This is just conspiracy theory nonsense. Go read up the specs please! (RFC2373 especially section 2.5.1, and RFC2462 especially section 6), or look at http://www.ipv6.org/ .
In a nutshell: half the address is your router, half the address is your Ethernet MAC (or equivalent - and you can make this bit up!). Its *all* about routing.
While there are some nasties in this direction (eg MS record you MAC address in Office documents in order to trace you), MACs are *not* globally unique, because you can trivially change them on many cards. I know this to my pain having been sent a bunch of PCs that all autoconfigured to the same MAC under NT, though they worked under other OS...
For the RFC-unaware it (section 6, Security, of the IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration RFC) reads...
"Stateless address autoconfiguration allows a host to connect to a network, configure an address and start communicating with other nodes without ever registering or authenticating itself with the local site. Although this allows unauthorized users to connect to and use a network, the threat is inherently present in the Internet architecture. Any node with a physical attachment to a network can generate an address (using a variety of ad hoc techniques) that provides connectivity."
Real tenuous connection - there was an episode of the Outer Limits starring Mark Hamill (as "Dr Sam Stein" - I looked it up on IMDB here guys, I'm not that much of a trainspotter) in which he plays a Scientist who invents a virtual reality environment called - the CAVE.
Sub-frankenstein nonsense, of course, the machine falls in love with him and tries to pull him permanently into virtual reality. But now I'm thinking - hey maybe it was real after all...
His theory, as best as I can tell, depends on the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I prefer the Copenhagen interpretation, but you know what? Neither one of them is in the slightest bit scientific.
I have to differ with you on this. There is a proposed experiment to test the Everett theory. It just can't be done with the current technology. I'm not even convinced he *was* using Everett, since there is no collapse of the wavefunction in Everett's theory, but the article refers to 'collapse of the multiverse' in places.
It sounds to me like a variation on the anthropic principle - ie you have to exist to ask the question 'why do I exist?'.
What I mean is, he seems to suggest that we see beneficial mutations because we are on the branch of the multiverse where the mutations were beneficial. Which doesnt really tell you anything.
Or, more controversially, he may really mean that the multiverse collapses, back to an earlier point in time, so that only beneficial mutations can result. Well, theres an obvious argument against that - there are clearly genetic defects in the population.
Without reading the guys book I suspect he's not arguing anything like this at all, but is arguing the toss about how organized systems came to be in the first place. Life seems to get along just fine after that.
There are other competing explanations for this stuff - Kaufmann's work on self organising systems, Hoyle's stuff about life being seeded from space (simple biological molecules have been discovered in interstellar gas), Cairns-Smith and his clay crystals, the folk who work on black smokers, etc etc. And of course theres the God theory. All of them controversial, most of them testable to some extent. I dont think this one amounts to much more than that. -Baz
Sure VMs will always be slow. But that is no reason to abandon platform independent binaries. Take a look at the research on Slim Binaries for Oberon: http://caesar.ics.uci.edu/oberon/research.html
"This paper presents an alternative approach based on "slim binaries", files that contain a target-machine-independent program representation from which native code is generated on-the-fly at load-time. The slim binaries used in our implementation are based on adaptive compression of syntax trees, and not on a virtual-machine representation such as p-code or Java byte-codes. They are highly compact and can be read from a storage medium very efficiently, significantly reducing the I/O cost of loading. The time thus saved is then spent on code generation, making the implemented system fast enough to compete with traditional loaders."
Many languages (eg Perl, Smalltalk, elisp, VB, Java) rely on something VM-like at an underlying level. I think a lot of brain cycles are being wasted on reinventing VMs, freeze/thaw mechanisms, portable binaries, etc. Part of the problem is that the VMs are too closely tied to the languages. It would be a Good Thing if there was a project looking at separating out the pieces for on-the-fly-compiled and interpreted languages, much as EGCS does for compiled languages.
