The new iMac. That's something else. It is gorgeous. Incredible. Beautiful. It's also Luxo Jr., the mascot of Pixar, which Steve Jobs *also* runs.
It's the exception that proves the rule: The new iMac is unique design, in a way that nothing else on the market is. Apple can pull stunts like that because, well, they're Apple. One of these days I want a collectible card game based on Silicon Valley figures; you'd play as Apple or Microsoft or the Non-Aligned Unix Worlds or something.
Reality Distortion Field would be damn fun to see illustrated.
But I digress. The multimedia box you pointed me at is a tub; another responder mentioned a case that -- no offense -- was outdated twenty years ago and actually *does* have lethal edges. I'm sure someone, somewhere has made a case that looks like real stereo equipment. Interesting how we're struggling to just achieve the status quo of blase from another domain...
Apple does something slightly out of the ordinary -- shave off a few edges, put a spit shine on the thing, throw in a screen -- and they're the heights of hardware innovation.
Yes, cloning Luxo Jr. makes up for it all, but it's the exception that proves the rule. For the most part, a tower is a tower is a tower.
They don't have to be.
Where are cases that look like they'd fit directly in with an entertainment system, replete with integrated DVD-ROMs and elegantly sliding front panels for expansion?
Where are low depth mods of rackmount cases, meant for vertical deployment next to your monitor?
Why is everything so angular? Volvos weren't this boxy. Why is every sharp angle in the computer world the kind of thing you could just *see* a prisoner filing down in about five minutes into a lethal weapon? I mean, I know programmers have a thing for powers of two (bug me, we'll chant 2^n, it's a real party lemme tell ya), and 90 is 360/2/2, but damn. Pass calculus already.
Hell, just to be ornery -- where's a natural keyboard clone you can stick a PC inside? In case you haven't noticed, your keyboard is several times larger than the avarage laptop.
This isn't random complaining. We've got cookie cutter cases with trivial modifications for a reason: Systems that *do* new things are apparently selling better than systems that *look* like they do -- or at least, the economies of scale of making nigh-identical cases are so incredibly massive that every deviation from the standard design introduces order of magnitude slashes of profit margins.
You might say this has as much to do with the limitations of the ATX spec, which specifically for cost purposes enforces fixed locations for all motherboard connectors. I don't know. I saw one random hobbyist with an ATX machine made out of a hollow cylinder of transparent plexiglass, illuminated with LEDs and with a detailed LCD providing system stats. Damn thing was a work of art. Sony, the one company most known for its attention to industrial design, recently came out with the closest "competitor": A _dark_ grey box with a spinach green LCD.
And that's the thing, folks. That hobbyist probably spent dozens of hours hand crafting that beauty. The processes required to make such a unique case are extraordinarily varied and unique, and if every new generation of computers needed completely new case designs, costs would shoot through the roof. Your case would become the most expensive part of your machine.
And so...we don't have unique cases. And I think I'm OK with that. But everyone, please. Unless you're talking about that brilliant homage to Pixar, don't think there's any originality at all among corporate case design.
There's just not. Your dollars have spoken -- maybe even wisely.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Cory Doctorow was talking about the Journalism 3.0 talk at the Emerging Technologies conference sometime back, and mentioned something insanely significant:
Eventually, when a major event happens, the first imagery of it won't be from government-released photos or even freelance photographers. It'll be anyone in the area with their cell phones, sending images of the disaster/situation off to their friends. Dozens upon dozens of individual, low quality but zero-hour latency images, sent over data networks to remote archives.
That's the future of journalism -- or at least part of it.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky, CISSP
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Depends on your approach. Klaus Engel and company are all sorts of interesting isosurface and direct volume rendering in realtime of really high detail models -- check out:
Seems like a decent number of people have absolutely no clue what Cg is all about, so I'll see if I can clear up some of the confusion:
Modern NVidia(and ATI) GPU's can execute decently complex instruction sets on the polygons they're set to render, as well as the actual pixels rendered either direct to screen or on the texture placed on a particular poly. The idea is to run your code as close to the actual rendering as possible -- you've got massive logic being deployed to quickly convert your datasets into some lit scene from a given perspective; might as well run a few custom instructions while we're in there.
There's a shit-ton of flexibility lost -- you can't throw a P4 into the middle of a rendering pipeline -- but in return, you get to stream the massive amounts of data that the GPU has computed in hardware through your own custom-designed "software" filter, all within the video card.
