I suspect that text books are expensive in part because of the hierarchical purchasing structure that amplifies success and failure. It's like the movie industry where in any given year there's only enough theater space, interest and mind share so you have a few collosal winners and a lot of losers that still cost you money.
As for kindle, I think it is going to get bracketed by apple and die. Let me first say the big hope here is the subscription model. It's perfect for the NYtimes which is best read old school on large paper. (if you don't beleive me, try buying a copy at starbucks and see if you don't find it more satisfying and leisurely to read that way even though in theory the content is the same as the web.)
Anyhow, the point is given a choice of carrying a kindle plus some a netbook or just a net book and I suspect the netbook wins if it's added features make it compelling enough to outweigh the e-ink legibility advantage.
Subsidize this netbook with a verizon data-only contract and you have ubiquitous on-the go computing at an affordable price. The key thing here is that both the kindle and the netbook want a cell phone connection. But the Kindle is going to seek subsidy from the content providers whereas the netbook is going to seek subsidy from the deeper pockets of the cell phone providers.
Right now no one has a netbook that is sufficiently compelling, and kindle's price range puts in mainly in the hands of people who are not price sensitive or need to worry about choosing between two devices.
But what is going to kill the kindle I think is bracketing by apple. When apple comes out with a high performance netbook it will be something about the same size but with a lot more capability. I expect it will even have game capability. what really set the iPhone apart from all the previous pda-smartphones was it's performance. it has an integrated conformal mattery that I think gives them enough extra juice in a small space to power a much more capable device and they gave it a familiar OS and stack underneath that can run real applications. I suspect apples purchase of freescale and embrace of Nivida chips is aimed squarely at small devices with higher performance.
kindle won't be able to compete against a device like that.
St. Johns teaches from the "great books". e.g. learn physics from Newton, etc...
just nab their sylabus and you have not only what you want but also what you need, a list the great purged of historical anachronisms and ones that are poor for teaching. (e.g. you probably don't want to learn medicine from a list of bodily humors)
I have no idea who wrote that in wikipedia but I've actually read a number of history books on this and that quote is actually a good synopisis of il duce's view.
I too work in a place where cameras and microphones are not allowed. On macs it is very easy to disable these. There is a small harness under the Keyboard you have to yank (then tape to prevent it from rattling).
The problem is that on many (not all) models this harness also contains the speaker drivers but not the headphones. so you lose all sound playing. This however might actually be a good thing for a court reporter. For me, it means I need headphones to do the training videos.
You can of course just cut the wires selectively to save the sound out. But that voids the warantee.
At first I used to wring my hands about doing his to my computer. But then I realized "who am I kidding" it's not "my" computer. Who the fsck cares about resale value. it's not my problem. it's a freakin tool, and if the cost of the tool is anywhere close to what your productivity earns for the company then they hired the wrong person. This was a very easy rationalization for me since it's also the reason I rationalize using a mac over a cheaper windows box. The cost of the tool is irrelevant to it's ability to influence my productivity.
Now as far as convincing the security guard goes. just gouge the freakin' camera right out. Don't worry about getting it back. If that cost bothers you then again you are not worth your salary.
This is actually a wonderful idea for them. it lowers the barrier for the transition. Even companies can push their costs forward in time.
But i'm thinking of all the pirates in asia. The street vendors with virus laden bootlegs will be competing against free. this will hurt their market. Then a year later what will the chinese consumer do? He could go out an buy a bootleg and re-install his system or he could buy a keycode and continue with his current system state. in many cases the idea of re-installing a system would be daunting enough to suddenly make the key code seem cheap.
The back story here is that verizon is switching away from CDMA. they are expected however to maintain CDMA for voice and phase in the new network for data. Apple has said they are not eager to develop for CDMA since it has no future.
So if apple came out with a data device, say a netbook, for verizon it could run on the new network and not bother with CDMA.
One could still seem some uses for this. For example consider some bios based infection. While it theoretically could do a lot of harm, in practice it is going to be really hard to implement a lot of things from the bios. So why not infect the OS itself on every boot? In principle no new capabilities in theory, but it might still be a really convenient vector for an attack.
