Why yes, faith in a universe that operates by a consistent and knowable set of rules, rather than the whims of an unknowable deity does fill me with great joy and peace.
If you RTFA, it says that he was reminded of the paper because the creationists quoted it. Because it was brought to his attention again he re-read it. He discovered it contained embarrassing factual errors, so he retracted it. It's too bad that he only caught the errors after they had been misused, but it's great that he caught the errors eventually and responded appropriately.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "As a person who does believe in some faith", nor am I really clear on what you mean by a middle ground between creationism and scientific beliefs. Care to explain?
It really is the best explanation of the controversy around string theory. I wonder if people were discouraged from talking about the controversy or if videos mentioning it were just discarded. All the entries leave more questions unanswered than they answer but they try to gloss over that because they're supposed to be "explaining" it in 2 minutes.
One of the videos was truly awful, it made some kind of wild-ass claim that when humans were purely hunters they lived in a 1-dimensional world, when they discovered agriculture they lived in a 2-dimensional world, and when they invented flight, they lived in a 3-dimensional world. It's a cute analogy if it's left as an idea of what dimensions are, but then the narrator talks about the extra dimensions in string theory and tries to predict how long it will take to understand string theory based on how long it took humans to move from 1 to 3 dimensions. It was horrible.
No, it is the worker's fault. If they're being asked to make quotas that make them unable to do their job to any semblance of a reasonable degree of competence, then they should quit. If you're putting your name on a document saying "In my professional opinion, this is non-obvious and has never been done before" and it is something this obvious, it is your fault.
Speaking of canceling your service, it sounds like a good time to talk alternatives. I, like many people here I'm sure, want a service that gives me the following:
A static IP (or multiple static IPs)
Honest usage caps, if it's unlimited, it's unlimited and maybe I pay a bit more. If it's limited, I want to know the limits
High bandwidth, low latency
No packet filtering or port blocking
The option to run servers (web, mail, game, etc.)
Something not too expensive (i.e. I don't want to pay for "business" service if I can avoid it, because business rates are much higher than home rates, probably because of the expectation of higher support costs)
Does anybody have suggestions for services which meet these goals? I am not currently a comcast user, I use speakeasy. They give you static IPs and let you run servers, but these days they're not exactly high bandwidth or cheap, so I'm looking at alternatives, especially after they were bought by best buy. I know some options are only available in some areas, but I'm sure there are a lot of people who want the same thing, so if you know of a good option even if it is only local, speak up.
Please do, because I doubt such a rule exists. Sure, there are collective nouns and plural pronouns, I just don't think that what they did is grammatically incorrect.
I got the Orange Box mostly for Team Fortress 2, but also for Portal. I wasn't terribly interested in Half Life. I really liked Portal though, but I was a bit surprised at how short it was. What I thought was the first mini-boss fight turned out to be the end of the game. The tutorial levels were literally half of the game. I also didn't find the plot at all surprising, things were pretty much what I expected right from the beginning, but they were pretty well fleshed out. The extra challenges after you finish the game are really interesting too. Compared to the easy puzzles in the game, they're really a huge challenge.
It would have been interesting if they could have made the physics a bit more realistic, for example, your forward momentum is maintained when you go through a portal, but not any other kind of momentum, there's also no air resistance, and there's a magic "flip right-side-up" when you come through a portal. This makes the game easier, but it would have been fun to see what could have been done with bonus extra realism.
From the context it is clear that Pogue is not part of the group to which "we" refers. "We" is the valleywag group, Pogue is not part of that group. The structure of the article is something along the lines of "we said X, Pogue replied Y, we countered with Z. In the end, Pogue and we agree that X". Your talk of collectives and hives is interesting and all, but I haven't seen any references to actual grammar problems with the construction "Pogue and we..."
Why not? Would you prefer "Pogue and us wish the industry standard would change" "Us and Pogue wish the industry would change"? "We and Pogue" would probably be the more common construction, but "Pogue and we" is grammatically correct too.
Assuming these are her lawyers, I wouldn't do this. Her lawyers were awful from what I saw. Rather than give them more money, I'd give her money to find some good ones.