For practical applications, some of the best work I've seen with realtime hair uses vertex shaders to smoothly deform straight lines into flowing, flexible segments. From pixel shaders, we're starting to see volume rendering of actual MRI data that used to take quite some time to calculate instead happening *in realtime*.
It's a bit creepy to see a person's head, hit C, and immediately a clip plane slices the top of guy's scalp off and you're lookin' at a brain.
Now, these shaders are powerful, but by nature of where they're deployed, they're quite limited. You've got maybe a couple dozen assembly instructions that implement "useful" features -- dot products, reciprocal square roots, adds, multiplies, all in the register domain. It's not a general purpose instruction set, and you can't use it all you like: There's a fixed limit as to how many instructions you may use within a given shader, and though it varies between the two types, you've only got space for a couple dozen.
If you know anything about compilers, you know that they're not particularly well known for packing the most power per instruction. Though there's been some support for a while for dynamically adjusting shaders according to required features, they've been more assembly-packing toolkits than true compilers.
Cg appears different. If you didn't notice, Cg bears more than a passing resemblance to Renderman, the industry standard language for expressing how a material should react to being hit with a light source. (I'm oversimplifying horrifically, but heh.) Renderman surfaces are historically done in software *very, very* slowly -- this is a language optimized for the transformation of useful mathematical algorithms into something you can texture your polys with...speed isn't the concern, quality above all else is.
Last year, NVidia demonstrated rendering the Final Fantasy movie, in realtime, on their highest end card at the time. They hadn't just taken the scene data, reduced the density by an order of magnitude, and spit the polys on screen. They actually managed to compile a number of the Renderman shaders into the assembly language their cards could understand, and ran them for the realtime render.
To be honest, it was a bit underwhelming -- they really overhyped it; it did not look like the movie by any stretch of the imagination. But clearly they learned alot, and Cg is the fruits of that project. Whereas a hell of alot more has been written in Renderman than in strange shader assembly languages (yes, I've been trying to learn these lately, for *really* strange reasons), Cg could have a pretty interesting impact in what we see out of games.
A couple people have talked about Cg on non-nVidia cards. Don't worry. DirectX shaders are a standard; game authors don't need to worry about what card they're using, they simply declare the shader version they're operating against and the card can implement the rest using the open spec. So something compiled to shader language from Cg will work on all compliant cards.
Hopefully this helps?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
If it doesn't involve moving an object across a distance into some goal zone through a space defended by the opposing team, it is not a "sport".
Basketball, football, water polo, baseball (the object is the player; the ball is the weapon of the defenders), rugby, even that screwed up dead goat Afghani game all qualify.
The farther you get from this game definition, the harder a time people have defining something as a sport.
Sport is spoken of in the context of competition, but understood in the context of a very tightly defined game style that appears to show up cross-culturally. Interestingly enough, nobody would care about the "not a sport" thing if it wasn't from the massive legitimacy boost brought by sport-participation.
Remember how a fridge works -- a gas compressed loses heat. Total system heat increases, of course, which is why the ice cream coolers always had hot grades. But the heat is far away.
Hmmm. Maybe a normal spring and some gas that responds acceptably to being compressed by human force? I dunno. This is *so* not my specialty:-)
I have the suspicion that building machines with solid state hard drives would create a larger performance gain than the next three generations of Pentiums.
I do fail to see how two CPU's would be more power efficient than one.
1) We're going to finally start seeing hard-drive free systems. RAM is actually cheap enough that one to two gigs, living off an independent power supply, should be price competitive with a ten gig hard drive. Though XP might need to be shaved down a bit to fit in such a small amount of space, the increased system speed and vastly decreased amount of moving parts should make a significant difference in both power consumption and heat generation(the two are arguably the same thing). On the flip side, repeatedly pulsing that much memory might actually drain more power than I'd guess, and battery life on the RAM might not extend past a few days. In this case, I could still see a microdrive + RAM combo, or even a system that flat out just ran off a 2gb microdrive.
2) CPU heat will eventually be turned into a power source. Heh -- it's there, it's dependable, and if nothing else, it'll supplement primary power sources. I don't know how efficient electrical heat->power systems are -- I doubt Peltiers are going to work too well here, and we ain't sticking a turbine into a laptop (though Microfluidics just got much, much more interesting!). So this is the "five-to-ten years down the road" likelihood.
