"Major power outages in the United States over the past decade have a recurring theme--the lack of wide-area situational understanding," says Tom King, manager of electric transmission and distribution technologies for ORNL's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Program. (emphasis added)
As a follow-up, I hear they are planning a "Wide-Area Situational Understanding Program", aka WASUP!:)
These isotopes, Caesium-137 and Strontium-90, permeated the earth's oil and plant life and ended up in works of art made in the post-war era because natural oils, usually flax/linseed, were used as binding agents for paints.
"I wanted to find something ironclad - that couldn't be disputed, and this led me to approach scientists for ideas," said Basner.
Off the top of my head, here are some ideas:
Use paints made before atomic testing began (if you'd ever seen my dad's garage, you'd KNOW there's old stuff out there)
Grow your own flax in a controlled environment (i.e. hydroponics; filled with pure Oxygen, Nitrogen, etc. in proper proportions; start with a vacuum if necessary) extract your oils from that.
Create false positives by "tagging" genuine works in museums with controlled radiation sources.
Other? Please reply with your ideas.
Yes, these are not terribly practical, but if someone could get millions of dollars for a few high-quality fakes, this would just be the cost of doing business.
So, in summary, her assertion "ironclad - that couldn't be disputed" seems overstated. I'll grant that it IS an additional hurdle to overcome, but sufficiently motivated people WILL find a way.
Look on page 3 of that PDF, where there is "Table 1. Global IP Traffic 2006-2012".
A quick scan of the values do show a doubling of volume looking 2 years out from any given year... but there are exceptions to that. The comparison of traffic from 2010 to 2012 mostly does not show a doubling, AND, in a couple places, the data comparing 2009 to 2011 does not double, either.
Lastly, the final row of that table predicts "Total IP traffic (PB per month)":
2006: 4,234
2007: 6,577
2008: 10,747
2009: 16,296
2010: 24,228
2011: 32,983
2012: 43,518
Twice the volume of 2010, i.e. 24,228 would be 48,456 which is less than 43,518. So, though not quite doubled in one case listed there, to say that it would double every two years would be incorrect. And we'd be all over that if they had claimed it to be. IMHO, to say 'double' is a reasonable way to express this concept.
It really depends on the judges idea of obvious. You could write a very simple program to XOR each pixel in the rectangle with a randomly defined constant so the data and display would look scrambled. However it's fairly well known that XOR'ing pixels a second time with the same value will unscramble it.
Using XOR was my first thought, as well. As you say, it's relatively well-known that XOR is reversible. What is less well-known, or more plausibly deniable, is a convoluted logical expression that evaluates the same as an XOR, but it composed of more primitive operators:
Exclusive disjunction - Equivalencies, elimination, and introduction, to wit:
NOTE: I'm using:
"+" to denote "inclusive or"
"*" to denote "and"
"^" to denote "not"
p XOR q
= (p * ^q) + (^p * q)
= (p + q) * (^p + ^q)
= (p + q) * ^(p * q)
At this point, you could use a simple nested conditional, or, even better, a nested conditional assignment statement, ala:
For bonus points, wrap the preceding inside a function or macro definition.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." -- C. A. R. Hoare
(NOTE: I'm a little rusty on my C, so please ignore syntax errors.)
In tests on example conversations, the software correctly identified phrases with an average accuracy of about 50%. But that jumped to 90% for longer, more complicated words.
Wright thinks these phrases may be the most important. "I think the attack is much more of a threat to calls with some sort of professional jargon where you have lots of big words that string together to make long, relatively predictable phrases," he says. "Informal conversational speech would be tougher because it's so much more random."
So, ummm, what we should do to, umm, well, protect ourselves from, ummm, yaknow, eavesdroppers, heh-heh, is well, make sure there's enough, ummmmmmm, yaknow, like extra noise, like, mixed in, dude.
Balancing offense with defense. Though I understand the need to be able to respond to a cyber-threat, I am interested in your plans to improve the existing military, commercial, and civilian infrastructure to prevent and/or lessen the damage that could be caused by cyberwarfare. (eg SELinux.)
