I have nothing again'st people making a living, but lets see how your tune changes when they start outsourcing journalist jobs...
Journalists are already having their jobs outsourced to blogs. And before that tele-journalists. How many people do you know that read a daily paper compared to 10 years ago? And how much do you think the people working at arstechnica make compared to NYT?
Their reasoning is that we're supposed to be nimble and get educated again. To what end? When I have 7 PHDs and $1million in student debt will that be enough? Will their be a job I can get? Or should I just go apply for Wal-Mart greeter now? Because this "learn more and keep up" crap is stupid. I already know what I need to know to do my job. So my choices are spend more money going to school or get a service job. Great choice.
Learn a trade. Canada/America/etc are badly, badly in need of tradesman. My roommate dropped out of mechanical engineering because he couldn't do the math, is about finished a year and a half of what he describes as a dirt-easy machining course at college, and already has a $64k(CDN)/year job offer. Most of the engineers I know who are graduating here would be happy to get $35-40k. And they're A+ students.
The point is to learn something that somebody NEEDS, not something you think is hard/high class. Everyone's had it drummed into their heads that they need to go to University, but it's obviously not working out that way.
I don't understand your point. It makes no sense. I understand that there's no entitlement to jobs in this country or any country. I understand that I'm as entitled to a job as a caveman is to a meal, but isn't America supposed to be better than that? Aren't we supposed to be about opportunity and giving people chances to prove themselves? So when I say expect, I mean that I expect better from this country and the people that run it (the corps, the politicians). I expect that they understand that for this country to thrive there has to be a decent number of middle class jobs for qualified Americans. That not everyone is going to be a nuclear-physicist or start their own company. It's not only not practical, it's stupid. There has to be a middle class and there has to be some middle class jobs and on that level I expect it.
If you've really proved your skills, and are so confident in them, why DON'T you walk into a bank, get a loan, and start a company?? If you've proven your ability to lead and manage and evolve in that 7 years, and not just proven that you could do and re-do last year's technology, that shouldn't be a problem.
To me it sounds like you don't want to have to move out of the entry-level kind of positions you started on, because they were easy, and you liked them. But the easy jobs get moved overseas the easiest. America's capitalist system is about moving up, and taking responsibility, and RISK. And a few failed risks doesn't mean you should give up.
Don't expect anyone to give you a job just because you have skills. You need to have something that they want. And right now that's tech management, or true research and development, not code reguritation.
Not to mention that maybe you just bit off more than you can chew, and shouldn't have been living off credit all of these years. Perhaps you should have made money for school, THEN paid for it, when you could AFFORD it. Because apparently you couldn't deal with the risk.
You can have geo sync LEO satellites... Otherwise you'd could put it into permanent orbit. Who wants that... now I can justify the constant rocket project in the garage
Okay, it's really hard to take your meaning from your contradictory, fractured grammar, but the point is that LOW earth orbits aren't high enough to achieve geosynchronicity (without thrust, anyway). LEOs are at 2000 km above earth. GSO's are more like 36 000 km out.
No, a true geek would build their own rocket and launch their own communications satelite into a geo sync LEO
A true geek would know that geosynchronus and low-earth orbits are two different things. Unless you want to load it with propellant constantly, which you really don't.
But here's a tip for you: avoid loops if possible.
Amen. I've actually had this emphasized to me in my University statistics class, digital comm classes, and at my internships. Vectorize everything and it's smoking fast. Loop and you're done for.
Maybe the average guy on the street hasn't heard of Fourier or Leibniz, but you can't throw a stone without hitting something in today's society to which Fourier's and Leibniz's ideas did not contribute. I doubt very much you can say the same of Frankel, and I bet you 200 years from now the same will be true.
I agree that I may have exaggerated when comparing him to great scientists, but he's certainly in the leauge of great technologists/inventors. I'd say he's at least on par with people who created things like the slide rule, or the steam engine. Which while only applications of known principles that didn't add much to our fundamental knowledge base directly or stay in common use, most definitely helped to explore those fundamentals further, not to mention highlighting fundamental areas that needed more research.
