But what about the use for data transfer over fiber? One of the nice things about fiber is that you can send several "colors" in parallel which will not disturb each other, something impossible with copper. Up till now they use laser diodes with a fixed wavelength, so the number of diodes determines how many parallel signals you can send. Now there is a technology that can create any wavelength.
We've had this for some time now. It's known as a tunable laser.
This is really awesome, however carbon spontaneously forms many different shapes, not the least of which are C60, nanotubes, and graphite (which has a honeycomb shape). As cool as this is, what part of this is "news?"
I'm not sure why, but I've been active on slashdot for 7 years and your nick, CleverNickName, and Black Parrot are the only ones I really ever recognize... Glad to hear self employment is working for you, it's looking like that's what I'll be doing with contracting/consulting etc... we'll see how that goes!
Perhaps the next opportunity for profit in this game is to hack other people's botnets to bend to your own purposes? Probably a lot less risky than hacking thousands of potentially litigous members of the public. Secure encryption would stop most of this, however the master endpoint computer would still have some vulnerability.
I was just trying for a quick funny mod.... alas...
Re:For most problems...
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I have a computer wich will not boot up, unless I eather connect a new powered periphial, or disconnect a currect one (latly ive been unplugging/plugging in the floppy drive every other boot). If I dont it powers up for about half a second, then crashes. Besides this problem it has run for 2 years without a problem. (got it cheap but no warrenty and made it a linux box only time its powered off is when ive had to move or theres been a power outage of more than 20 minutes)
Apparently your spellcheck program is also broken.
Wow, a response from the illustrius KFG! I've been reading many of your posts for the last few years, and often wonder who you are IRL. How do you find time to post so often?
Re:For most problems...
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I know where you're coming from, but I disagree somewhat. I don't think understanding the physics of the semiconductors is terribly important unless you are actively working on engineering better chips. It's intellectually interesting (to some), but it's really of very little value when it comes time to program.
It's not useful for programming, but that's not what this article (or my post) is about - it's about using and fixing computers. All the software knowledge in the world doesn't help you when it's really a hardware problem. There are computer problems that an electrical engineer (and occasionally even a mechanical engineer, or materials scientist) could solve, that a computer scientist cannot fix any better than the average person.
Knowing how the physical device works also helps one to avoid damage to a computer because then one can predict what types of things are bad for the computer, and how to see early warning signs of hardware failure. Some individuals do not know, for instance, that lithium ion batteries are sensitive to extreme cold, and temperature swings. Those people might put a spare in their luggage on a long flight, and find a nasty surprise in their suitcases.
Re:For most problems...
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That has to be about the most insightful thing I've ever seen here on Slashdot. And, of course, you got modded funny.
Actually, to be honest, I find that creating an incentive for the user to understand the technology is a much better long run solution. The average person nowadays can accomplish an awful lot with a very basic, approximate functional understanding of the system. Unless there is some reason that they need to learn the details, they will likely never do so.
The truth is that this does not merely apply to "lusers," but to many of the most brilliant programmers you'll find. How many programmers know the deep details about the electronics that make up the processor? Or about the connection between doping, band-gap effects, and statistical mechanics that regulate the real-world execution of logical operations? I have dual degrees in Physics and CS, yet I would not include myself in that category.
I think what we need is users that aren't necessarily "theoretically" educated (this can, in practice, be quite useless), but rather have the appropriate metaphors (pipes, not tubes) to understand the majority of what to do in a given situation. Know what different symbols and actions connote, and where to find help (besides just asking the "computer guy").
The low-level details of these decentralized networks will be critical, but I am personally much more interested in the problems of applying this network to decentralized Command and Control in near-future urban combat. Squads will likely be temporary formations managed by decentralized algorithms. Dispersion of combat data will likely use gossip-like protocols and other ideas taken from modern P2P. The use of probabilistic flooding search will likely be more difficult because while networks like Gnutella have rapidly changing connectivity, they tend to retain the same basic statistics and topology. Because of rapid changes in a mobile network's connectivity statistics, the criticality threshold for probabilistic flooding as described by percolation theory will likely fluctuate as well, making it difficult to effectively operate near the transition region, where the number of flooded requests is minimized while still retaining good coverage.
