When Solaris 10 ships (along with Studio 10), it will be interesting to see how Sun's C compiler stacks up against GCC for the Opteron. I'm assuming you're doing development work on SPARC.
Sun's C compiler is not a drop-in replacement for GCC - due to Sun's compiler not having some of GCC's -um- interesting features.
One source for his observation was what happened in the US during WW1 - the US was never directly attacked by Germany, yet declared war on Germany in 1917. To protect the war effort, the US Government had set up a group of 100,000 domestic spies whose job was to report any negative comments about the war - and many ended up in jail because of that. One of the stories that got quashed was about a flu going around in 1918 - until things got so out of hand that it couldn't be ignored anymore - since the flu was first reported by the uncensored Spanish press, it got the name "Spanish Flu" even though most evidence points to the source as being in the US.
One other thing about the US during WW1. Every public gathering had to have a few minutes turned over to one of George Creel's "Minutemen" who gave a quick talk extollin the war effort. Part of the process was spreading blatant lies about what the Germans were doing in Europe. In the 1920's, the extent of the lying became known to the American public, which became very opposed to any further military involvement in Europe (which lasted past Pearl Harbor, the US only declared war on Germany because FDR goaded Hitler into declaring war on the US first). Another consequence was that Goering and his Nazi cohorts committed the atrocities that the Germans were accused of in WW1.
Interestingly enough, one rarely hears much about the atrocities committed by the Japanese (e.g. Nanking).
Do you mean if they feel the story receives signficantly less public coverage than the importance of the story merits.
Very insightful comment.
TFA came across as having a leftist slant - someone with more of a right-wing viewpoint could come up with a completely different list of censored stories and be as equally valid claiming that they were either censored or under-reported.
From TFA: What struck me after living in the US for a while, was the similarity, at a very fundamental level, between the US and Soviet systems: while the means by which they attain their objectives differ, the objectives themselves are, for all practical purposes, the same: control and exploitation of the public. Both systems indoctrinate with propaganda from childhood.
The one difference is that the "control" in the US is usually less centralized and the source of control shifts with time.
If you really want to find out about abuses in propaganda, google on George Creel - who probably picked up a few lessons from William Randolph Hearst's conduct just prior to the Spanish American War. I wouldn't be surprised if the Soviets picked up a few tidbits from Creel's work.
It is also interesting that Pascal did not mention Orwell's 1984 which is the classic description of propaganda in action. That story is becoming especially spooky with reports of the UK having the largest scale deployment of public surveillance cameras.
It's a big pressurized stainless steel can with engines. Still a good design after half a century.
IIRC, the Atlas V uses a more conventional structure similar to the Thor (now Delta).
A dad of one of my friend's from high school worked on the Atlas in the early days and had a few stories to tell. One story was how TI got into volume production of silicon transistors - Convair wanted a bunch, TI said they couldn't make that many, and the Air Force said build a plant to make them - the Minuteman project later jump started the IC business.
Still amazing to see a design as old as I am still in use.
Perhaps the following comments may clear up Schily's approach to cdrecord... BTW, he is also the author of mkisofs.
He's stated a couple of times that cdrecord is developed under Solaris, then ported to Linux and other Unix and Unix-like OS's. While his SCSI over ATA may be baroque, it does have the advantage of being portable and consistent over the various flavors of Unix (as opposed to being convenient to use on Linux and a real pain on non-Linux environments).
Schily is not a big fan of the GNU tools - he makes very rude noises about GNU tar (especially when comparing it with his own star (Schily TAR). Doesn't surprise me that he doesn't like GNU make either.
He's got some strongly held opinions (which is completely unlike such gents as Stallman or de Radt) but also has considerable technical skill to bring into discussions.
Ownership of radios have been frequently forbidden by oppressive regimes (e.g. North Korea, Germany under Hitler, the U.S under Wilson). If you haven't been paying attention, your right to own non-DRM'ed radios or TV's are being threatened by the *AA's.
(((In a letter seen by Reuters, XM's lawyers told MacLean to.. provide the company with a list of purchasers.)))
Wonder if the typical slashdotter is starting to get the picture of why the NRA gets wigged out when gun registration is mentioned??? Besides, would XM turn over their customer list if some scumbag lawyer asked for it?
I did RTDA and you are pretty much on the money in what it said.
I also wrote to Wildstrom stating that the GPL was not as anti-commerce as he made it out to be. Another point made to him was that it would be very unlikely that Linux would ever go off the GPL due to the logistics of getting approval from all of those who contributed code.
