"The trains were fully automated, controlled by computer, and had no driver; a Passenger Service Agent (PSA) on each train, originally referred to as a "Train Captain", was responsible for patrolling the train, checking tickets, making announcements and controlling the doors."
This I have no objection to, but it is essentially the job-preservation demand of a union. They are not a driver. They can be replaced in a day. However, currently drivers are claiming to be irreplaceable and, when they strike, the capacity of the network is decimated.
Hence, "driverless" may be better than "unmanned". But one man on a train of several hundred people isn't going to add much "safety" at all in an emergency. Especially if there are three carriages full of people - getting them off safely cannot be the domain of one man.
But if you want a guy to stamp tickets and press the emergency-stop button - no problem at all. Because his pay will reflect that and he's easily replaced if he decides not to come into work.
(P.S. Walkways? Though I admit my knowledge may be outdated as I don't use DLR, I have vivid memories of there being sections with no space at all to walk: http://www.london-traveltips.c... - Where?)
And the solution is not one man trying to evacuate people down the line (it's an emergency, right? So if you shut down the line enough for help other than the lone driver we have at the moment to walk down the line, then everyone could walk back to the station safely anyway!)
And escape walkway or not - what the hell does that matter? It means you can't walk down the SIDE of the train. Only through it and out onto the tracks. If you're out of the train, the danger is the same. In fact, I'd say it's safer NOT to have a narrow walkway that you want to push 200 people down, but to just power down the line and have them walk out of the tunnel.
Why does this need a driver? And to me, the solution is not to pay several hundred men £30k each to push a lever for 10 years, but to widen the tunnel slightly.
The DLR is actually AIRBORNE at some points (no escape at all) and was unmanned. The "must be manned" is the union line to preserve jobs, not anything to do with safety.
Actually, the real news is that it's "inspired by Tube driver strikes".
The London Underground staff go on strike so often, this is basically a (well-deserved) warning shot. If the drivers being paid more than teachers, nurses and doctors to push a lever forward for 8 hours a day (probably only 300 days a year, though, once you take into account strikes, holidays, etc.) want to disrupt the entire London Tube network and bring London to a standstill every time they negotiate their above-inflation pensions and pay-rises, this is the only sensible and logical result.
No drivers. No strikes. And if the station staff go on strike - well, we've almost eliminated them too and they are much more easily replaced. Funny how the unions are whining about "unattended" stations now, isn't it...
London has been held hostage by the railway unions for decades. The only spark of hope was the DLR (which is a driverless train line) but even there they were forced to put "safety officers" on the trains because of union representation. Now it seems that the joyride is ending and we might get a decent subway system not subject to the whims of a union leader (strange how this all changed once Bob Crow was out of the picture...).
I counted up one year. There were something like 30 days of strikes in one year, all backed by the same union - drivers, then station staff, then railway maintenance staff, etc. but all the same union.
I just want a transport system that works. I don't really care how we get there and there are more than enough jobs to go around when you have 8 million people going back and forth every day. But I abandoned public transport when, if it wasn't the strikes, it was the cancellations, delays, or total shutdowns for maintenance, then the ticket prices went through the roof to pay a Tube driver who requires 1 year's training more than I was being paid in a good job, after 15 year's experience and needing a degree.
News summaries for this year regarding transport are: Problem, problem, problem. Bob Crow gone. Station staff gone except for skeleton staff, automated ticket systems instead. Drivers gone, driverless trains instead. Weekend openings (after DECADES of weekend shutdowns "for maintenance", because nobody in London wants to go anywhere on a weekend, do they?).
All of a sudden, we have a system that stands a chance of working. All I need now is for them to install the barriers to stop over-crowding meaning you can fall onto the tracks (and shut down the whole Tube network for another day) and we might have something approaching what every other country in the world has had for decades.
If your port 80 is being throttled, it's being throttled. That's going to affect a random website as much as your VPS.
All we avoid is ISP's "unthrottling" select websites to give you a false impression that throttling isn't enabled. That's exactly what a VPS download will discover - the real download speed of your connection to a random website.
Rent or trial a VPS. You can get them for literally a few pounds/dollars per month.
Put a large file on Apache on it.
Download the file from several places.
Rename the file on the server to check it's not cached.
The "upper limit" on this is then the VPS, which generally are connected direct to 100mbps lines in a datacenter somewhere. If you think it's limited by the VPS, get another from another provider. Or load up iptraf or some packet capture and see how it did.
Speedtest websites are indicative only, and are cheated on by some places. Your own website can't be cheated on - you will see the request coming in and can watch the outgoing traffic to see where the bottleneck lies.
Yes, it's not new and I imagine it still suffers from the same problems it always has (multiple frames required in order to identify which LED it actually is, sync issues requiring extra cabling, etc.).
I'm always amazed at how WE'RE always amazed (or supposed to be) that animals can do things that we do.
There are fewer and fewer and fewer things that are the realm of humans alone (and even then, it's generally only by scale, rather than actual ability).
We're animals. They are animals. We all do things like "try to sound like other animals we hear".
I wrote scripts to do ADSL load-balancing / failover using kernel patches that allowed all kinds of things that aren't in the base kernel. Problem was that our ADSL modems were sucky and wouldn't bring the connection back up when it could have done, so I stuck a £5 Velleman electronics kit and a couple of relays into a box, and with USB control we could reset them from the router itself.
It ran a school for 5+ years, even able to stick 3G sticks into the list and let it failover to them when a dead connection was spotted. And, handily, the 3G sticks worked as a perfect "text-to-fix" receptor and also sent out and received text messages on behalf of the school at the same time. Hell, in one emergency, we even just bought a shed-load of SIMs and every time we hit 1Gb data on a SIM, it turned it off, we changed the SIM for the next and threw the first one away (to get around stupid low data limits). We literally didn't have anyone know we'd done it, from inside the school, except myself and the bursar who bought the SIMs. Everything just worked seamlessly.
But, just watch number of packets incoming on connection. It's much easier. If your external DNS is down, you aren't going anywhere anyway, without manual intervention. If the root DNS is down, you're fucked. If traceroute can't trace to your ISP's gateway, you're probably dead anyway. All of these work, there's no need to get too complex and ping-out.
So if you aren't getting DNS packets coming back from simple queries, you might as well consider the connection dead and move onto the next. That's what we did. Then a few second later you'd hear a click, the lights would flash on one of the modems, and in a couple of minutes it's would be back up and pass traffic again.
The biggest problem? We had to put TWO IP's on the external VPN list because you were never quite sure what line was up and handling the route for the VPN. It could be either. Plug both in, let the VPN client try both. End of problem.
Was so sad when I realised that I'd left the hardware and scripts for that at my previous workplace.
Though I agree with your post, and am aware of the majority of it but maybe couldn't reel off the exact curve names, there are problems here.
There are a number of areas where EC is being "forced".
Perfect Forward Secrecy is one (one that you hadn't heard mention of in general IT circles). Yes, there is a non-EC way to do it, but it's horrendously slow compared to the alternative. The only way to get PFS is to use EC. We're being told to abandon RSA and move to EC, in no uncertain terms in other areas. But, as you point out, RSA is still viable. Which raises more questions.
EC curve choices are things that should not come down to "one person / organisation" - no matter how much you trust djb (and he gets a certain level of respect because every bit of his software is pretty damn good on the security front), it should not be a question of trust in an individual to form a curve.
