Love the Mac fanboyism. The story is actually about Bill Gates and his point of view on OS bootup speed.
Hmmm....
Well, the story is told in the movie "Triumph of the Nerds". That came out in June 1996 - the events it's talking about were much, much older than that. But XP wasn't released in October 2001.
There is absolutely no way this could be a ripoff of a Gates-ism from the XP development era....plus I've never owned a Mac and I havn't used one since 1985 - so I don't think you'd class me as a Mac fanboy. I run Linux on PC hardware.
(I hope I have this story right...this is from memory)
The story goes that the engineer working on the boot sequence for the original Mac was working late one night when Steve Jobs wanders past and asks how long the thing takes - the engineer is pretty happy that he's gotten it down to around 30 seconds (or however long it was) and that's probably good enough. Jobs then comments that they'll probably sell at least a million of these things - and each one will probably be booted a couple of times a day - and the machines will last maybe five years - so if he can save just one second more from the bootup time - that's equivelent to 113 years from the lives of Mac owners. So if you can save just one more second - that's like saving someone's life.
Talk about pressure!
But it's a serious point. The amount of human lifetimes that are wasted waiting for PC's to reboot is pretty horrifying - and there's a lot more than a million of them. Someone should take this seriously.
Your form is missing an answer to the one I came up with a while back. It's a hybrid legislation and vigilante approach in which the law legalises one very specific form of vigilanteism:
Here is my law:
Make it not illegal to send hot cheques or
bogus credit card numbers to spammers.
This permits a kind of reverse spam. We know that when some item is offered for sale via spam, only a very tiny percentage of people respond to buy the stuff. If outraged recipients were allowed to send bad cheques and incorrect credit card numbers to these bozos, they would fall victim to the exact same set of problems that we suffer...that of separating good money from reverse-spam that we would send to them.
Just as it doesn't take many respondants out of the millions they spam to make a profit, it doesn't take many of the millions of victims to send a bad cheque or a bogus credit card number back to the spammer to mean that they have to chase down hundreds of bogus payments just in order to collect a handful of actual payments.
They could try increasingly sophisticated ways to 'filter' our reverse spam - but we'd find ever cleverer ways around that.
Well - it probably wouldn't work - there is bound to be a flaw - but it brings a smile to my face to imagine the spammer sitting with a million dollars worth of orders made up of 20,000 cheques for $50 each - knowing full well that only five of them are real and that the only way to tell the difference it to attempt to cash each one of them. He's made several hundred bucks from the idiot buyers - but in order to cash their cheques he's got to pay in 19,995 bad cheques - and because of my law, he's got no legal recourse. If he fails to cash the handful of legitimate cheques, he upsets his 'real' customers who bought something that didn't ever arrive...yeah, their cheques didn't get cashed - but they'll probably think twice about ordering stuff that was promoted via Spam the next time.
Banks and credit card companies seeing the cost of bouncing very large numbers of cheques and credit card numbers would pretty soon impose a hefty surcharge onto their banking fees for doing this - and voila! No more direct sales spam!
Actually, I wonder whether it's even necessary to have the law. Merely having a few tens of thousands of people ask questions about the product - sending empty envelopes that need to be opened, slashdotting their web servers, etc.
Anyway - feel free to shoot this idea down in flames too.
'63 Austin Mini - Right-hand drive (which raises some eyebrows here in Texas!) I've been working on it for a year - it's driveable now but still in restoration. It's 850cc engine is pretty much at the end of the line - so I'm hunting for a 1300cc motor for it - when it's done it'll be quick. But it's not a dragster - with maybe 100hp at the wheels for a 1200lb car and handling like a go-kart - it's an autocross car - just about the most fun you can have on four wheels.
I posted an email to tell the editor it was a dupe (of a dupe of a dupe) while it was still 'in the mysterious future' - but it got posted anyway...sigh.
I didn't assume 1 dot is 1 bit. I was actually rather generous and assumed that one dot was 24 bits (6 each of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black...which is VERY generous!!)
Even using YOUR VERY OWN most generous estimation of 4.32MB/in^2, finish that thought...there are 8.5x11 inches on a sheet of paper - so YOU came up with an upper limit (assuming 24 bit inks and magical scanners) of just 403MB for a sheet of paper. Recall that this guy is claiming 250 GIGABYTES. That's 620 times more than your best possible estimate.
It doesn't matter how complex the scheme is. You can't fit more data into some fixed number of storage locations than there are locations. Whether he uses shapes, teeny-tiny letters, bar codes or anything else, there are only so many possible ways to cover a sheet of paper with ink. The X resolution times the Y resolution times the width of the paper times the height of the paper is the MAXIMUM number of 'storage locations' on the paper. That's just like the number of bytes in the RAM of your computer except instead of bytes, we have coloured dots. That's an upper limit - fundamental information theory doesn't permit more than that no matter what shapes you draw with those dots or what colours you use.
