I can see it now, the pilot is operating this airplane at a comfortable 5 meters above sea level, going about 400 meters/sec. Then he looks through his 2 meter thick double paned glass cockpit window, and his seat designed for the average 70cm man.
All the time, he wonders when NASA will learn to convert to and from the English and SI system.
I would just like to announce that I have just recieved a patent on finger-operated input devices, but I've decided to make it Freeware, so if you are reading this message, please send me a postcard and a 5 pound brick. I'll pay the postage. Here's my address:
General Information Services Division
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Crystal Plaza 3, Room 2C02
Washington, DC 20231
Or you can call and say hello. I love getting threatening and perverted phone calls:
Its partially the language C that causes these problems because C has no bound checking on its arrays which can lead to bad situations with buffer overruns and such.
Yes, its the programmer's responsibility in the end to write secure code, but despite its speed and portability, C is sortof a poor choice as far as security goes, and C++ is only marginally better, because it depends so much on how a person decides to write their C++ code.
So, in other words, this person who at least was a criminal is now starting a business, using his reputation for doing shady things as his resume. Don't get me wrong, I am more or less a dualist when it comes to the old time "hacker" mentality that existed before the Linux explosion, but I think that part of the reason OSS doesn't get taken as seriously as it should is because a large part of the community tries to justify the activities of a group that is motivated towards crime.
At any rate, I am happy to see that this talented individual is using his talents in a positive way, and I hope he succeeds in this endeavor.
What does everyone else think? Is the "hacker" image of the OSS community hurting it?
Another great idea from the open source community, in my opinion. Something like this has been waiting to happen, and I don't know about other people, but for me, getting a good way to some of these web programming things has been a real hinderance to me finding time to learn it. Hopefully, this will open the door to people with less resources, both financially and knowledge-wise. Now just if mozilla could get their mailer working right...:)
Well, its sorta like a baby. After a while, a young kernel grows up and stops being cute. If your little 3 month old 2.4 angel dumps its core all over your kitchen floor, you probably won't be too angry, but if your teenage rebellious 2.4 does it, you're probably going to kick its ass.
This sounds like a very interesting idea, but it also makes me wonder about the computational resources a system like this would require, as well as the complexity of the grammar that represents it.
As it stands now (or previously... in ipchains), rules were defined in a way that could be reduced to a regular expression, which as everyone knows are fast and don't require a stack to interpret.
However, as soon as you introduce "state" into a grammar, you require of yourself a stack, which means that additional memory is going to be needed to store these values to aid in parsing the grammar.
This doesn't sound too bad, even though it may slow the process of packet interpretation, but it seems like there still would be a signifigant performance hit on busy servers.
Also, since these rules have state, I wonder if there will be ways send packets that will cause something similar to a stack overflow (infinite recursion) by sending it a quasi-infite series of packets.
(Imaging sending a C++ compiler the following..
[I can't send what I want, a string of open parens, so this will have to suffice./. lameness filter]
String= (*
Eventually there will be a stack overflow from all the parens.
nobody seems to be reading this article, but just in case, I have some comments on this...
Your O(n^2)(which should be O(n) as pointed out in another reply) limitation is only on space as you state. However, the O(2^n) growth rate is a limitation on time. Thus, if you double the area of the plate, you can make roughly twice as many arms but with only one more time step, not twice as many time steps.
An interesting point, although I still don't exactly see how the things could grow exponentially at all without some kind of motion to move the "center" nanobots.
In a sense, its like having localized depletion of resources. The oldest bots would be surrounded by younger bots, and I don't see how this is avoidable, even given the complex geometry of these plates.
My contention remains that localized "starvation" of these bots would limit their growth rate to polynomial time. (Which aint bad)
In fact, it is O (n). To easily visualize this, imagine the system in 1D for a moment. After the first unit assembles its nearest neighbors, each additional unit builds the next unit at the end of the line of units. This leads to a constant rate of growth. In 2D, the rate of growth is determined by the rate of change of the area, not length, which leads to O (n). In 3D, the rate of growth is determined by the rate of change of the volume, which leads to O (n^2). The result in each case is easy to visualize : it is limited by the boundary of the N-D volume the units have already filled.
Yes! You are right! However I would like to save face and say that something that is O(n) is also O(n^2)... heh, technically. The boundary of a square is 1-D and a surface of a region in 3-space is 2-D... I see your point.. It's worse than I expected.
newly built units were "mixed" randomly into the grid. This could be the case if each unit could be assigned to move some random distance under its own power, after each building cycle. Eventually, however, the exponential rate of growth will turn over when the system's capacity is reached.
Wouldn't the fact that the systems had to move limit the process? After all, moving takes time, and the amount that they would have to move would be going up on the at least the same order as the size of the region.
what i want to know is,...does each arm have the knowledge - independant of each other or something else - of how to complete it's job.
