Lessee, the Universal Turing Machine required exponential slowdown to emulate absolutely anything. Emulating CISC on RISC is going to take a linear slowdown (expanding some operation into the X fundamental operations). Heck, if this emulator even looks at the program it's emulating, it has to read program P of size N; it can't run itself in constant time C and then run the program it's emulating as if it were native. Unless the miracle is that in constant time C this emulator transforms your system into one native for the program.
I'd like to test this program by emulating a program written for a Cray. Love to have my p.o.s. top-of-the-line-for-1998 transformed into a Cray.:)
It's a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and integrated monitor stand that hooks back into a computer, via a network. You can even hook up more than 4! Amazing, that. Or is this supposed to be an oooh-aaah for changing a KVM switcher into a multiplexer?
This is what I've been stuck doing for 2 years after getting my *Master's*. In the process, I have made contacts 'higher up' in the companies, and I have gotten interviews. So far, the denying factor has been the economy- in one case, I would have had the position sealed, but they decided to 'rearranged their assets and no longer had the position to fill'.
Also, consider that while you are stuck doing this work, do your own thing, improve your skills, make something that is a portfolio piece. I'm working on one of those projects that would show my capability, and make up for that lack of experience.
But interestingly, it was setting up my own website (blah blah Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL), and subsequently helping set up a site to facilitate a friend's hobby-business that may soon land me a 'real' job in e-commerce land.
So don't spend all your free time on games, pump a bit into your geeky hobbies, and expanding your skills with even academic-grade projects. The resume expansion may help.
I have had a couple tech jobs now, and often discussed the overtime rules to see how decently compensated I'd be for that 6th and 7th consecutive work day, after some days that included 12+ hours of work.
Well damn, if they're going to say that they need me there extra, they're going to pay extra or I'll get to it when I'm back in the morning. =P
Jeezum H Crow, the things Katz writes about!
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Star Wars and Spider-Man are just the wave that Katz hopes he can surf and say something intelligent about. Quote box-office numbers. Quote real authors about storylines and plots. Give it the trademark hype-it-up opener which makes me wretch at Katz' style of "writing."
"High Truancy Rate"? Not what I was thinking at the theatre I went to, which was HUUUUGE and EMMMMPTY. I kinda figured that after Ep1, people weren't willing to give Lucas any first-weekend records.
But then the truth hit: it was just/my/ theatre, because the place didn't have THX sound. Doh!
The text is up there, the first few words regarding, "distributing or permitting to distrubute.." Makes me think that if I host a NWN game server, loaded with my modules, but don't allow ppl to download the modules to play by themselves or host on their servers... means it's MINE, ALL MINE! MINE I SAY! and Bioware/Infogrames can contact me with offers to acquire my material, subject to negotiation and approval.. and royalties for me.
Can't write, make sense, OR cancel service, huh?
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Why, your ineptitude is becoming legendary.
"Stop writing crap." -Harlan Ellison
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The quote was said to J. Michael Strazcynski, when he called for advice on getting his works to sell, since none had. The *next* thing he wrote was Bab5.
Katz opens his mouth.. again.. on another dubious subject (in that the choice of topic, to bring it up, and things said about it are dubious), and what comes forth? A whole lotta trash from every corner trying to be political, quote news sources (which do not make good sources), or somehow analyze the socio-economics of this next Katz topic.
This is still Slashdot, right? Not some Forbes-Forum? Not the CNN chat room? Where's the Tech?? Yes, Globalisation has an impact on everything else socio-politico-economico-trollio, but what about someone pointing to how satellites enable round-the-world communication? How ocean-lay'd fiber lets international markets trade? How those multinational corp's would be dead without the internet? Or even- why they might not be dead without it. (gasp!)
So, how about it? Anyone wanna think aloud about TECH's impact on globalisation, and globalisation's impact on tech? I mean come on, what's really driving up the size of the bandwidth pipe? broadband users' desire for pr0n?:P
--cryptomancer, "Being a programmer, I understand how globalisation has affected my distributed app's latency.."