In fact, using shapes and stuff would dramatically lower your information content because it would remove some combinations of dot colours from the set that he can print.
So no, he can't possibly under any mechanism be getting what he's claimed. We could maybe avoid calling him a complete fraud if he'd simply been quoting theoretical numbers for an untried technique - we could allow that he'd dropped a couple of decimal places. But he has also "demonstrated" his claim - by scanning a piece of 'rainbow-encoded' paper and playing a full length movie off of it - which we know is quite utterly impossible for really fundamental reasons. Some we know he couldn't conceivably have done this 'for real' - he must have cheated and put up a 'rigged' demo - which means he's not just claiming the impossible - he KNOWS it's impossible. That's a scam.
The guy is a liar and a cheat - and please don't call me an idiot for proving that using the numbers that you provided.
Nope - follow the link to the article - then follow the link from there to the ORIGINAL article in "Arab News" - the reporter claims to have been shown a working paper scanner that scanned in a movie - then played it on-screen. 256Kbytes isn't enough to store a movie!
Also, the guy is going off on claims to replace DVD's with PVD (paper video disks)...and all manner of crap like that.
No - this isn't a mistake - it's definitely a scam.
Suppose there was a scheme (however complex) that could reliably take absolutely any arbitary data and compress it without loss by just one bit - and reconstitute it reliably. So you'd throw a million bits of arbitary data at it - and it would give you back 999,999 bits. This sounds (on the face of it) entirely reasonable - but it's not.
If you had such a program, you could take the compressed data stream out of it and put it back into the compression program and shave another bit off of it. Take your million bits of data - and shove it through the program 999,998 times and you have one bit of (very, very, compressed) data! The trouble is that how can the decompressor possibly know which of the countless amounts of possible inputs to make from a single 1 or 0?
So no - there is no concievable way that you can RELIABLY compress arbitary data losslessly. You can reliably compress data with losses (eg JPEG) or you can come up with schemes (eg the kinds of algorithms that ZIP and gzip use) that compress most kinds of data losslessly - but occasionally make the data a little bit bigger. You can also compress certain kinds of data (eg English text) reliably and losslessly - but only because it's not ARBITARY data.
So no - you can't invoke a magical compression algorithm to let this guy off the hook.
There are 2D barcode technologies out there that can store data on paper like that - including a few that use colour.
Picking one at random from the Wikipedia article on 'Barcode': A company called 'MarkAny' (for example) has a 440bytes/cm2 black and white barcode that's actually in common use. That would get you around 200Kbytes on a sheet of A4...it's not 10Mbytes - but enough for an MP3 track.
10Mbytes would be tough - that's 117Kbytes per square inch - which would need (say) 256 unique colours and 350 dots per inch - reliably through both printer and scanner. I wouldn't say it was impossible - but it's pushing the envelope. You could use error-correction techniques to solve some of the ikky problems you'd end up with - but that'll eat into your data capacity.
so 16 megabytes, much higher than people here so far have been claiming, and using very, very conservative colour choices and resolutions. While this is an order of magnitude away from the stated values
I have no problem in believing 16Mbytes - but that's not "an order of magnitude away" - he's claiming 250Gbytes. That's FIVE orders of magnitude.
You end up needing shapes that are of the order of 1/10000'th of an inch across (much smaller than the strands of material that make up the paper) and colour precision of around 24 bits - which is vastly better than any existing printer can manage.
Then you need a small scanner that can scan at similar resolutions...also VASTLY beyond any reasonable technology.
Whilst it would be nice to assume this guy made an honest mistake - that is definitely not the case. The original article in the "Arab News" web site says that the journalist watched him scan in an play a feature length movie from a single sheet of A4.
Since we know that's impossible - even in theory and with perfect equipment, we know for 100% sure that this isn't what happened.
Either the journalist is lying - or (MUCH more likely IMHO), he scanned the paper into one file and replayed the movie from a different file. That would be childishly easy to do.
But it's not something he could have done by accident. This guy is a scammer - pure and simple.
If you could print and recognise all 2^24 colours (very unlikely) and print and scan reliably at 10,000 dots per inch (no way!) - then this would be possible. However, if this guy knows how to do that - he should be in the printing and scanning business because there isn't a machine built that can come close to doing that.
But you wouldn't use circles and squares and such.
Suppose for a moment we have 10" square paper (8.5" x 11") 256Gbits translates to a data density of 2.5 Gbits per square inch. If you have a really nice colour printer you might get 500 dots per inch - so you need to encode 2.5Gbits using 250 thousand dots. So each coloured dot has to store 10,000 bits of information. That's a pretty clever trick for a colour that's only described using a 24 bit RGB value.
