It's been in the works for a couple of years, but we recently decided to rewrite it (previously neither the code nor the interface were very usable by people other than us) and open up the source under the GPL or something similar. (This should be at a releasable state before the year is out)
Although it's not really necessary, it would be EXTREMELY nice to have the domain jao.org as the homepage for the project.
Since it's a 3 letter domain, of course someone's squatting on it. Even if I had an extra $5k (what they're asking) that I couldn't think of anything better to do with, I wouldn't want to give it to a domain squatter, on principle.
My impression of the current situation is that I have two choices - pay up, or get a different address. Are there any other options? Will registering this name as a trademark make any difference, given that there are no hosts in the jao.org domain?
b) Toss DNS out altogether. OK, this won't happen, but as the transfer of addresses in meatspace becomes more rare, I think it makes sense. If you want to find a large webpage, services like Google work fine, and for everything else there is the good old link. The ultimate decentralized namespace has already been invented: its name is Hypertext.
It's nice to have all the links to my site remain functional even though I just changed ISPs. DNS propogates pretty slowly, but it's a racecar compared to search engines, and people updating their pages.
Since IP addresses are set up in a way to facilitate routing, they can't remain constant for a given computer that may move around, change ISPs or subnets. Thus it is NECESSARY that another layer of abstraction be added over that. It could be another set of arbitrary numbers, but that would raise similar conflicts (people hack other's ICQ passwords to control "good" numbered UINs), and would just be more difficult to remember.
Interestingly enough, what you propose is basically where we are at with the telephone system. Telephone addresses are long strings of numbers, which contain some ammount of routing information (eg, area code). If you move you may have to change phone numbers. You can look it up in a search engine (the phone book or call directory assistance) but if the change is recent enough the database will not be current, and you lose, unless the old address still points to new information ("bo boo bee, the number you have dialed has changed to 209.207.224.40"). Sure the phone system doesn't have hypertext, but neither do a lot of other applications of TCP/IP.
So they're saying "The DOJ does a necessary job badly - we must reduce the amount of money they receive, so they will do a better job." Is that correct?
I don't believe they see the DOJ's job as necessary. Try this on "The DOJ does a unnecessary job badly - we must reduce the ammount of money they receive, so they do less unnecessary things badly."
While that is a sound argument, there are more appropriate less contemptious ways of addressing their issues. However, the system maintains the system, so its understandable that they wish to work around the system, rather than within it.
Personally, I'd prefer a third party reverse engineering of MiniDisc
You mean sony's optical audio medium? I think it's not worth the bother. 74 minutes at 5:1 compression means it doesn't hold a lot more than a zip disk. (~160 MB?) They do, however, have a kind of anime-cyber-cool to them which zip disks lack. I'm not sure how fast they CAN be, since for standard audio applications they only NEED to deliver 30 KB/s.
All that aside, a MD based portable MP3 player would be nice.
And Beta was better, anyway...it's still the standard for broadcasting. Sony just didn't have the media clout back then to get high volumes of popular movies in that format...
Betacam != betamax
Re:Geem, where have I seen this before...
on
Time Doesn't Exist
·
· Score: 1
Time is just another spacial dimension.. We already know (if we believe Einstein) that space can get warped pretty good by this kind of stuff (and gravity as well).
On the overall topic of a metalanguage: I'm familiar with Chomsky's theory of a universal grammar and if we could reconstruct that grammar, a metalanguage would be possible to create and implement. However, without a good understanding of the universal grammar, it would seem to be nearly impossible. We're too set in our individual grammatical tracks to fully understand those of other languages. That's one reason why teaching small children multiple languages is so successful: their internal grammar is not yet completely rigid.
Incidently all the Lojban (and loglan) affectionados cite this as reason why people whose native language is a more expressive less biased one (such as Lojban) would have freeer and more powerful minds. (I'm simplifying this a bit). I don't recall the name of this hypothesis, but it's attributed to someone or other.
For those who don't know, Loglan is a conversational language, the grammar for which is based upon predicate calculus. It's nothing like any spoken language, and has some fairly rigid rules for everything from generating/importing new words to constructing unambiguous sentences. Lojban is an updated version of loglan. I've looked at the primary Lojban book, and it seems pretty awkward, though that could just be that I'm not used to it.
