If you're wondering why the Brown Daily Herald (student paper of Brown Univ.) got the scoop on the first Feiss interview, the reason is that someone on its staff was apparently an ex-classmate of hers. She has avoided the media, by her own choice and at Apple's request (they are trying to downplay the pot thing) but she figured that a college newspaper would be sufficiently "under the radar."
When you sign up for spamcop, you get a unique email address to which you can forward you spam. It's something like sumbit.(gibberish)@spam.spamcop.net. Anyway, just add this to your address book and forward you spam to that address. Spamcop replies with an email that contains a web link to click on to finish the reporting, where you add your comments and select which addresses to send to.
It amazes me that anyone actually cuts and pastes message text.
However, I've heard that popup blockers and tabbed browsing are making their way into IE (and MS employees can already use these features), but we'll see if they're actually integrated.
Already exists. Crazy Browser uses the IE engine and adds tabs, popup blocking, easy toggling of images/videos/activex, "tab groups" that can be saved/opened together, etc. (it's freeware, too.)
RMS: "The new restrictions on Bitkeeper, saying that people who contribute to CVS or Subversion and even companies that distribute them cannot even run Bitkeeper, have sparked outrage."
As far as I know from reading the first slashdot story, the Bitkeeper folks are not saying that "companies that distribute [subversion, et al] cannot even run Bitkeeper." Rather, it's only programmers who are actively participating in the development of Bitkeeper replacements that cannot take advantage of the free license. In the words of Larry McVey speaking on behalf ob Bitmover,
Our position is clear, it's not unreasonable, it affects very few kernel developers, and it doesn't even make those developers any worse off than they were before we showed up. All we are saying is that
you don't get to use our tools if you are trying to rewrite our tools.
In my opinion, that makes the situation considerably less imperative. Sure, it's a real wrench in the works, but it's not as bad as it's made out to be -- BK is not preventing Redhat, Suse, Mandrake (et al) employees from using BitKeeper, only those who actively develop Subversion or arch.
All you need to do is make a chip oscillate fast, and Joe Customer will think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Not to mention most of the geek wannabes who post on slashdot.
Yeah, let's not forget about the/. crowd that seems to chime in every time a new processor speed is achieved:
"2.8 GHz? Who needs that? No possible computer application could possibly demand that. Why, I've been using my AMD K6-2 300MHz box for the last 6 years and I can run everything just fine."
We should get these two groups to somehow combine, and it would cancel out the bias on both sides...
At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media
While there are people who truly feel that way, that's not what this case is about at all. No one is "eliminating the traces" of anything here, a company is simply making these additional versions available. I'm sure they would love it if the movies came from Hollywood pre-censored, but I don't think anyone seriously expects this to happen any time soon. Sure, there's always a push-and-tug, a "couldja tone it down a bit" going on, but that has nothing to do with this case. The outcome of this case is not going to have an effect on the amount of sex and violence in Hollywood. They're orthogonal issues.
As much as I really sympathize with the feelings of the directors, producers, and actors, I can't see how they are legally in the right. Does the DGA get upset when consumers fast forward portions of movies? Does the DGA intend to sue every individual who stops a movie in the middle and returns it to Blockbuster, since they've violated the director's vision? If an individual mutes a movie while they talk on the phone with someone, does that violate a director's rights? It just doesn't hold up.
And there's nothing to a financial argument either. The studios are making exactly the same amount of money from a sale to Clean Flicks as a sale to Best Buy. In fact, they are making slightly more, since they are now selling their product to an audience that would have spent less or even no money previously.
Rock on. Agree completely. I would also like to add that it's ridiculous to include a link to the root page of the story source e.g. wired.com or microsoft.com, or whatever. Even more annoying is when this type of link is the first in the submission. The first link should be the actual article, OR, it should have the link text of "story" or "article". Stop trying to make your submission look better by putting a bunch of common sense links.
