A man on a good horse can maybe cover 30 miles a day unless he wants to kill the horse. A man on foot maybe 20 if he's in top shape. My comment stands. Maybe I should have said "A dozen or few" but still, you're just being pedantic.
My 60 year old stepmom can go 100 miles a day on a bike over paved roads. And used to be able to do 200 when she was younger. Horses only go 30? I feel like it would be more! Don't know for sure though.
In the last 110 years, we did discover an entirely new branch of physics. We keep noticing funny things that make it seem like that will happen again. We've got dark energy and string theory, and we have almost no idea how gravity works.
I have a feeling that if we keep building particle accelerators, and playing with fusion and building better machines, we'll discover some new process that allows us to travel very, very fast within the next 500 years.
Humans as a whole are amazingly intelligent. If we don't blow ourselves up or exhaust our economies of science funding or destroy our schools to the point where no one knows science, I could see it happening in the next 500 years.
And honestly, you can't tell me I'm wrong - it's the fucking future and this is rampant speculation anyway. I've read a Brief History of Time, watched the COSMOS series, and thought for hours on end about the vastness of space and the insane complexity of interstellar travel, so I know enough to at least be part of the conversation.
The simplest thing is to dull the reflective surfaces of the offending parts of the building. This problem isn't unique, it's happened before elsewhere.
They did that. When they designed it, they thought of this and added a film over the windows that reduces reflected energy by 70%, according to TFA.
It still manages to raise temperatures by 20-30 degrees in the affected zone, and on a 110 degree day thats enough to melt plastics and people. -Taylor
From a motion tracking point of view, tracking a brightly colored ball is pretty much the simplest possible thing you can do.
I agree; that was a good call on Sony's part. Clever of them to find an easier way to do something than the competition.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is creating Kinect, which combines multiple cameras to create depth and color maps of your living room and model your entire skeleton in real time. *That* is incredibly complex...
Yeah, it's going to be hard to squeeze that kind of processing onto a console... Microsoft and their devs have their work cut out for them.
Instead of putting an infrared tracking camera in each remote (like the Wii), they can just use one camera on the TV and just put LEDs in the remote.
Totally! Choosing the cheap way actually allowed Sony to approach Nintendo's price point for once, and making it easy for the camera to track allows for excellent accuracy.
I think we have a lot in common. We should be friends.
You joke (well, and there is some seriousness there clearly), but if Sony doesn't provide a compelling reason for people to buy their product, their sales and profit will suffer. They may have saved a bit on manufacturing and development costs, but showing up to the motion tracking game 4 years after Nintendo and not even clearly beating them at that game just means current buyers have no reason to choose Sony - so they'll ultimately lose money.
They could have spent a bit more in development to secure a spot in the market, but instead they've basically thrown away what money they invested. Sure, it muddies the waters a bit, maybe levels the playing field, but when you come out with a product 4 years after your competition, you'd better be tipping the field your way, not fighting for the same scraps of the market they are.
Somebody should teach Sony what my dad taught me when I was 8: you gotta spend money to make money. -Taylor
And I don't know if this was the cheapest way. It's coming mighty close the price of the Wii itself. Wouldn't Nintendo's method thusly be cheaper?
Cost and price are different. Sony's method probably costs them less to make than Nintendo's costs them, but Sony charges more. All that means is that Sony makes more profit. -Taylor
From a technical perspective, this is just such a pathetic response from sony to the motion controller game.
Sony used to be such an innovator (or so everyone tells me) but all I have seen from them for years is pisspoor effort after pisspoor effort. This is a particularly sad effort on their part. Why do I say that?
From a motion tracking point of view, tracking a brightly colored ball is pretty much the simplest possible thing you can do. Check out this embedded system you could buy for $150 or so in 2002 that did it as a basic demo: http://www.acroname.com/examples/10067/10067.html
It was one of the first things I did when I learned how to use the OpenCV computer vision library. Its just pathetically easy to do. You basically max out the contrast, and any pixels still white are the bright spots. Go check out ball tracking or blob tracking videos on YouTube. Every college student with a class in MATLAB has probably learned how to do it from the ground up, without a library.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is creating Kinect, which combines multiple cameras to create depth and color maps of your living room and model your entire skeleton in real time. *That* is incredibly complex and extremely innovating!
