Also, didn't the early productivity studies regarding lighting show that productivity went because of the study itself? Wikipedia is down, so I can't link it, but if I recall, they changed the lighting, and productivity went up 15%. They changed the lighting back, and productivity still went up 15%. They determined that people worked harder because of the study.
Which just illustrates the need for control groups in such studies.
I work in a "War Room" now and its the worst idea ever conceived. Programming requires being able to quietly concentrate on your work, but the war room atmosphere is noisy and makes for a lousy enviromnent for the developer. Its all part of this FrAgile process... the next job I take will not be in such an environment.
Sounds like your employer is picking and choosing parts of an agile process without thought as to how they interconnect. Yes, this kind of environment is often recommended for agile (esp. XP) developers. Why? Because it enhances communication, and isn't a distraction for people programming in pairs, because you enter a different kind of zone for such work that isn't disturbed by people talking. But it doesn't sound as though you're doing pair programming (which is, really, a key part of agile development).
I believe the pattern disappears because the instrument must delay the photon somehow. That delay is enough to mess with the phase of the wave. The combining of the phases of the waves from the two slits is what causes the pattern. I bet that instead of the phasing pattern, it would appear to look more like a reverb of sound. (steals idea from sound waves, it's still waves, just much faster.)
So unless the speed of light in your detector, and the speed of light in the air are the same, the phases of the observed waves are going to be messed with.
It's worse than that. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle demands that the momentum of the photon be varied by an unpredictable amount, which causes complete decoherence; the light passing out of the detector cannot be considered to have phase at all, as it is effectively white noise.
The most straight-forward example (that doesn't involve murdering cats) is the double-slit experiment. You send a coherent beam of light (or electrons, it turns out, although that particular experiment is harder) at a screen with two slits in it, and observe what pattern appears on the wall behind it. With just one slit, a particular pattern (a diffraction pattern) appears. But with both slits in place, you see characteristic alternating bands of light and dark (an interference pattern). The weird part comes if you place a detector in the slit (that still allows the light to pass through), to try to see which slit each photon goes through. If you do that, the intereference pattern disappears! Somehow, the act of passively measuring the photon (which is just EM radiation under a different name) with scientific instruments changes the fundamental character of the interaction - that is, you "collapse the wave function."
There is no such thing as a passive measurement. That's the point of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The act of measuring the location of the photon destroys the information in its momentum, causing it to decohere with the other photons released thus destroying the interference pattern. Nothing weird about this.
the point is just that the axioms of quantum mechanics, when applied to the universe as a whole, give this result.
The axioms of quantum mechanics do not define what constitutes an observation. Therefore, on scales where we don't have experimental evidence for what is / isn't an observation (of which "the universe as a whole" is an extreme example) it is very difficult to apply them with any confidence of accuracy.
To sum up, "observation changest things" is not a "mystification," but rather a way to generalize what's going on and develop a theoretical framework (which, incidentally, is quantitatively by far the best verified theory science has ever created).
Well, yes, but to suggest that what quantum physics calls an "observation" only occurs when the observation is made by an intelligent being can, quite rightly, be called mystical bullshit. Which mainstream quantum physicists really believe it?
IANAQP, but I believe the main contender for what constitutes an observation is based on transfer of matter/energy density: once the possible waveforms have diverged to a certain degree, the collapse will occur. Interactions with sensing equipment will always cause a collapse because sensors cause the waveforms to diverge substantially.
Unless, of course, you can tell me an experiment that behaves differently if someone is watching it to see the result, I (and I'm pretty sure most scientists) will not believe an intelligent observer is required.
another person that learned database work from a book. Just what we needed.
I take exception to that. I learned databases from a book, and have never had much trouble because of it. Of course, the book in question was The Relational Model for Data Base Management by E F Codd, but still...
Raw CPU speed is nice but when are we going to make the busses fatter. Most of the bottle necks are in the memory and hard drive subsystems.
Did you actually, you know, read the article? The entire point here is that Intel have just released a chip that needs a faster bus to run. And, yeah, sure, a 576-bit wide memory interface is great, but it would be insanely expensive for a consumer-oriented system. I'd expect to see the first 256-bit wide consumer systems (requiring 4 DIMMs to be installed for peak performance) introduced some time soon. Intel and AMD have both announced their plans for the next year or so, but I'd expect to see them hitting the market in 2009.
"Almost as soon as we had Phenom samples, Intel made the decision to sample a CPU requiring a FSB that wasn't officially supported by any chipset at the time. No, 1600MHz FSB support won't come until next year with the X48 chipset, but it didn't matter to Intel; we were getting chips now.
