"Alex Giakoumis... said his company had built defensive measures into its products that would make them invulnerable to such an attack. However, he said he was unwilling to be specific about the nature of the security system."
However, it is speculated that the card contains material that can obscure the flash, literally achieving "security through obscurity."
In my last car, I had an aftermarket radio that I bought without thinking about it too much. Instead of a volume control knob, it had volume up and volume down buttons. They tried to make it clever, with one of those controlled-backlash features--that is, each UP press would take you up four units in volume, then each DOWN press would take you down a single unit.
It drove me bananas. I can't believe just how annoying and distracting it was to use that thing.
Plus, it had one of these deals where you can set eighteen FM stations and six AM stations--there's a row of six station buttons and another button that cycles you through FM-1, FM-2, FM-3, and AM. After about a month I finally got clued in and set FM-1, FM-2, and FM-3 each to the SAME set of stations. _I_ can't remember an arbitrary four-by-six array of stations and I don't think anyone else can, either.
Setting the clock for daylight savings time? Twice a year I would say "this CAN'T be that hard, I'm SURE I can remember enough from last time to figure it out. Let's see, you press and hold the TIME button for three seconds and then hold the station 1 button while you press the "volume up" button? Nope, not it." And twice a year I'd have to stumble into my house and try to find where I had left the manual for the thing...
What WILL Donald Norman do when EVERYTHING in the world is a badly-designed computer interface and there ARE no natural objects with plain "affordances" to point do?
Patents such as #6,293,874 ("User-operated amusement apparatus for kicking the user's buttocks...a user-operated and controlled apparatus for self-infliction of repetitive blows to the user's buttocks by a plurality of elongated arms bearing flexible extensions that rotate under the user's control.") and #6,368,227 ("Method of swinging on a swing," discussed recently in Slashdot) certainly sound as if SOMEONE is trying to prove SOMETHING.
I'm strongly tempted to mail copies of these patents to my congressman with a letter saying, simply, "The patent office is broken. Fix it."
If they interpret the symbol at all, they're more likely to say "Oh boy! Buried treasure!"
Voice-operated pianos, computerphobic executives
on
Why Hal Will Never Exist
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Would anyone seriously consider trying to build a voice-operated piano? Simply dictate into it the notes you want it to play... Of course not, everyone realizes the bandwidth of brain-to-fingers-to-keyboard is much higher.
So why the "voice command" fantasy in the first place?
When the PC revolution was just starting to take off, most people had not learned to type in high school. Typing was considered a skill for secretaries, who, of course, were poorly paid, low in social rank, and referred to as "girls."
For many years, computer technology did not penetrate the higher corporate levels because directly handling machines was considered beneath the dignity of an executive. "I don't have time to learn to use that gear, I have people to do that for me," was the typical attitude. Execs would have their secretaries print out all their email for them, dictate replies, and have their secretaries keyboard them back in.
This changed when the young MBA's started arriving with their computer spreadsheets.
Most people, even wealthy people who can afford chauffeurs, drive their own cars, and most people now operate their own computers... Time to retire the whole "voice interface" concept, except for people with special needss.
It has been all but acknowledged by Microsoft that MS-DOS 1.0 contained code directly borrowed from CP/M. _The MS-DOS Encyclopedia_, for example, notes that "the resemblance [between CP/M and MS-DOS] was even more striking at the rpogrmaming level, with an almost one-to-one correspondence between CP/M and MS-DOS in the system calls available to applications programs."
This was not a matter of common design or reverse engineering; there was actual CP/M code in MS-DOS, I believe specifically in the FCB-oriented file services.
I wish I could remember where I read the interview where Tim Paterson acknowledged "low-level borrowing" from CP/M. I can't seem to find it right now.
What will happen when the music executives find out about THIS? Oh, those clever, wicked teenagers... they buy ONE copy of a CD, but TWO people get to listen to it!
If they play it on a boom box on the subway, the number of illegal listeners can climb even higher! It's theft, that's what it is! It's just like shoplifting--no, bank robbery!
