That is actually one of the rare cases where law enforcement has proven they are not technically inept. Maybe this is a sign of better things to come.
Not really, it's one of those cases where criminals get caught because they are not paranoid enough. One of the domains that received info from the botnet was registered using a real name. Another incriminating fact was they got caught connecting to the botnet directly from their own IPs. And to top it all the supposed mastermind was selling the botnet software for peanuts advertising with pricelist and everything on his web page. A paranoid hacker borrowing domains and tunnels from infected servers would not get caught so easily.
Looking at the wavelength (which is the same as bluray) there is little headroom to decrease track pitch and increase bit rate, so it is unlikely they can increase layer density by more than a very small single digit factor over bluray.
So getting to 20 times bluray capacity will require many more layers.
As the disks cannot be spinning much faster it would also be necessary to read several layers or several parallel tracks simultaneously otherwise read speed will be laughably slow compared to capacity.
Obviously, there are quite a few problems to solve. Assuming they are solvable, can they make working prototypes soon enough to get to market while 1T optical capacity still seems exciting compared to other storage and distribution technologies?
Images are just a collection of pigments or pixels, they represent history, reality, fantasy, imagination, art, depravity, tragedy, etc. In the end just an arrangement of the color spectrum. I don't understand how this could be considered illegal. I understand a fragile mind may be stirred emmotionly but often times that is the content creators goal. What's next illegal texts? Speech?
I kind of feel empathy for these people that can't view a cartoon or corpse and feel a need to retaliate or seek phsychiatric help.
Having seen some of the weirdest stuff found in computer forensics cases, I can tell you you have no idea how seeing really sick photos and videos changes even the perception of possible dimensions of sociopathy. Child pornography per example is not illegal because the photons are hitting your retina in an illegal way. It's because really sick people are torturing innocent children for the pleasure of a few other problematic people. Do you want to help them gain their weird pleasures or do you prefer to protect the children?
In the meantime, I'm curious why the "card path" of any exposed payment system would be designed such that it has internal voids where 3rd party hardware can be stashed. A mag-stripe reader is just a surface, with a few mm of electronics behind it.
That's not how they do it. They either attach a second card reader chip to the pins or wires that go to existing head or attach some nearly transparent head+electronics at some external place that's highly likely to be close to the the card stripe.
The human eye has about 6 million cones, so that's its resolution (in the sense of a digital camera): 6 megapixels. The human eye can scan a scene and the brain can detect some finer detail, but so can a camera; it doesn't change the resolution. However, since monitors and cameras count resolution differently, that 6 megapixel resolution correponds to a 2 megapixel color display screen resolution.
You get the higher figures through eye and head movement. But instead of surrounding yourself with monitors and moving your head, you can just... move and manage your windows. That way you have many gigapixels at your fingertips. The human brain is remarkably adaptable that way.
It's not that simple.
First, the resolution of the eye is much higher at the center of the retina than it is at periphery. So you need much higher resolution overall if you want to keep the same quality of the image no matter where the eyes are centered.
Second, the numbers of rods and cones vary significantly, I remember ratios of 1:4 and even up to 1:10 between people.
If you do some testing with people, you'll notice that maximum required resolution to cover the whole visual field uniformly is somewhere between 12M and 50M pixels. I'm not excluding possibility that there are a few sharp-eyed individuals which can discern more than that.
I think we shouldn't bash all Chinese here, because I've seen similar cheats of smaller magnitude from US and EU scientists too. I've seen a lot of similar fake jobs in startups pretending to innovate.
Isn't maybe the whole world getting over-competitive? Because there's so much competition you are less likely to be successful with an original contribution, so it's often a more successful strategy to bluff and imitate. As bluffers get ahead and the society notices it's even more work for the real innovators to somehow prove they are not faking it, which gives yet a little more headroom to the con-artists. So I think society would be better off by raising rewards to the real innovators and punishing cheaters more severely. It will do no good to simply bash all Chinese.
Several times, when I was highly motivated on exciting new projects I was able to code for about 120 hours for 2-3 weeks. That would be 7 days per week, 4 hours of sleep, minus mealtime, teatime and shower time. But thinking back, a lot of the code produced was crap, it was basically a joyride implementing what seemed to be a straightforward approach and enjoying a lot of incremental results.
These days I prefer to plan for 3 hours of coding a day with most of the time spent on meetings, learning, planning and a lot of contemplation about the easiest approach to implementation. It's funny that just sitting on a couch meditating about simple solutions often produced ideas that made me implement solutions in days that other programmers would take months.
