When I first started reading it I thought well this is cute but impractical. But I had a change of heart. What first bothered me was the idea that if a function is called with a list of args that the function should not just process the args but in fact should look at the args as a pattern that it needs to respond to. First this would imply that every function has been 'trained' or has enough history of previous calls under its belt that it's smart enough to figure out what you are aksing for even if you ask for it a little wrong. Second the amount of computational power needed to process every single function call as a pattern rather than as a simple function call is staggering.
or is it? how does 'nature' do it. well the answer in nature is that everything is done in parallel at the finest level of detail. when a rock sits on a surface every point on the rock is using its f=MA plus some electomagentics to interact with the surface. each point is not supervised, but the whole process is a parallel computation.
so although his ideas are of no use to a conventional system, maybe they will be of use 100 years from now when we have millions of parallel processors cheaply available (maybe not silicon). So one cant say, this is just stupid on that basis.
indeed the opposite is true. if we are ever going to have mega-porcessor interaction these interactions are going to have to be self-negotiating. It is quite likely that the requirements for self negoitation will far out strip trying to implement doing something the most efficeint way possible as a coded algorithm would. spending 99% of your effort on pattern recognition on inputs and 1% of your processor capability fuulfilling the requested calacultion may make total sense in a mega scale processing environement. it might run 100x slower than straight code would but it will actually work in a mega scale system.
The next step is how to make the processor have a history so that it can actually recognize what to do. That's where the idea of recognizing protocols comes in. At first the system can be trained on specific protocols, which can then be generalized byt theprocessor. superviser learning versus unsupervised.
Cellular systems in multi-cellular organism mostly function analogously. They spend 99% of their effort just staying alive. hugeamounts of energy are expended trying to interpret patterns on their receptors. some energy is spent reponding to those patterns. Signals are sent to other cells (chemically) but the signals dont tell the cell what to do exactly. Instead they just trigger pattern recognition on the receptors.
thus it is not absurd to propose that 'functions' spend enormous effort on pattern recogntion before giving some simple processing result. But for this to make sense youhave to contextualize it in a mega processor environement.
Blaze certainly realizes this appraoch is not without limits. His point is two fold. 1) that an exponentially large number of keys can be reduced to a tiny searchable number. 2) that the goal is not to 'open the lock', for which there are many methods including kicking itin. the goal is to start with an ordinary key and create a master key.
the following is quoted verbatim:
Our adaptive oracle attack is only effective against locks that have a single shear line used by both master
and change keys. Although this is the case with the majority of mastered locks, there are commercially
available designs that do not have this property. Locks with a separate master ring, for example, require that
all pin stacks be aligned to the same one of two distinct master or change shear lines, and therefore do not
provide feedback about the master bitting of a pin given the change bittings of the other pins. (Master ring
locks, however, are actually more vulnerable to reverse engineering from lock disassembly by an attacker
without access to the change key).
This attack assumes that the attacker has access to a modest supply of blank keys for the system. Whether
this is a practical assumption depends on the particular system, of course, and some "restricted keyway" lock
products may make it more difficult for the attacker to obtain blanks from commercial sources. However,
blanks for many so-called restricted systems are in fact readily available from aftermarket vendors. Even
when an exact blank is not commercially available, often a different blank can be milled down to fit. Unusual
key designs, such as those employing a sidebar cut, may be more difficult to procure directly or modify from
commercial sources, but blanks can still usually be fabricated in small quantities relatively easily by casting
(especially since the attacker already possesses a working change key cut on the correct blank).
In medium-scale master systems, it may be possible to limit the information contained in any given lock,
at the expense of somewhat increased vulnerability to cross keying and picking. In standard master schemes,
each pin stack is cut only at the master and change depths. The attacker exploits the fact that any working
depths not corresponding to the change key must be on the master. A natural way to frustrate the attack,
therefore, is to add "false" cuts to some pin stacks that do not correspond to the master and that do not appear
in the majority of other locks in the system. If one "extra" cut is added to each pin stack, the attacker will
learn 2P different possible master keys from one lock, only one of which will correspond to the "true" TMK
bitting. These extra cuts must be selected very carefully, however, since each such cut reduces the number
of unique differs available in the system. Effectively, the extra cuts create new subclasses of sub-master
keys among locks that share the same false cuts, which the attacker must eliminate before learning the true
high-level master key.
2)count the notches, if its a 5 pin tumbler, then buy 6 more blank keys. ($2.00)
3) cut 5 keys to be identical to the original except at one of the pin position, let it be full height. SO that you now have 5 keys each with a full height blank at a different pin postion.
3.b) reducing the complexity. it's not physically possible to have a full height position adjacent to a deeply cut position. No problem, just cut it as high a possible, the master key suffers the same limits too, and this reduces the complexity of the pattern.
4) insert the first key. does it turn? No then file off 0.010" of metal and try again. within 7 tries, usually only one or 2 it will turn. congatulation you now know the pin 1 master height.(duh: ignore the turning at the original height.)
5) insert key2, rinse, lather repeat.
the beauty of this crack twofold. first, you are discovering the master heights of each pin independently, so the combinatorics is just linear in the number of resolvable pin heights not the product of pin-positions times pin heights. Second, you are also simultaneously factoring the ordinary key out of the master key combination, thus only discovering the master key not some useless key that is part paster and part ordinary key (that would only owrk on that particular lock).
6) Exception: if you cannot find the a pin height that opens one of the tumblers (ignoring the obvious one for the original key) then the original key height is the one for the master too.
Cryptographer Matt Blaze (of AT&T),previously known for cracking the backdoor of the vaunted 'clipper chip' has submitted a publication to the IEEE journal "Security and Privacy" which demonstates that given an ordinary building key (like your office key or one borrowed for the rest room) you can get 'root' access to the entire building (i.e. a master key) with no more that about 30 guesses and $2.00 at the hardware store, and typically much less than that.
The crack works on virtually all locks and was inpsired by parallels to cryptographic analysis, reducing the search from exponential to linear, and exploiting 'key" generation weaknesses. Virtually all master-key locks are vulnerable.
There is also a story on the front page of the nytimes covering police verification of the threat including giving the instructions to a 15 year old.
Heck this has been going on longer than post-irony set in. I remember my amusement when I first heard ronald reagan was a presidential candidate. Well he'll never win I thought, what a joke. After he won I was in disbelief, and realized I was not the only one when I saw a bathroom grafitii "reagan...without a cause", an obvious riff on the james dean movie title.
Later after watching "back to the future" there is a scene where marty tries to prove he's fromt he future. The professor asks "okay future boy, whos president." MArty answeres "ronald reagan" thus assuring the professor he's a lunatic: "Oh and who's the treasury secratary 'jack benny?'.
Later in the same movie, the professor is amazed by the video camera "a portable movie production studio....Great scott! no wonder your politicians have to be actors!". A banal observation unless you think of in the context of it dawning on a person from the 1950's.
So will we all be thinkng "great scott, no wonder all your presidents have to be CEO's of consumer products" when a visitor from the future comes back and tells us about president Jobs?
Are you suggesting that like PARC, Microsoft is full of visionaries but never produces anything original because like xerox it gets misunderstood by management?
