary as opposed to human googling by hand.
I read both articles and I don't recall seeing anywhere that they would allow anyone access to their findings and research. I believe that open source means anyone can access it and contribute if they wish. I believe that their findings will still be restricted to the 16 groups involved. That's no more open source than 16 companies banding together to create a software suite and keeping the source closed to only themselves.
Either way, I'm never going to be able to see the research or dump the data in to Weka and try to find correlations by mixing and matching data mining algorithms on lab data.
Also, I think it's stupid that the story implied irony that Gates doesn't use the open source model in software:
The catch? They have to share their work even if the groups were previously competing against each other. Sounds like a familiar development model to me, I wonder where I have seen it before?
I don't know where you got that quote because I can't find it in either of the linked articles. People's lives depend on a cure/vaccine/treatment for HIV/AIDS. People's lives do not depend on the development of software--especially Microsoft software, thank god. They are two very different development efforts with very different ethical connotations.
I built prototype search software that revolved around a product called Collexis. It has a medical demo you can mess around with. The beautiful thing is that it uses a taxonomy to fingerprint documents. It also takes in raw text and assigns it a fingerprint and then uses Sleepy Cat to quickly reference many records and match your fingerprint. Unfortunately, it's not built for "open" domains like everything on the web but works best when you have a finite domain and a large number of documents to search.
I feel the author fails to even address the first thing he should have in this article. Why move from "Web 1.0" to "Web 2.0"? This article is not intuitively laid out.
I found an article in Nature to be much more informative than the article linked in this story.
'We're not taking aim at the open-source movement; we're talking about the full-disclosure model and how that effectively serves malware development,' the spokesman for McAfee says.
Yeah, you could probably blame a few people who altered a little bit of a virus/bot and re-released it to the public on the full disclosure model.
But what model would you blame for the hundreds of PC viruses that devestated home and corporate computers in the 90's up to today? I think the exploits they relied upon were simple coding flaws and insecure type checking or buffer overflows that wer simply poor coding kept as a secret.
So, in light of what causes the malware, would I rather the code be fully disclosed or instead guess that there's probably no major exploit possible? I'd probably go with the former considering the sheer number of viruses based on the latter and the fact that it's the exploits based on proprietary code that often do the most severe damage to society.
I would like to ask McAfee what they would think if a competitor found a virus and figured out how to fix it but couldn't tell McAfee that information because it would be considered disclosure. That would be the real irony here. Sites that host viruses and describe/publish them are often very useful sources for people looking to rid them from their computers or even how to avoid exploits in the future.
This article is entitled "Hackers Learn from Open Source" but they only learn as much as the researchers and patchers do. I would rather the community be progressing towards solid impenetrable code than have guarded secrets that keep everyone under a thin veil of security. Because if those secrets are ever discovered by the wrong people, we will not know about them and we'll essentially be caught with our pants down. I'd rather have every programmer know the pitfalls of coding than to have thousands of applications deployed world wide all waiting for one hacker to stumble upon a secret.
You really have to question McAfee's motives here in their Sage magazine... are they doing this with the customer in mind or are they attempting to place themselves in the leader seat of virus protection with even more exploits running rampant on our machines?
When I read this Slashdot article, all the rules of software design came flooding back to me. Low coupling, high cohesion, encapsulated complex structures, all that jazz. Before you even started to program a complex FPS game, you might start by carefully separating the layers and keeping things like two dimensional surfaces rendered to be de-coupled from other things like the AI of the enemies. Separate the garphics from the rest of the gameplay. I completely buy into the possibility that games can be designed well enough to abstract their graphics to a point where the same exact graphics package can be used in even several different types of games.
When I read this article, it sounded like a classic example of someone going nuts with the design patterns that encourage encapsulation and separation of layers to improve modularity. Like someone had actually put in a lot of effort to the game to reduce the amount of effort that will be required later when new platforms and libraries come out for the game. On top of that, the imagery doesn't come from a data file but instead is derived on the fly from a library of procedures--something easily achieved by the strategy pattern. The funny thing is that if other games have abstracted their graphics packages sufficiently, they should be able to rework the libraries to be procedures instead or maybe even build adapters to.kkrieger's procedures.
Why don't we see this more often in all games? Because I think most games today are disposable. They're built for one console or platform with the intent of only running on the current version of Windows or Mac and with no interest in coming out with new releases that support new hardware or software. They do this because games are construed as novelty software that expire as the user tires of them. Games like WoW or other MMOs might bring about a shift in the way game designers spend their efforts. Maybe games will start to take a longer time to develop but last a hell of a lot longer than they traditionally have?
This is my opinion, I have nothing to back it up but I think Sony released these ads with the intent of causing unrest. As pointed out in prior comments on Slashdot, they got some great coverage with this advertising campaign.
But the ads rely entirely on imagery. The pictures I saw didn't even have words on them, just two women. One completely white and one completely black in all respects. As also pointed out earlier there were three images with only the white-on-top-of-black one being controversial.
Why did they pick humans? The humans are supposed to represent PSPs, an inate object? I don't understand why this decision was made to use human beings. Put a black wolf and a white timberwolf in the image. Put a black demon and a white angel in the image. Why would you put two ethnicities of the human race that have obvious baggage attached to them. Even if it doesn't offend anyone you know, there are people alive today that are still suffering from the effects of racial tensions either directly or indirectly.
Why did they pick women? Again, the women are representing a PSP, you're just inviting people to speculate that women are objects. And to gamers, this might be "ok" or welcomed but when you throw it on a billboard, you're only drawing heat.
Why is there a struggle between these two subjects? Why would different colored PSPs fight each other? Are they incompatible? Is one better than the other? Again, I don't understand why they made the decision to pit them against each other in the images.
In retrospect, no matter what their motives or realizations were, I f*cking hate marketing and all forms of it.
"There is absolutely no reason these constants should be constant," says astronomer Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "These are famous numbers in physics, but we have no real reason for why they are what they are."