Except everyone seems to have missed the fact that the X38 chipset, available now, supports 1600MHz FSB.
Hail to Apple for integrating a quartz clock into their systems - others appear to dumb to do that. Finally I can read the time on my Computer and trust it too.
Erm... the real time clock in all PCs since IBM introduced the AT is a quartz clock. It used one of these, connected as shown in Fig. 10 on the datasheet, with a 32.768kHz crystal.
I don't know about the Apple hardware, but I suspect the difference is it uses a higher frequency crystal, and is probably calibrated before leaving the factory, which most PC manufacturers don't bother doing.
DST is set by local governments. This is an entirely different thing, an international standards body messing around with time, instead.
BTW: I'm of the opinion that it's not DST that should be abolished, but non-DST. Non-DST time is a good mathematical division of the day, centred equally around 12:00 (+- 30mins). Unfortunately, as a society, we seem to have decided to centre our actual lives around 13:00 instead. Switching permanently to DST would fix this.
We can ignore the problem then too. Eventually, morning and evening will be on different days. We might just gain or lose a whole day. Heck, we can ignore the problem forever. We'll be off by a year, then a decade...
And, with any luck, by then it won't matter. Earth-centric timekeeping will seem to be a quaint holdover from old times, and the idea of having periods of time vary in length to match a phenomenon that occurs only on a specific planet will likely be rejected.
Either that, or we'll all be back on sundials because we didn't solve the energy problems.
SarBox law in the US, and I'm sure that the UK has similar regulations
No, thank God, the UK does *not* have anything similar to Sarbanes-Oxley. The only real requirement we have is the Data Protection Act, which requires only that "appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data." The law offers little or no means to identify what an "appropriate technical [or] organisational measure" actually is, and it has historically been interpreted fairly laxly.
Wouldn't due diligence specifically exclude using windows?
Err... no. There are perfectly good, secure, disk encryption schemes available for Windows that should make it impossible for anyone to access the data (save via user incompetence).
So which bank allows you to do business with them without providing them with your ID information?
As I understand it, there are a few such banks operating out of Switzerland, and some in the Cayman Islands, and a few others in odd places like those. Of course, they'll charge you quite a bit for the privelege, but if you really *are* concerned about people knowing who you are, there are options.
Of course, any time you're depending on a downloaded applet for encryption, you're at the mercy of whomever you're downloading it from... there's no reason (other than it being more difficult) that Hushmail couldn't be forced to "poison" their Java applet, or backdoor its encryption engine. Unless you're going to examine the code yourself each time, you have no way of really trusting it. But that's a lot more technically difficult than just grabbing the password from the server-side decryption engine, which appears to be what they did.
The applet is signed. They could make themselves invulnerable to this attack by wiping the key they signed it with. This would mean if they ever have to introduce a new applet, it would have a different certificate associated, and users' browsers would prompt them again whether they wanted to trust the applet. Knowledgeable users would then know not to trust the new applet until they'd confirmed that it was trustworthy (e.g. by decompiling it and comparing to the publicly available source code for the official applet).
Actually they are quite forthcoming, you just need to practice what is called 'Due Diligence' and READ. I know it's an uncommon skill nowadays.
Where does it say this? The only mention on the home page is at the bottom, "Hushmail without Java is now available". OK. Say I don't particularly care whether or not Java is used; I click on the "sign up for free email" button.
The text on this page is:
New Secure Email Account Welcome to Hushmail, the world's premier free, secure web-based email and document storage system.
Step 1 Choose your new email address: Click here to use an automatically generated email address
Step 2 The security of your account is determined by the strength of your passphrase. Please use a passphrase that is much longer than an ordinary password. For advice on generating a strong passphrase, see http://www.diceware.com./
Choose your passphrase: Re-type your passphrase:
Step 3 Five numbers are displayed below to help us distinguish between real people like you and computer programs trying to use our service. Please type the five numbers you see below:
Step 4 (Optional) Show advanced options
Step 5
By signing up for this service, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to abide by our terms of service.
Do you expect people to read the entire site before signing up, in order to realise that in order to be secure they have to click "Show advanced options", and press the "Enable Java" button that's hiding in that panel?
I've been getting text message SPAM advertising a site, whose WHOIS records point to a HUSHMAIL account.
Andy
Err.. right. So spammers (who conduct often-illegal activities) are using a webmail service that makes it a little more difficult than usual for law enforcement to get hold of their details.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, didn't the early productivity studies regarding lighting show that productivity went because of the study itself? Wikipedia is down, so I can't link it, but if I recall, they changed the lighting, and productivity went up 15%. They changed the lighting back, and productivity still went up 15%. They determined that people worked harder because of the study.