Public Key Encryption, in general, requires no magic numbers, fixed initialisation vectors, "parameters" or similar. Hashes, possibly, but PKE, not. You choose two huge primes that only you know and that's the end of it. To have to resort to "picking" a particular curve *is* akin to placing some magic number and mixing it with the primes in question - this is territory that's not to be trusted if it's to form the basis of the world's encryption standards.
For a start, as you show, the NSA curve was chosen and got into widespread circulation before anyone really noticed. If nobody knows any way it could be a weakness, do we know any way that it's a strength? And the answer is no. Which is questioning the entire use of such a chosen curve.
The parameters that need to be agreed were obviously agreed on by the NSA for some reason - hostile or not. That reasoning is different to other curves and other people's choices which, in itself, is a weakness on one side. Either we're choosing curves that the NSA is avoiding, or they're choosing curves that we're avoiding. And that's just a mess for an algorithm that needs to take over the world's data security.
I'm a mathematician, but I have to say that the exact mathematics is beyond me nowadays. However, as "suspicious IT guy" with no reason to believe in conspiracy theories, government collusion or any other crackpot schemes, it worries me that we can't agree on curves and that such agreement is even necessary.
The wonderful things about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. But the wonderful things about security is we need one well-defined way, and to constantly work on a single replacement for it. EC, in that regard, is suspiciously popular and dangerously configurable without explanation.
There are a handful of companies able to do this, and a handful of well-funded amateurs with the capability to do this for 80's video game chips that everyone is desperate to pay £10k just to acquire (let alone emulate).
If you keep up with any of the MAME scene, the decapping projects are few and far between and pretty much one guy rules them all and it can take YEARS to decap a chip, and years more to understand what it does. On commercially available stuff from the 80's.
Security chips, etc. generally fall to statistical analysis and modern computing power, not someone looking inside the chip. And the keys in a TPM chip won't be stored where they can be "seen" while decapping - that reveals only the structure and to find out where to hook into in a complex encryption chip is quite a skill. To do so without disrupting the chip's operation (even if it has no security) is difficult. To extract actual useful data, even more so.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen, if a case came up with the military or NSA needed to get access to something stored on a TPM chip. But it's not something they'll be doing routinely. And you can "force" chip manufacturers all you like - most of the stuff we use does NOT originally come from the USA or from US-influenced countries. I'm not saying they're not compromised too, in some fashion, but it's not as easy as saying "We are the NSA, put in a backdoor". Most countries will tell you where to go, and get you into the international press for even trying (could even be considered an act of war if you tried that on the Chinese, for example).
Things aren't as simple as "everything is backdoored", "acres of supercomputers", "listening to every phone call", etc. That's all hyperbole. And it works on exactly the people it's intended to - the general public who have nothing of import to hide, and thus feel reassured that they're safe from nasties / scared that shouldn't become a nasty in case they get caught.
Any encryption you might use as a consumer is NOT intended to defeat a well-funded military adversary with reason to decrypt it. That might be possible, it might even be what encryption was invented for, but that's NOT the use-case of 99% of encryption out there. Don't think it is. Hell, we had the world's most popular SSL library have a flaw it in for 10 years and NOBODY NOTICED.
If anything, elliptic-curve cryptography is the weak-link. We're being forced onto it by being told everything else is weak. It's not as well-researched or understood as the algorithms that have been attacked for nearly 40 years. Implementations are few and based on published curves. And there's NOTHING being said about our move to it.
If anything, when you think the trick is happening, it's already been done.
De-compiling or tracing Windows is not a small task, especially not if we're talking kernels, signed-drivers, etc. With TPM etc. you may not even be able to investigate much of the boot process.
And monitoring packets that go back over the network - well, that's what TLS was INVENTED to make safe from even packet-level snooping.
So it's one of those things that's almost impossible to do, probably can't be done with reverse-engineering (or otherwise breaking the EULA of the software itself), and may not ever reveal the true story (i.e. what if MS put a flag onto machines they are interested in, which then return more data than they normally would?).
Did you know that Windows after XP contacts an MS-controlled server with your IP to "check" whether you're actually connected to the Internet or not? http://technet.microsoft.com/e...
Most people don't. And it's only because the knowledge is public that we really know. And how easy it would be to detect what information was being sent home by something like that if, say, rundll32.exe was talking out to an MS port with a TLS connection? Your firewall would allow it, you wouldn't be able to sniff it, and it would look like nothing more than an NCIS login which you can't block if you want Windows to think it's actually "online".
I'm not sure that curiosity or intrigue is some property that you can just "put" into a question, as the summary suggests.
Curiosity is so-obviously a huge factor in interest, but it's something that is - at least in part - inherent in a personality, not a question. You can ask the most wonderfully "intriguing" question of someone but if they have no interest, no desire to know, then it's not going to spark their interest. At best, they'll think there's more to the question, then be disappointed at the "trick".
As someone who works in schools (including private schools), curiosity is actually quite a rare trait. Most students just aren't interested in what their learning because it is - to the most part - not something they want to learn. They get forced to.
And the bright ones will FIND something intriguing about the most dull of subjects. I was always more fascinated by mathematics, and trying computer science to mathematics, and science to mathematics, and even graphic design to mathematics (the golden ratio, etc.) made it more interesting to me. This is the geek's main skill and the source of their brain power - the interest they can find in the most mundane of subjects.
The students that stand out have an unquenchable curiosity about the most mundane of things. They suck the knowledge from their teachers until they run dry and then move on to the next source.
I work in IT in schools - I'm not a teacher - but I had a student just last term who realised that I actually knew some things that his teachers didn't know (C programming, basic electronics, etc.). His curiosity ran riot and he did everything he could to learn more and schedule time that I could show him things (I'm not a teacher, but the school are really good about focusing on the student, so they allowed it). Hell, I took him into the science lab and showed him how to solder circuits because NOBODY had ever shown him how to do it.
This is a young adult that's since gone to an exclusive private school with the best teachers and resources in the world but because soldering was "new" to him, he took it on and within a couple of hours was proficient in it. It piqued his interest, so he didn't let it rest. Did I make it interesting? Did I come up with some link to other subjects he enjoyed? Did I make up stories about the history of soldering to make it more interesting? No.
Curiosity is a trait to instil in your child, at all costs. Not through trick questions, not through forcing them but to just get them to question and - when they do - answer. I can't tell you the number of teachers and parents I see say "I don't know" to a child's question and leave it at that. Or "it's too hard for you". Or even "Shut up, we need to do this next bit".
Instil curiosity by making curiosity the norm. "Well, how does it do that, do you think? I've no idea myself, son. Let's go find out, shall we? Shall we ask that guy that's running the machine?".
Curiosity is the driver here. It's not something you can make happen, it's certainly not something that you can get into a kid by rewording a question - but it's something you can encourage, by asking questions that all the other adults never bother to ask, and never bother to answer either.
No. It doesn't. It hasn't for years. I had a WinXP image that followed me for 8 years and never got reinstalled. It had any amount of stuff installed over it and was in constant daily use (took it to work, worked all day on it, brought it home, played games all evening on it).
It's not an inherent property of Windows that it "slows down" or any such nonsense. If you ask it to run 20 services on startup, it will be slower than if you ask it to run 10. It's a given. The trick is to make sure that NOTHING IS RUNNING unless it needs to be.