One might also use this to hack systems that one nominally has physcial access to but no actual control. For example if some future Xbox 420 is running a windows 7 kernel, maybe you could use this as a way to bust in to the locked down device in a generic way.
You might as well say the Army has a conflict of interest since if they have a new weapon they could take over the country.
It's both true and not true. in some countries the army does indeed take over when it wants to. In others it tries to protect it's citizens. Why should the NSA not be expected to do this as well? What is needed is proper oversight.
Now as for How to approach this. I'm utterly puzzled why trusted platform computing (e.g. Palladium) has not take off for government and embedded computing. Sure you may not want it on your computr because it locks down what you can do to an outside source's approval. But this is exactly what we do want on single use computers and on computers protecting data bases and on government computers.
Seems like there's a huge market for this. Way way way more than needed to make it worth manufacturing the hardware changes to the motherboards and firmware. Why has TPC not proceeded since it was developed.
But, those with flat feet, in need of arch support, could still benefit from good shoes...
Exactly, if you are an athlete runner you have to learn the proper biomechanical motions or you will rip yourself apart. Once you do, well, it's what your body was built for. But for those of us who run seldomly or who have previoulsy injured ankles or knees it's painfully obvious how a running shoe is a lot easier to run in. I don't need a study to tell me that I've done my own definitve study on myself.
Apple has an enterprise program. You buy the $299 dev licence, and you can install to your own company/platoon/whatever's devices.
That's interesting. Does it also allow you to lock it down so that only sanctioned apps can go on it, or so that only fully approved updates can be installed? They're the kind of features I'd be looking for if I had to approve the phone or touch for military applications.
Well that sort of depends on what backdoors the chinese firmware creators left in.
The article kind of muffed it's key point I think, but it's there if you read it carefully. Let me try to restate it.
1) First, suppose there were no way for anyone to get major lable music for free. Piratebay provides this service.
2) Now in such a world, an indie label could establish new artisits simply by giviving away free music. People like free, so it would get downloaded and played.
3) Of course Indie lables sometime do that now, so why are not people gorging on it? The reason is, they can also get free mainstream music from pirate bay, which being lazy and suceptible to marketing and peer pressure they prefer when all else is equal.
Thus the author's thesis is simply that free mainstream music is choking the market and denying the indies an avenue to distinguish themselves. He would prefer that "all else" not be equal. That one were instead choosing between taking a risk on free aural adventures he was offering or the non-free but shiny comfortable mainstream music.
His problem is that because prirate bay is actually something only adventureous people do, that it's sort of actually one more obstacle for these folks on their way to other adventures in free music.
Another way to put this is that, if indie music is free one might think it is not worth as much as music that you have to pay for (but can get free by pirating it).
His thesis is logical. It only goes wrong at the close where he wonders why the record labels chase the pirates. The point is they can't make it easy to get it for free. Just easy enough to satisfy the hard core folks and further advertise their wares, but not so easy that everyone stops buying music.
There are encryption algorithms that allow addition. That is, the sum of two encrypted messages is an encryption of the sum. I've forgotten how these work exactly, I think they are some many to one mapping, and the addition operation is not simply adding the encrytped numerical representations.
I came across these when looking at voting systems that allow N distributed people to vote in a way that sums the result before it is decrypted rather than decrypting to do the sum.
Anyhow what this means is that is possible to do certain operations on a remote database, like sum a column, without the database knowing the result and without transmistting anything additional information inbound or outbound.
You could presumably have your data stored in many forms on the database, each form suited for one type of query. Then you just query the approriate form to perform the operation of interest.
I'm reasonably sure there is no way to perform very high order operations that one might typically do in a relational database however.
I used to work on this technology. The justification for it is really simple. If you could prevent just one lightning induced internet or power outage the amount of money saved would more than pay for all the research to date.
Under conditions When it works these systems are more effective than lightning rods. But to make these things ubiquitously functional and dependable is not a simple matter.