How many theses have been written on Gnutella, and true distributed applications like it? Didn't it spark the development of Freenet, which is invaluable in totalitarian countries? Didn't Winamp make everyone want mp3s, thereby sparking how much lobbying money to change hands, how many laws to be written or changed?
And the point is he's not close to done. If journalists only wrote stories on people from 200 years ago who had confirmed long lasting effects, there'd be no stories about them preserved for future generations to evaluate. Maybe he won't amount to much else, but that doesn't mean he's not important or newsworthy today. If I wanted to read about people who made two line patches to Apache, I'd read their livejournals. Which are probably not compelling to the mass readership of Rolling Stone.
The Internet is not now, never has been, and never will be about celebrity status. Justin Frankel is no more important than someone who contributes 2 lines of code to Apache.
The point is not that he's a celebrity (because he's really not), but that he's influential. Like Leibniz, or Fourier, or any of those other brutally important innovators that most haven't heard of.
But yes, "there's no end to the good you can do if you don't care who gets credit." Celebrity certainly doesn't equal importance, but neither is there no such thing as degrees of influence/importance on the internet.
To put it in/. terms, just because everyone knows who Bush is, doesn't mean he runs the country. But not everyone is as influential as him, either.
Don't begrudge him credit because your jealous. No one's asking you to worship him. Just appreciate that he's innovative, and that's important.
You know I hate spam more than just about anything. But here is my prediction: Tougher anti-spam legislation will be used as a power-grab by the US feds. I can't wait to see what privacy sucking, corporate loving "provisions" will be added. Everyone hates spam so much that I'm sure our government will try and use it to sneak in the most egregious legislation.
Man, in years to come archaeologists will hold this up as the quintessential example of a/. post. Good job.
I am curious what northern suburb of Chicago you are talking about. I went to HS in a NW suburb called Barrington, where 95% of kids at that school smoked weed, and it was almost an accepted fact by the police. Sure you'd see 1-3 kids you knew in the police blotter every week, but that's really nothing compared to the 2600 in the school. But this suburb is considered safe....it doesn't have much of other types of crime.
OH. MY. GOD. You just hit on exactly the reason why Canada was about to legalize weed, if only the new leader wasn't so intent on buddying back up to the US. Fuck. Stoned people don't go out and steal cars and smash them up. Although drunk people do. Figure that one out.
I would say that cable companies are in an infinitely better position than the broadcast networks who only charge in one direction. Are you saying that cable networks must pay actors more than ABC, CBS, and NBC?
This is true, but the networks also have higher ratings, and therefore command more ad dollars. What it doesn't change is the fact that people DO pay for the service regardless.
Now the cable companies make money from both ends. They charge us consumers to watch the commercials that they charge the advertisers to play for them.
And why is this?
1. Because they need the money to pay their actors up to $1 Million PER EPISODE, to keep them from bolting to movies, etc. 2. Why can they bolt to movies? Because move studios WILL PAY THEM that much 3. And why do the movie studios have that money?? Because WE GIVE IT TO THEM
Sorry, it's just pure capitalism to charge as much (and show as many commercials) as the consumer will bear. This isn't art. It's commerce. Your taxes pay for art, your consumer choices pay for tv.
What about mail order? Do the companies that sell on www.pricewatch.com charge extra to shipments with Canadian addresses? Are shipments held at the border by Canadian Customs until the 29% surcharge plus customs duties are paid?
Customs are definitely enforced...especially on hardware. I tend to shop with companies that support BorderFree (e.g. ecost and creative labs) that will tell you UP FRONT exactly what the final cost in CDN dollars will be. The other way you get your shipment right away no problem (i.e. they're not held), but then you get billed a few weeks later by some random company that paid your customs for you.
Formerly this didn't happen to me with thinkgeek, but it has in the last couple of years. And a friend of mine has repeatedly had to pay tobacco tax on his tobaccoless cigarettes, annoyingly, despite their clear labelling as such.
You can sometimes get better deals (especially now with the weak American dollar), but you've got to watch it pretty carefully. Amazon.ca pretty much trumps everyone in the CD/DVD market, 90-95% of the time.
