I couldn't find any mention of near-IR in the article, but supposing they are using a near-IR sensor:
Near-IR is a reflective imaging band. It does not measure heat unless the object is several hundred degrees C. It typically extends out to about 1000nm or so. To detect the IR light coming from a warm object (such as a human body, ), you need to detect light starting at about 3000 nm.
If heat cannot be measured (and remember we don't know that for sure since I can't find it in the article), they must rely on the skin being partially transmissive at longer wavelengths. Therefore, a dead severed hand will look the same as a live one (yay!).
Also, it would be much easier to just take a picture of someone's hand using a CCD with similar IR color filter, print it out (in black and white toner) on a piece of paper, and show it to the camera to get access. That's a lot easier and much more covert than chopping off a hand. You could take the picture with a tele-photo lens, IR filter, and security camera from several hundred feet away.
I brewed caffienated beer several years ago. Actually contained three pots of coffee in 5 gallons of beer. It was pretty good. Coffee goes well with a stout. I'm not aware of it agreeing with anything Anheuser Bush brews, but then again, I'm not aware of anything going well with an Anheuser-Bush brew. (a little beer-snobbery there).
char Jack_Valenti;/* the outgoing president of the MPAA and the object of hatred for many hacker after he took he on DVD Jon */ Engadget has an interview with Jack_Valenti, who is retiring tomorrow after more than three decades on the job.
There have been many posts about underutilization of these computers when the (scientific or artistic) users are not at their desks rendering the next CGI movie or modeling their semiconductor quantum dots.
For these to be a useful expendature, they need to integrate into the main batch job processing system at night or when the user is out to lunch. Obviously, the local user's processes would be highest priority, but it should certainly not be strictly limited to a single-user "workstation". That would be a major waste of money. When you spend this much money on a set of CPUs, you just don't let them sit idle -- especially when they're designed to be a cluster and you've got cluster work to be done.
I could easily see a day when Dreamworks does away with their batch processing cluster and uses clusters of their employee's workstations to render batch jobs at night or when the employee is tinkering with something simple.
Well, also hardness does generally does not relate to a material's ability to stand up to an impact. Steel can be made harder by incorporating more impurities, but the material quickly becomes brittle and snaps under pressure.
That's how diamonds are cut. They are very hard, but also brittle, so they can fracture along cleavage (huh huh. He said cleavage.) planes.
I have had Video on Demand. I would have to disagree with many posters here. It's actually pretty convenient. When we first got the VOD service, the listings were pretty sparse, but once the number of listings increased, the service actually became pretty nice. We could watch the Sopranos or 6' Under whenever we had a chance to sit down in front of the TV, not just at 9pm on Sunday night. We also had access to HBO's current line-up of movies available at any time. No, we didn't have to tune in to a channel that simply plays the same show over and over again. It was actually streamed to our digital TV decoder on the fly.
We had the service as a part of a promotional period (with Comcast). Once the period was over, we canceled it because it was too expensive (I'm a graduate student, my wife is a social worker). But I can see a time (in the relatively near future) when we might order the service again.
If I were to extend this trend into the future, I can envision a time when we don't buy DVDs (as much), but just pay $1-2 when we want to _WATCH_ a movie. I'm going to take the unpopular view that this will be good for EVERYONE. The media companies like it because they get money for a service rather than the one-time sale of a DVD. The product is cheaper, so more people are likely to purchase (the WalMart mentality). Though the margin may be relatively thin, it will be made up for in volume. Consumers will be happy because they don't have to shell out $15-$20 for a DVD (or DivX, remember that bomb?), nor do they have to make a trip to the video store to rent it for $3-4. If the media companies are wise, they'll still allow consumers to purchase rights to watch their favorite movies repeatedly for no additional charge. With enough storage space, the media companies can keep a deep archive of older movies, keep track of preferences, and use those preferences to sell viewings of older movies, much like NetFLIX (which just doesn't happen with DVD sales). This gives consumers a broader range of movies to watch (by including the older ones they've forgotten about) and allows older movies to continue producing revenue for the media companies.
