Honestly, Moon's story is so weird that I just can't shake the feeling that he is actually a character from b-grade conspiracy fiction, rather than real life...
There goes South Korea's lead when it comes to science education.
While I am far from delighted to see creationist claptrap ooze any further out of the dark ages than it has to, it would be a dangerous underestimation to operate on the assumption that believing stupid things automatically makes people stupid(stupid people are quite adept and believing stupid things, and generally do; but once a smart person gets ahold of a stupid thing, they are far better equipped to cling to it through means other than pig-headed obstinacy).
It's perfectly possible(and has been done) for creationists(YECs, even) to do perfectly adequate science by means of some 'microevolution/macroevolution' flimflam, 'working out the implications of evolution as a contrafactual hypothesis', or simply not thinking about it much from Monday to Friday and thinking the opposite on Sundays. In areas of science that aren't biological, of course, it's even easier, and engineering is practically like home(not that engineers need to believe in intelligent design; but the belief that complex systems were intelligently designed isn't exactly crippling when your job is intelligently designing complex systems...)
Unfortunately, when it gets to the point that the textbook wars are being lost, that often is a sign that Cletus the slack-jawed yokel has grabbed the reigns; but one cannot simply depend on a self-correction induced by science falling apart thereafter.
(Incidentally, this also isn't wildly surprising. South Korea has a surprisingly strong Team Jesus contingent; best known for punching well about its weight, per capita, in terms of sending out missionaries to assorted scenic and/or hostile locales.)
Given the, at best limited, ability of anti-nuclear lobbyists to do much of anything about the nuclear navy, I suspect that defense types have some very clear ideas about where they plan to find a source of electricity next to a large supply of water...
For whatever reason, somebody was shameless enough to start talking about 'environmentally friendly'(because if there is anything that war isn't...); but the fact that some of the more forward-thinking DoD types might want to be able to still move if their supply of diesel gets cut off isn't a huge surprise.
Incidents like this one, make the effective price per gallon look substantially higher than domestic pump rate...
Incidentally, do you know what happened to MIPS that put it behind ARM in the trendy widgets market?
You still see MIPS cores in some routers(Broadcom, if I remember correctly, uses MIPS SoCs in their small router chipsets) and there are a few el-cheapo poor cousin Android devices that run(not terribly well) on MIPS SoCs; but not much action. What happened that everybody is talking about ARM now, MIPS is a lower profile player, PPC has retreated to a few niches, and things like SuperH barely come up for air anymore?
Smaller is more vulnerable(all else being equal, which it isn't necessarily). Sunlight isn't really an issue in practice(in addition to being alarmingly indestructable, that black epoxy stuff is about as opaque as it looks); but even your big-chunky-classic-single-transistor-in-a-metal-can will show quite readily measurable photo-sensitivity effects if you chop the can open.
I suspect that the answer is a combination of 'don't hold your breath on that' and 'at least a year ago, did you miss it?'
In terms of sheer screaming power(and, for the moment, even supporting 64 bit memory spaces) ARM is a toy and shows no terribly strong signs of making any strides in that area that Intel would really be worried about.
On the other hand, it would appear that an awful lot of netbooks and laptops were never sold, possibly never even built, because of tablets and smartphones... If things like this turn out to be a good fit for some 'cloud' niche or other sales of select Xeons could see similar hits.
At least so far, you don't go up against Chipzilla benchmark-for-benchmark. The world evolves around you such that your virtues are now more desirable than his...
Does anybody know who the 20nm fabs ARM is expecting to provide these chips are? It was my understanding that Samsung, Globalfoundries and TSMC were still working on a larger process(28mm?) and Intel has been very cagey about fabbing any 3rd-party stuff except for a handful of FPGAs and other high-margin oddballs that don't compete in Intel's area of business in any meaningful way.
The Feds may also be leaning on MS/Verisign/whoever; but this instance appears to be one of rather serious fuck-uppery. From MS's blog entry:
"What we found is that certificates issued by our Terminal Services licensing certification authority, which are intended to only be used for license server verification, could also be used to sign code as Microsoft. Specifically, when an enterprise customer requests a Terminal Services activation license, the certificate issued by Microsoft in response to the request allows code signing without accessing Microsoft’s internal PKI infrastructure."
