How many people had to die for freedom, because appearantly it only takes 3000 deaths to take it back. More people die every year of the flu, but I don't see acts of congress trying to prevent flu as serious as these. Aids will kill more people this year, but the government isn't sinking the kind of money they used to fight Afghanistan to find a cure. This isn't about American lives, it's about changing our govenment to a police state. We're going to war with Iraq for 2 reasons. #1 oil, #2 to try to keep Bush's popularity up amongst the red-necks. He's the most horrid president that the US has ever seen. Even if his policies tend to show that he wants to rid the US from dependance on oil, he has done so much to harm freedom and the economy. From his tax plan to having the DOJ pretty much drop the MS issue, he's screwed the economy to the point of practically no return. The job market is getting thinner. He has allowed or worked to create many laws that break the fundamental rights of Americans. The Patriot Act should be unconstitutional because we are given freedom from unreasonable search and seizures. Don't depend on the courts saving you though, because the whole MS issue has only taught us that they can't be trusted either.
What is it about gaming that works so well to help focus? In some places it is being used as a treatment for ADD. I know my development team was overworked badly at one point, and we still managed to get the project done on time by working 80 hour week by taking 30 minute half-life breaks every 2 hours. Actual programming time was probably only a 60h week, but I never was tired like you get after you program for that much. We had clean code that didn't need a much debugging at all.
It would be a cool study to figure out if there is any chemical/physical reason this is so. Perhaps when you play a game you are using another part of your brain that is overactive until that part is tired, while the chemicals used to fire neurons or just raw energy or even oxygen comes back to the logical reasoning parts of the brain.
It's kind of like stairing at a light that only has one color... like the old orange/green monitors... after a while, you can't see that color as bright as before. I guess as programmers, we sometimes forget that we are organic and can't work like a computer.
HAHAHA... I wished there was another hitchickers guide to the galaxy movie. But you have to admit, there is some kind of a plot to go along with those wacky characters:)
Yep... they could have shown any of the two-parter weekday episodes, and it would have been about the same quality. Just compare the movie to the borg episodes! Why did they have to get the stupidest plot ever? "Hey, let's throw some cloning into Star Trek!" What a dumb idea. Then they cut out Wil's part!?! What was he thinking? Multiplicity in space would have had a better plot.
I don't know who wrote that POS, but it was not Star Trek material. Don't axe star trek because some idiot thought it would be a good idea to clone Pickard. It's the dumbest Star Trek ever. You can get away with stupid teen movies or stupid girly movies or even stupid action movies because people don't go to see them for their intelligence. Star Trek is about people being smart. They didn't need a damn clone if they had a kick ass weapon. A doomsday weapon and a clone and a retarded robot do NOT make a plot.
I haven't even got to the ending. WTH? Data dies, the ship is nearly destroyed, and the romulans came to help??? It's a contrived and forced "Suprise" ending.
Don't make dung and call it Star Trek, and people will come see it. People haven't stopped liking star trek, star trek has stopped being star trek. It's no longer new and political. People watch Star Trek because it shows them how it is possible to achieve a good bit of a Eutopia by not being stupid (at least in the original series).
Star Trek has always been politically racy. The censors would scream at rodenberry quite often. Then he would just make the plot make fun of stupidity even more... like the half-black/half-white planet. What happened to those kinds of plots? Can you just imagine a story like that with todays technology so that it doesn't look cheesy?
It's not dead, creativity is dead. It's dieing with the creator. It's quite sad actually.
yeah... I used to have night terrors as a child. most people don't know about the condition. It's a mild night terror when it takes 10 minutes to shake it off. Some poor unlucky souls (not me) actually are a danger to themselves and anyone else. Some wake up and are running so hard that they crash through walls. An average night terror doesn't stop when you open your eyes. You hullucinate and panic for some time yet. Some of my worst ones I still can't remember. It was described to me once as me screaming and beating myself. Occasionally I would say "Get them off!" Other times that I can remember, I was afraid that a bicycle was going to fall over and hurt my dad. Once, I saw gold coins chase me and I just kept trying to run. All this occurs after you are awake usually. Some people, with more mild forms of it panic for about 10 minutes in terror when they wake up. None of it is much fun. Most people, like I did, grow out of it. If you do have them, all I can say is they are often triggered by heat or fever. If you are hot, you are much more likely to experience a night terror.
If you want to read some more about them: www.nightterrors.org is the best place.
Be sure to check their message board for some real stories of how bad they can get.
I live in the third world country known as Kentucky. I didn't believe it until I traced the green sludge of bacteria eating feces down the stream to the lake where the water is taken from. Not that it's really that bad of a thing, but in most cases, the waste is treated, but still released into the water for bateria to eat. Haven't you ever seen south park's rip off of Lion King? They just don't show you how you take water from that same river/lake, but it does happen.