So, for all the trouble of scrapping an entire industry and starting over, we'd only go from 0.50 to 0.30 nm. Not sure if thats going to be worth it. Not that graphene isn't interesting or cool, just that its unit cell isn't much smaller than Si unit cell.
It's not about scaling, the key property of graphene is greatly improved electron mobility. It also has many other interesting properties.
I do not consider anything below 8mbit "broadband" these days.
My experience on a gigabit pipe is that most downloads max out at about 4Mbit/s (500KB/s) per client. So a 5Mbit connection feels about as broadband as a gigabit connection for simple browsing and downloading. About that bitrate, graphical remote desktop also becomes acceptably responsive.
Enough nukes detonated all on one side will ablate material off the surface and produce thrust, changing the rocks orbit by a little bit. Luckily, even a minuscule change in direction will produce a significant change in position 30 years down the line.
The really interesting thing is if a rock is detected that will hit in 10-15 years. At that point, it is less likely for our current technology to be fully effective. We'd end up with a crash program that would make Apollo look like chump change. I could even imagine NASA dusting off the old Orion nuclear pulse propulsion ideas if the whole world were at stake; after all, what's a few hundred nukes being detonating in the atmosphere compared human extinction.
Actually there's a whole study somewhere on internet on how best to deal with big objects likely to hit Earth and how to use them for military purposes. The most effective method is landing a digger-thrower machine that digs material and shoots it into space, thus providing impulses to change the orbit bit by bit. Landing such a machine a few years in advance should do the trick. Apparently the whole thing is technologically way simpler than human trips to Moon.
I would gladly pay a few cents per a short video and more than a few cents for a longer one under a few conditions: - decent video quality - no ads except for unbiased links to related contets - streaming server guarantees decent bandwidth to my location - there is a "give me my money back" button (with possibly a few options for a reason) to discourage bad content - I don't have to repay to replay a clip
A few months ago I noticed quite a serious problem with Ext3. A power outage caused an error on the primary Ext3 superblock. Ext3 driver has a problem with the specific SATA error and refuses to mount filesystem in normal mode and displays some cryptic SATA errors instead (but it does mount in recovery mode). FSCK is unable to fix the error, even when feeding it the correct offsets of superblock copies, because it gets thrown off course by the same SATA read error and it quits before even starting any work using alternative superblock copies. So a single sector error causes you quite a big problem, practically you are forced to copy the partition to fix it quickly, not to mention the time wasted to figure out what's going on.
In EU there are quite strict rules about the coloring of pills and there's a company called Sensum producing machines that use computer vision to inspect and sort all kinds of pills. I guess Biovail Corp. needs to buy a pill checking machine such as this: http://www.sensum.si/
Persian Gulf is not that shallow but not really deep either. Let me quote Wikipedia:
The waters are overall very shallow and have a maximum depth of 90 metres and an average depth of 50 metres.
If you read the BBC paper you will notice that they cheat a little - their MIMO system relies on two polarizations (vertical and horizontal) insted of spatial separation of the two antennas. Satellite TV has been using polarizations for a long time, though not in MIMO mode.
The correct summary would be "BBC White Paper Claims HD By Efficient Use of Existing Bandwidth".
I went to high school some 15 years ago, and our teacher derived all the trigonometry from square equations of triangles+circles using cartesian geometry - very simple and very similar to this "new stuff". Also, doing a lot of work in graphics applying all that linear algebra, one quickly notices dot products and cross products, and rather known equations with known properties (well, at least if developing 3D graphics is your job). It's nice to rewrite basic trigonometry, but I'll have to read the other chapters to see if there's anything actually new.
I am lucky to know one of the chip codevelopers at Flextronics Slovenia and I sat through a presentation given by director a few days ago.
A few highlights (not slashdotted yet):
the quoted speed of 160 MHz is for full SoC, the core itself was measured to run at over 200 MHz in.18
the current core is integer with provisions for FPU, vector units and coprocessors
simulation environment is available, it's functionally equivalent but not completely cycle exact
GCC backend is ported, so guess what languages are ported (they quoted C,C++,Java)
linux runs with drivers for all modules (ethernet, VGA, sound, serial, PCI, other IO)
they quoted the core without caches to take something like 0.5 mm2 in.18 process (I hope I remember that correctly), I don't remember the complete SoC die size - basically it depends on the size of caches and embedded memory
I held the chip in my hands, I asked for the price, and was quoted "around $5" - the package is nail sized and really thin
the whole design is modular - select the modules you need and get the chip plan (or whatever it's called) for production
the successor chip is already in development, they hinted at FPU (now they have only integer MAC), maybe.13 process
they showed a picture of a linux embedded PC-like board with the chip, I asked for the price quote, they said it's development board only:)
Any competitors? I'm looking for an embedded linux board with video/audio acquisition and 10/100 ethernet.
