It is self modifying to an extent, but I am not aware of any sites that take in anything and then spawn off entirely new websites without human intervention,
It is a system in which human intervention plays a major role. The users / administrators of the internet are not outside of this i-cology (I like that better than e-cology, because you can tell them apart. If it bugs you, tough) they are it's nutrients, they provide the energy. They also make pretty good accuators.
Well, that part seems reasonable to me - it's the back, so don't fret it. It's really just the whole damned thing which seems fake to me, rather than specific details like this.
Most of todays crypto algorithms rely upon the fact that given f(x,y) it can be difficult to find x and y. Multiplication is O(N) wheren N is the number of bits you're working with. The computational complexity of factoring is not known, though it seems to be in a class of problems which we call NP - using nondeterministic methods they can solved in polynomial time (indeed, for factoring, linear), or in otherwords, if you could try all of the possible answers at once, in would only take you O(N) to tell which one is right.
Currently the best we can do is solve NP problems in exponential time - we just try all the answers serially (sure, we can exclude a lot of possibilities, but not enough to REALLY get things fast). It hasn't been proven that NP problems cannot be solved determinisitically in less than exponential time, but most people think it's probably true.
The whole reason to switch over to quantum computing is that it provides nondeterminism. That doesn't mean we can theoretically calculate anything we couldn't before (this is proven), just that some calculations may get easier. Such as NP problems, which by their very definitions are solvable in polynomial time, using nondeterminstic techniques.
Any encryption algorithm that relies on NP problems being extremely difficult to solve will be broken by quantum computing. I'm no crypto-whiz or nuthin' but it seems likely to me that all common crypto relies on this assumption.
There are computational problems that are harder than NP problems, but they're not all that common, and really hard, so they haven't gotten a whole lot of attention. I imagine that if quantum computing took off, these would see a lot more research.
How convenient for Intel, that they can hide the USB2 implementation cost in higher chipset prices (hint: more than the $0.25/device Apple et al are charging for 1394).
Am I mistaken in thinking that the $0.25/device is merely for the licensing? The cost of implementation is certainly more than that for both formats?
I mean, great: gigatexels per second. As much RAM as I currently have on my mainboard. Meaning what? I can now play Quake3 at 4,000*3,000 resolution? Yay. Yes, I know about anti-aliasing, but this is overkill for even that if not running very righ resolutions (1024*768 and above).
Actually, if you had been feverishly keeping up on hype for the last few months as I have, some of the features of this involve an accumulation buffer which will be used for doing motion-blur/depth of focus-blur. The way thse will be implemented is by doing multiple renders per frame, and this sure as hell uses a very high fill-rate.
Further more, the number of pixels rendered per frame will often be significantly higher than the number of pixels on the screen as some polys are obscured by others - even if you fully z-sort your polys you can't be guaranteed to be free of having to draw over an old poly (which is why we have and need z-buffers).
Symantec, Mijenix, NT Internals etc get by very well, doing some very cool stuff with windows.
This doesn't indicate that undocumented functions aren't necessary, just that documentation is not always necessary to use a call. A lot of these tools poke around at undocumented stuff. What's this mean? Well, it means that it's that much more difficult to implement a Win32-compatible API (as WINE tries to do) since you have to implement things which have no real documentation.
I don't attribute this to some diabolical plan on MS's OS division - it's more the fault of the application programmers (including, but in no way limited to MS's apps team).
EnumProcesses
Hmm. The Win32 SDK help files I am using do not have an entry for this function. Thanks.
so if you're a masochist, you'll be able to hook that USB 2 hard drive up to your current USB ports, and blaze along at a breathtaking 1.5 megabytes per second. I can see the advertising now; "Get the power of a hard drive with the speed of CD-ROM!"
CD-ROMs aren't that slow anymore. You're talking 10x. Real nice CD-ROMs (such as kenwood trueX) go 43-70x (5-10 megabytes/s)
Also, external modems are pretty decent, although the UART on your standard motherboard may not be able to make the most of a compressed 56K connection.
The PCI soundcards that you mentioned are OBJETIVELY no better to the Human Ear, since a good 16-bit soundcard can produce two sounds that are separated by so little that the ear treats them as the same (either in duration, tone, or volume).