For such a system to catch on it would have to be a clear winner over existing VM systems. The Oberon Slim Binaries are just such a winning technology. With perl already being rewritten from scratch as Topaz, and pretenders banging at the door for elisp (CLOS and guile versions of emacs are in the works), is this such an impossible dream?
Some AC earlier claimed (probably vacuously) that he held a patent on this. But I happen to know there is a patent on a similar device in Europe (and probably worldwide) held by BT, thought I dont know how general it is.
I can't find it listed on the updated BT labs site (http://www.labs.bt.com) but there was a press release a year ago about a pen they were demoing which did exactly this. It also had a tiny screen on the top which produced a virtual (in the optical sense) view of what you'd written. IIRC it also picked up the 3d motion of the pen, which is apparently important in detecting forgery of signatures.
It was covered on the BBC, and I think it even got mentioned on/. at the time?
Its interesting that many languages (perl, python, rebol, for example) have now gone down the line of being pre-compiling interpreters. Independently, the same work is being done, done again, and redone. This makes me wonder. If you look at the ecgs project, we have compilers written for many different languages and targets by combining front and back ends. IIRC they've worked hard on keeping in 'enough' information through the various stages that optimisation is comparable to handcrafted compilers.
Why wouldnt this strategy work for the scripting tongues? In Topaz there is already a project to rewrite perl from scratch. Its possible (though admittedly a bit of a pipe dream) that the engine could be written to be retargetable to other VMs (eg Squeak's, or (more unlikely) Javas). And then, why not allow the front end to interpret python, tcl,...?
Actually perl is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks for such a project, as (among other things) the syntax is so wacky.
Anyone involved in writing those languages care to comment?
-Baz
(BTW: my 2c on the original argument is that you should look at what actually needs optimized before worrying about perl,C,php,ASP as a web language. I find the bottleneck is usually in the DB; consequently the number of coders here who already know perl and can code rapidly is a major factor. C loses due to long debug/test cycles for memory management. This shouldnt be true, and I know C hackers will say they dont suffer from this, but in the real world I've seen it many times)
You don't have to wade through code. Diagrams, at worst. Assuming Rose doesnt choke (a big assumption!) its always a good laugh to see it trying to reverse-engineer a huge project... but anyway there have been papers at recent OOPSLAs on pattern mining in large scale projects. Some academic will just point his manic miner at the code and win the prize.
Fortunately for me I dont feel tempted, I already have an autographed copy of the GoF book :o) (well, by one of the four anyway)
Latins not as dead as you think. Its still used for papal encyclicals and the like, and as a consequence they maintain a latin dictionary which every so often is updated with neologisms.
This made the news about 6 months back - they included new words for things like 'lapdancer' in the latest edition.
Why do it on the client? Indexing would be much faster if the index was carried at the server, with a hierarchy of index servers not doing any spidering at all, if possible.
Sound familiar? Its Harvest's SOIF format: http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/harvest/
Just my 2c - I'd be happier if much *less* of the web was indexed...just the useful stuff. And if search engines could only recognize a mirror when they see one, then I wouldnt get so many identical replies...
So its not as groundbreaking as it sounds. (read the press blurb). The questions people have been asking here on how it handles colloquialisms and 'the general problem' are mostly irrelevant. I saw a demo of a system (possibly the same one, as it was working on the same domain) translating on the fly between English and German, and it worked just fine, over a year ago.
The way these things work is, since they are in such a restricted domain, (in this case ordering plane tickets and the like), it isnt impossible to give the machine a fairly complete picture of all possible tacks a conversation at a ticket desk might go. It can then use this internal, and fairly complete, model of its domain to get a model of the meaning of the conversation. This intermediate step into an 'interlingual' model means that internally it doesnt need to care what language you want it to speak in.