It could happen, but it probably wouldn't happen much and would stop after the first time someone noticed. Normally tags are put on boxes, and so it's unlikely the tag would be put on the item inside the box anyhow. If it happened, the person receiving the shipment wouldn't be able to read any tags, so they'd figure out why, then ask the shipper "please don't put the tags on the metal parts of the bike, we can't read the tags when they're like that". If the person receiving the bikes is Wal*Mart they'd probably phrase it more like "don't put tags on the metal parts of the bikes, if you do that we'll count your shipment as invalid and refuse to pay you."
No, she was just in idiot to take them to court with a horrible lawyer. I didn't follow the case closely, but from what I've read he based his entire defense strategy on trying to make some doubt that she was the one sharing the files, and yet he didn't seem to have a good counter argument to the question "well why's the username in kazaa, which she claims not to use, the same one she uses on match.com?". He also did some things like "well if she had had a wireless router, anybody could have used the IP address" which the RIAA's lawyer beat by showing... she didn't have a wireless router.
We've seen plenty of Slashdot stories of lawyers who have actually looked at the details and found ways to beat the mob lawyers. This lawyer really didn't seem to do a good job, or even a decent one.
And the potential to upload music is all they successfully proved. From what I've read, they never proved that she actually transferred a single file, just that her music sharing client listed files whose names matched artists and songs that a music company represented by the RIAA owns a copyright on.
How do you define a "failure rate" for RFID? Your numbers are orders of magnitude higher than any failure rate I've ever seen. The last numbers I saw were successful read rates for reading a single working tag in a decently good environment at up to about 12 feet of range of 100%, and successful read rates for a pallet full of a few hundred tags on a variety of challenging items being driven by a forklift through an RFID gateway of higher than 95%. I have no idea what kind of metric would give you a failure rate of 40%, but I've never seen anything like that.
Alright, but from what other people have pointed out in this discussion RFID has its own set of problems so even if you could get 5 cents per tag, how would you prevent the RFID errors from being just about as bad
The concept is this: right now you have two options. Option 1: you assume the shipping manifest is correct and take a pallet into inventory, but say 2% of pallets are actually missing items (or have extra ones). Option 2: you break down each pallet as it arrives and check each item on the pallet (say with a handheld barcode scanner) and make sure that you received everything you're supposed to have. You always discover pallets with missing items, but there's a high labor cost to doing things this way, and sometimes you have to pack them up again after you've done this. This is especially bad for companies like Wal*Mart that have big distribution centers where they receive items from suppliers then re-ship them to stores.
The idea with RFID is that as the pallets come off the truck, they're scanned and most of the time your RFID reader reports that the number of tags it sees corresponds with the shipping manifest, so you're almost sure you got all the items you were supposed to get. This happens very quickly, there's just a reader at the point where the forklift brings the items off the truck, and it doesn't even have to slow down. Say 5% of the time the count is off, so these pallets go off to the side where you use more/better readers to check them out. Say 10% of these cases the count is still off, so you have to take things off the pallet and actually check them out. The cost savings is that in almost all cases you know that what you received is what you were supposed to receive, and you don't have to spend the time and manpower to individually check every pallet.
Unfortunately, unless the tags are really cheap and the error rates are really low it is more cost-effective to either assume all your shipments are correct, or to have some guy disassemble all the pallets and hand-scan every item.
what is keeping the price at $0.20 and is that ever likely to come down?
Tags are really pretty amazingly complex little computers powered by emitted RFID radiation, able to withstand pretty rough treatment and smart enough to participate in a pretty complex anti-collision protocol. Getting something that complex to cost just a few pennies is a real engineering and manufacturing challenge.
Hi, actual (former) RFID engineer here. In many cases reflection is good, it makes it more likely that a tag will be seen by the reader. Instead of having to rely on the antenna being in a direct line of sight with the tag, you can get a reflection, making the tag visible, so a combination of helpful reflections and lots of open space makes reading tags on boxes of bikes really easy, as long as they're not doing something really dumb and actually putting the tags on the metal parts of the bikes. As for whether or not a reflected signal is a bounce of the read signal or a returned signal from a tag, well the protocol takes care of that, that and the fact you don't receive while transmitting.
UHF RFID (the type being talked about in the article) isn't used for loss prevention and isn't at all appropriate for it. At UHF frequencies radio waves can't make it through even a tiny bit of skin, so if you hold an RFID tag in your hadn the reader can't see it. LF or HF RFID (i.e. key fobs) work for loss prevention because they can actually travel through your body. You can hold a key fob in your hand and wave it by the sensor and it will read the thing just fine, but that's not the technology they're using for inventory management for other reasons.
