And this is innovative? Frankly, I don't see the point.
In my mind, this is nothing more than a budget Pocket PC. And at $200, this is almost the price of some of the lower budget Pocket PCs, which have 200 MHz processors, 64 MB memory and a true color screen.
This really does take the cake for being the most non-original 'innovation' ever. Do they think by calling it a 'Simputer', charging $200 for a greyscale device and marketing to the poor they're going to do something unique?
And then there's Linux. Why the hell does Linux need to go onto a device which is marketed to underprivilaged, poor folk who are more concerned with bags of grain than developing an IT industry? I'm sure they're going to have lots of time to study cryptic shell functions as soon as they survive the drought. Umm, I forgot: they can't read, write, and they use their toes for counting. People who can't read and are under-educated aren't going to understand Linux, let alone even the interaction between computer and person. Most probably have never used a computer and don't have much of a clue what they're for. I'm sure most aren't interested, and, because of lack of education, are not going to be because they won't be able to see the benefits.
Let's face it: developing countries means developing. They're not ready to start making their lives better or easier when they can't even survive or maintain stability as it is. There needs to be certain foundations in order for things like an information industry to develop. You can't expect to sell Simputers to starving African children or a war torn country. Hey, your home was taken out by the latest raid, but you can have a Simputer for only $200! I'm sure $200 in those countries could *buy* a new house.
This is very unfortunate, but still goes along the lines of the solution to such problems as world hunger. How can we get the entire world using technology? You'll remeber technology is the application of science toward a problem in society, so if there is no application, there is no technology. Who would want this thing??? Tell me one situation where a citizen in a devloping country (probably poor, uneducated) would have just cause for needing a Simputer. It's true there are some countries which do have resonable literacy rates and are still developing in a sense, but even these are very unstable and there would be very little use for a device like this.
I especially like the technique Matthews is using to overcome the lowly 1 bit DAC/timer tied to the PC speaker. However, he fails to mention it is a known method, called PWM, or pulse width modulation. It's a pretty cool and well known trick, but hardly genious as he accredits himself. Any "2nd year DSP student", as he self-admits, knows of this method.
DHTML Lab (dhtmllab.com) had a tutorial on this awhile back. A full featured, cross-browser content editor in DHTML and Javascript, complete with realistic application interface. It produced compliant code in XML which could then be translated to HTML (whatever compliance you like) using server side processing (ASP, PHP, etc.).
It may still be up there, as I recall it was an early project.
There are some microATX dual processor motherboards around, so you might start there.
However, you haven't mentioned what your tilter is here. You can't possibily have performance and size the same, just as you can't have cost and performance the same. Larger servers will most always perform better than smaller ones, because in this case size isn't too big of a consideration. Consumer PCs can get away with their mid-tower size by sacrificing a good motherboard and power supply. Laptops take this to a whole new level, but some of the solutions are getting more and more impressive. Still though, I don't think there will ever be a time when a full size server will be the same size or slower than, something, say, the size of a laptop. True, processor feature sizes shrink, but transistor counts similarly rise, almost linearly. This is why processor sizes have largely remained the same -- even grown a little bit. This, despite a feature size jump from 1 micron down to 180 nanometers.
Ultimatly, if you're that pressed for space, you could try jerry-rigging a dual GHz system inside something the size of a 700 MHz laptop, but don't expect your hardware to like you. A GHz system is worth much if you're constantly getting BSODs and lockups...
You could always wait a few years when people are trying to cram 5 GHz systems into small enclousers, then a dual 1 GHz system will be no problem. Can anyone say DIMM-PC?
Actually, I worked for a very large dialup pool who provided leased access to large companies (AOL, MSN, Juno, etc.). We never kept any logs in the slightest, and if some agency wanted any info, personally, I wouldn't know how I could help them. We simply provided IP addresses to software (industry standard protocols or not), and users could send anything over the network they wanted. It is against the law to backup, transmit, or monitor any communications of any ISP user, on any network (unless the network is private -- the Internet is NOT private). Of course an ISP can't intercept any of your mail, for any purposes, or monitor your browsing habits or any other information at all. The telecommunications act of 1988 prohibits this as well as most other logging methods, even if you have permission from the user.
Due to the high number of sessions (this is a free dialup), the only logs we kept were those of system failure and some security logs.
