I've played the piano since i was 7 and coded since i was 6.
I stuck at piano for over 10 years but i sucked at it. I mean i could play stuff relatively well but it never clicked into place.
OTOH i can code in my sleep, i've coded A graded uni assignments after 8 hour drinking sessions. It's just completely natural to me and I can see how to decompose just about any problem into code.
Over the years my code has become more sophisticated as i've picked up more skills, but that's just what comes of learning new techniques and languages.
I really think it's just different minds are suited to different things. I was never meant to be a musician.
It could kick ass for servers. I could sign all the binaries my system runs using a secondary (unnetworked) system and then so long as i control all the keys then it becomes very difficult for someone to install backdoors, rootkits, and viruses.
I'm quite psyched about the control it provides. Sadly most of the public are probably too ignorant to even want that control.
I thought we were already pretty damn close to the shannon bound. I believe the paper you want is:
Claude Berrou, Alain Glavieux, and Punya Thitimajshima, "Near Shannon Limit Error-Correcting Coding and Decoding:Turbo-Codes", ICC'93, page 1064-1070, May 1993.
From what i recall, turbo codes let us get as close as we'd need to the shannon bound. Now the only way to get more data in a given bandwidth is to reduce noise (which will probably come in time as uwaves get better and people get more modern dect phone handsets..)
When i sat for a while on hold with them they extolled the wonders of free wifi broadband on all flights between frankfurt and dc.... now i have to admit that's a tempting way to pass a 9 hr flight.
Going after the people who are using the service for illegal activities is a good thing.
Firstly this is the proper and right way these things should be handled, secondly it's a lot more expensive and time-consuming for the RIAA and MPAA. That means that they'll have less time to spend recruiting the sort of great new talent we expect from them...
I'm with you on this. I can extract 125MP of info from a single negative or chrome taken with my 4x5 camera - it just has to be seen to be believed, oh and i need a computer with more memory to handle that sort of image gracefully
This guy mentions that compact flash dies after 100,000 to a million rewrites... and that you'll reach that surprisingly quickly if you put your swap file on it.
It seems highly unlikely that any sane person on any desktop system would choose to spend money on compact flash to use as swap, when they could spend less money and buy dram instead - which shuld be faster.
Anyway potentially you only need fast solid state diskspace for your operating system and main applications, since few people need that sort of speed on their 'data files'. I could build a bootable linux box that ran off a 256Mb compact flash - doesn't seem like it'd be too bad at all.
Let the patenet office grant as many patents as it wants (so long as they are basically relevant) then *if* the patent is ever relevant (and only about 1% of them are) THEN it can be debated in court.
Of course we need provisions to stop companies with patents forcing individuals to stop something, and using their size and finances to win the court case.
One of my dad's collegues lives in Crieff and does indeed have this service and it is apparently every bit as fast as it claims to be.
I believe it's subsidised at the moment to make the approx USD 50 / month price tag - but that should come down with wider adoption.
I believe however that scottish hydro are in a reasonably good position since they already have a fast fibre optic network and are indeed only using this for the last mile.
As i've heard it, (makes sense but could be false) they started putting optic fibre down the middle of their overhead cables to carry diagnostic information to and from unmanned locations. Given the cost of copper cable, adding a fibre to it cost virtually nothing. Over time we then learned how to squeeze more and more data down those fibres and magically they suddenly have a fast IP network.
If you are only going to make a half-assed attempt then you may as well not bother.
Surely the brightest minds in game development dont need someone standing up there telling them that massive online multiplayer games aren't as easy as single player ones?!.. if they do then we're probably all doomed
The most frustrating thing I found was that they block the sort of offline browser that'd make that content useful. Being able to make use of their books while you are on the road or on a slow or pay-per-minute net connection would be fantastic.
However I used the useful perl skills I learnt from the to write a proxy server which just happened to log the pages for future reference.
British pounds, american dollars, norwegian somethings, swedish krona, finnish marks, estonian marks and euros.
The biggest problem was that the instruction to confiscate my card went to someone in (i think) estonia who didn't speak more than a few words of english. Caused me a little aggravation.
actually i have bank accounts and credit cards in both the us and uk. So in reality i have 2 credit cards in the uk, a corporate card in the us, and the debit cards for my appropriate bank accounts.
