I considered this and had a fiddle, but I didn't work out how to get the DLL to talk to the PCI card. I have it on good authority that it's dead easy for ISA cards, but the same person couldn't help with this particular PCI card.
Most probably it's a matter of time before this approach does work, but this has taken too long already.
Well according to your next post you think I'm working on NMR quantum computing. I'm not. It's an optical scheme involving coherent transients in rare-earth doped inorganic crystals. So we aren't using a bought system, it's a system that's been put together over a decade, out of all sorts of discrete pieces of equipment, many of which were not bought by us for this purpose, all of which must be usable under a given OS for the whole experiment to use that OS. The only software that really can't be replaced is the hardware drivers, and the whole issue is that they can't be replaced without information from the company.
Whilst you are correct that much of the hardware we use, such as DSOs, waveform generators, etc. are OS-independent (via GPIB busses most of the time), we have some things that we simply can't replace and yet they don't work without proprietary drivers. Such as the USB->ISA converter in the pulse sequencer. We do fortunately know everything we need to know about the ISA card, but ARS Technologies manufactured the USB->ISA converter and it uses a magical black-box driver. No help with the specs when I asked them. So we would have to pull it all apart and use the ISA card directly from the PC (which I'm open to do BTW). Also the NI DAQPads are USB devices with equally mysterious USB converters, once again requiring black-box drivers under Windows.
I'm sure you realise that I am one of the people who *wants* to dump Windows in our lab. But I have to start by proving it's both possible and simple, on my own specific project, which for the present month is to retrofit an old optical spectrometer to be controlled from a PC. And before I got here, we had a PC running Win95, and using a broken VB app that talks to an NI PCI-7324 stepper card.
Now that's the thing that consumed going on two weeks of my time now. Instead of implementing a solution using VB, I felt adventurous. I tried GNU/Linux, but found that there's most likely no way without some hardcore reverse-engineering, to get the card going under Linux. Not all of that time was wasted on the card, some of it went into experiments with QT as a cross-platform development environment. Still, I've given up (at least for now) as I still have to use Windows.
Who do you sue? I don't know. M$? No, they sue you. You should have upgraded when they gave you the polite invitation. The company who made the card? They're an international entity bigger than most. They would sit back and smile, knowing that they got the initial sale, and then when you lose, they get the court costs and damages for libel. There's no point asking who to sue.
Warranty of fitness? They don't even give specifications or support. That's not a very fit product for my application, i.e. using it. And have you seen the click-through EULA on most proprietary software? There is *no warranty*, expressed or implied.
As for the design process, I've seen some utter crap proprietary software out there. Clearly no thought went into the design of Win95 for example, or I wouldn't have to reboot it as often. Or upgrade it. Whereas I can take a look at the free software out there and make a decision. No need to pay for it (unless I really like it) up front. No need to be locked in. If it sucks, you've not wasted any more resources than if you bought a proprietary package and hate it.
Most importantly, using commercial software makes repeatibility in other labs a more likely possibility.
Why? When anyone anywhere can download the same software as me, compile on any platform they happen to be using, and try it out at no financial cost, how could using black-box proprietary software be more repeatable? If somebody wanted to duplicate my setup, then using free software I have the freedom to burn a copy of my hard disc onto CDs and post it to them. There's no more repeatable solution than that.
That means I should start looking for a weapon and maybe some sort of alliance with the hero figure who will never let me be taken by the hoards of mutant photons streaming from the monitor. Yes I'm the fat guy in my lab;)
Been there, done that. The problem is in obtaining the knowledge. Hey, if they want Linux support all they have to do is make it only mildly difficult and people like us will give it to them. Then they can keep profiting from us. But if they make it so hard that you have to reverse-engineer binary drivers, then they can go find themselves somebody else to sell to.
"Alessandro Rubini's excellent book Linux Device Drivers (another fine O'Reilly publication)" Ahh, knowledge, what could be finer. Free software, free info. Go get it and become the research tech God you want to be.
Well I've read Linux Device Drivers, nearly cover to cover, and I've implemented Linux drivers for the chip I designed during my Engineering Honours project. So I'm not scared of doing it although I know of how much effort it takes. The main thing is you need to have specs for the card. Such things don't seem to exist outside of NI's vaults.
I've been told that our lab distrusts LabView because of previous irritations. I don't have any experience with it personally. But as for the Linux version, there still aren't any drivers for my stepper board (NI PCI-7324).
Your time is your most important resource. Don't waste it recoding.
That's some good advice, I agree. But still my ideals die hard.
