I attended a presentation recently by Doug Engelbart (the inventor of the mouse, windowing, and other cool stuff). One of the things he did was to display his "chord keyboard" - similar to an actual keyboard, but you depress more than one key at once (hence Chord). He attacked the existing icon-based metaphor as being too limited, and what his chord keyboard provided was a more expressive way of describing what you wanted to do i.e. expressing your actions in terms of nouns and verbs, instead of syntatically limited mouse clicks. This may be something free software GUIs may want to experiment with - much better than going down the route of 3d windows which I don't really see the point of.
He also attacked the current obsession with making things "easy to learn". My intepretation of this is that if something lets us accomplish more than what we could without it, and if it really had to be that hard, then we should be prepared to learn it rather than complain and do without it.
(FYI, Engelbart was using Windows with Powerpoint:) And despite being the inventor of the mouse, he seemed very hesistant with it, probably due to his age. )
I agree with you that history is important, challenging, and that the teaching of humanties should be an important part of any education. However, Mathematics is far more than rule application. In developing his incompleteness theorem, one of Godel's objectives was to show that intuition plays a crucial role in mathematics, and that mathematics cannot be reduced to simple rule application. There's an excellent article ("The limits of logic") on this in the June 1999 edition of Scientific American. Unfortunately, the article is not online, but I highly recommend you getting hold of it.
Do I sue the makers? That's like suing parents -- it just doesn't hold for something legally declared a being. But can we punish something that has no real regrets
I seriously doubt an AI can be considered sentient, or legally declared a being unless it possesses feelings like regret. Until then, go ahead and sue the manufacturer.
I'm guessing (I am TOO tired to read the article and make total sense of it right now) that they have already isolated which frequencies effect ADSL. That leaves it to a simple matter of determining a way to filter out the noise from those frequencies at each end. That, unfortunately, is not easy.
No. The primary way noise is compensated for is by sending *less* signal energy on frequency bands where the noise level is high (e.g. AM frequency bands), and *more* signal energy on bands where the noise is low.
e.g. If you imagine a band pass channel which only passes frequencies between F-df to F+df, then you would want to send *all* your signal energy in that band (since the response of the channel elsewhere is 0!) So in general, the amount of signal you send on a particular band is something like (I'm not being precise here) proportional to the SNR in that band.
So for the problem of AM intereference, they can simply elect not to send much signal energy in those bands, and this is already accounted for in the ADSL specs.
I happened to attend a talk last week by Professor Cioffi of Stanford University, the inventor of the DMT technique widely used in ADSL. The issue of AM interference with ADSL transmission came up during his presentation. However, what DMT does is to optimize the transmission by reducing the strength of the signal sent on frequency bands where the noise is high (or where FCC regulations do not permit transmission due to emissions produced by the DSL line), and increase the signal strength on bands where the noise is low. If I recall correctly, AM interference is accounted for and the actual ADSL specs do not transmit a significant amount of energy in the AM frequency bands, so it's strange that this article identifies AM interference as a problem.
Encryption regulations are a royal pain, especially for small developers. I had an idea for a program that uses cryptography, so I got together with a friend to write this. After nearly half a year, our software is almost done, but the issues regarding crypto regulations are unresolved.
In order to comply with the export regulations, we had to cripple our software (56bit DES instead of 3DES), because we plan to offer our software for download over the internet but we don't have the resources to limit our software to people in the US only. Even then, there are still more problems. We have to submit our software for a "one time technical review". After spending hours and hours pouring through the regulations and making phone calls to the BXA, we finally figure out what has to be done. There are half are dozen forms to fill out, we have to describe our software in detail, spend time modifying our code so that the encryption strength cannot be easily increased, etc. etc.
We haven't managed to find the time or energy to do this yet. I'm still studying and my friend holds a full time job. We barely have time to work on the software proper, let alone deal with legal crap like this. Perhaps someone has some advice to offer on how we should go ahead?
How did distinction come about?
on
Geeks vs. Nerds
·
· Score: 2
'Geek' has become an almost positive term: smart, rich (silicon valley types), if on the dorky side. 'Nerd' is still almost wholly negative.
I think the interesting question is, how did things turn out this way? It seems to be a very recent distinction: I remember posting (anonymously) on/. several years back a comment on the distinction between geek and nerd, and I remember that the difference in meaning was much less clear then than it is now.
