Of course such a DVD is an example a la Goedel, Escher, Bach of the class of DVD entitled "I cannot be played on DVD player X". The tortoise would be proud.
Re:Mod me down if you must
on
Giant Sub-Woofer
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Is that a geek fishing joke? Maybe they would appreciate it
here?
In the UK tea drinking on building sites is very common. But you've got the wrong mental image.
Imagine instead a 6 foot, 20 stone hairy arsed builder with a fat hairy belly hanging out of his lumberjack shirt, his trousers hanging halfway down his arse, scratching his bollocks with a copy of a shite tabloid newspaper open to a page full of topless birds. Exclaiming 'cor, look at the tits on that!' with a fag hanging out of his mouth. And sipping from a big mug of char, probably stewed PG tips.
Or you can perform an IP to
ICBM Address lookup, and then bring down some righteous retribution on their heads using your favorite weapon of mass retribution
All it takes is a small battery and a couple of diodes and you can hold SRAM for weeks/years after power out, cos these chips only consume a few uA at standby. Whereas DRAM consumes mA so you need a an unfeasibly large battery for any reasonable length of time.
Also write speeds for flash are very slow, (order of 10s-100s of milliseconds rather than order of 10-100 nano seconds for SRAM, however reads are fast, so for a static RAM disc that is loaded once and then searched this may not be a problem. There is also FRAM which is non-volatile but has 200 nano-sec read and writes, but write time is not infinite (about 10^8 to 10^9).
Also note that most electronically re-writable non-volatile techonologies are only guaranteed for 10 years. So it ain't forever.
Electrostatic discharges can kill chips because they can generate 5-20kV impulses with enough energy to damage some of the circuitry. Most circuits that connect to the outside world are hardened for overvoltages and transients typical of ESD and induced lighting effects. But only to very small energies.
If you have an EMP inducing currents and voltages on wires, then I would guess that the energy pulses produced can be significantly larger than those expected due to ESD and normal overvoltage events. Hence lots of kit will get frazzled.
As well as the reduced power requirements of Bluetooth, the protocol is _much_ simpler. A full blown tcp-ip stack is total overkill for applications such as wireless mice/keyboards, and even audio streaming for BT headsets. WiFi is total overkill for the applications BT is targetted at.
Think of all those frigging bytes in a bloated packet sending 1 bit of information about a mouse keypress. Using internet protocols equates to more RAM, more MHz more PROM, more Amps, more Watts of heat, (and maybe more PCB real-estate, component count, manufacturing steps, testing steps, failure modes etc. etc.) for no real gain in functionality.
As far as range goes, the standards allow for 1m, 10m and 100m, with obvious power/distance penalties. I believe that the majority use the 10m range.
If I remember correctly, the linking character is the enigmatic Molly.
I just finished Mona Lisa Overdrive, Molly is in Mona Lisa (with the pseudonym Polly), and the Count is in both Mona Lisa and Count Zero, but I dont remember Molly being in Count Zero.
As a side note, I think it is a great trilogy. Gibson really makes you work hard, he tosses in throwaway lines about the state of the world, different technologies, jargon for new technologies (microsofts, stims) etc. which other authors would take pages to explain. It makes it much more difficult to read as the reader is left to infer the meaning, and it gives the reader a feeling of culture shock because you dont fully understand immediately everything that you see. But I think this adds to the gritty reality of the books, and Gibsons cyber universe.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
·
· Score: 1
Absolutely. My first 'computer' was my dads Sinclair programmable calculator in the mid 70's. Oh the joy of programming in moonlander, not much of a GUI though.
Then I graduated to the ZX-81, wow, a whole 1K to play with. Then expanded it to 16K, gosh, how am I ever going to write a program to fill that? Then onto IBM-XT, AT, with lots and lots of K, and lots of Hz.
But here I am, 30 years later writing code for microcontrollers with a few Kb of ROM and a couple of hundred bytes of RAM running at 10Mhz. Plus ca change.
but Newton is famous for saying "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
The irony of this famously humble statement of Newtons was that he was probably actually taking the piss out of Hooke, who was a bit of a short arse. Quoting from a good article on the subject:
The quotation about giants' shoulders is a product of the feud with Hooke, originating in a letter which Newton wrote to him in 1676. Although the letter is couched in outwardly courteous terms, the reference to giants has been seen by many as a direct insult to Hooke. According to his contemporaries John Aubrey and Samuel Pepys, Hooke was short and somewhat unprepossessing in appearance. Newton's reference to 'giants' alludes, perhaps, to Hooke's lack of physical stature and implied that he was similarly lacking in intellectual stature.