The airy beam decribed here I believe is just a variation of the old axiconic focus concept. With an axicon the beam only "looks like" it is bending. But the light does not bend per se. What is happeing is that one creates a fresnel lens and adjusts each lens segment to focus at a different foci. If you do this densly enhough the foci merge into a line. the light passing through one foci immediately diverges and does not pass through the next focii. That next focii is formed by diffenent rays. But to the viewer it looks like a continuous filament.
This is distict from soliton filmamentation. In this kind of filmentation the light realy does self-induce a light guide that allows an extended filemanet like focus. It's not unreasonable to imagine that a clever person could design an assymetric filament that would propagate it's light guide into an arc.
The description of the system uses language draw from both genre's of filament production, so it's not really clear which they are doing. This is understandable since due to the destructive nature of the filaments it's really really hard to insert monitoring equipment into the beam to actually determine which way the light is propagating. In many cases it's likely a little bit of both. some self containment fed by some axiconic focusing to replenish the beam as it loses energy.
In any cast the end result is a conduction channel.
Like lightning rods sometimes the purpose of the conduction channel is not to seed a lighting path but rather to cause conduction to drain the charge separation that is creating the conditions for lighting. indeed originally lightning rods were placed in large arrays to deplete the stored energy and prevent lightining rather than be sacrificial guides that preferentially attract lightning.
While either technique is good at preventing lightings lethal effects of causing fires. with electronics it is better to just never have lightining bolt at all, as our electronic systems fon't do well when the ground plane suddenly surges to a million volts.
Apparently they don't know about SlashdotFS. This system uses an english hidden markov model sentence constructor to generate plausible comment text and save it as reply's on slashdot. The path through the markov model is variable having multiple word choices at each node so it can encode arbitrary data and can be decoded by replaying the message through the same network model.
It was just a toy till 2003 when a pair of graduate students realized the information density could be dramatically enhanced by introducing spelling, gramatical errors, typo's and l337-speak into the model.
Comments encoding these are usually late posts in the discussion threat and frequently replied to by grammar nazi's.
It's now one of the major Warez dumping sites since it is particularly useful for immutable data of low value.
The VPN mentioned is kinda bizarre if you think about it.
First, the whole strength of bit-torrent is scalability through it's use of edge connections avoiding a central hub.
VPN would necessarily be through a central hub and thus not direct peer to peer.
I suppose perhaps they are thinking that the p2p would continue outside the VPN but the low bandwidth tracker and maybe some of he handshaking would be contacted via VPN?
It's not dead obvious what is meant since it is often the case that when a user invokes a VPN, the the OS's entire network adapter switches over to the Vitrual one and the physical one is not used except to transact the VPN connection. (hence making the VPN transparent to the client browsers and such)
On the flip side, this would be a very special VPN nexus not just a general purpose one: namely if you ran all the p2p traffic through it then nearly all the requests would be for packets that had already passed through the nexus earlier. So hanging a cache off the nexus would make things simpler. It would no longer be p2p at all but rather a clearing house for packets of common interest.
As long as linux advocates curse the foolish choices of the enduser they will never succeed in increasing market share. One can ask, well is market share the goal? If not then don't begrudge windows for providing an end user experience that is preferred. Sure in your view it's a lesser ecperience, but people want comfort. More people like cheeseburgers than tofu even if tofu is better for them. Does that make cheesburger's bad or good?
Since a CFL consumes a exactly constant amount of power it shoul dbe trivial to put in an inductor and capacitor in the package to exactly compensate for it.
Moreover if the power factor is really 0.5 then it seems like just having two of these running in quadrature ought to null the power factor back to 1.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that text books are expensive in part because of the hierarchical purchasing structure that amplifies success and failure. It's like the movie industry where in any given year there's only enough theater space, interest and mind share so you have a few collosal winners and a lot of losers that still cost you money.
As for kindle, I think it is going to get bracketed by apple and die. Let me first say the big hope here is the subscription model. It's perfect for the NYtimes which is best read old school on large paper. (if you don't beleive me, try buying a copy at starbucks and see if you don't find it more satisfying and leisurely to read that way even though in theory the content is the same as the web.)