It seems that it could have gone either way: we needed a term with a positive connotation and a term with a negative connotation, so people just made an arbitrary choice.
Conincidentally, just a few weeks ago, the professor for an imaging class I'm taking discussed the method of detecting planets by measuring the reflected light off the planet. Basically, we wait for a period of increased solar activity (which causes a spike in the received signal), and then take the autocorrelation of the received signal. We should then see 2 spikes in the autocorrelation function: one corresponding to the direct emission from the star, the other from the reflection off the planet.
In practice however, it doesn't work that well (and in fact hadn't been applied sucessfully before this) since the reflection off the planet is very weak and drowned by noise.
The amount of xenophobia here amazes me. It seems that everytime we have an article on any advance in China, we have Slasdotters making chittering little noises that amount to "Oh no, are they going to kill us now?"
China has replaced the Soviet Union as the big bad wolf in American eyes, and when supposedly rational Slashdotters take part in the fear mongering, it's easy to see how movements like McCarthyism arose in America.
Perhaps someone can tell me, what do groupware programs like Notes and Exchange do that's so special? From the screenshots, it looks just like a mail program with calender functions, a to do list and an address book.
These new transistors have much smaller gate thickness, which means less capacitance, which means higher switching speeds, but also a lower breakdown voltage, which means less power. Making the transistors smaller also allows them to be crowded together, which reduces wire length (not necessarily wire thickness, as you think). So the net effect is positive: everything gets smaller and faster and uses less power.
Wire thickness has to be reduced to match the transistor sizes, otherwise you don't get any gains in density. Crowding the wires together also increases the capacitance between wires.
Shorter wires don't cause much problems, but longer wires have large resistances and delays (and longer wires will still exist since the purpose is to squeeze more transistors into the same area).
Smaller transistor sizes don't necessarily make the chip run faster. The problem is, as the transistors get smaller, the wires get smaller as well. Smaller wires have higher resistance and have more capacitive contact with surrounding wires, and so at a certain point, the delays in the wires start to dominate and the delays in the chip actually increase as the chip is minaturized.
This is a big problem in the industry today. Copper wires help because they have lower resistance than Al interconnects. People are also researching optical interconnects.
Interesting. But since UPS is a private enterprise, it's free to make its own business decisions. The customer is told that he has to pay this price, and if the thing breaks, he is paid this much. If the customer isn't happy with the price he has to pay for insurance, he can always go elsewhere (unless we have a monopoly or collusion within the industry). So I'm not that there is really a case.
UPS does make you pay the insurance. First they ask you if your item costs above $100, and if it does, you've to pay the insurance. You can try lying of course. For international shipments, they even want a copy of the receipt (for customs purposes as well).
I was wondering the same thing as well. If the customers are paid when their stuff is damaged, how does it matter exactly what UPS does with the money? Of course they'll invest the money somewhere, they won't just leave it sitting around.
Sure, they take more in than they pay out, but that's how it is with all kinds of insurance -- otherwise insurance companies wouldn't exist.
19111999 is prime as well
on
Happy Odd Day!
·
· Score: 3
If you write the date in British format (as most countries do), 19/11/1999, then 19111999 is prime as well!
*Amazon (someone mentioned this) is a _bad_ idea. Profit motive and releasing free documents don't coincide well.
I suggested Amazon earlier, but I guess I should have argued my point rather than just suggesting it. Why don't profit motive and releasing free documents coincide well?
Profit motive and free documents can coincide perfectly, and work to each other's mutual benefit. The free software world shows that the profit motive, demonstrated by companies like Red Hat, may in fact be the *best* way of supporting the development of free stuff (software, documents, and who knows what else). What Project Gutenberg needs is publicity, and who can do publicity better than companies like Amazon with plenty and of money and marketing skills?
But why would Amazon want to help PG? For the same reason why enlightened bookstores make it easy for customers to browse through books -- letting customers browse increases sales; putting links to PG texts brings this browsing experience online (imo, there isn't much worry that the customer will just read the whole book online rather than buy it -- reading a whole book online is just too unpleasant).
Furthermore, the PG deals with copyright expired books, so the market is different in most cases; linking to PG is just another value added service that online booksellers like Amazon can provide for their customers.
Project Gutenberg carries only copyright expired texts, so it doesn't really compete directly with Amazon's business. And it may be a good thing for Amazon: it's a nice service for Amazon's customers to be able to read books online.