Well explained my friend. Just used up my mod points but you deserve some, this is the first really informative post in this whole discussion.
Chaos and complexity have always fascinated me, particularly the idea that on reaching a certain levels of connectedness a system becomes 'interesing', too little interaction and the system is boringly still, too much and the system is effectively random. It seems to relate to how rapdily information diffuses through a system (CAs and spatially distrubited dynamic systems.) Tune it right and exciting things appear, patterns slowly evolve and change. Playing with the rules of Life (Conways) gives one a feel for how this coupling determines the behaviour.
I have always had a belief that the brains complex behviour is a result of this sort of fine tuning. If intelligence is advantageous in an evolutionary sense, which I'm sure it was for us in the past, then perhaps a nervous system with suitably tuned feedback can display complex behaviour. Look at the nervous systems of insects which effectively control leg and flight muscles in an apparently intelligent fashion. Suitable evolutionary pressure to enlarge this system could lead to the finely tuned structure of our brain.
Play around with some form of neural network with feedback, there are some very complex relationships because the neuron activation functions are typically non-linear. But to find the edge of chaos we need to tune it. Chuck in a Genetic Algorithm step, create a population and define a suitable measure of 'interesting behviour' and before long you'll have Deep Thought. Only problem is that in the human brain there are ~10^11 neurons and 10^15 synapses, gonna need some serious teraflops to do anything useful in realtime.
The BBC is NOT government funded. It operates under a Royal Charter with no oversite or control from the government, and no tax payers money from the treasury. The money comes from the licence-fee, payed by everyone with a television. Although this appears similar to a tax the important point is that the BBC budget is not controlled by the government and therefore they can't threaten budget cuts in order to rein them in. Although they may be able to influence the terms of the charter at its renewal in 2006.
Some people object to being forced to pay GBP 116 (about $210 at todays prices) per year for this service even if they dont watch it. I think it is a small price to pay for some of the highest quality TV in the world, with no brainless adverts interrupting the programs every 15 minutes. For this money we get two main terrestrial channels + 6 other channels (News 24 etc), and 10 high quality radio stations including the BBC World Service, Radios 1 to 4, all again with no adverts.
The Rocket Assisted Decent motors used on the current landers are designed to bring the landers almost to a complete stop (ie ~zero vertical velocity) a few feet or 10s of feet above the surface. However there can be very strong winds on Mars. The landing site and time of the Viking lander was highly restricted to very flat, boring, featureless areas with low wind speeds to minimise the risk of sideways movement on landing leading to it getting smeared across the landscape.
The addition of air bags means there is a much greater range of safe geography that can be explored because the final phase of the decent can safely occur even with large horizontal and vertical velocities at parachute release.
Obviously even with this system it is prudent to avoid regions with lots of crevasses and cracks as it would be rather a shame if it bounced along the surface and ended up jammed in a crack and unable to open.
Generally there are low-voltage detection circuits inside and/or connected to the microprocessor that detect that power is fading, and wrap things up, terminating any writes in an orderly fashion if possible. Generally any power-down is going to be very slow (orders of 10s to 100s of milli-seconds or more) because of capacitor storage in the power supply. The LV device gives sufficient notice that power is fading so that the remaining processor time is more than ample to shut things down gracefully.
Obviously with volatile RAM without battery backup we shouldn't need to care about the state of the RAM on power-down as it is only temporary storage and will be re-initialised on power-up. Generally the storage components will have wider operating tolerances than the microprocessor so it is very unlikely that the RAM will get corrupted during the powerdown proceedure.
With non-volatile hardware such as battery backed RAM, flash, eeprom, fram etc we have a problem because these contain NV config data and firmware that must be consistent. And with some such as FLASH the write times can be very long, may be longer than the power-down time. In this case the general philosophy is to write the bytes, and the very last step is to update the checksum and set a valid data flag. Which means at worst the device boots up and knows its got some dodgy code or data on its hands, and hopefully handles it in a graceful fashion.
With something like the Spirit I would guess that some form of multiple redundancy is used so that there are multiple firmware images, with a switchable bootloader so that a new image or dataset can be uploaded to an area that is offline, and only once all of the checksums/message hashes are confirmed is the switch made. And hardware watchdogs are running so that if the worst happens and it hangs it can always boot an alternate image. I would also expect a backup OTP PROM image that is guaranteed never to change and known to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you provide some authoritative references to back up your statements?
Well the answer is...
Wait until he is having a conversation with someone else.
Then phone him, you will have his 100% attention.
