Near the beginning of the article, there were a couple of references to Fourier analysis being ill-equipped to deal with transient components in signals. It also mentions this being related to the Heisengberg Uncertainty Principle...
My first impression when they mentioned "transients" and "crappy" was the Gibbs phenomenon. Is this what they were talking about, and more importantly, is the Gibbs phenomenon caused by the H.U.P.?
I apologize if this point has already been made below my 3 browse threshold, but...
It looks like sweet paranoid FUD continues to flow from the mouths of lawyers and the slashdot community... sigh
How many of you actually read the ~25 page pdf? Don't trust the summaries!!! Ack!
Anyways, my point is, they're not going to ban linking, in the traditional sense. They're not banning the use of thumbnails. Thumbnails were deemed to be fair use of the copyrighted material, due to sufficient transformation of the material in both form and intent of use. However what the judge has said is that inline linking of copyrighted content is a no-no; i.e. displaying works outside of the context of the copyright holders' intent is illegal. This is justified, IMHO.
The way I see it is analogous to television. Imagine that tv station WABC was rebroadcasting WXYZ's copyrighted content without their consent, taking out WXYZ's commericials and sticking in their own. This situation is no different. You've got a stream of information available on a publically accessible medium, which is being retransmitted by another entity. Try and tell me that this is not a violation of the law.
On the converse, if this decision does get reversed, could one not argue that I could retransmit major league baseball games without "express written consent", and instead go on "implied aural consent" since they've made it freely available to me?
There's a lot of people who question the motives of U.S. politicians constantly. IMHO, the main reason for this is how much money it takes to be elected to federal office in the U.S., and the fact that tons of that money comes from corporations.
Check out this amazing site to see what I'm talking about. I know some people might say I sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but I sincerely believe that big business controls the U.S. government.
For a current example, we only need to look at how Pres. Bush has done thus far; one of the first things we heard about in his term was opening up federally protected land in Alaska to oil exploration. More recently, we saw the federal government stand by and watch while California experienced a horrendous energy crisis, and the energy companies made a killing. For those who don't know, Bush is from the state of Texas, where several large oil and energy companies are headquartered. These statistics show that during the presidential campaign, energy interests(oil & gas, electric utilities, coal, etc.) gave Bush $2.9 million dollars for his campaign. They gave Gore $325,000... I'd say their investment has already paid off handsomely...
Canada's reputation for answering the call of the internation community in times of need has been going downhill for over 10 years now, as our military falls further and further into decline. It's a sad, sad state of affairs. I mean, it's to the point now where we cannot rely on our own coast guard for search and rescue, due to the decrepit fleet of Sea King helicopters they've been flying for over thirty years. Do you not think that the country with the longest coastline in the world should have an adequate means of peforming these duties!? I agree that since the start of the cold war, we've been under the protective umbrella of the DEW line (later NORAD) and the U.S. in general, but they needed our strategic position guarding the northern polar route as much as we needed them.
arrr...
and another thing. CANDU reactors can burn plutonium. It hasn't been in the news lately, but do you recall the plan to burn surplus Russian and American MOX fuel (95% uranium oxide, 5% plutonium oxide) in CANDU reactors? Check out this info page at the Atomic Energy Canada Limited website. The project update from January 22, 2001 refers to burning MOX with 3% and 5% weapons-grade plutonium content. The idea is to actually eliminate all this surplus fissile material which resulted from the START treaties and their ilk.
holy crap.. everybody uses Halliday & Resnick (& Walker, too, I think)...:) I used the 5th edition a couple of years ago, and I know people who are using the 6th now... those guys must be so crazy rich...
In the summer i took a numerical methods course using "Introduction to Numerical Methods and MATLAB: Implementations and Applications" by Recktenwald. If you can use procedural languages, you can read/write Matlab scripts. I'd give the link to the course website, but the prof changes the password every term; it's a damn shame, too. He's a fellow of the IEEE, really smart guy. Had good course notes.
combine the hierarchical structure of the directory tree with the visual clarity (for simple (L)users) of the desktop by showing every directory as a desktop, with proper icons for navigating around
Funny, that sounds suspiciously like running 'My Computer' maximized in Windows...
