To make matters worse, there are actually 3 different ways to define, say, a "megabyte:
Decimal aka Metric: 1 MB = 10^6 or 1,000,000 bytes
Binary : 1 mb = 2^20 or 1,048,576 bytes. Note the lower case distinction here. SI prefixes for large units always use capital letters. OK, so I stole this from 4DOS. So shoot me.
Mixed: a meg (Mb or mB) is one K k, or one k K, which is 10^3 x 2^10, or 1,024,000. And I've actually seen this used a few places.
The problem is that memory chips will always be measured in powers of 2, and marketdroids will always want to use the powers of 10 to make their hard drives look larger, with the fact of SI prefixes to back them up. (Things such as disk cluster/block sizes will tend to be binary, however.) So I always try to say "Binary gigabyte" when I'm talking about memory, if there's any question which I mean.
I guess we're going to have to change the name of those holes that are full of glass in our walls, else we be sued by Microsoft
Micrsoft spokesman Elmer FUD agrees:
Given the avewage intewwigence of Windows usews, the potentiaw for confusion is enowmus. Homeownews can spend thousands of dowwas on those gwass windows, weaving them no money to pay fow an upgwade to XP! Owaw wawews awe sending thweatening wettews to Andewson Windows and Pewwa Windows wight now. These fowks who spehw Windows.com with an 'ehw' instead of a 'dubbyew' awen't foowing anyone!
Maybe this will allow "directed evolution" of humans, just like Linux evolves (microcreation, but macroevolution). As long as the mods are Open Source, so that the species doesn't fork, that is. Unfortunately, the laws in most countries will push the research into the proverbial "back alley"....
For this reason, the life of a patent used to be 14 years maximum after two extensions (US law here). After 14 years, the knowledge was avaiable for everyone to use.
. ..
Miserably. The current patent system is actually preventing innovation in many areas because the lifetime has been increased radically (I think they are now at 70 years in the US)
You have patents and copyrights confused. Patents are 17 years, non-renewable, and TTBOMK they haven't been changed a bit in quite a while (allthough I'd like to see one tweak, starting the clock on drugs requiring FDA approval after that approval, because now drug companies have just a few years left, and some diseases that affect a small minority just aren't worth researching anymore).
Actually, the metric definition of Giga = 10^9 has been around a lot longer than the binary variation. Somewhere in the dim mists of computer history, someone noticed that 2^10 ~ 10^3, and started talking about "kilobytes". If anything, we should call these "binary kilobytes", "binary gigabytes", etc.
Did anyone around here with a.cx domain notice that at almost exactly the same time/. went down Friday, so did niccx.com? I've not been able to get through to them at all since. Anyone know what's happened Down Under?
"HAL killed the ['2001'] crew because it had been told not
to lie to them, but also to lie to them about the mission," he observes. "No one ever told
HAL that killing is worse than lying. But we've told Cyc."
Could it be that they've told it:
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
I'm not sure someone with $50M invested is going to put 2. and 3. in that order, though
Would someone who is comment on whether this license defames the GPL et. al., and those who use it, to the point that it could be the basis of a suit against MS? This thing defines "Potentially Viral":
(x) create, or purport to create, obligations for Microsoft with respect to the Software or (y) grant, or purport to grant, to any third party any rights to or immunities under Microsoft's intellectual property or proprietary rights in the Software
Had they left it at that, it would have been one thing, but by naming the five specific licenses as included in this definition, they assert that which is simply untrue.
From my admittedly non-expert reading, nothing in any of the enumerated licenses could do that, unless Microsoft itself were to release the code under one of them, so all that's left is to prove that the lies are damaging to the plaintiffs, and that MS acted with reckless disregard for the truth. (If I remember the elements as explained to me by the last real lawyer I talked to on the subject of libel.)
If we are suspicious of the agendas attached to corporate-funded research, shouldn't we be equally suspicious of government funding? If you don't think that the bureaucracy that decides who gets government research grants is subject to the same group dynamics (including self-preservation to the point of viciousness) as any other, you're kidding yourself.
