Yeah, I know about the whole "replaying to my own post thing".
Anyway, I wanted to alert those whose hackles I raised by bring up gun issues. I tried to think of something which I consider a far more pressing concern than privacy - physicaly security - for use as an analogy.
Quite frankly, one must be feeling pretty physically secure to give such attention to privacy issues.
But turning my attention directly to the gun issue - no, the bracelet is not comparable to the gun because the gun doesn't track you remotely, though it does leave its marks and indicates its presence and it can be traced to a degree.
The primary objective was to say that even a device which was designed and is primarily purchased for today as a human killing weapon has a good side (defense) and a bad side (offense) There's no way to design a gun which has only the good use.
Likewise it's almost impossible today to develop any technology or device which has no evil purpose or use. You can't even design a comic character without someone somewhere twisting it into subversion in their own medium.
Who are we to decide what tools are worth developing and what tools are not? Who are we to deny others the use of this technology - which could be used to track alzheimer's patients so they can stay at home - comfortable and happier - rather than a 24-hour monitored, locked, sterile (and expensive) institution?
If you had the ability to go back in time and prevent the development of nuclear weapons and energy, would you? What would the outcome be?
Furthermore, it's little use preventing the use of this technology until its full potential is known - you can't know the full potential of something - it can be infinite. You can only get a glimpse of it by putting it out there, and seeing what people make of it. Who knew, when gunpowder was invented, that it would pave the way for space exploration?
No. House arrest devices typically require an on-premises device hooked up to a regular phone line to operate.
The device I mentioned was in Micro Center on a display. It looked like an oversized watch with a thick plastic band that didn't appear to be flexible.
Besides, ankle bracelet house arrest devices don't receive pages or show current time. If they did then criminals might show up to court on time instead of claiming traffic was bad as they are put under another 60 days of house arrest for being 6 minutes late.
A device I saw which claims to do the same thing (could be the same) was a watch that is locked onto the persons arm - it can be unlocked manually or remotely, but requires a key of some sort or an unlock command for central.
Just wrap tinfoil around it, or better yet, slam it against every wall you walk past. Eventually it'll get too expensive to replace, and the old fashioned methods of checking up on your own kids yourself and becoming involved in their lives will again become common.
I haven't read the whitepaper, but I imagine the services does now, or soon will, include cell tower positioning information as well. Between GPS (great in open areas serviced by few cell sites, lousy in urban jungles with reflections and bad line of sight) and cell tower (great in dense urban jungles where reflections and blocking are not so problematic due to lower frequencies and a greater number of towers, but lousy in open areas with maybe one or two towers in range) you can have coverage everywhere.
But the error is large enough that key finding won't be so easy, however my wife lost her keyring (probably on the freeway somewhere - left them in the trunk lock) and this would provide a good enough search area to reclaim most objects.
Yeah, because if my fictitious nine year old decides to have a nike symbol tattooed on his forehead for cool clothes without my permission, then he should be able to do that.
I mean, come on. We can certianly trust children to make life altering and sometimes threatening decisions without our involvement.
Parents have a hard enough time keeping their children alive and well until they are past puberty (the age of bad decisions) and a little into their more stable years without adding jibes about how kids today are not much more than slaves.
I'm not saying I'd use Woz's service - I don't know, my children aren't old enough to be on their own. But you shouldn't dismiss it because it does have some potentially bad abuses.
Of course, you might have a double standard there. Perhaps you think it's ok to have file sharing even though it can be used in the commision of crimes, but not an object tracking service because it could be used in the commision of crimes?
I could understand your consternation if this tool only had bad uses, or was designed primarily for 'bad' purposes (ie, the handgun is a weapon whose primary design and use is killing or disabling human beings, but it does have other purposes, such as target practise so you can become better at killing humans instead of just disabling them - but it can be used in both offense and defense) but you can't claim that the service is a bad thing and will bring about Aldus Huxley's futurific version of reality.
We are a tool using species. Don't bemoan the tool, bemoan the uses.
-Adam
For those who don't like to register:
on
Wozniak Unveils WozNet
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· Score: 4, Informative
Last time I looked at it it was essentially a watch with both GPS and GSM (phone) built in so one could get the location of the watch at any time through their service. Sounds like a potentail DOS atack, though, if you obtain phone numbers or cell phone connection information (jamming signals, jamming GPS, etc)
Plus, since all the power is being used by the phone and GPS (chances are good the actual GPS processing is done elsewhere, like in the current E991 GPS services offered by phones) then it's unlikely that much encryption is being done at all.
