Why are you hard pressed on making students run virus scanners? Most viri only hurt the local machine, and the rest can be solved with a good firewall and e-mail filtering.
But you do not have a right to force students to use any anti virus products, and you also do not have a right to grant/deny network access on the basis of usage of such products.
It's good to want your network to have high uptimes, but, frankly, most network failures are due to failed routers. Also in many University networks there are frequent cable problems. When I was at OSU, it was every other day an intra-campus cable had failed. Now that they're using fiber, it's probably more severe. But seriously, viruses only cause harm in mass, and although an e-mail virus can quickly spread to every person in the school (and their parents, grandparents, etc.) via Outlook, if you have e-mail filters the above said is no problem.
You should by all means encourage students to run virus scanners, because most support requests are local problems. As to the capabilities of the scanners, most do little than perform filename searches and occasionally search a bit of the file. Today's up-start global virus is usually polymorphic, embedding itself in rundll.exe or systray or constantly chuking itself up.
However, for catching things like Sub7, these scanners do work well. That being said, I have never used a commercial virus scanning product and have never had a virus. The only reason commercial virus products are so popular for their limited (null?) functionality is because of hype much associated with blaming something YOU did on an invisible gremlin 'virus' that 'must' be screwing things up.
But for the reckless who fancy accepting file transfers from haxor3llt in IRC, those who frequent warez sites, and those who infect themselves with sub7, they should by all means be forced to use any University-controlled virus software. Unfortunatly, I've just described virturall all college students so it fits perfectly;)
Sounds like the StarCraft mechanism for moving and relocating buildings. Perhaps a model for relocatable buildings with 'plug-n-play' utility and land connections will be develop as a result of this ability. That is, companies can relocate their buildings on demand and plug them into landing platforms anywhere in the world. It also would be a major plus, as the article mentions, to land a hospital right in the middle of a crisis area.
Maybe the sight of giant buildings floating in the sky will become more common in the later century?
I was responsible for several students at a local K-5 school during a summer program which was a citywide initiative by the mayor and included sports, arts, etc. It wasn't inner city, but middle-class.
I was teaching a general class about computers, a band of over 25 teachers and others who didn't have any idea of what to do besides sit the kids in front of a bunch of Macs and have them click blindly. (Memories of my own days going to 'computer class' where you would sit while the teacher talked to the librarian flashed into mind).
I would suggest you go the route others have mentioned with LOGO. It's an excellent learning environment, especially for higher thinking. Most kids don't realize there is a process for everything we do, and when they do (usually in a sudden epiphany while learning Algebra years later) it's too late to build upon in their early years.
You should also expect to have some students not interested in anything at all. Some of the kids I had, for example, were being forced by their parents into this 'free' summer program as a solution to daycare. I can only imagine what inner city parents might do to get their kids a free babysitter (my experience was from dual income $50k+ parents). Anyway, there were a few kids, especially two little girls who refused to do anything and wanted to play with a bag of toys their mother had dropped off. Several of the kids were only in the program because the sports and arts programs had filled up. You should be prepared for kids like this, and remember not to take it personally. Try to isolate them from the other children to avoid their influence on the group (e.g. "This isn't school, I don't have to do it, and I want to play."). Kids can cause chaos just a well as rioting adults can, and you don't want 24 kids running around throwing paper, eating gum from under the table, kicking each other, and crying in the corner.
Sound like the voice of experience?
I don't want to dampen your optimism, however. In my case I wasn't using LOGO but was teaching internet browsing basics. I thought I would start the kids off at some of the well known kid hangouts, etc. such as pokemon.com, foxkids.com, back street boys, etc. This ended up working well and many kids said they would go to the public library to use computers or ask their parents if they could learn more about using their home computer, which, for many, was most interestingly off limits.
But you should remember you are no teacher and that those in the field go through just as much behavoiral traning as that in academics. Especially with young kids, some of the methods aren't immediatly obvious because we haven't been kids for at least a little while and once you go logic/adult you never go back.
So be prepared, and be flashy: teenagers have trouble sitting through a lecture, and you expect kids to? Identify those interested and those not, maintain control at ALL COSTS, and be prepared for night-flying parents with the $120/week daycare payment in mind...
Also remember to keep in mind that your main goal isn't to teach a computer science class, but get disadvatged kids interested in something which is certain to bring them out of poverty. You want them to leave with a "all the possibilities" and some grasp of just how important computers and how big they are. Little kids especially can't understand large differences, for example a thousand and a million are about the same to a 1st grader. Try to make them understand computers are much larger than any known number and that if anything is possible using computers. Some kids may like the fact that you can tell a computer to do whatever you want and it will always obey like a perfect-best friend (for an 8 year old, that is). You want to impact these kids that they go home and are excited about coming back and begin to look at the world differently.
I can get T1 service in my area (Columbus, Ohio) for $250 from a company called E Internet Access, and around this area ($200-$250) from other companies. I was all set to have a T1 installed to my house, but my area got cable and a cable modem can get up to 2.5 mbps and is cheaper ($40/month) so I opted for that.
The T1covers the ISP charges, but you will need a T1 switch (modem), and have to have local loop installed into your home by way of the telephone company (one time service charge). Check in your area. I'm sure a full T1 is only around $250-$500 a month. It starts getting really expensive when you want to run a T3, or want to plug right into the net with an OC optical connection.
Unfortunatly, DSL was never meant to run on, actually, can't. It sends a high frequency signal down your copper phone line, using it like a big antenna. You have to have conductive material (e.g. POTs copper) for this to work. If there is any fiber, which is plastic, it only converts the 8 khz voice signals in order to transport them -- all other frequencies on the line are discarded, which is one of the great reasons for using fiber in that it prevents and is resistive to noise, acting like a bandpass filter.
There is a possibility that such a technology exists which takes the DSL signal and also puts it on fiber, but this probably isn't so. This would eat up your telco bandwidth for voice lines, which probably isn't meant to handle high speed singal sourced access, let alone an IP transport.
It looks like your only options are T1 (about $250 a month), cable, satellite, or 56k...
Out of this whole sick, sick story of lawyers at their best, I especially like the following quote:
"I think similar gains can be achieved by realizing that working together...works for everyone."
You bet it does. With 25% of a telecommunications company created especially for this case and unnamed liquid assests, I'd sure think it would work for me and my deep pockets.
First of all, the rights which are being referred to are called geological rights. These are the rights to mine the land. Most people own structure rights, which include the rights to attach structures to the land -- to build on it. The regular Joe Blow homeowner doesn't own the geological rights to his two story home, which also happens to have a basement underground.
Geological rights were created to solve the problem of finding some rich resource on land which the seller didn't know was there. This way, people could still technically sell the land, but not the minerals (like gold, oil, etc.) which lay under the soil waiting to be discovered. These rights were originally bought from The State, along with the property, and cost extra. A geological survey is (I think) required and if you live in a state park or other natural reserve, or anywhere you cannot mine the land, the State still owns these rights. For this reason, most people didn't and don't buy so-called mineral rights when they build a home, etc.
General rights to use the land include the right to build zone structures. Of course, you can dig into the ground and put whatever you want there. DIRT is free. As long as you own the property, you can license others to use it on any type of legal ability, transfer rights (sell), or give other forms of use. These all must be legal, however. You can't invent rights just to monopolize the land (e.g. air/land/ground rights are not legal).
In this case, as far as I can see, the cable companies aren't doing anything wrong legally at all. They aren't mining the land unless you consider dirt a natural resource. They're placing cable a few feet down in the ground, also similar to the depth at which many rail road ties extend, incidentally..
I'm not a lawyer and I don't claim to be, but I have purchased land before and worked with commercial real estate. I know there is no such thing as above and below ground restrictions. That's just plain silly. I imagine why any of this lawyer Ackerson's cases have never gone to trial is because they are some warped interpretation of mineral rights and trying to manipulate that into somehow being "ground" rights. This isn't so, it's just lawyers trying to fatten their pockets, delay and interfere with the progress of the Internet, and create new backdoor companies which they're quarter partners in.
