Why is this insightful? Tivo are not only making money by selling subscriptions, they are also licensing their technology to companies (Philips and Sony, for example) who sell the hardware. They basically incur ZERO costs licensing the technology (other than legal fees, I guess) whereas the manufacturers have to worry about startup and production costs.
Also, the Tivo service is NOT something you can get for free by looking the listings up on TVGuide.com. It does a lot more than just matching up the listings to what you want to record, it also figures out what you like to watch, and recommends shows that maybe you haven't heard of by (anonymously) collecting the viewing habits of others like you, and correlating the data. Personally I really like this service, as although I sometimes get some whacky programming (I don't speak Spanish, but my Tivo sometimes thinks I do) I also get many shows which I never would have watched otherwise, but which turn out to be shows I really enjoy.
While video display terminal (VDT) use has become commonplace in many types of jobs, there is little information on how long a person can safely use a computer each day.
Did you happen to fail the reading comprehension section on the SATs?
However, the article does disagree with the actual study (which links the symtpoms suffered to the work conditions) and in general seems sensationalistic.
If they move to support your product, they inadvertently make you the market leader.
The phrase embrace and extend comes to mind. Just because your competitor is compatible with your product does not automatically make you the market leader.
They also raise issues of their code now having been derived from your code, and thus required to be GPL'd itself. On the whole, no smart competitor would touch anything you put under the GPL.
Legally this really only applies if the code is *directly* derived from the GPL code, which is very easy to avoid, while still saving lots of money on research and development costs. While you can't cut & paste the code, you can easily see how stuff is implemented, and maybe even make improvements or optimizations the originator was unable to since you have extra development time to spend.
You forgot:...an army of competitors in the same market who now have your source code which they can use to make their product compatible with your own, while you are stuck spending tons of research dollars on reverse engineering their product to compete.
The whole reason people don't release source code in the first place is to make it harder for the competition to duplicate the effort that went into developing your technology. For hardware companies it might or might not be as much an issue (depending on the product, etc.), but for software companies this is really important, because (like medicine) you have to spend lots of money up front on R&D and giving away your source code to the competition will definitely shorten the time within which you can recoup those expenses.
Re:Cool...but an old concept
on
Water Computing
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The "apraphulian computer" article in 1988 was an April Fool's joke. A.K. Dewdney has a history of presenting interesting scientific concepts as fiction. You can find examples of this style of presentation in his book Planiverse as well as some of the earlier corewars articles in Scientific American IIRC.
Interesting point. I'm wondering why companies would bother paying $1200 for packages you can get off the shelf for free, many of which are already installed by default for server configurations on several distros.
Since they've got all that other stuff on there, they should throw in IMP as well.
Exactly which part was inaccurate? You acknowledge they rerouted the river, which was the only thing I claimed. I am well aware they used tunnels, which by the way were made by continually blasting the stone with dynamite for several months straight. But I'm sure that had no effect on the wildlife in the area. Nor the fact that they erected a temporary dam to reroute the water into the tunnels, causing (temporary) severe disruptions to the flow of water in the area.
Oh, but you're right...it probably didn't affect the quality of the water too much.
Hmm...I'd tend to agree with that reasoning. Before the advent of automobiles rivers were used quite extensively as a means of transport. So, you'd have humans going up and down pretty much every navigable river constantly.
The same thing happened along coastlines, as shipping industries would use the coastal waters to transport goods to different harbors.
I don't think rivers and coastlines are used as much today as in the past (we can move faster and cheaper on land usually nowadays) but there's still some transit on these types of waterways. Plus let's not forget cities on major ports and waterways, which will invariably have a strong influence far beyond the reaches of the city itself.
2) They used nine datasets to plot human influence, of which two were RIVERS and COASTLINES. Given that they used independant plots for population density etc, I have to wonder exactly why they feel humans are responsible for the distribution of rivers and coastlines. They assume that the possibility of access by humans implies human interference.
