agreed - 50 heads followed by 50 tails is first order statistically 'good', though just a tad predictable.
The generator I referred to is good for crypto & good for other app's also.
Thanks for the reference, I tend to prefer less applied and more generalised texts on algebra , fields, groups, combinatorics, spaces & topologies.
Custom built, special purpose, analog computing engines built 50 years ago had the edge on speed until about the second pentium chip.
Deep Blue(?) the chess computer was built out of custom chips that specialised in chess evaluations.
DSP chips can perform several loads, scalar multiplications, additions, stores & modular indexing increments PER CLOCK CYCLE.
I imagine if the NSA wanted to crack a code (PGP), they would custom design a chip with it's basic low level operations corresponding directly to low level 'crack' operations && then go massively parallel.
Umm - I seem to recall that Napoleon set up an incredibly extensive system of semaphore towers on hilltops that spanned his empire at it's peak.
Tales abound of young officer's versed in the secret art of 'pointy stick' messages being set up for blackmail or worse. Evil revolutionaires would actually hide in barns and spy on govt comms.
-imagine.
I'd expect a reasonably competent programmer to read prior art, there's a wealth of material, both theory & code in many places. Knuth for one.
I'd also expect a reasonably competent programmer to testbed a random number generator and all other modules both seperately and in gestalt.
Wouldn't you ?
I believe the last random number generator I wrote is still in use as one of several alternate generators in a library used by the local maths dept. modelling group.
Andrew Hodges "Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence" has some good bits of crypto history too.
Despite being a biography and published by Counterpoint, it also fails the 'lurid' test.
However the inclusion of material on halting, incompleteness & the possible source of the Apple logo, more than make up for the lack of goat links.
You'd be surprised how many 'professional' mapping / navigation packages upwards of $10K (US)per liscence have errors resulting from things like discontinuities across the international date line, small angles leading to divide by zero, etc.
While most linux Joe Hacker's might not know much about navigation, In My Humble Experience many people that deal with 'real' navigation are pretty fair hardware/OS Joe Hacker's. Some even use ( Linux / Minux / BSD / Solaris / DRDOS / Forth /... ) and peer exchange code / ideas.
It's a funny old world.
Re:Good Fnarg! that article is so full of shit.
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 1
Dang right, at the moment terrabyte sized systems are common place in the petroleum exploration industry.
A recent airphoto mosaic I automated, of a city at 1m resolution, came to about 32GB & compressed down to about 8GB or so.
In mid 2004 we'll probably have the $300 terrabyte standard size drive available in stores.
I don't think many people will want to be stuck with a poxy 2GB file limit.
humph, don't know about HIS window manager, but mine,
at least the last one that I wrote, took about six months.
That was a tad over 8 years ago and the WM was a 'clone' of OS2's Presentation Manager that ran on 80386 hardware. It would have been quicker, but I was also writing an application to capture and process 16Khz seismic signals on a custom built add in board based around the Texas Instruments C30 DSP chip.
with the consoles, networking, & the SDK's the miltary can develop their own 3D Arena's.
Very handy for exercises invovling buildings you want to storm or defend.
Variations on this use hanger sized buildings with
floor to ceiling back projected screens.
Ditto, only more so - I script and toolbuild to drive the ortho rectification, colour balancing and mosaicing of tens of thousands of colour aerial photo's, each of which is a tad under 400MB.
I find that Photoshop, without the appropriate plugins, currently chokes on 32GB compressed images.
In four and a half years time when I can get a $300.00 terrabyte compact drive at the local shop for use as a school atlas, I'd like be able to use a GIMP derived viewer to roam, zoom & 2D/3D view about one and a third terrabytes of uncompressed height and colour data.
That would be the whole state and some surrounding ocean at 1m resolution.
Aside from using this to resolve issues such as state resource usage, housing development near sensitive river systems, and who's left their outhouse door open, the opportunity to apply daily diff patches to regions of interest can offer valuable insight into surf conditions 300Km up the coast.