This allows the semantic extraction to be MUCH more computationally intensive than systems like babelfish can afford. When you make a document, it's okay to spend an extra 15 seconds to extract a pretty good representation of the gist of it, so long as it doesn't need to happen every time the page is viewed. (babelfish doesn't even cache translations, does it?)
Okay, so some of the idioms and convoluted sentences will be improperly converted, and will need some manual tweaking. Hopefully this system will allow this tweaking to take place. By providing multiple different conversions back into the author's native tongue, they may be able to see some of the translational oversights, and fix them.
This won't be good for poetry, but will allow people who only know one language (English speakers seem more likely to fit this category than other people) to publish documents readable by people who do not speak English - that's a substantial breakthrough.
It would be nice if this standard would allow segments to be set to fixed translations, so that if I really wanted the English to read a particular way, I could enforce that particular idiom, without loss of generality. ("Normally translate 'it has a low probability' but if you ARE translating to english, substitute the literal string 'fat chance'")
Is this what happens inside the head of a bi-lingual person?
Uh, no. Typically, I believe bi-lingual people internally switch back and forth, or represent some concepts in one language and others in the other. That is to say, when they actually are using internal linguistic representations of things at all.
Why implement a technology when you know you don't understand its ramifications?
While you have a point that very serious considerations should be made, it's rediculous to refrain from doing anything until you understand the consequences - the best we can do is guess.
Our society is at best deterministic chaos - meaning even small changes (seemingly insignificant inventions?) may (or may not) have very substantial and DIFFICULT TO PREDICT results.
Now, I don't mean to suggest that we should just implement everything we can think of - just that understanding of ramifications can only go so far, and that's not very far.
Firewire is currently the accepted standard in the Digital Video, a niche no doubt, but still gives it a strong toehold. I don't know whether it will 'take off big', but it is currently being used for things that it's good for.
Firewire is currently the accepted standard in the Digital Video, a niche no doubt, but still gives it a strong toehold. I don't know whether it will 'take off big', but it is currently being used for things that it's good for.
I think it's appropriate to suggest the extent to which one might have to go to really maintain a fairly secure system.
I also think it's appropriate for them to re-run the test on fairer ground, in light of claims that installing these 21 security patches is not a whole lot different from installing NT service pack 5.
Not to suggest that this test is all that useful as any sort of security benchmark. High-profile anecdotal evidence is still anecdotal evidence - if a famous person's Audi blows up that doesn't mean it's more prone to explosion than Joe Blow's Pinto.
They claim early on in the article that security is tough stuff, absolutely true. Then they claim that it's only going to get tougher. Absolutely wrong.
It certainly does get tougher as your demands increase. The intricate the network services you're providing the harder it is to keep them secure.
Assuming that the site you are maintaining remains free of growth, things will become more solid. However no corproation wishes to even consider this possibility, and reasonably so.
I was under the impression that the hotmail security hole was actually explicitly added to allow Microsoft's Messenger to check your hotmail box without having to prompt for another password.
Why not just slap another processor on the motherboard and call it a "GPU" instead?
Well, you have to squeeze a lot of geometry through the AGP bus. If you can store some of the scene there, you can just have the card happily rendering away while the CPU(s) and bus are free to do other important things.
Furthermore, this is a more complicated chip than the P3 (at least in terms of number of transistors), dedicated to the particular maths which make 3d rendering hard. It doesn't matter how fast this runs Office or Photoshop - so they optimize accordingly. Often you can exchange generality for speed.
Ok, so now here's my question: Why limit yourself to what a Game Boy can do???
Well, as a proof of concept, it is definately worth showing that this can be done on even a relatively slow processor.
I would argue that instead of demonstrating how efficient this is by how fast it can display simple scenes, it would be more convincing to show a scene that's more elaborate than current algorithms support on modern hardware.
However, bear in mind that it's not exactly fair to compare Algorithm X on normal hardware to Polygons, since most people these days have EXTREMELY accelerated hardware for drawing polygons.
However, for something as simple as the demo on this page, there's no reason to think he didn't cheat a whole lot, and just use a simplified voxel approach (we can't even change the camera's pitch or roll!)
Interesting points, but I'm not sure about the TTL one..
i mean what IDIOT makes a protocol with 128 bit address scheme and keeps TTL field of 8 bit (which makes maximal TTL be 256).