Not to obnoxiously plug, but lylix.net, a Linux/Asterisk VPS host that I consult for, has gone from a single-man show with few customers to nearly overflowing with incoming business as a result of an aggressive "white hat" SEO campaign - mostly just putting up good content on the site in a format that search engines like (and probably also the thousands of links from slashdot from my sig/homepage).
These results surprised me very much - I've gotten over a thousand hits on lylix.net as a result of my postings in the last month and a half, but this is easily dwarfed by lylix's position as the 3rd hit for 'asterisk VPS', first for 'linux asterisk vps', and being 4th-5th page for just "VPS".
For those who can put up quality content and carve out a decent search rank, Google is a veritable gold mine. Yes, it's possible that looking at the internet through Google's lens gives a skewed perspective, but it's still the best way to find most things. Word-of-mouth is find for big sites, or niche sites known by your friends, but I can honestly say I do not find most things online that way.
I proposed this very idea to the president of the Pasadena chapter of the Mars Society. He looked at me likee I was some kind of horrible person, and then told me to never mention it to anyone again.
In a lawful society, laws need to be enforced - this goes triply against non-human entities like corporations. If more laws were enforced maximally, we'd see better laws (public would not put up with bad laws nearly as much if they were not used mostly to harass poor/minorities) and we'd have less lawless behavior.
Corporations do whatever they can to make money, and we need to keep this in check by actually enforcing the laws that govern them. If there is to be leniency, well, that is why we have judges - they get to make the final call.
Of course, there is a law of the internet that states that just after posting something making fun of someone for making an error, you realize that you were also in error.
But it's known that humans are not dispassionate rational agents. And indeed that there probably
is no such thing as a dispassionate rational agent. Commander Data and Spock are very ill-conceived
ideas of robot-like reasoners. Passion (emotion, affect) is the prioritizer of reasoning that allows
it to respond effectively (sometimes in real time) to the relevant aspects
of situations. Without the guidance of emotion, no common-sense reasoning engine would be powerful
enough, no matter how parallel it was, to process all of the ramifications of situations and
come up with relevant and useful and communicable and actionable conclusions.
It sounds to me as if you are suggesting that emotions function as a heuristic to incite a proper reaction. I agree with this. In the case where something like Cyc was to be used, it is likely that you would require a subsumption architecture using these kinds of reaction-heuristics (the reactions themselves perhaps even precalculated from the Cyc database, or with expert attention). There are many problems in robtics, etc, that do require non-realtime deliberative reasoning, and this can sit at a higher level on the subsumption architecture, safe in the knowledge that a lower level function will take over control if an important situation arises (for instance, danger).
Unlike Microsoft, which has a lot of customers that are concerned about legacy application support, Apple has a customer-base that generally uses newer software, and tends to be more forgiving to these kinds of problems. OS X updates have frequently broken all kinds of old applications, but their market share continues to go up.
By now most folks know that purchasing Revision A hardware is a gamble - to be honest I think that some of the fun that comes with living on the "bleeding edge" is the knowledge that if things work, you've really survived something.
The biggest problem I have with the apple transition was that they had a 32-bit intel architecture that now must be supported for years to come. I honestly am not quite sure why they did that, as there will undoubtably be some support headaches for apple developers for the next few years.
Slashdot Mirror
But what about the use for data transfer over fiber? One of the nice things about fiber is that you can send several "colors" in parallel which will not disturb each other, something impossible with copper. Up till now they use laser diodes with a fixed wavelength, so the number of diodes determines how many parallel signals you can send. Now there is a technology that can create any wavelength.
We've had this for some time now. It's known as a tunable laser.
Most important thing is to use a stable operating system, that way it doesn't freeze up.
Thanks folks, I'll be here all week!