I said trying, not succeeding. There would be no problem if I had won.
I guess it all comes down to the definition of a better alternative. If it doesn't work, it's clearly not better, no matter how close it came to working.
Even if you know what you are doing is going to be really lousy, if it works it's not a total loss.
Well it's so simple you're gonna laugh, I'm controlling a two-axis pulsed-laser spectrometer. The problem is that I've got a National Instruments PCI-7324 stepper motor card to work with and even Comedi (which looks kewl BTW) doesn't support it. I can't blame them, there's just no information out there to start with. NI won't even reply to my emails.
I thought it would be clever to implement a GUI using QT and then simply compiling on Windows with the stubs filled in to use the DLL. How wrong I was. The GUI looks great, but Trolltech's official position is that the Non-Commercial version of QT for Windows isn't supported any more, so you have to use QT 2.3 when 3.1 is out for Linux. I would have even ported my code back to 2.3 but then I would still need MS Visual C++ or Borland C++ Builder 5 (yes, I have version 6 and that's not binary compatible with the QT distribution). In case you're wondering, I did try MinGW but in the time I had available I didn't get anywhere because qmake still looks for a C++ Builder 5 DLL which I don't have. I could download the MS VC++ version of QT 2.3 but I expect to have the same problems all over again. And really if you've paid good money for a development environment like Borland C++ Builder 6, you might as well just use it instead. Oh and I did try to get the NI software running under Wine, I think I might have had some luck that way but I couldn't see how to get the Windows DLL talking to the PCI card in the time I had.
Then came a flurry of ideas for changing the stepper card to something else, say a timer/counter card, and use Comedi. But I quickly came to the conclusion that I've wasted enough time, I have a working stepper card already, and my supervisor really wanted a product using VB anyway because it's the easiest way to get physicists with zero coding experience to use and modify the application to fit their needs. It's logic I can't really beat right now, I wish it weren't so, I *so* wish I could hand him a free software solution with the same benefits to him as a VB solution, but I just can't.
Oh and if you were still wondering, I have to use Win95. That or replace it with the free (as in beer) OS of my choice, which would be Mandrake 9.1. Maybe I'll get an upgrade to Win2K but it bothers me to pay good money for a piece of software I wouldn't need if a) the original Win95 worked without blue-screening randomly, or b) NI would have some Linux support.
There's a guy upstairs who used to have an entire lab running GNU/Linux until he battled Agilent's and NI's lousy Linux support. He finally gave up and converted his lab from Linux to Windows (at great financial cost) so he could keep working on his experiments. Along came the customary driver conflicts, forced expensive updates, etc. etc. It's a sad tale, and it's what I was told when I began asking around in desperation. Now I know he wasn't kidding around:(
our beloved USA-homegrown CDMA didn't win out in Iraq after all
Hey, I'm one of the US self-bias allegers and I'm angry CDMA isn't being used in Iraq.
In Australia we are pretty much stuck with crappy GSM, although CDMA has a presence in those remote areas where there are long distances to cover and the crappiness of GSM prevents it from being used. I mean, seriously dudes, code-division craps on time-division and every engineer who understands the difference will tell you that.
CDMA is one of the better US inventions and yet we can't convince policy makers to roll it out. I can understand why it's tough to do when GSM has a strong foothold, it costs so much to replace a whole network. But the coalition would have wiped out every last bit of telecommunications infrastructure, and what they had probably wasn't that great anyway. The least we owe the Iraqis is a decent mobile phone system. The kind I wish for myself.
I realised that due to Australia being one of the first countries to experience any given anniversary, it was gone by the time/. mentioned it.
Clearly/. is behind on the times... by about 12 hours;)
I think that anniversaries should be posted about 12 hours earlier for those living closer to the date line. It gives the rest of you a chance to put up some decorations too;)
Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
I am an emulation that thinks I'm me. It's old biotechnology, and in need of an upgrade, but it's got an uptime of 21 years and that's hard to beat with other technologies.
When the system is getting ready to crash, I'd appreciate it if somebody moved the system image to something more modern, with better reliability than the present platform. But the emulated code will start off the same.
Plus if my latest experiment goes horribly wrong and I am destroyed in the process, the sysadmin can restore me from backup tapes;)
Once we can perfectly replicate the functionality of every last bit of the brain, do we just have a really nifty toy, or a genuine mind?
The absolutely-wikid game called Deus Ex visits this kind of question in its storyline. JC Denton is given an opportunity to chat with Morpheus, an AI prototype for Echelon IV, which knows everything there is to know about him. It seems to be pretty clever, but a really cool toy nonetheless (in fact that's its stated purpose).
