The problem is you don't have any control over it once it is published in a reproduce-able format. And especially after it goes online. Practically speaking, suing one person does nothing to prevent another form doing the same or downloading it. So it doesn't protect your intellectual property. I even have a problem with the idea that it is yours to begin with: a copyright is all well and good, but I have a problem with the idea that you own something that I have already bought. I'm not leasing the pdf, I own it. It's mine, and I'll do what I want with it. Copyright isn't going to change it. It's a piece of paper somewhere that I may or may not agree with. And in any case there's nothing you can do about it except try to sue me, which won't prevent anyone else from doing the same, and is certainly not going to encourage me to cooperate with you. Besides, I own the pdf. I have direct control over the file and can do whatever I like to it. Copy it, Modify it, send it to Tajikistan, whatever. Litigation doesn't prevent it and then,after the fact, doesn't even discourage it. You don't have the same right with non-digital formats... You can't legally take a copyrighted VHS videotape (analog) and make lots of copies of it and give them away. You can't legally take a copyrighted paper book and photocopy it and give the copies to ten people. In each case, you'd be violating the author's rights to control distribution. Of course, there are some things you're allowed to do, like make a copy for personal backup purposes, or to sell your copy. But the physical instance is just that -- one instance of a piece of intellectual property, and you can't further distribute that intellectual property.
Why should I be able to seek redress for analog violations when analogous digital violations don't get handled appropriately?
You may say it's the "bottom line" that you can't sell something that can be redistributed for free, but the foundations of valuing information itself rely on stopping unauthorized distribution, whether it's technically easily redistributed or not.
I hate DRM, but I've never heard a good argument for why we should just throw all of intellectual property rights out the window.
So, I understand that the legal process that the RIAA is trying to use is questionable at best, with ex-parte discovery and merging of multiple unrelated acts of infringement. But I fear that too many people are reading into your fight against the RIAA that the music industry should not be entitled to protect their intellectual property rights.
Maybe it's easier to take an example outside of the music industry. For example, say that I write a creative text, and publish it online as a PDF file that I sell, and that I do not grant the right to redistribute my work. If I later discover that someone who legally obtained my work is now hosting it online for others to obtain, and even have evidence that an actual unauthorized redistribution has taken place (i.e. someone linking to it with a comment suggesting they've downloaded it), do I not have a right to protect my intellectual property? Even if all I have is a time and IP address, shouldn't I be able to seek appropriate civil action against the infringing party?
There are lots of cases of genuine copyright infringement occurring, and while I understand and support your campaign to make sure the RIAA plays by the rules and isn't overly broad in their accusations, I also don't think it's right to let infringers go unpunished. I think too many people see the endgame as one where the RIAA "folds" and can't protect its interests, and where IP holders have no recourse against digital infringement. But when I read into your work, I think the endgame is really one where the RIAA just has to work a bit harder to present its case in the right way, and infringers are punished.
We know that Microsoft claims to hold patents that Linux users are infringing... but they won't tell us which ones. What's new?
So there are two possibilities: either they've got a specific one or two that they're really able to show Kyocera that are troublesome, or they've just got this massive library of "probable" ones that Kyocera decided to give in to. What would be more interesting to know is who approached who about the deal. What does it permit? What did that cost?
Anyway, this is at the stage where it isn't using patent law, but is just using corporate risk expectations. Very dangerous... which is why MSFT doesn't want to show their hand.
Software patent lifetimes should probably get quite a bit shorter, too...
From the article:
Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid's face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work. How can you pick on them? They've got freckles. That's a crook. He may as well be wearing a bandit's mask. While the imagery is over the top, as is the assertion that it's absolutely every kid, the basic message is just about correct: lots of people are pirating music. I've been reading the other slashdot responses talking about the failure of the traditional CD business model... and believe it or not, the industry has (slowly) come around to alternatives, like per-track pricing. But even still, people continue to pirate at an alarming rate. And more than that, they think it's morally OK. And they think it's justified because of the failure of the music industry to adapt. That's plain wrong: the slow movement of the music industry doesn't make it right to illegally circumvent the legal market for their goods.
And I think he's generally right that pirates need to be taken to court and prosecuted. This is a far better alternative than DRM, which hurts legal users too. Prosecute the criminals. I don't think that the slashdot audience can be self-consistent if it's both opposed to DRM and to prosecuting criminals.
And while some people are more than willing to sell everyone's rights up the river for fist full of gold, there is also a good community of people who have morals and are willing to refuse to obey bad laws. I agree that this policy of network filtering is a bad one, and that it violates the rights of the network users.
