The question about replacing the NT kernel with a BSD or Linux kernel isn't about what is possible, profitable, or whatever. It's about the fact that there is nothing WRONG, per se, with the NT kernel, and replacing it would cause very much harm and yield absolutely no benefit.
In a sense, a kernel is a kernel is a kernel. Yeah, they have different features and design philosophies, but it's a piece of software that provides an extensive set of OS facilities. Sure, it could use improvement. Linux could too. And indeed, Microsoft does improve it when they find it to benefit them financially. But the most important idea here is that the majority of complaints about Windows apply NOT to the kernel but to applications that USE the kernel, which presumably wouldn't change.
The NT windowing system is already written for the NT kernel. Add to that all of the other applications that would have to be rewritten as well, and you have a nightmare. And for what? Like I said, changing kernels wouldn't improve anything. If Microsoft wanted better multitasking and resource utilization like Linux, they could just make changes to their existing kernel. But again, the majority of Windows' resource hogging has to do not with the kernel but with applications that use the kernel, so replacing the kernel doesn't help.
If Microsoft wanted to do something practical and useful in this vein, all they would need to do is add a compatibilty layer to their kernel that runs BSD and Linux applications, much as they do for DOS and OS/2 apps. Another practical thing would be to make the GRAPHICAL GUI optional for servers. If they were to change ANYTHING for a benefit, it would be to replace that bloated windowing system with something much simplified for server apps to optionally use. And making loads of other applications (like IE which IS an application) optional as well would cut down on the pointless waste of disk space.
Now, about the impact of the windowing system, although it is big and slow, it's only a problem if something is actually DISPLAYED. If you were to have a server that somehow avoided using the windowing system entirely, then, in theory, the windowing system would get swapped out to the swap file and have no impact on memory or CPU, only disk space.
Oh, and it's not like X11 isn't big and slow too (although admittedly much less so than Windows). I like X a lot, but I also recognize that the Windows windowing system is also just an application program that acts as a display server for Windows apps. On that level, there's no difference.
I like Linux and hate Windows, but in the end, they're both operating systems, which is all just the same crappy idea that's going to be obsoleted in a few decades anyhow.
Isn't it interesting how "everygeek" will believe something is good or bad or whatever for like forever, until one day, some other card-carrying geek has a new insight, and then everyone suddenly changes their opinion. So now, a good 80% of Slashdot readers are suddenly going to erase the Betamax/VHS debate from their minds because they're been enlightened now to the fact that VHS won, and that's cool because it was, in fact, superior. They've also added the concept of "whole product" to their set of memes.
On the one hand, this is great, because smart people grow and learn. But on the other hand, it's very amusing, because people don't figure these things out on their own (not like I did) and are only swayed when some other insightful geek gives them a new perspective. And that insightful geek got it from marketing suits and was just smart enough (more so than the rest of us) to not ignore what the suits were saying.
Maybe we should look at this on the meta level. Geeks seem to go on crusades over every little technological inferiority/superiority. Maybe they should learn from their new-found enlightenment that perhaps many of their other beliefs also are based on near-sighted analysis. There's a bigger picture, and we need to consider that!
Taking this a step further: Many 'geek ideals' are wonderful, but they also have to be marketed. Consider what has made things like Windows and VHS succeed in the market and apply that to marketing things like Free Software. Some people do that, but things like this article may help people to see another approach.
Why can't I shake the feeling that my last paragraph just became near-sighted again?
A great point is made by the author of the article. I NEVER use SP mode on my VCR. The loss of quality in EP mode has never been a problem, although I do have a newer Sony with the 19 micron head which does EP vastly superior to my older VCR.
And the loss of quality isn't a problem because I'm a junky for too many shows and don't want to watch them when they're on, so I set up my TWC digital box to record everything and then I watch it later. Buffy, SG1, Enterprise, Farscape, Angel, Charmed, Junkyard Wars, FMC, etc. Yeah, I'm a geek.:)
I've considered buying a Tivo, but I haven't found any evidence that it'll work well with the TWC digital box, so I hesitate and stick (happily) with 'crappy' VHS tables in EP mode, despite the fact that I know exactly how a VCR works and know exactly why it's 'technically' lower quality.
Therefore, this is why PVR's are also taking some time to catch on, and given that you can't move the recordings out of the machine is another deterrent to me. In fact, I bet when HDTV becomes mandatory, I'm probably going to still try to tape some shows down-converted to NTSC, at least until the MPAA is destroyed by market failure and we can freely record HDTV shows and possibly keep some for later (which I usually don't, but...).