Then it probably wouldn't be a good idea to tell everyone how their waste is usually dropped into a local stream/river where you get your water supply. Honestly, it's going to get back to you one way or another:)
From what I read, if at point A, you alter the state of an entangled photon, it is instantly noticed at point B. If you have a state change at all that is visible, you can send information using manchester encoding. What you don't understand I guess is that I'm not asking for a complete piece of information like the quantum state of a third particle to be transmitted. I'm only asking for a measurable change to occur.
Basically, I don't care if I know what I'm looking at, I just want to know when what I'm looking at now is different than what I was looking at just a second ago. If quantum teleportation actually does anything at all, it should cause a measurable result to occur at some distant point. Elsewise, what you are saying is that ALL the information from point A is carried to point B then applied, or that we have no means of measuring quantum states.
Has anyone measured it? Wouldn't it just shoot relativity to hell if quantem teleportation transferred information instantaneously?
For instance, I could measure exactly how fast we were moving and in what direction by measuring our time skew by synchronizing to a quantum state to measure the ammount of time it takes for a photon to travel so far. Basically, I would have an independant, third party perspective of time. You might just be able to measure the time skew by carrying a clock from point A to B, then point A recieves information from point B, and they both record the time. Either the clock traveling from point A to B was traveling faster, slower, or the same as the person from A (depends on weather the Earth is moving toward A, B, or neither). This means you could measure the discrepancy, and calculate if relativity is true, thereby proving or disproving the theory once and for all. (Though it would seriously be undermined in a lot of ways, you could prove part of it being true.) Either that, or we can patch the theory some more to make it work in another way it doesn't seem to. Einstein knew about these situations, a good study of this may help lead a little closer to a unified theory?
The only problem I could see is that you wouldn't know what you were sending, but how could quantum computers be useful if you couldn't set at least some value?
You are hitting at the heart of it now. This technology was created to allow other possibilities. You could use the TCPA chip (from what I hear) to validate the boot loader and the kernel of the OS. This means, you could make it so that a hard disk must be in a certain system in order to boot. Perhaps even load an encrypted kernel off of the device.
With this technology, perhaps we are moving ever closer to my idea of the future. I see a future where you have a smart card to log in. The computer has a built in key that it uses to validate your key with a server. Your smart card will require your private key on the machine in order to actually write the smart card (no destruction of your property). All the machine's data will be encrypted using the machines private key (not changeable without the same private key). Without the proper private key, it won't be allowed to interact with other computers. All network traffic and disk IO will use the key. You are assigned a local key (assigned by network administrator) based on an encryption challenge to your private key. That key is then encrypted with the machine's public key, your public key, then sent over the network. The machine decrypts it and hands it to your smart card. Your card decrypts it and hands it to the machine. Since the machine is in a trusted state (have to break strong encryption to get your local private key from the server), it is trusted (ALA trusted computing) to handle your key properly. Your card is the only one then that can decrypt it further, therefore, it must be you on a verified good machine. No more hacking, no more viruses, no more snooping. The US government would be PISSED if this is what they released first. So they release enough hardware to make this possible (but slow).
The TCPA chip should be able to verify that the kernel is not breeched. The kernel can then load, and proceed to decrypt the filesystem as needed. By the time this is finished, the bus signals will be encrypted and you will be using LCD. Those stray RF signals and flashy lights will even be harder to figure out. No more need of the faraday cage to prevent people from snooping. These chips probably aren't cheap enough get to put in everything (from keyboards and mice to CPU and LCD monitors) so it won't be the ultimate security system for a while to come.
Then again, we really need to have implants that work only with our brain and read quantum states to have a totally secure system. That is assuming that reading the information directly from our brains isn't possible.
Ok... I'm not that paranoid, but I am an encryption enthusiast/junkie.
I also know that this is possible without the TCPA chip. It's just a whole lot faster with it. Now all we need is smart cards to be more popular. This is where the credit card companies will likely do the trick for us. Using smart cards to sign transactions with strong encryption will save them and their customers a lot of money. VISA will have a key server, and life will be great. They are probably just working on good biometric methods of verification to ensure that the key can't be physically compromised. It's the last piece of the puzzle. Verifing the right human is holding the card that is in the machine. Well... then we have to verify that the human holding the card that is in the machine is doing so of his on free will and is in the right state of mind. A form of verification that detects and/or fails if the user is nervous?
All this and more could be yours for the low low price of 0$. Download Xolox today and enjoy online MD5 sum database verification. If Xolox detects a descrepency, you will be given the option of blacklisting the whole tree of nodes that you got the file from... before long the P2P polluting scum will be begging on the streets to borrow spare IP addresses to connect to the gnutella network. You can play/extract and test the file before you you blacklist. Of course blacklisting the host will delete your local file so that other unsuspecting users won't suffer your plite over and over.
Xolox is not affiliated with poster. Xolox(TM) Xolox Inc. May cause rectal hemoraging of RIAA. If rash appears, discontinue use and consult a lawyer.
