My favorite "You did WHAT in perl?" response is: On several projects, when there were portability problems, I've created a Makefile entry that runs a "man foo" command and pipes the data to a perl script, which generates C files for that system. It's typically just header files, but sometimes also a few.c files with data structures and/or simple functions to intercede with variant library routines.
It's fun to watch people's reaction when they realize that "You wrote a perl script that reads the manual and generates the code?" I just respond something like "Uh, yeah; you got a problem with that?"
Especially fun has been the couple of discussions in which I expressed a great deal of skepticism of various "AI" claims. Then someone brings up the fact that I write perl programs that read English-language docs and generate code from them. They're obviously puzzled by the fact that I do this while looking skeptically at "AI" proposals. It's like they expect me to just shrug and write other impossible things in perl.
Maybe what Sun's trying is the old game of buying out the cheap competition, with the idea of simply shutting it down. And maybe they don't properly appreciate that MySQL's source is Out There.
But I'm a bit unclear on just how MySQL is licensed these days. Could Sun actually shut it down, take it off the market, and prevent previous users from continuing with it indefinitely? And is all the source really available, or will current users have to migrate to something else for their next machine if MySQL is no longer available?
Just curious. The legalities of such things can get confusing, until a court tells you what you're stuck with.
Hmmm... So it's really just a very poorly done visual pun. After all, as someone else pointed out, the icons really mean "image loading" (which I realize now is true), not "broken image". And there are big chunks of the image missing paint that aren't labelled, such as most of the left character's clothes. So this isn't "very clever", it's "rather lame".
Looking around at the rest of the series, I conclude that "rather lame" describes most of them. The best I could manage was a weak grin at the Mondrian painting with the HTML <TABLE> overlay, and even that one I'd call "lame".
That "very clever" Annunciation image is baffling. It's covered with white rectangles, each of which has a little icon in the upper left that looks like a "broken link" icon. But there's nothing active associated with the rectangles or the little icon. Clicking on various things gets nothing except the usual image menu, and that gets me another copy of the Annunciation.
It's not the browser, because I tried it on a number of different browsers from different sources, including Firefox, Opera, Safari, iCab and SeaMonkey. They all show the same thing, so presumably that's what's supposed to be on my screen.
But it doesn't seem at all clever; it's just baffling. And there's nothing resembling an explanation or other clue that I can find. What am I so non-geeky as to be missing here?
In contrast, a moderate sized asteroid has almost no gravity, but can be hollowed out, filled with air, and spun to provide the illusion of gravity relatively easily.
Actually, that's a rather poor engineering approach. Few if any asteroids are likely to have the tensile strength to be reliable when spun up to the 1/2 g or so that you'd want. Once you were settled down, suddenly the whole thing would bust up and go flying off in all directions. Actually, you probably wouldn't get a chance to settle down; filling it with air would probably produce a catastrophic failure before you even moved in.
The practical approach would be to mine an asteroid for raw materials, and use them to construct the sort of artificial "habitat" that sci-fi writers have been describing for decades. They'd probably be similar in size and shape to a lot of asteroids, but they'd be structurally sound.
Actually, some writers have suggested a sort of compromise: hollow out an asteroid, construct a structurally-sound habitat in the interior, and leave a few meters of rock as shielding from cosmic rays, incoming meteoroids, etc. But this is really just the same. The asteroid would contribute nothing to the structure except shielding. You could do the same by constructing the habitat, and then bolting on a thick layer of the leftover slag from the mining operation. The result would look like an asteroid, but wouldn't be one in any meaningful sense.
But you don't want to just hollow out an asteroid and start it spinning. You want to live in a habitat with a strong, solid structure. And that won't be found in nature; we'll have to build it.
(Others have suggested that it'd be better to mine comets. They tend to have lots of ice and gases, and those are very useful if you want to grow food. The problem is that the inner solar system has lots of asteroids but not very many comets. And the visiting comets tend to be in orbits that are expensive to get to. The closest asteroids with ice are around Jupiter.)
The Web was supposed to make information flow more freely.... Why is something as notionally simple as contact list transfer so technologically complicated that we actually consider it to be a great service to us when two giants like Microsoft and Facebook bless us with the ability to synchronize our contact information between them?
Well, the Web does make information flow easy - if both parties want the information to flow. I don't think any of us would approve of a Web that makes our information flow out to unknown parties without our permission. Would you?