Reading the IBM paper and some of the propoganda against TCPA, I have to express my distaste for those who constantly insist on crying "boycott this", "ban that" whenever something like this is developed without bothering to actually find out what it is. First, there was DRM, which is bad, then Microsoft comes out with Palladium, and all these idiots ASSUME that it's Microsoft rolling over for Hollywood. Well, I don't like Microsoft anymore than the next geek, but Microsoft isn't about to do anything they think would cost them money, and so it appears that Palladium isn't any more of a threat to our freedom than TCPA. Besides, MS just joined an anti-DRM coalition! SO... then we learn about TCPA, and OF COURSE, people immediately begin yapping about how it's another form of DRM and making up "facts" out of whole cloth and doing nothing but confusing the issue.
Activism is a good thing when it HELPS something, but everything is clouded for no good end when people leap to totally uninformed conclusions and then make every activist look like morons along with them. The anti-TCPA people should be ASHAMED of themselves.
I, along with everyone else who has ever thought Steve Jobs was cool, thought of this years ago. I just wonder how he would convince people to vote for him, given his patented Reality Distortion Field.
The only thing different between this and what Orlando did years ago is that in Orlando, you don't have to dial the 1 first.
My rights to my intellectual property
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Ask Kevin Mitnick
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· Score: 4, Informative
If memory serves, one of the things you got into trouble for was that you broke into computer systems owned by certain big corporations and downloaded proprietary code and/or documents. I've heard your justification for this which is that since you didn't remove anything from their systems, and you didn't sell it for profit, then you didn't really harm them.
An analogous situation would be where you had a Xerox machine and your own paper in a backback, and you entered into the file rooms of a company where you copied files, and then put them back where you got them. You didn't actually remove anything, and you didn't sell the documents, but you have copies of something that they didn't want you to have.
In that case, it would be considered breaking an entering and/or espionage, and few people would question that you did something unethical.
I am an advocate of open source software and disclosure of scientific information which may enhance innovation. But my personal view is that there are certain bits of information about myself that I don't want other people to have. My salary is one such thing. There are open-source software projects I work on in secret before I consider them releasable, which I work on in secret, and I would not appreciate them being released prematurely. The basic idea is that people have personal information and personal inventions which they own and which they have the right to control completely.
This also applies to a corporation. If IBM pays money to engineers to develop an application, then they own it, and they have the right to control it 100%. That also means they have the right to prevent others from looking at it, even if some of those lookers wouldn't do anything harmful with it.
In addition, there's this basic idea of being nice and respecting people's rights. I can peek into my neighbors' house and watch them having sex without them knowing it, but out of respect for their wish to not be observed when doing that, I don't try to look.
Given these two intimately related ideas that people own their inventions that they should have complete control over, and that they have the right to not disclose them, regardless of whether or not you intend to use it for anything, how do you justify hacking into computer systems which do not belong to you and making copies of information which the owners do not wish you to have?
How is not not harm when you violate someone's personal privacy, even that of a corporation?
... if it includes Intel in the top 100 companies to work for. I've heard nothing but nightmares. Check out www.faceintel.com.
Wait a sec: Kinetic energy is relative too!
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E ~ mc^2
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· Score: 2, Informative
>> It's (E^2) = (m^2)(c^4) + (p^2)(c^2).
Actually, it's E = m * c^2, where m is the rest mass times the Lorenz transform.
If you then subtract the rest energy from the energy when in motion (m*c^2 - m0*c^2), you get the kinetic energy, which at low speeds is approximately equal to 1/2*m*v^2, which we all recognize as the formula for kinetic energy in Newtonian physics.
That is to say, relativistic kinetic energy is not exactly equal to newtonian kinetic energy.
Re:What Einstein WASN'T a genius at...
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Einstein Unveiled
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· Score: 1
I'm basing come of my comment more on observation of many people I have personally known than on anecdotes about Einstein.
And forgetting that you have a dentist appt and forgetting your phone number are two entirely different things.
Additionally, being good at PROCESSING details is much different from being able to REMEMBER them. I, for instance, am very good at taking details, one at a time, and checking them (or whatever) and considering them in the greater context of whatever it is I'm doing. But I can't take them as fast as some people can, and I never remember them two seconds after I've processed them. The tradeoff is that I'm converting the _detail_ into an abstract _idea_, which takes thought, and then I can deal with the abstract idea directly. I'll tend to remember the idea rather than the details, which sometimes results in some distortion.
What Einstein WASN'T a genius at...
