The problem BR-2049 ran into was the terrible tuning the Dolby Atmos audio system.
I really wanted to like that movie, but being male and over the age of 25 does NOT mean that I wanted to suffer low-level but constant pain during the first 20 minutes of the movie.
The MIT solution, as described, appears to do away with the clock-based system that RSA uses, and instead has the server and the chip stay in lock-step as transactions occur.
What happens when the two drift out of synchronization will be the key to disrupting the technology.
If the server and chip stop talking to each other when they get out of synch, then the whole system is vulnerable to a wide scale DOS simply by corrupting the server's database of keys.
Imagine an industrial plant manager's reaction when 1000 different devices brick themselves due to a hacker's attack. If it takes a day to replace and reset everything so it all works again, that manager will rip out the technology so that his or her plant is never down that long, ever again.
On the other hand, if the server and chip and re-synchronize after a glitch, then a hacker can emulate that resynchronization process.
I wonder if a Man in the Middle attack would work where the MiM and server exchange one set of keys, while the MiM and chip exchange a second set of keys. Would either side know that it was talking to a fraudulent data source?
It is a collection of Isaac Asimov's non-fiction essays about Mathematics, published in book form in 1977.
Clear, concise writing, covering topics as diverse as the history of mathematical disocoveries, the concept behind zero, pi, imaginary numbers, infinity (and beyond).
1080p is fine for watching movies - but that is not the only thing that I use my laptop for.
I need a mobile workstation, and when I dropped $3k on a laptop last year, finding a major brand with a resolution better/taller than 1920x1080 would have been the deciding factor.
It looks like some of the major manufacturers have figured it out, finally.
My primary goal as a contractor is to "put myself out of a job". It can be scary to let go of an existing income stream, but no job is a guarantee. If I walk out of a site with a happy customer, they have an incentive to hire me back... and I get to work on something new (to me), rather than being stuck maintaining the same code for years.
There are risks, but if your replacement flames out, they can always come back to you, later.
You care very deeply about your project. Your Program Manager has recently made a decision to bring on new people. You are concerned that these new people are not necessary, and may be detrimental to the project.
More to the point, you do not understand the reason why your PM feels that more people are necessary at this time.
Since you have a good working relationship with your PM, that is your starting point - ask why the change is a good idea. Do not respond immediately - listen to the response you are given, spend some time thinking about, and THEN make a decision. Your PM could be spot on (example: "I believe that you will need more people in about 8 months, and it takes 6 months to actually get them in place. I figure we have about 2 months of wiggle room if I start the process, now. I do not need to waste your valuable time handling what are essentially HR duties...") or could be making a mistake ("I want a bigger office, so I am growing my empire..."), or could be acting upon orders ("The owner is concerned that if you leave or get hit by abus, we're screwed. We need to have a back-up for you in place, just in case...").
Currently, you do not have enough information. If you get stonewalled by the PM, then go over his or her head.
Actually, I have been a fan of the USNO for a long time. Very cool stuff.
However there is a passage that I feel is most relevant:
The Second
In 1967, the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures first defined the International System (SI) unit of time, the second, in terms of atomic time rather than the motion of the Earth. Specifically, a second was defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave light absorbed or emitted by the hyperfine transition of cesium-133 atoms in their ground state undisturbed by external fields.
[emphasis mine].
My thought was this: If the distance from the sun affects the nuclear decay rate (which occurs at the subatomic level), could it also affect the speed at which the electron energy states changes in the cesium clock design?
Science starts by asking questions. Even when the answer to the question turns out to be, "nope, not that we can tell", other interesting things can be found along the way.
I wonder if MediaDefender's code is based on Microsoft.NET Framework v1.1.4322?
There is a bug in that version of the.NET Framework - System.Timer.Timers() where, if an unpatched server has been up for something approaching 49.7 days, the timers start firing as fast as they can be serviced, rather than when the programmer expected them to be serviced. It has to do with the number of milliseconds that can be stored in a 32-bit integer.
So, MediaDefender could be correct in saying "every three hours", but if stung by this bug, it would easily turn into 8000/second if the servers had been up for 7 weeks.
Say, after a mass-reboot after deploying some new version.
Of course, the fact that they admitted to hijacking Revision3's servers has got me riled up. Bad Form!
Looks like it is time for a BadStatistics web site to go up there with BadAstronomy.
