So, I worked as an intern at Carrier about 2 years ago. For years they've been using a propriatary network and protocal called CCN (Carrier Comfort Network), and, also for years, they had the software set up so that they can monitor and manage large buildings environments via dial-up to the building's CCN. While I was there, they were talking about making the system Web-accesable, because that's what their customers wanted.
That said, more than likely this system is not designed for the home user, but for large buildings already using CCN systems (which can control and monitor some 200+ devices (not couting subnets), from thermostats to massive 10,000 gallon chillers), so I don't think every joe-shmoe is going to have an IP for his home AC unit.
Also, I would imagine this will be implimented on site with a device connected to the CCN which just happens to have an net-connection, and the real work will be on the software controlling myappliance.com (because customs also hate to have to change their hardware).
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
This may be the dividing line between Linux and Microsoft - Microsoft's product would be popular, legal, but limited... We all have a good idea of what the Microsoft solution will be: Encryption and copy protection enforced at the operating system level...
My biggest fear is the RIAA will go further then just getting in bed w/ M$, like you said, we can just use open-source software that doesn't have the limitations M$/RIAA have implemented. What I'm afraid of is what will happen if they get in bed with hardware manufacturers. It's a lot harder to get around anything built into the hardware. And Intel is already working on a 'secure' harddrive. [shudder].
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
This difference is simple. If you have a list of bugs -- your list with your data -- you can do whatever you want with it. If you buy a CD, it's yours but the data is copywritten. It would be a more intelligent question to ask "If I bought a list of bugs, can I put it online so anyone can get it without paying for it?" The answer then is the same as it is for music, i.e. only if the owner of the data says you can.
Personally, I don't want to have to pay RIAA $$$ just because some software I have might be used to make MP3s of stuff they own, just like I don't want to pay RIAA $$$ because the P2P software I have might be used to pirate their stuff. It's the same argument, moving it from the P2P program to the MP3 encoding program doesn't change anything.
Using P2P is not illegal. Using an MP3 encoder is not illegal. Giving away free copies of stuff that someone else owns the distribution rights to is illegal. If you want to "nip it in the bud," you have to go after the individuals who are providing pirated music, because that is first illegal act (not ripping the CD; that can be for personal use.)
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
I wouldn't want the manufacturer optimizing for that over other, useful things.
You mean, like the way they optimize for MHz over other, useful things, like flops? Remember when AMD did that little ad campaign of "Our 800 MHz chip is faster than Intel's 766 MHz chip!" How many "normal" people followed that one? Today, MHz is the standard rating of speed, and is misleading. mflops would be a much better measure (although you're right that, with different ops taking different amounts of time, you'd have to carefully define what you mean by an operation).
Secondly, I don't think it will take "several years" of experimentation to figure out how much faster your add is than your multiply. We already know the answer to that question, and it depends on how you decide to impliment your circuit. If you decide to do multiplication with shift/add you could get a tiny little multiplier that's freaking slow, or you can go hog-wild with 7,3 counters, wallace trees, fast adders, etc. etc., and have a gigantic circuit that's really fast, but that's how hardware design has always worked and the options for solutions will be unchanged. Now though, you have a few more choices to make since your ops don't all have to fit into equal length pipeline stages, and also each op doesn't have to take the same amount of time for each set of inputs (for example, 7 + 1 might take x gate-dealays of time, whereas 7 + 0 could take many less.)
It's all very exciting.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
So, if I spend months and months downloading all kinds of annoying ads, then, in the end I'm rewarded with the ability to... not have to download annoying ads. Ummm. Why don't I just filter them before hand and not bother? If you want to reward people for seeing ads, have you considered going for something concrete, like, I dunno, a free/. t-shirt, or discounts on whatever it is your advertisers are selling?
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
I attend Carnegie-Mellon University, well known for both its engineering, computer science, and for its art department. We have a very exciting cross-college course called Building Virtual Worlds, as well as a degree program in electronic entertainment. Just thought that some of you line-bluring artist/programmers might be interested (especially if you're not at college yet.)
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Because a patent is a contract between society and the inventor. The inventor gets nigh-total control over their good idea for the next X years, in exchange for telling us what it is. Without the financial incentive of a temporary monopoly, inovation would be less attractive and "human growth" would be restricted.
But I agree about the having-and-not-using part sucking.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Yup... and then some little bacterium will come along that our in-bred super-animals just happen to be severely weak against, and 99% of them will die, sending the world into a terrible apocolyptic depression.
Diversity is good.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Yeah, except wether or not a browser does that is not covered in the spec for HTML. The goal is to make all browsers follow the spec, and the spec explicetly has nothing to do what they do while they're loading, just how it aught to display the data when it's got it.