It is just so sad that Sony is actually releasing this as a product. It is literally like someone said "Hey, we need to do something about the wii", and someone said, "okay, how can we do motion tracking the cheapest way?"
In fact, that's probably why they did it. Instead of putting an infrared tracking camera in each remote (like the Wii), they can just use one camera on the TV and just put LEDs in the remote. They probably did this first and foremost because it was cheap, and for no other reason. Its sad that a company that used to innovate is not just a cost-cutting me-too company. They didn't think about how to improve on the concept, or if it even made sense; they just copied it with the least cost they could. -Taylor
The disk drives are also controlled. The disk drive don't let you just get the bits out - they will only give you data if you have a key, etc. I don't know the specifics but this is a *well* thought out system. They have serious control over this shit.
So unless you're going to start writing firmware for blu ray disk drives (which are certainly also protected in some way from attacks like that) i don't see how you're going to get the sequence of bits out.
I can tell you one thing - that kind of hack is nothing I've heard of; its always people getting the key. -Taylor
That's funny coz the "pirates" in my country don't need this key to copy stuff.
They just copy the entire disks as is, and any player that can play the original can play the copy.
It's like making a photocopy of a book in a language you don't understand. It doesn't matter if you can't understand it, all that matters is the end-user (player) can.
That's probably not what's happening. Blu Ray disks won't even let you read them unless you have the key. Only "Legitimate" players (software, or hardware) are allowed access to those keys.
Most Blu Ray copies exist because an indivdual key for that particular disk was sniffed. Then "Illigitimate" software can load the key to make a copy. But you can't even access the data without some kind of key. Your pirates probably DO rely on "Illigitimate" software that uses sniffed keys.
This new leak is the *Master* key with which they made all those individual keys that the disks are protected with.
Which means we can now generate good keys on the fly. Which, I'm led to believe, lets us copy any Blu Ray disk without first having to sniff the key. Though that last part I'm still not sure about. But thats what it seems like. -Taylor
Yeah, that's just fucking terrible. Honestly I'm getting so sick of people writing terrible, terrible blog postings on supposedly high tech blogs. If this were a cat blog, I would understand, but its just silly for slashdot to post such crap. Why does this happen? -Taylor
The difference between engineering majors and business majors:
The part of the flowchart that says "then a miracle occurs" is a joke to engineering majors. For business majors, it's a required step that makes perfect sense.
GNU/AB is old news. I'm starting a fork called YAFABS (Yet Another Free Anchor Baby System). Naturalized in 5 years? With YAFABS you'll be naturalized in two! -Taylor
Flash is fine on my Nexus One. Its not quite the best experience and I'd imagine that really heavy players might not work well (hulu is abysmal, but their player seems to be really chunky), but it works out great when I'm reading a blog or following a twitter link, and someone has embedded a flash video. I know the iPhone does YouTube but there's plenty of other flash video sites, and my phone works on many more.
People also need to clean up their flash players for mobile use. Flash Video isn't the problem, that works fine. The problem is when people try to have a feature loaded flash player, and then it pukes. They need to have a simpler mobile version, but that's a lot easier than forcing them to write a whole new app, I think.
And when a player supports fullscreen video, its usually pretty nice. I actually prefer watching youtube videos embedded than loading the dedicated youtube app to watch them. Its easy to do either, but when its a short video I just like to click and go. -Taylor
I've been using FEMM lately for some magnetics stuff I've been working on. I would LOVE an android port, or some way to run simulations from my phone.
I don't *really* need it, but its just funny how something like that is actually possible these days. We probably will have supercomputers in our hands someday. I mean, current phones already are supercomputers by the standards of what...? 30 years ago? 20 years ago?
Smartphones will become the tricorders of the future, its inevitable. -Taylor
Does it matter if it's anthropogenic? I'm against a hot world with rising seas, melting ice caps and global drought. I'm against all of the other terrible nastiness associated with it. I don't give a damn who we blame, but let's find a way to halt/fix it, shall we?
If it's nonanthropogenic, there probably is not a way to stop it.