3) I feel like sounding like an idiot for a second, so I'll put this out there just for someone else to discredit: What about mechanical compression? Imagine a spring on the side of a laptop that needed to be pushed in periodically, but would absorb heat by slowly expanding. It'd be annoying, but each time the spring was compressed, heat should be lost reasonably harmlessly to the user's musculature. I'm sure this doesn't work, but I'd be interested in knowing the history of why not.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Run, don't walk, to http://djvu.research.att.com/home.html . DJVu is a image-based competitor to PDF that is a feat of beautiful engineering -- 300DPI scans break down to about 10-30K a page, the viewer is about an order of magnitude faster than PDF, the format cleanly supports separate encoding of page texture/graphics vs. page text, there's significant amounts of open source for it, and more.
It's truly a brilliant format. Go check it out.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
In the world of GIS(Geo-Information Systems, basically hardcore maptech), there exists such a thing as a Datum. Datums are constant values that are used to determine the precise latitude and longitude of a location. The most common datum was developed in the 1920's; it had to be revised sixty or seventy years later because advanced satellite technology had accuracy that surpassed what was possible with 1920's mapping methods. Datum error only introduces a few hundred meters of distortion, but GPS is good enough to tell you what side of the street you're on. More accuracy was required -- at the expense of breaking the previously absolute standard of Latitude and Longitude.
So, why would I bring up this incredibly boring piece of geek trivia, in a discussion bemoaning the lack of science knowledge among the general population? Simple:
When was the last time somebody threw themselves off a bridge because they couldn't get a datum?
Most of the EMF fears are driven by a need to spawn a legitimate excuse to avoid some insufficiently legitimate harm. Power lines don't cause cancer, but *are* ugly and distasteful. Those who complain loudest about the lines are often pretty heavy power users, so they can't say power overall is bad -- but by claiming a health risk, they get to legitimize their desire for...well...somebody else to get sick. Just not them:-)
Cell phones are about in the same boat. Human social behavior evolved all sorts of methods for a third party to enter a conversation in the immediate geographical vicinity -- the sheer number of entrance rituals through the world's cultures is astonishing. Cell phones block this ritual quite effectively -- the speaker only works well for one listener, and the microphone ain't much better. Three person conversations become impossible; the person with the phone at best may alternate between two semi-independent two person conversatoins. This is really annoying to the third person, who likely has geographic proximity and thus a "greater" right to be talking to the person he *has* to be hearing (but not able to understand entirely, due to the one-way nature of the phone conversation).
Long story short, the third person needs a legitimate way to express his illegitimate complaint -- you're not paying attention to me, you're paying attention to this other, far away person. You should be paying attention to me. But we can't say that, so instead we say "You should stop killing yourself."
It's really not that much different than "Keep touching yourself, and you'll go to hell."
Anyway, once cell phone manufacturers make it trivial for third parties to link phones into geographically linked party lines (over bluetooth ideally, but probably with cell-tower multipoint aggregation for charging purposes), a decent amount of the cell phone angst will dissipate. Not all, of course -- conspicuous outrage is a decent method of gaining attention in and of itself, and those who discovered they could get attention by keeping their immediate neighbors off phones also discovered they got attention for that specific action.
Hell, if nothing else, it's something to talk about.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
The point is that Win32 C++ sucks, and for a number of applications, HTML/JScript sucks much, much less so. To belabor the point, should Microsoft *have* to include an RTF Help File parser because the *feds* demand that Windows be unable to parse the single most significant new file format of the last few years?
It's interesting that you bring up the X11 API's. HTML is cross platform -- Win32 ain't.
Regarding the lack of the monitor: Windows is not fully administerable from a command line -- disagree with this philosophy if you like, but as Perl says, There's More Than One Way To Do It.
Well, yes. It's quite possible to ship a version of Windows XP without the web browsing component. It's also possible to ship it without the DOS Emulation component, or the Win16 execution environment, or MFC, or any VC++ libraries, or whatnot.
They're called API's, folks. Application Programming Interfaces. Win32 is clunky as hell, but undeniably exposes some damn powerful capabilities. Do we really want a federal mandate that developers must not have dependable access to a better way to code?
For all the talk of the browser, I do note that by '98 there wasn't an operating system on the market that shipped without a web browser, except perhaps VxWorks. Windows 98 was one of the last.