So, guys, turns out that we accidentally built our phone-home DRM such that the cryptographic "OK, your CALS are worthy unto Redmond and thou mayst remote desktop" message is also a valid signing key with a chain of trust going right back up to a default-trusted Microsoft cert... Oops.
Now, given that (so far as we know, clearly team AV isn't in any position to tell us) this little mistake was not widely known or exploited, clearly the Flame guys were on the ball(and far more interested in spying on Iran or whoever than in improving the security of domestic computers... thanks a whole fucking lot on that one, feds).
Why would I want to build my latest project with a Raspberry Pi instead of Arduino?
That very strongly depends on the nature of your project. Arduinos are great for nice, accessable, GPIO twiddling and some light sampling. In the hands of people who actually know their microcontroller-fu, you can also wring some surprising calculation power out of them.
For connected applications, though, their weaknesses become apparent fairly quickly. As a slave peripheral? No problem. One or two other devices over TTL serial, custom protocol? Fine. Ethernet(wired or otherwise): There's a shield for that, and it'll set you back as much as the board it connects to. Fantastic.
That's the trouble with some of the Arduino 'ecosystem' stuff. At heart, it's still based around a microcontroller. Nothing wrong with that, microcontrollers are exactly what the doctor ordered for all sorts of applications; but it makes bolting certain functions (ethernet, any serious level of video, USB host capabilities, etc.) fairly clunky and expensive. There is practically nothing that some clever person hasn't managed to encapsulate as a TTL or SPI-interface shield object that exposes some capabilities to the arduino and does a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes; but most such shields are easily as powerful as the Arduino itself, and the cost can mount fast.
Assuming(and this is important, one of Arduino's great strengths is that even n00bs can just dive in) that a reasonably sane default-beginner's-image-and-utilities emerges for the Pi, it is arguably well placed as the answer to anything where the problem requires adding frankly excessive shields to an arduino. It still has some GPIO twiddling capability; but also comes with ethernet, USB host, and video out for ~2x what an arduino would cost. As a 'desktop' the feeble main processor largely dooms it; but it's luxury by microcontroller standards and easily enough for all sorts of light web-enabling stuff.
The PandaBoard, of course, is largely the Pi without some of the compromises. More money, more power.
These camera units have to have some sort of clue about their owner(unless they are configured in the not-so-terribly-useful 'record only to local storage, somebody climbs up when it is time to collect" mode). Are they connected to fixed wiring? Do they have a data radio of some flavor? WiFi? Cellular? Any SIM card to be pulled? Serial numbers, vendor information, dates of manufacture, etc, etc.
Unless somebody went to considerable trouble to do this in some deep-black-ops kind of way, they should leak clues like a sieve once somebody just gives the cops the finger and takes one apart...
In the more specific case of this spaceport, I would be considering the fact that most rocket programs so far seem to have had trouble avoiding more or less alarming amounts of hydrazine seeping all over the place. SpaceX's use of RP-1, at least for present designs, makes that less of a concern; but rocket launching doesn't exactly have a sterling reputation.
I have as well. My point was merely that serious freaking out about textual integrity and historical accuracy and translation and whatnot is fairly serious business. It's a pretty big deal within academic publishing.
PG largely fails the zOMG MUST BE AUTHENTICEST!! test; but produces fairly high quality results because only people who care are involved.
The cut-price shlock slingers can be widely variable. If you are lucky, they are a more or less straight PG rip, and fairly decent; but you can't expect more than a few minutes of effort went into the book.
Well chances are you wont be using your hands. Bring along a small pocket knife, voila!
I'm not in the shoplifting business; but when I'm on the receiving end of a clamshelled product in the mail, I find that a very small, very sharp, blade on a handle(think an x-acto knife or a scalpel) works better than a bigger knife.
You get much better depth control, it is much easier to cut precise outlines(even through just the top layer, right next to the fused seam), and generally avoid resorting to brute force, ignorance, and cutting yourself on packaging.
Plus, nothing says 'don't bother rme, I'm busy with my hobbies.' quite like flicking up your scalpel when somebody demands your attention in mid-unbox...