What do you see as your role in continuing and supporting the development of such technology to protect all of us from cyber threats?
Technology vs people. And a follow-on: technological solutions, however well-developed or implemented, are not sufficient protection. The best lock in the world is little protection against those who make and distribute duplicate keys to that lock. E.g., those people who paste a sticky note to their monitor which has a list of IDs and passwords.
What are your thoughts and plans to address the human element in these developments?
... you'll have to keep your mirror looking up, at all times. So you either place it on the pole, in which case it will be looking at the same place for a very, very long time (until precession slowly moves it around). This is good for doing very deep fields, but hasn't much use otherwise since if there's nothing interesting to look at there, you're stuck there anyways.
Or you can place it anywhere else than the pole, but then you're never gonna look at a given object for more than a couple seconds.
A couple of thoughts on this...
First off, I'm reminded of the Lunar Lawn Mower which was proposed as
a way to fuse lunar regolith using microwaves. I'll come back to that, later.
Arecibo: As for the mirror being immobile, What about the 305m-diameter Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico?
Instead of moving the mirror, they move the receiver's location WRT to the mirror, to wit:
it is a spherical reflector (as opposed to a parabolic reflector). This form is due to the method used to aim the telescope: the telescope's dish is fixed in place, but the receiver at its focal point is repositioned to intercept signals reflected from different directions by the spherical dish surface. The receiver is located on a 900-ton platform which is suspended 150 m (500 ft) in the air above the dish by 18 cables running from three reinforced concrete towers, one of which is 110 m (365 ft) high and the other two of which are 80 m (265 ft) high (the tops of the three towers are at the same elevation). The platform has a 93 m long rotating bow-shaped track called the azimuth arm on which receiving antennas, secondary and tertiary reflectors are mounted. This allows the telescope to observe any region of the sky within a forty degree cone of visibility about the local zenith (between -1 and 38 degrees of declination). Puerto Rico's location near the equator allows Arecibo to view all of the planets in the solar system, though the round trip light time to objects beyond Saturn is longer than the time the telescope can track it, preventing radar observations of more distant objects.
Granted, that would then entail creating and operating machinery to move the receiver. That requires power and equipment to construct it as well as operate it. OTOH, nothing says it has to be a 305m dish like Arecibo, or 50m as mentioned in TFA; I'm sure a single 5m or 10m dish, could provide much useful science to start off with.
Array of scopes: As the skills and techniques are developed to construct and operate, say, one 10m telescope on the moon are developed, an array of these could be constructed. Some would aim at the same point overhead so as to provide a larger apparent aperture. Others could point at nearby points overhead so that, as an object under investigation sweeps out of view from one scope, it would already be in view of the next one. This would permit longer-term continuous observation of an object. Then, as more scopes are constructed, one could get both increased apparent aperture AND longer-term observation.
Because gravity on the moon is 1/6th that of the earth, it would take much less infrastructure to support the receiver. This, in turn, suggests less power would be required to move the receiver, too.
Lunar Lawn Mower: This was proposed by Larry Taylor, Distinguished Professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Tennessee. It was discussed here a while ago: (Slashdot | Lunar 'Lawnmower' Devised for Moon Colonists).
"I'm one of those weird people who like to stick things in ordinary kitchen microwave ovens to see what happens," Taylor confessed to several hundred scientists at the Lunar Exploration Advisory Group (LEAG) conference at NASA's Johnson S
I'm clicking on your link, but nothing is happening. Am I doing it wrong?
I click the link and it DOES bring up the page.
Hi, sorry, I was teasing you. You pasted a URL, but did not make it a link.
Do you perhaps have a linkifier? Because, not everyone does.
HEY! Thanks for that! I just recently stopped making an explicit link in posts here because they seemed to
automagically turn into a link anyway.
I just figured it was some/. feature.
No idea how long it'd take for me to discover it was my
linkificationFirefoxaddon
unless you had pointed it out! Thanks again!
