At my old house, I was on a 1.5 Mb/s DSL plan, but I never got more than 1.0 Mb/s, and just before I moved, it had degraded to 600 Kb/s. I was using the standard 'put a filter on every phone jack' method, the only method that the ISP would tell me about. I tried the 3 Mb/s plan, but the speed was actually worse, so they bumped me back down to 1.5 Mb/s.
I just moved to a new house. This time, I decided to do things right, and had a DSL splitter installed at the point where the phone line enters the house. [My splitter looks just like the one in the picture.] The previous owner had had unacceptably low DSL speed, but with the splitter installed, I'm within about 8% of the theoretical maximum on the 3 Mb/s plan. The phone line between the NID mounted on the outside wall of my house and the phone exchange is likely not perfect, which may account for the 8% degradation.
Note that the rated maximum speed (3 Mb/s in my case) accounts for not just the actual payload data being transmitted, but all of the protocol overhead as well: TCP headers, IP headers, etc (there are multiple protocol layers, each with overhead). Your typical internet speed test is not able to directly account for all of the protocol overhead, so your data will be transmitted slower than the rated line speed.
The
patent application
mentions a number of applications: (1) video conferencing, (2) using the screen to replace the camera in multi-function portable devices like PDAs and mobile phones, (3) medical probes that must capture an image and supply their own illumination.
Slashdot user Isaac mentions the idea of using this for a touch sensitive display. I couldn't find this mentioned in the patent application, so the race is on to file a follow-on patent!
But you wouldn't actually have to touch the screen. Years ago, MIT built a user interface called "put that there" that did gaze tracking and voice recognition, so that the "mouse pointer" was pointing at whatever object you happened to be looking at on the display. No need to touch a mouse, you just use your gaze. That might be possible with this technology. It could also be used to interpret hand gestures and facial expressions, and use them as input.
I personally think it would be cool to build a software-programmable mirror. Think of a bathroom mirror with zoom functionality, image enhancement functions, etc. The extra functions are activated by hand gestures, and face recognition is used to determine the centre of zoom (because in a bathroom, you normally want to zoom in on your face).
from the parent: I need something smaller, with instant on, and decent battery life
from the article: the new devices, which will have battery life of about three hours
This is not your father's Palm Pilot (or Newton). It won't have "instant on", because it has a 3 hour battery life, and when you turn it on, you will have to wait for it to boot Windows.
In other news, "New" is not necessarily the same as "Improved".
I RTFA, and I saw this in the email thread about cctools:
>>>I was amazed to find that the gas sources had been split out of cctools, so they could be provided in accordance with the GPL, but no other part of cctools was made available. So I never did get an answer to my question.
>>I see today a much more populated source tree for x86. >>Thank you to everyone responsible.
>Indeed, I also would like to pass along my thanks, since I was one of the people to comment on this with my concern before.
One potential use for the MacBook's PC card slot is to add a FireWire 800 port, or a modem port. I've personally never had the use for either on my laptop. The MacBook does have a FireWire 400 port, contrary to the title of the Slashdot article.
Dennett is a materialist. He believes that machines can in principle be built that have consciousness, because there is no fundamental distinction between humans and machines: humans and machines are both made of matter, and their properties derive entirely from their structure and the properties of matter. In the book that I cited, Dennett argues that free will is compatible with determinism, and he argues that free will is not an all or nothing proposition. Humans were not created, ab initio, by God, with free will already installed. Instead, we evolved from lower animals. So free will must also have evolved, in stages.
Determinism and free will are directly conflicting ideas. Please explain.
Well, it seems intuitively obvious to me that, in order to have free will, I have to be deterministic, or at least largely deterministic. To the extent that my actions are controlled by random quantum fluctuations, or whatever, instead of by my will, to that extend I am lacking in free will.
