Is this really true? If the government really pays for a large majority of software mutliple times, this seems like a criminal waste of my tax dollars, especially at a time when we're in a budget crunch.
And I chose criminal intentionally, not just for rhetorical purposes - if our government really spends money for nothing in return, that's a crime, and heads should roll. To put in in terms MS would understand, it's software piracy in reverse.
Most corporations will have a server-side spam filtering set up; while an integrated Bayesian filtering mechanism might function better, in practice it's probably not worth the individual user's time to set up and train.
I get about 100 spam messages a day. SpamAssassin catches about 60% of those. That leaves 40 messages a day I need to deal with. In mozilla, I just started clicking "this message is spam" and a few days later, I get less than 1 spam message a day. It pretty much couldn't have gotten easier.
Granted, I happened to use a tool that supported the Bayesian filtering, but that's sort of the original complaint: an integrated solution makes it trivial to catch spam that other filters missed.
The bonus is that users hate spam, and giving them a button to click when they get it satisifies their need to somehow complain:).
On comedy central the other week, there was a comedian who talked about her love of video games. "I love the video games, and The News hates the video games, so I hate The News". She pointed out that the more violent, the better she liked them, and if they made a game that involved stabbing babies, it would be the best game ever.
All I can think when I read yet another lameass story about video games causing violence is: I wish they made that babies game.
Wouldn't 10 g's on touchdown cause death by deceleration trauma?
Bah. During the cold war, the air force did studies using a rocket sled, led by Dr. John P. Stapp that showed that 10Gs is nowhere near fatal. From the page:
By riding the decelerator sled himself, Dr. Stapp demonstrated that a human can withstand at least 45 G's in the forward position, with adequate harness. This is the highest known G force voluntarily encountered by a human.
I suppose the "with adequate harness" part can't be stressed enough, but there's nothing automatically fatal about 10Gs.
Dr. Stapp sounds like a pretty unique guy, and his work led to more survivable crashes in both aircraft and automobiles. I'm giving you One last chance to click on his biography, since I really want you to read it.:).
Your idea sounds pretty close (but not identical) to GraffitiWriter, a remote control car with a "print head" consisting of 5 cans of spray paint. You should check it out.
Theoretically, a dual processor machine for chess WOULD be twice as fast as a single processor machine, unlike in normal tasks where dual doesn't mean double.
Not so fast there, sonny. On a dual processor machine, there's still a single main memory which has its own bandwidth limits. The cache does hopefully alleviate some of the pressure on the pipe, but probably can't relieve it all.
You'll see the memory bandwidth limit in a lot of other applications that seem like they should be theoretically double-speed. I've seen it when rendering two seperate frames of animation, or working on two different Mersenne primes; the speed ends up being something like 1.8 times as fast as a single processor system, instead of double.
Why are Americans so much more paranoid than other people? Have your government really screwed over that many times?
How can you Europeans be so laid back about this, when you've got examples of ethnic cleansing in Germany, Kosovo, Turkey, Macedonia, among others..
Don't get me wrong...Americans also have our own checkered past (Slavery, Japanese interment camps, near genocide of Native-Americans, etc.) but at least we're worried about our own ugly past repeating itself.
The PlexWriterâ(TM)s reinforced tray bezel and drive bezel can resist the escape of the
disc or disc fragments in the event of disc failure at this high 48X speed.
I knew it was worth paying the extra for the Plextor. Although such an event would almost certainly wreck the drive, it would still be a pretty cool story.
I was about 10 years old when the first series aired, and by today's standards it's pretty tame, but the 'alien eats a live mouse' scene is still pretty vivid in my mind. (It was also the focus of many a playground discussion. I don't remember if "radical" was the hip lingo at the time, though.) I'm hoping the new version keeps the mouse-eating around.
Anti-piracy method 1: Spend a lot of time and effort trying to keep ahead of the serial# spreaders and/or crackers, yet still fail pretty miserably, as every other program out there does. Only the honest people actually pay.
Anti-piracy method 2: Sit back, drink a beer, don't give a rat's ass, and the honest people still pay.
It's too bad that you didn't scan any of my earlier replies, because you missed my post here. The New Scientist article still sounds like snake oil; it's not my fault that they obscure and misrepresent the details in a sensationalistic way. Of course the public isn't going to understand TCP, but it is possible to simplify without misrepresening. And is the public going to understand when and where the "6000 x" and "5 seconds to download a movie" applies, either?
