Were the consumers given the plans ('source code') to the car and tires? Were they given as many copies as they want to run in different enviornments ('OSes', 'systems', 'platforms') as they wanted? It's not the same thing.
The product was publicly available, but not the engineering ('algorithm') behind it.
Line of sight issues not new
on
Optical Cellphones
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Current cellphones are already operating in bands where line of sight is quite critical to half-decent reception. What makes this feasible is that many surfaces are reflective of a lot of bands of EM radiation. This is why we can see things - they reflect light. This is why you can use your TV remote by pointing it away from the set - it bounces off the wall.
I agree that attenuation will be a big problem, but it's already getting almost that bad as we get higher and higher in the spectru.
Now, if they could only modulate the sun's rays...
You need to take some information theory classes. A light wave is periodic, and a periodic signal is entirely deterministic, and therefore carries no information, other than it's own properties.
They're talking about sensing the beginning of a light wave and producing the peak sooner than it enters. All that is is a phase shift. The only 'information' is the frequency, which you don't need the whole pulse to tell you.
More interesting would be the Mozart example, because it seems to imply modulation. NO details are offered about that experiment, suspisciouly.
While XML is just a data format I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's "low level" like 1s and 0s, as you claim. XML is in fact relatively human readable, and pretty much trivial to reverse-engineer, as it is in _plain text_, with mark-up tags (somewhat like HTML).
In fact, one of the guiding principles of the XML standards board is that a first year computer science student should be able to write a XML parser in about a week.
After parsing, it's just a matter of knowing what the tags are. Which yes, are 'propriety' in the sense that anyone can define their own tags. But it's not like you can hide them. I'd say the open source community would be able to import the files in about 3 days, if that, and generate them in 7.
This tool lists ALL available security patches for Windows 2000 and IE. Most of them go through more stability testing before being released to the unwashed masses on windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
Maybe it's still not 'as fast' as some linux patches, but it's relatively automated and easy to use, and centralized.
Again, yet another case of RTFA. The digital information is being broadcast within the current FM channels' guardbands, assigning NO new spectrum to anyone.
And it's actually lower power. If you think moving things to digital INCREASES bandwidth usage, you're seriously misinformed. The most inefficient thing on the entire spectrum is analog TV......_6 MHz_ per channel. You can serve almost 200 simultaneous cellphone users on that, or maybe 30 of them watching better quality video than you could get on analog TV.
Wake up and smell the spread-spectrum. Digital is increasing capacity, not lowering it. Compression, vocoders, low probability of intercept, it's all leagues more efficient than CB radio could ever be.
This is pretty much Waterloo's claim to uniqueness, is it not? Something about being the only Univeristy in Canada with a math _Faculty_?
I think this may provide some insight into whether or not it's a GoodThing for CS students to have more math in their degrees. Microsoft hires more programmers from Waterloo than anywhere else. And just look at the QUALITY of their code.:)
On a somewhat tangential note, I'm in Communications Engineering at Carleton, and we badly need a stochastics course in our program, so Digital Comm doesn't keep flying over our heads. Sometimes more math is good.
How does a spammer have any right to privacy?? The whole point of spam (ostensibly) is to _advertise_ yourself.
For that matter, the whole idea of e-mail is centered around sending information from yourself to one or more persons. Unless you're leaving an anonymous tip, they're not a whole lot of justification for hiding your identity. Would you trust random snail mail with no return address? Personally I'd be handing that one over to the bomb squad.
Privacy and advertising should be (and largely are) anti-thetical. If you're telling someone to buy something, tell them who you are. That's not a privacy violation, it's common sense.
As for this "promo[ting] a database state and t[ying] together all a person's Constutionally private information", RTFA. There's no talk of that at all. The only suggestion is using information in _the advertisement_ about the _advertising company_ to track them down. If Nike starts sending you junk mail, it's not violating their privacy to look up the address of their headquartes and ask them to stop.
The identity of a business is NOT private information. Any suggestion that this has anything to do with 'big brother'-style policy is absurd.
What's interesting is that in Canada we specifically have exemptions for programmers and Engineering type-people. Apparently this was largely included because of support for this 'culture' in the programming community. Programmers WANTED to continue to have the option to stay in late and order pizza in dim lighting, this was just their style.
This is based on sites who've installed "HitBox" software to monitor their users. These numbers are based on visits to the kind of sites who support that sort of thing.
I think a lot of hardcore Netscape/Mozilla users avoid sites that perform detailed information-mining like the plague. And there was no indication of whether they kept track of IPs with the page hits... maybe netscape users just find what they're looking for faster.:)
Re:Coulombs are a measure of charge not current
on
Electric Armor
·
· Score: 1
Thank God somebody pointed this out. Pity it was an AC.
At least scientific naming arguments are (usually) more straightforward than the GNU/Linux fiasco.;)
In any event, there's another issue he doesn't really touch upon..