Computers DO NOT GET SLOWER WITH AGE. They are the same speed to within MILLIONTHS of a second. If you ask them to do more then, yes, they will seem slower. Don't ask them to do more - remove unwanted programs but most importantly do NOT let things run on startup or in the background unless they are vital. Hint: Almost nothing is vital. QuickTime does not need to be in your startup. Java does not need it's QuickStarter. Adobe stuff needs NOTHING running in the background. And so on.
Do that, and the computer does not slow down at all. I have an 8-year-old XP image to prove it until I stopped using it a couple of years ago (and not because it was slow - because I was managing Windows 7/8 networks).
If you manage your machine properly (and you're working in IT if you post here, I assume), it does not happen. And it's no more a burden than having to reinstall everything after a format. I have NEVER formatted a machine to clean it. I've gone back to known-good images on work machines, but those images have histories going back years too - but kept PRISTINE so they could re-image nicely.
If you format, as far as I'm concerned, that's a harder version of the "reboot will fix it" mantra. A total cop-out. I have brought machines back from the dead (five minutes to get to Windows logon, down to 45 seconds on the same hardware) by proper management of the machine and pruning only third-party services and junk on startup.
Stop making excuses and doing the "Microsoft-fix". Manage your machine properly and it's never an issue.
I had to explain to a school once that we were still deploying Office 2003 to students who came into the school system in 2004.
That seemed to wake them up a bit, when they realised that the reason the kids found the IT stuff strange was that they weren't even BORN when it first came out, and was nothing like they were using at home.
When they ask what the difference is between 2003 and 2013, you can say - with a straight face - the same as the difference between the 80's and the 90's. When they realise their lesson plans and teaching are 10 YEARS out of date, it kind of shakes them up a bit.
Just give me a damn option. Who cares what silly nonsense the latest fad is to launch programs (and, sorry, Windows 8 Tiles = Windows 95 Active Desktop in all but name)? Just give me the option - if it's really THAT good, I'll switch to it. If not, I've lost nothing.
And the development time is literally in the "freeware utility" range so don't give me shit about how long it takes MS to manage two shell paradigms.
I've deployed Windows 8 - but wouldn't do it without Classic Shell and specifically its GPO settings. When I constantly ask myself WHY that's not part of Windows any more, it makes me question what I'm expecting from Windows in the future.
P.S. Microsoft - make it a fucking single setting in GPO to push Desktop Backgrounds, Logon Screens, Lock Screens, Colour Themes etc. to clients (and put AD pictures into Windows 8 User Icons on logon). While you're there, make it a free feature to put a corporate signature in Exchange without poncing about with transport rules and copying files down to clients. 20 years and we still don't have the SIMPLEST of things done right.
More directly, any sort of winning on a "bet" you make has to come from somewhere. Some guy loses out, or some stock exchange gives you money that it's inevitably getting from someone else as they lose.
Gambling, or trading, overall, is not a zero-sum game. Your earnings have come from someone else's loss - PLUS commission. The guys earning commission are raking it in with little or no loss. But the guys the other end - they are the ones "giving" you that money, one way or another. Maybe via third-parties, maybe from their own companies, maybe from their own mistakes, maybe just in allowing the stock exchange to balance out and be profitable to operate while you're winning on the other, but the money has come from somewhere. It didn't magic out of thin air.
Vegas and lotteries are the same. Yeah, you might win a million. The million came from some other MORE THAN ONE MILLION poor saps each spending one (of whatever currency) trying to win the million. And nothing is guaranteed. If you have a brain you stop once you've won big. To keep going is not only a sign of greed, but a sign of some stupidity. Before long, the tide will turn and if you're stupid you'll spend whatever you have left hoping that the next hand will fall your way.
So you only ever hear of people winning big - and then never hearing of them again, or winning big and then stopping playing. The "I pissed away millions" story just makes people think you're a stupid fucker, so it's not that those stories don't exist or aren't heard, it's that nobody has any sympathy for *that* guy.
Similarly for all those celebs who were earning millions and then have to declare themselves bankrupt. It's news both ends. But if you're wanting to make it big, you won't care about the second story because "you're not that stupid".
If the blob is only needed to control the thermal logic on the chips, then the vast majority of the open code that's required (interfacing with the buses, talking to the chips, converting and uploading primitives and textures to RAM etc.) is still under the control of the OS.
I see it as akin to the wireless devices where the region-specific allowed frequencies are used. The operation of the chip - it's loading order, it's interaction and security of RAM, it's performance, it being under the control of the OS, etc. is all there. But the one bit that nVidia can't take a chance on - the dangerous stuff that you shouldn't be playing with anyway if you're concerned about the integrity of the device - is in firmware. Would it be worse if that just existed on a ROM chip and you couldn't change it at all? Probably. At least this can be upgraded to new versions.
And the requirement for open-source is that the card can play nicely with other code - that it interacts with the OS and other drivers nicely without having to rewrite PCI drivers or hand over full control of DMA of any part of RAM to the device. That's the point of Noveau, that's WHY we want to avoid blobs. And this looks like a blob that doesn't actually matter. It could be on the card, and we wouldn't care. But if the PCI interaction logic or the DMA code that the OS has to execute is just on card ROM, then it's a whole lot harder to make the damn thing work for Linux, etc. instead of just the main market of Windows.
Similarly, the wifi debacle of a few years ago - no, we don't want to just be passing off random blobs whose "open" parts are to basically hand off complete DMA / USB access to the device and the blackbox of code makes it work. But if we have to have a firmware of just the essential, must not play with, vendor-supplied part that doesn't interfere with operation and we can revert it at any time - that's a tiny, tiny loss for a massive, massive gain: vendor support without fear of litigation if they somehow "approve" our code that might transmit on frequencies it's not allowed to, or fry our cards.
It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than some other companies offer at all. And there seems to be good reasoning behind it. And, in the end, it won't affect your use of the card for any of the primary goals you buy it for, nor will it break when you go to a Linux 3.6 kernel because they never updated the PCI code in the wrapper, or whatever.
Still a long way to go - they are still just a toy.
Bought one for the school I work for, and it's cool to watch but it has a LOT of problems, not inherent to the implementation.
When people ask how it works, I explain to those old enough to remember pen-plotters that it's just one of those, with melted plastic and a vertically-moving surface. They nod and then realise that we could have done this decades ago with any number of other materials and got something similar. And we actually did, and have done.
The process has a long way to go - plastic is a nicer material than some home-brew thing could made, but it's still having problems. Cleaning supports and struts is a pain - I understand if you have a completely "floating" support that they are necessary but in, say, a teacup the whole thing is joined to every other point so there's no real reason to require supports. Moving up AND down a level and being able to orient the head would help a lot here and solve some other problems.
The layering produces obvious stripes. If you print circles, inevitably you have to adjust the print movement or else you end up with a "seam" where the head completes the circles and moves up a level. It's very hard to 3D print, say, a watertight object - even with the best preparation it's hard to guarantee the material will stick to the print-base, and that it will join to itself perfectly.
And print time is still atrocious. All things that will get better, I'm sure, but given that it's a plotter with a vertical base, you have to wonder why the speed isn't anywhere near the best plotters as were around 20-30 years ago.
Genetic algorithms has a classic example where a GA evolved a chip design that could distinguish between two frequencies of an electrical input. It do so in a more efficient and smaller package than anything designed to do so. And it was so complex that (it was said, but people say a lot) nobody really understands how it works... but it does.
