Analyze this! A Conversation with James Gosling, Part I by Bill Venners Jun 9, 2003
Summary James Gosling talks with Bill Venners about his current research project, code-named Jackpot, which builds annotated parse trees for programs and can help you analyze, visualize, and refactor your program. For the past several years, Java's creator James Gosling has been working at Sun Labs, researching ways to analyze and manipulate programs represented as annotated parse trees, a project called Jackpot. Compilers have long built parse trees when they translate source code into binary. But traditionally, programmers have worked with source code primarily by manipulating text with editors. The goal of the Jackpot project is to investigate the value of treating the parse tree as the program at development time, not just at compile time.
In this interview, which will be published in multiple installments, James Gosling talks about many aspects of programming. In this first installment, Gosling describes the ways in which Jackpot can help programmers analyze, visualize, and refactor their programs.
Treating Programs as Algebraic Structures Bill Venners: What's the state of Jackpot, your current research project?
James Gosling: Jackpot has been really cool lately. It's what I'm spending most of my time on, and it's been a lot of fun. I was really hoping to have something I could hand out at JavaOne this year, but I've been finding too many entertaining things to do.
It's a very different world when a program is an algebraic structure rather than a bag of characters, when you can actually do algebra on programs rather than just swizzling characters around. A lot of things become possible.
Bill Venners: Like what?
James Gosling: If you look at any of the refactoring books, most of those refactoring actions become much more straightforward, in ways that are fairly deep.
Moving a method isn't just cutting and pasting text. It's a lot more than renaming the parameters and swizzling them around, because you really want to be able to do things like construct forwarding methods. When you construct forwarding methods, they're different from the original methods.
You can't just replace all uses of the forwarding method by uses of the moved method, because they actually behave slightly differently. The difference is usually around what happens when the pivot parameter is null. That can lead you into a deep morass of essentially theorem proving about properties of the code fragments that you're moving, to understand how they behave with respect to null. And you can treat all kinds of code manipulation that way.
So Jackpot has a baby theorem prover, or algebraic simplifier, that knows an awful lot about data flow and the implications of values. And it really does treat your program as a piece of algebra to be simplified and transformed. It can do an awful lot of interesting analysis that pays off when you want to make fairly significant pervasive changes to very large programs. That analysis pays off, for example, when you want to replace one API with another API that is almost the same. Often "almost the same" is actually harder than "radically different." I spent most of the last four months working on this baby theorem prover, and that's been a lot of fun.
Creating Visual Representations of Programs Bill Venners: I read that Jackpot can create interesting graphical representations of a program. What is that about?
James Gosling: Jackpot can take this underlying algebraic structureâ" it's really the annotated parse treeâ"and generate a visual representation from that. Our internal notion of the truth is not text. But once it's not text, all of a sudden you can display it in really interesting ways.
We've got an underlying rule engine that's able to do structural pattern matching very efficiently. We can go from the structural patterns it sees in your code to visual representations. So you can write what is kind o
IEEE approves wireless network specs By Patrick Mannion
EE Times June 12, 2003 (11:59 a.m. EST)
MANHASSET, N.Y. â" The IEEE on Thursday (June 12) gave its stamp of approval to two new wireless local- and personal-area networking standards and two corresponding recommended practices. The move is expected to open the floodgates to product introductions and upgrades while ensuring interoperability between those products.
The most anticipated of the four are the IEEE 802.11g and 802.15.3 standards for WLAN and WPAN connectivity, respectively.
The newly approved 802.11g standard specifies data rates of up to 54 Mbits/s in the 2.45-GHz band. While 802.11g uses orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), mandatory provisions have been made within the standard to make it inherently compatible with the well-established 802.11b standard at 11 Mbits/s, which uses complementary code keying (CCK) modulation. Both.11g and.11b operate at ranges of up to 300 feet.
The 802.15.3 standard for High Rate WPANs also operates in the 2.45-GHz band and at similar rates, from 11 to 55 Mbit/s, but is designed for shorter-range (1 to 50 meters), very-low-power operation. It also uses time division, multiple access (TDMA) protocol.
The use of TDMA makes the.15.3 spec suitable for its target application: small consumer devices, many of which will be operating in the same environment in close proximity. It features quality of service, connection management, advanced power management modesâ"allowing long and QoS synchronized sleep modes, ad hoc and peer-to-peer topology support, mesh support and enhanced security.
While 802.11g products based on the draft standard are already available, products based on the new 802.15.3 standard are not expected to appear until 2004.
The two recommended practices approved today are for 802.15.2 and 802.11f. The first, 802.15.2, addresses the coexistence issue between WLANs and WPANs operating in the 2.45-GHz bands, such as Bluetooth, 802.15.3 WPANs and 802.11b and g WLANs.
The second, the 802.11f Inter Access Point Protocol, ensures interoperability between access points from multiple vendors, which primarily enables client roaming.
You know, just enter scoove in google and out come your details, you got a profile at yahoo. Your from Omaha, Nevada. email- w0jrs+arrl@net. Other email- scoove@area51+research+nv+us.
Industry Offers a Carrot in Online Music Fight By AMY HARMON
Like a lot of music fans roaming the Internet these days, David Bishop registers one basic sentiment when he thinks about the record industry. "They're a bunch of greedheads," he says. "They've been really fat on what I think of as huge profits and now they're trying to maintain the status quo."
Mr. Bishop is not your typical college-dormitory Internet pirate. A 49-year-old illustrator in San Rafael, Calif., he has steered scrupulously clear of file-sharing software like Napster and KaZaA. But he recently discovered how to play the music provided by other online fans without copying it, and has no compunction about flouting recent efforts to stamp out the practice.
"I'm not doing anything wrong," he insists.
Until recently, music executives have largely failed to acknowledge the millions of individuals, from teenage Eminem fans to Elvis-obsessed baby boomers, who have joined in what amounts to an online rebellion against the industry by some of its most important customers. Hoping to end Internet music piracy by ridding the world of the technologies that make it possible, they have so far focused on legal battles against KaZaA and its many brethren.
But for the first time in the Internet file-sharing wars, record industry executives have in recent weeks started to address music fans directly, both offering carrots and wielding sticks to persuade people to buy their product again. How well they succeed is likely to determine the way music is produced and consumed for years to come.
"The technology has destabilized us, it has hurt us," said Doug Morris, the chief executive of the Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi Universal and the largest of the five major record companies. "But now it's going to take us to new heights."
The industry is pursuing lawsuits against music pirates but is also offering new ways to legally listen to and buy music online through deals like a recent alliance with Apple Computer.
That prospect may be difficult to achieve. Forty-three million Americans â" half of those who connected to the Internet â" used file-sharing software last month that allows people to copy music without paying for it, according to a survey by the NPD Group, a market research firm. The file-sharing program KaZaA, which rose in popularity after the record industry won its lawsuit against Napster, has been downloaded more than 270 million times, more than any other free program available on CNet's Download.com site.
The migration of music from shiny disks to the online arena has personalized debates about intellectual property rights once reserved for lawyers, turning passive consumers into political activists in increasingly large numbers. Having discovered the virtues of the new online form, many people are demanding the freedom to sample, trade and make available music in ways that were never before possible.
Some of those ways, like making unauthorized copies of hundreds of copyrighted songs without paying for them, are clearly not legal. Others may be the subject of a negotiation that the music industry is beginning to accept it may have to enter into.
"I have rights to listen to my music the way I want to," said William Raleigh, 33, a marketing manager in Los Angeles who says he never buys music produced by the major record labels, preferring to reserve his acquisitions for independent bands that sell CD's through the Web site CD Baby. "I'm not a criminal if I want to share it with some friends, and I'm opposed to the technology that tries to restrict my rights as a consumer."
Paul Vidich, an executive vice president with the Warner Music Group, a unit of AOL Time Warner, said that the degree to which people could share their music was a key point in the company's negotiations with Apple. They explored what the equivalent of playing music in a living room full of friends would be in the online world. Would it be O.K. for students in a dormitory roo
At the CLEO in Baltimore, researchers describe a record-breaking âunhackableâ(TM) link.
UK researchers have broken the distance record for quantum cryptography, the optical technique that enables âunhackableâ(TM) communication along an optical fiber.
Andrew Shields and colleagues from Toshiba Research Europe, UK, revealed their record-breaking link, which reaches over 100 km, at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) in Baltimore, US.