However, one thing that some of the slashdot crowd tends to ignore is that content owners have rights too. Or are we suddenly to believe that the only things that have value are physical things?
Encryption can beat this, but should it have to? Now we've got to throw a lot of computing power at a problem just to get around our nominally "common carriers."
I think we can all agree that there's a problem: lots of illegal video transmission is happening online. And while some of the slashdot crowd consists of "information wants to be free" hippies, there is also a good community of people who reasonably understand the value of intellectual property rights. But I don't think anyone is excited about a solution like this, which clearly removes the user's fair use rights and common sense.
So where's the balance? Can a technical solution exist that will simultaneously stop the illegal pirating of movies and TV shows (which would be good), and allow other uses (even short clips, parodies, etc)? I think the answer is no. The determination of fair use relies heavily on intent, and no technical system will be able to determine that very effectively.
In the article, the authors of XviD and FFMPEG, aren't too optimistic about speedups. If video encoding/decoding is the bottleneck, then why not start building motherboards with a dedicated chip specialized for this kind of work, instead of trying to cram extra instructions into an already bloated CISC CPU? Doesn't make sense to me.
The article asserts that logging onto someone's AP without their permission is "breaking the law", but is that really clear? Do I have to explicitly ask for permission before I walk into a restaurant? Of course not -- there's a reasonable expectation that there are no barriers to my entry, so I'm allowed (even invited) in. But, while I think physical analogies to computer situations can be very misleading, in the real world entry becomes illegal when you've had to defeat some protection mechanism (a lock) to get in.
So, to summarize: I feel like cracking someone's WEP key to get on their net is pretty damn illegal. But I don't think hopping onto an open net is unsecured. In fact, the fact that it's open may be interpreted as a sign that the owner intends to allow open access!
Take a look at this set of videos from MIT's 6.004 Computation Structures class. They basically walk through the design of a simple 32-bit CPU from transistors, to gates, to functional blocks, to a full processor.
Anyway, reading about how hard it was to recreate the source code from the 4004 makes me wonder how easily we could find source code for some apps from even a decade ago. Lots of companies have gone bankrupt / discontinued products / been sold / etc, and we all know that lots of people aren't good about backing up their code. It's neat to go to the Linux Kernel Archives and look at the Historic Linux sources.
The real problem here isn't just that Comcast is doing the filtering. Who knows -- maybe it's really OK under their EULA and the law (which I doubt). But the most painful part of the problem to consumers is that the Comcast government-granted monopoly on the cable lines means that lots of consumers have no other alternative.
I think the antitrust laws might have something to say here, although it's a bit of a stretch. In any case, how can we codify the fact that providers with effective monopoly status should have an additional burden of service to their customers? I do wonder if this is bigger than limited net neutrality legislation.
In Massachusetts, they are continually working on roads... I'd love to know the secret that makes them think that they'll be able to keep these strips around for more than a year or so. Beyond that, I'd think that it places greater stresses on the outermost pieces of tire, because of the uneven loading. Doesn't seem that smart to me...
But again, because the electronics are distributed around the car, you'd need to shield the entire car.
A Faraday cage is only protective for wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation which are larger than the size of the gaps in the Faraday cage. The car's metal exterior has some pretty big gaps... and beyond that, the panels aren't even connected well to each other electrically. (RF people will put copper mesh down along all the edges of their devices to get everything.) For the microwave wavelengths, they'll come right in and induce all kinds of voltages on your car body.
Still, it's possible to defend against this kind of thing. I just think that the practical defense has more to do with optical isolation and circuit design rather than a Faraday cage shielding.
I'd like to try to explain why their microwave design might work, and why the "faraday cage" argument isn't enough: Differential vs. Common-Mode Signals. It's because of all the devices connected to the car's central engine controller.
Lots of old school communications protocols are based on single-ended signaling, where one voltage represents a 0 or 1. This includes RS232, Parallel, and even ISA and PCI slots on your motherboard. However, almost everything new that's outside the computer is based on differential signaling -- reading the differential voltage between two wires. This includes 10/100/1000BaseT ethernet over twisted pair, USB, Firewire, etc.
Here's the key difference: when you get noise coupling onto your signal, whether it's a pulse from the engine ignition coil firing or from this car-stopping microwave device, it tends to be the case that the voltage of *both* of the differential wires is increased by the same amount -- so that when the voltages are subtracted, the effect of the noise cancels out.
However, this exploits the fact that no devices have an infinitely large common-mode range. That is, the average voltage of the differential pair must be within some predefined limit, or your circuit won't work. By putting in a big enough pulse, this microwave device might be able to move charges around on the outside of the car body (which happens to be the ground that most devices hook to) enough to move the voltages significantly. This would cause any devices (think an oxygen sensor or a tachometer) to act as though they were momentarily dead.
