Re:moving parts? power and reliability
on
A Single Pixel Camera
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Micromirror arrays have been commercially available for ten years now, and had been in design for at least ten years prior to that. They're used in DLP projectors and projection TVs. You can go buy one at Best Buy if you'd like.
The durability of a micromirror array is actually very high. It's counterintuitive, but not hard to understand. The reason is the mirrors are so tiny. They have very little mass which means they transfer very little stress to their mechanical structure, even under large G force loading.
Think about the normal operating conditions of a micromirror in a DLP TV -- each of those mirrors is designed to flap at 100 kHz. They're already subject to extreme G forces in their everyday operations. Bouncing a chip off the ground is not much force compared to actually using it.
A good question would be the efficiency of light transmission. There's a clear shield mounted over the mirror array, which will attenuate the light both on the way in and on the way out. And the mirrors themselves can not be 100% efficient reflectors. But I suppose with a single pixel detector, you can invest more in making it very sensitive to low light conditions.
My "google-analytics.com" Adblock Plus entry had pretty much ensured that it wasn't for me regardless.
Now, if NoScript had "blacklisting" that would be even better. I currently don't like NoScript because of the bar that's constantly at the bottom of every site with scripts by google-analytics, tacoda, imrworldwide, omniture or hitbox (which is pretty much everyone.) Once I've visited a site I don't want to remember whether or not I've cleaned it up -- I'd use the presence of the warning bar to remind me. Oh well, the author says it's coming someday.
a world that readily embraces advertisement and popup blockers
This qualifies as a different world. Sure, most of the slashdottians block ads, but we're hardly representative of "the world." When it comes down to it, half the sheeple don't have the ability to change their browser's home page, let alone install an adblocking piece of software, not to mention configuring it to the point of effectiveness.
However, I still agree with you that it's nowhere near "serious" trouble. Their statistics are accurate enough for their purposes. They can even calculate the percentage of people running adblockers easily enough (unless they're tracking it with a readily-blocked Javascript,) but I'm sure they can extrapolate the data they think they need.
You can hear their "tracking mechanism" on the radio, if you're paying attention.
"The WBBY news is brought to you by Yoyodyne, makers of Gnomovision. Visit us online at www.yoyodyne.com-slash-wbby".
Not that WBBY has anything to do with the content they'll deliver to you, but it has everything to do with tracking visitors referred from their station. If you're lucky, the referrer cookie they drop on your browser might offer you a discount on your purchase.
They'll do anything they can to differentiate visitors to discern the referrer. You'll find ads that refer you to yoyodyne69.com, tv.yoyodyne.com or "Enter promo code DRDOBBS for a $10.00 discount."
I think the solution for this whole problem is to secretly send Condi Rice to China, and have her say "Ummm...well, don't tell the U.N. we said so, and especially don't tell South Korea, but we promise not to give a shit if you invade North Korea -- as long as you stop at the 38th parallel." I think China would be happy to have another province instead of an untrustworthy ally. And we know China has excellent control over their own nuclear arsenal, so the NK weapons would be in safe hands.
The only losers would be the psychopathic monsters at the top of the North Korean regime and whatever unfortunate troops they threw in front of the Chinese. South Korea would wail and gnash their teeth, but as long as China stopped at the DMZ no real harm would come to them. Everyone would win.
Thank you for posting this. As a Westerner, I have long known that I've never understood China. Your post explains a lot to me.
Of course, as a Westerner, I still disagree with your position. Your society seems to value "the stability of the society" above all else, whereas in the West, particularly the United States, we value "individual freedoms" above all else.
In China, you're taught to abhor actions that could "upset the apple cart." Here in the West, we let people have their freedoms but we know that eventually someone will upset the cart. Some people can handle the turmoil, and others cannot. Your culture seems to value "avoiding the turmoil" which keeps most everyone happy.
The difference as we see it is that because we are free to talk about problems, we can act on those problems. If the government is failing to do something, or doing something wrong, we can discuss it and even choose a new government to address the problems. Without the freedom to criticize the government, many wrongs would never be righted.
What your "long view" fails to account for is that in the West we can see that each upset, each problem and each iteration of solutions has made things get progressively better, not worse. Not always, but in general things are better. For example, our current administration is much worse than we've had in 80 years, but we're still better off than we were 50 years ago. And we don't think we've reached the top yet, either.