Lemme tell ya, it was exciting to be in the room with the press conference. Well, that's a bit misleading, because many of the institutions participating in the DTF (Distributed Terascale Facility) were holding the press conference over the Grid, via the AccessGrid, with Intel an IBM and their invited press people dialed in over the phone. I'm at ANL, where the AG was born.. if before I started here.;)
Actually, I didn't stick around for as much of the press conference, 'cuz I had WORK to do! Many press releases on the DTF make it sound like it's one cluster in one lab's basement, and that ain't right. As importantly as looking at the distributed nature of the project, look at what each institution is contributing- this isn't a homogeneous wide-area cluster. I don't have a big part in it, and my internship is almost over, but I'd like to think that what I've been working on for over a year may become well-known soon. So yeah, while the press conference was going on I was in the next room working on enhancing a visualization library to work on tiled displays, (which has been news on/. recently. Too bad few managed to find our work here- We gots neet stuph).
Now an obligatory Oh, puh-leeze! RC-5 cracking? Quake? We've already seen Quake3 in the CAVE. Listening to conversations at the reception, there are much cooler things coming..
You may need a better term than proxy to be clear. Feeding a UDP game protocol into a box to be rendered with a certain viewpoint in order to generate video stream, OK, that's just 'a box' afaic. If the UDP game protocol is then merely repackaged for multicast broadcast to let ppl use their game engine as the clients, it's still just 'a box'; the difference in the content being UDP game protocol and UDP video stream is moot.?P?
Logging into that box to receive the video stream is not multicast, it's unicast, and the box is a proxy. Using Mbone tools to receive the stream from that box (without making any connection to that box, or even knowing it's addy) is multicast, and the box is merely a 'Sender', as per ?A HREF=http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iet f-avt-rtp-new-09.txt?
IETF spec on multicast RTP?/A?.?P?
There does need to be some clarification on the difference between the 'mbone' and a multicast-capable network. That is, not all multicast traffic is over the Mbone, especially with more and more networks enabling multicast, both at the LAN and WAN scale.
Multicast isn't about some proxy server you log into to get the broadcast signal.. what's this Valve guy been fed? Multicast is something on the router level.. Before I go on, some credit to peterb and his comment earlier.
Now I've written a multicast video transmitter, and tested it with viewers between Boston and Japan. First off, it broadcasts on some addy that's 22?.x.x.x/5-digit-portnumber. These addy's don't correspond to any machines, it's just a way of telling the routers what to do. So my transmitter tells the local routers that it's going to subscribe to the mcast addy and can then send/recv. Then, when people want to view this video, they tune their receiver app to that channel; they're telling their local router that they'd like to receive this traffic, and then the router pipes it to them. Contrary to peterb, this scales very well for one-to-many better than unicast; my transmitter only puts out one stream, and NEVER needs to accept a connection from anyone else. So that whole thing of a proxy server off the game server that people connect to? Bogus. That's not how multicast works. Now, I believe it if that's their transmitter box..
But the real downside is this: how many people have access to multicast? very few. Hardly any ISP which anyone is connected through subscribes to it, much less has the equipment to route multicast traffic to individual users. DSL, for example: multiple end-users are connected to a single box in their local CO, and that box doesn't know what to do with multicast. Even if multicast were given to it, it means that all end-users would receive it, not just the subscribers. Now, I get multicast traffic at work, but my workplace has a beeg pipe and peers with abeleine in order to pioneer those group-to-group multicast apps. The other thing is that it co$t$ to get mcast from backbones, so most ISP's aren't gonna spring for it, especially because then they still need to upgrade and configure their routers right.
But if nothing else, it *is* the right idea for 'net broadcasting. But it'll be some time before it's more widespread, and even more before home-users get it.
No I wouldn't care about the wireless listening on my house. If you can cut through the noise and get some signal out of it, your method could make you some bucks.
Echelon? email sniffers? Why should I care so long as good ol' ROT13's around?:P
And yes, feel free to manipulate the DirectTV signal however you want. But by reprogramming the decoder box you're violating service agreements.. now it's no longer a matter of free reception of broadcast signals, it's contract violation. I hear a pack of lawyers barking in the not-so-distance..
Cryptomancer, whom applauds the hacks and counter-hacks for advancing the art if not the philosophy
I'd like to start by saying that I am a big fan of Metallica, and have bought every CD I have. Also, that I have yet to go to a concert (or any concert, for that matter. So in that, I'm a loser; losing out on something cool). I'm also not on this MP3 bandwagon, not because I think it's a Bad Thing(tm), but for not being suceptible to the peer pressure or fad/rave nature of it. I recall some band documentary on TV, regarding the release of Load and many inches of hair from the band. "Sold out," some 'fans' complained. "Sold out," one member responded, "every show, every time."
