Apparently Microsoft security bulletins are a faith-healer type religious experience... almost like an exorcism where the sysadmin slaps the computer on the forehead and says "demons be gone".
Using past data to predict future events has always been a tricky situation, but the more dangerous trap is beleiving that if your model works with a set of past-data, that it is good. An excellent comparison is the stock market and people who try to predict it - sure, you can do a super-duper model that fits well with the data that fed it, but it ultimately fails when handed new data. If it worked, there would be a whole lot of very rich people out there.
Stock market modeling seems like it would be much easier: you've got daily data on every single company going back 100 years, plus a whole lot more detailed financial information than you could ever get out of passengers (what's your book-to-bill ratio?). To top it off, performance can be measured in one absolute indisputable figure - profit - that is an attribute of most companies, whereas security has a fuzzy performance measurement(*) and few examples of what officials are looking for.
Another thing that concerns me is that, AFAIK, the jet blue travel database contains precisely zero hijackings, so it seems to me that -- according to any possible model that could be generated -- the old system worked perfectly and could not be improved. Nail-clipper weilding maniacs, sure - plenty of those, but no actual hijackers.
(* Pop quiz. Who killed more people, 9/11 or the airline "security" procedures that followed? If you added the expected life expencties of the people who died that day and got an hour number, that number is on the same order of magnatude of the extra time wasted in airports every year)
Maybe they're playing a game with someone down the hall (or on the other side of campus) on the LAN, which just also happens to also go out to the real world. Sounds pretty common.
In the last paragraph, I was refering to small gas-powered generators that people buy for power outages or use on their camper. Boy did that thing get pissed when I'd turn on the air conditioning!
If they're using AC generators (which I suspect provides most of the power - they're used in coal, nuclear, and hydro plants, but not solar, and not newer high-voltage DC transmission lines), then the frequency output is related to the spin of the shaft. Two things control the speed of the shaft - power in (water pressure) and power out (load demand from the grid), and a control system tries to keep the frequency a constant 60 Hz.
The trick is that the control system can only react so fast - suddenly disconnect an entire town, and the load drops, causing the power in to spin the generator too fast. If the control system overcorrects, then you'll get too low of a frequency. If a far-away generator drops out and you've got to supply more current to your local region, then the demand has gone up, slowing the frequency.
If you've been around generators, you can hear this exact phenonemoa - if the load changes suddenly, the motor will hunker down a little and then catch back up to normal speed. Usually a flywheel can damp out extremely short transients, but it would be prohibitively big if it were sized to handle transients as large as the control system (throttle) will allow.
They have an *incredible* need
on
Cracking GSM
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· Score: 1
True, hopefully they'll act legally when dealing with domestic carriers, but internationally, it's a totally different story. No Chinese carrier is going to allow the US government to tap in. Heck, even British Telecom probably wouldn't let them... and even if they did, the US government would want to absolutely minimize the chance that the victim could find out about the tap -- and a good step towards that is keeping all information within their own organization (and not in the hands of a private or foreign-governement-owned phone carrier)
I don't think the idea is to actually watch two weeks of television... that would be two weeks of your life you'd never get back, and probably require medical supervision.
The idea behind the bigger hard drive size is to increase the possibility that it'll record a show that you'll eventually want to watch. For example, you notice that tonight part II of an A-team episode is on, and you want to see last week's part I first. If the Tivo thought that there was a 1 in 1000 chance you seeing the show (based on watching DC CAB six times in a row), it would weigh that with the available disk space -- if there was enough room for 2000 shows, then it would go ahead and take that risk. If there was enough room for only 10 shows, then it would only record things it thought you had a 1 in 10 chance of seeing.
So, it's about maximizing the chance it'll get something you'll want to see.
Mostly unfettered. Like the Iranian filters, the U.S. service blocks porn sites -- "There's a limit to what taxpayers should pay for," says Berman.
So, the object is to provide Iranians with access to political sites that the Iranian government wants blocked. As a taxpayer, I want to know what filter is being used, and what political sites are still being blocked.
I was going with alkaline (for no particular reason - it's just an illustration and that number showed up more than once in my quickie google search), which goes up to 18AH.
We were building a satellite with upload-code capability, and were facing a deadline, so we ran the numbers.
We had a very slow uplink, maybe 300 baud (packet overhead and protocol turn-around time included). And we had a lot of code. The satellite was visible only for maybe 8 minutes out of every 90 minute orbit, so unless we had ground stations positioned all around the world and synchronized, we were effectively limited to about 30 baud long-term average. And we had a lot of code.