Ah, well that makes all the difference, if only I hadn't commented I'd go up and mark you +5 insightful.
That first issue your friend raised is a really important one, and it sure does lower the effectiveness, and he's certainly right about the other thing he said. I'm not sure I agree with his analysis of the ROI of tagging kids bikes, but otherwise he seems very informed.
I'm actually pretty amazed. Stories about RFID on slashdot have gone from "OMG! They're going to read my RFIDs from the street and know what kind of pr0n I bought!!!11!1" a few years ago to discussions about the physics of RFID, the IT infrastructure challenges, and other informed, rational discussions. What happened to the uninformed trolls?
The tags are really easy to destroy. What's hard is keeping them alive. If you want to kill one it's easy. Rip the antennas off the IC, microwave it, smash the chip with a hammer, even just bend it a few times and you'll probably deactivate it. Remember, they're being made as cheaply as possible, as little as 10c in massive volumes, how durable do you think they really are at that price?
Anybody who thinks UHF RFID will help prevent theft doesn't know anything about the technology.
That's why the industry wants a multiple-nines read rate on tags. Missing a tag is a big deal. On some items (like a pallet of bikes) getting 100% almost every time is easy (a bike in a box is mostly air). On other items (like cans of soup) it's extremely hard. Wal*Mart is unlikely to demand that individual soup cans get tagged, but they might want cases tagged, but even then it's hard because it's soup -- mostly metal and water, two things that don't play well with RFID tags.
One thing to remember is that these companies aren't run by complete idiots. If they pay 6c per can of soup they won't demand that every can be tagged. They also won't trust that the number of RFID tags they've scanned is the number of items shipped. Instead they'll have a shipping manifest that says "300 widgets". If the RFID scanner says it found 300 individual RFID tags, then they can be pretty confident that they read all the tags and that their order is complete. If instead it says 293 they'll know they either have to try to scan it a few more times, or if that doesn't work they'll have to disassemble the pallet and figure out if there really are only 293 widgets or if there are 7 that aren't getting read. If the system works well enough that most of the time it says 300 widgets when there really are 300 widgets it could be useful, but 300 widgets == 300 tags == $30-$60, which is a lot, depending on what's actually on the pallet.
Slashdot Mirror
Why yes, faith in a universe that operates by a consistent and knowable set of rules, rather than the whims of an unknowable deity does fill me with great joy and peace.
If you RTFA, it says that he was reminded of the paper because the creationists quoted it. Because it was brought to his attention again he re-read it. He discovered it contained embarrassing factual errors, so he retracted it. It's too bad that he only caught the errors after they had been misused, but it's great that he caught the errors eventually and responded appropriately.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "As a person who does believe in some faith", nor am I really clear on what you mean by a middle ground between creationism and scientific beliefs. Care to explain?
It really is the best explanation of the controversy around string theory. I wonder if people were discouraged from talking about the controversy or if videos mentioning it were just discarded. All the entries leave more questions unanswered than they answer but they try to gloss over that because they're supposed to be "explaining" it in 2 minutes.
One of the videos was truly awful, it made some kind of wild-ass claim that when humans were purely hunters they lived in a 1-dimensional world, when they discovered agriculture they lived in a 2-dimensional world, and when they invented flight, they lived in a 3-dimensional world. It's a cute analogy if it's left as an idea of what dimensions are, but then the narrator talks about the extra dimensions in string theory and tries to predict how long it will take to understand string theory based on how long it took humans to move from 1 to 3 dimensions. It was horrible.
No, it is the worker's fault. If they're being asked to make quotas that make them unable to do their job to any semblance of a reasonable degree of competence, then they should quit. If you're putting your name on a document saying "In my professional opinion, this is non-obvious and has never been done before" and it is something this obvious, it is your fault.
Speaking of canceling your service, it sounds like a good time to talk alternatives. I, like many people here I'm sure, want a service that gives me the following:
Does anybody have suggestions for services which meet these goals? I am not currently a comcast user, I use speakeasy. They give you static IPs and let you run servers, but these days they're not exactly high bandwidth or cheap, so I'm looking at alternatives, especially after they were bought by best buy. I know some options are only available in some areas, but I'm sure there are a lot of people who want the same thing, so if you know of a good option even if it is only local, speak up.