If you want to increase the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, the way to do it is to use the plankton in the ocean. All we need to do is fertilize the ocean. There was a
CNN story earlier this year about experiments designed to test the hypothesis. Both approaches use iron-based fertilizers, and have the advantage of being much more economical than Kyoto-type proposals.
What will doom them is politics. Even if, as the article suggests, a producer can operate a fertilization system that removes from the air more carbon than their products generate, that just won't be good enough for the hard-core Greens.
I've come to basically the same conclusion: I don't have "deep" skills, specializing in one narrowly-defined area. I am a generalist - I can build boxen, network them, install OS/apps, troubleshoot all of it when it breaks, train users how maybe not to break things so often, write scripts to glue different technologies together...
The problem is that I'm simultaneously underqualified and overqualified - I don't have the depth of experience in any one or two skills to make me the "best" candidate for a job with a narrow focus, and all the extras just tell most employers that I'll be looking to leave ASAP, so they'll have to hire someone else anyway (which isn't true in my case, but they don't know that).
My last IT job was working technical support for a well-known tax-preparation company's consumer tax software. All my "evaluations" said I was doing well above average, but I was still one of the 98% or so laid off in the middle of April.
And do you know what I'm doing for money now? Any day I don't have an interview (most of them) I'm down at the day labor agency at the crack of dawn; when I'm lucky I get called to work for barely above minimum wage doing semi-skilled construction work.
The idea was that if you cleared the brush, plowed the land, tended to your flock/herd etc., building something productive out of the wilderness, you earned the right to control what you'd built.
Elz built.au; it's only right that he continue to control it. His silence speaks volumes:
I don't recognize your.authority. You think you have the right to the domain; take it. You don't think you need my permission, so there's nothing to talk about.
By remaining silent, he grants no legitimacy to the land grab.
By way of analogy, imagine a government deciding that it's just too dangerous for something as important as, say, Linux to remain under the control of a private individual, rather than a duly-appointed government contractor. Then imagine the sorts of quotes you'd see from the contractor:
How dare Linus Torvalds refuse to even talk to us about turning over control of Linux to the proper authority. I mean, who does he think he is? What right does he have to control Linux? Nobody elected or appointed him!
Sounds ridiculous, right?
Here's an idea: Let the government ask for a whole new domain, called.oz (but there's some folks in Kansas that might have their eyes on that one) that they can administer according to their whims, and leave well enough alone.
There is some very fuzzy logic here. Suppose a police officer runs car license plates at random through the police database and finds a stolen car. Can he arrest the driver? After all, he was using technology not available to the public in order to obtain incriminating evidence.
When you register your car, you understand that you're giving that information to the police. You therefore don't expect them to not have it. The general public has computers with databases, too.
The grocery store has one that relates the UPC numbers to prices, inventory levels, etc.; and that discount tag on my keyring relates my purchases to each other, too. I know they have the information, and the computers to organize it.
The insurance company has a database that shows the claims charged to my auto policy, and a link to a database the DMV keeps, showing the tickets I've gotten. When I applied for the policy, I signed the form releasing this information to them. Since the information is about things that happened on the streets/highways, it's not like I expect privacy.
But I read the opinion. The bright line distinction is that the police used technology that the general public does not use.
If I leave the curtains open on my windows, I have
no right to expect people not to look at what can plainly be seen through them from outside my property, even through a backyard-astronomer-grade telescope, two blocks over. But I do expect to be able to speak to my wife or children and not have a TLA van train a laser on one of those windows to pick up the vibrations of our voices. They need a court order to carry out such a "search".
Now, if we apply the reasoning to laws against "hacking", we see the absurdity of a law that presumes an expectation that people won't use technology that is plainly common in (that segment of) the public. If I put a box on the net and have a daemon listening on port 80, I have no reason to bitch about people trying to access web pages from it. It's up to me to close the curtains.