I'm clicking on your link, but nothing is happening. Am I doing it wrong?
I click the link and it DOES bring up the page. Unfortunately, since it is a cached copy of the page, it is sometimes out of date. I.e., there have been updates to the actual page that are not reflected in what the Coral Cache copy displays.:/
As of this writing (Monday morning, 06/02/08), it appears that ThePlanet Datacenter folks have created a NEW STATUS PAGE to lessen the load on their servers:
Kudos to them for their timely updates as to system status. Having their status page listed on/. doesn't help them much, but I
was encouraged to see a Coral Cache link to their status page. In that light, here's:
a link to the Coral Cache lofiversion of their status page:
The second article contains a slide-show of various illusions [CC] [GC] and why the brain interprets them as it does.
Maybe I missed something, but I found the second article to be a let-down.
(Warning for epileptics: if visual stimuli can set off a seizure for you, you should probably stay away from the following links. I am not susceptible, but I found the second link to be visually overwhelming at first.)
Icahn is an idiot if he believes that a) Yahoo and MS can merge peacefully, and b) Yahoo brings anything other than a brand to MS. MS doesn't want anything other than Yahoo email users, Yahoo portal users and Yahoo search engine users. Note to MS: users come and go. You tried it before with various other web companies, and it didn't work then. It won't work now.
I think you are on the right track, but I'd posit MS does not want just the USERS; they are as muc, if not more, interested in the DATA.
Targeted ads are more effective so Google, Yahoo, etc. can charge advertisers more for each one. Microsoft wants some of that income stream. They've tried to build their internet presence but have stumbled so far (e.g. look what happened with HotMail.)
Sure, Microsoft would prefer to have the users stay on board with Yahoo, (they need to put the ads in front of *someone*), but I think they are ultimately looking for more data upon which they can decide which ads to post to which users. So, to employ a classic/. meme, Microsoft:
Buy Yahoo!
Data-mine address-lists, e-mails, IMs, etc.
Target Ads
...
Profit!
P.S. early morning rambling with insufficient coffee - interpret accordingly.:^)
I think the (only real) benefit is the ability to get away from card-shaped items and allow key-fobs and the like. Technically, the RFID chip could be put in a ring, bracelet, or on a key chain, etc...
So, if I swing my key chain containing my RFID credit card fobs in the vicinity of the checkout reader... how do I make it scan my American Express(r) card fob instead of my Visa(r) card fob instead of my... ???!!!?
It's not uncommon to see someone open their wallet to reveal a dozen or more credit cards. Besides the majors (Amex, Visa, MC, Discover) there were several more store credit cards and/or gas cards, etc. So what is such a customer going to do... remove the fob they want to use from their key ring, swing THAT fob near the reader, and then reattach it to their key ring? And THAT is supposed to speed things up how? Or, more likely, they'll try and make the desired fob stick out from the others and try and wave that one at the reader... OOPS! It scanned the wrong card. Can you ring that up again, please?
Or, attempting to be helpful, the pin pad displays "We noticed you are carrying the following credit cards; please click on the one you want to use for this transaction." Privacy advocates would just LOVE that one.:/
So, please tell me again what the advantage of having an RFID chip in my credit card(s) is? Given the choice, I'd much prefer sliding my mag stripe through the slot.
Back in 1979 (IIRC), a college classmate and I discovered that our TI-55 calculators would put out a blast of noise on the AM dial whenever something was written to the LED display! We tuned a nearby radio to the most effective frequency and started exploring.
Imagine our excitement when we discovered there was a different delay between bursts depending on how many LED segments were lit up! (That is, it took longer to display 88888888 than 11111111). Hey! We can make Music!! Frustratingly, we were limited to a 32 step program, so many promising attempts fell short because we needed a few more steps to complete the beat. Still, we came up with a dozen or so different rhythms and had a heck of a time doing it!
</graybeardmode>
I'm sure we weren't the only ones to discover this phenomenon... I'd love to hear from others about their experiences.