You need to purchase a stamp to enter most 'no purchase necessary' contests. You can run msn messenger on MAC, IIRC, so you are not required to purchase something that 90% of people who own computers don't already have - windows or mac.
Everyone else can go suck and egg, for all MS cares.
The UM solar car, SpectrUM, has four wheel steering - the rear wheels are servo actuated with the front being mechanical linkages. It is alos a two person car - the tradoff is that you can have a larger solar array if you carry two people.
I got to see them in a test run a week or two ago, and it's very odd to see the car moving in one direction, but pointing 10-20 degrees off its path. The race page indicates that steering failure caused the car not to finish the prequalifier - probably due in part to their more complex system.
As a note, the previous car did have four wheel steering, but the rear two wheels were locked during the races. I understand the reason is that the fairings (covers to keep wind drag down) became too large and the drag was greater than the benefit of having four wheel steering.
There is a ton of technology in the cars - both in and on the cells and within the shell - which you can't see because they like to keep an edge over other teams. Even though the cells appear to be flat on the back they are designed to take light in at a particular angle (or as close as one can get to that angle) and so I assume the four wheel steering is to enable them to point the cells more effectively into the sun.
Bottom line:
FPGA's can't handle the complexity for the programs we write today for general computer use
FPGA's are much more expensive in terms of power and cost than an equivilant processor/ASIC/specific purpose chip
FPGA's are exceedingly slow. In order to make them worthwhile, the hardware algorithm they contain must be massively parallel, or not require speeds that modern processors can attain - which leads back to the FPGA's cannot represent extrememly complex systems yet.
Those people who have an interest in both software and hardware tend to lean to one side or the other, and end up writing drivers for embedded systems, or designing hardware for embedded systems, very few actually participate in the whole enchillada because of the complexity fo the complete system
There's still a metric ton and many years of research work to be done behind the idea of a language that can be translated into both hardware and software
Before this happens you're going to see VHLL (Very High Level Languages) come into increasing use - languages which make it easier to program extremely large, complex, interconnected software systems using a small set of human resources.
Because, let's face it, hardware is freaking dirt cheap. You can go buy a computer now that has the processing power of a 5 year old supercomputer (though it can't quite manage the flow of information that supercomputer can handle, but that's a different discussion altogether)
"Being a better programmer means being able to design more effective and trustworthy programs and knowing how to do that efficiently. It is about not wasting storage cells or machine cycles and about avoiding those complexities that increase the number of reasoning steps needed to keep the design under strict intellectual control. What is needed to achieve this goal, I can only describe as improving one's mathematical skills, where I use mathematics in the sense of "the art and science of effective reasoning". As a matter of fact, the challenges of designing high-quality programs and of designing high-quality proofs are very similar, so similar that I am no longer able to distinguish between the two: I see no meaningful difference between programming methodology and mathematical methodology in general. The long and the short of it is that the computer's ubiquity has made the ability to apply mathematical method more important than ever." prof. dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra - EWD1209
You might find it'll work better via convection air flow if you tilt it so the back is up and the front is down.
Mount it or set it on small blocks so air can flow freely around the entire unit.
Mount it to the wall.
Use a vacuum and clean any dust and debris out.
Remove some of the plastic casing over the warmest chip, and mount a tiny fan (such as those sold at radio shack) onto the case, blowing onto the chip
Hang it from a string from the cieling or bookshelf
Place it on a large aluminum (aluminium, for you other blokes) plate, or block of steel
Attach it to the blade of your ceiling fan
Go to Radio Shack and get a few aluminum heatsinks and use thermal adhesive to glue them to the tops of the chips (or pcmcia card) that are getting hot
RTFM
Put it in your neighbor's airconditioned house/apt/condo/cardboard box
Learn not to buy cheap
Use it in an interactive, wireless art exhibit - "Schrodinger's Net connection: You don't know if it's dead or alive until you open the laptop..."
It might be useful to note that the archive servers are located outside the US, and that they act on requests to have information and websites removed from their archive. (IIRC). I would state that the Archive serves a compelling public interest, both in the sense of free speech, and in the basic idea of keeping a history or record of the internet. The archive is a museum of sorts.
Google, on the other hand, is gathering data for its search engine, and, of necessity, must have what essentially amounts to a copy of each web page in its stores in order to provide this service. If one does not want to have their data in Google, they simply use robots.txt, and Google doea not spider, cache, or store any data from that site if robots.txt is filled out. However, the site owner also denies themselves the ability to be listed, for 'free', in googles search pages. This could be thought of as the cost of being listed.