This is really awesome, however carbon spontaneously forms many different shapes, not the least of which are C60, nanotubes, and graphite (which has a honeycomb shape). As cool as this is, what part of this is "news?"
I'm not sure why, but I've been active on slashdot for 7 years and your nick, CleverNickName, and Black Parrot are the only ones I really ever recognize... Glad to hear self employment is working for you, it's looking like that's what I'll be doing with contracting/consulting etc... we'll see how that goes!
Perhaps the next opportunity for profit in this game is to hack other people's botnets to bend to your own purposes? Probably a lot less risky than hacking thousands of potentially litigous members of the public. Secure encryption would stop most of this, however the master endpoint computer would still have some vulnerability.
I was just trying for a quick funny mod.... alas...
I have a computer wich will not boot up, unless I eather connect a new powered periphial, or disconnect a currect one (latly ive been unplugging/plugging in the floppy drive every other boot). If I dont it powers up for about half a second, then crashes. Besides this problem it has run for 2 years without a problem. (got it cheap but no warrenty and made it a linux box only time its powered off is when ive had to move or theres been a power outage of more than 20 minutes)
Apparently your spellcheck program is also broken.
*ducks*
Wow, a response from the illustrius KFG! I've been reading many of your posts for the last few years, and often wonder who you are IRL. How do you find time to post so often?
I know where you're coming from, but I disagree somewhat. I don't think understanding the physics of the semiconductors is terribly important unless you are actively working on engineering better chips. It's intellectually interesting (to some), but it's really of very little value when it comes time to program.
It's not useful for programming, but that's not what this article (or my post) is about - it's about using and fixing computers. All the software knowledge in the world doesn't help you when it's really a hardware problem. There are computer problems that an electrical engineer (and occasionally even a mechanical engineer, or materials scientist) could solve, that a computer scientist cannot fix any better than the average person.
Knowing how the physical device works also helps one to avoid damage to a computer because then one can predict what types of things are bad for the computer, and how to see early warning signs of hardware failure. Some individuals do not know, for instance, that lithium ion batteries are sensitive to extreme cold, and temperature swings. Those people might put a spare in their luggage on a long flight, and find a nasty surprise in their suitcases.
That has to be about the most insightful thing I've ever seen here on Slashdot. And, of course, you got modded funny.
Actually, to be honest, I find that creating an incentive for the user to understand the technology is a much better long run solution. The average person nowadays can accomplish an awful lot with a very basic, approximate functional understanding of the system. Unless there is some reason that they need to learn the details, they will likely never do so.
The truth is that this does not merely apply to "lusers," but to many of the most brilliant programmers you'll find. How many programmers know the deep details about the electronics that make up the processor? Or about the connection between doping, band-gap effects, and statistical mechanics that regulate the real-world execution of logical operations? I have dual degrees in Physics and CS, yet I would not include myself in that category.
I think what we need is users that aren't necessarily "theoretically" educated (this can, in practice, be quite useless), but rather have the appropriate metaphors (pipes, not tubes) to understand the majority of what to do in a given situation. Know what different symbols and actions connote, and where to find help (besides just asking the "computer guy").
The low-level details of these decentralized networks will be critical, but I am personally much more interested in the problems of applying this network to decentralized Command and Control in near-future urban combat. Squads will likely be temporary formations managed by decentralized algorithms. Dispersion of combat data will likely use gossip-like protocols and other ideas taken from modern P2P. The use of probabilistic flooding search will likely be more difficult because while networks like Gnutella have rapidly changing connectivity, they tend to retain the same basic statistics and topology. Because of rapid changes in a mobile network's connectivity statistics, the criticality threshold for probabilistic flooding as described by percolation theory will likely fluctuate as well, making it difficult to effectively operate near the transition region, where the number of flooded requests is minimized while still retaining good coverage.
Thus proving the age old adage that one man's trash is another man's VC funding.
For most problems, I find smacking the user is more effective than smacking the computer.
