Hard disks used to be sold by the raw megabyte, the number of bits, including ones you never benefit from, like the sector marks, lead-in sync bytes, CRC bytes, spare tracks, and landing zones.
Cars have speedometers that go up to 120 or even 180 MPH. Lotsa luck trying to drive at that speed on those tires.
A goodly percentage of men and women have surgically-enhanced bodies, and lousy personalities.
Why should ISP's be any different?
Obligatory technical note: actual transfer rates can be as low as 1/3 the theoretical without anybody being to blame. There's unavoidable overhead in both bits and time.
$413 sounds a bit pricey, but then I thought back to my fiurst disk srive,
a DEC DF-32. Only 32,768 12-bit words!
Price I don't know, definitely no less than $5000 of 1972 dollars.
That's about 78 bits per dollar.
This new disk is about 14634146341.463414634146341463415 bits per dollar
that's an improvement of about 187 million times .
but wait those old dolalrs were at least 4 times more studly than today's, so that's about 600 million times better over the last 34 years.
An annual rate of about 183% !
It's just swell to work in a lab, but you should occasionally read a newspaper or surf the internet.
Right now, nobody needs or wants any more U235, except for North Korea, Iran, and various splinter groups.
The US Govt has PILES of the stuff, as does the USSR. Plus many tons of Plutonium. All very expensive stuff, but worth less than zero.
There's more tons of U235 and Plutonium in all the unprocessed fuel elements that have outlived their usefulness in nuclear reactors. The stuff is so worthless it's being stored or buried, not put through a relatively cheap chemical reprocessing cycle to recover the U235 and Plutonium.
If we needed more U235, there are several multi-billion dollar separation plants in mothballs that one could restart with relatively little effort.
So this laser-enrichment, IF it can ever be gotten working on a large scale, is (a) a threat if rogue states and the Mafia get into it and (b) Will produce soemthing nobody needs, and (c) probably riskier and more expensive than just starting up the old plants.
It's very unlikely this development will 'cloak" anything.
Small matter of "index of refraction".
You'll note the picture in the article shows light rays hitting the object "head-on". What happens to rays that hit at an angle? Even if they exit at the same angle, are they exiting along the same axis, or displaced? The article doesnt say.
Also most substances have significant reflection at each air-substance boundary-- how will this device handle that issue?
Nice try, but still quite a long way from making an object "invisible".
Er, I hope MSoft has a bit more sense than that. An employee isnt all that generic. Your basic manager just might be able run as a underprivilidged user, but the maybe 30% of actual coders will have a hard time of it. Quite often system coders need lots of privilidge, like to install dll's and drivers in %systemroot%, run kernel debuggers, mess with the registry etc....
Plus as others have noted, the Windows security "model", is less like Jessica Alba and more like Herman Munster. The choice has always been, do we delay the next release, or do we clean up all the security misfeatures, rough edges, questionable defaults? Ballmer always says "Ship it".
In the old days, you'd hire a window washer to drill a little hole in a window frame and insert a tiny microphone, with a camoflauged lead running to the building next door, where a front company would have a front room of cute typists and a back room of guys with earphones and tape recorders. And a back door to scram out thru if the KGB started pounding on the front door. Cheap, effective, and semi-deniable when found out.
NOW the "Get Smart" guys build a "secret room" right in the bleepin Ma Bell building! And said room is of course (a) On the building plans, in duplicatre. (b) Known to everybody, as they're not allowed to go in there. (c) Uses scads of bulky and hot, and easily-identifiable off-the-rack equipment.
The fine inventor should try to *think* before inventing. A few quibbles:
As many have noted, a loonball passanger with a D-Cell and a paper-clip can make enough sparks to block most radio signals. Crash.
The control wires are already really thin, not much weight or cost to be saved there.
Most actuators are either electrical or hydraulic. For either one you already need a relatively thick hydraulic tube or thick power wire. Adding another contol wire is not a noticeable increment.
