I wonder what else they'll be able to find out about neutrinos with this detector. I remember the Super-Kamiokande Detector at the University of Tokyo Institute for Cosmic Ray Research. They detected the first neutrino oscillations with it back in 1998 and did an experiment a couple of years ago with an atrificial neutrino beam that further supports the hypothesis that neutrinos oscillate and therefore possess a small amount of mass. I guess this Canadian detector ought to support the theory further.
It will probably be many years before the SNO can produce any kind of useful experimental results, though. Neutrino interactions are of extremely low probability...
Bill Joy just doesn't get a fundamental point about everything that is going digital today: none of them is a product, and any idea that categorizes them as such is flawed and doomed to failure. Music is a service, always has been, and it's only when music had to be imprisoned in physical objects such as tape and compact discs could it have justifiably been called a product. But now music is rapidly reverting to the form it was before Edison invented the phonograph: a service, and all the RIAA's horses and all the RIAA's men cannot put the broken record back together again. I remember reading an article by Courtney Love on Salon that takes this view, and I think Mr. Joy should read it for his edification; this from someone who is actually in the music industry. Courtney Love doesn't see the kind of dichotomy between the music industry and the software industry that Bill Joy seems so sure exists. There really is very little fundamental difference between the music and software industries and I suppose Joy, being ignorant about the former, fails to see its connection to the latter...
The one part of the article which turned my head was Moore's statement that "If the voluntary ideals of the open source movement are further corrupted by a subculture of intellectual property theft, then the whole movement will be tainted. The owners of intellectual property will continue to fight the movement rather than cooperate with it." It kinda makes me think that even after this documentary (which I may never see unless it gets aired on Discovery Channel someday), J.T.S. Moore just doesn't get it. The whole point of the Free Software movement is not so much voluntary programming for fun as it is to get away from these notions of intellectual property, once and for all. There is a very large and very vocal segment of the Free Software movement which indeed laughs at all notions of "intellectual property" and whose spirit is the very antithesis of the owning of information: The Free Software Foundation. The fact that this was the organization that spearheaded the revolution should not have escaped Moore, and that this undercurrent of hostility to the concept of "intellectual property" pervades the hacker subculture now more than ever (a brief look at some of the articles and comments that appear here on/. should convince anyone beyond doubt).
If Moore had decided to read some of the texts on the philosophy of the GNU project, the GNU Public License, or even recent/. articles (and their attendant comments) on intellectual property issues (such as DeCSS) he would be convinced that the very idea of "intellectual property" and the ownership of information of any kind is fundamentally incompatible with and repugnant to the ideals of the Free Software movement. The Free Software movement is not just about free software, but free exchange of ideas. The owners of intellectual property are concerned with restricting such an exchange of ideas for their personal gain. Both sides are obviously mutually and diametrically opposed, though Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens have managed to negotiate an uneasy peace under the banner of "Open Source." It remains to be seen whether this compromise will last, but it is my belief that this war of ideology will continue until one side's power is broken for good.
>When exactly did Hollywood come to hate generals so much? Can you remember a positive recent portrayal of one?
Well, I remember Independence Day, and it seems that the old general there came of as a good guy, and the real villains were the that was around 1996...
There is a glaring inaccuracy in the presentation of the 3Drage article which I feel compelled to correct. Number one, the article states that a quantum computer has no net energy consumption. Of course, this isn't true. While the quantum computer is inherently reversible, this only means that it will consume the minimum amount of energy needed. You have to erase information in the quantum computer eventually, or else junk bits accumulate, and hence dissipate a cquantity of heat equal to k_BTln 2 (where k_B is Boltzmann's constant). The irreversibility also means only that an adiabatic cycle applies in the thermodynamic system of a quantum computer, meaning only that the minimum amount of energy is consumed, which is not zero (I forget the formula though). And in practice, you'll wind up using simple things like lasers, RF transmitters, and things like that to control your quantum computer via a classical machine, meaning that you necessarily will dissipate heat much more than this minimum. To say you can do work (such as computation) without consuming energy is in direct violation of the laws of thermodynamics. TANSTAAFL.
And to say that a quantum computer is a billion times faster than a classical machine is an egregious overstatement. In all likelihood, quantum computers can't perform basic arithmetic operations any faster than a classical computer; in fact, because of the way they are constructed, quantum computers are likely to be considerably slower at these things! You can't push a qubit to switch faster than the underlying quantum technology will allow, and the times that most quantum systems take to switch are slow by the standards of today's computers. The most promising approach so far, based on nuclear magnetic resonance, and described in the 3drage article, has switching times measured in milliseconds, which makes it even slower than the Intel 4004 in this respect, because the rate at which you can reliably send RF pulses to alter the state of the qubits is so low. The only reason why this can be faster than even today's supercomputers is because--with the right algorithms--you can take advantage of quantum parallelism. Meaning you can do factoring and extract discrete logarithms in O(n^2) time instead of in exponential time, and searches in O(sqrt(n)) time instead of linear time. If you can find a quantum algorithm for 3D rendering (which is not so impossible), then you may have such dramatic speedups as well.
