A lot of flowers have UV markings that insects can see. He'll be able to determine which blooms have the best nectar reserves.
In WWII, UV lights were used to signal to boats offshore - they made sure to take someone who'd had their cataracts removed along, because it's the lens that filters out the UV light. In a similar vein, bomber crews liked to carry someone with red/green colour blindness, because they could see right through common forms of camouflage.
Who knows what UV light could show you... well, apart from bees.
Indeed, it's probably cleaner than your keyboard - your keyboard is not made of impervious porcelain and regularly flushed with copious amounts of water. It's made of attractively textured plastic (lots of little niches for bacteria to thrive) and regularly touched by human hands (lots of food for bacteria to eat, skin, grease, etc).
The flush toilet is a horrendously inefficient use of water anyway. 40% of our domestic water use is flushing the toilet, which is a staggering waste of potable water in an era where there is a shortage of water.
That would very much be my assessment of the Cherry key switches over the IBM buckling springs - the IBM is heavier, and louder, but the key sound is probably less irritating (even if people do comment about the machine gun noise on conference calls...)
In addition, they don't have the longevity of the IBM switches, the switches on my G80-3000 are slightly less reliable now. While I have confidence in my current keyboard lasting me a few more decades, I really wish I'd bought the other one from the same vendor while I could - it's all but impossible to get hold of genuine vintage UK-layout Model Ms now.
Anecdotal : my dear grey-haired mother used to be a legal secretary, so she would type most of the day for all of her professional career. When I saw that she was getting arthritis in her finger joints, as any good son would, I replaced the shitty generic standard-issue membrane keyboard that came with her office computer with a decent Cherry. Her arthritis improved significantly within weeks. (Both keyboards were non-ergonomic standard layout). When she retired, she took the keyboard with her and continues to use it even today.
The main problem with a membrane keyboard is a lack of positive feedback. You have to wait until a character appears on screen and your brain has processed this event to know whether you have successfully hit the key. For a fast typist, this is way to slow, so instead, they start to mash the keys harder than necessary in order to be sure of positive contact. Hence the finger joint arthritis.
With a mechanical keyswitch, there are two forms of positive feedback that you have successfully hit the key. First, there is the characteristic "click" sound. Secondly, there is the moment in the keystroke when the key switch "gives". This means that your finger can sense precisely how much effort is required to achieve positive contact, which means you only expend as much effort as necessary. In my humble opinion, ergonomic keyboards are a really stupid response to most typing RSI issues, and it's probably a better idea to get a keyboard with proper keyswitches - all the ergonomic boards I've touched still have the same shitty membrane switches.
The thing that got to me the most was her IT departments disgruntled response about having to install a new keyboard - "Why do you need a special keyboard?" (she shut them up by informing them her son was both a doctor and a computer professional). A professional typist (whether you're typing code, or legal papers) should use a professional keyboard. IBM understood this when they developed the Model M. It's a shame that we've lost that in the quest for cost savings..
Not so. You're thinking of the little green USB -> PS2 adapters like the ones that used to come with the MS Intellimouse, which were purely electrical because the PS/2 circuitry was in the mouse.
Why would any keyboard with a PS/2 plug on it (and without it's own USB plug) be able to output USB signals?
These little dongles contain a USB HID device for both mouse and keyboard and bridge the input from the PS/2 devices, as you describe. There are some concerns with a genuine old Model M because they draw a lot of current, and some of these adapters can't cope with it, but I've been lucky so far (my Model M is a '96, so it's a relatively late model, I suspect the keyboard controller is not as hungry).
I've got both a Cherry G80-3000 and a Model M hooked up to these adapters and both seem to be fine. The only downside is that you lose the N-key roll-over, and who uses that?
The Cherry is showing signs of age - some of the switches are getting a little unreliable. The Model M is still going strong, and looks like new after you strip it down and wash the casing and keycaps. I'd still buy another Cherry in a heartbeat - the Model M is just too loud to take into an open-plan office.
The only codec problems I have on Linux are where someone has created their own insane proprietary format for purposes of control - ie, they are actively trying not to have their media file read. This usually occurs in conjunction with web conferencing software.