Which just illustrates the need for control groups in such studies.
I work in a "War Room" now and its the worst idea ever conceived. Programming requires being able to quietly concentrate on your work, but the war room atmosphere is noisy and makes for a lousy enviromnent for the developer. Its all part of this FrAgile process... the next job I take will not be in such an environment.
Sounds like your employer is picking and choosing parts of an agile process without thought as to how they interconnect. Yes, this kind of environment is often recommended for agile (esp. XP) developers. Why? Because it enhances communication, and isn't a distraction for people programming in pairs, because you enter a different kind of zone for such work that isn't disturbed by people talking. But it doesn't sound as though you're doing pair programming (which is, really, a key part of agile development).
I believe the pattern disappears because the instrument must delay the photon somehow. That delay is enough to mess with the phase of the wave. The combining of the phases of the waves from the two slits is what causes the pattern. I bet that instead of the phasing pattern, it would appear to look more like a reverb of sound. (steals idea from sound waves, it's still waves, just much faster.)
So unless the speed of light in your detector, and the speed of light in the air are the same, the phases of the observed waves are going to be messed with.
It's worse than that. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle demands that the momentum of the photon be varied by an unpredictable amount, which causes complete decoherence; the light passing out of the detector cannot be considered to have phase at all, as it is effectively white noise.
The most straight-forward example (that doesn't involve murdering cats) is the double-slit experiment. You send a coherent beam of light (or electrons, it turns out, although that particular experiment is harder) at a screen with two slits in it, and observe what pattern appears on the wall behind it. With just one slit, a particular pattern (a diffraction pattern) appears. But with both slits in place, you see characteristic alternating bands of light and dark (an interference pattern). The weird part comes if you place a detector in the slit (that still allows the light to pass through), to try to see which slit each photon goes through. If you do that, the intereference pattern disappears! Somehow, the act of passively measuring the photon (which is just EM radiation under a different name) with scientific instruments changes the fundamental character of the interaction - that is, you "collapse the wave function."
There is no such thing as a passive measurement. That's the point of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The act of measuring the location of the photon destroys the information in its momentum, causing it to decohere with the other photons released thus destroying the interference pattern. Nothing weird about this.
the point is just that the axioms of quantum mechanics, when applied to the universe as a whole, give this result.
The axioms of quantum mechanics do not define what constitutes an observation. Therefore, on scales where we don't have experimental evidence for what is / isn't an observation (of which "the universe as a whole" is an extreme example) it is very difficult to apply them with any confidence of accuracy.
To sum up, "observation changest things" is not a "mystification," but rather a way to generalize what's going on and develop a theoretical framework (which, incidentally, is quantitatively by far the best verified theory science has ever created).
Well, yes, but to suggest that what quantum physics calls an "observation" only occurs when the observation is made by an intelligent being can, quite rightly, be called mystical bullshit. Which mainstream quantum physicists really believe it?
IANAQP, but I believe the main contender for what constitutes an observation is based on transfer of matter/energy density: once the possible waveforms have diverged to a certain degree, the collapse will occur. Interactions with sensing equipment will always cause a collapse because sensors cause the waveforms to diverge substantially.
Unless, of course, you can tell me an experiment that behaves differently if someone is watching it to see the result, I (and I'm pretty sure most scientists) will not believe an intelligent observer is required.
another person that learned database work from a book. Just what we needed.
I take exception to that. I learned databases from a book, and have never had much trouble because of it. Of course, the book in question was The Relational Model for Data Base Management by E F Codd, but still...
I just read the story as:
"A wealthy musician with a track record for going [...] with [...] little kids..."
and thought "Woah. *Gary Glitter* is suing TPB!?"
So presumably this isn't a production motherboard?
Raw CPU speed is nice but when are we going to make the busses fatter. Most of the bottle necks are in the memory and hard drive subsystems.
Did you actually, you know, read the article? The entire point here is that Intel have just released a chip that needs a faster bus to run. And, yeah, sure, a 576-bit wide memory interface is great, but it would be insanely expensive for a consumer-oriented system. I'd expect to see the first 256-bit wide consumer systems (requiring 4 DIMMs to be installed for peak performance) introduced some time soon. Intel and AMD have both announced their plans for the next year or so, but I'd expect to see them hitting the market in 2009.
"Almost as soon as we had Phenom samples, Intel made the decision to sample a CPU requiring a FSB that wasn't officially supported by any chipset at the time. No, 1600MHz FSB support won't come until next year with the X48 chipset, but it didn't matter to Intel; we were getting chips now.