PLOT SPOILER WARNING
One of the three endings involves Denton merging with an AI which has total awareness of everything happening on the future Internet. The result is partly human mind made of nano-augmented flesh, part AI executing on every information system on the planet. AI is clearly not just a toy at this point, since there is a humand mind present as well!
With that much computer grunt behind the AI it's surprising that the AI would want this, but it's because it wants to understand human emotion in order to become a benevolent dictator. Perhaps in reality we will be able to copy this information from the mind to the machine, removing the need for human flesh at all.
People pull the plug on loved ones who are living as vegetables. Who's to say if that's the right decision either?
At least with a hippocampus bypass, they are bypassing something that was known to be barely functional in the first place, and failure of the surgery results in similar living conditions to before.
Future surgery may insert a better device. Pulling the plug is a little more permanent;)
Amigas are incredibly resilient. Ask anyone who ever opened one up without any idea what they were doing;)
I was once moving my A1200 motherboard into an AT miditower case. I soldered wires from an old AT motherboard connector to the motherboard, where the power jack was. I clearly made a mistake with my multimeter when working out the connections, since the 0V and 5V connections were OK but the +12V and -12V connections were reversed.
You would think that this kind of problem would cause horrendous damage, but in fact I didn't notice for a little while. It booted and all, just wouldn't output any sound and there were faint ripples on the display. I didn't do anything about that though, thinking I had left off the audio leads. It's only when it stank that I felt around the board with my finger. Some discrete semiconductor was painfully hot, so I checked everything I'd done. I swapped the wires to the correct spots, and everything's been fine ever since!
A related story is for the most resilient chip in history. Now they aren't very clever in their design or performance, but one thing Microchip PIC16F84 microcontrollers have going for them is their ability to be set on fire and still work. I've accidentally reversed the 5V supply and burned my fingerprint onto the top of the chip once, and then fixed the problem to have it work perfectly. In fact it only died when I made a similar mistake on the programming pin, there must be a lack of protection due to the normally higher voltage than Vcc. But the chip mostly worked, just couldn't reprogramme!
I've also witnessed a friend standing at an engineering honours project expo, suit and tie, ready to present his design to the judges. With the PIC16F84 on fire. With said friend shitting himself. Just as the judges arrived, he tried again and it worked. Must have removed the short and let it cool off in time!
My pet theory is that these chips have more silicon area devoted to the protection diodes than to the rest of the logic. So whether that's true, you can safely assume that they can take what you can dish out. Maybe I'll try on my half-dead PIC something that I know doesn't work for LEDs: hooking up to my pulse discharge equipment and pumping around 50 J of energy in at around 20 kV, in a few microseconds (yes, that's several MW peak output power). LEDs give a dim flash but plastic shards hit the walls and bounce around, with the remnants of the device containing no silicon die anymore. I tried that one last week;)
Many countries are quickly jumping on the "computer break-in" = "cyberterrorism" bandwagon and making laws with worse penalties than brutal rape/murder. At least here in Australia it's gotten that way and I hear the US is no better off. Do you think we should campaign that spam using forged headers is a form of computer break-in (i.e. bypassing a spam filter) and thus a form of "cyberterrorism"? There is clearly a significant loss of productivity and the occasional important email.
Also, what do you think of the huge number of wide-open SMTP servers accepting these forged headers from anyone? Would you think they should be treated as aiding and abetting these evil "cyberterrorists" and forced to improve "cybersecurity"?
The important thing about this "teleportation" process to remember is: if you stick your hand into the region between the transmitter and reciever you will still get a hole burned in it by the perfectly ordinary beam of energetic, physical photons that is "teleporting" the information.
Not necessarily so, since all that is required is that the source and destination both share entanglement. This can be established well in advance of the actual teleportation, say by entangling nuclear spins using entangled photons. These spins can be kept entangled for a while, in many cases for tens of milliseconds, or longer using such techniques as entanglement purification and quantum error-correcting codes. I would expect many days to be a perfectly reasonable time to hold on to shared entanglement.
Then when teleportation is to occur, only classical information must be communicated, using whatever means are popular at the time. Perhaps TCP/IP over fibre optics?
Great weapon development here, I guess you could teleport bullets halfway around the world faster than the speed of light?.. ouch.
Um, several problems with the statement.
Firstly, from a theoretical viewpoint, faster than light teleportation is ruled out already. Sorry.
Secondly, there has to be someone on the other end to receive the communication and reconstruct the quantum state. Sure, if somebody is dumb enough to accept a bullet, they will learn a lesson.