IMHO, one thing that's been lost in this discussion is the distinction between data and applications. i think that the metaphor of a filing cabinet for hierarchical data organization is ideal. "Hi Joe L. User. This is your hard drive. It's like a filing cabinet. It contains file folders. Some ubergeeks will call them 'directories', but they're folders. Folders contain documents, or other folders. Get it?"
>90% of people understand this, because there is a 1:1 mapping in their brain of "Filing Cabinet" -> "Hard Drive", "File Folder" -> "Directory", "Invoice" -> "Invoice.doc"
People start getting messed up when you try explain how programs exist on the hard drive, the same way documents do. The document represents a physical thing in the user's mind. They can print it out and hold it in their hands. The program is an action. It's something the user does, not something the user has. You can't print MS Word (well, technically, I guess you could...)
what I'm getting at here is that I think more of a distinction needs to be made between the "data space" and the "applications space" on a computer. most people don't need to know what is in '/etc/bin'. they just need an "applications" or "start menu" button with symlinks to those programs. complete separation of functional behaviour from implementation details. OTOH, people do need to understand '/home/userjl', but the funny part is, they can understand that. it's meaningful to them, where 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\WinWord.exe' just isn't.
the process you have just described is called "the scientific method" by most. it is a well-established and respected system whereby scientists make hypotheses, and then perform experiments to test them. it's been working pretty damn well for the past couple of hundred years.
the only unfortunate part is that astrophysicists can't schedule and perform their "experiments" whenever they like. they have to keep their eyes open for whenever nature decides to show off some of it's wonders.
The challenge of producing chips with smaller and smaller feature sizes is the difficulty in using photolithographic techniques effectively.
Photolithography is how IC's are made. The process is kind of similar to silk-screening. Masks of the various layers of the chips are made. Chemicals are deposited on the surface of the chip. Light is shone through one of the masks, and focused with lenses onto the chip. The chemicals react to exposure to light, so the portions of the layer of chemicals on the chip that were exposed to light through the mask are now different from the dark masked sections. Depending on the process, now, either the light- or dark-exposed chemicals can be etched away with acid, leaving the oppositely-exposed regions intact. This is done repeatedly to lay out components and interconnections on chips.
The hard part in reducing feature sizes is that the wavelength of the light being used becomes a limiting factor in size reduction. Decreasing the wavelength to x-ray scales can do funny things to previously effective techniques of masking and focusing, due to refraction and other effects. These are the areas currently under research by chip makers, using techniques like xray and electron-beam lithography to allow further decreases in feature size.
arrr... yet another misinterpretation of Moore's Law...
Moore's Law - (moo-urhz lah) n. 1.Famous statement by Intel founder Gordon Moore. Moore predicted that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every 18 months. See here.
Moore's law says nothing about the number of transistors per unit area doubling every 18 months. Only transistors per IC; and a Pentium IV is a hell of a lot bigger than a 4004.
The result has meant that everyone who has switched over to Outlook shares an addressbook which lists EVERYONE in the organisation (1000's of people).
This is not at all uncommon. In one of my previous co-op placements, I worked for an Ontario provincial government ministry. The entire provincial government here runs on Outlook/Exchange. Everybody uses the master provincial gov. address book, with 20,000+ users listed. I was working there when LoveBug.vbs was making the rounds. Our email was down for 2 1/2 days. I'm not joking.
Right now I'm on another co-op workterm, and our email is on Lotus Notes. Distributed over four different address books I currently have access to over 197,000 internal email addresses. How about them apples? Even if we assume that 40-50% of those are inactive/invalid address which haven't been removed for some reason, that's still over 100,000 email addresses. Any spammers out there want some fresh meat?
yes, i know, in real world terms, it's very impractical to expect the world to just give up on the x86 architecture, but really, it's so friggin needed. Moore et. al. must have really had something against registers, because damn that setup sucks ginormous ass.
btw, i'm totally biased, having first learned about architectures on motorola. after being priveleged enough to have the ability to play with 8 DR's and 8 AR's, the first time i started reading about intel architecture, i just about shit. segment addresses? wtf? CS? DS? why do you want to hurt me, gordon moore? why?