âoeAs far as we are aware, this is the first demonstration of quantum cryptography over fibers longer than 100 km,â said Shields. âoeThe technique could be deployed in a wide range of commercial situations in less than three years.â
Communication with quantum cryptography is inherently secure because it takes advantage of the physical properties of single photons. In the technique, each transmitted bit of a cryptographic key is encoded upon a single photon.
The sender and recipient each have a key to decode the photon stream, but any attempt to hack into the link and capture the key is doomed to failure as it alters the quantum state of the intercepted photons. These changes are easily detectable, revealing the presence of the hacker.
In practice, attenuation in the optical fiber and noise in the detection unit limits the distance over which quantum cryptography works.
The Toshiba team was able to improve the link distance thanks to an ultra-low noise detector, which detects single photons. This detector is based on a GaAs/AlGaAs modulation doped field effect transistor (MODFET), which does not rely on avalanche processes and is therefore less prone to noise than conventional devices (see related story).
The previous transmission record of 87 km was set by researchers from the Japanese company Mitsubishi Electric in November last year. They also developed a novel kind of detector, which had a low dark-count probability, to extend the link distance.
Banks and government organizations are expected to be the first users of quantum cryptography systems when they become commercially available.
Author Michael Hatcher is technology editor of Opto & Laser Europe magazine.
LOL.
That statement is so stupid, where do I even start. I read about this conflict in the washpost. When India and Pakistan were partitioned, Kashmir went to India. Pakistan wanted it ever since.
Those two countries have even fought 2 wars over it because Pakistan wanted Kashmir. India is fighting to keep Pakistan from making Kashmir a part of Pakistan.
Massive tsunami sweeps Atlantic Coast in asteroid impact scenario for March 16, 2880 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SANTA CRUZ, CA--If an asteroid crashes into the Earth, it is likely to splash down somewhere in the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet's surface. Huge tsunami waves, spreading out from the impact site like the ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, would inundate heavily populated coastal areas. A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States.
The researchers based their simulation on a real asteroid known to be on course for a close encounter with Earth eight centuries from now. Steven Ward, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCSC, and Erik Asphaug, an associate professor of Earth sciences, report their findings in the June issue of the Geophysical Journal International.
March 16, 2880, is the day the asteroid known as 1950 DA, a huge rock two-thirds of a mile in diameter, is due to swing so close to Earth it could slam into the Atlantic Ocean at 38,000 miles per hour. The probability of a direct hit is pretty small, but over the long timescales of Earth's history, asteroids this size and larger have periodically hammered the planet, sometimes with calamitous effects. The so-called K/T impact, for example, ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
"From a geologic perspective, events like this have happened many times in the past. Asteroids the size of 1950 DA have probably struck the Earth about 600 times since the age of the dinosaurs," Ward said.
Ward and Asphaug's study is part of a general effort to conduct a rational assessment of asteroid impact hazards. Asphaug, who organized a NASA-sponsored scientific workshop on asteroids last year, noted that asteroid risks are interesting because the probabilities are so small while the potential consequences are enormous. Furthermore, the laws of orbital mechanics make it possible for scientists to predict an impact if they are able to detect the asteroid in advance.
"It's like knowing the exact time when Mount Shasta will erupt," Asphaug said. "The way to deal with any natural hazard is to improve our knowledge base, so we can turn the kind of human fear that gets played on in the movies into something that we have a handle on."
Although the probability of an impact from 1950 DA is only about 0.3 percent, it is the only asteroid yet detected that scientists cannot entirely dismiss as a threat. A team of scientists led by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported on the probability of 1950 DA crossing paths with the Earth in the April 5, 2002, issue of the journal Science.
"It's a low threat, actually a bit lower than the threat of being hit by an as-yet-undiscovered asteroid in the same size range over the same period of time, but it provided a good representative scenario for us to analyze," Asphaug said.
For the simulation, the researchers chose an impact site consistent with the orientation of the Earth at the time of the predicted encounter: in the Atlantic Ocean about 360 miles from the U.S. coast. Ward summarized the results as follows:
The 60,000-megaton blast of the impact vaporizes the asteroid and blows a cavity in the ocean 11 miles across and all the way down to the seafloor, which is about 3 miles deep at that point. The blast even excavates some of the seafloor. Water then rushes back in to fill the cavity, and a ring of waves spreads out in all directions. The impact creates tsunami waves of all frequencies and wavelengths, with a peak wavelength about the same as the diameter of the cavity. Because lower-frequency waves travel faster than waves with higher frequencies, the initial impulse spreads out into a series of waves.
"In the movies they show one big wave, but you actually end up with dozens of waves. The first ones to arrive are pr
Do you think just having GPS satellites will counter the American military supremacy? Dude you are so mistaken. Let Europe build whatever information infrastructure it wants. Military supremacy depends on how many soldiers you have and how well they are trained !
Right now Europre can only provide peace-keeping troops because it does NOT have the budget of America. America is essentially the world's most powerful army.
"Rumsfeld is likely shaking in his boots."
Jesus Christ, please go and read informed newspapers and magazines. Reading some propoganda piece of shit will just confirm your status as a retard. Why should Rumsfeld quake in his boots? Do the Europeans have as big and as well a funded army as the US? NO !
Unless Europe as a whole decides to increase its military funding 8 fold( YES 8 FOLD !) they WILL NOT MATCH what the US spends on its military. You know who were the people quaking in their boots? The *peace loving* europeans. No matter how much they ranted against the US, they COULD NOT do anything to stop the US.
NYC: Leverage Fiber, Offer Free Wi-Fi By Erin Joyce
A new study from the New York City Council is recommending that the Big Apple throw open the competitive bidding process for its annual $130 million phone and Internet bill in order to leverage one of the most expansive -- and underused -- fiber optic networks in the country.
In so doing, New York City could not only cut its annual telecom bill, but would also be in a position to deploy wireless networking links as the "last mile" connecting metropolitan area networks, or MANs (define). In addition, it suggested using the fiber to deploy free Internet access with a Wi-Fi (define) Network in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.
Prepared by Council Speaker Gifford Miller and Councilman Gale Brewer, who chairs the council's select committee on technology in government, the report is entitled "Network NYC: Building the Broadband City."
With the rapidly unfolding maturation of wireless and fiber optic technologies, along with a glut of fiber optics lines left over from the telecom bubble, the use of network pricing that can reduce current and future telecom costs is expanding, the report said.
The 22-page study, released Thursday, recommends that the Mayor's office competitively bid "the city's $130 million annual phone and Internet bill -- 75 percent of which has been historically provided as a sole source contract to Verizon."
Verizon has held the annual contract for decades, according to a city official.
The report suggested the move would help address the city's ongoing fiscal crisis, which was already reeling from a recession before Sept. 11.
"Without competition, and with Verizon's lock on 75 percent of the City's telecom bill, the Comptroller's Office repeatedly has asked a basic question: how can New York City be assured that it is getting the best telecom rates and services if it is not soliciting multiple bids in a rigorous, open market process?"
A Verizon spokesman was not available for comment by presstime.
New York City is the largest municipal buyer of telecommunications goods and services in the U.S., said the report. In addition, it said the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) manages franchise agreements for 21 separate fiber-optic companies -- more companies holding more high capacity metropolitan fiber than in any other city, as well as a portfolio of over 2,220 municipal rooftops potentially ripe for wireless deployments.
Yet "there has been little public discussion or long term strategic thinking about how the city could better organize this public and private infrastructure to encourage a truly citywide deployment of affordable, high speed networking capacity," the report said.
It also criticized the lack of coordination among so many fiber-rich departments within the city. Locally, for example, New York City already essentially owns, operates and manages, an albeit limited fiber network known as the Institutional Network, or I-Net.
In addition, "and as a further indication of the lack of coordinated telecom planning in the City, several [city] agencies, DOT, and the New York Public Library (NYPL), operate their own separate fiber networks for transmitting large amounts of data and/or as backhaul networks for Internet traffic."
It also cited an example of neighborhoods with several bandwidth-rich municipal buildings clustered nearby. Typically, the firehouses, police precincts, library branches and other government offices are all connected separately via the telephone companies' network, with multiple T-1 lines, "that cost anywhere between $400 and $1,200 each."