We need a law requiring every CD player to include a little IR scanner that counts the number of people in the room and shuts down if you haven't purchased the right number of licenses (or charges them to your credit card). This is in our own interest as consumers, because if this isn't done, there won't be any profit in music any more and then there won't be any music. Nope, none at all. How would we like THAT?
Incandescent lamps... around 20 lumens per watt. Fluorescent lamps... about 70 lumens per watt. White LED, 50 lumens per watt and climbing. And the power requirements and ability to fit them into small spaces are much less tricky than for fluorescent.
LED's are almost there--and efficiencies are climbing. Main problem right now is that they're expensive. But already, I see they're being used for the red, and, increasingly, the green lights in traffic lights around here.
By the time this stuff makes it out of the lab, LEDs will be cheap and even more efficient than they are now.
And, of course, all the gee-whiz wizards-of-the-labs articles never say how much the new technology is likely to COST. And the stated efficiencies tend to decline as the devices start to approach reality...
If they can really make these things twelve times as efficient as LED's AND give a pleasant, flattering light spectrum AND get the cost down, it will be interesting.
...well, unfortunately I can't seem to find it, even via www.archive.org's "wayback machine," but I could have sworn that in the old days when the Web meant lynx and lynx by default took you to a CERN page with some introductory material--INCLUDING an EXPLICIT statement that the concept of a "home page" was a completely arbitrary convention, that there were no features distinguishing a "home page" from any other page.
Hyperlinking between pages at ANY level is the essence of the Web.
Aren't there any W3C standards that still say this?
"I don't know what problem you ran into, but a conforming implementation of map would not have those performance characteristics. map.operator[] has O(log n) access time."
Of course. It's SUPPOSED to have reasonable performance characteristics. That's why I figured it was OK to use.
That's why I was SURPRISED when the access time was more like about O to the fifth power.
As I said, you apparently can't trust vendor-supplied implementations of STL to behave as expected.
I've gotten very frustrated with STL. Some problems are:
a) Microsoft has its own kludged-up-vaguely STL-like stuff (CStrings, etc.) and every Microsoft-brainwashed programmer uses them, when you're working with other folk on a big chunk of code with this stuff mixed throughout, it's easier to go along than try to mix in something else. You don't have to face down the skepticism of people who fear that the STL headers might conflict with some of Microsoft's, or that STL might add to the volume of code, or whatever...
b) Since Microsoft programmers use the kludged-up Microsoft stuff, they're NOT using STL, so problems and issues with it aren't well-known and aren't necessarily addressed by Microsoft;
c) If you don't like the Microsoft-centricity in command a and b and happen to be a Mac programmer, substitute "Metrowerks Powerplant" for the above... same remarks apply.
d) The quality of STL implementations varies widely, and doesn't seem to be anywhere near as solid as, say, the C Standard Library.
Although Stoustrup introduces STL early, uses it in his calculator example, encourages you to use it, and says, cheerfully and optimistically "the standard library and other libraries are meant to be used. Often a library has received more care in its design and implementation than a programmer could afford for a handcrafted piece of code..." this seems to be wishful thinking.
The first time I seriously used STL in a real project, I ran into a SERIOUS, SERIOUS problem with the implementation of the _map_ container. It was a performance issue. I no longer recall the type of the things I was mapping, but it completely escaped notice in debugging, because the time it took to access a map entry seemed to go up as something like the fifth power of the number of entries in the table... a few hundred entries, no problem; a thousand entries, fuhgeddaboudit. I'm talking milliseconds on maps with a hundred entries, ten to twenty seconds on maps with a thousand...
e) Because they're implemented as templates, the STL "code" itself, in addition to being very sophisticated and rather cryptic, is very hard to debug. In the example above, it was certainly faster for me to refactor the part of the program not to use maps (yeah, I rolled my own... doing a simple linear search on the keys!!!... and it worked fine) than to try to figure out what was wrong with the map.
