Sun Tzu said it best...
on
P2P Goes To War
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The ultimate deployment is formless.
If you cannot analyze your opponent's organization, then you cannot fight it. This is especially apropos in the digital battlefield, where a P2P network minimizes the dependence on any one node.
The frequency spectrum is considered a "natural resource" and is public property. The FCC was granted control over the allocation of this spectrum in the Communications Act of 1934. You can license frequencies from the FCC, but you do not gain ownership of them. Location has nothing to do with the control over the frequency spectrum. It is within the FCC's authority to limit the rights to monitor signals within certain frequency bands (whether or not it is enforceable is another matter).
I am not necessarily advocating the state of affairs, but it is the law of the land. Since I am of course oversimplifying, you may want to check out the issues raised here.
It is technically feasible, but also a major headache. There would also be some serious economic considerations. Here are some obstacles such a technology would have to overcome:
1) Making the cost/benefit ratio of the processing power required for software radio competitive with a single-technology solution.
2) Ease of integration into different infrastructures. Just because you can make the air interface work with any type of radio technology does not mean that you've fixed the whole problem. Every layer of the OSI model must be satisfied.
3) Regulatory requirements. Such a device would have to demonstrate compliance with a wider range of standards (both government and industry-enforced) than normal. This could make time to market longer and more expensive than a simpler product.
I'm not saying that this shouldn't be pursued, but given the current state of affairs I would be surprised if someone could make it profitable.
I agree with you that a standard GUI is one key to widespread adoption of a desktop platform. A single GUI might be more curse than blessing, however. Would Linux users really be willing to give up their freedom of choice to gain broad acceptance? Personally, I doubt it. Once you start down the path of uniformity, forever will it dominate your destiny.
Dr. Lenat and others in the field of AI research should know better than to make claims about consciousnes and morality in a public forum. Cognitive scientists don't even begin to agree on what consciousness is, let alone what it would take for a machine to replicate it. Some very respected individuals do not even think that human consciousness can be replicated within the forseeable future (e.g. Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind). Like any other scientific discipline, these sorts of claims should be left to peer review. Claiming to have invented a conscious machine would be akin to a physicist claiming to have unified quantum with relativity, but without having submitted their findings to any publication.
I appreciate the extra information you have posted here about the Shenzhou.
But I would be reluctant to call the low cost of the Russian space program an "edge". A lot of what the Soviet (now Russian) space program achieved came at the cost of many cosmonauts' lives. Granted, the American program is extremely bloated and has had its own losses, but the safety of the astronauts has always been considered paramount.
It would be interesting to see what kind of data this system returned in other cultures. I currently work for a Finnish company, and one of the things they told me when I got here was that "If a Finnish manager isn't talking to you, they are happy; but if an American isn't talking to you, they are probably angry." That is certainly an oversimplification, but I do believe that common management styles can vary drastically from one culture to another. This techinque might help to codify and visualize these trends.
I think you have been misinformed: Rotary Rocket was never intended to go to geosynch. It could potentially be used as a platform for another object to boost itself from LEO to GEO (much like the shuttle), but it was never intended to reach GEO on its own -- with or without a pilot.
The Rotary Rocket was a brilliant design for many reasons, but very few people are willing to make that kind of paradigm shift in their thinking about vehicle design.
In the end, though, it was really killed by overall industry pressure. Like many inventions, people probably won't appreciate the value of a single stage to orbit reusable vehicle until they have it. And then we won't be able to build enough of them. (And don't let anyone convince you that the shuttle is an SSTO vehicle - as good as it is, it is an embarassment to its original objectives.)
IR radiation does not have sufficient energy to penetrate a cell and alter its chromosomes (which is what I assume you mean by mutation). It could affect chemical reactions within the cell in any number of ways, but it is essentially impossible for IR to cause a mutation.
I do agree, however, that the article could have afforded to present at least one hypothesis about what is going on here.