Instead, the report suggested, with "secure, point to multi-point wireless last mile or last hundred feet links, however, the tallest municipal building in a given area can distribute bandwidth wirelessly to all the various municipal sites off of the one building's fiber backbone." In effect, the building itself would become a Point of Presence (define)
Where do you even get the fucking idea that a place like slashdot can ask people to use their real names?
If it were'nt for a check box named "Anonymous Coward" you woud'nt even have been posting that comment.
And how do you think Slashdot is going to enforce the rule that *only* your "REAL NAME" will be used? I can use my classmate's SS number and his name. How are you going to verify that? Do you think every country's phone list/citizen list is on the web like it in the US? You might have the real of a slashdotter from Europe? His name's not on any phone list. What are you going to do? Please keep stupid ideas to yourself.
Yes, if slashdot becomes subscription only, then there is a very good chance. But then again, what is the chance that slashdot will become subscriber only? -Nil-
So many people post entire articles itself. Are the websites they're posting from come to their houses with a baseball hat?
Becoming a member of amazon is not difficult. Anybody with an email id can do it.
And what do you mean that real names will solve the problem. Do you think getting social security numbers and names is difficult to get? Fine, Amazon forces you to use your real name. Then?? Can you tell me how many James Smith's or whatever are there in the US? Do you know which state they are in? There might be a 150 of them.
Are you going to go around the country and bludgeon every James Smith just because he gave away the movie spoiler or gave a crappy book a good review?
Usenet ?? Dude, you think your neighborhood is the only one that matters in the world?? What the fuck's wrong with you? Usenet isn't your backyard that you can throw out anybody who does'nt belong there.
And how does the Matrix even figure in this? Leave the Matrix alone.
Jesus Christ. For heaven's sake somebody mod down the troll that the above AC has posted.
If somebody needs to think carefully, its the coward himself.
Customized iPAQ promising as public safety and homeland defense interoperability solution
Washington, DC - May 12, 2003 - Vanu, Inc. is demonstrating the first hand-held software radio device today at the "Wireless Innovations: New Technologies and Evolving Policies" Showcase in Washington, DC. The event, hosted by the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the FCC and the U.S. Department of State's International Communications and Information Policy group, brings together premier wireless technology demonstrations and facilitates policy discussions about the state of technology and innovation in the wireless telecommunications industry.
Vanu, Inc., selected by show organizers as a "leading edge" participant, is a developer of software radios. Unlike traditional hardware radios, which are limited to one specific type of communication service, software radios allow a single wireless device to provide multiple services. This means one software radio can now support a range of capabilities that previously required multiple hardware radios.
Featured among Vanu, Inc.'s demonstrations is the first hand-held software radio using general purpose processors. "This device is the culmination of nine years of software radio research, coupled with the advancements in processing power promised by Moore's Law," says Dr. Vanu Bose, founder and CEO of Vanu, Inc.
The standard off-the-shelf Hewlett-Packard iPAQ, runs on a Xscale processor from Intel and a Linux operating system. The radio transceiver operates from 100 MHz to 475 MHz and is housed in a standard iPAQ expansion pack. The iPAQ utilizes Vanu Software RadioTM to implement all of the signal processing. The current configuration of the device supports commercial analog FM radio service, including Family Band Radio, as well as the public safety APCO 25 digital standard. Future prototypes under development include operational capabilities of up to 900 MHz and support for cellular and PCS standards such as TDMA and GSM.
Such a device has great appeal in the public safety community, where decentralized purchasing decisions, legacy systems and advancements in technology have left first responders unable to communicate with other agencies at an emergency scene. A handheld software radio with the capability of operating among several standards and frequencies alleviates the communications problems caused by incompatible radio systems.
"Someday, most public safety radios will be software-based," said David Coursey, executive editor of ZDNet AnchorDesk, an online technology newsletter. "Making the best use of spectrum while improving compatibility and multi-agency connectivity are problems that software radios seem best-suited to solve. Vanu, Inc. is way ahead of this curve."
"I want this kind of technology for my own emergency communications work," added Mr. Coursey, who also has nearly 20 years' experience working with emergency services agencies.
In addition to the hand-held software radio, Vanu, Inc. is also demonstrating their software radio GSM basestation and a multi-mode laptop system with the ability to support multiple standards on a single system. The second day of the event features a roundtable on Unlicensed Wireless Technologies. Dr. Bose is participating as a panelist for the Spectrum Policy and Regulatory Issues discussion, along with business leaders, policy makers and experts from industry, government and academia.
About Vanu, Inc. Vanu, Inc. has revolutionized SDR through the development of Vanu Software Radio. Their approach applies modern software engineering techniques to the high-speed signal processing elements at the core of wireless devices to create portable software radio applications that will greatly increase the pace of innovation in wireless devices. Vanu, Inc. licenses software radio components and applications and provides design-consulting services to wireless OEMs, system integrators and service providers. Vanu, Inc. was founded in 1998 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Vanu Software Radio(TM) is a registered trademark of Vanu, Inc.
All other names and trademarks are registered property of their respective companies
Verizon envisions the 21st-century pay phone: 'Internet hot spots'
'Wireless fidelity' technology will allow high-speed access to special laptops in Manhattan
Saturday, May 10, 2003
BY KEVIN COUGHLIN Star-Ledger Staff
NEW YORK -- Pay phones, those lonely relics from the pre-cellular era, are about to be reborn.
Verizon plans to put transmitters in pay phones across New York City, creating "WiFi hot spots" where customers with specially equipped laptop computers and handheld devices can surf the Internet at high speeds -- without clumsy wires.
"That probably will be the vehicle we will use in Manhattan" to provide WiFi service, Lawrence T. Babbio Jr., president of Verizon Communications, said yesterday. A formal announcement is likely next week, he said.
WiFi, short for "wireless fidelity," is a fast-growing radio technology for beaming data between computers and printers, and for wirelessly tapping into Internet access points called "hot spots" from distances of up to about 300 feet.
"We're building hot spot extensions of our DSL service," Babbio said, referring to Verizon's Internet service.
Babbio said Verizon is studying pricing plans -- not to mention how to upgrade some 200,000 pay phones in the New York metropolitan area. About half those phones lack electrical power needed for the transmitters, he told a conference on wireless security hosted by Stevens Institute of Technology, his alma mater.
He said Verizon probably will offer WiFi to cell phone customers as well as DSL subscribers.
"We have to put together the right price and right value," said Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe.
WiFi has some powerful fans. Intel Corp. just rolled out a new line of laptop processors, dubbed Centrino, designed to simplify wireless computing. The chipmaker's $300 million WiFi promotion includes McDonald's restaurants, where free wireless is served with Big Macs at a few locations.
Intel also joined with AT&T and IBM to start Cometa Networks, a $150 million venture that aims to lease thousands of hot spots to re-sellers around the country. T-Mobile, meanwhile, sells WiFi access in Starbucks cafes.
New York is blanketed with free hot spots, too, but a big problem is finding the hot spots. Experts say that's where Verizon enjoys a huge edge.
"As Americans, we're all trained to look for pay phones," said James Thompson of Vivato, a Spokane company that makes WiFi gear.
Bell Canada caught Verizon's eye earlier this year when it converted surplus pay phones to Wi-Fi hot spots at train stations in Montreal and Toronto, and at a big Toronto hospital. Those hot spots offer free service with minimal security.
With the growing use of wireless phones, big carriers like Verizon have seen pay phone revenues plunge. To lure callers back, carriers have experimented with new pricing schemes. Analysts said Verizon's WiFi plans could turn a liability into an asset.
"It sounds like a money-maker," said Pat Comack, a telecom analyst for Guzman & Co. "It makes their pay phone business more viable and it gives their wireless business data service a competitive edge over other providers."
Maintaining the pay phones will be a challenge, however. "They've lost so much maintenance that a lot of these phones are always broken," Comack said.
Thompson said Verizon may be embracing WiFi to cannibalize its other wireless data services before rivals can do so.
Verizon has unveiled several recent initiatives to attract more customers to its high-speed wireless data business. In March, the company launched a WiFi plan to allow customers to access the Web from hundreds of hotels and 10 airports.
Staff writer Tom Johnson contributed to this report.
The VMS flash memory contains 128 kilobytes of storage. These are divided into 256 blocks of 512 bytes each. Of these blocks, 200 are available for user files. The rest of the blocks contain filesystem information, or are simply not used at all. The allocation of the 256 blocks is as follows:
The Directory, FAT and Root block are system files. They are not listed in the Directory, but do appear in the FAT. The Root block is always block 255. The start block of the FAT and Directory can be found in the Root block, see below.