The hypothetical shoplifter might have good luck with a similar small blade attached to a finger-brace or short, palm-able handle.
Has anybody ever been introduced to the wonderful world of the truly dreadful unauthorized variants of canonical texts that were being hacked out while the ink on those texts was barely dry?
Actors and/or audience members cobbling their (often surprisingly good; but not good enough) memory of a new work of Shakespear into a cut-price unauthorized edition, some really trippy stuff in those version... Hack printers buying first editions and setting blunt type as fast and furious as they could, to get their knockoff on the street before the other guy did... Never mind the various editorial mistakes in subsequent prints, bowdlerizations, etc.
Of course, works that started as oral traditions or assembled-by-committee mashes of existing texts are far worse than even the worst horrors of post-gutenburg hackery. Oh, and let's not even talk about the dark history of situations where translation has been needed...
There's a whole industry, in academia, of 'critical editions' that are distinguished in no small part by the editor actually giving a damn about the sources drawn from, attempting to provide the most accurate reproduction of the original, essays and footnotes illuminating the process of choosing between manuscript A and manuscript B, and how to transliterate manuscript C's character names, and whatnot.
Sure,.99 public domain cash-ins are largely shlock(Project Gutenburg isn't world-class critical editions; but they do at least tend to be produced by people who give a damn and aren't just grubbing for cash by releasing quick and dirty repackages); but the quality of the low end of the market for printed works has always been pretty dire. At least, these days, we don't generally see physical problems like crap ink, blunt, used type, or horrid paper stock also being inflicted on the readers in the cheap seats.
It seems a bit unfair to call plastic clamshell packaging the 'worst design ever' just because the collateral damage don't like it very much...
It can be inexpensively vacuum formed from plastic sheet stock, easily machine cut and sealed, allows items to be presented for display in a retail environment, and makes it harder for the small-but-valuable stuff to wander away. From the perspective of the actual customer(ie. the one who buys clamshell packaging, not you, you peon) it's actually quite a successful design.
Obviously, it is out of place in mail-order environments, and now that a large amount of merchandise gets moved that way, I assume we'll see dedicated 'warehouse-only' packaging come to the fore; but clamshell has been phenomenally successful on the shop floor.
In other news, shell-shocked civilians describe high-explosives as 'pretty lame' and 'about the worst ever'...
It would, indeed, be brutally customer-hostile. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that that makes it implausible(was it PSP Go downloads or Nintendo DS ones where you had to personally beg customer support for mercy if your hardware died and you wanted to transfer games that you had paid to download?)...
In any case, merely intended to be an off-the-cuff hypothetical implementation of "killing the resale market without substantially increasing media costs or requiring an internet connection". Not a goal that I support; but one that I suspect.
You almost have to admire HP for fucking it up so badly that somebody voluntarily hired a defense contractor in the hope that they would be more competent and efficient...
Given that even a 25GB BD-R(which is more expensive per unit than the mass produced pressed flavor) only costs a dollar or two, with case, the economics of using SD cards are a trifle questionable...
Our old friend the burst cutting area can fairly trivially assign a machine-readable unique ID to a disk.
Assuming a locked console(not implausible, unless the next generation is weaker than the present one), it would take next to no bandwidth and local storage to keep a local database of 'authorized' disks, refuse to play any others, and, upon encountering a new disk, query the server to insure that it hadn't already been authorized elsewhere.
If you had to work with no bandwidth at all, a modification of the disk format, allowing the first console that encounters the disk to permanently modify it in some way(eg. tiny sliver of writeable area, that the console writes a signed block of data to on first insertion(and verifies on subsequent insertions, so you can't just cover it with tape).
Not 100% foolproof; but you just have to make resale uneconomic...
I'll be interested to see if this arbitrary TLD nonsense merely expands the TLD-ghetto that exists beyond the top few into a nearly infinite morass, or whether the sheer confusion throws us back to a google-based equivalent of the old days of 'AOL Keywords', where virtually everybody has abandoned any hope of knowing the URL, and just plugs in some stuff in the search bar and hits enter...
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, Moon's story is so weird that I just can't shake the feeling that he is actually a character from b-grade conspiracy fiction, rather than real life...
We were hoping that Britain would provide something of a buffer; but it looks like metric wind is making its way from the EU after all...
