I've got this too... my phone has a video camera in it, and if I hold it in front of the TV I can capture one minute clips of any show I want! Take that, TiVo!
The parent probably meant it in jest, but I'll go ahead and analyse it seriously anyway.
To get good WiFi, you need three things: - Line of sight (going through walls will work in a house, but not around buildings) - Plenty of signal power - Low interference
As one of the tallest free-standing structures in the world, the CN tower has great line of sight to a huge area of Toronto, even in areas of downtown where there are plenty of tall buildings. Heck, even the entire U of T campus (dead in the middle of downtown) can see the tower... (incidentally it makes a very good "south" indicator if you ever get lost there.) So far we're 1 for 1
Signal power, OTOH, would be problematic. IIRC, 802.11 works in the ISM bands, so there are FCC limits on how much power you can pump into the signal (not to mention practical limits in terms of laptop battery power for generating replies.) I've worked with 802.11 links up to about 20 km, but you need special equipment with expensive amplifiers and huge directional antennas, because your signal ends up something like -70 to -90 dBm. We're down 1 for 2.
The real killer, however, is interference. So much TV and other stuff gets transmitted off the CN Tower that I wouldn't be surprised if the noise-floor is higher than most ISM band-signals. In theory the frequency bands are isolated from each other, but in reality any sufficiently amplified signal will have a bell-curve-like frequency distribution. There's also the fact that Toronto probably has so many wireless networks, that trying to jam in yet another one will cause major overlapping problems. I don't see much future left in the ISM band. 1 out of 3.
Of course, I gotta confess that I too thought "Cool! CN Tower!" upon reading the article header.
Gotta agree with you about the whole "rough approximations" thing being no better than making up a number on the spot.
For all we know, those millions of downloads could just be the result of a few hundred people downloading the thing thousands of times over. Those fanboys have no restraint.
Anyways, I've gotta get back to my 19,234th firefox download. Ciao!
Perhaps we'll see the AC group hitting back with demonstrations of how dangerous these DC powersupplies are to the hamsters and other wildlife native to big server rooms.
Incidentally, that's how the electric chair came about:
[Edison]AC is dangerous! Just watch what happens to these various animals when I close this circuit! Edison electrocutes some horses [US_Gov]Ooooo... I'll bet that works on people too! US_Gov introduces new grisly method of executions, while disregarding the main point of Edison's demonstrations.
The story has a good post script too... some reporters came to Edison to get his take the new, modern form of executions. When asked what name he would give to the method, Edison, in an attempt to forever link his competitor's name with electricity's most grusome application, offered "to Westinghouse someone."
I simply refused to believe the slashdot summary, so I clicked on the links, expecting them to lead to a parody site like theonion.com. Each link I followed only increased my sense of disbelief.
Quite simply, they couldn't have followed a better course of action if their goal was to become the most reviled company in America. Bogus litigation, gratuitous attacks upon OSS, and now a pyramid/text-message spam scheme to keep the whole wreck afloat? SCO is setting a new standard for last place.
Do a google search for the first sentence of the parent post in slashdot. This post has been copy pasted numerous times by a guy who's got an ax to grind against Roland:
Here's my advise to the guy with the ax to grind: you've submitted this rant often enough. Go take a huff of lithium and stop bogging down the discussions with OT copy-paste posts. If you don't like Roland's stuff, add him to your filter list.
Here's my advice to everyone else: stop modding this up. This is OFF TOPIC.
As a proof of concept, they meant well, but started off down the wrong path by having these things centrally controlled.
Central control will work for a few hundred machines, maybe even a few thousand, but you'll run into major bottlenecking issues when you've got these things small enough to use clouds of millions or billions. Moreover, central control requires needlessly high bandwidth, when you have a single decision-maker in charge of things which could more easily be handled at the local level. Think about how well your company would work if you had to route every single decision through the CEO, no matter how trivial the matter may be.
The challenge of networks is to get rid of the central controller which still achieving controlled behavior. Distributed control through self-organizing networks is a certainly difficult, but it's the only way to fly.
Instead of making everyone pissed off by trying to legislate technology to be unable to skip commercials, they should focus on trying to make commercials people would want to watch. IMO this interactivity idea isn't a half bad start... it even piqued my interest.
