The government put up the 3g licenses for auction and the top 4 mobile companies paid something like a combined 60billion ukp for them. And that doesnt include actually building the network.
One factor in the huge costs that these spectrums sold for was that the telcos weren't used to using the auction system. They got excited as the price climed and bid higher than they had ever intended. You see the same things happen on ebay and traditional auctions (one-dolla, one-dolla, can I get two-dolla-two?) all the time. It turns into a battle not to get the item bid on, but just to win.
I work for a leading cellular infrastructure/mobile unit designer/manufacturor. Right after the auctions, most people here were stunned by how much the telcos payed for their spectrum. How are they possibly going to make money off of these systems?
... that of all the boards tested, there is a marginal difference between them. Really, in all of the figures there is the slightest of margins between performance figures. Only thing that I can conclude from the bench marks is that if I were to buy a motherboard right now, it wouldn't be the Asus KT266A board.
the usual course is to go through IT management and request it.
This would almost never work for me. The types of apps that I need installed are usually extremely specific to my work (simulator development) and things that I need today, not tomorrow, and not next week. I can only imagine the headache involved in getting things like MPI installed. Or a special graphics library. I *need* space to install custom apps. On my machine at work, that's been provided for in the/local directory. Simulation results can be huge. I'm talking 1-2 gig compressed. You need space to extract and read them too.
why not consider moving 'em into the tech department?
Because I've been there and done that and you'd have to drag me back kicking and screaming. I just can't deal with sessions that begin with
me:"Click your start button"
them:"My what button?"
me:"Your start button"
them:"Oh, here it is. My Computer"
me:"No, your start button. Its in the lower left hand corner of your screen"
them:"Network Neighborhood?"
Because most (if not all) of the applications of this super-cluster will probably be research. Scientific research. Scientific research that requires insanely high-precision numbers. 64 bit processors go a long way toward high-precision without using any scary high-precision math libraries. Or the scary high-precision math libraries that you do use can be tweeked for 64 bit processors thusly resulting in faster math. That's the name of the game here. Faster math.
Beyond that, you really need as high a processing-power to memory-transfer cost ratio as possible. When you are dealing with highly coupled simulations (such as wireless simulations) you pay dearly for cross-processor memory IO.
No, not a festival of pork and bacon (I wish!), but the ever popular and never reproduced HAM Radio festivals. The main focus of these events isn't computers, but I've found a number of rare buys at these events. The people are rarely (as of about 5-6 years ago) companies set up selling you some crap PC they built on the way to the show. More often then not, they seem to be people that have bought stuff in the past and either have no need for it anymore or fixed it cause it was broken and hope to get a little return from it.
And.... HAM fest people are just swank. Really cool. I mean their the bee's knees and all that. Really "wow, this tastes like butter" neat.
You just hit the pony on the head (or something like that). You've included two brilliant examples of how companies strayed from the pack, produced superior technology (sorta), got sufficient buy-in buy those in the market place, and became the standard. What about us poor souls who didn't have a SoundBlaster? I know that my Ensoniq SoundScape sure wasn't SoundBlaster compliant and man did the sound suck in Quake when it first came out. Don't even bother asking about getting kernel drivers for it back in '96.
The same thing is happening now. I'm not going to say that I like it, but in a few years people will probably have consolidated on the technology offering of one of these two companies (or perhaps some other startup) and then video cards will be declaring themselves "nVidia compliant" or "ATI compliant". I just hope that its the hardware that's driving the graphics market, not the software. Look how far we got with that angle back in the day.
As for scientific applications, you need load balancing regardless of whether the processors running the threads are in one box or in several. This is usually handled transparently by the OS, the compliler, the communications library, or a combination of the above (usually all of the above).
In my experience with high precision RF simulations on massive SGI multiprocessor machines, the OS (IRIX), the compiler (MipsPRO), and the communications package (OpenMP) do very little for you automatically. In order to achieve decent scalability you need to take your computing needs into consideration when you develop the architecture behind your simulation. If you, as the developer, don't distribute your calculations as evenly as possible, your simulation is going to run very, very poorly. It will become more noticible how poorly your simulation runs as you throw more processors at the problem.
If you are dealing with simulations requiring high levels of internal messaging, you definitely gain from a multiprocessor machine. Bus throughput is much higher than network throughput, especially because data must be specially packaged before it is sent across the network. Again, you must design your simulation architecture specifically for this application. Frequently used data should be close to the process that needs it. If the data resides on only one processor (or machine in a cluster, as the case may be), you will deal with a high cost in accessing that data from any processor or machine to which the data is not local.
If you are dealing with a simulation that has high internal messaging and relatively little computational work, you are actually better off using fewer processors/machines. Of course the optimal amount depends on the application, so your milage may vary. And, of course, none of this means squat if you don't plan for spreading the work and localizing messaging and hope everything will be taken care of automatically.
Quite right. My father is a high school art teacher and has done a project like this every year as far back as I can remember. About 25 students get a sheet of paper (I don't remember how large, but close to 8 1/2 x 11) and create their art on it. He then attatches all of the pieces together into one rather large picture.