This is why in large networks, especially global, where IP addresses are distributed very broadly, and 3rd party services are common, it's almost impossible to get real names (HOW??? Please tell me!).
Now, if you're on, say, a campus network, which is PRIVATE, you are essentially bound to whatever agreement they have set for you. And I'm sure they log all activity quite heavily.
The order did not specify what acts were being investigated, and the Secret Service agent acknowledged that the IMC itself was not suspected of criminal activity.....
Responding to questions from IMC volunteers, the agents claimed that their investigation concerned the source of either one or two postings which, they said, had been posted to an IMC newswire early Saturday morning. These posts, according to the agents, contained documents stolen from a Canadian government agency, including classified information related to the travel itinerary of George W. Bush (who was at that time in Quebec City, participating in Summit of the Americas meetings). Agents claimed that the Secret Service was notified of the existence of such posts by a tip from an (unnamed) major commercial news network.
This only means one thing: they're looking for someone based on their IP address. I'll explain not only why this is difficult, but vary rarely leads to any substansial information.
The thing I don't get is why they wanted IP addresses. They're just numbers. They MEAN nothing. In order to match IP addresses to names or even usernames, you're going to need yet another court order sent to the network who own's the netblock (in most cases) of the IP in question. You have to have substansial reason and evidence, just like all orders asking for private information. You can't just say "We think it's...".
IP address logs aren't helpful if you're looking for a particular person -- which address is theirs? Most dial-up and cable networks assign IP addresses (static or otherwise) from a national or global pool, so you don't know if IP addresses differing in only a few minor digits represent someone across the country or right next door. To do so requires access to ISP network information, and in the case of free dial-ups this is almost impossible. Most don't keep the route logs for *EACH* and every user session, in fact, most keep no record of sessions at all beyond that for technical purposes.
As an example, Juno, the largest free online service, uses 3rd party networks (UUNET, etc.) to connect their users. They use the same log-in information for each and every user (minus a challenge password provided by the Juno software), so you would need info from them -- and they don't even have the information on where their user's are really based (unless they were truthful when they signed up;-).
Many other users use proxy, so you will need to evaluate those cases and then request logs from whatever proxy server they're using. This means, quite possibily, dealing with foreign governments. You also need to know when an IP address has been forged, which is an investigation in itself.
I can't think of any reason why IP address logs, hostnames, or other connection info would be useful in the slightest. System administrators use it to provide traffic statictics and to spot possible script kiddies and filter them out, but this is all at the IP level, and you never need the real identity of someone. Matching someones real identity to an IP address is hard, and can be made very hard if they're using some sort of method to hide themself (as in the case of criminal activity).
First of all, The Terminator was a movie about giving sentient computers weapons power and absolute authority. I'll remind you no current human has these powers, except some government officials, and even then they must go through certain checks and balances to insure their decisions represent their governments/peoples' views on specific issues.
eLiza, from what I can tell, is simply going to be a suit of tools which help analyze critical network attacks, maintain complicated global networks, and provide automated fixes for problems.
How they're going to do this, I don't know, but I'm sure the several billion dollar budget will help get the creative juices flowing.
The hoopla about eLiza destroying humanity is complete nonsense, and certainly isn't characteristic of the users on Slashdot. That said, not all people at/. are programmers.
I would think what IBM wants to do is similar to what SSL and data encryption did for data security in the 1980's (and 90's). Although it is possible to break encryption, it's very difficult mathematically, and this is probably what IBM is aiming for: a globally dynamic counterattack system which is very difficult to disrupt, yet easy to manage (self-managing even).
As networks grow, there won't be enough capacity in the human mind to simplify and quantify (humans have great strengths qualitativly, but have very little depth quantitativly) the almost chaos-level interconnections which will exist in all networks, and all networks being connected to each other via one huge super network (the Internet in 20 years???).
I think what IBM is doing is great, and I've thought about something similar often. Even if it isn't a major success, the research will be interesting and might reveal something insightful about information or network theory.
For now, lets draw the line between fantasy and reality. In movies, walking drones battle in world conquest and destruction, in reality people get paranoid about the same thing happening in real life. Its interesting because it wouldn't much matter if it was machines or people destroying things, as it still gets done anyway (we've always had wars).