I am a moral person, and I believe that killing is wrong. If you put me in a dangerous situation where one of my options would involve killing a person, and another of my options would involve a flight to safety, then you can predict what I will do. I will not kill, I will run away. I'm behaving predictably and deterministically. But I am also behaving in accordance with my free will, in accordance with my morals and beliefs.
It's probably not possible to convince you that free will requires determinism in a few short paragraphs. For a more detailed argument, you should read "Freedom evolves" by Daniel Dennett.
The "intelligent design" crowd is a group of people who, for religious reasons, refuse to believe that human beings and animals belong to the same category. Since it's inconceivable that humans evolved from non-human animals, the theory of evolution must be overthrown, and another theory erected in its place.
There is a similar thing going on with people who study how the human mind works. Some people, for religious reasons, refuse to believe that human beings and machines belong to the same category. Humans have souls, and machines do not. Therefore, a computer can never be programmed to have all the qualities of the human mind. It's harder to see this as a religious issue, since some of the people who hold this position are atheists who claim not to believe in souls or the supernatural. But what makes this a religious issue is that there is no amount of scientific evidence that can ever convince these people otherwise.
Anyway, the two camps have been arguing about this forever. It's impossible for a member of one camp to "convert" a member of the opposite camp using rational argument. So they resort to insults. People in the "strong ai" camp accuse the other camp of being Cartesian dualists, or believing in a supernatural soul. People in the "dualist" or "mysterian" camp accuse the strong ai folks of denying the existence of human consciousness and self awareness. According to the dualists, strong ai folk believe that humans are just machines, so humans can't be conscious in any real sense, don't have free will, and can't be morally responsible for their own actions. Some (stupid) strong ai folks even agree with these insults directed against them, which makes the debate more complicated, and more infuriating. The issue of moral responsibility, which is always bubbling under the surface of these debates, shows how this is really a religious issue at a deeper level.
For the record, I am a strong ai person who believes that human beings are deterministic machines who have consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility.
If you would like to read some good books that back up my position, see: - How the brain works, by Pinker - Freedom evolves, by Dennett
I would recommend Firefox be distributed with this option disabled.
Are you also recommending that Firefox be distributed with Javascript disabled? Because this ping functionality is easy enough to implement in javascript. If ping is disabled by default, then nobody will have it enabled, which means that web developers will continue to do it the old fashioned way, and the ability to disable ping will be worthless.
Apple is clearly holding back the music industry by preventing them from charging $10 for a Britney Spears single. Likewise, through their blatant disregard for copyright (Google has stored copies of billions of copyrighted web pages in their index without obtaining permission from each copyright holder), Google has created an atmosphere of disrespect for copyright itself, which harms the music industry. Finally, Wikipedia, by distributing blatant propaganda like this page here, is actively trying to bring down the music industry.
Oh, wait. Was the parent article a troll? Never mind.
From the article: The spyware wars are over - and spyware has won
This Wired article is full of misinformation, and reads like a press release from the Claria public relations department.
Here's the truth.
1. The perception: Spyware continues to be perceived as a huge threat. Just look at the Sony fiasco (a google search for "sony spyware" returns 18,600,000 hits). The anti-spyware market place continues to be active, with lots of competing products, and new players are still appearing.
2. The reality: Spyware continues to make workstations slower and less stable. Spyware phone-home traffic continues to suck up large amounts of bandwidth on corporate networks, if you don't have good protection installed. And Claria continues to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. Anti-spyware products continue to detect, block and remove Claria spyware.
3. The article implies that anti-spyware vendors are no longer protecting against Claria. That's certainly not true for the anti-spyware products that my company ships, and it's not true for other products I've tested. Although Wired puts the well-known spin on Windows anti-spyware (OMG Microsoft is in bed with Claria), it continues to detect Claria, it still warns you if you try to install it, and it still gives you the option to remove it.
Now, it's true that Claria software is slightly less abusive of your computer than it used to be, and Microsoft did downgrade the threat level based on this change in behaviour. But the fact that Claria has made their software less egregious does not mean that "spyware has won". It means that the anti-spyware crusaders are having an effect on corporate behaviour. Just as they are now having an effect on Sony's behaviour.