The reality is if the article had said, "A performance degradation in a network algorithm which becomes apparent on high-speed 'ultrascale' networks can now be avoided", it would have been too boring, so they made a wrote a sensationalistic article instead.
What are you going to tell us next - BSD is dying?
A wholly unnecessary and baseless character attack. Now you're trolling me.
I stand by my claim that the New Scientist article sounds like snake oil. It's a misleading article, pure and simple.
But, now that I've read some of the documents from the Caltech site, and I think I understand the claims, the research is fairly interesting, at least in the world of "ultrascale" networking. Of course, I'm just an unfrozen caveman engineer, and that world confuses and frightens me, so my understanding might be slightly off. Here goes anyways.
As I understand it, the authors are saying that current TCP congestion avoidance algorithms break down on very high speed, long-haul networks. They mention looking forward to 100Gbps and higher speeds for "ultrascale" supercomputing. They have papers analyzing TCP Vegas (which was designed in 1994) and show that for the networks they're looking at, Vegas "does not scale to this regime". Specifically, they examine throughput stability of Vegas, and show that with these ultrascale networks, performance can end up bouncing between the two states of "balls-to-the-wall" fast and molasses slow. (They do not actually use the phrase "ball-to-the-wall"; that's my addition.) Network performance doesn't reach equilibrium, and your average throughput is quite ugly. In this context, the "cars starting and stopping" analogy starts to make sense.
This is a fairly different "regime" than I'm used to; then again, I'm an unfrozen caveman engineer, and the fastest neworks I've dealth with are 10Gbps LANs, and not high speed WANs. It appears that network performance on such networks can be surprisingly bad, at least, it's surprising to me. (And heck, there's a world of conditions under which Vegas is a great TCP congestion control algorithm, and the network delivers fair bandwidth to everyone. They even link to plenty of papers which analyze, simulate, and measure conditions where current algorithms work just fine.)
They're really looking forward to where the network finally starts to reach pathological extremes, and this all breaks down, which is different than conditions I (and most readers of the New Scientist article) would have seen.
Their first solution, by the way, is a slightly modified algorithm called "stabilized Vegas". They prove that this algorithm avoids the oscilating behavior, and thus avoids the low throughput situation that results. Neat.
Let me summarize my summary: original article bad, sounds like a scam. Actual research interesting, but applies to network speeds and conditions that are forward-looking, and probably don't directly apply to Mr. Bob Homeuser for quite a while. Fire bad.
First of all, the New Scientist article doesn't mention anything about TCP sliding windows or congestion control.
The whole "driving a car while looking 10 meters ahead" analogy ignores a lot of the work TCP does to keep things moving fast. The "trasnmists, waits, then sends the next" packet paragraph is almost deliberately misleading.
It tosses about a "6000 times faster" statistic without explaining 6000 times faster than what. Is my dad's 28.8 modem going to suddenly be getting throughput of 172Mbps? Of course not, but what difference is it going to make to him? I think maybe none at all, and FastTCP is only for very large network hauls, but the article has claims about me downloading a movie in 5 seconds.
My DSL line is 768kbps; I get downloads of large files through it of around 85kBps, which is a data throughput rate of 680kbps. That means that all the layers of the OSI burrito, including resends, checksums, and routining information, add up to about 12% overhead. Not the best, but not that bad, either. How much improvement is FastTCP going to get me?
The numbers for their practical test of Fast TCP connected two computers that got 925Mbps, and the "ordinary" TCP got just 266Mbps. Even that's pretty unbelievable to me; I find it hard to believe that TCP was running at about 25% efficiency.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Like I said before, without further technical details, this doesn't actually sound all that different than the claims of Pixelon, which also had an eye towards video on demand.
Maybe they've got something; someone linked to the actual caltech article, which I haven't had a chance to read in detail (and wasn't linked to at the time I started my post). Caltech certainly is a cool place, so there is probably something interesting going on. But the New Scientist article is a fluff piece, pure and simple, and if calliing shennanigans on it makes me a troll, so be it.
I'm sorry, but without further technical details, this sounds like the sort of technical mumbo-jumbo that snake-oil salesmen were peddling back in the dot-com era.
I hope an actual radio astronomer comes and clears things up, but...I suspect that the image given in "Contact" of radio astronomers sitting near the equipment, monitoring it for a signal and guiding the search moment to moment is probably quite misleading.
Instead, I bet they write something like a perl script that executes a well-researched plan on a preset schedule. In theory, the 24 hours of data collection could have been a very non-eventful period, hardly requiring any caffeine at all.
Of course, once the results all come in, that's probably when diet coke and vivarin time really starts.