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Einstein Unveiled
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· Score: 5, Interesting
One thing about Einstein that is often omitted is what he was intellectually bad at. Sure, we know he wasn't good at math, but an even more important point was that he couldn't memorize details to save his life. I remember reading a story about how he called the telephone operator from a pay phone to ask what his phone number and address were -- he couldn't remember them.
Maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but not much of one, because this isn't unheard of. The crux of this boils down to this: One has only a certain amount of cognitive processing power; if the majority is dedicated to one particular type of reasoning, then others will suffer.
So Einstein, as we know, was immensely brilliant at dealing with abstract ideas, but at the same time, he was also miserable at dealing with concrete things, like memorizing a bit of text or some numbers, or for that matter, being able to take in the full sensory experience of a walk in the park, without distraction from other ideas in his head.
I do believe that he was certainly of above average intelligence, but it's important to realize that his total brainpower may not have been AS FAR beyond us as we are taught. As far as he was greater than us in abstract reasoning, he was equally lousy at many of the cognitive things that most people take for granted.
In fact, Einstein was not a fluke or a freak of nature. There are other people like him in the world. They are rare, but they are otherwise normal humans. Rather than being brilliant at Physics, many are brilliant socially or amazing at understanding the thoughts and motivations of other people. Some of them are geeks.
A) Not everything on a circuit board is an ATI chip. Besides the simple things (resistors, etc.), there are RAMs (which don't all have the same timing numbers), possibly external DVI transmitters, power regulators, etc.
B) OEM boards do their own board layout. Layout can make or break a board because of issues of inductance, capacitance, crosstalk, signal timings, and all sorts of things.
As a person who has worked at a technical level with OEM "powered-by" ATI cards, I can assure you that they are NOT the same thing.
Actually, RAM timing numbers are a big deal. If the OEM chooses to use RAMs different from what ATI uses (for instance, ones that have CAS 2), then only the BIOS on the OEM card will work. You CANNOT use the ATI BIOS, because it has the wrong programming for the RAM chips. Furthermore, if the OS driver attempts to reprogram the memory timing with something improper for the RAM chips on the board, it will not work.
They'll never respond. Well, maybe it's just me. I encountered a problem when a program I was writing (under GPL) turned out to violate a Mitsubishi patent. FSF completely ignored me.
As I recall, the call for comments from the public on the settlement were most against the settlement. Was that just an exercise in time-wasting? It looks like it was completely ignored.
Ever since Bush got into office, this case has been a disaster.
In Science, a "Theory" is "something which is supported by a perponderance of evidence."
The next level down from that is "Hypothesis", and if black hole theory were merely an hypothesis, then you would be more justified in your complaint.
Of course, theories can be wrong. But then again, the next level up, referred to as "Fact", is also found to be wrong from time to time.
The bottom line is that with black holes, they qualify as a theory (ie. something that can be very well trusted), because they are implied by mathematics based on even more strongly established theories, and there is plenty of empirical evidence to support the mathematical implications.
So the likliest thing is that if black hole theory is wrong, then it's probably only partially wrong, because clearly, there have to exist objects with that much mass, and the real thing probably behaves very much like the theory.
I'm a software developer and a chip designer, hense the two pairings of languages I mention.
One thing I have noticed is that some languages of the same genre take a heck of a lot more typing to achieve the same thing than others. For instance, the source code to a chip designed in VHDL would probably take on the order of twice as much space as one written in Verilog (we'll assume they result in identical logic).
So we should use Verilog then, right? Not necessarily. VHDL is a more strict language, more strongly typed, etc. You have to do all that extra tying because you have to specify things that the synthesizer uses to check to make sure you mean what you say you mean. The result is that Verilog may require more debugging time. The VHDL synthesizer will catch far more of your errors at compile time than the Verilog synthesizer. Would you rather spend hours going over compiler warnings or days doing gate-level simulation because your design doesn't work?
This is why Ada, as annoying as it is, is a safer language than C. C takes less up-front work, but while Ada helps you explicitly to write a bullet-proof program, it's FAR more difficult to do that in C.
Scripting languages are another issue entirely, and I'm no expert on them. But they fall into a different class from these.
It seems that I had become unusually dependent on my peripheral vision, because I have noticed a reduction in quality. I had -5.00 of correction with some astigmatism. The doctors said that they've had people with -10 with only 6.5mm of their cornea corrected and felt that their peripheral vision was better than with glasses, while I noticed very early on that something was amiss with my peripheral vision. They don't seem to believe me.