In the long run, I see broadband prices going up, property near railroad tracks being monopolized and as a result infrastructure deployment being delayed, and the people who actually did own the property getting screwed, taken for a ride by lawyers who can get whatever they can out of the next legal loophole.
Yes, I did mean beat. Most parents today do in fact give repeated 'spanking sessions' which can be translated to beatings.
All physical punishment is in some way fundamentally wrong. For the minority (e.g. you) it occasioanlly works. But for many, 'spankings', which often later translate to 'beatings' when parents go too far, don't work. Children live what they learn, and children who are hit for doing something wrong learn violence is acceptable and often go on to apply it when they think someone else is wrong. This sets the stage professionals the world over know as social violence.
You may think it worked for you, but I would rather think you were lucky. You're right, the inverse is also just as wrong, children need to have some kind of constructive punishment. Either extremes are very dangerous.
It's just that many people don't understand why we punish children and what we really want. In most cases, it's to teach children right and wrong. We don't have to hit them to inflict fear of doing it again (and thus no concept of right and wrong) to do this. You can just as easily explain to a child why something is wrong and why it is right, and why you should want to do the wrong thing. You should make it clear that while there are two courses of action, you can choose whichever you want, but will that action make you a good person?
Children want to be good people. They will want to do what pleases you because this is a standard human concept. Everyone in my family have been raised with these concepts, and none have ever been in any trouble and have basically been all constructive, productive adults. Furthermore, we all have good relationships with each other which aren't bound by fear.
So I forward to you that you rexamine your last statement and consider if you really think any type of violence translates into maturity. It's not the quantity, its the principle. I hope you don't hit your children, and take the route less followed: right and wrong, not fear.
I do a form of this all the time. My cable modem has come under attack a few times, and each time I just release and renew IPs via DHCP and let the router handle all the bandwidth. Coupled with a dynamic DNS and you have a moving target which is accessible to those who you only want it to.
Isn't this just a variation of some kind of dynamic host configuration?
Unfortuantly, in both cases, hit the control server (e.g. DHCP, trn, etc.) and the whole system is down. There is also the cavet that at some point the dynamic address must be available to the public (in my case via dynamic DNS), so if my script kiddies were smart enough, they could have had their program get my address from my DNS server and adjust their attack accordingly. Or taken down the DNS server, so I would have defeated my purpose.
In either case you shouldn't rely on security through haystack and needle methods. You can always burn the haystack if you don't care about the needle.
According to US Census, over 60% of 16 year olds are sexually active. We have sex education classes for 4th graders which explain all the details. Why do we insist on this ironic misnomer of trying to 'protect' our children?
Obviously, a 4 year old isn't smart enough to search for porn. When a kid becomes smart enough to handle adult concepts, shouldn't he be allowed to handle them? Why are we afarid to accept the transition between child and adult?
Additionally, by banning and filtering access in so many ways we make the inappropriatness, which is a part of human life, forbidden fruit, that more lucrative toward kids.
Kids who are raised in open environments where they are exposed to good, bad, etc. grow up to be mentally sound and productive citizens, because they learn that the world isn't what's shown on PBS and there are decisions which must be made, and they learn the right way to make them by their parents, by exposure and experience.
By contrast, parents who isolate their children and encapsulate them in bubbles often have troubled kids. Many don't know how to handle adult situations when they suddenly become an adult after being a child all their life. Kids need exposure to learn the difference between right and wrong and to establish valid ranges of what's right and wrong, and then extend this to develop their own insight. Unfortunatly, many parents are ashamed of themselves, people in general, and the world we live in. This is caused from a variety of sources, sometimes generational and other times it's the function of a religion or other ideal which insists on incorporating shame in everyday life.
If children live with shame, they're not going to do whats right because they want to, they're going to do it because they are afarid of being condemed and isolated. This just doesn't work.
Today, as much as we like to think, we still have quite classical ideas. Many parents still beat their children. Others mentally abuse them and shame them. Some isolate them and make them into unprepared adults. This is changing, and people are realizing that children shouldn't be delt with as children, but as what they are -- people. Kids are smart and shouldn't be sheltered from something because they won't understand it. Why not try to talk with them instead of putting a filtering program on your computer, assuming these are 'adult' concepts? Having an open relationship with a child is much better than having one of authrotiy, and your child (trust me) will respect you much more in the long run. That's parenting.
All through the interview I got the general feeling this guy doesn't know anything about any of the major issues in the tech world right now. Don't confuse this with avoidance, because it's complete ignorance.
He may hold two engineering degrees, but he stumbled over all the major questions in the interview, without adding any information either way and basically not saying anything.
Like my Grandfather always said, politicains are all the same, they say: "Some people are for [it] and some are against [it], and I'm for the people.". Absolutly nothing.
I guess you have to realize politics is a profession, and to keep your job you gotta have the most people that like you...so don't do anything. Don't agree, disagree, and when an interviewing asks you questions, go into rhetorical mode. This will keep people on either side happy because you're technically not for the other guy, and people like me who realize what's going on (e.g. 1%) just don't know what to think.
This guy also seems to think just by providing power to an industry you're going to get results. Someone should explain the difference between an economic industry and a vacuume cleaner to him. Industries need monitoring, they need guidance just like a three year old around a cookie jar. You can't let an industry self-regulate...this is what's happening in California right now, which ironically doesn't even have power.
I also love the fact he thinks privacy isn't important and giving up some of our privacy can be a good thing. Well, it can be good in that it saves lives and it saves money, but it also decreases the value of human life as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But what is the inverse? Does such a system of complete non-privacy impact the citizens as having privacy at the cost of loss of information? People will always be killed and people will always kill people. It's the human way. We're violent and destructive. You can try to buffer all that by spying on everyone on the off-chance they might do something in hopes of preventing it, but at what cost overall. You have to look at the big picture and not just one output.
I hope we get a tech advisor who at least does more than read the news paper clippings on the subject he is advising the nation in. Maybe someone with real interest in something who is not just doing the job because the country's been good to him, someone who has a vested interest in the safe progression of technology in such a way as to benefit people and not just corporations. We need someone who recognizes people are and own the country, not large corporations and ideas should be the medium of transaction, not money. Here's hoping for a better future ~
First, this is through RealNetworks, so for your $10 a month you can download some nice 12 kb/s streaming crap which is worse than what you can hear on the radio for free.
"The record labels like this format, since they can keep track of where and when the music is played."
This scares me. When I read this, almost jumping back in my chair, I pictured a controlling and abusive husband wanting to know everything about his poor, little wife. This is unhealthy and destructive behavoir, in any medium. They need to get a clue that consumers aren't here to control, we're customers and are the sole reason people like them make any money at all.
"In essence, consumers wouldn't buy music, just rent it."
This violates the Betamax case which states consumers have the right to do personally whatever they want with any content (e.g. copy it to tapes for personal viewing, etc.). You don't rent music like you can rent a house. Pretty soon all ownership will be in the hands of giant companies, and the consumer will own nothing. We can already rent our house, our car, furniture, computer, TV, software, cable or satellite service, why not music? Why don't we just start paying monthly fees to eat at McDonald's?
"Is this going to end up as some sort of monopoly control, where the companies you own and partner with will be the only ones who can do this?"
I think so. Napster obviosully can't do it, even if they pay the Artists.
Well, that's it. We might as well give ourselves to Corporate America. We should each pay to rent our lives, we should pay for our air. One way or another it isn't going to be free, but what is? Who today isn't looking to make a buck off of anything people will buy? This is truly a sad state of affairs.