Well, I'm a computer scientist not a physicist but I thought these constants are present because all observations so far have verified that. We aren't able to make observations from several million or billion years ago so we cannot tell whether or not these constants change or at what rate. Our instruments are not precise enough to do that nor have they been around long enough.
I recall reading that as a universe expands or contracts, the constants would theoretically change to adjust to the expansion or contraction of the basic building blocks of matter.
Not all quasar data is consistent with variations. In 2004, a group of astronomers -- including Patrick Petitjean of the Astrophysical Institute of Paris -- found no change in the fine structure constant using quasar spectra from the Very Large Telescope in Chile. No one has yet explained the discrepancy with the Keck telescope results.
"These measurements are so difficult and at the extreme end of what can be achieved by the telescopes that it is very difficult to answer this question," Petitjean says.
Is it possible that the measuring instruments failed here? I thought that was always a possibility in observations. Is it also possible that the quasars we are observing are differing light years away and thus we are making observations based on data from several billion years ago (as the article states)?
"We have an incomplete theory, so you look for holes that will point to a new theory," Murphy says. Varying constants may be just such a hole.
Yes, I think that there is call for speculation on the constants varying over billions of years since the light we are observing is roughly 12 billion years old and all our observations here on earth remain static.
Well, this is one firm's results and we all know how sometimes findings can be biased. If you want the full report from onestat, it is here with all browsers covered.
Interestingly, Adtech found similar results (~12% in Europe) while The Counter put Firefox at more around ~9-10% for those months. Net Applications placed Firefox at around 10% also. Of course, Wikipiedia has a decent article on this with combined data at the bottom.
I guess 13% seems like kind of a stretch and 10% seems a bit more realistic. I don't know what makes any one source more reliable than the other though as none of them really talk about their strategy for attaining these statistics.
The big question shouldn't be "where is Firefox's percentage" but instead "how do we make Firefox more appealing to non-technical users?" Because it's clear that the technically savvy people have adopted Firefox but you'll never make it past 15% of the population with that attitude. I hate to say it, but introducing some functionality that Internet Explorer doesn't have might be the only way to accomplish that. And when you do that, you lose the stability and security that made it so popular in the first place. Solution? Perhaps a MySpace plug-in in light of recent news?:)
In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?
I'd like to think that education would cure all three of those issues. But it's a rather naïve view. Either way, I'll have my official answer be better education throughout the entire world about everything. That's our best strategy for making it through the next 100 years. Bank on the children. If you raise a child, it's your duty to make sure that they become far smarter than you are. I think it was around high school when I became much more intelligent than my father but I don't fault him for it. I only thank him for ensuring that his son and daughters were well educated even though he wasn't.
Given those three issues, it seems probable that we may not make it another hundred years without severe loss of life. I don't think the loss of life will be complete with the death of all humans but I think there is a high probability for a large loss of our populations in one country or another. I don't mean thousands like natural disasters but I mean a hundred million or more.
We'll survive, just not at a luxury like we've known. Honestly, if a lot of major religions and their leaders could start coming to terms with each other. You know, make it so that it's not like a death sentence when you don't believe in God or Allah? You could also reveal to everyone that our leaders should be more like Gandhi and less like Hitler. That would probably help with those first two problems. In every country, to be a successful politician you need a lot of financial support. Unfortunately, the ideal people leading us are those with no interest in padding their own pockets.
As for the third problem you listed, we're screwed. We're screwed because our numbers are reaching epic proportions that the earth cannot sustain and there's really no way around it aside from birth control. I don't support enforced birth control as far as the Chinese have taken it but you have to admit it certainly curbed their population growth rate. If nature fails us or vice versa, things will be pretty bad though I doubt we would become extinct entirely.
Of course, there are an infinite number of universes and I'm sure there exists one which doesn't have any of those three problems....
*loads a bullet into the chamber of his handgun*
...which is why I suggest you get to work on the machine that allows yourself, ten beautiful women and I a way to cross over to that parallel universe, Mr. Hawking.
"It's way too early to say whether the company would pursue licenses and litigation from its competitors," Friendster President Kent Lindstrom told RedHerring.com. "We'll do what we can to protect our intellectual property."
I think that last sentence means they're going to liquidate all their assets and assemble the largest all star team of lawyers since Microsoft evaded penalties even after being convicted.
Then they'll buy out Kevin Bacon when he screams prior art.
Then they'll figure out that Moneybags Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace and go after News Corp. You know, News Corp, that generically named conglomerate of multiple money sucking companies?
There's not a lot of social networking projects that are open source or free to the communities. Every single one seems to be some ad revenue money grubbing scheme anyway. You have PeopleAggregator and maybe NovaShare though the latter doesn't really support degrees of separation searching.
I guess if MySpace & FaceBook went away tomorrow I really wouldn't care. What I do care about is the fact that this patent is just as stupid and obvious as the Amazon patent on "methods and systems of assisting users in purchasing items." Will we ever see these end? Probably not as long as the patent lawyers are milled out of "the world's finest educational institutions."
Though the Friendster patent could be challenged in either the patent system or the courts, opponents would face an uphill battle.
Importantly perhaps, the ads are for the European release of the white PSP and are appearing on billboards in Amsterdam rather than in the US where racial tension remains a fraught issue.
So if an ad has racist tones it's ok for a company to post it in a country that doesn't have racial problems? I wouldn't really appreciate a company that does that.
I like how a Keith Stuart (a games blogger from the UK Guardian) can comment on the state of racial tension in two countries he doesn't live in.
In America, it's called "racism." In Europe, it's just people trying to protect their culture. To me, it's called "ignorance." Ignorance is everywhere no matter how hard we try to eradicate it.
America's quick to cry foul play because of our recent history, yes. It's seen as very important to be equal opportunity here. Do I walk down the street and feel conscience of other people's skin color? No. Some people in America still might but it's only due to their ignorance. I've only seen someone oppressed once because of their skin color and it was because I was in Alabama for a wedding and my Indian friend was rubbing someone wrong at a bar.