Eh... so what if its off topic. It was related to the post that I was replying to. The poster had an email address at Big Idea productions. Hence the VegiTales. Its amazing how seriously people take slashdot. Relax
I just wonder what it would look like if you passed Monet's Water Lillies through the VanGogh filter. An approximation of an impression of an impressionist's painting. Figure out the logistics of that one.
Do you think that there is a net economic benefit from allowing IBM to patent this algorithm?
IBM? Maybe not. Sprint, Ameritech, Nokia, Motorola? Absolutely. Voice compression, believe it or not, is not just used in recording audio files for our listening pleasure. It is also used in voice communications. That cell phone of yours doesn't sound slightly warbly from time to time because its a fashionable thing to do. That's the voice compression that you're hearing (that and losing voice packets). So yes, AT&T definately has something to gain by patenting everything and anything related to voice communication.
Ever wonder why Qualcomm is still around? They pretty much own CDMA and are living (largely) off of the profits that patent licensing provides them.
But the GOOD traffic can find them? How the hell does this thing know the difference?
As someone else kindly pointed out, this is the same as frequency hopping in radio communications. You change frequency so often that an observing third party can't pick out the whole conversation. In fact (in the radio world), your communications pretty much just look like noise. This requires a fast processor, though, to implement properly.
Now, I admit, I haven't read the article, so this is a mostly uninformed point of view. However, if they plan to implement it anything like frequency hopping, I'm betting that the idea here is that this is for communication between two hosts that are aware of each other. They agree upon some IP hopping pattern at the beginning of the communication or even before the communication begins or figure out what the pattern is based on some set of acceptable patterns or, well, you get the idea. From that point on, the receiver listens for communications at the IPs that fall in the agreed-upon pattern. Whala, you are suddenly able to pick out the GOOD traffic. In order for it to be really secure, you need to be using IP hopping in both directions.
When I was in my second year at university, a friend of mine stole my program off of my machine and turned it in as his. He went to all sorts of lengths to change the program so that the prof wouldn't know that he copied it. He even went so far as to accidentally change the working bits of the program! His copy didn't even work! Of course I didn't find out about this untill our programs were handed back. He admitted that he had copied the code without my knowledge and took the sole hit on the matter. Nothing really major happened to him. The worst part was that the professor was very suspicious of me for the remainder of my time in her class. I got an A, he even got out with a C. Doesn't seem fair.
If you can get DirectX ported well to Linux (and Mac OS X), then there is a decent percentage of the gaming public that becomes dependant on an available version of DirectX. When MS releases a new version of DirectX (or a secret hidden version, whatever), most companies will be compatible with older ones rather than losing a chunk of sales.
That would be an ideal solution if it weren't for the fact that gamers are now used to needing to upgrade to the latest version of DirectX every time they buy a new game. Game companies have no problem requiring this upgrade because they know that much of the gaming market is driven by whomever can release the first game with some bleeding-edge feature. Besides, if the project meetings for games in the design/coding stage are anything like the project meetings that I have at my work, these games probably suffer from near-terminal feature-creep. I would be surprised if any manager would accept old technology.
Add on top of that the rate at which Microsoft releases new versions of DirectX (which they've actually slowed down recently!) and you have about one year to produce a fully functional DirectX API for *nix.
Then you should have no problem with cloning for gestation or cloning for slavery, as long as the clone isn't harmed and has a chance to know God, right? QED
Wow. How did you possibly get that out of my comment? You seem to have some serious issues with Christians. I'm not going to even begin to claim that there aren't any bad Christians out there. Being a Christian and living like a Christian are two totally different animals. I'm sure that there have been many a monster that believed in Christ, or at least believed that he believed in Christ, yet didn't live his life as a Christian. Christians are sinners too.
As for clones for slavery, I wouldn't want anyone to be a slave regardless of how they came into this world! There are a whole lot of things that I wouldn't want clones used for, I guess that I didn't feel like I needed to cover every crime against humanity in my previous comment and say that they also applied to clones.
Your god laid out ten simple rules to live by, and as much as you'd like to, you can't easily adapt them to the science of cloning as long as it doesn't harm the fetus.
Yup, God did do that. In fact, one of those ten simple rules to live by is Thou shalt not kill. I think that applies. You've got to remember, the problem that I have here is creating a clone and then killing it (whether that's in the process of organ harvesting or whatever). I don't want to even begin debating creating a clone of a whole person because you're right, I don't know what God thinks about this.
... life begins... [at] some stage in between when the brain has grown to the point that it can support the impulses of thought you call a soul... [and when] a child realises its own existance, which I'm sad to say isn't until they've been out of the womb for several years.
Ah, I see the root of our disagreement. I do believe that life does begin at conception. If you've been around new borns much, you would begin to appreciate that yes, these are very much people. Being able to express self-awareness is not a pre-requisite for being alive or for being a person. Are you telling me that a three year old isn't alive? That's several years after they've been out of the womb.