There goes South Korea's lead when it comes to science education.
While I am far from delighted to see creationist claptrap ooze any further out of the dark ages than it has to, it would be a dangerous underestimation to operate on the assumption that believing stupid things automatically makes people stupid(stupid people are quite adept and believing stupid things, and generally do; but once a smart person gets ahold of a stupid thing, they are far better equipped to cling to it through means other than pig-headed obstinacy).
It's perfectly possible(and has been done) for creationists(YECs, even) to do perfectly adequate science by means of some 'microevolution/macroevolution' flimflam, 'working out the implications of evolution as a contrafactual hypothesis', or simply not thinking about it much from Monday to Friday and thinking the opposite on Sundays. In areas of science that aren't biological, of course, it's even easier, and engineering is practically like home(not that engineers need to believe in intelligent design; but the belief that complex systems were intelligently designed isn't exactly crippling when your job is intelligently designing complex systems...)
Unfortunately, when it gets to the point that the textbook wars are being lost, that often is a sign that Cletus the slack-jawed yokel has grabbed the reigns; but one cannot simply depend on a self-correction induced by science falling apart thereafter.
(Incidentally, this also isn't wildly surprising. South Korea has a surprisingly strong Team Jesus contingent; best known for punching well about its weight, per capita, in terms of sending out missionaries to assorted scenic and/or hostile locales.)
Given the, at best limited, ability of anti-nuclear lobbyists to do much of anything about the nuclear navy, I suspect that defense types have some very clear ideas about where they plan to find a source of electricity next to a large supply of water...
For whatever reason, somebody was shameless enough to start talking about 'environmentally friendly'(because if there is anything that war isn't...); but the fact that some of the more forward-thinking DoD types might want to be able to still move if their supply of diesel gets cut off isn't a huge surprise.
Incidents like this one, make the effective price per gallon look substantially higher than domestic pump rate...
Incidentally, do you know what happened to MIPS that put it behind ARM in the trendy widgets market?
You still see MIPS cores in some routers(Broadcom, if I remember correctly, uses MIPS SoCs in their small router chipsets) and there are a few el-cheapo poor cousin Android devices that run(not terribly well) on MIPS SoCs; but not much action. What happened that everybody is talking about ARM now, MIPS is a lower profile player, PPC has retreated to a few niches, and things like SuperH barely come up for air anymore?
Smaller is more vulnerable(all else being equal, which it isn't necessarily). Sunlight isn't really an issue in practice(in addition to being alarmingly indestructable, that black epoxy stuff is about as opaque as it looks); but even your big-chunky-classic-single-transistor-in-a-metal-can will show quite readily measurable photo-sensitivity effects if you chop the can open.
I suspect that the answer is a combination of 'don't hold your breath on that' and 'at least a year ago, did you miss it?'
In terms of sheer screaming power(and, for the moment, even supporting 64 bit memory spaces) ARM is a toy and shows no terribly strong signs of making any strides in that area that Intel would really be worried about.
On the other hand, it would appear that an awful lot of netbooks and laptops were never sold, possibly never even built, because of tablets and smartphones... If things like this turn out to be a good fit for some 'cloud' niche or other sales of select Xeons could see similar hits.
At least so far, you don't go up against Chipzilla benchmark-for-benchmark. The world evolves around you such that your virtues are now more desirable than his...
Does anybody know who the 20nm fabs ARM is expecting to provide these chips are? It was my understanding that Samsung, Globalfoundries and TSMC were still working on a larger process(28mm?) and Intel has been very cagey about fabbing any 3rd-party stuff except for a handful of FPGAs and other high-margin oddballs that don't compete in Intel's area of business in any meaningful way.
The Feds may also be leaning on MS/Verisign/whoever; but this instance appears to be one of rather serious fuck-uppery. From MS's blog entry:
"What we found is that certificates issued by our Terminal Services licensing certification authority, which are intended to only be used for license server verification, could also be used to sign code as Microsoft. Specifically, when an enterprise customer requests a Terminal Services activation license, the certificate issued by Microsoft in response to the request allows code signing without accessing Microsoft’s internal PKI infrastructure."