I remember what it was like back in high school here in the Philippines. And the scars show. Always insulted, laughed at, ostracized from everything, just because I decided to be different. Because I would rather spend break times making cryptic writings rather goofing off the way they did. Because I'd rather play Ultima VI than watch basketball games. I always wished I had even a few friends back then, but they didn't come until high school was nearly at an end, and that's what I try to remember about my high school days rather than all the anger and humiliation I experienced back then.
Ironically, the person who eventually became my best friend by the time we got to the last year used to be the one who had tormented me most unmercifully during the first three years of high school. In all ways, he was my opposite; sports-minded, extraverted, and definitely as non-nerdy as anyone could get. But none of that seemed to matter when we began to understand each other. Never mind if I used to consider him one of my worst enemies. We have now an enduring friendship that lasted throughout our college years and until now when we're both professionals and he now has a family of his own. And why? He said it best: "Because we're so different we have so much to share."
I guess that's certainly true. If only the nerds and non-nerds would try to take the time to understand one another. The trouble is that it's usually the non-nerds who have to do the understanding, and they are generally unwilling to do so. My best friend made the first move. I wish others were as enlightened. There is so much that both can share with each other if they would only try. The other side of the coin is that being non-conformist doesn't necessarily mean being antisocial as well. I've never been a sports fan, probably never will be either, and my best friend will probably never become the video game freak I am, but we both were able to see what the other sees in what he enjoys, without any kind of phony conformity. This is what we nerds have to learn; that we are in some ways excluding them as much as they have been excluding us. The only way to win is to break out of the pattern somehow. The trouble is, they don't know what they're missing, but we do, and that's our pain.
Gee, I remember seeing a demonstration of this robot on a feature at the Discovery Channel two years ago! They reached a breakthrough at around that time, I think...
Fixed time actually is a relic of the industrial age, and was only necessary because the machines of the industrial age required workers to be synchronized to its rhythms. You had to be on time or else the whole factory would be delayed. Since most jobs, including the job of the person asking this question aren't based on Machine Age rhythms, but on the information flows of the Internet Age. Flextime therefore is a natural thing given the nature of the work involved, and is not just a perk or a benefit. Forcing people to come at fixed hours actually makes them less productive.
Well, I suppose Richard Garriott's decision to rush-release Ultima IX: Ascension in late 1999 did some good after all. It made it possible for this last game of what was a great series to be excluded from that list! I've been playing the Ultima games since around 1986 (with Ultima III on my C-64), and am terribly disappointed with the final chapter of the series. As are many other former Ultima fans. Thin plot, no continuity, bad voices; about the only compliment I can give U9 is that its graphics are excellent. Except you'll need a 800+MHz Athlon with a Voodoo5 AGP to experience it fully...
This is a completely disingenuous remark. I for one have been using Linux for the past six years, and I suppose a lot of people who have been using it for even less time than I have would know this to be true. Linux's licensing protects our freedom, and all companies that make use of it cannot legally do anything that can infringe on that freedom: it would be a violation of GPL to do so. The same is true for the GNU Compiler Collection, and much of the software Red Hat itself has helped develop and includes in its distribution. So, say this is Red Hat's Evil Master Plan, and they get proprietary closed-source vendors to use GCC 2.96 instead of the more interoperable versions of GCC that are available. They may gain a monopoly lock-in for a few weeks. After that, GCC has a new, more interoperable version, and Red Hat is compelled to use it in 7.1. If their monoply lock as you call it is so pervasive and they persist in using the errant GCC, then nothing stops other Linux vendors from getting a Source RPM of the errant GCC that Red Hat decided to use and bringing an end to the "monopoly lock". Red Hat can't legally prevent anyone from doing that; they'd be in gross violation of the GPL if they tried. Now, if I were the Evil Mind behind Red Hat, what I would do is invest money in developing a whole other closed-source compiler that made binaries egregiously incompatible with GCC, kink the kernel to operate around it and compile all of Red Hat 7 with it. But even that would only give them a small amount of time (and a BIG PR disaster), till someone figured out how their kernels were kinked and wrote a patch that allowed the kernel to run both the "broken" binaries compiled with Red Hat's hypothetical compiler and the legitimate GCC. Patch makes its way into the distribution kernel. Iterate ad nauseam.
The only way that they could conceivably become the kind of monopoly that you envision would be if they were to completely abandon Linux altogether in favor of a closed OS, and I don't think anyone sees this happening any time soon either.
Red Hat is the biggest player in the Linux market and control the biggest share of the biggest market for commercial Linux use because they have earned a good reputation among people like us, the Linux geeks who guide commercial Linux use. And they've earned it by consistently working towards interoperability and openness. This is worth a lot more than Microsoft's excellent marketing strategy that earned them the biggest share of the PC market, and also much more fragile. If they knowingly, and willfully did anything that endangered that reputation, and the trust that comes from that reputation, other Linux vendors would have a field day. And then we would speak thereafter not of Red Hat, but Akallabêth, the Downfallen, Atalantë in the old Eldarin tongue.:-)
Has Microsoft ever produced a real open standard? Of course not. There are de facto standards like Word DOC which nobody outside MS is happy about. Not even people who use Microsoft products all the time are happy; they know the pain of enforced upgrades all too well... The rest of us are irritated by the fact that we can't read it. They tried to make another "standard" for virtual private networks called PPTP, but we all know that one doesn't hold water. All this aside, Microsoft's business is not about creating standards, it's based on embrace and extend: taking what standards it can get and then perverting them so that nobody else can use them. They were all set to take over HTML when they started shipping Internet Exploiter with Win95, but fortunately for us Mozilla and the antitrust suit intervened. They also tried the same with Java but their court battle with Sun ended that one as well...