The technology is not really even its infancy anymore. It's just a matter of purchasing the equipment, encoding the movies, and marketing the product.
The biggest concern that I see is that competition will not be as strong as it should be. You're stuck with your cable provider. There needs to be a way that several competing VOD services can market to the consumers of a single cable service.
This is all well and good, but the problem with playing with 419'ers is that it takes a lot of one's personal time. It would be better if someone would write an automated script to make the letters for you. Apparently, it wouldn't take much A.I. to defeat most of these thieves.
As someone who just had a garage sale to get rid of my useless crap (some is on eBay too... ), I'd have to say that they are definately banking on #1. Very few people actually want old, crappy computers. There's certainly not a market for them.
The cost of finding the usable parts is probably more than the cost to just melt it all down for scrap.
You may be on to something with #3, however. It may count as a charitable donation to pay the cost of recycling.
One VERY important question: How are you going to download a new web browser without IE?
Did anyone reading this use something other than IE to download their favorite browser to your brand spanking new Windows system? I never have.
If it weren't for IE packaged with Windows, you would have to buy browser software at the store or scam a copy on a CD from a friend before you could download Mozilla, Netscape, or whatever it is you use!
American aerospace giants were willing to sell him the valve at costs that ranged from $300,000 to $1 million. Bigelow found and purchased the same valve from a European company. The cost for the identical valve? A mere $5,000.
OK, A less expensive valve is one thing, but . . .
Bigelow was able to purchase a life support system from a German company. The complete system cost only $1.3 million. If he had purchased the same system from American companies, it would have cost in the neighborhood of $100 million, he says.
Anyone else uncomfortable with living in a space-vehicle with a cut-rate life support system?!
My wife and I are serious DVD collectors. We've got the I and II, but we've decided not to acknowledge the third. We've already wasted $14 on that piece of trash. Still liked 1 and 2.
The computational intensity of the simulation is still bound by the laws of classical digital logic. The result is, therefore, that the simulation takes more time than an old-fashioned brute-force factoring algorythm (where digital logic speed-ups can be employed).
I suppose I should also mention that (a) it _IS_ possible to simulate a quantum computer, but it is MUCH more computationally intensive (in terms of the number of instructions). And, (b) the simulated computer behaves much like the real thing, but at a much slower pace.
The point is that QC with, effectively, 31-bits of combined CPU and RAM can do in a few instructions what this computer cluster (with several million times the memory) takes billions of instructions to complete.
For those of you who don't know: The biggest problem with quantum computing is that you can never extract all the information you compute. So you can process y=f(x) for 2^31 values of x simultaneously, but when you go to read y from the computer, you just get one solution, and what's worse, you don't even know which value of X it corresponds to!
Using Shor's factoring algorythm, however, you can extract one of the factors of a large number without knowing all the other factors. That would be useful for public key encryption. I wouldn't worry about your PGP key just yet though. 7 q-bit computers are incredibly difficult to make. The process used to make the 7-bit QC does not scale to larger numbers easily. 2048 bit computers are way beyond our technical skills.
On a side-note, I wonder if each computer simulates a q-bit (with one responsible for management). It would be the most obvious way to run the simulation, but may or may not be the fastest. There would need to be a lot of cross-communication since all the q-bits are entangled in any interesting quantum computation.
This reminds me of some similar hardware predictions (which I sincerely hope won't be analogous to this case):
1. Researchers have continually predicted that we will reach the fundamental limit of Moore's law in about ten years. (i.e. in 1970, it was ~1980, now, it's ~2014).
You can look at a chart of the predicted end of Moore's Law as a function of time, and it's almost a straight line! The thing is that we've continuously found ways around it, seemingly in the nick of time.
I suppose the scary analogy here is that Microsoft will continually innovate just a little bit faster than the open-source community. While I'd like to say that the open-source community can out-innovate MS, let's not forget that MS has a LOT of money to throw at it, and they'll do whatever it takes if they feel threatened.
