However, there are several times a week that I must
report on site (I work for a University).
Working from home means that you aren't on site
for customer support duties, which can be important
for small employers. From your point of view, your
desire to work for international companies (e.g. U.S.) may be unrealistic. The tech sector in the U.S. is having a very tough time of it for the last 3 years, and unless you have very special skills, there is plenty of local talent that you will have to compete against. Competing on a price basis is going to be tough because much off site development is being shipped to India in the U.S. due to a talent pool (IIT grads are strong and labor costs are lower).
I was browsing it and opened another/. window
and it wasn't there. Perhaps there is a glitch?`
I do like the idea of having an on-line editor to
actually read problems associated with new stories,
the link to the editor seems like a good idea
(after all/. doesn't want to be like the NY Times:-).
The technology smashes the crystal
on
Mastering Light
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The approach is destructive of the crystal used for filtering the light, although they hope to be able to use sound waves in the future. Due to the distorion of the crystal lattice structure required, even sound waves may wind up breaking the crystal (remember the old memorex commercials with the singer breaking a crystal wine glass). The approach is very interesting, but there still are some serious design issues that they need to address,
otherwise, it will be tough to deploy this for applications such as optical repeaters or switches.
Several things come to mind reading this.
For one thing, they appear to be using Microsoft Chat over the internet to communicate reconnaissance information. Whether such communication is secure is something I'd really like the govt. to think about, if not it could be putting soldiers at risk. One thing that is mission critical is tech support, and apparently they have a top tier (premier?) support from Microsoft. I wonder if anybody short of say IBM could offer a competing Open Source (*BSD or Linux) based solution?
As technology becomes more powerful, tracking of people and their actions is facilitated. Now, some technologies (e.g. the Telephone) have regulations that restrict use/disclosure of the information gathered (e.g. wire tapping requires a court issued warrant in the U.S.). Given that GPS informatoin and satellite information exists, what usages restrictions would be appropriate? Perhaps non disclosure except under court order?
Finding where your software spends most of its time can be hard. Having a tool measure resource/time consumption of the regiouns of source code is critical in finding bottlenecks and improving performance.
To which the DOJ could reply that after the copyright expires, whether the works are accessable is irrelavant to the law.
Interesting thought, but let me counter conjecture.
Suppose that work A is encrypted with method X,
and that work A's copyright expires. Your claim is that the DMCA no longer holds and that it should be safe to work on methods to circumvent A's copy protection.
However, let's now consider a realistic scenario that could occur. Suppose that before A returns to the public domain there is another copyrighted work B which is also encrypted using method X and B remains copyrighted. Does the DMCA allow you to break the method on A in that case?
It may not, because you are also breaking the method on B (because they are the same method). This would seem to violate
Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, where it states:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing
for limited times
to inventors and authors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries.
Furthermore, suppose that B is no secured with X,
in fact X becomes obsolete, but B remains copyright. Does the DMCA say it is still illegal to crack X? What happens if the media on which A is stored starts to fail? Can we ever extract A and revert it to the public domain? The judge may have
found a very compelling approach.
Perhaps that will make the DMCA unconstitutional?
The judges insight on this looks real promising to me.
All sources of news and culture have their biases. Unfortunately, consolidation means that diversity decreases over time. This is why we don't hear about major international events, and most of our news sources look the same. Thus, even if we have "freedom of the press", the de facto freedom is constrained by commercial interests. The recording industry is getting so cozy with the radio stations that there is little variation in content there as well.
I hope that we can fix this, however the economy of scale which drives this process may be very hard to overcome.
RNA worlds model a higher level of assmbly where
amino acids are constructed into RNA. RNA worlds are assumed to also be a necessary (but later) step in the Origin of life. One problem with the approaches used is that historically they used to
require lockstep state transitions, but recently Wright and Joyce developed a continuous approach, which allows transitions to occur at overlapping time.
The consistency semantics of NFS more closely match Unix System semantics, and NFS holds up well with less than say 100 nodes per server. At my grad school we used AFS, while our dept. internally used NFS. I think the fundamental questions you might want to ask are:
Do I need changes to open files to be visible to other users prior to closing them. If your not sharing a database or some other large file, AFS or its descendents are probably reasonable choice.
