I'm amazed that the Stop RFID people are so scared about the monstrosity they picture on their website. Tags get much smaller.
In truth, RFID doesn't seem all that alarming to me. I work for a company that's about to enter this market, and the technical aspects of it seem pretty harmless. For one thing, the detectors aren't positional; you can't tell where the tag is, only what data it contains. This is most useful in a warehouse, where you want to know how much of which pallet you've got.
Secondly, the tags are VERY short-range. We're talking inches here, especially for the small tags linked above. You can boost range with a higher-power transmitter, but if you want to extend farther than a couple of feet, you'll probably fry somebody's brain. I'm not sure how this could be used for surveillance.
When the Oregon legislature first tried to balance the state budget, they made public announcements that schools and police were to face heavy cuts unless a tax increase was immediately enacted (as one writer put it, "15,000 state employees, and the 200 you choose to fire are cops?").
Of course, being scared of their own tails, they couldn't just vote in a tax increase; they put it to a ballot measure. People being what they are, the tax increase was voted down, and the budgets got cut.
The prevailing opinion among people I've talked to is that it was a scare tactic: tell horror stories so that voters will be afraid of NOT increasing taxes, then let them do it, thus avoiding any responsibility for the increase. I never thought of it before, but maybe this round of idiocy is the same sort of thing.
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age had an interesting system for avoiding IP theft. While matter compilers were in every home, the means to produce (or extract) pure masses of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. were centralized and monitored. Thus, you could steal any design you wanted, but the quantities of atoms used in the design, as well as the order in which they would be used, were precisely known, and when you pulled them from the Feed, you would be caught.
Swap files are still very useful, and to discount them as useless is foolish.
Example: the memory pagefile. The OS needs to know which program or user owns each block of memory. Say your OS supports up to 4GB of RAM, and you only have 512 MB. If you can't offload some of this pagefile to disk, you're using RAM to store ownership data about the 3.5GB of RAM that doesn't exist.
This becomes even more important with 64-bit address spaces; your memory pagefile becomes larger than 1GB. Without the ability to page to disk, you're using all your RAM to store data about your RAM.
The point is that Deep Blue played the game (ultimately) because of an emotional "want" to play the game. That want was provided by its human creators, because Deep Blue couldn't provide its own.
Also, I wouldn't call Deep Blue "intelligent" by any stretch. Deep blue is to chess what Mathematica is to integrals - a big calculator.
Emotion is the foundation of intelligence, and intelligence cannot exist without it.
Think about it. Albert Einstein didn't do physics because he could, he did it because he wanted to. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are; if you don't have a purpose to put it to, you may as well be a jellyfish. Emotion provides direction for intelligence.
Of course, the converse is also true: intelligence provides direction for emotion.
One thing most of the ideas for 'what comes after the RIAA falls' ignore is possibly the most important part of why they exist. Mainstream radio stations and recording studios exist not only to sell music, but to tell the sheep-like consumers what they want. There is simply too much music out there for people to listen to it all and make an informed decision on what they like, so most people rely on recommendations - from friends, acquaintances, the guy down the pub, and (most prevalently) the radio.
Also, realize that most artists make nearly nothing from recording; most of an artist's income comes from live performances and (possibly) merchandise. With album sales providing nearly no income, we may as well throw it out entirely.
Free music is all well and good, but it provides neither an easy way for consumers to find what they want/like easily, nor an avenue for popular bands to REALLY make it big - worldwide tours, packed auditoriums, and gaggles of screaming fans.
The RIAA needs replacing with a better system; something that allows artists to get widespread exposure and consumers to get informed advice on what to buy, without all the corruption, money, and indentured servitude. My idea is for a central repository of reviews and a seeding center for free music exchange, sort of a blog-cluster and Napster root server in one.
This system would rely on a set of independent reviewers. Artists send their tracks to them, hoping that the reviewer likes it. The reviewer writes about tracks that interest them. Consumers read the reviewer's column/blog, choosing which ones they agree with, taking recommendations from them, and buying stuff from the artists.
Crapflooding could be a concern, so a fee would probably be required both from the artists (say, X dollars per track reviewed, and Y (\X) dollars for distribution only) and from the consumers (Z dollars per month for unlimited access to all reviewers and tracks).