MS has been a genious at settling the frontiers of computing with a sustainable and growing bussiness model but not in pioneering. In fact I cant think of any technology that ever came from MS that was not derivative. Nor can I even think of a slick integration of technologies (e.g. apple's forte), nor even a novel presentation of a new technology.
Maybe some MS folks can contadict me with a couple trivial examples. But look for a billion dollar company with 90% of the market their creative output is pathetic. Maybe some MS worker bees reading slashdot can say why. Does MS have a creative research dept? if so where's the products?
Answer. phase conjugation can have ZERO latency. it's done all the time in optics. In accoustics the latency is only the latency of the analog electronics which can probably be immeasurably small on the time scale of frequency. By definition the rate of change of the phases needed to track a clutter pattern must be slow copared to the frequency. if this were not so the phase modualtion would change the frequency dramtically.
HOW THIS WORKS
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Reflections
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Here's how I imagine that the physics of this works and I'll explain what a time reversal anatenna is.
First how is it possible to gain bandwith using 'clutter' ? here is how. imagine that you and I are both in our cars at a stop light and listening to the same rasio station. Only my radio can barely get the staion and yours does fine. If I pull my car forward a few feet, suddenly my reception improves. What happened is that the multi-path interference made my car sit in a node and your sit at a maximum.
Now if there had been more than one radio transmitter and some dude back at the station had changed the relative phase of the antennas he could have put your car in a node and my car in maximum. Thus by changing the relative phases of antenna one can direct the signal to whichever car you want. If we now differenlty modulate the signals on the antenna's we could send one signal to one car and the other signal to another car. Thus by recycling the same broadcast channel we have doubled our bandwidth.
But there is a problem here. How does the guy at the station know how to adjust the phases of the transmitters to get this spatial separation? the answer is he cant know unless he knows where both of us are and where all of the building are, and the moving cars,etc... basically impossible to compute beforehand.
So instead what you do is have the car transmit a signal on the same frequency that is coded to say 'hi i'm car #1'. The guy at the station receives this signal on his antennas and notes the relative phase of the singals on each. Now by time reversal symmetry, if he broadcast at those phases all of the multi-path signals would converge in phase on my car's antenna. Likewise he can pick out car number 2 and so on.
Furthermore i'f the clutter is changing or almost equivalently if I am driving my car, he can just keep updating the relative phases and track my car's antenna.
So the missing ingredient here is some way to detect phases and re-transmit phases in real time. One approach is to have a reference signal all of the transmitters are locked to that from which they could compute the phases they need to re-transmit. This is potentially compuationally expensive since we also have to demodulate and detect all the signals as well.
another approach is to simply phase conjugate the incoming signal, amplify it, remodulate it witht he signal, and rebroadcast it. Thus the outgoing signal is the time reversed image of the incoming signal. We never need to actually measue the phase.
there are lots of ways of 'phase conjugating' as signal but I'm not enough of a microwave jock to say how you do it in that region of the spectrum. In the optical band region there are lots of ways using non-linear optics. However none of these are wide band. They only work at specific (laser) wavelengths that can be created coherently. From the comments in the article I am assuming this is true in the microwave regime as well. When you get down to the ultra-sonic regime you get to frequencies (mega hertz) where you can do this electronically directly. So that is proably why its accoustic.
interestingly there are a number of approaches to making passive approximate phase conjugate mirrors using engineered materials (bulk element transmission lines) that do operate in the microwave regime. these however are not advanced enough for practical use yet. currenly they are finding use as light weight stealth materials aimed at radar invisibility. But probably within 5 to ten years these will be practical enough for the applications envisioned here.
I might specualte that just as the development of electronics was first spurred by military use and then by consumer use. This might happen here too.
and if some bozo complains about my typing skills I will adjust the phases of my heat ray to melt their brain.
If this were a valid theory, that added traction is an advantage, then it would seem logical that it would still be true. Thus chickens would flap down not up to get more traction. Watching chickens I see them use their wings for lift to hop further.
Likewise the era of pre-marsupial when ground birds ruled in the southern americas ought to show skeleton optimized for traction since none of these flew, yet they were predators like dinasours.
why dont cheetas have wings?
Luxuries during economic downturn.
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Apple Reports Q1 Loss
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· Score: 4, Insightful
In an ecomonic downturn or uncertainty people defer the puchase of luxury goods. It's also well known that while they economize on the big items, they also splurge on cheap luxuries like cheesburgers or movies.
Apple computers are luxury goods compared to you barebones PC. This is not to say apple products are expensive for what you get, actually they are a screaming deal for what you get. It's even arguable that apple's have lower long term costs. But faced with budgetary limits, people will seek short term economies and cheap PC's or NO pc at all is it.
On the otherhand this is leading to a lot of defered purchases. When the economic confidence resumes or companies reach a point where they have to upgrade they will make those purchases. So I think it's important to look not just at apple's sales relative to PC sales, but rather to apple's installed base. Those people are the ones that are defering purchases and will likely be purchasing apples in the future.
I've read apple has a fair amount of cash in the bank and they have a relatively adaptive production line. Thus they are in a good position to do research and develop strategic products (keynote, iPhoto, OSX, G5 architectures, Xraid) during the economic downturn. If they restructure a bit to minimize cash burn and keep innovating they will win when the market inproves. Some evidence can be seen at the consumer elctronics show where the most innovative ideas were a nerd watch and an ovrsized ipod that cant play DVDs. The collective PC idustry is not spending money on research there are no venture capital to launch new things. Mean while apple chugs out all sort of new stuff single handedly.
it's anyone's guess when this economic downturn will end. By the end of it there's going to be a lot of consolidationa and carnage inthe PC industry. what will emegre will be fewer companies with either the leanest production or the most innovative products. Apple will benefit on both ends. their production costs will go down due to the lower costs of production of electronics and they will have the most uniquely differentiated products. So it's really a question of staying solvent not making money at this point in the game.
There's two more surprises in this pipeline that will be coming out of shultz group. this is the tip of the ice berg.
First lets explain what shultz achieved that was new. with 4 bases there are 4^3 = 64 possible 3 base-codons. Think of these as the word (or byte) size used in computer that uses base-4 rather than base 2 logic. (so this is equivalent to a 6 bit byte). continuing this analogy, like the ascii character set, these bytes code for the 'amino acid' cheracter set.
However, these are non-uniquely mapped to 20 amino acids (plus an end-of-line character) by the ribosome. In keeping with the ascii analogy, more than one bit pattern is interpreted as the same letter. In principle one could have as many as 63 different amino acids represented in this coding scheme but in practice there are only 20.
Because nature designed ribosomes and tRNAs so long ago you just cant fiddle with this machinery very easily and expect any orgnaism to be viable. (sort of like messing with the lowest level of the bios). To fiddle with it successfully you would have to fiddle with many poorly understood parts simultaneously.
The above statement is almost true. There are a few organims that happen not to use one or two of the 64 codons. these codons are called amber and ochre in the literature. In such an organism these codons are "undefined" and not used anywhere in the DNA of the organism. (oversimplification warning).