What's worse is we figured that the radiation environment would reset the satellite every so often... this was fine in normal operation, but would kill an upload. It would be almost statistically impossible to upload the entire code without an upset.
So, we all got back to work.
Eventually, we got good code and launched the satellite. Unfortuantly, the rocket flew off-course and was blown up by the range safety officer -- the satellite ended up in the water. Our company also made bouys (functionally, they are similar concept satellites), so the debate was always whether we should load the regular code or the bouy code into the satellites. We didn't try to figure out the code-uplink case for "underwater".
40MW for 7 minutes = 4.6 MWattHours. A D-cell is 12 AmpHours * 1.5 = 18 WattHours, so this battery pack is equivalent to 260,000 D-cells. A D-cell is 60 mm long, so this is would be a Mag Light 9.6 Miles Long!. Here's an artist's rendering
When you're talking about theories of time, who would you trust -- some old guy named Albert, or some 27-year-old who has made practical use of his theories and traveled back in time to become a 17 year old college student again?
Ah, my mistake. I thought they were going to go up on the ISS and then be released to free space orbit . It's an interesting start, but I'm sure they can't get that much far apart inside... I guess they'll be doing tight-formation flying, otherwise the test doesn't stress that much of the experiment. But, too much guessing - I should look up more detailed specs.
I see IBM has a 32/64 bit programming reference manual, but it seems to cover the architecture in general, and not so much the 970. I'll read it tonight!
Virtual PC for Mac Version 6.1 relies on a feature of the PowerPC G3 and G4 processors called 'pseudo little-endian mode' for increased performance when emulating a Pentium processor. Current versions of Virtual PC require this feature in order to function. Because the new G5 processor does not support this feature, large portions of the VPC for Mac program must be rewritten and carefully tested to work properly on the G5 CPU.
Sure, you can mangle the endian in software, but it's such an expensive operation that needs to be done so often, that performance will be incredibly terrible.
I'd love to verify this myself... I've seen the registers in the older PPC's I've used (GP405), but would love to get a datasheet for the G5. Anyone have one?
In 1991, DSI (now bought by Orbital Sciences) built a series of similar-sized satellites for Darpa, named Microsat aka SCS.
These were pretty simple - if I remember correctly, they didn't have much of an attitude control system. You can see tell this from the picture because the solar cells on all sides, and the antenna shown (one of two) is relatively omni-directional. I think they had some compressed gas for station keeping (they were supposed to be evenly spaced around the orbit) and/or creating spin... it was flying in formation, but not too sophisticated.
What troubles me is that the SPHERES have no solar cells. True, electronics take less power now, and LiIon batteries store more energy than our old NiCds, but radios will still take a few watts. I wonder what the life of their two test satellites will be, or if they just forgot to include the solar cells.
We fully qualified 8 of our Microsat satellites, but only lauched seven. The left-over real satellite was a great marketing tool and cool show and tell piece to bring to schools.
Red Hat 9 Pro (at $93) is described as "a boon for those who already use it, but it's too expensive to warrant a switch from Windows."
Either they're admitting that you've already been suxored into paying the microsoft tax, or they're trying to explain how $93 is expensive compared to $130 for Windows XP Pro. Interestingly, they rate Mandrake just as good as windows!
That's not how it worked in applesoft -- are you talking about an application or Integer basic? If it was integer, than that would fit Woz's style (and PRNs in applesoft would fit Bill Gate's).
One neat program that I wrote converted the disk drive read byte to a sound - you could definately hear the difference between a disk in the drive and the door open. Even with a formatted disk, I think you'd still get somewhat random numbers because the data between sectors wasn't synchronized. I don't know if anyone used this for random numbers, though.
Incidently, linux does use inter-key timing (among many other things) for randomness.
That's for clean rubber-on-rubber. Add some dust, sand, or dirt in there, and I'm sure it goes down a whole lot. It's also for generally flat rubber (flooring or tread) - change that for asphalt-like texture and you'll have crannies for the dust to flee to (so it stays out of the contact area), but you'll also change the whole surface interaction.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently Microsoft security bulletins are a faith-healer type religious experience... almost like an exorcism where the sysadmin slaps the computer on the forehead and says "demons be gone".