Here's a tip for all you inventors looking to make things easy for the rest of us: CELL PHONES DO NOT HAVE A SIMPLE ENOUGH INTERFACE FOR MOST COMMON INTERACTIONS.
That's how a vending machine down the corridor works: type a 5-digit mobile payment number, append the cash amount digits to the number, dial and place your phone close to the vending machine mic for a few seconds. Now choose the type of drink you want prepared.
If you store the payment number as a fastdial number, it takes only 2 keypresses to pay a preset amount.
Ghost 7.5 experience
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Quite recently I used Ghost 7.5 to clone a win2k+rh8 installation to 15 workstations. My experience was the following:
it can clone win2k partitions without any problems
it has problems cloning redhat 8.0 ext3 partitions (cloning breaks with a strange error)
it can clone anything in the sector by sector mode (the images are compressed on the fly)
it is extremely efficient in multicasting mode - it cloned to 14 machines only slightly slower than to a single machine!!
a lousy DOS packet driver can cause really strange problems (that's the driver problem, but still it does affect ghost!)
I see advantages and disadvantages with g4u:
+ you are not tied to a win32 ghost server on the LAN, you merely need a reachable FTP server
Imagine your PVR stored all the TV shows for the last 5 years. Then during the next election, you could browse back and see what the candidates have promised and what happened later. So it's no surprise that politicians will be the first to support time-limited recording.
Who wants to work in a Faraday cage where your cell phone doesn't work, your pager doesn't work, you cannot listen to radio, and wireless internet doesn't even reach next floor?
Obviously the usage will be limited to high security buildings, but hey, if you want to do that, you can just put metal panels in or on the walls.
The communication between PC and keyboard is a simple low-speed serial protocol. The cable is unshielded and acts as a transmitter. The signals are squarish and will transmit well. Now take a good directional receiver (even beter use more and some digital processing to locate transmitter). You get the bits, now use an ascii table to look up what was typed.
Want to defeat this? Use some metal shielding around keyboard cables and connectors. Put your keyboard in a metal case, so that it's open only from the top. If someone's on your house's roof, you know what's going on. Wanna know more? Go to google and search for TEMPEST.
Slashdot Mirror
That is actually one of the rare cases where law enforcement has proven they are not technically inept. Maybe this is a sign of better things to come.
Not really, it's one of those cases where criminals get caught because they are not paranoid enough. One of the domains that received info from the botnet was registered using a real name. Another incriminating fact was they got caught connecting to the botnet directly from their own IPs. And to top it all the supposed mastermind was selling the botnet software for peanuts advertising with pricelist and everything on his web page. A paranoid hacker borrowing domains and tunnels from infected servers would not get caught so easily.
Looking at the wavelength (which is the same as bluray) there is little headroom to decrease track pitch and increase bit rate, so it is unlikely they can increase layer density by more than a very small single digit factor over bluray.
So getting to 20 times bluray capacity will require many more layers.
As the disks cannot be spinning much faster it would also be necessary to read several layers or several parallel tracks simultaneously otherwise read speed will be laughably slow compared to capacity.
Obviously, there are quite a few problems to solve. Assuming they are solvable, can they make working prototypes soon enough to get to market while 1T optical capacity still seems exciting compared to other storage and distribution technologies?
Images are just a collection of pigments or pixels, they represent history, reality, fantasy, imagination, art, depravity, tragedy, etc. In the end just an arrangement of the color spectrum. I don't understand how this could be considered illegal. I understand a fragile mind may be stirred emmotionly but often times that is the content creators goal. What's next illegal texts? Speech?
I kind of feel empathy for these people that can't view a cartoon or corpse and feel a need to retaliate or seek phsychiatric help.
Having seen some of the weirdest stuff found in computer forensics cases, I can tell you you have no idea how seeing really sick photos and videos changes even the perception of possible dimensions of sociopathy. Child pornography per example is not illegal because the photons are hitting your retina in an illegal way. It's because really sick people are torturing innocent children for the pleasure of a few other problematic people. Do you want to help them gain their weird pleasures or do you prefer to protect the children?