Why is Turkey having a hard time joining the EU? Hmmmm? One of the reasons cited is fear of mass immigration to the UK or Germany for work. There have already been two waves to Germany that upset the locals.
I thought 'texting' would be a verb. As in, "I just got an $1800 ticket for texting while driving" or "my teacher sent me to the principles office for texting during class."
Maybe I'm wrong, I'm a better ones-and-zeros-smith than a wrodsmith.
from the don't-forget-web20 dept.
What the hell is web-twenty? Is that the time of day when all the pot heads get off their asses and sit at their iMacs and work on their crappy Phish tribute GeoCities site with flying toasters and images of Jerry Garcia?
There's not a lot of meat to this article other than "here comes Leopard!" This tech blog seems to state the obvious and then say perhaps five times... so I'll throw down some speculation as this article points out.
Way back in the day, Apple code named their boxes by color. From the aforementioned article:
Red Box (for those that don't remember), was said to be a compatibility environment where Windows apps ran on the Macintosh but did so within a separate Windows installation. Apple doesn't have to reverse engineer the Windows API (like WINE) to get this functionality and theoretically upset Microsoft. Rather, it could simply be based on a standard copy of Windows. Red Box would override Windows native interface when run on OS X and would incorporate OS X's Aqua user Interface in the place of the Windows UI. The software would then make the two environments (Mac and Windows) functionally seamless with one another. Unlike a virtual environment, the end result would be full compatibility while retaining both visual as well as functional usability for the Mac user.
So we can speculate that Leopard might not only be fast but also encourage a partitioned Windows installation using boot camp so that it can reference everything within Windows and run Windows apps flawlessly without having to reboot or (more importantly) reverse engineer Windows.
Again, this is just speculation, I've been expecting them to put 'red box' functionality in a release of OS X soon.
A half a year ago, I went home for the holidays and fixed my parent's windows machine for them.
Not more than two weeks later my mom called me up saying it had a blue screen of death whenever it tried to boot up. I asked her what the error said and she started reading to me the hex from the screen.
She said my older sister had been using the computer last so I told her to put her on the line and asked her what had happened. She told me her friend in college had sent her an attachment in an e-mail named "ms... blast... worm... 32.exe or something" but when she clicked on it, the machine started acting funny.
Growing up, I was ravaged by mosquitoes daily in the summers. There were years when they were particularly bad and they would literally swarm you. They were huge too. If you think it's cold in Minnesota and we don't have mosquitoes, you're wrong. They just had to be that much bigger and drink that much more blood to survive. You would be out playing baseball and three of them would hold you down while another worked his proboscis through your breastplate directly into your heart. Often times there wouldn't be much left of me but skin and bones when I got home. And that was if you were lucky. If there were six or more, oftentimes they'd just grab your shoulders and carry you back to their nest and you'd never be seen again.
If you have someone that loves "all of God's creatures" then you should throw them in pond filled with mosquitoes and see how long it takes them to become a killing machine. Not very long I'd wager. In fact, mosquitoes are pretty good proof that there is no god. Why would a being of infinite good unleash such a horrible plague upon man?
It seemed that the people who produced the most sweat and breathed the hardest were the most attractive. These features seem to come hand in hand with being overweight but I never really bought the idea that overweight people's blood tasted better. If that were true, all the mosquitoes would have moved to Wisconsin.
Instead, you'd have mosquitoes buzzing around your mouth & ears. Why? Because I guess they are attracted to carbon dioxide big time. You accumulate natural carbon dioxide in the wells of your ears and it pours out of your mouth. They also somehow detect lactic acid which you'll find about large animals.
For those of you who don't know, mosquitoes breed in water (when the eggs hatch, they look like this). Not moving water, but standing water. One of the tasks I used to have was laying silage down, putting a tarp over it and weighting the tarp down with old tires. Invariably, rainfall would fill the insides of the tires with just enough water to make them each a breeding well for mosquitoes. It's not a fun job but you have to make sure that all that old scummy water is emptied out otherwise you'd find yourself engulfed with mosquitoes at the end of the summer.
I've never underestimated mosquitoes, I think they need to be very good at detecting carbon dioxide, scents, heat & water vapor in order to successfully find food for their eggs and lay them. This is quite a task considering what they've got and I think that it's amazing they manage to reproduce at all. I dream of the day when mosquitoes are endangered organisms.
*mental note* Do not hold Olympic summer games in Athens, Greece.
I don't like being a karma whore but here's a working link to the NYTimes article. And, if you're like me and hate ads, try out the text only version. That's right, in order to get to read an article without obstruction, you have to pretend to be both an RSS feed AND a printing machine.
Now to comment on something I read in the article:
"At some point you have to ask yourself what is your core business," said Kevin Timmons, Yahoo's vice president for operations. "Are you going to design your own router, or are you going to build the world's most popular Web site? It is very difficult to do both."
I disagree with that. I think it should be re-stated to say "It is very difficult to accomplish more than you have the resources to sustain." It's fatal in thinking that you only do one thing for a business to be successful. A simple analogy would be the farms that I grew up on. No one specialized in one crop or animal. Why? Because sometimes the market would tank for one particular thing and it would tank hard. If you had a distributed investment in produce (like a portfolio) then you would survive most of the market problems. I think Google's strategy is much the same in that they are trying to cement themselves in other technologies--not because they're going to lose the search market--just because it's a smart thing to do.
I think that there's a lot to be said about concentrating on one thing and getting it right. If you do get it right, then it's encouraged to move on to something else. I think Google has found themselves in the top of the search engine market. They found out that their technology doesn't work so well for closed domains (military or business level searching) so I think they just need to keep looking for new ways to stay ahead of the competition. Meanwhile, they have seemingly unlimited resources. Why not try to build your own router?