Di I need to handle frequent disconnetion and reconnection (then you probably need Coda or Intermezzo, although Coda is proabably more mature).
Is my real goal to learn distributed file systems administration or have something that works? NFS setup is quick. Put behind a firewall, much of the risk of packet sniffing is reduced. Some versions of NFS encrypt all traffic, and NIS+ offers some security improvements over vanilla NIS (although NIS is easier to administer).
Sure the users of a system can't have everything, but what the designers can do is provide an analysis of what the trade-offs are. A good designer reduces uncertainty and guides the user to alternatives that best meet (or come close to meeting) a user's needs prior to deploying the solution. Knowing is much better than guessing.
Informed design decisions in classical engineering use estimates of cost, correctness and performance to pick the best solution. In security, much of the selection seems to be "a matter of taste",
but perhaps it shouldn't be. Given two competing solutions to security problems, how do you propose that the user measure the solutions fitness to make an informed design decision?
I'm surprised they got a patent on this, the military has been studying this for years.
Edelman's recent work uses inverse functions to counter multipath interference in sonar with security applications. The only difference here is application as far as I can tell, the technique appears similar.
Many of the replies talk about error detection (parity) but don't really describe error correction.
Error correction involves:
Detecting an error
Locating exactly what data was corrupted
Inverting the error (correction)
For n bits of user data, an extra
log(n) (base 2) additional bits of metadata are needed (to encode the position of the corrupted bit) for each bit of error correction we want to support. This is how Hamming Codes work. Hamming codes designed to correct k errors (k n) they can detect k+1 errors so for 64 bit word memory with single error correct (double error detect) we need 8 extra bits, which about 12.5% extra memory, plus some logic in the packaging. A 10-15% price premium is about right.
In particular I was referring to the explicit typing requirement of generics for container classes. The article, which says:
If I had to pick one that might require some adjustment, it would be generics, because you'll have to get used to providing
additional information in declarations. Instead of merely saying:
List words = new ArrayList();
You'll have to say:
List words = new ArrayList();
If they allow default behavior of assuming that the ArrayList contains Object, (as suggested by YetAnotherName then type safety is lost (although I guess the compiler could at least issue warnings in that case). If they strictly enforce it, existing code is unlikely to compile.
As a matter of fact, this is EXACTLY the case I was worried about. Maybe I should have been clearer about it.
On a side note, I wrote most of a 10k line app in Java from the 1.1 days, and I need to keep the binaries around since there were some syntax changes (I think the event handling was one of the things that bit me, but I don't have time to research it properly now, so my memory could be faulty there). I recall feeling very disappointed with Sun at the time (although the code was not mission critical).
This looks to me like they are changing a language so that existing apps no longer compile which is a bad idea. While I like many features of Java, I try hard to avoid authoring code in a
language that has unstable syntax which
results in a flux in the semantics. While it is O.K. to extend the language, the grammar has changed and many existing apps are not likely to compile without
manual intervention (otherwise the compilers would be smart enough to figure it out). It is exactly this kind of "oh, we will revise the standard" years after the initial offering that hinders wide spread adoption, and opens the doors for the competitors (e.g..NET).
Maybe his software does it different than other tools, but his tools have the same interface across all target architectures and are always found in the same directories. He appears to do exactly what he preaches along those regards.
The real problem isn't that they won't update it, the problem is that they refused to issue a security patch for a "difficult problem to fix"
before the advertised ond of life date for the software. Maybe this particular problem is not "too" severe or using a different firewall is a "acceptable" workaround, but deciding not to fix an acknowledged problem before end of life should make any manager concerned.
I thought viaweb (now Yahoo!Store) was successful because it automated as a server the mechanism for store creation in e-commerce. The management of the server is challenging, and is a customer interface, but not really the product or service actually delivered for most small businesses. I'm not sure that operating PCs got that much easier as Bricklin stated (with the notable exception of the windowing GUI stuff that became popular instead of command line interfaces). Administration, backup, maintenance, and all the other headaches are still about the same level of difficulty, just now more people do it themselves out of necessity. Security in particular is harder than ever, and where there is money, security is needed. Thus, I'm not sure pushing server management down to the end user is going to be a win.
