Garbage.
I have a 21" Eizo CRT on my main home machine, and in order to have pinpoint convergence on the whole screen, it's about 24" deep! Likewise on the 21" Nokia monitor at work.
So firstly the monitor is far too close to the end of my nose, as I can't position it far enough back on the desk. (I only want a couple of inches more, I'm really just absurdly close at the moment.)
Also, in order for the CRT to be structurally sound with such large spans of glass, it needs to be quite think (in the same way dinosaur bones are relativelty thinker than crocodile bones which are relatively thicker than newt bones)./Ipso facto/ my Eizo weighs 38kg, and the Nokia about the same.
I have had to DIY reinforce my crappy desk at home to support the weight! (technology stuff is higher priority than furniture stuff, obviously). A flat pane display would weigh about a third of that. I could put it anywhere. I could even stick it on the wall...
Yes, these are just "convenience", but for some convenience is worth spending money on.
Correct, LCD/TFT are very different.
Duff pixels are indeed "part of the deal".
/However/, various companies set the acceptable quality levels at different ration/pixel-counts.
On a standard 14" laptop display some big name manufacturers will ship up to 10 duff pixels. (Hewlett Packard in my experience not only set the approval level the highest, but also employ people who can't count to judge them, I've returned 2 laptops for screen problems in the last few years - both HP). However, this appears to be big-name complacency on their part. In my experience the _small_ manufacturers of laptops _seem_ to have a higher overall quality when it comes to the TFTs (and super-twists in the past) they use.
One "bargain" that used to be available from SGI was the "reject shop" that they ran. They used to sell _really_ cheaply huge flat panel displays for about a quarter of what they would have been worth if they didn't have about 20 duff pixels.
The SI unit for "solid angle" is the steradian.
What is "170 degrees of conic view"? Do they mean that the screen can be seen (distorted as fuck) from 85 degrees away from the normal in every direction? (That's about 1.8pi steradians - 4pi is the whole sphere, 2pi is a hemisphere.)
Windows NT was selectable between the Win3.1 and the Win95 interface. The interfaces were data configurable from the control panel (border width/color, mouse double-click speed and left/right-mouse-handedness (i.e behaviour)).
When was that version of NT released? Is it prior art (to claim 1 at least)?
Can MS do the big money thing, and stomp on this patent before it takes hold?
If there's enough interest locally, do the broadband yourself. You'll need a telephone company that permits you to rent 4wire copper connections (so you are all _electrically_ connected to your shared machine room); however, as these are _zero maintainance_, if offered they will be cheaper than any service provision. Then from the machine room you doo need an upstream, which costs the big bucks, but the cost is shared by all your co-subscribers. Every subscriber needs to provide their own pair of modems, which can be baseband modems (2Mb) of course. That's exactly what we've done at Kotiverkkoyhistys in a region just west of Helsinki (www.dna.fi - in Finnish). (Having said that, broadband is available, we just knew it could be done for less.) Note - this requires time and effort to manage and maintain, but is worth it in the end.
The creationists (some of them) still demand proof that speciation has happened in "higher" animals.
To them viruses don't really count, and also finches growing shorter or longer beaks is still irrelevant - it's still a finch.
I believe that they will never be satisfied. They have a defence mechanism that will make them move the goalposts whenever a 'proof' challenges their current wording. It'll eventually get to "Put a banana in an environment that favours a wombat - and show me it evolve into one" and then you know the argument is no longer worth having.
About 10-15 years ago in the UK, the Catholic Church made an official formal statement that the principle of evolution was "so obvious that it is not worthy of being called a theory". This of course is not the global Catholic view, just the UK.
Talk about changing colours, and _then_ adding an insult to the scientists as well.
You're right, yes. There's a very fine region between it being intrusive or not. It if modifies too much of the data it's useless as you are damaging the product, if it doesn't then it will simply be excised with very little damage to the data. The most anal they can be is the "custom hardware" approach. Even that's crackable, of course. As soon as the algorithm used appears, then the data will be interpretable by software, and the scenario you mention again begins.
In my previous post I simply wanted to indicate that the "copy protect bit" was a naive view of how it could be implemented.
Imagine if I tried to stop people from finding the glamour images off my computer by renaming them from.jpg to.dll, for example. And changed the 2nd byte to be a 'Q' rather than a 'P'. It would work, but it wouldn't last 2 seconds after people found out about it.