OT: it's the same with almost any technology... the carrot is a great deal more effective than the stick, and causes much less resentment. For example, RFID tags in passports: instead of making them mandatory, they could offer incentives to those who sign up, such as getting through customs 10x faster. They'd probably get almost total voluntary compliance, and people would think they're the ones getting a good deal./off topic.
No, you misunderstand... the GP's first point was that companies could try to sidestep ever having to pay liscense fees by simply waiting three years and then getting the concepts for free.
In reply to this, I would say that any company trying to do so would run the risk of having one of their competitors snap up the exclusive rights to the invention before the three year wait is up. That, or the inventor might do some inexpensive busy-work on models or prototypes which might convince the courts that he hasn't been squatting. Alternatively, a simple way to solve this problem would be to include "actively seeking corporate backing regardless of success" as an acceptable form of 'making progress.'
IHMO, the three year expiry date is an excellent idea.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I for one would argue that taking the first steps towards human interplanetary and interstellar travel were worth a lot more than fighting some stupid wars. Developing the technology to go to the moon is one thing, but there is no substitute for proving you can by actually doing it.
Totally OT, but I remember having a (lengthy) debate with a guy who claimed that absolutely nothing is ethically wrong, because according to the Many Worlds interpretation no matter what course of action you choose in this universe, there is some other quantum reality where you did the opposite.
"Gee, don't feel bad about me brutally killing your whole family... according to this completely untestable theory I have, there is another inaccessible parallel universe out there where I didn't! See? It's all good now."
I always hated the Many Worlds interpretation because it's not science, it's religion clothed in science-speek. By it's very nature it is untestable... might as well say invisible purple monkeys (or flying spaghetti monsters) are responsible for how things run "behind the scenes." I subscribe much more strongly to the "shut up and calculate" school of thought.
Bush is gung-ho for hydrogen because it's a drawing-board technology. In all likelihood it will stay on the drawing board forever, even after all the major technical hurdles of safely storing, transferring, and combusting hydrogen have been solved.
Why? Simple: no-one will buy the cars until there are enough hydrogen stations to make them practical, and no-one will put up the money to build thousands of ultra-expensive hydrogen stations when there are next to no cars to use them. There simply is no way to achieve a nice smooth transition (unlike, say, gas-electric hybrid cars, which would provide a beautifully logical and economical transition to an electric-car infrastructure.)
Radioactive iodine has a half-life measured in the millions of years, and the stuff can have nasty effects on the thyroid gland, where it gets concentrated once ingested. It is very difficult to find rock formations which will remain stable on that kind of time-frame.
Of course, there are still probably many places we could safely stick the radioactive waste, but the BANANA principle (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) will always make such sites a very difficult sell for politicians.
So, um, you applied for a job you knew you wouldn't want, just so you could reject them? Or have they taken to calling people randomly from the phone book to give out free jobs as a kind of promotional thing?
If it was the former, I'm sure it'll make google reconsider it's whole "be evil by complying with the law" thing. About as much as getting snubbed by google would have made China reconsider it's whole "being a Communist dictatorship" thing.
I actually like the idea of this table, but I'm puzzled why they call it a "coffee table" at all... instead of emphasizing that this is something you DON'T want coffee around.
Surely the sensors in the touch screen cannot repeatedly withstand getting hot coffee spilled onto them, can they?
Actually, the one that really gets my goat is TVs built right into the dashboard. With all the fuss people raised about cell-phones being distracting, I have no idea how auto manufacturers managed to slip this one under the radar. (In theory the TV is supposed to be off unless the vehicle is in park, but the safety switch is easy to disable and many ethically challenged auto shops will do it for you.) How any sane government could have let this pass regulations just blows my mind.
OTOH, maybe they did it on purpose. GM: Better Drivers through Darwinian Selection.
This "they said they wouldn't do evil and now they did evil" line is just getting stupid.
First of all, let's look at the 'evil' they did. They provide filtered search results which are legal to access in China on top of the illegal content you can get by bypassing the firewall, and THEY EVEN HAVE A DISCLAIMER SAYING THE FSCKING RESULTS ARE FILTERED. People looking for unfiltered content can do what they've had to do up till now... bypass the firewall and go to google.com. Google just ADDED functionality by having filtered servers in China, and yet idiots out there claim this is 'evil' because they didn't break the law to add as much as they would have liked. Blame the Chinese government for making that law, instead of hating google because they try to offer service in whatever ways they can. Frankly, it would have been worse had google taken its ball and gone home. This way the Chinese people have MORE access to information, not less.