While I mostly agree with you on other points, the fact is that humans do influence rivers and coastlines. I just got back from a trip out to Vegas last week, and we spent a few hours at Hoover Dam while I was out there. Besides the obvious presence of a dam causing massive long-term changes to the area (Lake Mead is the largest artificial body of water in the world), just to build the dam in the first place they had to reroute the entire river around the area where they did the construction. Both the construction and continuing presence of the dam had strong influence far up- and down-stream.
The same can be said for coastlines. The presence of humans on the coast (construction, boating, fishing, etc.) has caused measurable deterioration of stuff like coral reefs and other natural barriers, which actually changes the shape of the coastline over time. Also, we do clever stuff like building islands on landfills (Kansai airport in Japan is built on an artificial island) and creating barriers to soften the ocean waves on beaches (Cancun, Mexico).
While what you say is true, the systems described are not purely asynchronous. Rather, they seem to be a collection of individually synchronized (and possibly purely asynchronous) modules that use handshaking to communicate between each other.
Yes, but that wouldn't matter so much since I would assume the point would be for SearchKing to learn the details of how the ranking system works so they can spam it more effectively, or even duplicate it.
The advantage outlined here seems to be independant functionality between different areas of the PC. It would be nice if the components could work independently and time themselves, but is there really a huge loss in sustained synchonous data transfer?
Yes, for many reasons which are somewhat glossed over in the article (I guess the author assumes you are an EE or CPE familiary with the subject). Here's a quick breakdown of the two major issues:
1. Power Distribution & Consumption - In a synchronous system, every single unit has a clock associated with it that runs at some multiple of the global clock frequency. In order to accomplish this you must have millions of little wires running everywhere which connect the global clock to the individual clocks on all the gates (a gate is a single unit of a logic function, sorta like a 0 or 1). Electricity does not run through wires for free except in superconductors. Real wires are like little resistors in that to push the current through them, you have to give up some of the power you are distributing (how much is a function of the cross-sectional area of the wire). The power which doesn't make it through the wire turns into heat. One of the reasons you can fry an egg on your P4 is because it's literally throwing away tons of power just trying to syncrhonize all the gates to the global clock. As stated in the article, in an asynchronous system, the clocks are divided up on a modular basis, and only the modules that are running need power at all. This design technique is already used to some degree in synchronous designs as well (sorta like the power saving feature on your laptop), but does not benefit as much since in a synchronous design must always trigger at the global clock frequency rather than only triggering when necessary.
2. Processor Speed - Much like the speed of an assembly line is limited to the slowest person on the line, so too is the speed of a CPU limited to the slowest unit. The problem with a synchronous design is that *everything* must run at the slower pace, even if they could theoretically move faster. In an asynchronous design, the parts that can go faster, will, so the total processing time can be reduced.
One company is offering a cell phone that has a camera and integrated GPS, and the commercial shows some guy taking a picture of a beatiful girl, and sending it to his friend's cell phone, along with a map showing how to get there.
When I was in Japan a couple months ago I was reading an article in Nikkei Shinbun about the cell phone market in Japan. Here's a statistic to open your eyes: one out of every 2 people in Japan (including infants, elderly, EVERYONE) has a cell phone. The cell phone market in Japan is so deeply saturated the only way to generate growth is to provide new technologies and services to entice users to either switch (if they are using another provider) or add more services (like playing subscription games on your phone).
Instead of making ourselves look mature and putting out a decent game
You are talking about the same platform with titles such as DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball (I actually saw a Japanese advertisement that promoted its "realistic [breast] motion") and BMX XXX. I doubt this is going to lower the maturity level any more.
Why the hell do mobile phone companies keep harping on about their integrated cameras. Come on, think about it can you honestly imagine even a contrived situation when a mobile phone camera can do something that a disposable or digital camera can't do just as well if not better
Hmm...well they're pretty popular in Japan right now, but maybe it's because they're a spur-of-the-moment photographic bunch to begin with...I mean, walk around in Tokyo and you see PURIKURA (a photo booth thing, that prints on little stickers you can affix to your phone) all over the place. I get pictures in the mail all the time from my Japanese friends, because it's as easy as point-click-send.
