You are confusing momentum and kinetic energy. The momentum of a system is always conserved,
Momentum is mass x velocity, but kinetic energy is 1/2 mass x (velocity squared).
This inertia drive you describe puts energy into accelerating the mass, which is lost when the mass deforms, however the momentum of the system is conserved - that means the system starts moving in the opposite direction to the mass as the mass moves, and then stops moving when the mass stops.
The center of mass of this 'inertia drive' system will not change, so for the drive part to keep moving yet maintain the same center of mass, the acellereted mass would have to keep moving further away from it, ala a rocket.
* Who cares if SMTP was an excellent protocol in the environment it was designed in. What matters is that it is completely inadequate today - I'm not blaming the designers, it's the fault of people who still think SMTP is good and we should bolt more shit onto it instead of using a protocol that works in todays environment.
* It's not just about trying to add security to make up for the "lost appropriateness of trust", the problems with SMTP are more fundamental than that. SMTP places the burden of delivery upon the receipient and there will be no significant answers to the spam problem while this remains the case. Internet Mail 2000 is one example of an attempt at that problem - the sender (rather than the recipient) provides a server for the recipient to retrieve their email from, the sender can't fake the IP because then their message can't be retrieved, the sender must also keep the server online for the message to be retrieved. Not a spam solution in of itself, however it is an infrastructure than a working spam solution (either legal or technical) could actually be built on.
Personally I think email is a dead duck, the adoption problem will prevent people from switching away from SMTP, and SMTP will prevent the elimination of spam. Centrally controlled Instant Messaging, or some other spam free technology will slowly replace email. A shame really.
You appear to know little of games, people can cheat by running a modified client. Open source can secure a protocol sure, but open source can't ensure that the client it is talking to is running the code it is supposed to be, and not for instance rendering everything with the lights on, or the walls see-through.
I'm a fan of open source, but thinking that OpenSSH demonstrates that open source is as good as closed source at impeding cheaters is just wrong - they're not compareable problems.
spammers don't live by moral rules so... why should we?
We do live by moral rules, but there's little point in extending that hospitality to those who chose not to and use it to try and take advantage of those that do. Infact it is a moral duty to not extend some moral behaviours to the immoral.
For instance (to use courtesy instead of morality), a telemarketter knows that it is common courtesy that neither person hang up the phone until both parties have signalled the end of the conversation. Since telemarketters are not courteous this gives them an advantage over the courteous - the courteous person cannot hang up the phone until the telemarketer has signalled that they've said everything they wanted to (which won't happen until a sale is made).
What's a courteous person to do? Obviously, we make the Telemarketter play on the playing field they created, by foregoing courtesy and hang up.
Likewise, for any business that will disregard a moral course of action every time a more favourable alternative is present that is still legal, it is your moral duty to ensure that you do not give that business the benifit of moral treatment over legal treatment in the situations that favour you at its expense. To act otherwise would be to give competitive advanges to immoral behaviour.
By all means, turn the other cheek in life - just don't do it for someone is counting on you to do so and will take advantage of it when you do.
Spammers should be made to play on the playing field they created.
But you are still only holding one bit's worth of information in any one bit (though frequently it doesn't even mean that much when you take it out of context).
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity. Don't let THEM imminetize the eschaton.
Of course you are only encoding one bit's worth of information into one bit, the non obvious part is that when the entropy of an independent piece of information is less that one bit, you can actually store it in less than one bit and then use the rest of that bit to store something else unrelated to the first piece of information. This is certainly not obvious, I've never met a programmer who figured that one out for themselves. Also, from what you wrote it is hard to tell if you understand arithmetic compression - many people misunderstand it when it is explained to them because it just sounds impossible.
This is simply untrue. Arithmetic compression for example is not at all obvious, and if it was always kept as a trade secret and never published then the vast majority of programmers would live out their entire lives and never realise they can encode more than one piece of information into a single bit.
As much as I dislike patents, it's the frivolous ones that are the real problem, the trivial ones, the obvious ones, not the software ones.
I'm the one posting as Anonymous Coward, I post with my account name if I want to know when people have replied to the post, or if the post is a bit of an essay that might be useful to have archived with my slashdot account history. Throwaway posts just clutter the list of posts in your account.
Looking at your replies to my posts, I see you saying I haven't adequitely addressed things that I thought of as so simple as not needing any more discussion, and you also go into a lot of depth in areas I don't see as particularly important. So I think we are on two very different wavelengths at the moment.
So before addressing your points I'm going to try and resolve what I see as one possible reason we keep misunderstanding each other: DVDs, CDs, and professional pirates.
I was not proposing that the DRM box replace DVDs or CDs as people's main source of purchased media, these remain as they are - easily purchasable, and easily copyable. What I am proposing is a system within the power of Hollywood that will result in people buying DRM/Palladium computers because they want them, rather than because they are forced upon them. Once DRM machines are in every home then we can talk about whether it's feasible to slowly replace DVDs and CDs, but for now that's outside the scope of my argument.
You want me to address how there will be more stuff available to DRM boxes. I can't really address your points because they rely on the assumption I was advocating a format war and phasing out the old format. I can somewhat address the last point tho:
Any transitional period would have both formats available [I should point out in with roughly equal quantities of media], hence my point: consumers would have to choose, and as long as they have the choice, they won't choose DRM [because of the inconveniences it causes - even if there are "carrots" on the DRM side, the barrier to invest in new hardware is high, based on the cost of that hardware].
OK, DRM/Palladium boxes become available for sale at wallmart. The RIAA (ie music, not movies) make all their member content available through one website.
People with DRM boxes now have a choice whenever they want a song, they can search for what looks like the song they are after on P2P services, hope that it's actually on the P2P service, download it at unreliable speeds, hope it wasn't digitized via the analogue audio in, hope that proper jitter correction was used, and hope that the start and end of the song are correct (ie not truncated, and not blended into the next or previous song on the CD).
Or they could go to one website, know they're getting the right song, download it at reliable speed, know that it's going to be of excellent quality, pay a reasonable rate for it (because it won't get pirated, and the RIAA can use low costs as a carrot here) and get that warm fuzzy feeling of having supported their artist and the distribution of their artist's material.
Now if I had a DRM box, I would be doing a combination of both of the above depending on the song. If I had an open box I would be stuck with the P2P services.