Thirdly, massive particles have never been teleported, and this challenge will be a tough nut to crack. Not only that, but a single bullet contains so many qubits of quantum information that teleporting it would require more classical communication than has ever been sent over the Internet, or will ever be sent using the types of technology presently imaginable.
Lastly, I see no reason why the teleported bullet would arrive travelling with its original velocity. I suppose it's possible, but surely you'd notice that something funny was going on while reconstructing it, and go "hang on, why would that shipment of porn be going *that fast*?"
It would be far simpler to just bomb the victim flat into the ground, using nuclear weapons, taking as many civilians with him as possible. That would be far more likely given how much Western governments like to spend money on far-sighted R&D, versus how many nukes the US has lying around, just going to waste;)
Kevin, imagine that you are somehow trapped in an elevator, with the prosecutor who argued that you could start a nuclear war from a touch-tone phone, and the judge who believed him and put you in solitary confinement as a result.
After the long, awkward silence, when you three finally had something to say to each other, what do you think it would be?
Do you feel that, at least that one time, you were punished by the judge for his own stupidity?
...or does there seem to be an awful lot about Australia on/. these days?
It's all part of John Howard's cunning plan to make Australia the newest state of the USA. The first step is to get Americans used to the name Australia, and the very idea that it exists outside the US. Once they have gotten over that shock to reality, the next step is to send our troops to a war for American oil. They will see, in time, that we really *are* willing to be led around by Bush, just like real Americans!
We've got 20 million people, plenty of desert and a shortage of intelligent, rational people, as evidenced by our choice in leaders. We could be the next redneck state of the US;) (yay!)
Disclaimer: I am Australian. Therefore I enjoy the use of sarcasm.
Correct, although the usual way to say this is that photons have mass, but no rest mass. This is a pretty important distinction since special relativity says that an object with rest mass can never travel at the speed of light (or at least it's mass-energy would have to be infinite, which seems kind of stupid to most people).
If anybody wants to know, the energy of a photon is given by
E = h f
where E is energy in J, h is Planck's constant (roughly 6.626E-34 J s) and f is frequency in Hz
From there it's pretty easy to rearrange E = mc^2 to get:
m = E / c^2 = h f / c^2
where m is mass in kg and c is the speed of light in a vacuum (roughly 2.998E8 m/s)
Much like the act of modchipping has a fair use (playing your own bought games from other countries), so too does the act of breaking the keys. To use your own software on your own hardware, in your own home.
At least here in Australia it's been ruled legal to modchip so why not let the Aussies crack the key and then everyone can enjoy it;)
Surely Micro$oft would be happy that less people modchip their Xboxes, right? Nahhh...
My friends and I have been bitterly disappointed with the way that Enterprise has been dumbed-down and commercialised. Most of the time it's just too hard to believe that it's really happening. We find it an embarassment to everything that Gene Roddenberry's legacy stands for.
So do you think, Mr Shatner, that Gene would be tempted to clobber Rick Burman from beyond the grave? Wouldn't he be at least a little offended?
After considering your answer, are you tempted to do it for him?;)
I'm studying chip design and my supervisor scoffs at asynchronous logic. I don't have any real input of my own, but his view is that we've been waiting for commercially viable asynchronous designs for as long as cheap fusion, and neither has happened yet despite many loud enthusiasts.
One of the real problems of asynchronous logic is in testing. With synchronous logic your design is partitioned into registers and combinational logic. The combinational stuff can be tested at production by use of every possible test vector, while registers are rather easy to test. Together these two tests virtually guarantee that the state machine works. Do that for every state machine and you're done.
Asynchronous state machines, however, have no obvious way to break them down. You have to give them sequences of inputs and check their sequential outputs. Even if you think it's working you can never be sure, and what happens when the temperature changes? Race conditions can result in the state machine breaking under changing temperatures.
Synchronous design is a very mature field. Nowadays you can be sure that a design works before fabrication (well, almost.. =) and then synthesise it into gates that ought to work first go. If they didn't then AMD and Intel would go under pretty soon!
Asynchronous design is hard and my hat goes off to the people who do it for a living. But the same amount of effort would result in far more development using standard techniques. I guess you really have to want to do it.
Yes, synchronous logic has serious issues with clock distribution, but it's still the most commercially viable design technique. The fact that your CPU is fully synchronous is testament to that.
So, which will come first: cheap fusion or reliable asynchronous logic?