People like to hate homosexuals and unwed mothers
That's funny, some of my best friends are homosexuals. I haven't known that many unwed mothers, but I'm sure that they are wonderfull people too. God told us to hate the sin but love the sinner. If you were to hate everyone who was a sinner I'm sorry to say that you wouldn't be able to love anyone but God himself. Everyone sins. I sin. The pope sins. Martin Luther sinned. Adam and Eve sinned. But good news! Christ died so that our sins would be forgiven! And he taught us to forgive and forget. Oh, and to not judge others. So who am I to criticize others for the way they live their lives? Besides, what on Earth do homosexuals and unwed mothers have to do with the act of cloning?
The most common complaint that I've heard expressed against Christians is that we're not very tolerant. I'd like to think that I'm a fairly open minded individual. I've shared my views with you in as pollite a manner as possible. I had hoped that I would receive the same courtesy from you in response.
Ok, I haven't seen it, so I'm going to post it in here. I'll even put in the requisit "You probably won't agree with me so you will most likely mod me down" comment that almost ensures that this comment will get modded up just so that people can say they support free expression of opinions even if they differ from their own.
Why, from a Christian point of view, cloning is bad. Creating another person, whether that be through good old fashion sex or by fertilizing an egg with existing DNA, is still creating just that; a person. My problem with cloning is the same as my problem with abortion. If you create this person, and then "terminate" them, or whatever other euphamism you choose, you are commiting murder. The method that is taken here is still a conception. Christianity teaches us that a person is a person from the point of conception on (no, I can't site you passages from the Bible on that, but I will look if you ask nicely). If you create a clone, or a cloned heart, or a cloned body minus the brain, through a method of conception (i.e. fertilizing an egg), you are still creating a person.
What I don't have a problem with, and other Christians may disagree with me on this, is generating a new organ from an existing one. Take tissue from a heart and generate a new heart from it. Cool. So long as we do it without conceiving a clone.
Where does this take us with a brain? I'm going to be honest here; I don't know. I honestly don't believe that I am my brain. If I lose my brain, then I lose all ability for me to express myself through my body. By my soul is still there.
Even if you choose to ignore the Christian point of view, or disagree with it (God gave us free will after all): Has anyone else ever seen Gattica? Blade Runner? Any of the number of other clones-are-scum centric movies or books? Egad man. That's some scary stuff.
Movies have been doing this for years. Some do it cleverly so that you see the product but don't feel as though you just saw an advertisement for said product. "Oh, look at the computer that guy is using. Aw, that's a cute i-mac" They rely on the subconscious connection that you make between product and super-duper-computing-power. "Hey, if a mac was good enough for Sandra Bullock, its good enough for me."
Then there are the not-so-clever advertisments in movies. Anyone here see Inspector Gadget? Wow. Blatant ad placement. Skittles, Coke, McDonalds, etc. All in the car. How sad.
Then, you also have games that have done this as far back (perhaps further) as the original 8bit Nintendo. Anyone remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Every other picture in the game was an ad for Pizza Hut. That was too much. Why was there that much advertising for one company all on the same wall. There were other ways that the ads could have been worked in that wouldn't have been quite so anoying. I wouldn't have thought twice about it if I had seen coke machines in Shogo. But I did stop and take an extra look at them simply becuause they weren't Coke (or Pepsi, but mainly because they weren't Coke). I think that right there speaks to the level of penetration these products have in our lives.
I believe that SGI's objection holds fair ground. They are not objecting (so far as I can tell) to the word Open, but rather the way in which that word is used. Products with a name of the format Open[2 letters] seems too similar to OpenGL.
Actually, yet. I do believe that the CEO, Chief Engineer, Software Engineer, Hardware Engineer, and Sanitation Engineer care whether or not some joe blow starts up a project with the name Open or GL in it. Especially if that project is exceptionally sucky or exceptionally wonderful. If SGI allows projects with like names, they risk becoming associated with those like-named projects. Or, even worse, SGIs products could become associated with the like-named projects. SGI wants you to know that if you are using an OpenGL application, you're using SGI technology. They also want you to know that OpenAL has nothing to do with SGI. Because it is fairly widely known that SGI designed OpenGL, many will assume that anything named similarly must also be made by SGI. I know that I did the first time that I heard of OpenAL.
SGI is fighting over Brand recognition. They wouldn't have had this problem if they had continuously marketed their products as "SGI OpenGL" or "SGI OpenMP". That would ensure that their name is tied with the product at all times.
Look at what happened to Bayer with Asprin. No, Asprin isn't the name of the drug. It was a product name that Bayer used. Over time, though, people forgot that Asprin was made by Bayer, and so refered to all asprin-like products as Asprin. Yeah, it's a little different, but many of the concepts are the same. The tech industry isn't imune from it. For years people would say "I've got an IBM computer" or "I've got an Apple computer" when what they really meant was "I've got a TDK IBM compatible computer" or "I've got a Laser Apple compatible computer.
I seem to recall this exact same phenomenon about three to four years ago as the first 3D accelerator cards and accelerated games were coming. You basically had to own a 3DFX board in order to play anything accelerated. In fact, I believe that there was even an episode of Wing Commander that relied exclusively on 3DFX/Glide. You couldn't play it unless you had one of these amazing cards.
