What were they thinking? Where have they been??
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
This "news" item really should be on
Slashdot because it shows how completely
unreliable ABC is. (Not like timothy, who
filed it under, "plain-old-lunacy".)
"Harmless" microwaves?
Jeez, wasn't it ABC news that was
driving the bandwagon-style
campaign against leaky
microwave ovens?
"Only" one percent of the moon's surface?
Everyone knows it takes a huge amount of
resources to get just one team of people
to the moon and back, yet this guy thinks
it's feasible to haul thousands of tons of
material and supplies for an interplanetary
construction project bigger than the state
of Texas?
This idea has been around
for decades, and it keeps getting shot
down for the same, obvious, practical reasons.
Not to mention... it would take
far more energy to manufacture and transport each
solar cell than they would produce over their
entire service life! Even if it were actually
carried out, it would be a net loss.
Why-2k again?
on
Byte Wars
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This review was very well done.
I especially appreciated the link back to some
of the author's previous (and now, dubious) work.
Heh, heh, heh... Give that man a "5" for "funny"!
This author looks like the run-o'-the-mill
fear-mongering sort that the media loves to
trot out when they've got no real news
to talk about. So why on earth are we hearing
about him at all?
Hmmm.... Maybe I should start writing book
reviews for Slashdot! "Review: Discourses
of Epictetus, a rational look at the
problems of today's world politics and our
individual lives"... written only 1900 years ago!
I installed and tried to use the sphynx2
speech recognition but no matter how persistently
I clicked on the "Start Listening" button, it
never did start listening.
Maybe because I was trying to run it from inside
IceWm?
(on Mandrake 8.2, upgraded from 8.1)
I really didn't like being asked about foreground
and background colors during the install though.
Jeez, it should have some nice-looking defaults
and then let you mess with it if you want to
(duh, like every other window manager, including
the infamous Windows desktops).
The main strength of the one-time pad is that each and every element is as completely random as possible. The theoretical "amount of information" in a stream of such random data is approximately equal to the size of the stream.
This system is using a pseudo-random number generation algorithm, albeit a changeable one, which means that with a very small amount of data it is possible to completely predict the entire key stream. That means that the "amount of information" really contained in that stream is very small, since a small algorithm completely defines it.
This is what one of the other posters was referring to as "key space". How much information must be guessed in order to decode the message?
For these snake-oil vendors, the amount of information that needs to be guessed to decode a message is only as big as the pseudo-random algorithm (or likely smaller, since these guys obviously don't know what they're doing). If you crack the beginning of a message, you've cracked the whole message no matter how large.
For a real one-time pad though, the amount of information which must be guessed is as big as the entire message. No matter how much of the message you "crack", you'll have no more advantage to cracking the rest than you did before. Each element is random. There is no "method" to predict random numbers and so there is no way to crack a true one-time pad.
There's a biblical quote (Proverbs) that says essentially:
A BAD MANAGER HAS BAD SUBORDINATES
As a "subordinate", it's your job to keep your manager informed. It's your job to suppliment your supervisors' knowledge in your area of expertise. It's YOUR job to use YOUR skills to support your manager in any way that you can.
When your managers don't understand something, inform them but always in terms of what it means to them, and what it means to the company.
Contrary to popular slashdot-ish opinion, your managers are not babysitters. Their job is to give your work direction and to handle administrative things that might be preventing you from following that direction. Your job is to make their dreams become reality, or to guide them to more realistic dreams.
Grow up.
Your managers and you are co-workers with totally different areas of expertise and vastly different responsibilities. It's thier job to know what they need you to do, and it's your job to know how to do it, or to let them know if their expectations are unrealistic.
If your managers are clueless, it's only because you haven't spent enough time feeding them clues!
To transmute Na(11,21) into Mg(12,22), you just add a proton,...which I imagine is bound to happen if you blast a solid sample of Sodium-21 with a high-enough energy proton beam for long enough. Well, duh!
I guess I'm not catching the real significance of this "achievement". What was the theory? What was this experiment attempting to prove or disprove? Were they just showing off how fast they could accellerate protons??
Proclaiming that their proton beam somehow creates a miniature nova seems like a ploy to attract attention (and funding, of course).
Sigh... All "logic" is essentially binary, Monseur 'Liquor'.
