I think there are things like directional antennas, reflection off of the ground and atmosphere, etc, that can make it a little less simple than the inverse square law.
Even directional antennae are subject to the inverse square law. Columnated beams of energy like lasers dissipate at near-zero rates in short distances, because the columnation approximates a distant source, but once you get away from local effects, it's still a 1/x^2 problem.
The point is that, regardless of local approximations or atmosheric effects on a particular trial, the concept of power/distance as a constant across all distances is deeply flawed.
The difference here is that while substituting Centigrade for Celsius or calling something a speedometer instead of a veloimeter is just a semantic difference, the units of 'watts per mile' are misleading by their nature not by their terminology.
A more accurate analogy would be saying that because one person radiates heat at 98.6 degrees F, five people in a room radiate heat at 493 degrees. The 'fact' itself is wrong, and leads laypeople (and some ACs, apparently) the believe that all you need to create a fusion reactor is to put 100,000 people in a stadium and hook the urinals to a steam generator.
'Miles per watt' is a stupid, meaningless metric. Since watts dissipate by the inverse square law, it's completely false to say that (for example) a an efficiency of 0.001 watts at one mile equates to 1 watt at 1000 miles.
If I wanted to break this 'record' I would simply replicate the experiemnt from a distance of 273 miles (half the distance) where I could pick up the signal with 1/4th the required signal strength (inverse square law) and suddenly I have a 'record' of 26,935,960 miles per watt! Heck, if we put the transmitter on the same circuit board as the receiver I could create an 'efficiency' that would let me contact quasars with a hamster wheel.
Either VisitorVille responds to slashdotting by saying it doesn't have data, or some companies were *really* fast with their privacy injunctions.
Re:Comprehensive interviews are very important.
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
Read the book Moneyball. It's a powerful look into the myth of 'A players' and baseball, and it applies in so many other areas.
What it comes down to is that if a team of 'A players' isn't performing as well as other teams then the metrics that define an 'A player' aren't the right ones.
With all the comments investigating the validity of Google's interview process, not many people are wondering whether Google is using different 'A player' metrics than everyone else. Instead slashdotters guess 'which metric' Google uses (intelligence, cleverness, personality, education) and leave it at that. It's easier to do this because it's easy to pick at someone who relies on one -- or even all four -- of these metrics as their 'A player' criteria.
The prime vunerability here (not that they're kind enough to tell you) is that the trusted site opens a popup window with a known name (in this case, Citibank opens a window named 'spoofing'). The malicious page keeps checking for the existence of a window with this name and if it exists, the malicious code stuffs their own url in there instead.
One way to fix this would be to only let a popup be modified or accessed by code that originated from the same domain as the code that opened the popup int e first place.
Another way for site-owners to protect their sites is to either spawn all new popups with a name of '_new' or, if your site needs to access that popup repeatedly after it's created, to generate a random number on the server side, set a cookie on the client's browser, and use that cookie value as the window name. Whenever you need to access the window again, grab the cookie value that only code from your own domain will have access to.
The vulnerability here is that the attacker knows Citibank 'names' that popup "spoofing". If the attacker doesn't know the name of the popup, then the exploit doesn't work.
The article states that the factory where the glass is made is also the largest user of the glass:
The factory is now the world's largest single PV module plant, producing 100 megawatts of energy annually.
A megawatt isn't a unit of energy, it's a rate of transfer. Do they mean that it produces a continuous flow of 100 megawatts? If so, they would have to have 604 acres of glass (2.4 million of their 1m^2 panels). Of course you need to double that number because they're only collecting power half the day (generously assuming they're at peak output during all daylight hours)
On the other hand, if they're talking about generating 100 megawatt hours over the course of a year, then the plant is generating about 11,000 watts, or enough for about 10 average homes. By those numbers they'd have about 600 panels. That's a lot more reasonable.
It seems to me that Google in this case is only presenting that it's true that someone put these things on the web, rather than the truth of the actual things they say.
Saying "John said Bob is a liar" isn't slander if it can be proven, in fact, that John did say Bob is a liar.
This is my own opinion, and I don't represent it to be that of any other person or organization.
Everyone's been posting Jim Louderback's premonition of TiVo's death like it's the Gospel, and so I feel compelled to tell you exactly why Jim (a reporter who's been naysaying the TiVo for years) is wrong, and that punchy three-word headlines don't equate to a balanced market analysis.
The simple reason TiVo will live is because TV is intimate. People want ownership of their experience, and they want ownership of the resulting media. This is exactly the opposite of what cable and satellite companies want.