Well, if the user is responsible for not violating the licenses, then Sun must be guilty. In this case, since Sun chose to use as examples Becker's eepro and tulip drivers, then Sun must have been guilty of infringing on the GPL. They say the user is responsible for ensuring that their use of the tool does not violate any licenses. In this case, they were the user, they violated a license, so now they have to pay. The tool itself doesn't do that. It allows you to do it, perhaps even encourages you to do it, but preventing them from distributing the tool is the sort of thing we want to avoid, at the risk of looking like hypocrites. It would be most hypocritical of the hacker community to argue in favor of a tool like DeCSS (although to be fair, DeCSS isn't really used for copyright infringement, but people have taken this idea, the DVD-CCA's core argument, at face value and judged it to be wanting), while asking for similar treatment for Sun's driver kit. Yes, admittedly Sun's kit could be used for copyright infringing purposes, but that doesn't mean that it was intended for that. Sun made this issue worse by deliberately choosing an infringing action as its example for use, so making Donald Becker as mad as he is, and tainting the tool by making it look like such actions were the intended use of the tool. Hell, they could have just written an independent driver of their own, even if it would duplicate Becker's or someone else's work and used that as an example, but nooo....
Hacker challenge is it? Well, ever since the fiasco with DeCSS, will us hackers listen to the SDMI, which is nothing but the RIAA's DVD-CCA? Of course not. There was no need to call for such a boycott. I don't think even the hungriest hacker, whether true open sourcer or black hat script kiddie, would even think of touching that offer with a ten-meter cattle prod. We've all seen what happened with DeCSS. Now these corporate SOB's have got the gall to ask us for our help? I say screw em.
The real reason why you guys in America have had cases like Napster and DeCSS is not that your judges are technically ignorant. Well, they are, but even if they were not I believe that that wouldn't have changed the verdicts one bit.
The issues involved in both these cases however are really about technology, but the trouble is not that the judges didn't understand it; it's that the plaintiffs that have absolutely no comprehension of the technology! The MPAA and RIAA have to get it into their heads that their business models have been made obsolete long ago by technological change, and attempting to leverage the not inconsiderable power they obtained in their zenith to push it back will only make things worse for them in the long run. The Third Wave is here. If these dinosaurs of the Second Wave wish to survive it, they must evolve to match, and think up a new way of working that swims with the wave, not pushes against it. They have the look of Luddites destroying machines. I think nothing would make them more happy than to see every computer in the world dumped into the sea. A new court is not the solution. The solution is for plaintiffs to gain more vision and try to see how they can work with the new technologies rather than against it. And in the meantime take steps to take the power that has been corrupting them back.
Has anyone read Alvin Toffler's seminal book The Third Wave? That book may have been written nearly twenty years ago, but it also divides history and the future into pretty much the same categories and draws many similar conclusions about the world of the future, although when he names specific technologies he's understandably way off the mark. He also speaks of how information technology, which is the hallmark of the Third Wave, and its demassifying effects, empowering the individual, moving it away from the mass society from which the Second Wave nation state drew much of its power. And so second-wave government is no longer able to deal with it. I take it that Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age is like an updated version of The Third Wave rewritten by people who live in the heart of a newly-born Third Wave as opposed to someone writing from the vantage point of the Third Wave's birth pangs.
I've done a little hacking on NASM myself, and just saw this on the mailing list around the same time it came up here. I'm just wondering what would happen if we tried talking to Simon Tatham and Julian Hall and asking them for a license change. It's a shame as it's the most well-developed x86 assembler available (GAS doesn't count; that was obviously intended for a compiler to use and it's extremely painful to write code for it; doubly so if you're used to writing Intel syntax rather than AT&T). A look at the license shows that
When did the USPTO ever deny a patent for computer concepts? These people are apparently so ignorant of computers and computing technology that any computer-related patent filed by some vulture capitalist usually slides its way through with out a hitch. Unless IBM (which has been using the concept of virtualizing OS's since the Iron Age; long before most/. readership was even born), and the makers of VMWare take appropriate action. All of them--plex86's efforts included--constitute prior art and would be sufficient grounds for denying the patent, if someone managed to educate the USPTO about it. It is to be hoped that this is possible.