1. It seems that Sony has not actually included any executable code from LAME, only some data, which is likely used as a signature, to determine if you have LAME installed and are using it to rip MP3s. This is likely fair use, not wholesale copyright violation, as far as LAME and the LGPL are concerned.
So the interesting question is: what does the rootkit do when it detects LAME on your hard drive? Does it disable or corrupt LAME? Does it phone home? Does it automatically initiate an RIAA lawsuit?
*This* is what I think the next Sony class-action lawsuit should be about. I doubt there is enough grounds to get them on an LGPL copyright infringement suit.
2. Muzzy points out that the Sony uninstaller installs a "safe for scripting" Active-X control with remotely exploitable entry points for rebooting your machine and possibly for installing arbitrary code on your machine. More fuel for the tasty class action suits that are starting up.
3. Sony has done so many evil things with the rootkit fiasco (and we haven't discovered them all yet); the outrage is spreading, and it may lead to a major backlash against the whole industry practice of distributing corrupted CDs in the name of DRM. Here's hoping for a brighter tomorrow.
That's silly. Google caching is, morally, no different from anybody else's caching. The HTTP protocol has been designed, since early days, to support caching. Caching is a good thing, generally, because it speeds up access to web pages, decreases network congestion, and mitigates the "slashdot effect". There are a huge number of caches deployed across the internet, and you may be reading this content via a cache without even knowing it. Lots of ISPs deploy HTTP caches, and so do many businesses, colleges and universities.
Your "moral" argument against Google caching is that it allows people access to content without going through the content provider's access mechanisms. That's the thing that deprives the author of value. But this argument also applies to HTTP protocol caching. My counter-argument is that caching is an inherent part of the design of the WWW, and it provides a social benefit by allowing the web to operate faster and more efficiently.
If you operate a web site, you should know that your content is subject to caching, because that's how the web works. If you don't want your content to be cached, you can opt out. For example, you can use <META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE"> to prevent HTTP caching, and you can use <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> to prevent Google caching.
This looks very similar to the implementation technique used for the Squeak programming language (not the Smalltalk Squeak). Squeak is a preprocessor for C that makes it very easy to use this technique.
When Turner first acknowledged problems with the O'gara article he used some weasel words and stopped short of apologizing.
Turner was senior editor for the print edition of LinuxWorld, but he had no control over the content of the web site. As far as I know, he was never happy about seeing anti-Linux attack dog O'Gara's articles on the web site, but there was nothing he could do. I suspect that the PJ article, and Sys-con's refusal to apologize for publishing it, was the last straw.
I wouldn't mind this, if Verisign's contract was amended to prohibit domain-typo hijacking, and more generally, to require them to remain compatible and RFC compliant. And I would want those same contract provisions regardless of who runs.com and.net.
I recently emailed google, complaining about a search result very similar to what you described.
They sent me this:
Thank you for your note. We understand your concern and are constantly
working to improve the quality of our search results. If you encounter
sites that are trying to deceive our web crawlers, please submit a report
at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. We use these reports to
collect data that our engineers use to devise scalable solutions to fight
spam in our search results. While we do not always take action on
individual sites as a result of these reports, please be assured that we
are using the information to make large-scale improvements to our system.
We appreciate your assistance in maintaining the quality of our search
results.
Regards,
The Google Team
Whenever I get a google search result that is full of spam, I usually try several other search engines, but the other engines results are normally worse than what Google gives me.
If you know a search engine that is less susceptible to spam than Google, please share!
I've programmed in Fortran (1954), Algol (1959), Cobol (1960) and Lisp (1960). Not at those times, mind you--these languages were all designed before I was born.
I've also programmed in Raw Machine Code, by patching a running system (late 1940's?).