Even in the case where Amazon is trying to sell the same books covered by Project Gutenberg (e.g. classics), I think most people still prefer to read the book in printed form, so providing links from the book's page to the project Gutenberg text provides a using previewing service and may help to generate more interest (and sales) for the book.
If the patent really contained anything substantial, why on earth would NSA patent it and thus share the information with every other intelligence agency on Earth? They would just keep it secret -- a patent wouldn't stop foreign intelligence agencies from using the information.
Furthermore, according to Applied Cryptography, there is no need for the NSA to obtain a patent, because in the case that an independent inventor later makes the same discovery, NSA has the power to announce that the discovery they made earlier and date their discovery from the date of their announcement.
So it seems that the NSA does not really possess such a technology in working form , but the sole purpose of the patent is that if someone else were to later invent such a device (for real), the NSA could stop its use (through their earlier patent), or claim the invention for themselves.
Imagine you are Joe Newbie. You install Windows and suscribe to the Support service by Bill's company. You pay a nominal fee each month. Then every other week you get a CD in the mail with various updates and bug fixes. Also you get a newsletter with various happenings in Windows world.
Lets say that Joe newbie is having problems with Excel crashing. He emails support with his problem and gets a reply that they have fixed the problem. The fix will be installed on the next CD or can be downloaded. Not only that but the fix will be distributed to all the subscribers.
Now lets say Joe Newbie wants a certain feature. Like perhaps animated icons. He emails support and they say that they will charge a fee but the fee is less for subscribers. The feature will be developed in six weeks and will come on that CD. If the feature is benificial for Windows as a whole it will be on everyone's CD and included in the next Windows distribution.
Windows support could develop themes, desktop wallpaper, alternate icons, etc. They could propietize these which I don't think is against the principles of free software: they are creative works.
Many users will like this service. They always have the latest stable software.
Slashdot Mirror
I attended a presentation recently by Doug Engelbart (the inventor of the mouse, windowing, and other cool stuff). One of the things he did was to display his "chord keyboard" - similar to an actual keyboard, but you depress more than one key at once (hence Chord). He attacked the existing icon-based metaphor as being too limited, and what his chord keyboard provided was a more expressive way of describing what you wanted to do i.e. expressing your actions in terms of nouns and verbs, instead of syntatically limited mouse clicks. This may be something free software GUIs may want to experiment with - much better than going down the route of 3d windows which I don't really see the point of.
:) And despite being the inventor of the mouse, he seemed very hesistant with it, probably due to his age. )
He also attacked the current obsession with making things "easy to learn". My intepretation of this is that if something lets us accomplish more than what we could without it, and if it really had to be that hard, then we should be prepared to learn it rather than complain and do without it.
(FYI, Engelbart was using Windows with Powerpoint
I agree with you that history is important, challenging, and that the teaching of humanties should be an important part of any education. However, Mathematics is far more than rule application. In developing his incompleteness theorem, one of Godel's objectives was to show that intuition plays a crucial role in mathematics, and that mathematics cannot be reduced to simple rule application. There's an excellent article ("The limits of logic") on this in the June 1999 edition of Scientific American. Unfortunately, the article is not online, but I highly recommend you getting hold of it.
Do I sue the makers? That's like suing parents -- it just doesn't hold for something legally declared a being. But can we punish something that has no real regrets
I seriously doubt an AI can be considered sentient, or legally declared a being unless it possesses feelings like regret. Until then, go ahead and sue the manufacturer.
I'm guessing (I am TOO tired to read the article and make total sense of it right now) that they have already isolated which frequencies effect ADSL. That leaves it to a simple matter of determining a way to filter out the noise from those frequencies at each end. That, unfortunately, is not easy.
No. The primary way noise is compensated for is by sending *less* signal energy on frequency bands where the noise level is high (e.g. AM frequency bands), and *more* signal energy on bands where the noise is low.
e.g. If you imagine a band pass channel which only passes frequencies between F-df to F+df, then you would want to send *all* your signal energy in that band (since the response of the channel elsewhere is 0!) So in general, the amount of signal you send on a particular band is something like (I'm not being precise here) proportional to the SNR in that band.
So for the problem of AM intereference, they can simply elect not to send much signal energy in those bands, and this is already accounted for in the ADSL specs.