I recommend that Kim, Chong H be fired.
Haha, cute. Ok, point out the british grammar rule that says it's wrong.
Please do, because I doubt such a rule exists. Sure, there are collective nouns and plural pronouns, I just don't think that what they did is grammatically incorrect.
I got the Orange Box mostly for Team Fortress 2, but also for Portal. I wasn't terribly interested in Half Life. I really liked Portal though, but I was a bit surprised at how short it was. What I thought was the first mini-boss fight turned out to be the end of the game. The tutorial levels were literally half of the game. I also didn't find the plot at all surprising, things were pretty much what I expected right from the beginning, but they were pretty well fleshed out. The extra challenges after you finish the game are really interesting too. Compared to the easy puzzles in the game, they're really a huge challenge.
It would have been interesting if they could have made the physics a bit more realistic, for example, your forward momentum is maintained when you go through a portal, but not any other kind of momentum, there's also no air resistance, and there's a magic "flip right-side-up" when you come through a portal. This makes the game easier, but it would have been fun to see what could have been done with bonus extra realism.
From the context it is clear that Pogue is not part of the group to which "we" refers. "We" is the valleywag group, Pogue is not part of that group. The structure of the article is something along the lines of "we said X, Pogue replied Y, we countered with Z. In the end, Pogue and we agree that X". Your talk of collectives and hives is interesting and all, but I haven't seen any references to actual grammar problems with the construction "Pogue and we..."
Ok, those are acceptable, but is "Pogue and we" violating any grammar rules?
Why not? Would you prefer "Pogue and us wish the industry standard would change" "Us and Pogue wish the industry would change"? "We and Pogue" would probably be the more common construction, but "Pogue and we" is grammatically correct too.
Assuming these are her lawyers, I wouldn't do this. Her lawyers were awful from what I saw. Rather than give them more money, I'd give her money to find some good ones.
It could happen, but it probably wouldn't happen much and would stop after the first time someone noticed. Normally tags are put on boxes, and so it's unlikely the tag would be put on the item inside the box anyhow. If it happened, the person receiving the shipment wouldn't be able to read any tags, so they'd figure out why, then ask the shipper "please don't put the tags on the metal parts of the bike, we can't read the tags when they're like that". If the person receiving the bikes is Wal*Mart they'd probably phrase it more like "don't put tags on the metal parts of the bikes, if you do that we'll count your shipment as invalid and refuse to pay you."
No, she was just in idiot to take them to court with a horrible lawyer. I didn't follow the case closely, but from what I've read he based his entire defense strategy on trying to make some doubt that she was the one sharing the files, and yet he didn't seem to have a good counter argument to the question "well why's the username in kazaa, which she claims not to use, the same one she uses on match.com?". He also did some things like "well if she had had a wireless router, anybody could have used the IP address" which the RIAA's lawyer beat by showing... she didn't have a wireless router.
We've seen plenty of Slashdot stories of lawyers who have actually looked at the details and found ways to beat the mob lawyers. This lawyer really didn't seem to do a good job, or even a decent one.
And the potential to upload music is all they successfully proved. From what I've read, they never proved that she actually transferred a single file, just that her music sharing client listed files whose names matched artists and songs that a music company represented by the RIAA owns a copyright on.
To me, her lawyer sounds like crap.
How do you define a "failure rate" for RFID? Your numbers are orders of magnitude higher than any failure rate I've ever seen. The last numbers I saw were successful read rates for reading a single working tag in a decently good environment at up to about 12 feet of range of 100%, and successful read rates for a pallet full of a few hundred tags on a variety of challenging items being driven by a forklift through an RFID gateway of higher than 95%. I have no idea what kind of metric would give you a failure rate of 40%, but I've never seen anything like that.
The concept is this: right now you have two options. Option 1: you assume the shipping manifest is correct and take a pallet into inventory, but say 2% of pallets are actually missing items (or have extra ones). Option 2: you break down each pallet as it arrives and check each item on the pallet (say with a handheld barcode scanner) and make sure that you received everything you're supposed to have. You always discover pallets with missing items, but there's a high labor cost to doing things this way, and sometimes you have to pack them up again after you've done this. This is especially bad for companies like Wal*Mart that have big distribution centers where they receive items from suppliers then re-ship them to stores.