I think with the lower end of Linus's statement (5 years), the use (and awareness) of Linux will become much more noticeable. I've noticed recently that the SCO lawsuit has made some waves in UK papers, where previously you'd be hard pushed to find a mention of Linux whenever a computer-related article is published (Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft!). Possibly something to do with the fact that the big name of IBM is involved, but surely this is a good thing - getting the Linux name actually recognised!
My roommate was working tech support in the summer, and when blaster hit he definitely started noticing angry people saying stuff like "Windows is bullshit!", who had probably never thought about it that way before (i.e. previously they just blamed computers in general, or themselves). People are starting to blame Microsoft for their failures. And that can only lead to them looking for another option.
Have you considered the possibility that a critical mass of home users may affect decisions at work? Our NPO upgraded to Windows XP after clients and staff had pretty much all upgraded to XP at home.
Our IT department still refuses to let XP on the network, because it's such a piece of shit. This means that with every new computer we buy we have to waste money on XP, and then use the "downgrade" option in the license to wipe them and put on 2000. Ick. There's also a complicated process for using XP machines to connect from home, most people give up, or go back to 2000. Or use Linux.
A one-way function is simply some function which is not one-to-one. For example, consider the length function L which maps words to integers, e.g. L("bob")=3, L("A")=1.
Think this one through. The algorithms used to sign PGP/GPG messages are one way. The reason being is that it's hard to come up with something else that maps to the same value.
Using your length function example, considering the two e-mails from Alice
"I love Bob"
"I hate Bob"
Would both parse to 1 4 3. Which means Eve could flip Alice's feelings for Bob, without invalidating the signature.
That, my friend, is a crappy 'one-way' function. So crappy, that's it's not really one-way.
The "multiple inputs give the same output" thing just means it's non-linear. And all that that implies.
The American digital broadcast standard is in-band, in other words it occupies roughly the same bandwidth as the concurrent analogue FM it simulcasts. To fit a digital signal within one FM space allocation requires intense lossy data compression. The analogue FM doesn't undergo data compression (dynamic compression is an entirely different beast.) There's your catch. Digital in this case is less effecient.
FM signals have 150 kHz to work with. MP3s can be decoded in real-time, and sound pretty clear to the majority of people at 128 kbps. And if you're getting less than one bit per Hz of bandwidth, your coding scheme (or transmitter, or receiver) isn't very good. And was possibly designed in the 1960s.
I realize the digital signal has to co-exist with the analog signal in the same bandwidth, but there's clever ways of doing that sort of thing.
Consider of what a modern cellphone is capable of with MILLIWATTS of transmission power. Now picture being able to transmit your signal in the hundreds or thousands of Watts and use your imagination.
Yeah, I never have drop outs or loss of quality with those ultra modern digital cell phones. And those digital TV stations sure ar perfect. Yep, no artifacts whatsoever. I'm sure glad my cable company want me to pay double for the privledge.
Yeah...but cell phone companies are optimizing their alogrithms to squeeze the maximum number of users on at an acceptable quality (i.e. that people will (and DO) pay for). They COULD offer perfect quality on a higher percentage of calls, but at the sacrifice of insufficient capacity at times.
If you like, you could start up a service that offered the perfect quality you desire, but see how many people would pay for a system where they were constantly getting "error...insufficient capacity to make this call" on their phones. Good luck to you.
With radio broadcast the same signal is going to ALL users, so capacity is far less of an issue. So I don't doubt that it offers very high quality to a very high number of users. They also have to worry far less about causing interference to other stations, because FM allocations are designed to put the maximum distance between stations on the same frequency. So they can jack up the power, and therefore SNR.
As for reliability...well...cable modems had really crappy service in my area for the first couple of years, with extended outages, etc. But that problem has gone away. Economics of scale mean that all parts used in the system have got cheaper and more reliable. And the same will happen with digital cable. And cell phones (if they stop pushing features and start pushing reliability, that is). And digital radio.
Encoding digital signals in a small amount of bandwidth has to come with a catch. What's this sound like if the signal strength is low? What kind of digital qaulity is this? Is there lossy compression used?
Keep in mind that digital signalling techniques weren't really invented at all until the 1940s. And that AM was deployed before than, and FM either before that or not much after.
