Another wonderfully devious mechanism is transcription errors in HIV. HIV is a retrovirus - it stores its genetic material as RNA and uses an enzyme called reverse transcriptase to copy RNA to DNA. Normally all copying goes the other way - DNA is copied to RNA which is then used as instructions to build proteins.
So reverse transcriptase is in a sense going the wrong way - it's the biological equivalent of disassembling a binary to produce an assembler file. And the interesting thing it has a high transcription error rate. Of course if you make a bunch of viruses with a few errors some of them will fail to reproduce because they've got a mutation which stops reproduction. Some will be OK. Some will be mutations that aren't fatal to the virus. And some of those mutations will be resistant to drugs.
So HIV and other retroviruses are actually good at evading drugs because their copying mechanism is bad. Yay evolution!
I saw a horrifying experiment where they had bacteria on agar blocks. The first one had no antibiotic, the next one had 1x, the one after that 10x , 100x, 1000x, and so on.
So the bacteria spread all through the antibiotic free block. Then some mutant strain appears which is able to colonise the one with 1x antibiotic concentration. After a while another mutant strain appears and that colonises the one with 10x antibiotic concentration. Given enough time, the bacteria eventually colonise the block with 1000x antibiotic concentration.
Of course the worrying thing about this experiment is that a malicious actor could presumably produce bacteria which are resistant to almost any antibiotic given a lot of time and agar even if they didn't know anything about the underlying resistance mechanism, thanks to the wonders of natural selection.
I suppose in a sense hospitals are effectively doing this experiment given how common drug resistant bacteria are there.
In the drug case suppose you make a Prozac ER which releases the drug more slowly. The original company will stop making Prozac but other companies are allowed to make the generic version. They can't make the ER version.
You might be able to do better than this now - there are loads of MVNOs and the market is fairly competitive.
Most countries have mobile operators which offer cheap data packages for pay as you go. In fact in Taiwan it's cheaper to get pay as you go data than it is to get prepaid data. Which is handy if you have a dual SIM phone - have one SIM for the phone number but another for cheap data. Or of course if you have a phone for calls and some other device for data.
Problem is it's not a very practical form factor. As crappy as touch screens are it's actually easier to get used to one for typical 'phone' stuff than it is to open up a Communicator type device and try and type on a physical keyboard.
It's worth experimenting with though. I could see myself buying a Windows 10 or Android ARM or x86 device if it was the the same width and height as my LG V20 but was a bit thicker, had a physical keyboard and could run Android apps.
Microsoft have got x86 applications running on ARM but with a fairly heft performance penalty - they only run about 40% as fast as they would natively. And they also apparently managed to get Android applications running on Windows Phone before it was cancelled.
The ad agencies don't give a flying fuck if you hate the ad or not. When I was getting my degree in advertising, it was actually a point in classes that there was no such thing as bad press. If you get your ad out, no matter how repugnant, you got eyeballs and people dealing with it... you got publicity and buzz.
There've been very famous ads in the UK that are memorable because they're so irritating.
E.g. "The Ambassador's Reception" for Ferrero Rocher, the Shake and Vac ad, ViPoo.
Why not have Inline Infotainment? I found out InfoTourettes patented scripting system will add tailored product DIET COKE! placements that don't MARLBORO LIGHTS! LO FAT VEGETARIAN SALAD! disrupt the flow of the article TAMPONS! WONDERBRA! and adapt your site's likely audience PONIES! so as not to annoy them or seem intrusive PERSONAL TRAINERS! MANOLO BLAHNIKS!
You probably haven't even noticed, but I'm using it now. And now InfoTourettes Car edition is available DON'T DRIVE THERE! DRIVE HERE INSTEAD! for all your in car Infotainment needs.
Sadly, thee is a trick to work around the 20 year patent limit. Patent a subtle feature of the old design, and if necessary tune the new patent to be more applicable to modern tools.
I could see drug companies patenting a 'modified release' version of an old drug which is going out of patent. Still the non 'modified release' version still enters the public domain.