He mentions that this sort of setup is required for outputting _production quality_ video. If you're a production house, I'd imagine you'd already have the required RAID array/CPU power, etc. to do this sort of thing.
Because Mac OSX licenses would cost them money, and add no value to the customer. FreeDOS is (I'm assuming), free, and only costs them the price of the media to ship it on it (i.e. essentially nothing). That's probably the real reason it doesn't ship with Linux, Linux would take more discs/space. I bet they cram FreeDOS on their driver disc or something.
You're most likely buying your DVDs used, hombre. The purchased new ones don't generally have ads on them, only the rental copies do.
Why do rental stores buy their copies like this? Because they come out in that format first. Why doesn't everyone buy them early, then? Because they're more expensive.
This is how they make the most money possible. Gouging the rental stores for the privilege to rent it to you before you can buy it - which some people will - because they're so desparate to see it.
Don't complain about seeing ads on something you never paid the original producer for. It's like buying a magazine from your friend and complaining about the ads, because you paid your subscription fee.
All those commericals on the VHS tapes (and the DVDs) you've seen? They're all on the rental copies only, generally. Which makes sense - you're not supposed to own it, so they're throwing some advertising at you in return for the cheap viewing. Tapes/discs bought new generally don't have any ads (except for disney ads for their other movies), because they'd fall horribly out of date quite quickly, and make them look dumb.
So buy new. When you buy something used the original producer gets no money from the transaction, so they're hitting you with ads. And you're sure no one's scratched up the ending, I missed two critical minutes of a movie I rented last weekend, because the DVD player ground to a halt on one section. Blech.
I agree that your story is horrible...and many a person has a similar one with PayPal.
But "mak[ing] a buck freezing accounts"??? That doesn't make any sense. They LOST money by not letting you use your account. It's bad business practice, pure and simple. Not only did they lose that specific piece of business, and any that you would have made in the next 5 weeks/future, they lose the business of people who read your story.
So keep telling people. So they don't make a buck. Idiots usually don't.
It seems to me that the airplane they are showing there could be weak. If you look at the second picture you can see it bowing in the middle.
Ever notice how trees bend without breaking? Or how buildings gently sway in the wind? The easiest way to ensure something will break is to make it stiff and brittle. Structures with a bit of leeway are more resilient in the end.
The much vaunted titanium is actually quite bendable, which is one of the reasons its so strong.
Or the computer could pick random numbers out of a hat, with the chances of picking any one number the same as for any other.
Now, all other problems with the article aside, I think this little sentence about generating random numbers is the most problematic. As most people are aware, generating random numbers on a computer is no trivial thing. If they have since grown the ability to draw numbers out of a hat...I'd really like to see it.
The government isn't proposing to FIX any of Microsoft's holes. It's building a tool that looks for KNOWN FLAWS that have already been fixed, by Microsoft, and letting you know what they are. Because although MS is distributing patches already, rather loudly (windowsupdate is right on the start menu), a lot of people still don't listen. So maybe they'll listen to the government instead.
It's like blaming car manufacturers for not MAKING drivers wear their seatbelts. All they can do is put them in there and suggest that you use them, but some people won't actually do it till the gov't tells them so.
What I find much more interesting is that when the cDc & co. makes this sort of tool, it's 'hacking'.
...bringing yet another monopoly to bear in the war for household broadband.
You seem to be mixing your concepts here. I'm all for more powerful opponents in the connectivity war. But the very fact that they're competitors implies that none of them are monopolies, n'est pas?
The problem with this concept of interconnected neighborhoods is that every current wireless system is designed with a fast downlink, and slow uplink. I recently attended a talk from the leader of the World Wireless Forum, and this isn't changing any time soon.
And this is exactly what is turning the net over to the media conglomerates. Sure, everyone can get ON the net.....but it is increasingly difficult/expensive for the commmon man/woman to actually _serve_ content.
I really don't see the point of having every appliance in the world wired and receiving information, if none of them can communicate back at more than a snail's pace. Which is why your suggestion of neighborhood-to-neighborhood routing isn't feasible. There's nothing in TCP/IP stopping this from happenning, in theory, but all the content is on the backbones.
Until someone markets a good, cheap, uplink solution, the neighborhoods will still be slaves to the wire.
Actually, the number of cell towers is almost entirely a function of subscriber numbers, not distance. Each 'cell' can handle a certain number of users/bandwidth, and the more users that sign up in a certain area, the more it has to be subdivided into smaller and smaller cells to accomadate them (with each tower generating less power).
The number of towers per area is really only an issue in very sparsely populated areas, where the providers are not allowed to jack the power up high enough to reach their quota of users per tower.
Slashdot Mirror
Were the consumers given the plans ('source code') to the car and tires? Were they given as many copies as they want to run in different enviornments ('OSes', 'systems', 'platforms') as they wanted? It's not the same thing.