People at the time were shocked that games were going to start requiring the use of an accelerator board in the near future. They were angry because 3DFX was pretty much the only option on the block. Yes, there were competitors, but how many of us actually bought an S3Virge? Well, where is 3DFX now? They aren't making boards any more. Yeah, they've been gobbled up by NVidia, but the point is they lost what had seemed to be their market and their market alone for over two years.
Well, the same thing is happening now with NVidia. I don't know how long they are going to be around. Maybe they'll be able to stick with the market, but then again, maybe they won't. Only time will tell. I'm just glad that I'm going to be around for the ride. And what a ride it looks to be!
Now here's a question for you all that I really don't know the answer to. Acording to the GPL, it breaks the license to link any non-GPLd code to any GPLd library. But what about libc? Using that same argument everything that is linked agains libc (99% of the software that I use is) would then need to be open sourced and GPLd. I know that this doesn't always happen, though. Is this a violation? Is it a violation for any non-GPLd software to exist on a Linux boxen? Is libc even GPLd? Someone, please shed some light on this for me.
Actually, it really isn't (or shouldn't be) that difficult to check for dependencies. What are the dependencies of a software program? 99% of the time, with what I use, its libraries or other binaries. Now, for 4 years of my career as a software developer, I worked on a project where I created an installer for various pieces of internet related software using InstallShield. I saw numerous versions of InstallShield come and go, but the one thing that remained constant was the need to check for libraries. You can check for libraries rather easily on a unix system. Take a peak at LD_LIBRARY_PATH, (or any of its derivatives) and whala! You've got the search path for any library. Look at PATH, and you know where to look for any binaries on a system that mater. If they're not in the search path, then require the user to direct you to them.
Now, I said that this shouldn't be too difficult to do. But that's not the case, now then is it? Ok, so we've got these libraries. Cool. We know where the binaries are, right? Yup, but what version are they? Ok, while there are some version numbers built into the names of the libraries (you may have to look at some symbolic links, but nothing too difficult), but what about programs? How do we have any idea what version they are?
I'm sad to say that Microsoft solved this problem a long time ago by allowing the integration of version information into the string tables of its executables and libraries. This is the standard way of handling things. Now, sure, you could do the same thing in Unix, but nobody does. Or at least nobody with any influence. Now, sure, you can query a binary for its version information, but which flag is it again? --version, right? Or is it -version? Err.. -V, no, that's not right. -v. Crap, that's 'verbose'. Well, which is it?
The sad truth is that this just isn't feasible right now. Its going to take a lot more than a project with good intentions to get people to start putting version information into their binaries, and even when they do, there's whole lot of people out there that have old binaries and will see absolutely no need to purchase an update to their OS (yup, some people buy their Unix, like Irix, Solaris, etc.) just to get version information put into their binaries. Its going to take even more than a good idea to get companies like Sun and SGI to recompile all of their code and change all of their Makefiles just to take advantage of these new whiz-bang version features.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think that the ability to maintain "packages" without the need of a database would be wonderful. I've dealt with my fair share of RPM headaches caused by taking the rode less traveled and compiling things from scratch. But I think that before we develop a new packaging system, there are other more important problems that need to be addressed first. Attack the problem at the root, don't go for the branches or you'll never win any ground.
Re:light stopped? Or destroyed and re-emitted...
on
Stop, Light.
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Based on an article that I read a couple of years ago (and nothing else, as I have no background in physics, let alone quantum phyisics) the principle of teleportation revolves around twining particles. When you have two particles, A and B, and you twine B around A, B becomes an exact opposite of A. If you them twine a third particle C around B, it becomes an exact opposite of B, hense an exact duplicate of A. In the process, though (and this is the way that I remember it, not necessarily the way it really is), A and B are effectively destroyed, leaving you only with C. By effectively destroyed, I'm assuming that they lose whatever properties they had that made them distinctly A or distinctly B. The big plus point here is that it apparently doesn't matter how far appart B and C are from each other. They could be a few feet or a few light years (though I immagine there would be problems being a few light years away).
However, the researcher interviewed in this article noted that he immagined that transporting a person by this means would be a bit like being ripped appart one particle at a time. Not the way I would want to start my vacation!
So, by inference here, I'm assuming that when the above poster said that the original would be destroyed, I don't think he meant destroyed in the sense that you destroy a rabid dog, but rather, the original would effectively disipate. Of course this all brings up the philisophical question of "am I made up of more than a bunch of random synaptic firings organized and chained in such a way as to give me personality and self?" to which I can answer a resounding and joyfull "Yes". But hey, that's the fun of Christianity.
Oh, for more on the idea of knowing that you are a copy (an idea put forth in the recent Swartzegnager [what kind of sick person gives their kid a name that hard to spell?] flick "the Sixth Day") check out the Orson Scott Card short story "Fat Farm". I think that its in the Cruel Miricles collection. There was a hardback copy of all those books put together, but I don't think its in print. I don't think the smaller books are either.
Slashdot Mirror
The government put up the 3g licenses for auction and the top 4 mobile companies paid something like a combined 60billion ukp for them. And that doesnt include actually building the network.
