Does anybody really think technology goes by stops and starts, synchronized with the calendar year? And that an industry with a heavy R&D invetment is just going to let all that infrastructure just sit idle?
It's more likely there's just a random lull in announcements. It takes years of research to develop each increase in drive capacity, then more time to develop th eindutrial processes to make all those drives reliably and cheaply.
As for progress, my first computer at work was a 3MB disk drive, size of 4 PC cases, dimmed the lights when it started up. Almost $22K in today's dollars.
I wouldnt say progress has been slow.
Sooo we, as nerds, are supposed to be happy that "Wall Street" is happy with MicroSoft? I don't think so.
Microsoft has never diverged from their emphasis on maximum cash extraction, minimum software quality.
Latest evidence: their spyware tool, allegedly Beta, with many user-interface infelicities such as three different ways to start scanning, installs itself as a startup item even if you command it not to, it irrevocably cancels a scan if you click on the upper-right hand text buttons, a "save settings" button that does nothing, and more. This is not a product from a company with any quality control.
It seems unlikely we've discovered the algorithm that will compare two scenes and not get fooled by different angles, perspectives, saturation, angle of sun, street lighting on/off, fog, rain, snowcover, traffic changes, etc....
It may be quite a few decades before it's cheaper to use a computer for this than to have a real human being look at the picture and go "hmmm, looks like a Asian scene, those mopeds look Laotian, and that guy has a bag from Taco Bell-- must be the capital!
No standard file listing format, so you have to be a human or very clever code to extract the file names.
Requests that get out of sync with replies.
Using separate connections for cmds and data, and random ones at that.
No directory transfer cmd.
Telnet:
The wonderfully flexible and broken option negotiations, which took several RFC's to describe the various race conditions therein, and the recommended kludges for avoiding or exiting same.
The various bizarre modes to support totally obsolete comm protocols.
The lack of recognition by the RFC's of ANSI or VT-100 formatting, both de-facto standards.
HTTP:
The bizarre decision to have the client speak first, as if the client wouldnt want to know what the server is capable of.
The bizarre and perhaps unwritten rules about what to do with missing HTTP/version info.
The AFAIK unwritten rules about what to do with partial push data.
Not HTTP, but the whole JavaScript mess. Undeclared variables, a good thing?
So FOUR out of HUNDREDS of studies have found "some correlation".
To my mind, that proves that there is NO correlation.
-------------
For those of you that don't get it, let's do a thought experiment. Let's say 100 researchers do independent studies of tumor incidence versus shoe color. Let's assume they don't have any bias either way, either intentional or not.
A certain percentage are going to find some correlation, just due to the laws of statistics. Just a guess, but I suspect at least 4% will find some correlation.
Repeat the same study this time comparing against underwear color, and probably another 4% correlation.
As you can see, 4% doesnt mean ANYTHING. Except maybe the opposite of what you were investigating.
This statement seems meaningless unless IBM has been on a crusade to inspect Open Source Software for infringement and has been asking for royalties from infringing parties.
But they probably realized long ago that this would be a bad or impossible thing to do.
So stating that they're not going to sue in the future, when they havent in the past, doesnt seem to change anything much.
Apparently they're not interested in bringing pirates into the MS fold, it only runs on "authorized" installations. Hmmm..
It asks me if I want it to run at 2 AM, I click "no", then later it reports it's set to run at 2AM. Hmmm....
I click on Manage 2AM runs, and I see no option to turn them off. If you deselect all runs, it complains that you havent selected any runs. Hmmm...
Screen is a dog's breakfast:
non standard panel borders that trail off, looking like a bad screen update.
The app name appears several times, in different fonts and sizes. One instance is clickable, and takes you to an unexpected summary page. The next text isnt.
There's a cacophony of active items. There's menus. There's clickable text. There's a separate area on the top right with BOTH icon-like things and clickable text.
If you click on the things in the upper right, it immediatel;y and irrevokably cancels the current scan. Nice. Not only does it do something unexpected, it doesnt even ask if you want to do it, and you can't back out or continue. Sweet.