Extra content not released on non DRM formats can be used as extra carrots, but really, P2P services suck for finding stuff that isn't the lastest mainstream (eg a good Rammstein music video) so it wouldn't be hard for the RIAA website to provide more content than the P2P sites, well it might be hard, but they could do it if they wanted. This stuff is still available via CD or DVD, so the more popular of it will end up on P2P systems, but buying music online will still have a strong appeal - and buying music online will be a bullet point on the side of a DRM machine at wallmart.
No last mile problems because even with my DRM machine, most of my music will still come from the CD store.
Watermarking... Psychographic compression will never defeat watermarking because it will never be perfect. People perceive different things so the concept is very loose and fuzzy to begin with, and the moment it starts stripping out so much 'unnoticeable' data that there is no longer anywhere to hide 64 bits in 24megs, then many people will be able to see the compression artifacts.
Remember also that the RIAA watermarking people will go 'do people notice this if they can't watch it side by side with the original', an advantage that people recompressing it won't have.
Yes, perfect PG compression would kill watermarking, but I don't ever see us getting there. However your point about being able to study the same stream with different watermarks is a very good one, and no elegant solutions spring to mind, a couple of ideas:
random combinations of watermarking techniques in each data stream - this only makes it much harder to figure out, it still isn't very secure.
unique data streams - each stream is encoded with jittered encoding parameters, and since videos have several pixels of border, the image being encoded could be shifted a pixel left, or down etc each scene change as well. While this would solve the problem (ugly as it is), it's not very practical at the moment - encrypting a data stream on the fly is easy, and one computer could handle many, but encoding a video every time someone downloaded one would be very expensive.
Professional pirates... Professional Pirates are only going to crack things that they can sell (to recoup the money it cost them to crack each encryption chip), this means only the mainstream stuff will be professionally cracked but it also means that they will not be selling it over the internet.
Your line of thought is that once they bootleg it, the bootleg will be in an open format and someone will buy one and copy it onto their P2P systems. That's what my Rammstein point was about, right now anybody can bootleg anything and stick it on a P2P system, they don't need a lab to pull keys out of chips, they don't have to buy these chips and then throw them away, yet with piracy as simple as it is for anybody to do I still can't get a high quality music vid of a song I'm after.
The day we require professional pirates to open media and sell it on CDs/DVDs before it can be placed on a P2P system is the day I can't find any new Rammstein vids of any quality. The variety of stuff on P2P will become a joke and I will go out and buy DRM.
I guess my point is, it will never matter when some content leaks because it's not like DVD, leaks do not open the floodgates or make the DRM weaker, there's no magic secret that can break the system if it escapes. Each leak is going to require a guy with a lab to do it.
all else being equal, the only attraction a DRM device could have over a non-DRM device is that there is no new content for the non-DRM device. And as I have explained, this is far from a trivial thing to accomplish.
Not so much no new content for the non-DRM box, more like lots of extra content for the DRM box, and provided that the DRM box is secure (which we're still arguing) then this is trivial and well within the power of hollywood.
I can, for instance, circumvent your hypothetical protections with hypothetical exploits: a motherboard tap anywhere inside the DA should be sufficient to recover bit-perfect digital data from your device.
two points
That doesn't circumvent the protections: If you publish your bit perfect digital data, then the key to your DRM box gets pulled and your publishing days are over (until your buy another computer). Yeah, a few movies got opened in the process, but it hit you in the wallet hard, and you won't be warezing any new movies - the number of people ripping movies and putting them on a P2P system will dry up real qick. If you don't publish your bit perfect digital data, then the DRM has done its job:).
The motherboard doesn't have to be tamper proof, they can use one of those monitors that take an encrypted signal. I will admit however that in the end this bit is still breakable, and probably always will be. The real security of this hypothetical system lies more in being able to pull keys on demand than obfuscation.
This is ignoring the biggest problem in your plan, which is real-time encrypted digital video delivery to a mass-market audience. I would optimistically guess we are at least a decade away from this capability. Remember, we're talking about the last mile problem now. Let alone the expense.
No, I already download a lot of legitimate video files (eg the Matrix Reloaded trailer), if there was DRM then the entire catalogue of the RIAA would probably be available for download at high quality also (P2P has no quality assurance). When making a purchasing decision, will joe public choose the system that can play most media, or the one that can play most media and play higher quality trailers, and buy music online. It'll be a gradual changeover, the RIAA/MPAA will offer carrots in the form of Neat Stuff(tm) that only the DRM people get to see, then as more DRM boxes appear on the market they will gradually move more and more of their stuff to DRM. We don't need movies-on-demand technology to make DRM a tempting option for many people.
I am not aware of any evidence presented in a respectable setting that watermarks can be used in the way you describe. I would appreciate correction on that point if I am wrong, but remember, marks can be tiny, but they won't survive recompression. They can be big and redundant, but then they will be easy to spot and remove. Not that it matters. Watermarks won't even be useful for tracking down pirates, who if enforcement is aggressive will simply steal equipment/keys the way bank robbers steal cars.
Watermarks are much misunderstood. A watermark is a way of hiding a small amount of data imperceptibly into a media datastream, traditionally we think of putting copyright information in a watermark but you can put any data in there provided there is enough space, including the public key the video stream was encoded with.
many Slashdot people seem to think that watermarking is about storing information in the low bit of each byte or DWORD (or whatever). While this is an example of watermarking, it is very lame, detectable, and compression will (as you say) remove it.
I don't know how state of the art watermarking works, but if I designed one for video, then off the top of my head (again:)) it would be in the frequency domain of the image (thus surviving reasonable compression - and unreasonable compression would still leave a demand for the DRM boxes), stored many times in the high frequencies (thus surving cropping) and a few times in the low frequencies (thus surviving noise).
if you want an example of a watermarking system that can survive cropping, scaling, compression, and introduction of noise. Grab a copy of photoshop or paintshop pro and have a play with the digimarc watermarking they provide - this will give you a hands on feel for the ruggardness vs visibility of watermarks. Supposedly the digimarc ones survive being printed and scanned, but I haven't tested that claim (I have however tested cropped them, drawing bits over them, compressed them, etc. Interesting enough, the surest way to kill them is to rotate the image 90 degrees:). I've also differenced them with the original to see how much they changed the image - they change the image mostly around edges of things which is a cute way of not being noticed but I'm getting sidetracked)
The watermarks in the hypothetical DRM box are not used to track down and prosecute pirates, they are merely used to invalidate any DRM box whose content has been found on the internet.