Is it inconceivable to believe a brand new field has seen startingly gains in efficiency in 60 years time? Look at how much modems improved (56kps over the same line that once only supported 150bps...nearly a 400 times gain).
There is no catch. Telecommunications technology has just improved a hell of a lot in the last 100 years.
This is the reason why cell phone provides are so antsy to relaim all those 6 MHz wide UHF allocations....you can use that bandwidth so much more effectively with modern techniques, instead of throwing raw, uncompressed analog data out there.
Also witness the huge number of digital channels cable providers have packed into coax, despite the continued presence of regular TV stations, AND internet connections.
And this is the part where everyone should stop whining about taxes and having to give money to their local learning institution.
The minimum spec for next-gen consoles is an order of magnitude higher than their current ones.
7 GHz!?!? I have serious difficulty believing that.
Sony has actually stated they want Playstation 3 to be TWO or THREE orders of magnitude more powerful than Playstation 2. How?? Grid computing. If you've been reading slashdot at all the last year or so, you've probably seen numerous articles about the Sony/IBM "Cell" processor, a small processor designed to be used in massive numbers. They want to put one (or more) in every Sony product, so for every Sony component you have, your system gains more multiprocessing power.
It's pretty brilliant, and also pretty brilliantly evil. They already have patents on the design.
Also, just for shits and giggles, put a N64 next to a SNES, or a SNES next to a NES, or a PS2 next to a PS1. And tell me you don't see an order of magnitude difference in the power. It doesn't just come from the CPU.
Might also make it more worthwhile to put e-mail signatures (plain text) at the bottom of all of your outbound e-mails. Spam messages typically won't have duplicated your personal signature lines, so those lines will end up being scored as ham (decreasing the odds of being mis-classified as spam). Would probably be a worthwhile corporate policy to configure everyone with a 2-3 line signature for their e-mail.
This is kind of a solution for a problem isn't there, because any sensible filter (like Mozilla's, for example), whitelists anyone in your personal address book, and is also set up to collect the addresses of anyone you send mail to and put them in there.
Worse, stuff like area codes and addresses (usually what goes in the signature) tend to come up as spammy, because of the need to include contact information in successful spam.
Now, if everyone was to use PGP/GPG signing, and incorrect signatures were rejected at the incoming mail server, that would be a start. Because valid signatures would require valid e-mail addresses, and increase the computational load of the sender. And anything with a valid signature block would start to look very hammy.
Even "real" juice has a lot of sugar--not something you want to drink large amounts of.
When I first went on something Atkins-like about 5 years ago someone told me that natural cranberry juice (i.e. no sugar added) has little to no sugar. I never got around to tracking any down, though.
Never before had it hit me the extent to which these legal drugs we are so used to really are drugs with all the connotations that follow.
What I've never been able to forget is this video they showed us in first year chem, with these five "levels" of dangerous chemicals. I believe alcohol was in level 3, while caffeine was in the next HIGHER level.
What's also hilarious is to listen to people defend pot as 'natural', and say how they would never use 'chemicals' like ecstasy, etc, etc. What, THC isn't a chemical? There's not HUNDREDS of chemicals in pot? ARgh.
We are now writing games for the future not for the present systems? Plz, that is what made ID great, they could get better performance out of the present systems than their peers could.
Which company have you been watching? Were you able to run Quake/Q2/Q3 at full details/resolution when they came out? Hell no! Why do you think Quake3 was used as a benchmark for so long? Only about a year ago did the framerates start getting meaninglessly high on the high-end rigs with full details.
The whole point of id has been to make engines that last long enough to get the next one out, so they can continue to resell it to make money in the interim. Look what Counterstrike did with Half-Life did with the Quake engine, it's still going strong, and I'm STILL seeing posts complaining of slowdowns in certain areas.
Quake ran like ass compared to Duke3D when they both originally came out (remember all the flame wars?), but it's clear which one was built to last. id knows what they're doing. And yes, they also get better peformance at the same hardware level, they just have much higher standards of performance.
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I have nothing again'st people making a living, but lets see how your tune changes when they start outsourcing journalist jobs...
