they pick up clock skew as they're not running _quite_ in real time
That makes no sense - the machine isn't spinning in a loop, counting instruction cycles, to keep track of time. It has to come from something like periodic interrupt or an RTC. There nothing about being in a VM, or anything else about the precision of the CPU core clock, that could "dilate" those timings. Maybe you might miss some interrupts for some reason, but if that's the case then it is probably the fault of the VM, not the guest.
I had my doubts at first, but this makes it abundantly clear that Childs was right. More right than any of us might have imagined when this spin-doctored story first came out.
In hindsight he took totally reasonable, prudent measures to protect incompetent city officials from themselves. Who knows how they got into that situation, but I won't blame him for anything in light of this, and I sincerely hope a jury wouldn't either.
He should first collect damages himself, and then initiate a class action suit against the city on behalf of all their residents. Maybe put the DA in jail for criminal negligence - in fact I'd venture a guess that he's mentally defective enough to file the charges himself.
It's a big company. Takes a long time for everyone to start going in the same direction, especially given Microsoft's entrenched culture and weak leadership.
The way this works is some guy deep in the bowels of some special project says to his boss "look, I know what our policy is but I really need to contribute this patch so that it gets incorporated into future versions. See, this benefits us. Can we make an exception". By some miracle it gets approved, and thus an internal movement is born. It may take years for all the upper management asshats to get their head around it, but this is how it starts. I agree with the GP, surprisingly nothing stinks about this particular movement, albeit deep in the bowels of the company.
Although not as dense, newer conventional electrolytics, as well as higher capacity multilayer ceramics, seem to be increasingly preferred to tantalums in new designs due to their improving density and decreasing cost. Eg you can now get X7R ceramic 22uF in 1206 packages - once exclusively the realm of tantalums, and with better ESR and temperature stability. So are tantalum's days numbered anyway?
Maybe 20 people are infringing on the patent because the claims of the patent are public knowledge.
That is not the case in the overwhelming majority of computer hardware/software patent lawsuits today. More often than not, the people who are sued have independently developed their supposedly infringing design well before the patent was granted and made public. Also, the grantee of the patent usually doesn't actually get around to shipping their product until late in that time frame, so it's not available to be reverse engineered either.
It takes a long time, often three to four years, between the critical filing date and the date the information is made public. Indeed, the fact that others in the field made the same invention at the same time should alone stand as proof that the invention was obvious, but unfortunately the courts haven't seen it that way.
Basically, the vast majority of stuff that is patented today in EE/CS is stuff that comes about as soon as either a) the prerequisite, underlying technology becomes available/affordable or b) demand materializes for the thing. Almost never is it precipitated by any actual invention.
Mr. Paranoid Admin with a God complex had big freakin' huge vulnerabilities on his precious network?
Attaching old-fashioned modems to the console ports of routers and switches is sometimes done in order to allow the administrator to remotely access the equipment during a major network failure.
It's not an egregious "vulnerability", assuming the console it password protected. That statement was spun to make it sound like they were back doors, when in reality this was likely done for no other reason than to facilitate emergency maintenance.
Please note I am not defending Childs generally. I'm just saying that the way they've minced words in some of these allegations gives me pause.
Are there any American citizens (who understand what FISA is) that actually support it? I would think that even the right should be against it. If conservatives want to restore traditional American values, then surely preventing the government from using new technology to conduct widespread domestic spying is conducive to that goal.
With both congress and the president's approval rating hovering at below 20%, it is clear that the will of the people is not being represented. The only plausible explanation for FISA is that it is intended an means for the executive branch to seize an even greater imbalance of power, and/or to cover up widespread criminal activity that took place in the last eight years.
Why didn't Obama try to stop this? He could have spoken out and got the rest of the dems behind him. Instead he voted in favor of it. This is what his campaign said in October:
"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."
And on Dec 17:
Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same.
Oh sure, he voted for the amendments which attempted to remove or limit the immunity, but everyone already knew those would fail.
This is from his most recent statement last week:
The ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States is a vital counter-terrorism tool, and I'm persuaded that it is necessary to keep the American people safe -- particularly since certain electronic surveillance orders will begin to expire later this summer. Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, I've chosen to support the current compromise.
Another nail in the coffin for our constitution. This is a sad day. And to think that most of the senate voted on this WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING WHAT THEY WERE GIVING THE TELCOMS IMMUNITY FOR!!!.