The GPL should be easy for business types to understand - it is a way for authors of code to protect their investment.
He's a tech reporter who hasn't investigated the situation much and wrote the first thing that occurred to him.
Based on my experience corresponding with him, I'd say Wildstrom does have a clue - though I disagree with the premise of his column. I did respond to his column a couple of days after it came out (surprised it to/. this long to pick it up) - stating among other things that the GPL vs BSD license debate was probably a minor consideration in Apple's basing OS-X on BSD as opposed to Linux.
I also stated that Linux switching to a different license (away from GPL) wasn't going to happen if for no other reason than getting all of the author's to agree would be a logistical nightmare.
The RIAA is going to court to get justice. The people being sued are guilty...are guilty??
The people are being sued are thought to be guilty by the RIAA. As someone else pointed out, "guilt" is a matter of a criminal case, the operative word in a civil case is "responsible". Either way, that determination is made by the jury, not the accuser.
What the uproar is about is that people whom the RIAA suspects of engaging in copyright infringement are being asked to either pay $3,000 now or a lot more in legal fees if they don't cave in. Since the RIAA has a lot more resources to put into the legal case than Joe Sixpack, there is a legitimate concern that "justice" depends more on who has the most money for lawyers rather than the merits of the respective cases.
There is a legal saying that it is better to let 10 murderers go free than to hang one innocent man. Similarly, it does society a lot more harm to have one innocent person go through the legal hell of being served with a ungrounded lawsuit than to have a dozen file-sharers get off scot-free.
However, in the first case (RIAA), their is direct evidence you did it; they can download a song from you and verify it is actually copyrighted -- they actually "observe" you committing the illegal act. ???????
I have yet to see a person capable of uploading songs to the internet - people typically use computers for that.
What you probably meant to say was that the RIAA (or minions thereof) directly "observe" downloading from what purportedly your computer - presumably ID'ed through IP addresses. Some caveats:
Was that IP address really routed to your computer?
Was the functionality for uploading done with your authorization or knowledge? Not totally out of the question that your box could have been 0wn3d.
Besides, could you imagine an army of nerdy, weak Slashdotters? They would probably turn back after half an hour because they are alergic to sunlight and have to take their asthma medication.
Not all the geeks on slashdot are computer geeks - I'll bet there are a fair number who like seeing what they can do with deflagrating granules used to push pieces of lead/antimony alloy wrapped in gilding metal down tubes made of 4140 alloy.
You comment still holds true for people living in areas where the truck and car speed limits are the same. FWIW, Calif's 55 MPH limit for trucks is probably why the Nixon administration settled on 55, not 50 for the "temporary speed limit".
Lessee, at least 4 people killed a couple of days ago in Wyoming due to among other things, speeding trucks.
As long as I'm on a roll - we could make great strides in highway safety by requiring all trucks to carry speed recorders - that would involve less infringement on rights than what the RIAA is doing.
Technically, if he's tailgaiting you, he cannot be going any faster than you are (not for long, anyways). So if he's driving above the speed limit, so are you.
Obviously you don't live in California.
Speed limit for trucks/autos with trailers: 55 MPH
Speed limits for cars can be 65 or 70 MPH
The OP had a very good point, that the speeding 18-wheeler tailgating him is much more a threat to society than someone offering music for downloading.
For which there are known avenues for protest and legal remedies. The only answer to tyrants is force; that is not the case here.
In case you haven't got it through your thick head, any time the courst are involved, there is the possibility of deadly force being involved (police, marshalls and bailiffs are known to carry and use guns). People have been killed in police raids based on bogus evidence.
The other aspect is that with few exceptions (such as the one covered in the article), judges have not paid attention to the issues of racketeering and extortion.
Case in point, Lewis Kaplan, who ruled against 2600 magazine - refused to recuse himself even though it affected his former employer - something that Richard Nixon had the integrity to do wrt Penn Central's bankruptcy.
First off, you should be asking EE majors, not Physics majors. FWIW, I got a BSEE, have an extra class amateur radio license and know several people with degrees in physics with emphasis on optics.
Second, remember the trig identity cos(at)cos(bt) = 1/2(cos((a+b)t) + cos((a-b)t).
Thirdly, remember Heisenberg. If you know the photon's frequency exactly, then you have no knowledge of the position (which implies no knowledge of time of arrival). Modulation puts constraints on time, hence position, which then prohibits the photon from having an exact frequency.
Why don't we multiplex radio broadcasts the way we can multiplex fiber optics.