You can use the knowledge of the DTD to better understand the document and to compress it. A standard way of converting tags from the DTD into binary codes would be trivial(DTD's would have to be versioned like the spec wants you too). You can also add indexing information(make the file bigger again) if you know that you will be running XPATH on it. Then, run it through GZIP for text in fields (other than boolean/restricted value fields that you can further compress more accurately than GZIP).
I want to have my cake and eat it too:)
The resulting standard in binary formated XML would be as human readable as a word document or PDF file. As long as you have a decent editor for it, you could do verification as you go, automatic DTD generation, and tag auto-completion/closure. Sure, IDE's can do that today, but when it is a binary format, computers can deal with it better. The gzip compression would of course have to be optional. Don't want to kill the CPU (de)compressing after trying to save some time in parsing.
Human readable formats on servers are usually there because the people writting the server had to debug the interface. The actual interface code wouldn't need to be debugged in this situation because there would be a lot of free binary libraries that do the job properly to begin with. All you have to do is the required fields or handle the exceptions you will recieve when your dtd is wrong. You can't send an invalid message in this system because it is verified before transmission. If by some chance you do, it's only because your DTD is incorrect, or DTD's won't let you limit one field based on another. Most errors in these kind of programs are not incorrect data, but incorrectly formatted data(syntax) anyhow.
Re:All this hype about XML
on
DTD vs. XML Schema
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There really needs to be a standard for compiled XML that uses a DTD to replace tags with binary references.
We would have a standard binary format of information exchange that is small and much easier to create and parse(from a performance standpoint). You can still edit the xml by hand with a decompiler, which would be a VERY trivial editor. Hell... even verification of the data would be trivial. Someone will make one to improve performance of XML-RPC some day by setting up proxies, and you will be able to achieve DSL results on a modem.
JavaLobby recently had a discussion about SUN partnering or being bought. Some wondered why MS didn't just buy SUN. Of course the FTC doesn't smile upon buying your competition, but selling IP is a different story. I think just about everyone believes that IBM is your best bet of getting Java out of SUN's hands. They've said in the past that they'ld love to have it. Even if some evil company wanted to buy Java, IBM would out-bid them.
BTW, there are plenty of open source VM's out there. What we don't have is a decent class library. SUN has sank a lot of money into that, and honestly they deserve some money for it.
Like you say though, SUN could be holding Java back now. SUN doesn't have the resources that they did going it to it. They've worked hard and for little return relatively.
As I said on JavaLobby, they could partner with Oracle and offer one hell of a deal all the way down to the hardware! Companies getting a joint solution from Oracle and SUN with specialists from each company contractable would sound very enticing to just about anyone who can afford it, don't you think?
Most of the slowness is introduced from poor design, or overly complicated designs. It will only matter as much as C vs ASM by the time everyone has a 2Ghz processor.:) I don't think you were trying to say it's an obstacle, but rather you were trying to say it is a concern. I wouldn't make a language choice based on the slowness of swing or Java (because they aren't that slow). That doesn't mean that the job is done either. When Java is more popular, 3rd parties will be selling JVM's that out perform the free standard one by leeps and bounds. When there are a lot of applications built on Java, users will pay for a better VM... they paid for Memory doubler (which didn't do anything... really... it did nothing but display fake statistics).
The mobile/embedded devices are indeed going to be the next Java win. Desktop applications won't be far behind though. I would say Webstart will become a big thing soon for companies. Imagine never having to update software on the end machines! Well... except for the OS, but chances are, that changes less than your custom software. You don't even have to install the software on the new machine... the user accesses the application right off the corperate website, but it's a rich client!
Good ole memory management... The days of security through obscurity. Most of those old programs were so cludgy that they won't even run on a fast computer. I was affectionate of them, but honestly, for the good of the world, I'm glad they are gone. If any of my old programs had encountered a string >255/65535 bytes long, it would probably have died and brought the computer down with it. VM's are the way of the future... They are the ultimate hardware abstraction. Imagine if all the software in the world was written in a scripting language or Java. X86 would have died long ago, and hardware would have compensated for the performance loss and them some.
I try not to have the "pry my hexeditor/notepad from my cold dead hand" approach to computer practice and theory. It's quite hard to be too liberal about software development. #1 The best way to do something will never be found. #2 Things change faster than you can code.
A good IDE is a neccesity. Even the notepad people have some kind of IDE... It may not be as integrated, but even a build tool + editor is an ide. It's just easier for new people to get into computer programming with an IDE. They usually have integrated help, auto-completion, and other utilities that make a 10h project a 9h project. They also let people learning to code do a little maintenance work to learn the language and style of a program without learning 4 tools (editor,builder,compiler,repository). In a good IDE, you only need to worry about the code and the editor.
In the end, programming will be done with the least possible human input. Say, you design the program, and the computer interprets the design into a machine readable format. There will always need to be someone who can work at each tier though to improve the system. Someone has to make better hardware, compiler/interpreter, OS/VM, UI. Someone out there will have to be the next generation's low-level optimization specialist or basic system OS boot-strap writer, or VM optimization person. Those skills will always be needed, but the lack of demand will cause the quality of work at these levels to deteriorate some. There is always that crazy 13y/old that can speak X86 binary like a native language though, so who knows.