I've been at 50 Karma for ages, just today I earned 8, but of course had to decline due to karma cap. You've finally enabled me to actually gain karma again!
He begins the story so long after the open source movement was already well established that the interesting part of the story is being ignored.
I remember having to "bootstrap" my machines into networkable machines by downloading _source_ code to a simple pip clone (basically a 50 line serial driver) which permitted me to copy onto my machine the _source_ to kermit (back when kermit was open source). When I had that, I could then on my own machine download the _source_ to the other tools that would then enable me to compile/assemble the _source_ to the other programs that I really wanted. The variety of programs was very broad (but remember that it was almost exclusively command line programs in those days), you name a tool, you could download a copy...
At this stage Linus was just a teenager.
It's only because the Open Source "movement" (what movement?) was so strong already that Linus decided that's how he wanted his project to be.
I think that's a very long way of saying "I'm not going to buy this Linux-bandwagon-jumping book".
Wooo! meritocracy argument - excellent.
You're both part right. There are certainly people who are not qualified (as rational people) to judge evidence, and there are some who certainly aren't. IQ is not necessarily an indication of this I'll accept. How ESN (hey, screw PC, I think it's a perfectly valid term) does someone need to be before they don't have the right to be part of the running of society? So you need a way of judging the eligibility. I reckon that in the same way that there's a driving test, there ought to be a voting test and a jury test too. I'm not asking for much, merely that the principles involved are understood. A society run by the elite would not be an improvement at all.
Having said that, with the adversarial system most countries use, you can't get biased expert witnesses to put fancy falsities into your case, as they are cross-examinable. As long as the other party or its councel have the required knowledge to shoot down the falsities, then the jury don't need to be good at anything apart from weighing two counter arguments with opposing views. Both councels have the same weapons at hand, and a logical scientist will be as able to get a lawyer in knots as the reverse. Hey, I've seen every episode of Quincy, I know that science wins out in the end!
:-)
FatPhil --
Oh indeed, I just didn't want to start a discussion of a real modern-day issue when these discussions have been done to death on slashdot already. I tried to stay within "science" though.
Sorry for ambiguity.
How impartial is impartial?
Would the AAAS not be considered to be biased in some states/districts, for example if there were to be a "rights to not be taught evolution" case?
I'm not saying AAAS bods wouldn't be "right" in this case, I'm just saying that they are able to color the situation with their own views as much as anyone else, and hence would not be impartial to the case in hand.
Part of being "enterprise ready" is that you need to guarantee 100% quality to the customer/client. I'm _not_ saying that Linux can't provide this. However, the businesses that want to provide such a guarantee need their "insurance". This "insurance" is typically a vendor guarantee.
If E-garbage-mart run in a Tandem system they _know_ that if they can't run their business because of a problem with the Tandem servers they know that it'll be fixed in 4 hours, or they get compensation. I believe DEC used to offer _1 hour_ onsite support in some parts of Europe (Germany).
(This means that they needed a dozen sites in the country with people on call 24/7.)
If companies offer cold hard "99.995% uptime" guarantees on Linux systems with compensation terms, then people will consider them Enterprise ready. Not one line of code needs to change - simply that fact that someone is willing to _fiscally_ underwrite it.
Well said.
As we speak I am coding something which will hopefully make a mathematical discovery by spring that it would have been impossible to make 15 years ago.
All I need is one of two things
a) more fast PCs b) faster PCs.
My discovery will be overshadowed in a year or two I'd guess, but I'm programming for _now_.
If it's true then it's because the problem was worded wrongly.
You _cannot_ trisect an arbitrary plane angle using only a compass and a straight edge.
Proven, mathematical truth. If you deny it then you deny the whole of maths.
However...
It's possible to construct a device which will permit to to trisect a plane angle but it requires the user to "find the position where point A touches line XY and arc BC is tangent to XZ.
i.e. you're getting the human to manually 'solve' an equally intractable (with straght edge and compass) problem, and then map that _approximately found_ solution onto a solution of the original problem.
The +5 is an anathema. The quote is a misrepresentation of what Bruce Schneier has said.
The one time pad, if all the preconditions are satisfied, is provably secure. It does however require a secure channel, which means that there's a possible man in the middle attack, namely if someone steals your pad!