I was going to ask if the legal use of the word "obvious" is different than the common-sense one, but google quickly answered my question.
I won't try to summarize the document, as I'm sure I'd butcher the meaning, but short answer: Yes, patent law use of the word "obvious" is somewhat contrary to common sense. In retrospect, I guess this should have been obvious to me. *rimshot*
It is frightening to think that something that any group of 5th graders might come up with in a brainstorming session could qualify as non-obvious, but it sounds like this could be the case.
It's not a glass house situation; it isn't hypocrasy to say, "Learn from our mistakes." Modern western countries have pretty much abandoned making dams. Sometimes we get carried away with our self-righteousness and criticism, but ultimately it comes down to, "We were ignorant in the past."
unlike certain countries who have only found out that terrorism is real in the last couple of years, we've been dealing with it for decades.
Sure. But the whole "America must be a war zone" comment seemed like an unecessary snide comment coming from someone in a country that has arguably been a "war zone" as well.
Funny, I never heard Americans make snide comments about people in New York over-reacting - maybe it's not terrorism unless it happens to America?
First: we made much fun of the people buying gas masks, I'm surprised you missed it. Perhaps you have poor listening skills. Second: where's the whole "it's not terrorism unless it happens to America" thing coming from? I thought I was sort of saying, "England has terrorism problems too, you snide 'America is a war zone' comment making limey." That's pretty much the exact opposite. Perhaps you have poor listening skills.
Re:Other tech from the battlefield to the enterpri
on
The Soldier is the Network
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Here in the US, we're pretty generous with our "bullet to person" ratio, so 60 bullets does not imply anywhere close to 60 people. I mean, seriously, even when running with the counterstrike cheats, nobody's that good.
P.S. Last time I was in England, we couldn't find a trash can anywhere. They had mostly been removed because of the possiblity that someone would leave a bomb in one. How's that war zone thing going with you guys?
Other tech from the battlefield to the enterprise.
on
The Soldier is the Network
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I can think of some other technologies that I would have liked to have available at work, some days.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this really true? If the government really pays for a large majority of software mutliple times, this seems like a criminal waste of my tax dollars, especially at a time when we're in a budget crunch.
And I chose criminal intentionally, not just for rhetorical purposes - if our government really spends money for nothing in return, that's a crime, and heads should roll. To put in in terms MS would understand, it's software piracy in reverse.
Most corporations will have a server-side spam filtering set up; while an integrated Bayesian filtering mechanism might function better, in practice it's probably not worth the individual user's time to set up and train.
I get about 100 spam messages a day. SpamAssassin catches about 60% of those. That leaves 40 messages a day I need to deal with. In mozilla, I just started clicking "this message is spam" and a few days later, I get less than 1 spam message a day. It pretty much couldn't have gotten easier.
Granted, I happened to use a tool that supported the Bayesian filtering, but that's sort of the original complaint: an integrated solution makes it trivial to catch spam that other filters missed.
The bonus is that users hate spam, and giving them a button to click when they get it satisifies their need to somehow complain :).
I wonder if widespread printing, audio, and video recording technology might have a long-term stabilizing effect on language.
On comedy central the other week, there was a comedian who talked about her love of video games. "I love the video games, and The News hates the video games, so I hate The News". She pointed out that the more violent, the better she liked them, and if they made a game that involved stabbing babies, it would be the best game ever.
All I can think when I read yet another lameass story about video games causing violence is: I wish they made that babies game.
Wouldn't 10 g's on touchdown cause death by deceleration trauma?
Bah. During the cold war, the air force did studies using a rocket sled, led by Dr. John P. Stapp that showed that 10Gs is nowhere near fatal. From the page:
I suppose the "with adequate harness" part can't be stressed enough, but there's nothing automatically fatal about 10Gs.
Dr. Stapp sounds like a pretty unique guy, and his work led to more survivable crashes in both aircraft and automobiles. I'm giving you One last chance to click on his biography, since I really want you to read it. :).
Remember, the US is only slightly older than 2 centuries (the constitution wasn't ratified until 1788). Prior to that, well...this page has some info on inventor protections before the modern patent office.
Your idea sounds pretty close (but not identical) to GraffitiWriter, a remote control car with a "print head" consisting of 5 cans of spray paint. You should check it out.
I think you have to count the whole electron microscope, not just the print head.
Theoretically, a dual processor machine for chess WOULD be twice as fast as a single processor machine, unlike in normal tasks where dual doesn't mean double.
