Not quite. Maxwell's demon operates in a system that is in equilibrium at a macroscopic scale but may have minor incidences of non-equilibrium at microscopic scale and using this micro-unbalanced state to encourage more non-equilibrium, eventually altering the large scale state to a macroscopic non-equilibrium. But taking advantage of the non-equilibrium state for power moves it towards equilibrium faster than it can move it away.
Attempts to harness energy from a non-equilibrium state tends to make the state reach equilibrium... which may still be too hot for the rest of the chip to operate. There will still be waste heat to dissipate. What they propose is a system that necessarily gets in the way of heat dissipation to recover energy.
What they need are components that thrive on the extra heat and switch to them as the temperature rises.
And now a funny quote:
"Now, the cold side is kept cold by putting it under a heating unit-- wait. There's a cold side." [turns sandwich package around] "And they put it under a heating unit-- they put the heating unit..." "Are you makin' this stuff up?" "OK, this is a hamburger..." -- Late 1980s Wendy's commercial comparing to McDonalds' McDLT.
(I'd love to see that whole ad campaign on YouTube. That one, and the "reconstituted onions" one with tomatoes "shrunk to the size of a garden pea. I've got about five hundred of them in my pocket here....")
Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. This is only a slight overgeneralization in modern English; in hackish, however, it is good form to mark them in some standard nonstandard way.
I was trying to complete one the other day, and honestly, I was only making educated guesses as to what the characters were, it took me three or four attempts.
Yeah, they practically discriminate against both the blind and the colorblind these days.
Though some sites with captchas may just be captcha-solving farms. Once you solve three or four for them, they just let you in.
Killing people is wrong. Comparing people to pests is something that the Nazis liked to do, with the same intention: to pave the way for killing people.
That'd be a spectacular waste of electricity, seeing as the drive would be spinning all the time, but almost never actually used.
Won't a drive hosting swap do that regardless of non-zero swap capacity? Seems to me a dedicated drive would be better than one hosting comparatively infrequently accessed data. (A solid state drive would need very large capacity in which to spread the wear to be used for swap, and thus very expensive. Better an obsolete drive die instead.)
Unless you're doing operations that need the low latency of constantly spinning drives like live data stream capture.
Insufficient swap space is one cause of enduring Green Screen of Death on early TiVo expansions (Series 1). There it wasn't the size of the memory (fixed) that was the issue; it was the size of the video storage and how much space you would need to do the equivalent of fsck on it.
So make it something unreasonably huge. Got an old spare 40 GB drive lying around? Make it all swap and use it 'til it dies. If your environment has as an upper limit something smaller, use that instead. Disks are cheap.
What I mean is, creatures like sharks, the crock family, turtles(?) have such fierce immune systems (ie molecular acid for blood) that they can afford to live basically forever.
I think you're getting your Earth species confused with Internecivus raptus.
I'm stocking up on gas masks, spam, and guns, but after hearing that I'm also going to be stocking up on orange juice. Figure that'll be good for if I catch it.
Pinky: Ahoy Brain. We're almost out of spam, but there's a bunch of gelatine in here with bits of spam stuck to it. Do you want any? Brain: [vomiting] Pinky: Right, I'll save you some then. Zort!
I'm free to disregard the password hint option, and I could just bang my head against the keyboard and enter in random jibberish for my secret question that no one (not even me) would be able to guess.
Alas, many sites do not provide the opportunity for the user to enter their own question, restricting you to their set of questions which answers may be general knowledge (like maternal grandmother's maiden name or name of high school you graduated from) or even easily forgotten knowledge (why would I remember what my favorite color was in 8th grade?!). At best then you could enter gibberish for the answer (unless they only let you choose a favorite color from a predetermined palette which wouldn't surprise me but would irritate me).
That's good, but a lot of people will trust the cloud to have its own redundancy system to protect their data, never thinking the cloud might betray their trust.
Also consider what would happen if the cloud were to leak your data, having it rain down on your competitors, or just one person inside the cloud with the ability to read your data and deciding its something the world should know (Palin e-mails). (Just because you don't use cloud services for sensitive communications doesn't mean others won't send them to your cloud.)
Consider what's happening when DRM services for entertainment media are going away. Now consider what happens if a cloud service with your only copy of your critical data goes away.
I switched from my old DSL ISP to my current one years ago due to one specific difference: no bandwidth cap. My speed was 768/384. They used to provide Usenet, then when I complained about them dropping it they comped me another Usenet provider, but when they saw I had subscribed to another they silently dropped my comped provider (I was going to work on a client-side aggregator).
Now I check my ISP's site and though my speed is now 1536/384, they now report I have an 8 GB/mo. cap. Combined charges from ISP and DSL provider is $49.66 a month ($29.95 for the ISP, $19.71 for the phone company). And I'm told they're going to be dropping support for my original Cisco 675 DSL router and don't provide for replacement (ISP even said the one the telco is pushing is crap and I buy another discontinued router from eBay instead.)