This stinks of a grand-scale coverup. There is still the possibility of suing the government, and perhaps striking this bill as unconsitutional. Let's hope we get to the bottom of this and put some people in jail.
Maybe I'm just old hat, but I thought the role of a CTO was to deal with the.. uh.. technology. As in, for companies that actually develop technology. And the CIO does the IT.
As I recall, "CIO" was popularized by the dot-com companies, and immediately thereafter, since they needed as many C**s on staff as possible to get their VC funding, decided that a CTO was needed too, even though their business was selling pimento loaves on the e-web. So then it became just a great big alphabet soup with everyone squabbling over what their all important title should be. (Yes, I have worked in such an environment more than once).
I think the most obvious mark of a doomed startup is when people get completely hung up on establishing the org chart before the company has even made a dime in revenue. I realize it's basic human (/animal) nature to have to get the pecking order establish first and foremost. However when the title itself is the result of such as clueless and counterproductive process - and indeed, a throwback to such a clueless era as the dot com days, it's hard to see how you could expect your underlings could bestow any credibility on it.
I realize I may have offend any CIOs in the audience, but that's not the intent. My point is not personal - what I'm saying is just that if you're good at your job and still getting no respect, perhaps a less "tainted" title is in order.
Software is a machine with thousands of moving parts running on a machine with with several billion moving parts.
The issue with moving parts as a point of failure is that they are prone to breaking on their own. When software fails it is the fault of the programmer, not some mysterious things that are breaking in spite of him.
While I somewhat agree with your sentiment that we should cut programmers some slack, I still believe it is possible for software to work right with very little debugging. If a programmer is spending more time debugging than coding, he's doing it wrong... either that or marketing needs to quit making him bolt on features that the system was never designed to support).
Marine battery + panel + DC lighting. Done
on
DIY Solar Resources?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Shed lighting is pretty easy because the power requirement and the duty cycle (on vs off time) will be low, and you don't need voltage regulation. That means all you need is a largeish 12V battery (preferably rated for "deep cycle"), and a modest 12V solar panel of maybe 2-3 square feet. Test with a small setup first, and then if you want more run time (from a fully charged battery) add another battery. For more duty cycle, add another panel.
Hook the panel to the battery with a diode in series, and then hook 12V lighting (eg track lighting minus the transformer) to the battery, and you're done. Solar panels are inherently quite compatible with lead-acid charging requirements, so you don't even need charge circuitry for a small setup such as this.
If you want to power a small 110V device, you can use an inverter. You won't be running a table saw on one of those though.
Why the hate on "theoretically"? In the example you gave, they could have removed "Theoretically", and that sentence of the article *would still* have been a correct statement.
And they are right. I don't work with watts every day so I don't understand exactly what 30pW mean. This is how the human brain works: comparisons with other things in life. You know that a Hummer is big because most other vehicles are smaller.
OK.. so distances are better explained in terms of Hummers placed end-to-end, instead of miles? The watch battery comparison is just as meaningless, because people don't need to power anything for 200+ years, nor do they have an intuitive feel for how much energy a watch uses compared to an implanted eye pressure sensor. If you could guess to even within 2-3 orders of magnitude, then you probably already have a feel for the size of a pW anyway.
This is after all a "news for nerds" site, so some technical information about the invention would be preferable to a PR piece. I don't see why you'd fault your fellow nerd for picking on the details - I'm just going with what's in TFA. However, I went back and read the rest of it and it's actually not bad. The problem is when an article opens with this kind of thing (and the bit about "we made it use less power by making the battery smaller")... it's pretty hard to justify reading the rest.
no, I think you're missing the point. They aren't really saying you can use the same battery and have it last 200 years. They're saying you can use a MUCH SMALLER battery and have it last just as long.
Actually, I got that point exactly, which is why I said the watch battery metric is stupid. The problem is that marketroids actually think that more people will understand it if they rate it in "watch battery years" instead of watts, just like storage capacities are easier for us to understand in terms of "libraries of congress".
What's with all these idiots who think "theoretically" is a synonym for "not really"? This gem in particular:
"Theoretically, the energy stored in a watch battery would be enough to run the Phoenix for 263 years."
Note that it's carefully worded to say "the energy stored in.." not to that a watch battery actually _could_ do this. Because it couldn't. The battery's internal resistance and chemical processes would cause it to drain itself long before you'd ever consume a meaningful portion of that energy.
