The problem is not even this guy, the problem is his opposition. There isn't one. As always, "Yes Prime Minister" has the example. Story: Hacker is given the task of coming up with a new transport policy involving road, rail and air. He soon learns that each sector is represented by a civil servant fighting not for the common good but for HIS sector.
The people that are supposed to support the common good are... politicians, and that's why we have elections. And to some degree they might even do their job. But I'm not naive enough to think that a constant barrage of lobbyists & documents crafted by pro-IP industry groups will leave those politicians clear-headed (or do what their voters want).
Rules to say what lobbyist groups can or cannot do may help, but not enough. Big money & vested interests will find a way to distort reality for those politicians.
Therefore the only way is to stop putting money into the pockets of these industry groups. If you don't like what a business does, stop buying their products (if there's only evil to choose from, choose the least evil). Period. That will give said industry less money to work with, less means to manipulate public opinion & corrupt the system.
Now I'm also not naive enough to think that the general public will do so; most people simply don't give a shit about copyright / patent / trademark issues. Up to the point where it bites them in the ass, hard (at which point it will be too late). But still: voting with your wallet / feet (& red pencil) does make a difference, if enough people do it.
Not exactly - according to the Wiki, reading core memory is destructive, that is: after reading a memory location, you have to re-write the data kept there (what you just read, or modified data written back).
In contrast, above article states: "This nondestructive readout is possible (..)" (emphasis mine). No mention of tiny coil-like structures either...
On military tactical maps, there's a diagram for converting from grid North (straight up using MGRS maps) to magnetic north (where the needle points on a compass). It'll say add or subtract some number of degrees to convert from one to the other, and each map is different depending on where in the world it is depicting. Since many of these maps are several years old, I wonder what impact this will have on ground navigation?
Probably little... for those applications where using the magnetic north pole is good enough, that'll likely stay the case if the pole shifts a bit. For applications where higher accuracy is needed, other systems like GPS would be used.
This shows the failure of how hyperlinks works and how the page rank algorithm works.
Hardly: a search engine just makes it easy to find popular sites. With popular meaning 'much visited, linked from many other sites', not 'containing useful info from trustworthy source'. A user's mistake starts when he/she loses track of that distinction.
Of course you'd want the 'useful info from trustworthy source', but that's not a search engine's job (to decide what's 'good' or 'bad' info), is it? Google finds it, you decide what it means.
...for activities that involve a lot of typing, not so much. IMHO even the short travel of typical laptop keys are much nicer than hitting virtual keys on a touchscreen.
Btw - how's that flexible 'dual' screen laptop coming? You know, where you flip it open 180 degrees, to have a single screen surface.
I have 0 problems getting around / get work done on KDE (any version), and have regularly used KDE for day-to-day work years ago. My point was it just takes too much time to get to know it (well). Especially for ordinary users, who don't have the patience a power-user might have. With that as a given, anything that a n00b user (count me out) can't find quickly, is lost on that user. And you'll have to agree that non-power users are the vast majority of desktop users.
I've played around a bit with KDE 4.x (don't remember exact version) in Ubuntu 10.04, but I wasn't very impressed. It look very slick, gives a feeling of advanced tech under the hood, but:
After fiddling with settings for hours, I concluded it's too much work to get settings to suit my taste. Do a setting here, and something else doesn't work quite how you want it. Try a setting there, and it doesn't do what you expect, or you see no effect at all. Only to find later there was some override that caused previous setting to be ignored.
I don't have time for this crap, a desktop environment is just one of many things you have to configure when customizing an OS, it shouldn't take a day to wander through its configuration. This wouldn't be a problem if defaults are chosen well enough that you're done with changing very few things from the default, but that's not the case. From what I understand, SuSE offers one of the best out-of-the-box KDE experiences, but hey I'm not changing distro's just to have nice defaults on the desktop environment.