The root block (block 255) contains information such as:
The date when the card was formatted The color and icon for this VMS in the Dreamcast file manager Location and size of the FAT and Directory system files I'm not sure about the actual format of this block, apart from the following: 0x000-0x00f : All these bytes contain 0x55 to indicate a properly formatted card. 0x010 : custom VMS colour (1 = use custom colours below, 0 = standard colour) 0x011 : VMS colour blue component 0x012 : VMS colour green component 0x013 : VMS colour red component 0x014 : VMS colour alpha component (use 100 for semi-transparent, 255 for opaque) 0x015-0x02f : not used (all zeroes) 0x030-0x037 : BCD timestamp (see Directory below) 0x038-0x03f : not used (all zeroes)... 0x046-0x047 : 16 bit int (little endian) : location of FAT (254) 0x048-0x049 : 16 bit int (little endian) : size of FAT in blocks (1) 0x04a-0x04b : 16 bit int (little endian) : location of directory (253) 0x04c-0x04d : 16 bit int (little endian) : size of directory in blocks (13) 0x04e-0x04f : 16 bit int (little endian) : icon shape for this VMS (0-123) 0x050-0x051 : 16 bit int (little endian) : number of user blocks (200)...
The File Allocation Table works similar to a MS-DOS FAT16 File Allocation Table. It serves two purposes; it indicates which blocks are unallocated, and it links the blocks of a file together. Each of the 256 blocks have an entry in this table consisting of a 16-bit integer value (little endian). The entry for block 0 is stored first in the FAT, and the entry for block 255 is stored last. The entry is interpreted like this:
0xfffc : This block is unallocated 0xfffa : This block is allocated to a file, and is the last block in that file 0x00-0xff : This block is allocated to a file, and is not the last block in that file
In the last case, the actual value of the entry indicates the next block in the file. This way, if the number of the first block of a file is known, the subsequent blocks can be found by traversing the FAT. The number of the first block can be found in the Directory if it is a user file, or in the Super block if it is a system file.
Note that mini-game files are allocated starting at block 0 and upwards, while a data file is allocated starting at block 199 selecting the highest available free block. This is probably because a mini-game should be able to run directly from the flash, and thus needs to be placed in a linear memory space starting at a known address (i.e. 0).
Although block 200 through 240 are marked as "free" in the FAT, they can not be used for anything.
The Directory lists all the user files stored in the VMS. The Directory consists of a sequence of 32-byte entries each potentially describing a file. When the VMS is formatted, enough space is allocated to the Directory file to accommodate 200 entries. This is enough, since each file must be at least one block long, and there are only 200 blocks available for user files. The actual blocks making up the Directory can be found using the Root block and the FAT, although it should be safe to assume that the Directory has been allocated to blocks 241 through 253; 253 being the first block of the Directory, and 241 the last.
An entry in the directory is either all NUL-bytes (denoting an unused entry), or a structure describing a file. This structu
May 7, 2003 | Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope's powerful new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) have taken the deepest visible-light image ever made of the sky.
The 3.5-day (84-hour) exposure captures stars as faint as 31st magnitude, according to Tom M. Brown (Space Telescope Science Institute), who headed the eight-person team that took the picture. This is a little more than 1 magnitude (2.5 times) fainter than the epochal Hubble Deep Fields, which were made with the Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. It is 6 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the naked eye.
Brown and his colleagues chose to point at a spot 1 southeast of M31, the Great Andromeda Galaxy, in order to get a census of faint stars populating M31's outer halo. The full ACS image is about 3.1 arcminutes square, the size of a sand grain held at arm's length against the sky. The ACS magnifies this small field into a vast panorama of some 300,000 stars and thousands of faint background galaxies. At M31's distance of 2.5 million light-years, the faintest of the stars are slightly less luminous than our Sun. A large fraction of the most distant galaxies appear patchy and irregular, testimony to the collisions and mergers in the early universe that built up the familiar galaxies we see closer around us today.
Most of the stars in the image indeed proved to be in M31's halo, judging from their colors and brightnesses. Moreover, they show a surprisingly wide range of estimated ages -- from 6 to 13 billion years, compared to 11 to 13 billion years for our Milky Way's halo stars. Perhaps M31 has captured and torn apart younger dwarf galaxies than our Milky Way has done. Or perhaps M31 underwent a massive, disruptive merger with a single large galaxy billions of years ago; in this scenario some of M31's younger disk stars could have been flung into its halo. Or maybe some combination of these events triggered waves of star formation in regions that ended up in M31's outer fringes.
The image was made in two colors: near-infrared and "visual" (a band spanning the part of the spectrum running from yellow through green). The renditions displayed here were crafted to resemble true-color views by interpolating from these two colors. These vignettes each show only about 1 percent of the ACS image. The full image is available from the Hubble Telescope's press site at various qualities and sizes (up to 128 megabytes), along with more highlights and a finder chart showing its relation to M31.
Plans are afoot for an even deeper "Ultra-Deep Field," which will use ACS for longer exposures in four colors and go slightly fainter still.
Some things are worth waiting for. And, from the looks of it, the 3D feature film Kaena: The Prophecy is one of them.
Five years in the making, the 90-minute adventure from Xilam Animation in Paris boldly departs from the tried-and-true cartoon-like look of such US blockbusters as Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and Ice Age, and introduces a unique painterly style to evolve its sophisticated character-driven story. Also impressive is the fact that the digital artists created this feature entirely with commercial software, which forced them to overcome technical challenges by creatively applying the tools at hand, rather than developing specialized code.
Even Kaena's story line deviates significantly from those of its US film cousins. Rather than presenting a humorous children's tale, the movie explores a serious theme directed at teen and adult audiences, although occasionally two worm-like characters offer a dose of comic relief. Kaena unfolds within the fantasy world of a giant tree, known as the Axis, which is inhabited by a tribe of people whose main focus is harvesting the tree's sap, which they then offer to the gods. When the sap begins to dry up, a young woman called Kaena (voiced by Kirsten Dunst) leaves her village to find the root of the problem and a solution. A courageous dreamer, Kaena travels to the forbidden region beneath the clouds. There, she encounters a host of unusual and sometimes hostile creatures, including the Selenites, a race that is also trying to save the tree from impending doom, albeit through the enslavement of others.
"The story is also about the unlikely heroine's journey from childhood to adulthood as she defies authority, traditions, and beliefs in pursuit of her own truths and personal identity--a topic that transcends cultural borders," explains director Chris Delaporte.
In addition to Dunst, a number of other well-known American actors and actresses--including Angelica Houston as queen of the Selenites and Richard Harris as the 600-year-old extraterrestrial Opaz--are likewise lending their voices to the Kaena cast. Because the film is intended for worldwide release, it has been produced in English and will be dubbed in local languages. The production is scheduled to open next month in France, followed by worldwide release this fall. (Xilam was still negotiating a deal for US distribution at press time.)
At first glance, Kaena's overall look and feel is reminiscent of computer games, with its fantastic settings and goal-oriented characters. "The style of the environments will be more familiar to computer game players than moviegoers," contends Delaporte. In fact, he and writer-partner Patrick Daher conceived the project as a game in 1997, pitching it to the newly formed Chaman Productions (Paris), which was focused on producing digital content for games and television.
Impressed by the rich, unusual environments, Chaman's founder chose to expand the project to include a feature film, formerly called Axis, that would be released alongside the game (Computer Graphics World, March 2000, pg. 33). Alas, the ambitious goal of creating a full-length CG film proved too lofty for the start-up. Despite having approximately half the film and game completed, Chaman relinquished control to Xilam, a traditional animation company with expertise in 3D, having developed several computer games and 2D/3D television series. Xilam has since completed the Kaena film and game, with Delaporte still serving as director. Cinema Roots
"Telling a story for 90 minutes for a film is far more difficult than telling one in a half-hour for television," says Marc Du Pontavice, chairman and CEO of Xilam. "When it comes to cinema, the story alone cannot carry a project like it can in br
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Analyze this!
A Conversation with James Gosling, Part I
by Bill Venners
Jun 9, 2003
Summary
James Gosling talks with Bill Venners about his current research project, code-named Jackpot, which builds annotated parse trees for programs and can help you analyze, visualize, and refactor your program.