What happens then however is that it only takes a single person to arrange a jailbreak, and extract content from inside the box. Once converted to an open format, it is then endlessly distributed and enjoyed on conventional, non-black box hardware.
What we are discussing is the DVD in a nutshell......because of this problem with the black box, the MPAA/RIAA is now actively campaigning to make non-DRM hardware and software illegal.
This is the big/. assumption that I want to dispell. The MPAA/RIAA might be campaigning for this, but they don't need legislation to make their block boxes work (I'll explain this below) so (1) DRM can happen regardless of legislation and (2) a DRM box will be more attractive to the general public than an open box.
Because of (1) and (2), I very much doubt legislation against non-DRM hardware will ever happen (this is why I don't think it's an issue).
I explained (2) in my previous post, so now to explain (1)...
DVD CSS was hacked and now anybody can view them, sure, but CSS was weak encryption and we were damn lucky. Everyone on/. seems to think that palladium/DRM etc has a fatal flaw and has to be legislated otherwise open hardware can just circumvent it, but with strong encryption this will not be the case.
Here's a design off the top of my head: The DRM black box can play all open media but also has on-chip decryption software to decode RIAA/MPAA member content.
You want to watch the trailer for the latest Matrix movie, or get the latest Britney song:)...
You connect to the internet, and the DRM box sends its public key to the RIAA/MPAA member website, which then stream (or upload) the content to you already encrypted with the DRM box's public key.
Slashdotters at this point would just assume someone will hack the chip and publish the private key.
If this happens, the RIAA/MPAA add that key to a central list of untrusted keys and the key immediately becomes useless for downloading RIAA/MPAA content. Since each DRM box has its own key (I presume the decrypt chips would be processors with on-chip ROM), none of the general public are affected by this.
Given a 22meg trailer for a movie, watermarking 2048bits (or whatever) into it so it can't be spotted would pretty trivial. If the public key is watermarked into all DRM streams then the RIAA/MPAA immediatly know which keys to pull the moment any DRM content appears in a open format. This means that while the odd bit of DRM content might be opened, the vast library of DRM content stays DRM, but also has the side effect of meaning Information-wants-to-be-free fighters can only publish DRM warez at the risk of turning their DRM box into a paperweight.
Even if you don't believe that watermarking that little data into that big a data stream would be foolproof, remember that they can change watermarking schemes on whim.
AFAIK, DVD was only breakable for two reasons, the keys were far too short (export restrictions I think), and there weren't enough keys to allow pulling keys at whim (without pissing off joe public).
The whole problem with DRM is that anytime someone can choose between having it or not, they will almost always choose not to have it. This is elementary common sense.
Nope, given a choice between a box that can pay all media (ie the DRM box - it can play open media as well as the stuff encrypted by the RIAA & MPAA), and a box that can only play outdated or amature media (ie an open box in a world where all RIAA & MPAA member content is encyrpted), most people will chose the DRM box, possibly even me.
While you later concede that form input and input from other programs might be good reasons to use a regex, that you would even pose this question is strange. For 90% of the regex fans, form input and screen scraping is exactly what they do. For almost any Web developer, this is the day-in, day-out norm. So your point seems to downplay the very uses that have made regex's so popular
point and point.
What I was trying to justify there, was that when you need to use a regexp it may be a subtle hint that there's a design problem somewhere in the system, I didn't mean to imply they had no uses.
If each time you feel an urge to use a regular expression you ask yourself 'Is this a clue that something is wrong?' then with those examples you can go "no I'm dealing with form input", or "yes, but it's out of my hands".
In the later case your regexpr alarm-bell has at least made you think about that fact that you're about to tie your software to a specific version of a specific program.
They are most definitely useful little beasties and in that sense my reply was somewhat off the topic it was replying to - I too would have to question the experience of a coder who didn't know regular expressions.
You realize this does not bolster your claim that regex's are "overrated" -- it merely points out that some developers are overrated. A bad developer does not make a language bad.
Yeah, I think email addresses were a bad example to use - the problem is really that they look deceptively simple, rather than anything to do with regular expressions.
The point I guess I was wanting to make there was that if you have something that is defined by a grammar of tokens then it's better to parse it with something that works that way. Normally you can take a parser off the shelf, but even if you can't it's much easyier to get it right first time and forever when you can code the grammar straight from the specification, as opposed to regular expressions which I believe encourage you to look at what the input normally looks like and construct some pattern to approximate it. (Then confirm the regexpr is correct by testing it with the tiny subset of inputs that you based it off in the first place)
That HTML tag stripper you hacked up, did you remember to handle comments?
Same as above. You're complaining about human error and then blaming the regex system itself.
Nope, the 'human error' would never have occurred if an html parser had been used (the proper tool for the job) instead of a regexpr, they're not that much harder to use (or find).
But you asked for other people's views, and in my view, regex's are sorely needed.
Yep, thanks, and I'm not going to disagree with you there.:)
However, I think that if we portray regular expressions as a sometimes neccessary kludge (well, often neccessary, depending on what you do), rather than something that seperates the uber coders from the novices, then people will think to question what it was that resulted in them wanting to solve a problem with one, and learn from the design decisions of others.
I know and use regular expressions, but use of regular expressions is often symptomatic of poor design, this makes me somewhat suspicious of those who live and breath regexp's and preach them to the world.
Text processing - why isn't your text marked up? Converting data into text, passing it along, and then trying to pluck the data back out of the text is brittle and leaves you with a system that can't be upgraded - your components can't be improved to produce a more informative text stream as it will break all the regexpr's of all the components that use that stream etc.
Text straight from the keyboard of a user won't be marked up and seems a good place to be using regular expressions. Due to the popularity of brittle and unupgradable (is that a word?) text processing, the input from other programs might not be marked up either, here regexprs are necessary (ie symptomatic of poor design, but it wasn't your decision).
Parsing - how many times have you encountered a HTML or XML parser written with a regexpr? Unless your job requires you code by the seat of your pants, this is just plain lazy. Parsers written with regular expressions are always incomplete (ie they work on the subset of HTML/XML they were tested on, and if the requirements or layout ever changes they break), and they are very slow compared to a proper parser. Proper robust and well tested parsers are available under most licenses and for most languages.