A hell of a lot of people around here are complaining about "I don't need certification to write software. I've got ten years experience, blah blah blah.", and they're right, if they're just writing plain-jane software. It's the same thing for people who have talked about how "I don't need to be an EE to tinker with my radio.". They're correct as well. Hell, they could try and build themselves a radio from scratch if they wanted (although the governing certification body in your country might not like it).
The point is, none of these systems are life-critical. You don't need an S.E. to write vi, or pine, or Word. Any asshole can do that. The point of S.E. university programs, IMHO, is so these software designers understand more than just how to bash out code in their procedural-/OO-/data-oriented language of choice. They're also learning about tons of other stuff regarding how physical systems work. That's the difference. I think the goal of this whole Certified/Licensed S.E. movement isn't one of elistism, or more reliable commercial products. It's so that when you need autopilot control software, or nuclear reactor control software, or ATC software, you can get someone with high-quality qualifications.
And to finish off my rant, I'd like to point out that the difference between tinkering with a radio, or building one from drawings, and designing one from nothing is huge. Do you think that all EE students do is play with wires and power supplies? or all that CE students do is fsck around with PCB's and IC's and see how they work together? jesus... well, next time somebody needs a 60,000 HP induction motor or an ASIC, I guess we can tell them that the geniuses as slashdot figure that since they've played with a few induction coils and know how to use a soldering iron, they're qualified. likewise, I'm sure they all know everything about programming that a CS or SE does. they'll tell us all about algorithm analysis, and design patterns, and data structures.
This is a really cool idea, and I can totally see musicians who don't get "discovered" or are disillusioned with the recording industry totally going this way now, and more so in the near future.
Street Cents, a show on CBC (yeah, I know, 90% of you don't get CBC) had a show a while back about these high school kids in Halifax who set up a recording studio business in their basement. It was pretty impressive.
Unfortunately, as parent poster proficiently pointed out, marketing is the problem. Specifically, radio. Radio is what sells records, and payola is as much alive today as it was way back before "New Year's Rockin' Eve" was even a twinkle in Dick Clarks' eye. His eyes were too busy being used along with his fingers to count all his "investment income". The only difference between then and now is that it's not DJ's who see the big bucks, but the executives who run the giganticmediaconglomerates.:(
For the uninitiated
on
Clockless Chips
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Race condition - An aspect of asynchronous sequential logic design. When a change in input causes two or more flipflops (latches) to change state. This is a race.
This change in input creates instability in the system, as all logic elements affected by the input change undergo state transitions. If the resulting stable state at the output end of the logic block is the same no matter what, it's a noncritical race. However, in some cases the output can settle in different stable states depending on the order of the flipflop state transitions within the circuit. This is called a critical race, and it is a bad thing.
Critical races mean we can't predict what the output of a circuit will be given an initial state and an input value. Therefore, the circuit is worthless.
yeah, probably. ET was too busy building spaceships and death rays.
on the eve of armageddon, we'll all be hearing "bwa ha ha ha! foolish humans! what have your prime numbers brought you? nothing! you have wasted your precious resources, and now you will pay the ultimate price! except for you, Linus, you've got some good ideas..."
and not the GWB kind of justice. It's pretty sad to see when a person with one of the brightest minds in the world have such a complete lack of ethical values.
I really shouldn't be that surprised. It's not like people with PhD's are immune to being ignorant theiving bastards. I guess this guy just decided he wasn't ready to be a full-blown evil genius quite yet; figured he better start with something small, and then work his way up to taking over the world.
OTOH, look at the number of liability lawsuits currently underway, particularly in the U.S.
frankly, there are days when it seems to me that they should start teaching kids in elementary school how to write legally-binding disclaimer statements. not only for liability, but probably also for protection regarding ficticious works. recall the kids who have been punished for writing stories their teachers found offensive (i.e. relating to school shootings). was it appropriate? probably not. are there more appropriate ways to deal with this kind of thing? probably... but at this point, I'm waayyy off topic, so I'll shut up.