Using past data to predict future events has always been a tricky situation, but the more dangerous trap is beleiving that if your model works with a set of past-data, that it is good. An excellent comparison is the stock market and people who try to predict it - sure, you can do a super-duper model that fits well with the data that fed it, but it ultimately fails when handed new data. If it worked, there would be a whole lot of very rich people out there.
Stock market modeling seems like it would be much easier: you've got daily data on every single company going back 100 years, plus a whole lot more detailed financial information than you could ever get out of passengers (what's your book-to-bill ratio?). To top it off, performance can be measured in one absolute indisputable figure - profit - that is an attribute of most companies, whereas security has a fuzzy performance measurement(*) and few examples of what officials are looking for.
Another thing that concerns me is that, AFAIK, the jet blue travel database contains precisely zero hijackings, so it seems to me that -- according to any possible model that could be generated -- the old system worked perfectly and could not be improved. Nail-clipper weilding maniacs, sure - plenty of those, but no actual hijackers.
(* Pop quiz. Who killed more people, 9/11 or the airline "security" procedures that followed? If you added the expected life expencties of the people who died that day and got an hour number, that number is on the same order of magnatude of the extra time wasted in airports every year)
Just look at the size of that case compared to the leaf in the backgroud -- I'll bet you could get a few servers in the space of a 5 1/4" drive bay.
Battery backup?
Laptops do it, of course, and the original Macintosh did, too -- it used its clock battery to save the RAM.
Maybe they're playing a game with someone down the hall (or on the other side of campus) on the LAN, which just also happens to also go out to the real world. Sounds pretty common.
In the last paragraph, I was refering to small gas-powered generators that people buy for power outages or use on their camper. Boy did that thing get pissed when I'd turn on the air conditioning!
If they're using AC generators (which I suspect provides most of the power - they're used in coal, nuclear, and hydro plants, but not solar, and not newer high-voltage DC transmission lines), then the frequency output is related to the spin of the shaft. Two things control the speed of the shaft - power in (water pressure) and power out (load demand from the grid), and a control system tries to keep the frequency a constant 60 Hz.
The trick is that the control system can only react so fast - suddenly disconnect an entire town, and the load drops, causing the power in to spin the generator too fast. If the control system overcorrects, then you'll get too low of a frequency. If a far-away generator drops out and you've got to supply more current to your local region, then the demand has gone up, slowing the frequency.
If you've been around generators, you can hear this exact phenonemoa - if the load changes suddenly, the motor will hunker down a little and then catch back up to normal speed. Usually a flywheel can damp out extremely short transients, but it would be prohibitively big if it were sized to handle transients as large as the control system (throttle) will allow.
True, hopefully they'll act legally when dealing with domestic carriers, but internationally, it's a totally different story. No Chinese carrier is going to allow the US government to tap in. Heck, even British Telecom probably wouldn't let them... and even if they did, the US government would want to absolutely minimize the chance that the victim could find out about the tap -- and a good step towards that is keeping all information within their own organization (and not in the hands of a private or foreign-governement-owned phone carrier)
I don't think the idea is to actually watch two weeks of television ... that would be two weeks of your life you'd never get back, and probably require medical supervision.
The idea behind the bigger hard drive size is to increase the possibility that it'll record a show that you'll eventually want to watch. For example, you notice that tonight part II of an A-team episode is on, and you want to see last week's part I first. If the Tivo thought that there was a 1 in 1000 chance you seeing the show (based on watching DC CAB six times in a row), it would weigh that with the available disk space -- if there was enough room for 2000 shows, then it would go ahead and take that risk. If there was enough room for only 10 shows, then it would only record things it thought you had a 1 in 10 chance of seeing.
So, it's about maximizing the chance it'll get something you'll want to see.
3. Will any government respect the patents, or will they take the opportunity to bolster their own national security?
You've either been seeing too much Futurama or not enough. It's been done already - picture
Mostly unfettered. Like the Iranian filters, the U.S. service blocks porn sites -- "There's a limit to what taxpayers should pay for," says Berman.
So, the object is to provide Iranians with access to political sites that the Iranian government wants blocked. As a taxpayer, I want to know what filter is being used, and what political sites are still being blocked.
I was going with alkaline (for no particular reason - it's just an illustration and that number showed up more than once in my quickie google search), which goes up to 18AH.
We were building a satellite with upload-code capability, and were facing a deadline, so we ran the numbers.