2. Gallium arsenide is the silicon of tomorrow, and it always will be.
The carrier mobilities in GaAs are MUCH higher than silicon (i.e. the electrons move quicker), and we can incorporate several similar (III-V) semiconductors on a single chip to make ridiculously high frequency HEMTs (can you say 400GHz?), but it never caught on for VLSI applications. Primarily, this is because silicon has a nice native oxide (SiO2) layer that allows us to make high quality MOSFETs, which are better for VLSI integration for various reasons. GaAs can make some REALLY fast transistors and lasers, and gets plenty of use in cell phones and optics, but it's just too hard to integrate into VLSI, and all-optical processors are a long way off, so we're still using silicon in our processors.
The analogy here is that Linux may be well suited to the server environment, where it's more configurable and secure, but may never catch on on the desktop because of its the very same complexity that makes it so useful for servers.
Limiting filenames to 8.3 is just laziness. Even worse: all filenames used those 11 bytes, even if they didn't need them: how's that for efficiency?
Well, actually, fixed file name lengths make your record lengths fixed, which makes it MUCH faster to parse through the data (does anyone who runs a major database waht to back me up here?). There was a day before fast hard drives and back when processor speed was measured in single digit MHz. People used to BOOT from a floppy disk on computers without a fixed disk. Do you REALLY want long file names and, hence, a larger directory structures on your floppy-based computer?! The 8.3 convention was probably intended to make sure that parsing large directories didn't take up a significant portion of the CPU time (go type "dir" on A:\ and tell me if it responds fast enough for you), and also to make it easier for applications that required access to files could more easily store those filenames.
It's especially useful for small apps that need to TSR (terminate and stay resident). Often, large chunks of these were written in assembly language! Do you really want to implement "copy or compare data from this pointer to a pointer until you get a 0x00" in assembly just to copy or compare a filename?
For the programmer types, we're talking about the difference between a pointer to a fixed-length string and a pointer to a pointer to a variable length string (since you couldn't fit variable length strings in a fixed-length directory entry). Pointer operations are always slow, but they used to be even slower on older processors.
Also, the original MSDOS didn't have the nice up/down arrow to repeat previous commands feature in 4DOS (did 4DOS also have tab-key completion?), so typing long filenames would be tedious (wow, that was back before GUIs! Anyone remember Norton Utilities?).
Come on! Don't give us that standard-issue "slippery slope" crap! If there's nothing wrong with the current technology, then who cares?
The only reason any of those other crazy ideas would be produced would be if there were some financial interest for the auto companies or demand from law-makers. That's not likely. Current black boxes are only useful for determining what happened seconds before a crash. They can often tell if the auto-maker may be at fault in an accident (i.e. throttle stuck, brakes gave out, driver over-steered, etc..). It helps dissuade frivolous law suits, and helps engineers design safer cars. There's significant value there for both the auto makers and the public. That the boxes can also produce data that's useful for law-enforcement is incidental. There would be other data in most cases (e.g. witnisses, the lack of skid-marks, etc...) that would probably be enough to convict the driver without the black box.
Let's also recall that there's a GPS in OnStar so if you get in an accident or want driving directions, they know your position. There's also one in modern cell phones. There are also cameras on poles around most metropolitan highways.
The technology exists to track you, but there's one major thing missing: Someone would have to GIVE A $#!+. And somehow, I don't think that's likely. In the end, even with cameras and GPS build-in to the car, it would still be easier and more reliable to just tail you in an unmarked car.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't find any mention of near-IR in the article, but supposing they are using a near-IR sensor:
Near-IR is a reflective imaging band. It does not measure heat unless the object is several hundred degrees C. It typically extends out to about 1000nm or so. To detect the IR light coming from a warm object (such as a human body, ), you need to detect light starting at about 3000 nm.