Recent ping test from their shell account-hosting machine to my home computer:
100 packets transmitted, 95 packets received, 5% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 23.866/361.592/831.181/259.827 ms
This morning I couldn't get a reliable connection through my DSL router, even after disconnecting all telephones from my service.
I could drop to a cheaper plan with the same speed that offers only 1 IP address instead of 5, but it will drop to a 5 GB cap for only an $11/mo. savings. I'm subscribed to many video podcasts through my TiVo, and there's always some during the month that end up truncated.
Cable alternative is Time Warner Cable, and I have my own set of headaches from them and the software they run on their cable boxes (incompatible with TiVos due to bugs interfering with channel changes, will turn themselves off with only one LED of indication). Plus I already have to use an unbalanced splitter for all the digital cable devices hooked up thus far, and access to that splitter has been recently drywalled up.
I also theorized about this as a kid. It's easy when the platforms you want it to work with look at different places for their initial data, and easier if you can direct them to unusual places for subsequent data.
But if you have two systems with different processors both going to the same track and sector for their first data, it becomes an exercise in how to write machine code that both systems can execute and neither of them crash running. A matter of finding safe bytes that do nothing of consequence on one platform but becomes an unconditional branch case on the other so you can split the boot block in half.
And as long as your disk is write protected, you don't need to worry about maintaining two sets of sector allocation tables, or even if they overlap each other. To make one of them writable could be done. To do both would require either teaching each OS how to allocate for the other or sync them on reboot.
Assuming of course there are no Magic Numbers in a common spot to foil any such an attempt, or just completely different formatting methods. E.g. TiVos use a different magic number in their otherwise standard Macintosh partition table to foil trivial access by a Mac to their Ext3 partitions (video is stored in a proprietary filesystem), and earlier models also being byteswapped.
If I really set myself down to do it, I could probably create a 5.25" disk that would boot into ProDOS on 65c02 and 65c816 Apple II machines and into DOS 3.3 on 6502 Apple II machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Greg Pead?
Not quite. Maxwell's demon operates in a system that is in equilibrium at a macroscopic scale but may have minor incidences of non-equilibrium at microscopic scale and using this micro-unbalanced state to encourage more non-equilibrium, eventually altering the large scale state to a macroscopic non-equilibrium. But taking advantage of the non-equilibrium state for power moves it towards equilibrium faster than it can move it away.
Attempts to harness energy from a non-equilibrium state tends to make the state reach equilibrium... which may still be too hot for the rest of the chip to operate. There will still be waste heat to dissipate. What they propose is a system that necessarily gets in the way of heat dissipation to recover energy.
What they need are components that thrive on the extra heat and switch to them as the temperature rises.
And now a funny quote:
"Now, the cold side is kept cold by putting it under a heating unit-- wait. There's a cold side."
[turns sandwich package around]
"And they put it under a heating unit-- they put the heating unit..."
"Are you makin' this stuff up?"
"OK, this is a hamburger..."
-- Late 1980s Wendy's commercial comparing to McDonalds' McDLT.
(I'd love to see that whole ad campaign on YouTube. That one, and the "reconstituted onions" one with tomatoes "shrunk to the size of a garden pea. I've got about five hundred of them in my pocket here....")
Except that you used it as a noun.
The New Hacker's Dictionary (aka The Jargon File): Chapter 4. Jargon Construction: Overgeneralization
Don't you mean passing turing tests?
In this context, "breaking" and "passing" are synonymous. Just like farting.
I was trying to complete one the other day, and honestly, I was only making educated guesses as to what the characters were, it took me three or four attempts.
Yeah, they practically discriminate against both the blind and the colorblind these days.
Though some sites with captchas may just be captcha-solving farms. Once you solve three or four for them, they just let you in.
Killing people is wrong. Comparing people to pests is something that the Nazis liked to do, with the same intention: to pave the way for killing people.
What if Godwin's Law carried the Death Penalty?
Aren't RFID passports just DRM for people? DRM is a proven unsolvable problem. Why expect them to get it right?
From TFA:
This time those evil Russian bastards..
That would be why.
What does being born out of wedlock have to do with it?
It's also a variant of MUD, a la TinyMUCK.
That'd be a spectacular waste of electricity, seeing as the drive would be spinning all the time, but almost never actually used.
Won't a drive hosting swap do that regardless of non-zero swap capacity? Seems to me a dedicated drive would be better than one hosting comparatively infrequently accessed data. (A solid state drive would need very large capacity in which to spread the wear to be used for swap, and thus very expensive. Better an obsolete drive die instead.)
Unless you're doing operations that need the low latency of constantly spinning drives like live data stream capture.
Or no swap at all. That still fits the axiom. The point is, always make your limits unreasonable in the right direction, or time will make them so.
...or time will make them so in the wrong direction.
(And always read your postings before submitting. Preview only helps if you actually review the result.)
Or no swap at all. That still fits the axiom. The point is, always make your limits unreasonable in the right direction, or time will make them so.
Reasonable limits aren't.
Insufficient swap space is one cause of enduring Green Screen of Death on early TiVo expansions (Series 1). There it wasn't the size of the memory (fixed) that was the issue; it was the size of the video storage and how much space you would need to do the equivalent of fsck on it.