Thus, even with differential signaling (which cars already use), it's possible to break things by putting too much common-mode noise on top. See Wikipedia article.
The 80% figure is impressive. But beware of the efficiency numbers they quote. This isn't the full fuel cycle. You've still got to compress and distribute hydrogen, which takes a lot (gases take lots of work to compress). For a vehicle, burning it isn't too efficient maybe 30-40%, and fuel cells aren't quite there yet.
Additionally, with any kind of electrolytically-driven process like this one, there's a HUGE efficiency penalty once you increase the flow rates to be anything substantial. And you need to, because otherwise the amount of hydrogen produced per fuel cell area would be tiny. And then, at that point, you've got the problem of lots of carbon to dispose of. Guess what -- this working microbial fuel cell takes C,H,O in as vinegar or cellulose, and outputs H2 and CO2! Do you really call that 'carbon neutral' as a fuel source? It's still dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, just less of it per Joule of useful energy.
Still, this is a great direction for them to keep going... there are very interesting things you can do with hydrogen, even to extend existing liquid fuel stocks (i.e. crude oil to gasoline) by hydrogenation. (Much cheaper than building lots of fuel cells... but not carbon-neutral.)
The problem is that individual municipalities have been selling cable monopolies for decades... and in the old days, it used to be the case that no one cable company would get all of a particular large city, to ensure at least some semblance of competition. These days, they've all merged into one (in Philadelphia, at least).
What I think might be interesting is to decouple the wire from the service provider. Think about electricity deregulation: the transmission is seperate from the generation, and while everyone has to pay for the transmission (since we don't want overly redundant infrastructure), individuals can choose their generation source. The disadvantage here, as seen in the electrical case, is that there are more places to nickel-and-dime consumers. However, done with cable systems, we might actually have enough diversity of service offerings that it makes sense.
It seems like having all of your traffic on seven well-defined subnets is an easy way to make all of your activity really obvious.
But hey, at least these guys are being pursued and thwarted. There are way too many hackers and script kiddies out there who need to get their butts kicked one and become productive members of society with their skills. This is an important lesson and it comes at a price, but ultimately we need to convert these people to use their technical knowledge for good. By making it harder and harder for the underworld to survive, the economic benefits of that lifestyle become overshadowed by its risks. This will bring these people out into the light, and hopefully both reduce the economic pain they cause with their mischief, and also let them contribute constructively.
In the community around me, I've seen a lot of growth in the use of Linux on the desktop just in the last year. But probably the most interesting trend is that I've seen a bunch of new Ubuntu users among the mechanical engineering students, who in general aren't particularly computer-nerdy, and even more amazingly, are actually dependent on Windows-only software for some of their CAD tools (i.e. Solidworks).
I think the Walmart results might be indicative of a growing trend where people are just about ready to make the leap themselves... particularly when it comes preinstalled like it does here. Another step in the right direction.
What I'd love to see, though, is how much previous computer experience all of those Walmart reviewers had -- for some, it seems like quite a bit.
In a normal antenna, electrons in the metal slosh up and down, accelerated by the electromagnetic fields that it's receiving (or transmitting). In this case, I could use the same description: electrons slosh up and down, driven by the EM fields.
The idea that this could lead to a reconfigurable antenna is a bit farfetched, as it would require that the driving bias electrodes be able to totally float at RF frequencies. Just like a neon sign, or a fluorescent light, you're going to have to keep a large voltage across these to get them to light, so it'll be tricky to use it as a receiving antenna in particular.
Take a look at another project, Talking Lights. This uses conventional fluorescent lights (hey, a plasma!) with a modified ballast to transmit data at serial-link speeds.
The "jam-resistance" doesn't make any sense. If it can receive signals, it can receive signals, period. At the point of the antenna, the desired signal and the jamming signal have already been mixed. The antenna itself can't help you out. (Clever frequency-hopping or other schemes can, though.)
But software will only take you so far. There's a lot of unique PC to human interactions that are possible, but this world needs more hardware hackers.
In any case, this is a neat demo. People have been doing this on a much bigger, 3D, expensive $$$ scale with something called a Vicon Motion Capture System. They basically take a whole bunch of those cameras, and a whole bunch of LED arrays, and strobe them so that they get a picture of little reflective points from many different angles. They then use some trigonometry to figure out where, in 3D space, a particular point is. Cool stuff -- good to see it's being brought closer to everyone's homes, rather than the tens of thousands of dollars that Vicon charges.
The energy required to switch a capacitor from zero to Vdd volts is 1/2*C*Vdd^2.
