The PS/2 bidirectional serial port was all but 100% standard ever since the early 1990s. ECP/EPP came before IEEE-1284 (which was the standardization of these options); they were already ubiquitous when the first SuperIO chips came out
Furthermore, the electrical interface of the parallel port was defined by Centronics some time in the mid-1970s, and significantly predates the IBM PC -- IBM used it because it (and RS 232) exactly because it was *already* a standard!
Note also that on the original IBM PC all of these came on separate boards that you had to buy extra. Noone bought an "IBM Personal Computer Asynchronous Communication Adapter" (serial port) unless they had a modem to plug into, and noone bought a parallel port unless they had a printer.
... patent it, *then* you can figure out what business model you want to use.
Note, however, that the claims made by the submittor is basically a laundry list of the kinds of claims that makes seasoned cryptographers go "oh no, not again."
The speed of light in a vacuum (the Einstein Constant, c) is exactly 299 792 458 m/s, no more, no less. 300 000 000 m/s is just a convenient approximation.
Well, let's see, I'd be pretty darn disappointed if they didn't release bug-, security- and major functionality fixes. They're free for download; the RHN method is a bit more convenient if you paid for it, but there is no locking the stuff up.
As far as KDE versus GNOME, you can change the default either for the system (and it prompts you during installation!) or for an individual user. In fact, being able to set which desktop to use (as well as which language) right at the login prompt is very newbie friendly in my opinion.
The biggest problem with building your own is that you're the only one that can troubleshoot it if the system is DOA when you put it together and power it on. Typically you will find that the various component vendors will blame each other, and it's really hard to troubleshoot when you don't have the ability to swap out components.
The point was: if you are an Iranian company, and send a bill to MasterCard in New York, they are *required* to ignore it and not to pay. Although you probably can get around it for some time, it's by and large a "sticky bit", i.e. if you're a German compnay who acts as an in-between, pretty soon you'll find yourself on the U.S. gov't ban list...
Oh yes, each bit much have lasted at least 40ms -- the time it takes light to travel 12272km in a vacuum. In an optical fiber it would take even longer.
Now, if you're transmitting at 401Mbit/s, and assuming the speed of light in vacuum, each bit is just about 75cm long, which means it swoshes by an observer (such as the receiver) at about 2.5ns -- not even that is "a fraction of a nanosecond."
Well, you have a metric, which is bandwidth multiplied by distance, in this case 4.9Pbit*m/s... you can get the equivalent metric by sticking 35343 CD-ROMs worth of data in the back of a van and driving it at 100km/h down the freeway. Isn't statistics fun?:)
The article claims that Professor Freund said that his team had "tantalizing evidence" that as much as 1,000 litres of hydrogen may be trapped in each cubic metre of rock.
This basically means that any particular volume of rock contains its own volume (at atmospheric pressume, presumably) in hydrogen. Unfortunately, that really isn't that much. It takes much more energy than that to extract and presumably, crush 1 m of rock. The article states this, too.
The article somewhat confusingly states The low yield of energy from burning hydrogen compared to gas, however, means that vast quantities of rock would have to be mined. Hydrogen is in fact the most energy-rich chemical fuel, per unit weight, in existence, the problem is that at the concentrations they're talking about, this won't be solving any problems any time soon, unless they find these things trapped. Not that unlike drilling for natural gas.
What might be a lot more promising is that some scientists have been working on bioengineering algae to produce hydrogen when deprived of sunlight. This basically amounts to a very cheap form of solar energy: grow algae in ponds, then pump them into a bioreactor where they produce hydrogen. Leave them in for a few days, then before they start to die off pump them back out. A lot cheaper than refined silicon covering all that area...
The problem 3 is quite grave : What can you do if your mail server doesn't support anti-relay ?
Or if you must buy another licence, or it it's opensource, but needs a new version of the OS, or things like that. OK, now all email servers support anti-relay. But this was not the case at this time.