This puts Lawn Forcement in a tricky situation: They can't (admit to) use snoop technology without a proper warrant and enforce laws against the general public using the same technology (by definition preventing it from use by the public). They have to choose one or the other. So don't be surprised if some currently-illegal private uses of low-grade spy stuff are legalized in the near future.
I wonder if they could run the optimizer without the translation layer (or make a ChipX-to-ChipX dummy translation), and squeak some extra performance out of code on any platform?
I had exactly the same thought. The article says
[as always emphasis mine]
The Dynamite architecture is based around a translation kernel, with a front end that takes code aimed at a source processor and a back end that aims the translation at a new target. The front end acts as an instruction decoder, building an abstract, intermediate representation of the subject program in the form of what Transitive calls "directed acyclic graphs." The kernel can then perform abstract, machine-independent optimizations on this representation.
So, x86 => DAG => x86 should work just fine. In fact, x86 => DAG => x86 => DAG => x86 should produce exactly the same code on the second iteration; I wouldn't be surprised if Transitive is doing exactly this to test whether the optimizer were working correctly. At this point, Dynamite sounds conspicuously like Dynanmo.
I wonder if the specs for DAG will be open so that code can be compiled directly to it, optimized, and then distributed, saving the first two steps in the process. I can see commercial software vendors being all over this idea.
I was confused hy the article's explanation of the resolution:
The spaces between electrodes are small enough to give a resolution of 300 monochrome dots per inch (dpi).
...
A drawback of the filter approach to colour generation is that the filters need a single pixel for each primary colour. This effectively reduces the resolution by about a third, to 80 dpi.
First of all, 300/3 = 100, not 80. But that isn't even right - there are still 90,000 dots per square inch, so 30,000 color pixels in the same space, theoretically about 173 per linear inch, arranged perhaps somewhat like this:
As you can see, any L-shaped grouping of adjacent primary pixels can represent a color pixel at resolution 200h x 150v. If this thing is designed correctly, sub-pixel antialiasing can be done to retain nearly the full 300 dpi resolution WRT brightness. There's a great explanation of this on Gibson Research (Poor guy just got over a DDoS attack, and now I'm slashdotting him) as well as a demo of how it works.
If we can patch together segments of "digital paper", it could be a crucial step in making affordable the wall display panels from Arnold's apartment in Total Recall....
'dd' is a command in UNIX/Linux systems that allows direct writing to the disk bit by bit.
Not quite. It allows direct writing to the disk controller. The magnetic pattern written to the physical disk is (unimaginatively enough) controlled by the controller, which tells all sorts of lies to the computer. For example, the controller may detect that a sector can't be read back to contain the same data that were just written, and transparently move the data to a substitute sector without ever informing anyone or anything of this decision.
The program that can see past the controller's shenanigans is called "low-level format". It is more akin to a device driver, having intimate knowledge of how the actual disk operates. If the Pentagon wanted to contract with the manufacturers of disk drives for a very special LLF utility that properly exercised each sector, writing magnetic patterns specifically designed to cripple subsequent analysis, that might be good enough.
Or it might not. You've got to ask yourself how much effort an attacker is willing to expend to retrieve the contents of that drive, and how much damage can be done if he's successful to properly evaluate the risk.
There is no way I am paying to watch a DVD projected onto a cinema size screen with 500 something lines of resolution.
Nobody's asking you to. The digital projection systems being tested right now use something on the order of 60 GB hard drives to hold a movie, if memory serves. That's 15 times the bandwidth of a two-hour HDTV program. If that isn't enough storage, NBFD - add some more drives.
So my perception that Imax sounded clearer than AC3 and DTS was correct.
Rest assured that you'll have at least that level of quality from the new technology, precisely because the adoption of HDTV raises the bar for what people will pay to see at a theatre. The industry will either compete or lose customers as people just wait to see the film at home in digital form.
The studios will go to this as soon as they get the bugs out because of the cost of making prints. When they do, the only reason to release movies to theatres outside North America any later would be the time to get dubbing or subtitles in place, and I don't see any reason that can't be done in parallel with the other post-production work.