We do. Ever hear of channels? Wavelength division multiplexing is nothing more than channelization (as in radio/TV) done at optical frequencies. Instead of channels being 10 kHz wide (AM), 200 kHz (FM) or 6 MHz (TV), the channels are ten's to hundred's of GHz wide.
Go find a copy of the ARRL Handbook and read up the chapter on modulation - you obviously aren't comprehending the basics of modulation.
My point is that because of the physical inadequacies of our radio equitment we aren't really applying shannon's mathematics to the full range of possibilities.
From what I've read, "turbo-codes" are capable of getting within 0.5dB of the Shannon limit.
While radio propagation is indeed done with photons, they are of such low energy that radio can be treated as a continuum. If you want to get down and dirty about photons, then you will run nto Heisenberg's indeterminancy principle (the original German term translates into indeterminant, not uncertain) in which you have the choice of determining frequency or position (phase) but not both.
As for QAM, there are a couple of ways of doing it - one is to split a carrier into two components where one is phase shifted 90 degrees from the other (hence quadrature), amplitude modulating each of the components and then combing them, the result being a signal where both amplitude and phase are significant (this can be digitally) - and a brute force method would be direct phase modulation followed by amplitude modulation.
BTW, this is closely related to what I do for a living...
The benefit from the phased arrays are mainly that they are more compact than a set of dish antennas, and that they are electronically steerable, that is, you can choose the direction electronically instead of mechanically rotating an antenna.
There is one other benfit, and that may be what Doc Ruby was trying to get across, that the phased array is capable of multiple simulatneous "beams".
Phased array antennas have been around for a long time - AM broadcasters have been using them since the 30's (if not the 20's). Heck, a yagi antenna is nothing more than passive phased array antenna. What is new is electronic steering and tracking.
Getting good performance from a phased array requires tight control of the phase and amplitude for the whole system, and depending on where the phase and amplitude are varied, may require a much larger dynamic range than needed by a simple directional antenna. For what it is worth, I've recently been involved with a project using audio frequency gradiometers - the first attempt was with using digital subtraction (akin to a phased array) - but we ended up using a wired connection (akin to a fixed antenna) because of insufficient dynamic range.
He isn't completely off base. QAM uses a combination of phase and amplitude to encode information.
A key point about QAM - in order to detect the extra information, you need a better signal-to-noise ratio than with a simpler form of modulation (you get some of it from a narrower bandwidth). There are no magical modulation schemes that will get you past the limit set by Nyquist and Shannon.
If I wanted to take out a CDMA base station (at least for receive) it would be a simple matter of pointing an antenna at the station and either:
1) Transmit white noise in the receive bandwidth of the base station and of an intensity a few dB higher than what it expects from the mobile units.
2) Transmit a very loud single frequency (loud enought to overcome the spreading gain)
Needless to say, doing either will lead to some nasty run-ins with the FCC (or equivalent regulatory body).
My point is that in radio waves there are really two frequencies.
Sounds like you are thinking about the carrier and sidebands for AM (things are even more complicated for FM). Single sideband (SSB) can be thought of as translating the baseband signal to any arbitrary frequency (say 0-3kHz to 14,200-14,203 kHz).
Slashdot Mirror
Sun's C compiler is not a drop-in replacement for GCC - due to Sun's compiler not having some of GCC's -um- interesting features.
One source for his observation was what happened in the US during WW1 - the US was never directly attacked by Germany, yet declared war on Germany in 1917. To protect the war effort, the US Government had set up a group of 100,000 domestic spies whose job was to report any negative comments about the war - and many ended up in jail because of that. One of the stories that got quashed was about a flu going around in 1918 - until things got so out of hand that it couldn't be ignored anymore - since the flu was first reported by the uncensored Spanish press, it got the name "Spanish Flu" even though most evidence points to the source as being in the US.
One other thing about the US during WW1. Every public gathering had to have a few minutes turned over to one of George Creel's "Minutemen" who gave a quick talk extollin the war effort. Part of the process was spreading blatant lies about what the Germans were doing in Europe. In the 1920's, the extent of the lying became known to the American public, which became very opposed to any further military involvement in Europe (which lasted past Pearl Harbor, the US only declared war on Germany because FDR goaded Hitler into declaring war on the US first). Another consequence was that Goering and his Nazi cohorts committed the atrocities that the Germans were accused of in WW1.
Interestingly enough, one rarely hears much about the atrocities committed by the Japanese (e.g. Nanking).
Very insightful comment.