Not a reasonable way, for us, anyway.
I'm sure the aliens could help. Someone invent warp so the Vulcans can find us! -Taylor
It is illegal to intercept cellphone communications. Doesn't matter if it is a "security demonstration" what you call it is not relevant. You probably need waivers from everyone you plan on intercepting.
Get a lawyer who know that area of law, and not from the EFF. I like their ideals and all, but their track record is as idealists and they don't seem to do so good in terms of actual law, especially in the court.
Not saying don't give your talk, GSM security is serious and the phone companies need to get with it and fix that shit. However make sure you aren't breaking the law.
Yeah. Now that they've announced this to reassure everyone, they'll probably get shut down somehow.:-/ -Taylor
That was from 1996, so I understand this stuff changes, but it *always* goes over time and over budget. Can't the planners be a bit more realistic? -Taylor
Well that cannot really budget for accidents really. I mean you build the thing as close to the limits of your budget, then something breaks and you have no choice to go over budget.
I've never been part of a large, long budget project, but I get the idea that since accidents are unavoidable, people *have* to budget for accidents and unforeseen circumstances, or every budget ever would be over time.
Obviously many people fail to do this, but you'd expect people throwing around tens of billions of dollars to have enough experience to allow time for unforeseen circumstances, if they're being honest.
I mean, if they have to bring the thing up to ambient temp, they're down a *minimum* of 6 months (3 months to warm, 3 months to cool again). If that happens a few times, they're a year or two over time. You'd think they would have expected that might have happened and allowed for it.
I think instead they were afraid to be honest about how long it would take because they were trying not to lose support. -Taylor
That was from 1996, so I understand this stuff changes, but it *always* goes over time and over budget. Can't the planners be a bit more realistic?
The planners who give realistic budgets never get their project built. The money ends up going to the guy who gave an unrealistic budget, an the illusion of a much better value.
Yeah. I guess even if the politicians *know* it will go over budget, if the public doesn't realize it, they'll still look good.
Still frustrating, but its how people work i guess. -Taylor
You're comparing apples and oranges. All of these big experiments have things they need to get to get worked out before they're running at their design strength. That's the problem with building machines that are their own prototypes.
I can't speak for all of them, but the detector I work on has been performing excellently (all its detector subsystems, etc..). There was a flaw in some of the accelerator magnets of the main LHC ring, and it needs to be fixed, which involves warming up and cooling down the magnets (which takes 3 months each eway)
Fermilab, by comparison has been running for something like 20 years, they did their shakedown phase a long time ago, and now they're tuned to run optimally. It's the lifecycle of these things.
You're totally right, but I wish the planners took that kind of thinking into account. They all said this would be up and running 5 years ago, for much less cost than it has accrued.
That was from 1996, so I understand this stuff changes, but it *always* goes over time and over budget. Can't the planners be a bit more realistic? Right now you're saying "look, these things happen," but before they said "these things won't happen." At least, i feel like thats how it goes. I haven't been too involved so someone let me know if I'm wrong.
I guess the politicians are weary enough and these things are hard to get funding for, so people want to over promise a bit, but it just leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
Personally i think this stuff is worth way more money than wars and bailouts and whatnot, so I'm not complaining about the funding, i just think that these things constantly going over budget is the whole reason politicians are reluctant to buy in in the first place! -Taylor
You can get a nettop for about $200 that will have as much storage. It will be fast enough and be x86 so give you a wide choice of distros and with the correct choice of GPU will do hardware accelerated 1080p. Finally it will be a fraction of the size and consume 20 watts.
You're doing no-one other than your power company a favor by resurrecting the G5 tower.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the road to the stars have bikeways?
Yes.
My 60 year old stepmom can go 100 miles a day on a bike over paved roads. And used to be able to do 200 when she was younger.
Yeah, but bicycles were invented in the 19th century.
Yeah. I was more wondering about the 30 miles on a horse thing. Is that really all? I'm just curious.
A man on a good horse can maybe cover 30 miles a day unless he wants to kill the horse. A man on foot maybe 20 if he's in top shape. My comment stands. Maybe I should have said "A dozen or few" but still, you're just being pedantic.