Reviewers could be corrupted, so their reputation (and thus their audience and market) would depend on their integrity, and a reviewer wouldn't be allowed to take money (or anything else) from anybody for a more favorable review.
All tracks submitted to the service would belong to the artist, but must be freely redistributable. The main value of this service is to help artists and consumers find each other; the downloading is secondary. Plus, word-of-mouth is valuable to artists; the more people that hear their tracks and like them, the more tickets they'll sell to their next show.
The artist owns his/her/their own work. They can package it however they want - they can sell CD's/DVDa's at their shows, they can sell sheet music/tabs, etc.
The barrier to entry is low, but not zero. Anybody who's serious can try their hand at professional music, but trolls will generally be sifted out through both the review process and the cost of repeatedly submitting garbage.
I hope this gets modded up - I'd like to see what people think.
When my Logitech optical idles, the LED simply dims - it doesn't switch to a different LED, it just lowers the power output of the existing red LED. I suppose you could hack up some kind of voltage switch so that low voltage would power one LED and high voltage would power a different one, but I don't think there's that much space inside your mouse.:)
Does anybody know why the newspaper business is called the 'Fourth Estate?' What are the other three? Does it include ALL media (TV/cable, radio, print), or is it restricted to print?
AFAIK, Perl 6 is a whole other beast. It's a complete rewrite, with changes to the core language.
You'll still be able to run your Perl 5.x scripts under 6, but not vice-versa. Thus, with all the existing Perl 5.x scripts existing in the wild, having a Perl 5 book around may still be handy.
If you like analogies: why would you buy a C book when C++ has been around for years?
I don't think this is the problem. Let's do a quick calculation.
Say your card has 128MB of memory. With AGP 1x, the peak transfer rate is 266 MB/s. Even if you figure on getting only half of that, you can fill up the card's memory in one second.
In reality, the video card lives its life frame by frame. The real framerate hit comes when the texture load in a scene exceeds the card's memory, and it has to fetch from system memory to render each frame. This takes on the order of 10ms per transfer plus the actual transfer, or right around one (1) geological age, while the GPU twiddles its thumbs.
From a programmer's point of view, this seems fairly straightforward, from what little I know of HIPAA. Sure, the bill is draconian, but since it's pretty much a blanket "encrypt everything", a general solution shouldn't be so bad, right?
Make sure email apps do the official encryption automatically to ALL emails
Put the database servers behind a nice firewall
Write up some policy on sensitive operations
Granted, the management end isn't so simple, but when people realize that they could face fines or jail time for violations, they'll go along, even if they think it's stupid. The hardest part seems to be training people on a new email app.
On a synchronous design of any complexity, quite a bit of the routing (i.e. where the wires go) is due to clock distribution. The CLK signal is one of the few that needs to go to every corner of the chip. There are various strategies for doing this, but they all have difficulties.
One method is to lay a big wire across the center of the chip. Think of a bedroom, with the bed's headboard against one wall; you end up with a U-shaped space. Now, suppose you (some data) need to get from one tip of the 'U' (the decoder) to the other (an IO port). Either you have to walk around the entire bed (a long wire), or go over it (a shorter wire). The obvious choice is to go over, but when you have a wire with one voltage crossing a wire with a (potentially different) voltage, you get capacitance, and that limits the clock speed of the entire chip.
With an asynchronous design (lots of smaller blocks with their own effective clocks), you don't have this. Data can be routed wherever it needs to go, without fear of creating extra capacitance. The downside is that they're very difficult to design. This is partially because there are no tools for this - most of the mainstream hardware simulators slow waaaaaaayyy down once you get more than a few clock signals running around.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's completely different!
In truth, RFID doesn't seem all that alarming to me. I work for a company that's about to enter this market, and the technical aspects of it seem pretty harmless. For one thing, the detectors aren't positional; you can't tell where the tag is, only what data it contains. This is most useful in a warehouse, where you want to know how much of which pallet you've got.
Secondly, the tags are VERY short-range. We're talking inches here, especially for the small tags linked above. You can boost range with a higher-power transmitter, but if you want to extend farther than a couple of feet, you'll probably fry somebody's brain. I'm not sure how this could be used for surveillance.