First, I can answer some questions regarding this technology. I, myself, am involved in the study of memory methods in ultra-short intermediates in photochromes, which also offer great promse to cheaply store TBs of information. We have been able to store over 500 GBytes in an area around the size of 20 mm^2, and also read it out as fast as we can switch to the pages using an AO modulator.
First, access times. For the samarium method, the access times are in femtoseconds (theoritical). However, this is limited by the steering or positioning device, which can be mechnical, such as a galvanometer, or it can be an array of VCSELs (if femtosecond VCSELs exist, that is), which offer access times as fast as they can be switched and run at the speed of the underlying circuit, and act just like transistors in terms of their function.
As far as a file system is concerned, these memories are arranged naturally in a page format, and this is quite superior to current linear methods. To get to a location anywhere in the memory, you specify the page an the xy position where the data begins.
The reason why this method can store so much data is because 1) they are storing bits as 400 and 100 nm dots, and 2) they are storing it in a volume. As I understand it, the luminous 'dots' are not diffraction limited because they are not coherent and do not interfere with each other. CDs are limited naturally by diffraction because they use very coherent light, in an active approach to read data (e.g. light -> disc). This is because coherent light is the only light which can be collimated to the
However, unlike the view of the article, I am not optimistic of immediate commerical applications. If you read it you will note this method requires the use of a femptosecond light source. Femptosecond lasers are only very recent inventions, from the 1980s, and are also very bulky. Most consist of exotic Ti:Sapphire rods along with sophisticated Optical Parrmeteric Ossicilation and amplification, which all is very expensive and can easily fill an 8'x10' table. Some newer techniques use Nd:YUV04 with a crystal Q-Switch of KTP* or LBO, but these are still slighly bulky although they can fit in a box (still very expensive).
There are no diodes which can generate pulses at this frequency, and the only possible cantidates are organic LEDs which do generate at several hundred picseconds; if these are suitable I do not know. Diodes will probably not reach these speeds for quite some time, and as long as synethic sapphire and other crystals remain expensive (==low yield), this might be a cantidate for heavy industrial use (NASA is a good idea, as someone mentioned), but as far as that sugar cube dream, probably not.
There are also technical considerations, like readout. I would be very interested in how they plan to focus and read 100 nm size dots. There is no CCD or Si sensor with that kind of resolution. How do they position accurate to +/-
These is yet another subset of storage technology which will not make it out of the lab due to the need for certain intristic (yet overlooked) fundamentals. Holographic technology was also limited similarly, both by position and medium (although in recent years very good medium with BER of less than 10-^17 have been found), there still remains the need for very high resolution sensors and positioning devices. Until then, commerical applications won't be practical.
The challenge, I think, was well stated. It was clearly stated the data was to be compressed. In this case, the data was hidden by way of the filesystem. There wasn't anything clever or even novel about what that guy did. He didn't complete the challenge and the time spent on both parts was wasteful. Of course there is going to be loopholes, and literal translations, but this was simply a play on words. The point is both parties understood the terms, both were trying to trick each other AND make money at it, and both just ended up wasting time.
First of all you don't need another PSU, just a filter as others have mentioned.
You can purchase large solar panels which can produce 400 W 12V in direct sun, but these are large and often cost several thousand dollars. And, the very important question of night is also an issue.
A good alternative is a solar battery. It's a solar cell connected to a large DC NiMh or NiCd battery, which is continually trickle-charged (batteries don't care too much about current/voltage variations). This way, you have non-sunlight or low light level access and relativly consistent power. These units often come with a DC-AC converter, which means all you would have to do is plug in your computer (or any other appliance for that matter). These are also expensive, around $500+ for anything good.
I worked on a project which used a small version of a solar battery in remote monitoring embedded computers. We used the LART Intel SA-based MIPPs 200 MHz devices with 802.11 communications. They worked very well with solar batteries, and uptime for each node was almost 100%.
Of course, there is a question of why you would want to do this when you have plenty of juice piped in your home. For me at least, power interuptions are negligable and for the other times when I really need 100% I use APS. This approach would be difficult to scale, as I don't see any solar powered datacenters and I'd question the reliability of solar devices powering critical systems as compared to a good, multiple grid power input and backup systems.