Smaller logic sizes can operate faster because the physical gate area of the transistor is that much smaller, so there's less capacitance loading down the piece of logic before it (proportional to the square of the scaling, of course). However, it also tends to be the case that the operating voltages scale down too (because they adjust the semiconductor doping and the gate oxide thickness to match), so you get an even better effect on energy required. Thus, scaling helps both with speed and operating power.
The problem they're running into now is that at these smaller sizes, the off-state leakage currents are getting to be of the same magnitude as the actual switching (operating logic) currents! This happens because of the reduced threshold voltage when they scale down, so the transistor isn't as "off" as it used to be.
That's why Intel has to work extra hard to get the power consumption down as the sizes scale down.
STMs and AFMs are important because they let us see things much smaller than conventional optical microscopes can. Increasing the scan rate by a factor of 1000 might yield new applications, taking better STM movies, and elucidating mechanisms that run that much faster.
The only public data released on the RF STM stuff seems to be this one lonely chart. The gamma variable (on the Y axis) has to do with electrical reflections that come about because of impedance mismatches on transmission lines. For more information, take a look at these lecture notes (2.5MB PDF) which start from voltage and current, and end with the gamma plane.
In conventional (non-RF) STM, the tunneling current is exponentially related to the distance above the surface. This is a part of why control systems for STMs, which are supposed to keep the tip hovering a few nanometers or less above the surface, are challenging to get right. In general, the surface and scanning tip are kept at a constant bias voltage of a few volts, and there is a feedback loop which attempts to maintain a constant current (and thus constant height over the sample) by adjusting the displacement of the tip.
In this system, it appears that they've found that the small-signal impedance of the tunneling junction varies significantly enough to make a large impact on the reflection coefficient, and (more importantly) that that's a good way to go.
Considering they've released so little technical data, there's only one really obvious savings here to me: noise. If you're an electrical engineer, you'll know that most devices (and thus most circuits) have noise at all frequencies, but that things get particularly bad for low frequencies around DC. This is often called 1/f noise, and if you take f to zero (DC), you've clearly got a problem! Additionally, you get other nasty effects at DC, like drift related to temperature, etc, which tend to be much worse than at high frequencies. By designing their system to work with small signals at high frequencies, they're able to avoid 1/f noise yet still make the height measurement they want. Pretty smart.
While it's amazing that this story is newsworthy... it's worth taking a look at the bigger picture: people take notice at Google's logo changes because they've kept an uncluttered appearance. On most websites, you probably wouldn't even notice a small logo change!
In general, the so-called Web2.0 revolution has brought about much more single-purpose tools, compared to the multi-tools of the past. This leads to deeper functional design and performance, instead of deep integration (which is only slowly coming along thanks to mashup-enabling technologies).
The message is clear: web designers, get to the point! Don't distract your users. Make every word and every image count.
Slavery is illegal in this country... and an agreement like this is essentially financial slavery.
The idea that this kind of control over IP can extend beyond the scope of employment is, unfortunately, fairly typical. I think it's worth trying to fight. I haven't heard about trying to extend beyond the duration of employment, too -- that's just absurd.
Maybe it's possible to ask for increased compensation -- say an extra six months -- in exchange? If they really think that the intellectual property you'll create is worth it, that seems to be a first attempt at fairness.
In any case, in IT, are you really in the position to be creating that much intellectual property? Lots of companies are trying to shove agreements like this down employee's throats, without thinking about the consequences. Unfortunately, most people just sign blindly.
It's a bit overused, but might this be reflective of the atmosphere of American consumerism? Nobody wants to create content anymore... we'd like to just consume media. I hate to say it, but I think this all comes full circle into the file sharing debate:
People today don't sufficiently value intellectual property.
This leads to the problem with pirating electronic media, but also seems to lead to the situation where people don't stand up and refuse restrictive employment contracts like this one.
While the open source movement has done a great deal toward making software understandable, at some point, people have to trust their computers. However, this used to be a great deal easier, because engineers had a good idea of what could be done with a particular amount of circuitry.
The increasing level of integration means that hardware is more and more of a black box. While this has led to huge savings in cost and performance boosts, we've paid for it by being unable to debug the hardware, and unsure of what's really going on inside.
While the case in the article talks specifically about a trojan horse installed normally on the drive -- and thus something that should have been remedied by a good formatting job -- who knows what could happen once we have vulnerabilities embedded directly into the hardware. One could certainly imagine a trojan that was hard-coded in the firmward and kept moving itself around the disc after attempts to delete it.