Doesn't anyone believe Bruce Schneier? The whole crux behind any effective computer security is prevention, detection, and response. Doing without one is asking for trouble. Just like a physical security device such as a lock or a vault, all secure software does is buy you time. It's a preventive device in the same way a lock or vault prevents theft. Eventually, someone, somewhere will break it, if they're determined enough, and no one stops them. Even the vault at NORAD will yield to people with blowtorches and several thousand tanks of acetylene and oxygen, and the equivalent in dynamite of several tactical nuclear warheads, if the Strategic Air Command didn't take notice of what was going on at the vault gate. Or if someone drove up to the gate carrying a 25 megaton nuclear warhead pilfered from the old SS-18 bases in Kazakhstan. They'll get in eventually, even if it takes them a year or more. Telling people that they don't need better intrusion detection is like telling the folks at SAC not to put guards up in front of the gate at Cheyenne Mountain or install cameras to watch what goes on there, since after all, "the gate is secure. So now you don't need to know that someone's trying to get in." Absolute BS. Eventually, someone will find a way in no matter how good you think your security is. They may use the software equivalent of a blowtorch (or nuke) by taking whatever assumptions you had about your security model and turning them on their head. If you don't watch what's happening to your system, and don't take the appropriate steps to deal with it when something does happen. And something will happen, eventually. It's not a question of whether, but when. Then the question will be is will you be prepared to deal with it when someone tries to to make you one of the own3d. Prevention, detection, response. This article advises us to do without one of them. Don't listen to it.
"Security is a process, not a product." --Bruce Schneier
DMCA. There's the anti-circumvention clause in that stupid law which your legislators have been dumb enough to pass. Since DVD has an anti-circumvention technology: CSS, however lame-ass and weak it is, never mind that anyone who hasn't fallen out of a tree could break it in five minutes with pencil and paper, the law's designed to protect it. Ain't it silly? It's creating a legal solution to what is essentially a technological problem. In this case, the MPAA's problem is that technology has passed them by; the notions of copyright it depends on are obsolete, so they need to change its business models to adapt to the Internet world, and abandon their obsolete notions of "intellectual property" forever. Their notions of copyright were dying around 1991 when Tim Berners Lee and Linus Torvalds began their work. By now, almost ten years later, it's not only dead, but stinking to high heaven. They should get it in their heads to bury that corpse before it creates more virulent infections such as the DMCA. It won't kill them either, just force them to make less money than they're accustomed to making.
"Whether you like it or not, History is on our side. We will bury you." --Nikita Khruschev
"You had your time. The future is our world. The future is our time." --Agent Smith
If you want zero emissions, electric cars are not the way to go. Remember, TANSTAAFL. To charge up your car, you'll still have to plug it into the wall socket, and so you wind up transferring the emissions to the power plant supplying your electricity instead of at your car's exhaust pipe. And as most power plants burn fossil fuels anyway, you may end up producing more pollution than if you burned the fossil fuels yourself in an internal combustion engine in your car. It's just somewhere where you don't smell it, at least not yet. And provided your standard gasoline engine is anywhere close to being moderately efficient, as is, you wind up wasting more energy that way, even if the power plant was completely non-polluting. Lose energy due to power line resistances, transformer core eddy currents, energy lost in your electric vehicle's batteries, etc...
Use mass transit. It's a better way. Or better yet, telecommute if you can.
I'm one of those people who was lucky enough to have an employer who would allow me to work at home... At present, I only have to show up at the "office" once or twice a week to report on progress. And so no one minds if I turn off the lights, work past 2 a.m., keep (and occasionally consume) alcoholic beverages near my workstation, play games, or visit frivolous websites (I'd smoke too, but I'm trying to quit). As long as the work gets done on time, which I'm happy to say is still the case! I could even dispense with the weekly visits to the office if my employer had a way to do easy teleconferencing.
I just wonder why this working at home hasn't taken off as much as it should have. Information workers, and especially programmers such the majority of the Slashdot readership, don't need a specific place to work that one has to go to at 9am and go home from at 5pm. Much of what we do can be done at home, and with the ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections and high-end personal computers, it's no longer a question of whether work can be done in the home. Whether it will be allowed is the question. And now, as gasoline prices soar, making the cost of transportation increasingly expensive, and the environmental risks inherent in the consumption of fossil fuels are growing (e.g. a melting piece of the Arctic), I hope that this option of working at home becomes more and more attractive to employers.
Anyone ever hear of the Voynich Manuscript? It's an odd bit of coded manuscript from around the 14th century written in an unknown language (quite possibly two languages) that has baffled cryptanalysts for centuries. Wonder if our friends at the NSA have cracked it. Visit this link for more on the strange artifact. Speculation on its actual contents range from it being a codification of Cathar doctrine, an alchemical tract, or even the monstrous Necronomicon itself.../p?
Hey, even Dr. Gene Spafford ought to consider the POSIX standard, which the Linux community prides itself on conforming to. I believe I'm not mistaken when I say that some organization (UNIFIX) has already certified Linux to be 100% conformant to the POSIX.1 standard. POSIX is definitely a formal spec even by Dr. Spafford's rigorous definition, I suppose...
I hope they have adequate shielding on the shuttle to protect that poor G4 from cosmic rays (literal cosmic rays!). Most desktop machines are not made up of parts that are guaranteed to survive the rigors of space travel. I hope no random shower of high-energy particles wind up inside the G4's memory management unit and cause it to burst into flame. A fire aboard the shuttle would kill everyone onboard...
I heard about Grover's algorithm two years ago, and there have been papers about it on the LANL archive from as far back 1996! It apparently allows unordered searches in a list of N elements in O(sqrt(N)) time, whereas the best a classical machine can do is O(N). See quant-ph/9605043: "A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search", by Lov K. Grover (Bell Labs, Murray Hill NJ). Where has everyone been? This is old, old news. Now all that we need is someone to implement a quantum computer...