Why don't these people just setup a firewall to deny access to any MPAA IP or other 3rd party services.
Since the MPAA portscans you, as well as trys to connect on common service ports, why not setup a firewall? I have been scanned several times, and I know from others in the community the process is completly automated. Why not just block them from discovering you run these services in the first place?
It would actually be a good idea for some organization associated with Gnutella to establish a central list of hostnames, IPs, etc. which are known to represent the MPAA and other bloudhounds.
After all, you can't tell what files you have when you're getting a connection refused.
Hmm, lets see after the gas to the court office, the time, effort and resources for printing, etc. you just might be only $20 in the hole.
Really, are all things worth fighting for or are you just an old grump with no life?
Since you run a mail server, would it have been that difficult to setup a 30-second filter, or even press delete? I don't reall think whole $50 in principal damages are going to stop any spammer from making money.
AmIHotOrNot a technical success? James would wish so. What he has done isn't anything brilliant, in fact it's downright dishonest. His site steals services from the free hosting providers and Yahoo! for its club area software. His adds are even hosted elsewhere; his web statictics are hosted on webtrends. He's serving text.
He's stealing bandwidth, reusing it, and making money off of it. Figure this. A typical hotornot.com webpage is 1.19 KB (and since all pages are fundamentaly the same, this figure stands). 8 Million 1 K is
8 GB of bandwidth. That's downright cheap for a very popular site (1.19 K/hit).
Hong's advice for setting up a "fad" site doesn't work because he has none. He never did anything novel. It doesn't compare to the other sites which provide something more than a script and a few database calls. And the statement about a quad Sun running slower than a lowly Pentium is absolute nonsense. This either means that Sun Linux was written by a crack monkey, or James is a crack monkey. I prefer the later quite affectionatly. I don't have any excuse for these types of people.
The "fad" principle doesn't involve anything special. Use the standard methods for scalability and you'll scale. It's that simple. That's the right way to do it if you're going to do it and, of course, not cheat and steal bandwidth. Hong didn't even do that here, so his genious is in his theft and he has no technical merit for following standard "laws" for scalable sites. It's more difficult to go and get a job than it is to break into a store and take what you want.
I am the owner of a HyperGain 24 dB Heavy Duty Grid Antenna, from HyperLink Technologies.
I purchased it to provide extended converge of my 802.11 network through as much of the surrounding city. Currently, I do not have an amplifier but I am planning to get one.
I have the antenna on top of my Condo, which is about four stories high at the roof. When I first got the antenna and hooked it up I was disappointed with the performance. This, however, is due to the highly collimated beam (8 degrees). The problem was you could get a very good connection for miles away, but you had to have relative line of sight. That is, you had to be facing the direction of the antenna, and vice versa.
This provided limited, unidirectional coverage. I ended up fixing the problem by attaching a rotating stage to the Antenna and having it do 360 degree constant rotations and a few degree pan/tilts. This is controlled by the network, which looks for a signal. Once one is found, the antenna is adjusted to get the best reception and left in that position. This was all done with a simple C program, a bit of math, and a DAC card to control the motor.
This has increased the range significantly and given the simulation of a cell with a radius of equal reception. I was even able to maintain a good connection while driving and changing directions in a car; The system "tracking" the signal as it changes.
Some limitations include the fact it can only track one user at a time, although multiple users could be given equal amounts of connectivity "bust" time by spinning the antenna continuously, similar to the way a streaming server "bursts" data to a local streaming cache which then relays it to the slower client. This might be difficult (on the network), as a connection would be in a constant state of variation going on and off, but is still interesting.
What would really be interesting is if home users connected their wireless networks to one another, forming another totally separate network, analogous to ham radio IP, except a lot faster. Maybe if the technology could be improved to be a fraction of that of land lines, we wouldn't need ISPs in the first place and connections would be maintained by users themselves for their own personal benefit, but also contribute to the overall system - ala distributed aggregate like Napster. Completely free, diffuse, and powerful. Wireless is the natural medium because it doesn't require any land licensing or other utility fees.
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And this is innovative? Frankly, I don't see the point.
In my mind, this is nothing more than a budget Pocket PC. And at $200, this is almost the price of some of the lower budget Pocket PCs, which have 200 MHz processors, 64 MB memory and a true color screen.