For the past several years, Java's creator James Gosling has been working at Sun Labs, researching ways to analyze and manipulate programs represented as annotated parse trees, a project called Jackpot. Compilers have long built parse trees when they translate source code into binary. But traditionally, programmers have worked with source code primarily by manipulating text with editors. The goal of the Jackpot project is to investigate the value of treating the parse tree as the program at development time, not just at compile time.
In this interview, which will be published in multiple installments, James Gosling talks about many aspects of programming. In this first installment, Gosling describes the ways in which Jackpot can help programmers analyze, visualize, and refactor their programs.
Treating Programs as Algebraic Structures
Bill Venners: What's the state of Jackpot, your current research project?
James Gosling: Jackpot has been really cool lately. It's what I'm spending most of my time on, and it's been a lot of fun. I was really hoping to have something I could hand out at JavaOne this year, but I've been finding too many entertaining things to do.
It's a very different world when a program is an algebraic structure rather than a bag of characters, when you can actually do algebra on programs rather than just swizzling characters around. A lot of things become possible.
Bill Venners: Like what?
James Gosling: If you look at any of the refactoring books, most of those refactoring actions become much more straightforward, in ways that are fairly deep.
Moving a method isn't just cutting and pasting text. It's a lot more than renaming the parameters and swizzling them around, because you really want to be able to do things like construct forwarding methods. When you construct forwarding methods, they're different from the original methods.
You can't just replace all uses of the forwarding method by uses of the moved method, because they actually behave slightly differently. The difference is usually around what happens when the pivot parameter is null. That can lead you into a deep morass of essentially theorem proving about properties of the code fragments that you're moving, to understand how they behave with respect to null. And you can treat all kinds of code manipulation that way.
So Jackpot has a baby theorem prover, or algebraic simplifier, that knows an awful lot about data flow and the implications of values. And it really does treat your program as a piece of algebra to be simplified and transformed. It can do an awful lot of interesting analysis that pays off when you want to make fairly significant pervasive changes to very large programs. That analysis pays off, for example, when you want to replace one API with another API that is almost the same. Often "almost the same" is actually harder than "radically different." I spent most of the last four months working on this baby theorem prover, and that's been a lot of fun.
Creating Visual Representations of Programs
Bill Venners: I read that Jackpot can create interesting graphical representations of a program. What is that about?
James Gosling: Jackpot can take this underlying algebraic structureâ" it's really the annotated parse treeâ"and generate a visual representation from that. Our internal notion of the truth is not text. But once it's not text, all of a sudden you can display it in really interesting ways.
We've got an underlying rule engine that's able to do structural pattern matching very efficiently. We can go from the structural patterns it sees in your code to visual representations. So you can write what is kind o
lol. Thanks for pointing that out. I've only lived in Mi before moving back to europe. Another thing-Im staying alone and there's no basement here..;)
IEEE approves wireless network specs
.11g and .11b operate at ranges of up to 300 feet.
.15.3 spec suitable for its target application: small consumer devices, many of which will be operating in the same environment in close proximity. It features quality of service, connection management, advanced power management modesâ"allowing long and QoS synchronized sleep modes, ad hoc and peer-to-peer topology support, mesh support and enhanced security.
By Patrick Mannion
EE Times
June 12, 2003 (11:59 a.m. EST)
MANHASSET, N.Y. â" The IEEE on Thursday (June 12) gave its stamp of approval to two new wireless local- and personal-area networking standards and two corresponding recommended practices. The move is expected to open the floodgates to product introductions and upgrades while ensuring interoperability between those products.
The most anticipated of the four are the IEEE 802.11g and 802.15.3 standards for WLAN and WPAN connectivity, respectively.
The newly approved 802.11g standard specifies data rates of up to 54 Mbits/s in the 2.45-GHz band. While 802.11g uses orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), mandatory provisions have been made within the standard to make it inherently compatible with the well-established 802.11b standard at 11 Mbits/s, which uses complementary code keying (CCK) modulation. Both
The 802.15.3 standard for High Rate WPANs also operates in the 2.45-GHz band and at similar rates, from 11 to 55 Mbit/s, but is designed for shorter-range (1 to 50 meters), very-low-power operation. It also uses time division, multiple access (TDMA) protocol.
The use of TDMA makes the
While 802.11g products based on the draft standard are already available, products based on the new 802.15.3 standard are not expected to appear until 2004.
The two recommended practices approved today are for 802.15.2 and 802.11f. The first, 802.15.2, addresses the coexistence issue between WLANs and WPANs operating in the 2.45-GHz bands, such as Bluetooth, 802.15.3 WPANs and 802.11b and g WLANs.
The second, the 802.11f Inter Access Point Protocol, ensures interoperability between access points from multiple vendors, which primarily enables client roaming.
You know, just enter scoove in google and out come your details, you got a profile at yahoo. Your from Omaha, Nevada. email- w0jrs+arrl@net. Other email- scoove@area51+research+nv+us.
Industry Offers a Carrot in Online Music Fight
By AMY HARMON
Like a lot of music fans roaming the Internet these days, David Bishop registers one basic sentiment when he thinks about the record industry. "They're a bunch of greedheads," he says. "They've been really fat on what I think of as huge profits and now they're trying to maintain the status quo."
Mr. Bishop is not your typical college-dormitory Internet pirate. A 49-year-old illustrator in San Rafael, Calif., he has steered scrupulously clear of file-sharing software like Napster and KaZaA. But he recently discovered how to play the music provided by other online fans without copying it, and has no compunction about flouting recent efforts to stamp out the practice.
"I'm not doing anything wrong," he insists.
Until recently, music executives have largely failed to acknowledge the millions of individuals, from teenage Eminem fans to Elvis-obsessed baby boomers, who have joined in what amounts to an online rebellion against the industry by some of its most important customers. Hoping to end Internet music piracy by ridding the world of the technologies that make it possible, they have so far focused on legal battles against KaZaA and its many brethren.
But for the first time in the Internet file-sharing wars, record industry executives have in recent weeks started to address music fans directly, both offering carrots and wielding sticks to persuade people to buy their product again. How well they succeed is likely to determine the way music is produced and consumed for years to come.
"The technology has destabilized us, it has hurt us," said Doug Morris, the chief executive of the Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi Universal and the largest of the five major record companies. "But now it's going to take us to new heights."
The industry is pursuing lawsuits against music pirates but is also offering new ways to legally listen to and buy music online through deals like a recent alliance with Apple Computer.
That prospect may be difficult to achieve. Forty-three million Americans â" half of those who connected to the Internet â" used file-sharing software last month that allows people to copy music without paying for it, according to a survey by the NPD Group, a market research firm. The file-sharing program KaZaA, which rose in popularity after the record industry won its lawsuit against Napster, has been downloaded more than 270 million times, more than any other free program available on CNet's Download.com site.
The migration of music from shiny disks to the online arena has personalized debates about intellectual property rights once reserved for lawyers, turning passive consumers into political activists in increasingly large numbers. Having discovered the virtues of the new online form, many people are demanding the freedom to sample, trade and make available music in ways that were never before possible.
Some of those ways, like making unauthorized copies of hundreds of copyrighted songs without paying for them, are clearly not legal. Others may be the subject of a negotiation that the music industry is beginning to accept it may have to enter into.
"I have rights to listen to my music the way I want to," said William Raleigh, 33, a marketing manager in Los Angeles who says he never buys music produced by the major record labels, preferring to reserve his acquisitions for independent bands that sell CD's through the Web site CD Baby. "I'm not a criminal if I want to share it with some friends, and I'm opposed to the technology that tries to restrict my rights as a consumer."
Paul Vidich, an executive vice president with the Warner Music Group, a unit of AOL Time Warner, said that the degree to which people could share their music was a key point in the company's negotiations with Apple. They explored what the equivalent of playing music in a living room full of friends would be in the online world. Would it be O.K. for students in a dormitory roo
At the CLEO in Baltimore, researchers describe a record-breaking âunhackableâ(TM) link.
UK researchers have broken the distance record for quantum cryptography, the optical technique that enables âunhackableâ(TM) communication along an optical fiber.
Andrew Shields and colleagues from Toshiba Research Europe, UK, revealed their record-breaking link, which reaches over 100 km, at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) in Baltimore, US.