Where do you think it's all going? Is there still much room/demand for low-level programmers anymore? Do you think the trend will continue? To what end?
This is an interesting trend... Now real programmers use notepad. Last time I heard this phrase, it was "real programmers use a hexeditor" or debug. When computers are voice programmed, will people be saying real programmers use a keyboard or IDE?
I've read a lot on slashdot anti-hydrogen lately, so I think it's time someone explains why. Fuel cells are to replace batteries. That means you want the most amount of energy per volume. Compressed hydrogen may very well be the best chemical source for energy per volume. Devices that are hydrogen powered can be easily recharged (assuming the water didn't escape, you only need to plug it in the wall). Hydrolysis is a practically lossless way of converting electricity into hydrogen, and is safe enough to do in your own home. The only problem with hydrogen was safe containment, but that's been accomplished cheaply by several. I don't know exactly what the process is, but it involves a "sponge" like material for hydrogen to be trapped in. If it catches fire, it only burns, not explodes(normal batteries can explode as well). The only draw back I can foresee is that most common ways of returning the hydrogen and oxygen back into water to release the energy efficiently (IE. not burning), involves platinum. Not that it requires much platinum, but I would probably bet that the electrical load supported is directly proportional to the amount that you have.
The other arguements that I've seen against it is that hydrogen has the ability to escape most containers. It doesn't escape solid metal containers, except by way of the valve. A good valve won't leak enough to make a spark.
So really... what is the real arguement against hydrogen? You could use alcohol as well, but there has been a lot more research on how to get hydrogen to give up and take electricity.
Isn't it a sad case that the Music/Movie industry is making money off our forgetfullness/inability to remember every sence. I say, if you've seen it before, you should be able to pirate it to refresh your memory... That should be fair enough use:)
I'm excited to see the end product. Cryptographic processors on all motherboards sounds to me like a great idea. I wonder how hard it will/would be to change the keys though... I hope they aren't hard-wired. Palladium is just another reason to not run windows, but TCPA could theoretically be disabled, and you can run Linux.
The only way this will improve DRM is by allowing stronger encryption of data. 2048 bit encryption will be tough to break, and with these chips in DVD players, strong encryption will be possible even for small devices. The media companies will always have the problem of "It has to get in my brain somehow, and if it does, I could store what I see with good enough technology." Because your brain doesn't have DRM, they can never really lock out illegal copying. It has to be in a human understandable format at some point in order for it to have value. The more they fight the inevitable, the sooner an illegal trust/monopoly will be out of business. Art will continue. It probably won't pay the ludicrous amounts that it does now, but it will survive as it always has.
it's completely worthless anyhow. I just take it apart and use the different parts for random things. I gave away the platters to friends (they will be damaged pretty badly, but probably recoverable). The platters are usually used for toys or coasters or decoration. It would be a headache for even me to track them down. An untrained eye can hardly distinguish them from eccentric decor. I just love to play with the motors and magnets though. I still want to use a dead IBM drive's 10K RPM motor to make one of those LED clocks. I would have the worlds loudest digital clock probably:)
Well... the hardware implementation is because there are bugs.
Java isn't crippled(not SUN Java)... there are just a lot of crippled Java developers. All the really good Java programmers are working on the server side. What you have left are the people that just got their degree, and don't have a clue. Then the UI sucks, not because of the controls or interface, but because there is noone that can both program and design a UI. LUXOR (XUL for Java) is coming along, and may help this. Then there is Webstart(less broken every day) which will get rid of the run in a box problem, as well as it asks everytime the program needs more security and is required to be signed in order to have any security. It's a neat idea that will probably make it somewhere someday.
Local certification servers will probably be a popular idea, mostly in coorperations. They will demand this once other signing is up.
I'm not talking about whitelisting sites. It's more of a require digital signatures on sites in order for them to display thing. If they have a digital signature, then even search engines could have the signatures built into the query responses. Even responses to searches could be filtered based on the signature. They could fake the signature, but a search engine that did that would be blacklisted. (definately not whitelisted)
There are a lot of sites, but this ensures that children can use the internet with parental supervision, and the end user knows with a degree of certainty that the site is authentic. Defaced sites probably wouldn't get signed. (pretty much just sign the HTML before it can be displayed, not stupid https that works on the connection instead of the content.. securing connections is stupid in comparison to securing the content. If credit cards had public keys, we sure wouldn't need https Get a public key from Visa for a Card, then with a smart card chip, you could ask the card for a verification number (signature of the biller's account number and ammount to transfer))
It may not be feasible, but I guess the crypto-geek inside me would love to see encryption and signatures in places that they may not belong:) I think cryptographic monitors that require special glasses to read would be cool, but maybe I'm just a bit too paranoid or to easily excited by encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
How many people had to die for freedom, because appearantly it only takes 3000 deaths to take it back. More people die every year of the flu, but I don't see acts of congress trying to prevent flu as serious as these. Aids will kill more people this year, but the government isn't sinking the kind of money they used to fight Afghanistan to find a cure. This isn't about American lives, it's about changing our govenment to a police state. We're going to war with Iraq for 2 reasons. #1 oil, #2 to try to keep Bush's popularity up amongst the red-necks. He's the most horrid president that the US has ever seen. Even if his policies tend to show that he wants to rid the US from dependance on oil, he has done so much to harm freedom and the economy. From his tax plan to having the DOJ pretty much drop the MS issue, he's screwed the economy to the point of practically no return. The job market is getting thinner. He has allowed or worked to create many laws that break the fundamental rights of Americans. The Patriot Act should be unconstitutional because we are given freedom from unreasonable search and seizures. Don't depend on the courts saving you though, because the whole MS issue has only taught us that they can't be trusted either.