I'm concerned about a lack of motivation on the part of our sales team in really pressing the benefits of XP,.NET, and the evil of Linux on our customers. As you know, Linux is the threat to our business, and we need all the wins we can get.
That's why I think we need to take a more agressive stance in our internal communications with our sales people. Starting today, I'm authorizing you to initialize Operation Ink. The main thrust of this operation is:
To make all staff aware that losses to our filthy Linux competitors will result in immediate butt-tatooing. Failure is not an option here people, and it will result in harsh, painful posterior inking of anyone who drops the ball. Staff should also be aware of the possibility of tatoo's being done by myself personally, with the additional possibility of sodomy.
Please make sure that all staff are made immediately aware of this new corporate policy, Brian. I mean it. Don't make me subject you to "discipline".
wow, what a remarkably horrible website. That's funny... I live like, five minutes from there... in Canada. That's right... Brits and Yanks alike owe modern espionage to the mighty Canadians... bwa ha ha ha...
Slashdot Mirror
My first impression when they mentioned "transients" and "crappy" was the Gibbs phenomenon. Is this what they were talking about, and more importantly, is the Gibbs phenomenon caused by the H.U.P.?
It looks like sweet paranoid FUD continues to flow from the mouths of lawyers and the slashdot community... sigh
How many of you actually read the ~25 page pdf? Don't trust the summaries!!! Ack!
Anyways, my point is, they're not going to ban linking, in the traditional sense. They're not banning the use of thumbnails. Thumbnails were deemed to be fair use of the copyrighted material, due to sufficient transformation of the material in both form and intent of use. However what the judge has said is that inline linking of copyrighted content is a no-no; i.e. displaying works outside of the context of the copyright holders' intent is illegal. This is justified, IMHO.
The way I see it is analogous to television. Imagine that tv station WABC was rebroadcasting WXYZ's copyrighted content without their consent, taking out WXYZ's commericials and sticking in their own. This situation is no different. You've got a stream of information available on a publically accessible medium, which is being retransmitted by another entity. Try and tell me that this is not a violation of the law.
On the converse, if this decision does get reversed, could one not argue that I could retransmit major league baseball games without "express written consent", and instead go on "implied aural consent" since they've made it freely available to me?
Check out this amazing site to see what I'm talking about. I know some people might say I sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but I sincerely believe that big business controls the U.S. government.
For a current example, we only need to look at how Pres. Bush has done thus far; one of the first things we heard about in his term was opening up federally protected land in Alaska to oil exploration. More recently, we saw the federal government stand by and watch while California experienced a horrendous energy crisis, and the energy companies made a killing. For those who don't know, Bush is from the state of Texas, where several large oil and energy companies are headquartered. These statistics show that during the presidential campaign, energy interests(oil & gas, electric utilities, coal, etc.) gave Bush $2.9 million dollars for his campaign. They gave Gore $325,000... I'd say their investment has already paid off handsomely...
arrr...
and another thing. CANDU reactors can burn plutonium. It hasn't been in the news lately, but do you recall the plan to burn surplus Russian and American MOX fuel (95% uranium oxide, 5% plutonium oxide) in CANDU reactors? Check out this info page at the Atomic Energy Canada Limited website. The project update from January 22, 2001 refers to burning MOX with 3% and 5% weapons-grade plutonium content. The idea is to actually eliminate all this surplus fissile material which resulted from the START treaties and their ilk.
In the summer i took a numerical methods course using "Introduction to Numerical Methods and MATLAB: Implementations and Applications" by Recktenwald. If you can use procedural languages, you can read/write Matlab scripts. I'd give the link to the course website, but the prof changes the password every term; it's a damn shame, too. He's a fellow of the IEEE, really smart guy. Had good course notes.
Funny, that sounds suspiciously like running 'My Computer' maximized in Windows...