So the best you could POSSIBLY do with a 500 dpi printer would be 24bits x 500 x 500 x 8.5" x 11" = 561 Mbits.
But that assumes that the colour reproduction of both printer and scanner are 100% perfect - which they most certainly aren't!
You'd need a 100% perfect 10,000 dpi full colour printer AND an equally perfect scanner.
All the crap about storing different shapes is irrelevent - even using every possible colour of every possible shape/pattern/whatever only gets you to a half a gigabyte in theory and maybe one megabyte in practice.
The thing is that it takes lots of years for the effect of gas ratio changes at sea level to propagate up into the upper atmosphere.
From the vague article, these appear to be sea-level measurements - so the density of methane in the upper atmosphere (where it actually matters) will continue to grow for maybe 10 years before it starts to level off.
We are seeing the effects of methane growth rates in the 1980's and 1990's...it'll get worse before it gets better.
It really does cost $100 (or $150 or something - I think they said the price had gone up a little). The reason you can't buy one in a store is twofold - the OLPC project aren't interested in selling through conventional markets - and other manufacturers aren't interested in trying to sell large quantities of a cheap, stripped down machine because it's harder than selling smaller quantities of an expensive fully loaded machine.
You are also perhaps thinking of the OLPC device as just a cheap - but otherwise fairly standard - laptop. It's actually more like a big PDA: These laptops are horribly limited compared to what a 'regular' laptop has. You only get high resolution display in monochrome - it's not windows compatible, there is a special stripped-down version of Linux for it - it doesn't have a hard drive (flash memory only) - it's missing a bunch of standard keys on the keyboard. It has an incredibly slow CPU - no CD-ROM drive, no Floppy drive - not much RAM - no slots for expansion cards - no RAM expansion slot. If the machine's OS get's screwed up, your only way to reload it is over the network. They aren't paying the Microsoft tax either - they also aren't licensing a standard BIOS ROM.
There are economies of scale. They are budgetting on orders for MILLIONS of these machines. Not many laptops sell in these kinds of quantities.
Sure - you can give a village $100 worth of food - and if they ever actually get the food - and if it's not stolen by the local warloads - or the cash skimmed off by some corrupt politician - or eroded by all of the administrative overheads - then they'll be much better off for a year. They'll probably also stop planting crops too. If you keep it up for enough years - they won't even know how to plant crops. What happens the next year and the year after and for the next 100 years?
You could build them a generator - but who will service it? Where will they get gas to power it? OK - make it a windmill - but still, who will fix it when it breaks?
You can go on propping up these failed third world economies by paying 'welfare' - or you can try to fix the root problems and let them support themselves.
In the long term, what these countries need more than anything else is better education. With education, they can pull themselves out of mire that currently drags them down. That's a long term, sustainable, solution. $100 doesn't buy many text books - but it does buy Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg...it gets them keyboard skills. You can sit in a little hut in the middle of a drought blasted desert and so long as you have Internet access, a clockwork laptop and the right skills, you can earn vastly more money than you could ever earn any other way. You can earn enough buy your own generator - or you can learn enough to realise that in your environment, a windmill would be a better choice (or not) - you can learn how to service it. Even if you are a farmer in Kenya - you can learn what the current price of coffee in various markets - you can negotiate prices directly with StarBucks instead of being paid 1% of the value by some sleazy middle-man.
But they can't do that without education and a way to reach out to the outside world.
Google maps isn't all satellite photos. Lots of its content is aerial photography - from planes.
I doubt they'd be able to get a hold of satellite photographs at better than a meter or so per pixel.
Besides, I think they mean "Human eye visible from space". But for that, it's not big enough. At 100km altitude (the 'official' edge of space) an object needs to be at least 150 meters across to be visible at all (ie as a little dot that you can't read as a logo). This sign is only about half of that size. You can't see it from space at all without a telescope or something - and if you have that (eg on a military satellite with maybe 10cm resolution) then you can see regular storefront Logos.
Oops! I misread the article. I read 65,000 one foot tiles and mindlessly translated that as "65,000' across"....silly me.
I'm sorry...
So it's ACTUALLY more like sqrt(65000) feet across. Well, that's under 80 meters - and it needs to be 145m across if you're going to see it at all from space. But even then, it would be a pinkish spec - you wouldn't be able to see what it was.
Bah - this is B.S.
Oh - and the altitude of 100km for the lower edge of space came from Wikipedia: "The Kármán line lies at an altitude of 100 km above the Earth's surface, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space. This definition is accepted by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), which is an international standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics and astronautics."
Oh - PLEASE - not another "the first XXX visible from space" thing.
What exactly does that mean? We were told that The Great Wall of China was the only human construction visible from space...that didn't mean anything either.
We have commercial satellites that can comfortably resolve 1/2 meter features and unclassified military photos down to maybe 10cm - and I'm pretty sure there must be classified stuff that's better than that.