My 60 year old stepmom can go 100 miles a day on a bike over paved roads. And used to be able to do 200 when she was younger. Horses only go 30? I feel like it would be more! Don't know for sure though.
In the last 110 years, we did discover an entirely new branch of physics. We keep noticing funny things that make it seem like that will happen again. We've got dark energy and string theory, and we have almost no idea how gravity works.
I have a feeling that if we keep building particle accelerators, and playing with fusion and building better machines, we'll discover some new process that allows us to travel very, very fast within the next 500 years.
Humans as a whole are amazingly intelligent. If we don't blow ourselves up or exhaust our economies of science funding or destroy our schools to the point where no one knows science, I could see it happening in the next 500 years.
And honestly, you can't tell me I'm wrong - it's the fucking future and this is rampant speculation anyway. I've read a Brief History of Time, watched the COSMOS series, and thought for hours on end about the vastness of space and the insane complexity of interstellar travel, so I know enough to at least be part of the conversation.
But I could see it happening.
-Taylor
The simplest thing is to dull the reflective surfaces of the offending parts of the building. This problem isn't unique, it's happened before elsewhere.
They did that. When they designed it, they thought of this and added a film over the windows that reduces reflected energy by 70%, according to TFA.
It still manages to raise temperatures by 20-30 degrees in the affected zone, and on a 110 degree day thats enough to melt plastics and people.
-Taylor
I agree; that was a good call on Sony's part. Clever of them to find an easier way to do something than the competition.
Yeah, it's going to be hard to squeeze that kind of processing onto a console... Microsoft and their devs have their work cut out for them.
Totally! Choosing the cheap way actually allowed Sony to approach Nintendo's price point for once, and making it easy for the camera to track allows for excellent accuracy.
I think we have a lot in common. We should be friends.
You joke (well, and there is some seriousness there clearly), but if Sony doesn't provide a compelling reason for people to buy their product, their sales and profit will suffer. They may have saved a bit on manufacturing and development costs, but showing up to the motion tracking game 4 years after Nintendo and not even clearly beating them at that game just means current buyers have no reason to choose Sony - so they'll ultimately lose money.
They could have spent a bit more in development to secure a spot in the market, but instead they've basically thrown away what money they invested. Sure, it muddies the waters a bit, maybe levels the playing field, but when you come out with a product 4 years after your competition, you'd better be tipping the field your way, not fighting for the same scraps of the market they are.
Somebody should teach Sony what my dad taught me when I was 8: you gotta spend money to make money.
-Taylor
...
And I don't know if this was the cheapest way. It's coming mighty close the price of the Wii itself. Wouldn't Nintendo's method thusly be cheaper?
Cost and price are different. Sony's method probably costs them less to make than Nintendo's costs them, but Sony charges more. All that means is that Sony makes more profit.
-Taylor
From a technical perspective, this is just such a pathetic response from sony to the motion controller game.
Sony used to be such an innovator (or so everyone tells me) but all I have seen from them for years is pisspoor effort after pisspoor effort. This is a particularly sad effort on their part.
Why do I say that?
From a motion tracking point of view, tracking a brightly colored ball is pretty much the simplest possible thing you can do. Check out this embedded system you could buy for $150 or so in 2002 that did it as a basic demo:
http://www.acroname.com/examples/10067/10067.html
It was one of the first things I did when I learned how to use the OpenCV computer vision library. Its just pathetically easy to do. You basically max out the contrast, and any pixels still white are the bright spots. Go check out ball tracking or blob tracking videos on YouTube. Every college student with a class in MATLAB has probably learned how to do it from the ground up, without a library.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is creating Kinect, which combines multiple cameras to create depth and color maps of your living room and model your entire skeleton in real time. *That* is incredibly complex and extremely innovating!
It is just so sad that Sony is actually releasing this as a product. It is literally like someone said "Hey, we need to do something about the wii", and someone said, "okay, how can we do motion tracking the cheapest way?"
In fact, that's probably why they did it. Instead of putting an infrared tracking camera in each remote (like the Wii), they can just use one camera on the TV and just put LEDs in the remote. They probably did this first and foremost because it was cheap, and for no other reason. Its sad that a company that used to innovate is not just a cost-cutting me-too company. They didn't think about how to improve on the concept, or if it even made sense; they just copied it with the least cost they could.