And the Web has no control whatsoever of the format of data. Data is "just bits". There is Web software that understands a very few formats, such as plain text, HTML, GIF, PNG, JPEG, etc. But no useful network would have a way of blocking files in "unknown" formats. If a network could do that, we'd all be stuck with a few proprietary document formats that would be illegal for us to reverse engineer. Independent software development would be impossible. Most corporate development would even be impossible, because before you used any new format, you'd first have to get the bureaucracy to approve your format.
So we'll always have big players like Microsoft using their own private formats, and challenging the rest of us to reverse engineer them (and possibly suing us if we're successful). That's not a technical issue; it's a legal and political issue. The Web and the Internet must allow the transfer of data is arbitrary formats. In fact, they must allow encrypted data, or online commerce becomes impossible.
Whether data can be used by recipients isn't a Web/Internet question at all. It's a political, legal and economic question. If one party don't want their data to be usable by the competition, there's nothing that the Web can ever do about it. It has to be handled by either the courts or the Market.
That does kind of let you know that they don't intend you to control your own data, doesn't it?
Well, yes; but their policy is that it isn't your data, it's theirs. I've read quite a number of Microsoft EULAs, TOSs, and other pseudo-contracts that state explicitly in the fine print that any data placed on their servers becomes the property of Microsoft. To my knowledge, this hasn't been tested in the courts yet (though it'd be interesting to read of test cases), so it's possible that such terms are legal and enforcable.
I've also read a number of discussions of this in several fora that were concerned with "Intellectual Property". The primary example is: You're a poor, starving musician, and you don't want to sell your soul to a big corporation. You'd like to put your creations online and sell them directly to your fans. So how do you do this? Your ISP has a nice service where they'll create a web site for you; all you have to do is upload your files to their web server. But then you discover that the ISP is selling your files, and when you challenge them, they point to that little clause in their contract. When you uploaded your files, you were legally assigning the copyright to the ISP.
Note that msn.com (owned by Microsoft) was caught doing this a few years ago. They were extracting data, mostly images, from customers' files and using them commercially. When challenged, they responded exactly as above. Eventually they backed down - but they didn't change the contract language. Probably they've just become sneakier at appropriating customers' content for commercial use.
And we've recently heard a lot of people here on/. arguing that the comm companies own their wires, so they should be able to do anything they like with the data on the wires. It's apparently widely accepted that any of our data is the rightful property of any corporation that can get ahold of it. That's what the current Comcast investigation is all about, and so far the predictions are that Comcast will be allowed to do whatever they like with and to customers' communications.
If you don't like it, maybe you should be joining the fuss by talking to your local politicians. Unless we can get appropriate "clarifying" legislation, it's probably true that you don't own your own data, your ISP owns it.
Microsoft must be running for public office. Say one thing, do another.
Heh. Actually, they (i.e., their top officers) don't seem to be running for any public office. But they are giving a lot of "campaign contributions" (aka legal bribery) to politicians who are.
The textbook example is the 2000 US election. Before that, Microsoft had done very little in the way of financial support for politicians. In 2000, MS suddenly became one of the biggest corporate contributors. They mostly gave to republicans, including George Bush, but they also gave money to Democrats (just in case;-). After the election was over and Bush took office, the Justice Department quickly reversed course and settled the Microsoft case on terms that were very friendly to Microsoft.
Many observers seem to have made the observation that this was Microsoft's management had figuring out how US politics actually runs. And they've maintained their policy of giving since then. They've learned that campaign contributions are investments that often have a very large ROI.
Note that this isn't saying anything especially unusual about Microsoft. The unusual feature was their lack of political donations before 2000. They have really just joined the mainstream of the American corporate political culture.
If you have a few million spare US dollars, you can do the same.
So the solution is to package the liquid in a long, flexible straw, and then coil the straw up into the shape of a cup.
Clever, clever!
(Of course, we have had a number of cases where we did extensive research, and when someone finally found a simple solution to a problem, everyone who saw it said "That's obvious." This happened with things like the zipper, barbed wire, and the paper clip, all of which took decades of experimenting before someone stumbled across the simple way to do it. Simple solutions to problems are often much more difficult to see than complex solution.)
What I'm wondering is how much hotter than a "regularly black" panel one of these would become.