What I can't see is how you can do this for a documented CPU ISA. You could patent the details of superscalar or out of order execution. However doing that is actually creating a new invention.
Intel keep adding new instructions - SSE, AVX etc - but then those are actually new inventions too.
Successful companies probably are. The problem is Zdnet editors haven't gone through the purifying fire of the free market and thus haven't been cleansed of their impurities, like ore in a blast furnace being converted to steel.
To a reasonable approximation all patents must have been filed before then - as soon as details are published they cannot be patented. Post 1995 lifetime of a patent is 20 years.
So anything 20 years or older must be patent free. I.e. anything before 1998 or so should be fine. Oddly enough that means that the original 386 instruction set is OK. So is MIPS.
SSE etc is not though
Intel published a helpful chart of when each SIMD instruction set was patented
Since x64 requires SSE2 which was patented in 2001, there's still a bit of life in x64 patents. Also practically modern x64 and x86 applications probably all use more recent SIMD instruction sets and may not run on a chip which doesn't implement them.
Slashdot Mirror
Another wonderfully devious mechanism is transcription errors in HIV. HIV is a retrovirus - it stores its genetic material as RNA and uses an enzyme called reverse transcriptase to copy RNA to DNA. Normally all copying goes the other way - DNA is copied to RNA which is then used as instructions to build proteins.
So reverse transcriptase is in a sense going the wrong way - it's the biological equivalent of disassembling a binary to produce an assembler file. And the interesting thing it has a high transcription error rate. Of course if you make a bunch of viruses with a few errors some of them will fail to reproduce because they've got a mutation which stops reproduction. Some will be OK. Some will be mutations that aren't fatal to the virus. And some of those mutations will be resistant to drugs.
So HIV and other retroviruses are actually good at evading drugs because their copying mechanism is bad. Yay evolution!
Great post!
I saw a horrifying experiment where they had bacteria on agar blocks. The first one had no antibiotic, the next one had 1x, the one after that 10x , 100x, 1000x, and so on.
So the bacteria spread all through the antibiotic free block. Then some mutant strain appears which is able to colonise the one with 1x antibiotic concentration. After a while another mutant strain appears and that colonises the one with 10x antibiotic concentration. Given enough time, the bacteria eventually colonise the block with 1000x antibiotic concentration.
Of course the worrying thing about this experiment is that a malicious actor could presumably produce bacteria which are resistant to almost any antibiotic given a lot of time and agar even if they didn't know anything about the underlying resistance mechanism, thanks to the wonders of natural selection.
I suppose in a sense hospitals are effectively doing this experiment given how common drug resistant bacteria are there.
http://bash.org/?14207
Kind of amusing that iOS users have become the equivalent of AOLers given how snooty Apple users tend to be.
It always makes you wonder if there's an exploit for human vision of the type hypothesized here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)
The Halloween documents were just Bill Gates telling Steve Ballmer to make sure there were adequate supplies of candy available for trick or treaters.
Got any recommendations?
So you're literally a lousy German?
In the drug case suppose you make a Prozac ER which releases the drug more slowly. The original company will stop making Prozac but other companies are allowed to make the generic version. They can't make the ER version.
The point is that you can't discriminate and refused to sell a good to someone but you can refuse to perform a service.
As Ben Shapiro put it "If you're the one forcing me to do something, you're the bad person because that's tyranny"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And if it's all so stupid, why doesn't your side back down?
Hey, I may be scum but at least I'm not cdreimer level scum.
You can just buy the device outright and get yourself a pay as you go data SIM which you charge up when you're in the country
In the US I always used the T Mobile Walmart $30 a month package, now sadly discontinued
http://uk.businessinsider.com/...
In the UK I use Tesco mobile where you can get 1GB £7.50 or 2GB for £10
https://www.tescomobile.com/he...
You might be able to do better than this now - there are loads of MVNOs and the market is fairly competitive.
Most countries have mobile operators which offer cheap data packages for pay as you go. In fact in Taiwan it's cheaper to get pay as you go data than it is to get prepaid data. Which is handy if you have a dual SIM phone - have one SIM for the phone number but another for cheap data. Or of course if you have a phone for calls and some other device for data.