P2P doesn't have any good legal uses. That's the sad truth. People use what works, and P2P is designed in such a way to encourage mass piracy of copyrighted works. If Bob wanted to share is resume, there are better ways to do it than using P2P systems. P2P, from its inception, was designed to share copyrighted materials. It was a work around. It wasn't designed to tackle other problems or be applied in diverse field: it's going to be what it already is.
It's also interesting to note P2P systems live and die by user submissions, so the most popular content is always what's going to be there. Mom and Dad pictures just aren't in high as demand as Britney Spear's latest single, which is by chance copyrighted. Popular works are worth money, and thus are copyrighted so as to get paid for that popularity. Not necessarily the work mind you, but the popularity and the willingness for people to buy what's popular.
There are lots of neat-o uses people are coming up with for P2P like network monitors, etc. but most all already have good or better solutions to what's offered. Having a solution in search of a problem usually won't lead up to any practicle applications: most I've seen have only created problems but to solve them.
Despite these unforunates, I can think of one good service: FreeNet. While not exactly following the model of P2P, it could be passed as and could be looked at as Napster by naive politicians and citizens. Imagine headlines "Napster-like technology encourages freedom of Speech.". Now people, especially Americans (where the trouble is right now) love their freedom of speech like they love football and beer nuts. The recording industry would be belitted by such a statement. Obviously, something like FreeNet would work well and would contribute to the lasting of P2P, which would contribute to the real reason why EFF is "seeking legal examples".
Well, personally, I have gotten all of my hardware to work on Windows 2000, some of which didn't even had manufacture drivers for NT, let alone 2000.
Here's a tip: try to identify the underlying chipset of whatever you're trying to install instead of the manufacuture. Out of all the oodles of manufactures producing the same hardware, there are usually only one or two chipsets.
Chances are, one of those manufactures hasn't been lax on driver support. Simply use their driver, their software, whatever. It works great.
For example, my Pinnacle PCTV+ doesn't have WDM drivers, so I can't use many applications which use them. Solution? Use AverMedia drivers! They work just like using the AverMedia card, because both (and most all tuners on the market now) use the Bt84x chipset. I can even get Closed Captioning and Pinnacle wasn't planning on supporting this for another two years! It's that simple. And it works for all sorts of things -- my micromodem uses drivers from another company as well.
This also opens up the possibility of driver tuning, in that you can try multiple drivers to see which one works best with your system. Sometimes manufacture drivers for your card don't work as well as ones from others.
In your case with the Joystick drivers, which are probably highly specilized, the only real thing you're going to be able to do is lobby the company to produce some WDM or at least Windows 2k/NT compatible drivers. This, unfortunatly, can be a frustrating experience.
But for a host of other drivers, simply go to a different manufacture. If you're really desperate, you might take a look at the Windows Driver Development Kit (DDK), espeically WDM drivers. If you have experience with C++, and know the basics of drivers, virtural modes, addressing, etc. than you might be able to write your own driver using the WDM model. I'm sorry to say it, but WDM is the best driver specification I've ever seen and blows Linux out of the water: extensibility, maintainability, and modularization make it a very good and easy to learn package indeed. But this, of course, is only if you are willing to do what the manufacture should have. It's good experience none-the-less and you'll learn more about your system. For me, this was writing a driver for my Radio card. It was a perfectly simple example, and was a lot of fun. Remember to share with the rest of us if you end up anyhow.
First, most all CD-ROM drives after 4x don't have a play button and won't automatically start playback when an audio CD is inserted.
So this means you're going to need someway to send the IDE signal, which would probably involve, at least, a microcontroller although I'm not fully aware of the ATAPI spec and you may have to make the device completly physical (e.g. go through all the init routines) to even get to the point where you can send a command.
Second, these drives, as mentioned don't have skip protection. Todays in dash CD players have read ahead of 45-60 seconds or more, because this is what it takes to get even marginal performance while driving over gravel in your SUV.
Personally, I built an in-dash MP3/CD player using an old Sony VAIO 233 MHz system for my friend. The CD-ROM which came with the system was used, and in this case it already had mechanical skip protection. I used the LCD that came with it and bought a digital touch screen kit and connected this up the parallel port. To completly prevent skipping, I extracted the selected CD track to memory as it loads, at about +120 sec into playing buffer. Works very well. This was in a Jeep and he's told me he hasn't got it to skip. And yes, it runs Linux off an ATAFlash IDE card (no noise!).
In reference to the original post, you don't have to be a N.A.S.A. engineer, all you need is a laptop and some time (a few weekends).
By the time you're finished looking for your obstruficated CD-ROM and forcing the thing in your dash, you'd might as well been better purchasing a $165 car player as you'd be adding no addition functionality.
Hmm, at $207 a QphH, the most economical thing seems like a farm or cluster of HP NetServer LXr 8500's.
Also, everyone is thinking this is a win for Linux. If you look at how the data is displayed, you'll notice operating system and actual system are both dependant upon one another and cannot be seperated. Thus, it is worthless to compare Linux running on a different system with that of Windows running on a different system. In all fairness, we don't even know what Windows will do on that system.
As it is, these rankings are meant to show the best arbitrary configurations which just happen to be setup somewhere and just happen to be submitted. Again, as others have noted, you cannot compare apples to oranges, so Linux being on top may be of little significance only that someone happened to have a system with Linux running on it. In terms of the defined QphH, it seems that server hardware is the biggest swayer, not the OS.
Here is an analysis compiled by BindView RAZOR Team, including detection of the DLL on a remote host, decompilation of the file itself, and vulnerability risk assesments.
Analysis of DVWSSR.DLL Risks
Risks Uncovered:
The risks of having dvwssr.dll are not as severe as originally reported in
media outlets Friday morning, but still severe enough that system
administrators responsible for NT systems to investigate. The risks
involve whether or not a certain DLL is loaded, how rights are set, and
potentially how Front Page 98 is used.
1. If you have Microsoft NT 4 with the Option Pack loaded and FrontPage
98, you have the vulnerable dvwssr.dll loaded.
2. To run the dll remotely you need to have read access to the dll. This
is not assigned by default. Typically on systems with multiple virtual
hosts the administrator could have stuck everyone with a virtual host on
the system into a group and given that group access to the dll. This would
imply that any virtual host maintainer could look at other hosts' files.
Obviously a misconfigured host might allow anonymous access, but this
would require purposeful actions by the administrator for this to exist.
3. The files in question are asp files. This dll gives you the ability to
read asp source, so it is possible that hardcoded user names and passwords
to backend systems may be viewed. This is essentially the risk that Rain
Forest Puppy found.
4. There exists a buffer overflow in the dvwssr.dll. At offset 0x581811C9
in the DLL is an unchecked lstrcpy. By sending a large string of
characters, the dvwssr.dll can be overflowed. By carefully constructing
these characters, it is possible to remotely execute commands as "system"
which can be used for elevating priviledges. The buffer overflow was
uncovered by CoreSDI.
5. In theory if you can get the hash of a user with the access, you can
exploit the buffer overflow. This is called "passing the hash", and
essentially means that you use the hash without cracking the password to
authenticate to the target server. See
http://www.ntbugtraq.com/default.asp?pid=36&sid=1& A2=ind9704&L=NTBUGTRAQ&P=R2734&D=0
for details from RAZOR's Paul Ashton on the basis for this technique. This
technique is currently one of the stars of Foundstone's "Hacking Exposed:
Live" presentations being put on by George Kurtz and Eric Schultze at
security shows around the globe. Certainly in theory this could be adapted
to this exploit.
6. Sniffing the NT LanMan password hash being sent by a legitimate FP98
user using L0phtcrack, and subsequently cracking the password would
certainly give you the proper access to run the dll, and therefore elevate
priviledges. This would of course mean that the sniffer would have to be
located between the legit user and the target server, but is not beyond
the realm of possibility.