In the meantime, I'm curious why the "card path" of any exposed payment system would be designed such that it has internal voids where 3rd party hardware can be stashed. A mag-stripe reader is just a surface, with a few mm of electronics behind it.
That's not how they do it. They either attach a second card reader chip to the pins or wires that go to existing head or attach some nearly transparent head+electronics at some external place that's highly likely to be close to the the card stripe.
The human eye has about 6 million cones, so that's its resolution (in the sense of a digital camera): 6 megapixels. The human eye can scan a scene and the brain can detect some finer detail, but so can a camera; it doesn't change the resolution. However, since monitors and cameras count resolution differently, that 6 megapixel resolution correponds to a 2 megapixel color display screen resolution.
You get the higher figures through eye and head movement. But instead of surrounding yourself with monitors and moving your head, you can just... move and manage your windows. That way you have many gigapixels at your fingertips. The human brain is remarkably adaptable that way.
It's not that simple.
First, the resolution of the eye is much higher at the center of the retina than it is at periphery. So you need much higher resolution overall if you want to keep the same quality of the image no matter where the eyes are centered.
Second, the numbers of rods and cones vary significantly, I remember ratios of 1:4 and even up to 1:10 between people.
If you do some testing with people, you'll notice that maximum required resolution to cover the whole visual field uniformly is somewhere between 12M and 50M pixels. I'm not excluding possibility that there are a few sharp-eyed individuals which can discern more than that.
I think we shouldn't bash all Chinese here, because I've seen similar cheats of smaller magnitude from US and EU scientists too. I've seen a lot of similar fake jobs in startups pretending to innovate.
Isn't maybe the whole world getting over-competitive? Because there's so much competition you are less likely to be successful with an original contribution, so it's often a more successful strategy to bluff and imitate. As bluffers get ahead and the society notices it's even more work for the real innovators to somehow prove they are not faking it, which gives yet a little more headroom to the con-artists. So I think society would be better off by raising rewards to the real innovators and punishing cheaters more severely. It will do no good to simply bash all Chinese.
Several times, when I was highly motivated on exciting new projects I was able to code for about 120 hours for 2-3 weeks. That would be 7 days per week, 4 hours of sleep, minus mealtime, teatime and shower time. But thinking back, a lot of the code produced was crap, it was basically a joyride implementing what seemed to be a straightforward approach and enjoying a lot of incremental results.
These days I prefer to plan for 3 hours of coding a day with most of the time spent on meetings, learning, planning and a lot of contemplation about the easiest approach to implementation. It's funny that just sitting on a couch meditating about simple solutions often produced ideas that made me implement solutions in days that other programmers would take months.
So, for all the trouble of scrapping an entire industry and starting over, we'd only go from 0.50 to 0.30 nm. Not sure if thats going to be worth it. Not that graphene isn't interesting or cool, just that its unit cell isn't much smaller than Si unit cell.
It's not about scaling, the key property of graphene is greatly improved electron mobility. It also has many other interesting properties.
I do not consider anything below 8mbit "broadband" these days.
My experience on a gigabit pipe is that most downloads max out at about 4Mbit/s (500KB/s) per client. So a 5Mbit connection feels about as broadband as a gigabit connection for simple browsing and downloading. About that bitrate, graphical remote desktop also becomes acceptably responsive.
Enough nukes detonated all on one side will ablate material off the surface and produce thrust, changing the rocks orbit by a little bit. Luckily, even a minuscule change in direction will produce a significant change in position 30 years down the line.
The really interesting thing is if a rock is detected that will hit in 10-15 years. At that point, it is less likely for our current technology to be fully effective. We'd end up with a crash program that would make Apollo look like chump change. I could even imagine NASA dusting off the old Orion nuclear pulse propulsion ideas if the whole world were at stake; after all, what's a few hundred nukes being detonating in the atmosphere compared human extinction.
Actually there's a whole study somewhere on internet on how best to deal with big objects likely to hit Earth and how to use them for military purposes. The most effective method is landing a digger-thrower machine that digs material and shoots it into space, thus providing impulses to change the orbit bit by bit. Landing such a machine a few years in advance should do the trick. Apparently the whole thing is technologically way simpler than human trips to Moon.