My understanding of the Chinese long view is that you think we'll have that much further to fall in 100 years. In our view, even if we tumbled halfway down the mountain, we're still better off than if we'd never tried.
Nothing wrong with using Second Life to host a virtual trade show booth, though. It costs the attendees absolutely nothing. I just created a free account and downloaded the client earlier this week, and last night spent a few minutes learning how to navigate. It wasn't hard, and I'm sure I could now find my way to the Sun conference if I had to.
Just don't look for me to be a continually on-line participant. At this point I consider it only as a tool to reach someone else's services, more like a specialized web browser. I have no plans to be on it 24x7, so it won't work like a surrogate IM client, at least not for me.
A Silent 700? Well, weren't YOU the rich kid? You and your high-speed 300 baud modem, and your shiny expensive thermal paper! We used to dream of the day we might be able to get a Silent 700.
We had to make due with a Data Products PortaTerm, which apparently was invented and destroyed before the advent of photography, 'cuz I can't find an image of one anywhere on Google. It was a full briefcase-sized impact-hammer-through-the-paper terminal, complete with a 110 baud acoustically coupled modem. The briefcase even gave us enough room to haul a thin pile of tractor-fed 9-1/2" greenbar.
I used to set it up on a card table in my parents' basement, and I remember being afraid it was going to shake the table apart.
(Actually, once the school added a Silent 700 we still used the PortaTerm because none of us kids could afford the thermal paper.)
As they say, "you make your own luck." Jon seems to be in the right place at the right time because he's always trying to break DRM. If he wasn't, we wouldn't know his name.
Simple hardware hack to reverse the polarity of the disc motor in the DVD drive.
Actually, it won't work. Drive motors aren't like the simple DC-brush type motors that you're thinking of. They're stepper motors that have to be "controlled" by an external circuit. A big advantage of this design is the speed can be precisely set, allowing for faster RPM speeds while the head is near the hub, but slower speeds when it's near the rim, permitting "constant velocity" reading. You'd have to reverse the polarity of each field winding, which might be tricky depending on how they're brought out to the controller.
I think you missed the part where I mentioned "end user". You are about as far on the other end of that spectrum as you can get.
I figure if you're skilled enough to handcraft packets, there's no reason you wouldn't be able to wrap your code in a "raw protocol" driver to allow you to do just that. And I also have to believe you'd be up to the task of installing such a driver.
Those skills will set you above many of the worm authors. And the task of installing a new protocol driver might be beyond the ability of a drive-by worming, or could at least be detectable or otherwise made more difficult.
Again, weighing the difference between "making your life slightly more complex" and "denying bot-herders from using millions of properly upgraded computers in their DDoS attacks", well, you lose every time I get a vote.
Whether or not XP is at fault, or should be configured better, or should be installed better, doesn't enter into the equation -- it is what it is, and it has to be dealt with as is. Lighting the blame-throwers and burning Redmond to the ground might make you feel better, but it will not solve the existing DDoS problem. Denying raw packet craftsmanship to the bot-herders is an act that will actually help reduce the problem.
The "very annoying" limit is on the number of TCP connections that have been sent a SYN without having yet receieved an ACK, not on complete sockets. Is it annoying because you frequent dead hosts, or because you are running a port scanner?
And what exactly did you need to do with raw sockets that you couldn't do with AF_INET? Is there something so special about your application's packets that you have to hand-craft the TCP/IP headers? Do you intentionally write DDoS attackers?
At least you can port your application to a real OS if you feel the need to byte-edit your network packets. Oh, excuse me. I must have forgotten that even Linux doesn't support AF_RAW, because there's still no legitimate use for an end user to have access to raw sockets. Even so, you still have an option: you can write your own protocol (which is exactly what raw sockets was letting you informally do in the first place.)
Sorry, but with the number of Windows zombies out there that are screwing up the net, I'd rather have to make one person like you work to regain these "features" than to have them exist for millions of idiots who won't ever need them.
Or could it be that you just saw in a KB article that Microsoft "took something away", never mind that it actually helps improve network security, and you never did anything with raw sockets anyway?
