I honestly can't think of anything more useless than an OS that will not work if you don't have an internet connection.
Humorously, you posted that in an article about the ipad, since its arrival mine has never been out of range of my wifi router. Apple also sells a 3G model that is always "in range" of the internet.
these are universities, the organisations that have traditionally been at the forefront of IT.
Forefront of IT? Never. Utterly never. Well, maybe back in the 60s or something. Version control, whats that? No software development methodologies taught that were not in commercial use before the prof went to school. True, we don't have any data warehousing or cloud computing or virtual machine lab or classes, but we do have a great two semester COBOL curriculum. I am, unfortunately, speaking from recent personal experience here.
Forefront of CS? Always. Knuth. Need I say more?
And "the schools webserver" moved out of the CS research department into the corporate IT support department about a decade ago.
I wonder how they found out that the length of the passphrase is 50 characters. Did he brag to the authorities? Was there some way of detecting the length of the passphrase when they looked at the encrypted key?
Audio recording of him at the keyboard, each time containing 50 key clicks?
Just that the looms didn't do any math doesn't mean they weren't a a programmable device. Surely realizing that a programmable mechanical machine can be built is one of the steps on the way of figuring out how to make a machine that can solve arbitrary problems.
The looms are about as programmable as a hydraulic tracing lathe... My mother was interested in looms although not enough to buy something like a full jacquard-style loom, so my info is based on limited personal experience and lots of second hand discussion. People with no experience with those looms, sometimes overestimate the looms ability... Trust me its not like they were writing C# code on those panels, or they ran them thru a compiler or something... Even modern machine tool G-code is staggeringly more advanced and most people will not lower themselves to calling G-code "programming".
And can it be a complete coincidence that Babbage decided to use the same storage medium?
Well, frankly, yeah, at that stage of technology it is the only possible solution. So any working solution must be identical, more or less, to all the other working solutions. No mass storage devices from our post-punchcard era had yet been invented...
Hrm, any radio astronomers out there? How hard would it be to rig up a poor man's directional radio antenna powerful enough to send a clear signal to that planet?
Check out J.D. Kraus "Radio Astronomy" from your nearest library or pdf sharing website.
Its towards the end. You'll be disappointed. Its one of those situations where if you have to ask how difficult or expensive, then trust me, its way too difficult or expensive for you. On the other hand, its possibly within the range of major university program or maybe a religious cult.
You'll see modulation (or lack thereof) plays a big part, along with adsorption issues.
To a ridiculously crude first approximation, take a planetary radar, and maybe multiply its range by 10 since you get a factor of 2 by not bouncing back and at least a factor of five because you're not relying on reflectivity. So, planets in our solar system are no problemo, but alpha centauri would be quite a noteworthy achievement.
Market for pirated Seimens PLCs?
on
Stuxnet Worms On
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Is there a big market for pirated Seimens PLCs?
You know, the Chinese business plan where they run off extra copies after the assembly line closes, and sell them for pure profit? Also the move where they change virtually nothing but the name and start selling it as a generic model at Walmart / Harbor Freight / etc?
Maybe it was an attempt to "get" the infringing Chinese devices that got a little out of control and got the real ones too?
Actually, that brings up a question--when they transmit these messages, do they lead the target, aiming for where it should be in 40 years, or just blanket the system?
I do some microwave RF work. The two words you don't know to google for are "proper motion" and "beamwidth". I think you have either vastly overestimated the "proper motion" of the nearby stars, which tops out around 10 seconds of arc per year, or vastly underestimated the beamwidth of our antennaes, which maxes out around that on our largest scopes at their highed frequencies. Effelsberg class radio telescopes are not exactly a dime a dozen and using their highest RF frequency is not necessarily a great idea due to adsorption issues both in our atmosphere and interstellar media.
But its still a good first approximation that the best radio telescopes in the world are just barely at the level where their beamwidth is relevant to proper motion problems. Just barely....
No ones. There will be ten posts listing jacquard looms, none of which do arithmetic or control flow beyond making a big ole loop.
There will be a couple posts about theoretical ideas that were eventually implemented in IBMs unit record punch card data processing gear. It only took half a century to implement his ideas in that regard.
I agree that, according to our current understanding, speed of light seems absolute enough
Also according to our current collection of experiments, as far as I know.
but our experimental results aren't that absolute.
Yet the end of your quote tantalizingly hints that you know of or possess experimental evidence that it is not. Care to share? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
But until one actually does win the prize, I hope you'll understand why I'm less than impressed if yet another gullible mark handwaves some vague "we don't know" as a reason to believe in bullshit woowoo.
Something you both may be missing, is that being a sweaty bag of water, your skin conductivity etc does in fact vary with emotional condition. Or at least it certainly directly varies with sweatyness. Which seems to be the whole basis of a lot of lie detector technology.
Oddly enough, both wooowoo aura reading and lie detection machinery require gullible people to believe in them for there to be any effect. Both are just as unscientific and mostly depend on acting/marketing techniques.
Graphene is made out of carbon, and last I checked, carbon isn't one of the Nobel elements.
Neither is dynamite (groan).
Think of the good P.R. ole Alfred Nobel has gotten for decades now out of his little donation. You'd think some rich computer industry MBA would get with the program, and set up an annual award for the wittiest and most intelligent slashdot poster with a nickname beginning in V and ending in M...
Magnetic fields don't induce a current, a changing field (or moving through a field) does... if the magnetic field is a fixed one (I assume so but could easily be wrong) the minor movements of it floating around I'd imagine is unlikely to do much in a way that would trigger currents through nerves.
Frogger's center of gravity might/must remain motionless to float statically, but unless frogger is dead, its gonna wiggle in the field.
Sort of like when I swim, my center of gravity remains at a vaguely constant distance from the waters surface, but my extremities are a wrigglin. Same situation with laying on top of a waterbed, or so I'm told.
While it is true that China manages to produce these cheaply at the moment, rare earth elements are available basically all over the place in similar proportions.
Correction, China produces zinc cheaply at the moment. Mostly due to complete lack of environmental regulation.
The situation with indium is weird. If you scooped up a random perfectly mixed shovel full of global average earth crust, its 3x as high concentration as silver, which sounds GREAT. However, unlike silver, it never really accumulates anywhere. The current best source is some of the residue of zinc ore production, where its a spectacular 50 ppm, about 200x more concentrated than average crust composition. Silver sometimes is dug out of the ground in nuggets of more or less pure silver, which is a factor of a million more concentrated than average, plus or minus an order of magnitude. Thats why we have mines for silver, but no mines for indium.
So indium is freaking everywhere, all over, at a very low level. Last I heard, it wanders around a tenth of gold price. You could get about ten oz of indium per thousand tons of "average crust"... At roughly current indium prices thats about a thousand bucks revenue for processing about a thousand tons of dirt. A buck a ton isn't going to do it, even with slave labor in China. But what if the price went up to, say, platinum prices? Thats $20K revenue for a thousand tons of dirt, or $20 per ton. I'm thinking $20/ton is economically viable, maybe even in the USA...
If you happen to be outside the niche but are otherwise interested, is it your fault for not being able to see past it, or their fault for putting that in your way?
The offensive-ness that I'm referring to in the advertising is not some sort of anti- multicultural overreaction against the chosen customers of vmobile or jitterbug, but the offensiveness of the whole market situation of assuming an "average dude" desperately wants to be screwed over, but if you're in some little subculture maybe you might not want to be screwed over, oh but you'd only want to be treated fairly if you're not a middle aged white dude, gotta be some other group.
It would be like an ad assuming that "average people" enjoy smashing their skulls with dropped sledgehammers, but we sell a universal fit commodity construction dude hard hat, and ONLY if you're a recent south east asian immigrant you might want to buy our hard hat to protect your skull (and the rest of you can just suffer). Why can't I want the same good deal?