Somewhat O/T but it turns out you can download the classic Computer Architecture : A Quantitative approach 5th edition, grey market PDF edition for free.
I bet Intel and AMD pay someone to decap the chips, take die photos and do competitive analysis.
Interesting thing is if you do a search for patents on OOO and superscalar they're all rather old. E.g. This is from 1996. Which means it has expired.
Out-of-order superscalar microprocessor with a renaming device that maps instructions from memory to registers US 5838941 A
I had one of these
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Problem is it's not a very practical form factor. As crappy as touch screens are it's actually easier to get used to one for typical 'phone' stuff than it is to open up a Communicator type device and try and type on a physical keyboard.
It's worth experimenting with though. I could see myself buying a Windows 10 or Android ARM or x86 device if it was the the same width and height as my LG V20 but was a bit thicker, had a physical keyboard and could run Android apps.
Microsoft have got x86 applications running on ARM but with a fairly heft performance penalty - they only run about 40% as fast as they would natively. And they also apparently managed to get Android applications running on Windows Phone before it was cancelled.
https://www.neowin.net/news/it...
Fumigate your house now, then burn it down, then nuke the charred remains from orbit.
A Windows 10 ARM machine running x86 code gets 818 on Geekbench
https://www.windowslatest.com/...
I.e. about level with an Intel Celeron SU2300
http://browser.geekbench.com/p...
Running native code it's about 2.5x faster at 2092
http://weborus.com/snapdragon-...
Yup.
One of the early signs of brain damage is mistyping < as [ and > as ]
Linux runs/ran on MIPS too.
The ad agencies don't give a flying fuck if you hate the ad or not. When I was getting my degree in advertising, it was actually a point in classes that there was no such thing as bad press. If you get your ad out, no matter how repugnant, you got eyeballs and people dealing with it... you got publicity and buzz.
There've been very famous ads in the UK that are memorable because they're so irritating.
E.g. "The Ambassador's Reception" for Ferrero Rocher, the Shake and Vac ad, ViPoo.
Why not have Inline Infotainment? I found out InfoTourettes patented scripting system will add tailored product DIET COKE! placements that don't MARLBORO LIGHTS! LO FAT VEGETARIAN SALAD! disrupt the flow of the article TAMPONS! WONDERBRA! and adapt your site's likely audience PONIES! so as not to annoy them or seem intrusive PERSONAL TRAINERS! MANOLO BLAHNIKS!
You probably haven't even noticed, but I'm using it now. And now InfoTourettes Car edition is available DON'T DRIVE THERE! DRIVE HERE INSTEAD! for all your in car Infotainment needs.
Sadly, thee is a trick to work around the 20 year patent limit. Patent a subtle feature of the old design, and if necessary tune the new patent to be more applicable to modern tools.
I could see drug companies patenting a 'modified release' version of an old drug which is going out of patent. Still the non 'modified release' version still enters the public domain.
What I can't see is how you can do this for a documented CPU ISA. You could patent the details of superscalar or out of order execution. However doing that is actually creating a new invention.
Intel keep adding new instructions - SSE, AVX etc - but then those are actually new inventions too.
Successful companies probably are. The problem is Zdnet editors haven't gone through the purifying fire of the free market and thus haven't been cleansed of their impurities, like ore in a blast furnace being converted to steel.
To a reasonable approximation all patents must have been filed before then - as soon as details are published they cannot be patented. Post 1995 lifetime of a patent is 20 years.
So anything 20 years or older must be patent free. I.e. anything before 1998 or so should be fine. Oddly enough that means that the original 386 instruction set is OK. So is MIPS.
SSE etc is not though
Intel published a helpful chart of when each SIMD instruction set was patented
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
Since x64 requires SSE2 which was patented in 2001, there's still a bit of life in x64 patents. Also practically modern x64 and x86 applications probably all use more recent SIMD instruction sets and may not run on a chip which doesn't implement them.