So - almost any large-ish store sign (say a McDonalds golden arches) will be "visible from space".
Perhaps they mean "Naked eye visible from space".
The conventional definition for the altitude at which space "starts" is 100km. At that altitude, with our eyes able to resolve about 1/12th of a degree, at 100km we can resolve something that's 100km * tan(1/12 degrees) which is 0.145 km - 145 meters. So this sign is about 20km across - yep, you can definitely see that "from space" with your naked eye. Of course you'd be able to see one that was MUCH smaller than that - a logo that was around half a kilometer across would be visible too - so KFC could have saved themselves some money!
I'd be surprised if there were no company logos more than 145m across in the world - but I can't find any - so maybe KFC do get the award for being first - but I'd be surprised if that were true.
This turkish flag: http://members.tripod.com/kibrisevi/ozel/Bbayrak.h tm is big enough to see with the naked eye from space...but it's not a company logo. You'd be (just) able to tell it was there - but you couldn't resolve the design on it unaided.
If you read the actual court documents, what the defense seems to be saying is that the license (which evidently isn't GPL - it's some kind of Xfree or Berkely style license) requires them only to give credit to the authors - which they have evidently not done and this they do not seem to deny (although, of course they don't admit it either!). The significant part of their argument is that say that the consequence of their failure to do so is not a violation of copyright law - but instead a breach of the license terms of the software. Then they point to Sun vs Microsoft over Java in which it was ruled that MS had not violated copyright law but had instead breached the terms of their license.
IANAL - but that seems reasonable to me. Of course now they need to be stuck with a charge of breaching the license terms - but that's evidently not what the prosecution have accused them of. The problem is that the Xfree and similar licenses don't have cast-iron legal language as GPL does - so with weak language describing the 'licensing' terms - it seems possible that the defendants could indeed weasel their way out of this.
Personally, I think that if you are going to use one of those licenses, the best you could hope for is a one line mention in the very small print of the Albanian section of the user manual - somewhere between the environmental impact statement and the warning not to let children under 3 years play with the software because of choking hazards. Why the heck you'd find that important escapes me. If you want solid copyright protection, use the GPL - if you want utter freedom for people to do whatever they like with your code - then don't be surprised when they do exactly that.
What's peculiar about this kind of thing is that we should bear in mind that for these ad-driven services and products to be successful, they have to pursade you to watch adverts that cause you to spend more than would have without the product. So if they hand out a 'free' phone (worth maybe $30) - then the belief is that you'll spend $30 more than you would have done with the people sponsoring the phone.
OK - so that's a net gain for the advertisers - and a net loss for their competitors. If all companies advertise - then this is a zero sum game: ultimately, the cost of all of this advertising is in increasing the price of the advertised products - and the amount of that increase is exactly what you would have paid for your 'free' phone - plus the cost of filming the adverts, paying all of the various middle-men, etc. This makes NO SENSE.
Rational buyers should realise that the best value-for-money comes from products with the smallest advertising budget. Use those adverte to tell you what NOT to buy. The cars you see most often on TV ads are the ones where the most corners had to be cut in order to pay for those adverts.
I'd love to see a citation for a claim that 10% of articles in what is commonly regarded as the world's most authoritative encyclopedia are "non-factual".
Your wish is my command!
I guess "non-factual" seems a bit strong - I would take that to mean that the entire article had to be totally bogus. I don't think anyone is claiming that. But for a weaker definition of "non-factual": "An article containing at least one major non-fact", the figures are indeed about 10% for both Britannica AND Wikipedia.
The 'Nature' survey is the one that's generally quoted. They took 42 science-related articles from both Wikipedia and Britannica and asked a bunch of highly regarded experts in the field to carefully fact-check each article. They found FOUR significant factual errors within those 42 articles in each encyclopedia. That's a hair under 10% for those of us who are counting...but close enough. In addition to those four 'significant' errors, there were also 162 minor errors in Wikipedia and 123 minor errors in Britannica.
I don't have a link to the Nature article - but here is a story about the story:
I understand that subsequent surveys have shown that the minor error rate in Wikipedia has improved significantly (as you might expect for an encyclopedia that's updated so often) - and that by some measures at least, Wikipedia is now more reliable than Britannica. With Wikipedias error rate fast improving over Britannica - and with breadth of coverage VASTLY outstripping Britannica - we have to stop calling Britannica "the world's most authoritative" and hand that title to the Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
Love the Mac fanboyism. The story is actually about Bill Gates and his point of view on OS bootup speed.
...plus I've never owned a Mac and I havn't used one since 1985 - so I don't think you'd class me as a Mac fanboy. I run Linux on PC hardware.
Hmmm....