Hamster
That's "couch potato," Mr. Quayle.
Interesting results from the Insider page:
2003-06-11
OLSON, MICHAEL P
Vice President
6,000
Automatic Sale at $8.59 - $8.66 per share.
(Proceeds of about $52,000)
2003-06-09
BENCH, ROBERT K.
Chief Financial Officer
7,000
Planned Sale
(Estimated proceeds of $60,000)
2003-06-09
BENCH, ROBERT K.
Chief Financial Officer
7,000
Automatic Sale at $9.16 - $9.3 per share.
(Proceeds of about $65,000)
2003-06-06
HUNSAKER, JEFF F.
Vice President
5,000
Automatic Sale at $8.90 per share.
(Proceeds of $44,500)
When the Oregon legislature first tried to balance the state budget, they made public announcements that schools and police were to face heavy cuts unless a tax increase was immediately enacted (as one writer put it, "15,000 state employees, and the 200 you choose to fire are cops?").
Of course, being scared of their own tails, they couldn't just vote in a tax increase; they put it to a ballot measure. People being what they are, the tax increase was voted down, and the budgets got cut.
The prevailing opinion among people I've talked to is that it was a scare tactic: tell horror stories so that voters will be afraid of NOT increasing taxes, then let them do it, thus avoiding any responsibility for the increase. I never thought of it before, but maybe this round of idiocy is the same sort of thing.
Hamster
...use the best tool for the job?
Hamster
Hamster
So you have to email all your friends and family before they can email you? How else can somebody get on your whitelist?
The EFF is nominally a defense organization for computer users and cyberspace denizens. It probably won't get involved in biotech patents.
Hamster
WinCE is right!
Hamster
- SBC filed for the patent [uspto.gov] in May of 1996.
- Netscape 2.0 was released [hmetzger.de] in March of 1996.
Sounds like more Rambus gouging goodness.Hamster
- SBC filed for the patent in May of 1996.
- Netscape 2.0 was released in March of 1996.
Sounds like more Rambus gouging goodness.Hamster
Hamster
Swap files are still very useful, and to discount them as useless is foolish.
Example: the memory pagefile. The OS needs to know which program or user owns each block of memory. Say your OS supports up to 4GB of RAM, and you only have 512 MB. If you can't offload some of this pagefile to disk, you're using RAM to store ownership data about the 3.5GB of RAM that doesn't exist.
This becomes even more important with 64-bit address spaces; your memory pagefile becomes larger than 1GB. Without the ability to page to disk, you're using all your RAM to store data about your RAM.
Hamster
The point is that Deep Blue played the game (ultimately) because of an emotional "want" to play the game. That want was provided by its human creators, because Deep Blue couldn't provide its own.
Also, I wouldn't call Deep Blue "intelligent" by any stretch. Deep blue is to chess what Mathematica is to integrals - a big calculator.
-- Hamster
Think about it. Albert Einstein didn't do physics because he could, he did it because he wanted to. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are; if you don't have a purpose to put it to, you may as well be a jellyfish. Emotion provides direction for intelligence.
Of course, the converse is also true: intelligence provides direction for emotion.
-- Hamster
Sorry. Where it says "...Y (\X)..." that should be Y (less than X).
-- Hamster
One thing most of the ideas for 'what comes after the RIAA falls' ignore is possibly the most important part of why they exist. Mainstream radio stations and recording studios exist not only to sell music, but to tell the sheep-like consumers what they want. There is simply too much music out there for people to listen to it all and make an informed decision on what they like, so most people rely on recommendations - from friends, acquaintances, the guy down the pub, and (most prevalently) the radio.
Also, realize that most artists make nearly nothing from recording; most of an artist's income comes from live performances and (possibly) merchandise. With album sales providing nearly no income, we may as well throw it out entirely.
Free music is all well and good, but it provides neither an easy way for consumers to find what they want/like easily, nor an avenue for popular bands to REALLY make it big - worldwide tours, packed auditoriums, and gaggles of screaming fans.
The RIAA needs replacing with a better system; something that allows artists to get widespread exposure and consumers to get informed advice on what to buy, without all the corruption, money, and indentured servitude. My idea is for a central repository of reviews and a seeding center for free music exchange, sort of a blog-cluster and Napster root server in one.