Assume that each physical network has 8 links to it. Every time the size of the network increases eightfold, the maximum TTL needed to use all of that network goes up by one. Addresses run out MUCH faster than TTL's, as the network grows. Sure, there is going to be a lot of variation in size of subnets, but on the whole the net is much more broadly connected than it is deeply connected.
Both TTL and address bits required grow logarithmically with the number of nodes, but TTL has a much higher base to that log.
I'm unsure as to how name resolution would work then. Since now your IP address changes when your NIC catches fire and needs to be replaced.. That sounds inconvenient at best, unless this can be easily circumvented. (ie, they recommend that your IP address contain you MAC address, but it doesn't have to.)
Say you're running a big server, I dunno, eBay. You have a hardware failure, but you have a back-up system sitting there waiting, to minimize downtime in just such an event. Now when you swap it in you either have to lie about your MAC address (which is good) or update your name tables and wait for that to propogate, which is bad.
Which do we value more? Humans or potential humans? This is a major component of why both this and abortion are contravertial.
Society has invested a lot of resources into making a typical 20 year old. At this point in their life, they have passed through primary and possibly secondary school systems, costing taxpayers money, and using up time of people qualified and willing to educate them.
The theory behind the continuation of society is that society invests the time and energy into helping an individual develop, after which this person repays this debt through productivity and taxes. At this point in history, this exchange is creating a net surplus of resources - people get to retire when they get old, standards of living go up, etc. Resources ARE distributed unevenly, but that's a different issue.
Having kids is gambling. You invest time, love, and money, and maybe they fall ill and die, and maybe they win a noble prize, and maybe they become a mass-murderer. You can influence the odds, but you can't control the outcome.
The question our Ivy league friend raises is how this equation changes as the weights shift - what if there's only a 1% chance this child will reach maturity? What if there's a 1% chance that this child will ever be able to communicate with others in any way? What if there's only a 30% chance that this child will ever be a 'normal' member of society?
This child quite likely WILL take up more of the caregivers' resources. Is the child worth it if [s]he is unlikely to ever be develop a mental or emotional capacity beyond that of a goldfish? a poodle? an 8-year old?
At what point does the potential for a human to survive/succeed become small enough that the burden to actualized humans outweighs it?
-- end of post (I hope you weren't expecting me to try and answer any of these questions) --
Of course, the big question is why a printer driver must needs be a trade secret.
I discussed this a little earlier, but thought of a good way to say what I mean, so this gives me the chance to have another go at it.
There are two factors that must be done to get high quality printing. There's the hardware end, which means that if you decide you want a pixel to cover v much area at position x, y, the hardware will actually be able to put the right ammount of ink there and let it dry properly.
The other factor which is as important is deciding where you WANT to put the ink to make a picture look good.
The way the printer market is currently, I would estimate that between half and a third of the R&D resources go into the second element, which is obviously going to be solved in software/firmware (resources, in terms of man-hours, not true for materials, obviously). I don't know if this is true everywhere - this is true for one high-end wide-format printer company I worked for, whose name I feel I shouldn't reveal (though I can't really think of a good reason why not).
See, here's the issue. You have a 150x150 dpi 24bpp image you want to print out on a printer that can handle 1440x720 dpi, 2bpp. Or maybe you can vary the sizes of the dots or use different densities of ink and get 8 bpp or whatever. But either way, you have to perform some deep magic to make what comes out of the paper look like what's on your screen, especially since the way the ink behaves depends on the kind of paper you're printing on. Higher end printers use CCD cameras to calibrate themselves, which also, let-me-tell-you involves some pretty clever hard things.
Consider an alternate model of the printer industry - that the printer companies are selling software bundled with a parallel port dongle which enables it to work. The reality lies at a point inbetween this and "they sell hardware".
If you're business is making and selling software, why should your code be a trade secret? Because your business model relies upon it. I am not aware of business models for pure software development which don't involved closed development somewhere or other. As far as I know most OSS business models treat development as sort of incedental. You make money selling support or something.
It *might* be possible to shift the emphasis to post-sale consumables - special paper and inks, but is this really necessary? Is there no place in this world for commercial software development except for supporting other commercial ventures?
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a project I'm working on called Jao.