It's also seems fishy that much sensitive information (of relevance to a foreign government) could be obtained from randomly putting trojans on hard drives... Isn't it possible that this was an unintentional infection from some disk-handling or testing machine along the line?
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Practically speaking, suing one person does nothing to prevent another form doing the same or downloading it.
So it doesn't protect your intellectual property.
I even have a problem with the idea that it is yours to begin with: a copyright is all well and good, but I have a problem with the idea that you own something that I have already bought.
I'm not leasing the pdf, I own it.
It's mine, and I'll do what I want with it. Copyright isn't going to change it.
It's a piece of paper somewhere that I may or may not agree with. And in any case there's nothing you can do about it except try to sue me, which won't prevent anyone else from doing the same, and is certainly not going to encourage me to cooperate with you.
Besides, I own the pdf. I have direct control over the file and can do whatever I like to it. Copy it, Modify it, send it to Tajikistan, whatever.
Litigation doesn't prevent it and then,after the fact, doesn't even discourage it. You don't have the same right with non-digital formats... You can't legally take a copyrighted VHS videotape (analog) and make lots of copies of it and give them away. You can't legally take a copyrighted paper book and photocopy it and give the copies to ten people. In each case, you'd be violating the author's rights to control distribution. Of course, there are some things you're allowed to do, like make a copy for personal backup purposes, or to sell your copy. But the physical instance is just that -- one instance of a piece of intellectual property, and you can't further distribute that intellectual property.
Why should I be able to seek redress for analog violations when analogous digital violations don't get handled appropriately?
You may say it's the "bottom line" that you can't sell something that can be redistributed for free, but the foundations of valuing information itself rely on stopping unauthorized distribution, whether it's technically easily redistributed or not.
I hate DRM, but I've never heard a good argument for why we should just throw all of intellectual property rights out the window.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
So, I understand that the legal process that the RIAA is trying to use is questionable at best, with ex-parte discovery and merging of multiple unrelated acts of infringement. But I fear that too many people are reading into your fight against the RIAA that the music industry should not be entitled to protect their intellectual property rights.
Maybe it's easier to take an example outside of the music industry. For example, say that I write a creative text, and publish it online as a PDF file that I sell, and that I do not grant the right to redistribute my work. If I later discover that someone who legally obtained my work is now hosting it online for others to obtain, and even have evidence that an actual unauthorized redistribution has taken place (i.e. someone linking to it with a comment suggesting they've downloaded it), do I not have a right to protect my intellectual property? Even if all I have is a time and IP address, shouldn't I be able to seek appropriate civil action against the infringing party?
There are lots of cases of genuine copyright infringement occurring, and while I understand and support your campaign to make sure the RIAA plays by the rules and isn't overly broad in their accusations, I also don't think it's right to let infringers go unpunished. I think too many people see the endgame as one where the RIAA "folds" and can't protect its interests, and where IP holders have no recourse against digital infringement. But when I read into your work, I think the endgame is really one where the RIAA just has to work a bit harder to present its case in the right way, and infringers are punished.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
We know that Microsoft claims to hold patents that Linux users are infringing... but they won't tell us which ones. What's new?
So there are two possibilities: either they've got a specific one or two that they're really able to show Kyocera that are troublesome, or they've just got this massive library of "probable" ones that Kyocera decided to give in to. What would be more interesting to know is who approached who about the deal. What does it permit? What did that cost?
Anyway, this is at the stage where it isn't using patent law, but is just using corporate risk expectations. Very dangerous... which is why MSFT doesn't want to show their hand.
Software patent lifetimes should probably get quite a bit shorter, too...
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
And I think he's generally right that pirates need to be taken to court and prosecuted. This is a far better alternative than DRM, which hurts legal users too. Prosecute the criminals. I don't think that the slashdot audience can be self-consistent if it's both opposed to DRM and to prosecuting criminals.
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Get started with microcontrollers today!
However, one thing that some of the slashdot crowd tends to ignore is that content owners have rights too. Or are we suddenly to believe that the only things that have value are physical things?
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Long-time coder? No electronics experience? Come play with microcontrollers!
Encryption can beat this, but should it have to? Now we've got to throw a lot of computing power at a problem just to get around our nominally "common carriers."
I think we can all agree that there's a problem: lots of illegal video transmission is happening online. And while some of the slashdot crowd consists of "information wants to be free" hippies, there is also a good community of people who reasonably understand the value of intellectual property rights. But I don't think anyone is excited about a solution like this, which clearly removes the user's fair use rights and common sense.
So where's the balance? Can a technical solution exist that will simultaneously stop the illegal pirating of movies and TV shows (which would be good), and allow other uses (even short clips, parodies, etc)? I think the answer is no. The determination of fair use relies heavily on intent, and no technical system will be able to determine that very effectively.