I mean, fresh graduates are cheap. Some fresh graduates have a lot of ideas and are decent workers while the majority of others are lemons that don't do anything. Why not hire a bunch of them and spend a lot of money weeding them out? I think it's great that Google's taking a stab at other technologies and I honestly think they have a good strategy for doing it.
To comment further on the article, Google makes unreliable machines reliable en masse via redundancy. They are indeed very secretive about their technology but if you want to learn more about their page ranking algorithms or basic technologies, why not read their patents? They always seem to be covered on Slashdot anyway.
Poor guy, doesn't even know his head from his tube.
I read the whole thing in hopes that he was addressing why the government & pentagon use their own equipment and lines for communications but he wasn't.
One would hope that if you were planning on giving a speech about the internet that you would either pay an aide to sit you down and brief you on it... or you would at least Google it.
Hopefully this will be somewhat of a wake-up call for politicians to educate themselves on the topic of the internet before they start passing legislation on net neutrality. I doubt it though.
I can laugh at this guy, but if I think of any member of my immediate family they probably think of the internet as a "magic tube" just as much as Senator Ted Stevens. I could go through the frustrating process of trying to explain it to them but that's not so enticing.
Since Elo's screens have Linux support, I wanted to see if anyone on Slashdot has worked on similar projects and has experience with open source POS solutions.
First, I would like to say that the acronym "POS" means point of sale in the business world but in the computer science world, it tends to mean "piece of shit" (at least in my experience).
I know of solutions out there. They're all web solutions. You might not be looking to implement web solutions, however, isn't it possible to set it up on a local network? Maybe this is your strategy but I'm a bit confused as to what you're willing or desiring to do.
I'm also confused if it has to be "open source" or merely "free." On one hand the title says OSS but you seem to be only concerned with price. Just make a note that "free" and "OSS" are two different kinds of software. If you googled, you probably found a smattering of both. The two I suggest you investigate are purely OSS as I prefer that over free. Your last question ("Quite bluntly, what's the best but least expensive option that you know of?") seems to imply that you're willing to spend money if we can verify it's worth it. What conditions are you working under specifically?
Look into MozPos & freepos. They are web based and maybe you could install a very simple sleek version of Linux with merely Mozilla. The homepage would vary between computer and you could have a pop up keyboard or swipe strips for authentication. You would probably need a swiper that supports Linux but that's another issue.
If you're truly looking to get out of the box open source solutions, look into using websites instead of networked applications.
If you're willing to get your hands dirty, I encourage you to look at the engines some of these OSS things are based on and maybe make a GUI network application that is built on top of a layer of abstraction allowing you to use an already designed backend (database & reporting features). This is a lot of work but would be a great addition to the community if you subsequently made it available since Elo screens seem to be the leader in touch screens.
With a web based OSS application, you can download the source code and change the PHP/JSP/ASP/whatever interface code so that the HTML suites your liking considering the specifications of your Elo screens. That's why I suggest a web application and that's why I think that you'll be most satisfied if you pick one in a language you know and invest two or three solid weekends in tailoring the interface to precisely what you want.
Most importantly, change the system based on feedback from the workers.
Just a thought, I encourage you to post your choices and results here on Slashdot when you do make a selection and attempt to do it yourself.
Well, I try not to talk about this subject unless someone brings it up. You brought it up so sit back and listen.
I can't give you advice on how to get into robotics because I never successfully did that. I worked with pioneer robots mounted with laptops and had the whole Aria package figured out. I studied all the white papers and took all the courses. I'm even getting my masters with a specialization in AI. What was my problem? I'm not sure, it was probably the fact that my grades were ~3.5 GPA out of 4.0 & I've never been published.
If you really love this topic and will settle for nothing less, then you have to be prepared to devout a lot of time to reading about everything out there and, yes as you mentioned, tinkering with things like JStick and real time microboards all the time. You need to be a master of forward & inverse kinematics and also have all the algorithms down pat.
I say this because people are not ready to hand over responsibilities to robots. You might cite NASA but their rigorous protocol of checking and double checking every tiny movement of their robots anything but artificial intelligence. Reason? High failure rate otherwise.
Today's robots leave a lot to desire. That might have changed since I last looked in the field but I can tell you that less than 5% of all computer scientists are lucky enough to work with robots (or unlucky enough) and I think an even smaller percentage get to develop for them. Maintenance is just as needed there as it is in any other software.
I'm not trying to discourage you, I'm trying to be realistic. I read I, Robot in fifth grade and it changed my life. Unfortunately, it only gave me the desire, not the rigorous technical background needed to put me in the few high percentage points of students.
You mention mechanical engineering but that implies robotics from scratch. If you're a computer science student, I advise you to treat the hardware as a blackbox and use the APIs to program for them. There is some cross over you will need to learn to program for arm or walking robotics but this is more theory of how your code should look to work the controllers. I guess if you want to design from scratch and make genuinely new physical robots, then you need not only a mechanical engineering background but also one in electrical engineering. I also foresee a lot of the signals moving from hardwired to wireless for simplicity so that would mean Fourier transforms, wavelets, & the like.
My suggestion is to hit Citeseer for the free papers. Hit your college's IT site and try to get into the IEEE Computing document repository. They also have a special robotics division that you might find useful for creating contacts though I'm a member of it and that's never happened (you have to attend a lot of meetings). Look everywhere for material on the topic and see what other people did right and what other people did wrong. Have you ever heard of Robocup? Definitely read all the papers released about that and look into becoming active in your university's robotics lab.
Most importantly, keep yourself knowledgeable/marketable for conventional jobs in computer science because you really never know what's going to happen. Robotic development has a very limited market. The factory line robots are getting more and more reliable and it seems any biomimicked robotics are for purely entertainment value. I'm not intending to be mean when I say it, but there probably is no "career" solely in robotics. You've got to bus tables in the computer science world before you can prove yourself to the big dogs.
I now write web services and web applications. You have a romantic goal, I wish you the best of luck in a more exciting future.