Only in very specialized applications where you have extremely weak, but continuous sources of power, could you realize any benefit to a picowatt vs a nanowatt of consumption. For batteries or supercaps, the power source will self-discharge at a much higher rate anyway.
... that was relieved and surprised it wasn't "hub" and "10Base2"?
I'm not sure if you realize this, but 10base2 (aka thin net) doesn't use hubs. It's a shared 50 ohm coax with tees at each device and terminator plugs on each end. It uses CS/MACD like a hub, but the electronics and physical topology are totally different.
OK, so common sense prevailed and the EFF won. That's great, but what is the significance of this case? Is there actually a big problem with people getting hassled for giving/selling promo CDs, or am I missing some other broader implication as a result of this decision?
they throw in the towel to avoid precedent being established.
Seems to me further evidence that they are systematically abusing the legal system with sham lawsuits. If they actually cared about this individual case wouldn't they want to see it through?
Who hasn't already written off both of these companies? Anyone holding either of them for the long term simply does not grok where the internet and personal computing are going, or how desperately inept these two companies have become due to their size and age.
Microsoft's asset is an OS that people are still locked into, but becoming violently sick of. Yahoo's asset is a rapidly diminishing brand and user base. Combine them and you just get an even faster and more epic fail. This is the next AOL/TW.
The guys who will eat their lunch are the Googles and Apples of the world, who are both innovating and listening to their customers. Size alone won't help you compete with that, you need to get back to innovating. I think people are being way too slow to jump the sinking ship here - if I were a YHOO shareholder, I'd have dumped as soon as the offer hit the table and the stock hit $30. Why on earth would you hold out for $31?
tons of subscription services will lose most of their user base overnight - not just the ones charging for real time quotes, but also all the free sites that only offer delayed quotes. It could even have implications for market as a whole, because a whole lot more amateur investors will be getting involved in watching real-time activity. Evil though they may be, it's hard to deny that google gets their product offerings dead-on nearly all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
they pick up clock skew as they're not running _quite_ in real time
That makes no sense - the machine isn't spinning in a loop, counting instruction cycles, to keep track of time. It has to come from something like periodic interrupt or an RTC. There nothing about being in a VM, or anything else about the precision of the CPU core clock, that could "dilate" those timings. Maybe you might miss some interrupts for some reason, but if that's the case then it is probably the fault of the VM, not the guest.
With specs like that. It's pretty much useless.
If useful to you means "can play the latest FPS video games", then yes, it's useless.
he's mentally defective enough
er.. make that "she"
I had my doubts at first, but this makes it abundantly clear that Childs was right . More right than any of us might have imagined when this spin-doctored story first came out.
In hindsight he took totally reasonable, prudent measures to protect incompetent city officials from themselves. Who knows how they got into that situation, but I won't blame him for anything in light of this, and I sincerely hope a jury wouldn't either.
He should first collect damages himself, and then initiate a class action suit against the city on behalf of all their residents. Maybe put the DA in jail for criminal negligence - in fact I'd venture a guess that he's mentally defective enough to file the charges himself.
It's a big company. Takes a long time for everyone to start going in the same direction, especially given Microsoft's entrenched culture and weak leadership.
The way this works is some guy deep in the bowels of some special project says to his boss "look, I know what our policy is but I really need to contribute this patch so that it gets incorporated into future versions. See, this benefits us. Can we make an exception". By some miracle it gets approved, and thus an internal movement is born. It may take years for all the upper management asshats to get their head around it, but this is how it starts. I agree with the GP, surprisingly nothing stinks about this particular movement, albeit deep in the bowels of the company.
Although not as dense, newer conventional electrolytics, as well as higher capacity multilayer ceramics, seem to be increasingly preferred to tantalums in new designs due to their improving density and decreasing cost. Eg you can now get X7R ceramic 22uF in 1206 packages - once exclusively the realm of tantalums, and with better ESR and temperature stability. So are tantalum's days numbered anyway?
Maybe 20 people are infringing on the patent because the claims of the patent are public knowledge.
That is not the case in the overwhelming majority of computer hardware/software patent lawsuits today. More often than not, the people who are sued have independently developed their supposedly infringing design well before the patent was granted and made public. Also, the grantee of the patent usually doesn't actually get around to shipping their product until late in that time frame, so it's not available to be reverse engineered either.