Anyhow, the point is given a choice of carrying a kindle plus some a netbook or just a net book and I suspect the netbook wins if it's added features make it compelling enough to outweigh the e-ink legibility advantage.
Subsidize this netbook with a verizon data-only contract and you have ubiquitous on-the go computing at an affordable price. The key thing here is that both the kindle and the netbook want a cell phone connection. But the Kindle is going to seek subsidy from the content providers whereas the netbook is going to seek subsidy from the deeper pockets of the cell phone providers.
Right now no one has a netbook that is sufficiently compelling, and kindle's price range puts in mainly in the hands of people who are not price sensitive or need to worry about choosing between two devices.
But what is going to kill the kindle I think is bracketing by apple. When apple comes out with a high performance netbook it will be something about the same size but with a lot more capability. I expect it will even have game capability. what really set the iPhone apart from all the previous pda-smartphones was it's performance. it has an integrated conformal mattery that I think gives them enough extra juice in a small space to power a much more capable device and they gave it a familiar OS and stack underneath that can run real applications. I suspect apples purchase of freescale and embrace of Nivida chips is aimed squarely at small devices with higher performance.
kindle won't be able to compete against a device like that.
St. Johns teaches from the "great books". e.g. learn physics from Newton, etc...
just nab their sylabus and you have not only what you want but also what you need, a list the great purged of historical anachronisms and ones that are poor for teaching. (e.g. you probably don't want to learn medicine from a list of bodily humors)
Yes let's not move on to the larger problem. Lets stay focused on What tim geithner did. Why solve real problems when we can rub political ones raw.
We can't allow any politically questionable people to do any important jobs.
Felons should not be allowed to vote. etc...
I have no idea who wrote that in wikipedia but I've actually read a number of history books on this and that quote is actually a good synopisis of il duce's view.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power"-- Mussolini
[Citation needed]
Here's your citation
I too work in a place where cameras and microphones are not allowed. On macs it is very easy to disable these. There is a small harness under the Keyboard you have to yank (then tape to prevent it from rattling).
The problem is that on many (not all) models this harness also contains the speaker drivers but not the headphones. so you lose all sound playing. This however might actually be a good thing for a court reporter. For me, it means I need headphones to do the training videos.
You can of course just cut the wires selectively to save the sound out. But that voids the warantee.
At first I used to wring my hands about doing his to my computer. But then I realized "who am I kidding" it's not "my" computer. Who the fsck cares about resale value. it's not my problem. it's a freakin tool, and if the cost of the tool is anywhere close to what your productivity earns for the company then they hired the wrong person. This was a very easy rationalization for me since it's also the reason I rationalize using a mac over a cheaper windows box. The cost of the tool is irrelevant to it's ability to influence my productivity.
Now as far as convincing the security guard goes. just gouge the freakin' camera right out. Don't worry about getting it back. If that cost bothers you then again you are not worth your salary.
an anal probe does not actually "enter" your body, you pathetic torus.
Windows a gateway drug?
No it's more of a Dell drug.
This is actually a wonderful idea for them. it lowers the barrier for the transition. Even companies can push their costs forward in time.
But i'm thinking of all the pirates in asia. The street vendors with virus laden bootlegs will be competing against free. this will hurt their market. Then a year later what will the chinese consumer do? He could go out an buy a bootleg and re-install his system or he could buy a keycode and continue with his current system state. in many cases the idea of re-installing a system would be daunting enough to suddenly make the key code seem cheap.
The back story here is that verizon is switching away from CDMA. they are expected however to maintain CDMA for voice and phase in the new network for data. Apple has said they are not eager to develop for CDMA since it has no future.
So if apple came out with a data device, say a netbook, for verizon it could run on the new network and not bother with CDMA.
makes total sense.
One could still seem some uses for this. For example consider some bios based infection. While it theoretically could do a lot of harm, in practice it is going to be really hard to implement a lot of things from the bios. So why not infect the OS itself on every boot? In principle no new capabilities in theory, but it might still be a really convenient vector for an attack.