To me, it comes across as a typical case of too much unnecessary complexity - users don't care, they just want something that they can get familiar with in a short time. And where they can easily find the most important settings. Beyond that, additional complexity just wasts memory, CPU cycles & developer time. Which is really a shame given all the effort that goes into a project like KDE. Disclaimer: that's just my current impression, maybe these things are much improved in later releases like the one reviewed here...
You're seeking a problem where none exists. There's many fields already where there's someone operating potentially deadly equipment (the user), and manufacturer that might face charges if their product was faulty. Existing cars for one, industrial robots, household appliances, etc, etc.
Once the tech has proven itself, surely some laws could be passed to make it clear who's responsible and/or liable for what. In the mean while, there's nothing stopping a manufacturer from having customers signing a waiver that says "use at your own risk". Besides: if the technology proves safer than cars are currently, it might be a net positive for a manufacturer even if they'd hold a larger part of the risk.
Hehe, here in the Netherlands there was a TV report recently where people complained that they still received the phone book despite opting out. Then it was reported that in Belgium you don't get one anymore unless you ask for it (opt-in). Seems like a better way to me, cuts out all the waste from people that are too lazy to opt-out.
Yeah but crying about it & asking for 'sorry' changes nothing. The families involved should just sue their government for damages. That way any time a public servant steps on citizens' rights (and gets caught), there would be a significant pricetag attached. For a government that's low on funds, that might be a lot harder to ignore than a pile of damaging news reports.
And when possible those responsible should be kicked out of their jobs, perhaps even out of their profession.
(..) how about some intelligent discussion about either educating the general public or another more intelligent solution?
History has shown that educating the public has little effect, if any. Therefore I conclude that if at any time a regular user has to make a decision about whether some software can be trusted, the method is flawed. Regardless of whether user would make the right choice or not. If a trust issue can't be decided automatically, software should be regarded as harmful & unsafe to run, period.
So any intelligent solution should focus on reliable ways to tell apart software from trusted sources (for example by using a community-maintained list of trusted vendors, and cryptography to verify downloads is genuine from one in that list), and limiting what software (trusted & untrusted) can do. Like: by default, very, very limited access rights to things like networking, persistent storage or user data, unless given more rights by administrator. For anyone that says it would cause too many warnings etc: can you explain why random game / app / desktop widget that a user runs, would need access to all user files? No idea? Yet strangely that's normally the case - sounds like a design error to me. Another example: when user selects a file to open, there's nothing stopping an app from discarding that selection & opening some other file instead (or open 2nd file behind user's back). Another design error, if you ask me - if there's an open file dialog, the apps' file access should automatically be limited (by the OS) to the user-selected file. There's many more examples like this.
Which would make 0 difference for Chinese people, as (I'm assuming) they're already used to lower standards when it comes to product quality / safety. And I reckon this aircraft would be targeted at the growing China's middle class, so for most travelers it wouldn't be an unsafe plane vs. safe plane issue, but rather going from 'too expensive to fly' to 'let's enjoy our first plain travel holiday'.
That said, I'm sure there's countless places in the world where driving the streets for an hour is way more dangerous than taking a 1-hour trip on Chinese-developed aircraft.
The problem is that we have no good way of dealing with these lunatics when large parts of entire societies are thinking like this.
Sure there is: separation. If you happen to live in a western democracy, don't let your freedoms slip away. Make sure your democracy stays one (as in eternal vigilance). Don't vote for people who want to remove personal freedoms or democratic rights. If you vote for someone & they do, don't vote for them again. Ever. Period.
If people in other countries want to subject themselves to religious law, let them. If that makes them 'lose contact' with the rest of the world, and economic consequences puts them back in the middle ages, that's mostly their problem. If they do want to join the rest of us: shape up in the personal freedoms / democratic department first. In the mean while, they can take the freedoms that my ancestors fought for, from my cold, dead hands.
The fines would become even more complicated when you consider how much money a record label is actually losing for the illegally-shared songs.