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what else they'll be able to find out about neutrinos with this detector. I remember the Super-Kamiokande Detector at the University of Tokyo Institute for Cosmic Ray Research. They detected the first neutrino oscillations with it back in 1998 and did an experiment a couple of years ago with an atrificial neutrino beam that further supports the hypothesis that neutrinos oscillate and therefore possess a small amount of mass. I guess this Canadian detector ought to support the theory further.
It will probably be many years before the SNO can produce any kind of useful experimental results, though. Neutrino interactions are of extremely low probability...
Bill Joy just doesn't get a fundamental point about everything that is going digital today: none of them is a product, and any idea that categorizes them as such is flawed and doomed to failure. Music is a service, always has been, and it's only when music had to be imprisoned in physical objects such as tape and compact discs could it have justifiably been called a product. But now music is rapidly reverting to the form it was before Edison invented the phonograph: a service, and all the RIAA's horses and all the RIAA's men cannot put the broken record back together again. I remember reading an article by Courtney Love on Salon that takes this view, and I think Mr. Joy should read it for his edification; this from someone who is actually in the music industry. Courtney Love doesn't see the kind of dichotomy between the music industry and the software industry that Bill Joy seems so sure exists. There really is very little fundamental difference between the music and software industries and I suppose Joy, being ignorant about the former, fails to see its connection to the latter...
The one part of the article which turned my head was Moore's statement that "If the voluntary ideals of the open source movement are further corrupted by a subculture of intellectual property theft, then the whole movement will be tainted. The owners of intellectual property will continue to fight the movement rather than cooperate with it." It kinda makes me think that even after this documentary (which I may never see unless it gets aired on Discovery Channel someday), J.T.S. Moore just doesn't get it. The whole point of the Free Software movement is not so much voluntary programming for fun as it is to get away from these notions of intellectual property, once and for all. There is a very large and very vocal segment of the Free Software movement which indeed laughs at all notions of "intellectual property" and whose spirit is the very antithesis of the owning of information: The Free Software Foundation. The fact that this was the organization that spearheaded the revolution should not have escaped Moore, and that this undercurrent of hostility to the concept of "intellectual property" pervades the hacker subculture now more than ever (a brief look at some of the articles and comments that appear here on /. should convince anyone beyond doubt).
If Moore had decided to read some of the texts on the philosophy of the GNU project, the GNU Public License, or even recent /. articles (and their attendant comments) on intellectual property issues (such as DeCSS) he would be convinced that the very idea of "intellectual property" and the ownership of information of any kind is fundamentally incompatible with and repugnant to the ideals of the Free Software movement. The Free Software movement is not just about free software, but free exchange of ideas. The owners of intellectual property are concerned with restricting such an exchange of ideas for their personal gain. Both sides are obviously mutually and diametrically opposed, though Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens have managed to negotiate an uneasy peace under the banner of "Open Source." It remains to be seen whether this compromise will last, but it is my belief that this war of ideology will continue until one side's power is broken for good.
>When exactly did Hollywood come to hate generals so much? Can you remember a positive recent portrayal of one? Well, I remember Independence Day, and it seems that the old general there came of as a good guy, and the real villains were the that was around 1996...
There is a glaring inaccuracy in the presentation of the 3Drage article which I feel compelled to correct. Number one, the article states that a quantum computer has no net energy consumption. Of course, this isn't true. While the quantum computer is inherently reversible, this only means that it will consume the minimum amount of energy needed. You have to erase information in the quantum computer eventually, or else junk bits accumulate, and hence dissipate a cquantity of heat equal to k_BTln 2 (where k_B is Boltzmann's constant). The irreversibility also means only that an adiabatic cycle applies in the thermodynamic system of a quantum computer, meaning only that the minimum amount of energy is consumed, which is not zero (I forget the formula though). And in practice, you'll wind up using simple things like lasers, RF transmitters, and things like that to control your quantum computer via a classical machine, meaning that you necessarily will dissipate heat much more than this minimum. To say you can do work (such as computation) without consuming energy is in direct violation of the laws of thermodynamics. TANSTAAFL. And to say that a quantum computer is a billion times faster than a classical machine is an egregious overstatement. In all likelihood, quantum computers can't perform basic arithmetic operations any faster than a classical computer; in fact, because of the way they are constructed, quantum computers are likely to be considerably slower at these things! You can't push a qubit to switch faster than the underlying quantum technology will allow, and the times that most quantum systems take to switch are slow by the standards of today's computers. The most promising approach so far, based on nuclear magnetic resonance, and described in the 3drage article, has switching times measured in milliseconds, which makes it even slower than the Intel 4004 in this respect, because the rate at which you can reliably send RF pulses to alter the state of the qubits is so low. The only reason why this can be faster than even today's supercomputers is because--with the right algorithms--you can take advantage of quantum parallelism. Meaning you can do factoring and extract discrete logarithms in O(n^2) time instead of in exponential time, and searches in O(sqrt(n)) time instead of linear time. If you can find a quantum algorithm for 3D rendering (which is not so impossible), then you may have such dramatic speedups as well.