Great to hear the news that you're going to be upgrading the tech that supports this site./. has been a daily part of my life for well-nigh 10 years. Having seen many changes over the years, I'm especially interested in what will be supporting the site when you finish with the upgrade... so,
PLEASE update the FAQ - Tech page? ("Last Modified: 6/13/00")
Thanks in advance and please accept my gratitude for (the often thankless job of) keeping this site running so well.
For those who are advocating that an anti-bot be released (or whatever you want to call it) so as to disable this pest, I have a question for you: how is someone going to be able to tell the difference between these:
1.) A user who creates and releases an anti-bot, but through an error (design, programming, whatever) inadvertently causes "harm" to the system.
2.) A user who creates and releases an anti-bot that appears to try to block the worm, but is in fact designed to cause "harm" to the system.
Recall that the Morris worm was not intended to bring down the internet:
According to its creator, the Morris worm was not written to cause damage, but to gauge the size of the Internet. An unintended consequence of the code, however, caused it to be more damaging: a computer could be infected multiple times and each additional process would slow the machine down, eventually to the point of being unusable.
AND
The critical error that transformed the worm from a potentially harmless intellectual exercise into a virulent denial of service attack was in the spreading mechanism. The worm could have determined whether or not to invade a new computer by asking if there was already a copy running. But just doing this would have made it trivially easy to kill; everyone could just run a process that would answer "yes" when asked if there was already a copy, and the worm would stay away. The defense against this was inspired by Michael Rabin's mantra, "Randomization." To compensate for this possibility, Morris directed the worm to copy itself even if the response is "yes", 1 out of 7 times [3]. This level of replication proved excessive and the worm spread rapidly, infecting some computers multiple times. Rabin remarked when he heard of the mistake, that he "should have tried it on a simulator first."
See also A Tour of the Worm for a more detailed account of how it unfolded.
The intention may have been good, but the implementation had an unintended consequence that led to a major disruption of the internet. I remember full well the confusion at the time as the details unfolded. I was working at a major computer manufacturer that dropped its connection to the net to protect itself. Ultimately, none of our systems were hit (wrong OS), but the sheer volume of packets on the net led, effectively, to a DDOS'ing of the uninfected systems, too.
So, in a nutshell, how can one objectively tell the difference between an attempt to kill the worm that causes problems, and an attempt to cause problems that looks like it is trying to kill the worm? In a non-static environment. With our limited ability to write bullet-proof, error-free code. Besides, someone else could capture and re-purpose the good code to cause more problems.
The titles may conjure images of blitzkrieg, but the games themselves are actually a surprisingly clever and occasionally surreal blend of education, humor and intellectual challenge, aimed at teaching the player how to think. (emphasis added)
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum! (*)
* I think I think, therefore I think I am!
But seriously, I'm curious as to what part of these games is aimed at improving cognitive skills versus indoctrination? i.e. the difference between "how to THINK" versus "HOW to think."
I'm not so concerned about the technical issues as I am of the social issues.
I'm reminded of the problems that arose when "The War of the Worlds" was broadcast on the radio and some people thought it was real. That was audio. Then, IIRC, there was a scene in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" where the moon colony made up a video of a leader announcing something, but it wasn't real (sorry about the lack of details - I read it a LONG time ago - I'm sure someone here can elaborate/clarify).
Yes, there are still some technological hurdles to overcome in both hardware and software, but at some point I believe it will be possible to generate a scene that is, for all intents, indistinguishable from reality. Then what?
* Imagine a video of a government leader caught in a "compromising position". It doesn't have to be ultra-high resolution, either. Just good enough for youtube.
* Imagine a video that purports to be from a security camera that shows you breaking into a facility and wreaking havoc. And you were never there. How do you defend yourself?
* Imagine the difficulties in a court of law when all audio, photo, and video evidence is suspect.
* Imagine a group that is in power (be it government, industry, or whatever), what they'd be willing to do to stay (grow) in power, and what they could do with this.
The geek in me can't wait for the day for us to have this power. The human in me fears for the day it comes.