Most people who are not completely blinded by ideology will say honestly, "not yet".
Ah, you're right, I am blinded by my own zeal. Thank you for helping me see the light.
Not only should we select a document format that supports speech, but that should be embedded into the file format as a wav. I think that this will make it easier for applications to play it for the user.
Also embedded in the document will be a massive bitmap containing high resolution images with enlarged fonts for our users hard of sight.
We're not sure, either, if the people will all have the same true type font so we'll go ahead and embed that in the file too. Wait, better include the codecs for the image and sound snippets. Oh, and I guess we can't be sure the viewer can read them so we'll include the viewer too.
My, oh my, this is much better than the crappy OpenDocument format I used in my prior ideology.
I just opened up MS Word and typed "Hello World!" and saved it to my desktop. 24,064 bytes. Why? What in God's name is that bloated app bloating in it's bloated files?
Obviously it's (mostly) the app not the format that addresses this, but it's a valid bitch...
Slashdot Mirror
That's great news, but what about its commitment to the fans/consumer?
... only to disappoint me time and time again with bland console games and repackaged computer games in the new millennium.
I don't know about the rest of you but games like Tie Fighter, The Dig & Dark Forces won me over long ago
They could seriously concentrate on their fans before worrying about which console they're going to choose to support.
You know, the best method I've used to come up with what you're looking for is to just use a search engine and either blow up what you find or post it as normal size or put it in a binder that's always available. You can find some nice PDFs here if you want to take that route or you can look all over the place and mix/match. I personally only print out those I find myself using over and over again.
If you absolutely just want high quality print and don't have time to do this yourself, just visit Learn & Thrive which, to my recollection, has some decent sized posters available. They don't have the very particular kinds of posters you're asking for but then again, I don't know anybody who would do Oracle 10 specifically.
My suggestion is to get a high quality PDF from those first two links and just blow it up and have it laminated at Kinkos. Cost? Probably a lot less then buying something online.
If you really really want to do it yourself, I would suggest using The Gimp (or your favorite image editor) to capture images and text and make your own 'cheat sheet' with everything specific to where you work that would be pertinent. Share it with everyone else if you do and make sure to export as a high quality file format. Have it printed and keep it updated and specific to your workplace. If it's worth that much for productivity, you can probably convince your boss that the ROI is there for your time and money to get them printed.
I use this to maintain loose connections with friends from highschool/college.
Honestly, you know how addictive this site is if someone posts a story about it going offline to Slashdot and it's accepted!
That site was making some crazy loads of cash. The advertising department was saying "we need web traffic!" and the developers were saying "oh, we'll get you web traffic!" and now the hardware department is saying "wtf?"
Perhaps MySpace should be renamed to IcarusSpace?
Since (in my opinion) NVidia has taken the lead in GPUs, I hope that ATI will be boosted back into a competitive state and price wars ensue.
Again, to me this is nothing but great news for the end-consumer.
Next: It's a reference to a game centered around the film A.I. and refers to a society called the Cloudmakers.
Next: The phrase "so dark the con of man" is actually a religious blog.
A funny thing about the first three phrases I picked out is that they are all blogs online if you google them. Is this a coincidence or are all of the phrases here blogs? They seem to refer to direct blog entries, perhaps the html or text from these blog entries can be used as a hash encryption for the "junk" binary loaded in between each of the entries.
Again, this is just speculation. MKULTRA refers to the CIA's mind control program in response to rumors of the Soviet, Chinese and North Korean programs of the smae nature
Perhaps the purpose is to develop a blog scanning program that will accurately identify blogs and retrieve information and try to figure out a way to crack this document? It's very large so I am guessing automation would be necessary as opposed to human googling by hand.
Either way, I'm never going to be able to see the research or dump the data in to Weka and try to find correlations by mixing and matching data mining algorithms on lab data.
Also, I think it's stupid that the story implied irony that Gates doesn't use the open source model in software: I don't know where you got that quote because I can't find it in either of the linked articles. People's lives depend on a cure/vaccine/treatment for HIV/AIDS. People's lives do not depend on the development of software--especially Microsoft software, thank god. They are two very different development efforts with very different ethical connotations.
I built prototype search software that revolved around a product called Collexis. It has a medical demo you can mess around with. The beautiful thing is that it uses a taxonomy to fingerprint documents. It also takes in raw text and assigns it a fingerprint and then uses Sleepy Cat to quickly reference many records and match your fingerprint. Unfortunately, it's not built for "open" domains like everything on the web but works best when you have a finite domain and a large number of documents to search.
I feel the author fails to even address the first thing he should have in this article. Why move from "Web 1.0" to "Web 2.0"? This article is not intuitively laid out.
I found an article in Nature to be much more informative than the article linked in this story.
But what model would you blame for the hundreds of PC viruses that devestated home and corporate computers in the 90's up to today? I think the exploits they relied upon were simple coding flaws and insecure type checking or buffer overflows that wer simply poor coding kept as a secret.
So, in light of what causes the malware, would I rather the code be fully disclosed or instead guess that there's probably no major exploit possible? I'd probably go with the former considering the sheer number of viruses based on the latter and the fact that it's the exploits based on proprietary code that often do the most severe damage to society.
I would like to ask McAfee what they would think if a competitor found a virus and figured out how to fix it but couldn't tell McAfee that information because it would be considered disclosure. That would be the real irony here. Sites that host viruses and describe/publish them are often very useful sources for people looking to rid them from their computers or even how to avoid exploits in the future.
This article is entitled "Hackers Learn from Open Source" but they only learn as much as the researchers and patchers do. I would rather the community be progressing towards solid impenetrable code than have guarded secrets that keep everyone under a thin veil of security. Because if those secrets are ever discovered by the wrong people, we will not know about them and we'll essentially be caught with our pants down. I'd rather have every programmer know the pitfalls of coding than to have thousands of applications deployed world wide all waiting for one hacker to stumble upon a secret.