Of course TiVo as a standalone appliance will fade away as Decoder-PVRs become common, but they'll grow into three other markets: The referenced cable/satellite set-top boxes, DVD-R burning hybrids, and as an integrated component of television sets. Two of these hybrids are already on the market (DirecTiVo and two different DVDiVos) and the third, Toshiba and Phillips TVs with integrated free 'tivo lite' will be here by Christmas.
Saying that Cable-PVRs will squash TiVo is like saying that cable squashed the VCR, when in reality it made it much stronger. For all the benefits that a cable PVR has (that it seems cheaper because the cost is built into your monthly charge), there's no content provider in the world who would ship a device that would record to DVD, and no network that would deign to be included in a service that did.
Recording to a DVD isn't as easy as recording to a tape, and this is where an integrated 'export this show to that disc' solution really shines. If you're going to buy a DVD anyhow, the incremental cost of adding PVR functionality is a gimmie. And yes, within the next 4 years it will be an incremental cost.
TiVo is source independent. Cable, satellite, bunny ears or closed-circuit TV, TiVo is your box. As each content provider has their own proprietary system, if you change providers, you have to change systems, a shift as big as switching from Mac to Windows. Oh yeah, and your shows are gone, too. It's content lock-in, and it's one of the big reasons Dish Networks wants you to use their box, so leaving their fold is more painful, even when they suddenly drop CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon because of a contract dispute.
As long as content providers carry copyrighted material on their networds, they'll be hobbled by the demands of organizations like the MPAA and Viacom who will use all the leverage they have to inhibit the end user's ability to export to any portable digital media. Standalone PVRs and in-TV PVRs are farther outside their control, and as that control is flexed, PVR customers will flock to these options.
TiVo-in-TV, which Sony plans to market later this year, is another gimmie. It will provide a free 3-day window to the future, with an inexpensive up-sell to season pass functionality. The TV-TiVo-DVR box is probably about 24 months away.
Jim's main point is that TiVo will fail because the costs of enteing the market and delivering product are dropping rapidly, but this is likely why they'll succeed. TiVo will never be a Yahoo or other conglomorate, but they will become a platform standard with a steady revenue stream. When prices fall uniformly, users flock to the best solution, not the cheapest. Getting PVRs into peoples hands cheaply, on the backs of other products is exactly why the market will succeed, and when the market succeeds, TiVo will likely be at the top of it, based on product quality.
True, you won't have to buy a $299 box for your parents to bring them the light, but when you see the glow in their eyes, talking about the magic recording TV they bought at Best Buy last month, you can bet it'll have a little guy with two antennae and no arms stickered onto the remote.
I think the point of this is that you wouldn't NEED to type the TLD. They want to make this TLD the default search domain on mobile devices.
So, for example, http://google/ would take you to google.mobile on a cell phone.
That's terrible1 yo umean every domain owner out there would have to buy mydomain.mobile to make sure nobody else squats it and sucks their mobile visitors? This is teh suck.
The point of the Darpa project is to advance technology for driverless military vehicles, primarily for convoy work. To my mind, creating a computer system to quickly plan out routes based on intelligence is an important part of a practical solution.
Not only does it more accurately reflect the technology's intended use-case in the military field (convoy operators would lilely be given a general route a couple hours before a mission, instead of simply told, 'get it to this point and leave right now') but it also means that more of the technology is outside the vehicle.
A cost-effective solution would need to have as cheap a vehicle as possible. While a fully autonomous system might be nice for a science fiction 'technology run amok' film, in reality it's more effective to have sparse mobile systems with an ops center capable of planning routes for several vehicles.
It also costs less when one goes 'wheels up' or is captured by the enemy.
"If the majority of people don't obey a law, should that law even exist?"
If people could revoke a law by majority violation, would we pay taxes? Have copyright? The American Disabilities Act?
"I would also like to point out that there are two sides to this honor system, and if one side isn't playing fair, why should we."
The 'other side' offers a product, and they can choose what form and under what license to offer that product. If you don't like it, don't buy that product. By your comment I gather that you think it's okay to make copies of DVDs for your friends, or do you mean something else by 'not playing fair'?
"The people who make money infringe on copyrights are houses that produce DVDs by the thousands."
Yeah, but the people who lose money are the people who would otherwise sell their product.