The original article says this:
The first version of the BigGame is the only drawing with a descending trend line that when combined with the deviations identify the distribution as slightly abnormal
but it later explains:
As such, positional analysis focused on how the numbers are stratified within their given position
The specific problem is that there are 52 independant entities bouncing around in that chamber that happen to have numeric labels on them. The author sorts the data based on those labels, and runs a trend analysis that relies heavily on the sort order, in order to draw a conclusion that "the trend" is "abnormal" or "normal".
That effectively reduces a n^52 polynomial down to a n^1 polynomial. I would accept a conclusion based on 170 data points (1 lotto drawing is one data point) for a n^1 polynomial... but for a n^52? Not a chance. Give me a few billion data points for that polynomial, or proof that reducing the system down to that sort order is, in fact, valid.
Spammer thinks: Gee, I know how to get Hotmail to let through more of my spam... I'll get the Slashdot crowd to raise a firestorm about attachments that aren't delivered!
Rest of us think: Man, they only get 81% of the junk? How can we help them improve the kill ratio?
Although I am occasionally amused by the random babble e-mails that the spammers send, the collective weight of the UCE would give me reason to vote for just about any Death-penalty-for-spamming law that ever pops up on the ballot.
Actually, you are assigning motive to me in the absence of evidence.
That remark applies to me, as well. Although, having posted on Slashdot, the comments that someone else suggested (paraphrased) "resembled the kinds of things that you would say over a beer between friends" have now become very public. Some employers search Slashdot when a prospective employee comes in - I know, because I searched it the last time I interviewed someone.
However, I do see you point that you were working within the restrictions of Ask Slashdot. I was certainly moved to respond.
What I encountered instead was a demand that I reinvent the wheel letter-perfect instead.
In my opinion, nothing is more important than being able to re-build where we are today from the ground up. We may not need to re-invent the wheel, but if we ever do, I want to know that we can. The generation before us was able to get to the moon. I am not so sure that our generation can.
I have found that very difficult to do in practice.
Not every person who knows more than you do is frightening or hostile.
I agree with that statement. However, I have met and worked with an occasional person who fits the full classification. The number is very small - only 2 individuals come to mind at the moment.
Just because you hide everything you know [...]
How did you get that impression from what I wrote, earlier? I happen to have the opposite personality defect - I have a bad habit of trying to help too much. But we have drifted off topic, here...
I would already be looking to weed you out. Your disdain for the younger employees with junior technical skills is pretty obvious. As a manager, I would immediately wonder how you would treat those junior employees, and I would worry that you would regular belittle their knowledge, deride them for their mistakes and restort to intimidation to squelch a junior employee's idea that you happen to dislike.
Of course, I worked with someone who acted in the manner I describe. He actually managed to cost the company we both worked for many hours of my time, as he chose to display his extensive knowledge at every opportunity, and I found myself translating what he was saying into something that the junior employees could understand. Oh, and thanks - I had never heard of the Byzantine Generals problem. But your reference to it is something that I would take as a warning sign.
So, like previous posters, my suggestion is: just walk away. You are not built to work for a company like that.
It would be fun to see how they solved the hard part of of predicting staffing needs in restaurants - "special events".
Sales in a restaurant are semi-predictable in normal weeks... Tuesdays tend to be less than half the sales of a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. However, there are outside things that interfere with the normal ebb and flow of this day-in and day-out grind. For example:
Thanksgiving is defined to occur on a the fourth Thursday in November (in the U.S.), so the before and after spike in sales (and choosing to close the restaurant on Thanksgiving Day itself) can be predicted. Of course, Thanksgiving in Canada is a different day... so it had better be configurable!
Christmas Day is always on December 25, but it falls on Monday, this year, Tuesday in 2008, and so it... so it has an an interference pattern that covers a seven year span. Gathering sales information to properly predict that may take 7+ years of sales data.
Easter always falls on a Sunday, but it drifts as much as a month. If your restaurant always closes on Easter, then it becomes easy, but that is not an option for family buffet restaurants.
Superbowl always falls on a Sunday, an tries to be on the same day each year, but it has drifted in the recent past, so it can be as hard to figure out as Easter.
Then there are the one-off special events that no one can predict. What computer could predict that Thursday, May 14, 1998 was going to be one of the highest sales day of the entire year for every U.S. pizza delivery chain? Thursdays are not as "dead" as Tuesdays, but they rarely if every compare to the sales on a Friday night.