Detection of the DLL:
Detection is quite simple. The following examples use NetCat:
Example 1:
$ nc -v -w2 target.system 80
GET/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/dvwssr.dll HTTP/1.0 (hit enter twice)
HTTP/1.0 500 Server Error (The system could not find the environment
option that was entered. )
The 500 error means dvwssr.dll is not present.
Example 2:
$ nc -v -w2 target.system 80
GET/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/dvwssr.dll HTTP/1.0 (hit enter twice)
HTTP/1.0 401 Access Denied
The 401 error means dvwssr.dll is present but you do not have the rights to it.
Example 3:
$ nc -v -w2 target.system 80
GET/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/dvwssr.dll HTTP/1.0 (hit enter twice)
Connection closed by foreign host.
The connection closed means that you had the rights to run the DLL, but
since no parameters were passed the connection was completed.
Users of BindView's HackerShield can use the Rapid Fire Update released on
the evening of April 14 to detect the presense of the DLL on their systems
they manage.
Elimination of Vulnerability:
Microsoft's original recommendation of removal of the DLL still stands as
this eliminates the vulnerability completely. See
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms00-025.asp for
details.
Actually, I was one of the people in a group who worked on this technology (not at C3D -- don't know who they are, at another company).
The photochrome is called bacteriorhodopsin, which is a seven helices protein with an attached retinal molecule. It's about 4 nm long. When exposed to 570 nm (yellow-green) light, it starts a cycle of definable photointermediates which vary from a few fractions of a picosecond to tens of milliseconds. There are also several latched or nested photocycles which can remain transient for years. Some genetic variants even have the capability to run several photocycles at once. It's quite a remarkable molecular engineering feat of nature via natural selection of billions of years fromthe tiny blue-green bacterium H. salarium (used internally for photosynthesis via proton pumping over the cell wall and internal membrane).
Our group was able to create a bR coated CD which had over 500 layers of.8 nm pits (around 800MB-1 GB per layer). We were able to limit interference by way of a kind of two-photon absorption to select the layers and spot-test the data by measuring the amplitude of a specific spot on the disc when an absorbing wavelength (presumably) was emmited.
The BER (bit error ratio) was around the rate of CDs, and with error correction, it was almost a usable mass storage drive. We attempted to get production funding, but we could only create a few working models for a few highly specilized companies mainly because of the cost of the laser. As I mentioned, bacteriorhodopsin is controlled by wavelength, and we needed at least 3 different wavelengths corresponding to the absorption maximums of the different photointermediates. This means blue (400 nm) for erase, yellow (570 nm) for page select and red (675 nm) for write/read.
In our experiment, we used a single laser for all three wavelengths and we used optical parrametric ossciliation and frequency doubling/mixing to get the three colors using crystals, and we used a Q-switch to change colors in less than a few microseconds (e.g. access time). This was fairly complicated although the use of discrete components and a diode pump laser made the optical assembly as small as a large laser pointer. It was still costly as it required special optical crystals to do the OPO and frequency stuff. Currently, these crystals are expensive in low quantities, cheap in moderate quantities and expensive in high quantities because it is difficult to grow once the crystals get so large, and it isn't economical to grow tiny batches. For production, of course, we would need very large quantities and thus the drive wouldn't be cheap enough for the consumer market.
There are alternatives, for example. A pure semiconductor solution utilizing multi-color diodes would be optimal. There is a company currently producing blue laser diodes, and soon green, but these are still expensive and don't have a high life. So, fundamentally, we were limited by other technologies.
Currently, our group does have a production license from a major storage manufacture and we are developing a storage and processing device based on bacteriorhodopsin in solid form in sol-gel (aerogel) suspensions. This looks the most promising and it will be affordable to commercial markets as other solutions which provide the same features are much more expensive and have a much large footprint. We're likely to market to large datacenters and companies with lots of data which needs to be online in a fast and associative system, and where space is a concern.
I really think there is going to be some great things in terms of storage technologies as soon as diodes and VCSELs bridge into more wavelengths (read: WDM will force this) and have faster switching times. As it is, we're only using a fraction of the several hundred thousand terahertz bandwidth of even a single wavelength, let alone more than one. Optical is definatly the way to go.
Pretty cool stuff, especially when you see a movie playing off of something which was once only a thought and a proof-of-concept few bits in a lab.
First of all, the article points out that current large scale quantum computers don't exist, and is only speculating on a system created in scale using the same two and three bit methods. It's quite a possibility large scale Quantum computers, if even possible, may be nothing like the three bit experiments of today.
Second, the 'computer' will still need to be on to extract any information. Work will still need to be done on what did happen in order to find out what didn't. All this article says, basically, is in the conclusion:
Mitchison and Jozsa's 'counterfactual computation' essentially taps into worlds in which the computer did run in order to extract the result into a world in which it didn't.
This seems to indicate that by reading in a specific way, you will be able to get what didn't happen, in, say, a function as well as the original output. So, if a function's only purpose is to set a bit to 1, then you will also have available what didn't happen, which in case the bit would also be 0. This all goes back to the superposition principle.
Now, what gets really interesting is expanding this into many millions of bits and very complicated functions. Essentially, you will also have available what you didn't do (not the inverse, but what didn't happen) as well as what happened. This will be very useful for cryptographic techniques, as well as very complicated mathematical operations. And as someone mentioned, it may be possible to have the computer generate a program and based upon all the possible outcomes in real and imaginary worlds, if you know what the output should be, you can select the best fitting program and it will write itself. Presumably, if programs could know what the outputs of other programs should look like, they could write new programs which do specific tasks without having to understand how programs are actually written. This could come in very handing for creating an intelligence and is very similar to what we do.
Some people here are concerned with what will happen if the structure will collapse. Well, it's not even a structure. If you read the article, you'll know it's a cable. Possibly a few feet thick. Not "billions of tons of carbon tubules". Granted, it would be one long cable, but the result of it falling would probably end up destroying the cable due to the variations in gravity and disrrupting it's pseudo-orbit, than destroying the Earth.
People have always been alarmists, I for one think this will be a great idea. You could send over a pound of stuff up to space for little over a dollar, compared to the thousands it costs now.
Frankly, we haven't even seen the start of the space age.
"6) Stall XP Adoption: Until AOL can develop an appropriate XP
solution, message to AOL members and the public that XP is "not ready" for
broad adoption (i.e., has bugs, will not run AOL, will not run your existing
software, will violate your online privacy, etc...)"
I especially like this one. Lying to consumers to get your product forwarded. I could just see a big Steve Case "Member Community Outreach" regarding the severe online privacy violations with XP, just after AOL parades you with ten sign-on ads and collects data on your web browsing (AOL "proxy") while moderating everything to hell.
Everyone seems to think Microsoft is the worst corporate technology firm with devilish, underhanded practices, but this is just outrageous.
There have been many insightful comments regarding natural selection and insuring it continues, without introducing genes into the 'gene pool' which violate nature and eventually could lead to disease and other problems.
In the future, when genetic modification is common in terms of cloning and before/after birth modification (and it will be: read: purpose of the genome, it will happen eventually), I'd imagine we will have a gene registrar or index where all modifications are certified and controlled, thereby controlling the gene pool. This way, we can maintain certain natural proportions and only genes which have become 'free' can be used (assuming there will be no natural selection at all anymore and all people will be completely managed by technology).
I guess you can think of it as genetic CVS (no howls, please). The point is you just can't go adding to parts of the program willy-nilly, as we have all seen what one person can do to an otherwise stable foundation. I'm sure this seems like a frightening future, but it will be necessary as modifications of this nature are continually done and introduced into the huge dynamic of the world population everyday. The only thing I would be concerned with is the control of the organization responsible for regulating these modifications: it will literally have control over humanity. I can tell you right now all ICANN chairs are ineligible for a position.