You really have to question McAfee's motives here in their Sage magazine
When I read this Slashdot article, all the rules of software design came flooding back to me. Low coupling, high cohesion, encapsulated complex structures, all that jazz. Before you even started to program a complex FPS game, you might start by carefully separating the layers and keeping things like two dimensional surfaces rendered to be de-coupled from other things like the AI of the enemies. Separate the garphics from the rest of the gameplay. I completely buy into the possibility that games can be designed well enough to abstract their graphics to a point where the same exact graphics package can be used in even several different types of games.
.kkrieger's procedures.
When I read this article, it sounded like a classic example of someone going nuts with the design patterns that encourage encapsulation and separation of layers to improve modularity. Like someone had actually put in a lot of effort to the game to reduce the amount of effort that will be required later when new platforms and libraries come out for the game. On top of that, the imagery doesn't come from a data file but instead is derived on the fly from a library of procedures--something easily achieved by the strategy pattern. The funny thing is that if other games have abstracted their graphics packages sufficiently, they should be able to rework the libraries to be procedures instead or maybe even build adapters to
Why don't we see this more often in all games? Because I think most games today are disposable. They're built for one console or platform with the intent of only running on the current version of Windows or Mac and with no interest in coming out with new releases that support new hardware or software. They do this because games are construed as novelty software that expire as the user tires of them. Games like WoW or other MMOs might bring about a shift in the way game designers spend their efforts. Maybe games will start to take a longer time to develop but last a hell of a lot longer than they traditionally have?
This is my opinion, I have nothing to back it up but I think Sony released these ads with the intent of causing unrest. As pointed out in prior comments on Slashdot, they got some great coverage with this advertising campaign.
But the ads rely entirely on imagery. The pictures I saw didn't even have words on them, just two women. One completely white and one completely black in all respects. As also pointed out earlier there were three images with only the white-on-top-of-black one being controversial.
Why did they pick humans? The humans are supposed to represent PSPs, an inate object? I don't understand why this decision was made to use human beings. Put a black wolf and a white timberwolf in the image. Put a black demon and a white angel in the image. Why would you put two ethnicities of the human race that have obvious baggage attached to them. Even if it doesn't offend anyone you know, there are people alive today that are still suffering from the effects of racial tensions either directly or indirectly.
Why did they pick women? Again, the women are representing a PSP, you're just inviting people to speculate that women are objects. And to gamers, this might be "ok" or welcomed but when you throw it on a billboard, you're only drawing heat.
Why is there a struggle between these two subjects? Why would different colored PSPs fight each other? Are they incompatible? Is one better than the other? Again, I don't understand why they made the decision to pit them against each other in the images.
In retrospect, no matter what their motives or realizations were, I f*cking hate marketing and all forms of it.
I recall reading that as a universe expands or contracts, the constants would theoretically change to adjust to the expansion or contraction of the basic building blocks of matter.
Is it possible that the measuring instruments failed here? I thought that was always a possibility in observations. Is it also possible that the quasars we are observing are differing light years away and thus we are making observations based on data from several billion years ago (as the article states)?
Yes, I think that there is call for speculation on the constants varying over billions of years since the light we are observing is roughly 12 billion years old and all our observations here on earth remain static.
Well, this is one firm's results and we all know how sometimes findings can be biased. If you want the full report from onestat, it is here with all browsers covered.
:)
Interestingly, Adtech found similar results (~12% in Europe) while The Counter put Firefox at more around ~9-10% for those months. Net Applications placed Firefox at around 10% also. Of course, Wikipiedia has a decent article on this with combined data at the bottom.
I guess 13% seems like kind of a stretch and 10% seems a bit more realistic. I don't know what makes any one source more reliable than the other though as none of them really talk about their strategy for attaining these statistics.
The big question shouldn't be "where is Firefox's percentage" but instead "how do we make Firefox more appealing to non-technical users?" Because it's clear that the technically savvy people have adopted Firefox but you'll never make it past 15% of the population with that attitude. I hate to say it, but introducing some functionality that Internet Explorer doesn't have might be the only way to accomplish that. And when you do that, you lose the stability and security that made it so popular in the first place. Solution? Perhaps a MySpace plug-in in light of recent news?
Given those three issues, it seems probable that we may not make it another hundred years without severe loss of life. I don't think the loss of life will be complete with the death of all humans but I think there is a high probability for a large loss of our populations in one country or another. I don't mean thousands like natural disasters but I mean a hundred million or more.
We'll survive, just not at a luxury like we've known. Honestly, if a lot of major religions and their leaders could start coming to terms with each other. You know, make it so that it's not like a death sentence when you don't believe in God or Allah? You could also reveal to everyone that our leaders should be more like Gandhi and less like Hitler. That would probably help with those first two problems. In every country, to be a successful politician you need a lot of financial support. Unfortunately, the ideal people leading us are those with no interest in padding their own pockets.
As for the third problem you listed, we're screwed. We're screwed because our numbers are reaching epic proportions that the earth cannot sustain and there's really no way around it aside from birth control. I don't support enforced birth control as far as the Chinese have taken it but you have to admit it certainly curbed their population growth rate. If nature fails us or vice versa, things will be pretty bad though I doubt we would become extinct entirely.
Of course, there are an infinite number of universes and I'm sure there exists one which doesn't have any of those three problems
*loads a bullet into the chamber of his handgun*
Then they'll buy out Kevin Bacon when he screams prior art.
Then they'll figure out that Moneybags Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace and go after News Corp. You know, News Corp, that generically named conglomerate of multiple money sucking companies?
There's not a lot of social networking projects that are open source or free to the communities. Every single one seems to be some ad revenue money grubbing scheme anyway. You have PeopleAggregator and maybe NovaShare though the latter doesn't really support degrees of separation searching.
I guess if MySpace & FaceBook went away tomorrow I really wouldn't care. What I do care about is the fact that this patent is just as stupid and obvious as the Amazon patent on "methods and systems of assisting users in purchasing items." Will we ever see these end? Probably not as long as the patent lawyers are milled out of "the world's finest educational institutions." Whatever happened to the peer to patent system the USPTO was going to use? Is this thing a failed idea already?