This applies to much more than just HTML or XML, eg if you're going to write a javadoc clone for your pet language, do it properly, don't do it with regular expressions.
Development - Regular expressions appear to be developed with a 'try it and see' methodology - people write the regexpr and test it, thinking if it works then they must have done it right. This is very brittle, I've ecountered many regexpr's for email addresses, all of them work on your bog standard address, none of them work when deployed - there's always some guy with a % in their email address or some other oddity the author of the regexpr forgot or didn't know about (and lets not even think about trying to make an RFC compliant email address regexpr, it would have to handle "blarg@wibble"@slashdot.org)
That HTML tag stripper you hacked up, did you remember to handle comments? Just because there weren't any comments in the HTML it was tested on doesn't mean it'll never encounter them in the real world (wouldn't be an issue if an off the shelf parser is used).
I don't know, there are other issues with regexpressions but I've spend too long on this post already. I'm curious as to other's views on this - I've just come to associate use of regular expressions with flakey or hastily written software.
With regard to how you knew how to do something, "reminiscent" is probably right the vast majority of the time. However, when I say I want an intuitive interface, I'm asking something different:
reminiscent: implies you think back to a similar situation in the past and worked out how to do something from that.
intuitive: implies I don't even have to think about it, I just know, I don't know why I know.
The later is what people ask for. Now it may be the case that 'I just know' because subconciously I reminisced to a similar situation, however when a user asks for an intuitive interface they don't care why it was intuitive or whether it was reminiscent, they are asking for a UI that they 'just know' how to use.
Because of the huge amount of shared background amoung computer users, intuitive (in the 'just know' sense) interfaces do exist.
We are just playing word games here, when a user of a crap UI says 'make this part more intuitive' you know what they mean, you might not know how to go about making the UI less crap, but you understand the request.
Replying to the user that there's no such thing as intuitive, or saying they used the wrong word, or some oh-so-witty remark like "the only intuitive interface is the nipple, after that it's all learned" and then not actually fixing the problem is just wrong. The problem is real (very real in X apps), and if not fixable, then the problem is at the very least improvable.
The nipple quote spreads flawed logic to excuse flawed software, it's funny, but in the end it's just geek propegander.
I hate to start a theme here, but you don't get it.
Intuitive is not about having knowledge with no background knowledge.
Yes, I had to learn how to use a pen, but because I now know how to use a pen, when I am presented with a tablet, it is intuitive.
I don't have to learn to use a tablet - to use your dictionary defintion, I don't have to deduce how to use a tablet, nor do I have to reason about how to use a tablet, I just use it, I do this because even though I haven't used one before, it is an intuitive step from a pen, and I know pens.
You ask how much shared environment there is between all peoples... well it's a good bet that everyone using your software has also used a pen.
You call this a reminiscient interface, I think that's an unnecessarily restrictive word as the pattern matching that can happen with intuition is much more powerful than reminiscing, but you are definitely on the path to understanding what the word intuitive means.
Intuitive is a word in common usage in our language, usage is meaning and if the meaning of word "intuitive" was really as technical and restricted as you pretend it out to be, ie if the only thing that is intuitive was the nipple, then the adjective simply wouldn't exist in common usage. Intuitive is not a technical word. We as english speakers have little need for a word that specifically describes a baby sucking on a nipple.
but you can't say a piece of knowledge is "intuitive" because there exists some person who doesn't think so--guarenteed
You keep making me think 'autism', people don't speak in absolutes, we speak in generalisations, if 99 people find something obvious and one person doesn't then that's a pretty damn intuitive interface, and you wouldn't be wrong to call it such. Natural language isn't C code.
Your assumption that if windows becomes "intuitive" then something that works a different way won't be, is also wrong. Intuition happens inside the interface, it's more than real world metaphores, internal consistancy in the interface for example provides what you would call reminiscent intuition, even if the interface is working differently to windows.
And as for forgotten advances, granted Windows isn't going to take us far, but neither is sticking with unix, they are both ruts (and no, I'm not advocating something else, just pointing out that we're well and truely stuck).
PS I know it was a joke, it is funny, I did laugh the first time I heard it, I gave it a serious response because I think that line can be damaging - it's a meme that gives people a flawed excuse to produce shoddy software, and shoddy software is something we have far too much of.
I understand what this is saying, and it's an elegantly worded copout. Bruce Ediger does not know what "intuitive" means.
Intuitition is not about knowing how to do something in the complete absence of any learned knowledge, it is knowing how to do something new because your brain has pattern-matched the problem with similiar situations you've dealt with in the past (Also, don't assume that with user interfaces, real world metaphores are the only way to achieve this).
Interfaces that are patently intuitive: A tablet. A machine that only does one thing and only has one button.
Geeks love to think that they are somehow above the rest of the population, but if the lusers all make the same mistake using your interface, or expect something to be somewhere it's not etc, then the interface is at fault and waffling on about nipples isn't going to change that.
FWIW I think Bruce Ediger probably wanted to say "genetic knowledge" rather than "intuitive", but as another poster has pointed out, babies need to be taught about nipples too.
I only ever hear this copout from the unix community, but until now I'd never seen the quote attributed. The irony for me is that I'd always considered X applications to be the worst offenders. Anyone who responds to a complaint of some UI not being intuitive, with "there's no such thing as intuitive" should not be working on user interfaces.
Dividing time into steps of 60 and 24 makes sense, in a way, because these numbers are more easily divisible
True, except that if you used metrics you would no longer need to run scared of divisions that don't result in round numbers - you can just use a decimal point... because it's decimal... just like the metric system you would be using.
Kazaa isn't dead, it's a dodge, read the article
on
KaZaA Collapses
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· Score: 1
The people that made Kazaa are already rich off the sale of the Kazaa network, the Kazaa software does not need the company for it to still work. Kazaa is folding so that it can't lose the people that made Kazaa any money. Even the RIAA is acusing them of doing this as a dodge.
Presumably the company that now owns the Kazaa network will also get sued, however it's a private company in Vanuatu... maybe to make it hard for the RIAA to sue? If this company hasn't ever distributed software to US citizens then it'll probably be even harder to sue. I dunno, IANAL, but it sounds like this is just Kazaa not playing the RIAA's game to me.
