Huh? The T-ray picture makes the guy look lumpy and out of focus. The "naughty bits" are not merely unclear, I can't even see them at all. What was the point you were trying to make with that link exactly?
It will give it to the program from where? What if I want to run the game in windowed mode so the Windows GUI is still accessible? Where's all the video memory I need for the game coming from now, does OS magically not need it anymore in spite of still being visible, just because I'm playing a game? Or if I alt-tab away from the game in fullscreen to check a web page and come back? Where's all that video memory moving through (like say the pagefile) so it can be reallocated, and how long does that take?
My point is the OS shouldn't be trying to use that much video ram to begin with, there is no need other than fluff meant to impress, offering no additional usefulness to the environment. I play games to get that fluff, it doesn't need to fill my workspace, only to be worked around.
It's faith because even though it has already happened in the past eleventy-billion times and everybody saw it, we still haven't seen it come up tomorrow, where there could possibly be some unforseen calamity happening that will prevent it. But I'm not going to lose any sleep over worrying about it.
When tomorrow comes and the sun actually rises, then it'll be fact.
Stuff that matters to whom? It mattered to the submitter, and it matters to anyone who finds it amusing or interesting. You are not Slashdot, and neither am I.
They use the same connectors, but USB 2.0-rated cables are better shielded. A cable made when USB 1.1 was all there was did not have to be capable of carrying as much data. USB 2.0 is 40 times faster than "full speed" USB 1.1, so if you want to ensure you're getting the most out of your device, you want a higher grade of cable.
Your job is quite safe without getting a PI license. You can dig around and uncover evidence in your network all you like, and you can take normal actions upon that evidence, such as tracing IPs and contacting authorities etc, all the usual stuff. What you can't do is provide what you find in your network as evidence in a court case, that is all. Someone else has to check your place out and then do the testifying themselves. Basically the court does not consider you an accredited expert witness under this legislation. If that is required, a temp PI computer forensic guy can be brought in, collect what is needed, and then he goes somewhere else (he's not into being a network admin, he's got more places to investigate), leaving your position intact.
But you've got to wonder why some other super advanced civilization didn't move some stars around to circle themselves or something and make it really obvious where they lived.
They just did, about 5 days ago. But we won't see the changes for several thousand years.
For 4 grand I could buy a whackload of 750 GB hard drives, either USB or in hot-swap chassis enclosures, and rotate through them once a week doing full backups. I'd feel much better about the integrity of such backups, though they would take up a bit more physical space.
Desktop CDs/DVDs/Whatever burners will be a thing of the past.
I sure hope not. Sure it would be convenient to be able to get at my media collection from various computers, but I'd be worried about the times my internet isn't working and I want to watch something but I can't because none of my media is physically present. I would also be concerned about losing everything I've collected if the hosting company folded. Or if something I enjoyed got onto a banned list somehow and was permanently removed from the database, or whatever. Not to mention that someone would probably want to make it all Pay-Per-View as well. I want to retain control of the media I enjoy; you'll get my DVD burner away from me when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.
Ask if they'd be ready to pay the salary of the average office worker that suddenly can't work.
They might respond with: "Oh, so you're using our service for business purposes? You'll need to be "upgraded" to our business package for $200/month, here I can adjust your account right now."
This sounds like an actual legitimate use for RFID tags.
Yeah, that's exactly what I thought of when I saw the article. For a second I misinterpreted the title to say "RFID tags" instead of "bar codes" because bar codes don't make nearly as much sense. It made me think of the fat bar code stickers you see on products nowadays, that have RFID inside them. Obviously if you think a surgical instrument might be inside a patient, and you're going to the trouble of tagging your instruments, why would you want the tags to be purely optical? I assumed they were using some variation of the combo stickers that include both registration methods. Still take your before and after count, but if you come up short just wave a scanner across the patient, get a hit on the tag, and go get the instrument back. This helps you in situations where the lost instrument is not in the patient but has somehow left the room, as an earlier poster mentioned happened to him once.