I remember what it was like back in high school here in the Philippines. And the scars show. Always insulted, laughed at, ostracized from everything, just because I decided to be different. Because I would rather spend break times making cryptic writings rather goofing off the way they did. Because I'd rather play Ultima VI than watch basketball games. I always wished I had even a few friends back then, but they didn't come until high school was nearly at an end, and that's what I try to remember about my high school days rather than all the anger and humiliation I experienced back then. Ironically, the person who eventually became my best friend by the time we got to the last year used to be the one who had tormented me most unmercifully during the first three years of high school. In all ways, he was my opposite; sports-minded, extraverted, and definitely as non-nerdy as anyone could get. But none of that seemed to matter when we began to understand each other. Never mind if I used to consider him one of my worst enemies. We have now an enduring friendship that lasted throughout our college years and until now when we're both professionals and he now has a family of his own. And why? He said it best: "Because we're so different we have so much to share." I guess that's certainly true. If only the nerds and non-nerds would try to take the time to understand one another. The trouble is that it's usually the non-nerds who have to do the understanding, and they are generally unwilling to do so. My best friend made the first move. I wish others were as enlightened. There is so much that both can share with each other if they would only try. The other side of the coin is that being non-conformist doesn't necessarily mean being antisocial as well. I've never been a sports fan, probably never will be either, and my best friend will probably never become the video game freak I am, but we both were able to see what the other sees in what he enjoys, without any kind of phony conformity. This is what we nerds have to learn; that we are in some ways excluding them as much as they have been excluding us. The only way to win is to break out of the pattern somehow. The trouble is, they don't know what they're missing, but we do, and that's our pain.
Gee, I remember seeing a demonstration of this robot on a feature at the Discovery Channel two years ago! They reached a breakthrough at around that time, I think...
Fixed time actually is a relic of the industrial age, and was only necessary because the machines of the industrial age required workers to be synchronized to its rhythms. You had to be on time or else the whole factory would be delayed. Since most jobs, including the job of the person asking this question aren't based on Machine Age rhythms, but on the information flows of the Internet Age. Flextime therefore is a natural thing given the nature of the work involved, and is not just a perk or a benefit. Forcing people to come at fixed hours actually makes them less productive.
Well, I suppose Richard Garriott's decision to rush-release Ultima IX: Ascension in late 1999 did some good after all. It made it possible for this last game of what was a great series to be excluded from that list! I've been playing the Ultima games since around 1986 (with Ultima III on my C-64), and am terribly disappointed with the final chapter of the series. As are many other former Ultima fans. Thin plot, no continuity, bad voices; about the only compliment I can give U9 is that its graphics are excellent. Except you'll need a 800+MHz Athlon with a Voodoo5 AGP to experience it fully...
This is a completely disingenuous remark. I for one have been using Linux for the past six years, and I suppose a lot of people who have been using it for even less time than I have would know this to be true. Linux's licensing protects our freedom, and all companies that make use of it cannot legally do anything that can infringe on that freedom: it would be a violation of GPL to do so. The same is true for the GNU Compiler Collection, and much of the software Red Hat itself has helped develop and includes in its distribution. So, say this is Red Hat's Evil Master Plan, and they get proprietary closed-source vendors to use GCC 2.96 instead of the more interoperable versions of GCC that are available. They may gain a monopoly lock-in for a few weeks. After that, GCC has a new, more interoperable version, and Red Hat is compelled to use it in 7.1. If their monoply lock as you call it is so pervasive and they persist in using the errant GCC, then nothing stops other Linux vendors from getting a Source RPM of the errant GCC that Red Hat decided to use and bringing an end to the "monopoly lock". Red Hat can't legally prevent anyone from doing that; they'd be in gross violation of the GPL if they tried. Now, if I were the Evil Mind behind Red Hat, what I would do is invest money in developing a whole other closed-source compiler that made binaries egregiously incompatible with GCC, kink the kernel to operate around it and compile all of Red Hat 7 with it. But even that would only give them a small amount of time (and a BIG PR disaster), till someone figured out how their kernels were kinked and wrote a patch that allowed the kernel to run both the "broken" binaries compiled with Red Hat's hypothetical compiler and the legitimate GCC. Patch makes its way into the distribution kernel. Iterate ad nauseam. The only way that they could conceivably become the kind of monopoly that you envision would be if they were to completely abandon Linux altogether in favor of a closed OS, and I don't think anyone sees this happening any time soon either. Red Hat is the biggest player in the Linux market and control the biggest share of the biggest market for commercial Linux use because they have earned a good reputation among people like us, the Linux geeks who guide commercial Linux use. And they've earned it by consistently working towards interoperability and openness. This is worth a lot more than Microsoft's excellent marketing strategy that earned them the biggest share of the PC market, and also much more fragile. If they knowingly, and willfully did anything that endangered that reputation, and the trust that comes from that reputation, other Linux vendors would have a field day. And then we would speak thereafter not of Red Hat, but Akallabêth, the Downfallen, Atalantë in the old Eldarin tongue. :-)
Has Microsoft ever produced a real open standard? Of course not. There are de facto standards like Word DOC which nobody outside MS is happy about. Not even people who use Microsoft products all the time are happy; they know the pain of enforced upgrades all too well... The rest of us are irritated by the fact that we can't read it. They tried to make another "standard" for virtual private networks called PPTP, but we all know that one doesn't hold water. All this aside, Microsoft's business is not about creating standards, it's based on embrace and extend: taking what standards it can get and then perverting them so that nobody else can use them. They were all set to take over HTML when they started shipping Internet Exploiter with Win95, but fortunately for us Mozilla and the antitrust suit intervened. They also tried the same with Java but their court battle with Sun ended that one as well...