That particular Thursday, however, was the day that the series finale of Seinfeld premeired.
If they have figured out how to predict the "Seinfeld"... then they have truly done a wondrous thing... because I was not smart enough to figure out how to do it when I tried in 2002.
Every 11 years or so we enter into a period of intense solar activity that has been known to knock out our power grids.
If this wireless flight is going to be safe, it needs to survive a massive burst and still be able to land. Anything less, and I'll take good old hydraulics, any day.
--
But what I really want to see is the time when pilot A turns on his plane and we see planes B, C, D and E all do the same thing. CRUNCH!
Older gasoline engines were designed without taking ethanol content into account. Some cheap plastic parts (cheap as in, less expensive) work just fine in gasoline engines, but deteriorate quickly when exposed to ethanol.
The engines in the vehicles in Brazil were designed to take ethanol content into account, so they do not experience this problem. Both Ford and GM are bringing these engines to the United States in the near future (some are already here), so they will be just fine. It's those older cars that are in trouble - like your 1993 Ford Explorer.
Ethanol does not release as much energy when it is burned when compared to gasoline, so you do not get quite as high real MPG when using a gasoline/ethanol mix when compared to normal gasoline. Still, if you get 80% of the MPG for 33% of the price, it's a good deal all around.
The other interesting thing is that it is harder to get ethanol to burn at lower temperatures than it is to get gasoline to burn. Minnesota, you said? The solution is to have a small gasoline-only tank used just to start the car on a cold day, and then a change over to Ethanol once things have warmed up.
One Bay Area mother told me that when she was planning a move to Minnesota with her son, who has Asperger's syndrome, she asked the school district there if they could meet her son's needs. "They told me that the northwest quadrant of Rochester, where the IBMers congregate, has a large number of Asperger kids," she recalls. "It was recommended I move to that part of town."
Slashdot Mirror
The problem BR-2049 ran into was the terrible tuning the Dolby Atmos audio system.
I really wanted to like that movie, but being male and over the age of 25 does NOT mean that I wanted to suffer low-level but constant pain during the first 20 minutes of the movie.
Almost.
The MIT solution, as described, appears to do away with the clock-based system that RSA uses, and instead has the server and the chip stay in lock-step as transactions occur.
What happens when the two drift out of synchronization will be the key to disrupting the technology.
If the server and chip stop talking to each other when they get out of synch, then the whole system is vulnerable to a wide scale DOS simply by corrupting the server's database of keys.
Imagine an industrial plant manager's reaction when 1000 different devices brick themselves due to a hacker's attack. If it takes a day to replace and reset everything so it all works again, that manager will rip out the technology so that his or her plant is never down that long, ever again.
On the other hand, if the server and chip and re-synchronize after a glitch, then a hacker can emulate that resynchronization process.
I wonder if a Man in the Middle attack would work where the MiM and server exchange one set of keys, while the MiM and chip exchange a second set of keys. Would either side know that it was talking to a fraudulent data source?
It is a collection of Isaac Asimov's non-fiction essays about Mathematics, published in book form in 1977.
Clear, concise writing, covering topics as diverse as the history of mathematical disocoveries, the concept behind zero, pi, imaginary numbers, infinity (and beyond).
No.
1080p is fine for watching movies - but that is not the only thing that I use my laptop for.
I need a mobile workstation, and when I dropped $3k on a laptop last year, finding a major brand with a resolution better/taller than 1920x1080 would have been the deciding factor.
It looks like some of the major manufacturers have figured it out, finally.
Yes. My track record is not perfect, but that's okay.
My primary goal as a contractor is to "put myself out of a job". It can be scary to let go of an existing income stream, but no job is a guarantee. If I walk out of a site with a happy customer, they have an incentive to hire me back ... and I get to work on something new (to me), rather than being stuck maintaining the same code for years.
There are risks, but if your replacement flames out, they can always come back to you, later.
Here is my re-statement of your situation:
You care very deeply about your project. Your Program Manager has recently made a decision to bring on new people. You are concerned that these new people are not necessary, and may be detrimental to the project.
More to the point, you do not understand the reason why your PM feels that more people are necessary at this time.