Well, the story is told in the movie "Triumph of the Nerds". That came out in June 1996 - the events it's talking about were much, much older than that. But XP wasn't released in October 2001.
There is absolutely no way this could be a ripoff of a Gates-ism from the XP development era.
(I hope I have this story right...this is from memory)
The story goes that the engineer working on the boot sequence for the original Mac was working late one night when Steve Jobs wanders past and asks how long the thing takes - the engineer is pretty happy that he's gotten it down to around 30 seconds (or however long it was) and that's probably good enough. Jobs then comments that they'll probably sell at least a million of these things - and each one will probably be booted a couple of times a day - and the machines will last maybe five years - so if he can save just one second more from the bootup time - that's equivelent to 113 years from the lives of Mac owners. So if you can save just one more second - that's like saving someone's life.
Talk about pressure!
But it's a serious point. The amount of human lifetimes that are wasted waiting for PC's to reboot is pretty horrifying - and there's a lot more than a million of them. Someone should take this seriously.
Your form is missing an answer to the one I came up
with a while back. It's a hybrid legislation and
vigilante approach in which the law legalises one
very specific form of vigilanteism:
Here is my law:
Make it not illegal to send hot cheques or
bogus credit card numbers to spammers.
This permits a kind of reverse spam. We know that when
some item is offered for sale via spam, only a very tiny
percentage of people respond to buy the stuff. If outraged
recipients were allowed to send bad cheques and incorrect
credit card numbers to these bozos, they would fall victim
to the exact same set of problems that we suffer...that
of separating good money from reverse-spam that we would send
to them.
Just as it doesn't take many respondants out of the millions
they spam to make a profit, it doesn't take many of the
millions of victims to send a bad cheque or a bogus credit
card number back to the spammer to mean that they have to
chase down hundreds of bogus payments just in order to collect
a handful of actual payments.
They could try increasingly sophisticated ways to 'filter'
our reverse spam - but we'd find ever cleverer ways around
that.
Well - it probably wouldn't work - there is bound to be a
flaw - but it brings a smile to my face to imagine the
spammer sitting with a million dollars worth of orders
made up of 20,000 cheques for $50 each - knowing full well
that only five of them are real and that the only way to
tell the difference it to attempt to cash each one of them.
He's made several hundred bucks from the idiot buyers - but
in order to cash their cheques he's got to pay in 19,995 bad
cheques - and because of my law, he's got no legal recourse.
If he fails to cash the handful of legitimate cheques, he
upsets his 'real' customers who bought something that didn't
ever arrive...yeah, their cheques didn't get cashed - but
they'll probably think twice about ordering stuff that was
promoted via Spam the next time.
Banks and credit card companies seeing the cost of
bouncing very large numbers of cheques and credit card
numbers would pretty soon impose a hefty surcharge onto
their banking fees for doing this - and voila! No more
direct sales spam!
Actually, I wonder whether it's even necessary to have
the law. Merely having a few tens of thousands of people
ask questions about the product - sending empty envelopes
that need to be opened, slashdotting their web servers, etc.
Anyway - feel free to shoot this idea down in flames too.
'63 Austin Mini - Right-hand drive (which raises some eyebrows here in Texas!) I've been working on it for a year - it's driveable now but still in restoration. It's 850cc engine is pretty much at the end of the line - so I'm hunting for a 1300cc motor for it - when it's done it'll be quick. But it's not a dragster - with maybe 100hp at the wheels for a 1200lb car and handling like a go-kart - it's an autocross car - just about the most fun you can have on four wheels.
I posted an email to tell the editor it was a dupe (of a dupe of a dupe) while it was still 'in the mysterious future' - but it got posted anyway...sigh.
I didn't assume 1 dot is 1 bit. I was actually rather generous and assumed that one dot was 24 bits (6 each of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black...which is VERY generous!!)
Even using YOUR VERY OWN most generous estimation of 4.32MB/in^2, finish that thought...there are 8.5x11 inches on a sheet of paper - so YOU came up with an upper limit (assuming 24 bit inks and magical scanners) of just 403MB for a sheet of paper. Recall that this guy is claiming 250 GIGABYTES. That's 620 times more than your best possible estimate.
It doesn't matter how complex the scheme is. You can't fit more data into some fixed number of storage locations than there are locations. Whether he uses shapes, teeny-tiny letters, bar codes or anything else, there are only so many possible ways to cover a sheet of paper with ink. The X resolution times the Y resolution times the width of the paper times the height of the paper is the MAXIMUM number of 'storage locations' on the paper. That's just like the number of bytes in the RAM of your computer except instead of bytes, we have coloured dots. That's an upper limit - fundamental information theory doesn't permit more than that no matter what shapes you draw with those dots or what colours you use.
In fact, using shapes and stuff would dramatically lower your information content because it would remove some combinations of dot colours from the set that he can print.