It's true that you usually have install extra packages to get to this point, and a shame that the distro can't really encourage you to do this with a popup that says "now install the codec support we couldn't include because people invent this stuff so their media can be consumed and then... well, want to charge you for it.."
You could repost a cryptographically signed message still not be the original poster, unless the message was rewritten to include a declaration of where you were posting it.
As the percentage of auto-drive vehicles on the road increases, the effect on traffic flow will be good as well.
A lot of jams on the motorway are just because people have crappy feedback loops, and don't leave enough braking space, and this causes waves of braking to propagate back through the traffic, gathering magnitude, until you end up with a stop.
Auto-drive cars will both leave sufficient stopping space and given a means of communicating with each other, can brake in perfect synchrony, anticipate each others lane changing and turning manoeuvres, etc.
This will have more of an effect on fuel efficiency and the general throughput of the road network than anything else. The only downside to this is that it will become less easy to successfully argue that you should be working at home...
I'd imagine they are MUCH cheaper than current-generation cruise missiles to manufacture.
Cruise missiles carry a jet engine. A Tomahawk costs $600,000 for one round. While these have much lower speed and performance, you could pay for whole wings of them for that kind of money. Because they are aircraft, and not just missiles, you can have them loiter near the target, exploiting their much smaller radar cross section and thermal emissions for an almost immediate strike. You could have a whole range of yields and payloads lofted simultaneously. And you can return them to base for refuelling, so you only pay for the fuel and the drones you actually put into "terminal mode". And at the same time they can gather intel.
There was a guy in New Zealand who estimated that you could make a cruise missile for around $5,000 ; now there are entire online communities devoted to manufacturing UAVs and an industry to support them. The planting of anti-air missiles on the rooftops of London to "protect" the Olympic games was almost a laughing stock here in the office ; these missiles could do nothing about a "flying cluster bomb" composed of small-payload semi-autonomous UAVs.
Didn't you know, the entire industry is funded by multi-billionaire philanthropists? The only reason they insist on you buying tickets is so they can count how many peoples lives they are enriching.
You'd think the same about lottery tickets and cigarettes ; they're both expensive and detrimental, but it's the poor people who indulge in them the most, because the middle class folks tend to have the education to understand their bad side, and less of the angst that leads to their consumption.
One thing I never really agreed with in terms of the Star Trek's depiction of computers was that the alphanumeric keyboard was a goner.
How Scotty manages to rock the QWERTY in Star Trek IV, I don't know. Dictation is not a natural fit for everyone ; I can probably type far more efficiently than I can orate.
And while there are some nods to a "tactile interface" - presumably produced by forcefields in the control panels - the TNG / Okuda panels must be murderous for anyone who wants to be productive.
Enterprise and Voyager both acknowledged this to a degree by bringing back the analogue joystick for the helmsman.
The game only works if the machine knows what your password is, so that you can succeed at playing that sequence better.
Which reveals the flaw in the scheme ; currently, the computer you are logging into doesn't need to know your password - it stores a hash instead. With this scheme, the machine needs a way to recover your password as plaintext, so that it can test you on it. Which means that if you can sieze the system itself, you can get into it, you just need to extract the password and train someone else to know it.
It's probably better to prevent the global warming, on account of how it could potentially cause so many problems, disproportionately affecting the poverty stricken people who are most of the hunger problem in the first place. But because you can score so many political points by shrieking - "That guy wants people to STARVE!!!!" it's unlikely that any kind of rational choice between the two would be made.
Indeed. Support contracts give the private contractors a disproportionate amount of power.
I work for the UK National Health Service ; back when I was defining interoperability standards for medical records communication, I was revising the standard for GP (General, or Family Practitioner) health record communications. The messages were declared in terms of a common standard for interoperability. Somewhat naively, I specified that the messages should use the standard means to convey unknown information (the absence, and the reason for it's absence), rather than the "magic numbers" that were being used at the time. I was promptly told that I couldn't actually make things consistent with the standard, because to change those bits of the vendor system would, under the terms of the contract, result in a full system test, which was a chargeable item costing millions of pounds.
So they had nicely arranged things such that you couldn't promote interoperability (by using a well-defined standard available to all vendors), because you couldn't afford the work they would have to do in order to fix their system to follow the government-dictated standard which they had known they would have to use all along....