Assuming an infinite supply of maneuvering thruster fuel, infinitely long lived electronics, infinite RTG half life, infinite radiation shielding, etc.
Also theres some lovely and interesting theoretical orbits that unfortunately involve passing beneath the "surface" of the sun or the gas giants. Admittedly surface is a vague concept, but if you have to use aerobraking calculations you're probably doing it wrong since you're turning valuable velocity into heat. Or would be a perfect slingshot around Mars except for the bad luck of impacting Deimos, etc.
Proving that all "relevant" moons and asteroids will not affect the orbit is the hard part, given how many there are.
it is my understanding that this is *not* a purely computer solvable problem
since there is no obvious "best trajectory" for many deep space missions
It is computer solvable but there are two problems:
1) The ancient GIGO garbage in garbage out problem... Without a full description including solar sail effects, differential outgassing, etc, you can be pretty far off. Read up on the pioneer anomaly, not specifically for that anomaly but to see what all has to be included... lightwave IR radiation pressure from the hot parts of the spacecraft, drag from the solar wind, etc. All at best semi-predictable.
2) Overly simplistic model. "best trajectory" will be different for every vehicle design. One that cannot survive severe electrical conditions can't aerobrake against Jupiter no matter how much fuel it might save. One that would roast itself to death inside earths orbit can't slingshot around Venus. If the RTG dies "too much" or ancient TWT microwave amplifiers would expire, a 20 year looping path isn't going to work. If you blow on average 10% of your attitude thruster fuel per year, taking more than a decade isn't going to work. Same for radiation exposure, heck for imaging probes they usually have a calibration target to tune the pics and the calibration target paint might fade. Etc etc etc.
However, like the wildly popular Do Not Call registry and a voluntary program for direct mail, these do reduce the annoyance level a bit, because there are advertisers with scruples. The equivalent in the world of phone marketing is that the almost nightly "Do you want to change your long distance carrier?" calls have been replaced by maybe monthly calls from "Cardholder Services" and other obvious scam artists. While not perfect, it's definitely an improvement.
Terrible analogy. What you're proposing is much more like giving your CC information to the "cardholder services" scammers, and if it turns out they're legit, they'll leave you alone.
I know a lot of people call that kind of thing a 'disease' but that term implies a virus, bacteria, or other etc external agent (even the government spraying Agent Orange) came along and caused it.
Actually no. Historically "dis ease" as in lack of ease, or discomfort. Which would seem to apply to heart failure. Every modern definition applies either at one end to a unique set of symptoms, or any unique pathological condition resulting in those symptoms.
Its like arguing that people often talk about species of insects, therefore they can't talk about species of bacteria.
Just generate a history of horrifically devient behavior and they'll take you out of the system out of sheer shame by association. Start by googling zucchini and lubrication.
Marketing people are much dumber that us computer people, and generally don't even know it.
I tried something similar a decade ago with a relative and one of those "free dialup internet email" providers, you know, you fill out a questionnaire, they let you dial in for free for email and also spam the unholy hell out of you. They spammed her with the union of the sets of her interests, not the intersection of the sets of her interests.
You'll almost certainly end up with zucchini cookbooks, and ten cent off coupons for quarts of 5w30. Nothing nearly as interesting as you'd see on google images for the query.
I'm sure this won't be abused at all by the more unscrupulous types of advertisers. You know, those who get paid by the click or the ones trying to distribute malware.
"abused"? That might literally be the only time these things are actually used, at all...
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly can't think of anything more useless than an OS that will not work if you don't have an internet connection.
Humorously, you posted that in an article about the ipad, since its arrival mine has never been out of range of my wifi router. Apple also sells a 3G model that is always "in range" of the internet.
these are universities, the organisations that have traditionally been at the forefront of IT.