This really does take the cake for being the most non-original 'innovation' ever. Do they think by calling it a 'Simputer', charging $200 for a greyscale device and marketing to the poor they're going to do something unique?
And then there's Linux. Why the hell does Linux need to go onto a device which is marketed to underprivilaged, poor folk who are more concerned with bags of grain than developing an IT industry? I'm sure they're going to have lots of time to study cryptic shell functions as soon as they survive the drought. Umm, I forgot: they can't read, write, and they use their toes for counting. People who can't read and are under-educated aren't going to understand Linux, let alone even the interaction between computer and person. Most probably have never used a computer and don't have much of a clue what they're for. I'm sure most aren't interested, and, because of lack of education, are not going to be because they won't be able to see the benefits.
Let's face it: developing countries means developing. They're not ready to start making their lives better or easier when they can't even survive or maintain stability as it is. There needs to be certain foundations in order for things like an information industry to develop. You can't expect to sell Simputers to starving African children or a war torn country. Hey, your home was taken out by the latest raid, but you can have a Simputer for only $200! I'm sure $200 in those countries could *buy* a new house.
This is very unfortunate, but still goes along the lines of the solution to such problems as world hunger. How can we get the entire world using technology? You'll remeber technology is the application of science toward a problem in society, so if there is no application, there is no technology. Who would want this thing??? Tell me one situation where a citizen in a devloping country (probably poor, uneducated) would have just cause for needing a Simputer. It's true there are some countries which do have resonable literacy rates and are still developing in a sense, but even these are very unstable and there would be very little use for a device like this.
I especially like the technique Matthews is using to overcome the lowly 1 bit DAC/timer tied to the PC speaker. However, he fails to mention it is a known method, called PWM, or pulse width modulation. It's a pretty cool and well known trick, but hardly genious as he accredits himself. Any "2nd year DSP student", as he self-admits, knows of this method.
DHTML Lab (dhtmllab.com) had a tutorial on this awhile back. A full featured, cross-browser content editor in DHTML and Javascript, complete with realistic application interface. It produced compliant code in XML which could then be translated to HTML (whatever compliance you like) using server side processing (ASP, PHP, etc.).
It may still be up there, as I recall it was an early project.
There are some microATX dual processor motherboards around, so you might start there.
However, you haven't mentioned what your tilter is here. You can't possibily have performance and size the same, just as you can't have cost and performance the same. Larger servers will most always perform better than smaller ones, because in this case size isn't too big of a consideration. Consumer PCs can get away with their mid-tower size by sacrificing a good motherboard and power supply. Laptops take this to a whole new level, but some of the solutions are getting more and more impressive. Still though, I don't think there will ever be a time when a full size server will be the same size or slower than, something, say, the size of a laptop. True, processor feature sizes shrink, but transistor counts similarly rise, almost linearly. This is why processor sizes have largely remained the same -- even grown a little bit. This, despite a feature size jump from 1 micron down to 180 nanometers.
Ultimatly, if you're that pressed for space, you could try jerry-rigging a dual GHz system inside something the size of a 700 MHz laptop, but don't expect your hardware to like you. A GHz system is worth much if you're constantly getting BSODs and lockups...
You could always wait a few years when people are trying to cram 5 GHz systems into small enclousers, then a dual 1 GHz system will be no problem. Can anyone say DIMM-PC?
Actually, I worked for a very large dialup pool who provided leased access to large companies (AOL, MSN, Juno, etc.). We never kept any logs in the slightest, and if some agency wanted any info, personally, I wouldn't know how I could help them. We simply provided IP addresses to software (industry standard protocols or not), and users could send anything over the network they wanted. It is against the law to backup, transmit, or monitor any communications of any ISP user, on any network (unless the network is private -- the Internet is NOT private). Of course an ISP can't intercept any of your mail, for any purposes, or monitor your browsing habits or any other information at all. The telecommunications act of 1988 prohibits this as well as most other logging methods, even if you have permission from the user.
Due to the high number of sessions (this is a free dialup), the only logs we kept were those of system failure and some security logs.
This is why in large networks, especially global, where IP addresses are distributed very broadly, and 3rd party services are common, it's almost impossible to get real names (HOW??? Please tell me!).
