The book Disappearing Cryptography is an introduction that explains much of the science of steganography. THere's an ample discussion of Dining Cryptographers nets which are a fairly basic way for several people to hold a discussion without revealing who is speaking. The book is a bit old (companies like Zero Knowledge are now doing cooler things), but it's not bad.
It was already public knowledge. That's the price of patenting something. You disclose everything. So they released it two weeks early. Why? Are they trying to claim some tax deduction? Are they trying to seem like good guys? Why waste perfectly good electrons on the press release?
The content companies bitch and moan about how the new technology is threatening to destroy their business. Copying will be so easy. But the debate never comes around to the new rights that the content companies are giving to themselves. If you bought an old style book, you owned it and could share it with a friend, sell it, or keep it for the future. Now, they want to bind up knowledge and keep you as a subscriber for life.
I wish the content companies would admit how much they're gaining for the new technology instead of just growsing about how it threatens their existence.
The truth is, great software comes from great programmers, not from a large number of people slaving
away," Mr. Joy said. "Open source can be useful. It can speed things up. But it's not new, and it's not holy
water."
This is probably quoted a bit out of context, but it's quite bogus. There's no doubt that getting many people involved in the source helps find bugs. The myth of one brilliant guy spinning out perfect code died in the early 80s when programs became too big. The only way to write great programs today is to work with other programmers and working with other programmers is ten times easier if you can read their code.
It's too bad that the author didn't have enough time or space to question this a bit more.
I've seen, er heard, technology like this before in museums. They take a tube, put a speaker on one end, and point the tube toward where they want the sound to go. The tube focuses the energy at just the right people.
You can experience this in a number of different museums. If you stand in the right place under the tube, you hear some sound associated with the exhibit. If you move three to four feet away, you hear nothing.
I'm not surprised that MIT is hyping this. It's their style. But perhaps they're doing much more with computers to shape the sound. Apparently there's plenty of cool research on finding ways to get an array of speakers to reproduce a three dimensiona aural environment. This is sort of the equivalent of 3d graphics chips.
A real cool solution would be to use a number of small speakers and tubes in concert. Each would broadcast sound at a very low level along a line defined by the axis of the tube. Only a person who's at the intersection point would get a strong enough signal, er noise, well, you get the idea.
Now that I think about it, the US Capitol has a weird effect in the old House of Representatives. If you stand in one place, you can hear someone speak quietly at another. The shape of the dome focuses it. Apparently the legend goes that one legislator discovered this effect and didn't inform the rival party which often gathered in the other spot. The Capitol has since been expanded with new chambers and the spot is now a tourist trap. I think it's functionally equivalent to those pairs of big dishes that are popular at science museums.
The Crusoe Processor has many things going for it, but it is far from the only machine on the market. The earliest power benchmarks they released suggested that it could do 2 to 3 times the computation with the same amount of power as a Pentium chip. Well, that's not exactly the best comparison. Intel's never really worked at saving power too much and the Pentium line is well known as a power hog.
Apple's G3 laptops, on the other hand, have battery lives that are two to three times longer than Wintel laptops. That suggests that Crusoe and the old G3 are similar in computation per unit power. Of course, Apple/Motorola has gone the other direction with G4. It has a huge die to accommodate the SIMD instructions in the Altivec. Power consumption has skyrocketed. Still, Apple's MPEG DVD playing demonstration with the G3 is a great benchmark for a computer.
It's clear that Transmeta began as an academic exercise in exploring a new kind of computer chip that converted the instructions on the fly. They were entranced with the possibilities of doing pre-processing of instructions at the time of execution. This gives them some neat benefits, but they're not huge ones. After a bit, the Transmeta folks gave up singing that their processor was going to go faster and started hyping the power consumption.
It's not clear to me that Transmeta hasn't used any techniques that can't be easily ported to the latest model of the Pentium. So we'll see what happens.
I would also take Toshiba's decision with a grain of salt. There are plenty of other big companies with good engineeer who are still behind Transmeta.
Re::::Free for All::: misnomer
on
Free For All
·
· Score: 1
Dead tree editions are just easier to read when the text gets long. Monitors just don't have a good resolution.
Hmm. I think it's clear that some of the most original software for protecting privacy (PGP, GnuPG, Free/SWAN) has come out of the free software/open source world. The academic world created a few equations, but the implementation details are not easy. Phil Zimmerman and those who followed him did much more than produce a workalike. They created the first versions.
It's also clear that programs like Gnutella, for instance, are technically superior in some ways than their commercial bretheren like Napster. Again, these guys didn't create a workalike, they redesigned. Yes, technically they worked for AOL at the time, but I think that AOL's disavowal speaks for something. It was sort of a garage project.
There are also many areas where free software is just better. GNU Emacs, for instance, still rocks. No ands, ifs or buts.