If Plankalkul was added to the chart, then it would have no lines descending from it. The paper was written in German, there was never an English translation until relatively recently (in programming language history). Nobody was influenced by the language.
Direct influence is Unlikely, since C predates Algol68. Its more probable that both were influenced by general discussions taking place at the time.
C was designed and implemented between 1971 and 1973.
The design of Algol 68 took place over a longer period of time before there was a working compiler (corrections if this is wrong, please), but surely the design began in 1968. The earliest Algol 68 publication I'm aware of came out in 1969.
Slashdot Mirror
I just moved to a new house. This time, I decided to do things right, and had a DSL splitter installed at the point where the phone line enters the house. [My splitter looks just like the one in the picture.] The previous owner had had unacceptably low DSL speed, but with the splitter installed, I'm within about 8% of the theoretical maximum on the 3 Mb/s plan. The phone line between the NID mounted on the outside wall of my house and the phone exchange is likely not perfect, which may account for the 8% degradation.
Note that the rated maximum speed (3 Mb/s in my case) accounts for not just the actual payload data being transmitted, but all of the protocol overhead as well: TCP headers, IP headers, etc (there are multiple protocol layers, each with overhead). Your typical internet speed test is not able to directly account for all of the protocol overhead, so your data will be transmitted slower than the rated line speed.
Doug Moen
Slashdot user Isaac mentions the idea of using this for a touch sensitive display. I couldn't find this mentioned in the patent application, so the race is on to file a follow-on patent!
But you wouldn't actually have to touch the screen. Years ago, MIT built a user interface called "put that there" that did gaze tracking and voice recognition, so that the "mouse pointer" was pointing at whatever object you happened to be looking at on the display. No need to touch a mouse, you just use your gaze. That might be possible with this technology. It could also be used to interpret hand gestures and facial expressions, and use them as input.
I personally think it would be cool to build a software-programmable mirror. Think of a bathroom mirror with zoom functionality, image enhancement functions, etc. The extra functions are activated by hand gestures, and face recognition is used to determine the centre of zoom (because in a bathroom, you normally want to zoom in on your face).
Doug Moen
from the article: the new devices, which will have battery life of about three hours
This is not your father's Palm Pilot (or Newton). It won't have "instant on", because it has a 3 hour battery life, and when you turn it on, you will have to wait for it to boot Windows.
In other news, "New" is not necessarily the same as "Improved".
Doug Moen
Zonk posts old news on Slashdot and it's the government's fault?
I RTFA, and I saw this in the email thread about cctools:
>>>I was amazed to find that the gas sources had been split out of cctools, so they could be provided in accordance with the GPL, but no other part of cctools was made available. So I never did get an answer to my question.
>>I see today a much more populated source tree for x86.
>>Thank you to everyone responsible.
>Indeed, I also would like to pass along my thanks, since I was one of the people to comment on this with my concern before.
Doug Moen
One potential use for the MacBook's PC card slot is to add a FireWire 800 port, or a modem port. I've personally never had the use for either on my laptop. The MacBook does have a FireWire 400 port, contrary to the title of the Slashdot article.
Doug Moen
Dennett is a materialist. He believes that machines can in principle be built that have consciousness, because there is no fundamental distinction between humans and machines: humans and machines are both made of matter, and their properties derive entirely from their structure and the properties of matter. In the book that I cited, Dennett argues that free will is compatible with determinism, and he argues that free will is not an all or nothing proposition. Humans were not created, ab initio, by God, with free will already installed. Instead, we evolved from lower animals. So free will must also have evolved, in stages.
Well, it seems intuitively obvious to me that, in order to have free will, I have to be deterministic, or at least largely deterministic. To the extent that my actions are controlled by random quantum fluctuations, or whatever, instead of by my will, to that extend I am lacking in free will.