I submit that a movie such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would not be made in the first place without the expectation (on the part of those who put up the money to make it) of being able to make a profit. Someone has convinced these people that their profit is maximized by this Zone system. Unless and until they are persuaded otherwise, they will only make these movies under these terms.
If there is a "broader problem", it's that the Guys in the Ties have bought into the idea that zoning the distribution of videotapes or discs preserves box office revenues in zones where theatrical release comes later. I don't buy it. They should make more money selling the DVDs than they do from exhibition of the films, especially at Zone 1 prices.
The real losers, if there are any, are the theatres in the other zones, who actually might lose some traffic to DVD sales.
Maybe the studios are playing these games just to appease that constituency.
But, just as technology has created this problem, it will also bring the solution: When the movie theatres themselves convert to digital projection systems, it will no longer be necessary for studios to release film prints to Zone 1 first, then other zones later. The other zones may be a bit later getting dubbed/subtitled versions, but a Zone 1 disc without those enhancements shouldn't hurt ticket sales for them.
Once again, a "feature" is added to a product which, rather than adding value, actually takes it away. Free market, my ass.
Well, no matter what you think, it is still a mostly-free market. As in: You are free not to buy the DVD discs that use this technology. The only way that these media companies will learn anything is if people hit them right in the pocketbook.
Refuse to buy discs that are deliberately designed not to be playable in certain machines.
Make it clear to retailers that you purchase a disk contingent on it being playable in any machine you choose. If their return policy excludes region incompatibility, refuse to do business with them.
Support indie distributors that refuse to region-code their discs (a "girl-cot"?)
Consider the possibility that you really don't have to go to the theatre to see [Insert "Must-See Movie" title here.].
One of the
interesting ideas that sociobiology brings us, as it struggles to shed
its ugly reputation from the 1970s, is that human beings are hardwired
with the capability to keep track of about 150 other human beings.
Perhaps that's the size of a typical village on the African savannah,
50,000 years ago.
I tend not to trust the "soft" or "social" sciences, because their practitioners always seem to have an axe to grind, starting from a preconceived conclusion and searching for data to support it. I found the persepctive of zoologist Desmond Morris, author of "The Naked Ape" and "The Human Zoo" quite interesting. By viewing H. Sapiens as just another species of animal, and comparing to other primates, he comes up with the premise that we can really know about 60 people well enough to form a cohesive tribal unit. It seems that, whenever a tribe reaches triple digits, it fissions into two smaller tribes.
Morris' thesis is basically that the ills of modern man come from the fact that our social systems go beyond the ability to keep track of personal reputations that is essential to a functional society. That jerk who cut you off in traffic this morning suffers nothing as a result, because you don't know him and will probably never even see him again. So, instead of each of us keeping that "ledger" of repuation, we use clumsy substitutes, like crowns, cops, courts, churches, commercials, and celebrities to tell us what to think.
Recently we've become more clever. The sort of devices the article mentions, as well as our own "karma", or the digital TV recorder feature that suggests programs rated highly by others who seem to rate things the way you do, are attempts to find more efficient ways of distributing knowledge of reputation.
Two-way digital communications themselves make possible the creation of non-geographic "tribes" that are small enough that the members really can feel like they know someone.
It's as if our brains have receptors for social interaction patterns that something is going to plug into. We just have to figure out which ones are best.
Slashdot Mirror
-
Decimal aka Metric: 1 MB = 10^6 or 1,000,000 bytes
-
Binary : 1 mb = 2^20 or 1,048,576 bytes. Note the lower case distinction here. SI prefixes for large units always use capital letters. OK, so I stole this from 4DOS. So shoot me.
- Mixed: a meg (Mb or mB) is one K k, or one k K, which is 10^3 x 2^10, or 1,024,000. And I've actually seen this used a few places.