I imagine so. Knowledge can be represented in numerous ways. certainly mechanical knowledge is a good example of this. like a can opener may have the "knowledge" of how to open a can, mechanically at least.
They have a potential for O(n^2) growth - if you can move them away fast enough. Bots building replicas inside a blender might achieve that for a while. Bots on a surface is limited to (n^2), or possibly (n^2.x) if the surface is fractal. Bots turning a planet into goo will be limited to (n^3)...
Okay, I can see arguing the blender idea, beacuse one could say that it would be a limitation of the size of the blender that limted production, given enough random motion, but it seems that even this is sorta deceptive because of the lmiitations of 3-space.
The blender, as it mixes is after all going to increase in nanobot density which means there will be a amount of stuff around it, and mixing of an infinite blender doesn't really make much sense, because how would a particle get from one edge of an infinite blender to the other?
You assume that they use a 2-D surface. To remedy this problem, all they need to do is not use a 2-D surface or use a 2-D surface and when the arm is built, it get's transfered to a new location away from where it was built. An assembly line has always been an efficient way to manufacture products. Perhaps the robots would create assembly lines as they were created. Then in a 2-D space they would be able to obtain an exponential growth rate.
Well, all that would do is make it a O(n^3) limitation, which would still be polynomial and not exponential growth....
Also, the act of transfering the arm is going to be at least a O(n) process which would also limit production. since there are three dimensions in which to move, this limitation would also be o(n^3) in nature. picture things moving away from each other at a constant rate but getting bigger at a rate of S=n^3. They would eventually overlap and consume each other.
Okay, picture a 2-D surface upon which these parts are laid. Now there is one arm in the middle of this. Let's say that each arm produces another arm in t=1. Now there are 2 arms, then 4, etc... Hence the O(2^n) sorta growth rate.
Here is my question. Assuming the arms are stationary, it is reasonable to assume that they can only build an arm adjacent to itself (and if they move, moving would be a O(n) process).... This means that for any grid area n^2, there are(n+2)^2 adjacent squares.
Because of this fact, I don't see how these things can achieve any more than a O(n^2) growth rate, because the adjacent resources available to these bots would be O(n^2).
Anyone know how these buggers get around this limitation?
I think what the world really needs is an obfuscated DeCSS T-Shirt contest. That way, the MPAA will be too stupid to figure out what it does. Now, I guess the question, what language is easier to obfuscate?
Perl, Lisp, or C? (Or maybe all three!)
Then again, maybe some sed scripts would be sufficiently arcane.
Any takers?
Re:Of all the silly things to get worked up over..
on
ACLU Takes on ICANN
·
· Score: 1
Are you kidding? The ACLU has been behind quite a few of important movements and court decisions in the past.
If you don't think that TLDs are important, I suggest you, one, read the article, and two, think for a moment about the money wrapped up in things like registering domain names.
It may not be what you are thinking about ATM but I assure you, it is important.
Not everyone loves the ACLU, but give them some credit. At times, they have been one of the only organizations to stand behind the ideals of protection of human rights.
I am getting sick of the things going on today in the tech sector. It seems that everywhere I look, people are trying to use convenience to take our rights away.
There is only one body that can prevent such a thing from happening, and its not the government. It's the people; frankly, most people don't care. They would rather watch their movies in Digital Surround Sound and Digital Image Quality in trade for their rights of fair use then boycott the whole damn thing and demand better from these companies.
Whatever the court decision, this issue in a broader sense is not going away, and WON'T ever, and its going to keep on getting worse as people keep on selling their rights away for comfortable living. Does it remind you a little bit of something, like perhaps the fall of Rome?
But isn't posting this document right on/. illegal, if not just inappropriate? I don't work for these companies, or anything, and I am not sure where this document came from, but it seems to me that something like this would be better off referred to indirectly than posted for everyone to see, considering that it is in fact a stolen document.
Um, no one will read this, I imagine, since there are 380 messages as of now, but I would like to comment anyways:
OS/2 ? IBM screwed themselves with OS/2 when they decided not to support it at ALL, and stop writing drivers for it, and basically let it decompose when they had a userbase that was just about as big as linux was back in the early '95-'97 era. My dad was a die hard OS/2 WARP user, until he finally gave up because IBM just didn't give a crap about it anymore.
I agree with your points mostly, however I think that there is a more important factor to consider when thinking about game design in a Linux system, and you touched on it when you mentioned adherance to standards.
It is true that sometimes adhering to standards is free, performance-wise; that going along with the "flow" and adopting other's formats and methods into your own only helps the performance and usability of your platform. However, in gaming I think that a system that adopts standards too strictly will be too restrictive for the gaming environment.