If one edits the organism's DNA to add these codons into a gene, and also simultenouesly supplies the organism with the ability to translate these codons to a new amino acid, then you can get the organism to build proteins using 21 amino acids one of which is defined by you. By "simultenouesly supplies the organism with the ability to translate these codons" I mean specifically supplying the organism with the specially modified tRNA which has on one end the signal to recognize the new codon, and on the other end is a gripper that holds the synthetic amino acid.
This has been done many times previously. However in all these cases the magic tRNA is chemically synthesized and then 'fed' to the organism. Shultz's work here is to get the organism to do the synthesis of this amber recognizing tRNA and the new amino.
Shultz's group has something even more revolutionary in the pipeline. They are working on adding two more bases to the 4 base set of DNA.
this gives 6^3 = 216 codons. of which only 64 are currently spoken for with natural tRNAs. For practical purposes this is an unlimited number of novel amino acids that could be incorporated into a protein.
Actually If I remeber correctly they have already created a working 6 base DNA, as well as created tRNAs that a ribosome can use to generate proteins. So now 'all' they have to do (I guess) is incorporate the tRNA and non-natural amino acids synthesis into the bug itself. in the mean time they can of course do this synthetically and 'feed' the tRNAs to the bugs.
This is pretty damn exciting stuff. there are an amazing number of possible uses. I'll name two first, protein's built from unusual amino acids will escape many cellular mechanisms for degrading or cutting up proteins. Medicines built out of these proteins will thus be able to last longer in the host (human or bacteria or...) and thus can be given in lower doses and less frequently. Currently Most plausible protein therapeautics are not effective for exactly these reasons: they get digested two quickly or would have to be delivered in toxic doses. With the extremley large amino acid substitution set available, it would be theoretically possible to redesign drugs in a computer much faster than pathogenic organisms could evolve machinery to destroy each new variation.
A second application is there is no limit to the chemical functionality that could be placed on the bussiness ends of these amino acids. This would probably be a bad idea for use as therapeuatics, but would be a great way to make chemically active self-assembling nano materials. We let e coli built rigid protein scaffolds in any shape we want and then use this tehcnology to put reactive chemicals at precise locations on the scaffold. You can think of this like designer molecular sized cresent wrenches that can be shaped and chemically coded to grip only certain other shapes. the old lock and key analogy.
It is a modest exaggeration to imagine not just molecular sized transistors, but entire self-assembling mulit-molecular sized circuits and logic gates. That's a ways off. Before we get there there will be other sorts of molecular sized self-assembled doodads from molecular machines to chemical processing systems to optical coatings to information storage.
Hmmmm interesting. I went and looked up the studies by prather et al which you are quoting above. Not sure what to say. A single groups study is not completely convincing. Some MIT scientetists did claim the opposite, and NASA did have a study and mitigation call for proposals (the lidar project I responded to). So there was concern. The PH of lakes near the shuttle launches was domumented in many places, as well as acknowledged by NASA.
I suspect the NASA concern over this was all at a time when nasa was thinking about a much bigger space station that was going to need heavy payloads and weekly launches. if you scale prather's figures from 9 launches to 52 launches (or may twice that), and then double it again for heavier payloads, then the percentage injection would be a large fraction of the total hydrocarbon load on the stratosphere.
A second consideration is that the rockets emit chlorine radicals and chlorine molecules directly, these may have massively higher radical reactions than simple CFCs would. thus total chlorine mass should also take into account the type of chlorine.
All told I'm not sure where I stand now. Interesting discussion. Sorry to insult you.
Absolutely none of what you said is true. Where did you hear that?
Um mr know-it-all-nassa employee, I once Co-authored a proposal with NASA folks which was a response to a Call for proposals on just this issue. This was considered a very real problem. The proposal was not on mitigation but on monitoring the chemical distribution problem using near-IR lidar. Some of the mitigation proposals involved adding magnesium to the boosters in the right stochimetric mix so as to precipitate the chlorine. But these apparently had other problems including quenching the rocket fuel burn
So I do know a little bit about this. More than you at least. Obviously they have not informed the janitorial staff at NASA of this problem or you might have heard about it.
I think the danger here is if microsoft buys SCO. Now they own the patents. They wont really care about enforcibility. Actually, They wont even want to test it in court.
all they have to do is go to Spain, or venuzuela or Mexico or any govenrnment thinking about converting to Linux and point out the possible complicationsif this ever did go to trial. Maybe the linux distro you are thinking about will have an accident, see...
It would be the cheapest way for MS to subvert Linux. Even sheaper than buying the Sony DRM patents that are in the news lately. (Buy DRM patents, dont let GNU use them. Eventually enough music/movies is out in DRM that without liscenced DRM enabled players linux desktops suck. end of linux withou microsoft having to compete at all).
When a shuttle takes off, the pH of the surrounding lakes and ponds drops to around pH2 (think battery acid). This comes from the solid fuel boosters. Nassa has had an outstanding call for almost ten years now to fix this problem.
when people started talking about 1 launch a month or 1 launch a week, the amount of chlorine that would be placed in the upper atmoshpere whould be enough to destroy the entire ozone layer in a few decades. The only comparable natural phenomena is a volcanic eruption which puts even more chlorine (and other acids) into the upper atmoshere than a shuttle launch.
with china, japan, north korea, europe and boeing all coming on line as rocket launch systems this is going to be increasingly important. Of course not all of these are solid fuel rockets (the culprit).
Logo's and brands are usually controlled by an organization. Even organizations of "free" things like software or religion still have their own logo's like the Gnu or the cross.
But reading this post I find myself trying to write down examples of public domain logos that are not controlled by any organization. And I think that there are relatively few. Of those that come to mind, like the pawn shop's three balls, and the Medical caducious, they are very ancient. A few modern examples are the radioactive and biohazard tri-foils.
We are now poised at a point where a new public symbol might have reached a critical public awareness where it might spring into existence. The Warchalked Wi-Fi hot spot.
Of course I'm glossing over those generic sorts of informational highway type signs that basically are pictographs (mens room, telephone, hotel bed).
Or maybe this is more common than I think. Can slashdot readers come up with other (non-generic) examples of "free" logos with no controlling entity.
in a related development, many internet search sites are now going away from the pop-up ad and banner models and going (back) for the paid listing promotion. I guess advertisors feel humans ignore or wont click the pop-ups or can even block them with browsers, so put the ad in the content.
Putting adds in the content, or having the content members plug stuff is not new. Soap operas are called "soap operas" because they were shows pormoted exclusivley for a single advertiser. Some shows required the story to involve laundry scenes where the "whiteness of your whites" could be commented upon. Ed sullivan, groucho marx, and all the rest used to plug the products right in the show, reading the ads.
I imagine they went to the "modern" format of distinct ads becaause they were deemed more effective at catching viewer attention. Now the pendulum swings back.
A freind told me that in some european country, italy perhaps, there are certain shows or channels that only have ads at the begining and ends. The response of the adveritsers is to make comercials so good that you really want to watch. Which of course is sort odd segwaying back into making whole shows again with embedded comercials.
Its annoying enough when you get the same jokes forwarded by e-mail from all your uncles and aunts. Now brace yourself for endless copies of the time Gilligan accidentally sleeps in the Skippers Hammock lining your inbox. Ah modern technology!
Apple drives the perfection of technology. they dont invent it but they make it all work. they tame it, and thus transform the industry. It's like the scultor that sees the thing they will cut out of the block of granite.