Journalists are already having their jobs outsourced to blogs. And before that tele-journalists. How many people do you know that read a daily paper compared to 10 years ago? And how much do you think the people working at arstechnica make compared to NYT?
Their reasoning is that we're supposed to be nimble and get educated again. To what end? When I have 7 PHDs and $1million in student debt will that be enough? Will their be a job I can get? Or should I just go apply for Wal-Mart greeter now? Because this "learn more and keep up" crap is stupid. I already know what I need to know to do my job. So my choices are spend more money going to school or get a service job. Great choice.
Learn a trade. Canada/America/etc are badly, badly in need of tradesman. My roommate dropped out of mechanical engineering because he couldn't do the math, is about finished a year and a half of what he describes as a dirt-easy machining course at college, and already has a $64k(CDN)/year job offer. Most of the engineers I know who are graduating here would be happy to get $35-40k. And they're A+ students.
The point is to learn something that somebody NEEDS, not something you think is hard/high class. Everyone's had it drummed into their heads that they need to go to University, but it's obviously not working out that way.
I don't understand your point. It makes no sense. I understand that there's no entitlement to jobs in this country or any country. I understand that I'm as entitled to a job as a caveman is to a meal, but isn't America supposed to be better than that? Aren't we supposed to be about opportunity and giving people chances to prove themselves? So when I say expect, I mean that I expect better from this country and the people that run it (the corps, the politicians). I expect that they understand that for this country to thrive there has to be a decent number of middle class jobs for qualified Americans. That not everyone is going to be a nuclear-physicist or start their own company. It's not only not practical, it's stupid. There has to be a middle class and there has to be some middle class jobs and on that level I expect it.
If you've really proved your skills, and are so confident in them, why DON'T you walk into a bank, get a loan, and start a company?? If you've proven your ability to lead and manage and evolve in that 7 years, and not just proven that you could do and re-do last year's technology, that shouldn't be a problem.
To me it sounds like you don't want to have to move out of the entry-level kind of positions you started on, because they were easy, and you liked them. But the easy jobs get moved overseas the easiest. America's capitalist system is about moving up, and taking responsibility, and RISK. And a few failed risks doesn't mean you should give up.
Don't expect anyone to give you a job just because you have skills. You need to have something that they want. And right now that's tech management, or true research and development, not code reguritation.
Not to mention that maybe you just bit off more than you can chew, and shouldn't have been living off credit all of these years. Perhaps you should have made money for school, THEN paid for it, when you could AFFORD it. Because apparently you couldn't deal with the risk.
You can have geo sync LEO satellites... Otherwise you'd could put it into permanent orbit. Who wants that... now I can justify the constant rocket project in the garage
Okay, it's really hard to take your meaning from your contradictory, fractured grammar, but the point is that LOW earth orbits aren't high enough to achieve geosynchronicity (without thrust, anyway). LEOs are at 2000 km above earth. GSO's are more like 36 000 km out.
No, a true geek would build their own rocket and launch their own communications satelite into a geo sync LEO
A true geek would know that geosynchronus and low-earth orbits are two different things. Unless you want to load it with propellant constantly, which you really don't.
But here's a tip for you: avoid loops if possible.
Amen. I've actually had this emphasized to me in my University statistics class, digital comm classes, and at my internships. Vectorize everything and it's smoking fast. Loop and you're done for.
Maybe the average guy on the street hasn't heard of Fourier or Leibniz, but you can't throw a stone without hitting something in today's society to which Fourier's and Leibniz's ideas did not contribute. I doubt very much you can say the same of Frankel, and I bet you 200 years from now the same will be true.
I agree that I may have exaggerated when comparing him to great scientists, but he's certainly in the leauge of great technologists/inventors. I'd say he's at least on par with people who created things like the slide rule, or the steam engine. Which while only applications of known principles that didn't add much to our fundamental knowledge base directly or stay in common use, most definitely helped to explore those fundamentals further, not to mention highlighting fundamental areas that needed more research.