Another example of this is displaying tables while loading. This is a really neat feature. It too has nothing to do with the spec.
Also, someone mentioned fixing <TEXTAREA> so that users could click a button for bold instead of having to type B tags. Interesting idea, except textarea is designed to do all kinds of things besides except html code. If you really want a bold button, write a little something up in java, I'm sure it's possible.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
As long as the server is well written, there shouldn't be any issues. You probably remember what happened when Quake went open: since the client was trusted to tell the server when the player had done damage to another player, it was easy to say "I did 999 damage to every player but me. I win."
BUT! that was/not/ a well written server. Quake sacrificed security for performance. Since the Quake server trusts its clients, once the client became open anyone could cheat. A well-written MMORPG can be written to avoid these things. Just look at cheating in DiabloII compared to Diablo.
examples:
Bad Idea: server trusts client to determine wether or not a swing of your sword hits the enemy or not and how much damage it does.
Good Idea: server trusts client to say "I swing at that enemy" and server decides hit and damage.
I know Gamasutra had an article written on preventing cheating (from the designers perspective) which goes over a lot of this.
And besides, the code for most MUDs have been open for ages, and cheating isn't (much) of a problem there, and this is just a mud+pictures.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Re:Yeah but, chip making isn't as easy as writing
on
Open-Source Processors
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· Score: 1
I'm gonna just guess you havn't ever done any hardware layout. The verilog code is just one itsy-bitsy step. Take, for example, a full adder.
This is so far from actual hardware. You would never even use nand and xor gates for adders, you'd design it at transistor level. A mirror adder, for example, uses something like 28 CMOS transistors.
But that is still so far from actual hardware, you have to do layout. Sizing, routing, it's a lot of work. And verilog code has next to no correlation with it. (Quick google search turns up this guys assignment, which is a good example.)
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Yeah, except the science we have is cloning, not artificial wombs. To create this "organ factory" of yours, you still need to find a fertile women who would invest 9 months of her life (not to mention the other difficutlies of pregnancy) just to create an organ bank for someone else. It will be just as effective as finding a women to have a baby with a head for your organ bank.
Cloning != vat babies
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
While I was interning last year several top-level programmers were sent there for seminars. Granted, they all had been CS majors in college, and it wasn't a degree program, just a seminar, but CMUs undergrad CS courses are starting to incorporate some of the ideas from SEI.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
...but you could theoretically do this in a locked room by yourself and for yourself starting with no one else's work, which as far as I'm concerned pretty much makes legal issues moot.
Exellent point. The "justifaction" that it might encourage someone else to do something that is illegal is like saying we shouldn't learn about encryption because it might encourage us to use that knowledge to steal credit card numbers. It's ludicrous!
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Why? Evolutions goal (if a non-sentient concept can be said to have a "goal") is not to extend the life on the individual, but to pass on the individuals genes to the next generation. If a longer life doesn't help that, then genes that promote longer life will not be selected for. Evolution doesn't make perfect organisms, it only makes organisms that are just barely good enough.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Why, why, for the love of God why. Why do people use portals? I don't understand. When I want to search, I go to google and I search. When I want to look for good deal on plane tickets, I go search for them. Can someone explain to me exactly what activity these portals are suppose to accomplish? Because as near as I can tell, the only thing they do is increase the required bandwidth.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
1) Limit the width that the text can flow -- do not allow it to expand to full browser width. Text should be in a table with a width of approx 200 - 500 pxls.
Ewww, yuck! Do no such thing! Keep text out of tables if possible, and avoid limiting anything's size by pixels. Why, what if my resolution is 1200x1600 and I like having larger fonts? Your 500-pixel table will be about 20 characters wide.
If you want to keep nice wide margins (which are a good thing to have), use style sheets to edit the p and/or blockquote> tags and do it in ems or %.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
When I first heard about Intel's and AMD's plans for their 64 bit processors, I thought back to what I'd been told in my intro micro-architecture course, to paraphrase...
So Intel decided to design a new ISA with 32 bits. They put all their resources into it, and almost all of their best people, but one guy tried something else, he worked on a 32-bit extension to the existing x86 architecture. Well, the new ISA failed misserably. They had compiler problems and couldn't get enough programs. But, the 32-bit x86 chip, the 386, became one of the most popular and succesfull designs of all time.
Well, they've got backwards-compatability with old x86 code this time, they've already got 200+ programs to run... I think Intel might have done it right this time. We'll see. If not, we'll at least have AMD's 64-bit x86 to fall back on.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Shocking, a new market is moving to quickly for its own good. Such is the way of things. For an as-far-off-the-wall as I can think of example, consider the American west. All that space to take, all that money to be made, which is why it was "wild" for so long. Consider this the begining of the end of the "wild software." The computer landscape if finally being settled, and all the gunslingers and lawmen will be supplanted by a more organized and civil system.