Nintendo can sit back and sell consoles without HD and make money. They can also avoid the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war
This is very insightful. By delaying the choice of which expensive technology to embrace, they leave themselves with the guaranteed lowest price point of all major console systems. Also, Nintendo has also traditionally held the children's market, and parents of young children are definitely more price sensitive than the average gamer.
His point was that everything was a stock "default" install, and he just answered "Yes / OK / Accept" to any prompt that came up.
Vista still installs the user as Administrator by default. IE still lets you install all of the badness. Again, IE can't judge 'adware' vs 'desirable software', and your point is valid: it shouldn't make that decision for you.
Your example of No one chastises Linux for allowing you to "sudo rm -rf/". is a great example of the point. As we all know, in Linux a default install creates a root account and then immediately prompts you to create a personal account that is not root. You have to be conscious of the fact that you're going to execute something as root. But in Windows, a default install grants you root, whether you're conscious or not.
The surprise to me is that Microsoft is still desperately clinging to this failed "one user, one signon" model of security. What's worse is their consultants are still pushing that crap on businesses. Unix has had a perfectly workable security model for over 20 years, and it involves knowing separate passwords for separate functions.
Sure, this test demonstrated what happens if someone naively agreed with everything presented, but clicking OK on scary warnings isn't the same as entering root passwords. Except in Windows.
Right idea, but music is a poorer choice than white noise. A sophisticated eavesdropper could acquire his own copy of the music you use, and "subtract" the known waveform from the received waveform, leaving just the ambient room sounds. If the volume of the music makes you talk louder, it's all the better for the listener.
And just so you don't think you're safe just because you're IMing over an SSL port, with the proper sensor (a Hamamatsu H6780-01 photosensor module) the same telescope can be used to spy on your screen just by detecting the reflected light from your monitor. Markus Kuhn wrote this paper (read section 6) about just such an attack.
A friend of mine did that over 20 years ago when he was a kid, using just a homebuilt Heathkit HeNe laser. He shined the laser on a window, and aimed a telescope at the window. He taped a CdS photocell at the focal point of the telescope and built it into a simple audio amplifier. Even with that crude setup he was able to make out that loud sounds happened inside the house from across the street.
I bet using a modern phototransistor matched to the wavelength of an off-the-shelf laser diode plus a $100 Target toy refracting telescope should yield pretty good results. (A refracting telescope will always be a better choice for the tiny signal changes that need to be detected here.) Also, it will be easier to aim one with a cheaper alt-azimuth mount rather than an expensive equatorial mount (equatorial mounts are really useful only for astronomy.)
Regardless, their "king" commercials are not nearly as disturbing as their commercials featuring the fake angus self-help guru. There's a guy who creeps me out at least as much as the real Tony Robbins.
Of course, their ads do seem to work at some level (for some non-standard definition of 'work'.) We all seem to remember them; and even though it's in a negative light I see the self-deprecating humor, which puts them in my grouping of 'not all that bad.'
Their food, however... Well, let's just say that 'not all that bad' would be charitable.:-)
I think the biggest reason some of these games had value (especially to us old guys) was their novelty. PONG was cool because it was the first video game. Asteroids was cool because it had "graphics". Tank Battle was cool because two players could shoot each other. Dragon's Lair was cool because it incorporated a real cartoon. Battle Zone was cool because it was the first "3D" game. Castle Wolfenstein was cool because it was the first 3D game to feature images instead of wireframes. And so on.
Each game that incorporated some new technological advance was making leaps over what had previously existed. Sure, good gameplay was vital, but each of those games really stood out above its competition, in easily visible terms. Now, the improvements are incremental at best. 1280x1024 x 32 bits of color was an improvement over 1280x1024 x 8 bits, but by comparison it was not a dramatic leap like "color vs. black and white".
Novelty also means the designers get the luxury of calling their solution "right". If a new thing is copied but changes the user interface slightly, it may be seen as awkward or uncomfortable in comparison to the original thing.
I don't think we can easily discount nostalgia, either. These old arcade games had a lot of social value. The technology in those boxes was not "available-at-home technology" for the average kid. If you wanted the coolest thing ever, you had to travel to an arcade to play them, and that usually meant hooking up with your buddies. All those things build pleasant associations in your brain. No matter what games you had, an Atari 2600 at home just wasn't as fun as going to the noisy arcade with a big group of friends. Even now, my brain associates Asteroids with "good times as a kid" regardless of how good the gameplay may have been. And that may have rubbed off on you, being exposed to "old people" who have repeated to you how good Missile Defender was.