For actuators in the wings, it's unlikely that a radio signal is going to reach in there. You see aluminum blocks radio waves really well.
Planes routinely have to flty through other plane's weather radar emanations-- microwave pulses in the upper tens of kilowatts. Have you ever tried designing a receiver that could ignore many nearby kilowatts?
What happens at Kennedy Airport where you have several hundred planes in close proximity? Does Delta 23's pilot end up steering Air Ubongio 44?
IIRC when Bell Labs was experimenting with microwaves, circa 1939, they noticed their signals were a LOT weaker when the weather was humid.
So much so, that when they rolled out microwave telephone relay towers, circa 1950, they intentionally boosted the transmitted signal by some 20db (that's 100 times) more than necessary on a dry day, just to allow the signals to still get through during damp or fog or rain.
So this isnt even old news, it's going on 68 years!
I've worked alongside PhD's all my life. Just because someone has a PhD in field U doesnt mean he knows squat about field V. Just because someone runs business X doesnt mean he's competent in field Y. And a good 33% of the PhD's I've met have forgotten most everything they ever learned, or have no common sense.
As just one example, this EE PhD brought his stereo in for repair-- "No left channel". I glanced at it and told him: "You have the balance control all the way to the right". The expression on his face was precious.
>he first gets the car up to 90 miles an hour....
That's still less than 20% of the speed of the exhaust gases. So the car is going to accelerate with about 20% of the potential exhaust energy, which itself is incidental.
A *cool* idea, but mighty inefficient.
Nice project, but the article glosses over a few major problems with this idea:
This is a turboshaft engine. That means it puts out its intended power out a shaft, any thrust out the back is just incidental.. But in the VW installation, there's no way to couple this power to the wheels, so the 1,400 horsepower is just wasted.
A jet engine's thrust is least efficient at low speeds. Lots of velocity in the exhaust, but that's mostly wasted at anything less than jet plane speeds. The acceleration of this thing is unspecified, but I'd guess not much more than a fraction of a G.
Most of these older jet engines take a very looong time to reach 100% power, something like 20-35 seconds. Not suitable for impressive jack-rabbit-like starts. You'd basically have to jam on the brakes, hit the accelerator, and --wait-- 30 seconds for the power to build up. Not very impressive.
There's, ahem, a big safety problem for bystanders-- these early engines were not rated to contain their blades if something bad happens. if the engine intake ingests a small rock or loose bolt, the thing could disassemble in a hurry, with white-hot pieces of turbine blades heading out in all directions. Not a healthy environment to be standing around!
The rotational momentum of 10 compressor and one power turbine sections is going to be significant, and not in a good way. This car probably needs a very flat aqnd level and straight highway. Any bump is going to cause all kinds of gyroscopic precession around the center and axis of momentum, which is NOT a good thing.
This is a particularly ridiculous idea. Let's do the math, making wildly optimistic assumptions:
We'll store the energy in car batteries, about the cheapest $/watt storage medium.
The batteries will last forever.
Off peak power costs half as much as peak power
Using those assumptions, slet's see what we get:
A typical lead-acid car battery might be good for 50 amp-hours, that's 600 watt-hours, let's assume 20% conversion loss each way, so it's about 0.4 kilowatt-hour per car battery.
Let's say you have TWENTY FIVE car batteries in this device, mighty heavy, but doable. That means you can store 10 kilowatt-hours. At typical electricity rates, 8 cents off-peak, that's about 80 cents you can buy, which will displace $1.60 of peak-time power. If we assume one peak/off-peak cycle per day, we're saving 80 cents a day. Over a year, that's about $300 saved per year. Hmmm, not too shabby...
EXCEPT you're already out $10 grand. If you'd kept that in a bank, getting interest, you'd have made $300 to $400.
AND in the real-world, batteries can only stand a few hundred charge-discharge cycles. Typically you'd have to replace the batteries every year, at a cost of $1000 to $2000 for twenty-five of them.