So I don't think either of those two situations have any problems defending themselves. An anonymizer could also be seen as providing a useful, protected service. An anonymizer is nothing more than a proxy service, and many ISPs use proxies now, not to mention caches and many other tools that store website information or meta information without notifying or requesting explicit permission to do so - they request implicit permission by sending a GET command.
Wifi in every country
A satellite with very directional antennas and low noise amplifiers
A parallel computing encryption deciphering supercomputer
And 75 cents will get you all the remotely gathered intellegence you could want.
I'd say the US should immediately donate billions of dollars of wireless equipment to every other country in the world.
Just try to avoid the comparisons to blankets soiled with disease sold to indians thing...
Honestly, though, except for the security issues, this is a valid idea. The industrial revolution came shortly after the telegraph and fast messaging. The ability to move information from one point to another quickly and cheaply can mean success for so many businesses who are struggling right now.
Like it or not, the US has really made the entire world into a capitalist environment. The only way to move a country from 3rd to 2nd to 1st world is to produce goods to be sold both internally and externally, and to make a large profit doing so. The only way to make a large profit is by knowing more information more quickly (market trends, rapid sales and purchases, asset shifting, etc) and being able to get in on the deals (and deliver on them) ASAP.
The encryption needed to prevent serious eavesdropping will come as needed.
Imagine, now, instead of the scratchy scrawl you write on the bathroom walls now, you can not only print the number but also a picture of your roommate's girlfriend.
Admit it - you were always jealous he usually had one. Could be because he didn't go into computers...
Another interesting (though OT) item about grocery pricing, is that it used to be (and may still be for some stores) that the cents field, which is nearly ALWAYS 99 was used as a product code.
A cashier could look up a product, and seeing a 95, or 65 or something in the cents would know that the line is discontinued, backordered, etc. It was helpful to work with non-updateable cash registers that could barely pull the price and product description from the server, nevermind status codes.
Of course, for item under $10 this did not work so well. Perhaps they only used the last digit in these cases (99 was the same code as 49, 29, etc)
"The Playstation 2 uses a MIPS processor and so is very different from an Intel architecture. The Cube uses a PowerPC, also very different. The Xbox uses an Intel processor, so "emulation" would just be cracking the game protection."
I've studied all three architectures, I've programmed at least a little assembly for all of them. I understand to some degree for each of them how their basic pipeline works. I understand that they are all essentially RISC processors, though that has lost a lot of its meaning in todays world, especially now that old world CISC processors are being emulated on RISC pipelines, such as is the case now with the P4 line.
The only thing that bothers me about emulating these consoles are that they have pipelines which work with larger numbers in fewer cycles than the current 32 bit processors handle natively. As I qualifed in my original post. This, as I suggested in my followup, could be overcome by using the huge processing power of the graphics card, or using a seperate FPGA.
What you don't seem to understand is that only very quickly developed and bloated emulators need to use more than 2 times the processing power of the machine being emulated in these cases. It's hard to make an emulator that takes less than your made up figure of 3-4 times, which is why I qualified my statements with not cheap. Obviously it would depend on the processor used - it would take more than twice the power to emulate a 64 bit machine on a 32 bit. But please understand that saying the processor in the playstation is a 64 or 128 bit processor (as I've seen some claim) is like saying that the 8086 was a 16 bit machine. It isn't - it's an 8 bit machine with 16 bit extensions. Also please note that many of these huge calcualtions are done on the graphics processor, rather than the system processor.
Furthmore, there's no money in it. No company making such a machine would be able to recoup their losses, especially since it would enable a much larger amount of piracy, and the new system/company would be the target of the blame.
Quite frankly the political and business issues are FAR more imposing than the technical barriers.
"I hope this clears everything up, as you obviously don't know that much about different architectures."
Yeah, I'm pretty stupid that way.
-Adam
The real reason SCO won't show code...
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The real reason, of course, as to why SCO isn't showing anyone the code (and will likely try to keep it under wraps as much as possible) is that Linus might well excorsize those portions of the kernel, and they would be patched within days.
Then the judge would look at SCO and say, "Ok, so what's the problem now?"
"No 2GHZ Intel chip has the power to emulate a Cube, and would have a difficult time even handling the PS2 at acceptable speeds."