Also, the overcorrected me so that I needed +1.5. They've done an "enhancement" since then. To do hyperopic correction, the correction area is about 8mm. But what pisses me off is that they did that correction without taking into account the original 6.5mm for -5.0. So rather than smoothing my cornea to the optimal shape, they did a superposition of 6.5mm of -5 and 8mm of +1.5.
It's been just over a week since the enhancement, and I'm noticably near sighted. We'll see how it heals, but I'm worried.
If I'd known that I would have so noticably uncorrected peripheral vision, I would never have had the surgery. Sometimes, I feel like I'm in a bit of a tunnel. It's amazing to me how little they account for peripheral vision... one of the topography machines only images 5.26mm. What about the rest of the eye?
Say you have two 4-bit gray pixels next to each other, and you want to know how many possible grays you could get with them in combination.
Obviously, you could make them the same shade, which would give you 16 values. You could also make them differ by one, so you have X next to X+1, giving you intermediate shades. You'd think that would give you 32 possible combinations, but in the case of X==15, X+1==16 which is invalid, so you end up with only 31 representable shades. (Making two adjacent pixels differ by two shades is useless because putting shade 7 next to shade 9 is basically the same as putting two 8's next to each other.)
But one of them is 61, you say. How do they get that? Also simple. In this case, you use a 2x2 block of pixels. You can get X, X, X, X, or you can get X, X, X, X+1, or X, X, X+1, X+1, or X, X+1, X+1, X+1 as possible combinations. However, you because of the case where X==15 makes X+1 invalid, you don't get 16+16+16+16 but rather 16+15+15+15 which is 61.
The reader can easily generalize this to color. What they probably did was dither pairs of adjacent pixels for red and green and groups of four for blue, because the human eye has less fovial resolution for blue, or maybe they do groups of four for green because the eye has greater sensitivity to more shades of green.
Thus, we have 31*31*61 colors or 58621.
This, therefore, is a simple ordered dithering technique. The fact that this is transparent to us geeks/mathematicians is of no consequence to either the marketing suits or most people using the thing.
In case you were wondering how many colors you could get using real 16-bit color and the same 2x1/2x2 ordered dithering technique, we can work it out here.
Let's assume we're using 565 color which gives 32 shades of red and blue and 64 shades of green. If we did 2x1 dithering on red and blue and 2x2 dithering on green, we'd get this:
This "Framerate control" is called "Temporal Modulation" in some circles. It works very well with LCD displays because they have such a long decay period (change the pixel color, and it takes a while to really change on the display). If the refresh rate is, say, twice the response of the LCD display, then you can double your RGB values by doing two-frame temporal modulation. That would yield 32k colors. If you were to do four-frame temporal modulation, that would give you 64k colors.
One thing I don't know is how different shades are done on an LCD in the first place. It may be some high-rate temporal modulation in the first place, although I doubt that. One thing I know is that LCD panels have a sinusoidal gamma curve, and this is because brightness levels come from the angle of rotation of the crystals. 90 degrees gives you black, 0 degrees is white. If you were to rotate the crystal by linear angle, it would not be a sinusoidal color response.
Of course, add on top of that the fact that even a linear scale in light emission (luminance) is not a linear scale to the human eye (luma). These are why LCD displays are notorious at having poor color response, and the manufacturers don't seem to be smart enough to compensate for it, even though the math is butt easy to people like our esteemed friend Dr. Charles Poynton.
Oh, and Temporal Modulation is not a linear interpolation. Why is left as an exercise for the reader.:)
I'm just going to recommend to my employer that we no longer buy Dell products. They're not that great anyhow. If Dell suffer a little for bowing to the pressures of Microsoft so maybe they'll take legal action against Microsoft.
The RIAA acts as though pirating music is ripping off the artists. Have they ever addressed the fact that they themselves are the ones ripping off the artists? The amount of profit made by an artist is a small fraction of what the recording companies make.
I'm not saying that this fact is an excuse to pirate music. I'm just saying that I've never seen the RIAA address it.
My biggest peeve about Ada, which I believe MAY have been corrected since, was that it didn't directly support variable-length character strings. That's something I also hates about what's called "Standard Pascal" which makes you use fixed-length character arrays. Are we still stuck in the days of Fortran? Did these language designers never consider that one might want to perform string manipulation that resulted in a length not predicted at development time? I can certainly understand having strings with a maximum length, and I can see problems with having strings which exceed the array size you've allocated, but variable-length string handling seems so BASIC (pun intended) to me that I have trouble respecting a language that lacks it.
But that's just me ranting. It's also conceivable to me that the Ada designers had a valid reason for explicitly not including variable-length strings. Perhaps they chose it because it eliminates the possibility of having a buffer overrun?