âoeAs far as we are aware, this is the first demonstration of quantum cryptography over fibers longer than 100 km,â said Shields. âoeThe technique could be deployed in a wide range of commercial situations in less than three years.â
Communication with quantum cryptography is inherently secure because it takes advantage of the physical properties of single photons. In the technique, each transmitted bit of a cryptographic key is encoded upon a single photon.
The sender and recipient each have a key to decode the photon stream, but any attempt to hack into the link and capture the key is doomed to failure as it alters the quantum state of the intercepted photons. These changes are easily detectable, revealing the presence of the hacker.
In practice, attenuation in the optical fiber and noise in the detection unit limits the distance over which quantum cryptography works.
The Toshiba team was able to improve the link distance thanks to an ultra-low noise detector, which detects single photons. This detector is based on a GaAs/AlGaAs modulation doped field effect transistor (MODFET), which does not rely on avalanche processes and is therefore less prone to noise than conventional devices (see related story).
The previous transmission record of 87 km was set by researchers from the Japanese company Mitsubishi Electric in November last year. They also developed a novel kind of detector, which had a low dark-count probability, to extend the link distance.
Banks and government organizations are expected to be the first users of quantum cryptography systems when they become commercially available.
Author
Michael Hatcher is technology editor of Opto & Laser Europe magazine.
Those two countries have even fought 2 wars over it because Pakistan wanted Kashmir. India is fighting to keep Pakistan from making Kashmir a part of Pakistan.
Seriously, your one dumb and ignorant moron.Massive tsunami sweeps Atlantic Coast in asteroid impact scenario for March 16, 2880
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SANTA CRUZ, CA--If an asteroid crashes into the Earth, it is likely to splash down somewhere in the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet's surface. Huge tsunami waves, spreading out from the impact site like the ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, would inundate heavily populated coastal areas. A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States.
The researchers based their simulation on a real asteroid known to be on course for a close encounter with Earth eight centuries from now. Steven Ward, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCSC, and Erik Asphaug, an associate professor of Earth sciences, report their findings in the June issue of the Geophysical Journal International.
March 16, 2880, is the day the asteroid known as 1950 DA, a huge rock two-thirds of a mile in diameter, is due to swing so close to Earth it could slam into the Atlantic Ocean at 38,000 miles per hour. The probability of a direct hit is pretty small, but over the long timescales of Earth's history, asteroids this size and larger have periodically hammered the planet, sometimes with calamitous effects. The so-called K/T impact, for example, ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
"From a geologic perspective, events like this have happened many times in the past. Asteroids the size of 1950 DA have probably struck the Earth about 600 times since the age of the dinosaurs," Ward said.
Ward and Asphaug's study is part of a general effort to conduct a rational assessment of asteroid impact hazards. Asphaug, who organized a NASA-sponsored scientific workshop on asteroids last year, noted that asteroid risks are interesting because the probabilities are so small while the potential consequences are enormous. Furthermore, the laws of orbital mechanics make it possible for scientists to predict an impact if they are able to detect the asteroid in advance.
"It's like knowing the exact time when Mount Shasta will erupt," Asphaug said. "The way to deal with any natural hazard is to improve our knowledge base, so we can turn the kind of human fear that gets played on in the movies into something that we have a handle on."
Although the probability of an impact from 1950 DA is only about 0.3 percent, it is the only asteroid yet detected that scientists cannot entirely dismiss as a threat. A team of scientists led by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported on the probability of 1950 DA crossing paths with the Earth in the April 5, 2002, issue of the journal Science.
"It's a low threat, actually a bit lower than the threat of being hit by an as-yet-undiscovered asteroid in the same size range over the same period of time, but it provided a good representative scenario for us to analyze," Asphaug said.
For the simulation, the researchers chose an impact site consistent with the orientation of the Earth at the time of the predicted encounter: in the Atlantic Ocean about 360 miles from the U.S. coast. Ward summarized the results as follows:
The 60,000-megaton blast of the impact vaporizes the asteroid and blows a cavity in the ocean 11 miles across and all the way down to the seafloor, which is about 3 miles deep at that point. The blast even excavates some of the seafloor. Water then rushes back in to fill the cavity, and a ring of waves spreads out in all directions. The impact creates tsunami waves of all frequencies and wavelengths, with a peak wavelength about the same as the diameter of the cavity. Because lower-frequency waves travel faster than waves with higher frequencies, the initial impulse spreads out into a series of waves.
"In the movies they show one big wave, but you actually end up with dozens of waves. The first ones to arrive are pr
What the heck is wrong with you?
Do you think just having GPS satellites will counter the American military supremacy? Dude you are so mistaken. Let Europe build whatever information infrastructure it wants. Military supremacy depends on how many soldiers you have and how well they are trained !
Right now Europre can only provide peace-keeping troops because it does NOT have the budget of America. America is essentially the world's most powerful army.
"Rumsfeld is likely shaking in his boots."
Jesus Christ, please go and read informed newspapers and magazines. Reading some propoganda piece of shit will just confirm your status as a retard. Why should Rumsfeld quake in his boots? Do the Europeans have as big and as well a funded army as the US? NO !
Unless Europe as a whole decides to increase its military funding 8 fold( YES 8 FOLD !) they WILL NOT MATCH what the US spends on its military.
You know who were the people quaking in their boots? The *peace loving* europeans. No matter how much they ranted against the US, they COULD NOT do anything to stop the US.
So please shut up. Thank you.
NYC: Leverage Fiber, Offer Free Wi-Fi
By Erin Joyce
A new study from the New York City Council is recommending that the Big Apple throw open the competitive bidding process for its annual $130 million phone and Internet bill in order to leverage one of the most expansive -- and underused -- fiber optic networks in the country.
In so doing, New York City could not only cut its annual telecom bill, but would also be in a position to deploy wireless networking links as the "last mile" connecting metropolitan area networks, or MANs (define). In addition, it suggested using the fiber to deploy free Internet access with a Wi-Fi (define) Network in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.
Prepared by Council Speaker Gifford Miller and Councilman Gale Brewer, who chairs the council's select committee on technology in government, the report is entitled "Network NYC: Building the Broadband City."
With the rapidly unfolding maturation of wireless and fiber optic technologies, along with a glut of fiber optics lines left over from the telecom bubble, the use of network pricing that can reduce current and future telecom costs is expanding, the report said.
The 22-page study, released Thursday, recommends that the Mayor's office competitively bid "the city's $130 million annual phone and Internet bill -- 75 percent of which has been historically provided as a sole source contract to Verizon."
Verizon has held the annual contract for decades, according to a city official.
The report suggested the move would help address the city's ongoing fiscal crisis, which was already reeling from a recession before Sept. 11.
"Without competition, and with Verizon's lock on 75 percent of the City's telecom bill, the Comptroller's Office repeatedly has asked a basic question: how can New York City be assured that it is getting the best telecom rates and services if it is not soliciting multiple bids in a rigorous, open market process?"
A Verizon spokesman was not available for comment by presstime.
New York City is the largest municipal buyer of telecommunications goods and services in the U.S., said the report. In addition, it said the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) manages franchise agreements for 21 separate fiber-optic companies -- more companies holding more high capacity metropolitan fiber than in any other city, as well as a portfolio of over 2,220 municipal rooftops potentially ripe for wireless deployments.
Yet "there has been little public discussion or long term strategic thinking about how the city could better organize this public and private infrastructure to encourage a truly citywide deployment of affordable, high speed networking capacity," the report said.
It also criticized the lack of coordination among so many fiber-rich departments within the city. Locally, for example, New York City already essentially owns, operates and manages, an albeit limited fiber network known as the Institutional Network, or I-Net.
In addition, "and as a further indication of the lack of coordinated telecom planning in the City, several [city] agencies, DOT, and the New York Public Library (NYPL), operate their own separate fiber networks for transmitting large amounts of data and/or as backhaul networks for Internet traffic."
It also cited an example of neighborhoods with several bandwidth-rich municipal buildings clustered nearby. Typically, the firehouses, police precincts, library branches and other government offices are all connected separately via the telephone companies' network, with multiple T-1 lines, "that cost anywhere between $400 and $1,200 each."
Instead, the report suggested, with "secure, point to multi-point wireless last mile or last hundred feet links, however, the tallest municipal building in a given area can distribute bandwidth wirelessly to all the various municipal sites off of the one building's fiber backbone." In effect, the building itself would become a Point of Presence (define)
who even modded up this troll?