f) Since a lot of vendors don't really do their own STL implementation but OEM it from some other outfit, it's harder to submit effective bug reports or work with technical support people on any difficult issues. And, hey, if you think it's hard to get action on a BUG, try getting action on a PERFORMANCE ISSUE. ("Sir, we don't guarantee performance..." "No, no, you don't understand, I'm talking about TEN SECONDS to add ONE key to a map..." "We don't guarantee performance...")
g) IS STL really standard? Judging from the flakiness and the rapid changes in details from release to release on the platforms I work with, I have to wonder about it... I suspect there's a chicken-and-egg problem: not enough programmers REALLY use it for the vendors to be forced to make sure it is really rock-solid.
Not everything in life is a win-win situation, and listing used books possibly has some negative consequences for authors, but it is DEFINITELY a useful service to Amazon's CUSTOMERS, which is where Amazon's focus should be.
Re:Arthur C. Clarke Short Story "Silence, Please"
on
Making Your Room Quiet
·
· Score: 1
It was in "Tales from the White Hart" and the story was "Silence, Please." The real issue, raised by one character in the story (Clarke showing he understood it) and glossed over for the sake of the story, is how you can create a three-dimensional sound field that will accurately cancel a three-dimensional noise sound field everywhere (or at least over a large area, not just at a single point).
A stereo system creates a sound field that sounds like the real sound field, just as a.jpg looks like the full picture. But to CANCEL a sound field, you need to quantitatively DUPLICATE it in three dimensions with opposite polarity, not just SOUND LIKE it.
In the story, the device fails because of conservation of energy. Sound energy can't be destroyed, so the total energy in the area of silence has to go someplace else. In the story it's the capacitors in the power supply. In the real world, it's an interesting question, but sound doesn't have all THAT much energy and it can't be THAT hard to dissipate a few hundred watts (or, as someone else suggested, reduce the noise in one area and intensify it in another).
Something else that makes me really suspicious about the practicality of the device is that you have to do awfully high quality cancellation to get much of a perceptual effect. For example, if you were to match the sound field with 90% accuracy and cancel all but 10%, you'd get a 20 db reduction which would be noticeable, but certainly would not silence the noise. And it would be far less effective than even the cheapest earplugs.
...or at least it's not JUST about the technology.
One of the things that's so great about Google is that they're focussed on delivering an honest and useful service.
The Google screen is not crapped up with a lot of extraneous garbage, they don't do pop-behinds or plant millions of cookies on you, the listings appear to be honest, and, most astonishing of all, the sponsored links only appear when I'm actually searching for the sponsored stuff and are actually relevant to my search.
Google has done a fine job at rescuing the Deja News database after Deja apparently got taken over by marketeers.
And the interesting thing is that Google makes money at it.
Now, so far Teoma's screen is clean and Google-like. And they don't plant cookies or run ads. I don't know what Teoma's core values are like, so I don't know whether the similarity of approach reflects a similarity of values or whether they're just, well, imitating Google.
But talk of "killing Google" does not impress me. I've noticed that whenever companies focus on their competition, they are very apt to lose sight of their customers.
Remember the Dean Drive, a frequent subject of articles and editorials in Astounding (or was it Analog then) in the sixties? Dean had discovered that Newton's laws of motion were only approximate, f didn't equal ma, there was a tiny little high-order nonlinear term in it... which meant that big, massive, unbalanced, counter-rotating linear weights could generate a tiny little linear component. Without any reaction mass.
There were all sorts of photographs of the device in action. They were all marred by little details. Somehow it could never quite lift its own weight, although a simple scaling up would, of course, do it. The device was always tethered, or on a surface...
The best one was the before-and-after shot of it sitting on a bathroom scale. When turned off, the scale showed one reading. When turned on, the scale showed a lighter reading. Unfortunately the pointer was a little, well, BLURRED, but the accompanying text vouched that there was a net weight reduction and that the camera had not just captured an extreme swing of an oscillating pointer.
Whatever... HAPPENED to the Dean Drive? You don't suppose it could have been a fraud, do you?