One factor in the huge costs that these spectrums sold for was that the telcos weren't used to using the auction system. They got excited as the price climed and bid higher than they had ever intended. You see the same things happen on ebay and traditional auctions (one-dolla, one-dolla, can I get two-dolla-two?) all the time. It turns into a battle not to get the item bid on, but just to win.
I work for a leading cellular infrastructure/mobile unit designer/manufacturor. Right after the auctions, most people here were stunned by how much the telcos payed for their spectrum. How are they possibly going to make money off of these systems?
... that of all the boards tested, there is a marginal difference between them. Really, in all of the figures there is the slightest of margins between performance figures. Only thing that I can conclude from the bench marks is that if I were to buy a motherboard right now, it wouldn't be the Asus KT266A board.
the usual course is to go through IT management and request it.
/local directory. Simulation results can be huge. I'm talking 1-2 gig compressed. You need space to extract and read them too.
This would almost never work for me. The types of apps that I need installed are usually extremely specific to my work (simulator development) and things that I need today, not tomorrow, and not next week. I can only imagine the headache involved in getting things like MPI installed. Or a special graphics library. I *need* space to install custom apps. On my machine at work, that's been provided for in the
why not consider moving 'em into the tech department?
Because I've been there and done that and you'd have to drag me back kicking and screaming. I just can't deal with sessions that begin with
me:"Click your start button"
them:"My what button?"
me:"Your start button"
them:"Oh, here it is. My Computer"
me:"No, your start button. Its in the lower left hand corner of your screen"
them:"Network Neighborhood?"
and it just goes downhill from there.
Because most (if not all) of the applications of this super-cluster will probably be research. Scientific research. Scientific research that requires insanely high-precision numbers. 64 bit processors go a long way toward high-precision without using any scary high-precision math libraries. Or the scary high-precision math libraries that you do use can be tweeked for 64 bit processors thusly resulting in faster math. That's the name of the game here. Faster math.
Beyond that, you really need as high a processing-power to memory-transfer cost ratio as possible. When you are dealing with highly coupled simulations (such as wireless simulations) you pay dearly for cross-processor memory IO.
No, not a festival of pork and bacon (I wish!), but the ever popular and never reproduced HAM Radio festivals. The main focus of these events isn't computers, but I've found a number of rare buys at these events. The people are rarely (as of about 5-6 years ago) companies set up selling you some crap PC they built on the way to the show. More often then not, they seem to be people that have bought stuff in the past and either have no need for it anymore or fixed it cause it was broken and hope to get a little return from it.
And.... HAM fest people are just swank. Really cool. I mean their the bee's knees and all that. Really "wow, this tastes like butter" neat.
...IBM-PC compatible. SoundBlaster compatible...
You just hit the pony on the head (or something like that). You've included two brilliant examples of how companies strayed from the pack, produced superior technology (sorta), got sufficient buy-in buy those in the market place, and became the standard. What about us poor souls who didn't have a SoundBlaster? I know that my Ensoniq SoundScape sure wasn't SoundBlaster compliant and man did the sound suck in Quake when it first came out. Don't even bother asking about getting kernel drivers for it back in '96.
The same thing is happening now. I'm not going to say that I like it, but in a few years people will probably have consolidated on the technology offering of one of these two companies (or perhaps some other startup) and then video cards will be declaring themselves "nVidia compliant" or "ATI compliant". I just hope that its the hardware that's driving the graphics market, not the software. Look how far we got with that angle back in the day.
See: this page for information about Motorola's MX1, Dragonball + ARM9.
As for scientific applications, you need load balancing regardless of whether the processors running the threads are in one box or in several. This is usually handled transparently by the OS, the compliler, the communications library, or a combination of the above (usually all of the above).
In my experience with high precision RF simulations on massive SGI multiprocessor machines, the OS (IRIX), the compiler (MipsPRO), and the communications package (OpenMP) do very little for you automatically. In order to achieve decent scalability you need to take your computing needs into consideration when you develop the architecture behind your simulation. If you, as the developer, don't distribute your calculations as evenly as possible, your simulation is going to run very, very poorly. It will become more noticible how poorly your simulation runs as you throw more processors at the problem.
If you are dealing with simulations requiring high levels of internal messaging, you definitely gain from a multiprocessor machine. Bus throughput is much higher than network throughput, especially because data must be specially packaged before it is sent across the network. Again, you must design your simulation architecture specifically for this application. Frequently used data should be close to the process that needs it. If the data resides on only one processor (or machine in a cluster, as the case may be), you will deal with a high cost in accessing that data from any processor or machine to which the data is not local.
If you are dealing with a simulation that has high internal messaging and relatively little computational work, you are actually better off using fewer processors/machines. Of course the optimal amount depends on the application, so your milage may vary. And, of course, none of this means squat if you don't plan for spreading the work and localizing messaging and hope everything will be taken care of automatically.
Will Disney know no shame? It's obviously a publicity stunt for their newest animated flick.