How many theses have been written on Gnutella, and true distributed applications like it? Didn't it spark the development of Freenet, which is invaluable in totalitarian countries? Didn't Winamp make everyone want mp3s, thereby sparking how much lobbying money to change hands, how many laws to be written or changed?
And the point is he's not close to done. If journalists only wrote stories on people from 200 years ago who had confirmed long lasting effects, there'd be no stories about them preserved for future generations to evaluate. Maybe he won't amount to much else, but that doesn't mean he's not important or newsworthy today. If I wanted to read about people who made two line patches to Apache, I'd read their livejournals. Which are probably not compelling to the mass readership of Rolling Stone.
The Internet is not now, never has been, and never will be about celebrity status. Justin Frankel is no more important than someone who contributes 2 lines of code to Apache.
/. terms, just because everyone knows who Bush is, doesn't mean he runs the country. But not everyone is as influential as him, either.
The point is not that he's a celebrity (because he's really not), but that he's influential. Like Leibniz, or Fourier, or any of those other brutally important innovators that most haven't heard of.
But yes, "there's no end to the good you can do if you don't care who gets credit." Celebrity certainly doesn't equal importance, but neither is there no such thing as degrees of influence/importance on the internet.
To put it in
Don't begrudge him credit because your jealous. No one's asking you to worship him. Just appreciate that he's innovative, and that's important.
You know I hate spam more than just about anything. But here is my prediction: Tougher anti-spam legislation will be used as a power-grab by the US feds. I can't wait to see what privacy sucking, corporate loving "provisions" will be added. Everyone hates spam so much that I'm sure our government will try and use it to sneak in the most egregious legislation.
/. post. Good job.
Man, in years to come archaeologists will hold this up as the quintessential example of a
I am curious what northern suburb of Chicago you are talking about. I went to HS in a NW suburb called Barrington, where 95% of kids at that school smoked weed, and it was almost an accepted fact by the police. Sure you'd see 1-3 kids you knew in the police blotter every week, but that's really nothing compared to the 2600 in the school. But this suburb is considered safe....it doesn't have much of other types of crime.
OH. MY. GOD. You just hit on exactly the reason why Canada was about to legalize weed, if only the new leader wasn't so intent on buddying back up to the US. Fuck. Stoned people don't go out and steal cars and smash them up. Although drunk people do. Figure that one out.
I would say that cable companies are in an infinitely better position than the broadcast networks who only charge in one direction. Are you saying that cable networks must pay actors more than ABC, CBS, and NBC?
This is true, but the networks also have higher ratings, and therefore command more ad dollars. What it doesn't change is the fact that people DO pay for the service regardless.
Now the cable companies make money from both ends. They charge us consumers to watch the commercials that they charge the advertisers to play for them.
And why is this?
1. Because they need the money to pay their actors up to $1 Million PER EPISODE, to keep them from bolting to movies, etc.
2. Why can they bolt to movies? Because move studios WILL PAY THEM that much
3. And why do the movie studios have that money?? Because WE GIVE IT TO THEM
Sorry, it's just pure capitalism to charge as much (and show as many commercials) as the consumer will bear. This isn't art. It's commerce. Your taxes pay for art, your consumer choices pay for tv.
What about mail order? Do the companies that sell on www.pricewatch.com charge extra to shipments with Canadian addresses? Are shipments held at the border by Canadian Customs until the 29% surcharge plus customs duties are paid?
Customs are definitely enforced...especially on hardware. I tend to shop with companies that support BorderFree (e.g. ecost and creative labs) that will tell you UP FRONT exactly what the final cost in CDN dollars will be. The other way you get your shipment right away no problem (i.e. they're not held), but then you get billed a few weeks later by some random company that paid your customs for you.
Formerly this didn't happen to me with thinkgeek, but it has in the last couple of years. And a friend of mine has repeatedly had to pay tobacco tax on his tobaccoless cigarettes, annoyingly, despite their clear labelling as such.
You can sometimes get better deals (especially now with the weak American dollar), but you've got to watch it pretty carefully. Amazon.ca pretty much trumps everyone in the CD/DVD market, 90-95% of the time.