RCA introduced these briefly in the sixties. The word "floppy disk" hadn't been invented then, but it should have been. These monstrosities were floppy, also flabby, flimsy, flim-flams, etc.
According to RCA it was all in the interest of fidelity--even if it did give some misguided consumer the impression they were cheapening the product. (Oddly enough, the reduced costs in vinyl were not reflected in the price of the Dynaflex disks).
As it happened, Dynaflex was flayed in both the consumer and audiophile press, and in the marketplace, just as it did in one's hands, it flopped.
"Now MightyWords does not perform authorization anymore, so it would seem that legitimate users of MightyWords eMatter are now out of luck."
If the Domesday book on laserdisk became unreadable due to technology drift in just a couple of decades, it seems likely that DRM schemes will have the same problem. Fortunately in the case of the Domesday book, there is an analog hardcopy to fall back on.
It is disturbing to think that our civilization might entrust its new works of art to DRM schemes that make accessibility to the work dependent on the perpetual business success of the vendor.
In the eighties, when Microsoft was facing competition from Lotus--remember? there was once competition?--it has been reported that when new releases of DOS were in the works, the slogan was "The job's not done 'til Lotus won't run."
Now, Microsoft all but controls the hardware platform as well as the OS.
Gee, the changes mandated by Microsoft just happen to disable Linux? Gosh! Fancy that!
No, I don't think that Microsoft did it deliberately (starry-eyed idealist that I am). But I do think that Microsoft realizes that constantly changing, constantly tinkering with hardware interfaces in ways that are always compatible with Microsoft, but frequently cause problems for companies that are not dictating the changes, is good for Microsoft.
Don't you love it? They can get a special key with a picture of the Windows logo put onto every keyboard, but they can't manage to make the "Prnt Scrn" key changed to "Clip Scrn?" (Or, how about... change Windows so it will actually PRNT the scrn?)
Harbison and Steele's "C: A Reference Manual" is the book I use. I like it a lot. This is "real-world" C, full of guidance on things which are in the standard but frequently implemented correctly (so you can avoid them if you want to be conservative), or things which are not in the standard but a frequently implemented in a certain "traditional" way.
It is valuable because it does NOT have the "one-vendor" myopia that is so common elsewhere.
IMHO, it is better organized and better written than K&R. And, unlike K&R, which describes C the way K&R would like it to be, Harbison and Steele describe C the way it is.
The Gates email, says "My first address space was the PDP-8. That was a 12-bit address space!"
Well, not really. The PDP-8 word was 12 bits long and had three, count them THREE bits for the instruction part, leaving nine for the address part. Only SEVEN were available for the address itself. One bit selected whether that address was in page 0 (the bottom page of memory) or the current page (the same page the instruction itself was in). Another selected direct or indirect addressing. In indirect addressing, the indirect address could indeed be a full 12 bits.
There were no index registers. However, certain addresses--I believe addresses 8 through 15 in page 0--were "autoincrement" addresses that got bumped by one every time you accessed them, so you had an effective *ptr++ although no *ptr--.
The instruction set and development tools were fairly sweetly designed and all of this worked well enough that for the most part it DID feel as if you were in a 12 bit address space. (There was, of course, an agonizingly awful bank-switching scheme that expanded it to 15 bits later on).
The funny part was that despite the initial feeling of power you got on a PDP-11, the PDP-11 wasn't really all that much easier to program in assembly language than the PDP-8. And many people believe the PDP-8 was the most core-efficient instruction set ever designed. Generally speaking, equivalent programs written in PDP-8 and PDP-11 assembly language used roughly the SAME numbers of instructions--but a PDP-8 instruction used 12 bits, while an average PDP-11 instruction tended to use nearly 16-bit words.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe "mendacity through opacity?"
Or "confusion via occlusion?"
Or "protection by misdirection?"
"Alex Giakoumis... said his company had built defensive measures into its products that would make them invulnerable to such an attack. However, he said he was unwilling to be specific about the nature of the security system."
