Comment I downloaded them (Score 1) 142
I downloaded them to see if I or my friends' infos are floating around out there.
I downloaded them to see if I or my friends' infos are floating around out there.
About eight hours ago I noticed Boing Boing has been running a gamedev contest that has attracted several Javascript/Canvas games. They seem to have sound using the "Sound" element that works in Firefox.
If only there were a way the public could verify these claims... has anyone ever thought of developing software that exposes its source codes so that users can explore and improve their programs?
Youtube is pretty much unwatchable now, between the annoying boxes people put on videos to the annoying ads. I may never find out about their new features, because I don't go there anymore.
When YouTube ditches Flash for Javascript and HTML5 video, we'll all be able to hack YouTube with browser add-ons like Greasemonkey to disable the annoying boxes people add to videos when/if we want, or move them so they don't obscure the video.
My computer's GPU fan just kicked on for the very first time since I bought this machine about 6 months ago.
At first I thought there was something wrong.
And then I realized that, for the first time... there was something right.
As we become more dependent on these systems, we should make sure they are at least as robust as good old-fashioned know-how.
They already are at least as robust as good old-fashioned know-how, because the system supplies advisory information to a human with a brain.
But the human brain is becoming more dependent on this system to know how to get around. A lot of people these days know one route to get between point a and point b. If humans get used to being able to ask a computer that can't be clever in an emergency, then it will be a problem when we are dependent upon it, not before.
The same thing happened to me, but I turned around and found another way without Google's help.
What makes this a problem in my mind is that Google Maps doesn't offer a "detour me" feature that allows you to easily avoid specified nodes in the commute graph. My Garmin GPS had this feature and driving all over the Western half of the US for many months I can tell you it was an indispensable feature.
A good detour feature is a really necessary feature in an emergency situation. As we become more dependent on these systems, we should make sure they are at least as robust as good old-fashioned know-how. Being a firm believe in technology, I'm sure Google Maps could in fact surpass our own robustness and incorporate features to make emergencies even safer for people, but right now Google Maps seems to be focused on telling you how to go some place where you'll spend money.
Are there any plans to punish companies that went along with this? Sure, they could argue they were strong-armed into it by Intel but that's no comfort for AMD and the sales they'll have lost.
AMD may even benefit from this. They may have in fact come to an agreement with Intel about how this would be done. AMD may have seen more sales, but then there would have actually been competition, and that means more product for a lower price! Yikes!!!
Um... seriously? If they know the specific customer they wouldn't need to install the trojan.
It's not disclosed how the "trojan" is loaded onto the perpetrator's system, however getting that system to request and execute your code cuts through what is potentially a very hairy situation: who knows how many layers of abstraction the perp is using to hide from traces.
The article is very light on details, but I take it the idea is that more power would translate to higher clock frequencies or higher data throughput and the like.
I think an easier approach is for the scheduler to query the battery power before and after each task gets its shot at CPU time. If an application is using more than its power allocation, simply schedule it shorter and/or fewer turns on the CPU.
The article also fails to mention whether this mobile OS is capable of multitasking. If it is, then presumably the power settings for a given application would apply to the timeslices during which it is running.
There are two pages to the article, and it's quite clear that it supports some form of multitasking.
..fear of prison..
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a generalized model for decision-making in a non-zero-sum game (net cooperation must yield more than net defection.) A story involving prisoner's and jail time is only the most popular canonical representation for the game. While I've nothing to say in defense of the researchers' intelligence: to levy criticism that the researchers have perhaps overlooked subjects' aversion to actual prison time is to suggest that the researchers are, perhaps, extremely stupid, and have no idea what they are doing at all.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