1 channel of CD quality audio = 150 kBytes/s. 8 channel of CD quality audio = 150 kbits/s
Yeah, you could mix the audio in software. What if you now want to put different DSP effects on the channels? (3d sound?) You want to do that on the main processor too. Sound cards are progressing the same way video cards have. They're not as high-profile, because a lot of people don't care, however. A PCI sound card does make some sense.
Show me the typist that can type over 1000 cpm, so I guess that 9600 baud serial keyboard is gonna last a while. The reason we shouldn't scrap all legacy hardware is there is a good portion of it that exeeds it's design specifiations to this day.
Bandwidth are not the only reasons to use a USB or PCI device. They are also allow for more flexible/easy configuration. ISA sucks for plug-n-play - even ISAPNP isn't great. USB keyboards let you put a bunch of them on the same system (if you're so inclined), and are more orthogonal (if you're using USB for other stuff as well).
Relax, people will still make SOME motherboards with ISA slots as long as there are people like you to buy them. They will be (within a few years, I imagine) be more expensive (more logic, fewer produced), but you'll be able to get one if you refuse to use "bleeding-edge" technologies.
I was under the impression that MS's internal documentation is really no better than its external docs. It's easy to assume that MS is monolithic and that the Office programmers know everything that the GDI coders do, but of course this is far from the case. In a company the size of MS, you don't just walk up to whoever wrote the scheduler and ask her "Hey, is there a way to get a complete list of processes?" ("yeah, but it's not documented! use SuperSecretGetProcessList(HANDLE hSecretMagicMSHandle, DWORD *lpdwBuffer)muahahah!") or whatever.
Apps written by other companies also use undocumented API calls - since you can list the exports from any given DLL it's not too difficult to find them, and sometimes guess what they do. Andrew Tennenbaum has done just this to make his Undocumented Windows books, for instance.
The only real difference, however, is that if the Office development team uses an undocumented call, the OS development team will be unable to remove/change it as it breaks MS's other products. A lot of the time they end up documenting calls a few versions down the road, presumably because they're now in wide enough use that they can't change the implementation anyways.
It's basically equivalent to saying "I am a Danish" instead of "I am danish". Only 3 differences: 1) It was in german. 2) Different locale. 3) Different kind of pastry.
If you decide to start selling Monkey Butter, and nobody decides to compete with you, you have a monopoly on Monkey Butter. This is perfectly legal. If then someone else decides to start selling Monkey Butter, and you use your monopoly status to unfairly prevent them from competing with you, that IS illegal. I think it is also illegal if you used your monkey butter monopoly to unfairly foist your cow butter on people as well.
The other issue is that people visualize 2d space very easily. The degree to which people can internally represent 3 dimensions depends on the individual, of course, but typically it's a lot lower. 4d's even worse.:)
A totally broken implementation of this would say 199a, a half broken implementation would say 19a0, (which is the internal representation) and a not at all broken implementation would also have the output code fixed to translate that to 2000.
You can set slashdot to deduct points for posts shorter than 80 bytes or whatever you choose. That will go a long way towards elimininating this crap. Or if you want to be more positive, add points for posts longer than foo bytes long.
This still hurts research a fair ammount - much research is motivated financially by the percieved payback of making a discovery which could be commerically successful. Now at best this dangling carrot is tempered by royalties and at worst by lawsuits.
some really bad bugs(by bad i mean something like the F00F bug)
The F00F bug only really was at all serious on a server which is running untrusted code. While this is certainly a bug, it's not one that will affect a large quantity of the people using this chip. Furthermore once someone smart enough thought about it, it became easy to fix/work-around in software. The Pentium's FDIV bug is probably a better example of a bad bug.
The big difference is that software can be distributed for free.
Okay, so you have an ingeneous solution to problem X, but will take you and a team of PHDs several years to actually get the solution implemented good, and to be aware of all the issues, and prove that it's a good solution and what all. Total cost? lots.
If the solution's necessarily hardware, you say ScumCo shouldn't be allowed to just rip it off, and skip the R&D costs and therefore be able to undercut you and force you out of the market. All they would have would be the cost of implementing the already researched solution and manufacturing costs, which is why they'd be ABLE to undercut you even if you were running your plant pretty efficiently. That's generally why patents are considered appropriate for hardware.
But what if it's a software solution? You and these PHDs need to eat while doing research. But now for ScumCo to rip you off, they just need to implement the algorithm you spent $x to develop, and they don't even have to worry much about manufacturing costs. So they can undercut you even further. Is it okay if they charge $250 a seat instead of your $25000? What if Microsoft becomes alarmed that someone who's not Microsoft is making money and decides to ship a free version of your product? What can you do about it? Unless you can recoup the R&D costs in between your product release and their product release, you lose because you bothered to do something new.