I'm guessing the next "big" game is not going to be here for a while yet, but will incorporate some new unaffordable "wow!" technology, such as a holographic display that doesn't require glasses, or something like that.
I'd always assumed that it was both a homage to, and a spoof of, films and comics from the golden age of sci-fi. In that light, it's quite good! Surely it wasn't meant to be taken seriously?
I figure if something is meant to be a parody or satire that the actors at least throw the audience a bone to let us know they're in on the joke, too. Maybe a wink at the camera, or a doubletake into the lens, jokes told during the final credits, anything to play with the audience would have gone a long way. As it was, the wooden acting was just wooden acting. The cardboard sets were just cardboard sets. Instead of being an homage or a tribute, it came across too much like "just another" one of those films.
"Imitation as the sincerest form of flattery" comes with a time limit.
Flash! Aa-aaahhh! was on cable very late last weekend, and I stupidly propped my eyes open long enough to watch it again. It was like a slow-motion train wreck -- I just couldn't stop.
I had forgotten just how awful it really was. It was like a bad parody of itself, without anyone checking to see if it was worthy of being parodied. I'm talking "brillo-pad-to-the-eyeballs-bad". When he dies, Max von Sydow should ask for ball-bearings to be installed on his casket so that he can more easily roll over in his grave everytime someone watches it and recognizes him.
And spam blockers were nice once upon a time because nobody blocked spam. Once spam-filtering was able to be deployed at the mail server level, spammers had to ratchet up the creativity.
If ad blocking is ever "turned on" by default, I predict this balance would change dramatically. Advertisers would go out of their way to discover new ways to slide ads onto pages. I was actually surprised to see Firefox ship with a popup blocker that was enabled by default. I was not surprised to see Microsoft ship IE without a popup blocker enabled by default.
Slashdot Mirror
The durability of a micromirror array is actually very high. It's counterintuitive, but not hard to understand. The reason is the mirrors are so tiny. They have very little mass which means they transfer very little stress to their mechanical structure, even under large G force loading.
Think about the normal operating conditions of a micromirror in a DLP TV -- each of those mirrors is designed to flap at 100 kHz. They're already subject to extreme G forces in their everyday operations. Bouncing a chip off the ground is not much force compared to actually using it.
A good question would be the efficiency of light transmission. There's a clear shield mounted over the mirror array, which will attenuate the light both on the way in and on the way out. And the mirrors themselves can not be 100% efficient reflectors. But I suppose with a single pixel detector, you can invest more in making it very sensitive to low light conditions.
Now, if NoScript had "blacklisting" that would be even better. I currently don't like NoScript because of the bar that's constantly at the bottom of every site with scripts by google-analytics, tacoda, imrworldwide, omniture or hitbox (which is pretty much everyone.) Once I've visited a site I don't want to remember whether or not I've cleaned it up -- I'd use the presence of the warning bar to remind me. Oh well, the author says it's coming someday.
Hell, people pay ME to remove spyware! I'm all for it!
This qualifies as a different world. Sure, most of the slashdottians block ads, but we're hardly representative of "the world." When it comes down to it, half the sheeple don't have the ability to change their browser's home page, let alone install an adblocking piece of software, not to mention configuring it to the point of effectiveness.
However, I still agree with you that it's nowhere near "serious" trouble. Their statistics are accurate enough for their purposes. They can even calculate the percentage of people running adblockers easily enough (unless they're tracking it with a readily-blocked Javascript,) but I'm sure they can extrapolate the data they think they need.
"The WBBY news is brought to you by Yoyodyne, makers of Gnomovision. Visit us online at www.yoyodyne.com-slash-wbby".
Not that WBBY has anything to do with the content they'll deliver to you, but it has everything to do with tracking visitors referred from their station. If you're lucky, the referrer cookie they drop on your browser might offer you a discount on your purchase.
They'll do anything they can to differentiate visitors to discern the referrer. You'll find ads that refer you to yoyodyne69.com, tv.yoyodyne.com or "Enter promo code DRDOBBS for a $10.00 discount."
The only losers would be the psychopathic monsters at the top of the North Korean regime and whatever unfortunate troops they threw in front of the Chinese. South Korea would wail and gnash their teeth, but as long as China stopped at the DMZ no real harm would come to them. Everyone would win.