Slashdot Mirror
I considered this and had a fiddle, but I didn't work out how to get the DLL to talk to the PCI card. I have it on good authority that it's dead easy for ISA cards, but the same person couldn't help with this particular PCI card.
Most probably it's a matter of time before this approach does work, but this has taken too long already.
You dared me did ya?
Well according to your next post you think I'm working on NMR quantum computing. I'm not. It's an optical scheme involving coherent transients in rare-earth doped inorganic crystals. So we aren't using a bought system, it's a system that's been put together over a decade, out of all sorts of discrete pieces of equipment, many of which were not bought by us for this purpose, all of which must be usable under a given OS for the whole experiment to use that OS. The only software that really can't be replaced is the hardware drivers, and the whole issue is that they can't be replaced without information from the company.
Whilst you are correct that much of the hardware we use, such as DSOs, waveform generators, etc. are OS-independent (via GPIB busses most of the time), we have some things that we simply can't replace and yet they don't work without proprietary drivers. Such as the USB->ISA converter in the pulse sequencer. We do fortunately know everything we need to know about the ISA card, but ARS Technologies manufactured the USB->ISA converter and it uses a magical black-box driver. No help with the specs when I asked them. So we would have to pull it all apart and use the ISA card directly from the PC (which I'm open to do BTW). Also the NI DAQPads are USB devices with equally mysterious USB converters, once again requiring black-box drivers under Windows.
I'm sure you realise that I am one of the people who *wants* to dump Windows in our lab. But I have to start by proving it's both possible and simple, on my own specific project, which for the present month is to retrofit an old optical spectrometer to be controlled from a PC. And before I got here, we had a PC running Win95, and using a broken VB app that talks to an NI PCI-7324 stepper card.
Now that's the thing that consumed going on two weeks of my time now. Instead of implementing a solution using VB, I felt adventurous. I tried GNU/Linux, but found that there's most likely no way without some hardcore reverse-engineering, to get the card going under Linux. Not all of that time was wasted on the card, some of it went into experiments with QT as a cross-platform development environment. Still, I've given up (at least for now) as I still have to use Windows.
Who do you sue? I don't know. M$? No, they sue you. You should have upgraded when they gave you the polite invitation. The company who made the card? They're an international entity bigger than most. They would sit back and smile, knowing that they got the initial sale, and then when you lose, they get the court costs and damages for libel. There's no point asking who to sue.
Warranty of fitness? They don't even give specifications or support. That's not a very fit product for my application, i.e. using it. And have you seen the click-through EULA on most proprietary software? There is *no warranty*, expressed or implied.
As for the design process, I've seen some utter crap proprietary software out there. Clearly no thought went into the design of Win95 for example, or I wouldn't have to reboot it as often. Or upgrade it. Whereas I can take a look at the free software out there and make a decision. No need to pay for it (unless I really like it) up front. No need to be locked in. If it sucks, you've not wasted any more resources than if you bought a proprietary package and hate it.
Most importantly, using commercial software makes repeatibility in other labs a more likely possibility.
Why? When anyone anywhere can download the same software as me, compile on any platform they happen to be using, and try it out at no financial cost, how could using black-box proprietary software be more repeatable? If somebody wanted to duplicate my setup, then using free software I have the freedom to burn a copy of my hard disc onto CDs and post it to them. There's no more repeatable solution than that.
I bet the fat guy in your lab gets it first.
;)
That means I should start looking for a weapon and maybe some sort of alliance with the hero figure who will never let me be taken by the hoards of mutant photons streaming from the monitor. Yes I'm the fat guy in my lab
Been there, done that. The problem is in obtaining the knowledge. Hey, if they want Linux support all they have to do is make it only mildly difficult and people like us will give it to them. Then they can keep profiting from us. But if they make it so hard that you have to reverse-engineer binary drivers, then they can go find themselves somebody else to sell to.
Comedi is awsome.
I second that sentiment!
"Alessandro Rubini's excellent book Linux Device Drivers (another fine O'Reilly publication)" Ahh, knowledge, what could be finer. Free software, free info. Go get it and become the research tech God you want to be.
Well I've read Linux Device Drivers, nearly cover to cover, and I've implemented Linux drivers for the chip I designed during my Engineering Honours project. So I'm not scared of doing it although I know of how much effort it takes. The main thing is you need to have specs for the card. Such things don't seem to exist outside of NI's vaults.
I've been told that our lab distrusts LabView because of previous irritations. I don't have any experience with it personally. But as for the Linux version, there still aren't any drivers for my stepper board (NI PCI-7324).
Your time is your most important resource. Don't waste it recoding.
That's some good advice, I agree. But still my ideals die hard.