The way it goes now, is if you develop something that you think it's new, and it's not, you get sued a bunch, and you lose. So, I certainly agree that the patent system needs reform. But that hardware and software are so fundamentally different that the idea of IP applies to one but not to the other is silly.
Couldnt some of those dyes (assuming you get more than 2^2=4 variations in hue for each one produce some sort of useful display??
If you can make them pretty small, 1 bit pixel depth if perfectly adequate, since you can dither. That's how colour inkjet printers work. 1200x1200 dpi is pretty !#%! high quality, and 1800x1800 is, in my experience, sufficient for the unaided eye to be fooled into thinking it's continuous tone, from up close. You could even argue that this kind of solution is BETTER than lower resolution true continuous tone, as you can represent MUCH finer details.
Where do you draw the line? Firmware? Microcode? Gate logic?
What's the difference? An invention's an invention. If you can emulate Roger's gate logic in software to perform the same operations and implement the same algorithm that he and RogCo spent $171m developing, is that different than if you just implement the hardware solution?
The reasons to and not to patent software are pretty much the same as those not to patent hardware. The big difference is that software patents affect more software geeks (and the open source folks).
Design: Something unobtrusive. Eno, Lustmord, Global Communication.
Implementation: Something meatier to keep me moving. Autechre (really anything on the Warp label), Juno Reactor, Empirion.
Debugging: This varies the most of all. No music at all, sometimes. Sometimes kinda crazy stuff, maybe -ziq. Or Portishead?
Usually when it's extremely late (early?) I feel the need to switch over to either very loud thumpy stuff, or very ambient stuff (the Aphex Twin's SAW2, for instance). Both help me stay awake.
Slashdot Mirror
It is self modifying to an extent, but I am not aware of any sites that take in anything and then spawn off entirely new websites without human intervention,
It is a system in which human intervention plays a major role. The users / administrators of the internet are not outside of this i-cology (I like that better than e-cology, because you can tell them apart. If it bugs you, tough) they are it's nutrients, they provide the energy. They also make pretty good accuators.
Well, that part seems reasonable to me - it's the back, so don't fret it. It's really just the whole damned thing which seems fake to me, rather than specific details like this.
Most of todays crypto algorithms rely upon the fact that given f(x,y) it can be difficult to find x and y. Multiplication is O(N) wheren N is the number of bits you're working with. The computational complexity of factoring is not known, though it seems to be in a class of problems which we call NP - using nondeterministic methods they can solved in polynomial time (indeed, for factoring, linear), or in otherwords, if you could try all of the possible answers at once, in would only take you O(N) to tell which one is right.
Currently the best we can do is solve NP problems in exponential time - we just try all the answers serially (sure, we can exclude a lot of possibilities, but not enough to REALLY get things fast). It hasn't been proven that NP problems cannot be solved determinisitically in less than exponential time, but most people think it's probably true.
The whole reason to switch over to quantum computing is that it provides nondeterminism. That doesn't mean we can theoretically calculate anything we couldn't before (this is proven), just that some calculations may get easier. Such as NP problems, which by their very definitions are solvable in polynomial time, using nondeterminstic techniques.
Any encryption algorithm that relies on NP problems being extremely difficult to solve will be broken by quantum computing. I'm no crypto-whiz or nuthin' but it seems likely to me that all common crypto relies on this assumption.
There are computational problems that are harder than NP problems, but they're not all that common, and really hard, so they haven't gotten a whole lot of attention. I imagine that if quantum computing took off, these would see a lot more research.
lazy bastard.
How convenient for Intel, that they can hide the USB2 implementation cost in higher chipset prices (hint: more than the $0.25/device Apple et al are charging for 1394).
Am I mistaken in thinking that the $0.25/device is merely for the licensing? The cost of implementation is certainly more than that for both formats?
I mean, great: gigatexels per second. As much RAM as I currently have on my mainboard. Meaning what? I can now play Quake3 at 4,000*3,000 resolution? Yay. Yes, I know about anti-aliasing, but this is overkill for even that if not running very righ resolutions (1024*768 and above).
Actually, if you had been feverishly keeping up on hype for the last few months as I have, some of the features of this involve an accumulation buffer which will be used for doing motion-blur/depth of focus-blur. The way thse will be implemented is by doing multiple renders per frame, and this sure as hell uses a very high fill-rate.