I think with the lower end of Linus's statement (5 years), the use (and awareness) of Linux will become much more noticeable. I've noticed recently that the SCO lawsuit has made some waves in UK papers, where previously you'd be hard pushed to find a mention of Linux whenever a computer-related article is published (Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft!). Possibly something to do with the fact that the big name of IBM is involved, but surely this is a good thing - getting the Linux name actually recognised!
My roommate was working tech support in the summer, and when blaster hit he definitely started noticing angry people saying stuff like "Windows is bullshit!", who had probably never thought about it that way before (i.e. previously they just blamed computers in general, or themselves). People are starting to blame Microsoft for their failures. And that can only lead to them looking for another option.
Have you considered the possibility that a critical mass of home users may affect decisions at work? Our NPO upgraded to Windows XP after clients and staff had pretty much all upgraded to XP at home.
Our IT department still refuses to let XP on the network, because it's such a piece of shit. This means that with every new computer we buy we have to waste money on XP, and then use the "downgrade" option in the license to wipe them and put on 2000. Ick. There's also a complicated process for using XP machines to connect from home, most people give up, or go back to 2000. Or use Linux.
What's wrong with good old symmetrical encryption algorithms?
Because they're talking about SIGNING the documents so they can't be altered, not encrypting them. RTFA.
A one-way function is simply some function which is not one-to-one. For example, consider the length function L which maps words to integers, e.g. L("bob")=3, L("A")=1.
Think this one through. The algorithms used to sign PGP/GPG messages are one way. The reason being is that it's hard to come up with something else that maps to the same value.
Using your length function example, considering the two e-mails from Alice
"I love Bob"
"I hate Bob"
Would both parse to 1 4 3. Which means Eve could flip Alice's feelings for Bob, without invalidating the signature.
That, my friend, is a crappy 'one-way' function. So crappy, that's it's not really one-way.
The "multiple inputs give the same output" thing just means it's non-linear. And all that that implies.
The American digital broadcast standard is in-band, in other words it occupies roughly the same bandwidth as the concurrent analogue FM it simulcasts. To fit a digital signal within one FM space allocation requires intense lossy data compression. The analogue FM doesn't undergo data compression (dynamic compression is an entirely different beast.) There's your catch. Digital in this case is less effecient.
FM signals have 150 kHz to work with. MP3s can be decoded in real-time, and sound pretty clear to the majority of people at 128 kbps. And if you're getting less than one bit per Hz of bandwidth, your coding scheme (or transmitter, or receiver) isn't very good. And was possibly designed in the 1960s.
I realize the digital signal has to co-exist with the analog signal in the same bandwidth, but there's clever ways of doing that sort of thing.
Consider of what a modern cellphone is capable of with MILLIWATTS of transmission power. Now picture being able to transmit your signal in the hundreds or thousands of Watts and use your imagination.
Yeah, I never have drop outs or loss of quality with those ultra modern digital cell phones. And those digital TV stations sure ar perfect. Yep, no artifacts whatsoever. I'm sure glad my cable company want me to pay double for the privledge.
Yeah...but cell phone companies are optimizing their alogrithms to squeeze the maximum number of users on at an acceptable quality (i.e. that people will (and DO) pay for). They COULD offer perfect quality on a higher percentage of calls, but at the sacrifice of insufficient capacity at times.
If you like, you could start up a service that offered the perfect quality you desire, but see how many people would pay for a system where they were constantly getting "error...insufficient capacity to make this call" on their phones. Good luck to you.
With radio broadcast the same signal is going to ALL users, so capacity is far less of an issue. So I don't doubt that it offers very high quality to a very high number of users. They also have to worry far less about causing interference to other stations, because FM allocations are designed to put the maximum distance between stations on the same frequency. So they can jack up the power, and therefore SNR.
As for reliability...well...cable modems had really crappy service in my area for the first couple of years, with extended outages, etc. But that problem has gone away. Economics of scale mean that all parts used in the system have got cheaper and more reliable. And the same will happen with digital cable. And cell phones (if they stop pushing features and start pushing reliability, that is). And digital radio.
Encoding digital signals in a small amount of bandwidth has to come with a catch. What's this sound like if the signal strength is low? What kind of digital qaulity is this? Is there lossy compression used?