I said trying, not succeeding. There would be no problem if I had won.
I guess it all comes down to the definition of a better alternative. If it doesn't work, it's clearly not better, no matter how close it came to working.
Even if you know what you are doing is going to be really lousy, if it works it's not a total loss.
Well it's so simple you're gonna laugh, I'm controlling a two-axis pulsed-laser spectrometer. The problem is that I've got a National Instruments PCI-7324 stepper motor card to work with and even Comedi (which looks kewl BTW) doesn't support it. I can't blame them, there's just no information out there to start with. NI won't even reply to my emails.
:(
I thought it would be clever to implement a GUI using QT and then simply compiling on Windows with the stubs filled in to use the DLL. How wrong I was. The GUI looks great, but Trolltech's official position is that the Non-Commercial version of QT for Windows isn't supported any more, so you have to use QT 2.3 when 3.1 is out for Linux. I would have even ported my code back to 2.3 but then I would still need MS Visual C++ or Borland C++ Builder 5 (yes, I have version 6 and that's not binary compatible with the QT distribution). In case you're wondering, I did try MinGW but in the time I had available I didn't get anywhere because qmake still looks for a C++ Builder 5 DLL which I don't have. I could download the MS VC++ version of QT 2.3 but I expect to have the same problems all over again. And really if you've paid good money for a development environment like Borland C++ Builder 6, you might as well just use it instead. Oh and I did try to get the NI software running under Wine, I think I might have had some luck that way but I couldn't see how to get the Windows DLL talking to the PCI card in the time I had.
Then came a flurry of ideas for changing the stepper card to something else, say a timer/counter card, and use Comedi. But I quickly came to the conclusion that I've wasted enough time, I have a working stepper card already, and my supervisor really wanted a product using VB anyway because it's the easiest way to get physicists with zero coding experience to use and modify the application to fit their needs. It's logic I can't really beat right now, I wish it weren't so, I *so* wish I could hand him a free software solution with the same benefits to him as a VB solution, but I just can't.
Oh and if you were still wondering, I have to use Win95. That or replace it with the free (as in beer) OS of my choice, which would be Mandrake 9.1. Maybe I'll get an upgrade to Win2K but it bothers me to pay good money for a piece of software I wouldn't need if a) the original Win95 worked without blue-screening randomly, or b) NI would have some Linux support.
There's a guy upstairs who used to have an entire lab running GNU/Linux until he battled Agilent's and NI's lousy Linux support. He finally gave up and converted his lab from Linux to Windows (at great financial cost) so he could keep working on his experiments. Along came the customary driver conflicts, forced expensive updates, etc. etc. It's a sad tale, and it's what I was told when I began asking around in desperation. Now I know he wasn't kidding around
our beloved USA-homegrown CDMA didn't win out in Iraq after all
;)
Hey, I'm one of the US self-bias allegers and I'm angry CDMA isn't being used in Iraq.
In Australia we are pretty much stuck with crappy GSM, although CDMA has a presence in those remote areas where there are long distances to cover and the crappiness of GSM prevents it from being used. I mean, seriously dudes, code-division craps on time-division and every engineer who understands the difference will tell you that.
CDMA is one of the better US inventions and yet we can't convince policy makers to roll it out. I can understand why it's tough to do when GSM has a strong foothold, it costs so much to replace a whole network. But the coalition would have wiped out every last bit of telecommunications infrastructure, and what they had probably wasn't that great anyway. The least we owe the Iraqis is a decent mobile phone system. The kind I wish for myself.
Yes, I'm done
I realised that due to Australia being one of the first countries to experience any given anniversary, it was gone by the time /. mentioned it.
/. is behind on the times... by about 12 hours ;)
;)
Clearly
I think that anniversaries should be posted about 12 hours earlier for those living closer to the date line. It gives the rest of you a chance to put up some decorations too
Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
;)
I am an emulation that thinks I'm me. It's old biotechnology, and in need of an upgrade, but it's got an uptime of 21 years and that's hard to beat with other technologies.
When the system is getting ready to crash, I'd appreciate it if somebody moved the system image to something more modern, with better reliability than the present platform. But the emulated code will start off the same.
Plus if my latest experiment goes horribly wrong and I am destroyed in the process, the sysadmin can restore me from backup tapes
Once we can perfectly replicate the functionality of every last bit of the brain, do we just have a really nifty toy, or a genuine mind?
The absolutely-wikid game called Deus Ex visits this kind of question in its storyline. JC Denton is given an opportunity to chat with Morpheus, an AI prototype for Echelon IV, which knows everything there is to know about him. It seems to be pretty clever, but a really cool toy nonetheless (in fact that's its stated purpose).