The wikipedia article others have linked to is a good intro. The brief summary: "Not much." This material would radiate the heat as a "black body". At ambient temperatures (275-300 K), this is in the far infrared, so you can't see it. You might be able to feel it, but the heat would be comparable to what you feel if you hold your hand in sunlight.
There is real potential for applications in light-gathering gadgets, such as solar-power equipment. We'll probably start hearing about them in a few years.
we all know that file extensions don't end with a slash, right..?
True, but directory pathnames do, and there's no reason that a directory's name can't contain a dot. I've seen a few sites that do this to categorize their files. Thus, for package foo, they might have a directory foo.html/ that contains the package's web pages, foo.jpeg/ that contains the package's images, and foo.pdf/ that contains the package's PDF files. Try it with your web server; you'll probably find that it works fine.
It's yet another reason that, back in the 1970s, the guys at Bell Labs that invented unix decided not to hard-code any suffix-to-type mappings. They were already dealing with networks of computers of mixed types, and had learned that you can't tell anything at all from a file's name. If you hard-code such knowledge into your file system, some perverse users of other systems will name their files in a way that your system misinterprets, and the only solution will be to rewrite part of your kernel. The only reliable way to determine file type is to examine the data. Any other clues (including HTTP headers and HTML META tags) can and often do lie about the data format.
This was rediscovered recently by the malware writers, who found that they could get their code into a lot of systems by merely putting a misleading suffix on a file name.
One of the fun parts of writing network code is all the web servers that send any unrecognized file suffixes as "Content-type: text/html". I've seen any number of network newbie programmers going through the throes of understanding that there's nothing at all you can do to make someone else's computer do this right, especially since some of them do it maliciously. All you can do is write code that's skeptical of such things, and tries to determine the actual format. Or you can write code that doesn't work right, which is easier (but doesn't work right;-).
We were working on a new internet thingy back in the day when everything on the internet was new, and there were about a half dozen or so developers, working on a couple of spiffy new Sun boxes via telnet over ssh.
So, where were you working back in 1982, where you had Sun boxes and ssh?
Curious minds want to know...
(Lots of us back then were already getting nervous about telnetting over the public Internet. We all knew that telnet sent user ids and passwords in the clear, and we all had line monitors that would show us the text in the packets. The security implications were obvious. I think most of us were disappointed that we couldn't get our hands on an encrypting version of telnet even in 1984. So if you had ssh then, someone was holding out on us.;-)
Was this a response to something that I wrote? If so, I have no clue as to what wikipedia article you might be talking about, obscure or otherwise. Maybe it'd help if in the future, you quote the bit of an article that you're replying to.
Intel/Microsoft can either help or hinder, but they have no sympathy from me if they continue to choose the latter.
Heh. I suspect that they don't much give a damn about your sympathy. They're after money, not sympathy. Their motive is to get their computers in use everywhere, in exchange for money. Your and my sympathy is somewhat irrelevant to this.
Negroponte in the past has all but ruled out selling the OLPC in America - because he intended the OLPC for 'poor nations'.
I keep seeing claims like this, but back when news of the OLPC was being designed, the reports mentioned the plan to make them available to school children in the US, too. I noticed partly because I live in one of the states that was mentioned as part of the "pilot" project, Massachusetts (where the OLPC project's leaders live).
So who is lying to me? Either the project intended to sell the OLPC in America from the first reports, or the people who wrote those reports were lying. Both claims can't be true. They can't have planned this from the start, and also just decided to do it.
I'd think that watermarks would be "broken" far before any case comes up in court. I'd expect a few curious programmers to collect several downloaded versions of the same recording, and compare them. They'd be mostly identical, and the fields that are different would be the data that identifies the specific files. It shouldn't take too much testing to figure out which of those fields can be safely randomized without damaging the music.
Of course, opening the file format via court records would be even more useful, and make programmers' jobs a lot easier.
Oh, sure, that works fine. It's how a lot of the long-lived space probes have been powered. In the inner solar system, solar cells are more practical, but as you pass Jupiter and Saturn, they deliver less and less power, so a chunk of radium or other radioisotopes works a lot better.
But I'm a bit dubious about the thought of a small nuclear power plant in the basements of my neighbors' homes...
By the way, "representative republic" is not a word; it's a phrase.