I want to reply to all of those who think my comment was sinical about the Grandmother analogy. First, of course it wouldn't be a replacement for truly taking the time out and visiting your loved one, but for someone who is chronically ill, you can't be there all the time. When my Grandmother died, I obviously couldn't be there throughout the entire two month hospital stay. When she did past away, the hospital was unable to contact me so I wasn't able to be there with other family members during her last hours.
To summerize: I'd rather want to learn there is trouble from a web site (any source, really) and have the 24-hour active monitoring capability of any Internet connection than not knowing at all.
I think this is a great idea. Unlike many others here who are afarid of introducing a public network into critical operating devices, I think the article clears this up pretty well. They're not going to be hosting CNN.com, and the only thing they'll probably do is transmit a keep-alive signal (takes a whole new meaning) to a web server and this is then made available on a secure site which family can monitor.
I can personally see where this has huge benefits. For example, if my Grandmother was in the hospital in critical condition, I would feel alot easier knowing I can check that she's OK anytime during the day by simply going to a web site. This frees up time for families with sick relatives and allows them to do such things as go to work to pay for the bills.
I could also see it being used as a way to rate hospitals. How long has it been since a patient has gone into arrest? How many per day? I could see hospitals advertising their 'uptimes' just as much as is the case with network system stability.
In addition, if the information was de-personalized and made available to the public, researchers and doctors could have access a wealth of data (especially if the devices are trasmitting more than a signal, e.g. heartrate, etc.) to examine regarding conditions, and varying opinions could be generated by many experts by examing data. In a way, you could get a second opinion by just telling your doctor to go look at the log on the web.
I think this is a case where humor got the best of us. Something like this has real possibilities for a wide range of audencies.
You shouldn't forget you're also in that e-mail as the originating sender, and all failures could be sent right back to you, e.g. 45,000 non-delivery messages if the spam name happens to be fake (no really???).
Slashdot Mirror
For a load of laughs see the page:m .html
http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/mithril/diagra
It was drawn by EvilBorg too, and almost a year ago.
Why are you hard pressed on making students run virus scanners? Most viri only hurt the local machine, and the rest can be solved with a good firewall and e-mail filtering.
;)
But you do not have a right to force students to use any anti virus products, and you also do not have a right to grant/deny network access on the basis of usage of such products.
It's good to want your network to have high uptimes, but, frankly, most network failures are due to failed routers. Also in many University networks there are frequent cable problems. When I was at OSU, it was every other day an intra-campus cable had failed. Now that they're using fiber, it's probably more severe. But seriously, viruses only cause harm in mass, and although an e-mail virus can quickly spread to every person in the school (and their parents, grandparents, etc.) via Outlook, if you have e-mail filters the above said is no problem.
You should by all means encourage students to run virus scanners, because most support requests are local problems. As to the capabilities of the scanners, most do little than perform filename searches and occasionally search a bit of the file. Today's up-start global virus is usually polymorphic, embedding itself in rundll.exe or systray or constantly chuking itself up.
However, for catching things like Sub7, these scanners do work well. That being said, I have never used a commercial virus scanning product and have never had a virus. The only reason commercial virus products are so popular for their limited (null?) functionality is because of hype much associated with blaming something YOU did on an invisible gremlin 'virus' that 'must' be screwing things up.
But for the reckless who fancy accepting file transfers from haxor3llt in IRC, those who frequent warez sites, and those who infect themselves with sub7, they should by all means be forced to use any University-controlled virus software. Unfortunatly, I've just described virturall all college students so it fits perfectly
Sounds like the StarCraft mechanism for moving and relocating buildings. Perhaps a model for relocatable buildings with 'plug-n-play' utility and land connections will be develop as a result of this ability. That is, companies can relocate their buildings on demand and plug them into landing platforms anywhere in the world. It also would be a major plus, as the article mentions, to land a hospital right in the middle of a crisis area.
Maybe the sight of giant buildings floating in the sky will become more common in the later century?
I was responsible for several students at a local K-5 school during a summer program which was a citywide initiative by the mayor and included sports, arts, etc. It wasn't inner city, but middle-class.
I was teaching a general class about computers, a band of over 25 teachers and others who didn't have any idea of what to do besides sit the kids in front of a bunch of Macs and have them click blindly. (Memories of my own days going to 'computer class' where you would sit while the teacher talked to the librarian flashed into mind).
I would suggest you go the route others have mentioned with LOGO. It's an excellent learning environment, especially for higher thinking. Most kids don't realize there is a process for everything we do, and when they do (usually in a sudden epiphany while learning Algebra years later) it's too late to build upon in their early years.
You should also expect to have some students not interested in anything at all. Some of the kids I had, for example, were being forced by their parents into this 'free' summer program as a solution to daycare. I can only imagine what inner city parents might do to get their kids a free babysitter (my experience was from dual income $50k+ parents). Anyway, there were a few kids, especially two little girls who refused to do anything and wanted to play with a bag of toys their mother had dropped off. Several of the kids were only in the program because the sports and arts programs had filled up. You should be prepared for kids like this, and remember not to take it personally. Try to isolate them from the other children to avoid their influence on the group (e.g. "This isn't school, I don't have to do it, and I want to play."). Kids can cause chaos just a well as rioting adults can, and you don't want 24 kids running around throwing paper, eating gum from under the table, kicking each other, and crying in the corner.
Sound like the voice of experience?
I don't want to dampen your optimism, however. In my case I wasn't using LOGO but was teaching internet browsing basics. I thought I would start the kids off at some of the well known kid hangouts, etc. such as pokemon.com, foxkids.com, back street boys, etc. This ended up working well and many kids said they would go to the public library to use computers or ask their parents if they could learn more about using their home computer, which, for many, was most interestingly off limits.
But you should remember you are no teacher and that those in the field go through just as much behavoiral traning as that in academics. Especially with young kids, some of the methods aren't immediatly obvious because we haven't been kids for at least a little while and once you go logic/adult you never go back.
So be prepared, and be flashy: teenagers have trouble sitting through a lecture, and you expect kids to? Identify those interested and those not, maintain control at ALL COSTS, and be prepared for night-flying parents with the $120/week daycare payment in mind...
Also remember to keep in mind that your main goal isn't to teach a computer science class, but get disadvatged kids interested in something which is certain to bring them out of poverty. You want them to leave with a "all the possibilities" and some grasp of just how important computers and how big they are. Little kids especially can't understand large differences, for example a thousand and a million are about the same to a 1st grader. Try to make them understand computers are much larger than any known number and that if anything is possible using computers. Some kids may like the fact that you can tell a computer to do whatever you want and it will always obey like a perfect-best friend (for an 8 year old, that is). You want to impact these kids that they go home and are excited about coming back and begin to look at the world differently.
I can get T1 service in my area (Columbus, Ohio) for $250 from a company called E Internet Access, and around this area ($200-$250) from other companies. I was all set to have a T1 installed to my house, but my area got cable and a cable modem can get up to 2.5 mbps and is cheaper ($40/month) so I opted for that. The T1covers the ISP charges, but you will need a T1 switch (modem), and have to have local loop installed into your home by way of the telephone company (one time service charge). Check in your area. I'm sure a full T1 is only around $250-$500 a month. It starts getting really expensive when you want to run a T3, or want to plug right into the net with an OC optical connection.
Unfortunatly, DSL was never meant to run on, actually, can't. It sends a high frequency signal down your copper phone line, using it like a big antenna. You have to have conductive material (e.g. POTs copper) for this to work. If there is any fiber, which is plastic, it only converts the 8 khz voice signals in order to transport them -- all other frequencies on the line are discarded, which is one of the great reasons for using fiber in that it prevents and is resistive to noise, acting like a bandpass filter.
There is a possibility that such a technology exists which takes the DSL signal and also puts it on fiber, but this probably isn't so. This would eat up your telco bandwidth for voice lines, which probably isn't meant to handle high speed singal sourced access, let alone an IP transport.
It looks like your only options are T1 (about $250 a month), cable, satellite, or 56k...