It's been in the works for a couple of years, but we recently decided to rewrite it (previously neither the code nor the interface were very usable by people other than us) and open up the source under the GPL or something similar. (This should be at a releasable state before the year is out)
Although it's not really necessary, it would be EXTREMELY nice to have the domain jao.org as the homepage for the project.
Since it's a 3 letter domain, of course someone's squatting on it. Even if I had an extra $5k (what they're asking) that I couldn't think of anything better to do with, I wouldn't want to give it to a domain squatter, on principle.
My impression of the current situation is that I have two choices - pay up, or get a different address. Are there any other options? Will registering this name as a trademark make any difference, given that there are no hosts in the jao.org domain?
b) Toss DNS out altogether. OK, this won't happen, but as the transfer of addresses in meatspace becomes more rare, I think it makes sense. If you want to find a large webpage, services like Google work fine, and for everything else there is the good old link. The ultimate decentralized namespace has already been invented: its name is Hypertext.
It's nice to have all the links to my site remain functional even though I just changed ISPs. DNS propogates pretty slowly, but it's a racecar compared to search engines, and people updating their pages.
Since IP addresses are set up in a way to facilitate routing, they can't remain constant for a given computer that may move around, change ISPs or subnets. Thus it is NECESSARY that another layer of abstraction be added over that. It could be another set of arbitrary numbers, but that would raise similar conflicts (people hack other's ICQ passwords to control "good" numbered UINs), and would just be more difficult to remember.
Interestingly enough, what you propose is basically where we are at with the telephone system. Telephone addresses are long strings of numbers, which contain some ammount of routing information (eg, area code). If you move you may have to change phone numbers. You can look it up in a search engine (the phone book or call directory assistance) but if the change is recent enough the database will not be current, and you lose, unless the old address still points to new information ("bo boo bee, the number you have dialed has changed to 209.207.224.40"). Sure the phone system doesn't have hypertext, but neither do a lot of other applications of TCP/IP.
So they're saying "The DOJ does a necessary job badly - we must reduce the amount of money they receive, so they will do a better job." Is that correct?
I don't believe they see the DOJ's job as necessary. Try this on "The DOJ does a unnecessary job badly - we must reduce the ammount of money they receive, so they do less unnecessary things badly."
While that is a sound argument, there are more appropriate less contemptious ways of addressing their issues. However, the system maintains the system, so its understandable that they wish to work around the system, rather than within it.
And don't think formatting comes for free either!
Personally, I'd prefer a third party reverse engineering of MiniDisc
You mean sony's optical audio medium? I think it's not worth the bother. 74 minutes at 5:1 compression means it doesn't hold a lot more than a zip disk. (~160 MB?) They do, however, have a kind of anime-cyber-cool to them which zip disks lack. I'm not sure how fast they CAN be, since for standard audio applications they only NEED to deliver 30 KB/s.
All that aside, a MD based portable MP3 player would be nice.
And Beta was better, anyway...it's still the standard for broadcasting. Sony just didn't have the media clout back then to get high volumes of popular movies in that format...
Betacam != betamax
Time is just another spacial dimension.. We already know (if we believe Einstein) that space can get warped pretty good by this kind of stuff (and gravity as well).
On the overall topic of a metalanguage: I'm familiar with Chomsky's theory of a universal grammar and if we could reconstruct that grammar, a metalanguage would be possible to create and implement. However, without a good understanding of the universal grammar, it would seem to be nearly impossible. We're too set in our individual grammatical tracks to fully understand those of other languages. That's one reason why teaching small children multiple languages is so successful: their internal grammar is not yet completely rigid.
Incidently all the Lojban (and loglan) affectionados cite this as reason why people whose native language is a more expressive less biased one (such as Lojban) would have freeer and more powerful minds. (I'm simplifying this a bit). I don't recall the name of this hypothesis, but it's attributed to someone or other.
For those who don't know, Loglan is a conversational language, the grammar for which is based upon predicate calculus. It's nothing like any spoken language, and has some fairly rigid rules for everything from generating/importing new words to constructing unambiguous sentences. Lojban is an updated version of loglan. I've looked at the primary Lojban book, and it seems pretty awkward, though that could just be that I'm not used to it.
