cgart's comments

Going through the comments posted here, I wonder why actually nobody speaks loud an obvious thing: "Why in the hell twitter uses non-obfuscated password?" I think on of the rule of thumb, when creating a webservice with credentials, is to store the password in the way in the database, that it cannot be retrieved. I mean, you usually obfuscate it with some salt and then hash it afterwards.

Assuming Twitter does this kind of obfuscation, then all the password couldn't be retrieved from Twitter directly and hence no blaim on Twitter side.

Assuming Twitter does not obfuscate the password, why then nobody mentioning this? In such a case Twitter made a beginner failure and this should be somehow pointed out, I think. I just remember the case about one dating-site, which did that and it was more or less lynched for this by the community.

I wonder why nobody speaks about http://teamviewer.com? I tried it and in deed just works like a charm. No need for any registration either, just download and run it directly. This took me something like 2 minutes to run it. You even not only share the screen but has also a full remote access. Yeah, it even works on any kind of OS (Win, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS).

What is so special about this new screen sharing startup which hasn't been solved already by other projects? I would even claim that Teamviewer does pretty much nails the problem of screen sharing.

[Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with teamviewer in any sense.]

I am happy for sahillavingia that he get the investment, however isn't it little bit funny that in the techcrunch article most of the time they tell how good his designer skills are :) ? (no doubt, they are)

I see this not for the first time, that a really simple and straight forward project get much attention just because of nice design. Such kind of projects is easly copycated, don't they? So, that means that whenever you have a nice idea but your design skills sucks, then don't publish it before you haven't polished it, otherwise it will be copycated with much nicer look'n'feel and you sucked. Is this is not a contradiction on its own (that we were told to publish as eary as possible) ?

>I've already started to save money for body/brain updates and longevity treatments. I'll gladly admit that it's more important to me than saving for a house/car or my pension. I'll rather live in a crappy apartment/with a crappy car for the next decades and afford to live 150-200 years (when immortality surely will be an option for the rich, which I plan to be) than to spend all my money on a house/car and die a natural death at 80-100 years old.

That is IMHO a bad decision. I was also thinking about this way of life for some time. The big issue here is that you are betting with your wealth life in ages (house, pension, ...) against some possibly available life extension tool.

From my point of view the technology growing rate slightly decreases in the last decade. There is already 2012 outside but we still do not have flying cars (as has been thought twenty years ago), we were not able to beat HIV, we still do not understand how the human brain works, etc etc etc.

So, my bet is that this life extension medicine will exists in a usable and working way maybe in 50 years. At this time your are already 71 or maybe even older. Do you really want to have a long life at this age??? No, I bet not. For us (I am 28) it is already too late now. And I do not want to live 200 years at an age of 80 or so. I would be old crappy man, and will be psychologically labile since there would be so much young people around me living a much longer "young" life as I did. I don't want imagine how this feels like.

Yes. We use his original software, XGRT, every day in our research group. All our research about point clouds and geometry is implemented as modules in this software. The software is open source and supports point clouds of really huge sizes, e.g. 80GB datasets, dynamically streamed from the disk.

This video is not that fresh. I have seen it already last year and the way how this guys speaks has not changed since then (speaks like a salesmen) ;)

Their technique is based on point cloud rendering. My supervisor has proposed already in 2004 how this can be done on a standard PC. Look at his PhD-Thesis [1].

This technique is usable for static objects as well as for dynamic objects; however, using it for dynamic scenes additional acceleration structures are required (besides of the Octrees) in order to dynamically change according to the deformation of the object. To clarify on several comments made here:

- this is a rasterization technique

- they used acceleration data-structures like Octrees, kd-trees, BVH, ... (which exactly they don't tell)

- the graphic "aesthetics" depends actually only on the artists and not on the technology itself, so not a good point

[1] M. Wand: Point-Based Multi-Resolution Rendering. PhD Thesis, Wilhelm Schickard Institute for Computer Science, Graphical-Interactive Systems (WSI/GRIS), University of Tübingen, 2004.

I completely agree with that blog post. We are currently in the process of bootstrapping a web project http://bebbl.com and got some echo from the local media. From all the media coverage we recieved there was only one journalist who was able to write about our project correctly. All other either just copied text from others or were not really able to get the idea right.

I suppose the problem for them, is that they need to produce something really fast and have no time to go deeper into the field.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the video on the web. If somebody could find this, please post it here and I will edit the post to include it.

Yes, you are right, but you just didn't get the point what I was trying to say. In deed I was expected that I will be downvoted by this comment :)

I never claimed that speeds are additive. I've just claimed that it fully depends on what you define as a speed. If you define the speed the classical way (space unit per time), then due to the relativistic effects, it will never work out for you.

However, and this is the point, if you define the speed as just some counter running in front of you which add a value on every engine thrust, then it will work out for you that you are traveling faster, then the "earth's" speed of light!!!

Imagine just another experiment. You are waking up at a space ship and there is nothing around you where you can fix your view to see if you are moving or not. So, the speed-counter on this ship shows you 0.9c (here c is "earth's c"). No, you press the accelerate button and accelerates to additional 0.2c. There is nothing which would stop you accelerating, because in your frame you can assume that you are at rest! So, adding now the new velocity amount to your previous you get 1.1c, HOWEVER, this the "earth's c" ,so the speed of light as it is measured on the earth!!! In your frame, since you have no clue if you was moving or not, you should assume that you have now only 0.2c or just 0c, since you cannot measure the speed in the classical way anymore (there is no other point to fix on).