Out of this whole sick, sick story of lawyers at their best, I especially like the following quote:
"I think similar gains can be achieved by realizing that working together...works for everyone."
You bet it does. With 25% of a telecommunications company created especially for this case and unnamed liquid assests, I'd sure think it would work for me and my deep pockets.
First of all, the rights which are being referred to are called geological rights. These are the rights to mine the land. Most people own structure rights, which include the rights to attach structures to the land -- to build on it. The regular Joe Blow homeowner doesn't own the geological rights to his two story home, which also happens to have a basement underground.
Geological rights were created to solve the problem of finding some rich resource on land which the seller didn't know was there. This way, people could still technically sell the land, but not the minerals (like gold, oil, etc.) which lay under the soil waiting to be discovered. These rights were originally bought from The State, along with the property, and cost extra. A geological survey is (I think) required and if you live in a state park or other natural reserve, or anywhere you cannot mine the land, the State still owns these rights. For this reason, most people didn't and don't buy so-called mineral rights when they build a home, etc.
General rights to use the land include the right to build zone structures. Of course, you can dig into the ground and put whatever you want there. DIRT is free. As long as you own the property, you can license others to use it on any type of legal ability, transfer rights (sell), or give other forms of use. These all must be legal, however. You can't invent rights just to monopolize the land (e.g. air/land/ground rights are not legal).
In this case, as far as I can see, the cable companies aren't doing anything wrong legally at all. They aren't mining the land unless you consider dirt a natural resource. They're placing cable a few feet down in the ground, also similar to the depth at which many rail road ties extend, incidentally..
I'm not a lawyer and I don't claim to be, but I have purchased land before and worked with commercial real estate. I know there is no such thing as above and below ground restrictions. That's just plain silly. I imagine why any of this lawyer Ackerson's cases have never gone to trial is because they are some warped interpretation of mineral rights and trying to manipulate that into somehow being "ground" rights. This isn't so, it's just lawyers trying to fatten their pockets, delay and interfere with the progress of the Internet, and create new backdoor companies which they're quarter partners in.
In the long run, I see broadband prices going up, property near railroad tracks being monopolized and as a result infrastructure deployment being delayed, and the people who actually did own the property getting screwed, taken for a ride by lawyers who can get whatever they can out of the next legal loophole.
Yes, I did mean beat. Most parents today do in fact give repeated 'spanking sessions' which can be translated to beatings.
All physical punishment is in some way fundamentally wrong. For the minority (e.g. you) it occasioanlly works. But for many, 'spankings', which often later translate to 'beatings' when parents go too far, don't work. Children live what they learn, and children who are hit for doing something wrong learn violence is acceptable and often go on to apply it when they think someone else is wrong. This sets the stage professionals the world over know as social violence.
You may think it worked for you, but I would rather think you were lucky. You're right, the inverse is also just as wrong, children need to have some kind of constructive punishment. Either extremes are very dangerous.
It's just that many people don't understand why we punish children and what we really want. In most cases, it's to teach children right and wrong. We don't have to hit them to inflict fear of doing it again (and thus no concept of right and wrong) to do this. You can just as easily explain to a child why something is wrong and why it is right, and why you should want to do the wrong thing. You should make it clear that while there are two courses of action, you can choose whichever you want, but will that action make you a good person?
Children want to be good people. They will want to do what pleases you because this is a standard human concept. Everyone in my family have been raised with these concepts, and none have ever been in any trouble and have basically been all constructive, productive adults. Furthermore, we all have good relationships with each other which aren't bound by fear.
So I forward to you that you rexamine your last statement and consider if you really think any type of violence translates into maturity. It's not the quantity, its the principle. I hope you don't hit your children, and take the route less followed: right and wrong, not fear.
I do a form of this all the time. My cable modem has come under attack a few times, and each time I just release and renew IPs via DHCP and let the router handle all the bandwidth. Coupled with a dynamic DNS and you have a moving target which is accessible to those who you only want it to.
Isn't this just a variation of some kind of dynamic host configuration?
Unfortuantly, in both cases, hit the control server (e.g. DHCP, trn, etc.) and the whole system is down. There is also the cavet that at some point the dynamic address must be available to the public (in my case via dynamic DNS), so if my script kiddies were smart enough, they could have had their program get my address from my DNS server and adjust their attack accordingly. Or taken down the DNS server, so I would have defeated my purpose.
In either case you shouldn't rely on security through haystack and needle methods. You can always burn the haystack if you don't care about the needle.
According to US Census, over 60% of 16 year olds are sexually active. We have sex education classes for 4th graders which explain all the details. Why do we insist on this ironic misnomer of trying to 'protect' our children?
Obviously, a 4 year old isn't smart enough to search for porn. When a kid becomes smart enough to handle adult concepts, shouldn't he be allowed to handle them? Why are we afarid to accept the transition between child and adult?
Additionally, by banning and filtering access in so many ways we make the inappropriatness, which is a part of human life, forbidden fruit, that more lucrative toward kids.
Kids who are raised in open environments where they are exposed to good, bad, etc. grow up to be mentally sound and productive citizens, because they learn that the world isn't what's shown on PBS and there are decisions which must be made, and they learn the right way to make them by their parents, by exposure and experience.
By contrast, parents who isolate their children and encapsulate them in bubbles often have troubled kids. Many don't know how to handle adult situations when they suddenly become an adult after being a child all their life. Kids need exposure to learn the difference between right and wrong and to establish valid ranges of what's right and wrong, and then extend this to develop their own insight. Unfortunatly, many parents are ashamed of themselves, people in general, and the world we live in. This is caused from a variety of sources, sometimes generational and other times it's the function of a religion or other ideal which insists on incorporating shame in everyday life.
If children live with shame, they're not going to do whats right because they want to, they're going to do it because they are afarid of being condemed and isolated. This just doesn't work.
Today, as much as we like to think, we still have quite classical ideas. Many parents still beat their children. Others mentally abuse them and shame them. Some isolate them and make them into unprepared adults. This is changing, and people are realizing that children shouldn't be delt with as children, but as what they are -- people. Kids are smart and shouldn't be sheltered from something because they won't understand it. Why not try to talk with them instead of putting a filtering program on your computer, assuming these are 'adult' concepts? Having an open relationship with a child is much better than having one of authrotiy, and your child (trust me) will respect you much more in the long run. That's parenting.
All through the interview I got the general feeling this guy doesn't know anything about any of the major issues in the tech world right now. Don't confuse this with avoidance, because it's complete ignorance.
He may hold two engineering degrees, but he stumbled over all the major questions in the interview, without adding any information either way and basically not saying anything.
Like my Grandfather always said, politicains are all the same, they say: "Some people are for [it] and some are against [it], and I'm for the people.". Absolutly nothing.
I guess you have to realize politics is a profession, and to keep your job you gotta have the most people that like you...so don't do anything. Don't agree, disagree, and when an interviewing asks you questions, go into rhetorical mode. This will keep people on either side happy because you're technically not for the other guy, and people like me who realize what's going on (e.g. 1%) just don't know what to think.
This guy also seems to think just by providing power to an industry you're going to get results. Someone should explain the difference between an economic industry and a vacuume cleaner to him. Industries need monitoring, they need guidance just like a three year old around a cookie jar. You can't let an industry self-regulate...this is what's happening in California right now, which ironically doesn't even have power.
I also love the fact he thinks privacy isn't important and giving up some of our privacy can be a good thing. Well, it can be good in that it saves lives and it saves money, but it also decreases the value of human life as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But what is the inverse? Does such a system of complete non-privacy impact the citizens as having privacy at the cost of loss of information? People will always be killed and people will always kill people. It's the human way. We're violent and destructive. You can try to buffer all that by spying on everyone on the off-chance they might do something in hopes of preventing it, but at what cost overall. You have to look at the big picture and not just one output.
