But is this linking or including? I mean, yes a link tells the browser where to find the information BUT the HTML/Javascript code does also include it into the page. If all that visible for the link is a button or link and a title then in what way does it constitute republishing the original content. The user must click on the link to access the original content.
On many browsers PDF used to be something that you had to download to view. Not any more. Likewise on some browsers you can mouse over a link and see a preview of the page. IN the very early days of hyperlinking (things akin to lynx) images were not embedded but were downloadable.
As browsers move into the future more and more things that were "downloads" become embedds. this happens without the HTML changing. it's the browsers that are changing.
thus you can't really draw the line you want to draw so clearly.
I already anticipated your response in a post further down the page. Se there for more discussion. But to offer a quick example to show why the line between "linking" and "hosting" is not so clear consider the following.
someone takes a copyright image and XORs it with random data taken from some publicly avalaible list of random numbers. If they host this image it's not violating any copyright. it's just a random piece of crap.
now some third party links to both this image and to the random number key. IS that publishing? not yet you say? okay, suppose they include some javascript or some future HTML 9.0 tag that xors the images together to recreate the copyright image. Surely that is publishing?
But it's just links. THe data all was hosted elsewhere and not hosted in a form that constituted any infringement. The infringing information was the knowledge of how to combine the two images and that was all in the links.
Anticipating the comeback to my post above.... one might try to argue "the linker to hosted material is not the publisher. the publisher is the person hosting the material".
I'd agree in large measure but one can intentionally muddy this a bit. consider the following thought experiment.
I divide a movie into a million single pixel movies. Byt themselves none of these single pixel movies is an "image" it's just a time series of color. Now I host these on 1 million different web sites.
I then create a page linking to all million of these websites and geometrically arranging the pixels into a rectangle.
when you load this page, you see a movie mad up from links.
did the important information here reside in any one of the hosted 1 pixel movies or in the knowledge of how to re-assemble them?
if you again say, in the hosted 1-pixel movies. then I'll instead link to static color pixles and have a javascript that keeps changing which color patch a given pixel points too. now the hosted color patches clearly are not publishing anything copyrighted. it's just a pixel of color, not a time series. it's the javascript that is chinging these in time and posiution to make a movie.
where does the important info now lie? is it the linking that is publishing or the hosting sites.
I hope you can perceive the analogy to bit torrent. A torrent file contains a lot of information about where to find the slices of movie. But it's just links to other places hosting data. None of the hosts is hosting a full movie, just slices. The slices would be useless without info about how to they go together and where to find missing ones.
so is the torrent tracker hosting the movie or the peer/seeds?
I'd say the line is grey where you move from the tracker links being the critical info to the peers data files.
It might seem obvious that linking is not publishing. But wait. Let's think about this more clearly for a second. Is the page you are looking at one monolithic published chunk of text? No, it's many auto-expanded links. Did the images show up as links to images or did your browser go and fetch those images and display them.
Thus a person can create a set of links that display art works or copyrighted images from other sites simply by placing links in his documents.
likewise one can have kinds of links or scripts that auto-expand to place text, movies and audio into other images.
Now let's reconnect this to the bit torrent case. Bit torrent is a transport protocol. it moves a document from one place to another. So is for example quicktime or flash. they transport video. they also display video.
SO If I created a browser plugin that transported a movie and displayed it would I have published that video? Does it matter that the transport was flash or bit torrent. Does it matter that transport layer (bit torrent or http) does not actual do presentation (quicktime or flash)?
No the ONLY, ONLY ONLY thing missing here is a browser plugin that combines the two steps of bit torrent and video display. That's the oninon skin difference between a simple pointer and an active publication. Eventually someone will write that plug in. indeed I believe they exist already. But to give an example: it used to be that pdf documents did not display in a browser but had to be presented just as links. Now they display. These things happen.
Linking can be publishing because all web pages short of just plain text are inherently are a bunch of links that assemble their content.