And the average person has 1.01 testicles.
And will we be able to buy the database on DVD?
Of course such a DVD is an example a la Goedel, Escher, Bach of the class of DVD entitled "I cannot be played on DVD player X". The tortoise would be proud.
Is that a geek fishing joke? Maybe they would appreciate it here?
No shit!
Well for the last few months they have been worth about the same. May as well merge them and have the Eurodollar.
Not.
Yup. Just gone sunset here and I can plainly see the moon with the naked eye. Well done for an excellent bit of applied maths.
Imagine instead a 6 foot, 20 stone hairy arsed builder with a fat hairy belly hanging out of his lumberjack shirt, his trousers hanging halfway down his arse, scratching his bollocks with a copy of a shite tabloid newspaper open to a page full of topless birds. Exclaiming 'cor, look at the tits on that!' with a fag hanging out of his mouth. And sipping from a big mug of char, probably stewed PG tips.
There you have your typical English builder.
Translation for non-native English speakers.
Permanent Denial of Service.
Maybe its an unplanned eruption?
'Non-Volatile' chips such as EEPROM or Flash have problems with limited writes (10^3 to 10^5) before they loose their ability to be non-volatile. See this guide to Non-Volatile Memory chips. And a nice diagram of all the families
Also write speeds for flash are very slow, (order of 10s-100s of milliseconds rather than order of 10-100 nano seconds for SRAM, however reads are fast, so for a static RAM disc that is loaded once and then searched this may not be a problem. There is also FRAM which is non-volatile but has 200 nano-sec read and writes, but write time is not infinite (about 10^8 to 10^9).
Also note that most electronically re-writable non-volatile techonologies are only guaranteed for 10 years. So it ain't forever.
Electrostatic discharges can kill chips because they can generate 5-20kV impulses with enough energy to damage some of the circuitry. Most circuits that connect to the outside world are hardened for overvoltages and transients typical of ESD and induced lighting effects. But only to very small energies.
If you have an EMP inducing currents and voltages on wires, then I would guess that the energy pulses produced can be significantly larger than those expected due to ESD and normal overvoltage events. Hence lots of kit will get frazzled.
Your post.
And I imagine THIS post will be showing up shortly. Or maybe I will be first cos I have mentioned MSN (twice).
UK backs PFI military satellite Skynet 5 is a huge 15-year project...
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
As well as the reduced power requirements of Bluetooth, the protocol is _much_ simpler. A full blown tcp-ip stack is total overkill for applications such as wireless mice/keyboards, and even audio streaming for BT headsets. WiFi is total overkill for the applications BT is targetted at.
Think of all those frigging bytes in a bloated packet sending 1 bit of information about a mouse keypress. Using internet protocols equates to more RAM, more MHz more PROM, more Amps, more Watts of heat, (and maybe more PCB real-estate, component count, manufacturing steps, testing steps, failure modes etc. etc.) for no real gain in functionality.
As far as range goes, the standards allow for 1m, 10m and 100m, with obvious power/distance penalties. I believe that the majority use the 10m range.
I just finished Mona Lisa Overdrive, Molly is in Mona Lisa (with the pseudonym Polly), and the Count is in both Mona Lisa and Count Zero, but I dont remember Molly being in Count Zero.
As a side note, I think it is a great trilogy. Gibson really makes you work hard, he tosses in throwaway lines about the state of the world, different technologies, jargon for new technologies (microsofts, stims) etc. which other authors would take pages to explain. It makes it much more difficult to read as the reader is left to infer the meaning, and it gives the reader a feeling of culture shock because you dont fully understand immediately everything that you see. But I think this adds to the gritty reality of the books, and Gibsons cyber universe.
Absolutely. My first 'computer' was my dads Sinclair programmable calculator in the mid 70's. Oh the joy of programming in moonlander, not much of a GUI though.
Then I graduated to the ZX-81, wow, a whole 1K to play with. Then expanded it to 16K, gosh, how am I ever going to write a program to fill that? Then onto IBM-XT, AT, with lots and lots of K, and lots of Hz.
But here I am, 30 years later writing code for microcontrollers with a few Kb of ROM and a couple of hundred bytes of RAM running at 10Mhz. Plus ca change.
The behaviour is still wrong. The developer should be the exception, not the rule. Any barrier to migration is going to reduce uptake.
Developer mode flags can be set in a number of ways, registry, config files etc.