IMHO, one thing that's been lost in this discussion is the distinction between data and applications. i think that the metaphor of a filing cabinet for hierarchical data organization is ideal. "Hi Joe L. User. This is your hard drive. It's like a filing cabinet. It contains file folders. Some ubergeeks will call them 'directories', but they're folders. Folders contain documents, or other folders. Get it?"
>90% of people understand this, because there is a 1:1 mapping in their brain of "Filing Cabinet" -> "Hard Drive", "File Folder" -> "Directory", "Invoice" -> "Invoice.doc"
People start getting messed up when you try explain how programs exist on the hard drive, the same way documents do. The document represents a physical thing in the user's mind. They can print it out and hold it in their hands. The program is an action. It's something the user does, not something the user has. You can't print MS Word (well, technically, I guess you could...)
what I'm getting at here is that I think more of a distinction needs to be made between the "data space" and the "applications space" on a computer. most people don't need to know what is in '/etc/bin'. they just need an "applications" or "start menu" button with symlinks to those programs. complete separation of functional behaviour from implementation details. OTOH, people do need to understand '/home/userjl', but the funny part is, they can understand that. it's meaningful to them, where 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\WinWord.exe' just isn't.
the only unfortunate part is that astrophysicists can't schedule and perform their "experiments" whenever they like. they have to keep their eyes open for whenever nature decides to show off some of it's wonders.
GNUniverse's Not (the) Universe
Photolithography is how IC's are made. The process is kind of similar to silk-screening. Masks of the various layers of the chips are made. Chemicals are deposited on the surface of the chip. Light is shone through one of the masks, and focused with lenses onto the chip. The chemicals react to exposure to light, so the portions of the layer of chemicals on the chip that were exposed to light through the mask are now different from the dark masked sections. Depending on the process, now, either the light- or dark-exposed chemicals can be etched away with acid, leaving the oppositely-exposed regions intact. This is done repeatedly to lay out components and interconnections on chips.
The hard part in reducing feature sizes is that the wavelength of the light being used becomes a limiting factor in size reduction. Decreasing the wavelength to x-ray scales can do funny things to previously effective techniques of masking and focusing, due to refraction and other effects. These are the areas currently under research by chip makers, using techniques like xray and electron-beam lithography to allow further decreases in feature size.
Moore's Law - (moo-urhz lah) n. 1.Famous statement by Intel founder Gordon Moore. Moore predicted that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every 18 months. See here.
Moore's law says nothing about the number of transistors per unit area doubling every 18 months. Only transistors per IC; and a Pentium IV is a hell of a lot bigger than a 4004.
This is not at all uncommon. In one of my previous co-op placements, I worked for an Ontario provincial government ministry. The entire provincial government here runs on Outlook/Exchange. Everybody uses the master provincial gov. address book, with 20,000+ users listed. I was working there when LoveBug.vbs was making the rounds. Our email was down for 2 1/2 days. I'm not joking.
Right now I'm on another co-op workterm, and our email is on Lotus Notes. Distributed over four different address books I currently have access to over 197,000 internal email addresses. How about them apples? Even if we assume that 40-50% of those are inactive/invalid address which haven't been removed for some reason, that's still over 100,000 email addresses. Any spammers out there want some fresh meat?
ha ha ha... corporatism is the most basic American value.
yes, i know, in real world terms, it's very impractical to expect the world to just give up on the x86 architecture, but really, it's so friggin needed. Moore et. al. must have really had something against registers, because damn that setup sucks ginormous ass.
btw, i'm totally biased, having first learned about architectures on motorola. after being priveleged enough to have the ability to play with 8 DR's and 8 AR's, the first time i started reading about intel architecture, i just about shit. segment addresses? wtf? CS? DS? why do you want to hurt me, gordon moore? why?
A hell of a lot of people around here are complaining about "I don't need certification to write software. I've got ten years experience, blah blah blah.", and they're right, if they're just writing plain-jane software. It's the same thing for people who have talked about how "I don't need to be an EE to tinker with my radio.". They're correct as well. Hell, they could try and build themselves a radio from scratch if they wanted (although the governing certification body in your country might not like it).