--Dan
P.S. I'm a hardcore Linux user, coder, and administrator, and wouldn't mandate Win32 on anyone. It's in that context that I understand the painfulness of MS's position.
The simple response to your argument is that, well, college ain't the real world. In the real world, you're not surrounded by dozens to hundreds of people who are expected to independently solve the exact same problem. In college, you are.
Normally, working off the backs of others prevents them from doing their own work, and is really only appropriate when their improved productivity frees you up to do something else that you're more productive at. Those who fail to do that something else often get canned. In college, working off of others doesn't create as immediate a cost, nor does it provide a benefit to the university with its now devalued degree.
So, in summary, in reality you're right, but college ain't reality. That being said, all the claims that he could have "gone to his professor" are rather bullshit; it's not advisable to expose your ignorance to the individual who could punish you for it. Now that's reality.
Bruce just answered the very legitimate question, "Why do hackers tend to congregate on IRC instead of, say, chat rooms on Yahoo and AOL?"
Well, how would you reply?
Bruce never implied for a moment that IRC should be shut down because that's where all the hackers are, he simply pointed out that it was a system more suitable to the technocultural aspects of the seedier parts of hackerdom -- which, of course, it is. So too is Linux, so too are home-built computers, so too is a distaste for your average sitcom. One can observe that without arguing that Linux, non-Dells, and Dharma and Greg-free homes be raided.
I was under the impression the the ECPA prevented disclosure of network traffic to any third party, and that monitoring one's network was only allowed to look for technical malfunctions. (Indeed, if one employee found something funny in their searches for hackers, and told another, that would be federally actionable.)
Bit busy -- finishing up The Book(TM) -- but I wrote a bit about this subject some time ago. Head over to: http://www.doxpara.com/read.php/security/secure_de letion.html
There's a Part 2, and some other stuff over there too. yeah, the site needs to be updated desperately. Wait till feb.
There's one piece of information that's very new and very, very cool: Apparently, some company has been going around the WTC crash site, picking out hard drives from crushed servers, and (though I can't imagine this) actually recovering data from the drives through all the crush damage and dust. I mean, yes, the concept that a non-portable, super expensive, very labor intensive read head would be able to recover significantly more data redundancy than some mass produced mag-head is unsurprising, but...damn.
Given: Freeloading is defined as the lack of cooperation.
Given: Punishment is defined as the act of making a given behavior fail to work.
Given: Something is considered to work if the majority does not fail when executing that behavior.
Conclude: The subject of this story is tautological; the subject "Cooperation" grammatically must "work" when its opposite "freeloading" is defined to not work by means of majority punishment.
Caveat: The results of this research most likely aren't useless or obvious; tautologies are, after all, incontrovertable truths, and lets not forget what science seeks.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
The odds of anyone managing to read this(without plugging around my post history or googling long in the distant future) are pretty miniscule, but heh.
Cars have existed for what, ninety years now? Guess what, they still crash.
Error Correction (Reed-Solomon Encoding, in this case) is a system for increasing system robustness. Even with scratches, dents, and so on, the system should still work.
Security in general and Cactus's scheme in particular is a system for decreasing system robustness. Except with a precise combination of software player, disc, and equipment, the system should not still work.
So, from a theoretical point of view, they've repurposed something that added value into something that subtracted value. In practical terms, scratching your CD is now much more likely to cause serious damage, worthy of replacement.
This can, and will be proven experimentally.
The irony, of course, is that the more copy protection is added, the more legitimate the need will be to make copies. Beautiful.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
It's quite telling that one of the first major CDs to receive copy protection is also one of the most disappointing CDs I've ever listened to in my life.
I'm serious -- her first album, Left Of The Middle, was actually really cool, and I genuinely liked the vast majority of the tracks.
I think there's like one(1) song on the entire new album I'd ever listen to again, copy protected or not. Generic tripe doesn't begin to describe it -- and this is coming from a *fan*.
Ugh.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Slashdot Mirror
Clueless Troll? Big words, AC ;-)
The old iMac is a BOX. It's a BOX with a MONITOR.
The new iMac. That's something else. It is gorgeous. Incredible. Beautiful. It's also Luxo Jr., the mascot of Pixar, which Steve Jobs *also* runs.
It's the exception that proves the rule: The new iMac is unique design, in a way that nothing else on the market is. Apple can pull stunts like that because, well, they're Apple. One of these days I want a collectible card game based on Silicon Valley figures; you'd play as Apple or Microsoft or the Non-Aligned Unix Worlds or something.