Boy I'd like to throw down some discussions on this patent.
I like how a Keith Stuart (a games blogger from the UK Guardian) can comment on the state of racial tension in two countries he doesn't live in.
In America, it's called "racism." In Europe, it's just people trying to protect their culture. To me, it's called "ignorance." Ignorance is everywhere no matter how hard we try to eradicate it.
America's quick to cry foul play because of our recent history, yes. It's seen as very important to be equal opportunity here. Do I walk down the street and feel conscience of other people's skin color? No. Some people in America still might but it's only due to their ignorance. I've only seen someone oppressed once because of their skin color and it was because I was in Alabama for a wedding and my Indian friend was rubbing someone wrong at a bar.
Why is Turkey having a hard time joining the EU? Hmmmm? One of the reasons cited is fear of mass immigration to the UK or Germany for work. There have already been two waves to Germany that upset the locals.
Maybe I'm wrong, I'm a better ones-and-zeros-smith than a wrodsmith.
What the hell is web-twenty? Is that the time of day when all the pot heads get off their asses and sit at their iMacs and work on their crappy Phish tribute GeoCities site with flying toasters and images of Jerry Garcia?
Way back in the day, Apple code named their boxes by color. From the aforementioned article: So we can speculate that Leopard might not only be fast but also encourage a partitioned Windows installation using boot camp so that it can reference everything within Windows and run Windows apps flawlessly without having to reboot or (more importantly) reverse engineer Windows.
Again, this is just speculation, I've been expecting them to put 'red box' functionality in a release of OS X soon.
A half a year ago, I went home for the holidays and fixed my parent's windows machine for them.
... blast ... worm ... 32.exe or something" but when she clicked on it, the machine started acting funny.
Not more than two weeks later my mom called me up saying it had a blue screen of death whenever it tried to boot up. I asked her what the error said and she started reading to me the hex from the screen.
She said my older sister had been using the computer last so I told her to put her on the line and asked her what had happened. She told me her friend in college had sent her an attachment in an e-mail named "ms
Growing up, I was ravaged by mosquitoes daily in the summers. There were years when they were particularly bad and they would literally swarm you. They were huge too. If you think it's cold in Minnesota and we don't have mosquitoes, you're wrong. They just had to be that much bigger and drink that much more blood to survive. You would be out playing baseball and three of them would hold you down while another worked his proboscis through your breastplate directly into your heart. Often times there wouldn't be much left of me but skin and bones when I got home. And that was if you were lucky. If there were six or more, oftentimes they'd just grab your shoulders and carry you back to their nest and you'd never be seen again.
If you have someone that loves "all of God's creatures" then you should throw them in pond filled with mosquitoes and see how long it takes them to become a killing machine. Not very long I'd wager. In fact, mosquitoes are pretty good proof that there is no god. Why would a being of infinite good unleash such a horrible plague upon man?
It seemed that the people who produced the most sweat and breathed the hardest were the most attractive. These features seem to come hand in hand with being overweight but I never really bought the idea that overweight people's blood tasted better. If that were true, all the mosquitoes would have moved to Wisconsin.
Instead, you'd have mosquitoes buzzing around your mouth & ears. Why? Because I guess they are attracted to carbon dioxide big time. You accumulate natural carbon dioxide in the wells of your ears and it pours out of your mouth. They also somehow detect lactic acid which you'll find about large animals.
For those of you who don't know, mosquitoes breed in water (when the eggs hatch, they look like this). Not moving water, but standing water. One of the tasks I used to have was laying silage down, putting a tarp over it and weighting the tarp down with old tires. Invariably, rainfall would fill the insides of the tires with just enough water to make them each a breeding well for mosquitoes. It's not a fun job but you have to make sure that all that old scummy water is emptied out otherwise you'd find yourself engulfed with mosquitoes at the end of the summer.
I've never underestimated mosquitoes, I think they need to be very good at detecting carbon dioxide, scents, heat & water vapor in order to successfully find food for their eggs and lay them. This is quite a task considering what they've got and I think that it's amazing they manage to reproduce at all. I dream of the day when mosquitoes are endangered organisms.
*mental note* Do not hold Olympic summer games in Athens, Greece.
Is anyone else as astonished as I am? I thought Blizzard only made high quality computer games. Perhaps they have a few skeletons in their closet?
Also, whoever wrote this article seems to suffer from Tourettes Syndrome:
Now to comment on something I read in the article: I disagree with that. I think it should be re-stated to say "It is very difficult to accomplish more than you have the resources to sustain." It's fatal in thinking that you only do one thing for a business to be successful. A simple analogy would be the farms that I grew up on. No one specialized in one crop or animal. Why? Because sometimes the market would tank for one particular thing and it would tank hard. If you had a distributed investment in produce (like a portfolio) then you would survive most of the market problems. I think Google's strategy is much the same in that they are trying to cement themselves in other technologies--not because they're going to lose the search market--just because it's a smart thing to do.
I think that there's a lot to be said about concentrating on one thing and getting it right. If you do get it right, then it's encouraged to move on to something else. I think Google has found themselves in the top of the search engine market. They found out that their technology doesn't work so well for closed domains (military or business level searching) so I think they just need to keep looking for new ways to stay ahead of the competition. Meanwhile, they have seemingly unlimited resources. Why not try to build your own router?
I mean, fresh graduates are cheap. Some fresh graduates have a lot of ideas and are decent workers while the majority of others are lemons that don't do anything. Why not hire a bunch of them and spend a lot of money weeding them out? I think it's great that Google's taking a stab at other technologies and I honestly think they have a good strategy for doing it.
To comment further on the article, Google makes unreliable machines reliable en masse via redundancy. They are indeed very secretive about their technology but if you want to learn more about their page ranking algorithms or basic technologies, why not read their patents? They always seem to be covered on Slashdot anyway.