I'm no fan of major labels, the RIAA, or the MPAA, but if and when smaller labels make their comeback through online distribution, they'll be the ones who are hurt by flagrant copying, and no matter how piusly we can say 'we won't copy the little label's music or movies, just the big-label basters who rape their artists' I don't believe that the day we remove copyright law is the day we stop needing it.
"...the popular DVD X Copy software, which allows consumers to make backup copies of DVD movies. Strike one for fair use."
Actually, it allows consumers to copy DVDs. If it only allowed backup copies, there wouldn't have been a lawsuit.
It's nice to stand on a soapbox of innocence, but I don't thikn anyone here is naive enough to truly believe that only a tiny majority of DVD X Copy made copies of their DVDs and passed the copies or originals on to friends or ebay.
It's not striking one for fair use when the courts come down against an honor-system solution that isn't being honored.
Ideally, the courts would have added that movie studios must proffer an exchange program for damaged or destroyed media, so backups aren't necessary. Even better would be if we bought the rights to a movie in whatever format, instead of just buying ownership of a piece of plastic, but that's a whole other discussion.
If Inktomi Paid Inclusion has no impact on your ranking, then why do you pay for it? I've looked at your site (I assume you're talking about subcultural.com) and it doesn't look like the info on your pages updates daily, so what do you pay Inktomi for?
If you stop writing checks to Inktomi, and as a result your rank goes down, then you are paying for rank.
Oh and your link is about Inktomi's syndicated search, not Yahoo's hybrid. Yahoo's search results are demonstrably different than stock Inktomi results, so again I ask if you have evidence that Yahoo doesn't boost for paid inclusion?
So then the only reason to spend $25/page/year is to make sure your content is current?
I don't buy it. Please provide evidence from Yahoo's site. If PPI doesn't raise your rank, there would be copy somewhere on Yahoo's site saying that their web results are unbiased.
Please find it and show us, instead of pretending that terse sentences equate to insider fact.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there are things like directional antennas, reflection off of the ground and atmosphere, etc, that can make it a little less simple than the inverse square law.
Even directional antennae are subject to the inverse square law. Columnated beams of energy like lasers dissipate at near-zero rates in short distances, because the columnation approximates a distant source, but once you get away from local effects, it's still a 1/x^2 problem.
The point is that, regardless of local approximations or atmosheric effects on a particular trial, the concept of power/distance as a constant across all distances is deeply flawed.
The difference here is that while substituting Centigrade for Celsius or calling something a speedometer instead of a veloimeter is just a semantic difference, the units of 'watts per mile' are misleading by their nature not by their terminology.
A more accurate analogy would be saying that because one person radiates heat at 98.6 degrees F, five people in a room radiate heat at 493 degrees. The 'fact' itself is wrong, and leads laypeople (and some ACs, apparently) the believe that all you need to create a fusion reactor is to put 100,000 people in a stadium and hook the urinals to a steam generator.
'Miles per watt' is a stupid, meaningless metric. Since watts dissipate by the inverse square law, it's completely false to say that (for example) a an efficiency of 0.001 watts at one mile equates to 1 watt at 1000 miles.
If I wanted to break this 'record' I would simply replicate the experiemnt from a distance of 273 miles (half the distance) where I could pick up the signal with 1/4th the required signal strength (inverse square law) and suddenly I have a 'record' of 26,935,960 miles per watt! Heck, if we put the transmitter on the same circuit board as the receiver I could create an 'efficiency' that would let me contact quasars with a hamster wheel.
Bah.
Either VisitorVille responds to slashdotting by saying it doesn't have data, or some companies were *really* fast with their privacy injunctions.
Read the book Moneyball. It's a powerful look into the myth of 'A players' and baseball, and it applies in so many other areas.
What it comes down to is that if a team of 'A players' isn't performing as well as other teams then the metrics that define an 'A player' aren't the right ones.
With all the comments investigating the validity of Google's interview process, not many people are wondering whether Google is using different 'A player' metrics than everyone else. Instead slashdotters guess 'which metric' Google uses (intelligence, cleverness, personality, education) and leave it at that. It's easier to do this because it's easy to pick at someone who relies on one -- or even all four -- of these metrics as their 'A player' criteria.
The prime vunerability here (not that they're kind enough to tell you) is that the trusted site opens a popup window with a known name (in this case, Citibank opens a window named 'spoofing'). The malicious page keeps checking for the existence of a window with this name and if it exists, the malicious code stuffs their own url in there instead.
One way to fix this would be to only let a popup be modified or accessed by code that originated from the same domain as the code that opened the popup int e first place.
