Whatever, you just keep picking out single words to focus on instead of using your mind to grasp the obvious point
Well, I guess that's Slashdot for you. Don't let it get to you.
For the record: I agree wholeheartedly with your obvious point about software reuse being a Good Thing.
My issue with the concept of Amazon's solution being proprietary was not that proprietary = bad, but that they would be building something that has already been built (and successfully implemented) before. Sometimes you don't need to reinvent the wheel so to speak.
Perhaps you meant bespoke rather than proprietary
When was the last time you wrote your own bubble sort algorithm.
Too late. Just ask AOL at trying to stop WASTE when it came out.
That is assuming AOL actually were trying to anything so obviously futile as stopping WASTE. Rather than, say, just trying to distance themselves from it in order to head off any legal trouble that the program might get them into, and also to avoid upsetting any of their other buddies in the RIAA.
Furthermore, by having WASTE out there, but undermined, they've divided the efforts of any programmers who may care to work upon this sort of thing, thus undermined the development of any replacement for WASTE (oh, and, anyone fancy working in a "clean-room" enviroment and/or risk AOL make IP claims spurious or otherwise, against them?... didn't think so).
In the mean time, who cares if the activites of WASTE users are encrypted when they can go after people for using WASTE itself.
(i.e. Jon has to know Jane's Public Key, and Jane has to know Jon's Public Key.)
Sorry, I don't understand. Oh, wait... you mean Alice has to know Bob's Public Key, and Bob has to know Alice's Public Key... I see;-)
In general, Public Key's are called Public Key's, because they're well, public. i.e. you can give it to the whole world and his dog, not just people you trust. On the other hand you don't give anyone your Private Key.
With WASTE it's a little more complicated:
if you know public keys from a network, you can sniff some traffic and do an offline dictionary attack on the network name/ID
(I'm quoting from the pulled site, by the way, so this might be forbidden knowledge, but hell, the notice only says the software was unauthorized:-)
So you might want
to keep your public keys within your peer group, or,
if you're using, e.g. 1024 bit keys, choose a network name that contains 1024 bits of random data, and keep that secret within your peer group.
await further "unauthorized" software releases that address this protential issue, and perhaps also allows for more ad-hoc peer-groups (why should Bob have to trust everyone who Alice trusts)
Realise that the worst that can happen in this senario is that some interloper can join your network (which you'll notice immediately and can pull the plug before very much leaks out)... although this does require you to take your tinfoil hat off
The machines may endure forever, but the number of calculations is limited by their finite energy reserve.
Only if you assume that the amount of energy required to perform a calculation remains constant rather than dropping, but you can't assume that unless Dyson's Biological Scaling Hypothesis has been disproved; and as I said, I believe the jury is still out.
Please explain. I'm afraid I don't see how Zeno's paradox applies. In fact I think it's unlikely that you'll be able to find anything mathematically wrong with the scenario that I've presented. The Physics is another matter. I believe the jury is still out on whether or not such machines could be constructed in our universe. http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0205/02 05279.pdf
Yes that's right, trillions of years old. We've been lied to. Everything is cooling towards (but never reaching) absolute zero, thus human life is long since extinct. The Machines however, continue to function. Every calculation that they perform depletes their supply of energy, but by always slowing down and operating at lower and lower temperatures, they eak their finite resources out to last forever. By hybernating between calculations for longer and longer periods, they disapate the waste heat that thermodynamics demands they emit. Thus by staying close to, but above, the temperature of the eternally cooling universe, they endure forever - and in a very real sense, for there is no limit to the number of calculations that these machines can ultimately perform. For them, death does not exist.
My point is that a milisecond of our simulated time does not take a minute of real time to process. It take eons.
Great work guys. I'm downloading Matrix: Reloaded right now with BitTorrent and the whole thing is about to get Slashdotted.
Actually BitTorrent is built to survive a slashdotting. You can't download without providing upload capacity (because essentially you are trading fragments of the file with peers). Thus the idea is that as demand grows for a particular file, so should the supply of bandwidth
On the other hand, there is a central component, which is vunerable to a cease-and-desist.
actually, each input is analog. I have muxed one of them before to get 8-bits of input. The RCX isn't bad, once you put J2ME on it, or something decent. Here is a page where someone did the same thing with 6 inputs: rcxinput.html
Cool, thanks for putting me right. Electronics has always fascinated me. Pity I keep falling asleep right at the beginning when they explain what all the coloured bands on the resistors mean.