Clocking different parts of a chip with separate completely independent clocks is a bad idea, because then different parts of the chip are in different clock domains. This causes metastability problems when the drifting clocks periodically align to violate the timing constraints of the other side of the circuit. Then you need synchronizing circuits, which add delays and don't guarantee anything (the more you wait, the more you reduce your chance of failure, but there is always a chance).
Thanks for the explanation; I think I see what you're saying. Bad Things can happen when things get out of sync. But I'm having trouble reconciling this with how, for example, a GPU doesn't run (generally) at the same clock as the CPU, and yet they (seem to) get along just fine.
I grok software a lot better than hardware, so please bear with me. Let's say I've got two chips. Chip1 wants something done. Chip2 will do it for me. Chip1 sends the command and data out to Chip2. But, Chip2 waits until Chip1 has set a line on Chip2 to indicate that it is ready for processing (Data Ready or something like that). It's only THEN that Chip2 does its thing. When Chip2 is done, it puts the result on its outputs to be read by Chip1. Chip1, similarly waits for Chip2 to set its Result Ready line so that Chip 1 knows it's safe to read the result.
Can't these chips have different clocks? They just wait for the appropriate line to toggle and then they know they are good to go. So, if that's the case, just put these two "chips" on the same piece of silicon and use this new clocking mechanism to give them whatever the fastest clock is that they can handle. Let's say it takes 100 ticks for Chip2 to do its thing. But, it's simple stuff and it can be clocked 20% faster than what Chip1 can handle. Seems like a net improvement to me.
Think of it as a Beowulf cluster on a chip. One can use systems with different clock speeds in a cluster, can't something similar be done on a single chip?
Also, multiple resonators of different frequencies could be put on the same chip...
Could this lead to improved performance for CPU/GPUs? My understanding is that there are parts of a chip that cannot keep up with the rest of it and
the slowest part ends up being the one that sets the clock speed. Let's say some part(s) of the chip can handle being clocked at 4.5 GHz. But, other parts could only handle 3.0 GHz.
Instead of clocking the whole chip at 3.0 GHz, one could put multiple resonators on the chip and let part(s) run faster than the rest. This would be a hybrid of the current fully-clocked chip (and all the attendant problems with propagation and synchronization of the clock) and of a clockless chip (which has its own design constraints).
Of course, this would make it even more "interesting" to try and figure out just how fast a chip is:
The Intel mulberion (TM) processor is clocked at up to 4.5 GHz (that we only use for one part of the chip; the rest runs at 1 GHz but it sounds much better this way.
Blegh. Might as well call it a need-a-clue-clue-clock.;^)
Slashdot Mirror
Quoth the parent:
He who controls the weather, rains supreme
Fixed that for ya. :)
Here's a bit more detail from the ORNL web site: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v40_3_07/article13.shtml and http://www.ornl.gov/sci/electricdelivery/vis_VERDE.html where there are links to: VERDE video (WMV 81.2MB) (13m 54s)
In the first-listed link above, I found this:
As a follow-up, I hear they are planning a "Wide-Area Situational Understanding Program", aka WASUP! :)
Off the top of my head, here are some ideas:
Yes, these are not terribly practical, but if someone could get millions of dollars for a few high-quality fakes, this would just be the cost of doing business.
So, in summary, her assertion "ironclad - that couldn't be disputed" seems overstated. I'll grant that it IS an additional hurdle to overcome, but sufficiently motivated people WILL find a way.
Said the parent post:
They predicted the amount of traffic in petabytes per month.
Said the original post:
TFA contains a link to Cisco's Visual Networking Index (PDF)
Look on page 3 of that PDF, where there is "Table 1. Global IP Traffic 2006-2012".
A quick scan of the values do show a doubling of volume looking 2 years out from any given year... but there are exceptions to that. The comparison of traffic from 2010 to 2012 mostly does not show a doubling, AND, in a couple places, the data comparing 2009 to 2011 does not double, either.