I think Unix/Linux integrators keep frittering away opportunities, since they don't want to really standardize on a directory layout/interface for common utilities. I think some of this happens due to laziness (two competing versions are implemented concurrently but the authors don't unify their interfaces), but as djb says there is a short term local reward for fragmenting the interface that the integrators choose in spite of the long term global penalty. This has held Unix/Linux back in my opinion, since code developers and administrators hate how these incompatibilities make it difficult to configure/install software properly.
Anything which encourages people to purchase music directly by cutting out the retail link can only help artists in the long run.
I agree. Should this become sufficiently popular, the old boy radio and retail distribution channels, it may be possible that "a label" or direct dealing focused on the download based distribution channels will develop. Then the RIAA might die (however other oligopolies may take their place). This appears to be an encouraging step in the right direction, but the chicken and egg problem "how does an artist get enough exposure?" coupled with "now the artist is famous, why can't they get a reasonable cut of the gross?" might both have suitable answers.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, now if only you had used Basque, or try an endangered language, then your clever ploy would have worked.
However, there are several times a week that I must report on site (I work for a University). Working from home means that you aren't on site for customer support duties, which can be important for small employers. From your point of view, your desire to work for international companies (e.g. U.S.) may be unrealistic. The tech sector in the U.S. is having a very tough time of it for the last 3 years, and unless you have very special skills, there is plenty of local talent that you will have to compete against. Competing on a price basis is going to be tough because much off site development is being shipped to India in the U.S. due to a talent pool (IIT grads are strong and labor costs are lower).
I was browsing it and opened another /. window
and it wasn't there. Perhaps there is a glitch?`
I do like the idea of having an on-line editor to
actually read problems associated with new stories,
the link to the editor seems like a good idea
(after all /. doesn't want to be like the NY Times :-).
The approach is destructive of the crystal used for filtering the light, although they hope to be able to use sound waves in the future. Due to the distorion of the crystal lattice structure required, even sound waves may wind up breaking the crystal (remember the old memorex commercials with the singer breaking a crystal wine glass). The approach is very interesting, but there still are some serious design issues that they need to address, otherwise, it will be tough to deploy this for applications such as optical repeaters or switches.
The Parent gives some nice technical details.
Several things come to mind reading this. For one thing, they appear to be using Microsoft Chat over the internet to communicate reconnaissance information. Whether such communication is secure is something I'd really like the govt. to think about, if not it could be putting soldiers at risk. One thing that is mission critical is tech support, and apparently they have a top tier (premier?) support from Microsoft. I wonder if anybody short of say IBM could offer a competing Open Source (*BSD or Linux) based solution?
As technology becomes more powerful, tracking of people and their actions is facilitated. Now, some technologies (e.g. the Telephone) have regulations that restrict use/disclosure of the information gathered (e.g. wire tapping requires a court issued warrant in the U.S.). Given that GPS informatoin and satellite information exists, what usages restrictions would be appropriate? Perhaps non disclosure except under court order?
Finding where your software spends most of its time can be hard. Having a tool measure resource/time consumption of the regiouns of source code is critical in finding bottlenecks and improving performance.
However, let's now consider a realistic scenario that could occur. Suppose that before A returns to the public domain there is another copyrighted work B which is also encrypted using method X and B remains copyrighted. Does the DMCA allow you to break the method on A in that case? It may not, because you are also breaking the method on B (because they are the same method). This would seem to violate Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, where it states:
Furthermore, suppose that B is no secured with X, in fact X becomes obsolete, but B remains copyright. Does the DMCA say it is still illegal to crack X? What happens if the media on which A is stored starts to fail? Can we ever extract A and revert it to the public domain? The judge may have found a very compelling approach. Perhaps that will make the DMCA unconstitutional?The judges insight on this looks real promising to me.
All sources of news and culture have their biases. Unfortunately, consolidation means that diversity decreases over time. This is why we don't hear about major international events, and most of our news sources look the same. Thus, even if we have "freedom of the press", the de facto freedom is constrained by commercial interests. The recording industry is getting so cozy with the radio stations that there is little variation in content there as well. I hope that we can fix this, however the economy of scale which drives this process may be very hard to overcome.