Keep in mind that digital signalling techniques weren't really invented at all until the 1940s. And that AM was deployed before than, and FM either before that or not much after.
Is it inconceivable to believe a brand new field has seen startingly gains in efficiency in 60 years time? Look at how much modems improved (56kps over the same line that once only supported 150bps...nearly a 400 times gain).
There is no catch. Telecommunications technology has just improved a hell of a lot in the last 100 years.
This is the reason why cell phone provides are so antsy to relaim all those 6 MHz wide UHF allocations....you can use that bandwidth so much more effectively with modern techniques, instead of throwing raw, uncompressed analog data out there.
Also witness the huge number of digital channels cable providers have packed into coax, despite the continued presence of regular TV stations, AND internet connections.
And this is the part where everyone should stop whining about taxes and having to give money to their local learning institution.
The minimum spec for next-gen consoles is an order of magnitude higher than their current ones.
7 GHz!?!? I have serious difficulty believing that.
Sony has actually stated they want Playstation 3 to be TWO or THREE orders of magnitude more powerful than Playstation 2. How?? Grid computing. If you've been reading slashdot at all the last year or so, you've probably seen numerous articles about the Sony/IBM "Cell" processor, a small processor designed to be used in massive numbers. They want to put one (or more) in every Sony product, so for every Sony component you have, your system gains more multiprocessing power.
It's pretty brilliant, and also pretty brilliantly evil. They already have patents on the design.
Also, just for shits and giggles, put a N64 next to a SNES, or a SNES next to a NES, or a PS2 next to a PS1. And tell me you don't see an order of magnitude difference in the power. It doesn't just come from the CPU.
Might also make it more worthwhile to put e-mail signatures (plain text) at the bottom of all of your outbound e-mails. Spam messages typically won't have duplicated your personal signature lines, so those lines will end up being scored as ham (decreasing the odds of being mis-classified as spam). Would probably be a worthwhile corporate policy to configure everyone with a 2-3 line signature for their e-mail.
This is kind of a solution for a problem isn't there, because any sensible filter (like Mozilla's, for example), whitelists anyone in your personal address book, and is also set up to collect the addresses of anyone you send mail to and put them in there.
Worse, stuff like area codes and addresses (usually what goes in the signature) tend to come up as spammy, because of the need to include contact information in successful spam.
Now, if everyone was to use PGP/GPG signing, and incorrect signatures were rejected at the incoming mail server, that would be a start. Because valid signatures would require valid e-mail addresses, and increase the computational load of the sender. And anything with a valid signature block would start to look very hammy.
Even "real" juice has a lot of sugar--not something you want to drink large amounts of.
When I first went on something Atkins-like about 5 years ago someone told me that natural cranberry juice (i.e. no sugar added) has little to no sugar. I never got around to tracking any down, though.
Never before had it hit me the extent to which these legal drugs we are so used to really are drugs with all the connotations that follow.
What I've never been able to forget is this video they showed us in first year chem, with these five "levels" of dangerous chemicals. I believe alcohol was in level 3, while caffeine was in the next HIGHER level.
What's also hilarious is to listen to people defend pot as 'natural', and say how they would never use 'chemicals' like ecstasy, etc, etc. What, THC isn't a chemical? There's not HUNDREDS of chemicals in pot? ARgh.
We are now writing games for the future not for the present systems? Plz, that is what made ID great, they could get better performance out of the present systems than their peers could.
Which company have you been watching? Were you able to run Quake/Q2/Q3 at full details/resolution when they came out? Hell no! Why do you think Quake3 was used as a benchmark for so long? Only about a year ago did the framerates start getting meaninglessly high on the high-end rigs with full details.
The whole point of id has been to make engines that last long enough to get the next one out, so they can continue to resell it to make money in the interim. Look what Counterstrike did with Half-Life did with the Quake engine, it's still going strong, and I'm STILL seeing posts complaining of slowdowns in certain areas.
Quake ran like ass compared to Duke3D when they both originally came out (remember all the flame wars?), but it's clear which one was built to last. id knows what they're doing. And yes, they also get better peformance at the same hardware level, they just have much higher standards of performance.