Lastly, the final row of that table predicts "Total IP traffic (PB per month)":
Twice the volume of 2010, i.e. 24,228 would be 48,456 which is less than 43,518. So, though not quite doubled in one case listed there, to say that it would double every two years would be incorrect. And we'd be all over that if they had claimed it to be. IMHO, to say 'double' is a reasonable way to express this concept.
Using XOR was my first thought, as well. As you say, it's relatively well-known that XOR is reversible. What is less well-known, or more plausibly deniable, is a convoluted logical expression that evaluates the same as an XOR, but it composed of more primitive operators: Exclusive disjunction - Equivalencies, elimination, and introduction, to wit:
NOTE: I'm using:
- "+" to denote "inclusive or"
- "*" to denote "and"
- "^" to denote "not"
p XOR qAt this point, you could use a simple nested conditional, or, even better, a nested conditional assignment statement, ala:
For bonus points, wrap the preceding inside a function or macro definition.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." -- C. A. R. Hoare
(NOTE: I'm a little rusty on my C, so please ignore syntax errors.)
FTFA
So, ummm, what we should do to, umm, well, protect ourselves from, ummm, yaknow, eavesdroppers, heh-heh, is well, make sure there's enough, ummmmmmm, yaknow, like extra noise, like, mixed in, dude.
Balancing offense with defense. Though I understand the need to be able to respond to a cyber-threat, I am interested in your plans to improve the existing military, commercial, and civilian infrastructure to prevent and/or lessen the damage that could be caused by cyberwarfare. (eg SELinux.)
What do you see as your role in continuing and supporting the development of such technology to protect all of us from cyber threats?
Technology vs people. And a follow-on: technological solutions, however well-developed or implemented, are not sufficient protection. The best lock in the world is little protection against those who make and distribute duplicate keys to that lock. E.g., those people who paste a sticky note to their monitor which has a list of IDs and passwords.
What are your thoughts and plans to address the human element in these developments?
Here is a link to the actual report (PDF): http://www.verizonbusiness.com/resources/security/databreachreport.pdf
I quickly scanned the report and it appears to be quite detailed. Definitely required reading for any CxO!
A couple of thoughts on this...
First off, I'm reminded of the Lunar Lawn Mower which was proposed as a way to fuse lunar regolith using microwaves. I'll come back to that, later.
Arecibo: As for the mirror being immobile, What about the 305m-diameter Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico? Instead of moving the mirror, they move the receiver's location WRT to the mirror, to wit:
Granted, that would then entail creating and operating machinery to move the receiver. That requires power and equipment to construct it as well as operate it. OTOH, nothing says it has to be a 305m dish like Arecibo, or 50m as mentioned in TFA; I'm sure a single 5m or 10m dish, could provide much useful science to start off with.
Array of scopes: As the skills and techniques are developed to construct and operate, say, one 10m telescope on the moon are developed, an array of these could be constructed. Some would aim at the same point overhead so as to provide a larger apparent aperture. Others could point at nearby points overhead so that, as an object under investigation sweeps out of view from one scope, it would already be in view of the next one. This would permit longer-term continuous observation of an object. Then, as more scopes are constructed, one could get both increased apparent aperture AND longer-term observation.
Because gravity on the moon is 1/6th that of the earth, it would take much less infrastructure to support the receiver. This, in turn, suggests less power would be required to move the receiver, too.
Lunar Lawn Mower: This was proposed by Larry Taylor, Distinguished Professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Tennessee. It was discussed here a while ago: (Slashdot | Lunar 'Lawnmower' Devised for Moon Colonists).
HEY! Thanks for that! I just recently stopped making an explicit link in posts here because they seemed to automagically turn into a link anyway. I just figured it was some /. feature.
No idea how long it'd take for me to discover it was my
linkification
Firefox
addon
unless you had pointed it out! Thanks again!