Now if we could get people to start actually summarizing the story instead of cutting and pasting the first paragraph, we'd be half way to being able to call this "journalism." The other half would come when the editors actually edit.
heh. Isn't Lagos one of those destinations mentioned in the small print at the airport as one of the places the State Department recommends you not visit?
Good points. But I suggest that as time advances this will become more realistic, since storage costs should eventually become trivial. You would then be limited only by the amount of time it takes to store the challenge/response pairs in advance. And the security of that database, of course. And the cost of the reader hardware. But for certain applications, it would be very nice.
What would be even neater would be if there was some way to make two identical spheres at creation time, while retaining the properties of being all but impossible to duplicate after that. Then you could create these pairs, and send one to the user and keep the other at HQ. Authentication then becomes a matter of picking a good challenge and testing it on both devices. That would really open up the possibilities, since those "terabytes" of information could be put to use. THAT would be really cool, but I don't see how it would be possible.
The searched Slashdot postings have no year indication on them. Is this a Y0K bug?)
No, it means you haven't changed the date format in your user preferences from the stock. By default no year is shown, but that's just one of many formats. Of course you have to be logged in for this to have any effect.
The articles weren't clear on this, but I got the impression that the "input angle" was constantly changed. That's the whole point, the device encrypts the input data (whatever angle the laser enters the thing) to the output of a specle pattern. To cheat you would need to have a mapping of "input X equals output Y" for however many different inputs are possible. That was what they meant about "storing terabytes of data in a small place" I believe.
The downside of course is that since you can only create one copy of each fob, you have to first record a number of input/output pairs in a database somewhere before you send it to the user. This is the real killer I believe, because for this to be useful you would need a very large large number of possible inputs, and each one would take up storage space at the database. But, storage is cheap, especially as time advances. Security of this database, however, would be an issue.
This also explains why "reversing" the device would be hard. Sure, it might be mathematically possible to take an output speckle pattern and come up with an arrangement of spheres to produce that pattern. Suppose you could even manufacture that resultant device (which they say is currently impossible.) This doesn't help you, though, since it would have to respond with the correct pattern not only to the one input agle you designed it for, but any arbitraty input angle (to the limit of however much data is recorded in the database.) So the problem is not finding a configuration that successfully maps A to B, it's finding one that maps A1 to B1, A2 to B2, A3 to B3, etc, which is much harder -- especially since it seems that changing the sphere coordinates even the slightest would alter the output significantly. Think about it, the amount of information in a speckle pattern is a lot less than the amount of information stored in the precise number and locations of the spheres. In other words, a given speckle pattern maps to a very large number of possible sphere configurations. The great challenge of breaking this would be finding a single configuration common to a number of speckle patterns, to the limit of the amount of data stored in the database. Their paper probably demonstrates that this is theoretically equivalent to brute-forcing hard crypto.
If only a single input laser angle were used, I don't see the point of this.
Presumably the tank would be reinforced with kevlar fiber to help prevent this. The article is light on details but it does state that the tank is made of steel reinforced thermoplastic. Sounds kind of fishy...
Bullshit. Film has a definite resolution, corresponding to the size of the grains. The faster the film, the larger the grains. Just compare the sharpness of ISO 100 film with ISO 400 or 800. Even with standard 4x6 prints you can tell a difference. While its true that general still photographic film has very high resolution, I guarantee that film fast enough to take 12000 exposures per second will have HUGE grains. Have you ever seen the resulting images of film shot this fast? There have been TV programs (it might have been an episode of Nova, or it could have been a TLC/Discovery Channel production) about high speed photography. The bottem end stuff (couple hundred FPS) looks really nice, and is generally used for advertising -- think Brita/PUR commercials. The faster you go, the less quality. When you're at 12000 fps, don't expect resolution anywhere close to still photography. The upper ends of the spectrum (in the hundreds of thousands to millions of FPS) is used by military labs, to analyze the impact of armor piercing shells as well as very fast combustion processes. There are only a couple of cameras in the world that can take photographs that fast, and the resulting product looks like a cross between a crappy webcam and a turn-of-the-century movie camera. Color? Yeah right! In other words this "virtually imlimited [resolution]" business is bullshit.