So this idea isnt terribly practical. You're tying up $10 grand and still losing money every day.
Maybe sd should stop parrotting every dang fool thing Dvorak writes or says?
I suspect the coding effort in IE is about 3% of that invested in XP and Vista. Where does he get the $billions cost from? A web browser is a biggish program, but many lone hackers have written one in under one person/year.
So I'm interviewing around. Last month a big prestigious company calls me in for a scheduled 4 hours of interviews. Here's how it goes:
8 AM: I show up a world headquarters on time. I'm supposed to be interviewed by two programmers. One doesnt show up until 8:30. He has green spiked hair and looks very hungover (this was on a Tuesday). The other guy never does show up. Mr green-hair desultory asks me some behavioral questions from a sheet. I answer with canned responses I'd rehearsed the previous night. He fills in about twelve boxes on a form with illegible squiggles.
9:AM Then an hour with a a HR person. Very general questions, a few behavioral ones too. More boxes to be filled in.
10AM: An hour with a medium-level programmer. More behavioral questions. "Please describe a time you had to give your manager bad news". "Please describe a time you had to do xxxxxx". Yawn.
11:AM: I must be going good, as they now bring in the manager. Same stuff. "What did you do when xxxxx". More yawns.
Go google on "behavioral interviews" to find several sets of typical questions. Try to think up plausible responses.
Not a single technical question for this very techy job! And I brushed up on Java/XML/UML/HTML too.
By the end of the torture sessions, I'd decided I probably didnt want to work for an organization so fouled up in red tape.
They apparently decided that of the EIGHT people they interviewed none was close enough to what they wanted. Sheesh.
Many multiple redundant layers of safety devices "designed in" were part of the problem.
Too many blinking warning lights,.
a computer that was running 22 minutes behind in printing out warning messages.
A main bleed valve that stuck, partly because it was based on a MILK FLOW CONTROL VALVE, and the designers didnt think that maybe hot high pressure radioactive water might not be as good a lubricant as butterfat-laden cool milk.
Fifteen out of sixteen radioactivity sensors inside the containment that failed.
A crew that didnt have a clue as to the most critical parameter-- the water level in the reactor.
A core that partially melted down, and nobody knew about it til years later.
It's a bit of a stretch to call this a "success story". More like a major monument to human fallibilities, wishful thinking, and greed.
Electrically heated windshields, propellers, etc... have been around for 70+ years.
Jet planes spend 95% of their flying time way above or below the icing levels.
Jet turbines have a virtually free and unlimited amount of hot air availbale for deicing.
It's not affordable to load down a plane with 100's of pounds of extra generators, batteries, and/or capacitors that are only needed in very rare and usally avoidable circumstances.
The planes that would need this the most, little prop planes that can't climb above icing, are also the ones that can least afford the weight penalty of this deicing system. Adding even 150 pounds to a small plane can make it a non-viable flying machine.
Even if you outfitted a small plane with wing de-icers, it would also need pro de-icers, which are either alcohol squirters or electrical heating elements, either of which are quite expensive to install and maintain.
Q: Oh hello Bondm be careful now, that table has a lot of expensive equipment on it.
Bond: Can I surf for some p0rn on this computer?
Q: Now Bond! Pay attention! That's your next target trainer. You just take this roll of duct-tape...
Bond: I know, and use it to tie the hands of Mr Moto's gal-pal tot he bedposts?
Q: No!
Bond: What other possible use could there be for this stuff??
Q: Oh Bond, you take a piece of it and, while sipping a Martini, (shaken, not stirred) with one hand, you surreptitiously slap the piece over the arch-vilian's computer's FAN.
Bond: Sigh, how prosaic!... Then do I tie up the bimbo?
Q: No, Bond, you make dashing small talk and repartee with the bad guy, while you pull this little floppy disk out of your pocket...
Bond: ANd sling it at his neck, decapitating him?