I happened to attend a talk last week by Professor Cioffi of Stanford University, the inventor of the DMT technique widely used in ADSL. The issue of AM interference with ADSL transmission came up during his presentation. However, what DMT does is to optimize the transmission by reducing the strength of the signal sent on frequency bands where the noise is high (or where FCC regulations do not permit transmission due to emissions produced by the DSL line), and increase the signal strength on bands where the noise is low. If I recall correctly, AM interference is accounted for and the actual ADSL specs do not transmit a significant amount of energy in the AM frequency bands, so it's strange that this article identifies AM interference as a problem.
Encryption regulations are a royal pain, especially for small developers. I had an idea for a program that uses cryptography, so I got together with a friend to write this. After nearly half a year, our software is almost done, but the issues regarding crypto regulations are unresolved.
In order to comply with the export regulations, we had to cripple our software (56bit DES instead of 3DES), because we plan to offer our software for download over the internet but we don't have the resources to limit our software to people in the US only. Even then, there are still more problems. We have to submit our software for a "one time technical review". After spending hours and hours pouring through the regulations and making phone calls to the BXA, we finally figure out what has to be done. There are half are dozen forms to fill out, we have to describe our software in detail, spend time modifying our code so that the encryption strength cannot be easily increased, etc. etc.
We haven't managed to find the time or energy to do this yet. I'm still studying and my friend holds a full time job. We barely have time to work on the software proper, let alone deal with legal crap like this. Perhaps someone has some advice to offer on how we should go ahead?
'Geek' has become an almost positive term: smart, rich (silicon valley types), if on the dorky side. 'Nerd' is still almost wholly negative.
/. several years back a comment on the distinction between geek and nerd, and I remember that the difference in meaning was much less clear then than it is now.
I think the interesting question is, how did things turn out this way? It seems to be a very recent distinction: I remember posting (anonymously) on
It seems that it could have gone either way: we needed a term with a positive connotation and a term with a negative connotation, so people just made an arbitrary choice.
The mathematical association of america has some nice information on this:
http://www.maa.org/mathland/math trek_11_22_99.html
Conincidentally, just a few weeks ago, the professor for an imaging class I'm taking discussed the method of detecting planets by measuring the reflected light off the planet. Basically, we wait for a period of increased solar activity (which causes a spike in the received signal), and then take the autocorrelation of the received signal. We should then see 2 spikes in the autocorrelation function: one corresponding to the direct emission from the star, the other from the reflection off the planet.
In practice however, it doesn't work that well (and in fact hadn't been applied sucessfully before this) since the reflection off the planet is very weak and drowned by noise.
The amount of xenophobia here amazes me. It seems that everytime we have an article on any advance in China, we have Slasdotters making chittering little noises that amount to "Oh no, are they going to kill us now?"
China has replaced the Soviet Union as the big bad wolf in American eyes, and when supposedly rational Slashdotters take part in the fear mongering, it's easy to see how movements like McCarthyism arose in America.
Perhaps someone can tell me, what do groupware programs like Notes and Exchange do that's so special? From the screenshots, it looks just like a mail program with calender functions, a to do list and an address book.
Take a look at the National Technology Roadmap for semiconductors:c hal4.pdf
http://www.i trs.net/NTRS/RdmpMem.nsf/Lookup/RdmpPDF/$file/grd
The diagram on page 11.
The total delay *increases* after a certain point because the delays in the wires dominate.
These new transistors have much smaller gate thickness, which means less capacitance, which means higher switching speeds, but also a lower breakdown voltage, which means less power. Making the transistors smaller also allows them to be crowded together, which reduces wire length (not necessarily wire thickness, as you think). So the net effect is positive: everything gets smaller and faster and uses less power.
Wire thickness has to be reduced to match the transistor sizes, otherwise you don't get any gains in density. Crowding the wires together also increases the capacitance between wires.
Shorter wires don't cause much problems, but longer wires have large resistances and delays (and longer wires will still exist since the purpose is to squeeze more transistors into the same area).
Smaller transistor sizes don't necessarily make the chip run faster. The problem is, as the transistors get smaller, the wires get smaller as well. Smaller wires have higher resistance and have more capacitive contact with surrounding wires, and so at a certain point, the delays in the wires start to dominate and the delays in the chip actually increase as the chip is minaturized.