EE's, help me here. Let's say I have a single 24VDC bench supply (I'm starting at 110v at home)at 15-20A. I'm thinking that for any item drawing under, say, 500ma, I could build mini step-down regulators (in something like 35mm film canisters) using something in the 78xx series of regulators (i.e. 7805 for 5v). I'd put one of those quick disconnect plugs (mentioned above) on the output, so it would easily and quickly interface with the device.
Well doing that would work, but it won't be all that efficient. If you had something that needed 5V at 500mA and you achieve that with a linear regulator you'd be dissipating (24-5)(.5) = 9.5W which is way more than most linear regulators can handle without a huge heat sink and/or fan.
The important thing is to determine what is really required of your devices. The output of a typical wall wart can vary substantially: unregulated AC, unregulated DC, regulated DC. It makes no sense at all to take a regulated bench supply, then step that down with another linear regulator, and feed that to a device which likely has its own voltage regulator (since its wall-wart was just a cheap transformer and unregulated rectifier.)
If your primary goal is to reduce the clutter, then what you mentioned would probably work well, but try to make the main supply voltage as low as possible to still cover everything you need. And don't worry about being a few volts "off" of what is printed on the wall wart. Most electronics step that voltage down anyway. Also, don't measure the open circuit voltage of the wall-wart's output, it will not be a reliable number. They're so cheap that the voltage will drop substantially when loaded.
Anoter option is to get one large power supply with several outputs. It doesn't have to have super regulation. The idea is to just connect whatever output is closest to what the device needs, and don't worry so much about exact voltages. A switching supply might work here, but watch out for poorly filtered outputs, and a lot of cheaper ones have a minimum load below which they either won't operate or will operate with poor regulation. It's easy to get a cheap $20 switcher with gobs of output power available, but you have to be aware of the caveats.
Re:[Slightly OT] nitpick time...
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 1
But that's not correct. "Habeas" means "you should have." It's second person,
Wait, let me get this straight... a thread discussing the second person subjuctive case of Latin, in hiaku. Somewhere, a high school teacher is satisfied.
First we just had the internet, then came intranets and extranets, now we have something called an infranet? Christ, what's next? endonet? perinet? epinet? ultranet? hypernet? Just not satisfied until we've used all the greek prefixes, are we?
The building now uses 500,000 kilowatts of energy per year.
Dear Jennifer L. Ivan:
A kilowatt is not a unit of energy, it is a unit of power. It's like saying "The distance from New York to Boston is 50 MPH." You probably meant to say 500,000 kilowatt-hours.
I'm sure it's a common mistake and ordinarily I wouldn't have said anything. But the newspaper business is about all about conveying facts accurately, so I expect a higher level of editing and checking.
Re:Just pretty lightning.. not effective, here's w
on
Build Your Own Tesla Coil
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The statement that electricity naturally flows to the nearest earth is likewise fallacious.
Yes, as is the assertion that electricity somehow âoechooses a path of least resistance.â This is also an example of the anthropomorphic fallacy â" attributing human-like qualities to something inanimate.
In an electrical circuit, given an electric potental (i.e., a voltage), current will flow through all available paths. The magnitude of the current in each branch is inversely proportional to the resistance (or impedance if we consider more than simple DC) so it can often seem as if somehow those lazy electrons survey their options and decide to take the easiest path.
The problem in understanding usually is emphasized when you deal with paths of conduction through air or other materials that are normally insulators. The issue here is that the breakdown voltage of air and most nonconductors is very large. Unless the electric field strength exceeds this threshold then the material is an insulatore. In these cases there are no alternate paths, except for the unwitting human who happens to come too close, and gets a shock. So it's no so much that his body formed the path of least resistance; more like he formed a path period where before there were none.