As for SEIs procedures, some professors have begun teaching them at even the lowest level CS courses here at CMU. A friend of mine had one of those professors. Teaching quality is important, but she should have taught the class how to program first.
And finally, I did QA for the software division of a company last year. It was actually kinda fun: click until it breaks, then figure out why; or look at the spec, look at the screen, what doesn't match? It's amazing how many bugs I found.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
My test for "compliance" is whether I can read the sites I want to read
That is the most non-sensical thing I've read today. Do you realize how idiotic that sounds? You claim to know what's going on 'under the hood' of your browser. Great. Do you have any concept what standards are for? Apparently not, so let me explain. Standards are like a contract between two parties. In this case, one party is the broswer designers, the other are the web-developers. If everyone follows the standards, then anyone can use any browser to view any page. A wonderfull utopian ideal, and everyone benefits. If we all decide to use your "I can see what I wanna see" test, then we go back to the dark ages of "best viewed with IE 4.5 at 1600x1200 resolution with 8-bit color while standing on your head." I don't want that to happen again. Standards are good. Get your head out of the sand and realize that.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Silly me, I thought the reason we had a tax code was to raise revenue, not to engage in this sort of asinine social micromanagement.....
Okay, so how do you feel about parking tickets? You park in a fire lane, you get fined. Gasp! How dare the government engage in such micromanagement and infringe on my right to park. So maybe that's a little over-the-top, but in general I think people agree that parking in fire lanes is a detriment to the public good, and those individuals engagine in such activities should be penalized. I know what your going to say: it's not the same thing. Parking in a fire lane is illegal, whereas using gasoline (and polluting the environment, for example) is legal but taxed. But I ask you: IS it really different? How is making something illegal in our society and fining the offender different than taxing something which offends society? It's a fine point.
Darn it... now I've got myself thinking. You're not suppose to park in a firelane, ever. Laws are not meant to be broken. You ARE allowed to use gasoline to drive your car for as long as you pay the tax on it. It's like a law that you pay to bend instead of break.
So do you want things to be black and white (legal/illegal) or grey (sin-taxes). When I started this post, I was going to disagree with you. But now... down with sintaxes!
After all, we tax sales... does that mean we dislike commerce?
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Slashdot Mirror
That said, more than likely this system is not designed for the home user, but for large buildings already using CCN systems (which can control and monitor some 200+ devices (not couting subnets), from thermostats to massive 10,000 gallon chillers), so I don't think every joe-shmoe is going to have an IP for his home AC unit.
Also, I would imagine this will be implimented on site with a device connected to the CCN which just happens to have an net-connection, and the real work will be on the software controlling myappliance.com (because customs also hate to have to change their hardware).
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Personally, I don't want to have to pay RIAA $$$ just because some software I have might be used to make MP3s of stuff they own, just like I don't want to pay RIAA $$$ because the P2P software I have might be used to pirate their stuff. It's the same argument, moving it from the P2P program to the MP3 encoding program doesn't change anything.
Using P2P is not illegal. Using an MP3 encoder is not illegal. Giving away free copies of stuff that someone else owns the distribution rights to is illegal. If you want to "nip it in the bud," you have to go after the individuals who are providing pirated music, because that is first illegal act (not ripping the CD; that can be for personal use.)
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
You mean, like the way they optimize for MHz over other, useful things, like flops? Remember when AMD did that little ad campaign of "Our 800 MHz chip is faster than Intel's 766 MHz chip!" How many "normal" people followed that one? Today, MHz is the standard rating of speed, and is misleading. mflops would be a much better measure (although you're right that, with different ops taking different amounts of time, you'd have to carefully define what you mean by an operation).
Secondly, I don't think it will take "several years" of experimentation to figure out how much faster your add is than your multiply. We already know the answer to that question, and it depends on how you decide to impliment your circuit. If you decide to do multiplication with shift/add you could get a tiny little multiplier that's freaking slow, or you can go hog-wild with 7,3 counters, wallace trees, fast adders, etc. etc., and have a gigantic circuit that's really fast, but that's how hardware design has always worked and the options for solutions will be unchanged. Now though, you have a few more choices to make since your ops don't all have to fit into equal length pipeline stages, and also each op doesn't have to take the same amount of time for each set of inputs (for example, 7 + 1 might take x gate-dealays of time, whereas 7 + 0 could take many less.)
It's all very exciting.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
But I agree about the having-and-not-using part sucking.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Diversity is good.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Another example of this is displaying tables while loading. This is a really neat feature. It too has nothing to do with the spec.