Of course, as a Westerner, I still disagree with your position. Your society seems to value "the stability of the society" above all else, whereas in the West, particularly the United States, we value "individual freedoms" above all else.
In China, you're taught to abhor actions that could "upset the apple cart." Here in the West, we let people have their freedoms but we know that eventually someone will upset the cart. Some people can handle the turmoil, and others cannot. Your culture seems to value "avoiding the turmoil" which keeps most everyone happy.
The difference as we see it is that because we are free to talk about problems, we can act on those problems. If the government is failing to do something, or doing something wrong, we can discuss it and even choose a new government to address the problems. Without the freedom to criticize the government, many wrongs would never be righted.
What your "long view" fails to account for is that in the West we can see that each upset, each problem and each iteration of solutions has made things get progressively better, not worse. Not always, but in general things are better. For example, our current administration is much worse than we've had in 80 years, but we're still better off than we were 50 years ago. And we don't think we've reached the top yet, either.
My understanding of the Chinese long view is that you think we'll have that much further to fall in 100 years. In our view, even if we tumbled halfway down the mountain, we're still better off than if we'd never tried.
Just don't look for me to be a continually on-line participant. At this point I consider it only as a tool to reach someone else's services, more like a specialized web browser. I have no plans to be on it 24x7, so it won't work like a surrogate IM client, at least not for me.
We had to make due with a Data Products PortaTerm, which apparently was invented and destroyed before the advent of photography, 'cuz I can't find an image of one anywhere on Google. It was a full briefcase-sized impact-hammer-through-the-paper terminal, complete with a 110 baud acoustically coupled modem. The briefcase even gave us enough room to haul a thin pile of tractor-fed 9-1/2" greenbar.
I used to set it up on a card table in my parents' basement, and I remember being afraid it was going to shake the table apart.
(Actually, once the school added a Silent 700 we still used the PortaTerm because none of us kids could afford the thermal paper.)
Sneak up behind these people with a short piece of rope held between your hands, loop it over their heads, and pull. They are then throttled. Easy.
To make it easier, do it one person at a time.
As they say, "you make your own luck." Jon seems to be in the right place at the right time because he's always trying to break DRM. If he wasn't, we wouldn't know his name.
Actually, it won't work. Drive motors aren't like the simple DC-brush type motors that you're thinking of. They're stepper motors that have to be "controlled" by an external circuit. A big advantage of this design is the speed can be precisely set, allowing for faster RPM speeds while the head is near the hub, but slower speeds when it's near the rim, permitting "constant velocity" reading. You'd have to reverse the polarity of each field winding, which might be tricky depending on how they're brought out to the controller.
Oh, it was a joke. Nevermind. :-)
I figure if you're skilled enough to handcraft packets, there's no reason you wouldn't be able to wrap your code in a "raw protocol" driver to allow you to do just that. And I also have to believe you'd be up to the task of installing such a driver.
Those skills will set you above many of the worm authors. And the task of installing a new protocol driver might be beyond the ability of a drive-by worming, or could at least be detectable or otherwise made more difficult.
Again, weighing the difference between "making your life slightly more complex" and "denying bot-herders from using millions of properly upgraded computers in their DDoS attacks", well, you lose every time I get a vote.
Whether or not XP is at fault, or should be configured better, or should be installed better, doesn't enter into the equation -- it is what it is, and it has to be dealt with as is. Lighting the blame-throwers and burning Redmond to the ground might make you feel better, but it will not solve the existing DDoS problem. Denying raw packet craftsmanship to the bot-herders is an act that will actually help reduce the problem.
And what exactly did you need to do with raw sockets that you couldn't do with AF_INET? Is there something so special about your application's packets that you have to hand-craft the TCP/IP headers? Do you intentionally write DDoS attackers?
At least you can port your application to a real OS if you feel the need to byte-edit your network packets. Oh, excuse me. I must have forgotten that even Linux doesn't support AF_RAW, because there's still no legitimate use for an end user to have access to raw sockets. Even so, you still have an option: you can write your own protocol (which is exactly what raw sockets was letting you informally do in the first place.)
Sorry, but with the number of Windows zombies out there that are screwing up the net, I'd rather have to make one person like you work to regain these "features" than to have them exist for millions of idiots who won't ever need them.