-Taylor
The disk drives are also controlled. The disk drive don't let you just get the bits out - they will only give you data if you have a key, etc. I don't know the specifics but this is a *well* thought out system. They have serious control over this shit.
So unless you're going to start writing firmware for blu ray disk drives (which are certainly also protected in some way from attacks like that) i don't see how you're going to get the sequence of bits out.
I can tell you one thing - that kind of hack is nothing I've heard of; its always people getting the key.
-Taylor
That's funny coz the "pirates" in my country don't need this key to copy stuff.
They just copy the entire disks as is, and any player that can play the original can play the copy.
It's like making a photocopy of a book in a language you don't understand. It doesn't matter if you can't understand it, all that matters is the end-user (player) can.
That's probably not what's happening. Blu Ray disks won't even let you read them unless you have the key. Only "Legitimate" players (software, or hardware) are allowed access to those keys.
Most Blu Ray copies exist because an indivdual key for that particular disk was sniffed. Then "Illigitimate" software can load the key to make a copy. But you can't even access the data without some kind of key. Your pirates probably DO rely on "Illigitimate" software that uses sniffed keys.
This new leak is the *Master* key with which they made all those individual keys that the disks are protected with.
Which means we can now generate good keys on the fly. Which, I'm led to believe, lets us copy any Blu Ray disk without first having to sniff the key. Though that last part I'm still not sure about. But thats what it seems like.
-Taylor
*facepalm* So that's 9 in decimal, right?
Yeah, that's just fucking terrible. Honestly I'm getting so sick of people writing terrible, terrible blog postings on supposedly high tech blogs. If this were a cat blog, I would understand, but its just silly for slashdot to post such crap. Why does this happen?
-Taylor
The difference between engineering majors and business majors:
The part of the flowchart that says "then a miracle occurs" is a joke to engineering majors. For business majors, it's a required step that makes perfect sense.
You mean they actually *teach* ????->PROFIT?
no, no, no... the proper term is GNU/Anchor Baby.
GNU/AB is old news. I'm starting a fork called YAFABS (Yet Another Free Anchor Baby System). Naturalized in 5 years? With YAFABS you'll be naturalized in two!
-Taylor
... We humans will shit in our own backyard by choice.
Crap, you mean you saw me shitting the backyard? I thought no one was watching!
-Taylor
...Okay, what's different with this than having search results show up in the google bar on Firefox, IE or in my Android google widget?
Those aren't search results, those are other suggested search terms. Different.
Flash is fine on my Nexus One. Its not quite the best experience and I'd imagine that really heavy players might not work well (hulu is abysmal, but their player seems to be really chunky), but it works out great when I'm reading a blog or following a twitter link, and someone has embedded a flash video. I know the iPhone does YouTube but there's plenty of other flash video sites, and my phone works on many more.
People also need to clean up their flash players for mobile use. Flash Video isn't the problem, that works fine. The problem is when people try to have a feature loaded flash player, and then it pukes. They need to have a simpler mobile version, but that's a lot easier than forcing them to write a whole new app, I think.
And when a player supports fullscreen video, its usually pretty nice. I actually prefer watching youtube videos embedded than loading the dedicated youtube app to watch them. Its easy to do either, but when its a short video I just like to click and go.
-Taylor
You've clearly never heard of guns.
I've been using FEMM lately for some magnetics stuff I've been working on. I would LOVE an android port, or some way to run simulations from my phone.
I don't *really* need it, but its just funny how something like that is actually possible these days. We probably will have supercomputers in our hands someday. I mean, current phones already are supercomputers by the standards of what...? 30 years ago? 20 years ago?
Smartphones will become the tricorders of the future, its inevitable.
-Taylor
Does it matter if it's anthropogenic?
I'm against a hot world with rising seas, melting ice caps and global drought. I'm against all of the other terrible nastiness associated with it. I don't give a damn who we blame, but let's find a way to halt/fix it, shall we?
If it's nonanthropogenic, there probably is not a way to stop it.