Quite right. My father is a high school art teacher and has done a project like this every year as far back as I can remember. About 25 students get a sheet of paper (I don't remember how large, but close to 8 1/2 x 11) and create their art on it. He then attatches all of the pieces together into one rather large picture.
Eh... so what if its off topic. It was related to the post that I was replying to. The poster had an email address at Big Idea productions. Hence the VegiTales. Its amazing how seriously people take slashdot. Relax
I just wonder what it would look like if you passed Monet's Water Lillies through the VanGogh filter. An approximation of an impression of an impressionist's painting. Figure out the logistics of that one.
Do you think that there is a net economic benefit from allowing IBM to patent this algorithm?
IBM? Maybe not. Sprint, Ameritech, Nokia, Motorola? Absolutely. Voice compression, believe it or not, is not just used in recording audio files for our listening pleasure. It is also used in voice communications. That cell phone of yours doesn't sound slightly warbly from time to time because its a fashionable thing to do. That's the voice compression that you're hearing (that and losing voice packets). So yes, AT&T definately has something to gain by patenting everything and anything related to voice communication.
Ever wonder why Qualcomm is still around? They pretty much own CDMA and are living (largely) off of the profits that patent licensing provides them.
But the GOOD traffic can find them? How the hell does this thing know the difference?
As someone else kindly pointed out, this is the same as frequency hopping in radio communications. You change frequency so often that an observing third party can't pick out the whole conversation. In fact (in the radio world), your communications pretty much just look like noise. This requires a fast processor, though, to implement properly.
Now, I admit, I haven't read the article, so this is a mostly uninformed point of view. However, if they plan to implement it anything like frequency hopping, I'm betting that the idea here is that this is for communication between two hosts that are aware of each other. They agree upon some IP hopping pattern at the beginning of the communication or even before the communication begins or figure out what the pattern is based on some set of acceptable patterns or, well, you get the idea. From that point on, the receiver listens for communications at the IPs that fall in the agreed-upon pattern. Whala, you are suddenly able to pick out the GOOD traffic. In order for it to be really secure, you need to be using IP hopping in both directions.
When I was in my second year at university, a friend of mine stole my program off of my machine and turned it in as his. He went to all sorts of lengths to change the program so that the prof wouldn't know that he copied it. He even went so far as to accidentally change the working bits of the program! His copy didn't even work! Of course I didn't find out about this untill our programs were handed back. He admitted that he had copied the code without my knowledge and took the sole hit on the matter. Nothing really major happened to him. The worst part was that the professor was very suspicious of me for the remainder of my time in her class. I got an A, he even got out with a C. Doesn't seem fair.
If you can get DirectX ported well to Linux (and Mac OS X), then there is a decent percentage of the gaming public that becomes dependant on an available version of DirectX. When MS releases a new version of DirectX (or a secret hidden version, whatever), most companies will be compatible with older ones rather than losing a chunk of sales.
That would be an ideal solution if it weren't for the fact that gamers are now used to needing to upgrade to the latest version of DirectX every time they buy a new game. Game companies have no problem requiring this upgrade because they know that much of the gaming market is driven by whomever can release the first game with some bleeding-edge feature. Besides, if the project meetings for games in the design/coding stage are anything like the project meetings that I have at my work, these games probably suffer from near-terminal feature-creep. I would be surprised if any manager would accept old technology.
Add on top of that the rate at which Microsoft releases new versions of DirectX (which they've actually slowed down recently!) and you have about one year to produce a fully functional DirectX API for *nix.
Then you should have no problem with cloning for gestation or cloning for slavery, as long as the clone isn't harmed and has a chance to know God, right? QED
... life begins ... [at] some stage in between when the brain has grown to the point that it can support the impulses of thought you call a soul ... [and when] a child realises its own existance, which I'm sad to say isn't until they've been out of the womb for several years.
Wow. How did you possibly get that out of my comment? You seem to have some serious issues with Christians. I'm not going to even begin to claim that there aren't any bad Christians out there. Being a Christian and living like a Christian are two totally different animals. I'm sure that there have been many a monster that believed in Christ, or at least believed that he believed in Christ, yet didn't live his life as a Christian. Christians are sinners too.
As for clones for slavery, I wouldn't want anyone to be a slave regardless of how they came into this world! There are a whole lot of things that I wouldn't want clones used for, I guess that I didn't feel like I needed to cover every crime against humanity in my previous comment and say that they also applied to clones.
Your god laid out ten simple rules to live by, and as much as you'd like to, you can't easily adapt them to the science of cloning as long as it doesn't harm the fetus.
Yup, God did do that. In fact, one of those ten simple rules to live by is Thou shalt not kill. I think that applies. You've got to remember, the problem that I have here is creating a clone and then killing it (whether that's in the process of organ harvesting or whatever). I don't want to even begin debating creating a clone of a whole person because you're right, I don't know what God thinks about this.
Ah, I see the root of our disagreement. I do believe that life does begin at conception. If you've been around new borns much, you would begin to appreciate that yes, these are very much people. Being able to express self-awareness is not a pre-requisite for being alive or for being a person. Are you telling me that a three year old isn't alive? That's several years after they've been out of the womb.