This system would rely on a set of independent reviewers. Artists send their tracks to them, hoping that the reviewer likes it. The reviewer writes about tracks that interest them. Consumers read the reviewer's column/blog, choosing which ones they agree with, taking recommendations from them, and buying stuff from the artists.
Crapflooding could be a concern, so a fee would probably be required both from the artists (say, X dollars per track reviewed, and Y (\X) dollars for distribution only) and from the consumers (Z dollars per month for unlimited access to all reviewers and tracks).
Reviewers could be corrupted, so their reputation (and thus their audience and market) would depend on their integrity, and a reviewer wouldn't be allowed to take money (or anything else) from anybody for a more favorable review.
All tracks submitted to the service would belong to the artist, but must be freely redistributable. The main value of this service is to help artists and consumers find each other; the downloading is secondary. Plus, word-of-mouth is valuable to artists; the more people that hear their tracks and like them, the more tickets they'll sell to their next show.
The artist owns his/her/their own work. They can package it however they want - they can sell CD's/DVDa's at their shows, they can sell sheet music/tabs, etc.
The barrier to entry is low, but not zero. Anybody who's serious can try their hand at professional music, but trolls will generally be sifted out through both the review process and the cost of repeatedly submitting garbage.
I hope this gets modded up - I'd like to see what people think.
-- Hamster
Possible, but tricky.
:)
When my Logitech optical idles, the LED simply dims - it doesn't switch to a different LED, it just lowers the power output of the existing red LED. I suppose you could hack up some kind of voltage switch so that low voltage would power one LED and high voltage would power a different one, but I don't think there's that much space inside your mouse.
-- Hamster
Does anybody know why the newspaper business is called the 'Fourth Estate?' What are the other three? Does it include ALL media (TV/cable, radio, print), or is it restricted to print?
-- Hamster
AFAIK, Perl 6 is a whole other beast. It's a complete rewrite, with changes to the core language.
You'll still be able to run your Perl 5.x scripts under 6, but not vice-versa. Thus, with all the existing Perl 5.x scripts existing in the wild, having a Perl 5 book around may still be handy.
If you like analogies: why would you buy a C book when C++ has been around for years?
-- Hamster
I don't think this is the problem. Let's do a quick calculation.
Say your card has 128MB of memory. With AGP 1x, the peak transfer rate is 266 MB/s. Even if you figure on getting only half of that, you can fill up the card's memory in one second.
In reality, the video card lives its life frame by frame. The real framerate hit comes when the texture load in a scene exceeds the card's memory, and it has to fetch from system memory to render each frame. This takes on the order of 10ms per transfer plus the actual transfer, or right around one (1) geological age, while the GPU twiddles its thumbs.
-- Hamster
-- Hamster
- Make sure email apps do the official encryption automatically to ALL emails
- Put the database servers behind a nice firewall
- Write up some policy on sensitive operations
Granted, the management end isn't so simple, but when people realize that they could face fines or jail time for violations, they'll go along, even if they think it's stupid. The hardest part seems to be training people on a new email app.-- Hamster
On a synchronous design of any complexity, quite a bit of the routing (i.e. where the wires go) is due to clock distribution. The CLK signal is one of the few that needs to go to every corner of the chip. There are various strategies for doing this, but they all have difficulties.
One method is to lay a big wire across the center of the chip. Think of a bedroom, with the bed's headboard against one wall; you end up with a U-shaped space. Now, suppose you (some data) need to get from one tip of the 'U' (the decoder) to the other (an IO port). Either you have to walk around the entire bed (a long wire), or go over it (a shorter wire). The obvious choice is to go over, but when you have a wire with one voltage crossing a wire with a (potentially different) voltage, you get capacitance, and that limits the clock speed of the entire chip.
With an asynchronous design (lots of smaller blocks with their own effective clocks), you don't have this. Data can be routed wherever it needs to go, without fear of creating extra capacitance. The downside is that they're very difficult to design. This is partially because there are no tools for this - most of the mainstream hardware simulators slow waaaaaaayyy down once you get more than a few clock signals running around.
-- Hamster