Thus actually, it's naive to think that linking is NOT publishing.
THe thing that makes me think Java has a huge path forward is groovy.
in theory groovy has all the advantage python has and more. Plus unlike python it has a path forward to a statically typed quasi compiled and generally close-to-c speed when you need it without much effort.
the altair 8800 ran on an 8080 and you programmed it in octal.
Of course it was not octal. it was binary. there were 16 switches across the front.
these days most people represent binary numbers as hex. Ever wonder why Octal used to be so much more popular? when you write octal numbers they are really inconvenient so why use them?
Well the answer is, if you are keying in binary number in one switch at a time you can do it lightning fast in octal but not in hex.
with octal you use your middle, index and ring fingers and you can whip the switches up an down. While you do have four fingers you can't easily use all four fingers to slap the switches
try it, your fingers are not equally long, and it's hard to retract your fingers in all 16 possible positions.
octal is easy.
So you programmed altairs in octal.
the altair I used did not even have a boot loader. you just toggled in the binary to enter the boot loader then once you had that in you could read the casstte which had a longer more sphisticated boot loader. which then read in BASIC.
there was no OS. if you wanted an OS, you wrote it in basic as you needed it.
to enter the program into memory the altair used an interesting trick. the front panel switches could set the address counter to an address, which could then be incremented. You put the computer into a wait state to enter the data to be written to the memory, then advanced the address counter.
by the way the 6502 was a much better processor with a simpler but more sophisticated instruction set.
one reason I think the 8080/Z80-series beat the 6502 was an early version of the megahertz myth. The 4mhz base clock rate of the z80 was faster than the 6502's base clock rate of 1Mhz. But the z80 used 4 clock cycles and a few wait states for most instructions. the 6502 complete nearly every instruction in one instruction.
if only the altair had been 6502 based.
(the 6502 came out later in time of course, so it's understandable.. and there was a 6800-series version of the altair that never caught on).
While 3D seems like a simple enough concept, faking 3D on a screen can go several different routes.
the kind you have in theaters or with shutter glasses approximates supplying each eye with a different image just like it would in real life. So what's the catch? well you get the same two images no matter where you sit in the theater. So 1) it can't be perfectly correct for every point of view in the theater 2) you don't see the expected change if you move. that is if you move you'd expect to be able to see around one object blocking your view of another. but that does not happen with this kind of 3D.
then there are ones that try to broadcast a different image at every different angle. You can't really do that in practice so you broadcast one or two images at a couple angles and let interpolation happen.
lenticular lenses and these blocked screen do this second type.
this recovers the head-motion 3d but has the drawback of having less of a sweet spot where each eye gets the perfectly registered image. However even when this fails, it can fall back to monocular 3D where at least the view point is right.
this kind of 3d is better for up close viewing by a single person. that is, for a hand controller.
A final kind of 3D is monocular 3D. there there is one image but you eye track or tilt track in a way that lets you update the image for the new point of view.
IN objective-C methods are not bound at compile time. When you call a method the compiler does not use a pointer or even a derefeneced pointer. instead it passes a message to an object. the object then intereprets how to handle the message-- usually by finding a method with the same name and polymorphism as the call. But the object is free to interpret it differently.
Moreover the object is actually free not to even respond to a call! (try that in C++). if it does not it will send a message to the exception handler instead.
Objects are dynamically linked at run time, not compile time.
You can dynamically add methods to an object at run time.
and you can even send messages to objects the running program does not own.
thus it really is like socket programming and sending mes
How does this actually work? does the mainland china google just have links to the hong kong web site? which when you go there then has links to banned content?
Or what exactly?
I was under the impression the great firewall of china did not have it's barn door open. e.g. if the Falun Gong or Uhgers had a Hong kong web page would it be visible all over china?
I've always thought that both data flow languages and fortran95 had some innovations for multi-core programming worthy of being copied.