Actually, I signed up on Facebook precisely because of an ex-coworker. We had a friendship at work, and then she quit, with a parting email to various work friends to look her up on Facebook to keep in touch. So now I'm on Facebook, and I really don't like it, because yeah, now I've gone tons of current co-workers on my friends list, one of which I really came to dislike after adding him. And sometimes I wonder about some of the ones not on my friends list, who have some reason to dislike me, what might they possibly post about me there for the others to see?
Besides that, it's also like some surreal real-people version of The Sims, with regards to the social interaction. "So-and-so updated their mood and noticed you haven't updated yours in awhile". Aww shit, more stuff for me to go click on. Or So-and-so poked me, so I better poke them back or they'll think I don't care for them anymore. Or the worst things, those stupid chain-letter spams that start with "I really hope I get this back!". I don't really feel that I should be obligated to forward *anything*, particularly a chain letter than claims I'm going to get all kinds of bad luck if I don't send it on, or that I'm a bad friend if I'm too busy to do it. Yeah I already get that with email, but isn't that enough?
And it's just weird to click checkboxes to interact with people. Recruiting them as pirates or ninjas seemed fun at first. But apparently I could also fling poo at them if I wanted to. WTF?
I have the same problem with my signature. At one time, it used to be very consistant, and quite legible. Enough people remarked that it looked just like regular handwriting, so I started doing it much more quickly and carelessly since that appears to be the normal way of doing a signature. Now, no matter how I try, I can't make it quite the same way twice, except maybe the capitals. I generally don't get all the letters into the last name either, and which ones make it in changes from one attempt to the next.
Give it the exact voice from the BBC series and plenty of funny/interesting phrases to say for various situations using HHGTTG references and I'd get a whole bundle of kicks out of having that in my car. It made me smile just thinking about it, that would probably actually work against road rage for me.
It's not 1024*4. Although that is mathematically correct, it's not the correct way to interpret colour depth on a computer. 4096 in this instance is 16*16*16. There are 4096 colours available to the display because it is using a range of 16 values (4 bits) for each of the three channels, Red, Green, and Blue. 0 means none of that particular colour and 15 means the most intense shade of that colour. The three base RGB colours get combined with their various values of 0 to 15 to give new colours like shades of purple, or yellows, etc. When all three have the same value you get some shade of grey (black with all at 0, white with all at 15). Together all 3 colour channels use 12 binary bits (3 base colours * 4 bits for each) which gives you, in decimal numbers, 4096 different possible colours that can be expressed this way.
2 seconds seems like a really long time. The player isn't reacting here, they are timing.
Yeah that's my thought as well. Think of a platform scroller like Mario or something like that, where you are running along and can see there's a jump ahead you'll need to make. That's the sort of thing this system is predicting. If you have to jump because something is suddenly flying at you fast, I doubt it would pick up that blip in your skin in time for its "frustration" reaction to have relevance.
I'm also not sure how they think this can improve response time. It can sense the person is planning to jump (or depending on the application, do *some specific action*, maybe something involved in flying a real airplane for example) but does it really know when their brain is intending to actually fire the signal to hit the button? Too early might be as bad as too late, what do they hope the software will be able to judge this by? And as someone above pointed out, there is some latency between the motor center firing and the finger actually moving. People work out this timing for themselves automatically when they practice something, their own individual latency is taken into account in the moves they make. This is what hand-eye coordination amounts to, and different people are better or worse at it. The software would mess with a person's unconscious sense of their internal latency wouldn't it? If you're often seeing the feedback (the guy jumping on the screen, or your plane banking a bit to the left) a split second before you actually move the control, adapting to this too well might do a number on your natural coordination when not riding the 'trodes.
I ride in cabs fairly regularly, and I've never had a cab driver try to do this to me
I haven't had this happen to me either, however, I've never ridden in a cab outside of being in my own city. Are most of your cab rides in your own city? The driver can tell within the first minutes of conversation whether you are an outsider or not. If you seem like a resident and not a visitor, he's not going to try anything like that.