Or could it be that you just saw in a KB article that Microsoft "took something away", never mind that it actually helps improve network security, and you never did anything with raw sockets anyway?
This is very insightful. By delaying the choice of which expensive technology to embrace, they leave themselves with the guaranteed lowest price point of all major console systems. Also, Nintendo has also traditionally held the children's market, and parents of young children are definitely more price sensitive than the average gamer.
Vista still installs the user as Administrator by default. IE still lets you install all of the badness. Again, IE can't judge 'adware' vs 'desirable software', and your point is valid: it shouldn't make that decision for you.
Your example of No one chastises Linux for allowing you to "sudo rm -rf /". is a great example of the point. As we all know, in Linux a default install creates a root account and then immediately prompts you to create a personal account that is not root. You have to be conscious of the fact that you're going to execute something as root. But in Windows, a default install grants you root, whether you're conscious or not.
The surprise to me is that Microsoft is still desperately clinging to this failed "one user, one signon" model of security. What's worse is their consultants are still pushing that crap on businesses. Unix has had a perfectly workable security model for over 20 years, and it involves knowing separate passwords for separate functions.
Sure, this test demonstrated what happens if someone naively agreed with everything presented, but clicking OK on scary warnings isn't the same as entering root passwords. Except in Windows.
And just so you don't think you're safe just because you're IMing over an SSL port, with the proper sensor (a Hamamatsu H6780-01 photosensor module) the same telescope can be used to spy on your screen just by detecting the reflected light from your monitor. Markus Kuhn wrote this paper (read section 6) about just such an attack.
I bet using a modern phototransistor matched to the wavelength of an off-the-shelf laser diode plus a $100 Target toy refracting telescope should yield pretty good results. (A refracting telescope will always be a better choice for the tiny signal changes that need to be detected here.) Also, it will be easier to aim one with a cheaper alt-azimuth mount rather than an expensive equatorial mount (equatorial mounts are really useful only for astronomy.)
Of course, their ads do seem to work at some level (for some non-standard definition of 'work'.) We all seem to remember them; and even though it's in a negative light I see the self-deprecating humor, which puts them in my grouping of 'not all that bad.'
Their food, however... Well, let's just say that 'not all that bad' would be charitable. :-)
Each game that incorporated some new technological advance was making leaps over what had previously existed. Sure, good gameplay was vital, but each of those games really stood out above its competition, in easily visible terms. Now, the improvements are incremental at best. 1280x1024 x 32 bits of color was an improvement over 1280x1024 x 8 bits, but by comparison it was not a dramatic leap like "color vs. black and white".
Novelty also means the designers get the luxury of calling their solution "right". If a new thing is copied but changes the user interface slightly, it may be seen as awkward or uncomfortable in comparison to the original thing.
I don't think we can easily discount nostalgia, either. These old arcade games had a lot of social value. The technology in those boxes was not "available-at-home technology" for the average kid. If you wanted the coolest thing ever, you had to travel to an arcade to play them, and that usually meant hooking up with your buddies. All those things build pleasant associations in your brain. No matter what games you had, an Atari 2600 at home just wasn't as fun as going to the noisy arcade with a big group of friends. Even now, my brain associates Asteroids with "good times as a kid" regardless of how good the gameplay may have been. And that may have rubbed off on you, being exposed to "old people" who have repeated to you how good Missile Defender was.
I'm guessing the next "big" game is not going to be here for a while yet, but will incorporate some new unaffordable "wow!" technology, such as a holographic display that doesn't require glasses, or something like that.
"Imitation as the sincerest form of flattery" comes with a time limit.
I had forgotten just how awful it really was. It was like a bad parody of itself, without anyone checking to see if it was worthy of being parodied. I'm talking "brillo-pad-to-the-eyeballs-bad". When he dies, Max von Sydow should ask for ball-bearings to be installed on his casket so that he can more easily roll over in his grave everytime someone watches it and recognizes him.
If ad blocking is ever "turned on" by default, I predict this balance would change dramatically. Advertisers would go out of their way to discover new ways to slide ads onto pages. I was actually surprised to see Firefox ship with a popup blocker that was enabled by default. I was not surprised to see Microsoft ship IE without a popup blocker enabled by default.