Plug in a module to translate from an interlingual response to eg French, et voila, the computer will respond in French. Translating _out_ is much easier than translating _in_, since you already have a precise representation of the response internally; but translating _in_ is made much easier as you dont need the machine to understand the entirety of the language.
This is all a bit glib, and I'm not knocking the achievement; I'm just putting some perspective on what's been done. IANAL(ingistics researcher);o) . Anyway, what I'm trying to say is: the only reason they are making any progress is by restricting the domain to one where the conversations are simple and well-understood. That way, they can do a *far* better job than the Babelfish, but its not Star Trek technology yet.
I can see it now: "By opening this box you agree to the terms of the GPL contained inside..."
:o)
I would happily take a GNU sticker and put it on every system I use - NT, 95, Solaris, Linux... because I've got the software running in them all. However, I dont think this sticker is going to resolve the issue for RMS, and even bringing it up again is damagingly divisive...
Slashdot Mirror
In a nutshell: half the address is your router, half the address is your Ethernet MAC (or equivalent - and you can make this bit up!). Its *all* about routing.
While there are some nasties in this direction (eg MS record you MAC address in Office documents in order to trace you), MACs are *not* globally unique, because you can trivially change them on many cards. I know this to my pain having been sent a bunch of PCs that all autoconfigured to the same MAC under NT, though they worked under other OS...
For the RFC-unaware it (section 6, Security, of the IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration RFC) reads...
Sub-frankenstein nonsense, of course, the machine falls in love with him and tries to pull him permanently into virtual reality. But now I'm thinking - hey maybe it was real after all...
Or not, as the case may be. ;o)
-Baz
I have to differ with you on this. There is a proposed experiment to test the Everett theory. It just can't be done with the current technology. I'm not even convinced he *was* using Everett, since there is no collapse of the wavefunction in Everett's theory, but the article refers to 'collapse of the multiverse' in places.
It sounds to me like a variation on the anthropic principle - ie you have to exist to ask the question 'why do I exist?'.
What I mean is, he seems to suggest that we see beneficial mutations because we are on the branch of the multiverse where the mutations were beneficial. Which doesnt really tell you anything.
Or, more controversially, he may really mean that the multiverse collapses, back to an earlier point in time, so that only beneficial mutations can result. Well, theres an obvious argument against that - there are clearly genetic defects in the population.
Without reading the guys book I suspect he's not arguing anything like this at all, but is arguing the toss about how organized systems came to be in the first place. Life seems to get along just fine after that.
There are other competing explanations for this stuff - Kaufmann's work on self organising systems, Hoyle's stuff about life being seeded from space (simple biological molecules have been discovered in interstellar gas), Cairns-Smith and his clay crystals, the folk who work on black smokers, etc etc. And of course theres the God theory. All of them controversial, most of them testable to some extent. I dont think this one amounts to much more than that. -Baz
"This paper presents an alternative approach based on "slim binaries", files that contain a target-machine-independent program representation from which native code is generated on-the-fly at load-time. The slim binaries used in our implementation are based on adaptive compression of syntax trees, and not on a virtual-machine representation such as p-code or Java byte-codes. They are highly compact and can be read from a storage medium very efficiently, significantly reducing the I/O cost of loading. The time thus saved is then spent on code generation, making the implemented system fast enough to compete with traditional loaders."
Many languages (eg Perl, Smalltalk, elisp, VB, Java) rely on something VM-like at an underlying level. I think a lot of brain cycles are being wasted on reinventing VMs, freeze/thaw mechanisms, portable binaries, etc. Part of the problem is that the VMs are too closely tied to the languages. It would be a Good Thing if there was a project looking at separating out the pieces for on-the-fly-compiled and interpreted languages, much as EGCS does for compiled languages.
For such a system to catch on it would have to be a clear winner over existing VM systems. The Oberon Slim Binaries are just such a winning technology. With perl already being rewritten from scratch as Topaz, and pretenders banging at the door for elisp (CLOS and guile versions of emacs are in the works), is this such an impossible dream?