TFA came across as having a leftist slant - someone with more of a right-wing viewpoint could come up with a completely different list of censored stories and be as equally valid claiming that they were either censored or under-reported.
The one difference is that the "control" in the US is usually less centralized and the source of control shifts with time.
If you really want to find out about abuses in propaganda, google on George Creel - who probably picked up a few lessons from William Randolph Hearst's conduct just prior to the Spanish American War. I wouldn't be surprised if the Soviets picked up a few tidbits from Creel's work.
It is also interesting that Pascal did not mention Orwell's 1984 which is the classic description of propaganda in action. That story is becoming especially spooky with reports of the UK having the largest scale deployment of public surveillance cameras.
IIRC, the Atlas V uses a more conventional structure similar to the Thor (now Delta).
A dad of one of my friend's from high school worked on the Atlas in the early days and had a few stories to tell. One story was how TI got into volume production of silicon transistors - Convair wanted a bunch, TI said they couldn't make that many, and the Air Force said build a plant to make them - the Minuteman project later jump started the IC business.
Still amazing to see a design as old as I am still in use.
He's stated a couple of times that cdrecord is developed under Solaris, then ported to Linux and other Unix and Unix-like OS's. While his SCSI over ATA may be baroque, it does have the advantage of being portable and consistent over the various flavors of Unix (as opposed to being convenient to use on Linux and a real pain on non-Linux environments).
Schily is not a big fan of the GNU tools - he makes very rude noises about GNU tar (especially when comparing it with his own star (Schily TAR). Doesn't surprise me that he doesn't like GNU make either.
He's got some strongly held opinions (which is completely unlike such gents as Stallman or de Radt) but also has considerable technical skill to bring into discussions.
Ownership of radios have been frequently forbidden by oppressive regimes (e.g. North Korea, Germany under Hitler, the U.S under Wilson). If you haven't been paying attention, your right to own non-DRM'ed radios or TV's are being threatened by the *AA's.
Wonder if the typical slashdotter is starting to get the picture of why the NRA gets wigged out when gun registration is mentioned??? Besides, would XM turn over their customer list if some scumbag lawyer asked for it?
This is the most intelligent post on the issue of re-licensing - basically ain't gonna happen for exactly the reasons you gave.
I also wrote to Wildstrom stating that the GPL was not as anti-commerce as he made it out to be. Another point made to him was that it would be very unlikely that Linux would ever go off the GPL due to the logistics of getting approval from all of those who contributed code.
The GPL should be easy for business types to understand - it is a way for authors of code to protect their investment.
Based on my experience corresponding with him, I'd say Wildstrom does have a clue - though I disagree with the premise of his column. I did respond to his column a couple of days after it came out (surprised it to /. this long to pick it up) - stating among other things that the GPL vs BSD license debate was probably a minor consideration in Apple's basing OS-X on BSD as opposed to Linux.
I also stated that Linux switching to a different license (away from GPL) wasn't going to happen if for no other reason than getting all of the author's to agree would be a logistical nightmare.
Tell them that the ship is a haven for file-swappers.
The people are being sued are thought to be guilty by the RIAA. As someone else pointed out, "guilt" is a matter of a criminal case, the operative word in a civil case is "responsible". Either way, that determination is made by the jury, not the accuser.
What the uproar is about is that people whom the RIAA suspects of engaging in copyright infringement are being asked to either pay $3,000 now or a lot more in legal fees if they don't cave in. Since the RIAA has a lot more resources to put into the legal case than Joe Sixpack, there is a legitimate concern that "justice" depends more on who has the most money for lawyers rather than the merits of the respective cases.
There is a legal saying that it is better to let 10 murderers go free than to hang one innocent man. Similarly, it does society a lot more harm to have one innocent person go through the legal hell of being served with a ungrounded lawsuit than to have a dozen file-sharers get off scot-free.
I have yet to see a person capable of uploading songs to the internet - people typically use computers for that.
What you probably meant to say was that the RIAA (or minions thereof) directly "observe" downloading from what purportedly your computer - presumably ID'ed through IP addresses. Some caveats:
Was that IP address really routed to your computer?
Was the functionality for uploading done with your authorization or knowledge? Not totally out of the question that your box could have been 0wn3d.
Not all the geeks on slashdot are computer geeks - I'll bet there are a fair number who like seeing what they can do with deflagrating granules used to push pieces of lead/antimony alloy wrapped in gilding metal down tubes made of 4140 alloy.