For example, recently Australia had a site along the lines of 'crime.net.au' set up by an ex-police officer who was offering a database service of peoples criminal records.
The stink that this raised marks this site as a 'milestone' in Australian net history, but somehow I don't think it will be archived.
There is now a vast amount of remote sense data floating about the world. The major types are satellite data ('photographic' and multiband), aerial ( photographic / geophysical ) and seismic ( marine / land ), with a plethora of 'spot' readings of various types. The stages of data use are: 1) Aquisition - downlink from sat, fly plane & aquire, send ship out & measure, etc. 2) Georeference - correct perspective distortion / grid raw data , etc. 3) Delivery - Fat data over thin wire problem. 4) Process / Enhance / Interact with / Use.
In the world outside of mineral exploration / military use, the big news has been the Ikonos sat. & the explosion of much cheaper & higher resolution air photo mosaic's. ( One of the local councils has a 25cm air mosaic several Gigs in size & amoungst other uses, roofing tilers are grabbing the data to target people with tiles missing off their roofs )
One of the current hot topics is how to deliver terrabytes of raster/vector data over inet connections for people to use at home or in the office.
My current URL ( http://www.earthetc.com/ )( nope - I don't work for them, although friends do ) has a pretty impressive demo of zomming and panning over the net.
The OS community is looking at catching up with about thirty years of commercial / military software development stemming from USGS code, GRASS, GMT etc. Various components such as orthorectification have have dedicated commercial packages ( Halava , ermapper ) worth several thousand dollars.
An interesting tack for the OS movement to tack would be to leapfrog the aquisition & georeferencing stages, assume the existence of large georeferenced mosaiced data sets, and focus on the issues of delivery and end user tools, ( smart street directories, hand held's with 200Gb drives for use in co-ordinating emergency response teams etc.( requires integration with 'live' GPS data)).
IIRC one of the factors that led the young lad in "The Falcon & the Snowman" US spy case to sell on US secrets to the Russians was reading the CIA material on how they were helping to subvert the then Govt. in Australia, then, as now, one of the US's "erstwhile 'allies'".
This is an area where some of the OS & GUI talent might look to for apps to leapfrog wintel desktops.
Traditionally a unix domain, the business of aquisition, geo-referencing, rectification, enhancement, projection, storage and display of geo(data/imagery) has been migrating towards NT.
The file sizes are worth pondering, single full colour scanned aerial photos are approx 400Mb, composite colour aerial's of a reasonable sized city are about 32Gb in size, compressable to under 10 Gb ( & preferably in a manner that allows rapid server access to any sized region at any zoom level ).
The colour imagery and DEM( digital elevation model ) for a large state can easily top a terrabyte.
Add to this a database of locations, labels, vectors, populations, demographics, land-use, etc...
( An "OpenContentDistributed"(tm) database perhap's )
some stuff that's about:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/gltiles.shtml
http://www.earthetc.com
Re:And the point of this being... It's fun
on
V2 OS
·
· Score: 1
and in a dusty rack shelf behind the bike shed still lives the 80286 AT box & keyboard with real springs & the Apple][ case with the hand mounted ARM board & the 4xtransputer plugin card. and i still have the MINUX ( yes, boys and girls, pre-LINUX ) source that we hacked onto three platforms via hand built assemblers/KR2 C compilers... & why... because it is fun.
How broad do the court decisions on 'fair use' of data go?
I've recently bought the entire set of National Geographic maps ( digital ) to complement the family archives of the Nat Geo's & map inclusions that have been gathered over the last X generations. It's an 8 CD set, and being in mapping I've got the live drive space to quietly tuck the lot away in a partition or 'virtual CD' space, or to print the images to TIF file & browse. However, by the Mindscape & Nat Geo liscence, this sort of usage is stated to be 'illegal'. The only behaviour allowed by their liscence is to play silly buggers with the CD tray & to put disc1 in followed by discX etc. Never mind that the tray might not be handy to the desk, or that, god forbid, you might actually be using the device for something else.