So my inquiry is this: Does Metallica (& affiliates) make more money from concerts or CD sales? I put this in the context of a year that a new CD is released, that a tour is held, and from sales of older CD's. Given that, how much is lost because people might not buy a CD, instead trading an MP3? How much could be gained, from new 'fans' that can now listen to the studio-produced music and decide to attend a concert?
Cryptomancer I would support the artist I liked, even if their art were made free, so that there would be more.
Of course Prof. Pollack is right in saying that Reading is fundamental, and there are many other useful links on the page... but a search for books on AI at your favorite online bookstore is probably going to turn up stuff you're not interested in. So, if you have the other prerequisites of being great at both real and discrete mathematics as well as a natural born programming genius, then here are the two books on my shelf:
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Russel & Norvig, Prentice Hall
AI for Games and Animation: A Cognitive Modeling Approach, John David Funge, A K Peters
Object-Oriented Common Lisp, Stephen Slade, Prentice Hall
(LISP is the language of symbolic programming, and though I'd rather do my stuff in C*, it does cater to AI programming.)
Yeah, there are only three books on my shelf. Hey, I'm still in my first year as a Master's student in AI. I'll get more books eventually;)
-cryptomancer Great at real and discrete math, and a natural born programming genius. No modesty.
True, REAL intelligence is nice to find. But since a "good size of the population are utter and complete morons", it's necessary for some of us to make an AI to do some useful work for us when there isn't a monkey available to train. And let's consider what's easier: making a PERSON smarter, or making a 'smart' machine?
-cryptomancer "In order to get the computer to produce the solution you want, you need to find the solution yourself and program it in." -me
First I'll say that yes, as many other people have pointed out, there are holes in the technical portion of this 'Gravitational Spacecraft' as big as the one at Cygnus X-1. Mind you, I'm no Fizzisyst, but to compare what I found, here's my list:
photons can 'absorb' other photons: the collision of certain high-energy photons results in a matter/anti-matter pair; reversible: the collision of a matter/anti-matter pair releases energy in the form of a pair of photons.
The proof completely lacks any reference to equations which describe physical properties. That 'eq 1.04' is written by Fran, so of course it will produce the answer that a photon has null gravitational mass. Which isn't right, because photons have relativistic mass, momentum, and inertia. Thanks to the particle/wave duality of nature, though you might not be able to talk of matter when referring to a photon, but it is still affected and effects the rest of the universe.
There's talk of nullifying gravitons. Please, gravitons are theorized and still have no evidence as to their existence. Personally, I'm starting to believe that gravity along with 'dark matter' are sub-spacial effects from the extradimensional nature of the universe. Grep this/. article and its link.
By this point, I havn't even gotten past the first paragraph. And looking at the rest of the 'proof' is similarly... lacking. But seeing the really neat rendered graphics (nevermind the AOL host site), I'm tempted to say this is better off as an appendix to a web-distributed sci-fi graphic novel.
But let me give kudos to Andrea Fasce for the Galaxy Applet also running on the page. Schlick graphics.
As for the overall concept, there is some merit. There has to be some merit to wild ideas, eg Jules Verne. In this, not necessarily in reducing a spacecraft's inertial mass by shielding it from gravity, but in changing the properties of the space around it. Go pick up Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, and read Feynman's lecture on warped space-time. I don't think it'll solve the problem of making a ship go incredibly fast, but it could fix some of the problem of getting a human to travel interstellarly within their own lifetime.
But hey, I'm just another sci-fi buff with feet still on the Earth (last I checked). Keep dreaming, keep reaching, keep working towards the unreachable goal. - me.
Hello, I'd like to turn myself in to this 'WAVE America' thing. Admittedly, I'm no longer in High School, but I still suffer from all the same conditions.
First, I get depressed. When all my friends are busy, or unreachable because they're out with other friends, and I'm bored, at home all alone, it's depressing. I get manic sometimes- though I attribute it to my insane caffeine intake- about if this girl likes me or not, if I'll succeed in the long run, or just make it through the next week. So, I'm one of the types of people being looked for to be profiled, right?
Second, I'm dangerous, for various reasons. A half-dozen years of martial arts, some firearms training, minor pyromanism (candles and incense count, right?), and a little more chemistry than is covered in the Anarchist's Cookbook all make me dangerous to other humans. Further, I like to dress in all black, I keep my hair long and like it colored, I'm atheist and a-political with Socialist friends, leftist and right-handed, I listen to nearly everything between Anthrax and R.A.T.M. to Mozart and Wagner (not Winger), and I read/. So I have to be dangerous to the system.