Data flow languages such as "G" which is sold as national instruments "labview" brand are intrinsically parallel at many levels. What they do is look at a function call as a list of unsatisfied inputs. These inputs are waiting for the data to arrive to make the variables valid. Then the subroutine fires. Thus every single function is potenitally a parallel process. it's just waiting on it's data. If you program in a serial fashion then of course those functions get called serially. But with graphic programming in 2D, you almost never are programming serially. You are just wiring outputs of other functions to inputs of others. Serial dependencies do arise but these are asynchronous and localized cliques. everything else is parallel. Yet you never ever ever actually write parallel code. it just happens automatically. Perl data language had a glimpse of this but it's not the same thing since the language is still perl and thus not parallel.
Objective-C with it's "message passing" abstraction is perhaps getting closer to the idea of a data flow. While one might complain that well objective-C message passing is just a different sugar coating of C just like C++ is. This would be true from the user's point of view. But it's not as true from the Operating system's point of view. IN OSX, these messages are passing more like actual socket programming at the kernel level. So there's more to objective C on apple's than meets the eye. But I don't know how far you can push that abstraction.
In fortran there are some rather simple but powerful multi-processor optimizations. First there's loops like "forall" that designate that a loop can be done in any order of the loop index and even in parallel. and then there's vectorized statements as part of the language like matrix multiplies. those are rather simple things so don't solve much but they do show that you can put a lot of compiler hinting into the language itself without re-inventing the language.
The air to water transition is a huge impedance change. so most sound will be reflected not transmitted into the water. Second Since they are talking about 18% of the absorbed energy being converted and not 18% of the incident energy, even once it gets into the water most of the incident energy is probably reflected or absorbed in the water itself.
Unless they have already taken these into account it seems like the conversion rate of air acoustic energy to hydrogen energy must be in the fraction of a percent. Even so free is free, and some forms of vibration like car vibrations might be coupled in without going through the air.
His whole point was not "this is how you should do it", it was "you could do this, and because you could do this it shows that it's theoretically possible". This is a variant of what is know as a gedanken experiment-- an argument that proves or disproves some fact is true while not actually being somethign you would want to carry out. For example, you could suppose that you could measure the force field is under by running a pole from the earth to the moon and pushing slightly on it. Not that you want to do this, but it shows that measuring that force field is possible at all. Now you need to figure out an easy way to do that.
f2py is a match made in heaven. Fortran 77 is a very fast and very simple memory model. it's hard to make typographic errors in fortran that will execute (e.g. no == ). and it compiles lightning fast.
but fortran 77 sucks for expression of complex ideas that python excels at.
I often have python write fortran code on the fly, compile it and execute it.
The first anti lock breaks were developed for air planes. My brother worked on those. My original comment was not a screed against technology. My dad had many innovations in air plane design. I'm just saying that he was a walking encyclopedia of examples of how even when you think you have thought of everything you haven't. Since it's harder to validate computers than physical systems it should make you think twice.
Derek, as you might have noticed I was keeping it short on the comet disaster. But to expand. yes of course metal fatigue as a phenomena was known before the Comet disaster. What my Dad told me was they learned that they did not know about how to design for it yet. They did not have any computer modeling to know what flight stress really did to winds and to metal. they hardly had any way to measure material strength changes in-place. The people who built the Comet we no dummies so clearly they discovered a scaling issue in metal no one had encountered before nor new how to design for at that time. The point I was making was that just because you can't foresee a problem in something new does not mean you cant anticipate there might be problems you can't foresee. The switch to composites opened up the same sort of issues that the comet did.
