Ahh. The original poster overloaded the word "mathematically".
His definition includes: "I mathematically killed Fred by calculating how fast I had to go to hit him with my car as he crossed the road and then going that fast and hitting him with my car."
The book is pretty much as it sounds. While the author doesn't *actually* invest in stocks, he *is* a mathematician and he plays through (mostly with logic) ways to get ahead in the stock market game. As you would probably guess, it's not easy.
A great read. Sadly, my dreams of a quick fortune by computing stocks were quickly squashed by his well presented arguments.
I futzed with a few wikis to try and orgnise all the disparate parts of my life (which were usually recorded on a swarm of post-it notes). My main problems were having to setup/admin a httpd server on which to run the wiki, and then backing up/restoring the information in the wiki.
Eventually I found tiddlywiki. Pros: * no httpd required * all information stored in a single html file (including the wiki code itself!) * has tags and a search function * monstrously quick and easy to set up.
Cons: * haven't found anything about it I don't like yet.
I've now torn down every postit from my wall - if it needs recording, it gets stuck it the wiki (a process that takes less than a minute).
My guess is that they're expanding the compressed JPEG co-efficients (which are entropy encoded using huffman - sometimes using pre-calculated huffman tables - see the standard) and re-compressing them with an optimized algorithm - something proprietary and tweaked extensively for standard jpeg images.
Sort of like saving space by converting gzip files to bzip2 files - except their compression scheme isn't documented or open.
Worthless punting by Cringely - obvious predictions about obvious things, useless predictions about useless things. Just like a "Best of year X", everybody needs to do a "Predictions for year X+1" - and Cringely's predictions are as good as anyone else's (i.e. worthless).
Although Phil snorted this in response to a woman's claim of having studied 19th century French poetry, I think I can hear the collective snort of many people in reponse to a story about the blog of a convention for bloggers.
Granted the article is pretty vague with arm-waving non-technical statements like "huge amounts of data".
The extra information for the surround sound (which is just multiple channels stored in the same file with various cross-channels redundancies removed) needs to be stored somewhere so that it can be recreated by the player. And this will be with the Z 'ancillary bits' I talked about.
I don't quite understand your point about "multichannel" not being "surround". ISO13818-3 describe "audio with 3 front channels and 2 rear channels plus a Low Frequency (subwoofer) channel".
I realise there are layers of jargon when talking surround/Dolby Surround/DTS/etc/etc; however the article seems to be using the term 'surround' in the generic(lots of channels) sense, not the Dolby(tm) sense (these definitions are pretty close anyway, unless you want to get into the way the channels are matrixed).
Multichan MP3 is already *in* the MPEG2 standard
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MP3...in Surround Sound
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· Score: 3, Interesting
See ISO13818-3 which describes MPEG2-audio (which is an extention of the original mpeg audio standard - iso 11172)
ISO13818 describes * the Low Sampling Frequency extensions (which describe encoding mpeg audio at 16/22.05/24 kHz). This is already incorporated in most encoders. * 3/2-stero+LFE (Section 0.2.3.2 describes the various configurations e.g. 3/2, 3/1, etc)
For a very brief moment when I had too much time, I worked on getting the multichannel stuff working in tooLame (the layer2 mpeg audio encoder) and the way it works is this:
1. The encoder works out the overall bitrate for all the channels (X bits) 2. The encoder assigns some bits (Y) to be used for the backwards compatible 2-channel stereo so that all compliant decoders will work. Y gt X. (The way the 5 channels are crosstalked and cancelled out to get 2 stereo channels is complex. Read the standard if you want more info). 3. There will then be Z bits (Z=X-Y) left over for the storage of the other channels. (Referred to as "Ancillary data"). 4. The beginning of the mpeg audio frame has a flag set so that compliant decoders know about the extra info. 5. Old decoders won't grok the flag, and so they'll just read the stereo info, skip over all the extra info and then find the next bit of data they do understand.
The outcome of all this is that you may have a 512kbps mpeg audio stream which contains 256kbps of the stereo information and then 256kbits of "extra" info that is used to reconstruct the full 3/2 channels of sound.
There is a problems with this however. Compliant MPEG audio streams have a maximum bitrate as set out in the original MPEG1 standard (11172). For example, the maximum total bitrate of a 44.1kHz mp3 file is 1011 kbps. However, when you do really high bitrate multichannel stuff, you can exceed this limit: in this case, the MPEG2 standard suggests using another file to store the information (referred to as the "extension bitstream").
The conversation died for a while, and then it was brought up again in March. (Although the conversation seemed to get bogged down on selecting a name for the format).
The format description is now included in the DOCS/tech directory of the mplayer tarball. Not sure whether any of it's actually implemented in the mplayer code.
both amiga programmers will be fighting hard to get the cash.
I used to use the GCC tools on the amiga (ADE - or whatever it turned into). But then that slowly went stagnant - and it was 10x faster to cross-compile stuff on the FreeBSD/Pentium166 than to wait for the A3000/'030.
When Amiga/PPC hardware started appearing, I was keen to do some portage of unix-ish type stuff - except the PPC dev toolchain was so woeful it made me want to cry.
Guthrie did work with work into PKU (PKU=Phenylketonuria. An inherited human metabolic disease that is characterized by inability to oxidize a metabolic product of phenylalanine.) and related diseases.
My issues with their costs(plus an offtopic aside)
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Open Source Telephony
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In the cost comparison on their site, why is a "closed source" PC $700, but an "open source" one only $500? What's the difference? It's not the OS, as they factor in $300 for that later on. It just sounds like they're stacking the books to make their solution sound even better.
The rest of this is going to be totally off topic (besides the fact that I am from the same place as the product mentioned in the story).
Google Cache Links The poster was smart enough to put in google cache links to the story. Prevents a slashdotting of the original site (although google might get shirty). How about slashcode automatically include google cache links? It's easy to do. Check out merkac dot for an implementation.
Subscribers as early mirror makers I've noticed on the last couple of stories which where savagely slashdotted, that the subscribers had a chance to mirror the articles before it became available to the rest of us (the unsubscribed rabble). On one of them (it might've been the missing matter in the universe one), an early peruse of the comments showed only 3 comments at a threshold at 2 or greater. And each of these was a subscriber (probably?) posting a mirror site.