It takes a long time, often three to four years, between the critical filing date and the date the information is made public. Indeed, the fact that others in the field made the same invention at the same time should alone stand as proof that the invention was obvious, but unfortunately the courts haven't seen it that way.
Basically, the vast majority of stuff that is patented today in EE/CS is stuff that comes about as soon as either a) the prerequisite, underlying technology becomes available/affordable or b) demand materializes for the thing. Almost never is it precipitated by any actual invention.
Mr. Paranoid Admin with a God complex had big freakin' huge vulnerabilities on his precious network?
Attaching old-fashioned modems to the console ports of routers and switches is sometimes done in order to allow the administrator to remotely access the equipment during a major network failure.
It's not an egregious "vulnerability", assuming the console it password protected. That statement was spun to make it sound like they were back doors, when in reality this was likely done for no other reason than to facilitate emergency maintenance.
Please note I am not defending Childs generally. I'm just saying that the way they've minced words in some of these allegations gives me pause.
Are there any American citizens (who understand what FISA is) that actually support it? I would think that even the right should be against it. If conservatives want to restore traditional American values, then surely preventing the government from using new technology to conduct widespread domestic spying is conducive to that goal.
With both congress and the president's approval rating hovering at below 20%, it is clear that the will of the people is not being represented. The only plausible explanation for FISA is that it is intended an means for the executive branch to seize an even greater imbalance of power, and/or to cover up widespread criminal activity that took place in the last eight years.
Deplorable
Why didn't Obama try to stop this? He could have spoken out and got the rest of the dems behind him. Instead he voted in favor of it. This is what his campaign said in October:
"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."
And on Dec 17:
Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same.
Oh sure, he voted for the amendments which attempted to remove or limit the immunity, but everyone already knew those would fail.
This is from his most recent statement last week:
The ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States is a vital counter-terrorism tool, and I'm persuaded that it is necessary to keep the American people safe -- particularly since certain electronic surveillance orders will begin to expire later this summer. Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, I've chosen to support the current compromise.
Another nail in the coffin for our constitution. This is a sad day. And to think that most of the senate voted on this WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING WHAT THEY WERE GIVING THE TELCOMS IMMUNITY FOR!!!.
This stinks of a grand-scale coverup. There is still the possibility of suing the government, and perhaps striking this bill as unconsitutional. Let's hope we get to the bottom of this and put some people in jail.
http://www.lamperdlesslethal.com/news/upload/pg2HomelandSecurity7_06.pdf
There, fixed it for you.
Maybe I'm just old hat, but I thought the role of a CTO was to deal with the.. uh.. technology. As in, for companies that actually develop technology. And the CIO does the IT.
As I recall, "CIO" was popularized by the dot-com companies, and immediately thereafter, since they needed as many C**s on staff as possible to get their VC funding, decided that a CTO was needed too, even though their business was selling pimento loaves on the e-web. So then it became just a great big alphabet soup with everyone squabbling over what their all important title should be. (Yes, I have worked in such an environment more than once).
I think the most obvious mark of a doomed startup is when people get completely hung up on establishing the org chart before the company has even made a dime in revenue. I realize it's basic human (/animal) nature to have to get the pecking order establish first and foremost. However when the title itself is the result of such as clueless and counterproductive process - and indeed, a throwback to such a clueless era as the dot com days, it's hard to see how you could expect your underlings could bestow any credibility on it.
I realize I may have offend any CIOs in the audience, but that's not the intent. My point is not personal - what I'm saying is just that if you're good at your job and still getting no respect, perhaps a less "tainted" title is in order.
The picture in the article shows the sphere being handled in what obviously isn't a cleanroom. Won't that mess up its surface?
I'm sure they don't cart the real ones around for press tours.
Software is a machine with thousands of moving parts running on a machine with with several billion moving parts.
The issue with moving parts as a point of failure is that they are prone to breaking on their own. When software fails it is the fault of the programmer, not some mysterious things that are breaking in spite of him.
While I somewhat agree with your sentiment that we should cut programmers some slack, I still believe it is possible for software to work right with very little debugging. If a programmer is spending more time debugging than coding, he's doing it wrong... either that or marketing needs to quit making him bolt on features that the system was never designed to support).
Shed lighting is pretty easy because the power requirement and the duty cycle (on vs off time) will be low, and you don't need voltage regulation. That means all you need is a largeish 12V battery (preferably rated for "deep cycle"), and a modest 12V solar panel of maybe 2-3 square feet. Test with a small setup first, and then if you want more run time (from a fully charged battery) add another battery. For more duty cycle, add another panel.
