The technology is pretty nifty. At work, where we bring in many customer laptops to do virus cleanings etc., one computer had a very long and annoying password. After logging in once, then needing to reboot, I went to log in again, and the login box flashed away just as I put my hands to the keyboard. I logged back out to check, and I found that it had taken a sample image of my face on my first login without my noticing (it did say it was doing it; I just wasn't paying attention), and on the second login it recognized me before I could start typing the long password. All this without me even trying or realizing it was a feature, or even noticing there was a camera (I wasn't looking for one).
The lighting conditions and my face may have been ideal for the camera and facial recognition software, but if they can get that kind of performance in the less ideal cases, I think this would be very well received by the general masses. I forget what brand the laptop was.
I did get the question correct, instinctively. But, the factor of 5 was much higher than I thought would be quipped as a difference.
What the article says is true: Going from a 10 miles per gallon car to a 20 mpg car saves you 4.85 times as much fuel for any trip as does changing from 33 mpg to 50 mpg. However, it might be worthy to note that the first change lets you use 0.5 times the fuel for a trip, while the second change lets you use 0.66 times the fuel. And so, you could say that the first switch lets you use 0.16 times less fuel than the second switch. That's the factor I was thinking of.
Well, I suppose the point of this article is a way of conveying long term fuel use in a way easy to process and compare in somewhat complex ways in the average American's head.
The article's idea for gallons per 100 miles (gp100m?), where smaller numbers are better, seems nice. If we used that, then you would be comparing switching from 10 gp100m to 5 gp100m, and from 3.03 gp100m to 2 gp100m. With this metric, one can easily and quickly see that the first switch gives a bigger difference in fuel use, the difference being that the first switch saves 3.97 gp100m more than the second switch.
Using gp100m does avoid the problem that this article pointed out, but is there any other problem of perception and comparison that might arise? Also, does the quick and dirty comparison using gp100m above give a good representation of intensities in the comparisons?
It looks like there was a sidewalk, if the given route is correct. In both street view and satellite modes, it appears that there is indeed a sidewalk that follows the highway, though with a good amount of space including grass, trees, and walls between the two.
The addresses are Speedtest.net and Pingtest.net. And yeah, I checked to make sure I got the capitalization correct.
speedtest.com is a squatter, and pingtest.com redirects to bandwidthplace.com, which looks awfully shady. Whois says it was registered by proxy, the Better Business Bureau has no record on that phone number, and neither does Google.
I'm on Ubuntu 10.04. I had google-chrome-beta 5.0.375.55-r47796 installed from Google's stable/main (dl.google.com) repository. In the browser's About Google Chrome window, it said 5.0.375.55 beta. Last update was 3 days ago on 2010-05-22.
I downloaded google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb, but that said there was a conflict. So I refreshed my package list, and found that there is now a google-chrome-stable 5.0.375.55-r47796 available. I installed that, which uninstalled the beta package, and now the about window says 5.0.375.55.
Now the downloaded file says the same version is already installed. BTW, there has been and still is a google-chrome-unstable 6.0.408.1-r47574 package available that I have not been using.
In short, nothing really changed on Linux. Just a label, saying they consider what was automatically released and updated 3 days ago to be stable. I expect the two packages will advance differently in the future, though, in the normal beta/stable relationship, which is why I'm keeping the google-chrome-stable package installed.
You're thinking of getting XP? Mac Os X 10.3 was released October 24, 2003; 6.5 years ago. Microsoft is retiring their extended support for Windows XP Professional in the US on 4/8/2014; 4 years in the future. If your current Mac lab is any indication, you may be keeping whatever you get now for longer than 4 years, so you may want to rethink getting XP.
I did some calculations. If you assume they're actually thinking 45 PiB, that's 1.18 GiB / page, or 589.82 GiB / manuscript. If you assume 45 PB, that's 1.05 GiB / page, or 523.87 GiB / manuscript. One of the cameras they're using is 50 megapixels. If you assume 32 bits (4 bytes) per pixel, that's 190.73 MiB. Assuming there's not much meta data, that's about 5.99 photos per page. Is that what they're really doing?
But he is bound by law to do the most he can to improve sales and shareholder value, regardless of the environmental cost, social need or greater economic benefit.