Like many of these thingies, it feels it has to put up the name of every file it is scanning, and update the file totals. And run a dumb little static animation that really makes no sense, as it isnt moving files at all. This is not only useless and misleading information, it slows down the scanning process, especially with older video cards.
It did find one registry key, but AFAICS it doesnt bother explaining what it is and what the ramifications are. And the button to remove it is inadequately labeled "Continue", which requires some extra text by it explaining what it really does.
I wouldnt call this a Beta, I've seen better preliminary prototype mock-ups.
Arent computers great. You build a model, tweak with it until you get reasonable looking answers, then you publish.
Only problem, the real world may be a lot more complex than your model:
There may be actual live people that are used to using the same bandwidth for their radio hobby. They tend to be able to write to legislators whenever somebody steps on their turf. Add this to your model.
There are other signal generators on the power grid, such as lightning storms, old flourescent lights, body shops with arc welders, clinics with diathermy machines, millions of homes with vacuum cleaners, shavers, electric trains, trolleys, light dimmers, touch-lamps. Add these to your model.
There are signal attenuators on the power grid: power transformers, surge surpressors, outlet strips, computer power supplies, whatchacallem, capacitor banks. Add these too.
By the time you add reasonable amounts of these other factors, your usable bandwidth is down to a few bits per second, AND legislators are proposing bills to shut down your plans.
This record is REALLY hard to take at face value becuz:
The 80 meter band tends to have a lot of background noise. More in the summer and less in the winter, as a lot of the noise is the integrated combo of every lightning strike within hearing range. But still, anything below 50 watts is down in the noise a lot of the time.
This is a somewhat artificial situation, not your typical ham contact. For code and other low data rate signals you can use a really narrow filter, say 1Hz wide, to filter out as much noise as possible. But to effectively use a 1Hz filter, you need to first know the exact frequency of the transmitter, to within 1Hz accuracy, otherwise you'll spend a whole lot of time scanning for it. It's a whole lot easier to find something if you know where it is! In the real world it's unlikely you could ever hear this signal during your normal scanning of the ham bands.
There's a possibility that while the measured output was indeed down in the microwatts, much more signal could have leaked out through other means. Unless the transmitter is very well shielded, with all wires carefully filtered, it's quite easy to have a transmitter leak milliwats back out thru the power line, while the attenuated antenna output is truly turned down to microwatts.
And oh, the distance may be quite a bit greater than the distance along the Earth's surface. Most signals past 100 miles or so get there by bouncing off the ionosphere.
I was consulting with a small computer maker in 1982. They were excited-- they'd just gotten a good price for memory chips. Intel would sell them 64K bit RAM chips for $21 each. That's... $2,688 for just the RAM chips, in quantity.
And oh, the chips had to go back to Intel so they could laser-drill a hole in the top and pump in some gas they forgot to do the first time around.
Okay, but it's still 134,000 * 550 or 73 million ft-lbs per second.
If the wind is blowing up there at 100mph (146 feet/sec), the tension on the cable must be 73 million / 146 ft/sec or about 500,000 lbs.
Some cable.
A little web browsing shows a cable that can handle this tension with a safety factor of three is going to weigh about 8-10 pounds per foot. So if my math is right the poor kites have to be able to lift 450,000 pounds of line. Yipes.
oops, shouldnt try to do the math in my head.
Still, it's a whole lot of power to transfer by aerial cable. Where are those buckyball nanotube ropes when we need them?
And think of the tedium of winding in the ropes. or trying to recover them if they come down in the border areas. Gonna take a lot of cowboys to round up all that kite string.
The numbers don't make much sense. 100 megawatts is about 75 MILLION horsepower, or about 35 BILLION pound/feet per second. It would take a HECK of a kite string, probably thicker than a suspension bridge cable, to bring down that much power.
Just supporting the cable is going to take a heck of a high wind.