The product was publicly available, but not the engineering ('algorithm') behind it.
Current cellphones are already operating in bands where line of sight is quite critical to half-decent reception. What makes this feasible is that many surfaces are reflective of a lot of bands of EM radiation. This is why we can see things - they reflect light. This is why you can use your TV remote by pointing it away from the set - it bounces off the wall.
I agree that attenuation will be a big problem, but it's already getting almost that bad as we get higher and higher in the spectru.
Now, if they could only modulate the sun's rays...
You need to take some information theory classes. A light wave is periodic, and a periodic signal is entirely deterministic, and therefore carries no information, other than it's own properties.
They're talking about sensing the beginning of a light wave and producing the peak sooner than it enters. All that is is a phase shift. The only 'information' is the frequency, which you don't need the whole pulse to tell you.
More interesting would be the Mozart example, because it seems to imply modulation. NO details are offered about that experiment, suspisciouly.
We _are_ talking about Ottawa, Ontario, Canada here. Not all tech companies are in California.
Ottawa is well known as 'Silicon Valley North', and is the capital of the country. Wake up.
In fact, one of the guiding principles of the XML standards board is that a first year computer science student should be able to write a XML parser in about a week.
After parsing, it's just a matter of knowing what the tags are. Which yes, are 'propriety' in the sense that anyone can define their own tags. But it's not like you can hide them. I'd say the open source community would be able to import the files in about 3 days, if that, and generate them in 7.
This tool lists ALL available security patches for Windows 2000 and IE. Most of them go through more stability testing before being released to the unwashed masses on windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
Maybe it's still not 'as fast' as some linux patches, but it's relatively automated and easy to use, and centralized.
Again, yet another case of RTFA. The digital information is being broadcast within the current FM channels' guardbands, assigning NO new spectrum to anyone.
And it's actually lower power. If you think moving things to digital INCREASES bandwidth usage, you're seriously misinformed. The most inefficient thing on the entire spectrum is analog TV......_6 MHz_ per channel. You can serve almost 200 simultaneous cellphone users on that, or maybe 30 of them watching better quality video than you could get on analog TV.
Wake up and smell the spread-spectrum. Digital is increasing capacity, not lowering it. Compression, vocoders, low probability of intercept, it's all leagues more efficient than CB radio could ever be.
This standard broadcasts in the sidebands of the current FM channels, usuing NO additional spectrum. No extra interference, no extra channels needed.
As for FM quality, you obviously don't live in an area with lots of tall buildings, or one far away from the transmitters.
What would be really cool is if they use it to start transmitting 4.1 audio streams. Mmmmmmm.
This is pretty much Waterloo's claim to uniqueness, is it not? Something about being the only Univeristy in Canada with a math _Faculty_?
:)
I think this may provide some insight into whether or not it's a GoodThing for CS students to have more math in their degrees. Microsoft hires more programmers from Waterloo than anywhere else. And just look at the QUALITY of their code.
On a somewhat tangential note, I'm in Communications Engineering at Carleton, and we badly need a stochastics course in our program, so Digital Comm doesn't keep flying over our heads. Sometimes more math is good.
How does a spammer have any right to privacy?? The whole point of spam (ostensibly) is to _advertise_ yourself.
For that matter, the whole idea of e-mail is centered around sending information from yourself to one or more persons. Unless you're leaving an anonymous tip, they're not a whole lot of justification for hiding your identity. Would you trust random snail mail with no return address? Personally I'd be handing that one over to the bomb squad.
Privacy and advertising should be (and largely are) anti-thetical. If you're telling someone to buy something, tell them who you are. That's not a privacy violation, it's common sense.
As for this "promo[ting] a database state and t[ying] together all a person's Constutionally private information", RTFA. There's no talk of that at all. The only suggestion is using information in _the advertisement_ about the _advertising company_ to track them down. If Nike starts sending you junk mail, it's not violating their privacy to look up the address of their headquartes and ask them to stop.
The identity of a business is NOT private information. Any suggestion that this has anything to do with 'big brother'-style policy is absurd.
What's interesting is that in Canada we specifically have exemptions for programmers and Engineering type-people. Apparently this was largely included because of support for this 'culture' in the programming community. Programmers WANTED to continue to have the option to stay in late and order pizza in dim lighting, this was just their style.
Be careful what you wish for....
This is based on sites who've installed "HitBox" software to monitor their users. These numbers are based on visits to the kind of sites who support that sort of thing.
:)
I think a lot of hardcore Netscape/Mozilla users avoid sites that perform detailed information-mining like the plague. And there was no indication of whether they kept track of IPs with the page hits... maybe netscape users just find what they're looking for faster.
Thank God somebody pointed this out. Pity it was an AC.
;)
At least scientific naming arguments are (usually) more straightforward than the GNU/Linux fiasco.