Now, if you're on, say, a campus network, which is PRIVATE, you are essentially bound to whatever agreement they have set for you. And I'm sure they log all activity quite heavily.
are here for indymedia: http://logs.indymedia.org/
The order did not specify what acts were being investigated, and the Secret Service agent acknowledged that the IMC itself was not suspected of criminal activity. ....
;-).
Responding to questions from IMC volunteers, the agents claimed that their investigation concerned the source of either one or two postings which, they said, had been posted to an IMC newswire early Saturday morning. These posts, according to the agents, contained documents stolen from a Canadian government agency, including classified information related to the travel itinerary of George W. Bush (who was at that time in Quebec City, participating in Summit of the Americas meetings). Agents claimed that the Secret Service was notified of the existence of such posts by a tip from an (unnamed) major commercial news network.
This only means one thing: they're looking for someone based on their IP address. I'll explain not only why this is difficult, but vary rarely leads to any substansial information.
The thing I don't get is why they wanted IP addresses. They're just numbers. They MEAN nothing. In order to match IP addresses to names or even usernames, you're going to need yet another court order sent to the network who own's the netblock (in most cases) of the IP in question. You have to have substansial reason and evidence, just like all orders asking for private information. You can't just say "We think it's...".
IP address logs aren't helpful if you're looking for a particular person -- which address is theirs? Most dial-up and cable networks assign IP addresses (static or otherwise) from a national or global pool, so you don't know if IP addresses differing in only a few minor digits represent someone across the country or right next door. To do so requires access to ISP network information, and in the case of free dial-ups this is almost impossible. Most don't keep the route logs for *EACH* and every user session, in fact, most keep no record of sessions at all beyond that for technical purposes.
As an example, Juno, the largest free online service, uses 3rd party networks (UUNET, etc.) to connect their users. They use the same log-in information for each and every user (minus a challenge password provided by the Juno software), so you would need info from them -- and they don't even have the information on where their user's are really based (unless they were truthful when they signed up
Many other users use proxy, so you will need to evaluate those cases and then request logs from whatever proxy server they're using. This means, quite possibily, dealing with foreign governments. You also need to know when an IP address has been forged, which is an investigation in itself.
I can't think of any reason why IP address logs, hostnames, or other connection info would be useful in the slightest. System administrators use it to provide traffic statictics and to spot possible script kiddies and filter them out, but this is all at the IP level, and you never need the real identity of someone. Matching someones real identity to an IP address is hard, and can be made very hard if they're using some sort of method to hide themself (as in the case of criminal activity).
This is another case of federal stupidity.
First of all, The Terminator was a movie about giving sentient computers weapons power and absolute authority. I'll remind you no current human has these powers, except some government officials, and even then they must go through certain checks and balances to insure their decisions represent their governments/peoples' views on specific issues.
/. are programmers.
eLiza, from what I can tell, is simply going to be a suit of tools which help analyze critical network attacks, maintain complicated global networks, and provide automated fixes for problems.
How they're going to do this, I don't know, but I'm sure the several billion dollar budget will help get the creative juices flowing.
The hoopla about eLiza destroying humanity is complete nonsense, and certainly isn't characteristic of the users on Slashdot. That said, not all people at
I would think what IBM wants to do is similar to what SSL and data encryption did for data security in the 1980's (and 90's). Although it is possible to break encryption, it's very difficult mathematically, and this is probably what IBM is aiming for: a globally dynamic counterattack system which is very difficult to disrupt, yet easy to manage (self-managing even).
As networks grow, there won't be enough capacity in the human mind to simplify and quantify (humans have great strengths qualitativly, but have very little depth quantitativly) the almost chaos-level interconnections which will exist in all networks, and all networks being connected to each other via one huge super network (the Internet in 20 years???).
I think what IBM is doing is great, and I've thought about something similar often. Even if it isn't a major success, the research will be interesting and might reveal something insightful about information or network theory.
For now, lets draw the line between fantasy and reality. In movies, walking drones battle in world conquest and destruction, in reality people get paranoid about the same thing happening in real life. Its interesting because it wouldn't much matter if it was machines or people destroying things, as it still gets done anyway (we've always had wars).
Why would you want to do something fucking stupid like that?
Hard-drives are sealed for a reason, and dust between the head and the platter, floating about 2 microns above the surface, will cause a head crash.