Except everyone seems to have missed the fact that the X38 chipset, available now, supports 1600MHz FSB.
There is a motherboard available for actual use. TFA is talking bollocks.
Unfortunately MS supports only up to 4gigs of memory up through XP on non-server OSes.
On 32-bit systems, yes. XP 64-bit edition supports 128GB.
I think there is a limit on how much memory and single process can use.
Yes, there is, it's 3GB on Windows (2, unless you know how to make the config changes to enable 3).
That's not to say photoshop wouldn't benefit from more than 3GB of RAM; it uses a tile cache on disk which would be sped up if it were in disk cache.
Yet they don't have 8GB sticks to make a 32GB system.
So get a motherboard with 8 slots then.
Umm, isn't that the format used in the most popular voting machines to store all our votes?
Yes. And?
Hail to Apple for integrating a quartz clock into their systems - others appear to dumb to do that. Finally I can read the time on my Computer and trust it too.
Erm... the real time clock in all PCs since IBM introduced the AT is a quartz clock. It used one of these, connected as shown in Fig. 10 on the datasheet, with a 32.768kHz crystal.
I don't know about the Apple hardware, but I suspect the difference is it uses a higher frequency crystal, and is probably calibrated before leaving the factory, which most PC manufacturers don't bother doing.
DST is set by local governments. This is an entirely different thing, an international standards body messing around with time, instead.
BTW: I'm of the opinion that it's not DST that should be abolished, but non-DST. Non-DST time is a good mathematical division of the day, centred equally around 12:00 (+- 30mins). Unfortunately, as a society, we seem to have decided to centre our actual lives around 13:00 instead. Switching permanently to DST would fix this.
If we change to the "leap hour" strategy, I'll have to remember what the offset is now, and that offset will change all the time...
At a rate of 1 min for every 10 years, I'm sure you could keep up.
We can ignore the problem then too. Eventually, morning and evening will be on different days. We might just gain or lose a whole day. Heck, we can ignore the problem forever. We'll be off by a year, then a decade...
And, with any luck, by then it won't matter. Earth-centric timekeeping will seem to be a quaint holdover from old times, and the idea of having periods of time vary in length to match a phenomenon that occurs only on a specific planet will likely be rejected.
Either that, or we'll all be back on sundials because we didn't solve the energy problems.
SarBox law in the US, and I'm sure that the UK has similar regulations
No, thank God, the UK does *not* have anything similar to Sarbanes-Oxley. The only real requirement we have is the Data Protection Act, which requires only that "appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data." The law offers little or no means to identify what an "appropriate technical [or] organisational measure" actually is, and it has historically been interpreted fairly laxly.
Wouldn't due diligence specifically exclude using windows?
Err... no. There are perfectly good, secure, disk encryption schemes available for Windows that should make it impossible for anyone to access the data (save via user incompetence).
So which bank allows you to do business with them without providing them with your ID information?
As I understand it, there are a few such banks operating out of Switzerland, and some in the Cayman Islands, and a few others in odd places like those. Of course, they'll charge you quite a bit for the privelege, but if you really *are* concerned about people knowing who you are, there are options.
Of course, any time you're depending on a downloaded applet for encryption, you're at the mercy of whomever you're downloading it from ... there's no reason (other than it being more difficult) that Hushmail couldn't be forced to "poison" their Java applet, or backdoor its encryption engine. Unless you're going to examine the code yourself each time, you have no way of really trusting it. But that's a lot more technically difficult than just grabbing the password from the server-side decryption engine, which appears to be what they did.
The applet is signed. They could make themselves invulnerable to this attack by wiping the key they signed it with. This would mean if they ever have to introduce a new applet, it would have a different certificate associated, and users' browsers would prompt them again whether they wanted to trust the applet. Knowledgeable users would then know not to trust the new applet until they'd confirmed that it was trustworthy (e.g. by decompiling it and comparing to the publicly available source code for the official applet).
Where does it say this? The only mention on the home page is at the bottom, "Hushmail without Java is now available". OK. Say I don't particularly care whether or not Java is used; I click on the "sign up for free email" button.
The text on this page is:
Do you expect people to read the entire site before signing up, in order to realise that in order to be secure they have to click "Show advanced options", and press the "Enable Java" button that's hiding in that panel?
I've been getting text message SPAM advertising a site, whose WHOIS records point to a HUSHMAIL account.
Andy
Err.. right. So spammers (who conduct often-illegal activities) are using a webmail service that makes it a little more difficult than usual for law enforcement to get hold of their details.
And you're surprised... why?