I'm loving this conversation here because I've gotten crucified in slashdot before for making simmilar comments to the whole thread here. I grew up in a family of top managers of Boeing systems engineers. They hated computers. My dad never even learned how to turn one on. He hired other monkey to use the computers. As A child I was regailed with wonderful stories of every hard lesson in safety my dad had learned over his lifetime. He loved world war II because they got to use cutting edge designs for balls out performance yet at the same time learned how to make things reliable by disecting the accident. He would tell me about the accident that taught them that the engine pumps need to be at full speed but flow stalled on take off so that there's no lag when you hot swap after a pump fails. He told me of the accident where they learned not to route 100% of the control system wiring through any one junction box. etc...
Probably because of all these hard won lessons boeing for years insisted on fully mechanical or hydraulic flight surface controls. Whereas Airbus and other jumped on the fly-by-wire concept early. My dad would spit after hearing some youg person tout all the advantages of fly by wire. He knew them perfectly well. He was big on accepting new innovations to reduce fuel costs and increas performance. He was not a luddite. But he had a safety background that told him these electonic systems were hard as hell to validate and hard as hell to make truly independent from each other.
For example they often used triple redundant computers and if one of them disagreed the other two would vote it off the island and stop listening to it. From what I've read it's now suspected that the latest airbus crash in the pacific had one of it's root problem in the voting nexus where a superior computer over ruled a more primitive safety system.
While we all know that computer software validation is hard if not impossible. It's not something we readily admit here on slash dot. It's because for years people like my dad would throttle the innovations the computer engineeers wanted to implement. I think as a result there became this culture of computer engineers that presented the case that embedded computing could be made safer than it really could be to offset that.
So now we come full circle and have to admit there is this middle ground. Just because a computer can improve perfromance does not mean it's reliable and safe. The old guys had a point after all when it came to safety.
Next week I'll tell you about how the ancient shocking lesson of the British Commet aluminum aircraft wings falling off led to the unanticipated discovery of metal fatigue and probably was the reason Boeing was slow to move to composite materials in commercial aircraft (but not in military aircraft). In hind sight we have heard of many tales of the composite tails of plane falling off as the reason for the loss of control before a crash. Conversely, composite wings on UAVs allow them to absorb a lot of bullet holes with no loss of control and to operate under higher perfromance conditions.
The point is that safety and performance are trade offs when both are pushed to the limit. The old guys know a lot more about safety than you might expect. The young guys are all about performance.
Even a perfectly neutral ISP rightly should have a love hate relationship with bit torrent. Bit torrent can be a good thing if most of the peers are local connections. And they espeically should like peer groups that dont' exit or enter their network.
And if an ISP were really savvy about the network topology they could strategically place their own seeds to create local peering groups. But they could not do that without having a way to track the torrent topology on their network.
So maybe they are good people that are looking at this as a way to optmize local torrent networks for everyone's benefit including their own?
However that reasoning assumes that with or without bit torrent the same amount of data transfers would be made. Local bit torrents thus are beneficial. But if you take the assumption that without bit torrent not as many data transfers would be made, but people would still be willing to pay the same for their service, then the ISP would love to squish bit torrent completely.
Moreover if they have content to sell then any bit torrent use is competition for the bandwidht they want to sell high QOS content over (including voip content).
IN Leopard Apple went from ipfw to an application firewall. But ipfw is still there and can be run. you can configure ipfw to limit the bandwidth to specific IP addresses. Your problem is exactly what this is for.
Slashdot Mirror
But is this linking or including? I mean, yes a link tells the browser where to find the information BUT the HTML/Javascript code does also include it into the page. If all that visible for the link is a button or link and a title then in what way does it constitute republishing the original content. The user must click on the link to access the original content.
On many browsers PDF used to be something that you had to download to view. Not any more. Likewise on some browsers you can mouse over a link and see a preview of the page. IN the very early days of hyperlinking (things akin to lynx) images were not embedded but were downloadable.
As browsers move into the future more and more things that were "downloads" become embedds. this happens without the HTML changing. it's the browsers that are changing.
thus you can't really draw the line you want to draw so clearly.