This allows the semantic extraction to be MUCH more computationally intensive than systems like babelfish can afford. When you make a document, it's okay to spend an extra 15 seconds to extract a pretty good representation of the gist of it, so long as it doesn't need to happen every time the page is viewed. (babelfish doesn't even cache translations, does it?)
Okay, so some of the idioms and convoluted sentences will be improperly converted, and will need some manual tweaking. Hopefully this system will allow this tweaking to take place. By providing multiple different conversions back into the author's native tongue, they may be able to see some of the translational oversights, and fix them.
This won't be good for poetry, but will allow people who only know one language (English speakers seem more likely to fit this category than other people) to publish documents readable by people who do not speak English - that's a substantial breakthrough.
It would be nice if this standard would allow segments to be set to fixed translations, so that if I really wanted the English to read a particular way, I could enforce that particular idiom, without loss of generality. ("Normally translate 'it has a low probability' but if you ARE translating to english, substitute the literal string 'fat chance'")
Is this what happens inside the head of a bi-lingual person?
Uh, no. Typically, I believe bi-lingual people internally switch back and forth, or represent some concepts in one language and others in the other. That is to say, when they actually are using internal linguistic representations of things at all.
Why implement a technology when you know you don't understand its ramifications?
While you have a point that very serious considerations should be made, it's rediculous to refrain from doing anything until you understand the consequences - the best we can do is guess.
Our society is at best deterministic chaos - meaning even small changes (seemingly insignificant inventions?) may (or may not) have very substantial and DIFFICULT TO PREDICT results.
Now, I don't mean to suggest that we should just implement everything we can think of - just that understanding of ramifications can only go so far, and that's not very far.
Firewire is currently the accepted standard in the Digital Video, a niche no doubt, but still gives it a strong toehold. I don't know whether it will 'take off big', but it is currently being used for things that it's good for.
Firewire is currently the accepted standard in the Digital Video, a niche no doubt, but still gives it a strong toehold. I don't know whether it will 'take off big', but it is currently being used for things that it's good for.
I think it's appropriate to suggest the extent to which one might have to go to really maintain a fairly secure system.
I also think it's appropriate for them to re-run the test on fairer ground, in light of claims that installing these 21 security patches is not a whole lot different from installing NT service pack 5.
Not to suggest that this test is all that useful as any sort of security benchmark. High-profile anecdotal evidence is still anecdotal evidence - if a famous person's Audi blows up that doesn't mean it's more prone to explosion than Joe Blow's Pinto.
They claim early on in the article that security is tough stuff, absolutely true. Then they claim that it's only going to get tougher. Absolutely wrong.
It certainly does get tougher as your demands increase. The intricate the network services you're providing the harder it is to keep them secure.
Assuming that the site you are maintaining remains free of growth, things will become more solid. However no corproation wishes to even consider this possibility, and reasonably so.
I was under the impression that the hotmail security hole was actually explicitly added to allow Microsoft's Messenger to check your hotmail box without having to prompt for another password.
Why not just slap another processor on the motherboard and call it a "GPU" instead?
Well, you have to squeeze a lot of geometry through the AGP bus. If you can store some of the scene there, you can just have the card happily rendering away while the CPU(s) and bus are free to do other important things.
Furthermore, this is a more complicated chip than the P3 (at least in terms of number of transistors), dedicated to the particular maths which make 3d rendering hard. It doesn't matter how fast this runs Office or Photoshop - so they optimize accordingly. Often you can exchange generality for speed.
Well, it's uglier. for one thing.
Sorry to nitpick, but wouldn't you want OR operations? A point is part of the landscape if it is part of the ground OR part of the mountain?
Ok, so now here's my question: Why limit yourself to what a Game Boy can do???
Well, as a proof of concept, it is definately worth showing that this can be done on even a relatively slow processor.
I would argue that instead of demonstrating how efficient this is by how fast it can display simple scenes, it would be more convincing to show a scene that's more elaborate than current algorithms support on modern hardware.
However, bear in mind that it's not exactly fair to compare Algorithm X on normal hardware to Polygons, since most people these days have EXTREMELY accelerated hardware for drawing polygons.
However, for something as simple as the demo on this page, there's no reason to think he didn't cheat a whole lot, and just use a simplified voxel approach (we can't even change the camera's pitch or roll!)
Interesting points, but I'm not sure about the TTL one..
i mean what IDIOT makes a protocol with 128 bit address scheme and keeps TTL field of 8 bit (which makes maximal TTL be 256).