The whole point of what I was saying was that if you represent logic states with voltage levels you would be throwing away a quarter of your bandwidth using three states. Here's why:
To determine what state a 'trit' is in, TWO BINARY COMPARISONS must be made, one against each dead zone. Why, that sure looks like two whole bits-worth of information! But your trinary system doesn't allow one of the four states, and thus throws away what could have been a useful bit.
If you make those two comparisons simultaneously to keep the same bandwidth, then you'll need more voltage spread and higher currents (and an oven mitt to handle your circuit).
It just doesn't pay to throw out a perfectly good bit. There's ALWAYS a trade-off. If you think you're getting something for nothing, you're probably wrong.
The big disadvantage of using any logic system with more than two states, electrically, is that sometimes in switching from one state to another you must go through a third state which is electrically "valid" but not the correct output for the function you're implementing.
Electrically, implementation is inevitably binary, at its core... electrical comparisons of boundary conditions. "Trinary" is just a minimal case of "analog", with all of the same disadvantages.
You want the same noise margins? You'll have to double your voltage. That means you're cutting your speed in half. So overall you're taking a loss because at half speed you could have gotten two whole bits for your money instead of one lousey trit.
Not to mention the fact that you're using more power, switching between these trinary states due to the longer transition and detection times. Oh boy! Hotter chips! Bleah!
One of the things that keeps me "fresh" to the trade is remembering to keep up my hobby interest in the fields which also happen to bring me income.
If you're always doing what other people want, you'll lose interest and the whole experience becomes a mix of drudgery and frustration. You need to take some time following a few rabbit trails of your own interests:
Learn something new, just for fun, something that tickled your funny bone or made you say, "Cool! I wonder how they do that?" Or something you were just curious about or that you've heard someone else say is the best thing since sliced bread. Learn it and play with it, with no pre-determined goals other than to see what it's all about.
Fix a bug or add a feature in that open source app that's been irking you... just because you want it that way. Who cares whether the developer even accepts your patch? (Wanna see a really neat boot-logo patch for Linux?)
Write something useless, just to show off. It may surprise you, or it may really be useless... but who cares?
Just keep in mind that it's not the "CS" trade that has you bummed... it's the fact that you haven't had time to do it just for the fun of it lately.
A carpenter can put up framing for houses for a living but he doesn't loathe his tools when he gets home. He might even pick them up to make some patio furniture, a bookcase or something for himself now and then, and his professional skill will show in the quality of his casual project. And the unrelated projects may lead him to find or invent techniques that will enhance his work performance as well.
Same with us, only more. Because CS deals so much with information we can find correlations between the skills we know and nearly everything! Lots of people have what seem to be ultra-low-tech hobbies and then they end up writing software to help out. (I haven't seen any flint-knappers' applications yet though.)
What we need is a 3D display that you can reach into and 'grab' stuff. Maybe done with VR goggles and a 3D mouse, maybe some other way... Tools, as objects, could be connected with "pipes" in three dimensions between "rooms" which might be different user spaces or different machines...
The "desktop" is pretty much the ideal paradigm for managing documents but when connecting processes we don't just need pipes... we need plumbing.
Soren says he didn't invent those data structures... he reverse-engineered them.
Seems to me that reverse-engineered information isn't exactly the intellectual property of the reversing engineer. Sure, he spent some time figuring out what someone else had done but the real IP is the work of the original implementing engineer.
Keep in mind that many user license agreements prohibit reverse-engineering, portraying that act as IP theft...
I don't know what script you've been reading, but when I see a fight coming I don't automatically assume that I'm on the winning side. Maybe other fellow geeks have been in similar situations before, eh?
If Microsoft is successful in getting employers to sign up their developers under this "shared source" program, every one of them will be contaminated whether they actually look at the stuff or not. Your name was on the invoice! Can you prove that you never looked at it?
How hard do you think it would be for them to show cut-n-paste similarities between their code and the GPL'd stuff you've been working on? Have you actually sent copy of your prior art to the Copyright office? Can you prove that those verbatim duplications weren't originally written by Microsoft? Anyone can fake the timestamps in a CVS repository...
So you're not just walking into any schoolyard fight when you play with Microsoft's "shared source"... you're dealing with the kid with the beeper who none the school faculty will mess with.