Last and not least, I am potentially violent. Though I control it well, I get highly 'temperamental' towards people: those jerks who walk into me on the street not looking where they're going, the cab drivers who nearly run me over while biking, lusers asking me stupid questions over and over again, my 'classmates' who try to get me to pull their weight because I know my stuff and they didn't even take the prerequisite courses, and let's not forget dealing with society's myriad bureaucracies.
So that's me, and now that I'm a registered mutant, I'd like to collect my snitch's reward money before corrective positive action is taken against me.:)
So here I go throwing two cents, a farthing and a fennig at some of the Q&A's.
Q1) Re: Dynamic user-level docs So maybe there isn't a dynamic document that will tailor itself to the skill level of the user reading it. Personally, I'd be frightened if any piece of software were psychically-enabled. But seriously, help docs in plain ol' HTML could work pretty well, with some simple design, such as:
Top-level page is newbified
Has links to most-common scenario HOWTO's
Links topics to sub-pages with detailed nuts & bolts for the technically minded; this makes the topic organized and navigable, unlike man pages.
Q2: Document Version Control I have to agree with Deb that keeping a writer around whose existence is justified by keeping the documentation current with the code can solve the problem. But for those open-source dev groups that still have to write the docs for their publication dept. (be it Kinko's or internal), I'd think keeping version/release numbers with the docs could help. That way, new release = time to write new docs. (Just what did we change this iteration?) It also lets users prod you for the documentation for v0.8, since the docs zipped with the source are v0.2.
Q4: Translating Docs I remember from my technical writing class some guidelines on documentation. Things like never use cliche's, idioms, Un-Defined Acronyms (UDA), etc. Following some of those I'm sure would go a long way to making works easier to translate, or at least read for ESL readers. (Oops, TLA.) It's similar to the philosophy that writing good code makes code that's easy to use, maintain, expand, port, etc. Writing a good doc makes it easier to read, and probably easier to translate.
Q6: Coding in DOC Learning at least a little bit of how to write technical documents is important. So much so, that it was a mandatory part of my UG CS program.:P So books are good. Find a good book, and Read The Fine Manual on how to write technical documents. When I went to search fatbrain.com for the technical writing reference guide on my shelf, all I got was:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e31'
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired /include/_incStandardFunctions.asp, line 239
Q8: Man Pages No manual entry for Pages. MY opinion on this is just my HTML idea as up in Q1. Maybe even convert man to HTML, and link that top-level newbified doc to specific anchors in the ultra-technical man page.
Q10: Auto-documentation from source code I think Deb's right, in that user-level documentation probably won't come from the source code. On the other hand, some really handy information about that source you're distributing will come from the Rubbish Lister!:)
Q11: LinuxChix/Feminism I wouldn't touch this question with a 10-BaseT cable. Besides, I'm not qualified, and I know my limits.
This isn't as far-fetched as the sci-fi referencing posts would make it out to be. If you looked at the proposal solicitation, it's asking for someone to come forward with a plan to integrate existing technologies into something suited to that particular task.
And it really does seem feasible by existing technology. I don't know how useful it would be, if it were built with existing tech, but it could still be done. So you have a set of hydraulics tied into haptic feedback devices strapped on, and you've got the strength of a bulldozer or backhoe- but applying that strengh might be as clumsy, if you're driving a human-shaped piece of construction equipment. Now think of how slow and lumbering you'd be walking around, nevermind if you're carrying 2 tons on one shoulder or not.
So I believe it can be done, absolutely. DARPA is just looking for someone to do it, if for nothing else than to figure out where the shortcomings and limitations are so that R&D can be directed at them. Whether or not it will be useful on the battlefield, I think even a clumsy exoskeletal suit has better applications in society. Imagine if you will:
EMT use their exoskeletal hands in lieu of the Jaws of Life to extract people from car wrecks.
Firefighters with truly no fear of fire.
Rescue workers who can lift and toss aside boulder-sized chunks of concrete and entire steel girders when looking for earthquake survivors.
I hope that the technology developed has a civilian counterpart released just as soon. Maybe there will only be a civilian version initially, especially if the only way to solve the power-source problem is to use an Evangelion style extension cord.;)
This really is the right track, imho- problem analysis. And it's not so much looking at the cypher itself, but it's presentation. Published in an article which had been solving cyphers, and with stories which go on to explain the methods of solving (simple) cyphers, if those techniques worked on this, then the author (Poe or Tyler) was just giving another exercise to the readers. But it's not just another exercise, unless the exercise is to let the aspiring codebreaker know that the previous techniques don't work.