Not to obnoxiously plug, but lylix.net, a Linux/Asterisk VPS host that I consult for, has gone from a single-man show with few customers to nearly overflowing with incoming business as a result of an aggressive "white hat" SEO campaign - mostly just putting up good content on the site in a format that search engines like (and probably also the thousands of links from slashdot from my sig/homepage).
These results surprised me very much - I've gotten over a thousand hits on lylix.net as a result of my postings in the last month and a half, but this is easily dwarfed by lylix's position as the 3rd hit for 'asterisk VPS', first for 'linux asterisk vps', and being 4th-5th page for just "VPS".
For those who can put up quality content and carve out a decent search rank, Google is a veritable gold mine. Yes, it's possible that looking at the internet through Google's lens gives a skewed perspective, but it's still the best way to find most things. Word-of-mouth is find for big sites, or niche sites known by your friends, but I can honestly say I do not find most things online that way.
I proposed this very idea to the president of the Pasadena chapter of the Mars Society. He looked at me likee I was some kind of horrible person, and then told me to never mention it to anyone again.
Seriously, how much would it cost just to get the Russians to fork over some of their old-school-but-reliable technology.
We may have "won" the cold war, but they definitely won the "spacecraft that aren't overly-engineered death traps" war.
In a lawful society, laws need to be enforced - this goes triply against non-human entities like corporations. If more laws were enforced maximally, we'd see better laws (public would not put up with bad laws nearly as much if they were not used mostly to harass poor/minorities) and we'd have less lawless behavior.
Corporations do whatever they can to make money, and we need to keep this in check by actually enforcing the laws that govern them. If there is to be leniency, well, that is why we have judges - they get to make the final call.
If the aliens were really intelligent, they would have left an Opera circle.
Of course, there is a law of the internet that states that just after posting something making fun of someone for making an error, you realize that you were also in error.
BUT! I hereby nominate "Don't Do Evil" as the new way to mockingly refer to ANY corporate misdoings. Let's see how they like that!
I hereby nominate "Don't Do Evil" as the new way to mockingly refer to people who cannot properly quote "Do No Evil."
But it's known that humans are not dispassionate rational agents. And indeed that there probably is no such thing as a dispassionate rational agent. Commander Data and Spock are very ill-conceived ideas of robot-like reasoners. Passion (emotion, affect) is the prioritizer of reasoning that allows it to respond effectively (sometimes in real time) to the relevant aspects of situations. Without the guidance of emotion, no common-sense reasoning engine would be powerful enough, no matter how parallel it was, to process all of the ramifications of situations and come up with relevant and useful and communicable and actionable conclusions.
It sounds to me as if you are suggesting that emotions function as a heuristic to incite a proper reaction. I agree with this. In the case where something like Cyc was to be used, it is likely that you would require a subsumption architecture using these kinds of reaction-heuristics (the reactions themselves perhaps even precalculated from the Cyc database, or with expert attention). There are many problems in robtics, etc, that do require non-realtime deliberative reasoning, and this can sit at a higher level on the subsumption architecture, safe in the knowledge that a lower level function will take over control if an important situation arises (for instance, danger).
Unlike Microsoft, which has a lot of customers that are concerned about legacy application support, Apple has a customer-base that generally uses newer software, and tends to be more forgiving to these kinds of problems. OS X updates have frequently broken all kinds of old applications, but their market share continues to go up.
By now most folks know that purchasing Revision A hardware is a gamble - to be honest I think that some of the fun that comes with living on the "bleeding edge" is the knowledge that if things work, you've really survived something.
The biggest problem I have with the apple transition was that they had a 32-bit intel architecture that now must be supported for years to come. I honestly am not quite sure why they did that, as there will undoubtably be some support headaches for apple developers for the next few years.
Okay that's it, I officially declare the 'internet is a series of tubes' reference not funny any more.
Yeah, to be honest, of all the things said during that horrid speech, that was the most accurage. tubes/pipes, WTF is the difference?
One more thing to add to my iptables block list...
You could always just transmit data secretly by controlling electromagnetic emanations of computers. Lets see a firewall stop that.