If the CCD he was using was so sensitive to IR, I wonder if he could have gotten anything out of it if he'd taken a picture at night. Maybe not enough light.
Slashdot Mirror
The question about replacing the NT kernel with a BSD or Linux kernel isn't about what is possible, profitable, or whatever. It's about the fact that there is nothing WRONG, per se, with the NT kernel, and replacing it would cause very much harm and yield absolutely no benefit.
In a sense, a kernel is a kernel is a kernel. Yeah, they have different features and design philosophies, but it's a piece of software that provides an extensive set of OS facilities. Sure, it could use improvement. Linux could too. And indeed, Microsoft does improve it when they find it to benefit them financially. But the most important idea here is that the majority of complaints about Windows apply NOT to the kernel but to applications that USE the kernel, which presumably wouldn't change.
The NT windowing system is already written for the NT kernel. Add to that all of the other applications that would have to be rewritten as well, and you have a nightmare. And for what? Like I said, changing kernels wouldn't improve anything. If Microsoft wanted better multitasking and resource utilization like Linux, they could just make changes to their existing kernel. But again, the majority of Windows' resource hogging has to do not with the kernel but with applications that use the kernel, so replacing the kernel doesn't help.
If Microsoft wanted to do something practical and useful in this vein, all they would need to do is add a compatibilty layer to their kernel that runs BSD and Linux applications, much as they do for DOS and OS/2 apps. Another practical thing would be to make the GRAPHICAL GUI optional for servers. If they were to change ANYTHING for a benefit, it would be to replace that bloated windowing system with something much simplified for server apps to optionally use. And making loads of other applications (like IE which IS an application) optional as well would cut down on the pointless waste of disk space.
Now, about the impact of the windowing system, although it is big and slow, it's only a problem if something is actually DISPLAYED. If you were to have a server that somehow avoided using the windowing system entirely, then, in theory, the windowing system would get swapped out to the swap file and have no impact on memory or CPU, only disk space.
Oh, and it's not like X11 isn't big and slow too (although admittedly much less so than Windows). I like X a lot, but I also recognize that the Windows windowing system is also just an application program that acts as a display server for Windows apps. On that level, there's no difference.
I like Linux and hate Windows, but in the end, they're both operating systems, which is all just the same crappy idea that's going to be obsoleted in a few decades anyhow.
Isn't it interesting how "everygeek" will believe something is good or bad or whatever for like forever, until one day, some other card-carrying geek has a new insight, and then everyone suddenly changes their opinion. So now, a good 80% of Slashdot readers are suddenly going to erase the Betamax/VHS debate from their minds because they're been enlightened now to the fact that VHS won, and that's cool because it was, in fact, superior. They've also added the concept of "whole product" to their set of memes.
On the one hand, this is great, because smart people grow and learn. But on the other hand, it's very amusing, because people don't figure these things out on their own (not like I did) and are only swayed when some other insightful geek gives them a new perspective. And that insightful geek got it from marketing suits and was just smart enough (more so than the rest of us) to not ignore what the suits were saying.
Maybe we should look at this on the meta level. Geeks seem to go on crusades over every little technological inferiority/superiority. Maybe they should learn from their new-found enlightenment that perhaps many of their other beliefs also are based on near-sighted analysis. There's a bigger picture, and we need to consider that!
Taking this a step further: Many 'geek ideals' are wonderful, but they also have to be marketed. Consider what has made things like Windows and VHS succeed in the market and apply that to marketing things like Free Software. Some people do that, but things like this article may help people to see another approach.
Why can't I shake the feeling that my last paragraph just became near-sighted again?
A great point is made by the author of the article. I NEVER use SP mode on my VCR. The loss of quality in EP mode has never been a problem, although I do have a newer Sony with the 19 micron head which does EP vastly superior to my older VCR.
:)
:)
And the loss of quality isn't a problem because I'm a junky for too many shows and don't want to watch them when they're on, so I set up my TWC digital box to record everything and then I watch it later. Buffy, SG1, Enterprise, Farscape, Angel, Charmed, Junkyard Wars, FMC, etc. Yeah, I'm a geek.
I've considered buying a Tivo, but I haven't found any evidence that it'll work well with the TWC digital box, so I hesitate and stick (happily) with 'crappy' VHS tables in EP mode, despite the fact that I know exactly how a VCR works and know exactly why it's 'technically' lower quality.
Therefore, this is why PVR's are also taking some time to catch on, and given that you can't move the recordings out of the machine is another deterrent to me. In fact, I bet when HDTV becomes mandatory, I'm probably going to still try to tape some shows down-converted to NTSC, at least until the MPAA is destroyed by market failure and we can freely record HDTV shows and possibly keep some for later (which I usually don't, but...).