Forefront of IT? Never. Utterly never. Well, maybe back in the 60s or something. Version control, whats that? No software development methodologies taught that were not in commercial use before the prof went to school. True, we don't have any data warehousing or cloud computing or virtual machine lab or classes, but we do have a great two semester COBOL curriculum. I am, unfortunately, speaking from recent personal experience here.
Forefront of CS? Always. Knuth. Need I say more?
And "the schools webserver" moved out of the CS research department into the corporate IT support department about a decade ago.
I wonder how they found out that the length of the passphrase is 50 characters. Did he brag to the authorities? Was there some way of detecting the length of the passphrase when they looked at the encrypted key?
Audio recording of him at the keyboard, each time containing 50 key clicks?
Just that the looms didn't do any math doesn't mean they weren't a a programmable device. Surely realizing that a programmable mechanical machine can be built is one of the steps on the way of figuring out how to make a machine that can solve arbitrary problems.
The looms are about as programmable as a hydraulic tracing lathe... My mother was interested in looms although not enough to buy something like a full jacquard-style loom, so my info is based on limited personal experience and lots of second hand discussion. People with no experience with those looms, sometimes overestimate the looms ability... Trust me its not like they were writing C# code on those panels, or they ran them thru a compiler or something... Even modern machine tool G-code is staggeringly more advanced and most people will not lower themselves to calling G-code "programming".
And can it be a complete coincidence that Babbage decided to use the same storage medium?
Well, frankly, yeah, at that stage of technology it is the only possible solution. So any working solution must be identical, more or less, to all the other working solutions. No mass storage devices from our post-punchcard era had yet been invented...
Hrm, any radio astronomers out there? How hard would it be to rig up a poor man's directional radio antenna powerful enough to send a clear signal to that planet?
Check out J.D. Kraus "Radio Astronomy" from your nearest library or pdf sharing website.
Its towards the end. You'll be disappointed. Its one of those situations where if you have to ask how difficult or expensive, then trust me, its way too difficult or expensive for you. On the other hand, its possibly within the range of major university program or maybe a religious cult.
You'll see modulation (or lack thereof) plays a big part, along with adsorption issues.
To a ridiculously crude first approximation, take a planetary radar, and maybe multiply its range by 10 since you get a factor of 2 by not bouncing back and at least a factor of five because you're not relying on reflectivity. So, planets in our solar system are no problemo, but alpha centauri would be quite a noteworthy achievement.
Is there a big market for pirated Seimens PLCs?
You know, the Chinese business plan where they run off extra copies after the assembly line closes, and sell them for pure profit? Also the move where they change virtually nothing but the name and start selling it as a generic model at Walmart / Harbor Freight / etc?
Maybe it was an attempt to "get" the infringing Chinese devices that got a little out of control and got the real ones too?
Actually, that brings up a question--when they transmit these messages, do they lead the target, aiming for where it should be in 40 years, or just blanket the system?
I do some microwave RF work. The two words you don't know to google for are "proper motion" and "beamwidth". I think you have either vastly overestimated the "proper motion" of the nearby stars, which tops out around 10 seconds of arc per year, or vastly underestimated the beamwidth of our antennaes, which maxes out around that on our largest scopes at their highed frequencies. Effelsberg class radio telescopes are not exactly a dime a dozen and using their highest RF frequency is not necessarily a great idea due to adsorption issues both in our atmosphere and interstellar media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_motion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effelsberg_100-m_Radio_Telescope
But its still a good first approximation that the best radio telescopes in the world are just barely at the level where their beamwidth is relevant to proper motion problems. Just barely....
Hell, military aircraft top speeds are falling off. The Mach 2.5-3+ aircraft like SR-71, MiG-25, MiG-31, XB-70 just aren't being built anymore.
Attention shifted from making faster aircraft to making faster missiles.
Chart A/A A/S and S/A missile performance, both speed and range (and to a lesser extent, payload).
It's a stylistic change to put your performance in missiles instead of planes, its not like aerodynamic knowledge of flying fast is being lost.
Whose designs did he build on?
No ones. There will be ten posts listing jacquard looms, none of which do arithmetic or control flow beyond making a big ole loop.