The problem is that it's also not intelligence of any kind. If anything, the opposite. Pigeons, for example, if you put them in an enclosed room and feed them at completely random times will pick up a "superstition" where they correlate something they were doing at the time the food was dispensed, and think that "brings food". So you'll get pigeons sitting there banging their head against the wall because the first time they did that, some food dropped at random. That's not intelligence, even if it's being displayed by a real animal.
This is the same thing. By sheer chance, a correlation is formed between "winning slightly more often" and a certain action and that action is reinforced every time it wins slightly more.
This isn't scary, and it's certainly not intelligence or AI, and it's miles over making the leap that real "intelligent" animals can make - "if I do this, this will happen, which will give me what I want", which is an entirely different abstraction from repeatedly trying something and has an intellectual "insight", which may help through situations that you've NEVER encountered before (instead of being repeatedly trained on the same situation until you happen to find the solution).
It's the difference between a point-and-click adventure where if you just point-and-click enough and in every combination, you'll "win", and a 3D FPS where you can use tactics and strategy that can outwit an opponent who's totally unpredictable through insight into the deeper situation.
Because the average persons care about business practices rather than, say, having the best product.
I can't convince friends that there are better alternatives to Apple, I sure as hell couldn't get them away from nVidia just because of their use of a proprietary "standard".
(And, to be honest, I'm with them - I don't really care at all about 4K, and would rather use the faster, more stable card / driver available).
In that same way that some have taken hi-res scans of the Mona Lisa in every spectrum (visible, UV, etc.), there are companies capable of taking these laser scanners and doing just the same - without the voxel bollocks.
At no point is that engine rendering "hundreds" of voxels in between every point that the laser scanner scanned. What they've done is taken several laser scanned, merged them together to get an almost-3D representation (of the backs of objects the laser can't penetrate etc.) and then found a method (dozens of "I'd do it this way"'s spring to mind as I think of it) to merge them into a set of points, with colouration that a modern graphics workstation can render a static scene from. There are ALREADY people doing this with laser scanners and running the point data to get vectors that you can then plug straight into a conventional 3D engine.
They've just hyped up their way of doing with some voxel ("3D pixel") bollocks. Watch the demos - you can't manipulate or see a single 3D pixel - because it's not there. The 3D pixel data no doubt existed from the merged laser scanner data but it's just TOO LARGE to store, and they mention that themselves. All they did was do that, then cut out the hidden pixels (hidden surface removal - where have I heard that before?), and combined it with colour data from the laser scanners to provide some kind of "colour" to the pixel (i.e. a texture).
To then get that into streamable-from-a-hard-disk format, there's either an immense amount of cheating, or an immense amount of bullshit. My guess is that they just put it into a compact format without the unnecessary information and then plug that through a very high-end OpenGL workstation to render those shots. Because, at the end of the day, they haven't made their own graphics cards - they are still rendering data the same as everyone else. And if they are "cheating", they may well be unable to do this in anywhere near real-time and every single pixel change in the scene would require whole new data to be recompressed, optimsed, polygonned, stored and sent to the card.
There's more than a whiff of bullshit, more than the presenter silly voiceover even, about what they are claiming and what they are doing. They couldn't lie. Not legally. But they aren't telling you the truth.
And, whenever I saw the "infinite detail" demos, I always wondered why they stopped at about the resolution that a normal game stops. At that point, even when they show you it zoomed it, it looks blocky and you can see individual pixels - I suspect those are individual pixels on a texture on a vectorised surface generated from their data, but nobody but them can prove otherwise. And if that's the case - people have been doing this for decades. Almost any 3D scanner project has something like this - every computer vision student has knocked something similar up in their career. How to get a 3D vector interpretation from 2D pixel data from multiple angles... it's a classic.
The proof of the pudding, as all these things, is in the eating. If this is going to revolutionise games, check the reviews of the first game that uses it. If you're right, all you lost was a few days of pre-order on a game. If you're wrong, however, you've lost nothing except a bit of pride.
You can't buy this. You can't use this. You (probably) can't write a game in this engine. So why hype it? But, increasingly, why believe in the hype while those are true?
Too much fancy posturing and hype and not enough actually getting stuff done. A handful of static scenes aren't impressive - have you ever seen ray-traced Quake or similar evolutions of existing game engines? Looks stunning. Nothing ever came of it because it wasn't what you thought it actually was. By the time PC's were powerful enough, simple 3D graphics techniques were wiping the floor with it.
Quite a bit, if he expects to be able to drive down a road to get to his house which passes the front of mine, and someone to maintain that road, and enforce the law on it so he doesn't have tankers going past all day breaking it up and requiring repairs (that he probably expects to happen too)? Or he expects to share an electrical / water / sewage / utility that the utility company would happily charge him a small fortune for a "personal" set of utilities for (similar to that asked for a leased line instead of a broadband connection).
Or if he expects the police to come running if someone breaks into his house (or mine next door, for that matter). Or if he expects some fire fighter or doctor to arrive at the scene. Or if he expects records to be kept of his property boundaries and entitlements. Or if he expects someone to come running if I build a 200ft Eiffel Tower overshadowing his garden or have a loud party disturbing him until 5am or someone parks across his drive. Or if he expects his son to be educated. Or if he expect paedophiles to be caught, to stand trial, to be jailed and/or (in countries with no concept of human rights) executed.
Sure, you can be a total fucknut and say "I'll handle those things personally"... in which case the guy living next to YOU will want all that shit, to guard from your actions.
What percentage my neighbour should pay isn't fixed. Depends on a lot of things - some of the Scandi-wegian countries have 50% tax rates precisely because the services they get are so much better (education is fucking excellent over there, etc.). The UK has the NHS - no chances of dying because you couldn't afford a doctor's bill over here - you literally DO NOT PAY for surgical treatment at all and the most you can be asked to pay is a bit of your time and a maximum of a hundred-and-something pounds a year on your drugs (total... including everything... cancer drugs, the pill, I know someone on 46 different types of pill from a serious illness who pays just that maximum, once, per year). That's fucking worth paying for.
So long as we're paying the same percentage (or there's a sufficient reason why not - e.g. disability that stops you working), it's fair. Because when he breaks his legs and uses the doctor I paid for, I'll call the cops that he paid for, etc.
Taxation pays for all that shit you might complain about being inefficient but actually wouldn't want to live without. Without it, you literally have anarchy. And nobody - no how matter tough or how many weapons they have - would last a week in anarchy before some gang broke in and killed them for their possessions.
People put phones in pockets. People sit on phones. People drop phones.
I know, because I've done all the above. My phone basically lives in my pocket, sitting or standing, or running around. And I've never bent one yet.
Maybe it's just fashion-over-functionality, like most Apple products, but I'd prefer a very expensive phone not to bend because it's in your pocket.
P.S. My keys are metal. They don't bend. Car keyfobs don't bend, even the larger ones. You can make excuses all you like - other models and manufacturers DO NOT have this problem, to anywhere near the same extent. Seriously, one week after release - it's not a "repeated and prolonged" stress - it's you forgetting it's in your pocket ONCE and then bending a very expensive device.
Slashdot Mirror
"The trains were fully automated, controlled by computer, and had no driver; a Passenger Service Agent (PSA) on each train, originally referred to as a "Train Captain", was responsible for patrolling the train, checking tickets, making announcements and controlling the doors."