Time is time. They're not talking about flops or results received. They simply mean that people have contributed 500,000 years of time on their machines. (Actually slightly less since some setups can process multiple results simultaneously.) But if you want a real computing power measure, the total number of Floating Point Operations has been (as of their last post):
This is a great milestone from Seti, but I think they could be doing even better. They already have a great, attractive interface which draws people to the client. What the really need to attract even more people is regular public feedback about the value of the results being received.
I know they're short on time and staff, but with significant web site updates (newsletters and the like) happening on the order of months, I've seen a lot of people drift away from the program because they don't have a good sense that anything is happening.
After all, a significant aspect of any successful distributed computing project is good old fashioned PR.
It doesn't seem like this will deter many companies from investigating port scans -- it just means that they can't claim damages for the scan itself. But it is a good decision, and I hope Moulton wins the counter suit against VC3.
Admins and their managers are going to have to face up to the fact that if they want to maintain a secure system, they'll have to be vigillant and won't be able to sue everyone for their time.
Maybe I wasn't clear, but I was comparing public transportation based on an electric grid to public transportation based on self-contained electric vehicles. I was not trying to bring private automobiles into the picture at all.
For the most part I would agree with you. Though I think you have missed one additional problem with the initial cost of public transportation. In most cities that grow without enough forethought, the private roadway system will have been established for decades before a public system becomes needed. Then in order to retrofit a public rail or similar fixed system onto the existing infrastructure, you have the cost to both build the new system and rebuild the old. Private transportation is a fact of American life which, at least for the meantime, will have to be accepted unless there is a major social change in people's travel habits.
Electric Trolley:
As the article admits, the infrastructure expense here is prohibitive, and why do this when self-contained electric vehicles are becoming more and more feasible?
Pneumatic Post:
Amiga:
Personally, I think Amiga failed for one basic reason: speed. The early Amigas had some amazing potential, but for day-to-day office use, for example, they could be very cumbersome. Unfortunately, by the time the hardware speed caught up with what they were trying to do, other manufacturers had competitive formats for graphics, sound, etc.
Ribbon Microphone:
I just don't get this one. I work in acoustics, and while I will grant that the ribbon microphone was impressive in its day, there are other many other alternatives that work just as well. This is probably a case of audiophiles glamorizing a certain sound timbre rather than a quantifiable advantage in performance. For example, it is possible to make a microphone with a flat response to the edge of human hearing on a silicon chip these days.
Wax Cylinder:
As with my comments for the ribbon mike, maybe there were some performance advantages to the Cylinder over vinyl, but in this day, there is no reason to prefer it over a digital system. Again, we may have a case of audiophiles prefering the qualitative aspects of a certain sound, even if a strict performance criteria would show it to be inferior.
Slide Rule:
I think I can agree with this one, if for no other reason than the article's point on its education value is true.
Reel Mowers:
Amen to this. I hate being woken up on a Saturday morning by area lawn mowers.
Automatic Watch:
A modern, electronic version of a self-charging watch does exist. Still, those things are amazing.
Airship:
This technology absolutely needs to be reinvestigated. It may, unfortunately, be caught in a Catch22: it needs more money to research new designs, but it needs better proven designs to get more money. Sort of like the problem the single-stage-to-orbit vehicle people seem to be stuck in right now.
After a basic overview to see if a person is technically qualified (the easy part), I find it very effective to apply a behavioral approach to interviewing. Basically, try to ask somewhat open-ended questions which allow the candidate to give you information about their past experience.
To give a very general example:
Do you work well in a customer-service oriented environment, and can you give us some examples from your last position?
Or on a more technical level:
What was the biggest innovation you made in your last job?
What kind of technical challenges did you face in your last position, and how did you overcome them?
These can of course be even more specifically tailored, but they should leave enough room for any qualified candidate to be able to tell you about their past actions and experience. (We are assuming an initial screening for the technical requirements of the job ahead of time -- either at the beginning or in a separate interview.) If chosen carefully, this kind of strategy will give you a good picture of the candidate both personally and technically. The open-ended nature of the questions may bring out strengths and weekness you would never have anticipated.