Other reasons:
1. The cameras aren't particularly obvious, so it can also be used to take pictures of people without them being aware of it.
2. It's also easy to use one-handed, and is accessible when pulling out a regular camera might be difficult in that environment (like on a train).
3. Less crap to carry. These integrate cell phone, wireless web access, PDA, and cameras into a single handheld appliance that fits in your front shirt pocket. When I travel now, I have to take all that stuff PLUS the damn power adaptors, extra batteries, etc. I've been waiting for a few years (and still waiting, here in the US) for something to come along and allow me to integrate all those functions into a single device, because I hate carrying lots of crap when I travel.
He foresees human occupied cities, suspended in Venusian clouds. "It's room temperature up there," he points out. "All we'll need is a suit to fend off acid clouds, oxygen tanks, and something cold to drink."
Let me grab my goggles and a slurpie, and I'll be right over!
I'm well aware of this. My point is that the known exploits are already taken care of in newer versions, whereas they still exist, *and are well known* with older versions. At least with the new stuff someone has to find the exploit first. It's kind of like "security through obscurity." No, it's not actually more secure in reality, because in the long haul someone will find an exploit, but in the short term it is more secure than something that has known security holes.
The main problem with known security holes is that there are 1 million skr1pt k1dd13z that can find them in 10 seconds or less. Nobody has written scripts yet for unkown exploits, so it's not as likely you'll be compromised right away.
I think the general thinking behind statements like this are the same reason Redhat 7.2 is more secure than say Redhat 3.0. The software has been around longer, so more security holes have been found and exploited. Granted, there are patches available but in general you could say that the newer versions are more secure with respect to these known exploits, since the patches are already built-in to the newer release.
I'd rather use it to call other folks on the network for free than exchange files. I just don't have enough storage on my cell phone to be sharing files, but a nice, cheap VoIP or similar would be great.
Thank you, I was going to say the same thing...the whole point of the paper is to demonstrate that hijacking a connection is entirely feasible on certain systems. Why else would you need to predict ISNs?
Not everyone in the world is enamored with DRM. China already distrusts Microsoft products enough to fully embrace linux as their OS of choice. Will the same thing happen to Intel products in China?
It doesn't seem like a very smart business decision to lock yourself out of the fastest-growing market in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this insightful? Tivo are not only making money by selling subscriptions, they are also licensing their technology to companies (Philips and Sony, for example) who sell the hardware. They basically incur ZERO costs licensing the technology (other than legal fees, I guess) whereas the manufacturers have to worry about startup and production costs.
Also, the Tivo service is NOT something you can get for free by looking the listings up on TVGuide.com. It does a lot more than just matching up the listings to what you want to record, it also figures out what you like to watch, and recommends shows that maybe you haven't heard of by (anonymously) collecting the viewing habits of others like you, and correlating the data. Personally I really like this service, as although I sometimes get some whacky programming (I don't speak Spanish, but my Tivo sometimes thinks I do) I also get many shows which I never would have watched otherwise, but which turn out to be shows I really enjoy.
From the article:
Did you happen to fail the reading comprehension section on the SATs?
However, the article does disagree with the actual study (which links the symtpoms suffered to the work conditions) and in general seems sensationalistic.
The phrase embrace and extend comes to mind. Just because your competitor is compatible with your product does not automatically make you the market leader.
Legally this really only applies if the code is *directly* derived from the GPL code, which is very easy to avoid, while still saving lots of money on research and development costs. While you can't cut & paste the code, you can easily see how stuff is implemented, and maybe even make improvements or optimizations the originator was unable to since you have extra development time to spend.