I hope you don't take this personally, but I don't trust your word on this. Perhaps you could point out a study or analysis of the systems in question and a conclusion written by a professional who understand the inner workings of each system in question.
In the end, all these consoles are are simple processors with graphics computers attached. Most of the games out there are 3d or 2d, and appropiate conversions can be made to convert information meant for, say, the PS2 graphics system to work on a geforce.
The processors are optimized for certian tasks - this may be the only bottleneck. But since the systems run 2-3 times more slowly than the latest intel and amd chips, there is now, or soon will be, no reason to think they can't be emulated. Worst comes to worst, the ideal console will have a built in reconfigurable FPGA which will emulate those tricky instructions on demand. The 64 bit processors coming out should have an even easier time, since many of the special instructions are simply operations on very long numbers.
Smaller chargers are not meant to charge larger batteries - you may well be overstressing your UPS charger by expecting it to charge your new, larger battery for so long.
Lead Acid batteries and their variants (gell-cell, deep cycle, etc) do NOT like to be discharged more than 50%, yes, that includes so-called deep cycle batteries. Deep cycle means that deep discharges won't hurt the battery as much as it would hurt a regular gell cell, but it'll still be damaged.
Most consumer and low end UPS systems do NOT monitor battery temperature. They simply charge the battery so slowly that there is little risk of overheating, boiling, or overcharging.
Cycling the battery with light bulbs may not be a good idea, because many UPS systems allow more than 50% battery discharge. You'd have to monitor the voltage, then shut it off when it drops below 11 or 12v.
Light bulbs will not pull power the same way your computer will, so the best load test is the real load you intend to use. a 400W powersupply doesn't draw 400W. Depending on how you measure it, it may pull more or less from the AC line (read about Power Factor and power factor correction). This is one of the reasons these supplies are rated in VA and not Watts.
Of course, the real question is, Why? When you have few power outages, what is the reason to use such a large capacity battery, but more important, why do you even need to characterize it?
Lastly, make certian you aren't pulling more current than the supply is regulated for. As you suggest a larger battery does not make it more able to handle larger loads. You'll be tempted in the future to add more stuff because 'it should handle it', but it'll only make it fail faster.
It's essentially a PC (runs PC compatible games - probably runs a version of embedded XP). So the only advantages to owning something like this is the service, and the fact that it is (hopefully) quiet and as easy to use as a console.
The service is what will make or break this unit. Are you ready to pay a monthly fee to play games for your console?
What the console market really really needs is a system that will play the games on all three current consoles. Getting that much computing power cheaply into one box wouldn't be easy, but writing the emulators ought to be straightforward since half the work has already been done in previous emulators.
A high end graphics card coupled with a 2GHz processor ought to do it. And, of course, a special DVD drive that will manage all the tricks
(including running backwards) that current consoles have.
Might have to break some encryption, though, which involves DMCA land. But the reality is that the games shouldn't be tied to the console at all. Ubiquitous computing should include the ability to run any program anywhere, and should be covered under fair use.
The leader is already over 1700 miles into the ~3000 mile race and is averaging over 15 miles an hour, with about 3 hours of sleep in the last 5 days. It started Sunday morning.
When's the last time you traveled 3000 miles under your own power?
I also build and program microcontrollers - mainly PIC right now, but I just attended an Atmel conference (for the free goodies, of course) and am planning on using those as the situation warrants as well.
"The other is viewing too many images in tabs - even if you close tabs after you've viewed the pics, and try not to keep more than a half-dozen open at once, eventually it will die, and the Netscape Quality Agent pops up...
Really? I have a bookmark that loads 45 tabs so I can get my slashdot and all my daily comics out of the way quickly. Each page has many images. The only thing I've noticed is that RC1, after 45 tabs or so will pretend to load additional tabs, but they will show up empty and I can't close them.
FWIW, Mozilla rarely crashes, though it does crash more frequently since RC1 than it did for 1.4b. Hopefully RC2 will fix that...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know about the whole "replaying to my own post thing".
Anyway, I wanted to alert those whose hackles I raised by bring up gun issues. I tried to think of something which I consider a far more pressing concern than privacy - physicaly security - for use as an analogy.
Quite frankly, one must be feeling pretty physically secure to give such attention to privacy issues.
But turning my attention directly to the gun issue - no, the bracelet is not comparable to the gun because the gun doesn't track you remotely, though it does leave its marks and indicates its presence and it can be traced to a degree.
The primary objective was to say that even a device which was designed and is primarily purchased for today as a human killing weapon has a good side (defense) and a bad side (offense) There's no way to design a gun which has only the good use.