Another way for site-owners to protect their sites is to either spawn all new popups with a name of '_new' or, if your site needs to access that popup repeatedly after it's created, to generate a random number on the server side, set a cookie on the client's browser, and use that cookie value as the window name. Whenever you need to access the window again, grab the cookie value that only code from your own domain will have access to.
The vulnerability here is that the attacker knows Citibank 'names' that popup "spoofing". If the attacker doesn't know the name of the popup, then the exploit doesn't work.
That they put google up there as the number one search result is not that surprising. What gets me is they have themselves at number four.
Not anymore. They apparently hand-edited their own company out of the results about an hour ago.
So the laser from Real Genius is okay, since it's a non-nuclear weapon of unary destruction?
The article states that the factory where the glass is made is also the largest user of the glass:
The factory is now the world's largest single PV module plant, producing 100 megawatts of energy annually.
A megawatt isn't a unit of energy, it's a rate of transfer. Do they mean that it produces a continuous flow of 100 megawatts? If so, they would have to have 604 acres of glass (2.4 million of their 1m^2 panels). Of course you need to double that number because they're only collecting power half the day (generously assuming they're at peak output during all daylight hours)
On the other hand, if they're talking about generating 100 megawatt hours over the course of a year, then the plant is generating about 11,000 watts, or enough for about 10 average homes. By those numbers they'd have about 600 panels. That's a lot more reasonable.
Good call. Also, the picture looks a like a photoshopped Newton 2100.
Imagine a beowulf cluster...
I'd hope the average salary is over $100... ;-)
Gmail doesn't block attachments other than executables (like the 30 .pif viruses you get every day).
Non-executables (zip, jpg, doc, html, gif, pdf, etc.) are accepted just fine, and the per-message limit is 10 megs.
Response
I have a Gmail account, but then I helped build the thing.
No, current users aren't under an NDA.
It seems to me that Google in this case is only presenting that it's true that someone put these things on the web, rather than the truth of the actual things they say.
Saying "John said Bob is a liar" isn't slander if it can be proven, in fact, that John did say Bob is a liar.
This is my own opinion, and I don't represent it to be that of any other person or organization.
Everyone's been posting Jim Louderback's premonition of TiVo's death like it's the Gospel, and so I feel compelled to tell you exactly why Jim (a reporter who's been naysaying the TiVo for years) is wrong, and that punchy three-word headlines don't equate to a balanced market analysis.
The simple reason TiVo will live is because TV is intimate. People want ownership of their experience, and they want ownership of the resulting media. This is exactly the opposite of what cable and satellite companies want.
Of course TiVo as a standalone appliance will fade away as Decoder-PVRs become common, but they'll grow into three other markets: The referenced cable/satellite set-top boxes, DVD-R burning hybrids, and as an integrated component of television sets. Two of these hybrids are already on the market (DirecTiVo and two different DVDiVos) and the third, Toshiba and Phillips TVs with integrated free 'tivo lite' will be here by Christmas.
Saying that Cable-PVRs will squash TiVo is like saying that cable squashed the VCR, when in reality it made it much stronger. For all the benefits that a cable PVR has (that it seems cheaper because the cost is built into your monthly charge), there's no content provider in the world who would ship a device that would record to DVD, and no network that would deign to be included in a service that did.
Recording to a DVD isn't as easy as recording to a tape, and this is where an integrated 'export this show to that disc' solution really shines. If you're going to buy a DVD anyhow, the incremental cost of adding PVR functionality is a gimmie. And yes, within the next 4 years it will be an incremental cost.
TiVo is source independent. Cable, satellite, bunny ears or closed-circuit TV, TiVo is your box. As each content provider has their own proprietary system, if you change providers, you have to change systems, a shift as big as switching from Mac to Windows. Oh yeah, and your shows are gone, too. It's content lock-in, and it's one of the big reasons Dish Networks wants you to use their box, so leaving their fold is more painful, even when they suddenly drop CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon because of a contract dispute.
As long as content providers carry copyrighted material on their networds, they'll be hobbled by the demands of organizations like the MPAA and Viacom who will use all the leverage they have to inhibit the end user's ability to export to any portable digital media. Standalone PVRs and in-TV PVRs are farther outside their control, and as that control is flexed, PVR customers will flock to these options.
TiVo-in-TV, which Sony plans to market later this year, is another gimmie. It will provide a free 3-day window to the future, with an inexpensive up-sell to season pass functionality. The TV-TiVo-DVR box is probably about 24 months away.