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NerdKits: Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
In the article, the authors of XviD and FFMPEG, aren't too optimistic about speedups. If video encoding/decoding is the bottleneck, then why not start building motherboards with a dedicated chip specialized for this kind of work, instead of trying to cram extra instructions into an already bloated CISC CPU? Doesn't make sense to me.
Also, an earlier comment that may be useful in this discussion: Why smaller feature sizes (45nm) mean faster clock times.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
The article asserts that logging onto someone's AP without their permission is "breaking the law", but is that really clear? Do I have to explicitly ask for permission before I walk into a restaurant? Of course not -- there's a reasonable expectation that there are no barriers to my entry, so I'm allowed (even invited) in. But, while I think physical analogies to computer situations can be very misleading, in the real world entry becomes illegal when you've had to defeat some protection mechanism (a lock) to get in.
So, to summarize: I feel like cracking someone's WEP key to get on their net is pretty damn illegal. But I don't think hopping onto an open net is unsecured. In fact, the fact that it's open may be interpreted as a sign that the owner intends to allow open access!
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Take a look at this set of videos from MIT's 6.004 Computation Structures class. They basically walk through the design of a simple 32-bit CPU from transistors, to gates, to functional blocks, to a full processor.
Anyway, reading about how hard it was to recreate the source code from the 4004 makes me wonder how easily we could find source code for some apps from even a decade ago. Lots of companies have gone bankrupt / discontinued products / been sold / etc, and we all know that lots of people aren't good about backing up their code. It's neat to go to the Linux Kernel Archives and look at the Historic Linux sources.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
The real problem here isn't just that Comcast is doing the filtering. Who knows -- maybe it's really OK under their EULA and the law (which I doubt). But the most painful part of the problem to consumers is that the Comcast government-granted monopoly on the cable lines means that lots of consumers have no other alternative.
I think the antitrust laws might have something to say here, although it's a bit of a stretch. In any case, how can we codify the fact that providers with effective monopoly status should have an additional burden of service to their customers? I do wonder if this is bigger than limited net neutrality legislation.
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Educational microcontroller kits for a digital generation.
In Massachusetts, they are continually working on roads... I'd love to know the secret that makes them think that they'll be able to keep these strips around for more than a year or so. Beyond that, I'd think that it places greater stresses on the outermost pieces of tire, because of the uneven loading. Doesn't seem that smart to me...
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
But again, because the electronics are distributed around the car, you'd need to shield the entire car.
A Faraday cage is only protective for wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation which are larger than the size of the gaps in the Faraday cage. The car's metal exterior has some pretty big gaps... and beyond that, the panels aren't even connected well to each other electrically. (RF people will put copper mesh down along all the edges of their devices to get everything.) For the microwave wavelengths, they'll come right in and induce all kinds of voltages on your car body.
Still, it's possible to defend against this kind of thing. I just think that the practical defense has more to do with optical isolation and circuit design rather than a Faraday cage shielding.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
I'd like to try to explain why their microwave design might work, and why the "faraday cage" argument isn't enough: Differential vs. Common-Mode Signals. It's because of all the devices connected to the car's central engine controller.
Lots of old school communications protocols are based on single-ended signaling, where one voltage represents a 0 or 1. This includes RS232, Parallel, and even ISA and PCI slots on your motherboard. However, almost everything new that's outside the computer is based on differential signaling -- reading the differential voltage between two wires. This includes 10/100/1000BaseT ethernet over twisted pair, USB, Firewire, etc.
Here's the key difference: when you get noise coupling onto your signal, whether it's a pulse from the engine ignition coil firing or from this car-stopping microwave device, it tends to be the case that the voltage of *both* of the differential wires is increased by the same amount -- so that when the voltages are subtracted, the effect of the noise cancels out.
However, this exploits the fact that no devices have an infinitely large common-mode range. That is, the average voltage of the differential pair must be within some predefined limit, or your circuit won't work. By putting in a big enough pulse, this microwave device might be able to move charges around on the outside of the car body (which happens to be the ground that most devices hook to) enough to move the voltages significantly. This would cause any devices (think an oxygen sensor or a tachometer) to act as though they were momentarily dead.
Thus, even with differential signaling (which cars already use), it's possible to break things by putting too much common-mode noise on top. See Wikipedia article.
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Can you code? Want to become a hardware hacker? Educational microcontroller kits for a digital generation.
The 80% figure is impressive. But beware of the efficiency numbers they quote. This isn't the full fuel cycle. You've still got to compress and distribute hydrogen, which takes a lot (gases take lots of work to compress). For a vehicle, burning it isn't too efficient maybe 30-40%, and fuel cells aren't quite there yet.