The irony of this famously humble statement of Newtons was that he was probably actually taking the piss out of Hooke, who was a bit of a short arse. Quoting from a good article on the subject:
The quotation about giants' shoulders is a product of the feud with Hooke, originating in a letter which Newton wrote to him in 1676. Although the letter is couched in outwardly courteous terms, the reference to giants has been seen by many as a direct insult to Hooke. According to his contemporaries John Aubrey and Samuel Pepys, Hooke was short and somewhat unprepossessing in appearance. Newton's reference to 'giants' alludes, perhaps, to Hooke's lack of physical stature and implied that he was similarly lacking in intellectual stature.
(+1 Informative)
Well explained my friend. Just used up my mod points but you deserve some, this is the first really informative post in this whole discussion.
Chaos and complexity have always fascinated me, particularly the idea that on reaching a certain levels of connectedness a system becomes 'interesing', too little interaction and the system is boringly still, too much and the system is effectively random. It seems to relate to how rapdily information diffuses through a system (CAs and spatially distrubited dynamic systems.) Tune it right and exciting things appear, patterns slowly evolve and change. Playing with the rules of Life (Conways) gives one a feel for how this coupling determines the behaviour.
I have always had a belief that the brains complex behviour is a result of this sort of fine tuning. If intelligence is advantageous in an evolutionary sense, which I'm sure it was for us in the past, then perhaps a nervous system with suitably tuned feedback can display complex behaviour. Look at the nervous systems of insects which effectively control leg and flight muscles in an apparently intelligent fashion. Suitable evolutionary pressure to enlarge this system could lead to the finely tuned structure of our brain.
Play around with some form of neural network with feedback, there are some very complex relationships because the neuron activation functions are typically non-linear. But to find the edge of chaos we need to tune it. Chuck in a Genetic Algorithm step, create a population and define a suitable measure of 'interesting behviour' and before long you'll have Deep Thought. Only problem is that in the human brain there are ~10^11 neurons and 10^15 synapses, gonna need some serious teraflops to do anything useful in realtime.
Wow, thats a lot of cabbages, and a lot of guns. What did they do with them?
Some people object to being forced to pay GBP 116 (about $210 at todays prices) per year for this service even if they dont watch it. I think it is a small price to pay for some of the highest quality TV in the world, with no brainless adverts interrupting the programs every 15 minutes. For this money we get two main terrestrial channels + 6 other channels (News 24 etc), and 10 high quality radio stations including the BBC World Service, Radios 1 to 4, all again with no adverts.
The Rocket Assisted Decent motors used on the current landers are designed to bring the landers almost to a complete stop (ie ~zero vertical velocity) a few feet or 10s of feet above the surface. However there can be very strong winds on Mars. The landing site and time of the Viking lander was highly restricted to very flat, boring, featureless areas with low wind speeds to minimise the risk of sideways movement on landing leading to it getting smeared across the landscape.
The addition of air bags means there is a much greater range of safe geography that can be explored because the final phase of the decent can safely occur even with large horizontal and vertical velocities at parachute release.
Obviously even with this system it is prudent to avoid regions with lots of crevasses and cracks as it would be rather a shame if it bounced along the surface and ended up jammed in a crack and unable to open.
Generally there are low-voltage detection circuits inside and/or connected to the microprocessor that detect that power is fading, and wrap things up, terminating any writes in an orderly fashion if possible. Generally any power-down is going to be very slow (orders of 10s to 100s of milli-seconds or more) because of capacitor storage in the power supply. The LV device gives sufficient notice that power is fading so that the remaining processor time is more than ample to shut things down gracefully.
Obviously with volatile RAM without battery backup we shouldn't need to care about the state of the RAM on power-down as it is only temporary storage and will be re-initialised on power-up. Generally the storage components will have wider operating tolerances than the microprocessor so it is very unlikely that the RAM will get corrupted during the powerdown proceedure.
With non-volatile hardware such as battery backed RAM, flash, eeprom, fram etc we have a problem because these contain NV config data and firmware that must be consistent. And with some such as FLASH the write times can be very long, may be longer than the power-down time. In this case the general philosophy is to write the bytes, and the very last step is to update the checksum and set a valid data flag. Which means at worst the device boots up and knows its got some dodgy code or data on its hands, and hopefully handles it in a graceful fashion.
With something like the Spirit I would guess that some form of multiple redundancy is used so that there are multiple firmware images, with a switchable bootloader so that a new image or dataset can be uploaded to an area that is offline, and only once all of the checksums/message hashes are confirmed is the switch made. And hardware watchdogs are running so that if the worst happens and it hangs it can always boot an alternate image. I would also expect a backup OTP PROM image that is guaranteed never to change and known to work.