If so, they're right in blocking you. You're saying "oh, we're not willing to go through the trouble of cleaning up our server, to hell with anyone who gets spammed." It's exactly those sites that they're supposed to be blocked
2. They should leave you 10-15 days to fix the problem before blocking you
That's insane. Once you end up on a spamrelay list, you'll be the conduit for tons of spam within hours of even minutes. 10-15 days is an eternity in that respect.
Let's face it -- there are some times when cheap and portable is what matters, and low density just doesn't matter. Whether or not at that point you use puched paper, bar codes or magnetic strips is mostly just a matter of your application. Personally I suspect that bar codes is actually the main competitor to punch cards in this application, because they can be produced on standard laser printers (a fairly new development, mind you), however punch cards do have one major advantage over bar codes or magstrips: it's probably the less fragile of the three.
I think the big question is going to be: do you get what you pay for? Personally, I wouldn't mind paying USD 80 (meant as equivalence in purchase power, not in value) for broadband of the class you apparently get in Canada (here in Silly Con Valley you can't get that at all basically) *IF* they comes with lessened restrictions -- such "premium" customers should be able to get fixed IPs and run servers as they wanted up to the limit of the contract. That's a real service that is worth money.
Getting higher penetration of broadband even among casual users is a good thing. It should increase availability, and make services easier to market. In that way, it's an entirely reasonable thing.
However, what I'd be afraid of is that the ISPs will treat the "premium customers" with the same kind of disdain that they do everyone else... *sigh*
Technically it's feasible because many people has already done this for commercial servers. Is there any difficulties(political? Legal? Ownership?) make it impossible?
The difficulties are administrative/ownership. We (the kernel.org staff) has no real control of the mirrors, so I can't guarantee that any particular mirror is always up to date. For that reason, it seems more fair to let users at least know that they're using a mirror.
That being said, the mirror system participants provide a huge service, without which we would certainly have bandwidth problems.
We don't have any problem covering our bandwidth bills, because ISC graciously gives us bandwidth at no charge. I would like to get another server for redundancy, but that's a completely different issue.
As far as mirrors of other sites are concerned, that's what class-based queueing is for. If we are saturated (which we rarely are) traffic gets prioritized, with outbound mirrors getting high priority and our mirrors of other sites getting low priority.
because its broad frequency range includes the ultra-low frequencies used to communicate with submerged submarines, UWB can be used easily in buildings and even underground.
Bullshit.
There is so little bandwidth in those low frequencies that you can hardly talk about "ultrawideband"! If it wasn't clear that he doesn't know what he was talking about beforehand, that statement should have made it clear.
"Ultrawideband" is really not anything other than a marketing name for direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS). It has been rebranded in no small part in order to attempt to get the FCC and similar regulatory agencies to allow it to be spread across already allocated radio bands (where they become part of the noise floor) rather than confined in between narrowband applications.
All of this really isn't anything particularly earth-shattering. The standard electromagnetic spectrum frequency domainis given by a Fourier transform of the electromagnetic wave using sine waves as base functions. Spread-spectrum technologies simply create a new "frequency domain" use a different set of base functions. They are resistant to interference or jamming only because most sources of interference or jamming operates in the standard frequency domain, not in the "alternate" one. 802.11b actually uses direct-sequence spread spectrum (spread across a fairly wide 2.4 GHz band officially used for industrial applications and microwave ovens) already -- the security added by DSSS is automatically removed by the fact that you can buy 802.11b-compatible waveform correlators for a few hundred dollars at any electronics store. Sorry guys, you still need encryption.
I think this particular article is an egregorious misrepresentation of the arguments. Noone is arguing that an autoconfigurator isn't a nice thing to have, however:
Eric has requested several in-kernel facilities solely to support his autoconfigurator. Most of these requests have been at the very best ridiculous.