Further more, the number of pixels rendered per frame will often be significantly higher than the number of pixels on the screen as some polys are obscured by others - even if you fully z-sort your polys you can't be guaranteed to be free of having to draw over an old poly (which is why we have and need z-buffers).
Symantec, Mijenix, NT Internals etc get by very well, doing some very cool stuff with windows.
This doesn't indicate that undocumented functions aren't necessary, just that documentation is not always necessary to use a call. A lot of these tools poke around at undocumented stuff. What's this mean? Well, it means that it's that much more difficult to implement a Win32-compatible API (as WINE tries to do) since you have to implement things which have no real documentation.
I don't attribute this to some diabolical plan on MS's OS division - it's more the fault of the application programmers (including, but in no way limited to MS's apps team).
EnumProcesses
Hmm. The Win32 SDK help files I am using do not have an entry for this function. Thanks.
Not really. Firewire doesn't need Intel; it has the entire consumer electronics industry behind it. Plus Compaq, NEC, and Apple.
Intel makes the most common PC chipsets - at least for intel based systems. It usually takes some time before Via et al catch up.
If USB is integrated on the motherboard, and firewire requires a $20+ card, USB has a large advantage.
so if you're a masochist, you'll be able to hook that USB 2 hard drive up to your current USB ports, and blaze along at a breathtaking 1.5 megabytes per second. I can see the advertising now; "Get the power of a hard drive with the speed of CD-ROM!"
CD-ROMs aren't that slow anymore. You're talking 10x. Real nice CD-ROMs (such as kenwood trueX) go 43-70x (5-10 megabytes/s)
I believe 3com's "Internet Gaming Modem" fits the bill.
Also, external modems are pretty decent, although the UART on your standard motherboard may not be able to make the most of a compressed 56K connection.
The PCI soundcards that you mentioned are OBJETIVELY no better to the Human Ear, since a good 16-bit soundcard can produce two sounds that are separated by so little that the ear treats them as the same (either in duration, tone, or volume).
1 channel of CD quality audio = 150 kBytes/s.
8 channel of CD quality audio = 150 kbits/s
Yeah, you could mix the audio in software. What if you now want to put different DSP effects on the channels? (3d sound?) You want to do that on the main processor too. Sound cards are progressing the same way video cards have. They're not as high-profile, because a lot of people don't care, however. A PCI sound card does make some sense.
Show me the typist that can type over 1000 cpm, so I guess that 9600 baud serial keyboard is gonna last a while. The reason we shouldn't scrap all legacy hardware is there is a good portion of it that exeeds it's design specifiations to this day.
Bandwidth are not the only reasons to use a USB or PCI device. They are also allow for more flexible/easy configuration. ISA sucks for plug-n-play - even ISAPNP isn't great. USB keyboards let you put a bunch of them on the same system (if you're so inclined), and are more orthogonal (if you're using USB for other stuff as well).
Relax, people will still make SOME motherboards with ISA slots as long as there are people like you to buy them. They will be (within a few years, I imagine) be more expensive (more logic, fewer produced), but you'll be able to get one if you refuse to use "bleeding-edge" technologies.
I was under the impression that MS's internal documentation is really no better than its external docs. It's easy to assume that MS is monolithic and that the Office programmers know everything that the GDI coders do, but of course this is far from the case. In a company the size of MS, you don't just walk up to whoever wrote the scheduler and ask her "Hey, is there a way to get a complete list of processes?" ("yeah, but it's not documented! use SuperSecretGetProcessList(HANDLE hSecretMagicMSHandle, DWORD *lpdwBuffer)muahahah!") or whatever.
Apps written by other companies also use undocumented API calls - since you can list the exports from any given DLL it's not too difficult to find them, and sometimes guess what they do. Andrew Tennenbaum has done just this to make his Undocumented Windows books, for instance.
The only real difference, however, is that if the Office development team uses an undocumented call, the OS development team will be unable to remove/change it as it breaks MS's other products. A lot of the time they end up documenting calls a few versions down the road, presumably because they're now in wide enough use that they can't change the implementation anyways.
It's basically equivalent to saying "I am a Danish" instead of "I am danish". Only 3 differences: 1) It was in german. 2) Different locale. 3) Different kind of pastry.