So not only are these people paying for the privilege of seeing the stories early, they're doing work for slashdot by making sure the stories are mirrored correctly (and karma whoring quite nicely at the same time).
Maybe some official mirroring technique is called for. Not by slashdot (since they've said quite plainly that they won't mirror anything), but if there was a nice bit of code to auto-mirror every article's URL to a free web mirror (or some site which has the guts to take a slashpede).
The reason "we" got into programming when young is that we were all probably maths/science people looking for an outlet for our energy ("I never made the first team, I just made the first team laugh" - billy bragg).
Unless they already have a flexible and mathematical brain, it's really going to be hard to teach them to cope with the logic of
x = x+1
That statement is directly contradictory to anything that they ever learn in maths, and I certainly wouldn't want them believing that it was actually a statement of equality.
As programmers we contort our brains to think of it as 'x takes the value of whatever x is now plus 1' - but it's us changing our thinking to suit the computers for this specific task.
I have thought a number of times about trying to teach teenagers computer programming, but after having taught them maths for the last 4 years, I don't think I would attempt this with any but the most advanced students.
However, programming concepts can be taught using more visual tools. I can't remember the name of the program, but I have seen a Lego Mindstorm programming interface which is ideal for kids: it's visual, it's dragging and dropping program pieces, and it gives kids some concrete feedback on their progress (since it makes the Lego robot, or whatever, do something).
You and I might be happy to write a "helloworld" or a "prime number list generator", but most people need something a bit less abstract as a proof of their progress. LOGO had the conrete output of a picture (so it'd be a competition between the kids to make the picture). Mindstorms have robots (so it's a competition to make the coolest robot).
To summarise the summary of the summary
Be visual (few things are more boring to kids than grammar and syntax)
Pick something with concrete feedback (e.g. making pictures, controlling robots)
Because It's There: Putting Everest Online By NANCY GOHRING
IF the 25-below-zero temperature, howling wind and grim effects of altitude sickness do not make most of those trying to scale Mount Everest feel a world away from home, the near-complete lack of communications on and around Everest surely does.
This year, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary's first ascent of Everest, climbers on the mountain will have the chance to connect with the world below by e-mail. That is because Tsering Gyaltsen, the grandson of the only surviving Sherpa to have accompanied Hillary on that famed climb, is planning to build the world's highest Internet cafe at base camp.
It is fitting that the added comfort comes courtesy of a Sherpa, one of the clan of Nepalese who take charge of getting most everything up the mountain for the usually wealthy adventurers seeking the thrill of topping the world's highest peak.
But in contrast to many climber services, this one does not stand to benefit foreign-run outfitters primarily. Although it is an obvious perk for the climbers, the residents of a nearby town may get Internet access because of it, and the mountain may get a bit cleaner.
The technical challenge is significant. Wireless radios will be positioned on moving glaciers, and gear must be insulated against temperatures far colder than they were designed to withstand. And at the helm of the project is Mr. Gyaltsen, who is not wealthy and has no formal technical training.
But tenacious he is. From halfway around the world, Mr. Gyaltsen has attracted an all-star cast of technologists in the United States dedicated to furthering his goal.
It started when Gordon Cook, author and publisher of a monthly newsletter, The Cook Report on Internet (www.cookreport.com), met Mr. Gyaltsen by chance during a visit to Nepal in November. Mr. Cook was so intrigued by Mr. Gyaltsen's success at independently restoring phone service to his town, Namche Bazar - cut off for more than a year after Maoists tore down a government-owned telecommunications tower in 2001 - that he started asking friends to lend their expertise to his work. "I put my full network at Tsering's disposal," Mr. Cook said.
At the time, Mr. Gyaltsen had set up a satellite Internet link and cybercafe in Namche Bazar, a six-day hike below the Everest base camp, and was trying to figure out how to make it more available to his neighbors. Then one night over a beer, he and a friend who works for the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, a nonprofit environmental group that is responsible for disposing of the mounds of garbage on Everest, hatched the idea for an Internet cafe at base camp.
The proceeds would help bring in money for the committee, which Mr. Gyaltsen said that as a Sherpa he felt it "my duty to help."
Mr. Cook brought in Dave Hughes, a leading wireless-technology thinker who has studied the performance of wireless equipment in extreme weather in Alaska for the National Science Foundation. One of the first calls Mr. Hughes placed was to his friend Jim Forster, who holds the title of distinguished engineer at the networking giant Cisco Systems.
Mr. Forster eagerly donated three Wi-Fi radios on behalf of his company. Such radios enable the creation of wireless networks that can relay data within a couple of hundred feet or as far as several miles as the crow flies, much the way that local-area networks, or LAN's, work in offices.
"What I like about this project is that it demonstrates that the technology developed for a LAN in a building can be applicable beyond that," Mr. Forster said. "This may be as far outside the building as you can get."
From his base in Colorado Springs, Mr. Hughes, 74, is using a Web-based conferencing system as a long-distance tool to teach Mr. Gyaltsen and his colleagues how to set up the base-camp network. Mr. Gyaltsen is working with technicians on loan from two Internet service providers, Square Networks and Worldlink, based in Nepal's capital, Katmandu. Another friend of Mr. Cook's, Mike Trest, an independent consultant and satellite expert, is helping to teach the Nepalese about satellites.
The network will consist of a small satellite dish, planted about 1,500 feet above base camp, that can provide two-way communications. Because the dish must operate from firm ground, it cannot be used directly at base camp, which is on a moving glacier. The $10,000 satellite dish, which Mr. Gyaltsen purchased with a bank loan and funds from Square Networks, will connect to the cybercafe at base camp over the Wi-Fi radios. The dish will beam data to a satellite in orbit and to an Internet service provider in Israel.
It sounds as if it would be challenging for Mr. Hughes to teach relative novices how to set up such a complicated network from nearly 8,000 miles away. But Mr. Hughes - who was teaching a college class online in 1982, a decade before most people had heard of the Internet - says that the 13-hour time difference is not the biggest problem.
"The distance is easy," Mr. Hughes said. "It's the culture that's hard."