Additionally, with any kind of electrolytically-driven process like this one, there's a HUGE efficiency penalty once you increase the flow rates to be anything substantial. And you need to, because otherwise the amount of hydrogen produced per fuel cell area would be tiny. And then, at that point, you've got the problem of lots of carbon to dispose of. Guess what -- this working microbial fuel cell takes C,H,O in as vinegar or cellulose, and outputs H2 and CO2! Do you really call that 'carbon neutral' as a fuel source? It's still dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, just less of it per Joule of useful energy.
Still, this is a great direction for them to keep going... there are very interesting things you can do with hydrogen, even to extend existing liquid fuel stocks (i.e. crude oil to gasoline) by hydrogenation. (Much cheaper than building lots of fuel cells... but not carbon-neutral.)
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Original article (instead of Tomcat error)
In any case, the real judge is how they decide to act next time something like this happens...
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
The problem is that individual municipalities have been selling cable monopolies for decades... and in the old days, it used to be the case that no one cable company would get all of a particular large city, to ensure at least some semblance of competition. These days, they've all merged into one (in Philadelphia, at least).
What I think might be interesting is to decouple the wire from the service provider. Think about electricity deregulation: the transmission is seperate from the generation, and while everyone has to pay for the transmission (since we don't want overly redundant infrastructure), individuals can choose their generation source. The disadvantage here, as seen in the electrical case, is that there are more places to nickel-and-dime consumers. However, done with cable systems, we might actually have enough diversity of service offerings that it makes sense.
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Educational microcontroller lab kits for the digital generation.
It seems like having all of your traffic on seven well-defined subnets is an easy way to make all of your activity really obvious.
But hey, at least these guys are being pursued and thwarted. There are way too many hackers and script kiddies out there who need to get their butts kicked one and become productive members of society with their skills. This is an important lesson and it comes at a price, but ultimately we need to convert these people to use their technical knowledge for good. By making it harder and harder for the underworld to survive, the economic benefits of that lifestyle become overshadowed by its risks. This will bring these people out into the light, and hopefully both reduce the economic pain they cause with their mischief, and also let them contribute constructively.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
In the community around me, I've seen a lot of growth in the use of Linux on the desktop just in the last year. But probably the most interesting trend is that I've seen a bunch of new Ubuntu users among the mechanical engineering students, who in general aren't particularly computer-nerdy, and even more amazingly, are actually dependent on Windows-only software for some of their CAD tools (i.e. Solidworks).
I think the Walmart results might be indicative of a growing trend where people are just about ready to make the leap themselves... particularly when it comes preinstalled like it does here. Another step in the right direction.
What I'd love to see, though, is how much previous computer experience all of those Walmart reviewers had -- for some, it seems like quite a bit.
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Electronics kits for the digital generation.
In a normal antenna, electrons in the metal slosh up and down, accelerated by the electromagnetic fields that it's receiving (or transmitting). In this case, I could use the same description: electrons slosh up and down, driven by the EM fields.
The idea that this could lead to a reconfigurable antenna is a bit farfetched, as it would require that the driving bias electrodes be able to totally float at RF frequencies. Just like a neon sign, or a fluorescent light, you're going to have to keep a large voltage across these to get them to light, so it'll be tricky to use it as a receiving antenna in particular.
Take a look at another project, Talking Lights. This uses conventional fluorescent lights (hey, a plasma!) with a modified ballast to transmit data at serial-link speeds.
The "jam-resistance" doesn't make any sense. If it can receive signals, it can receive signals, period. At the point of the antenna, the desired signal and the jamming signal have already been mixed. The antenna itself can't help you out. (Clever frequency-hopping or other schemes can, though.)
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Microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
But software will only take you so far. There's a lot of unique PC to human interactions that are possible, but this world needs more hardware hackers.
In any case, this is a neat demo. People have been doing this on a much bigger, 3D, expensive $$$ scale with something called a Vicon Motion Capture System. They basically take a whole bunch of those cameras, and a whole bunch of LED arrays, and strobe them so that they get a picture of little reflective points from many different angles. They then use some trigonometry to figure out where, in 3D space, a particular point is. Cool stuff -- good to see it's being brought closer to everyone's homes, rather than the tens of thousands of dollars that Vicon charges.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
The energy required to switch a capacitor from zero to Vdd volts is 1/2*C*Vdd^2.
Smaller logic sizes can operate faster because the physical gate area of the transistor is that much smaller, so there's less capacitance loading down the piece of logic before it (proportional to the square of the scaling, of course). However, it also tends to be the case that the operating voltages scale down too (because they adjust the semiconductor doping and the gate oxide thickness to match), so you get an even better effect on energy required. Thus, scaling helps both with speed and operating power.