Free Software is great for hardware companies. It sucks for most software companies. RedHat will never pull in
the dough like MS did.
Well, free software can be just as bad for the hardware companies. GNU/Linux running on top of an Alpha or a PowerPPC looks much the same as GNU/Linux running on top of an x86. It's pretty easy to port things once the compiler is done. That makes it a commodity market for chips too.
WebTV has been designing custom chips from the beginning. The founders are old hardware jocks (Perlman and Leak) who did great things at Apple with their cool video TV systems. They were the first that made it possible to watch TV on your mac in a window AND drag that window around. It was way cool at the time. They took this expertise and developed the custom chips for WebTV.
Since then, they've done many revs. Sure Microsoft bought them several years ago, but designing new chips is not new.
There are other good books too. Alan Deutschman's _The Second Coming of Steve Jobs_ and Peter Wayner's _Free for All_ come to mind. It's hard to write about technology without telling some of the history. These books aren't histories per se, they're more books that examine one area with an eye toward the future. They use the past as prolog.
The great news is that studying computer history is dirt cheap. Old machines are sold for next to nothing. You can probably buy an old Cray 1 if you convince the old owner that you're going to take good care of it. The biggest expense will be putting in the right power equiptment and cooling machines.
It can also be fun. I remember a good friend of mine had an old PDP-8 in his living room. He just flicked on one night and said, "Go ahead, it doesn't need to boot." I still remember the speed of core memory every day when I turn on the machine and wait for everything to load. (Of course rebooting is a real bear. He needs to reload the OS with a paper tape!)
My favorite folks in computer history are the ones who make emulators of old machines. It's possible to have a virtual Commodore 64 on your desk if you run the right emulator. That means you can run your old software without futzing over old hardware. This kind of virtual collecting is pretty cool and arguably the right way that cyber savvy folks should be collecting. Who wants to get into the artificially introduced scarcity of physical goods? Lets leave that for the baseball card and stamp fanatics.
I don't think that the RSA patent is as big a problem as they suggest. PGP circulates with a very GNU-like license. People can experiment with it. After RSA realized how many people were using it, they forced PGP to use RSA's licenses.
Also, the RSA patents don't hold overseas. There's no reason why this development couldn't take place in Europe. Well, it would have been a bit inconvenient for the folks in Utah, but they could have gotten everything rolling.
This article didn't really belong in Slashdot. The author was clearly interested in printing whatever Linus Torvalds had to say. While I like hearing it, I've heard most of it before.
Plus, there are clearly places where Gomes blindly rattled on and on about how Torvalds is the leader of the Linux movement. This is pure hype and even Torvalds doesn't buy into it. He knows that there are hundreds doing more work with Linux each week than him. He's working hard at an ultra secret startup, not a company that shares its source. Sheesh.
Not only did it suck, but it is sort of filled with ingratiating whitewash. Linus Torvalds is a great guy, but he's far from the leader any more of the Linux movement. There are several dozen folks with much more influence over what people see and how Linux computers behave.
Plus, he has a secretary or at least someone who takes messages for him. Such horse manure.
Oh, the G4 has really given Apple plenty of marketting trouble. People just love that megahertz number despite the fact that it is only one part of a fast machine. Apple has done a good job showing how the G4 boosted Photoshop performance, but I don't know if it's helped much else. Is there a more general set of benchmarks? Is there any other application that's sped up by the Altivec? Does anyone ever use Intel's MMX instructions?
I remember when we had MIPS, a reasonably good standard. Are any on the horizon?
We need more plugins. How about one for valley girl speak? Has anyone looked at converting the various filters into tools for steganography? It shouldn't be hard? I would like guess you've like got plenty of like choice about where to like put the word "like". That means you can store plenty of like bits.
Slashdot Mirror
The book Disappearing Cryptography is an introduction that explains much of the science of steganography. THere's an ample discussion of Dining Cryptographers nets which are a fairly basic way for several people to hold a discussion without revealing who is speaking. The book is a bit old (companies like Zero Knowledge are now doing cooler things), but it's not bad.
No. It's more of an interview if you ask me.
I wish the content companies would admit how much they're gaining for the new technology instead of just growsing about how it threatens their existence.
This is probably quoted a bit out of context, but it's quite bogus. There's no doubt that getting many people involved in the source helps find bugs. The myth of one brilliant guy spinning out perfect code died in the early 80s when programs became too big. The only way to write great programs today is to work with other programmers and working with other programmers is ten times easier if you can read their code.
It's too bad that the author didn't have enough time or space to question this a bit more.
You can experience this in a number of different museums. If you stand in the right place under the tube, you hear some sound associated with the exhibit. If you move three to four feet away, you hear nothing.
I'm not surprised that MIT is hyping this. It's their style. But perhaps they're doing much more with computers to shape the sound. Apparently there's plenty of cool research on finding ways to get an array of speakers to reproduce a three dimensiona aural environment. This is sort of the equivalent of 3d graphics chips.