Once, Mr. Gyaltsen disappeared from e-mail and the online network for two days. Mr. Cook later learned that after the deaths of some villagers, nearby Buddhist monks had instructed people in the town to attend a special ceremony at the monastery - nearly a full day's walk from home.
Another time, Mr. Gyaltsen was incommunicado for a couple of days because some drunken climbers in Namche Bazar had tripped over the wires connecting his Internet cafe to his satellite dish there.
Cisco and Mr. Gyaltsen are working out the seemingly endless bureaucratic requirements for importing the radios to Nepal. Once they have arrived, Mr. Gyaltsen will transport them by plane to Lukla, a town at roughly 9,800 feet, then up by yak train to Namche Bazar (more than 11,000 feet) and on to the base camp (nearly 18,000 feet) before the final leg of the trip.
Mr. Gyaltsen and the pollution committee, which will technically own the radios, are still deciding what to charge users. They are considering a flat fee of $2,000 to $5,000 per expedition, which can number 5 to 20 people. That price might sound steep, but Mr. Gyaltsen says it paled in comparison with the cost of the expedition itself, typically $65,000 a person.
The satellite link and Internet service will cost the operators less than $1,000 a month for the climbing season. Any profits will go to the pollution committee. While initial expectations for profits are modest, organizers believe it is safe to say that the Sherpas will not come up short in the end.
"There's a handful of us prepared to make sure that Tsering doesn't lose anything," Mr. Trest said.
Mr. Gyaltsen's goal is to begin the network in March, in time for the climbing season. He expects 1,000 people to pass through base camp between mid-March and the start of the monsoon in early June, for a typical stay of four weeks before ascending the summit.
While those involved in the project are intrigued by the technical challenge, most seem far more interested in the cultural ramifications.
Mr. Hughes and Mr. Cook are particularly intrigued by how the radios can be used during the off season. Mr. Gyaltsen hopes to move them to Namche Bazar, where they will be hooked up to his existing satellite dish. The radios will provide Internet reception over a nearby hill to a school with about 250 students. With such a link in place, Mr. Hughes and a friend who once taught English in Nepal hope to establish a distance-learning program.
The possibility of better educating his neighbors, improving life in town and encouraging educated people to stay has inspired Mr. Gyaltsen.
"My friends who are well educated, they are doctors or engineers, they don't want to come back here," he said. "But these are the people we need here." If the town has more to offer in terms of Internet connectivity and development, educated people may want to return, he reasons.
Mr. Cook and Mr. Forster also see the effort as a potential model for poor communities around the world that are seeking to set up communications networks without relying on huge, often government-run telecommunications corporations.
"It's such a classic example of how one person brought telecom into an area where the phone company wouldn't," Mr. Cook said.
There seems to have been a recent change in how some people/businesses are coping with online financial difficulties - begging.
There's probably an earlier example, but save karyn comes quickly to mind. She spent too much money on shoes on her credit card and she asked for donations to pay it back - and people did.... or at least, they pledged money. It's become enough of a phenomenom that there are articles on wired, caplan, and newhouse and many many others. And that's mostly in the realm of personal begging.
Companies now seem to be joining in. Mandrake now have this money drive, and another one earlier in the year. Gnome is asking for money. And there seems to be a trend of having software for ransom.
All of this concerns me because it seems that there a plethora of open source related companies/products that aren't viable on their own merits.
Whilst very few of us are lawyers, and hence almost all of us will not be qualified to answer you question directly, a simple google search turns up a heap of great starting points.
The first google link for hailstorm is for microsoft's initial announcement. So it's not totally wiped. Still totally vague on what it's supposed to be though (although I did win a game of 'buzzword bingo' while reading it).
I've been looking for a "do everything" DVD drive for a while. Still haven't found it. But I have found a couple of good spots on the net for DVD comparisons and info: Extremetech DVD page
Mirrored Text (for posterity, not karma): Digital Cash.
Implementations of various electronic cash protocols. Digital Cash Implementations of various electronic cash protocols.
magicmoney 1.0 Magic Money is a digital cash system designed for use over electronic mail. Magic Money is a digital cash system designed for use over electronic mail.The system is online and untraceable. Online means that each transactioninvolves an exchange with a server, to prevent double-spending. Untraceablemeans that it is impossible for anyone to trace transactions, or to match awithdrawal with a deposit, or to match two coins in any way. The systemconsists of two modules, the server and the client. Magic Money uses the PGPascii-armored message format for all communication between the server andclient. All traffic is encrypted, and messages from the server to the clientare signed. Untraceability is provided by a Chaum-style blind signature.Note that the blind signature is patented, as is RSA. Using it forexperimental purposes only shouldn't get you in trouble. Digicash isrepresented by discrete coins, the denominations of which are chosen by theserver operator. Coins are RSA-signed, with a different e/d pair for eachdenomination. The server does not store any money. All coins are stored bythe client module. The server accepts old coins and blind- signs new coins,and checks off the old ones on a spent list. sources MagicMoney.tar.gz author Pr0duct Cypher edit application object
-lucre 0.9.0 Unofficial Cypherpunks Release of Chaum's ecash. -lucre is a C library that implements the protocols of DigiCash's ecash.-lucre provides all of the basic things you would like (payment requests,payments, deposits, withdrawals, opening accounts), as well as a fewadvanced features (like the ability to use the same account on multiplemachines, and the ability to use ecash without having a bank account atall). The format of the wallet is somewhat different from that of DigiCash'sstandard client, so you have to be careful if you want to use use both thatand -lucre with the same bank account. It does seem to work, though. sources lucre-0.9.0.tar.gz author Anonymous edit application object
ncash 19971216 An efficient off-line electronic cash system based on the representation problem. Experimental implementation of an off-line electronic cash system based onthe representation problem. From the documentation, "Our system is the firstto be based entirely on descrete logarithms. Using the representationproblem as a basic concept, some techniques are introduced that enable us toconstruct protocols for withdrawl and payment that do not use the cut andchoose methodology of earlier systems. As a concequence, our cash system ismuch more efficient in both computation and communication complexity thanpreviously proposed systems.". The technical paper is mirroredhere. sources snapshot.tar.gz author Niels Möller homepage http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/NCash/NCash.html edit application object
Perspective: Tech's answer to Big Brother - Tech News - CNET.com CNET tech sites: Price comparisons | Product reviews | Tech news | Downloads | Site map News.context: Special Reports | Newsmakers | Perspectives Perspective: Tech's answer to Big Brother By Declan McCullagh December 16, 2002, 4:00 AM PT WASHINGTON-Why is everyone so surprised that the U.S. government wants to create a Total Information Awareness database with details about everything you do?