Likewise it's almost impossible today to develop any technology or device which has no evil purpose or use. You can't even design a comic character without someone somewhere twisting it into subversion in their own medium.
Who are we to decide what tools are worth developing and what tools are not? Who are we to deny others the use of this technology - which could be used to track alzheimer's patients so they can stay at home - comfortable and happier - rather than a 24-hour monitored, locked, sterile (and expensive) institution?
If you had the ability to go back in time and prevent the development of nuclear weapons and energy, would you? What would the outcome be?
Furthermore, it's little use preventing the use of this technology until its full potential is known - you can't know the full potential of something - it can be infinite. You can only get a glimpse of it by putting it out there, and seeing what people make of it. Who knew, when gunpowder was invented, that it would pave the way for space exploration?
-Adam
No. House arrest devices typically require an on-premises device hooked up to a regular phone line to operate.
The device I mentioned was in Micro Center on a display. It looked like an oversized watch with a thick plastic band that didn't appear to be flexible.
Besides, ankle bracelet house arrest devices don't receive pages or show current time. If they did then criminals might show up to court on time instead of claiming traffic was bad as they are put under another 60 days of house arrest for being 6 minutes late.
-Adam
A device I saw which claims to do the same thing (could be the same) was a watch that is locked onto the persons arm - it can be unlocked manually or remotely, but requires a key of some sort or an unlock command for central.
Just wrap tinfoil around it, or better yet, slam it against every wall you walk past. Eventually it'll get too expensive to replace, and the old fashioned methods of checking up on your own kids yourself and becoming involved in their lives will again become common.
-Adam
I haven't read the whitepaper, but I imagine the services does now, or soon will, include cell tower positioning information as well. Between GPS (great in open areas serviced by few cell sites, lousy in urban jungles with reflections and bad line of sight) and cell tower (great in dense urban jungles where reflections and blocking are not so problematic due to lower frequencies and a greater number of towers, but lousy in open areas with maybe one or two towers in range) you can have coverage everywhere.
But the error is large enough that key finding won't be so easy, however my wife lost her keyring (probably on the freeway somewhere - left them in the trunk lock) and this would provide a good enough search area to reclaim most objects.
-Adam
Yeah, because if my fictitious nine year old decides to have a nike symbol tattooed on his forehead for cool clothes without my permission, then he should be able to do that.
I mean, come on. We can certianly trust children to make life altering and sometimes threatening decisions without our involvement.
Parents have a hard enough time keeping their children alive and well until they are past puberty (the age of bad decisions) and a little into their more stable years without adding jibes about how kids today are not much more than slaves.
I'm not saying I'd use Woz's service - I don't know, my children aren't old enough to be on their own. But you shouldn't dismiss it because it does have some potentially bad abuses.
Of course, you might have a double standard there. Perhaps you think it's ok to have file sharing even though it can be used in the commision of crimes, but not an object tracking service because it could be used in the commision of crimes?
I could understand your consternation if this tool only had bad uses, or was designed primarily for 'bad' purposes (ie, the handgun is a weapon whose primary design and use is killing or disabling human beings, but it does have other purposes, such as target practise so you can become better at killing humans instead of just disabling them - but it can be used in both offense and defense) but you can't claim that the service is a bad thing and will bring about Aldus Huxley's futurific version of reality.
We are a tool using species. Don't bemoan the tool, bemoan the uses.
-Adam
Macworld UK says "WozNet is a lost cause"
Macworld has a pretty decent article
Cryptonomican bemoans the lack of information about security
Google has the goods
And there's even an article on Slashdot about it...
Last time I looked at it it was essentially a watch with both GPS and GSM (phone) built in so one could get the location of the watch at any time through their service. Sounds like a potentail DOS atack, though, if you obtain phone numbers or cell phone connection information (jamming signals, jamming GPS, etc)
Plus, since all the power is being used by the phone and GPS (chances are good the actual GPS processing is done elsewhere, like in the current E991 GPS services offered by phones) then it's unlikely that much encryption is being done at all.
-Adam
You need to purchase a stamp to enter most 'no purchase necessary' contests. You can run msn messenger on MAC, IIRC, so you are not required to purchase something that 90% of people who own computers don't already have - windows or mac.
Everyone else can go suck and egg, for all MS cares.
-Adam
You too can be a wiener!
Well, changing the dictionary or turning off auto-replace isn't exactly, er, rocket science.