So, hands up everyone that thinks 'fair use' of purchased data/media includes anything that you personally want to do with it, bar onselling, giving away to pirates, public performance, etc. Are we free & should we be free to plasticly bend, warp, copy, deface etc, data( - image, sound, numeric,...) however we wish in the privacy of our own homes.
hmmm & what about a 3D rendered view of my living room with a Nat Geo map on the wall ? If I rendere from the image on disk, that's illegal. If I take a photo of the room that includes the map hanging on the wall & the other paintings etc, that's apparently legal.
Funny you should mention: "as many people living in asia" Do you recall recent/. posts about adoption of Linux by the Chinese ? About UN organisations distributing Linux across third world ? And US-centric views aside, the folks in the rest of the world are both intelligent and technical users.
The commercial & 'e-commerce' push to build multi-terra byte servers to deliver high speed intranet seamless roaming of complete earth coverage with local hi-res dataset embedding is on for young and old. A city sized area at 1m resolution is approx 60kmx30kmx1m = 1.8e9cells. ( about 2GigCells ) Earths surface is of order 1e13 1m res cells ( about 10 TerraCells ) Is ID interested in an open source distributed data design that incorporates existing relavent data structures: 1) Earth science type map projected sat/air photo/DEM/magnetics/radiometrics/demographics/vect or data. 2) QUAKE style structures embedded in landscape 3).. add own hooks. Yes ID is well positioned to back this stuff & so are a few other 'open interface' companies in areas outside gaming. This is a suitable 'shed' project and gets more so every day, here in Australia 100Gb of storage is about the price of an old car that has maybe 2 years left in it. ( approx $3000.00 AusDolls ) Don't let the gnomes of zurich neatly slice out free access to cool data. Go for it, extend the design to encourage the growth of a world sized user patched in landscape.
Slashdot Mirror
agreed - 50 heads followed by 50 tails is first order statistically 'good', though just a tad predictable.
The generator I referred to is good for crypto & good for other app's also.
Thanks for the reference, I tend to prefer less applied and more generalised texts on algebra , fields, groups, combinatorics, spaces & topologies.
Custom built, special purpose, analog computing engines built 50 years ago had the edge on speed until about the second pentium chip.
Deep Blue(?) the chess computer was built out of custom chips that specialised in chess evaluations.
DSP chips can perform several loads, scalar multiplications, additions, stores & modular indexing increments PER CLOCK CYCLE.
I imagine if the NSA wanted to crack a code (PGP), they would custom design a chip with it's basic low level operations corresponding directly to low level 'crack' operations && then go massively parallel.
Umm - I seem to recall that Napoleon set up an incredibly extensive system of semaphore towers on hilltops that spanned his empire at it's peak.
Tales abound of young officer's versed in the secret art of 'pointy stick' messages being set up for blackmail or worse. Evil revolutionaires would actually hide in barns and spy on govt comms.
-imagine.
mod this comment up, please.
It's a point often forgotten, some good people in the world AREN'T actually white american middle class 'christians'.
I'd expect a reasonably competent programmer to read prior art, there's a wealth of material, both theory & code in many places. Knuth for one.
I'd also expect a reasonably competent programmer to testbed a random number generator and all other modules both seperately and in gestalt.
Wouldn't you ?
I believe the last random number generator I wrote is still in use as one of several alternate generators in a library used by the local maths dept. modelling group.
Andrew Hodges "Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence" has some good bits of crypto history too.
Despite being a biography and published by Counterpoint, it also fails the 'lurid' test.
However the inclusion of material on halting, incompleteness & the possible source of the Apple logo, more than make up for the lack of goat links.
Well a good look at the code would tell me.
... ) and peer exchange code / ideas.
You'd be surprised how many 'professional' mapping / navigation packages upwards of $10K (US)per liscence have errors resulting from things like discontinuities across the international date line, small angles leading to divide by zero, etc.
While most linux Joe Hacker's might not know much about navigation, In My Humble Experience many people that deal with 'real' navigation are pretty fair hardware/OS Joe Hacker's. Some even use ( Linux / Minux / BSD / Solaris / DRDOS / Forth /
It's a funny old world.