Not so fast there, sonny. On a dual processor machine, there's still a single main memory which has its own bandwidth limits. The cache does hopefully alleviate some of the pressure on the pipe, but probably can't relieve it all.
You'll see the memory bandwidth limit in a lot of other applications that seem like they should be theoretically double-speed. I've seen it when rendering two seperate frames of animation, or working on two different Mersenne primes; the speed ends up being something like 1.8 times as fast as a single processor system, instead of double.
Why are Americans so much more paranoid than other people? Have your government really screwed over that many times?
How can you Europeans be so laid back about this, when you've got examples of ethnic cleansing in Germany, Kosovo, Turkey, Macedonia, among others.. Don't get me wrong...Americans also have our own checkered past (Slavery, Japanese interment camps, near genocide of Native-Americans, etc.) but at least we're worried about our own ugly past repeating itself.
Here's a quote from the manual of my CD-RW drive:
The PlexWriterâ(TM)s reinforced tray bezel and drive bezel can resist the escape of the disc or disc fragments in the event of disc failure at this high 48X speed.
I knew it was worth paying the extra for the Plextor. Although such an event would almost certainly wreck the drive, it would still be a pretty cool story.
I was about 10 years old when the first series aired, and by today's standards it's pretty tame, but the 'alien eats a live mouse' scene is still pretty vivid in my mind. (It was also the focus of many a playground discussion. I don't remember if "radical" was the hip lingo at the time, though.) I'm hoping the new version keeps the mouse-eating around.
- Anti-piracy method 1: Spend a lot of time and effort trying to keep ahead of the serial# spreaders and/or crackers, yet still fail pretty miserably, as every other program out there does. Only the honest people actually pay.
- Anti-piracy method 2: Sit back, drink a beer, don't give a rat's ass, and the honest people still pay.
Personally, I think WinZip's got the right idea.You need to read the articles again.
It's too bad that you didn't scan any of my earlier replies, because you missed my post here. The New Scientist article still sounds like snake oil; it's not my fault that they obscure and misrepresent the details in a sensationalistic way. Of course the public isn't going to understand TCP, but it is possible to simplify without misrepresening. And is the public going to understand when and where the "6000 x" and "5 seconds to download a movie" applies, either?
The reality is if the article had said, "A performance degradation in a network algorithm which becomes apparent on high-speed 'ultrascale' networks can now be avoided", it would have been too boring, so they made a wrote a sensationalistic article instead.
What are you going to tell us next - BSD is dying?
A wholly unnecessary and baseless character attack. Now you're trolling me.
I stand by my claim that the New Scientist article sounds like snake oil. It's a misleading article, pure and simple.
But, now that I've read some of the documents from the Caltech site, and I think I understand the claims, the research is fairly interesting, at least in the world of "ultrascale" networking. Of course, I'm just an unfrozen caveman engineer, and that world confuses and frightens me, so my understanding might be slightly off. Here goes anyways.
As I understand it, the authors are saying that current TCP congestion avoidance algorithms break down on very high speed, long-haul networks. They mention looking forward to 100Gbps and higher speeds for "ultrascale" supercomputing. They have papers analyzing TCP Vegas (which was designed in 1994) and show that for the networks they're looking at, Vegas "does not scale to this regime". Specifically, they examine throughput stability of Vegas, and show that with these ultrascale networks, performance can end up bouncing between the two states of "balls-to-the-wall" fast and molasses slow. (They do not actually use the phrase "ball-to-the-wall"; that's my addition.) Network performance doesn't reach equilibrium, and your average throughput is quite ugly. In this context, the "cars starting and stopping" analogy starts to make sense.
This is a fairly different "regime" than I'm used to; then again, I'm an unfrozen caveman engineer, and the fastest neworks I've dealth with are 10Gbps LANs, and not high speed WANs. It appears that network performance on such networks can be surprisingly bad, at least, it's surprising to me. (And heck, there's a world of conditions under which Vegas is a great TCP congestion control algorithm, and the network delivers fair bandwidth to everyone. They even link to plenty of papers which analyze, simulate, and measure conditions where current algorithms work just fine.)
They're really looking forward to where the network finally starts to reach pathological extremes, and this all breaks down, which is different than conditions I (and most readers of the New Scientist article) would have seen.
Their first solution, by the way, is a slightly modified algorithm called "stabilized Vegas". They prove that this algorithm avoids the oscilating behavior, and thus avoids the low throughput situation that results. Neat.