If you decide to start selling Monkey Butter, and nobody decides to compete with you, you have a monopoly on Monkey Butter. This is perfectly legal. If then someone else decides to start selling Monkey Butter, and you use your monopoly status to unfairly prevent them from competing with you, that IS illegal. I think it is also illegal if you used your monkey butter monopoly to unfairly foist your cow butter on people as well.
coding 4d is way easier than visualizing it.
The other issue is that people visualize 2d space very easily. The degree to which people can internally represent 3 dimensions depends on the individual, of course, but typically it's a lot lower. 4d's even worse. :)
Well, it's no longer unique. 19a0 = 199a = 2000.
A totally broken implementation of this would say 199a, a half broken implementation would say 19a0, (which is the internal representation) and a not at all broken implementation would also have the output code fixed to translate that to 2000.
You can set slashdot to deduct points for posts shorter than 80 bytes or whatever you choose. That will go a long way towards elimininating this crap. Or if you want to be more positive, add points for posts longer than foo bytes long.
This still hurts research a fair ammount - much research is motivated financially by the percieved payback of making a discovery which could be commerically successful. Now at best this dangling carrot is tempered by royalties and at worst by lawsuits.
some really bad bugs(by bad i mean something like the F00F bug)
The F00F bug only really was at all serious on a server which is running untrusted code. While this is certainly a bug, it's not one that will affect a large quantity of the people using this chip. Furthermore once someone smart enough thought about it, it became easy to fix/work-around in software. The Pentium's FDIV bug is probably a better example of a bad bug.
I'm sure if you asked Intel, they would tell you they'd be perfectly happy if AMD would stop making faster chips.
Or did you mean to write AMD?
The big difference is that software can be distributed for free.
Okay, so you have an ingeneous solution to problem X, but will take you and a team of PHDs several years to actually get the solution implemented good, and to be aware of all the issues, and prove that it's a good solution and what all. Total cost? lots.
If the solution's necessarily hardware, you say ScumCo shouldn't be allowed to just rip it off, and skip the R&D costs and therefore be able to undercut you and force you out of the market. All they would have would be the cost of implementing the already researched solution and manufacturing costs, which is why they'd be ABLE to undercut you even if you were running your plant pretty efficiently. That's generally why patents are considered appropriate for hardware.
But what if it's a software solution? You and these PHDs need to eat while doing research. But now for ScumCo to rip you off, they just need to implement the algorithm you spent $x to develop, and they don't even have to worry much about manufacturing costs. So they can undercut you even further. Is it okay if they charge $250 a seat instead of your $25000? What if Microsoft becomes alarmed that someone who's not Microsoft is making money and decides to ship a free version of your product? What can you do about it? Unless you can recoup the R&D costs in between your product release and their product release, you lose because you bothered to do something new.
The way it goes now, is if you develop something that you think it's new, and it's not, you get sued a bunch, and you lose. So, I certainly agree that the patent system needs reform. But that hardware and software are so fundamentally different that the idea of IP applies to one but not to the other is silly.
Couldnt some of those dyes (assuming you get more than 2^2=4 variations in hue for each one produce some sort of useful display??
If you can make them pretty small, 1 bit pixel depth if perfectly adequate, since you can dither. That's how colour inkjet printers work. 1200x1200 dpi is pretty !#%! high quality, and 1800x1800 is, in my experience, sufficient for the unaided eye to be fooled into thinking it's continuous tone, from up close. You could even argue that this kind of solution is BETTER than lower resolution true continuous tone, as you can represent MUCH finer details.
Where do you draw the line? Firmware? Microcode? Gate logic?
What's the difference? An invention's an invention. If you can emulate Roger's gate logic in software to perform the same operations and implement the same algorithm that he and RogCo spent $171m developing, is that different than if you just implement the hardware solution?
The reasons to and not to patent software are pretty much the same as those not to patent hardware. The big difference is that software patents affect more software geeks (and the open source folks).
Design:
Something unobtrusive. Eno, Lustmord, Global Communication.
Implementation:
Something meatier to keep me moving. Autechre (really anything on the Warp label), Juno Reactor, Empirion.
Debugging:
This varies the most of all. No music at all, sometimes. Sometimes kinda crazy stuff, maybe -ziq. Or Portishead?
Usually when it's extremely late (early?) I feel the need to switch over to either very loud thumpy stuff, or very ambient stuff (the Aphex Twin's SAW2, for instance). Both help me stay awake.