Another fine example that shows how pre-conceived people's notions on file-sharing are. Where's proof that file-sharing is actually making a record label lose money? It might just as well be that it makes a song more popular, to the point where people go out & buy the media. I'm not saying that's the case, but the opposite isn't true beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt either. P2P activity vs. sales plots may show correlation, not cause. More likely it depends... on what song, what band, when it was shared, where it was shared, etc. And varying with time - at some put it may hurt sales, other times it may help sales.
Personally I think that laws should result from obvious findings (something that everyone can see & agree on). Preferably combined with cold, hard math. In the absence of such obvious / irrefutable facts, we should just cut the red tape & scrap those laws. Or limit their scope to the point that we can (accurately!) measure their effect.
I'm not - war should be expensive, both in lives & financial sense, preferably for all parties involved.
Countries should avoid going into a war at all costs. Even it improves things on your side of the war, that might mean the same investment (in money & lives) on your side translates into more casualties on the other side. While you may think of that as improvement, it also makes it easier to stamp out an enemy that has every right to be fighting you, or makes it easier to get into a war you shouldn't be getting into. So when there's a development that makes it easier/cheaper to run a war, I don't necessarily see that as a good thing.
for sufficiently cheap power you can compromise on density.
Comments so far seem to ignore the issue of mass/power: every kilogram of mass you tack onto a vehicle, reduces its performance. Because that weight has to be accelerated, and at the next stop sign that weight has to brought to a halt. And for most vehicles, "brought to a halt" means wasting the energy that was stored in the form of kinetic energy (vehicle's speed). An electrical vehicle may re-capture some of that kinetic energy, but never 100%. And if a re-capture system adds another 10 kg. to vehicle weight, that's another 10 kg. that rides along, that needs to be accelerated & stopped.
So everything has both a + and - effect on overall efficiency, and driving style / area where a vehicle is used also counts. Cheap power doesn't gain you anything if using it reduces overall efficiency to the point where you started from.
Due to the Von Neuman bottleneck, most of the transistors in a computer are in the RAM, which is idle except for the row/column being accessed at a given time. The bitgrid gets around this by building a grid of look up tables which operate on 4 bits in and 4 bits. It should be quite easy to build a chip which has a million of these tables in a 1000x1000 grid. This would allow data to flow off the edges at a result per clock cycle.... which in modern CMOS is at least 1 Ghz.
No offense, but poster is an idiot - what he is describing is called a FPGA, readily available, and image processing (for scientific, industrial purposes etc) is one of its many applications. A few hundred $$ will buy you a board with FPGA on it that has hundreds of thousands, or even millions "look up tables which operate on 4 bits in and 4 bits" (look up table = LUT, which effectively translates into a simple logic gate of your choice).
No, creating 1000x1000 grids of those isn't easy, but Xilinx, Altera etc. have been doing it for a while now. And building a FPGA isn't the hard part anymore - understanding the architecture, thinking up effective ways to use them, and programming them, is.
Sneakernet was definitely better than the Internet in some ways.
We're talking early 80's here, people hadn't heard of the internet back then (and that thing named WWW didn't exist yet). Wiki says the BSA didn't exist either (founded 1988), and software industry was still in its infancy - copyright issues included. So in the context of audio tapes, your comment makes no sense.
Also IIRC it was quite common to tape directly from vinyl -> audio cassettes. It's not that the original records were especially rare or expensive, and (since analog) every intermediate step means lower quality tape recording. More likely reel-to-reel tape was used to prevent records from wearing out quickly.
Yeah it feels kind of a low number, you'd expect at least a significant portion of the world population to have (or had) a walkman by now. But that 200 million number refers to Sony models, and of course there are many products from other manufacturers that (ignoring Sony's brand name) would commonly be called 'walkman'. Even if limited to audio-cassette based ones. I wonder what's total number - anyone got some references?
Slashdot Mirror
Hackers add end-user value to product (by making it more flexible and/or versatile).
Next up: manufacturer works hard to reduce product's end-user value to what it was before.
True. Still waiting for one of those picture-frames to show up in a shop, that has:
Above seems 'simple' enough, but haven't heard of / seen any examples yet...