Off topic perhaps, but:
What is it about gaming that works so well to help focus? In some places it is being used as a treatment for ADD. I know my development team was overworked badly at one point, and we still managed to get the project done on time by working 80 hour week by taking 30 minute half-life breaks every 2 hours. Actual programming time was probably only a 60h week, but I never was tired like you get after you program for that much. We had clean code that didn't need a much debugging at all.
It would be a cool study to figure out if there is any chemical/physical reason this is so. Perhaps when you play a game you are using another part of your brain that is overactive until that part is tired, while the chemicals used to fire neurons or just raw energy or even oxygen comes back to the logical reasoning parts of the brain.
It's kind of like stairing at a light that only has one color... like the old orange/green monitors... after a while, you can't see that color as bright as before. I guess as programmers, we sometimes forget that we are organic and can't work like a computer.
The ending was ruined long before I posted.
HAHAHA... I wished there was another hitchickers guide to the galaxy movie. But you have to admit, there is some kind of a plot to go along with those wacky characters :)
Yep... they could have shown any of the two-parter weekday episodes, and it would have been about the same quality. Just compare the movie to the borg episodes! Why did they have to get the stupidest plot ever? "Hey, let's throw some cloning into Star Trek!" What a dumb idea. Then they cut out Wil's part!?! What was he thinking? Multiplicity in space would have had a better plot.
I don't know who wrote that POS, but it was not Star Trek material. Don't axe star trek because some idiot thought it would be a good idea to clone Pickard. It's the dumbest Star Trek ever. You can get away with stupid teen movies or stupid girly movies or even stupid action movies because people don't go to see them for their intelligence. Star Trek is about people being smart. They didn't need a damn clone if they had a kick ass weapon. A doomsday weapon and a clone and a retarded robot do NOT make a plot.
I haven't even got to the ending. WTH? Data dies, the ship is nearly destroyed, and the romulans came to help??? It's a contrived and forced "Suprise" ending.
Don't make dung and call it Star Trek, and people will come see it. People haven't stopped liking star trek, star trek has stopped being star trek. It's no longer new and political. People watch Star Trek because it shows them how it is possible to achieve a good bit of a Eutopia by not being stupid (at least in the original series).
Star Trek has always been politically racy. The censors would scream at rodenberry quite often. Then he would just make the plot make fun of stupidity even more... like the half-black/half-white planet. What happened to those kinds of plots? Can you just imagine a story like that with todays technology so that it doesn't look cheesy?
It's not dead, creativity is dead. It's dieing with the creator. It's quite sad actually.
You have single handedly changed the results of this poll. Perl wasn't half what it is now.
yeah... I used to have night terrors as a child. most people don't know about the condition. It's a mild night terror when it takes 10 minutes to shake it off. Some poor unlucky souls (not me) actually are a danger to themselves and anyone else. Some wake up and are running so hard that they crash through walls. An average night terror doesn't stop when you open your eyes. You hullucinate and panic for some time yet. Some of my worst ones I still can't remember. It was described to me once as me screaming and beating myself. Occasionally I would say "Get them off!" Other times that I can remember, I was afraid that a bicycle was going to fall over and hurt my dad. Once, I saw gold coins chase me and I just kept trying to run. All this occurs after you are awake usually. Some people, with more mild forms of it panic for about 10 minutes in terror when they wake up. None of it is much fun. Most people, like I did, grow out of it. If you do have them, all I can say is they are often triggered by heat or fever. If you are hot, you are much more likely to experience a night terror. If you want to read some more about them: www.nightterrors.org is the best place. Be sure to check their message board for some real stories of how bad they can get.
I live in the third world country known as Kentucky. I didn't believe it until I traced the green sludge of bacteria eating feces down the stream to the lake where the water is taken from. Not that it's really that bad of a thing, but in most cases, the waste is treated, but still released into the water for bateria to eat. Haven't you ever seen south park's rip off of Lion King? They just don't show you how you take water from that same river/lake, but it does happen.
You do know the IQ of a crowd is min(IQ)/N right?