Reality Distortion Field would be damn fun to see illustrated.
But I digress. The multimedia box you pointed me at is a tub; another responder mentioned a case that -- no offense -- was outdated twenty years ago and actually *does* have lethal edges. I'm sure someone, somewhere has made a case that looks like real stereo equipment. Interesting how we're struggling to just achieve the status quo of blase from another domain...
--Dan
Apple does something slightly out of the ordinary -- shave off a few edges, put a spit shine on the thing, throw in a screen -- and they're the heights of hardware innovation.
Yes, cloning Luxo Jr. makes up for it all, but it's the exception that proves the rule. For the most part, a tower is a tower is a tower.
They don't have to be.
Where are cases that look like they'd fit directly in with an entertainment system, replete with integrated DVD-ROMs and elegantly sliding front panels for expansion?
Where are low depth mods of rackmount cases, meant for vertical deployment next to your monitor?
Why is everything so angular? Volvos weren't this boxy. Why is every sharp angle in the computer world the kind of thing you could just *see* a prisoner filing down in about five minutes into a lethal weapon? I mean, I know programmers have a thing for powers of two (bug me, we'll chant 2^n, it's a real party lemme tell ya), and 90 is 360/2/2, but damn. Pass calculus already.
Hell, just to be ornery -- where's a natural keyboard clone you can stick a PC inside? In case you haven't noticed, your keyboard is several times larger than the avarage laptop.
This isn't random complaining. We've got cookie cutter cases with trivial modifications for a reason: Systems that *do* new things are apparently selling better than systems that *look* like they do -- or at least, the economies of scale of making nigh-identical cases are so incredibly massive that every deviation from the standard design introduces order of magnitude slashes of profit margins.
You might say this has as much to do with the limitations of the ATX spec, which specifically for cost purposes enforces fixed locations for all motherboard connectors. I don't know. I saw one random hobbyist with an ATX machine made out of a hollow cylinder of transparent plexiglass, illuminated with LEDs and with a detailed LCD providing system stats. Damn thing was a work of art. Sony, the one company most known for its attention to industrial design, recently came out with the closest "competitor": A _dark_ grey box with a spinach green LCD.
And that's the thing, folks. That hobbyist probably spent dozens of hours hand crafting that beauty. The processes required to make such a unique case are extraordinarily varied and unique, and if every new generation of computers needed completely new case designs, costs would shoot through the roof. Your case would become the most expensive part of your machine.
And so...we don't have unique cases. And I think I'm OK with that. But everyone, please. Unless you're talking about that brilliant homage to Pixar, don't think there's any originality at all among corporate case design.
There's just not. Your dollars have spoken -- maybe even wisely.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Cory Doctorow was talking about the Journalism 3.0 talk at the Emerging Technologies conference sometime back, and mentioned something insanely significant:
Eventually, when a major event happens, the first imagery of it won't be from government-released photos or even freelance photographers. It'll be anyone in the area with their cell phones, sending images of the disaster/situation off to their friends. Dozens upon dozens of individual, low quality but zero-hour latency images, sent over data networks to remote archives.
That's the future of journalism -- or at least part of it.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky, CISSP
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Depends on your approach. Klaus Engel and company are all sorts of interesting isosurface and direct volume rendering in realtime of really high detail models -- check out:
l /p re-integrated/
:-)
http://wwwvis.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/~enge
That's being done in realtime. They're doing more than just slapping slices on top of eachother and letting 'em alpha blend.
--Dan
Seems like a decent number of people have absolutely no clue what Cg is all about, so I'll see if I can clear up some of the confusion:
Modern NVidia(and ATI) GPU's can execute decently complex instruction sets on the polygons they're set to render, as well as the actual pixels rendered either direct to screen or on the texture placed on a particular poly. The idea is to run your code as close to the actual rendering as possible -- you've got massive logic being deployed to quickly convert your datasets into some lit scene from a given perspective; might as well run a few custom instructions while we're in there.
There's a shit-ton of flexibility lost -- you can't throw a P4 into the middle of a rendering pipeline -- but in return, you get to stream the massive amounts of data that the GPU has computed in hardware through your own custom-designed "software" filter, all within the video card.
For practical applications, some of the best work I've seen with realtime hair uses vertex shaders to smoothly deform straight lines into flowing, flexible segments. From pixel shaders, we're starting to see volume rendering of actual MRI data that used to take quite some time to calculate instead happening *in realtime*.