However, it is speculated that the card contains material that can obscure the flash, literally achieving "security through obscurity."
In my last car, I had an aftermarket radio that I bought without thinking about it too much. Instead of a volume control knob, it had volume up and volume down buttons. They tried to make it clever, with one of those controlled-backlash features--that is, each UP press would take you up four units in volume, then each DOWN press would take you down a single unit.
It drove me bananas. I can't believe just how annoying and distracting it was to use that thing.
Plus, it had one of these deals where you can set eighteen FM stations and six AM stations--there's a row of six station buttons and another button that cycles you through FM-1, FM-2, FM-3, and AM. After about a month I finally got clued in and set FM-1, FM-2, and FM-3 each to the SAME set of stations. _I_ can't remember an arbitrary four-by-six array of stations and I don't think anyone else can, either.
Setting the clock for daylight savings time? Twice a year I would say "this CAN'T be that hard, I'm SURE I can remember enough from last time to figure it out. Let's see, you press and hold the TIME button for three seconds and then hold the station 1 button while you press the "volume up" button? Nope, not it." And twice a year I'd have to stumble into my house and try to find where I had left the manual for the thing...
What WILL Donald Norman do when EVERYTHING in the world is a badly-designed computer interface and there ARE no natural objects with plain "affordances" to point do?
Patents such as #6,293,874 ("User-operated amusement apparatus for kicking the user's buttocks...a user-operated and controlled apparatus for self-infliction of repetitive blows to the user's buttocks by a plurality of elongated arms bearing flexible extensions that rotate under the user's control.") and #6,368,227 ("Method of swinging on a swing," discussed recently in Slashdot) certainly sound as if SOMEONE is trying to prove SOMETHING.
I'm strongly tempted to mail copies of these patents to my congressman with a letter saying, simply, "The patent office is broken. Fix it."
If they interpret the symbol at all, they're more likely to say "Oh boy! Buried treasure!"
Would anyone seriously consider trying to build a voice-operated piano? Simply dictate into it the notes you want it to play... Of course not, everyone realizes the bandwidth of brain-to-fingers-to-keyboard is much higher.
So why the "voice command" fantasy in the first place?
When the PC revolution was just starting to take off, most people had not learned to type in high school. Typing was considered a skill for secretaries, who, of course, were poorly paid, low in social rank, and referred to as "girls."
For many years, computer technology did not penetrate the higher corporate levels because directly handling machines was considered beneath the dignity of an executive. "I don't have time to learn to use that gear, I have people to do that for me," was the typical attitude. Execs would have their secretaries print out all their email for them, dictate replies, and have their secretaries keyboard them back in.
This changed when the young MBA's started arriving with their computer spreadsheets.
Most people, even wealthy people who can afford chauffeurs, drive their own cars, and most people now operate their own computers... Time to retire the whole "voice interface" concept, except for people with special needss.
It has been all but acknowledged by Microsoft that MS-DOS 1.0 contained code directly borrowed from CP/M. _The MS-DOS Encyclopedia_, for example, notes that "the resemblance [between CP/M and MS-DOS] was even more striking at the rpogrmaming level, with an almost one-to-one correspondence between CP/M and MS-DOS in the system calls available to applications programs."
This was not a matter of common design or reverse engineering; there was actual CP/M code in MS-DOS, I believe specifically in the FCB-oriented file services.
I wish I could remember where I read the interview where Tim Paterson acknowledged "low-level borrowing" from CP/M. I can't seem to find it right now.
...with more than one person in the room?
What will happen when the music executives find out about THIS? Oh, those clever, wicked teenagers... they buy ONE copy of a CD, but TWO people get to listen to it!
If they play it on a boom box on the subway, the number of illegal listeners can climb even higher! It's theft, that's what it is! It's just like shoplifting--no, bank robbery!
We need a law requiring every CD player to include a little IR scanner that counts the number of people in the room and shuts down if you haven't purchased the right number of licenses (or charges them to your credit card). This is in our own interest as consumers, because if this isn't done, there won't be any profit in music any more and then there won't be any music. Nope, none at all. How would we like THAT?