Okay, there may be limits, but in the XP Pro distro, they're not too sanely set. For example, the batch file go.bat:
----------------:loop
start go.bat
goto:loop
----------------
Give it about 15 seconds and it has 184 copies running, true not all got to open console windows. But the system is pretty well hung, ctrl-alt-del can't get enough priority to bring up its window, the GUI is inoperable. Had to turn off the power to stop all the commotion.
Last time I checked, Windows in all its multifarious versions has no way to run a program in a sandbox, such that this program is incapable of DOS'ng the PC by opening tons of windows, file handles, memory blocks, processes, etc....
If the system isnt designed fromt he ground up to be compartmentalized, stable, and secure, IMHO there's little change of grafting all these qualities on a decade down the road.
The FA seems to be awfully sure about a whole lot of things:
That particular volcano is going to split off and "drop" into the sea.
Aforesaid volcano is going to do this in a catastrophic manner.
Somehow just because there is a visible split on the surface, this indicates the whole half of the volcano is somehow overbalanced and likely to tip over, something that seems physically unlikely.
That when the stuff falls, it is going to do so at just the right rate to efficiently couple its energy to the water.
That said energy is going to stay bunched up and not be too influenced by sea conditions, sea bottom irregularities, and currents and tides.
That the amount of energy, after the losses in coupling to the water, diffracting, reflecting, travelling, and reforming as changes in sea height near shore ("waves"), and the losses in spreading out in every direction, the residualk forces are going to be relatively large.
Sounds like an awful lot of worst-case assumptions. Sounds like bad scientific public relations. Sounds like a crock.
it's not clear from the article, but I suspect Philips had to shrink the process by a factor of at least 1000, plus develop the complex interleaved storage format, plus develop the mass-production process, plus develop inexpensive readers, plus develop the inexpensive LSI decoder IC's. At least the work of 100 other scientists and technologists, certainly at least 20 other patents on the various processes and devices.
Given all that, what would be an equitable payment for that original guy? Pretty low, I'd guess.
BY THE WAY, the old IBM corp had a big optical disk they used for dictionary storage waaay before this "original" guy's invention, circa 1960.
After reading TFA I don't know whether to laugh or cry:
Microsoft's best are not able to turn off Media Player 8.
Media Player 9 went thru a "security audit", so it must be better than 8, which has been tested by several hundred million people.
Enabling a firewall breaks *everything*. Apparently they havent heard of a simple GUI with easily-understood checkboxes. (See IE options... for the classic counterexample).
They somehow expect a semi self-anointed czar of security patches to gain everyone's support.
Nowhere is it mentioned the (estimated) 45,000 uses of unsafe string functions in the source code.
One example is meaningless. To get a realistic idea of how useful this system is, we'd like to see what it says if you ask several dozen questions. For all we know this was the one question out of 100 that it answered correctly.
If radio waves caused DNA breaks, then we should see lots of tentacled zombies walking out of taxicabs, radio stations, TV stations, cruise-ships, diathermy clinics, radio shacks, microwave oven companies, airline pilots, airport birds, aircraft carrier deck crews, TV reporters, NIST personnel, base-jumpers, helicopter pilots, metal-forging shops, police, fire, utility workers. Cell site repairpersons, microwave signal repeater tower workers, cell-phone testers, walkie-talkie repairfolk, CB radio aficionados, FM and TV tower painters. TV tower red flashy light bulb changers, Pierce Brosnan (fought at the focal point of the Arcibo dish in some paltrily above average Bond movie)
If the damage was proportional to the absorbed dose we should see about one out of 23 cell phone users with huge tumors by their ears, smaller suppurating pustules down their cheeks, and just raw purplish open sores over the rest of their heads. I must be hanging around with the wrong crowd.
Not a big Symantec fan here. I have to support a program that somebody wrote with Symantec C, just before they gave up on that very buggy compiler.
Then our org bought Norton, er, Symantec Anti-Virus, which has a bunch of rough edges, and now on this Pc I'm typing on the uninstall feature has broken, so I can't even cleanly uninstall the mess and switch to AVG.