Dang right, at the moment terrabyte sized systems are common place in the petroleum exploration industry.
A recent airphoto mosaic I automated, of a city at 1m resolution, came to about 32GB & compressed down to about 8GB or so.
In mid 2004 we'll probably have the $300 terrabyte standard size drive available in stores.
I don't think many people will want to be stuck with a poxy 2GB file limit.
I also routinely interface with variometers, not to mention spectrometers, magnotometers, scanning lasers, raw NOAA-14 & GMS-X sat data.
You can write a ballVarioDump.exe that receives commands from switches and parses stdin text, and outputs the vario data as a formatted text stream.
Voila! The hardware interface remains secret & you have a useful tool that can be scripted to drive any, GPL'd or o/wise, graphics interface.
humph, don't know about HIS window manager, but mine,
at least the last one that I wrote, took about six months.
That was a tad over 8 years ago and the WM was a 'clone' of OS2's Presentation Manager that ran on 80386 hardware. It would have been quicker, but I was also writing an application to capture and process 16Khz seismic signals on a custom built add in board based around the Texas Instruments C30 DSP chip.
How long did your WM take to write ?
with the consoles, networking, & the SDK's the miltary can develop their own 3D Arena's.
Very handy for exercises invovling buildings you want to storm or defend.
Variations on this use hanger sized buildings with
floor to ceiling back projected screens.
Ditto, only more so - I script and toolbuild to drive the ortho rectification, colour balancing and mosaicing of tens of thousands of colour aerial photo's, each of which is a tad under 400MB.
I find that Photoshop, without the appropriate plugins, currently chokes on 32GB compressed images.
In four and a half years time when I can get a $300.00 terrabyte compact drive at the local shop for use as a school atlas, I'd like be able to use a GIMP derived viewer to roam, zoom & 2D/3D view about one and a third terrabytes of uncompressed height and colour data.
That would be the whole state and some surrounding ocean at 1m resolution.
Aside from using this to resolve issues such as state resource usage, housing development near sensitive river systems, and who's left their outhouse door open, the opportunity to apply daily diff patches to regions of interest can offer valuable insight into surf conditions 300Km up the coast.
For example, recently Australia had a site along the lines of 'crime.net.au' set up by an ex-police officer who was offering a database service of peoples criminal records.
The stink that this raised marks this site as a 'milestone' in Australian net history, but somehow I don't think it will be archived.
There is now a vast amount of remote sense data floating about the world.
...
The major types are satellite data ('photographic' and multiband), aerial ( photographic / geophysical ) and seismic ( marine / land ), with a plethora of 'spot' readings of various types.
The stages of data use are:
1) Aquisition - downlink from sat, fly plane & aquire, send ship out & measure, etc.
2) Georeference - correct perspective distortion / grid raw data , etc.
3) Delivery - Fat data over thin wire problem.
4) Process / Enhance / Interact with / Use.
In the world outside of mineral exploration / military use, the big news has been the Ikonos sat. & the explosion of much cheaper & higher resolution air photo mosaic's.
( One of the local councils has a 25cm air mosaic several Gigs in size & amoungst other uses, roofing tilers are grabbing the data to target people with tiles missing off their roofs )
One of the current hot topics is how to deliver terrabytes of raster/vector data over inet connections for people to use at home or in the office.
My current URL ( http://www.earthetc.com/ )( nope - I don't work for them, although friends do ) has a pretty impressive demo of zomming and panning over the net.
The OS community is looking at catching up with about thirty years of commercial / military software development stemming from USGS code, GRASS, GMT etc. Various components such as orthorectification have have dedicated commercial packages ( Halava , ermapper ) worth several thousand dollars.
An interesting tack for the OS movement to tack would be to leapfrog the aquisition & georeferencing stages, assume the existence of large georeferenced mosaiced data sets, and focus on the issues of delivery and end user tools, ( smart street directories, hand held's with 200Gb drives for use in co-ordinating emergency response teams etc.( requires integration with 'live' GPS data)).