(yeah yeah I know it is. dont mention 'eval'...)
-Baz, living on another planet, as usual.
I can't find it listed on the updated BT labs site (http://www.labs.bt.com) but there was a press release a year ago about a pen they were demoing which did exactly this. It also had a tiny screen on the top which produced a virtual (in the optical sense) view of what you'd written. IIRC it also picked up the 3d motion of the pen, which is apparently important in detecting forgery of signatures.
It was covered on the BBC, and I think it even got mentioned on /. at the time?
Why wouldnt this strategy work for the scripting tongues? In Topaz there is already a project to rewrite perl from scratch. Its possible (though admittedly a bit of a pipe dream) that the engine could be written to be retargetable to other VMs (eg Squeak's, or (more unlikely) Javas). And then, why not allow the front end to interpret python, tcl,...?
Actually perl is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks for such a project, as (among other things) the syntax is so wacky.
Anyone involved in writing those languages care to comment?
-Baz
(BTW: my 2c on the original argument is that you should look at what actually needs optimized before worrying about perl,C,php,ASP as a web language. I find the bottleneck is usually in the DB; consequently the number of coders here who already know perl and can code rapidly is a major factor. C loses due to long debug/test cycles for memory management. This shouldnt be true, and I know C hackers will say they dont suffer from this, but in the real world I've seen it many times)
You don't have to wade through code. Diagrams,
at worst. Assuming Rose doesnt choke (a big
assumption!) its always a good laugh to see it
trying to reverse-engineer a huge project...
but anyway there have been papers at recent
OOPSLAs on pattern mining in large scale projects.
Some academic will just point his manic miner
at the code and win the prize.
Fortunately for me I dont feel tempted, I
already have an autographed copy of the GoF book
:o) (well, by one of the four anyway)
- Design Fanboy
Latins not as dead as you think. Its still
used for papal encyclicals and the like, and
as a consequence they maintain a latin dictionary
which every so often is updated with neologisms.
This made the news about 6 months back - they
included new words for things like 'lapdancer'
in the latest edition.
Why do it on the client? Indexing would be
u al/node151.html#SECTION0001200000000000000 00
much faster if the index was carried at the
server, with a hierarchy of index servers
not doing any spidering at all, if possible.
Sound familiar? Its Harvest's SOIF format:
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/harvest/
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/harvest/docs/old-man
Just my 2c - I'd be happier if much *less* of
the web was indexed...just the useful stuff.
And if search engines could only recognize a
mirror when they see one, then I wouldnt get
so many identical replies...
-Baz
The way these things work is, since they are in such a restricted domain, (in this case ordering plane tickets and the like), it isnt impossible to give the machine a fairly complete picture of all possible tacks a conversation at a ticket desk might go. It can then use this internal, and fairly complete, model of its domain to get a model of the meaning of the conversation. This intermediate step into an 'interlingual' model means that internally it doesnt need to care what language you want it to speak in.
Plug in a module to translate from an interlingual response to eg French, et voila, the computer will respond in French. Translating _out_ is much easier than translating _in_, since you already have a precise representation of the response internally; but translating _in_ is made much easier as you dont need the machine to understand the entirety of the language.
This is all a bit glib, and I'm not knocking the achievement; I'm just putting some perspective on what's been done. IANAL(ingistics researcher) ;o) . Anyway, what I'm trying to say is: the only reason they are making any progress is by restricting the domain to one where the conversations are simple and well-understood. That way, they can do a *far* better job than the Babelfish, but its not Star Trek technology yet.
I can see it now:
"By opening this box you agree to the
terms of the GPL contained inside..."
:o)
I would happily take a GNU sticker and put
it on every system I use - NT, 95, Solaris,
Linux... because I've got the software running
in them all. However, I dont think this sticker
is going to resolve the issue for RMS, and
even bringing it up again is damagingly
divisive...
-Baz