PLOT SPOILER WARNING
One of the three endings involves Denton merging with an AI which has total awareness of everything happening on the future Internet. The result is partly human mind made of nano-augmented flesh, part AI executing on every information system on the planet. AI is clearly not just a toy at this point, since there is a humand mind present as well!
With that much computer grunt behind the AI it's surprising that the AI would want this, but it's because it wants to understand human emotion in order to become a benevolent dictator. Perhaps in reality we will be able to copy this information from the mind to the machine, removing the need for human flesh at all.
People pull the plug on loved ones who are living as vegetables. Who's to say if that's the right decision either?
;)
At least with a hippocampus bypass, they are bypassing something that was known to be barely functional in the first place, and failure of the surgery results in similar living conditions to before.
Future surgery may insert a better device. Pulling the plug is a little more permanent
Amigas are incredibly resilient. Ask anyone who ever opened one up without any idea what they were doing ;)
;)
I was once moving my A1200 motherboard into an AT miditower case. I soldered wires from an old AT motherboard connector to the motherboard, where the power jack was. I clearly made a mistake with my multimeter when working out the connections, since the 0V and 5V connections were OK but the +12V and -12V connections were reversed.
You would think that this kind of problem would cause horrendous damage, but in fact I didn't notice for a little while. It booted and all, just wouldn't output any sound and there were faint ripples on the display. I didn't do anything about that though, thinking I had left off the audio leads. It's only when it stank that I felt around the board with my finger. Some discrete semiconductor was painfully hot, so I checked everything I'd done. I swapped the wires to the correct spots, and everything's been fine ever since!
A related story is for the most resilient chip in history. Now they aren't very clever in their design or performance, but one thing Microchip PIC16F84 microcontrollers have going for them is their ability to be set on fire and still work. I've accidentally reversed the 5V supply and burned my fingerprint onto the top of the chip once, and then fixed the problem to have it work perfectly. In fact it only died when I made a similar mistake on the programming pin, there must be a lack of protection due to the normally higher voltage than Vcc. But the chip mostly worked, just couldn't reprogramme!
I've also witnessed a friend standing at an engineering honours project expo, suit and tie, ready to present his design to the judges. With the PIC16F84 on fire. With said friend shitting himself. Just as the judges arrived, he tried again and it worked. Must have removed the short and let it cool off in time!
My pet theory is that these chips have more silicon area devoted to the protection diodes than to the rest of the logic. So whether that's true, you can safely assume that they can take what you can dish out. Maybe I'll try on my half-dead PIC something that I know doesn't work for LEDs: hooking up to my pulse discharge equipment and pumping around 50 J of energy in at around 20 kV, in a few microseconds (yes, that's several MW peak output power). LEDs give a dim flash but plastic shards hit the walls and bounce around, with the remnants of the device containing no silicon die anymore. I tried that one last week
Barry,
Many countries are quickly jumping on the "computer break-in" = "cyberterrorism" bandwagon and making laws with worse penalties than brutal rape/murder. At least here in Australia it's gotten that way and I hear the US is no better off. Do you think we should campaign that spam using forged headers is a form of computer break-in (i.e. bypassing a spam filter) and thus a form of "cyberterrorism"? There is clearly a significant loss of productivity and the occasional important email.
Also, what do you think of the huge number of wide-open SMTP servers accepting these forged headers from anyone? Would you think they should be treated as aiding and abetting these evil "cyberterrorists" and forced to improve "cybersecurity"?
The important thing about this "teleportation" process to remember is: if you stick your hand into the region between the transmitter and reciever you will still get a hole burned in it by the perfectly ordinary beam of energetic, physical photons that is "teleporting" the information.
Not necessarily so, since all that is required is that the source and destination both share entanglement. This can be established well in advance of the actual teleportation, say by entangling nuclear spins using entangled photons. These spins can be kept entangled for a while, in many cases for tens of milliseconds, or longer using such techniques as entanglement purification and quantum error-correcting codes. I would expect many days to be a perfectly reasonable time to hold on to shared entanglement.
Then when teleportation is to occur, only classical information must be communicated, using whatever means are popular at the time. Perhaps TCP/IP over fibre optics?
Um, several problems with the statement.
- Firstly, from a theoretical viewpoint, faster than light teleportation is ruled out already. Sorry.
- Secondly, there has to be someone on the other end to receive the communication and reconstruct the quantum state. Sure, if somebody is dumb enough to accept a bullet, they will learn a lesson.