Q: No, you reboot the computer so it boots up from the floppy into unprotected mode, then AUTOEXEC.BAT copies our file to OVERHT.DLL. Then in a few minutes the computer overheats and the overheat interrupt calls out code! Brilliant work by my boffins I think!
Bond: Well, if I werent just as dumb as Sean Connery I'd wonder why you have the overheat handler do the dirty work, as our rebooting could have done the same thing.
Q: Now Bond, do yo think anybody would want this movie to be over by the first reel? There has to be omimous music, brooding shadows, knives in the back, and so on. We can never do the obvious things.... You should know that by now...
Bond: Sigh, you're right as usual Q. DLL patching it is.
Didnt read TFA: guilty as charged. But still the sd article was really way off.
>Um, they're making wires, not battery cells with the phage. The phage have exactly 0 volts of EMF and do not use any EMF to enter a cell. There's an intrinsic electrostatic charge on the phage that helps to attach to a cell but that is not EMF.
Sorry to be pedantic here, but yI think you can't have a charge without having EMF.
The diagrams of phages I've seen show a lunar-lander-like phage, with the leg's pads having the right charge (~emf) to stick to the cell membrane, and a drill-like probe in the center. Now biochemists are going to talk about the drill having enzymes to penetrate the cell wall. Chemists might go down one level and talk about the chemical valences at the end of the drill. Physicists might go down another level and discuss the electron energy levels of the chemicals.
> That's like saying the intrinsic +1 charge on a sodium atom makes it a battery.
You seem to be confusing valence and charge. They're two very different things.
>WTF are you talking about? Do you think that they would use a single cell to power a laptop?!
Guess I didnt make myself clear enough. When you get to things that small, the volume is VERY small, and the surface area of the contacts is not so small. Which leads to a terribly poor weight to power ratio. And a terrible self-discharge ratio. So even if you had a quintillion of these cells, you'd still have an extremely poor battery. We're talking many powers of ten poor.
Plating gold or other metals onto a virus is not new, not that difficult, and unlikely to ever be useful as a "battery". Many reasons:
Scientists have been depositing metal onto bilogical specimens for 60 years or so. (it's very useful for showing off contrast in electron-micrographs).
A "battery" is a bunch of somethings. In common usage, a bunch of electrochemical generators. A electrochemical battery is made up of electrochemical "cells". These guys are plating metal onto viruses, which are, strictly defined, a type of "cell", So they're making CELLS, not batteries.
Putting wires onto a microscopic electrochemical CELL is wildly unuseful, for oh so many reasons:
A virus is unlikely to have more than a millivolt of EMF from end to end.
A virus isnt designed to be a good EMF generator, so its amps and volts will be extremely miniscule.
The power available goes down as the third power of the linear dimensions. A virus has about the smallest linear dimension of just about anything. When you take about the smallest number one can imagine, and cube it, you get a breathtakingly small number. That's the watt-hour capacity of a virus, down in the microwatt-microsecond range. Just stunningly small.
The leakage from terminal to terminal of a electrochemical cell goes down as the first and second powers of the linear dimensions, while as mentioned above, the power capability goes down as the CUBE. Long before you get down to the size of a virus, the leakage dwarfs the power capacity-- in other words the cell "runs down" almost immediately.
Viruses use their EMF as a large part of their tools for invading a cell. If you plate a virus, it probably loses that ability, so it's not going to be able to grow or replicate.
Thats about all the objections for now. Hope that's enough.
Slashdot Mirror
- They may be distributing one-time pads or keys.
- They might be sending gibberish-- just to keep the other side's cryptanalysts too busy to work on the real messages.
- hey might be sending gibberish-- just to keep the frequency squatted on so other pirates don't squat on it.
Lots of possibilities that don't involve actual messages.Cars have speedometers that go up to 120 or even 180 MPH. Lotsa luck trying to drive at that speed on those tires.
A goodly percentage of men and women have surgically-enhanced bodies, and lousy personalities.
Why should ISP's be any different?