Dynamic memory is a perfect example. Other computers that used it were totally un reliable. most foldks used Static ram
Apple 2: first to tame the following
stable dynamic memory refresh, interlace screen graphics, game sprites
early mac: first to tame the following:
GUI, mouse. WSIWIG editors. Cut and paste graphics between apps. Graphica interface multi-tasking. Impact Printers that printed graphics and text that worked seemlessly with all applications. Postscript printing
Next:
Display postscript for true WSISWIG. Optical disks. Grid Computing (all NeXTS could share their unused cycles across internet) . shaded Pixar Rendering built in, elegant industrial design for office computers.
scully period:
mostly crap. abandoned software. newtons, OpenDoc,Quciktime. copland
Jobs era:
firewire, ipods, imac1 imac2, osX
well history will decide. But every year we see people trying to clone mac innovations.
My nightmare is that by next year we will all be be wearing MS wrist watches. It will happen like this
Microsoft announced that to prevent piracy they will be assessing $100 to anyone who has a wrist even if the MS wristwatch is not intalled. The BSA has proposed challenge audits, in which all persons hanving one or more wrist must be able to document thay have paid the $100 wrist- site liscence or that they have purchased a MS wrist watch. "it is just to easy for someone to remove the watch from the wrist and install it on another unlicensed Wrist" said a microsoft spokes person, " that is a violation of the EULA". He went onto hint that the forthcoming "palladium wristwatch that once implanted..err.. I mean worn, cannot be removed, only upgraded from a 'trusted' member of the collective."
Not even the all-powerful reality distortion field of steve Jobs could make a data-watch seem like a major research achievement, or even new, or even something you would want touching your arm. (they are as stylish and practical is a pocket protector).
It seems to me that this has got to be an all time low point for announcements of innovation in consumer electronics. Why? Maybe its because of the down turn in the tech-market means new products are not being developed. Another possibility is that microsoft's moves into hardware production(x box,phones) and Hardware specification (palladium, watches, media player, smartScreens) is having a chilling effect on the electronics industry. Recently they (allegedly) tried bankrupt a phone maker and move his technology to a competitor. Shades of Stacker and all the other software companies microsoft co-opted, ruined then bought their technology.
There is little doubt that MS stifled innovation in software. Just the fact that jobs could tweak an open source project to tripple the speed of a web browser over IE, when IE has had a clear field to innovate for five years or more, speaks volumes about the MS innovation stifle field. How could apple even dream they could technologically beat MS in the Power point market, but they did.
Does anyone else find these MS offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?
Bill gates announces a recylced idea for a Nerd watch that shows sport scores, headlines. The debut the smartScreen, a 1500$ screen-only that hooks to your compute by wi-fi but cant play movies or mp3s, then they announce that anyone who already bought was is out of luck since that they will be changing the specs to use 802.11a to get better bandwidth for movies. then an oversized so-called "video" ipod that also cant show DVD movies, for more bucks than a ipod.
The only thing I thought was interesting was that they decided to switch to 802.11a for the smartScreens and not 802.11g. I dont know much about these standards except what Jobs said. 802.11a is dead, because it is not backwards compatible with 802.11b hotspots whereas 802.11g is.
How is it possible that one company can lead the entire market year after year going back all the way to the taming of dynamic memory. While the other company can lead the bussiness world and innovate nothing.
My nightmare is that by next year we will all be be wearing MS wrist watches. It will happen like this
Microsoft announced that to prevent piracy they will be assessing $100 to anyone who has a wrist even if the MS wristwatch is not intalled. The BSA has proposed challenge audits, in which all persons hanving one or more wrist must be able to document thay have paid the $100 wrist- site liscence or that they have purchased a MS wrist watch.
"it is just to easy for someone to remove the watch from the wrist and install it on another unlicensed Wrist" said a microsoft spokes person, " that is a violation of the EULA". He went onto hint that the forthcoming "palladium wristwatch that once implanted..err.. I mean worn, cannot be removed, only upgraded from a 'trusted' member of the collective."
Not even the all-powerful reality distortion field of steve Jobs could make a data-watch seem like a major research achievement, or even new, or even something you would want touching your arm. (they are as stylish and practical is a pocket protector).
It seems to me that this has got to be an all time low point for announcements of innovation in consumer electronics. Why? Maybe its because of the down turn in the tech-market means new products are not being developed. Another possibility is that microsoft's moves into hardware production(x box,phones) and Hardware specification (palladium, watches, media player, smartScreens) is having a chilling effect on the electronics industry. Recently they (allegedly) tried bankrupt a phone maker and move his technology to a competitor. Shades of stacker and all the other software companies microsoft co-opted, ruined then bought their technology.
There is little doubt that MS stifled innovation in software. Just the fact that jobs could tweak an open source project to tripple the speed of a web browser over IE, when IE has had a clear field to innovate for five years or more, speaks volumes about the MS stifle field. How could apple even dream they could technologically beat MS in the Power point market, but they did. What is MS doing with its 90% market share besides sitting on it, and creating palladium to keep it?
MS to assess $100 charge for having a wrist
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Assorted CES Gizmos
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· Score: 2
Microsoft announced that to prevent piracy they will be assessing $100 to anyone who has a wrist even if the MS wristwatch is not intalled. The BSA has proposed challenge audits, in which all persons hanving one or more wrist must be able to document thay have paid the $100 wrist- site liscence or that they have purchased a MS wrist watch.
"it is just to easy for someone to remove the watch from the wrist and install it on another Wrist" said a microsoft spokes person, " that is a violation of the EULA".
802.11a Leaves me Cold, compared to apple Macworld
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Assorted CES Gizmos
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· Score: 5, Informative
Does anyone else find these offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?
Bill gates announces a recylced idea for a Nerd watch that shows sport scores, headlines. The debut the smartScreen, a 1500$ screen-only that hooks to your compute by wi-fi but cant play movies or mp3s, then they announce that anyone who already bought was is out of luck since that they will be changing the specs to use 802.11a to get better bandwidth for movies. then an oversized so-called "video" ipod that also cant show DVD movies, for more bucks than a ipod.
The only thing I thought was interesting was that they decided to go with 802.11a and not 802.11g I dont know much about these standards except what Jobs said. 802.11a is dead, because it is not backwards compatible with 802.11b hotspots whereas 802.11g is.
How is it possible that one company can lead the entire market year after year going back all the way to the taming of dynamic memory. While the other company can lead the bussiness world and innovate nothing.
One language I have used is "g" by National Instruments. They market it as "labView". Here one does not write code. in stead one places icons on a screen and wires their input and ouput nodes. A scalar operation like cosine has one input and one output node. A loop is a box with wires that pass in and out of the box, inputs for the loop length, and internal wiring for local variables. Inside the box you put more circuits.
subrountins are just hierarchical encapuslations of these with inputs and outputs.
a given subroutine does not "fire" (is called) until all of the input wires have delivered there data. Thus one does not (usually) explicity control the order in which subroutines execute. as long as they have no dependencies (i.e. output wires from one leading to input wires of the other) then they are free to execute whenever their inputs are filled.
to debug in this language one watched the diagram. Graphicaly a value passes down a "wire" like a pig in a python and stops when it reaches an input (or maybe it splits if the wire splits, and goes to more than one input icon). once the subroutine icon has all its inputs filled, it pops open and reveals all the witing in side. the data again passes from the input connectors to the internal wires and so on. once all the outputs are satisfied, the window closes and were back in the original diagram.
you can place text boxes or graphs or chart recorders, or image plots on any wire. these show you the contents or changing contents of the wire in the format if the viewer. e.g. a strip chart recorder plots single or array values on a strip char that scrolls with time so you can watch them change.
you can selectively debug any part of the wiring diagram and let the other perform normally.