Ok, so it's like you've got a car, and you find a line through it that doesn't have many intersections. So you take a cutting torch to that spot and slice through the car. And then you, uh... attempt to claim to your insurance company that this somehow happened in a car wash. Some new laser-operated one, yeah that's the ticket. And then you promise yourself to never make a bet while drunk ever ever again.
It doesn't have to be hate that makes you throw out all the stuff that reminds you of them. The pictures, letters, knick-knacks, whatever, conjure memories of when you were happy with them. This brings much pain because it is a strong reminder that they are not there now and not coming back. I think a reasonably adjusted person would not wish to live in a shrine of lost memories. Get rid of it and you can get on with life all the sooner.
What are people doing with drives to make them fail?
I've got the same question, as I've gone through a lot of hard drives over the years but only due to upgrading, not failure. The only exception was the IBM Deskstar GXP75 that had the whole click of death thing going on. I don't count that one since it was a known issue that resulted in a class action suit, which I didn't bother to take part in. The first one failed within a month, so I replaced it at the store, and the replacement failed after a day. Replaced again. The third one failed after a week but I was tired of going back to the store by then so tried an experiment - the click of death was kicking in somewhere near 500MB after the beginning of the drive so I repartitioned it to leave the first 500MB unpartitioned. My experience with the drive up to that point told me that wherever the click of death manifested, it would consistantly happen in whatever part of the drive it first happened at. That drive has been in constant use ever since then (it's been like 5 years or so by now hasn't it?) and still works great, since it never accesses the 'bad part' anymore.
I don't know if I need a single DVD-sized disc to store 500GB of data. What I think would be cooler is if that space was made redundant and strewn all over the disc, so I could store maybe 100GB or so (still way lots) and have the peace of mind of knowing that an accidental scratch isn't likely to lose me anything.
Slashdot Mirror
The winning entry according to the article was the burger maker. But the video linked in the summary is a machine making orange juice.
Huh? The T-ray picture makes the guy look lumpy and out of focus. The "naughty bits" are not merely unclear, I can't even see them at all. What was the point you were trying to make with that link exactly?
It will give it to the program from where? What if I want to run the game in windowed mode so the Windows GUI is still accessible? Where's all the video memory I need for the game coming from now, does OS magically not need it anymore in spite of still being visible, just because I'm playing a game? Or if I alt-tab away from the game in fullscreen to check a web page and come back? Where's all that video memory moving through (like say the pagefile) so it can be reallocated, and how long does that take?
My point is the OS shouldn't be trying to use that much video ram to begin with, there is no need other than fluff meant to impress, offering no additional usefulness to the environment. I play games to get that fluff, it doesn't need to fill my workspace, only to be worked around.
Uh, but then you load a game, and have only 1/2XMB of video memory available for it because the OS has the other half. What was your point exactly?
It's faith because even though it has already happened in the past eleventy-billion times and everybody saw it, we still haven't seen it come up tomorrow, where there could possibly be some unforseen calamity happening that will prevent it. But I'm not going to lose any sleep over worrying about it.
When tomorrow comes and the sun actually rises, then it'll be fact.
Stuff that matters to whom? It mattered to the submitter, and it matters to anyone who finds it amusing or interesting. You are not Slashdot, and neither am I.
They use the same connectors, but USB 2.0-rated cables are better shielded. A cable made when USB 1.1 was all there was did not have to be capable of carrying as much data. USB 2.0 is 40 times faster than "full speed" USB 1.1, so if you want to ensure you're getting the most out of your device, you want a higher grade of cable.
Your job is quite safe without getting a PI license. You can dig around and uncover evidence in your network all you like, and you can take normal actions upon that evidence, such as tracing IPs and contacting authorities etc, all the usual stuff. What you can't do is provide what you find in your network as evidence in a court case, that is all. Someone else has to check your place out and then do the testifying themselves. Basically the court does not consider you an accredited expert witness under this legislation. If that is required, a temp PI computer forensic guy can be brought in, collect what is needed, and then he goes somewhere else (he's not into being a network admin, he's got more places to investigate), leaving your position intact.