So no, he can't possibly under any mechanism be getting what he's claimed. We could maybe avoid calling him a complete fraud if he'd simply been quoting theoretical numbers for an untried technique - we could allow that he'd dropped a couple of decimal places. But he has also "demonstrated" his claim - by scanning a piece of 'rainbow-encoded' paper and playing a full length movie off of it - which we know is quite utterly impossible for really fundamental reasons. Some we know he couldn't conceivably have done this 'for real' - he must have cheated and put up a 'rigged' demo - which means he's not just claiming the impossible - he KNOWS it's impossible. That's a scam.
The guy is a liar and a cheat - and please don't call me an idiot for proving that using the numbers that you provided.
Feel free to apologise at any time!
Nope - follow the link to the article - then follow the link from there to the ORIGINAL article in "Arab News" - the reporter claims to have been shown a working paper scanner that scanned in a movie - then played it on-screen. 256Kbytes isn't enough to store a movie!
Also, the guy is going off on claims to replace DVD's with PVD (paper video disks)...and all manner of crap like that.
No - this isn't a mistake - it's definitely a scam.
No - you can't win by arguing for compression.
Suppose there was a scheme (however complex) that could reliably take absolutely any arbitary data and compress it without loss by just one bit - and reconstitute it reliably. So you'd throw a million bits of arbitary data at it - and it would give you back 999,999 bits. This sounds (on the face of it) entirely reasonable - but it's not.
If you had such a program, you could take the compressed data stream out of it and put it back into the compression program and shave another bit off of it. Take your million bits of data - and shove it through the program 999,998 times and you have one bit of (very, very, compressed) data! The trouble is that how can the decompressor possibly know which of the countless amounts of possible inputs to make from a single 1 or 0?
So no - there is no concievable way that you can RELIABLY compress arbitary data losslessly. You can reliably compress data with losses (eg JPEG) or you can come up with schemes (eg the kinds of algorithms that ZIP and gzip use) that compress most kinds of data losslessly - but occasionally make the data a little bit bigger. You can also compress certain kinds of data (eg English text) reliably and losslessly - but only because it's not ARBITARY data.
So no - you can't invoke a magical compression algorithm to let this guy off the hook.
There are 2D barcode technologies out there that can store data on paper like that - including a few that use colour.
Picking one at random from the Wikipedia article on 'Barcode': A company called 'MarkAny' (for example) has a 440bytes/cm2 black and white barcode that's actually in common use. That would get you around 200Kbytes on a sheet of A4...it's not 10Mbytes - but enough for an MP3 track.
10Mbytes would be tough - that's 117Kbytes per square inch - which would need (say) 256 unique colours and 350 dots per inch - reliably through both printer and scanner. I wouldn't say it was impossible - but it's pushing the envelope. You could use error-correction techniques to solve some of the ikky problems you'd end up with - but that'll eat into your data capacity.
so 16 megabytes, much higher than people here so far have been claiming, and using very, very conservative colour choices and resolutions. While this is an order of magnitude away from the stated values
I have no problem in believing 16Mbytes - but that's not "an order of magnitude away" - he's claiming 250Gbytes. That's FIVE orders of magnitude.
You end up needing shapes that are of the order of 1/10000'th of an inch across (much smaller than the strands of material that make up the paper) and colour precision of around 24 bits - which is vastly better than any existing printer can manage.
Then you need a small scanner that can scan at similar resolutions...also VASTLY beyond any reasonable technology.
It's a scam - the end.
Whilst it would be nice to assume this guy made an honest mistake - that is definitely not the case. The original article in the "Arab News" web site says that the journalist watched him scan in an play a feature length movie from a single sheet of A4.
Since we know that's impossible - even in theory and with perfect equipment, we know for 100% sure that this isn't what happened.
Either the journalist is lying - or (MUCH more likely IMHO), he scanned the paper into one file and replayed the movie from a different file. That would be childishly easy to do.
But it's not something he could have done by accident. This guy is a scammer - pure and simple.
...and a very good printer too.
If you could print and recognise all 2^24 colours (very unlikely) and print and scan reliably at 10,000 dots per inch (no way!) - then this would be possible. However, if this guy knows how to do that - he should be in the printing and scanning business because there isn't a machine built that can come close to doing that.
But you wouldn't use circles and squares and such.
This is bogus - it's a complete scam.
Suppose for a moment we have 10" square paper (8.5" x 11") 256Gbits translates to a data density of 2.5 Gbits per square inch. If you have a really nice colour printer you might get 500 dots per inch - so you need to encode 2.5Gbits using 250 thousand dots. So each coloured dot has to store 10,000 bits of information. That's a pretty clever trick for a colour that's only described using a 24 bit RGB value.
So the best you could POSSIBLY do with a 500 dpi printer would be 24bits x 500 x 500 x 8.5" x 11" = 561 Mbits.