I expect the Veritas stuff to go to crap within a release or two, if old trends continue...
Before one gets too enthused...
on
Lego Logic Gates
·
· Score: 1
Before you get all enthused about nanotech mechanical computers, pls consider:
The mass of a gate goes down as the cube of its linear dimension, while effects like friction and surface tension and static electricity only go down as the square. So if you make a lego gate 1000 times smaller, it only weighs a billionth as much. That's good. But it has only a millionth the surface area, which is bad, proportionally. It is 1000 times more bothered by friction, surface tension, and static. That's very bad. You end up with a gate that is hard to move (because of friction), tends to stick in one position (due to surfaqce tension), and is very likely to flip or stick (due to static electricity).
As others have mentioned, there's no amplification, so one gate can't effectively drive mroe than one other gate (and with difficulty at that because of all the friction).
There's nothing like WIRES that can carry mechanical motion without lots of mechanical inertia. So you can only build small clusters of gates if you want any speed at all.
Mechanical gadgets you may have noticed WEAR OUT after a few million operations.
Mechanical gadgets have a relatively high error rate. It's hard to move something small a few million times without it glitching at least once or twice due to dust, vibration, cosmic rays, microbes,viruses, or brownian motion.
At best you're maybe talking about gate propagation times in the low milliseconds, while electronics is working in the middle picoseconds. That's NINE orders of magnitude slower. Slower than a diesel Vega. Slower than a Turing machine emulating a Cray. Really slow.
My wife's 1881 pump-organ has a patent for its arrangement of knobs that control the various sound-modifying apertures.
They didnt have names for these concepts at the time, but looking it over with a modern eye, one can see it includes AND gates, OR gates, and open-collector wired-OR pullups, all made out of wooden rods and leather straps.
Where the heck could they get that much spectrum space? For 1Gb/sec we'd need at least 100 to 300 Mhz of spectrum per user per cell. There just ain't that much spectrum available anywhere below 6GHz. Eventually when the current analog TV channels go away that will free up some space but not enough.
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Does anybody really think technology goes by stops and starts, synchronized with the calendar year? And that an industry with a heavy R&D invetment is just going to let all that infrastructure just sit idle? It's more likely there's just a random lull in announcements. It takes years of research to develop each increase in drive capacity, then more time to develop th eindutrial processes to make all those drives reliably and cheaply. As for progress, my first computer at work was a 3MB disk drive, size of 4 PC cases, dimmed the lights when it started up. Almost $22K in today's dollars. I wouldnt say progress has been slow.
Sooo we, as nerds, are supposed to be happy that "Wall Street" is happy with MicroSoft? I don't think so. Microsoft has never diverged from their emphasis on maximum cash extraction, minimum software quality. Latest evidence: their spyware tool, allegedly Beta, with many user-interface infelicities such as three different ways to start scanning, installs itself as a startup item even if you command it not to, it irrevocably cancels a scan if you click on the upper-right hand text buttons, a "save settings" button that does nothing, and more. This is not a product from a company with any quality control.
It seems unlikely we've discovered the algorithm that will compare two scenes and not get fooled by different angles, perspectives, saturation, angle of sun, street lighting on/off, fog, rain, snowcover, traffic changes, etc.... It may be quite a few decades before it's cheaper to use a computer for this than to have a real human being look at the picture and go "hmmm, looks like a Asian scene, those mopeds look Laotian, and that guy has a bag from Taco Bell-- must be the capital!
- Passwords in the clear!
- No standard file listing format, so you have to be a human or very clever code to extract the file names.
- Requests that get out of sync with replies.
- Using separate connections for cmds and data, and random ones at that.
- No directory transfer cmd.
Telnet:- The wonderfully flexible and broken option negotiations, which took several RFC's to describe the various race conditions therein, and the recommended kludges for avoiding or exiting same.
- The various bizarre modes to support totally obsolete comm protocols.
- The lack of recognition by the RFC's of ANSI or VT-100 formatting, both de-facto standards.