I click the link and it DOES bring up the page. Unfortunately, since it is a cached copy of the page, it is sometimes out of date. I.e., there have been updates to the actual page that are not reflected in what the Coral Cache copy displays. :/
As of this writing (Monday morning, 06/02/08), it appears that ThePlanet Datacenter folks have created a NEW STATUS PAGE to lessen the load on their servers:
Kudos to them for their timely updates as to system status. Having their status page listed on /. doesn't help them much, but I
was encouraged to see a Coral Cache link to their status page. In that light, here's:
a link to the Coral Cache lofiversion of their status page:
Maybe I missed something, but I found the second article to be a let-down.
(Warning for epileptics: if visual stimuli can set off a seizure for you, you should probably stay away from the following links. I am not susceptible, but I found the second link to be visually overwhelming at first.)
IMHO, more interesting galleries of examples can be found at Wikipedia's Optical Illusions page and at Michael Bach's 78 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena page.
That's EASY! Take something "complex" and remove just the "imaginary" part. ;^)
I think you are on the right track, but I'd posit MS does not want just the USERS; they are as muc, if not more, interested in the DATA.
Targeted ads are more effective so Google, Yahoo, etc. can charge advertisers more for each one. Microsoft wants some of that income stream. They've tried to build their internet presence but have stumbled so far (e.g. look what happened with HotMail.)
Sure, Microsoft would prefer to have the users stay on board with Yahoo, (they need to put the ads in front of *someone*), but I think they are ultimately looking for more data upon which they can decide which ads to post to which users. So, to employ a classic /. meme, Microsoft:
P.S. early morning rambling with insufficient coffee - interpret accordingly. :^)
So, if I swing my key chain containing my RFID credit card fobs in the vicinity of the checkout reader... how do I make it scan my American Express(r) card fob instead of my Visa(r) card fob instead of my... ???!!!?
It's not uncommon to see someone open their wallet to reveal a dozen or more credit cards. Besides the majors (Amex, Visa, MC, Discover) there were several more store credit cards and/or gas cards, etc. So what is such a customer going to do... remove the fob they want to use from their key ring, swing THAT fob near the reader, and then reattach it to their key ring? And THAT is supposed to speed things up how? Or, more likely, they'll try and make the desired fob stick out from the others and try and wave that one at the reader... OOPS! It scanned the wrong card. Can you ring that up again, please?
Or, attempting to be helpful, the pin pad displays "We noticed you are carrying the following credit cards; please click on the one you want to use for this transaction." Privacy advocates would just LOVE that one. :/
So, please tell me again what the advantage of having an RFID chip in my credit card(s) is? Given the choice, I'd much prefer sliding my mag stripe through the slot.
They should have a contest to come up with a name for the ASIMO conductor...
My vote? MetroGnome? !!!
<graybeardmode>
Back in 1979 (IIRC), a college classmate and I discovered that our TI-55 calculators would put out a blast of noise on the AM dial whenever something was written to the LED display! We tuned a nearby radio to the most effective frequency and started exploring.
Imagine our excitement when we discovered there was a different delay between bursts depending on how many LED segments were lit up! (That is, it took longer to display 88888888 than 11111111). Hey! We can make Music!! Frustratingly, we were limited to a 32 step program, so many promising attempts fell short because we needed a few more steps to complete the beat. Still, we came up with a dozen or so different rhythms and had a heck of a time doing it!
</graybeardmode>
I'm sure we weren't the only ones to discover this phenomenon... I'd love to hear from others about their experiences.
Hey, CmdrTaco!
Great to hear the news that you're going to be upgrading the tech that supports this site. /. has been a daily part of my life for well-nigh 10 years. Having seen many changes over the years, I'm especially interested in what will be supporting the site when you finish with the upgrade... so,
PLEASE update the FAQ - Tech page? ("Last Modified: 6/13/00")
Thanks in advance and please accept my gratitude for (the often thankless job of) keeping this site running so well.
For those who are advocating that an anti-bot be released (or whatever you want to call it) so as to disable this pest, I have a question for you: how is someone going to be able to tell the difference between these:
1.) A user who creates and releases an anti-bot, but through an error (design, programming, whatever) inadvertently causes "harm" to the system.