The problem is not even this guy, the problem is his opposition. There isn't one. As always, "Yes Prime Minister" has the example. Story: Hacker is given the task of coming up with a new transport policy involving road, rail and air. He soon learns that each sector is represented by a civil servant fighting not for the common good but for HIS sector.
The people that are supposed to support the common good are... politicians, and that's why we have elections. And to some degree they might even do their job. But I'm not naive enough to think that a constant barrage of lobbyists & documents crafted by pro-IP industry groups will leave those politicians clear-headed (or do what their voters want).
Rules to say what lobbyist groups can or cannot do may help, but not enough. Big money & vested interests will find a way to distort reality for those politicians.
Therefore the only way is to stop putting money into the pockets of these industry groups. If you don't like what a business does, stop buying their products (if there's only evil to choose from, choose the least evil). Period. That will give said industry less money to work with, less means to manipulate public opinion & corrupt the system.
Now I'm also not naive enough to think that the general public will do so; most people simply don't give a shit about copyright / patent / trademark issues. Up to the point where it bites them in the ass, hard (at which point it will be too late). But still: voting with your wallet / feet (& red pencil) does make a difference, if enough people do it.
Not exactly - according to the Wiki, reading core memory is destructive, that is: after reading a memory location, you have to re-write the data kept there (what you just read, or modified data written back).
In contrast, above article states: "This nondestructive readout is possible (..)" (emphasis mine). No mention of tiny coil-like structures either...
On military tactical maps, there's a diagram for converting from grid North (straight up using MGRS maps) to magnetic north (where the needle points on a compass). It'll say add or subtract some number of degrees to convert from one to the other, and each map is different depending on where in the world it is depicting. Since many of these maps are several years old, I wonder what impact this will have on ground navigation?
Probably little... for those applications where using the magnetic north pole is good enough, that'll likely stay the case if the pole shifts a bit. For applications where higher accuracy is needed, other systems like GPS would be used.
(see subject)
IPv4 is dying - Netcraft confirms it, bla bla...
In the mean while, why not simply create some IP addresses? As long as you keep them to yourself, no-one will complain...
From the article:
(..) users who had downloaded films like The Hurt Locker, Far Cry and Call of the Wild
I liked the game Far Cry, so how about that movie? Is it any good? Is it worth the download?
This shows the failure of how hyperlinks works and how the page rank algorithm works.
Hardly: a search engine just makes it easy to find popular sites. With popular meaning 'much visited, linked from many other sites', not 'containing useful info from trustworthy source'. A user's mistake starts when he/she loses track of that distinction.
Of course you'd want the 'useful info from trustworthy source', but that's not a search engine's job (to decide what's 'good' or 'bad' info), is it? Google finds it, you decide what it means.
Btw - how's that flexible 'dual' screen laptop coming? You know, where you flip it open 180 degrees, to have a single screen surface.
I have 0 problems getting around / get work done on KDE (any version), and have regularly used KDE for day-to-day work years ago. My point was it just takes too much time to get to know it (well). Especially for ordinary users, who don't have the patience a power-user might have. With that as a given, anything that a n00b user (count me out) can't find quickly, is lost on that user. And you'll have to agree that non-power users are the vast majority of desktop users.
I've played around a bit with KDE 4.x (don't remember exact version) in Ubuntu 10.04, but I wasn't very impressed. It look very slick, gives a feeling of advanced tech under the hood, but:
After fiddling with settings for hours, I concluded it's too much work to get settings to suit my taste. Do a setting here, and something else doesn't work quite how you want it. Try a setting there, and it doesn't do what you expect, or you see no effect at all. Only to find later there was some override that caused previous setting to be ignored.
I don't have time for this crap, a desktop environment is just one of many things you have to configure when customizing an OS, it shouldn't take a day to wander through its configuration. This wouldn't be a problem if defaults are chosen well enough that you're done with changing very few things from the default, but that's not the case. From what I understand, SuSE offers one of the best out-of-the-box KDE experiences, but hey I'm not changing distro's just to have nice defaults on the desktop environment.