The most important question is the price. Will it be cheaper than refrigerator compressors for example?
In a word... No
If it costs them 50c to produce a chip as efficient as a $200 aircon heat pump, then until there is someone else who can produce a heat pump for less than $200 there is no reason to charge less than $180 for the chip.
I suspect this is what has happened with the micromirror chips Texas Instruments invented to replace LCD projectors, for all the waffling on about how cheap these things would be, they've been available for a few years now and a projector will still set you back $5000, regardless of whether you get LCD or micromirror.
Until there is a competeing technology, these chips will not be significantly cheaper.
You still have *exactly* the same problem than rigth now: how do I remove that heat from the colding system? It is still one square inch
No, the heat dissipated is proportional to the difference in the temperature between the hot thing and the cold thing, and with one of these chips you can make the hot surface hotter, thus dissipating more heat.
If the heatsink on the hot side of the coolchip isn't radiating as much heat as the CPU is producing then (assuming the coolchips heat pumping properties work) the hot side of the coolchip will keep getting hotter until the radiation of the heatsink matches the heat output by the CPU. You argument would work if the coolchip was just an excellent conductor of heat, but it's a heat pump - it can shift heat from a side that is cool to a side that is hotter than the side the heat came from.
how much air you can pass over an square inch on a time unit, given the fact it has to be in countach with the refrigerator unit time enough to transfer that heat to it
This is what heatsinks are for, a 1 inch cube heatsink can have a huge surface area (which air is then blown through), and there's no reason to stick to one cubic inch, the heatsync can be much larger than the coolchip provided it can conduct the heat sufficently to all it's tiny fins. If two coolchips can actually do the heat pumping work of an air conditioner, then transferring that into the actual air should be no trickier than with conventional aircon units.
What if one of these spyware programs were to catch (or come with) a virus? My computer would (without my knowledge) spread this virus to other people....
You know, the scarey thing is this isn't as farfetched as it sounds. The SDK Cydoor provides for download did have a virus in it, luckily in this case the virus was not attached to the part of the SDK that you distribute, but that's the only reason your hypothetical situation hasn't already occured.
The only way you can get a virus nowadays, is to start up Outlook
There are now two ways nowadays to get a virus. One is to start up Outlook (as you say), the other is to have someone on your network start up Outlook who has one of your drives mapped and writeable (There may even be viruses now that don't need the drive to be mapped).
But yeah, I've never bothered with AV software (or security beyond the LAN being firewalled) and the extend of damage viruses have caused me is the inconvenience of no longer wanting to leave drives shared-writable:(
Ahh those were days... you could leave your front door unlocked and just copy anything to your computer from anywhere transparently.
BSP trees don't give any visibility testing information. They provide a fast way of determining draw order, and ensure that there is always at least one correct draw order (an effect of the way surfaces are cut).
AFAIK (I might have this bit all wrong, the Quake engine changed many times in development and I might not have got it right to begin with) With Quake, JC (John Carmak, not that other guy;)) attached a list of visible polys in each leaf node of the BSP tree, but since which-polys-are-visible can change as you move around within the space defined by a leaf node, I suspect this has little to do with BSPs and he just used the BSP as a convenient structure to bolt the visibility info on to - it's already built, it's very fast to locate the leaf node volume you are in, the size of the volume will be smaller in more complex areas (where presumably the visibilty-list changes more often), the volume will always be convex with no walls running through it etc.
But yeah, while I have yet to figure out exactly what people mean by "deep" (non-trivial and elegant?), BSP trees seem to be as classy as the other algorithms people are putting forward.
Slashdot Mirror
You are confusing momentum and kinetic energy.
The momentum of a system is always conserved,
Momentum is mass x velocity, but kinetic energy is 1/2 mass x (velocity squared).
This inertia drive you describe puts energy into accelerating the mass, which is lost when the mass deforms, however the momentum of the system is conserved - that means the system starts moving in the opposite direction to the mass as the mass moves, and then stops moving when the mass stops.
The center of mass of this 'inertia drive' system will not change, so for the drive part to keep moving yet maintain the same center of mass, the acellereted mass would have to keep moving further away from it, ala a rocket.
Photoshop has had a path tool for quite some time
Two points:
* Who cares if SMTP was an excellent protocol in the environment it was designed in. What matters is that it is completely inadequate today - I'm not blaming the designers, it's the fault of people who still think SMTP is good and we should bolt more shit onto it instead of using a protocol that works in todays environment.
* It's not just about trying to add security to make up for the "lost appropriateness of trust", the problems with SMTP are more fundamental than that. SMTP places the burden of delivery upon the receipient and there will be no significant answers to the spam problem while this remains the case. Internet Mail 2000 is one example of an attempt at that problem - the sender (rather than the recipient) provides a server for the recipient to retrieve their email from, the sender can't fake the IP because then their message can't be retrieved, the sender must also keep the server online for the message to be retrieved. Not a spam solution in of itself, however it is an infrastructure than a working spam solution (either legal or technical) could actually be built on.
Personally I think email is a dead duck, the adoption problem will prevent people from switching away from SMTP, and SMTP will prevent the elimination of spam. Centrally controlled Instant Messaging, or some other spam free technology will slowly replace email. A shame really.
You appear to know little of games, people can cheat by running a modified client. Open source can secure a protocol sure, but open source can't ensure that the client it is talking to is running the code it is supposed to be, and not for instance rendering everything with the lights on, or the walls see-through.
I'm a fan of open source, but thinking that OpenSSH demonstrates that open source is as good as closed source at impeding cheaters is just wrong - they're not compareable problems.
For instance (to use courtesy instead of morality), a telemarketter knows that it is common courtesy that neither person hang up the phone until both parties have signalled the end of the conversation. Since telemarketters are not courteous this gives them an advantage over the courteous - the courteous person cannot hang up the phone until the telemarketer has signalled that they've said everything they wanted to (which won't happen until a sale is made).
What's a courteous person to do?
Obviously, we make the Telemarketter play on the playing field they created, by foregoing courtesy and hang up.
Likewise, for any business that will disregard a moral course of action every time a more favourable alternative is present that is still legal, it is your moral duty to ensure that you do not give that business the benifit of moral treatment over legal treatment in the situations that favour you at its expense. To act otherwise would be to give competitive advanges to immoral behaviour.