The real purpose of "shared source" was disclosed.
"People who have seen shared source will have
problems working on other projects."
You can expect Microsoft to make a direct attack upon GPL'd projects, claiming that some of the developers were privy to "shared source". They're going to claim that their proprietary code was used in the making of GPL'd software in violation of their shared source agreement. Bet on it!
Some nerve! It's typical, isn't it though?
"Shared source" is a direct attack upon the GPL because they're going to claim that we've used their code to make ours,...despite the obvious fact that it's really the other way around.
When you borrow someone else's car, you agree to
abide by their rules. The rental agency, as the
owner of the vehicle, has every right to know
where you take their car and how hazardously you've been driving it. And they even have the right to check whether you're obeying their rules and to charge you the penalty stated in the rental agreement if you break them. They're not talking about monitoring
your car, just their own.
They're obviously using GPS because it's the simplest way to handle different types of vehicles with almost no installation/maintenance hassles but it does give rise to some privacy concerns. They should not be allowed to make commercial use of, nor publish, logged GPS information. Whether that information could be subpoena'd for use in court... well, I dunno.
In general though, I like this idea, since it will likely translate into lower insurance rates.
Merge Technologies had a license to use Xerox's
"Data Glyphs" several years ago (at least).
They use them to tag medical images.
Their only advantage over other 2-D barcodes
was supposed to be how they can masquerade as
innocent grey background. That way you don't
have to mess up your product's graphic layout
with an unsightly bar-code symbol.
It must have sounded really "Hi-Tech" back then
but checkers have enough trouble finding UPC
symbols as it is, without hiding the things
on purpose.
If a person can see or hear the data, they can also copy it.
It used to be that only a publishing company could afford the equipment and initial costs of copying. Those were the days when Copyright law was written. In those days, Copyright was enforceable.
With computers, and with their nearly instant and cost-free capability for duplication, the assumptions that the Copyright was based upon are no longer valid. Everyone is now a "publisher" with resources several orders of magnitude above what anyone could have imagined back then.
In its current state, Copyright law is impossible to enforce no matter how far people's privacy is invaded. It needs major revision.
The press releases didn't say that 3dfx would become a part of NVidia... they said that 3dfx would be dissolved and that its assets would be sold off. I suppose those "assets" would include real estate and equipment (aside from just the patents).
My uncle Joe (in-law, actually) felt the same way. Despite living in the Bay area, so close to Silicon Valley, he won't use telephones or watch TV.
Hmmm... come to think of it, just look how dependent everyone seems to have gotten upon those hi-tech "wheel" doo-hickies. Just look at those tire recalls!
Point is, *any* technology at *any* level may have flaws.
Law enforcement in the UK has already used cell phone system logs (which track roughly where you are in relation to their towers) to disprove falsified alibis.
"You say you were still in London that day?" "Yes." "...and you received a call from so-n-so?" "Yes." "That call, as logged, was answered by a cell phone operating through a wireless station in Edinburgh!"
Offer free Tupperware products to a friend or acquaintance if they will host a "party" where you can demonstrate products and make a sales pitch.
Show up early and tell your friend to hide all of the GladWare that they usually serve snacks in, and please not to even open the cupboard where they're kept.
I wonder how "metallic" this asteroid is. How easy would metal extraction be? How expensive would it be to "ship" packets down the gravity well to Earth?
Slashdot Mirror
"Harmless" microwaves? Jeez, wasn't it ABC news that was driving the bandwagon-style campaign against leaky microwave ovens?
"Only" one percent of the moon's surface? Everyone knows it takes a huge amount of resources to get just one team of people to the moon and back, yet this guy thinks it's feasible to haul thousands of tons of material and supplies for an interplanetary construction project bigger than the state of Texas?
This idea has been around for decades, and it keeps getting shot down for the same, obvious, practical reasons.
Not to mention... it would take far more energy to manufacture and transport each solar cell than they would produce over their entire service life! Even if it were actually carried out, it would be a net loss.
This author looks like the run-o'-the-mill fear-mongering sort that the media loves to trot out when they've got no real news to talk about. So why on earth are we hearing about him at all?
Hmmm.... Maybe I should start writing book reviews for Slashdot! "Review: Discourses of Epictetus, a rational look at the problems of today's world politics and our individual lives"... written only 1900 years ago!