Opening up my hard-drive and taking a dremel and belt sander to it isn't my idea of fun. Go figure data redundancy.
First, I can answer some questions regarding this technology. I, myself, am involved in the study of memory methods in ultra-short intermediates in photochromes, which also offer great promse to cheaply store TBs of information. We have been able to store over 500 GBytes in an area around the size of 20 mm^2, and also read it out as fast as we can switch to the pages using an AO modulator.
First, access times. For the samarium method, the access times are in femtoseconds (theoritical). However, this is limited by the steering or positioning device, which can be mechnical, such as a galvanometer, or it can be an array of VCSELs (if femtosecond VCSELs exist, that is), which offer access times as fast as they can be switched and run at the speed of the underlying circuit, and act just like transistors in terms of their function.
As far as a file system is concerned, these memories are arranged naturally in a page format, and this is quite superior to current linear methods. To get to a location anywhere in the memory, you specify the page an the xy position where the data begins.
The reason why this method can store so much data is because 1) they are storing bits as 400 and 100 nm dots, and 2) they are storing it in a volume. As I understand it, the luminous 'dots' are not diffraction limited because they are not coherent and do not interfere with each other. CDs are limited naturally by diffraction because they use very coherent light, in an active approach to read data (e.g. light -> disc). This is because coherent light is the only light which can be collimated to the
However, unlike the view of the article, I am not optimistic of immediate commerical applications. If you read it you will note this method requires the use of a femptosecond light source. Femptosecond lasers are only very recent inventions, from the 1980s, and are also very bulky. Most consist of exotic Ti:Sapphire rods along with sophisticated Optical Parrmeteric Ossicilation and amplification, which all is very expensive and can easily fill an 8'x10' table. Some newer techniques use Nd:YUV04 with a crystal Q-Switch of KTP* or LBO, but these are still slighly bulky although they can fit in a box (still very expensive).
There are no diodes which can generate pulses at this frequency, and the only possible cantidates are organic LEDs which do generate at several hundred picseconds; if these are suitable I do not know. Diodes will probably not reach these speeds for quite some time, and as long as synethic sapphire and other crystals remain expensive (==low yield), this might be a cantidate for heavy industrial use (NASA is a good idea, as someone mentioned), but as far as that sugar cube dream, probably not.
There are also technical considerations, like readout. I would be very interested in how they plan to focus and read 100 nm size dots. There is no CCD or Si sensor with that kind of resolution. How do they position accurate to +/-
These is yet another subset of storage technology which will not make it out of the lab due to the need for certain intristic (yet overlooked) fundamentals. Holographic technology was also limited similarly, both by position and medium (although in recent years very good medium with BER of less than 10-^17 have been found), there still remains the need for very high resolution sensors and positioning devices. Until then, commerical applications won't be practical.
The challenge, I think, was well stated. It was clearly stated the data was to be compressed. In this case, the data was hidden by way of the filesystem. There wasn't anything clever or even novel about what that guy did. He didn't complete the challenge and the time spent on both parts was wasteful. Of course there is going to be loopholes, and literal translations, but this was simply a play on words. The point is both parties understood the terms, both were trying to trick each other AND make money at it, and both just ended up wasting time.
First of all you don't need another PSU, just a filter as others have mentioned.
;-)
You can purchase large solar panels which can produce 400 W 12V in direct sun, but these are large and often cost several thousand dollars. And, the very important question of night is also an issue.
A good alternative is a solar battery. It's a solar cell connected to a large DC NiMh or NiCd battery, which is continually trickle-charged (batteries don't care too much about current/voltage variations). This way, you have non-sunlight or low light level access and relativly consistent power. These units often come with a DC-AC converter, which means all you would have to do is plug in your computer (or any other appliance for that matter). These are also expensive, around $500+ for anything good.
I worked on a project which used a small version of a solar battery in remote monitoring embedded computers. We used the LART Intel SA-based MIPPs 200 MHz devices with 802.11 communications. They worked very well with solar batteries, and uptime for each node was almost 100%.
Of course, there is a question of why you would want to do this when you have plenty of juice piped in your home. For me at least, power interuptions are negligable and for the other times when I really need 100% I use APS. This approach would be difficult to scale, as I don't see any solar powered datacenters and I'd question the reliability of solar devices powering critical systems as compared to a good, multiple grid power input and backup systems.