Obligatory technical note: actual transfer rates can be as low as 1/3 the theoretical without anybody being to blame. There's unavoidable overhead in both bits and time.
Price I don't know, definitely no less than $5000 of 1972 dollars. That's about 78 bits per dollar.
This new disk is about 14634146341.463414634146341463415 bits per dollar that's an improvement of about 187 million times .
but wait those old dolalrs were at least 4 times more studly than today's, so that's about 600 million times better over the last 34 years. An annual rate of about 183% !
Right now, nobody needs or wants any more U235, except for North Korea, Iran, and various splinter groups.
The US Govt has PILES of the stuff, as does the USSR. Plus many tons of Plutonium. All very expensive stuff, but worth less than zero.
There's more tons of U235 and Plutonium in all the unprocessed fuel elements that have outlived their usefulness in nuclear reactors. The stuff is so worthless it's being stored or buried, not put through a relatively cheap chemical reprocessing cycle to recover the U235 and Plutonium.
If we needed more U235, there are several multi-billion dollar separation plants in mothballs that one could restart with relatively little effort.
So this laser-enrichment, IF it can ever be gotten working on a large scale, is (a) a threat if rogue states and the Mafia get into it and (b) Will produce soemthing nobody needs, and (c) probably riskier and more expensive than just starting up the old plants.
It's very unlikely this development will 'cloak" anything.
Small matter of "index of refraction".
You'll note the picture in the article shows light rays hitting the object "head-on". What happens to rays that hit at an angle? Even if they exit at the same angle, are they exiting along the same axis, or displaced? The article doesnt say.
Also most substances have significant reflection at each air-substance boundary-- how will this device handle that issue?
Nice try, but still quite a long way from making an object "invisible".
Plus as others have noted, the Windows security "model", is less like Jessica Alba and more like Herman Munster. The choice has always been, do we delay the next release, or do we clean up all the security misfeatures, rough edges, questionable defaults? Ballmer always says "Ship it".
NOW the "Get Smart" guys build a "secret room" right in the bleepin Ma Bell building! And said room is of course (a) On the building plans, in duplicatre. (b) Known to everybody, as they're not allowed to go in there. (c) Uses scads of bulky and hot, and easily-identifiable off-the-rack equipment.
Sheesh!
So much so, that when they rolled out microwave telephone relay towers, circa 1950, they intentionally boosted the transmitted signal by some 20db (that's 100 times) more than necessary on a dry day, just to allow the signals to still get through during damp or fog or rain.
So this isnt even old news, it's going on 68 years!
I've worked alongside PhD's all my life. Just because someone has a PhD in field U doesnt mean he knows squat about field V. Just because someone runs business X doesnt mean he's competent in field Y. And a good 33% of the PhD's I've met have forgotten most everything they ever learned, or have no common sense.
As just one example, this EE PhD brought his stereo in for repair-- "No left channel". I glanced at it and told him: "You have the balance control all the way to the right". The expression on his face was precious.
>he first gets the car up to 90 miles an hour....
That's still less than 20% of the speed of the exhaust gases. So the car is going to accelerate with about 20% of the potential exhaust energy, which itself is incidental. A *cool* idea, but mighty inefficient.
Using those assumptions, slet's see what we get:
A typical lead-acid car battery might be good for 50 amp-hours, that's 600 watt-hours, let's assume 20% conversion loss each way, so it's about 0.4 kilowatt-hour per car battery.
Let's say you have TWENTY FIVE car batteries in this device, mighty heavy, but doable. That means you can store 10 kilowatt-hours. At typical electricity rates, 8 cents off-peak, that's about 80 cents you can buy, which will displace $1.60 of peak-time power. If we assume one peak/off-peak cycle per day, we're saving 80 cents a day. Over a year, that's about $300 saved per year. Hmmm, not too shabby...
EXCEPT you're already out $10 grand. If you'd kept that in a bank, getting interest, you'd have made $300 to $400.