Poor guy, doesn't even know his head from his tube.
... or you would at least Google it.
I read the whole thing in hopes that he was addressing why the government & pentagon use their own equipment and lines for communications but he wasn't.
One would hope that if you were planning on giving a speech about the internet that you would either pay an aide to sit you down and brief you on it
Hopefully this will be somewhat of a wake-up call for politicians to educate themselves on the topic of the internet before they start passing legislation on net neutrality. I doubt it though.
I can laugh at this guy, but if I think of any member of my immediate family they probably think of the internet as a "magic tube" just as much as Senator Ted Stevens. I could go through the frustrating process of trying to explain it to them but that's not so enticing.
I know of solutions out there. They're all web solutions. You might not be looking to implement web solutions, however, isn't it possible to set it up on a local network? Maybe this is your strategy but I'm a bit confused as to what you're willing or desiring to do.
I'm also confused if it has to be "open source" or merely "free." On one hand the title says OSS but you seem to be only concerned with price. Just make a note that "free" and "OSS" are two different kinds of software. If you googled, you probably found a smattering of both. The two I suggest you investigate are purely OSS as I prefer that over free. Your last question ("Quite bluntly, what's the best but least expensive option that you know of?") seems to imply that you're willing to spend money if we can verify it's worth it. What conditions are you working under specifically?
Look into MozPos & freepos. They are web based and maybe you could install a very simple sleek version of Linux with merely Mozilla. The homepage would vary between computer and you could have a pop up keyboard or swipe strips for authentication. You would probably need a swiper that supports Linux but that's another issue.
If you're truly looking to get out of the box open source solutions, look into using websites instead of networked applications.
If you're willing to get your hands dirty, I encourage you to look at the engines some of these OSS things are based on and maybe make a GUI network application that is built on top of a layer of abstraction allowing you to use an already designed backend (database & reporting features). This is a lot of work but would be a great addition to the community if you subsequently made it available since Elo screens seem to be the leader in touch screens.
With a web based OSS application, you can download the source code and change the PHP/JSP/ASP/whatever interface code so that the HTML suites your liking considering the specifications of your Elo screens. That's why I suggest a web application and that's why I think that you'll be most satisfied if you pick one in a language you know and invest two or three solid weekends in tailoring the interface to precisely what you want.
Most importantly, change the system based on feedback from the workers.
Just a thought, I encourage you to post your choices and results here on Slashdot when you do make a selection and attempt to do it yourself.
I can't give you advice on how to get into robotics because I never successfully did that. I worked with pioneer robots mounted with laptops and had the whole Aria package figured out. I studied all the white papers and took all the courses. I'm even getting my masters with a specialization in AI. What was my problem? I'm not sure, it was probably the fact that my grades were ~3.5 GPA out of 4.0 & I've never been published.
If you really love this topic and will settle for nothing less, then you have to be prepared to devout a lot of time to reading about everything out there and, yes as you mentioned, tinkering with things like JStick and real time microboards all the time. You need to be a master of forward & inverse kinematics and also have all the algorithms down pat.
I say this because people are not ready to hand over responsibilities to robots. You might cite NASA but their rigorous protocol of checking and double checking every tiny movement of their robots anything but artificial intelligence. Reason? High failure rate otherwise.
Today's robots leave a lot to desire. That might have changed since I last looked in the field but I can tell you that less than 5% of all computer scientists are lucky enough to work with robots (or unlucky enough) and I think an even smaller percentage get to develop for them. Maintenance is just as needed there as it is in any other software.
I'm not trying to discourage you, I'm trying to be realistic. I read I, Robot in fifth grade and it changed my life. Unfortunately, it only gave me the desire, not the rigorous technical background needed to put me in the few high percentage points of students.
You mention mechanical engineering but that implies robotics from scratch. If you're a computer science student, I advise you to treat the hardware as a blackbox and use the APIs to program for them. There is some cross over you will need to learn to program for arm or walking robotics but this is more theory of how your code should look to work the controllers. I guess if you want to design from scratch and make genuinely new physical robots, then you need not only a mechanical engineering background but also one in electrical engineering. I also foresee a lot of the signals moving from hardwired to wireless for simplicity so that would mean Fourier transforms, wavelets, & the like.
My suggestion is to hit Citeseer for the free papers. Hit your college's IT site and try to get into the IEEE Computing document repository. They also have a special robotics division that you might find useful for creating contacts though I'm a member of it and that's never happened (you have to attend a lot of meetings). Look everywhere for material on the topic and see what other people did right and what other people did wrong. Have you ever heard of Robocup? Definitely read all the papers released about that and look into becoming active in your university's robotics lab.
Most importantly, keep yourself knowledgeable/marketable for conventional jobs in computer science because you really never know what's going to happen. Robotic development has a very limited market. The factory line robots are getting more and more reliable and it seems any biomimicked robotics are for purely entertainment value. I'm not intending to be mean when I say it, but there probably is no "career" solely in robotics. You've got to bus tables in the computer science world before you can prove yourself to the big dogs.
I now write web services and web applications. You have a romantic goal, I wish you the best of luck in a more exciting future.
Not only should we select a document format that supports speech, but that should be embedded into the file format as a wav. I think that this will make it easier for applications to play it for the user.
Also embedded in the document will be a massive bitmap containing high resolution images with enlarged fonts for our users hard of sight.
We're not sure, either, if the people will all have the same true type font so we'll go ahead and embed that in the file too. Wait, better include the codecs for the image and sound snippets. Oh, and I guess we can't be sure the viewer can read them so we'll include the viewer too.
My, oh my, this is much better than the crappy OpenDocument format I used in my prior ideology.
I just opened up MS Word and typed "Hello World!" and saved it to my desktop. 24,064 bytes. Why? What in God's name is that bloated app bloating in it's bloated files?
Arguing for MS Office is not a "valid bitch."