Then it probably wouldn't be a good idea to tell everyone how their waste is usually dropped into a local stream/river where you get your water supply. Honestly, it's going to get back to you one way or another :)
From what I read, if at point A, you alter the state of an entangled photon, it is instantly noticed at point B. If you have a state change at all that is visible, you can send information using manchester encoding. What you don't understand I guess is that I'm not asking for a complete piece of information like the quantum state of a third particle to be transmitted. I'm only asking for a measurable change to occur.
Basically, I don't care if I know what I'm looking at, I just want to know when what I'm looking at now is different than what I was looking at just a second ago. If quantum teleportation actually does anything at all, it should cause a measurable result to occur at some distant point. Elsewise, what you are saying is that ALL the information from point A is carried to point B then applied, or that we have no means of measuring quantum states.
Has anyone measured it? Wouldn't it just shoot relativity to hell if quantem teleportation transferred information instantaneously?
For instance, I could measure exactly how fast we were moving and in what direction by measuring our time skew by synchronizing to a quantum state to measure the ammount of time it takes for a photon to travel so far. Basically, I would have an independant, third party perspective of time. You might just be able to measure the time skew by carrying a clock from point A to B, then point A recieves information from point B, and they both record the time. Either the clock traveling from point A to B was traveling faster, slower, or the same as the person from A (depends on weather the Earth is moving toward A, B, or neither). This means you could measure the discrepancy, and calculate if relativity is true, thereby proving or disproving the theory once and for all. (Though it would seriously be undermined in a lot of ways, you could prove part of it being true.) Either that, or we can patch the theory some more to make it work in another way it doesn't seem to. Einstein knew about these situations, a good study of this may help lead a little closer to a unified theory?
The only problem I could see is that you wouldn't know what you were sending, but how could quantum computers be useful if you couldn't set at least some value?
You are hitting at the heart of it now. This technology was created to allow other possibilities. You could use the TCPA chip (from what I hear) to validate the boot loader and the kernel of the OS. This means, you could make it so that a hard disk must be in a certain system in order to boot. Perhaps even load an encrypted kernel off of the device.
With this technology, perhaps we are moving ever closer to my idea of the future. I see a future where you have a smart card to log in. The computer has a built in key that it uses to validate your key with a server. Your smart card will require your private key on the machine in order to actually write the smart card (no destruction of your property). All the machine's data will be encrypted using the machines private key (not changeable without the same private key). Without the proper private key, it won't be allowed to interact with other computers. All network traffic and disk IO will use the key. You are assigned a local key (assigned by network administrator) based on an encryption challenge to your private key. That key is then encrypted with the machine's public key, your public key, then sent over the network. The machine decrypts it and hands it to your smart card. Your card decrypts it and hands it to the machine. Since the machine is in a trusted state (have to break strong encryption to get your local private key from the server), it is trusted (ALA trusted computing) to handle your key properly. Your card is the only one then that can decrypt it further, therefore, it must be you on a verified good machine. No more hacking, no more viruses, no more snooping. The US government would be PISSED if this is what they released first. So they release enough hardware to make this possible (but slow).
The TCPA chip should be able to verify that the kernel is not breeched. The kernel can then load, and proceed to decrypt the filesystem as needed. By the time this is finished, the bus signals will be encrypted and you will be using LCD. Those stray RF signals and flashy lights will even be harder to figure out. No more need of the faraday cage to prevent people from snooping. These chips probably aren't cheap enough get to put in everything (from keyboards and mice to CPU and LCD monitors) so it won't be the ultimate security system for a while to come.
Then again, we really need to have implants that work only with our brain and read quantum states to have a totally secure system. That is assuming that reading the information directly from our brains isn't possible.
Ok... I'm not that paranoid, but I am an encryption enthusiast/junkie.
I also know that this is possible without the TCPA chip. It's just a whole lot faster with it. Now all we need is smart cards to be more popular. This is where the credit card companies will likely do the trick for us. Using smart cards to sign transactions with strong encryption will save them and their customers a lot of money. VISA will have a key server, and life will be great. They are probably just working on good biometric methods of verification to ensure that the key can't be physically compromised. It's the last piece of the puzzle. Verifing the right human is holding the card that is in the machine. Well... then we have to verify that the human holding the card that is in the machine is doing so of his on free will and is in the right state of mind. A form of verification that detects and/or fails if the user is nervous?
All this and more could be yours for the low low price of 0$. Download Xolox today and enjoy online MD5 sum database verification. If Xolox detects a descrepency, you will be given the option of blacklisting the whole tree of nodes that you got the file from... before long the P2P polluting scum will be begging on the streets to borrow spare IP addresses to connect to the gnutella network. You can play/extract and test the file before you you blacklist. Of course blacklisting the host will delete your local file so that other unsuspecting users won't suffer your plite over and over.
Xolox is not affiliated with poster. Xolox(TM) Xolox Inc. May cause rectal hemoraging of RIAA. If rash appears, discontinue use and consult a lawyer.