One might also use this to hack systems that one nominally has physcial access to but no actual control. For example if some future Xbox 420 is running a windows 7 kernel, maybe you could use this as a way to bust in to the locked down device in a generic way.
to the term "chip shot"
You might as well say the Army has a conflict of interest since if they have a new weapon they could take over the country.
It's both true and not true. in some countries the army does indeed take over when it wants to. In others it tries to protect it's citizens. Why should the NSA not be expected to do this as well? What is needed is proper oversight.
Now as for How to approach this. I'm utterly puzzled why trusted platform computing (e.g. Palladium) has not take off for government and embedded computing. Sure you may not want it on your computr because it locks down what you can do to an outside source's approval. But this is exactly what we do want on single use computers and on computers protecting data bases and on government computers.
Seems like there's a huge market for this. Way way way more than needed to make it worth manufacturing the hardware changes to the motherboards and firmware. Why has TPC not proceeded since it was developed.
Well, possibly for people with normal/good feet.
But, those with flat feet, in need of arch support, could still benefit from good shoes...
Exactly, if you are an athlete runner you have to learn the proper biomechanical motions or you will rip yourself apart. Once you do, well, it's what your body was built for. But for those of us who run seldomly or who have previoulsy injured ankles or knees it's painfully obvious how a running shoe is a lot easier to run in. I don't need a study to tell me that I've done my own definitve study on myself.
That's interesting. Does it also allow you to lock it down so that only sanctioned apps can go on it, or so that only fully approved updates can be installed? They're the kind of features I'd be looking for if I had to approve the phone or touch for military applications.
Well that sort of depends on what backdoors the chinese firmware creators left in.
finally someone invents a use for the formerly useless lego mindstorms thermal sensor. Use it to let your mindstorms bot find a recharging stations
The article kind of muffed it's key point I think, but it's there if you read it carefully. Let me try to restate it.
1) First, suppose there were no way for anyone to get major lable music for free. Piratebay provides this service.
2) Now in such a world, an indie label could establish new artisits simply by giviving away free music. People like free, so it would get downloaded and played.
3) Of course Indie lables sometime do that now, so why are not people gorging on it? The reason is, they can also get free mainstream music from pirate bay, which being lazy and suceptible to marketing and peer pressure they prefer when all else is equal.
Thus the author's thesis is simply that free mainstream music is choking the market and denying the indies an avenue to distinguish themselves. He would prefer that "all else" not be equal. That one were instead choosing between taking a risk on free aural adventures he was offering or the non-free but shiny comfortable mainstream music.
His problem is that because prirate bay is actually something only adventureous people do, that it's sort of actually one more obstacle for these folks on their way to other adventures in free music.
Another way to put this is that, if indie music is free one might think it is not worth as much as music that you have to pay for (but can get free by pirating it).
His thesis is logical. It only goes wrong at the close where he wonders why the record labels chase the pirates. The point is they can't make it easy to get it for free. Just easy enough to satisfy the hard core folks and further advertise their wares, but not so easy that everyone stops buying music.
There are encryption algorithms that allow addition. That is, the sum of two encrypted messages is an encryption of the sum. I've forgotten how these work exactly, I think they are some many to one mapping, and the addition operation is not simply adding the encrytped numerical representations.
I came across these when looking at voting systems that allow N distributed people to vote in a way that sums the result before it is decrypted rather than decrypting to do the sum.
Anyhow what this means is that is possible to do certain operations on a remote database, like sum a column, without the database knowing the result and without transmistting anything additional information inbound or outbound.
You could presumably have your data stored in many forms on the database, each form suited for one type of query. Then you just query the approriate form to perform the operation of interest.
I'm reasonably sure there is no way to perform very high order operations that one might typically do in a relational database however.
I used to work on this technology. The justification for it is really simple. If you could prevent just one lightning induced internet or power outage the amount of money saved would more than pay for all the research to date.
Under conditions When it works these systems are more effective than lightning rods. But to make these things ubiquitously functional and dependable is not a simple matter.