I think that BitTorrent is a great piece of technology! One of the things I like about it is the common sense attitude it takes to the problem of so-called "leeching". Peers trade fragments of the file - you've got to give something in order to get something. Even if everybody's motives are entirely venal, the p2p network should stay in pretty good shape. Admittedly there would be efficiency gains in a rose-coloured-spectacle world where everyone cares are shares, but it's not a pre-requisite.
Maybe someone with performance gain/loss statistics will correct me (I admit I don't have any, but I reckon it'd make less and less difference, the larger the size of the file being downloaded gets)
I personally think that appealing to users better nature is actually damaging to BitTorrent. Firstly it's selling the technology short by giving the impression that it doesn't cope otherwise. Secondly, all this preaching (which is how it's likely to be viewed, even if it's not the intention) is very off putting! I'm not saying that I don't have a better nature, it's just that I'm sure that there are far worthier causes for it's attention, than giving a p2p network a bit of a boost.
I think you guys don't appreciate the value of language diversity. When languages die, stuff dies with them. Beyond just cultural reference points. You couldn't possibly take a language spoken by some isolated tribe and convert it word-for-word into English. Things would be lost. Just like there's stuff you can do in COBOL but not in C and vice versa.
You've got a good point about natural languages, but I don't think it applys to programming languages. Any stuff you can do in one programming language, you should be able to do in another (as long is it's Turing-complete)
once poeple know the rules that determine what a "word burst" is and when it's happening, then tools will be developed to artificially inflate desired word burts
The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity:
1. The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory.
2. The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations.
3. The population must be in the billions (±75 billions) for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical validity.
It occurs to me that re-entry technology along these lines, might be relatively cheap to test (in the first instance, anyway), as the experiments could be dropped from high-altitude balloons, rather than orbit... or maybe 100,000ft just isn't high enough.
Certainly not at all feasible at the moment - or at least wasn't a few months ago when I looked into it (when I also examined many of the sites linked at the top of this article, more closely apparently than the first posters who claimed it's already been done-and-dusted).
And yes indeed, raw pointers are a fundamental problem when compiling C/C++/etc for the JVM. Personally I would work around the problem by virtualising the memory used by the C program. Imagine a java class with, say, a peek method, a poke method, and a member variable containing one huge buffer (actually that's not sophisticated enough, but should convey the general idea). If the code is compiled to use this class as memory, rather than directly accessing the JVM's memory, then suddenly it can do pointer arithmetic to it's hearts content, without being thrown out of the JVM, and without compromising any sandbox.
You now have a PC running a virtual machine which is itself running a virtual memory manager. This notion is going to make some people cringe, especially those who think that Java is already slow. I agree that this solution would only be fast enough to work for legacy code, but if we suppose that you are already serious about moving to the JVM platform, then hello, wake up, your existing code is already legacy anyway.
Personally I can see it working. When I can run Angband (a game written in *very* portable C) in a Java applet I'll be satisfied... or maybe that just goes to show I'm crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I guess that's Slashdot for you. Don't let it get to you.
For the record: I agree wholeheartedly with your obvious point about software reuse being a Good Thing.
Perhaps you meant bespoke rather than proprietary
When was the last time you wrote your own bubble sort algorithm.
Never, but not because it would be like re-inventing the wheel. http://www.hack.gr/jargon/html/B/bubble-sort.html
That is assuming AOL actually were trying to anything so obviously futile as stopping WASTE. Rather than, say, just trying to distance themselves from it in order to head off any legal trouble that the program might get them into, and also to avoid upsetting any of their other buddies in the RIAA.
Furthermore, by having WASTE out there, but undermined, they've divided the efforts of any programmers who may care to work upon this sort of thing, thus undermined the development of any replacement for WASTE (oh, and, anyone fancy working in a "clean-room" enviroment and/or risk AOL make IP claims spurious or otherwise, against them?... didn't think so).
In the mean time, who cares if the activites of WASTE users are encrypted when they can go after people for using WASTE itself.