I hope we get a tech advisor who at least does more than read the news paper clippings on the subject he is advising the nation in. Maybe someone with real interest in something who is not just doing the job because the country's been good to him, someone who has a vested interest in the safe progression of technology in such a way as to benefit people and not just corporations. We need someone who recognizes people are and own the country, not large corporations and ideas should be the medium of transaction, not money. Here's hoping for a better future ~
First, this is through RealNetworks, so for your $10 a month you can download some nice 12 kb/s streaming crap which is worse than what you can hear on the radio for free.
"The record labels like this format, since they can keep track of where and when the music is played."
This scares me. When I read this, almost jumping back in my chair, I pictured a controlling and abusive husband wanting to know everything about his poor, little wife. This is unhealthy and destructive behavoir, in any medium. They need to get a clue that consumers aren't here to control, we're customers and are the sole reason people like them make any money at all.
"In essence, consumers wouldn't buy music, just rent it."
This violates the Betamax case which states consumers have the right to do personally whatever they want with any content (e.g. copy it to tapes for personal viewing, etc.). You don't rent music like you can rent a house. Pretty soon all ownership will be in the hands of giant companies, and the consumer will own nothing. We can already rent our house, our car, furniture, computer, TV, software, cable or satellite service, why not music? Why don't we just start paying monthly fees to eat at McDonald's?
"Is this going to end up as some sort of monopoly control, where the companies you own and partner with will be the only ones who can do this?"
I think so. Napster obviosully can't do it, even if they pay the Artists.
Well, that's it. We might as well give ourselves to Corporate America. We should each pay to rent our lives, we should pay for our air. One way or another it isn't going to be free, but what is? Who today isn't looking to make a buck off of anything people will buy? This is truly a sad state of affairs.
P2P doesn't have any good legal uses. That's the sad truth. People use what works, and P2P is designed in such a way to encourage mass piracy of copyrighted works. If Bob wanted to share is resume, there are better ways to do it than using P2P systems. P2P, from its inception, was designed to share copyrighted materials. It was a work around. It wasn't designed to tackle other problems or be applied in diverse field: it's going to be what it already is.
It's also interesting to note P2P systems live and die by user submissions, so the most popular content is always what's going to be there. Mom and Dad pictures just aren't in high as demand as Britney Spear's latest single, which is by chance copyrighted. Popular works are worth money, and thus are copyrighted so as to get paid for that popularity. Not necessarily the work mind you, but the popularity and the willingness for people to buy what's popular.
There are lots of neat-o uses people are coming up with for P2P like network monitors, etc. but most all already have good or better solutions to what's offered. Having a solution in search of a problem usually won't lead up to any practicle applications: most I've seen have only created problems but to solve them.
Despite these unforunates, I can think of one good service: FreeNet. While not exactly following the model of P2P, it could be passed as and could be looked at as Napster by naive politicians and citizens. Imagine headlines "Napster-like technology encourages freedom of Speech.". Now people, especially Americans (where the trouble is right now) love their freedom of speech like they love football and beer nuts. The recording industry would be belitted by such a statement. Obviously, something like FreeNet would work well and would contribute to the lasting of P2P, which would contribute to the real reason why EFF is "seeking legal examples".
Well, personally, I have gotten all of my hardware to work on Windows 2000, some of which didn't even had manufacture drivers for NT, let alone 2000.
Here's a tip: try to identify the underlying chipset of whatever you're trying to install instead of the manufacuture. Out of all the oodles of manufactures producing the same hardware, there are usually only one or two chipsets.
Chances are, one of those manufactures hasn't been lax on driver support. Simply use their driver, their software, whatever. It works great.
For example, my Pinnacle PCTV+ doesn't have WDM drivers, so I can't use many applications which use them. Solution? Use AverMedia drivers! They work just like using the AverMedia card, because both (and most all tuners on the market now) use the Bt84x chipset. I can even get Closed Captioning and Pinnacle wasn't planning on supporting this for another two years! It's that simple. And it works for all sorts of things -- my micromodem uses drivers from another company as well.
This also opens up the possibility of driver tuning, in that you can try multiple drivers to see which one works best with your system. Sometimes manufacture drivers for your card don't work as well as ones from others.
In your case with the Joystick drivers, which are probably highly specilized, the only real thing you're going to be able to do is lobby the company to produce some WDM or at least Windows 2k/NT compatible drivers. This, unfortunatly, can be a frustrating experience.
But for a host of other drivers, simply go to a different manufacture. If you're really desperate, you might take a look at the Windows Driver Development Kit (DDK), espeically WDM drivers. If you have experience with C++, and know the basics of drivers, virtural modes, addressing, etc. than you might be able to write your own driver using the WDM model. I'm sorry to say it, but WDM is the best driver specification I've ever seen and blows Linux out of the water: extensibility, maintainability, and modularization make it a very good and easy to learn package indeed. But this, of course, is only if you are willing to do what the manufacture should have. It's good experience none-the-less and you'll learn more about your system. For me, this was writing a driver for my Radio card. It was a perfectly simple example, and was a lot of fun. Remember to share with the rest of us if you end up anyhow.
First, most all CD-ROM drives after 4x don't have a play button and won't automatically start playback when an audio CD is inserted.
So this means you're going to need someway to send the IDE signal, which would probably involve, at least, a microcontroller although I'm not fully aware of the ATAPI spec and you may have to make the device completly physical (e.g. go through all the init routines) to even get to the point where you can send a command.
Second, these drives, as mentioned don't have skip protection. Todays in dash CD players have read ahead of 45-60 seconds or more, because this is what it takes to get even marginal performance while driving over gravel in your SUV.
Personally, I built an in-dash MP3/CD player using an old Sony VAIO 233 MHz system for my friend. The CD-ROM which came with the system was used, and in this case it already had mechanical skip protection. I used the LCD that came with it and bought a digital touch screen kit and connected this up the parallel port. To completly prevent skipping, I extracted the selected CD track to memory as it loads, at about +120 sec into playing buffer. Works very well. This was in a Jeep and he's told me he hasn't got it to skip. And yes, it runs Linux off an ATAFlash IDE card (no noise!).
In reference to the original post, you don't have to be a N.A.S.A. engineer, all you need is a laptop and some time (a few weekends).
By the time you're finished looking for your obstruficated CD-ROM and forcing the thing in your dash, you'd might as well been better purchasing a $165 car player as you'd be adding no addition functionality.
Hmm, at $207 a QphH, the most economical thing seems like a farm or cluster of HP NetServer LXr 8500's.
Also, everyone is thinking this is a win for Linux. If you look at how the data is displayed, you'll notice operating system and actual system are both dependant upon one another and cannot be seperated. Thus, it is worthless to compare Linux running on a different system with that of Windows running on a different system. In all fairness, we don't even know what Windows will do on that system.
As it is, these rankings are meant to show the best arbitrary configurations which just happen to be setup somewhere and just happen to be submitted. Again, as others have noted, you cannot compare apples to oranges, so Linux being on top may be of little significance only that someone happened to have a system with Linux running on it. In terms of the defined QphH, it seems that server hardware is the biggest swayer, not the OS.
Actually, I was one of the people in a group who worked on this technology (not at C3D -- don't know who they are, at another company).
.8 nm pits (around 800MB-1 GB per layer). We were able to limit interference by way of a kind of two-photon absorption to select the layers and spot-test the data by measuring the amplitude of a specific spot on the disc when an absorbing wavelength (presumably) was emmited.
The photochrome is called bacteriorhodopsin, which is a seven helices protein with an attached retinal molecule. It's about 4 nm long. When exposed to 570 nm (yellow-green) light, it starts a cycle of definable photointermediates which vary from a few fractions of a picosecond to tens of milliseconds. There are also several latched or nested photocycles which can remain transient for years. Some genetic variants even have the capability to run several photocycles at once. It's quite a remarkable molecular engineering feat of nature via natural selection of billions of years fromthe tiny blue-green bacterium H. salarium (used internally for photosynthesis via proton pumping over the cell wall and internal membrane).