So, this is the way how to understand the relativistic effects. There is no "super-dooper" spaghetti-monster hand, which will for some reason stop you accelerating. No, this is just because everybody around you will never be able to measure your real speed, because they can only measure the speed relative to their frame.

Oh, finally we got here cool discussion. Here is how I explain that one "could" travel faster then the speed of light! HOWEVER, and this is VERY IMPORTANT, this depends on your definition of the speed. So imagine following experiment:

There are two space ships which are built like these russian matroshkas. One smaller space ship is in the hangar of a bigger one. The bigger one starts from the earth and accelerates to the speed of light (or just until 0.999c). Now, the smaller ship starts and can again accelerate from the bigger ship point of view until 0.999c. So, if there is just a simple velocity measure instrument, which is measuring acceleration by F = m*a, and we know the relative space ship mass "m" as it was relative to the earth, then knowing how much force our engine produces we can compute the acceleration. And hence our velocity measurement device will add small "a" to the current velocity by every thrust of the engine.

So given that type of measurement, our smaller space ship can accelerate to the speed of 2c relative to the earth. HOWEVER, due to the relativistic effects the people living on the earth would never ever realize that this ship was moving with 2c, since they are measuring speed by looking how far the ship went in the certain amount of time. And due to the time dilation they will never realize that this ship was actually much farther away then it looks like.

So, regarding to this experiment, we can travel faster then the light. However, this is only due to the definition of the speed.

A counter argument would be that the mass "m" is also changing. However, one could argue that the mass is represented by the amount of particles per volume unit and hence remain constant if volume remain constant. Ok, another guy could argue again that the size of the volume shrinks, but I could then argue that if size of the volume shrinks, then the density of the particles per volume unit from the earth point of view would increase and could end up in a singularity or just black hole, so big bang ?:confused:

This kind of experiment fits well into my experience of the world, where I just cannot accept some of the constraints we get from the nature :) Yes, you cannot travel faster then the speed of light, BUT this is only because I stay at the earth and measure your speed by looking how fast you come back. But this pure guy who is traveling could measure the speed as I've proposed and would then realize that, in deed he was faster then the "earth's speed of light" :)

You do not need to type in /s/blah/anotherblah, it is already enough that you just hit the 'Up'-key on your keyboard. You then can edit previously written text!!!

It is really interesting that nobody points this out ;)

Hi, my suggestion on the hotel is the Cardinal Hotel in The heart of Palo Alto. I've stayed there couple years ago for a week. For the price they ask this hotel has anything one do need. The university ave is jus couple of blocks away and Palo Alto, at least in my opinion, is the heart of Sillicon Valley.

I might make me here unpopular, but I would say: No, you did it wrong! Let me clarify on this: Yes, in CS you might not learn how to program well, this is true. However, when you study you get knowledge about several interesting computer science problems and how to solve them. You will see that problems later in your programming carrier however now you have a good background to solve them. Just a simple example: You given an array (let's say integeres). How would you remove all duplicates? A naive solution would be to check for every value, if there is more of this in the array. This has a running time complexity of O(n^2). The better way would be first to sort your array and then just iterate and remove all neighbours which are equal. This corresponds to O(nlogn) + O(n) complexity.

What I try to say, as a young "coder" you might not see all the troubles (in this case performance) you make when coding just straight away. You need to understand what you are actually doing, for this CS study gives you a good background.

The other really important point is: Startups fail with very high probability! CS diploma (or whatever this is in your country) gives you a solid background on which you can relay, when looking for a job position after your startup time. So, complete with your study is maybe a very classic way, however this is the most secure way for a long term.

I do not think, that Diaspora will be FB killer for the next, say 5 years. Most people does not really care about big privacy or other things, what Diaspora meant to find solution for. The idea is good, yeah, damn good. However one still need some skills in order to run his own diaspora server or you still need to trust somebody if you put your data on his diaspora server.

Of course the trust connection to your local Diaspora server admin is better then to some unknown very far away Californian FB admins, so this might be a benefit. But you would still need to find a "pub" provider and still would have to decide either you trust him or just go the easy way with FB, where all your friends are already ;)

Indeed, I also think that OpenID is not designed well. I mean, I have tried to implement it already twice. And everytime, I think, I got the idea of OpenID, later I realize, no I still didn't got real wht it tries to do.

What is wrong in that a spammer could easily host its own OpenID server and log in with that account on numerous sites. You even can write scripts to do it automatically, so I didn't really get the idea of OpenID.

I think in the future we get OAuth as the winner. Yes, its main purpose is different, however "signing in" with OAuth is so much easier. Even a simple user can understand how it works. And by implicit use of only specific OAuth providers (where you registered your app), you close the door for "bot"-providers. Of course one can argue, that you can also force to use only specific OpenID providers, but this is not core idea of what OpenID was created for.

Let's make one clear: Everything you see today which is called 3D, is NOT 3D! This is just Stereo, or call it also fake-3D!

A real 3D "thing" is currently to expensive and not practical for a mass market.

I wouldn't say that 24GB is enough, no way. It depends always on type of thing you use your computer for. For a normal user who installed windows and recently plays games, 24GB might be more than enough. For almost any kind of developer this might be also more than enough, in the end this developer develops for an end-user, which used not to have much RAM.

However, I am a scientist, and my machine at work has 96GB RAM with 24Cores, so at the end it comes to around 2GB/Core, which isn't that much anymore. In order to run algorithms on big data and not to bother about disk accesses (SSD or not) more RAM is just crucial. My previous machine had only 8GB ram and it was a big problem to stress algorithms with big data sets on them. So in my case, there are never enough RAM ;)