After all, games usually use cutting edge, sometimes proprietary and soemtimes secret technology to perform well in a specific environment. Because of that, typically the less standards that a gaming programmer is required to follow, the better, because the game design can be customized for the specific needs of the game.. Think about all of those future crew demos written in inline ASM using watcom C/C++.
And, right now, with the variance among linux distros and everything else, It is already very hard to push towards a linux system where all kinds of standards are adhered to for portability reasons. I think that gaming on linux is the wrong way to go about developing it, and may cause more trouble than anything else.
Don't get me wrong, if people want to work on it, they can, but I would rather see the "Linuces" consolidate their differences and keep adopting more community-wide standards. Right now Linux is poised in a position to make a huge ass dent in M$ on a server/networking perspective.
Let microsoft spend all of that money on keeping up with the different proprietary standards involved in supporting different games and gamer-specific hardware.
I find it mildly interesting that when things like open source and software piracy get discussed, there is a large group of people that come out syaing things like, "information should be free" et al, but when something like this happens, no one is cheering. Encryption technology is an interesting example; a lot of people were happy to see that get let out, even if that technology could be used against us (people who had it) in a war situation. What makes these nuclear secrets any different? What makes them possible to control whereas other information is characterized by a need to spread to anyone who has the desire to find it?
Perhaps this is the wrong forum to bring this up, but is the world ready for information to be free, and if not, where do we draw the line?
First, locate the underwater cable running to Hawaii. Use the wirecutters to strip to pierce the shielding and strip the end of your CAT5. Use the electrical tape to splice into the cable. Use the crimper to put an end on the CAT5. Now you can sail anywhere within ~300 miles of your splice. For longer distances, use a longer cable.
Actually, it is alot easier than this, because seawater is an excellent conductor. All you really need to do is leave your phone line dipped in the ocean before you leave, and plug into the Pacific on the other side. But watch out for Aqua-Boxers; they might use your phone to set up a party line while they are on cruise.
Slashdot Mirror
All the time, he wonders when NASA will learn to convert to and from the English and SI system.
General Information Services Division
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Crystal Plaza 3, Room 2C02
Washington, DC 20231
Or you can call and say hello. I love getting threatening and perverted phone calls:
1-800-786-9199
Yes, its the programmer's responsibility in the end to write secure code, but despite its speed and portability, C is sortof a poor choice as far as security goes, and C++ is only marginally better, because it depends so much on how a person decides to write their C++ code.
Just my two cents.
At any rate, I am happy to see that this talented individual is using his talents in a positive way, and I hope he succeeds in this endeavor.
What does everyone else think? Is the "hacker" image of the OSS community hurting it?
Another great idea from the open source community, in my opinion. Something like this has been waiting to happen, and I don't know about other people, but for me, getting a good way to some of these web programming things has been a real hinderance to me finding time to learn it. Hopefully, this will open the door to people with less resources, both financially and knowledge-wise. Now just if mozilla could get their mailer working right... :)
Something like that.
As it stands now (or previously... in ipchains), rules were defined in a way that could be reduced to a regular expression, which as everyone knows are fast and don't require a stack to interpret.
However, as soon as you introduce "state" into a grammar, you require of yourself a stack, which means that additional memory is going to be needed to store these values to aid in parsing the grammar.
This doesn't sound too bad, even though it may slow the process of packet interpretation, but it seems like there still would be a signifigant performance hit on busy servers.
Also, since these rules have state, I wonder if there will be ways send packets that will cause something similar to a stack overflow (infinite recursion) by sending it a quasi-infite series of packets.
(Imaging sending a C++ compiler the following ..
[I can't send what I want, a string of open parens, so this will have to suffice. /. lameness filter]
String= (*
Eventually there will be a stack overflow from all the parens.
Your O(n^2)(which should be O(n) as pointed out in another reply) limitation is only on space as you state. However, the O(2^n) growth rate is a limitation on time. Thus, if you double the area of the plate, you can make roughly twice as many arms but with only one more time step, not twice as many time steps.
An interesting point, although I still don't exactly see how the things could grow exponentially at all without some kind of motion to move the "center" nanobots.
In a sense, its like having localized depletion of resources. The oldest bots would be surrounded by younger bots, and I don't see how this is avoidable, even given the complex geometry of these plates.
My contention remains that localized "starvation" of these bots would limit their growth rate to polynomial time. (Which aint bad)
Yes! You are right! However I would like to save face and say that something that is O(n) is also O(n^2)... heh, technically. The boundary of a square is 1-D and a surface of a region in 3-space is 2-D... I see your point.. It's worse than I expected.
newly built units were "mixed" randomly into the grid. This could be the case if each unit could be assigned to move some random distance under its own power, after each building cycle. Eventually, however, the exponential rate of growth will turn over when the system's capacity is reached.