Well, if the user is responsible for not violating the licenses, then Sun must be guilty. In this case, since Sun chose to use as examples Becker's eepro and tulip drivers, then Sun must have been guilty of infringing on the GPL. They say the user is responsible for ensuring that their use of the tool does not violate any licenses. In this case, they were the user, they violated a license, so now they have to pay. The tool itself doesn't do that. It allows you to do it, perhaps even encourages you to do it, but preventing them from distributing the tool is the sort of thing we want to avoid, at the risk of looking like hypocrites. It would be most hypocritical of the hacker community to argue in favor of a tool like DeCSS (although to be fair, DeCSS isn't really used for copyright infringement, but people have taken this idea, the DVD-CCA's core argument, at face value and judged it to be wanting), while asking for similar treatment for Sun's driver kit. Yes, admittedly Sun's kit could be used for copyright infringing purposes, but that doesn't mean that it was intended for that. Sun made this issue worse by deliberately choosing an infringing action as its example for use, so making Donald Becker as mad as he is, and tainting the tool by making it look like such actions were the intended use of the tool. Hell, they could have just written an independent driver of their own, even if it would duplicate Becker's or someone else's work and used that as an example, but nooo....
Hacker challenge is it? Well, ever since the fiasco with DeCSS, will us hackers listen to the SDMI, which is nothing but the RIAA's DVD-CCA? Of course not. There was no need to call for such a boycott. I don't think even the hungriest hacker, whether true open sourcer or black hat script kiddie, would even think of touching that offer with a ten-meter cattle prod. We've all seen what happened with DeCSS. Now these corporate SOB's have got the gall to ask us for our help? I say screw em.
The real reason why you guys in America have had cases like Napster and DeCSS is not that your judges are technically ignorant. Well, they are, but even if they were not I believe that that wouldn't have changed the verdicts one bit. The issues involved in both these cases however are really about technology, but the trouble is not that the judges didn't understand it; it's that the plaintiffs that have absolutely no comprehension of the technology! The MPAA and RIAA have to get it into their heads that their business models have been made obsolete long ago by technological change, and attempting to leverage the not inconsiderable power they obtained in their zenith to push it back will only make things worse for them in the long run. The Third Wave is here. If these dinosaurs of the Second Wave wish to survive it, they must evolve to match, and think up a new way of working that swims with the wave, not pushes against it. They have the look of Luddites destroying machines. I think nothing would make them more happy than to see every computer in the world dumped into the sea. A new court is not the solution. The solution is for plaintiffs to gain more vision and try to see how they can work with the new technologies rather than against it. And in the meantime take steps to take the power that has been corrupting them back.
Has anyone read Alvin Toffler's seminal book The Third Wave? That book may have been written nearly twenty years ago, but it also divides history and the future into pretty much the same categories and draws many similar conclusions about the world of the future, although when he names specific technologies he's understandably way off the mark. He also speaks of how information technology, which is the hallmark of the Third Wave, and its demassifying effects, empowering the individual, moving it away from the mass society from which the Second Wave nation state drew much of its power. And so second-wave government is no longer able to deal with it. I take it that Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age is like an updated version of The Third Wave rewritten by people who live in the heart of a newly-born Third Wave as opposed to someone writing from the vantage point of the Third Wave's birth pangs.
I've done a little hacking on NASM myself, and just saw this on the mailing list around the same time it came up here. I'm just wondering what would happen if we tried talking to Simon Tatham and Julian Hall and asking them for a license change. It's a shame as it's the most well-developed x86 assembler available (GAS doesn't count; that was obviously intended for a compiler to use and it's extremely painful to write code for it; doubly so if you're used to writing Intel syntax rather than AT&T). A look at the license shows that
When did the USPTO ever deny a patent for computer concepts? These people are apparently so ignorant of computers and computing technology that any computer-related patent filed by some vulture capitalist usually slides its way through with out a hitch. Unless IBM (which has been using the concept of virtualizing OS's since the Iron Age; long before most /. readership was even born), and the makers of VMWare take appropriate action. All of them--plex86's efforts included--constitute prior art and would be sufficient grounds for denying the patent, if someone managed to educate the USPTO about it. It is to be hoped that this is possible.