The point is, none of these systems are life-critical. You don't need an S.E. to write vi, or pine, or Word. Any asshole can do that. The point of S.E. university programs, IMHO, is so these software designers understand more than just how to bash out code in their procedural-/OO-/data-oriented language of choice. They're also learning about tons of other stuff regarding how physical systems work. That's the difference. I think the goal of this whole Certified/Licensed S.E. movement isn't one of elistism, or more reliable commercial products. It's so that when you need autopilot control software, or nuclear reactor control software, or ATC software, you can get someone with high-quality qualifications.
And to finish off my rant, I'd like to point out that the difference between tinkering with a radio, or building one from drawings, and designing one from nothing is huge. Do you think that all EE students do is play with wires and power supplies? or all that CE students do is fsck around with PCB's and IC's and see how they work together? jesus... well, next time somebody needs a 60,000 HP induction motor or an ASIC, I guess we can tell them that the geniuses as slashdot figure that since they've played with a few induction coils and know how to use a soldering iron, they're qualified. likewise, I'm sure they all know everything about programming that a CS or SE does. they'll tell us all about algorithm analysis, and design patterns, and data structures.
in conclusion, AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!
Further proof that Slashdot is a microcosm of society....
oh yeah, fritz post was here... :)
posters can't choose whether or not they want the [domain] added to their link, but users can turn the feature on or off in their preferences
Street Cents, a show on CBC (yeah, I know, 90% of you don't get CBC) had a show a while back about these high school kids in Halifax who set up a recording studio business in their basement. It was pretty impressive.
Unfortunately, as parent poster proficiently pointed out, marketing is the problem. Specifically, radio. Radio is what sells records, and payola is as much alive today as it was way back before "New Year's Rockin' Eve" was even a twinkle in Dick Clarks' eye. His eyes were too busy being used along with his fingers to count all his "investment income". The only difference between then and now is that it's not DJ's who see the big bucks, but the executives who run the gigantic media conglomerates. :(
This change in input creates instability in the system, as all logic elements affected by the input change undergo state transitions. If the resulting stable state at the output end of the logic block is the same no matter what, it's a noncritical race. However, in some cases the output can settle in different stable states depending on the order of the flipflop state transitions within the circuit. This is called a critical race, and it is a bad thing.
Critical races mean we can't predict what the output of a circuit will be given an initial state and an input value. Therefore, the circuit is worthless.
the SCSI bus is completely isolated from the main system bus, so transfers between two SCSI devices (i.e. hdd0 -> hdd1) can go alot faster.
"EYE triple-EEE"
yeah, probably. ET was too busy building spaceships and death rays.
on the eve of armageddon, we'll all be hearing "bwa ha ha ha! foolish humans! what have your prime numbers brought you? nothing! you have wasted your precious resources, and now you will pay the ultimate price! except for you, Linus, you've got some good ideas..."
I really shouldn't be that surprised. It's not like people with PhD's are immune to being ignorant theiving bastards. I guess this guy just decided he wasn't ready to be a full-blown evil genius quite yet; figured he better start with something small, and then work his way up to taking over the world.
frankly, there are days when it seems to me that they should start teaching kids in elementary school how to write legally-binding disclaimer statements. not only for liability, but probably also for protection regarding ficticious works. recall the kids who have been punished for writing stories their teachers found offensive (i.e. relating to school shootings). was it appropriate? probably not. are there more appropriate ways to deal with this kind of thing? probably... but at this point, I'm waayyy off topic, so I'll shut up.
To: Brian Valentine
Subject: Sales team motivation...
Brian,
I'm concerned about a lack of motivation on the part of our sales team in really pressing the benefits of XP, .NET, and the evil of Linux on our customers. As you know, Linux is the threat to our business, and we need all the wins we can get.
That's why I think we need to take a more agressive stance in our internal communications with our sales people. Starting today, I'm authorizing you to initialize Operation Ink. The main thrust of this operation is:
Please make sure that all staff are made immediately aware of this new corporate policy, Brian. I mean it. Don't make me subject you to "discipline".
-WG