Well duh. If it was rocket science he'd have no problem.
-Adam
Gee, you must be right. There's absolutely no way a servo mechanism could possibly be nearly as energy efficient as a mechanical linkage.
Unless, of course, you think through the problem and discover that it can and is.
But why find out, when you can go around indicating that it's not only impossible but stupid to even try.
If you want to make a statement about human intelligence and preconcieved notions - oh wait, you've already done that.
-Adam
The UM solar car, SpectrUM, has four wheel steering - the rear wheels are servo actuated with the front being mechanical linkages. It is alos a two person car - the tradoff is that you can have a larger solar array if you carry two people.
I got to see them in a test run a week or two ago, and it's very odd to see the car moving in one direction, but pointing 10-20 degrees off its path. The race page indicates that steering failure caused the car not to finish the prequalifier - probably due in part to their more complex system.
As a note, the previous car did have four wheel steering, but the rear two wheels were locked during the races. I understand the reason is that the fairings (covers to keep wind drag down) became too large and the drag was greater than the benefit of having four wheel steering.
There is a ton of technology in the cars - both in and on the cells and within the shell - which you can't see because they like to keep an edge over other teams. Even though the cells appear to be flat on the back they are designed to take light in at a particular angle (or as close as one can get to that angle) and so I assume the four wheel steering is to enable them to point the cells more effectively into the sun.
-Adam
Bottom line:
FPGA's can't handle the complexity for the programs we write today for general computer use
FPGA's are much more expensive in terms of power and cost than an equivilant processor/ASIC/specific purpose chip
FPGA's are exceedingly slow. In order to make them worthwhile, the hardware algorithm they contain must be massively parallel, or not require speeds that modern processors can attain - which leads back to the FPGA's cannot represent extrememly complex systems yet.
Those people who have an interest in both software and hardware tend to lean to one side or the other, and end up writing drivers for embedded systems, or designing hardware for embedded systems, very few actually participate in the whole enchillada because of the complexity fo the complete system
There's still a metric ton and many years of research work to be done behind the idea of a language that can be translated into both hardware and software
Before this happens you're going to see VHLL (Very High Level Languages) come into increasing use - languages which make it easier to program extremely large, complex, interconnected software systems using a small set of human resources.
Because, let's face it, hardware is freaking dirt cheap . You can go buy a computer now that has the processing power of a 5 year old supercomputer (though it can't quite manage the flow of information that supercomputer can handle, but that's a different discussion altogether)
-Adam
"Being a better programmer means being able to design more effective and trustworthy programs and knowing how to do that efficiently. It is about not wasting storage cells or machine cycles and about avoiding those complexities that increase the number of reasoning steps needed to keep the design under strict intellectual control. What is needed to achieve this goal, I can only describe as improving one's mathematical skills, where I use mathematics in the sense of "the art and science of effective reasoning". As a matter of fact, the challenges of designing high-quality programs and of designing high-quality proofs are very similar, so similar that I am no longer able to distinguish between the two: I see no meaningful difference between programming methodology and mathematical methodology in general. The long and the short of it is that the computer's ubiquity has made the ability to apply mathematical method more important than ever."
prof. dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra - EWD1209
-Adam
- Mount it or set it on small blocks so air can flow freely around the entire unit.
- Mount it to the wall.
- Use a vacuum and clean any dust and debris out.
- Remove some of the plastic casing over the warmest chip, and mount a tiny fan (such as those sold at radio shack) onto the case, blowing onto the chip
- Hang it from a string from the cieling or bookshelf
- Place it on a large aluminum (aluminium, for you other blokes) plate, or block of steel
- Attach it to the blade of your ceiling fan
- Go to Radio Shack and get a few aluminum heatsinks and use thermal adhesive to glue them to the tops of the chips (or pcmcia card) that are getting hot
- RTFM
- Put it in your neighbor's airconditioned house/apt/condo/cardboard box
- Learn not to buy cheap
- Use it in an interactive, wireless art exhibit - "Schrodinger's Net connection: You don't know if it's dead or alive until you open the laptop..."
-AdamIt might be useful to note that the archive servers are located outside the US, and that they act on requests to have information and websites removed from their archive. (IIRC). I would state that the Archive serves a compelling public interest, both in the sense of free speech, and in the basic idea of keeping a history or record of the internet. The archive is a museum of sorts.