The airy beam decribed here I believe is just a variation of the old axiconic focus concept. With an axicon the beam only "looks like" it is bending. But the light does not bend per se. What is happeing is that one creates a fresnel lens and adjusts each lens segment to focus at a different foci. If you do this densly enhough the foci merge into a line. the light passing through one foci immediately diverges and does not pass through the next focii. That next focii is formed by diffenent rays. But to the viewer it looks like a continuous filament.
This is distict from soliton filmamentation. In this kind of filmentation the light realy does self-induce a light guide that allows an extended filemanet like focus. It's not unreasonable to imagine that a clever person could design an assymetric filament that would propagate it's light guide into an arc.
The description of the system uses language draw from both genre's of filament production, so it's not really clear which they are doing. This is understandable since due to the destructive nature of the filaments it's really really hard to insert monitoring equipment into the beam to actually determine which way the light is propagating. In many cases it's likely a little bit of both. some self containment fed by some axiconic focusing to replenish the beam as it loses energy.
In any cast the end result is a conduction channel.
Like lightning rods sometimes the purpose of the conduction channel is not to seed a lighting path but rather to cause conduction to drain the charge separation that is creating the conditions for lighting. indeed originally lightning rods were placed in large arrays to deplete the stored energy and prevent lightining rather than be sacrificial guides that preferentially attract lightning.
While either technique is good at preventing lightings lethal effects of causing fires. with electronics it is better to just never have lightining bolt at all, as our electronic systems fon't do well when the ground plane suddenly surges to a million volts.
These are already in production use: the movie Beowulf used them to capture the eye-movements of the actors, so clearly the technique is mainstream.
So you could say "imagine a beowulf cluster" of these tracking you.
Is it because they are now reduced to a cheap goggle form or something that makes this news?
Apparently they don't know about SlashdotFS. This system uses an english hidden markov model sentence constructor to generate plausible comment text and save it as reply's on slashdot. The path through the markov model is variable having multiple word choices at each node so it can encode arbitrary data and can be decoded by replaying the message through the same network model.
It was just a toy till 2003 when a pair of graduate students realized the information density could be dramatically enhanced by introducing spelling, gramatical errors, typo's and l337-speak into the model.
Comments encoding these are usually late posts in the discussion threat and frequently replied to by grammar nazi's.
It's now one of the major Warez dumping sites since it is particularly useful for immutable data of low value.
The VPN mentioned is kinda bizarre if you think about it.
First, the whole strength of bit-torrent is scalability through it's use of edge connections avoiding a central hub.
VPN would necessarily be through a central hub and thus not direct peer to peer.
I suppose perhaps they are thinking that the p2p would continue outside the VPN but the low bandwidth tracker and maybe some of he handshaking would be contacted via VPN?
It's not dead obvious what is meant since it is often the case that when a user invokes a VPN, the the OS's entire network adapter switches over to the Vitrual one and the physical one is not used except to transact the VPN connection. (hence making the VPN transparent to the client browsers and such)
On the flip side, this would be a very special VPN nexus not just a general purpose one: namely if you ran all the p2p traffic through it then nearly all the requests would be for packets that had already passed through the nexus earlier. So hanging a cache off the nexus would make things simpler. It would no longer be p2p at all but rather a clearing house for packets of common interest.
As long as linux advocates curse the foolish choices of the enduser they will never succeed in increasing market share. One can ask, well is market share the goal? If not then don't begrudge windows for providing an end user experience that is preferred. Sure in your view it's a lesser ecperience, but people want comfort. More people like cheeseburgers than tofu even if tofu is better for them. Does that make cheesburger's bad or good?
Since a CFL consumes a exactly constant amount of power it shoul dbe trivial to put in an inductor and capacitor in the package to exactly compensate for it.
Moreover if the power factor is really 0.5 then it seems like just having two of these running in quadrature ought to null the power factor back to 1.
mod parent +1: wry humor with sly historical reference.
I think there's a saying about that but I can't recall what it is :-)