This I have no objection to, but it is essentially the job-preservation demand of a union. They are not a driver. They can be replaced in a day. However, currently drivers are claiming to be irreplaceable and, when they strike, the capacity of the network is decimated.
Hence, "driverless" may be better than "unmanned". But one man on a train of several hundred people isn't going to add much "safety" at all in an emergency. Especially if there are three carriages full of people - getting them off safely cannot be the domain of one man.
But if you want a guy to stamp tickets and press the emergency-stop button - no problem at all. Because his pay will reflect that and he's easily replaced if he decides not to come into work.
(P.S. Walkways? Though I admit my knowledge may be outdated as I don't use DLR, I have vivid memories of there being sections with no space at all to walk: http://www.london-traveltips.c... - Where?)
And the solution is not one man trying to evacuate people down the line (it's an emergency, right? So if you shut down the line enough for help other than the lone driver we have at the moment to walk down the line, then everyone could walk back to the station safely anyway!)
And escape walkway or not - what the hell does that matter? It means you can't walk down the SIDE of the train. Only through it and out onto the tracks. If you're out of the train, the danger is the same. In fact, I'd say it's safer NOT to have a narrow walkway that you want to push 200 people down, but to just power down the line and have them walk out of the tunnel.
Why does this need a driver? And to me, the solution is not to pay several hundred men £30k each to push a lever for 10 years, but to widen the tunnel slightly.
The DLR is actually AIRBORNE at some points (no escape at all) and was unmanned. The "must be manned" is the union line to preserve jobs, not anything to do with safety.
Actually, the real news is that it's "inspired by Tube driver strikes".
The London Underground staff go on strike so often, this is basically a (well-deserved) warning shot. If the drivers being paid more than teachers, nurses and doctors to push a lever forward for 8 hours a day (probably only 300 days a year, though, once you take into account strikes, holidays, etc.) want to disrupt the entire London Tube network and bring London to a standstill every time they negotiate their above-inflation pensions and pay-rises, this is the only sensible and logical result.
No drivers. No strikes. And if the station staff go on strike - well, we've almost eliminated them too and they are much more easily replaced. Funny how the unions are whining about "unattended" stations now, isn't it...
London has been held hostage by the railway unions for decades. The only spark of hope was the DLR (which is a driverless train line) but even there they were forced to put "safety officers" on the trains because of union representation. Now it seems that the joyride is ending and we might get a decent subway system not subject to the whims of a union leader (strange how this all changed once Bob Crow was out of the picture...).
I counted up one year. There were something like 30 days of strikes in one year, all backed by the same union - drivers, then station staff, then railway maintenance staff, etc. but all the same union.
I just want a transport system that works. I don't really care how we get there and there are more than enough jobs to go around when you have 8 million people going back and forth every day. But I abandoned public transport when, if it wasn't the strikes, it was the cancellations, delays, or total shutdowns for maintenance, then the ticket prices went through the roof to pay a Tube driver who requires 1 year's training more than I was being paid in a good job, after 15 year's experience and needing a degree.
News summaries for this year regarding transport are: Problem, problem, problem. Bob Crow gone. Station staff gone except for skeleton staff, automated ticket systems instead. Drivers gone, driverless trains instead. Weekend openings (after DECADES of weekend shutdowns "for maintenance", because nobody in London wants to go anywhere on a weekend, do they?).
All of a sudden, we have a system that stands a chance of working. All I need now is for them to install the barriers to stop over-crowding meaning you can fall onto the tracks (and shut down the whole Tube network for another day) and we might have something approaching what every other country in the world has had for decades.
If your port 80 is being throttled, it's being throttled. That's going to affect a random website as much as your VPS.
All we avoid is ISP's "unthrottling" select websites to give you a false impression that throttling isn't enabled. That's exactly what a VPS download will discover - the real download speed of your connection to a random website.
Rent or trial a VPS. You can get them for literally a few pounds/dollars per month.
Put a large file on Apache on it.
Download the file from several places.
Rename the file on the server to check it's not cached.
The "upper limit" on this is then the VPS, which generally are connected direct to 100mbps lines in a datacenter somewhere. If you think it's limited by the VPS, get another from another provider. Or load up iptraf or some packet capture and see how it did.
Speedtest websites are indicative only, and are cheated on by some places. Your own website can't be cheated on - you will see the request coming in and can watch the outgoing traffic to see where the bottleneck lies.
Yes, it's not new and I imagine it still suffers from the same problems it always has (multiple frames required in order to identify which LED it actually is, sync issues requiring extra cabling, etc.).
I'm always amazed at how WE'RE always amazed (or supposed to be) that animals can do things that we do.
There are fewer and fewer and fewer things that are the realm of humans alone (and even then, it's generally only by scale, rather than actual ability).
We're animals. They are animals. We all do things like "try to sound like other animals we hear".
Do what every IT professional in the world has to do. Google the full offline installer / MSI:
https://www.google.co.uk/chrom...
I wrote scripts to do ADSL load-balancing / failover using kernel patches that allowed all kinds of things that aren't in the base kernel. Problem was that our ADSL modems were sucky and wouldn't bring the connection back up when it could have done, so I stuck a £5 Velleman electronics kit and a couple of relays into a box, and with USB control we could reset them from the router itself.
It ran a school for 5+ years, even able to stick 3G sticks into the list and let it failover to them when a dead connection was spotted. And, handily, the 3G sticks worked as a perfect "text-to-fix" receptor and also sent out and received text messages on behalf of the school at the same time. Hell, in one emergency, we even just bought a shed-load of SIMs and every time we hit 1Gb data on a SIM, it turned it off, we changed the SIM for the next and threw the first one away (to get around stupid low data limits). We literally didn't have anyone know we'd done it, from inside the school, except myself and the bursar who bought the SIMs. Everything just worked seamlessly.
But, just watch number of packets incoming on connection. It's much easier. If your external DNS is down, you aren't going anywhere anyway, without manual intervention. If the root DNS is down, you're fucked. If traceroute can't trace to your ISP's gateway, you're probably dead anyway. All of these work, there's no need to get too complex and ping-out.
So if you aren't getting DNS packets coming back from simple queries, you might as well consider the connection dead and move onto the next. That's what we did. Then a few second later you'd hear a click, the lights would flash on one of the modems, and in a couple of minutes it's would be back up and pass traffic again.
The biggest problem? We had to put TWO IP's on the external VPN list because you were never quite sure what line was up and handling the route for the VPN. It could be either. Plug both in, let the VPN client try both. End of problem.
Was so sad when I realised that I'd left the hardware and scripts for that at my previous workplace.
Though I agree with your post, and am aware of the majority of it but maybe couldn't reel off the exact curve names, there are problems here.
There are a number of areas where EC is being "forced".
Perfect Forward Secrecy is one (one that you hadn't heard mention of in general IT circles). Yes, there is a non-EC way to do it, but it's horrendously slow compared to the alternative. The only way to get PFS is to use EC. We're being told to abandon RSA and move to EC, in no uncertain terms in other areas. But, as you point out, RSA is still viable. Which raises more questions.
EC curve choices are things that should not come down to "one person / organisation" - no matter how much you trust djb (and he gets a certain level of respect because every bit of his software is pretty damn good on the security front), it should not be a question of trust in an individual to form a curve.