The neat part of the language is there is NO SUCH THING as a syntax error, or wrong pointer, or memory location overlap. Indeed there are no variables at all. just wires and controls that inject values into wires or display values in the wires. this makes it very suitable for control systems where those sort of programming errors are undesirable. Better to have wrong functionality that weird unexpected memory errors
the other cool thing about the language is that because it is inherently concurrent and event driven rather than sequenctial, the data flow language is easy to parallelize. It's also relatively easy to use an FPGA to hard code the functions of the icons into hardware.
the problem with the language is it requires garbarge collection and is the memory management is not so good as implemented. It's not too speedy either. But as I said it may be that its parallel advantages and near bug free coding and easy debugging outweigh single cpu speen in applications.
Slashdot Mirror
or is it? how does 'nature' do it. well the answer in nature is that everything is done in parallel at the finest level of detail. when a rock sits on a surface every point on the rock is using its f=MA plus some electomagentics to interact with the surface. each point is not supervised, but the whole process is a parallel computation.
so although his ideas are of no use to a conventional system, maybe they will be of use 100 years from now when we have millions of parallel processors cheaply available (maybe not silicon). So one cant say, this is just stupid on that basis.
indeed the opposite is true. if we are ever going to have mega-porcessor interaction these interactions are going to have to be self-negotiating. It is quite likely that the requirements for self negoitation will far out strip trying to implement doing something the most efficeint way possible as a coded algorithm would. spending 99% of your effort on pattern recognition on inputs and 1% of your processor capability fuulfilling the requested calacultion may make total sense in a mega scale processing environement. it might run 100x slower than straight code would but it will actually work in a mega scale system.
The next step is how to make the processor have a history so that it can actually recognize what to do. That's where the idea of recognizing protocols comes in. At first the system can be trained on specific protocols, which can then be generalized byt theprocessor. superviser learning versus unsupervised.
Cellular systems in multi-cellular organism mostly function analogously. They spend 99% of their effort just staying alive. hugeamounts of energy are expended trying to interpret patterns on their receptors. some energy is spent reponding to those patterns. Signals are sent to other cells (chemically) but the signals dont tell the cell what to do exactly. Instead they just trigger pattern recognition on the receptors.
thus it is not absurd to propose that 'functions' spend enormous effort on pattern recogntion before giving some simple processing result. But for this to make sense youhave to contextualize it in a mega processor environement.
the following is quoted verbatim:
Our adaptive oracle attack is only effective against locks that have a single shear line used by both master and change keys. Although this is the case with the majority of mastered locks, there are commercially available designs that do not have this property. Locks with a separate master ring, for example, require that all pin stacks be aligned to the same one of two distinct master or change shear lines, and therefore do not provide feedback about the master bitting of a pin given the change bittings of the other pins. (Master ring locks, however, are actually more vulnerable to reverse engineering from lock disassembly by an attacker without access to the change key).
This attack assumes that the attacker has access to a modest supply of blank keys for the system. Whether this is a practical assumption depends on the particular system, of course, and some "restricted keyway" lock products may make it more difficult for the attacker to obtain blanks from commercial sources. However, blanks for many so-called restricted systems are in fact readily available from aftermarket vendors. Even when an exact blank is not commercially available, often a different blank can be milled down to fit. Unusual key designs, such as those employing a sidebar cut, may be more difficult to procure directly or modify from commercial sources, but blanks can still usually be fabricated in small quantities relatively easily by casting (especially since the attacker already possesses a working change key cut on the correct blank).
In medium-scale master systems, it may be possible to limit the information contained in any given lock, at the expense of somewhat increased vulnerability to cross keying and picking. In standard master schemes, each pin stack is cut only at the master and change depths. The attacker exploits the fact that any working depths not corresponding to the change key must be on the master. A natural way to frustrate the attack, therefore, is to add "false" cuts to some pin stacks that do not correspond to the master and that do not appear in the majority of other locks in the system. If one "extra" cut is added to each pin stack, the attacker will learn 2P different possible master keys from one lock, only one of which will correspond to the "true" TMK bitting. These extra cuts must be selected very carefully, however, since each such cut reduces the number of unique differs available in the system. Effectively, the extra cuts create new subclasses of sub-master keys among locks that share the same false cuts, which the attacker must eliminate before learning the true high-level master key.
Here's the method in a nutshell.
1) get a normal key that opens a lock.
2)count the notches, if its a 5 pin tumbler, then buy 6 more blank keys. ($2.00)
3) cut 5 keys to be identical to the original except at one of the pin position, let it be full height. SO that you now have 5 keys each with a full height blank at a different pin postion.
3.b) reducing the complexity. it's not physically possible to have a full height position adjacent to a deeply cut position. No problem, just cut it as high a possible, the master key suffers the same limits too, and this reduces the complexity of the pattern.
4) insert the first key. does it turn? No then file off 0.010" of metal and try again. within 7 tries, usually only one or 2 it will turn. congatulation you now know the pin 1 master height.(duh: ignore the turning at the original height.)
5) insert key2, rinse, lather repeat.
the beauty of this crack twofold. first, you are discovering the master heights of each pin independently, so the combinatorics is just linear in the number of resolvable pin heights not the product of pin-positions times pin heights. Second, you are also simultaneously factoring the ordinary key out of the master key combination, thus only discovering the master key not some useless key that is part paster and part ordinary key (that would only owrk on that particular lock).
6) Exception: if you cannot find the a pin height that opens one of the tumblers (ignoring the obvious one for the original key) then the original key height is the one for the master too.
Cryptographer Matt Blaze (of AT&T),previously known for cracking the backdoor of the vaunted 'clipper chip' has submitted a publication to the IEEE journal "Security and Privacy" which demonstates that given an ordinary building key (like your office key or one borrowed for the rest room) you can get 'root' access to the entire building (i.e. a master key) with no more that about 30 guesses and $2.00 at the hardware store, and typically much less than that.
The crack works on virtually all locks and was inpsired by parallels to cryptographic analysis, reducing the search from exponential to linear, and exploiting 'key" generation weaknesses. Virtually all master-key locks are vulnerable.
There is also a story on the front page of the nytimes covering police verification of the threat including giving the instructions to a 15 year old.
pardon me, but DUH???
Heck this has been going on longer than post-irony set in. I remember my amusement when I first heard ronald reagan was a presidential candidate. Well he'll never win I thought, what a joke. After he won I was in disbelief, and realized I was not the only one when I saw a bathroom grafitii "reagan...without a cause", an obvious riff on the james dean movie title.
Later after watching "back to the future" there is a scene where marty tries to prove he's fromt he future. The professor asks "okay future boy, whos president." MArty answeres "ronald reagan" thus assuring the professor he's a lunatic: "Oh and who's the treasury secratary 'jack benny?'.