It's a pretty interesting field
IIRC one of the factors that led the young lad in "The Falcon & the Snowman" US spy case to sell on US secrets to the Russians was reading the CIA material on how they were helping to subvert the then Govt. in Australia, then, as now, one of the US's "erstwhile 'allies'".
Traditionally a unix domain, the business of aquisition, geo-referencing, rectification, enhancement, projection, storage and display of geo(data/imagery) has been migrating towards NT.
The file sizes are worth pondering, single full colour scanned aerial photos are approx 400Mb, composite colour aerial's of a reasonable sized city are about 32Gb in size, compressable to under 10 Gb ( & preferably in a manner that allows rapid server access to any sized region at any zoom level ).
The colour imagery and DEM( digital elevation model ) for a large state can easily top a terrabyte.
Add to this a database of locations, labels, vectors, populations, demographics, land-use, etc ...
( An "OpenContentDistributed"(tm) database perhap's )
some stuff that's about:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/gltiles.shtml
http://www.earthetc.com
and in a dusty rack shelf behind the bike shed still lives the 80286 AT box & keyboard with real springs & the Apple][ case with the hand mounted ARM board & the 4xtransputer plugin card. and i still have the MINUX ( yes, boys and girls, pre-LINUX ) source that we hacked onto three platforms via hand built assemblers/KR2 C compilers ... & why ... because it is fun.
How broad do the court decisions on 'fair use' of data go?
...) however we wish in the privacy of our own homes.
I've recently bought the entire set of National Geographic maps ( digital ) to complement the family archives of the Nat Geo's & map inclusions that have been gathered over the last X generations.
It's an 8 CD set, and being in mapping I've got the live drive space to quietly tuck the lot away in a partition or 'virtual CD' space, or to print the images to TIF file & browse. However, by the Mindscape & Nat Geo liscence, this sort of usage is stated to be 'illegal'. The only behaviour allowed by their liscence is to play silly buggers with the CD tray & to put disc1 in followed by discX etc. Never mind that the tray might not be handy to the desk, or that, god forbid, you might actually be using the device for something else.
So, hands up everyone that thinks 'fair use' of purchased data/media includes anything that you personally want to do with it, bar onselling, giving away to pirates, public performance, etc. Are we free & should we be free to plasticly bend, warp, copy, deface etc, data( - image, sound, numeric,
hmmm & what about a 3D rendered view of my living room with a Nat Geo map on the wall ? If I rendere from the image on disk, that's illegal. If I take a photo of the room that includes the map hanging on the wall & the other paintings etc, that's apparently legal.
The whiff of double standard anyone.. ?
Funny you should mention: "as many people living in asia" Do you recall recent /. posts about adoption of Linux by the Chinese ? About UN organisations distributing Linux across third world ? And US-centric views aside, the folks in the rest of the world are both intelligent and technical users.
The commercial & 'e-commerce' push to build multi-terra byte servers to deliver high speed intranet seamless roaming of complete earth coverage with local hi-res dataset embedding is on for young and old. A city sized area at 1m resolution is approx 60kmx30kmx1m = 1.8e9cells. ( about 2GigCells ) Earths surface is of order 1e13 1m res cells ( about 10 TerraCells ) Is ID interested in an open source distributed data design that incorporates existing relavent data structures: 1) Earth science type map projected sat/air photo/DEM/magnetics/radiometrics/demographics/vect or data. 2) QUAKE style structures embedded in landscape 3) .. add own hooks. Yes ID is well positioned to back this stuff & so are a few other 'open interface' companies in areas outside gaming. This is a suitable 'shed' project and gets more so every day, here in Australia 100Gb of storage is about the price of an old car that has maybe 2 years left in it. ( approx $3000.00 AusDolls ) Don't let the gnomes of zurich neatly slice out free access to cool data. Go for it, extend the design to encourage the growth of a world sized user patched in landscape.