(P.S. It's irony, folks)
just like the merger of AT&T and NCR, the merger of Burroughs and Sperry, and the merger of Digital and Compaq.
Incandescent lamps... around 20 lumens per watt. Fluorescent lamps... about 70 lumens per watt. White LED, 50 lumens per watt and climbing. And the power requirements and ability to fit them into small spaces are much less tricky than for fluorescent.
LED's are almost there--and efficiencies are climbing. Main problem right now is that they're expensive. But already, I see they're being used for the red, and, increasingly, the green lights in traffic lights around here.
By the time this stuff makes it out of the lab, LEDs will be cheap and even more efficient than they are now.
And, of course, all the gee-whiz wizards-of-the-labs articles never say how much the new technology is likely to COST. And the stated efficiencies tend to decline as the devices start to approach reality...
If they can really make these things twelve times as efficient as LED's AND give a pleasant, flattering light spectrum AND get the cost down, it will be interesting.
...well, unfortunately I can't seem to find it, even via www.archive.org's "wayback machine," but I could have sworn that in the old days when the Web meant lynx and lynx by default took you to a CERN page with some introductory material--INCLUDING an EXPLICIT statement that the concept of a "home page" was a completely arbitrary convention, that there were no features distinguishing a "home page" from any other page.
Hyperlinking between pages at ANY level is the essence of the Web.
Aren't there any W3C standards that still say this?
"I don't know what problem you ran into, but a conforming implementation of map would not have those performance characteristics. map.operator[] has O(log n) access time."
Of course. It's SUPPOSED to have reasonable performance characteristics. That's why I figured it was OK to use.
That's why I was SURPRISED when the access time was more like about O to the fifth power.
As I said, you apparently can't trust vendor-supplied implementations of STL to behave as expected.
I've gotten very frustrated with STL. Some problems are:
a) Microsoft has its own kludged-up-vaguely STL-like stuff (CStrings, etc.) and every Microsoft-brainwashed programmer uses them, when you're working with other folk on a big chunk of code with this stuff mixed throughout, it's easier to go along than try to mix in something else. You don't have to face down the skepticism of people who fear that the STL headers might conflict with some of Microsoft's, or that STL might add to the volume of code, or whatever...
b) Since Microsoft programmers use the kludged-up Microsoft stuff, they're NOT using STL, so problems and issues with it aren't well-known and aren't necessarily addressed by Microsoft;
c) If you don't like the Microsoft-centricity in command a and b and happen to be a Mac programmer, substitute "Metrowerks Powerplant" for the above... same remarks apply.
d) The quality of STL implementations varies widely, and doesn't seem to be anywhere near as solid as, say, the C Standard Library.
Although Stoustrup introduces STL early, uses it in his calculator example, encourages you to use it, and says, cheerfully and optimistically "the standard library and other libraries are meant to be used. Often a library has received more care in its design and implementation than a programmer could afford for a handcrafted piece of code..." this seems to be wishful thinking.
The first time I seriously used STL in a real project, I ran into a SERIOUS, SERIOUS problem with the implementation of the _map_ container. It was a performance issue. I no longer recall the type of the things I was mapping, but it completely escaped notice in debugging, because the time it took to access a map entry seemed to go up as something like the fifth power of the number of entries in the table... a few hundred entries, no problem; a thousand entries, fuhgeddaboudit. I'm talking milliseconds on maps with a hundred entries, ten to twenty seconds on maps with a thousand...
e) Because they're implemented as templates, the STL "code" itself, in addition to being very sophisticated and rather cryptic, is very hard to debug. In the example above, it was certainly faster for me to refactor the part of the program not to use maps (yeah, I rolled my own... doing a simple linear search on the keys!!!... and it worked fine) than to try to figure out what was wrong with the map.
f) Since a lot of vendors don't really do their own STL implementation but OEM it from some other outfit, it's harder to submit effective bug reports or work with technical support people on any difficult issues. And, hey, if you think it's hard to get action on a BUG, try getting action on a PERFORMANCE ISSUE. ("Sir, we don't guarantee performance..." "No, no, you don't understand, I'm talking about TEN SECONDS to add ONE key to a map..." "We don't guarantee performance...")
g) IS STL really standard? Judging from the flakiness and the rapid changes in details from release to release on the platforms I work with, I have to wonder about it... I suspect there's a chicken-and-egg problem: not enough programmers REALLY use it for the vendors to be forced to make sure it is really rock-solid.