I am a moral person, and I believe that killing is wrong. If you put me in a dangerous situation where one of my options would involve killing a person, and another of my options would involve a flight to safety, then you can predict what I will do. I will not kill, I will run away. I'm behaving predictably and deterministically. But I am also behaving in accordance with my free will, in accordance with my morals and beliefs.
It's probably not possible to convince you that free will requires determinism in a few short paragraphs. For a more detailed argument, you should read "Freedom evolves" by Daniel Dennett.
Doug Moen.
The "intelligent design" crowd is a group of people who, for religious reasons, refuse to believe that human beings and animals belong to the same category. Since it's inconceivable that humans evolved from non-human animals, the theory of evolution must be overthrown, and another theory erected in its place.
There is a similar thing going on with people who study how the human mind works. Some people, for religious reasons, refuse to believe that human beings and machines belong to the same category. Humans have souls, and machines do not. Therefore, a computer can never be programmed to have all the qualities of the human mind. It's harder to see this as a religious issue, since some of the people who hold this position are atheists who claim not to believe in souls or the supernatural. But what makes this a religious issue is that there is no amount of scientific evidence that can ever convince these people otherwise.
Anyway, the two camps have been arguing about this forever. It's impossible for a member of one camp to "convert" a member of the opposite camp using rational argument. So they resort to insults. People in the "strong ai" camp accuse the other camp of being Cartesian dualists, or believing in a supernatural soul. People in the "dualist" or "mysterian" camp accuse the strong ai folks of denying the existence of human consciousness and self awareness. According to the dualists, strong ai folk believe that humans are just machines, so humans can't be conscious in any real sense, don't have free will, and can't be morally responsible for their own actions. Some (stupid) strong ai folks even agree with these insults directed against them, which makes the debate more complicated, and more infuriating. The issue of moral responsibility, which is always bubbling under the surface of these debates, shows how this is really a religious issue at a deeper level.
For the record, I am a strong ai person who believes that human beings are deterministic machines who have consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility.
If you would like to read some good books that back up my position, see:
- How the brain works, by Pinker
- Freedom evolves, by Dennett
Doug Moen
Are you also recommending that Firefox be distributed with Javascript disabled? Because this ping functionality is easy enough to implement in javascript. If ping is disabled by default, then nobody will have it enabled, which means that web developers will continue to do it the old fashioned way, and the ability to disable ping will be worthless.
Doug Moen.
Oh, wait. Was the parent article a troll? Never mind.
Doug Moen
This Wired article is full of misinformation, and reads like a press release from the Claria public relations department.
Here's the truth.
1. The perception: Spyware continues to be perceived as a huge threat. Just look at the Sony fiasco (a google search for "sony spyware" returns 18,600,000 hits). The anti-spyware market place continues to be active, with lots of competing products, and new players are still appearing.
2. The reality: Spyware continues to make workstations slower and less stable. Spyware phone-home traffic continues to suck up large amounts of bandwidth on corporate networks, if you don't have good protection installed. And Claria continues to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. Anti-spyware products continue to detect, block and remove Claria spyware.
3. The article implies that anti-spyware vendors are no longer protecting against Claria. That's certainly not true for the anti-spyware products that my company ships, and it's not true for other products I've tested. Although Wired puts the well-known spin on Windows anti-spyware (OMG Microsoft is in bed with Claria), it continues to detect Claria, it still warns you if you try to install it, and it still gives you the option to remove it.
Now, it's true that Claria software is slightly less abusive of your computer than it used to be, and Microsoft did downgrade the threat level based on this change in behaviour. But the fact that Claria has made their software less egregious does not mean that "spyware has won". It means that the anti-spyware crusaders are having an effect on corporate behaviour. Just as they are now having an effect on Sony's behaviour.
Doug Moen
1. It seems that Sony has not actually included any executable code from LAME, only some data, which is likely used as a signature, to determine if you have LAME installed and are using it to rip MP3s. This is likely fair use, not wholesale copyright violation, as far as LAME and the LGPL are concerned.