HTTP:So FOUR out of HUNDREDS of studies have found "some correlation". To my mind, that proves that there is NO correlation. ------------- For those of you that don't get it, let's do a thought experiment. Let's say 100 researchers do independent studies of tumor incidence versus shoe color. Let's assume they don't have any bias either way, either intentional or not. A certain percentage are going to find some correlation, just due to the laws of statistics. Just a guess, but I suspect at least 4% will find some correlation. Repeat the same study this time comparing against underwear color, and probably another 4% correlation. As you can see, 4% doesnt mean ANYTHING. Except maybe the opposite of what you were investigating.
This statement seems meaningless unless IBM has been on a crusade to inspect Open Source Software for infringement and has been asking for royalties from infringing parties. But they probably realized long ago that this would be a bad or impossible thing to do. So stating that they're not going to sue in the future, when they havent in the past, doesnt seem to change anything much.
- Apparently they're not interested in bringing pirates into the MS fold, it only runs on "authorized" installations. Hmmm..
- It asks me if I want it to run at 2 AM, I click "no", then later it reports it's set to run at 2AM. Hmmm....
- I click on Manage 2AM runs, and I see no option to turn them off. If you deselect all runs, it complains that you havent selected any runs. Hmmm...
- Screen is a dog's breakfast:
- non standard panel borders that trail off, looking like a bad screen update.
- The app name appears several times, in different fonts and sizes. One instance is clickable, and takes you to an unexpected summary page. The next text isnt.
- There's a cacophony of active items. There's menus. There's clickable text. There's a separate area on the top right with BOTH icon-like things and clickable text.
- If you click on the things in the upper right, it immediatel;y and irrevokably cancels the current scan. Nice. Not only does it do something unexpected, it doesnt even ask if you want to do it, and you can't back out or continue. Sweet.
- Like many of these thingies, it feels it has to put up the name of every file it is scanning, and update the file totals. And run a dumb little static animation that really makes no sense, as it isnt moving files at all. This is not only useless and misleading information, it slows down the scanning process, especially with older video cards.
- It did find one registry key, but AFAICS it doesnt bother explaining what it is and what the ramifications are. And the button to remove it is inadequately labeled "Continue", which requires some extra text by it explaining what it really does.
I wouldnt call this a Beta, I've seen better preliminary prototype mock-ups.- There may be actual live people that are used to using the same bandwidth for their radio hobby. They tend to be able to write to legislators whenever somebody steps on their turf. Add this to your model.
- There are other signal generators on the power grid, such as lightning storms, old flourescent lights, body shops with arc welders, clinics with diathermy machines, millions of homes with vacuum cleaners, shavers, electric trains, trolleys, light dimmers, touch-lamps. Add these to your model.
- There are signal attenuators on the power grid: power transformers, surge surpressors, outlet strips, computer power supplies, whatchacallem, capacitor banks. Add these too.
By the time you add reasonable amounts of these other factors, your usable bandwidth is down to a few bits per second, AND legislators are proposing bills to shut down your plans.I was consulting with a small computer maker in 1982. They were excited-- they'd just gotten a good price for memory chips. Intel would sell them 64K bit RAM chips for $21 each. That's ... $2,688 for just the RAM chips, in quantity.
And oh, the chips had to go back to Intel so they could laser-drill a hole in the top and pump in some gas they forgot to do the first time around.
Okay, but it's still 134,000 * 550 or 73 million ft-lbs per second. If the wind is blowing up there at 100mph (146 feet/sec), the tension on the cable must be 73 million / 146 ft/sec or about 500,000 lbs. Some cable. A little web browsing shows a cable that can handle this tension with a safety factor of three is going to weigh about 8-10 pounds per foot. So if my math is right the poor kites have to be able to lift 450,000 pounds of line. Yipes.
oops, shouldnt try to do the math in my head. Still, it's a whole lot of power to transfer by aerial cable. Where are those buckyball nanotube ropes when we need them? And think of the tedium of winding in the ropes. or trying to recover them if they come down in the border areas. Gonna take a lot of cowboys to round up all that kite string.