Let me summarize my summary: original article bad, sounds like a scam. Actual research interesting, but applies to network speeds and conditions that are forward-looking, and probably don't directly apply to Mr. Bob Homeuser for quite a while. Fire bad.
First of all, the New Scientist article doesn't mention anything about TCP sliding windows or congestion control.
The whole "driving a car while looking 10 meters ahead" analogy ignores a lot of the work TCP does to keep things moving fast. The "trasnmists, waits, then sends the next" packet paragraph is almost deliberately misleading.
It tosses about a "6000 times faster" statistic without explaining 6000 times faster than what. Is my dad's 28.8 modem going to suddenly be getting throughput of 172Mbps? Of course not, but what difference is it going to make to him? I think maybe none at all, and FastTCP is only for very large network hauls, but the article has claims about me downloading a movie in 5 seconds.
My DSL line is 768kbps; I get downloads of large files through it of around 85kBps, which is a data throughput rate of 680kbps. That means that all the layers of the OSI burrito, including resends, checksums, and routining information, add up to about 12% overhead. Not the best, but not that bad, either. How much improvement is FastTCP going to get me?
The numbers for their practical test of Fast TCP connected two computers that got 925Mbps, and the "ordinary" TCP got just 266Mbps. Even that's pretty unbelievable to me; I find it hard to believe that TCP was running at about 25% efficiency.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Like I said before, without further technical details, this doesn't actually sound all that different than the claims of Pixelon, which also had an eye towards video on demand.
Maybe they've got something; someone linked to the actual caltech article, which I haven't had a chance to read in detail (and wasn't linked to at the time I started my post). Caltech certainly is a cool place, so there is probably something interesting going on. But the New Scientist article is a fluff piece, pure and simple, and if calliing shennanigans on it makes me a troll, so be it.
I'm sorry, but without further technical details, this sounds like the sort of technical mumbo-jumbo that snake-oil salesmen were peddling back in the dot-com era.
For example, NAC Geographic Products' address in Toronto would be 8CNB5 Q8Z4R.
Ecnbs Qesar?
Sorry. I keep trying to decode that address code as 'leet speak. :)
I hope an actual radio astronomer comes and clears things up, but...I suspect that the image given in "Contact" of radio astronomers sitting near the equipment, monitoring it for a signal and guiding the search moment to moment is probably quite misleading.
Instead, I bet they write something like a perl script that executes a well-researched plan on a preset schedule. In theory, the 24 hours of data collection could have been a very non-eventful period, hardly requiring any caffeine at all.
Of course, once the results all come in, that's probably when diet coke and vivarin time really starts.
I was going to ask if the legal use of the word "obvious" is different than the common-sense one, but google quickly answered my question.
I won't try to summarize the document, as I'm sure I'd butcher the meaning, but short answer: Yes, patent law use of the word "obvious" is somewhat contrary to common sense. In retrospect, I guess this should have been obvious to me. *rimshot*
It is frightening to think that something that any group of 5th graders might come up with in a brainstorming session could qualify as non-obvious, but it sounds like this could be the case.
It's not a glass house situation; it isn't hypocrasy to say, "Learn from our mistakes." Modern western countries have pretty much abandoned making dams. Sometimes we get carried away with our self-righteousness and criticism, but ultimately it comes down to, "We were ignorant in the past."
Also, you might want to look into supporting the Restore Hetch Hetchy movement.
unlike certain countries who have only found out that terrorism is real in the last couple of years, we've been dealing with it for decades.
Sure. But the whole "America must be a war zone" comment seemed like an unecessary snide comment coming from someone in a country that has arguably been a "war zone" as well.
Funny, I never heard Americans make snide comments about people in New York over-reacting - maybe it's not terrorism unless it happens to America?
First: we made much fun of the people buying gas masks, I'm surprised you missed it. Perhaps you have poor listening skills. Second: where's the whole "it's not terrorism unless it happens to America" thing coming from? I thought I was sort of saying, "England has terrorism problems too, you snide 'America is a war zone' comment making limey." That's pretty much the exact opposite. Perhaps you have poor listening skills.
Here in the US, we're pretty generous with our "bullet to person" ratio, so 60 bullets does not imply anywhere close to 60 people. I mean, seriously, even when running with the counterstrike cheats, nobody's that good.
P.S. Last time I was in England, we couldn't find a trash can anywhere. They had mostly been removed because of the possiblity that someone would leave a bomb in one. How's that war zone thing going with you guys?
I can think of some other technologies that I would have liked to have available at work, some days.
I'm pretty sure that $4 is in fact less than $10.