Also, someone mentioned fixing <TEXTAREA> so that users could click a button for bold instead of having to type B tags. Interesting idea, except textarea is designed to do all kinds of things besides except html code. If you really want a bold button, write a little something up in java, I'm sure it's possible.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
As long as the server is well written, there shouldn't be any issues. You probably remember what happened when Quake went open: since the client was trusted to tell the server when the player had done damage to another player, it was easy to say "I did 999 damage to every player but me. I win."
BUT! that was /not/ a well written server. Quake sacrificed security for performance. Since the Quake server trusts its clients, once the client became open anyone could cheat. A well-written MMORPG can be written to avoid these things. Just look at cheating in DiabloII compared to Diablo.
examples:
Bad Idea: server trusts client to determine wether or not a swing of your sword hits the enemy or not and how much damage it does.
Good Idea: server trusts client to say "I swing at that enemy" and server decides hit and damage.
I know Gamasutra had an article written on preventing cheating (from the designers perspective) which goes over a lot of this.
And besides, the code for most MUDs have been open for ages, and cheating isn't (much) of a problem there, and this is just a mud+pictures.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
module FA(s,cout,a,b,cin);
output s,cout;
input a,b,cin;
NAND2 n1(na1,a,b), n2(na2,xr1, cin), n3(cout,na1,na2);
XOR2 x1(xr1,a,b), x2(s,cin,xr1);
endmodule
This is so far from actual hardware. You would never even use nand and xor gates for adders, you'd design it at transistor level. A mirror adder, for example, uses something like 28 CMOS transistors.
But that is still so far from actual hardware, you have to do layout. Sizing, routing, it's a lot of work. And verilog code has next to no correlation with it. (Quick google search turns up this guys assignment, which is a good example.)
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
http://www.wpi.edu/~riffraff/irongame.html
http://www.ironchef.com/irongame.shtml
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Cloning != vat babies
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Carnegie-Mellon's Software Engineering Institute
While I was interning last year several top-level programmers were sent there for seminars. Granted, they all had been CS majors in college, and it wasn't a degree program, just a seminar, but CMUs undergrad CS courses are starting to incorporate some of the ideas from SEI.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Exellent point. The "justifaction" that it might encourage someone else to do something that is illegal is like saying we shouldn't learn about encryption because it might encourage us to use that knowledge to steal credit card numbers. It's ludicrous!
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Good faith?
The article didn't say...
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Ewww, yuck! Do no such thing! Keep text out of tables if possible, and avoid limiting anything's size by pixels. Why, what if my resolution is 1200x1600 and I like having larger fonts? Your 500-pixel table will be about 20 characters wide.
If you want to keep nice wide margins (which are a good thing to have), use style sheets to edit the p and/or blockquote> tags and do it in ems or %.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
As for SEIs procedures, some professors have begun teaching them at even the lowest level CS courses here at CMU. A friend of mine had one of those professors. Teaching quality is important, but she should have taught the class how to program first.
And finally, I did QA for the software division of a company last year. It was actually kinda fun: click until it breaks, then figure out why; or look at the spec, look at the screen, what doesn't match? It's amazing how many bugs I found.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
That is the most non-sensical thing I've read today. Do you realize how idiotic that sounds? You claim to know what's going on 'under the hood' of your browser. Great. Do you have any concept what standards are for? Apparently not, so let me explain. Standards are like a contract between two parties. In this case, one party is the broswer designers, the other are the web-developers. If everyone follows the standards, then anyone can use any browser to view any page. A wonderfull utopian ideal, and everyone benefits. If we all decide to use your "I can see what I wanna see" test, then we go back to the dark ages of "best viewed with IE 4.5 at 1600x1200 resolution with 8-bit color while standing on your head." I don't want that to happen again. Standards are good. Get your head out of the sand and realize that.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Okay, so how do you feel about parking tickets? You park in a fire lane, you get fined. Gasp! How dare the government engage in such micromanagement and infringe on my right to park. So maybe that's a little over-the-top, but in general I think people agree that parking in fire lanes is a detriment to the public good, and those individuals engagine in such activities should be penalized. I know what your going to say: it's not the same thing. Parking in a fire lane is illegal, whereas using gasoline (and polluting the environment, for example) is legal but taxed. But I ask you: IS it really different? How is making something illegal in our society and fining the offender different than taxing something which offends society? It's a fine point.
Darn it... now I've got myself thinking. You're not suppose to park in a firelane, ever. Laws are not meant to be broken. You ARE allowed to use gasoline to drive your car for as long as you pay the tax on it. It's like a law that you pay to bend instead of break.
So do you want things to be black and white (legal/illegal) or grey (sin-taxes). When I started this post, I was going to disagree with you. But now... down with sintaxes!
After all, we tax sales... does that mean we dislike commerce?
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein