>>I'm just as skeptical as the next geek, but remember: MP3 changed everything in audio. Compressing a 60M song to ~6M?!? 10-12X compression with only minor quality loss?
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>
This statement only makes sense if you assume broadband was already streaming uncompressed video, and we are looking for an improvement over that. The fact is that MPEG is already compressed by a massive amount over raw video, and it requires about 1 Mbps to stream properly (320x240). You are suggesting that we compress this already compressed data by a factor of 50. In other words, by your analogy, we take the 6M mp3, and reduce it in size to 100K with minimal quality loss. I'm not saying this is absolutely impossible, but it is certainly a source of great skepticism.
I wish I would have thought to ask this before, but I can't believe no one mentioned that the Halloween Documents basically answer many of these questions in a much less politically spin doctored way. I wonder how he would have responded to this?
Imagine, I already pay $40 a month for my DSL. Imagine if for only $10 more, I get all the software I need downloaded right through my high speed connection. Imagine. I plug everything in, insert the setup CD, and everything just works. Now if this worked in fact, and not just in theory, it might actually be worth it. $120 per year is more than I currently spend on productivity software, and they have minimal distribution costs. I think it might actually work. I'm just not sure if it's a good thing or not.
* Light is emitted in the form of photons. Photons have momentum, and when they are reflected off a surface, they transfer momentum to that surface. In principle, if a spacecraft is tethered to a large reflecting surface, or "lightsail", sunlight falling on that surface would provide a gentle but continuous pressure that could propel the spacecraft between planets without any need to carry propellants for primary propulsion.
While I doubt this pressure is sufficient(even in a laser) to do real damage, it is not out of the realm of possibility. Any mirror, however, is not perfect, and if you take a high power laser, and reflect it off of a mirror with a spec of dust, you will still get significant heating. It is unlikely that chrome would make a missile immune, but it may help.
I can't remember exactly, but I thought I saw this story two weeks ago, and I seem to remember posting this exact same response, but I'm not quite sure.
How about a computer vote which prints out two optically scanable ballots. One for you to submit, and one for you to keep as a receipt. That way, you get the best of both worlds. Instant results, plus a fallback to count against in case of fraud.
Actually, If I was DC, I _WOULD_ be scared of this. You DON'T mess with the USPS.
Remember, everyone thinks that Al Capone went to jail for Tax evasion - He didn't he went to jail for MAILING the false return.
________________________________________________ _
Did you bother to check your facts before posting this nonsense. Please give a reference. Try:
It is a link to the New York Times article after the conviction. It reads in part:
Two of the five counts are
misdemeanors, failure to file
income tax in 1924 and 1928,
each carrying possible
maximum sentence of one
year imprisonment and
$10,000 fine. The other
counts on which he was
found guilty are felonies and
each carries a maximum
penalty of five years'
imprisonment and $10,000
fine for "attempt to evade and
defeat" the income tax in
1925, 1926 and 1927.
It's amazing how fast misinformation can spread over the internet.
Check out http://www.anoto.com/ They have a new bluetooth based pen which would be an ideal companion to this watch. The pen is strong on input, but weak on output. The watch is the other way around. I saw this demoed a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty damn cool.
I've been thinking for a long time that the major problem with electric vehicles is range (Can't take a trip to grandma's you know.) But most of the time I don't need more than a 20 mile range in town. Wouldn't it be cool if in the next generation, Honda could provide enough battery to get you 20 miles per day without using a drop of gas, but still have the gas engine as a backup, or for long range trips. I don't know about you, but if I only had to go the gas station a couple times a year when I would actually need to take a long trip in my hybrid car, that would almost be worth the $20000.
First of all, the term "theoretical limit" is a bit vague, but the limit which seems most directly relevent is what they call the superparamagnetic limit. This is the point at which the thermal energy which tends to randomize magnetic moment are stronger than (or just as strong as) the amount of magnetic energy stored in an individual bit. This effectively means that you may be able to store the bit, but it won't stay stored very long. Anyway, most scientists "estimate" this limit to be about 100 Gb/sq. in. (IIRC) I say "estimate" because magnetic field calculations is still more of an art than a science, and the calculations make some pretty strong assumptions about geometry. I believe the above mentioned limit assumes all of the magnetic moments are alligned in plane, for instance, which is very poor arrangement from a Gb/sq.in. perspective, but currently is the only practical way to arrange a drive. There are also other assumptions about the media being uniform, the substrate being flat, etc., etc. When we no longer assume many of these assumptions, we have more opportunities for greater density, at the expense of greater technical challenge, so the question really should be, "What is the theoretical limit assuming the same fundamental drive design", and as I said before that is about 100 Gb/sq.in. By the way, the read head design alone has changed fundamentally at least two times in the past 10 years (inductive heads, magnetoresistive heads, and GMR heads), so the assumption of drives remaining fundamentally the same until we reach this limit is a pretty weak assumption.
At least not in the sense that you seem to mean. Just because you experience radiation, does not mean the source is radioactivity. When I shine a flashlight on you, you are experiencing radiation which has nothing do do with radioactivity. Radioactivity implies a nuclear decay. This decay often releases many types of radiation (generally not electromagnetic in nature.) For all those smart guys who are going to tell me that the sun which produces the radiation is just a big nuclear reaction, that is true, but it is fusion, and not fission, thus the sun is not radioactive per se. The moon is radiated, or irradiated, but not radioactive (or more correctly, not significantly more radioactive that the earth).
It's always amazed me how the same people who get all concerned about journalists using the word hacker when they mean cracker, tell RMS to get over it in regards to the whole Linux vs. GNU/Linux thing. Is this just my imagination, or are these two distinct groups of people.
It's just a connotation versus denotation thing. The other day, I saw that a friend of mine got a new bike, so I said, "So you finally got your new bike, huh?" He said, "Dude, it's not a bike, it's a Colnago!" The connotation was totally lost on me. As far as I was concerned, it was a bike. The same is true for the public with hacker vs. cracker. The distinction is unimportant to the general public, just like the distinction between Linux and GNU/Linux is unimportant to most people who use it. The only time when this really becomes important is when you are having a technical conversation with someone in a particular area of expertise.
When my girlfriend or family ask me what I do at work, I might tell them that I work with UNIX, but when an employer or co-worker ask me I might tell them I work with IRIX. In both cases I refer to the same thing, but in one, I am being more specific. For this reason, if I was writing a story for the New York Times, I would probably use the word hacker. If I was writing for slashdot, I would use the word cracker. In neither case would I be wrong.
One of the problems which disturbs me to no end is the difficulty most people have in translating law from the physical world to the internet. Sometimes, simply doing this makes the legal matters much more obvious. Let me give an example:
It is difficult for law enforcement to stop the shipment of illegal drugs, because they cannot monitor all of the roads and airways. Solution: Shut down all the roads and airways, and we can significantly stem the tide of illegal drugs.
Napster and DeCSS are the roads...
In the physical world, it seems obvious that law enforcement must take on the unbelieveably difficult task of finding those commiting crimes, rather than taking on the relatively simple task of removing all possible mechanisms by which they may commit their crimes. I just hope the juries can be made to realize that Metallica and their cronies are required to do the same.
I used to do some work with GaAs in semiconductor lasers, and I have no idea where you get the idea that GaAs is less effort. For semiconductor lasers, it is less effort, but for device fab, the major problem is the lack of a native oxide. What this means in laymans terms is that you can process silicon, let it oxidize(rust), use a photomask to lay down a pattern, etch away the oxide in the pattern, and start over again. There is no such native oxide for GaAs which means that you have to somehow invent a non-native oxide such as GaAlAs which is a real pain in the ass. As for GaAs being faster, this is also only partially true. I can't remember exactly, but I believe that at low frequencys, GaAs has a higher electron mobility, but this effect drops off at higher frequencies to the point where GaAs and Si are similar in speed. The net result is that GaAs has a limited range of applications for which it is acutally better, and it always costs more. It's true that the cost is decreasing rapidly for GaAs, it is decreasing just as fast or faster for Si.
Isn't Slashdot about stories which may be buried?
on
Tech Stocks Tumble
·
· Score: 2
I don't presume to speak for the Slashdot community, but I've always found that the reason that slashdot is so useful to me is that it has stories which, while I could find them somewhere else, I would have to wade through a massive amount of noise, just to get to the "News for Me. Stuff that matters." Now I don't have any problem with a story about how the market has crashed, but you'd have to have been living in a cave not to already have heard this, and in this sense, it is not particularly valuable to me.
Several months ago, in the course of my work, Jack Simth of ABC news was filming a segment for ABC Nightly News. During the course of the shoot, they informed us that there was some breaking hot story at HP. When he told me what it was about, I told him that I had read about it on Slashdot almost a week before. This is the real value of Slashdot to me. I hate to say it Cmdr. Taco, but on the story about the stock market slideing, you got scooped.
Please don't take this a criticism, I think slashdot is one of the greatest sites on the net. And for those who think it has been slipping lately, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds: If you think you can do it better, by all means do it.
WindowMaker makes a Great Thin Client Interface!
on
GNUstep 0.6.5 freeze
·
· Score: 1
I know this may be a bit off topic, but I just thought I would chime in and say that I have done a fair amount of work using VNC (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/) for thin client computing. While I really like KDE and to a lesser degree GNOME on my local desktop, I have found that they seem to be quite slow over anything slower than the highest speed network. WindowMaker, on the other hand seems snappy even under a 56K connection. The only WM I have found to be any faster is twm (which I use to export individual applications to a web browser when I don't need any window manager.) Can anyone tell me why WindowMaker is so fast over a low bandwidth connection. Is it just the simple color scheme, or is there something more to it.
Did I misunderstand, or did Tom say there are a few PPGA socket 370 Pentium III's called 550E's. If so, would these work in the ABIT BP6 to give a relatively cheap dual Pentium III (or provide a good upgrade from a dual celeron system)?
I've heard mention of the fact that these guys use linux, but when looking at the box, there is no way of knowing what version of linux (if any) they are using. So I have two question: 1) Can anyone describe exactly what portion of Linux these guys are using? 2) How can we tell if these guys are adhering to the GPL which they are bound to if they are using Linux. Does the GPL apply to embeded devices? If so, how?
I agree that it is stupid to try to change the name of a commonly used term like Megabyte, so how about just adding a term to clarify for when it makes a difference like they do with ton and metric ton. A metric megabyte could be 10**6 (metric is always based on tens) while english could be 2**10. The whole reason they don't usually distinguish is that it usually doesn't usually make a difference. "How big is that file?" "About a Megabyte." "English or metric?"
Does anyone else see this as a positive thing. The more rediculous the laws governing software licensing become, the more industries will be forced to take a closer look at those ignored little licenses. Once they start to look a little closer, they might not like what they find, and may actually start to demand the rights they deserve. Just another argument for Open Source software as I see it, and perhaps the most compelling one so far.
The thing that really disturbs me about this is that it sort of defeats the whole point of the internet: To get information as quickly and easily as possible. If there is one thing I can't stand, it's getting a link which says, "See the new trailer of XYZ here", and then I have to jump through fifteen more hoops, or use another sites search engine to find the page. If I get routed to the front page, and the thing I am looking for is not there, I'm outta there. I'm not going to flip through five more pages of advertisements to get it. It's kind of like neighboring cities saying, "I don't want you linking to my city without first routing all traffic down Main Street so that they can drive by all our tourist attractions. I'm not going to look at all of the tourist attractions. I'm going to say, "I need to get the hell out of this town and never come back again."
You seem to have missed the point of my comment. Let's say Redhat (Microsoft, etc) steels an installer from Installs R Us. I have no idea what the licenseing conditions of this installer are. So long as I agree to the license provided by my vendor, isn't he responsible for the copyright infringement?
Are software licenses legal or enforcable. It's one thing when Microsoft has a license which states that by clicking on this button, you sign your soul over to bill, but I never clicked such a button when I installed my Redhat 5.2. Would this make Redhat responsible for license violations. Can you enforce a contract which one side has never even seen? I suspect the ideas of software licenses will have to be revisited by the legislature at some point (Scary thought).
Slashdot Mirror
>>I'm just as skeptical as the next geek, but remember: MP3 changed everything in audio. Compressing a 60M song to ~6M?!? 10-12X compression with only minor quality loss?
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>
This statement only makes sense if you assume broadband was already streaming uncompressed video, and we are looking for an improvement over that. The fact is that MPEG is already compressed by a massive amount over raw video, and it requires about 1 Mbps to stream properly (320x240). You are suggesting that we compress this already compressed data by a factor of 50. In other words, by your analogy, we take the 6M mp3, and reduce it in size to 100K with minimal quality loss. I'm not saying this is absolutely impossible, but it is certainly a source of great skepticism.
I wish I would have thought to ask this before, but I can't believe no one mentioned that the Halloween Documents basically answer many of these questions in a much less politically spin doctored way. I wonder how he would have responded to this?
Imagine, I already pay $40 a month for my DSL. Imagine if for only $10 more, I get all the software I need downloaded right through my high speed connection. Imagine. I plug everything in, insert the setup CD, and everything just works. Now if this worked in fact, and not just in theory, it might actually be worth it. $120 per year is more than I currently spend on productivity software, and they have minimal distribution costs. I think it might actually work. I'm just not sure if it's a good thing or not.
From the CNN Coverage:
Eros became only the fifth celestial body touched by a human spacecraft, following the Moon, Mars, Venus and Jupiter.
How did we touch Jupiter? Does atmospheric brakeing count or something?
Doesn't the Matrix plus the Superbowl give you the XFL?
The following passage is taken from the website:
http://vectorsite.tripod.com/talitec.html
* Light is emitted in the form of photons. Photons have momentum, and when they are reflected off a surface, they transfer momentum to that surface. In principle, if a spacecraft is tethered to a large reflecting surface, or "lightsail", sunlight falling on that surface would provide a gentle but continuous pressure that could propel the spacecraft between planets without any need to carry propellants for primary propulsion.
While I doubt this pressure is sufficient(even in a laser) to do real damage, it is not out of the realm of possibility. Any mirror, however, is not perfect, and if you take a high power laser, and reflect it off of a mirror with a spec of dust, you will still get significant heating. It is unlikely that chrome would make a missile immune, but it may help.
I can't remember exactly, but I thought I saw this story two weeks ago, and I seem to remember posting this exact same response, but I'm not quite sure.
How about a computer vote which prints out two optically scanable ballots. One for you to submit, and one for you to keep as a receipt. That way, you get the best of both worlds. Instant results, plus a fallback to count against in case of fraud.
Actually, If I was DC, I _WOULD_ be scared of this. You DON'T mess with the USPS.
_ _
i sday/991017onthisday_big.html
Remember, everyone thinks that Al Capone went to jail for Tax evasion - He didn't he went to jail for MAILING the false return.
_______________________________________________
Did you bother to check your facts before posting this nonsense. Please give a reference. Try:
http://verify.nytimes.com/learning/general/onth
It is a link to the New York Times article after the conviction. It reads in part:
Two of the five counts are
misdemeanors, failure to file
income tax in 1924 and 1928,
each carrying possible
maximum sentence of one
year imprisonment and
$10,000 fine. The other
counts on which he was
found guilty are felonies and
each carries a maximum
penalty of five years'
imprisonment and $10,000
fine for "attempt to evade and
defeat" the income tax in
1925, 1926 and 1927.
It's amazing how fast misinformation can spread over the internet.
Check out http://www.anoto.com/ They have a new bluetooth based pen which would be an ideal companion to this watch. The pen is strong on input, but weak on output. The watch is the other way around. I saw this demoed a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty damn cool.
I've been thinking for a long time that the major problem with electric vehicles is range (Can't take a trip to grandma's you know.) But most of the time I don't need more than a 20 mile range in town. Wouldn't it be cool if in the next generation, Honda could provide enough battery to get you 20 miles per day without using a drop of gas, but still have the gas engine as a backup, or for long range trips. I don't know about you, but if I only had to go the gas station a couple times a year when I would actually need to take a long trip in my hybrid car, that would almost be worth the $20000.
First of all, the term "theoretical limit" is a bit vague, but the limit which seems most directly relevent is what they call the superparamagnetic limit. This is the point at which the thermal energy which tends to randomize magnetic moment are stronger than (or just as strong as) the amount of magnetic energy stored in an individual bit. This effectively means that you may be able to store the bit, but it won't stay stored very long. Anyway, most scientists "estimate" this limit to be about 100 Gb/sq. in. (IIRC) I say "estimate" because magnetic field calculations is still more of an art than a science, and the calculations make some pretty strong assumptions about geometry. I believe the above mentioned limit assumes all of the magnetic moments are alligned in plane, for instance, which is very poor arrangement from a Gb/sq.in. perspective, but currently is the only practical way to arrange a drive. There are also other assumptions about the media being uniform, the substrate being flat, etc., etc. When we no longer assume many of these assumptions, we have more opportunities for greater density, at the expense of greater technical challenge, so the question really should be, "What is the theoretical limit assuming the same fundamental drive design", and as I said before that is about 100 Gb/sq.in. By the way, the read head design alone has changed fundamentally at least two times in the past 10 years (inductive heads, magnetoresistive heads, and GMR heads), so the assumption of drives remaining fundamentally the same until we reach this limit is a pretty weak assumption.
At least not in the sense that you seem to mean. Just because you experience radiation, does not mean the source is radioactivity. When I shine a flashlight on you, you are experiencing radiation which has nothing do do with radioactivity. Radioactivity implies a nuclear decay. This decay often releases many types of radiation (generally not electromagnetic in nature.) For all those smart guys who are going to tell me that the sun which produces the radiation is just a big nuclear reaction, that is true, but it is fusion, and not fission, thus the sun is not radioactive per se. The moon is radiated, or irradiated, but not radioactive (or more correctly, not significantly more radioactive that the earth).
Isn't it?
It's always amazed me how the same people who get all concerned about journalists using the word hacker when they mean cracker, tell RMS to get over it in regards to the whole Linux vs. GNU/Linux thing. Is this just my imagination, or are these two distinct groups of people.
It's just a connotation versus denotation thing. The other day, I saw that a friend of mine got a new bike, so I said, "So you finally got your new bike, huh?" He said, "Dude, it's not a bike, it's a Colnago!" The connotation was totally lost on me. As far as I was concerned, it was a bike. The same is true for the public with hacker vs. cracker. The distinction is unimportant to the general public, just like the distinction between Linux and GNU/Linux is unimportant to most people who use it. The only time when this really becomes important is when you are having a technical conversation with someone in a particular area of expertise.
When my girlfriend or family ask me what I do at work, I might tell them that I work with UNIX, but when an employer or co-worker ask me I might tell them I work with IRIX. In both cases I refer to the same thing, but in one, I am being more specific. For this reason, if I was writing a story for the New York Times, I would probably use the word hacker. If I was writing for slashdot, I would use the word cracker. In neither case would I be wrong.
One of the problems which disturbs me to no end is the difficulty most people have in translating law from the physical world to the internet. Sometimes, simply doing this makes the legal matters much more obvious. Let me give an example:
It is difficult for law enforcement to stop the shipment of illegal drugs, because they cannot monitor all of the roads and airways. Solution:
Shut down all the roads and airways, and we can significantly stem the tide of illegal drugs.
Napster and DeCSS are the roads...
In the physical world, it seems obvious that law enforcement must take on the unbelieveably difficult task of finding those commiting crimes, rather than taking on the relatively simple task of removing all possible mechanisms by which they may commit their crimes. I just hope the juries can be made to realize that Metallica and their cronies are required to do the same.
I used to do some work with GaAs in semiconductor lasers, and I have no idea where you get the idea that GaAs is less effort. For semiconductor lasers, it is less effort, but for device fab, the major problem is the lack of a native oxide. What this means in laymans terms is that you can process silicon, let it oxidize(rust), use a photomask to lay down a pattern, etch away the oxide in the pattern, and start over again. There is no such native oxide for GaAs which means that you have to somehow invent a non-native oxide such as GaAlAs which is a real pain in the ass. As for GaAs being faster, this is also only partially true. I can't remember exactly, but I believe that at low frequencys, GaAs has a higher electron mobility, but this effect drops off at higher frequencies to the point where GaAs and Si are similar in speed. The net result is that GaAs has a limited range of applications for which it is acutally better, and it always costs more. It's true that the cost is decreasing rapidly for GaAs, it is decreasing just as fast or faster for Si.