Since you have a good working relationship with your PM, that is your starting point - ask why the change is a good idea. Do not respond immediately - listen to the response you are given, spend some time thinking about, and THEN make a decision. Your PM could be spot on (example: "I believe that you will need more people in about 8 months, and it takes 6 months to actually get them in place. I figure we have about 2 months of wiggle room if I start the process, now. I do not need to waste your valuable time handling what are essentially HR duties...") or could be making a mistake ("I want a bigger office, so I am growing my empire..."), or could be acting upon orders ("The owner is concerned that if you leave or get hit by abus, we're screwed. We need to have a back-up for you in place, just in case...").
Currently, you do not have enough information. If you get stonewalled by the PM, then go over his or her head.
Actually, I have been a fan of the USNO for a long time. Very cool stuff.
However there is a passage that I feel is most relevant:
[emphasis mine].
My thought was this: If the distance from the sun affects the nuclear decay rate (which occurs at the subatomic level), could it also affect the speed at which the electron energy states changes in the cesium clock design?
Science starts by asking questions. Even when the answer to the question turns out to be, "nope, not that we can tell", other interesting things can be found along the way.
If the decay rate is variable based on distance, I wonder - are the vibrations used by the Cesium clocks are variable, also?
All kinds of research is based on the assumption that a second (or other favorite unit of time) is measurable.
I wonder if MediaDefender's code is based on Microsoft.NET Framework v1.1.4322?
.NET Framework - System.Timer.Timers() where, if an unpatched server has been up for something approaching 49.7 days, the timers start firing as fast as they can be serviced, rather than when the programmer expected them to be serviced. It has to do with the number of milliseconds that can be stored in a 32-bit integer.
There is a bug in that version of the
So, MediaDefender could be correct in saying "every three hours", but if stung by this bug, it would easily turn into 8000/second if the servers had been up for 7 weeks.
Say, after a mass-reboot after deploying some new version.
Of course, the fact that they admitted to hijacking Revision3's servers has got me riled up. Bad Form!
Looks like it is time for a BadStatistics web site to go up there with BadAstronomy.
The original article says this:
The first version of the BigGame is the only drawing with a descending trend line that when combined with the deviations identify the distribution as slightly abnormalbut it later explains:
As such, positional analysis focused on how the numbers are stratified within their given positionThe specific problem is that there are 52 independant entities bouncing around in that chamber that happen to have numeric labels on them. The author sorts the data based on those labels, and runs a trend analysis that relies heavily on the sort order, in order to draw a conclusion that "the trend" is "abnormal" or "normal".
That effectively reduces a n^52 polynomial down to a n^1 polynomial. I would accept a conclusion based on 170 data points (1 lotto drawing is one data point) for a n^1 polynomial ... but for a n^52? Not a chance. Give me a few billion data points for that polynomial, or proof that reducing the system down to that sort order is, in fact, valid.
It is hard to pick on someone who does not know something, but acts intelligently to correct that situation, isn't it?
Of course, I like it when skeptics look at and think about the facts - and then decide to join the crusade, anyway.
Spammer thinks: Gee, I know how to get Hotmail to let through more of my spam ... I'll get the Slashdot crowd to raise a firestorm about attachments that aren't delivered!
Rest of us think: Man, they only get 81% of the junk? How can we help them improve the kill ratio?
Although I am occasionally amused by the random babble e-mails that the spammers send, the collective weight of the UCE would give me reason to vote for just about any Death-penalty-for-spamming law that ever pops up on the ballot.
Draco the Lawgiver would be proud.
In 1989, the lab I worked in had two Intel ICE-85 (In Circuit Emulator) machines, which could debug hardware instructions.
... Summer wasn't so pleasant.
Along with a big IBM boat anchor of a laser printer, our lab was always nice and toasty in the wintertime
Actually, you are assigning motive to me in the absence of evidence.
That remark applies to me, as well. Although, having posted on Slashdot, the comments that someone else suggested (paraphrased) "resembled the kinds of things that you would say over a beer between friends" have now become very public. Some employers search Slashdot when a prospective employee comes in - I know, because I searched it the last time I interviewed someone.
However, I do see you point that you were working within the restrictions of Ask Slashdot. I was certainly moved to respond.
What I encountered instead was a demand that I reinvent the wheel letter-perfect instead.
In my opinion, nothing is more important than being able to re-build where we are today from the ground up. We may not need to re-invent the wheel, but if we ever do, I want to know that we can. The generation before us was able to get to the moon. I am not so sure that our generation can.
Don't judge yourself by your own example.
I have found that very difficult to do in practice.
Not every person who knows more than you do is frightening or hostile.