Jim's main point is that TiVo will fail because the costs of enteing the market and delivering product are dropping rapidly, but this is likely why they'll succeed. TiVo will never be a Yahoo or other conglomorate, but they will become a platform standard with a steady revenue stream. When prices fall uniformly, users flock to the best solution, not the cheapest. Getting PVRs into peoples hands cheaply, on the backs of other products is exactly why the market will succeed, and when the market succeeds, TiVo will likely be at the top of it, based on product quality.
True, you won't have to buy a $299 box for your parents to bring them the light, but when you see the glow in their eyes, talking about the magic recording TV they bought at Best Buy last month, you can bet it'll have a little guy with two antennae and no arms stickered onto the remote.
Finally, are you ever going to update the Cameo project on your website?
Would you believe I'm actually working on it again? Anotehr couple months, probably.
I think the point of this is that you wouldn't NEED to type the TLD. They want to make this TLD the default search domain on mobile devices.
So, for example, http://google/ would take you to google.mobile on a cell phone.
That's terrible1 yo umean every domain owner out there would have to buy mydomain.mobile to make sure nobody else squats it and sucks their mobile visitors? This is teh suck.
The point of the Darpa project is to advance technology for driverless military vehicles, primarily for convoy work. To my mind, creating a computer system to quickly plan out routes based on intelligence is an important part of a practical solution.
Not only does it more accurately reflect the technology's intended use-case in the military field (convoy operators would lilely be given a general route a couple hours before a mission, instead of simply told, 'get it to this point and leave right now') but it also means that more of the technology is outside the vehicle.
A cost-effective solution would need to have as cheap a vehicle as possible. While a fully autonomous system might be nice for a science fiction 'technology run amok' film, in reality it's more effective to have sparse mobile systems with an ops center capable of planning routes for several vehicles.
It also costs less when one goes 'wheels up' or is captured by the enemy.
What's more, this thread is the first result! At least their spider is fast.
"If the majority of people don't obey a law, should that law even exist?"
If people could revoke a law by majority violation, would we pay taxes? Have copyright? The American Disabilities Act?
"I would also like to point out that there are two sides to this honor system, and if one side isn't playing fair, why should we."
The 'other side' offers a product, and they can choose what form and under what license to offer that product. If you don't like it, don't buy that product. By your comment I gather that you think it's okay to make copies of DVDs for your friends, or do you mean something else by 'not playing fair'?
"The people who make money infringe on copyrights are houses that produce DVDs by the thousands."
Yeah, but the people who lose money are the people who would otherwise sell their product.
I'm no fan of major labels, the RIAA, or the MPAA, but if and when smaller labels make their comeback through online distribution, they'll be the ones who are hurt by flagrant copying, and no matter how piusly we can say 'we won't copy the little label's music or movies, just the big-label basters who rape their artists' I don't believe that the day we remove copyright law is the day we stop needing it.
"...the popular DVD X Copy software, which allows consumers to make backup copies of DVD movies. Strike one for fair use."
Actually, it allows consumers to copy DVDs. If it only allowed backup copies, there wouldn't have been a lawsuit.
It's nice to stand on a soapbox of innocence, but I don't thikn anyone here is naive enough to truly believe that only a tiny majority of DVD X Copy made copies of their DVDs and passed the copies or originals on to friends or ebay.
It's not striking one for fair use when the courts come down against an honor-system solution that isn't being honored.
Ideally, the courts would have added that movie studios must proffer an exchange program for damaged or destroyed media, so backups aren't necessary. Even better would be if we bought the rights to a movie in whatever format, instead of just buying ownership of a piece of plastic, but that's a whole other discussion.
If Inktomi Paid Inclusion has no impact on your ranking, then why do you pay for it? I've looked at your site (I assume you're talking about subcultural.com) and it doesn't look like the info on your pages updates daily, so what do you pay Inktomi for?
If you stop writing checks to Inktomi, and as a result your rank goes down, then you are paying for rank.
Oh and your link is about Inktomi's syndicated search, not Yahoo's hybrid. Yahoo's search results are demonstrably different than stock Inktomi results, so again I ask if you have evidence that Yahoo doesn't boost for paid inclusion?
Thanks!
"PFI doesn't raise your rank - period."
So then the only reason to spend $25/page/year is to make sure your content is current?
I don't buy it. Please provide evidence from Yahoo's site. If PPI doesn't raise your rank, there would be copy somewhere on Yahoo's site saying that their web results are unbiased.
Please find it and show us, instead of pretending that terse sentences equate to insider fact.