Our group was able to create a bR coated CD which had over 500 layers of
The BER (bit error ratio) was around the rate of CDs, and with error correction, it was almost a usable mass storage drive. We attempted to get production funding, but we could only create a few working models for a few highly specilized companies mainly because of the cost of the laser. As I mentioned, bacteriorhodopsin is controlled by wavelength, and we needed at least 3 different wavelengths corresponding to the absorption maximums of the different photointermediates. This means blue (400 nm) for erase, yellow (570 nm) for page select and red (675 nm) for write/read.
In our experiment, we used a single laser for all three wavelengths and we used optical parrametric ossciliation and frequency doubling/mixing to get the three colors using crystals, and we used a Q-switch to change colors in less than a few microseconds (e.g. access time). This was fairly complicated although the use of discrete components and a diode pump laser made the optical assembly as small as a large laser pointer. It was still costly as it required special optical crystals to do the OPO and frequency stuff. Currently, these crystals are expensive in low quantities, cheap in moderate quantities and expensive in high quantities because it is difficult to grow once the crystals get so large, and it isn't economical to grow tiny batches. For production, of course, we would need very large quantities and thus the drive wouldn't be cheap enough for the consumer market.
There are alternatives, for example. A pure semiconductor solution utilizing multi-color diodes would be optimal. There is a company currently producing blue laser diodes, and soon green, but these are still expensive and don't have a high life. So, fundamentally, we were limited by other technologies.
Currently, our group does have a production license from a major storage manufacture and we are developing a storage and processing device based on bacteriorhodopsin in solid form in sol-gel (aerogel) suspensions. This looks the most promising and it will be affordable to commercial markets as other solutions which provide the same features are much more expensive and have a much large footprint. We're likely to market to large datacenters and companies with lots of data which needs to be online in a fast and associative system, and where space is a concern.
I really think there is going to be some great things in terms of storage technologies as soon as diodes and VCSELs bridge into more wavelengths (read: WDM will force this) and have faster switching times. As it is, we're only using a fraction of the several hundred thousand terahertz bandwidth of even a single wavelength, let alone more than one. Optical is definatly the way to go.
Pretty cool stuff, especially when you see a movie playing off of something which was once only a thought and a proof-of-concept few bits in a lab.
First of all, the article points out that current large scale quantum computers don't exist, and is only speculating on a system created in scale using the same two and three bit methods. It's quite a possibility large scale Quantum computers, if even possible, may be nothing like the three bit experiments of today.
Second, the 'computer' will still need to be on to extract any information. Work will still need to be done on what did happen in order to find out what didn't. All this article says, basically, is in the conclusion:
Mitchison and Jozsa's 'counterfactual computation' essentially taps into worlds in which the computer did run in order to extract the result into a world in which it didn't.
This seems to indicate that by reading in a specific way, you will be able to get what didn't happen, in, say, a function as well as the original output. So, if a function's only purpose is to set a bit to 1, then you will also have available what didn't happen, which in case the bit would also be 0. This all goes back to the superposition principle.
Now, what gets really interesting is expanding this into many millions of bits and very complicated functions. Essentially, you will also have available what you didn't do (not the inverse, but what didn't happen) as well as what happened. This will be very useful for cryptographic techniques, as well as very complicated mathematical operations. And as someone mentioned, it may be possible to have the computer generate a program and based upon all the possible outcomes in real and imaginary worlds, if you know what the output should be, you can select the best fitting program and it will write itself. Presumably, if programs could know what the outputs of other programs should look like, they could write new programs which do specific tasks without having to understand how programs are actually written. This could come in very handing for creating an intelligence and is very similar to what we do.
Some people here are concerned with what will happen if the structure will collapse. Well, it's not even a structure. If you read the article, you'll know it's a cable. Possibly a few feet thick. Not "billions of tons of carbon tubules". Granted, it would be one long cable, but the result of it falling would probably end up destroying the cable due to the variations in gravity and disrrupting it's pseudo-orbit, than destroying the Earth.
People have always been alarmists, I for one think this will be a great idea. You could send over a pound of stuff up to space for little over a dollar, compared to the thousands it costs now.
Frankly, we haven't even seen the start of the space age.
"6) Stall XP Adoption: Until AOL can develop an appropriate XP solution, message to AOL members and the public that XP is "not ready" for broad adoption (i.e., has bugs, will not run AOL, will not run your existing software, will violate your online privacy, etc...)"
I especially like this one. Lying to consumers to get your product forwarded. I could just see a big Steve Case "Member Community Outreach" regarding the severe online privacy violations with XP, just after AOL parades you with ten sign-on ads and collects data on your web browsing (AOL "proxy") while moderating everything to hell.
Everyone seems to think Microsoft is the worst corporate technology firm with devilish, underhanded practices, but this is just outrageous.
There have been many insightful comments regarding natural selection and insuring it continues, without introducing genes into the 'gene pool' which violate nature and eventually could lead to disease and other problems.
In the future, when genetic modification is common in terms of cloning and before/after birth modification (and it will be: read: purpose of the genome, it will happen eventually), I'd imagine we will have a gene registrar or index where all modifications are certified and controlled, thereby controlling the gene pool. This way, we can maintain certain natural proportions and only genes which have become 'free' can be used (assuming there will be no natural selection at all anymore and all people will be completely managed by technology).
I guess you can think of it as genetic CVS (no howls, please). The point is you just can't go adding to parts of the program willy-nilly, as we have all seen what one person can do to an otherwise stable foundation. I'm sure this seems like a frightening future, but it will be necessary as modifications of this nature are continually done and introduced into the huge dynamic of the world population everyday. The only thing I would be concerned with is the control of the organization responsible for regulating these modifications: it will literally have control over humanity. I can tell you right now all ICANN chairs are ineligible for a position.
I want to reply to all of those who think my comment was sinical about the Grandmother analogy. First, of course it wouldn't be a replacement for truly taking the time out and visiting your loved one, but for someone who is chronically ill, you can't be there all the time. When my Grandmother died, I obviously couldn't be there throughout the entire two month hospital stay. When she did past away, the hospital was unable to contact me so I wasn't able to be there with other family members during her last hours.
To summerize: I'd rather want to learn there is trouble from a web site (any source, really) and have the 24-hour active monitoring capability of any Internet connection than not knowing at all.
I think this is a great idea. Unlike many others here who are afarid of introducing a public network into critical operating devices, I think the article clears this up pretty well. They're not going to be hosting CNN.com, and the only thing they'll probably do is transmit a keep-alive signal (takes a whole new meaning) to a web server and this is then made available on a secure site which family can monitor.
I can personally see where this has huge benefits. For example, if my Grandmother was in the hospital in critical condition, I would feel alot easier knowing I can check that she's OK anytime during the day by simply going to a web site. This frees up time for families with sick relatives and allows them to do such things as go to work to pay for the bills.
I could also see it being used as a way to rate hospitals. How long has it been since a patient has gone into arrest? How many per day? I could see hospitals advertising their 'uptimes' just as much as is the case with network system stability.
In addition, if the information was de-personalized and made available to the public, researchers and doctors could have access a wealth of data (especially if the devices are trasmitting more than a signal, e.g. heartrate, etc.) to examine regarding conditions, and varying opinions could be generated by many experts by examing data. In a way, you could get a second opinion by just telling your doctor to go look at the log on the web.
I think this is a case where humor got the best of us. Something like this has real possibilities for a wide range of audencies.
You shouldn't forget you're also in that e-mail as the originating sender, and all failures could be sent right back to you, e.g. 45,000 non-delivery messages if the spam name happens to be fake (no really???).
I'm curious, has it ever happened?