By all means, turn the other cheek in life - just don't do it for someone is counting on you to do so and will take advantage of it when you do.
Spammers should be made to play on the playing field they created.
This is simply untrue. Arithmetic compression for example is not at all obvious, and if it was always kept as a trade secret and never published then the vast majority of programmers would live out their entire lives and never realise they can encode more than one piece of information into a single bit.
As much as I dislike patents, it's the frivolous ones that are the real problem, the trivial ones, the obvious ones, not the software ones.
Oh... you mean here?
Looking at your replies to my posts, I see you saying I haven't adequitely addressed things that I thought of as so simple as not needing any more discussion, and you also go into a lot of depth in areas I don't see as particularly important. So I think we are on two very different wavelengths at the moment.
So before addressing your points I'm going to try and resolve what I see as one possible reason we keep misunderstanding each other: DVDs, CDs, and professional pirates.
I was not proposing that the DRM box replace DVDs or CDs as people's main source of purchased media, these remain as they are - easily purchasable, and easily copyable. What I am proposing is a system within the power of Hollywood that will result in people buying DRM/Palladium computers because they want them, rather than because they are forced upon them. Once DRM machines are in every home then we can talk about whether it's feasible to slowly replace DVDs and CDs, but for now that's outside the scope of my argument.
You want me to address how there will be more stuff available to DRM boxes. I can't really address your points because they rely on the assumption I was advocating a format war and phasing out the old format. I can somewhat address the last point tho:
OK, DRM/Palladium boxes become available for sale at wallmart. The RIAA (ie music, not movies) make all their member content available through one website.
People with DRM boxes now have a choice whenever they want a song, they can search for what looks like the song they are after on P2P services, hope that it's actually on the P2P service, download it at unreliable speeds, hope it wasn't digitized via the analogue audio in, hope that proper jitter correction was used, and hope that the start and end of the song are correct (ie not truncated, and not blended into the next or previous song on the CD).
Or they could go to one website, know they're getting the right song, download it at reliable speed, know that it's going to be of excellent quality, pay a reasonable rate for it (because it won't get pirated, and the RIAA can use low costs as a carrot here) and get that warm fuzzy feeling of having supported their artist and the distribution of their artist's material.
Now if I had a DRM box, I would be doing a combination of both of the above depending on the song. If I had an open box I would be stuck with the P2P services.
Extra content not released on non DRM formats can be used as extra carrots, but really, P2P services suck for finding stuff that isn't the lastest mainstream (eg a good Rammstein music video) so it wouldn't be hard for the RIAA website to provide more content than the P2P sites, well it might be hard, but they could do it if they wanted. This stuff is still available via CD or DVD, so the more popular of it will end up on P2P systems, but buying music online will still have a strong appeal - and buying music online will be a bullet point on the side of a DRM machine at wallmart.
No last mile problems because even with my DRM machine, most of my music will still come from the CD store.
Watermarking...
Psychographic compression will never defeat watermarking because it will never be perfect. People perceive different things so the concept is very loose and fuzzy to begin with, and the moment it starts stripping out so much 'unnoticeable' data that there is no longer anywhere to hide 64 bits in 24megs, then many people will be able to see the compression artifacts.
Remember also that the RIAA watermarking people will go 'do people notice this if they can't watch it side by side with the original', an advantage that people recompressing it won't have.
Yes, perfect PG compression would kill watermarking, but I don't ever see us getting there. However your point about being able to study the same stream with different watermarks is a very good one, and no elegant solutions spring to mind, a couple of ideas:
Professional pirates...
Professional Pirates are only going to crack things that they can sell (to recoup the money it cost them to crack each encryption chip), this means only the mainstream stuff will be professionally cracked but it also means that they will not be selling it over the internet.
Your line of thought is that once they bootleg it, the bootleg will be in an open format and someone will buy one and copy it onto their P2P systems. That's what my Rammstein point was about, right now anybody can bootleg anything and stick it on a P2P system, they don't need a lab to pull keys out of chips, they don't have to buy these chips and then throw them away, yet with piracy as simple as it is for anybody to do I still can't get a high quality music vid of a song I'm after.
The day we require professional pirates to open media and sell it on CDs/DVDs before it can be placed on a P2P system is the day I can't find any new Rammstein vids of any quality. The variety of stuff on P2P will become a joke and I will go out and buy DRM.
I guess my point is, it will never matter when some content leaks because it's not like DVD, leaks do not open the floodgates or make the DRM weaker, there's no magic secret that can break the system if it escapes. Each leak is going to require a guy with a lab to do it.
two points
No, I already download a lot of legitimate video files (eg the Matrix Reloaded trailer), if there was DRM then the entire catalogue of the RIAA would probably be available for download at high quality also (P2P has no quality assurance). When making a purchasing decision, will joe public choose the system that can play most media, or the one that can play most media and play higher quality trailers, and buy music online. It'll be a gradual changeover, the RIAA/MPAA will offer carrots in the form of Neat Stuff(tm) that only the DRM people get to see, then as more DRM boxes appear on the market they will gradually move more and more of their stuff to DRM. We don't need movies-on-demand technology to make DRM a tempting option for many people.
Watermarks are much misunderstood. A watermark is a way of hiding a small amount of data imperceptibly into a media datastream, traditionally we think of putting copyright information in a watermark but you can put any data in there provided there is enough space, including the public key the video stream was encoded with.
many Slashdot people seem to think that watermarking is about storing information in the low bit of each byte or DWORD (or whatever). While this is an example of watermarking, it is very lame, detectable, and compression will (as you say) remove it.
I don't know how state of the art watermarking works, but if I designed one for video, then off the top of my head (again
if you want an example of a watermarking system that can survive cropping, scaling, compression, and introduction of noise. Grab a copy of photoshop or paintshop pro and have a play with the digimarc watermarking they provide - this will give you a hands on feel for the ruggardness vs visibility of watermarks. Supposedly the digimarc ones survive being printed and scanned, but I haven't tested that claim (I have however tested cropped them, drawing bits over them, compressed them, etc. Interesting enough, the surest way to kill them is to rotate the image 90 degrees
The watermarks in the hypothetical DRM box are not used to track down and prosecute pirates, they are merely used to invalidate any DRM box whose content has been found on the internet.
Because of (1) and (2), I very much doubt legislation against non-DRM hardware will ever happen (this is why I don't think it's an issue).