Aunt Tillie shouldn't have to build a new kernel. I can't emphasize this enough. We should be striving towards modular autoconfiguration at runtime, so you don't have to mess with your kernel because your hardware changed -- either at runtime or between boots.
The autoconfigurator is bound to be an imperfect job, simply because a PC doesn't give you enough information to tell what exactly is in it, at least not in the presence of ISA cards. There is no magic you can do to avoid this problem.
The kernel people are already drowning in bogus bug reports, to the point where it is very hard to avoid ignoring real bug reports. This, unfortunately, isn't likely to improve the situation.
I really can't emphasize strongly enough that I believe that if Aunt Tille has to build her own kernel, we have much bigger problems that Eric's autoconfigurator will solve.
Due to the relations between the US and Canada, all that's required is proof of citizenship to cross the border, either way. Although it's much easier with photo ID (Drivers license, Pasport, Government issued ID card)
And in what way does having a Driver's License constitute proof of citizenship? I have had a U.S. driver's license for 13 years, but have never been a U.S. citizen during that time...
"Document, spreadsheet or presentation..." isn't about what OS you're running, it's about what office suite you're running. This, of course, is the classic example of Microsoft trying to cross-leverage their Windows and Office monopolies (the latter which was developed by leveraging the former.)
This is ground zero of the M$ empire strength, but there are a lot more productive computer uses than producing office documents. Unfortunately it's what managers (and journalists) understand.
First, MaGIC is built on UDP, so delivery of the datagrams are not guarantied. If a collision occurs on your network you?ve lost data.
Full-duplex Ethernet (which is what MaGIC is built on) doesn't have collisions -- there is nothing to collide with;
Collisions don't mean data loss on Ethernet, although it means a slight delay.
Re:Ternary Computing and the rw measure
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 2
The parent comment is exactly on target when it comes how things are implemented in electronics... you have to detect n-1 threshold levels, not n. It's actually even worse, because generating a single threshold level comes almost "for free" with an appropriate combination of transistors -- this very fact is the basis for CMOS logic, which has by and large taken over as the *only* way to implement logic circuits...
Ternary computing is an old idea; in fact it is said that there were a group of computer scientists in the old USSR who were quite enamored with the idea, especially the balanced ternary form (-1, 0 +1).
The problem is that although you reduce the number of gates, the gates themselves get horribly complex. There are only 16 possible two-input binary gates, of which two are trivial, two are wires, two are NOTs, two are ANDN, two are ORN, and one each of AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR and XNOR. All of these are familiar gates. However, there are no less than 19683 two-input ternary gates. If you sacrifice some of the combinations, you suddenly are doing less than true ternary computation, and you're wasting the power of your machine.
That, in combination with the sheer commonality of true/false type states, means, in my opinion, that binary is here to stay.
Slashdot Mirror
The PS/2 bidirectional serial port was all but 100% standard ever since the early 1990s. ECP/EPP came before IEEE-1284 (which was the standardization of these options); they were already ubiquitous when the first SuperIO chips came out
Furthermore, the electrical interface of the parallel port was defined by Centronics some time in the mid-1970s, and significantly predates the IBM PC -- IBM used it because it (and RS 232) exactly because it was *already* a standard!
Note also that on the original IBM PC all of these came on separate boards that you had to buy extra. Noone bought an "IBM Personal Computer Asynchronous Communication Adapter" (serial port) unless they had a modem to plug into, and noone bought a parallel port unless they had a printer.
... patent it, *then* you can figure out what business model you want to use.
Note, however, that the claims made by the submittor is basically a laundry list of the kinds of claims that makes seasoned cryptographers go "oh no, not again."
The speed of light in a vacuum (the Einstein Constant, c) is exactly 299 792 458 m/s, no more, no less. 300 000 000 m/s is just a convenient approximation.
Well, let's see, I'd be pretty darn disappointed if they didn't release bug-, security- and major functionality fixes. They're free for download; the RHN method is a bit more convenient if you paid for it, but there is no locking the stuff up.
As far as KDE versus GNOME, you can change the default either for the system (and it prompts you during installation!) or for an individual user. In fact, being able to set which desktop to use (as well as which language) right at the login prompt is very newbie friendly in my opinion.
The biggest problem with building your own is that you're the only one that can troubleshoot it if the system is DOA when you put it together and power it on. Typically you will find that the various component vendors will blame each other, and it's really hard to troubleshoot when you don't have the ability to swap out components.
The point was: if you are an Iranian company, and send a bill to MasterCard in New York, they are *required* to ignore it and not to pay. Although you probably can get around it for some time, it's by and large a "sticky bit", i.e. if you're a German compnay who acts as an in-between, pretty soon you'll find yourself on the U.S. gov't ban list...
I believe it's illegal for U.S. persons to conduct *any* business with Iran, so how do they expect to get paid? "Europeans only?"
Oh yes, each bit much have lasted at least 40ms -- the time it takes light to travel 12272km in a vacuum. In an optical fiber it would take even longer. Now, if you're transmitting at 401Mbit/s, and assuming the speed of light in vacuum, each bit is just about 75cm long, which means it swoshes by an observer (such as the receiver) at about 2.5ns -- not even that is "a fraction of a nanosecond."
Well, you have a metric, which is bandwidth multiplied by distance, in this case 4.9Pbit*m/s... you can get the equivalent metric by sticking 35343 CD-ROMs worth of data in the back of a van and driving it at 100km/h down the freeway. Isn't statistics fun? :)
The article claims that Professor Freund said that his team had "tantalizing evidence" that as much as 1,000 litres of hydrogen may be trapped in each cubic metre of rock.
This basically means that any particular volume of rock contains its own volume (at atmospheric pressume, presumably) in hydrogen. Unfortunately, that really isn't that much. It takes much more energy than that to extract and presumably, crush 1 m of rock. The article states this, too.
The article somewhat confusingly states The low yield of energy from burning hydrogen compared to gas, however, means that vast quantities of rock would have to be mined. Hydrogen is in fact the most energy-rich chemical fuel, per unit weight, in existence, the problem is that at the concentrations they're talking about, this won't be solving any problems any time soon, unless they find these things trapped. Not that unlike drilling for natural gas.
What might be a lot more promising is that some scientists have been working on bioengineering algae to produce hydrogen when deprived of sunlight. This basically amounts to a very cheap form of solar energy: grow algae in ponds, then pump them into a bioreactor where they produce hydrogen. Leave them in for a few days, then before they start to die off pump them back out. A lot cheaper than refined silicon covering all that area...
If so, they're right in blocking you. You're saying "oh, we're not willing to go through the trouble of cleaning up our server, to hell with anyone who gets spammed." It's exactly those sites that they're supposed to be blocked
That's insane. Once you end up on a spamrelay list, you'll be the conduit for tons of spam within hours of even minutes. 10-15 days is an eternity in that respect.
Let's face it -- there are some times when cheap and portable is what matters, and low density just doesn't matter. Whether or not at that point you use puched paper, bar codes or magnetic strips is mostly just a matter of your application. Personally I suspect that bar codes is actually the main competitor to punch cards in this application, because they can be produced on standard laser printers (a fairly new development, mind you), however punch cards do have one major advantage over bar codes or magstrips: it's probably the less fragile of the three.
I think the big question is going to be: do you get what you pay for? Personally, I wouldn't mind paying USD 80 (meant as equivalence in purchase power, not in value) for broadband of the class you apparently get in Canada (here in Silly Con Valley you can't get that at all basically) *IF* they comes with lessened restrictions -- such "premium" customers should be able to get fixed IPs and run servers as they wanted up to the limit of the contract. That's a real service that is worth money.
Getting higher penetration of broadband even among casual users is a good thing. It should increase availability, and make services easier to market. In that way, it's an entirely reasonable thing.