But you've got to wonder why some other super advanced civilization didn't move some stars around to circle themselves or something and make it really obvious where they lived.
They just did, about 5 days ago. But we won't see the changes for several thousand years.
For 4 grand I could buy a whackload of 750 GB hard drives, either USB or in hot-swap chassis enclosures, and rotate through them once a week doing full backups. I'd feel much better about the integrity of such backups, though they would take up a bit more physical space.
Desktop CDs/DVDs/Whatever burners will be a thing of the past.
I sure hope not. Sure it would be convenient to be able to get at my media collection from various computers, but I'd be worried about the times my internet isn't working and I want to watch something but I can't because none of my media is physically present. I would also be concerned about losing everything I've collected if the hosting company folded. Or if something I enjoyed got onto a banned list somehow and was permanently removed from the database, or whatever. Not to mention that someone would probably want to make it all Pay-Per-View as well. I want to retain control of the media I enjoy; you'll get my DVD burner away from me when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.
I wish I could mod this +4 LIES. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Ask if they'd be ready to pay the salary of the average office worker that suddenly can't work.
They might respond with: "Oh, so you're using our service for business purposes? You'll need to be "upgraded" to our business package for $200/month, here I can adjust your account right now."
This sounds like an actual legitimate use for RFID tags.
Yeah, that's exactly what I thought of when I saw the article. For a second I misinterpreted the title to say "RFID tags" instead of "bar codes" because bar codes don't make nearly as much sense. It made me think of the fat bar code stickers you see on products nowadays, that have RFID inside them. Obviously if you think a surgical instrument might be inside a patient, and you're going to the trouble of tagging your instruments, why would you want the tags to be purely optical? I assumed they were using some variation of the combo stickers that include both registration methods. Still take your before and after count, but if you come up short just wave a scanner across the patient, get a hit on the tag, and go get the instrument back. This helps you in situations where the lost instrument is not in the patient but has somehow left the room, as an earlier poster mentioned happened to him once.
Actually, I signed up on Facebook precisely because of an ex-coworker. We had a friendship at work, and then she quit, with a parting email to various work friends to look her up on Facebook to keep in touch. So now I'm on Facebook, and I really don't like it, because yeah, now I've gone tons of current co-workers on my friends list, one of which I really came to dislike after adding him. And sometimes I wonder about some of the ones not on my friends list, who have some reason to dislike me, what might they possibly post about me there for the others to see?
Besides that, it's also like some surreal real-people version of The Sims, with regards to the social interaction. "So-and-so updated their mood and noticed you haven't updated yours in awhile". Aww shit, more stuff for me to go click on. Or So-and-so poked me, so I better poke them back or they'll think I don't care for them anymore. Or the worst things, those stupid chain-letter spams that start with "I really hope I get this back!". I don't really feel that I should be obligated to forward *anything*, particularly a chain letter than claims I'm going to get all kinds of bad luck if I don't send it on, or that I'm a bad friend if I'm too busy to do it. Yeah I already get that with email, but isn't that enough?
And it's just weird to click checkboxes to interact with people. Recruiting them as pirates or ninjas seemed fun at first. But apparently I could also fling poo at them if I wanted to. WTF?
I have the same problem with my signature. At one time, it used to be very consistant, and quite legible. Enough people remarked that it looked just like regular handwriting, so I started doing it much more quickly and carelessly since that appears to be the normal way of doing a signature. Now, no matter how I try, I can't make it quite the same way twice, except maybe the capitals. I generally don't get all the letters into the last name either, and which ones make it in changes from one attempt to the next.
Hi there! This is Eddie your car computer
Give it the exact voice from the BBC series and plenty of funny/interesting phrases to say for various situations using HHGTTG references and I'd get a whole bundle of kicks out of having that in my car. It made me smile just thinking about it, that would probably actually work against road rage for me.