It's a bit creepy to see a person's head, hit C, and immediately a clip plane slices the top of guy's scalp off and you're lookin' at a brain.
Now, these shaders are powerful, but by nature of where they're deployed, they're quite limited. You've got maybe a couple dozen assembly instructions that implement "useful" features -- dot products, reciprocal square roots, adds, multiplies, all in the register domain. It's not a general purpose instruction set, and you can't use it all you like: There's a fixed limit as to how many instructions you may use within a given shader, and though it varies between the two types, you've only got space for a couple dozen.
If you know anything about compilers, you know that they're not particularly well known for packing the most power per instruction. Though there's been some support for a while for dynamically adjusting shaders according to required features, they've been more assembly-packing toolkits than true compilers.
Cg appears different. If you didn't notice, Cg bears more than a passing resemblance to Renderman, the industry standard language for expressing how a material should react to being hit with a light source. (I'm oversimplifying horrifically, but heh.) Renderman surfaces are historically done in software *very, very* slowly -- this is a language optimized for the transformation of useful mathematical algorithms into something you can texture your polys with...speed isn't the concern, quality above all else is.
Last year, NVidia demonstrated rendering the Final Fantasy movie, in realtime, on their highest end card at the time. They hadn't just taken the scene data, reduced the density by an order of magnitude, and spit the polys on screen. They actually managed to compile a number of the Renderman shaders into the assembly language their cards could understand, and ran them for the realtime render.
To be honest, it was a bit underwhelming -- they really overhyped it; it did not look like the movie by any stretch of the imagination. But clearly they learned alot, and Cg is the fruits of that project. Whereas a hell of alot more has been written in Renderman than in strange shader assembly languages (yes, I've been trying to learn these lately, for *really* strange reasons), Cg could have a pretty interesting impact in what we see out of games.
A couple people have talked about Cg on non-nVidia cards. Don't worry. DirectX shaders are a standard; game authors don't need to worry about what card they're using, they simply declare the shader version they're operating against and the card can implement the rest using the open spec. So something compiled to shader language from Cg will work on all compliant cards.
Hopefully this helps?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
You're a terrorist. You want to see just how much your enemy can find out about you.
Would you rather penetrate MI6? Or the Department of Work and Pensions?
I'm not saying I distrust any podunk agency. I'd much rather not particularly need to. Desperately.
--Dan
If it doesn't involve moving an object across a distance into some goal zone through a space defended by the opposing team, it is not a "sport".
Basketball, football, water polo, baseball (the object is the player; the ball is the weapon of the defenders), rugby, even that screwed up dead goat Afghani game all qualify.
The farther you get from this game definition, the harder a time people have defining something as a sport.
Sport is spoken of in the context of competition, but understood in the context of a very tightly defined game style that appears to show up cross-culturally. Interestingly enough, nobody would care about the "not a sport" thing if it wasn't from the massive legitimacy boost brought by sport-participation.
People are funny.
--Dan
Remember how a fridge works -- a gas compressed loses heat. Total system heat increases, of course, which is why the ice cream coolers always had hot grades. But the heat is far away.
:-)
Hmmm. Maybe a normal spring and some gas that responds acceptably to being compressed by human force? I dunno. This is *so* not my specialty
I have the suspicion that building machines with solid state hard drives would create a larger performance gain than the next three generations of Pentiums.
I do fail to see how two CPU's would be more power efficient than one.
1) We're going to finally start seeing hard-drive free systems. RAM is actually cheap enough that one to two gigs, living off an independent power supply, should be price competitive with a ten gig hard drive. Though XP might need to be shaved down a bit to fit in such a small amount of space, the increased system speed and vastly decreased amount of moving parts should make a significant difference in both power consumption and heat generation(the two are arguably the same thing). On the flip side, repeatedly pulsing that much memory might actually drain more power than I'd guess, and battery life on the RAM might not extend past a few days. In this case, I could still see a microdrive + RAM combo, or even a system that flat out just ran off a 2gb microdrive.
2) CPU heat will eventually be turned into a power source. Heh -- it's there, it's dependable, and if nothing else, it'll supplement primary power sources. I don't know how efficient electrical heat->power systems are -- I doubt Peltiers are going to work too well here, and we ain't sticking a turbine into a laptop (though Microfluidics just got much, much more interesting!). So this is the "five-to-ten years down the road" likelihood.