2.) A user who creates and releases an anti-bot that appears to try to block the worm, but is in fact designed to cause "harm" to the system.
Recall that the Morris worm was not intended to bring down the internet:
ANDSee also A Tour of the Worm for a more detailed account of how it unfolded.
The intention may have been good, but the implementation had an unintended consequence that led to a major disruption of the internet. I remember full well the confusion at the time as the details unfolded. I was working at a major computer manufacturer that dropped its connection to the net to protect itself. Ultimately, none of our systems were hit (wrong OS), but the sheer volume of packets on the net led, effectively, to a DDOS'ing of the uninfected systems, too.
So, in a nutshell, how can one objectively tell the difference between an attempt to kill the worm that causes problems, and an attempt to cause problems that looks like it is trying to kill the worm? In a non-static environment. With our limited ability to write bullet-proof, error-free code. Besides, someone else could capture and re-purpose the good code to cause more problems.
Yes!!! But... I didn't know who wrote it, just that I'd heard it many years ago. Thanks for the attribution!
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum! (*)
* I think I think, therefore I think I am!
But seriously, I'm curious as to what part of these games is aimed at improving cognitive skills versus indoctrination? i.e. the difference between "how to THINK" versus "HOW to think."
I'm not so concerned about the technical issues as I am of the social issues.
I'm reminded of the problems that arose when "The War of the Worlds" was broadcast on the radio and some people thought it was real. That was audio. Then, IIRC, there was a scene in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" where the moon colony made up a video of a leader announcing something, but it wasn't real (sorry about the lack of details - I read it a LONG time ago - I'm sure someone here can elaborate/clarify).
Yes, there are still some technological hurdles to overcome in both hardware and software, but at some point I believe it will be possible to generate a scene that is, for all intents, indistinguishable from reality. Then what?
The geek in me can't wait for the day for us to have this power. The human in me fears for the day it comes.
Thanks for the explanation; I think I see what you're saying. Bad Things can happen when things get out of sync. But I'm having trouble reconciling this with how, for example, a GPU doesn't run (generally) at the same clock as the CPU, and yet they (seem to) get along just fine.
I grok software a lot better than hardware, so please bear with me. Let's say I've got two chips. Chip1 wants something done. Chip2 will do it for me. Chip1 sends the command and data out to Chip2. But, Chip2 waits until Chip1 has set a line on Chip2 to indicate that it is ready for processing (Data Ready or something like that). It's only THEN that Chip2 does its thing. When Chip2 is done, it puts the result on its outputs to be read by Chip1. Chip1, similarly waits for Chip2 to set its Result Ready line so that Chip 1 knows it's safe to read the result.
Can't these chips have different clocks? They just wait for the appropriate line to toggle and then they know they are good to go. So, if that's the case, just put these two "chips" on the same piece of silicon and use this new clocking mechanism to give them whatever the fastest clock is that they can handle. Let's say it takes 100 ticks for Chip2 to do its thing. But, it's simple stuff and it can be clocked 20% faster than what Chip1 can handle. Seems like a net improvement to me.
Think of it as a Beowulf cluster on a chip. One can use systems with different clock speeds in a cluster, can't something similar be done on a single chip?
Could this lead to improved performance for CPU/GPUs? My understanding is that there are parts of a chip that cannot keep up with the rest of it and the slowest part ends up being the one that sets the clock speed. Let's say some part(s) of the chip can handle being clocked at 4.5 GHz. But, other parts could only handle 3.0 GHz.
Instead of clocking the whole chip at 3.0 GHz, one could put multiple resonators on the chip and let part(s) run faster than the rest. This would be a hybrid of the current fully-clocked chip (and all the attendant problems with propagation and synchronization of the clock) and of a clockless chip (which has its own design constraints).
Of course, this would make it even more "interesting" to try and figure out just how fast a chip is: The Intel mulberion (TM) processor is clocked at up to 4.5 GHz (that we only use for one part of the chip; the rest runs at 1 GHz but it sounds much better this way.
Blegh. Might as well call it a need-a-clue-clue-clock. ;^)