Why are moderaters using their points on this kind of thing?
So there was a duplicate. Life goes on.
Slashdot is a huge site and some people with lives don't read every last word of it. When I see a post with "4 Insightful" I hope to see some on-topic content.
OK, I have a fairly high tolerance for this kind of thing, but these folks have gone way off the deep end. Can't read it aloud?
But aside from the obvious foolishness, what gets me is the financial damage done by preventing the giving of the book as a gift. "Hey! I've got a bright idea: Let's cut ourselves out of any chance of competing with a huge section of the retail market by never being able give this as a gift!" The eBooks idea will never get off the ground at this rate.
I build on one aspect of this argument (which I wholeheartedly agree with): Katz's comment about the growing generational gap is arguably contradicted by the gaming industry rather than supported. His own previous article pointed out how gamers were getting older and progressively reaching a wider and wider audience. Wouldn't this tend to suggest a greater shared entertainment experience between young and old?
While Mr. Katz's thesis may be interesting, this is a poor essay for the simple reason that there is almost no evidence. This is an article of broad generalizations without supporting argument. Which is not to say that I think it is wrong. I think there are some subsets of American culture where this "Moral Panic" might exist, but Katz presents it as an all-consuming cultural crisis.
From my own limited vantage point, America seems to be gradually accepting gaming culture more and more.
The key problem I see with this sort of unplanned, organically-grown wireless network is the loss of bandwidth efficiency that would come from this lack of central planning. Bandwidth is a limited resource (and free public bandwidth is particularly scarce in the RF band convenient for this sort of signalling), and it is important to make the best use of it possible. Every new user who comes onto this kind of network drops the signal to noise ratio for everyone else, thus reducing their throughput. If such a network ever really caught on, you would end up with an extremely crowded airspace with all sorts of tranceivers competing for resources without any method of arbitration.
On another note, I think it is silly to keep using the "open source" metaphor outside the software industry. Open Source is a unique thing within software/the net because you are dealing with ideas - not limited resources. It is one thing to "open source" a method of doing networking, but the metaphor breaks down once you start talking about a noisy transmission environment. To stretch the metaphor to breaking - every new "copy" of the "source" changes the performance of everyone else's version. Everyone seems to want to latch on to "Open Source" just because it is fashionable without thinking.
Well, I have to admit that it was great to see such a thorough adaptation of the novel. And the production values were overall very good -- at least on par with other high-end TV SciFi.
I think, however, that the thoroughness of the adaption (as seen so far) is its greatest weakness. Herbert's novel was not written to act as a screenplay, and I think that this adaptation would probably play very poorly with someone who was not very familiar with the novel's material. The novelization allows the characters to be developed in ways that arguably should be compensated for in a screen presentation (presentation of internal monologues, detailed background descriptions, etc.).
For these reasons, I actually thought the scene that was least faithful to the novel was also one of the most dramatically effective -- namely, the encounter between Paul and Princess Irulan.
Finally, on an unrelated note, I was hoping for a slightly more epic score. Granted, writing for a six hour miniseries is a daunting task, but an epic story like this deserves music which paints in broad, thematic storkes.
First of all, IMT-2000 is a reference to third generation wireless technology and not (as far as I am aware) the model number of the device. And before Americans get too excited about this, keep in mind that the network infrastructure for this kind of technology does not exist here. For that matter, it does not exist in most other countries yet on any significant scale.
Still, it seems to be a fairly interesting product. It would be interesting to see how reliable the Linux-based system is, given the complex list of supported features. Personally, I would be suspicious that the company is just cramming in features to make headlines without ironing out a lot of the details.
Actually, that wasn't Conway's goal at all. In fact, though it is extremely interesting, it is entirely contrary to the original goals. Life was hoped to be a set of simple rules that would lead to complex, hard-to-predict systems that would tend neither towards collapse or infinite growth. In crude terms, he wanted cellular automata that would resemble a sort of primordial soup.