You forgot: ...an army of competitors in the same market who now have your source code which they can use to make their product compatible with your own, while you are stuck spending tons of research dollars on reverse engineering their product to compete.
The whole reason people don't release source code in the first place is to make it harder for the competition to duplicate the effort that went into developing your technology. For hardware companies it might or might not be as much an issue (depending on the product, etc.), but for software companies this is really important, because (like medicine) you have to spend lots of money up front on R&D and giving away your source code to the competition will definitely shorten the time within which you can recoup those expenses.
The "apraphulian computer" article in 1988 was an April Fool's joke. A.K. Dewdney has a history of presenting interesting scientific concepts as fiction. You can find examples of this style of presentation in his book Planiverse as well as some of the earlier corewars articles in Scientific American IIRC.
Interesting point. I'm wondering why companies would bother paying $1200 for packages you can get off the shelf for free, many of which are already installed by default for server configurations on several distros.
Since they've got all that other stuff on there, they should throw in IMP as well.
I wonder if the spam filter is SpamAssassin?
Exactly which part was inaccurate? You acknowledge they rerouted the river, which was the only thing I claimed. I am well aware they used tunnels, which by the way were made by continually blasting the stone with dynamite for several months straight. But I'm sure that had no effect on the wildlife in the area. Nor the fact that they erected a temporary dam to reroute the water into the tunnels, causing (temporary) severe disruptions to the flow of water in the area.
Oh, but you're right...it probably didn't affect the quality of the water too much.
The same thing happened along coastlines, as shipping industries would use the coastal waters to transport goods to different harbors.
I don't think rivers and coastlines are used as much today as in the past (we can move faster and cheaper on land usually nowadays) but there's still some transit on these types of waterways. Plus let's not forget cities on major ports and waterways, which will invariably have a strong influence far beyond the reaches of the city itself.
While I mostly agree with you on other points, the fact is that humans do influence rivers and coastlines. I just got back from a trip out to Vegas last week, and we spent a few hours at Hoover Dam while I was out there. Besides the obvious presence of a dam causing massive long-term changes to the area (Lake Mead is the largest artificial body of water in the world), just to build the dam in the first place they had to reroute the entire river around the area where they did the construction. Both the construction and continuing presence of the dam had strong influence far up- and down-stream.
The same can be said for coastlines. The presence of humans on the coast (construction, boating, fishing, etc.) has caused measurable deterioration of stuff like coral reefs and other natural barriers, which actually changes the shape of the coastline over time. Also, we do clever stuff like building islands on landfills (Kansai airport in Japan is built on an artificial island) and creating barriers to soften the ocean waves on beaches (Cancun, Mexico).
While what you say is true, the systems described are not purely asynchronous. Rather, they seem to be a collection of individually synchronized (and possibly purely asynchronous) modules that use handshaking to communicate between each other.
Yes, but that wouldn't matter so much since I would assume the point would be for SearchKing to learn the details of how the ranking system works so they can spam it more effectively, or even duplicate it.
Yes, for many reasons which are somewhat glossed over in the article (I guess the author assumes you are an EE or CPE familiary with the subject). Here's a quick breakdown of the two major issues:
1. Power Distribution & Consumption - In a synchronous system, every single unit has a clock associated with it that runs at some multiple of the global clock frequency. In order to accomplish this you must have millions of little wires running everywhere which connect the global clock to the individual clocks on all the gates (a gate is a single unit of a logic function, sorta like a 0 or 1). Electricity does not run through wires for free except in superconductors. Real wires are like little resistors in that to push the current through them, you have to give up some of the power you are distributing (how much is a function of the cross-sectional area of the wire). The power which doesn't make it through the wire turns into heat. One of the reasons you can fry an egg on your P4 is because it's literally throwing away tons of power just trying to syncrhonize all the gates to the global clock. As stated in the article, in an asynchronous system, the clocks are divided up on a modular basis, and only the modules that are running need power at all. This design technique is already used to some degree in synchronous designs as well (sorta like the power saving feature on your laptop), but does not benefit as much since in a synchronous design must always trigger at the global clock frequency rather than only triggering when necessary.