My mom came up against something like this. She was investing in a portfolio investment firm of some sort, and a group of other people investing in the same portfolio brought up some moral concerns regarding some of the companies they were investing in. My mom had a vote, and she received advise from that group and from the firm's board. The board was bound to give advise to maximized profits.
So this firm had a balance thing to give moral vs. monetary issues their due consideration. I wonder if Domtar has a similar balance of some sort, and we're only seeing one side of it right now?
Today, I was listening to Pandora, and noticed they offered to connect to my Facebook account. I said fine, then later on, noticed that below the player, Pandora was telling me that one of my coworkers liked the same song that I did. I hadn't known that about him, and at the time, it was relevant and interesting information, as I was listening to the song. Pandora has not posted anything to my or anyone else's Facebook wall yet.
There is something about ISP Usenet servers that I don't think I understand correctly.
It seems that Cox, an ISP, is going to be shutting down their Usenet server soon. What this server has done until now is communicate with other Usenet servers on the internet to synchronize and update posts. Cox subscribers were allowed to connect to the Cox Usenet server to read and write posts.
Now, for whatever reason, Cox wishes to take down its server. So, why can't people who like to use Usenet connect to some other ISP's Usenet server? If other ISPs don't like non-subscribers connecting to their Usenet servers, then why aren't there a few free Usenet servers out there on the internet? There are plenty of other free services, like Google Groups, Flickr, Facebook, Ubuntu Forums, etc. Is there something about the Usenet NNTP port 119 protocol that makes it not work as well as HTTP port 80 based free services?
I've read up some on Usenet, though I've never gotten around to even finding out if my ISP or my university has a Usenet server, but I've never figured out why there are no Usenet servers available for the general public. And if there are, then why are the Cox people complaining? Is there anything bad about switching to a free general public Usenet server?
As I read the blog post, I kept wondering, what if Google did this for corporate requests as well? Information on the number of, say, DMCA take-down requests that the highest requesting corporations or individuals have made would be cool to see. So would the number of successful counter-requests. They could include information from other countries too, if they have a similar system.
For this to be effective, either the website needs to be highly publicized, or the user needs to be stupid or in a panic. I can't image the web site can be publicly known for long; virus maintainers have a hard enough time keeping their private servers up and connectable. I wonder how the virus convinces the user that their private history will be available for peruse by their friends/coworkers/family?
...how they know it’s lensing, and that the stars aren’t just positioned like that?
I think it's because, in a perfectly flat space-time, only light that starts out coming directly at us will reach us. However, in our universe, heavy stuff can make light reach us that did not originally start coming at us. Also, when this bent light hits us, it appears to be coming from a direction that is not its true starting point.
Now, here's the key: Two photons starting at a star going in slightly different directions can both reach us, due to the heavy stuff out there bending space-time. When they reach us, they appear to be coming from slightly different directions. If we can tell that both photons came from the same star, then we can calculate what heavy stuff made that gravitational lensing effect.
I did some quick searching a month back. In Maine, for private single person health insurance, there is very little choice, and what few choices there are, are very expensive. Also, for insurance companies that do operate in Maine, they offer limited plans.
Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it's creating new bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" and services, or other uses we can't yet imagine.
A Chinese-born engineer was sentenced Monday to more than 15 years in prison for hoarding sensitive information aboard the US space shuttle with the intent of giving it to China.
Ergo, there is no evidence that the latest patched version of Internet Explorer are less secure, since the officially "known" security features have been fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if this would help out Lisi's theory that the organization, and expression, of particles lines up with the mathematical E8 Lie group?
Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything | Video on TED.com
The technology is pretty nifty. At work, where we bring in many customer laptops to do virus cleanings etc., one computer had a very long and annoying password. After logging in once, then needing to reboot, I went to log in again, and the login box flashed away just as I put my hands to the keyboard. I logged back out to check, and I found that it had taken a sample image of my face on my first login without my noticing (it did say it was doing it; I just wasn't paying attention), and on the second login it recognized me before I could start typing the long password. All this without me even trying or realizing it was a feature, or even noticing there was a camera (I wasn't looking for one).
The lighting conditions and my face may have been ideal for the camera and facial recognition software, but if they can get that kind of performance in the less ideal cases, I think this would be very well received by the general masses. I forget what brand the laptop was.