They have to do it via a "secure channel".
Namely, ordinary crypto.
"then you crack that channel first..." I hear you say!
Except by the time you've worked out where the in the random stream you should find the pad that's been used you've filled up every hard disk in the world two times over. Or something like that.
Personally I don't really buy it. How do you trust your random stream? What if someone pushes storage capacities up by 10^12? What if you want to _store_ the message?
I prefer to hide behind the strong crypto energy estimate - for a deterministic process, there's only so much computing that can be done due to energy requirements. Sure, as soon as ND systems become a reality then I'll rethink...
Explosives provide their own O2. For most common explosives this is what the 'nitrates' are for.
XNO3 for X=almost anything (From Potassium to Toluene and beyond) will often part with its oxygen quite easily. (The Potassium version in the saltpetre in traditional gunpowder, and the toluene version wants three 'nitro's round it, and hey presto - nice almond smell and TNT)
How on earth (no pun intended) did this get to +5?
The "putting things into near earth orbit" is already amost a commodity. The exploration of space is a totally different kettle of fish, and your syllogism just isn't valid.
Secondly, how do you know if I want the price of space launches to be brought down? You have no right to speak for "all".
You obviously have no knowledge of engineering.
Look at the size of the Apollo landers, and of the Saturn V rockets. Notice a difference in size? If you wanted to put one poxy nanobot into space you'd still need huge rocket, as for most of the time the rocket needs to propel itself with its fuel as well as the nanobot. The thing _does not scale linearly_.
Slashdot Mirror
Garbage. /Ipso facto/ my Eizo weighs 38kg, and the Nokia about the same.
I have a 21" Eizo CRT on my main home machine, and in order to have pinpoint convergence on the whole screen, it's about 24" deep! Likewise on the 21" Nokia monitor at work.
So firstly the monitor is far too close to the end of my nose, as I can't position it far enough back on the desk. (I only want a couple of inches more, I'm really just absurdly close at the moment.)
Also, in order for the CRT to be structurally sound with such large spans of glass, it needs to be quite think (in the same way dinosaur bones are relativelty thinker than crocodile bones which are relatively thicker than newt bones).
I have had to DIY reinforce my crappy desk at home to support the weight! (technology stuff is higher priority than furniture stuff, obviously). A flat pane display would weigh about a third of that. I could put it anywhere. I could even stick it on the wall...
Yes, these are just "convenience", but for some convenience is worth spending money on.
FatPhil
--
Correct, LCD/TFT are very different.
Duff pixels are indeed "part of the deal".
/However/, various companies set the acceptable quality levels at different ration/pixel-counts.
On a standard 14" laptop display some big name manufacturers will ship up to 10 duff pixels. (Hewlett Packard in my experience not only set the approval level the highest, but also employ people who can't count to judge them, I've returned 2 laptops for screen problems in the last few years - both HP). However, this appears to be big-name complacency on their part. In my experience the _small_ manufacturers of laptops _seem_ to have a higher overall quality when it comes to the TFTs (and super-twists in the past) they use.
One "bargain" that used to be available from SGI was the "reject shop" that they ran. They used to sell _really_ cheaply huge flat panel displays for about a quarter of what they would have been worth if they didn't have about 20 duff pixels.
FatPhil
--
The SI unit for "solid angle" is the steradian.
What is "170 degrees of conic view"? Do they mean that the screen can be seen (distorted as fuck) from 85 degrees away from the normal in every direction? (That's about 1.8pi steradians - 4pi is the whole sphere, 2pi is a hemisphere.)
FP.
--
Windows NT was selectable between the Win3.1 and the Win95 interface. The interfaces were data configurable from the control panel (border width/color, mouse double-click speed and left/right-mouse-handedness (i.e behaviour)).
When was that version of NT released? Is it prior art (to claim 1 at least)?
Can MS do the big money thing, and stomp on this patent before it takes hold?