The numbers don't make much sense. 100 megawatts is about 75 MILLION horsepower, or about 35 BILLION pound/feet per second. It would take a HECK of a kite string, probably thicker than a suspension bridge cable, to bring down that much power. Just supporting the cable is going to take a heck of a high wind.
Okay, there may be limits, but in the XP Pro distro, they're not too sanely set. For example, the batch file go.bat: ---------------- :loop
start go.bat
goto :loop
----------------
Give it about 15 seconds and it has 184 copies running, true not all got to open console windows. But the system is pretty well hung, ctrl-alt-del can't get enough priority to bring up its window, the GUI is inoperable. Had to turn off the power to stop all the commotion.
Last time I checked, Windows in all its multifarious versions has no way to run a program in a sandbox, such that this program is incapable of DOS'ng the PC by opening tons of windows, file handles, memory blocks, processes, etc.... If the system isnt designed fromt he ground up to be compartmentalized, stable, and secure, IMHO there's little change of grafting all these qualities on a decade down the road.
Tin oxide has been used for over a century to make cheap power resistors and heated windshields. Nothing new to see here.
Sounds like an awful lot of worst-case assumptions. Sounds like bad scientific public relations. Sounds like a crock.
Given all that, what would be an equitable payment for that original guy? Pretty low, I'd guess.
BY THE WAY, the old IBM corp had a big optical disk they used for dictionary storage waaay before this "original" guy's invention, circa 1960.
- Microsoft's best are not able to turn off Media Player 8.
- Media Player 9 went thru a "security audit", so it must be better than 8, which has been tested by several hundred million people.
- Enabling a firewall breaks *everything*. Apparently they havent heard of a simple GUI with easily-understood checkboxes. (See IE options... for the classic counterexample).
- They somehow expect a semi self-anointed czar of security patches to gain everyone's support.
- Nowhere is it mentioned the (estimated) 45,000 uses of unsafe string functions in the source code.
Sigh^3?One example is meaningless. To get a realistic idea of how useful this system is, we'd like to see what it says if you ask several dozen questions. For all we know this was the one question out of 100 that it answered correctly.
If radio waves caused DNA breaks, then we should see lots of tentacled zombies walking out of taxicabs, radio stations, TV stations, cruise-ships, diathermy clinics, radio shacks, microwave oven companies, airline pilots, airport birds, aircraft carrier deck crews, TV reporters, NIST personnel, base-jumpers, helicopter pilots, metal-forging shops, police, fire, utility workers. Cell site repairpersons, microwave signal repeater tower workers, cell-phone testers, walkie-talkie repairfolk, CB radio aficionados, FM and TV tower painters. TV tower red flashy light bulb changers, Pierce Brosnan (fought at the focal point of the Arcibo dish in some paltrily above average Bond movie) If the damage was proportional to the absorbed dose we should see about one out of 23 cell phone users with huge tumors by their ears, smaller suppurating pustules down their cheeks, and just raw purplish open sores over the rest of their heads. I must be hanging around with the wrong crowd.
Not a big Symantec fan here. I have to support a program that somebody wrote with Symantec C, just before they gave up on that very buggy compiler. Then our org bought Norton, er, Symantec Anti-Virus, which has a bunch of rough edges, and now on this Pc I'm typing on the uninstall feature has broken, so I can't even cleanly uninstall the mess and switch to AVG. I expect the Veritas stuff to go to crap within a release or two, if old trends continue...
My wife's 1881 pump-organ has a patent for its arrangement of knobs that control the various sound-modifying apertures. They didnt have names for these concepts at the time, but looking it over with a modern eye, one can see it includes AND gates, OR gates, and open-collector wired-OR pullups, all made out of wooden rods and leather straps.
Where the heck could they get that much spectrum space? For 1Gb/sec we'd need at least 100 to 300 Mhz of spectrum per user per cell. There just ain't that much spectrum available anywhere below 6GHz. Eventually when the current analog TV channels go away that will free up some space but not enough.