And we actually help them. I think the system testing clause is in there at the insistence of the government side ; when I was on the other side of the divide working for a private sector supplying an NHS hospital, I was told I couldn't fix bugs in our system because it would necessitate a full system test - even though I point-blank told them that this was NOT necessary because the component concerned was covered by rigorous unit tests. Instead, they rolled back the changes in their system that had broken ours (having been told not to change that aspect of the configuration in the first place).
Accumulo is an Apache 2.0 licensed extension of other OSS components - so there is no downside from the commercial side, apart from not being able to justify charging for it's cost of development. Which is what I suspect the problem is.
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? S R Hadden - Contact
If you're talking corn ethanol, I totally agree with you. It's probably more efficient to corn-feed a horse (dietary considerations notwithstanding).
Without numbers in front of me, I'd guess that biodiesel is probably more efficient than horses ; the engine alone is more efficient (~ 45%) than horse muscles (~ 25%), plus you don't have the overhead of "idling" a diesel engine 100% of the time to keep it useful.
Producing a horse will consume 10 times it's mass in biofuel just for starters ; the same ratio as for soy and beef. I'm not sure of the energy cost of producing the diesel engine, but I'd also guess it lasts longer, requires less maintenance, needs mucking out less frequently, and freaks out and kicks you in the head less often.
The horse probably has a better smell. And is more companionable.
Hemp can grow like a weed. That's the thing it can do better. In a situation where resources are scarce, that's a valuable property.
Of course, this runs counter to the "I want the best, and I want it now" mentality that we've all grown into, but I get the feeling we are all going to have to give that up at some point soon.
Secure boot is the first link the chain of a trusted OS.
Secure boot refuses to load a bootloader unless it's signed with a private key it trusts the public key for. This then refuses to load a kernel unless it's signed, and so on.
From there, it's presumed that all loaders may now refuse to load binaries that are not cryptographically signed with a key they trust. Since it's impossible to compromise a file without rendering it's signature invalid, you can now be certain that any given software component is untouched when you load it.
Windows has most of this already, by default Windows Vista and upward have refused to load unsigned drivers ; the weak link in the chain has always been the bootloader, which the BIOS would just load because it was there. A compromised bootloader can break the rest of the chain of trust by patching the kernel to ignore signatures.
Of course, the main question when you speak of a trusted OS is who the trust resides with - at the moment, it's Microsoft, and their trust is on behalf of their buddies in the content industries, who trust that Windows will refuse to load, for example, a unsigned display driver which has an extra feature that dumps the framebuffer to disk so you can make a digital copy of a BluRay, or a sound driver that has the "record what you hear" function (which used to be available).
If you can load keys for yourself, the trust becomes yours.
I think the context is that there are many individuals who have reached the level of emotional and sexual maturity to engage in consensual sexual activity, which the law still considers children. And even if both participants are in a loving relationship and entirely understand, and consent to the act, if either of them is below an arbitrary age limit set by the law, then legally speaking it becomes paedophilia.
RMS was just displaying the lack of guile and tendency to spell out the facts in black and white that are characteristic of many geeks ; but because he is more in the public eye, and because there are vested interests who want to see him dragged down, much more of a fuss was made of it than would be made about a few frat boys sitting around shooting off comments like "Hey dude, I'd totally hit that Miley Cyrus" (this conversation is happening a couple of years ago, in Kansas. Across the state line, in Nebraska, it's totally legal to bang Miley at this time).
Heaven forbid that people actually think or talk about the grey area that falls just outside the law. Isn't that far more healthy than the pervasive culture of sexualizing young girls way before they even understand it? Isn't any kind of discourse involving actually thinking about things more healthy than ESPN?
Indeed, Tony Blair concealed his religious leanings quite assiduously while in office, sometimes with the intervention of his director of Communications. In the UK, someone who openly made state decisions based on religious reasoning would be ridiculed in the popular satirical comedy press, and probably regarded as being "a bit barmy" by everyone else.
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A lot of flowers have UV markings that insects can see. He'll be able to determine which blooms have the best nectar reserves.
In WWII, UV lights were used to signal to boats offshore - they made sure to take someone who'd had their cataracts removed along, because it's the lens that filters out the UV light. In a similar vein, bomber crews liked to carry someone with red/green colour blindness, because they could see right through common forms of camouflage.