This is an unsurprising result of having so much information about our lives archived on the computers of our credit card companies, our banks, our health insurance companies and government agencies.
Now a Defense Department agency is devising a way to link these different systems together to create a kind of digital alter ego of each of us. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, this proposed centralization was inevitable-and it's only going to get worse.
Blame retired Admiral John Poindexter, national security adviser for former President Ronald Reagan, who returned to the Pentagon in February to run a creepy new agency that's trying to create this mammoth surveillance and information-analysis system. It's called Total Information Awareness, and it's funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's a good idea, or that it's consistent with the traditional American values of limited government and a sharp demarcation between the private and the public sector. I'm not even sure if Poindexter's brainchild could ever work.
What I am saying is that if our personal information-some of it extraordinarily sensitive-is archived in corporate or government databases and protected only by the weak shield of the law, it's vulnerable to federal snoops.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, this proposed centralization was inevitable-and it's only going to get worse. When a nation is responding to perilous threats, politicians tend to repeal privacy laws in a femtosecond. The current process started with overwhelming votes for the USA Patriot Act last year. (It cleared the Senate with only one "nay" vote, from the courageous Russ Feingold, D-Wisc.) And if another terrorist attack happens, all bets are off.
That's why simply enacting laws and trusting to the government to protect our privacy can be a very dangerous thing. Just ask the Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. New research says they were selected using Census Bureau data-data that was handed over to the government in strict confidence. Or ask the people who were robbed by the former chief of detectives for the Chicago Police Department, who pleaded guilty last year to using law enforcement databases to plot crimes.
Technology offers a better way to preserve our rights against government overreaching. New crises may prompt Congress to vote unanimously to skewer the Bill of Rights. But technological protections don't vary with the whims of politicians or shifts in Supreme Court majorities.
The sad thing is that for years we've known about technology that can slow down this mass "databasification" of American society. We just haven't used it.
One approach is outlined in Peter Wayner's useful book, "Translucent Databases." It describes methods-complete with Java code that produces standard SQL (Structured Query Language)-to construct databases that use one-way functions to scramble data and shield it from prying eyes.
New crises may prompt Congress to vote unanimously to skewer the Bill of Rights. But technological protections don't vary with the whims of politicians or shifts in Supreme Court majorities. "The main goal I had with writing the book is to show it is possible to build a database that does useful work and solves problems without keeping personal information," Wayner said. "At first it seems counterintuitive. You figure that if you're going to arrange appointments and keep track of what customers bought in the past, you need the information there. But it turns out it's possible (to scramble it), and it can make the database smaller and faster, too."
A basic example is the venerable Unix password file, which doesn't store any actual passwords. Instead, the operating system scrambles a user's password using a one-way hash function and saves the scrambled version to the file. Because the function cannot be reversed, the database is secure if viewed by a malicious hacker, but users can still log in.
More importantly, even if Poindexter obtained that file through a court order or some more surreptitious method, assuming the encryption algorithm worked properly, he wouldn't be able to extract anyone's actual passwords from it.
Wayner's book provides tips that more programmers should follow. He shows how to build an encrypted department store database using a one-way function that can't divulge personal information unless a customer's full name is supplied. Other examples include encrypted car rental databases and lotteries.
A second approach was invented by Stefan Brands, previously a scientist at Zero Knowledge Systems, who outlined it in a book titled "Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates: Building in Privacy."
Brands describes a remarkable technology called limited disclosure certificates. It's a pre-emptive response to current trends in authentication, where you might end up using one digital ID certificate for everything from driving to shopping to health care-and all your information and transactions would instantly appear in Poindexter's database.
Limited disclosure certificates solve that centralization problem. They use a clever bit of mathematics to protect the identity of honest people, but reveal the identity of people who attempt to commit fraud. As soon as you try to cheat someone, the privacy protection evaporates.
Brands predicts in his book how a limited disclosure certificate would work on a smart card: "Any data leakage from and to the smart card can be blocked. The cardholder can even prevent his or her smart card from developing information that would help the card issuer to trade the cardholders' transactions, should the card contents become available to the card issuer. Transactions can be completed within as little as 1/20th of a second, so that road-toll and public transport applications are entirely feasible."
In an interview, Brands added that "instead of all this information about you being managed in central databases, you could manage it yourself. In theory, all the data that organizations hold about you and need to make decisions about you could be distributed to you.
"If you use good cryptography, the organizations' information is protected: You can't modify the information. At the same time, you would then be able to disclose whatever you need for a particular purpose."
MIT professor Ron Rivest described Brands' work as imparting a way for people to remain anonymous and yet convince an Internet service provider that they are a paid subscriber. The beauty is that the user's sessions are unlinkable-the ISP can't even tell if an user currently logged in is the same as the user who used the service at a previous time.
It's true that Congress could outlaw Wayner's and Brands' techniques and force all information to be stored in a surveillance-enabled way. But until that happens, we don't have to make it any easier for Poindexter and his snoops.
More Perspectives
biography Declan McCullagh is the Washington correspondent for CNET News.com, chronicling the ever-busier intersection between technology and politics. Before that, he worked for several years as Washington bureau chief for Wired News. He has also worked as a reporter for The Netly News, Time magazine and HotWired. Search News.com All CNET The Web
"Innocence: Ghost In The Shell as the sequel to Ghost In The Shell, anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii, has been announced [G]. Due out in spring of 2004 in Japan, with Mamoru Oshii as screenplay/director, produced by Mitsuhisa Ishikawa of Production I.G [G], and co-produced by(!) Studio GHIBLI [G]."
Slashdot Mirror
That graph is horribly unreadable.
Ahh. The original poster overloaded the word "mathematically".
His definition includes: "I mathematically killed Fred by calculating how fast I had to go to hit him with my car as he crossed the road and then going that fast and hitting him with my car."