Wouldn't the fact that the systems had to move limit the process? After all, moving takes time, and the amount that they would have to move would be going up on the at least the same order as the size of the region.
what i want to know is, ...does each arm have the knowledge - independant of each other or something else - of how to complete it's job.
I imagine so. Knowledge can be represented in numerous ways. certainly mechanical knowledge is a good example of this. like a can opener may have the "knowledge" of how to open a can, mechanically at least.
Okay, I can see arguing the blender idea, beacuse one could say that it would be a limitation of the size of the blender that limted production, given enough random motion, but it seems that even this is sorta deceptive because of the lmiitations of 3-space.
The blender, as it mixes is after all going to increase in nanobot density which means there will be a amount of stuff around it, and mixing of an infinite blender doesn't really make much sense, because how would a particle get from one edge of an infinite blender to the other?
Well, all that would do is make it a O(n^3) limitation, which would still be polynomial and not exponential growth....
Also, the act of transfering the arm is going to be at least a O(n) process which would also limit production. since there are three dimensions in which to move, this limitation would also be o(n^3) in nature. picture things moving away from each other at a constant rate but getting bigger at a rate of S=n^3. They would eventually overlap and consume each other.
Here is my question. Assuming the arms are stationary, it is reasonable to assume that they can only build an arm adjacent to itself (and if they move, moving would be a O(n) process).... This means that for any grid area n^2, there are(n+2)^2 adjacent squares.
Because of this fact, I don't see how these things can achieve any more than a O(n^2) growth rate, because the adjacent resources available to these bots would be O(n^2).
Anyone know how these buggers get around this limitation?
Or maybe GLinux,GEnlightenment, or Gnubbles...
Perl, Lisp, or C? (Or maybe all three!)
Then again, maybe some sed scripts would be sufficiently arcane.
Any takers?
If you don't think that TLDs are important, I suggest you, one, read the article, and two, think for a moment about the money wrapped up in things like registering domain names.
It may not be what you are thinking about ATM but I assure you, it is important.
Not everyone loves the ACLU, but give them some credit. At times, they have been one of the only organizations to stand behind the ideals of protection of human rights.
There is only one body that can prevent such a thing from happening, and its not the government. It's the people; frankly, most people don't care. They would rather watch their movies in Digital Surround Sound and Digital Image Quality in trade for their rights of fair use then boycott the whole damn thing and demand better from these companies.
Whatever the court decision, this issue in a broader sense is not going away, and WON'T ever, and its going to keep on getting worse as people keep on selling their rights away for comfortable living. Does it remind you a little bit of something, like perhaps the fall of Rome?
Ah well. It was good while it lasted.
But isn't posting this document right on /. illegal, if not just inappropriate? I don't work for these companies, or anything, and I am not sure where this document came from, but it seems to me that something like this would be better off referred to indirectly than posted for everyone to see, considering that it is in fact a stolen document.
OS/2 ? IBM screwed themselves with OS/2 when they decided not to support it at ALL, and stop writing drivers for it, and basically let it decompose when they had a userbase that was just about as big as linux was back in the early '95-'97 era. My dad was a die hard OS/2 WARP user, until he finally gave up because IBM just didn't give a crap about it anymore.
It is true that sometimes adhering to standards is free, performance-wise; that going along with the "flow" and adopting other's formats and methods into your own only helps the performance and usability of your platform. However, in gaming I think that a system that adopts standards too strictly will be too restrictive for the gaming environment.
After all, games usually use cutting edge, sometimes proprietary and soemtimes secret technology to perform well in a specific environment. Because of that, typically the less standards that a gaming programmer is required to follow, the better, because the game design can be customized for the specific needs of the game.. Think about all of those future crew demos written in inline ASM using watcom C/C++.
And, right now, with the variance among linux distros and everything else, It is already very hard to push towards a linux system where all kinds of standards are adhered to for portability reasons. I think that gaming on linux is the wrong way to go about developing it, and may cause more trouble than anything else.
Don't get me wrong, if people want to work on it, they can, but I would rather see the "Linuces" consolidate their differences and keep adopting more community-wide standards. Right now Linux is poised in a position to make a huge ass dent in M$ on a server/networking perspective.
Let microsoft spend all of that money on keeping up with the different proprietary standards involved in supporting different games and gamer-specific hardware.
Great, now I finally have something to add to my ( furby | cabbage patch doll | tickle-me elmo | beanie baby | pokemon card ) collection!
Such as H.D. Thoreau... (not the unabomber)
Perhaps this is the wrong forum to bring this up, but is the world ready for information to be free, and if not, where do we draw the line?
_winter_fantom_
Actually, it is alot easier than this, because seawater is an excellent conductor. All you really need to do is leave your phone line dipped in the ocean before you leave, and plug into the Pacific on the other side. But watch out for Aqua-Boxers; they might use your phone to set up a party line while they are on cruise.