Nationwide as in: accessible anywhere in the nation [â¦]
I'm afraid the only thing that truly fits that bill in this country is good old first-generation analog â" what's the acronym, AMPS? I'm sure some modern systems have great coverage, but none of them are what I would call âoeaccessible anywhere.â
Slashdot Mirror
If you're wondering why the Brown Daily Herald (student paper of Brown Univ.) got the scoop on the first Feiss interview, the reason is that someone on its staff was apparently an ex-classmate of hers. She has avoided the media, by her own choice and at Apple's request (they are trying to downplay the pot thing) but she figured that a college newspaper would be sufficiently "under the radar."
(see also the Wired Article...)
When you sign up for spamcop, you get a unique email address to which you can forward you spam. It's something like sumbit.(gibberish)@spam.spamcop.net. Anyway, just add this to your address book and forward you spam to that address. Spamcop replies with an email that contains a web link to click on to finish the reporting, where you add your comments and select which addresses to send to.
It amazes me that anyone actually cuts and pastes message text.
However, I've heard that popup blockers and tabbed browsing are making their way into IE (and MS employees can already use these features), but we'll see if they're actually integrated.
Already exists. Crazy Browser uses the IE engine and adds tabs, popup blocking, easy toggling of images/videos/activex, "tab groups" that can be saved/opened together, etc. (it's freeware, too.)
As far as I know from reading the first slashdot story, the Bitkeeper folks are not saying that "companies that distribute [subversion, et al] cannot even run Bitkeeper." Rather, it's only programmers who are actively participating in the development of Bitkeeper replacements that cannot take advantage of the free license. In the words of Larry McVey speaking on behalf ob Bitmover, In my opinion, that makes the situation considerably less imperative. Sure, it's a real wrench in the works, but it's not as bad as it's made out to be -- BK is not preventing Redhat, Suse, Mandrake (et al) employees from using BitKeeper, only those who actively develop Subversion or arch.
Flame away.
"2.8 GHz? Who needs that? No possible computer application could possibly demand that. Why, I've been using my AMD K6-2 300MHz box for the last 6 years and I can run everything just fine."
We should get these two groups to somehow combine, and it would cancel out the bias on both sides...
Break it up into chunks and sell them for their Super Mystical Energy Powers to the New Age loons...
While there are people who truly feel that way, that's not what this case is about at all. No one is "eliminating the traces" of anything here, a company is simply making these additional versions available. I'm sure they would love it if the movies came from Hollywood pre-censored, but I don't think anyone seriously expects this to happen any time soon. Sure, there's always a push-and-tug, a "couldja tone it down a bit" going on, but that has nothing to do with this case. The outcome of this case is not going to have an effect on the amount of sex and violence in Hollywood. They're orthogonal issues.
As much as I really sympathize with the feelings of the directors, producers, and actors, I can't see how they are legally in the right. Does the DGA get upset when consumers fast forward portions of movies? Does the DGA intend to sue every individual who stops a movie in the middle and returns it to Blockbuster, since they've violated the director's vision? If an individual mutes a movie while they talk on the phone with someone, does that violate a director's rights? It just doesn't hold up.
And there's nothing to a financial argument either. The studios are making exactly the same amount of money from a sale to Clean Flicks as a sale to Best Buy. In fact, they are making slightly more, since they are now selling their product to an audience that would have spent less or even no money previously.
Rock on. Agree completely. I would also like to add that it's ridiculous to include a link to the root page of the story source e.g. wired.com or microsoft.com, or whatever. Even more annoying is when this type of link is the first in the submission. The first link should be the actual article, OR, it should have the link text of "story" or "article". Stop trying to make your submission look better by putting a bunch of common sense links.
Now if we could get people to start actually summarizing the story instead of cutting and pasting the first paragraph, we'd be half way to being able to call this "journalism." The other half would come when the editors actually edit.
heh. Isn't Lagos one of those destinations mentioned in the small print at the airport as one of the places the State Department recommends you not visit?