So the interesting question is: what does the rootkit do when it detects LAME on your hard drive? Does it disable or corrupt LAME? Does it phone home? Does it automatically initiate an RIAA lawsuit?
*This* is what I think the next Sony class-action lawsuit should be about. I doubt there is enough grounds to get them on an LGPL copyright infringement suit.
2. Muzzy points out that the Sony uninstaller installs a "safe for scripting" Active-X control with remotely exploitable entry points for rebooting your machine and possibly for installing arbitrary code on your machine. More fuel for the tasty class action suits that are starting up.
3. Sony has done so many evil things with the rootkit fiasco (and we haven't discovered them all yet); the outrage is spreading, and it may lead to a major backlash against the whole industry practice of distributing corrupted CDs in the name of DRM. Here's hoping for a brighter tomorrow.
Doug Moen.
So MozCorp is worried that those crafty Quebecois will use the first prize to build weapons of mass destruction?
That's silly. Google caching is, morally, no different from anybody else's caching. The HTTP protocol has been designed, since early days, to support caching. Caching is a good thing, generally, because it speeds up access to web pages, decreases network congestion, and mitigates the "slashdot effect". There are a huge number of caches deployed across the internet, and you may be reading this content via a cache without even knowing it. Lots of ISPs deploy HTTP caches, and so do many businesses, colleges and universities.
Your "moral" argument against Google caching is that it allows people access to content without going through the content provider's access mechanisms. That's the thing that deprives the author of value. But this argument also applies to HTTP protocol caching. My counter-argument is that caching is an inherent part of the design of the WWW, and it provides a social benefit by allowing the web to operate faster and more efficiently.
If you operate a web site, you should know that your content is subject to caching, because that's how the web works. If you don't want your content to be cached, you can opt out. For example, you can use <META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE"> to prevent HTTP caching, and you can use <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> to prevent Google caching.
Doug Moen
If you do this, then you are deliberately disabling a copy protection system, which is illegal under the DMCA. So Sony can sue you.
[Note: this varies with your jurisdiction. No DMCA in Canada, yet.]
Doug Moen.
This looks very similar to the implementation technique used for the Squeak programming language (not the Smalltalk Squeak). Squeak is a preprocessor for C that makes it very easy to use this technique.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cardelli85squeak.html
Doug Moen
This is based on how much time I spend reading science fiction, vs how much time I spend reading slashdot.
Doug Moen
Turner was senior editor for the print edition of LinuxWorld, but he had no control over the content of the web site. As far as I know, he was never happy about seeing anti-Linux attack dog O'Gara's articles on the web site, but there was nothing he could do. I suspect that the PJ article, and Sys-con's refusal to apologize for publishing it, was the last straw.
Doug Moen
I wouldn't mind this, if Verisign's contract was amended to prohibit domain-typo hijacking, and more generally, to require them to remain compatible and RFC compliant. And I would want those same contract provisions regardless of who runs .com and .net.
Doug Moen
Acrobat 7.0 Professional costs $449.
A Mac Mini costs $499.
Doug Moen.
Whenever I get a google search result that is full of spam, I usually try several other search engines, but the other engines results are normally worse than what Google gives me.
If you know a search engine that is less susceptible to spam than Google, please share!
Doug Moen.
I've programmed in Fortran (1954), Algol (1959), Cobol (1960) and Lisp (1960). Not at those times, mind you--these languages were all designed before I was born.
I've also programmed in Raw Machine Code, by patching a running system (late 1940's?).
Doug Moen.
If Plankalkul was added to the chart, then it would have no lines descending from it. The paper was written in German, there was never an English translation until relatively recently (in programming language history). Nobody was influenced by the language.
Doug Moen.
C was designed and implemented between 1971 and 1973.
The design of Algol 68 took place over a longer period of time before there was a working compiler (corrections if this is wrong, please), but surely the design began in 1968. The earliest Algol 68 publication I'm aware of came out in 1969.
Doug Moen.