Google, on the other hand, is gathering data for its search engine, and, of necessity, must have what essentially amounts to a copy of each web page in its stores in order to provide this service. If one does not want to have their data in Google, they simply use robots.txt, and Google doea not spider, cache, or store any data from that site if robots.txt is filled out. However, the site owner also denies themselves the ability to be listed, for 'free', in googles search pages. This could be thought of as the cost of being listed.
So I don't think either of those two situations have any problems defending themselves. An anonymizer could also be seen as providing a useful, protected service. An anonymizer is nothing more than a proxy service, and many ISPs use proxies now, not to mention caches and many other tools that store website information or meta information without notifying or requesting explicit permission to do so - they request implicit permission by sending a GET command.
-Adam
Wifi in every country
A satellite with very directional antennas and low noise amplifiers
A parallel computing encryption deciphering supercomputer
And 75 cents will get you all the remotely gathered intellegence you could want.
I'd say the US should immediately donate billions of dollars of wireless equipment to every other country in the world.
Just try to avoid the comparisons to blankets soiled with disease sold to indians thing...
Honestly, though, except for the security issues, this is a valid idea. The industrial revolution came shortly after the telegraph and fast messaging. The ability to move information from one point to another quickly and cheaply can mean success for so many businesses who are struggling right now.
Like it or not, the US has really made the entire world into a capitalist environment. The only way to move a country from 3rd to 2nd to 1st world is to produce goods to be sold both internally and externally, and to make a large profit doing so. The only way to make a large profit is by knowing more information more quickly (market trends, rapid sales and purchases, asset shifting, etc) and being able to get in on the deals (and deliver on them) ASAP.
The encryption needed to prevent serious eavesdropping will come as needed.
-Adam
Imagine, now, instead of the scratchy scrawl you write on the bathroom walls now, you can not only print the number but also a picture of your roommate's girlfriend.
Admit it - you were always jealous he usually had one. Could be because he didn't go into computers...
-Adam
Another interesting (though OT) item about grocery pricing, is that it used to be (and may still be for some stores) that the cents field, which is nearly ALWAYS 99 was used as a product code.
A cashier could look up a product, and seeing a 95, or 65 or something in the cents would know that the line is discontinued, backordered, etc. It was helpful to work with non-updateable cash registers that could barely pull the price and product description from the server, nevermind status codes.
Of course, for item under $10 this did not work so well. Perhaps they only used the last digit in these cases (99 was the same code as 49, 29, etc)
-Adam
"The Playstation 2 uses a MIPS processor and so is very different from an Intel architecture. The Cube uses a PowerPC, also very different. The Xbox uses an Intel processor, so "emulation" would just be cracking the game protection."
I've studied all three architectures, I've programmed at least a little assembly for all of them. I understand to some degree for each of them how their basic pipeline works. I understand that they are all essentially RISC processors, though that has lost a lot of its meaning in todays world, especially now that old world CISC processors are being emulated on RISC pipelines, such as is the case now with the P4 line.
The only thing that bothers me about emulating these consoles are that they have pipelines which work with larger numbers in fewer cycles than the current 32 bit processors handle natively. As I qualifed in my original post. This, as I suggested in my followup, could be overcome by using the huge processing power of the graphics card, or using a seperate FPGA.
What you don't seem to understand is that only very quickly developed and bloated emulators need to use more than 2 times the processing power of the machine being emulated in these cases. It's hard to make an emulator that takes less than your made up figure of 3-4 times, which is why I qualified my statements with not cheap. Obviously it would depend on the processor used - it would take more than twice the power to emulate a 64 bit machine on a 32 bit. But please understand that saying the processor in the playstation is a 64 or 128 bit processor (as I've seen some claim) is like saying that the 8086 was a 16 bit machine. It isn't - it's an 8 bit machine with 16 bit extensions. Also please note that many of these huge calcualtions are done on the graphics processor, rather than the system processor.
Furthmore, there's no money in it. No company making such a machine would be able to recoup their losses, especially since it would enable a much larger amount of piracy, and the new system/company would be the target of the blame.
Quite frankly the political and business issues are FAR more imposing than the technical barriers.
"I hope this clears everything up, as you obviously don't know that much about different architectures."
Yeah, I'm pretty stupid that way.
-Adam
The real reason, of course, as to why SCO isn't showing anyone the code (and will likely try to keep it under wraps as much as possible) is that Linus might well excorsize those portions of the kernel, and they would be patched within days.
Then the judge would look at SCO and say, "Ok, so what's the problem now?"
-Adam
"No 2GHZ Intel chip has the power to emulate a Cube, and would have a difficult time even handling the PS2 at acceptable speeds."