Pardon my not-awake-yet ramblings.
Reading the IBM paper and some of the propoganda against TCPA, I have to express my distaste for those who constantly insist on crying "boycott this", "ban that" whenever something like this is developed without bothering to actually find out what it is. First, there was DRM, which is bad, then Microsoft comes out with Palladium, and all these idiots ASSUME that it's Microsoft rolling over for Hollywood. Well, I don't like Microsoft anymore than the next geek, but Microsoft isn't about to do anything they think would cost them money, and so it appears that Palladium isn't any more of a threat to our freedom than TCPA. Besides, MS just joined an anti-DRM coalition! SO... then we learn about TCPA, and OF COURSE, people immediately begin yapping about how it's another form of DRM and making up "facts" out of whole cloth and doing nothing but confusing the issue.
Activism is a good thing when it HELPS something, but everything is clouded for no good end when people leap to totally uninformed conclusions and then make every activist look like morons along with them. The anti-TCPA people should be ASHAMED of themselves.
I, along with everyone else who has ever thought Steve Jobs was cool, thought of this years ago. I just wonder how he would convince people to vote for him, given his patented Reality Distortion Field.
The only thing different between this and what Orlando did years ago is that in Orlando, you don't have to dial the 1 first.
An analogous situation would be where you had a Xerox machine and your own paper in a backback, and you entered into the file rooms of a company where you copied files, and then put them back where you got them. You didn't actually remove anything, and you didn't sell the documents, but you have copies of something that they didn't want you to have.
In that case, it would be considered breaking an entering and/or espionage, and few people would question that you did something unethical.
I am an advocate of open source software and disclosure of scientific information which may enhance innovation. But my personal view is that there are certain bits of information about myself that I don't want other people to have. My salary is one such thing. There are open-source software projects I work on in secret before I consider them releasable, which I work on in secret, and I would not appreciate them being released prematurely. The basic idea is that people have personal information and personal inventions which they own and which they have the right to control completely.
This also applies to a corporation. If IBM pays money to engineers to develop an application, then they own it, and they have the right to control it 100%. That also means they have the right to prevent others from looking at it, even if some of those lookers wouldn't do anything harmful with it.
In addition, there's this basic idea of being nice and respecting people's rights. I can peek into my neighbors' house and watch them having sex without them knowing it, but out of respect for their wish to not be observed when doing that, I don't try to look.
Given these two intimately related ideas that people own their inventions that they should have complete control over, and that they have the right to not disclose them, regardless of whether or not you intend to use it for anything, how do you justify hacking into computer systems which do not belong to you and making copies of information which the owners do not wish you to have?
How is not not harm when you violate someone's personal privacy, even that of a corporation?
What's the maximum altitude at which Linux will run?
... if it includes Intel in the top 100 companies to work for. I've heard nothing but nightmares. Check out www.faceintel.com.
>> It's (E^2) = (m^2)(c^4) + (p^2)(c^2).
Actually, it's E = m * c^2, where m is the rest mass times the Lorenz transform.
If you then subtract the rest energy from the energy when in motion (m*c^2 - m0*c^2), you get the kinetic energy, which at low speeds is approximately equal to 1/2*m*v^2, which we all recognize as the formula for kinetic energy in Newtonian physics.
That is to say, relativistic kinetic energy is not exactly equal to newtonian kinetic energy.
I'm basing come of my comment more on observation of many people I have personally known than on anecdotes about Einstein.
And forgetting that you have a dentist appt and forgetting your phone number are two entirely different things.
Additionally, being good at PROCESSING details is much different from being able to REMEMBER them. I, for instance, am very good at taking details, one at a time, and checking them (or whatever) and considering them in the greater context of whatever it is I'm doing. But I can't take them as fast as some people can, and I never remember them two seconds after I've processed them. The tradeoff is that I'm converting the _detail_ into an abstract _idea_, which takes thought, and then I can deal with the abstract idea directly. I'll tend to remember the idea rather than the details, which sometimes results in some distortion.
One thing about Einstein that is often omitted is what he was intellectually bad at. Sure, we know he wasn't good at math, but an even more important point was that he couldn't memorize details to save his life. I remember reading a story about how he called the telephone operator from a pay phone to ask what his phone number and address were -- he couldn't remember them.
Maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but not much of one, because this isn't unheard of. The crux of this boils down to this: One has only a certain amount of cognitive processing power; if the majority is dedicated to one particular type of reasoning, then others will suffer.