I like those odds - not a single fradulent use in 2.2 million cards.
Hell i've had 3 fradulent transactions and only own 3 credit cards and two debit cards.
One thing i've noticed is that my card company seem good at stopping me from spending when they think i'm fradulent. Just put 7 currencies on your card in as many days and alarm bells seem to ring somewhere.... but catching real theives is a little too tricky
The problem with regulation is that it doesn't apply internationally very well.
Currently I have a vonage digitalvoice (which absolutely rocks btw) but I took the voice router out of the USA and plugged it into my network in scotland.
This means that I've got a US number, yet it rings in the UK. I've got unlimited calls to the USA for $40/mo.
In fact, vonage is sooo price competitive that at some times of day they beat my local telephone company for uk calls!
Regulation might make this sort of thing difficult in the future and that'd be a real shame. I look forward to the day when I can have a few different VoIP providers in different geographical locations and route my calls to the one that provides the best price.
Hang on a second - I'm not 100% sure but I strongly suspect that you license you bios software from AMI (much like any other software you never actually buy it).
This is no different than when a manufacturer only ever supplies a machine with windows preinstalled. I think some people have actually had refunds because they never used the installed os.
Should be interesting to see if AMI abuse their monopoly position to try and stop manufacturers supplying machines with alternate bios's
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I've played the piano since i was 7 and coded since i was 6.
I stuck at piano for over 10 years but i sucked at it. I mean i could play stuff relatively well but it never clicked into place.
OTOH i can code in my sleep, i've coded A graded uni assignments after 8 hour drinking sessions. It's just completely natural to me and I can see how to decompose just about any problem into code.
Over the years my code has become more sophisticated as i've picked up more skills, but that's just what comes of learning new techniques and languages.
I really think it's just different minds are suited to different things. I was never meant to be a musician.
Trusted Computing != Palladium
It could kick ass for servers. I could sign all the binaries my system runs using a secondary (unnetworked) system and then so long as i control all the keys then it becomes very difficult for someone to install backdoors, rootkits, and viruses.
I'm quite psyched about the control it provides. Sadly most of the public are probably too ignorant to even want that control.
Umm... you do what every other business does - you either give your customers less or charge them more.
I believe we'll end up with inflation, but that's the way it goes.
yeah i knew that really, was a poor attempt at humour
Perhaps if you could claim that the very idea of the internet made you think of nekkid girls... then it would work :)
nothing to see here
I thought we were already pretty damn close to the shannon bound. I believe the paper you want is:
Claude Berrou, Alain Glavieux, and Punya Thitimajshima, "Near Shannon Limit Error-Correcting Coding and Decoding:Turbo-Codes", ICC'93, page 1064-1070, May 1993.
From what i recall, turbo codes let us get as close as we'd need to the shannon bound. Now the only way to get more data in a given bandwidth is to reduce noise (which will probably come in time as uwaves get better and people get more modern dect phone handsets..)
That's when i'll change...
and I dont think it's that far off - AOL probably have more need than most and might pull it off more easily.
They already need heaps of IP addresses for all their dialup users.
Most aol users wouldn't give a monkey if they installed AOL v19 and suddenly it used ipv6... they just wouldn't notice.
The remaining computer literate aol users (if they exist) would probably be quite pleased.
Just my thoughts.
When i sat for a while on hold with them they extolled the wonders of free wifi broadband on all flights between frankfurt and dc.... now i have to admit that's a tempting way to pass a 9 hr flight.
Going after the people who are using the service for illegal activities is a good thing.
Firstly this is the proper and right way these things should be handled, secondly it's a lot more expensive and time-consuming for the RIAA and MPAA. That means that they'll have less time to spend recruiting the sort of great new talent we expect from them...
I'm with you on this. I can extract 125MP of info from a single negative or chrome taken with my 4x5 camera - it just has to be seen to be believed, oh and i need a computer with more memory to handle that sort of image gracefully
This guy mentions that compact flash dies after 100,000 to a million rewrites... and that you'll reach that surprisingly quickly if you put your swap file on it.