If heat cannot be measured (and remember we don't know that for sure since I can't find it in the article), they must rely on the skin being partially transmissive at longer wavelengths. Therefore, a dead severed hand will look the same as a live one (yay!).
Also, it would be much easier to just take a picture of someone's hand using a CCD with similar IR color filter, print it out (in black and white toner) on a piece of paper, and show it to the camera to get access. That's a lot easier and much more covert than chopping off a hand. You could take the picture with a tele-photo lens, IR filter, and security camera from several hundred feet away.
I brewed caffienated beer several years ago. Actually contained three pots of coffee in 5 gallons of beer. It was pretty good. Coffee goes well with a stout. I'm not aware of it agreeing with anything Anheuser Bush brews, but then again, I'm not aware of anything going well with an Anheuser-Bush brew. (a little beer-snobbery there).
1 013F2A2.htm
Here's one recipe:
http://www.stoutbillys.com/stout/recipens/(Flat)/
For many of you, it might read easier this way:
/* the outgoing president of the MPAA and the object of hatred for many hacker after he took he on DVD Jon */
char Jack_Valenti;
Engadget has an interview with Jack_Valenti, who is retiring tomorrow after more than three decades on the job.
He really is a character too.
(mod -5 Bad Puns)
There have been many posts about underutilization of these computers when the (scientific or artistic) users are not at their desks rendering the next CGI movie or modeling their semiconductor quantum dots.
For these to be a useful expendature, they need to integrate into the main batch job processing system at night or when the user is out to lunch. Obviously, the local user's processes would be highest priority, but it should certainly not be strictly limited to a single-user "workstation". That would be a major waste of money. When you spend this much money on a set of CPUs, you just don't let them sit idle -- especially when they're designed to be a cluster and you've got cluster work to be done.
I could easily see a day when Dreamworks does away with their batch processing cluster and uses clusters of their employee's workstations to render batch jobs at night or when the employee is tinkering with something simple.
> . . . These things don't design themselves . . .
They may not design themselves, but perhaps they'll design the next generation.
If any of you had read the press release (RTFPR?), there would be no confusion. It clearly says that the bandwidth is pi gigabytes per nano-century.
;) If you're wondering what that says about me, stop right now!
If you check, you're a huge nerd.
Well, also hardness does generally does not relate to a material's ability to stand up to an impact. Steel can be made harder by incorporating more impurities, but the material quickly becomes brittle and snaps under pressure.
That's how diamonds are cut. They are very hard, but also brittle, so they can fracture along cleavage (huh huh. He said cleavage.) planes.
To the contrary! We now know that some of them are not actually full of shit! (Mod: -5 bad pun?)
I feel strangely compelled to clean my keyboard and mouse and go wash my hands.
I have had Video on Demand. I would have to disagree with many posters here. It's actually pretty convenient. When we first got the VOD service, the listings were pretty sparse, but once the number of listings increased, the service actually became pretty nice. We could watch the Sopranos or 6' Under whenever we had a chance to sit down in front of the TV, not just at 9pm on Sunday night. We also had access to HBO's current line-up of movies available at any time. No, we didn't have to tune in to a channel that simply plays the same show over and over again. It was actually streamed to our digital TV decoder on the fly.
We had the service as a part of a promotional period (with Comcast). Once the period was over, we canceled it because it was too expensive (I'm a graduate student, my wife is a social worker). But I can see a time (in the relatively near future) when we might order the service again.
If I were to extend this trend into the future, I can envision a time when we don't buy DVDs (as much), but just pay $1-2 when we want to _WATCH_ a movie. I'm going to take the unpopular view that this will be good for EVERYONE. The media companies like it because they get money for a service rather than the one-time sale of a DVD. The product is cheaper, so more people are likely to purchase (the WalMart mentality). Though the margin may be relatively thin, it will be made up for in volume. Consumers will be happy because they don't have to shell out $15-$20 for a DVD (or DivX, remember that bomb?), nor do they have to make a trip to the video store to rent it for $3-4. If the media companies are wise, they'll still allow consumers to purchase rights to watch their favorite movies repeatedly for no additional charge. With enough storage space, the media companies can keep a deep archive of older movies, keep track of preferences, and use those preferences to sell viewings of older movies, much like NetFLIX (which just doesn't happen with DVD sales). This gives consumers a broader range of movies to watch (by including the older ones they've forgotten about) and allows older movies to continue producing revenue for the media companies.