This is equivalent to saying that he "mathematically beat the tossing of a coin" i.e. the statement makes no sense.
I recommend every aspiring trader have a read of A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos.
The book is pretty much as it sounds. While the author doesn't *actually* invest in stocks, he *is* a mathematician and he plays through (mostly with logic) ways to get ahead in the stock market game. As you would probably guess, it's not easy.
A great read. Sadly, my dreams of a quick fortune by computing stocks were quickly squashed by his well presented arguments.
I futzed with a few wikis to try and orgnise all the disparate parts of my life (which were usually recorded on a swarm of post-it notes). My main problems were having to setup/admin a httpd server on which to run the wiki, and then backing up/restoring the information in the wiki.
Eventually I found tiddlywiki.
Pros:
* no httpd required
* all information stored in a single html file (including the wiki code itself!)
* has tags and a search function
* monstrously quick and easy to set up.
Cons:
* haven't found anything about it I don't like yet.
I've now torn down every postit from my wall - if it needs recording, it gets stuck it the wiki (a process that takes less than a minute).
My guess is that they're expanding the compressed JPEG co-efficients (which are entropy encoded using huffman - sometimes using pre-calculated huffman tables - see the standard) and re-compressing them with an optimized algorithm - something proprietary and tweaked extensively for standard jpeg images.
Sort of like saving space by converting gzip files to bzip2 files - except their compression scheme isn't documented or open.
especially about the future.
Worthless punting by Cringely - obvious predictions about obvious things, useless predictions about useless things. Just like a "Best of year X", everybody needs to do a "Predictions for year X+1" - and Cringely's predictions are as good as anyone else's (i.e. worthless).
"What a waste of time!"
Although Phil snorted this in response to a woman's claim of having studied 19th century French poetry, I think I can hear the collective snort of many people in reponse to a story about the blog of a convention for bloggers.
Blog me with a spoon.
Granted the article is pretty vague with arm-waving non-technical statements like "huge amounts of data".
.
The extra information for the surround sound (which is just multiple channels stored in the same file with various cross-channels redundancies removed) needs to be stored somewhere so that it can be recreated by the player. And this will be with the Z 'ancillary bits' I talked about.
I don't quite understand your point about "multichannel" not being "surround". ISO13818-3 describe "audio with 3 front channels and 2 rear channels plus a Low Frequency (subwoofer) channel"
I realise there are layers of jargon when talking surround/Dolby Surround/DTS/etc/etc; however the article seems to be using the term 'surround' in the generic(lots of channels) sense, not the Dolby(tm) sense (these definitions are pretty close anyway, unless you want to get into the way the channels are matrixed).
See ISO13818-3 which describes MPEG2-audio (which is an extention of the original mpeg audio standard - iso 11172)
ISO13818 describes
* the Low Sampling Frequency extensions (which describe encoding mpeg audio at 16/22.05/24 kHz). This is already incorporated in most encoders.
* 3/2-stero+LFE (Section 0.2.3.2 describes the various configurations e.g. 3/2, 3/1, etc)
For a very brief moment when I had too much time, I worked on getting the multichannel stuff working in tooLame (the layer2 mpeg audio encoder) and the way it works is this:
1. The encoder works out the overall bitrate for all the channels (X bits)
2. The encoder assigns some bits (Y) to be used for the backwards compatible 2-channel stereo so that all compliant decoders will work. Y gt X. (The way the 5 channels are crosstalked and cancelled out to get 2 stereo channels is complex. Read the standard if you want more info).
3. There will then be Z bits (Z=X-Y) left over for the storage of the other channels. (Referred to as "Ancillary data").
4. The beginning of the mpeg audio frame has a flag set so that compliant decoders know about the extra info.
5. Old decoders won't grok the flag, and so they'll just read the stereo info, skip over all the extra info and then find the next bit of data they do understand.
The outcome of all this is that you may have a 512kbps mpeg audio stream which contains 256kbps of the stereo information and then 256kbits of "extra" info that is used to reconstruct the full 3/2 channels of sound.
There is a problems with this however. Compliant MPEG audio streams have a maximum bitrate as set out in the original MPEG1 standard (11172). For example, the maximum total bitrate of a 44.1kHz mp3 file is 1011 kbps. However, when you do really high bitrate multichannel stuff, you can exceed this limit: in this case, the MPEG2 standard suggests using another file to store the information (referred to as the "extension bitstream").
Hope this helped someone.
later
mike
It was first raised in Feb2003 here.
The conversation died for a while, and then it was brought up again in March. (Although the conversation seemed to get bogged down on selecting a name for the format).
The format description is now included in the DOCS/tech directory of the mplayer tarball. Not sure whether any of it's actually implemented in the mplayer code.
both amiga programmers will be fighting hard to get the cash.
I used to use the GCC tools on the amiga (ADE - or whatever it turned into). But then that slowly went stagnant - and it was 10x faster to cross-compile stuff on the FreeBSD/Pentium166 than to wait for the A3000/'030.
When Amiga/PPC hardware started appearing, I was keen to do some portage of unix-ish type stuff - except the PPC dev toolchain was so woeful it made me want to cry.
sigh.
Guthrie did work with work into PKU (PKU=Phenylketonuria. An inherited human metabolic disease that is characterized by inability to oxidize a metabolic product of phenylalanine.) and related diseases.
The rest of this is going to be totally off topic (besides the fact that I am from the same place as the product mentioned in the story).
Google Cache Links
The poster was smart enough to put in google cache links to the story. Prevents a slashdotting of the original site (although google might get shirty). How about slashcode automatically include google cache links? It's easy to do. Check out merkac dot for an implementation.
Subscribers as early mirror makers
I've noticed on the last couple of stories which where savagely slashdotted, that the subscribers had a chance to mirror the articles before it became available to the rest of us (the unsubscribed rabble). On one of them (it might've been the missing matter in the universe one), an early peruse of the comments showed only 3 comments at a threshold at 2 or greater. And each of these was a subscriber (probably?) posting a mirror site.
So not only are these people paying for the privilege of seeing the stories early, they're doing work for slashdot by making sure the stories are mirrored correctly (and karma whoring quite nicely at the same time).