It seems highly unlikely that any sane person on any desktop system would choose to spend money on compact flash to use as swap, when they could spend less money and buy dram instead - which shuld be faster.
Anyway potentially you only need fast solid state diskspace for your operating system and main applications, since few people need that sort of speed on their 'data files'. I could build a bootable linux box that ran off a 256Mb compact flash - doesn't seem like it'd be too bad at all.
Let the patenet office grant as many patents as it wants (so long as they are basically relevant) then *if* the patent is ever relevant (and only about 1% of them are) THEN it can be debated in court.
Of course we need provisions to stop companies with patents forcing individuals to stop something, and using their size and finances to win the court case.
One of my dad's collegues lives in Crieff and does indeed have this service and it is apparently every bit as fast as it claims to be.
I believe it's subsidised at the moment to make the approx USD 50 / month price tag - but that should come down with wider adoption.
I believe however that scottish hydro are in a reasonably good position since they already have a fast fibre optic network and are indeed only using this for the last mile.
As i've heard it, (makes sense but could be false) they started putting optic fibre down the middle of their overhead cables to carry diagnostic information to and from unmanned locations. Given the cost of copper cable, adding a fibre to it cost virtually nothing. Over time we then learned how to squeeze more and more data down those fibres and magically they suddenly have a fast IP network.
If you are only going to make a half-assed attempt then you may as well not bother.
.. if they do then we're probably all doomed
Surely the brightest minds in game development dont need someone standing up there telling them that massive online multiplayer games aren't as easy as single player ones?!
The way they prevent spidering is to have hidden single pixel links to logout pages.
They dont have any other heuristics afaics, I had my proxy server saving pages and with a tabbed mozilla i could probably click on 30 ppm.
The code is *so* messy that i'm not happy about sharing it, and fairly dependant on my network setup.
The most frustrating thing I found was that they block the sort of offline browser that'd make that content useful. Being able to make use of their books while you are on the road or on a slow or pay-per-minute net connection would be fantastic.
However I used the useful perl skills I learnt from the to write a proxy server which just happened to log the pages for future reference.
Even if it's three strikes and you're out, I could find 3 addresses to complain about someone that i dont like for other reasons.
Then it becomes the isps responsibility to investigate otherwise they could face legal libability for cutting off someone account wrongly.
Who are you, Jason Bourne??
:)
I like to think so
British pounds, american dollars, norwegian somethings, swedish krona, finnish marks, estonian marks and euros.
The biggest problem was that the instruction to confiscate my card went to someone in (i think) estonia who didn't speak more than a few words of english. Caused me a little aggravation.
well it's less than 2.2 million :)
actually i have bank accounts and credit cards in both the us and uk. So in reality i have 2 credit cards in the uk, a corporate card in the us, and the debit cards for my appropriate bank accounts.
I like those odds - not a single fradulent use in 2.2 million cards.
Hell i've had 3 fradulent transactions and only own 3 credit cards and two debit cards.
One thing i've noticed is that my card company seem good at stopping me from spending when they think i'm fradulent. Just put 7 currencies on your card in as many days and alarm bells seem to ring somewhere.... but catching real theives is a little too tricky
The problem with regulation is that it doesn't apply internationally very well.
Currently I have a vonage digitalvoice (which absolutely rocks btw) but I took the voice router out of the USA and plugged it into my network in scotland.
This means that I've got a US number, yet it rings in the UK. I've got unlimited calls to the USA for $40/mo.
In fact, vonage is sooo price competitive that at some times of day they beat my local telephone company for uk calls!
Regulation might make this sort of thing difficult in the future and that'd be a real shame. I look forward to the day when I can have a few different VoIP providers in different geographical locations and route my calls to the one that provides the best price.
At least if it ran MS Windows Brain Surgery Edition then you could try sueing microsoft when it went wrong.
Hang on a second - I'm not 100% sure but I strongly suspect that you license you bios software from AMI (much like any other software you never actually buy it).
This is no different than when a manufacturer only ever supplies a machine with windows preinstalled. I think some people have actually had refunds because they never used the installed os.
Should be interesting to see if AMI abuse their monopoly position to try and stop manufacturers supplying machines with alternate bios's