Public Key Encryption, in general, requires no magic numbers, fixed initialisation vectors, "parameters" or similar. Hashes, possibly, but PKE, not. You choose two huge primes that only you know and that's the end of it. To have to resort to "picking" a particular curve *is* akin to placing some magic number and mixing it with the primes in question - this is territory that's not to be trusted if it's to form the basis of the world's encryption standards.
For a start, as you show, the NSA curve was chosen and got into widespread circulation before anyone really noticed. If nobody knows any way it could be a weakness, do we know any way that it's a strength? And the answer is no. Which is questioning the entire use of such a chosen curve.
The parameters that need to be agreed were obviously agreed on by the NSA for some reason - hostile or not. That reasoning is different to other curves and other people's choices which, in itself, is a weakness on one side. Either we're choosing curves that the NSA is avoiding, or they're choosing curves that we're avoiding. And that's just a mess for an algorithm that needs to take over the world's data security.
I'm a mathematician, but I have to say that the exact mathematics is beyond me nowadays. However, as "suspicious IT guy" with no reason to believe in conspiracy theories, government collusion or any other crackpot schemes, it worries me that we can't agree on curves and that such agreement is even necessary.
The wonderful things about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. But the wonderful things about security is we need one well-defined way, and to constantly work on a single replacement for it. EC, in that regard, is suspiciously popular and dangerously configurable without explanation.
There are a handful of companies able to do this, and a handful of well-funded amateurs with the capability to do this for 80's video game chips that everyone is desperate to pay £10k just to acquire (let alone emulate).
If you keep up with any of the MAME scene, the decapping projects are few and far between and pretty much one guy rules them all and it can take YEARS to decap a chip, and years more to understand what it does. On commercially available stuff from the 80's.
Security chips, etc. generally fall to statistical analysis and modern computing power, not someone looking inside the chip. And the keys in a TPM chip won't be stored where they can be "seen" while decapping - that reveals only the structure and to find out where to hook into in a complex encryption chip is quite a skill. To do so without disrupting the chip's operation (even if it has no security) is difficult. To extract actual useful data, even more so.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen, if a case came up with the military or NSA needed to get access to something stored on a TPM chip. But it's not something they'll be doing routinely. And you can "force" chip manufacturers all you like - most of the stuff we use does NOT originally come from the USA or from US-influenced countries. I'm not saying they're not compromised too, in some fashion, but it's not as easy as saying "We are the NSA, put in a backdoor". Most countries will tell you where to go, and get you into the international press for even trying (could even be considered an act of war if you tried that on the Chinese, for example).
Things aren't as simple as "everything is backdoored", "acres of supercomputers", "listening to every phone call", etc. That's all hyperbole. And it works on exactly the people it's intended to - the general public who have nothing of import to hide, and thus feel reassured that they're safe from nasties / scared that shouldn't become a nasty in case they get caught.
Any encryption you might use as a consumer is NOT intended to defeat a well-funded military adversary with reason to decrypt it. That might be possible, it might even be what encryption was invented for, but that's NOT the use-case of 99% of encryption out there. Don't think it is. Hell, we had the world's most popular SSL library have a flaw it in for 10 years and NOBODY NOTICED.
If anything, elliptic-curve cryptography is the weak-link. We're being forced onto it by being told everything else is weak. It's not as well-researched or understood as the algorithms that have been attacked for nearly 40 years. Implementations are few and based on published curves. And there's NOTHING being said about our move to it.
If anything, when you think the trick is happening, it's already been done.
Assuming that Microsoft allows any CA to sign their internal certs....
Because it could be almost impossible to know.
De-compiling or tracing Windows is not a small task, especially not if we're talking kernels, signed-drivers, etc. With TPM etc. you may not even be able to investigate much of the boot process.
And monitoring packets that go back over the network - well, that's what TLS was INVENTED to make safe from even packet-level snooping.
So it's one of those things that's almost impossible to do, probably can't be done with reverse-engineering (or otherwise breaking the EULA of the software itself), and may not ever reveal the true story (i.e. what if MS put a flag onto machines they are interested in, which then return more data than they normally would?).
Did you know that Windows after XP contacts an MS-controlled server with your IP to "check" whether you're actually connected to the Internet or not? http://technet.microsoft.com/e...
Most people don't. And it's only because the knowledge is public that we really know. And how easy it would be to detect what information was being sent home by something like that if, say, rundll32.exe was talking out to an MS port with a TLS connection? Your firewall would allow it, you wouldn't be able to sniff it, and it would look like nothing more than an NCIS login which you can't block if you want Windows to think it's actually "online".
I'm not sure that curiosity or intrigue is some property that you can just "put" into a question, as the summary suggests.
Curiosity is so-obviously a huge factor in interest, but it's something that is - at least in part - inherent in a personality, not a question. You can ask the most wonderfully "intriguing" question of someone but if they have no interest, no desire to know, then it's not going to spark their interest. At best, they'll think there's more to the question, then be disappointed at the "trick".
As someone who works in schools (including private schools), curiosity is actually quite a rare trait. Most students just aren't interested in what their learning because it is - to the most part - not something they want to learn. They get forced to.
And the bright ones will FIND something intriguing about the most dull of subjects. I was always more fascinated by mathematics, and trying computer science to mathematics, and science to mathematics, and even graphic design to mathematics (the golden ratio, etc.) made it more interesting to me. This is the geek's main skill and the source of their brain power - the interest they can find in the most mundane of subjects.
The students that stand out have an unquenchable curiosity about the most mundane of things. They suck the knowledge from their teachers until they run dry and then move on to the next source.
I work in IT in schools - I'm not a teacher - but I had a student just last term who realised that I actually knew some things that his teachers didn't know (C programming, basic electronics, etc.). His curiosity ran riot and he did everything he could to learn more and schedule time that I could show him things (I'm not a teacher, but the school are really good about focusing on the student, so they allowed it). Hell, I took him into the science lab and showed him how to solder circuits because NOBODY had ever shown him how to do it.
This is a young adult that's since gone to an exclusive private school with the best teachers and resources in the world but because soldering was "new" to him, he took it on and within a couple of hours was proficient in it. It piqued his interest, so he didn't let it rest. Did I make it interesting? Did I come up with some link to other subjects he enjoyed? Did I make up stories about the history of soldering to make it more interesting? No.
Curiosity is a trait to instil in your child, at all costs. Not through trick questions, not through forcing them but to just get them to question and - when they do - answer. I can't tell you the number of teachers and parents I see say "I don't know" to a child's question and leave it at that. Or "it's too hard for you". Or even "Shut up, we need to do this next bit".
Instil curiosity by making curiosity the norm. "Well, how does it do that, do you think? I've no idea myself, son. Let's go find out, shall we? Shall we ask that guy that's running the machine?".
Curiosity is the driver here. It's not something you can make happen, it's certainly not something that you can get into a kid by rewording a question - but it's something you can encourage, by asking questions that all the other adults never bother to ask, and never bother to answer either.
No. It doesn't. It hasn't for years. I had a WinXP image that followed me for 8 years and never got reinstalled. It had any amount of stuff installed over it and was in constant daily use (took it to work, worked all day on it, brought it home, played games all evening on it).
It's not an inherent property of Windows that it "slows down" or any such nonsense. If you ask it to run 20 services on startup, it will be slower than if you ask it to run 10. It's a given. The trick is to make sure that NOTHING IS RUNNING unless it needs to be.