So make it something unreasonably huge. Got an old spare 40 GB drive lying around? Make it all swap and use it 'til it dies. If your environment has as an upper limit something smaller, use that instead. Disks are cheap.
What I mean is, creatures like sharks, the crock family, turtles(?) have such fierce immune systems (ie molecular acid for blood) that they can afford to live basically forever.
I think you're getting your Earth species confused with Internecivus raptus .
I'm stocking up on gas masks, spam, and guns, but after hearing that I'm also going to be stocking up on orange juice. Figure that'll be good for if I catch it.
Pinky: Ahoy Brain. We're almost out of spam, but there's a bunch of gelatine in here with bits of spam stuck to it. Do you want any?
Brain: [vomiting]
Pinky: Right, I'll save you some then. Zort!
It lets you do functional programming. Hence, F#.
Oh, I thought they just made the strings tighter.
I'm free to disregard the password hint option, and I could just bang my head against the keyboard and enter in random jibberish for my secret question that no one (not even me) would be able to guess.
Alas, many sites do not provide the opportunity for the user to enter their own question, restricting you to their set of questions which answers may be general knowledge (like maternal grandmother's maiden name or name of high school you graduated from) or even easily forgotten knowledge (why would I remember what my favorite color was in 8th grade?!). At best then you could enter gibberish for the answer (unless they only let you choose a favorite color from a predetermined palette which wouldn't surprise me but would irritate me).
That's good, but a lot of people will trust the cloud to have its own redundancy system to protect their data, never thinking the cloud might betray their trust.
Also consider what would happen if the cloud were to leak your data, having it rain down on your competitors, or just one person inside the cloud with the ability to read your data and deciding its something the world should know (Palin e-mails). (Just because you don't use cloud services for sensitive communications doesn't mean others won't send them to your cloud.)
Consider what's happening when DRM services for entertainment media are going away. Now consider what happens if a cloud service with your only copy of your critical data goes away.
I switched from my old DSL ISP to my current one years ago due to one specific difference: no bandwidth cap. My speed was 768/384. They used to provide Usenet, then when I complained about them dropping it they comped me another Usenet provider, but when they saw I had subscribed to another they silently dropped my comped provider (I was going to work on a client-side aggregator).
Now I check my ISP's site and though my speed is now 1536/384, they now report I have an 8 GB/mo. cap. Combined charges from ISP and DSL provider is $49.66 a month ($29.95 for the ISP, $19.71 for the phone company). And I'm told they're going to be dropping support for my original Cisco 675 DSL router and don't provide for replacement (ISP even said the one the telco is pushing is crap and I buy another discontinued router from eBay instead.)
Recent ping test from their shell account-hosting machine to my home computer:
This morning I couldn't get a reliable connection through my DSL router, even after disconnecting all telephones from my service.
I could drop to a cheaper plan with the same speed that offers only 1 IP address instead of 5, but it will drop to a 5 GB cap for only an $11/mo. savings. I'm subscribed to many video podcasts through my TiVo, and there's always some during the month that end up truncated.
Cable alternative is Time Warner Cable, and I have my own set of headaches from them and the software they run on their cable boxes (incompatible with TiVos due to bugs interfering with channel changes, will turn themselves off with only one LED of indication). Plus I already have to use an unbalanced splitter for all the digital cable devices hooked up thus far, and access to that splitter has been recently drywalled up.
This would be the perfect time for Santa Claus to conquer the Martians.
The Bill Plympton segment "Push Comes to Shove" is one of my favorites, and is available on DVD from his website.
I also theorized about this as a kid. It's easy when the platforms you want it to work with look at different places for their initial data, and easier if you can direct them to unusual places for subsequent data.
But if you have two systems with different processors both going to the same track and sector for their first data, it becomes an exercise in how to write machine code that both systems can execute and neither of them crash running. A matter of finding safe bytes that do nothing of consequence on one platform but becomes an unconditional branch case on the other so you can split the boot block in half.
And as long as your disk is write protected, you don't need to worry about maintaining two sets of sector allocation tables, or even if they overlap each other. To make one of them writable could be done. To do both would require either teaching each OS how to allocate for the other or sync them on reboot.
Assuming of course there are no Magic Numbers in a common spot to foil any such an attempt, or just completely different formatting methods. E.g. TiVos use a different magic number in their otherwise standard Macintosh partition table to foil trivial access by a Mac to their Ext3 partitions (video is stored in a proprietary filesystem), and earlier models also being byteswapped.
If I really set myself down to do it, I could probably create a 5.25" disk that would boot into ProDOS on 65c02 and 65c816 Apple II machines and into DOS 3.3 on 6502 Apple II machines.
I clicked on the story thinking he had found some kind of strange Goatse image embedded in the disk. I was very disappointed.
Thank you for that. I'll never be able to look at the spindle hole of an 8" or 5.25" disk the same way again.
Seems like a pain to have to reboot to play games...
It seems retro to me... sonny.