Later in the same movie, the professor is amazed by the video camera "a portable movie production studio....Great scott! no wonder your politicians have to be actors!". A banal observation unless you think of in the context of it dawning on a person from the 1950's.
So will we all be thinkng "great scott, no wonder all your presidents have to be CEO's of consumer products" when a visitor from the future comes back and tells us about president Jobs?
MS has been a genious at settling the frontiers of computing with a sustainable and growing bussiness model but not in pioneering. In fact I cant think of any technology that ever came from MS that was not derivative. Nor can I even think of a slick integration of technologies (e.g. apple's forte), nor even a novel presentation of a new technology.
Maybe some MS folks can contadict me with a couple trivial examples. But look for a billion dollar company with 90% of the market their creative output is pathetic. Maybe some MS worker bees reading slashdot can say why. Does MS have a creative research dept? if so where's the products?
Answer. phase conjugation can have ZERO latency. it's done all the time in optics. In accoustics the latency is only the latency of the analog electronics which can probably be immeasurably small on the time scale of frequency. By definition the rate of change of the phases needed to track a clutter pattern must be slow copared to the frequency. if this were not so the phase modualtion would change the frequency dramtically.
First how is it possible to gain bandwith using 'clutter' ? here is how. imagine that you and I are both in our cars at a stop light and listening to the same rasio station. Only my radio can barely get the staion and yours does fine. If I pull my car forward a few feet, suddenly my reception improves. What happened is that the multi-path interference made my car sit in a node and your sit at a maximum.
Now if there had been more than one radio transmitter and some dude back at the station had changed the relative phase of the antennas he could have put your car in a node and my car in maximum. Thus by changing the relative phases of antenna one can direct the signal to whichever car you want. If we now differenlty modulate the signals on the antenna's we could send one signal to one car and the other signal to another car. Thus by recycling the same broadcast channel we have doubled our bandwidth.
But there is a problem here. How does the guy at the station know how to adjust the phases of the transmitters to get this spatial separation? the answer is he cant know unless he knows where both of us are and where all of the building are, and the moving cars,etc... basically impossible to compute beforehand.
So instead what you do is have the car transmit a signal on the same frequency that is coded to say 'hi i'm car #1'. The guy at the station receives this signal on his antennas and notes the relative phase of the singals on each. Now by time reversal symmetry, if he broadcast at those phases all of the multi-path signals would converge in phase on my car's antenna. Likewise he can pick out car number 2 and so on.
Furthermore i'f the clutter is changing or almost equivalently if I am driving my car, he can just keep updating the relative phases and track my car's antenna.
So the missing ingredient here is some way to detect phases and re-transmit phases in real time. One approach is to have a reference signal all of the transmitters are locked to that from which they could compute the phases they need to re-transmit. This is potentially compuationally expensive since we also have to demodulate and detect all the signals as well.
another approach is to simply phase conjugate the incoming signal, amplify it, remodulate it witht he signal, and rebroadcast it. Thus the outgoing signal is the time reversed image of the incoming signal. We never need to actually measue the phase.
there are lots of ways of 'phase conjugating' as signal but I'm not enough of a microwave jock to say how you do it in that region of the spectrum. In the optical band region there are lots of ways using non-linear optics. However none of these are wide band. They only work at specific (laser) wavelengths that can be created coherently. From the comments in the article I am assuming this is true in the microwave regime as well. When you get down to the ultra-sonic regime you get to frequencies (mega hertz) where you can do this electronically directly. So that is proably why its accoustic.
interestingly there are a number of approaches to making passive approximate phase conjugate mirrors using engineered materials (bulk element transmission lines) that do operate in the microwave regime. these however are not advanced enough for practical use yet. currenly they are finding use as light weight stealth materials aimed at radar invisibility. But probably within 5 to ten years these will be practical enough for the applications envisioned here.
I might specualte that just as the development of electronics was first spurred by military use and then by consumer use. This might happen here too.
and if some bozo complains about my typing skills I will adjust the phases of my heat ray to melt their brain.
If this were a valid theory, that added traction is an advantage, then it would seem logical that it would still be true. Thus chickens would flap down not up to get more traction. Watching chickens I see them use their wings for lift to hop further.
Likewise the era of pre-marsupial when ground birds ruled in the southern americas ought to show skeleton optimized for traction since none of these flew, yet they were predators like dinasours.
why dont cheetas have wings?
Apple computers are luxury goods compared to you barebones PC. This is not to say apple products are expensive for what you get, actually they are a screaming deal for what you get. It's even arguable that apple's have lower long term costs. But faced with budgetary limits, people will seek short term economies and cheap PC's or NO pc at all is it.
On the otherhand this is leading to a lot of defered purchases. When the economic confidence resumes or companies reach a point where they have to upgrade they will make those purchases. So I think it's important to look not just at apple's sales relative to PC sales, but rather to apple's installed base. Those people are the ones that are defering purchases and will likely be purchasing apples in the future.
I've read apple has a fair amount of cash in the bank and they have a relatively adaptive production line. Thus they are in a good position to do research and develop strategic products (keynote, iPhoto, OSX, G5 architectures, Xraid) during the economic downturn. If they restructure a bit to minimize cash burn and keep innovating they will win when the market inproves. Some evidence can be seen at the consumer elctronics show where the most innovative ideas were a nerd watch and an ovrsized ipod that cant play DVDs. The collective PC idustry is not spending money on research there are no venture capital to launch new things. Mean while apple chugs out all sort of new stuff single handedly.
it's anyone's guess when this economic downturn will end. By the end of it there's going to be a lot of consolidationa and carnage inthe PC industry. what will emegre will be fewer companies with either the leanest production or the most innovative products. Apple will benefit on both ends. their production costs will go down due to the lower costs of production of electronics and they will have the most uniquely differentiated products. So it's really a question of staying solvent not making money at this point in the game.
There's two more surprises in this pipeline that will be coming out of shultz group. this is the tip of the ice berg.
...) and thus can be given in lower doses and less frequently. Currently Most plausible protein therapeautics are not effective for exactly these reasons: they get digested two quickly or would have to be delivered in toxic doses. With the extremley large amino acid substitution set available, it would be theoretically possible to redesign drugs in a computer much faster than pathogenic organisms could evolve machinery to destroy each new variation.
First lets explain what shultz achieved that was new. with 4 bases there are 4^3 = 64 possible 3 base-codons. Think of these as the word (or byte) size used in computer that uses base-4 rather than base 2 logic. (so this is equivalent to a 6 bit byte). continuing this analogy, like the ascii character set, these bytes code for the 'amino acid' cheracter set.
However, these are non-uniquely mapped to 20 amino acids (plus an end-of-line character) by the ribosome. In keeping with the ascii analogy, more than one bit pattern is interpreted as the same letter. In principle one could have as many as 63 different amino acids represented in this coding scheme but in practice there are only 20.
Because nature designed ribosomes and tRNAs so long ago you just cant fiddle with this machinery very easily and expect any orgnaism to be viable. (sort of like messing with the lowest level of the bios). To fiddle with it successfully you would have to fiddle with many poorly understood parts simultaneously.