-Rick
Maybe because I was trying to run it from inside IceWm? (on Mandrake 8.2, upgraded from 8.1)
I really didn't like being asked about foreground and background colors during the install though. Jeez, it should have some nice-looking defaults and then let you mess with it if you want to (duh, like every other window manager, including the infamous Windows desktops).
-Rick
This system is using a pseudo-random number generation algorithm, albeit a changeable one, which means that with a very small amount of data it is possible to completely predict the entire key stream. That means that the "amount of information" really contained in that stream is very small, since a small algorithm completely defines it.
This is what one of the other posters was referring to as "key space". How much information must be guessed in order to decode the message?
For these snake-oil vendors, the amount of information that needs to be guessed to decode a message is only as big as the pseudo-random algorithm (or likely smaller, since these guys obviously don't know what they're doing). If you crack the beginning of a message, you've cracked the whole message no matter how large.
For a real one-time pad though, the amount of information which must be guessed is as big as the entire message. No matter how much of the message you "crack", you'll have no more advantage to cracking the rest than you did before. Each element is random. There is no "method" to predict random numbers and so there is no way to crack a true one-time pad.
As a "subordinate", it's your job to keep your manager informed. It's your job to suppliment your supervisors' knowledge in your area of expertise. It's YOUR job to use YOUR skills to support your manager in any way that you can.
When your managers don't understand something, inform them but always in terms of what it means to them, and what it means to the company.
Contrary to popular slashdot-ish opinion, your managers are not babysitters. Their job is to give your work direction and to handle administrative things that might be preventing you from following that direction. Your job is to make their dreams become reality, or to guide them to more realistic dreams.
Grow up.
Your managers and you are co-workers with totally different areas of expertise and vastly different responsibilities. It's thier job to know what they need you to do, and it's your job to know how to do it, or to let them know if their expectations are unrealistic.
If your managers are clueless, it's only because you haven't spent enough time feeding them clues!
So, in the balance of things, will there be less tsetse flies overall due to the population dip, or more due to to seeding???
I guess I'm not catching the real significance of this "achievement". What was the theory? What was this experiment attempting to prove or disprove? Were they just showing off how fast they could accellerate protons??
Proclaiming that their proton beam somehow creates a miniature nova seems like a ploy to attract attention (and funding, of course).
Sigh... All "logic" is essentially binary, Monseur 'Liquor'.
The whole point of what I was saying was that if you represent logic states with voltage levels you would be throwing away a quarter of your bandwidth using three states. Here's why:
To determine what state a 'trit' is in, TWO BINARY COMPARISONS must be made, one against each dead zone. Why, that sure looks like two whole bits-worth of information! But your trinary system doesn't allow one of the four states, and thus throws away what could have been a useful bit.
If you make those two comparisons simultaneously to keep the same bandwidth, then you'll need more voltage spread and higher currents (and an oven mitt to handle your circuit).
It just doesn't pay to throw out a perfectly good bit. There's ALWAYS a trade-off. If you think you're getting something for nothing, you're probably wrong.
-Rick
Electrically, implementation is inevitably binary, at its core... electrical comparisons of boundary conditions. "Trinary" is just a minimal case of "analog", with all of the same disadvantages.
You want the same noise margins? You'll have to double your voltage. That means you're cutting your speed in half. So overall you're taking a loss because at half speed you could have gotten two whole bits for your money instead of one lousey trit.
Not to mention the fact that you're using more power, switching between these trinary states due to the longer transition and detection times. Oh boy! Hotter chips! Bleah!
If you're always doing what other people want, you'll lose interest and the whole experience becomes a mix of drudgery and frustration. You need to take some time following a few rabbit trails of your own interests:
Just keep in mind that it's not the "CS" trade that has you bummed... it's the fact that you haven't had time to do it just for the fun of it lately.
A carpenter can put up framing for houses for a living but he doesn't loathe his tools when he gets home. He might even pick them up to make some patio furniture, a bookcase or something for himself now and then, and his professional skill will show in the quality of his casual project. And the unrelated projects may lead him to find or invent techniques that will enhance his work performance as well.