Personally, nothing inspires me more than a challenge. (but don't send me any 'challenges', I'm a lazy-assed procrastinator, too.) And that's really what this cypher does- it challenges you to think about new things. If 'simple' cyphers can be cracked by symbol frequency, then mask the frequency somehow, by not having a 1-to-1 correspondence between symbols. -One means of doing this using the Lewis Carrol encryption algorithm. (look it up!:) I don't think that's at work here, because of the lack of repeated characters- in a Lewis Carrol code, you could see the same character repeated several times, each appearance corresponding to a different character because of the cypher key. (that'll make more sense if you looked it up.;) -Another means of 'flattening the frequencies' is at work here. Whether or not it's some alphabetic rotation as proposed won't be known until it's cracked.;) But it seems that this is another part of problem analysis which could yield some good starts- figure out the problems resulting from trying to map 26 characters up to 156. I pose to the reader, how do you choose what set of 26 characters to use, and then what character? (so I pop open the calculator and start shuffling numbers... nothing really conclusive.) -Following the last idea of character mapping, then there's the matter of building words, and building the paragraph line by line. Maybe the words are encoded, and then their order is determined by another algorithm. (And here I'll give thanks to the Anonymous Coward who offered 'boustrophedon', and to dictionary.com for having the definition!) This compounds the problem of decryption, because finding out how a word is encoded is now foiled by it potentially being upside down and backwards. So in trying to solve the character-mapping problem, you have to think of every which way each word could be turned.
That should be enough thought-provoking schlock for anybody either looking at the problem, or at encryption in general.
Slashdot Mirror
I could say more things informative or praiseworthy, but best to clarify is that: yes you can use it to do what you need.
Lessee, the Universal Turing Machine required exponential slowdown to emulate absolutely anything. Emulating CISC on RISC is going to take a linear slowdown (expanding some operation into the X fundamental operations). Heck, if this emulator even looks at the program it's emulating, it has to read program P of size N; it can't run itself in constant time C and then run the program it's emulating as if it were native. Unless the miracle is that in constant time C this emulator transforms your system into one native for the program.
:)
I'd like to test this program by emulating a program written for a Cray. Love to have my p.o.s. top-of-the-line-for-1998 transformed into a Cray.
It's a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and integrated monitor stand that hooks back into a computer, via a network. You can even hook up more than 4! Amazing, that. Or is this supposed to be an oooh-aaah for changing a KVM switcher into a multiplexer?
This is what I've been stuck doing for 2 years after getting my *Master's*. In the process, I have made contacts 'higher up' in the companies, and I have gotten interviews. So far, the denying factor has been the economy- in one case, I would have had the position sealed, but they decided to 'rearranged their assets and no longer had the position to fill'.
Also, consider that while you are stuck doing this work, do your own thing, improve your skills, make something that is a portfolio piece. I'm working on one of those projects that would show my capability, and make up for that lack of experience.
But interestingly, it was setting up my own website (blah blah Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL), and subsequently helping set up a site to facilitate a friend's hobby-business that may soon land me a 'real' job in e-commerce land.
So don't spend all your free time on games, pump a bit into your geeky hobbies, and expanding your skills with even academic-grade projects. The resume expansion may help.
...Unless Yahoo means they want people to use a client that ~allows~ spam to reach you unauthorized by you- paid advertisements.
I have had a couple tech jobs now, and often discussed the overtime rules to see how decently compensated I'd be for that 6th and 7th consecutive work day, after some days that included 12+ hours of work.
Well damn, if they're going to say that they need me there extra, they're going to pay extra or I'll get to it when I'm back in the morning. =P
Ugh.
But then the truth hit: it was just
The text is up there, the first few words regarding, "distributing or permitting to distrubute.." Makes me think that if I host a NWN game server, loaded with my modules, but don't allow ppl to download the modules to play by themselves or host on their servers... means it's MINE, ALL MINE! MINE I SAY! and Bioware/Infogrames can contact me with offers to acquire my material, subject to negotiation and approval.. and royalties for me.
Why, your ineptitude is becoming legendary.
The quote was said to J. Michael Strazcynski, when he called for advice on getting his works to sell, since none had. The *next* thing he wrote was Bab5.
This is still Slashdot, right? Not some Forbes-Forum? Not the CNN chat room? Where's the Tech?? Yes, Globalisation has an impact on everything else socio-politico-economico-trollio, but what about someone pointing to how satellites enable round-the-world communication? How ocean-lay'd fiber lets international markets trade? How those multinational corp's would be dead without the internet? Or even- why they might not be dead without it. (gasp!)