A real cool solution would be to use a number of small speakers and tubes in concert. Each would broadcast sound at a very low level along a line defined by the axis of the tube. Only a person who's at the intersection point would get a strong enough signal, er noise, well, you get the idea.
Now that I think about it, the US Capitol has a weird effect in the old House of Representatives. If you stand in one place, you can hear someone speak quietly at another. The shape of the dome focuses it. Apparently the legend goes that one legislator discovered this effect and didn't inform the rival party which often gathered in the other spot. The Capitol has since been expanded with new chambers and the spot is now a tourist trap. I think it's functionally equivalent to those pairs of big dishes that are popular at science museums.
Apple's G3 laptops, on the other hand, have battery lives that are two to three times longer than Wintel laptops. That suggests that Crusoe and the old G3 are similar in computation per unit power. Of course, Apple/Motorola has gone the other direction with G4. It has a huge die to accommodate the SIMD instructions in the Altivec. Power consumption has skyrocketed. Still, Apple's MPEG DVD playing demonstration with the G3 is a great benchmark for a computer.
It's clear that Transmeta began as an academic exercise in exploring a new kind of computer chip that converted the instructions on the fly. They were entranced with the possibilities of doing pre-processing of instructions at the time of execution. This gives them some neat benefits, but they're not huge ones. After a bit, the Transmeta folks gave up singing that their processor was going to go faster and started hyping the power consumption.
It's not clear to me that Transmeta hasn't used any techniques that can't be easily ported to the latest model of the Pentium. So we'll see what happens.
I would also take Toshiba's decision with a grain of salt. There are plenty of other big companies with good engineeer who are still behind Transmeta.
Dead tree editions are just easier to read when the text gets long. Monitors just don't have a good resolution.
It's also clear that programs like Gnutella, for instance, are technically superior in some ways than their commercial bretheren like Napster. Again, these guys didn't create a workalike, they redesigned. Yes, technically they worked for AOL at the time, but I think that AOL's disavowal speaks for something. It was sort of a garage project.
There are also many areas where free software is just better. GNU Emacs, for instance, still rocks. No ands, ifs or buts.
Well, free software can be just as bad for the hardware companies. GNU/Linux running on top of an Alpha or a PowerPPC looks much the same as GNU/Linux running on top of an x86. It's pretty easy to port things once the compiler is done. That makes it a commodity market for chips too.
Since then, they've done many revs. Sure Microsoft bought them several years ago, but designing new chips is not new.
The great news is that studying computer history is dirt cheap. Old machines are sold for next to nothing. You can probably buy an old Cray 1 if you convince the old owner that you're going to take good care of it. The biggest expense will be putting in the right power equiptment and cooling machines.
It can also be fun. I remember a good friend of mine had an old PDP-8 in his living room. He just flicked on one night and said, "Go ahead, it doesn't need to boot." I still remember the speed of core memory every day when I turn on the machine and wait for everything to load. (Of course rebooting is a real bear. He needs to reload the OS with a paper tape!)
My favorite folks in computer history are the ones who make emulators of old machines. It's possible to have a virtual Commodore 64 on your desk if you run the right emulator. That means you can run your old software without futzing over old hardware. This kind of virtual collecting is pretty cool and arguably the right way that cyber savvy folks should be collecting. Who wants to get into the artificially introduced scarcity of physical goods? Lets leave that for the baseball card and stamp fanatics.
Also, the RSA patents don't hold overseas. There's no reason why this development couldn't take place in Europe. Well, it would have been a bit inconvenient for the folks in Utah, but they could have gotten everything rolling.
Plus, there are clearly places where Gomes blindly rattled on and on about how Torvalds is the leader of the Linux movement. This is pure hype and even Torvalds doesn't buy into it. He knows that there are hundreds doing more work with Linux each week than him. He's working hard at an ultra secret startup, not a company that shares its source. Sheesh.
It's all hype.
Plus, he has a secretary or at least someone who takes messages for him. Such horse manure.
He certainly has someone who fields call for him. She's a press rep. Linus is a great guy, but this report sure was kissing his ass.
Oh, the G4 has really given Apple plenty of marketting trouble. People just love that megahertz number despite the fact that it is only one part of a fast machine. Apple has done a good job showing how the G4 boosted Photoshop performance, but I don't know if it's helped much else. Is there a more general set of benchmarks? Is there any other application that's sped up by the Altivec? Does anyone ever use Intel's MMX instructions?
I remember when we had MIPS, a reasonably good standard. Are any on the horizon?
We need more plugins. How about one for valley girl speak? Has anyone looked at converting the various filters into tools for steganography? It shouldn't be hard? I would like guess you've like got plenty of like choice about where to like put the word "like". That means you can store plenty of like bits.