There will be a couple posts about theoretical ideas that were eventually implemented in IBMs unit record punch card data processing gear. It only took half a century to implement his ideas in that regard.
Several others: Transistors, Fire, Radio, Electricity, Walkman
FPGA field programmable gate arrays
How about most of the biological sciences / genetics?
NMR/MRI
I agree that, according to our current understanding, speed of light seems absolute enough
Also according to our current collection of experiments, as far as I know.
but our experimental results aren't that absolute.
Yet the end of your quote tantalizingly hints that you know of or possess experimental evidence that it is not. Care to share? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Forum spammer sues vigilante, gets both arrested. Vigilante does more time.
I'm guessing a jury trial might provide different results.
But until one actually does win the prize, I hope you'll understand why I'm less than impressed if yet another gullible mark handwaves some vague "we don't know" as a reason to believe in bullshit woowoo.
Something you both may be missing, is that being a sweaty bag of water, your skin conductivity etc does in fact vary with emotional condition. Or at least it certainly directly varies with sweatyness. Which seems to be the whole basis of a lot of lie detector technology.
Oddly enough, both wooowoo aura reading and lie detection machinery require gullible people to believe in them for there to be any effect. Both are just as unscientific and mostly depend on acting/marketing techniques.
Graphene is made out of carbon, and last I checked, carbon isn't one of the Nobel elements.
Neither is dynamite (groan).
Think of the good P.R. ole Alfred Nobel has gotten for decades now out of his little donation. You'd think some rich computer industry MBA would get with the program, and set up an annual award for the wittiest and most intelligent slashdot poster with a nickname beginning in V and ending in M...
Magnetic fields don't induce a current, a changing field (or moving through a field) does... if the magnetic field is a fixed one (I assume so but could easily be wrong) the minor movements of it floating around I'd imagine is unlikely to do much in a way that would trigger currents through nerves.
Frogger's center of gravity might/must remain motionless to float statically, but unless frogger is dead, its gonna wiggle in the field.
Sort of like when I swim, my center of gravity remains at a vaguely constant distance from the waters surface, but my extremities are a wrigglin. Same situation with laying on top of a waterbed, or so I'm told.
While it is true that China manages to produce these cheaply at the moment, rare earth elements are available basically all over the place in similar proportions.
Correction, China produces zinc cheaply at the moment. Mostly due to complete lack of environmental regulation.
The situation with indium is weird. If you scooped up a random perfectly mixed shovel full of global average earth crust, its 3x as high concentration as silver, which sounds GREAT. However, unlike silver, it never really accumulates anywhere. The current best source is some of the residue of zinc ore production, where its a spectacular 50 ppm, about 200x more concentrated than average crust composition. Silver sometimes is dug out of the ground in nuggets of more or less pure silver, which is a factor of a million more concentrated than average, plus or minus an order of magnitude. Thats why we have mines for silver, but no mines for indium.
So indium is freaking everywhere, all over, at a very low level. Last I heard, it wanders around a tenth of gold price. You could get about ten oz of indium per thousand tons of "average crust"... At roughly current indium prices thats about a thousand bucks revenue for processing about a thousand tons of dirt. A buck a ton isn't going to do it, even with slave labor in China. But what if the price went up to, say, platinum prices? Thats $20K revenue for a thousand tons of dirt, or $20 per ton. I'm thinking $20/ton is economically viable, maybe even in the USA...
If you happen to be outside the niche but are otherwise interested, is it your fault for not being able to see past it, or their fault for putting that in your way?
The offensive-ness that I'm referring to in the advertising is not some sort of anti- multicultural overreaction against the chosen customers of vmobile or jitterbug, but the offensiveness of the whole market situation of assuming an "average dude" desperately wants to be screwed over, but if you're in some little subculture maybe you might not want to be screwed over, oh but you'd only want to be treated fairly if you're not a middle aged white dude, gotta be some other group.