I already anticipated your response in a post further down the page. Se there for more discussion. But to offer a quick example to show why the line between "linking" and "hosting" is not so clear consider the following.
someone takes a copyright image and XORs it with random data taken from some publicly avalaible list of random numbers. If they host this image it's not violating any copyright. it's just a random piece of crap.
now some third party links to both this image and to the random number key. IS that publishing? not yet you say? okay, suppose they include some javascript or some future HTML 9.0 tag that xors the images together to recreate the copyright image. Surely that is publishing?
But it's just links. THe data all was hosted elsewhere and not hosted in a form that constituted any infringement. The infringing information was the knowledge of how to combine the two images and that was all in the links.
see my other post for more discussion.
Anticipating the comeback to my post above....
one might try to argue "the linker to hosted material is not the publisher. the publisher is the person hosting the material".
I'd agree in large measure but one can intentionally muddy this a bit. consider the following thought experiment.
I divide a movie into a million single pixel movies. Byt themselves none of these single pixel movies is an "image" it's just a time series of color. Now I host these on 1 million different web sites.
I then create a page linking to all million of these websites and geometrically arranging the pixels into a rectangle.
when you load this page, you see a movie mad up from links.
did the important information here reside in any one of the hosted 1 pixel movies or in the knowledge of how to re-assemble them?
if you again say, in the hosted 1-pixel movies. then I'll instead link to static color pixles and have a javascript that keeps changing which color patch a given pixel points too. now the hosted color patches clearly are not publishing anything copyrighted. it's just a pixel of color, not a time series. it's the javascript that is chinging these in time and posiution to make a movie.
where does the important info now lie? is it the linking that is publishing or the hosting sites.
I hope you can perceive the analogy to bit torrent. A torrent file contains a lot of information about where to find the slices of movie. But it's just links to other places hosting data. None of the hosts is hosting a full movie, just slices. The slices would be useless without info about how to they go together and where to find missing ones.
so is the torrent tracker hosting the movie or the peer/seeds?
I'd say the line is grey where you move from the tracker links being the critical info to the peers data files.
publishing can be linking.
It might seem obvious that linking is not publishing. But wait. Let's think about this more clearly for a second. Is the page you are looking at one monolithic published chunk of text? No, it's many auto-expanded links. Did the images show up as links to images or did your browser go and fetch those images and display them.
Thus a person can create a set of links that display art works or copyrighted images from other sites simply by placing links in his documents.
likewise one can have kinds of links or scripts that auto-expand to place text, movies and audio into other images.
Now let's reconnect this to the bit torrent case. Bit torrent is a transport protocol. it moves a document from one place to another. So is for example quicktime or flash. they transport video. they also display video.
SO If I created a browser plugin that transported a movie and displayed it would I have published that video? Does it matter that the transport was flash or bit torrent. Does it matter that transport layer (bit torrent or http) does not actual do presentation (quicktime or flash)?
No the ONLY, ONLY ONLY thing missing here is a browser plugin that combines the two steps of bit torrent and video display. That's the oninon skin difference between a simple pointer and an active publication. Eventually someone will write that plug in. indeed I believe they exist already. But to give an example: it used to be that pdf documents did not display in a browser but had to be presented just as links. Now they display. These things happen.
Linking can be publishing because all web pages short of just plain text are inherently are a bunch of links that assemble their content.
Thus actually, it's naive to think that linking is NOT publishing.
1) get a good test like this one on biscuit topology
2) and learn a major turing complete programing language preferred by mathematicians use
THe thing that makes me think Java has a huge path forward is groovy.
in theory groovy has all the advantage python has and more. Plus unlike python it has a path forward to a statically typed quasi compiled and generally close-to-c speed when you need it without much effort.
the altair 8800 ran on an 8080 and you programmed it in octal.
Of course it was not octal. it was binary. there were 16 switches across the front.
these days most people represent binary numbers as hex. Ever wonder why Octal used to be so much more popular? when you write octal numbers they are really inconvenient so why use them?