Especially since the town mentioned in the article is Berkley, while the slighly more well known town in California is Berkeley.
Good points. But I suggest that as time advances this will become more realistic, since storage costs should eventually become trivial. You would then be limited only by the amount of time it takes to store the challenge/response pairs in advance. And the security of that database, of course. And the cost of the reader hardware. But for certain applications, it would be very nice.
What would be even neater would be if there was some way to make two identical spheres at creation time, while retaining the properties of being all but impossible to duplicate after that. Then you could create these pairs, and send one to the user and keep the other at HQ. Authentication then becomes a matter of picking a good challenge and testing it on both devices. That would really open up the possibilities, since those "terabytes" of information could be put to use. THAT would be really cool, but I don't see how it would be possible.
The searched Slashdot postings have no year indication on them. Is this a Y0K bug?)
No, it means you haven't changed the date format in your user preferences from the stock. By default no year is shown, but that's just one of many formats. Of course you have to be logged in for this to have any effect.
The articles weren't clear on this, but I got the impression that the "input angle" was constantly changed. That's the whole point, the device encrypts the input data (whatever angle the laser enters the thing) to the output of a specle pattern. To cheat you would need to have a mapping of "input X equals output Y" for however many different inputs are possible. That was what they meant about "storing terabytes of data in a small place" I believe.
The downside of course is that since you can only create one copy of each fob, you have to first record a number of input/output pairs in a database somewhere before you send it to the user. This is the real killer I believe, because for this to be useful you would need a very large large number of possible inputs, and each one would take up storage space at the database. But, storage is cheap, especially as time advances. Security of this database, however, would be an issue.
This also explains why "reversing" the device would be hard. Sure, it might be mathematically possible to take an output speckle pattern and come up with an arrangement of spheres to produce that pattern. Suppose you could even manufacture that resultant device (which they say is currently impossible.) This doesn't help you, though, since it would have to respond with the correct pattern not only to the one input agle you designed it for, but any arbitraty input angle (to the limit of however much data is recorded in the database.) So the problem is not finding a configuration that successfully maps A to B, it's finding one that maps A1 to B1, A2 to B2, A3 to B3, etc, which is much harder -- especially since it seems that changing the sphere coordinates even the slightest would alter the output significantly. Think about it, the amount of information in a speckle pattern is a lot less than the amount of information stored in the precise number and locations of the spheres. In other words, a given speckle pattern maps to a very large number of possible sphere configurations. The great challenge of breaking this would be finding a single configuration common to a number of speckle patterns, to the limit of the amount of data stored in the database. Their paper probably demonstrates that this is theoretically equivalent to brute-forcing hard crypto.
If only a single input laser angle were used, I don't see the point of this.
Presumably the tank would be reinforced with kevlar fiber to help prevent this. The article is light on details but it does state that the tank is made of steel reinforced thermoplastic. Sounds kind of fishy...
Analog images have virtually unlimited sizes
Bullshit. Film has a definite resolution, corresponding to the size of the grains. The faster the film, the larger the grains. Just compare the sharpness of ISO 100 film with ISO 400 or 800. Even with standard 4x6 prints you can tell a difference. While its true that general still photographic film has very high resolution, I guarantee that film fast enough to take 12000 exposures per second will have HUGE grains. Have you ever seen the resulting images of film shot this fast? There have been TV programs (it might have been an episode of Nova, or it could have been a TLC/Discovery Channel production) about high speed photography. The bottem end stuff (couple hundred FPS) looks really nice, and is generally used for advertising -- think Brita/PUR commercials. The faster you go, the less quality. When you're at 12000 fps, don't expect resolution anywhere close to still photography. The upper ends of the spectrum (in the hundreds of thousands to millions of FPS) is used by military labs, to analyze the impact of armor piercing shells as well as very fast combustion processes. There are only a couple of cameras in the world that can take photographs that fast, and the resulting product looks like a cross between a crappy webcam and a turn-of-the-century movie camera. Color? Yeah right! In other words this "virtually imlimited [resolution]" business is bullshit.