But that assumes that the colour reproduction of both printer and scanner are 100% perfect - which they most certainly aren't!
You'd need a 100% perfect 10,000 dpi full colour printer AND an equally perfect scanner.
All the crap about storing different shapes is irrelevent - even using every possible colour of every possible shape/pattern/whatever only gets you to a half a gigabyte in theory and maybe one megabyte in practice.
This is incredibly bogus...total BS.
The thing is that it takes lots of years for the effect of gas ratio changes at sea level to propagate up into the upper atmosphere.
From the vague article, these appear to be sea-level measurements - so the density of methane in the upper atmosphere (where it actually matters) will continue to grow for maybe 10 years before it starts to level off.
We are seeing the effects of methane growth rates in the 1980's and 1990's...it'll get worse before it gets better.
It really does cost $100 (or $150 or something - I think they said the price had gone up a little). The reason you can't buy one in a store is twofold - the OLPC project aren't interested in selling through conventional markets - and other manufacturers aren't interested in trying to sell large quantities of a cheap, stripped down machine because it's harder than selling smaller quantities of an expensive fully loaded machine.
You are also perhaps thinking of the OLPC device as just a cheap - but otherwise fairly standard - laptop. It's actually more like a big PDA: These laptops are horribly limited compared to what a 'regular' laptop has. You only get high resolution display in monochrome - it's not windows compatible, there is a special stripped-down version of Linux for it - it doesn't have a hard drive (flash memory only) - it's missing a bunch of standard keys on the keyboard. It has an incredibly slow CPU - no CD-ROM drive, no Floppy drive - not much RAM - no slots for expansion cards - no RAM expansion slot. If the machine's OS get's screwed up, your only way to reload it is over the network. They aren't paying the Microsoft tax either - they also aren't licensing a standard BIOS ROM.
There are economies of scale. They are budgetting on orders for MILLIONS of these machines. Not many laptops sell in these kinds of quantities.
Sure - you can give a village $100 worth of food - and if they ever actually get the food - and if it's not stolen by the local warloads - or the cash skimmed off by some corrupt politician - or eroded by all of the administrative overheads - then they'll be much better off for a year. They'll probably also stop planting crops too. If you keep it up for enough years - they won't even know how to plant crops. What happens the next year and the year after and for the next 100 years?
You could build them a generator - but who will service it? Where will they get gas to power it? OK - make it a windmill - but still, who will fix it when it breaks?
You can go on propping up these failed third world economies by paying 'welfare' - or you can try to fix the root problems and let them support themselves.
In the long term, what these countries need more than anything else is better education. With education, they can pull themselves out of mire that currently drags them down. That's a long term, sustainable, solution. $100 doesn't buy many text books - but it does buy Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg...it gets them keyboard skills. You can sit in a little hut in the middle of a drought blasted desert and so long as you have Internet access, a clockwork laptop and the right skills, you can earn vastly more money than you could ever earn any other way. You can earn enough buy your own generator - or you can learn enough to realise that in your environment, a windmill would be a better choice (or not) - you can learn how to service it. Even if you are a farmer in Kenya - you can learn what the current price of coffee in various markets - you can negotiate prices directly with StarBucks instead of being paid 1% of the value by some sleazy middle-man.
But they can't do that without education and a way to reach out to the outside world.
So - give a man a fish or teach him to fish?
I fot one would welcome a Beowulf cluster of ??? profiting Russion overlords (and all my bases belong to them too).
Google maps isn't all satellite photos. Lots of its content is aerial photography - from planes.
I doubt they'd be able to get a hold of satellite photographs at better than a meter or so per pixel.
Besides, I think they mean "Human eye visible from space". But for that, it's not big enough. At 100km altitude (the 'official' edge of space) an object needs to be at least 150 meters across to be visible at all (ie as a little dot that you can't read as a logo). This sign is only about half of that size. You can't see it from space at all without a telescope or something - and if you have that (eg on a military satellite with maybe 10cm resolution) then you can see regular storefront Logos.
Bah.
Oops! I misread the article. I read 65,000 one foot tiles and mindlessly translated that as "65,000' across"....silly me.
I'm sorry...
So it's ACTUALLY more like sqrt(65000) feet across. Well, that's under 80 meters - and it needs to be 145m across if you're going to see it at all from space. But even then, it would be a pinkish spec - you wouldn't be able to see what it was.
Bah - this is B.S.
Oh - and the altitude of 100km for the lower edge of space came from Wikipedia: "The Kármán line lies at an altitude of 100 km above the Earth's surface, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space. This definition is accepted by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), which is an international standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics and astronautics."
Oh - PLEASE - not another "the first XXX visible from space" thing.
h tm
What exactly does that mean? We were told that The Great Wall of
China was the only human construction visible from space...that
didn't mean anything either.