However, what I'd be afraid of is that the ISPs will treat the "premium customers" with the same kind of disdain that they do everyone else... *sigh*
The difficulties are administrative/ownership. We (the kernel.org staff) has no real control of the mirrors, so I can't guarantee that any particular mirror is always up to date. For that reason, it seems more fair to let users at least know that they're using a mirror.
That being said, the mirror system participants provide a huge service, without which we would certainly have bandwidth problems.
As far as mirrors of other sites are concerned, that's what class-based queueing is for. If we are saturated (which we rarely are) traffic gets prioritized, with outbound mirrors getting high priority and our mirrors of other sites getting low priority.
Bullshit.
There is so little bandwidth in those low frequencies that you can hardly talk about "ultrawideband"! If it wasn't clear that he doesn't know what he was talking about beforehand, that statement should have made it clear.
"Ultrawideband" is really not anything other than a marketing name for direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS). It has been rebranded in no small part in order to attempt to get the FCC and similar regulatory agencies to allow it to be spread across already allocated radio bands (where they become part of the noise floor) rather than confined in between narrowband applications.
All of this really isn't anything particularly earth-shattering. The standard electromagnetic spectrum frequency domainis given by a Fourier transform of the electromagnetic wave using sine waves as base functions. Spread-spectrum technologies simply create a new "frequency domain" use a different set of base functions. They are resistant to interference or jamming only because most sources of interference or jamming operates in the standard frequency domain, not in the "alternate" one. 802.11b actually uses direct-sequence spread spectrum (spread across a fairly wide 2.4 GHz band officially used for industrial applications and microwave ovens) already -- the security added by DSSS is automatically removed by the fact that you can buy 802.11b-compatible waveform correlators for a few hundred dollars at any electronics store. Sorry guys, you still need encryption.
Expect it to look a lot like AMD's x86-64 architecture, although it will probably be gratuitously incompatible.
I really can't emphasize strongly enough that I believe that if Aunt Tille has to build her own kernel, we have much bigger problems that Eric's autoconfigurator will solve.
And in what way does having a Driver's License constitute proof of citizenship? I have had a U.S. driver's license for 13 years, but have never been a U.S. citizen during that time...
It's pretty silly comparing RDRAM to SDRAM. Compare it to DDR instead.
If so, he would have to possess the kernel.org secret keys. If he does, we have some really nasty security problems that we didn't know about :-/
This isn't just an md5sum, it's a gpg signature. You can verify it as long as you have the public key, which is widely available.
"Document, spreadsheet or presentation..." isn't about what OS you're running, it's about what office suite you're running. This, of course, is the classic example of Microsoft trying to cross-leverage their Windows and Office monopolies (the latter which was developed by leveraging the former.)
This is ground zero of the M$ empire strength, but there are a lot more productive computer uses than producing office documents. Unfortunately it's what managers (and journalists) understand.
The parent comment is exactly on target when it comes how things are implemented in electronics... you have to detect n-1 threshold levels, not n. It's actually even worse, because generating a single threshold level comes almost "for free" with an appropriate combination of transistors -- this very fact is the basis for CMOS logic, which has by and large taken over as the *only* way to implement logic circuits...
Ternary computing is an old idea; in fact it is said that there were a group of computer scientists in the old USSR who were quite enamored with the idea, especially the balanced ternary form (-1, 0 +1).
The problem is that although you reduce the number of gates, the gates themselves get horribly complex. There are only 16 possible two-input binary gates, of which two are trivial, two are wires, two are NOTs, two are ANDN, two are ORN, and one each of AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR and XNOR. All of these are familiar gates. However, there are no less than 19683 two-input ternary gates. If you sacrifice some of the combinations, you suddenly are doing less than true ternary computation, and you're wasting the power of your machine.
That, in combination with the sheer commonality of true/false type states, means, in my opinion, that binary is here to stay.