To me, it comes across as a typical case of too much unnecessary complexity - users don't care, they just want something that they can get familiar with in a short time. And where they can easily find the most important settings. Beyond that, additional complexity just wasts memory, CPU cycles & developer time. Which is really a shame given all the effort that goes into a project like KDE. Disclaimer: that's just my current impression, maybe these things are much improved in later releases like the one reviewed here...
http://xkcd.com/505/ "A Bunch of Rocks"
You're seeking a problem where none exists. There's many fields already where there's someone operating potentially deadly equipment (the user), and manufacturer that might face charges if their product was faulty. Existing cars for one, industrial robots, household appliances, etc, etc.
Once the tech has proven itself, surely some laws could be passed to make it clear who's responsible and/or liable for what. In the mean while, there's nothing stopping a manufacturer from having customers signing a waiver that says "use at your own risk". Besides: if the technology proves safer than cars are currently, it might be a net positive for a manufacturer even if they'd hold a larger part of the risk.
Hehe, here in the Netherlands there was a TV report recently where people complained that they still received the phone book despite opting out. Then it was reported that in Belgium you don't get one anymore unless you ask for it (opt-in). Seems like a better way to me, cuts out all the waste from people that are too lazy to opt-out.
Yeah but crying about it & asking for 'sorry' changes nothing. The families involved should just sue their government for damages. That way any time a public servant steps on citizens' rights (and gets caught), there would be a significant pricetag attached. For a government that's low on funds, that might be a lot harder to ignore than a pile of damaging news reports.
And when possible those responsible should be kicked out of their jobs, perhaps even out of their profession.
(..) how about some intelligent discussion about either educating the general public or another more intelligent solution?
History has shown that educating the public has little effect, if any. Therefore I conclude that if at any time a regular user has to make a decision about whether some software can be trusted, the method is flawed. Regardless of whether user would make the right choice or not. If a trust issue can't be decided automatically, software should be regarded as harmful & unsafe to run, period.
So any intelligent solution should focus on reliable ways to tell apart software from trusted sources (for example by using a community-maintained list of trusted vendors, and cryptography to verify downloads is genuine from one in that list), and limiting what software (trusted & untrusted) can do. Like: by default, very, very limited access rights to things like networking, persistent storage or user data, unless given more rights by administrator. For anyone that says it would cause too many warnings etc: can you explain why random game / app / desktop widget that a user runs, would need access to all user files? No idea? Yet strangely that's normally the case - sounds like a design error to me. Another example: when user selects a file to open, there's nothing stopping an app from discarding that selection & opening some other file instead (or open 2nd file behind user's back). Another design error, if you ask me - if there's an open file dialog, the apps' file access should automatically be limited (by the OS) to the user-selected file. There's many more examples like this.
Which would make 0 difference for Chinese people, as (I'm assuming) they're already used to lower standards when it comes to product quality / safety. And I reckon this aircraft would be targeted at the growing China's middle class, so for most travelers it wouldn't be an unsafe plane vs. safe plane issue, but rather going from 'too expensive to fly' to 'let's enjoy our first plain travel holiday'.
That said, I'm sure there's countless places in the world where driving the streets for an hour is way more dangerous than taking a 1-hour trip on Chinese-developed aircraft.
The problem is that we have no good way of dealing with these lunatics when large parts of entire societies are thinking like this.
Sure there is: separation. If you happen to live in a western democracy, don't let your freedoms slip away. Make sure your democracy stays one (as in eternal vigilance). Don't vote for people who want to remove personal freedoms or democratic rights. If you vote for someone & they do, don't vote for them again. Ever. Period.
If people in other countries want to subject themselves to religious law, let them. If that makes them 'lose contact' with the rest of the world, and economic consequences puts them back in the middle ages, that's mostly their problem. If they do want to join the rest of us: shape up in the personal freedoms / democratic department first. In the mean while, they can take the freedoms that my ancestors fought for, from my cold, dead hands.