Let's compare that to other companies, who've quietly complied with far more appalling agreements with the Chinese government. Some of these agreements have resulted in dissidents getting arrested, and for all we know tortured or killed. Going after google, instead of, say, Yahoo, merely because of the fscking motto, reveals an interesting mentality, which goes something like "it's OK to do evil, just so long as you don't *say* you won't."
Besides, as far as I can see it, google has pretty much stuck to its 'do no evil' mantra. Faced with the choice between providing filtered results with a disclaimer, and providing NO content, they rightly decided the former is the better path for everyone. Better for google, better for the chinese people. Unless you subscribe to the ridiculous idea that getting snubbed by a single search engine would cause the Chinese government to rethink its whole 'repressing the people' thing, providing no search results in China serves absolutely no-one.
Exactly right. The degradation could simply be more visible in the educated, who in some ways had "more to lose."
Besides, 0.3 percent difference sounds awfully low. I highly doubt that their margin of error could have even been close to this, given that these are human subjects, after all.
Love, like almost all human emotions, has a perplexingly broad spectrum, filled with variation and diversity. I love my parents, I love my fiancee, and I have no doubt I will love my children... but all in very different ways. While I would willingly take a bullet to save any one of them, 'perfect love' doesn't really describe what I feel.
I've never really understood the concept of 'perfect love.' By what standard is it perfect? Leaving out oft-quoted intangible qualities such as how "noble" or "pure" a love should be, defining perfect love solely in terms of total self-sacrifice seems a bit one-dimensional, if not unhealthy. It sounds weird to say it, but love needs to contain at least some traces of selfishness, least it become entirely one-sided and exploitative.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got this too... my phone has a video camera in it, and if I hold it in front of the TV I can capture one minute clips of any show I want! Take that, TiVo!
The parent probably meant it in jest, but I'll go ahead and analyse it seriously anyway.
To get good WiFi, you need three things:
- Line of sight (going through walls will work in a house, but not around buildings)
- Plenty of signal power
- Low interference
As one of the tallest free-standing structures in the world, the CN tower has great line of sight to a huge area of Toronto, even in areas of downtown where there are plenty of tall buildings. Heck, even the entire U of T campus (dead in the middle of downtown) can see the tower... (incidentally it makes a very good "south" indicator if you ever get lost there.) So far we're 1 for 1
Signal power, OTOH, would be problematic. IIRC, 802.11 works in the ISM bands, so there are FCC limits on how much power you can pump into the signal (not to mention practical limits in terms of laptop battery power for generating replies.) I've worked with 802.11 links up to about 20 km, but you need special equipment with expensive amplifiers and huge directional antennas, because your signal ends up something like -70 to -90 dBm. We're down 1 for 2.
The real killer, however, is interference. So much TV and other stuff gets transmitted off the CN Tower that I wouldn't be surprised if the noise-floor is higher than most ISM band-signals. In theory the frequency bands are isolated from each other, but in reality any sufficiently amplified signal will have a bell-curve-like frequency distribution. There's also the fact that Toronto probably has so many wireless networks, that trying to jam in yet another one will cause major overlapping problems. I don't see much future left in the ISM band. 1 out of 3.
Of course, I gotta confess that I too thought "Cool! CN Tower!" upon reading the article header.
Gotta agree with you about the whole "rough approximations" thing being no better than making up a number on the spot.
For all we know, those millions of downloads could just be the result of a few hundred people downloading the thing thousands of times over. Those fanboys have no restraint.
Anyways, I've gotta get back to my 19,234th firefox download. Ciao!
Perhaps we'll see the AC group hitting back with demonstrations of how dangerous these DC powersupplies are to the hamsters and other wildlife native to big server rooms.
Incidentally, that's how the electric chair came about:
[Edison]AC is dangerous! Just watch what happens to these various animals when I close this circuit!
Edison electrocutes some horses
[US_Gov]Ooooo... I'll bet that works on people too!
US_Gov introduces new grisly method of executions, while disregarding the main point of Edison's demonstrations.