3) I feel like sounding like an idiot for a second, so I'll put this out there just for someone else to discredit: What about mechanical compression? Imagine a spring on the side of a laptop that needed to be pushed in periodically, but would absorb heat by slowly expanding. It'd be annoying, but each time the spring was compressed, heat should be lost reasonably harmlessly to the user's musculature. I'm sure this doesn't work, but I'd be interested in knowing the history of why not.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Run, don't walk, to http://djvu.research.att.com/home.html . DJVu is a image-based competitor to PDF that is a feat of beautiful engineering -- 300DPI scans break down to about 10-30K a page, the viewer is about an order of magnitude faster than PDF, the format cleanly supports separate encoding of page texture/graphics vs. page text, there's significant amounts of open source for it, and more.
It's truly a brilliant format. Go check it out.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
In the world of GIS(Geo-Information Systems, basically hardcore maptech), there exists such a thing as a Datum. Datums are constant values that are used to determine the precise latitude and longitude of a location. The most common datum was developed in the 1920's; it had to be revised sixty or seventy years later because advanced satellite technology had accuracy that surpassed what was possible with 1920's mapping methods. Datum error only introduces a few hundred meters of distortion, but GPS is good enough to tell you what side of the street you're on. More accuracy was required -- at the expense of breaking the previously absolute standard of Latitude and Longitude.
So, why would I bring up this incredibly boring piece of geek trivia, in a discussion bemoaning the lack of science knowledge among the general population? Simple:
When was the last time somebody threw themselves off a bridge because they couldn't get a datum?
--Dan
Most of the EMF fears are driven by a need to spawn a legitimate excuse to avoid some insufficiently legitimate harm. Power lines don't cause cancer, but *are* ugly and distasteful. Those who complain loudest about the lines are often pretty heavy power users, so they can't say power overall is bad -- but by claiming a health risk, they get to legitimize their desire for...well...somebody else to get sick. Just not them :-)
Cell phones are about in the same boat. Human social behavior evolved all sorts of methods for a third party to enter a conversation in the immediate geographical vicinity -- the sheer number of entrance rituals through the world's cultures is astonishing. Cell phones block this ritual quite effectively -- the speaker only works well for one listener, and the microphone ain't much better. Three person conversations become impossible; the person with the phone at best may alternate between two semi-independent two person conversatoins. This is really annoying to the third person, who likely has geographic proximity and thus a "greater" right to be talking to the person he *has* to be hearing (but not able to understand entirely, due to the one-way nature of the phone conversation).
Long story short, the third person needs a legitimate way to express his illegitimate complaint -- you're not paying attention to me, you're paying attention to this other, far away person. You should be paying attention to me. But we can't say that, so instead we say "You should stop killing yourself."
It's really not that much different than "Keep touching yourself, and you'll go to hell."
Anyway, once cell phone manufacturers make it trivial for third parties to link phones into geographically linked party lines (over bluetooth ideally, but probably with cell-tower multipoint aggregation for charging purposes), a decent amount of the cell phone angst will dissipate. Not all, of course -- conspicuous outrage is a decent method of gaining attention in and of itself, and those who discovered they could get attention by keeping their immediate neighbors off phones also discovered they got attention for that specific action.
Hell, if nothing else, it's something to talk about.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Xtifr--
The point is that Win32 C++ sucks, and for a number of applications, HTML/JScript sucks much, much less so. To belabor the point, should Microsoft *have* to include an RTF Help File parser because the *feds* demand that Windows be unable to parse the single most significant new file format of the last few years?
It's interesting that you bring up the X11 API's. HTML is cross platform -- Win32 ain't.
Regarding the lack of the monitor: Windows is not fully administerable from a command line -- disagree with this philosophy if you like, but as Perl says, There's More Than One Way To Do It.
--Dan
Well, yes. It's quite possible to ship a version of Windows XP without the web browsing component. It's also possible to ship it without the DOS Emulation component, or the Win16 execution environment, or MFC, or any VC++ libraries, or whatnot.
They're called API's, folks. Application Programming Interfaces. Win32 is clunky as hell, but undeniably exposes some damn powerful capabilities. Do we really want a federal mandate that developers must not have dependable access to a better way to code?
For all the talk of the browser, I do note that by '98 there wasn't an operating system on the market that shipped without a web browser, except perhaps VxWorks. Windows 98 was one of the last.