We had a very slow uplink, maybe 300 baud (packet overhead and protocol turn-around time included). And we had a lot of code. The satellite was visible only for maybe 8 minutes out of every 90 minute orbit, so unless we had ground stations positioned all around the world and synchronized, we were effectively limited to about 30 baud long-term average. And we had a lot of code.
What's worse is we figured that the radiation environment would reset the satellite every so often... this was fine in normal operation, but would kill an upload. It would be almost statistically impossible to upload the entire code without an upset.
So, we all got back to work.
Eventually, we got good code and launched the satellite. Unfortuantly, the rocket flew off-course and was blown up by the range safety officer -- the satellite ended up in the water. Our company also made bouys (functionally, they are similar concept satellites), so the debate was always whether we should load the regular code or the bouy code into the satellites. We didn't try to figure out the code-uplink case for "underwater".
40MW for 7 minutes = 4.6 MWattHours. A D-cell is 12 AmpHours * 1.5 = 18 WattHours, so this battery pack is equivalent to 260,000 D-cells. A D-cell is 60 mm long, so this is would be a Mag Light 9.6 Miles Long!. Here's an artist's rendering
When you're talking about theories of time, who would you trust -- some old guy named Albert, or some 27-year-old who has made practical use of his theories and traveled back in time to become a 17 year old college student again?
Ah, my mistake. I thought they were going to go up on the ISS and then be released to free space orbit . It's an interesting start, but I'm sure they can't get that much far apart inside... I guess they'll be doing tight-formation flying, otherwise the test doesn't stress that much of the experiment. But, too much guessing - I should look up more detailed specs.
I see IBM has a 32/64 bit programming reference manual, but it seems to cover the architecture in general, and not so much the 970. I'll read it tonight!
Sure, you can mangle the endian in software, but it's such an expensive operation that needs to be done so often, that performance will be incredibly terrible.
I'd love to verify this myself... I've seen the registers in the older PPC's I've used (GP405), but would love to get a datasheet for the G5. Anyone have one?
In 1991, DSI (now bought by Orbital Sciences) built a series of similar-sized satellites for Darpa, named Microsat aka SCS.
... it was flying in formation, but not too sophisticated.
These were pretty simple - if I remember correctly, they didn't have much of an attitude control system. You can see tell this from the picture because the solar cells on all sides, and the antenna shown (one of two) is relatively omni-directional. I think they had some compressed gas for station keeping (they were supposed to be evenly spaced around the orbit) and/or creating spin
What troubles me is that the SPHERES have no solar cells. True, electronics take less power now, and LiIon batteries store more energy than our old NiCds, but radios will still take a few watts. I wonder what the life of their two test satellites will be, or if they just forgot to include the solar cells.
We fully qualified 8 of our Microsat satellites, but only lauched seven. The left-over real satellite was a great marketing tool and cool show and tell piece to bring to schools.
Gotta love that!
Red Hat 9 Pro (at $93) is described as "a boon for those who already use it, but it's too expensive to warrant a switch from Windows."
Either they're admitting that you've already been suxored into paying the microsoft tax, or they're trying to explain how $93 is expensive compared to $130 for Windows XP Pro. Interestingly, they rate Mandrake just as good as windows!
That push got them 3rd place in 2002:
South Korea.... 40%
China, Taiwan.. 32%
Japan.......... 27%
I wonder how their spending compared vs. other countries...
That's not how it worked in applesoft -- are you talking about an application or Integer basic? If it was integer, than that would fit Woz's style (and PRNs in applesoft would fit Bill Gate's).
One neat program that I wrote converted the disk drive read byte to a sound - you could definately hear the difference between a disk in the drive and the door open. Even with a formatted disk, I think you'd still get somewhat random numbers because the data between sectors wasn't synchronized. I don't know if anyone used this for random numbers, though.
Incidently, linux does use inter-key timing (among many other things) for randomness.
That link refered to tires used a fill under the roadway:
...the recycled rubber is piled to a maximum depth of 27 feet on a 4-foot gravel bed, topped with 3 feet to 5 feet of soil.
From this article:
What's being proposed is a modification to the asphalt - more of a surface treatment.
That's for clean rubber-on-rubber. Add some dust, sand, or dirt in there, and I'm sure it goes down a whole lot. It's also for generally flat rubber (flooring or tread) - change that for asphalt-like texture and you'll have crannies for the dust to flee to (so it stays out of the contact area), but you'll also change the whole surface interaction.
cool info, thanks.