The above statement is almost true. There are a few organims that happen not to use one or two of the 64 codons. these codons are called amber and ochre in the literature. In such an organism these codons are "undefined" and not used anywhere in the DNA of the organism. (oversimplification warning).
If one edits the organism's DNA to add these codons into a gene, and also simultenouesly supplies the organism with the ability to translate these codons to a new amino acid, then you can get the organism to build proteins using 21 amino acids one of which is defined by you. By "simultenouesly supplies the organism with the ability to translate these codons" I mean specifically supplying the organism with the specially modified tRNA which has on one end the signal to recognize the new codon, and on the other end is a gripper that holds the synthetic amino acid.
This has been done many times previously. However in all these cases the magic tRNA is chemically synthesized and then 'fed' to the organism. Shultz's work here is to get the organism to do the synthesis of this amber recognizing tRNA and the new amino.
Shultz's group has something even more revolutionary in the pipeline. They are working on adding two more bases to the 4 base set of DNA.
this gives 6^3 = 216 codons. of which only 64 are currently spoken for with natural tRNAs. For practical purposes this is an unlimited number of novel amino acids that could be incorporated into a protein.
Actually If I remeber correctly they have already created a working 6 base DNA, as well as created tRNAs that a ribosome can use to generate proteins. So now 'all' they have to do (I guess) is incorporate the tRNA and non-natural amino acids synthesis into the bug itself. in the mean time they can of course do this synthetically and 'feed' the tRNAs to the bugs.
This is pretty damn exciting stuff. there are an amazing number of possible uses. I'll name two
first, protein's built from unusual amino acids will escape many cellular mechanisms for degrading or cutting up proteins. Medicines built out of these proteins will thus be able to last longer in the host (human or bacteria or
A second application is there is no limit to the chemical functionality that could be placed on the bussiness ends of these amino acids. This would probably be a bad idea for use as therapeuatics, but would be a great way to make chemically active self-assembling nano materials. We let e coli built rigid protein scaffolds in any shape we want and then use this tehcnology to put reactive chemicals at precise locations on the scaffold. You can think of this like designer molecular sized cresent wrenches that can be shaped and chemically coded to grip only certain other shapes. the old lock and key analogy.
It is a modest exaggeration to imagine not just molecular sized transistors, but entire self-assembling mulit-molecular sized circuits and logic gates. That's a ways off. Before we get there there will be other sorts of molecular sized self-assembled doodads from molecular machines to chemical processing systems to optical coatings to information storage.
Hmmmm interesting. I went and looked up the studies by prather et al which you are quoting above. Not sure what to say. A single groups study is not completely convincing. Some MIT scientetists did claim the opposite, and NASA did have a study and mitigation call for proposals (the lidar project I responded to). So there was concern. The PH of lakes near the shuttle launches was domumented in many places, as well as acknowledged by NASA.
I suspect the NASA concern over this was all at a time when nasa was thinking about a much bigger space station that was going to need heavy payloads and weekly launches. if you scale prather's figures from 9 launches to 52 launches (or may twice that), and then double it again for heavier payloads, then the percentage injection would be a large fraction of the total hydrocarbon load on the stratosphere.
A second consideration is that the rockets emit chlorine radicals and chlorine molecules directly, these may have massively higher radical reactions than simple CFCs would. thus total chlorine mass should also take into account the type of chlorine.
All told I'm not sure where I stand now. Interesting discussion. Sorry to insult you.
Um mr know-it-all-nassa employee, I once Co-authored a proposal with NASA folks which was a response to a Call for proposals on just this issue. This was considered a very real problem. The proposal was not on mitigation but on monitoring the chemical distribution problem using near-IR lidar. Some of the mitigation proposals involved adding magnesium to the boosters in the right stochimetric mix so as to precipitate the chlorine. But these apparently had other problems including quenching the rocket fuel burn
So I do know a little bit about this. More than you at least. Obviously they have not informed the janitorial staff at NASA of this problem or you might have heard about it.
all they have to do is go to Spain, or venuzuela or Mexico or any govenrnment thinking about converting to Linux and point out the possible complicationsif this ever did go to trial. Maybe the linux distro you are thinking about will have an accident, see...
It would be the cheapest way for MS to subvert Linux. Even sheaper than buying the Sony DRM patents that are in the news lately. (Buy DRM patents, dont let GNU use them. Eventually enough music/movies is out in DRM that without liscenced DRM enabled players linux desktops suck. end of linux withou microsoft having to compete at all).
when people started talking about 1 launch a month or 1 launch a week, the amount of chlorine that would be placed in the upper atmoshpere whould be enough to destroy the entire ozone layer in a few decades. The only comparable natural phenomena is a volcanic eruption which puts even more chlorine (and other acids) into the upper atmoshere than a shuttle launch.
with china, japan, north korea, europe and boeing all coming on line as rocket launch systems this is going to be increasingly important. Of course not all of these are solid fuel rockets (the culprit).
But reading this post I find myself trying to write down examples of public domain logos that are not controlled by any organization. And I think that there are relatively few. Of those that come to mind, like the pawn shop's three balls, and the Medical caducious, they are very ancient. A few modern examples are the radioactive and biohazard tri-foils.
We are now poised at a point where a new public symbol might have reached a critical public awareness where it might spring into existence. The Warchalked Wi-Fi hot spot.
Of course I'm glossing over those generic sorts of informational highway type signs that basically are pictographs (mens room, telephone, hotel bed).
Or maybe this is more common than I think. Can slashdot readers come up with other (non-generic) examples of "free" logos with no controlling entity.
Putting adds in the content, or having the content members plug stuff is not new. Soap operas are called "soap operas" because they were shows pormoted exclusivley for a single advertiser. Some shows required the story to involve laundry scenes where the "whiteness of your whites" could be commented upon. Ed sullivan, groucho marx, and all the rest used to plug the products right in the show, reading the ads.
I imagine they went to the "modern" format of distinct ads becaause they were deemed more effective at catching viewer attention. Now the pendulum swings back.
A freind told me that in some european country, italy perhaps, there are certain shows or channels that only have ads at the begining and ends. The response of the adveritsers is to make comercials so good that you really want to watch. Which of course is sort odd segwaying back into making whole shows again with embedded comercials.
Its annoying enough when you get the same jokes forwarded by e-mail from all your uncles and aunts. Now brace yourself for endless copies of the time Gilligan accidentally sleeps in the Skippers Hammock lining your inbox. Ah modern technology!
Apple drives the perfection of technology. they dont invent it but they make it all work. they tame it, and thus transform the industry. It's like the scultor that sees the thing they will cut out of the block of granite. Dynamic memory is a perfect example. Other computers that used it were totally un reliable. most foldks used Static ram Apple 2: first to tame the following stable dynamic memory refresh, interlace screen graphics, game sprites early mac: first to tame the following: GUI, mouse. WSIWIG editors. Cut and paste graphics between apps. Graphica interface multi-tasking. Impact Printers that printed graphics and text that worked seemlessly with all applications. Postscript printing Next: Display postscript for true WSISWIG. Optical disks. Grid Computing (all NeXTS could share their unused cycles across internet) . shaded Pixar Rendering built in, elegant industrial design for office computers. scully period: mostly crap. abandoned software. newtons, OpenDoc,Quciktime. copland Jobs era: firewire, ipods, imac1 imac2, osX well history will decide. But every year we see people trying to clone mac innovations.