In any event, there's another issue he doesn't really touch upon..
He mentions that this sort of setup is required for outputting _production quality_ video. If you're a production house, I'd imagine you'd already have the required RAID array/CPU power, etc. to do this sort of thing.
Because Mac OSX licenses would cost them money, and add no value to the customer. FreeDOS is (I'm assuming), free, and only costs them the price of the media to ship it on it (i.e. essentially nothing). That's probably the real reason it doesn't ship with Linux, Linux would take more discs/space. I bet they cram FreeDOS on their driver disc or something.
You're most likely buying your DVDs used, hombre. The purchased new ones don't generally have ads on them, only the rental copies do.
Why do rental stores buy their copies like this? Because they come out in that format first. Why doesn't everyone buy them early, then? Because they're more expensive.
This is how they make the most money possible. Gouging the rental stores for the privilege to rent it to you before you can buy it - which some people will - because they're so desparate to see it.
Don't complain about seeing ads on something you never paid the original producer for. It's like buying a magazine from your friend and complaining about the ads, because you paid your subscription fee.
All those commericals on the VHS tapes (and the DVDs) you've seen? They're all on the rental copies only, generally. Which makes sense - you're not supposed to own it, so they're throwing some advertising at you in return for the cheap viewing. Tapes/discs bought new generally don't have any ads (except for disney ads for their other movies), because they'd fall horribly out of date quite quickly, and make them look dumb.
So buy new. When you buy something used the original producer gets no money from the transaction, so they're hitting you with ads. And you're sure no one's scratched up the ending, I missed two critical minutes of a movie I rented last weekend, because the DVD player ground to a halt on one section. Blech.
I agree that your story is horrible...and many a person has a similar one with PayPal.
But "mak[ing] a buck freezing accounts"??? That doesn't make any sense. They LOST money by not letting you use your account. It's bad business practice, pure and simple. Not only did they lose that specific piece of business, and any that you would have made in the next 5 weeks/future, they lose the business of people who read your story.
So keep telling people. So they don't make a buck. Idiots usually don't.
It seems to me that the airplane they are showing there could be weak. If you look at the second picture you can see it bowing in the middle.
Ever notice how trees bend without breaking? Or how buildings gently sway in the wind? The easiest way to ensure something will break is to make it stiff and brittle. Structures with a bit of leeway are more resilient in the end.
The much vaunted titanium is actually quite bendable, which is one of the reasons its so strong.
Or the computer could pick random numbers out of a hat, with the chances of picking any one number the same as for any other.
Now, all other problems with the article aside, I think this little sentence about generating random numbers is the most problematic. As most people are aware, generating random numbers on a computer is no trivial thing. If they have since grown the ability to draw numbers out of a hat...I'd really like to see it.
The government isn't proposing to FIX any of Microsoft's holes. It's building a tool that looks for KNOWN FLAWS that have already been fixed, by Microsoft, and letting you know what they are. Because although MS is distributing patches already, rather loudly (windowsupdate is right on the start menu), a lot of people still don't listen. So maybe they'll listen to the government instead.
It's like blaming car manufacturers for not MAKING drivers wear their seatbelts. All they can do is put them in there and suggest that you use them, but some people won't actually do it till the gov't tells them so.
What I find much more interesting is that when the cDc & co. makes this sort of tool, it's 'hacking'.
...bringing yet another monopoly to bear in the war for household broadband.
You seem to be mixing your concepts here. I'm all for more powerful opponents in the connectivity war. But the very fact that they're competitors implies that none of them are monopolies, n'est pas?
The problem with this concept of interconnected neighborhoods is that every current wireless system is designed with a fast downlink, and slow uplink. I recently attended a talk from the leader of the World Wireless Forum, and this isn't changing any time soon.
And this is exactly what is turning the net over to the media conglomerates. Sure, everyone can get ON the net.....but it is increasingly difficult/expensive for the commmon man/woman to actually _serve_ content.
I really don't see the point of having every appliance in the world wired and receiving information, if none of them can communicate back at more than a snail's pace. Which is why your suggestion of neighborhood-to-neighborhood routing isn't feasible. There's nothing in TCP/IP stopping this from happenning, in theory, but all the content is on the backbones.
Until someone markets a good, cheap, uplink solution, the neighborhoods will still be slaves to the wire.
Actually, the number of cell towers is almost entirely a function of subscriber numbers, not distance. Each 'cell' can handle a certain number of users/bandwidth, and the more users that sign up in a certain area, the more it has to be subdivided into smaller and smaller cells to accomadate them (with each tower generating less power).
The number of towers per area is really only an issue in very sparsely populated areas, where the providers are not allowed to jack the power up high enough to reach their quota of users per tower.
That just says 'video game' - makes no mention of Sun specifically..
I believe that's the joke, compadre....