The comment about "why should it be networked" is right on.
There should be a variant of Murphy's law: if it CAN be abused, it WILL be.
...and I think that's a good thing.
Not everything in life is a win-win situation, and listing used books possibly has some negative consequences for authors, but it is DEFINITELY a useful service to Amazon's CUSTOMERS, which is where Amazon's focus should be.
It was in "Tales from the White Hart" and the story was "Silence, Please." The real issue, raised by one character in the story (Clarke showing he understood it) and glossed over for the sake of the story, is how you can create a three-dimensional sound field that will accurately cancel a three-dimensional noise sound field everywhere (or at least over a large area, not just at a single point).
.jpg looks like the full picture. But to CANCEL a sound field, you need to quantitatively DUPLICATE it in three dimensions with opposite polarity, not just SOUND LIKE it.
A stereo system creates a sound field that sounds like the real sound field, just as a
In the story, the device fails because of conservation of energy. Sound energy can't be destroyed, so the total energy in the area of silence has to go someplace else. In the story it's the capacitors in the power supply. In the real world, it's an interesting question, but sound doesn't have all THAT much energy and it can't be THAT hard to dissipate a few hundred watts (or, as someone else suggested, reduce the noise in one area and intensify it in another).
Something else that makes me really suspicious about the practicality of the device is that you have to do awfully high quality cancellation to get much of a perceptual effect. For example, if you were to match the sound field with 90% accuracy and cancel all but 10%, you'd get a 20 db reduction which would be noticeable, but certainly would not silence the noise. And it would be far less effective than even the cheapest earplugs.
...or at least it's not JUST about the technology.
One of the things that's so great about Google is that they're focussed on delivering an honest and useful service.
The Google screen is not crapped up with a lot of extraneous garbage, they don't do pop-behinds or plant millions of cookies on you, the listings appear to be honest, and, most astonishing of all, the sponsored links only appear when I'm actually searching for the sponsored stuff and are actually relevant to my search.
Google has done a fine job at rescuing the Deja News database after Deja apparently got taken over by marketeers.
And the interesting thing is that Google makes money at it.
Now, so far Teoma's screen is clean and Google-like. And they don't plant cookies or run ads. I don't know what Teoma's core values are like, so I don't know whether the similarity of approach reflects a similarity of values or whether they're just, well, imitating Google.
But talk of "killing Google" does not impress me. I've noticed that whenever companies focus on their competition, they are very apt to lose sight of their customers.
Remember the Dean Drive, a frequent subject of articles and editorials in Astounding (or was it Analog then) in the sixties? Dean had discovered that Newton's laws of motion were only approximate, f didn't equal ma, there was a tiny little high-order nonlinear term in it... which meant that big, massive, unbalanced, counter-rotating linear weights could generate a tiny little linear component. Without any reaction mass.
There were all sorts of photographs of the device in action. They were all marred by little details. Somehow it could never quite lift its own weight, although a simple scaling up would, of course, do it. The device was always tethered, or on a surface...
The best one was the before-and-after shot of it sitting on a bathroom scale. When turned off, the scale showed one reading. When turned on, the scale showed a lighter reading. Unfortunately the pointer was a little, well, BLURRED, but the accompanying text vouched that there was a net weight reduction and that the camera had not just captured an extreme swing of an oscillating pointer.
Whatever... HAPPENED to the Dean Drive? You don't suppose it could have been a fraud, do you?