RNA worlds model a higher level of assmbly where amino acids are constructed into RNA. RNA worlds are assumed to also be a necessary (but later) step in the Origin of life. One problem with the approaches used is that historically they used to require lockstep state transitions, but recently Wright and Joyce developed a continuous approach, which allows transitions to occur at overlapping time.
Interestingly imdb claims he broke a rib. Still must hurt like hell though (never had the pleasure of brorken ribs).
Sure the users of a system can't have everything, but what the designers can do is provide an analysis of what the trade-offs are. A good designer reduces uncertainty and guides the user to alternatives that best meet (or come close to meeting) a user's needs prior to deploying the solution. Knowing is much better than guessing.
Informed design decisions in classical engineering use estimates of cost, correctness and performance to pick the best solution. In security, much of the selection seems to be "a matter of taste", but perhaps it shouldn't be. Given two competing solutions to security problems, how do you propose that the user measure the solutions fitness to make an informed design decision?
I'm surprised they got a patent on this, the military has been studying this for years. Edelman's recent work uses inverse functions to counter multipath interference in sonar with security applications. The only difference here is application as far as I can tell, the technique appears similar.
- Detecting an error
- Locating exactly what data was corrupted
- Inverting the error (correction)
For n bits of user data, an extra log(n) (base 2) additional bits of metadata are needed (to encode the position of the corrupted bit) for each bit of error correction we want to support. This is how Hamming Codes work. Hamming codes designed to correct k errors (k n) they can detect k+1 errors so for 64 bit word memory with single error correct (double error detect) we need 8 extra bits, which about 12.5% extra memory, plus some logic in the packaging. A 10-15% price premium is about right.On a side note, I wrote most of a 10k line app in Java from the 1.1 days, and I need to keep the binaries around since there were some syntax changes (I think the event handling was one of the things that bit me, but I don't have time to research it properly now, so my memory could be faulty there). I recall feeling very disappointed with Sun at the time (although the code was not mission critical).
This looks to me like they are changing a language so that existing apps no longer compile which is a bad idea. While I like many features of Java, I try hard to avoid authoring code in a language that has unstable syntax which results in a flux in the semantics. While it is O.K. to extend the language, the grammar has changed and many existing apps are not likely to compile without manual intervention (otherwise the compilers would be smart enough to figure it out). It is exactly this kind of "oh, we will revise the standard" years after the initial offering that hinders wide spread adoption, and opens the doors for the competitors (e.g. .NET).
Maybe his software does it different than other tools, but his tools have the same interface across all target architectures and are always found in the same directories. He appears to do exactly what he preaches along those regards.
The real problem isn't that they won't update it, the problem is that they refused to issue a security patch for a "difficult problem to fix" before the advertised ond of life date for the software. Maybe this particular problem is not "too" severe or using a different firewall is a "acceptable" workaround, but deciding not to fix an acknowledged problem before end of life should make any manager concerned.
I thought viaweb (now Yahoo!Store) was successful because it automated as a server the mechanism for store creation in e-commerce. The management of the server is challenging, and is a customer interface, but not really the product or service actually delivered for most small businesses. I'm not sure that operating PCs got that much easier as Bricklin stated (with the notable exception of the windowing GUI stuff that became popular instead of command line interfaces). Administration, backup, maintenance, and all the other headaches are still about the same level of difficulty, just now more people do it themselves out of necessity. Security in particular is harder than ever, and where there is money, security is needed. Thus, I'm not sure pushing server management down to the end user is going to be a win.
I think Unix/Linux integrators keep frittering away opportunities, since they don't want to really standardize on a directory layout/interface for common utilities. I think some of this happens due to laziness (two competing versions are implemented concurrently but the authors don't unify their interfaces), but as djb says there is a short term local reward for fragmenting the interface that the integrators choose in spite of the long term global penalty. This has held Unix/Linux back in my opinion, since code developers and administrators hate how these incompatibilities make it difficult to configure/install software properly.