FatPhil
--
If there's enough interest locally, do the broadband yourself. You'll need a telephone company that permits you to rent 4wire copper connections (so you are all _electrically_ connected to your shared machine room); however, as these are _zero maintainance_, if offered they will be cheaper than any service provision. Then from the machine room you doo need an upstream, which costs the big bucks, but the cost is shared by all your co-subscribers. Every subscriber needs to provide their own pair of modems, which can be baseband modems (2Mb) of course. That's exactly what we've done at Kotiverkkoyhistys in a region just west of Helsinki (www.dna.fi - in Finnish). (Having said that, broadband is available, we just knew it could be done for less.) Note - this requires time and effort to manage and maintain, but is worth it in the end.
FatPhil
--
The creationists (some of them) still demand proof that speciation has happened in "higher" animals.
To them viruses don't really count, and also finches growing shorter or longer beaks is still irrelevant - it's still a finch.
I believe that they will never be satisfied. They have a defence mechanism that will make them move the goalposts whenever a 'proof' challenges their current wording. It'll eventually get to "Put a banana in an environment that favours a wombat - and show me it evolve into one" and then you know the argument is no longer worth having.
(was it ever)
FatPhil
--
About 10-15 years ago in the UK, the Catholic Church made an official formal statement that the principle of evolution was "so obvious that it is not worthy of being called a theory". This of course is not the global Catholic view, just the UK.
Talk about changing colours, and _then_ adding an insult to the scientists as well.
FatPhil
--
You're right, yes. There's a very fine region between it being intrusive or not. It if modifies too much of the data it's useless as you are damaging the product, if it doesn't then it will simply be excised with very little damage to the data. The most anal they can be is the "custom hardware" approach. Even that's crackable, of course. As soon as the algorithm used appears, then the data will be interpretable by software, and the scenario you mention again begins.
.jpg to .dll, for example. And changed the 2nd byte to be a 'Q' rather than a 'P'. It would work, but it wouldn't last 2 seconds after people found out about it.
In my previous post I simply wanted to indicate that the "copy protect bit" was a naive view of how it could be implemented.
Imagine if I tried to stop people from finding the glamour images off my computer by renaming them from
FatPhil
--
Woo Woo - Troll?
I've been at 50 Karma for ages, just today I earned 8, but of course had to decline due to karma cap. You've finally enabled me to actually gain karma again!
Thanks!
--
Thanks.
In that case I direct my chagrin at whoever wrote the the total misdirection in the top paragraphs...
All your open source are belong to us.
FP.
--
He begins the story so long after the open source movement was already well established that the interesting part of the story is being ignored.
I remember having to "bootstrap" my machines into networkable machines by downloading _source_ code to a simple pip clone (basically a 50 line serial driver) which permitted me to copy onto my machine the _source_ to kermit (back when kermit was open source). When I had that, I could then on my own machine download the _source_ to the other tools that would then enable me to compile/assemble the _source_ to the other programs that I really wanted. The variety of programs was very broad (but remember that it was almost exclusively command line programs in those days), you name a tool, you could download a copy...
At this stage Linus was just a teenager.
It's only because the Open Source "movement" (what movement?) was so strong already that Linus decided that's how he wanted his project to be.
I think that's a very long way of saying "I'm not going to buy this Linux-bandwagon-jumping book".
FatPhil
--
Wooo! meritocracy argument - excellent.
You're both part right. There are certainly people who are not qualified (as rational people) to judge evidence, and there are some who certainly aren't. IQ is not necessarily an indication of this I'll accept. How ESN (hey, screw PC, I think it's a perfectly valid term) does someone need to be before they don't have the right to be part of the running of society? So you need a way of judging the eligibility. I reckon that in the same way that there's a driving test, there ought to be a voting test and a jury test too. I'm not asking for much, merely that the principles involved are understood. A society run by the elite would not be an improvement at all.
Having said that, with the adversarial system most countries use, you can't get biased expert witnesses to put fancy falsities into your case, as they are cross-examinable. As long as the other party or its councel have the required knowledge to shoot down the falsities, then the jury don't need to be good at anything apart from weighing two counter arguments with opposing views. Both councels have the same weapons at hand, and a logical scientist will be as able to get a lawyer in knots as the reverse. Hey, I've seen every episode of Quincy, I know that science wins out in the end!
:-)
FatPhil
--
Oh indeed, I just didn't want to start a discussion of a real modern-day issue when these discussions have been done to death on slashdot already. I tried to stay within "science" though.
Sorry for ambiguity.
FP
--
Grrr! I'm a mathmo, and I'm as cynical about this scheme as you are!