So, how about it? Anyone wanna think aloud about TECH's impact on globalisation, and globalisation's impact on tech? I mean come on, what's really driving up the size of the bandwidth pipe? broadband users' desire for pr0n? :P
--cryptomancer, "Being a programmer, I understand how globalisation has affected my distributed app's latency.."
Actually, I didn't stick around for as much of the press conference, 'cuz I had WORK to do! Many press releases on the DTF make it sound like it's one cluster in one lab's basement, and that ain't right. As importantly as looking at the distributed nature of the project, look at what each institution is contributing- this isn't a homogeneous wide-area cluster. I don't have a big part in it, and my internship is almost over, but I'd like to think that what I've been working on for over a year may become well-known soon. So yeah, while the press conference was going on I was in the next room working on enhancing a visualization library to work on tiled displays, (which has been news on /. recently. Too bad few managed to find our work here- We gots neet stuph).
Now an obligatory Oh, puh-leeze! RC-5 cracking? Quake? We've already seen Quake3 in the CAVE. Listening to conversations at the reception, there are much cooler things coming..
Cryptomancer, working the magic on code
You may need a better term than proxy to be clear. Feeding a UDP game protocol into a box to be rendered with a certain viewpoint in order to generate video stream, OK, that's just 'a box' afaic. If the UDP game protocol is then merely repackaged for multicast broadcast to let ppl use their game engine as the clients, it's still just 'a box'; the difference in the content being UDP game protocol and UDP video stream is moot.?P? Logging into that box to receive the video stream is not multicast, it's unicast, and the box is a proxy. Using Mbone tools to receive the stream from that box (without making any connection to that box, or even knowing it's addy) is multicast, and the box is merely a 'Sender', as per ?A HREF=http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iet f-avt-rtp-new-09.txt?
IETF spec on multicast RTP?/A?.?P?
There does need to be some clarification on the difference between the 'mbone' and a multicast-capable network. That is, not all multicast traffic is over the Mbone, especially with more and more networks enabling multicast, both at the LAN and WAN scale.
Now I've written a multicast video transmitter, and tested it with viewers between Boston and Japan. First off, it broadcasts on some addy that's 22?.x.x.x/5-digit-portnumber. These addy's don't correspond to any machines, it's just a way of telling the routers what to do. So my transmitter tells the local routers that it's going to subscribe to the mcast addy and can then send/recv. Then, when people want to view this video, they tune their receiver app to that channel; they're telling their local router that they'd like to receive this traffic, and then the router pipes it to them. Contrary to peterb, this scales very well for one-to-many better than unicast; my transmitter only puts out one stream, and NEVER needs to accept a connection from anyone else. So that whole thing of a proxy server off the game server that people connect to? Bogus. That's not how multicast works. Now, I believe it if that's their transmitter box..
But the real downside is this: how many people have access to multicast? very few. Hardly any ISP which anyone is connected through subscribes to it, much less has the equipment to route multicast traffic to individual users. DSL, for example: multiple end-users are connected to a single box in their local CO, and that box doesn't know what to do with multicast. Even if multicast were given to it, it means that all end-users would receive it, not just the subscribers. Now, I get multicast traffic at work, but my workplace has a beeg pipe and peers with abeleine in order to pioneer those group-to-group multicast apps. The other thing is that it co$t$ to get mcast from backbones, so most ISP's aren't gonna spring for it, especially because then they still need to upgrade and configure their routers right.
But if nothing else, it *is* the right idea for 'net broadcasting. But it'll be some time before it's more widespread, and even more before home-users get it.
-cryptomancer
No I wouldn't care about the wireless listening on my house. If you can cut through the noise and get some signal out of it, your method could make you some bucks.
Echelon? email sniffers? Why should I care so long as good ol' ROT13's around? :P
And yes, feel free to manipulate the DirectTV signal however you want. But by reprogramming the decoder box you're violating service agreements.. now it's no longer a matter of free reception of broadcast signals, it's contract violation. I hear a pack of lawyers barking in the not-so-distance..
Cryptomancer, whom applauds the hacks and counter-hacks for advancing the art if not the philosophy
So my inquiry is this: Does Metallica (& affiliates) make more money from concerts or CD sales? I put this in the context of a year that a new CD is released, that a tour is held, and from sales of older CD's. Given that, how much is lost because people might not buy a CD, instead trading an MP3? How much could be gained, from new 'fans' that can now listen to the studio-produced music and decide to attend a concert?