My nightmare is that by next year we will all be be wearing MS wrist watches. It will happen like this
Microsoft announced that to prevent piracy they will be assessing $100 to anyone who has a wrist even if the MS wristwatch is not intalled. The BSA has proposed challenge audits, in which all persons hanving one or more wrist must be able to document thay have paid the $100 wrist- site liscence or that they have purchased a MS wrist watch.
"it is just to easy for someone to remove the watch from the wrist and install it on another unlicensed Wrist" said a microsoft spokes person, " that is a violation of the EULA". He went onto hint that the forthcoming "palladium wristwatch that once implanted..err.. I mean worn, cannot be removed, only upgraded from a 'trusted' member of the collective."
Not even the all-powerful reality distortion field of steve Jobs could make a data-watch seem like a major research achievement, or even new, or even something you would want touching your arm. (they are as stylish and practical is a pocket protector).
It seems to me that this has got to be an all time low point for announcements of innovation in consumer electronics. Why? Maybe its because of the down turn in the tech-market means new products are not being developed. Another possibility is that microsoft's moves into hardware production(x box,phones) and Hardware specification (palladium, watches, media player, smartScreens) is having a chilling effect on the electronics industry. Recently they (allegedly) tried bankrupt a phone maker and move his technology to a competitor. Shades of Stacker and all the other software companies microsoft co-opted, ruined then bought their technology.
There is little doubt that MS stifled innovation in software. Just the fact that jobs could tweak an open source project to tripple the speed of a web browser over IE, when IE has had a clear field to innovate for five years or more, speaks volumes about the MS innovation stifle field. How could apple even dream they could technologically beat MS in the Power point market, but they did.
Does anyone else find these MS offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?
Bill gates announces a recylced idea for a Nerd watch that shows sport scores, headlines. The debut the smartScreen, a 1500$ screen-only that hooks to your compute by wi-fi but cant play movies or mp3s, then they announce that anyone who already bought was is out of luck since that they will be changing the specs to use 802.11a to get better bandwidth for movies. then an oversized so-called "video" ipod that also cant show DVD movies, for more bucks than a ipod.
The only thing I thought was interesting was that they decided to switch to 802.11a for the smartScreens and not 802.11g. I dont know much about these standards except what Jobs said. 802.11a is dead, because it is not backwards compatible with 802.11b hotspots whereas 802.11g is.
How is it possible that one company can lead the entire market year after year going back all the way to the taming of dynamic memory. While the other company can lead the bussiness world and innovate nothing.
Microsoft announced that to prevent piracy they will be assessing $100 to anyone who has a wrist even if the MS wristwatch is not intalled. The BSA has proposed challenge audits, in which all persons hanving one or more wrist must be able to document thay have paid the $100 wrist- site liscence or that they have purchased a MS wrist watch.
"it is just to easy for someone to remove the watch from the wrist and install it on another unlicensed Wrist" said a microsoft spokes person, " that is a violation of the EULA". He went onto hint that the forthcoming "palladium wristwatch that once implanted..err.. I mean worn, cannot be removed, only upgraded from a 'trusted' member of the collective."
Not even the all-powerful reality distortion field of steve Jobs could make a data-watch seem like a major research achievement, or even new, or even something you would want touching your arm. (they are as stylish and practical is a pocket protector).
It seems to me that this has got to be an all time low point for announcements of innovation in consumer electronics. Why? Maybe its because of the down turn in the tech-market means new products are not being developed. Another possibility is that microsoft's moves into hardware production(x box,phones) and Hardware specification (palladium, watches, media player, smartScreens) is having a chilling effect on the electronics industry. Recently they (allegedly) tried bankrupt a phone maker and move his technology to a competitor. Shades of stacker and all the other software companies microsoft co-opted, ruined then bought their technology.
There is little doubt that MS stifled innovation in software. Just the fact that jobs could tweak an open source project to tripple the speed of a web browser over IE, when IE has had a clear field to innovate for five years or more, speaks volumes about the MS stifle field. How could apple even dream they could technologically beat MS in the Power point market, but they did. What is MS doing with its 90% market share besides sitting on it, and creating palladium to keep it?
Microsoft announced that to prevent piracy they will be assessing $100 to anyone who has a wrist even if the MS wristwatch is not intalled. The BSA has proposed challenge audits, in which all persons hanving one or more wrist must be able to document thay have paid the $100 wrist- site liscence or that they have purchased a MS wrist watch.
"it is just to easy for someone to remove the watch from the wrist and install it on another Wrist" said a microsoft spokes person, " that is a violation of the EULA".
Does anyone else find these offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?
Bill gates announces a recylced idea for a Nerd watch that shows sport scores, headlines. The debut the smartScreen, a 1500$ screen-only that hooks to your compute by wi-fi but cant play movies or mp3s, then they announce that anyone who already bought was is out of luck since that they will be changing the specs to use 802.11a to get better bandwidth for movies. then an oversized so-called "video" ipod that also cant show DVD movies, for more bucks than a ipod.
The only thing I thought was interesting was that they decided to go with 802.11a and not 802.11g
I dont know much about these standards except what Jobs said. 802.11a is dead, because it is not backwards compatible with 802.11b hotspots whereas 802.11g is.
How is it possible that one company can lead the entire market year after year going back all the way to the taming of dynamic memory. While the other company can lead the bussiness world and innovate nothing.
subrountins are just hierarchical encapuslations of these with inputs and outputs.
a given subroutine does not "fire" (is called) until all of the input wires have delivered there data. Thus one does not (usually) explicity control the order in which subroutines execute. as long as they have no dependencies (i.e. output wires from one leading to input wires of the other) then they are free to execute whenever their inputs are filled.
to debug in this language one watched the diagram. Graphicaly a value passes down a "wire" like a pig in a python and stops when it reaches an input (or maybe it splits if the wire splits, and goes to more than one input icon). once the subroutine icon has all its inputs filled, it pops open and reveals all the witing in side. the data again passes from the input connectors to the internal wires and so on. once all the outputs are satisfied, the window closes and were back in the original diagram.
you can place text boxes or graphs or chart recorders, or image plots on any wire. these show you the contents or changing contents of the wire in the format if the viewer. e.g. a strip chart recorder plots single or array values on a strip char that scrolls with time so you can watch them change.
you can selectively debug any part of the wiring diagram and let the other perform normally.
The neat part of the language is there is NO SUCH THING as a syntax error, or wrong pointer, or memory location overlap. Indeed there are no variables at all. just wires and controls that inject values into wires or display values in the wires. this makes it very suitable for control systems where those sort of programming errors are undesirable. Better to have wrong functionality that weird unexpected memory errors
the other cool thing about the language is that because it is inherently concurrent and event driven rather than sequenctial, the data flow language is easy to parallelize. It's also relatively easy to use an FPGA to hard code the functions of the icons into hardware.
the problem with the language is it requires garbarge collection and is the memory management is not so good as implemented. It's not too speedy either. But as I said it may be that its parallel advantages and near bug free coding and easy debugging outweigh single cpu speen in applications.