So Einstein, as we know, was immensely brilliant at dealing with abstract ideas, but at the same time, he was also miserable at dealing with concrete things, like memorizing a bit of text or some numbers, or for that matter, being able to take in the full sensory experience of a walk in the park, without distraction from other ideas in his head.
I do believe that he was certainly of above average intelligence, but it's important to realize that his total brainpower may not have been AS FAR beyond us as we are taught. As far as he was greater than us in abstract reasoning, he was equally lousy at many of the cognitive things that most people take for granted.
In fact, Einstein was not a fluke or a freak of nature. There are other people like him in the world. They are rare, but they are otherwise normal humans. Rather than being brilliant at Physics, many are brilliant socially or amazing at understanding the thoughts and motivations of other people. Some of them are geeks.
A) Not everything on a circuit board is an ATI chip. Besides the simple things (resistors, etc.), there are RAMs (which don't all have the same timing numbers), possibly external DVI transmitters, power regulators, etc.
B) OEM boards do their own board layout. Layout can make or break a board because of issues of inductance, capacitance, crosstalk, signal timings, and all sorts of things.
As a person who has worked at a technical level with OEM "powered-by" ATI cards, I can assure you that they are NOT the same thing.
Actually, RAM timing numbers are a big deal. If the OEM chooses to use RAMs different from what ATI uses (for instance, ones that have CAS 2), then only the BIOS on the OEM card will work. You CANNOT use the ATI BIOS, because it has the wrong programming for the RAM chips. Furthermore, if the OS driver attempts to reprogram the memory timing with something improper for the RAM chips on the board, it will not work.
They'll never respond. Well, maybe it's just me. I encountered a problem when a program I was writing (under GPL) turned out to violate a Mitsubishi patent. FSF completely ignored me.
As I recall, the call for comments from the public on the settlement were most against the settlement. Was that just an exercise in time-wasting? It looks like it was completely ignored.
Ever since Bush got into office, this case has been a disaster.
In Science, a "Theory" is "something which is supported by a perponderance of evidence."
The next level down from that is "Hypothesis", and if black hole theory were merely an hypothesis, then you would be more justified in your complaint.
Of course, theories can be wrong. But then again, the next level up, referred to as "Fact", is also found to be wrong from time to time.
The bottom line is that with black holes, they qualify as a theory (ie. something that can be very well trusted), because they are implied by mathematics based on even more strongly established theories, and there is plenty of empirical evidence to support the mathematical implications.
So the likliest thing is that if black hole theory is wrong, then it's probably only partially wrong, because clearly, there have to exist objects with that much mass, and the real thing probably behaves very much like the theory.
The Spiraling Shape will make you go insane.
I'm a software developer and a chip designer, hense the two pairings of languages I mention.
One thing I have noticed is that some languages of the same genre take a heck of a lot more typing to achieve the same thing than others. For instance, the source code to a chip designed in VHDL would probably take on the order of twice as much space as one written in Verilog (we'll assume they result in identical logic).
So we should use Verilog then, right? Not necessarily. VHDL is a more strict language, more strongly typed, etc. You have to do all that extra tying because you have to specify things that the synthesizer uses to check to make sure you mean what you say you mean. The result is that Verilog may require more debugging time. The VHDL synthesizer will catch far more of your errors at compile time than the Verilog synthesizer. Would you rather spend hours going over compiler warnings or days doing gate-level simulation because your design doesn't work?
This is why Ada, as annoying as it is, is a safer language than C. C takes less up-front work, but while Ada helps you explicitly to write a bullet-proof program, it's FAR more difficult to do that in C.
Scripting languages are another issue entirely, and I'm no expert on them. But they fall into a different class from these.
It seems that I had become unusually dependent on my peripheral vision, because I have noticed a reduction in quality. I had -5.00 of correction with some astigmatism. The doctors said that they've had people with -10 with only 6.5mm of their cornea corrected and felt that their peripheral vision was better than with glasses, while I noticed very early on that something was amiss with my peripheral vision. They don't seem to believe me.
Also, the overcorrected me so that I needed +1.5. They've done an "enhancement" since then. To do hyperopic correction, the correction area is about 8mm. But what pisses me off is that they did that correction without taking into account the original 6.5mm for -5.0. So rather than smoothing my cornea to the optimal shape, they did a superposition of 6.5mm of -5 and 8mm of +1.5.
It's been just over a week since the enhancement, and I'm noticably near sighted. We'll see how it heals, but I'm worried.