The technology is not really even its infancy anymore. It's just a matter of purchasing the equipment, encoding the movies, and marketing the product.
The biggest concern that I see is that competition will not be as strong as it should be. You're stuck with your cable provider. There needs to be a way that several competing VOD services can market to the consumers of a single cable service.
This is all well and good, but the problem with playing with 419'ers is that it takes a lot of one's personal time. It would be better if someone would write an automated script to make the letters for you. Apparently, it wouldn't take much A.I. to defeat most of these thieves.
As someone who just had a garage sale to get rid of my useless crap (some is on eBay too. .. ), I'd have to say that they are definately banking on #1. Very few people actually want old, crappy computers. There's certainly not a market for them.
The cost of finding the usable parts is probably more than the cost to just melt it all down for scrap.
You may be on to something with #3, however. It may count as a charitable donation to pay the cost of recycling.
One VERY important question: How are you going to download a new web browser without IE?
Did anyone reading this use something other than IE to download their favorite browser to your brand spanking new Windows system? I never have.
If it weren't for IE packaged with Windows, you would have to buy browser software at the store or scam a copy on a CD from a friend before you could download Mozilla, Netscape, or whatever it is you use!
OK, A less expensive valve is one thing, but . . .
Bigelow was able to purchase a life support system from a German company. The complete system cost only $1.3 million. If he had purchased the same system from American companies, it would have cost in the neighborhood of $100 million, he says.
Anyone else uncomfortable with living in a space-vehicle with a cut-rate life support system?!
My wife and I are serious DVD collectors. We've got the I and II, but we've decided not to acknowledge the third. We've already wasted $14 on that piece of trash. Still liked 1 and 2.
The computational intensity of the simulation is still bound by the laws of classical digital logic. The result is, therefore, that the simulation takes more time than an old-fashioned brute-force factoring algorythm (where digital logic speed-ups can be employed).
I suppose I should also mention that (a) it _IS_ possible to simulate a quantum computer, but it is MUCH more computationally intensive (in terms of the number of instructions). And, (b) the simulated computer behaves much like the real thing, but at a much slower pace.
Really, it's just solving complex second-order differential equations of Psi(x, y, z, t). That happens to be pretty tough.
A 31-bit QC can accomplish in a few instructions what takes this mainframe several hours.
- C
The point is that QC with, effectively, 31-bits of combined CPU and RAM can do in a few instructions what this computer cluster (with several million times the memory) takes billions of instructions to complete.
For those of you who don't know: The biggest problem with quantum computing is that you can never extract all the information you compute. So you can process y=f(x) for 2^31 values of x simultaneously, but when you go to read y from the computer, you just get one solution, and what's worse, you don't even know which value of X it corresponds to!
Using Shor's factoring algorythm, however, you can extract one of the factors of a large number without knowing all the other factors. That would be useful for public key encryption. I wouldn't worry about your PGP key just yet though. 7 q-bit computers are incredibly difficult to make. The process used to make the 7-bit QC does not scale to larger numbers easily. 2048 bit computers are way beyond our technical skills.
On a side-note, I wonder if each computer simulates a q-bit (with one responsible for management). It would be the most obvious way to run the simulation, but may or may not be the fastest. There would need to be a lot of cross-communication since all the q-bits are entangled in any interesting quantum computation.
Yeah, but who wants to pay that much for hardware?!
(INTC flamebait?)