--Dan
P.S. I'm a hardcore Linux user, coder, and administrator, and wouldn't mandate Win32 on anyone. It's in that context that I understand the painfulness of MS's position.
Stu--
The simple response to your argument is that, well, college ain't the real world. In the real world, you're not surrounded by dozens to hundreds of people who are expected to independently solve the exact same problem. In college, you are.
Normally, working off the backs of others prevents them from doing their own work, and is really only appropriate when their improved productivity frees you up to do something else that you're more productive at. Those who fail to do that something else often get canned. In college, working off of others doesn't create as immediate a cost, nor does it provide a benefit to the university with its now devalued degree.
So, in summary, in reality you're right, but college ain't reality. That being said, all the claims that he could have "gone to his professor" are rather bullshit; it's not advisable to expose your ignorance to the individual who could punish you for it. Now that's reality.
--Dan
Entire generations joined the net *after* ICQ, AIM, and Yahoo. People deliberately are avoiding the "newer" tech.
--Dan
Bruce just answered the very legitimate question, "Why do hackers tend to congregate on IRC instead of, say, chat rooms on Yahoo and AOL?"
Well, how would you reply?
Bruce never implied for a moment that IRC should be shut down because that's where all the hackers are, he simply pointed out that it was a system more suitable to the technocultural aspects of the seedier parts of hackerdom -- which, of course, it is. So too is Linux, so too are home-built computers, so too is a distaste for your average sitcom. One can observe that without arguing that Linux, non-Dells, and Dharma and Greg-free homes be raided.
--Dan
I was under the impression the the ECPA prevented disclosure of network traffic to any third party, and that monitoring one's network was only allowed to look for technical malfunctions. (Indeed, if one employee found something funny in their searches for hackers, and told another, that would be federally actionable.)
Did something change?
--Dan
Touche.
*moment of silence*
Bit busy -- finishing up The Book(TM) -- but I wrote a bit about this subject some time ago. Head over to: http://www.doxpara.com/read.php/security/secure_de letion.html
There's a Part 2, and some other stuff over there too. yeah, the site needs to be updated desperately. Wait till feb.
There's one piece of information that's very new and very, very cool: Apparently, some company has been going around the WTC crash site, picking out hard drives from crushed servers, and (though I can't imagine this) actually recovering data from the drives through all the crush damage and dust. I mean, yes, the concept that a non-portable, super expensive, very labor intensive read head would be able to recover significantly more data redundancy than some mass produced mag-head is unsurprising, but...damn.
--Dan
Given: Freeloading is defined as the lack of cooperation.
Given: Punishment is defined as the act of making a given behavior fail to work.
Given: Something is considered to work if the majority does not fail when executing that behavior.
Conclude: The subject of this story is tautological; the subject "Cooperation" grammatically must "work" when its opposite "freeloading" is defined to not work by means of majority punishment.
Caveat: The results of this research most likely aren't useless or obvious; tautologies are, after all, incontrovertable truths, and lets not forget what science seeks.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
The odds of anyone managing to read this(without plugging around my post history or googling long in the distant future) are pretty miniscule, but heh.
Cars have existed for what, ninety years now? Guess what, they still crash.
--Dan
Error Correction (Reed-Solomon Encoding, in this case) is a system for increasing system robustness. Even with scratches, dents, and so on, the system should still work.
Security in general and Cactus's scheme in particular is a system for decreasing system robustness. Except with a precise combination of software player, disc, and equipment, the system should not still work.
So, from a theoretical point of view, they've repurposed something that added value into something that subtracted value. In practical terms, scratching your CD is now much more likely to cause serious damage, worthy of replacement.
This can, and will be proven experimentally.
The irony, of course, is that the more copy protection is added, the more legitimate the need will be to make copies. Beautiful.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
It's quite telling that one of the first major CDs to receive copy protection is also one of the most disappointing CDs I've ever listened to in my life.
I'm serious -- her first album, Left Of The Middle, was actually really cool, and I genuinely liked the vast majority of the tracks.
I think there's like one(1) song on the entire new album I'd ever listen to again, copy protected or not. Generic tripe doesn't begin to describe it -- and this is coming from a *fan*.
Ugh.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
You need to a soldier to really fight soldiers. You need to be a hacker to really fight hackers.
In the world of hackers, there are attackers, and there are defenders. It's easy to attack. It's much more interesting and important to defend.
--Dan