I hope you don't take this personally, but I don't trust your word on this. Perhaps you could point out a study or analysis of the systems in question and a conclusion written by a professional who understand the inner workings of each system in question.
In the end, all these consoles are are simple processors with graphics computers attached. Most of the games out there are 3d or 2d, and appropiate conversions can be made to convert information meant for, say, the PS2 graphics system to work on a geforce.
The processors are optimized for certian tasks - this may be the only bottleneck. But since the systems run 2-3 times more slowly than the latest intel and amd chips, there is now, or soon will be, no reason to think they can't be emulated. Worst comes to worst, the ideal console will have a built in reconfigurable FPGA which will emulate those tricky instructions on demand. The 64 bit processors coming out should have an even easier time, since many of the special instructions are simply operations on very long numbers.
It's all logic, man.
-Adam
The only issues you'll have to deal with are
Smaller chargers are not meant to charge larger batteries - you may well be overstressing your UPS charger by expecting it to charge your new, larger battery for so long.
Lead Acid batteries and their variants (gell-cell, deep cycle, etc) do NOT like to be discharged more than 50%, yes, that includes so-called deep cycle batteries. Deep cycle means that deep discharges won't hurt the battery as much as it would hurt a regular gell cell, but it'll still be damaged.
Most consumer and low end UPS systems do NOT monitor battery temperature. They simply charge the battery so slowly that there is little risk of overheating, boiling, or overcharging.
Cycling the battery with light bulbs may not be a good idea, because many UPS systems allow more than 50% battery discharge. You'd have to monitor the voltage, then shut it off when it drops below 11 or 12v.
Light bulbs will not pull power the same way your computer will, so the best load test is the real load you intend to use. a 400W powersupply doesn't draw 400W. Depending on how you measure it, it may pull more or less from the AC line (read about Power Factor and power factor correction). This is one of the reasons these supplies are rated in VA and not Watts. Of course, the real question is, Why? When you have few power outages, what is the reason to use such a large capacity battery, but more important, why do you even need to characterize it?
Lastly, make certian you aren't pulling more current than the supply is regulated for. As you suggest a larger battery does not make it more able to handle larger loads. You'll be tempted in the future to add more stuff because 'it should handle it', but it'll only make it fail faster.
-Adam
It's essentially a PC (runs PC compatible games - probably runs a version of embedded XP). So the only advantages to owning something like this is the service, and the fact that it is (hopefully) quiet and as easy to use as a console.
The service is what will make or break this unit. Are you ready to pay a monthly fee to play games for your console?
What the console market really really needs is a system that will play the games on all three current consoles. Getting that much computing power cheaply into one box wouldn't be easy, but writing the emulators ought to be straightforward since half the work has already been done in previous emulators.
A high end graphics card coupled with a 2GHz processor ought to do it. And, of course, a special DVD drive that will manage all the tricks (including running backwards) that current consoles have.
Might have to break some encryption, though, which involves DMCA land. But the reality is that the games shouldn't be tied to the console at all. Ubiquitous computing should include the ability to run any program anywhere, and should be covered under fair use.
Ain't gonna happen, but nice to dream about.
-Adam
I train for Ultra Marathon Cycling events, such as the 9 day Race Across America going on right this minute.
The leader is already over 1700 miles into the ~3000 mile race and is averaging over 15 miles an hour, with about 3 hours of sleep in the last 5 days. It started Sunday morning.
When's the last time you traveled 3000 miles under your own power?
I also build and program microcontrollers - mainly PIC right now, but I just attended an Atmel conference (for the free goodies, of course) and am planning on using those as the situation warrants as well.
-Adam
"Can a happy medium exist between self-expression and the professional environment?"
Of course. But then, she'd better be a well paid psychic if she's truly going to be a happy medium.
Why all the wierd ask slashdots lately?
-Adam
"The other is viewing too many images in tabs - even if you close tabs after you've viewed the pics, and try not to keep more than a half-dozen open at once, eventually it will die, and the Netscape Quality Agent pops up...
Really? I have a bookmark that loads 45 tabs so I can get my slashdot and all my daily comics out of the way quickly. Each page has many images. The only thing I've noticed is that RC1, after 45 tabs or so will pretend to load additional tabs, but they will show up empty and I can't close them.
FWIW, Mozilla rarely crashes, though it does crash more frequently since RC1 than it did for 1.4b. Hopefully RC2 will fix that...
-Adam