The problem is that memory chips will always be measured in powers of 2, and marketdroids will always want to use the powers of 10 to make their hard drives look larger, with the fact of SI prefixes to back them up. (Things such as disk cluster/block sizes will tend to be binary, however.) So I always try to say "Binary gigabyte" when I'm talking about memory, if there's any question which I mean.Maybe this will allow "directed evolution" of humans, just like Linux evolves (microcreation, but macroevolution). As long as the mods are Open Source, so that the species doesn't fork, that is. Unfortunately, the laws in most countries will push the research into the proverbial "back alley"....
Actually, the metric definition of Giga = 10^9 has been around a lot longer than the binary variation. Somewhere in the dim mists of computer history, someone noticed that 2^10 ~ 10^3, and started talking about "kilobytes". If anything, we should call these "binary kilobytes", "binary gigabytes", etc.
Did anyone around here with a .cx domain notice that at almost exactly the same time /. went down Friday, so did niccx.com? I've not been able to get through to them at all since. Anyone know what's happened Down Under?
-
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
I'm not sure someone with $50M invested is going to put 2. and 3. in that order, thoughWould someone who is comment on whether this license defames the GPL et. al., and those who use it, to the point that it could be the basis of a suit against MS? This thing defines "Potentially Viral":
Had they left it at that, it would have been one thing, but by naming the five specific licenses as included in this definition, they assert that which is simply untrue. From my admittedly non-expert reading, nothing in any of the enumerated licenses could do that, unless Microsoft itself were to release the code under one of them, so all that's left is to prove that the lies are damaging to the plaintiffs, and that MS acted with reckless disregard for the truth. (If I remember the elements as explained to me by the last real lawyer I talked to on the subject of libel.)I just got on Time Warner RoadRunner... Am I missing something here? What keeps me from using a different news server?
If we are suspicious of the agendas attached to corporate-funded research, shouldn't we be equally suspicious of government funding? If you don't think that the bureaucracy that decides who gets government research grants is subject to the same group dynamics (including self-preservation to the point of viciousness) as any other, you're kidding yourself.
What will doom them is politics. Even if, as the article suggests, a producer can operate a fertilization system that removes from the air more carbon than their products generate, that just won't be good enough for the hard-core Greens.
The problem is that I'm simultaneously underqualified and overqualified - I don't have the depth of experience in any one or two skills to make me the "best" candidate for a job with a narrow focus, and all the extras just tell most employers that I'll be looking to leave ASAP, so they'll have to hire someone else anyway (which isn't true in my case, but they don't know that). My last IT job was working technical support for a well-known tax-preparation company's consumer tax software. All my "evaluations" said I was doing well above average, but I was still one of the 98% or so laid off in the middle of April.
And do you know what I'm doing for money now? Any day I don't have an interview (most of them) I'm down at the day labor agency at the crack of dawn; when I'm lucky I get called to work for barely above minimum wage doing semi-skilled construction work.
Elz built .au; it's only right that he continue to control it. His silence speaks volumes:
By remaining silent, he grants no legitimacy to the land grab.By way of analogy, imagine a government deciding that it's just too dangerous for something as important as, say, Linux to remain under the control of a private individual, rather than a duly-appointed government contractor. Then imagine the sorts of quotes you'd see from the contractor:
Sounds ridiculous, right?Here's an idea: Let the government ask for a whole new domain, called .oz (but there's some folks in Kansas that might have their eyes on that one) that they can administer according to their whims, and leave well enough alone.
-
The grocery store has one that relates the UPC numbers to prices, inventory levels, etc.; and that discount tag on my keyring relates my purchases to each other, too. I know they have the information, and the computers to organize it.
- The insurance company has a database that shows the claims charged to my auto policy, and a link to a database the DMV keeps, showing the tickets I've gotten. When I applied for the policy, I signed the form releasing this information to them. Since the information is about things that happened on the streets/highways, it's not like I expect privacy.
These curtains are open.#include <ianal.h>
But I read the opinion. The bright line distinction is that the police used technology that the general public does not use.