Where do you even get the fucking idea that a place like slashdot can ask people to use their real names?
If it were'nt for a check box named "Anonymous Coward" you woud'nt even have been posting that comment.
And how do you think Slashdot is going to enforce the rule that *only* your "REAL NAME" will be used? I can use my classmate's SS number and his name. How are you going to verify that? Do you think every country's phone list/citizen list is on the web like it in the US? You might have the real of a slashdotter from Europe? His name's not on any phone list. What are you going to do? Please keep stupid ideas to yourself.
Yes, if slashdot becomes subscription only, then there is a very good chance. But then again, what is the chance that slashdot will become subscriber only? -Nil-
So many people post entire articles itself. Are the websites they're posting from come to their houses with a baseball hat?
Becoming a member of amazon is not difficult. Anybody with an email id can do it.
And what do you mean that real names will solve the problem. Do you think getting social security numbers and names is difficult to get? Fine, Amazon forces you to use your real name. Then??
Can you tell me how many James Smith's or whatever are there in the US? Do you know which state they are in? There might be a 150 of them.
Are you going to go around the country and bludgeon every James Smith just because he gave away the movie spoiler or gave a crappy book a good review?
Usenet ?? Dude, you think your neighborhood is the only one that matters in the world?? What the fuck's wrong with you? Usenet isn't your backyard that you can throw out anybody who does'nt belong there.
And how does the Matrix even figure in this? Leave the Matrix alone.
Jesus Christ. For heaven's sake somebody mod down the troll that the above AC has posted.
If somebody needs to think carefully, its the coward himself.
Customized iPAQ promising as public safety and homeland defense interoperability solution
Washington, DC - May 12, 2003 - Vanu, Inc. is demonstrating the first hand-held software radio device today at the "Wireless Innovations: New Technologies and Evolving Policies" Showcase in Washington, DC. The event, hosted by the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the FCC and the U.S. Department of State's International Communications and Information Policy group, brings together premier wireless technology demonstrations and facilitates policy discussions about the state of technology and innovation in the wireless telecommunications industry.
Vanu, Inc., selected by show organizers as a "leading edge" participant, is a developer of software radios. Unlike traditional hardware radios, which are limited to one specific type of communication service, software radios allow a single wireless device to provide multiple services. This means one software radio can now support a range of capabilities that previously required multiple hardware radios.
Featured among Vanu, Inc.'s demonstrations is the first hand-held software radio using general purpose processors. "This device is the culmination of nine years of software radio research, coupled with the advancements in processing power promised by Moore's Law," says Dr. Vanu Bose, founder and CEO of Vanu, Inc.
The standard off-the-shelf Hewlett-Packard iPAQ, runs on a Xscale processor from Intel and a Linux operating system. The radio transceiver operates from 100 MHz to 475 MHz and is housed in a standard iPAQ expansion pack. The iPAQ utilizes Vanu Software RadioTM to implement all of the signal processing. The current configuration of the device supports commercial analog FM radio service, including Family Band Radio, as well as the public safety APCO 25 digital standard. Future prototypes under development include operational capabilities of up to 900 MHz and support for cellular and PCS standards such as TDMA and GSM.
Such a device has great appeal in the public safety community, where decentralized purchasing decisions, legacy systems and advancements in technology have left first responders unable to communicate with other agencies at an emergency scene. A handheld software radio with the capability of operating among several standards and frequencies alleviates the communications problems caused by incompatible radio systems.
"Someday, most public safety radios will be software-based," said David Coursey, executive editor of ZDNet AnchorDesk, an online technology newsletter. "Making the best use of spectrum while improving compatibility and multi-agency connectivity are problems that software radios seem best-suited to solve. Vanu, Inc. is way ahead of this curve."
"I want this kind of technology for my own emergency communications work," added Mr. Coursey, who also has nearly 20 years' experience working with emergency services agencies.
In addition to the hand-held software radio, Vanu, Inc. is also demonstrating their software radio GSM basestation and a multi-mode laptop system with the ability to support multiple standards on a single system. The second day of the event features a roundtable on Unlicensed Wireless Technologies. Dr. Bose is participating as a panelist for the Spectrum Policy and Regulatory Issues discussion, along with business leaders, policy makers and experts from industry, government and academia.
About Vanu, Inc.
Vanu, Inc. has revolutionized SDR through the development of Vanu Software Radio. Their approach applies modern software engineering techniques to the high-speed signal processing elements at the core of wireless devices to create portable software radio applications that will greatly increase the pace of innovation in wireless devices. Vanu, Inc. licenses software radio components and applications and provides design-consulting services to wireless OEMs, system integrators and service providers. Vanu, Inc. was founded in 1998 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Vanu Software Radio(TM) is a registered trademark of Vanu, Inc.
All other names and trademarks are registered property of their respective companies
Verizon envisions the 21st-century pay phone: 'Internet hot spots'
'Wireless fidelity' technology will allow high-speed access to special laptops in Manhattan
Saturday, May 10, 2003
BY KEVIN COUGHLIN
Star-Ledger Staff
NEW YORK -- Pay phones, those lonely relics from the pre-cellular era, are about to be reborn.
Verizon plans to put transmitters in pay phones across New York City, creating "WiFi hot spots" where customers with specially equipped laptop computers and handheld devices can surf the Internet at high speeds -- without clumsy wires.
"That probably will be the vehicle we will use in Manhattan" to provide WiFi service, Lawrence T. Babbio Jr., president of Verizon Communications, said yesterday. A formal announcement is likely next week, he said.
WiFi, short for "wireless fidelity," is a fast-growing radio technology for beaming data between computers and printers, and for wirelessly tapping into Internet access points called "hot spots" from distances of up to about 300 feet.
"We're building hot spot extensions of our DSL service," Babbio said, referring to Verizon's Internet service.
Babbio said Verizon is studying pricing plans -- not to mention how to upgrade some 200,000 pay phones in the New York metropolitan area. About half those phones lack electrical power needed for the transmitters, he told a conference on wireless security hosted by Stevens Institute of Technology, his alma mater.
He said Verizon probably will offer WiFi to cell phone customers as well as DSL subscribers.
"We have to put together the right price and right value," said Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe.
WiFi has some powerful fans. Intel Corp. just rolled out a new line of laptop processors, dubbed Centrino, designed to simplify wireless computing. The chipmaker's $300 million WiFi promotion includes McDonald's restaurants, where free wireless is served with Big Macs at a few locations.
Intel also joined with AT&T and IBM to start Cometa Networks, a $150 million venture that aims to lease thousands of hot spots to re-sellers around the country. T-Mobile, meanwhile, sells WiFi access in Starbucks cafes.
New York is blanketed with free hot spots, too, but a big problem is finding the hot spots. Experts say that's where Verizon enjoys a huge edge.
"As Americans, we're all trained to look for pay phones," said James Thompson of Vivato, a Spokane company that makes WiFi gear.
Bell Canada caught Verizon's eye earlier this year when it converted surplus pay phones to Wi-Fi hot spots at train stations in Montreal and Toronto, and at a big Toronto hospital. Those hot spots offer free service with minimal security.
With the growing use of wireless phones, big carriers like Verizon have seen pay phone revenues plunge. To lure callers back, carriers have experimented with new pricing schemes. Analysts said Verizon's WiFi plans could turn a liability into an asset.
"It sounds like a money-maker," said Pat Comack, a telecom analyst for Guzman & Co. "It makes their pay phone business more viable and it gives their wireless business data service a competitive edge over other providers."
Maintaining the pay phones will be a challenge, however. "They've lost so much maintenance that a lot of these phones are always broken," Comack said.
Thompson said Verizon may be embracing WiFi to cannibalize its other wireless data services before rivals can do so.
Verizon has unveiled several recent initiatives to attract more customers to its high-speed wireless data business. In March, the company launched a WiFi plan to allow customers to access the Web from hundreds of hotels and 10 airports.
Staff writer Tom Johnson contributed to this report.
The VMS flash memory contains 128 kilobytes of storage. These are divided into 256 blocks of 512 bytes each. Of these blocks, 200 are available for user files. The rest of the blocks contain filesystem information, or are simply not used at all.
... ...