Who knows what UV light could show you... well, apart from bees.
Indeed, it's probably cleaner than your keyboard - your keyboard is not made of impervious porcelain and regularly flushed with copious amounts of water. It's made of attractively textured plastic (lots of little niches for bacteria to thrive) and regularly touched by human hands (lots of food for bacteria to eat, skin, grease, etc).
The flush toilet is a horrendously inefficient use of water anyway. 40% of our domestic water use is flushing the toilet, which is a staggering waste of potable water in an era where there is a shortage of water.
That would very much be my assessment of the Cherry key switches over the IBM buckling springs - the IBM is heavier, and louder, but the key sound is probably less irritating (even if people do comment about the machine gun noise on conference calls...)
In addition, they don't have the longevity of the IBM switches, the switches on my G80-3000 are slightly less reliable now. While I have confidence in my current keyboard lasting me a few more decades, I really wish I'd bought the other one from the same vendor while I could - it's all but impossible to get hold of genuine vintage UK-layout Model Ms now.
The mechanical keyswitches are better to type on.
Anecdotal : my dear grey-haired mother used to be a legal secretary, so she would type most of the day for all of her professional career. When I saw that she was getting arthritis in her finger joints, as any good son would, I replaced the shitty generic standard-issue membrane keyboard that came with her office computer with a decent Cherry. Her arthritis improved significantly within weeks. (Both keyboards were non-ergonomic standard layout). When she retired, she took the keyboard with her and continues to use it even today.
The main problem with a membrane keyboard is a lack of positive feedback. You have to wait until a character appears on screen and your brain has processed this event to know whether you have successfully hit the key. For a fast typist, this is way to slow, so instead, they start to mash the keys harder than necessary in order to be sure of positive contact. Hence the finger joint arthritis.
With a mechanical keyswitch, there are two forms of positive feedback that you have successfully hit the key. First, there is the characteristic "click" sound. Secondly, there is the moment in the keystroke when the key switch "gives". This means that your finger can sense precisely how much effort is required to achieve positive contact, which means you only expend as much effort as necessary. In my humble opinion, ergonomic keyboards are a really stupid response to most typing RSI issues, and it's probably a better idea to get a keyboard with proper keyswitches - all the ergonomic boards I've touched still have the same shitty membrane switches.
The thing that got to me the most was her IT departments disgruntled response about having to install a new keyboard - "Why do you need a special keyboard?" (she shut them up by informing them her son was both a doctor and a computer professional). A professional typist (whether you're typing code, or legal papers) should use a professional keyboard. IBM understood this when they developed the Model M. It's a shame that we've lost that in the quest for cost savings..
Not so. You're thinking of the little green USB -> PS2 adapters like the ones that used to come with the MS Intellimouse, which were purely electrical because the PS/2 circuitry was in the mouse.
Why would any keyboard with a PS/2 plug on it (and without it's own USB plug) be able to output USB signals?
These little dongles contain a USB HID device for both mouse and keyboard and bridge the input from the PS/2 devices, as you describe. There are some concerns with a genuine old Model M because they draw a lot of current, and some of these adapters can't cope with it, but I've been lucky so far (my Model M is a '96, so it's a relatively late model, I suspect the keyboard controller is not as hungry).
I've got both a Cherry G80-3000 and a Model M hooked up to these adapters and both seem to be fine. The only downside is that you lose the N-key roll-over, and who uses that?
The Cherry is showing signs of age - some of the switches are getting a little unreliable. The Model M is still going strong, and looks like new after you strip it down and wash the casing and keycaps. I'd still buy another Cherry in a heartbeat - the Model M is just too loud to take into an open-plan office.
What if it's a video instructing you how to debug programs or plot graphs..?
The only codec problems I have on Linux are where someone has created their own insane proprietary format for purposes of control - ie, they are actively trying not to have their media file read. This usually occurs in conjunction with web conferencing software.
It's true that you usually have install extra packages to get to this point, and a shame that the distro can't really encourage you to do this with a popup that says "now install the codec support we couldn't include because people invent this stuff so their media can be consumed and then... well, want to charge you for it.."
You could repost a cryptographically signed message still not be the original poster, unless the message was rewritten to include a declaration of where you were posting it.