It would be like an ad assuming that "average people" enjoy smashing their skulls with dropped sledgehammers, but we sell a universal fit commodity construction dude hard hat, and ONLY if you're a recent south east asian immigrant you might want to buy our hard hat to protect your skull (and the rest of you can just suffer). Why can't I want the same good deal?
The optimal path might take a VERY long time.
Assuming an infinite supply of maneuvering thruster fuel, infinitely long lived electronics, infinite RTG half life, infinite radiation shielding, etc.
Also theres some lovely and interesting theoretical orbits that unfortunately involve passing beneath the "surface" of the sun or the gas giants. Admittedly surface is a vague concept, but if you have to use aerobraking calculations you're probably doing it wrong since you're turning valuable velocity into heat. Or would be a perfect slingshot around Mars except for the bad luck of impacting Deimos, etc.
Proving that all "relevant" moons and asteroids will not affect the orbit is the hard part, given how many there are.
it is my understanding that this is *not* a purely computer solvable problem
since there is no obvious "best trajectory" for many deep space missions
It is computer solvable but there are two problems:
1) The ancient GIGO garbage in garbage out problem... Without a full description including solar sail effects, differential outgassing, etc, you can be pretty far off. Read up on the pioneer anomaly, not specifically for that anomaly but to see what all has to be included... lightwave IR radiation pressure from the hot parts of the spacecraft, drag from the solar wind, etc. All at best semi-predictable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly
2) Overly simplistic model. "best trajectory" will be different for every vehicle design. One that cannot survive severe electrical conditions can't aerobrake against Jupiter no matter how much fuel it might save. One that would roast itself to death inside earths orbit can't slingshot around Venus. If the RTG dies "too much" or ancient TWT microwave amplifiers would expire, a 20 year looping path isn't going to work. If you blow on average 10% of your attitude thruster fuel per year, taking more than a decade isn't going to work. Same for radiation exposure, heck for imaging probes they usually have a calibration target to tune the pics and the calibration target paint might fade. Etc etc etc.
does not mean that it was not considered.
Then how did you get it so wrong or at least out of date?
However, like the wildly popular Do Not Call registry and a voluntary program for direct mail, these do reduce the annoyance level a bit, because there are advertisers with scruples. The equivalent in the world of phone marketing is that the almost nightly "Do you want to change your long distance carrier?" calls have been replaced by maybe monthly calls from "Cardholder Services" and other obvious scam artists. While not perfect, it's definitely an improvement.
Terrible analogy. What you're proposing is much more like giving your CC information to the "cardholder services" scammers, and if it turns out they're legit, they'll leave you alone.
"Implanted an artificial heart" somehow got translated into "Transplanted a robot heart" ?
I know a lot of people call that kind of thing a 'disease' but that term implies a virus, bacteria, or other etc external agent (even the government spraying Agent Orange) came along and caused it.
Actually no. Historically "dis ease" as in lack of ease, or discomfort. Which would seem to apply to heart failure. Every modern definition applies either at one end to a unique set of symptoms, or any unique pathological condition resulting in those symptoms.
Its like arguing that people often talk about species of insects, therefore they can't talk about species of bacteria.
Just generate a history of horrifically devient behavior and they'll take you out of the system out of sheer shame by association. Start by googling zucchini and lubrication.
Marketing people are much dumber that us computer people, and generally don't even know it.
I tried something similar a decade ago with a relative and one of those "free dialup internet email" providers, you know, you fill out a questionnaire, they let you dial in for free for email and also spam the unholy hell out of you. They spammed her with the union of the sets of her interests, not the intersection of the sets of her interests.
You'll almost certainly end up with zucchini cookbooks, and ten cent off coupons for quarts of 5w30. Nothing nearly as interesting as you'd see on google images for the query.
I'm sure this won't be abused at all by the more unscrupulous types of advertisers. You know, those who get paid by the click or the ones trying to distribute malware.
"abused"? That might literally be the only time these things are actually used, at all...