I did get the question correct, instinctively. But, the factor of 5 was much higher than I thought would be quipped as a difference.
What the article says is true: Going from a 10 miles per gallon car to a 20 mpg car saves you 4.85 times as much fuel for any trip as does changing from 33 mpg to 50 mpg. However, it might be worthy to note that the first change lets you use 0.5 times the fuel for a trip, while the second change lets you use 0.66 times the fuel. And so, you could say that the first switch lets you use 0.16 times less fuel than the second switch. That's the factor I was thinking of.
Well, I suppose the point of this article is a way of conveying long term fuel use in a way easy to process and compare in somewhat complex ways in the average American's head.
The article's idea for gallons per 100 miles (gp100m?), where smaller numbers are better, seems nice. If we used that, then you would be comparing switching from 10 gp100m to 5 gp100m, and from 3.03 gp100m to 2 gp100m. With this metric, one can easily and quickly see that the first switch gives a bigger difference in fuel use, the difference being that the first switch saves 3.97 gp100m more than the second switch.
Using gp100m does avoid the problem that this article pointed out, but is there any other problem of perception and comparison that might arise? Also, does the quick and dirty comparison using gp100m above give a good representation of intensities in the comparisons?
It looks like there was a sidewalk, if the given route is correct. In both street view and satellite modes, it appears that there is indeed a sidewalk that follows the highway, though with a good amount of space including grass, trees, and walls between the two.
The addresses are Speedtest.net and Pingtest.net. And yeah, I checked to make sure I got the capitalization correct.
speedtest.com is a squatter, and pingtest.com redirects to bandwidthplace.com, which looks awfully shady. Whois says it was registered by proxy, the Better Business Bureau has no record on that phone number, and neither does Google.
I'm on Ubuntu 10.04. I had google-chrome-beta 5.0.375.55-r47796 installed from Google's stable/main (dl.google.com) repository. In the browser's About Google Chrome window, it said 5.0.375.55 beta. Last update was 3 days ago on 2010-05-22.
I downloaded google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb, but that said there was a conflict. So I refreshed my package list, and found that there is now a google-chrome-stable 5.0.375.55-r47796 available. I installed that, which uninstalled the beta package, and now the about window says 5.0.375.55.
Now the downloaded file says the same version is already installed. BTW, there has been and still is a google-chrome-unstable 6.0.408.1-r47574 package available that I have not been using.
In short, nothing really changed on Linux. Just a label, saying they consider what was automatically released and updated 3 days ago to be stable. I expect the two packages will advance differently in the future, though, in the normal beta/stable relationship, which is why I'm keeping the google-chrome-stable package installed.
You're thinking of getting XP? Mac Os X 10.3 was released October 24, 2003; 6.5 years ago. Microsoft is retiring their extended support for Windows XP Professional in the US on 4/8/2014; 4 years in the future. If your current Mac lab is any indication, you may be keeping whatever you get now for longer than 4 years, so you may want to rethink getting XP.
Official Google Blog: Just the facts, fast 4/07/2005
Hah, only 2 of the 6 examples above work with Squared below.
Official Google Blog: Understanding the web to find short answers and “something different” 5/12/2010
Why is this going to be taking up so much space?
I did some calculations. If you assume they're actually thinking 45 PiB, that's 1.18 GiB / page, or 589.82 GiB / manuscript. If you assume 45 PB, that's 1.05 GiB / page, or 523.87 GiB / manuscript. One of the cameras they're using is 50 megapixels. If you assume 32 bits (4 bytes) per pixel, that's 190.73 MiB. Assuming there's not much meta data, that's about 5.99 photos per page. Is that what they're really doing?
But he is bound by law to do the most he can to improve sales and shareholder value, regardless of the environmental cost, social need or greater economic benefit.
My mom came up against something like this. She was investing in a portfolio investment firm of some sort, and a group of other people investing in the same portfolio brought up some moral concerns regarding some of the companies they were investing in. My mom had a vote, and she received advise from that group and from the firm's board. The board was bound to give advise to maximized profits.
So this firm had a balance thing to give moral vs. monetary issues their due consideration. I wonder if Domtar has a similar balance of some sort, and we're only seeing one side of it right now?
They find it, and what do they do first? Zap it with a laser. No wonder it was hiding!