You can use the knowledge of the DTD to better understand the document and to compress it. A standard way of converting tags from the DTD into binary codes would be trivial(DTD's would have to be versioned like the spec wants you too). You can also add indexing information(make the file bigger again) if you know that you will be running XPATH on it. Then, run it through GZIP for text in fields (other than boolean/restricted value fields that you can further compress more accurately than GZIP).
:)
I want to have my cake and eat it too
The resulting standard in binary formated XML would be as human readable as a word document or PDF file. As long as you have a decent editor for it, you could do verification as you go, automatic DTD generation, and tag auto-completion/closure. Sure, IDE's can do that today, but when it is a binary format, computers can deal with it better. The gzip compression would of course have to be optional. Don't want to kill the CPU (de)compressing after trying to save some time in parsing.
Human readable formats on servers are usually there because the people writting the server had to debug the interface. The actual interface code wouldn't need to be debugged in this situation because there would be a lot of free binary libraries that do the job properly to begin with. All you have to do is the required fields or handle the exceptions you will recieve when your dtd is wrong. You can't send an invalid message in this system because it is verified before transmission. If by some chance you do, it's only because your DTD is incorrect, or DTD's won't let you limit one field based on another. Most errors in these kind of programs are not incorrect data, but incorrectly formatted data(syntax) anyhow.
There really needs to be a standard for compiled XML that uses a DTD to replace tags with binary references.
We would have a standard binary format of information exchange that is small and much easier to create and parse(from a performance standpoint). You can still edit the xml by hand with a decompiler, which would be a VERY trivial editor. Hell... even verification of the data would be trivial. Someone will make one to improve performance of XML-RPC some day by setting up proxies, and you will be able to achieve DSL results on a modem.
JavaLobby recently had a discussion about SUN partnering or being bought. Some wondered why MS didn't just buy SUN. Of course the FTC doesn't smile upon buying your competition, but selling IP is a different story. I think just about everyone believes that IBM is your best bet of getting Java out of SUN's hands. They've said in the past that they'ld love to have it. Even if some evil company wanted to buy Java, IBM would out-bid them.
BTW, there are plenty of open source VM's out there. What we don't have is a decent class library. SUN has sank a lot of money into that, and honestly they deserve some money for it.
Like you say though, SUN could be holding Java back now. SUN doesn't have the resources that they did going it to it. They've worked hard and for little return relatively.
As I said on JavaLobby, they could partner with Oracle and offer one hell of a deal all the way down to the hardware! Companies getting a joint solution from Oracle and SUN with specialists from each company contractable would sound very enticing to just about anyone who can afford it, don't you think?
Most of the slowness is introduced from poor design, or overly complicated designs. It will only matter as much as C vs ASM by the time everyone has a 2Ghz processor. :) I don't think you were trying to say it's an obstacle, but rather you were trying to say it is a concern. I wouldn't make a language choice based on the slowness of swing or Java (because they aren't that slow). That doesn't mean that the job is done either. When Java is more popular, 3rd parties will be selling JVM's that out perform the free standard one by leeps and bounds. When there are a lot of applications built on Java, users will pay for a better VM... they paid for Memory doubler (which didn't do anything... really... it did nothing but display fake statistics).
The mobile/embedded devices are indeed going to be the next Java win. Desktop applications won't be far behind though. I would say Webstart will become a big thing soon for companies. Imagine never having to update software on the end machines! Well... except for the OS, but chances are, that changes less than your custom software. You don't even have to install the software on the new machine... the user accesses the application right off the corperate website, but it's a rich client!
I would guess 1%.
Good ole memory management... The days of security through obscurity. Most of those old programs were so cludgy that they won't even run on a fast computer. I was affectionate of them, but honestly, for the good of the world, I'm glad they are gone. If any of my old programs had encountered a string >255/65535 bytes long, it would probably have died and brought the computer down with it. VM's are the way of the future... They are the ultimate hardware abstraction. Imagine if all the software in the world was written in a scripting language or Java. X86 would have died long ago, and hardware would have compensated for the performance loss and them some.
I try not to have the "pry my hexeditor/notepad from my cold dead hand" approach to computer practice and theory. It's quite hard to be too liberal about software development. #1 The best way to do something will never be found. #2 Things change faster than you can code.
A good IDE is a neccesity. Even the notepad people have some kind of IDE... It may not be as integrated, but even a build tool + editor is an ide. It's just easier for new people to get into computer programming with an IDE. They usually have integrated help, auto-completion, and other utilities that make a 10h project a 9h project. They also let people learning to code do a little maintenance work to learn the language and style of a program without learning 4 tools (editor,builder,compiler,repository). In a good IDE, you only need to worry about the code and the editor.
In the end, programming will be done with the least possible human input. Say, you design the program, and the computer interprets the design into a machine readable format. There will always need to be someone who can work at each tier though to improve the system. Someone has to make better hardware, compiler/interpreter, OS/VM, UI. Someone out there will have to be the next generation's low-level optimization specialist or basic system OS boot-strap writer, or VM optimization person. Those skills will always be needed, but the lack of demand will cause the quality of work at these levels to deteriorate some. There is always that crazy 13y/old that can speak X86 binary like a native language though, so who knows.