Well the answer is, if you are keying in binary number in one switch at a time you can do it lightning fast in octal but not in hex.
with octal you use your middle, index and ring fingers and you can whip the switches up an down. While you do have four fingers you can't easily use all four fingers to slap the switches
try it, your fingers are not equally long, and it's hard to retract your fingers in all 16 possible positions.
octal is easy.
So you programmed altairs in octal.
the altair I used did not even have a boot loader. you just toggled in the binary to enter the boot loader then once you had that in you could read the casstte which had a longer more sphisticated boot loader. which then read in BASIC.
there was no OS. if you wanted an OS, you wrote it in basic as you needed it.
to enter the program into memory the altair used an interesting trick. the front panel switches could set the address counter to an address, which could then be incremented. You put the computer into a wait state to enter the data to be written to the memory, then advanced the address counter.
by the way the 6502 was a much better processor with a simpler but more sophisticated instruction set.
one reason I think the 8080/Z80-series beat the 6502 was an early version of the megahertz myth. The 4mhz base clock rate of the z80 was faster than the 6502's base clock rate of 1Mhz. But the z80 used 4 clock cycles and a few wait states for most instructions. the 6502 complete nearly every instruction in one instruction.
if only the altair had been 6502 based.
(the 6502 came out later in time of course, so it's understandable.. and there was a 6800-series version of the altair that never caught on).
While 3D seems like a simple enough concept, faking 3D on a screen can go several different routes.
the kind you have in theaters or with shutter glasses approximates supplying each eye with a different image just like it would in real life. So what's the catch? well you get the same two images no matter where you sit in the theater. So 1) it can't be perfectly correct for every point of view in the theater 2) you don't see the expected change if you move. that is if you move you'd expect to be able to see around one object blocking your view of another. but that does not happen with this kind of 3D.
then there are ones that try to broadcast a different image at every different angle. You can't really do that in practice so you broadcast one or two images at a couple angles and let interpolation happen.
lenticular lenses and these blocked screen do this second type.
this recovers the head-motion 3d but has the drawback of having less of a sweet spot where each eye gets the perfectly registered image. However even when this fails, it can fall back to monocular 3D where at least the view point is right.
this kind of 3d is better for up close viewing by a single person. that is, for a hand controller.
A final kind of 3D is monocular 3D. there there is one image but you eye track or tilt track in a way that lets you update the image for the new point of view.
If it's a hoax then why is Orange Micro is partnering with Pystar to bring out a Mac OSX emulation cartridge?
I did say "like" not "was" socket programming.
IN objective-C methods are not bound at compile time. When you call a method the compiler does not use a pointer or even a derefeneced pointer. instead it passes a message to an object. the object then intereprets how to handle the message-- usually by finding a method with the same name and polymorphism as the call. But the object is free to interpret it differently.
Moreover the object is actually free not to even respond to a call! (try that in C++). if it does not it will send a message to the exception handler instead.
Objects are dynamically linked at run time, not compile time.
You can dynamically add methods to an object at run time.
and you can even send messages to objects the running program does not own.
thus it really is like socket programming and sending mes
How does this actually work? does the mainland china google just have links to the hong kong web site? which when you go there then has links to banned content?
Or what exactly?
I was under the impression the great firewall of china did not have it's barn door open. e.g. if the Falun Gong or Uhgers had a Hong kong web page would it be visible all over china?
I've always thought that both data flow languages and fortran95 had some innovations for multi-core programming worthy of being copied.
Data flow languages such as "G" which is sold as national instruments "labview" brand are intrinsically parallel at many levels. What they do is look at a function call as a list of unsatisfied inputs. These inputs are waiting for the data to arrive to make the variables valid. Then the subroutine fires. Thus every single function is potenitally a parallel process. it's just waiting on it's data. If you program in a serial fashion then of course those functions get called serially. But with graphic programming in 2D, you almost never are programming serially. You are just wiring outputs of other functions to inputs of others. Serial dependencies do arise but these are asynchronous and localized cliques. everything else is parallel. Yet you never ever ever actually write parallel code. it just happens automatically. Perl data language had a glimpse of this but it's not the same thing since the language is still perl and thus not parallel.