Assume that each physical network has 8 links to it. Every time the size of the network increases eightfold, the maximum TTL needed to use all of that network goes up by one. Addresses run out MUCH faster than TTL's, as the network grows. Sure, there is going to be a lot of variation in size of subnets, but on the whole the net is much more broadly connected than it is deeply connected.
Both TTL and address bits required grow logarithmically with the number of nodes, but TTL has a much higher base to that log.
I'm unsure as to how name resolution would work then. Since now your IP address changes when your NIC catches fire and needs to be replaced.. That sounds inconvenient at best, unless this can be easily circumvented. (ie, they recommend that your IP address contain you MAC address, but it doesn't have to.)
Say you're running a big server, I dunno, eBay. You have a hardware failure, but you have a back-up system sitting there waiting, to minimize downtime in just such an event. Now when you swap it in you either have to lie about your MAC address (which is good) or update your name tables and wait for that to propogate, which is bad.
Which do we value more? Humans or potential humans? This is a major component of why both this and abortion are contravertial.
Society has invested a lot of resources into making a typical 20 year old. At this point in their life, they have passed through primary and possibly secondary school systems, costing taxpayers money, and using up time of people qualified and willing to educate them.
The theory behind the continuation of society is that society invests the time and energy into helping an individual develop, after which this person repays this debt through productivity and taxes. At this point in history, this exchange is creating a net surplus of resources - people get to retire when they get old, standards of living go up, etc. Resources ARE distributed unevenly, but that's a different issue.
Having kids is gambling. You invest time, love, and money, and maybe they fall ill and die, and maybe they win a noble prize, and maybe they become a mass-murderer. You can influence the odds, but you can't control the outcome.
The question our Ivy league friend raises is how this equation changes as the weights shift - what if there's only a 1% chance this child will reach maturity? What if there's a 1% chance that this child will ever be able to communicate with others in any way? What if there's only a 30% chance that this child will ever be a 'normal' member of society?
This child quite likely WILL take up more of the caregivers' resources. Is the child worth it if [s]he is unlikely to ever be develop a mental or emotional capacity beyond that of a goldfish? a poodle? an 8-year old?
At what point does the potential for a human to survive/succeed become small enough that the burden to actualized humans outweighs it?
-- end of post (I hope you weren't expecting me to try and answer any of these questions) --
Do you need to RDNS to foo.prn as well?
Of course, the big question is why a printer driver must needs be a trade secret.
I discussed this a little earlier, but thought of a good way to say what I mean, so this gives me the chance to have another go at it.
There are two factors that must be done to get high quality printing. There's the hardware end, which means that if you decide you want a pixel to cover v much area at position x, y, the hardware will actually be able to put the right ammount of ink there and let it dry properly.
The other factor which is as important is deciding where you WANT to put the ink to make a picture look good.
The way the printer market is currently, I would estimate that between half and a third of the R&D resources go into the second element, which is obviously going to be solved in software/firmware (resources, in terms of man-hours, not true for materials, obviously). I don't know if this is true everywhere - this is true for one high-end wide-format printer company I worked for, whose name I feel I shouldn't reveal (though I can't really think of a good reason why not).
See, here's the issue. You have a 150x150 dpi 24bpp image you want to print out on a printer that can handle 1440x720 dpi, 2bpp. Or maybe you can vary the sizes of the dots or use different densities of ink and get 8 bpp or whatever. But either way, you have to perform some deep magic to make what comes out of the paper look like what's on your screen, especially since the way the ink behaves depends on the kind of paper you're printing on. Higher end printers use CCD cameras to calibrate themselves, which also, let-me-tell-you involves some pretty clever hard things.
Consider an alternate model of the printer industry - that the printer companies are selling software bundled with a parallel port dongle which enables it to work. The reality lies at a point inbetween this and "they sell hardware".
If you're business is making and selling software, why should your code be a trade secret? Because your business model relies upon it. I am not aware of business models for pure software development which don't involved closed development somewhere or other. As far as I know most OSS business models treat development as sort of incedental. You make money selling support or something.
It *might* be possible to shift the emphasis to post-sale consumables - special paper and inks, but is this really necessary? Is there no place in this world for commercial software development except for supporting other commercial ventures?