You comment still holds true for people living in areas where the truck and car speed limits are the same. FWIW, Calif's 55 MPH limit for trucks is probably why the Nixon administration settled on 55, not 50 for the "temporary speed limit".
Lessee, at least 4 people killed a couple of days ago in Wyoming due to among other things, speeding trucks.
As long as I'm on a roll - we could make great strides in highway safety by requiring all trucks to carry speed recorders - that would involve less infringement on rights than what the RIAA is doing.
Obviously you don't live in California.
Speed limit for trucks/autos with trailers: 55 MPH
Speed limits for cars can be 65 or 70 MPH
The OP had a very good point, that the speeding 18-wheeler tailgating him is much more a threat to society than someone offering music for downloading.
In case you haven't got it through your thick head, any time the courst are involved, there is the possibility of deadly force being involved (police, marshalls and bailiffs are known to carry and use guns). People have been killed in police raids based on bogus evidence.
The other aspect is that with few exceptions (such as the one covered in the article), judges have not paid attention to the issues of racketeering and extortion.
Case in point, Lewis Kaplan, who ruled against 2600 magazine - refused to recuse himself even though it affected his former employer - something that Richard Nixon had the integrity to do wrt Penn Central's bankruptcy.
Stupid git.
ISTR that it is a bit over 40,000 feet. What you would want is something like a scaled up RB-57F.
Second, remember the trig identity cos(at)cos(bt) = 1/2(cos((a+b)t) + cos((a-b)t).
Thirdly, remember Heisenberg. If you know the photon's frequency exactly, then you have no knowledge of the position (which implies no knowledge of time of arrival). Modulation puts constraints on time, hence position, which then prohibits the photon from having an exact frequency.
We do. Ever hear of channels? Wavelength division multiplexing is nothing more than channelization (as in radio/TV) done at optical frequencies. Instead of channels being 10 kHz wide (AM), 200 kHz (FM) or 6 MHz (TV), the channels are ten's to hundred's of GHz wide.
Go find a copy of the ARRL Handbook and read up the chapter on modulation - you obviously aren't comprehending the basics of modulation.
From what I've read, "turbo-codes" are capable of getting within 0.5dB of the Shannon limit.
While radio propagation is indeed done with photons, they are of such low energy that radio can be treated as a continuum. If you want to get down and dirty about photons, then you will run nto Heisenberg's indeterminancy principle (the original German term translates into indeterminant, not uncertain) in which you have the choice of determining frequency or position (phase) but not both.
As for QAM, there are a couple of ways of doing it - one is to split a carrier into two components where one is phase shifted 90 degrees from the other (hence quadrature), amplitude modulating each of the components and then combing them, the result being a signal where both amplitude and phase are significant (this can be digitally) - and a brute force method would be direct phase modulation followed by amplitude modulation.
BTW, this is closely related to what I do for a living...
There is one other benfit, and that may be what Doc Ruby was trying to get across, that the phased array is capable of multiple simulatneous "beams".
Phased array antennas have been around for a long time - AM broadcasters have been using them since the 30's (if not the 20's). Heck, a yagi antenna is nothing more than passive phased array antenna. What is new is electronic steering and tracking.
Getting good performance from a phased array requires tight control of the phase and amplitude for the whole system, and depending on where the phase and amplitude are varied, may require a much larger dynamic range than needed by a simple directional antenna. For what it is worth, I've recently been involved with a project using audio frequency gradiometers - the first attempt was with using digital subtraction (akin to a phased array) - but we ended up using a wired connection (akin to a fixed antenna) because of insufficient dynamic range.
He isn't completely off base. QAM uses a combination of phase and amplitude to encode information.
A key point about QAM - in order to detect the extra information, you need a better signal-to-noise ratio than with a simpler form of modulation (you get some of it from a narrower bandwidth). There are no magical modulation schemes that will get you past the limit set by Nyquist and Shannon.
If I wanted to take out a CDMA base station (at least for receive) it would be a simple matter of pointing an antenna at the station and either:
1) Transmit white noise in the receive bandwidth of the base station and of an intensity a few dB higher than what it expects from the mobile units.
2) Transmit a very loud single frequency (loud enought to overcome the spreading gain)
Needless to say, doing either will lead to some nasty run-ins with the FCC (or equivalent regulatory body).
My point is that in radio waves there are really two frequencies.
Sounds like you are thinking about the carrier and sidebands for AM (things are even more complicated for FM). Single sideband (SSB) can be thought of as translating the baseband signal to any arbitrary frequency (say 0-3kHz to 14,200-14,203 kHz).