The story has a good post script too... some reporters came to Edison to get his take the new, modern form of executions. When asked what name he would give to the method, Edison, in an attempt to forever link his competitor's name with electricity's most grusome application, offered "to Westinghouse someone."
I share that sentiment.
I simply refused to believe the slashdot summary, so I clicked on the links, expecting them to lead to a parody site like theonion.com. Each link I followed only increased my sense of disbelief.
Quite simply, they couldn't have followed a better course of action if their goal was to become the most reviled company in America. Bogus litigation, gratuitous attacks upon OSS, and now a pyramid/text-message spam scheme to keep the whole wreck afloat? SCO is setting a new standard for last place.
Do a google search for the first sentence of the parent post in slashdot. This post has been copy pasted numerous times by a guy who's got an ax to grind against Roland:
I think most of you are aware of the controversy
Here's my advise to the guy with the ax to grind: you've submitted this rant often enough. Go take a huff of lithium and stop bogging down the discussions with OT copy-paste posts. If you don't like Roland's stuff, add him to your filter list.
Here's my advice to everyone else: stop modding this up. This is OFF TOPIC.
As a proof of concept, they meant well, but started off down the wrong path by having these things centrally controlled.
Central control will work for a few hundred machines, maybe even a few thousand, but you'll run into major bottlenecking issues when you've got these things small enough to use clouds of millions or billions. Moreover, central control requires needlessly high bandwidth, when you have a single decision-maker in charge of things which could more easily be handled at the local level. Think about how well your company would work if you had to route every single decision through the CEO, no matter how trivial the matter may be.
The challenge of networks is to get rid of the central controller which still achieving controlled behavior. Distributed control through self-organizing networks is a certainly difficult, but it's the only way to fly.
Me too.
/off topic.
Instead of making everyone pissed off by trying to legislate technology to be unable to skip commercials, they should focus on trying to make commercials people would want to watch. IMO this interactivity idea isn't a half bad start... it even piqued my interest.
OT: it's the same with almost any technology... the carrot is a great deal more effective than the stick, and causes much less resentment. For example, RFID tags in passports: instead of making them mandatory, they could offer incentives to those who sign up, such as getting through customs 10x faster. They'd probably get almost total voluntary compliance, and people would think they're the ones getting a good deal.
No, you misunderstand... the GP's first point was that companies could try to sidestep ever having to pay liscense fees by simply waiting three years and then getting the concepts for free.
In reply to this, I would say that any company trying to do so would run the risk of having one of their competitors snap up the exclusive rights to the invention before the three year wait is up. That, or the inventor might do some inexpensive busy-work on models or prototypes which might convince the courts that he hasn't been squatting. Alternatively, a simple way to solve this problem would be to include "actively seeking corporate backing regardless of success" as an acceptable form of 'making progress.'
IHMO, the three year expiry date is an excellent idea.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I for one would argue that taking the first steps towards human interplanetary and interstellar travel were worth a lot more than fighting some stupid wars. Developing the technology to go to the moon is one thing, but there is no substitute for proving you can by actually doing it.
"Gee, don't feel bad about me brutally killing your whole family... according to this completely untestable theory I have, there is another inaccessible parallel universe out there where I didn't! See? It's all good now."
I always hated the Many Worlds interpretation because it's not science, it's religion clothed in science-speek. By it's very nature it is untestable... might as well say invisible purple monkeys (or flying spaghetti monsters) are responsible for how things run "behind the scenes." I subscribe much more strongly to the "shut up and calculate" school of thought.
Bush is gung-ho for hydrogen because it's a drawing-board technology. In all likelihood it will stay on the drawing board forever, even after all the major technical hurdles of safely storing, transferring, and combusting hydrogen have been solved.
Why? Simple: no-one will buy the cars until there are enough hydrogen stations to make them practical, and no-one will put up the money to build thousands of ultra-expensive hydrogen stations when there are next to no cars to use them. There simply is no way to achieve a nice smooth transition (unlike, say, gas-electric hybrid cars, which would provide a beautifully logical and economical transition to an electric-car infrastructure.)
The problem is iodine.
Radioactive iodine has a half-life measured in the millions of years, and the stuff can have nasty effects on the thyroid gland, where it gets concentrated once ingested. It is very difficult to find rock formations which will remain stable on that kind of time-frame.
Of course, there are still probably many places we could safely stick the radioactive waste, but the BANANA principle (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) will always make such sites a very difficult sell for politicians.