It's not 1024*4. Although that is mathematically correct, it's not the correct way to interpret colour depth on a computer. 4096 in this instance is 16*16*16. There are 4096 colours available to the display because it is using a range of 16 values (4 bits) for each of the three channels, Red, Green, and Blue. 0 means none of that particular colour and 15 means the most intense shade of that colour. The three base RGB colours get combined with their various values of 0 to 15 to give new colours like shades of purple, or yellows, etc. When all three have the same value you get some shade of grey (black with all at 0, white with all at 15). Together all 3 colour channels use 12 binary bits (3 base colours * 4 bits for each) which gives you, in decimal numbers, 4096 different possible colours that can be expressed this way.
2 seconds seems like a really long time. The player isn't reacting here, they are timing.
Yeah that's my thought as well. Think of a platform scroller like Mario or something like that, where you are running along and can see there's a jump ahead you'll need to make. That's the sort of thing this system is predicting. If you have to jump because something is suddenly flying at you fast, I doubt it would pick up that blip in your skin in time for its "frustration" reaction to have relevance.
I'm also not sure how they think this can improve response time. It can sense the person is planning to jump (or depending on the application, do *some specific action*, maybe something involved in flying a real airplane for example) but does it really know when their brain is intending to actually fire the signal to hit the button? Too early might be as bad as too late, what do they hope the software will be able to judge this by? And as someone above pointed out, there is some latency between the motor center firing and the finger actually moving. People work out this timing for themselves automatically when they practice something, their own individual latency is taken into account in the moves they make. This is what hand-eye coordination amounts to, and different people are better or worse at it. The software would mess with a person's unconscious sense of their internal latency wouldn't it? If you're often seeing the feedback (the guy jumping on the screen, or your plane banking a bit to the left) a split second before you actually move the control, adapting to this too well might do a number on your natural coordination when not riding the 'trodes.
I ride in cabs fairly regularly, and I've never had a cab driver try to do this to me
I haven't had this happen to me either, however, I've never ridden in a cab outside of being in my own city. Are most of your cab rides in your own city? The driver can tell within the first minutes of conversation whether you are an outsider or not. If you seem like a resident and not a visitor, he's not going to try anything like that.
Ok, so it's like you've got a car, and you find a line through it that doesn't have many intersections. So you take a cutting torch to that spot and slice through the car. And then you, uh... attempt to claim to your insurance company that this somehow happened in a car wash. Some new laser-operated one, yeah that's the ticket. And then you promise yourself to never make a bet while drunk ever ever again.
It doesn't have to be hate that makes you throw out all the stuff that reminds you of them. The pictures, letters, knick-knacks, whatever, conjure memories of when you were happy with them. This brings much pain because it is a strong reminder that they are not there now and not coming back. I think a reasonably adjusted person would not wish to live in a shrine of lost memories. Get rid of it and you can get on with life all the sooner.
What are people doing with drives to make them fail?
I've got the same question, as I've gone through a lot of hard drives over the years but only due to upgrading, not failure. The only exception was the IBM Deskstar GXP75 that had the whole click of death thing going on. I don't count that one since it was a known issue that resulted in a class action suit, which I didn't bother to take part in. The first one failed within a month, so I replaced it at the store, and the replacement failed after a day. Replaced again. The third one failed after a week but I was tired of going back to the store by then so tried an experiment - the click of death was kicking in somewhere near 500MB after the beginning of the drive so I repartitioned it to leave the first 500MB unpartitioned. My experience with the drive up to that point told me that wherever the click of death manifested, it would consistantly happen in whatever part of the drive it first happened at. That drive has been in constant use ever since then (it's been like 5 years or so by now hasn't it?) and still works great, since it never accesses the 'bad part' anymore.
I don't know if I need a single DVD-sized disc to store 500GB of data. What I think would be cooler is if that space was made redundant and strewn all over the disc, so I could store maybe 100GB or so (still way lots) and have the peace of mind of knowing that an accidental scratch isn't likely to lose me anything.
It is of critical importance that they have sanitary telephones to use as well.