Computers DO NOT GET SLOWER WITH AGE. They are the same speed to within MILLIONTHS of a second. If you ask them to do more then, yes, they will seem slower. Don't ask them to do more - remove unwanted programs but most importantly do NOT let things run on startup or in the background unless they are vital. Hint: Almost nothing is vital. QuickTime does not need to be in your startup. Java does not need it's QuickStarter. Adobe stuff needs NOTHING running in the background. And so on.
Do that, and the computer does not slow down at all. I have an 8-year-old XP image to prove it until I stopped using it a couple of years ago (and not because it was slow - because I was managing Windows 7/8 networks).
If you manage your machine properly (and you're working in IT if you post here, I assume), it does not happen. And it's no more a burden than having to reinstall everything after a format. I have NEVER formatted a machine to clean it. I've gone back to known-good images on work machines, but those images have histories going back years too - but kept PRISTINE so they could re-image nicely.
If you format, as far as I'm concerned, that's a harder version of the "reboot will fix it" mantra. A total cop-out. I have brought machines back from the dead (five minutes to get to Windows logon, down to 45 seconds on the same hardware) by proper management of the machine and pruning only third-party services and junk on startup.
Stop making excuses and doing the "Microsoft-fix". Manage your machine properly and it's never an issue.
And provides a real-world slap in the face.
I had to explain to a school once that we were still deploying Office 2003 to students who came into the school system in 2004.
That seemed to wake them up a bit, when they realised that the reason the kids found the IT stuff strange was that they weren't even BORN when it first came out, and was nothing like they were using at home.
When they ask what the difference is between 2003 and 2013, you can say - with a straight face - the same as the difference between the 80's and the 90's. When they realise their lesson plans and teaching are 10 YEARS out of date, it kind of shakes them up a bit.
Fuck that, even.
Just give me a damn option. Who cares what silly nonsense the latest fad is to launch programs (and, sorry, Windows 8 Tiles = Windows 95 Active Desktop in all but name)? Just give me the option - if it's really THAT good, I'll switch to it. If not, I've lost nothing.
And the development time is literally in the "freeware utility" range so don't give me shit about how long it takes MS to manage two shell paradigms.
I've deployed Windows 8 - but wouldn't do it without Classic Shell and specifically its GPO settings. When I constantly ask myself WHY that's not part of Windows any more, it makes me question what I'm expecting from Windows in the future.
P.S. Microsoft - make it a fucking single setting in GPO to push Desktop Backgrounds, Logon Screens, Lock Screens, Colour Themes etc. to clients (and put AD pictures into Windows 8 User Icons on logon). While you're there, make it a free feature to put a corporate signature in Exchange without poncing about with transport rules and copying files down to clients. 20 years and we still don't have the SIMPLEST of things done right.
More directly, any sort of winning on a "bet" you make has to come from somewhere. Some guy loses out, or some stock exchange gives you money that it's inevitably getting from someone else as they lose.
Gambling, or trading, overall, is not a zero-sum game. Your earnings have come from someone else's loss - PLUS commission. The guys earning commission are raking it in with little or no loss. But the guys the other end - they are the ones "giving" you that money, one way or another. Maybe via third-parties, maybe from their own companies, maybe from their own mistakes, maybe just in allowing the stock exchange to balance out and be profitable to operate while you're winning on the other, but the money has come from somewhere. It didn't magic out of thin air.
Vegas and lotteries are the same. Yeah, you might win a million. The million came from some other MORE THAN ONE MILLION poor saps each spending one (of whatever currency) trying to win the million. And nothing is guaranteed. If you have a brain you stop once you've won big. To keep going is not only a sign of greed, but a sign of some stupidity. Before long, the tide will turn and if you're stupid you'll spend whatever you have left hoping that the next hand will fall your way.
So you only ever hear of people winning big - and then never hearing of them again, or winning big and then stopping playing. The "I pissed away millions" story just makes people think you're a stupid fucker, so it's not that those stories don't exist or aren't heard, it's that nobody has any sympathy for *that* guy.
Similarly for all those celebs who were earning millions and then have to declare themselves bankrupt. It's news both ends. But if you're wanting to make it big, you won't care about the second story because "you're not that stupid".
It depends.
If the blob is only needed to control the thermal logic on the chips, then the vast majority of the open code that's required (interfacing with the buses, talking to the chips, converting and uploading primitives and textures to RAM etc.) is still under the control of the OS.
I see it as akin to the wireless devices where the region-specific allowed frequencies are used. The operation of the chip - it's loading order, it's interaction and security of RAM, it's performance, it being under the control of the OS, etc. is all there. But the one bit that nVidia can't take a chance on - the dangerous stuff that you shouldn't be playing with anyway if you're concerned about the integrity of the device - is in firmware. Would it be worse if that just existed on a ROM chip and you couldn't change it at all? Probably. At least this can be upgraded to new versions.
And the requirement for open-source is that the card can play nicely with other code - that it interacts with the OS and other drivers nicely without having to rewrite PCI drivers or hand over full control of DMA of any part of RAM to the device. That's the point of Noveau, that's WHY we want to avoid blobs. And this looks like a blob that doesn't actually matter. It could be on the card, and we wouldn't care. But if the PCI interaction logic or the DMA code that the OS has to execute is just on card ROM, then it's a whole lot harder to make the damn thing work for Linux, etc. instead of just the main market of Windows.
Similarly, the wifi debacle of a few years ago - no, we don't want to just be passing off random blobs whose "open" parts are to basically hand off complete DMA / USB access to the device and the blackbox of code makes it work. But if we have to have a firmware of just the essential, must not play with, vendor-supplied part that doesn't interfere with operation and we can revert it at any time - that's a tiny, tiny loss for a massive, massive gain: vendor support without fear of litigation if they somehow "approve" our code that might transmit on frequencies it's not allowed to, or fry our cards.
It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than some other companies offer at all. And there seems to be good reasoning behind it. And, in the end, it won't affect your use of the card for any of the primary goals you buy it for, nor will it break when you go to a Linux 3.6 kernel because they never updated the PCI code in the wrapper, or whatever.
Still a long way to go - they are still just a toy.
Bought one for the school I work for, and it's cool to watch but it has a LOT of problems, not inherent to the implementation.
When people ask how it works, I explain to those old enough to remember pen-plotters that it's just one of those, with melted plastic and a vertically-moving surface. They nod and then realise that we could have done this decades ago with any number of other materials and got something similar. And we actually did, and have done.
The process has a long way to go - plastic is a nicer material than some home-brew thing could made, but it's still having problems. Cleaning supports and struts is a pain - I understand if you have a completely "floating" support that they are necessary but in, say, a teacup the whole thing is joined to every other point so there's no real reason to require supports. Moving up AND down a level and being able to orient the head would help a lot here and solve some other problems.
The layering produces obvious stripes. If you print circles, inevitably you have to adjust the print movement or else you end up with a "seam" where the head completes the circles and moves up a level. It's very hard to 3D print, say, a watertight object - even with the best preparation it's hard to guarantee the material will stick to the print-base, and that it will join to itself perfectly.
And print time is still atrocious. All things that will get better, I'm sure, but given that it's a plotter with a vertical base, you have to wonder why the speed isn't anywhere near the best plotters as were around 20-30 years ago.
It's not scary. It's pretty basic.