So, um, you applied for a job you knew you wouldn't want, just so you could reject them? Or have they taken to calling people randomly from the phone book to give out free jobs as a kind of promotional thing?
If it was the former, I'm sure it'll make google reconsider it's whole "be evil by complying with the law" thing. About as much as getting snubbed by google would have made China reconsider it's whole "being a Communist dictatorship" thing.
Wasn't there an article not too long ago about a restaurant requiring their employees to hit the gym if they gained more than x% of their bodyweight?
"Jane, maybe you shouldn't eat that donut. You're seriously lowering the asthetic value of my work experience."
Hee... if only I could mod you up.
"Jimmy! What are you doing lying on the coffee table with your pants down? No more GTA for you!"
Very true.
I actually like the idea of this table, but I'm puzzled why they call it a "coffee table" at all... instead of emphasizing that this is something you DON'T want coffee around.
Surely the sensors in the touch screen cannot repeatedly withstand getting hot coffee spilled onto them, can they?
Perhaps we could use the backcronym LINUX = Linux Is Not UniX?
Actually, the one that really gets my goat is TVs built right into the dashboard. With all the fuss people raised about cell-phones being distracting, I have no idea how auto manufacturers managed to slip this one under the radar. (In theory the TV is supposed to be off unless the vehicle is in park, but the safety switch is easy to disable and many ethically challenged auto shops will do it for you.) How any sane government could have let this pass regulations just blows my mind.
OTOH, maybe they did it on purpose. GM: Better Drivers through Darwinian Selection.
You're missing the point. The point is ...oooh shiny! :)
Sadly, my link filter at work didn't quite like the suggestively 'adult' overtones contained within that URL. :(
Much like penisland.com... get your free pen today from Pen Island! (Sorry... the immature child in me couldn't resist)
This "they said they wouldn't do evil and now they did evil" line is just getting stupid.
First of all, let's look at the 'evil' they did. They provide filtered search results which are legal to access in China on top of the illegal content you can get by bypassing the firewall, and THEY EVEN HAVE A DISCLAIMER SAYING THE FSCKING RESULTS ARE FILTERED. People looking for unfiltered content can do what they've had to do up till now... bypass the firewall and go to google.com. Google just ADDED functionality by having filtered servers in China, and yet idiots out there claim this is 'evil' because they didn't break the law to add as much as they would have liked. Blame the Chinese government for making that law, instead of hating google because they try to offer service in whatever ways they can. Frankly, it would have been worse had google taken its ball and gone home. This way the Chinese people have MORE access to information, not less.
Let's compare that to other companies, who've quietly complied with far more appalling agreements with the Chinese government. Some of these agreements have resulted in dissidents getting arrested, and for all we know tortured or killed. Going after google, instead of, say, Yahoo, merely because of the fscking motto, reveals an interesting mentality, which goes something like "it's OK to do evil, just so long as you don't *say* you won't."
Besides, as far as I can see it, google has pretty much stuck to its 'do no evil' mantra. Faced with the choice between providing filtered results with a disclaimer, and providing NO content, they rightly decided the former is the better path for everyone. Better for google, better for the chinese people. Unless you subscribe to the ridiculous idea that getting snubbed by a single search engine would cause the Chinese government to rethink its whole 'repressing the people' thing, providing no search results in China serves absolutely no-one.
IIRC from The Hot Zone, you only need about five virii fragments in order to get the infection.
Exactly right. The degradation could simply be more visible in the educated, who in some ways had "more to lose."
Besides, 0.3 percent difference sounds awfully low. I highly doubt that their margin of error could have even been close to this, given that these are human subjects, after all.
Love, like almost all human emotions, has a perplexingly broad spectrum, filled with variation and diversity. I love my parents, I love my fiancee, and I have no doubt I will love my children... but all in very different ways. While I would willingly take a bullet to save any one of them, 'perfect love' doesn't really describe what I feel.
I've never really understood the concept of 'perfect love.' By what standard is it perfect? Leaving out oft-quoted intangible qualities such as how "noble" or "pure" a love should be, defining perfect love solely in terms of total self-sacrifice seems a bit one-dimensional, if not unhealthy. It sounds weird to say it, but love needs to contain at least some traces of selfishness, least it become entirely one-sided and exploitative.