So, guys, turns out that we accidentally built our phone-home DRM such that the cryptographic "OK, your CALS are worthy unto Redmond and thou mayst remote desktop" message is also a valid signing key with a chain of trust going right back up to a default-trusted Microsoft cert... Oops.
Now, given that (so far as we know, clearly team AV isn't in any position to tell us) this little mistake was not widely known or exploited, clearly the Flame guys were on the ball(and far more interested in spying on Iran or whoever than in improving the security of domestic computers... thanks a whole fucking lot on that one, feds).
Why would I want to build my latest project with a Raspberry Pi instead of Arduino?
That very strongly depends on the nature of your project. Arduinos are great for nice, accessable, GPIO twiddling and some light sampling. In the hands of people who actually know their microcontroller-fu, you can also wring some surprising calculation power out of them.
For connected applications, though, their weaknesses become apparent fairly quickly. As a slave peripheral? No problem. One or two other devices over TTL serial, custom protocol? Fine. Ethernet(wired or otherwise): There's a shield for that, and it'll set you back as much as the board it connects to. Fantastic.
That's the trouble with some of the Arduino 'ecosystem' stuff. At heart, it's still based around a microcontroller. Nothing wrong with that, microcontrollers are exactly what the doctor ordered for all sorts of applications; but it makes bolting certain functions (ethernet, any serious level of video, USB host capabilities, etc.) fairly clunky and expensive. There is practically nothing that some clever person hasn't managed to encapsulate as a TTL or SPI-interface shield object that exposes some capabilities to the arduino and does a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes; but most such shields are easily as powerful as the Arduino itself, and the cost can mount fast.
Assuming(and this is important, one of Arduino's great strengths is that even n00bs can just dive in) that a reasonably sane default-beginner's-image-and-utilities emerges for the Pi, it is arguably well placed as the answer to anything where the problem requires adding frankly excessive shields to an arduino. It still has some GPIO twiddling capability; but also comes with ethernet, USB host, and video out for ~2x what an arduino would cost. As a 'desktop' the feeble main processor largely dooms it; but it's luxury by microcontroller standards and easily enough for all sorts of light web-enabling stuff.
The PandaBoard, of course, is largely the Pi without some of the compromises. More money, more power.
These camera units have to have some sort of clue about their owner(unless they are configured in the not-so-terribly-useful 'record only to local storage, somebody climbs up when it is time to collect" mode). Are they connected to fixed wiring? Do they have a data radio of some flavor? WiFi? Cellular? Any SIM card to be pulled? Serial numbers, vendor information, dates of manufacture, etc, etc.
Unless somebody went to considerable trouble to do this in some deep-black-ops kind of way, they should leak clues like a sieve once somebody just gives the cops the finger and takes one apart...
In the more specific case of this spaceport, I would be considering the fact that most rocket programs so far seem to have had trouble avoiding more or less alarming amounts of hydrazine seeping all over the place. SpaceX's use of RP-1, at least for present designs, makes that less of a concern; but rocket launching doesn't exactly have a sterling reputation.
I have as well. My point was merely that serious freaking out about textual integrity and historical accuracy and translation and whatnot is fairly serious business. It's a pretty big deal within academic publishing.
PG largely fails the zOMG MUST BE AUTHENTICEST!! test; but produces fairly high quality results because only people who care are involved.
The cut-price shlock slingers can be widely variable. If you are lucky, they are a more or less straight PG rip, and fairly decent; but you can't expect more than a few minutes of effort went into the book.
Well chances are you wont be using your hands. Bring along a small pocket knife, voila!
I'm not in the shoplifting business; but when I'm on the receiving end of a clamshelled product in the mail, I find that a very small, very sharp, blade on a handle(think an x-acto knife or a scalpel) works better than a bigger knife.
You get much better depth control, it is much easier to cut precise outlines(even through just the top layer, right next to the fused seam), and generally avoid resorting to brute force, ignorance, and cutting yourself on packaging.
Plus, nothing says 'don't bother rme, I'm busy with my hobbies.' quite like flicking up your scalpel when somebody demands your attention in mid-unbox...
The hypothetical shoplifter might have good luck with a similar small blade attached to a finger-brace or short, palm-able handle.