Maybe some official mirroring technique is called for. Not by slashdot (since they've said quite plainly that they won't mirror anything), but if there was a nice bit of code to auto-mirror every article's URL to a free web mirror (or some site which has the guts to take a slashpede).
That's all.
When geekdom becomes popular, true geeks move on.
The reason "we" got into programming when young is that we were all probably maths/science people looking for an outlet for our energy ("I never made the first team, I just made the first team laugh" - billy bragg).
Unless they already have a flexible and mathematical brain, it's really going to be hard to teach them to cope with the logic of
x = x+1
That statement is directly contradictory to anything that they ever learn in maths, and I certainly wouldn't want them believing that it was actually a statement of equality.
As programmers we contort our brains to think of it as 'x takes the value of whatever x is now plus 1' - but it's us changing our thinking to suit the computers for this specific task.
I have thought a number of times about trying to teach teenagers computer programming, but after having taught them maths for the last 4 years, I don't think I would attempt this with any but the most advanced students.
However, programming concepts can be taught using more visual tools. I can't remember the name of the program, but I have seen a Lego Mindstorm programming interface which is ideal for kids: it's visual, it's dragging and dropping program pieces, and it gives kids some concrete feedback on their progress (since it makes the Lego robot, or whatever, do something).
You and I might be happy to write a "helloworld" or a "prime number list generator", but most people need something a bit less abstract as a proof of their progress. LOGO had the conrete output of a picture (so it'd be a competition between the kids to make the picture). Mindstorms have robots (so it's a competition to make the coolest robot).
To summarise the summary of the summary
Because It's There: Putting Everest Online
By NANCY GOHRING
IF the 25-below-zero temperature, howling wind and grim effects of altitude sickness do not make most of those trying to scale Mount Everest feel a world away from home, the near-complete lack of communications on and around Everest surely does.
This year, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary's first ascent of Everest, climbers on the mountain will have the chance to connect with the world below by e-mail. That is because Tsering Gyaltsen, the grandson of the only surviving Sherpa to have accompanied Hillary on that famed climb, is planning to build the world's highest Internet cafe at base camp.
It is fitting that the added comfort comes courtesy of a Sherpa, one of the clan of Nepalese who take charge of getting most everything up the mountain for the usually wealthy adventurers seeking the thrill of topping the world's highest peak.
But in contrast to many climber services, this one does not stand to benefit foreign-run outfitters primarily. Although it is an obvious perk for the climbers, the residents of a nearby town may get Internet access because of it, and the mountain may get a bit cleaner.
The technical challenge is significant. Wireless radios will be positioned on moving glaciers, and gear must be insulated against temperatures far colder than they were designed to withstand. And at the helm of the project is Mr. Gyaltsen, who is not wealthy and has no formal technical training.
But tenacious he is. From halfway around the world, Mr. Gyaltsen has attracted an all-star cast of technologists in the United States dedicated to furthering his goal.
It started when Gordon Cook, author and publisher of a monthly newsletter, The Cook Report on Internet (www.cookreport.com), met Mr. Gyaltsen by chance during a visit to Nepal in November. Mr. Cook was so intrigued by Mr. Gyaltsen's success at independently restoring phone service to his town, Namche Bazar - cut off for more than a year after Maoists tore down a government-owned telecommunications tower in 2001 - that he started asking friends to lend their expertise to his work. "I put my full network at Tsering's disposal," Mr. Cook said.
At the time, Mr. Gyaltsen had set up a satellite Internet link and cybercafe in Namche Bazar, a six-day hike below the Everest base camp, and was trying to figure out how to make it more available to his neighbors. Then one night over a beer, he and a friend who works for the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, a nonprofit environmental group that is responsible for disposing of the mounds of garbage on Everest, hatched the idea for an Internet cafe at base camp.
The proceeds would help bring in money for the committee, which Mr. Gyaltsen said that as a Sherpa he felt it "my duty to help."
Mr. Cook brought in Dave Hughes, a leading wireless-technology thinker who has studied the performance of wireless equipment in extreme weather in Alaska for the National Science Foundation. One of the first calls Mr. Hughes placed was to his friend Jim Forster, who holds the title of distinguished engineer at the networking giant Cisco Systems.
Mr. Forster eagerly donated three Wi-Fi radios on behalf of his company. Such radios enable the creation of wireless networks that can relay data within a couple of hundred feet or as far as several miles as the crow flies, much the way that local-area networks, or LAN's, work in offices.
"What I like about this project is that it demonstrates that the technology developed for a LAN in a building can be applicable beyond that," Mr. Forster said. "This may be as far outside the building as you can get."
From his base in Colorado Springs, Mr. Hughes, 74, is using a Web-based conferencing system as a long-distance tool to teach Mr. Gyaltsen and his colleagues how to set up the base-camp network. Mr. Gyaltsen is working with technicians on loan from two Internet service providers, Square Networks and Worldlink, based in Nepal's capital, Katmandu. Another friend of Mr. Cook's, Mike Trest, an independent consultant and satellite expert, is helping to teach the Nepalese about satellites.
The network will consist of a small satellite dish, planted about 1,500 feet above base camp, that can provide two-way communications. Because the dish must operate from firm ground, it cannot be used directly at base camp, which is on a moving glacier. The $10,000 satellite dish, which Mr. Gyaltsen purchased with a bank loan and funds from Square Networks, will connect to the cybercafe at base camp over the Wi-Fi radios. The dish will beam data to a satellite in orbit and to an Internet service provider in Israel.
It sounds as if it would be challenging for Mr. Hughes to teach relative novices how to set up such a complicated network from nearly 8,000 miles away. But Mr. Hughes - who was teaching a college class online in 1982, a decade before most people had heard of the Internet - says that the 13-hour time difference is not the biggest problem.
"The distance is easy," Mr. Hughes said. "It's the culture that's hard."
Once, Mr. Gyaltsen disappeared from e-mail and the online network for two days. Mr. Cook later learned that after the deaths of some villagers, nearby Buddhist monks had instructed people in the town to attend a special ceremony at the monastery - nearly a full day's walk from home.
Another time, Mr. Gyaltsen was incommunicado for a couple of days because some drunken climbers in Namche Bazar had tripped over the wires connecting his Internet cafe to his satellite dish there.