I explained (2) in my previous post, so now to explain (1)...
DVD CSS was hacked and now anybody can view them, sure, but CSS was weak encryption and we were damn lucky. Everyone on
Here's a design off the top of my head:
The DRM black box can play all open media but also has on-chip decryption software to decode RIAA/MPAA member content.
You want to watch the trailer for the latest Matrix movie, or get the latest Britney song
You connect to the internet, and the DRM box sends its public key to the RIAA/MPAA member website, which then stream (or upload) the content to you already encrypted with the DRM box's public key.
Slashdotters at this point would just assume someone will hack the chip and publish the private key.
If this happens, the RIAA/MPAA add that key to a central list of untrusted keys and the key immediately becomes useless for downloading RIAA/MPAA content. Since each DRM box has its own key (I presume the decrypt chips would be processors with on-chip ROM), none of the general public are affected by this.
Given a 22meg trailer for a movie, watermarking 2048bits (or whatever) into it so it can't be spotted would pretty trivial. If the public key is watermarked into all DRM streams then the RIAA/MPAA immediatly know which keys to pull the moment any DRM content appears in a open format. This means that while the odd bit of DRM content might be opened, the vast library of DRM content stays DRM, but also has the side effect of meaning Information-wants-to-be-free fighters can only publish DRM warez at the risk of turning their DRM box into a paperweight.
Even if you don't believe that watermarking that little data into that big a data stream would be foolproof, remember that they can change watermarking schemes on whim.
AFAIK, DVD was only breakable for two reasons, the keys were far too short (export restrictions I think), and there weren't enough keys to allow pulling keys at whim (without pissing off joe public).
(nah, I'd actually get both)
What I was trying to justify there, was that when you need to use a regexp it may be a subtle hint that there's a design problem somewhere in the system, I didn't mean to imply they had no uses.
If each time you feel an urge to use a regular expression you ask yourself 'Is this a clue that something is wrong?' then with those examples you can go "no I'm dealing with form input", or "yes, but it's out of my hands".
In the later case your regexpr alarm-bell has at least made you think about that fact that you're about to tie your software to a specific version of a specific program.
They are most definitely useful little beasties and in that sense my reply was somewhat off the topic it was replying to - I too would have to question the experience of a coder who didn't know regular expressions.
Yeah, I think email addresses were a bad example to use - the problem is really that they look deceptively simple, rather than anything to do with regular expressions.
The point I guess I was wanting to make there was that if you have something that is defined by a grammar of tokens then it's better to parse it with something that works that way. Normally you can take a parser off the shelf, but even if you can't it's much easyier to get it right first time and forever when you can code the grammar straight from the specification, as opposed to regular expressions which I believe encourage you to look at what the input normally looks like and construct some pattern to approximate it. (Then confirm the regexpr is correct by testing it with the tiny subset of inputs that you based it off in the first place)
Nope, the 'human error' would never have occurred if an html parser had been used (the proper tool for the job) instead of a regexpr, they're not that much harder to use (or find).
Yep, thanks, and I'm not going to disagree with you there.
However, I think that if we portray regular expressions as a sometimes neccessary kludge (well, often neccessary, depending on what you do), rather than something that seperates the uber coders from the novices, then people will think to question what it was that resulted in them wanting to solve a problem with one, and learn from the design decisions of others.
- Text processing - why isn't your text marked up? Converting data into text, passing it along, and then trying to pluck the data back out of the text is brittle and leaves you with a system that can't be upgraded - your components can't be improved to produce a more informative text stream as it will break all the regexpr's of all the components that use that stream etc.
- Parsing - how many times have you encountered a HTML or XML parser written with a regexpr? Unless your job requires you code by the seat of your pants, this is just plain lazy. Parsers written with regular expressions are always incomplete (ie they work on the subset of HTML/XML they were tested on, and if the requirements or layout ever changes they break), and they are very slow compared to a proper parser. Proper robust and well tested parsers are available under most licenses and for most languages.
- Development - Regular expressions appear to be developed with a 'try it and see' methodology - people write the regexpr and test it, thinking if it works then they must have done it right. This is very brittle, I've ecountered many regexpr's for email addresses, all of them work on your bog standard address, none of them work when deployed - there's always some guy with a % in their email address or some other oddity the author of the regexpr forgot or didn't know about (and lets not even think about trying to make an RFC compliant email address regexpr, it would have to handle "blarg@wibble"@slashdot.org)
I don't know, there are other issues with regexpressions but I've spend too long on this post already. I'm curious as to other's views on this - I've just come to associate use of regular expressions with flakey or hastily written software.Text straight from the keyboard of a user won't be marked up and seems a good place to be using regular expressions. Due to the popularity of brittle and unupgradable (is that a word?) text processing, the input from other programs might not be marked up either, here regexprs are necessary (ie symptomatic of poor design, but it wasn't your decision).
This applies to much more than just HTML or XML, eg if you're going to write a javadoc clone for your pet language, do it properly, don't do it with regular expressions.
That HTML tag stripper you hacked up, did you remember to handle comments? Just because there weren't any comments in the HTML it was tested on doesn't mean it'll never encounter them in the real world (wouldn't be an issue if an off the shelf parser is used).
With regard to how you knew how to do something, "reminiscent" is probably right the vast majority of the time. However, when I say I want an intuitive interface, I'm asking something different:
reminiscent: implies you think back to a similar situation in the past and worked out how to do something from that.
intuitive: implies I don't even have to think about it, I just know, I don't know why I know.
The later is what people ask for.
Now it may be the case that 'I just know' because subconciously I reminisced to a similar situation, however when a user asks for an intuitive interface they don't care why it was intuitive or whether it was reminiscent, they are asking for a UI that they 'just know' how to use.
Because of the huge amount of shared background amoung computer users, intuitive (in the 'just know' sense) interfaces do exist.
We are just playing word games here, when a user of a crap UI says 'make this part more intuitive' you know what they mean, you might not know how to go about making the UI less crap, but you understand the request.
Replying to the user that there's no such thing as intuitive, or saying they used the wrong word, or some oh-so-witty remark like "the only intuitive interface is the nipple, after that it's all learned" and then not actually fixing the problem is just wrong. The problem is real (very real in X apps), and if not fixable, then the problem is at the very least improvable.