Has anybody ever been introduced to the wonderful world of the truly dreadful unauthorized variants of canonical texts that were being hacked out while the ink on those texts was barely dry?
.99 public domain cash-ins are largely shlock(Project Gutenburg isn't world-class critical editions; but they do at least tend to be produced by people who give a damn and aren't just grubbing for cash by releasing quick and dirty repackages); but the quality of the low end of the market for printed works has always been pretty dire. At least, these days, we don't generally see physical problems like crap ink, blunt, used type, or horrid paper stock also being inflicted on the readers in the cheap seats.
Actors and/or audience members cobbling their (often surprisingly good; but not good enough) memory of a new work of Shakespear into a cut-price unauthorized edition, some really trippy stuff in those version... Hack printers buying first editions and setting blunt type as fast and furious as they could, to get their knockoff on the street before the other guy did... Never mind the various editorial mistakes in subsequent prints, bowdlerizations, etc.
Of course, works that started as oral traditions or assembled-by-committee mashes of existing texts are far worse than even the worst horrors of post-gutenburg hackery. Oh, and let's not even talk about the dark history of situations where translation has been needed...
There's a whole industry, in academia, of 'critical editions' that are distinguished in no small part by the editor actually giving a damn about the sources drawn from, attempting to provide the most accurate reproduction of the original, essays and footnotes illuminating the process of choosing between manuscript A and manuscript B, and how to transliterate manuscript C's character names, and whatnot.
Sure,
It seems a bit unfair to call plastic clamshell packaging the 'worst design ever' just because the collateral damage don't like it very much...
It can be inexpensively vacuum formed from plastic sheet stock, easily machine cut and sealed, allows items to be presented for display in a retail environment, and makes it harder for the small-but-valuable stuff to wander away. From the perspective of the actual customer(ie. the one who buys clamshell packaging, not you, you peon) it's actually quite a successful design.
Obviously, it is out of place in mail-order environments, and now that a large amount of merchandise gets moved that way, I assume we'll see dedicated 'warehouse-only' packaging come to the fore; but clamshell has been phenomenally successful on the shop floor.
In other news, shell-shocked civilians describe high-explosives as 'pretty lame' and 'about the worst ever'...
It would, indeed, be brutally customer-hostile. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that that makes it implausible(was it PSP Go downloads or Nintendo DS ones where you had to personally beg customer support for mercy if your hardware died and you wanted to transfer games that you had paid to download?)...
In any case, merely intended to be an off-the-cuff hypothetical implementation of "killing the resale market without substantially increasing media costs or requiring an internet connection". Not a goal that I support; but one that I suspect.
You almost have to admire HP for fucking it up so badly that somebody voluntarily hired a defense contractor in the hope that they would be more competent and efficient...
Will they be in the 'less than a dollar' range?
Given that even a 25GB BD-R(which is more expensive per unit than the mass produced pressed flavor) only costs a dollar or two, with case, the economics of using SD cards are a trifle questionable...
The, er, superb performance of the diskless PSP Go probably didn't help. And that was a design that axed a disk that everybody loathed and mocked...
Our old friend the burst cutting area can fairly trivially assign a machine-readable unique ID to a disk.
Assuming a locked console(not implausible, unless the next generation is weaker than the present one), it would take next to no bandwidth and local storage to keep a local database of 'authorized' disks, refuse to play any others, and, upon encountering a new disk, query the server to insure that it hadn't already been authorized elsewhere.
If you had to work with no bandwidth at all, a modification of the disk format, allowing the first console that encounters the disk to permanently modify it in some way(eg. tiny sliver of writeable area, that the console writes a signed block of data to on first insertion(and verifies on subsequent insertions, so you can't just cover it with tape).
Not 100% foolproof; but you just have to make resale uneconomic...
Now, I wouldn't put an American banker or insurance company in charge of somebody else's counterfeit nickel; but surely the IMF isn't much better...
I'll be interested to see if this arbitrary TLD nonsense merely expands the TLD-ghetto that exists beyond the top few into a nearly infinite morass, or whether the sheer confusion throws us back to a google-based equivalent of the old days of 'AOL Keywords', where virtually everybody has abandoned any hope of knowing the URL, and just plugs in some stuff in the search bar and hits enter...