People like to hate homosexuals and unwed mothers
That's funny, some of my best friends are homosexuals. I haven't known that many unwed mothers, but I'm sure that they are wonderfull people too. God told us to hate the sin but love the sinner. If you were to hate everyone who was a sinner I'm sorry to say that you wouldn't be able to love anyone but God himself. Everyone sins. I sin. The pope sins. Martin Luther sinned. Adam and Eve sinned. But good news! Christ died so that our sins would be forgiven! And he taught us to forgive and forget. Oh, and to not judge others. So who am I to criticize others for the way they live their lives? Besides, what on Earth do homosexuals and unwed mothers have to do with the act of cloning?
The most common complaint that I've heard expressed against Christians is that we're not very tolerant. I'd like to think that I'm a fairly open minded individual. I've shared my views with you in as pollite a manner as possible. I had hoped that I would receive the same courtesy from you in response.
Ok, I haven't seen it, so I'm going to post it in here. I'll even put in the requisit "You probably won't agree with me so you will most likely mod me down" comment that almost ensures that this comment will get modded up just so that people can say they support free expression of opinions even if they differ from their own.
Why, from a Christian point of view, cloning is bad. Creating another person, whether that be through good old fashion sex or by fertilizing an egg with existing DNA, is still creating just that; a person. My problem with cloning is the same as my problem with abortion. If you create this person, and then "terminate" them, or whatever other euphamism you choose, you are commiting murder. The method that is taken here is still a conception. Christianity teaches us that a person is a person from the point of conception on (no, I can't site you passages from the Bible on that, but I will look if you ask nicely). If you create a clone, or a cloned heart, or a cloned body minus the brain, through a method of conception (i.e. fertilizing an egg), you are still creating a person.
What I don't have a problem with, and other Christians may disagree with me on this, is generating a new organ from an existing one. Take tissue from a heart and generate a new heart from it. Cool. So long as we do it without conceiving a clone.
Where does this take us with a brain? I'm going to be honest here; I don't know. I honestly don't believe that I am my brain. If I lose my brain, then I lose all ability for me to express myself through my body. By my soul is still there.
Even if you choose to ignore the Christian point of view, or disagree with it (God gave us free will after all): Has anyone else ever seen Gattica? Blade Runner? Any of the number of other clones-are-scum centric movies or books? Egad man. That's some scary stuff.
Movies have been doing this for years. Some do it cleverly so that you see the product but don't feel as though you just saw an advertisement for said product. "Oh, look at the computer that guy is using. Aw, that's a cute i-mac" They rely on the subconscious connection that you make between product and super-duper-computing-power. "Hey, if a mac was good enough for Sandra Bullock, its good enough for me."
Then there are the not-so-clever advertisments in movies. Anyone here see Inspector Gadget? Wow. Blatant ad placement. Skittles, Coke, McDonalds, etc. All in the car. How sad.
Then, you also have games that have done this as far back (perhaps further) as the original 8bit Nintendo. Anyone remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Every other picture in the game was an ad for Pizza Hut. That was too much. Why was there that much advertising for one company all on the same wall. There were other ways that the ads could have been worked in that wouldn't have been quite so anoying. I wouldn't have thought twice about it if I had seen coke machines in Shogo. But I did stop and take an extra look at them simply becuause they weren't Coke (or Pepsi, but mainly because they weren't Coke). I think that right there speaks to the level of penetration these products have in our lives.
I believe that SGI's objection holds fair ground. They are not objecting (so far as I can tell) to the word Open, but rather the way in which that word is used. Products with a name of the format Open[2 letters] seems too similar to OpenGL.
Actually, yet. I do believe that the CEO, Chief Engineer, Software Engineer, Hardware Engineer, and Sanitation Engineer care whether or not some joe blow starts up a project with the name Open or GL in it. Especially if that project is exceptionally sucky or exceptionally wonderful. If SGI allows projects with like names, they risk becoming associated with those like-named projects. Or, even worse, SGIs products could become associated with the like-named projects. SGI wants you to know that if you are using an OpenGL application, you're using SGI technology. They also want you to know that OpenAL has nothing to do with SGI. Because it is fairly widely known that SGI designed OpenGL, many will assume that anything named similarly must also be made by SGI. I know that I did the first time that I heard of OpenAL.
SGI is fighting over Brand recognition. They wouldn't have had this problem if they had continuously marketed their products as "SGI OpenGL" or "SGI OpenMP". That would ensure that their name is tied with the product at all times.
Look at what happened to Bayer with Asprin. No, Asprin isn't the name of the drug. It was a product name that Bayer used. Over time, though, people forgot that Asprin was made by Bayer, and so refered to all asprin-like products as Asprin. Yeah, it's a little different, but many of the concepts are the same. The tech industry isn't imune from it. For years people would say "I've got an IBM computer" or "I've got an Apple computer" when what they really meant was "I've got a TDK IBM compatible computer" or "I've got a Laser Apple compatible computer.