Genetic algorithms has a classic example where a GA evolved a chip design that could distinguish between two frequencies of an electrical input. It do so in a more efficient and smaller package than anything designed to do so. And it was so complex that (it was said, but people say a lot) nobody really understands how it works... but it does.
The problem is that it's also not intelligence of any kind. If anything, the opposite. Pigeons, for example, if you put them in an enclosed room and feed them at completely random times will pick up a "superstition" where they correlate something they were doing at the time the food was dispensed, and think that "brings food". So you'll get pigeons sitting there banging their head against the wall because the first time they did that, some food dropped at random. That's not intelligence, even if it's being displayed by a real animal.
This is the same thing. By sheer chance, a correlation is formed between "winning slightly more often" and a certain action and that action is reinforced every time it wins slightly more.
This isn't scary, and it's certainly not intelligence or AI, and it's miles over making the leap that real "intelligent" animals can make - "if I do this, this will happen, which will give me what I want", which is an entirely different abstraction from repeatedly trying something and has an intellectual "insight", which may help through situations that you've NEVER encountered before (instead of being repeatedly trained on the same situation until you happen to find the solution).
It's the difference between a point-and-click adventure where if you just point-and-click enough and in every combination, you'll "win", and a 3D FPS where you can use tactics and strategy that can outwit an opponent who's totally unpredictable through insight into the deeper situation.
Because the average persons care about business practices rather than, say, having the best product.
I can't convince friends that there are better alternatives to Apple, I sure as hell couldn't get them away from nVidia just because of their use of a proprietary "standard".
(And, to be honest, I'm with them - I don't really care at all about 4K, and would rather use the faster, more stable card / driver available).
Don't be fooled by the hype.
In that same way that some have taken hi-res scans of the Mona Lisa in every spectrum (visible, UV, etc.), there are companies capable of taking these laser scanners and doing just the same - without the voxel bollocks.
At no point is that engine rendering "hundreds" of voxels in between every point that the laser scanner scanned. What they've done is taken several laser scanned, merged them together to get an almost-3D representation (of the backs of objects the laser can't penetrate etc.) and then found a method (dozens of "I'd do it this way"'s spring to mind as I think of it) to merge them into a set of points, with colouration that a modern graphics workstation can render a static scene from. There are ALREADY people doing this with laser scanners and running the point data to get vectors that you can then plug straight into a conventional 3D engine.
They've just hyped up their way of doing with some voxel ("3D pixel") bollocks. Watch the demos - you can't manipulate or see a single 3D pixel - because it's not there. The 3D pixel data no doubt existed from the merged laser scanner data but it's just TOO LARGE to store, and they mention that themselves. All they did was do that, then cut out the hidden pixels (hidden surface removal - where have I heard that before?), and combined it with colour data from the laser scanners to provide some kind of "colour" to the pixel (i.e. a texture).
To then get that into streamable-from-a-hard-disk format, there's either an immense amount of cheating, or an immense amount of bullshit. My guess is that they just put it into a compact format without the unnecessary information and then plug that through a very high-end OpenGL workstation to render those shots. Because, at the end of the day, they haven't made their own graphics cards - they are still rendering data the same as everyone else. And if they are "cheating", they may well be unable to do this in anywhere near real-time and every single pixel change in the scene would require whole new data to be recompressed, optimsed, polygonned, stored and sent to the card.
There's more than a whiff of bullshit, more than the presenter silly voiceover even, about what they are claiming and what they are doing. They couldn't lie. Not legally. But they aren't telling you the truth.
And, whenever I saw the "infinite detail" demos, I always wondered why they stopped at about the resolution that a normal game stops. At that point, even when they show you it zoomed it, it looks blocky and you can see individual pixels - I suspect those are individual pixels on a texture on a vectorised surface generated from their data, but nobody but them can prove otherwise. And if that's the case - people have been doing this for decades. Almost any 3D scanner project has something like this - every computer vision student has knocked something similar up in their career. How to get a 3D vector interpretation from 2D pixel data from multiple angles... it's a classic.
The proof of the pudding, as all these things, is in the eating. If this is going to revolutionise games, check the reviews of the first game that uses it. If you're right, all you lost was a few days of pre-order on a game. If you're wrong, however, you've lost nothing except a bit of pride.
You can't buy this. You can't use this. You (probably) can't write a game in this engine. So why hype it? But, increasingly, why believe in the hype while those are true?
Too much fancy posturing and hype and not enough actually getting stuff done. A handful of static scenes aren't impressive - have you ever seen ray-traced Quake or similar evolutions of existing game engines? Looks stunning. Nothing ever came of it because it wasn't what you thought it actually was. By the time PC's were powerful enough, simple 3D graphics techniques were wiping the floor with it.
Quite a bit, if he expects to be able to drive down a road to get to his house which passes the front of mine, and someone to maintain that road, and enforce the law on it so he doesn't have tankers going past all day breaking it up and requiring repairs (that he probably expects to happen too)? Or he expects to share an electrical / water / sewage / utility that the utility company would happily charge him a small fortune for a "personal" set of utilities for (similar to that asked for a leased line instead of a broadband connection).
Or if he expects the police to come running if someone breaks into his house (or mine next door, for that matter). Or if he expects some fire fighter or doctor to arrive at the scene. Or if he expects records to be kept of his property boundaries and entitlements. Or if he expects someone to come running if I build a 200ft Eiffel Tower overshadowing his garden or have a loud party disturbing him until 5am or someone parks across his drive. Or if he expects his son to be educated. Or if he expect paedophiles to be caught, to stand trial, to be jailed and/or (in countries with no concept of human rights) executed.
Sure, you can be a total fucknut and say "I'll handle those things personally"... in which case the guy living next to YOU will want all that shit, to guard from your actions.
What percentage my neighbour should pay isn't fixed. Depends on a lot of things - some of the Scandi-wegian countries have 50% tax rates precisely because the services they get are so much better (education is fucking excellent over there, etc.). The UK has the NHS - no chances of dying because you couldn't afford a doctor's bill over here - you literally DO NOT PAY for surgical treatment at all and the most you can be asked to pay is a bit of your time and a maximum of a hundred-and-something pounds a year on your drugs (total... including everything... cancer drugs, the pill, I know someone on 46 different types of pill from a serious illness who pays just that maximum, once, per year). That's fucking worth paying for.
So long as we're paying the same percentage (or there's a sufficient reason why not - e.g. disability that stops you working), it's fair. Because when he breaks his legs and uses the doctor I paid for, I'll call the cops that he paid for, etc.
Taxation pays for all that shit you might complain about being inefficient but actually wouldn't want to live without. Without it, you literally have anarchy. And nobody - no how matter tough or how many weapons they have - would last a week in anarchy before some gang broke in and killed them for their possessions.
Then don't make your phone from that metal.
People put phones in pockets. People sit on phones. People drop phones.
I know, because I've done all the above. My phone basically lives in my pocket, sitting or standing, or running around. And I've never bent one yet.
Maybe it's just fashion-over-functionality, like most Apple products, but I'd prefer a very expensive phone not to bend because it's in your pocket.
P.S. My keys are metal. They don't bend. Car keyfobs don't bend, even the larger ones. You can make excuses all you like - other models and manufacturers DO NOT have this problem, to anywhere near the same extent. Seriously, one week after release - it's not a "repeated and prolonged" stress - it's you forgetting it's in your pocket ONCE and then bending a very expensive device.