Objective-C with it's "message passing" abstraction is perhaps getting closer to the idea of a data flow. While one might complain that well objective-C message passing is just a different sugar coating of C just like C++ is. This would be true from the user's point of view. But it's not as true from the Operating system's point of view. IN OSX, these messages are passing more like actual socket programming at the kernel level. So there's more to objective C on apple's than meets the eye. But I don't know how far you can push that abstraction.
In fortran there are some rather simple but powerful multi-processor optimizations. First there's loops like "forall" that designate that a loop can be done in any order of the loop index and even in parallel. and then there's vectorized statements as part of the language like matrix multiplies. those are rather simple things so don't solve much but they do show that you can put a lot of compiler hinting into the language itself without re-inventing the language.
The air to water transition is a huge impedance change. so most sound will be reflected not transmitted into the water. Second Since they are talking about 18% of the absorbed energy being converted and not 18% of the incident energy, even once it gets into the water most of the incident energy is probably reflected or absorbed in the water itself.
Unless they have already taken these into account it seems like the conversion rate of air acoustic energy to hydrogen energy must be in the fraction of a percent. Even so free is free, and some forms of vibration like car vibrations might be coupled in without going through the air.
His whole point was not "this is how you should do it", it was "you could do this, and because you could do this it shows that it's theoretically possible". This is a variant of what is know as a gedanken experiment-- an argument that proves or disproves some fact is true while not actually being somethign you would want to carry out. For example, you could suppose that you could measure the force field is under by running a pole from the earth to the moon and pushing slightly on it. Not that you want to do this, but it shows that measuring that force field is possible at all. Now you need to figure out an easy way to do that.
f2py is a match made in heaven. Fortran 77 is a very fast and very simple memory model. it's hard to make typographic errors in fortran that will execute (e.g. no == ). and it compiles lightning fast.
but fortran 77 sucks for expression of complex ideas that python excels at.
I often have python write fortran code on the fly, compile it and execute it.
Python is faster than you think.
huh? it's about 1000x slower than C. and No i'm not exaggerating. Numpy is fast and close to C. Python itself is not.
The first anti lock breaks were developed for air planes. My brother worked on those. My original comment was not a screed against technology. My dad had many innovations in air plane design. I'm just saying that he was a walking encyclopedia of examples of how even when you think you have thought of everything you haven't. Since it's harder to validate computers than physical systems it should make you think twice.
Derek, as you might have noticed I was keeping it short on the comet disaster. But to expand. yes of course metal fatigue as a phenomena was known before the Comet disaster. What my Dad told me was they learned that they did not know about how to design for it yet. They did not have any computer modeling to know what flight stress really did to winds and to metal. they hardly had any way to measure material strength changes in-place. The people who built the Comet we no dummies so clearly they discovered a scaling issue in metal no one had encountered before nor new how to design for at that time. The point I was making was that just because you can't foresee a problem in something new does not mean you cant anticipate there might be problems you can't foresee. The switch to composites opened up the same sort of issues that the comet did.
I'm loving this conversation here because I've gotten crucified in slashdot before for making simmilar comments to the whole thread here. I grew up in a family of top managers of Boeing systems engineers. They hated computers. My dad never even learned how to turn one on. He hired other monkey to use the computers. As A child I was regailed with wonderful stories of every hard lesson in safety my dad had learned over his lifetime. He loved world war II because they got to use cutting edge designs for balls out performance yet at the same time learned how to make things reliable by disecting the accident. He would tell me about the accident that taught them that the engine pumps need to be at full speed but flow stalled on take off so that there's no lag when you hot swap after a pump fails. He told me of the accident where they learned not to route 100% of the control system wiring through any one junction box. etc...