Cryptomancer
I would support the artist I liked, even if their art were made free, so that there would be more.
(LISP is the language of symbolic programming, and though I'd rather do my stuff in C*, it does cater to AI programming.)
Yeah, there are only three books on my shelf. Hey, I'm still in my first year as a Master's student in AI. I'll get more books eventually ;)
-cryptomancer
Great at real and discrete math, and a natural born programming genius. No modesty.
-cryptomancer
"In order to get the computer to produce the solution you want, you need to find the solution yourself and program it in." -me
Oops. If I'm lucky, the moderators will mark up this post, if it bears my name. :P cryptomancer
photons can 'absorb' other photons: the collision of certain high-energy photons results in a matter/anti-matter pair; reversible: the collision of a matter/anti-matter pair releases energy in the form of a pair of photons.
The proof completely lacks any reference to equations which describe physical properties. That 'eq 1.04' is written by Fran, so of course it will produce the answer that a photon has null gravitational mass. Which isn't right, because photons have relativistic mass, momentum, and inertia. Thanks to the particle/wave duality of nature, though you might not be able to talk of matter when referring to a photon, but it is still affected and effects the rest of the universe.
There's talk of nullifying gravitons. Please, gravitons are theorized and still have no evidence as to their existence. Personally, I'm starting to believe that gravity along with 'dark matter' are sub-spacial effects from the extradimensional nature of the universe. Grep this /. article and its link.
By this point, I havn't even gotten past the first paragraph. And looking at the rest of the 'proof' is similarly... lacking. But seeing the really neat rendered graphics (nevermind the AOL host site), I'm tempted to say this is better off as an appendix to a web-distributed sci-fi graphic novel.
But let me give kudos to Andrea Fasce for the Galaxy Applet also running on the page. Schlick graphics.
As for the overall concept, there is some merit. There has to be some merit to wild ideas, eg Jules Verne. In this, not necessarily in reducing a spacecraft's inertial mass by shielding it from gravity, but in changing the properties of the space around it. Go pick up Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, and read Feynman's lecture on warped space-time. I don't think it'll solve the problem of making a ship go incredibly fast, but it could fix some of the problem of getting a human to travel interstellarly within their own lifetime.
But hey, I'm just another sci-fi buff with feet still on the Earth (last I checked).
Keep dreaming, keep reaching, keep working towards the unreachable goal. - me.
First, I get depressed. When all my friends are busy, or unreachable because they're out with other friends, and I'm bored, at home all alone, it's depressing. I get manic sometimes- though I attribute it to my insane caffeine intake- about if this girl likes me or not, if I'll succeed in the long run, or just make it through the next week. So, I'm one of the types of people being looked for to be profiled, right?
Second, I'm dangerous, for various reasons. A half-dozen years of martial arts, some firearms training, minor pyromanism (candles and incense count, right?), and a little more chemistry than is covered in the Anarchist's Cookbook all make me dangerous to other humans. Further, I like to dress in all black, I keep my hair long and like it colored, I'm atheist and a-political with Socialist friends, leftist and right-handed, I listen to nearly everything between Anthrax and R.A.T.M. to Mozart and Wagner (not Winger), and I read /. So I have to be dangerous to the system.
Last and not least, I am potentially violent. Though I control it well, I get highly 'temperamental' towards people: those jerks who walk into me on the street not looking where they're going, the cab drivers who nearly run me over while biking, lusers asking me stupid questions over and over again, my 'classmates' who try to get me to pull their weight because I know my stuff and they didn't even take the prerequisite courses, and let's not forget dealing with society's myriad bureaucracies.
So that's me, and now that I'm a registered mutant, I'd like to collect my snitch's reward money before corrective positive action is taken against me. :)
cryptomancer must be a hacker's nommiker.
Q1) Re: Dynamic user-level docs
So maybe there isn't a dynamic document that will tailor itself to the skill level of the user reading it. Personally, I'd be frightened if any piece of software were psychically-enabled. But seriously, help docs in plain ol' HTML could work pretty well, with some simple design, such as:
Top-level page is newbified
Has links to most-common scenario HOWTO's
Links topics to sub-pages with detailed nuts & bolts for the technically minded; this makes the topic organized and navigable, unlike man pages.