You don't live in California, do you?
Why don't these people just setup a firewall to deny access to any MPAA IP or other 3rd party services.
Since the MPAA portscans you, as well as trys to connect on common service ports, why not setup a firewall? I have been scanned several times, and I know from others in the community the process is completly automated. Why not just block them from discovering you run these services in the first place?
It would actually be a good idea for some organization associated with Gnutella to establish a central list of hostnames, IPs, etc. which are known to represent the MPAA and other bloudhounds.
After all, you can't tell what files you have when you're getting a connection refused.
Hmm, lets see after the gas to the court office, the time, effort and resources for printing, etc. you just might be only $20 in the hole.
Really, are all things worth fighting for or are you just an old grump with no life?
Since you run a mail server, would it have been that difficult to setup a 30-second filter, or even press delete? I don't reall think whole $50 in principal damages are going to stop any spammer from making money.
AmIHotOrNot a technical success? James would wish so. What he has done isn't anything brilliant, in fact it's downright dishonest. His site steals services from the free hosting providers and Yahoo! for its club area software. His adds are even hosted elsewhere; his web statictics are hosted on webtrends. He's serving text.
He's stealing bandwidth, reusing it, and making money off of it. Figure this. A typical hotornot.com webpage is 1.19 KB (and since all pages are fundamentaly the same, this figure stands). 8 Million 1 K is 8 GB of bandwidth. That's downright cheap for a very popular site (1.19 K/hit).
Hong's advice for setting up a "fad" site doesn't work because he has none. He never did anything novel. It doesn't compare to the other sites which provide something more than a script and a few database calls. And the statement about a quad Sun running slower than a lowly Pentium is absolute nonsense. This either means that Sun Linux was written by a crack monkey, or James is a crack monkey. I prefer the later quite affectionatly. I don't have any excuse for these types of people.
The "fad" principle doesn't involve anything special. Use the standard methods for scalability and you'll scale. It's that simple. That's the right way to do it if you're going to do it and, of course, not cheat and steal bandwidth. Hong didn't even do that here, so his genious is in his theft and he has no technical merit for following standard "laws" for scalable sites. It's more difficult to go and get a job than it is to break into a store and take what you want.
I get a bad destination :(
I am the owner of a HyperGain 24 dB Heavy Duty Grid Antenna, from HyperLink Technologies.
I purchased it to provide extended converge of my 802.11 network through as much of the surrounding city. Currently, I do not have an amplifier but I am planning to get one.
I have the antenna on top of my Condo, which is about four stories high at the roof. When I first got the antenna and hooked it up I was disappointed with the performance. This, however, is due to the highly collimated beam (8 degrees). The problem was you could get a very good connection for miles away, but you had to have relative line of sight. That is, you had to be facing the direction of the antenna, and vice versa.
This provided limited, unidirectional coverage. I ended up fixing the problem by attaching a rotating stage to the Antenna and having it do 360 degree constant rotations and a few degree pan/tilts. This is controlled by the network, which looks for a signal. Once one is found, the antenna is adjusted to get the best reception and left in that position. This was all done with a simple C program, a bit of math, and a DAC card to control the motor.
This has increased the range significantly and given the simulation of a cell with a radius of equal reception. I was even able to maintain a good connection while driving and changing directions in a car; The system "tracking" the signal as it changes.
Some limitations include the fact it can only track one user at a time, although multiple users could be given equal amounts of connectivity "bust" time by spinning the antenna continuously, similar to the way a streaming server "bursts" data to a local streaming cache which then relays it to the slower client. This might be difficult (on the network), as a connection would be in a constant state of variation going on and off, but is still interesting.
What would really be interesting is if home users connected their wireless networks to one another, forming another totally separate network, analogous to ham radio IP, except a lot faster. Maybe if the technology could be improved to be a fraction of that of land lines, we wouldn't need ISPs in the first place and connections would be maintained by users themselves for their own personal benefit, but also contribute to the overall system - ala distributed aggregate like Napster. Completely free, diffuse, and powerful. Wireless is the natural medium because it doesn't require any land licensing or other utility fees.
One can only dream ~