Heh; that's tellin' 'em.;-)
Some of my favorite grammar naziisms fall into this class. Thus, among linguists, one of the all-time favorite pop-ling tropes is "Language X has no word for Y". A while back, I ran across a claim that some language (I forget which one, but it doesn't matter) "has no word for free speech". My immediate reaction was "Neither does English; that's why we use two words." But I don't think that the author of the original claim appreciated my pointing this out.
Of course, this one was merely a paraphrase of Ronald Reagan's claim that Russian has no word for 'freedom', to which my immediate reaction was "Huh? What about 'svoboda'?" I also suspect that RR might not have thanked me if I'd been able to ask him that in person.
(And I often wish that slashdot allowed UTF-8 so I could spell Russian words correctly.;-)
Also, it appears RSA can be implemented in only 2 lines of Perl now!
Well, that's technical advance for you! I'll have to find that code. I expect it'll look like pure line noise. Also, I was being a bit generous with my original "4-line" description, since I counted the first #!/usr/bin/perl line, and that's not really what you could call perl code. Others only count it as three lines.
I did like the "-export-a-crypto-system-sig" comment in the original. Like many perl geeks, I have used it as a sig off and on over the years.
it is just that Lodz [we really need unicode here] is in Poland.
Heh. Both the US and Poland seem to be infested with "authorities" whose natural reaction is to blame the messenger rather than the people who should be responsible.
Of course, the kid needs a stern talking-to. But you'd think that anyone who has ever watched kids playing with toy trains, cars, transformers, etc would have the sense to understand that kids naturally repeat toy disasters over and over, often until the toys are damaged. A sensible adult would recognize this as typical juvenile behavior, to be handled with education rather than punishment. You don't really want to prevent kids from play-crashing toys (even big ones); doing that is shooting your future economy in the foot by stifling your budding engineers. You want to limit their play to toys that can't do any real harm.
The real criminals here are the people who set up the system so that a child can do unsupervised play with adult toys. Sorta like the people who keep their guns in containers that aren't child proof, or who don't install child-resistant latches on their floor-level kitchen cabinet doors (especially the ones under the sink where the child can find the bottles of toxic chemicals).
I wonder how the Polish authorities are treating the adults who run the tram system? I notice that the Reg's article makes no mention of that question.
How about using these in a water-heater sized device in your home.
I've seen this suggestion any number of times, often with snide comments about how engineers have missed something obvious. This usually causes some engineer to simply mention that there's a better way. No matter how your water heater is powered, it's always more efficient to add insulation to the water heater, and use the fuel that you save to directly power an electrical generator. This skips the stage of extracting power from the water heater's heat loss, and can thus extract more electricity from the fuel (or use less fuel to generate the same electricity).
Unfortunately for such schemes, it's only practical to extract energy from a heat gradient if the heat gradient is going to be there anyway. Then, if the extra weight isn't a problem, you might be able to use some of the heat you're losing to produce a small amount of electricity "for free" (i.e., at no additional fuel cost).
The effect has been known for a century... don't need to worry about classification!
Actually, at least here in the US, you probably should still worry about it being classified information.
For example, various historians have mentioned that the Rosenbergs were executed for giving "secrets" to the Russians that apparently were available in a number of college-level physics textbooks at the time.
Decades later (but still a few decades before today), I did an end-of-chapter exercise in a physics text that was something like: Using equations E and F from this chapter, and table T in appendix A, calculate the critical masses of the following isotopes.... There was an asterisk at the end, and the footnote said that telling any of the answers to a non-citizen was a felony under US law and listing the possible penalties (which included execution).
The US government's security agencies don't consider previous publication in school textbooks to be a restriction on their right to classify information.
For another example, google for RSA encryption. I have one of those t-shirts that has the 4-line perl implementation of RSA, and on the back "Warning: This t-shirt is a munition" plus a reference to the appropriate regulation. I never had the nerve to wear it to the airport on an international flight, though I did wear it to a number of techie meeting where there were non-citizens. I kept wishing someone would get arrested for wearing one, since the trial could have been entertaining. But I suppose now they wouldn't bother with a trial; you'd just disappear to an undisclosed location in an unstated country for a few years and then dropped off on a hillside in Macedonia when they're done with you.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm trying to put together a business model based on that idea.
;-)
Well, I think you might be a bit late with that.
But think of the good things that could be done with a free and open implementation.
OTOH, it's been more than 25 years since the first true distributed OS was announced, and the idea hasn't exactly taken the world by storm.