On initial investigation, Life seems to achieve these goals, but further investigation and huge advances in computing power have found all sorts of infinitely self-replicating structures (and eventually wires, logic gates, and even this Turing machine).
Let me start off by saying that I do think this would be a pretty helpful device. In fact, it seem pretty applicable to a variety of applications.
In my mind, however, this effort is overshadowed by the fact that so many RTS games really need to improve their UI. I would hate to think that future RTS games will use this as a crutch thinking, "Hey, we can just recommend that they buy a second input device.". Too many RTS games (which are Real Time Tactics games in most cases, if you ask me), have fairly limited unit AI and rely on the player to provide precise maneuvering orders in complex situations. Take for example WarCraft II -- how many times did you wish for an option to "move the catapult just outside of the range of that tower" rather than having to micro-manage every last unit's movement. I'll grant that these are not simple problems and some games are moving to fix this, but most RTS games are still far short of being truly "strategy" games instead of intricate click-fests.
I believe it was Mark Twain who said, "There are three kinds of falsehoods: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Though perhaps someone can correct me on that.
My point, however, is that this MIT fellow with the figure of the Buchanan vote in Palm Beach County being a 1 in 3x10^15 probability, could just as well have said that there is a 3x10^15 chance that the distribution of vote between counties is not normal. Why, after all, would anyone expect a voting distribution to fall on a normal distribution? There are any number of statistical distributions we could choose arbitrarily (Weibull, Exponential, Raleigh, etc.), none of which is usually useful in matters of human behavior or politics.
What is MIT teaching people these days? To shove any list of numbers they can find into a canned stat program?
Slashdot Mirror
The ultimate deployment is formless.
If you cannot analyze your opponent's organization, then you cannot fight it. This is especially apropos in the digital battlefield, where a P2P network minimizes the dependence on any one node.
A bit about legal control over radio frequency -
The frequency spectrum is considered a "natural resource" and is public property. The FCC was granted control over the allocation of this spectrum in the Communications Act of 1934. You can license frequencies from the FCC, but you do not gain ownership of them. Location has nothing to do with the control over the frequency spectrum. It is within the FCC's authority to limit the rights to monitor signals within certain frequency bands (whether or not it is enforceable is another matter).
I am not necessarily advocating the state of affairs, but it is the law of the land. Since I am of course oversimplifying, you may want to check out the issues raised here.
It is technically feasible, but also a major headache. There would also be some serious economic considerations. Here are some obstacles such a technology would have to overcome:
1) Making the cost/benefit ratio of the processing power required for software radio competitive with a single-technology solution.
2) Ease of integration into different infrastructures. Just because you can make the air interface work with any type of radio technology does not mean that you've fixed the whole problem. Every layer of the OSI model must be satisfied.
3) Regulatory requirements. Such a device would have to demonstrate compliance with a wider range of standards (both government and industry-enforced) than normal. This could make time to market longer and more expensive than a simpler product.
I'm not saying that this shouldn't be pursued, but given the current state of affairs I would be surprised if someone could make it profitable.
I agree with you that a standard GUI is one key to widespread adoption of a desktop platform. A single GUI might be more curse than blessing, however. Would Linux users really be willing to give up their freedom of choice to gain broad acceptance? Personally, I doubt it. Once you start down the path of uniformity, forever will it dominate your destiny.
Dr. Lenat and others in the field of AI research should know better than to make claims about consciousnes and morality in a public forum. Cognitive scientists don't even begin to agree on what consciousness is, let alone what it would take for a machine to replicate it. Some very respected individuals do not even think that human consciousness can be replicated within the forseeable future (e.g. Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind). Like any other scientific discipline, these sorts of claims should be left to peer review. Claiming to have invented a conscious machine would be akin to a physicist claiming to have unified quantum with relativity, but without having submitted their findings to any publication.
But I would be reluctant to call the low cost of the Russian space program an "edge". A lot of what the Soviet (now Russian) space program achieved came at the cost of many cosmonauts' lives. Granted, the American program is extremely bloated and has had its own losses, but the safety of the astronauts has always been considered paramount.