I seem to recall this exact same phenomenon about three to four years ago as the first 3D accelerator cards and accelerated games were coming. You basically had to own a 3DFX board in order to play anything accelerated. In fact, I believe that there was even an episode of Wing Commander that relied exclusively on 3DFX/Glide. You couldn't play it unless you had one of these amazing cards.
People at the time were shocked that games were going to start requiring the use of an accelerator board in the near future. They were angry because 3DFX was pretty much the only option on the block. Yes, there were competitors, but how many of us actually bought an S3Virge? Well, where is 3DFX now? They aren't making boards any more. Yeah, they've been gobbled up by NVidia, but the point is they lost what had seemed to be their market and their market alone for over two years.
Well, the same thing is happening now with NVidia. I don't know how long they are going to be around. Maybe they'll be able to stick with the market, but then again, maybe they won't. Only time will tell. I'm just glad that I'm going to be around for the ride. And what a ride it looks to be!
Now here's a question for you all that I really don't know the answer to. Acording to the GPL, it breaks the license to link any non-GPLd code to any GPLd library. But what about libc? Using that same argument everything that is linked agains libc (99% of the software that I use is) would then need to be open sourced and GPLd. I know that this doesn't always happen, though. Is this a violation? Is it a violation for any non-GPLd software to exist on a Linux boxen? Is libc even GPLd? Someone, please shed some light on this for me.
Actually, it really isn't (or shouldn't be) that difficult to check for dependencies. What are the dependencies of a software program? 99% of the time, with what I use, its libraries or other binaries. Now, for 4 years of my career as a software developer, I worked on a project where I created an installer for various pieces of internet related software using InstallShield. I saw numerous versions of InstallShield come and go, but the one thing that remained constant was the need to check for libraries. You can check for libraries rather easily on a unix system. Take a peak at LD_LIBRARY_PATH, (or any of its derivatives) and whala! You've got the search path for any library. Look at PATH, and you know where to look for any binaries on a system that mater. If they're not in the search path, then require the user to direct you to them.
Now, I said that this shouldn't be too difficult to do. But that's not the case, now then is it? Ok, so we've got these libraries. Cool. We know where the binaries are, right? Yup, but what version are they? Ok, while there are some version numbers built into the names of the libraries (you may have to look at some symbolic links, but nothing too difficult), but what about programs? How do we have any idea what version they are?
I'm sad to say that Microsoft solved this problem a long time ago by allowing the integration of version information into the string tables of its executables and libraries. This is the standard way of handling things. Now, sure, you could do the same thing in Unix, but nobody does. Or at least nobody with any influence. Now, sure, you can query a binary for its version information, but which flag is it again? --version, right? Or is it -version? Err.. -V, no, that's not right. -v. Crap, that's 'verbose'. Well, which is it?
The sad truth is that this just isn't feasible right now. Its going to take a lot more than a project with good intentions to get people to start putting version information into their binaries, and even when they do, there's whole lot of people out there that have old binaries and will see absolutely no need to purchase an update to their OS (yup, some people buy their Unix, like Irix, Solaris, etc.) just to get version information put into their binaries. Its going to take even more than a good idea to get companies like Sun and SGI to recompile all of their code and change all of their Makefiles just to take advantage of these new whiz-bang version features.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think that the ability to maintain "packages" without the need of a database would be wonderful. I've dealt with my fair share of RPM headaches caused by taking the rode less traveled and compiling things from scratch. But I think that before we develop a new packaging system, there are other more important problems that need to be addressed first. Attack the problem at the root, don't go for the branches or you'll never win any ground.
Based on an article that I read a couple of years ago (and nothing else, as I have no background in physics, let alone quantum phyisics) the principle of teleportation revolves around twining particles. When you have two particles, A and B, and you twine B around A, B becomes an exact opposite of A. If you them twine a third particle C around B, it becomes an exact opposite of B, hense an exact duplicate of A. In the process, though (and this is the way that I remember it, not necessarily the way it really is), A and B are effectively destroyed, leaving you only with C. By effectively destroyed, I'm assuming that they lose whatever properties they had that made them distinctly A or distinctly B. The big plus point here is that it apparently doesn't matter how far appart B and C are from each other. They could be a few feet or a few light years (though I immagine there would be problems being a few light years away).
However, the researcher interviewed in this article noted that he immagined that transporting a person by this means would be a bit like being ripped appart one particle at a time. Not the way I would want to start my vacation!
So, by inference here, I'm assuming that when the above poster said that the original would be destroyed, I don't think he meant destroyed in the sense that you destroy a rabid dog, but rather, the original would effectively disipate. Of course this all brings up the philisophical question of "am I made up of more than a bunch of random synaptic firings organized and chained in such a way as to give me personality and self?" to which I can answer a resounding and joyfull "Yes". But hey, that's the fun of Christianity.
Oh, for more on the idea of knowing that you are a copy (an idea put forth in the recent Swartzegnager [what kind of sick person gives their kid a name that hard to spell?] flick "the Sixth Day") check out the Orson Scott Card short story "Fat Farm". I think that its in the Cruel Miricles collection. There was a hardback copy of all those books put together, but I don't think its in print. I don't think the smaller books are either.