The idea with RFID is that as the pallets come off the truck, they're scanned and most of the time your RFID reader reports that the number of tags it sees corresponds with the shipping manifest, so you're almost sure you got all the items you were supposed to get. This happens very quickly, there's just a reader at the point where the forklift brings the items off the truck, and it doesn't even have to slow down. Say 5% of the time the count is off, so these pallets go off to the side where you use more/better readers to check them out. Say 10% of these cases the count is still off, so you have to take things off the pallet and actually check them out. The cost savings is that in almost all cases you know that what you received is what you were supposed to receive, and you don't have to spend the time and manpower to individually check every pallet.
Unfortunately, unless the tags are really cheap and the error rates are really low it is more cost-effective to either assume all your shipments are correct, or to have some guy disassemble all the pallets and hand-scan every item.
what is keeping the price at $0.20 and is that ever likely to come down?Tags are really pretty amazingly complex little computers powered by emitted RFID radiation, able to withstand pretty rough treatment and smart enough to participate in a pretty complex anti-collision protocol. Getting something that complex to cost just a few pennies is a real engineering and manufacturing challenge.
Hi, actual (former) RFID engineer here. In many cases reflection is good, it makes it more likely that a tag will be seen by the reader. Instead of having to rely on the antenna being in a direct line of sight with the tag, you can get a reflection, making the tag visible, so a combination of helpful reflections and lots of open space makes reading tags on boxes of bikes really easy, as long as they're not doing something really dumb and actually putting the tags on the metal parts of the bikes. As for whether or not a reflected signal is a bounce of the read signal or a returned signal from a tag, well the protocol takes care of that, that and the fact you don't receive while transmitting.
UHF RFID (the type being talked about in the article) isn't used for loss prevention and isn't at all appropriate for it. At UHF frequencies radio waves can't make it through even a tiny bit of skin, so if you hold an RFID tag in your hadn the reader can't see it. LF or HF RFID (i.e. key fobs) work for loss prevention because they can actually travel through your body. You can hold a key fob in your hand and wave it by the sensor and it will read the thing just fine, but that's not the technology they're using for inventory management for other reasons.
Ah, well that makes all the difference, if only I hadn't commented I'd go up and mark you +5 insightful.
That first issue your friend raised is a really important one, and it sure does lower the effectiveness, and he's certainly right about the other thing he said. I'm not sure I agree with his analysis of the ROI of tagging kids bikes, but otherwise he seems very informed.
I'm actually pretty amazed. Stories about RFID on slashdot have gone from "OMG! They're going to read my RFIDs from the street and know what kind of pr0n I bought!!!11!1" a few years ago to discussions about the physics of RFID, the IT infrastructure challenges, and other informed, rational discussions. What happened to the uninformed trolls?
The tags are really easy to destroy. What's hard is keeping them alive. If you want to kill one it's easy. Rip the antennas off the IC, microwave it, smash the chip with a hammer, even just bend it a few times and you'll probably deactivate it. Remember, they're being made as cheaply as possible, as little as 10c in massive volumes, how durable do you think they really are at that price?
Anybody who thinks UHF RFID will help prevent theft doesn't know anything about the technology.
That's why the industry wants a multiple-nines read rate on tags. Missing a tag is a big deal. On some items (like a pallet of bikes) getting 100% almost every time is easy (a bike in a box is mostly air). On other items (like cans of soup) it's extremely hard. Wal*Mart is unlikely to demand that individual soup cans get tagged, but they might want cases tagged, but even then it's hard because it's soup -- mostly metal and water, two things that don't play well with RFID tags.
One thing to remember is that these companies aren't run by complete idiots. If they pay 6c per can of soup they won't demand that every can be tagged. They also won't trust that the number of RFID tags they've scanned is the number of items shipped. Instead they'll have a shipping manifest that says "300 widgets". If the RFID scanner says it found 300 individual RFID tags, then they can be pretty confident that they read all the tags and that their order is complete. If instead it says 293 they'll know they either have to try to scan it a few more times, or if that doesn't work they'll have to disassemble the pallet and figure out if there really are only 293 widgets or if there are 7 that aren't getting read. If the system works well enough that most of the time it says 300 widgets when there really are 300 widgets it could be useful, but 300 widgets == 300 tags == $30-$60, which is a lot, depending on what's actually on the pallet.