Probably because of all these hard won lessons boeing for years insisted on fully mechanical or hydraulic flight surface controls. Whereas Airbus and other jumped on the fly-by-wire concept early. My dad would spit after hearing some youg person tout all the advantages of fly by wire. He knew them perfectly well. He was big on accepting new innovations to reduce fuel costs and increas performance. He was not a luddite. But he had a safety background that told him these electonic systems were hard as hell to validate and hard as hell to make truly independent from each other.
For example they often used triple redundant computers and if one of them disagreed the other two would vote it off the island and stop listening to it. From what I've read it's now suspected that the latest airbus crash in the pacific had one of it's root problem in the voting nexus where a superior computer over ruled a more primitive safety system.
While we all know that computer software validation is hard if not impossible. It's not something we readily admit here on slash dot. It's because for years people like my dad would throttle the innovations the computer engineeers wanted to implement. I think as a result there became this culture of computer engineers that presented the case that embedded computing could be made safer than it really could be to offset that.
So now we come full circle and have to admit there is this middle ground. Just because a computer can improve perfromance does not mean it's reliable and safe. The old guys had a point after all when it came to safety.
Next week I'll tell you about how the ancient shocking lesson of the British Commet aluminum aircraft wings falling off led to the unanticipated discovery of metal fatigue and probably was the reason Boeing was slow to move to composite materials in commercial aircraft (but not in military aircraft). In hind sight we have heard of many tales of the composite tails of plane falling off as the reason for the loss of control before a crash. Conversely, composite wings on UAVs allow them to absorb a lot of bullet holes with no loss of control and to operate under higher perfromance conditions.
The point is that safety and performance are trade offs when both are pushed to the limit. The old guys know a lot more about safety than you might expect. The young guys are all about performance.
Car? All students should be forced to take the bus so they can read and get smarter.
Even a perfectly neutral ISP rightly should have a love hate relationship with bit torrent. Bit torrent can be a good thing if most of the peers are local connections. And they espeically should like peer groups that dont' exit or enter their network.
And if an ISP were really savvy about the network topology they could strategically place their own seeds to create local peering groups. But they could not do that without having a way to track the torrent topology on their network.
So maybe they are good people that are looking at this as a way to optmize local torrent networks for everyone's benefit including their own?
However that reasoning assumes that with or without bit torrent the same amount of data transfers would be made. Local bit torrents thus are beneficial. But if you take the assumption that without bit torrent not as many data transfers would be made, but people would still be willing to pay the same for their service, then the ISP would love to squish bit torrent completely.
Moreover if they have content to sell then any bit torrent use is competition for the bandwidht they want to sell high QOS content over (including voip content).
interestingly that photography exception has been contested lately. A stamp showing the korean war memorial has been sued for infrigement.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090804/0116455762.shtml
http://www.floridapatentlawyerblog.com/2010/02/photographer-sued-over-photo-o.html
Does the builder or architect own my house? No, but he might own the floor plan to my house. He might not too. it depends on what I paid for.
how to set up ipfw in leopard:
see here and here:
http://www.netmojo.ca/2007/10/31/fixing-leopards-firewall/
http://securosis.com/blog/help-build-the-best-ipfw-firewall-rules-sets-ever
or use the GUI tool wateroof to configure the firewall.
add the rules decribed here:
http://www.macgeekery.com/hacks/software/traffic_shaping_in_mac_os_x
then turn it on at boot like this:
http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2008-May/010337.html
and then turn off the application firewall in system preferences.
IN Leopard Apple went from ipfw to an application firewall. But ipfw is still there and can be run. you can configure ipfw to limit the bandwidth to specific IP addresses. Your problem is exactly what this is for.
http://www.macgeekery.com/hacks/software/traffic_shaping_in_mac_os_x
THere is probably some way to do this with the application firewall too but I don't know how.