EE's, help me here. Let's say I have a single 24VDC bench supply (I'm starting at 110v at home)at 15-20A. I'm thinking that for any item drawing under, say, 500ma, I could build mini step-down regulators (in something like 35mm film canisters) using something in the 78xx series of regulators (i.e. 7805 for 5v). I'd put one of those quick disconnect plugs (mentioned above) on the output, so it would easily and quickly interface with the device.
Well doing that would work, but it won't be all that efficient. If you had something that needed 5V at 500mA and you achieve that with a linear regulator you'd be dissipating (24-5)(.5) = 9.5W which is way more than most linear regulators can handle without a huge heat sink and/or fan.
The important thing is to determine what is really required of your devices. The output of a typical wall wart can vary substantially: unregulated AC, unregulated DC, regulated DC. It makes no sense at all to take a regulated bench supply, then step that down with another linear regulator, and feed that to a device which likely has its own voltage regulator (since its wall-wart was just a cheap transformer and unregulated rectifier.)
If your primary goal is to reduce the clutter, then what you mentioned would probably work well, but try to make the main supply voltage as low as possible to still cover everything you need. And don't worry about being a few volts "off" of what is printed on the wall wart. Most electronics step that voltage down anyway. Also, don't measure the open circuit voltage of the wall-wart's output, it will not be a reliable number. They're so cheap that the voltage will drop substantially when loaded.
Anoter option is to get one large power supply with several outputs. It doesn't have to have super regulation. The idea is to just connect whatever output is closest to what the device needs, and don't worry so much about exact voltages. A switching supply might work here, but watch out for poorly filtered outputs, and a lot of cheaper ones have a minimum load below which they either won't operate or will operate with poor regulation. It's easy to get a cheap $20 switcher with gobs of output power available, but you have to be aware of the caveats.
But that's not correct.
"Habeas" means "you should have."
It's second person,
Wait, let me get this straight... a thread discussing the second person subjuctive case of Latin, in hiaku. Somewhere, a high school teacher is satisfied.
First we just had the internet, then came intranets and extranets, now we have something called an infranet? Christ, what's next? endonet? perinet? epinet? ultranet? hypernet? Just not satisfied until we've used all the greek prefixes, are we?
The building now uses 500,000 kilowatts of energy per year.
Dear Jennifer L. Ivan:
A kilowatt is not a unit of energy, it is a unit of power. It's like saying "The distance from New York to Boston is 50 MPH." You probably meant to say 500,000 kilowatt-hours.
I'm sure it's a common mistake and ordinarily I wouldn't have said anything. But the newspaper business is about all about conveying facts accurately, so I expect a higher level of editing and checking.
The statement that electricity naturally flows to the nearest earth is likewise fallacious.
Yes, as is the assertion that electricity somehow âoechooses a path of least resistance.â This is also an example of the anthropomorphic fallacy â" attributing human-like qualities to something inanimate.
In an electrical circuit, given an electric potental (i.e., a voltage), current will flow through all available paths. The magnitude of the current in each branch is inversely proportional to the resistance (or impedance if we consider more than simple DC) so it can often seem as if somehow those lazy electrons survey their options and decide to take the easiest path.
The problem in understanding usually is emphasized when you deal with paths of conduction through air or other materials that are normally insulators. The issue here is that the breakdown voltage of air and most nonconductors is very large. Unless the electric field strength exceeds this threshold then the material is an insulatore. In these cases there are no alternate paths, except for the unwitting human who happens to come too close, and gets a shock. So it's no so much that his body formed the path of least resistance; more like he formed a path period where before there were none.
Nationwide as in: accessible anywhere in the nation [â¦]
I'm afraid the only thing that truly fits that bill in this country is good old first-generation analog â" what's the acronym, AMPS? I'm sure some modern systems have great coverage, but none of them are what I would call âoeaccessible anywhere.â