It's best not to check. If you check, even if you think you're in the clear, you can be sued for triple damages for knowing infringement.
As the percentage of auto-drive vehicles on the road increases, the effect on traffic flow will be good as well.
A lot of jams on the motorway are just because people have crappy feedback loops, and don't leave enough braking space, and this causes waves of braking to propagate back through the traffic, gathering magnitude, until you end up with a stop.
Auto-drive cars will both leave sufficient stopping space and given a means of communicating with each other, can brake in perfect synchrony, anticipate each others lane changing and turning manoeuvres, etc.
This will have more of an effect on fuel efficiency and the general throughput of the road network than anything else. The only downside to this is that it will become less easy to successfully argue that you should be working at home...
I'd imagine they are MUCH cheaper than current-generation cruise missiles to manufacture.
Cruise missiles carry a jet engine. A Tomahawk costs $600,000 for one round. While these have much lower speed and performance, you could pay for whole wings of them for that kind of money. Because they are aircraft, and not just missiles, you can have them loiter near the target, exploiting their much smaller radar cross section and thermal emissions for an almost immediate strike. You could have a whole range of yields and payloads lofted simultaneously. And you can return them to base for refuelling, so you only pay for the fuel and the drones you actually put into "terminal mode". And at the same time they can gather intel.
There was a guy in New Zealand who estimated that you could make a cruise missile for around $5,000 ; now there are entire online communities devoted to manufacturing UAVs and an industry to support them. The planting of anti-air missiles on the rooftops of London to "protect" the Olympic games was almost a laughing stock here in the office ; these missiles could do nothing about a "flying cluster bomb" composed of small-payload semi-autonomous UAVs.
Duh - "The Avengers" lost money. Every film that Hollywood makes loses money. Especially the ones with the biggest box-office numbers.
Didn't you know, the entire industry is funded by multi-billionaire philanthropists? The only reason they insist on you buying tickets is so they can count how many peoples lives they are enriching.
You'd think the same about lottery tickets and cigarettes ; they're both expensive and detrimental, but it's the poor people who indulge in them the most, because the middle class folks tend to have the education to understand their bad side, and less of the angst that leads to their consumption.
One thing I never really agreed with in terms of the Star Trek's depiction of computers was that the alphanumeric keyboard was a goner.
How Scotty manages to rock the QWERTY in Star Trek IV, I don't know. Dictation is not a natural fit for everyone ; I can probably type far more efficiently than I can orate.
And while there are some nods to a "tactile interface" - presumably produced by forcefields in the control panels - the TNG / Okuda panels must be murderous for anyone who wants to be productive.
Enterprise and Voyager both acknowledged this to a degree by bringing back the analogue joystick for the helmsman.
Yeah, that way of life only works until the printers can make organs out of gene-tailored cell lines. We can already print simple things, like livers.
The odds are good that your only value will be as a source of fetal stem cells.
Hmm... charged conductors ... either side of a dielectric... sounds familiar...
The game only works if the machine knows what your password is, so that you can succeed at playing that sequence better.
Which reveals the flaw in the scheme ; currently, the computer you are logging into doesn't need to know your password - it stores a hash instead. With this scheme, the machine needs a way to recover your password as plaintext, so that it can test you on it. Which means that if you can sieze the system itself, you can get into it, you just need to extract the password and train someone else to know it.
Which is the better investment?
It's probably better to prevent the global warming, on account of how it could potentially cause so many problems, disproportionately affecting the poverty stricken people who are most of the hunger problem in the first place. But because you can score so many political points by shrieking - "That guy wants people to STARVE!!!!" it's unlikely that any kind of rational choice between the two would be made.
Let me clarify ; support contracts on closed-source implementations.
Indeed. Support contracts give the private contractors a disproportionate amount of power.
I work for the UK National Health Service ; back when I was defining interoperability standards for medical records communication, I was revising the standard for GP (General, or Family Practitioner) health record communications. The messages were declared in terms of a common standard for interoperability. Somewhat naively, I specified that the messages should use the standard means to convey unknown information (the absence, and the reason for it's absence), rather than the "magic numbers" that were being used at the time. I was promptly told that I couldn't actually make things consistent with the standard, because to change those bits of the vendor system would, under the terms of the contract, result in a full system test, which was a chargeable item costing millions of pounds.