Hook the panel to the battery with a diode in series, and then hook 12V lighting (eg track lighting minus the transformer) to the battery, and you're done. Solar panels are inherently quite compatible with lead-acid charging requirements, so you don't even need charge circuitry for a small setup such as this.
If you want to power a small 110V device, you can use an inverter. You won't be running a table saw on one of those though.
Why the hate on "theoretically"? In the example you gave, they could have removed "Theoretically", and that sentence of the article *would still* have been a correct statement.
:)
In theory, you're absolutely right.
And they are right. I don't work with watts every day so I don't understand exactly what 30pW mean. This is how the human brain works: comparisons with other things in life. You know that a Hummer is big because most other vehicles are smaller.
OK.. so distances are better explained in terms of Hummers placed end-to-end, instead of miles? The watch battery comparison is just as meaningless, because people don't need to power anything for 200+ years, nor do they have an intuitive feel for how much energy a watch uses compared to an implanted eye pressure sensor. If you could guess to even within 2-3 orders of magnitude, then you probably already have a feel for the size of a pW anyway.
This is after all a "news for nerds" site, so some technical information about the invention would be preferable to a PR piece. I don't see why you'd fault your fellow nerd for picking on the details - I'm just going with what's in TFA. However, I went back and read the rest of it and it's actually not bad. The problem is when an article opens with this kind of thing (and the bit about "we made it use less power by making the battery smaller")... it's pretty hard to justify reading the rest.
no, I think you're missing the point. They aren't really saying you can use the same battery and have it last 200 years. They're saying you can use a MUCH SMALLER battery and have it last just as long.
Actually, I got that point exactly, which is why I said the watch battery metric is stupid. The problem is that marketroids actually think that more people will understand it if they rate it in "watch battery years" instead of watts, just like storage capacities are easier for us to understand in terms of "libraries of congress".
What's with all these idiots who think "theoretically" is a synonym for "not really"? This gem in particular:
"Theoretically, the energy stored in a watch battery would be enough to run the Phoenix for 263 years."
Note that it's carefully worded to say "the energy stored in.." not to that a watch battery actually _could_ do this. Because it couldn't. The battery's internal resistance and chemical processes would cause it to drain itself long before you'd ever consume a meaningful portion of that energy.
Only in very specialized applications where you have extremely weak, but continuous sources of power, could you realize any benefit to a picowatt vs a nanowatt of consumption. For batteries or supercaps, the power source will self-discharge at a much higher rate anyway.
... that was relieved and surprised it wasn't "hub" and "10Base2"?
I'm not sure if you realize this, but 10base2 (aka thin net) doesn't use hubs. It's a shared 50 ohm coax with tees at each device and terminator plugs on each end. It uses CS/MACD like a hub, but the electronics and physical topology are totally different.
OK, so common sense prevailed and the EFF won. That's great, but what is the significance of this case? Is there actually a big problem with people getting hassled for giving/selling promo CDs, or am I missing some other broader implication as a result of this decision?
they throw in the towel to avoid precedent being established.
Seems to me further evidence that they are systematically abusing the legal system with sham lawsuits. If they actually cared about this individual case wouldn't they want to see it through?
Who hasn't already written off both of these companies? Anyone holding either of them for the long term simply does not grok where the internet and personal computing are going, or how desperately inept these two companies have become due to their size and age.
Microsoft's asset is an OS that people are still locked into, but becoming violently sick of. Yahoo's asset is a rapidly diminishing brand and user base. Combine them and you just get an even faster and more epic fail. This is the next AOL/TW.
The guys who will eat their lunch are the Googles and Apples of the world, who are both innovating and listening to their customers. Size alone won't help you compete with that, you need to get back to innovating. I think people are being way too slow to jump the sinking ship here - if I were a YHOO shareholder, I'd have dumped as soon as the offer hit the table and the stock hit $30. Why on earth would you hold out for $31?
tons of subscription services will lose most of their user base overnight - not just the ones charging for real time quotes, but also all the free sites that only offer delayed quotes. It could even have implications for market as a whole, because a whole lot more amateur investors will be getting involved in watching real-time activity. Evil though they may be, it's hard to deny that google gets their product offerings dead-on nearly all the time.