I don't presume to speak for the Slashdot community, but I've always found that the reason that slashdot is so useful to me is that it has stories which, while I could find them somewhere else, I would have to wade through a massive amount of noise, just to get to the "News for Me. Stuff that matters." Now I don't have any problem with a story about how the market has crashed, but you'd have to have been living in a cave not to already have heard this, and in this sense, it is not particularly valuable to me.
Several months ago, in the course of my work, Jack Simth of ABC news was filming a segment for ABC Nightly News. During the course of the shoot, they informed us that there was some breaking hot story at HP. When he told me what it was about, I told him that I had read about it on Slashdot almost a week before. This is the real value of Slashdot to me. I hate to say it Cmdr. Taco, but on the story about the stock market slideing, you got scooped.
Please don't take this a criticism, I think slashdot is one of the greatest sites on the net. And for those who think it has been slipping lately, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds:
If you think you can do it better, by all means do it.
I know this may be a bit off topic, but I just thought I would chime in and say that I have done a fair amount of work using VNC (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/)
for thin client computing. While I really like KDE and to a lesser degree GNOME on my local desktop, I have found that they seem to be quite slow over anything slower than the highest speed network. WindowMaker, on the other hand seems snappy even under a 56K connection. The only WM I have found to be any faster is twm (which I use to export individual applications to a web browser when I don't need any window manager.) Can anyone tell me why WindowMaker is so fast over a low bandwidth connection. Is it just the simple color scheme, or is there something more to it.
Did I misunderstand, or did Tom say there are a few PPGA socket 370 Pentium III's called 550E's. If so, would these work in the ABIT BP6 to give a relatively cheap dual Pentium III (or provide a good upgrade from a dual celeron system)?
I've heard mention of the fact that these guys use linux, but when looking at the box, there is no way of knowing what version of linux (if any) they are using. So I have two question: 1) Can anyone describe exactly what portion of Linux these guys are using? 2) How can we tell if these guys are adhering to the GPL which they are bound to if they are using Linux. Does the GPL apply to embeded devices? If so, how?
I agree that it is stupid to try to change the name of a commonly used term like Megabyte, so how about just adding a term to clarify for when it makes a difference like they do with ton and metric ton. A metric megabyte could be 10**6 (metric is always based on tens) while english could be 2**10. The whole reason they don't usually distinguish is that it usually doesn't usually make a difference. "How big is that file?" "About a Megabyte." "English or metric?"
Does anyone else see this as a positive thing. The more rediculous the laws governing software licensing become, the more industries will be forced to take a closer look at those ignored little licenses. Once they start to look a little closer, they might not like what they find, and may actually start to demand the rights they deserve. Just another argument for Open Source software as I see it, and perhaps the most compelling one so far.
The thing that really disturbs me about this is that it sort of defeats the whole point of the internet: To get information as quickly and easily as possible. If there is one thing I can't stand, it's getting a link which says, "See the new trailer of XYZ here", and then I have to jump through fifteen more hoops, or use another sites search engine to find the page. If I get routed to the front page, and the thing I am looking for is not there, I'm outta there. I'm not going to flip through five more pages of advertisements to get it. It's kind of like neighboring cities saying, "I don't want you linking to my city without first routing all traffic down Main Street so that they can drive by all our tourist attractions. I'm not going to look at all of the tourist attractions. I'm going to say, "I need to get the hell out of this town and never come back again."
You seem to have missed the point of my comment. Let's say Redhat (Microsoft, etc) steels an installer from Installs R Us. I have no idea what the licenseing conditions of this installer are. So long as I agree to the license provided by my vendor, isn't he responsible for the copyright infringement?
This re-raises the issue:
Are software licenses legal or enforcable.
It's one thing when Microsoft has a license which states that by clicking on this button, you sign your soul over to bill, but I never clicked such a button when I installed my Redhat 5.2. Would this make Redhat responsible for license violations. Can you enforce a contract which one side has never even seen? I suspect the ideas of software licenses will have to be revisited by the legislature at some point (Scary thought).