So they had nicely arranged things such that you couldn't promote interoperability (by using a well-defined standard available to all vendors), because you couldn't afford the work they would have to do in order to fix their system to follow the government-dictated standard which they had known they would have to use all along ....
And we actually help them. I think the system testing clause is in there at the insistence of the government side ; when I was on the other side of the divide working for a private sector supplying an NHS hospital, I was told I couldn't fix bugs in our system because it would necessitate a full system test - even though I point-blank told them that this was NOT necessary because the component concerned was covered by rigorous unit tests. Instead, they rolled back the changes in their system that had broken ours (having been told not to change that aspect of the configuration in the first place).
Accumulo is an Apache 2.0 licensed extension of other OSS components - so there is no downside from the commercial side, apart from not being able to justify charging for it's cost of development. Which is what I suspect the problem is.
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? S R Hadden - Contact
Which biofuel though?
If you're talking corn ethanol, I totally agree with you. It's probably more efficient to corn-feed a horse (dietary considerations notwithstanding).
Without numbers in front of me, I'd guess that biodiesel is probably more efficient than horses ; the engine alone is more efficient (~ 45%) than horse muscles (~ 25%), plus you don't have the overhead of "idling" a diesel engine 100% of the time to keep it useful.
Producing a horse will consume 10 times it's mass in biofuel just for starters ; the same ratio as for soy and beef. I'm not sure of the energy cost of producing the diesel engine, but I'd also guess it lasts longer, requires less maintenance, needs mucking out less frequently, and freaks out and kicks you in the head less often.
The horse probably has a better smell. And is more companionable.
Hemp can grow like a weed. That's the thing it can do better. In a situation where resources are scarce, that's a valuable property.
Of course, this runs counter to the "I want the best, and I want it now" mentality that we've all grown into, but I get the feeling we are all going to have to give that up at some point soon.
Secure boot is the first link the chain of a trusted OS.
Secure boot refuses to load a bootloader unless it's signed with a private key it trusts the public key for. This then refuses to load a kernel unless it's signed, and so on.
From there, it's presumed that all loaders may now refuse to load binaries that are not cryptographically signed with a key they trust. Since it's impossible to compromise a file without rendering it's signature invalid, you can now be certain that any given software component is untouched when you load it.
Windows has most of this already, by default Windows Vista and upward have refused to load unsigned drivers ; the weak link in the chain has always been the bootloader, which the BIOS would just load because it was there. A compromised bootloader can break the rest of the chain of trust by patching the kernel to ignore signatures.
Of course, the main question when you speak of a trusted OS is who the trust resides with - at the moment, it's Microsoft, and their trust is on behalf of their buddies in the content industries, who trust that Windows will refuse to load, for example, a unsigned display driver which has an extra feature that dumps the framebuffer to disk so you can make a digital copy of a BluRay, or a sound driver that has the "record what you hear" function (which used to be available).
If you can load keys for yourself, the trust becomes yours.
I think the context is that there are many individuals who have reached the level of emotional and sexual maturity to engage in consensual sexual activity, which the law still considers children. And even if both participants are in a loving relationship and entirely understand, and consent to the act, if either of them is below an arbitrary age limit set by the law, then legally speaking it becomes paedophilia.
RMS was just displaying the lack of guile and tendency to spell out the facts in black and white that are characteristic of many geeks ; but because he is more in the public eye, and because there are vested interests who want to see him dragged down, much more of a fuss was made of it than would be made about a few frat boys sitting around shooting off comments like "Hey dude, I'd totally hit that Miley Cyrus" (this conversation is happening a couple of years ago, in Kansas. Across the state line, in Nebraska, it's totally legal to bang Miley at this time).
Heaven forbid that people actually think or talk about the grey area that falls just outside the law. Isn't that far more healthy than the pervasive culture of sexualizing young girls way before they even understand it? Isn't any kind of discourse involving actually thinking about things more healthy than ESPN?
Indeed, Tony Blair concealed his religious leanings quite assiduously while in office, sometimes with the intervention of his director of Communications. In the UK, someone who openly made state decisions based on religious reasoning would be ridiculed in the popular satirical comedy press, and probably regarded as being "a bit barmy" by everyone else.