It would be interesting to see what kind of data this system returned in other cultures. I currently work for a Finnish company, and one of the things they told me when I got here was that "If a Finnish manager isn't talking to you, they are happy; but if an American isn't talking to you, they are probably angry." That is certainly an oversimplification, but I do believe that common management styles can vary drastically from one culture to another. This techinque might help to codify and visualize these trends.
The Rotary Rocket was a brilliant design for many reasons, but very few people are willing to make that kind of paradigm shift in their thinking about vehicle design.
In the end, though, it was really killed by overall industry pressure. Like many inventions, people probably won't appreciate the value of a single stage to orbit reusable vehicle until they have it. And then we won't be able to build enough of them. (And don't let anyone convince you that the shuttle is an SSTO vehicle - as good as it is, it is an embarassment to its original objectives.)
I do agree, however, that the article could have afforded to present at least one hypothesis about what is going on here.
5.97 x 10^20
Not bad, eh?
I know they're short on time and staff, but with significant web site updates (newsletters and the like) happening on the order of months, I've seen a lot of people drift away from the program because they don't have a good sense that anything is happening.
After all, a significant aspect of any successful distributed computing project is good old fashioned PR.
Admins and their managers are going to have to face up to the fact that if they want to maintain a secure system, they'll have to be vigillant and won't be able to sue everyone for their time.
For the most part I would agree with you. Though I think you have missed one additional problem with the initial cost of public transportation. In most cities that grow without enough forethought, the private roadway system will have been established for decades before a public system becomes needed. Then in order to retrofit a public rail or similar fixed system onto the existing infrastructure, you have the cost to both build the new system and rebuild the old. Private transportation is a fact of American life which, at least for the meantime, will have to be accepted unless there is a major social change in people's travel habits.
As the article admits, the infrastructure expense here is prohibitive, and why do this when self-contained electric vehicles are becoming more and more feasible?
Pneumatic Post:
Amiga:
Personally, I think Amiga failed for one basic reason: speed. The early Amigas had some amazing potential, but for day-to-day office use, for example, they could be very cumbersome. Unfortunately, by the time the hardware speed caught up with what they were trying to do, other manufacturers had competitive formats for graphics, sound, etc.
Ribbon Microphone:
I just don't get this one. I work in acoustics, and while I will grant that the ribbon microphone was impressive in its day, there are other many other alternatives that work just as well. This is probably a case of audiophiles glamorizing a certain sound timbre rather than a quantifiable advantage in performance. For example, it is possible to make a microphone with a flat response to the edge of human hearing on a silicon chip these days.
Wax Cylinder:
As with my comments for the ribbon mike, maybe there were some performance advantages to the Cylinder over vinyl, but in this day, there is no reason to prefer it over a digital system. Again, we may have a case of audiophiles prefering the qualitative aspects of a certain sound, even if a strict performance criteria would show it to be inferior.
Slide Rule:
I think I can agree with this one, if for no other reason than the article's point on its education value is true.
Reel Mowers:
Amen to this. I hate being woken up on a Saturday morning by area lawn mowers.
Automatic Watch:
A modern, electronic version of a self-charging watch does exist. Still, those things are amazing. Airship: This technology absolutely needs to be reinvestigated. It may, unfortunately, be caught in a Catch22: it needs more money to research new designs, but it needs better proven designs to get more money. Sort of like the problem the single-stage-to-orbit vehicle people seem to be stuck in right now.
To give a very general example:
Do you work well in a customer-service oriented environment, and can you give us some examples from your last position?
Or on a more technical level:
What was the biggest innovation you made in your last job?
What kind of technical challenges did you face in your last position, and how did you overcome them?
These can of course be even more specifically tailored, but they should leave enough room for any qualified candidate to be able to tell you about their past actions and experience. (We are assuming an initial screening for the technical requirements of the job ahead of time -- either at the beginning or in a separate interview.) If chosen carefully, this kind of strategy will give you a good picture of the candidate both personally and technically. The open-ended nature of the questions may bring out strengths and weekness you would never have anticipated.