Sorry, I don't understand. Oh, wait... you mean Alice has to know Bob's Public Key, and Bob has to know Alice's Public Key... I see ;-)
In general, Public Key's are called Public Key's, because they're well, public. i.e. you can give it to the whole world and his dog, not just people you trust. On the other hand you don't give anyone your Private Key.
With WASTE it's a little more complicated:
if you know public keys from a network, you can sniff some traffic and do an offline dictionary attack on the network name/ID
(I'm quoting from the pulled site, by the way, so this might be forbidden knowledge, but hell, the notice only says the software was unauthorized :-)
So you might want
Well yes, but actually they tend to US manafactured and mainly situated in US air-bases.
Only if you assume that the amount of energy required to perform a calculation remains constant rather than dropping, but you can't assume that unless Dyson's Biological Scaling Hypothesis has been disproved; and as I said, I believe the jury is still out.
Thank you :-))
Google for "Zeno's paradox".
Please explain. I'm afraid I don't see how Zeno's paradox applies. In fact I think it's unlikely that you'll be able to find anything mathematically wrong with the scenario that I've presented. The Physics is another matter. I believe the jury is still out on whether or not such machines could be constructed in our universe. http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0205/02 05279.pdf
My point is that a milisecond of our simulated time does not take a minute of real time to process. It take eons.
Actually BitTorrent is built to survive a slashdotting. You can't download without providing upload capacity (because essentially you are trading fragments of the file with peers). Thus the idea is that as demand grows for a particular file, so should the supply of bandwidth
On the other hand, there is a central component, which is vunerable to a cease-and-desist.
I usually use an F#-word or two when dealing with *any* programming language. Even those who swear by computers also swear at them.
Cool, thanks for putting me right. Electronics has always fascinated me. Pity I keep falling asleep right at the beginning when they explain what all the coloured bands on the resistors mean.
Yes, I'm sure there are many many imaginative ways of encoding the three bits of sensor data that the Mindstorms RCX can recieve as XML
000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111
Those are all the possible states. Add tags to taste.
...was XML optimal for searchability?!
Maybe someone with performance gain/loss statistics will correct me (I admit I don't have any, but I reckon it'd make less and less difference, the larger the size of the file being downloaded gets)
I personally think that appealing to users better nature is actually damaging to BitTorrent. Firstly it's selling the technology short by giving the impression that it doesn't cope otherwise. Secondly, all this preaching (which is how it's likely to be viewed, even if it's not the intention) is very off putting! I'm not saying that I don't have a better nature, it's just that I'm sure that there are far worthier causes for it's attention, than giving a p2p network a bit of a boost.
And not a nepotic plutocracy?... oops, my mistake.
Fuck, we're b*mbing Iraq
You've got a good point about natural languages, but I don't think it applys to programming languages. Any stuff you can do in one programming language, you should be able to do in another (as long is it's Turing-complete)
I think we *are* talking thousands of millions here.
Psychohistory is a fictional science employed upon a galatic population.
once poeple know the rules that determine what a "word burst" is and when it's happening, then tools will be developed to artificially inflate desired word burts
The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity:
1. The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory.
2. The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations.
3. The population must be in the billions (±75 billions) for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical validity.
"We are aiming to reach the edge of space in an attempt to break the world record for the highest manned balloon flight"
And yes indeed, raw pointers are a fundamental problem when compiling C/C++/etc for the JVM. Personally I would work around the problem by virtualising the memory used by the C program. Imagine a java class with, say, a peek method, a poke method, and a member variable containing one huge buffer (actually that's not sophisticated enough, but should convey the general idea). If the code is compiled to use this class as memory, rather than directly accessing the JVM's memory, then suddenly it can do pointer arithmetic to it's hearts content, without being thrown out of the JVM, and without compromising any sandbox.
You now have a PC running a virtual machine which is itself running a virtual memory manager. This notion is going to make some people cringe, especially those who think that Java is already slow. I agree that this solution would only be fast enough to work for legacy code, but if we suppose that you are already serious about moving to the JVM platform, then hello, wake up, your existing code is already legacy anyway.
Personally I can see it working. When I can run Angband (a game written in *very* portable C) in a Java applet I'll be satisfied... or maybe that just goes to show I'm crazy.