I agree with that statement. However, I have met and worked with an occasional person who fits the full classification. The number is very small - only 2 individuals come to mind at the moment.
Just because you hide everything you know [...]
How did you get that impression from what I wrote, earlier? I happen to have the opposite personality defect - I have a bad habit of trying to help too much. But we have drifted off topic, here ...
I would already be looking to weed you out. Your disdain for the younger employees with junior technical skills is pretty obvious. As a manager, I would immediately wonder how you would treat those junior employees, and I would worry that you would regular belittle their knowledge, deride them for their mistakes and restort to intimidation to squelch a junior employee's idea that you happen to dislike.
Of course, I worked with someone who acted in the manner I describe. He actually managed to cost the company we both worked for many hours of my time, as he chose to display his extensive knowledge at every opportunity, and I found myself translating what he was saying into something that the junior employees could understand. Oh, and thanks - I had never heard of the Byzantine Generals problem. But your reference to it is something that I would take as a warning sign.
So, like previous posters, my suggestion is: just walk away. You are not built to work for a company like that.
It would be fun to see how they solved the hard part of of predicting staffing needs in restaurants - "special events".
... Tuesdays tend to be less than half the sales of a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. However, there are outside things that interfere with the normal ebb and flow of this day-in and day-out grind. For example:
... so it had better be configurable!
... so it has an an interference pattern that covers a seven year span. Gathering sales information to properly predict that may take 7+ years of sales data.
... then they have truly done a wondrous thing ... because I was not smart enough to figure out how to do it when I tried in 2002.
Sales in a restaurant are semi-predictable in normal weeks
Thanksgiving is defined to occur on a the fourth Thursday in November (in the U.S.), so the before and after spike in sales (and choosing to close the restaurant on Thanksgiving Day itself) can be predicted. Of course, Thanksgiving in Canada is a different day
Christmas Day is always on December 25, but it falls on Monday, this year, Tuesday in 2008, and so it
Easter always falls on a Sunday, but it drifts as much as a month. If your restaurant always closes on Easter, then it becomes easy, but that is not an option for family buffet restaurants.
Superbowl always falls on a Sunday, an tries to be on the same day each year, but it has drifted in the recent past, so it can be as hard to figure out as Easter.
Then there are the one-off special events that no one can predict. What computer could predict that Thursday, May 14, 1998 was going to be one of the highest sales day of the entire year for every U.S. pizza delivery chain? Thursdays are not as "dead" as Tuesdays, but they rarely if every compare to the sales on a Friday night.
That particular Thursday, however, was the day that the series finale of Seinfeld premeired.
If they have figured out how to predict the "Seinfeld"
Singular nouns get the "'s", even "princess" becomes "princess's".
Every 11 years or so we enter into a period of intense solar activity that has been known to knock out our power grids.
If this wireless flight is going to be safe, it needs to survive a massive burst and still be able to land. Anything less, and I'll take good old hydraulics, any day.
--
But what I really want to see is the time when pilot A turns on his plane and we see planes B, C, D and E all do the same thing. CRUNCH!
Older gasoline engines were designed without taking ethanol content into account. Some cheap plastic parts (cheap as in, less expensive) work just fine in gasoline engines, but deteriorate quickly when exposed to ethanol.
The engines in the vehicles in Brazil were designed to take ethanol content into account, so they do not experience this problem. Both Ford and GM are bringing these engines to the United States in the near future (some are already here), so they will be just fine. It's those older cars that are in trouble - like your 1993 Ford Explorer.
Ethanol does not release as much energy when it is burned when compared to gasoline, so you do not get quite as high real MPG when using a gasoline/ethanol mix when compared to normal gasoline. Still, if you get 80% of the MPG for 33% of the price, it's a good deal all around.
The other interesting thing is that it is harder to get ethanol to burn at lower temperatures than it is to get gasoline to burn. Minnesota, you said? The solution is to have a small gasoline-only tank used just to start the car on a cold day, and then a change over to Ethanol once things have warmed up.
I wonder what the bounty is for the 0-day exploit?
No, wait. I *shudder* to think about what the 0-day exploit will be.
The reference is on page 5 of the article:
It was late 2001, google to the rescue.
There is a similar story in Wired about the rise of Autism in Rochester, Mn (home of a very large number of IBM employees).
Apparently, slight to mild autism is a genetic trait that is good for programmers.