When do we get a FOSS runtime library for using this valuable public resource?
Imagine all the useful things we could do for the world if we all had access to this distributed computing power.
My favorite "You did WHAT in perl?" response is: On several projects, when there were portability problems, I've created a Makefile entry that runs a "man foo" command and pipes the data to a perl script, which generates C files for that system. It's typically just header files, but sometimes also a few .c files with data structures and/or simple functions to intercede with variant library routines.
It's fun to watch people's reaction when they realize that "You wrote a perl script that reads the manual and generates the code?" I just respond something like "Uh, yeah; you got a problem with that?"
Especially fun has been the couple of discussions in which I expressed a great deal of skepticism of various "AI" claims. Then someone brings up the fact that I write perl programs that read English-language docs and generate code from them. They're obviously puzzled by the fact that I do this while looking skeptically at "AI" proposals. It's like they expect me to just shrug and write other impossible things in perl.
Maybe what Sun's trying is the old game of buying out the cheap competition, with the idea of simply shutting it down. And maybe they don't properly appreciate that MySQL's source is Out There.
But I'm a bit unclear on just how MySQL is licensed these days. Could Sun actually shut it down, take it off the market, and prevent previous users from continuing with it indefinitely? And is all the source really available, or will current users have to migrate to something else for their next machine if MySQL is no longer available?
Just curious. The legalities of such things can get confusing, until a court tells you what you're stuck with.
Hmmm ... So it's really just a very poorly done visual pun. After all, as someone else pointed out, the icons really mean "image loading" (which I realize now is true), not "broken image". And there are big chunks of the image missing paint that aren't labelled, such as most of the left character's clothes. So this isn't "very clever", it's "rather lame".
Looking around at the rest of the series, I conclude that "rather lame" describes most of them. The best I could manage was a weak grin at the Mondrian painting with the HTML <TABLE> overlay, and even that one I'd call "lame".
Oh, well; onward to the next story.
That "very clever" Annunciation image is baffling. It's covered with white rectangles, each of which has a little icon in the upper left that looks like a "broken link" icon. But there's nothing active associated with the rectangles or the little icon. Clicking on various things gets nothing except the usual image menu, and that gets me another copy of the Annunciation.
It's not the browser, because I tried it on a number of different browsers from different sources, including Firefox, Opera, Safari, iCab and SeaMonkey. They all show the same thing, so presumably that's what's supposed to be on my screen.
But it doesn't seem at all clever; it's just baffling. And there's nothing resembling an explanation or other clue that I can find. What am I so non-geeky as to be missing here?
In contrast, a moderate sized asteroid has almost no gravity, but can be hollowed out, filled with air, and spun to provide the illusion of gravity relatively easily.
Actually, that's a rather poor engineering approach. Few if any asteroids are likely to have the tensile strength to be reliable when spun up to the 1/2 g or so that you'd want. Once you were settled down, suddenly the whole thing would bust up and go flying off in all directions. Actually, you probably wouldn't get a chance to settle down; filling it with air would probably produce a catastrophic failure before you even moved in.
The practical approach would be to mine an asteroid for raw materials, and use them to construct the sort of artificial "habitat" that sci-fi writers have been describing for decades. They'd probably be similar in size and shape to a lot of asteroids, but they'd be structurally sound.
Actually, some writers have suggested a sort of compromise: hollow out an asteroid, construct a structurally-sound habitat in the interior, and leave a few meters of rock as shielding from cosmic rays, incoming meteoroids, etc. But this is really just the same. The asteroid would contribute nothing to the structure except shielding. You could do the same by constructing the habitat, and then bolting on a thick layer of the leftover slag from the mining operation. The result would look like an asteroid, but wouldn't be one in any meaningful sense.
But you don't want to just hollow out an asteroid and start it spinning. You want to live in a habitat with a strong, solid structure. And that won't be found in nature; we'll have to build it.
(Others have suggested that it'd be better to mine comets. They tend to have lots of ice and gases, and those are very useful if you want to grow food. The problem is that the inner solar system has lots of asteroids but not very many comets. And the visiting comets tend to be in orbits that are expensive to get to. The closest asteroids with ice are around Jupiter.)
The Web was supposed to make information flow more freely. ... Why is something as notionally simple as contact list transfer so technologically complicated that we actually consider it to be a great service to us when two giants like Microsoft and Facebook bless us with the ability to synchronize our contact information between them?