From the article:
The fines would become even more complicated when you consider how much money a record label is actually losing for the illegally-shared songs.
Another fine example that shows how pre-conceived people's notions on file-sharing are. Where's proof that file-sharing is actually making a record label lose money? It might just as well be that it makes a song more popular, to the point where people go out & buy the media. I'm not saying that's the case, but the opposite isn't true beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt either. P2P activity vs. sales plots may show correlation, not cause. More likely it depends... on what song, what band, when it was shared, where it was shared, etc. And varying with time - at some put it may hurt sales, other times it may help sales.
Personally I think that laws should result from obvious findings (something that everyone can see & agree on). Preferably combined with cold, hard math. In the absence of such obvious / irrefutable facts, we should just cut the red tape & scrap those laws. Or limit their scope to the point that we can (accurately!) measure their effect.
I'm not - war should be expensive, both in lives & financial sense, preferably for all parties involved.
Countries should avoid going into a war at all costs. Even it improves things on your side of the war, that might mean the same investment (in money & lives) on your side translates into more casualties on the other side. While you may think of that as improvement, it also makes it easier to stamp out an enemy that has every right to be fighting you, or makes it easier to get into a war you shouldn't be getting into. So when there's a development that makes it easier/cheaper to run a war, I don't necessarily see that as a good thing.
for sufficiently cheap power you can compromise on density.
Comments so far seem to ignore the issue of mass/power: every kilogram of mass you tack onto a vehicle, reduces its performance. Because that weight has to be accelerated, and at the next stop sign that weight has to brought to a halt. And for most vehicles, "brought to a halt" means wasting the energy that was stored in the form of kinetic energy (vehicle's speed). An electrical vehicle may re-capture some of that kinetic energy, but never 100%. And if a re-capture system adds another 10 kg. to vehicle weight, that's another 10 kg. that rides along, that needs to be accelerated & stopped.
So everything has both a + and - effect on overall efficiency, and driving style / area where a vehicle is used also counts. Cheap power doesn't gain you anything if using it reduces overall efficiency to the point where you started from.
Due to the Von Neuman bottleneck, most of the transistors in a computer are in the RAM, which is idle except for the row/column being accessed at a given time. The bitgrid gets around this by building a grid of look up tables which operate on 4 bits in and 4 bits. It should be quite easy to build a chip which has a million of these tables in a 1000x1000 grid. This would allow data to flow off the edges at a result per clock cycle.... which in modern CMOS is at least 1 Ghz.
No offense, but poster is an idiot - what he is describing is called a FPGA, readily available, and image processing (for scientific, industrial purposes etc) is one of its many applications. A few hundred $$ will buy you a board with FPGA on it that has hundreds of thousands, or even millions "look up tables which operate on 4 bits in and 4 bits" (look up table = LUT, which effectively translates into a simple logic gate of your choice).
No, creating 1000x1000 grids of those isn't easy, but Xilinx, Altera etc. have been doing it for a while now. And building a FPGA isn't the hard part anymore - understanding the architecture, thinking up effective ways to use them, and programming them, is.
Sneakernet was definitely better than the Internet in some ways.
We're talking early 80's here, people hadn't heard of the internet back then (and that thing named WWW didn't exist yet). Wiki says the BSA didn't exist either (founded 1988), and software industry was still in its infancy - copyright issues included. So in the context of audio tapes, your comment makes no sense.
Also IIRC it was quite common to tape directly from vinyl -> audio cassettes. It's not that the original records were especially rare or expensive, and (since analog) every intermediate step means lower quality tape recording. More likely reel-to-reel tape was used to prevent records from wearing out quickly.
Yeah it feels kind of a low number, you'd expect at least a significant portion of the world population to have (or had) a walkman by now. But that 200 million number refers to Sony models, and of course there are many products from other manufacturers that (ignoring Sony's brand name) would commonly be called 'walkman'. Even if limited to audio-cassette based ones. I wonder what's total number - anyone got some references?