The nipple quote spreads flawed logic to excuse flawed software, it's funny, but in the end it's just geek propegander.
Intuitive is not about having knowledge with no background knowledge.
Yes, I had to learn how to use a pen, but because I now know how to use a pen, when I am presented with a tablet, it is intuitive.
I don't have to learn to use a tablet - to use your dictionary defintion, I don't have to deduce how to use a tablet, nor do I have to reason about how to use a tablet, I just use it, I do this because even though I haven't used one before, it is an intuitive step from a pen, and I know pens.
You ask how much shared environment there is between all peoples... well it's a good bet that everyone using your software has also used a pen.
You call this a reminiscient interface, I think that's an unnecessarily restrictive word as the pattern matching that can happen with intuition is much more powerful than reminiscing, but you are definitely on the path to understanding what the word intuitive means.
Intuitive is a word in common usage in our language, usage is meaning and if the meaning of word "intuitive" was really as technical and restricted as you pretend it out to be, ie if the only thing that is intuitive was the nipple, then the adjective simply wouldn't exist in common usage. Intuitive is not a technical word. We as english speakers have little need for a word that specifically describes a baby sucking on a nipple.
You keep making me think 'autism', people don't speak in absolutes, we speak in generalisations, if 99 people find something obvious and one person doesn't then that's a pretty damn intuitive interface, and you wouldn't be wrong to call it such. Natural language isn't C code.
Your assumption that if windows becomes "intuitive" then something that works a different way won't be, is also wrong. Intuition happens inside the interface, it's more than real world metaphores, internal consistancy in the interface for example provides what you would call reminiscent intuition, even if the interface is working differently to windows.
And as for forgotten advances, granted Windows isn't going to take us far, but neither is sticking with unix, they are both ruts (and no, I'm not advocating something else, just pointing out that we're well and truely stuck).
PS I know it was a joke, it is funny, I did laugh the first time I heard it, I gave it a serious response because I think that line can be damaging - it's a meme that gives people a flawed excuse to produce shoddy software, and shoddy software is something we have far too much of.
I understand what this is saying, and it's an elegantly worded copout. Bruce Ediger does not know what "intuitive" means.
Intuitition is not about knowing how to do something in the complete absence of any learned knowledge, it is knowing how to do something new because your brain has pattern-matched the problem with similiar situations you've dealt with in the past (Also, don't assume that with user interfaces, real world metaphores are the only way to achieve this).
Interfaces that are patently intuitive:
A tablet.
A machine that only does one thing and only has one button.
Geeks love to think that they are somehow above the rest of the population, but if the lusers all make the same mistake using your interface, or expect something to be somewhere it's not etc, then the interface is at fault and waffling on about nipples isn't going to change that.
FWIW I think Bruce Ediger probably wanted to say "genetic knowledge" rather than "intuitive", but as another poster has pointed out, babies need to be taught about nipples too.
I only ever hear this copout from the unix community, but until now I'd never seen the quote attributed. The irony for me is that I'd always considered X applications to be the worst offenders. Anyone who responds to a complaint of some UI not being intuitive, with "there's no such thing as intuitive" should not be working on user interfaces.
The people that made Kazaa are already rich off the sale of the Kazaa network, the Kazaa software does not need the company for it to still work. Kazaa is folding so that it can't lose the people that made Kazaa any money. Even the RIAA is acusing them of doing this as a dodge.
Presumably the company that now owns the Kazaa network will also get sued, however it's a private company in Vanuatu... maybe to make it hard for the RIAA to sue? If this company hasn't ever distributed software to US citizens then it'll probably be even harder to sue. I dunno, IANAL, but it sounds like this is just Kazaa not playing the RIAA's game to me.
If it costs them 50c to produce a chip as efficient as a $200 aircon heat pump, then until there is someone else who can produce a heat pump for less than $200 there is no reason to charge less than $180 for the chip.
I suspect this is what has happened with the micromirror chips Texas Instruments invented to replace LCD projectors, for all the waffling on about how cheap these things would be, they've been available for a few years now and a projector will still set you back $5000, regardless of whether you get LCD or micromirror.
Until there is a competeing technology, these chips will not be significantly cheaper.
If the heatsink on the hot side of the coolchip isn't radiating as much heat as the CPU is producing then (assuming the coolchips heat pumping properties work) the hot side of the coolchip will keep getting hotter until the radiation of the heatsink matches the heat output by the CPU. You argument would work if the coolchip was just an excellent conductor of heat, but it's a heat pump - it can shift heat from a side that is cool to a side that is hotter than the side the heat came from.
This is what heatsinks are for, a 1 inch cube heatsink can have a huge surface area (which air is then blown through), and there's no reason to stick to one cubic inch, the heatsync can be much larger than the coolchip provided it can conduct the heat sufficently to all it's tiny fins. If two coolchips can actually do the heat pumping work of an air conditioner, then transferring that into the actual air should be no trickier than with conventional aircon units.
You know, the scarey thing is this isn't as farfetched as it sounds. The SDK Cydoor provides for download did have a virus in it, luckily in this case the virus was not attached to the part of the SDK that you distribute, but that's the only reason your hypothetical situation hasn't already occured.
But yeah, I've never bothered with AV software (or security beyond the LAN being firewalled) and the extend of damage viruses have caused me is the inconvenience of no longer wanting to leave drives shared-writable
Ahh those were days... you could leave your front door unlocked and just copy anything to your computer from anywhere transparently.
BSP trees don't give any visibility testing information. They provide a fast way of determining draw order, and ensure that there is always at least one correct draw order (an effect of the way surfaces are cut).
;)) attached a list of visible polys in each leaf node of the BSP tree, but since which-polys-are-visible can change as you move around within the space defined by a leaf node, I suspect this has little to do with BSPs and he just used the BSP as a convenient structure to bolt the visibility info on to - it's already built, it's very fast to locate the leaf node volume you are in, the size of the volume will be smaller in more complex areas (where presumably the visibilty-list changes more often), the volume will always be convex with no walls running through it etc.
AFAIK (I might have this bit all wrong, the Quake engine changed many times in development and I might not have got it right to begin with) With Quake, JC (John Carmak, not that other guy
But yeah, while I have yet to figure out exactly what people mean by "deep" (non-trivial and elegant?), BSP trees seem to be as classy as the other algorithms people are putting forward.