The problem they're running into now is that at these smaller sizes, the off-state leakage currents are getting to be of the same magnitude as the actual switching (operating logic) currents! This happens because of the reduced threshold voltage when they scale down, so the transistor isn't as "off" as it used to be.
That's why Intel has to work extra hard to get the power consumption down as the sizes scale down.
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NerdKits: electronics kits for the digital generation.
STMs and AFMs are important because they let us see things much smaller than conventional optical microscopes can. Increasing the scan rate by a factor of 1000 might yield new applications, taking better STM movies, and elucidating mechanisms that run that much faster.
The only public data released on the RF STM stuff seems to be this one lonely chart. The gamma variable (on the Y axis) has to do with electrical reflections that come about because of impedance mismatches on transmission lines. For more information, take a look at these lecture notes (2.5MB PDF) which start from voltage and current, and end with the gamma plane.
In conventional (non-RF) STM, the tunneling current is exponentially related to the distance above the surface. This is a part of why control systems for STMs, which are supposed to keep the tip hovering a few nanometers or less above the surface, are challenging to get right. In general, the surface and scanning tip are kept at a constant bias voltage of a few volts, and there is a feedback loop which attempts to maintain a constant current (and thus constant height over the sample) by adjusting the displacement of the tip.
In this system, it appears that they've found that the small-signal impedance of the tunneling junction varies significantly enough to make a large impact on the reflection coefficient, and (more importantly) that that's a good way to go.
Considering they've released so little technical data, there's only one really obvious savings here to me: noise. If you're an electrical engineer, you'll know that most devices (and thus most circuits) have noise at all frequencies, but that things get particularly bad for low frequencies around DC. This is often called 1/f noise, and if you take f to zero (DC), you've clearly got a problem! Additionally, you get other nasty effects at DC, like drift related to temperature, etc, which tend to be much worse than at high frequencies. By designing their system to work with small signals at high frequencies, they're able to avoid 1/f noise yet still make the height measurement they want. Pretty smart.
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NerdKits: Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
While it's amazing that this story is newsworthy... it's worth taking a look at the bigger picture: people take notice at Google's logo changes because they've kept an uncluttered appearance. On most websites, you probably wouldn't even notice a small logo change!
In general, the so-called Web2.0 revolution has brought about much more single-purpose tools, compared to the multi-tools of the past. This leads to deeper functional design and performance, instead of deep integration (which is only slowly coming along thanks to mashup-enabling technologies).
The message is clear: web designers, get to the point! Don't distract your users. Make every word and every image count.
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NerdKits: Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Slavery is illegal in this country... and an agreement like this is essentially financial slavery.
The idea that this kind of control over IP can extend beyond the scope of employment is, unfortunately, fairly typical. I think it's worth trying to fight. I haven't heard about trying to extend beyond the duration of employment, too -- that's just absurd.
Maybe it's possible to ask for increased compensation -- say an extra six months -- in exchange? If they really think that the intellectual property you'll create is worth it, that seems to be a first attempt at fairness.
In any case, in IT, are you really in the position to be creating that much intellectual property? Lots of companies are trying to shove agreements like this down employee's throats, without thinking about the consequences. Unfortunately, most people just sign blindly.
It's a bit overused, but might this be reflective of the atmosphere of American consumerism? Nobody wants to create content anymore... we'd like to just consume media. I hate to say it, but I think this all comes full circle into the file sharing debate:
People today don't sufficiently value intellectual property.
This leads to the problem with pirating electronic media, but also seems to lead to the situation where people don't stand up and refuse restrictive employment contracts like this one.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
While the open source movement has done a great deal toward making software understandable, at some point, people have to trust their computers. However, this used to be a great deal easier, because engineers had a good idea of what could be done with a particular amount of circuitry.
The increasing level of integration means that hardware is more and more of a black box. While this has led to huge savings in cost and performance boosts, we've paid for it by being unable to debug the hardware, and unsure of what's really going on inside.
While the case in the article talks specifically about a trojan horse installed normally on the drive -- and thus something that should have been remedied by a good formatting job -- who knows what could happen once we have vulnerabilities embedded directly into the hardware. One could certainly imagine a trojan that was hard-coded in the firmward and kept moving itself around the disc after attempts to delete it.
It's also seems fishy that much sensitive information (of relevance to a foreign government) could be obtained from randomly putting trojans on hard drives... Isn't it possible that this was an unintentional infection from some disk-handling or testing machine along the line?
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.