- Thirdly, massive particles have never been teleported, and this challenge will be a tough nut to crack. Not only that, but a single bullet contains so many qubits of quantum information that teleporting it would require more classical communication than has ever been sent over the Internet, or will ever be sent using the types of technology presently imaginable.
- Lastly, I see no reason why the teleported bullet would arrive travelling with its original velocity. I suppose it's possible, but surely you'd notice that something funny was going on while reconstructing it, and go "hang on, why would that shipment of porn be going *that fast*?"
It would be far simpler to just bomb the victim flat into the ground, using nuclear weapons, taking as many civilians with him as possible. That would be far more likely given how much Western governments like to spend money on far-sighted R&D, versus how many nukes the US has lying around, just going to wasteKevin, imagine that you are somehow trapped in an elevator, with the prosecutor who argued that you could start a nuclear war from a touch-tone phone, and the judge who believed him and put you in solitary confinement as a result.
After the long, awkward silence, when you three finally had something to say to each other, what do you think it would be?
Do you feel that, at least that one time, you were punished by the judge for his own stupidity?
It's all part of John Howard's cunning plan to make Australia the newest state of the USA. The first step is to get Americans used to the name Australia, and the very idea that it exists outside the US. Once they have gotten over that shock to reality, the next step is to send our troops to a war for American oil. They will see, in time, that we really *are* willing to be led around by Bush, just like real Americans!
We've got 20 million people, plenty of desert and a shortage of intelligent, rational people, as evidenced by our choice in leaders. We could be the next redneck state of the US
Disclaimer: I am Australian. Therefore I enjoy the use of sarcasm.
Correct, although the usual way to say this is that photons have mass, but no rest mass. This is a pretty important distinction since special relativity says that an object with rest mass can never travel at the speed of light (or at least it's mass-energy would have to be infinite, which seems kind of stupid to most people).
If anybody wants to know, the energy of a photon is given by
E = h f
where E is energy in J, h is Planck's constant (roughly 6.626E-34 J s) and f is frequency in Hz
From there it's pretty easy to rearrange E = mc^2 to get:
m = E / c^2 = h f / c^2
where m is mass in kg and c is the speed of light in a vacuum (roughly 2.998E8 m/s)
Much like the act of modchipping has a fair use (playing your own bought games from other countries), so too does the act of breaking the keys. To use your own software on your own hardware, in your own home.
;)
At least here in Australia it's been ruled legal to modchip so why not let the Aussies crack the key and then everyone can enjoy it
Surely Micro$oft would be happy that less people modchip their Xboxes, right? Nahhh...
pretty easily brute-forced with even a relatively weak quantum computer.
Well by todays standards, 10 qubits would be a pretty good quantum computer, so "relatively weak" is indeed a relative term =)
My friends and I have been bitterly disappointed with the way that Enterprise has been dumbed-down and commercialised. Most of the time it's just too hard to believe that it's really happening. We find it an embarassment to everything that Gene Roddenberry's legacy stands for.
;)
So do you think, Mr Shatner, that Gene would be tempted to clobber Rick Burman from beyond the grave? Wouldn't he be at least a little offended?
After considering your answer, are you tempted to do it for him?
I'm studying chip design and my supervisor scoffs at asynchronous logic. I don't have any real input of my own, but his view is that we've been waiting for commercially viable asynchronous designs for as long as cheap fusion, and neither has happened yet despite many loud enthusiasts.
One of the real problems of asynchronous logic is in testing. With synchronous logic your design is partitioned into registers and combinational logic. The combinational stuff can be tested at production by use of every possible test vector, while registers are rather easy to test. Together these two tests virtually guarantee that the state machine works. Do that for every state machine and you're done.
Asynchronous state machines, however, have no obvious way to break them down. You have to give them sequences of inputs and check their sequential outputs. Even if you think it's working you can never be sure, and what happens when the temperature changes? Race conditions can result in the state machine breaking under changing temperatures.
Synchronous design is a very mature field. Nowadays you can be sure that a design works before fabrication (well, almost.. =) and then synthesise it into gates that ought to work first go. If they didn't then AMD and Intel would go under pretty soon!Asynchronous design is hard and my hat goes off to the people who do it for a living. But the same amount of effort would result in far more development using standard techniques. I guess you really have to want to do it.
Yes, synchronous logic has serious issues with clock distribution, but it's still the most commercially viable design technique. The fact that your CPU is fully synchronous is testament to that.
So, which will come first: cheap fusion or reliable asynchronous logic?