Where do you think it's all going? Is there still much room/demand for low-level programmers anymore? Do you think the trend will continue? To what end?
This is an interesting trend... Now real programmers use notepad. Last time I heard this phrase, it was "real programmers use a hexeditor" or debug. When computers are voice programmed, will people be saying real programmers use a keyboard or IDE?
I've read a lot on slashdot anti-hydrogen lately, so I think it's time someone explains why. Fuel cells are to replace batteries. That means you want the most amount of energy per volume. Compressed hydrogen may very well be the best chemical source for energy per volume. Devices that are hydrogen powered can be easily recharged (assuming the water didn't escape, you only need to plug it in the wall). Hydrolysis is a practically lossless way of converting electricity into hydrogen, and is safe enough to do in your own home. The only problem with hydrogen was safe containment, but that's been accomplished cheaply by several. I don't know exactly what the process is, but it involves a "sponge" like material for hydrogen to be trapped in. If it catches fire, it only burns, not explodes(normal batteries can explode as well). The only draw back I can foresee is that most common ways of returning the hydrogen and oxygen back into water to release the energy efficiently (IE. not burning), involves platinum. Not that it requires much platinum, but I would probably bet that the electrical load supported is directly proportional to the amount that you have.
The other arguements that I've seen against it is that hydrogen has the ability to escape most containers. It doesn't escape solid metal containers, except by way of the valve. A good valve won't leak enough to make a spark.
So really... what is the real arguement against hydrogen? You could use alcohol as well, but there has been a lot more research on how to get hydrogen to give up and take electricity.
Unless you count forgetfullness as DRM...
:)
Isn't it a sad case that the Music/Movie industry is making money off our forgetfullness/inability to remember every sence. I say, if you've seen it before, you should be able to pirate it to refresh your memory... That should be fair enough use
I'm excited to see the end product. Cryptographic processors on all motherboards sounds to me like a great idea. I wonder how hard it will/would be to change the keys though... I hope they aren't hard-wired. Palladium is just another reason to not run windows, but TCPA could theoretically be disabled, and you can run Linux.
The only way this will improve DRM is by allowing stronger encryption of data. 2048 bit encryption will be tough to break, and with these chips in DVD players, strong encryption will be possible even for small devices. The media companies will always have the problem of "It has to get in my brain somehow, and if it does, I could store what I see with good enough technology." Because your brain doesn't have DRM, they can never really lock out illegal copying. It has to be in a human understandable format at some point in order for it to have value. The more they fight the inevitable, the sooner an illegal trust/monopoly will be out of business. Art will continue. It probably won't pay the ludicrous amounts that it does now, but it will survive as it always has.
it's completely worthless anyhow. I just take it apart and use the different parts for random things. I gave away the platters to friends (they will be damaged pretty badly, but probably recoverable). The platters are usually used for toys or coasters or decoration. It would be a headache for even me to track them down. An untrained eye can hardly distinguish them from eccentric decor. I just love to play with the motors and magnets though. I still want to use a dead IBM drive's 10K RPM motor to make one of those LED clocks. I would have the worlds loudest digital clock probably :)
Well... the hardware implementation is because there are bugs.
:) I think cryptographic monitors that require special glasses to read would be cool, but maybe I'm just a bit too paranoid or to easily excited by encryption.
Java isn't crippled(not SUN Java)... there are just a lot of crippled Java developers. All the really good Java programmers are working on the server side. What you have left are the people that just got their degree, and don't have a clue. Then the UI sucks, not because of the controls or interface, but because there is noone that can both program and design a UI. LUXOR (XUL for Java) is coming along, and may help this. Then there is Webstart(less broken every day) which will get rid of the run in a box problem, as well as it asks everytime the program needs more security and is required to be signed in order to have any security. It's a neat idea that will probably make it somewhere someday.
Local certification servers will probably be a popular idea, mostly in coorperations. They will demand this once other signing is up.
I'm not talking about whitelisting sites. It's more of a require digital signatures on sites in order for them to display thing. If they have a digital signature, then even search engines could have the signatures built into the query responses. Even responses to searches could be filtered based on the signature. They could fake the signature, but a search engine that did that would be blacklisted. (definately not whitelisted)
There are a lot of sites, but this ensures that children can use the internet with parental supervision, and the end user knows with a degree of certainty that the site is authentic. Defaced sites probably wouldn't get signed. (pretty much just sign the HTML before it can be displayed, not stupid https that works on the connection instead of the content.. securing connections is stupid in comparison to securing the content. If credit cards had public keys, we sure wouldn't need https Get a public key from Visa for a Card, then with a smart card chip, you could ask the card for a verification number (signature of the biller's account number and ammount to transfer))
It may not be feasible, but I guess the crypto-geek inside me would love to see encryption and signatures in places that they may not belong