AND in the real-world, batteries can only stand a few hundred charge-discharge cycles. Typically you'd have to replace the batteries every year, at a cost of $1000 to $2000 for twenty-five of them.
So this idea isnt terribly practical. You're tying up $10 grand and still losing money every day.
I suspect the coding effort in IE is about 3% of that invested in XP and Vista. Where does he get the $billions cost from? A web browser is a biggish program, but many lone hackers have written one in under one person/year.
That's the way EVERYTHING in biochemistry works!
Go google on "behavioral interviews" to find several sets of typical questions. Try to think up plausible responses.
Not a single technical question for this very techy job! And I brushed up on Java/XML/UML/HTML too.
By the end of the torture sessions, I'd decided I probably didnt want to work for an organization so fouled up in red tape.
They apparently decided that of the EIGHT people they interviewed none was close enough to what they wanted. Sheesh.
On the other hand, if your company has 17% of the market, and everybody else has smaller pieces, then it's really really hard to grow.
Basic arithmetic.
Try reading the Kemeny report:
It's a bit of a stretch to call this a "success story". More like a major monument to human fallibilities, wishful thinking, and greed.
Was this article written by the nuke PR folks?
So many holes, so little time.....
Q: Oh hello Bondm be careful now, that table has a lot of expensive equipment on it. Bond: Can I surf for some p0rn on this computer? Q: Now Bond! Pay attention! That's your next target trainer. You just take this roll of duct-tape... Bond: I know, and use it to tie the hands of Mr Moto's gal-pal tot he bedposts? Q: No! Bond: What other possible use could there be for this stuff?? Q: Oh Bond, you take a piece of it and, while sipping a Martini, (shaken, not stirred) with one hand, you surreptitiously slap the piece over the arch-vilian's computer's FAN. Bond: Sigh, how prosaic! ... Then do I tie up the bimbo?
Q: No, Bond, you make dashing small talk and repartee with the bad guy, while you pull this little floppy disk out of your pocket...
Bond: ANd sling it at his neck, decapitating him?
Q: No, you reboot the computer so it boots up from the floppy into unprotected mode, then AUTOEXEC.BAT copies our file to OVERHT.DLL. Then in a few minutes the computer overheats and the overheat interrupt calls out code! Brilliant work by my boffins I think!
Bond: Well, if I werent just as dumb as Sean Connery I'd wonder why you have the overheat handler do the dirty work, as our rebooting could have done the same thing.
Q: Now Bond, do yo think anybody would want this movie to be over by the first reel? There has to be omimous music, brooding shadows, knives in the back, and so on. We can never do the obvious things.... You should know that by now...
Bond: Sigh, you're right as usual Q. DLL patching it is.
>Um, they're making wires, not battery cells with the phage. The phage have exactly 0 volts of EMF and do not use any EMF to enter a cell. There's an intrinsic electrostatic charge on the phage that helps to attach to a cell but that is not EMF.
Sorry to be pedantic here, but yI think you can't have a charge without having EMF.
The diagrams of phages I've seen show a lunar-lander-like phage, with the leg's pads having the right charge (~emf) to stick to the cell membrane, and a drill-like probe in the center. Now biochemists are going to talk about the drill having enzymes to penetrate the cell wall. Chemists might go down one level and talk about the chemical valences at the end of the drill. Physicists might go down another level and discuss the electron energy levels of the chemicals.
> That's like saying the intrinsic +1 charge on a sodium atom makes it a battery. You seem to be confusing valence and charge. They're two very different things.
>WTF are you talking about? Do you think that they would use a single cell to power a laptop?!
Guess I didnt make myself clear enough. When you get to things that small, the volume is VERY small, and the surface area of the contacts is not so small. Which leads to a terribly poor weight to power ratio. And a terrible self-discharge ratio. So even if you had a quintillion of these cells, you'd still have an extremely poor battery. We're talking many powers of ten poor.
Thats about all the objections for now. Hope that's enough.