We have commercial satellites that can comfortably resolve 1/2 meter
features and unclassified military photos down to maybe 10cm - and I'm
pretty sure there must be classified stuff that's better than that.
So - almost any large-ish store sign (say a McDonalds golden arches)
will be "visible from space".
Perhaps they mean "Naked eye visible from space".
The conventional definition for the altitude at which space "starts"
is 100km. At that altitude, with our eyes able to resolve about 1/12th
of a degree, at 100km we can resolve something that's 100km * tan(1/12 degrees)
which is 0.145 km - 145 meters. So this sign is about 20km across
- yep, you can definitely see that "from space" with your naked eye.
Of course you'd be able to see one that was MUCH smaller than that - a
logo that was around half a kilometer across would be visible too - so
KFC could have saved themselves some money!
I'd be surprised if there were no company logos more than 145m across
in the world - but I can't find any - so maybe KFC do get the award for
being first - but I'd be surprised if that were true.
This turkish flag: http://members.tripod.com/kibrisevi/ozel/Bbayrak.
is big enough to see with the naked eye from space...but it's not a
company logo. You'd be (just) able to tell it was there - but you
couldn't resolve the design on it unaided.
Thanks! That's a useful clarification.
If you read the actual court documents, what the defense seems to be saying is that the license (which evidently isn't GPL - it's some kind of Xfree or Berkely style license) requires them only to give credit to the authors - which they have evidently not done and this they do not seem to deny (although, of course they don't admit it either!). The significant part of their argument is that say that the consequence of their failure to do so is not a violation of copyright law - but instead a breach of the license terms of the software. Then they point to Sun vs Microsoft over Java in which it was ruled that MS had not violated copyright law but had instead breached the terms of their license.
IANAL - but that seems reasonable to me. Of course now they need to be stuck with a charge of breaching the license terms - but that's evidently not what the prosecution have accused them of. The problem is that the Xfree and similar licenses don't have cast-iron legal language as GPL does - so with weak language describing the 'licensing' terms - it seems possible that the defendants could indeed weasel their way out of this.
Personally, I think that if you are going to use one of those licenses, the best you could hope for is a one line mention in the very small print of the Albanian section of the user manual - somewhere between the environmental impact statement and the warning not to let children under 3 years play with the software because of choking hazards. Why the heck you'd find that important escapes me. If you want solid copyright protection, use the GPL - if you want utter freedom for people to do whatever they like with your code - then don't be surprised when they do exactly that.
What's peculiar about this kind of thing is that we should bear in mind that for these ad-driven services and products to be successful, they have to pursade you to watch adverts that cause you to spend more than would have without the product. So if they hand out a 'free' phone (worth maybe $30) - then the belief is that you'll spend $30 more than you would have done with the people sponsoring the phone.
OK - so that's a net gain for the advertisers - and a net loss for their competitors. If all companies advertise - then this is a zero sum game: ultimately, the cost of all of this advertising is in increasing the price of the advertised products - and the amount of that increase is exactly what you would have paid for your 'free' phone - plus the cost of filming the adverts, paying all of the various middle-men, etc. This makes NO SENSE.
Rational buyers should realise that the best value-for-money comes from products with the smallest advertising budget.
Use those adverte to tell you what NOT to buy. The cars you see most often on TV ads are the ones where the most corners had to be cut in order to pay for those adverts.
I take it you havn't seen what vandals to do Wikipedia then? :-)
I'd love to see a citation for a claim that 10% of articles in what is commonly regarded as the world's most authoritative encyclopedia are "non-factual".
0 a.html
Your wish is my command!
I guess "non-factual" seems a bit strong - I would take that to mean that the entire article had to be totally bogus. I don't think anyone is claiming that. But for a weaker definition of "non-factual": "An article containing at least one major non-fact", the figures are indeed about 10% for both Britannica AND Wikipedia.
The 'Nature' survey is the one that's generally quoted. They took 42 science-related articles from both Wikipedia and Britannica and asked a bunch of highly regarded experts in the field to carefully fact-check each article. They found FOUR significant factual errors within those 42 articles in each encyclopedia. That's a hair under 10% for those of us who are counting...but close enough. In addition to those four 'significant' errors, there were also 162 minor errors in Wikipedia and 123 minor errors in Britannica.
I don't have a link to the Nature article - but here is a story about the story:
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/43890
I understand that subsequent surveys have shown that the minor error rate in Wikipedia has improved significantly (as you might expect for an encyclopedia that's updated so often) - and that by some measures at least, Wikipedia is now more reliable than Britannica. With Wikipedias error rate fast improving over Britannica - and with breadth of coverage VASTLY outstripping Britannica - we have to stop calling Britannica "the world's most authoritative" and hand that title to the Wikipedia.