I would gladly pay a few cents per a short video and more than a few cents for a longer one under a few conditions:
- decent video quality
- no ads except for unbiased links to related contets
- streaming server guarantees decent bandwidth to my location
- there is a "give me my money back" button (with possibly a few options for a reason) to discourage bad content
- I don't have to repay to replay a clip
A few months ago I noticed quite a serious problem with Ext3. A power outage caused an error on the primary Ext3 superblock. Ext3 driver has a problem with the specific SATA error and refuses to mount filesystem in normal mode and displays some cryptic SATA errors instead (but it does mount in recovery mode). FSCK is unable to fix the error, even when feeding it the correct offsets of superblock copies, because it gets thrown off course by the same SATA read error and it quits before even starting any work using alternative superblock copies. So a single sector error causes you quite a big problem, practically you are forced to copy the partition to fix it quickly, not to mention the time wasted to figure out what's going on.
In EU there are quite strict rules about the coloring of pills and there's a company called Sensum producing machines that use computer vision to inspect and sort all kinds of pills. I guess Biovail Corp. needs to buy a pill checking machine such as this: http://www.sensum.si/
If you read the BBC paper you will notice that they cheat a little - their MIMO system relies on two polarizations (vertical and horizontal) insted of spatial separation of the two antennas. Satellite TV has been using polarizations for a long time, though not in MIMO mode.
The correct summary would be "BBC White Paper Claims HD By Efficient Use of Existing Bandwidth".
Legal case against Andrej P. (his address blacked out), charged with criminal act of helping copyright infrigment by 1. article of 159. of some law...
...suspected of misdemeanor of helping unwarranted use of copyrighted work....
Actually a more accurate translation would be:
I went to high school some 15 years ago, and our teacher derived all the trigonometry from square equations of triangles+circles using cartesian geometry - very simple and very similar to this "new stuff". Also, doing a lot of work in graphics applying all that linear algebra, one quickly notices dot products and cross products, and rather known equations with known properties (well, at least if developing 3D graphics is your job). It's nice to rewrite basic trigonometry, but I'll have to read the other chapters to see if there's anything actually new.
A few highlights (not slashdotted yet):
the quoted speed of 160 MHz is for full SoC, the core itself was measured to run at over 200 MHz in .18
the current core is integer with provisions for FPU, vector units and coprocessors
simulation environment is available, it's functionally equivalent but not completely cycle exact
GCC backend is ported, so guess what languages are ported (they quoted C,C++,Java)
linux runs with drivers for all modules (ethernet, VGA, sound, serial, PCI, other IO)
they quoted the core without caches to take something like 0.5 mm2 in .18 process (I hope I remember that correctly), I don't remember the complete SoC die size - basically it depends on the size of caches and embedded memory
I held the chip in my hands, I asked for the price, and was quoted "around $5" - the package is nail sized and really thin
the whole design is modular - select the modules you need and get the chip plan (or whatever it's called) for production
the successor chip is already in development, they hinted at FPU (now they have only integer MAC), maybe .13 process
they showed a picture of a linux embedded PC-like board with the chip, I asked for the price quote, they said it's development board only :)
Any competitors? I'm looking for an embedded linux board with video/audio acquisition and 10/100 ethernet.
That's how a vending machine down the corridor works: type a 5-digit mobile payment number, append the cash amount digits to the number, dial and place your phone close to the vending machine mic for a few seconds. Now choose the type of drink you want prepared.
If you store the payment number as a fastdial number, it takes only 2 keypresses to pay a preset amount.
it can clone win2k partitions without any problems
it has problems cloning redhat 8.0 ext3 partitions (cloning breaks with a strange error)
it can clone anything in the sector by sector mode (the images are compressed on the fly)
it is extremely efficient in multicasting mode - it cloned to 14 machines only slightly slower than to a single machine!!
a lousy DOS packet driver can cause really strange problems (that's the driver problem, but still it does affect ghost!)
I see advantages and disadvantages with g4u:
+ you are not tied to a win32 ghost server on the LAN, you merely need a reachable FTP server
+ many many NIC drivers included
- no multicasting
Do you live in a tall building? Buy gecko socks... for safer sleepwalking.
Imagine your PVR stored all the TV shows for the last 5 years. Then during the next election, you could browse back and see what the candidates have promised and what happened later. So it's no surprise that politicians will be the first to support time-limited recording.
Obviously the usage will be limited to high security buildings, but hey, if you want to do that, you can just put metal panels in or on the walls.
Want to defeat this? Use some metal shielding around keyboard cables and connectors. Put your keyboard in a metal case, so that it's open only from the top. If someone's on your house's roof, you know what's going on. Wanna know more? Go to google and search for TEMPEST.
"Science" news reporting that "accidentially" fits Hollywood movie schedules is getting way out of control.