This is a big problem in the industry today. Copper wires help because they have lower resistance than Al interconnects. People are also researching optical interconnects.
Interesting. But since UPS is a private enterprise, it's free to make its own business decisions. The customer is told that he has to pay this price, and if the thing breaks, he is paid this much. If the customer isn't happy with the price he has to pay for insurance, he can always go elsewhere (unless we have a monopoly or collusion within the industry). So I'm not that there is really a case.
UPS does make you pay the insurance. First they ask you if your item costs above $100, and if it does, you've to pay the insurance. You can try lying of course. For international shipments, they even want a copy of the receipt (for customs purposes as well).
I was wondering the same thing as well. If the customers are paid when their stuff is damaged, how does it matter exactly what UPS does with the money? Of course they'll invest the money somewhere, they won't just leave it sitting around.
Sure, they take more in than they pay out, but that's how it is with all kinds of insurance -- otherwise insurance companies wouldn't exist.
If you write the date in British format (as most countries do), 19/11/1999, then 19111999 is prime as well!
I think the point is just that this will be the last odd day for some time to come.
*Amazon (someone mentioned this) is a _bad_ idea. Profit motive and releasing free documents don't coincide well.
I suggested Amazon earlier, but I guess I should have argued my point rather than just suggesting it. Why don't profit motive and releasing free documents coincide well?
Profit motive and free documents can coincide perfectly, and work to each other's mutual benefit. The free software world shows that the profit motive, demonstrated by companies like Red Hat, may in fact be the *best* way of supporting the development of free stuff (software, documents, and who knows what else). What Project Gutenberg needs is publicity, and who can do publicity better than companies like Amazon with plenty and of money and marketing skills?
But why would Amazon want to help PG? For the same reason why enlightened bookstores make it easy for customers to browse through books -- letting customers browse increases sales; putting links to PG texts brings this browsing experience online (imo, there isn't much worry that the customer will just read the whole book online rather than buy it -- reading a whole book online is just too unpleasant).
Furthermore, the PG deals with copyright expired books, so the market is different in most cases; linking to PG is just another value added service that online booksellers like Amazon can provide for their customers.
Project Gutenberg carries only copyright expired texts, so it doesn't really compete directly with Amazon's business. And it may be a good thing for Amazon: it's a nice service for Amazon's customers to be able to read books online.
Even in the case where Amazon is trying to sell the same books covered by Project Gutenberg (e.g. classics), I think most people still prefer to read the book in printed form, so providing links from the book's page to the project Gutenberg text provides a using previewing service and may help to generate more interest (and sales) for the book.
Try teaming up with amazon or something.
Tests for 1 processor systems with NT clients are to conspicously missing. This, conincidentally, is where Linux should beat NT.
Mindcraft hasn't made up their results, but there's no need to when you select your benchmarks carefully.
If the patent really contained anything substantial, why on earth would NSA patent it and thus share the information with every other intelligence agency on Earth? They would just keep it secret -- a patent wouldn't stop foreign intelligence agencies from using the information.
Furthermore, according to Applied Cryptography, there is no need for the NSA to obtain a patent, because in the case that an independent inventor later makes the same discovery, NSA has the power to announce that the discovery they made earlier and date their discovery from the date of their announcement.
So it seems that the NSA does not really possess such a technology in working form , but the sole purpose of the patent is that if someone else were to later invent such a device (for real), the NSA could stop its use (through their earlier patent), or claim the invention for themselves.
barf...
Imagine you are Joe Newbie. You install Windows and suscribe to the Support service by Bill's company. You pay a nominal fee each month. Then every other week you get a CD in the mail with various updates and bug fixes. Also you get a newsletter with various happenings in Windows world.
Lets say that Joe newbie is having problems with Excel crashing. He emails support with his problem and gets a reply that they have fixed the problem. The fix will be installed on the next CD or can be downloaded. Not only that but the fix will be distributed to all the subscribers.
Now lets say Joe Newbie wants a certain feature. Like perhaps animated icons. He emails support and they say that they will charge a fee but the fee is less for subscribers. The feature will be developed in six weeks and will come on that CD. If the feature is benificial for Windows as a whole it will be on everyone's CD and included in the next Windows distribution.
Windows support could develop themes, desktop wallpaper, alternate icons, etc. They could propietize these which I don't think is against the principles of free software: they are creative works.
Many users will like this service. They always have the latest stable software.