Cisco and Mr. Gyaltsen are working out the seemingly endless bureaucratic requirements for importing the radios to Nepal. Once they have arrived, Mr. Gyaltsen will transport them by plane to Lukla, a town at roughly 9,800 feet, then up by yak train to Namche Bazar (more than 11,000 feet) and on to the base camp (nearly 18,000 feet) before the final leg of the trip.
Mr. Gyaltsen and the pollution committee, which will technically own the radios, are still deciding what to charge users. They are considering a flat fee of $2,000 to $5,000 per expedition, which can number 5 to 20 people. That price might sound steep, but Mr. Gyaltsen says it paled in comparison with the cost of the expedition itself, typically $65,000 a person.
The satellite link and Internet service will cost the operators less than $1,000 a month for the climbing season. Any profits will go to the pollution committee. While initial expectations for profits are modest, organizers believe it is safe to say that the Sherpas will not come up short in the end.
"There's a handful of us prepared to make sure that Tsering doesn't lose anything," Mr. Trest said.
Mr. Gyaltsen's goal is to begin the network in March, in time for the climbing season. He expects 1,000 people to pass through base camp between mid-March and the start of the monsoon in early June, for a typical stay of four weeks before ascending the summit.
While those involved in the project are intrigued by the technical challenge, most seem far more interested in the cultural ramifications.
Mr. Hughes and Mr. Cook are particularly intrigued by how the radios can be used during the off season. Mr. Gyaltsen hopes to move them to Namche Bazar, where they will be hooked up to his existing satellite dish. The radios will provide Internet reception over a nearby hill to a school with about 250 students. With such a link in place, Mr. Hughes and a friend who once taught English in Nepal hope to establish a distance-learning program.
The possibility of better educating his neighbors, improving life in town and encouraging educated people to stay has inspired Mr. Gyaltsen.
"My friends who are well educated, they are doctors or engineers, they don't want to come back here," he said. "But these are the people we need here." If the town has more to offer in terms of Internet connectivity and development, educated people may want to return, he reasons.
Mr. Cook and Mr. Forster also see the effort as a potential model for poor communities around the world that are seeking to set up communications networks without relying on huge, often government-run telecommunications corporations.
"It's such a classic example of how one person brought telecom into an area where the phone company wouldn't," Mr. Cook said.
I suppose what is needed is some sort of cross between
Or maybe just bloody mirror the links...
There seems to have been a recent change in how some people/businesses are coping with online financial difficulties - begging.
There's probably an earlier example, but save karyn comes quickly to mind. She spent too much money on shoes on her credit card and she asked for donations to pay it back - and people did.... or at least, they pledged money. It's become enough of a phenomenom that there are articles on wired, caplan, and newhouse and many many others. And that's mostly in the realm of personal begging.
Companies now seem to be joining in.
Mandrake now have this money drive, and another one earlier in the year. Gnome is asking for money. And there seems to be a trend of having software for ransom.
All of this concerns me because it seems that there a plethora of open source related companies/products that aren't viable on their own merits.
The first google link for hailstorm is for microsoft's initial announcement. So it's not totally wiped. Still totally vague on what it's supposed to be though (although I did win a game of 'buzzword bingo' while reading it).
I've been looking for a "do everything" DVD drive for a while. Still haven't found it. But I have found a couple of good spots on the net for DVD comparisons and info:
Extremetech DVD page
Extremetech dvd/cd page
arstechnica dvd a04 review with a great comparison table down the bottom.
Merkac Dot : 48210
Links to Google Cache(N.B. Not always cached.)
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Mirrored Text (for posterity, not karma): Digital Cash.
Implementations of various electronic cash protocols. Digital Cash Implementations of various electronic cash protocols.
magicmoney 1.0 Magic Money is a digital cash system designed for use over electronic mail. Magic Money is a digital cash system designed for use over electronic mail.The system is online and untraceable. Online means that each transactioninvolves an exchange with a server, to prevent double-spending. Untraceablemeans that it is impossible for anyone to trace transactions, or to match awithdrawal with a deposit, or to match two coins in any way. The systemconsists of two modules, the server and the client. Magic Money uses the PGPascii-armored message format for all communication between the server andclient. All traffic is encrypted, and messages from the server to the clientare signed. Untraceability is provided by a Chaum-style blind signature.Note that the blind signature is patented, as is RSA. Using it forexperimental purposes only shouldn't get you in trouble. Digicash isrepresented by discrete coins, the denominations of which are chosen by theserver operator. Coins are RSA-signed, with a different e/d pair for eachdenomination. The server does not store any money. All coins are stored bythe client module. The server accepts old coins and blind- signs new coins,and checks off the old ones on a spent list. sources MagicMoney.tar.gz author Pr0duct Cypher edit application object
-lucre 0.9.0 Unofficial Cypherpunks Release of Chaum's ecash. -lucre is a C library that implements the protocols of DigiCash's ecash.-lucre provides all of the basic things you would like (payment requests,payments, deposits, withdrawals, opening accounts), as well as a fewadvanced features (like the ability to use the same account on multiplemachines, and the ability to use ecash without having a bank account atall). The format of the wallet is somewhat different from that of DigiCash'sstandard client, so you have to be careful if you want to use use both thatand -lucre with the same bank account. It does seem to work, though. sources lucre-0.9.0.tar.gz author Anonymous edit application object
ncash 19971216 An efficient off-line electronic cash system based on the representation problem. Experimental implementation of an off-line electronic cash system based onthe representation problem. From the documentation, "Our system is the firstto be based entirely on descrete logarithms. Using the representationproblem as a basic concept, some techniques are introduced that enable us toconstruct protocols for withdrawl and payment that do not use the cut andchoose methodology of earlier systems. As a concequence, our cash system ismuch more efficient in both computation and communication complexity thanpreviously proposed systems.". The technical paper is mirroredhere. sources snapshot.tar.gz author Niels Möller homepage http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/NCash/NCash.html edit application object
$Id: application-index.html,v 0.24 1999/09/16 14:13:43 root Exp $ munitions.vipul.net Amsterdam, Netherlands mirror © 1999-2001, Vipul Ved Prakash. Thanks to xs4all for providing the resoruces to host this site.