Same with us, only more. Because CS deals so much with information we can find correlations between the skills we know and nearly everything! Lots of people have what seem to be ultra-low-tech hobbies and then they end up writing software to help out. (I haven't seen any flint-knappers' applications yet though.)
From the blurry picture, it's hard to tell. Sure looks like a bi-lingual keyboard though.
The "desktop" is pretty much the ideal paradigm for managing documents but when connecting processes we don't just need pipes... we need plumbing.
Soren says he didn't invent those data structures... he reverse-engineered them.
Seems to me that reverse-engineered information isn't exactly the intellectual property of the reversing engineer. Sure, he spent some time figuring out what someone else had done but the real IP is the work of the original implementing engineer.
Keep in mind that many user license agreements prohibit reverse-engineering, portraying that act as IP theft...
"There is no honor among thieves."
If Microsoft is successful in getting employers to sign up their developers under this "shared source" program, every one of them will be contaminated whether they actually look at the stuff or not. Your name was on the invoice! Can you prove that you never looked at it?
How hard do you think it would be for them to show cut-n-paste similarities between their code and the GPL'd stuff you've been working on? Have you actually sent copy of your prior art to the Copyright office? Can you prove that those verbatim duplications weren't originally written by Microsoft? Anyone can fake the timestamps in a CVS repository...
So you're not just walking into any schoolyard fight when you play with Microsoft's "shared source"... you're dealing with the kid with the beeper who none the school faculty will mess with.
You can expect Microsoft to make a direct attack upon GPL'd projects, claiming that some of the developers were privy to "shared source". They're going to claim that their proprietary code was used in the making of GPL'd software in violation of their shared source agreement. Bet on it!
Some nerve! It's typical, isn't it though?
"Shared source" is a direct attack upon the GPL because they're going to claim that we've used their code to make ours, ...despite the obvious fact that it's really the other way around.
They're obviously using GPS because it's the simplest way to handle different types of vehicles with almost no installation/maintenance hassles but it does give rise to some privacy concerns. They should not be allowed to make commercial use of, nor publish, logged GPS information. Whether that information could be subpoena'd for use in court... well, I dunno.
In general though, I like this idea, since it will likely translate into lower insurance rates.
Their only advantage over other 2-D barcodes was supposed to be how they can masquerade as innocent grey background. That way you don't have to mess up your product's graphic layout with an unsightly bar-code symbol.
It must have sounded really "Hi-Tech" back then but checkers have enough trouble finding UPC symbols as it is, without hiding the things on purpose.
Whoopee... not.
It used to be that only a publishing company could afford the equipment and initial costs of copying. Those were the days when Copyright law was written. In those days, Copyright was enforceable.
With computers, and with their nearly instant and cost-free capability for duplication, the assumptions that the Copyright was based upon are no longer valid. Everyone is now a "publisher" with resources several orders of magnitude above what anyone could have imagined back then.
In its current state, Copyright law is impossible to enforce no matter how far people's privacy is invaded. It needs major revision.
Not if I can sue them first for infringing upon my own patent. "A New Method for Patenting the Blatently Obvious."
So, what happens to former 3dfx employees?
Oh, and how 'bout their stock options??
My uncle Joe (in-law, actually) felt the same way. Despite living in the Bay area, so close to Silicon Valley, he won't use telephones or watch TV.
Hmmm... come to think of it, just look how dependent everyone seems to have gotten upon those hi-tech "wheel" doo-hickies. Just look at those tire recalls!
Point is, *any* technology at *any* level may have flaws.
Something which tells where you are?
It's called, "wireless phone".
Law enforcement in the UK has already used cell phone system logs (which track roughly where you are in relation to their towers) to disprove falsified alibis.
"You say you were still in London that day?"
"Yes."
"...and you received a call from so-n-so?"
"Yes."
"That call, as logged, was answered by a cell phone operating through a wireless station in Edinburgh!"
Become a Tupperware(tm) salesperson.
Offer free Tupperware products to a friend or acquaintance if they will host a "party" where you can demonstrate products and make a sales pitch.
Show up early and tell your friend to hide all of the GladWare that they usually serve snacks in, and please not to even open the cupboard where they're kept.
Be prepared for a short career.
Small packets, of course.
Phil didn't invent the Lempel-Ziv(sp?!?) algorithm he used but he did write PKZIP. I understand he was quite the wizard with x86 assembler.