...is the license still valid?
Can a bar refuse to honor a driver's license as proof of age if the strip is demagnetized?
Hey, anyone remember RCA's Dynaflex LP's?
RCA introduced these briefly in the sixties. The word "floppy disk" hadn't been invented then, but it should have been. These monstrosities were floppy, also flabby, flimsy, flim-flams, etc.
According to RCA it was all in the interest of fidelity--even if it did give some misguided consumer the impression they were cheapening the product. (Oddly enough, the reduced costs in vinyl were not reflected in the price of the Dynaflex disks).
As it happened, Dynaflex was flayed in both the consumer and audiophile press, and in the marketplace, just as it did in one's hands, it flopped.
"Now MightyWords does not perform authorization anymore, so it would seem that legitimate users of MightyWords eMatter are now out of luck."
If the Domesday book on laserdisk became unreadable due to technology drift in just a couple of decades, it seems likely that DRM schemes will have the same problem. Fortunately in the case of the Domesday book, there is an analog hardcopy to fall back on.
It is disturbing to think that our civilization might entrust its new works of art to DRM schemes that make accessibility to the work dependent on the perpetual business success of the vendor.
In the eighties, when Microsoft was facing competition from Lotus--remember? there was once competition?--it has been reported that when new releases of DOS were in the works, the slogan was "The job's not done 'til Lotus won't run."
Now, Microsoft all but controls the hardware platform as well as the OS.
Gee, the changes mandated by Microsoft just happen to disable Linux? Gosh! Fancy that!
No, I don't think that Microsoft did it deliberately (starry-eyed idealist that I am). But I do think that Microsoft realizes that constantly changing, constantly tinkering with hardware interfaces in ways that are always compatible with Microsoft, but frequently cause problems for companies that are not dictating the changes, is good for Microsoft.
Don't you love it? They can get a special key with a picture of the Windows logo put onto every keyboard, but they can't manage to make the "Prnt Scrn" key changed to "Clip Scrn?" (Or, how about... change Windows so it will actually PRNT the scrn?)
...THAT should prove an effective barrier to those pesky would-be participants that don't have barrels of corporate money behind them...
Harbison and Steele's "C: A Reference Manual" is the book I use. I like it a lot. This is "real-world" C, full of guidance on things which are in the standard but frequently implemented correctly (so you can avoid them if you want to be conservative), or things which are not in the standard but a frequently implemented in a certain "traditional" way.
It is valuable because it does NOT have the "one-vendor" myopia that is so common elsewhere.
IMHO, it is better organized and better written than K&R. And, unlike K&R, which describes C the way K&R would like it to be, Harbison and Steele describe C the way it is.
The Gates email, says "My first address space was the PDP-8. That was a 12-bit address space!"
Well, not really. The PDP-8 word was 12 bits long and had three, count them THREE bits for the instruction part, leaving nine for the address part. Only SEVEN were available for the address itself. One bit selected whether that address was in page 0 (the bottom page of memory) or the current page (the same page the instruction itself was in). Another selected direct or indirect addressing. In indirect addressing, the indirect address could indeed be a full 12 bits.
There were no index registers. However, certain addresses--I believe addresses 8 through 15 in page 0--were "autoincrement" addresses that got bumped by one every time you accessed them, so you had an effective *ptr++ although no *ptr--.
The instruction set and development tools were fairly sweetly designed and all of this worked well enough that for the most part it DID feel as if you were in a 12 bit address space. (There was, of course, an agonizingly awful bank-switching scheme that expanded it to 15 bits later on).
The funny part was that despite the initial feeling of power you got on a PDP-11, the PDP-11 wasn't really all that much easier to program in assembly language than the PDP-8. And many people believe the PDP-8 was the most core-efficient instruction set ever designed. Generally speaking, equivalent programs written in PDP-8 and PDP-11 assembly language used roughly the SAME numbers of instructions--but a PDP-8 instruction used 12 bits, while an average PDP-11 instruction tended to use nearly 16-bit words.