Well, the Web does make information flow easy - if both parties want the information to flow. I don't think any of us would approve of a Web that makes our information flow out to unknown parties without our permission. Would you?
And the Web has no control whatsoever of the format of data. Data is "just bits". There is Web software that understands a very few formats, such as plain text, HTML, GIF, PNG, JPEG, etc. But no useful network would have a way of blocking files in "unknown" formats. If a network could do that, we'd all be stuck with a few proprietary document formats that would be illegal for us to reverse engineer. Independent software development would be impossible. Most corporate development would even be impossible, because before you used any new format, you'd first have to get the bureaucracy to approve your format.
So we'll always have big players like Microsoft using their own private formats, and challenging the rest of us to reverse engineer them (and possibly suing us if we're successful). That's not a technical issue; it's a legal and political issue. The Web and the Internet must allow the transfer of data is arbitrary formats. In fact, they must allow encrypted data, or online commerce becomes impossible.
Whether data can be used by recipients isn't a Web/Internet question at all. It's a political, legal and economic question. If one party don't want their data to be usable by the competition, there's nothing that the Web can ever do about it. It has to be handled by either the courts or the Market.
That does kind of let you know that they don't intend you to control your own data, doesn't it?
/. arguing that the comm companies own their wires, so they should be able to do anything they like with the data on the wires. It's apparently widely accepted that any of our data is the rightful property of any corporation that can get ahold of it. That's what the current Comcast investigation is all about, and so far the predictions are that Comcast will be allowed to do whatever they like with and to customers' communications.
Well, yes; but their policy is that it isn't your data, it's theirs. I've read quite a number of Microsoft EULAs, TOSs, and other pseudo-contracts that state explicitly in the fine print that any data placed on their servers becomes the property of Microsoft. To my knowledge, this hasn't been tested in the courts yet (though it'd be interesting to read of test cases), so it's possible that such terms are legal and enforcable.
I've also read a number of discussions of this in several fora that were concerned with "Intellectual Property". The primary example is: You're a poor, starving musician, and you don't want to sell your soul to a big corporation. You'd like to put your creations online and sell them directly to your fans. So how do you do this? Your ISP has a nice service where they'll create a web site for you; all you have to do is upload your files to their web server. But then you discover that the ISP is selling your files, and when you challenge them, they point to that little clause in their contract. When you uploaded your files, you were legally assigning the copyright to the ISP.
Note that msn.com (owned by Microsoft) was caught doing this a few years ago. They were extracting data, mostly images, from customers' files and using them commercially. When challenged, they responded exactly as above. Eventually they backed down - but they didn't change the contract language. Probably they've just become sneakier at appropriating customers' content for commercial use.
And we've recently heard a lot of people here on
If you don't like it, maybe you should be joining the fuss by talking to your local politicians. Unless we can get appropriate "clarifying" legislation, it's probably true that you don't own your own data, your ISP owns it.
Microsoft must be running for public office. Say one thing, do another.
;-). After the election was over and Bush took office, the Justice Department quickly reversed course and settled the Microsoft case on terms that were very friendly to Microsoft.
Heh. Actually, they (i.e., their top officers) don't seem to be running for any public office. But they are giving a lot of "campaign contributions" (aka legal bribery) to politicians who are.
The textbook example is the 2000 US election. Before that, Microsoft had done very little in the way of financial support for politicians. In 2000, MS suddenly became one of the biggest corporate contributors. They mostly gave to republicans, including George Bush, but they also gave money to Democrats (just in case
Many observers seem to have made the observation that this was Microsoft's management had figuring out how US politics actually runs. And they've maintained their policy of giving since then. They've learned that campaign contributions are investments that often have a very large ROI.
Note that this isn't saying anything especially unusual about Microsoft. The unusual feature was their lack of political donations before 2000. They have really just joined the mainstream of the American corporate political culture.
If you have a few million spare US dollars, you can do the same.
So the solution is to package the liquid in a long, flexible straw, and then coil the straw up into the shape of a cup.
Clever, clever!
(Of course, we have had a number of cases where we did extensive research, and when someone finally found a simple solution to a problem, everyone who saw it said "That's obvious." This happened with things like the zipper, barbed wire, and the paper clip, all of which took decades of experimenting before someone stumbled across the simple way to do it. Simple solutions to problems are often much more difficult to see than complex solution.)