Mirrored Text (for posterity, not karma): C|Net has an interesting editorial
Perspective: Tech's answer to Big Brother - Tech News - CNET.com CNET tech sites: Price comparisons | Product reviews | Tech news | Downloads | Site map News.context: Special Reports | Newsmakers | Perspectives Perspective: Tech's answer to Big Brother By Declan McCullagh December 16, 2002, 4:00 AM PT WASHINGTON-Why is everyone so surprised that the U.S. government wants to create a Total Information Awareness database with details about everything you do?
This is an unsurprising result of having so much information about our lives archived on the computers of our credit card companies, our banks, our health insurance companies and government agencies.
Now a Defense Department agency is devising a way to link these different systems together to create a kind of digital alter ego of each of us. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, this proposed centralization was inevitable-and it's only going to get worse.
Blame retired Admiral John Poindexter, national security adviser for former President Ronald Reagan, who returned to the Pentagon in February to run a creepy new agency that's trying to create this mammoth surveillance and information-analysis system. It's called Total Information Awareness, and it's funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's a good idea, or that it's consistent with the traditional American values of limited government and a sharp demarcation between the private and the public sector. I'm not even sure if Poindexter's brainchild could ever work.
What I am saying is that if our personal information-some of it extraordinarily sensitive-is archived in corporate or government databases and protected only by the weak shield of the law, it's vulnerable to federal snoops.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, this proposed centralization was inevitable-and it's only going to get worse. When a nation is responding to perilous threats, politicians tend to repeal privacy laws in a femtosecond. The current process started with overwhelming votes for the USA Patriot Act last year. (It cleared the Senate with only one "nay" vote, from the courageous Russ Feingold, D-Wisc.) And if another terrorist attack happens, all bets are off.
That's why simply enacting laws and trusting to the government to protect our privacy can be a very dangerous thing. Just ask the Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. New research says they were selected using Census Bureau data-data that was handed over to the government in strict confidence. Or ask the people who were robbed by the former chief of detectives for the Chicago Police Department, who pleaded guilty last year to using law enforcement databases to plot crimes.
Technology offers a better way to preserve our rights against government overreaching. New crises may prompt Congress to vote unanimously to skewer the Bill of Rights. But technological protections don't vary with the whims of politicians or shifts in Supreme Court majorities.
The sad thing is that for years we've known about technology that can slow down this mass "databasification" of American society. We just haven't used it.
One approach is outlined in Peter Wayner's useful book, "Translucent Databases." It describes methods-complete with Java code that produces standard SQL (Structured Query Language)-to construct databases that use one-way functions to scramble data and shield it from prying eyes.
New crises may prompt Congress to vote unanimously to skewer the Bill of Rights. But technological protections don't vary with the whims of politicians or shifts in Supreme Court majorities. "The main goal I had with writing the book is to show it is possible to build a database that does useful work and solves problems without keeping personal information," Wayner said. "At first it seems counterintuitive. You figure that if you're going to arrange appointments and keep track of what customers bought in the past, you need the information there. But it turns out it's possible (to scramble it), and it can make the database smaller and faster, too."
A basic example is the venerable Unix password file, which doesn't store any actual passwords. Instead, the operating system scrambles a user's password using a one-way hash function and saves the scrambled version to the file. Because the function cannot be reversed, the database is secure if viewed by a malicious hacker, but users can still log in.
More importantly, even if Poindexter obtained that file through a court order or some more surreptitious method, assuming the encryption algorithm worked properly, he wouldn't be able to extract anyone's actual passwords from it.
Wayner's book provides tips that more programmers should follow. He shows how to build an encrypted department store database using a one-way function that can't divulge personal information unless a customer's full name is supplied. Other examples include encrypted car rental databases and lotteries.
A second approach was invented by Stefan Brands, previously a scientist at Zero Knowledge Systems, who outlined it in a book titled "Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates: Building in Privacy."
Brands describes a remarkable technology called limited disclosure certificates. It's a pre-emptive response to current trends in authentication, where you might end up using one digital ID certificate for everything from driving to shopping to health care-and all your information and transactions would instantly appear in Poindexter's database.
Limited disclosure certificates solve that centralization problem. They use a clever bit of mathematics to protect the identity of honest people, but reveal the identity of people who attempt to commit fraud. As soon as you try to cheat someone, the privacy protection evaporates.
Brands predicts in his book how a limited disclosure certificate would work on a smart card: "Any data leakage from and to the smart card can be blocked. The cardholder can even prevent his or her smart card from developing information that would help the card issuer to trade the cardholders' transactions, should the card contents become available to the card issuer. Transactions can be completed within as little as 1/20th of a second, so that road-toll and public transport applications are entirely feasible."
In an interview, Brands added that "instead of all this information about you being managed in central databases, you could manage it yourself. In theory, all the data that organizations hold about you and need to make decisions about you could be distributed to you.
"If you use good cryptography, the organizations' information is protected: You can't modify the information. At the same time, you would then be able to disclose whatever you need for a particular purpose."
MIT professor Ron Rivest described Brands' work as imparting a way for people to remain anonymous and yet convince an Internet service provider that they are a paid subscriber. The beauty is that the user's sessions are unlinkable-the ISP can't even tell if an user currently logged in is the same as the user who used the service at a previous time.
It's true that Congress could outlaw Wayner's and Brands' techniques and force all information to be stored in a surveillance-enabled way. But until that happens, we don't have to make it any easier for Poindexter and his snoops.
More Perspectives
biography Declan McCullagh is the Washington correspondent for CNET News.com, chronicling the ever-busier intersection between technology and politics. Before that, he worked for several years as Washington bureau chief for Wired News. He has also worked as a reporter for The Netly News, Time magazine and HotWired. Search News.com All CNET The Web
All story links point to the google cache. See Merkac Dot for the full slashdot summary
"Innocence: Ghost In The Shell as the sequel to Ghost In The Shell, anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii, has been announced [G]. Due out in spring of 2004 in Japan, with Mamoru Oshii as screenplay/director, produced by Mitsuhisa Ishikawa of Production I.G [G], and co-produced by(!) Studio GHIBLI [G]."