Doesn't anyone believe Bruce Schneier? The whole crux behind any effective computer security is prevention, detection, and response. Doing without one is asking for trouble. Just like a physical security device such as a lock or a vault, all secure software does is buy you time. It's a preventive device in the same way a lock or vault prevents theft. Eventually, someone, somewhere will break it, if they're determined enough, and no one stops them. Even the vault at NORAD will yield to people with blowtorches and several thousand tanks of acetylene and oxygen, and the equivalent in dynamite of several tactical nuclear warheads, if the Strategic Air Command didn't take notice of what was going on at the vault gate. Or if someone drove up to the gate carrying a 25 megaton nuclear warhead pilfered from the old SS-18 bases in Kazakhstan. They'll get in eventually, even if it takes them a year or more. Telling people that they don't need better intrusion detection is like telling the folks at SAC not to put guards up in front of the gate at Cheyenne Mountain or install cameras to watch what goes on there, since after all, "the gate is secure. So now you don't need to know that someone's trying to get in." Absolute BS. Eventually, someone will find a way in no matter how good you think your security is. They may use the software equivalent of a blowtorch (or nuke) by taking whatever assumptions you had about your security model and turning them on their head. If you don't watch what's happening to your system, and don't take the appropriate steps to deal with it when something does happen. And something will happen, eventually. It's not a question of whether, but when. Then the question will be is will you be prepared to deal with it when someone tries to to make you one of the own3d. Prevention, detection, response. This article advises us to do without one of them. Don't listen to it. "Security is a process, not a product." --Bruce Schneier
DMCA. There's the anti-circumvention clause in that stupid law which your legislators have been dumb enough to pass. Since DVD has an anti-circumvention technology: CSS, however lame-ass and weak it is, never mind that anyone who hasn't fallen out of a tree could break it in five minutes with pencil and paper, the law's designed to protect it. Ain't it silly? It's creating a legal solution to what is essentially a technological problem. In this case, the MPAA's problem is that technology has passed them by; the notions of copyright it depends on are obsolete, so they need to change its business models to adapt to the Internet world, and abandon their obsolete notions of "intellectual property" forever. Their notions of copyright were dying around 1991 when Tim Berners Lee and Linus Torvalds began their work. By now, almost ten years later, it's not only dead, but stinking to high heaven. They should get it in their heads to bury that corpse before it creates more virulent infections such as the DMCA. It won't kill them either, just force them to make less money than they're accustomed to making. "Whether you like it or not, History is on our side. We will bury you." --Nikita Khruschev "You had your time. The future is our world. The future is our time." --Agent Smith
If you want zero emissions, electric cars are not the way to go. Remember, TANSTAAFL. To charge up your car, you'll still have to plug it into the wall socket, and so you wind up transferring the emissions to the power plant supplying your electricity instead of at your car's exhaust pipe. And as most power plants burn fossil fuels anyway, you may end up producing more pollution than if you burned the fossil fuels yourself in an internal combustion engine in your car. It's just somewhere where you don't smell it, at least not yet. And provided your standard gasoline engine is anywhere close to being moderately efficient, as is, you wind up wasting more energy that way, even if the power plant was completely non-polluting. Lose energy due to power line resistances, transformer core eddy currents, energy lost in your electric vehicle's batteries, etc... Use mass transit. It's a better way. Or better yet, telecommute if you can.
I'm one of those people who was lucky enough to have an employer who would allow me to work at home... At present, I only have to show up at the "office" once or twice a week to report on progress. And so no one minds if I turn off the lights, work past 2 a.m., keep (and occasionally consume) alcoholic beverages near my workstation, play games, or visit frivolous websites (I'd smoke too, but I'm trying to quit). As long as the work gets done on time, which I'm happy to say is still the case! I could even dispense with the weekly visits to the office if my employer had a way to do easy teleconferencing. I just wonder why this working at home hasn't taken off as much as it should have. Information workers, and especially programmers such the majority of the Slashdot readership, don't need a specific place to work that one has to go to at 9am and go home from at 5pm. Much of what we do can be done at home, and with the ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections and high-end personal computers, it's no longer a question of whether work can be done in the home. Whether it will be allowed is the question. And now, as gasoline prices soar, making the cost of transportation increasingly expensive, and the environmental risks inherent in the consumption of fossil fuels are growing (e.g. a melting piece of the Arctic), I hope that this option of working at home becomes more and more attractive to employers.
Anyone ever hear of the Voynich Manuscript? It's an odd bit of coded manuscript from around the 14th century written in an unknown language (quite possibly two languages) that has baffled cryptanalysts for centuries. Wonder if our friends at the NSA have cracked it. Visit this link for more on the strange artifact. Speculation on its actual contents range from it being a codification of Cathar doctrine, an alchemical tract, or even the monstrous Necronomicon itself.../p?
Hey, even Dr. Gene Spafford ought to consider the POSIX standard, which the Linux community prides itself on conforming to. I believe I'm not mistaken when I say that some organization (UNIFIX) has already certified Linux to be 100% conformant to the POSIX.1 standard. POSIX is definitely a formal spec even by Dr. Spafford's rigorous definition, I suppose...
I hope they have adequate shielding on the shuttle to protect that poor G4 from cosmic rays (literal cosmic rays!). Most desktop machines are not made up of parts that are guaranteed to survive the rigors of space travel. I hope no random shower of high-energy particles wind up inside the G4's memory management unit and cause it to burst into flame. A fire aboard the shuttle would kill everyone onboard...
I heard about Grover's algorithm two years ago, and there have been papers about it on the LANL archive from as far back 1996! It apparently allows unordered searches in a list of N elements in O(sqrt(N)) time, whereas the best a classical machine can do is O(N). See quant-ph/9605043: "A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search", by Lov K. Grover (Bell Labs, Murray Hill NJ). Where has everyone been? This is old, old news. Now all that we need is someone to implement a quantum computer...