Not a reasonable way, for us, anyway.
I'm sure the aliens could help. Someone invent warp so the Vulcans can find us!
-Taylor
They always say this, and we always find something.
Check out this article about hard drive density i just found from 2001:
http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20011029disk1029p2.asp
"...within two or three years, advances in storage capacity will begin to taper off, he predicted."
Drives were about $300 for 80GB back then... Last weekend i bought a 2TB drive for $125.
Yeah, we will always find something. These articles about "zomg technology is going to END!" need to stop.
-Taylor
It is illegal to intercept cellphone communications. Doesn't matter if it is a "security demonstration" what you call it is not relevant. You probably need waivers from everyone you plan on intercepting.
Get a lawyer who know that area of law, and not from the EFF. I like their ideals and all, but their track record is as idealists and they don't seem to do so good in terms of actual law, especially in the court.
Not saying don't give your talk, GSM security is serious and the phone companies need to get with it and fix that shit. However make sure you aren't breaking the law.
Yeah. Now that they've announced this to reassure everyone, they'll probably get shut down somehow. :-/
-Taylor
That was from 1996, so I understand this stuff changes, but it *always* goes over time and over budget. Can't the planners be a bit more realistic?
-Taylor
Well that cannot really budget for accidents really. I mean you build the thing as close to the limits of your budget, then something breaks and you have no choice to go over budget.
I've never been part of a large, long budget project, but I get the idea that since accidents are unavoidable, people *have* to budget for accidents and unforeseen circumstances, or every budget ever would be over time.
Obviously many people fail to do this, but you'd expect people throwing around tens of billions of dollars to have enough experience to allow time for unforeseen circumstances, if they're being honest.
I mean, if they have to bring the thing up to ambient temp, they're down a *minimum* of 6 months (3 months to warm, 3 months to cool again). If that happens a few times, they're a year or two over time. You'd think they would have expected that might have happened and allowed for it.
I think instead they were afraid to be honest about how long it would take because they were trying not to lose support.
-Taylor
That was from 1996, so I understand this stuff changes, but it *always* goes over time and over budget. Can't the planners be a bit more realistic?
The planners who give realistic budgets never get their project built. The money ends up going to the guy who gave an unrealistic budget, an the illusion of a much better value.
Yeah. I guess even if the politicians *know* it will go over budget, if the public doesn't realize it, they'll still look good.
Still frustrating, but its how people work i guess.
-Taylor
You're comparing apples and oranges. All of these big experiments have things they need to get to get worked out before they're running at their design strength. That's the problem with building machines that are their own prototypes.
I can't speak for all of them, but the detector I work on has been performing excellently (all its detector subsystems, etc..). There was a flaw in some of the accelerator magnets of the main LHC ring, and it needs to be fixed, which involves warming up and cooling down the magnets (which takes 3 months each eway)
Fermilab, by comparison has been running for something like 20 years, they did their shakedown phase a long time ago, and now they're tuned to run optimally. It's the lifecycle of these things.
You're totally right, but I wish the planners took that kind of thinking into account. They all said this would be up and running 5 years ago, for much less cost than it has accrued.
http://public.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases1996/PR09.96ECouncil96.html
That was from 1996, so I understand this stuff changes, but it *always* goes over time and over budget. Can't the planners be a bit more realistic? Right now you're saying "look, these things happen," but before they said "these things won't happen." At least, i feel like thats how it goes. I haven't been too involved so someone let me know if I'm wrong.
I guess the politicians are weary enough and these things are hard to get funding for, so people want to over promise a bit, but it just leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
Personally i think this stuff is worth way more money than wars and bailouts and whatnot, so I'm not complaining about the funding, i just think that these things constantly going over budget is the whole reason politicians are reluctant to buy in in the first place!
-Taylor
That Is The Correct Answer.
You can get a nettop for about $200 that will have as much storage. It will be fast enough and be x86 so give you a wide choice of distros and with the correct choice of GPU will do hardware accelerated 1080p. Finally it will be a fraction of the size and consume 20 watts.
You're doing no-one other than your power company a favor by resurrecting the G5 tower.
Well, you could tape a few nettops inside!