If I leave the curtains open on my windows, I have no right to expect people not to look at what can plainly be seen through them from outside my property, even through a backyard-astronomer-grade telescope, two blocks over. But I do expect to be able to speak to my wife or children and not have a TLA van train a laser on one of those windows to pick up the vibrations of our voices. They need a court order to carry out such a "search".
Now, if we apply the reasoning to laws against "hacking", we see the absurdity of a law that presumes an expectation that people won't use technology that is plainly common in (that segment of) the public. If I put a box on the net and have a daemon listening on port 80, I have no reason to bitch about people trying to access web pages from it. It's up to me to close the curtains.
This puts Lawn Forcement in a tricky situation: They can't (admit to) use snoop technology without a proper warrant and enforce laws against the general public using the same technology (by definition preventing it from use by the public). They have to choose one or the other. So don't be surprised if some currently-illegal private uses of low-grade spy stuff are legalized in the near future.
...gave their customers the option of filtered cancer sticks decades ago.
I wonder if the specs for DAG will be open so that code can be compiled directly to it, optimized, and then distributed, saving the first two steps in the process. I can see commercial software vendors being all over this idea.
If we can patch together segments of "digital paper", it could be a crucial step in making affordable the wall display panels from Arnold's apartment in Total Recall....
The program that can see past the controller's shenanigans is called "low-level format". It is more akin to a device driver, having intimate knowledge of how the actual disk operates. If the Pentagon wanted to contract with the manufacturers of disk drives for a very special LLF utility that properly exercised each sector, writing magnetic patterns specifically designed to cripple subsequent analysis, that might be good enough.
Or it might not. You've got to ask yourself how much effort an attacker is willing to expend to retrieve the contents of that drive, and how much damage can be done if he's successful to properly evaluate the risk.
The studios will go to this as soon as they get the bugs out because of the cost of making prints. When they do, the only reason to release movies to theatres outside North America any later would be the time to get dubbing or subtitles in place, and I don't see any reason that can't be done in parallel with the other post-production work.
If there is a "broader problem", it's that the Guys in the Ties have bought into the idea that zoning the distribution of videotapes or discs preserves box office revenues in zones where theatrical release comes later. I don't buy it. They should make more money selling the DVDs than they do from exhibition of the films, especially at Zone 1 prices.
The real losers, if there are any, are the theatres in the other zones, who actually might lose some traffic to DVD sales. Maybe the studios are playing these games just to appease that constituency. But, just as technology has created this problem, it will also bring the solution: When the movie theatres themselves convert to digital projection systems, it will no longer be necessary for studios to release film prints to Zone 1 first, then other zones later. The other zones may be a bit later getting dubbed/subtitled versions, but a Zone 1 disc without those enhancements shouldn't hurt ticket sales for them.
-
Refuse to buy discs that are deliberately designed not to be playable in certain machines.
-
Make it clear to retailers that you purchase a disk contingent on it being playable in any machine you choose. If their return policy excludes region incompatibility, refuse to do business with them.
-
Support indie distributors that refuse to region-code their discs (a "girl-cot"?)
- Consider the possibility that you really don't have to go to the theatre to see [Insert "Must-See Movie" title here.].
You get the idea.Morris' thesis is basically that the ills of modern man come from the fact that our social systems go beyond the ability to keep track of personal reputations that is essential to a functional society. That jerk who cut you off in traffic this morning suffers nothing as a result, because you don't know him and will probably never even see him again. So, instead of each of us keeping that "ledger" of repuation, we use clumsy substitutes, like crowns, cops, courts, churches, commercials, and celebrities to tell us what to think.
Recently we've become more clever. The sort of devices the article mentions, as well as our own "karma", or the digital TV recorder feature that suggests programs rated highly by others who seem to rate things the way you do, are attempts to find more efficient ways of distributing knowledge of reputation. Two-way digital communications themselves make possible the creation of non-geographic "tribes" that are small enough that the members really can feel like they know someone.
It's as if our brains have receptors for social interaction patterns that something is going to plug into. We just have to figure out which ones are best.