The allocation of the 256 blocks is as follows:
The Directory, FAT and Root block are system files. They are not listed in the Directory, but do appear in the FAT. The Root block is always block 255. The start block of the FAT and Directory can be found in the Root block, see below.
The root block (block 255) contains information such as:
The date when the card was formatted
The color and icon for this VMS in the Dreamcast file manager
Location and size of the FAT and Directory system files
I'm not sure about the actual format of this block, apart from the following:
0x000-0x00f : All these bytes contain 0x55 to indicate a properly formatted card.
0x010 : custom VMS colour (1 = use custom colours below, 0 = standard colour)
0x011 : VMS colour blue component
0x012 : VMS colour green component
0x013 : VMS colour red component
0x014 : VMS colour alpha component (use 100 for semi-transparent, 255 for opaque)
0x015-0x02f : not used (all zeroes)
0x030-0x037 : BCD timestamp (see Directory below)
0x038-0x03f : not used (all zeroes)
0x046-0x047 : 16 bit int (little endian) : location of FAT (254)
0x048-0x049 : 16 bit int (little endian) : size of FAT in blocks (1)
0x04a-0x04b : 16 bit int (little endian) : location of directory (253)
0x04c-0x04d : 16 bit int (little endian) : size of directory in blocks (13)
0x04e-0x04f : 16 bit int (little endian) : icon shape for this VMS (0-123)
0x050-0x051 : 16 bit int (little endian) : number of user blocks (200)
The File Allocation Table works similar to a MS-DOS FAT16 File Allocation Table. It serves two purposes; it indicates which blocks are unallocated, and it links the blocks of a file together. Each of the 256 blocks have an entry in this table consisting of a 16-bit integer value (little endian). The entry for block 0 is stored first in the FAT, and the entry for block 255 is stored last. The entry is interpreted like this:
0xfffc : This block is unallocated
0xfffa : This block is allocated to a file, and is the last block in that file
0x00-0xff : This block is allocated to a file, and is not the last block in that file
In the last case, the actual value of the entry indicates the next block in the file. This way, if the number of the first block of a file is known, the subsequent blocks can be found by traversing the FAT. The number of the first block can be found in the Directory if it is a user file, or in the Super block if it is a system file.
Note that mini-game files are allocated starting at block 0 and upwards, while a data file is allocated starting at block 199 selecting the highest available free block. This is probably because a mini-game should be able to run directly from the flash, and thus needs to be placed in a linear memory space starting at a known address (i.e. 0).
Although block 200 through 240 are marked as "free" in the FAT, they can not be used for anything.
The Directory lists all the user files stored in the VMS. The Directory consists of a sequence of 32-byte entries each potentially describing a file. When the VMS is formatted, enough space is allocated to the Directory file to accommodate 200 entries. This is enough, since each file must be at least one block long, and there are only 200 blocks available for user files. The actual blocks making up the Directory can be found using the Root block and the FAT, although it should be safe to assume that the Directory has been allocated to blocks 241 through 253; 253 being the first block of the Directory, and 241 the last.
An entry in the directory is either all NUL-bytes (denoting an unused entry), or a structure describing a file. This structu
May 7, 2003 | Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope's powerful new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) have taken the deepest visible-light image ever made of the sky.
The 3.5-day (84-hour) exposure captures stars as faint as 31st magnitude, according to Tom M. Brown (Space Telescope Science Institute), who headed the eight-person team that took the picture. This is a little more than 1 magnitude (2.5 times) fainter than the epochal Hubble Deep Fields, which were made with the Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. It is 6 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the naked eye.
Brown and his colleagues chose to point at a spot 1 southeast of M31, the Great Andromeda Galaxy, in order to get a census of faint stars populating M31's outer halo. The full ACS image is about 3.1 arcminutes square, the size of a sand grain held at arm's length against the sky. The ACS magnifies this small field into a vast panorama of some 300,000 stars and thousands of faint background galaxies. At M31's distance of 2.5 million light-years, the faintest of the stars are slightly less luminous than our Sun. A large fraction of the most distant galaxies appear patchy and irregular, testimony to the collisions and mergers in the early universe that built up the familiar galaxies we see closer around us today.
Most of the stars in the image indeed proved to be in M31's halo, judging from their colors and brightnesses. Moreover, they show a surprisingly wide range of estimated ages -- from 6 to 13 billion years, compared to 11 to 13 billion years for our Milky Way's halo stars. Perhaps M31 has captured and torn apart younger dwarf galaxies than our Milky Way has done. Or perhaps M31 underwent a massive, disruptive merger with a single large galaxy billions of years ago; in this scenario some of M31's younger disk stars could have been flung into its halo. Or maybe some combination of these events triggered waves of star formation in regions that ended up in M31's outer fringes.
The image was made in two colors: near-infrared and "visual" (a band spanning the part of the spectrum running from yellow through green). The renditions displayed here were crafted to resemble true-color views by interpolating from these two colors. These vignettes each show only about 1 percent of the ACS image. The full image is available from the Hubble Telescope's press site at various qualities and sizes (up to 128 megabytes), along with more highlights and a finder chart showing its relation to M31.
Plans are afoot for an even deeper "Ultra-Deep Field," which will use ACS for longer exposures in four colors and go slightly fainter still.
Although new to the 3D feature film scene, Xilam Animation in Paris opted for the road less traveled for Kaena: The Prophecy by choosing a mature style for the characters, environments, and story line. All images ©2003 Xilam Films, StudioCanal, and TVA International IV.
Some things are worth waiting for. And, from the looks of it, the 3D feature film Kaena: The Prophecy is one of them.
Five years in the making, the 90-minute adventure from Xilam Animation in Paris boldly departs from the tried-and-true cartoon-like look of such US blockbusters as Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and Ice Age, and introduces a unique painterly style to evolve its sophisticated character-driven story. Also impressive is the fact that the digital artists created this feature entirely with commercial software, which forced them to overcome technical challenges by creatively applying the tools at hand, rather than developing specialized code.
Even Kaena's story line deviates significantly from those of its US film cousins. Rather than presenting a humorous children's tale, the movie explores a serious theme directed at teen and adult audiences, although occasionally two worm-like characters offer a dose of comic relief. Kaena unfolds within the fantasy world of a giant tree, known as the Axis, which is inhabited by a tribe of people whose main focus is harvesting the tree's sap, which they then offer to the gods. When the sap begins to dry up, a young woman called Kaena (voiced by Kirsten Dunst) leaves her village to find the root of the problem and a solution. A courageous dreamer, Kaena travels to the forbidden region beneath the clouds. There, she encounters a host of unusual and sometimes hostile creatures, including the Selenites, a race that is also trying to save the tree from impending doom, albeit through the enslavement of others.
"The story is also about the unlikely heroine's journey from childhood to adulthood as she defies authority, traditions, and beliefs in pursuit of her own truths and personal identity--a topic that transcends cultural borders," explains director Chris Delaporte.
In addition to Dunst, a number of other well-known American actors and actresses--including Angelica Houston as queen of the Selenites and Richard Harris as the 600-year-old extraterrestrial Opaz--are likewise lending their voices to the Kaena cast. Because the film is intended for worldwide release, it has been produced in English and will be dubbed in local languages. The production is scheduled to open next month in France, followed by worldwide release this fall. (Xilam was still negotiating a deal for US distribution at press time.)
At first glance, Kaena's overall look and feel is reminiscent of computer games, with its fantastic settings and goal-oriented characters. "The style of the environments will be more familiar to computer game players than moviegoers," contends Delaporte. In fact, he and writer-partner Patrick Daher conceived the project as a game in 1997, pitching it to the newly formed Chaman Productions (Paris), which was focused on producing digital content for games and television.
Impressed by the rich, unusual environments, Chaman's founder chose to expand the project to include a feature film, formerly called Axis, that would be released alongside the game (Computer Graphics World, March 2000, pg. 33). Alas, the ambitious goal of creating a full-length CG film proved too lofty for the start-up. Despite having approximately half the film and game completed, Chaman relinquished control to Xilam, a traditional animation company with expertise in 3D, having developed several computer games and 2D/3D television series. Xilam has since completed the Kaena film and game, with Delaporte still serving as director.
Cinema Roots
"Telling a story for 90 minutes for a film is far more difficult than telling one in a half-hour for television," says Marc Du Pontavice, chairman and CEO of Xilam. "When it comes to cinema, the story alone cannot carry a project like it can in br