If I'd known that I would have so noticably uncorrected peripheral vision, I would never have had the surgery. Sometimes, I feel like I'm in a bit of a tunnel. It's amazing to me how little they account for peripheral vision... one of the topography machines only images 5.26mm. What about the rest of the eye?
It's really quite simple.
/2x2 ordered dithering technique, we can work it out here.
Say you have two 4-bit gray pixels next to each other, and you want to know how many possible grays you could get with them in combination.
Obviously, you could make them the same shade, which would give you 16 values. You could also make them differ by one, so you have X next to X+1, giving you intermediate shades. You'd think that would give you 32 possible combinations, but in the case of X==15, X+1==16 which is invalid, so you end up with only 31 representable shades. (Making two adjacent pixels differ by two shades is useless because putting shade 7 next to shade 9 is basically the same as putting two 8's next to each other.)
But one of them is 61, you say. How do they get that? Also simple. In this case, you use a 2x2 block of pixels. You can get X, X, X, X, or you can get X, X, X, X+1, or X, X, X+1, X+1, or X, X+1, X+1, X+1 as possible combinations. However, you because of the case where X==15 makes X+1 invalid, you don't get 16+16+16+16 but rather 16+15+15+15 which is 61.
The reader can easily generalize this to color. What they probably did was dither pairs of adjacent pixels for red and green and groups of four for blue, because the human eye has less fovial resolution for blue, or maybe they do groups of four for green because the eye has greater sensitivity to more shades of green.
Thus, we have 31*31*61 colors or 58621.
This, therefore, is a simple ordered dithering technique. The fact that this is transparent to us geeks/mathematicians is of no consequence to either the marketing suits or most people using the thing.
In case you were wondering how many colors you could get using real 16-bit color and the same 2x1
Let's assume we're using 565 color which gives 32 shades of red and blue and 64 shades of green. If we did 2x1 dithering on red and blue and 2x2 dithering on green, we'd get this:
Red: 32+31 = 63
Blue: 32+31 = 63
Green: 64+63+63+63 = 253
63*63*253 = 1004157
If we use Palm marketing speek, that gives us 19.9375 bit color.
This "Framerate control" is called "Temporal Modulation" in some circles. It works very well with LCD displays because they have such a long decay period (change the pixel color, and it takes a while to really change on the display). If the refresh rate is, say, twice the response of the LCD display, then you can double your RGB values by doing two-frame temporal modulation. That would yield 32k colors. If you were to do four-frame temporal modulation, that would give you 64k colors.
:)
One thing I don't know is how different shades are done on an LCD in the first place. It may be some high-rate temporal modulation in the first place, although I doubt that. One thing I know is that LCD panels have a sinusoidal gamma curve, and this is because brightness levels come from the angle of rotation of the crystals. 90 degrees gives you black, 0 degrees is white. If you were to rotate the crystal by linear angle, it would not be a sinusoidal color response.
Of course, add on top of that the fact that even a linear scale in light emission (luminance) is not a linear scale to the human eye (luma). These are why LCD displays are notorious at having poor color response, and the manufacturers don't seem to be smart enough to compensate for it, even though the math is butt easy to people like our esteemed friend Dr. Charles Poynton.
Oh, and Temporal Modulation is not a linear interpolation. Why is left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm just going to recommend to my employer that we no longer buy Dell products. They're not that great anyhow. If Dell suffer a little for bowing to the pressures of Microsoft so maybe they'll take legal action against Microsoft.
The RIAA acts as though pirating music is ripping off the artists. Have they ever addressed the fact that they themselves are the ones ripping off the artists? The amount of profit made by an artist is a small fraction of what the recording companies make.
I'm not saying that this fact is an excuse to pirate music. I'm just saying that I've never seen the RIAA address it.
My biggest peeve about Ada, which I believe MAY have been corrected since, was that it didn't directly support variable-length character strings. That's something I also hates about what's called "Standard Pascal" which makes you use fixed-length character arrays. Are we still stuck in the days of Fortran? Did these language designers never consider that one might want to perform string manipulation that resulted in a length not predicted at development time? I can certainly understand having strings with a maximum length, and I can see problems with having strings which exceed the array size you've allocated, but variable-length string handling seems so BASIC (pun intended) to me that I have trouble respecting a language that lacks it.
But that's just me ranting. It's also conceivable to me that the Ada designers had a valid reason for explicitly not including variable-length strings. Perhaps they chose it because it eliminates the possibility of having a buffer overrun?
If the CCD he was using was so sensitive to IR, I wonder if he could have gotten anything out of it if he'd taken a picture at night. Maybe not enough light.