FP.
--
Wasn't it between his forearm and his upper arm?
Or was it that hole in thte ground.
Oh I get some confused sometimes...
FP.
--
How impartial is impartial?
Would the AAAS not be considered to be biased in some states/districts, for example if there were to be a "rights to not be taught evolution" case?
I'm not saying AAAS bods wouldn't be "right" in this case, I'm just saying that they are able to color the situation with their own views as much as anyone else, and hence would not be impartial to the case in hand.
FatPhil
--
In the same way that you can STOP-A into the ROM debugger on a Sun 3/60, and set your processes' uid to 0?
Yeah right..
What happens if the "protected" bit is woven into the sound data in an undetectable way? (i.e it is a watermark)
FatPhil
--
Part of being "enterprise ready" is that you need to guarantee 100% quality to the customer/client. I'm _not_ saying that Linux can't provide this. However, the businesses that want to provide such a guarantee need their "insurance". This "insurance" is typically a vendor guarantee.
If E-garbage-mart run in a Tandem system they _know_ that if they can't run their business because of a problem with the Tandem servers they know that it'll be fixed in 4 hours, or they get compensation. I believe DEC used to offer _1 hour_ onsite support in some parts of Europe (Germany).
(This means that they needed a dozen sites in the country with people on call 24/7.)
If companies offer cold hard "99.995% uptime" guarantees on Linux systems with compensation terms, then people will consider them Enterprise ready. Not one line of code needs to change - simply that fact that someone is willing to _fiscally_ underwrite it.
FatPhil
--
Well said.
As we speak I am coding something which will hopefully make a mathematical discovery by spring that it would have been impossible to make 15 years ago.
All I need is one of two things
a) more fast PCs b) faster PCs.
My discovery will be overshadowed in a year or two I'd guess, but I'm programming for _now_.
FatPhil
--
Wake up! There are Axp 21264 processors out there you know.
FP
--
If it's true then it's because the problem was worded wrongly.
You _cannot_ trisect an arbitrary plane angle using only a compass and a straight edge.
Proven, mathematical truth. If you deny it then you deny the whole of maths.
However...
It's possible to construct a device which will permit to to trisect a plane angle but it requires the user to "find the position where point A touches line XY and arc BC is tangent to XZ.
i.e. you're getting the human to manually 'solve' an equally intractable (with straght edge and compass) problem, and then map that _approximately found_ solution onto a solution of the original problem.
FatPhil
--
The +5 is an anathema. The quote is a misrepresentation of what Bruce Schneier has said.
The one time pad, if all the preconditions are satisfied, is provably secure. It does however require a secure channel, which means that there's a possible man in the middle attack, namely if someone steals your pad!
FatPhil
--
They have to do it via a "secure channel".
Namely, ordinary crypto.
"then you crack that channel first..." I hear you say!
Except by the time you've worked out where the in the random stream you should find the pad that's been used you've filled up every hard disk in the world two times over. Or something like that.
Personally I don't really buy it. How do you trust your random stream? What if someone pushes storage capacities up by 10^12? What if you want to _store_ the message?
I prefer to hide behind the strong crypto energy estimate - for a deterministic process, there's only so much computing that can be done due to energy requirements. Sure, as soon as ND systems become a reality then I'll rethink...
FatPhil
--
Explosives provide their own O2. For most common explosives this is what the 'nitrates' are for.
XNO3 for X=almost anything (From Potassium to Toluene and beyond) will often part with its oxygen quite easily. (The Potassium version in the saltpetre in traditional gunpowder, and the toluene version wants three 'nitro's round it, and hey presto - nice almond smell and TNT)
FatPhil
--
How on earth (no pun intended) did this get to +5?
The "putting things into near earth orbit" is already amost a commodity. The exploration of space is a totally different kettle of fish, and your syllogism just isn't valid.
Secondly, how do you know if I want the price of space launches to be brought down? You have no right to speak for "all".
You obviously have no knowledge of engineering.
Look at the size of the Apollo landers, and of the Saturn V rockets. Notice a difference in size? If you wanted to put one poxy nanobot into space you'd still need huge rocket, as for most of the time the rocket needs to propel itself with its fuel as well as the nanobot. The thing _does not scale linearly_.
Sheesh,
FP.
--