What I'm wondering is how much hotter than a "regularly black" panel one of these would become.
The wikipedia article others have linked to is a good intro. The brief summary: "Not much." This material would radiate the heat as a "black body". At ambient temperatures (275-300 K), this is in the far infrared, so you can't see it. You might be able to feel it, but the heat would be comparable to what you feel if you hold your hand in sunlight.
There is real potential for applications in light-gathering gadgets, such as solar-power equipment. We'll probably start hearing about them in a few years.
we all know that file extensions don't end with a slash, right..?
;-).
True, but directory pathnames do, and there's no reason that a directory's name can't contain a dot. I've seen a few sites that do this to categorize their files. Thus, for package foo, they might have a directory foo.html/ that contains the package's web pages, foo.jpeg/ that contains the package's images, and foo.pdf/ that contains the package's PDF files. Try it with your web server; you'll probably find that it works fine.
It's yet another reason that, back in the 1970s, the guys at Bell Labs that invented unix decided not to hard-code any suffix-to-type mappings. They were already dealing with networks of computers of mixed types, and had learned that you can't tell anything at all from a file's name. If you hard-code such knowledge into your file system, some perverse users of other systems will name their files in a way that your system misinterprets, and the only solution will be to rewrite part of your kernel. The only reliable way to determine file type is to examine the data. Any other clues (including HTTP headers and HTML META tags) can and often do lie about the data format.
This was rediscovered recently by the malware writers, who found that they could get their code into a lot of systems by merely putting a misleading suffix on a file name.
One of the fun parts of writing network code is all the web servers that send any unrecognized file suffixes as "Content-type: text/html". I've seen any number of network newbie programmers going through the throes of understanding that there's nothing at all you can do to make someone else's computer do this right, especially since some of them do it maliciously. All you can do is write code that's skeptical of such things, and tries to determine the actual format. Or you can write code that doesn't work right, which is easier (but doesn't work right
We were working on a new internet thingy back in the day when everything on the internet was new, and there were about a half dozen or so developers, working on a couple of spiffy new Sun boxes via telnet over ssh.
...
;-)
So, where were you working back in 1982, where you had Sun boxes and ssh?
Curious minds want to know
(Lots of us back then were already getting nervous about telnetting over the public Internet. We all knew that telnet sent user ids and passwords in the clear, and we all had line monitors that would show us the text in the packets. The security implications were obvious. I think most of us were disappointed that we couldn't get our hands on an encrypting version of telnet even in 1984. So if you had ssh then, someone was holding out on us.
Was this a response to something that I wrote? If so, I have no clue as to what wikipedia article you might be talking about, obscure or otherwise. Maybe it'd help if in the future, you quote the bit of an article that you're replying to.
Intel/Microsoft can either help or hinder, but they have no sympathy from me if they continue to choose the latter.
Heh. I suspect that they don't much give a damn about your sympathy. They're after money, not sympathy. Their motive is to get their computers in use everywhere, in exchange for money. Your and my sympathy is somewhat irrelevant to this.
Negroponte in the past has all but ruled out selling the OLPC in America - because he intended the OLPC for 'poor nations'.
I keep seeing claims like this, but back when news of the OLPC was being designed, the reports mentioned the plan to make them available to school children in the US, too. I noticed partly because I live in one of the states that was mentioned as part of the "pilot" project, Massachusetts (where the OLPC project's leaders live).
So who is lying to me? Either the project intended to sell the OLPC in America from the first reports, or the people who wrote those reports were lying. Both claims can't be true. They can't have planned this from the start, and also just decided to do it.
I'd think that watermarks would be "broken" far before any case comes up in court. I'd expect a few curious programmers to collect several downloaded versions of the same recording, and compare them. They'd be mostly identical, and the fields that are different would be the data that identifies the specific files. It shouldn't take too much testing to figure out which of those fields can be safely randomized without damaging the music.
Of course, opening the file format via court records would be even more useful, and make programmers' jobs a lot easier.
Oh, sure, that works fine. It's how a lot of the long-lived space probes have been powered. In the inner solar system, solar cells are more practical, but as you pass Jupiter and Saturn, they deliver less and less power, so a chunk of radium or other radioisotopes works a lot better.
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But I'm a bit dubious about the thought of a small nuclear power plant in the basements of my neighbors' homes
At this moment in time, there's exactly one google match for "died in a barbecue accident". And also for "died in a haircut accident".