So there was a duplicate. Life goes on.
Slashdot is a huge site and some people with lives don't read every last word of it. When I see a post with "4 Insightful" I hope to see some on-topic content.
But aside from the obvious foolishness, what gets me is the financial damage done by preventing the giving of the book as a gift. "Hey! I've got a bright idea: Let's cut ourselves out of any chance of competing with a huge section of the retail market by never being able give this as a gift!" The eBooks idea will never get off the ground at this rate.
I build on one aspect of this argument (which I wholeheartedly agree with): Katz's comment about the growing generational gap is arguably contradicted by the gaming industry rather than supported. His own previous article pointed out how gamers were getting older and progressively reaching a wider and wider audience. Wouldn't this tend to suggest a greater shared entertainment experience between young and old?
From my own limited vantage point, America seems to be gradually accepting gaming culture more and more.
On another note, I think it is silly to keep using the "open source" metaphor outside the software industry. Open Source is a unique thing within software/the net because you are dealing with ideas - not limited resources. It is one thing to "open source" a method of doing networking, but the metaphor breaks down once you start talking about a noisy transmission environment. To stretch the metaphor to breaking - every new "copy" of the "source" changes the performance of everyone else's version. Everyone seems to want to latch on to "Open Source" just because it is fashionable without thinking.
I think, however, that the thoroughness of the adaption (as seen so far) is its greatest weakness. Herbert's novel was not written to act as a screenplay, and I think that this adaptation would probably play very poorly with someone who was not very familiar with the novel's material. The novelization allows the characters to be developed in ways that arguably should be compensated for in a screen presentation (presentation of internal monologues, detailed background descriptions, etc.).
For these reasons, I actually thought the scene that was least faithful to the novel was also one of the most dramatically effective -- namely, the encounter between Paul and Princess Irulan.
Finally, on an unrelated note, I was hoping for a slightly more epic score. Granted, writing for a six hour miniseries is a daunting task, but an epic story like this deserves music which paints in broad, thematic storkes.
Still, it seems to be a fairly interesting product. It would be interesting to see how reliable the Linux-based system is, given the complex list of supported features. Personally, I would be suspicious that the company is just cramming in features to make headlines without ironing out a lot of the details.
Actually, that wasn't Conway's goal at all. In fact, though it is extremely interesting, it is entirely contrary to the original goals. Life was hoped to be a set of simple rules that would lead to complex, hard-to-predict systems that would tend neither towards collapse or infinite growth. In crude terms, he wanted cellular automata that would resemble a sort of primordial soup. On initial investigation, Life seems to achieve these goals, but further investigation and huge advances in computing power have found all sorts of infinitely self-replicating structures (and eventually wires, logic gates, and even this Turing machine).
In my mind, however, this effort is overshadowed by the fact that so many RTS games really need to improve their UI. I would hate to think that future RTS games will use this as a crutch thinking, "Hey, we can just recommend that they buy a second input device.". Too many RTS games (which are Real Time Tactics games in most cases, if you ask me), have fairly limited unit AI and rely on the player to provide precise maneuvering orders in complex situations. Take for example WarCraft II -- how many times did you wish for an option to "move the catapult just outside of the range of that tower" rather than having to micro-manage every last unit's movement. I'll grant that these are not simple problems and some games are moving to fix this, but most RTS games are still far short of being truly "strategy" games instead of intricate click-fests.
My point, however, is that this MIT fellow with the figure of the Buchanan vote in Palm Beach County being a 1 in 3x10^15 probability, could just as well have said that there is a 3x10^15 chance that the distribution of vote between counties is not normal. Why, after all, would anyone expect a voting distribution to fall on a normal distribution? There are any number of statistical distributions we could choose arbitrarily (Weibull, Exponential, Raleigh, etc.), none of which is usually useful in matters of human behavior or politics.
What is MIT teaching people these days? To shove any list of numbers they can find into a canned stat program?