Q2: Document Version Control
I have to agree with Deb that keeping a writer around whose existence is justified by keeping the documentation current with the code can solve the problem. But for those open-source dev groups that still have to write the docs for their publication dept. (be it Kinko's or internal), I'd think keeping version/release numbers with the docs could help. That way, new release = time to write new docs. (Just what did we change this iteration?) It also lets users prod you for the documentation for v0.8, since the docs zipped with the source are v0.2.
Q4: Translating Docs
I remember from my technical writing class some guidelines on documentation. Things like never use cliche's, idioms, Un-Defined Acronyms (UDA), etc. Following some of those I'm sure would go a long way to making works easier to translate, or at least read for ESL readers. (Oops, TLA.) It's similar to the philosophy that writing good code makes code that's easy to use, maintain, expand, port, etc. Writing a good doc makes it easier to read, and probably easier to translate.
Q6: Coding in DOC :P
Learning at least a little bit of how to write technical documents is important. So much so, that it was a mandatory part of my UG CS program.
So books are good. Find a good book, and Read The Fine Manual on how to write technical documents. When I went to search fatbrain.com for the technical writing reference guide on my shelf, all I got was:
Q8: Man Pages
No manual entry for Pages.
MY opinion on this is just my HTML idea as up in Q1. Maybe even convert man to HTML, and link that top-level newbified doc to specific anchors in the ultra-technical man page.
Q10: Auto-documentation from source code I think Deb's right, in that user-level documentation probably won't come from the source code. On the other hand, some really handy information about that source you're distributing will come from the Rubbish Lister! :)
Q11: LinuxChix/Feminism
I wouldn't touch this question with a 10-BaseT cable. Besides, I'm not qualified, and I know my limits.
And it really does seem feasible by existing technology. I don't know how useful it would be, if it were built with existing tech, but it could still be done. So you have a set of hydraulics tied into haptic feedback devices strapped on, and you've got the strength of a bulldozer or backhoe- but applying that strengh might be as clumsy, if you're driving a human-shaped piece of construction equipment. Now think of how slow and lumbering you'd be walking around, nevermind if you're carrying 2 tons on one shoulder or not.
So I believe it can be done, absolutely. DARPA is just looking for someone to do it, if for nothing else than to figure out where the shortcomings and limitations are so that R&D can be directed at them. Whether or not it will be useful on the battlefield, I think even a clumsy exoskeletal suit has better applications in society. Imagine if you will:
EMT use their exoskeletal hands in lieu of the Jaws of Life to extract people from car wrecks.
Firefighters with truly no fear of fire.
Rescue workers who can lift and toss aside boulder-sized chunks of concrete and entire steel girders when looking for earthquake survivors.
I hope that the technology developed has a civilian counterpart released just as soon. Maybe there will only be a civilian version initially, especially if the only way to solve the power-source problem is to use an Evangelion style extension cord. ;)
-Cryptomancer, fully caffeinated.
Personally, nothing inspires me more than a challenge. (but don't send me any 'challenges', I'm a lazy-assed procrastinator, too.) And that's really what this cypher does- it challenges you to think about new things. If 'simple' cyphers can be cracked by symbol frequency, then mask the frequency somehow, by not having a 1-to-1 correspondence between symbols. ;) But it seems that this is another part of problem analysis which could yield some good starts- figure out the problems resulting from trying to map 26 characters up to 156. I pose to the reader, how do you choose what set of 26 characters to use, and then what character? (so I pop open the calculator and start shuffling numbers... nothing really conclusive.)
-One means of doing this using the Lewis Carrol encryption algorithm. (look it up!:) I don't think that's at work here, because of the lack of repeated characters- in a Lewis Carrol code, you could see the same character repeated several times, each appearance corresponding to a different character because of the cypher key. (that'll make more sense if you looked it up.;)
-Another means of 'flattening the frequencies' is at work here. Whether or not it's some alphabetic rotation as proposed won't be known until it's cracked.
-Following the last idea of character mapping, then there's the matter of building words, and building the paragraph line by line. Maybe the words are encoded, and then their order is determined by another algorithm. (And here I'll give thanks to the Anonymous Coward who offered 'boustrophedon', and to dictionary.com for having the definition!) This compounds the problem of decryption, because finding out how a word is encoded is now foiled by it potentially being upside down and backwards. So in trying to solve the character-mapping problem, you have to think of every which way each word could be turned.
That should be enough thought-provoking schlock for anybody either looking at the problem, or at encryption in general.
"Holy exponential permutations!" -cryptomancer