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There's gotta be a lot more
By the way, "representative republic" is not a word; it's a phrase.
;-)
;-)
Heh; that's tellin' 'em.
Some of my favorite grammar naziisms fall into this class. Thus, among linguists, one of the all-time favorite pop-ling tropes is "Language X has no word for Y". A while back, I ran across a claim that some language (I forget which one, but it doesn't matter) "has no word for free speech". My immediate reaction was "Neither does English; that's why we use two words." But I don't think that the author of the original claim appreciated my pointing this out.
Of course, this one was merely a paraphrase of Ronald Reagan's claim that Russian has no word for 'freedom', to which my immediate reaction was "Huh? What about 'svoboda'?" I also suspect that RR might not have thanked me if I'd been able to ask him that in person.
(And I often wish that slashdot allowed UTF-8 so I could spell Russian words correctly.
Also, it appears RSA can be implemented in only 2 lines of Perl now!
Well, that's technical advance for you! I'll have to find that code. I expect it'll look like pure line noise. Also, I was being a bit generous with my original "4-line" description, since I counted the first #!/usr/bin/perl line, and that's not really what you could call perl code. Others only count it as three lines.
I did like the "-export-a-crypto-system-sig" comment in the original. Like many perl geeks, I have used it as a sig off and on over the years.
Heh. Both the US and Poland seem to be infested with "authorities" whose natural reaction is to blame the messenger rather than the people who should be responsible.
Of course, the kid needs a stern talking-to. But you'd think that anyone who has ever watched kids playing with toy trains, cars, transformers, etc would have the sense to understand that kids naturally repeat toy disasters over and over, often until the toys are damaged. A sensible adult would recognize this as typical juvenile behavior, to be handled with education rather than punishment. You don't really want to prevent kids from play-crashing toys (even big ones); doing that is shooting your future economy in the foot by stifling your budding engineers. You want to limit their play to toys that can't do any real harm.
The real criminals here are the people who set up the system so that a child can do unsupervised play with adult toys. Sorta like the people who keep their guns in containers that aren't child proof, or who don't install child-resistant latches on their floor-level kitchen cabinet doors (especially the ones under the sink where the child can find the bottles of toxic chemicals).
I wonder how the Polish authorities are treating the adults who run the tram system? I notice that the Reg's article makes no mention of that question.
How about using these in a water-heater sized device in your home.
I've seen this suggestion any number of times, often with snide comments about how engineers have missed something obvious. This usually causes some engineer to simply mention that there's a better way. No matter how your water heater is powered, it's always more efficient to add insulation to the water heater, and use the fuel that you save to directly power an electrical generator. This skips the stage of extracting power from the water heater's heat loss, and can thus extract more electricity from the fuel (or use less fuel to generate the same electricity).
Unfortunately for such schemes, it's only practical to extract energy from a heat gradient if the heat gradient is going to be there anyway. Then, if the extra weight isn't a problem, you might be able to use some of the heat you're losing to produce a small amount of electricity "for free" (i.e., at no additional fuel cost).
The effect has been known for a century... don't need to worry about classification!
.... There was an asterisk at the end, and the footnote said that telling any of the answers to a non-citizen was a felony under US law and listing the possible penalties (which included execution).
Actually, at least here in the US, you probably should still worry about it being classified information.
For example, various historians have mentioned that the Rosenbergs were executed for giving "secrets" to the Russians that apparently were available in a number of college-level physics textbooks at the time.
Decades later (but still a few decades before today), I did an end-of-chapter exercise in a physics text that was something like: Using equations E and F from this chapter, and table T in appendix A, calculate the critical masses of the following isotopes
The US government's security agencies don't consider previous publication in school textbooks to be a restriction on their right to classify information.
For another example, google for RSA encryption. I have one of those t-shirts that has the 4-line perl implementation of RSA, and on the back "Warning: This t-shirt is a munition" plus a reference to the appropriate regulation. I never had the nerve to wear it to the airport on an international flight, though I did wear it to a number of techie meeting where there were non-citizens. I kept wishing someone would get arrested for wearing one, since the trial could have been entertaining. But I suppose now they wouldn't bother with a trial; you'd just disappear to an undisclosed location in an unstated country for a few years and then dropped off on a hillside in Macedonia when they're done with you.