2. Processor Speed - Much like the speed of an assembly line is limited to the slowest person on the line, so too is the speed of a CPU limited to the slowest unit. The problem with a synchronous design is that *everything* must run at the slower pace, even if they could theoretically move faster. In an asynchronous design, the parts that can go faster, will, so the total processing time can be reduced.
Hope that helps.
I always did it as:
% got a light? got: no match.
It's the Chief of Police! He's using the system to lead you off on a wild goose chase while framing you for the murder!
Life does imitate art, right?
...just as soon as we get that elevator built! ;-)
When I was in Japan a couple months ago I was reading an article in Nikkei Shinbun about the cell phone market in Japan. Here's a statistic to open your eyes: one out of every 2 people in Japan (including infants, elderly, EVERYONE) has a cell phone. The cell phone market in Japan is so deeply saturated the only way to generate growth is to provide new technologies and services to entice users to either switch (if they are using another provider) or add more services (like playing subscription games on your phone).
You are talking about the same platform with titles such as DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball (I actually saw a Japanese advertisement that promoted its "realistic [breast] motion") and BMX XXX. I doubt this is going to lower the maturity level any more.
Hmm...well they're pretty popular in Japan right now, but maybe it's because they're a spur-of-the-moment photographic bunch to begin with...I mean, walk around in Tokyo and you see PURIKURA (a photo booth thing, that prints on little stickers you can affix to your phone) all over the place. I get pictures in the mail all the time from my Japanese friends, because it's as easy as point-click-send.
Other reasons:
1. The cameras aren't particularly obvious, so it can also be used to take pictures of people without them being aware of it.
2. It's also easy to use one-handed, and is accessible when pulling out a regular camera might be difficult in that environment (like on a train).
3. Less crap to carry. These integrate cell phone, wireless web access, PDA, and cameras into a single handheld appliance that fits in your front shirt pocket. When I travel now, I have to take all that stuff PLUS the damn power adaptors, extra batteries, etc. I've been waiting for a few years (and still waiting, here in the US) for something to come along and allow me to integrate all those functions into a single device, because I hate carrying lots of crap when I travel.
Easy!
http://www.omnimag.com/archives/continuum/venus.ht ml
Let me grab my goggles and a slurpie, and I'll be right over!
I'm well aware of this. My point is that the known exploits are already taken care of in newer versions, whereas they still exist, *and are well known* with older versions. At least with the new stuff someone has to find the exploit first. It's kind of like "security through obscurity." No, it's not actually more secure in reality, because in the long haul someone will find an exploit, but in the short term it is more secure than something that has known security holes.
The main problem with known security holes is that there are 1 million skr1pt k1dd13z that can find them in 10 seconds or less. Nobody has written scripts yet for unkown exploits, so it's not as likely you'll be compromised right away.
I think the general thinking behind statements like this are the same reason Redhat 7.2 is more secure than say Redhat 3.0. The software has been around longer, so more security holes have been found and exploited. Granted, there are patches available but in general you could say that the newer versions are more secure with respect to these known exploits, since the patches are already built-in to the newer release.
I'd rather use it to call other folks on the network for free than exchange files. I just don't have enough storage on my cell phone to be sharing files, but a nice, cheap VoIP or similar would be great.
Thank you, I was going to say the same thing...the whole point of the paper is to demonstrate that hijacking a connection is entirely feasible on certain systems. Why else would you need to predict ISNs?
Uh, I was referring to Intel, not MS. I already acknowledged that MS has nothing to gain in China.
Not everyone in the world is enamored with DRM. China already distrusts Microsoft products enough to fully embrace linux as their OS of choice. Will the same thing happen to Intel products in China?
It doesn't seem like a very smart business decision to lock yourself out of the fastest-growing market in the world.