Today, I was listening to Pandora, and noticed they offered to connect to my Facebook account. I said fine, then later on, noticed that below the player, Pandora was telling me that one of my coworkers liked the same song that I did. I hadn't known that about him, and at the time, it was relevant and interesting information, as I was listening to the song. Pandora has not posted anything to my or anyone else's Facebook wall yet.
There is something about ISP Usenet servers that I don't think I understand correctly.
It seems that Cox, an ISP, is going to be shutting down their Usenet server soon. What this server has done until now is communicate with other Usenet servers on the internet to synchronize and update posts. Cox subscribers were allowed to connect to the Cox Usenet server to read and write posts.
Now, for whatever reason, Cox wishes to take down its server. So, why can't people who like to use Usenet connect to some other ISP's Usenet server? If other ISPs don't like non-subscribers connecting to their Usenet servers, then why aren't there a few free Usenet servers out there on the internet? There are plenty of other free services, like Google Groups, Flickr, Facebook, Ubuntu Forums, etc. Is there something about the Usenet NNTP port 119 protocol that makes it not work as well as HTTP port 80 based free services?
I've read up some on Usenet, though I've never gotten around to even finding out if my ISP or my university has a Usenet server, but I've never figured out why there are no Usenet servers available for the general public. And if there are, then why are the Cox people complaining? Is there anything bad about switching to a free general public Usenet server?
As I read the blog post, I kept wondering, what if Google did this for corporate requests as well? Information on the number of, say, DMCA take-down requests that the highest requesting corporations or individuals have made would be cool to see. So would the number of successful counter-requests. They could include information from other countries too, if they have a similar system.
For this to be effective, either the website needs to be highly publicized, or the user needs to be stupid or in a panic. I can't image the web site can be publicly known for long; virus maintainers have a hard enough time keeping their private servers up and connectable. I wonder how the virus convinces the user that their private history will be available for peruse by their friends/coworkers/family?
Symantec has some information on the virus: HTTP Infostealer Kenzero Activity: Attack Signature - Symantec Corp.
Is this related to the Star Wars babies rumor from a bit ago?
Sheldon: Sheldon Talk forum: Star Wars Babies! GUHHHHHHHHHHH
Wonder who was responsible for the cracks in the universe?
I'd bet it was Rose, when she absorbed the Time Vortex from the Heart of the TARDIS and became Bad Wolf, spreading clues throughout space and time.
...how they know it’s lensing, and that the stars aren’t just positioned like that?
I think it's because, in a perfectly flat space-time, only light that starts out coming directly at us will reach us. However, in our universe, heavy stuff can make light reach us that did not originally start coming at us. Also, when this bent light hits us, it appears to be coming from a direction that is not its true starting point.
Now, here's the key: Two photons starting at a star going in slightly different directions can both reach us, due to the heavy stuff out there bending space-time. When they reach us, they appear to be coming from slightly different directions. If we can tell that both photons came from the same star, then we can calculate what heavy stuff made that gravitational lensing effect.
Also, pretty pictures: Gravitational lens - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hah! I get 94 results! And... the first result is Slashdot. And there are no results that don't have the word 'for' in front of 'non-farmers'...
This for a man who 'ultimately protected the [City's] network until the bitter end.'
Obligatory: xkcd: Devotion to Duty
I did some quick searching a month back. In Maine, for private single person health insurance, there is very little choice, and what few choices there are, are very expensive. Also, for insurance companies that do operate in Maine, they offer limited plans.
There is no Aetna, little Anthem/Blue Cross/Blue Shield, little Assurant, no Cigna, no UnitedHealth/Golden Rule, no Humana. A health insurance searcher doesn't work, either: no eHealthInsurance.
Dupe: Slashdot Technology Story | Military's Robotic Pack Mule Gets $32M Boost
Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it's creating new bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" and services, or other uses we can't yet imagine.
How about drying laundry?
A Chinese-born engineer was sentenced Monday to more than 15 years in prison for hoarding sensitive information aboard the US space shuttle with the intent of giving it to China.
Ergo, there is no evidence that the latest patched version of Internet Explorer are less secure, since the officially "known" security features have been fixed.
What about this unpatched, known vulnerability: Internet Explorer Charset Inheritance Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability - Secunia Advisories - Vulnerability Information - Secunia.com?