This reminds me of some similar hardware predictions (which I sincerely hope won't be analogous to this case): 1. Researchers have continually predicted that we will reach the fundamental limit of Moore's law in about ten years. (i.e. in 1970, it was ~1980, now, it's ~2014). You can look at a chart of the predicted end of Moore's Law as a function of time, and it's almost a straight line! The thing is that we've continuously found ways around it, seemingly in the nick of time.
I suppose the scary analogy here is that Microsoft will continually innovate just a little bit faster than the open-source community. While I'd like to say that the open-source community can out-innovate MS, let's not forget that MS has a LOT of money to throw at it, and they'll do whatever it takes if they feel threatened. 2. Gallium arsenide is the silicon of tomorrow, and it always will be. The carrier mobilities in GaAs are MUCH higher than silicon (i.e. the electrons move quicker), and we can incorporate several similar (III-V) semiconductors on a single chip to make ridiculously high frequency HEMTs (can you say 400GHz?), but it never caught on for VLSI applications. Primarily, this is because silicon has a nice native oxide (SiO2) layer that allows us to make high quality MOSFETs, which are better for VLSI integration for various reasons. GaAs can make some REALLY fast transistors and lasers, and gets plenty of use in cell phones and optics, but it's just too hard to integrate into VLSI, and all-optical processors are a long way off, so we're still using silicon in our processors.
The analogy here is that Linux may be well suited to the server environment, where it's more configurable and secure, but may never catch on on the desktop because of its the very same complexity that makes it so useful for servers.
Limiting filenames to 8.3 is just laziness. Even worse: all filenames used those 11 bytes, even if they didn't need them: how's that for efficiency?
Well, actually, fixed file name lengths make your record lengths fixed, which makes it MUCH faster to parse through the data (does anyone who runs a major database waht to back me up here?). There was a day before fast hard drives and back when processor speed was measured in single digit MHz. People used to BOOT from a floppy disk on computers without a fixed disk. Do you REALLY want long file names and, hence, a larger directory structures on your floppy-based computer?! The 8.3 convention was probably intended to make sure that parsing large directories didn't take up a significant portion of the CPU time (go type "dir" on A:\ and tell me if it responds fast enough for you), and also to make it easier for applications that required access to files could more easily store those filenames.
It's especially useful for small apps that need to TSR (terminate and stay resident). Often, large chunks of these were written in assembly language! Do you really want to implement "copy or compare data from this pointer to a pointer until you get a 0x00" in assembly just to copy or compare a filename?
For the programmer types, we're talking about the difference between a pointer to a fixed-length string and a pointer to a pointer to a variable length string (since you couldn't fit variable length strings in a fixed-length directory entry). Pointer operations are always slow, but they used to be even slower on older processors.
Also, the original MSDOS didn't have the nice up/down arrow to repeat previous commands feature in 4DOS (did 4DOS also have tab-key completion?), so typing long filenames would be tedious (wow, that was back before GUIs! Anyone remember Norton Utilities?).
Come on! Don't give us that standard-issue "slippery slope" crap! If there's nothing wrong with the current technology, then who cares?
The only reason any of those other crazy ideas would be produced would be if there were some financial interest for the auto companies or demand from law-makers. That's not likely. Current black boxes are only useful for determining what happened seconds before a crash. They can often tell if the auto-maker may be at fault in an accident (i.e. throttle stuck, brakes gave out, driver over-steered, etc..). It helps dissuade frivolous law suits, and helps engineers design safer cars. There's significant value there for both the auto makers and the public. That the boxes can also produce data that's useful for law-enforcement is incidental. There would be other data in most cases (e.g. witnisses, the lack of skid-marks, etc...) that would probably be enough to convict the driver without the black box.
Let's also recall that there's a GPS in OnStar so if you get in an accident or want driving directions, they know your position. There's also one in modern cell phones. There are also cameras on poles around most metropolitan highways.
The technology exists to track you, but there's one major thing missing: Someone would have to GIVE A $#!+. And somehow, I don't think that's likely. In the end, even with cameras and GPS build-in to the car, it would still be easier and more reliable to just tail you in an unmarked car.